It’s nine on Sunday morning, and Eileen
is going to mass with Simon. They’ve
known each other for a very long time —
since they were teenagers. They’ve shared
a romantic interlude in Paris, only to part
for years after. They’ve woken up in bed
together this morning.
It’s both a notable and unexciting event,
the sort that Eileen, nearing 30, clings to.
The moment happens in her head more
than in reality, in her heart. She watches
this man she’s loved for some time now
sing his praises to someone he’s never
met, joined by the chorus of believers. She
watches him pray. He kisses her on the
cheek, and they say goodbye. In an email
to her friend Alice, Eileen wonders, “Do
I resent him for liking the concept of God
more than he likes me?”
Alice is far from her friends in Dublin.
She’s chosen to rent a house in the Irish
countryside after a stint in a psychiatric
hospital. She’s not working. She’s not
writing a new novel, which is what she
usually does in these private spaces far
from the world. She has plenty of money,
no car, no interest in resuming her old life in
the city. Soon she meets a man named Felix
and brings him along on a publicity tour
in Rome for her last novel. They sleep in
separate bedrooms for the first few nights.
In an email to Eileen, Alice asks, “But
what would it be like to form a relationship
with no preordained shape of any kind?
Just to pour the water out and let it fall. I
suppose it would take no shape, and run off
in all directions.”
“Beautiful World, Where Are You,” the
third novel by acclaimed Irish author Sally
Rooney, is not “Normal People.” For Alice
and Eileen, years have passed since the
clarity and confusion of youthful romance.
They believe themselves to be passed that
stage of thrilling uncertainty. They’re in
their late 20s; life should be happening by
now, settled in some way, meaningful in
some way. It’s not. Is the meaning still to
come, or has the moment passed?
That touch of adolescent excitement,
which Rooney played to perfection in
“Normal People,” is used sparingly in
“Beautiful World.” Alice and Eileen debate
whether they should be thrilled by their
lives, but they don’t often feel thrilled.
In their email correspondence, which
runs through the spine of the novel, they
discuss looming topics in distant regard to
themselves — the bleak hum of capitalism;
the tepid reality of one’s career; the goes-
both-ways struggle of friendship and love.
These are not new topics for Rooney, but
they’re renewed, reworked for characters
settling into the dire prospect that life lasts
longer than 20 or so years.
But the spirit of Rooney’s unintrusive
narration is as stunning as ever: “Driving
back that night, the crescent moon
lopsided and golden like a lifted saucer of
champagne, the top buttons of her blouse
were undone, she put her hand inside,
touching her breastbone, they were talking
about children, she had never wanted any
before, but lately she wondered…” It doesn’t
matter which character this is — you know
them at once. You know where they are,
what they want, what they think they
want.
Rooney is unmatched in her style, in the
immersive draw of her prose. She doesn’t
use quotation marks. She doesn’t stunt a
lucid clause by binding it to a full sentence.
In “Normal People,” this feeling of presence
sometimes became a grotesque thing, a
stunning intensity. How many conflicts
could have been resolved if Marianne and
Connell chose to speak their minds?
But in “Beautiful World,” we are less
often challenged to criticize than to
concord in silence. These lives are not
so simple, so young, so defined by the
question of whether to speak or not to
speak. Simon and Eileen’s connection is not
new, it’s known: “And their phone calls, the
messages they wrote to one another, their
jealousies, the years of looks, suppressed
smiles, their dictionary of little touches …
This much was in their eyes and passed
between them.”
And here we are with another story
about knowing someone, being known by
someone. We find ourselves once more
treading in that deep water, only now we’re
further from the shore:
“I just want everything to be like it was,
Eileen said. And for us to be young again
and live near each other, and nothing to
be different. Alice was smiling sadly. But if
things are different, can we still be friends?
she asked … Crescent moon hanging low
over the dark water. Tide returning now
with a faint repeating rush over the sand.
Another place, another time.”
Readers will be initially disappointed to
hear that Rooney hasn’t written another
“Normal People.” She’s written something
better: an honest account of the motion of
life, the march forward, the dissolution of
pride and self-assurance.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, September 8, 2021 — 5
Sandra Oh in a frumpy coat with
her wonderfully curly hair puffed up
is Hollywood catnip. I don’t know why
Oh can never have a well-fitted trench,
but she’s legally prohibited. The more
functional and disheveled the coat, the
better.
The industry trend holds true as
Sandra Oh dons a lovely Lands’ End
toggle wool jacket in “The Chair,” a
comedy-drama set at a fictional Ivy
League school.
Debilitatingly funny and touching,
“The
Chair”
essentializes
higher
education:
overworked
teacher’s
assistants, anxious students, professors
in crisis, the politics of tenure. The
show lovingly documents the current
state of academia through the story
of one recently promoted department
chair.
Ji-Yoon
(Sandra
Oh,
“Grey’s
Anatomy”)
enters
as
the
English
department is in decline. Enrollment
is down, and the department’s aging
professors can’t relate to or retain
students. Gifted a desk plate that is
endearingly inscribed with “fucker in
charge of you fucking fucks,” Ji-Yoon is
tasked with whipping the department
into shape.
However,
Ji-Yoon
is
first
and
foremost an educator, and not equipped
to spar with administration politically.
When upper management demands she
get three older professors to resign,
Ji-Yoon scrambles to modernize the
professors’ syllabi. But her efforts lead
to more confusion and unhappy peers.
At home, Ji-Yoon lives alone with
her adopted daughter Juju (Everly
Carganilla, “Yes Day”). Scenes with
Juju anchor the series and provide a
much-needed relief from wood-paneled
offices. But the domestic scenes do more
than contrast the elite, academic setting.
Instead, home scenes substantiate the
show’s ultimate thesis about being
overwhelmed. Through interweaving
the personal and the professional,
“The Chair” understands Ji-Yoon as a
multifaceted individual: a busy mother,
a daughter, an employee and a friend.
Ji-Yoon often has to drop her
daughter off at her elderly Korean
father’s house. The interplay between
Juju, Ji-Yoon and her grandfather
Habi (Ji-Yong Lee, “Righteous Ties”)
is absolutely fantastic and wholesome.
Some of the funniest and most touching
moments
feature
Juju,
hilarious
and
frighteningly
self-composed,
contrasted with Habi and his constant
bewilderment. Habi easily makes the
list of top five television grandparents.
Characters like Juju and Habi justify
The Atlantic heralding “The Chair” as
“Netflix’s best drama in years.”
But in the end, overcommitted and
spread too thin, Ji-Yoon finds herself
constantly unprepared to show up in
a satisfactory way for the people she
cares about.
And that’s the show. “The Chair”
is about professional disappointment:
negotiating wins and losses, taking
responsibility for thoughtlessness. But
unlike other workplace TV shows that
glorify the grind and hard work, “The
Chair” presents a startlingly simple
solution to the impossible Gordian knot
of professional obligation and personal
responsibility: quit.
No one person has all the hours in the
day to be a leader, an attentive mother, a
good friend and a teacher. Throughout
the series, no matter how much harder
Ji-Yoon tries, and despite her brilliance
and her willingness to compromise, the
reality is that Ji-Yoon is unhappy trying
to fulfill her obligations.
The show’s thesis is bolstered by
its lucid understanding of academia’s
contradictions. One might adore the cold
snap of winter and trekking across a quad
immersed in literature, but no gamely
exploration of Chaucer with a passionate
professor can paste over students’ keen
awareness of how wrong and broken the
world is. The show resists the urge to
make ivory tower politics seem absurd
or the result of “snowflake undergrads”
in need of “reality checks.”
How relevant is an English degree
when the California state forests
are
burning?
How
can
college
campuses serve as both a vanguard
of liberalism and theoretical thought
while simultaneously being capitalist
institutions that invest in Big Oil?
The conflicts Ji-Yoon faces are all
outgrowths of the turbulent present
and higher education’s contradictions.
“The
Chair”
doesn’t
reconcile
or
directly respond to these questions, but
instead validates them as queries. In a
true collegiate fashion, the show says:
“Great question, does anyone else have
thoughts?”
“He’s All That” is a meta-exploration
of what it means to be and stay famous.
Though the film is almost an exact
replica of the ’90s classic “She’s All
That,” it fails to romanticize the teen
experience in the same way.
The modern update of the film stars
TikTok personality Addison Rae (“Spy
Cat”) as Padgett Sawyer, this century’s
Zack Siler (Freddie Prinze Jr., “Scooby-
Doo”). She’s a Southern California-
based teen influencer whose social
status is in peril when she loses her cool
on Instagram Live after walking in on
her cheating boyfriend. She loses her
sponsorship, watches her follower count
plummet and decides that the only
logical solution is to bet that she can
make a certified “dork” named Cameron
Kweller (Tanner Buchanan, “Chance”),
the next prom king.
It’s a classic story with a classic
solution and, inevitably, Padgett and
Cameron develop feelings for each
other. The antics that bring Padgett
and her pet project together are sweet
— they scoop poop together, reveal
inane secrets (like how Padgett’s mom
is a nurse or that Cameron likes to take
pictures) and do all the things teens do
when falling in love in an hour and a half
on our computer screens. While “He’s
All That” is not a story for the ages, Rae
is a surprisingly good actress, offering
a level of sincerity and emotion that we
don’t often see in the TikTok videos the
star is famous for.
Predictably, this film is interesting
only to the extent that it can be
compared to the original. For instance,
the fact that a social media landscape
even exists in “He’s All That” drastically
changes the dynamics of the plot. The
stakes are arguably higher for Padgett
than they were for Zack. While Zack’s
reputation as cool guy du jour in the
original is under the watchful eye of
maybe three thousand people, four if
we’re being generous, Padgett’s fall
from glory is seen by between eight
hundred thousand and nine hundred
thousand people and a critical corporate
representative. “The bet,” for Zack, is a
way to get his mind off the blonde who
broke his heart. For Padgett, it’s the
difference between securing her college
tuition or drowning in student debt.
No matter how funny it is that they
made Cameron a horse-boy instead
of a falafel-slinger, Netflix can’t just
let a movie be a movie. The streaming
company’s favorite thing to do is
make sure its characters have a moral
awakening — “He’s All That” is no
different. The issue here, however, is
that there is simply no way to make a
movie starring influencers without
inadvertently
insulting
the
very
thing that got them the part in the
first place. Early in their friendship,
Cameron criticizes Padgett’s need
to document everything in her life,
allowing Netflix to eventually drive
home the tired message that what
we see on social media is not the full
picture.
While this lesson is positive enough,
it’s marred by the fact that Addison
Rae is an influencer herself and on a
much larger scale than her character.
She has no credits to her name beyond
“A-list
TikToker”
and
“Kourtney
Kardashian’s friend.” She boasts 83.5
million followers on TikTok and close to
40 million on Instagram. What’s more,
Rae was at the center of a social media
cheating scandal with YouTuber Bryce
Hall that had people taking sides and
making catchy hashtags in the same
way they did for Padgett after her messy
public breakup.
But though these similarities make
it hard to take Netflix’s high-minded
scheming seriously, Addison Rae is a
different story. As one of her first forays
into a more “traditional” Hollywood
career, “He’s All That” establishes the
TikToker as a viable option for other
films in the future, bringing with her
a stable following for which studio
executives will probably salivate. So,
while I doubt many of us have plans
to watch this film as religiously as the
original, I also won’t be surprised if
Addison Rae becomes a Netflix cast
staple.
I was obsessed with the true and false binary for
a very brief period in the summer of 2019. These
binary statements meant everything when coding
my research on a computer-generated analysis of
Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics (I know that’s a little
too theatre kid, but bear with me). Knowing how to
categorize words in a productive way felt impossible
without using something so strict as a true-and-
false parameter.
Coding is not easy, especially when it comes to
artificial intelligence. In a world of tech secrecy,
using a binary doesn’t cut it. Binaries don’t work
on complex modern problems. There is a spectrum
of solutions needed to give AI the chance to shine.
With restrictive AI practices, there is a world of gray
that is hard to clear out.
However, “Stephanie Dinkins: On Love and Data”
is anything but just gray. It’s neon yellow, deep violet
and a spectrum of what AI is here and now.
At the School of Art & Design Stamps Gallery
downtown, “Stephanie Dinkins: On Love and
Data,” curated by Gallery Director Srimoyee Mitra,
celebrates Dinkins’s manifesto of “Afro-now-ism”:
an active statement for what art and tech should be
against systemic oppression.
Mitra pulls from Dinkins’s most recent works to
create a place where visitors can experience AI that
fosters community and generational storytelling.
One of the most technically complex exhibits
comes in the form of a dialogue. “Conversations
with Bina48: Fragments 7, 6, 5, 2” is the recorded
in-person,
face-to-face
interaction
between
Stephanie Dinkins and advanced social robot Bina48
(short for “Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural
Architecture”). The four clips of conversations last
about a minute each — yet, as you listen, you can
hear the repetitive nature of AI emulating personal
thought. They touch on love, life and Bina herself,
who is perhaps the only robot who is a Black woman.
Bina speaks with complex, long sets of
statements. She circles around a point, shading it
into existence rather than painting it all at once.
If not for the stark image of Dinkins and Bina’s
faces inches from touching, I might not have felt
the intimate nature of their connection. Their
proximity was magnetic, seeing the subtlety of
Dinkins compared to the more simulated nature of
Bina’s delivery.
This piece, like most in the exhibit, is in that
exciting space of ongoing: not quite final, ever-
changing. The nature of AI makes projects hard
to complete — how can they be finished, when AI
is evolving every second? Changing, adapting and
radicalizing new ways to dismantle and connect; if
anything, this constant growth gives the collection
a sense of unity. Everything’s in action. Sensors,
speakers and AI harmonize to create a holistic
image of technology that electrifies.
“Secret Garden” is the culmination of this
action. An immersive installation of projectors
and speakers illustrates three generations of Black
women’s power and their stories. The use of space
and projection breathes life into the space. A
woman is seen ducking to the sides of a corner, and
the projected background is composed of flora that
highlights the space the women hold together. It
perfectly embodies the women’s stories — stories
of resilience and power in the face of generational
inequality.
Binaries are stupid. When it comes time to create
content, whether coded or not, I shouldn’t depend
on something so limited. It’s time to think about
how tech can bring power to communities that have
often been hurt by coding practices. “Stephanie
Dinkins: On Love and Data” shows how and what
AI should be.
Open at the Stamps Gallery until Oct. 23, it is
worth seeing Dinkins in a league of her own.
Sandra Oh is the “fucker in charge” in Netflix’s ‘The Chair’
Addison Rae is the latest victim of the rom-com genre’s
gambling addiction in ‘He’s All That’
Sally Rooney’s ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’ is
required reading
‘Stephanie
Dinkins: On Love
and Data’ shows
AI as it should be
This image is from the official trailer for “The Chair,” produced by Netflix.
ELIZABETH YOON
Managing Arts Editor
EMMA CHANG
Daily Arts Writer
JULIAN WRAY
Daily Arts Writer
MATTHEW EGGERS
Daily Arts Writer
This image is from the official trailer for “He’s All That,” distributed by Netflix.
Design by Madison Grosvenor