H8r Diaries: Summer 2k23
It took me all summer, but I'm finally willing to say that 'The Guest', 'The Bear', and two other things are... good
Nothing, not even human trafficking, drives me crazier than critical consensus. I know, I know, I should be more upset about human trafficking, our country’s number one scourge. But I look at a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score, or a weeks-old movie now bestriding a Letterboxd “All-Timers” list, and I think… this is how I’m supposed to feel? This is the official take, to be wielded at all times lest I be made a pariah on social media, or my group texts? I thought this was America.
It’s lonely out there for contrarians like me (or “h8rs” as we’re often derogatorily called), forced like Aaron Burr to become the villain in your history of Metacritic reviews. Do you think I relish loving then hating then loving again then hating again something like the movie ‘Garden State’? Absolutely not. It’s a question of duty — to my own critical faculties, first of all, but also the part of me desperate to stay one step ahead of the masses at all times. I’m not like other girls; I’m different.
So you know that it is with some effort that I write today’s missive, a re-examination of four recent works — one movie, one book, one show, and one game — all of which received immediate rapturous praise and that I, holding the line with my other h8rs, remained wary of as long as I could. But here’s the thing about any h8r worth his or her salt: they are also, in time, willing to love.
‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’
“Masterpiece” is a true h8r trigger word, one that immediately sends our h8r brains into a tailspin. “Oh, is it?” we ask ourselves, sometimes out loud. “Is it ‘The Godfather’? Is it the friggin’ ‘Canterbury Tales’? Shut up.” Masterpieces prove themselves over time, not in a series of breathless tweets orchestrated by Kevin Feige and/or Amy Pascal!
I caught Sony’s second ‘Spider-Verse’ movie on opening weekend back in June and, Contrarian Take machine positively humming, would only concede the animation was “brilliant” but the story, like ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest’ before it, amounted to little more than an extended trailer for the third movie. This felt good to write on Letterboxd. Empowering, even.
But I knew, deep in my h8r heart, that I wasn’t giving ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ a proper shake. I vowed to revisit the movie several months later, after The Discourse™️ had died down.
On second viewing… I mean, guys, it’s still basically ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest’. You’re allowed to say this! It’s not illegal. BUT some of the sweatier plot machinations can be forgiven when the rest of the movie — in imagery and character and the collision of the two — is just so rich. Every frame of ‘Spider-Verse’ bursts with intention and personality.
Something as simple as, like, an upside-down heart-to-heart between Miles and Gwen captures everything the movie does well. The necessary superhero stuff (will Miles join the multi-versal Spidey league? Also they’re upside-down), but suffused with New York spirit (they’re upside-down on the iconic Williamsburg Bank Building) and an undeniable human heartbeat (two teens who can’t quite say what they want to say). It’s the type of quiet scene we’ve stopped expecting from superhero movies, lived-in to such a degree you can only call it… well, real.
You know how 'The Super Mario Bros. Movie' feels like it was conceived, written, and programmed by a suite of generative AI apps? People made this. Artists made this. I'd say "we don't deserve it" but maybe that's the problem, that we don't advocate for our own artistic pleasure. We deserve movies like this! I hope the sequel takes ten years to finish, or maybe never happens.
‘The Guest’
Another thing h8rs h8: ubiquity. And no book has been more ubiquitous this summer than Emma Cline’s ‘The Guest’. Even if you haven’t read it, I can almost guarantee you know the cover: bold blue lettering against a tennis court-green background, one outstretched hand suggesting either “come hither” or help me.” This shit is everywhere! Peeking out of beach bags. Hiding faces on the New York City subway. Already this cover scans as iconic as other semi-recent summer faves like ‘The Help’ (yellow! birds!) or ‘Freedom’ (blue-ish! bird!), which not coincidentally were also written by and about upwardly mobile ha-white people.
If you’re familiar with John Cheever’s short story ‘The Swimmer’ — cited by Cline as a major inspiration — then you’ve got a good baseline for ‘The Guest’, which follows a sex worker named Alex stumbling her way through the Hamptons (unnamed, but it’s very obviously the Hamptons) during the waning days of summer. Alex uses drugs; she uses people. Is she a villain? Is everyone in the Hamptons a villain? Maybe “book” isn’t useful as a designation when, like, this thing is actually a mirror. To society.
Suffice it to say, I figured a book this popular couldn’t possibly be good. And yet…
Sometimes fun things are fun! ‘The Guest’ isn’t aiming at profundity; it’s just aiming to capture a vibe. And in this case, “beach read” needn’t be a diss so much as a testament to how easily Cline puts you in Alex’s headspace, into the feeling of late August in an environment that might as well be ennui Disneyland. What feels effortless — floating from chance encounter to chance encounter in a benzos and bikinis haze — is smart, careful writing from an author my girlfriend and I were dismayed, maybe even beside ourselves to learn is younger than us. My only solace is knowing that the movie adaptation, inevitably starring Dakota Johnson, will be terrible.
‘The Bear’
(Before we go any further, can we agree on one thing? ‘The Bear’ isn’t a comedy. It can make you chuckle from time to time, smile a little, but… it’s not a comedy! ‘Ted Lasso’ wasn’t funny1, but it was definitionally a comedy. ‘The Bear’ is a 30 minute drama that might occasionally highlight a moment of levity. WORDS MATTER.)
🚨🚨 (Also: spoilers for season two) 🚨🚨
So ‘The Bear’. We love ‘The Bear’, don’t we folks? Carmy the Bear, preparing all those wonderful dishes. Even when no one appreciates him, including his so-called “cousin.” Sad!
‘The Bear’ premiered summer 2022 to a streaming landscape desperate, apparently, for a Chicago-based dramedy and was immediately anointed as “the show of the summer,” even though I did not see one chef’s outfit over Halloween. The first season was very good! That one episode played like a more manageable helping of ‘Uncut Gems’, pure anxiety unspooling in the most enclosed space since Ryan Reynold’s ‘Buried’ coffin. The characters felt real (Ayo Edebiri’s Sydney, especially), the food felt real, and we all felt real for liking it.
All of which made ‘The Bear’ an absolutely textbook candidate for a season two glow-up. Which the show leaned into, HARD. Guest stars galore! Longer run-times! Location shoots in Copenhagen for some reason! Season one’s standout episode (“Review”) clearly paved the way for season two’s “Fishes,” a boiling-pot story of family trauma featuring:
Bob Odenkirk
Gillian Jacobs
Sarah Paulson
John Mulaney
and the trow-ma queen herself, Jamie Lee Curtis
I h8d it. I felt like I was being punk’d, by Ashton Kutcher AND Jon Bernthal, doing his whole loud-quiet-loud thing, threatening me with a fork and then screaming about his mental health through a too-tight fire department t-shirt. Not to be outdone, Jamie Lee Curtis drives a car through the house. This is like… a parody of prestige television, right? It’s a post-modern commentary on acclaimed second season excess.
But I would not be writing this now overlong post today if something didn’t change, and by the end of the season all those seemingly masturbatory elements — the guest stars and the run-times and the standalone episodes, all of them — came together for me in a satisfying, even devastating way. That’s the thing about stories, the good ones anyway: you can’t judge them in the middle. I know “Fishes” was a ready-made standout for most people, their dream Guest Actor Emmy roster alongside Murray Bartlett and Nick Offerman for that one episode of ‘The Last of Us’ that I will decline commentary on at this time. For me, it just needed its follow-through — in this case the four episodes to follow, which unspool Carmy’s own mental health struggles (much more interesting to me than Jon Bernthal or Jamie Lee Curtis doing Tennessee Williams) he inherited from his family, as depicted in the “Fishes'“ episode. Seasons of television! What a concept.
‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’
And last, a little something for the nerds. Ten days into the writers strike, Nintendo released its long-awaited sequel to 2017 masterpiece (🙄) ‘Breath of the Wild’, a title I am forced to admit is at minimum one of the most influential games of the last decade. Everyone immediately lost their minds. The 10 out of 10s rang out like Ewok song at the end of ‘Return of the Jedi’ (pre-Special Edition):
“‘Tears of the Kingdom’ makes ‘Breath of the Wild’ look like a tech demo.”
“For too long gamers have been shackled to the dictates of staid, cautious level design. Nintendo devs said: ‘you’re free’.”
“I would sell my unborn child, who we are thinking of naming Miles Morales, if I could re-experience the magic of constructing my first Zonai vehicle again.”2
So yeah, you bet your ass my h8r r8r (hater radar) was up and running! Not to go full Gamergate here, but early game reviews are about as reliable as MCU influencers telling you “how much heart” the new Dr. Strange movie has after a pre-release screening for which no paid critics were in attendance. Access media, in all its forms, has been a scourge on honest criticism.
At first — satisfyingly — my concerns were validated. This six-years-in-the-making sequel was using the same ol’ map, the same ol’ combat system as its predecessor? Hadn’t they made ‘Majora’s Mask’ in a year, using the ‘Ocarina of Time’ engine, and managed to create an entirely new world? I cared about ‘Tears of the Kingdom’’s story more than I did ‘BotW’, but only barely. The Princess is still missing. Hyrule is still in trouble. Same shit, different day.
But eventually the nerd chorus dies down — usually because everyone has moved on to a new game, in this case ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ — and you can finally hear yourself think, accompanied by ‘TotK’’s world-class ambient score.
You think: it’s kinda cool that I can fuse a rocket to my shield. Wow, what a smart game loop that the resources I pick up in the sky help me in the depths, and vice versa. Did I just build a Power Rangers Zord to decimate a camp of Moblins?
Now you’re not evaluating one game against its predecessor3 but meeting it on its own terms, which maybe aren’t what you’d been clamoring for but, you have to admit, are still pretty friggin’ sick. Exploration was the backbeat, maybe even just the point of ‘BotW’; here that takes a backseat (😎) to the most robust physics engine I’ve ever experienced, allowing you to do pretty much anything (of a non-sexual nature!!) your demented little Hyrulian head can think up. It is a true “sandbox” game, the promise of which has been touted since Grand Theft Auto III but maybe not truly capitalized on until now. And for that, I have to tip my hat and say—
it feels so good to write “wasn’t”
Admittedly only one of these quotes is real, the first one, which I’m pretty sure came from IGN
or, in the case of a series as long-running as ‘Zelda’, its ancestors