Arts & Culture

Alissa Wilkinson, a movie critic at The New York Times and a Didion expert, is especially interested in how Hollywood continues to use such cliches when telling stories. Her newest book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion in the American Dream Machine, is an exploration of Didion’s writing in connection to the movie business and how her observations about Hollywood can help us interpret the current political landscape

Sometimes kings raise a foundling —
it didn’t work out well for the Pharaoh —
but the opposite seems more typical.
Royals, gods, drop into the hands
of commoners. Gilgamesh, they say,
was hurled as an infant from a tower.
An eagle broke his fall; a gardener took him in.
Satyavati Kali, the female twin found in a fish
was handed back to the fisherman.
And there’s the Nazarene carpenter.

What happens to such parents? Do they win
a suite in the palace? Or do they remain at home,
fused to their roles: gardener, fisherman, carpenter,
rising early, low as dew on grass,
moving to their tasks, unchanged
by the glory they served,
set in their motions like planets,
pausing now and again in their labor
to be kissed by lapping waves,
to hear the grain of the wood
gently praising their name.

THE DAY AFTER the presidential inauguration in January, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, preaching at a prayer service for unity attended by President Donald J. Trump, warned members of the new administration that contempt is “a dangerous way to lead a country.” She pleaded for their mercy and compassion for the most vulnerable and outlined a vision for social healing founded on genuine “care for one another.” Budde’s words stand in stark contrast to the campaign of dehumanization and destruction we’ve witnessed since.

In the last few months, I’ve contemplated how, with incredible grace, Budde spoke truth to the power sitting before her in the pews. Her sermon left me feeling calm and convicted and brought to mind one of my favorite artists, the 19th-century impressionist Mary Cassatt. Like Budde’s sermon, Cassatt’s paintings are striking in their softness; they remind me of the kind of activist and person I want to be. I want to live with my heart softened and meet suffering with tenderness.

As Ruth E. Iskin explains in Mary Cassatt Between Paris and New York, Cassatt was “neither simply or completely a bourgeois, nor fully a precursor to the 1890s New Woman, but a mixture of both.” She was “anchored in a transatlantic network that included numerous conservative Americans” and an independent working woman who passionately supported women’s suffrage and full emancipation. In a male-dominated art scene, Cassatt made a name for herself with humanizing portraits of women of all ages, showing the relationship between caregivers and children and the dignity of motherhood. Her layered, emotionally vulnerable pieces highlighted the strength of women and the beauty and seriousness of care itself.

Her politics were characterized by a similar sensitivity. Iskin explains, “[Suffragists] claimed that the very role of mothers in the private sphere justified extending their activity into the public sphere of politics and government.” In other words, they made the case that the qualities of love, strength, and commitment exhibited by many women in their homes would also benefit civic spaces.

I FIRST CAME across digital media artist Madeleine Jubilee Saito’s work on social media. While scrolling through a sea of Instagram stories about environmental disasters, civil unrest, and humanitarian strife, I reached a square that made me pause: a multicolor four-panel image from a digital watercolor comic. I took in the top two panels of a gray figure staring out into the sky and then the glimmering, fruited foliage framing the bottom two panels. It felt like a vision from a better, more just future. The text on each panel, though brief, was powerful. I took in each word like a sacred telegram: THE GREAT WOUND / IS HEALED / ALL THINGS / MADE NEW.”

When I was younger, I found comfort in dynamic plotlines nestled in the predictable geometry of print and online comic series. Through Saito’s work, that comfort returned to me, in the form of four panels grappling with climate grief and environmental repair.

When I spoke with Saito about her work, she said that her affinity for comics started in high school. “As a young person, I had a very hard time accessing my own feelings or seeing that my interiority or my life were particularly valuable,” she said. “Comics were a way I could crystallize that value and the meaning of my own interiority for others — make it visible.” Now, Saito’s work conveys the value of the natural world. In her ecological storytelling, we see portraits of people amid towering trees and shimmering waterways. Her human subjects submerge themselves in the elements; her natural subjects invite readers to take a closer look at this numinous world.

Her upbringing in northern Illinois exposed Saito to the tensions between humans and earth. She grew up in a house deep in the woods — “a strip of forest in the middle of this desolate monocrop landscape,” she said, explaining how she saw beauty amid exploitation. “The animals — raccoons and possums — were pests to be managed. Every year the trees and bushes and plants from the forest would encroach further toward the house and every year they would need to be cut back.”

This awareness of the adversarial relationship with the natural world has guided her work and now culminates in her debut book, You Are a Sacred Place: Visual Poems for Living in Climate Crisis (Andrews McMeel, 2025). The first section explores the doom happening parallel to climate collapse. In one story, we see someone curled up in bed, sinking into and verbalizing their sadness post-job layoff. Wildfire smoke chokes the Seattle air around them. In this panel, I see myself, two years ago, numb from financial despair while wildfire smoke cast a noxious orange hue over Philadelphia.

In Nosferatu, writer-director Robert Eggers seeks to empower Ellen as a martyr: Yes, her death is a tragedy. But by giving her agency in a world that sought to deny her humanity, Ellen is a savior, one who has laid down her life for her loved ones and for the world. The Christian parallels are obvious.

Similar to Parasite, Mickey 17 is ultimately about the ethics of revolutionary struggle. The film considers how Christian morality — especially as understood by thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, or Karl Marx, the latter of whom famously referred to religion as the “opiate” of the masses — prevents the downtrodden from standing up for their rights. Here, Pattinson’s Mickey is a clear stand-in for Christ and the model Christian. Resurrected ad infinitum, he humbly accepts the pain, suffering, and dehumanization inflicted on him by his apathetic, at times downright demonic coworkers as punishment for his perceived sins.

Our Lord Jesus Christ could often be found on a mountain. He went to a mountain to pray, to seek solitude from the crowds. He fasted and prayed for 40 days and 40 nights on the mountain where the devil tempted him. He met Moses and Elijah on Mount Tabor and was transfigured before his disciples. His most famous sermon is the Sermon on the Mount.

At the first of what will be many funerals that appear in The Monkey, a young priest struggles to find the right words. After offering some half-hearted bromides about how everything happens for a reason, the priest can no longer pretend that there’s some divine plan behind the death that brought them together — an accident involving a hibachi chef’s knife getting too close to a diner.

“It is what it is,” the priest (Nicco Del Rio) finally declares, with the most conviction he can muster. “The words of the Lord.”

I GREW UP heavily steeped in ’90s Christian rapture culture. I’d polished off all 40 books of the Left Behind kids series before I finished 6th grade, and holes formed in the knees of my favorite butterfly jeans because I wore them as often as I could to make sure I was raptured in them.

While the rapture is no longer central to my faith, I never realized how much apocalyptic thinking is soaked into our culture — and how much of it I absorb — until I picked up Dorian Lynskey’s latest book.

In Everything Must Go, Lynskey chronicles humanity’s unending preoccupation with the end, detailing how apocalyptic thinking has pervaded the media and pop culture throughout history, “turn[ing] fear into entertainment.” His book focuses on examples of apocalyptic thinking that “reveal something important ... about the times in which they were created.” Most obviously, apocalyptic imaginings reveal what we’re afraid of. Each era has had a different disaster to fear, be it nuclear, ecological, or cosmological. For millennia, the world has been ending again and again. “There is simply no end of ends,” Lynskey writes.

And some of the most influential end-time tales come from the Bible. From Genesis to Revelation, scripture is full of disaster narratives. “It is the Bible that supplies the primordial tales that surface over and over again in the art, literature, cinema, and television of the West,” Lynskey writes. “The Christian apocalypse is still with us, then, in a range of disguises.”