I can’t remember the last time a catch-up phone call with a confidante didn’t include one of us marveling that we haven’t caught an assault charge. If any law enforcement happens to be reading this, I want to make it clear that will never happen.
Well, let’s call it a non-zero chance. At the end of the day, I am a realist; anything can flip a person’s switch from off to blackout rage. However, I have decades of practice holding back my inner She-Hulk. So do most women.
Every day, we wake up in a nation controlled by a convicted felon accused of multiple sexual assaults, while a college student seeking justice after alleging she was gang-raped at a fraternity party is doxxed and swatted. We are not taken seriously in politics or at work. The manosphere has poisoned our water coolers and social media feeds.
Women have had it, including with each other. Aspiring tradwives and “Live, Laugh, Love” Karens selling out everyone else to keep up their manicures are legion. They threaten to run you down in crosswalks and refuse to bow out gracefully when told, for instance, that a pretty mechanical bird mounted on a boutique’s wall isn’t for sale.
Ladies, look to your left. Now look to your right. One of you is dying to knife somebody. Only Pamela Voorhees, brought to life by Linda Cardellini in “Crystal Lake,” has the guts to act on that impulse. Her bloodlust coats her skin in the crappy opening scene of this “Friday the 13th” prequel, after she’s dispensed with two goons who make the fatal blunder of invading her home and taunting her. One goes down with a swift nick to the jugular. The other loses half his face to the Voorhees family’s machete.
The thing is, by the time we’re assaulted by all that, we understand that Pamela has had it, too. She lost her gentle son, a boy born with hydrocephalus, a birth defect in the brain, who is endlessly bullied until he drowns at camp. The town moves from pitying her to whispering that she’s crazy, leaving her rutted in the anger stage of the grieving process. As she chops away at the men who attack her, I found myself muttering, “Yes. Get him. Again. Again!”
Don’t confuse this for an endorsement. Please don’t. “Crystal Lake” is a barely watchable gorefest, with a plot riddled with more seeping holes than Pamela’s victims. (Of course, if you’re into that kind of thing, which I am not, I guess that counts as a recommendation.) What passes for story amounts to little more than a two-dimensional cartoon rendered in human-flesh puppetry, courtesy of actors capable of much better, Cardellini included.
Even so, it’s kind of great to watch one of TV’s most enjoyable performers massacre a gaggle of sex-crazed hippies, or knock an abusive parent into a deep fryer for stress relief. Few of us can claim to have never daydreamed about, say, an anvil dropping from the clouds to erase some menace from our lives, whether it’s an entitled relative or an idiot comedian. Jason Voorhees’ mom simply prefers a hands-on approach.
I understand why the many chefs who mucked up the “Crystal Lake” cauldron, starting with Bryan Fuller, were compelled to fill in the blanks of Pamela’s origin story. The beauty of the character, once her truth was revealed in the original 1980 movie, is her relative mystery. Who would suspect a frumpy matron in a humble sweater could wreak such unhinged havoc? Other women, that’s who. We’ve always suppressed murderous desires. (See: “Dateline,” “Snapped” and rest of the Oxygen channel’s true crime lineup.) Only recently have we taken to saying that out loud.
Long before the medical and pharmaceutical industries made perimenopausal rage fashionable, Pamela Voorhees was a genre outlier, especially in a cultural climate that had already started retreating from a decade of legislative gains for women’s rights.
Now, in this post-Roe v. Wade world of ours, feminine wrath must be mansplained to be taken seriously. While women have produced excellent recent examinations, including “Furious” and “East of Eden,” the brutal truth is that the “Friday the 13th” movies are IP recognizable to hockey-masked trick-or-treaters too young to watch them.
So it falls to “Crystal Lake” to tell most of us why the mother of slasher cinema’s patron saint was driven to kill, kill and kill again in the first place. But it also helps us understand why a crumpled sock in the middle of the living room or dirty dishes on the kitchen counter makes the exhausted woman in your life crash out.
Let’s assume that if you’re reading this far, you already know the first movie’s big twist: the real killer wasn’t Jason Voorhees, but his mad mama. If not, I mean, what gives? Did you see that picture of Cardellini and wonder what cool-as-a-cuke Lindsay Weir from “Freaks and Geeks” has been up to? With regret, I present this as your answer.
But as any old-school porn hounds skilled in fast-forwarding through “the plot” will tell you, there’s merit in skipping straight to the action — meaning, Pamela destroying fools with something more cutting than wit.
Maybe Fuller, the guy who classed up “Hannibal,” could have done something brilliant with Pamela. But he exited the project early due to creative differences, leaving “It: Welcome to Derry” showrunner Brad Caleb Kane to expand the legend of a woman whose motives were fairly basic. I mean, if your kid died because two horny teen counselors shirked their lifeguard duties to bone in a shed, you might harbor a few homicidal compulsions too.
Alas, in these days of milking dormant franchises for every drop of ichor, a simple explanation isn’t enough. Therefore – and this will either save you the trouble of enduring all eight episodes or spoil them – Pamela Voorhees is revealed to be a victim of a patriarchal industrial plot.
The former professional singer gets knocked up by her lover, Elias (Hamish Linklater), who works for a company called Bellflower. When she nearly miscarries, he convinces her to marry him and move to his company’s sponsored enclave that’s popping with pregnant women like her. Once she’s settled in, her husband plies her with Bellflower-manufactured TV dinners and happy pills, occasionally shuttling her to the doctor to be pumped full of mystery muck. Truly a MAHA conspiracist’s nightmare.
Sometime later, Jason arrives and demonstrates a knack for reviving from naps the average human wouldn’t wake up from. So father secretly subjects son to all manner of mad science, including massive radiation exposure. Once Pamela discovers this, she rescues Jason, turning the skull of the man who gets in her way into soup, and they escape to Crystal Lake.
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Cardellini’s Pamela Voorhees is what happens when women drinking from a bottomless well of contempt and human carelessness hit their limit. The writers, in their clumsy way, cater to that idea by having her dispose of her first slaughter by slathering the bodies in a deconstructed tonnato sauce of canned fish and honey, and standing by as a massive bear lumbers up to feast.
Before the animal takes a bite, it sizes up Pamela, sniffs her tears, and leaves her be. You could view this as one predator recognizing another. To women of a certain mood, though, it confirms what we already know: that a bear is preferable company to thoughtless, dangerous people. Plus, it’ll help rid you of pesky evidence without asking questions, which only a true, understanding friend would do.
All episodes of “Crystal Lake” are streaming on Peacock.
Conservatives have long pitched their project as a return to normalcy, a way to set right a world that’s gone off its axis. In theory, it’s an understandable goal. Who doesn’t react to getting older and more removed from the engine of culture with an initial feeling that the next generation is doing it wrong?
In practice, the right’s message is more of a respectable veil covering the fact that they want the power to beat up on minorities and buy anything they want. But there’s one arena where the right might actually be bringing back an honest-to-goodness return to tradition: the multiplex.
The lines between television and the movies used to be rather rigid. There were movie stars and there were television actors, and rarely did the twain meet. Actors without matinee idol looks or sufficient draw could make a living as character actors. Faded stars could scrape out a second act in B-movies and lesser studio offerings without losing the prestige of the silver screen. Television actors traded that type of cachet for steady work and wider audiences. A movie star appearing on television was a sign of terminal decline.
The rise of prestige television and streaming shook up the established hierarchy. If television could hit something approaching the same cinematic highs and emotional depths as a Hollywood movie, even if rarely, then the stigma of going episodic couldn’t last. The prestige TV gold rush inspired plenty of marquee stars to jump ship, taking roles from deep-pocketed streamers for niche audiences. (Somebody must be watching Reese Witherspoon and Billy Crudup on Apple TV’s “The Morning Show,” but I can’t say I’ve ever seen them.) The old order and the connotations of each medium had gone post-modern and topsy-turvy.
Enter Ben Shapiro.
The Daily Wire co-founder and conservative political commentator has made several attempts to break into Hollywood. Over the years, he has repeatedly alluded to a script he wrote as a young man at the behest of the late ABC executive Leonard Goldberg, while his dramedy about a conservative student at Harvard never got off the ground. But that hasn’t deterred Shapiro. He’s used his political commentary outlet as a springboard to produce a series of execrable comedies and thrillers, from 2023’s irredeemable and laughless “Lady Ballers,” which centers on a group of former high school basketball players reuniting to compete in women’s basketball by posing as transgender women, to the semi-competent and bloody hatefest “Run Hide Fight: Infidels.”
Shapiro’s films haven’t made much of a dent in Hollywood, let alone the wider culture. But that is likely to change with The Daily Wire’s upcoming film “Confession.”
Shapiro’s films haven’t made much of a dent in Hollywood, let alone the wider culture. But that is likely to change with The Daily Wire’s upcoming film “Confession.”
Written by Shapiro, “Confession” follows an academic in Moscow under the rule of Joseph Stalin. He’s brought in for questioning after allegedly conspiring with a dissident priest, only to find that his interrogator is a former student. In less ideological hands, the film could be an interesting examination of loyalty and state overreach. Coming from the man who accused Baron Harkonnen, the villain in the “Dune” science-fiction franchise, of being a communist, we aren’t holding our breath.
Still, the announcement of “Confession” made a splash, less for its logline than its topline. The cast is chock full of former Oscar nominees and one-time A-listers. The participation of James Franco, Rob Lowe, Brad Dourif and Emile Hirsch make this the most star-studded production Shapiro has ever produced. Beyond the musty Cold War paranoia and production design straight out of the “Command & Conquer: Red Alert” video game, the film is small-c conservative in its appeal to a bygone tradition: giving disgraced actors a mid-budget springboard from which to launch their career revivals.
Franco was once a megawatt star, but his career faltered shortly after several women accused him of sexual misconduct in 2018. In the late aughts, with a Screen Actors Guild-nominated turn in “Into the Wild,” Hirsch was positioned to be the next big thing. But the belly flop of “Speed Racer” and a 2015 assault of a female Paramount Pictures executive at the Sundance Film Festival put his career on ice. Lowe’s scandal-plagued days are long behind him, but he’d settled into a career as a reliable network television star. Most recently, the star of “The West Wing” has been a mainstay on Fox’s campy disaster series “9-1-1.” “Confession” sees him trying out long atrophied dramatic acting muscles, taking a tentative step into Hollywood. Dourif has never generated any significant controversies to our knowledge, but his appearance is notable because it contradicts his 2024 retirement announcement.
Taken with the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it starring turn from Jonathan Majors in “Infidels,” The Daily Wire’s gambit becomes clear. In reaching out to disgraced or out-of-fashion actors, the company is getting notable names for their bargain-basement productions. The actors, in turn, can add a few performances for their sizzle reels that post-date whatever controversy pushed them out of the limelight.
It’s not a bad deal for either party. From the actors’ perspective, they’re just following the B-list trails blazed by actors like John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, stars who spent decades cranking out direct-to-video duds while seeking the right role to catapult them back into notoriety. What’s new is the ideological bent of a studio like Shapiro’s. Typically, appearing in outwardly conservative fare was the mark of an inwardly conservative star. Think Kirk Cameron’s Christian schlock or Kevin Sorbo’s post-Hercules output. When a name like Jim Caviezel shows up in QAnon-adjacent thrillers, it’s a bit of a “fork found in kitchen” situation.
Shapiro’s comeback machine is something slightly different. Given what we’ve seen from the films he has worked on in the past, the machine is likely to be clunky — but that won’t matter to either party if it works.
Conservatives’ belief that “cancel culture” has gone too far, that men chastised for behaving badly are really victims of a radical mob run amok, allows them to take on names that are not welcome in Hollywood. If the ploy works, it’s proof that they were right all along — that cooler heads prevailed and the initial controversy was an overreaction.
With the Daily Wire’s film arm, Shapiro is bringing back the B-list for a cancel culture age, offering dimmed stars the chance to bide their time until the unistudio of Paramount/Warner Bros. comes calling.
Since news about the lawsuit against the “Cornell 7” broke, the internet has been rife with discourse about how Millennial parents are “raising sons differently.” That doesn’t just mean teaching young boys about consent. As Tomika Anderson wrote in Essence recently, “I want to raise a son who understands that his responsibility to another human being doesn’t end with, ‘I didn’t do it.'”
“Masculinity isn’t aggression, and being a good man isn’t about never having anger or difficult emotions,” one mom said. “It’s about learning what to do with those emotions without making somebody else pay for them.”
From online influencers to Reddit threads and group chats, it’s not the first time discussions have sparked around whose responsibility it is to teach young boys about consent, boundaries and rape culture. As a Millennial boy mom myself, I’m deeply familiar with this discourse. And as an American mom living in Italy, we aren’t free of gender-based violence. In September, Italy saw its seventh alleged femicide since mid-August. But instead of the conversation focusing on consent, this generation of parents appears to be expanding it to teaching young boys to be willing to speak up. Curious, I asked parents what they’re doing differently, and then I asked a few psychologists if it might be working.
Stephanie Janét is a Millennial mother of two boys. But since she had her first child when she was 19, she said she’s seen firsthand how the cultural conversations around boys, masculinity, respect and boundaries have evolved over the years. From a young age, she would start to introduce empathy with her sons by simply saying, “Mommy doesn’t like this,” or asking, “How do you think that would make somebody feel?” Janét said she’s also tried to communicate that masculinity isn’t synonymous with aggression.
“Masculinity isn’t aggression, and being a good man isn’t about never having anger or difficult emotions,” she said. “It’s about learning what to do with those emotions without making somebody else pay for them.”
For 35-year-old Katie Mills, she said raising her sons differently means that they know not to be afraid “to ask for help.” That they “understand their own mental health and know that becoming an adult doesn’t mean having to face everything alone.”
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Indeed, reframing masculinity is a big part of the conversation among Millennial parents — and research supports this shift in mindset among generations. According to a Pew Research poll, Millennials were more likely than Boomers to say it’s a good thing for parents to encourage young boys to play with toys and pursue activities normally associated with girls. The same poll found that women are more likely than men to think both boys and girls should be encouraged more to share their feelings.
Diana Chu, a licensed marriage and family therapist and executive coach in California, said she thinks Millennials are the first generation of parents to parent with a vocabulary for feelings— something, she said, that many of them learned in therapy as adults.
As for the “consent talk,” Chu said, it is not enough on its own. She said that parents need to think about how to teach their sons the ability to “break from the group.” In her own work as an executive coach, Chu has observed how men who run companies are afraid to break from the group when they’re in a room with people they want to like them. “They learned early that staying in step with the group was safer than being right, and the cost of questioning values and ethics is high,” she said. “The question parents are asking after Cornell is really how to raise a boy who will take the risk and leave the room.”
Chu said teaching young boys to become men who aren’t afraid to break from the group can start at home, at a young age, with low stakes. For example, letting a six-year-old say no to you and watching the no “hold.” She added that young boys also learn from seeing their parents disagree and repair.
“If a son never hears his father say ‘I was wrong’ or ‘I’m scared,’ he learns that men don’t, and the boys who can’t say a small true thing are the ones who go quiet when a big one is happening,” Chu said.
Stephonia Llewellyn, a therapist who works with children, adolescents and families, said when it comes to raising today’s boys “differently,” it’s important to focus on helping them develop emotional intelligence, empathy and accountability from an early age. “We should be creating environments where they can express sadness, fear, disappointment and vulnerability without being shamed or told to ‘toughen up,’” she said. “At the same time, emotional expression needs to be paired with responsibility—children should learn that having strong emotions is okay, but hurting others or violating someone’s boundaries is not.”
Llewellyn emphasized that fathers and other male role models have an especially meaningful role to play. “Children learn a great deal from what they observe,” she said. “When boys see the men in their lives communicate openly, apologize when they are wrong, respect others, manage frustration appropriately, and treat women and other people with dignity, those lessons can be incredibly powerful.”
“The question parents are asking after Cornell is really how to raise a boy who will take the risk and leave the room,” says Diana Chu, a licensed marriage and family therapist.
Christopher Everett, a father of a four-year-old boy, said he is obviously not sitting his son down to discuss the details of the Cornell 7 lawsuit today. But stories like these do make him think deeper about what he’s teaching long before these conversations can occur.
“For me, raising a boy differently has less to do with telling him what kind of man he should become and more to do with what we allow him to practice now,” Everett told me. “I want him to be able to say when he’s scared, hurt, embarrassed or wrong without feeling like those things diminish him.”
Everett added that he wants to teach him that strength and being gentle “are not opposites.”
“I want him to learn that another person’s boundaries matter even when he doesn’t understand or agree with them and that kindness isn’t something you perform only when adults are watching,” he said. “A lot of that begins in very small moments.” For example, how he treats his little sister, how they handle conflict at home, and whether Everett apologizes when he gets something wrong.
Everett said he doesn’t believe one generation of parents gets to declare they have figured out how to “raise boys correctly,” but he’s seen his peers trying to give their sons a larger emotional vocabulary than they inherited. “Without confusing emotional openness with an absence of responsibility or discipline,” he added.
A New Mexico judge has dismissed child sexual abuse charges against Timothy Busfield, best known for playing Elliot Weston on the ABC drama “thirtysomething.” But the ruling, which cited prosecutorial misconduct, does not prevent prosecutors from seeking a new indictment against the actor.
State District Judge Joseph Montano ruled Friday that prosecutors improperly prevented grand jurors from hearing testimony from witnesses they had requested, compromising the integrity of the proceedings.
“The prosecuting attorney failed to act in a fair and impartial manner,” Montano wrote, finding that the state’s actions effectively withheld witnesses from the grand jury.
Busfield, 69, was indicted in February on four counts of criminal sexual contact with a minor. The allegations stemmed from his work directing the Fox series “The Cleaning Lady,” where he was accused of inappropriately touching a young actor on set between 2022 and 2024.
The actor and director, also known for his acting roles in “The West Wing” and “Field of Dreams,” has consistently denied the allegations and pleaded not guilty.
Although the indictment was dismissed, Montano explicitly left the door open for another prosecution. The Bernalillo County District Attorney’s Office said it was evaluating its options.
Busfield’s attorney, Amber Fayerberg, said her client was “relieved and grateful,” but acknowledged the legal fight might continue.
“We know this may not be the end,” Fayerberg said. “If the State chooses to try again, Tim is ready, and so are those witnesses.”
The allegations have also placed Busfield’s marriage to “Little House on the Prairie” star Melissa Gilbert under public scrutiny.
Gilbert, who married Busfield in 2013, has steadfastly defended her husband. In an April interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” she described the allegations as devastating to their family and his career.
“Our life as we knew it is done,” Gilbert said, adding that she believed Busfield would be exonerated.
Following Friday’s dismissal, Gilbert shared a news report about the ruling on social media, signaling her continued support.
For now, the indictment is gone, but the possibility of renewed criminal proceedings remains.
In the first episode of his hit HBO series, “The Rehearsal” — a show about evaluating the outcomes of hypothetical real-life situations — comedian Nathan Fielder admits, “I’ve been told my personality can make some people uncomfortable, so I have to work to offset that.” For Fielder, who is equal parts lovably strange and dryly hilarious, offsetting other people’s discomfort can be a sizable task. It’s not easy to go through life in a double consciousness, hyperaware that one’s behavior might offend or unease. “Humor is my go-to instinct,” Fielder says about trying to reassure others. “But every joke is a gamble.”
Consider, then, the overlap between Fielder and someone like Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the bogus blood-testing company Theranos, who was convicted of swindling hundreds of millions of dollars from investors with her purportedly revolutionary blood-analysis device. Even before her downfall, Holmes drew the media’s attention with her wide, unblinking eyes, bold red lip, deep voice and stilted speech — all of which became parody-ready upon her indictment. But all the more perplexing was Holmes’ reticence to admit guilt when caught with hands as red as her lipstick, talking herself in circles in pursuit of her truth. Her statements always seemed misaligned with the evidence, as if she were so convinced of her company’s virtue that she didn’t care about the eerie dissonance between her reality and the world’s. If Holmes was indeed playing a character she made up, as many people speculated, she was a skilled method actor.
As Fielder gains steady footing on the margin dividing observation and manipulation, aiming the camera at either side, he uncovers something deeply, cosmically sad: Holmes can’t seem to tell the difference between the two.
Sitting just inches apart around a San Diego beach rental’s dinner table in Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim’s magnificent new documentary, “You Can See Everything,” Fielder and Holmes look decidedly comfortable with one another. They share an ease and rapport neither has readily exhibited on camera before — certainly not around virtual strangers. But while they may not share many overt similarities, the strange duo align in their mutual slipperiness.
Before them lie components of Theranos’ blood-analyzer, which Holmes hopes to turn into a new product after her 11-year prison sentence, set to begin 34 days after filming begins. Trying to explain the device, and how her claims of its efficacy were misread by investors and the public, Holmes once again can’t translate her thoughts into words that make sense to Fielder. Instinctually, Fielder makes a joke. “Isn’t it funny that I hosted a show about business scams, and now you’re in trouble for a business scam?” Holmes remarks that she hadn’t thought about it until now, and the tension lifts as her frustration dissipates. Despite his well-intentioned wisecrack — or perhaps because of it — Holmes can relate to her new associate. Somehow, Fielder can see her.
But which version of her Fielder — and, by extension, the audience — sees, and which version is the truest, remains up for debate. The title “You Can See Everything,” taken from a text Holmes sent to Fielder during production, is an obvious red herring. This documentary is about a woman notorious for her deception. We, of course, can’t really see anything.
And yet, it’s all on display. Fielder, Oppenheim, and the viewer share the task of putting those pieces together legibly, to tell Holmes’ story in a way that hasn’t already been done for her by the media, Hulu’s limited series “The Dropout,” and Holmes’ muddled observations. As the film plays out, its three-hour runtime gliding by in a flash, it becomes painfully clear that this is what Elizabeth Holmes has wanted all along: for someone to tell her story in a way she can’t — not because she doesn’t want to, but because she herself is unclear about what that story is. Breaking through Holmes’ tight circle of dubious companions, Fielder pulls at every thread he can, attempting to unravel a greater truth from life’s gnarled yarn. As he gains steady footing on the margin dividing observation and manipulation, aiming the camera at either side, Fielder uncovers something deeply, cosmically sad: Holmes can’t seem to tell the difference between the two.
That does not, however, mean she doesn’t want to try. Holmes is intent on letting the cameras see as much of her life as possible, not only to prove the innocence she’s maintained all along, but to show that she has nothing to hide. She understands that the world sees her a certain way, a way she doesn’t understand — or, in the case of the infamous photo of her holding a vial of blood between two fingers, outright refutes — but that people’s perception is entirely out of her control. Maybe emerging from hiding for the first time in seven years with a full-scale documentary team isn’t such a bad idea. Five weeks out from a decade in prison, what’s the worst they could uncover?
“You Can See Everything” isn’t so much about big, jaw-dropping revelations as it is about the people behind them, and the assortment of personality and/or neurodevelopmental disorders fueling their actions. Holmes raves about her husband, San Diego hotel-chain heir William Evans, whose ego takes up most of the space in their beachside rental. When Fielder asks how he and Holmes met, Evans relays murky details of a 2017 party where the two spoke for an hour before he realized who Holmes was, even though he’d toured the former Theranos building the day before.
Later, during a visit from Holmes’ parents, Fielder asks Holmes’ father, Christian, about her former lover and Theranos business partner, Sunny Balwani. Evans immediately interjects, trying to halt and redirect the conversation. Persisting, Fielder asks Christian to pinpoint a turning point in his daughter’s life. “That’s an easy one,” Christian says, confessing that the turning point came when Holmes was sexually assaulted at 19, a crossroads that Holmes admits had a hand in her dropping out of Stanford and starting Theranos.
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When Evans derails the conversation again, a new question pops up — an occurrence in this film as natural and frequent as breathing. Is Holmes’ husband trying to maneuver the situation because he cares for his wife, or because his behavioral patterns mirror those of Balwani and Holmes’ assailant? All three men directly impacted Holmes at vulnerable points in her life, and from the film’s outset, it’s clear Evans savors controlling the narrative, whether through Holmes’ life’s work or simply the way she whisks eggs for scrambling. What’s constantly baffling is how much affection Holmes has for her repugnant husband, no matter how much he twists stories or alienates the film crew. One could say the two share a talent for deception, but it always feels more complex and tricky than that, as if it would be too easy to say that Holmes and Evans get along because they’re both hucksters, skilled in fabrication. They both get something out of this relationship. Whether it’s love is anyone’s guess.
What’s brutally, painfully clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that Holmes has not yet learned how to use her own voice. She knows how to speak, dictate orders and ideas. (And, obviously, how to fool powerful people.) But Holmes doesn’t grasp where her ideas end, and someone else’s influence begins. She personifies a complete lack of identity, so irrevocably tied to her inventions, physical or otherwise, that, compared to Fielder — whose work is marked by his own keen self-awareness — she looks like the diametrical opposite. Holmes is the tragedy to his comedy. Naturally, the two are intrinsically connected.
Many things about Elizabeth Holmes aren’t certain. But what’s irrefutable is that she knows how lonely it is not to be able to communicate the world inside her head, and how painful it is not to understand others the same way. It’s no wonder that, when she meets someone who can bridge that gap, she wants to make a monument of it.
All of the questions about who’s running Holmes’ show take new, thorny form as the film blossoms in its latter half — the portion that, thanks to a surprise guest, makes the movie one of the most startling and memorable exercises in metafiction ever concocted. But the film’s most heartbreaking and pivotal scene comes in its first third, before Holmes surrenders, when Fielder gathers her and Evans on the couch to show them Abbott and Costello’s famous “Who’s on First?” act.
Fielder tells Holmes that he was reminded of the bit the day before, when Holmes tried to describe the science and intention of Theranos in front of its deconstructed prototype. Holmes has never seen the routine, and gives it a few chuckles. But when Fielder asks her to explain the joke — that “Who” is the name of the baseball player on first base, yet sounds like a question, confusing the two men — and why it’s funny, she can’t. As Fielder clarifies the punchline, Holmes breaks down in tears across from him, frustrated that she can’t understand.
In this moment, Fielder conjures a world of empathy for his subject, again posing questions about what gets lost between two people who believe they’re being perfectly clear, yet aren’t making sense to one another. Many things about Elizabeth Holmes aren’t certain. But what’s irrefutable is that she knows how lonely it is not to be able to communicate the world inside her head, and how painful it is not to understand others the same way. It’s no wonder that, when she meets someone who can bridge that gap, she wants to make a monument of it — be it a business, a marriage, a film or a profession of love.
Though the questions persist: Is this all part of Holmes’ master plan? Is she letting the cameras in to dupe us, to make us feel sorry for someone whose actions caused real harm? Maybe. Those seeking clear answers will leave with nothing more than new questions, but that’s the glorious part of “You Can See Everything.” In an era when documentaries are made for everything and nothing, it’s critical to remember that searching for reason in something as immense as the human condition is a fool’s errand.
Fielder might be fascinated by motive and rationale, but he’s primarily interested in circumstance, and he understands Holmes’ circumstances perfectly. His film is a self-reflexive study of the inability to act as people expect — of masking and deception. How much of life is a performance? Can anyone truly be themselves when society’s bylaws not only dictate proper human behavior but also how successful anyone can be in something as complicated and unknowable as life itself? In seeking the truth, all one finds is more differences, more judgment. Sure, we can see everything. But whether we really should is another question entirely.
In a digital flyer promoting the stand-up shows that would culminate in her new HBO comedy special, “Parmesan,” comedian, actress and one of America’s greatest working artists, Kate Berlant, posed an important question: “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CLOWN?” In one photo, Berlant, fresh from glam, seduces the camera; in the other, her face contorts into a rascally grin, eyes half-crossed for effect. No dichotomy better represents Berlant’s razor-sharp, thoroughly tasteful wit, which sits halfway between refined humorist and go-for-broke court jester.
If you haven’t seen this clown, there’s no better time than the present. Like most of Berlant’s work — from her extensive collaborations with best friend John Early to her unforgettable one-woman show, “KATE” — “Parmesan” is a masterful send-up of a time when we’re all doing character work. What begins as an honest account of modern life’s bleak state is distorted alongside Berlant’s malleable expressions, slowly blossoming into something life-affirming, like a diamond among the rubble. Some comedians like to say they give their audience a “night off” from the world. Berlant, on the other hand, relishes the chance to remind her audiences of just how blissfully hysterical the world can be.
Everyday life, in the Berlantian sense, is driven by affection for both the mundane and the surreal in equal measure. In the joke that inspires the special’s title, she measures an Instagram comment’s subzero value in a wide scope, lampooning the communal yet cartoonish nature of our endless scroll. Elsewhere, Berlant gets more personal than she ever has on stage, using the relatively recent discovery that she isn’t straight as the springboard for bits about how embracing queerness later in life can be as beautiful as it is uniquely mortifying.
But with Berlant, it’s not just about the jokes; it’s about the rhythm and physicality that accompany them. No one understands their audience better than she does, knowing comedy relies as much on observation as on good, old-fashioned slapstick. Berlant’s a tenured professor at the Make-‘Em-Laugh Institute, and “Parmesan” proves her research-driven thesis statement time and again: There’s no bad mood a good clown can’t improve.
From the moment Alex Gibney announced he was working on “Musk” in 2023, it became one of the most anticipated documentaries around – and a source of trepidation for its titular subject, tech mogul Elon Musk. But we may have underestimated how far the world’s wealthiest man and his ilk would go to prevent audiences from seeing it.
Weeks before “Musk” hit theaters, its distributor, Bleecker Street, couldn’t buy ads on TikTok, YouTube, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram or, here’s a shocker, Musk’s own X. A Hollywood Reporter story published on Sept. 25 made YouTube and Meta reverse course – a rare case of two media giants shamed into living up to their free-speech claims.
But this attempted media suppression shows “Musk” has struck a nerve, despite its namesake dismissing it as a “hit piece that misses.”
What happened to Bleecker Street, then, is both familiar to Gibney and extraordinarily alarming. “You can see how a few platforms coalescing around the endorsement of what these tech viziers are doing decide that a criticism of tech power is somehow political and can’t be allowed in terms of open discourse on their platforms,” Gibney told Salon. “So that was really disconcerting.”
It’s shaping up to be a dark autumn for Silicon Valley’s villains. In early December, Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial” turns our attention to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, played by Andrew Garfield.
Meanwhile, “Musk” was recently joined in theaters by Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” in which Jeremy Strong portrays Zuckerberg as a soulless ghoul prioritizing clicks over user safety. In “You Can See Everything,” notorious prankster Nathan Fielder shadows notorious (for different reasons) Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in the days before she went to prison.
Gibney also profiled Holmes in his 2019 work “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” which adds another layer of coincidental symmetry: Fielder’s film hits theaters on Oct. 16, the same day “Musk” opens nationwide.
But “Musk” is unquestionably a tougher watch, and given its subject’s extensive integration into the second Trump administration, it can’t help but be political.
Of course, “Musk” isn’t campaigning for anything except our need to confront the existential threat posed by one man exercising significant control over our media and our military.
A chorus of testimony from people who were once closest to Musk builds a profile of a megalomaniacal con artist. Two of Musk’s most incisive critics, his ex-wife Justine Musk and former right-wing influencer Ashley St. Clair, describe him as a gaslighter and a nuke, respectively.
But perhaps the most damning testimonial comes from Musk himself – or rather, existing audio recordings of Musk delivered by a CGI version of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, since he refused to participate.
All of it boils down to simple questions Gibney poses at the film’s outset: How could Musk assume so much power, and why have we given it to him? I discussed those questions with Gibney, and what they taught him about Musk and our penchant for enabling men like him, in a wide-ranging conversation transcribed below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Salon: You’ve done a documentary on Putin. You did one on Scientology, a famously litigious organization. You have a vast filmography featuring subjects who might have taken issue, or have taken issue, with what was said in your documentaries. Where does this rank in terms of threat level, legal or otherwise?
Gibney: Well, high. I mean, when just before “Going Clear” was released, the Church of Scientology took out full-page ads in the New York Times and the L.A. Times with a big picture of me, sort of denouncing me. And there were people, you know, who would pop up in dark parking lots, you know, sort of accosting me, trying to kind of destabilize me psychologically. But I think in this case, he’s the richest man in the world. He has a lot of resources… And he has this platform, Twitter, which has become a kind of Thunderdome of hate and vitriol, and that activates, you know, unpredictable characters who sometimes act on their own…
That said, I don’t want to exaggerate what’s happened to me so far. Other people put themselves at greater risk than I, in the sense that they came forward and appeared on camera.
One of the things that you said in other interviews, and I think you actually said this in the documentary as well, is that you used to be a fan of Elon Musk’s products.
I mean, I looked at him from afar. I have some history on this whole electric car thing because I was brought in long ago to help with the editing of a doc called “Who Killed the Electric Car,” which is about GM’s first foray into the world of electric cars. A woman I met on that film, Jessie Deeter, later produced a film called “Revenge of the Electric Car,” and Elon Musk is in that. And Jessie, when she worked with him on that, was a big fan. [Deeter is also a producer on “Musk.”]
(Courtesy Bleecker Street Film / Gregg Segal)
So, you know, I had a certain connection to him. And I’m a big electric car guy. I own one — not a Tesla— but I own one, and I had a Tesla Powerwall in my house. I also sort of liked the kind of mumbling charisma that he had for a while, because he seemed like very much a regular guy. He was joking with people around on Twitter and stuff like that.
That said, he could also do unpredictable, chaotic and sometimes offensive things. But largely speaking, my view of him was positive. But I was interested in the fact that he accumulated so much power, and so that was the basis on which I dug in back in 2022.
Do you think that his ability to amass this much power is related to the fact that he is doing it in the American capitalist system, or do you think he could have done it in any other place in the world?
Well, I mean, there are a lot of intersections of opportunities for Elon Musk, and I also think he discovered, to use a phrase of his, the anomaly in the matrix for the American system. And that is money. He discovered that not only can you get a lot of money from the federal government, but if you have a lot of money, you can use it to influence sometimes how much money you get from the federal government or state governments. So I think there was that.
The other big thing is that in America we also have a kind of grudging admiration for the P.T. Barnum-like qualities of certain larger-than-life entrepreneurs, you know, and you see that a lot in Silicon Valley . . . That is a kind of cultural trope in this society for which I think we have a weakness. We sort of like to see them trick us all, though we also do like to see them go down after they’ve tricked us. So I think for all those reasons that maybe Elon was able to succeed here in a way that really exploited some of the flaws in our system and our psyche.
There’s also a propensity in our culture to believe in some superhuman aspect of genius, which I think your documentary gets at very well.
Yeah, it’s also that our weakness for money, or the power of money, in this culture also causes us somehow to think that if you’re wealthy, you’re also wise rather than just ruthless, right?
I often think of that famous line from “Citizen Kane,” where Orson Welles is joking with somebody, you know, having been very successful playing this William Randolph Hearst character, who said, “It’s no trick making a lot of money if all you want to do is make a lot of money.” Meaning, if you’re ruthless and determined, you can make a lot of money. Doesn’t mean you’re a genius, and it doesn’t mean that you’re a tech genius either.
I also think Elon Musk, having seen the ascent of Steve Jobs, was sort of defining himself in that way too – or going back to Thomas Edison, who had his own P.T. Barnum-like qualities in terms of inventing a character for himself to play. It’s not just the investor; it’s the inventor.
“Musk” runs for almost four hours. Did you always know it would be that long?
No. In fact, I had a cut of the film in the spring of 2024 that was under two hours. We were moving to release that and put it into the fall festivals. Then, in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump is nearly assassinated, and Musk hitches his wagon to the Trump train. And my friends at HBO said, “You’re not done. You have to follow this story because it could go to places that you don’t expect, and having spent as much time as you have, you have to follow it to at least a moment of greater conclusion.”
So I did, and that ended up being the reason that it’s at such a length. You see patterns from the first film that then repeat themselves, but on a much larger scale, in the second film. Suddenly economic power meets political power, economic and technological power meets political power, and that is the making of an epic story.
(Courtesy Bleecker Street Film / Ken Cedenoupi / UPI Alamy News) Elon Musk
In addition, it just so happened that as he embarked on his political project, a lot of people that I was talking to in the background, trying to persuade them to come forward, did come forward because they saw some of the more problematic aspects of Musk wielding power as part of MAGA world. That gave the story a kind of human dimension as well.
Weirdly, you know, I was having trouble kind of putting it all together, and I didn’t really get a sense of how to shape it until I watched Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” which in itself was a kind of take on the tech bros. That helped me kind of find a way forward in terms of what became a kind of epic narrative.
How so?
Well, you know, you start with a scientist who wants to do something big and important. And there’s even a sense of idealism about his ambition. But then he literally creates a monster, and the whole enterprise becomes utterly reckless and irresponsible and all about his own sort of grandiosity. Rather than a mission that might help people, it becomes about him.
What are you hoping this documentary will do in terms of making people a little bit more aware of who Elon Musk is and getting at the man behind the curtain, so to speak?
Well, I mean, it is an agent provocateur. I don’t provide a solution, but I do provide, I think, a pretty compelling story, which asks the kind of fundamental question I posed at the beginning, which is, how did this guy get so much power, and why did we give it to him? Because it’s both about him and it’s about us, and it asks some discomforting questions about how literally existential power rests in the hands of one man who is increasingly chaotic, unhinged, and seemingly pursuing power without reason. There’s a chilling moment at the end of the film where somebody asks him, “Why have you accreted so much power?” And he literally can’t answer the question…
He’s a very peculiar character who’s a chaos agent. But we’ve allowed him to become normalized in a way.
I remember writing about him being on “Saturday Night Live” and people shrugging it off, like, “Oh, it’s not that big of a deal.” But it was a very big deal. Those kinds of things make him into a character when the reality is he has massive access to power.
And he’s saying things, even on “Saturday Night Live,” that were patently untrue… Even when he says, “Did you think I was going to be a chill, normal dude?” Well, there’s a funny hidden message there, which is kind of discomforting if you really think about it. Like, if you want to drive a Tesla, be prepared to endure a lot of performative cruelty from me, including cruelty that may end up killing people. . . That’s a pretty brutal message, honestly, for “Saturday Night Live.” But it was a joke, right? And that’s the genius, in a way, of Elon Musk: he’s constantly saying stuff that is deadly serious and a joke at the same time.
Speaking of that, the images and the joke, let’s talk about using the [CGI] avatar. I remember when the news first broke about that, someone said, “Well, I wonder if that’s Alex kind of trolling Musk back.”
I mean, it’s kind of a troll-back, yeah. In a way, it’s kind of investing in him, playing in his sandbox, because he didn’t agree to appear.
And I should make it clear, as I tried to do in the film, that what we hear from him are actual audio recordings of him. In other words, they’re not AI-confected answers. We didn’t ask AI what Elon would say. We’re taking real audio recordings, but how to couch that visually? And we took our cue, having done all this research into stuff that Elon said, from something he kept going over again: This idea that we’re likely living in a simulation. So I thought, OK, how about a simulated interview?
And yes, he’s famous for trolling people. He’s famous for creating memes. What was it he said in 2020 on Twitter? He said, you know, parodying “Dune,” he said, “He who controls the memes, controls the universe,” right? OK, well, here’s a meme for you, Elon, of you.
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What, if anything, about this documentary may help illuminate a few things for people, regardless of their political leanings, as we approach the midterms?
I mean, this should be our concern, whether you’re from the left or the right, is giving people unaccountable power. Also, this whole idea that our politics and, indeed, our Department of Justice and our Department of Defense can be utterly transactional.
We’re not getting the best that money can buy. We’re getting what money can buy. Period. In other words, the military stuff that you’re seeing is a third-rate frontier AI technology being fully integrated into our Department of Defense. And why is the worst technology being integrated? Because Elon Musk is literally paying for political advantage. So it’s a payback system, and we should all be outraged about that, left, right, or otherwise.
And now you’re seeing him trying to buy the midterms. He’s spending way more now than he did for the presidential campaign in 2024, and in part that’s to get more money for himself in the form of military contracts. But also, he knows that a reckoning is coming for him if the Democrats take over the House and the Senate, and there’s going to be a lot of investigations into him for corruption and abuse of power, taking our information, particularly possibly relating to DOGE, and doing God knows what with it.
Our whole system is built on a system of checks and balances, and the idea that the government is our instrument for making a better world, rather than, you know, making a few people rich…
But I think that what’s changed now with Trump is that the Department of Justice has become a protection racket for those who flatter and ally themselves with the president, and an instrument of revenge for those who oppose the president. You can’t depend on it as a kind of law-enforcing mechanism, and that may be the scariest thing of all. . . What we’re talking about is Putin’s Russia here, right? And if people want to avoid that, then I would strongly urge them to go out to the polls. Because this is a rogue administration that goes beyond any kind of sense of party affiliation. It’s a rogue administration that’s literally destroying our democracy.
A network of AI-generated models is using comics’ material to funnel views to their OnlyFans and Fanvue accounts—and there’s not much comedians can do about it.
It was the Peanut Butter heist that won me over. Everyone watching “Cape Fear” knows what I’m talking about – it’s the sixth-episode confrontation in which Max Cady, played by Javier Bardem, tangles yet again with his nightmare neighbors Anna (Amy Adams) and Tom Bowden (Patrick Wilson).
Some of you may be thinking I’ve mischaracterized the Bowdens since past versions of “Cape Fear” establish Max as the problem. But for all of Tom and Anna’s trepidation toward Max, they do little to thwart him from being all up in their business.
In one scene, Anna discovers Max in her kitchen making a sandwich for her son Zack (Joe Anders). In another, her daughter Natalie (Lily Collias) hitches a ride with him. Anna carpools with him too, and Tom joins Max for a few drinks at a local bar. The Bowdens spend more time with their local tormentor than I have ever spent with my neighbors, whom I like quite a bit.
All this happens after Zack turns up with a missing toe, which Anna suspects Max orchestrated. Just like she and Tom strongly suspect Max spiked the family’s iced tea with Tom’s stash of LSD. Why does Tom have a stash of LSD? For microdosing, because Tom is a yuppie who hates his life.
(Apple TV) Patrick Wilson and Amy Adams in “Cape Fear.”
Anyway, when the couple angrily strides across the street to confront Max, we’re supposed to be in their corner. But Max’s door is open to them, and inside they find him preparing a luxurious meal. Before Tom gives the hardened ex-con an earful of what for, he and Anna are shocked silent when their cat strolls into Max’s kitchen.
“You took Peanut Butter?” Tom yelps in a way that halts Max in his tracks. He walks over to the cat and picks him up, and in previous adaptations of this story, this might signal that a disturbing act of animal cruelty is about to happen.
But Bardem’s Max is a different breed of psychopath from those previously embodied by Roberts DeNiro and Mitchum. “Peanut Butter? Really?” he says. “You’re calling this majestic creature . . . Peanut Butter?” Then he kisses kitty on the cheek and reintroduces him as Maní – the Spanish word for peanut.
“Maní will come home when he’s ready,” he says later. “You can’t force a cat.”
“Cape Fear” has now inspired three screen adaptations – two of them feature-length films that last about as long as the endurance limit most people have for its brand of sadism. In adapting the premise for TV, series creator Nick Antosca dilutes the movies’ naked menace by pouring reasonable doubt into both Max’s profile and that of the Bowdens, the married lawyers behind his downfall.
That doesn’t save “Cape Fear” from being a 10-hour slog set to an imitation of Bernard Herrmann’s anxiety-inducing score, but it does lend a little intrigue to Antosca and Bardem’s interpretation of Max.
Everyone in this series is some shade of awful.
The TV variation of Max Cady is where the classic prestige drama Difficult Man shakes hands with a manosphere cultist’s pent-up aggression. Bardem’s villain is built more like an aughts-edition antihero. He was once a respected celebrity chef who loved his wife even though he cheated on her, and exudes a kind of danger that brings out a touch of Bonnie and Clyde syndrome in horny strangers.
Meanwhile, Anna and Tom Bowden are a split version of the attorney previously played by Gregory Peck and Nick Nolte, Sam Bowden. Their relationship with Max is also much more personal: Anna was Max’s pregnant lawyer in the trial where Max stood accused of killing his expectant wife, while Tom was the prosecutor.
(Apple TV) Patrick Wilson and Javier Bardem in “Cape Fear.”
At some point, Anna persuaded Max to plead guilty even though he maintained his innocence. Shortly after Max’s trial ended, Anna and Tom got married, Anna got sober, and both buried a few secrets. While Max spent 17 years in prison, Anna built a reputation for freeing wrongfully convicted inmates, while Tom went to work for a fancy law firm.
It’s hard not to feel some kind of sympathy for Max, who sustained a severe brain injury while he was incarcerated that required surgeons to install a metal plate in his skull. As he tells a fellow prisoner in a flashback, he’d never murdered anyone before he killed the men who attacked him. Who knows if that’s true? Then again, Anna and Tom aren’t exactly paragons of honesty either.
Everyone in this series is some shade of awful. Anna’s boss, Noa (CCH Pounder), thinks Max is just the greatest, to the point of gaslighting her unnerved colleague. An unhinged girl who turns out to be his secret daughter, Nevaeh (Malia Pyles), has been living in the walls of the Bowdens’ house and messing with their kids. Max even has his own stalker played by Juliette Lewis, who also starred in the 1991 movie.
Still, there’s no getting around Max’s demonic impulses or the Bowdens’ clumsy game of FAFO mixed with “You Started It.” As Anna and Tom keep saying, Max was going to come after them no matter what. But good lord, they are bad at this.
I’ve always understood Max Cady to be a poisonous extension of the male ego, dating back to “The Executioners,” John D. MacDonald’s 1957 book that started it all. Max Cady either validates the paranoia of upstanding men obsessed with protecting or dominating women, or the disdain felt by those whom such men look down upon.
(Apple TV) Javier Bardem in “Cape Fear.”
Relatedly, his cinematic incarnations have evolved over the years: In the 1962 film, Mitchum’s Cady is a straight-up unrepentant criminal terrorizing Peck’s Sam Bowden by threatening to rape his wife and virginal teenage daughter. DeNiro’s take in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake amplifies Max’s barbarism and Lewis’ Lolita vibe as Sam Bowden’s daughter, establishing her teenage curiosity about Max by sucking on his fingers. (Scorsese is also listed as an executive producer on the series, along with Steven Spielberg.)
Antosca’s choice to leave rape out of the equation in the TV show, then, is a smart one. Instead, he falls back on a tried-and-true fridging: Not only was Max’s wife brutalized to a degree that there were knife marks on her bones, but the killer also cut his unborn child out of her belly.
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By the rule of Difficult Men, if Max does bad things, he has his reasons. And if he does those things to terrible people, they probably have it coming. Unfortunately, one of the people who paid the ultimate price in this feud is Anna’s coworker, whom she couldn’t leave out of her personal problems. He’s currently resting in pieces, poor guy.
The plot of “Cape Fear” dictates that this sporting tale of homicidal pettiness can only end one way. Until that inevitable conclusion, I’ll be rooting for Max Cady’s campaign against the Bowdens’ vortex of selfishness, which is entirely OK to do. None of these people is real, but the irritations they represent – NIMBYism, narcissism and the compulsion to destroy others to build ourselves up – are quite familiar. If the Bowdens were better written, I wouldn’t wish them ill. But I always trust the instincts of a good cat.
BRUSSELS ― The EU should consider approving a three or four-year budget instead of trying to plan the bloc’s financial needs for seven years, the president of Cyprus told POLITICO.
“We’re discussing the budget in 2034 and now we’re in 2026,” Nikos Christodoulides said in an interview on the sidelines of Thursday’s summit of EU leaders in Brussels.
A three or four-year budget might be “easier” for some member countries to swallow, he suggested. “Why not open the political discussion?”
“You don’t know what’s going to be the situation in 2030, 2031,” he added. “I mean, look what happened with Covid, with the Ukrainian war … It’s not possible to declare all your priorities today.”
The EU’s seven-year, roughly €2 trillion budget has to be agreed by all 27 member countries but has two deeply entrenched camps on either side: The so-called frugals, comprised of Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and others who want a smaller budget, and the friends of cohesion, a loose grouping of 17 countries that do not want major cuts to agriculture and regional funds.
An EU official close to the budget negotiations said the idea of a shorter timeframe was weird.
EU law allows a budget of “at least five years,” though every budget has been seven years since 1993.
The odds of the budget being approved by the end of the year are increasingly slim, with an election in Spain in November, which polls indicate Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will lose to the center-right and far-right, potentially blowing out the timeline for consensus to 2027.
“Everybody used to understand that we need to finish … a political agreement by the end of the year,” Christodoulides said. “Now, with the situation in Spain, elections there,” that is less likely to happen.
Christodoulides also said he expected the budget to be cut by around a 10th compared to the budget proposed by the European Commission. Last week, the Irish government proposed an 8% cut compared to the Commission’s proposal.
“I think we may end up on 10% or 11%,” he said. “Double digits.”
Welcome to RATED AND SLATED, the column that’s terminally online so you don’t have to be.
This week, I’ve been distracting myself from the horrors of a livestreamed war by playing a relaxing new video game which lets you pilot a military drone.
I’ve been enjoying Remote Reaper: FPV Drone so much that I’m packing in the day job to focus on my YouTube channel, where I’ll be streaming myself carrying out combat missions. Subscribe now!
Ukrainian-developed FPV drone simulator “Remote Reaper: FPV Drone” has officially left Early Access, with version 1.0 now available on Steam.
Developed in collaboration with military pilots, the simulator focuses on combat FPV drone operations and introduces several features in… pic.twitter.com/63id2RVJoL
I’ll be modding the simulator so that I can drone bomb my favorite cities around the world. I’ve got no time for anyone who says this game could be used to generate military training data or perform real combat operations.
In fact, I’m so confident that this is all just a load of harmless fun that tonight I’ll be sending the reaper to pay a visit to my own home. Tune in live below!
RATED AND SLATED
AI FLIGHT BUDDIES
boy next to me asked chat gpt can he bring his cava on the flight and now he’s having a full on kii with the bot pic.twitter.com/R3m6iJuiG9
If this is the baseline level of AI psychosis for the general population, it won’t be long before you find yourself sitting on a commercial flight next to an LLM fanatic who’s “having a full-on kii with the bot” about how he’s about to hijack the plane—AND YOU MADE IT ON WITH THE BOX CUTTERS TOO MISSION ACCOMPLISHED TWIN NAHHH BUT BE FR… YOU REGRET NOT BRINGING THE BIG SUICIDE JACKET NOW? —oh well, at least you won’t have to worry about popping your ears for much longer.
ROBOT SECURITY DOGS WITH INDIAN ACCENTS
#BREAKING: Absolutely WILD footage has emerged from Atlanta where an apartment complex now uses "robot security dogs" to patrol the area at night.
The robot dogs also seem to speak in Indian accents to the residents.
Does the robot security dog have this accent because it’s manned by a human operator or because it was abandoned as a pup, stuck in India, living on the streets, surviving, being a tourist guide, smoking on the fucking roads?
I’m sick of going on X and seeing you complaining about 3D-printed salmon. I don’t want to hear that it’s not real meat, that “it contains zero fish at all”—grow up! This looks every bit as appetizing as all those AI-generated food menus. Well, it’s your loss; more for me. In fact, strap me into an eating chair, stick me under the specialized food-grade nozzles, and print those fake layers of muscle and fiber straight into my mouth, layer by layer, until I contain more slop than my own timeline.
THE FUTURE OF JOB INTERVIEWS
Good news. In the future our agents can just talk to each other while we sit alone in our basements and doomscroll. https://t.co/iWZWac8JGo
To be fair, if my AI agent does the video job interview with the AI recruiter while I’m not in the room, then I’d say that’s actually getting my new employer ready for what I’m going to be like at work: dissociating at my desk before vanishing off for 40-minute shits on company time. My agent had better work on his innocent face for when he’s asked who blocked the toilet in the gender-neutral restroom with partially digested 3D-printed salmon.
GOD’S OWN INFLUENCER
Belarus has blessed its first AI-generated religious icon
The icon depicts Carlo Acutis, an Italian teenager who was canonized in 2025 and became known as the “Cyber Apostle.”
The icon was installed in a Catholic church in Novolukoml, where Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz… pic.twitter.com/vawCVEK8aX
I know Cyber-Apostle of the Eucharist Saint Carlo Acutis isn’t technically “alive” anymore, but what’s to stop him from being the Pope? Maybe the real reason Leo XIV hates AI so much is that, like the rest of us, he’s worried it’s going to steal his job.
This melancholy duet sounds as if it could’ve been written to be Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten’s dream collaboration with Lana Del Rey, if only she wasn’t too busy recording a GTA VI radio station with her airboat captain husband to jump on the track. Fortunately, ROSALÍA was free to cut a yearning vocal take—presumably because there was no one around to take her on the alligator tour she’d originally planned for the day.
CAMERONWINTER.FILM
Bourgeois darling Paul Thomas Anderson strikes again, this time w a toothless, derivative, anti-revolutionary concert film devoted to saccharine young nepo-psyop Cameron Winter. In these trying times, Anderson chooses to mock liberatory aesthetics w grainy anesthetic 35mm slop. https://t.co/UMgBTaXfwa
Want a sad night out with the boys? Well, great news: The Cameron Winter concert film is coming to a cinema near you. Why not cheer up your pals by buying the official Live at Carnegie Hall grand piano popcorn bucket? Stick it on your lap, tell ’em to reach to the bottom, and then you, too, can bust out the falsetto.
If you promise to reboot Girls every ten years, then I will commit to the internet’s most stringent longevity protocol. I need to be around to see what happens to the bloodlines of Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna. You will find me in the hyperbaric chamber 100 years from now, watching their febrile descendants resort to increasingly extreme measures to keep their little dreams alive amidst the spectacular, decayed opulence of a futuristic New York City. By that point, I’ll be the last millennial alive, the only person in the world who still believes that Lena Dunham is the voice of our generation.
The artist’s macabre short works have been adapted into eerily freaky 30-minute bites for television. We got a sneak preview of the next episode airing on HBO Max.
Low-quality AI-generated content currently dominates children’s media. Maka, a streaming platform run by child development experts, is offering an alternative.
Not long ago, celebrities took to social media to express their contempt for a business and barely made a ripple in the public conversation, let alone national headlines.
When Alec Baldwin furiously smashed his big thumbs into his tiny BlackBerry keyboard, tweeting, “Starbucks on 93 and B’way. Uptight Queen barista named JAY has an attitude problem,” no news outlets darted to the Starbucks location to interview Jay.
When Kelly Osbourne tried in vain to pop into a Starbucks bathroom during New York Pride, inventing the hashtag “#PissedMyOwnPants,” no one ran to that Starbucks to see if they could recover evidence of Osbourne’s urine to prove her woes.
We used to treat these complaints as absurd follies of celebrity excess — tone-deaf musings that proved how out of touch the rich and famous are with the everyday person working a customer-facing service job. Without fail, the celebrity always looked like the ridiculous party. But no part of celebrity culture in the past 10 years has proven that we are well past this comical stage more than Kelly Clarkson’s war with a small business that wouldn’t sell her a singing bird mounted on their wall.
A business capitulating to a celebrity who reflexively sends a dogpile on them would set an alarming social precedent. Even more frightening is that so many demanded that capitulation blindly, without knowing a single additional detail. No matter whose side one might gravitate toward, the speed at which a celebrity’s will can mobilize the public should be deeply concerning.
Over the weekend, Clarkson stopped into a curiosities shop called Art of Play in Brooklyn, New York, with a few items in mind. Within minutes, a national tragedy in the form of an egregious misunderstanding occurred between Clarkson and a shop attendant. According to the store, Clarkson inquired about purchasing Molly, a custom-made singing automaton bird mounted on their wall for magic shows and public display — a bird that is not for sale. Clarkson was told they could find a comparable item for her, but apparently felt slighted. “. . .Literally was looked at as if I couldn’t afford it,” Clarkson posted on X a few minutes after the initial interaction. “You’re an idiot and just lost a huge sale. But y’all should check out Art of Play in Brooklyn if you enjoy being treated like Julia Roberts’ character in ‘Pretty Woman.’”
The fallout was swift. Thousands of people flew to the store’s Google reviews to tank its ratings and leave upset comments, despite never having set foot inside. People crowded their Instagram page, commenting on a post from earlier in the week, “Here before they turn the comments off!” And while the situation has become multilayered and far too overblown in the days since, I found this initial reaction most disconcerting.
This was one post, fired off in disgust from a major celebrity with a massive, very supportive audience. Sick in bed with nothing better to do this weekend, I watched the fallout play out in real time minutes after the post went up. It was as if Clarkson’s fans had their sleeper cells activated, ready to use the weapons at their disposal — their phones — at their commander’s word. The situation extended far past stan culture’s typical digital boundaries and immediately into the real world. Based on Clarkson’s behavior over the last month, I’m confident not only that the real world isn’t a place she ventures into often, but that many of us could stand to venture into it far more frequently, too. If a former karaoke-singing talk show host, a cocky shop owner and a sweet wooden bird caught in the middle can have so many people at each other’s throats, the world has officially tilted off its axis and begun spinning into perdition.
For those not already intimately versed in the situation’s details — consider yourself lucky — here’s the brass tacks. Art of Play clarified that Clarkson asked to buy Molly the singing bird automaton, which they told her was not for sale. The store continued, “It’s been a surreal experience to be the focus of such widespread outrage after just one mention by a celebrity. Clarkson responded with a post from the store’s Instagram story, featuring a blurry $15,000 price tag next to Molly. Art of Play clarified that their wall-mounted piece was not for sale, but that the artist would sell a twin creation for $15,000; meanwhile, a store employee offered her a comparable $2,000 option.
One of the store’s co-owners, Adam Rubin, gave an interview to Curbed, saying, “Kelly Clarkson put us in danger,” which is one of the more patently hysterical results of this entire situation. Earlier this week, investigative reporter Pablo Torre obtained audio-free security footage showing the entire interaction between Clarkson and the store employee. In the footage, recorded on a crowded day with plenty of customers, the employee appears to tell Clarkson about Molly, then points out a similar bird elsewhere in the store and helps another customer. Clarkson goes to leave, stopping on the way out to exchange what seem like heated words with another employee behind the counter. The entire sequence of events lasts just five minutes, yet it has consumed the zeitgeist for days.
As someone whose years of retail experience led to everything from customers crumpling their receipts and throwing them in his face to others threatening him after being unsatisfied with their discounts, my initial reaction was to side with Art of Play. Frankly, I don’t see how anyone’s reaction wasn’t. There isn’t one celebrity, living or dead, who I’d blindly support in using their five-minute shopping experience — which caused only ego bruises, not physical ones — to sic their millions of fans on a store. That’s just not something any human with an ounce of couth or self-awareness about the power of platform would do. Clarkson, who has been famous for her entire adult life and managed to grow her audience into a loyal following largely unscathed by scandal, is responsible for wielding her influence with tact. This was not a tactful decision.
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Art of Play jokingly raising Molly’s price to $15 million in the wake of the controversy doesn’t exactly paint the store in the best light either — though it at least exhibits a sense of humor. (I can’t say the same for their gross decision to try to prove their innocence with security footage.) I don’t entirely believe Rubin’s assertions that his employees have been put in danger, but his store certainly has. In commerce’s current state, small businesses live and die on Google reviews. It’s well within the store’s right to stick up for themselves and express shock at the way Clarkson’s fans operate. Capitulating to a celebrity who reflexively decides to send a dogpile on a business would set an alarming social precedent. Even more frightening is that so many demanded that capitulation blindly, without ever knowing a single additional detail outside of Clarkson’s post. No matter whose side one might gravitate toward, the speed at which a celebrity’s will can mobilize the public should be deeply concerning.
We live in a country where viral videos of unpleasant exchanges are valuable social capital, where those seeking power are looking to those who have it to learn what can be weaponized to seize control. It was always going to end this way when Clarkson named the store and pressed send.
But this is what happens when civilians stop treating celebrities like famous people and start trusting them like friends. Call it the talk show effect, or the America’s sweetheart effect; whatever you call it, it’s poisoning how we think and react. Internet stan culture has evolved so much that online culture wars have become real-life battles. When did a singer versus a singing bird become a saga that would capture the world’s attention? There is no world in which any of us should care about Clarkson’s innocuous interaction with a puzzle shop employee, and certainly no world where Clarkson should make it any of our business.
That’s what’s saddest about this situation: There are better ways to spend everyone’s time, and far more important ways for Clarkson to use her platform. Clarkson doesn’t appear to have posted anything on her X account that hasn’t gone through a manager in well over two years. And yet, she’ll go to bat for a perceived slight at a glorified magic shop? It’s been less than a month since her music industry peers, Macklemore and Ed Sheeran, got into a very public, contentious disagreement over Macklemore’s support of Palestine. And though several musicians spoke up and shared their opinions, Clarkson was not one of them. That issue — or the midterm elections, ICE protests, response to Flock cameras in Clarkson’s home state of Texas, anything! — was not important enough for Clarkson to log on to say something. Receiving less-than-perfect assistance in a small, crowded store? Alert the troops.
All this shows that, no matter how much Clarkson brands herself as everybody’s best friend, her actions don’t always reflect everybody’s best interests. This was clear as day two weeks ago when Clarkson was asked her thoughts on AI during an appearance on the “Las Culturistas” podcast. “Controversial, I don’t care: I love AI,” Clarkson said. “There are very amazing things with AI that I am obsessed with. I am very into it artistically, too.” Clarkson went on to say that her “issue” was with AI musicians potentially competing with human artists. In other words: Clarkson’s concerns aren’t with AI stealing other people’s art, gobbling up natural resources, replacing people’s jobs, or generally making the world worse. She cares when it affects her. What a perfectly succinct way to frame the feud with Art of Play too — and a perfect bit of cosmic irony that Clarkson wasn’t allowed to take a handcrafted bird home to an AI-obsessed household.
I’d like to think that Clarkson’s views on customer interactions, AI and the weight of political and social events don’t reflect the public’s. But judging by the response to Clarkson’s tweet, I don’t think that’s true anymore. In fact, Clarkson’s opinions are all-too indicative of the confluence between idol worship and social outrage. You might say it’s not that serious, and it wasn’t — until Clarkson made it that serious.
We’re a jacked-in species, seamlessly ported to our devices and the ephemeral digital worlds inside them, allowing them to dictate our emotional responses and how we use our precious time. We live in a country where viral videos of unpleasant exchanges are valuable social capital, where those seeking power are looking to those who have it to learn what can be weaponized to seize control. It was always going to end this way when Clarkson named the store and pressed send. How very ironic that the first American Idol has become a picture of the blind devotion synonymous with Western exceptionalism. Perhaps we should’ve listened a bit closer to the refrain in “Since U Been Gone,” where Clarkson tells us, straight up, “I get what I want.”
BRUSSELS — Slovakia is reviving a dormant cooperation forum with Moscow, putting Russia’s gas and oil supplies, nuclear fuel and the treatment of Russian athletes high on the agenda of their first such meeting in five years, according to a Russian government note obtained by POLITICO.
The note, written by Russian Science and Higher Education Minister Valery Falkov, says Slovak Foreign Minister Juraj Blanár agreed during an Aug. 20 video call to hold a meeting of the Russian-Slovak Intergovernmental Commission in Moscow.
Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico said Wednesday the meeting is scheduled for Nov. 25. The Russian note — which is dated Sept. 10 — initially set the date of the meeting as Oct. 26-27.
The IGC, which covers economic, scientific and technical cooperation, has been dormant since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The last meeting was the commission’s 21st session, held in Bratislava on Nov. 12, 2021.
The meeting comes as Moscow finds openings in other international arenas. The U.S. has invited Vladimir Putin to December’s G20 summit in Miami, while the International Olympic Committee has provisionally lifted its suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee and urged sports bodies to ease restrictions on Russian athletes.
Asked about the purported agenda for the IGC, the Slovak foreign ministry directed POLITICO to Blanár’s public statements after the Aug. 20 call. “We pursue a policy in all directions and maintain dialogue with all countries that are interested in pragmatic cooperation with us for the benefit of the Slovak Republic’s national interests,” Blanár said at the time.
The Russian foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
The renewed push for warmer Slovak-Russian relations follows Fico’s May 9 visit to Moscow, where he met Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during Victory Day commemorations. It comes after Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary’s April election, which cost Putin one of his closest partners in Europe and forced him to look elsewhere for EU allies.
Months before losing the election to Péter Magyar, Orbán rebooted the Russian-Hungarian Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation, which had been suspended for several years after the 2022 invasion. Magyar’s government did not confirm to POLITICO whether the commission would go ahead next year.
EU leaders, including Fico, will gather in Brussels on Thursday for a two-day summit focused on issues including energy prices and support for Ukraine, with the country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy expected to join them for a conversation on Friday.
Oil imports and cultural integration
In the August video call, Blanár raised Slovakia’s opposition to the EU’s phaseout of Russian gas imports and asked to discuss supplies at the Moscow meeting, according to the document, which POLITICO could not independently verify but bears the hallmarks of a legitimate Russian ministerial note. Slovak representatives also stressed the importance of continued Russian oil deliveries through the Druzhba pipeline and welcomed regular shipments of nuclear fuel for Slovak power plants, according to the note.
Slovakia remains heavily reliant on Russian oil and gas, and Fico has argued that ending imports would raise costs. When the two leaders met in Moscow on May 9, Putin said Russia would do everything to meet Slovakia’s energy needs.
The agenda for the meeting next month reaches beyond energy, according to the document. The sides plan to explore working groups on culture, tourism, agriculture and environmental protection, and to discuss the status of the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Bratislava.
Falkov also records Blanár’s opposition to what the note calls the “discrimination against Russian athletes” at international competitions, noting the issue is to be discussed at the IGC meeting.
The International Olympic Committee lifted the suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee in July and said its previous recommendations restricting Russian athletes’ participation no longer applied. World Archery lifted restrictions on Russian athletes and officials in August. FIFA President Gianni Infantino has also called for Russia to be allowed back into international football.
The approach echoes Moscow’s recent effort to lock in closer ties with Orbán’s Hungary. Budapest and Moscow in December agreed on a 12-point plan to expand cooperation in areas including energy, trade and culture. The plan was signed by then Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó and Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko after talks in Moscow in December. The Slovak note points to a similar breadth of ambition.
The Kremlin’s outreach to Fico shows how Moscow can use energy ties to pull individual EU countries away from a united stance on Ukraine. Putin made a similar pitch in Washington last weekend: After a call with the Russian leader, President Donald Trump said Russia would supply diesel to U.S. and global markets to bring down fuel prices. The deal would provide revenue to Moscow while weakening efforts to maintain a united front against the Kremlin.
But there are questions over whether Putin can follow through on his pledge to Trump. Ukraine has been stepping up drone strikes on Russian refineries, aiming to disrupt fuel supplies and cut revenue for Moscow’s war effort. Kyiv said this month that strikes had disabled 51 percent of Russia’s oil-refining capacity.
When it comes to box sets, Elvis Costello’s 49th-anniversary edition of his debut album “My Aim Is True” is a dream compilation for completists. The original 12-song LP clocked in at a swift 33 minutes, while the special edition features a whopping 104 tracks, along with Costello’s 72-page essay about the album’s origins. It’s a veritable feast for the ears, and “My Aim Is True” is a worthy subject for all of the attendant attention.
Released by Stiff Records in 1977, Costello’s debut took full advantage of the burgeoning punk movement. To commemorate the anniversary, such as it is, “My Aim Is True” features a fully remastered edition of the album. Stateside listeners will be delighted to learn that the edition concludes with “Watching the Detectives,” the searing track that was appended to the American release. The balance of the LP was recorded at North London’s Pathway studio with Clover, a California-based country rock band, and produced by Nick Lowe, Costello’s fellow Stiff Records colleague.
As presented here, “My Aim Is True” is every bit as explosive and exciting as the original release, an album that featured a clever blend of punk, rockabilly, pop and new wave sounds. With standout tracks like “Welcome to the Working Week,” “Less Than Zero,” and “Waiting for the End of the World,” it could hardly fail. Meanwhile, “Alison,” “(The Angels Wanna Wear) My Red Shoes,” and “Watching the Detectives” were early classics among the Costello canon.
What makes the 49th-anniversary box set particularly special is the inclusion of the extra discs. When “My Aim Is True” originally saw its release, Costello was at a crossroads. Working by day as a data entry clerk, he was contemplating different futures for his artistic self, as evinced by disc two, for example, which is entitled “The Blue Print” and is comprised of 17 acoustic demos for future tracks on such LPs as “Armed Forces,” “Get Happy!!” and “Trust.”
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A third disc, “The Stranger in the House,” finds Costello imagining another potential career for himself as a professional songwriter. Like “The Blue Print,” “The Stranger in the House” is made up of demos and outtakes he created for his fantasy life as a working songwriter — possibly even in faraway Nashville. Meanwhile, a fourth disc, the best of the lot for fans of his longtime backing band, is entitled “Becoming the Attractions” and finds Costello, keyboard player Steve Nieve, drummer Pete Thomas and bass player Bruce Thomas transforming “My Aim Is True” for mass consumption.
A fifth disc, “Covered in Clover,” takes the story of “My Aim Is True” full circle with Costello’s 2007 live performance of the LP with Clover. A benefit performance for victims of Prader-Willi Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, Costello’s reunion with Clover demonstrates one of the singer-songwriter’s greatest strengths: the elasticity of his music and his uncanny ability to remake himself across the decades. Indeed, it is the variety and profundity of his music since 1977 that continues to make him one of his genre’s most intriguing artists.
Watching Shane Gillis tickle himself to the point of being red in the face during his third “Saturday Night Live” hosting gig this past weekend, I’d wager that no one thinks Shane Gillis is funnier than Shane Gillis. But while that’s a pretty safe bet, his confidence in his own comedic stylings can’t get full credit for landing him where he’s at: appearances on a show he was fired from, Bud Light commercials where, as he points out, he “looked like a lesbian,” and a TV show about tires that 59% of critics hate and 91% of people who probably also think it’s funny to hear women called whores love.
No, we can thank everyone who, during the course of his 38 years on this earth, politely laughed at one of Gillis’ “Cornell 7‘s Big Book of Punchlines” zingers. And additional thanks to Lorne Michaels, who knows a ratings/headlines cow when he sees one, even if he doesn’t want to house him in his own barn at the end of the night.
Just as journalists worth their paychecks are taught to shy away from punching up headlines with puns or expletives because it’s lazy work, plenty of successful comedians refrain from desperately grasping for an easy laugh by calling women whores or punching down at their “big fat bit*h sisters,” as Gillis did in his monologue on Saturday night. Leanne Morgan has, to my knowledge, never joked about going to the gym and the men there being sluts for wearing sweatpants that show off their D and B’s, and she probably actually goes to the gym. Oh wait, Gillis did say in his monologue that he feels most comfortable working out in “his friend Joe Rogan‘s private gym.” Right. Riiiiiiiight.
It’s not the controversy alone that’s of value to a show like “SNL”; it’s giving a platform to someone who’s more than willing to stand there, in front of a live audience, and verbalize the ugly things that people are afraid to say out loud . . . for now. But if they see enough people doing it, they may just be bold enough to do the same.
Point being, happy, successful, confident, well-loved comedians are creative and secure enough to reach out and up for their material, not straight into their own asses. There’s a difference between being a “controversial” comic and appealing to the lowest common denominator. Dave Chappelle is equally awful, content-wise, but at least he’s good at being the absolute worst, if that can be a thing for the sake of this argument. Worth noting here that, even though he’s been in the game far longer than Gillis, Chappelle’s hosting number is only one larger than his . . . wonder why that is?
Gillis has made a career out of appealing to people chomping at the bit for their chance to storm the Capitol, and apparently there’s a home for that now on “SNL,” a show that’s lasted 51 years and counting by offering up a little something for everyone and carving out space for anyone — except for women, and people of color, and, more and more, viewers who haven’t been able to wear a red ball cap since 2017. Who’s laughing now? Not anyone I’d want to be next to on the treadmill.
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It’s not the controversy alone that’s of value to a show like “SNL”; it’s giving a platform to someone who’s more than willing to stand there, in front of a live audience, and verbalize the ugly things that people are afraid to say out loud . . . for now. But if they see enough people doing it, they may just be bold enough to do the same. And so it goes, and here we are. Audiences just want to look in a mirror, even if they themselves internally despise what they see in that mirror.
Gillis got enough polite, awkward laughs on his misogynistic sad clown shtick thus far from friends, relatives and dates just waiting for him to shut up so they can order appetizers that now he not only has a whole career to showcase that shtick, but a built-in audience of like-minded fans who also were told by one too many people that they have “a great sense of humor.” We’re all paying the nauseating price now, and anyone who paved the way is complicit.
But “SNL” is a liberal show, you may be thinking. I mean . . . sure? But it’s also a show with a sound bite archive spanning decades which includes such hits as “Jane, you ignorant slut,” from a late-’70s “Weekend Update” sketch starring Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin. I’ll save you the Google. There’s more.
Gillis got enough polite, awkward laughs on his misogynistic sad clown shtick thus far from friends, relatives and dates just waiting for him to shut up so they can order appetizers that now he not only has a whole career to showcase that shtick, but a built-in audience of like-minded fans who also were told by one too many people that they have “a great sense of humor.”
In the wake of Gillis’ most recent hosting gig, it’s been refreshing to see men in the entertainment industry call him out. Michael Che, who started at “SNL” as a writer in 2013 and transitioned to an on-screen role as a “Weekend Update” co-anchor the following year, weighed in on Gillis’ monologue via a series of Instagram stories, writing, “Gotta do more press this week to promote the special . . . wonder what every f—ing questions gonna be about . . . thanks a lot, Shane.” “Schitt’s Creek” star Dan Levy, son of “SCTV” alum Eugene Levy, also took to Instagram with a more direct and thoughtful approach, saying, “Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists.”
But the most effective statement would be from Lorne Michaels, which he could make by honoring his first instinct to place Gillis in the persona non grata pile after clips from his podcast, “Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast,” showed him using racist and homophobic slurs, causing Gillis to be canned from the cast of “SNL” just days after his hiring was announced.
I personally regret every time I put wind in the sails of a deeply unfunny and offensive man by politely laughing, feeling too awkward to course-correct the moment. Most women have these moments. I had one during my first job, when I was 15, and I laughed at the security guard twice my age who joked about his pants feeling tight after I mentioned that I had a girlfriend. I had one when I was driving with an old friend and didn’t give more than a “you gotta be careful with stuff like that” warning when he launched into a rant about how the women assaulted by Harvey Weinstein “shouldn’t have been surprised” he acted the way he did. It’s hard to stand up in moments like these, but look what happens when we don’t. Shane Gillis is a cystic pimple. All the rest of it is the pus.
Lorne Michaels will likely invite Gillis back. The fact that I and countless other writers are typing out similar commentaries all but ensures it. But what he should be asking himself is whether the audience he’s going after with jokes like the ones Gillis made this past weekend is an audience he’d feel comfortable sitting in. That should matter. And more people should say something if it seems like it doesn’t.
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