Fresh Meat

Sometimes this show knows my soul.

Reaction Post - I am here to win it all, everything, for all of us.

The Good Wife: 4x09 A Defense of Marriage.

...

Jack and Diane
A movie about
second-hand embarrassment.

Popular - Let the grieving begin.

Popular: 2x14 The News of My Death Has Been Greatly Exaggerated.

Das Lied zum Sonntag

Kill it Kid - Wild and Wasted Waters



via %


I leave with the evening on my breath.
Find my letters when I've left.
I'm gonna leave the evening on my breath.

Reaction Post - We're in it now.

The Good Wife: 4x08 Here Comes the Judge.

35 rhums

In Nenette and Boni, Claire Denis captured the intimacy in a complicated but very close family. It takes some time to work out how the characters in 35 rhums relate to each other and even more time to figure out how they are related in the strict biological sense, but maybe the latter doesn't even matter so much. 35 rhums is intimately and profoundly about characters caring about each other - Alex Descas' Lionel trying to take care of his colleague who's just retired and no longer knows what to do with his life, what to do when he isn't driving a Paris metro train - his daughter, Joséphine (Mati Diop), trying to take care of her dad, his ex-girlfriend (or girlfriend, or friend) Gabrielle trying to work her way back into their life, and the lodger in the top floor of the banlieue tower, played by Claire Denis regular Grégroire Colin, only fits into their configuration awkwardly, he comes and goes, constantly tries to draw Jo into his life while Jo attempts to hold on to him in some way, to figure out how to include him. "We have everything here, why go looking somewhere else?" says Lionel, when somewhere else becomes an option for his daughter, and it's this back-and-forth, the struggle between keeping her around because he needs her and letting her go because he knwos he will need to set her free eventually, which makes this film so interesting. At its core, 35 rhums is just a selection of intimate scenes of the family life of a very complicated family (a failed attempt to attend a concert that ends in a slowly evolving tragedy in a pub, a family visit in Germany that features a strange conversation about a lack of closeness), but somehow, this film manages to be just as compelling as Claire Denis' other more dramatic films. The acting is fantastic, Agnès Godard's cinematography as gorgeous as always, the Tindersticks provide the soundtrack, as always. Watching a film by Claire Denis feels like coming home from outside, the kind of feeling you have when it's been raining and the very moment you take off your soaked jacket, you feel completely safe and sound. 

2008, directed by Claire Denis, starring Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogue, Grégoire Colin, Julieth Mars Toussaint, Jean-Christophe Folly, Ingrid Caven, Melanie Petzold.

The Mountain Goats - Transcendental Youth

do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive
do every stupid thing to try to drive the dark away

the mountain goats, amy aka spent gladiator 1

I don't think I've felt a record to be absolutely necessary as much as this one in quite some time. I mean, Wild Flag feels necessary - this combination of musical fervour and talent and experience - but The Mountain Goats' Transcendental Youth is something else. It's a record with a theme - coping with your own personal demons, mental illness, depression paranoia - and it follows characters who either develop their own strategies to deal with their respective ailments or fail tragically, like Amy from the first song of the record did, like the guy in Lakeside View Apartment Suite, and addict who is awaiting death ("You can't judge us - you're not the judge"), like Frankie Lymon in Harlem Roulette, a Rock'n'Roll and Blues singer who died of a heroin overdose in 1968, aged 25 ("The loneliest people in the whole wide world are the ones you're never going to see again."). 

Nobody could sing Cry for Judas with that much exuberance, lines like "I am just a broken machine / and I do things that I don't really mean" as if they were a celebration of how brilliant yet incredibly fucked up life can be - it's like a party for a capitulation, almost. This is the most necessary and wonderful record - a record about people who manage to survive in the face of horrible, horrible things, and people who lose tragically, and people who take care of those who struggle and desperately try to hold on to their own sanity as they do. 

The Diaz Brothers is about fictional siblings referenced in Scarface, who once they enter the narrative are already dead. Counterfeit Florida Plates is a precise description of a paranoid schizophrenic, A Memory of Satan (the most haunting one, for me), the tale of a depressive shut-in who, instead of seeking traditional help, tries to figure out his issues in his own, quiet way ("In old movies people scream

Choking on their fists when they see shadows like these / But no one screams cuz it's just me / Locked up in myself / Never gonna get free"). 

Whatever you have to do, just stay alive. Stay forever alive, if you can. John Darnielle just made the best record of the year but more importantly, one of the most essential and necessary in maybe a decade. "Don't hurt anybody on your way up to the light" is the best advice you will ever get. 

Foreign policy

Drones, Drones, Drones

Reaction Post - You are tougher now. You're smarter about things.

The Good Wife: 4x07 Anatomy of a Joke.

Das Lied zum Sonntag

Daughter - KEXP Full Performance




And if you're in love, then you are the lucky one, 
'Cause most of us are bitter over someone.

Popular - I wanted a friend.

Popular: 2x13 Mary Charity.

James Duff, the writer of the episode, was also responsible for Joe Loves Mary Cherry, but you’d probably make the connection all on your own, considering how well Mary Charity uses Leslie Grossman’s acting talents. I’ve always admired her for the ability to play Mary Cherry, who is arguably the one character of the show that has, at least a little bit, made it into the cult canon of “now”, because pulling off her over-the-top quality with such abandon and brilliance can’t be easy; but episodes like this and Joe Loves Mary Cherry also reveal that she is a great dramatic actress, someone who can ground her character in reality. There’s a moment in the episode, when Lily shows Mary Cherry the homeless people, where her face suddenly becomes so unusually serious and earnest – and it’s not just that the shock of an absurdly sheltered person (because that’s the joke that’s always on her – that she’s sheltered – while Nic is the opposite, she’s not sheltered, she’s armoured against a world that she knows incredibly well) feeling pity, it’s also Mary Cherry realizing how deep people can fall in a country without a security net, and that it could happen to her. I admire the show for being honest enough to argue that charity is often, if not always, grounded in the fear of eventually being in a similar situation, and having to rely on other people’s kindness. 

I started with something that happens halfway through the episode because there are other things about Mary Charity that I don’t like quite as much, and it relates to something that feels like a fundamental problem with the show. Sometimes it feels to me that there was never a black board in the writers’ room that mapped out the characters and how they were evolving. I think everyone went into the script writing process with their own individual ideas about relationships, attractions and motivations, without any central leadership setting the course. James Duff’s version of Mary Cherry is one that I admire, I think it’s the most interesting way of thinking about her as a character, one that plays best to the actresses’ strength – but he misses the mark a bit with some other people in the episode, and the most frustrating thing is that I can’t remember the last time that someone captured Carmen well, or in any way that resembles who I thought she was built up to be in season one. But anyway, back to the beginning…

Yesterday's news...

President Barack Obama won Tuesday's election. Without Florida's undecided but inconsequential 29 electoral vote, the current result is 303 to 206 electoral votes for Obama. Of the swing states that were still in play on election night, Obama managed to win all (and if Florida is decided for Obama, Nate Silver's prediction for the election was completely correct). 

That’s why we do this. That’s what politics can be. That’s why elections matter. It’s not small, it’s big. It’s important. Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions. Each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions as a country, it necessarily stirs passions, stirs up controversy. That won’t change after tonight. And it shouldn’t. These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty, and we can never forget that as we speak, people in distant nations are risking their lives right now just for a chance to argue about the issues that matter [...] the chance to cast their ballots like we did today. 

NY Times: Transcript of President Obama’s Election Night Speech, November 7, 2012 [video of the speech)

The Democrats managed to hold on to the majority in the Senate and gained two seats. In Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren defeated incumbent Scott Brown, in Indiana, the Democratic candidate defeated notable tea party candidate Richard "pregnancies from rape are intended by god" Mourdock. With Tammy Baldwin winning in Wisconsin, she will be the first openly lesbian Senator. 

The Republicans lost three seats in the House of Representatives but still hold a majority of 233. 

In ballot measures in Maryland and Maine, voters legalized same-sex marriage (the first time ever by popular vote rather than court decisions). A similar measure in Washington seems to have succeeded as well, and one barring marriage for same-sex couples in Minnesota was defeated. 

Where will the Republican party go after "losing the popular presidential vote for the fifth time in six elections" with demographics working against their current political strategy? Did conservative media fail conservative voters? Will key positions in Obama's government change, with Geithner, Panetta and Clinton rumoured to be leaving? 

...

Good morning.

Linkliste unbehandelter Themen

Politics: 

I haven't ever talked about the numbers before, but today's Cat and Girl is a good starting point, so here we go: Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight today says that Obama chance to win currently is 91,6 per cent, The New York Times says there are 512 paths to the White House (and Obama has 431 ways to win). The swing states are Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Florida and New Hampshire (89 electoral votes). Talking Point Memo shows the final trend in Ohio and Virginia (Obama currently leads in both). The Guardian provides a helpful tool to figure out some of the numbers. Voting rights and voting conditions also seem to be an issue in this election. Some of the biggest news before today were New Jersey Governor Christie visiting places affected by Hurricane Sandy with President Obama, complimenting their "great working relationship", and NY mayor Bloomberg's endorsement of Obama (and criticism of Romney's position on climate change). 

And thus...

The most expensive presidential race in American history now becomes the biggest show on television, a night with enough uncertainty that it could become a telethon lasting well into morning.

ProPublica with an article on dark money groups, "tax-exempt organizations that can accept unlimited contributions and do not have to disclose their donors for political ads."

Foreign Affairs claims that "those who create Moscow's foreign policy, most Russians agree -- although not enthusiastically" slightly prefer Barack Obama. 

Nigeria's Chief of Army Stuff disclosed that Boko Haram, the jihadist militant organisation attacking Christians, have severely affected the economy and so far killed 3,000 people. 

The Guardian reports that the Syrian opposition "widens ranks amid tank battles in Aleppo". 

Pop Culture: 

BigThink on poet Sylvia Plath, who died fifty years ago. 

Late Plath, in other words, inhabits not only a fallen world but an absolutely toxic world, a world as diseased as her own mind and as treacherous as her own body. For her, all borders between that world and the self have dissolved; thus she feels entitled, even compelled, to drag the burden of mass catastrophe into the theater of her private tragedy. 

n+1 with a history of the post-apocalyptic novel. "Why bother dreaming up a devastated world when you live in one?"

Foals' new video for Inhaler (the follow-up to Total Life Forever will come out early 2013) is NSWF, Mumford & Sons' for Lover of the Light features Idris Elba. Crystal Castles' new record is so close that The A.V. Club has already reviewed it. 

Barbara

In Christian Petzolds Gespenster (2005) sprechen zwei der Hauptcharaktere bei einem Casting für eine Reality TV-Serie namens Freundinnen vor. Toni (Sabine Timoteo) erzählt eine fiktive Geschichte darüber, wie die beiden einander kennenlernten, die in all ihren Details den dramatischen Anforderungen zu entsprechen scheint. Nina (Julia Hummer) erwidert, stotternd und mit gesenktem Blick, mit einer eindringlichen Nacherzählung ihres tatsächlichen Treffens, deren Ehrlichkeit und Unmittelbarkeit so mitreißend ist, dass die beiden danach vom Produzenten angesprochen werden. Warum ist Ninas Geschichte, die von fehlendem Mut und Angst geprägt ist, emotionaler als die Tonis? Es ist nicht nur, weil sie die Realität nacherzählt, eine Szene, welche die Zuseher bereits gesehen haben, die in ihren eigenen Worten drastischer wird – sondern auch die Art der Erzählung, ihre Mimik und Gestik, und die Spannung, die plötzlich entsteht, weil diese Entwicklung nicht vorher abgesprochen war und Tonis von all dem nichts gewusst hat (es ist ihre Geschichte, aber Nina beansprucht sie, indem sie diese der Öffentlichkeit zugänglich macht). Geschichten geben uns Bedeutung, aber sie entstehen auch immer in der Auseinandersetzung miteinander und mit dem Publikum.

In Barbara gibt es drei Szenen, in denen der Film scheinbar aufbricht und über das Erzählen erzählt. Gegen Anfang erklärt André (Ronald Zehrfeld), Chefarzt des Krankenhauses, in das Barbara (Nina Hoss) versetzt wurde, nachdem sie einen Ausreiseantrag gestellt hat, warum er trotz seines Interesses an Forschung und seines umfassenden Wissens in der Provinz gelandet ist. Vor zwei oder drei Jahren machte er einen entscheidenden Fehler, der schreckliche Konsequenzen hatte – es ist wiederum eine Geschichte des Scheiterns – und hat sich jetzt mit dem einfachen Leben abgefunden, auch wenn er daran arbeitet, ein professionell ausgestattetes Labor einzurichten. Barbaras Reaktion auf die Geschichte ist, ebenso wie ihr gesamter Umgang mit dem Personal des Krankenhauses, kühl und zurückhaltend, und André fragt: „Zu lang die Geschichte? Zu rund?“ 

Der Film beantwortet diese Frage nicht. War es nur eine Geschichte? War es eine perfekt auf die Anforderungen ausgerichtete Erzählung, um Barbaras Vertrauen zu gewinnen? Schließlich ist André über Barbaras Übertretungen informiert, und zwischen den beiden herrscht ein ständiges Gefühl des Misstrauens, da Barbara vermutet, André sei Stasi-Informant und aus diesem Grund so vertraulich und zugänglich. Eine andere Frage ist, ob Barbara überhaupt irgendeine Geschichte glauben könnte, in einem Land, in dem ein Ausreiseantrag ausreicht, ihre Karriere zu zerstören und sie wöchentlich einem grauenvollen herabsetzenden Ritual der Kontrolle auszusetzen, wenn die Stasi klopf und jeden Millimeter ihrer Wohnung auseinander nimmt und ihre körperliche Autonomie in Frage stellt. Wie ist ein richtiges Leben oder authentische Gefühle unter ständiger Beobachtung und einem gesellschaftlich anerzogenen gegenseitigem Misstrauen überhaupt möglich? Barbara flieht in die Kälte, André in die Geschichten anderer. Zwei der Patienten, die Barbara behandelt, fliehen blindlings ohne Plan, selbstzerstörerisch und wild. 

Wir finden bald heraus, dass Barbaras Distanz zu diesem Leben, diesen Menschen, zum Teil daher rührt, dass sie auf ihre Flucht wartet. Sie ist im Inbegriff zu fliehen, während ihr Geliebter im Westen alles vorbereitet, das Geld, den Transportweg. Diese Verbindung zu jemandem von außen könnte die Alleinigkeit der Protagonistin aufbrechen, scheitert aber gänzlich an dem Verständnis von Freiheit der beiden – der Mann aus dem Westen erklärt stolz, er verdiene genug für sie beide und sie müsse im Westen nicht mehr arbeiten, ohne zu beachten, dass das einzige, was Barbara selbst hier nahe geht, ihre Arbeit ist – und meint schließlich sogar, sie könnten doch beide ein Leben hier beginnen. 

„Du spinnst. Hier kann man nicht glücklich werden.“

Das Glück, und die Freiheit, stehen im Zentrum dieses Filmes. Kann man glücklich werden in einem Land, in dem manche so überwältigend unglücklich sind, dass sie ihr Leben aufs Spiel setzen um zu entkommen? Barbara trifft auf Stella, eine junge Frau, die wieder und wieder aus einem Arbeitslager flieht, und dabei dem Tod immer näher kommt. Gegenüber diesen Patienten zeigt sie mehr Einfühlungsvermögen und Sympathie, als für die Kollegschaft, selbst wenn diese, wie André, den Kontakt sucht. Barbara identifiziert sich mit den Außenseitern dieser Gesellschaft, die sie verabscheut, gegen die sie aber nur durch das Tragen von geschmuggelten Luxusartikeln aufbegehren kann, während sie auf ihre Erlösung wartet. 

An einem Punkt driftet André ab (er wirkt wie ein Träumer, aber der Film lässt auch immer die Frage offen, ob genau dieser Eindruck, dieses Vertrauenserweckende, nicht gefährlich ist) und versucht sich an einer Bildinterpretation von Rembrandts Die Anatomie des Dr. Tulp: Die Ärzte starren auf ein Anatomiebuch, während der Patient, der wund und offen vor ihnen liegt, konventioneller Anatomie nicht entspricht. Die Interpretation könnte beinahe als Allegorie auf das System der DDR verstanden werden, gegen das Barbara auf ihre Weise aufbegehrt, während sich André mit seinen kleinen Momenten des Glücks – der Klavierstimmer, die romantischen Arztromane, sein kleines Labor im Hinterzimmer – arrangiert hat. 

Am Ende ist die Frage von Glück und Freiheit auch eine Frage der persönlichen Verantwortung. Was ist die Freiheit wert, wenn die moralischen Kosten zu hoch sind? Barbara erkauft die Freiheit Stellas, eine Freiheit für jemanden, der sonst körperlich zu Grunde gehen würde, während für sie selbst das Leben hier vielleicht erträglich sein könnte, wenn sie es zuließe. Erträglich, aber nicht glücklich, und nicht frei.

2012, Regie: Christian Petzold, mit Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Rainer Bock, Christina Hecke, Claudia Geisler, Jasna Fritzi Bauer.

Reaction Post - What are you doing, when it's all over?

The Good Wife: 4x06 The Art of War.

Das Lied zum Sonntag

HEALTH - Tears


directed by David Altobelli and Jeff Desom

The memories are wrong

Titus Andronicus - Local Business

I think by now we've established / everything is inherently worthless / and there is nothing in the universe / with any kind of objective purpose. 

titus andronicus, ecce homo

A couple of lines after this theme-setting opener of Titus Andronicus' third record, Local Business, singer Patrick Stickles regrets the lack of time to be explicit about the implications of his statements, and to make generalizations more specific. It's an interesting insight from a band that is so brilliant at writing poignant lines and songs only consisting of one sentence that seem to be designed to be shouted along, There was the weird jubilant quality of No Future Part Three: No Escape on  2010's The Monitor - You will always be a loser, a song that will always remind me of my favourite anthem, The Mountain Goats' No Children - on Ecce Homo, there's Food Fight, but probably fitting the bill more, Titus Andronicus vs. The Absurd Universe (3rd Round KO), which is 2:11 minutes of I'm Going Insane. 

And that brings me back to the title of the record, Local Business, which could be about the grassroot kind of patriotism of The Monitor (one of the quotes the albums uses is from Abraham Lincoln's Lyceum address - "All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined [...] could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years."), an idea of a country that draws its strength from individual enterprise. There's bits and pieces of it on the record, in Upon Viewing Oregon's Landscape With The Flood Of Detritus, "I've adored every inch of this country through the same dirty windshield / Peeking through blotches of the blood of bugs towards the Elysian Fields", but it makes more sense to think of the title as a comment on the ultimate local business, because most of the songs are about identity, addiction, struggling with eating disorder. The idea of authenticity is brought up right in the first song, both in terms of establishing a life outside a grinding machine of an oppressive job and in relation to the very personal demons that limit freedom in the most terrible ways. 

I heard them say
the white man created existential angst
When he ran out of other problems
Cause the thing about those problems was
Typically, more money would solve them
We're breaking out of our bodies now
Time to see what's underneath them. 

titus andronicus, ecce homo

As the record progresses, "breaking out of our bodies" becomes the ultimate utopia, an impossible accomplishment, deriving part of its undeniable power from the way Patrick Stickles delivers the lyrics, molding words to fit the metre ("And he's so unsure if being ignored / Was half the pain of being observed."). On Still Life With Hot Deuce On Silver Platter, context wins over content ("context wins, con men contact content's next of kin" - the closest you'll get to a pun here) and the rest of the song descends into incomprehensible madness. The combination of In A Big City and In A Small Body draws the map of the record, a map of all the different ways you can fail and you can be failed. "Don't tell me I was born free / That joke has been old since high school".

The other side of Sandy

Before making landfall in the United States, Sandy swept through the central Caribbean, directly hitting Jamaica and Cuba, and dropping more than 20 inches of rain on a country already well acquainted with the blunt force of nature: Haiti. The storm killed 52 Haitians, flooded much of the country's south, and displaced over 18,000 families. Up to 400,000 Haitians are still living in camps for those left homeless by the country's devastating 2010 earthquake. A subsequent cholera outbreak -- which most likely originated with U.N. peacekeepers stationed in the country -- killed up to 7,500 people. And while Haiti's 2011 presidential election might have demonstrated that the country's democratic development wouldn't be delayed on account of the earthquake, it was still a contentious affair that culminated in the elevation of Michele Martelly, a former pop singer with no prior political experience. There is never a "good" time for a killer storm to strike, but Sandy slammed into a highly vulnerable country that was struggling to emerge from a long spell of instability. 

The Atlantic: The Other Hurricane Sandy: The Storm's Impact in Haiti, October 31, 2012

The Guardian: Hurricane Sandy: Haiti in emergency aid plea as disaster piles upon disaster, October 30, 2012

The Guardian: Caribbean nations count cost of hurricane Sandy, October 29, 2012

NY Times: Hurricane Sandy Hits Bahamas After Sweeping Through Cuba and Haiti, October 25, 2012

Reading List: Oktober.

Non-Fiction: 

Andrew Wilson: Beautiful Shadow. A Biography of Patricia Highsmith.
Frantz Fanon: Die Verdammten der Erde.

Fiction: 

Carson McCullers: The Member of the Wedding.

Films: 

Hadewijch (2009, Bruno Dumont).
The Moth Diaries (2011, Mary Harron).
Secret Places (1984, Zelda Barron).
Standing Still (2005, Matthew Cole Weiss).
Butter (2011, Jim Field Smith).
Hostel II (2007, Eli Roth).
The Divide (2011, Xavier Gens).
Cowboys and Aliens (2011, Jon Favreau).
Safety Not Guaranteed (2012, Colin Trevorrow).
Fidaï (2012, Damien Ounouri).
De jueves a domingo (2012, Dominga Sotomayor Castillo).
Wadjda (2012, Haifaa Al-Mansour).
The Last King of Scotland (2006, Kevin Macdonald).
L'enfant d'en haut (2012, Ursula Meier).
Playing by Heart (1998, Willard Carroll).
Excision (2012, Richard Bates Jr.).

Shows: 

The X-Files. ALL OF IT. ALL OF THE X-FILES.
Great Expectations (2011).
Bleak House (2005).

Three Films - Viennale Edition

Damien Ounouri's Fidaï is a documentary about the experiences of his great uncle during the Algerian revolution working for the FLN in France. He experiments with how to portray memory on screen, how to tell the story of a man who assassinated a political enemy for his ideals. The film is more concerned with the question of duty (in the sense of the duty of the fidaï - literally the "self-sacrificer" - to the movement and the duty of the contemporary witness to tell his tale, in spite of how his surroundings will react) than that of guilt, and relies on the audience to be aware of the historical context, only providing a montage of shocking pictures of the war and the atrocities. Fidaï is the story of an individual and a documentary about story-telling more than an attempt to tell the history of the revolution, and completely succeeds in that regard. 

Fidaï (2012), directed by Damien Ounouri

De jueves a domingo is a beautifully told story about a family on a road trip through Chile, told mostly through the perspective of the daughter, who slowly puts together the pieces of how her parents' marriage is falling apart through observed fights behind windows, a secret affair that evolves as the film progresses. The film perfectly captures the inability to understand the whole picture, and is at its best when it focuses on small significant moments between the members of the family. The daugher is the important bit older than her brother and understands more than he does. There is a moving scene of jealousy when she sees her father teach him how to drive, a hilariously reckless attempt by the father to steal forbidden fruit from a stranger's garden, a precarious sense of community when the family joins another on the road for a couple of days - and throughout all of this, the precision in portraying the workings of the family unit is fascinating and capturing. 

De jueves a domingo (2012), directed by Dominga Sotomayor Castillo, featuring Santi Ahumada, Emiliano Freifeld, Paola Giannini, Francisco Pérez-Bannen, Jorge Becker, Axel Dupré.

Wadjda is one of the few examples of movies that seem to be made to become an instant classic, a universal tale about individuals, astonishingly acted especially by the young lead. Wadjda, an approximately ten-year old girl going to school in Saudi Arabia, is extremely industrious and sets her mind to earning enough money to buy her own bike, despite the fact that bike-riding girls are frowned upon. Surrounded by females who take small steps of resistence against the suffocating social limitations, she proves extremely resourceful in the face of overwhelming obstacles. While her mother struggles with the fact that her father is about to take a second wife because she is unable to give him a son, she joins a club to win a religious contest. The film is surprisingly hopeful, and the tenderness between the characters provides an emotional respite in these dire circumstances. Perhaps a perfect movie.

Wadjda (2012), directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour, featuring Reem Abdullah, Waad Mohammed, Abdullrahman Al Gohani, Ahd, Sultan Al Assaf.

Popular - Promise that it's actually you and not someone else.

Popular: 2x12 The Shocking Possession of Harrison John.

Nicole: All the money in the world can’t buy what nature gave me. An identity such as mine can only be inherited.

This is basically Friendships!! The Episode, which is a good thing because the show is at its best when it focuses on the relationships between the characters, and The Shocking Possession of Harrison John finally deals with the fact that since this season started, many established friendships have been struggling under the weight of newly formed alliances and romances. 

It’s also an episode about identity (and a nice reminder of how the show started – with Brooke proclaiming that she was trying to be more than one thing, and the nice way Popular has always played with expectations and stereotypes), and about choice, because Nicole’s statement at the beginning of the episode will be taken apart entirely at the end of it. 

I’d also argue that it’s first and foremost about Nicole Julian, who sort of appears in the title if you really think about it. It’s not that Harrison’s storyline doesn’t eventually turn a corner and become serious and moving towards the end, but the punch to the gut is delivered elsewhere, and it’s a rare thing for a show that (self-) identifies as a comedy to end on such a dire, hopeless note, and it speaks volumes about how far Nicole has come as a character (and Tammy Lynn Michaels’ acting) how powerful and draining that particular ending is. 

But it starts with Harrison’s shocking change from Mary Cherry’s beloved Joe to someone quite quickly proclaimed as a male version of Nicole Julian. He’s styled. He’s mean. He argues that honesty is kindness and destroys Bobbi Glass and April Tuna with a focused destructiveness that hints at all the things the old version of Harrison always thought but never dared to say (because if we’re being honest, Harrison has resorted to meanness before, and it’s interesting that nobody remembers). Awesomely, the person who picks up on it the most is Mary Cherry (not that Carmen and Sam don’t notice, but Mary Cherry is the first to take the initiative). This is great in the context of this season, because in Mary Cherry’s conception of Joe, he isn’t supposed to be mean to others. She already has a friend with these qualities, and her entire world would fall apart if Joe ended up being a copy of Nicole. She doesn’t need two Nicoles.

Nicole, meanwhile, gets a present from Brooke that is the cause of everything else that happens later on: since they haven’t spent a lot of time together, Brooke decides to give her old best friend a chart reading (because “a good chart reading can lead you to the person you were born to become” – which is such a great line, considering what happens next). Nicole needs the date and place of her birth for it and approaches her mother, who immediately blocks every attempt. Nicole steals her birth certificate and finds the inevitable – she was adopted. The whole structure of the episode is fantastic because Nicole starts out projecting all her confidence about her background (money and power), except once we see her interact with her mother, it becomes clear that they have a terrible relationship, one that entirely lacks love and comfort, so finding out about being adopted is on the one hand a shock to Nicole, but there is also a very real sense of hope there. Brooke plays into it as well, sharing her own experience with reconnecting with her mother, and Nicole starts to imagine how it would be if her birth mother weren’t as cold and distant as her adoptive one is. While Harrison tries to copy Nicole because “she gets results”, we see the reason for Nicole’s unforgiving hardness. 

So the theory that Nicole’s dominant DNA infiltrated Harrison’s body is wacky and fun for a bit, but the whole thing also plays out while we, the audience, find out that Nicole was adopted, that it’s really all nurture, that it’s the relationships that shape characters, not biology. While Mary Cherry gets Sam and Carmen to perform an exorcism of Nicole’s evil spirit, Brooke decides to fully support Nicole’s attempts to find her biological mother.