I said I would retrospect the dying decade and write a list, and it turned out like a memoir of earworms, maybe, or a transcription of the December air ringing chimes outside my window.
“Do Not Go Gentle: From the Diaries of Lenny Abramov,” the first chapter of “Super Sad True Love Story,” by Gary Shteyngart (2010)
The future imagined in Shteyngart’s dystopian third novel—set in an age of authoritarian government, absolutist consumerism, and tyrannical technology—matches our recent history and present trouble with uncanny precision. Its bravura opening, which is staged partly at a xenophobic United States Embassy and partly at a half-hearted Roman orgy, introduces a protagonist who sells the promise of “Indefinite Life Extension” to high-net-worth individuals. Themes include a bloated art market, the rise of totalitarian China, and the aching mysteries of romance. It’s a decline-and-fall-in-love story.
“The Clock,” by Christian Marclay (2010)
This twenty-four-hour film is a perpetually enchanting megaton supercut, a montage of timekeeping moments from the epic history of screen culture. In “10:04,” a book titled to synch with the lightning strike in “Back to the Future,” Ben Lerner inspects the gears of this fine timepiece: “Marclay had formed a supragenre that made visible our collective, unconscious sense of the rhythms of the day—when we expect to kill or fall in love or clean ourselves or eat or fuck or check our watch and yawn.”
“Generation Why?,” by Zadie Smith, in The New York Review of Books (2010)
In its well-reasoned hostility toward Facebook, this essay, which discusses David Fincher’s “The Social Network” and Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto,” seemed, at the time, prophetic. Note the Pninian squirrel taxidermied in the first paragraph and the head mount presented at the conclusion: “ ‘The Social Network’ is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called ‘Mark Zuckerberg.’ It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.”
New Yorker writers reflect
on the year’s best.
The log line for “Murdoch,” an unproduced screenplay by Jesse Armstrong, transcribed on the Sixth Annual Black List (2010)
“As his family gathers for his birthday party, Rupert Murdoch tries to convince his elder children to alter the family trust so that his two youngest children by his newest wife will have voting rights in the company.” This sentence is significant as a germ of “Succession” and as a harbinger of the current entertainment cycle of dramatizing the personal monstrosities and global atrocities committed by media empires, on which the dark sun never sets.
Frances Halladay dashes through Chinatown in “Frances Ha,” directed by Noah Baumbach (2013)
Greta Gerwig plays a modern dancer, or a post-postmodern person who is stumbling to make a career in dance. In this scene, she rushes through the New York streets, with some elated jetés and a droll twirl through a crosswalk, to the tune of David Bowie’s “Modern Love”—in homage to a scene in Leos Carax’s “Mauvais Sang”—as if running for her life at a euphoric sprint. (See also “Damsels in Distress,” where she twirls away from the abyss and starts a dance craze, the Sambola!)
The burglary of the Audrina Patridge residence in “The Bling Ring,” directed by Sofia Coppola (2013)
Up in the Hollywood Hills, down in a wide shot, two kids burgle the glass house of the reality-TV star. It’s a shot that lasts more than a hundred seconds, suspenseful and atmospheric, with an excruciatingly slow zoom, like viewing a doll-house heist, or watching lab mice run a maze made by Richard Neutra, while all the lights of Los Angeles twinkle like private bonfires of longing.
Matthew McConaughey as Mark Hanna in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” directed by Martin Scorsese (2013)
In his big scene, coked to the pallor of a scented candle, gliding through a skyline dining room in pin-striped peak lapels, Hanna leads Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort through the ways of high finance like Virgil touring Dante through Purgatory. He flutters through a philosophy of “fugazi”: “It’s not fuckin’ real. Stay with me. We don’t create shit. We don’t build anything.”
Kumail Nanjiani as Dinesh Chugtai on “Silicon Valley,” Season 1, Episode 8, “Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency,” directed by Mike Judge (2014)
Avatars of a venal era, this satire’s tech-sector jackasses yak like parlor-room nincompoops raised alone in noxious chat rooms. Among them, Dinesh ranks as a special case, on account of Nanjiani's arid delivery of juvenile invective and sociopathic posturing. Here, the character launches a clever and elaborate dirty joke by taking seriously a colleague’s declaration that the team will win a startup competition even if, during their ten-minute presentation, he must manually stimulate every man in the audience to orgasm. (It goes without saying that it’s pretty much all men in the room.) “Yeah,” Dinesh says, “even if you’re jerking two at a time, there are, what, eight hundred guys in that room? So that’s four hundred times whatever the mean jerk time is? . . . I mean, it doesn’t matter, but, hypothetically, time is equal to four hundred total jerks at a two-dick rate.” He lights up like a graphing calculator calibrated to yield graphic content.
The sounds of “Inherent Vice,” directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (2014)
In recompense for the receding of Thomas Pynchon to the back of the public mind—like, maybe his narrative quests after labyrinthine imperialist conspiracies cut too close to the bone?—we got the balm of Joanna Newsom’s savory voice-over narration and the juice of Jonny Greenwood’s warm score: essential sonic signage for finding one’s way through the haze of this California noir to its melancholy tides of Pacific goodbyes.
“David Lynch: The Unified Field,” at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (2014–15)
I see that a certain sort of film critic, possibly possessive, possibly possessed by a bias against the tube, insists upon claiming the third season of “Twin Peaks” for the cinema, despite its clear design as home entertainment for haunting your house. In reply, I offer this museum exhibition, which gathered about ninety paintings and drawings, made over five decades, as evidence that Lynch is too large an artist to bother with such trifling categorizations. The idea is transcendence, by any medium necessary. With a brush in hand, he gouges at the canvas by way of piercing his soul.
“Closure,” the epilogue of “The Sellout,” by Paul Beatty (2015)
Great endings often have an air of stepping aside. Witness the narrator of Beatty’s fourth novel. The story wraps its acidic tragicomedy about race like a low, eternal flame lapping at institutions and attitudes:
“The Reign of Beyoncé,” by Margo Jefferson, in Vogue (2015)
This essay on superstar qualities is, in itself, perfectly fine, with occasional gusts of greatness—Jefferson is never less than good, and her 2015 memoir, “Negroland,” is essential. But its pop-cultural importance is a function of its context: as a September cover story written without an interview, in deference to new dynamics of celebrity power.
The Kylo Ren lightsaber toothbrush (2015)
Four out of five dentists agree that this product, with its rounded bristles and indefatigable sound effects, is an ideal artifact of franchise culture, with its copious inanity, chaotic stimuli, and scattershot charms. Children would coax the sword to sing, and the snarl of Adam Driver—“That weapon is mine!”—would echo around the bathroom like blaster ricochet.
Keri Russell as Elizabeth Jennings as “Patty” on Season 4 of “The Americans,” created by Joseph Weisberg (2016)
The spy thriller was also a marriage story, so there was an existential texture to its play of false identities. In the course of her soul-wrecking seduction and betrayal of the Seong family, Elizabeth does herself up in Mary Kay cosmetics and ash-blond bangs, for a contrast between fragrant cosmetic glamour and rancid emotional squalor.
“Prince: A Eulogy,” by Greg Tate, on MTV News (2016)
A howling lament and funk-steeped exaltation, the tribute flows into an emotional celebration of American music. “Only after death are we forced to reckon with unsolvable riddles: How did that much music, wit, and spirit come out of that exsanguinated, stiff, shrunken, and breathless body? How could you just step off?”
“Gangsta Bitch Music, Vol.1,” by Cardi B (2016)
Here was a début mixtape heralding an artist of extravagant attitude. The title of its fourth track, “Washpoppin,” is a zesty phrase, from the Bronx demotic, for “what’s up.” Cardi begins by sampling her own social-media accounts (“I’m about this shmoney,” she hammed, in a viral Vine clip) and proceeds, with the sinuous delivery of findom lyrics (“I need like 50K right now”), upon ecdysiast beats, to announce a singular stage presence.
“Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook,” by Clive James (2016)
A great work by the late master, this book flows with analyses of all the esteemed TV series of its era, which are superior not only to everybody else’s analyses but also to many of the programs under review. I flipped it open at random and found this distillation of “Girls”: “Dunham’s central bravery is to find a comic language for the battle against nature.” Then I paged around looking for his “Mad Men” essay and got waylaid by one on “House of Cards,” which swerves into a mention of Machiavelli’s “Discourses on Livy” and then this kicker: “One of the salient qualities of recent long-form television drama has been to employ the utmost sophistication to face us with the primitive; and to make us realize that civilization has barbarism for a bottom level. Strip away the upper level and you are looking at ‘Game of Thrones.’ ”
“Search Party,” created by Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Michael Showalter (2016–)
In which a paranoid caper spirals into murderous farce. An amateur detective, played by Alia Shawkat, gets in over her heavy head. A great noir of its generation, it is bathed in neon lights in millennial pink, and it spoofs twenty-first-century manners even as it speaks sincerely to contemporary anxieties, like a satire with the mind of a psychological thriller.
“Hamilton,” Season 4, Episode 10 of “Drunk History,” created by Jeremy Konner and Derek Waters (2016)
Emily Nussbaum described this Comedy Central series, with its sozzled storytelling and wisely foolish reconstructions of yesteryear, as “silly in theory, strangely effective in practice.” This episode, with Lin-Manuel Miranda, is its ne plus ultra. Alia Shawkat is Hamilton; Aubrey Plaza is Burr; Miranda is trashed. “I want to order Domino’s,” he says.
@cindysherman, Instagram (2017)
Cindy Sherman opened the decade with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which was of a tone and scope to suit her station as the premiere self-portraitist of our era. She closes it as the operator of the finest feed on Instagram, a conceptual artist in dialogue with an era when self-portraiture ranks as a defining art and deforming social practice. The characters’ baroque self-distortions of filter and form achieve a trippy sense of self-definition. “They are some of the first pure protagonists in Sherman’s work,” Parul Sehgal wrote in the Times. “We meet them on their own terms—as we so frequently meet each other—in stagy, embarrassing, endearing selfies launched into the world.”
“Obama and Luther’s Farewell Address,” Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, on “The Daily Show,” Season 22, Episode 42 (2017)
Barack and his anger translator say goodbye. Obama: “In summation, thanks, America. It’s been real. And it’s been good. But it ain’t been real good.” Luther: “Apparently, orange is the new black! Good luck with your health care, assholes! I’m out!” Obama: “Peace.”
“We the People…,” by A Tribe Called Quest, at the fifty-ninth Grammy Awards (2017)
Featuring Busta Rhymes, who lowered a booming voice to introduce a glorious graffiti smear of protest art. Haunted by the absence of Phife Dawg, whose recorded voice, a year after his death, echoed achingly, “Who can come back years later, still hit the shot?” Q-Tip was aggrieved, later in the year, that the Recording Academy rewarded the group’s final work with zero nominations: “You think a nigga wanted to fuckin’ go out there and perform after I lost my man? We closed y’all show and we don’t get no fucking nominations? The last Tribe album?” An old line of Chuck D’s remained vital in its perspective: “Who gives a fuck about a goddam Grammy?”
The Eighty-Ninth Academy Awards (2017)
The accountants handed out a bad envelope, so Faye Dunaway announced “La La Land” as Best Picture, an error announced by one of its producers, Jordan Horowitz: “What? You guys, I’m sorry, no. There’s a mistake. ‘Moonlight,’ you guys won.” The reversal would have been the most thrilling moment in Oscar history even if there were lesser stakes or less pungent cultural symbolism, what with the flicker of justice in this mainstream breakthrough of a queer black story.
“Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to present The most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show viewing season! Collectors of Fine Art will Flock to see the latest Kara Walker offerings, and what is she offering but the Finest Selection of artworks by an African-American Living Woman Artist this side of the Mississippi. Modest collectors will find her prices reasonable, those of a heartier disposition will recognize Bargains! Scholars will study and debate the Historical Value and Intellectual Merits of Miss Walker’s Diversionary Tactics. Art Historians will wonder whether the work represents a Departure or a Continuum. Students of Color will eye her work suspiciously and exercise their free right to Culturally Annihilate her on social media. Parents will cover the eyes of innocent children. School Teachers will reexamine their art history curricula. Prestigious Academic Societies will withdraw their support, former husbands and former lovers will recoil in abject terror. Critics will shake their heads in bemused silence. Gallery Directors will wring their hands at the sight of throngs of the gallery-curious flooding the pavement outside. The Final President of the United States will visibly wince. Empires will fall, although which ones, only time will tell,” by Kara Walker (2017)
In spirit, the show was no less colossal than Walker’s bittersweet sphinx of 2014. Its centerpiece was as gray and grandly grotesque as Picasso’s “Guernica.”
“Tenderness,” by Parquet Courts, on “Wide Awake!” (2018)
In one of the better dance-rock songs of all time, a barroom piano tinkles toward agitated meditation on the lateness of the date: “The age of iron, steam and speed / Turned a stroll to a stampede / But we’ve come to increase time in between ticks / And there's romance in the slow dances.”
The book jacket of “Asymmetry,” by Lisa Halliday (2018)
Here’s a paper airplane half undone to open up a photographic view of a city skyscape, with a soaring passenger jet suspended in its blue. People who don’t know how to judge books by their covers don’t know how to read; the image, conceptually intricate as modular origami, exactly evokes an elegant narrative unfolding of stories about imbalances of power.
“Bike Lane,” by Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, at the Music Hall of Williamsburg (2018)
A surf-rock riff built to slay, in memory of Freddie Gray. The cops “got behind him with their truncheons / and choked the life right out of him,” Stephen Malkmus, here to sing a song about privilege, said. The pleasure of its body-rock strum vibrates against the lyrics’ sympathetic pain for the dead.
“That’s Just the Way That I Feel,” by Purple Mountains, on “Purple Mountains” (2019)
David Berman, who died in August, at fifty-two, ground out a final album that sounds like a ragged elegy for himself. On its first track, a saloon piano rambles beneath righteous brass and rueful lines: “When I try to drown my thoughts in gin / I find my worst ideas know how to swim.”
“Malfunctioning Sex Robot,” by Patricia Lockwood, in the London Review of Books (2019)
My group text on the topic of this critical essay, wherein a wizardly reviewer inks a complicated portrait of the politics and erotics and aesthetics of John Updike, is off the hook. Tangential responses range from “I never seriously considered committing adultery till I re-read Roger’s Version in 2014. Schwing!” to “Roger’s Version was the book that made me understand, finally, the problem with Updike. No matter who the protagonist is—car salesman, Protestant minister—Updike gives him the sex life of a famous novelist.”
Jenny Holzer at MASS MoCA (on view through at least 2020)
Up in North Adams, Massachusetts, they’ve got vast rooms seething with enraged meditations. The exhibition features recent stuff attuned to new frequencies, greatest hits that are not just enduring in their appeal but accelerating in their force, and a compose-your-own-“Truism” contest. They have a room fluorescently papered with her “Inflammatory Essays”—the broadsides that she pasted around Manhattan in the late nineteen-seventies and early nineteen-eighties, including the one that goes, “THE END THE U.S.A. ALL YOU RICH FUCKERS SEE THE BEGINNING OF THE END AND TAKE WHAT YOU CAN WHILE YOU CAN. YOU IMAGINE THAT YOU WILL GET AWAY, BUT YOU’VE SHIT IN YOUR OWN BED AND YOU’RE THE ONE TO SLEEP IN IT. WHY SHOULD EVERYONE ELSE STAY BEHIND AND SMELL YOUR STINKING COWARDICE. HERE’S A MESSAGE TO YOU—SPACE TRAVEL IS UNCERTAIN AND ANY REFUGE OF YOURS CAN BE BLOWN OFF THE MAP. THERE’S NO OTHER PLACE FOR YOU TO GO. KNOW THAT YOUR FUTURE IS WITH US SO DON’T GIVE US MORE REASONS TO HATE YOU.”
