Amanda Hess

Finally she came to a Winslow Homer oil painting from 1870, in which three drenched girls were wringing out their heavy swimming costumes on a Massachusetts shore. One was obscured beneath a toss of wet blond hair. Another was planted in the sand, scratchy bare legs splayed out in front of her. Her bathing cap lent her an androgynous edge. She shot the blonde a feral glare.

“Those are my girls,” Gerwig said. “Don’t they just look like girls that you know?”

As Gerwig set about writing and directing her adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” due Christmas Day, she hunted for evocative images of girls from the Civil War and just after — what she calls “girls-you-know pictures.” She studied portraits from the past that hit her with a curious immediacy: a new wife disdainfully preparing her first stew, painted by Lilly Martin Spencer in 1854; a surly Victorian teen captured in sepia by Julia Margaret Cameron. “This is a terrific one of this little munchkin,” Gerwig said, conjuring the Cameron photograph from the recesses of her phone. “Look at this girl. She’s so arrogant and mad. I love her.”

“Little Women” is a snow globe of girlhood that has been shaken and retold, generation after generation, for 150 years. Since 1917, it has been adapted for film seven times. The March sisters still act as an enduring personality test for young readers who see themselves in the mature Meg, the vain and ambitious Amy, the shy and sentimental Beth or, more often than not, the tomboyish Jo, who is the heroine of unruly, writerly girls — girls like Louisa May Alcott and Greta Gerwig.

Yet as the book goes on, the modern girl’s identification with the sisters grows less comfortable: By the end, each of the Marches is either married or dead. These “four really talented weirdo girls who were ambitious and funny and competitive and kind of crazy,” as Gerwig describes them, seem trapped by history. They are posed unnaturally in the conventional narratives of their time.

Gerwig’s film is less an update than it is an excavation — a kind of literary investigation of the characters, and their writer, and what they all really wanted. The result is a meta tale that cracks open the world of “Little Women” to make a larger point about the stories we tell about women and girls.

Reading the novel again as an adult, Gerwig, who is 36, was struck by how modern its dialogue felt once she brushed away the dusty surrounding material. “Things were jumping out at me that I felt like I’d never heard before,” Gerwig said, like Marmee telling her daughter Jo: “I am angry nearly every day of my life.” Gerwig said, “That’s not something you think of as Marmee saying, except that it’s right there in the book. She says it.”

Gerwig studied the story, and Alcott’s life, until she found what she calls “the thing underneath,” which is Alcott’s depiction of “all of these inappropriate emotions for young women to have.” Gerwig’s adaptation feels modern. But “I didn’t invent it,” she said. “It’s there.”

GERWIG DOES NOT RECALL reading “Little Women” for the first time. “I always knew who the Marches were,” she said. “It got absorbed into the fabric of who I was.” Just a few weeks ago, Gerwig’s mother reminded her that she had played Jo in a community theater production of “Little Women” when she was an 11-year-old girl growing up in Sacramento, California. Gerwig had forgotten, but the outline of a memory surfaced: Jo was supposed to flop dramatically onto the floor, and Gerwig recalled thinking, “I’m not really selling this.”

Opening the book again in her 30s, she told me, revealed a porthole to her younger self. She had idolized Jo as a child, and as she reread the story, she found herself measuring her adult life against the expectations of her girlhood. “I think, as adult women, we’re always walking with our younger selves,” she said. “I feel like I’m always answering to her, about whether I’m being as brave as I could be, or as big as I could be, or as ambitious as I could be.”

Her film is the rare adaptation that centers on the March sisters as adults. It opens when they are at the precipice of womanhood, halfway through the book. The project of their creative girlhood has stalled, and life has become about making a living or marrying into one. Then it blinks back and forth, from childhood to adulthood, investigating where childhood dreams bloom and where they shrivel.

Even as Gerwig was ruminating on Jo March, she was becoming her: Both grew up to be writers of commercial, semi-autobiographical works. (Gerwig started in on the “Little Women” screenplay before she made the 2017 coming-of-age tale “Lady Bird,” about another girl from Sacramento; now she and her partner, writer and director Noah Baumbach, 50, are at work on a script for a “Barbie” movie.) Producer Amy Pascal had been looking to mount a new “Little Women” 25 years after producing the beloved 1994 adaptation, and, Gerwig said, “I guess I went in and told her that I was the only person to make the movie, and that I thought it was about art and women and money.”

The film opens with Jo walking into the offices of the Weekly Volcano and offering a short story to its publisher, Mr. Dashwood. He scans it, laughs at its jokes, crosses out whole pages and underpays her. “I felt like it could have been written yesterday, sitting with an executive at a studio,” Gerwig said of the scene. Mr. Dashwood tells Jo to bring him more material, and to make sure that her characters are married by the end — “or dead, either way.”

As she dug into the world of “Little Women,” Gerwig learned how Alcott’s life diverged from that of Jo, her literary stand-in. Alcott never married. A storyline that she lends to the girls’ father — he goes off to war to serve soldiers and falls ill — was ripped from her own experience as a nurse on the front. Gerwig was interested in what Alcott had wanted for Jo, and “what she put in the book because she felt she had to.” Alcott’s sharply witty letters and diaries were clarifying. “Money is the end &amp; aim of my mercenary existence,” she once wrote to a friend, a line that Gerwig stole and gave to Jo.

The film’s Jo, played by “Lady Bird” star, Saoirse Ronan — who is quickly becoming a kind of avatar and muse for Gerwig — borrows heavily from Alcott, down to her ambidexterity and her handwriting, which Gerwig hired calligraphers to reproduce. As the film goes on, the line between Jo and Alcott blurs; Ronan becomes both the character and the novelist who created her. To prepare for the role, Gerwig instructed Ronan to start writing, for herself.

Alcott had never been interested in writing a book for girls — she called the genre “moral pap for the young” — but her publisher insisted. When the novel became a sensation, selling out in two weeks, it pulled Alcott’s family out of abject poverty. And when Alcott’s readers demanded that Jo end up married — presumably, to the handsome boy-next-door, Laurie — Alcott complied, with a wry twist. In the back half of the book — originally published as a sequel, under the title “Good Wives” — Jo does get married, but not to Laurie. “Jo should have remained a literary spinster,” Alcott wrote to a friend, but she felt so pressured to satisfy expectations that “I didn’t dare refuse &amp; out of perversity went &amp; made a funny match for her,” with an older German professor. The only way Alcott could forge an independent life as a woman was to sell an alternate reality of her life — one in which Jo was not so independent.

Historical narratives have a tendency to lag behind history itself. In every time, there are the things you are allowed to do, and the things you are allowed to write. Three girls might bathe undisturbed on a beach, but when Winslow Homer painted them, viewers were disturbed. One critic called the girls “exceedingly red-legged and ungainly”; a family magazine drew trousers over their legs. Louisa May Alcott could be a spinster, but the same was not true for her heroine. It would be unsatisfying; it would be depressing; it wouldn’t sell.

As our tour of the Met wound down, Gerwig led us toward the cafe, where we pushed two chairs onto the end of a crowded table. She bent over a banana and spoke about the ending of her own “Little Women,” which rips open the contradictions between life and art and commerce and reveals them plainly onscreen. Jo goes to Mr. Dashwood with a book based on her life and the lives of her sisters. The publisher insists that the Jo character become a wife by the end. They haggle, and finally Jo agrees to marry her off, for a price.

And then we do see Jo snag herself a husband, in a way. Gerwig shot the scene like “the end of a studio romance,” she said. She wanted it backlit, with rain machines and the camera on a crane. She wanted Jo’s odd German suitor played by French dreamboat Louis Garrel. She wanted a pursuit by carriage and a dramatic kiss.

The scene feels triumphant, but the real triumph is Jo’s novel, compromised though it may be. At some point, having filmed this meta romcom scene, Gerwig was asked to consider playing it straight. Couldn’t this be the real end of the movie, not just the fictional ending of the book-inside-the-movie? “To which I said, I never would have shot it that way,” Gerwig said. “Everyone would have been like, What did we just watch?” She added: “That ending’s not in me. At all.”

BY THE TIME SHE WAS DONE SHOOTING last December, Gerwig was six months pregnant, though her cast and crew did not know that at the time. “I didn’t really intend for it to be that way,” Gerwig said. “It’s just that at the beginning, you don’t tell anyone. And then at some point, I realized, ‘Well, maybe I’ll just make it to the end, and no one will know.’ And then I did.” In the spring, she delivered her rough cut to the studio, and 24 hours later, she went into labor. “The baby was like, ‘All right, let’s do this,’ ” Gerwig said.

In late October, Gerwig arrived at a New York preview screening of “Little Women” for a crowd of journalists and critics and Alcott scholars. She stood awkwardly in the aisle, and a receiving line formed in front of her, everyone eager to grab her hands and touch her shoulders and pay their respects. “I feel like I’m at my wedding, for my movie,” she said, and then she slouched to the front of the room to introduce the film. “As a girl, my heroine was Jo,” she said. “As a woman, it’s Louisa May Alcott.”

As she spoke, I noticed she was wearing a ring on the ring finger of her left hand. I watched her film, I cried, and then I went home and scanned her recent press photos for the ring. It had materialized several months ago and hadn’t left. Some of the images were attached to tabloid reports of the “secret baby” she’d had with Baumbach, whose own film about art and relationships, “A Marriage Story,” is due in November. I guess I, too, was eager to know whether my heroine would be married by the end. That night, when Gerwig was out walking her dog, Wizard, she called me, and I asked her questions about directing movies, and then I said:

“Oh, no,” she said. She laughed.

I had noticed she was wearing a ring, I said.

“Yeah, that’s a — that’s true, but — yes — no, but I’m not married,” she said. Then she added mischievously: “Yet.”

This article originally appeared in

What Greta Gerwig Saw in 'Little Women': 'Those Are My Girls'

Greta Gerwig was deep in the American Wing of the Met, searching for signs of modern life. She wound her way instinctively through the halls, bobbed between throngs of tourists, waved an arm and leapt impulsively into a closing elevator: “Maybe we’ll go in here! Sorry. Hi!”

KÜSNACHT, Switzerland — There is a metal plaque on the gate to Tina Turner’s estate that says “Vor 12.00 Uhr nicht läuten, keine Lieferungen,” which I believe is German for “Do not even think about bothering Tina Turner before noon.”

She was the symbol of rock ’n’ roll stamina for 50 years. Her “Proud Mary” was 175% longer than the original, and John Fogerty didn’t even dance. She became a star with Ike Turner in her 20s, escaped his abuse in her 30s, fought her way up the pop charts in her 40s, toured the world through her 60s, and now she would like to sleep in.

So I arrived at 2. Erwin Bach, Turner’s lovely German husband, fetched me in his SUV and delivered me to the house, which is named — did you think Tina Turner’s house would not have a name? — the Chateau Algonquin. It has cartoon palace energy: ivy snaking up the walls, gardeners manicuring the shrubs, a life-size two-legged horse sculpture suspended from a domed ceiling, a framed rendering of Turner as an Egyptian queen, a room stuffed with gilded Louis XIV style sofas and, sprawled on one of them, Tina Turner herself.

Turner is 79 years old. She has been retired for 10 years and she is still basking in all of the nothing she has to do.

“I don’t sing. I don’t dance. I don’t dress up,” she told me. Even her wig — “a critical part of the Tina Turner look,” as she wrote in her recent memoir — has relaxed from its formerly perpendicular posture into a saucy shag. Her voice is as beguiling as ever, though it is now employed for different means. She slips into a rich continental accent when she calls for her husband, and she dives into her low, trembling rasp — “not the voice of a woman,” as she has put it — when she teases him.

She does not miss performing. Oh, no. Even in 2009, as she romped around the world on the final dates of the “Tina! 50th Anniversary” tour, she was fantasizing, to be honest, about redecorating her house. She lived that life with Ike, and then she conquered that life with a life of her own, and now it was time to take in her unobstructed view of Lake Zurich.

“I was just tired of singing and making everybody happy,” she said. “That’s all I’d ever done in my life.”

Once in a while, though, she will be in the car. The radio will come on, and with Bach humming respectfully beside her, she will give the song the full Tina Turner treatment, bouncing in her seat and purring for an audience of one. There is a song that she can’t resist. “Oh, what’s his name?” she called to her husband, who was puttering around in the next room. “Darling? What’s his name?” And then she did sing: “I want something just liiiike this!”

Bach called: “The song is by Coldplay!”

“Coldplay,” Turner repeated. “You know what I like?” She began to rhapsodize on the counterintuitive appeal of Chris Martin’s voice. “He doesn’t have that really good black voice, like Motown —”

“ — The song is called ‘Coldplay with the Chainsmokers!’ ” Bach called.

“It doesn’t maaatter!” she called back, as if she had summoned her full vocal powers to banish the very idea of whatever a Chainsmoker is from the face of the Earth. She shot me a sly look. “It’s Coldplay,” she said.

Tina watching Tina

Turner may not be singing much these days, but there’s a squad of Tinas performing around the world on her behalf.

“Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” based on her life and scored with her hits, has brought a Tina to London and a Tina to Hamburg, Germany. Soon it will bring a Tina to Broadway, when the $16.5 million production begins performances at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater next month, with Adrienne Warren in the wig.

Directed by Phyllida Lloyd (“Mamma Mia!”), the show covers four decades of Turner’s life, beginning when she was little Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, and hopscotching through the ’80s, when she grew into the fiercest pop star on the planet. (Katori Hall, whose Martin Luther King play “The Mountaintop” reached Broadway in 2011, is the lead book writer, along with Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins.)

Turner consulted closely on the musical, showing the choreographer her moves and sharing her recollections with the writers. When she met Warren in London, she administered a little quiz.

Lounging on a couch, the actress standing expectantly before her, Turner asked, “Can you do the Pony? Do it a little bit.”

Warren bounced enthusiastically up and down. “That?” she asked, to which Turner replied: “No.”

And so Turner rose, paused her retirement just long enough to correctly execute her signature move, and then collapsed laughing onto the couch, gleefully kicking her Louboutin flats into the air.

I asked her if it’s strange to watch these other women pretend to be her, and she said that she has spent her whole career watching other women pretend to be her.

She used to audition promising background singers for the Ike &amp; Tina Turner Revue and say: “She’ll make a good Tina.” Later, when she started to see young pop starlets arise in her mold, she would look them over and say: “She’ll make a good Tina.” And when her record company told her that Beyoncé had released a song that referenced her — “Drunk in Love,” on which Jay-Z crudely boasts of his resemblance to Ike — Turner’s response was, “Yeah, I’m not surprised.”

It’s revisiting her life itself that is hard. The musical traces her triumphant rise as a solo artist and her budding romance with Bach, but first it tears through the 16 years she spent with Ike. She met him when he was a swaggering St. Louis bandleader and she was 17-year-old Anna Mae. He gave her a break as a performer, but by the end, he had almost made her hate music. He changed her name, and then he trademarked it, and then he owned her. He stole her earnings. He threw hot coffee in her face. He broke her jaw. Through it all he made her sing, even if blood was running down her throat.

It is difficult to neatly fictionalize that kind of physical and psychological violence. When Disney mounted “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” the 1993 biopic based on Turner’s life, Laurence Fishburne would not agree to play Ike until his “cardboard cutout” villain character was deepened. The climax of the stage musical shows Tina Turner triumphantly hitting Ike back before running to freedom; in real life, she did hit him back, but then she rubbed his temples until he fell asleep; only then did she feel safe enough to sneak away.

To this day, Turner has never revealed the full extent of his abuse. “I think I’m ashamed,” she said. “I feel I told enough.”

She first documented the violence in her 1986 book “I, Tina,” and it was then that her public persona began to evolve from popular singer to living legend. Suddenly, “You’re not just a star onstage with the hair and the legs,” she said. “You had a life. You had a tough life.” But once she had said it, she was forced to retell the story again and again. It felt like every time her friend Oprah interviewed her, she would ask, “Do you remember the first time Ike hit you?” When “What’s Love Got to Do With It” came out, Turner didn’t watch it. She didn’t need to relive that nightmare.

But last year, when “Tina” the musical debuted in London, there she was, sitting in the best seat in the house. And as she watched her story unfold once more, she found herself laughing. At the curtain call, she walked onstage and assured the actor who played Ike: “I forgive you.” Some took that to mean that she had forgiven Ike Turner himself, which she had not.

“I don’t know if I could ever forgive all that Ike ever did to me,” she said, but “Ike’s dead.” Turner laughed. “So we don’t have to worry about him.”

He calls her ‘Schatzi’

When Turner finally escaped Ike in 1976, she left with just 36 cents in her pocket. Her head was so swollen from the beatings, she had to leave even her wig behind. And she was in debt. All the venues for all the canceled Ike &amp; Tina Turner Revue shows were calling, and they weren’t interested in launching the solo career of a 37-year-old single black woman. She went on “Hollywood Squares,” and the host, Peter Marshall, introduced her by saying, “Tina, where’s Ike?”

By the time she was fully and properly respected in America as a solo artist, Turner was already gone. She wanted to put an ocean between herself and Ike. Besides, she was done with American guys. In those years, she skipped across Europe, sampling a continental buffet: She enjoyed flirtations with a Dutchman, an Italian, a Greek. She loved the way Europeans said her name. Ike always said it like “Tee-nuh,” but here it was “Tee-nah.” She recorded her 1984 comeback album, “Private Dancer,” in London, and she shot the cover for her 1990 single, “Foreign Affair,” literally hanging off the Eiffel Tower, Paris at her feet. She began to believe that she might have been French in another life. Nobody there ever asked her where Ike was.

She had just flown into Cologne, Germany, when she saw him. An A&amp;R; man for her record company, EMI, emerged from behind a column in a jaunty windbreaker, like some kind of German-boyfriend-ex-machina. She loved his eyes. She loved his nose. “Didn’t like his hairstyle,” she told me, but she figured she could redecorate that, too.

The instant attraction was not mutual. Bach told me that, as a music industry professional, he would never even have considered fraternizing with an artist. “But also I was bushed,” Turner added. “I didn’t look too good.” So later that night, at a business dinner where she had made sure to look extra fine, she mischievously requested every last record company executive’s date of birth and then researched Bach’s full astrological profile. (He’s an Aquarius, thank God. Ike, obviously, was a Scorpio). Then, when the Cristal was flowing, she turned to him and said, “I want you to make love to me.”

She was 46 and he was 30. The press called him her “boy toy.” But here they are, more than 30 years later, and his silver hair is slicked back in a Tina-Turner-pleasing formation. He calls her “Bärli” (German for little bear) and “Schatzi” (sweetheart) and will under no circumstances reveal what her nickname is for him. Whenever he talks too much, Turner raises a hand in the air and cinches her fingers together in the style of Dr. Evil, and he quiets.

He knows that his wife is a star and he is not, and he feels that it is very important to honor that distinction. The Erwin character in the show woos Tina, and while the real Erwin doesn’t recognize himself in the role, he says matter-of-factly: “The musical is done by professionals under the guidance of Tina, and they decide how the characters look.”

Several years ago, when Turner was on dialysis and close to death, her husband gave her a kidney. “And I would do it again,” he said, to which she replied: “Well, I might need another one on the other side.” Turner may have laughed through the musical, but Bach cried.

Inside the chateau

The couple moved to Switzerland in 1995. After a chaotic life, Turner likes the Swiss zeal for order. Everything here runs according to the rules. She does not speak German, which, actually, she prefers; it means she’s not expected to say much. If someone says something amusing, she can just ask her husband what it was.

On a typical day, she gets up. Her major-domo, Didier, an enormously tall Swiss man with a bright polo shirt buttoned all the way to his shy face, makes her some oatmeal. She shops.

The Algonquin is overflowing with beautiful things: a pair of novelty castle keys (“I really wanted a castle until I saw how big castles were,” she said); pieces of an enormous shattered amethyst arranged by the in-ground swimming pool (“It was a gift”); framed photographs of the sarcophagi of old Egyptian royalty (she senses she was one of them in a past life; Didier was there, too); a sword-wielding pre-Columbian idol she picked up just as she was leaving America for good (“I liked him, at the time”). Nothing is in storage: Now that she can afford it, “I want to see it,” she said.

When Turner was with Ike, she had no space of her own. She changed the towels in the bathroom once, and he screamed at her. She hid her Buddhist prayer cabinet in a spare room, and when he discovered it, he ordered it out of the house. One day she returned home from a hospital stay to find that he had totally remodeled the place in his vulgar style. Thirty years later, Mike Wallace visited Anna Fleur, Turner’s villa in the south of France, and he asked her: “Do you feel like you deserve all this?” To which she replied: “I deserve more.”

Now she has the Chateau Algonquin, where she is in total control of her physical surroundings, and she revels in them. The only hitch is that she does not actually own the chateau. Her landlord, Kaspar, lives in her attic and controls the boathouse, which stands un-Tina-fied at the shore of the lake.

She led me on a tour of the grounds, holding my arm in hers, and as we paused beneath her covered patio, she gazed wistfully at the boathouse. “I’m looking forward to decorating that,” she said.

‘I just kept going’

Tina Turner has become a symbol of so many things — sex appeal, resilience, empowerment — that she cannot quite relate to. She was never trying to be sexy onstage; she was sweating through her clothes to sell her songs. And the idea of connecting her life to the feminist movement or recasting it through #MeToo feels alien to her. “I identify only with my life,” she said. While everyone was making her into a symbol, “I was busy doing it. Doing the work.”

The strength of her voice, and the power of her story, have seemed to build an almost invincible persona, but it’s just a persona. “I don’t necessarily want to be a ‘strong’ person,” she said. “I had a terrible life. I just kept going. You just keep going, and you hope that something will come.” She gestured around her. “This came.”

When Turner got tired of talking about herself, I left her. I returned the following afternoon to find her transformed: wig styled, lips painted red, eyes sparkling. “That was Anna Mae yesterday,” she told me. “Here’s Tina.”

Turner was having her photo taken that day. A makeshift studio had been erected on her lawn. She had draped herself in luxury accessories, which she listed aloud: Cartier. Bulgari. And “who’s the one with the red bottoms, darling?” Louboutin.

Despite her protestations — “I don’t sing, I don’t dance, I don’t dress up” — when the camera came out, she turned on. She was pouting. She was squatting. She was throwing her head back in ecstasy. A portable stereo was on hand, and the photographer selected some other diva to set the mood.

Tina Turner Is Having the Time of Her Life

(Fall Preview)

Every episode is the same. Five queer experts in various aesthetic practices conspire to make over some helpless individual. Tan France (fashion) teaches him to tuck the front of his shirt into his pants; Bobby Berk (design) paints his walls black and plants a fiddle-leaf fig; Antoni Porowski (food) shows him how to cut an avocado; Jonathan Van Ness (grooming) shouts personal affirmations while shaping his beard; and Karamo Brown (“culture”) stages some kind of trust-building exercise that doubles as an amateur therapy session. Then, they retreat to a chic loft, pass around celebratory cocktails and watch a video of their subject attempting to maintain his new and superior lifestyle. The makeover squad cries, and if you are human, you cry, too.

Because “Queer Eye” is not just a makeover. As its gurus lead the men (and occasionally, women) in dabbing on eye cream, selecting West Elm furniture, preparing squid-ink risotto and acquiring gym memberships, they are building the metaphorical framework for an internal transformation. Their salves penetrate the skin barrier to soothe loneliness, anxiety, depression, grief, low self-esteem, absentee parenting and hoarding tendencies. The makeover is styled as an almost spiritual conversion. It’s the meaning of life as divined through upgraded consumer choices.

Just a few years ago, American culture was embracing its surface delights with a nihilistic zeal. Its reality queens were the Kardashians, a family that became rich and famous through branding its own wealth and fame. “Generation Wealth,” Lauren Greenfield’s 2018 documentary on American excess, captured portraits of people who crave luxury, beauty and cash as ends in and of themselves. Donald Trump, the king of 1980s extravagance, was elected president.

But lately American materialism is debuting a new look. Shopping, decorating, grooming and sculpting are now jumping with meaning. And a purchase need not have any explicit social byproduct — the materials eco-friendly, or the proceeds donated to charity — to be weighted with significance. Pampering itself has taken on a spiritual urgency.

Practitioners of this new style often locate its intellectual underpinnings in the work of Audre Lorde. But when Lorde wrote, in her 1988 essay “A Burst of Light,” that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” she was speaking in the context of managing her liver cancer — and doing it as a black lesbian whose health and well-being were not prioritized in America.

Now the ethos of “self-care” has infiltrated every consumer category. The logic of GOOP, Gwyneth Paltrow’s luxury brand that sells skin serums infused with the branding of intuition, karma and healing, is being reproduced on an enormous scale.

Women’s shoes, bras, razors, tampons and exclusive private clubs are stamped with the language of empowerment. SoulCycle and Equinox conceive of exercise as not just a lifestyle but a closely held identity, which backfired when some members were aggrieved by the news that the chairman of the brands’ parent company is a financial supporter of Trump. Therapy memes imagine mental health professionals prescribing consumerist fixes, which are then repurposed by beauty brands. Even Kim Kardashian West is pivoting to the soul: Her latest project is launching a celebrity church with her husband, Kanye West.

And through the cleaning guru Marie Kondo, who also became a Netflix personality this year, even tidying objects can be considered a spiritual calling. Her work suggests that objects don’t just make us feel good — objects feel things, too. She writes of old books that must be woken up with a brush of the fingertips and socks that sigh with relief at being properly folded.

“Queer Eye” has further elevated material comforts into an almost political stance. When the reboot of the original — which ran on Bravo from 2003 to 2007, as “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” — debuted last year, Netflix announced that it intended to “make America fabulous again” by sending its crew deep into the red states to “turn them pink.” By preaching self-care to the men of Middle America — it has so far plucked its makeover subjects from Georgia, Missouri and Kansas — the show would heal the nation itself through the power of stuff.

Is “Queer Eye” a political show? In a sense, yes. Van Ness, the show’s profoundly magnetic grooming expert, rocks a signature look of a Jesus beard, mermaid hair, painted nails and high-heeled booties. His fashion and grooming choices have an obvious political valence; he recently came out as nonbinary. When he makes over some straight dude, it is as if he is imbuing the process with his own transgressive identity, even if he’s grooming the guy into a standard-issue cool dad.

Anyway, it’s wonderful to watch. In contrast, the original “Queer Eye” no longer goes down so easy. The show’s exclusive focus on providing men with physical upgrades now plays as cynical. The Fab Five ridicule their marks as much as they help them. More than a decade before same-sex marriage would be legalized across the United States, these five out gay men were quite obviously punching up.

But in the new version, the power dynamic has flipped. The difference between the Fab Five and their charges is no longer chiefly one of sexual orientation or gender identity. (This “Queer Eye” also provides makeovers to gay men and to women.) The clear but unspoken distinction is a class one.

The “Queer Eye” cast may come from humble beginnings, but they now reside in coastal cultural centers and hold fulfilling and lucrative jobs. Their makeover subjects are lower- and middle-class people who are, though it is rarely put this way, struggling financially. This “Queer Eye” handles them gently. As Van Ness puts it in one episode: “We’re nonjudgmental queens.”

It’s a little bit curious that as our political discourse is concerned with economic inequality — and the soaring costs of health care, education and homes — the cultural conversation is fixated on the healing powers of luxury items. What does it mean, that materialism is now so meaningful? “Generation Wealth” posits that extreme spending is a symptom of a civilization in decline. Americans may not have what they need, but at least they can get what they want, even if it’s on credit.

Writer and performer Amanda-Faye Jimenez recently posted a meme to Instagram of a child swinging blithely on the playground as a fire rages in the forest behind him. The forest is tagged: “My personal life and career.” The child: “The skincare routine.”

Material comforts are comforting: cooking a nice and interesting meal; living in a tidy and beautiful space; soothing tired eyes with a cool mask. And money helps you get money: The subjects of “Queer Eye” are typically made over in a standard professional style, as if they are being retrofitted for the workforce. Surreptitiously, “Queer Eye” provides vacation time, too: Its subjects somehow receive a week off from work to focus on themselves.

The trouble is that when “Queer Eye” offers these comforts, the show implies that its subjects have previously lacked them because of some personal failure. They have been insufficiently confident, skilled, self-aware, dedicated or emotionally vulnerable. The spiritual conversion of the show occurs when the subject pledges a personal commitment to maintaining a new lifestyle going forward. But what these people need is not a new perspective. They need money, and they need time, which is money.

“Queer Eye” offers a kind of simulation of wealth redistribution. But every time the Fab Five retreats from the scene, I imagine the freshly-painted homes slowly falling into disrepair, the beards growing shaggy again, the refrigerators emptying.

In the fourth season, which dropped last month, the team makes over a single dad from Kansas City who is known as “the cat suit guy” because he wears feline print onesies to local sporting events. By the end, he gets a new corporate casual wardrobe, and a pop-up support network for his depression — he struggled to discuss it with anyone until the cast of “Queer Eye” broke through his shell.

As they prepare to leave, he tells them that he really needs them to stay in touch. “You’ve got to check on me,” he says. Absolutely, one of them says: “On Instagram.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/arts/queer-eye-kondo-makeover.html" id="6dbb7f4b-61dc-300a-a340-ad8ef39d93b4">The New York Times</a>.

How did you spend your summer vacation? I spent mine in a dissociative fugue of materialist excess, lying prone on my couch and watching all four seasons of “Queer Eye,” the Netflix makeover show reboot. Once an hour, I briefly regained consciousness to feverishly click the “next episode” button so that I wouldn’t have to wait five seconds for it to play automatically. Even when I closed my laptop, the theme song played on endless loop as Jonathan Van Ness vogued through my subconscious. The ...

The New Spiritual Consumerism

Last year, during a stretch of anxious nights, I stumbled upon an app that offered to help me fall into a deep and restful sleep. It would do this by, essentially, programming my phone to lull me into unconsciousness. Now, every night, I crawl into bed and scroll aimlessly through my phone in the dark until I have exhausted all of its mindless distractions — email, Instagram, a virtual wooden-block puzzle. Then I open one last app. My phone speaks to me for 20 minutes, and then it plays nature songs for a very long time.

The voice in the phone is a woman’s, which I like. I don’t need some man telling me what to do. Her tone is gentle and optimistic. It sounds like she is smiling as she speaks. Her words are crisp and clear, but they are softened, almost slurred around the edges, as if she is delicately easing me into each sentence and then releasing me back into silence. Her “ands” are so subdued that they are nearly implied. Sometimes she pauses for long stretches at a time, and that is wonderful, too.

The voice tells me to do things — to breathe in deeply, and breathe out slowly — but I have listened to the exact same recording so many times now that it barely registers as instruction. It’s more like she’s administering some kind of sound tranquilizer. The app is a “sleep and meditation” service called Calm, and it costs $69.99 a year. It’s been downloaded more than 52 million times.

For several weeks, I tapped into Calm at night without thinking much about what I was doing. The whole point of the recording was for me to focus on the voice — not on the meta implications of enlisting my smartphone to spark a parasocial relationship with a stranger whom I now require to fulfill a core human need. But soon I began to wonder who was whispering into my brain every night. Ours is a strangely intimate relationship. Hers is the last voice that I hear before I go to sleep. She speaks to me past the point that I am even aware that I am hearing anything.

One night, as I prepared to start the recording, I noticed her name. Narrator: Tamara Levitt. Author: Tamara Levitt. As I explored the app further, I discovered that she had written and recorded hundreds of meditations. Her voice can guide a person through depression, loneliness, eating and commuting. There are sessions specifically designed to speak into your ear as you’re walking down the street.

I Googled her and clicked through photos of her smiling easily on a rocky beach, her hair tousled in the wind. I read the awed user comments that unspooled beneath Calm’s YouTube page and percolated across social media. Fans call Levitt’s voice “marvelous,” “hypnotic” and “somehow magic.” One user said that her voice “has helped heal my brain.” If Levitt recorded commercial voice-overs, another wrote, “I’d probably end up buying three insurance policies and a Snuggie before snapping out of it.”

A couple of months ago, I wrote to Levitt and told her I wanted to learn more about how she spoke so intimately to millions of people at once. Then I flew to Toronto to hear her in person.

Internet culture is often described as hyper-visual, but it has also cracked open new relationships to sound. The rise of podcasts — designed to be listened to alone, in interstitial moments — has forged new aural pathways and carved out its own aesthetic category: the “podcast voice,” that wry, stammering, cool-nerd cadence. YouTube’s ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, practitioners work their whispers and breaths and mouth noises to evoke physical sensations. Even the sounds of jogging geese and crackling ice are preserved for their #oddlysatisfying effects.

Mindfulness apps are exploring how voices could tinker with the inner workings of our minds. In addition to Calm, there are also Headspace, iMindfulness, Aura, Breethe and Buddhify, each with its own central voice. Headspace features a British ordained Buddhist monk with a degree in circus arts; Breethe is built around a recovering “type-A businesswoman”; Buddhify’s meditations are recorded in one of 14 voices. If a user dislikes the voice of a particular track, Buddhify counsels her to “use that difficulty as a focus for your meditation.” No thank you: I am permanently pair-bonded to Levitt’s voice.

It is ironic that apps are using the smartphone to help allay problems that are often delivered through the phone itself — distraction, obsession, anxiety, stress. Calm helps redirect my worst phone habits toward more constructive uses; most of its sessions begin with the instruction to close my eyes. But it’s also extended my reliance on my phone deep into the night — even into my unconsciousness.

The evening I fly up to Toronto, my flight is delayed as we wait for thunderstorms to pass over New York. I’m an anxious flyer, so as we sit on the tarmac, I put on Levitt’s recording on “Calming Flight Anxiety.” (“Since our fears are rooted in the future, we can return to a place of calm by reconnecting with the present moment.”) The next morning, I walk across downtown Toronto toward Levitt’s recording studio, the Orange Lounge. I tap into Calm again. I’m an anxious interviewer, so I listen to her “Mindful Walking” track and reroute my attention toward my movement. (“Your heel lifts,” she tells me. “The sole of your foot peels off the ground. Then the ball of your foot raises, and your toes follow.”)

When I arrive, I find Levitt bathed in jewel tones: The studio is covered in red and gold tapestries, purple fringed pillows, an orange swirled shag rug, multiple lava lamps. Levitt has a big smile and wonderful posture. She looks like her photographs, but her voice is not quite familiar. It sounds faster and harsher than it does on the app, although it is not at all fast and not at all harsh. It is professional and projected, a little sardonic and pretty Canadian. Her accent is barely perceptible in the app.

Levitt has been recognized in person, by her voice, only twice. She sounds different because she is conversing in another realm. She is not here to soothe me and tuck me in; she is speaking to me as if I am an adult. What sounds relaxing on the app might sound a little woo-woo, even infantilizing, in the open air. But the sudden emotional distance between us feels oddly destabilizing. Levitt worked as a musician and a voice-over actress before she became a mindfulness instructor, and it, too, is an art. “It’s much more difficult to do voice work like this than it is to speak normally,” she says. “It’s really hard to maintain a very soft, kind-of-whispery voice.”

When Levitt records, she stands in an expansive room in the studio, at the center of two screens covered in packing blankets and angled in a slim V-shape, her mouth 4 inches from the microphone. She has arranged the room so that her audio engineer, Spencer Sunshine, cannot see her from his editing bay. She wants to feel still and unselfconscious. She wants to drift into a partial meditative state.

Visible from the booth is a paisley-printed easel fitted with an iPad (for her script) and an iPod (for keeping time), and a footstool crowded with beverages: a bottle of water, a large white teapot steeped with Breathe Easy tea and a can of Dole apple juice, which helps to quiet mouth smacks. Occasionally Levitt’s hand will emerge from behind the screen, remove a glass and retract. But mostly she is a voice behind a curtain, an extremely chill Wizard of Oz.

Today, Levitt is rerecording the opening line of a new sleep meditation, which is called “Gently Back to Sleep.” The Calm founders rarely comment on Levitt’s content, but one of them, digital entrepreneur Michael Acton Smith, has requested that she soften the first line. It is, “Hi, this is Tamara.” Levitt’s voice has undergone a kind of pleasant erosion in the 4 1/2 years she’s been recording for Calm, every remaining edge sanded down. Recently I noticed that the session I listen to every night had been swapped with a new, silkier recording. Levitt used to present her meditations “more announcer-like,” she says. Now she’s “a little bit more relaxed.” She’s more intimate.

Levitt disappears behind the screen. Sunshine puts on some spacey music. Levitt tries the line — “Hi, This is Tamara” — and her Calm voice crackles pleasantly in the editing bay. Then she coughs and slices back in with her real voice: “See, it becomes sexy if it’s too soft. Let me try it again.”

After recording the line five or six times, Spencer plays the clips back to her, instantly stitching each option into the full recording, and Levitt chooses the one she likes best. She not only writes and records the meditations but oversees the editing, too. Later she will deliver precise instructions for how long each pause ought to be between each line — eight seconds, or 16, or one minute, 50 seconds. As I listen to her, dictating the editing of the meditation from behind the screen, it strikes me that she is among the most valuable content creators on Earth. Imagine if much of Netflix content was conceived, written, performed and edited by the same person.

For all the talk of the podcast revolution, its forms are basically recognizable. Vox’s “The Weeds” is a youthful, progressive spin on panels like “The McLaughlin Group.” “The Joe Rogan Experience” draws from the sprawling programs of AM radio, one part “Imus in the Morning,” one part “Coast to Coast AM.” And comedy podcasts are a rollicking extension of late-night talk shows.

But mindfulness apps represent something that feels totally remote. Listening to them can seem, at first, like padding around a science-fiction film, absorbing ambient noises while forging companionship with a kind of audio gynoid. In addition to Levitt’s meditation recordings, Calm offers a whole range of relaxation-adjacent audio experiences: audio tracks adapted from Bob Ross’ “The Joy of Painting,” recordings by ASMR YouTubers, the sounds of distant owls and strong winds recorded in the wilds of Northern California, and bedtime stories for grown-ups narrated by people like Matthew McConaughey, who is a natural. “Let your mind drift with me for just a minute,” McConaughey begins. “Let’s ask the question: How often do we ponder the depth of the present moment?”

There is a choose-your-own-relaxation feeling to Calm. Most meditation content is evergreen, so the app can invest in customization, drawing the listener into the process. A user can choose her session’s theme, length (options range from about a minute to about an hour) and signature nature sound. “I’m the guy who picks ‘Rain on Leaves,’ ” LeBron James, a Calm evangelist, has said. I’m partial to “Forest Ambiance.”

In a world ruled by content, Calm offers a kind of anti-content. Half of the programming is stuff designed to fall asleep to: If it’s working, you don’t hear it. I gladly pay to listen to the exact same thing night after night. Although the mindfulness meditation sessions can take on a kind of narrative structure, they work to dispel the stories we tell ourselves. They encourage us to dispassionately observe our emotions, to deconstruct our physical surroundings into colors and textures and sounds, to fixate on the air entering our nostrils as we breathe. I treasure some of Levitt’s lines like dialogue in a movie I’ve seen a thousand times. My favorite is: “Become aware of the mattress or floor beneath you, offering support.” It makes me feel as if my Beautyrest is my friend.

Maybe that sounds nuts. It’s true that the meta-conversation around these apps can be oddly stressful. Embedded in them is a strange confluence of nonjudgmental acceptance and the pursuit of peak performance of that nonjudgmental acceptance. Calm calls itself “the Nike of the mind” and rewards users with a meditation “streak” every time they complete a session. Buddhify has a series where you meditate on various features of your smartphone’s interface — “Now, resting your eyes on the big round pause button in the middle ...” — that is too absurd to complete. Even the word “Buddhify” freaks me out. For some students of Buddhism, and critics of capitalism, these applications represent a perversion of a social good in the service of a cult of the self. They call it “McMindfulness.”

If you’re looking for an app to be your Buddha, Calm will disappoint you. But I am not religious, and I am also not spiritual-but-not-religious. I am a person who downloaded a game to my phone that advertises itself in the app store as “Addictive best block puzzle,” and I need help.

We are often said to be living in an “attention economy,” where advertisers and content creators and technologies are competing to gobble up the scarce resource of human attention. Most of the media pumped out by Netflix or Hulu or Luminary or countless mobile game developers is bent on grabbing that attention and not letting it go. Calm wants your attention, too, but it wants you to pay attention to thinking about attention — and the ways you waste it on self-hatred, and stress, and the endless scroll of social media. Much of internet culture works by fitting a second skin over our experience, feeding us roiling commentaries and meta-narratives and boundless information. Calm strips away all the layers of meaning until all that’s left is the sensation of your toes lifting off the ground.

After the recording session, I meet up with Levitt for dinner at Toronto’s SoHo House, where she is a member. It’s loud. We are almost shouting across the table. I ask her how it feels to have a one-sided intimate relationship with millions of people. She tells me that it is unreal. It’s overwhelming, and it’s a huge responsibility. She is accessing such depths of emotion with such a vast group of people. In supporting so many beginners, the smallest sounds can make a difference. Even the pauses must be timed strategically. If she leaves people in silence for too long, they may feel unsupported. They’ll wonder, “Where did she go?”

As we talk, I begin to worry that I am learning too much about her — that she took her first intensive meditation course in treatment for an eating disorder, that she has used it to help deal with her relationship with her father, that she still deals with anxiety, that she does not believe she has reached enlightenment, that for two years she regularly worked 12-hour days on Calm. I worry that this knowledge might distract me from my pure relationship with her voice. But when I put on the recording late that night in my hotel room, her story falls away, and I fall asleep.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/arts/21calm.html" id="15cf2107-5994-3718-a57b-29980009c4f5">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Notebook)

The App That Tucks Me In at Night

Below, the show’s creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge; Comer; and director Harry Bradbeer discuss some of the influences on their mood-swinging show, including a YouTube video, a podcast and a viral ad.

An Infamous Jailhouse Interview

When Waller-Bridge was tapped to spin Jennings’ books into a TV show, “I fell into a Google hole around female assassins,” she said during a recent conversation in London. She crawled out with a 2012 jailhouse interview on YouTube with convicted Arizona killer Angela Simpson.

Simpson — who appears in a black-and-white-striped jail uniform, a World Star Hip-Hop logo hanging over her image — is a far cry from Villanelle’s glamorous psycho. But as she watched Simpson’s story of how she locked a man in her basement, tortured and killed him, Waller-Bridge spied “gold dust.”

Waller-Bridge had been trying to access the inner workings of Villanelle’s mind, and she found a key in Simpson. When Simpson boasts about the murder, “she sounds more like a psycho than anyone has ever sounded,” Waller-Bridge said.

But when Simpson thinks the camera is off, she erupts exuberantly at her performance. She beams at the camera crew and says: “That’s going to be wicked! Make it look good, please!” All of a sudden, as Waller-Bridge put it, “she sounds so girlie.” The look of the affectless psychopath is just one costume Simpson assumes, and she becomes giddy with pride when she wears it well.

The ‘My Favorite Murder’ Podcast

Eve Polastri is charming partly because of her less-than-professional interest in murder, which helps peel away the self-serious trappings of typical crime dramas and draw her closer to the voyeuristic audience. In early scripts, Eve was a true-crime nut, and Waller-Bridge enlisted a friend obsessed with the genre to explain its appeal.

The friend introduced her to the podcast “My Favorite Murder,” in which the comedians Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark gush over the Wikipedia pages of odd and horrifying crimes. Then, Waller-Bridge recorded her friend as she explained the psychological and physical effects of listening.

“‘I like feeling that vacuous emptiness in my soul when I realize there are people out there who can do this,’” Waller-Bridge recalled her friend saying. “‘It puts me in a victim position, and it makes me feel alive.’” Later, Waller-Bridge decided that Eve’s murder fascination should be sparked just as Villanelle enters her life, and should grow only stronger as she learns of her crimes.

The Kenzo World Ad

Villanelle is a psychopath with great emotional range, which is not to say that her facial expressions convey normal human reactions — they seem to originate from a different place than everybody else’s. One reference point was Spike Jonze’s 2016 ad for Kenzo World perfume, which Waller-Bridge and Bradbeer sent to Comer as a clue to Villanelle.

In the ad, actress and ballerina Margaret Qualley is sitting complacently at a fancy dinner when she is taken over by some kind of alien force, her body and face shifting and spasming out of control. This could be framed as frightening, but instead it is played as invigorating — as a kind of freedom from societal expectations. Comer was drawn to “the unpredictability” of Qualley but also to her “playfulness and the enthusiasm,” she said. “At the flip of a switch, she can be something completely different.”

‘No Country for Old Men’

Harry Bradbeer, who directed the first two episodes of the first season, knew that “the camera should have a special relationship with Villanelle,” he said. Though there is a remoteness to Villanelle’s personality, the camera is often close on her face, immersing the audience in her emotions and hinging on her perspective. As Bradbeer put it, “The camera studies her while she studies the world.” It’s as if “the audience is in the driver’s seat of the character’s mind.”

In shooting Villanelle, Bradbeer studied the cinematographer Roger Deakins’ work with the Coen brothers, who are also known for their blend of comedy and terror. In “No Country for Old Men,” we get an oddly intimate glimpse at the most inhuman of figures, Javier Bardem’s ghastly hit man, Anton Chigurh. Like Villanelle, Chigurh is most chilling in those moments when he seems to be acting almost normal. “The more happy and innocent and playful and naughty Villanelle seems,” Bradbeer explained, “the more dangerous she becomes.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/arts/television/killing-eve-phoebe-waller-bridge-jodie-comer.html" id="6a7e4168-10c5-3c1b-a2d8-6c2a70777c9c">The New York Times</a>.

One of the thrills of “Killing Eve,” which returns Sunday for Season 2 on BBC America, is that it is not simply a thriller. The show careens between genres, at once an office sitcom, a police procedural and a screwball romance between the stylish assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) and the unlikely spy Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh). And although the source materials for “Killing Eve” are nominally Luke Jennings’ slick novellas, the show was built on a jumble of pop culture inputs.

The Wild Inspirations for 'Killing Eve'

I almost swiped past it. “Dating Around,” Netflix’s latest reality show, is based on an unremarkable premise: In each episode, “one real-life single navigates five blind dates,” in search of “one match worthy of a second date.” This is the kind of conceptual void that reality television producers typically pad with gimmicks. They make their daters go bikini skiing, or mud wrestle their romantic rivals, or kiss in old-age makeup. But on “Dating Around,” two strangers just get together for dinner and drinks, and this scenario supplies all of the necessary drama. It is the rare dating show that takes dating seriously.

That is a pleasant surprise. Previous iterations of the multiple-blind-date format — early aughts offerings like “Next,” “Dismissed” and “ElimiDate” — subsisted on canned one-liners and bitter judgments. The camera always seemed to be looking down on everyone. Even “The Bachelor,” which styles itself as so hopelessly romantic that each season is designed to culminate in an engagement, is a fundamentally cynical exercise. But by lowering the stakes about as far as they can go, “Dating Around” has managed to dial up the excitement and possibility of the dreaded first-date experience.

The six episodes of “Dating Around” are named for their central singletons — Luke, Gurki, Lex, Leonard, Sarah and Mila — and the show handles them delicately, bathing them in low light and summoning close friends to introduce them via voice-over. Reality dating shows often draw from the aesthetics of beauty contests and sports, but this one is produced like prestige television, filming dates as if they were scenes between character actors.

The editing style recalls the “Master of None” episode “First Date,” in which Aziz Ansari’s Dev embarks on a series of app-mediated encounters that are spliced together into a single narrative. And it feels like a distant relative of “Russian Doll,” except that these New Yorkers are fated to blind-date over and over again, eating at the same restaurants and sidling up to the same bars, until some unexpected element sends their lives in a new direction.

Reality television editing has a bad reputation. It is the nefarious tool that carves regular people into villains and fools. (One “Bachelor in Paradise” contestant was edited to look as if she spoke to raccoons.) If the editing of “Dating Around” is manipulative, it is a constructive kind of interference. Its montage technique injects mystery into an otherwise rote exercise. Though our daters are often following the same lines of questioning — where are you from, what do you do, what do you want? — the edit destabilizes our perspective, so that we never know exactly who is on the other end of the conversation at any given moment. This converts the mildest of emotions into suspense: When a dater looks smitten or miffed, we hold our breath until we discover who produced the feeling.

“Dating Around” has an eye for romance, and not just because it lingers on its daters’ coy glances. It zooms in on the most optimistic moment in a relationship (you met someone you might actually like!) and cuts away before the letdown (nevermind, he’s terrible!).

Each episode ends with a shot of the single person, shown now in the bright light of day, heading out for a second date with the chosen match, whose identity is revealed at a heart-stopping final moment. When widowed private investigator Leonard, a coffee in each hand, spots his choice across the street — it’s sign-language-fluent divorcée Dianna! — I gave my screen a standing ovation. And that’s it: The actual second date is not filmed. An anti-climactic reunion episode published on YouTube details the disappointment we’d encounter if we followed these relationships any further: Each one fizzled and faded.

That “Master of None” episode took a satirical approach to dating apps, and it’s one that’s shared by many of their users. Tinder, Bumble and Hinge offer vast playing fields but slim pickings, so daters survive by wearing cynicism as armor, telling themselves that nothing matters and that they really don’t care. But “Dating Around” dispels the nihilism haunting the dating app experience. By replicating its process and filming it for television, the show imbues it with great significance.

Not all of the dates are good — Gurki, an Indian-American divorcée, has a harrowing run-in with Justin, a white guy who berates her over her relationship history — but they do matter. When Justin storms out, Gurki exhales and presses a hand to her heart, as if to make sure it’s still there.

This represents a dramatic mood shift for the genre. The stud of the television dating scene is “The Bachelor” and its spinoffs, and though it is sheathed in the trappings of romance — red roses, votive candles, diamond rings — it plays most of its love-seekers as fools, assigning them job titles like “pantsapreneur” and “twin” and scoring them with dopey circus music. Then it drives the rest of its contestants mercilessly toward marriage even though it knows that most of its engagements are soon broken. (The fact that the show has promoted suitors with histories of racism and sexual assault only heightens the cynicism; it’s not clear how a series as sincere as “Dating Around” would weather such a scandal.) While there are pleasures to be found there — its spectacle of gender stereotypes scratches a kind of itch — it is only natural to yearn for a deeper connection.

The level of interference in “Dating Around” feels similar to that found on dating apps; whether by producer or by algorithm, strangers are selected to meet. In place of the brittle gender roles of “The Bachelor,” “Dating Around” offers a mélange of identities: There are people on the show who identify as straight, gay, bisexual, soft-aggressive, femme, dominant and stud; more than one has a drag persona. And if a dater shows up with an expertly waxed mustache or some underdeveloped flirtation skills, these quirks are not edited to loom grotesquely over their entire personalities; dates are awkward enough as they really are.

The show’s queasiest moments come when daters appear to be operating in a different reality television universe. One does not get the sense that Justin was sincerely chosen as a remotely likely love match for Gurki; Sarah, a technology recruiter, spits lines that feel so fastidiously rehearsed that they would not seem out of place on the “Next” bus.

Critics of reality television harp on how unreal it all is. It can feel like the smart and knowing move for a show to lean into its artifice. Placing itself at a cynical remove pre-emptively guards against criticism. Nothing matters, and it doesn’t really care. But “Dating Around” embraces its vulnerability, dangling in the space between documentary and drama.

Maybe the rise of dating apps has helped us come to terms with a touch of meddling in our romantic lives, and a little bit of performance in our courtship rituals. “Dating Around” may be staged, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/arts/television/netflix-dating-around.html" id="ea635081-ee12-3322-a878-bc9b9ca8eb59">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Notebook)

Netflix Finally Brings Romance to Reality TV

It begins innocently enough. In the third episode of the Hulu comedy “PEN15,” seventh-grader Maya is playing with two My Little Pony dolls, mashing their pink plastic faces together in a fantasy make-out session, when her face flushes pink, too. For maybe the first time, she sticks a hand down her underwear, and for the remainder of the 30-minute episode, that hand rarely re-emerges. Suddenly Maya’s suburban middle school existence is pulsing with masturbation triggers: a pencil hole drilled into a purple eraser; a classmate’s ear hair; the curve of a sand dune in a nature documentary. A switch has flipped. Now everything is sex.

In the middle school of the American collective imagination, packs of filthy-minded boys stalk the halls, snapping bras and howling at the cliff’s edge of puberty. The sex-obsessed adolescent girl is a rarer breed. More often girls are positioned as victims of raging male hormones, or else they are styled as preternaturally mature, rising above the boys and their juvenile misadventures. Now — in “PEN15,” the film “Eighth Grade” and the Netflix animated comedy “Big Mouth” — the lustful adolescent girl is having her moment.

It is not, to be clear, an altogether glorious time. At least, it’s not for the girls themselves. Trapped in the years between childhood and adulthood, they are realizing that women are valued for their sex appeal, but do not yet know how to look or feel sexy. They think about boys constantly, but aren’t actually ready to touch them. They pursue sex and romance aggressively, but almost exclusively in their imaginations.

Though polished and popular girls — fitted with thongs, coated in lip gloss and paired with boyfriends — exist in their worlds, they might as well belong to a different species. Our girls are awkward and weird. They are undergoing orthodontic treatments. They have made out with every bedpost and door frame in their bedrooms.

Through their eyes, it is the boys who become smooth, uncomplicated objects. Kayla, the slump-shouldered loner at the heart of “Eighth Grade,” is stupefied by her crush, and when his puny body emerges glistening from a pool, it is in slow motion and set to thumping stripper music. Meanwhile, the seventh-grade BFFs of “PEN15,” Maya Ishii-Peters and Anna Kone — played, with an absurd and haunting realism, by 31-year-old writer-actors Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle — are entranced by the sun-kissed nape of a small boy on the kickball field. These boys don’t have much going for them; their personalities range from vacant to misanthropic. But they are genetically and socially blessed with whatever the middle school idea of “hot” is, and that is a gift that eludes our girls.

In the second episode of “PEN15,” Maya finds herself in a closet make-out scenario with a boy, and when she unclamps her dripping retainer from her mouth, the boy flashes a look of such genuine disgust that you can’t help but feel empathy for both parties. We have seen a version of this dynamic before — it is a staple of the teen movie (à la “She’s All That” and “Never Been Kissed”) for the popular kid to be forced into intimate contact with a loser — but here our alliances have shifted. While it’s clear that Maya has been unfairly ranked in the middle school sexual hierarchy — her “Ace Ventura” impression is criminally underrated — we also recognize that on some level, she is not ready to kiss a boy. And the boy, for his part, seems neither overly judgmental nor indiscriminately sex-obsessed. Through him we see that girls can be revolting, too.

Often tween boys and girls are isolated into separate spheres, portrayed as alien to each other and to adults. But these properties reveal much of adolescent culture that can be shared. When Kayla in “Eighth Grade” finally connects with a boy, it is over their mutual love of the Adult Swim animated comedy “Rick and Morty.” “PEN15” gets its name from the PEN15 Club — a made-up institution that exists to trick other kids to write “penis” on their hands — and the show reveals that such juvenile antics are not exclusive to one gender.

“Big Mouth” is fashioned like a psychedelic coed sex-ed class, which is where the show begins. The first episode is about ejaculation; the second takes on menstruation. Though it is mostly about boys, the show smartly acknowledges that girls are experiencing analogous, if not precisely similar, issues. (The same cannot be said of its predecessors: “Freaks &amp; Geeks,” for instance, never privileged girls as members of its younger geek crowd.) The central conceit of “Big Mouth” — pubescent kids are visited by animated hormone monsters that goad them into furious masturbation, crude flirtation attempts and irrational outbursts — helps to situate its boys and girls as equals. They’re simply operating under separate influences: The boys are mostly visited by Maury the Hormone Monster (voiced by Nick Kroll), while the girls are counseled by Connie the Hormone Monstress (Maya Rudolph).

Though these are all comedies, they take their horny girls quite seriously. In “PEN15,” the adults who play Maya and Anna are supported by a cast of real middle schoolers. This could easily be played as a sight gag, but instead the choice resonates deeply. It works to punctuate the moment when girls’ growth spurts send them towering over boys, and it dramatizes Maya and Anna’s outsider status at an age when kids seem capable of sniffing out difference on a cellular level.

The hyper-realistic style of “Eighth Grade” delivers its own emotional gut punch. The 14-year-old Kayla is played by Elsie Fisher, who was herself 14 when she shot the film. Though Kayla makes YouTube videos for an audience in the single digits, and Fisher is a professional performer, knowing that character and actor are both stuck in the same life stage only magnifies the film’s anxious, claustrophobic feel. Jessi of “Big Mouth” is, of course, a cartoon, which allows the character to careen dramatically between adolescence and maturity. When she gets her period on a field trip to the Statue of Liberty, she is a steel cage of emotional control, but the second she enters her mother’s car after school, she melts into a sub-verbal puddle.

These stories are each inspired by slightly different eras, and watched together, they reveal a complex relationship among girls, sex and technology. Though “Big Mouth” is set in the present, it is heavily influenced by the early 1990s adolescence of its creators, and modern technologies take a back seat in its plots. “PEN15” is set in the year 2000, around the time Erskine and Konkle entered middle school, and its girls access the heady adult world through dial-up AOL and Ask Jeeves. Kayla of “Eighth Grade,” meanwhile, rarely releases her grip on her iPhone, and her puberty is mediated through YouTube, Tumblr and Instagram. In one memorable scene, she types “how to give a blow job” into the YouTube search bar, deletes it, and tries instead: “how to give a good blow job."

New technologies are typically framed as accelerators for the sexual corruption of girls, but here their risks are linked inextricably to great rewards. For the girls of “PEN15,” who together pretend to be a “hot” 26-year-old woman in a chat room, AOL is a portal to disembodied sexual exploration, a way to digitally map out imaginary adult sex lives without actually exposing them to stranger danger. And though it can be painful to watch Kayla lying in her dark bedroom, mainlining her classmates’ Instagram feeds on her phone, it is merely an embodied version of the fantasies that have always thrilled and haunted middle school girls. The “Big Mouth” indifference to technology is its own form of commentary: Social media, it seems to say, just can’t compete with the wild physical and emotional forces of adolescence.

Even for a woman who was once a girl like them — I, too, practiced kissing the back of my hand when my mouth was jammed with wires and rubber bands — there can be a frisson of anxiety to actually seeing their private moments revealed onscreen. The default pop cultural perspective remains that of the adult man, and from his vantage point, exposing adolescent female sexuality onscreen can feel predatory or perverted. These comedies have little interest in considering how those men will feel when they are transported into a girl’s bedroom. Girls’ feelings matter, too. And these girls feel so much.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/movies/pen15-eighth-grade-middle-school-girls.html" id="5133ab75-dd70-310a-add3-a61d13a28057">The New York Times</a>.

The Lustful Middle School Girl Rises

As director Marielle Heller prepared to shoot “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” a biopic about literary forger Lee Israel, she knew that she would need a highly realistic prop to pull off the pivotal scene in which Israel finds her beloved pet cat, Jersey, dead. Heller wanted a dead cat with heft. She wanted an inanimate object that her star, Melissa McCarthy, could act against. “I was really intense about it,” Heller said on the phone recently. “We discussed strategy a number of times.”

So important was the dead cat that Heller sought to secure it even before casting the film’s real live Jersey. She’d just find a cat that looked like her wonderful prop. How much difference could the real one make, anyway? On her first film, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” she had saved money by tossing her own cat, Willie, in front of the camera. So when the movie’s animal trainer promised to bring in what she called her highest-performing cat, Heller wasn’t sure what that could mean. That it wasn’t going to pee everywhere?

The cat’s name was Towne. He was a lanky black-and-white guy with green eyes and a petal pink nose, and to everyone’s surprise, he was amazing. Yes, he followed directions — hitting his marks with the help of a trainer equipped with a clicker and a laser pointer — but he also seemed to do something more. “Towne had a very expressive face,” Heller said.

During one moment in the film he gazes toward McCarthy “sort of sympathetically, and also judgmentally, and you feel all of that,” Heller added. Heller ended up commissioning a prop modeled after Towne that cost thousands of dollars — the most expensive one for the production.

Towne’s efforts did not go unnoticed. “This cat is outacting me,” McCarthy recalled thinking as they worked.

“The Marlon Brando of cats,” Deadline raved upon the film’s release.

Declared Jezebel: “This Cat Deserves an Oscar!”

Towne’s turn in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” is emblematic of a new class of animal performances, ones that are recognized as much for what the animal does not do as for what it does. These animals are not filmed talking like humans or fetching things. They don’t shake hands or roll over. Instead, they are captured somewhat naturalistically.

Towne spends much of “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” gazing languidly from the couch. At the emotional core of “Roma” sits a family dog, its incessant barking and its accumulating waste; Borras is a professional dog behaving as if woefully untrained. And in “Widows,” a fluffy white terrier named Olivia pants calmly, the image of unsuspecting innocence, as violent criminals creep around her. Olivia is “paving new ground for the canine acting community,” Alyssa Bereznak wrote on The Ringer, and she has ambled into her own grassroots Oscar campaign.

By these modern standards, Toto is an amateur. Mister Ed? A hack. A year of buzzy pet performances raises the question: Are animals getting better at acting?

Before we get to that, some sad news: After a decadelong career, Towne died last year. In a phone interview, his trainers described him as a really nice cat who loved people. He is survived by his look-alike brother, with whom he often acted.

Towne was never really acting, at least, not in the human sense. If animals have any “motivation” for their performances, it lies largely in delicious treats. Towne loved jars of baby food, while Olivia dined on hot dogs on the “Widows” set. Our sense of a “good” animal actor is a combination of its behavioral training and our own emotional projection.

Animals were among the first silent film stars, and they’ve been hailed as natural performers ever since. “A certain critical tradition has taken animals as the standard by which to judge all acting, animal or human,” said James Leo Cahill, a professor of cinema studies at the University of Toronto. The appeal lies in their “lack of self-consciousness before the camera.”

But while animals have often been coded as naturals, they have not always been filmed that way. It was once common to use physical restraints, shock collars and trip wires to produce unnatural animal behaviors on film. Consider the “Dogville” comic shorts that played before features in the 1930s, in which dogs appeared to play instruments, walk on two legs and kiss each other, effects that could be achieved by attaching piano wire to the dogs’ limbs and manipulating their bodies like puppets.

Those practices drew protests from animal-welfare groups, and by the 1940s, animal-welfare regulations had arrived in Hollywood. “One of the biggest shifts in how animals are filmed” arose from “cultural re-evaluations of what constitutes cruelty toward animals,” said Courtney E. White, an instructor at Columbia College Hollywood who studies the intersection of cinema and animal welfare.

As Jonathan Burt noted in his 2002 book, “Animals in Film,” the focus of filmmaking flipped from serving what the director wanted to what the animal needed.

Amanda Hess

Articles written by the author

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