Bulletins

What crossed my desk this month

When T.S. Eliot wrote that April was the cruelest month, he should’ve given February more consideration. An interim post-Grammys and pre-Oscars, this month’s new releases are more thought-provoking than good. In a meeting for the literary magazine I’m on staff for, the editor-in-chief explained how all of us, with English literature backgrounds, are so skilled at talking about what might be interesting in a given piece. Anything can have interesting elements, he said, but do you like it?

Industry season four

I’m terrified of this show, which I love so deeply, going the way of The Bear—expanding the scope season by season is ambitious, and usually a turn for the worse. By the end of season three, every remaining character had left their jobs at the investment bank Pierpoint, leaving the showrunners to come up with more and more convoluted reasons to get people to interact with each other. Industry has always been cutthroat about letting go of characters who no longer served the narrative, but these losses have always been mitigated by new faces with quick characterization. The name “Sweetpea Golightly” alone is a gambit, and it works. By contrast, Whitney, the season’s new major antagonist, is a cipher despite all the screentime devoted to him.

The lead characters don’t fare much better, either. Yasmin is stuck trying to Lady Macbeth her bum of a husband, and Harper, the former protagonist of the show, has devastatingly little to do. She supposedly has the type of power she’s always wanted—her first appearance of the season in a three-piece tailored skirt suit was practically made for edits of Harper Stern aura and hype moments—but she mostly sits around waiting for her short to succeed, or else delivers odd speeches laden with TikTok therapy speak. Really, I want to see gorgeous and evil divas on my television screen, and Yasmin and Harper have barely committed any crimes this season. Maybe the last episode of season four, and the upcoming fifth and final season, will tie it all together. If nothing else, the season has given me a long-awaited kiss between Harper and Yasmin. What Industry understands, unlike any other show, is that it makes for fantastically messy TV when every single character is sexually fluid.

“White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” by Lana Del Rey

Lana Del Rey is a true eccentric, which people find hard to understand because she’s also a beautiful woman. Her recent single “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” is almost an overture for her career, evoking the recent acoustic soundscape of Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd, the awesome heterosexual lyrical content of Ultraviolence and Born to Die, and the flirtation with trip-hop dating back to her unreleased music under the persona of “Lizzie Grant.” Her song titles continue to grow longer and longer (my favorite is still Ocean Blvd’s “Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep‐sea fishing”), but I appreciate the self-awareness in the way even she gets tripped up by the title on the chorus.

Given the various images of femininity Lana has tried on and discarded throughout her career, the image from the music video of her putting her head in the stove is too Tumblr-brained to really offend me. As she addressed in an Instagram comment about this supposed controversy, “I took it out.” Whatever seriousness there is—coming from the woman who described her mental state as “24/7 Sylvia Plath”—dissipates upon remembering her forthcoming album is supposed to be called “Stove.” In any case, I’m glad her marriage with her alligator-wrangling husband, muse, and cowriter is going well, and I think the song is interesting, even if it doesn’t touch the sprawling, postmodern brilliance of Ocean Blvd single “A&W.” In the words of my friend Emma, “I like it but would never listen to it again probably.”

“Wuthering Heights” (2026) dir. Emerald Fennell

Sometime between the release of Saltburn and her latest film, I found myself becoming unexpectedly pro-Emerald Fennell. Each movie of hers has been worse than the last, but who cares? It’s a classical liberal approach, I guess—I don’t support her movies, but I support her right to make them. I don’t have any particular allegiance to Emily Brontë’s novel, but I think people get too up in arms about adaptations. It’s not that the act of adaptation itself is transgressive, but that the types of art that get adaptations and reboots and remakes are usually beloved and classic cultural properties. Changing the material of the original works when it’s good and sucks when it’s bad. Casting Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, nonwhite in the novel, isn’t unfortunate in a vacuum. It’s unfortunate because removing the novel’s subtext about racialization makes for a worse and less complex movie, not to mention that it’s less diverse than a nearly 200-year-old book. (Though I did see a brilliant tweet about Elordi, an Australian, becoming the black sheep of the British-empire diaspora represented in the cast.)

Fennell has overcome her reputation as a provocateur by making such a boring film. Wuthering Heights is still sold in bookstores today, but it’s surrounded by 400-page romantasy sequels and unassuming bodice rippers with pastel cartoon people on their covers—arguably, we’ve never been more ready for a sexy adaptation. Something something Victorian era and repression, right? If “Wuthering Heights” is supposed to be a work of fanfiction, disavowing any fidelity to the source material with the quotation marks in the title, then I’m disappointed Fennell’s vision was so mild. In a post-Heated Rivalry world, I’m not sure three minutes of puppy play are really going to scandalize the viewer. The critical success of Phantom Thread, along with the ensuing popular sentiment of “I wish my girlfriend would poison me and then nurse me back to health,” shows that there’s still an untapped cinematic market of sickos out there.

Wuthering Heights by Charli xcx

Despite her horrible mockumentary The Moment, Charli xcx’s anxieties about her relevance post-BRAT were unfounded. This companion album is nowhere near essential work for her, but it seems to capture more of the spirit of Brontë’s novel, at least. I’m unsure why Fennell, upon receiving a whole soundtrack album from Charli, chose to abandon it halfway through the movie in favor of a boring piano score. If I’m going to be subjected to Margot Robbie crying two perfect tears because of her vaguely forbidden love with her pseudo-brother, I would appreciate hearing Sky Ferreira’s vocals in the background. “Chains of Love,” deeply romantic and the album’s obvious standout, is wasted on a fun-times-in-an-unhappy-marriage montage. On the other hand, “Dying for You” is a boring, probably actively bad song. For all her narrativizing about doing pop her way, I wonder why every recent Charli project has an out-of-place, formulaic pop song: “Hello goodbye” from the deluxe (now-canonical) version of BRAT, her 2023 single “In the City” featuring Sam Smith, most of CRASH, even “Blame It on Your Love” from Charli. Maybe selling out just operates on different terms nowadays, as indicated by the increase in LinkedIn posts about “the marketing genius of Charli xcx.”

As a longtime fan, it’s my curse to be perpetually annoyed by everyone else’s opinions on Charli’s work. People calling this album a return to the soundscape of her debut True Romance have never listened to True Romance—if anything, it sounds most similar to Caroline Polachek’s strain of art pop. In any case, I welcome the strings as an addition to her sonic palette. I’m still holding out for the Lou Reed album she always talks about wanting to make, and I hope the collaboration with his Velvet Underground bandmate John Cage on lead single “House” has brought her one stop closer.

Alysa Liu’s Olympic figure skating victory

There are only so many narratives we’re told about the Olympics. As neoliberal subjects who probably did a childhood sport and quit, we all understand that hard work requires sacrifice—and often abuse. Even when acknowledging the pressure of the Olympics, as in Simone Biles’s mental health and figure skater Ilia Malinin’s failure to live up to his title of “quad god,” we often perpetuate this false binary of suffering for a medal and sparing yourself at the expense of unrealized potential. The world, me included, has fallen in love with twenty-year-old American figure skater Alysa Liu, who offers a new type of narrative. Having retired at sixteen after the 2022 Olympics, Liu chose to return to the sport on her own terms. Her agency in her training is reflected in her mindset: she seems to totally lack a sense of nervousness, and her passion arises from her desire to perform. Unlike most athletes, winning is almost incidental.

Liu, then, is one of the rare figure skaters who seems to have fun. It’s telling that the most impressive highlights from her free skate to Donna Summer’s version of “MacArthur Park” aren’t her jumps, but her amazing moments of musicality. Sports like figure skating claim to prioritize both artistry and difficulty in their scoring systems, although difficulty usually prevails. After Russian coach Eteri Tutberidze’s reign of terror over the sport, I find it refreshing to see a routine provoke such a widespread affective response in people. Multiple friends, including me, have teared up—if not cried outright—watching her skate with so much joy. The Olympics are about watching other people perform superhuman feats. Instead, Liu seems to promise that you can have it all—you can be alternative and from Oakland and have a self-done smiley piercing and say “fuck” on live television and wear glamorous costumes and win two gold medals and have a bowl of cereal as your Instagram profile picture.