Now, it seems, the 85-year-old is putting all his chips on the table one last time, with his long-awaited sci-fi epic Megalopolis, which debuts at the Cannes film festival this Friday. Nobody can quite believe it has happened: Coppola has been trying to make this movie for more than 40 years, during which the project has gone through innumerable rewrites, delays and false starts. It exists now only because he sold part of his successful winery estate to finance the movie when no one else would. So, will Megalopolis be one final masterpiece from the New Hollywood titan, or will it turn out to be a “really shitty, embarrassing, pompous film on an important subject”?
But amid a music industry largely absent of benevolent big sister energy, Hanna really did function as something like a Sharpie-scrawled, Doc Martens-clad, Glinda the Good Witch for decades' worth of young women. These women saw themselves in her lyrics and sought her out after shows to disclose their own histories of abuse, trauma, and suffering, mostly at the hands of men who cared very little about what they had to say.
Rebel Girl makes it clear that Hanna has always cared about what women and gender-nonconforming people have to say.
So I would want to insist that a powerfully felt need for a kind of protective irony is at work here. When we are abusing like, we mean, and don’t mean, the words we are saying. Therefore, I would contend that the “hesitation” McWhorter identified is much more the central point of the matter, and that the indecisive behavior we are observing is more like a compulsive verbal tic than something creative in character.
A good writer can make any material sing. We hardly need another midlife crisis novel, marriage breakdown novel or sexual awakening novel, so it must be the singular ability of film-maker, artist and writer Miranda July – coming along to show everyone else how it’s done – that makes her new novel, All Fours, seem essential.
Outwardly, July’s sophomore novel is about the binary of heterosexual love and the claustrophobia inherent in being a mother in a heteronormative family. More broadly, it’s a book about straddling two worlds. Two states of being. Two identities. A person or a wife. An artist or a mother. A sexual object or an invisible body. Pre- or postmenopausal.
Gruesome yet cavalier, “When Among Crows” has action, romance, family drama, fantasy, and a healthy helping of mythology. Best devoured in one or two sittings, the story is tight, the lore inviting and the characters fun.