6A — Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

By CHRISTIAN KENNEDY

Daily Music Editor

I was lying in bed last night 

trolling through my phone’s 
songs on shuffle. My clock 
doesn’t move because it’s bro-
ken, but track by track, my 
phone reminded me it was 2 
a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m., and, now, 5 
a.m., when the roughly 1/5924 
chance of the unmistakeable 
banjo strums of “FourFiveSec-
onds” came through the speaker, 
filling my apartment.

The word “throwback” came 

to mind, but it stuck there with a 
tinge of bitterness. Throwback. 
“FourFiveSeconds,” 
the 
lead 

single for Rihanna’s forthcom-
ing album Anti was released on 
Jan. 24, 2015. Next Friday’s date 
is Jan. 22, 2016 (more on this 
later…).

Two months after “FourFi-

veSeconds,” we were blessed 
with “Bitch Better Have My 
Money,” and then came lacklus-
ter-at-best “American Oxygen.” 
Spring of last year, it felt like 
the world was Rihanna’s oyster. 
With three singles and rumors 
of a joint tour with Kanye West, 
it felt like it was going to be rain-
ing RihRih all summer long. 
Nonetheless, it has been a (his-
torically un)cold, long, Rihanna-
less winter.

She hasn’t left her fans all the 

way behind: a faint trail of videos 
alluding to a concept album have 
been laced throughout an online 
“AntiDiary.” 
Underwhelming 

in content, the site offers exclu-
sive tidbits for Samsung users 
and other videos, clues, etc. for 
the general public. I have yet to 
meet someone who knew about 
this before I told them. (Read: 
It’s going well. Everyone is on 
the edge of their seats.)

The rooms of the site are 

labeled “R1” through the “R8 
Bedroom,” the latter of which 
just so happens to be the only 
one left locked. That, combined 
with the excessive hashtagging 
of #R8 for the past year as a ref-
erence to Rih’s eighth album, 
leads to the conclusion that once 
the R8 Bedroom is unveiled, as 
will Anti.

Flashback to 5:21 a.m. on Sat-

urday Jan. 16, 2015.

Rihanna won’t be releasing 

her album tonight for its sur-
prise drop. The Sun feels too 
close, ya know? Next week, Jan. 
22, seems like the most viable 
option. Unreality UK added 
some backbone to the notion — 
however, it was also supposed to 
drop on Nov. 6, and then maybe 
again on Dec. 24.

On Jan. 29, Sia, writer of 

Rihanna’s 
“Diamonds,” 
and 

transcendent 
songstress 
of 

would’ve-been Anti track “Reap-
er,” releases her album This Is 
Acting. Rihanna won’t release 
hers the same week — that’d be 
a dick move.

There’s nothing inherently 

unlikely about Feb. 5 other than 
the fact that I want the release 
to be Jan. 22. The next week we 

will see Yeezy’s Swish, so that’s 
out. And if we get to Feb. 19, 
a mere 7 days before Rihanna 
embarks on her 69-show Anti 
World Tour, so help me God.

Rihanna 
wants 
her 
next 

album to be “timeless.” Do the 
singles feel timeless? Is Travi$ 
Scott to blame? Are they dat-
ing? Does this article read like a 
lot of fluff without much payoff? 
You now feel what it’s like to be 
a Rihanna fan on Jan. 16 at 5:35 
a.m.

On Nov. 23, 2014 a Michi-

gan Daily headline read, “Dear 
Rihanna, where are you?”

On Jan. 17, 2016, it reads: 

“What the hell, Rihanna?”

UPDATE: Rihanna shared a 

CBS promo on Jan. 16 for “Three 
Big Events” in which she and the 
NFL flip a coin (one side with the 
Super Bowl 50 logo, the other 
with a Grammy) to see who 
will go first on Feb. 7; she loses 
and says “I’m worth the wait.” 
Super Bowl 50 will be immedi-
ately followed by a live edition of 
“The Late Show” with Stephen 
Colbert. The 58th Grammys air 
Feb. 15. Will Rihanna release her 
album on Colbert? Possibly at the 
end of the show à la Miley Cyrus 
& Her Dead Petz at the VMAs? 
With Rihanna 8.0, one thing 
is for sure: without an album 
release prior to her seems-to-
be appearance at the Grammys 
(considering she isn’t nominated 
for a Grammy this year), it may 
just feel like another door open-
ing with nothing behind it.

When will Rihanna 
actually drop ‘Anti?’

ROC NATION

Hey Mr. DJ, song Pon de Release your album already.

NO FILTER

“

Children don’t know the 
meaning of yesterday, of 
the day before yesterday, or 

even of tomorrow, everything is 
this, now: the street is this, the 
doorway 
is this, the 
stairs are 
this, this is 
Mamma, 
this is 
Papa, this 
is the day, 
this the 
night.” 

Elena 

Fer-
rante, an 
acclaimed Italian author who 
writes under that pseudonym, 
intoned these words in “My 
Brilliant Friend,” the first story 
in her series the “Neapolitan 
Novels.” The series follows two 
girls, Lila and Elena, growing 
up in an impoverished neigh-
borhood of Naples, as they 
struggle for an education, are 
daunted and then intrigued by 
boys and yearn for a life outside 
of their community — really, 
as they come to grips with the 
complex truths of growing up 
as a girl.

I’m only on the second book, 

but what I’ve read has been lumi-
nous, quietly potent as Ferrante 
meanders through complicated 
lives — as a review in the Guard-
ian stated, “Nothing quite like it 
has ever been published.”

As important as I find these 

stories, I would have to disagree 
that they are the first of their kind.

I was a freshman in high 

school when I first learned the 
term “Bildungsroman,” coming 
from the mouth of an English 
teacher I idolized. A German 
word, clunky and unromantic, 
it’s used to describe a story sur-
rounding a character’s coming-
of-age. A story in which the 
greatest plot point is the main 

character changing and growing 
over the course of time. I was 
disappointed that such an unin-
spiring, sticky word described 
what was the most important 
genre to me when I was growing 
up, and to this day.

These were the books that 

had always captivated me: ones 
of slow growth and rich details, 
ones that allowed readers to 
dive into a character’s mind and 
watch as they changed and grew 
up. I had my favorites, the classic 
novels listed in the Bildungsro-
man Wikipedia entry: “Catcher 
in the Rye,” John Knowles’ “A 
Separate Peace,” even “Harry 
Potter.” Stories about boys, and 
about boyhood.

But two Bildungsromans in 

particular had entranced me 
from fifth grade on. I felt I was 
their girl protagonists, as they 
grew into women I dreamed of 
becoming. Both published in the 
early 1900s, neither “Anne of 
Green Gables” nor “A Tree Grows 
in Brooklyn” were lauded at the 
time of their release, but they 
sold well, and they still sell today. 
Stories of smart, sincere young 
girls growing up and navigating 
two distinct worlds. Both struck 
a chord with readers. Almost a 
century later, they struck a chord 
with me. I connected intimately 
with Anne and Francie, despite 
living very different lives from 
them — I saw shades of myself 
and the women I loved in them as 
they grew up.

So despite the Guardian’s 

pronouncement, Ferrante’s 
stories are not the only in their 
class, though the group is small. 
Anne from small town Canada, 
who over the course of 11 novels 
finds a family, a vocation, falls 
in and out of love, has children 
and loses one, is very different 
from “Brooklyn” ’s Francie — a 
girl growing up in impover-
ished Williamsburg, who has 

to face the dichotomy of honor-
ing her heritage and leaving 
the pain and poverty behind. 
Like Ferrante’s Lila and Elena, 
“Brooklyn” relays rarely repre-
sented expressions of girlhood 
as it makes its jumbled way into 
womanhood.

Books (or Bildungsromans) 

like “Gables” and “Brooklyn,” 
like the “Neapolitan Novels,” 
find ways to get inside the minds 
of young girls — laying anew the 
aching insecurities, the unwin-
nable competitions we are placed 
in, the sad importance men and 
boys have in shaping our self-
esteem. However, these stories 
go farther than just the univer-
salities of girlhood, using pains-
taking details to create fully 
developed lives. In the scope of 
great literature they may seem 
small, or irrelevant — relegated 
to the category of young adult lit, 
or worse, “women’s,” whatever 
that means. But their stories 
are inherently unique in how 
they create fully realized female 
characters rather than general-
ized tropes or bit parts. And 
unlike much of great literature, 
they are not focused on the cli-
maxes, on great acts of valor, on 
powerful figures, on sweeping 
virtuosos. They are about the 
daily walk to school, the boy 
met on a beach and then never 
seen again, the fight with a best 
friend, the small, unimpressive 
stories that fill the lives of girls 
and that are rarely given value. 
The little moments that create a 
life that make a person.

I haven’t finished Ferrante’s 

books yet, but I can’t wait to see 
what happens to Lila and Elena. 
That’s really all that great books 
are supposed to do to you.

Gadbois is inspired but skeeved 

by the term “Bildungsroman.” 

To suggest alternatives, email 

gadbnat@umich.edu. 

GENDER AND MEDIA COLUMN

The coming-of-age 
power of Ferrante

NATALIE 

GADBOIS

In campus talk, prof. 
defends narcissism

By MARIA ROBINS-SOMER-

VILLE

Daily Arts Writer

Laura Kipnis, Northwestern 

University Communications Prof., 
told a crowd at the University 
today that she’s unafraid to ven-
ture into dialogue about touchy 
subjects — from pornography to 
what she has coined as “sexual 
paranoia,” which she says has 
washed over college campuses 
across the country.

Kipnis has published six books 

that mostly focus on discourse 
about gender/sexuality politics, 
love, sex, American popular cul-
ture and aesthetics through essays 
and anecdotes on her extensive 
experience and research as a 
video artist and cultural critic. 
Her recent essay “Sexual Para-
noia Strikes Academe” garnered 
uproar among the student body at 
Northwestern, resulting in a Title 
IX claim filed against her.

Kipnis spoke at Rackham Tues-

day to an audience composed 
partially of past and present 
members of the Michigan Soci-
ety of Fellows, a group that grants 
individuals who have demon-
strated excellence in various aca-
demic disciplines with three-year 
fellowships. During the event, 
she read from an excerpt of her 
upcoming book about narcissism.

“There is a rampant level of 

accusation about other people’s 
narcissism, and I guess it irks me 
in a certain way,” Kipnis said in 
an interview with The Michigan 
Daily. “I often find myself writing 
about things that irk me.” 

She added that narcissism had 

persistently come up in her travels 
and conversations, prompting her 
to write about it.

“At a certain point I just started 

thinking that everywhere I went 
and lots of conversations I was 
having and cultural criticism I was 

reading had to do with accusations 
about other people’s narcissism,” 
Kipnis said. “It’s always someone 
else who is a narcissist, not you.”

In the lecture, Kipnis excavated 

the rich history of narcissism in a 
way that touched on the evolution 
of the concept throughout history. 
She asked questions that would 
provoke the audience to revisit 
their attitudes toward the phrase 
and any aversion to identifying 
with it. She spoke about classifica-
tion of a narcissist in terms of self-
love; some say narcissists have an 
excess of self-esteem, where oth-
ers have argued that the narcis-
sist emerges from having too little 
self-esteem.

“There’s this really interesting 

history of who first gets diagnosed 
as a narcissist, who the term first 
gets invented about, which ends 
up interestingly being indepen-
dent women,” said Kipnis.

She explored the work of 

cultural historian Christopher 
Lasch, who wrote extensively 
on the ways in which American 
culture has the tendency to nor-
malize narcissistic behaviors. He 
saw himself as exempt from his 
own critique of narcissism, which 
was characterized by the blame 
of individuals for collective faults 
and bottomless repressed rage.

Kipnis also lectured on Sig-

mund 
Freud, 
unpacking 
his 

idea of primary narcissism — 
the innate self-involvement of 
infants that turns into secondary 
narcissism, an infatuation with 
the ego—now coined a narcis-
sistic personality. Kipnis posed 
the question of whether this 
increased self-love has devalued 
the ability to love others.

She additionally dove into dis-

cussion of the Narcissism Per-
sonality Inventory (NPI) — a test 
meant to measure quantity of 
narcissism in one’s personality. 
She suggested that the test was 
controversial as in what it truly 

measures, unclear, hard to agree 
upon and overused. Kipnis said the 
varying types of narcissism clas-
sifications she encountered in her 
research, from the “aggressive” to 
the “paranoid” to the “craving”, to 
the “phallic” to the “exhibitionist,” 
supported her claim that narcis-
sism in our world takes a myriad of 
forms and functions that encom-
pass more of our cultural identity 
than we’d like to admit.

Kipnis asked her audience to 

consider whether rampant narcis-
sism was a problem of competition 
for limited resources or simply the 
way we construct our character, 
summing up her points when she 
asked, “What are we entitled to?”

“Everyone’s ex is a consum-

mate narcissist,” she joked when 
exploring narcissism in the con-
text of romantic relationships.

In the Q&A portion Kipnis was 

questioned on the notion of “enti-
tlement” which she referred to as 
“demand on steroids” and a term 
that the right side of the political 
spectrum liked to throw around 
to describe those who expected 
different forms of government aid.

Kipnis’s tricky past of express-

ing discontent with the sexual 
politics 
on 
college 
campuses 

resurfaced when she responded 
to a question that asked whether 
entitlement came as an expecta-
tion to be protected from harm.

“I have to think more about 

that,” she said. 

Kipnis 
raised 
interest-

ing points and with thorough 
research, broadened the scope of 
the ways in which our culture has 
given in to self-interest.

“Rather than just point fingers 

at every one else, just take a look in 
the mirror,” she said on Tuesday.

Her statement, albeit jaded, 

held some truth yet left me hoping 
for a further investigation of the 
empathy, justice and compassion 
that any definition of narcissism 
fails to encompass. 

COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK

Stunning visuals and 
tense plot in ‘Theeb’

By JOE WAGNER

For The Daily

Theeb. Wolf. “(In Bedouin cul-

ture,) if someone calls you a wolf, 
you have earned their respect as 
a man of daring 
and cunning, a 
person who can 
achieve impos-
sible feats,” Naji 
Abu 
Nowar, 

director of the 
Jordanian film 
“Theeb,” wrote 
in his statement 
for Minnesota St. Paul Film Soci-
ety. “The wolf is an ambiguous 
creature both revered and feared, 
it is both a pack animal, loyal to 
its tribe, and a strong individual 
capable of existing by itself.”

Nowar’s directorial debut is a 

compelling, sometimes confusing 
reinterpretation of the western 
genre, interlaced with a Bildung-
sroman narrative. The cast is 
composed entirely of nonprofes-
sional actors with the exception 
of Jack Fox (“Blood Moon”). The 
film, set in 1916, takes place in the 
beautiful Arabian landscape of 
the Wadi Rum desert, which at 
times seems to evoke the classic 
Western location of Monument 
Valley.

Theeb (Jacir Eid Al-Hwietat), 

the protagonist of the film, is 
given his name at birth, which 

means that greatness is expected 
of him. At its core, “Theeb” is a 
story of boy who must live up to 
these high expectations. A boy 
who must become a man.

Theeb and his brother Hus-

sein (Hussein Salameh Al-Swei-
lhiyeen) have recently lost their 
father, the leader of their tribe. 
When Edward (Jack Fox), an 
Englishman, and Marji (Marji 
Audeh), an Arab, visit Theeb 
and 
Hussein’s 
encampment 

seeking refuge and guidance 
through the desert, the brothers 
accept the request out of honor 
for their deceased father. Hus-
sein, an expert navigator of the 
area, is asked to guide them to a 
well along a pilgrims’ trail near 
the Ottoman railroad. The trail 
is rumored to have more raiders 
than pilgrims.

Despite the complaints of 

Edward and Marji, Theeb joins 
the group, eager for adventure 

and wanting to spend time with 
his brother. The rumor of dan-
ger comes to fruition when they 
arrive at the well, where they 
are ambushed. During an intense 
Western-style shoot-out, lives 
are lost and Theeb must work 
together with one of the murder-
ous raiders to survive the treach-
erous Wadi Rum desert.

“Theeb,” with its stunning 

landscape shots and anxiety-pro-
voking story, is an adventure film 
that is, at the least, entertaining. 
The skeleton survival tale of the 
plot is easily accessible with its 
primal urgency. However, the 
details, which make films real-
ly come alive, lack clarity. For 
example, why does the English-
man travel alone? Why is he visit-
ing different wells? Perhaps, with 
greater knowledge of the Middle 
Eastern theatre of World War I 
or a better understanding of Bed-
ouin culture, the film’s subtleties 
would be more comprehensible. 
Yet for the lay-viewer, these ques-
tions are left unanswered.

Still, the story of a boy becom-

ing a man is timeless and relat-
able. In a year riddled with 
survival films (like “The Rev-
enant,” “The Martian” and “Mad 
Max: Fury Road”), “Theeb” man-
ages to hold its own by playing 
with genre and telling a story 
from a people whose views are 
rarely depicted on the screen.

FILM REVIEW

B+

Theeb

State Theatre

MAD Solutions

An adventure 
film that is, 
at the least, 
entertaining.

