weird little guys

no shade to swamp boating but apparently he didn’t even tell his daughter they were dating???

olivia nuzzi and rfk jr! lana and the swamp boat captain! something is up, or maybe something has always been up. women love making weird romantic choices—maybe we’ve been nurtured into deferent little empathy machines, maybe there’s horror in the familiar, or maybe it feels special to “get” someone kind of off-putting, like getting a wild horse to eat sugar from the palm of your hand. it’s libra season, it’s eclipse season, it’s a certain proclivity to conflate inscrutability with depth. or we are on the precipice of world war iii and powerlessly complicit in literal genocide; of course women want a recognizable narrative, containable chaos. or maybe this has something to do with weird being the insult of the summer—every pejorative has a period of reclamation. has the pendulum swung? is weird already back?

anyway, re: weird guys, i saw megalopolis last week. francis ford coppola’s passion project—forty years in the making, entirely self-funded, for which he sold off about a third of his namesake winery—is so impressively strange, it’s kind of a triumph. it’s a PBS shakespeare production of a play written on acid. the dialogue is wild. the CGI is wild. the wikipedia page is super long and includes 9-11 references and entire departments walking off set. coppola bought a motel and made the entire cast and crew live there together, and the cast was in character. aubrey plaza is the only actor who approached their part with any semblance of humanity—she’s amazing, actually. personally i love adam driver, and after recently rewatching girls, it was a joy to see his turn as the film’s protagonist because it’s exactly the kind of part adam on girls would land and then put his whole adam drivussy into. i didn’t know we were still casting shia labeouf, but he’s there too i guess.

like many on letterbox’d, i actually don’t know if i can assess megalopolis on a scale of 1 to 5, or good to bad. i loved the experience of watching it; matthias and i spiked our concessions sodas with fireball and our theater wasn’t afraid to laugh. on principal, if there’s no, like, bigotry involved, i have a gooey spot in my heart for any true passion project. let me see the inside of your brain! it’s so vulnerable, especially when the result is confounding—and if it weren’t confounding it wouldn’t be real, because at our core, aren’t we all full of contradictions and mistakes and self-aggrandized mediocre ideas? megalopolis is amazing because it’s so incredibly alien, and at the same time, its creation is so human.

it’s also a total mess. i know that the studio system drains the blood from projects, but megalopolis underscores the power of a second (or third, or fourth) pair of eyes. more than that, the pressure to create One Big Work isn’t just unrealistic, it’s actively detrimental to one’s art. it was a relief, honestly, to watch megalopolis and see firsthand how the “my whole life’s work” framing undermines what might be two or three or six solid projects.

be kind to yourself, artists: life is long and nothing is perfect. you’re putting the pieces of a career together one idea at a time.

rfk jr. and the swamp boat guy and megalopolis bring to mind what hannah horvath’s mom once says of girls adam:

“he’s odd. he’s angry. he’s uncomfortable in his own skin. he bounces around from thing to thing. i don’t want you to spend your whole life socializing him like he’s a stray dog, making the world a friendlier place for him. it’s not easy being married to an odd man.”

tall weird guy privilege, via vulture