Yet let’s be clear: It’s not just, or maybe even primarily, the size of the company that is giving people the shakes. It’s the fact that a single film corporation now seems to own everything worth having — at least, in stark capitalistic blockbuster terms. Disney owns Marvel, it owns “Star Wars,” it owns the fabled animated features that it has been using to mint live-action-remake megahits as if it were printing money. What’s still on the table — “Godzilla,” the shards of “Harry Potter,” and the fumbling-out-of-the-vampire-gate Dark Universe? You can make the case that the merger of Disney and Fox, if you boil out the feathers, really comes down to the merger of Marvel and “Star Wars.” That sounds like the merger of Christmas and the Fourth of July, with Halloween thrown in as a bonus.
Viewed according to the logic of 21st-century fantasy culture, Disney doesn’t just suddenly own all the properties. It owns all the mythologies. Long ago, Hollywood was called the Dream Factory. The intimidation factor of the new bulked-up, bursting-with-franchise-moxie Disney is the suspicion that a single company has become the Dream Factory. And the anxiety this has provoked is about something beyond market share. What a lot of people are wondering is: Will Disney now have the power to control our dreams?
In 1946, not long after she fell in love with Pablo Picasso, Françoise Gilot made a painting called “Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple.” Two flat, angular figures sit at a table. The woman placidly clasps her hands in front of her as the man—bald, blocky, with one dark, piercing eye shown in profile—thrusts the fruit into her mouth. Temptation, knowledge, punishment, exile: these are things, in Gilot’s version of Genesis, that come from man, even if it is woman who will be blamed. The same year, Gilot moved in with Picasso. A friend warned that she was headed for catastrophe. “I told her she was probably right, but I felt it was the kind of catastrophe I didn’t want to avoid,” Gilot recalls in her remarkable 1964 memoir, “Life with Picasso,” written with the art critic Carlton Lake, and recently reissued by New York Review Books Classics. In the painting, the woman’s eyes are clear, and wide open.
To live in California is to make a wary peace with an existential dichotomy: breathtaking weather, astounding natural beauty, bounteous food and wine, stimulating multiculturalism and … the possibility of imminent, unpredictable disaster. Depending on where we live, Californians are just one spark, one mudslide, or, yes, one earthquake away from severe destruction—a reality that can be met with fatalism, fear, or some combination of both, but one that is omnipresent, if surprisingly easy to forget.
I can’t pretend it's quite like living in Israel in the midst of an intifada, or in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, but there is nevertheless a low-grade febrile uncertainty amid the routines of daily life here. When your 100-year-old house shifts and groans with a sound like the straining timbers of a wooden vessel under sail—as ours did the other day—it’s hard not to feel a certain nauseated intimation of mortality.
In 2006, after years reporting in the Middle East, I moved to Paris. It was an accidental choice, the serendipity of a sublet through a friend of a friend. It was meant to be temporary; at the time I was just looking for somewhere to hole up and finish a book. My friends all said: “Oh Paris, how lovely! You must be eating well.” They were surprised to hear me complain that Parisian menus were dull and repetitive. “Paté followed by nothing but entrecôte, entrecôte, entrecôte. Occasionally roast lamb, duck breast. No vegetables to speak of,” I told them. “It’s a tyranny of meat-in-brown-sauce.” As the rest of the world had begun to (re)discover their own cuisines and innovate, the French restaurant seemed to be stagnating in a pool of congealing demi-glace.
Elsewhere, places such as Balthazar in New York and the Wolseley in London seemed to be doing the French restaurant better than the French. In France, the old guard of critics and restaurateurs remained convinced that French cuisine was still the best in the world and a point of national pride. The bistros cleaved to the traditional red-and-white checked table cloths and chalked-up menus even as they were microwaving pre-prepared boeuf bourguignon in the back. In 2010, when the French restaurant meal was added to Unesco’s list of the world’s “intangible cultural heritage”, it felt as if the French restaurant had become a museum piece, and a parody of itself.
I wasn’t born in Virginia, and for a long time I was reluctant to claim the state. I was born in 1986 in Washington, D.C., where both of my parents were born and raised, their families having made it there as part of the mid-twentieth-century migration of black folks out of the South toward what they hoped would be more opportunity, more freedom. My father was in the Navy, and we moved to naval housing in Norfolk (which, if you’re from Virginia, is pronounced “Nor-fuck”) for a spell when I was a toddler before a three-year stint in Naples, Italy. Beginning in 1993 my father was stationed in Virginia Beach, where we settled and where I’d spend my formative years. My cousins from the “big” city of D.C. made fun of me for being from the country and I felt more than a little embarrassed in their presence.
Where we lived was far from country—not like the part of Virginia where my granny is from. Max Meadows is country. There still aren’t more than three or four stoplights in that town. Granny has demonstrated on more than one occasion the way they used to kill chickens with their bare hands, grabbing the live bird by the neck and twisting until it snapped. That’s country.
It is hard to say when I stopped noticing the sirens. They’re still there, piercing the otherwise normal Wednesday-afternoon noise. But I haven’t noticed them for at least fifteen years. In the central Ohio area, a test of the state’s tornado-siren system takes place every Wednesday at noon. I would describe the sound for you, but even now I can barely remember it. I recall it beginning as a low whistle that bends into a loud howl, but the sound feels distant to me now. It’s indistinguishable from all the other ways this city rumbles its way toward productivity.
When I was a kid in elementary school, I assumed the siren tests happened everywhere. Twice a month, at noon, when the howling began to announce itself, all of us kids spilled into the hallway, and sat on our knees facing the wall. We’d lock one of our hands into the other, put them behind our heads, and curl ourselves downward. It was practice for the actual tornado, which we were told might come at any moment. It might come while we were in our classrooms learning whatever it is elementary school kids learned in the nineties (yet another thing I don’t recall). I never knew this was something exclusive to my school, or schools in my area. I imagined an entire chain of balled-up bodies, trembling against walls in school hallways across the country.
The Second-Worst Restaurant in France has a plot with some surprising turns and twists and manages a spanking pace in spite of the icing. In a gentle way, it is a love story, about both people and food. And, above all, it is excellent entertainment.