Audaciously, the German-language film invites us to regard its central couple not as calculating monsters, the way we’re used to seeing Nazis depicted onscreen, but as ordinary people acting on recognizable motives. For the most part, the Hösses want the things we want: comfort, security, the occasional treat. In an early scene, we see them chatting in their twin beds. Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) asks Rudolf (Christian Friedel) if he will take her back to the spa they once visited in Italy. “All that pampering,” she says, her head propped up on her hand, beginning to reminisce. “And the walks. And that nice couple we met.” Suddenly she succumbs to laughter as a further, Chekhovian detail bubbles up: “And that man who played the accordion to the cows.” Rudolf replies, “They loved it.” The conversation is so mundane and universal—this could be any wife addressing any husband—that it’s possible to forget, if only for a moment, just whose pillow talk we are listening in on.

“I wanted to humanize them,” Glazer, who is Jewish, said—in the sense, he quickly clarified, of showing the Hösses as only human, all too human. “I wanted to dismantle the idea of them as anomalies, as almost supernatural. You know, the idea that they came from the skies and ran amok, but thank God that’s not us and it’s never going to happen again. I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith at No. 26.”

In doing so, he is pushing back against an edifice of conventional wisdom. Thinkers as varied as Jewish theologians and postmodern theorists have conceived of the Holocaust as a singular, almost transcendent disaster—[Eli] Wiesel’s “ultimate mystery.” This impulse to sequester the Nazi Judeocide from the rest of human experience is understandable, but in the words of the historian Robert Jan van Pelt, it inadvertently consigns the death camps “to the realm of myth, distancing us from an all too concrete historical reality.” It is this concrete historical reality that The Zone of Interest seeks to recover.

When Hüller was approached to play Hedwig, she was initially skeptical. “I always refused to play Fascists—which, of course, especially in international productions, come your way from time to time as a German actress,” she told me over lunch at a restaurant in Leipzig, where she lives with her twelve-year-old daughter. (Hüller is not with the girl’s father.) The neighborhood was filled with galleries and restaurants, and the pavement of its main street, Karl-Heine Strasse, was studded with Stolpersteine—memorial plaques outside buildings whose former residents were murdered in the Holocaust. We sat in a pleasant outdoor area, and Hüller’s dog, a Weimaraner mix, rested beside her on a blanket that Hüller had brought from home. (The dog appears in “The Zone of Interest” as the family pet.) “I didn’t like the idea of putting on a Nazi uniform like that, or using language like that—to get close to the energy of that, or to discover there would be fun in that,” Hüller went on. “I have seen colleagues that actually have fun doing it. Maybe it’s still in their bodies from former generations. They like to change their language and speak like that”—the tone of her voice changed, her usually soft-spoken, careful speech becoming harsh and rat-a-tat. Reverting to her own voice, she asked, “Why do they do it? They could speak like a normal person.”

Hüller also disapproves of projects that use the Nazi era as a canvas upon which to paint a dramatic story that has little to do with Fascism. (Netflix’s recent soapy drama “All the Light We Cannot See” could be considered a prime example.) She was therefore attracted to the pointed absence of drama in Glazer’s screenplay: nothing much happens beyond what we know is happening offscreen, as the murderous apparatus under Höss’s command becomes ever more efficient. She told me, “Jonathan and I had a lot of conversations about the traps in this kind of story we wanted to tell—which is not really a story. There is a couple, and one wants to leave, and the other doesn’t.

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When two touted pop-culture events happen on the same day, people—consumers, the media, even the artists themselves—tend to frame it as a showdown. Think Kanye West vs. 50 Cent, Blade Runner vs. The Thing, Nevermind vs. Blood Sugar Sex Magik. That’s not happening with Barbie and Oppenheimer, both of which hit theaters today. To the contrary: The term “Barbenheimer” has swept into the pop lexicon to describe turning this cinematic synchronicity into a double feature. Yes, reader, that means four hours and 54 minutes of big-screen immersion.

As for why this has happened, your guess is as good as ours. It helps, of course, that both films are the product of acclaimed and accomplished directors (Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan, respectively); it also helps that the two movies are so tonally disparate that they act as natural complements. But there’s also a very real joy, after three years of pandemic-fueled box-office stagnation and in this age of superhero fatigue and endless media conglomeration, at having two smart non-sequels in theaters at the same time.

But there’s one other very important thing to point out about Barbenheimer: From our standpoint, this is maybe the most Longreads-friendly meme since TikTok’s New Journalism Icons as Zodiac Signs Challenge. (Or it would be, if that existed.) Barbie and J. Robert Oppenheimer have each been the subject of numerous critical and journalistic examinations over the years, and they cast long cultural shadows well before they became central characters in $100 million films. With that in mind, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite reads about the weirdest dynamic duo of 2023, presented as a quartet of Barbenheimer-style doubleheaders. See you when Didion and Talese get greenlit!

The Ken Doll Reboot: Beefy, Cornrowed, and Pan-Racial

Caity Weaver | GQ | June 20, 2017 | 4,033 words

The new lineup of Ken Dolls—seeking to represent a more multicultural, physically diverse populace (read: client base)—landed earlier this week to much fanfare. Some of the reactions were laudatory; some were less so (who can resist a man-bun joke, after all?). Caity Weaver, writing at GQ, got to follow the creative process leading to the new dolls’ release. Through her eyes, we learn how even an attempt to “celebrate diversity” often requires so much semantic and design acrobatics that it’s not very clear who the celebration is for, and who might still be excluded from it.

When he debuted in 1961, Ken (legal name: Ken Carson) was a spindly, anemic fan of casual swimwear. Over the years, he has blossomed into a sculpted, perma-tanned icon of American masculinity. Even if you never played with Ken, his tiny footfall has reverberated through your life; he charges in early in the formative years of the fairer sex, setting an impossible standard for males against which you will be judged forever. Ken is the first man—or, technically, eunuch—many little girls will ever see nude. Consequently, he teaches young ladies that men are meant to have bodies like Olympic water-polo players. He’ll teach girls precisely how much taller than women men should be and (sort of) about the different ways men use the bathroom; Barbie’s Dreamhouse, a one-woman mega-mansion, features a single but quintessential nod to Ken’s existence: a toilet seat that lifts up. “That’s very important for Ken from a girl’s perspective,” says Michael Shore, Mattel’s head of global consumer insights (it means he watches kids play with dolls). “Because guys use toilets different from girls.”

Over time, Ken has been depicted as a rapping rocker (Rappin’ Rockin’ Ken), a doctor (Dr. Ken), and a sovereign of the Crystal Caves (King of the Crystal Caves Ken), but that is what he is reduced to: someone who uses the toilet in a mysterious way.

A Profile of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Lincoln Barnett | LIFE | October 10, 1949

Four years after America dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, writer Lincoln Barnett went to Princeton to interview J. Robert Oppenheimer. Barnett found a noticeably relieved Oppenheimer, deep into new research—a “revival of physics”—after years spent building a weapon that to his mind was “merely a gadget, a technological artifact that exploited principles well known before the war.” This remarkable profile, available via Google Books in its original print format, includes one of the earliest descriptions of Oppenheimer’s famous observation upon the detonation of the first atomic bomb test.

Los Alamos took its toll of his physical energies, for in the final phases of the work he slept but four hours a night. By the pre-dawn of July 16, 1945, when the first bomb was raised to the test tower at Alamogordo, his weight had fallen from its normal 145 to 115 pounds. Above and beyond the fatigue he felt as he peered across the darkened desert that morning, he was beset by two complementary anxieties: he feared first that the bomb would not work; second he feared what would happen to the world if it did. And then when the great ball of fire rolled upward to the blinded stars, fragments of the Bhagavad-Gita flashed into his mind: “If the radiance of a thousands suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One…. I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.” And as the shock waves and sound waves hurled themselves furiously against the distant mountains, Oppenheimer knew that he and his co-workers had acquired a promethean burden they could never shed. “In some crude sense,” he observed later, “which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” These sentiments were no sudden by-product of the explosion’s terror and fury. The moral problem adduced by their work had been debated by the Los Alamos scientists incessantly from the beginning. Oppenheimer once analyzed their ethical position in these words: “We thought that since atomic weapons could be realized they must be realized for the world to see, because they were the best argument that science would make for a new and more reasonable idea of relations between nations.” Although Oppenheimer represented the idealist wing, who thought development of the bomb might lead to some good end, many of the physicists justified their work on purely empirical grounds. This “operational” standpoint was expressed bluntly by Oppenheimer’s former teacher, Dr. Bridgman of Harvard, who pooh-poohed his famous student’s feelings of guilt, declaring, “Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. It’s their job to find the facts. There’s no sin connected with it—no morals. If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there.”

When Barbie Went to War With Bratz

Jill Lepore | The New Yorker | January 17, 2018 | 4,700 words

Jill Lepore looks at the problem of defining intellectual property when it comes to what young girls should play with: “The feud between Barbie and Bratz occupies the narrow space between thin lines: between fashion and porn, between originals and copies, and between toys for girls and rights for women.”

In 2010, Alex Kozinski, then the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who presided over Mattel v. MGA, wrote in his opinion that most of what makes a fashion doll desirable is not protectable intellectual property, because there are only so many ways to make a female body attractive. “Little girls buy fashion dolls with idealized proportions which means slightly larger heads, eyes and lips; slightly smaller noses and waists; and slightly longer limbs than those that appear routinely in nature,” Kozinski wrote, giving “slightly” a meaning I never knew it had. But only so much exaggeration is possible, he went on. “Make the head too large or the waist too small and the doll becomes freakish.” I’d explain how it is that anyone could look at either a Barbie or a Bratz doll and not find it freakish, except that such an explanation is beyond me. As a pull-string Barbie knockoff once told Lisa Simpson, “Don’t ask me! I’m just a girl!”

Oppenheimer’s Tragedy—and Ours

Robert Jay Lifton | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist | July 17, 2023 | 3,485 words

This is a fascinating dive into both Oppenheimer and the human psyche. Robert Jay Lifton proves himself to be an Oppenheimer commentator who has true knowledge, insight, and understanding, even admitting that “had I been a physicist at the time I would have readily joined that crusade.” A thought-provoking take that goes beyond the narrative into the complexities of humanity.

Underneath Oppenheimer’s promethean capacities was a vulnerable and at times deeply distraught human being. He could be needy and contradictory in his relationships with others and subject to periodic depression. During his early adult life he was at times suicidal and on at least two occasions violent toward others: He poisoned an apple of a Cambridge tutor (we do not know how much poison he used) who insisted that he engage in hated laboratory work, and on another occasion attempted to strangle a friend who told him of love and plans for marriage.

Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ Dream Job

Willa Paskin | The New York Times Magazine | July 11, 2023 | 6,671 words

Anyone who grew up with a Barbie (or Ken) doll will be enthralled by this piece. It explores not just the new film, but also Barbie’s history and complicated relationship with feminism. There has been a flood of Barbie content recently, but this reporting has far more depth than most.

“Barbie,” too, is a coming-of-age story; the figure coming of age just happens to be a full-grown piece of plastic. “Little Women” would have been a fine alternate title for it. Same with “Mothers & Daughters,” a working title for “Lady Bird.” For Barbie, as in both those other films, growing up is a matriarchal affair. It is something you do with your mother, your sisters, your aunties. Or, in Barbie’s case, with the women threaded through your product history.

Excerpt From ‘American Prometheus’

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin | Penguin Random House | 2005 | 2,552 words

In this first chapter of American Prometheus, we meet the parents of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic era. Robert’s father Julius was a German-born clothier; his mother Ella, an American artist. Oppenheimer had a privileged upbringing in New York City, in a home filled with piano lessons and paintings by the likes of Picasso, Rembrandt, Renoir, and Van Gogh. “Excellence and purpose” were considered words to live by.

Barbie Wants to Get to Know Your Child

James Vlahos | The New York Times | September 16, 2015 | 6,303 words

What happens when you try to program a doll to have a real conversation with a child? A look at the new A.I.-powered Barbie doll hitting the market this Christmas.

This summer, when I visited Mattel’s sprawling campus in El Segundo, a prototype of Hello Barbie stood in the middle of a glass-topped conference table, her blond tresses parted on the right and cascading down to her left shoulder. She looked like your basic Barbie, but Aslan Appleman, a lead product designer, explained that her thighs had been thickened slightly to fit a rechargeable battery in each one; a mini-USB charging port was tucked into the small of her back.

A microphone, concealed inside Barbie’s necklace, could be activated only when a user pushed and held down her belt buckle. Each time, whatever someone said to Barbie would be recorded and transmitted via Wi-Fi to the computer servers of ToyTalk. Speech-recognition software would then convert the audio signal into a text file, which would be analyzed. The correct response would be chosen from thousands of lines scripted by ToyTalk and Mattel writers and pushed to Hello Barbie for playback — all in less than a second.

‘‘Barbie, what is your full name?’’ Appleman asked the doll as I watched.

‘‘Oh, I thought you knew,’’ Barbie replied. ‘‘My full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.’’

On Albert Einstein

Robert Oppenheimer | The New York Review of Books | March 17, 1966 | 2,409 words

Oppenheimer’s lecture, originally given at UNESCO House in Paris in 1965—and reprinted the following year in NYRB.

Though I knew Einstein for two or three decades, it was only in the last decade of his life that we were close colleagues and something of friends. But I thought that it might be useful, because I am sure that it is not too soon—and for our generation perhaps almost too late—to start to dispel the clouds of myth and to see the great mountain peak that these clouds hide. As always, the myth has its charms; but the truth is far more beautiful.

John: Anthony Perkins was a really kind, kind man, and he had a lot of talent. Did you ever meet him?

Nicolas: I never met him. But I’d love to hear about him.

John: Back in the day, Burt Reynolds, when he was riding high, used to throw these parties. I went to one, and it was pretty incredible. They had a game of charades, and Anthony Perkins and I teamed up, and we were perfect. We beat everybody, hands down. Because we had the same brain. I could come up with one gesture, and he had what it was.

Nicolas: Well, you know what that means, then, John? That means that you’re also an actor.

John: [Laughs] No, no, no.

Nicolas: Well, yeah. To communicate through a gesture and get it… Let’s say you have a child, and you want to know if they can act—give them a toy phone, and see what they sound like when they’re pretending they’re on the phone with somebody.

There’s just something about the eye of a photographer, their relationship with an actor, their ability to read the room, and their understanding of what works on a billboard or a magazine cover. The industry is also full of post-production stories about unit photographers delivering graded stills, only for that grade to inform the color grade of the film itself. It is a deeply symbiotic relationship.

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Michael Musto | Longreads | Month 2019 | 8 minutes (2,090 words)

I’ve known about the power of good/bad movies since I was a kid, but I was reminded of it just a few days after 9/11, when I went to a press screening of Mariah Carey’s unwitting classic Glitter.

Naturally, New York City was traumatized, many of us going through the motions in a daze as we tried to make sense of the horror. But we had to make a living, so, along with a handful of other arts journalists, I dragged myself to the screening, not sure of what we were getting into. It turned out to be the hackneyed story of a DJ who tries to lift a backup singer (Mariah) up from her humble roots through song and romance. And it was evident quickly into the film that Mariah just didn’t have the acting chops; the new Meryl Streep this wasn’t. We uncomfortably sat there watching the pop diva try to act, but eventually we couldn’t hold back, and a few of her line readings were greeted with titters — the first time I’d heard laughter (including my own) since 9/11. It sounded both shocking and very welcome, and the unintended reaction mounted during a ludicrous scene where Mariah and the DJ were magically thinking of the same melody. By the end, when Mariah spills out of a limo in a glittery gown to visit her dirt-poor mother, we were all screaming in hilarity. This was just the catharsis we needed, and it generously helped us bond and move on.

***

I grew up in the ’60s with good/bad movies in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn because the nearby Walker Theater was where subpar films regularly came to crash land. It was very rare that they had an Oscar-caliber movie there, and I had to wonder if the place was a front or some kind of tax write-off, though that didn’t stop me in the least from being a regular customer. I pantingly lined up for the dire attractions like Boom! (an overheated Tennessee Williams drama with Liz Taylor in an eye-popping headdress and Noel Coward as “the witch of Capri”), Secret Ceremony (Liz again, this time as a prostitute who fancies herself the mother of broken waif Mia Farrow), and De Sade (Keir Dullea as the celebrated sadist, with lots of slow-motion flogging that I didn’t quite understand at age 13, though I felt very adult taking it in). I was well aware that these were not works of prestige, having read the savage newspaper reviews, but there was no denying that I loved them! For a mere dollar admission, I sat there (usually alone) and found joy in the exotic settings, the over the top acting, and the glitzy accessories. “Bad” became “good” to me because, even if I occasionally felt the urge to question the inanity of these films, they took me out of the ennui of my adolescence while also educating me about the power of escapism and star quality. I was not bored.

Many years later — in the ’90s — I found that “misery loves company” by re-enacting the movie-going experiences of my youth, this time with friends. Performer John Epperson had invited me and a few of my cohorts over to his place to watch The Love Machine, based on the trashy Jackie Susann novel about a heartless, bed hopping TV exec. The movie wasn’t quite as unintentionally campy as Valley of the Dolls (a high good/bad watermark, based on an even more lurid Susann book), but it still had enjoyably risible elements, with terrible casting and heavy handed lines like “Have you ever felt anything for anyone?” We ate it up and eventually splintered over to my own apartment, where the good/bad movie club runs to this day. Every few weeks, six of us get together to nibble on snacks I lay out and watch camp classics — often the very same ones I grew up with. Openly snarky now, we rip into them, commenting along with all the absurdities, though there’s also an underlying appreciation of the art of making these films — so much so that after taking in a bunch of them, we get together and vote on the Movie Club Awards. They’re sort of halfway between the Golden Razzies and the Oscars, as we honor movies and performances that were so vividly awful that they kept us amused. Winners have included Raquel Welch, Burgess Meredith, and Pearl Bailey in their off moments, plus flicks like Skidoo (a surreal all-star mess with Groucho Marx as a mobster named God) and Jennifer on My Mind (about a guy whose girlfriend ODs, so he stuffs her in his harpsichord and hopes no one notices).

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Whether we stream our featured attractions, get them from Amazon, or tape them off movie channels, we’ve instinctively learned what makes a bad movie fun. Magazine editor Mickey Boardman, a founding member of my club, loves the idea of “big stars brought down low” — as in Jennifer Jones playing a former porn star who takes LSD and sky dives in the inimitable Angel, Angel, Down We Go (1969) or Oscar winners Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine robbing banks in full hippie garb in the misfire comedy Bunny O’Hare (1972). The most bizarre star vehicle of all is the musical of Lost Horizon (1971), in which a bunch of Academy Award types float around what looks like the courtyard of a Malibu Marriott hotel, singing ghastly Burt Bacharach/Hal David songs. In the case of Liv Ullmann and Peter Finch, they mainly just “think” their songs — a la Mariah Carey — and fortunately, John Gielgud (as Chang) and Charles Boyer (as the High Lama) don’t sing at all. By the end of the lugubrious movie, you’ll probably feel that, unlike the residents of Shangri-La, you’ve considerably aged. And we absolutely love every minute!

Part of the fun here is in feeling better about yourself as you watch artists with such glorious track records fail so abysmally. It’s perversely comforting to see brilliant people mess up on such a grand scale, instilling the viewer with a superiority that great films simply can’t provide. “What were they thinking?” is the familiar, satisfying response, though there’s also the delight of discovering obscure chestnuts that hardly anyone else has ever heard of, for obvious reasons. (As in, “Did you know that Bette Davis once rode a motorcycle and robbed banks in a movie called Bunny O’Hare? And that she played the mother of a schizophrenic cross dresser in Scream Pretty Peggy?”) Another enjoyable thing about these films is that they free you from the tyranny of quality and good taste. There isn’t the challenging “This is good for me” feeling that makes movies from Gandhi to Never Look Away seem like less than a romp in the park to sit through. And you don’t even have to really pay attention!

A lot of horror films suit our interests because horror by definition involves out of the ordinary plot developments, and those must be presented with some cogent internal logic or the results go awry. Well, my movie club loves it when that’s not the case. In fact, the more misguided and ridiculous the approach, the more cheesy and fun/terrible the movie is. One of our favorites is The Manitou (1978), in which Susan Strasberg is pregnant on the back of her neck with the reincarnation of an ancient medicine man. You read that correctly. Also, Exorcist II: The Heretic, with a hammy Richard Burton and a placid Louise Fletcher (who always seemed like a second-tier Ellen Burstyn, which is perfect because sequels almost always trade down). I also adore The Creeping Terror, a low budget 1964 thriller about an outer space monster that looks like it crawled out of ABC Carpet & Home on clearance day.

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We gave multiple awards to The Baby, a 1973 non-Oscar-winner with Ruth Roman as a tough lady who keeps her adult son diapered and in a crib, only to have social worker Anjanette Comer try to get “the baby” away from her. But Anjanette has her own agenda. It turns out her husband has been infantilized in an accident and he needs a playmate! The highlight is the showdown between the two women (“You want the baby for yourself!”), but the bit where Comer becomes so crazed that she buries Roman alive also needs to be seen to be disbelieved. The latter actress had been in quality films like Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, but she doesn’t condescend to this material at all, instead looking like she’s having a ball being wickedly vampy. And for me and my club, her glee is infectious.

***

But the best kind of good/bad movie is one that doesn’t even know it’s bad. Enter The Room, the 2003 stinker that’s been called “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” and which proved that Tommy Wiseau is a quadruple non-threat — he can’t produce, direct, write, or act. Using a sizable budget of unknown origin, Wiseau plays Johnny, a sincere guy whose scheming girlfriend, Lisa, seduces Johnny’s best friend with disastrous results. The exceedingly earnest love-triangle tragedy is done in by endless establishing shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, character touches that add nothing (Lisa orders a very specific pizza over the phone), and illogical characters, like Lisa’s mother, who chirps, “I definitely have breast cancer!” The movie was initially sold as a riveting melodrama, until audiences — such as they were — jeered in derision and it was rebranded “a dark comedy.” It’s hilarious all right — and became a midnight attraction and one of my movie club’s faves, as we all chant along with the rotten dialogue (the way the 1975 drag musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show went from a dud to an interactive delight.) I’ll give Wiseau this much: Along with Ed Wood’s oeuvre, The Room has the distinction of having spawned a truly quality movie, in this case The Disaster Artist, with James Franco as the whack auteur.

The year 2003 also brought Gigli, with Jennifer Lopez hired to watch over kidnapper Ben Affleck, though obviously no one was hired to watch over the whole deranged project. The dialogue is so blissfully undignified for a couple so big the media branded them with a shared name (“Bennifer’) that it helped to make them a lot less big, while providing a giddy bonding experience for trash-minded cineastes everywhere. Even more raunchily delectable, 1995’s Showgirls — with Elizabeth Berkley as a Vegas dancer who has underwater sex — is one of the glitziest, most hyped clunkers of all time. Costar Kyle MacLachlan recently told me the film found “a response that’s a lot of fun. It is not necessarily the way it was intended, but it’s found its place.” His unabashed admission reminded me of the time Oscar winner Patty Duke told me she had finally come to embrace Valley of the Dolls because, for whatever reason, it’s brought great joy to a lot of people. And that’s the only way to deal with such a gigantic lemon — make lemonade!

Much like Showgirls, Mommie Dearest took a serious subject — Joan Crawford’s alleged abuse against her daughter Christina — and heightened it, with kabuki style makeup for Faye Dunaway, who bulges her eyes and screeches pronouncements like “No wire hangers!” and “Bring me the axe!” Audiences guffawed at her antics, though I find the film a searing portrait of dementia, as well as a cautionary tale, a look inside Hollywood, and a fashion show. Part of me is still that awkward adolescent who didn’t know good from bad — or who didn’t care. And whatever it is, Mommie Dearest is endlessly entertaining, teetering on the good/bad brink so deliciously that Faye won the Golden Razzie for Worst Actress but also was a runner-up for Best Actress at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards. That takes a particular brand of genius.

That film — and all the other ones I mentioned — have helped me get through many of life’s real horrors, while making me feel that my most embarrassing missteps weren’t quite that lousy after all. While people are still divided as to whether films like Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody really deserved Oscars, no one in my movie club ever questions our awards for stuff like The Baby and The Room. So thank you, good/bad movies. You’re the best.

* * *

Michael Musto is a weekly columnist for NewNowNext.com and a freelance writer for outlets from the New York Times Styles section to the Daily Beast. He was the longtime author of the “La Dolce Musto” entertainment and nightlife column for the Village Voice and has authored four books, including the non-fiction guide “Downtown” and the roman a clef novel “Manhattan on the Rocks.” Musto is an awards-related commentator for Goldderby.com and as such appears on CNN to discuss the Oscars and other entertainment topics.

Editor: Sari Botton

In an incisive essay for the Baffler, political scientist Adolph Reed considers how many pop culture creations made with Black audiences in mind — including films like Birth of a Nation, Selma, and Black Panther —  are narratives of singular, heroic, often male, achievement. “Tales of inspiration and uplift,” he calls them. Meanwhile, films like Glory, which hinged on its historical accuracy, were received by some with considerably less enthusiasm:

Occasionally on a boring flight, I’ll rewatch the Battle of James Island scene from the magnificent 1989 film, Glory. The scene depicts the first engagement of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first Northern regiment of black troops organized by the Army of the United States to fight against the Confederate insurrection. James Island was a fateful battle outside Charleston, SC, on July 16, 1863. I pulled up the clip on a recent flight and was moved yet again by the powerful imagery of black men finally able to strike a blow against the slaveocracy. Imagining what that felt like for the soldiers of the 54th is always intensely gratifying.

Watching it this time, I remembered how startled I had been when Glory was released to learn that many people, including blacks and people on the left, dismissed or even disparaged the film as a “white savior narrative”—a phrase that is now a routine derogation of certain cross-racial sagas of resistance to white supremacy. In Glory’s case, this complaint arose mainly in response to the (historically accurate) depiction of the regiment’s commanding officers as Northern whites.

This objection left me dumbfounded. After all, the 54th Massachusetts was a real historical entity. As a compromise to ensure political support, it was stipulated that its officers be white. Nonetheless, prominent abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and the free black community of Boston, were enthusiastic about its formation and instrumental in recruiting its ranks.

Now I think I understand. I’ve long suspected that, to a certain strain of race-conscious or antiracist discourse, historical exploration in popular culture was less important than the propagation of tales of inspiration and uplift. These fables typically feature singular black heroes who have overcome crushing racist adversity against all odds. In recent years, a steady stream of films and other narratives have openly embraced that preference.

He suggests these escapist portrayals echo what is disturbingly superficial about our current drive to uplift diverse leadership and voices in media. “Winning anything politically — policies or changes in power relations — is not the point.,” Reed writes.

Decisions by blacks to support nonblack candidates or social policies not expressed in race-first terms are interpreted as evidence of flawed, limited, misguided, or otherwise co-opted black agency. The idea that blacks, like everyone else, make their history under conditions not of their own choosing becomes irrelevant, just another instance of insufficient symbolic representation.

The notion that black Americans are political agents just like other Americans, and can forge their own tactical alliances and coalitions to advance their interests in a pluralist political order is ruled out here on principle. Instead, blacks are imagined as so abject that only extraordinary intervention by committed black leaders has a prayer of producing real change. This pernicious assumption continually subordinates actually existing history to imaginary cultural narratives of individual black heroism and helps drive the intense—and myopic—opposition that many antiracist activists and commentators express to Bernie Sanders, social democracy, and a politics centered on economic inequality and working-class concerns.

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