John Wick Marathon

In our Spring issue, we published Kyra Wilder’s poem “John Wick Is So Tired.” To celebrate the poem and the recent release of John Wick: Chapter 4, we sent four reviewers to three different John Wick screenings over the course of a week.  

Tuesday, March 21: Press Preview

The first thing we noted when we entered AMC Lincoln Square 13 for the New York press screening of John Wick: Chapter 4 was that film PR girls are way nicer than their fashion industry counterparts. Check-in was a breeze, and we were informed that since we had special blue wristbands, we didn’t have to turn in our phones. We hadn’t considered that we would potentially have to turn in our phones, but were relieved nevertheless. We were handed a very large stack of papers with a large John Wick logo at the top, containing detailed information about the franchise and a long explanation of the movie’s plot, which we chose not to read too closely for fear of spoilers. This heavy stack of papers was also where we first learned that the runtime was a whopping 169 minutes. This troubled us, mostly because we had had a lot of wine with dinner and were concerned that we would have to pee. The theater was packed with agitated-seeming nonjournalists who were somehow able to secure tickets. People wove up and down the aisles in a huff, frustrated by the first-come-first-served seating. A couple of women exchanged curse words over another woman’s volume. Multiple people arrived late with full take-out bags, their lack of discretion leading us to believe that the staff of the theater were not too concerned with enforcing the rules of this AMC John Wick press preview. 

The French crime film maestro Jean-Pierre Melville once said, “What is friendship? It’s telephoning a friend at night to say, ‘Be a pal, get your gun, and come on over quickly.’ ” In the universe of John Wick, it’s pretty much that too, but it’s a thousand guns, two dozen archers, bows, arrows, knives, swords, bulletproof suits, a sundry list of exotic ammunition, an attack dog, a blind assassin, dueling pistols, a fleet of luxury attack vehicles, and a handful of classic American muscle cars. Oh, and if you could bring them all to the Sacré-Cœur, in Paris, by sunrise, that would be great, thanks.

By now, with the fourth installment in the franchise, the formula is familiar. John Wick (Keanu Reeves), on the run from the High Table (a governing body for the underworld whose main function just seems to be killing people) kills a lot of people in a series of highly choreographed set-piece action sequences in places like fancy hotels for assassins, fancy churches for assassins, and fancy Berlin techno clubs, also presumably for assassins. There’s something very charmingly mid-2010s about the environs and the soundtrack (was that the opening of Justice’s “Genesis”?), like a world where there was no COVID pandemic, but where everyone is a rich assassin in an ugly custom three-piece sparkly suit. Better times.

Reeves speaks softly and carries a number of big loud sticks, swords, et cetera, often breaking down his guns into their constituent parts and throwing them, stabbing people with them, or indulging in other creative but necessary acts of violence. There’s an extremely fetishistic aspect to the gearheaded breakdown of the guns, and to the clicking of magazine releases, that forms a sort of counterpoint to the theoretically balletic fight choreography. Like Jean-Pierre Melville, John Wick normally drives a classic Mustang. How a similar car made its way to Paris in this film is anyone’s guess. There really aren’t any other comparison points between this film and Melville’s Le Samouraï, except that they’re both about assassins. Oh, and friendship.

—Alex Tsebelis and Chloe Mackey

Thursday, March 23: Premiere Day

I was supposed to go to a cosplay premiere event for John Wick: Chapter 4, but couldn’t get tickets in time—so I ended up at a normal Regal theater for the nearly sold-out 7 P.M. screening. I’d dressed for cosplay that morning, but I’d also never seen a John Wick film, so I had to make some educated guesses. Action movies, I knew, are all about men in suits performing suit-inappropriate actions. Assuming John would have a sexy love interest (this turned out to be wrong), I selected the female suit equivalent, a secretary costume: fitted brown houndstooth minidress. I loitered at the Regal Essex Crossing second-floor bar, photographing my outfit against the sunset over the Williamsburg Bridge, a very John Wick backdrop. “Is this for a fashion blog?” the Regal bartender asked me, winking. “No,” I said. “I mean, yes.” 

Everyone else in the audience wore joggers, a garment absent from the fashion-forward film. Indeed, without context, the opening sequence registered to me as a kind of psychedelically plotless Saint Laurent advertisement, a brand for which Keanu Reeves is an “ambassador.” We begin with John Wick punching a brick in an elaborately shadowy warehouse. His training is interrupted by the dramatic entrance of his three-piece suit, appearing, silhouetted against the inexplicably fiery glow of a doorway, in the hands of some sinister fellow (friend, foe, butler?). The suit—presented in a manner usually reserved for the hero’s weapon of choice—is accompanied by a line of dialogue I neither understood at the time nor remember now, but which was clearly a classic John Wick catchphrase that meant something like “Here’s your suit. Now it’s time to kill—again.” And he totally does. 

Wick’s antagonist, the Marquis, sports a series of glittery waistcoats complete with asymmetrical gold buttons and stupid little chains. His weapon: blades. His goal: glory. The effete Marquis probably has ten times as much dialogue, and charisma, as John Wick, who is completely without character attributes. John Wick is just a killer, more like a machine than a human being. His suit, like his gun, is all-black.

—Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

Tuesday, March 28

The statistically inclined among us might have told me, as my projectionist friend did later on, that the odds of the screen going black twenty minutes into my 10:30 A.M. Sunday-brunch screening of John Wick: Chapter 4 at the Alamo Drafthouse up at least three escalators in the City Point mall were actually not so low in the age of automated projection. So my associate (a different one) and I finished our cauliflower-crust breakfast pizza and got a refund, and I picked up where we’d left off two days later at AMC 34th Street 14, where Nicole Kidman’s on-screen avatar assured me that the display was IMAX and the projectors laser. In the basement of a Berlin techno club full of bad, identically robotic dancers making repetitive upward arm movements, John Wick is dealt in to a five-card-draw game of poker with the two hitmen contracted to murder him and a German High Table official named Killa. At the end of the game, Wick puts two black eights and two black aces on the table, in what is usually a strong move—called the dead man’s hand, as I learned that night on the Reddit forum r/NoStupidQuestions, after the hand Wild Bill Hickok was reputedly holding when he was shot—but Killa destroys his chances by playing an unbeatable five of a kind: impossible to achieve without cheating, of course, because there are only four suits in a deck. Vegas would do well to be reminded, though, of the words of the Marquis, which I should start telling myself when I wake up in the morning: “How you do anything is how you do everything.” The odds are always against John Wick, and he always wins anyway. In the end, he slices Killa’s neck open with a playing card, and pockets one of his gold teeth.

—Oriana Ullman, assistant editor

Rivers Solomon, Elisa Gonzalez, and Elaine Feeney Recommend

As I get older, and the world gets worse, or gets differently bad, or stays the same but my understanding of its badness deepens and broadens, I grow ever more dependent upon books like Akwugo Emejulu’s Fugitive Feminism. This short, sharp text reminds readers that, like the rattling door in a haunted house or the concerned face of a friend who understands well the way a lover is slowly bringing about your annihilation, it is good to leave that which does not serve you. Fleeing, as in the case of the enslaved from the plantation, is no act of cowardice but a tremendous gesture toward liberation.

The flight Emejulu encourages is not from a place but from a conceptual space. Referencing the work of Black critical theorists like Sylvia Wynter, Fugitive Feminism troubles the notion of the “human,” arguing that it is not a neutral, objective term for one type of mammal but a philosophical and political category informed by colonialism that, from its invention, excluded Blackness and Black people. For years, many have fought (to no avail) to be, for once, called and acted upon as humans, but for Emejulu, there is nothing to be reclaimed in that cursed white supremacist taxonomy. When we stop seeking inclusion into a category built on genocide and eugenics, there is freedom to explore other ways of being, seeing, and doing.

Emejulu’s writing is clear, evocative, and concise, and while readers with no background in the subject material may find places where they need to spend more time, Fugitive Feminism is an extraordinarily accessible text that will touch many of those left behind by society without sacrificing complexity and critical rigor.

—Rivers Solomon, author of “This Is Everything There Will Ever Be”

A few Januaries ago, I spent a week in Sheringham, a coastal town in Norfolk, England. The friend who’d invited me said that in the summer, the town swells by thousands as pleasure-seekers descend. In the winter, it is cold, rainy, pleasantly desolate. Perfect for writing, which is what we were there for. I’d decided to use the time to write a short story, something I hadn’t done since childhood. 

When I don’t know how to do something, I research, so I’d been reading many short stories, new and not so new, by Emma Cline, Shirley Hazzard, Gina Berriault, Deborah Eisenberg, Lucia Berlin, Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, and Yiyun Li. For that week, I brought with me Sylvia Townsend Warner’s selected stories. On the train from London, I read “Oxenhope,” first published in 1966. I’d read it before and liked it. This time it settled on me like an atmosphere. As did Sheringham, when I arrived, with its crash of waves against the seawall on nighttime walks, its empty arcades, and its signs advertising candy floss. Before we arrived, a cliff had crumbled into the sea, taking with it a holiday cottage. (We had to imagine the collapse; we could see only land’s unspectacular absence.)

In “Oxenhope,” a sixty-four-year-old man named William returns to the rural Scottish village where he spent a transformative month at seventeen, when, overstudied and exhausted, he’d suffered what he calls a “brain-mauling.” He’d been on a disastrous walking tour when a family of farmers saved him from a storm and insisted he stay. The dailiness of Oxenhope restored him. After departing, he’d undertaken the life he was supposed to have: university, good career, marriage, et cetera. Decades later, though, he feels “like a castaway on the remainder of what life was left to him.” So he returns to Oxenhope. Townsend Warner captures the intricacies of coming back to a place that once changed you, carrying with you all the changes that have happened since. Such a return forces the resisted, unavoidable concession “that the past was draining away out of the present, that Oxenhope, lovely as ever, was irrecoverable … He had grasped at the substance, and the lovely shadow was lost.” As he leaves Oxenhope for the second time, the past unexpectedly comes charging into the present: a young boy shares a bit of local lore, not knowing that the tale features the teenage William. Being a story, having “tenancy in legend,” consoles him. Narrative redeems the fact that the past is uninhabitable. 

The story I wrote that week in Sheringham—which appears in the Review‘s Spring issue—does not resemble “Oxenhope,” except, perhaps, in its attention to what is said and what it’s possible to say, and to the force that narrative exerts on the future, not just on the past.

—Elisa Gonzalez, author of “Sanctuary”

Recently I watched Klostės (Folds/Pleats), a black-and-white stop-motion art film directed by the Irish artist Aideen Barry and based on the stories and myths of Kaunas, Lithuania. The film brings together hundreds of local writers, dancers, musicians, and artists in an ambitious collaboration that explores the histories of the city and its interwar architecture. Barry, influenced by her early exposure to Russian, Czech, and Lithuanian stop-motion film on eighties Irish television, revels in the surreal. From the opening shot, a kaleidoscope of abstract, origamiesque pleats of black paper, the film masterfully folds stories upon stories into a dizzying, nonverbal world where colorful characters and the architecture of the city collide. A woman walks into a restaurant; shortly after she orders from the menu, a cake assembles itself in the shape of a building, right by her table. From there we are swept into the magic of Kaunas. In Klostės, Barry suggests that we can reimagine a postcapitalist world, and the citizen as artist in it. 

—Elaine Feeney, author of “Same, Same”

Art Out of Time: Three Reviews

This week, three reviews on damaged art, art out of time, art of our time, and enjoying the void. 

We’re in a particular phase of “pandemic art” now—I don’t mean work that portrays the spread of disease (I’ll leave The Last of Us to another writer) but the work that artists made while they lived in hibernation: writers at their desks with no social obligations to draw them out into the city, artists in their studios with the endless horizon of hours receding. Now they are showing what they made. Tara Donovan’s stunning “screen drawings,” on view last month at Pace Gallery in Chelsea, are a project begun in that period. The “drawings” are made from typical aluminum insect screens, cut and tweezed into intricate geometric patterns—layered lines, swirls, and cutouts—that shimmer and morph as you walk through the gallery. They are subtle optical illusions cut from the humblest everyday material. Their connection to the period of “high quarantine” strikes me immediately: time spent looking out the window onto silent streets, time spent feeling intensely aware of the need for protection. The discourse around “screen time” is of course fatiguing, but Donovan’s drawings for me reinvigorate the multiple meanings of the phrase. Before we came to understand the screen as the portal that brought the outside infinity into our personal space, screens were more often for keeping something out: a fugitive look, a bothersome fly. (I saw Donovan’s work around the same time as I became aware of an interesting but disquieting TikTok trend of overlaying TV clips with ASMR videos, in case you didn’t have enough stimulation.) What else do they continue to separate from us? A special quality of Donovan’s manipulations is that no photo of them can do them justice—they look good in two dimensions, but in person they are almost hypnotic in their immersive power. They’re hardly capturable as digital artifacts, and so much the better.

—David S. Wallace, contributing editor

Going eight floors up the elevator at Greene Naftali on my lunch break and out into the open white space that recently housed the gallery’s Bernadette Corporation exhibition felt a lot like walking into God’s office on his break from Creation: there were whiteboards covered with half-assed frescos and half-erased flowcharts; pennies, some stacked neatly, others laid out in the shape of man; on the white plinths supporting them, more doodles of equations, apples, and names begun and then abandoned. It all connects, of course, somehow—this stuff, these ideas. The scribbles suggest motion and relation, formal analogies (between pie charts and pennies, currency and chemistry), but the forces of association seem to give out halfway. The only thing left whole was an oil-slick-iridescent Supreme-branded basketball, spherical and sparkly, that seemed to have bounced straight out of those equations and onto the floor. God must have gotten bored setting up gravity, orchestrating economies, making paintings, and doing anti-capitalist art critique. But he still likes to play—and shop. The effect, difficult to execute and surprisingly lovely, is of a beautifully bad throw of the ball: an immaculate weak gesture, conceptually and aesthetically. I didn’t mind; such are the times. If I were God I’d take a break, too. Sunlight still flooded the mostly empty room. I wished it had all been even weaker, that there’d been couches and a coffee machine, to make the art recede even further into the scene of the God-office/gallery, and to make it easier for me to sit around and play on my iPhone. The show closed last weekend, but that’s okay. Its brilliance is that it was only half-there to begin with. You can still go answer your emails on the eighth floor of Greene Naftali on your lunch break if you work in Chelsea.

—Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

Lately, I’ve been rereading Molly Brodak’s 2020 poetry collection The Cipher. I first read it more than a year ago and have found myself returning to it ever since, whenever I’m in need of a line to carry me through the day. This time, I’ve been drawn to moments when opulent, lush textures adjoin absences or voids. There’s the extravagant feast of “The Babies,” for example, rendered in exquisite detail but forbidden to eat. In “Axiom,” a cloth of yellow silk enfolds the empty space where the Ark of the Covenant would be kept, were it ever recovered or had it ever even really existed. The guard at the door watches over an empty chamber containing only the silk, and, at times, a ray of light. Describing the inspiration for her poem “The Flood”—which describes a Paolo Uccello fresco of the Noah’s Ark, which has itself been damaged by a real flood—she writes: “I don’t know if I would like the painting as much if it hadn’t been damaged. It is another painting now.” This reminds me of another one of her lines, from “Conversation”: “I imagined / a bolt of pink waterstained silk / in place of me, being / loved.” It is a marked object—textured with the evidence of utility, accident, or event—with which Brodak chooses to represent herself. In her work, things that change are never ruined; they are merely renewed as variations on themselves.

—Leena Mahan, reader

Announcing the 2023 George Plimpton and Susannah Hunnewell Prize Winners

We are delighted to announce that on April 4, at our Spring Revel, Harriet Clark will receive the George Plimpton Prize, and the inaugural Susannah Hunnewell Prize will be presented to Ishion Hutchinson. 

The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993 by the editorial committee of our board of directors, recognizes an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the Review during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Yiyun Li, Ottessa Moshfegh, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Jonathan Escoffery, Eloghosa Osunde, and the 2022 winner, Chetna Maroo.

Harriet Clark’s slanting, beautiful story “Descent,” which appeared in our Summer 2022 issue (no. 240), is narrated by a young girl caught between her mother—imprisoned for her part in a botched robbery intended to finance revolutionary struggle—and her grandmother, whose grief encompasses a cruel resentment. A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Clark is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and was a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford. She is at work on her first novel. The Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, writes:

In “Descent,” Harriet Clark deftly tells an enclosing story about the wish for resurrection. An eight-year-old girl, “a great stayer,” knows departure as a fact of life. She and her grandfather simulate disappearance and recovery in a game they play with her in the trunk of the car. A silence is kept in honor of a felled deer. Strange cats attack the old man. Clark somehow manages to give us each character’s interiority: “if my mother told this story she might say that one day her father disappeared.” Clark ends where she began, with a conundrum, this time inflected with the grandmother’s harsh language: “To want to go home was to wish a man dead but I did want, very much, to go home.”

The Susannah Hunnewell Prize, which honors a writer for an outstanding piece of prose or poetry published by the Review in the previous calendar year, was established in 2023 in memory of Hunnewell, who joined the Review as an intern during George Plimpton’s tenure. She remained associated with the magazine for thirty years, serving as its Paris editor and later as its publisher from 2015 until her death in 2019. She also conducted some of the most beloved interviews in the Writers at Work series, including conversations with Harry Mathews, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and Emmanuel Carrère. 

The prize’s first winner, Ishion Hutchinson, published his essay “Women Sweeping”—a moving illumination of the artistry that infused his grandmother’s work and life, by way of Édouard Vuillard’s painting of his own mother sweeping—in our Spring 2022 issue (no. 239). Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, Hutchinson is the author of two poetry collections, Far District and House of Lords and Commons, and a forthcoming collection of essays. He is the recipient of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Mona Simpson writes:

She was the house, Henry James said of his mother. And so it was with Vuillard’s mother and Ishion Hutchinson’s grandmother, a “short and solid-built” baker. Sounds of “jubilation” hiss from the kitchen as the narrator witnesses the honor and pleasure of his grandmother making a home. “The interior does not simply belong to her, it is her,” Hutchinson writes of Vuillard’s mother. For a disenfranchised people, owning a house was, and still is, the ultimate achievement. By herself, Hutchinson’s grandmother earned what Mr. Biswas strived for in Naipaul’s novel: “legally owned property.” How? “Through baking.”

This question and answer form a refrain, as the narrator watches her measure flour and sugar with empty Betty and Carnation cans and eats the bits (“bun bun”Harr) left on the tin baking pans after black cake and coconut drops are removed to sell. There’s something quietly radical in Hutchinson’s association of his Jamaican grandmother with Madame Vuillard, and in his valorization of what is traditionally women’s work. The narrator was able to go to the good school on the island; Vuillard attended the same school as Marcel Proust. How? We are not told. But at the end of the essay, Hutchinson reveals his grandmother’s guarded secret, her vulnerability, her shame, and her wish, along with her pride.

Tickets are still available for the Revel, which will take place on April 4 at Cipriani 42nd Street. We hope you’ll join us to celebrate Clark and Hutchinson, as well as the inimitable Vivian Gornick, who will receive the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature. We’ll also be marking the seventieth anniversary of the Review, which was founded in Paris in 1953. Since then, the magazine has evolved the contemporary canon, publishing a spirited mix of emerging and established voices. That exhilarating encounter between different styles and generations also reliably makes the Revel an excellent party, and all proceeds help sustain the magazine. We’d love to see you there.

 

What Is This Video? Three Recommendations

What is this video? A plot summary might run something like this: A low-quality cell phone records, in slow motion, a small suburban lake being stocked with fish. A long, transparent inflatable tube runs the fish from a truck across a lawn and into the lake. They get stuck; they struggle; they clog the tube; they swim, weakly, upstream; and eventually men in aprons (the fish stockers?) pick up the tube and force the last fish out. Neighbors (I presume) have gathered to watch the process—children are filming, a lone man reaches out piteously to stroke the clots of confused fish through the tube, and a goldendoodle’s fluffy head bobs in and out of the frame. The video, by the artist Barrett White, borrows its grand title—“Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”—from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and letters, in which that phrase describes the coexistence of apparently contradictory orientations to the world. White sets the video’s banal footage to Arvo Pärt’s solemn “Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten,” complete with periodically tolling bell.

The video’s appeal is its constant oscillation between tragedy and, well, bathos. At first, the video seems like a funny TikTok—grand music, slo-mo, grainy vertical footage, silly suburban fish situation. Ha. But then it goes on for almost eight minutes? Just as Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” becomes a gorgeous and resigned dirge when slowed down (recommend), something about the dilation of time changes the tonality of White’s video. It creates space for an aesthetically sensible movement between the video’s contradictory tonal cues. This extension of time allows for multiple and layered juxtapositions of grand and banal. You can really feel this circulation when you’re watching it—feel the way your own feeling turns into its apparent opposite, and back.

I’ve returned to this video repeatedly since I first saw it last year. It has a total of 110 views as of February 1, at least ten of which are mine. Sometimes I notice the way the tumble of the fish’s bodies looks like a Renaissance etching of sinners tumbling into hell; sometimes I notice the bearded man’s camo pants; sometimes I notice the confused pathos of the man who leans out to touch the knot of disoriented trout—and I feel, like him, the terror of the fish, and sadness for them. Like the fish, I feel the force of the cues at play—for them, it’s water pushing one way; for me, it’s the music’s command to FEEL! PATHOS NOW!, which also has the ironic overlay of saying how silly it is, to feel that. But I resist: I don’t like being told what to feel, and if I do feel something like mourning, maybe I’m a fool. Maybe those feelings are out of scale, out of tune with the world as it actually is. Or maybe when I see this situation as ridiculous, and I’ve accepted a certain kind of banality, that’s when I’m out of tune with the world as it actually is. Maybe this tube leads to death. Or maybe it leads to another slightly larger holding tank that is just fine.

—Kirsten (Kai) Ihns, reader

Barn sour, an equestrian term, describes a domesticated horse who doesn’t want to leave its home. A barn sour horse will resist being taken from its stable, often violently. If they are forced out, they might bolt back home, throwing their rider off their back, sometimes trampling them. The term has been taken as the name for a mysterious sound-collage artist from Winnipeg, Canada. I came across Barn Sour’s tape horses fucked over the head with bricks in late 2019, on which sparse harmonies on a detuned piano are dubbed over recordings of manic laughter and guttural glossolalia. It is just under nine minutes long, incredibly disturbing, and absolutely mesmerizing. It was released under two pseudonyms, one of which is C. Lara, the name of a real racehorse. The other is James Druck, a long-dead fraudster implicated in a scheme to kill show horses in order to collect insurance money. (James Druck’s daughter, whose childhood horse was among the horses killed, is also the inspiration for a central character in Jay McInerney’s novel Story of My Life.)

I feel like I’m watching scenes from a horror movie on a deteriorating VHS tape in a large, cold, empty house: the gruesome images are hard to make out; I can’t tell if the fuzziness is making the experience more or less fascinating or nauseating. Most of Barn Sour’s releases have titles invoking an esoteric reference to equine terminology. Soap & Glue, their compendium album, released by Penultimate Press this year, takes its name from two products historically made from ground-up horse parts. It’s a suitable name for the album, which is full of reworkings and rebludgeonings of their previously released material—but also because it is billed as Barn Sour’s final release, their death, their body of work ground to a pulp. Join them for a final foal-y à deux before they trot back to their barn for good.

—Troy Schipdam, reader

While visiting my hometown this winter, mildly jet-lagged, I started waking up at 4 A.M. To kill time before the sun rose, I’d watch an animated sci-fi show from the early nineties. Æon Flux (1991-1995)—which first aired as a series of six experimental films on MTV’s late-night showcase for indie animators—is perfectly suited for the borderland between dreaming and consciousness. In the iconic title sequence, an insect lands on a woman’s cheek and crawls into her open, pupilless eye only to be captured in its lashes, as in a Venus flytrap, when the lids snap shut. The eye reopens and the pupil swivels into place, bringing its prey into focus. Many of the elements that earned the show its cult following are there in the intro: hallucinatory images, biopunk body augmentation, a bit of eroticized violence. Set in an ultramodern dystopia, Æon Flux follows the titular character, a femme fatale–type (slicked-down black hair, violet irises, bondage gear) who works as an assassin for the resistance. We quickly learn that Æon is a morally ambiguous antiheroine traveling between two competing societies: the anarchic Monica and the technocratic police state Bregna, ruled by an Aryan-blond despot (and Æon’s nemesis-lover) called Trevor Goodchild. Æon is frequently killed and reincarnated before the credits roll.

Æon Flux is a masterpiece of visual storytelling. Its early episodes are free of dialogue and instead rely heavily on clusters of impressions and shifts in perspective. Influenced by Egon Schiele, the French cartoonist Moebius, and manga artists like Kazuo Umezu and Osamu Tezuka, the creator and director Peter Chung’s style is defined by expressive lines. He prioritizes evocative character design—elongated, sinewy figures, angular architecture—over surface detail. The series is a combination of fetish content, classic sci-fi, and, according to some fan theories, Gnostic symbolism. In one episode, the body of a soldier is reanimated so his belly can be used to gestate a godlike being with an iridescent halo. In another, a woman’s shattered vertebra is surgically removed, allowing her to rotate her body a full 360 degrees, and replaced with a device that reseals her spinal column with the push of a button. Late in the series, Æon clones her own body in a biotech laboratory, and, in a campy allusion to Narcissus and his reflection, she kisses her surrogate self as she emerges from a pool of water.

Consuming a nonstop stream of images like this for a few hours each morning, under my parents’ roof once more, left me feeling delirious and impossibly old. But Chung’s characters, with their contortionist acrobatics and cyberpunk experiments, also plucked the string inside me that tethers me to my kid self, the one who read books about dystopian futures, kissed girls in their bedroom once their parents had gone to sleep, and tried to decide what they wanted to do with their body.

—Jay Graham, reader

The Review Wins the National Magazine Award for Fiction

We are thrilled to announce that The Paris Review has won the 2023 ASME Award for Fiction. The Review is also nominated in the category of general excellence, with the winner to be announced on March 28. Read the three prizewinning stories—“Trial Run” by Zach Williams, “Winter Term” by Michelle de Kretser, and “A Good Samaritan” by Addie E. Citchens—unlocked this week in celebration.

My Boyfriend Nietzsche and a Boy Like a Baked Alaska

After two vodka tonics and a cosmo, my ninety-year-old grandmother lifts her glass and says, “But you know that Nietzsche is my boyfriend?” 

“He is?”

“He’s my boyfriend.”

It’s all right—we’ve shared boyfriends before. The actor Javier Bardem. Errol Louis, anchor at NY1. Her new neighbor. Her many doctors. She tells me that Nietzsche is her boyfriend because Nietzsche also hates the German composer Richard Wagner. I tell her Nietzsche hates a lot of people. She nods. “That’s good in a man.” 

Earlier in our dinner I’d mentioned I was finally reading Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist—two white-hot texts that serve, in part, as the ecstatic summation of much of Nietzsche’s previous work. Both works glow with special invective. The usual targets are abused (Socrates, Kant, et cetera). So are George Sand, George Eliot, and, of course, generally happy people: “Nothing could make us less envious than … the plump happiness of a clean conscience.” It’s in Twilight that Nietzsche announces, “The man who has renounced war has renounced a grand life.”

Would he be a good boyfriend? He’d be a fierce one, often railing at the “radical and mortal hostility to sensuality.” He’d remind you: “When a man is in love he endures more than at any other time; he submits to anything.” Would he wink? Probably not. 

Freud claimed, apparently, that Nietzsche “had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live.” In these final writings it is clearer than ever how Nietzsche’s “hate” evolves out of a prolonged annoyance at knowing people—and history and philosophical systems—better than they know themselves. You sense the loneliness of this awareness. Nietzsche needs his supernatural, self-generating heat, lest his flame down there wither in the wild pits of instinct. (“Nothing ever succeeds which exuberant spirits have not helped to produce.”) If he was your lover, he’d remind you, his torch high, that “one must be superior to mankind in force, in loftiness of soul—in contempt.” Those who cannot achieve this are “merely mankind.” 

I look at my grandmother, whose awareness—as Nietzsche might recommend—seems to recede from the outside world as it advances internally. She closes her eyes. I think she’s slipped under when she points at me. “First it’s our Spanish fellow. Then that other fellow. Then Nietzsche.” 

—Sophie Madeline Dess, author of “Zalmanovs”

A friend whose taste I trust recently recommended Denton Welch’s 1945 novel In Youth Is Pleasure, a beautiful little book and one of my favorite discoveries of 2022. Welch’s writing is impressionistic, playful, homoerotic, dreamy, often hilarious, and at times ecstatic. What plot there is centers on the fifteen-year-old Orvil Pym, who is spending the summer holiday with his father and brothers at a hotel in Surrey several years before the outbreak of World War II. Orvil’s mother has died; his feelings for his siblings and for his father (who has bestowed upon him the nickname “Microbe”) range from vague fondness to childish terror and loathing. Often Orvil is left alone. He eats pêche Melba (“‘It’s like a celluloid cupid doll’s behind,’ said Orvil to himself. ‘This cupid doll has burst open and is pouring out lovely snow and great big clots of blood’”); he spies jealously on a schoolmaster reading Jane Eyre to two boys, one of whom appears to be taking a particular kind of gratification from the experience; he desecrates a church with libidinal glee, throwing himself on a brass statue and kissing its face “juicily.” At the end of the day, Orvil always seems to be consuming oozing cakes in the hotel dining room, dressed in mud-stained clothes. 

This is a lonely book, and a remarkable one for the way in which its sensuality emerges: from inside this loneliness. Orvil takes an aesthete’s pleasure in the physical world but also in the eruptions of his own consciousness; much of the novel’s eroticism arises from his encounters with a kind of other within the self. Desire, enchantment, the delights of reverie and of metaphor—these spring from within. Floating alone along a river, Orvil thinks, “I’m like one of those Baked Alaskas … one of those lovely puddings of ice-cream and hot sponge.” Here, loneliness can be devastating, mischievous, grotesque, monstrous, thrilling—but it is never grim.

—Avigayl Sharp, author of “Uncontrollable, Irrelevant”