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Feb 7 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
1. Joel Coen's adaptation of Macbeth is pretty great. It works well as both a Shakespearean movie and also, despite being Ethan-less, a Coen movie. Worth asking how this Coen/Shakespeare fusion came about. Here's one reason.
2. Coen(s) have always been good at finding material to film that coincides with their sensibility either directly adapted (McCarthy, Portis) or indirect (Hammet, Chandler, Cain).
3. "Morons with grandiose dreams" is one Shakespeare/Coen thematic link. But also the pathos of infertility (Raising Arizona, Man Who Wasn't There, the Macbeths being very much a post-menopausal childless couple) & demonic intervention in human affairs.
4. Finally, a Coen-esque MacBeth because it brings together both new actors with some familiar faces from Coen troupe (McDormand, Harry Melling) as well as frequent backstage collaborators (Carter Burwell, Ellen Chenoweth)
5. I talked to @bellye66 about all the ways MacBeth fused the Coen world with Shakespeare: jeetheer.substack.com/p/podcast-some…

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More from @HeerJeet

Jeet Heer Profile picture
Feb 3
1. Maus. Whoopi Goldberg. Swastikas (some ironic, some not) at the so-called Truckers Convoy in Ottawa. Lots of fascist discourse going around but much of it shows a decreasing awareness of what fascism actually was.
2. One reason I like John Ganz' Unpopular Front newsletter so much is that he's done a lot of hard thinking about what fascism was and how the term is still relevant now, beyond being an all purpose insult,
3. "Fascism" isn't just any bad form of politics or even authoritarianism: it's the politics that emerges in liberal democracies that are gridlocked, which opens up a path for strongman leader whose path to power comes from fusing conservative elite & roughneck street fighters.
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jan 31
1. Over the weekend, Trump hailed "those great Canadian truckers" protesting mandates. Joe Rogan, Jordan B Peterson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rob Schneider also love those Canadian truckers. What's going on?
2. As @CarlBeijer usefully points out, there's a history of the hard right trying to mobilize truckers, usually unsuccessfully: a 2013 anti-Obama protest (30 trucks) & a 2021 Australian one (2 trucks). carlbeijer.com/p/truckers-sit…
3. As compared to those early fizzles, Canadian protest is relatively successful: generously maybe 1,000-1,500 trucks & 10-15,000 protestors. But that's piddling compared to other Canadian protests. 2019 climate protest had 1 million across country & 500,000 in Montreal.
Read 6 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jan 30
There's nothing to stop a president or would be president from encouraging followers to commit all sorts of federal crimes with the promise that they'll be pardoned.
Let's say you encourage your followers -- including elected officials and election officers -- to do all sorts of illegal shit to ensure you become president with the understanding that they'll be pardoned. What's to stop that?
The presidential power has been used in the past to help cover up crimes by a president's cronies and supporters (notably by the two Bushes) but Trump is really taking up to a new level.
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jan 28
1. I'm struck by this ignorant line from @sullydish:
"If you have to teach Nikole Hannah-Jones, add a section on Zora Neale Hurston." Assumption is Hurston isn't being taught. In fact, she is & her recuperation as writer was pushed by the very people Sullivan denounces as woke Image
2. "If you have to teach Nikole Hannah-Jones, add a section on Zora Neale Hurston" -- teach where? Hurston is mainly taught in English departments, Hannah-Jones would be taught in history & social sciences. Why link the two, except they are both black women?
3. Some of Hurston's writings on slave testimony & on black folklore is also taught in anthropology in & history but since her work is decades old it would be taught in a very different way than someone synthesizing contemporary research like Hannah-Jones.
Read 7 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jan 27
1. This is a good thread but saying there's no anti-Semitism & Holocaust denialism misses the point since it's very clear from the minutes that the swear words & nudity are pretextual for larger discomfort about a story about the Holocaust.
2. I would encourage reading the actual transcripts because it's very explicit board members think grade 8 students should read about "It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids" -- i.e. it's about the Holocaust.
3. The other area of objection is Maus shows how fraught Art Spiegelman's relationship is with father -- which is part of what makes the book great. It's about how suffering doesn't ennoble but causes trauma that ripples through generations.
Read 7 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jan 23
1. When the Nation published my tribute to Terry Teachout this week they used this photo of The Vile Body, a salon Teachout formed in late 1980s, which revived all sorts of memories of the cult of Waugh & the failed attempt to create an American cultural aristocracy.
2. When we think of cultural Reaganism, what usually comes to mind is the populist pop stuff: Family Ties, Rambo, Red Dawn etc. But there was a niche high end counterpart in the Waugh Revival. Tellingly, when PBS aired Masterpiece Theatre they got William F. Buckley to introduce
3. The Wauvian moment in 1980s had many roots: popularity of the BBC adaptation of Masterpiece Theatre, longstanding anglophilia in elite circles bolstered now Thatcher/Reagan relationship, desire for alternative canon to fight cultural liberalism.
Read 9 tweets

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