Nostalgia is a powerful tonic. It can induce a state of hypnosis through cheap pastiche and content trash of the lowest common denominator. It can drive a country further to the right and justify all sorts of fascist policies, as we can see in the memetic movement to Make Whichever Nation Great Again.
Or it can lead a beloved director to make some truly uninspired television. This may be the case for Wong Kar-wai, whose thirty-episode Blossoms Shanghai is now available to stream on the Criterion Channel. As Xiao Yue Shan explains, the series is a departure from Hong Kong’s cinematic tradition, returning the director to the city of his birth for better and worse. And Eric Dean Wilson considers the backward-facing Plainclothes, a film that situates the police crackdown on cruising in a more ignorant time—as if bathroom stings were simply a thing of the past.
Elsewhere, Ann Manov reviews a recent novel of incels, raw milk, bad art, and worse sex. Poetry from Rafil Kroll-Zaidi revels in digital disambiguation and conflicting identities. And in a story from our archives, James Pogue describes what happens when nonfiction becomes IP.
“Plainclothes misses the mark on multiple levels. If it’s shooting at all, the barrel is aimed right at the very community it would probably like to lift up.”
“The novel sits uneasily, constraining itself from strong emotion in either direction, flattening out, instead, into an object of mostly sociological interest.”
“This article is about the real Directors of the FBI. For the criminal who pretends to be the Director of the FBI when sending fraudulent e-mails, see”
“This is, of course, the logic of this moment—that what you might have once thought of as literary publishing is, when you get down to it, just high-status corporate content generation.”
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