Lambs and Dragons: I watch “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” (sort of)

Last updated on: July 21, 2020 at 12:02 am By Eve Tushnet

So last night I had my first experience of coronatheater: a reading, performed in five different bedrooms over Zoom, of Will Arbery’s Pulitzer-nominated play Heroes of the Fourth Turning. This is a play about four youth of today whose conservative Catholic educations have left them shipwrecked and jagged; over the course of a truly terrible party the rotten foundations of that education are exposed, and we even begin to suspect that the “demons” troubling these characters are extremely literal. I’m... Read more

Shadows Searching for What Cast Them: Five Shakespeare Movies

Last updated on: July 17, 2020 at 5:53 pm By Eve Tushnet

Some have the sublimity of Bottom’s dream… some are rudely mechanical. 10 Things I Hate About You: This is “The Taming of the Shrew” adapted for a modern high-school setting, which should be impossible and instead is somehow brilliant. Harold Bloom used to say that Katharina and Petruchio end the play as joint conspirators, united against the world which threw them against one another; it’s not as easy to wring that interpretation from the text as I’d like, but boy,... Read more

“All the Colors Above Them”: Gloria Miklowitz’s “War Between the Classes”

Last updated on: July 14, 2020 at 1:38 pm By Eve Tushnet

I’m at We Are the Mutants, bowing and curtsying: Assign teenagers to different socioeconomic classes and require the lower classes to perform humiliating rituals of obeisance to the upper. Give other students the power to enforce class boundaries and punish those who get ideas above their station. Make sure the artificial hierarchy affects the students’ friendships and grades. What could go wrong? This is the setup for Gloria D. Miklowitz’s 1985 young adult novel, The War Between the Classes. But... Read more

Yea, Thou I Walk Through the Tiny Scandinavian Island of the Shadow of Death

Last updated on: July 9, 2020 at 12:23 pm By Eve Tushnet

Last night I finished The Summer Book, Tove Jansson’s quirky, haunting little novel about a girl and her grandmother, and the summers they spent together on one of the tiny islands off the coast of Finland. It’s not a slice-of-life so much as a series of slices, like a cake dome filled with thin wedges of twenty different kinds of cake. I loved it and it’s a perfect read for a summer which will, I think, be memorable for many... Read more

“Don’t Hide from the Sins of Saint Louis”

Last updated on: July 6, 2020 at 3:58 pm By Eve Tushnet

I’m in America: I will pour forth tears until like a river they reach Unto the tombs of your most noble princes, Moses and Aaron, on Mount Hor, and I will ask: Is there A new Torah, that your scrolls may be burned? This is part of the lament “Sha’ali Serufah Ba’esh,” “O you who are burned in fire,” written by Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg in the aftermath of the burning of thousands of copies of the Talmud at the... Read more

Three Non-Horror Films for Horror Fans: I’m at Kindertrauma

Last updated on: July 3, 2020 at 11:57 am By Eve Tushnet

kindertraumatizin’: 1: THE SISTERHOOD OF NIGHT (2014) This film looks like it’s gonna be a teen horror, maybe about witches??, and it is indeed about a secret club of high-school girls who meet in the woods to perform mysterious rituals. But this update of “The Crucible” uses wiggy costumes and snappy dialogue, not spells and special effects, to represent the apocalyptic emotions of teenagers. A girl dresses like a “David Bowie bird”; the sun glows, giant against the treeline, that... Read more

“Joan of Arc” Is One Weird Hagiography… But Not Quite Weird Enough

Last updated on: June 22, 2020 at 12:41 pm By Eve Tushnet

I’m at America magazine: Bruno Dumont’s 2017 film “Jeanette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc” may be the weirdest hagiography ever filmed. Dumont’s film, which features nonprofessional actors from his native northern France, shows us a little child who (like so many little children) grapples with the thorniest theological questions: Why hasn’t God stopped the violence and injustice all around me? How can we be happy? If some are damned, how can I trust God? Her visions are shown on... Read more

That’s Where I Shed Some Blood: Three short horror-flick reviews

Last updated on: June 20, 2020 at 12:14 pm By Eve Tushnet

From least-good to best! Also, all of these are currently available on Shudder… I am not being paid to say this. The House of the Devil: Intense late ’70s/early ’80s nostalgia here, not only in setting but in the languorous pacing (as Kindertrauma points out). A Final Girl Type with a fun relationship with her feisty BFF gets a gig babysitting at an isolated house… but the “baby” is not what she expected! Devilry ensues. Basically the atmosphere was fun... Read more

The Empty Tomb of the Past: Three short book reviews

Last updated on: June 21, 2020 at 8:12 pm By Eve Tushnet

Ending with Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth, for today’s holiday. Lillian Lee, Farewell My Concubine. I spotted this in a used-book store and grabbed it at once. I’d never realized the 1993 Chen Kaige film was based on a book. And if you loved that lush, heartbreaking movie, let me tell you, the book is very much like it. Farewell tells the story of two men, trained from childhood to perform in the traditional Chinese opera, and the woman who comes between... Read more

Humility and Resistance in the Visions of an Enslaved Mystic

Last updated on: June 18, 2020 at 3:31 pm By Eve Tushnet

I get v. personal at The Lamp: In the middle of the seventeenth century in the city of Lima, a living woman asked a dead one whether black women could go to heaven. Ursula de Jesús, the living woman, had entered the Franciscan Convent of Santa Clara as a nun’s slave—or, technically, she was the slave of all the nuns and only served the woman who had owned her when her work for all the others was done, this being... Read more