Two recent dramas that pivot on the fraught convergence of consent, power, and desire have turned these tropes on their heads by inverting the gender of the potentially abusive adults. Todd Field’s Tár (2022) and Todd Haynes’s May December (2023) both center on complex adult female characters who fall for young paramours. In Tár, Cate Blanchett plays a world-renowned composer-conductor whose affairs with younger female musicians end up undermining her career. In May December, Julianne Moore plays Gracie, an aging belle once sent to prison for having an illicit sexual affair with a Korean American seventh grader, Joe, whom she later married. Made during, and directly responding to the provocations of, the #MeToo era, both films question whether the ethics and politics of intergenerational desire change when the gender, sexuality, and/or race of the players depart from the standard pattern.
May 2018 was a pivotal moment for people we might now call “anti-woke” thinkers. When Bari Weiss put together a feature on “the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” writers and academics who churned out books and blog posts on political correctness suddenly acquired the sheen of glamour that comes from having a forbidden or dissident point of view. The piece, which profiled “a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities” who felt “locked out of legacy outl
If I were asked to trace the decline of the American psyche, I suppose I would go to a set of cultural changes that started directly after World War II and built over the next few decades, when writers as diverse as Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch and Tom Wolfe noticed the emergence of what came to be known as the therapeutic culture.