Until recently, I had never seen Ewan McGregor’s movie adaptation of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. I had hardly heard of it. And when I researched it, I found that it had been a serious flop in 2016, earning about a tenth of what it cost. But when my wife and I came across the picture, hiding in the stream, we loved it and were moved by it.

I don’t mean to call it a masterpiece. That can be too much of a burden. But it is so well done (it is the only film McGregor has directed, so far). What did we like? I think it was the unstressed sadness, and how that emotion grew out of its unusual study of a decent family in New Jersey coming apart. It’s about a couple (played by McGregor and Jennifer Connelly) who have a daughter (Dakota Fanning) who has a serious stammer. This is only smoothed away when, grown up, she becomes opposed to so much of Vietnam-era America and takes up a life of underground terrorism in which she bombs a small post office and kills a passer-by. It also destroys her father who had been a shining success in his young life, an athletic hero and a model for many onlookers.

The film sent me to Roth’s novel, published in 1997, to discover how much plot in the 423-page book the film had omitted (it was scripted by John Romano, a good writer on Hill Street Blues and the Coen Brothers’ movie, Intolerable Cruelty). I could see why these cuts had been made, and did not regret them because I felt McGregor had delivered what Roth intended. But the film had an urgency that improved on the Dickensian detail of Roth’s writing; this can be not so much rich and rewarding as claustrophobic. I don’t think it is the great book some commentators (like Harold Bloom) have claimed. Sometimes a movie can get to a point in a compelling way in one shot, instead of three pages. Of course, Roth was so esteemed that may have left editors afraid to touch him.

There has been a truism for decades that great novels make disappointing films while minor or even pulp fiction can be resplendent on the screen. So the films of Anna Karenina or The Great Gatsby are pathetic whereas very effective pictures were made from Double Indemnity (by James M. Cain), Kiss Me Deadly (Mickey Spillane) and The Graduate (Charles Webb). But this orthodoxy has been altered by television’s ability to do a novel, or a series of novels, in proper detail. Part of the impact of the original BBC The Forsyte Saga, in 1967, was that all (or nearly all) the narrative was covered, along with enviable period interiors and a cast of fine performances all done with care and respect. No one then anticipated what we now call long-form television with a literary reach. But it would grow into such epics as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Babylon Berlin and Ozark, which at over 40 hours on screen became novels on film — those old-fashioned novels that favor realistic social context, full descriptions of place, furnishing and atmosphere, and a delight in colorful small-part characters.

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What I’m talking about is not just a texture of physical realism, but the chance of the story leaving characters more affected by doubt than saved by sudden brave adventure and melodramatic resolution. What I like about the film of American Pastoral is the way McGregor’s character breaks down, without collapsing, so that he anticipates his death before it arrives. It’s a movie that ends with a more poignant, though hushed, feeling for its America, its dream and its imagination, than we expected. It has uncertainties that are usually resolved or tidied up in our movies. That trait is a profound giveaway: American optimism is so desperately insecure. As if we all guess quietly that the recommended positive thinking is a scam.

Does that sound depressing? Movies have promised us modest fun all our lives. But are we really grown-up if we always accept that pressure in movies to have us feel good — again, or not for the first time (as if some grandeur has been lost or taken from us)? Isn’t that the inability to face life that cripples President Trump in his insistence on making America great again? What does that “again” refer to? To slavery, the exploitation of wilderness, to a crowd of unknown souls? When one might aspire instead to decent ordinariness, aware that most of us will die in some sense of failure, and in poverty and anonymity. How irrational to hope for anything much better — like wealth, fame, sexual glory, unhindered ego and an arch of our own — those abiding measures of cinematic fantasy.

What I like about the movie of American Pastoral is that lasting dismay, and a movie experience from which you walk back into the light, not humming the theme song, but so lost in thought you hardly want to talk to other people about what you felt. Because feeling life can be too complicated. So many bought the American ads — until recently.

The marriage of novels and films can work in strange ways. For example, Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, published in 1937, is one of his best books — hard, clipped, unsentimental, but assured. But it never won much critical approval. There is a film of it, made by Howard Hawks in 1944, with Humphrey Bogart and introducing Lauren Bacall. It is a travesty of the book (no matter that William Faulkner was one of the screenwriters) but it is a glorious film: a screwball fantasy about courage, wit and sexiness (that uniquely American screen quality). It’s a good example of how Hollywood insouciance could massage a tough book into silky magic.

Hemingway fumed at the movie, but pocketed the deal. Movie has hung over authorship with its apparent promise of easy money. Time and again, Hollywood ruined his work — The Old Man and the Sea (with Spencer Tracy absurd as the Hispanic fisherman) has to be seen to be believed. But was it a dumb book in the first place?

We might all be better off if some fairly challenging novels had been filmed by someone as thoughtful as Ewan McGregor. So why is there no movie of Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow (I think Jack Nicholson wanted to do it), or Democracy by Joan Didion (her masterpiece but hardly known), or Kate Vaiden by Reynolds Price, or The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (where a character wonders if he has seen William Holden on the street that gets at the heart of film in a way that could never be filmed), or of James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, which in its terse, tender way outflanks most films’ wish to cover sex?

It’s possible for the seasoned observer to say: don’t worry, let literature look after itself. Fair point. It could be that novels will be here after we have stopped making movies. (That seems more likely now than 50 years ago.) Leave open the possibility that the novel’s openness to doubt, disenchanted reflection, and an understanding of failure may keep it alive. Film is in many ways a narrative form, and we still like to follow a story. But film can offer piercing feeling in a split second. And so our “American Imagination” might be more mature if it was open to a little more dismay as well as the thrill of immediate impact. Like Bacall asking Bogart if he knows how to whistle.

This is not only the American Imagination, though that is discussed much more often than the English Imagination — is that because Americans are so desperate to observe themselves in a fit of narcissism, and are in a habit of watching themselves as cinema? Does the happy ending lead to its own madness? I can think of no sadness to surpass Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) which starts off by calling itself “the saddest story ever told”. This is an English novel, though most of it takes place on the Continent and one of its characters is American. It’s an uncanny book, one to return to every year or so. There was a television version made in Britain in 1981, and it’s faithful to the book’s lethal irony and poisoned allure. But there ought to be a new movie of the novel, one fit for our nausea now, that leaves us unclean or disturbed at having kept company with the characters.

You see, there is a chance in a book that we will be left in shocked awareness of what it is to be left alive.

***

A Sudden Flicker of Light by David Thomson is published by Allen Lane on 7 July 2026.

Set in Uppsala, Sweden the film follows the sprawling Ekdahl family through the eyes of 10-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve) and his younger sister Fanny (Pernilla Allwin). Their father, the bohemian Oscar (Allan Edwall) runs a charming, ramshackle family theater; their grandmother Helena (Gunn Wållgren), the family matriarch, presides over lavish dinners and her son’s productions, while entertaining the discreet presence of her lover, the Jewish art dealer Isak Jacobi (Erland Josephson). The first part the film, which I’m concerned with here, shows us the course of Christmas Eve, from dawn to early morning Christmas Day: meal preparation, rehearsal at the theater (including a moving speech by Oscar), the arrival of the extended Ekdahl family, Christmas dinner (toasts, jokes, songs), coffee and gossip for the adults while the children pretend to fall asleep. 

Fanny and Alexander is Bergman’s last major film (he continued directing for the stage and television), and it inverts much of what we think of as Bergman-esque. It is shot in vivid color, and part one especially does not show us the psychological and spiritual torsion produced by an unbearable, isolating modernity (think, most famously perhaps, Persona); instead it offers a cozy, loving (albeit imperfect) family ecology in which Christmas, through ritual and tradition, is the center of the energy and spirit of the Ekdahl clan.

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Bergman’s nostalgic but still realistic depiction of what Christmas looked like without electronic technology — and, by extension, without the constant overhang of global anxieties, global threats, and globalized media culture — returns the focus to the house and the family. The family is most relevant to us because of its anti-relevance, because it’s so alien to our own sensibilities. The long takes with depth of field, overlapping dialog, motion, and frames crowded with fabric, wood, candlelight, food, color, highlight the importance of the home during long, snowy Nordic winters, and display the plenitude of bourgeois life and the humanistic warmth of the Ekdahl family.

This theatrical Christmas, as the camera shows, flows throughout the entire house: bedrooms, servants’ quarters, kitchens, drawing rooms, dining rooms. We hear the jingle of sleigh bells outside. Even though the world of adults that young Alexander encounters is lurid, deceptive, and in some cases embittered (Bergman rarely idealizes), the wider field of family is soulful and alive. The warmth of tradition overrides the neurotic contradictions of the everyday bourgeois world.

Bergman’s convincing recreation of the late 19th century or early 20th century household appeals to us because it shows us what Christmas was before mass media, and indeed before Christmas movies themselves. The irony of Fanny and Alexander is that it exists before cinema, or it takes place before cinema was created. Because movies haven’t been invented yet, Alexander must rely on watching a magic lantern projected against his bedroom wall; in 1900, life itself was the Christmas movie.

Bergman’s message is ambivalently bound up in his medium. Many of the best Christmas movies, in other words, are acts of mourning, which locate moments when some bit of cultural innocence or candor, exuberance, and intensity were shed in exchange for something more efficient. Though shot in the early 1980s, Fanny and Alexander represent the world of yesterday. There is something of a straight line from it to American Christmas movies of the ’80s and ’90s, which are almost entirely about the tragicomedy of small nuclear households trying to survive the absurdity of maintaining Christmas traditions and getting everyone the gifts they want (Home Alone, Jingle All the Way, The Santa Clause, Christmas With the Kranks).

Fanny and Alexander is almost unbearably moving because of the intergenerational tenderness and care displayed by the extended family in the film. The domestic arrangements of Bergman’s masterpiece seems much further away from us even than the idealized nuclear family in It’s a Wonderful Life, and certainly from the screen-alienated modern family. Here, young Alexander Ekdahl, the son of a man of the theater (who later in the film dies of a heart attack), experiences Christmas at home as a dense maze of conversations, games, song, and hijinks late into the night. Family life is a multi-generational web; his experience of a single night is rooted in centuries of Christmases and of Ekdahls. 

Christmas movies show us how families respond to pressure, and how families recover from the pressures and torments of ordinary life. They are idealized on the whole, because the larger thrust of Christmas is in the direction of charity, forgiveness, and communion, both secular and sacred. Audiences in the ’80s watching Bergman’s film knew that the bourgeois world ended and had to end, and watching the movie again in our decade, in our new century, we also know that the bourgeois world ended and had to end. 

Christmas movies are compensation. We have them because we can no longer have the past. That, I think, is inarguable. But I also think we can look at Christmas movies as codes or scripts or algorithms, in a sense, which we can use to reprogram our lives, borrowing from them to restore both material and spiritual vital components.

What strikes me maybe most about rewatching Fanny and Alexander in 2025, on the cusp of 2026, is how much the actual material costs of having a 19th-century Christmas have fallen; if we wanted to, Christmas could be something like this: convivial, screen-free, humane, sacred and profane at once. The obvious critique of the 19th-century Christmas is that it would have only been available to a few, or a smaller section of society (maybe 20% or 30% of society in 1900). Candlelight, singing, food from farms, children, big families, people of all ages gathering together: none of these things are beyond the means of the average household in 2025, only beyond our imaginations.

So there it is: the uncomfortable irony of Bergman’s classic. The world of today does not use its resources very well. And Christmas is not a celebration of the plenitude and solidity of the well-appointed household, but an insane and alienated striving after stuff and entertainment, in which the last days of December provide considerably less solace, joy, and closeness than they used to.

It might be the case that we are at the point in our civilization where Christmas is a broken technology that we no longer know how to use. Movies or novels — think Dickens, for instance — contain records of how that technology used to work. And I would suggest that we might allow ourselves to be romantic enough to try to learn again what Christmas was, motivated by the depressing contrast with what it is.

Welcome to the situationship economy.

Created by algorithms, this is a culture in which social status, geography, money, and convention are empowered to choose for us in ways that resemble premodern mores. Instead of meddling, class-conscious parents, there is now an array of buzzing sensors and guardrails, indifferent to the pulses of romance and demoralizing to anyone who would like to imagine that they are free to choose.

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This was not always the case. The period between 1965 and 2012, roughly between the Sexual Revolution and the rise of dating apps, was a transformative era for American romance. During this time, most of the country adopted the sexual and relationship mores once associated with beatniks and bohemians. Premarital sex and cohabitation became normalized. Marriages lost any vestigial signs of being arranged — whether by parents, pastors, community elders, or extended families — and both marriage and dating became fully marketized.

Gradually, as coupling became shaped more by the market than by community ties, Americans embraced what might be called a cult of choice: the belief in finding the perfect person, a beloved who might have been inaccessible under previous forms of marriage shaped by custom and convention. This led to an explosion of spontaneous desire and also to great unhappiness; mid-century portrayals of marriage were not exactly hopeful or happy. 

In film and literature of the era, this disillusionment is palpable. Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) depicts the strained marriage of Maggie and Brick Pollitt, held together only by money and status — an aristocratic Southern power marriage gone wrong. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is similarly pessimistic. Richard Yates’s powerful 1961 novel, Revolutionary Road, takes us through the unraveling suburban marriage of Frank and April Wheeler, both of whom dream of art, sex, and bohemia in the city.

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A few years later, Esther Greenwood, in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), views marriage as a trap and fears becoming like her mother. In Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), George and Martha, a couple from the Northeastern elite and a good class match, stay together, but their marriage is desperate and miserable. In Nichols’s next film, The Graduate (1967), Benjamin Braddock is seduced by Mrs. Robinson, a woman of the previous generation, who is trapped in a bad marriage sustained only by alcohol and convention. All of these portrayals, in their own way, echo Madame Bovary — the ur-text for the discontents of the modern bourgeoisie.

There was a clear shift in the emphasis of culture narratives in the Eighties, a period of economic deregulation and globalization: stories of unhappy marriages were discarded in favor of successful dating stories, in which love as a personal, autonomous, market-based solution triumphs. After 1980 — and after the Aquarian, punk, experimental Seventies — something shifted in American romantic culture: middle-class dating and marriage were re-conceived as free choice, without the vestigial social expectations that produced mid-century ennui; dating became liberatory and coupling an achievement, not a sacrifice. 

Sex, dating, and marriage became totally liberalized, subject to the adjudication of the marketplace. A corollary social myth arose in which the liberated choice of partner was the only relationship that couldn’t be socially constructed (though of course, it was mediated silently by the market instead). Culture circled back towards Jane Austen and away from Bovary. The romantic comedy became the primary vehicle through which two individuals navigated class and social pressures to find true love, guided by both emotion and reason, rather than the bourgeois tragedy in which moderately unfree people suffer at each other’s hands.

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When Harry Met Sally (1989) introduces two yuppies who convert friendship into genuine love. Richard Curtis’s Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Notting Hill (1999) celebrate unions that defy social expectations, pairing Brits and Americans in a globalized culture that allows more choice, more freedom, and more happiness. The deeply romantic Before Sunrise (1995) begins with an American (Ethan Hawke), at the end of a study abroad trip, meeting a French woman (Julie Delpy) on a train; the early-Nineties romantic world is open and exciting and full of possibility. Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1998) has two yuppies converting a business rivalry into love. The movie begins as a story about internet retail destroying brick-and-mortar bookstores, but love ends up overcoming the trauma of neoliberalism; Meg Ryan, the shop owner, falls for Tom Hanks, the big-box-store guy; romance redeems economic antagonism. Both Seinfeld and Sex and the City, canonical Nineties TV shows, feature successful protagonists who are always dating, never settling.

After 2010, however, the magic ran out, giving rise to today’s neo-feudal order, with algorithms now playing the role of stern parents and village busybodies. The 2010 cult hit Blue Valentine marks this shift: free romantic choice across class barriers leads to tragedy, embarrassment. Yuppie, Boomer optimism is gone; Millennial pessimism has arrived.

In this era, romance is less about love, and more about whether you’ve made it; fame first, pair-bonding second or third or fourth. Lorde’s breakthrough 2013 song “Royals” commences the decade’s obsession with status and status cosplay. In Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, career frustrations demolish a loving union. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s seminal series Fleabag is about someone who is basically unlovable or incapable of love.

Charli XCX’s 2020 song “Forever” crystallizes the final transition out of the rom-com economy, in which choice was validated, into the long-gestating situationship economy of today, in which real choice is impossible — and infinitely delayed. “Forever” is sung from the point of view of a fragmented consciousness which idealizes what will never be, and has never been, experienced: rooted, historically mediated, lasting love.

Similarly, the 2020 High Fidelity reboot, starring Zoë Kravitz, takes a beloved Gen-X rom-com and turns it into a depressive, sepia-toned portrait of consumerist dissatisfaction. The market works in the 2000 movie, adapted from Nick Hornby’s novel. But in the 2020 TV show, the market is broken. The record-store hipster in the original can still find a love that suits his tastes; in the remake, she can’t.

This breakdown of personal choice mirrors a larger collapse of faith in the systems that once promised abundance and connection.

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The situationship economy — the reversion to caste-like determinism without the definitiveness of arranged marriage — is a subtle and invisible reversal of a period in which culture celebrated romantic choice (the rom-com economy), the culture in which people born between 1980 and 2010 were raised, but not the one they inherited (or helped create). The learned expectation, in other words, is of freedom of choice. But reality — post-iPhone and, increasingly, post-AI — is morbidly deterministic.

As with economic liberalization, the irony of romantic liberalization is that it has given birth to its opposite: a feeling of extreme overdetermination and the submission to the algorithm and to the social logic embedded within it. Gone is the post-globalization fantasy of finding a partner in another part of the world or across economic classes via an Austen-like combination of reason and heady emotion. Trump-era tariffs and economic recalibration register this cultural shift in the material realm.

From 1980 to 2010, singles were entrepreneurs within the romance market; after 2010, they increasingly became raw resources to be extracted and packaged. We have been trained to sell ourselves as products, to expect that our “product” can be ranked, and to believe we deserve products of a similar ranking. Men and women alike, though differently, now obsessively assert their preferences on apps like Hinge: height, weight, age, religion, politics. “No Trump supporters. No one under six feet. No one over 25. Not looking for anything serious.” These aren’t the views or behaviors of people who believe that love is a harmonious pattern of extremely complex attitudes. They are rather the views of people in thrall to a brutal utilitarian logic and a vision of social class as an insuperable barrier.

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The lesson here is that every era of romance, love, dating, and marriage is historically conditioned. Through a secular lens, no specific romantic arrangement or habit can assert itself as the definitive or universal one. Yet, paradoxically, by removing romantic blinders and seeing ourselves as products of social and historical conditioning   — acknowledging that dark truth  — we can pay heed to elements of a common and continuing human condition: our deeper potential to take an active, rather than passive, role in our fundamental commitments and choices.

For Jane Austen is finally preferable to Flaubert; Elizabeth and Darcy to Charles and Emma. The classic rom-coms still delight. There’s something moving about the possibility of two people choosing each other outside of the forcefield of social mores and pressures. But what makes romance funny, what brings delight, and not tragedy, is always an element of cynicism, of world-weariness and foresight on the part of the protagonists; love doesn’t start with illusions; it must construct practical visions to replace them first. Pride and prejudice — or in our case, technological addiction and moral passivity — must be overcome.

It’s not the act of reading I remember so much as an image and a feeling: a bald history teacher, who had seen me wearing an Anti-Flag T-shirt some weeks earlier and had since tried to become “buddy buddy” with me, now standing above me, looking down. I had the novel on my desk.

“Gatsby?”

I looked up: “Huh?”

“That novel has the best opening paragraph in all of American literature.”

I wanted him to go away.

“In my younger…”, he began, looming over me, looking directly at me.

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I was dismayed. What was happening? At first, when he got to the phrase “my father gave me some advice”, I thought that he was telling me about his own father, but as he continued, I realized that he was, in fact, quoting the aforementioned “best opening paragraph in all of American literature” from memory. I nodded, and he explained to me how important the concept of privilege was.

Gatsby lives on in the American consciousness in precisely this way: it is a high-school novel; a novel one is forced to read at a time in one’s life when one cares more about literally everything in the world other than classwork; and a novel one remembers very little of. It’s a novel about the terror of nostalgic longing, and the American Dream — the romantic delusion that you can become whoever you want, through sheer force of will — but it masks itself in our collective memory as a high-school meme.

My friend Kevin, who teaches high school in Dallas, has his students spend 10 minutes at the outset of each class reading silently. He gives them a list of books they can choose from, and he tells me that all the girls pick Gatsby. It’s nice to know that somewhere in at least one American high school, students are still reading novels. Kevin and I have an ongoing riff, based on a conversation he’d overheard between two students on the day of a quiz, during which one student asked another what The Great Gatsby was all about, and the student replied, “it’s about this guy named Big Joe Gatsby”.

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Over the phone, we concocted a scheme: he would ask his 12th-graders to write answers to the question: “How would you describe this book to someone who hasn’t read it?” Here are some of the answers:

“Gatsby is an interesting book with a rich + mysterious theme to it involving mostly Gatsby in that category.” “I would describe Gatsby as one guy crashing out and yearning for a married woman over 100 pages.” “This book is about wealth in society, new money and old money.”

Others identified the feeling of regret: “The Great Gatsby is a book full of the idea of ‘but what if they had just done this?’ As you read [it], you constantly find yourself in the position of asking, ‘But it’s so simple, just do it’.”

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Each of these contains hints of the double-motion of Gatsby in America: a hazy intuition of the classic American fascinations — wealth, envy, complicated romantic entanglement — and a barely literate initial engagement that degrades them over time into their simplest, most flippant form.

In 2013, two years after I graduated high school, a new major motion picture version of The Great Gatsby showed at the theater in my hometown in Ohio. It was the first movie I knew of that had 3D effects. I took pills and went to see it: something with the water — green light — wealth — romance; I remember money flying out of the screen into my eyes. The experience felt profoundly a-literary but also profoundly American — Gatsby no longer as novel, but as parodic, garish gluttony; seductive displays of wealth and a “conversation about privilege”.

In a culture oversaturated with discussions about privilege, some of the more obvious social “insights” of the novel fall flat today, but there are moments of phenomenological acuity, psychological precision, and descriptive defamiliarization — making the familiar strange to reveal it anew. These work to create a compelling portrait not so much of a country warped by wealth, but of a man possessed by nostalgia, and the dream of making and remaking himself.

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Jay Gatsby is nostalgic in a limerent, romantic way; he builds wealth, constructs his own identity, and turns his life into a performance for a memory. But when the fantasy becomes reality, in the face of Daisy, it crumbles. The real breaks through the dream, and Gatsby cracks.

Formally, the novel is less boring than I’d expected when I reread it recently. It produces textual nostalgia in the reader through its formal structure: Nick Carraway tells the story from the future, wistfully looking back on the time of the novel. Thus, as the scholar Niklas Salmose has noted, the reader experiences a kind of phenomenological nostalgia as he reads, which is part of the novel’s genius.

Like America, Gatsby is, in the words of the critic Gautam Kundu, “made gorgeous by the magic touch of a romantic imagination that nevertheless moves inexorably toward eventual disintegration and dissolution”; and yet we can’t help but be emotionally drawn into it, even as we stand at a semi-distance and watch with horror.

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Still, cultured people’s relationship with the novel borders on ironic, which is understandable. In 2014, my friend Adam Humphreys, a filmmaker, directed a six-minute film titled Baseball that also centers around a recitation of the first paragraph of Gatsby from memory. The protagonist, played by novelist Zachary German, is having an affair while his girlfriend is out of town. He is at his mistress’s apartment when his girlfriend calls and asks him to read the beginning of Gatsby, which she’d left on the bedside table — “Read from the beginning,” she commands him. “The part you always say.” After fumbling around at his mistress’s bookshelf, he can’t find a copy of Gatsby, so he stands upright and tries to recite it, pretending to read.

“In my younger and more vulnerable years,” he begins, “my father offered me some advice that I’ve been mulling over in my head ever since.” The camera switches from the mistress’s apartment to his girlfriend. “He told me there would be times in life when I would feel compelled to judge the actions of those around me, but that I should always remember that not everyone has had all of the advantages that I have had.”

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He takes a long pause; his girlfriend starts silently crying. “He told me that human goodness was not distributed equally, and that it would be unfair to act as though the alternative was true.” The camera pans to Singaporean baseball on TV. “This, giving the benefit of the doubt to my fellow man, has led me to a number of worthwhile moments.”

Today, I searched “Gatsby” in my Gmail inbox, and found: an interview with me that never came out, from 2013, in which the interviewer says that his roommate read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love after “having not read any fiction since The Great Gatsby when we were 16”; nine unopened emails from a rare bookseller; the word “Gatsby” in the Substack of a person whose name I don’t recognize and which I don’t remember subscribing to; The Great Gatsby on a list of Michael Clune’s “25 best American novels”; an email I forwarded to my now-dead friend Russell, who used to write college papers for a now-dead guy named Lucas, who I vaguely knew from Twitter, and for whom I edited the papers in 2015, for money; a screenshot of a one-star review of an apartment building called “Gatsby on Ross”, which ends, “The real Gatsby would be ashamed and horrified”.

“The real Gatsby” made me smile: Gatsby, the commodified literary object; Gatsby, clichéd symbol of wealth; Gatsby, phantom high-school impression; Gatsby, Leonardo DiCaprio; Gatsby, like all things in America, reduced to two opposites, always in tension with each other but unified in destroying every part of the culture they touch — worship of money and conversations about privilege; Gatsby, Big Joe Gatsby. The Gatsby we forget is the Gatsby we should most remember: a man possessed by a fantasy or fixation because his life has become devoid of spiritual significance.

It’s been 100 years since the novel came out. Much has changed, and much has stayed the same. Reading the novel today produces, at least for me, a slightly unrelated nostalgia for a time when American literature was more serious and more ambitious. But Gatsby also offers a timely exhortation to those who, giving into this nostalgia, wish to return to a past mode: nostalgic yearning is disguised, impotent pride. Many remain crippled by a kind of longing for an idealized past that never really existed, one that was empty in much the same way as the present, as an excuse for living impotently within the nothingness of modernity.

The Great Gatsby was a failure when it came out, but it is still worth reading a century hence. Its bleak, cynical view of self-determination was unpalatable to American readers then, and, as evidenced by the way culture has preserved it as a butchered meme, may still be unpalatable now. But it feels eerily relevant to today. May it become more than a nostalgic memory.

But it could also turn the final frontier into another zone of hyper-exploitation — a grim possibility probed by Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho’s new political satire set in space, Mickey 17, whose villain is a hybrid of Musk and Donald Trump.

As the SpaceX craft plummeted back to its Florida landing spot, dolphins jumped sweetly out of the water to greet it. The scene was so beautifully cinematic, it could well have served as the opening of Mickey 17. In it, Joon Ho imagines a future that we already live in: where exploited laborers (here referred to as “expendable clones”) serve at the whims of a short-tempered oligarch whose devoted “followers” have eagerly joined his space flight.

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Elon Musk just wants to go to space

By Gerard DeGroot

Our protagonist is Mickey, played by Robert Pattinson, and since he is essential to the ship’s mission, no one questions his pain and suffering, least of all himself. As he dies over and over in excruciating pain in clone form — his body freezes, he loses a hand, he is poisoned while being tested for a new vaccine — this is treated as routine. He did, after all, sign up for the job. Eager to leave behind his debts on Earth, he confesses with a smile that he might have scrutinized the paperwork more closely. The ship’s onlookers laugh knowingly at each death: silly, sweet Mickey, making all our lives safer, smoother, more efficient.

About 20 minutes into the film, it becomes clear that Joon Ho thought Trump was going to lose the 2024 election. Mark Ruffalo plays the failed congressman Kenneth Marshall, who hosts an inflight reality competition show and was so humiliated by losing his “re-election campaign” that he leaves Earth to colonize space. An attempted assassination only brings him back stronger. As his followers chant the name of their leader, they stick their arms up in the air, one finger pointing at the sky, echoing a Nazi salute (ahem, “Roman salute”). His wife, the unnervingly poised Toni Collette, resembles Melania in the least charitable interpretation. At one point, when her husband is about to kill Mickey, 17 she screams and screams; but it is not for Mickey, rather at the thought of a bullet hole in her lovely carpet.

Bong Joon Ho says the character isn’t inspired by Musk and Trump, but by a range of “dictators we have seen throughout history”, which would be hard to believe even if Marshall’s supporters didn’t wear red MAGA-style baseball hats that say “the one and only”. There’s no Kenneth Marshall in the book the film is based on; the novel’s autocrat, Hieronymus, is more a maniacal military soldier than an eccentric billionaire. But in the movie version, he wants to colonize space, make babies with the women on board with “the ideal genetics”, and he’s constantly throwing tantrums. Sounds pretty familiar.

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Satire succeeds best when it touches a nerve of truth. Parasite, Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning film from 2019, exploded the fantasy of upward mobility by showing an upper-class family’s vampiric relationship to their servants. Its bloody conclusion is a depressing catharsis of just how little hope there is for improving your chances. But where Parasite benefited from a subtle touch — the social critique unfolded gradually to reveal a horrifying picture of the real world — Mickey 17 can be too on-the-nose, at times resembling Saturday Night Live at its flaccid worst.

The Marshall character slides between impressions of Musk and his ostensible government boss, Trump. Writing Mickey 17 three years ago, Joon Ho couldn’t have known how powerful a role Musk would be playing in the current administration, but his determined plans to colonize space have long been clear. The SpaceX boss’s ultimate mission is to “occupy Mars” and develop a city of 1 million people there in the next two to three decades. He has volunteered his own sperm to get the population going, and he wants to retire on the Red Planet.

Though space dominance has long been a goal of American foreign policy, most crucially in the Cold War, Musk isn’t aiming for any kind of national leverage: he wants to leave Earth behind to make a new society centered on himself. It’s a “backup” plan for humanity, but it will be a colony of children born from his own genetic material.

Musk isn’t alone. Instead of countries vying for extraterrestrial supremacy, Musk’s foremost space rival is Bezos, who is set to launch a bizarre all-female rocket to space this spring with his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, and Katy Perry on board. Bezos hopes to industrialize space, moving the manufacturing concerns “that stress Earth” away from it. Both men have built huge company towns in Texas, where thousands of workers live to build their rockets.

Musk, meanwhile, wants to bio-engineer a new version of human that can survive in Mars’s burning temperatures, an idea close to the new cloning technology that props up Joon Ho’s movie world. For Joon Ho’s Musk-Trump composite character, Kenneth Marshall, the impulse to “purify” humanity can only be achieved by abandoning it, and any successful society requires masses willing to be exploited to get things done.

Like Marshall, who is quick to abandon his promises on Earth for better chances in space, it’s fair to question how invested space fanatics like Musk can be in making American society better, when he hopes to leave it as soon as he can. More likely, he views space as a stellar business opportunity, ripe with untapped resources and with no laws or regulations to get in your way.

What Joon Ho shows us is how powerful figures normalize the exploitation of those who work for them to prop up their ambitions, something Musk is no stranger to. Tesla’s “giga-factories” have been accused of rampant sexual harassment and safety violations, and one lawsuit alleges a worker told his wife “I’m going to die in this factory”. Predictably, Musk thinks trade unions “create negativity in a company”. Bezos, our other keen space pioneer, uses algorithms to push his Amazon workers to breaking point; and those who work in his American factories are regularly, and seriously, injured. This kind of undervalued, exploited labor isn’t born from futuristic scientific experiments or any kind of dystopian future. It’s just ordinary people being walked all over today.

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Yet the filmmaker is too nakedly partisan for his jabs at Musk-Trump to land. Indeed, the Trump-Musk amalgam can often serve as a distraction. The deeper, more productive critique embedded in the film has to do with the mistreatment of nameless multitudes, who damage their bodies and give up their lives so that those in higher social classes can enjoy themselves. We don’t need breakthroughs like cloning to normalize the extreme exploitation of workers, because there are Mickeys all around us.

Asked in a recent interview why even his Korean-language films are so popular all over the world, Joon Ho guessed it is because “except for one or two countries, everyone’s living under capitalism — it’s a universal language”. Storytelling in space can make the familiar feel alien. That’s the brilliance of Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror masterpiece, Alien, which harnesses fear out of the anxiety of pregnancy.

In its best moments, Mickey 17, does the same: by transposing exploitation into futuristic clones, the film indicts the present-day exploitation of our fellow human beings. It’s a worthy reminder that if we leave space — or Earth for that matter — in the unchecked hands of oligarchs, we might end up doing astonishing things, even as we export our worst human instincts: greed, selfishness, and the ability to turn a blind eye.