home-cover

home-cover-2

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/home-diary/"></div>Week 1
In what I like to call a royal flush, the restaurant below my apartment is loudly bumping Drake’s “Toosie Slide,” a car alarm is going off, and a man with an accordion is playing two notes over and over again outside my window while my roommate listens to the Harry Potter audiobook in the next room at 9 a.m. There is also a global pandemic. 
The uncertainty of survival, financial solvency, and societal collapse slow down the initial days of quarantine into a numbed, panicked, gloop. I scramble to make a routine for myself — reading? Exercise? Calling old flames at 2 a.m.? My roommate says she watched an incredible movie last night. It’s called Home Again. It stars Reese Witherspoon as a recently divorced 40-year-old mother of two named Alice. She crosses paths with a group of three late twenties men who are in Los Angeles to get funding for a movie that did well in short form at South by Southwest. The three boys Harry (Pico Alexander), George (Jon Rudnitsky), and Teddy (Nat Wolff) meet Alice and her friends at a bar after 27-year-old Harry charms her over to their table. Then, through a bit of movie magic the boys end up staying at Alice’s house because they have no other place to stay and a romance flourishes between Alice and Harry.
I first watch this movie at night sitting on my startup brand mattress nestled into a huge fluffy yellow-duckling-colored comforter with cushion-y headphones from Walgreens and stumble down an experiential rabbit hole that cannot be un-stumbled. 
The Alice-Harry chemistry feels immediate and permanent — real in a way that exists outside the realm of art, outside the realm of human time. He looks at her with fluttering lids and a smirk across a table of friends. He has an intoxicating blend of innocence and confidence, boldness and flirtatious reticence. He is lanky and tall. Despite his slight build, there’s something physically commanding about his presence. This physicality and persona seem to convey that he is boldly pursuing her, but with a kind of freshly nubile naiveté. His physicality emotes a softness, a boyishness, but he plays it off as a puckish trickster. 
Their connection shakes me deeply awake. All the switches that have been turned off are now turned on. Anything that has been made sad has now been made happy. Any whiff of hopelessness is now converted into high octane hope, an abiding belief that love and truth and beauty will expand out through the rest of time. It feels like a warm glow that will envelop my soul and protect me. My dreams will come true, love will prevail, we will all be safe from the elements.
As someone who spends a lot of time and money constantly nursing and fine tuning my mental health, this B-rated, mommy-porn rom-com is a miraculous cure-all not just to pandemic anxiety and dread, but for all anxiety and dread, here, now, and forever. I finally and instantaneously believe that life is benevolent and will offer me countless blessings. I am grateful for my current life and have faith that love will be a generative and constant heartbeat, shielding me from all that is not for me. Love is abundant! Happiness is possible! Your dreams can come true, and will.
¤
Week 2
I watch the eye fluttering flirtation scene every night before bed for a while. I watch a few other scenes of them falling in love as well. If anyone calls during my Home Again time I quickly silence the phone and throw it under the bed. It is my shot of goodness before I fall into unconsciousness, and relinquish myself to a softer kind of uncertainty. It revitalizes me and promises me that life is generous and kind. With this talisman of awareness I am lulled into an acquiescence and surrender towards the fates, my mind and body relax, sleep gently carries me away from the day.
Leaning into a swoon has a uniquely emboldening effect. It quickens the blood — caught in a building energy that is vacuum sealed away from time and other earthly phenomena — like you’re in high school sitting on your plush carpet late at night in a big T-shirt waiting for your boyfriend to sneak in your window while a train whistles off in the distance as the moon beams down on you approvingly.
¤
Week 3
The YouTube algorithm notifies me of the existence of a video that someone made titled “harry &amp; alice &lt;3” that is a supercut of the romantic scenes from the movie overlaid with an overblown and jarringly jaunty ABBA song “Does Your Mother Know.” This video of all my favorite scenes is surprisingly, uncomforting and offensive. My deep and abiding immersion into the true spirit of being is not a YouTube video. It is not a commodity, or merely a sum of composite parts. The vacuum seal on my private existential fantasia leaks.
I am also studying the characters so much that the original transcendence begins to feel itchy as I pay too close attention to the physical reality of the acting. I begin to feel the separation between the performer and the lines. I become increasingly aware that they are actors saying words from a script. The lines written for Harry seem slightly off to me now — sometimes grandiose or situationally uneven in a way that feels unnatural. Reese Witherspoon’s facial reactions sometimes seem lax, imprecise, or awkward. The shoelaces of the fantasy loosen and threaten to untie in my brain. The hope injection still works but the movie is now becoming a movie to me. An object of the material world. 
¤
Week 4
I watch a few of the scenes again at night but with a nostalgic sheen as if I am revisiting a memory from an event long ago. I feel the warmth of witnessing two old friends tell the story of how they first met. I feel that the world is good but I am more of an observer of the world instead of a participant of it. I do not experience the world as saturated in a single feeling or the knowledge of an all-encompassing truth. Instead, I gaze at the glow of the embers and think about heading inside. 
¤
Week 5
To desire, is itself joy. 
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Home Again Diary

Home Again Diary

hitchcock-caillou

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/caillou-conceit-narrative-overexposure-hyperreal-pacing-netflixs-love/"></div>A <a href="http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2011/09/08/peds.2011-2071">2011 study</a> published in the medical journal Pediatrics found that children who watched fast-paced cartoons (like SpongeBob SquarePants or Dragon Ball Z) performed significantly worse on memory and attention tests than children who watched real-time, slow-paced cartoons like Caillou or Sesame Street.
Caillou is a simple show following the day-to-day, real-life situations of the four-year-old Caillou. Caillou is like a cartoon descendant of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood in terms of show pacing: Caillou rides in a car with his mom, plays in the park with his friends, goes to the dentist, and makes Christmas cookies with his grandma, all in an eerily evenhanded human tempo.
The Netflix show Love, which premiered in 2016, has a similar Caillou conceit — an intentional, hyperreal pacing drives the narrative and demands an unusual amount of patience from its viewers. Love positions itself as an alternative to jump-cuts and rapid-fire romances seen in shows like Gossip Girl, aiming to train the viewer’s attention span to the pacing of a real relationship. Gus (Paul Rust), a nervous, overeager type, and blunt, self-destructive Mickey (Gillian Jacobs), meet one day at a gas station, and the show follows the arc of their relationship over three seasons, almost moment-to-moment. The last scene of the first season is the same one that starts the second. All of the narrative information, significant and insignificant, is available to the viewer. The result is a kind of scripted version of uncut reality TV footage.
The benefit of this storytelling method is that it has the potential to give the viewers an extremely intimate and minutia-oriented detailing of, well, Love. We get a full and complete view inside a relationship from start to finish, and perhaps its creators hope we can witness a connection. It is a TV-voyeurism novelty to experience the entire trajectory and particularities of someone’s relationship, even in a simulation. But strangely, the result of this storytelling conceit is a feeling of discomfort and boredom instead of an interested focus.
Part of this reaction is probably that instead of Pretty Little Liars, where we see only the juiciest parts of a fake relationship — drama, scandal, cheating, lies, sex — Love shows Gus and Mickey getting to know each other at breakfast after sleeping over, wandering to a movie after, going to work. My attention span ends up straining, not lengthening, against the banality of watching someone ask another person how many siblings they have. But, while feeling the widening gyre of my attention span is part of the discomfort of watching Love, Gus and Mickey’s love connection just doesn’t garner enough enthusiasm to keep us glued and ultimately works against the Caillou-style storytelling meant to train our attention.
At its best, the hyperreal pacing technique and narrative overexposure of Love has the potential to capture the diffuse and particular essence of two people’s burgeoning chemistry like a lightning bug (or lightning) in a bottle. And, similar to the satisfaction of telling a friend the play-by-play of scenes from our real-life relationships, this overexposure leaves no stone unturned, no detail left up to interpretation. Instead of the he-said-she-said of real life, all fodder for analysis and scrutiny is offered to us in a buffet of open information. Slice of life meets Freedom of Information Act.
The potential downside to the lightning bottle, however, is that things kept in a bottle are susceptible to withering and dying. Which is unfortunately the fate of Love. The chemistry between Jacobs and Rust’s characters is only ever tepid at best, and whatever simulation of bonhomie they were able to muster is suffocated in the never-closing eye of the narrative lens. The Caillou conceit storytelling backfires when the content doesn’t live up to the creative potential of the hyperreal pacing.
One could argue that the show isn’t trying to depict anything more than a lukewarm relationship and it’s banalities, but because the show ends in marriage and is littered with quotes like, “I never gave a shit about work before I met you. You really bring out the best in me,” it feels reasonable to assume that they were aiming at depicting a meaningful relationship. Sound bites like that indicate something substantial has happened between them, but the results of a challenging, life-giving connection are never earned. Meeting a few parents and exes does not a connection make. Which isn’t to say love can’t be mundane, but to judge it on the terms that they set out for themselves, it seems to just go through the motions and fall flat.
Duck Butter, a movie that also employed Caillou-conceit storytelling, more successfully depicted a compelling, real-time relationship. The story is about two women who meet and pledge to spend 24 hours together without sleeping in order to fast track the intimacy of a relationship. Just like Love, they show every scene of the relationship from start to finish and their rapid connection and dissolution is fascinating to watch. Duck Butter succeeds in depicting the magic of people falling in love by showing the getting to know you conversations while maintaining the depth and frisson in the art of an intimate conversation. Where Gus and Mickey discuss how many brothers and sisters they each have in a stilted manner over coffee or argue about whether or not they should throw out the milk, Naima and Sergio from Duck Butter yell at a wall together about why they hate their moms and Sergio makes Naima scream at the moon “I am beautiful!” Our attention is trained by the pacing but only because the content sparkles and makes it shine.
Caillou’s hyperreal pacing has the potential to capture the otherworldliness of love as part of this world, “the real world,” but also its extra dimension, a place where it transcends space and time while still apart of both. It’s like never closing your eyes to try and see the grass grow: it happens while you are watching, but you can’t see it. The hyperreal pace allows us to experience love in real time without attempting to interpret it, to catch it, to hold it still and piece it together. The hyperreal gets us the closest to the incommunicable of the real. In this pacing’s best iteration, concept and content merge and the viewer becomes submerged in the numinous.
As Love rounded out its third season, they came up against the inevitable monolith. Watching a couple brush their teeth, discuss ROYGBIV on a date, or compose texts to each other during a work day is, at the end of the day, boring — unless this is actually a couple we have become invested in as an audience. But even then, if we tell ourselves stories in order to live, they need a little bit of magic — something that sets them apart from our lived reality and mirrors the ineffable. We want reality, of course, but we also want a slice of the sublime that reality contains.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/caillou-conceit-narrative-overexposure-hyperreal-pacing-netflixs-love/"></div>

The Caillou Conceit: Narrative Overexposure and Hyperreal Pacing in Netflix’s Love

The Caillou Conceit: Narrative Overexposure and Hyperreal Pacing in Netflix’s Love

9781584350347

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/woman-looking-chris-kraus-looking-men-love-dick-krauss-precarious-female-gaze/"></div>When the television series I Love Dick, adapted from Chris Kraus’s novel of the same name, aired in May, it got a lot of attention for centering on the female experience through a female gaze, as Kraus’s novel did in 1997. The book has remained in circulation for two decades and its staying power is a testament to the philosophical project at its core: a complex portrait of female desire that questions gendered respectability politics, the aesthetics of longing, and a search for meaning. Amazon’s television adaptation fails to emulate the key ways in which Kraus successfully achieves this project and, lauded as Kraus’s novel is, it too often slips into a problematic depiction of the female gaze, one which panders to or services the male one.
One way Kraus successfully represents the female gaze is that she strips down the experience of infatuation and shows how the man is functionally irrelevant to the alchemy of longing. “The loved person can become a holding pattern for all tattered ends of memory, experience and thought you’ve ever had.” Her experience of trying to reconcile her current existential reality is what’s actually at stake. “Loving you had made it possible to admit the failure of my film and marriage.” Her longing for Dick was really a longing to be seen and understood by herself — “What turned me on most in sex was believing that they knew me, that I’d found somebody to understand,” —  or a longing to feel totalized — “To be in love with someone means believing that to be in someone else’s presence is the only means of being, completely, yourself.”
Because her project of the female gaze is a type of meditation and exploration of solipsism via aesthetic longing, the male characters Dick and Sylvere are not explored. They show up in relation to her existential project but remain opaque. The TV show took the plot of the book — married woman falls for other man — and made a very literal interpretation of this dynamic, portraying a worn-out plot of the song and dance of infidelity featuring anger, sadness, and betrayal. But the book does not depict a melodrama between Sylvere and Chris: Sylvere is portrayed as mostly game for this erotic play and his feelings toward the breakdown of their marriage are not really explored in the novel, whereas in the show copious air time is dedicated to his anguish and emotions surrounding his experience.
Similarly, the book’s Dick is a begrudging lover, telling Chris he’s “not uncomfortable with the idea” of having sex with her, and the next morning clarifying his lack of obligation to her: “I don’t owe you anything.” But, under the narrative logic of television, the eventual almost-consummation between Dick and Chris is depicted as a breakdown of resistance into tenderness. This depicts an ideal exchange between two persons and lends an equality to the narrative that only comes from a zoomed out version of depicting “a sexual encounter” between two people. However, the female gaze Kraus depicts in the novel is one that is one dimensional by nature and is either ambiguously in the dark to the intentions of Dick as she is not privy to his interiority or does not desire to report acknowledgement or absorption of the signals he is giving off.
Kraus’s I Love Dick is an exploration of the self, driven by an obsessive interiority and intense search for meaning; the show, partly because of its medium, centers on the dynamics and complexities of marriage, infidelity, and infatuation. In doing so, it loses the firepower of parts of the female experience that Kraus successfully renders. The show’s plot-driven rendering loses the intense focus on Chris’s processing and confusion that the book so lucidly describes.
But Kraus’s female gaze isn’t perfect either, or at least, it doesn’t purely belong to the feminine. The eye she turns inwards, the female gaze she directs towards herself, seems always haunted by a male one. The dismissive way she describes her project as “The Dumb Cunt’s Tale,” and the dismissive way she describes herself — “As an Ugly Girl it didn’t matter much to me” — imbues the reader with the sense that this book, at times, is crying out to a male gaze for absolution.
She wants to expose her shame surrounding desire, but doing so with detachment and self-lacerating irony indicates that she is distilling her experience through a perceived judgmental male gaze. The female gaze and experience of herself is constantly filtered through a critical male one. After she claims she is “not pretty or maternal” she says, “If I can’t make you fall in love with me for who I am, maybe I can interest you with what I understand.”
At times, this book feels vaguely apologetic instead of raw. After all the exegesis, it seems to be awaiting a final male judgment. This tension to revert the male gaze while trapped in it is intriguing and goes unresolved, which is perhaps its own message. Perhaps an apologetic crouch is the true stance of the female gaze in the end; perhaps the show offers more interiority to the men so as to absolve them of their guilt and apologize for their behavior as women are required to do for them.
Regardless, if we want to believe, as Eileen Myles posits in the forward, that Kraus has “turned female abjection inside out and aimed it at a man,” more reflexiveness is required on the texture of the female gaze that Kraus enacts. As a supposed feminist reversal of abjection, the tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation of her femaleness laced throughout undermines Kraus’s venture.
“That’s the real subject of his films: an ugly man who was wanting, looking to be loved. The subtext rested in between us like the sushi. Because of course I was ugly too.”
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A Woman Looking at Chris Kraus Looking at Men: I Love Dick and Kraus’s Precarious Female Gaze

A Woman Looking at Chris Kraus Looking at Men: I Love Dick and Kraus’s Precarious Female Gaze

Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

Callie Hitchcock is a writer and graduate of the NYU journalism master’s degree for Cultural Reporting and Criticism. She has published writing in The Believer, The New Republic, Los Angeles Review of Books, Real Life magazine, and elsewhere.

Callie Hitchcock

Imperfect Wisdom: On Rachel Aviv’s “Strangers To Ourselves”

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

"The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not." — Gertrude Stein

Science &amp; Technology

Precarious Devotion: A Conversation with Ivanna Baranova

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry." — John Cage

Poetry

Cooking Outside the Lines: A Conversation with Alison Roman

"We all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top." — Hunter S. Thompson

Food & Drink

Trick Mirror

Blurry Feminism: On Jia Tolentino’s “Trick Mirror”

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

"As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag." — Patti Smith

Gender &amp; Sexuality

Callie Hitchcock is a writer and graduate of the NYU journalism master’s degree for Cultural Reporting and Criticism. She has published writing in The Believer, The New Republic, Los Angeles Review of Books, Real Life magazine, and elsewhere.