Kindle Edition, 2013 © The New Yorker

COMMENT
Limited Options

by George Packer

Toward the end of last week’s Senate hearing on American military action in Syria, Tim Kaine, of Virginia, admitted to being confused. Secretary of State John Kerry had been repeating for hours the Administration’s line that the purpose of bombing Syria was “limited”: to punish Bashar al-Assad for gassing more than a thousand of his own people, including hundreds of children, and to discourage him from doing it again. On the other hand, General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had tersely acknowledged that the act of destroying Syrian military assets would inevitably hurt Assad’s ability to fight the rebellion—so the effects might not be so limited after all. Meanwhile, the American goal in Syria remains a negotiated settlement. Since no one from the Administration would connect the dots, Kaine struggled to do it. Bombing, he offered, “will level the playing field by removing the ability to use chemical weapons, and it will therefore increase the odds that the parties will then come to the table to try to figure out that political solution.” He went on, “Is that the connection between the military option you are proposing and the stated end goal of a solution to the civil war only being—only being achieved through a political end?” “It’s the collateral connection to it,” Kerry replied. “It’s not the purpose of it, but it is a collateral connection.”

The Administration’s case for making Assad pay is as practically flawed as it is morally defensible. The war-weary American people overwhelmingly oppose it, and the debate in Washington is not winning them over to President Obama’s side. There’s also a problem with the debate itself: Obama seems to be reserving the right to ignore Congress if it fails to deliver the verdict he wants, which has led Senator Rand Paul, of Kentucky, to accuse the Administration of “making a joke of us.” In the meantime, a number of Republicans talk about the Syria crisis as if it were an overseas extension of the debt crisis—another chance to thwart a President they despise. The geopolitics of military action are just as problematic: the United States, supported by a handful of mostly silent partners, is upholding a collective standard single-handedly, and preserving the mission of the United Nations by ignoring it.

It would be less difficult to wave off these contradictions if the Administration seemed to have a plan for the day after the last cruise missile takes out the last Syrian jet. But the flaws start to appear fatal when you consider the lack of any strategy beyond bombing. It’s a worrying sign when America’s chief diplomat refers to the central objective in Syria as “a collateral connection.” The Administration would like to frame missile strikes as a kind of judicial action, a one-time ruling from the bench, not as a military intervention. Yet bombing would change the balance of power in Syria and, one way or another, entangle America in the civil war despite Obama’s ardent wish to stay out. The White House clearly failed to plan for a mass chemical-weapons attack; it would now be far better for the Administration to think through ways of reaching American goals before the missiles launch.

For almost two years, the U.S. has conducted a barely perceptible, utterly futile diplomatic exercise with Russia. Vladimir Putin has frustrated every effort to negotiate a ceasefire and a political transition in Syria, and now Russia is preventing the U.N. from even condemning the use of chemical weapons. Russia has relatively little invested in Syria, and it wants nothing from the U.S.—the war is just a cheap way for Putin to damage American interests. The clearest path to a settlement now may be not through Moscow but through Tehran. Iran has a lot at stake in Syria—in money, arms, lives, and regional strategy. The Revolutionary Guard has always tried to carry out foreign policy with no fingerprints, through proxies and covert operations, but Syria is becoming an Iranian quagmire.

The Obama Administration has refused to allow Iran a seat at the Geneva talks, but Iran has a new President, Hassan Rouhani, a seemingly pragmatic centrist whose top priority is to ease tensions with the U.S. and to end Iran’s international isolation. He and his foreign minister, Javad Zarif, issued conciliatory tweets on the Jewish New Year, while former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, Rouhani’s political patron, dared to blame Assad for the chemical attack. During the Iran-Iraq War, tens of thousands of Iranians were gassed by the forces of Saddam Hussein. It’s conceivable that the atrocity in Damascus has turned the stomach of Iran’s political leadership. In the wake of American strikes, Iranian radicals might want to retaliate—there are reports of a secret order to attack the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad or Beirut—and restraining them would be the first test of Rouhani’s power to carry out his agenda.

Some Iranians point to the Bonn Conference of 2001—where Iran and the U.S. coöperated in the formation of an Afghan government, after the fall of their mutual enemy, the Taliban—as a model for what might take place with Syria. The U.S. and Iran have a common interest: preventing Salafi extremists, affiliated with Al Qaeda, from gaining power in the region. If this appeared probable in Syria, Iran might be willing to drop its support for Assad in exchange for a face-saving transition, backed by Turkey, Jordan, and the Gulf states: a ceasefire, a peacekeeping force made up of Muslim troops from the region, protections for Alawites and other minorities, U.N.-sponsored elections, and exile in a comfortable dacha for the Assad family.

None of this is likely. It would take imaginative diplomacy of the kind that the Administration has shown little taste for in the Middle East. Iran would have to be convinced that it can’t win but also that it needn’t lose, and this would not be possible without deeper American engagement. The question of arming rebel groups came up at the Senate hearings. “The opposition has increasingly become more defined by its moderation,” Kerry said, “by its adherence to some, you know, democratic process.” Yet this version of Iraqi “sweets and flowers” is contradicted by accounts of rebel brutality, and by a new report from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which describes fractured rebel forces that are increasingly dominated on the battlefield by hard-core Salafists. The fact that promised American weapons have been so slow to reach the rebels suggests that U.S. intelligence shares this view. Nonetheless, one of the report’s authors, Andrew Tabler, an American with long experience in Syria, argues that, with careful vetting, U.S. arms, along with political support in border areas, could still strengthen the more secular nationalist rebels. Without some such effort, the war looks more and more like a choice between Assad and Al Qaeda.

This strategy carries tremendous risks and few prospects for a resolution. There’s an easier case to be made for doing nothing—letting the war burn on for years. That policy would have the virtue of being clear and consistent, which cannot be said of what the Administration seems poised to do. But fires are hard to contain. The conflict is already spreading to Lebanon, Iraq, and perhaps the wider region. In the end, there’s no way for a conflagration in the Middle East to spare American interests. ♦

PASSION PLAY
Minsanity

by Ben McGrath

“Do you know Mr. Hur?” a Korean broadcaster said, pointing a camera at a minor-league pitcher warming up at Provident Bank Park, in Rockland County. “He’s a very rich, rich man.” The rich man, Hur Min, wore Harry Potter glasses and had a short ponytail sticking out of the back of his cap. A new signee with the Rockland Boulders, in the independent Can-Am League, he had recently flown in from Seoul and was scheduled to take the mound in an hour. The Boulders were playing the Newark Bears, whose alumni include Jose Canseco and Rickey Henderson. The game was to be streamed live on Korean ESPN. Min looked loose, if a little stooped. “Is he a good pitcher?” an onlooker asked, and the cameraman giggled before answering, “Maybe!”

Hur Min is the founding owner, back home, of a professional baseball team called the Goyang Wonders, for whom he has never pitched. He is a thirty-seven-year-old rookie with a sixty-three-mile-an-hour fastball. His wealth derives from non-sporting pursuits, like Dungeon and Fighter, a video game that he produced and sold for nearly two hundred million dollars, and WeMakePrice.com, which he describes as a Korean version of Groupon. “I have twelve companies,” he said. “I don’t know how much I have, you know? Really rich man don’t know.”

Min’s art is the knuckleball, which he has been attempting to master since 2006, when he had shoulder surgery and resigned himself to the fact that an arm that had qualified him as a “benchwarmer” at Seoul National University wasn’t going to grow any livelier in his thirties. He hired a personal trainer to catch for him: a hundred pitches a day, five days a week. After three years of study, he decided to seek further outside help. “I found out that Phil Niekro is No. 1 knuckleball pitcher,” he said, referring to the Atlanta Braves Hall of Famer, a.k.a. Knucksie. “I sent him e-mail a lot of times.” Eventually, Knucksie agreed to a consultation, and Min flew to Atlanta. “He told me that he don’t know when I will know how to throw knuckleball,” Min went on. “Tomorrow, one week after, one month after, ten years? ‘Just keep going.’ ” Last year, Knucksie visited Min in South Korea.

Min went to Fenway Park and watched the Red Sox knuckleballer Tim Wakefield pitch. “Fantastic,” he said. He attended tryouts with the Rangers, the Mariners, and the Diamondbacks before concluding that he might have to set his sights a little lower. Two months ago, he auditioned for the Boulders, who were then still in contention for a playoff spot. After a losing streak ended the team’s post-season hopes, in late August, they called him back. With little at stake, why not give him a shot? They printed a thousand T-shirts with slogans like “Min-mania” and “Min-sanity.” (“The Knicks had Linsanity in 2012 and the Boulders have Min-sanity in 2013,” the team’s president, Ken Lehner, explained.) Min himself bought two thousand tickets.

Play ball! Min’s first pitch floated in at fifty-three miles an hour: a called strike. His next six pitches were balls. The Bears loaded the bases, with two out. Min came within one strike of escaping the jam, but then yielded a double. Three–zip.

In the dugout, Min’s personal trainer massaged his shoulders. The second inning showed promise: three up, three down (two pop-ups and a line out). Then the same Bears batter who’d hit the double came up again in the third, and this time clubbed one over the fence: 5–0.

The Boulders’ manager flagged Min’s interpreter, a Rutgers student named Michael Choo, and explained that he’d be sending Min out to throw a single pitch in the fourth before summoning relief. “Just one pitch?” Min said. He looked confused, but he made it count, plunking a Bears batter in the elbow before doffing his cap to the applauding crowd of three thousand. Five runs, four walks, no strikeouts. “Today, my knuckleball is not so good,” he said.

The Bears went on to win, 6–2, but the losing pitcher stuck around to sign autographs in front of the dugout. “Can you put your number on there?” one man asked, looking perplexed at the Korean characters Min had scribbled on a ball. Min said that he just had. “You did?” the man asked. “Oh, all right. Sweet. Thank you, brother.”

An American knuckleball enthusiast asked Min why he hadn’t ever attempted to pitch for the team he owns. “That is a really good question,” Min said, and then explained that he saw the Wonders as a charitable venture—an opportunity for more Koreans to play baseball. “So if I throw the knuckleball on my team, then someone lost the chance to show his play, you know?” He paused a moment, then added, “If I buy the major leagues, that is a different idea.” ♦

DISTINGUISHED VISITOR
Night Move

by Emma Allen

A couple of weeks ago, the newest crop of pop starlets and boy bands strutted down the red carpet, into the Barclays Center, for the MTV Video Music Awards. The other evening, to significantly less fanfare, a flatbed truck cruised the wrong way along Atlantic Avenue, bringing another guest to the Brooklyn arena. Guards inside the lobby pressed up against the glass for a better look. She was late, but she would outlast all the other acts in town.

“These bronze sculptures are easily good for two thousand years,” Andrew Pharmer, the general manager of the Polich Tallix fine-art foundry, in Rock Tavern, New York, said. He was talking about “Ona,” a nineteen-and-a-half-foot-tall, nearly twelve-thousand-pound art work by the sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard, which had been commissioned as a permanent installation for the Daily News Plaza, outside the Barclays Center’s Geico main entrance, and which he was helping to install.

A few hours earlier, Pharmer, a soft-spoken man with a scruffy beard, had stood in the hangarlike foundry, in the spot just vacated by “Ona.” To his right were bulbous figures, by the artist Tom Otterness, destined for a playground in Qatar. “Ona” was outside in the dark, wrapped in a silver tarp and fastened to the truck with bright-yellow straps.

Jimmy Jolly, the head fabricator on the project, ambled in. He had begun work on “Ona” in February, casting the sculpture from a form made of cedar planks—von Rydingsvard’s primary medium since the nineteen-seventies—which she stacks in interlocking patterns, and then chews away at with a circular saw. The two bronze halves had been fused together only the day before; Jolly had been at the foundry until 2 A.M. finishing the piece, and would stay with it through the night, until it was bolted into the ground, in Brooklyn, at 7 A.M. “Everybody leaves with all their fingers and toes, we’re happy,” he said.

Pharmer and Chris (Rocket) Roqué, the foundry photographer, got into a Toyota Avalon, which would be trailing “Ona” to the city. Pharmer said that he had last seen von Rydingsvard, who is seventy-one, the night before—she’d been at Polich Tallix until around eight, wielding a blowtorch.

“And was she stressing, dude?” Roqué asked.

“Yup, and I’ve never seen her stressed out,” Pharmer replied, as “Ona” squeaked through an EZ-Pass lane ahead.

It was a little after 11 P.M. when “Ona” pulled up to the arena. Although von Rydingsvard has works in the collections of MOMA, the Met, and the Whitney, this was her first permanent installation in Brooklyn, where she has had studios for the past thirty-five years. She showed up wearing all black. “She looks pretty cozy in there, right?” von Rydingsvard said of “Ona,” as she clambered up onto the flatbed. “Like she has a babushka on, all cuddled in.” She pulled back the tarp and stroked her creation. “People will touch it, I hope. And then the parts that they touch will become shiny, like the Buddha’s belly.”

“Ona,” von Rydingsvard explained, means “she” or “her” in Polish, the artist’s first language. (She was born in Nazi Germany, to Ukrainian and Polish parents, and spent her childhood in refugee camps, before moving to Connecticut, in 1950.) “It seemed to have some level of affection and intimacy, but not really gooey intimate.”

“What is that?” a young woman on the sidewalk asked. “I live down there, and I’ve gotten to the point where I get out of the subway and go”—she threw her hands up—“Well, what today?” A crane was maneuvered into place by a master rigger wearing a shirt that read, “Money won’t buy happiness, but it’ll get your ass on a boat and that’s a start.” Slowly, amid much arm-waving and yelling, the sculpture was tilted upright, hoisted over the sidewalk, and transferred to a forklift that would orient it toward the subway entrance. It resembled an upside-down tree trunk—ten feet wide at the top, three and a half feet wide at the bottom—its sides marked with ridges and folds. Pharmer hypothesized that people might nickname it “the tornado”—“Like, ‘Meet me at the tornado,’ ” he said.

Keith Richey, an M.T.A. employee with a gold tooth, suggested that it looked more like a gyro: “Lamb meat!”

David Berliner, the chief operating officer of Forest City Ratner, who heads the Barclays Center’s arts initiative, stood with von Rydingsvard. “There was this commercial that was on, when I was growing up, for VO5 hair spray,” he said. “There was this British celebrity named Rula Lenska, and they would show her backstage. The lines were something like, ‘My hair has to stand up, even if I can’t!’ And someone would knock on the door and say, ‘Five minutes, Ms. Lenska,’ and then she would go out onstage.”

“And her hair did stay up—it did not lie flat,” von Rydingsvard said.

Berliner nodded and said, “Five minutes, Ms. Ona. It’s your time.” ♦

THE BOARDS
Between the Lines

by Andrew Marantz

SCENE 1: A black-box theatre on Barrow Street, in the West Village. Seven actors—three male, four female—flit about, rehearsing. They are members of the New York Neo-Futurists, a theatre company known for its avant-garde ethos. Upstage, a blue scrim represents “a glassy tropic sea”; an array of vintage hats hangs from two clotheslines. The stage is a square on the floor, demarcated by masking tape. It is two hours before curtain.

Tonight’s performance will be called “The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill, Volume 1: Early Plays/Lost Plays.” (Volume 2 will be performed this Saturday, in Highland Lake, New York.) Text by Eugene O’Neill; condensing by Christopher Loar, the director. Loar—thirtyish, faint mustache, wearing a ski hat by the surf clothing brand O’Neill—sits downstage, eating pizza, and watches his actors.

LAUREN (silencing everyone): Can we take it from “She takes a broom”?

JACQUELYN: She takes a broom.

(Lauren takes a broom.)

ERICA (crossing down left): Then we cross here—

LAUREN: And afterward we move the chairs off. (They move the chairs off.)

The actors finish their run-through. Jacquelyn takes a downward-dog pose. Danny exits stage left to find a prop. Jacquelyn does a headstand. Loar continues eating pizza. If he is nervous, he does not show it.

SCENE 2: O’Neill, a failed poet before he was a playwright, provided unnecessarily thorough stage directions. Some of these seem like a neurotic writer’s attempt to micromanage directors, or like passages from an unrealized novel (“Lucy is an intelligent, healthy American girl suffering from an overdose of undigested reading”). Others—“He rises from his chair and gets ready to crush her with the weight of his eloquence”—are best ignored. In Loar’s production, the stage directions are read aloud and rendered as literally as possible, for comic effect. When a character is directed to “take a chair,” she picks one up and carries it around the stage.

JACQUELYN (sitting at a side table, reading from a lectern): The Older Man is seated. (Connor, who plays the Older Man, sits.) His hair is turning gray (He glances upward) and his face is the face of one who has wandered far, lived hard, seen life in the rough, and is a little weary of it all. (Connor screws his face into a caricature of dejection.)

SCENE 3: A West Village saloon at midnight: black leather banquette; pints and pub fare.

CHRISTOPHER: Our theatre company’s longest-running show is thirty short plays in sixty minutes. So for that show I did a tiny version of this—“Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Act I, Scene 1, just the stage directions. And it went surprisingly well. So I just decided to keep going. At first, people asked, “Have you looked at Shaw? Have you looked at Williams?” But it had to be O’Neill. His stage directions are just so over the top.

The first idea was to do all of it. All of O’Neill’s plays, all the stage directions—like an epic production, the kind with a dinner break. We had thirty-seven of his plays fully blocked out. Sometimes the rehearsals would get so boring it would be, like, “Should we even be doing this?”

ERICA: Then our lawyer told us that only the early ones are public domain, and we’d have to pay for the later, more famous ones.

CHRISTOPHER: We had too much material anyway.

CARA: I actually really like the plays. Even the earliest ones, the ones he later said he was embarrassed by. They remind me of that stage every writer has to go through—the stage I sometimes feel I’m still in—where you’re finding your voice.

ERICA: If Eugene O’Neill saw our show, he’d hate it, obviously. At least at first. (She picks up a mozzarella stick and bites, pensively.) But then, on some level, I think he’d be, like, “O.K., fair enough.”

JACQUELYN: It’s all out of love and admiration.

ERICA: We’re making fun—

JACQUELYN: But just a little.

ERICA: Like the way you’d make fun of your grandpa.

WAITRESS (entering stage left, carrying a tray of whiskey shots): On the house, folks!

CHRISTOPHER (lifting a glass): To stage directions!

ALL: To stage directions!

They drink. ♦

THE FINANCIAL PAGE
Uber Alles

by James Surowiecki

For most of the past century, Americans have been the world’s greatest consumers. And usually consumption has meant ownership: just before the Great Recession, the average American household owned 2.28 cars, and had more television sets than people. But these days a host of new companies are trying to disrupt the paradigm—offering the benefits of consuming without the costs of ownership. Ride-sharing companies such as Lyft, Sidecar, and, in some cities, UberX, own no cars themselves. Instead, they sign up ordinary car owners: when you need a ride, you can use their apps to find a driver near you and ask to be picked up. Many other companies are trying to cash in on what’s often called “the sharing economy.” Airbnb now features more than three hundred thousand listings from people making their apartments and homes available for short-term rentals. RelayRides and Getaround let you rent cars from their owners (rather than from Hertz or Avis). Boatbound offers boat rentals, Desktime office space, ParkatmyHouse parking spaces. SnapGoods makes it possible for people to borrow consumer goods from other people in their neighborhood or social network. It may not be too long before you’re able to pay to sit in a stranger’s living room and “share” his home theatre.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Uber (which also runs services allowing you to book livery cars and cabs) disclosed that it had raised more than a quarter of a billion dollars in venture-capital funding, most of it from Google. The flood of new money into all these new businesses feels like a mini-bubble in the making. But beneath all the hype is a sensible idea: there are a lot of slack resources in the economy. Assets sit idle—the average car is driven just an hour a day—and workers have time and skills that go unused. If you can connect the people who have the assets to people who are willing to pay to rent them, you reduce waste and end up with a more efficient system.

In the past, this was hard to pull off, because the transaction costs involved in borrowing and lending were high: there was no easy way to find someone who had what you were looking for and no easy way to know if someone was trustworthy. So if you borrowed a lawnmower it was typically from your neighbor. But digital technology has made it much easier for buyers and sellers to find each other quickly, and to evaluate the people they’re trading with. The effect has been to make sharing a much more plausible business model. “We now have hundreds of millions of consumers who are carrying in their pockets powerful computers that are always connected to high-speed networks,” Arun Sundararajan, a professor at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business and an expert on the sharing economy, told me. “That makes it possible for people to rethink the way they consume.”

Sharing has also had a boost from the weak economy. People are leery of making big up-front purchases, and many have had to scramble for ways to monetize their time and their assets. More important, there are signs that the ties between consumption and ownership are loosening, particularly among younger people. Studies suggest that Millennials are less interested in owning cars than previous generations have been, and the success of sites such as Netflix and Spotify show that, at least with some goods, renting can trump ownership. For one thing, people get access to a much wider range of products than they could ever own. “There’s a mind-set that consumers are doing this just to save money,” Sundararajan said. “But I think that what’s really compelling about the sharing economy is the variety and expansion of choices that it offers. Instead of being tied to owning one car, I can drive twenty different ones. So I expect this will expand consumption, rather than shrink it.”

Before that happens, though, there are serious hurdles that the sharing economy has to get over. The most obvious of these is regulation. Cities typically have elaborate rules for cabs and limos that control drivers, vehicles, fares, and so on. These rules in part reflect the desire of vested interests (like cab companies) to protect their businesses and in part consumer concerns about safety and liability. Sharing companies circumvent some of those rules, in effect arguing that, if you choose to pay someone to give you a ride to the airport—or rent you an apartment—the state shouldn’t stop you. That’s an appealing position, but the companies are actually piggybacking on the trust that consumers feel in what is typically a highly regulated economy. If these companies become more established, they’ll have to reach some kind of accommodation with regulators, perhaps along the lines of rules that California’s Public Utilities Commission recently proposed, which would let Sidecar, Lyft, and Uber operate if they implement certain safety and driver regulations.

It isn’t just companies and regulators who will have to be flexible, though. Workers will, too, since the sharing economy requires people to function as micro-entrepreneurs. Uber is just a broker, and the drivers aren’t anyone’s employees, any more than the landlords in Airbnb’s system are. They are all independent contractors, working for themselves and giving the companies a cut of the action. This has certain attractions: no boss, the ability to set your own hours, control over working conditions. It also means no benefits, no steady paycheck, and the need to always be hustling; in that sense, it fits all too well with the free-agent nation we’re increasingly becoming. Sharing, it turns out, is often a hell of a lot of work. ♦

JOURNALS
My Dear God

A young writer’s prayers.

by Flannery O’Connor

In January, 1946, while studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flannery O’Connor began keeping a journal in a ruled Sterling notebook. O’Connor, who had left her home in Milledgeville, Georgia, for Iowa, turned twenty-one in March and had her first short story, “The Geranium,” accepted for publication that month. She was a devout Catholic, and over a year and a half she filled the notebook with a series of entries addressed to God. The following excerpts from her journal chart her thoughts on the subject of faith and prayer, and her hopes for her fiction.

Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.

I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.

I want very much to succeed in the world with what I want to do. I have prayed to You about this with my mind and my nerves on it and strung my nerves into a tension over it and said, “oh God, please,” and “I must,” and “please, please.” I have not asked You, I feel, in the right way. Let me henceforth ask You with resignation—that not being or meant to be a slacking up in prayer but a less frenzied kind, realizing that the frenzy is caused by an eagerness for what I want and not a spiritual trust. I do not wish to presume. I want to love.

Oh God please make my mind clear.

Please make it clean.

I ask You for a greater love for my holy Mother and I ask her for a greater love for You.

Please help me to get down under things and find where You are.

I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always very fugitive. This way I have it every instant. I can feel a warmth of love heating me when I think & write this to You. Please do not let the explanations of the psychologists about this make it turn suddenly cold. My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be.

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Please let Christian principles permeate my writing and please let there be enough of my writing (published) for Christian principles to permeate. I dread, oh Lord, losing my faith. My mind is not strong. It is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery. I do not want it to be fear which keeps me in the Church. I don’t want to be a coward, staying with You because I fear hell. I should reason that if I fear hell, I can be assured of the author of it. But learned people can analyze for me why I fear hell and their implication is that there is no hell. But I believe in hell. Hell seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven. No doubt because hell is a more earthly-seeming thing. I can fancy the tortures of the damned but I cannot imagine the disembodied souls hanging in a crystal for all eternity praising God. It is natural that I should not imagine this. If we could accurately map heaven some of our up-&-coming scientists would begin drawing blueprints for its improvement, and the bourgeois would sell guides 10¢ the copy to all over sixty-five. But I do not mean to be clever although I do mean to be clever on 2nd thought and like to be clever & want to be considered so. But the point more specifically here is, I don’t want to fear to be out, I want to love to be in; I don’t want to believe in hell but in heaven. Stating this does me no good. It is a matter of the gift of grace. Help me to feel that I will give up every earthly thing for this. I do not mean becoming a nun.

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My dear God, how stupid we people are until You give us something. Even in praying it is You who have to pray in us. I would like to write a beautiful prayer but I have nothing to do it from. There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise; but I cannot do it. Yet at some insipid moment when I may possibly be thinking of floor wax or pigeon eggs, the opening of a beautiful prayer may come up from my subconscious and lead me to write something exalted. I am not a philosopher or I could understand these things.

If I knew all of myself dear God, if I could discover everything in me pedantic egocentric, in any way insincere, what would I be then? But what would I do about those feelings that are now fear, now joy, that lie too deep to be touched by my understanding. I am afraid of insidious hands Oh Lord which grope into the darkness of my soul. Please be my guard against them. Please be the Cover at the top of the passage. Am I keeping my faith by laziness, dear God? But that is an idea that would appeal to someone who could only think.

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My dear God, I do not want this to be a metaphysical exercise but something in praise of God. It is probably more liable to being therapeutical than metaphysical, with the element of self underlying its thoughts. Prayers should be composed I understand of adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication and I would like to see what I can do with each without writing an exegesis. It is the adoration of You, dear God, that most dismays me. I cannot comprehend the exaltation that must be due You. Intellectually, I assent: let us adore God. But can we do that without feeling? To feel, we must know. And for this, when it is practically impossible for us to get it ourselves, not completely, of course, but what we can, we are dependent on God. We are dependent on God for our adoration of Him, adoration, that is, in the fullest sense of the term. Give me the grace, dear God, to adore You, for even this I cannot do for myself. Give me the grace to adore You with the excitement of the old priests when they sacrificed a lamb to You. Give me the grace to adore You with the awe that fills Your priests when they sacrifice the Lamb on our altars. Give me the grace to be impatient for the time when I shall see You face to face and need no stimulus than that to adore You. Give me the grace, dear God, to see the bareness and the misery of the places where You are not adored but desecrated.

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Dear God, I am so discouraged about my work. I have the feeling of discouragement that is. I realize I don’t know what I realize. Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted. That is so far from what I deserve, of course, that I am naturally struck with the nerve of it. Contrition in me is largely imperfect. I don’t know if I’ve ever been sorry for a sin because it hurt You. That kind of contrition is better than none but it is selfish. To have the other kind, it is necessary to have knowledge, faith extraordinary. All boils down to grace, I suppose. Again asking God to help us be sorry for having hurt Him. I am afraid of pain and I suppose that is what we have to have to get grace. Give me the courage to stand the pain to get the grace, Oh Lord. Help me with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing.

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Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story—just like the typewriter was mine. Please let the story, dear God, in its revisions, be made too clear for any false & low interpretation because in it, I am not trying to disparage anybody’s religion although when it was coming out, I didn’t know exactly what I was trying to do or what it was going to mean. I don’t know now if it is consistent. Please don’t let me have to scrap the story because it turns out to mean more wrong than right—or any wrong. I want it to mean that the good in man sometimes shows through his commercialism but that it is not the fault of the commercialism that it does.

Perhaps the idea would be that good can show through even something that is cheap. I don’t know. But dear God, I wish you would take care of making it a sound story because I don’t know how, just like I didn’t know how to write it but it came. Anyway it all brings me to thanksgiving, the third thing to include in prayer. When I think of all I have to be thankful for I wonder that You don’t just kill me now because You’ve done so much for me already & I haven’t been particularly grateful. My thanksgiving is never in the form of self sacrifice—a few memorized prayers babbled once over lightly. All this disgusts me in myself but does not fill me with the poignant feeling I should have to adore You with, to be sorry with or to thank You with. Perhaps the feeling I keep asking for is something again selfish—something to help me to feel that everything with me is all right. And yet it seems only natural but maybe being thus natural is being thus selfish. My mind is a most insecure thing, not to be depended on. It gives me scruples at one minute & leaves me lax the next. If I must know all these things through the mind, dear Lord, please strengthen mine.

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My dear God, Supplication. This is the only one of the four I am competent in. It takes no supernatural grace to ask for what one wants and I have asked You bountifully, oh Lord. I believe it is right to ask You too and to ask our Mother to ask You, but I don’t want to overemphasize this angle of my prayers. Help me to ask You, oh Lord, for what is good for me to have, for what I can have and do Your service by having.

I have been reading Mr. Kafka and I feel his problem of getting grace. But I see it doesn’t have to be that way for the Catholic who can go to Communion every day. The Msgr. today said it was the business of reason, not emotion—the love of God. The emotion would be a help. I realized last time that it would be a selfish one. Oh dear God, the reason is very empty. I suppose mine is also lazy. But I want to get near You. Yet it seems almost a sin to suggest such a thing even. Perhaps Communion doesn’t give the nearness I mean. The nearness I mean comes after death perhaps. It is what we are struggling for and if I found it either I would be dead or I would have seen it for a second and life would be intolerable. I don’t know about this or anything. It sounds puerile my saying anything so obvious.

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My dear God, to keep myself on a course, I am going to consider Faith, Hope, and Charity. Now Faith. Of the three, this gives me the most mental pain. At every point in this educational process, we are told that it is ridiculous and the arguments sound so good it is hard not to fall into them. The arguments might not sound so good to someone with a better mind; but my mental trappings are as they are, and I am always on the brink of assenting—it is almost a subconscious assent. Now how am I to remain faithful without cowardice when these conditions influence me like they do. I can’t read the particular depths of myself that say something about this. There is something down there that is feeling—it is under the subconscious assent—in a certain way about this. It may be that which is holding me in. Dear God, please let it be that instead of that cowardice the psychologists would gloat so over & explain so glibly. And please don’t let it be what they so jubilantly call water-tight compartments. Dear Lord, please give the people like me who don’t have the brains to cope with that, please give us some kind of weapon, not to defend us from them but to defend us from ourselves after they have got through with us. Dear God, I don’t want to have invented my faith to satisfy my weakness. I don’t want to have created God to my own image as they’re so fond of saying. Please give me the necessary grace, oh Lord, and please don’t let it be as hard to get as Kafka made it.

●

Dear God, About hope, I am somewhat at a loss. It is so easy to say I hope to—the tongue slides over it. I think perhaps hope can only be realized by contrasting it with despair. And I am too lazy to despair. Please don’t visit me with it, dear Lord, I would be so miserable. Hope, however, must be something distinct from faith. I unconsciously put it in the faith department. It must be something positive that I have never felt. It must be a positive force, else why the distinction between it and faith? I would like to order things so that I can feel all of a piece spiritually. I don’t suppose I order things. But all my requests seem to melt down to one for grace—that supernatural grace that does what ever it does. My mind is in a little box, dear God, down inside other boxes inside other boxes and on and on. There is very little air in my box. Dear God, please give me as much air as it is not presumptuous to ask for. Please let some light shine out of all the things around me so that I can. What it amounts to I suppose is be selfish. Is there no getting around that, dear God? No escape from ourselves? Into something bigger? Oh dear God I want to write a novel, a good novel. I want to do this for a good feeling & for a bad one. The bad one is uppermost. The psychologists say it is the natural one. Let me get away dear God from all things thus “natural.” Help me to get what is more than natural into my work—help me to love & bear with my work on that account. If I have to sweat for it, dear God, let it be as in Your service. I would like to be intelligently holy. I am a presumptuous fool, but maybe the vague thing in me that keeps me in is hope.

●

Dear God, In a way I got a good punishment for my lack of charity to Mr. Rothburg [a fellow workshop student] last year. He came back at me today like a tornado which while it didn’t hurt me too much yet ruined my show. All this is about charity. Dear Lord please make my mind vigilant about that. I say many many too many uncharitable things about people everyday. I say them because they make me look clever. Please help me to realize practically how cheap this is. I have nothing to be proud of yet myself. I am stupid, quite as stupid as the people I ridicule. Please help me to stop this selfishness because I love you, dear God.

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How can I live—how shall I live. Obviously the only way to live right is to give up everything. But I have no vocation & maybe that is wrong anyway. But how eliminate this picky fish bone kind of way I do things—I want so to love God all the way. At the same time I want all the things that seem opposed to it—I want to be a fine writer. Any success will tend to swell my head—unconsciously even. If I ever do get to be a fine writer, it will not be because I am a fine writer but because God has given me credit for a few of the things He kindly wrote for me. Right at present this does not seem to be His policy. I can’t write a thing. But I’ll continue to try—that is the point. And at every dry point I will be reminded Who is doing the work when it is done & Who is not doing it at that moment. Right now I wonder if God will ever do any more writing for me. He has promised His grace; I am not so sure about the other. Perhaps I have not been thankful enough for what has gone before.

The desires of the flesh—excluding the stomach—have been taken away from me. For how long I don’t know but I hope forever. It is a great peace to be rid of them.

Can’t anyone teach me how to pray?

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No one can be an atheist who does not know all things. Only God is an atheist. The devil is the greatest believer & he has his reasons.

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The majesty of my thoughts this evening! Do all these things read alike as they seem to? They all send a faint nausea through me—albeit they were sincere at the time & I recant none of my articles of faith. This evening I picture theoretically myself at seventy saying it’s done, it’s finished, it’s what it is, & being no nearer than I am. This moral turpitude at seventy won’t be tolerable. I want a revolution now, a mild revolution, something that will put an even 20th cen. asceticism into me at least when I pass the grocery.

The intellectual & artistic delights God gives us are visions & like visions we pay for them; & the thirst for the vision doesn’t necessarily carry with it a thirst for the attendant suffering. Looking back I have suffered, not my share, but enough to call it that but there’s a terrific balance due.

●

To maintain any thread in the novel there must be a view of the world behind it & the most important single item under this view of world is conception of love—divine, natural, & perverted. It is probably possible to say that when a view of love is present—a broad enough view—no more need be added to make the world view.

Freud, Proust, Lawrence have located love inside the human & there is no need to question their location; however, there is no need either to define love as they do—only as desire, since this precludes Divine love, which, while it too may be desire, is a different kind of desire—Divine desire—and is outside of man and capable of lifting him up to itself. Man’s desire for God is bedded in his unconscious & seeks to satisfy itself in physical possession of another human. This necessarily is a passing, fading attachment in its sensuous aspects since it is a poor substitute for what the unconscious is after. The more conscious the desire for God becomes, the more successful union with another becomes because the intelligence realizes the relation in its relation to a greater desire & if this intelligence is in both parties, the motive power in the desire for God becomes double & gains in becoming God-like. The modern man isolated from faith, from raising his desire for God into a conscious desire, is sunk into the position of seeing physical love as an end in itself. Thus his romanticizing it, wallowing in it, & then cynicizing it. Or in the case of the artist like Proust of his realizing that it is the only thing worth life but seeing it without purpose, accidental, and unsatisfying after desire has been fulfilled. Proust’s conception of desire could only be that way since he makes it the highest point of existence—which it is—but with nothing supernatural to end in. It sinks lower & lower in the unconscious, to the very pit of it, which is hell. Certainly hell is located in the unconscious even as the desire for God is. The desire for God may be in a superconsciousness which is unconscious. Satan fell into his libido or his id whichever is the more complete Freudian term.

Perversion is the end result of denying or revolting against supernatural love, descending from the unconscious superconscious to the id. Where perversion is disease or result of disease, this does not apply since no free will operates. The sex act is a religious act & when it occurs without God it is a mock act or at best an empty act. Proust is right that only a love which does not satisfy can continue. Two people can remain “in love”—a phrase made practically useless by stinking romanticism—only if their common desire for each other unites in a greater desire for God—i.e., they do not become satisfied but more desirous together of the supernatural love in union with God. My God, take these boils & blisters & warts of sick romanticism.

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Dear Lord, please make me want You. It would be the greatest bliss. Not just to want You when I think about You but to want You all the time, to think about You all the time, to have the want driving in me, to have it like a cancer in me. It would kill me like a cancer and that would be the Fulfillment. It is easy for this writing to show a want. There is a want but it is abstract and cold, a dead want that goes well into writing because writing is dead. Writing is dead. Art is dead, dead by nature, not killed by unkindness. I bring my dead want into the place the dead place it shows up most easily, into writing. This has its purpose if by God’s grace it will wake another soul; but it does me no good. The “life” it receives in writing is dead to me, the more so in that it looks alive—a horrible deception. But not to me who knows this. Oh Lord please make this dead desire living, living in life, living as it will probably have to live in suffering. I feel too mediocre now to suffer. If suffering came to me I would not even recognize it. Lord keep me. Mother help me.

●

What I am asking for is really very ridiculous. Oh Lord, I am saying, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately. But then God can do that—make a mystic out of cheeses. But why should He do it for an ingrate slothful & dirty creature like me. I can’t stay in the church to say a Thanksgiving even and as for preparing for Communion the night before—thoughts all elsewhere. The Rosary is mere rote for me while I think of other and usually impious things. But I would like to be a mystic and immediately. But dear God please give me some place, no matter how small, but let me know it and keep it. If I am the one to wash the second step everyday, let me know it and let me wash it and let my heart overflow with love washing it. God loves us, God needs us. My soul too. So then take it dear God because it knows that You are all it should want and if it were wise You would be all it would want and the times it thinks wise. You are all it does want, and it wants more and more to want You. Its demands are absurd. It’s a moth who would be king, a stupid slothful thing, a foolish thing, who wants God, who made the earth, to be its Lover. Immediately.

If I could only hold God in my mind. If I could only always just think of Him.

●

My thoughts are so far away from God. He might as well not have made me. And the feeling I egg up writing here lasts approximately a half hour and seems a sham. I don’t want any of this artificial superficial feeling stimulated by the choir. Today I have proved myself a glutton—for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me. ♦

ANNALS OF PSYCHOLOGY
Unreality Star

The paranoid used to fear the C.I.A. Now their delusions mirror “The Truman Show.”

by Andrew Marantz

Soon after Nick Lotz enrolled at Ohio University, in the fall of 2007, he grew deeply anxious. He was overweight, and self-conscious around women; worse, he thought that everyone sensed his unease. People who once seemed like new friends gradually stopped returning his texts. He went out four or five nights a week, and drank to mask his discomfort, occasionally to the point of blacking out. After such episodes, he worried that he’d said, or typed, something that he should have kept private. He suspected that people were posting embarrassing videos of him online, though he couldn’t find any on Facebook.

Lotz, who wanted to be a filmmaker, largely ignored his classwork. Often, he’d draw the blinds of his dorm room and take Suboxone, an opiate that he bought from an older student, and sleep for days. Then he’d snort Adderall or Focalin and stay up all night, watching YouTube videos and working on screenplays. His laptop became his primary connection to the world. Online interactions were less taxing than face-to-face conversations, but they introduced new concerns: just as he monitored his friends’ Internet activity, he assumed that, whenever he clicked links on BuzzFeed or posted comments on Reddit, people were tracking him, too. When he surfed the Web, in a sleepless blur, every site seemed to contain a coded message about him.

In the spring, he returned home to Hudson, an affluent town between Akron and Cleveland. One evening, his mother, Ann, found him taking apart the thermostat in the front hallway. He was looking for cameras.

On another occasion, he told her that he was at the center of a network of covert operatives.

“Have you seen that movie ‘A Beautiful Mind’?” she asked.

“Mom, I’m not like that,” he said.

The next morning, he seemed more lucid, and he assured her that he was fine. School was stressful, and Adderall had aggravated the problem, but it wouldn’t happen again.

Lotz and his sister, Cecelia, had long-standing plans to attend a jam-band festival in western Michigan; their father, Jay, an event promoter, was travelling to the festival separately. Cecelia was concerned about Lotz’s state of mind, and told their parents that he should stay home, but he protested. His parents knew about his drinking and drug habits and were worried about him. They told him that he could attend the concert if he agreed to enter a rehab program, in Montana, immediately afterward.

Cecelia drove to the festival in their parents’ Volvo, with Lotz asleep in the passenger seat and three friends in the back. After the group pitched a tent, Lotz found a drug dealer and said, “Give me whatever I can get for a hundred dollars.” The next night, he took acid and Ecstasy. He and his friends hung out for a while, but eventually Lotz drifted, alone, toward the main stage. The headliner was the Dave Matthews Band, and, though Lotz did not love their music, he felt that he was there for a reason. He wedged his body closer to the stage. Matthews’s lyrics seemed eerily appropriate: “One year of crying and the words creep up inside.”

Suddenly, Lotz solved the puzzle of his life. Since starting college, he had been the star of a reality-TV show. The network had kept the cameras hidden, as in “Candid Camera” and “Punk’d.” That night was supposed to be the finale. All he had to do was call his father, who’d find him in the crowd, lead him onstage, and present him with a check for a million dollars. Lotz took out his cell phone, but he was too strung out to place the call. It was too late—he’d missed his chance to make the cameras turn off.

He returned to the tent and paced outside it until daybreak. When Cecelia woke up, she asked him what was wrong. He responded, “Smile, you’re on camera!”

The next day, he flew to Montana and began rehab. A counsellor, explaining the rules of the program, said, “We’re all going to be watching you.” To Lotz, this was an explicit acknowledgment that he was the star of a show that was being broadcast live, all day and all night. At the treatment center, he ducked into empty rooms, searching for editing equipment. He didn’t find any, but that proved nothing: cameras could be hidden behind mirrors or inside shirt buttons.

Lotz was discharged from rehab before he completed the program—his problems, the counsellors said, went beyond drug abuse. Back at home, he remained agitated, but he decided to keep quiet about the show. He completed a local rehab program, and declared himself ready for school. His parents, unsure what to do, allowed him to return to college for his sophomore year.

Lotz decided to embrace being watched by millions of strangers. He left his laptop open, allowing the cameras to zoom in on the screen, broadcasting his words to the world. When he spoke in class, he grinned clownishly, letting the audience know that he was in on the joke. He enrolled in acting and public-speaking courses, determined to become a better performer. Once, in acting class, he read an article about “the doubt or fatigue” that can wear down an actor. That night, Lotz wrote in his journal, “Anything that humiliates me or pisses me off is actually . . . a hazard of being famous.”

Psychotic disorders typically emerge between the ages of eighteen and thirty. One such condition, schizophrenia, affects approximately one per cent of the population, a figure that appears to have remained stable across epochs and continents. Hippocrates wrote of patients who exhibited paraphrosune, which translates roughly as “paranoia.”

Hypothetically, any false belief might turn into a delusion. You could become convinced that a Cézanne still-life contained real apples and pears. But in practice nobody suffers from Edible-Painting Delusion. Mental illness has rules. Just as all spoken languages share a universal grammar, clinically recognized delusions conform to a familiar set of themes, including persecution, grandiosity, and erotomania.

If form is fixed, content is not. Between 1995 and 2004, the International Study on Psychotic Symptoms, a survey of eleven hundred patients from seven countries, found that the mind supplies the contours of delusions, and culture fills in the details. Grandiose schizophrenics from largely Christian countries often claim to be prophets or gods, but sufferers in Pakistan, a Muslim country, rarely do. In Shanghai, paranoid people report being pricked by poisoned needles; in Taipei, they are possessed by spirits. Shifts in technology have caused the content of delusions to change over the years: in the nineteen-forties, the Japanese controlled American minds with radio waves; in the fifties, the Soviets accomplished this with satellites; in the seventies, the C.I.A. implanted computer chips into people’s brains.

For nine years, Joel Gold was the attending psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital. “New York is a magnet for psychosis,” he says. “If someone loses it at J.F.K. or Grand Central, they’re brought right to Bellevue.” The delusions of Gold’s patients fell within standard categories, but the details often varied from those he’d read about in textbooks. “After 9/11, many Southern African-American women came to New York to raise the dead at Ground Zero,” he says. “You see that once and it’s, like, ‘Oh, interesting.’ Then, a week later, another one comes in.”

The doctors at Bellevue discussed such trends, but did not report them to journals. Psychiatry, as a discipline, has largely lost interest in the content of delusions. Freud based his theories on his patients’ dreams and fears, and other early clinicians—Joseph Capgras, Jules Cotard—rose to prominence by documenting a single rare delusion. But in the nineteen-fifties antipsychotic drugs came into wide clinical use. To many doctors, the subject of a patient’s rantings no longer mattered; the goal was to administer medication that stopped the ranting. In 1984, Nancy Andreasen, an American neuroscientist and psychiatrist, summed up the consensus: “The biological revolution in psychiatry has already occurred.”

Gold, who was trained in both neuroscience and psychoanalysis, worries that doctors of psychotic patients have limited themselves to psychopharmacology. “All productions of the mind have meaning,” he says. “To disregard any content, no matter how psychotic it is, seems to me to be a miscarriage of what the discipline was founded on.” When his patients describe odd beliefs, he pays close attention.

In 2002, Gold treated several young, educated men who shared a peculiar set of symptoms. One patient, who suspected that the September 11th attacks had been a plot twist on his TV show, had travelled across the country to Manhattan to see if the Twin Towers were still standing. Another man reported that all his friends and relatives were actors following a script; another had worked on the production team of a reality show until he concluded that the show was actually about him. Some of these patients compared their experiences to the 1998 movie “The Truman Show,” in which Jim Carrey plays a man for whom all the world’s a soundstage.

Other doctors began referring such cases to Gold, and within two years he had interviewed nearly fifty patients. In 2012, he and his brother, Ian, a philosopher at McGill University, published a paper in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry describing a form of psychosis in which “the patient believes that he is being filmed, and that the films are being broadcast for the entertainment of others.” They named this disorder the “Truman Show” delusion.

Several newspapers and blogs covered the story, and Gold soon received e-mails from dozens of Truman patients. He could not treat them all, but he spoke to many of them on the phone. “I wish I had more to tell them,” he says. “There’s no Truman Show pill. As with any psychosis, you just do the best you can.”

Michael Garrett, a professor of clinical psychiatry at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, says, “Joel is clearly right that the way we communicate is spawning new sorts of delusions—not new diseases but new content, which can be equally important.” Paolo Fusar-Poli, a psychiatrist who works at a public clinic in London, estimates that, of the approximately ten patients he sees each week, one or two exhibit Truman-like symptoms. He says, “We see many, many young people who have had the sensation of being filmed.”

In Nick Lotz’s mind, the show was everything, and everything was the show. The producers had invented a wireless speaker that went into his head, and they used it to feed him lines and critique his performance. They informed him that the audience could hear his thoughts. “Make sure your thoughts are entertaining!” they said, with the forced cheer of a game-show announcer.

Every few hours, the producers issued a new challenge. “No food for three days!” they said. (After several failed attempts, Lotz completed the fast.) Once, they woke him in the middle of the night and ordered him to stand on one leg: “America doesn’t want to watch you sleep—it’s boring.” They told him to exercise regularly: “You have to look good on camera!” Lotz lost fifty pounds. If he made it to the end of the show, the producers promised, he’d win a hundred million dollars.

When he went home on breaks, his family kept asking him what was wrong. His responses were usually elusive: “You know all about it”; “Careful, you’re off script.” He was tempted to ask for help, but he didn’t want to break the fourth wall.

His mother tried to be supportive without driving him away. Lotz was now nineteen, and she couldn’t force him into an institution. Still, she demanded that he see a psychiatrist. “They don’t want me to,” he said, meaning the producers.

“Maybe we shouldn’t listen to them anymore,” she said.

One afternoon, at a Chinese restaurant in Hudson, he told his mother to stop asking so many questions. When he won a hundred million dollars, she’d be glad that she hadn’t sabotaged him. “That doesn’t make sense, Nick,” she said. But at the end of the meal the message inside his fortune cookie read, “You will win a great reward in the near future.”

Lotz’s family couldn’t pinpoint the moment when he had become unstable. As a child, he had been shy around girls, but among boys he had been an extrovert, playing Dungeons & Dragons and quoting his favorite movies and fantasy novels. In tenth grade, Lotz discovered drugs: mainly marijuana, but also Ecstasy and cocaine. He grew his hair long, spent a lot of time on Web sites like Digg and Reddit, and joined a clique of genial stoners. When those friends saw Lotz now, they agreed that he had changed.

Against Lotz’s wishes, his mother scheduled appointments with therapists near Hudson. (Lotz’s parents are married, but his father lives in Los Angeles.) Lotz was terse at the sessions, but he said enough to receive a diagnosis of “delusional disorder, persecutory type.” The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM, has long stated that a delusional disorder is characterized by “one or more nonbizarre delusions that persist for at least one month.” In its first edition, in 1952, the DSM divided delusions into two categories: bizarre and nonbizarre. The former are beliefs that can’t possibly be true; the latter are beliefs that aren’t true but could be. “I am dead” is bizarre. “Millions of strangers are obsessed with me” is nonbizarre (and, for Ryan Gosling, nondelusional).

DSM-5, the first major revision in nineteen years, came out in May, and for the first time the chapter on psychosis no longer emphasizes the bizarre/nonbizarre distinction. Dolores Malaspina, one of the chapter’s authors, says, “Rapid expansion of technology raises questions about the reliability between clinicians in determining which delusions are possible and which ones are bizarre.” In 2005, the New York Civil Liberties Union canvassed Manhattan and found nearly forty-two hundred security cameras south of Fourteenth Street. And, given the recent revelations about the N.S.A.’s domestic surveillance, it is hardly implausible to think that the government monitors your every move.

Is it bizarre for a college student to think that he is a household name? With rare exceptions, it used to be that only extraordinary people—the most talented, the richest—became famous. Now, Us Weekly regularly covers reality-TV stars who, apart from their narcissism, really are just like us. In “The Image,” published in 1962, Daniel Boorstin wrote of people whose “chief claim to fame is their fame itself.” He was writing about faded starlets like Brenda Joyce; he could not have predicted Snooki. On the CBS series “Big Brother,” contestants live in a house infested with cameras. For a subscription fee, you can watch them twenty-four hours a day.

In 2003, Matt Kennedy Gould, a law-school dropout from Pittsburgh, signed a contract to appear on “The Lap of Luxury,” a show in which contestants would live in a Los Angeles mansion and compete to win a hundred thousand dollars. In fact, Gould was the only competitor. His housemates were actors on the series—a Spike TV production whose real title was “The Joe Schmo Show.” In the final episode, the hoax was revealed and Gould was presented with an oversized check. He pumped his fist in the air, then collapsed in tears. Afterward, he told Entertainment Weekly, he “holed up in an apartment in Santa Monica and spent a lot of the money on marijuana and alcohol. . . . The next day, I flushed a half-ounce of pot down the toilet, packed my car, came home to Pittsburgh, and I got help.”

By the fall semester of Lotz’s junior year, he felt imprisoned by fame. The producers’ chatter over the tiny speaker had grown incessant; to drown out their voices, he sat at his computer and wrote stream-of-consciousness journal entries for twelve hours at a stretch. One night, he wrote, “I don’t know if its basic cable or just cable and I can’t really understand jokes I just kind of laugh I guess it’s what being an idiot feels like.” The words ran on for fifty-two pages.

Desperate for help, Lotz wrote to two hundred actors and directors, including Judd Apatow and Tina Fey: “I’m currently stuck in a mind control loop. My career and life are in ruins.” He considered hiring a lawyer so that he could dissolve his contract, even if it meant forgoing prize money. While taking notes in Spanish class, he scribbled, “There is no amount large enough to make me do this anymore.”

In December, the premise of his show shifted. The goal was no longer to win a hundred million dollars; it was to join the cast of “Saturday Night Live.” A voice on the speaker commanded, “Get out there and do standup.” Lotz began performing at open-mike nights around town, telling jokes about marijuana and Internet porn. His delivery was unsettlingly antic, and the crowds were small and aloof, but he persisted; millions were watching at home, including casting agents for “S.N.L.” When he could not get onstage, he performed without an audience—in a parking lot, on a bus, in his dorm room while his roommate tried to sleep.

One Thursday night, a producer’s voice told Lotz, “It’ll end if you go to New York.” Using savings from summer jobs, he booked a flight for the next morning. He planned to track down Lorne Michaels, the producer of “S.N.L.,” and demand to be hired. Whatever the response, it would be a memorable final scene.

He made it to New York and headed for Rockefeller Center, feeling exultant. The plot was moving, finally, toward the climax. It was Saturday. If all went well, Lotz’s show would end at 11:29 P.M.; at eleven-thirty, he would appear on “S.N.L.” Then he would sleep peacefully for the first time in years.

Outside Rockefeller Center, people were ice-skating, just like in the movies. He pushed through a revolving door and entered the lobby of NBC headquarters.

“I need to see Lorne Michaels,” he told a security guard.

“You can’t go inside,” the guard said.

“Please,” Lotz said. “Tell him I’m here.”

“I can’t,” the guard said.

Lotz waited in the lobby for a while. People passed by without looking in his direction. The trip was a mistake, he realized. He walked out into the cold city air.

“The Truman Show” did not single-handedly cause Truman delusions, any more than “The Manchurian Candidate” caused Cold War paranoia. In the fifteen years since “The Truman Show” was released, its premise has increasingly come to seem nonbizarre. Reviewing the film in 1998, Jonathan Rosenbaum expressed skepticism about its conceit: “Given the number of undramatic moments that fill Truman’s daily life . . . are we supposed to believe that millions of spectators . . . are taking all this in?” The millions of people who watch Honey Boo Boo, or scroll through endless tweets, have answered that question.

In 1941, Robert Heinlein published a story, “They—,” in which a mental patient insists that his surroundings are a “stage” and the patients and staff “swarms of actors.” Philip K. Dick adopted a similar premise in his 1959 novel, “Time Out of Joint.” Both stories invoke a fear of solipsism that goes back to the Sophists; but, because they were written before television became ubiquitous, the scenarios were vague or outlandish. In the recent film “Reality,” a Neapolitan fishmonger comes unravelled after auditioning for Italy’s version of “Big Brother.” The filmmakers didn’t have to invent a shadowy conspiracy—“Grande Fratello” has been on the air since 2000.

The human brain has evolved to have a vigilant threat-detection system. If that system becomes oversensitive, however, the result is paranoia. A delusion of grandeur might represent a paranoid person’s attempt to feel less vulnerable. It’s long been said that in the early nineteenth century madhouses in France were full of people who claimed to be Napoleon—presumably, the least vulnerable person they could imagine. In a sense, Truman disorder is an unusually modest form of grandiose delusion: rather than becoming Napoleon, you become a famous version of yourself.

Joel Gold, the psychiatrist, left Bellevue in 2009. He now has a private practice in Manhattan. He prescribes drugs to psychotic patients and also engages in weekly psychotherapy with most of them. Another man Gold has interviewed, who is bipolar, develops Truman symptoms when he is in a manic phase. During such periods, he might see anonymous strangers and “recognize” them as celebrities making cameos on his show. “He’ll ask his wife, ‘Does that guy look like Bruce Willis?’ ” Gold says. His wife will tell him that he’s mistaken; his doctor may then focus on the delusion in a therapy session and adjust his medication. Fusar-Poli, the psychiatrist in London, has developed techniques that he believes to be particularly effective with Truman patients. He notes, “If someone says, ‘I get the impression that I’m being filmed when I walk down the street,’ we might have a psychologist take a walk with him and say, ‘Show me the cameras.’ ”

Benjamin Sadock, a professor at N.Y.U. and the author of a best-selling psychiatry textbook, says that many psychiatrists now treat patients with the understanding that “pharmacotherapy combined with psychotherapy gives better results than either one alone.” Nancy Andreasen, the psychiatrist who once heralded the “biological revolution,” feels that the revolution went too far. “You can’t treat a person as a purely biological creature,” she says. Antipsychotic drugs are blunt instruments, and are often administered on a trial-and-error basis; prolonged exposure at high doses can cause brain damage. “When you have a therapeutic relationship, you can manage the dosage better,” Andreasen says. “You can talk to the patient about their side effects. Compliance goes up. The patient gets better more quickly.”

Gold and his brother are writing a book, for Simon & Schuster, arguing that both biological and social factors contribute to psychosis. Studies show that residents of cities have a higher risk for schizophrenia, as do immigrants. Psychotic people are several times more likely than nonpsychotics to have been sexually abused. Mental illness, the Golds believe, is rarely reducible to brain chemistry.

“Think back a few hundred years,” Joel Gold says. “The idea of walking into Times Square would have been crazy-making to absolutely anyone. For most of human history, there weren’t strangers bumping into you. You lived in a place where there were fifty people, and you knew all of them intimately.” Now such collisions are constant: a smartphone is a Times Square that we carry around in our pocket.

“If living in New York City is a risk factor of psychosis, then why not the Internet?” Gold continues. “We’re not saying, ‘Don’t let your children surf the Web—they will be psychotic.’ We are saying, ‘This is something we should think about.’ ” Just as Times Square is a diversion for some people and a stressful place for others, the cyclopic camera above a laptop’s screen might, for a certain type of person, become a source of corrosive unease.

Lotz decided not to return to college for his senior year. He didn’t want to stay at home in Hudson, though—that would make for a tedious show. He asked his father if he could live with him in L.A. His father said that he could, if he saw a psychiatrist. He refused.

One day, while Lotz was out running, his mother found copies of the desperate letters that he had mailed to celebrities. When she confronted him, he said, “You shouldn’t have opened my mail.”

In tears, she said, “You’re asking all these people you don’t know for help. Would you please let me help you?”

She Googled psychiatrists in L.A. while Lotz watched her, silently. The producers wouldn’t like it if he accepted his mother’s help, but he couldn’t figure out a way to refuse it. “Let me go up to my room and think about it,” he said. After a few minutes, he bounded downstairs. For the first time in years, his mother saw an unclouded look on his face. “They say I should do it!” he said. “If I go to a doctor in California, I’ll win a million dollars!”

In June, 2010, he moved in with his father and went to see Stephen Marder, a psychiatrist at the U.C.L.A. Psychosis Clinic. Marder gave Lotz a prescription for Geodon, an antipsychotic that usually takes months to work, if it works at all. At first, Lotz only pretended to swallow the medicine; you had to consume five hundred calories of food before taking each pill, in order to prevent nausea, and he didn’t want to anger the producers by gaining weight.

He made frequent visits to the clinic, however, to talk with Marder and the residents. “Psychiatrists who treat serious mental illness don’t spend the time with patients that they used to,” Marder says. Yvonne Yang, a resident, recalls Lotz telling her that the clinic “was the first place where he felt listened to, and where people took his feelings and thoughts seriously.” Lotz was initially hesitant to describe his symptoms, but he eventually admitted that he heard voices. Soon afterward, he began taking the pills.

On the morning of November 10, 2010, he woke up on the futon in his father’s living room; for the first time in two and a half years, he was alone in his brain. “It felt beautiful,” he told me. When his father returned from work, Lotz announced, “It’s all gone.” Only weeks later, when he began referring to “my delusions” in a self-deprecating tone—and in the past tense—did his parents feel confident that he was getting better.

Lotz’s irrational thoughts have not disappeared, Marder says, but he “has developed the ability to deal with it.” Marder steered him toward cognitive-behavioral therapy, which helps him distinguish fantasy from reality. He does relaxation exercises, repeating words like “peace.” Such rituals help push away “interfering thoughts,” Lotz says, adding, “If I have an overwhelming fear that I cannot rationalize, I discuss it with my therapist.”

In June, 2012, Lotz was surfing the Web when he saw a headline: “CASES OF ‘TRUMAN SHOW’ DELUSION ON THE RISE.” The article mentioned Joel Gold. Lotz sent him an e-mail:

I saw an article today in the Daily Mail about the Truman Show disorder and it blew my mind. I subsequently purchased and downloaded your article in the cognitive neuropsychiatry journal. . . . It would really help me to share this with someone, and if there is any ways you can make more effective treatment for this disorder with my help, it would truly help validate my life.

Gold called Lotz, and they spoke for about an hour. Lotz recently told me, “Knowing that other people are afflicted with this, and that there is recognition and treatment for it, has been something that has given me great strength.”

In December, I went to Ohio to meet the Lotzes, who live in a planned development called Hudson Hills. As I drove down their block, I noticed tiny, colorful objects scattered across the snow-covered lawns. I stopped the car. Planted in the snow, at ankle height, were dozens of plastic flags. I bent down to read an orange one. “Buried Fiber-Optic Cable,” it said.

Lotz was home for the holidays. Although we were meeting for the first time, he told his story in medias res, as though I already knew him. In a way, I did: I had begun following his blog, his Facebook page, his Twitter feed, his LinkedIn profile, and his SoundCloud stream. I had also watched the seventeen videos on his YouTube channel, most of them standup sets that he had recorded while delusional. Some of the videos had been viewed only ten or twenty times, but during the next few months their view counts rose steadily. It was hard to tell if I was the only one clicking on the videos, or if strangers were watching them, too.

The day after Christmas, Lotz and I drove to Ohio University. On High Street, we passed an outdoor wooden staircase that descended a steep hill. “Once, they made me run up and down these stairs all night,” he said. We parked the car, and, for a few minutes, we walked without saying much. It was his first visit to the campus since his paranoia had diminished. We passed by Jefferson Hall, his former dormitory, which he had once believed was an elaborate stage set. “I was nervous to come here, like, that I would feel it again,” he finally said. “But it’s just a boring college town.”

Lotz now lives by himself, in Long Beach, California. He has a part-time job, and he studies Chinese at a local college. On weekends, he goes kayaking or skiing. He still enjoys writing; he is working on three science-fiction screenplays, but has no expectation that they will be produced. He has found a doctor he trusts and a prescription drug that blunts his symptoms without making him dysfunctional. Many people with psychosis are not so lucky. Still, there is no cure—only remission. These days, Lotz finds it helpful to view his brain’s excesses as amusing, not alarming. He recently wrote to me, “Whenever some eerie coincidence happens . . . there’s this part of my brain which jacks itself up all of a sudden and spazzes out, exclaiming ‘This is it! What they were always talking about! It’s happening! They are watching me!’ Except now, it’s kind of reassuring in a way. ‘People care. They are paying attention. I matter.’ I don’t, actually, but it’s nice of my mind to tell me I do.” ♦

THE POLITICAL SCENE
The President and the Pipeline

The campaign to make the Keystone XL the test of Obama’s resolve on climate change.

by Ryan Lizza

On the day of his second Inauguration, in January, Barack Obama delivered an address of unabashed liberal ambition and promise. As recently as early April, before the realities of the world and the House of Representatives made themselves painfully evident, the President retained the confidence of a leader on the brink of enormous achievements. It seemed possible, even probable, that he would win modest gun-control legislation, an immigration-reform law, and the elusive grand bargain with Republicans to resolve the serial crises over the federal budget. And he seemed determined to take on even the most complicated and ominous problem of all: climate change. The President, who had a mixed environmental record after his first term, vowed that he would commit his Administration to combatting global warming, saying that “failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”

The President flew to San Francisco on April 3rd for a series of fund-raisers. He stopped in first at a cocktail reception hosted by Tom Steyer, a fifty-six-year-old billionaire, former hedge-fund manager, and major donor to the Democratic Party. Steyer lives in the city’s Sea Cliff neighborhood, in a house overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. As the President’s motorcade headed to the party, several hundred activists were assembling along the route to his second event—a dinner hosted by Ann and Gordon Getty, in Pacific Heights, on a street known as Billionaires’ Row. The protesters held banners that represented various causes, but most of them held professionally printed two-toned blue signs that said, “STOP THE KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE.” The “o” in “Keystone” replicated the Obama campaign logo.

The environmental movement was testing Obama. Would he stand by his own Inaugural Address? During the past two years, environmentalists have coalesced around opposition to the seventeen-hundred-mile Keystone pipeline, which would carry oil from northern Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico. Because the project crosses an international border, it requires the approval of the State Department and the President; a decision is expected in the coming months. Supporters of Keystone consider it essential to reducing the United States’ reliance on oil from the Middle East and unstable countries like Venezuela; its critics view it as Obama’s best chance to make a clear stand against one of the dirtiest fossil fuels contributing to climate change. “What do we want from our Pre-si-dent?” the protesters yelled. “No pipeline for the one per cent!” One marcher led the crowd in a call and response: “When I say ‘pipeline,’ you say ‘kill’! Pipeline! Kill!”

At the reception in Sea Cliff, Steyer, an ardent environmentalist, was no less relentless with his guest from Washington, pressing Obama on the issue of the pipeline. In 2004, Steyer raised significant funds for John Kerry, and in 2008 for Hillary Clinton. In 2010 and 2012, he wrote large checks for statewide ballot initiatives in California that addressed environmental concerns. Last fall, he announced that he was stepping down as head of his investment firm, Farallon Capital Management, to devote himself full time to politics, especially to the issue of climate change. He has spent generously to boost pro-green candidates in the Massachusetts Senate race and the Virginia governor’s race. This month, he is appearing in a series of ninety-second, self-financed television ads in which he argues against Keystone. In October, he is launching a major bipartisan initiative on climate change with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson.

Steyer, hoping for greater political influence, also has flirted with the idea of buying the Los Angeles Times, and is considering running for office in California. His brother Jim is a law professor and the founder and C.E.O. of Common Sense Media, which rates movies, books, apps, and video games to help parents find age-appropriate material for their kids. Jim Steyer told me that a friend had asked him if he and Tom were aspiring to be the Koch brothers of the left. “Yeah, I like that!” Jim replied. Tom dismissed the analogy. “I completely disagree, because what they’re doing is standing up for ideas that they profit from,” he said of the Kochs. “We think we’re representing the vast bulk of citizens of the United States. We’re not representing our pockets.” Bill McKibben, the environmental writer and advocate, who has met extensively with Steyer to discuss the strategy against Keystone, said, “After years of watching rich people manipulate and wreck our political system for selfish personal interests, it’s great to watch a rich person use his money and his talents in the public interest.”

Steyer is, at first glance, an unlikely leader of the environmental movement. He is rangy and square-jawed, and he has exquisite establishmentarian credentials, to say nothing of a vast pile of money. He honed his raffish sense of humor at Phillips Exeter Academy, and went on to get degrees from Yale and Stanford business school. Before starting his own fund, he worked at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. According to a Forbes estimate, Steyer’s net worth is $1.4 billion, although one of his aides says, “The general assumption is it’s a lot more than that.”

Steyer’s goal, at his fund-raiser for Obama, was not so much to berate the President, he said, as to “do the old F.D.R. thing,” showing Obama that the green movement was growing, and that supporting its goals was good politics. President Roosevelt is said to have once told labor leaders who were asking him to support major reforms, “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” The story may be apocryphal, but Obama sometimes recounts it as a way of explaining to liberals that they need to build popular movements for their policies. When California Representative Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House, asked Steyer to hold the fund-raiser, to help Democrats running for Congress in 2014, he agreed, with one proviso: he would tell potential guests that they could lobby the President about the folly of approving Keystone.

Steyer’s pitch to the donors was simple: “This is the best deal I’m ever going to give you. You should want to give this money, period, even if you never got anything. You can go and speak to the highest people in the Democratic congressional leadership. And we’re throwing in the President of the United States as a gimme. So you should be begging me to come.” To insure that the event left an impression on Obama, Steyer invited fifteen top donors to join him for an intimate conversation with the President before the reception for a hundred. Jim Steyer said, “Tom really hammered Obama on the pipeline.”

Obama listened politely to Steyer, his wife, Kat Taylor, and their guests, then told them that climate change was one of many big issues he intended to address before he left office. “He was extremely impressive in terms of understanding the issue,” Steyer told me. “But he was saying, ‘I need to put this in the context of a whole program that I’m trying to get to. This isn’t the only thing I care about.’ ” Taylor said, “We didn’t get the answers we wanted.” At the larger reception, Obama joked about how the Republican Party’s miserable showing with Latinos in the 2012 election had been “clarifying” and said that passing immigration reform was a real possibility in the next few months.

On the issue of climate change, he was far more pessimistic. He reminded his audience that many Americans don’t share the views or the culture of Steyer’s guests. “The politics of this are tough,” he said. “Because if you haven’t seen a raise in a decade; if your house is still twenty-five thousand, thirty thousand dollars under water; if you’re just happy that you’ve still got that factory job that is powered by cheap energy; if every time you go to fill up your old car because you can’t afford to buy a new one, and you certainly can’t afford to buy a Prius, you’re spending forty bucks that you don’t have, which means that you may not be able to save for retirement.” He added, “You may be concerned about the temperature of the planet, but it’s probably not rising to your No. 1 concern.” To some in the room, it seemed that the President was speaking for himself. He never mentioned Keystone. “The clear takeaway for Tom was that the President issued us a challenge,” one of Steyer’s political aides said. “Go out there and make the public-policy case as to why this pipeline is not in our country’s best interest.”

One afternoon in early August, I met Steyer for lunch at a Greek restaurant in San Francisco’s financial district. Steyer’s voice turned grave when he talked about his embrace of climate change as a political issue.

“In every generation, there’s an overwhelming issue that people may not recognize at the time, but that becomes the issue that is the measure of what you did,” he said. “In World War Two, if you look back, everybody was measured by what they said in the thirties and what they did in the forties. Charles Lindbergh was the biggest hero in the United States of America, and he went wrong on the biggest issue of the day, and that was the end of him. Look back to where people came out on civil rights in the fifties and sixties: maybe you were right about economic policy then, but, if you blew it on the big issue, then that’s the measure.” Climate change, Steyer insisted, “is the issue we’ll get measured by as a country and a generation. If we blow this, it will be because we were very focussed on the short term, on our pocketbooks, and we had no broader sense of what we were trying to do and what we were trying to pass on.”

According to Steyer, the opposition to Keystone emerged from the President’s failed efforts to tackle climate change early in his Administration. Obama had some limited successes. In 2009, in one of his first acts in office, he ordered the Department of Transportation to implement higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars; in 2012, the rules were finalized, and they are his single most significant climate-change policy.

The Environmental Protection Agency, led by Lisa Jackson, a chemical engineer, also issued a stringent rule on mercury emissions, forcing some coal plants, one of the largest sources of carbon emissions, to close down or switch to natural gas, which releases about half the carbon content of coal when burned. But Obama comes from Illinois, a coal state, and often has campaigned as a friend of the coal industry. As President, he didn’t confront the fossil-fuel industry in the way that many environmentalists and some advisers had hoped. “He’s been oil- and gas-friendly,” John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff and an adviser to the Obama White House, said.

In December, 2009, Obama left an international climate summit in Copenhagen without a binding agreement to deal with global emissions or even a deadline to reach one. In April, 2010, after BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, spilling some two hundred million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, a debate ensued within the Administration. The E.P.A and other agencies wanted to use the event to vilify BP and drive an environmental agenda that would take on the fossil-fuel industry. They found little support at the White House, where Obama’s senior staff believed that such an approach was either wrong on the merits or politically dangerous.

“We were told to stand down,” a former senior Administration official who argued for taking a more confrontational approach said. During the cleanup, the Administration focussed on working constructively with BP while pursuing an ambitious climate bill that would have effectively put a price on carbon emissions, the starting point for moving away from fossil fuels. The bill passed the House in 2009, but the following summer, with Democrats from coal states opposing it and the White House unable to find enough votes to overcome a filibuster, it died in the Senate. In November, Republicans won back the House of Representatives, eliminating the prospects for any climate-change initiative. The incoming class of Tea Partiers included a number of climate-change deniers, and Obama abandoned serious work on the issue.

“I think that in the first term he was hiding his light under a bushel,” Steyer said. “Barack did a good job on the regulatory side, but he made the decision that it was going to be somewhere between extremely unlikely and impossible to get a big energy bill. He obviously didn’t make it his top priority.”

Opposing Keystone is just one item in Steyer’s new portfolio of political interests. After lunch, we headed to his offices at Next Generation, part of his growing network of energy and climate organizations, which include a political arm, a policy think tank, three clean-energy investment funds, and two research centers that he has financed at Stanford University. Steyer’s top policy adviser on climate is Kate Gordon, who previously worked at the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal think tank in Washington. After the summer of 2010, she said, the environmental movement, which had been unusually united in support of Obama’s climate bill, fractured. “Everything crashed and burned, and immediately all those groups retreated to their corners,” Gordon said. As Obama grappled with the Republican ascendancy in Congress, he dropped from his agenda any mention of climate change. Podesta, who is now an adviser to Steyer, said that Keystone filled the policy vacuum left by the President’s silence: “People were beginning to doubt the President’s commitment.” Keystone “became the test of the question: Are we going to do anything long term about climate change?, as he had promised in the 2008 election.”

Gordon told me that until recently she thought that Obama was likely to approve the pipeline and that it was not wise for the movement to stress the issue. “I thought that it would be putting all of our eggs in one basket,” she said. “And, to continue with the egg metaphor, if we lost it would be a major loss and we’d have a lot of egg on our face.” She did see the benefits of the campaign, however: “The goal is as much about organizing young people around a thing. But you have to have a thing. You can’t organize people around a tipping point on climate change.”

Canada has the third-largest reserve of oil in the world, behind Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, and the United States imports more oil from Canada than any other country does. Ninety-nine per cent of the oil that Canadians export—roughly 2.7 million barrels a day—comes here to be refined into petroleum products, which are sold domestically and abroad. The overwhelming majority of Canada’s reserves are in the form of bitumen, a viscous oil, attached to a mixture of sand, water, and clay, that is found under pristine boreal forests across fifty-four thousand square miles in northern Alberta.

It’s the most controversial oil deposit in the world. Oil sand has the texture of soft asphalt; twenty per cent of it lies close to the surface, and the area is effectively strip-mined. The bitumen-rich sand is removed, mixed with water into a slurry, and spun in centrifuges until the oil is separated, leaving behind vast black tailings ponds that are hazardous to wildlife. The mining operations sprawl ruinously for miles. The remaining eighty per cent of the oil sands lie hundreds of feet down beneath a layer of hard rock. Steam is injected deep belowground until the oil naturally separates and is drawn out. The extra energy required to extract the oil from the sand makes it a more carbon-intensive fossil fuel—averaging seventeen per cent more, according to the State Department—than conventional oil. Even the name of the oil fields of Alberta is contested. Most industry and government sources use the term “oil sands”; environmentalists and other opponents prefer “tar sands.”

The oil sands also are the only major reserve of crude in the world that is completely landlocked. Canadian oil companies, with tacit support from the U.S., have long sought to connect the facilities in Alberta to the Gulf Coast, the site of several large refineries, such as that of the oil company Valero, in Port Arthur, Texas, which are designed to handle heavy crude oil. The industry argues that although rail and other pipeline projects hold some potential, the Keystone pipeline is the simplest, most cost-effective, and most direct way to get Canadian oil to market.

Keystone is actually the name for a system of pipelines. An existing line runs east from Alberta and then cuts south through the Dakotas and Nebraska, where it divides in two. One leg turns east and terminates at refineries in Illinois. The other leg runs south to Cushing, Oklahoma, a crucial oil-market hub. Much of the oil that the U.S. imports from Canada already passes through these pipelines. But the major controversy is over the Keystone XL, a proposed “bullet” pipeline connecting Alberta to Nebraska and a new southern leg that runs from Cushing to the Gulf. The southern project didn’t require Presidential approval and is nearing completion, despite some local efforts to stop it. Keystone XL would increase Canada’s oil exports to the U.S. by as much as eight hundred and thirty thousand barrels a day, and, environmentalists argue, it would increase the speed at which the oil sands are exploited.

“The pipeline would completely change the rate at which the oil comes out of the ground,” Steyer said. “It would enable a much faster development, three times as fast. This is the size of Florida. . . . This is going to go on for decades. It’s not like we’re enabling a Shell station to be open after midnight.”

Anti-Keystone activists believe that, if they can prevent Canadian crude from reaching Texas, they can dramatically slow the development of the oil sands. The industry concedes the point. In February, a pro-oil Canadian think tank issued a report called “Pipe or Perish: Saving an Oil Industry at Risk.” It noted that without Keystone XL the amount of oil produced in northern Alberta, which is projected to double by 2030, will soon outpace the industry’s ability to export it: “If this happens, investment and expansion will grind to a halt.”

The construction of Keystone XL seemed like a foregone conclusion until the spring of 2011, when the climate scientist James Hansen posted an article online. The title of his post, which was really a short note to other climate researchers and activists, was “Silence Is Deadly.” The message was alarming: “The U.S. Department of State seems likely to approve a huge pipeline to carry tar sands oil (about 830,000 barrels per day) to Texas refineries unless sufficient objections are raised.” Hansen argued that catastrophic climate change could be averted if coal was phased out in the next few decades, even if known deposits of conventional oil continued to be exploited. But, as the easily accessible deposits of oil have diminished, industry has focussed increasingly on unconventional deposits, like the oil sands.

“Phase-out of emissions from coal is itself an enormous challenge,” Hansen wrote. “However, if the tar sands are thrown into the mix, it is essentially game over.” If the carbon locked underground in Alberta is exploited, he insisted, there is no chance of preventing runaway global warming.

One of Hansen’s readers was Bill McKibben, a former staff writer at The New Yorker, who first started writing about climate change in the nineteen-eighties; he now runs an advocacy group called 350.org. (The name is a nod to Hansen’s calculation that once the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide exceeds three hundred and fifty parts per million, climate change could become uncontainable.) Like many climate-change activists, McKibben, after Obama’s legislative failure, was struggling to bring focus to the movement. He became seized by the pipeline issue. “This is like a Rube Goldberg machine producing global warming and other environmental catastrophes,” he told me. “You couldn’t figure out a grosser way to wreck the planet than what they’re doing. If we’re going to do anything about global warming, it’s the poster child for the kind of stuff that’s going to have to stay in the ground.”

In June, 2011, McKibben and several fellow-activists, including Hansen, the poet Wendell Berry, and the actor Danny Glover, circulated a letter urging people to join a protest against the pipeline, to take place in Washington that August. Over two weeks, McKibben and twelve hundred and fifty-two others were arrested in a civil-disobedience demonstration outside the White House gates. (Most were arrested for “failure to obey a lawful order,” after police asked them to move.) McKibben spent three days in a D.C. jail. He helped to persuade ten large environmental groups, ranging from Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace to the Environmental Defense Fund and the League of Conservation Voters, to write a joint letter to Obama opposing Keystone and supporting the demonstration. Later, the Sierra Club, which has always kept its distance from environmental radicalism, made an exception to its hundred-and-twenty-year-old tradition of using only “lawful means” to protect the environment, in order to allow its leadership to take part in future actions. McKibben had successfully made Keystone the most prominent environmental cause in America.

That fall, McKibben and some of his colleagues sat down at a computer in his office at Middlebury College, and examined Google Earth images of downtown Washington. For the next action, he wanted to build a human chain around the White House. The route was about a mile and a half long; he figured that he would need three thousand people. The movement was growing, especially on college campuses. In November, some fifteen thousand people showed up for the demonstration, which they called a “solidarity hug.” Many carried signs that quoted Obama’s statements from the 2008 campaign on climate change and his commitment to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels. “We want him to live up to what he said he was going to do,” McKibben said.

The anti-Keystone movement had seemed like a fringe cause. Now it was generating front-page headlines. Four days after the human-chain stunt, the Administration announced that the State Department would need another year to study the pipeline. In July of 2012, McKibben wrote an article for Rolling Stone called “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” The piece explained the difficulties of tackling climate change if unconventional oil resources such as the Canadian oil sands were exploited. Tom Steyer admired the article so much that he called McKibben, whom he didn’t know, to congratulate him.

Steyer grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His father, from a Jewish family in Bedford-Stuyvesant, became a Wall Street lawyer, and his mother, an Episcopalian from Minnesota, was a journalist and a teacher. He and his older brothers, Jim and Hume, a lawyer in New York, attended Buckley, a boys’ school near their apartment. Tom often spent his summers outdoors. He worked on a cattle ranch in Nevada, picked fruit in Oregon, and travelled around Alaska as an adviser to the state, scouting projects that the government could fund with its oil revenues. After graduating from Yale, he worked for two years on Wall Street, and then Jim helped persuade him to move to California to attend business school at Stanford, where Jim went to law school. Tom, in his second year, met his future wife, Kat Taylor, also a Stanford law student. She runs a community bank and TomKat Ranch, a two-thousand-acre cattle ranch in Pescadero, an hour south of San Francisco, on the Pacific Coast.

In 1983, after finishing business school, Tom returned to New York and worked in the risk-arbitrage division of Goldman Sachs under Robert Rubin, Clinton’s future Treasury Secretary. Goldman had made money through the most difficult economic years of the nineteen-seventies. Steyer wanted to learn how to invest, but he was also interested in politics, and he was attracted to Rubin, partly because he was one of the few prominent Wall Street figures with ties to the Democratic Party. “I knew that I was going to be taught how to be a careful and successful person in investing by people who had done it in really, really, really hard times,” Steyer said.

Steyer was seen as a future leader at Goldman, but his relationship with the company ended abruptly when, less than three years into the job, he told Rubin that he was considering moving to California to manage his own investment fund. “They demand loyalty,” Steyer’s wife, Taylor, said. “He went to talk about leaving to possibly run some money in San Francisco, and Goldman basically said, ‘Fine, see ya.’ ” The move led to a temporary falling out between Steyer and Rubin. “I remember thinking we were losing a superstar, ” Rubin said.

In San Francisco, in February, 1986, Steyer started Farallon Capital Management, and he married Taylor a few months later. The new hedge fund applied the methodology he had learned at Goldman to a broader range of investment activities. He raised about ten million dollars to start the firm. When he left, he said, he was managing “about twenty B”—twenty billion dollars.

After securing his fortune, Steyer spent his forties turning to God and politics. “I am very religious,” he said. “I go to church every Sunday. I think about everything I’m doing now from a religious perspective. My midlife crisis was thinking about the purpose in living, and my reaction was to figure out that I believe in God.”

Steyer became a philanthropist and wrote occasional checks to Democratic politicians in California, but the Bush Presidency galvanized him. “In 2002, I was, like, ‘O.K., this guy’s a historic mistake,’ ” he said. “I can’t tell my grandchildren, ‘We really screwed it up, but I was making a lot of money so I didn’t have time to do anything about it.’ I thought, Win, lose, or draw, I have to put everything I can into defeating this guy because he’s going to be terrible for the United States if he gets reëlected. So I went to work for John Kerry.”

In 2007, Chris Lehane, a former Clinton and Gore operative nicknamed the “master of disaster” for his work at the White House responding to Whitewater and the Lewinsky affair, learned that Republicans in California were attempting to change the rules for allocating electoral votes in Presidential elections. Under the proposed plan, the Republican nominee for 2008 would have gained some twenty extra electoral votes. Lehane approached Steyer, who had become well known in Democratic donor circles, about funding a campaign to defeat the proposal. It was a battle of hedge-fund managers. Paul Singer, an investor close to Rudolph Giuliani, who was running for President, largely funded the Republican effort, and Steyer, spending nearly a million dollars, funded the counter-campaign. Steyer won.

Three years later, Steyer and Lehane teamed up again, to defeat a ballot proposition financed by two Texas oil companies that would have overturned a California law to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Unlike the 2007 effort, in which Steyer’s role was not well-known until afterward, Steyer co-chaired the 2010 campaign with George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was governor and also opposed the oil companies’ proposition, recruited him. The unlikely pair of Steyer and Shultz became the public faces of the effort. Shultz, who is now ninety-two, said of Steyer, “He likes to win—big.” Steyer spent five million dollars, and the proposition was defeated by a margin of sixty-two to thirty-eight.

Last year, Steyer funded a California proposition to close a tax loophole that benefitted out-of-state corporations. The money would be directed instead to education and environmental initiatives. Steyer spent more than thirty million dollars on the initiative, which passed by sixty-one per cent; it will add an extra billion dollars of revenue to the state budget every year for the foreseeable future. He considers it one of the best investments he ever made. “I would do that every year for the rest of my life if I could,” he said. At the end of the campaign, he established a political arm of Next Generation, which he is using to replicate the successful California strategy across the country.

Last summer, in his first phone call with McKibben, Steyer suggested that the two go hiking in the Adirondacks. By the time they descended Giant Mountain, Steyer was prepared to dedicate himself to Keystone full time.

“He understood the math of everything,” McKibben told me. “Not surprisingly, because I guess that’s what you do when you’re a hedge-fund guy, or whatever it is he does—you sit around figuring out the mathematical implications of things. He instantly understood why Keystone was important both in science terms and in political terms—that it would be the moment when the President would make or break his place in this particular history.”

That October, Steyer officially stepped down from running Farallon. He no longer has an ownership position in the company, but the firm still invests his money and he’s the equivalent of a limited partner. After being criticized by some Republicans for holding some investments in the fossil-fuel industry, including stock in Kinder Morgan, which has proposed extending a rival pipeline to Keystone, Steyer said that he would fully divest his portfolio of its “dirty energy” holdings within a year. After leaving Farallon, he convened a two-day “Big Think Climate Meeting” to plot his future in politics. He held the retreat at the TomKat Ranch. Two dozen top environmentalists attended, among them McKibben, Hal Harvey, and Tara McGuinness, who now works at the White House. Also present were Steyer’s closest political advisers, including Lehane and Podesta, and some friends from the venture-capital and high-tech worlds, among them some young executives from Twitter.

The news about climate change was particularly grim. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography had reported that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was three hundred and ninety-one parts per million, well above the safe limit of three hundred and fifty. Obama was favored to win reëlection, but he had hardly mentioned climate change in the campaign. Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, avidly supported Keystone, promising to “build it myself,” if necessary. “We wanted to get as many people who know stuff but weren’t part of the existing climate-energy establishment to think about this problem,” Steyer said. Between sessions, which took place at a long table in the TomKat kitchen, some attendees played around outside on a mechanical bull.

There was no debate about the science and little debate about the policy prescriptions. The planet was warming and greenhouse-gas emissions had to be curbed. The problem was that the political system wasn’t responding fast enough. “If you’re driving a car at a hundred miles an hour toward a cliff,” Steyer said, “you can’t wait until the last inch and go, ‘You’re absolutely right, that is a cliff!’ ” Given the inevitable consequences to the environment, Lehane said, climate will become a top issue for voters. “The social-theory question Tom basically settled on was: How do we accelerate that process?” Lehane said.

The group broke into three camps. The participants from Silicon Valley were deeply influenced by how activists in the Arab Spring had used cell phones, text messages, and social media to organize. “They talked about liberation technology, and how that could be used and deployed around this movement and this issue, particularly given how strongly young people feel,” one of Steyer’s aides said. (Young voters overwhelmingly support climate-change policy.) Podesta, who was skeptical, described them as the “all we need is the killer app” camp.

McKibben represented the second faction, which Podesta described as a “human-rights kind of strategy.” McKibben talked about civil disobedience, of the sort that he and his followers engaged in, and about his latest effort, a campaign modelled on the anti-apartheid divestment movement. He believes that major institutions can be pressured to divest themselves of fossil fuels. He is at work enlisting what he says are huge numbers of young people—his organization has thousands of volunteers—including an extensive network on college campuses.

Podesta and Lehane argued that, to change policy, one had to change the politics. They cited immigration reform and gay marriage, issues on which national politics had changed quickly in the Democrats’ favor. “Right now, there’s no pain in being a weasel on climate change,” Podesta said. “What’s the safest political thing to do? Don’t piss off the fossil-fuel industry, because they’ll come after you if you do. And then the other group is ‘Say the right thing, but don’t do much.’ ” Republicans have been able to claim that the science is unclear and that there hasn’t been appreciable warming in the past ten years and not “pay any price for it.” Podesta and Lehane urged Steyer to spend his money on electoral politics, to force politicians to pay a price.

After Obama won reëlection, he began to talk again about global warming. “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” he said in his second Inaugural Address. In his State of the Union Message, he declared that if Congress didn’t send him a plan to reduce carbon emissions he would act on his own, through the E.P.A.’s regulatory process. Obama likely would have quietly approved the original pipeline-permit proposal, submitted by TransCanada, the company building Keystone, to the State Department in 2008. But in December, 2011, congressional Republicans inserted language in an economic package that demanded a decision within sixty days, and the State Department said that that wasn’t enough time to review the proposal. TransCanada submitted a new permit application in May, 2012, the one now under review. Activists have used the interim to lobby against the plan. “This thing was rolling toward approval,” Podesta said, arguing that the Republican effort to force Obama’s decision backfired. “All they did was put off the decision long enough so that you could mount a serious campaign against it.”

In February, a few days after Obama’s State of the Union address, McKibben helped organize a major rally on the Mall. Tens of thousands of people showed up. Steyer addressed the crowd, along with the country’s leading anti-Keystone activists. McKibben had asked Steyer to join him and Hansen and a few dozen others in tying themselves to the White House gates and getting arrested, but Jim, among others, talked him out of it. “Tom, that’s not who you are, that’s who Bill McKibben is,” he told him. “It’s important to have a voice like Bill McKibben, but that’s not your voice. Your voice is as this incredibly smart, thoughtful business guy who’s looking at the economic implications and going, ‘This is a disaster.’ ”

Steyer wanted to test Lehane’s theory that traditional campaign politics—the world of Super PACs and field organizations and TV ads—was the best way to spend his money. “Once politicians start to become aware that this issue can either help them or hurt them, you begin to change the conduct and behavior of those who are in elected office,” Lehane insisted. “Politicians very rarely lead, despite the fact that they talk about leadership in every speech. They typically follow.”

There aren’t usually many significant electoral races in the year after a Presidential election, but in December, with Hillary Clinton stepping down, President Obama nominated Massachusetts Senator John Kerry as Secretary of State. Kerry, a longtime advocate for addressing climate change and a co-author of the failed 2010 legislation, was now in charge of reviewing TransCanada’s application to build the pipeline extension, and the special election in Massachusetts to fill his Senate seat gave Steyer an ideal test case. Edward Markey, a longtime Massachusetts congressman and another co-author of climate legislation, opposed Keystone. His Democratic primary opponent, Representative Steve Lynch, supported it. Steyer’s group spent $1.8 million attacking Lynch and backing Markey. Lehane said they used the same “formula” that had been successful in California: an “enemy” oil company pursuing its own self-interest was hurting the state. Markey won, and went on to victory in the general election. Steyer began looking for his next opportunity.

Alberta is the Texas of Canada, a fact that Canada and the U.S. have appreciated for some time. In 2005, when Vice-President Dick Cheney visited, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada sent him a cable about his destination: “Considered the ‘most Americanized’ province in Canada, attributable in part to the oil and gas boom that drew U.S. firms to the province in the early 1900s, Alberta maintains a relatively pro-American, free market sentiment.” U.S. entrepreneurs spent decades trying to help Canada figure out how to profitably exploit the oil sands. “The old joke there was that Canadians sold life insurance and Americans drilled for oil,” David Manning, Alberta’s lobbyist in Washington, said. “My friends growing up were from Oklahoma and Texas. A lot of the expertise and a lot of the early investment came from the U.S.”

For many years, interest in the oil sands spiked only when crude prices rose enough to justify the high costs of extracting the petroleum from the sand. Mired in debt, Alberta lacked the ability to fully develop the resource. Its industry was saved by a prolonged spike, from 9/11 until the recent recession, when the price of oil jumped from twenty-five dollars a barrel to more than a hundred and thirty. Canada began advertising its vast oil resources to the world.

The Bush Administration saw Canadian oil as a cornerstone of its energy policy, and in 2005 Alberta opened an office in Washington to help solidify American backing. Revenues from oil erased Alberta’s debt. In 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, an Alberta politician who started in the petroleum industry in Calgary in 1978, declared Canada an “emerging energy superpower.” Today, one-third of the Canadian economy is tied in some way to the oil sands.

The impact is most immediately visible in Calgary. The skyline is dotted with construction cranes and new glass towers built by oil and gas companies: the Bow, the newest and tallest building, built by the energy companies Encana and Cenovus; the Shell Centre; the Home Oil Tower; the sprawling Suncor Energy Centre, home to one of the largest operators in the oil sands; and the TransCanada Tower, which houses the pipeline company’s headquarters and the control room it uses to pump oil from Alberta to the U.S. through the existing Keystone pipeline.

Many of the energy executives, regulators, and politicians I spoke to in Calgary seemed baffled that their industry and province had become the face of global environmental ruin. Jim Ellis, who was a commander in Bosnia in 1994 and ran the Canadian military in Afghanistan in 2005, now directs the Alberta Energy Regulator, which oversees environmental compliance for the oil sands. In 2009, he was greeted as a pariah at the Copenhagen climate summit. “We had no idea,” he said. “We were just little Alberta. We wandered in and went, ‘Holy crow, what is going on here?’ We came back, and one of the ministers said, ‘You know what, I don’t think some people like Alberta and Albertans.’ We’ve never seen that before! We’re nice people!”

Industry officials point out that the amount of carbon emitted to extract the oil in Alberta has declined by about one per cent every year for the past two decades. They note that Hansen’s dire warning about Canada’s unconventional oil deposits was based on the assumption that every ounce of oil in the sands would be burned. (Only a small fraction of the total estimated reserves is recoverable, and doing so will take decades.) Alberta even instituted a carbon tax for its heaviest emitters, a policy that has never gained traction in the United States. The tax is only fifteen dollars per ton of carbon dioxide, but the money goes into a fund to pay for research to lower the amount of carbon used to extract the oil. To many critics, however, focussing so much attention on reducing the carbon footprint of oil-sands oil to the levels of, say, Saudi Arabian oil, which has a lower carbon profile, is like telling a morbidly obese patient to lose weight by eating Quarter Pounders instead of Big Macs.

Obama’s approach to Keystone is characteristically technocratic. In June, he delivered a major speech about climate change in which he declared that Keystone XL would be approved “only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” The State Department has been studying the issue, and in March it released a draft environmental-impact statement. It concluded that building the pipeline would not “significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands,” and noted that, without Keystone XL, oil from Alberta would be shipped to refineries on the Gulf by rail, which is more carbon intensive, or to foreign markets through new pipelines that Canadian companies are trying to build to their east and west coasts. There are regulatory hurdles and local opposition to those projects. But in a market analysis the State Department concluded that, one way or another, the Canadians would find a way to sell their oil.

Lisa Jackson, frustrated by Obama’s inaction on climate change, left the E.P.A. in February. In April, the agency, under attack by congressional Republicans who were delaying the confirmation of its next administrator, Gina McCarthy, scrambled the Keystone debate: it challenged the State Department’s analysis of the oil market, suggesting that Canada might find it difficult to ship its oil without Keystone. “We think it is important that it be as complete and accurate as possible,” the E.P.A. assessment noted, adding that the State Department’s report, “while informative, is not based on an updated energy-economic modeling effort.” The fate of Keystone now depends on the outcome of this bureaucratic fight. “If State sticks with its original analysis, Keystone will probably be approved,” a former State Department official said.

Kerri-Ann Jones, the Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, who is in charge of that analysis, told me that she is taking the E.P.A.’s critique seriously. “We’re looking at any new information regarding the market analysis, any changes we’re seeing,” she said.

The E.P.A.’s rebuke to the State Department has energized environmentalists and unsettled the Canadians. Gary Doer, the Canadian Ambassador to the U.S., is a former pre-mier of Manitoba who has a good record on climate-change policy—one of the reasons that the Harper government sent him to Washington in 2009. Doer is tanned, with a sweep of white hair. When I spoke with him last month, he said that he took umbrage at being lectured on climate change by the U.S. “We have regulations well in advance of the United States,” he said.

I mentioned that I had recently been in San Francisco with Tom Steyer. “California thermal oil, outside the San Francisco areas that you were in, has higher greenhouse-gas emissions than oil sands!” he said. “When we have California celebrities commenting on oil, it’s a little rich, in its full sense of the word. We have a different culture. You can’t own five homes and drive around in a corporate plane and then claim to be some Buddhist purist.” He added, “It is an interesting thing when you have people going to Copenhagen saying, ‘I’ve weaned myself completely off of all fossil fuels,’ which begs the question, How long is that kayak ride from Malibu to Copenhagen?”

On August 15th, Steyer was standing in shirttails and a pair of blue-and-white striped boxers on the deck of a pontoon boat as it navigated an inlet along the Texas-Louisiana border in the Gulf of Mexico. His boat crept toward the Mariposa, a hulking gray tanker in front of Motiva, a refinery owned jointly by Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Refining. Jim Margolis, a political ad-maker best known for producing most of Obama’s Presidential-campaign commercials in 2008 and 2012, was pacing the deck, directing the captain. The Mariposa’s two forward anchors looked like torpedoes protruding from the bow. “If we get in any closer, Tom, and they figure out it’s you, I think they’ll probably drop an anchor on you,” Margolis said, as he handed Steyer some clothes.

Steyer had asked Margolis to help him produce a series of television ads making the case against Keystone. In August, Lehane had produced an ad that featured an actor, portraying the C.E.O. of TransCanada, hurtling down a pipeline as if it were a waterslide while he bragged about selling Keystone to the American public using an “old-fashioned lie.” Lehane wanted it to air in Washington during an appearance, on August 6th, by Obama on the “Tonight Show,” but the local NBC affiliate said that the commercial didn’t meet its standards. Lehane “was delighted when that happened,” Steyer said, noting that the decision only gave the ad more attention.

The ad was largely a stunt, but Margolis came up with a million-dollar campaign consisting of four ninety-second commercials that will appear sequentially over four weeks, starting on September 8th, during the Sunday-morning political chat shows. He and Steyer call it the Keystone Chronicles. Each week, Steyer will appear in a new location. After the Gulf, he’ll go to Arkansas, near the site of a recent spill of Canadian crude. Then he’ll appear at a clean-energy manufacturing plant to discuss jobs. The series will end with Steyer in New York, on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, with the Manhattan skyline behind him, speaking about Hurricane Sandy and the impact of climate change. “It gives it a more documentary feel, in the sense that each one is different and you have to watch each week to see what he’s doing next,” Margolis said.

Steyer put on a pair of khakis, changed into a blue shirt, and read his script aloud. “I’m Tom Steyer, I evaluate investments and help grow companies,” he said. “Being successful means learning the difference between a good investment and a bad deal. Today, we look at who profits when Keystone is built. Here’s a hint: it’s not America. We’re on the Gulf Coast at one of the largest refineries in the world, owned by Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Refining. It’s where tar-sands oil piped from Canada will be refined and loaded on ships to be sold overseas to countries like China.” While Steyer studied his lines, Margolis and his crew watched the Mariposa, which seemed to be leaving port. Filming in the path of a moving vessel carrying some six hundred thousand barrels of oil seemed unwise.

Steyer’s boat motored through the inlet in search of another backdrop, and stopped at a refinery owned by Valero, the Texas company that happened to be his opponent during his California proposition fight in 2010. The Sanko Amity, a green-and-red tanker, was sitting idle in front of the refinery. Its ballast tank was largely empty, so the ship towered above the water. After anchoring and setting up the shot, Margolis’s partner, J. Toscano, looked into a monitor and was thrilled. “It’s so good, it’s going to seem like Green Screen,” he said.

A makeup artist touched up Steyer’s face, and he stood in front of the Valero tanker reading the script from a teleprompter, as Margolis shouted instructions. “Less angry, more factual,” he said. “More in sorrow than in anger.” After two dozen takes and some B-roll of Steyer floating past the refineries looking at pipelines, they were finished. The ad followed Steyer and Lehane’s California formula: foreign oil from Canada was being sold to foreign refiners in the Gulf and shipped to China, while the oil companies profited.

As political theatre, it was a pretty good ad. Steyer appeared honest and confident. But, as a lesson in global-oil economics, the ad lacked context. Back on shore, I met with Greg Gentry, Valero’s general manager in Port Arthur. As he explained the process of turning crude oil into gasoline, diesel, kerosene, and jet fuel, he pointed out of the window at a distillation tower with tubes running from it. Inside the tower, crude oil was heated at various temperatures and turned into vapor, which was then collected and condensed. The higher up the tower, the lower the temperature. Heating crude oil toward the bottom, at four hundred degrees, made kerosene. Farther up, at two hundred degrees, made gasoline. I noted that it wasn’t much different from distilling alcohol. “That’s exactly what it is,” Gentry said.

Most early American refineries were built to refine lighter crudes produced in the U.S. As America began importing more foreign oil, newer refineries were designed to process heavy crudes. The refineries best situated to buy oil-market crude were the ones on the Gulf Coast, Gentry said. “They’re sitting on the water, so they upgraded to run the world’s heavier crudes.”

Much of the gasoline, diesel, and other fuels produced at Valero is sent north by pipeline. “If you’re consuming product anywhere in the Northeast United States, the majority of that product is made on the Gulf Coast,” he said. The rest is sold in foreign markets, a fact that Steyer and other opponents of Keystone have seized upon to argue that Canadian oil would do little to achieve oil independence for America. But there’s a world market for refined products, and American refiners sell according to market demands, no matter what country they buy their crude oil from. Keystone wouldn’t change that basic fact of the international oil market.

Gentry favors approval of the Keystone XL. He said that he needs three hundred and forty-five thousand barrels of oil a day, and having a pipeline of crude that would terminate up the road would be ideal. He currently buys his foreign oil from Venezuela, Mexico, and Russia, and the reliability of a pipeline beats the costs and potential delays associated with tankers. “When the weather kicks up, or there’s a hurricane in the Gulf, ships get delayed four or five days,” he said. He laughed when I said that the Canadian Ambassador to the U.S. had told me that Keystone was being built at the request of Gulf refiners. “Is that right?” he said. Gentry’s main concern was in receiving a reliable supply at the best price. He also disagreed with the State Department’s claim that, without Keystone, Canada would simply ship its oil by rail. Bringing Canadian oil to the Gulf by rail is too expensive, he said: “They would have to drop the price of their crude.”

This fall, five months after Obama’s visit to San Francisco, the politics of his second term have changed. His gun-control agenda is dead. His immigration bill—the legislative centerpiece of his second term—is languishing in the House, with little prospect for passage. Chances for a grand bargain with Republicans on the budget seem remote. The White House had hoped that Obama’s 2012 victory would jolt Republicans into a more coöperative mood, but Congress has thwarted his entire domestic agenda.

In recent months, Obama has been looking for ways to act without Congress. Climate change happens to be the one policy area that requires almost nothing from Capitol Hill in order for him to make a major difference. “In my State of the Union address, I urged Congress to come up with a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one that Republican and Democratic senators worked on together a few years ago,” he said in his June climate speech. “And I still want to see that happen. I’m willing to work with anyone to make that happen. But this is a challenge that does not pause for partisan gridlock. It demands our attention now. And this is my plan to meet it.” He directed the E.P.A. to issue new rules curbing emissions from coal-fired power plants. Electricity plants running on coal produce more than a quarter of U.S. carbon pollution. Depending on the stringency of the new E.P.A. rules, they could be even more consequential than his 2012 automobile regulations.

Accounts of Obama’s private views about his second-term climate agenda suggest that he sees the E.P.A. rules as his real legacy on the issue, and that he’s skeptical of the environmentalists’ claims about Keystone. “He thinks the greenhouse-gas numbers have been inflated by opponents,” Ambassador Doer said. Journalists who discussed the issue with Obama earlier this year in off-the-record sessions said that he told them the same thing. Some of Steyer’s allies on the climate issue also remain unconvinced that Keystone is the right battle. Rubin, who will be an adviser to the climate initiative being launched by Steyer, Paulson, and Bloomberg, says he doesn’t oppose the pipeline, and Shultz, another adviser to the new effort, favors approving Keystone. “This is oil that’s going to be produced whether or not there’s a Keystone pipeline,” Shultz said. “Get over it!”

But the deterioration of Obama’s legislative agenda and the growing strength of the movement against the pipeline have convinced some that the odds are now higher that Obama will deny the pipeline permit. “I think it’s a fifty-fifty proposition,” Podesta said.

For many activists, the opposition to Keystone isn’t really about the pipeline; they admit that no single project will tip the balance on climate change. Rather, they want Obama to use Keystone as a symbolic opportunity to move America away from fossil fuels. On the night Obama won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, he pledged to “free this nation from the tyranny of oil, once and for all.” In his second Inaugural Address, he said, “The path toward sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition, we must lead it.” Speaking of Obama’s coming decision on Keystone, the former senior Administration official pointed out, “Rarely do you get an opportunity to so easily define who you are and what you think the future of this country should look like from an energy perspective.”

In Keystone, Steyer has picked an issue that enables him to win regardless of Obama’s decision. Leading the fight against the pipeline will help him in a future political campaign in his home state. “He’s now won two major ballot campaigns in California, and has an incredibly strong relationship with both labor and environmentalists, in a state where it costs fifty million dollars to be a competitive candidate,” Lehane said. “In terms of California brand and California politics, he’s in a pretty sweet place.”

The stakes for Obama are higher. There are few opportunities to influence the politics of climate change and leave a legacy on the issue. If he intends to lead an effort to write an international treaty on climate change, as he has promised, taking a stand against the oil sands would provide moral authority in those negotiations, Steyer said: “If you want a leadership position, you have to make public, hard decisions, stick with them, and lead. Everyone’s watching this around the world. Everyone knows this is his big choice. You can’t whiff on the big choices and then turn around and say, ‘But, you know, we really are leading on this—except when it’s inconvenient to us.’ ”

Whether or not the pipeline was the correct battle to wage over climate change, it is now Obama’s. “Sometimes you don’t get to pick the perfect fight,” Steyer said. “Sometimes, someone punches you in the face and you’re in the fight.” ♦

PROFILES
The One Who Knocks

How Bryan Cranston made himself a star.

by Tad Friend

The staggering was all wrong. And the flailing? Unacceptable. Bryan Cranston turned from the video playback with a grin. A few weeks before, he had shot the last episode of “Breaking Bad,” the AMC series that gave him what he calls “the role that will undoubtedly be the first line of my obituary.” Now he was on the set of “Godzilla,” a Warner Bros. remake. In this scene, Cranston, playing the top scientist at a Tokyo nuclear facility, was having an intense argument that’s interrupted by a seismic jolt. Behind him, jumpsuit-wearing extras had begun reeling about as if they were in a cheaply enjoyable fifties version of the story, rather than in the expensively enjoyable version that Warner Bros. hoped to produce. “Doesn’t work, does it?” he said. The director, Gareth Edwards, an Englishman working on his first studio film, gave a rueful nod. “What I tell the background guys when I direct,” Cranston said afterward, referring to the television episodes he’s directed, “is ‘Don’t do it, think it.’ If you just think, This guy’s a douche bag, it will come through your eyes.”

On this June morning, all the elements were in place for a pro-forma blockbuster: a nine-figure budget, the most awesome mutant lizard that computers could generate, and a colossal monument to hubris soon to lie in ruins—the nuclear facility, played by the sludge-control building of a wastewater-treatment plant near Vancouver. The afternoon’s filming would consist of camera-car shots of swarms of extras racing down an endless concrete corridor and Cranston barking into a walkie-talkie as he raced the other way: the Hollywood disaster film in sum.

Yet one reason that the filmmakers cast Cranston, a three-time Emmy winner on “Breaking Bad,” was to distinguish this “Godzilla” from a standard remake. Sue Kroll, the president of worldwide marketing for Warner Bros., says, “When non-fanboys see that Bryan is in it, they’ll hesitate and think, That’s interesting—I wonder what he saw in the role?” The actor has become the studios’ ancho chili, the ingredient that adds distinction to any dish. When Ben Affleck was preparing “Argo,” in 2011, he told his producer, Grant Heslov, that he wanted to hire Cranston. “Yeah, we should,” Heslov replied. “We’re the only movie coming out next year that doesn’t have him in it.”

Cranston serves projects as a one-man truth squad. It begins with his appearance: age has favored him with the craggy, slab-jawed countenance of a religious elder. He smiles a lot—at fifty-seven, he has responded to his late stardom with boyish ardor—but when he smiles “you’re completely confused,” his wife, Robin Dearden, says, “because the smile doesn’t go with that face.”

On “Godzilla,” Cranston radiated vigilance. In one scene, his character, Joe Brody, walks briskly with an administrator named Stan as the two scan a printout of seismic activity. Stan wonders whether it shows earthquakes, but Brody says, “No, no—earthquakes are random and jagged. This is steady and increasing.” Between takes, Cranston tweaked the dichotomy to “random, jagged” and “consistent, increasing” to give it a scientist’s concision and to avoid the paradox of “steady and increasing.” He persuaded Edwards to shoot the moment not as a walk-and-talk and a closeup but in one go. “It’s an affirmation of what Joe already knows,” he pointed out—no spoilers, but the movie is called “Godzilla”—“so he wants to move.” Then he surveyed the extras and murmured, “There’s a guy reading a manual in the background—would that happen?” Noticing that Edwards was beginning to resemble St. Sebastian, Cranston patted his shoulder and said, “Never mind, never mind—I’m picky. We’re good!”

Cranston has time for such troubleshooting because he’s not one of those broody actors who wrap themselves in a Navajo blanket and insist on being addressed only as Mr. Wolverine. He gets into character instantly and can produce wracking sobs on cue (the secret, he learned from a stint in soap operas, is to hydrate days in advance). Nicolas Winding Refn, who directed Cranston as a seedy mechanic in “Drive,” says, “Bryan Cranston can play anything, anytime, anywhere, any way.”

On “Action!,” as the next scene began, Cranston instantly became a preoccupied Joe Brody, resisting Stan’s attempts to stifle his concerns and keep the plant operating. But when Cranston was supposed to bark, “I have operational authority,” it came out as “I have control authority.” Without skipping a beat, he continued, “I am the Secret Santa to all these guys!” and everyone cracked up. Cranston—a master of the blown-take button and the vibrator hidden in a co-star’s drawer—uses anarchy strategically, to keep his sets relaxed. The first time he directed an episode of “Breaking Bad,” he arrived wearing a beret and a monocle and carrying a horsewhip. Between takes now, he played the bongos on the crew’s hard hats, duckwalked, dipped into a British chav accent, and recited Samuel L. Jackson’s “motherfuckin’ snakes on this motherfuckin’ plane!” speech, getting Jackson’s indignant cadences just right.

Meanwhile, take by take, Joe Brody shrugged Stan off more and more touchily. Cranston had suggested that Stan drag Joe aside. “In order to stop me, at this point, he’s got to physically stop me,” he explained. “And my reaction—that I wouldn’t feel right about letting him move me like I was a little boy—helps create a history and a mood.” Edwards told me, “There’s a fine line between a great, character-driven movie and a throwaway popcorn flick, and that little scene is one of my favorites, because it helps us harken back to a seventies-movie feel. The layer of history Bryan created—that Joe and Stan are good friends, but their friendship is being severely tested—wasn’t at all on the page.” He laughed. “The problem with Bryan is that he comes with a lot of ideas, and you have to say ‘Damn it,’ and rethink everything, because he’s always right.”

If you’re always right, you may not always be in the right place. In his trailer, Cranston told me that when he trumpeted a few recent offers to his wife the skeptical tilt of her head made him realize that he’d been indiscriminate. He wanted to carve out time to pursue a deal he’d made with Sony Television to produce his own shows, and also wanted to pick roles that forced him to stretch. “You never want to repeat yourself,” he told me. “Otherwise, it’s just”—he named a well-known actor—“doing his thing.” He leaped to his feet, raised an imaginary pistol, and shouted, “Get down! Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam!,” followed by “Because right now you’re safest with me!” and “He’s my son!” He shrugged. “You can write the dialogue before you see the film.”

So he’d constructed a grid in blue ballpoint: the Cranston Project Assessment Scale. On the left were rankings from Very Good to Poor, and across the top, in decreasing order of importance, were Story, Script, Role, Director, and Cast. A very good story was worth ten points, a very good cast only two. Story and script count the most, he said, because “an actor can only raise the level of bad writing by a grade. C writing, and I don’t care if you’re Meryl Streep—you can only raise it to a B.” After factoring in bonus points (high salary = +1; significant time away from family = –3), he’d pass on a project that scored less than 16 points, consider one from 16 to 20, accept one from 21 to 25, and accept with alacrity one from 26 to 32. “ ‘Argo’ was a twenty-eight,” he explained, showing his addition. “Ben was a three as a director—he was ‘good’—and now he’s a four, ‘Argo’ says. ‘Godzilla’ was a twenty, on the high end of ‘consider.’ I was dubious, but when I read the script I was surprised—you care about these people, and you’ve got Godzilla.”

After a thirteen-hour day at the waste-treatment plant, a day that had been smelly, noisy, and numbingly fluorescent, Cranston retained an expectant “Where’s the after-party?” air. “As they take the wig off, I’ll put a hot towel on my face and wash the character away,” he said. “And it’s then, for the first time, that I’ll realize how tired I am. Remember the plate spinner on the ‘Sullivan’ show? I’m a plate spinner. I used to think you could never have too many.”

For years, Cranston scrabbled after guest-star roles on crappy TV shows while making his living in commercials. He played a bland smoothie with bread-loaf hair who just happened to love Shield Deodorant Soap, Arrow Shirts, Coffee-mate, and Excedrin, a middle-of-the-bell-curve guy who, despite his initial skepticism, was really sold on the product: “Now you can relieve inflamed hemorrhoidal tissue with the oxygen action of Preparation H.” He says, “I had that everyman look—nonthreatening, non-distracting, no facial hair. I fit in.”

As he was often the last person cast on a show or film, his strategy was to play the opposite of what the ensemble already had. Drama is conflict, after all. When he auditioned for the father on “Malcolm in the Middle,” the Fox sitcom about a crew of unruly brothers, he knew that the boys’ mother was bombastic, fearless, and insightful, so he played the father as gentle, timid, and obtuse. “It was a genius way to make an underwritten part work,” Linwood Boomer, the show’s creator, says. “By the third episode, we realized we had to do a lot more writing for the guy.”

“Malcolm” aired from 2000 to 2006, and established Cranston as a television fixture, if not a star. Yet even after he landed the lead in “Breaking Bad,” in 2007, he framed his character, Walter White, as an opposite—in this case, the opposite of the man Walter would become. The show is about a fifty-year-old high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque who, after getting a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer, secretly works with a former student, the sweet yo-yo Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), to make enough crystal meth to leave a nest egg for his family. Walt’s extremely pure product becomes wildly successful, but at great cost to everyone around him.

Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator and executive producer, had sold it to the AMC network as “a man who goes from Mr. Chips to Scarface,” and, in the pilot, Walt tells his students that chemistry is “the study of change.” But Cranston quietly shifted the arc from good-man-becomes-bad to invisible-man-becomes-vivid. In pre-production, Gilligan recalls, Cranston began to construct an ideal nebbish: “Bryan said, ‘I think I should have a mustache, and it should be light and thin and look like a dead caterpillar, and I should be pale, and a little doughier, a hundred and eighty-six pounds.’ ”

Cranston explains, “I wanted Walt to have the body type of my dad, who’s now eighty-nine, like Walt was a much older man. When I was studying my dad, taking on his posture and burdens—I didn’t tell him I was doing it—I noticed I was also taking on some of his characteristics, the ‘Aw, jeez,’ or an eye roll, or”—he gave a skeptical grimace—“when Jesse did something stupid.”

Gilligan, an amiable, fatalistic Virginian, says, “I had a very schematic understanding of Walt in the early going. I was thinking structurally: we’d have a good man beset from all sides by remorseless fate.” Not only does Walt have cancer, an empty savings account, and searing regrets about his career path but his son has cerebral palsy and his wife, Skyler, is unexpectedly pregnant. Gilligan gave a wry smile. “The truth is you have to be very schematic indeed to force someone into cooking crystal meth.”

Instead, Cranston played the role so that Walter’s lung-cancer diagnosis catalyzes a gaudy midlife crisis—so that a luna moth breaks from the drabbest of cocoons. Across the show’s five seasons, which depict a lively two years, Walt is increasingly inhabited by Heisenberg, his drug-dealing pseudonym and alter ego—a figure Cranston describes as “the emotionless, brave, risk-taking imaginary friend who looks out for Walt’s best interests.” Early in the first season, when Walt scurries out of his Pontiac Aztek to retrieve the drug dealer Krazy-8, who lies unconscious on a suburban corner in broad daylight, he’s terrified of being seen, and takes tiny nerdy steps, his shoulders twitching with self-consciousness. There is a touch of Hal, the father Cranston played on “Malcolm in the Middle,” about him still—he might almost waggle his hands in panic for comic effect. (The first season of the show was particularly funny, if darkly so, and Vince Gilligan asked his colleagues whether he should submit it to the Emmys as a drama or a comedy.)

After undergoing chemotherapy, Walt shaves his head and grows a Vandyke, alpha-male plumage that helps him play the bruiser. By the end of the second season, he rousts two would-be meth cooks from his territory with pure assurance: a wide stance, arms relaxed yet poised to strike. And when he reveals his hidden powers to his wife in the famous “I am the one who knocks!” speech, he levels his hand at her like a gun. “The more believable humanity of Walter White—the discovery that he’s not a good man but an everyman—is due to Bryan,” Gilligan said. “The writers realized, from his acting, that Walt isn’t cooking for his family; he’s cooking for himself.”

By the fifth season, having killed Krazy-8 and become responsible for at least a hundred and ninety-four other deaths, Walt has no anxiety left. His voice is low and commanding, his manner brash—he’s eager to be seen. He was cowed at first by his brother-in-law, Hank Schrader, a bluff D.E.A. agent who treats him with kindly contempt. But soon enough he’s snarling at Hank, “I’m done explaining myself,” and taunting him for misidentifying Heisenberg: “This genius of yours, maybe he’s still out there.” Then he eliminates his boss, a drug lord named Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), by blowing his face off with a wheelchair bomb. As Walt takes on the role of the dominant dealer, Cranston has him unconsciously appropriate some of Esposito’s coiled stillness. “I wanted to plant a subliminal thing with the audience,” he says. “But it was Bryan who modelled Walt’s body language on Gus’s—Walt didn’t know what he was doing. All he knew is that he felt more confident with his shoulders back.”

In movies, unless you’re the star, you’re going to play an archetype. Studios, noticing the authority in Cranston’s persona, have often cast him as a colonel (“Saving Private Ryan,” “John Carter,” “Red Tails”). Ben Affleck, who hired him to be the C.I.A.’s version of a colonel in “Argo,” says, “Bryan is the boss you might actually like. He’s not a general and he’s not a sergeant—he’s a colonel.” Yet Cranston’s friend Jason Alexander, who starred as George Costanza on “Seinfeld,” says, “Bryan doesn’t play an idea particularly well, those military roles. That’s because his strongest card is complexity, where you can’t figure out what he represents until he gradually reveals himself.” A producer friend of Cranston’s observes that he doesn’t stand out in such films as “Total Recall,” where he chewed the scenery as a dictator, “because he wasn’t reined in. Actors want to act, but you need someone who will say, ‘Give me the take where he’s doing less.’ ”

A cable series, a format that showcases accretive subtlety, is where Cranston could truly shine. Luckily, cable’s golden age arrived just as he did. “Bryan had to grow into his weight as an actor,” John O’Hurley, a close friend of Cranston’s since the mid-eighties, when they were both married to the same woman on the soap opera “Loving,” says. “He became dangerous when he began letting his eyes go dead. It’s the sign of a man with nothing to lose.”

In Hollywood, where everyone routinely calls everyone else a genius, the praise Cranston inspires is remarkably fervent. It borders on envy, not just of his talent but of his expansive approach to life. “Bryan would be the guy to be stuck on a desert island with,” Jane Kaczmarek, who played the mother on “Malcolm in the Middle,” says. “Not only would he be great company but he’d build you a hut and find you some food.” “Breaking Bad” ’s Aaron Paul says, “He’s my mentor, and hands down the greatest guy I’ll ever work with.” And Frankie Muniz, who played Malcolm on “Malcolm in the Middle,” says, “I remember thinking, Man, I want to be Bryan when I’m older. He was like the perfect Hollywood movie dad. He was almost too perfect.”

Cranston’s warmth and his interest in helping young people are genuine. (He and his wife are mainstays of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.) They are also an aspect of the public work of being “Bryan Cranston,” which of late has become an extremely demanding role. When I walked around Manhattan with the actor last fall, he was unfailingly charming with the many, many people who recognized him as Walter White. When one woman wanted her picture taken with him, after he posed for one with her boyfriend, he snarled, “I’ll take a photo with him, but you? You disgust me!” Then he laughed and flung an arm around her.

“Bryan’s really good at it,” Robin Dearden says. “But it takes him longer to shut that off than it does to get out of character—it usurps his energy, overwhelms him. When he comes home, the last thing he wants is a woman’s chat”—she laughed. “I try not to take it personally when he gets curt, because one reason he gets exhausted is that after years of trying so hard to get anything he could, he doesn’t have that gauge of, ‘O.K., I’ve done enough now.’ ”

Fame can blunt an actor’s acuity; he can’t study people because they’re always studying him. Cranston says, “I used to just watch people at malls, to get out of that rut where there’s too much of you seeping into your roles, where your character is ‘Me, but with a hat!’ ” By way of example, he cycled rapidly through Robert De Niro’s scowl, Jimmy Stewart’s stammer, and Al Pacino’s chesty roar. “But now when I watch people, working to get away from my Bryanisms”—the tics taken from his father; a sagging-jaw move he does to demonstrate awe—“I have to wear dark glasses and ear buds and nod my head, so people think I’m listening to music.” He avoids dining out, and has developed tricks for gliding around incognito: feigning interest in his cell phone, sitting near older people in airport lounges because they’re less likely to recognize him. “I wouldn’t mind being a hermit when I’m not working,” he told me.

Playing other people allows Cranston to be most vividly himself. In late June, he spent four hours in a basement sound studio on the DreamWorks Animation lot, in Glendale. It was his first recording session for “Kung Fu Panda 3,” in which he’ll play a new character, Lee Shen—the biological father of Jack Black’s Po. The first scenes went slowly, as the director, Jennifer Yuh Nelson, nudged Cranston to make Lee stern yet not uncaring, and to sharpen the enmity between Lee and Mr. Ping, the talkative goose who raised Po. Late in the day, Cranston’s stomach growled, and he said, as Lee, “I’m still hungry. I should have eaten that goose.” Warming to the idea, he became a broadcaster: “True Hollywood Confessions: When ‘Kung Fu Panda’ went horribly wrong.” He bent down, as Cranston again, to answer an imaginary phone call from the head of the studio. “Yes, Mr. Katzenberg,” he whispered. “No, no—it wasn’t me. It was Jennifer! She went crazy!” He listened, his eyes widening as if Katzenberg were reading his thoughts. “Yes, exactly like a drunken goose!”

One afternoon, Cranston set aside some time to check on his prostheses. KNB EFX Group, the special-effects studio that did the makeup for “Breaking Bad,” had made him a ski-jump nose, Buddha earlobes, and saggy cheeks tethered to a cleft chin. The actor was going to play Lyndon Johnson in Robert Schenkkan’s “All the Way,” a show about Johnson’s first year as President. (It opens this week in Cambridge, Massachusetts, preparing for a bid at Broadway.) Cranston was uncertain he was up to the challenge, which thrilled him. He’d been reading everything he could about Johnson and listening to his Oval Office tapes, but the physical appropriation would be his gateway in.

At KNB, in a room presided over by a maquette of Doctor Evil, a technician dabbed on the appliqués and turned Cranston to the mirror. “Aw, jeez!” Cranston said, delighted. “I already have the thin lips, the forehead lines and pinched brow. And the receding hairline and hooded eyes. So now imagine the hair back!” He practiced working his lobes into place, murmuring, “Now, now, it’s just a girl putting on earrings is all.” Cranston’s voice eased toward a Texas Hill Country drawl, breathy yet clenched, so “now” came out as “na.” “It’s scary,” he said, “but you try to trust that the more you absorb through osmosis, the more he becomes a part of me, and then suddenly”—he patted his belly—“oh, there he is!” He turned, strode up too close, and thumped me on the chest: “Na, come on, Tad, ya gonna hep me with this vote!”

The actors Cranston looks to—Spencer Tracy, Jack Lemmon, Rod Steiger—make you forget you’re watching a performance. You think of them not as stars but in specific roles. The present-day actor he most admires is Mark Rylance, a Brit best known for his galvanic theatrical work. He told me, “He’s got a little more recklessness, maybe. It feels like if they told Mark, ‘Oh, your character enters masturbating, full frontal,’ he’d go, ‘Sure, let’s try that tonight.’ Whereas, if I’m honest, I’d go, ‘Oh, wow—really? Hmm.’ ”

If Cranston has boundaries in his acting, they’re not immediately apparent. In the “Malcolm in the Middle” pilot, he was introduced as a naked man whose wife was shaving his pelt of body hair (actually, glued-on yak hair). “He was so relaxed we thought that there might be something wrong with him, that he might be too into it,” Linwood Boomer says. The show’s writers tried to devise an indignity that would make Cranston balk, but he embraced them all, from gyrating in the nude as the ballad “Show and Tell” played to being covered with thirty thousand live bees. (Cranston always lets bees land on him, mystified by his companions’ alarm, but in this case, he admits, “one of them stung me right on the nutsack.”)

Robin Dearden says, “There are two things Bryan owns that I wish I had: he doesn’t worry, and he’s not afraid. And, because he’s not afraid, the bees don’t sting him. His whole premise in life is ‘What have you got to lose?’ I think that comes from his childhood. He fell off the cliff, they all went over, and there really wasn’t any more to lose.”

A few months ago, Cranston gazed at his childhood home, a small, three-bedroom ranch house in Canoga Park, at the cheaper end of Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. There were mounds of cigarette butts and trash bags by the door and a dead Toyota in the yard. “It’s bad, it’s a shitty house now,” he said, turning to the street. “Me and my older brother Kyle and the neighborhood boys would play baseball here”—a hedge marked the outfield wall—“and do the resin gag, driving people crazy at night with resin on a string: ‘Squeak, squeak, squeak!’ ” If they got bored, they could ride the Cranstons’ pet donkey, Tom.

Cranston’s parents, Joe and Peggy, met in an acting class, and Cranston, the middle of three children, was born in 1956. He was a freckled kid with an impish squint whose nickname was Sneaky Pete. “I was sly, I guess, always looking for shortcuts,” he said. “ ‘What do I need to do to get a C?’ ” His father, who’d been a boxer in his youth, and who still settled disputes with his fists, was a handsome, gregarious man who appeared in shows such as “Dragnet” and “My Three Sons” and drive-in movies like “Beginning of the End,” in which he was devoured by locusts. Joe was always cooking up moneymaking schemes: a trampoline park, a night club attached to a bowling alley, houses he’d flip for two hundred and fifty dollars down. “We put in a pool one year,” Cranston said, “and then my mother said we couldn’t afford the chemicals to swim in it, so we just let the water stagnate.” From the look of things—Cranston shinnied up the back fence to take a peek—the water hadn’t been changed since.

His parents separated when he was twelve. “My dad wanted desperately to be successful, and he wasn’t, and it just brought him to his knees,” Cranston said. “He stole away some other guy’s wife.” (According to Joe Cranston, the relationship began after he and the woman were separated from their spouses.) “It was a real love affair for them, but . . . I remember lying to my friends, saying, ‘Oh, yeah—my dad comes home late at night, he gets us up in the morning, we play.’ ”

The family’s house was foreclosed on, and Bryan and Kyle lived with their mother’s parents for a time, while their mother and their younger sister, Amy, moved in with their father’s mother. It was a painful and confusing period: Peggy Cranston brought the kids with her to divorce proceedings, but didn’t explain that she and Joe were getting divorced. Afterward, she and the children lived with three boarders in a house that had one bathroom, surviving on food stamps. “My mother had a great zest for life, but when my father rejected her it just destroyed her,” Cranston said. “She became like Blanche DuBois with men, she wallowed in anxiety, depression, and alcoholism, and she lived in clutter.” At Cranston’s house now—a comfortable clapboard affair with a pool out back, at the palmier end of the Valley—he labels everything, and expects his wife and daughter to put in at least an hour a week tidying up.

The elementary school down the street was a refuge. In fifth grade, Cranston got the lead role of Professor Flipnoodle in the school play, “The Time Machine.” One of his lines was “President Lincoln will finish writing the Gettysburg Address when he returns to the White House.” Instead, he said “to the White Front,” a local chain store. “Boom, life stopped,” he recalled. “Every single person was laughing at me. There were, I’m not exaggerating, men kneeling in the aisles, helpless with laughter.” (Kyle Cranston says, “It was very embarrassing for Bryan, and for our parents, but I thought it was hilarious.”) “It was awful,” Cranston continued. “The experience probably had something to do with me pushing away from performing for a long time.” In high school, he was the top cadet in the L.A.P.D. Law Enforcement Explorers Program, and he thought he might become a cop.

The Cranston children didn’t see their father for ten years. “My recollection is of a single mom and two older brothers who were my dads,” Amy Cranston says. Joe Cranston told me, in his apartment, “The family fell apart, everything fell apart.” He shaded his eyes, then flicked his hand away. “I like to omit that period of my life.” Joe lives in Studio City, a few miles from Bryan, and has fourteen prospective screenplays ready to go; a number of them are tailor-made for his son to star in, most recently a fourteen-million-dollar action project called “G.R.A.B.”

Cranston, who gently resists his father’s blandishments, said, “I try to remember the good stuff—him coaching my Little League team, or putting up the Christmas lights together.” Standing on the street in front of his old house, he took a last squint. “Someone else’s life now,” he said, evenly, then strode to his Audi.

“In writers’ rooms, being nerds, we talk in terms of characters’ superpowers,” Vince Gilligan says. “On the face of it, you’d think Walt’s superpower is his scientific genius. But, in our minds, Walt’s superpower is his ability to effortlessly lie to everyone. And the person he’s best at lying to is himself.” Walt’s lies are a reagent that leaches candor and trust from every relationship. In the third episode of the final eight, Skyler assures her sister, Marie Schrader, and Marie’s husband, Hank, that Walt’s out of the meth game. Marie cries, “How can we believe anything you say? There’s no telling where the lies begin and end.”

The series is a meditation on performance. Hank pretends that he doesn’t have P.T.S.D.; Skyler pretends to be a ditz to make the I.R.S. drop its criminal pursuit of her old boss; Jesse growls threats at his dealers over the phone, then looks to Walt for approval. Walt has just challenged Jesse, in one of the show’s touchstone speeches, to play the role he cast him for: “What does the blowfish do, Jesse? What does the blowfish do? . . . The blowfish puffs himself up!” Jesse was supposed to be killed off during the first season, and then Gilligan recognized that Aaron Paul’s Jesse and Cranston’s Walt met like flint and steel. But the warmth of Jesse and Walt’s father-son bond is also laced with violence, suspicion, and, on Walt’s part, a searing contempt for Jesse’s gullibility. It isn’t Walt’s horrific treatment of his wife that gradually alienates viewers; it’s the ruthless duplicity of his actions toward Jesse—his beloved son, the patsy.

The progress of Walter’s deceptive skill has a symphonic rise and fall. Early in the series, when Skyler accuses him one night of keeping a secret cell phone, he makes all the rookie mistakes. “A second cell phone?” he says, eyes wide and mouth agape. The next morning, compounding the error, he revisits the topic. As he spins a threadbare yarn, his hands fly up to flap Skyler’s doubts away, which only confirms her suspicions. Walt soon gets wise to this tell, and begins stuffing his hands in his pockets when he lies—except when he’s lying to himself. In the third season, he walks away from meth and informs Gus that an appeal to vanity won’t get him to return. “You believe I have some proprietary kind of selfishness about my own formula,” he says, almost sneering. “Some sort of”—hand flap—“overweening pride, I suppose? That you think simply”—hand flap—“overwhelms me.” Yep.

In the middle episodes of these final eight, when Walt tells whoppers to Skyler about how he got soaked in gasoline, or his urgent need to fix a soda machine (where he’s hidden a pistol), his hands again flap wildly. That’s because he’s tried to suppress Heisenberg—and, Cranston says, because “Walt is shot through with adrenaline and having to invent excuses on the fly. Human behavior never follows a smooth line.” When Walt has time to plan, as when he makes a “confession” tape in which he black-heartedly names Hank as the real criminal mastermind, his hands stay relaxed. Heisenberg is back in charge.

Gilligan says, “Walter White is the best actor in the world of ‘Breaking Bad.’ If you saw that confession tape, you’d think, This D.E.A. asshole really ran a number on the poor guy sitting on the edge of the bed.” Yet because Walt’s superpower has been revealed no one believes him, even when he’s telling the truth. In this past Sunday’s episode, Walt begs Jesse to recall all the ways he’s protected him over the years, pleading, “Don’t you know me by now?” Jesse replies, “I know you’re a lying, evil scumbag. That’s what I know.” This occurs while Jesse is flimflamming Walt into disclosing where he buried his money in the desert. “The student has become the teacher,” Gilligan says.

Even people who worked on the show lost their faith in Walt. Melissa Bernstein, a co-producer, says, “To the rest of us, it felt like, by the middle of the series, Walt had crossed over, had made too many bad choices. But Bryan never let go of Walt—he felt so strongly that there were pure motives there.” Cranston hopes that “Breaking Bad” will earn a place in the canon of American tragedies, and argues that the show will be tragic only if the audience believes to the end that Walt can still reverse his course. In the second season, he told Gilligan, “I really think Walt’s doing it for his family,” and Gilligan replied, “No, I think he’s actually kind of selfish.” Gilligan says, “It dawned on me, slowly, that I was telling the actor he’s mistaken about his own character—and that my stupidity was jeopardizing the whole show. You don’t have to be Freud to know that Hitler thought of himself as a wonderful guy.”

Smiling tightly, Cranston says, “I was able to keep that conversation at bay.” The actor can’t let himself know things that he knows. And so, for a long time, Cranston has been lying to himself that the monster he carries in his belly is a wonderful dad.

For two years, Cranston went to Los Angeles Valley College, where he earned an associate’s degree in police science—and discovered, when he took acting as an elective, that it awakened a long-slumbering curiosity. After graduating, he left on a motorcycle trip around the country with his brother, Kyle. It was 1976, and they were influenced as much by the TV show “Then Came Bronson,” with its Harley-Davidson-riding hero, as by “On the Road.” They worked at cafés and carnivals to cover food and gas, and slept behind schools and churches, meandering through more than forty states in two years.

In Daytona Beach, they sold Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil by day and acted at the Daytona Playhouse by night. One evening, as the king was dying in “The King and I,” Cranston, playing the retainer Kralahome, felt the undercoat of Vaseline on his eyelids melting into his eyes. “The tears start to flow, and I hear gasps in the first ten rows. They are thinking, Oh, my God, this guy is so into his role! It was a total accident, but I got so much praise. And I realized that in acting—unlike in high school—if you show vulnerability, you become attractive. It’s like you’ve suddenly got a grenade: power was at hand!”

When Cranston was twenty-one, he and Kyle took refuge from a heavy rain under a picnic shelter off the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia. The storm lasted six days. One afternoon, having exhausted the time-killing powers of gin rummy and pushups, Cranston began reading “Hedda Gabler.” When he looked up, it was dark. Instantly, he says, “I understood that this is what I should be doing with my life. I came up with this motto: ‘Find something you love and hopefully become good at’—as opposed to ‘Find something you’re good at and hopefully fall in love with.’ ”

He moved back to Los Angeles with his girlfriend, an actress named Mickey Middleton, and began taking acting classes. (He and Middleton married in 1979 and divorced two years later.) If he felt too comfortable in a class, or too in thrall to its teacher, he’d move on. He studied Meisner and improv, tried estand psychotherapy and Scientology, and even worked as a comedian to conquer his fear of doing standup. “It was like putting together a bouquet,” he says.

After a few years, he began getting guest-star shots on TV shows such as “Murder, She Wrote” and “Matlock,” where the job was to wear an ill-fitting sports jacket and either get killed (just after saying something like “All right, Sissy—cool it”) or get caught (just after saying something like “There’s no way you can prove any of this”). Cranston shotgunned postcards out to casting directors to alert them to these appearances: “I knew ninety-nine per cent of them wouldn’t watch, but my face and name would get in front of them, and it would plant the subliminal message ‘He works a lot, this guy!’ ” He kept at it for more than a decade, without appreciable progress; in the eighties, his characters sent their loot to a Swiss bank account, and in the nineties to the Cayman Islands. The best thing about the guest spots was that in 1986, on a dudes-with-a-helicopter show called “Airwolf,” he struck up a lunchtime friendship with a funny and engaging co-star, Robin Dearden. They were married in 1989, and their daughter, Taylor, was born in 1993.

Though Cranston was making a good living from commercials, he felt close to creative despair. Early in their marriage, he told Dearden, “I feel I’m stuck on the junior varsity.” So she gave him a gift of private sessions with the self-help guru Breck Costin, who suggested that he focus on process, not outcome. Cranston says, “It incrementally came to me that when I audition I’m not trying to get a job, but to give them something, my acting. The victory is not ‘Did I beat that other guy out?’ but ‘Did I present that character as believably as I could?’ That was the turning point.”

In the mid-nineties, he gained some notice on “Seinfeld,” in the recurring role of Tim Whatley, a smarmy “dentist to the stars.” And in 1996 he landed a guest spot as a homeless guy on “Diagnosis Murder,” starring Dick Van Dyke. Watching the episode now, you can see Cranston rising above the material, as when he instructs Van Dyke how to go undercover as a vagrant (walk like your feet hurt; lose the smile). Van Dyke says, “I told Bryan, ‘I haven’t seen anyone that good on the show.’ And then I told everyone I could about this guy.” Joe Cranston recalls, with perhaps a touch of exaggeration, that Van Dyke “took me by the shoulders and said, ‘Your son is the greatest actor of all time.’ ”

Cranston often credits luck with his elevation to the varsity. In 1998, he got to play the astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the HBO miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon” when another actor showed up too fat for the spacesuit. He landed the role on “Malcolm in the Middle” two days before production began, Jane Kaczmarek says, “after all the hairy fat guys didn’t work out.” And Gilligan cast him in “Breaking Bad” because he recalled an episode of “The X-Files” he’d written, in 1998, in which Cranston played a redneck roofer—a part he’d got largely because he auditioned wearing drumstick sideburns and a bushy mustache, which he’d grown to play a redneck mechanic in an indie film called “Last Chance.”

Yet luck is the residue of design and devotion. Cranston wrote and directed “Last Chance,” which starred Robin Dearden, as a birthday gift to her. And he made his “X-Files” role menacing yet memorably sympathetic, giving his racist roofer the trembling hands of someone who’d been picked on in school. Cranston had three Emmy nominations for “Malcolm,” and each time he took out sly “For your consideration” ads promoting his work. “It’s a game, and I know the game,” he explains. “The whole idea is to put yourself in a position to be recognized for your work so opportunities increase. False humility or even laziness could prevent that.”

On “Breaking Bad,” Cranston tried to keep the set free of emotional clutter; his philosophy was, “Let’s save the drama for in front of the cameras.” In an industry where actors average a blowup a day, he had just one in five years, after the writers countermanded the blocking that the actors had worked out for a scene. “It was disrespectful—it was an encroachment into my world,” he says. But all he did in response was state his position firmly and take a long walk. He wrote post-mortem e-mails to the other actors after each season (This year was great, but we can still do better), hosted an annual bowling party for the crew, and made sure everyone showed up to publicize the show at the Television Critics Association conference. Dean Norris, who played Hank, says, “Bryan set the example on set. In the talking-pillow scene”—when Walt’s extended family gathers to encourage him to undergo chemo—“he cried every single time, even when the camera was on one of the rest of us. But he also set the example for how to be a professional, the work ethic. I was more, ‘Ah, fuck this,’ and he told me, ‘You can’t be the “Ah, fuck this” guy. They’re paying you a lot of money, so you need to play your role and be a member of the “Breaking Bad” team. You need to grow up.’ ”

After the third season, Cranston told Gilligan he wanted to be one of the show’s producers. “I wanted it for future credibility,” the actor says. “It is important to me to come across as the leader—I like the power, the empowerment.” Gilligan, who viewed producers’ titles as a writers’ prerogative, was resistant. Cranston explained all that he did: “I am a liaison to the actors and the crew. I travel and give interview after interview—I am a promoting machine. I am the face of the show!” Gilligan looked into it and discovered, he says, that “in large part it was Bryan who was keeping the ship from foundering.” So he acquiesced—just as he had, also reluctantly, when Cranston came to him after the first season and asked to direct an episode. “Bryan was very much the dad of this series,” Gilligan says. “Even I looked to him as the dad.”

For all his geniality, Cranston has a barbed side. One day, he got a call from a nurse at his mother’s assisted-living facility, informing him that his mother, who had Alzheimer’s, had taken up with an equally senescent man, and that they’d “formalized” their relationship. “I know it must concern you greatly to imagine your mother with someone other than your father,” she said. Cranston, whose parents had been married a total of seven times, said that it did, greatly: “What if she gets pregnant?”

Anna Gunn, who played Walt’s wife, grew close to Cranston, and they’d often banter between takes. She recalls, “In the second season, as things got tense between Walt and Skyler, Bryan said some harsh things that made me go, ‘Wow.’ ” After their characters’ new baby, Holly, was born, Cranston would often suggest that Walt be closer to her. “He’d be holding the baby, and he’d go, ‘Yes, that’s right, Holly. Yes! Your mother is cold and doesn’t care,’ ” Gunn says. “Because it was a very male set, where all the men were siding with Walt, the humor would just hit me in the stomach. So I took Bryan aside, feeling a bit like a little girl, and said, ‘I get hurt, because I’m so much my character’s advocate.’ And he said, ‘I am so sorry. My humor can be cutting, and I sometimes forget how vulnerable you can be.’ ”

Cranston says, matter-of-factly, “I often find myself in a pickle and having to apologize, because that’s what risk-takers have to do. In a regular workplace, you’re not supposed to pat someone on the ass. In our world, if you pat someone on the ass or say something crazy, you’re rewarded for it. You’re supposed to get into the character’s deepest feelings.” So he grew fatherly toward his screen children and possessive of his screen wife. When Skyler began sleeping with her boss, Ted Beneke, Cranston says, “I felt jealousy and resentment and anger. I treated Chris Cousins”—who played Ted—“horribly. Good actor and good man, but I didn’t like him. When he arrived in makeup, I’d say, ‘Oh, boy—here’s the asshole.’ ”

At the end of the second season, Walt feels that he is losing Jesse, his true son, to Jesse’s girlfriend, Jane. One night, Walt finds the couple in Jesse’s bed, passed out from using heroin—and then Jane vomits and starts to choke. “Breaking Bad” scripts are unusually dense with stage directions, and the script dictated that Walt, having realized “it serves him better if she keeps CHOKING,” decides not to help her, which prompts “a look of horror, of fear and revulsion.” The scene was intended as a milepost in Walt’s moral decay. In an earlier version, rejected by AMC as too much of a leap, Walt pushes Jane onto her back to make her choke.

Vince Gilligan says, “What you see on film is Walt’s surprise, alarm, then fear, then the realization of opportunity, then sadness and self-loathing, and then acceptance and a hardening of resolve—all in a few seconds. But, great as it was on camera, there was some heat that came off Bryan in the room, something powerful and elusive—almost as if he put it across on the infrared band.”

Cranston says he prepared “by thinking about the pro-and-con list, the way Walt would—about how if Jane dies Jesse stays alive. But in acting you open yourself. And in one of the takes, as I was thinking about how it was someone’s daughter, lying there, I was suddenly looking down at my own daughter’s face. Taylor popped in, and it made me gasp.”

“I gave Bryan a hug afterward,” Anna Gunn says, “and he just grabbed me and held on, crying.” It took him nearly fifteen minutes to stop. “It got him in a place he didn’t expect, a dark place.”

The lines blurred for everyone. When Walt turned his Heisenberg face on Skyler, Gunn almost couldn’t stand it. “It was like something came over the sun, and something would drop in my stomach, and I’d feel so alone and scared and angry,” she says. “I don’t know where he goes, and I don’t want to know.” Rian Johnson, the director of three of the series’ strongest episodes (including the one that airs this Sunday, which Gilligan calls the show’s best), says, “When you talk to Bryan and he’s thinking about a scene, his face gets that Heisenberg look. He says he achieves it just by letting his face go blank, but it bores into you, and I found myself stammering.”

Cranston fixed me with his blank stare to demonstrate that his face is naturally “mean,” and the experience was like a cold walk in the uncanny valley. Jason Alexander, who’s received the Heisenberg from Cranston at the poker table, defined the feeling: “It can be particularly chilling when someone who gives you such joy turns off the source of it. It makes you think, Wait—which one is real?”

Cranston runs for exercise, and every so often he’ll be jogging along and realize that his face is contorted with anger—“rage blasting out of my body, a rush of toxins and rage.” His sister, Amy, says, “He gets a lot of hostility out by running, and it’s always tied back to childhood or his father.” Running releases what remains from acting. “Part of me—of any human being—is really dark,” Cranston told me, in his living room. “And this, with Walt, is how I work through my issues. It’s much easier for me to allow the character to explode than it is for Bryan to open up.” He sat thinking. “I wouldn’t consider myself closed, or open. I’m . . .” He treaded water a moment. “I’m ‘On lunch break; back in an hour.’ ”

As “Breaking Bad” ’s fourth season wound down, Gilligan recalls, “Bryan came to me and said, ‘You really want to end the show?’ ” Cranston believed that they had two seasons left in them, but Gilligan, fearing he’d run out of story, had decided on one. “It was, like, ‘Say it ain’t so, Joe,’ ” Gilligan told me. “I felt I was betraying him.” Cranston admits, “I didn’t want to let go of the greatest experience of my professional life.” At a party after the final episode wrapped, he had the “Breaking Bad” logo tattooed on the inside of his right ring finger.

The interplay between the show’s two fathers kept the story moving. Generally, Gilligan was the architect and Cranston the builder, but it got complicated. Gilligan, who says fear is his creative engine, would bang his head against a wall when he was blocked and, at times, found himself envying Walt’s freedom: “There’s a neurotic wish fulfillment in a cancer diagnosis, how liberating it would be, how it would make your daily worries go away.” And Cranston was building, at times, from his own blueprints; Heisenberg is who he might have turned into if he’d become a cop. In the final season, when Cranston suggested that Walt start womanizing—“If you’re a conquering hero, you grab a wench and say, ‘You’re having sex with me!’ ”—Gilligan wisely let the idea die. When the script had Walt acknowledge that he’d shot his partner, Mike, needlessly, Cranston held up production for an hour because he believed the line would turn Walt into a putz and trivialize Mike’s death. As the sun set over the Rio Grande, Cranston finally uttered the line, but in a dazed way that made Walt not quite responsible for it.

The last creative debate took place over the first episode of the final eight. Walt, realizing that his brother-in-law is on to him, goes to his house to suss him out. After a violent confrontation, in which Hank punches him in the face, he demonstrates what a good liar he’d make on the stand: “I’m a dying man who runs a car wash—my right hand to God, that is all I am.” Bewildered and heartsick, Hank replies, “I don’t even know who I’m talking to.” Walt says, “If that’s true—if you don’t know who I am . . . then maybe your best course would be to tread lightly.”

The scene was written for Walt to unleash his powers, Gilligan says: “We wanted the showmanship of having Heisenberg come out.” But Cranston, who was directing the episode, argued, “Walter knows this discovery has crushed Hank, and he doesn’t want to crush him anymore.” He and Gilligan finally arrived at a way to play the scene. When Hank suggests a reconciliation—why doesn’t Walt bring Skyler and the kids over, and they’ll all talk?—Walt flashes a menacing hint of Heisenberg. “I said, ‘That’s not going to happen,’ ” Cranston told me, and “I let my eyes go dead.” But the “tread lightly” speech ended up being mostly a dying man’s plea to his brother-in-law to remember the relationship that they once had.

The idea was that Walt, having outfoxed Hank, now genuinely pities him, and seeks his pity in return. But Dean Norris says, “When Bryan played it so Walt was really listening to Hank, it was so much scarier—you could see Walt contemplating what it was like to have become a monster, and almost weeping. It was badass and scary and sad, all at the same time, and I wanted to reach out and give him a hug. Bryan’s so transparent in his eyes that people still root for that guy, one of the most evil monsters out there.”

Your conclusion about that scene, and about the final eight, depends on whether you believe that Walt can keep Heisenberg at bay, or whether you suspect that Heisenberg is using Walt as a decoy. Even as the character’s mortality comes knocking, Cranston somehow keeps both narratives—the triumph of the brave, cold dad and of the fearful, warm one—alive. The Walter that he leaves us with, Gilligan says, “isn’t freshwater, and he isn’t seawater. The man is purely brackish.” ♦

SHOUTS & MURMURS
Memo

by Paul Rudnick

A prominent Russian screenwriter working on a film of Tchaikovsky’s life that has just received state financing caused an uproar this week by saying that the biopic will not focus on the homosexuality of the composer because “it is far from a fact that Tchaikovsky was a homosexual.”

The biopic is being directed by Kirill Serebrennikov . . . on his Facebook page on Wednesday, Mr. Serebrennikov posted what he described as a synopsis of a film about Tchaikovsky in which the composer encounters his first love at a ball only to find that she is married. When she leaves her husband, the composer dies of cholera with her at his side.

One commentator on the post noted that Mr. Serebrennikov had, in fact, posted the synopsis of “Es War eine Rauschende Ballnacht,” a 1939 German film about the composer. The movie was released in the United States under the title “It Was a Gay Ballnight.”—The Times.

MEMO TO: Department of Cultural Purity

FROM: Vladimir Putin

With regard to several upcoming projects, I would like the following guidelines to be strictly adhered to:

1. In the film of Tchaikovsky’s life, when the composer first meets his true love, I would like him to say, “What a wonderful ballnight. I’m so glad you are not a handsome young man.” To which his true love will reply, “But, alas, I am married.” The composer will respond, “I am so upset that I may very well run off and almost become a homosexual.” Later in the film, as the composer dies, he should tell his true love, “While I may have cholera, at least I did not compose musical comedies.”

2. In an upcoming miniseries on the life of Michelangelo, the artist should be portrayed as a roguish womanizer, who only creates the sculpture of David to impress a waitress. While working on the sculpture, the artist should tell his nude male model, “You are very muscular, but I wish you were a waitress.” The artist should then bring his completed sculpture, in a wagon, to the café where the waitress works. He should tell her, “Look at what I have made for you. Someday it will become a world-renowned refrigerator magnet. Kiss me.”

3. In a planned biography of Oscar Wilde, I would like the text to emphasize the fact that Wilde often misplaced his spectacles, and could therefore not distinguish between male prostitutes and female prostitutes, causing some people to wrongly assume that he was homosexual. In one chapter, Wilde should tell a male prostitute, “You are very burly, Margaret.” After another such encounter, Wilde should tell a street urchin, “Your mustache tickles, Karen. I suppose you cannot shave because you are poor.”

4. In the Russian Wikipedia entry on Elton John, the first paragraph should read, “Elton John is a successful singer and songwriter, who has married his male partner owing to a severe shortage of Englishwomen. Ever since the Second World War, women have been rationed throughout England, which has forced more than seventy-eight per cent of the male population to form sexual relationships with men. In the words of Prime Minister David Cameron, ‘In England, a fellow can go for days without seeing anything that truly resembles a woman.’ ”

5. In the Russian release of the film “Brokeback Mountain,” the film should be edited to remove all hints of homosexuality. The film will then be shown in a seven-minute format, under the title “The Cowboy Who Never Met Anyone.”

6. When any history textbook covers the personal relationships of Alexander the Great, Alexander’s male companions should be referred to as “unpaid interns.”

7. At the Bolshoi and all other Russian dance companies, all male dancers should be required to wear pants and sports jackets onstage.

8. Should the HBO film “Behind the Candelabra” be made available as a Russian DVD, it will be retitled “Keep Your Hands on the Piano, Buster.”

9. If the play “Angels in America” is to be performed by any Russian theatrical company, the central male couple should be portrayed by a male actor and a chair.

10. In every academic mention of the author Marcel Proust, it should be explained that Proust is often mistakenly thought to be homosexual, simply because his first name is Marcel.

11. If any art work contains scenes of passionate lovemaking between two women, it must be brought to my office and labelled “Putin Party Pix.” ♦

THE CURRENT CINEMA
How They Roll

“Wadjda” and “Riddick.”

by Anthony Lane

There are many ways in which “Wadjda” could have gone wrong. It could have been cute beyond endurance. Consider the setup: a lively girl of ten or eleven, an only child, with a smile that can be switched on like a lamp, adores her father but seldom sees him. She also knows that his gaze is drifting away from her mother, with whom the girl lives a sedentary and sometimes fractious life. Put like that, the tale has the sad sound of a children’s book from the days of “A Little Princess,” and there is something antiquated in the object of our heroine’s desires: a bicycle, which she longs to possess, and on which her hopes of change and escape—her only plausible ones—are pinned.

The movie could also have been worthy to a fault. Written and directed by Haifaa Al Mansour, it is the first full-length feature to be made by a woman from Saudi Arabia. That is long overdue, and it speaks of both courage and persistence, but it offers no guarantee as to the quality of the result; the world is full to bursting of bad novels and even worse poems that sprang from—and reflected upon—conditions of clampdown and woe. I know people who had the chance to see “Wadjda” at film festivals but skipped it, fearing, on the strength of its reputation, that they were about to be preached at or improved. Such fear is, for once, misplaced. On occasion, Al Mansour may have had to direct from inside a van, being unable to mix with male members of the crew in public, but, if so, the bother was worth it.

From the start, the film, set in Riyadh, is focussed on particulars. Nothing matters more, for instance, than shoes. At the local school, most pupils wear Mary Janes, but Wadjda (Waad Mohammed), as we are informed by a few efficient closeups, prefers high-top sneakers, with stars on them. When told to switch to black shoes, she simply inks in the stars. As statements of rebellion go, it’s not much, but it counts for something when you are obliged, as all the female characters are, to wear the abaya in public. If you swathe your head in the niqab as well, then your feet and your eyes are almost the only patches of free expression left to you. Two of Wadjda’s schoolmates make so bold as to daub their toenails blue. This visual shorthand is enriched by a long shot of their headmistress, the scary and stately Miss Hussa (Ahd), in which we glimpse, below her hem, a pair of lofty stilettos. I wondered whether Al Mansour—educated at the American University in Cairo and at film school in Australia—was remembering the nun who sports high heels in “The Lady Vanishes.” That was a typical spike in Hitchcock’s fetishistic yen, but it also hinted at a dastardly plot, and, in “Wadjda,” the import of the principal’s shoes is not lost on her charges: they whisper among themselves that she has a lover.

She certainly runs a tight ship. Girls are reprimanded for playing hopscotch in the yard, because it puts them in sight of workmen atop a wall a hundred yards away. “If you can see them, they can see you,” the hoppers are told. And watch out for jokes; men outside the school might hear the peal of female laughter from within, and that would never do. Wadjda’s contemporaries are still so immature that they giggle when a teacher mentions periods, and yet soon afterward we hear, to our bewilderment, that one of them is not just betrothed but already married; her future is locked into place. When I first saw “Wadjda,” the pitch of this moral confinement made it seem like a prison flick. Only on second viewing did it reveal itself, more precisely, as the truest form of school movie. That is to say, the schooling is so ingrained that it does not stop at the limits of girlhood. Grown women are governed and regimented as if they, too, were still in class, and their individual temperaments unfurl as they try to work the system, testing the rules to check how far you can bend them before they snap.

Not far, in the case of Wadjda’s mother (Reem Abdullah). The burden of the film—and this is a tribute to a fine actress—seems to be borne in the motions of her body, which, more than lines of dialogue, betray the tensions of a sundered soul. She is blithe, even voluptuous, when she sings in the kitchen or brushes her hair; she droops in a boneless despair as she stands on the rooftop, having a lonely smoke; she looks radiant in a scarlet dress that she sees in a store, although she has to try it on in the toilet; and she stiffens when lambasting her child for leaving the Koran open. “The Devil may spit into it,” she says. Behind closed doors, the mother’s beauty, unmasked, is clear to behold, but she seems barely aware of it, or, rather, it concerns her solely as a tool with which to retain her husband. She can’t have any more children, and he, desiring a male heir, is thinking of acquiring a second wife. It’s like living with Henry VIII.

So why should such a laden movie, heavy with all these cultural clues, feel so light on the eye? How do you make a near-comedy from a state of permanent crisis? The bike helps. Wadjda spots it outside a shop, makes the owner promise to keep it for her, then sets about earning the cash to buy it. By a delicious irony, her most lucrative target is a school prize, awarded to the student who shows the most devotion in learning and reciting passages from the Koran. In other words, Wadjda must feign orthodox goodness in her bid to be bad. For Miss Hussa, the idea of a girl on wheels in a land where women are forbidden to drive is close to heresy. Wadjda’s mother ventures to suggest that bike riding can harm one’s chances of having children. Then, there is a boy, a friend of Wadjda’s, who begins by making fun of her—“Do you really think you could catch up with me?” he cries, pedalling off on his bike—and slowly circles round to her point of view. That strikes me as the weak spot in the tale. No boy, whatever his background, will risk the jibes of his pals to go and hang out with a girl. Compared with the rooted figures who surround him, he seems a bit of a dream.

Nevertheless, “Wadjda” deserves its place in the canon of two-wheeled movies: a slim but distinguished line, gliding from De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves,” Tati’s “Jour de Fête,” and Truffaut’s “Les Mistons” through to the Dardenne brothers’ “The Kid with a Bike.” They all depend on an awkward clump of metal that has no use or purpose until it starts to move, at which point, especially for the young, it acquires a liberating grace. Al Mansour is too smart to overdo the symbolic spin, but the thrust of her film, toward the end, could hardly be more urgent. Wadjda winds up at an intersection, watching traffic stream by in both directions. You might read the scene as a feminist renewal of “The 400 Blows,” and of its celebrated freeze-frame at the ocean’s unwelcoming edge. Those of a hopeful heart will want to know where this genial striver, on the brink of womanhood, will head next. See “Wadjda” in a more sober mood, on the other hand, and you will ask yourself whether she can go anywhere at all.

Riddick, which etymologists will recognize as the Old English noun from which we derive the word “ridiculous,” is also the name of a character played by Vin Diesel. He first appeared in “Pitch Black” (2000), and again, four years later, in “The Chronicles of Riddick.” Now, under the hand of the same director, David Twohy, he is back, in a film simply titled “Riddick.” The vast armies that plagued the previous movie have melted away, and we find ourselves, as we did at the start of the franchise, in a wasteland—a sparse and hostile arena, in which a handful of desperadoes tussle to survive and, God willing, to come out on top. Think of a Senate committee, stranded in faraway space, and you’re almost there.

Riddick is an escaped convict, a combat specialist, and, as you can imagine, an all-around sweetie pie. He has silvery eyes that can see in the dark, whereas in daylight he must wear protective goggles; these are meant to signal meanness and cool, but he always reminds me of an Olympic swimmer who has mislaid his Speedos. Riddick was born on the planet Furya, but on this occasion he lands on another world, where his only friend—and the only other character of any depth in the story, despite being wholly digital—is a wild quadruped, which he raises from a pup. It is one part okapi, two parts jackal, and three parts Pongo, from “One Hundred and One Dalmatians,” and it proves both loyal and helpful when a gang of human bounty hunters, led by Johns (Matt Nable), come for Riddick’s head.

And that’s it, really: two hours of loneliness, interleaved with havoc. The dialogue has been distilled to expletives and grunts. Yet this bullish pursuit of extremity, in which our hero can hardly poke a toe into a pond without being assailed by venomous water snakes, has a mad momentum that tips nicely into the absurd, and my one sincere complaint against the film is that Twohy failed to revive the role of Aereon, a prophetic wise woman from “The Chronicles of Riddick.” She was played by Dame Judi Dench, no less, and hopes were high that we might be witnessing the birth of a great screen romance. Think of the lineage: Gilbert and Garbo. Tracy and Hepburn. Diesel and Dench. Wouldn’t they make a lovely couple? ♦

BOOKS
Hitler in Hollywood

Did the studios collaborate?

by David Denby

In 1937, Warner Bros. departed from its usual fare of jittery urban dramas and emotionally saturated women’s pictures. In a burst of ambition, it mounted a historical spectacle set in late-nineteenth-century Paris, “The Life of Emile Zola,” starring Paul Muni. “Zola” is meant to be a stirring man-of-conscience movie: after early struggles, followed by huge success, the writer, in self-satisfied middle age, gets drawn, with increasing fury, into the Dreyfus affair. “Zola,” which was directed by the German émigré William Dieterle, includes episodes that were interpreted at the time as indirect attacks on Nazi Germany: scenes of state-inspired mob agitation launched first against Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French Army who is falsely accused of treason; and then against Zola for defending him—his books are publicly burned. At the end, in an outpouring of the progressive rhetoric that was typical of the thirties, Zola makes a grandiloquent speech on behalf of justice and truth and against nationalist war frenzy. “The Life of Emile Zola” was a big hit for Warners. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards—Muni, formerly a star of the Yiddish theatre in New York (he was born Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund), was nominated for best actor—and it won three, including best picture. But there is a pervasive oddity about the film: the word “Jew” is never spoken in it, and anti-Semitism is never mentioned. There were four instances of “Jew” in the original screenplay, but three were cut, leaving a single appearance of the word, on a printed page. As the French general staff scan a list of officers, the words “Religion: Jew” appear onscreen next to Dreyfus’s name. The shot lasts about a second and a half.

Was the undeleted word an error? A solitary act of defiance? “The Life of Emile Zola” is a perfect example of the half-boldness, half-cowardice, and outright confusion that marked Hollywood’s response to Nazism and anti-Semitism in the nineteen-thirties. In that decade, the industry produced a generally good-hearted and liberal cinema that celebrated such democratic American virtues as easy manners, tolerance, heroic individualism, and loathing of mob violence—all of which can be seen as a de-facto rebuke to Nazism. At the same time, the studios cancelled several explicitly anti-Nazi films planned for production, and deleted from several other movies anything that could be construed as critical of the Nazis, along with anything that might be seen as favorable to the Jews—or even a simple acknowledgment that they existed. Except for Twentieth Century Fox, headed by Darryl Zanuck, a shrewd and tough Gentile from Nebraska, the studios were run by Jews, who controlled many hectares of Los Angeles turf and worldwide distribution networks—an enormous power base that makes their timidity regarding Nazism a matter of psychological and cultural as well as political interest.

In recent years, a variety of scholars, including Neal Gabler, J. Hoberman, Jeffrey Shandler, Lester D. Friedman, Steven Carr, and Felicia Herman, have worked on different aspects of this complicated history. But the story has been charged up by the appearance of two new books: “The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler” (Harvard), by Ben Urwand, a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard; and “Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939” (Columbia), by Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis. Doherty’s book is much the better of the two. A witty writer familiar with Hollywood history and manners, Doherty places the studios’ craven behavior within a general account of the political culture of the movies in the thirties and forties. He finds both greed and fear in studio practice, but in a recent Times report on the controversy he strongly objects to Urwand’s use of the word “collaboration.” Urwand, an Australian, and the grandson of Hungarian Jews who spent the war years in hiding, flings many accusations. He speaks of Hitler’s victory “on the other side of the globe,” by which he means Hollywood, and he claims to see “the great mark that Hitler left on American culture.” Throughout the book, he gives the impression that the studios were merely doing the Nazis’ bidding. In that same Times article, he says that Hollywood was “collaborating with Adolf Hitler, the person and human being.”

Urwand has established the existence of multiple contacts between the studios and German government officials, and, in an apparent coup, he makes central use of a figure whom Doherty summons only sparingly: the Nazi consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, a former diplomat whose suavely threatening manner resembles the polite menace of Conrad Veidt’s Major Strasser, in “Casablanca.” Urwand shows that the studios occasionally allowed Gyssling to read scripts, to see early cuts of movies, and to demand—sometimes successfully—deletions from finished films. But are Urwand’s extreme conclusions warranted by what he has discovered? And, intentionally or not, his accusations stir up an old, sore question: should the Jews have done more to fight the persecutions that eventually enveloped them?

“The Americans are so natural. Far superior to us,” Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, confided to his diary in 1935, after seeing “It Happened One Night.” American films, including musicals, were popular in Germany; they had a relaxed, colloquial way about them that German filmmakers, who tended toward agonized expressionism in the nineteen-twenties and rigid didacticism during the Nazi period, couldn’t match. Goebbels’s wistful appreciation of American ease is one of the bizarre ironies of the story, since he was intent on purging the cinema of anything that didn’t comport with Nazi ideology. Among other things, he removed Jewish artists and workers from the German film industry and pushed out Jews who worked for the distribution arms of American studios.

The Nazis saw every movie as a potential threat to their immaculacy. Urwand quotes some solemn colloquies among Nazi officials, including a mental-health expert. Would “King Kong” (giant ape with Nordic-looking blonde) offend the “healthy racial feelings” of the German people? How about “Tarzan” (shirtless jungle man with white woman)? “King Kong” was released, “Tarzan” banned. So was the violent “Scarface,” Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” and all the later films of Marlene Dietrich, an outspoken critic of the Nazis. Goebbels’s ministry also found out which American actors and crew members were Jewish or anti-Nazi, and refused to import films on which they had worked.

All this censoring and interdiction came at the German end of the distribution chain. Georg Gyssling was installed at the production end. After arriving in Los Angeles, in 1933, he began scouring the trade press. If he thought that a movie announced for production might contain elements “detrimental to German prestige,” or if he went to a screening (at the studio’s invitation) of such a movie when it was finished, he would write a letter detailing cuts that he wanted made. For instance, after seeing “The Lancer Spy,” a 1937 Fox picture set after the First World War, he objected to the way German officials were portrayed, and sent a list of changes, which, according to Urwand, were made before the film was released. The list was sent not to Fox but to the Hays Office, which administered the Production Code. “The production of a film of such a character will arouse very bad feeling in Germany against the producing company and may lead to serious difficulties which should be avoided in mutual interests,” he wrote, by which he meant that the film, at his suggestion, could be banned in Germany.

Gyssling protested other films about the First World War period—“Captured!,” set in a German prison camp, and “The Road Back,” based on Erich Maria Remarque’s sequel to “All Quiet on the Western Front” (a pacifist novel and movie that the Nazis hated). Urwand speculates that Gyssling, by harping on the past, was trying to forestall even more negative images of Germany set in the Nazi present. Gyssling played both the short game and the long, and, occasionally, he overplayed. In 1937, when Universal ignored his remonstrations and began adapting “The Road Back,” he sent letters to the cast and crew warning that any movies they worked on in the future might be banned in Germany. The impudent letter got into the press, an uproar ensued, and the German Foreign Office had to assure the State Department that no further threats would be made against American citizens. Yet Gyssling brazened it out and remained in place.

Why did the studio bosses listen to him at all? They were not thoughtful men who revealed themselves in diaries and letters; they ruled by meetings and telephone calls, so we know virtually nothing about their thinking on such sensitive matters. An obvious reason, which both Doherty and Urwand give, is that the studios wanted to hold on to the German market. Neither author, however, gives many figures, though Urwand notes that Paramount actually lost a little money in Germany in 1936. Tino Balio, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on the American film industry, says that the German market was much smaller than that of Great Britain, and that it got smaller still as the decade went on. Warners left Germany in 1934, the year Nazi thugs assaulted its representative there (an English Jew), and, as Urwand admits, by 1936 only Paramount, M-G-M, and Fox were still distributing films in the country. In any case, the studios did not have immediate access to their returns, which were frozen in German banks—something that Urwand waits until the middle of his book to tell us.

No doubt the studio bosses accommodated the Nazis because they hoped for a more amenable regime in the future; they were businessmen, and acted as businessmen. Fox and Paramount, eager to claim some part of the frozen assets, made newsreels, with Nazi coöperation, chronicling Party activities, and sold them to overseas markets. Urwand scores a point here: these were propaganda films, though we don’t know if audiences reacted to them with pleasure or with loathing. A second attempt to get at the frozen assets: at the suggestion of an American trade commissioner, M-G-M loaned money to German companies in return for the companies’ bonds, which it sold at a discount. Some of those companies made arms, and Urwand concludes that the studio “helped to finance the German war machine.” Yet the studio executives could hardly have known in the mid-thirties that another war was coming.

Given all the restrictions on studio operations in Germany, Gyssling’s threats could not have been very plausible by the middle of the decade. Isn’t it likely that the studios were responding to other pressures and fears as well?

What many people don’t know about the Production Code is that the studios imposed it on themselves. In 1922, they realized that, as a new and increasingly scandalous industry, they needed an organization to represent them in Washington. They formed the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, under the direction of the former Postmaster General Will H. Hays, an Indiana Republican and a Presbyterian. (It still represents the studios, under the title Motion Picture Association of America.) It also set up a moral guide, which was intended to ward off both national and local censorship. The Code was toothless until 1934, when the Legion of Decency—a conservative Catholic organization—claimed that Hollywood, with its racy productions, was polluting the nation’s youth. The organization threatened to get Catholics to boycott any films that it saw as unfit. From that point, a movie couldn’t get widespread distribution unless it received a Production Code seal, which certified that its morals and its politics had withstood scrutiny. Hays appointed as censor-in-chief Joseph I. Breen, a prominent Catholic layman and contributor to Catholic journals. He was also an anti-Semite. Two years before he was appointed, as Doherty reports, Breen wrote to a friend that “people whose daily morals would not be tolerated in the toilet of a pest house hold the good jobs out here and wax fat on it. Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the scum of the earth.”

Most of Breen’s rules centered on sex and language, but the code also included this stricture: “The history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry of all nations shall be represented fairly.” The statement was so loose in meaning that it could be used to ban any critical look at a foreign country. By 1934, then, Breen and Gyssling had overlapping briefs. Breen read every script before it went into production, and he used the “fairness” justification to limit or kill any film that touched on Nazi Germany. As J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler put it in their volume “Entertaining America” (2003), a history of Jews and the media, “Breen and his ecclesiastical supporters saw Hitler’s rise as instrumental in their campaign to reform Hollywood. Nazi politics and anti-Semitic agitation had made Jewish studio executives newly vulnerable.”

At several points in the mid-nineteen-thirties, an agent named Al Rosen—eager to become a producer—attempted to raise money for a project called “The Mad Dog of Europe.” The screenplay, which had been bouncing around Hollywood since 1933, was about the destruction of a German-Jewish family during Hitler’s rise to power. No studio had attached itself to the project, but the script got to Breen’s office, and Breen took the matter seriously. In a long memo, he wrote:

Because of the large number of Jews active in the motion picture industry in this country, the charge is certain to be made that the Jews, as a class, are behind an anti-Hitler picture and using the entertainment screen for their own personal propaganda purposes. The entire industry, because of this, is likely to be indicted for the action of a mere handful.

This kind of reasoning, with its open threat, effectively killed the project and maimed many others.

In 1936, M-G-M acquired Sinclair Lewis’s best-seller “It Can’t Happen Here,” a semi-satirical fantasia about American totalitarianism: a Huey Long-type demagogue takes over the Presidency, and rules by means of the secret police. When M-G-M geared up to shoot the movie, with prominent actors, including Lionel Barrymore and James Stewart, Breen wrote a letter to Will Hays, saying, “It is hardly more than a story portraying the Hitlerization of the United States of America. It is an attempt to bring home to American citizens, through the instrumentality of the screen, that which is transpiring in Germany today.” (That it certainly was.) Breen also wrote Louis B. Mayer, the president of M-G-M, a seven-page letter proposing sixty cuts in the screenplay—in effect, making a Production Code seal hostage to impossible demands. Even if the cuts were made, he wrote to Mayer, the movie would be subject “to the most minute criticism on all sides,” which “may result in enormous difficulty to your studio.” Mayer cancelled the project.

Breen continued to pressure the studios not to mention Nazism right up to the outbreak of war. In 1938, when M-G-M wanted to adapt “Three Comrades,” an explicitly anti-Nazi novel by Remarque, Breen insisted that the movie be set earlier in time. “Thus we will get away from any possible suggestion that we are dealing with Nazi violence or terrorism.” The pattern was clear: no matter how vicious Nazi conduct was, any representation of it could be deemed a violation of the code’s demand that foreign countries be treated “fairly.” In practice, the more cruel and irrational the Nazis got, the safer they were from any Hollywood dramatization of their actions. Breen warned the studios of the danger to their German earnings, but his real intent was probably to remind the men running Hollywood that they should never feel safe.

At times, Gyssling alerted Breen that something was amiss, and they worked together. At other times, Breen worked alone, and he was definitely the more powerful of the two; withholding a Production Code seal could severely restrict a movie’s commercial chances in the American market. You can discover the truth of Breen’s greater power from Urwand’s book, but only by patient deduction. Urwand accounts for Breen’s activities (without quoting his anti-Semitic letter), but he pumps up Gyssling’s role even when he’s not sure that Gyssling deserves the credit. For instance, Urwand writes that Gyssling, in 1934, “probably” intervened to get “Mad Dog” killed, though “the evidence is inconclusive.” And, after admitting that he has no proof that Gyssling caused M-G-M to abandon “It Can’t Happen Here,” he nevertheless insists that Gyssling’s “presence in Los Angeles undoubtedly affected M-G-M’s decision.” His account of what happened with “The Life of Emile Zola” is even shakier. When Gyssling heard, in 1937, that the movie was in the works, he called the producer, Henry Blanke, who, as he later wrote, placated Gyssling with a lie. Blanke told Gyssling that the Dreyfus affair would play only a small role in “Zola.” Urwand writes, “Just a few days after this phone call took place, Jack Warner dictated some important changes to the Dreyfus picture”—the three infamous deletions. But, as Felicia Herman notes, in a 2001 article in American Jewish History, citing a letter from Breen to Warner, it was the Production Code chief who persuaded the studio to make the cuts. Urwand quotes numerous letters from Gyssling to Breen but explicitly cites only one letter from Gyssling to a studio. At one point, he says that a threatening Gyssling letter to Warners has been lost, but he then reconstructs what the letter “would” have said, based on the single letter he cites (without ever quoting it). It’s hard to imagine how authoritative scholarship and furious accusations can be based on missing documents, the conditional mood, and conjecture.

Gyssling continued operating in Hollywood until June, 1941, when Franklin Roosevelt broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, and the Nazi consul, regretting his separation from his “thousands of friends” in Los Angeles, abruptly left town. He made a lot of mischief in his eight years, but neither he nor even Breen was as significant a force as the studio bosses’ own fears.

The future moguls came from the backwaters of Eastern Europe and arrived in the United States with nothing, not even fathers (who were mostly feckless or missing). Desperate for respectability and for cash, they worked at whatever trade lay at hand: peddling scrap metal, furs, gloves. Then, soon after the emergence of storefront nickelodeons, in 1905, they threw in their lot with a new, primitive art form that many regarded as a passing fad. Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky, and the four Warner brothers built their enterprises with a speed that even now, in the age of venture capital and mobile-app entrepreneurs, seems remarkable. And yet, outside their domain, as Neal Gabler has chronicled in his 1988 history, “An Empire of Their Own,” they were silent or utterly conventional. They acted as if all their power and their personal wealth could be taken away if they made a mistake.

Their fears were not entirely irrational, since anti-Semitism was widespread in America in the twenties and thirties. It could be found in the radio broadcasts of demagogues like Father Coughlin, in the street rallies of Nazi and pro-German groups in New York and other cities. The Jews were blamed in some quarters for the worldwide economic crisis. Henry Ford, Theodore Dreiser, and Charles Lindbergh, along with a variety of outraged organizations, fulminated over Jewish control of the movie business, whose leaders were variously excoriated as “Asiatics,” greedy buffoons, sexual predators, and Bolsheviks.

In response, the studio bosses wrapped themselves in Americanism, generating in their movies, as Gabler points out, an ideal country: “It would be an America where fathers were strong, families stable, people attractive, resilient, resourceful, and decent.” In that America, there was no room for the kind of Jewish characters and actors who had appeared in the silent and early-sound-period movies—the ghetto dwellers, the Yiddish dialogue comics, the Jewish boy in the first sound film (from 1927), “The Jazz Singer,” who turns his back on the Lower East Side and assimilates into American society.

By acting as they did, the studio bosses fell into the trap that they had allowed men like Gyssling and Breen to set for them. Because they were Jews, they believed, they couldn’t make anti-Nazi movies or movies about Jews, for this would be seen as special pleading or warmongering. (The Nazi appeaser Joseph P. Kennedy, the Ambassador to Great Britain, said as much to the studio heads as late as 1940, when the Wehrmacht was all over Europe.) Breen tormented them with the spectre of what anti-Semites might do as a way of stifling their response to what anti-Semitism was already doing—and would do, in Europe, with annihilating violence. It’s as if the Hollywood Jews had become responsible for anti-Semitism. Of all the filmmakers in the world, they became the last who could criticize the Nazis. Their situation was both tragic and absurd.

In their hesitations and their timidity, they were supported, as both Doherty and Urwand demonstrate, by such organizations as the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee, both of which took the line that the Jews had to be careful about thrusting themselves before the public. “They will get tired of us,” Cyrus Adler, the head of the A.J.C., said. “What I want them to do is to get tired of Hitler”—a line that is too sad for tears. These organizations, adding to Breen’s efforts, lobbied successfully against the making of “The Mad Dog of Europe” and “It Can’t Happen Here.” But were they overestimating the dangers of domestic anti-Semitism? In 1934, they did everything possible to get Fox to halt its production of “The House of Rothschild,” a historical account of the rise of the Rothschild banking family. What troubled them most was the early scenes, set in the eighteenth century, in which Mayer Rothschild (George Arliss) attempts to hide some taxable money from a collector. Later, Mayer instructs his sons to set up banks in multiple European cities as a way of attaining power and dignity, which the movie, in its second half, shows them achieving. The film is a celebration, and, when it opened, it was widely admired by Jewish and non-Jewish audiences alike. The feared anti-Semitic reaction in the United States never materialized, though the Anti-Defamation League remained unhappy. Apparently, no Jew should be shown as greedy and power-seeking. Urwand quotes a representative of the A.D.L. saying of the film, “It’s too bad that it was made at this time, for it corroborates the basic Nazi propaganda, and this corroboration is furnished by Jews.” The A.D.L. quickly remedied the situation, in 1934, by holding a meeting with a group of studio bosses and production heads, the result of which was that Jewish characters were banned altogether.

Oddly, Urwand seems to think that “The House of Rothschild” was a disaster for the Jews, and he cites the fact that the Nazis used passages of it for their own propaganda as an example of the harm it did. But the Nazis would use anything for their own purposes. In 1935, they loved Henry Hathaway’s paean to British imperialism in India, “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer,” with Gary Cooper enduring torture rather than betray his friends. The film’s endorsement of “the leader principle,” Urwand says, “enforced this central aspect of Nazi ideology,” and he calls “Lives,” a likably silly adventure film, Nazi propaganda. In his own way, Urwand thinks like an ideologue—or a censor. For instance, he writes of a movie as if its entire emotional effect could be summarized by recounting its story—as if acting, directing, cinematography, and innumerable details of emphasis and atmosphere didn’t shape our responses as much as plot does. Even Goebbels seemed to realize that American entertainment breathed freedom in a great many ways.

That a man like Georg Gyssling was allowed past the front gate of an American film studio is a disgrace, and Urwand deserves credit for bringing his role out of obscurity. But the charge of “collaboration” is inaccurate and unfair—a case of scholarly sensationalism. The studios didn’t advance Nazism; they failed to oppose it. In that failure, they were joined, and even surpassed, by other American businesses, including General Motors, DuPont, I.B.M., and Ford, which operated in Nazi Germany and, in some cases, continued to operate there after the war began. None of this makes Hollywood any less cowardly, but Urwand, writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, which few people in the mid-thirties could have imagined, recasts every act of evasion as the darkest complicity. And he is too enraged to pose the obvious practical questions: What if the studios had made a slew of anti-Nazi movies? Would many people have gone to them? Could the studios have alerted the world to the threat of Nazism? It’s hard to say. Still, it would have been nice if they had tried. ♦

BOOKS
Briefly Noted

Enon

by Paul Harding (Random House).

An extraordinary follow-up to the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning début, “Tinkers,” this novel takes its title from the name of a tiny New England village, where Charlie Crosby, a housepainter, is ravaged by sorrow after losing his teen-aged daughter in a bike accident. Charlie is the last of the family line, and he spends his days devouring painkillers, having shattered his hand by punching a wall in his grief; his nights are devoted to walking the old paths and byways of the wooded town in a near-hallucinatory state, trying to account for his suffering. Harding’s subject is consciousness rooted in a contemporary moment but bound to a Puritan past. His prose is steeped in a visionary, transcendentalist tradition that echoes Blake, Rilke, Emerson, and Thoreau, and makes for a darkly intoxicating read.

Blood & Beauty

by Sarah Dunant (Random House).

Dunant’s latest historical novel takes on the Borgias, the Spanish family who came to rule much of Italy in the early sixteenth century. The action begins when Rodrigo, the paterfamilias, ascends to the papacy, and ends nine years later, when his daughter Lucrezia is married off to her third politically useful husband. In that time, one son is murdered, another is born, and another quits the priesthood to conquer land in his father’s name. This is Cesare, the throbbing heart of the novel, who, when he’s not plunging his spear into a wild boar or penetrating the enemy’s fortress with his cannonballs, likes to seduce his little sister. It’s funny (if not entirely factual) stuff, but Dunant plays it straight: bodies fall and bosoms heave in a world where “the politics of God can be as ruthless as the politics of man.” Artful plotting and companionable characters keep the pages turning. A sequel is planned.

Very Recent History

by Choire Sicha (Harper).

Sicha, a writer for the Awl and Gawker, follows the life of a man named John as he tries to navigate early adulthood in New York City, circa 2009. He and his friends scramble for work, love, sex, drugs, and a sense of purpose in an environment that seems always on the verge of obliterating them. As they are laid off, betrayed, reunited, and rehired, they learn that much of the game is just to keep moving—“staying nimble enough to take advantage of whatever strange things the City might choose to offer to you.” A certain anesthetized quality to Sicha’s prose serves to underscore the sense of trauma that is daily urban life in a late-capitalist moment, and there is a flinty wit that highlights memorable moments of resistance: looking at the collection statements on his desk, John calculates the near-six-figure sum he owes, and decides that “that was what desk drawers were for.”

The Great Tamasha

by James Astill (Bloomsbury).

Astill sets out to examine the complexities of modern India through the game of cricket. Corruption looms large. Among other encounters, Astill meets with a low-level bookie in Mumbai (just down the street from a police station) who argues that ninety-nine per cent of the international games are fixed, and with Lalit Modi, the disgraced architect of the India Premier league. The League generates billions by purveying a raucous form of “cricketainment,” in which cheerleaders and Bollywood stars are as much a draw as the game itself, but Modi was driven out of his position amid allegations of auction rigging, nepotism, and kickbacks. Astill may not make cricket comprehensible to a non-fan, despite eager descriptions of “wristy” players and memorable matches, but his energetic reporting and a fluent grasp of history make for a compelling rendering of a cricket-mad country.

ON TELEVISION
Kids Today

Pivot, a new channel for Millennials.

by Emily Nussbaum

Who are the Millennials? Narcissists, that’s who. Entitled types who actually expect to be paid for the work they do. A generation foolish enough to have graduated into a recession—“liking” rather than loving, stealing Wi-Fi, twerking molly (or whatever it is you do with molly). Takers of selfies!

This unfortunate demographic, which has become an easy target for anti-technology pundits, a peg for prurient essays on hookup culture, and a marvellous resource for op-ed columnists in a rush, is now in possession of its very own cable channel: Pivot, which débuted, very quietly, last month. Launched by the producer Evan Shapiro, whose résumé includes executive roles at Sundance and IFC, two of the more innovative small cable networks, the network has a sly slogan: “It’s Your Turn.” And so far, at least, you’d never recognize that mythical Millennial in Pivot’s schedule, which has an appealingly humble aura—it’s diverse, it’s global, it’s progressive, with a touch of early MTV (right down to its première broadcast, a montage of bands covering “Video Killed the Radio Star”). As long as you avert your eyes from the talk show hosted by Meghan McCain, Pivot suggests legitimate creative possibilities. The highlight is the sweetly melancholic half-hour comedy “Please Like Me,” a small charmer that is a bit like “Louie” or “Girls”—that is, if Louis CK were Australian or Lena Dunham gay.

In addition, Pivot has “Jersey Strong,” a gritty reality series set in Newark, and plans to launch a crowd-sourced variety show called “hitRECord on TV,” hosted by the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. (On the hitRECord.org Web site, Gordon-Levitt has been posting daily videos in which he solicits material from viewers, including audio tracks and designs for animated characters.) Next year, there will be a scripted drama called “WILL.” It’s the story of Shakespeare as a Millennial, which is either the best idea on earth or the worst; either way, the concept has a brassy, shoot-the-moon quality and, presumably, a refreshing lack of criminal anti-heroes. There are also reruns from a smart set of syndicated series: the science-fiction show “Farscape,” the beloved marriage-and-football drama “Friday Night Lights,” and the long-running Canadian sitcom “Little Mosque on the Prairie” (here retitled “Little Mosque”), which is set in a Muslim community in Saskatchewan. Pivot will air documentaries on youth-oriented topics, along with a nightly live interactive news show called “TakePart Live.” I haven’t been able to TakePart yet, because Pivot isn’t on Time-Warner Cable in New York; the network’s ratings aren’t even being measured by Nielsen. The embryonic Pivot Web site has a form that lets viewers petition their cable provider for the channel, and some shows are available online, for cord-cutters.

The one show that I have seen in full—it is streaming on iTunes—is “Please Like Me,” which is fuelled, quite effectively, by the diffident charisma of Josh Thomas, who wrote the show and stars as a resident of Melbourne named Josh. Boyish and wry, a member of that reserved breed of gay men who rarely appear on TV but are everywhere in the offices where I’ve worked, Thomas resembles Mike White, or maybe “Brideshead Revisited” ’s Sebastian Flyte during a Woody Allen phase. At first, “Please Like Me” might give viewers déjà vu, with its focus on twentysomething friends being awkward about sex, but it quickly establishes its own tender, finicky quality, mingling stories about Josh’s gay awakening with ones about his mother’s depression. “Coming out, to me, just seems so nineties,” Josh complains, and he wistfully tells his best friend, who is straight, “I just really think I’m going to miss vaginas. They just make so much sense, Tom. You know, so nifty.” Much of the show’s appeal lies in the cast’s shaggy, naturalistic chemistry, which papers over the occasional imperfect plot turn. It’s also full of quotable bits, like Josh’s valiant attempt to contribute trash talk at a rugby match: “What are you going to do when you’re too old to do this? The life of a sportsman is short, and you never got a real education!”

There’s a solid ensemble around Josh, including his nerdy friend Tom (Thomas Ward), his ex-girlfriend Claire (Caitlin Stasey), his father and his father’s Thai girlfriend Mae, and Geoffrey (Wade Briggs), the clingy pretty boy Josh hooks up with. Yet some of the best sequences are between Josh and his mother, Rose (Debra Lawrance). In the first episode, she attempts suicide, and then Josh moves in with her. “I can’t be your next of kin,” Josh frets at her psychiatrist’s office. “You’re my next of kin.” The two have a loving, anxious rapport rare for television, a meld of sweet and sour that grounds the show.

Meghan McCain has already been picked on by the right and the left alike, so it’s tempting to write some sort of contrarian defense of her new show, “Raising McCain.” But, honestly, there’s only so much upspeak one critic can take. “This is not your mama’s talk show!” the intro brags, but it clearly intends to be your aunt’s talk show, if that aunt is Tabitha Soren, of the old MTV series “Choose or Lose.” The first episode, on the subject of privacy, isn’t bad, as infotainment goes—and it’s certainly well timed, given the revelations about the N.S.A. But McCain is a headache, all empty go-girl aphorisms. Styled in sassy grungewear, with a black cap pulled so low that she evokes Mushmouth on “Fat Albert,” she declares that she doesn’t care about privacy, and for most of the episode she and Michael Moynihan, a libertarian political journalist who is presented to viewers as a privacy expert, compete to dig up dirt on one another. It’s an entertaining conceit, particularly the part where he pays for surveillance footage of her walking around her neighborhood, but once you click on the second episode—about feminism—the walls cave in.

After McCain has a roundtable with her producers, the episode spirals into anxious segments about whether you can be a “sexy feminist.” “Who doesn’t like getting attention from the opposite sex?” McCain asks, in voice-over. She interviews a porn star and a feminist sex blogger. She complains about having had a “traumatizing experience” giving a speech at Reed College: “I totally cried? Like a baby, afterward?” Her ex-military brother, in a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt and shades, appears on camera to make snide remarks, then plays them off as a joke. Should women be Navy SEALs? Workout segment!

Out of the blue, a banner unfurls bearing the cover of Sheryl Sandberg’s book, “Lean In,” accompanied by another earnest McCain voice-over: “I want a brand of feminism that speaks to the challenges women face at work now.” Statistics appear, “Pop Up Video” style. There’s a random interview with the New York City Council member Inez Dickens, who reassures McCain that she’s a role model for young women. In a Town Car, Meghan and her brother discuss whether Cindy McCain is a feminist. “The greatest politician’s wife in the history of the free world,” Meghan intones. (“Mom and her stupid lemon chicken,” the brother mutters.) The episode concludes with McCain giving a speech to teen-agers; paranoically, she accuses a boy in the audience of looking bored. “I’m gonna fuckin’ call myself a feminist in the same way I’m gonna fuckin’ call myself a Republican,” she announces, with a plea for viewers to “continue the conversation.” No. Let it end.

Much better is “Jersey Strong,” a reality show created by the producers of “Brick City.” The show weaves together the lives of two Newark women: Brooke Barnett, a lesbian defense attorney and all-around badass, and Jayda (born Jessica Victoria Jacques), a former gang member who is raising two small children with another former gang member, Creep. (He says, “I love her as a woman. She loves me as a man. I just happened to be a Crip and she’s a Blood.”) As with any reality show, there’s plenty of manipulation hovering at the edges of the editing, but the characters have charisma, and the most powerful segments delve into subcultures that rarely show up on scripted TV, such as the single moms counselled by Jayda and the defendants given legal advice by Barnett. I’m uncomfortable with children appearing on reality shows—I sometimes wish it were simply illegal to film them—but Jayda’s kids are adorable, especially her nine-year-old son, who dreams of being a surgeon and worries about protecting his younger sister. As we watch Barnett obsess over her cases and neglect her loyal girlfriend, she promises to evolve into a fascinating figure—although it would be far more interesting to see the show explore the genuine drama of her job than to watch her advise her girlfriend’s daughter on her modelling career, an early emphasis.

Pivot is barely a network yet—it’s more of a soft launch—but, at its best, it feels like a thoughtful attempt to reach young viewers without relying on pre-chewed assumptions about who they are. Traditionally, cable networks don’t find their identities until they create a hit: “The Sopranos” for HBO, “Buffy” for the WB, “Mad Men” for AMC. Yet there’s something to be said for watching an institution before it becomes a stable brand, when there’s still oddness and experimentation, and room for interesting mistakes. MTV was like that at first: although the v.j.s barely knew how to handle their microphones, if you were the right age you couldn’t stop watching. Pivot isn’t anywhere near that exciting yet, but it’s been around only a month. Give the kid a chance. ♦

FICTION
“By Fire”

by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Returning home from the cemetery where he had just buried his father, Mohamed felt as though the burden he carried had become heavier. He was bent, aged. He walked slowly. He had just turned thirty. He’d never celebrated his birthday. The years went by, and they were all alike. Poverty, deprivation, and a vague resignation imbued his life with a sadness that had, over time, come to seem natural. Like his father, he never complained. He was not a fatalist, or even religious.

But his father’s death had turned his life upside down. He was the eldest, and was thus responsible now for the family. Three brothers and two sisters. A diabetic mother, not yet an invalid. Mohamed’s latest job hunt, like many before, had yielded nothing, and now he was nervous. It wasn’t a question of being lucky or unlucky. It was more, he said, a problem of injustice, linked to the misfortune of being born poor. He was not going to sit in front of the Finance Ministry headquarters to protest unemployment anymore. Some formerly unemployed graduates had found work, but he wasn’t one of them. His degree in history interested no one. He could have taught, but the Ministry of Education wasn’t hiring.

He dug out his old schoolbag, hidden in the linen closet, emptied it of all its papers and documents, including his diploma, made a small pile in the sink, and burned them. He watched the flames consume the words, and by chance they burned everything but his name and his date of birth. With a piece of wood, he rekindled the fire until all had turned to ash. His mother, alerted by the smell, rushed in.

“You’ve gone crazy! How will burning your diploma help anything? Now how are you going to apply for a teaching position? Three years gone up in smoke!”

Without a word, he collected the ashes, threw them into the trash, cleaned the sink, and washed his hands. He was calm. He had no desire to speak about or justify his action. What was the use of hanging on to a piece of paper that wasn’t going to get him anywhere? His face remained inscrutable. His mother reminded him to pick up her medicine. The pharmacist would give it to him on credit, she said.

Later, he sat on a bench and stared at a trail of ants on the ground. He asked a boy who sold loose cigarettes for one, lit it, and smoked slowly. The ants had deposited their loads and now headed back to where they had come from.

His mind was made up: he would take over his father’s cart. It was in bad shape. He would have to repair the wheels, replace a rotten plank, have the scale recalibrated, and get in touch with Bouchaïb, the fruit and vegetable supplier.

Where would he find the money? His mother had sold all her jewelry when his father got sick, and she had nothing left. Mohamed had heard about “microcredit.” He looked into it, and was given a thick stack of forms to fill out. He was quickly discouraged by all the paperwork. He began to regret having burned his diploma.

Mohamed had won a trip to Mecca in a raffle at the Faculty of Arts and Letters, where he had studied. The one time he’d got lucky, he couldn’t take advantage of it. What was he going to do with a plane ticket? He had no desire to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and, anyway, he didn’t have the money to carry out the ritual. He wanted the airline to refund the cost of the ticket to him, but it refused. The only thing he could do was sell it to a pilgrim. He managed to get a third of the price, but still had to bribe the travel agent to change the name on the ticket. With the meagre amount he had left, he repaired the cart and, finally, began to sell oranges and apples.

Mohamed knew that Bouchaïb was a crass and dishonest man. His father had often told him this. The man immediately claimed that Mohamed’s father owed him money and hadn’t paid his last two bills. Mohamed had no way of verifying this. He had to come to terms with the guy because Bouchaïb was the only one who sold on credit, charging a markup of ten to fifteen per cent. Mohamed didn’t argue and gave him a deposit for two crates of oranges and one of apples; he also asked for a few baskets of strawberries.

Bouchaïb took him aside and, in a hushed voice, asked after his younger sister. Mohamed answered that she was doing well and was getting ready for her college-entrance exam.

“You know, your father promised her to me,” Bouchaïb said. “I want to get married, have a family. You and I could even become partners. You can’t make ends meet with the fruit cart. There’s a lot of competition, and, also, to get the right spot you have to be on good terms with the police.”

Mohamed looked at him, bowed his head, and left without saying anything.

He didn’t really know where to set up his cart. Some venders moved around; others found themselves strategic spots, usually near an intersection or at a traffic circle. He soon saw that the best places were taken, and decided to keep moving. He loudly hawked his oranges and apples, but nobody could hear him over the honking horns. When Mohamed stopped for a moment next to a grocer’s stand, the owner instantly chased him off, shouting, “Are you crazy? What’s wrong with you? I bought my license, and I pay taxes. How am I going to make a living if you plant yourself right in front of me? Go on, get lost!”

On his first day, Mohamed just wandered around, from one street to another. Even so, he managed to sell more than half his produce. He realized that he would need to wake up very early the next day if he wanted to get a good spot before all the others arrived.

At dinner that night, he looked at his younger sister and imagined her in Bouchaïb’s arms. He felt ashamed. A young and innocent girl in the hands of such a brute. Never.

After dinner, he told his mother that Bouchaïb had demanded money from him. “Your father couldn’t stand having debts,” she said. “He paid them off as soon as he could. Bouchaïb is a crook. He has no proof. Just forget about it. Did you remember to get my medicine? I have only one pill left.”

Mohamed took out a box full of books and laid them out in front of the house for sale. History books, paperback novels, and a leather-bound copy of “Moby-Dick” in English—a prize he had won for coming first in his English class, in his senior year of high school. He sold three books, making just enough to buy the medicine. Nobody wanted “Moby-Dick,” so he kept it. That night, he reread a few pages and realized that his English was a little rusty. Before falling asleep, he thought about beautiful Zineb. He had loved her for two years. But with no money, no work, and no home of his own, it was impossible to get married. He was unhappy. What could he promise her when he had nothing to offer? But for now he had more pressing priorities, and he felt that he would succeed if he tackled things one at a time. Zineb would wait for him.

Zineb worked as a secretary at a doctor’s office. She really loved Mohamed. Because she was an only daughter, she had suggested that they get married and live at her parents’ place. But Mohamed was proud; it was unthinkable to him to depend on his wife and live with his in-laws.

Usually he and Zineb met at a café. They talked a lot, kidded around, and often burst into laughter. More than three months had passed since they’d been able to make love. The last time, Zineb’s cousin had lent them her small apartment while her roommate was travelling.

“Someday,” Zineb said, “we will reach the end of this tunnel. I promise you. I know it. I can feel it. You’ll have a good job, I’ll stop working for this sleazy doctor, and we’ll start our life. You’ll see.”

“Yes, someday, but you know I’ll never get on one of those flimsy boats and become an illegal. I know your plan: Canada! Yes, we’ll all go to Canada, and we’ll all go to paradise. It’s written somewhere. But, in the meantime, I have to feed a big family, take care of my mother, and fight to get a good spot for my cart.”

Zineb took his hands and kissed them. He took hers and did the same.

Mohamed woke up at six. He tried to make as little noise as possible, so as not to wake his brothers, with whom he shared a room. There was Nabile, twenty years old, an unlicensed tour guide, who often had problems with the police. There was Nourredine, eighteen, a high-school student, who worked in a bakery from Friday evening until Monday morning. And then there was Yassine, fifteen, intelligent, lazy, handsome, and spiritual. He’d promised his mother that he would become a millionaire and take her to visit the Pyramids.

Mohamed washed himself, swallowed a piece of bread, and took out his cart. At the corner of the narrow street, a police officer stopped him.

“This is your old man’s cart. Where is he?”

“He’s dead.”

“And you’re just taking over, as if nothing had happened?”

“What’s the problem? Is it forbidden to make an honest living?”

“Don’t be insolent! Your papers.”

Mohamed gave the man all the papers he had on him.

“No insurance. Can you imagine? If you ran over a kid, who would pay? You?”

“Since when is it necessary to have insurance for a fruit cart? This is new.”

The policeman took out a notebook and started writing something while watching Mohamed out of the corner of his eye. After a moment, he said, “You’re playing the fool—pretending you don’t understand.”

“I’m not doing anything. You’re the one who’s doing everything you can to keep me from working.”

“O.K., you can go now, but think about the insurance. I’m telling you this for your own good.”

Then, with both hands, the policeman helped himself to oranges and apples. He bit into an apple, and said, with his mouth full, “Move on now!”

Mohamed found a good spot; it was still quite early. He put down the cart and waited. A car stopped; the driver lowered his window and ordered: “One kilo of each, and give me the good ones.” The next customers were in less of a hurry; they got out of their cars, felt the fruits, asked for the price, bargained, and bought a few oranges.

An hour later, another vender arrived, with a decorated cart and a better, more attractive selection, including some expensive and rare exotic fruits. He had his regular customers. With a look and a slight nod of his head, the man indicated that Mohamed should leave this spot. He obeyed without protesting. Once again, he had to wander the streets. He’d had a good morning all the same, and he decided to have more variety the next time.

By the end of the day, he had sold everything. He went back to Bouchaïb to refill his cart.

That evening, although he was tired, he went to see Zineb at her parents’ place; they liked him. He told Zineb about his day and ate some crêpes with her before heading home.

In the meantime, a plainclothes policeman visited Mohamed’s mother. He asked her about Mohamed and wanted to know why he didn’t see the “unemployed graduate” group anymore. The poor woman answered as well as she could, with hesitation and apprehension. The policeman handed her a summons, according to which her son was to report to the police department that evening. She started to cry, knowing that the police never brought good news. She thought it best to tell the officer, “My son is not political.” He left without replying.

When she gave Mohamed the summons, he looked at it and then stuffed it into his pocket.

“I’ll go in a little while. They’re going to interrogate me. If I don’t go, they’ll come for me, which will be even worse.”

“Son, this visit has raised my blood sugar. I can tell; my mouth is dry, and I don’t feel well.”

“These people are paid to create problems for us. In all likelihood, that cop comes from a family as poor as ours. But, as you know, the poor don’t like one another.”

At the police department, Mohamed waited on a bench for a long time. Now and then he got up and tried to find out why he had been called in. No one knew. He suspected that the summons was intended simply to intimidate him. He had received a similar summons when he first joined the unemployed graduates’ demonstrations. Beside him sat an old man who was clearly impoverished; he didn’t say a word, and seemed about to fall asleep. What could one hold against this man, who was coughing and spitting and would have been better off in a hospital room? Mohamed moved away from him. He was afraid of catching tuberculosis.

There was also a woman in a djellabah; she smoked cigarette after cigarette and railed against life. “I was happy in my village. My God, why did I ever marry that imbecile who has now abandoned me?”

She called Mohamed to witness: “I’m a prostitute! I am not ashamed to say it. But someday all this will change, you’ll see; I know this. It can’t go on. . . .”

Around midnight, a man signalled for Mohamed to follow him.

Identity verification.

Classic interrogation.

The police officer found it intriguing that Mohamed was no longer in touch with his former fellow-activists. He asked if the Islamists had approached him.

“No, it was my father’s death that changed everything. I took over his cart, our only means of survival.”

“Yes, I know. How is it going?”

“I’ve barely got started.”

“You know, there are no miracles. There are those who manage and make quite a bit of money, and there are others—the chumps, the losers. It’s up to you to choose.”

It took Mohamed some time to understand the deal the police officer was offering him: become an informer and have a profitable spot or refuse and say goodbye to his business.

“Think about it hard. Tomorrow I’ll meet you at the Independence traffic circle. Now go home.”

Mohamed knew that if he showed up the next day at the appointed place he would have to accept the cop’s proposition.

Early in the morning, he took his cart and headed toward a working-class neighborhood far from the famous traffic circle.

His mother’s diabetes was out of control. She needed to go back to the doctor and get a new prescription. He made some calculations. Not enough money to meet this unexpected expense. He decided to take her to the public hospital. His seventeen-year-old sister went, too. Mohamed left them at the entrance and started to sell his produce. He realized that this was an excellent spot. People visiting the hospital bought fruit for the patients. An hour later, two police officers, one of them a woman, appeared before him: “Your papers.”

He gave them his papers.

“This is not your neighborhood. What are you doing here?”

“I brought my mother to the hospital; she has high blood sugar.”

“Bless you! It’s good that you brought her here, but you’ll be even more blessed if you clear out. We won’t make you pay a fine this time, but you’ve been warned. Don’t come here again. Is that clear?”

“But this is how I earn my living.”

“God’s earth is vast.”

Mohamed would have liked to answer that God clearly did not like the poor, and that the earth was only vast for those with means. But he told himself, “It’s not worth it; it’ll just make things worse. They could even arrest me for atheism.”

He was perhaps not an atheist, but since the Islamists were almost everywhere now he had distanced himself from religion. His father used to say to him, “The believer is destined for sorrow; God tests him. So be patient, my son!”

Just as Mohamed was about to leave, a car stopped in front of him. The driver, who seemed to be in a rush, asked him to weigh all his fruit and put it into a big basket, which he was holding out. “I want to buy it all. Today is a day of celebration; my son just graduated from high school. Can you believe it? I am going to send him to study in America, yes, sir, to America, because here you can study day and night and then there’s no work, but when you have an American degree they hire you right away. I am happy; he’s my only son. My daughters don’t count—I can’t get them married, nobody wants them. . . . Well, hurry up, quick, quick! How much is it? Calculate quickly; if you want, I can help you.” He took out his cell phone and started calculating as Mohamed dictated the numbers. “Well, it comes to two hundred and fifty-three riyals.” The man handed him three hundred-riyal bills. “You deserve it. You are a good guy—it shows.”

Mohamed started pushing his cart toward the wholesale market. He wasn’t going to go to Bouchaïb anymore. He would pay cash.

At the end of the afternoon, he put his cart away and went to wait for Zineb at the entrance to her office. Nearby were a large number of busy young people. He was stunned by how many ways these people had thought of to make a living: there were people speed-washing cars; helping the elderly; making toys out of soda cans; or selling loose American cigarettes, hand-drawn postcards, maps, or photographs of Michael Jackson and Ben Harper. There were acrobats dressed in red, performing tricks; there were monkey trainers, parrot trainers, venders of pirated DVDs, with films for all tastes—Indian, the latest American, classic films, Egyptian and French; there were also storytellers with microphones pinned to their jackets. Only snake charmers, fortune-tellers, sorcerers, and other swindlers were missing.

Then, suddenly, there was panic. The street venders all began running— security agents were chasing them. Violently, the police managed to catch two people—a parrot man and a DVD seller. Blows, insults. The parrot was screaming. The DVDs lay smashed on the ground. Among them was the movie “Spartacus,” starring Kirk Douglas. All that remained of the movie was its sleeve. The two venders were thrown into a National Security van. Mohamed felt like screaming, but he thought about his mother, about his entire family. He swallowed his anger and told himself, “I have to see Zineb.”

He was glad to see her. He told her about his day and avoided talking, at first, about the police attack on the street venders; he suggested that they have some fish in a popular restaurant by the harbor. Soon the two of them were laughing like children in a splendid meadow on a spring day. He said to her, “The police defeated Spartacus! He was crushed under the tires of the van.”

They returned home on foot. On the way, they saw some street kids making a fire to warm themselves. One of them asked for a cigarette. “I don’t smoke,” Mohamed said, “but take this and buy something to eat.”

Police vans drove slowly alongside them. Prostitutes were being asked for their papers. Zineb noticed one of the girls slipping a banknote into a cop’s pocket. It was routine. That was how things went.

They discussed their marriage again.

“We have to wait; I just started working. I’ve got to pull off something big first.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to rob anyone! But I’d really like to open a store at the market. One of our neighbors is sick, and he owns a well-positioned store in the central market. It’d be great if he let me take over; I could pay for it little by little. I’ve looked into it. His children don’t want to continue the business; they’re engineers and technicians, so they don’t have job problems. This would be an ideal solution for me. My mother is going to speak to the man.”

“You’re right,” Zineb said. “But I’m tired of waiting. We need to have our own place, even if it’s just a shack, a hole in the wall, a shed. . . .”

At home, the old TV was showing a program celebrating the President’s thirty-year reign over the republic. The President appeared with his wife, who had gained a lot of weight. Both wore makeup, were well dressed—too well dressed, too tidy, with not a hair out of place, and smug, satisfied smiles. The camera followed them through their palace, through their immaculate gardens with perfectly manicured trees and automatic sprinklers to water the lawns. The President’s wife was saying, “My husband works so hard that I have to force him to rest a little; thank God the country is doing well. The people are grateful; they show us their support every day, because they realize that the country is prosperous and is moving forward!”

The President made a gesture with his hand, as though waving to a child.

These images were accompanied by some syrupy background music, which got on Mohamed’s nerves. His mother was dozing. His brothers and sisters were getting ready for bed. Yassine showed Mohamed his report card. For every class, it said more or less the same thing: “Intelligent boy, talented student, but lazy. Could do better.” Yassine laughed and said, “I get bored in class, and, in any case, what’s the point of studying? You’ve seen it yourself—you studied like crazy, and then no job. Now you’ve taken up Dad’s cart.”

Mohamed tried to give his brother some hope, but it was difficult. There was too much injustice in the country, too much inequality and humiliation.

Yassine told him that while returning home from school he had seen a man being beaten by the police. The man was screaming, and people stopped, but no one intervened. “I recognized the guy; he was the caretaker of that glass building—you know, the one on the other side of the neighborhood. The guy was fired, but nobody knows why. Today he stole a chicken. It was bizarre; the man was screaming, and so was the chicken, because he wouldn’t let go of it.”

Early the next morning, Mohamed left to buy his fruit. He bought a larger variety this time. Coming out of the market, he met a former fellow-activist, who had got a job at the town hall.

“I don’t do anything there. I’m in an office with four other clerks,” he said. “Some of them have files to work on, but I don’t. I’m bored. Plus, I haven’t been paid yet; it’s been six months. I live on credit. I think they hired some university graduates just to make us shut up, when in fact they don’t have any positions for us. And how about you?”

“As you can see.”

They said goodbye and parted. Ten minutes later, as Mohamed was waiting at a red light, two policemen in plain clothes pulled him aside.

“What were you and your friend talking about?”

“Nothing.”

The first slap took Mohamed by surprise. He yelled and got a punch in his stomach.

“Shut the fuck up. Come on, what’s your friend’s name?”

“I forgot his name.”

Another slap. Some passersby stopped. One of the cops threatened them. “Clear off! He’s a thief. We’re doing this to protect you; let us do our job.”

Mohamed cried, “It’s not true! I am not a thief!”

Seeing the crowd close in on them, the cops knocked the cart over and left Mohamed with all his fruit on the ground.

The crowd comforted him; they helped him pick up the fruit, though most of the strawberries were crushed. Some of the people said, “This is disgusting! How shameful! Attacking a poor street vender.” “They behave as if they were in Mafia movies. These bastards all want their share!” “This can’t go on! One day or another, God will bring the truth to light.” “God’s on the side of the rich!”

Arguments followed.

“Villain! Infidel! God is with everyone! God is everywhere.”

The people decided to buy Mohamed’s fruit out of solidarity. He gave away the strawberries that weren’t crushed.

He didn’t feel like working anymore; he felt sick.

He went home, put away the cart, and decided to take advantage of his brothers’ absence to sleep and recuperate a bit.

He had a dream. His father, dressed all in white, was beckoning to Mohamed to join him. He was saying something, but Mohamed couldn’t hear him. He had no desire to join the deceased. Suddenly his mother appeared and said, “Don’t listen to what he’s asking you to do; he is with God, perhaps in Heaven.”

Mohamed woke, disturbed; the dream had been so powerfully real.

It was high time that Mohamed and Zineb had cell phones. He bought two used phones in the central market. The phones were simple. No monthly fee, just a rechargeable SIM card, which allowed them to receive calls even when the credit was used up.

Mohamed also decided to improve his fruit cart. On one side, he set up a manual juice press. On the other side, he arranged the different fruits in a more appealing way. He also attached a board to show the prices. And, to make it look pretty, he hung a picture of the singer Umm Kulthum. He even bought a flyswatter.

Mohamed seemed destined to be a wandering street vender, since those who collaborated with the police took all the good spots. But one morning he decided to return to the area by the hospital, where business was good.

Soon two police officers arrived and started circling him.

“Umm Kulthum! You like her voice? We do, too. But why have you hung a picture of an old singer who died a long time ago and not one of our beloved President? May God grant him a long life and prosperity!”

“I hadn’t thought about it. If you want, I can remove the singer’s picture.”

“No, keep it, but hang a nice picture of our dear President above it, and one that’s bigger than Umm Kulthum’s. O.K.?”

“O.K.”

The officers left. Mohamed was covered in cold sweat. He’d had enough of this almost daily harassment. He called Zineb and told her about the incident.

“They want you to give in. These people are rotten. Corrupt to the bone. I admire you for standing up to them.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“So shall we see each other this evening?”

“Yes, see you tonight.”

He found an old newspaper with a full-page picture of the President and tried to hang it on his cart. But the page kept falling. So he folded it up and put it under one of the crates. He would bring it out if they asked him again for a picture of the President.

While Mohamed waited for customers on a busy street, a newspaper vender stopped and handed him an Arabic newspaper. On the front page was written, “Scandal: An M.P. from the majority party extorted money from unemployed graduates by making them fill out forms to emigrate to Canada: 500 riyals per file; 252 victims. He has not been charged.”

Mohamed knew about this swindle and would have been a victim of it—if he’d ever managed to save the required “file fee.”

The newspaper vender said to him, “You see, we can write about everything, denounce everything, but it doesn’t change anything. The bastard is still an M.P.; he raked in a huge amount of money, and the authorities didn’t take any action against him.”

“You know, it wouldn’t surprise me if one day one of those victims slit his throat. After all, you can always take justice into your own hands.”

A sudden commotion.

Mohamed guessed that the police were making a roundup; he quickly pushed his cart into a narrow alleyway to hide. Some cats were fighting by an overturned trash can; children played with plastic guns.

He took a deep breath, crouched down, and held his head in his hands; he felt like throwing everything away and being done for good. But then he thought of his mother, saw Zineb’s face, his brothers, his sisters. . . . He got up and headed back toward the main street.

Mohamed had been working for more than a month, despite the countless obstacles he encountered. One morning, however, he had a bad feeling. As he was getting his cart out, one of the wheels fell off. He didn’t know whether this was an accident or the result of sabotage. He’d had problems with some of his neighbors, who disapproved of his criticizing the regime. One day, the husband next door had said, “If you continue speaking against the government, you’re going to bring trouble on all of us. Why do you have to run everything down? You want everyone to be rich? You’re a Communist, aren’t you? You’d better calm yourself, because, in this country, when the police arrest people you never know what shape they’ll be in when they return.”

“See—you, too, are criticizing the government.”

“No, I’m only stating facts. I’m happy; life is good.” Then he started shouting at the top of his lungs, “Long live the President! Long live the First Lady!”

Mohamed began repairing the wheel. Children stood around him, wanting to help. The cart was soon on its feet, and he left.

At the first intersection, a policeman stopped him.

“Where are you off to like this?”

“I’m going to work.”

“Your work permit?”

“You know very well that it doesn’t exist.”

“Yes, I know. But it can exist in other forms.”

Mohamed pretended not to understand.

The police officer said, “Too bad for you. That response may cost you a lot more. See you later.”

Mohamed left without turning around. He ran into a funeral procession. There were a lot of people, and, strangely, some of them were carrying the national flag.

Mohamed asked who was being buried. “A poor guy, like you and me. No one knows exactly how he died. He was arrested last week for something to do with the Internet, and then yesterday his parents found his body dumped in front of their door.”

“Killed by the police?”

“Clearly, but there’s no proof,” the man said in a low voice. “He was a great guy. He worked in a café, and in the evening he played on the Internet.”

Mohamed followed the procession while pushing his cart. He noticed that plainclothes policemen were taking pictures.

After the burial, he left for the wholesale market.

It was violent. He didn’t even have time to get up. Two uniformed police officers, a man and a woman, threw him to the ground and seized the cart.

“Confiscated!”

“You have no right to sell illegally. You have no work permit, no license; you don’t pay taxes; you’re stealing from the state. So it’s over: your cart is confiscated.”

The female officer said, “Now get lost. You’ll get a summons to appear in court. Get the hell out of here!”

Mohamed remained on the ground, because the other officer was still kicking him.

Passersby stopped to watch. Some of them protested. The police threatened them. A jeep arrived, and an officer got out. After the police had explained the situation, he got back into the jeep and disappeared.

Then a police van arrived. Other cops got out and gathered the fruit that had fallen off the cart. One of them even bit into an apple he’d picked up.

Mohamed, powerless, said nothing. He wandered through the streets, stunned by what had just happened and incapable of thought. Without his realizing it, his steps carried him to the town hall. He asked to speak to the mayor. The man at the front desk made quick circles at his temple with his index finger to indicate that Mohamed was crazy.

“You think you can see the mayor just like that?”

“Why not? I need to speak to him.”

“Who do you think you are? Are you rich? Are you important? Now get out of here and let me drink my tea in peace.”

Mohamed insisted, “Perhaps the deputy mayor . . .”

“They’re all out. The governor is opening a new mosque.”

“And tomorrow?”

“Let me give you some advice: drop it.”

“All right, but before I go I have to tell you why I want to speak to the mayor.”

“Why?”

“The police confiscated the one thing I need to make a living, the cart I use to sell fruit. It’s my livelihood.”

“And you think the mayor will overrule the police for the sake of your beautiful eyes?”

“For the sake of justice.”

“Well, aren’t you special! Where did you come from?” Lowering his voice a little, the man asked, “Where have you seen justice done in this country?” Then he stepped out for a moment and returned armed with a club. “Now get lost! Or I’ll break your pretty face.”

Mohamed didn’t insist anymore.

That evening, he saw Zineb, who suggested that she go with him to the town hall. Also, she had another idea.

“What if we went directly to the chief of police?”

“Why not?”

They went to the police headquarters.

None of the officers there knew about Mohamed’s situation. Zineb spoke first.

“Well, in that case we are going to press charges for theft!”

“You’re going to file a charge against the police? Where do think you are, Sweden?” the officer asked with a wicked smile.

“We just want our cart back.”

“I understand. Give me your I.D. cards so that I can make photocopies, and I’ll contact you if I have any news.”

Zineb didn’t trust him; she refused, pulled Mohamed by the arm, and they left.

They walked through the streets for a long time, holding hands, or with their arms around each other’s waist.

A car pulled up beside them: plain-clothes police officers.

“Your papers. . . . But you’re not married. It’s illegal to walk in deserted streets at this time of night.”

Zineb used her charm and begged the officer not to report them.

“My father’s very violent. Please let us go! We’ll go home; we weren’t doing anything wrong.”

“O.K., get going. You’re off the hook this time.”

They both went straight home.

Mohamed had a very restless night; he hadn’t told his mother what happened. Stress made her blood sugar rise, his father had said.

Early the next morning, Mohamed washed himself, then, for the first time since his father’s death, he decided to pray. He changed into clothes that were all white. His mother was asleep; without waking her, he kissed her forehead. He glanced at his sleeping brothers and sisters. Then he ran out of the house. He borrowed his brother’s old motorbike, stopped at a gas station, and filled a plastic water bottle with gasoline. He put the bottle in a small bag and headed toward the town hall.

There he asked to see an official.

No one wanted to see him.

He returned to the place where the police had confiscated his cart.

They were there again, and the cart was nearby. Empty.

Mohamed went up to them and asked for his property back.

The male cop slapped him hard and shouted, “Look, you filthy rat, get lost before I beat the shit out of you!”

Mohamed tried to defend himself. This time the female officer took her turn slapping him and spitting in his face. “You creep, you’re spoiling our breakfast! You have no manners. You’re a nobody.”

Mohamed lay prostrate. He didn’t speak, didn’t move; his face was immobile, his eyes were red, his jaw clenched. Something inside him was about to explode. He stayed in this position for two or three minutes—to him, it felt like an eternity.

The male officer said, “Go on, get out of here. Your cart—you’ll never see it again. It’s all over; you’ve shown us no respect. And, for this, you pay a price in our beloved country.”

Mohamed’s mouth was dry, his saliva bitter. It was hard for him to breathe. If I had a gun, I would empty it into these bastards, he thought. I don’t have a gun, but I still have my body, my life, my wasted life: this is my weapon.

Mohamed got to his feet and backed away from them. He started up the motorbike and headed to the town hall.

He locked the bike to a pole and again asked to speak to the mayor or one of his deputies. The man at the front desk was even angrier than he’d been the day before. Back outside, Mohamed thought about the bottle of gasoline in the small bag, adjusted his white clothes, and walked around the square. No one noticed him.

It was a sunny December morning. December 17th. A confused jumble of images rushed through his mind: his mother in bed, his father in his coffin, himself at the Faculty of Arts and Letters, Zineb smiling, Zineb angry, Zineb begging him not to do anything; his mother getting out of bed and calling for him; the face of the woman who’d slapped him earlier, who slapped him again; his body bent over as though he were offering himself to an executioner; the blue sky; a huge tree sheltering him; himself in Zineb’s arms under the tree; himself as a child, running so as not to be late for school; his French teacher praising him; himself taking his college exams, showing his diploma to his parents; his diploma pinned to a sign beside the word “unemployed”; his diploma burning in the sink; his father’s burial again; screams; birds; the President and his wife wearing huge black sunglasses; the woman who’d slapped him; the other who’d insulted him; a procession of sparrows crossing the sky; “Spartacus”; a public fountain; his mother and his two sisters standing in line to get water; the cops brutalizing him again, insults, blows, insults, blows . . .

One last time, Mohamed asked to see the mayor. Refusals and insults. The man at the front desk pushed him with his club and he fell to the ground. Mohamed rose in silence and went to stand in front of the town hall’s main entrance. He took the bottle of gasoline from the bag, poured it over himself, from head to toe, until the bottle was empty. Then he lit his Bic lighter, looked for a moment into its flame, and drew it toward his clothes.

The fire ignited instantly. Within moments, the crowd ran toward him. The front-desk man screamed. He tried to put out the fire with his jacket, but Mohamed had transformed into a torch. By the time an ambulance arrived, the fire was out, but Mohamed had lost all human resemblance. He was entirely black, like a grilled lamb.

The front-desk man was crying, “It’s all my fault. I should have helped him.”

Mohamed is in the hospital. His entire body is wrapped in bandages, like a shroud. He is in a coma. A commotion in the hallways. Doctors in white coats and nurses race down the hallway that leads to Mohamed’s room. The President has come; the President has inquired about Mohamed’s fate. The President is not happy. He hears about the mayor who refused to see Mohamed. He orders him fired. The President is angry. He finds out that the international press is covering the story.

A horde of doctors follow the President into the hospital room.

Obscene and ridiculous displays.

The entire country is in revolt. With her hair tied back, Zineb leads a demonstration. Her fist raised, she is shouting and screaming.

Mohamed dies on January 4, 2011.

There are demonstrations everywhere, cries of “We are all Mohameds!”

The President leaves the country like a thief. His plane disappears into the starry night.

More demonstrations.

Photographs of Mohamed are everywhere: victim and symbol. The international media rush to the country to interview his family.

Even a film producer comes to see them. He hands an envelope to the tearful mother and says, “Please accept this help; it’s not much. Such is fate, cruel and unjust.”

He bends down and whispers into the weeping woman’s ear, “It’s important that you don’t speak to anyone else. Don’t give any interviews to journalists. I am going to help you. I will tell Mohamed’s story. The entire world should know what happened. Mohamed is a hero, a victim, and a martyr. Do we agree? You will not speak with anyone but me. I have to go now, but, if you need anything at all, here’s my card, and here’s a cell phone so you can call me.”

The mother didn’t understand anything this person said. But her daughters understood very well: “This guy wants to buy our brother’s death and profit from it! What a nightmare! What an utter nightmare! Mohamed’s story doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s the story of a simple man, like millions of others, who, after being crushed, humiliated, and denied in life, became the spark that set the world ablaze. No one can ever steal his death.” ♦

(Translated, from the French, by Rita S. Nezami.)

POEMS
“Poem”

by Stanley Moss

Teacher of reading, of “You will not” and “You shall,”

almighty Grammarian author of Genesis,

whether language holds three forms of the future

as Hebrew does or no future tense at all

like Chinese, may it perform a public service,

offer the protection of the Great Wall,

the hope and sorrow of the Western Wall.

POEMS
“My Proteins”

by Jane Hirshfield

They have discovered, they say,

the protein of itch—

natriuretic polypeptide b—

and that it travels its own distinct pathway

inside my spine.

As do pain, pleasure, and heat.

A body it seems is a highway,

a cloverleaf crossing

well built, well traversed.

Some of me going north, some going south.

Ninety percent of my cells, they have discovered,

are not my own person,

they are other beings inside me.

As ninety-six percent of my life is not my life.

Yet I, they say, am they—

my bacteria and yeasts,

my father and mother,

grandparents, lovers,

my drivers talking on cell phones,

my subways and bridges,

my thieves, my police

who chase my self night and day.

My proteins, apparently also me,

fold the shirts.

I find in this crowded metropolis

a quiet corner,

where I build of not-me Lego blocks

a bench,

pigeons, a sandwich

of rye bread, mustard, and cheese.

It is me and is not,

the hunger

that makes the sandwich good.

It is not me then is,

the sandwich—

a mystery neither of us

can fold, unfold, or consume.

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Love Sprung

by Hilton Als

When you think about the talented children of famous parents, you don’t necessarily think about their gifts so much as their genes. Could the famous offspring’s renown be based on a kind of molecular nepotism? Would Liza Minnelli really have been Liza without Judy and Vincente? Would Jane Fonda’s righteous American quality be possible if Henry hadn’t gotten there first? I didn’t know who the twenty-six-year-old Condola Rashad’s parents were when I saw her last spring in “The Trip to Bountiful” (which runs through Oct. 9 at the Stephen Sondheim). All I felt, watching her, was excitement; she played her scenes with an unobstructed emotional steadiness that was completely stellar. Now Condola, the only daughter of the iconic actress Phylicia Rashad and the sports star Ahmad Rashad, has left that show to play the ultimate ingenue—Juliet to Orlando Bloom’s Romeo in David Leveaux’s Broadway version of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” in previews at the Richard Rodgers. It’s hard to imagine that she wouldn’t give Juliet her heart, her playfulness, and her unreconstructed sense of truth. ♦

TABLES FOR TWO
Atrium

15 Main St., Brooklyn (718-858-1095)

by Amelia Lester

A meal at Atrium might start with an olive-oil cocktail and oysters, followed by quinoa two ways and a sweet-corn panna cotta. Modern Mediterranean, maybe a little trend-obsessed. But this new restaurant in Dumbo, opened by a team of DB Bistro alums, is also an act of defiance against nature. It’s located around the corner from the carrousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park, which was engulfed by the East River during Hurricane Sandy, a moment captured in a now iconic photograph that showed the hooves of the glittering horses threatened by water and surrounded by darkness. The photo presaged the havoc Sandy would inflict on the Brooklyn waterfront and its businesses. In Dumbo alone, the River Café, the bobbing grande dame of the borough’s dining scene, was shut for many months (and is now open only for private events), and Governor closed for good. It was promising and ambitious and lived where Atrium does now.

Although the space remains slightly awkward—the downstairs feels too big, the mezzanine like exile—the vertical garden, which covers an entire wall, lifts it from generic industrial and imparts a pleasantly indoors-outdoors feel. Atrium has aspirations beyond a neighborhood joint. Though friendly, there’s a Manhattan-like formality to the service, down to the whispered deliberations between hosts about seating arrangements, and the wine list has over two hundred selections, though only one rosé.

Certainly the menu doesn’t offer the kind of casual fare the residents of this restaurant-starved area might want to eat on a Tuesday night: there’s no burger, for instance, but there is a veal-chop special, served with pre-recession quantities of shaved truffle. Many of the dishes are downright heavy, oddly wintery for an end-of-summer meal by the water. Which is not to say that the results aren’t frequently, even disconcertingly, satisfying. Just in case sweetbreads weren’t rich enough, at Atrium they’re served with chanterelles and chorizo; a bone-marrow appetizer comes scraped out and ground up with anchovies. It’s irresistible, almost obscenely salty, but the preparation does strange things to the texture of the marrow, which is no longer appealingly viscous but more like taco beef. A salad of bitter greens and beets, balanced and harmonious, comes with pickled, not fresh, berries.

The most interesting dish on the menu is that quinoa, which comes with starchy, hearty cauliflower. It appears in two ways: turned into a grainy, chewy tagliatelle, and with the kernels themselves toasted, as a topping. There are cumin seeds, too, so the over-all effect is a bounty of crunchy little orbs and noodles swimming in a velvety, lemon-scented, cauliflower cream sauce: a savory take on cereal and milk. It’s good now, and it will be even better later in the year, when the weather turns, and the puffy coats come out. (Open weekdays for dinner and weekends for brunch and dinner. Entrées $16-$34.) ♦

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
May Days

by Richard Brody

The famously publicity-averse filmmaker Chris Marker used the cinema like a giant megaphone, as in the 1962 documentary “Le Joli Mai,” a new restoration of which opens at Film Forum on Sept. 13. Working with the cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, Marker filmed interviews with a wide range of people in and around Paris—poor families in suburban hovels, stockbrokers and their young couriers, African immigrants, workers on strike, utopian architects and engineers—but his archly literary voice-overs (spoken by Yves Montand and Simone Signoret) and supertitles, together with his dryly ironic editing, turn the panoramic vision into an ode to Communist ideals. Yet the interviews—and the filmmakers’ curiosity and empathy—overflow their ideological container and present the idiosyncratic characters tenderly. The movie’s forecast of political upheavals, with allusions to censorship and terrorism, is trumped by a gyrating night-club scene, showing one reveller who seems to be dancing the Madison as if her life depended on it; it comes off as a prescient glimpse of cultural revolution on the wing. ♦

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Roach Motel

by Joan Acocella

Kafka is hard to adapt to any visual medium. In Steven Berkoff’s 1969 play “Metamorphosis”—which most of us over here saw only twenty years later, with Mikhail Baryshnikov as Gregor Samsa, the man who is turned into a bug—the important thing was just Baryshnikov. Now the South African choreographer Arthur Pita is bringing his “Metamorphosis,” created for London’s Royal Ballet in 2011, to the Joyce, Sept. 17-29. Pita’s Gregor, Edward Watson, a Royal Ballet principal with an astonishing extension, yanks himself around with his feet practically around his neck. His near-naked body is covered with brown slime. (He gets it all over his bedsheets.) His parents scream and throw things at the sight of him. Only his little sister stands by him. She brings him food; she tries to straighten out his legs. When she, too, abandons him, he goes off quietly and dies. No director seems able to capture the dryness—or the weirdly dreamlike quality—of emotion in Kafka tales. Pita’s no exception. But this show is very good: disgusting, heartbreaking. ♦

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
This Week

The Theatre

FIRST AMENDMENT

In 1991, a group of erotic dancers challenged an Indiana State law that banned public nudity, in the U.S. Supreme Court case Barnes vs. Glen Theatre. In “Arguendo,” Elevator Repair Service stages the oral argument, word for word, at the Public.

Night Life

ALL IN THE FAMILY

The T.J. Martell Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to raising money for cancer and AIDS research, was founded by the veteran music executive Tony Martell in 1975 after his son died of cancer. It’s having a Family Day at Roseland, with the singer-songwriter Jason Mraz, the young singer Austin Mahone, and the rising phenom Ed Sheeran.

Art

AFTER THE FIDDLER

In “Chagall: Love, War, and Exile,” the Jewish Museum exhibits thirty paintings and two dozen works on paper—as well as letters, poems, and photographs—made by the Russian artist during two rarely considered periods of his oeuvre: a stint in Paris, in the nineteen-thirties, and another in New York, between 1941 and 1948, where he lived after fleeing Nazi persecution.

Classical Music

HANGING AROUND

The Met is rightly proud of its new European Paintings Galleries, 1250-1800. It promotes them smartly with its first music program of the season: “The Grand Tour,” a sequence of four early-music mini-concerts (performed by Tenet, Dark Horse Consort, Quicksilver, and the harpsichordist Jory Vinikour), held in four different rooms of the museum.

Movies

INDEPENDENTS’ DAYS

In only its second year, the La Di Da Festival, programmed by Miriam Bale, has already become a crucial gathering of independent films. This year’s edition, at Anthology Film Archives, includes Josephine Decker’s first feature, “Butter on the Latch.”

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
The Theatre

OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS

Please call the phone number listed with the theatre for timetables and ticket information.

ARGUENDO

Elevator Repair Service created this piece, about the 1991 Supreme Court case Barnes vs. Glen Theatre, in which a group of dancers challenged a ban on nudity. John Collins directs. In previews. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555.)

BIG FISH

Norbert Leo Butz, Kate Baldwin, and Bobby Steggert star in this musical adaptation of the novel by Daniel Wallace, in which a man tries to determine whether the tall tales of his dying, estranged father are true. Andrew Lippa wrote the music and lyrics, and John August, who wrote the screenplay for the 2003 film adaptation, wrote the book. Susan Stroman directs and choreographs. In previews. (Neil Simon, 250 W. 52nd St. 877-250-2929.)

BRONX BOMBERS

Primary Stages presents the world première of a play conceived by Fran Kirmser and written and directed by Eric Simonson, about the history and legacy of the New York Yankees. The cast includes Francois Battiste as Reggie Jackson, Chris Henry Coffey as Joe DiMaggio, and Joe Pantoliano as Yogi Berra. Previews begin Sept. 17. (The Duke on 42nd Street, 229 W. 42nd St. 646223-3010.)

CARCASS

New Worlds Theatre Project presents the English-language première of a play by Peretz Hirshbein from 1905, in which a father’s drinking problem has a great impact on his family. Paul Takacs directs. In previews. Opens Sept. 12. (HERE, 145 Sixth Ave., near Spring St. 212-352-3101.)

FETCH CLAY, MAKE MAN

New York Theatre Workshop presents a play by Will Power, directed by Des McAnuff, about the friendship between Muhammad Ali and the actor and comedian Stepin Fetchit in the sixties. Starring Ray Fisher, K. Todd Freeman, Anthony Gaskins, Richard Masur, and Nikki M. James. In previews. Opens Sept. 12. (79 E. 4th St. 212-279-4200.)

THE FILM SOCIETY

Keen Company presents the 1988 play by Jon Robin Baitz (“Other Desert Cities”), set in a South African boys’ school in 1970, about a teacher attempting to keep politics out of his film club. Euan Morton and Roberta Maxwell star. Jonathan Silverstein directs. In previews. (Clurman, 410 W. 42nd St. 212-239-6200.)

THE GLASS MENAGERIE

Cherry Jones, Zachary Quinto, Brian J. Smith, and Celia Keenan-Bolger star in the American Repertory Theatre production of the Tennessee Williams play, directed by John Tiffany (“Once”). With original music by Nico Muhly and movement design by Steven Hoggett. In previews. (Booth, 222 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200.)

I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW

Origin’s “1st Irish” festival includes this one-woman comedy by the comedian Sonya Kelly, who tells the story of a seven-year-old girl with terrible eyesight. Opens Sept. 11. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.)

THE LIFE AND SORT OF DEATH OF ERIC ARGYLE

Ross Dungan wrote this play, about the ways in which humans find connections in everyday life. With guitar, harmonium, and glockenspiel performances by the cast. Dan Herd directs, as part of the “1st Irish” festival. Opens Sept. 11. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.)

MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY

Playwrights Horizons begins its season with the New York première of a play by Anne Washburn, a mash-up of “The Simpsons,” apocalyptic movies, and origin myths, with music by Michael Friedman. Steve Cosson directs. In previews. Opens Sept. 15. (416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.)

NATURAL AFFECTION

TACT presents the 1963 play by William Inge, in which the son of a single mother returns home from reform school and comes up against her new boyfriend. Jenn Thompson directs. Previews begin Sept. 17. (Beckett, 410 W. 42nd St. 212-239-6200.)

THE OLD FRIENDS

At the Signature Theatre, Betty Buckley, Veanne Cox, Hallie Foote, and Lois Smith star in the world première of a play by Horton Foote, about news that deeply affects two Texas farming families. Directed by Michael Wilson. In previews. Opens Sept. 12. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529.)

PHILIP GOES FORTH

The Mint presents a comedy by George Kelly, from 1931, in which a young man abandons the family business for a life as a playwright. Jerry Ruiz directs. In previews. (311 W. 43rd St. 866-811-4111.)

ROMEO AND JULIET

Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad star in the first Broadway production of the Shakespeare tragedy since 1977. David Leveaux directs. Also featuring Brent Carver, Jayne Houdyshell, Chuck Cooper, Christian Camargo, Justin Guarini, and Roslyn Ruff. In previews. (Richard Rodgers, 226 W. 46th St. 800-745-3000.)

WOMEN OR NOTHING

Atlantic Theatre Company begins its season with the world première of a new comedy by Ethan Coen, directed by David Cromer. Starring Robert Beitzel, Halley Feiffer, Susan Pourfar, and Deborah Rush. In previews. Opens Sept. 16. (336 W. 20th St. 866-811-4111.)

YOU NEVER CAN TELL

The Pearl, in a co-production with the Gingold Theatrical Company, presents this rarely produced 1896 comedy by George Bernard Shaw, for its thirtieth-anniversary season, directed by David Staller. In previews. Opens Sept. 15. (555 W. 42nd St. 212-563-9261.)

NOW PLAYING

ALL THE FACES OF THE MOON

Mike Daisey returns to the Public with a series of monologues, a new one every night, for each phase of the moon. Jean-Michele Gregory directs, at Joe’s Pub, through Oct. 3. (425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555.)

EVERYTHING IS OURS

Colt Coeur presents a comedy of manners by Nikole Beckwith, in which a wealthy, successful couple is visited by a ten-year-old girl with a surprise. Adrienne Campbell-Holt directs. (HERE, 145 Sixth Ave., near Spring St. 212-352-3101.)

FRINGENYC ENCORE SERIES

The Fringe reprises some of the most popular shows from this year’s festival. Plays include “Why You Beasting?,” by David Don Miller; “Rubble,” by Mike Reiss; and “The Rufus Equation,” by Ted Cubbin. At Baruch Performing Arts Center (55 Lexington Ave.) and the Players Theatre (115 MacDougal St.). (212-352-3101.)

THE HATMAKER’S WIFE

In the Playwrights Realm production of Lauren Yee’s bittersweet comedy, as soon as a young woman named Voice (Stephanie Wright Thompson) moves into an old house with her boyfriend, Gabe (Frank Harts), the walls start talking to her about an elderly couple who used to live there—Hetchman, the maker of a magically joy-inducing hat (David Margulies), and his sad wife (Marcia Jean Kurtz). Gabe can’t hear what the walls are saying, so he gets jealous when Voice becomes entirely wrapped up in the unfolding story: Hetchman loved his magical hat so much more than his wife that she ran off and took the hat with her, leaving him bereft and alone, with only his bighearted friend Meckel (Peter Friedman) to keep him company. Yee’s magical-realistic fable, about those who can love and those who can’t, might have been simply warm and fuzzy were it not for the wonderful performances by the seasoned actors Margulies, Kurtz, and Friedman, who, under the direction of Rachel Chavkin, give cartoonish characters weight and depth. (Peter Jay Sharp, 416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.)

THE HILL TOWN PLAYS

Five plays by Lucy Thurber, each about a troubled young woman growing up in rural Massachusetts, are being staged as part of the Rattlestick’s inaugural Theatre: Village Festival. In “Ashville,” directed by Karen Allen (at the Cherry Lane), all the addicts around sixteen-year-old Celia (Mia Vallet)—including her alcoholic mother’s boyfriend (Andrew Garman), her own violent boyfriend (Joe Tippett), and the drug dealer next door (James McMenamin)—regard her as a “good girl,” because she does her homework, but that doesn’t stop them from emotionally and sexually abusing her. In “Where We’re Born,” directed by Jackson Gay (at the Rattlestick), Lilly (Betty Gilpin), a working-class nineteen-year-old freshman at Amherst, returns to her home town to visit the beloved cousin (Christopher Abbott) who raised her—a homophobic young drunk with a hair-trigger temper—and, unbeknownst to him, starts having sex with his fiancée (Mackenzie Meehan). Thurber is an actor’s playwright—her spot-on, funny, and deep dialogue and her Shepardesque characters inspire these actors to give excellent, relaxed performances. These plays, both of which would benefit from another act, are made more whole by each other. (866-811-4111.)

SOUL DOCTOR

This musical, about the life and career of Shlomo Carlebach (Eric Anderson), a kind of Hasidic hippie popularly known as the “singing rabbi,” doesn’t work, not least because you can’t further sentimentalize a sentimental character. It’s a variation on the original “Jazz Singer,” starring Al Jolson, but the only featured black face in this show is Nina Simone’s. In this nearly three-hour evening, it’s Amber Iman’s Nina for whom we wait to return to the stage again and again. While Iman errs, sometimes, on the side of too much “jazz voice”—slurring her words to convey inner hipness—we forgive her because she believes in Nina, and it’s one of the few times we’ve ever seen a portrayal in which the musician’s faith in her art, and in the artistry of others, takes precedence over her various personal difficulties, which were never greater than her talent. With a book by Daniel S. Wise, lyrics by David Schechter, and music by Carlebach. Wise directs. (Circle in the Square, 235 W. 50th St. 212-239-6200.)

STOP. RESET.

Signature Theatre Company presents a play written and directed by Regina Taylor, about the owner of a company that publishes books by African-American writers, who questions his relevance in a dying business. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529.)

THE WEIR

Conor McPherson’s play, which débuted in the West End in 1997 and opened on Broadway two years later, is an elegant, funny, moving distillation and celebration of the uniquely Irish way with words. In a pub in the Irish countryside, the presence of a village newcomer, Valerie (Tessa Klein), inspires the talk to shift from the usual barbs, complaints, and grudges of the bartender, Brendan (Billy Carter), and his regulars Jack, Jim, and Finbar (Dan Butler, John Keating, and Sean Gormley) to a succession of ghost stories, each based in reality and each a little scarier and weirder than the one before it. McPherson’s transitions from bar banter to mesmerizing metaphysics are crafty and seamless, and, under the direction of Ciarán O’Reilly, the five excellent actors display their skill in the gift of gab and the art of listening. (Irish Repertory, 132 W. 22nd St. 212-727-2737. Through Sept. 15.)

ALSO PLAYING

ANNIE: Palace, Broadway at 47th St. 877-250-2929. BUYER & CELLAR: Barrow Street Theatre, 27 Barrow St. 212-868-4444. FIRST DATE: Longacre, 220 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200. JERSEY BOYS: August Wilson, 245 W. 52nd St. 212-239-6200. KINKY BOOTS: Hirschfeld, 302 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. THE LION KING: Minskoff, 200 W. 45th St. 866-870-2717. MATILDA THE MUSICAL: Shubert, 225 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200. MOTOWN: THE MUSICAL: Lunt-Fontanne, 205 W. 46th St. 877-250-2929. ONCE: Jacobs, 242 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. PETER AND THE STARCATCHER: New World Stages, 340 W. 50th St. 212-239-6200. PIPPIN: Music Box, 239 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. RODGERS + HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA: Broadway Theatre, Broadway at 53rd St. 212-239-6200. SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK: Foxwoods, 213 W. 42nd St. 877-250-2929. THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL: Stephen Sondheim, 124 W. 43rd St. 212-239-6200. WICKED: Gershwin, 222 W. 51st St. 212-239-6200.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Night Life

ROCK AND POP

Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements.

B. B. KING BLUES CLUB & GRILL

237 W. 42nd St. (212-997-4144)—Sept. 11: The Yardbirds were one of the edgiest of the British Invasion bands. Their hits, which included “For Your Love,” “Heart Full of Soul,” and “Over Under Sideways Down,” were odd, arresting records, neither blues nor pop, but rock infused with alien rhythms and modalities. Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page all passed through the group’s ranks in its heyday, but the first lead guitarist was Top Topham, who joins the original drummer, Jim McCarty, and the current lineup for this show.

BEACON THEATRE

Broadway at 74th St. (212-465-6500)—Sept. 16-17: The British electro-pop duo Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, who perform as the Pet Shop Boys, haven’t lost their stylistic edge after nearly thirty years of output. The act’s twelfth album, “Electric,” is a trove of slickly crafted dance-floor gems.

BOWERY BALLROOM

6 Delancey St. (212-533-2111)—Sept. 12: For a brief period in the mid-seventies, the music culture of Cleveland, Ohio, emerged as the main rival to the nascent punk movement then burgeoning in New York around CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. At the center of the Cleveland scene was Pere Ubu, a dark, sometimes terrifying group led by the singer David Thomas, which combined the aggressive directness of punk with experimental flourishes. The group, which sprang from the short-lived yet influential Rocket from the Tombs (also co-founded by Thomas), astounded the then tiny American underground with songs like “Heart of Darkness,” an intense, frightening sonic journey built around a hypnotic bass riff. (The author of that iconic riff, Tim Wright, who was also a founding member of the No-Wave pioneers DNA, died last month from cancer.) Though Pere Ubu broke up for a spell in 1982, they have remained periodically active since the late eighties. They recently released a superb new record, “Lady from Shanghai,” dominated by dissonant guitar patterns, eerie textural details, and Thomas’s plaintive nasal wail, which remains as affecting and strange as it was nearly forty years ago. Sept. 17-18 and Sept. 20: The Pixies. The recent departure of the founding member Kim Deal and the dubious quality of the group’s first new song to be released in nine years, an odd hip-hop/blues-rock fusion called “Bagboy,” will not keep fans away. These shows are long sold out. With the ferocious guitar master Reignwolf, at the first two shows.

CITY WINERY

155 Varick St. (212-608-0555)—Sept. 16: A pairing of two extraordinary musicians. David Hidalgo, of Los Lobos, who can play anything with strings, and Marc Ribot, the experimental downtown electric-guitar virtuoso, are teaming up for a new project, and this is their first New York performance together.

GLASSLANDS

289 Kent Ave., between S. 1st and S. 2nd Sts., Brooklyn (No phone)—Sept. 12: Dexter Tortoriello and Megan Messina are Houses, whose ambient keyboard and synth arrangements are full of majestic melancholy. Their latest release, “A Quiet Darkness,” is a concept album about a married couple’s attempt to reunite after a nuclear incident along the 10 Freeway, in California. The Detroit electronic-rockers Jamaican Queens, who can sometimes sound like a stoner Marilyn Manson with nothing to prove and at other times like the glam-era Bowie, and the dance-pop artist Candide are also on the bill. Sept. 13: Majical Cloudz. Watching the Canadian singer Devon Welsh throttle the microphone and punch the air, with his tightly shaved head and tucked-in white T-shirt, you’d think he fronted a hardcore punk band instead of this confessional synth-pop duo, which he shares with Matthew Otto. His music is melancholic, and it shares a commitment to emotional gut-spilling. At times, it even matches the grating hyperseriousness of hardcore; his new record, “Impersonator,” is one of the rawest statements to come from the Great White North in recent memory. With Moon King, who have yet to master the classic nineties dream pop they’re striving toward.

IRVING PLAZA

17 Irving Pl. (212-777-6800)—Sept. 11: The brothers Luther and Cody Dickinson are the core of the North Mississippi Allstars, purveyors of no-nonsense, super-amplified country blues. Their new album is “World Boogie Is Coming.” Sept. 12: Kishi Bashi’s records are lush, rhythmic, harmonically complex pop rhapsodies. For this show, presented by the cheeky concert-listing service Oh My Rockness, Bashi and his violin create the same kind of heady atmosphere with the help of loops, delays, and prodigious musical technique.

LITTLEFIELD

622 Degraw St., between Third and Fourth Aves., Brooklyn (718-855-3388)—Sept. 14: The legendary Detroit soul musician Melvin Davis makes a rare headlining appearance, under the aegis of the “Dig Deeper” party series, which specializes in finding unheralded greats of twentieth-century soul music and coaxing them back onstage. Davis is a multi-instrumentalist. As a drummer, he was a session player for Motown, and went on to back Smokey Robinson on “Tears of a Clown,” touring with him for two years. He also wrote a slew of songs that were immortalized by such artists as J. J. Barnes (“Chains of Love”), Lonette McKee (“Stop! (Don’t Worry About It)”), and Jackey Beavers (“I Need My Baby”). In the early sixties, he recorded a large amount of his own material, but it was released on obscure labels and is known by only the most devoted of fans. Here, he’ll revisit those songs, backed by the Brooklyn Rhythm Band, which will also perform an opening set.

MERCURY LOUNGE

217 E. Houston St. (212-260-4700)—Sept. 11: The Arizona quintet Destruction Unit was founded in 2000 by Ryan Rousseau, Alicja Trout, and the now deceased garage-rock icon Jay Reatard. They developed a cultish following, especially as their sound morphed further down a psychedelic noise-rock K-hole. The band’s most recent album is called “Deep Trip.” With their Sacred Bones Records label-mate Margaret Chardiet, who performs showstopping noise and power electronics as Pharmakon.

MUSIC HALL OF WILLIAMSBURG

66 N. 6th St., Brooklyn (718-486-5400)—Sept. 19: The Pixies (see the Bowery Ballroom).

OUR LADY OF LEBANON CATHEDRAL

113 Remsen St., Brooklyn (wordlessmusic.org)—Sept. 14: This gorgeous Brooklyn Heights cathedral provides an intense ambience and reverberating sound for the gothic-leaning singer Nika Roza Danilova, who performs under the name Zola Jesus. She is collaborating with her producer JG Thirlwell (a.k.a. the experimental musician Foetus), who reimagined her songs with orchestral arrangements for “Versions,” a project that began as a show at the Guggenheim Museum and is now an album and a tour. The Mivos Quartet joins her to create a sound that evokes the gray and powerful urgency of an oncoming storm.

ROSELAND

239 W. 52nd St. (877-598-8694)—Sept. 15: The T.J. Martell Foundation’s Family Day, featuring Jazon Mraz, Ed Sheeran, and others, raises money for cancer and AIDS research.

RUMSEY PLAYFIELD

Central Park, mid-Park at 69th St. (800-745-3000)—Sept. 15: The English band Alt-J (named for Δ, the symbol that’s created when pressing that combination on a computer keyboard, and that’s used in mathematics to designate change) won the Mercury Prize for its début album last year. It wistfully combines electronica effects and a folksy approach to create pungent art rock; imagine the anthems of Coldplay left out to age, like a fine cheese.

SAINT VITUS

1120 Manhattan Ave., Brooklyn (No phone)—Sept. 13: Scout Niblett has spent her career dredging the dark pagan heart of nineties grunge, and on her seventh record, “It’s Up to Emma,” she tells the story of a betrayed lover tumbling down a histrionic rabbit hole of anger, mourning, and, eventually, understanding. She is joined here by Baltimore’s Dope Body, with whom she shares a label (Drag City Records) and a love of fuming grunge and punk.

WEBSTER HALL

125 E. 11th St. (212-353-1600)—Sept. 11: At just twenty-one years old, the electronic producer Harley Streten, a native of Sydney, Australia, who goes by the stage name Flume, is proving to be a venerable wizard of beats and samples. His eponymous début album is an ambitious collage of dub-step, hip-hop, and spectral ambience that alternates between trance-inducing and dance-inspiring.

JAZZ AND STANDARDS

BIRDLAND

315 W. 44th St. (212-581-3080)—Sept. 10-14: Dave Liebman, a present-day saxophone titan, begins this engagement leading his Expansions Quintet for two nights, with the pianist Bobby Avey. He concludes the week at the forefront of a big band directed by Gunnar Mossblad.

BLUE NOTE

131 W. 3rd St. (212-475-8592)—Sept. 10-15: Joe Sample, a keyboardist equally comfortable with jazz, pop, and funk, stops by with his CreoleJoe band. Sample grew up in southeast Texas, and the group, which is inspired by the music of his youth, features C. J. Chenier, the crown prince of zydeco, on accordion.

CAFÉ CARLYLE

Carlyle Hotel, Madison Ave. at 76th St. (212-744-1600)—Sept. 10-28: Sutton Foster. On Broadway, Foster can do no wrong, and the same charm and vocal prowess that she displays on the Great White Way will be in evidence at this venerable and considerably more intimate venue.

CORNELIA STREET CAFÉ

29 Cornelia St. (212-989-9319)—Sept. 13: The virtuosic bassist and composer Mark Dresser fronts a quintet featuring a trusted associate, the saxophonist Marty Ehrlich, in celebration of the release of his new album, “Nourishments.” Sept. 14: Stephan Crump, another gifted bassist and composer, leads his chamber-jazz Rosetta Trio, with Liberty Ellman on acoustic guitar and Jamie Fox on electric guitar, in a show marking the release of their new record, “Thwirl.”

DIZZY’S CLUB COCA-COLA

Broadway at 60th St. (212-258-9595)—Sept. 12-15: Louis Hayes, the master hard-bop drummer who set the beat for the legendary Cannonball Adderley bands, leads his Jazz Communicators quintet featuring the saxophonist Abraham Burton and the vibraphonist Steve Nelson.

54 BELOW

254 W. 54th St. (646-476-3551)—Sept. 9 and Sept. 11-14: Duncan Sheik. Although he’s now best known as the composer of songs in the cherished Broadway hit “Spring Awakening,” Sheik started out as an indie singer-songwriter (“Barely Breathing” was his Clinton-era signature). Here, he returns to his roots as a performer.

GREENWICH HOUSE MUSIC SCHOOL

46 Barrow St. (212-242-4770)—Sept. 14: The pianist Matt Mitchell and the drummer Ches Smith, two deeply inquisitive new-jazz players, perform duets.

IRIDIUM

1650 Broadway, at 51st St. (212-582-2121)—Sept. 13-15: The unorthodox and dazzling jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan and his trio.

JAZZ AT KITANO

66 Park Ave., at 38th St. (212-885-7119)—Sept. 13-14: In 2012, the whip-smart pianist Frank Kimbrough released a fine trio album recorded at this night spot. For this two-night stint, he goes the quartet route, welcoming Steve Wilson, a much in-demand saxophonist, to the mix.

SMOKE

2751 Broadway, between 105th and 106th Sts. (212-864-6662)—Sept. 13-14: The Harold Mabern trio. Mabern, a seventy-seven-year-old native of the music-rich city of Memphis, Tennessee, once labelled himself a blues pianist who also plays jazz, but that doesn’t do justice to his expertise as a mainstream bop stylist.

VILLAGE VANGUARD

178 Seventh Ave. S., at 11th St. (212-255-4037)—Sept. 10-15: Last year, Dave King, the occasionally rambunctious drummer from the Bad Plus, released “I’ve Been Ringing You,” a lovely, decidedly low-key trio recording with the pianist Bill Carrothers and the bassist Billy Peterson. Their appearance here will draw from that under-the-radar treasure.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Art

MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM

Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800.” Opens Sept. 16. |  “Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective.” Through Sept. 22. |  “The Roof Garden Commission: Imran Qureshi.” Through Nov. 13. |  “Julia Margaret Cameron.” In the eighteen-sixties, one of photography’s most gifted amateurs was also one of its great pioneers. This small, smartly edited exhibition of work from the museum’s collection is a fine introduction to Cameron’s idiosyncratic take on Victorian aesthetics. Her dramatically lit portraits of Tennyson, Carlyle, Sir John Herschel, and other celebrated men, mostly friends and neighbors, have an unusual balance of intimacy and gravity. But her photographs of women are even more interesting and engaging. Whether regarding a parlor maid or her niece Julia Jackson (later Virginia Woolf’s mother), Cameron approached each subject with extraordinary empathy. As a result, her women have a startling presence—a quiet fire emphasized by the photographer’s signature use of soft focus. Through Jan. 5. |  “Everyday Epiphanies: Photography and Daily Life Since 1969.” Through Jan. 26. (Open daily, 10 to 5:30, and Friday and Saturday evenings until 9.)

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9400)—“Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes.” This exhaustive survey ends with a bang: a selection of big, turbulent drawings made during lectures by the legendary Swiss architect, in 1935, as he regaled U.S. audiences with his groundbreaking views on the urban landscape. The show opens with forgettable paintings from the architect’s youth, including several portraying Istanbul, where Corbusier’s exposure to Islamic architecture was formative. In between are models and architectural drawings of projects, ranging from the unrealized Plan Voisin, a 1925 scheme to raze Paris and rebuild it as the “radiant city,” to the sensual chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, in Ronchamp, built in 1954. The show also features a broad selection of Corbusier’s paintings, made under his real name, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, cubistic works that have a surprisingly raw energy, in stark contrast to the pristine rationalism of his buildings. Through Sept. 23. |  “American Modern: Hopper to O’Keeffe.” Through Jan. 26. |  “Walker Evans American Photographs.” Through Jan. 26. |  “Soundings: A Contemporary Score.” Through Nov. 3. |  “Images of an Infinite Film.” Through March 2. (Open daily, 10:30 to 5:30, and Friday evenings until 8.)

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

Fifth Ave. at 89th St. (212-423-3500)—“James Turrell.” Through Sept. 25. (Open Fridays through Wednesdays, 10 to 5:45, and Saturday evenings until 7:45.)

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

Madison Ave. at 75th St. (212-570-3600)—“Hopper Drawing.” This exhibition lets us into the factory of hand and mind that created “Nighthawks,” “New York Movie,” “Early Sunday Morning,” “Office at Night,” and other touchstones for which the word “iconic” is praise too faint. Those paintings hang here with entourages of studies that document the methods not of a realist painter but of a visual dramaturge. Every detail of a hand, a bed, a cornice, or a slant of light in a scene had to be auditioned and rehearsed in its role. The show explains the power of Hopper’s compositions but leaves their spiritual pang mysterious. What he was getting at—slight but profound epiphanies of ordinary life—could yield only to paint, and only to him. Also on view are masses of early work which establish Hopper’s talents, developed in Paris, as a master sketcher and an apt emulator of Post-Impressionism—gifts that he plowed under to achieve a mature style, which confronts the world not as a reflection but as a précis of soul-testing melancholy and lifesaving glints of grace. Through Oct. 6. (Open Wednesdays, Thursdays, and weekends, 11 to 6, and Fridays, 1 to 9.)

BROOKLYN MUSEUM

200 Eastern Parkway (718-638-5000)—“The Bruce High Quality Foundation: Ode to Joy, 2001-2013.” Through Sept. 22. |  “Valerie Hegarty: Alternative Histories.” Through Dec. 1. |  “ ‘Workt by Hand’: Hidden Labor and Historical Quilts.” Through Sept. 15. (Open Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 to 6, and Thursday evenings until 10.)

AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Central Park W. at 79th St. (212-769-5100)—“Whales: Giants of the Deep.” Through Jan. 5. (Open daily, 10 to 5:45.)

AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

Columbus Ave. at 66th St. (212-595-9533)—“Traylor in Motion: Wonders from New York Collections.” The American artist Bill Traylor, who was born into slavery in 1854, began making drawings at the age of eighty-five, when he was homeless and living in Montgomery, Alabama. Forty knockouts are exhibited here. Vigorous compositions—animals captured mid-leap, jaunty silhouettes of men and women—animate the page with sharp flashes of cobalt and scarlet. Traylor used whatever materials he could scare up, often scavenging discarded paper or cardboard. Asymmetrical proportions worked to his advantage, particularly when he expressed hard social truths: one image, on a triangular shard of cardboard, deftly captures the tension of a man with a cane, balancing on a fence as a ferocious dog barks beneath him. Through Sept. 22. (Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 7:30, and Sundays, noon to 6.)

ASIA SOCIETY

Park Ave. at 70th St. (212-288-6400)—“Iran Modern.” Through Jan. 5. (Open Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 to 6, and Friday evenings until 9.)

THE CLOISTERS

Fort Tryon Park (212-923-3700)—“Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet.” Through Dec. 8. (Open Tuesdays through Sundays, 9:30 to 5:15.)

DIA ART FOUNDATION AT THE FOREST HOUSES

Tinton Ave. between 163rd and 165th Sts., the Bronx (212-989-5566)—“Thomas Hirschhorn: Gramsci Monument.” Through Sept. 15. (Open daily, 10 to 6.)

FRICK COLLECTION

1 E. 70th St. (212-288-0700)—“Precision and Splendor: Clocks and Watches at the Frick Collection.” Through Feb. 2. (Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 to 6, and Sundays, 11 to 5.)

GREY ART GALLERY

100 Washington Sq. E. (212-998-6780)—“Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art.” Through Dec. 7. (Open Tuesdays through Fridays, 11 to 6, Saturdays, 11 to 5, and Wednesday evenings until 8.)

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY

1133 Sixth Ave., at 43rd St. (212-857-0000)—“A Different Kind of Order: The I.C.P. Triennial.” Through Sept. 22. (Open Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 to 6, and Friday evenings until 8.)

JEWISH MUSEUM

Fifth Ave. at 92nd St. (212-423-3200)—“Jack Goldstein x 10,000.” Through Sept. 29. |  “Elaine Reichek: A Postcolonial Kinderhood Revisited.” Through Oct. 20. |  “Chagall: Love, War, and Exile.” Opens Sept. 15. |  “threeASFOUR: Mer Ka Ba.” Opens Sept. 15. (Open Saturdays through Tuesdays, 11 to 5:45, Thursdays, 11 to 8, and Fridays, 11 to 4.)

NEW MUSEUM

235 Bowery, at Prince St. (212-219-1222)—“Erika Vogt: Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll.” Through Sept. 22. |  “Ellen Gallagher: Don’t Axe Me.” This disappointingly unfocussed show may send fans of the forty-seven-year-old American artist packing for London, where the Tate Modern has organized a concurrent mid-career survey—and, presumably, secured all the best loans. To Gallagher’s credit, she refuses to rest on the laurels of one signature style. She first garnered acclaim in the nineties for paintings and drawings that hung political themes on minimalist armature, extracting motifs from minstrel caricatures (extra-wide eyes, absurdly full lips) and repeating them in serial patterns. Those works, with their searing critique and dry wit, surpass more recent pieces: deft but slight watercolors featuring underwater creatures, from 2004, and new paintings of gnarled, reddish branches, which lack much intrigue. A 2010 16-mm. film and slide installation about a shipwreck, housed in a fussily designed black box, is little more than atmospheric. Through Sept. 15. (Open Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 to 6, and Thursday evenings until 9.)

NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

170 Central Park W., at 77th St. (212-873-3400)—“AIDS in New York: The First Five Years.” Through Sept. 15. (Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 to 6, Friday evenings until 8, and Sundays, 11 to 5.)

STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM

144 W. 125th St. (212-864-4500)—“Robert Pruitt: Women.” Through Oct. 27. |  “Things in Themselves: Steffani Jemison, Jennifer Packer, and Cullen Washington, Jr.” Through Oct. 27. |  “Body Language.” Through Oct. 27. (Open Thursdays and Fridays, noon to 9, Saturdays, 10 to 6, and Sundays, noon to 6.)

GALLERIES—UPTOWN

“ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG AND PHOTOGRAPHY”

The Pop artist’s early black-and-white photographs have enjoyed a revival of late, and several examples from the fifties and sixties are here, including six portraits of a somber Cy Twombly. But individual images are the exception in an exhibition that takes a broader view of Rauschenberg’s use, throughout his career, of photographs that he made or appropriated for collage-based compositions. In juxtapositions that have the logic of dreams, images of shop signs, hubcaps, chickens, and garbage pails—some smudged into abstraction—combine to suggest a fragmented, post-Pop world. Through Nov. 2. (Pace/MacGill, 32 E. 57th St. 212-759-7999.)

Short List

WALTERCIO CALDAS: Gering + Lopez, 730 Fifth Ave., at 57th St. 646-336-7183. Opens Sept. 12. WALTER DAHN: Venus Over Manhattan, 980 Madison Ave., at 76th St. 212-980-0700. Opens Sept. 12. JEAN DUBUFFET: Pace, 32 E. 57th St. 212-421-3292. Through Oct. 26. WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: Marian Goodman, 24 W. 57th St. 212-977-7160. Opens Sept. 17. LIU XIAODONG: Boone, 745 Fifth Ave., at 57th St. 212-752-2929. Through Oct. 26. EDMUND DE WAAL: Gagosian, 980 Madison Ave., at 76th St. 212-744-2313. Opens Sept. 12. “TUMESCENCE”: Werner, 4 E. 77th St. 212-988-1623. Through Dec. 2.

GALLERIES—CHELSEA

DIDIER MASSARD

The French photographer’s fabricated landscapes fall somewhere between Fabergé and Disney. Small-scale dioramas, which are constructed in Massard’s Paris studio, are lit like Tiffany’s windows, and reproduced at an extravagant size in storybook vistas and animal studies (illustrations for the artist’s “L’Atlas Imaginaire”). A tiger, an elephant, and a monkey are pictured in quasi-realistic environments, but most of Massard’s images are obviously—and fabulously—fake. A fluorescent bird is perched by a swamp on a vine-covered tree, the Tower of Babel rises from a rubble-strewn plain, and the ruins of a Gothic cathedral share the blue ocean floor with coral and jellyfish. Through Oct. 19 (Saul, 535 W. 22nd St. 212-627-2410.)

“GRETCHEN BENDER: TRACKING THE THRILL”

Near the end of the multipart video installation “Total Recall”—screening now, with breakneck intensity, at the Kitchen, where it was first exhibited in 1987—fireworks erupt in reverse. As bright blooms of light fade abruptly to darkness, the footage could serve as a metaphor for the career of this underappreciated member of the Pictures Generation, who died in 2004, at the age of fifty-three. Bender was an artist ahead of her time, preoccupied with sensory overload, the insinuation of corporate culture into private life, and the conflation of “reality” and “television” years before lives were lived on the Internet, let alone on the small screens of smartphones. In life, Bender sought a bigger stage than the art world, as seen here in music videos she edited for bands including New Order and Megadeth and in the pulse-quickening opening sequence she conceived for the TV series “America’s Most Wanted.” Bender had a prescient gift for critiquing mass media even as she exploited it. “Total Recall” screens hourly through Sept. 21; the exhibition upstairs continues through Oct. 5. (The Kitchen, 512 W. 19th St. 212-255-5793.)

Short List

NATHAN CARTER: Kaplan, 525 W. 21st St. 212-645-7335. Through Oct. 26. LESLIE HEWITT: Sikkema Jenkins, 530 W. 22nd St. 212-929-2262. Through Oct. 5. CHARLINE VON HEYL / ALLAN MCCOLLUM: Petzel, 456 W. 18th St. 212-680-9467. Through Oct. 5. EIKOH HOSOE: Yoshinaga, 547 W. 27th St. 212-268-7132. Opens Sept. 12. MATTHEW DAY JACKSON: Hauser & Wirth, 511 W. 18th St. 212-790-3900. Through Oct. 19. SOL LEWITT: Cooper, 534 W. 21st St. 212-255-1105. Through Oct. 10. BARRY MCGEE: Cheim & Read, 547 W. 25th St. 212-242-7727. Opens Sept. 12. RON MILEWICZ: Harris, 529 W. 20th St. 212-463-9666. Through Oct. 12. RAYMOND PETTIBON: Zwirner, 519 W. 19th St. 212-517-8677. Opens Sept. 12. JOSH SMITH: Luhring Augustine, 531 W. 24th St. 212-206-9100. Opens Sept. 13. “SCULPTURE AFTER ARTSCHWAGER”: Nolan, 527 W. 29th St. 212-925-6190. Opens Sept. 12. “SOME DREAMERS OF THE GOLDEN DREAM”: Greene Naftali, 508 W. 26th St. 212-463-7770. Through Oct. 5.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Dance

NEW YORK CITY BALLET

The fall season opens with a week of performances of Peter Martins’s “Swan Lake,” with colorful, garish designs by the Danish abstract expressionist Per Kirkeby. Created for the Royal Danish Ballet and first seen here in 1999, the two-act production has some distracting elements, like the jester who bounds through the court scenes. Still, the company boasts some of the most beguiling Odettes around, including the lush, tragic Sara Mearns (this is her signature role) and the cooler and more regal Teresa Reichlen. (David H. Koch, Lincoln Center. 212-496-0600. Sept. 17 at 7:30. Through Sept. 22.)

BEAT FESTIVAL

The acronym for this two-week event, now in its second year, stands for Brooklyn Emerging Artists in Theater. One who should be better known is Storyboard P, a street dancer of extraordinary fluidity and delicacy. He appears at a free lunchtime show at MetroTech Commons (Sept. 13), and performs his “Magna Carta Story” at the Brooklyn Museum (Sept. 14) and in front of Barclays Center (Sept. 17). Yanira Castro’s new production “Nancy,” in which four soloists attempt to embody the performer Nancy Ellis, is also among the first week’s attractions. See beatbrooklyn.com for full schedule. (Various locations. 347-762-3281. Sept. 12-21.)

OUI DANSE

Brice Mousset, a French choreographer and teacher of contemporary dance in New York, launched his company earlier this year. His new installation, “French Amour,” emphasizes Gallic culture, from title to the retro design elements and recordings of chansons. Love stories play out all over the space. Wine will be served. (Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, Second Ave. at 10th St. 866-811-4111. Sept. 12-14 at 8.)

LEIMAY

“Becoming-Corpus,” the latest creation by the Butoh-trained choreographer Ximena Garnica and the video artist Shige Moriya, furthers their experiments in transforming bodies by means of light. Eight dancers, accompanied by discordant sounds, serve as moving screens for geometric patterns of projected video. (BAM Fishman Space, 321 Ashland Pl., Brooklyn. 718-636-4100. Sept. 12-14 at 8 and Sept. 15 at 6.)

“NOTATIONOTATION”

After its post-renovation reopening last year, the Drawing Center inaugurates its new performance series with this collaboration between the German-born visual artist Susan Hefuna and the conceptually minded choreographer Luca Veggetti. The site-specific work is a kind of happening in various parts; it starts off with Hefuna’s video installation depicting pedestrians in a busy intersection, which is then reinterpreted by the artist as a chalk drawing on the gallery floor. The dancers, through Veggetti’s sinuous, spare choreography, gradually erase the drawing with their stockinged feet. (The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster St. 212-219-2166. Sept. 16-18 at 7.)

“FALL FOR DANCE”

From the sixties through the eighties, free dance in Central Park was an annual occurrence in the form of the New York Dance Festival. That event’s populism and eclecticism were inspirations for City Center’s “Fall for Dance,” which begins its tenth year with two free shows in the home of Shakespeare in the Park. The lineup is high energy and blue chip: New York City Ballet, Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, STREB Extreme Action Company leaping from a thirty-foot scaffolding, and the Paul Taylor Dance Company running and sliding through the imperishable joy of “Esplanade.” (Delacorte, Central Park. Enter at 81st St. at Central Park W. 212-967-7555. Sept. 16-17 at 8.)

“ROBERTO BOLLE AND FRIENDS”

As famous for his good looks as for his impeccable performances of “Romeo and Juliet” and “Swan Lake,” the Italian ballet dancer Roberto Bolle tries his hand as an impresario. This touring show follows the usual gala formula: lots of stars, including Alina Somova, of the Mariinsky; Herman Cornejo, of American Ballet Theatre; and of course Bolle himself, performing a series of solos and duets. Some, like “The Dying Swan,” to be performed by Somova, are chestnuts, but others, such as an excerpt from the late-nineteenth-century Italian tribute to science “Excelsior,” are rarities. Throw in some contemporary works, like Russell Maliphant’s “Two Times Two” and a multimedia spectacle for Bolle, “Prototype,” and you’ve got yourself a show. (City Center, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. Sept. 17 at 7.)

“THE METAMORPHOSIS”

Many gallons of viscous brown goo will be spilled at the Joyce for the two-week run of this interpretation of Kafka’s novella. Arthur Pita, the South African choreographer, conceived the show for the Royal Ballet in 2011. Gregor Samsa is played with almost intolerable grotesquerie by the preternaturally contortive Royal Ballet dancer Edward Watson. It’s a tour de force but not a one-man show; Samsa’s family is part of the action, as is the ingenious, shape-shifting set. (175 Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. Sept. 17 at 7:30. Through Sept. 29.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Classical

CONCERTS IN TOWN

TRINITY WALL STREET BRITTEN FESTIVAL

Vocal music will be prominent in any festival celebrating the great British composer Benjamin Britten, who would have been a hundred this year. Julian Wachner, the music director at Trinity Wall Street and the conductor of the Novus NY ensemble, continues his extensive series (which runs through the end of the year) with a concert featuring two of Britten’s most popular song cycles: the radiant “Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings” (with Vale Rideout) and the glamorous Rimbaud cycle “Les Illuminations” (with the soprano Sarah Brailey). (Broadway at Wall St. Sept. 12 at 1. No tickets required.)

ELLIOTT SHARP AND EITHER/OR

“Eavesdropping,” a wide-ranging avant-garde concert series (curated by Guy Barash) that ran for three years at the Tank, has moved to Spectrum, an intimate second-floor hole-in-the-wall that has become a center for some of the Lower East Side’s more daring concerts. The first of the season is offered by Sharp, a virtuoso guitarist and a legend of the New York scene, who teams up with the intrepid piano-and-percussion duo of Richard Carrick and David Shively for “Foliage,” an ambitious work laid out in graphic score, as well as several solos, duets, and improvisations. (121 Ludlow St. spectrumnyc.com. Sept. 12 at 8.)

IAN HOBSON: “JOHANNES BRAHMS”

Hobson, long a noted pianist and conductor, is establishing a Gotham beachhead (with several colleagues from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) at the DiMenna Center to offer a series of concerts illuminating aspects of the music of Brahms. The second, devoted to piano music, features the Piano Sonata No. 2 in F-Sharp Minor and the four books of Hungarian Dances (with the pianist Edward Rath assisting on the dances for four hands). (450 W. 37th St. brownpapertickets.com. Sept. 12 at 7:30. Through Nov. 14.)

SONGFUSION: JOHN HARBISON

Harbison, the dean of Boston composers, has written notable works in the orchestral and operatic genres, but it is for his songs and chamber music—composed in an intellectually intricate but expressive tonal style—that he is most renowned. This young combine of singers (including the soprano Mary Mackenzie and the baritone Michael Kelly) will be joined by a group of fine instrumentalists in a seventy-fifth-birthday concert that features songs from such cycles as “Motetti di Montale” and “Simple Daylight,” as well as “November 19, 1828” (a tombeau for Franz Schubert), for piano quartet, and “Songs America Loves to Sing,” for winds, strings, and piano. (National Opera Center, 330 Seventh Ave. songfusion.org. Sept. 13 at 7.)

ISSUE PROJECT ROOM: PAULINE OLIVEROS

The godmother of American experimentalist music is one of the most illustrious of the sixty established and emerging artists who are helping I.P.R. celebrate its tenth anniversary in a two-month festival, “Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain.” This concert features “Primordial/Lift,” an evening-length work in which an ensemble of guitar, violin, accordion, and glass drones is matched with a low-frequency oscillator that mimics the resonate frequency of the earth. A new work by the Chicago-based composer Olivia Block completes the program. (22 Boerum Pl., Brooklyn. issueprojectroom.org. Sept. 14 at 8.)

TRIBECA NEW MUSIC: BOLCOM AND MORRIS

William Bolcom, the dazzling composer-pianist, and Joan Morris, his longtime muse and chanteuse, are celebrating their seventy-fifth and seventieth birthdays this year. Beloved for their renditions of classics from the American Songbook (and from Bolcom’s own work), they take the stage at the Cell Theatre for a concert to benefit the Tribeca organization. Two young singers of note, Adrienne Denich and Michael Slattery, also perform. (338 W. 23rd St. tribecanewmusic.org. Sept. 15 at 3 and 8.)

“ZORN@60: MASADA MARATHON”

Lincoln Center did it in the spring, and the Metropolitan Museum and Miller Theatre will soon fall into line. But, for now, it’s the turn of N.Y.U.’s Skirball Center to fête John Zorn, the jazz-classical-world music phenom who, more than anyone else, sums up the musical possibilities of the current New York moment. This three-and-a-half hour concert brings together twelve ensembles and solo musicians—including Cyro Baptista’s Banquet of the Spirits, the pianist Uri Caine, and Zorn’s own Electric Masada—to perform his complete “Book of Angels,” from 2004. (566 LaGuardia Pl. 212-352-3101. Sept. 15 at 7.)

ONE WORLD SYMPHONY

Sung Jin Hong’s orchestra is a hardy survivor on the Gotham scene, putting on ebullient concerts with a young freelance ensemble. This program, “Vendetta,” offers orchestral and vocal excerpts from Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” and “Rigoletto” and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Tsar’s Bride,” as well as music from Shostakovich’s mighty Tenth Symphony. (Church of the Holy Apostles, 296 Ninth Ave. Sept. 15-16 at 8. Tickets at the door.)

“ANNA NICOLE”

In American opera, lyricism is painfully sincere; in British opera, it is largely a tool of satire. A fine example is “Anna Nicole,” a work that arrived with a bang at London’s Royal Opera House in 2011. (The U.S. première is a co-production of BAM and New York City Opera.) Its subject, as you may well have heard, is the improbable rise and seedy fall of Anna Nicole Smith, the actress, Playboy centerfold, and would-be heiress. The music, by the eminent modernist Mark-Anthony Turnage, is bluesy, seductive, and strikingly hard-edged; the libretto, by Richard Thomas, is strewn with enough four-letter words to rival any R-rated film. The result is brilliantly entertaining—and not unsympathetic to its central character. Sarah Joy Miller is Anna Nicole; Robert Brubaker portrays her aged second husband; and Rod Gilfry is her lawyer, Stern. Richard Jones directs; Steven Sloane conducts. (Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Ave. bam.org. Sept. 17 at 7:30. Through Sept. 28.)

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC

While most orchestras content themselves with an opening night, the Philharmonic presents a run of opening ceremonies that offer something for everyone. Mid-month brings the first installment of its Film Week, in which Constantine Kitsopoulos, in his Philharmonic début, conducts music from a host of Hitchcock films (including “Vertigo,” “Dial M for Murder,” and “North by Northwest”), with the matching scenes projected during the performances. Alec Baldwin, the orchestra’s favorite friend, hosts the first night; the redoubtable Sam Waterston hosts the second. (Avery Fisher Hall. 212-875-5656. Sept. 17-18 at 7:30.)

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM: “THE GRAND TOUR”

Since last season, the Met, with Limor Tomer as its new manager of concerts and lectures, has tried, sometimes too strenuously, to use musical programs to promote its art collection. This season’s efforts, however, are off to a flying start in a program in which four exceptional early-music authorities—the ensembles Quicksilver, Tenet, and Dark Horse Consort, as well as the harpischordist Jory Vinikour—perform successive twenty-minute sets in four different rooms of the museum’s new European Paintings Galleries, 1250-1800. (The superb violinist Robert Mealy is a member of all three ensembles.) The musical selections are by Lassus, Isaac, Rameau, and Venetian composers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. 212-570-3949. Sept. 17-18 at 8.)

OUT OF TOWN

SOUTH MOUNTAIN CONCERTS

This end-of-summer series—just five Sundays—makes up in star power what it lacks in size. The second of several gilt-edged chamber groups appearing this year is the long-admired Orion String Quartet, the resident quartet of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which performs Schubert’s Quartet No. 13 in A Minor (“Rosamunde”), Schumann’s Quartet in F Major, Op. 41, No. 2, and Dvořák’s Piano Quintet (with a pianist beloved in the Berkshires, Peter Serkin). (Pittsfield, Mass. southmountainconcerts.org. Sept. 15 at 3.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Movies

OPENINGS

BLUE CAPRICE

Alexandre Moors directed this drama, based on the true story of the Beltway snipers. Starring Isaiah Washington, Tequan Richmond, Joey Lauren Adams, and Tim Blake Nelson. Opening Sept. 13. (In limited release.)

THE FAMILY

A drama, starring Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Tommy Lee Jones, about a crime family in Normandy. Directed by Luc Besson. Opening Sept. 13. (In wide release.)

INFORMANT

Jamie Meltzer directed this documentary portrait of Brandon Darby, a left-wing anarchist who provided information to the F.B.I. Opening Sept. 13. (In limited release.)

JAYNE MANSFIELD’S CAR

Billy Bob Thornton directed and stars in this drama, set in 1969, about the residents of a small Alabama town who clash with a family recently arrived from London. Co-starring Robert Duvall, John Hurt, and Kevin Bacon. Opening Sept. 13. (In limited release.)

MOTHER OF GEORGE

Reviewed below in Now Playing. Opening Sept. 13. (In limited release.)

WADJDA

Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema. Opening Sept. 13. (In limited release.)

NOW PLAYING

THE BUTLER

A high-minded, didactic, but irresistible entertainment in which the long White House service of an African-American butler, Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), is used as a prism through which we view the development of the civil-rights movement. As the liveried Cecil, silent and dignified, serves sandwiches and coffee and exchanges courtesies with a variety of chief executives—including L.B.J. (Liev Schreiber), who addresses him while sitting on the can—Cecil’s son, Louis (David Oyelowo), becomes a militant and manages to hit every highlight, including the Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins in 1960, the Freedom Rides in 1961, and Martin Luther King’s motel room on the day that he’s shot. History and family life are not merely joined; they are held together in a mutual hammerlock. The movie’s right-mindedness is relieved now and then by scenes at Cecil’s house, where his wife, Gloria (Oprah Winfrey), grows restive and resentful, drinks, and dallies with a neighbor, played by Terrence Howard as a lazily insinuating porch lizard. With John Cusack, as Richard Nixon, and the English actor Alan Rickman doing Ronald Reagan with a wedge of high-riding hair and a voice as soft and slow as poured molasses. Written by Danny Strong. Directed by Lee Daniels.—David Denby (Reviewed in our issue of 8/26/13.) (In wide release.)

BUTTER ON THE LATCH

Suffering a sudden Brooklyn breakdown—a freak-out of vulnerability from life on the ambiguous edge of art and abuse—Sarah (Sarah Small), a young performance artist, heads to a rustic California “Balkan camp,” along with her friend Isolde (Isolde Chae-Lawrence), for a month of training in folk music and dance. There, the primal rhythms and ancient spirits of tradition fuse with the deep rural darkness and the magnetic pull of the redwoods to ensnare the women in a hypnotic bond of desire and an even more terrifying artistic nightmare. The friends’ erotic confidences veer toward sexual rivalry with the arrival of a tall and diffident classmate (Charlie Hewson). Carrying flashlights and wearing headlamps in the deep underbrush, Small and Chae-Lawrence convey looming frenzy with easygoing charm; the brazenly hallucinatory videography, by Ashley Connor, looks at faces and landscapes with penetrating detail while evoking spirit worlds and timeless mysteries. With her starkly sensitive, hyper-alert inventiveness, the director, Josephine Decker, seems to be filming in a state of permanent sleeplessness; every image and sound has the impulsive energy of a creation wrenched from a void into which she would leap again joyfully.—Richard Brody (Anthology Film Archives; Sept. 13.)

THE CONVERSATION

The writer-director Francis Ford Coppola took a suggestion from his fellow-filmmaker Irvin Kershner—to check out the expanding world of electronic eavesdropping—and developed it into a near-triumph about a hermetic, guilt-wracked bugging master named Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), who believes he hears intimations of murder on his surveillance tapes. When it premièred, in 1974, the technological tricks and sleek corporate backdrop evoked Watergate. Thanks to Walter Murch’s keen, intuitive sound montage and Hackman’s clammy, subtle performance, the movie captures a more elusive and universal fear—that of losing the power to respond, emotionally and morally, to the evidence of one’s own senses. Bespectacled and balding, Hackman conveys a clumsy sensitivity that compensates for the wispiness of the script; he’s abetted by John Cazale, as Caul’s assistant; Allen Garfield, as Caul’s competitor; and Cindy Williams, Frederick Forrest, and Robert Duvall, as the trio involved in the homicide plot.—Michael Sragow (Anthology Film Archives; Sept. 12 and Sept. 15.)

DRINKING BUDDIES

A group of young employees of a Chicago brewery work together, hang out together, and drink beer—they drink it at lunch, at dinner, even at breakfast. The hops-enhanced, slightly giddy sociability is a large part of what the movie is about, though we can see, amid the teasing and jostling, that something serious is going on: Luke (Jake Johnson), a smart, funny guy with a bushy black beard and penetrating dark eyes, can’t stop looking at Kate (Olivia Wilde), the startlingly beautiful woman who does the promotional work for the brewery. Unfortunately, they are both committed to other partners. Joe Swanberg, the speedy up-from-mumblecore writer-director (fifteen features in eight years), set out a general idea of what he wanted to accomplish in each scene and then let the actors work out the details. It’s no surprise that much of the conversational space is filled with hesitations, backing and filling, plans to talk about something another time. Swanberg moves smoothly and gently through the characters’ lives, but this amiable movie about missed happiness cries out for the revelations that a great dramatist—or even a talented screenwriter and director working together—can give us.—D.D. (9/9/13) (In limited release.)

ELYSIUM

Neill Blomkamp’s busy and indignant new film is set in the year 2154. The title refers to a space station: a haven for the wealthy, spinning just beyond the limits of our polluted planet, and clearly related to the elegant wheel that turned in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Not that Blomkamp’s manner owes much to Kubrick; where the latter’s movie finds serenity and wonder, the new film fidgets with anxiety, and the camera cannot hold still for long. Our hero is Max (Matt Damon), who, like the majority of humans, toils and sweats on Earth, where the cops are intemperate robots. After an accident at work, and with nothing to lose, he takes on a reckless task, assailing an evil billionaire (William Fichtner) and winding up on a shuttle to Elysium, hell-bent on reaching this artificial heaven and obtaining justice. The sequence of events is light on logic, yet such is the director’s urge to muscle us along that we barely notice. Politically, his movie flames with insurrectionary fervor, but its most cogent virtue is one of texture; rather than viewing a future world from a distance and admiring its digital enhancements, we feel thrust into the thick of it with such immediacy and sensory impact that, like most of its inhabitants, we can only dream of escape. With Jodie Foster, miscast as a frosty villainness, and Sharlto Copley, well cast as a maniacal rogue.—Anthony Lane (8/12 & 19/13) (In wide release.)

A GIRL IN EVERY PORT

In this rowdy and sly comedy, from 1928, Howard Hawks set the template for bromance, a friendship between two heterosexual men that withstands the test of erotic jealousy. Spike (Victor McLaglen), a big, strong, glad-handing sailor, discovers that another sailor has been beating him to all the names in his little black book—the slight, shrewdly reserved and quietly stylish Bill (Robert Armstrong). They team up after some barroom roughhousing in Marseilles, where Spike falls heavily for a carnival performer, Mam’selle Godiva (Louise Brooks), and jumps ship to pursue her. The pairing of two men, a naïve peacock and a savvy panther, is one that Hawks would often revisit, and Brooks’s sleek, boyish slenderness—and her coruscating intelligence—mesh perfectly with the director’s designs. Here, brawling between men takes the place of sex; a repeated post-fisticuffs trope of Spike straightening out Bill’s finger riotously foregrounds the subtext; and the friends’ grand reunion has all the tenderness—it almost leads to a kiss—that’s missing from the movie’s love scenes. Already, with his ironically understated direction, Hawks was a master of time, with slow builds that leap dizzyingly ahead in the flash of a glance; the unstable pace keeps the action balanced on the sharp edge of tragedy and comedy—and, in the years to come, he’d use this setup for both. Silent.—R.B. (Museum of the Moving Image; Sept. 15.)

GOOD OL’ FREDA

This warmhearted documentary portrait of Freda Kelly—the Beatles’ secretary for their entire decade-long adventure—offers a remarkable perspective on the local base for their world-historical launch. A teen-age typist in her native Liverpool, she was taken to lunch at the club where the quartet (then featuring Pete Best on drums) played daily, and was instantly smitten. Quickly becoming a backstage regular, she was hired by their manager, Brian Epstein, and served as a loyal (and passionately discreet) aide to the musicians. She also managed the group’s fan club with a fierce integrity (she kept band members’ old shirts and hair clippings to send to fans and got Starr to sleep on an enthusiast’s pillowcase) that, she explains, was rooted in sympathy arising from her own fandom—or fanaticism. Yet Kelly was also the quartet’s Liverpool neighbor and knew their families, even becoming a surrogate daughter to Ringo’s mother (throughout, Kelly refers to Starr only as “Richie”), and her portrait of their place in Liverpool society is as tender as it is revealing. The generous and evocative collection of archival photos is seemingly animated by the Kelly’s lively reminiscences, but her discretion is matched by her modesty (she still works as a secretary); the family story behind her own long-delayed moment in the spotlight is bittersweet. Directed by Ryan White.—R.B. (In limited release.)

THE GRANDMASTER

The writer-director Wong Kar-wai, recently a creator of romantic-erotic dramas (“Happy Together,” “In the Mood for Love”), has turned back to martial-arts moviemaking; his kung-fu warriors fight in dark rain, which falls in torrents, as in a forties film noir. But every raindrop in this movie appears to shine, through some digital-spiritual miracle, in iridescent glory. In 1936, as the Japanese are beginning their brutal occupation of China, the kung-fu masters of North and South meet in solemn competition. Ip Man (Tony Leung), an exponent of the Wing Chun style of fighting, and Gong Er (the flawlessly beautiful Ziyi Zhang), who practices another style, slash and spin in a stunning whirl—both the cinematography (by Philippe Le Sourd) and the editing (by Wong himself) have an indelible high excitement and precision. Unfortunately, the version of the movie released here has been seriously cut, and the film’s epic structure (it carries Ip Man up to the nineteen-fifties) now lies in ruins, with mysterious references and characters who appear out of nowhere. And Wong leaves central questions unanswered. What does unarmed fighting mean in the era of modern mechanized warfare? Did the various warriors play any role in the resistance to the Japanese occupation?—D.D. (9/9/13) (In limited release.)

MOTHER OF GEORGE

This drama offers the intrinsic pleasure of visiting a rarely filmed milieu—Brooklyn’s community of Nigerian émigrés—but as directed by Andrew Dosunmu and written by Darci Picoult, the movie is seemingly scripted down to the last detail, squeezing out any documentary interest. The story concerns a newlywed couple, Adenike (Danai Gurira), a young woman who’d been living here on her own, and Ayodele (Isaach De Bankolé), a somewhat older man who’s surrounded by family and owns a restaurant. When they have trouble conceiving a child, his mother (Bukky Ajayi) tries to drive the couple apart, and conflict ensues. Dosunmu nails every twist and turn in place; his faux-impressionistic imagery dangles like tinsel from an iron framework, and folkloric scenes of the wedding ceremony and of traditional-medicine practices are also merely decorative. To earn money on her own, Adenike takes a job cleaning houses—a subplot that could almost be a movie on its own—but Dosunmu doesn’t include a frame of it; the story remains sealed in a plotted enclosure in which the characters are trapped, and the formidable, deeply engaged cast of actors can’t do much about it.—R.B. (In limited release.)

MURDER BY CONTRACT

The director Irving Lerner had extensive experience with documentaries when he made this film noir, in 1958, and it shows. His antihero, Claude (Vince Edwards), is a workingman who, in his struggle to make a down payment on a house, decides to become a “contractor.” Claude comes equipped with a dazzling set of deadly wiles—but also a regular guy’s hangups, which get in the way of his big job: the killing of a woman who is about to testify against a high-level mobster. Much of the movie is taken up with the absorbing practicalities of murder; scenes of Claude’s self-punishing domestic workouts provide the template for the now familiar cinematic trope of the closeted killer’s do-it-yourself training. But, as in life itself, the absurd often comes to the fore, embodied here in the bumbling antics and colorful banter of Claude’s two handlers (Herschel Bernardi and Phillip Pine), who seem refracted from Hemingway’s story “The Killers.” Lerner directs with a wary neutrality that leaves judgment aside; he lets the killer speak his piece, resulting in a few politicized surprises.—R.B. (Anthology Film Archives; Sept. 12 and Sept. 17.)

OUR NIXON

For anyone who lived through it, Watergate has never really gone away, and, in Penny Lane’s shrewdly edited collection of news footage and “home movies” taken by members of the Nixon White House staff, there they are again, the familiar cast of characters: Dwight Chapin, the straight-arrow special assistant who hired the dirty trickster Donald Segretti; the chief of staff H. R. (Bob) Haldeman, calculating, bland, inarticulate, with a malevolent upper lip and a forced bright smile; John Ehrlichman, fraudulent, ironic, the most intelligent member of this semi-fascist apparat; and the President himself, at times masterful, at other times desperate, alcoholic, and sad. Most of the footage taken by the staff is of little distinction, so Lane resorts to the Oval Office audiotapes, and makes special use of the late-night telephone call in which Nixon, deep in Watergate and seeking reassurance from his henchmen that all was well, finally realizes that his staff would no longer take the fall for him. This moment is as devastating an impression of a powerful man facing the end as we are ever likely to have.—D.D. (9/9/13) (In limited release.)

PASSION

Obsessed by the video trail of modern life, whether it’s stealthy (surveillance cameras) or overt (lovers’ bedroom selfies), Brian De Palma builds this heavily plotted thriller on a witty commercial for a smartphone that Isabelle (Noomi Rapace), a young Berlin art director, shoots on her smartphone. Her boss, Christine (Rachel McAdams), who has been brazenly flirting with her, takes credit for the idea—and, suspecting that her own boyfriend, Dirk (Paul Anderson), another executive at the firm, has been sleeping with Isabelle, contrives intricate vengeance against both of them. De Palma’s virtuosic joy in image-making—with subtly skewed and wildly cocked angles, lurid closeups, overhead shots, needle-threading camera moves, acidulous lighting, and jolting color contrasts—is irrepressible, and one extended split-screen sequence is astonishingly meticulous and seductive. Yet the movie shows, above all, why the mid-level drama is almost extinct: despite De Palma’s lavish proof of what he can accomplish with classical technique, the movie comes off as too much for too little, a collection of mechanisms that decorate mechanisms. The finely woven fabric of sex and death, crime and punishment seems more like a totem than a fetish. This deliberate throwback, with its open Hitchcockian borrowings and allusions, is overwhelming in its exertions, its display of talent, and its insignificance.—R.B. (In limited release and video on demand.)

SOFT IN THE HEAD

Nathan Silver’s raucous, disturbing new film is a shrewdly conceived yet emotionally unhinged blend of uproarious situations and devastating outcomes. It stars Sheila Etxeberría as Natalia, a young New York woman whose boyfriend reacts with fury when she heads off to her friend Hannah’s Shabbat dinner without him; as a result, Natalia arrives late, drunk, and homeless, and ends up spending the night in a small private shelter, where the saintly manager, Maury (Ed Ryan), protects her from the advances of the facility’s uncouth and unbalanced residents. Knowing that Hannah’s introverted, socially inept brother, Nathan (Carl Kranz), has a crush on her, Natalia turns him into another protector—in the process, sowing trouble with his observant family. The setup and several way stations of the plot are ready-made Jewish jokes, but the emotional stakes are no laughing matter; Silver aims every scene at its point of maximal vulnerability, and the high-strung performances seem to shred the actors in real time. Silver achieves a tone reminiscent of films by the Hollywood shock-master Samuel Fuller in its combination of principle and violence, delight in the grotesque tall tale and horror at the actual pain. With Melanie J. Scheiner, as Hannah; Moshe and Nechama Kessler, as her long-suffering parents; and Theodore Bouloukos, as a shelter resident addicted to decaf coffee.—R.B. (Anthology Film Archives; Sept. 15.)

THE TARNISHED ANGELS

In 1932, an itinerant troupe of stunt and race fliers at a New Orleans waterfront fairground attracts the attention of Burke Devlin (Rock Hudson), an ambitious and colorful journalist. His fascination with Roger Shumann (Robert Stack), a First World War ace pilot with a lust for danger, is amplified by his attraction to the flier’s wife, LaVerne (Dorothy Malone), a flashy blond parachute jumper and an object of desire wherever she goes—for Roger’s crack mechanic, Jiggs (Jack Carson), and for all the hangers-on, but not for Roger himself, who’s ready to betray her for a serviceable airplane. In this 1957 adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel “Pylon,” the director, Douglas Sirk, mines exotic Americana—the rustic carnival, supercharged with industrial technology—for an enduring philosophical strain of proto-feminist endurance in a land that’s both made and menaced by its intrepid warriors. With its tangled shadows, fun-house mirrors, wrenching angles, and glaring lights, the wide-screen black-and-white photography evokes the psychological dislocations and distortions of the film’s band of reckless and rootless outsiders and expressionistically thrusts Sirk’s direction front and center even as the script’s grand melodrama puts the teller of tales at the heart of the story.—R.B. (MOMA; Sept. 17.)

A TEACHER

The moody wide-screen compositions of this unromantic melodrama, written and directed by Hannah Fidell, offer cautionary lessons on the division of cinematic labor. The story concerns Diana Watts (Lindsay Burdge), a young English instructor in an Austin, Texas, high school, who finds her student, Eric Tull (Will Brittain), a strapping senior with a reserved charm and a confident grin, irresistible. Their affair is his delight and her obsession; vacillating between the prudent course and the pleasant one, she exposes herself to terrifying risks. Fidell, working with the cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo, evokes desire and doom with low-light images and intimate framings, but the effects are merely illustrative. The script offers neither verbal illuminations nor practical insights, neither psychology nor morality, and the plot is little more than the reportorial backstory to a tabloid headline. Burdge, with her searching, closed-in manner, and Brittain, with his muscular grace, do the bulk of the work, and do it sympathetically, but Fidell’s stylish direction is flattened out by the film’s narrow range.—R.B. (In limited release.)

THE WORLD’S END

Not a sequel but the third panel of a comic triptych (the others being “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz”), this film reunites the director Edgar Wright with his star and co-writer Simon Pegg, plus an eager squadron of supporting players. The setting is a dreary British town, to which Gary (Pegg, noisier than before) goes back, accompanied by four reluctant friends, in a bid to relive—and, if possible, improve upon—a drinking bout from their teen-age years. As in the earlier films, the fun comes from a clash between the unglamorous grind of routine and the onset of sudden dramatic energy, fuelled entirely by a cinematic genre—in “Shaun of the Dead,” it’s zombie infestation. (It’s as though life, for Wright and Pegg, lacks all purpose and direction until it begins to resemble a movie.) Something similar occurs here, although the clash is more abrupt and the balance more disturbed; the gonzo side of the plot is not quite as engaging as the human drama, and the scenes in which the characters meet up and try to mesh again are some of the best in the film. As the jokes fly, and as the alcoholic consumption goes off the chart, we notice, more strongly than ever, one abiding theme of the triptych: the fear, among grown men, that the growing may have been a waste of time. With Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Rosamund Pike, and the wry, droning voice of Bill Nighy.—A.L. (9/2/13) (In wide release.)

ALSO PLAYING

AFTERNOON DELIGHT: In limited release. CLOSED CIRCUIT: In wide release. GETAWAY: In wide release. YOU’RE NEXT: In wide release.

REVIVALS, CLASSICS, ETC.

Titles with a dagger are reviewed above.

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES

32 Second Ave., at 2nd St. (212-505-5181)—“John Zorn Selects.” Sept. 12 at 6:45 and Sept. 15 at 4:15: “The Conversation” (+). | Sept. 12 at 9:15 and Sept. 17 at 7: “Murder by Contract” (+). | Sept. 13 at 6:45 and Sept. 16 at 9: “Vertigo” (1958, Alfred Hitchcock). | Sept. 14 at 2:45 and Sept. 16 at 7: “Touch of Evil” (1958, Orson Welles). | Sept. 14 at 4:45: “Pierrot le Fou” (1965, Jean-Luc Godard; in French). | Sept. 15 at 6:45: “No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic” (1962, Harry Smith). | La Di Da Festival. Sept. 13 at 6:30: “How to Disappear Completely” (2013, Raya Martin). | Sept. 13 at 9:15: “Butter on the Latch” (+). | Sept. 14 at 5: “White Reindeer” (2013, Zach Clark). | Sept. 14 at 7: “The Store” (1983, Frederick Wiseman). | Sept. 15 at 4:30: Secret screening. | Sept. 15 at 6:30: “Soft in the Head” (+). | Sept. 16 at 6:45: “Fatal Attraction” (1987, Adrian Lyne), followed by a panel discussion. | Sept. 16 at 9:30: “24 Exposures” (2013, Joe Swanberg).

BAM CINÉMATEK

30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-636-4100)—“Marlene Goes West.” Sept. 11 at 4:30 and 9:30: “Rancho Notorious” (1952, Fritz Lang). | Sept. 12 at 4:30, 7, and 9:30: “Touch of Evil” (1958, Orson Welles).

FILM FORUM

W. Houston St. west of Sixth Ave. (212-727-8110)—In revival. Sept. 11-19 at 1:20, 3:25, 5:45, 7:45, and 9:50: “Contempt” (1963, Jean-Luc Godard; in French). | Sept. 13-19 at 1:30, 4:40, and 7:45: “Le Joli Mai” (1962, Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme; in French). The 7:45 screening on Sept. 13 and the 4:40 screening on Sept. 15 will be introduced by Lhomme and followed by a Q. & A.

FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER

Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center (212-875-5610)—“An Evening with Pierre Lhomme.” Sept. 12 at 6:30: “Army of Shadows” (1969, Jean-Pierre Melville), “Be Seeing You” (1968, Chris Marker and Mario Marret), and “Class of Struggle” (1969, the Medvedkin Group), introduced by Lhomme.

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Roy and Niuta Titus Theatres, 11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9480)—“An Auteurist History of Film Reprise.” Sept. 11 at 7: “The Searchers” (1956, John Ford). | Sept. 12 at 4:30: “Wild Strawberries” (1957, Ingmar Bergman; in Swedish). | Sept. 12 at 8: “The Brothers Rico” (1975, Phil Karlson). | Sept. 15 at 2:30: “The Golden Coach” (1952, Jean Renoir; in French). | Sept. 15 at 5:30: “French Cancan” (1954, Renoir; in French). | Sept. 16 at 4:30: “Ashes and Diamonds” (1958, Andrzej Wajda; in Polish). | Sept. 17 at 4:30: “The Tarnished Angels” (+). | Sept. 17 at 8: “Suddenly, Last Summer” (1959, Joseph L. Mankiewicz).

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE

35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria (718-784-0077)—In première. Sept. 15 at 7:30: “Enough Said” (2013, Nicole Holofcener), followed by a discussion with the producer, Anthony Bregman, and the director. | Through Nov. 10: The films of Howard Hawks. Sept. 14 at 2: “Only Angels Have Wings” (1939). | Sept. 14 at 4:30: “I Was a Male War Bride” (1949). | Sept. 15 at 2: “Paid to Love” (1927, silent). | Sept. 15 at 4: “Trent’s Last Case” (1929; silent). | Sept. 15 at 6: “A Girl in Every Port” (+).

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Readings and Talks

NATIONAL ARTS CLUB

The photographer Ellen Wallenstein talks about her book “Respecting My Elders,” which features portraits of thirty culturally significant individuals, including Edward Albee, Lois Dodd, Milton Glaser, Francine du Plessix Gray, Wolf Kahn, James Earl Jones, and Philip Pearlstein. (15 Gramercy Park S. 212-475-3424. Sept. 12 at 6.)

“THE ACCIDENTAL PLAYGROUND”

Daniel Campo, a professor at Morgan State University, in Baltimore, and a former staff member of the New York City Department of Planning, marks the publication of his book, “The Accidental Playground: Brooklyn Waterfront Narratives of the Undesigned and Unplanned,” with a tour on Sept. 12 of the East River State Park, followed by a discussion and presentation at Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers. (Meet at Kent Ave. at N. 8th St. at 6:30. The bookstore is at 218 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn. 718-387-7322.)

THE POWERHOUSE ARENA

The New Yorker writer D. T. Max, the author of “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace,” talks about writing biographies with Blake Bailey, whose latest book is “Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson.” (37 Main St., at Water St., Brooklyn. 718-666-3049. Sept. 12 at 7.)

“LIVE FROM THE NYPL”

The fall season here starts with Margaret Atwood, who will be discussing with Carl Hiaasen her new novel, “MaddAddam,” the conclusion to the dark trilogy that started with “Oryx and Crake.” (New York Public Library, Fifth Ave. at 42nd St. 888-718-4253. Sept. 17 at 7.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Above and Beyond

GOVERNORS ISLAND HAPPENINGS

The end of summer means New Yorkers turn their attention to the new season of cultural events in Manhattan, but there is still life on other islands. The Governors Island Art Fair, which is now in its sixth year and runs weekends through the end of September, features a hundred rooms of painting, photography, sculpture, video installations, and other work, on display in the ornate and colorful houses of Nolan Park. (4heads.org.) On the lawns outside the Nolan Park houses, “Fête Paradiso,” the world’s first festival of vintage French carnival rides, has been going strong since July. It continues on weekends through the end of the month, too, and is not to be missed. The rides are charming (don’t miss the nineteenth-century velocipede, a bicycle carousel that is a noisy and rickety delight), and there is food from Le Gamin and a beer garden in the center of it all. The festival is presented by two wealthy French collectors, so the rides, while ticketed, tend to be of a generous length. (feteparadiso.com.)

AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES

As collectors return from their summer escapes, the auction houses kick into gear. As usual, the first burst of activity occurs in Asia Week, with shows that celebrate the art of the entire region—everything from figures of Shiva and Parvati to painted Chinese scrolls and Japanese ceramics. At Sotheby’s, where a selling exhibit of Buddhist art runs through Sept. 23, the first auctions—a doubleheader of Chinese art—take place on Sept. 17. In the morning, the house holds the first of two sessions of ceramics; another sale is devoted to ritual bronzes from a private European collection amassed after the Second World War, including a food vessel (from the eleventh to the tenth century BC) with a square base on which traditional taotie masks are carved, atypically, into the corners. (York Ave. at 72nd St. 212-606-7000.) |  Christie’s starts off with a sale of works on Sept. 17 by three Indian modern artists who were also friends: Nandalal Bose, Abanindranath Tagore, and Rabindranath Tagore. These include a series of posters depicting nationalist themes—bull handlers, cobblers, nursing mothers—commissioned by Gandhi for the 1938 Indian National Congress. In the afternoon, there’s a general sale of South Asian modern and contemporary art, ranging from works by such familiar figures as Syed Haider Raza to more contemporary fare, such as a triptych created out of thousands of self-adhesive bindis—symbolic markings traditionally worn by Hindu women—by Bharti Kher. (20 Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th St. 212-636-2000.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
On the Horizon

THE THEATRE

PIECE OF MY HEART

Sept. 20

For the actress playing Janis Joplin in the new bio-musical “A Night with Janis Joplin,” at the Lyceum, the vocal demands are so great that two people will alternate in the role. Mary Bridget Davies will take a break twice a week, when Kacee Clanton takes on the queen of rock. Randy Johnson wrote and directs. (212-239-6200.)

NIGHT LIFE

ON THE CASE

Sept. 26

Recently, the alt-country chanteuse Neko Case released “The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You,” her first album in four years. She’s touring the country, and she performs at Radio City Music Hall later this month. (ticketmaster.com.)

CLASSICAL MUSIC

POPPING OFF

Oct. 2

Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s opening-night gala concert at Carnegie Hall with the Philadelphia Orchestra brings his Francophone heritage to the fore while swerving in a populist direction. Joshua Bell is the soloist in music by Ravel (“Tzigane”) and Saint-Saëns; his wattage is matched by that of the jazz star Esperanza Spalding, performing her own music. (212-247-7800.)

ART

EXTREME MEASURES

Oct. 2-Jan. 12

The Los Angeles artist Chris Burden is best known for the day in 1971 when he was shot in the arm by a .22 rifle for the sake of his art. But there’s far more to Burden’s career. The New Museum devotes all five floors to his videos, installations, and sculptures. (212-219-1222.)

MOVIES

BOTH SIDES NOW

Oct. 8-29

The French actress Sandrine Bonnaire made one of the most striking débuts of recent decades in Maurice Pialat’s furious melodrama “À Nos Amours” (1983), about an adolescent’s erotic and familial turmoil. French Institute Alliance Française presents this film in a tribute to Bonnaire that also includes the 2012 movie “Maddened by His Absence,” starring William Hurt, which she directed. (212-355-6100.)

CONTRIBUTORS
Contributors

Flannery O’Connor (“My Dear God”) published her first novel, “Wise Blood,” in 1952. “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” her second collection of stories, appeared shortly after she died, in 1964, at the age of thirty-nine. “A Prayer Journal,” a notebook that she kept in 1946-47, is due out in November.

George Packer (Comment), a staff writer, is the author of eight books, including “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America,” which came out in May.

Andrew Marantz (The Talk of the Town; “Unreality Star,”) is a member of the magazine’s editorial staff.

Paul Rudnick (Shouts & Murmurs) contributes regularly to the magazine. “Gorgeous,” his first young-adult novel, came out in April.

Stanley Moss (Poem) is the author of the poetry collections “God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike” and “No Tear Is Commonplace.”

Lee Lorenz (Sketchbook), a longtime cartoonist and a former cartoon editor at the magazine, is the author of “The Art of The New Yorker 1925-1995.”

Ryan Lizza (“The President and the Pipeline”) is a staff writer based in Washington.

Tad Friend (“The One Who Knocks”) has been writing for the magazine since 1987. “Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor” is his latest book.

Jane Hirshfield (Poem) is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. “Come, Thief” is her most recent book of poems.

Tahar Ben Jelloun (Fiction) is a Moroccan-born writer who lives in France. His new novel, “Le Bonheur Conjugal,” will come out in English next year.

David Denby (Books), a film critic for the magazine, has published several books, including “Do the Movies Have a Future?”

Emily Nussbaum (On Television) writes the television column for the magazine.

Adrian Tomine (Cover) is a cartoonist and illustrator whose latest book, “New York Drawings,” comprises ten years of his work for The New Yorker. The thirteenth issue of his comic-book series “Optic Nerve” came out in August.

THE MAIL
Re: Crossing the Line; Poisoned Land

Letters in response to Steve Coll’s article (September 2, 2013), and Elif Batuman’s article (August 12 & 19, 2013).

STAND YOUR GROUND
Steve Coll, writing about Obama’s position on press leaks, conflates the regrettable persecution of the New York Times reporter James Risen with that of the whistle-blower Edward Snowden and the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange (Comment, September 2nd). Coll implies that Snowden and Assange were cowardly for not facing the law in the U.S., while Risen, whose reporting and legal fight are indeed heroic, has taken a higher road. Neither Snowden nor Assange is a reporter, nor does either of them work for what is arguably the world’s most powerful newspaper. The two men stayed away from the U.S. because the government is taking increasingly harsh measures against people who dare to shed light on the U.S. intelligence apparatus. Coll refers to Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning’s response, upon receiving a thirty-five-year sentence, that “sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society.” But Manning’s lengthy sentence is probably all that most of us would need to understand that exile was our only choice.

Greg King

Arcata, Calif.

Coll’s comments on the Risen case are marred by criticism of Snowden for accepting asylum in Russia and Assange for seeking sanctuary in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. Aside from the fact that Risen is unlikely to be jailed for a long time, compared with what the other two would face if they were extradited to the U.S., the U.S. has worked hard to make asylum in most fully democratic countries impossible for them. Furthermore, a willingness to risk being put in jail for decades for one’s beliefs and actions is a mountain only saints can climb.

Milton Mankoff

New York City

PROCESS OF ELIMINATION
Elif Batuman, in her piece on kidney disease in the Balkans, describes various theories addressing the etiology of the disease Balkan endemic nephropathy, or BEN (“Poisoned Land,” August 12th & 19th). Over the past fifty years, many of the hypotheses Batuman mentions have been eliminated by rigorous scientific research. The crucial exception, and now the most widely accepted cause, is aristolochic acid, an environmental toxin from seeds of the aristolochia plant, which has been shown to be present in the kidney and urothelial tissues of patients with BEN. We believe that aristolochic acid contaminates wheat grain, which is likely the primary route of toxin ingestion in the Balkans. As Batuman writes, it has been proposed that the designation BEN be changed to aristolochic acid nephropathy (AAN), a formal identifier that is critically important, as it would provide the impetus to change agricultural practices, thereby preventing contamination of crops. As an extension from the aristolochia research in the Balkan countries, another vital educational mission is now in progress in China and Taiwan, where aristolochia herbs are widely used for medicinal purposes. Taiwan has the highest incidence of upper-urinary-tract cancer in the world, characterized by the mutational signature of BEN. Indeed, the traditional use of this family of highly nephrotoxic and carcinogenic herbs represents a significant problem for global public health. The example of aristolochia’s toxicities, unrecognized for centuries because of the long time between ingestion and the development of cancer, should give us pause.

Arthur P. Grollman, M.D.

Distinguished Professor of Pharmacological Sciences

Stony Brook University School of Medicine

Stony Brook, N.Y.