When prolific filmmaker Werner Herzog first met the Chaplin twins, Freda and Greta, the internet as we know it did not exist. If it had, it’s likely that the mystifying story of these sisters — who had a brief flash of fame in the ’80s when their neighbor sought a restraining order against them after a sexual dalliance with the two of them turned hostile — would have already run its course. According to reports, Freda and Greta not only looked and dressed alike, but spoke in unison, as if they shared a single brain. No doubt the TikTok amateur detectives would’ve momentarily shifted from true crime to the Chaplin twins, trying their damnedest to debunk what only the sisters could truly understand. One can’t possibly grasp the closeness two people share until they’ve experienced firsthand the joy and indescribable pain that come with the kind of enmeshment written in fate’s codex.

Though to his credit, Herzog tried his best. In his memoir, “Every Man for Himself and God Against All,” he describes tracking down the Chaplin twins with a newspaper photograph of the building they lived in. “You could have folded a picture of them, and the two halves would’ve matched,” Herzog writes. He watched them vacuum together, walking side by side with four hands on the machine at once until they got stuck between two chairs, sending them into a tizzy. Trying to open a can of sardines could’ve gravely injured them had the twins not gotten into a screaming match in the process. Ever the humanist, fascinated by ordinary people taking on otherwise herculean tasks to the point of obsession, Herzog resolved decades ago to make a film inspired by the sisters. He even had a title.

(Gateway to Orkney) Rooney Mara and Kate Mara in “Bucking Fastard”

“Bucking Fastard,” Herzog’s long-gestating, extraordinary feature born from his time with the Chaplin twins, takes its name from an obscenity they shouted in court while on trial for the restraining order — a slip of the tongue allegedly uttered at the same time. History contends whether or not this really happened. But Herzog’s film makes it, and everything else, seem entirely possible. Screening at this year’s New York Film Festival, “Bucking Fastard” is a loaded cannon, currently waiting for a distributor to light the fuse to send Jean and Joan Holbrooke (Kate and Rooney Mara, respectively) soaring hand in hand into a world desperately in need of their peculiar wisdom. 

Playing versions of the Chaplins, the Holbrooke sisters share shades of classic Herzog characters while being quite unlike any of the eccentrics he’s brought to life before. Set in the present day, the sisters feel out of step with time, as if a glitch in the system spawned them here, letting them observe the world without understanding what it’s like to really live in it. As such, Jean and Joan are the only people who truly understand one another. But having a companion who sees everything the same way we do does not necessarily equate to love. Either sister’s sense of self is fundamentally rooted in the other. Their crippling codependence is alienating, as if there really were only one of them.

As Herzog moves the sisters between reality and film’s dreamy latter half, he plunges into the fizzy static that comprises their cosmic connection, examining their solitude as only he can. “Bucking Fastard” is a remarkable exploration of loneliness that only decades of tender rumination and appreciation could provide. For the wistful, lovelorn loner, it’s an imperative reminder that being attached at the hip can still be isolating, no matter how much two people think alike.

Herzog impresses this notion from the very beginning: A dream shared by Joan and Jean, in which the sisters stand in a corridor flanked by caged birds. “We could not be sure we saw the same birds,” they recall. “Only that there were cages on both sides.” The introduction sits right between poetic and blunt, and this same small, temporal crevice is where the Holbrooke sisters spend their time. Jean and Joan’s shared existence would otherwise make their days dull and predictable, but their bizarre circumstances let them see beyond their own purview and into someone else’s, even if only for a blip. They revel in the fascination they stir. Still, other people’s reactions to their similarity only remind the sisters of the bond they can’t break. Their gift is a curse. That’s the funny thing about love: No matter how perfect it is — no matter how much it seems like it’s written in the stars — there will always be the suspicion, somewhere in the back of your mind, that life might have something else to offer.

I’m at a point in my own life where much of my time is consumed by this very thought, facing forks in the road that feel more like cliffs. At 32, I like to feel fairly confident that, when it comes to relationships, I know the difference between love and comfort. But then something will happen that reminds me of life’s sheer unpredictability, and that matters of the heart are purely unknowable. After years of certainty, I’m no longer sure that true love is someone who knows you to the point of an echo. Is such sheer, universal familiarity the root of love — the kind of connection that everyone from Keats to Keaton wrote about — or does it trap you in one place, stunting your growth? How can anyone live like this, so doubtful about what is right and wrong? This is what leaps of faith are for, sure. But eventually, you reach an age where you put more emphasis on faith than the leap itself. If pleasant contentment is guaranteed if you just stay put, why take the risk?

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So much of Herzog’s career has been about weighing the hazards of happiness. Whether he’s challenging Fitzcarraldo (and himself) to lift a 320-ton steamship over a mountain, revealing the tragedy of Nosferatu’s immortality, or illuminating the perils of a life in nature, Herzog has dedicated his life’s work to pondering what we’ll do for our passions. In this way, “Bucking Fastard” feels like the culmination of it all. As the film progresses, Herzog intimately considers humanity’s relationship to the insurmountable. Could there be a place, somewhere in this vast Earth, where Joan and Jean don’t have to sacrifice their codependent sisterly bond to enjoy life’s pleasures?

As soon as they begin to wonder, the Holbrooke sisters — almost imperceptibly — begin to drift apart before snapping back in place. But maybe that’s progress. It could be enough. Perhaps this existence is more about riding the ebb and flow than it is mapping the course.

I’d be remiss not to heap praise on the sisters Mara, who bring something to the screen that I haven’t seen in quite some time. Their bond is, no surprise, electric. But it’s their palpable trust in one another that’s staggering. Always in the same frame, they exude a preternatural comfort that extends beyond familial ties and speaks to their shared life paths. Both Rooney and Kate are keenly aware of how petrifying it can be to be perceived, and how galvanizing it can be as well, and they bring both senses to their shared performance. It’s a sight to behold. For what “Bucking Fastard” lacks in Herzog’s early directorial style, it makes up for by focusing its lens on the magic happening in front of it. It’s like watching stars being sewn into the fabric of the universe.

Naturally, the Mara connection is the selling point here. But it’s also what grounds Herzog’s very airy, funny film. Every time the filmmaker’s typically unconventional ideas threaten to tilt the movie too far askew, the sisters bring “Bucking Fastard” back on the straight and narrow. (Well, as straight and narrow as a film about two horny, completely in-sync sisters can be.) They beautifully elucidate Herzog’s complex notions of loneliness, reminding us that the heart’s desire to cling to something familiar and safe can also be its undoing. Such closeness is inherently limiting, even when it’s ideal, too. “Bucking Fastard” relishes those contradictions, supposing that there might be some version of life where they can coexist in harmony. Herzog doesn’t have the answer to that question, and he doesn’t pretend to. He only knows that it’s enough to wonder.

“Bucking Fastard” screens from Wednesday, September 30, at the New York Film Festival. The film is currently seeking distribution.

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Certain obvious questions arise from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington this past week, a spectacle that one observer has described as “diplotainment” rather than actual diplomacy. Exactly how much did Donald Trump abase himself in service to a temporary and transactional friendship with the dictatorial leader of a nation that is, at least by conventional standards, America’s principal strategic enemy? 

No one knows; I am tempted to surmise that Trump doesn’t know himself. The man who in sunnier times for his regime enjoyed calling himself “your favorite president” does not seem to be his own favorite president these days. Trump almost visibly glowed with delight when Xi praised the quality of service and attention to detail of his White House visit. “Everything is done to the highest order of perfection, and there is thought in every little detail,” the Chinese president said through a translator. “And it’s greatly appreciated.”

You could describe that as the meaningless courtesies of routine statecraft, but it also suggested a high-flying hotel guest offering his compliments to the concierge: The eggs this morning were entirely delicious. And the way your people turn down the sheets at night: exquisite!

If we could somehow remove ourselves from the anguish and destruction caused by Trump’s improvised policies (which resemble comic-book versions of Big Brother’s “Two Minutes Hate” from the film version of “1984”) and his aggressively stupid public persona, we might be able to perceive some pathos in his predicament. He cannot escape from a situation he believed he had created and felt he could control: He is the massively unpopular elected leader of a rapidly collapsing superpower, whose downward slide he promised to reverse but has only accelerated, perhaps to the point of terminal velocity.

Trump visibly and hungrily longs for things he cannot have: the alleged greatness of the mythological American past, rendered as white supremacist schlock inherited third hand from the more vigorous fascist movements of the last century; the enforced adulation and obligatory public spectacle of a totalitarian regime such as Xi’s China or Kim Jong-un’s North Korea; most of all, perhaps, his own youth as a brash Manhattan philanderer and unstoppable political renegade, when he didn’t fall asleep in public or stumble around awkwardly with an unexplained contraption under his clothing.

To consider such matters is not a distraction; it begins to point us toward the larger and more painful questions behind the Xi-Trump pseudo-summit. It surprised literally no one that the two leaders negotiated no new agreements on regulating A.I. (or “Super Intelligence,” in Trump’s self-parodying rebrand), the status of Taiwan, the sporadic trade war between the two nations or ending the war with Iran and restarting the global flow of Middle East oil. No mention was made of Trump’s vaporware claims last May that the Chinese had agreed to buy hundreds of Boeing aircraft and $10 billion worth of U.S. beef and soybeans, but Xi promised to send two pandas from China’s breeding facility to the Atlanta zoo. So much winning. It’s impossible to calculate.

In large part, the absolute nothingness of this summit reflects the fact that China is already winning across the board and Xi needed nothing from Trump beyond the legitimation provided by a diplotainment spectacle “to the highest order of perfection.” As China scholars Nicholas Bequelin and Yaqiu Wang write in a Foreign Policy analysis published before the summit, over the first 19 months of Trump’s second term, the geopolitical “balance of power has shifted in Beijing’s favor”:

China has weathered the trade war, narrowed the technology gap, tightened its leverage over critical supply chains, increased pressure on Taiwan, and deepened ties with Russia and much of the global south.

Contrary to more Sinophobic commentators, they argue that China’s ruthlessly pragmatic leadership is not interested in dominating the world, or at least not in the same way postwar America did. But it does have a long-term agenda, they write, which includes breaking the global dependence on U.S.-centric financial institutions, discrediting democracy and furthering a historical process Xi has described as “the rise of the East and the decline of the West.”

I don’t disagree with any of that, but the most important aspect of Bequelin and Wang’s analysis gets a little buried beneath a forest of impeccably organized policy details. Xi has no need to strike an overtly aggressive posture and can afford to cosplay friendship with Trump because “the West,” or at least its greatest military and economic power, is doing a terrific job of declining all on its own. To borrow the nostrum attributed to Napoleon, the Chinese president is smart enough not to interrupt an opponent while he’s making a mistake. 

It may take generations — if there are any future generations — to measure the scale of America’s self-inflicted damage, which goes well beyond material issues into the realm of psychology or perhaps spirit. (If it’s pretentious to use the Hegelian term Geist, it still fits.) It remains astonishing, not to mention upsetting and enraging, that in the face of a global climate crisis that has already caused millions of deaths and is obvious to nearly everyone on the planet, the U.S. has deliberately chosen to double down on fossil fuels while “China is consolidating its worldwide dominance in batteries, solar, and EVs,” as Bequelin and Wang write. 

Chinese solar panels and batteries, often offered at steeply discounted prices, are revolutionizing transit and energy issues in many poorer countries, beginning to break the expensive and damaging addiction to foreign oil. Meanwhile, the U.S. has largely abandoned or dismantled its foreign aid programs aimed at fostering economic development, public health and education, while doing its level best to destroy its own reputation as a multiracial secular republic rooted in the rule of law. Faced with America’s spectacular self-own (which didn’t start with Trump, to be clear), who can blame people in the Global South for beginning to suspect that the tradeoff between “democracy” and “authoritarianism” was never as straightforward as they were led to believe?

Despite the widespread anger and disillusionment of Trump’s second term — an encouraging trend, to be clear — it’s still too easy for Americans to duck the biggest and most glaring question of all: To paraphrase one of the greatest works of postmodern angst, how did we get here? It no longer feels remotely adequate (if it ever did) to suggest that angry, vicious people accidentally elected an angry, vicious president who is pursuing a self-destructive and nihilistic agenda, and that at some future date our national sanity and our “indispensable” role in world affairs will be reasserted. 

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We tried that, remember? It didn’t work. Perhaps, from some great historical remove, Joe Biden’s presidency will appear noble and tragic. But it was also doomed, trapped in a vision of the past every bit as delusional as the MAGA fantasy, and nearly as damaging. The Biden regime’s self-appointed mission of enforcing a “rules-based order” involved pretending that the world had not changed, that America was still widely beloved and admired, that our so-called republic had not bred and nurtured Donald Trump and that he did not embody its bottomless greed, its gleeful ignorance, its wounded and flatulent national pride.

And so we arrive at the final conundrum of the Trump-Xi summit, and our president’s stopped-clock tendency to stumble upon hard truths. In his inimitable ass-backward fashion, Trump has discerned that the “free world” has become a meaningless abstraction and liberal democracy is in a state of systemic failure. He is correct about that, at least to a point. But he can provide no answer beyond prostrating himself before dictators and building monuments to himself in imitation of their grandiosity. If China’s repressive techno-state makes a distinctly unappealing candidate to lead the world into the future, America can only offer competing versions of an imaginary past. Hey, at least we got those pandas. 

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How hard is it to enjoy your husband’s company? According to content made for Christian conservative women, the heaviest cross they may bear is learning to feel affection for their spouses — or at least fake it well enough to buy some peace at home. That’s what I learned perusing the growing field of influencers offering would-be tradwives advice on how to make MAGA marriages work. 

“Normalize liking your husband,” reads a T-shirt sold by Savanna Stone, a 21-year-old self-proclaimed marriage expert who has been selling content preaching marital submission with the backing of shady far-right funders. At first blush, that may seem like a trifling concept. But, as Stone makes clear in her video content, her definition of liking or even loving a husband is both laborious and ascetic to an extreme. 

“Submission isn’t earned, it is given through the covenant of marriage,” Stone argued in one video. If a husband makes bad decisions, she said, it’s his wife’s fault because she isn’t submitting enough to give him the “confidence” to “take on the masculine role.” At her speech at the 2026 Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Conference, Stone encouraged women to marry young, as she did at 18. If they don’t, the risk is that they will “build their own life,” which she defined as “the death of marriage” because “two separate lives do not easily merge.”

Stone attracts a lot of attention for her tender age and lavishly produced content. But she’s just one of a burgeoning group of Christian influencers, most of them fairly young, who hold themselves out as experts on marriage. Some dress in fashionable and sexy clothes, like Stone, while others favor prairie-style dresses. Some are podcasters or video hosts; others offer online courses with names like “Wife School” or “Wife Academy.” But the message remains the same: They’re all speaking to the deep disappointment and frustration that many Christian women apparently feel in their husbands. The solution, though, only ever seems to be that wives must suck it up and submit even more to their men. 

Recently, Alex Clark, the host of TPUSA’s “Culture Apothecary” podcast, married another Christian influencer after what appears to have been a whirlwind engagement of only a few months. (As recently as May, she was lamenting her lack of viable marital prospects.) In the run-up to her nuptials, Clark presented her own “wife school” series that made marriage sound so miserable that a reasonable viewer’s only conclusion was to avoid being a wife altogether. 

Her first guest, Tilly Dillehay, got right down to business by scolding women who are “picky” because they want something from a husband beyond just a man who is “active in his faith” and makes enough money to “support a family.” Dillehay held herself out as an example of a woman who failed; she said she had dated men who were “flippant,” which appears to be her code word for fun. Instead, while she was “not immediately attracted” to her husband and he was not attracted to her, Dillehay married him anyway because he is a “steady man,” “serious” and not prone like she is to “joke around.” 

If that sounds like a formula for a miserable sex life, well, Dillehay didn’t seem to be concerned. “God has commanded you to participate” in sex with your husband, she said. An added incentive is that it’s “a way that you protect each other from infidelity.” 

“Half of the time,” she said, “it’s only in getting started that you even start to be in the mood.” What happens the other half of the time, she didn’t say. 

“Remember that there are a lot of women out there whose husbands are at the bar tonight and they’re not coming home,” Dillehay said. “There are a lot of women whose husbands are not going to work today.” It should be “enough,” she added, to have a husband who works and goes to church. 

Dillehay’s view is especially chilling in light of a recent Netflix documentary “The Death of the Pastor’s Wife,” which chronicled the suicide of Mica Miller, who spent years of trying to please the ever-escalating sexual demands of her minister husband. This expectation doesn’t appear to be the exception. As Dillehay showed in her interview with Clark, the view of sex as a wife’s duty is deeply ingrained in conservative Christian culture.

Stone has drawn attention by saying consent isn’t part of marriage. “Because when you say, ‘I do,’ you are committing to a lifetime of sex,” she explained in an interview earlier this year. “‘You didn’t fold your laundry. I’m not going to have sex with you. You didn’t unload the dishwasher. I’m not going to have sex with you.'” In citing these scenarios, Stone mocked women who withdraw from husbands sexually, calling it “manipulation,” or even a “sin,” to feel this way. 

Feminists might argue it’s hard to get in the mood with someone who doesn’t respect you. That opinion, though, carries no weight in MAGA circles. Still, there’s clearly a lot of resentment among some Christian conservative women about husbands who don’t do chores. Trying to stifle anger over this may be the single most common topic in Christian marital advice content.

In her “wife school” series, Clark interviewed her new sister-in-law, Katie Voetberg, a prairie dress-clad podcast host and mother of six, about how to avoid being a “nagging wife” and a “constant dripping faucet.” Voetberg’s heartwarming advice? Abandon all hope of having a responsible husband. If your husband forgets to pay the electric bill, she said, don’t remind him or hold him accountable. Instead, “light a candle” and hope that he learns from the “embarrassment” of his failure. Presumably, wives in these relationships don’t control the money, or they could pay it themselves. In cases where women do have a little more power, Voetberg recommended simply doing every chore a husband can’t be bothered with.

“He hates going to the dentist” or the doctor, she explained, so “I just put it on my to-do list” to make his appointment. Even when a husband won’t do “the stereotypical husband duties,” like mowing the lawn or taking out the trash, she continued, the wife should handle it and say, “it’s never going to hit [the husband’s] radar.”

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Other influencers agree. Millicent Sedra, a rising Christian-right influencer who serves as pastor at Echo Church in Sydney, Australia, recently preached that wives should “[s]top complaining about having to help your husband when our God-given role is to do exactly that.” Another of her sermons centered on Proverbs 21:9, which reads, “Better to live on a corner of the roof than share a house with a nagging wife.” 

Laura Zachary, the creator of “Wife Academy,” which is billed as “a program that allows women to rebuild their marriages from the inside out, explained in a video why all household chores should fall to wives: “Women were created for a man. So a woman without a man to take care of, she becomes very empty, very soulless, very bitter.” But Zachary’s logic is flawed: If scrubbing toilets and washing dishes while their husbands kicked back on the couch was, in fact, women’s natural inclination, then she wouldn’t be able to charge women thousands of dollars for courses that reportedly teach them how to love a life of submission.

Often, these lessons in denial are framed for Christian women as a rebuttal to feminists. As a marketing ploy, that’s smart, but it’s not entirely honest. Feminists aren’t listening to this content, and even if they were to stumble across it, they would simply move on. It is not sparking “debate.” 

The real audience for these messages are Christian women, a fact that is itself telling. That these classes exist in the first place shows that, despite being told it’s their “natural” role, Christian women do not actually enjoy submitting to their husbands. If women were eager to have sex in their conservative Christian marriages, they wouldn’t need to be told it’s their duty to have it, like it or not. Clearly, many Christian women resent domestic inequality, or else they wouldn’t have to be told to suck it up.

Why is there “wife school” but no apparent equivalent “husband school”? Men in this situation are perfectly fine; they are benefitting from a system set up to serve them at a woman’s expense. As long as that’s true, it’s inevitable that women will feel frustrated and resentful. “Wife school” can’t actually make women happier, since it reinforces the very male dominance that is causing their pain. But it sure can make men’s lives easier, if the teachers are successful at getting women to stop complaining and learn instead to serve their husband-masters in silence. 

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