What Hath Musk Wrought: Twitter Dread and Why It's So Hard to Build Better Social Media
PLUS: Reviews of Pinocchio, The Banshees of Inisherin, & Emily the Criminal AND Why "Last Christmas" is the "Die Hard" of Christmas Songs
Last week felt like a turning point in Elon Musk’s brief reign at Twitter. On Wednesday, Twitter suspended more than twenty-five accounts that used publicly-available information to actively track the private jets of government agencies, billionaires, and other high profile individuals, including Musk. This past November, Musk had stated he would allow the account tracking his jet to remain on Twitter due to his commitment to free speech even though he felt it posed a threat to his safety, but following what he claimed was an incident this week involving his son and a stalker, he changed his mind. OK, whatever.
But on Thursday, Twitter suspended the accounts of eight journalists, including Keith Olbermann and reporters for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN, who had written critically about Musk in the past. Despite being suspended for “violat[ing] the Twitter rules,” it wasn’t clear what specific rules they had broken. (The best guess is they ran afoul of Musk by referencing either the suspended tracking sites or the users that had been suspended for tracking planes.) At that point, things really began to snowball. The social media site Mastodon announced on its Twitter page that the user who operated the account following Musk’s jet had joined their network. Twitter then suspended Mastodon’s Twitter account. Journalists then began reporting on Mastodon’s suspension. Soon enough, those journalists found their accounts suspended. Now many news organizations and journalists are reconsidering their use of a social media site purportedly run by a “free speech absolutist,” while many ordinary users are now certain their new Twitter overlord is a less than benevolent man-child.
Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter has been tumultuous. Musk—one of Twitter’s most prolific and often sophomoric users—rolled back many of the regulations the company had put in place to prevent the spread of misinformation (for example, it no longer flags posts containing misleading information about COVID) and hate speech (although he did suspend Kanye West after the rapper posted an anti-Semitic image to his account.) The number of daily slurs directed at Blacks, Jews, and LGBTQ have in some cases more than doubled since Musk took over. Donald Trump, who (among other things) used Twitter to fan the flames of insurrection, got his account back, although the ex-president remains devoted to his own TruthSocial network. QAnon accounts are thriving, neo-Nazis have started posting again, and ISIS has re-established its presence on Twitter. Last week, Musk played to both the anti-vaxxer and QAnon crowd by using his account to call for the prosecution of Dr. Anthony Fauci and insinuate that the former head of Twitter’s Trust and Safety division is a pedophile. (Speaking of personal safety, CNN reported that latter individual had to leave his home following a spate of death threats sparked by Musk’s posts.)
Over the past few weeks, advertisers have fled Twitter, with half of its top one hundred advertisers no longer using the service to market their products. Several high-profile users have also quit the site. To save money, Musk laid-off large portions of Twitter’s workforce, gutting not only teams that repair code to keep the site functional, but divisions tasked with tracking down illegal activity like child abuse and countering the efforts of authoritarian governments to spam Twitter when anti-government topics start trending. To make money, Twitter is now charging users to verify their online identities, a move some argue will either push users from the site or lead to the proliferation of fake accounts.
Some have watched Musk and Twitter this week and delighted in what they see as the impending collapse of a social menace. Others wonder if Musk is some sort of mad scientist who, in the process of wrecking Twitter, will unleash a far worse version of it on society. Regardless, as Musk continues to tinker with Twitter to transform it into his ideal of a social media playground, many have been asking themselves what a good social media platform would look like.
I wish I knew the answer to that question. Not only are there features of social media I both appreciate and despise, what I appreciate and what I despise about social media often go hand-in-hand with one another. Even when I grow so frustrated with social media that I find myself inclined to believe we would be better off if it just vanished altogether, I quickly remind myself of all the joy and benefits we derive from it, from our ability to stay in touch with friends to its pithy humor to the unique avenues it has opened for political discourse. (For instance, there is currently a woman in Idaho documenting herself on TikTok as she undergoes a miscarriage that Idaho is forcing her to endure since state law prohibits her from obtaining an abortion. It’s a harrowing to watch, as the woman’s life is genuinely in danger, but it’s the sort of personal experience of politics we would be unlikely to encounter without social media.) I’m also convinced that even if we woke up tomorrow and every trace of Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok had been deleted from our existence, a new social medium would take their place within hours, and a great portion of the world’s population would end up using it within days. That’s the inevitability of social media.
So no, beyond “keeping the good and getting ride of the bad,” I don’t know what a good social media platform would look like or what it would take to create one. Instead, what I can offer is an exploration of the dilemmas that make it so difficult to reform social media. These dilemmas aren’t easily resolved, but simply recognizing them can hopefully help us think more clearly (and possibly more creatively) about the problem. As I see it, there are three main issues here:
To maximize their utility, social media networks need to maximize their user base, but the more users a platform gains, the more difficult it becomes to manage.
In the spirit of the First Amendment, social media networks want to place few restrictions on what sort of speech can be shared on their platforms, but many users abuse that freedom in ways that can seriously harm others or the public at large.
Social media networks are private entities that shouldn’t be beholden to government regulations concerning what they can or cannot publish on their platforms, but the enormous effect such networks have on the wider public invites greater regulation of their activities.
Let’s start with point one. Users desire social media platforms with extensive reach that allow them to network with as many people as possible. Few would want to join a social media network that did not include the full population of people who would potentially network with them. That’s led social media companies to extend their reach around the globe and erect few barriers to entry. But the resulting size of such networks makes it extremely difficult for social media companies to effectively monitor (and, if necessary, police) the activity occurring on their platforms.
Now, one can easily imagine a social network like Pinterest focused on a particular demographic that caters to that particular demographic’s interests. LinkedIn basically works that way, but the mores of the professional culture it caters to leads to a high degree of self-regulation. I’m thinking something more along the lines of a social network devoted to, say, the residents of Kansas City, or fans of the NFL, or Kansas City Chiefs fans, or Patrick Mahomes fans, or the Mahomes family. Some people may actually prefer to narrowcast their social media this way, but others would find it a pain to maintain and jump between numerous, highly specific social media platforms. They want it all fed into one personalized stream, and they want to be able to reach out into as many tributaries that could potentially feed that stream as possible. Social media platforms that dam-up some of those tributaries become of limited utility to many people in that regard.
Furthermore, regulating social media by topic would require some degree of moderation to keep posts on topic. Yet what one considers “on topic” becomes a thorny question: For instance, should those who post on Kansas City Chiefs forums be allowed to discuss the Denver Broncos, the Kansas City Royals, the University of Missouri’s football team, good places to eat in Kansas City, or Kansas City politics in such forums? Social media companies have generally resolved this problem by allowing users to network with the widest possible pool of users and curate their feeds as they see fit.
The resulting problem is that the largest, most used social media platforms claim hundreds of millions of users, making it extremely difficult for those companies to patrol behavior on those platforms. The problem isn’t merely topic moderation, but rather instances of online harassment, bullying, or the dissemination of violent or sexually-inappropriate speech. Even though we do expect these companies to regulate such speech, it’s logistically impossible to sift through billions of posts, comments, and videos on a daily basis. I suppose there are algorithms for that, but the problem requires more than broad brush enforcement.
At the same time, social media companies have proven very resistant to calls to regulate speech on their platforms. Part of this is self-interest: They want as many people using their products as possible and don’t want to discourage people from posting whatever they are moved to post online, and a robust in-house regulatory operation would be expensive to maintain. But as a matter of ethics, as the scope of these companies expanded, those who oversaw them began to regard these networks as the newest iteration of the public sphere and, in the spirit of the First Amendment, came to believe that speech on their platforms should be as unrestricted as possible. While they could be convinced (albeit reluctantly) to take it upon themselves to patrol for speech that constituted lawbreaking, they have proven far more reluctant to regulate constitutionally-protected speech, such as politically unpopular speech, “dangerous” speech, misinformation, and hate speech.
On the one hand, that’s an admirable stance. The marketplace of ideas ought to be as wide-open as possible so that bad ideas can be scrutinized and good ideas aren’t censored. The theory (although not guaranteed in practice) is that bad ideas will be defeated by better ideas so long as those better ideas can be aired. There’s also the notion that people shouldn’t be punished simply for speaking their minds, voicing an unpopular idea, or saying something provocative. For a civil libertarian, there is nothing more patriotic than standing up for someone’s right to say something you personally disagree with, be they a communist or a capitalist, a Klan member or a civil rights demonstrator, a politically incorrect stand-up comic or a transgressive rock star. By defending their right to speak, you defend everyone’s right to speak.
What we’ve come to learn, however, is that social media amplifies and bolsters speech that can have harmful effects on society. In recent months, we’ve seen anti-Semitism proliferate on social media, which has had the unfortunate effects of making its presence in social discourse appear normal and expanding anti-Semitic networks throughout the country. Social media also played a critical role in spreading misinformation about COVID vaccines (likely resulting in the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Americans) and the legitimacy of the 2020 election (which has threatened to undermine this nation’s democratic foundations.) Complicating this is that much of this speech has gotten tangled up in our politics, so that attempts at regulating this speech can easily be characterized as efforts to squelch political debate. If there is anything the First Amendment’s free speech provision is designed to protect, it’s political speech.
It’s fair to wonder if a less-polarized country would have been as susceptible to the spread of misinformation through social networks. But it’s also fair to wonder if our politics isn’t a byproduct of our social media age, one that builds a following around the most outrageous and caustic of voices, connects people to a bunch of likeminded followers inside an echo chamber, and then makes it effortless for millions of people to follow their thoughts down the darkest of rabbit holes. It’s not easy to counter that sort of speech with more and better speech.
That’s why more and more people are calling on social media companies to regulate themselves. As publishers, they have the power to decide what gets published on their forums, and as private entities, they are not required to treat their forums as a public space and allow their users to post anything and everything they want. If they wanted to, they could ban anti-Semitic speech, COVID misinformation, or something as minor as cat memes. But again, social media companies are guided by maximalist free speech principles, making them reluctant to regulate their platforms in this way, and would need to hire a large number of people to enforce these rules consistently on their platforms.
Absent that, people are calling for the government to step in and regulate social media sites. This would not be unprecedented, as the government currently regulates the television and radio media. They do this, however, on the premise that the number of broadcast channels are limited and therefore must be regulated to ensure that broadcasters do not broadcast over one another and so that the public interest is served by the speech that does air on these limited channels. It would be hard to justify government regulation of the Internet in this way. The government might intervene regardless if it concludes the social effects generated by the scope and reach of these platforms is too great to ignore and that private corporations can’t be trusted to effectively police themselves. Yet many Americans would be troubled by the government telling a private social media company what they can or can’t let their patrons post on their platforms while compelling them to spend money to enforce that project.
It seems to me those are the major issues people will need to wrestle with as they consider the future of social media in this country. That will entail making choices about the size of these platforms, what sort of speech we’re willing to tolerate on these sites, and what role the government should play in regulating them. Perhaps the market or innovative programmers will sort this out, or maybe it will be left to creative policymakers to devise reforms. As for Elon Musk…well, rather than leading us into a new and improved era of social media, he may only end up highlighting its deficiencies.
UPDATE: After taking a poll of Twitter users (maybe not the best way to set company policy) Musk apparently reinstated the accounts of the suspended journalists on Saturday.
Signals and Noise
Let’s lead with this: Don Trump raised about $75 million to help Republicans get elected in 2022. He only spent $15 million of that on that particular effort. The rest he transferred to his SuperPAC. Makes you think the guy is kind of running a scam, right?
Trump announced on Wednesday he had a big announcement set for Thursday. And that announcement was OMG WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?
I don’t get it, are we all living inside an SNL skit? Those things are only supposed to last about five minutes, right? When does this one we’re in end? What a clown. Merry Christmas, America.
On a more serious note: The 1/6 House Committee is likely to recommend that the DOJ pursue three charges against Trump for his actions related to the Capitol Riot: Insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding, and conspiracy to defraud the United States government.
Conservatives in both the Senate and House look like they intend to be thorns in the sides of Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy.
So this is what it takes for Trump to tell a group of malcontents on Capitol Hill to stand down: The ex-president is encouraging conservative hold-outs to get behind Kevin McCarthy’s bid for Speaker to avoid a “doomsday scenario.”
The leaders of the congressional appropriations committees have announced a framework for a government funding bill. It will likely include a 10% defense funding increase.
An immigration deal that would have protected 2 million “dreamers” and improved our asylum system won’t be passed in the lame duck.
A bipartisan bill has been unveiled that would ban the Chinese social media app TikTok, which many are worried is being used by the Chinese government to gather personal information on Americans.
Consider this: Republicans won the national House vote by 2.8%, but won the five closest races that determined control of the House (CO-3, CA-13, MI-10, NY-17, IA-03) by only 6,670 votes. Democrats won these “majority-maker” districts by 34,700+ votes in 2020 and 105,000+ in 2018. MORE: Aaron Blake of the Washington Post writes about how national elections are being decided by increasingly thin margins rather than decisive victories or landslides.
Democrats improved their performance among rural voters in some key races during the 2022 midterms.
Latino voters in the Southwest continued to support Democratic candidates during the 2022 elections.
Republicans made gains in the suburbs in 2022 but not enough to offset the overall gains Democrats made between 2016 and 2020.
Republican-authored voter suppression laws did not dampen turnout among Democrats in many key races last November. Instead, there appeared to be a boomerang effect, as the laws may have had the effect of motivating people to go to the polls.
Democrats don’t seem too keen to letting South Carolina go first during the 2024 primaries, as Joe Biden has recommended.
This just in: Don Trump’s NFT collection of trading cards sold out in about 12 hours, netting him a cool $4.45 million. OK, but how many of those cards did Trump buy himself to drive up the price on the secondary market (he gets a cut of every resale) and create demand for a second set?
The Washington Post learned Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has requested other state agencies send his office the names of individuals who have changed their gender identity over the past two years.
The antiabortion movement is now turning their attention to prosecuting individuals for distributing abortion pills in states where abortion is illegal. (In such states, state law is aimed at penalizing those who provide abortion services rather than the women obtaining abortions.)
The Biden administration anticipates 14,000 daily migrant border crossings will occur in the near future.
Inflation eased significantly last month compared to one year ago, although the 7.1% is still high compared to pre-pandemic years. The Fed raised interest rates by 0.5%, a quarter point less than recent rate hikes. That brings the benchmark interest rate to 4.25-4.5%, the highest it’s been since 2007.
Now Joe Biden has “major announcements” too:
Hmmm…Don Trump’s approval rating in a recent Quinnipiac poll has him way underwater at 31-59, the lowest he’s been since July 2015. Among Republican voters, though, he’s at 70-20.
According to recently disclosed text messages, Republican Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina urged former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to convince Don Trump to declare “marshall law” days before Biden was to become president.
Trump has taken to blaming social media companies, Democratic operatives, and the FBI for “rigging” the 2020 election by suppressing documents that would have damaged Biden. Gone are accusations that elections officials fixed ballot counts.
Which of the following statements did Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) utter during an address at the New York Young Republican Club last Saturday?
“I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized [1/6], we would have won. Not to mention, we would’ve been armed.”
“[The Democrats care about a country called Ukraine whose borders are far away and most of you couldn’t find it on a map.”
“[Y]ou can pick up a butt plug or a dildo at Target nowadays.”
All of the above. (HINT: It’s this one.)
By Jonathan Chait for New York magazine: “Republicans Don’t Have a ‘Candidate Quality Problem,’ They Have a Crazy-People Problem” (“Republicans are certainly wise to try harder next time to nominate candidates who live in the state they are running to represent, are not violent criminals, have avoided publicly calling for the overthrow of the government, and so on. That said, this advice is so blindingly obvious that one wonders why it became a question at all and why it took a cycle of election defeats for this lesson to set in. The answer is that the candidate-quality problem is merely the byproduct of a much more deeply rooted crisis of delusion that has spread up and down the ranks of the party.”)
Republican Florida Governor, full-time troll, and some would say frontrunner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination Ron DeSantis has created a new committee to counter federal health recommendations. He also wants a grand jury to investigate “crimes and wrongdoings” by the federal government for pushing the mRNA vaccines without disclosing problematic side effects. (For context, as Lori Rozsa of the Washington Post writes, “Large-scale observational studies on hundreds of millions of vaccine recipients have shown that while heart inflammation can be a rare side effect of the messenger RNA vaccines that disproportionately affect young men, with a small number of deaths in that age group, the protective effects of the vaccines at preventing severe covid outweigh those risks, experts at the American College of Cardiology concluded.”)
Meanwhile, a new study estimates the COVID vaccines kept 18.5 million Americans out of the hospital and saved the lives of 3.2 million Americans. The researchers point out those are conservative estimates. Additionally, the vaccines likely saved the United States $1.5 trillion in medical costs. COVID continues to claim just under 3,000 lives per day in the United States.
The Biden administration has restarted the program that allows people to order free COVID tests through the mail.
OK, here’s the deal: I’ll trade someone a Trump trading card—preferably the astronaut one—for one of these:
That’s right, an excellent-to-near-mint condition 1990 Lenny Dykstra Donruss Diamond King baseball card. It’s a beaut! Lenny “Nails” Dykstra won the World Series with the Mets in 1986, hit 81 career home runs while batting .285 lifetime, filed for bankruptcy in 2009, and was charged with fraud, grand theft auto, drug possession, and indecent exposure in 2011. He spent 11 seasons in the big leagues and six-and-a-half years in federal prison. Seems like a fair swap to me.
Enthusiasm for Brexit has turned into Bregret.
The United States will send Patriot missiles to Ukraine. Russia has warned of “consequences” if the U.S. follows through on this plan. ALSO: Ukraine was able to defend Kyiv Thursday night/Friday morning from a massive aerial bombardment using defense systems that were able to knock down 60 of 76 Russian missiles. Still, as Ukraine descends into winter, large portions of Ukraine are without heat and electricity as Russia continues to target the nation’s energy infrastructure.
The New York Times has an in-depth investigation of Russia’s failures in Ukraine based on interviews, official Russian documents, intercepts, and battle plans.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping may look to be putting some distance between himself and Vladimir Putin, but the Wall Street Journal reports he’s actually doubling-down on Chinese-Russian relations.
The mayor of Istanbul, an opponent of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and the leader of the nation’s opposition party, was jailed this week for criticizing the president, leading thousands of Turkish protesters to take to the streets.
Sounds like we can do fusion now. Unlike nuclear fission, which creates a nuclear reaction by splitting an atom, fusion bonds atoms together. Fission powers nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs; fusion powers the sun. Which reminds me…
Anyway, it was announced last week that scientists in California successfully created a fusion reaction that produces more energy than it takes in. We’re still years-to-decades away from a practical energy source based on fusion, but once we get there, it could revolutionize energy production on the planet and eliminate the need for fossil fuels. When we look back on 2022, this will probably go down as the most momentous event of the year.
Oh, what the heck, I’ll spare you the search. Merry Christmas. Cubs win!
Vincent’s Picks: Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio, The Banshees of Inisherin, and Emily the Criminal
Director Guillermo del Toro is known for populating his movies with monsters. It makes sense, then, that his cinematic version of Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann in a new stop-motion animated feature now streaming on Netflix) is something of a monster himself, albeit a cute one. Cobbled together by the anguished puppeteer Geppetto (David Bradley) this twiggy version of the puppet without strings is a Frankensteinian creature who appears more freakish than adorable to the local villagers. Pinocchio is also monstrous the way four-year-old kids can be monstrous: Mischievous, impulsive, naïve, manipulable, innocent. He encounters the world as he is, no filters or strings attached; the world reacts with shock.
It doesn’t take long for people to conclude they need to get strings on this kid. A travelling puppeteer named Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz) seeks to exploit the wooden boy by adding him to his show. After witnessing Pinocchio magically come back to life, the local Podesta (Ron Perlman) yearns to turn him into a soldier. The film is set in fascist Italy—Mussolini makes a cameo—so the theme of control is featured prominently throughout.
What Pinocchio learns is that the sort of control that matters is self-control, how you manipulate your own strings. Sebastian J. Cricket (Ewan McGregor) can act as his conscience for only so long; eventually, Pinocchio will need to make difficult moral decisions on his own. Over the course of the film, both the viewer and Pinocchio learn paradoxical lessons: The difference between a good lie and a bad lie, how living a good life may entail a good death, how independence requires limits, that nurturing someone often means accepting them for who they are and letting them go, and that the best sort of strings are those that bind us to one another. These aren’t necessarily easy lessons to learn. They require an ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s head at the same time, a kind of moral wisdom that comes with maturity.
Del Toro’s use of stop-motion animation fits his reputation as a maker of monster movies. The characters’ movements aren’t perfectly smooth the way CGI animation is. It’s never distracting, but it lends the film a 1930s King Kong vibe. That’s useful in a film filled with grotesqueries, from a sea creature’s snotty blow hole to a fascist youth camp. Don’t be mistaken: This is most definitely a children’s film and it’s never really scary but del Toro’s stop-motion technique is a constant reminder that Pinocchio (like many a kid) must navigate an unsettled world.
In many ways, though, this is as much Geppetto’s movie as it is Pinocchio’s, a story not only about what it takes to become a good boy but what it takes to become a good father. In the prologue, we see Geppetto happily raising his son Carlo in an Edenic existence. An aerial bombardment during World War I robs the puppeteer of his son, leading a drunken and bitter Geppetto to slap Pinocchio together a few years later. We see how a father’s pent-up pain can shape a child. Geppetto isn’t the film’s only flawed father, however. Volpe abuses the monkey Spazzatura (yes, Cate Blanchett) who toils as his assistant. The Podesta bullies his young son Candlewick (Finn Wolfhard) who in turn bullies Pinocchio. The twisted, fascist “Fatherland” teaches its boys how to obey the state and become warriors. At one point, the Catholic priest, or father, in the company of the Podesta, dutifully raises his arm in a Roman salute.
There is another important father figure looming over the film that ought to be mentioned as well. Throughout the movie, del Toro presents us with the image of a sculpted crucified Christ—the most famous son in all of human history—that Geppetto made for his local church. Meanwhile, some of Pinocchio’s stranger features are the nails Geppetto drove into the puppet’s back for no apparent reason. By the end of the film, Geppetto is not only redeemed as a father but rescued by the sacrifice of his son, who surrenders his immortality in the process. (After Sebastian J. Cricket is moved by Pinocchio’s selflessness, Pinocchio is resurrected by Tilda Swinton’s Wood Sprite.) In this way, del Toro’s film is the story of a heartbroken Father angry at a world that has ruined His creation bringing into that world a Son, and the mischievousness, innocence, and goodness of that Son saving His Father.
Most days at 2:00, dairy farmer Pádraic (Collin Farrell) meets up with his friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson) to drink a pint or two at the pub on the tiny island off the coast of Ireland they call home. But at the start of The Banshees of Inisherin, the latest film by Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) and streaming now on HBO Max, Colm has decided he no longer wants to be friends with Pádraic and flat out tells him to leave him alone.
Pádraic doesn’t understand why Colm has decided to end their friendship. Pádraic learns Colm and others think he’s a dull guy prone to engaging in long, tedious conversations, but that hasn’t kept them from being friends for all these years. It’s hypothesized Colm may be suffering from depression, but his conversations with the priest suggest otherwise. Colm at one point says his age is beginning to weigh on him and that he would like to spend his remaining years composing music that will be around long after he’s dead rather than engaging in meaningless conversation with his friend, but the ultimatum Colm issues to get Pádraic to leave him alone—a variation on cutting off your nose to spite your face—suggests that’s not entirely the case.
So it’s not clear why this friendship had to end. It could be that it’s simply run its course and that Colm has concluded he would be happier, more productive, more stimulated, and more fulfilled without Pádraic in his life. Maybe the break-up’s been a long time coming, too. But it’s over now. Attempting to get back into his former friend’s good graces, Pádraic reminds Colm he (Pádraic) is a nice guy and that it isn’t kind to just dump a friend. He’s got a point. But Colm just wants to move on without being mean about it. And if he doesn’t want to hang out with Pádraic anymore, that’s something he ought to be able to do.
That absence of animosity is a striking feature of this film, which is set near the end of the Irish Civil War in the early 1920s (the sound of gunfire from the mainland can periodically be heard on the isle.) There’s no grudge, no hurt, no reason for either man to be angry at the other nor a desire to remain angry at the other. There is little bitterness in what (at least initially) is actually a pretty funny film, filled with the sort of one-liners and gags we would expect to find in one of those movies built around a big misunderstanding that resolves itself in a moment of soul-bearing honesty. But The Banshees of Inisherin, which seems to pull from old Irish folk tales, slowly turns into a tragedy, with McDonagh carefully shifting the film’s tone over its runtime. That emotional journey, taking us to a place few movies dare to venture, is one of its strengths.
The critics at RogerEbert.com named The Banshees of Inisherin the year’s best film last week, and it’s expected to pick up Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Actor (for both Gleason and Farrell) as well as nods for Kerry Condon (who plays Pádraic’s sister) in the Best Supporting Actress category and Barry Keoghan (playing the dimwitted son of the local policeman) for Best Supporting Actor. It’s a small film worth seeking out that probes the dark, hurtful heart of friendship, kinship, and affection.
Early in first-time feature filmmaker John Patton Ford’s Emily the Criminal, an August theatrical release now streaming on Netflix, the movie’s eponymous character (played by Aubrey Plaza) repeatedly finds herself squeezed by the powers-that-be in her life. A cop tells her she’s parked illegally. A student loan agent (Emily is on the hook for $60,000 of debt) informs her that her monthly payments are only paying down the interest on her loans. And a potential employer won’t hire her because of her criminal record. The last one stings the most: Emily tried to play an aggravated assault charge off as a DUI, but the interviewer—who hadn’t been honest with Emily about digging into her record—calls her out on her dishonesty.
Emily is constantly reminded that those with money and power employ their own shady methods to exploit her and make her life more miserable than it ought to be. When she’s given the opportunity to work as a “dummy shopper”—someone who uses a fake credit card to buy expensive merchandise for a fencing operation—she’s initially reluctant to take the job, but her handler Youcef (Theo Rossi) is surprisingly straightforward with her about the scam’s risks and rewards. So why not supplement her income by ripping off a credit card company instead of trying to get by on the wages of a gig worker hauling take-out to white-collar employees in downtown L.A.? In certain ways, it’s a more honest day’s work than what passes these days as an honest living.
There’s also the fact Emily is kind of a natural when it comes to crime, and not just because she’s adept at committing fraud but because she knows how to stand up for and defend herself when necessary. Maybe as a young adult millennial, that’s how she’s learned to get by in the twenty-first century economy. Or maybe it’s just instinct. That tension is brought to the fore by Plaza’s casting as Emily. Plaza (Parks and Recreation, Legion, Ingrid Goes West, Black Bear) is known for playing off-kilter, deadpan roles (as well as playing an off-kilter, deadpan character in real life) and has a way of implicating the audience in her characters’ behavior. She turns us into voyeurs who keep watching her to see if she really is as weird, kinky, or devious as she hints she may be. Watch for too long, though, and she begins to make us feel as guilty as she is.
Plaza dials that effect way down for this role, but it’s still there, humming in the background, just waiting to manifest itself. At first it seems Emily’s circumstances push her into a life of crime. When a potential employer calls her “spoiled” for rejecting a job that comes without a wage, we share Emily’s outrage. Heck, the system practically treats her as a crook. But as the tension rises and people’s lives are on the line, the way Emily responds might lead us to wonder if her criminality is a calling and if we’re complicit in bringing that to the fore. As played by Plaza, Emily doesn’t so much learn how to become a criminal over this thriller’s taut ninety-minute run-time; instead, it’s a matter of self-actualization.
Top 5 Records Music Review: “Last Christmas” is the Die Hard of Christmas Songs
Since the death of George Michael on Christmas Day, 2016, “Last Christmas” by Wham! (1984) has become a staple of the holiday season. Don’t get me wrong: It is not as though radio stations avoided playing the song in years past. It just wasn’t beloved the way it is now. In every year since Michael’s passing, “Last Christmas” has charted in the top ten on the UK singles chart, even peaking at #1 in 2020 and early 2021. In the process, it set a record for the longest time for a song to reach the top spot on the UK singles chart following its release (a record since broken this year by “Running Up That Hill [A Deal With God]” by Kate Bush from 1985; thank you Stranger Things and the collapse of the recording music industry.1) Since 2016, the song has also steadily climbed year-by-year into the Top Ten in the United States, getting as high as #7 on January 1 of this year.
Like many pop Christmas songs, “Last Christmas” is a product of its time. It was not the first widely-played Christmas song to rely heavily on synthesizers (I’d guess that honor would go to the oft-maligned “Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney [1979],) but it hit the radio at a time when synthpop songs like it were all the rage. It’s probably no coincidence that 1984 was the year Mannheim Steamroller released their first collection of synthesized Christmas instrumentals. In a few short years, we’d also have synth-driven covers of “Winter Wonderland” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” by Eurythmics and Pretenders, respectively.
As it would be, by the 1990s, the sleek, icy sound of synthesized holiday songs came to be associated with Christmas in yuppie America. Remember in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation when Clark Griswold sent that spear of ice flying into his suburban neighbors’ bedroom, destroying Margo and Todd’s CD collection? I one-hundred percent guarantee you that at least two of those CDs contained laid-back adult contemporary Christmas tunes dusted with synths and paced by a drum machine. Sure, this song came out in 1998, but you know the type: They’re as cozy as chestnuts roasting on an open fire, but also maybe a little too cozy. Or alternately, they’re as chill as Jack Frost nipping at your nose, but also probably a little too chill.
Anyway, I think that’s what accounts for the diminished reputation of “Last Christmas” in the 90s and 00s. During that time, the song was dragged as a pop novelty that hadn’t aged well. It didn’t even make the cut for the original 2001 Now That’s What I Call Christmas! compilation, having to wait two years to be included on Volume 2, an honor it shared with classics like Elton John’s “Step Into Christmas”, the Waitresses’s “Christmas Wrapping”, and—stunningly—the now-standard “All I Want For Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey. Despite the slight, a prescient, up-and-coming country singer by the name of Taylor Smith—no, check that, Swift, Taylor Swift, my bad—placed a cover of “Last Christmas” on her 2007 Christmas EP. She was probably on to something.
The status of “Last Christmas” in 2010 is best summed up by a game called “Whamaggedon” (I have no idea why the geniuses who came up with this contest didn’t stylize it “Wham!aggedon) in which players try to avoid hearing the song during the first twenty-four days of December. Someone who hears any snippet of the song in its original form as performed by Wham! must post #Whamaggedon on their social media page to inform the other players they’ve lost. The last player not to hear the song wins.
The existence of this game at that time signaled both a.) a general disdain for the song, morphing into an ironic—and soon genuine—appreciation—of it, and b.) The song’s ubiquity on Christmas playlists. “Last Christmas” had never gone away, and people were coming around to it again. Why? By 2010, audiences had started re-embracing synthpop, so that helped. So did the fact that a lot of Gen Xers who were kids in the 1980s were now adults and nostalgic for the Christmases of their youth, which for a few years probably sounded like George Michael singing about giving his heart to someone special. (The same thing happened with Carey’s anthem; what was once a disposable holiday slice of cheese is now as central to Christmas as Santa Claus.)
But do you want to know a little secret about “Last Christmas”? It’s not really about Christmas. It’s a song about unrequited love that just happens to be set during Christmas. The lyrical authorities at Genius agree with me on this, so don’t even try arguing with me about it.
Here’s how I imagine it played out: Michael had the hook—“Last [something or another], I gave you my heart/ But the very next day, you gave it away/ This year, to save me from tears/ I’ll give it to someone special”—but he needed an identifiable date to plug into the song. It couldn’t be a month like April or a season like summer because he’s working in days, and it couldn’t be a day of the week because he’s referencing something that happened last year rather than last week. An actual date—say, March 5th—doesn’t work because that would be dumb and insignificant. It can’t be “yesterday” because…you know. So he needs a holiday or specific annual occasion. By process of elimination—it can’t be Halloween or Arbor Day or the four-syllable Valentine’s Day or the three-syllable Homecoming—it has to be Christmas. And it doesn’t hurt that you “give” things to people on Christmas either, but that’s more of a happy little accident in my book.
My main point, though, is that “Last Christmas” spends no time dwelling on the meaning of the season, references none of the holiday’s hallmarks (bells, mistletoe, reindeer, etc.) nor singles out any Christmas tradition beyond the word “wrapped.” Perhaps the Christmas setting adds to the heartbreak—you’re supposed to be happy at Christmas—but the song isn’t leaning on Christmas to generate that sense of heartbreak the way “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” does. And a song doesn’t become a Christmas song just because it mentions Christmas in it’s title. (You definitely want to click on that link.) Like I said, it’s a song about unrequited love…that happens to be set at Christmas time.
That makes “Last Christmas” the Die Hard of Christmas songs. Die Hard (1988) is an action movie set on Christmas Eve. People get into big arguments about whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Here’s a pretty good qualitative analysis of that question. (OK, maybe not that great. After posing the question, “Do any of the film’s major themes apply to Christmas,” the author replies in the affirmative, stating, “Since Hans Gruber and all the other terrorists end up dead, it’s safe to say the movie is a big ‘no’ on killing innocent people for profit,” which, come on, is a moral that applies year-round and not only to the Christmas season!) And for those who scoff at qualitative studies, here’s a pretty good quantitative analysis of this most pressing of questions. (Yes, the methodological rigor isn’t great, but there is counting along with some graphs, which is enough for this political theorist.) But come on, Die Hard, like “Last Christmas”, doesn’t need Christmas to work. It’s just a backdrop the screenwriters and songwriters can play with every now and then. The Christmas motif is not a critical element of either work, and neither work develops themes associated with the holiday. Just as Die Hard is not a Christmas movie, “Last Christmas” is not a Christmas song.
But, you know what? It’s the Christmas season, and I’m feeling generous. So here’s what “Last Christmas” has going for it: Unlike Die Hard, which hit theaters in the middle of the summer, Wham! released “Last Christmas” as a double-A side with the equally excellent “Everything She Wants” on December 3, 1984, right at the start of the Christmas season. There’s also the fact that no one, including myself, listens to “Last Christmas” when it isn’t December, which puts it in the same company as “Joy to the World”, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”, and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”. (BTW, speaking of “Christmas [Baby Please Come Home]: You are welcome.) Other memorable songs that fall into that same category include “Jingle Bells” and “Frosty the Snowman”, yet it should be noted that, by my own criteria, neither ought to be considered a Christmas song since their lyrics make absolutely no reference to the holiday. (Sorry, Frosty, but John McClane’s definitely got you on that one.) And really, shouldn’t an honest-to-goodness Christmas song really be about the events surrounding the birth of Jesus? He is the reason for the season, after all. That criteria would disqualify most of the songs heard on that radio station that starts playing holiday songs at the start of November and before stopping promptly at noon on December 25.
I guess Christmas has come to encompass a lot of things. It’s the Christmas Eve service with the whole family in tow, angels we have heard on high, shepherds tending their flocks by night, visits to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, caroling and cookies, poinsettias and Charlie Brown, presents under a tree, Home Alone on the television, “Santa Baby” on the radio, even a Scrooge or two. There’s a lot of room for maneuver there, and plenty of space for John McClane and a synthpop song by Wham!.
Thanks for reading. And to quote George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s holiday classic, “Merry Christmas.”
Exit Music: “Last Christmas” by Wham! (1984)
By “death of the recording music industry,” consider that only half of the Top Ten songs on the Billboard Hot 100 at the time I am writing this Thursday night were released this year. The other five were released in various decades of the last century. Counting down, from #10: 10. “Rich Flex” by Drake and 21 Savage; 9. “Last Christmas” by Wham!; 8. “Superheroes (Heroes & Villains)” by Metro Boomin, Future, & Chris Brown; 7. “Unholy” by Sam Smith and Kim Petras; 6. “Anti-Hero” by Taylor Swift; 5. “Creepin’” by Metro Boomin, the Weeknd, and 21 Savage; 4. “A Holy Jolly Christmas” by Burl Ives; 3. “Jingle Bell Rock” by Bobby Helms; 2. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” by Brenda Lee; 1. “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey. Yeah, I get they tally this stuff differently these days to account for streaming, and sure, it’s Christmas time, but pop music is in a pretty bad place when the planet’s hottest musical acts can’t top Burl Ives.