A bug’s life: In the latest Harper Reviewletter, Nicolas McKelvie examines the campaign to rid New York City of its newest invasive species, the spotted lanternfly. The command to squash at all costs has led to moments of unity among normally distant strangers. And yet, McKelvie argues that this unity is troubling on a larger scale. Turning to the work of contemporary political theorist Giorgio Agamben, McKelvie considers whether an alliance against a common enemy is the only thing that can bring about a sense of community. McKelvie argues that the campaign against lanternflies is reminiscent of this year’s Democratic National Convention, which paired an “over-the-top performance of patriotism” with “the hardest line Democrats have taken on immigration in decades.” Concluding with a question of his own, McKelvie asks: is it possible to love your country without hate of the “other”—be they “immigrants, political rivals, or spotted lanternflies?”
Elizabeth Eck, senior editor
(Inter)mission impossible: The rise of the three-hour blockbuster has been a disaster for movie theaters and moviegoers alike. Theaters can’t charge more for tickets or sell additional concessions for a movie that occupies twice the amount of viewing time as an old-fashioned feature. There’s only so long audiences can sit in their seats before their eyes glaze over and their bladders whine. So what a treat it was to watch Brady Corbet’s new three-and-a-half hour epic The Brutalist at the Chicago Film Festival—with a built-in fifteen-minute intermission. In those fifteen minutes, the audience rose, stretched, and sprung to life with chatter. The line for the bathroom bloomed and fresh bags of popcorn were duly served. All remembered that a masochistic dedication to three straight hours of flickering film will never reward the viewer like that same film punctuated with Raisinets and conversation.
Noah Glasgow, editor in chief
Flipping the script: By now, we’ve all grown familiar with the archetype that is the “award-winning film.” Rarely mastered, it is nevertheless gestured at every year—by audacious directors showing off their sleek style, their witty writing, and their fashionable (dare I say, perhaps too fashionable) political commentary. Sean Baker’s Anora is, on its surface, very much not that kind of film. Its portrait of a twenty-three-year-old stripper from Brighton Beach, momentarily swept up in life on the other side of the Brooklyn enclave’s gated mansions, makes little effort to raise its audience’s eyebrows. In your face, slapstick, and intentionally cliché, one takes it in as one does a ride at Luna Park—hoos and has from the audience included. And it is only as the heroine’s coked-out Vegas shotgun marriage to a Russian oligarch’s son falls to pieces that we are confronted by Anora’s profundity. After two hours of decadence, the long one-take denouement smacks less of the auteur and more of the sunlight on the other side of a nightclub’s door—it grinds against the rhythm still pulsing in our ringing ears, аnd reminds us that the whole time it’s been people up there dancing and floundering, as we shrieked with laughter.
Declan Rexer, senior editor