 Kyle MacLachlan reprises his role as FBI Agent Dale Cooper in a revival of “Twin Peaks.” (Suzanne Tenner/Showtime) Every week, I answer a question from the Monday Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the May 22 chat here and submit questions for the June 5 chat here. (Next Monday is Memorial Day, so the chat will be on hiatus.) This week, a reader wonders how I’m doing my job in the age of Trump. Does your own openness to popular culture increase or decrease when the current events of the day require so much attention? I realize that your job requires you to keep up the pace, but surely enthusiasm might wax and wane. I find myself struggling to keep up with anything on TV since I’m so often trying to catch up with newspapers (just The Post and New York Times, not going 100 percent junkie) and other hard news sources outside of work. I can keep a book going — though largely on the subway where I try to avoid total phone absorption. And I can keep up with live entertainment similar (maybe a bit less) to previous consumption levels just because the opportunities in the DC area are so fantastic. But sometimes even shows that I like seem like a slog when I’ve just read another long article about proposed budget intricacies. I’m hoping to pick up some serious (not really political, though it touches the edges of that) volunteer work in the fall. I’m assuming that taking actual responsibility for helping real people will be easy to prioritize. I may end up skipping the entire movie output of the summer. Even popcorn movies take up bandwidth. Please note that I am Facebook/Twitter/Instagram-free, so this isn’t coming from social media overload. Just the news. I don’t know that I’ve felt less inclined to consume large amounts of pop culture. After all, the weirdness of “Twin Peaks” puts the oddity of our present moment in perspective; if “Wonder Woman” is any good, it’ll be a moment of escapist delight; and not even President Trump’s vulgarity could make me feel any less excited for the conclusion of Kevin Kwan’s Singapore trilogy, “Rich People Problems,” which was released on May 23. Culture alternately distracts me from the world and helps me manage my responses to it. Of course, this is not really a question of bandwidth for me. I get paid to watch television, and read novels and go to the movies, so it’s not as though I have to carve extra time out of my schedule to do these things, or allocate limited leisure time to them. On the other hand, though, it does seem as though readers have less bandwidth for cultural stories and cultural controversies; my readership isn’t really down (which is amazing, considering this time last year, “Game of Thrones” was on the air), but I feel a shift in what’s sparking everyone’s attention. I do feel, to a certain extent, compelled to write about the new administration, sometimes because I genuinely feel as though I have a lot to say, but on other occasions, because it would feel negligent not to say something. Because of the pop culture production cycle, movies and television haven’t really responded to the new administration yet. Once they do, I suspect it’ll be clearer to me what a cultural critic’s role in the Trump era is. In the meantime, I’m burying myself in newspaper archives, reading delicious novels and dispatches from other eras in American history and embracing everything surreal. |
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