The documentary world's identity crisis

Streaming sparked a boom for documentaries, but now a reckoning is coming among filmmakers and their subjects. Reeves Wiedeman discusses how - as demand increased - a genre that once existed to inform evolved into a commercial product.

A survey of America’s cultural landscape offering coverage of film, television, art and more, Vulture is the go-to entertainment news site for the culturally obsessed.

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The boom — or glut — in streaming documentaries has sparked a reckoning among filmmakers and their subjects

The beloved children’s classic is all about the power of imagination. 

The Velveteen Rabbit is more than just a story about a stuffed rabbit that comes to life at Christmas. As Andrea Long Chu explains, it is a memorial to the magic of childhood and what we lose when we grow up.

The Velveteen Rabbit was always more than a children’s book

The half-Asian, half-white protagonist reflects American society as a whole.

Over the years, the United States has grappled with tense international relations with the far East, a struggle Asian Americans have become increasingly caught up in. Through literary fiction, Andrea Long Chu examines the paradox of Asian American identity and whether such a broad demographic should even be placed in the same category. 


The mixed metaphor

How did a movie studio achieve such a unique cultural status?

The iconoclastic studio has bred superfans, dropped swag, and developed a reputation as the film-industry version of an underground record label. As a result, it’s now teetering on the verge of self-parody. Nate Jones explores how A24 has sold itself as an original, distinctive and prestigious studio and has reached heights of unparalleled success by any other company of this kind.

The cult of A24

Whatever your problem, he wants you to talk it through.

"Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers" is not the message people want, but Kendrick Lamar feels it's the one they need. In this review of Lamar's latest offering, Craig Jenkins argues that despite it being a prickly listen, there are moments of brilliance that might make it one of his best albums yet.

How does that make you feel, Kendrick?

Is it espionage? Revenge? Or a complete waste of time?

For years, a mysterious figure has been stealing books before their release. They have adopted multiple aliases to obtain unpublished manuscripts, targeting victims worldwide and acting with no apparent motive.

The whole scheme resisted explanation. Was it someone in publishing or a Hollywood producer desperate for early access to books they might buy? Was the thief simply an impatient reader? Reeves Wiedeman tells the fascinating tale of a mysterious figure scamming the publishing world searching for unpublished manuscripts as the thief was still on the loose, exhibiting even bolder and more bizarre behaviour.

'This was a setup Stieg Larsson would have admired: a clever thief adopting multiple aliases, targeting victims around the world, and acting with no clear motive. The manuscripts weren’t being pirated, as far as anyone could tell. Fake Francesca wasn’t demanding a ransom. “We assumed it was the Russians,” Mörk said. “But we are the book industry. It’s not like we’re digging gold or researching vaccines.” Perhaps someone in publishing, or a Hollywood producer, was desperate for early access to books they might buy.'

The spine collector

She tortures her gay male characters but only so she can swoop in to save them.

Hanya Yanagihara's queer gothic riptide "A Little Life" became a best seller in 2015, won multiple awards and even received a nomination from the best novels of the past 125 years. How did a book with such dark themes surrounding trauma meet such success? In the run-up to Yanagihara's latest release, a complex tour de force in three interrelated sections that has emerged from the white heat of the moment, Andrea Long Chu reflects on the uniqueness of one of America's best modern authors.

"She seems to sense that wealth can be tilted, like a stone, to reveal the wriggling muck beneath. In a few cases, she is even making a political point, as with her abiding interest in the colonization of Hawaii. But more often in these books, wealth's rotten underbelly is purely psychological: There are no wrongful beach houses in A Little Life, no ill-gotten hors d'oeuvre. Luxury is simply the backdrop for Jude's extraordinary suffering, neither cause nor effect; if anything, the latter lends poignancy to the former. This was Yanagihara's first discovery, the one that cracked open the cobbled streets of Soho and let something terrible slither out — the idea that misery bestows a kind of dignity that wealth and leisure, no matter how sharply rendered on the page, simply cannot."

Hanya’s boys

Inspiration can come from some surprising places.

Four years ago, the fictional mob wife Carmela Soprano gave P.E. Moskowitz the confidence to transition by making the prospect of womanhood seem realistic. However, after a recent rewatch, she discovered how she had moved on from the character that changed her life.

I couldn’t imagine being happy — but I could imagine being Carmela

How one of the most hyped books became a publishing horror story — but still ended up a best seller.

"American Dirt", a book about a Mexican immigrant running away from the cartel, was described by its editor to the publishers as the "book about immigration that people who have no interest in immigration will read," and gathered early praise by critics. Despite this, it was soon revealed the author wasn't even Latin American and instead of being in the Pulitzer-prize conversation, it became the subject of widespread criticism due to its reliance on stereotypes about the culture. In Vulture, Lila Shapiro tells the story.

"In the months leading up to American Dirt’s publication, Macmillan had positioned the page-turner — about a mother and son escaping cartel violence in Mexico — as a definitive chronicle of the migrant experience. Prominent readers had praised it in terms worthy of a Nobel Prize. The novelist Don Winslow called it 'a Grapes of Wrath for our times.' Oprah, who picked it for her book club, wrote, 'This story changed the way I see what it means to be a migrant.' Gurba, who is Mexican American, saw it differently. In an essay for Tropics of Meta, an academic blog, she described it as shallow and full of harmful stereotypes and accused the author, Jeanine Cummins, a white woman, of writing 'trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf.' Many agreed. The early praise gave way to a flood of criticism: thousands of articles and tweets took issue with the author’s identity, the book itself, and, crucially, a massive marketing push that was viewed as tasteless and misleading."

Blurbed to death

Stories behind its production and what followed upon release have granted the film a myth-like status.

How did Orson Welles’s film become so firmly established at the top of the canon in the first place? In this must-listen piece for cinema and history aficionados, Bilge Ebiri takes a deep dive for Vulture into the unique lore of Citizen Kane, its dominant cinematic superiority... and why it may all be coming to an end over the coming years.

"Sight & Sound’s 1962 poll is generally regarded as the first official indication of Kane’s emergence as the greatest movie of all time, where it just edged out L’Avventura and Rules of the Game to overtake the No. 1 spot. There had been yet another Brussels poll of filmmakers a few years earlier — in 1958, at the Brussels World’s Fair. There, Kane came in ninth place, one of only three sound films to place in the Top 12. It would go on to dominate the Sight & Sound poll in 1972, 1982, 1992, and 2002. (Along the way, it would top lots of other surveys as well.) Looking at the polls and individual ballots over the years, you can see Kane’s influence growing, as it’s increasingly featured on the lists of international critics — starting with the British, then moving on to other continental critics as well as American ones, then expanding even further abroad."

The rise (and inevitable fall) of Citizen Kane as the greatest movie ever made

Thirty years into an epic career, Mariah Carey is still trying to explain herself.

As Christmas songs infiltrate the airwaves in households all around the world, and Carey's video of "All I Want For Christmas Is You" gets shown on repeat on TV, Allison P. Davis, from Vulture, talks to the singer about being a self-professed vampire, her family life in lockdown and how her memoir is, above all, for the fans.

You don’t know her

Nothing made sense in 2020 — unless you were on the internet.

For E. Alex Jung, despite all the hurdles the entertainment industries faced thanks to COVID-19, there was still "funny, challenging, inventive work everywhere, if you knew where to go." In this piece for Vulture, he reflects on the fever dream year of the pandemic — only slightly eased by the art of viral internet 'memeology'.

Quarantine brain

Why do corporations speak the way they do?

Molly Young is a seasoned start-up worker, with close to ten years of experience in multiple companies. Upon taking one gap year to do some freelance work, she returned to the office life with renewed enthusiasm, except for one thing: the language that governs it. In this absorbing piece for Vulture, she aims to decipher the way this type of communication impedes words, and why it is also purposefully designed with that in mind.

"Another thing this language has in common with garbage is that we can’t stop generating it. Garbage language isn’t unique to start-ups; it’s endemic to business itself, and the form it takes tends to reflect the operating economic metaphors of its day. A 1911 book by Frederick Winslow Taylor called The Principles of Scientific Management borrows its language from manufacturing; men, like machines, are useful for their output and productive capacity. The conglomeration of companies in the 1950s and ’60s required organizations to address alienated employees who felt faceless amid a sea of identical gray-suited toilers, and managers were encouraged to create a climate conducive to human growth and to focus on the self-actualization needs of their employees. In the 1980s, garbage language smelled strongly of Wall Street: leverage, stakeholder, value-add. The rise of big tech brought us computing and gaming metaphors: bandwidth, hack, the concept of double-clicking on something, the concept of talking off-line, the concept of leveling up."

This article was originally published in Vulture in February 2020.

Garbage language

Eating and coping mechanisms, childhood and self-control, criticism, love, cancer, and pandemics.

Spurred on by a shielded lockdown, Jerry Saltz reflects for Vulture on the impactful moments of his life that lead to his unorthodox culinary habits and to his unusual break into the world of art criticism — a heartfelt, moving listen about his life, becoming the person you are today and the inevitable passing of time.

Jerry Saltz the American art critic — and senior art critic and columnist for New York magazine — was formerly the senior art critic for The Village Voice. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2018 and was nominated for the award in 2001 and 2006.

"As I walked upstairs, the sound of my shoes on the steps made me remember that as we were heading out that morning, I’d heard my father running down these same stairs saying something about a 'relapse.' It terrified me. I made my way upstairs to my bedroom. I looked down from the third-floor landing and saw lots of old strangers in my living room. When they looked up at me, they all went silent. Like I was different. From that day forward, my mother was never mentioned again for the rest of my father’s life. Not once. All my memories of her except for the trip to the Art Institute — and one of her on that drive, saying, 'We might not see each other again' — vanished. That was that. There was no funeral, no memorial service, no nothing. I went to school the next day."

This article was originally published in Vulture in May 2020.

Jerry Saltz: My appetites

Despite being paralysed and unable to speak, director Stacy Title is determined to make one final movie.

Amy Wallace, from Vulture, follows the Academy Award-nominated director of the successful horror movie "The Bye Bye Man", in her remarkable journey to make one final movie despite a diagnosis of ALS, and having to fight one of the most discriminatory industries in the world: Hollywood. An inspirational listen that shows everything is possible.

"Hollywood is no place for quitters. Stacy Title has always known that, long before she and Jonathan moved from New York to Los Angeles to break into the movie business, long before the short film they made was nominated for an Oscar, long before they bought their Mediterranean-style hillside house perched under the HOLLYWOOD sign."

Walking time bomb

How Michaela Coel made the most sublimely unsettling show of 2020.

"I May Destroy You", a powerful account of a woman dealing with the aftermath of having been sexually assaulted when having her drink spiked on a night out, and based on Coel's own experience, took the world by storm when it premiered in the Summer. She produced, wrote, directed and starred in it, to universal critical acclaim. In this interview with Vulture's E. Alex Jung, we find out more about Coel's inspiring journey.

"Coel recalls one clarifying moment when she spoke with a senior-level development executive at Netflix and asked if she could retain at least 5 percent of her rights. 'There was just silence on the phone,' she says. 'And she said, ‘It’s not how we do things here. Nobody does that, it’s not a big deal.’ I said, ‘If it’s not a big deal, then I’d really like to have 5 percent of my rights.’' Silence. She bargained down to 2 percent, one percent, and finally 0.5 percent. The woman said she’d have to run it up the chain. Then she paused and said, 'Michaela? I just want you to know I’m really proud of you. You’re doing the right thing.' And she hung up."