Post- 10/12/17

OCT 12 – VOL 20 – ISSUE 5

In this issue...

Bikes, BEAM, and Blade Runner

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FEATURES Asphalt to Asphalt, Dust to Dust

Editor’s Note 7

Dear Readers, The leaves on the ground, and the associated leaf blowers that screech outside my bedroom windows (or is this just

– Chen Ye

me?) at 9 a.m have returned. They have also prompted some

Playing with Passion

8

– Anita Sheih

reflection, as I begin to roll out of bed, on the cyclical nature of this world, in this, my third fall at Brown. And it seems the fall has gotten many of our writers in reflective moods as well.

We’ve got time loops, where protagonists are forced to relive

5 LIFESTYLE Opportunity Calls

the same day à la Groundhog Day. A piece about wheels and a senior’s farewell to Brown.

What it’s like to pop the Brown Bubble.

5

– Eliza Cain

Unpacking Orange

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– Pia Mileaf-Patel ­

– James Feinberg

Do You Remember Today?

– Josh Wartel

grandfather ...and many more!

I hope you have a wonderful start to the fall with our memories and thoughts to guide you.

Best,

7 ARTS & CULTURE Don’t Call it a Comeback

The circle of life, with a granddaughter remembering her

7 8

Saanya

editor - in - chief

This Time Last Year...

Hot Post- Time Machine “It’s ghobi, not gobi, despite what the Kabob and Curry menu insists. Gobi is the name of a [M]ongolian desert.”

— Yamini Mandava, A Crisis of Indian-ness 10.13.2016 “A depressed croissant struggles to find meaning in the ‘upper crust’ life of bourgeois pastries.”

— Devika Girish, The Caped Croissant Crusader 10.08.2015

Post- Staff Editor-in-Chief Saanya Jain

Layout Chief Livia Mucciolo

Managing Editor, Features Jennifer Osborne

Creative Director Grace Yoon

Managing Editor, Lifestyle Annabelle Woodward Managing Editor, Arts & Culture Joshua Lu

Head of Media Claribel Wu Features Editors Anita Sheih Kathy Luo

Head Illustrator Doris Liou

Lifestyle Editors Amanda Ngo Marly Toledano Divya Santhanam

Copy Chief Alicia DeVos

Arts & Culture Editors Celina Sun

Josh Wartel Copy Editor Zander Kim Layout Assistants Eojin Choi Julia Kim Gabriela Gil Media Assistant Samantha Haigood Staff Writers Andrew Liu Anna Harvey Catherine Turner Chantal Marauta Claire Kim-Narita Daniella Balarezo

Daniera Rivera Eliza Cain Emma Lopez Jack Brook Karya Sezener Natalie Andrews Sonya Bui Sydney Lo Veronica Espaillat Staff Illustrators Caroline Hu Erica Lewis Harim Choi Kira Widjaja Nayeon (Michelle) Woo Cover Illustrator Erica Lewis

Asphalt to Asphalt, Dust to Dust Last-Minute Adventuring in the Northeast 3:15 p.m.

Shit.

I fall out of bed, groaning as I realize how much I have overslept — a ritual that’s becoming all too familiar as the days shorten and my problem sets lengthen.

This time, however, it isn’t lectures I am missing but the first day of a long weekend — theoretically perfect for knocking things off the bucket list. But with the sun setting at six, waking up deep into the afternoon isn’t doing any favors to my scheduling.

Fickle as it may be, fall is still my favorite season. Keenly aware of the weekends remaining before I graduate, I decide: The day must be salvaged.

4:02 p.m.

My bucket list mostly involves biking stupid distances to silly places.

I ride north. The trees in Providence have stayed green so far, but as I leave the heat of the city, more and more colors filter into view. Soon, I’m following a bike path along the Blackstone River, passing dams and the remnants of old mills every couple of miles.

An extensive network of these paths winds through Rhode Island. I’ve ridden one—the East Bay Bike Path—since childhood, when my parents were graduate students at Brown, and have been slowly crossing the others off my list since freshman year, after returning to the Northeast.

But one route of my own creation—a dirty, muddy, 100-mile loop linking trails in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut—has remained unfinished. The route begins and ends on the paved pathways in Rhode Island I’ve so frequently ridden but continues where the asphalt ends, winding through heavy forest, rolling hills, and swampland mostly on sandy hiking trails and gravelly railbeds. I call it the Tristate Circular.

A combination of distance, a bicycle not equipped to deal with off-road trail conditions, and a lack of time has always dissuaded me in the past. By now, however, I’ve gained the fitness, the bicycle, and the schedule to make one final attempt. My prospects for returning before midnight are dim since I overslept, but what’s a bucket-list attempt without a bit of challenge?

5:12 p.m.

It starts to drizzle. No one else is around, so I take my corners wide and fast, cutting to the inside of the path at the apex of each turn. The rain is not heavy enough to distract or soak and cools me down instead. It’s the perfect kind of weather for riding.

Fall in the Northeast is easy to like for practical reasons alone — it’s warm during the daytime, but cool enough for sleeping in an un-air-conditioned dorm at night. The weather might be varied, but it always feels appropriate—sunny days out are interspersed with cozy, rainy days in, and I’m thankful for both.

5:32 p.m.

Riding through Lincoln, I’m sandwiched between the river on the right and the

Blackstone Canal on my left. Built in 1828 but only operational for 20 years, the canal is old but has spent far more time as an abandoned structure than a functioning part of the built environment. This is true for many remnants of Rhode Island’s industrial past — though they evoke feelings of timelessness, the eras they belong to are actually as transient as the season I’m biking through.

But I think it’s this idea of transience— of a season ephemeral—that’s my favorite part about fall. The glory of fall colors is heightened by the limited time in which they exist, and the scarcity of good weather makes me appreciate the perfect days even more.

6:06 p.m.

At the Massachusetts border, the trail turns west and loses its paving, revealing its gravelly origins as an abandoned railway. This is where I’ve stopped before. It’s getting dark, and I could turn back now and be back in time for a pregame and the associated festivities: familiar comforts for the collegiate soul.

As I nose my bike tentatively forward, an early challenge emerges — two giant mud puddles block my way, taking up the whole span of the trail. Riding on a farm road next to a recently irrigated field this summer has taught me not to underestimate mud: It clogs wheels, sprockets, shoes, and cleats — in other words, everything . But there is no other way through, so I grit my teeth and downshift, powering through on the shallower edges.

Large chunks of mud fly off my wheels onto the road and my face. Thankfully, nothing jams, and I’m able to ride through.

This success—and the adrenaline that follows—convinces me—fuck it, it’s the long weekend — to push ahead. I know what FOMO-ridden freshman Chen would’ve picked, however, and it’s a satisfying testament to how much I’ve grown and changed in the past four years.

I’m concerned the rest of the trail will be similarly muddy, but it stays mostly nice and dry afterward, a product of sitting on a rail embankment with relatively good drainage.

As my tires crunch against the ballast, a spectacular sunset, likely the product of the earlier rain, leads the way.

Riding on gravel is a hypnotic experience. Unlike on pavement, I control the bike indirectly— where the bike goes is as much a product of the angles, friction, and textures of the trail as the factors I can influence: my line, speed, and moment. This isn’t a cerebral task, and I’m soon left in a focused but passive state, relying on instincts to keep myself upright as I ride faster.

7:17 p.m.

It is now thoroughly night. The trail widens and evens out as I enter Douglas State Forest, and I bob my lights to wave as I pass a man wheeling a child inside a wheelbarrow.

The forest is dense, but swampland lit by moonlight peeks through.

I stop occasionally, shining my headlight at information signs. I learn that George Washington criticized this area of Massachusetts as useless, but its lack of resources for European settlers to utilize has protected

it into the 21st century, making it one of the most biodiverse regions of Massachusetts.

This, too, is part of the wonder of New England, where even forests and pathways sit on layers of history.

7:43 p.m.

I cross into Connecticut—I think. The tri-state marker separating Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut informs me that there’s actually been a low-level dispute between the three states about the exact boundaries since the 1600s. The sign describes the situation evolving from a colonial exchange of arrests, blows, and very British insults (only silenced after “English authorities threatened to revoke both charters and attach the colonies to New Hampshire”) into a modern legislative battle about property taxes, the conflict only really pausing for World War II. It’s here that I also ride by (but don’t attempt to pronounce) Lake Char­gogg­a­gogg­ man­chaugg­a­gogg­chau­bun­a­gung­a­maugg.

The trail bears southwest and ends in Thompson, where I continue south on Connecticut backroads. Rural Connecticut at night is an experience of alternating blinding light and pitch black. Rolling hills mask the approach of cars until they crest, high beams at the ready, briefly making night into day. It is fast riding, however, and the hills give me an additional push.

After stopping for pizza in Putnam, I follow the East Coast Greenway, a continuous bicycle route from Florida to Maine, which will eventually guide me back to Providence.

10:10 p.m.

At Moosup, in southeastern Connecticut, I get on the Moosup Valley State Trail.

Also an abandoned railbed, this trail is scheduled to be paved in the next year. For now, however, the surface is very rough, littered with sinusoidal moguls (arrays of small humps generated by ATVs and dirt bikes) and occasional fallen branches to bunny-hop or dismount-hop over. It’s mile 70, and I’m too tired to do a fluid flying dismount, hop,

and remount, but my efforts are noted by nearby bunnies and raccoons as they scurry away. Mysterious side paths branch off, but I continue east, chasing the setting moon. I cross back into Rhode Island without much ceremony.

I pass beneath beautiful stone arch overpasses and have to cross a gorge using an abandoned rail bridge, tiptoeing along a onefoot-wide strut with the bike on my shoulder.

My cleats click as they contact the metal, emphasizing how poorly suited my shoes are for this. But as with most challenges when riding offroad, the trick is to not hesitate and let instincts take over. Standing too long in one place results in muscle tremors, and muscle tremors result in instability…

A final hop over a gap, and I’m across, back on firm ground. An eternity of sandy moguls later, I re-emerge into (relative) civilization, at the foot of a general store in Summit, RI. 11:29 p.m.

I come to the start of the familiar Washington Secondary Trail, a no-nonsense, paved, 20-mile bike path that will take me back into the heart of Federal Hill. Too bonked to go much faster, I hunker down and ride the W2T’s gentle grade back east and north at 18 mph. I daydream about donuts and watch the remaining miles tick down on my GPS. As the forest starts to disappear, I find myself taking stock. It’s these memories that I’ll miss the most about fall at Brown — taking time to explore new things and going on the occasional solo adventure, everything else be damned. Four years pass quickly, just as one season does, but it’s the brevity of these time periods — of moments in transition — that make them so special.

Chen Ye

contributing writer

&

illustr ator

Playing with Passion

A Conversation with Neil Goh ‘20 about BruNotes

“Everything I knew, I realized, came from someone else.”

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work best with. While it was difficult to gather my own materials for a beginner violin curriculum, I knew that my thirdgrade student had to learn the technical rudiments of playing the violin, like holding the bow and comfortably wedging the instrument underneath the chin.

The real struggle was personal, pointing to the question: What did I specifically have to do to spark a passion? To shape her musical path so that it driven by her own motivation to play? To prevent her from quitting two years later, like most other elementary-school musicians do?

It had always been easy to attribute my skills to my own merit, but my experience working with BruNotes brought to light the importance of the teacher.

Everything I knew, I realized, came from someone else.

Why do you think this work is important, and where you see it going in the future?

W

hen students think of community service at Brown, the larger, more well-known organizations associated with the Swearer Center often come to mind. Meanwhile, smaller, overlooked student groups, whose main recruitment strategies are booths at the activities fair, tend to have more specific goals that may better fit people’s personal interests. For example, BruNotes is a music outreach program at Brown that connects volunteer student teachers with low-income youth in the Providence area, allowing students to find a group of like-minded people who love music and enjoy teaching. By eliminating the cost of private lessons, the student-run organization helps students develop a passion for music while promoting hard work and creativity. The most popular types of lessons that BruNotes offers are for piano, both acoustic and electric guitar, and violin; but the full extent of their teaching

repertoire ranges out into voice and even music theory lessons. In this tight-knit community, the members are bonded by specialized shared interests.

Neil Goh ’20 is a school coordinator for BruNotes, pairing students from one of BruNotes’ partner schools, the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, with volunteer teachers from Brown. To get a more intimate look at the BruNotes experience, I asked Neil a few questions.

unfortunately all spots were filled for that semester, so I actually started to teach at the start of second semester.

What is your favorite memory from BruNotes?

NG: Meeting my very first student, a third grader from William D’Abate Elementary, was a really encouraging moment for me, since the third grade was also the year I began my musical career as a violinist.

How long have you been involved with BruNotes, and how did you hear about it?

What are some challenges you’ve faced?

Neil Goh: One day as I was practicing for an audition at Steinert in the beginning of freshman year, I saw a BruNotes poster up on the wall of my practice room. As soon as I left the building I sent an email to the president expressing my interest in the organization, but

NG: Having both patience and empathy as a teacher for beginner violinists. In my excitement to teach, I almost forgot that violin isn’t something you can just pick up in a couple months. But the greatest difficulty I faced wasn’t as much concerned with teaching my student as it was about learning the teaching style I

NG: I think art, not just music, is an essential human need that should be accessible to everyone. Empowering youth with a source of creative expression is something I’m really passionate about, since I know that realizing my musical ability at such a young age ended up opening so many doors for me. The BruNotes community was the perfect place to start doing that in college.

BruNotes may not fit everyone’s personal interests, but there is an abundance of teaching programs available at Brown that allow students to explore their passions in a new way, get involved with the larger Providence community, and be reminded of why they love what they do. No matter where an individual’s interests lie, there is an organization for them to share and create meaningful connections with others through those interests.

Anita Sheih

sec tion editor

Kira Widjaja

staff illustr ator

5

Opportunity Calls

BEAM and the Bubble

F

reshman year, I didn’t get out much. Before you start assuming I was a shy, introverted hermit who never socialized with my peers, I mean getting out more in the metaphorical sense—the metaphor being the “college bubble.” As adventurous and exploratory as I thought I would be upon coming to college, in reality, I rarely left Brown’s campus last year.

For the most part, it was simply because there was never really any reason for me to brave the great beyond, no pull strong enough for me to abandon the cobbled streets surrounding Brown in exchange for the cobbled streets of downtown Providence. I lived in a dorm that was five minutes from my classes, three minutes from the closest library, two minutes from the Ratty, 30 seconds from the nearest gym, two seconds from my best friends... I had everything I thought I needed pretty close by.

Which left me feeling a little conflicted. Was I missing out by eating all my meals on campus and not trying that new taco place downtown or by not taking the train to Boston on that three-day weekend? Well, maybe. But luckily, I had one saving grace: Once a week, I took the RIPTA (for those of you unfamiliar, that’s the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, which offers FREE bus transportation for Brown students) into Olneyville, a neighborhood in Providence. I was a volunteer with the Brown Elementary After-school Mentoring (BEAM) program, and my fellow teachers and I planned and taught lessons in the visual and performing arts for students at the D’Abate Elementary school two hours a week.

There was something about escaping campus, even for a few hours, that was beneficial for my mental state. All of my problems—that pesky comp. lit paper, anxiety about finding a summer internship, even boy drama—seemed so insignificant as soon as I got away from the Van Wickle gates and the Main Green.

Though Brown often felt like it was the whole world, my weekly visits to D’Abate Elementary reminded me that it was only a fraction.

Not only did BEAM provide that much-needed opportunity to actually leave campus, but it also introduced me to a new community of people. Over the course of a year, I first got to know an eager class of third graders, then, the next semester, a rowdy-but-sweet group of fifth graders. Once I’d learned all the students’ names, I spent time discovering their passions and hobbies so I could plan entertaining activities like drawing comic strips and writing and performing rap songs.

They would ask questions about me and my background: where I came from and what exactly Brown was like. I knew when I took the bus to Olneyville each week, I wasn’t just exploring Providence; I was actually interacting with the people who live there, the people outside of Brown’s borders.

This isn’t to say that BEAM was the

only time I ever left campus—I certainly made some infrequent visits to all the usual freshman haunts. I went to Providence Place a few times (always by Uber, because somehow a walk that is more than 15 minutes seems very long when you can cross campus in under 10); I partied down at Colosseum, where I simultaneously had my first kiss and learned that a kiss in a club doesn’t mean anything; I saw one of my favorite artists, Regina Spektor, at Lupo’s in the spring, and, not gonna lie, felt like a total badass because I was at a concert on a Monday night; I traveled once to Newport, but didn’t even do that right, because I went with my parents on Family Weekend on a dreary, rainy day (instead of going in September to the beach and taking loads of Instagrammable pics with my friends). Then there were the short road trips to nearby schools for Frisbee tournaments, and sometimes, hiking all the way to the Nelson felt like a sizeable journey. But, while these ventures were few and far between, BEAM gave me

RhodeIslandRedFoodTours.com

a routine and meaningful reason to exit the college gates once a week, leaving me mentally refreshed and re-energized.

I’m not saying that in order to have a well-rounded undergraduate experience, you need to constantly be exploring Providence and the surrounding cities. Like I said, I rarely left campus except with BEAM and on a few other occasions. But, while Brown is a relatively diverse school, it is still certainly not an accurate representation of the world. The advantage of a volunteer program like BEAM (and other organizations in the Swearer Center) is that it becomes a built-in opportunity to envelop yourself in a different environment, to become not just a part of Brown, but also a part of the Providence community.

Eliza Cain

staff writer

Harim Choi

staff illustr ator

Unpacking Orange

“

There is no orange without blue,” said Vincent van Gogh. Arches National Park has stacked orange rocks against a sky so deeply blue it seems the color has been pasted on.

These rocks make sweet-potato gateways that flicker from peach-pit orange to the inside of a summer-sunburst tomato. A stripe of steamed mussel gives way to mums in a flowerpot, and then to the terra cotta pot itself. As orange as the sky makes the arches, the arches make the sky blue. The bigness of these colors give me the confidence to pocket a tiny pebble, but when I unpack it at home, it is brown.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude filled Central Park with The Gates. They made up a silken glowing orange tunnel in the black and white branch and snow winter. I walked through the gates, tiny with wonder, pale with black home-cut bangs sticking to my forehead underneath my bundled winter hat. Jeanne-Claude’s hair is orange, too, although her shade would get called red in conversation. In a Google image search, her hair’s outer perimeter ignites when any light shines through. She and Christo stand in front of The Gates, holding each other’s hands. Her hair’s fire matches her bold lipstick and art installation.

Some old Indian men use henna to color their beards against inevitable greys. Practically bald and clean shaven, my grandpa, Bapa, would have never.

With henna applied, instead of salt and pepper, it’s fire and pepper. This natural dye does not look very natural. But orange and pink together feels very Indian to me. I can enjoy my heritage through

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Fire and Pepper

a color scheme, wear it on scarves and clothes, and indulge in it through turmeric spiced foods that stain my lips.

Orange has a wavelength of 585620 nanometers. The traditional pigments used to make orange are orpiment, which is found in arsenic mines, or realgar, a highly toxic arsenic sulfate.

So far, orange is poison. Then there are crocoite crystals, which make chrome orange. Saffron threads, a natural option, are the stigmas of crocus sativus and taste good. Turmeric, also a natural pigment, is derived from the curcuma longa plant. It’s a root, but we often see it as a powder. This yellow-orange dust discourages inflammation, while other oranges depict it. Cadmium orange, a favorite, takes pigment back to toxicity with cadmium sulfide that stains the tips of oil painters’ fingers. Original orange oil paint consisted of minium

“The bigness of these colors give me the confidence to pocket a tiny pebble, but when I unpack it at home, it is brown.” and massicot, two toxic tints made by heating lead oxide. Chrome and cad orange replaced these when the 20th century painters replaced those of the 19th. Still toxic, but less toxic. Even less toxic, quinacridone orange is supposed

to be as good as cad orange. My painting teacher last summer would disagree.

Self-mixed tube of lead white paint in hand, he would point out that we worry about toxic paints, but eat Doritos, which get their colors from pigments named after numbers: Yellow 6, Yellow 5, and Red 40. So, as Annie Dillard might conclude: so.

Ear crest, nose bridge, cheeks, fingertips, and knuckles in “Antoinette’s Caress” are all orange. The color comes up in the thin parts of skin of Mary Cassatt’s impressionist portrait of a mother and child. The child’s teeny fingers glow toward mother’s face. Tucked in a different gallery, Sherrie Levine’s “Check #5” pitches brown mahogany against green rectangles. The wax makes it flat and matte. This color combination makes for a natural green and dangerously glowing brown-orange. RISD’s red Rothko has a white square atop a smaller orange one. It may just be thinly removed red that seems orange, but with the stripe of yellow at the top of the square lets it feel like a warm body. At the tip of the tulip-inspired Trots Zynsky glass vase, the floral orange gives the appearance of a flash-fried fiori di zucca.

My grandmother knows how to make these, and the rest of my family knows how to eat them.

Rubbery, plastic-wrapped American cheese squares actually earn their shade of orange from nature. Annatto, “a natural food colour made from the seeds of the achiote tree” gets credit for the hue, according to a British Wikipedia user. Wikipedia’s “orange (colour)” page has a wonderfully bizarre list of foods, spanning from “khrenovina

sauce, a traditional Siberian sauce made of tomatoes, garlic and horseradish,” to “orange coloured pumpkin pie is the traditional dessert at a U.S. Thanksgiving dinner.”

The best orange in winter, however, is a clementine, each one a tiny bright gift. There are also two weeks of sumo oranges, little mottled freckled fruits that look lemony, but pack a flavor intensely orange. I stick my thumbnail into the rind of one and slide it between the taut orange slices and the fuzzy pith.

The skin peels away in one piece, swirling around and down and falling like a snow-laden coat. They are in season so quickly that it might be over by the time you remember they exist.

In the RISD Museum, a schoolteacher sits behind a field trip of little kids clustered on an orange cork floor.

An orange #2 pencil wiggles behind the teacher’s ear while he sketches something with a pen. There are no centrally orange pieces in the museum, and yet the color finds its way everywhere. It functions more as an accessory. One orange house in Cézanne’s “On the Banks of a River” is two orange squares reflected in water. On my way out of the gallery, a man swings a big iron bar with an ember on the tip in a video installation that I think is about dance.

Pia Mileaf-Patel

contributing writer

Caroline Hu

staff illustr ator

7

Don’t Call it a Comeback

V

alerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton’s new film, Battle of the Sexes, is a fascinating anomaly. It’s a tennis movie not all that interested in sports, a feminist allegory not all that interested in society, and a historical drama about events that could have happened last week. What it is, primarily, is easy to watch, occasionally visually stunning, masterfully edited, and ultimately predictable—which, of course, doesn’t matter.

It’s 1973, and women’s singles champion Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) faces off against Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) in an intersex clash of the titans at the Houston Astrodome before a TV audience of ninety million. The match itself takes up perhaps ten minutes of screen time; mostly, we luxuriate in the lead-up. (I’d like to see a triple feature of this film, 2008’s Frost/Nixon, and 2016’s Elvis and Nixon, all gloriously seventies, all mostly about desperate but somehow flashy preparation.)

We follow King, as she helps found a women’s tour and explores her sexuality, and Riggs, as he deals with the dissolution of his marriage and his rampant gambling addiction. The titular battle, we learn, serves different purposes for each—King, the more high-minded, has something to prove on behalf of women’s lib. Riggs, more of a buffoon than an outright sexist, is merely excited at the prospect of the spotlight and the prize money. We laugh along with him throughout, until we see male fans at the Astrodome holding signs bearing the slogan “I Am a Male Chauvinist Pig”— Riggs’s mantra. The film’s interest is not solely in the flamboyant sexism of, say, tennis exec Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman), but also the kind that reminds us that the words and attitudes of individuals matter—and resonate. The movie is ground-level: It’s King’s success, rather than the broad-based success of women generally, that drives the more

At the Movies: Battle of the Sexes and Blade Runner 2049

aspirational elements of the plot.

It’d be obvious even to the historically illiterate viewer that King is fated to win from the get-go (as she did, in straight sets), and yet, remarkably, both Riggs and King come off as remarkably complex, flawed, and sympathetic. Stone and Carell are live wires; it seems cruel that, in both this film and in Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), they share only momentary screen time.

In the latter picture, Stone shows up at a birthday party thrown by Carell, where the two barely talk, and, in Sexes, their longest conversation occurs by telephone. Perhaps they are to be this generation’s Pacino and De Niro in Heat (1995), dancing around each other at a distance, only with rackets instead of handguns. What’s new here—and what belies this film’s title—is that somehow, barely interacting, both Stone and Carell each manage, through sheer dogged excellence, to support and justify the other’s performance, and the film itself, from afar and within. Stone’s sweetness gives the unconventional Carell a springboard, while Carell’s blithe ignorance gives Stone’s freedom fighter a reason to exist. Thus one of the film’s more surprising, and interesting, themes—symbiosis. *** Talk about symbiosis—Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and the newly released sequel, Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, both begin with an extreme close-up of a breathtakingly green eye opening, and both end with an image of an uncertain Harrison Ford: in Scott’s film, his face behind a closing elevator door, and in Villeneuve’s, behind a plate-glass window.

2049 is its own film, though, self-evidently so. In the first Blade Runner, Scott’s future world, where androids called replicants, indistinguishable from humans, roam the earth, leaned on visual themes of inaccessibility and claustrophobia; in the

process, it was innovative in literally every frame. Villeneuve’s sequel, by contrast, is visually wide-open, letting K (Ryan Gosling), the spiritual follower of Ford’s Rick Deckard, fly in his hovercraft above the same cityscape that hemmed in the world of the first film. In place of innovation, per se, 2049 is cool, relentlessly cool, from start to nearlythree-hours-later finish. This may sound dismissive, but it’s not meant to be. We need more sweep and more sprawl in science fiction, and the first step is to look gorgeous.

Villeneuve (who also directed Arrival), and cinematographer Roger Deakins, have that in the bag.

The story doesn’t handle the sprawl quite as well. Hampton Fancher, who cowrote the first film, takes screenplay duties here along with Michael Green (Logan), and his world-building is agreeably complex and difficult, but there’s a lot that just doesn’t add up. Thematic threads are taken up and abandoned (a prospective rebellion comes to mind), twists are disappointing or manipulative, and eventually we move definitively into the realm of traditional sequel box-checking: Harrison Ford, it seems, must in every reboot or reimagining have an uncomfortable reunion with his offspring.

Admirably, both Fancher and Green and Villeneuve seem totally committed to the vision of the film, and the mosaic is conceptually total even if imperfect, which is a rarer and rarer quality in modern sci-fi. But the awkward moral argument that replicants are basically parallel to slaves plays even less convincingly here than in the original.

“If a baby can come from one of us,” intones Hiam Abbass, as a replicant rebel leader, “then we are our own masters.” Really? Who says?

It should be no surprise that Ford and Gosling have the chemistry that was so lacking between Ford’s Han Solo and John Boyega’s Finn in the most recent Star

Wars picture; after all, the stars of 2049 appear to have been hewn from the same block of faintly smirking granite. But Sylvia Hoeks, as a replicant who does double duty as a corporate executive and an assassin, is, in her terrifying weepy blankness, the best thing in the film. The cherry on top is that her character’s name, in an instance of triumphant ridiculousness, is Luv; Ana de Armas also pops up as a hologram named Joi. Presumably the other five dwarves were unavailable. Jared Leto, as Niander Wallace, Luv’s boss and the ostensible big bad, is by comparison a bore, spouting the same pseudo-religious gobbledygook you might expect to hear passing Jared Leto on the street.

Many stretches of this film drag a bit, but watching Leto, and imagining the method antics he got up to on set, is like Chinese water torture.

The film is constantly probing and ambitious, but it’s truly exciting only in one sequence, set on what’s left of a beach in Los Angeles. In one delicious moment, Hoeks and Gosling, rolling over one another as they fight to the death, slip under a crashing wave, and you hold out hope they’ll emerge in a lovers’ embrace, like Lancaster and Kerr in From Here to Eternity. (2049, to its credit, seems obsessed with Frank Sinatra, so this isn’t as far out as it sounds.) Alas, they merely continue to strangle and stab one another, in the style of high-concept action movies—which, one comes to realize, is basically what 2049 wants to be. As the tussle continues, Ford, trapped in a car rapidly sinking into the surf, rolls his eyes and emits an audible sigh. This guy can have fun anywhere.

James Feinberg staff writer

Lisa Fasol

illustr ator

Do You Remember Today?

I

t begins with waking up. Your very first thought is how to make it stop. But the alarm keeps going. You have no choice but to get out of bed, even though what awaits you is the same as yesterday. The same weather, the same family, the same friends, the same school, the same songs on the radio. Even though it’s all happened before, you move with more urgency today.

You’re rushing to a meeting you just remembered, something you scheduled long ago, when suddenly you wake up a second time.

A revelation flashes through your mind: It’s not me who’s late, but everyone else! And then a worse thought pops into your mind: It is the world itself that has stopped!

Ever since 1993’s Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray as an obnoxious weatherman trapped in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, it was only a matter of time until Hollywood found the magical formula.

Start with a troubled character attempting to accomplish a simple goal on an important day (get through the annual Groundhog Day broadcast and back to Pittsburgh), add a “natural” or “outside” problem that serves as a foil (an unexpected snowstorm), lay the seeds for a B-plot romance (fellow broadcast partner played by Andie MacDowell), and watch the great gears of repetition do their work.

After the 2014 Tom Cruise-Emily Blunt vehicle Edge of Tomorrow and the little-seen 2016 Netflix original ARQ, 2017 has seen at least two films that fit neatly into the “time loop” genre. The first is Before I Fall, starring Zoey Deutch as a popular high school student reliving Valentine’s Day, and the latest is coming out this weekend: a horror film, Happy Death Day, featuring Jessica Rothe as a sorority girl named Tree celebrating her birthday, only to be murdered at night by a masked mute.

How do we make sense of this latest fad in Hollywood? Is it simply a lazy form that filmmakers are falling back upon? Or are broader cultural forces at work here, shaping

Happy Death Day and the “Time Loop” Film Genre

and determining these films before the first draft of scripts are ever turned in?

One way to classify the “time loop” movie is to file it under a category that film scholar Thomas Elsaesser calls the “mind-game film.” These films tend to be deeply psychological (the mind part of Elsaesser term) and include movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Memento, and Inception. In both Before I Fall and Happy Death Day, protagonists grow increasingly mentally unstable. Confusion gives way to depression and eventually suicide. Happy Death Day’s Tree wakes up every morning with a headache, demanding Advil from her one-night stand. Eventually, she starts consuming the entire bottle. Alongside mental illness, Before I Fall and Happy Death Day’s plots involve a classic trauma, the dead mother. Trauma, in psychoanalytic theory at least, can become a “repetition compulsion,” where the victims reenact the traumatic event within their dreams.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud identifies a vital location where trauma is worked through: childhood games.

Likewise, only by solving “the game” can characters in “time loop” films return to a better state of mind. Elsaesser believes these films offer “productive pathologies” because they teach characters (and viewers) how to problem-solve within the matrix of society.

Groundhog Day’s protagonist, Phil Connors, learns new skills (playing piano, French) in efforts to win the love of Rita. But it is ethical or spiritual improvement that saves him—Phil rescues a dying homeless man and prevents another man from choking on his steak at dinner. Eventually, Phil runs from one event to another, having perfectly calculated the most good he can do in a single day.

Before I Fall takes after Groundhog Day in that Deutch’s Samantha learns to put others before herself. This lesson, that you are not the center of the world, is the same as so many teen films: Sam learns to appreci-

ate her parents and her younger sister. She breaks up with her jock boyfriend, Rob, and ends up with the boy next door, Kent. At the end of the film, she sacrifices herself to prevent the suicide of a girl her friends had bullied for years. As her life flashes before her eyes, Sam narrates her transformation.

Repetition gives way to difference. History returns, but at the cost of all of Sam’s possible futures. The ultimate revelation is the catastrophic annihilation of the self.

Happy Death Day is at once a sillier and stranger film than Before I Fall. The characters are little more than sketches, a combination of bitchy sorority sisters, generic white guys, and a raving serial killer. So many of the gags have just been dug up from the horror genre graveyard (Never walk alone in a dark tunnel!) that the laughs hit harder than the scares. Tree’s investment in becoming a better person is also never more than skin deep; she signs a petition to “fight global warming” and cushions a fainting fraternity pledge with the help of a pillow.

Really changing the world there! Sensing its own minimal intelligence, Happy Death Day goes wild in its third act, hiding a major plot twist behind the mask of Tree’s killer.

The final moments, like Groundhog Day, are meteorologically and romantically sunny.

While it remains a disappointment that the “time loop” genre has still not found its radical potential, now is not the time to despair. “Time loop” films are infinitely hopeful: They tell us we can always try again tomorrow. Already, this is a genre that teaches characters to read and reread the world.

The diegesis becomes a stable text (like any book or film) in order for us to begin interpretation and to look for clues, hidden histories, and alternative futures. But Samantha and Tree are not good enough readers. Their desires are too narrow, their pleasures too personal, for them to realize the potential of freedom. Sam and Tree are caught in the postmodern world that Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson describes:

“[It] would be better characterize[d] all in terms of History, a History that we cannot imagine except as ending, and whose future seems to be nothing but a monotonous repetition of what is already here. The problem is then how to locate radical difference; how to jumpstart the sense of history so that it begins again to transmit feeble signals of time, of otherness, of change, of Utopia.”

My hope for the “time loop” genre is that we’ll see a movie that jumpstarts the cycle of repetition with a radical ideological commitment, rather than just a personal transformation. Sweeping aside powerful structures of oppression, it is not just Samantha or Tree who are repeating the same day, but many people, even a majority.

As an ever-greater number of people wake up to the permanent crisis (living the same day), new forms of social organizations and society would become visible.

Instead, we leave the dark movie theaters to return to our own “time loop” films.

Falling asleep, you ask the same question every night: When will the revolution finally begin?

Josh Wartel

sec tion editor

Doris Liou

he ad llustr ator

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2 You are a crank inside a combustion engine.

3 You are stuck behind slow walkers and late to class.

4 There is a stain on the shirt you want to wear.

5 Angela, the interviewer for your dream job, cancels your dream job. This has nothing to do with the mixtaped you mailed them “just

who “Now that I have Tinder, ” needs LinkedIn anymore?

to show you care”.

6 It is raining outside.

7 You got a job offer with your second-favorite company. Then the offer is rescinded. Apparently Angela likes to gab.

8 Jo’s is out of regular flavored coconut water.

9 Your 9 a.m. alarm.

10 Alicia wrote the entire top 10.

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“I’m this Christin seme a ster.” Paxdon e wit h