Wednesday 10th September 2025
Blog Page 351

WATCH3WORDS: Black Bear – Funny.Stifling.Psychodrama.

Millie Butler-Gallie
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WATCH3WORDS: Black Bear – Funny.Stifling.Psychodrama.

Despite being set in a vast and remote mountainous region in North America, the atmosphere of Lawrence Michael Levine’s psychological drama, Black Bear, is stifling. As the film explores what it means to be an artist – from ego and behaviour to  influences, creative process, and even chosen medium – the line between artifice and reality becomes blurred in a wildly original display of metanarrative. Claustrophobic, erratic, and prickly all at once, Black Bear is an experiment in film which entangles its audience deep in its intellectual web.

At its centre is Aubrey Plaza as Allison, a witty young filmmaker who, having fallen prey to writer’s block, goes in search of inspiration at a lakeside cabin. Once there, her presence becomes a point of contention in the relationship between her two hosts, Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and Blair (Sarah Gadon), who happen to be expecting a child together. Plaza is probably best known for playing the offbeat queen-of-awkward April Ludgate in the office comedy Parks and Recreation. Some might also know her from her brilliant performance as a psychotic stalker in Ingrid Goes West (2017), or perhaps even from that time she accepted an award on behalf of Amy Poehler and proceeded to thank the devil himself before jokingly being pulled away from the mic. Plaza’s characteristic dark humour certainly bubbles under the surface in her portrayal of Allison, and the role almost feels as if it was created with her in mind. Black Bear’s comedy isn’t gimmicky, though. It’s too ominous and calculating for laugh-out-loud humour. Rather, the film borders on the absurd in the way it makes you feel so very uncomfortable, especially when the social blunders we are supposed to laugh are revealed to have toxic consequences.

When Blair becomes increasingly suspicious that Gabe is falling in love with Allison, tensions boil over, and all social etiquette is thrown out of the window. At dinner, conversations about film and feminism quickly turn personal as accusations of artistic failure and misogyny are thrown around. Black Bear’s oppressive atmosphere is also aided by its original soundtrack, composed by Giuio Carmassi and Bryan Scary. There aren’t any really ‘recognisable’ songs or, even voices – only very rarely are the mysterious instrumentals infused with some more melodious jazz. The result is an intensely insular focus on the loaded words, actions, and silences of the love triangle at the story’s centre.

Without revealing too much of the dramatic plot twist of the second act – which is well worth waiting for – it is at this point that the artistic anxiety and social discomfort which dominate the film’s first half become explosive. Passion, fury, and self-destruction take over as what some might first perceive to be a bit of a slow burn gets set on fire.

Black Bear is one of those rare films that doesn’t treat its viewer simply as the passive voyeur. It gleefully toys with its audience as much as the characters it pits against one another but, most impressively, you won’t realise what’s happening until it’s too late. 

Black Bear is available to purchase on Amazon Prime Video.

Art by Sasha LaCômbe.

“Well-behaved women seldom make history”: Hills, Poetry and Protest

Jaimini Patel
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“Well-behaved women seldom make history”: Hills, Poetry and Protest

At Joe Biden’s inauguration I, along with the rest of the world, watched Amanda Gorman reignite a marriage of unparalleled power: poetry and politics. Described by commentators as being the tenth Greek muse, this time not of history or poetry but of democracy, one line of Gorman’s poem The Hill We Climb particularly resonated with me:

‘being American is more than a pride we inherit. It’s the past we stepped into and how we repair it.’

Gorman’s poem promises salvation through struggle, and it is this willingness to step into the darker aspects of America’s historical struggle that makes this poem whole. You’ve probably learnt about some of the injustices Martin Luther King and Malcolm X fought against in this struggle. You’ve also probably read To Kill A Mockingbird, which addresses the injustice of false-rape accusations against black men. 

Cue, now, Ida B. Wells, a significantly less known figure, yet one who was instrumental in exposing and campaigning against violence against black people. Above all, Wells was a potent orator and writer whose fearless, raw, poetic speeches paved the way for women like Gorman to address the nation. 

Born into slavery during the civil war (1862), Wells had many-a-hill to climb during her life, but her primary struggle was against the institutionalised lynching and mob violence against innocent black people, primarily men, during her life. 

The first incident where Wells’ commitment to equality was demonstrated was when, aged 21, she was ordered by a conductor to move from her first-class carriage to a ‘coloured only’ one, despite having bought a first-class ticket. Wells refused, biting into the conductor’s hand when she was forcibly dragged out and eventually launching a legal battle against the train company, Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. Despite winning the court case, the verdict was overturned by a higher level court. 

Undeterred, Wells’ turned her eye to a new method of protest: journalism. In 1889 she became editor and co-owner of The Free Speech and Headlight, a black-owned newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee. Enraged by the People’s Grocery Lynchings, the first mob killings since the Civil War, in which three successful black businessmen were murdered, Wells began to investigate the shameful prevalence of unjust lynchings. 

Wells denounced the People’s Grocery Lynchings, then embarked on a journey across the south to investigate hundreds of mob-killings committed against innocent black people. What is so extraordinary about this is that Wells conducted all this research in a time when women did not even have the vote, and a black woman would certainly not have had the protection of law enforcement in towns where law enforcement would have been involved in the killings. Armed with only her pen and her pistol, Wells walked straight into a battleground where black people had been quite literally mutilated for no good reason. 

One of Wells’ most famous phrases is that ‘the way to right wrongs is to shine the light of truth upon them’, and this still rings true for investigative journalism today. Years before To Kill A Mockingbird was published, Wells had proof that rape was not alleged against black men in two thirds of the cases which she looked into, and even then it was only alleged after a consensual relationship. 

The irony of Wells’ situation is that, whilst her reporting aimed to hold violent perpetrators to account, the offices of her newspaper in Memphis were burned down by violent opponents of her reporting. Wells continued her work from New York and actually travelled to England, Scotland and Wales to try and gain a sympathetic audience to speak to her pamphlets, and she succeeded as the Londonn Anti-Lynching Committee was established: the first of its kind. 

In 1895 Wells married civil rights lawyer and activist Ferdinand L. Barnett, and became more involved in the national civil rights campaign from her new home of Chicago. Wells was an egalitarian in more than one aspect, however, showing her proto-feminist streak by adopting a double barrel surname rather than just taking her husband’s name. 

Wells’ involvement in the national civil rights movement can perhaps best be epitomised by an excerpt from one of her speeches to the 1909 National Negro Conference:

‘During the last 10 years, from 1899 to 1908 inclusive, the number lynched was 959. Of this number 102 were white, while the colored victims numbered 857. No other nation, civilized or savage, burns its criminals; only under that Stars and Stripes is the human holocaust possible. Twenty-eight human beings burned at the stake, one of them a woman and two of them children, is the awful indictment against American civilization – the gruesome tribute which the nation pays to the color line.’

It’s here that we see how the true power of Wells’ activism is a forerunner of Gorman’s, as she combines statistics from her own fearless research with poetry of the vanquished. The haunting synecdoche of the ‘Stars and Stripes’ which Wells links to a ‘human holocaust’ cuts right to the heart of the American identity at a time when such rhetoric could have cost Wells her life. 

Wells was a trailblazer in many ways, and perhaps one of her most relevant battles was that of intersectionality. As well as raising awareness of racial injustice, Wells was greatly involved in the women’s suffrage movement. The white female suffragists did not always see eye to eye with Wells, however, and at one suffrage parade organised for Washington, D.C. the day before the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson Wells, she was informed that she, alongside other black women, would walk at the end of the parade in a coloured delegation. Undaunted, Wells stepped into the middle of the march to link hands with her white colleagues: yet another symbol of her progressiveness, even within current civil rights movements. 

Ida B. Wells is not a textbook figure associated with civil rights, yet now more than ever she seems to be relevant to our world. Her strategies of investigative journalism and speech-making even when faced with violence remain admirable, but most of all it is her courage as a black woman without the protection of the society she was in that deserves to be celebrated.

Artwork by Emma Hewlett

Lost City

Leah Stein
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Lost City

The undulating sands stretch out, 

a vast expanse, sweltering

under the gaze of the sun

as it burns its way across the sky,

dunes flowing like currents, 

tides on an endless sea 

the color of ground cumin,

of cinnamon.  

 

A wall reaches toward the sky

weathered and incomplete, broken. 

Columns stand alone,  

lonely sentinels from a forgotten time, 

swallowed by ever shifting sands

beside a courtyard full of chipped cobblestone 

and dusty mosaics, glass

colorless.  

 

The ground bears deep lines, 

like scars etched onto its skin, 

from building foundations

long since withered away, 

long since disappeared to 

the wind, 

to the unforgiving hand of time, 

the coarse brush of sand. 

 

Beside the broken wall,

between lonely columns,

in the dusty courtyard, 

between etched lines,

where footsteps once echoed

where voices swelled over cracked desert sands, 

and fires once blew smoke into starry skies,

There are only ghosts. 

Dunkirk: the unknown soldier on screen

Sam Trevelyan
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Dunkirk: the unknown soldier on screen

Christopher Nolan’s films confuse me. It’s far from new for blockbusters to treat ‘character work’ as secondary to spectacle – as I’m writing this, the world’s number one film is Godzilla vs Kong – but it’s rare, and really quite special, to see a filmmaker build their style around this choice and yield some honest-to-god emotionally rousing stuff. I’m not sure I even like his films. Yet I can’t deny that when the formula works (as it does in Inception, The Prestige and The Dark Knight), the results get to me; they prove that a film can skimp on its characters and still be powerful and compelling.

But that’s not the end of my confusion, because then there’s 2017’s Dunkirk. For his tenth film, Nolan ditched his usual formula without fixing the character problems, and yet the result doesn’t just survive – it works even better than before. That improbable success is fascinating to me. So with finals upcoming and who knows how long until lockdown ends, what am I gonna do – not try to figure it out?

Let’s start with the usual formula. Nolan characters tend to be defined entirely by a single role: either their in-world jobs, like the thieves of Inception, who each get one-word labels like ‘chemist’ or ‘architect’, or their dramatic role as the embodiment of an ideal the film concerns itself with. The latter sort often come in pairs, as in The Prestige, a cautionary tale about obsession: one of the rival magicians sees and accepts the cost of his obsessions from the start, while the other ignores all warnings and learns of them the hard way. By the end, both have been driven to acts of literal self-destruction, but the one who regrets the damage he’s done to others gets the semblance of a happy ending. There’s something very mechanical about it all.

This approach makes for flat characters – not uninteresting per se, but they don’t exactly talk about much except plot details or personal philosophies, meaning the films crumble if their thematic cores aren’t rock-solid. Another effect is that the characters don’t typically inspire devotion from the audience. I don’t get the impression Nolan really cares about most of his characters, which is why so few get proper epilogues, and why we as viewers aren’t encouraged to fret about their struggles so much as contemplate them. It’s noteworthy that the only enduring fan-favourite his movies have produced is Heath Ledger’s Joker, who doesn’t even appear in The Dark Knight’s closing montage – he’s literally left hanging before the movie’s climax. Bane would get a similar treatment four years later, and Nolan’s leads aren’t given much either. Several of them don’t even have names, such as Tenet’s “Protagonist”.

The emptiness should be engulfing. Instead, when Nolan’s films work, they are spectacular.

His dialogue might sometimes be clunky or thick with exposition, but it’s also narratively efficient, well-performed and fascinating to listen to. Every person is a genius, every monologue a TED talk in miniature covering chaos, dreams, or the structure of magic tricks. Timelines are intercut to raise and answer questions in precise order. Nolan approaches story not as a sequence but as a tapestry, dissolving the usual separation of events in time and space so that we see the full picture all at once and feel the meaning of the characters’ speeches. Nobody wields montage for catharsis quite like him. The nearest thing to it might be Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, which merges two centuries-apart stories until the characters stand side-by-side, grappling with mysteries whose answers can only be seen from the other’s vantage point. Rambling monologues about entropy and rice pudding become commentaries on futility, lost knowledge and the play’s own narrative structure. And in this space, it no longer matters that Stoppard’s or Nolan’s characters are mere playthings, because their words are the only thing that’s important; they are the glue that binds the pretty pictures to their meaning.

Which brings us to Dunkirk: a film that keeps up the symphonic cross-cutting, but with minimal plot and with characters who have no philosophy, to the point they barely even speak. Nor are they any more fleshed-out than usual – on the contrary, it can be hard to tell one baby-faced soldier from another. So we have a Nolan film without the Nolan keystone, and with no apparent substitute. Again – it shouldn’t work.

But once again, it does – this time because a central theme in the film is how war has reduced these people in the exact same fashion. The soldiers in Dunkirk have no soldierly goal; their situation has turned them into a logistics problem, literally a payload stuck at point A that needs moving to point B. And even given a task, they would still be reduced by it, because the goals a soldier pursues are not their own – their targets are picked by context and commanders, for whose purposes one soldier is no different from another. The men of Dunkirk fight for their lives because they want to survive; their commanders want them to succeed partly for that alone, but also because they will be needed for the next battle. Similarly, the threats they face care nothing about their identities. It’s like what gambling expert David Sklansky says in his book The Theory of Poker: “when the cards are dealt, you are no longer a grandson, a friend, or a nice guy; you are a player.”

So unlike Nolan’s other works, where the neglect of character is a by-product of his focus being elsewhere, here his disinterest in the individual is thematically central. The whole film deals with the experience of being reduced by one’s situation to an object, a means – a character in a story that doesn’t care about you. In another Tom Stoppard play, this is what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern experience, realising they exist in Hamlet to complete a single role and then die for reasons they are not destined to understand. And with the experience comes angst, because it reminds them – and reminds us – that the systems within which we exist do not see us the way we see ourselves. That doesn’t mean these systems are right, but it creates friction between our personal and impersonal goals. That, at least in my view, is at the heart of Dunkirk. It’s why the film closes with the crinkle of a newspaper as a young man looks up after reading Churchill’s iconic speech, wondering, ‘What will this mean for me?’

I don’t know how much of this is deliberate. Nolan’s films are packed with self-referential subtext (Film Crit Hulk’s piece on the matter is so comprehensive that I cut several sections of this article when I discovered it, and I’m still worried about being derivative), but it’s hard to argue Dunkirk is Nolan’s conscious commentary on his stylistic shortcomings, when his next project, last year’s Tenet, doubled down on most of them. So perhaps the alignment of style and theme in Dunkirk is a happy accident.

Even if that’s true, however, I like one way it allows the film’s epilogue to be read. Much of the original literature about the angst of feeling ‘reduced’, from existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre, emphasised the role of other people’s gaze in making us feel such a way. But in Dunkirk, it takes being seen for the soldiers to remember they are human. Harry Styles’ Alex dreads the judgemental looks of his compatriots, but their quiet applause is what allows him to leave the French beaches behind. There are limits on what such gestures can do – this past year has seen the British government co-opt one, the Clap for Carers movement, instead of doing its actual duty to essential workers – but Dunkirk, which freely admits to being a tale of colossal military failure, reminds us that treating others with dignity doesn’t need to solve our problems for it to be worthwhile.

In this, it might be one of the warmest war films ever made. And of all people, it came from Christopher Nolan. That’s a twist not even he could have written.

Image Credit: Cassowary Colorizations via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Haute Kosher: No one is coming to save you and other Jewish parenting lessons

Leah Mitchell
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Haute Kosher: No one is coming to save you and other Jewish parenting lessons

“No one is coming to save you. You have to save yourself.”

This sticks in my mind as one of my mother’s great nuggets of advice. Alongside “only buy diamonds in America” and “it doesn’t matter how you drive, so long as you don’t hit anyone”. Unlike the notorious latter two, however, this was not said in a jocular tone. This was a lesson passed down, implicitly or explicitly, through generations, and now to me. I think my mother meant it to apply to a range of things – my being shy, my being a woman, but none more so than my being a Jew. Thus it was instilled in me from an early age that however small my voice is, I have to use it; because no one is going to speak up for me if I don’t speak up for myself.

My mother, when watching the news, or in conversation, would often say that most people are, to some degree, antisemitic. I used to tell her not to be so silly; it couldn’t possibly be true, I reasoned, that so many people could dislike us simply for being Jewish. In school we were taught that this was something which had happened in one isolated incident in the past, far removed from our present day British existence. It had come out of nowhere because of one man called Hitler and then gone away forever. Besides, I was barely Jewish: my father is an avowed atheist, raised Catholic; we never went to synagogue; we rarely celebrated most Jewish holidays. We were safe.

Except, except, except. At the age of around 8, I came across a copy of Anne Frank’s diary, accidentally moved to my classroom’s bookshelf from the school library. I was intrigued by the cover: a young Jewish girl with my mother’s surname. I took the book home and read it. And then I had nightmares. I remember sitting at the kitchen table and asking my parents why the Nazis had wanted to kill people like us, our family. Why the Jews? Why us? Rather than answering the unanswerable question, they asked sharply where this was coming from, and Anne Frank was whisked away out of my hands and placed back in the library.

Still I wondered. At 14, I seized the opportunity provided by a school history project to write up my grandmother’s stories about her family’s experiences in the Holocaust. Now I had facts, which I carefully stored away, and tried to arrange neatly into a coherent narrative, accompanied by black-and-white photos. But still no answers.

Aged around 15, in conversation with a few classmates about depictions of Jews in antisemitic propaganda, one of the girls I was speaking to asked me, “So do you have a big nose because you’re Jewish?”. I paused for a second, stunned. The worst part was, she didn’t seem to realise that there was any problem with this question – even though it had literally stemmed from discussion of antisemitic propaganda! With as much dryness as I could muster, I replied “Well, I don’t know; you’re looking at me – what do you think?” She didn’t have an answer to that.

But the damage was done. To this day, at the age of 20, I look in the mirror and wonder if my nose looks too big, if somehow the bridge of my glasses accentuates it. I hate that I do this, and I know perfectly well that it’s ridiculous – but once the seed is planted, it’s hard to shake. Maybe that’s how it is with antisemitism. Maybe this is how it is internalised.

When I moved to a boys’ school for sixth form, I became preoccupied with new versions of the old question: why all the desks were covered in swastikas and other Nazi iconography, for example. Why, while sitting alone on a bench in the school gardens, some boys decided to sit down opposite me and joke about cooking Jews in ovens and eating them. Why so many of the students thought it was funny to joke about recreating the Third Reich. I sat in my A-level History lessons, staring at images of prisoners in Nazi extermination camps, alongside the same boys who had grown up in that school and probably participated in its “humorous” and “edgy” Nazi fetishism, trying to make it all fit together. I was very quiet, focusing. Still I couldn’t.

Thus I discovered through first-hand experience that, “ironically” or not, the discourse of fascism remained alive and well, with antisemitism as one of its primary components. Well, I thought, good thing I’m a leftie. We enlightened progressives, so concerned with social justice, know how wrong this is. They’ll protect me.

In the summer of 2019, I tagged along with a friend to a local Labour Party meeting. All the people I chatted to there seemed very pleasant. All the talk was of social justice and proper reform and a bright future for all. Until, during a Q&A, a member of the audience stood up and delivered a tirade about how the accusations of antisemitism against the Labour Party were the result of a smear campaign by the Jews. A conspiracy. I stiffened, as tense as if I had been physically slapped. I looked around, waiting for someone to say something. Waiting for someone to save me.

No one batted an eyelid. I saw a few people nod their heads. The speaker, a high-profile member of the Labour Party to whom the tirade was directed, delivered a weak response about how this perhaps wasn’t entirely true and the allegations did have some substance, but at the end of the day Corbyn was a good chap, and then swiftly changed the topic. I have no idea how the speaker in question truly felt about the antisemitism scandal, but I do know that he wasn’t willing to alienate an antisemite by forcefully condemning his conspiracy theory rhetoric.

At the soonest possible opportunity, I fled the room. I no longer felt safe. I realised fully for the first time that antisemitism predates and transcends modern politics. Antisemitism is not just a problem of the “bad guys”, or of teenagers who think that being offensive is a substitute for a personality. It’s everywhere.

A little while into my time at university, the switch flipped. I decided I didn’t care anymore about trying to figure out the puzzle: why the Jews? Why us? I was done with being quiet, sure that I must have missed something, sure that what seemed the obvious conclusion couldn’t be right. I remembered my mother’s words: save yourself. And so now I speak up, and I stop trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. I stop being made to feel small and embarrassed and uncertain. I stand tall and I open my mouth and I save myself.

So, I don’t care how many people I alienate, how many people will inevitably see me as the loud Jew, the annoying Jew, the self-important Jew – the Jew who can’t shut up about antisemitism. Because I can’t shut up. No one is coming to save me. So time and again, when I see antisemitism, I do not just drag, but throw myself into the ring. Because that’s what you do when it’s existential. This is the only way I know how to honour adequately the legacy of my family and of our people.

May their memory be a blessing.

May their memory be a revolution.

It is also the only way I know how to respond to – to cope with – my unanswered question, the one I have carried since childhood. Now I have different questions: why is no one coming to save us? Why does no one spot antisemitism until we do? Or, if they do spot it, why do they not care? Or, if they do care, why do they not care enough to speak up for us?

No one is coming to save us. Will you?

Image credit: Jaime Antonio Alvarez Arango. Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. 

Bodleian Library introduces suspension policy

Angela Eichhorst
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Bodleian Library introduces suspension policy

Dealing with a shortage of library slots since Michaelmas, the Bodleian Library has introduced a new booking system whereby students who fail to turn up to sessions without cancelling beforehand risk being suspended from the service. The decision comes in light of recent data provided by the Bodleian: in week 8 of Hillary term, 1,214 readers (61%) missed a reading room booking without cancelling in advance and 761 readers (37%) failed to attend more than twice. 22 readers failed to attend 10 or more times in that week alone. 

Under the new regulations, if students miss four bookings in a week or six bookings in a fortnight, they will be suspended from using Space Finder (the Bodleian’s centralised booking system) until seven days after the Friday of the following week, before being able to book slots again. Suspended students can still attend their existing bookings. 

A spokesperson from the Bodleian said, “This proportion of non-attendance was typical through last term, and prevented other readers from securing a study space.”

The spokesperson confirmed that “this will only count if students miss a slot completely, not if they are late”. 

The Bodleian website advises readers to cancel online if they believe that they will miss their booking, which can be done up to 8am on the day of your booking. Available slots can be booked up to half an hour before the slot starts. During a term where many students have exams, the Bodleian urges students to “book with their fellow readers in mind” with the hope that any cancelled slots can become available again for someone else.  

The spokesperson told Cherwell: “We are acutely aware that this may cause some alarm but want to emphasise that we are doing so only to ensure that every student or researcher who wants to study in the library will be able to get a slot.”

According to the Bodleian, the new regulations were developed in consultation with the Student Union. The Bodleian said that Space Finder will also show readers a warning of how many slots they have missed. Students who missed their slot due to unexpected coronavirus isolation or believe they were unfairly suspended can email the Bodleian directly at [email protected].

More information is available at https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/libraries/book-a-library-time-slot.

Image credit: neiljs / CC BY 2.0

Sipping in the sun

J Daniels
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Sipping in the sun

Though I’ve lived in England for most of my life, when I was but a small child my father had a mid-life crisis and moved the family to Cataluña (alas, this has since extended into a later-life crisis, and with less exciting results). Despite only spending a few years there, I consider Cataluña my childhood home as, a handful of anomalies notwithstanding, my earliest memories are from there. Particularly vivid are my recollections of the piles of empty lemonade cans we would amass during the summer months. None of us can remember the original brand we bought (which at some point was discontinued and had to be replaced with another) as we just called them cans of ‘limo’, short for the Catalan word for lemonade, ‘llimonada’. I will never forget the yellow and blue cans, with their promising ‘psshh’ when you peeled back the tab. A cool glass of limo, usually with a little ice to make sure it stayed cool, was an absolute summer staple. Perfect for sipping lazily during siesta time, or for gulping down after racing about the garden in the summer heat. Once, when we had a pile of cans about the size of an armchair, my father made a game of squashing the cans, ready to more easily transport to the recycling bins. My sisters tapped them flat with mallets, while my brother and I relished slamming the sledge-hammer as hard as we could and crushing each can in one swing. Then we moved back to the UK, where the summer holidays are almost half as long and the sun is never quite as powerful, and limo was left behind.

Like most people, I was underage the first time I drank alcohol.  Because most parents (including my own) aren’t happy with this tradition, and the UK weather doesn’t encourage outdoor drinking for most of the year, I had my first sip of something in the summer. Lucky to live near the coast, as soon as it was warm enough, my friends and I would take to the beach with portable speakers, snacks, and whatever form of alcohol we had been able to scare up. Initially, I relied on a friend to bring drink for the both of us, and thus ended up with the baffling choice of Disaronno as my first alcoholic drink. No coward when it comes to embracing stereotypes, I naturally drank far too much and forgot most of the evening, except for the now abhorrent taste of Disaronno. Drunk me has since been known to describe it as ‘my only weakness’, a hubristic claim that I have successfully disproven on many occasions. Malibu is another drink I can’t bear to imbibe anymore. After the Disaronno disaster it became my go-to drink for those beach binges. The coconut liqueur, which tastes of summer holidays and goes down easy with some fizzy mixer, will now for me forever taste of teenage heartbreak, ill-advised games of spin the bottle, and pissing on a pebbled beach.

Oxford offered a whole new perspective on drinks. Not just because of the influence of the large number of posh and private school types in the student community, but because my student loan meant that, for the first time in my life, I actually had a significant amount of money to my name. Naturally, I splurged a lot of it spectacularly badly during my first year. Aside from developing a real penchant for port – inspired by the little taste offered after formals, my first encounter with the drink – I drank a lot of rosé and tried Pimm’s for the first time when plastic cups of it were sold at an outdoor student play. While the latter felt incredibly pretentious, I couldn’t help loving the fruity drink. A pitcher of Pimm’s became my standard Wetherspoon’s order. 

Now in my final year, I am older, wiser, and poorer. I look forward to the end of exams when I can stretch out beneath the sun in Port Meadow or University Parks with my friends and sip from some cans of whatever’s on sale in Tesco. Though COVID may not permit it that soon, the absolute best summer drink is the one your friend gives to you – because it’s free.

The Prosecutor’s Fallacy: How flawed statistical evidence has been used to jail innocent people

Joshua Mitchell
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The Prosecutor’s Fallacy: How flawed statistical evidence has been used to jail innocent people

CW: Discussion of murder and infanticide, mentions of rape and alcoholism. 

On the 24th October 2003, Kathleen Folbigg was sentenced to 40 years in prison for murder and manslaughter of her 4 young children. Branded as ‘Australia’s worst female serial killer’, she has spent 18 years incarcerated. The prosecution’s theory was that Folbigg had smothered all 4 children, despite the lack of any medical evidence to assert this. The case was made that the likelihood of all 4 children dying of natural causes was so statistically improbable as to render it impossible. Unfortunately, this used a line of logic known as ‘Meadow’s Law’, which has cost the freedoms of several innocent women, and is also part of a wider story about the misuse of statistics and the misuse of science generally in the courtroom.

Meadow’s Law, coined by paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow, states that ‘one sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, until proved otherwise’. This now discredited “law” was extremely influential and used by child protection agencies in the U.K to assess child abuse. However, its statistical reasoning is fundamentally flawed and has been rebuked by the Royal Statistical Society, but not before ruining several lives.

Meadow’s Law was used most infamously in the trial of Sally Clark, an English woman who was convicted of murdering both her infant sons in 1999. The defence argued both children died of cot death, a fact which wasn’t confirmed until years later. Sir Roy Meadow was called as an expert witness on the case and asserted that the probability of both children dying of cot death in the same family was 1 in 73 million, hence a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt for double murder could be obtained. This figure was obtained by assuming that both deaths were statistically independent (i.e. one death isn’t connected or influenced by another), neglecting the glaring problem that cot deaths within the same family aren’t independent events, and genetic and environmental factors both contribute. There are several other problems with this figure as well which we will come back to. This statistical evidence was challenged at her second appeal and Clark was eventually released from prison, having served more than 3 years behind bars. She never recovered from her wrongful conviction and loss of her two sons. She died of acute alcohol poisoning in 2007.

Sadly, the story doesn’t end there for Roy Meadow. In 2002 he was again used as an expert witness at the trial of Angela Cannings. Cannings tragically lost 3 of her 4 children to cot death a few years prior, and was tried and convicted of smothering 2 of them, with Meadow’s Law once again the main driver of conviction. She spent a year in prison before being released following an appeal in 2003. Many more women still fell victim to false murder convictions after cot deaths as a result of Meadow’s testimony, namely Donna Anthony, who spent more than 6 years in prison before her release after the death of her 2 children, as well as Trupti Patel, who was thankfully acquitted at her murder trial.

Though it isn’t just mothers who are victims of misuses of statistics in the courtroom. More generally, Meadow’s Law is an example of the ‘Prosecutor’s fallacy’. This assumes that the probability a defendant is innocent given the evidence that we observe, is equal to the probability of seeing that same evidence given the defendant is guilty. Perhaps this sounds minor, but it can have profound effects, and is best illustrated with an example: Say a man is accused of a robbery he didn’t commit. There was blood found at the scene which matches the defendant, and this particular blood type is only present in 1% of the population. The prosecution argues that the chance that this blood matches the defendant, given that the man innocent, is just 1% and therefore he’s very likely to be guilty. While this seems to make sense, this analysis is incorrect. What is relevant here is the probability that the man is innocent, given that his blood matches the blood at the scene. This order switching seems subtle, but it can have drastic effects on the outcomes. If there’s 1000 people in the city that all could’ve committed the robbery, 10 people’s blood types match with the crime scene, meaning that the probability this specific man is innocent is not 1%, but 90%! This is obviously an idealised example, but very real-world cases have been litigated with this logic.

In 2010, a man named Troy Brown was convicted in the U.S for the rape of a young girl. The compelling factor for the jury was the claim that only 1 in 3 million random people would have the same DNA profile as the rapist, so there was only a 0.00003% he was innocent. This was a classic prosecutor’s fallacy, which was thankfully overruled on appeal, as it once again assumes that the probability of a DNA match given Brown was innocent equalled the probability of innocence given a DNA match. Given that the other evidence was circumstantial and not particularly strong, and depending on how many other possible suspects there were, the chance of his innocence could be as high as 25%, which is of course certainly not grounds for a criminal conviction.

Another tragic miscarriage of justice occurred in the Netherlands in 2003, this time, to a nurse named Lucia De Berk who worked at a children’s hospital. After a series of unexplained deaths at the hospital that occurred while she was on shift, De Berk was charged and sentenced to life in prison. Once again, a problematic but shocking statistic was front and centre in the case. An expert witness, a law psychologist, found that the chance of De Berk being present at so many unexplained deaths was 1 in 342 million, hence De Berk must have played some sinister role in these fatalities. This, like all the other previously mentioned probabilities, was erroneously calculated, and made sweeping, unrealistic assumptions, leading to such an inflated probability. For context, subsequent analysis by prominent statisticians, factoring in all the possible biases, concluded that the probability of this sequence of events happening to a nurse at any hospital was approximately 1 in 9. After subsequent appeals, she was eventually found not guilty in 2010 after review of the statistical evidence, as well as other flawed medical evidence used to convict her. She spent 4 years in prison in total.

This exact scenario is scarily common. And several medical professionals have been charged when a string of unexplained deaths occur in a hospital setting. Tragically some, like English nurse Ben Geen, are still in prison. Geen was arrested in 2004 over the deaths of several patients over the course of a year. At trial, the prosecution argued there had been an “unusual pattern” that had emerged, and was branded as the “the nurse who killed for kicks”. After it seemed like this “unusual pattern” of deaths under Geen’s care was occurring, many more incidents started to be attributed to him, and with little exploration of natural causes being explored. This is known as diagnostic suspicion bias. He was charged with 2 murders and intentional grievous bodily harm against 15 patients. However, the prosecution had failed to consider the likelihood of a string of these incidents occurring compared with the background rate. They let their biases of seeing a potentially suspicious cluster of cases overcome the actual data and disregarded any natural explanations for some of the incidents and disregard just how uncommon this type of cluster was. After the trial, taking this all into account, a number of prominent statisticians analysed the data, and found that this “unusual pattern” simply isn’t there, and that Geen was prosecuted on completely foundationless grounds. In 2020 a further wave of statisticians came out in support of Geen, but he unfortunately remains in prison to this day.

All the examples presented here are tragic, with most incidents occurring in the late 90s/early 2000s, but there haven’t been many good remedies put in place in the legal system to address this fundamental issue of abuse of statistical and scientific evidence. Generally, expert witnesses, who are allowed to give scientific evidence and their own “expert” opinion in court, are admitted at the discretion of the judge. However, a huge problem with this approach is how is a judge expected to know whether the credentials of an academic or medical professional are credible? And how is a judge supposed to know whether a particular witness is actually an expert in the field of which they’re being used? For example, in the De Berk case involving the Dutch nurse, the erroneous figure of 1 in 342 million was admitted to the court via Henk Elffers, who was a law psychologist, and not an expert in the field of statistics. Also, Roy Meadows who gave evidence in the Sally Clark case as well as many others, while an esteemed paediatrician, was not an expert in the field of statistics nor was his ‘Meadow’s Law’ an established truth in the medical community. So perhaps the best solution is that for an expert scientific witness to be permitted to give their expertise in court, they should have to be sponsored by several of their peers in the scientific community, or at least have several academics educate the judge in which members are credible witnesses in a particular field. Otherwise, the judge is essentially guessing at who’s actually qualified.

Another reason why so many miscarriages of justice have occurred thanks to the misuse of statistics and medical evidence is that science isn’t really meant to be practised in a courtroom. In a trial, quick, definitive evidence is desirable, and the ability for a single witness to be able to sum up all the data and make a conclusion. Unfortunately, science doesn’t work that way. To publish a scientific paper, other academics have to check that work in a process called peer review before it enters the scientific literature. This can take months, not to mention the fact that the body of knowledge is always evolving as new evidence emerges. Furthermore, what if there are two scientists giving opposing opinions on either side, who does the jury believe? The jury simply won’t know who has the better facts and is giving a more honest assessment of the situation, so they’re essentially going to favour whichever expert who laid out their argument in the most convincing manner, regardless of whether their argument is factual or not. A resolution here would be for a report compiled by leading experts in whichever particular field should be prepared ahead of the trial. For example, if a group of respected statisticians produced a report summarising the statistical evidence, which was prepared ahead of any of the previously mentioned cases, and checked by the wider statistical community, I think it’s fair to say none of the false imprisonments would’ve occurred.

So is ‘Australia’s worst female serial killer’ Kathleen Folbigg really guilty of filicide? An inquiry of her case commenced in 2018, with the judge finding no doubt of her guilt. An assertion that was based on Meadow’s Law, and by interpretation of Folbigg’s diary entries, in the absence of any evidence of smothering. However, in March 2021, a letter signed by 90 eminent scientists to the governor of New South Wales demands her immediate release based on new evidence. It was found that 2 of the children had a specific gene mutation, known to cause cot death in infants, and likely caused cardiac arrythmia in the 2 girls. Furthermore, world-leading experts in pathology have collectively given medical explanations for the deaths of all 4 children. If released, it will be the biggest miscarriage of justice in Australia’s history.

Artwork by Rachel Jung. 

Fantasy: medieval European influences and alternatives

Krystalia Karamihou
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Fantasy: medieval European influences and alternatives

Faeries, elves, centaurs, wizards, dragons. In its purest form, fantasy is one of the most ancient literary genres, and fantastical elements can be found in myths and folktales around the world. It is in fantasy that humankind encapsulated its need for escapism and wonder for the unknown. Despite the fantastical elements in those tales, fantasy in the form we all know differs and is much more recent. It has evolved in a more self-conscious way, encouraging individual interpretations of novelised narratives based in complex worlds. One of the most popular subgenres is what is known as “medieval fantasy” and is recognisable by its influences from the medieval European period, typically from western Europe. These influences include resemblances to western medieval monarchy, feudal system, warfare, and social structure, which are often permeated with a blend of magic and European folklore. But why is this Medieval European setting so common in modern fantasy?

The main reasons are the legacy of the fathers of modern fantasy and cultural familiarity. The most obvious precursor to modern fantasy and its medieval subgenre is none other than J.R.R. Tolkien. Although he is called the father of modern fantasy, a well-deserved title, it would be unfair to ignore his predecessors. Writers such as William Morris (The Well at the World’s End), Lord Dunsany (The King of Elfland’s Daughter), George MacDonald (Phantastes), and E.R. Eddison (The Worm Ouroboros), among others, borrowed heavily from the European mythical past and they had a major impact on Tolkien as well as his friend, another fantasy writer, C.S. Lewis. 

It was Tolkien, though, who massively popularised the genre. The Lord of the Rings can be described as a consciously pseudo-medieval work given that Tolkien, a medievalist scholar at Oxford, drew heavily from a rich heritage of quest and adventure narratives found in north-western European literary traditions. He combined his own imagination with elements from literature in Old English, Welsh, Irish, Norse and, more indirectly, Middle French and German. Tolkien undoubtedly had the academic knowledge and status to elevate fantasy, a genre often not taken seriously by academic elitists. This is largely manifested in the twelve-volumed History of Middle-earth, compiled by his son, Christopher Tolkien, which tracks the meticulous literary and linguistic skill that his father employed. Taking, for instance, the tale of Ælfwine, a fictional Anglo-Saxon credited for finding the Elven lands and telling of his adventures. Tolkien wrote Ælfwine’s accounts in Old English:

“Fela bið on Westwegum werum uncúðra,
wundra and wihta, wlitescéne land,
eardgeard ælfa and ésa bliss.
Lýt ǽnig wát hwylc his langoð síe
þám þe eftsíðes eldo getwǽfeð.”

― Þus cwæð Ælfwine Wídlást Éadwines sunu

Meanwhile, Tolkien’s Lays of Beleriand were written in poetic metres found in medieval heroic and romance poems, such as alliterative verse and rhyming couplets.

The importance of all this is apparent in the influence that Tolkien had on later authors in turn. Given the widespread success of his works, many others consequently incorporated various elements into their own books, by either employing a well-tried recipe or adding their own touches to it. So, this new generation of writers also became a link in the chain that reproduced, reworked, and consolidated certain conventions. We should also not underestimate the fact that the vast majority of those authors wrote in the English language, which certainly helped their works reach a wider readership. Since the most famous of those fathers of fantasy came predominantly from the British Isles, they tended to focus on cultural context which they were familiar with.

Many of the successful authors that appeared towards the end of the twentieth century – including those from the USA – were familiar with old fantasy works, especially Tolkien’s. Although many attempted to deviate from his style, the resemblance to western medieval settings often remained. But this is more likely because the authors were also exposed more to the Western European medieval heritage than any other in Europe. Indeed, even Eastern Europe had been quite underrepresented in fantasy (and remains so in pop culture) until Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher rose to popularity. On the other hand, Mediterranean Europe tends to be the focus of historical fiction or classical fantasy that reworks the myths of antiquity.

So, the authors’ as well as the readers’ familiarity and continuous exposition to Western European cultural heritage over others has fuelled the popularity of this particular medieval setting in the fantasy genre.

Although a popular setting, it nevertheless overshadows other ones which deserve more recognition. It might come as a surprise to those not  familiar with fantasy to see that the genre is actually vast and divided into many subgenres. This means that readers who wish to diversify their reading habits have a plethora of options to choose from. 

It would be impossible to mention everything from each subgenre, but below are some worthy recommendations that focus on non-Western medieval European settings. Note that original Chinese fantasy literature is very different from Western. For example, in Western fantasy there are often creatures like elves, dwarves, gnomes, and goblins. The most common fantasy tropes include the battle of good versus evil, a mentor figure (usually an old man or wizard), and the “reluctant” hero who is the Chosen One and usually starts from humble origins but is secretly of royal blood. He is called to fulfill either world-endangering prophecies and grandiose battles (high fantasy), or embark on a personal quest. These goals often elevate the character to heroic status, but there are many novels that have anti-heroes as protagonists.

In contrast, Chinese fantasy revolves around the major genres of wuxia, xianxia and xuanhuan. Wuxia is often historical fiction but also contains supernatural elements of warriors possessing superhuman martial arts skills and acting within a world of martial code called jianghu. There are narratives that mix some wuxia conventions with Chinese deities, Taoism, Buddhism, martial arts, and other traditional Chinese elements which result in the popular xianxia genre. The typical xianxia protagonists have extraordinary martial arts skills and seek to become immortal beings called Xian by “cultivating” energy. Xuanhuan is somewhat similar to xianxia, but it may incorporate foreign settings and does not include Taoist elements or quests for immortality. Overall, Chinese fantasy focuses on human characters, although there might be other creatures, such as yaoguai (usually malevolent animal or plant spirits), monsters, and ghosts. Finally, there is a larger amount of love stories compared to Western fantasy. There is also the shenmo xiaoshuo subgenre (“gods and demons” fiction) which is much older — as early as the 14th century — and has its roots in traditional folktales and legends. Important plot elements are the use of medicine and alchemy while characters include Chinese deities, immortals, and monsters of Chinese mythology.

If you wish to explore fantasy more widely, here are some recommendations:

Chinese settings

Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en (shenmo xiaoshuo subgenre): One of China’s Four Classic Novels, this long work is an account of a Chinese Buddhist monk and his three disciples who travel west to Central Asia to retrieve Buddhist scriptures and their return home after many adventures and trials.

Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart: A modern take on traditional Chinese myths which take place in a fantastical version of imperial China.

Coiling Dragon by Ren Wo Xing (xianxia genre): A young noble born into a world of powerful magic wishes to save his declining clan and finds a ring he can use to trigger the dragon heritage in his blood.

Crane-Iron Series by Wang Dulu (wuxia): An epic pentalogy of various storylines set in ancient China involving love, revenge, intrigues and a lot of action. One of the novels is the famous Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which has been adopted into a film by Ang Lee.

 

Various settings

American Gods by Neil Gailman (urban fantasy): Different pantheons of gods in modern America.

Borderland by Terri Windling (urban fantasy): Dystopian novel where the worlds of elves and men merge.

The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher (urban fantasy/occult detective): A detective and wizard investigates supernatural cases involving various creatures in Chicago.

Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (YA fantasy): A witch transforms a girl into an old woman who finds herself inside a sorcerer’s ever-moving castle.

Mistborn: The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson (science fantasy/steampunk): Individuals harness magical abilities through metals and it is set in a modern dystopian world.

The Black Prism by Brent Weeks (flintlock fantasy): Set in a pre-industrial world with a quasi-Middle Eastern form of government and a magical system based on light.

The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin: The author reconstructs African elements and a social system within which dream assassinations take place.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (fantasy classic): To escape from a malevolent shadow, a young wizard travels across the world of Earthsea: a vast archipelago of hundreds of islands and uncharted sea.

Elric of Melniboné by Michael Moorcock (sword-and-sorcery fantasy): An albino sorcerer-emperor of a dying race embarks on a personal quest to slay his rival and retrieve his beloved.

Illustration by Gbenga Chesterman

In Conversation with Catherine Cohen

William Foxton
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In Conversation with Catherine Cohen

There’s only one Catherine Cohen.

It’s something you realise about five minutes into watching her perform — she’s just burped. “I’m sorry,” she says nonchalantly, “I literally can’t stop creating content.”

Comedian, poet and all-round spectacle, Cohen has made a name for herself through her intensely personal and yet highly relatable form of comedy. It’s a dizzying display of narcissism paired with her very own brand of insecurity. The result is something else.

Cohen is perhaps best-known for her songs, comedic observations about modern life from the perspective of a self-proclaimed “millennial renaissance woman.” With nothing but the sheer force of her charisma (and the ever-talented Henry Koperski on the keys), Cohen takes on the world, and no topic is off limits. There’s I can make myself c*m with my hand, a song about the joys of masturbation in an otherwise joyless world; Shit on The Street, an existential crisis under the guise of a droll ditty; and her seminal Look at Me, in which she recounts the struggles of an adolescence bereft of male attention. “Boys never wanted to kiss me,” she tells her audience, “so now I do comedy.” She regularly performs her creations at venues across New York, including Joe’s Pub and Club Cumming, where she hosts a weekly show. 

Then there’s her podcast, Seek Treatment, co-hosted by comedian and best friend Pat Regan. Joined by a special guest, each week the pair delve deep into conversation, tackling diverse subjects ranging from their love life to their sex life. It’s a stream of millennial consciousness and, as their tagline goes, “it’s ultimately damaging to ourselves, our friends, our family and our listeners…”

Her most recent artistic venture is a collection of poetry, entitled God I Feel Modern Tonight: Poems from a Gal About Town. Cohen’s pithy musings range from the utterly silly to the truly profound, often encompassing both within the same line. Highlights include: “I wish I were smart instead of on my phone”, “is it possible to miss everything at once?” and “it’s insane when you ask someone to give you space and then they do.” 

Each line of verse is carefully imbued with her characteristic sense of tragicomedy. Why are the mothers in my gym class hotter than me? What’s it called when you have a sixth sense that your ex is engaged? Should I intuitively eat, do an intermittent fast, or just think about food every second of the day till I pass? These are the questions of our time. And Cohen is asking them.

Whatever it is she’s doing, no one else is doing it quite like her.

And now with her award-winning Edinburgh fringe show The Twist…? She’s Gorgeous, a handful of roles in hit TV shows, such as Broad City and Search Party, and a critically acclaimed book of poetry under her belt, many are posing the question: is Catherine Cohen the voice of her generation?

“I’m so boring right now,” she says at the beginning of our call, “all I do is lay in bed in my nightgown eating take-out.”

She upped her anti-depressant dosage the night before, she tells me, which has led to the worst migraine. “I just woke up and I’m like…my vision is still…you know when you just feel kind of just like…out of it?”

“But it’s cool,” she insists, “it means I’m footloose and fancy-free for our interview…about to pop my birth control,” she laughs, a little manically. Truly, there’s only one Catherine Cohen.

A conversation with Cohen flits between the serious and the satirical at a frustrating pace. I begin by congratulating her on her successes, listing her recent accomplishments.  “That’s nice to hear because I don’t feel like a success…”And when I press her on it: “Well I agree,” she jests, before adopting a more serious tone. “You know, I’m so isolated from the world right now. I’ve forgotten lyrics to my own songs. I’ve forgotten my own jokes…I’m a shell of myself.” She laughs again. It’s a challenge to keep her earnest for long.

Cohen’s performance is characterised by an old-school cabaret feel, which draws influence from her origins in musical theatre. “It’s kind of the only thing you can do if you’re a kid and you want to be singing and dancing around,” she says, “but I loved it. I did it through college and then when I started doing comedy in New York I really missed singing. So when I started writing songs to put in my act it all kind of came together…” She also cites the Spice Girls as an important influence. “They were my first concert. When I was seven my dad took me and some friends. We went in a limo. It was the best night of my life…still. We got to stand up on the chairs. My parents made us wear ear plugs and I was like…this is art.”

Also discernible is a reactionary attitude to a religious childhood. “Growing up in Texas, all my friends were really Christian. It was the cool thing to do. We would go on ski trips and go camping. I was like…this is fun! We’re with boys! And it was really kind of insidious in that it brainwashed me in many ways… I was so scared of sex and stuff and now I’m completely obsessed with it. And I like talking about it and I think it’s very healing to be able to freely talk about things that I was previously ashamed of.”

I find it difficult to reconcile this with my impression of Cohen, though she insists she’s very susceptible to the allure of a cult. “There’s this amazing documentary on HBO about this cult that took place and started in Albany, New York. It was a totally crazy sex cult and totally misogynistic and terrible, but [watching] the first two episodes I’m like… this sounds great. It’s all about self-improvement and community. Everyone wants to feel part of something. As an adult just floating about in space, it’s hard. You want to feel like there’s a community.”

Cohen found this community in New York, where she would regularly host and attend comedy nights with an all-star line-up, though with the pandemic these performances moved online. Cohen recalls returning to New York, having cancelled her London shows after the initial outbreak: “I was like…fuck. I was supposed to do club Cumming the next week. I thought it would be funny if I went live on Instagram during that time. I didn’t realise you could add other people and I was like…let’s try and make this a show. Then it all took off from there.” For a short time last year, everyone was doing an Instagram live show; you could go online and have your pick. You could delve into the life of Catherine Cohen feat. her really cool friends. One such show was a collaboration with comedian Meg Stalter, a charity event raising money for Cameo Cares.

“So Catherine’s an amazing comedian, beautiful singer. I’m sort of a candle maker…I have a button factory,” Stalter begins. 

“Megan’s on Etsy. She does amazing stuff with cauliflower,” Cohen retorts. 

It’s easy to understand their appeal. With their improvisational style and absurd musings, the pair provide some much-needed escapism to their viewers. Watching them perform, as they try their hardest to make each other break character, and occasionally succeed, you feel as though you’re in the room with them, as though in conversation with old friends.

I’m intrigued by Cohen’s comedic stylings, curious as to how much of her performance is a persona and how much is the real thing. There’s a video she recently made for Into The Gloss in which she teaches her viewers how to do her signature ‘cat eye’. It begins with her characteristically playful narcissism, describing herself as a ‘very beautiful comedian’ and a ‘feminist icon.’ Though there’s a moment that catches me off guard. Referring to her ‘millions of followers’, Cohen momentarily breaks character, laughing at the absurdity of what she’s saying.  

“A glimmer of me,” she says, when I bring it up, “well…it’s all me.” It’s an exaggerated persona, she tells me, but it’s still her. “My persona is me if I didn’t care what people thought about what I was saying. I’m just saying what I actually want in that moment without thinking about the consequences or whatever. I don’t think it really is a separate thing. I’m just like…time to turn on the show. I really try not to overthink anything and just operate only from a place of pure feeling.”

There’s a strong element of parody to her work, with Cohen poking fun at the joys and absurdities of healing crystals and ridiculously expensive workout classes. And yet, her comedy never feels unkind, mainly because the things she parodies are all “[her] shit.” The result is something highly personal. “I want everything to have lots of heart,” she tells me, “sometimes I read funny things and I’m like…does that person believe that? You know what I mean? Some jokes just feel kind of empty. And I want mine to feel true.”

Her success stems from the specificity of what she says. Her creations are oddly particular (see poem I wrote after I went to Tuscany to journal about my toxic guitar teacher or poem I wrote after you ordered fried shrimp at the diner and I was like “gross” but really I was like “dang that sounds good”) and yet resonate with her readers. The singularity of these experiences is an intentional aspect of her work, she tells me. “When I’m reading stuff, I want to feel like I’m reading someone’s secret, someone’s weird little truth.”

Cohen has exposed these truths for the world to see. She gives the impression of a woman who lives her life naked. But is it true? 

“Sometimes it is. Sometimes I wear a big fur coat.”

 What wouldn’t she share?

“That’s for me to know and you to find out…!”, she retorts.

“I have a lot of fears,” she says in a more serious tone, “not being successful, issues with my body image…all the hits. Everything everyone else worries about…” “Dying,” she adds, “don’t want to do that. No fun there.”

She’s quick to bare her emotional nudity for the world to see, though it’s stylised to such an extent, I can’t help but wonder if she would feel as comfortable portraying her fears without her signature bells and whistles.

“I think I do that in the book,” she says, “I have poems that are more serious. That’s a bit scary…but also exciting. It feels totally liberating to be more vulnerable in my poetry. I like not worrying about jokes, just writing something true and seeing if people connect with it. It happened naturally. I have no choice but to be vulnerable in my work—it’s all I have. It’s the only thing that makes me feel less alone.”

The podcast, the performances, the poetry, they each offer a varying portrayal of the Cohen persona. But they’re linked by a common sentiment.

“It’s all about being a woman who wants everything,” she tells me. “And why shouldn’t I?”

But what does she want exactly?  What are her ambitions for her work? Her plans for the future?

“Everything,” she says, “can’t get enough of the stuff…”

A few weeks later, I attend one of her live events, a Q&A session about God I Feel Modern Tonight. Another victim of the pandemic, the event has been moved online. Cohen has been robbed of the mahogany podium at a Barnes & Noble she quite rightly deserves. And yet, she is at home in her apartment, greeting her attendees as old friends and basking in the glow of their virtual adoration. “Come on in,” she says tantalisingly, “the water’s warm….” 

As the evening draws to a close, I find myself posing the following question: as followers of your work, as lovers of your craft, how can we aspire to be feeling modern tonight?

She gasps. “What a beautiful question…”

“Being modern is all about being old,” she says with received wisdom. “It’s about putting your devices away and breathing deep and being like…everything is fine. You know?”

Watching Cohen perform, for a moment I feel as though I do.

Image Credit Bea Helman

 

 

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