| In today’s newsletter, Emily Nussbaum on getting to know the director Marielle Heller, and then: • A timely triennial of Latino art
• Donald Trump’s U.F.C. victory party
• Can A.I. improve our conversations? | | | |
| Emily Nussbaum
Staff writer When I first saw Marielle Heller’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” in 2018, I was stunned by how good the film was: deep, subtle, and biting, and, also, a perfect time capsule of nineteen-nineties literary New York, bad book parties and all—a subject I knew a bit about. I’d already watched Heller’s blazing début, “Diary of a Teenage Girl,” an adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic memoir about her adolescence in nineteen-seventies San Francisco. It drove me crazy that not enough people knew Heller’s name, so I pitched writing a Profile of the director. The reporting didn’t get going until late 2020, after Heller had released her third movie, the Mr. Rogers bio-pic “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” and had also played a breakthrough acting role in “The Queen’s Gambit.” But between the pandemic, her new baby, and a writers’ strike, the process took several years, as I traced her latest protect, “Nightbitch,” a movie adapted from a novel by Rachel Yoder—an audaciously peculiar story about a stay-at-home mother who morphs into a dog. In the course of my reporting, we had dozens of check-ins, including a brunch in Toluca Lake, L.A. (during which dogs mysteriously kept approaching us), a few days on set, cocktails in Brooklyn, and visits to the editing room, to post-production, and, ultimately, to the Toronto Film Festival. When you report for this long, it’s hard to tell what will wind up being important. But, as I went through my notes, I kept returning to a key day in early June, 2023, when the sky was a bright orange from the forest fires in Canada, and the mood was apocalyptic. Heller was feeling subdued, in part because of rough screenings. That moment became my lede, as it captured some central anxieties Heller was experiencing—a sensitive response from a sensitive subject. It also foregrounded something I knew would be true—that the film would be divisive. The other major choice I made was to focus on a difficult period in Heller’s marriage to the fellow-director and actor Jorma Taccone, memories of which had clearly inflected “Nightbitch.” I’m very grateful to Taccone for being so open with me during an interview that helped to fill in a crucial moment of the piece—and for offering an intimate perspective on the movie’s themes, which are as much about marriage as parenting. Then, the week I was finishing the Profile, Trump won the election. “Nightbitch” felt newly responsive to the national mood—and also in tension with it. Just as we were finalizing the piece, I added a line meant to directly reflect that issue: “Nightbitch” feels like a hetero-optimist movie in a hetero-pessimist time. | | | |
Reporting and commentary on what you need to know today.  Photograph by Chris Unger / Zuffa LLC / Getty The Ultimate Fighting Championship “alternates between the camp theatrics of show business and a kind of abject brutality that is impossible to look away from,” Sam Eagan writes. Sound familiar? Donald Trump has a long history with the U.F.C. and with Dana White, the organization’s C.E.O., who helped mobilize young men to go to the polls this fall. Trump and White were together again at a recent fight at Madison Square Garden, where the cheers for the President-elect were thunderous. “Donald Trump is tougher and more badass than anybody,” White told Eagan. Read the story » | | | |
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|  Illustration by Josie Norton Two communication styles were at play in the election: Republican offensive riffing and Democratic defensive messaging. “It’s often said that Americans no longer know how to talk to each other,” Joshua Rothman writes. Will A.I. help us relate, or deepen the divide? Read the column » Open Questions publishes every Tuesday. | | | |
| P.S. On Sunday, Joe Biden became the first sitting U.S. President to visit the Amazon. He declared November 17th to be International Conservation Day, and vowed that millions of dollars would be invested in restoring and regenerating the rain forest. It’s a wondrous, mysterious place; in 1925, a British explorer and his companions disappeared there and, in the decades since, scores of adventurers have tried to find their remains. The New Yorker writer David Grann was one person who went looking, and he wrote about his extraordinary experience. 🐆 | | | |
Hannah Jocelyn contributed to this edition. | | | |
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