A Portrait of an Obsolete Man

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Caleb Madison, The Atlantic’s very own crossword-puzzles editor and the author of the Good Word newsletter. He has written about why AI doesn’t get slang, the true meaning of meta, and the two most dismissive words on the internet.

Caleb recently ventured through the filmography of the director John Ford; his journey culminated in a screening of The Searchers, starring John Wayne. His other cultural interests include probing the “neoliberal child-product” of Spy Kids—a movie he truly enjoys, for the record—and reading Emily Wilson’s “colloquial yet classic” translation of The Odyssey.

But first, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

• Trump, defeated
• The real “deep state”
• The same old sex talk isn’t enough.

The Culture Survey: Caleb Madison

The culture product my friends are talking about most right now: A couple of months ago, a few friends (well, one friend and one fiancée) and I embarked on FordFest, an informal retrospective of the Golden Age of Hollywood director John Ford. Ford made more than 140 movies in a career that spanned from the Silent Era to Technicolor. He is best known for his elegant and poetic Westerns, starting with Stagecoach in 1939. Whereas most movies in the genre simplify the frontier into cartoonish propaganda, Ford’s depiction of the West is bittersweet and conflicted. I admit, before I saw any of his work with Ford, I thought John Wayne was supposed to be this macho hero. But Ford dissembles Wayne’s bravado to explore the sadness of the obsolete man––an aging former cowboy with no West left to win.

FordFest culminated at the Egyptian Theatre (where Ford’s first major movie, The Iron Horse, had its Los Angeles premiere in 1925) for a screening of the brand-new 70-mm print of The Searchers, a landmark achievement in narrative storytelling that inspired everything from Lawrence of Arabia to Taxi Driver. In it, Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a weird old Confederate soldier who returns to his brother’s house three years after losing the Civil War, which he is very defensive about. “Well, I never surrendered,” Ethan exclaims like a Tim Robinson character.

When Comanches raid the house and abduct Ethan’s “niece,” he makes rescuing her his whole thing. But the longer he spends looking for her, the more his rescue mission seems motivated by a depressive drive toward death-by-Comanche. By the final, heartbreaking shot, you can only pity the man. A cowboy is just an outcast with a rebrand.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: Not exactly a novel, but I’m loving Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. The way she renders Homer feels colloquial yet classic, and the world of ancient Greece has the soothing aesthetic qualities of a Nancy Meyers movie. Whenever Odysseus washes up on some island, the local royalty is always giving him a hot bath and anointing him in oils before laying down some comfy textiles on a marble floor by the fire so he can tell them his tale over a big chalice of wine and some roast meats. Yes, please.

Carlo Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems, about how scientific concepts of reality have evolved, blew my mind in a way that I am still actively trying to recover from. For a while there, I caught myself staring for hours at particles of dust, stretches of road, or leaves in the wind. It was not okay.

A musical artist who means a lot to me: This is a two-birds-one-stone situation. At the Met Gala, Rosalía—one of my favorite artists—shared an effervescent story about the salsa singer Héctor Lavoe, thus turning me onto this album, which I can’t stop listening to right now.

I also have a deep and undying love for the North London alt-rapper Jimothy Lacoste.

An online creator that I’m a fan of: Kevin Kennedy is a lawyer in Tennessee who somehow made it onto my TikTok feed and never left. He’s a theatrical guy with an outlandish sense of style and a flair for jewelry. I love how he gives us a peek into his practice, but I’m not sure I’d turn to him for representation. I guess it would depend on my crime.

Something I recently rewatched: Spy Kids, directed by Robert Rodriguez, is a true masterpiece––by far the best live-action children’s movie of all time. No guns or blood or dumb, winky jokes … Spy Kids is told from the perspective of a kid in a way that dignifies rather than demeans.

It’s also the origin story of the 21st-century neoliberal child-product. Gregorio and Ingrid Cortez, formerly active agents for the state, now live safely and comfortably as “consultants” with their two young Millennial children. But something is wrong. Their days of violence may be over, but the battle has relocated to the culture industry. Fegan Floop, the Gaudíesque children’s-show host their children love, also works for a private military contractor, abducting former spies whom he transforms into sculptural creatures known as Fooglies, then forcing them into supporting roles on his show. Floop operates from an island that’s both a prison and a production studio, disguising political warfare as children’s popular entertainment in a sick psyop conspiracy that would make Thomas Pynchon proud.

The ultimate product of this merger of media mind control? An army of robot children with computers for brains. A better metaphor for the formation of Millennial consciousness I have never seen.

All intellectual BS aside, the film is so beautifully faithful to the mind of a child. Apparently, Rodriguez adapted a lot of the details of the world from his childhood doodles, and it shows. Certain ideas and images from the film are lodged into my mind forever: the henchmen creatures composed of five huge thumbs, the car that seamlessly turns into a submarine when they drive off a cliff, the microwavable McDonald’s meal … It feels like playing a great game of imagination with your sibling. The story elegantly taps into the existential mystery of coming of age and realizing that your parents live in another world—one of unknowable intrigue, but one that you must prepare to enter soon.

The Week Ahead

1. The Watchers, a horror film directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan and starring Dakota Fanning as a woman who is trapped in a forest and stalked by unknown creatures (in theaters Friday)
2. Queenie, a television series based on the best-selling novel about a Jamaican British woman in London who goes through a quarter-life crisis after a messy breakup (premieres Friday on Hulu)
3. Fire Exit, a novel by Morgan Talty about a man who wrestles with whether or not to tell his neighbor that he’s actually her father (out Tuesday)

Essay

‘She Is the Icon of All That Is Joyful in the World’

By J. Clara Chan

Earlier this year, I was scrolling through TikTok when the sound of a piano, accompanied by a baby bird chirping, stopped my thumb mid-air. In the video, a little green puppet girl with big eyes and two tufts of hair holds a yellow felt bird in a blanket. “Hey, birdie. It’s okay, birdie,” she coos. “I’m gonna take care of you, birdie.” My mind went back to the difficult year I’d just had: the loss of my father to cancer, two consecutive layoffs from jobs I loved. But this video made me feel oddly comforted, as if I were both the girl and the bird. We were going to be okay.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

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• The slasher movie reaches disturbing new heights.
• You’ll become a fan of these fierce, strange girls.
• The woman who made America take cookbooks seriously
• What can’t Glen Powell do?

Catch Up on The Atlantic

• A radical reform to de-radicalize politics
• Trump’s smoking gun is a dream that will never die.
• RFK Jr.’s philosophy of contradictions

Photo Album

This week, crowds gathered at Cooper’s Hill, near Gloucester, England, to cheer as racers took part in the annual Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake. Check out these images of a chaotic scramble down a very steep and uneven grassy hill.

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