2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Hamlet

Posted on May 18, 2026 by sheila

My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
King John
The Merchant of Venice
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 2
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Much Ado About Nothing
Henry V
Julius Caesar
As You Like It

Hamlet

Dear friend.
I send you a flower from my garden – Though it dies in reaching you, you will know it lived, when it left my hand –
Hamlet wavered for all of us-
— Emily Dickinson to Mary Higginson, 1877

With all the many many many words in Hamlet – it is Shakespeare’s longest play – there are so many words, so much theorizing and reflecting and articulated mental struggle – so many questions and so few answers – when you get to the center of it, or at least what you might think is the center – what you find is silence. The silence you might hear in a portal to the farthest reaches of the universe. Everyone speaks. At length. What they say has meaning. We still quote what they say. But what, ultimately, does it all MEAN?

The fact that people have been arguing about the play for 400 years, struggling to dominate the discourse or express a Grand Theory of Everything Hamlet, just speaks to the play’s unruly and unnerving power. I feel like people are uncomfortable with the play’s open-endedness, with its refusal to just say what it means. This discomfort is appropriate, and – in fact – might be the play’s reason for existing?

It’s easy to forget that Hamlet is SUCH a strange play. There’s so much in between the play and our experiencing of it – it’s SO well-known we take it for granted. There are centuries of commentary, famous performances, etc. The play is covered in barnacles of research and opinion. And so we are overly familiar with it, and THUS, Hamlet is normalized. It’s “the establishment”. But take a step back. Take a couple. The play is not normal. The play is radically experimental. Nothing about it follows the rules.

This starts with the first moments of Act 1, scene 1, where two sentinels (Barnardo and Francisco) meet up on the ramparts of the castle. Famous opening, right? The first line of the play is “Who’s there?” Famously straightforward. “Who’s there?” (along with “how far that little candle throws its beams” from Merchant) is one of my favorite lines in all of Shakespeare. “Who’s there” is so practical – a question that requires a simple answer. This play – so full of questions – starts with one. Also, “Who’s there?” is such a humorously BRIEF question to open Shakespeare’s longest play. However, if you take “Who’s there?” as a metaphor, or as at least somewhat abstract, there you are again at the portal to the universe … or, if you like, standing down center stage looking out into the darkness. Who’s there? “Who’s there” is a wormhole.

Here is the opening exchange:

BARNARDO:
Who’s there?
FRANCISCO:
Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.
BARNARDO:
Long live the King!
FRANCISCO:
Barnardo?
BARNARDO:
He.
FRANCISCO:
You come most carefully upon your hour.
BARNARDO:
’Tis now struck twelve.

One sentinel relieves the sentinel already on duty. Big whup.

But look closer. It is the relieving-sentinel (Barnardo) who asks: “Who’s there?”

Think about it.

Barnado, the relief sentinel, approaches Francisco, the sentinel on duty, and says, “Who’s there?” Shouldn’t you know who’s there, because you’re approaching to take over the watch? You know the guy who’s on duty. It should not be a surprise who’s there. “Who’s there?” seems like it should be said by the OTHER guy, the sentinel currently on duty, looking out into the night and hearing someone approach. Francisco replies to Barnardo’s “Who’s there”, understandably, with, “Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.” Basically: “hey, asking ‘who’s there’ is MY job. Who are YOU?” Instead of identifying himself, though, Barnardo cries, “Long live the king!” Which is pretty funny. A desperate display of allyship, i.e. “I come in peace!” By this point, and “by this point” I mean three lines into the play – THREE!! – Francisco recognizes the voice and asks, “Barnardo?” These two are friends and Barnardo has complicated – unnecessarily – what should be a simple, “Wassup, I’m here, go home and get some sleep.” Barnardo confirms, “He.” Francisco says, a bit freaked out, “You come most carefully upon your hour.” Why you sneaking up on me, bro?

Again, these are the first seven lines. Hamlet starts in a state of total confusion. Nobody is identified. Everyone is “who’s there”-ing everyone else.

The rest of the scene does the opposite of providing clarity. Both sentries saw the Ghost the night before and are scared it will come again. Horatio arrives, calm skeptical Horatio. He’s heard the story and scoffs, “‘Twill not appear again.” Barnardo settles in to describe what they saw and you get the sense it’s going to be a long story, but he only gets five lines in when he is interrupted by the Ghost entering. The Ghost doesn’t speak (he only speaks to Hamlet). So … the exposition is interrupted by what the exposition was about to describe. Horatio gives a long (long) shpeel on the politics going on, and the conflict between the old Hamlet (the dad, the ghost) and Fortinbras. Not the Fortinbras who shows up at the end, but Fortinbras’ father, also named Fortinbras. To an audience who doesn’t know that both fathers have the same name as their sons, Horatio’s monologue is basically incomprehensible. Again: only in retrospect does it make sense. In the moment, clarity is not provided.

Meanwhile: let’s see what we HAVEN’T heard about in the first scene. We haven’t heard anything about Claudius, Gertrude, the quickie marriage, we haven’t heard anything about Hamlet! HAMLET doesn’t arrive until the SECOND scene, and he doesn’t speak until halfway through. He’s just part of the crowd (and the first time he speaks – fascinatingly – it’s an aside to us.) Most Shakespeare plays start with a scene where everything is laid out so we can orient ourselves. The first scene here does the opposite of setting up the story. We don’t know who is the lead, or what is the story, we can’t orient ourselves and neither can the characters. Nobody knows who anybody is! Wait, Horatio, which Fortinbras are you talking about?

There’s more strangeness though. The scenes are discrete little pockets, and there is a narrative – sort of – but it keeps diffusing and scattering. There’s no coherent throughline, although the play keeps attempting to straighten itself out. It’s so fascinating. There really is nothing else like it, unless you skip forward four hundred years to the breakdown of narrative in the modernist era. The action – Hamlet getting his revenge – is postponed throughout, almost to the point it becomes funny. Hamlet is going to go meet the ghost, but before that we get a whole long scene with Polonius and his kids Laertes and Ophelia. Then Hamlet and Horatio go to see the ghost, but before that Horatio delays the meeting, and Hamlet has this long speech about scandal. Hamlet is headed to see his mother, and then gets distracted by Claudius praying. Oh, and how about this: Hamlet is told to revenge his father’s death and who is his first target? Ophelia! The totally innocent Ophelia! He decides to “act crazy” and who does he test it on? Ophelia! Scaring her half to death. Ophelia has nothing to do with Claudius marrying Gertrude, so it’s like Hamlet has to cut her off – maybe because he knows he’s going to go somewhere murderous psychologically, and she won’t be able to follow. He knows he is going to change beyond recognition? Or maybe he hates her softness because he hates the softness in himself. (i.e. incel?). In other words, nothing happens when or how it should. There’s no urgency. In the middle of the whole revenge plot, Hamlet devotes himself to directing and writing a play! And he’s way more into THAT than he is into the revenge.

You could say, as Lawrence Olivier does at the start of his 1944 film: “This is a tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” This is a common interpretation: Hamlet can’t make up his mind whether or not to kill Claudius. This is a pretty good summing-up of what the play FEELS like … but the reality is much more fluid. At the end of the play eight people have died. But the way they die … it’s not exactly a one-man massacre. Ophelia dies at her own hand. Gertrude dies by accident, and it’s only because Claudius put the poison in the cup meant for Hamlet. She wasn’t supposed to drink from that cup. Hamlet stabs Polonius, but it’s only because he THINKS it’s Claudius behind the curtain. Laertes and Hamlet fight, but they switch rapiers by accident so Laertes dies but only because Hamlet now has the rapier with the poisoned tip. LOOK at this train of events. This is not just “a man who could not make up his mind”.

It’s well-known that Hamlet is a “revenge tragedy”, a very popular genre in Shakespeare’s time: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy launched a thousand ships, including Hamlet. But … what does revenge even mean in the scenario described in the paragraph above? Did Hamlet get his revenge? Not really! A revenge tragedy has familiar elements, all of which appear in Hamlet, but they are undercut repeatedly: it’s genre as skeleton only.

Hamlet wanting — and delaying — revenge is only part of the whole. There’s a dual investigation going on. Instead of blindly obeying the ghost, Hamlet spends almost the whole play testing whether or not the Ghost was correct. He wonders, worriedly, “What if the Ghost was actually the devil? What if he was lying?” So he puts together all these ways to test everyone around him, wreaking havoc and observing the results. So that’s one side: Hamlet investigating whether or not the Ghost was right. The other side belongs to Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, basically the whole court: They see that Hamlet is not like himself. They wonder if he is “mad”. If he IS mad, then why? Is it because he’s madly in love with Ophelia? Polonius thinks this is the reason. Or is it something else? This cohort sets up test after test as well, setting themselves up as secret audiences to observe Hamlet’s reactions to things, hoping to understand the genesis of his madness. We swing back and forth between these two investigations, as every character wrestles for control of the play, for what the story actually IS. The castle cohort is still arguing about Hamlet’s madness in Act IV!! They still don’t know why he’s crazy or IF his craziness is real! Meanwhile, Hamlet gets involved in a theatrical production, creating an excuse to continue his investigation into whether or not Claudius killed his father. But … you get the sense that being engrossed in a rehearsal process is more important to Hamlet. In Act IV, he is sent away on a ship to England, after killing Polonius by accident. Act IV is LATE to have the actual theme and plot of the play still so much up in the air.

There are all these patterns and motifs throughout, which you can’t help but cling to for clarity and structure:

Ears. (Not just the body part but that almost every scene features people eavesdropping.)
Boundaries. (corporeal and supernatural)
Garden. (Ophelia drowning, Claudius in the garden)
Rotten-ness. Images of decay, words like “foul” and “rank”. Political corruption.
Poison. Poison in the cup, poison in the ear, poison on the rapier tip, “fanged adders”, but also poisoned reputations, poisoned minds.
“Heaven and earth”. The phrase itself shows up multiple times (or “earth and heaven”). This could be a subset of the “boundaries” motif.
Acting/theatre. This is probably the biggest motif of all! You could say the play itself is a play. Plays within plays. Hamlet “acting” – as an actor – but also “acting” – as a revenger. Putting up pantomimes for an audience, whether paying or not. Hamlet “acting crazy”. Hamlet correcting his own death warrant, writing in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s names … he’s a playwright. The word “play” shows up … everywhere, always. Even stuffy Polonius gets in on the action when he mentions he was an actor back in his school days (nobody cares, Polonius), and one time he played Julius Caesar. (Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was written around the same time as Hamlet, by the way. And Shakespeare’s Brutus is a clear precursor of Hamlet. So Caesar (Polonius) is stabbed by Brutus (Hamlet). What if, back in the day, the actors who played Julius Caesar and Brutus ALSO played Polonius and Hamlet. The regular audience would get the joke. Worlds within worlds.

All of these symbols and motifs and patterns … they exist. You feel them in the text. But what doe it all mean, ultimately?

Hamlet goes into the duel with Laertes in a suicidal mood. (Or, more suicidal than usual. Hamlet is the prototype of suicidal ideation.) You could see the “duel” as an act – which it is – it’s planned out like a play, it’s not spontaneous. You could also see it as the pretext Hamlet needs for his own death. Death-by-cop. The ultimate avoidance of responsibility. Does Hamlet even want revenge? Does he care about being king eventually? He went away to college. He got OUT. The Ghost is seen wearing full armor: Dad Hamlet was a warrior king. His son is a university intellectual, a poet, a drama club kid. Like father like son is not this story, although Hamlet is filled with fathers and sons: Hamlet, Laertes and Polonius, Fortinbras and his dad, even Pyrrhus in the play within the play. When The Murder of Gonzago/The Mousetrap is presented, everything onstage splits or fractures into multiple spheres of “watching” and “action”: the audience in Elsinore watches the play, while Hamlet watches Claudius. We out here in the audience watch the play Hamlet, and so we watch Mousetrap too, but we can see that the REAL “play” in Act III, scene 2, is going on in the audience. The one up onstage, the fictional one, but also the audience we ourselves are actually in.

A word on the whole ‘Hamlet procrastinates’ thing, and this might get preachy:

Hamlet resists the Ghost’s command and keeps putting off the revenge. This can be frustrating, but only if … you think Hamlet killing a man is okay. In killing Claudius, Hamlet would be killing the thing that makes him him – his sensitivity, his liveliness, his interest in art … and in fact we watch that side of him die over the course of this thing. Hamlet is RIGHT to put off his revenge, because he doesn’t WANT to kill his stepfather, because somewhere he knows if he DOES, he will never be the same again. Wanting the revenge to play out is bloodthirsty and in a way Shakespeare is commenting on how these things usually go and maybe – maybe? – criticizing the audience for wanting to just get to the revenge.

There are a couple of similar theatrical moments that come to mind:

In an episode of Chernobyl, Barry Keough plays a kid drafted into cleanup duty, where he is put on “pet killing” detail. The character resists with every fiber of his being because he knows if he completes his task he will no longer be the same kind of person. He is killing himself, the soft tender part (the best part). I’ve seen YouTubers react to Chernobyl and many get frustrated with him, especially when he wounds a dog and hesitates to put it out of its misery. But … if he came out of the truck on his first day and started blasting away dogs and puppies … he’d be a psycho. No, he has to “come around to it”. In so doing, he has to murder the soft part of himself. His hesitation is the best in him, the best in us.

In Saving Private Ryan, Jeremy Davies crouches on the stairs crying, instead of running upstairs with the ammo. People – safely sitting in front of their computers, never having gone to war – HATE him, and JUDGE him for his cowardice. Spielberg said over and over during the press tour, “That character is me. That’s who I would be in that situation.” We want to think we’d be better than that character. We resist identification with him, even though the director insists we do.

There were those who got frustrated with the dual nature of The Sopranos: there’s the therapy personal-life side, and there’s the mob violence side. The ones who were in it for the violence – who viewed the other stuff as “filler” – were a vocal cohort, as you will recall if you watched the show in real time. I always felt that this cohort conveniently forget the pilot: the ducks in the pool, the panic attacks, the therapy, Tony Soprano breaking down in tears about the ducks, the empty pool, the empty sky. The pilot told you what the show would be, in no uncertain terms. It’s one of the best pilots ever because of this. Those who hated the ending also forgot the pilot. The show was not about bloodshed, cathartic or random. David Chase was very open about why he did what he did. Having the members-only jacket guy come out of the bathroom guns blazing like Michael Corleone would be a betrayal of what the show CLEARLY said it was interested in.

Hamlet putting off revenge reminded me of those things.

We all want catharsis. Aristotle understood this. Some dramas provide it and many of these dramas work, eternally. But when an audience is denied the catharsis they seek, they can turn on the work of art, judge it as imperfect, or somehow “avoidant” – when it is really the audience who is actively avoiding the implications of a work of art WITHOUT a catharsis.

People wish Hamlet would stop dilly-dallying and just kill the king.

But what about the soliloquies? What about everything else in the play? What about Hamlet’s delicacy and imagination? We want him to kill off those beautiful qualities? We think he would be better off if he was a murderer?

This is not to say Hamlet is without its classical elements. Tragedy requires an audience to identify somehow and wish they could intervene in the events. Think Romeo and Juliet. That’s in operation in Hamlet too. You can’t help but think … wouldn’t Hamlet be better off if he just left Denmark altogether and ran away with the acting troupe? He loves being around the actors! His whole mood changes when they show up. It’s the only time in the play he is authentically activated! You want this funny creative drama nerd to kill everyone? Critics considered the “messiness” of the play, and the lack of structure/ambiguity a flaw for centuries. T.S. Eliot called the play a “failure”, since so much is left unresolved, unexplained, and the central character is so ambiguous. The play is very strange but the strangeness is a feature, not a bug. I think part of critical resistance to Hamlet is he is seen as “unmanly”, like Jeremy Davies weeping soldier is, like Barry Keough’s hesitant pet killer is. We want these guys to “man up”. Hamlet is actually called “unmanly” in the play. Shakespeare knew what he was doing. He also knew that the “unmanly” part of Hamlet – the one who went off to school, who reads, who likes theatre – is the best part of him – and us. This is why Hamlet resists the revenge. He likes those parts of himself. He doesn’t want to say goodbye to them.

However, let’s not get it twisted: Hamlet is not a softboi. He is unpredictable and can be breathtakingly cruel. Hamlet has a little Hal in him. (“For worms, Percy.”) Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia is shocking. We know they had a relationship but we never see the good times. We come in at the end, just in time to watch Hamlet put a torch to the whole thing. He doesn’t “break up” with her, he shatters her, and still refuses to leave her alone. He accuses her of all kinds of things, which clearly aren’t true … all in full view of her family, who fail to protect her, and just continue to use her as a way to get close to Hamlet and see what’s going on with him. Hamlet is shockingly vicious to his mother. “the inmost parts of you” is terrifying. He is cruel to the point of psychopathy to Polonius, including calling his dead body “the guts”. He knows he is the center of everyone’s attention, and so he goes about pulling on puppet strings because he sees everything that’s going on. He knows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are up to no good. (Yes, but sending them off to their deaths is extreme.) He also knows Horatio is good and trustworthy. He commands Horatio to tell his story…

I read the play three times this year, once before I watched Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet and then twice for this, and each time I’m surprised by it. I remember all the scenes but still they take me by surprise, it’s like they arrive before I’m ready for them. I’m like “Oh! Claudius is praying now? I thought it came later??” or “Oh wow, the players are here already??” “Oh shit, here’s ‘rogue and peasant slave’, here we go …”

You can memorize the order of Romeo and Juliet, and the story/play is intact in any re-telling of it. The play exists on its own events, gorgeous language or no. There’s nothing outside the play’s plot. Not so with Hamlet. Awareness of “everything outside” the play flickers on the periphery, sometimes visible, always felt … At one point Polonius says:

I will find
Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed
Within the center.

This is true of the play Polonius is in. Truth is hid, and it’s hidden in the center. Meaning can be found in the center. And the center is so deep you can’t even GET to it.

Hamlet without the magnificent soliloquies ceases TO BE. This makes me think of a great exchange in the Canadian television series Slings & Arrows, when Jack, the movie star playing Hamlet (played by Luke Kirby), is freaking out before opening night about the bigness of the role, and Geoffrey, the artistic director (played by Paul Gross), tries to talk him down.

Geoffrey: I want you to think of it in terms of six soliloquies, okay? Count them off with me. ‘O that this too too solid flesh’. ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I.’ ‘To be or not to be.’ ‘Tis now the very witching hour’ – that’s a short one, that’s only twelve lines. ‘Now might I do it pat’. ‘How all occasions do inform against me.’ That’s it. Six. And the rest, as they say, is silence.
Jack: I think there’s some dialogue in between.
Geoffrey: Filler.

An exaggeration, of course, although to the guy playing Hamlet it might be helpful. Put your focus where it matters. Without the soliloquies, Hamlet isn’t Hamlet. The play is ABOUT the experience of interiority, which is why Act V is such a shock to the system. Hamlet has no soliloquies in Act V. He’s beyond it. He’s closed the door on his own interior life. Also, alarmingly, awfully, he starts to refer to himself in the third person.

So. These are (some of) my thoughts on Hamlet. When I read the play, I try to come to it fresh. I try to forget the interpretations handed down to us over the years. The amazing thing is Hamlet resists interpretation, ultimately. And it doesn’t matter somehow what everyone has said over the centuries … the experience of reading the play is still – still – a shock. The whole thing is so improbable, so unruly, so diffuse. The pieces can’t be gathered together. This is not to say the play is imperfect, or whatever, but I do believe strongly that uncategorizable works – works which cloak themselves in a genre but then undercut and wriggle out from under the rules of the genre – works that refuse the rules, and allow themselves to be wide-ranging, loose-limbed, even chaotic, have more staying power, not because of what they say, but because of what they suggest. A work that suggests will always be more powerful than a work that says. (Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia comes to mind. A mad work of art, resistant to easy explanation.) This is true, too, of great movie stars: the ones who lead with eccentric individuality (however curated) rather than tried-and-true formulas … they are the stars we keep coming back to again and again, drawn to the mystery, drawn to what they suggest. (Cary Grant, for example. Greta Garbo, for another. We cannot get to the bottom of them. Our conversation with them will never end.)

Hamlet is scary because it is endless.

Quotes below, mainly from my own personal reference library:
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Charles Lamb’s pieces on Shakespeare’s plays
Oscar Wilde, various essays and lectures
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: essays / lectures
W.H. Auden, lectures
Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (volumes 1 and 2)
William Hazlitt, Characters in Shakespeare’s Plays
Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
Stephen Booth, “On the Value of Hamlet” (from the collection Close Reading Without Readings

Quotes on the play

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Happy birthday, Big Joe Turner, “Boss of the Blues”

Posted on May 18, 2026 by sheila

Before the advent of microphones, if you were a singer, you needed to be heard. “Blues shouters” were powerful figures known for shouting above the music. Big Joe Turner was a blues shouter from Kansas City, and also one of the many – many – building blocks in what eventually would be called “rock ‘n roll”. His career spanned from jazz clubs in the 1920s to touring the world up until his death in 1985. He stood on stages with and collaborated with them all: Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, boogie-woogie maestro Albert Ammons, pianist Pete Johnson. Turner hailed from Kansas City, and did some early gigs in New York, but came back home, feeling New York wasn’t ready for the rowdiness of his sound yet. Eventually New York came calling in 1938, in the form of a talent scout – John Hammond – putting together the From Spirituals to Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall. (These two concerts are now legendary and did what they set out to do: connected the dots in Black culture, from gospel to jazz to swing.) In 1938, same time, Turner and pianist Pete Johnson went into the studio and recorded “Roll ‘Em Pete”.

For more background on “Roll ‘Em Pete”‘s significance, you really need to listen to Andrew Hickey’s episode on it in his A History of Rock and Roll in 500 Songs podcast. To boil it down: In “Rock and Roll Music”, Chuck Berry wrote “It’s got a back beat, you can’t lose it” … and “Roll ‘Em Pete” is generally considered to be the first song featuring that back beat. (Hickey goes into all that. And more. Way more. I’ll be listening to that podcast until the day I die, probably, and I still won’t be finished.)

Powerful forces were converging all over the place in the 1930s and 40s, cultural, spiritual, political and technological. These forces somehow coalesced making space – somehow – for what came after, i.e. 1950s rock ‘n roll and rockabilly. Something as world-changing as 1950s rock and roll doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s not a bolt from the blue. Even Elvis deciding to record “That’s All Right” in 1954, an old blues song by Arthur Crudup, has such a long history surrounding it you really need to understand the context to get why Elvis’ version was such a revolution (and seen as so threatening). If you don’t get all that, then you might make the mistake of thinking, “What is the fuss about?” It’s easy enough to get the timeline and know the Renaissance followed the Black Plague – ha – but there are a lot of little things along the way, inroads, developments, explorations, tangents – that help foster the eventual explosion.

“Roll ‘Em Pete” was a wellspring.

Big Joe Turner was a powerful performer, with a massive voice and infectious energy: these were all very important qualities in the “modern” era. If you wanted to get booked into clubs, then you had to make people want to MOVE. Big Joe Turner was a bluesman, but he was also a big band swing-bang master of ceremonies, which then of course morphed into boogie-woogie which was just a tiny skip away from rock ‘n roll.

Turner influenced everybody. Buddy Holly. Fats Domino. Little Richard. And, of course, Elvis. I love this live performance of “Shake, Rattle and Roll” – where even though he’s got that huge microphone, you can feel the shouting in his voice, the power of it.

In doing a little bit of research for this post, I came across this piece about Derek Coller’s Turner bio-discography Feel so Fine. Some really great details but I loved this anecdote: Turner was arriving in England in 1965 for a tour. He didn’t have a work permit and the immigration officer said, “You’ve got a nerve.” Turner replied, “That’s what it takes these days, daddy.”

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“It’s an absolute miracle that I’m still around.” — Dennis Hopper

Posted on May 17, 2026 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

I’m so glad I used one of my columns at Film Comment -now on hiatus – to sing the praises of Dennis Hopper’s wild and nihilistic Out of the Blue, starring Linda Manz and Hopper.

Of all the essential and now-iconic roles Hopper played in his ravaged and ravaging up-down-up-again legendary-as-it-unfolded career, this is one of the best things he ever did, reciting Rudyard Kipling’s “If” – by heart – on the Johnny Cash Show.

What a riveting moment. This is what it means to be present in the moment. So few people can do it, actors or otherwise. It comes to mind that this is a slightly more formal version of Lee Strasberg’s famous (to actors anyway) “song and dance exercise”, a terrifying confrontation with the void out there in the dark, and being present – intimately present – to those watching you and listening to you. (I wrote about this a little bit in the Film Comment column. I took a Master Class with Hopper, and he talked extensively about “song and dance” and how much he loved it, and then – standing up there – totally unafraid – he demonstrated it. Actors are scared of that exercise (at least that was my experience. It’s raw and naked and you can’t hide – which is the point). But Hopper wasn’t scared of it at all. He was an intellectual, in many ways, an actor trained in the classics. Song and dance was one of the things that released him, exploded him into the actor he eventually became.

He was also a brilliant photographer. Here’s his most famous:

“Double Standard” 1961

And finally: Shortly before Hopper passed, Matt Zoller Seitz wrote a gorgeous piece called “The Middle Word in Life”, accompanied by a gorgeous video compilation of moments through Hopper’s life and his career. The essay ends with the heartfelt (and prophetic words, as it turns out) words: “Contrary to what we’d all come to believe, Dennis Hopper is not immortal. Let’s appreciate him now.”

Yes. Let’s.

A story about Easy Rider:

I asked Ante, our guide in Croatia, what he would do if he came to America. He said, “I would drive route 66 end to end.”

“I’ve done that!”

“You know. Like Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. I want to do something like that that.” It was the 2nd time he referenced Easy Rider.

I said, “You love Easy Rider.”

He said, “It was banned here for years.”

“Wow, I had no idea. I can guess why though.”

“FREEDOM!!” he said, with a huge gesture as he careened our car along a mountain cliff road.

(I thought, Both hands on the wheel, Ante, I beg you.)

He said, looking at me thru the rear view, “The first time Easy Rider played in Croatia was in 1982. It was big BIG deal. And my father went and saw it and it changed his life. He understood freedom then and what it really was.” (His father was a wine-grower outside of Split.) “And my father told me all about the movie when I was a child and how it was what freedom meant. He told me there were lines down the block outside of theatre in 1982 to see the movie. Everyone wanted to see it. It was a very dangerous movie.”

Easy Rider came up yet again. On our boat ride to Hvar Island, and then again on our ferry ride to Split, we were surrounded by motorcycle gangs from Croatia/Bosnia (it was literally me, Ante, Rachel, and 80 Hell’s-Angels-the-Balkan-chapter on those ferries).

I glanced at Ante and said, “Dennis Hopper?”

He made a dismissive gesture at the bikers and said, “They’re fake. They’re not Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda.”

“So what about these guys over here, Ante?”

“Pfff. Fake.”

“I don’t know. They look pretty fucking tough to me.”

“No. Fake.”

“And these dudes, Ante? I find them all deeply attractive. And yet also scary.”

Ante: “They’re just pretending they’re Easy Rider.” Ante was having NONE of it. I, however, was having ALL of it.

“So Easy Rider …” I said, wanting him to finish the sentence, even though I had no idea what he would say. I just wanted to hear whatever it was.

Ante said, “Easy Rider is freedom and everyone wants that.”

The power of movies, people. You never know where they will go or who they will reach.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Actors, Art/Photography, Directors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

“I live life in the margins of society, and the rules of normal society don‘t apply to those who live on the fringe.” — Tamara de Lempicka

Posted on May 16, 2026 by sheila

Spoken like a true exile of Jewish descent.

For her birthday today:


“Self Portrait in the green Bugatti”

Fascinating woman, to say the least. Just a snippet from her teen years, okay?

In 1912, her parents divorced and Maria went to live with her wealthy Aunt Stefa in St. Petersberg, Russia. When her mother remarried, she became determined to break away to a life of her own. In 1913, at the age of fifteen, while attending the opera, Maria spotted the man she became determined to marry. She promoted her campaign through her well-connected uncle and in 1916 she married Tadeusz Lempicki in St. Petersburg; a well-known ladies man, gadabout, and lawyer by title, who was tempted by the significant dowry.

In 1917, during the Russian Revolution, Tadeusz was arrested in the dead of night by the Bolsheviks. Maria searched the prisons for him and after several weeks, with the help of the Swedish consul, she secured his release. They traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark then London, England and finally to Paris, France to where Maria’s family had also escaped, along with numerous upper-class Russian refugees.

Tip of the iceberg. More here.

And still more. She’s having “a year”. Camille Paglia deserves some credit, in my eyes, for including a chapter on Lempicka in her book Glittering Images, which is how I got into her work. (From the article: “In 2020 her ‘Portrait of Marjorie Ferry,’ a jazz chanteuse, set a new auction record for the artist, fetching almost $22 million.”) So yeah. Her time is now.

“My goal: never copy. Create a new style, with luminous and brilliant colors, rediscover the elegance of my models.”
— Tamara de Lempicka
 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Art/Photography, On This Day | Tagged , | 10 Comments

“Manuscripts don’t burn.” — Mikhail Bulgakov

Posted on May 15, 2026 by sheila

It’s Mikhail Bulgakov’s birthday. The author of The Master and Margarita, one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. (It’s not his only work. There are many others. But I’ll be focusing on Master and Margarita today.)

It’s a miracle Master and Margarita even exists. Bulgakov wrote it in the late 1920s, a terrible time although even more terrible times were coming. The book is not a “critique” of Soviet society. It is an indictment, an evisceration, the truths so appalling they can only be expressed allegorically.

Recently(ish), a graphic novel adaptation of The Master and Margarita was released, with astonishing illustrations by Polish graphic designer and artist Andrzej Klimowski.

Bulgakov started out as a physician before segueing to writing. Post Russian Civil War, in the 1920s, he found it increasingly difficult to get his work past the censors, even though Stalin himself was a “fan” of a couple of his plays. Stalin protected Bulgakov, putting in a good word, essentially. Eventually, though, Stalin’s protection vanished. In the 30s, Bulgakov’s work was permanently banned, which meant that his name was mud. He would never be able to publish again, not in his own country.

In desperation, Bulgakov (famously) wrote two letters to Stalin. Both letters and commentary here. The letters basically say: “I do not want to leave Russia. But I don’t know what else to do. If I am not allowed to work here, then please, I beg you, allow me to leave Russia.” They’re heartbreaking letters, and an indictment of dictatorships and censorship – not just the FACT of them, but what it DOES to people. Artists are always the first ones on the chopping block.

Unbelievably: Stalin received the letters and called Bulgakov personally on the phone. (None of this excuses Stalin for his tremendous war crimes on a scale which would have made Hitler jealous, I’m just reporting the facts: Stalin liked Bulgakov. Maybe because Bulgakov wrote a play in the 20s praising Stalin’s early years in Georgia – an act of sycophantish flattery on Bulgakov’s part – but even that play didn’t pass muster with the censors. Stalin’s early years were a very very touchy subject and Stalin did everything he could to erase all traces of himself.) This might not be the reason Stalin actually read these letters and actually called the anguished dude who wrote them. But there is a reason. Stalin never did anything without a reason: it’s one of his scariest characteristics. The people who survived the 1930s in the USSR only did so because Stalin, for whatever reason, decided to spare them.

Imagine being Bulgakov sitting around his apartment in 1930. The phone rings. He answers. It’s Stalin on the line. Stalin asked Bulgakov if he really wants to leave Russia. Bulgakov reiterated: “I don’t WANT to leave but I am not allowed to work here anymore. I have no choice.” So Stalin arranged for Bulgakov to work as a stage director’s assistant in the Moscow Art Theatre. (This is devastating. One of the greatest writers of the 20th century “allowed” to sweep backstage. It makes me see red. And not Soviet red.)

Now: about Master and Margarita.

Bulgakov wrote it in 1927, 1928. He considered it too dangerous to even exist so he burned the manuscript.

In the novel a burnt manuscript factors into the action, leading to the an immortal line (and immortal idea): “Manuscripts don’t burn.”

Consider that line … and consider Bulgakov burned the very manuscript in which the line appears …

One of the most amazing parts of this story is that Bulgakov rewrote the manuscript from memory in the late 1930s when the situation was even MORE harrowing, and Russia was quickly being turned into a mass grave slash prison. It was the time of the Great Terror and the Show Trials. Remember that line: “Manuscripts don’t burn.” Bulgakov burned his manuscript but it didn’t really burn.

Upon completion of the manuscript, he wrote a letter to his wife:

In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript (about 22 chapters). The most important remains – editing, and it’s going to be hard, I will have to pay close attention to details. Maybe even re-write some things… ‘What’s its future?’ you ask? I don’t know. Possibly, you will store the manuscript in one of the drawers, next to my ‘killed’ plays, and occasionally it will be in your thoughts. Then again, you don’t know the future. My own judgement of the book is already made and I think it truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest.

Bulgakov invited friends over for a private reading of Master and Margarita. He told the small group of friends he was going to take it to the publishers the next day. Everyone present was terrified. His wife begged him not to. A friend of his begged him not to let anyone else see it. And so Bulgakov didn’t bring it to the publishers. The manuscript stayed in a drawer and Bulgakov died in 1940. He died probably thinking his name would never be known, he probably thought his masterpiece would never see the light of day. The fact that it eventually WAS published is a triumph, but it is also a disgrace. It is a disgrace because it took so long, and it is a disgrace that some human beings think they have the ultimate power over other human beings’ freedom of expression. People say stupid shit like “Better late than never”. Fuck you. Not everything is an inspirational story.

I feel the same way about Jafar Panahi. I am glad he continues to make films, even though he has been banned from making movies for life. But I don’t think, “You go, Jafar, you’re an inspiration!” (although it is inspirational and I hope I would be as brave as Panahi if I was in the same terrible position). What I think of when I think of Panahi is: “I hope the assholes who have done this to him burn in hell. And fuck censors and dictators and autocracies and oligarchies and theocracies everywhere.” Fight the real enemy. And that enemy is not comfortably in the past. It has to be fought now.

What is amazing is that Bulgakov died of natural causes. Something was going on there. Everyone died or was imprisoned or vanished in the 30s. Bulgakov – hounded and harassed through the 1920s – survived. Nothing was “random” in the USSR. Stalin had a soft spot for the guy, and Stalin had maybe two soft spots in his whole entire makeup. And they were just SPOTS, nothing larger. But that’s got to be the reason Bulgakov wasn’t “disappeared.” He was on everyone’s radar as “controversial” in the 20s, and most people like that perished in the 30s, if they didn’t perish in the 20s. Anyone who survived was probably being protected at some higher secret echelon of power, and none of this is found in the archives. There’s no dictum from Stalin saying “Lay off him”, stamped and dated. Stalin erased his fingerprints from everything. You can only look at the results to perceive Stalin (this was Robert Conquest’s point, I’m just stealing it from him). Stalin erased himself from the archives – plausible deniability was his name: the erasure is so total it’s still hard to find out the truth about his childhood, his young adulthood. And so Bulgakov survived. That’s the result and it is the RESULT that matters, it is in the RESULT that you can see Stalin. Same with Anna Akhmatova. (My piece about her here.) She was famous outside Russia, and because of that Stalin hesitated. He “allowed” her to live. She couldn’t write or be published but she was allowed to live. As far as I know, Stalin calling up Bulgakov and negotiating a way Bulgakov could stay is an anomaly. Stalin never did such a thing before or since. This is hugely signifcant.

Bulgakov’s brave widow did not confiscate the manuscript, even though it was dangerous to have it around. She kept it hidden for DECADES. Finally, the coast was clear enough in the calcifying edifice that was Communism she felt it safe to bring the manuscript to a publisher. It was finally published in 1966.

One chapter of the book is called “Ivan Is Split In Two” and it is a brilliant breakdown of how man is broken down by brainwashing, interrogation, and propaganda. The 2+2=5 of George Orwell. You think that never in a million years could you be forced to declare 2+2=5. Orwell shows how it happens. So does Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon, and so does Bulgakov in Master and Margarita in “Ivan Is Split In Two.” We see it all around us still. The lessons are there. The warnings are there.

Ivan – the poet – witnesses strange things happening around Moscow. There’s a big black cat spotted on the streetcar, spotted elsewhere. Two men approach him in a park and talk to him. Pontius Pilate is a theme. Stalin is never mentioned. Communism is never mentioned. But – like Anna Burns’ The Milkman – the oppressive quality of the surrounding city is palpable in the book. After a tragedy occurs which makes no sense – there seems to have been something occult about it – (the devil is alive and well and living in Moscow, in other words), Ivan tries to tell people what has happened. He is not believed. He is desperate to get the word out. He tells everyone: “The Devil is here in Moscow!” Predictably, he is put into a mental institution. He is asked to write down all of his memories of the day of the tragedy. Then begins his re-education. A terrible term. And so Ivan must be “split in two.” People must always be ‘split in two’ in a totalitarian society. The officials say: What you saw is NOT really what you saw … and you cannot have an opinion on what you saw anyway. You have to just take it as truth. Even if you DO see a massive cat riding the streetcar … what proof do you have? You didn’t really see it.

It’s gaslighting on a gigantic scale.

Certain political systems want to abolish contemplation, grappling, THOUGHT itself. They only want party-line bullet points: and so the language is boiled down, destroying even the possibilities of ambiguity, of thought itself. (Again: Orwell’s “newspeak.”) If you limit a people’s vocabulary, you limit their thought. It’s that simple. The ideal is an obedient populace, a populace who will swallow ANYthing, even the devil walking around a pond in a public park. In that stifling environment, anyone who protests, “This isn’t right!” is seen as a threat, or as just flat out stupid or crazy.

I re-read the book for the third time last year. The conditions under which Bulgakov wrote the book (and then burned it) and then wrote it again from memory – haunt every page, so much so that I was consistently surprised at how FUNNY Master and Margarita is. The giant obnoxious cat lolling back on the bed sipping vodka, nibbling on a little hors d’ouevres. You can just SEE this giant cat chillin’ out, and it’s totally absurd. It’s also amazing because I love cats but I HATE this cat. Every page has some crazy image like that, and even a man’s severed head bouncing down a sidewalk has its humorous side.

The humor and the horror are one and the same, of course. Because of that, the book still feels dangerous.

It’s such a perfect metaphor. In a supposedly athiestic country – the Bolsheviks got rid of God, right? They turned churches into barns and pool halls and Museums of Atheism, right? – if the Devil appeared in such a place, the actual Devil, how would anyone even recognize him? In a world where no one is allowed to speak outside an approved narrative, then how on earth could you get the message out that there’s an abnormally large cat lying on your bed sipping vodka out of a glass? You are forced – at gunpoint essentially – to parrot the accepted truth. You did not see what you think you saw. There’s the almost slapstick sequence in the writers’ building, where everyone has been put under a spell and they can’t stop singing. They try desperately but they open their mouth and operatic anthems burst out. It’s HILARIOUS but … think of the metaphor. In the process of telling an entire population that they didn’t see what they say they saw, the cognitive dissonance is so extreme (Orwell’s 2+2=5 is the most perfect metaphor) that Ivan is “split in two”. It’s the only way to survive.

It’s fun to revisit because the book is so dense and brilliant there’s so much to it I always forget. But the details I remember. The apricot juice. The cat lolling about with the vodka. The writers’ restaurant. The character with one black eye and one green eye. The apartment where every resident eventually disappears, never to be seen again. Pontius Pilate’s headache. The headaches – everyone has splitting headaches. Of COURSE they do. That’s cognitive dissonance for you.

In “Ivan is Split in Two”, the doctor comes in, gives Ivan a shot, and says “all will be forgotten.”

This is the split. Ivan begins to doubt himself. He begins to doubt his own eyes. He doubts that he saw what he really saw.

Once when this happens, the enemy has won.

Here’s an excerpt from “Ivan Is Split In Two”:

The poet’s attempts to compose a report on the terrible consultant had come to nothing. As soon as he received a pencil stub and some paper from the stout nurse, whose name was Praskovya Fyodorovna, he had rubbed his hands together in a businesslike fashion and hastily set to work at the bedside table. He had dashed off a smart beginning, “To the police. From Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny, member of MASSOLIT. Report. Yesterday evening I arrived at Petrarch’s Ponds with the deceased Berlioz …”

And the poet immediately became confused, largely due to the word “deceased”. It made everything sound absurd from the start: how could he have arrived somewhere with the deceased? Dead men don’t walk! They really will think I’m a madman!

Such thoughts made him start revising. The second version came out as follows, “… with Berlioz, later deceased …” That didn’t satisfy the author either. He had to write a third version, and that came out even worse than the other two, ” … with Berlioz, who fell under a streetcar …” What was irksome here was the obscure composer who was Berlioz’s namesake; he felt compelled to add, “… not the composer …”

Tormented by these two Berliozes, Ivan crossed everything out and decided to begin with a strong opening that would immediately get the reader’s attention. He began with a description of the cat boarding the streetcar, and then went back to the episode of the severed head. The head and the consultant’s prediction made him think of Pontius Pilate, and in order to make the report more convincing, he decided to include the whole story about the procurator, starting with the moment when he came out onto the colonnade of Herod’s palace dressed in a white robe with a blood-red lining.

Ivan worked hard, crossing out what he had written and adding new words. He even tried to do drawings of Pontius Pilate, and of the cat on its hind legs. But the drawings didn’t help either, and the more the poet worked, the more confused and incomprehensible his report became…

The doctor appeared, gave Ivan an injection in his arm and assured him that he would stop crying, that now everything would pass, everything would change and all would be forgotten.

The doctor turned out to be right. The wood across the river started to look as it had before. It stood out sharply, down to the last tree, beneath the sky which had been restored to its former perfect blueness, and the river grew calm. Ivan’s anguish began to diminish right after the injection, and now the poet lay peacefully, gazing at the rainbow spread across the sky.

Things stayed this way until evening, and he never even noticed when the rainbow evaporated, the sky faded and grew sad, and the world turned black.

Ivan drank some hot milk, lay down again, and was himself surprised at how his thoughts had changed. The image of the demonic, accursed cat had somehow softened in his memory, the severed head no longer frightened him, and when Ivan stopped thinking about the head, he began to reflect on how the clinic wasn’t so bad, everything considered, and how Stravinsky was a clever fellow and a celebrity and extremely pleasant to have dealings with. And, besides, the evening air was sweet and fresh after the storm.

The asylum was falling asleep. The frosted white lights in the quiet corridors went out, and in accordance with regulations, the faint blue night-lights came on, and the cautious steps of the nurses were heard less frequently on the rubber matting in the corridor outside the door.

Now Ivan lay in a state of sweet lethargy, gazing now at the shaded lamp, which cast a mellow light down from the ceiling, now at the moon, which was emerging from the black wood. He was talking to himself.

“Why did I get so upset over Berlioz falling under a streetcar?” the poet reasoned. “In the final analysis, let him rot! What am I to him, anyway, kith or kin? If we examine the question properly, it turns out that I, esentially, didn’t really know the deceased. What did I actually know about him? Nothing, except that he was bald and horribly eloquent. And so, citizen,” continued Ivan, addressing an invisible audience, “let us examine the following: explain, if you will, why I got so furious at that mysterious consultant, magician, and professor with the black, vacant eye? What was the point of that whole absurd chase, with me in my underwear, carrying a candle? And what about that grotesque scene in the restaurant?”

“But, but, but …” said the old Ivan to the new Ivan, addressing him in a stern voice from somewhere inside his head or behind his ear, “but didn’t he know in advance that Berlioz’s head would be cut off? How could you not get upset?”

“What is there to discuss, comrades!” retorted the new Ivan to the broken-down old Ivan. “Even a child can see that there is something sinister about all this. He is, no doubt about it, a mysterious and exceptional personality. But that’s what makes it so interesting! The fellow was personally acquainted with Pontius Pilate, what could be more interesting than that? And instead of making that ridiculous scene at Petrarch’s Ponds, wouldn’t it have been better to have asked him politely about what happened next to Pilate and the prisoner Ha-Notsri? But instead, I got obsessed with the devil knows what! Is it such an earth-shattering event – that an editor got run over! Does it mean the magazie will have to close down? So, what can you do? Man is mortal and, as was said so fittingly, sometimes suddenly so. Well, God rest his soul! There’ll be a new editor, and maybe he’ll be even more eloquent than the last one.”

After dozing off for awhile, the new Ivan asked the old Ivan spitefully, “So how do I look in all this?”

“Like a fool!” a bass voice pronounced distinctly, a voice which did not come from either one of the Ivans and was amazingly reminiscent of the consultant’s bass.

For some reason Ivan did not take offense at the word “fool”, but was pleasantly surprised by it, smiled, and fell into a half-sleep. Sleep was creeping up on Ivan, and he could already see a palm tree on an elephantlike trunk, and a cat went by – not a fearsome one, but a jolly one, and, in short, sleep was about to engulf him when suddenly the window grille moved aside noiselessly, and a mysterious figure, who was trying to hide from the moonlight, appeared on the balcony, and shook a warning finger at Ivan.

Not feeling the least bit afraid, Ivan raised himself in bed and saw that there was a man on the balcony. And this man pressed his finger to his lips and whispered, “Shh!”

MANUSCRIPTS DON’T BURN.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Books, On This Day, writers | Tagged , , , , | 11 Comments

For Joseph Cotten’s birthday: Gaslight: His Listening Is Active

Posted on May 15, 2026 by sheila

Except for a couple of brief encounters in public settings, Joseph Cotten’s Brian Cameron and Ingrid Bergman’s Paula Asquist never meet until the final scene of Gaslight. Cameron is obsessed with the unsolved murder of Paula Asquist’s aunt, and is stunned when he sees Paula (Bergman) in the flesh: she is the spitting image of her beautiful aunt. He personally a cop to walk the beat on that block and report back. He hangs around in the bushes. He watches, he waits. He figures out the husband is probably sneaking into the house from the back through a skylight. But why? He has some suspicions, but he is not sure. The wife is the great mystery. The one time Brian saw her in a public setting at a fancy concert, she had a breakdown and was led weeping from the room. Is she mentally unstable? Cameron isn’t sure who the husband is, but he has some ideas. He senses the urgency of the situation, that something truly awful is going on in that house.It is time for him to make his move.

He knocks on the door of 9 Thornton Square. The elderly housemaid says the lady of the house is not well. Brian ignores her, coming into the hallway, saying, “Oh, she’ll want to see me.”

A fearful Ingrid Bergman appears at the top of the stairs and tells him to go away. He comes up to meet her, and launches into his story, designed to show his trustworthiness, and also he has something of use to her.

It is one of the first moments when a male (or female, for that matter: but his maleness is essential in this context) treats her as someone with the authority to make her own choices. He knows he has to prove himself to her, show her something that will gain her trust, and in so doing he admits (without saying so) she has autonomy as a person, trust is something that must be earned. The burden of proof is on HIM. His behavior in the opening moments of this scene are deeply respectful of her autonomy as a person.

I am mentioning the setup because I am interested in why things are successful. All of Gaslight is successful: the set, lighting design, costumes, script, the cast … the whole thing works. It is one of the most terrifying and accurate portraits of how brainwashing works in a domestic situation. (i.e. gaslighting). This scene has many twists and turns, ending in a showdown with the husband. But it begins quietly, cautiously, in the tentative conversation on the stairway. By this point in Gaslight, Paula believes she is losing her mind, and trusts nothing about her own perception of things. She believes she cannot be allowed autonomy because she is too forgetful, too dangerous to herself. She is thoroughly brainwashed.

Cameron does not know this, although he sensed she had been duped by her husband into 1. marrying him in the first place, and 2. going mad so he could send her away. But all of his deducing happens in those opening moments on the stairwell. His body language is alert with listening and attention. Cotten doesn’t do too much. He recognizes she is not well, but he senses (knows) her unwellness is her husband’s doing. He knows in his heart there is nothing whatsoever wrong with this woman’s mind. The scene is a masterpiece of writing: Cameron doesn’t blaze into the house shouting, “YOUR HUSBAND ISN’T WHO HE SAYS HE IS.” He has to work up to it. Perhaps he hadn’t realized just how far gone Paula was, but in 2 or 3 seconds, he gets the picture.

You can watch Joseph Cotten absorb it all, with no corresponding panic or condescension. He treats her like an adult, albeit a fragile one. He speaks to her calmly, putting it all together for her, as he puts it together for himself. And please note: he never takes his eyes off Ingrid Bergman.

In many ways, Cameron is a thankless part, although crucial. He is the lone investigator who remembers Alice Alquist, he is the independent thinker who keeps searching for the answer. Most of his dialogue is exposition. He provides outsider perspective on the situation in the house.

His dialogue in this scene is mostly questions. He asks her about her husband, about the noises she hears. He listens intently to the answers. Most of their conversation is filmed in long takes, with quick cuts up to the gas lamps, flame either waxing or waning. Bergman moves restlessly through the room, the camera following her, sometimes leaving Cotten out of frame. We can still feel his listening presence off-frame. Then he follows her into the frame. The scene does not stop for him, just because the camera is not on him. His listening makes the final scene what it is.

It is not the listening of a man who knows the answers. It is the listening of a man struggling to put the pieces together, in the moment, and under the gun. It matters to him how she has perceived things because he suspects she has known the truth all along. She slowly starts to open up. Her restlessness subsides, although her eyes keep darting around. She still is under her husband’s dark enchantment. But when actual evidence emerges – the letter in the desk – understanding begins to dawn. On the heels of this realization is grief. Her entire love affair was a sham. And on the heels of the grief is rage. How could he do this to her?

Cameron handles these waves of emotion calmly. He is not put off by her hysteria. The woman has been traumatized. He does not infantilize her. He just keeps speaking, quietly and urgently, telling her No, she is not crazy, Yes, the lights have been dimming, and Yes, it is her husband doing it. He is sorry “everything has been taken” from her, but he is calmly insistent. He shows her the way out.

He does not traumatize her again.

Cotten plays the urgency as well. They don’t have a lot of time. Cameron never forgets this respite will soon end. It is dangerous here for her, for him, too. The gun is gone. The time has come.

The scene moves from room to room. Bergman sits on a chaise longue, the asymmetrical shape of the back swooping up in the foreground, covering most of her body, revealing most of him. She is lost in delusions, but is starting to come back to reality. She rarely looks at Cotten. Paula doesn’t even know his name. She is so pliable that anyone could have come along at that moment, told her anything and she would have followed. But because it is Cameron, with his intelligent kindness and calm questions, not to mention his intent listening … she shedsthe effects of the brainwashing. Cotten plays this scene to perfection.

Listening is active. Talk to any actor and they will say listening is the #1 most important thing in acting. Funny how difficult it is to do, although perhaps it is not so funny. I know very few “good listeners” in real life. Listening requires you to be 100% present in the moment.

Good listening makes a scene happen more than big gestures.

Big gestures are essential to good acting as well, and Bergman has never been better than in Gaslight. She is explosive and intense.

But without Cotten’s active listening, her big gestures would occur in a vacuum. The scene would be cliche. She would walk away with the entire scene. Easily. She has the “big moments” after all, right? She screams, laughs, rages. But he makes it possible through how he listens.

People pretend to listen all the time. They have their eyes on you, they nod at what you say, but you feel their attention is elsewhere. It’s hard to put your finger on it. Being listened to is one of the most intoxicating and unique experiences in the human race, and without it, without actors who know how to listen – most of the major famous scenes in our literature could not take place.

New actors speak of doing scenes with, say, Robert DeNiro, and how it catapulted them to a new level in their acting, not because of the ego-massage of ACTING WITH DENIRO, but because of how he listens, and how his listening sets them up to be seen in the best possible light. Good listeners make other actors better. Being listened to in a real way forces YOU to become real. This is true in life, and it is true in acting as well. The listener is support staff. But think of a pass in a basketball game that leads to a scoring point. You need the pass. Victory is not just for the guy who makes the shot.

Joseph Cotten never takes his eyes off Ingrid Bergman except for when he looks up at the gas lamp. He is always thinking, active, open, allowing her to have an impact on him, reading her gestures, hearing what she can’t yet say.

Listening like this is a powerful thing. It is the most important thing in acting, and the most under-praised.

All good actors are great listeners. There are no exceptions.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Actors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged | 12 Comments

“That’s the way I work: I try to imagine what I would like to see.” — Sofia Coppola

Posted on May 14, 2026 by sheila

It’s her birthday today.

Doing these posts is a way to pull up things from my gigantic archives. I might as well find ways to share them. But it’s also a reminder of how much I haven’t written. Topics I should probably explore in print. For example: I haven’t written a word about Somewhere, which I think may very well be Coppola’s best film. I think it’s one of the best films of the last 30 years. A throwback to the Golden Age of 1970s American filmmaking.

I also have never written about Marie Antoinette, which got some VERY weird critiques back in the day … all those ANACHRONISMS (there were anachronisms in Shakespeare, you dolts.) Also, the ever-present criticism of nepotism. In fact, those critiques are SO constant that one could make the argument that Coppola has a VERY difficult battle indeed, to get her work taken seriously IN SPITE of her father. Nicolas Cage changed his damn name to try to make it on his own without the Coppola name. I love Marie Antoinette.

And her wonderful Christmas special – A Very Murray Christmas – which made me happy to be alive. (I’m not exaggerating.) The special is structured like one of those old-fashioned television specials and variety shows, where guests show up and do their thing, tell some jokes, sing a song, “banter”. And Coppola does all this – beautifully – but overlays it with this bittersweet feeling of nostalgia and melancholy and loneliness.

But I have written a couple of things about Coppola’s films:

— a piece on Bill Murray in Lost in Translation for my friend Jeremy Richey’s wonderful blog, Moon in the Gutter (RE-POSTED HERE). That one means a lot to me.

— I reviewed the extremely horny The Beguiled for Ebert.

And finally, here are two eloquent shots from Coppola’s first film, a short called Lick the Star. To say “I feel seen” by this doesn’t even come close to expressing the situation. Maybe it’s the Gen-X-ness of it all that I really respond to.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Directors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

“I’m very concerned that we don’t make movies that are original anymore.” — Robert Zemeckis

Posted on May 14, 2026 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

While Robert Zemeckis has gone on to be a bazillionaire and one of the most successful producers in Hollywood of fairly middle-brow movies, he started off small and rowdy – with two films I love: first, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, about a bunch of Beatles fans who all go to New York to try to get tickets to the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and the absolutely filthy – profane – corrupt – and gloriously funny Used Cars.

I mean …

That is not false advertising.

Both I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars were written by Zemeckis and Bob Gale. I find it difficult to forgive Forrest Gump. I’m not offended by much but I am offended by that film’s glorification of simplification and anti-intellectualism, and if you love it, I’m sorry but I’m all argued out on the Forrest Gump front. I had to deal with friends saying, shocked, “HOW could you not like it??” The critical tide has turned, and many people seem to hate it now, but I felt like I was standing alone at the time. I despise it.

But let’s not dwell. (It’s hard not to dwell, though, because Forrest Gump was such an enormous mainstream hit. I thought the whole world had gone stark raving crazy. I felt the same way about Life is Beautiful too. Any time critics say “If you don’t like this movie, check your pulse” – something is rotten in the state of Denmark.)

Zemeckis has also been at the helm of some other faves – Romancing the Stone and Death Becomes Her: adore both of them.

Contact has a very special place in my heart, and – unlike Forrest Gump – actually prized knowledge and competence and expertise. I love the Jodie Foster character. Back to the Future was, of course, huge – and unlike Forrest Gump justifiably huge. I love Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, loved its wit, loved how it utilized technology without upstaging the actual action. So far so good. I liked Cast Away but – again – did not feel the swoon of adoration so many others felt. I did not feel that it was a “celebration of the human spirit.” I’m cranky. The movie also generated the “if you didn’t like this, check your pulse” response. I’ve checked my pulse. I am, indeed, fully alive. I just disagree with you about Forrest Gump. Calm down. I’m not telling you YOU can’t love the movie. He directed Flight, a very good movie with a cop-out of an ending. Flight was rated-R and the first rated-R Zemeckis film SINCE Used Cars.

Looking at this track record (and I haven’t even mentioned his lengthy producer credits), it is VERY instructive to go back and watch I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars.

Both films are made with competence and confidence, and both include extremely complicated sequences – multiple characters, multiple narratives. Both films require perfect comic timing, broad yet specific performances, and fearlessness in pushing things forward. These movies really MOVE. There is also a sense of total chaos in both films, runaway trains of madcap adventure. A director has to create the controlled environment where chaos like that can occur.

I’ve been meaning to write about I Wanna Hold Your Hand for years. I caught it on afternoon TV when I was in high school and it launched me into one of those vivid fantasy worlds, where I was one of those kids, trying to storm the barricades.

But I HAVE written about Used Cars, for my Film Comment column. Used Cars is the opposite of heart-warming. It is also laugh-out-loud funny.

If you don’t laugh while watching Used Cars, check your pulse.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Directors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged | 8 Comments

“Music, at its essence, is what gives us memories. And the longer a song has existed in our lives, the more memories we have of it.” — Stevie Wonder

Posted on May 13, 2026 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

I love that quote because I have so many memories “attached” to Stevie Wonder’s songs, so attached that they don’t feel “attached” at all. The song IS the memory. And more than a memory, really: these songs, which have been in my life for what feels like always, call forth eras, times, feelings, sense memory … the inchoate amorphous sense of an entire time. He was on heavy HEAVY rotation among my group of friends in college, and so his songs call forth college: hungover hilarious breakfasts, making out on a beach, late night tech rehearsals, driving home with the windows open, the whole glorious intense chaos of being a theatre major surrounded by best friends and boyfriends, working on creative things, trying hard, enjoying triumphs, striving, dreaming … Summer vacations. Going to the movies. Going through the drivethru for iced coffee and headed to the beach. Stevie Wonder blasting from the car speakers, from the boom boxes, played in the dressing rooms as we got ready for dress rehearsal. It’s a MOOD, it’s a VIBE. He’s hard to talk about, because of that. (I also love Wonder’s perspective on Elvis, how Elvis represented – embodied – without even knowing it, just by standing there – racial reconciliation and healing and how people cannot deal with it. He called him “a Caucasian brother” in an interview.)

If I HAD to choose my favorite, it’d probably “Signed Sealed Delivered”. It’s a seratonin-blast.

My brother Brendan included Stevie Wonder’s classic album Innervisions on his Best Albums list. It’s a really good read.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“I was a sinister child, lazy and cynical.” — Eve Babitz

Posted on May 13, 2026 by sheila

“What I wanted, although at the time I didn’t understand what the thing was because no one ever tells you anything until you already know it, was everything. Or as much as I could get with what I had to work with. I wanted, mainly, a certain kind of song.
Like scents, certain songs just throw me. And I wanted to be thrown into that moment of perfume when everything was gone except for the dazzle. It doesn’t last long, but in order to have everything you must have those moments of such unrelated importance that time ripples away like a frame of water. Without those moments, your own heaven party can die of thirst. They’re like booster shots, they make you stronger. You know it’s worth the twinge of envy when you’ve recovered from the dazzle because the mystery of life fades when death, people having fun without you, is forgotten. Time escapes unnoticed and time is all you get.
If you live in L.A., to reckon time is a trick since there are no winters. There are just earthquakes, parties and certain people. And songs.”
— Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood

It’s her birthday today.

Eve Babitz, nobody else like her. Discovering her writing was like discovering a part of myself. Or at least seeing it in print written by someone else… and written so beautifully … was a revelation. Outlaw is the word I use. She was a swashbuckling romantic It-Girl outlaw. I wrote about her a lot, but here’s a big piece I wrote on my Substack.

I will leave you with this. In 1963, 18-year-old Eve Babitz was looking for a publisher for a novel she wrote. (It would take her 10 more years to get a book published). So she wrote to Joseph Heller, looking for help. All fine, all ambitious, good for teenage Eve. But here is how she introduced herself:

Dear Joseph Heller,

I am a stacked eighteen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard.

I am also a writer.

Eve Babitz

Unbelievable. I just have to observe: If those two sentences were reversed, the note wouldn’t have nearly the same effect. She knew.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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