The Batman

The advance word about Matt Reeves’s The Batman suggested the world was in for a pretty odd reboot. The film’s running time would be three hours. The hero would be played by the lugubrious Englishman Robert Pattinson, who revealed, in an interview, that The Batman was “a sad movie”, and that his character was “kind of a weirdo”, whom the writers had partly modelled on Kurt Cobain. 

As it turns out, Reeves’s movie is indeed odd. But it’s odd in an unsettling and haunting way. If American democracy continues its slide into decadence, future historians may well point to this film as a kind of watershed or omen: an ailing bat in the coal mine. After four years of Trump and two of Covid, even Batman seems ready to throw in the sponge. Surely a culture must be in terminal strife, when even its fictional superheroes can barely see the point of going on ... [READ MORE]

The Art of Clickbait

It’s not easy to say universally true things about the Internet. As our online experience becomes increasingly customised, increasingly tailored to our personal preferences and vices, it’s getting harder and harder to be confident that your version of the Internet will necessarily resemble mine. 

For example, is your online news feed as full of clickbait headlines as mine is? Or is mine so full of clickbait because the algorithm has worked out, correctly, that I can’t stop clicking on the stuff?

If I had no source of news besides my so-called news feed, I’d be able to tell you almost nothing important about what’s been going on in the world. On the other hand, I’ve become a big authority on the inane and the irrelevant. I can tell you who threw shade at Johnny Depp last week. I can tell you who called out Kanye.

And I can tell you a few secrets about the dark art of clickbaiting ... [READ MORE]

The Beatles: Get Back

"Breaking up is like knocking over a Coke machine," Jerry Seinfeld once observed. "You can’t do it in one push. You’ve got to rock it back and forth a few times, and then it goes over."

I was reminded of Seinfeld’s law when watching Get Back, Peter Jackson’s gruelling documentary about the making of the Beatles’ Let it Be album. Breaking up a band is indeed hard to do. But a well-executed demise can be vital to a band’s long-term reputation. Many a supergroup has ruined a perfectly good breakup by reforming when its members are about ninety, or when the lone survivor from the original lineup is a haggard bassist whose lawyers had the acumen to secure the naming rights ... [READ MORE]

Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads

“Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society – to help solve our contemporary problems – seems to me a peculiarly American delusion.”

Jonathan Franzen – whose sixth novel, the hefty and keenly awaited Crossroads, came out last week – wrote those words in 1996, in an essay about the state of American fiction. If a non-American were to make the same point, it might sound a bit rude. So it’s nice to hear an American novelist admit it. Americans do seem to have some overblown ideas about what novels are for, and what they can do. 

As it happens, Franzen started writing fiction at a moment when debate about the purpose and direction of the American Novel was raging especially hard ... [READ MORE]