I saw Jaws with my father in the summer of 1975, the year it came out. When we walked out of the Oaks movie theater in Berkeley, California, we were giddy, punch-drunk. It's a perfect movie'a big, exciting American movie. From its opening minutes you live inside of it, your regular life suspended somewhere behind you. Waiting for my mother to pick us up, we noticed that we were both vaguely on guard against shark attacks, even though we were standing on Solano Avenue, where the only dangerous sea creatures were down the street in the King Tsin lobster tank. The tagline of the marketing campaign was 'You'll never go in the water again,' and my only non-Jaws thought during the movie was I am never going to the beach again. My father loved the movies, and he knew a lot about them. He'd grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and as a child he'd gone by himself to the Pickwick Theatre every weekend. On Saturdays, he'd get the whole enchilada: the serial, the cartoons, the short subjects, the newsreel, a Western, and then the feature. On Sundays, there would be a shorter, more dignified program'the coming attractions, the newsreel, and a better class of feature. I had the clear impression that those hours at the movies'maybe as much as his tremendous reading, which began early and never stopped'were the most fully lived hours of his childhood. While other boys were playing baseball or running track or engaging in any of those dull and harassing pastimes that boys were supposed to love, he was at the movies....
Agnes Hathaway, the elusive heroine of the director Chloe Zhao's new film, Hamnet, seems happiest when in nature: retreating to the woods as often as she can, collecting mushrooms, tucking into tree hollows to sleep. She spends so much time outdoors that rumor spreads across her English village about her mother being a witch. It's a believable claim; Agnes, as played by the actress Jessie Buckley, is raw, brooding, and fundamentally enigmatic. The film's first stretch relishes her mystique, which attracts a suitor better known than practically anybody in the 16th century: William Shakespeare. When Agnes meets him, Shakespeare (played by Paul Mescal) is a similarly wayward creature in Stratford-upon-Avon. He's soon beguiled by her, unaware that she's the woman he'll go on to marry and have three children with. As historical fiction, Hamnet has little else to work off: Archival records reveal only the basic facts about their relationship. Shakespeare married Agnes, also known as Anne, in 1582, when he was 18 years old and she 26. They had three children, first a daughter and then boy-and-girl twins; their son, Hamnet, died in 1596 of unknown causes. The movie draws on the writer Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 novel, a speculative work that imagines the grief Shakespeare and his wife felt after losing their son. O'Farrell's story is based upon a theory that the play Hamlet is a reflection of that grief'a secret poured into maybe the most famous dramatic work ever written....
A seminal mid-century paper by the psychologist George Miller asserted that the human brain can hold seven items in short-term memory, give or take a couple. A person can chunk'that is, group items together in sensible, memorable units'to get a bit more bang, but modern psychologists think the species can handle only about four of those. None of the chunks in the great minestrone that is The Atlantic is going anywhere, though, so enjoy leisurely encoding them in your much more capacious long-term memory. Then dip into a little trivia to see what stuck. And by the way, did you know that in addition to Dollywood (very much not a filmmaking industry, unless you count the 2022 TV movie Dolly Parton's Mountain Magic Christmas), there is a Dhollywood and a Dhallywood' The former is India's Gujarati-language industry, named for its frequent use of the drum known as a dhol. The latter is Bangladesh's movie industry, named for the country's capital, Dhaka. And the surrealist cinema of the early 20th century, such as Un Chien Andalou' Maybe ' Daliwood!...
Sam Shepard wasn't born a cowboy. The actor and writer made himself into one. The dusty blue jeans, cattle drives, and folksy drawl suited his taciturn profile, giving Reagan-era America someone rugged to admire. Yet the people who knew Shepard best poked fun at his Western persona, which began to emerge in the 1970s and endured for the rest of his life. The singer and poet Patti Smith, a former paramour, called him 'a man playing cowboys,' and Shepard indeed acted in a number of Westerns. Late in his career, in Andrew Dominik's movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Shepard portrayed the outlaw's prickly brother. (He'd named his first child, Jesse, after the legend.) A line of narration from the movie seemed to sum up the complicated man behind the character: 'wrought up, perplexed, despondent.' The cowboy image may have been cultivated, but it was not false. You might say it was earned, the vaquero as self-made man. Shepard'reluctant movie star, poet of masculine angst, and rock-and-roll hero of the American theater'thought Broadway and Hollywood were full of middlebrow nonsense. Born in suburban Illinois and raised in Southern California, he sought out an authentic country, far from New York City or Los Angeles, where he could hear himself think. He found it in Kentucky, New Mexico, and Texas, places where he lived or set his stories. Framing his work in elemental terms of self-sufficiency, Shepard considered his analog tools: 'When you go to ride a horse, you have to saddle it. When you use a typewriter, you have to feed it paper.' Like his friend Cormac McCarthy'who grew up in a Tennessee suburb but likewise drifted west'Shepard found in open spaces a wellspring of bracing truth....
