Arts & Culture

Minus One, which premiered in U.S. theaters on Dec. 1, became the highest grossing Japanese live-action film in U.S. history.

Gary’s goal in the trial was to bring the buried deeds of the Loewen Group into the light, to tell the story they hid behind contracts and laws and cultural biases and systemic injustice. In doing so, he aims to purchase some measure of justice. Is this what Willie Gary learned in Black church?

At their strongest, films and TV shows can help us pay attention to — and by extension, love — the people and the world around us.

HOZIER IS AN artist known for using biblical, religious, and mythological allusions to make sense of the complexity of human relationships. So, it’s appropriate that he begins Unreal Unearth, his newest and third album, at the beginning. The opening track, “De Selby (Part 1),” serves as a musical preamble that recalls one of the most striking and haunting scenes in the Bible: Genesis 1. Lyrically, Hozier takes us to the very beginning, the Spirit floating, formless, above the void. In a sort of abstract for the album, he sings of “the likes of a darkness so deep / that God, at the start, couldn’t bear.” It was a depth of aloneness so “intolerable,” Hozier explains on his YouTube channel, that God “had to create the world.”

The rest of the album is structured as an epic journey that draws on biblical wellsprings for inspiration. Hozier has spoken publicly about being inspired by Dante’s Inferno. As he journeyed through the isolation and devastation of the pandemic, Hozier saw his story reflected in the 14th-century text by the Italian poet who realized the only way out of the underworld — and into the light — is through it.

WHEN I WAS a student at Earlham College in Indiana, I co-hosted an alcohol-free dance party. Fry House, which was owned by the university, held a reputation for wild parties before we established it as Interfaith House in 1997. We — a group of religiously observant and spiritually curious undergrads — wanted to bring a new spirit into our house. I had been to enough drunken high school parties that I chose not to drink in college, other housemates had parents with alcoholism, and some abstained for religious reasons. We posted flyers, twisting a beer slogan into our hook: “Why ask why? Try Fry Dry!”

When the big night came, we pushed the furniture aside, laid out snacks, turned up the music, and swallowed our pride when only one person showed up.

This memory returned when I noticed with some surprise how Dry January, which has an app called “Try Dry,” has become a global movement. In 2013, the nonprofit Alcohol Concern (now “Alcohol Change UK”) invited people to abstain from alcohol in January; 4,000 people signed up. In 2022, 130,000 people signed up, with many more participating around the world. As alcohol-related deaths, especially among women, rose in that same period, Dry January began to take hold.

IN 2018, 26-year-old American missionary John Allen Chau journeyed to the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. He wanted to minister to the Sentinelese, the Indigenous residents of North Sentinel Island and one of the last population groups on the planet to have avoided modernization by the outside world. Chau, an Oral Roberts University graduate who grew up steeped in conservative evangelical culture, felt called to bring the gospel to unreached people.

The mission did not go as planned. Chau was quickly killed by the Sentinelese, who saw him as a threat. Chau’s death caused a public reevaluation of cross-cultural missions, one explored in the documentary The Mission. The film tells Chau’s story through his diary excerpts, his father Patrick’s account of Chau’s life, and expert interviews.

Directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss don’t cast judgment; instead, they add context and ask questions. Was Chau’s death martyrdom, or the result of a foolish fantasy? Does teaching God’s word to isolated peoples help them, or open them to exploitation, colonization, and eradication?

In Priscilla, which is based off Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, we don’t primarily see Elvis through the eyes of his manager or adoring fans, instead, we see him through the eyes of the only woman he ever married, who he began courting when he was 24 and she was 14.

AS A KID, I had a fraught relationship with my cat, Buddy. I know what you’re thinking: “Buddy?? What a basic name.” Well, I couldn’t agree more. I was 5 when we got him, and unfortunately, I was not trusted with the responsibility of choosing a name. To placate me, my parents told me I could come up with the middle name and the last name of the new cat (I don’t know why Buddy didn’t take on our family’s surname — “Buddy Barnett” has a nice ring to it). I christened him “Buddy Bear Donkey.”

Maybe that’s why Buddy hated me. His disdain for me was different from most cats’ aversion to small children. He didn’t run from me or hide beneath couches, both conventional and understandable responses to overzealous hugs. No, Buddy didn’t seek avoidance; he pursued revenge. The orange tabby cat sought me out when I was weakest: at 5 a.m., in my deepest slumber. He would climb on my bed, dip his deceptively cute head under the covers, and bite (not nibble!) my toes.

In the morning, I would find him so that we could make up. Hug it out. Ask him, “What had I done to deserve this?” But I couldn’t get through. I even watched The Aristocats, hoping I could learn something about Buddy. Perhaps, like the Duchess and her kittens, Buddy had a love of the piano. I played him my best rendition of “Hot Cross Buns.” (In retrospect, he might’ve been hoping for a more refined tune. Perhaps an arpeggio or some coffeehouse Norah Jones).

ANDREW LELAND HAS been going blind since high school. In college, he was formally diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye condition. Leland, who is a writer, editor, and educator, named his memoir The Country of the Blind, after the 1904 H.G. Wells short story in which an explorer falls down a mountain and finds himself in a village where everyone is blind. But unlike the explorer, Leland does not experience a rapid descent into blindness. Instead, for decades he has traversed the blurry middle ground of “becoming blind.” He writes, “It’s so much easier to conceive of it as a binary — you’re either blind or you’re not; you see or you don’t.” The Country of the Blind breaks down the binaries of our understanding of blindness and sightedness, and takes us on a personal and historical journey through the culture of blindness.

Blindness has always been a part of my story. My father, who has both retinitis pigmentosa and Coats disease, started to lose his eyesight in his teens and lost almost all of it by the time he was 27. But his world was not lost when blindness set in. Rather, like Leland and others with blindness, his world was still there; he just needed to learn new ways to traverse it. Growing up, I observed my father navigate the world with intention. He chopped firewood to keep us warm in the winter. He identified different denominations of currency by distinctively folding the bills. He carried a special tool to guide his pen when he signed documents.