The Yale Herald Volume LXII Issue 7

The Yale Herald Volume LXII, Number 7 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Nov. 4, 2016

FROM THE STAFF Hey folks, Earlier this week, I watched a couple make out on Cross Campus in the middle of the afternoon. They were sitting on a bench across the quad from me, and they were really going at it (as my mother would say, there was some necking). I wonder whether they realized I was watching them. I suppose it is a fact of life on a college campus that you are constantly privy to other people’s private moments, in public.

In this week’s front, Sophie Dillon, DC ’17, breaks down her theories on the public/private divide, specifically as it relates to celebrity. From a history of the paparazzi to Kylie Jenner’s ubiquitous Snapchat presence, she examines the nature of life in the public eye.

Elsewhere on social media (and in this issue), Emma Chanen, BK ’19, condemns slacktivism and the self-righteous slacktivist police on Facebook. Victorio Cabrera, TC ’18, introduces you to Lenny Paquette, a man learning from the loss of his niece. And if eroticism and thrills are what you’re after, check out Mariah Kreutter’s, BK ’20, take on The Handmaiden.

I guarantee there’s something in here for you. Take a seat somewhere comfy (maybe not on Cross Campus) and give it a read.

Hugs but not kisses, Eve Sneider Reviews Editor

The Yale Herald Volume LX, Issue 7 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Nov. 4, 2016 EDITORIAL STAFF: Editors-in-Chief: Tom Cusano, Rachel Strodel Managing Editors: Victorio Cabrera, Oriana Tang Executive Editors: Sophie Haigney, Sarah Holder, David Rossler, Lily Sawyer-Kaplan, Charlotte Weiner Senior Editors: Libbie Katsev, Jake Stein Culture Editors: Emma Chanen, Emily Ge Features Editors: Frani O’Toole, Nick Stewart Opinion Editors: Luke Chang, Nolan Phillips Reviews Editors: Gabriel Rojas, Eve Sneider Voices Editor: Bix Archer Insert Editor: Marc Shkurovich Audio Editors: Phoebe Petrovic, Korinayo Thompson Copy Editors: Dimitri Diagne, Drew Glaeser, Hannah Offer ONLINE STAFF: Online Editor: Hannah Offer Bullblog Editors: Jeremy Hoffman, Caleb Moran DESIGN STAFF: Graphics & Design Editor: Haewon Ma Executive Graphics Editor: Claire Sheen BUSINESS STAFF: Publishers: Russell Heller, Jocelyn Lehman Director of Advertising: Matt Thekkethala The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office.

If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please send a check payable to The Yale Herald to the address below. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 2014-2015 academic year for 65 dollars.

Please address correspondence to: The Yale Herald P.O. Box 201653 Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520-1653 thomas.cusano@yale.edu www.yaleherald.com The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University.

Copyright 2016, The Yale Herald, Inc. Have a nice day.

Cover by Shelby Redman YH Staff

2 – The Yale Herald

THIS WEEK In this issue

Incoming Conspiracies If you listen to most of the state of Ohio, not only the World Series has been rigged.

Outgoing Curses The Curse of the Billy Goat honestly paled in comparison to this election season.

Cover 12– Snapchat, sex tapes, and King Kylie: Sophie Dillon, DC ’17, explores why privacy might soon be a thing of the past.

Voices 6 – Molly Montgomery, BR ’19, draws a poem from the language of folk songs.

Julia Hamer-Light, SM ’18, recalls a childhood visit to Kyrgyzstan.

Opinion 8 – Stop complaining to Emma Chanen, BK ’19, about slacktivisim.

Friday Roshni Woolsey Hall

6:00 p.m.

Friday Volleyball vs. Princeton John J. Lee Amphitheater (Payne-Whitney Gym) 7:00 p.m.

Saturday Seven Screening Whitney Humanities Center 7:00 p.m.

Tuesday Election Day! New Haven Public Library (133 Elm St.)

Charlie Kenney, BK ’19, advocates for gender-blind housing for all incoming freshmen.

Features 10 – While researching an 11-year-old murder investigation, Victorio Cabrera, TC ’18, finds his story in the victim’s uncle.

16 – Travel through time and space with the Herald staff as we chart Yale’s global reach. We’re blasting off again!

Culture 18 – Get a meal with Meghana Mysore, DC ’20, Lea Rice, DC ’18, and Eve Sneider, MC ’19, and take stock of Yale Dining.

Reviews 20 – Mariah Kreutter, BK ’20, is taken aback by The Handmaiden’s nuances and idiosyncracies.

21 – Visit the Yale Undergraduate Photography Society’s fall exhibition with Robert Newhouse, CC ’19. And revel in Moonlight’s blues with Nicole Mo, BK ’19.

Hall of Records (200 Orange St.)

Oct. 7, 2016 – 3

CREDIT / D / FAIL

THE NUMBERS Index 1 number of Election Days this year 0 number of people who were swayed by

(Soon-to-Be) President Hillary Clinton Top of this list is #LadyBoss and #NastyWoman, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton: Alumna of Yale Law School, Class of 1973, proven lover of both pantsuits and email as a mode of communication (33,000 is a LOT). Hillary is a (soon-tobe) President who knows how to get stuff done. Anyone at Yale who feels sus about the secret dealings of upper-echelon career politicians should remember that we attend the same school as Secretary Clinton’s successor, John Kerry. He was in a very secret society called Skull & Bones and graduated two years before fellow Bonesman George W. Bush. Remember those wild New World Order conspiracy theories from 2004?

And yet “Show me the emails!” protesters at political rallies are simply speaking the truth? C’mon. Technically, she’s not our 45th President, yet. But c’mon. I have a good feeling that come Tuesday night, there will be a lot of happy Yale students. And a small minority of unhappy ones. I apologize if this future-looking Cr offends anyone, but @YaleGOP made their choice. #Subtweet.

your Facebook post pleading Trump voters to reconsider

137

amount of likes you got on that Facebook post

3 number of branches of federal government & number of holes in a bowling ball, which you can use to destroy a voting machine

7 number of summits Gary Johnson has .

submitted out of the Seven Highest Summits

Presidents of On-Campus Organizations

500 number of miles I’d walk to be

Presidents of things on-campus are the real workhorses of the Yale College community. They put together all those endless panlists, proudly select new members for their clubs, and exclude those they were “honored to meet” but “just don’t have the room to take.” They also are the ones who take the heat from the Executive Committee when their Tap Night shenanigans wake up a FroCo. Everyone at Yale was a Club President in high school (shouts out to my own Club de Español), so that makes Club Presidents at Yale not just extra but, like, extra-extra. Feel free to chill out, guys. It is just college, after all. Just look at my suitemate, whose Aquascaping Club has two whole registered members (including himself) and still collects $400 from the Yale Treasury Office every semester. I hail to you, Clubmasters-In-Chief.

the man standing next to you, in a swing state, making you vote for Hillary – Gian-Paul Bergeron YH Staff

On the fifth day of election season my true love gave to me...

President Peter Salovey

5–

To be fair, he seems like a nice guy. He has arguably the jolliest cardboard cutout I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately it takes more than a screen-printed smile to be a great president. How many petitions has he been presented with that he’s just ignored?

How many letters of complaint has he shredded and made into collages? There’s the one with demands from NextYale, the one to rename Calhoun College, another with over a thousand signatures supporting the elimination of the Student Income Contribution, a petition with one signature (mine) asking him to grab a meal sometime…. The list goes on and on.

He must be too busy posing for Instagrams on West Campus and writing newsletters about some new Research Initiative or Center for the Study of Something Only Like 15 People In the World Care About. Sometimes, it feels like he spends more time opening “Centers” than listening to his students, you know? Who hurt you, President Salovey? If you would just reply to my emails and get coffee with me, maybe we could open up a new Center. The Center of Your Heart. <3.

– Will Nixon 4 – The Yale Herald

colors of paper plates for my all-inclusive election night party: Democrat Blue, Republican Red, Libertarian Lime, Green Party Orange, and Rand Paul Rouge

4–

election maps heavily gerrymandered to look like each one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

3–

t-shirts, respectively captioned with “Nasty Woman,” “Adorable Deplorable,” and “Jill Stein thinks I’m fine”

2–

“Hillary for Prism” Donald Trump/Pink Floyd Mashup albums

1–

“I voted” sticker fitted perfectly to the bumper of a Little Tikes Cozy Coupe™ – Noah Ritz

sarah.holder@yale.edu thomas.cusano@yale.edu

rachel.strodel@yale.edu

VOICES

Paddy

by Molly Montgomery The following poem is composed of song titles from American Ballads and Folk Songs by John Lomax (1934)

Paddy works on the Erie with Mike, Snagtooth Sal, Charlie Snyder and Ol’ Rattler, ten thousand miles from home, dreaming of goin’ home, dreaming of Rosie, long gone, long gone.

“The gal I left behind me,” he moans, “way over in the blooming garden, down in the valley where I left my home.

Rosie,” moanin’, “Beautiful darlin’.”

And sometimes Ol’ Rattler says, or Mike says, Or Charlie Snyder says, or Snagtooth Sal says, “Paddy, come on in town with us and find out what folks are made of.

Raise a rukus tonight. Drink that rot gut and find yourself a woman blue and drink her down and love her down the Erie Canal, love her down to Alabama, love her down to Hell in Texas and down to the deep, deep bottom of a deep, deep river.”

“Hardly think I will,” says Paddy.

“I don’t care what folks are made of.

Rosie’s made of the crows in the garden and red iron ore and dark Sunday school. She’s made of a rattlesnake and a stampede, she’s made of amazing grace and rye whiskey and a paper of pins and the cowboy’s dream.

She’s made of long gone and long time ago.

“Reason I stay on the job so long is, reason I stay so long is, I shot my pistol in the heart of town, I was tying a knot in the Devil’s tail, I was the killer and I was the war song, I was hard times.

I wish I was a mole in the ground.

Fare thee well, babe, I said, and I wish I was a mole in the ground.”

That’s what Paddy says when they ask him to town.

Graphic by Sheiran Phu YH Staff 6 – The Yale Herald

Fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan

by Julia Hamer-Light

A

halal butcher severs the jugular to drain the blood quickly and minimize the sheep’s pain. A sharp knife, a quick slash, a rush of red seeping into the dirt. I remember the clear blue of the sky but I don’t remember the scream the sheep made when it died.

Perhaps it didn’t scream at all.

I was in fourth grade and my mom, sibling, and I had followed my dad to Kyrgyzstan where he had been for the past few months on anthropology fieldwork. That week, my family had moved our suitcases out of a Soviet-era apartment building in Bishkek and into a compound in a village by Lake Issyk-Kul, the only major body of water in a mountainous and landlocked country. I don’t remember the name of the village, but I remember the stray tufts of grass growing in the dust of its roads where they met the cracked plaster of the walls encircling the village houses.

It might have been a holiday. It might have just been butchering day.

My mom says I stopped eating meat afterward, but I don’t remember if that’s true. I had never been on a farm before and what I remember best is the smell, warm and sharp, almost rude.

People from the family and the village gathered in the gravel-filled farmyard behind the house, their bodies forming an arena for the slaughter. A man tugged the reluctant sheep into the center on a frayed rope, its matted black wool full of burrs and hanging in rags. My mom pulled on my arm to lead me away, and I let her do so slowly. I don’t know if I was truly out of sight when the man drew his long sharp blade across the sheep’s neck. I know I saw the body of the sheep later, skinned. The red and white of its flesh was smooth as marble. The only meat I had seen before was in slabs on yellow styrofoam trays that my mom brought home from grocery stores in the United States.

My memories of that village and that country rise lightly in my mind, and when I try to force them into focus they nearly escape me. One: a kitchen with robin-egg walls where women stuffed sausages, using sheep intestines for casing. Their hands were slick with grease and moved with patterned efficiency, braiding the long ropes of meat as they finished them. Another: the piles of velour cushions in brilliant quilted patterns

that we slept on at night, our hosts and my family together, all in one big room. During the day, the pillows were kept stacked neatly against a wall.

I remember the family’s son rinsing out the stomach of the sheep.

The village had no running water, but the stream, used for everything but drinking, was nearby. He had fetched the water in the stomach itself and carried it back as though it were a tin pail. His limbs were long and brown and lanky, and his toes hung over the edges of his cracked rubber sandals. He folded at the knees and poured the water out of the stomach and into the earth. My dad came up behind me as I watched and put his hand on my shoulder. The stomach lining has rennet in it, he told me.

They save it because rennet is used to make cheese, cheese from the milk of other sheep.

These are some of the last days that I remember seeing my parents together. I imagine my dad standing with his head inclined toward my mom’s during the slaughter, worried about what Sam and I might think.

We returned to that cold concrete apartment in the middle of Bishkek two weeks later. One night we threw a party, I don’t remember what for.

A young woman, one of my dad’s students, was there, and something happened. I had never seen my mom drink before. That night, she was drunk. That night my mom shouted at my dad, and my sibling and I stayed in our room and read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The next morning we went to the market with my mom. She bought a bouquet of red roses and left it on his pillow in their bedroom in the apartment.

Soon we returned to the U.S.. He stayed behind.

I don’t remember the faces of the people we stayed with in the village, but I remember my mom, as the honored guest that night at dinner, being offered the fatty tail of the sheep. They presented it in a chunk, grease and broth pooling beneath it on a chipped white plate. She told me she was only barely able to taste it.

Graphic by Alex Wisowaty

Nov. 4, 2016 – 7

FEATURES

A Dawn to remember Victorio Cabrera, TC ’18, begins with a story of loss and ends with one of resilience

L

ike many of the residents of the greater New Haven area, Lenny Paquette is Italian, sort of. He is a dog behaviorist and someone who will tell you to “have a sparkling evening” and mean it. He is a singer-songwriter who released an album of Kenny Rogers covers in the late 90s (they’re pretty good) and has played at Toad’s Place. One of the songs off that album was the honky-tonk pick of the week on a Belgian radio station. Paquette has written a children’s book, Everett the Evergreen, inspired by his Native American grandfather. He also practices reiki, a spiritually-charged Japanese healing practice whose name means “a laying on of hands,” so he can tell you where your chakras are. But I did not know any of those things when I first met Lenny.

Here is what I did know: his niece, Dawn, had been murdered 11 years ago, and Lenny was working on the case with some paranormal researchers by the names of Scott and Jillian Hamilton. I was writing an article about the case, and I contacted Lenny to ask him about it. In the end, Lenny’s story was as much about recovery as it was about loss.

IT IS A BRISK FALL DAY OUTSIDE BLUE STATE Coffee on Wall St., and Lenny Paquette is hustling towards me, hand outstretched, ready for the shake.

“Vittorio? E un piacere, messier.”

I told him over the phone that my name was Victorio and that I was Uruguayan, which means I’m “a little bit” Italian. He seems to have really taken to that last part, and says Vittorio with relish.

I roll with it. I tell him it is nice to meet him. No, he says, it is nice to meet you.

We walk to the Silliman courtyard and choose a bench to sit on. He comments on the beauty of the leafy green space all around, and I agree. I’m not sure where to start, not sure how to ask someone about their dead niece. I look at my notepad.

Blank. I look at Lenny. Expectant. Lamely, I settle on an uncontroversial question.

“How are you?”

Lenny saves me.

“I’m excellent, excellent. I’ve had an amazing year, when it comes to Dawn, and her murder.”

10 – The Yale Herald

Lenny brings a big, three-inch binder between us on the bench. It is full of documents related to Dawn’s murder. It contains the coroner’s report, the letter Lenny wrote to obtain the aforementioned report, timelines of before and after the murder, clippings from newspapers about the murder, and more. More than enough information to give me an understanding of the case. But it is here, Lenny tells me, just in case we need it. He tells me he is “inclined to be loquacious” and can probably tell me all I need to know.

When I ask him if he “met with the police” about the murder, he lightly corrects me, explaining that he “met with them pertinent to the case.”

One of the suspects, in Lenny’s estimation, was a “borderline sociopath.” Getting off the bench, he describes how Dawn was found: pointing to his lower leg, he says that “the lividity—or where the blood settled—was here.”

Dawn was reported missing on July 24, 2005.

She was found dead by asphyxiation at a friend’s house on Jul. 26, though the police searched the premises of the house where she died once before then and failed to find her body because they did not go far enough inside. The Connecticut Department of Corrections prints cold case victims on packs of cards given to inmates; the hope is inmates might know information about those pictured and tip off investigators. Dawn’s card was the king of diamonds. To date, no arrest has been made. According to Lenny, an arrest warrant has been written up, but the DA of Middletown, Conn., had yet to sign it.

Lenny says all this solemnly, but ten years after the murder, as we sit on a bench in a leafy quad, he seems at peace. He takes a call from his wife, answers “Hi, honey boo boo,” tells her where his black pants are, and returns to telling me about how the murderer covered his tracks. He thinks of Dawn, he tells me, not through the lens of grief but the lens of love. Lenny has suffered, mourned, and come out on the other side, but he struggled deeply to arrive there.

“I would just come in and sit in my man cave chair,” he says, recalling the months after the

murder. His business as a dog behaviorist suffered. “Wasn’t bringing in any new clients. I had written a will.”

LENNY IS USUALLY UPBEAT, BUT WHEN HE lingers over the days and months after Dawn’s death, he speaks more slowly. Lenny shares this part of his story several times over the course of our later interviews. Whenever he mentions the will, it is laden with meaning. And, inevitably, it is followed by a name: Richard Jackson.

“Richard Jackson saved my life.”

Richard Jackson, according to his website, is a “Psychic Medium” and “Specialist in Solving Spiritual Anomalies,” among other things. He warned Lenny that he would be dead in three to six months if he kept grieving for Dawn. Lenny remembers this moment vividly, and he thinks Richard’s words brought him out of his mental fog.

His insight, according to Lenny, came from his paranormal sensitivity.

“I’ve always had a belief that there’s more to life here than we realize. There’s skilled people, sentient people.”

He thinks Richard Jackson is one of those people who is attuned to other powers. For example, Lenny was writing a book about the murder, A Dawn to Remember, but whenever he wrote, “near tragedies,” like for example a near-collision on the highway, would happen. Richard suggested these were a result of the negative energy surrounding the book. Lenny stopped writing, and the incidents seemed to abate.

Talking about Richard Jackson has got Lenny on a roll, “loquacious” as he is. The next part of our conversation is a whirlwind tour of Lenny’s experiences with the supernatural. When he was stationed in France with the armed forces, he saw a hypnotist perform a “life regression” on an officer’s daughter. She had been born and raised in America, but under the spell of the hypnotist she began to speak in an unintelligible language. According to Lenny, the officer recorded this speech and took it to a French academic, who told him such a language had not been spoken since the 1500s.

Lenny had a life regression done on himself, and he

learned that he had been with his wife in three past lifetimes.

When Dawn went missing, he consulted with a sensitive (what we, the uninitiated, might call a psychic) named Samy, and Lenny says she knew Dawn had been asphyxiated before the police did. Lenny has been friends with Samy for a long time, and he gave me the number I could call to schedule an appointment, explaining it would be $125 but worth it. Maybe I appear less than convinced—he assures me that the FBI has used Samy many times.

For Lenny, these supernatural occurrences form a context in which, unlike in our seemingly arbitrary world, things matter. A past life manifests itself in archaic speech. A source of bad en-

ergy acts as a magnet for tragedy. A murder tears a hole in the moral fabric. It makes sense, then, that Lenny’s mourning process happened partly in this liminal, ghostly space.

AS WE LEAVE THE SILLIMAN COURTYARD AND walk to his car, Lenny tells me about how he applies the supernatural in his job as a dog behaviorist. Usually, he can figure out what is wrong with the dog using normal strategies, but every once in a while he comes across a dog he terms idiopathic, “which is a wonderful way to say ‘your dog is fucked up and I don’t know how.’” In these cases, Lenny says he opens his “third eye,” focuses, and tries to send the dog a picture of Lenny perplexed, with his arms raised in puzzlement. He demon-

strates the puzzled arms and confused face. He assures me that Italian researchers are producing work that validates this.

As the interview draws to a close, Lenny tells me he has to “boogie.” At his minivan, he gives me one of his business cards (“Canine Cadre”) and one of his records (Dances A Lot, his Kenny Rogers cover album). He also slides open one of the car’s doors and shows me Cato, his very large dog, who barks at me. Lenny assures me Cato is really quite nice. I thank him for the interview.

“No, Vittorio—thank YOU.”

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff Nov. 4, 2016 – 11

Privates

By Sophie Dillon

12 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The Yale Herald

I. KYLIZZLEMYNIZZL

P

aparazzi cameras flash madly from the screen of my phone. I am watching Kylie Jenner’s Snapchat story on the toilet. While I take a mid-morning leak, I get one of my tri-daily doses of kylizzlemynizzl.

Right now she is on a red carpet in a Givenchy gown, walking forward in neat, expensive steps, looking at the screen of her phone, which is pointed towards the carpet, which is how she knows where she is going.

Kylie Jenner is the only Kardashian I Keep Up With, and I do so exclusively through Snapchat. So do millions of other people. Kylizzlemynizzl is the mostviewed account on the app. The King Kylie reign is so powerful that Snapchat added a personalized crown emoticon to her handle, the exclusive privilege of verified celebrity accounts. I started following kylizzlemynizzl last year when I found out you could follow celebrities on Snapchat. Snapchat accounts are not close to ubiquitous among celebrities, so the pickings were slim. These days I tend to skip through Jared Leto’s story, as he reminds me of an ex-boyfriend.

I often skip through Victoria Justice, who is the most basic person I have ever met*—though I suppose I have not really met her at all. Rihanna doesn’t update her story much, and when she does you can tell an assistant or friend is holding the phone. Sometimes the assistant forgets to turn the sound on. Kevin Jonas barely posts either, except for once when he got a hot dog on National Hot Dog Day, which he knew it was because there was a National Hot Dog Day Snapchat filter.

If you’ve heard about celebrity Snapchats, you’ve probably heard about DJ Khaled, who started scoring millions of story views in late 2015—particularly after he live-snapped a jet ski accident. DJ Khaled’s Snapchat did not blow up until after I had followed the first eight celebrity accounts Google revealed to me in the early summer of 2015. His explosion onto my social media feeds was too overwhelming to get involved in. I didn’t bother to follow his account. Besides, I skimmed enough social media to get snippets of DJ Khaled’s bizarre and funny quotes—and to see him recycle these quotes in interviews and advertisements.

His Snapchat account felt tainted by its monetization. DJ Khaled quickly became a profitable meme generator—an advertisement, not a human.

Kylie Jenner does not post snaps to entertain other people. This is pretty evident, as her Snapchat story is, technically speaking, quite boring. She uploads about 15 to 20 minutes of content every day, and most of these shots are video selfies of her singing along to music whose lyrics she does not know very well. One gets the sense that she is on Snapchat purely to entertain herself, to pass time in the makeup chair by looking at her own face. Kylie Jenner’s stories are transfixing, in part, because Kylie seems to live in a perpetual state of boredom, holed up in her private mansion in her gated community, which she says she never wants to leave. Kylie owns a lot of nice things: a fridge stocked with all of her favorite foods, a shelf stocked with all of her favorite wigs, a quartz crystal the size of her palm, a velvet car. Watching Kylie Jenner’s Snapchat is like watching a Barbie sit in her Barbie mansion, enjoying the quiet boredom of owning everything one could possibly want.

That Kylie Jenner is a 19-year-old American starlet who mostly sits at home is shocking precisely because it is not shocking. When celebrities crept into my consciousness in the 2000s, their lives seemed irreparably damaged. Disaster, in the form of addiction or prison or sex tape, felt intrinsic to the very idea of a young starlet. I grew up knowing that the price of fame was a life watched by paparazzi, and a life watched by paparazzi was not much of a life at all.

Everyone seemed to pity these broken women—Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton—who kept spiraling downward. In the checkout line of the Stop & Shop, I found myself looking away from copies of Us Weekly, whose covers just made me sad.

But Kylie is not a teen of the 2000s, she is a teen of the 2010s. No American teenager in 2016 needs a photographer to take pictures of her all day—she’ll gladly do the job herself. As a result, the paparazzi are no longer what they used to be. And neither is privacy.

*Once, while Justice was riding in a limo with her sister, Drake’s “Hotline Bling” came on the radio. “This is our SONG!” she said, squealing in utter delight, surprised that they were playing the number one hit song on a Top 40 radio station.

II. A HISTORY OF THE PAPARAZZI Elio Sorci, the first paparazzo, described a paparazzo as “a young, carefree, happy man who earns his daily bread by putting other people into difficulty and doesn’t mind the risks.” While this description may sound familiar given the aggressive style of today’s TMZ, the first wave of paparazzi had a much less combative relationship with the celebrities they photographed. Sorci was one of many young Italian photographers practicing a new style of photojournalism— candid shots of celebrities. Rome became a cinema powerhouse in the 1950s, a fertile petri dish of celebrity culture. Since the 1930s the press had revered this celebrity culture. Celebrities were glamorous, and were to be publicized as such. The press fed the celebrities, the celebrities fed the press, et cetera, et cetera.

Early photographs of celebrities were largely glamorous, but the accompanying rumors were not. Though photographic celebrity “gossip” wasn’t popularized until the 1960s, written celebrity gossip has been around since pretty much the beginning of time. Mesopotamians gossiped in cuneiform about a mayoral impeachment 3,500 years ago. In 1709 the first modern gossip magazine, The Tatler, was printed in London. At the time, salacious content involved duels, gambling, and thoughts on inappropriate manners. American public gossip started in the late nineteenth century with a weekly newspaper named Town Topics, which published a column called “Saunterings.” The publisher of Town Topics, William d’Alton Mann, was infamous for how carefully he played his cards, often leveraging power by keeping the best gossip to himself. When Hollywood burst into the national consciousness, gossip magazines pursued actors more ruthlessly.

In some ways, the camera-wielding paparazzi were born because they had to be. By the 1950s, Hollywood was more glamorous than ever, there was more media evidence of this glamour than ever, and there was also a growing curiosity about the stars, evidenced by the burgeoning gossip business. These factors, combined with the increasing accessibility of cameras, created the perfect opportunity—if only someone was willing to take it.

That someone was Elio Sorci, soon followed by other young Italian men seeking to cash in on Rome’s celebrity culture. More of these opportunistic photographers cropped up throughout the decade, inspiring the character Paparazzo, a reporter in Fellini’s 1960 La Dolce Vita. The nickname “paparazzi” was born from the name “Paparazzo”: both an Italian family surname and a bastardization of the Italian word for “mosquito.”

One of the definitive aspects of paparazzi photojournalism was its mercenary nature: no one worked on contract. The photo was always sold to the highest bidder. Paparazzi worked in direct competition with one another. The paparazzi business, by its very nature, rewarded opportunism—doing whatever one could do to be in the right place at the right time. In his introduction to Sorci’s posthumous photography collection Paparazzo, Philippe Garner, a director at Christie’s Auction House, writes that the early paparazzi’s “lack of formal training, their lack of self-consciousness towards the medium, the absence of all those aesthetic and ethical anxieties that can inhibit spontaneity [...] cast them […] perfectly in the role of ruthless image-hunters.” These men were able to get candid shots precisely because they were not “legitimate” members of the press. They had no union or workplace that benefitted from maintaining the glamour of Hollywood, and their work effectively ended the positive feedback loop of celebrity and celebrity press.

Still, the focus of paparazzi photojournalism was not (yet) on mining celebrity secrets. Rather, Sorci’s photographs drew their power from the simple act of making a private thing public—capturing people who were always on display in moments when they were not intended to be on display. Most of Sorci’s photographs are fascinating because they’re simply pictures of famous people looking sort of normal: Sophia Loren grimacing as she clambers into a limo, Mick and Bianca Jagger mid-conversation, Goldie Hawn about to tuck her hair behind her ear, giving Sorci a disgruntled glance. Yet the point was not to catch unflattering celebrity moments so much as unedited ones. Some of the photographs are quite beautiful: Brigitte Bardot still looks gorgeous while chewing on a blade of grass. Even a little off-balance, Clint Eastwood looks handsome on a skateboard.

Nov. 4, 2016– 13

And although the early paparazzi’s relationship with celebrities was opportunistic, it was not necessarily combative. Sorci became friends with many of the celebrities he photographed, even ones he caught in decidedly un-glamorous moments. Fellini even invited Sorci to shoot on the set of La Dolce Vita. According to Sorci’s wife, Sorci did not approve of the modern paparazzi in his old age, as he did not believe they truly practiced the craft.

This statement, of course, must be qualified by the many statements Sorci had previously made about money being his prime motivator. Still, there is something that sets his photographs apart from the ones splayed on the cover of today’s National Enquirer.

Philippe Garner shares this feeling: “Perhaps it is just nostalgia for a lost era, but somehow the stars and celebrity figures we see in Sorci’s images seem more seductive, more captivating than their modern equivalents.” Why is this the case? Is it because the paparazzi are so ubiquitous now that celebrities are always expecting to be on display, making it harder to capture a celebrity in a truly unstaged, private moment? Is it because Hollywood has been knocked off its glamorous pedestal for so long that it’s no longer fun to look at celebrities being unglamorous? Or has technology changed so radically that our perceptions of privacy have also shifted, making the original project of paparazzi photojournalism altogether impossible?

III. A HISTORY OF PRIVACY (a.k.a. WHY PEOPLE PAY FOR A PICTURE OF KELLY CLARKSON PICKING HER NOSE) The history of the paparazzi is, in essence, a history of the intersection between privacy and technology. As technologies have developed ways of producing and disseminating facsimiles of private moments, we have been forced to rethink the very concept of privacy. With the exponential growth of personalized technology in the last 20 years, this process has sped up rapidly—much more rapidly than material history can keep up with. This is to say, I have no facts to support these ideas, so rather than proving them with hard evidence, I am going to think through them with a sort of theoretical history—based in material history but intended more as a thought experiment than a textbook entry.

(Think Thomas Hobbes’s account of the “State of Nature,” the beginning of time when all men lived by themselves in constant fear of other men.

Was that the case in pre-civilization? No—we weren’t even humans yet, so thinking about the origins of humanity in terms of the Homo sapiens we know and love today is always sort of a moot point. But moot is sometimes a useful place to start.)

Let’s pretend we are at the beginning of human history. Humans are around, but they have not yet invented any technology. I’m talking no writing, no fire, no nothing. Blordak the Caveman sits in a tree all day growing out his opposable thumbs. Sometimes his friends come to his cave and they wrestle in exchange for coconuts. Sometimes they all hit up the watering hole for some gossip, or antelope, or, I don’t know, rocks.

At this point, there are three shades of the public/private divide: the embodied public (what most people mean when they say “public” colloquially today, the watering hole where all the cavemen gather), the embodied private (what most people mean when they say “private” colloquially today, Blordak’s cave where he can wrestle with his friends and be himself), and the mental private (inside one’s own head, Blordak’s stream of consciousness as he sits in his tree, twiddling his new thumbs). The relationship between these three dimensions is relatively simple: around many people (whom one might not know very well), one is in the embodied public; around fewer people (whom one feels comfortable around) or no one at all, one is in the embodied private; and alone, one is always in the mental private.

14 – The Yale Herald

(Pardon the academese, because it’s about to multiply. Really, if this isn’t your thing you’re welcome to read something else. I support you.*) The first technology to translate (or, make public) the mental private is speech. Using language, people can attempt to share the experience of being in their heads. However, speech (for the purpose of communication) requires a live audience within earshot, so as soon as the mental private is translated, it gets lost in the embodied conversation. Speech is great for sharing thoughts, but pretty shabby at recreating the mental private—the actual experience of being alone in one’s head.

Next comes written language, which is exponentially better at reproducing the mental private. With writing, the mental private does not get embodied in a human body (as speech does through the mouth), it gets embodied on paper—a confined thought-space much more like the mind’s blank slate. As writings begin to circulate, they create the first ever disembodied public, or mental public: the mental privates of many individuals co-mingling with one another in a disembodied space—the realm of thought. This is the literary commons.

For the first time, technology allows people to make public their mental private.

However, because access to printed works, let alone the literacy necessary to understand them, remained limited for a long time, the mental public of the literary commons was not truly a public space.

Let’s fast forward a few thousand years while humans work out the kinks of language and God and the Bubonic Plague, so we can get to the invention of photography.

Photography gives us the technology to translate the embodied private— to make public the physical space of privacy. (While I suppose visual art did this before photography, it was about as crude at translating the embodied private as speech was at translating the mental private.) This translation of the embodied private gets even better with the invention and popularization of film. By the mid-twentieth century, Americans (seemingly) have access to dozens of embodied private spaces: Lucy and Ricky Ricardo’s apartment, the Cartwright’s Ponderosa Ranch on Lake Tahoe, the Cleaver’s house on Leave it to Beaver (where the toilet was first shown on television!**).

But of course, these are merely facsimiles of the embodied private. In the actual embodied private, there are often toilets, and their presence does not upset the mores of the American Public, nor does it require weeks of wrangling with network censorship rules. Yet as technology gets better and better at approximating the embodied private, people start to forget that the whole thing is an illusion. This change produces the public/private oddity that is the Hollywood actor: a person on display (“in public”) so often in these facsimiles of privacy, that the line between public and private shifts. For actors, the embodied private is rarely actually private (at least this is true of our perception of actors, whom we mostly encounter in these reproductions of private space).

They are “in public” even when they are “in private,” because their private presence is being broadcast to the outside world.

The question of privacy for an actor, then, is actually a question of audience more than a matter of being alone or away from a crowd. Actors in the modern, densely populated world bring forth a new dimension of privacy: the unwatched private, when one is in an embodied public but does not perceive an audience.

For example, Brad Pitt as he walks little Maddox through the airport, Scarlett *I mean, I want you to read it. So keep that in mind when you decide. **This is (partially) a lie. They just showed the toilet tank. The writers spent an entire week trying to write out the toilet shot after the network said no, and simply could not do it. In their defense, it was a slippery plot line: Wally and Beaver bought a tiny alligator and needed to hide it from their parents. They couldn’t keep the tiny alligator in their bedroom, since their mom would find it when she cleaned the room. They couldn’t keep the tiny alligator in the sink or the bathtub, since their parents would find it when they cleaned themselves. That’s right, the toilet was first (partially) shown on television because the writers of Leave it to Beaver were not creative enough to invent a place were two boys in the 1950s could keep a tiny alligator. (idk, the yard? perhaps a nearby brook?)

Johansson as she picks out a Hallmark card for her aunt, Ryan Reynolds as he readjusts his ballsack on a park bench. In an increasingly crowded world, all of us can access the unwatched private—the anonymity of a crowd, the sensation of having privacy within an embodied public because no one is paying us attention.

When paparazzi photograph Jessica Alba shopping for yarn, they are capturing the unwatched private (a sort of private space within a public space, due to a lack of audience). When paparazzi break into Jessica Alba’s bathroom and hide in the shower to catch a nip slip, they are capturing the embodied private. The original paparazzi were the first to commodify the unwatched private.

This was previously impossible—in the past, there was not much demand for another person’s unwatched private. That’s because most people do not behave for an audience in the embodied public, and if they do, the audience is their mother or friend, rather than millions of Americans. Photographs of people who do not usually perform for an audience not performing for an audience in public are, alas, a hard sell. Yet because we encounter celebrities first in these facsimiles of the embodied private (the public private), encountering them in the unwatched private feels like encountering something truly private—the celebrity existing for herself, rather than for an audience.

I use the word “celebrity” now instead of actor because at this point most celebrities seem engaged in some form of translating the private. Singers cry in the bedrooms of their music videos, politicians sit down for family dinner in their advertisements, athletes wash up and go on Dancing with the Stars. While reproducing privacy for an audience is not the bread and butter of all celebrity professions, it’s definitely implicated in most.

This I find interesting. In essence, isn’t this the same project as paparazzi photojournalism? Making the private public? In some ways, aren’t the paparazzi a bit better at doing this than film actors? Even when we’re spellbound by Meryl Streep, in the back of our mind we know she is just Meryl Streep, doing a very good job at pretending she is Margaret Thatcher. Film actors are rewarded for how accurately they can reproduce the embodied private for a public audience, for how well they can shut off the tiny IMDb humming in our head, scanning each character for the actor beneath. Yet when a paparazzo takes a shot of Meryl Streep on the sidewalk, Meryl Streep is not complicit in his translation of her “privacy” (by which I mean her existence in the unwatched private, this public sort of privacy). As hard as cinema tries, you can’t truly capture someone’s privacy unless they are unaware of your presence. In this sense, aren’t paparazzi photographs, even ones of celebrities in public, more successful at translating the embodied and unwatched private than the facsimiles the celebrity has produced?

A true paparazzi photograph, then, by which I mean a photograph of a celebrity who does not know he is on display, must come at the expense of the celebrity’s knowledge of the paparazzo. There’s a cost to capturing privacy. This is where the ethical questions come in.

I’m going to go ahead and assume that most people agree (at least hypothetically) on the right to the embodied private. When a paparazzo breaks

for the cameras in exchange for money, in turn relinquishing the embodied and unwatched private as spaces of true privacy (i.e., audience-less spaces).

The paparazzi got a good shot, the celebrity got a modicum of control over her “candid” appearance, and the positive feedback loop of celebrity and celebrity press continued. This is how (I believe) being a modern celebrity became the business of selling one’s privacy. By the 2000s, no one knew more about selling privacy than Harvey Levin.

IV. SEX TAPES AND BUZZ CUTS: THE RISE OF TMZ Alec Baldwin called Harvey Levin, creator of TMZ, “a festering boil on the anus of American media.”* The Guardian has called him “the high prince of sleaze.”

Rory Waltzer, a former cameraman for Levin, has said he would make for a great dictator—though perhaps he already has.

Levin works from a riser at the center of TMZ’s office. He is 66. He wakes up every morning at 3:00 a.m. to exercise before he starts his workday, which is often as long as 12 hours. He sounds like a radio show host. His biceps bulk out from the short sleeves of the t-shirts he wears on television, like someone has injected lemons into his arms. According to Levin, TMZ is worth 400 million dollars. A pretty hefty sum, considering the website was only started in 2005.

Named “Thirty Mile Zone”** after an industry term for the Hollywood sprawl, Harvey Levin aimed to bring hard journalism techniques to celebrity press. In his view, the paparazzi had gone soft, mostly reporting stories that had been planted by publicists. His aim was “not to make celebrities look bad but to make them real.”

Levin was not interested in the slightly unflattering photo of the newest pop singer, he was interested in the massively unflattering photo of her police record.

Levin taught his guys to go for the hard stuff: the deleted section of the security tape, the drunken voicemail, the original transcript of the 911 call. “They were at police precincts, doing real beat reporting, and getting things like surveillance video,” said Brittain Stone, a competing photography director at Us Weekly.

By the turn of the century, the paparazzi had practically closed the positive feedback loop of celebrity press. Stone said at the beginning of the 2000s, “Our mission was to be aspirational—something that was pretty, shot in a certain kind of light, people looking good. TMZ never really did that.”

TMZ reopened the celebrity feedback loop by assuming a combative relationship with the celebrities they covered. On a radio show in 2013 Levin said: “You could take me, put me in Afghanistan, and I’ll use the same principles I’d use with Britney Spears.” (Though Levin fails to articulate why Britney Spears should warrant the same journalistic principles as a war.) While Levin espouses the principles of hard journalism, he diverges from old school journalism on one issue in particular: paying for information. TMZ shells out thousands of dollars for its visual stories, rewarding its army of moles like no other news source. Levin has sources in limousine services, airports, taxis, hotels, law offices, and state courts. And he pays them top dollar for the dirt.

In some ways, this is directly in line with Elio Sorci’s original conception of the mercenary photographer as paparazzi, loyal only to the highest bidder. Only TMZ is unique in that they are both paparazzi and bidder, spreading the cash throughout Los Angeles as they commission every low-level employee in town. No need to employ a handful of opportunistic young men when you have a city of opportunistic young people at your disposal, some of whom are bound to be in the right place at the right time. TMZ’s anonymous tip line receives over 100 tips a day. With high quality camera phones, anyone can be a paparazzo.

TMZ sought to make public a deeper, “realer” form of privacy than the embodied private or unwatched private. They sought to translate the narrative private***—the privacy of one’s life story. (The narrative private is any information that can produce a larger life story—not the stream of consciousness of the mental private but the information bank stored in our memory. This is the version of privacy meant by Facebook in their “Privacy Settings.” This is what your mom means when she asks you to keep your sex life private. The narrative private is the stuff we choose to excise from our public life story, what we mean in a literal sense by “private information.”) For Levin, photos that captured the embodied private or unwatched private did not make the cut unless they

The question of privacy for an actor, then, is actually a question of audience more than a matter of being alone or away from a crowd. into Jessica Alba’s shower for a nip slip, most people are going to defend Jessica Alba when she sues him for publishing the photographs. The ethics get thornier when it comes to the unwatched private. While some people might object to paparazzi hounding celebrities as they go about their day, some people say it serves them right—they’re public figures, after all. The cost of participating in commercially successful translations of the embodied private is one’s right to the unwatched private, the right for someone to exist as themselves (and not their work) in the embodied public and go unnoticed.

The paparazzi turned the unwatched private into a commodity at the expense of Hollywood stars…for a while. Then the stars figured out how to regain control— bargain with the paparazzi for planned “candid” photos of themselves. If the paparazzi were going to commodify their privacy, at least they would have a hand in selling it. Celebrities began to simulate both embodied and unwatched privacy

*This quote is from a 2016 New Yorker profile of Harvey Levin, as is much of the information in Section IV. **The website was almost named “Buzz Feed.” ***This will be on the test, so study up.

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revealed (or seemed to reveal) some aspect of the narrative private—the fuller story of a celebrity. The photo had to be a story, and the story had to come at the celebrity’s expense. The dirt wasn’t attractive unless it had been swept under the rug.

The ethics here are complicated. (Or not complicated at all, if you are Immanuel Kant.*) While, ethically speaking, one could get behind publishing all evidence of the narrative private sent TMZ’s way—subjecting everyone to equal standards of narrative privacy invasion—the second TMZ passes on a tip, they confer on someone their right to narrative privacy, making every case morally relative. Maybe this would be fine if TMZ employed a think tank that considered the ethics of publishing a photograph of Rihanna entering a plastic surgery office, but they do not keep philosophers on payroll. In a business whose heart is unabashedly cold cash, morality tends to fluctuate—something Levin himself admits to. “I can’t give you a rigid principle on where the line of privacy is,” he said during a lecture at the University of Chicago in 2010.

Levin has passed on several large stories, including a video of 16-year-old Justin Bieber singing his song “One Less Lonely Girl,” substituting the word “girl” for the n-word. When Levin chose not to publish the video, Justin Bieber’s publicist literally wept with relief. Instead, Levin used the video as leverage to gain greater access to Bieber. In exchange for withholding the juiciest narrative private, TMZ got access to more, less interesting narrative private—the exact sort of behavior for which Levin criticizes his predecessors.

So maybe he’s a bit of a hypocrite, but the man is also responsible for some important headlines. TMZ first broke national news with Mel Gibson’s drunk driving arrest, and a transcript of the police report detailing Gibson’s anti-Semitic rant (four pages that were removed from the report officially filed by the police station).

TMZ got the footage of Ray Rice abusing his wife in an elevator (evidence that the NFL lawyers failed to obtain). TMZ broke the news of Michael Jackson’s death, Michael Richard’s racist words at a standup show, Donald Sterling’s request to his mistress that she not bring her black friends to L.A. Clippers games. Levin says: “If you look at the stories we’ve broken they are stories that literally every newscast in America has put on the air.” He’s not wrong.

It’s easy to valorize TMZ when they’re exposing a celebrity’s racism—or worse, how the celebrity has exploited his status as a public figure to hide this racism. It becomes more difficult to valorize TMZ when they’re exposing a celebrity’s mental breakdown. Especially when the paparazzi are spurring it on, baiting the celebrity, camera in hand.

The rise of TMZ brought the frequency of celebrity meltdowns to a new pitch.

Some people, like Amy Winehouse, were already troubled. The constant onslaught of paparazzi documenting this trouble only made things worse. Winehouse could not enter any embodied public without getting mobbed by cameras, paparazzi hoping for her to give a drunken monologue or a coked-up rant. TMZ trapped Winehouse under her public image, something she attempted to escape through alcohol. In July of 2011, Winehouse drank so much vodka she stopped breathing.

She died alone in her bedroom, watching YouTube videos of herself singing.

Some people, however, were more complicit in the paparazzi’s presence. Just as celebrities regained control of celebrity press by commodifying the embodied private and unwatched private, celebrities attempted to regain control of this new, vicious brand of paparazzi photojournalism by commodifying the narrative private.

The narrative private proved significantly more difficult to commodify than the embodied private or the unwatched private. Celebrities did not just have to appear “candid,” they had to appear “candid” in compromising situations. They had to control the illusion that they were not in control of their life story.

Publicists quickly switched tack to achieve this authority, tipping off TMZ’s cameramen with “candid” “scandals.” (Of course, publicists did not want to release real scandals, so they settled for controlling smaller scale gossip.)

Paris Hilton’s publicist would alert TMZ when Paris was going to a movie with her boyfriend. Britney Spears would ring up TMZ before she went to get a spray tan.

But TMZ would not settle for a spray tan from Britney Spears. They wanted the custody battle with K-Fed, the series of driving misdemeanors, the back of the Las Vegas club where she’d passed out that night. And they got it. When Britney Spears shaved her head, the paparazzi covered the story like weathermen covering a natural disaster. Spears exploited the paparazzi to stay on the front of the tabloids, welcoming paparazzi into her embodied private and unwatched private in an attempt to gain control of her narrative private. In turn, the paparazzi exploited Spears’s offer, using their access to her embodied private and unwatched *If this is the case, congratulations on conquering death and traveling through space-time to read this essay. Also congratulations on being Kant.

16 – The Yale Herald

private to manufacture Spears’s narrative private—provoking her to pull tabloid-worthy stunts.

This voracious appetite for the narrative private led to another fad: the celebrity sex tape. Though celebrity sex tapes had been leaked decades before the 2000s, the Internet democratized access to these tapes, bringing the embodied private more fully into the mental public. If you weigh the options for celebrities at that time, making a sex tape actually made some sense. A sex tape would guarantee a star weeks of tabloid time, and was, in many ways, better than other forms of “candid” “scandal.” At least with a sex tape, a celebrity could commodify her embodied, narrative private. If paparazzi were going to invent a scandalous narrative privacy for her anyway, she might as well have a scandalous narrative privacy in which she’s moaning sexily on a nice bed, rather than passed out in her own vomit.

I should admit that this is pure speculation. I have no idea what Paris Hilton was thinking when she turned on the night vision setting of her video camera and left it to record from a nearby bookshelf. Hilton denies that she ever intended to profit commercially off the sex tape. It was sold and distributed by her exboyfriend, whom she had been dating during the filming of “One Night in Paris.”

Hilton sued her ex-boyfriend, settling out of court for a reported $400,000. I will say that the video was released at a convenient time—three weeks before the premiere of Hilton’s new reality show, The Simple Life. Needless to say, the first season of the show was an enormous success.

But the cost of commodifying one’s embodied, narrative private is the cost of destroying the existence of the embodied, narrative private as a truly private, audience-free space. If one cannot actually be unwatched, and thus in control of one’s embodied or narrative private, the only privacy left is the mental: the untranslatable experience of existing in one’s head.

This seems like an incredibly difficult way to live. Can you imagine if your only true form of privacy, the only place where there was never an audience, was in your own mind? Of course Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears ended up in rehab and prison. The paparazzi drove them into the furthest corner of their minds and left them clinging to their last shred of privacy, as they were dwarfed by their own public figure. The late 2000s was a miserable time to be famous…unless you were Kim Kardashian. Say what you will about her, but she was the heavyweight champ of 2000s celebrity culture. Not only did she make a cool five million suing Ray-J for the release of her sex tape, she also made tabloid covers and didn’t fall to pieces. Kim Kardashian is many things, but she is not a felon or an addict, the two seemingly inevitable paths for 2000s starlets.

This is because Kim Kardashian has a unique skill set: she is able to live with virtually no privacy.

V. KING KIM Kim Kardashian was the first to thrive on commodifying the embodied, unwatched, and narrative private with a business move that combined all three: a sex tape.

While making a sex tape is not particularly difficult to do, it is quite difficult to live with its consequences—to relinquish all privacy but the mental. By selling such a radically intimate moment of her life,** Kim became her own paparazzo. Her press fed her own celebrity, her celebrity fed her own press, et cetera, et cetera. In this way, she became the uberpaparazzo, closing the celebrity feedback loop around herself, taking full control of her public figure by sacrificing almost the entirety of her private space.

Kim has a knack for the craft of paparazzi. She recognizes the opportunities for exploiting her own privacy as they develop through new forms of technology— and she does it at breakneck speed. Kim was one of the first to capitalize on the reality show wave, inviting cameras to live semi-permanently in her home. By sacrificing the embodied private of her household, she became a household name.

Kim is one of the most followed celebrities on Twitter and Instagram. In 2014 she released Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, a free role-play game where one quite literally pretends to be Kim Kardashian. The goal of the game is to social climb **“Selling” is perhaps the wrong word here, as it ascribes intent to the distribution of Kim Kardashian’s sex tape. To be clear, Kim denies intentionally releasing the tape. She speaks about the event with regret and embarrassment. But she did make a great sum of money off a sex tape in a time when many startlets’ sex tapes were being “leaked.” It’s hard to say how intentional this was on Kim’s behalf—but what’s important is that, at the end of the day, Kim made bank off the tape, which is still on the internet, despite the fact that she could probably, by this point, have gotten it removed. Whether or not she intended to “sell” the sex tap when she made it, the point is that she “sold” it retroactively—effectively exchanging the tape’s existence for a great deal of fame and wealth.

through Hollywood, finally making it to the A-list. In 2015 she released Selfish, a 352-page book of her own selfies, in which she speaks candidly about how she achieved these supposedly candid looks.

Phillipe Garner says that Elio Sorci and the original wave of paparazzi photojournalists were brilliant not only in creating the medium but continuing to push the medium to its brink, “squeezing maximum mobility, flexibility, and possibility from the equipment then available.” This is precisely the genius of Kim Kardashian: moving with technology as it develops, pushing further into the layers of her privacy. When Paper Magazine released the infamous photo of Kim resting a champagne flute on her oiled ass cheeks, she “broke the internet.”

She might not have (actually) broken the internet, but she does seem to have broken the paparazzi. Celebrity pictures that scored $20,000 in the 2000s are selling for a measly 15 cents these days. Many of the smaller photo agencies that cropped up in the 2000s paparazzi boom have since folded. To be fair, this was not singlehandedly Kim’s fault. Just as the perfect storm of factors brought the paparazzi into being, the perfect storm of factors is now picking the paparazzi off. When the recession hit in 2008, people cut tabloids from their spending budgets. This was particularly easy to do considering the rise of celebrity social media accounts. Why pay five dollars for grainy pictures of Blake Lively when you could pay nothing for shots she’d taken herself? The industry’s recklessness had also finally caught up to itself, after celebrity car chases had caused so many crashes—even the death of one paparazzo.

In 2010 California passed a law intensifying consequences for reckless driving in pursuit of a photo: now a paparazzo might get fined $2,500, or even receive six months in the slammer. Plus, with the increased quality and ubiquity of camera phones, there was not as much need for a squad of mercenary photographers to track celebrities through L.A. Rather, celebrity presses could outsource their work to the public.

More recently, Kim Kardashian has discovered how to outsource her work (of self-publicizing) to the paparazzi, regularly uploading paparazzi photos to her Instagram, even ones that depict her shielding her face from the cameras in an attempt to maintain the privacy of the unwatched private. The paparazzi are happy to give her their photos. “We make money off them,” says Kelly Davis, managing editor of X-17, a paparazzi agency that Kim has stolen shots from in the past. “I’m not going to bite the hands that feed us. We try to be friendly with the stars we photograph and most of them actually get along quite well with the shooters—both sides realize it’s a symbiotic relationship.” There it is again, that symbiosis of celebrity and press, cycling forever around the Kardashian clan.

After commodifying her unwatched private and embodied, narrative private, Kim has planted an audience everywhere but her own head. Let the paparazzi take pictures—Kim Kardashian is always on display.

VI. KING KYLIE Kylie Jenner got Kim’s genes for both the surgically perfect curves and the primal instinct for self-commodification. Don’t get me wrong, the rest of the Kardashian family is pretty damn good at this. But only Kylie seems to possess that Kim-like knack for leaning in to technology. Just look at her Snapchat.

By instantaneously capturing and distributing her perspective of her world (which is, paradoxically, often just Kylie looking at herself), Kylie uses Snapchat to commodify the perspectival private*—the visual and auditory elements of the mental private: what Kylie sees and hears of the outside world from the privacy of her mind. Kylie has found a way to commodify an even deeper form of privacy than Kim—a slice of the mental private, the physical experience of existing in her head.

How though, is Kylie able to commodify this, considering Snapchat does not pay her directly for kylizzlemynizzl’s content? *Okay that was the last one, promise.

At this point, Kylie does not need to explicitly commodify her privacy (by which I mean she does not need to receive money directly in exchange for translations of her privacy). Kylie Jenner’s life is an advertisement for Kylie Jenner. What Kylie gets out of publicizing herself is press. The Kardashians have so radically collapsed the distance between public and private that the second an object appears on or near a Kardashian’s body, it is, effectively, being advertised for. If Kylie so much as mentions she likes POM pomegranate seeds, POM will send her a gift basket with a lifetime supply. Kylie Jenner can have any material thing she desires simply by saying it out loud—thus incorporating it into the brand of Kylie Jenner, in turn advertising for the material thing. Her advertisement is its own advertisement for herself, Kylie Jenner.** In this way, the Kardashians possess a sort of genius: both the ability to rapidly commodify their privacy, and the ability to live in only the mental private. Genius, of course, is a tricky word to use here, as to me it implies a level of intellect, which then seems to imply a level of intentionality. Underneath it all, does Kim Kardashian know what she’s doing? How is it possible that she has given up all but the mental private? Is she a sociopath? Is she so devoid of individual thought that there is simply nothing in her head? Or is that part of her master plan—to make us think she is an airhead, fully exposed, when in fact she is manufacturing this exposure? A part of me feels like Kim must know—if not on an intellectual level than at least on a gut level—exactly what game she is playing.*** A part of me imagines her peering at us from that last shred of privacy, watching us watch her watch herself in the camera in the mirror as she robs us all blind. She is Lady Godiva, riding stark naked on horseback through the streets of Los Angeles, charging us for every second we peek out the blinds.

THOUGH IN A WAY, EVERYONE IS SORT of doing this. With the ubiquity of social media, everyone is now both public figure and paparazzi, constructing the public from shards of the private. Maybe we do not spend as much time looking at ourselves as Kylie Jenner, but perhaps that too is a thing of the past. Young people increasingly use Snapchat to communicate, sending pictures of their surroundings instead of text. Rather than spending time together in an embodied private, we spend time together virtually, by exchanging translations of our mental private—creating a new sort of mental public. While we are in the embodied private, we are now often also in the mental public: the virtual commons, where we can be alone, together.

I am not going to assign any value judgment to this statement, as I am afraid of vastly oversimplifying things. Who knows if personal technology is ruining human communication or improving it exponentially? I certainly don’t. I just mean to say, the concept of celebrity today is not the concept of celebrity from ten years ago, in part because the concept of privacy grows exponentially more layered as new forms of technology get closer to approximating the final frontier of privacy: the mental private.

I just mean to say, when I am sitting on the toilet, watching Kylie Kardashian get mobbed by her fans, which one of us is truly in private?

**In the time since I first followed kylizzlemynizzl, Kylie Jenner has built a cosmetics empire by advertising through her various social media. Her Snapchat is now littered with videos of Kylie smearing eye shadow kits onto her forearm, asking customers for advice on new product names, and freaking out over Kylie Cosmetics web traffic. Kylie’s Snapchat has become an intimate new form of advertising—Kylie is able to spread the word about her business in a fully personal way. She is a friend documenting her life—which just so happens to include her cosmetics—rather than a public figure pushing her wares. Her cosmetics’ participation in her perspectival private (made public through Snapchat), adds to their value. ***She does—the game is Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.

Graphic by Shelby Redman YH Staff Nov. 4, 2016 – 17

FEATURES

L

ast winter, President Peter Salovey announced that the opening of Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray Colleges would significantly increase the percentage of Yale’s international undergraduate population. In fact, the University has long pursued a particularly robust agenda of internationalization, introducing new partnerships, fellowships, and programs at home and abroad. Sometimes this agenda has made Yale a positive global player, as Salovey claims the campus expansion will do. Other times, though, Yale’s international forays have proved more harmful than helpful.

Yung Wing, the first Chinese student to receive a diploma from an American university, graduates from Yale. He returns to China, where he serves as an interpreter and a Christian missionary during the Qing Dynasty.

Founded as the Foreign Missionary Society, the Yale-China Association proselytizes across the Pacific Ocean, attempting to spread Christianity throughout East Asia.

1854 1805 Professor Benjamin Silliman travels to the United Kingdom, making him the first Yale professor to conduct research abroad. A chemist by trade, Silliman studied the mineralogy and geology at the University of Edinburgh before teaching these disciplines upon his return to New Haven.

16 – The Yale Herald

1901

The Yale Corporation dedicates its fall retreat to the topic of global expansion, culminating in the release of “The Internationalization of Yale: The Emerging Framework.”

This doctrine lays the groundwork for new initiatives abroad—for the opening of international branch campuses, the creation of fellowships and international programs, and partnerships between Yale and foreign institutions.

1997 1911

Professor of Archaeology Hiram Bingham explores Machu Picchu. Yale and National Geographic jointly sponsor Bingham’s trip to Peru, which produced 5,415 lots of artifacts and the bones of 173 humans, all of which the expedition extracted and shipped to New Haven. After a contentious battle between Peru and Yale, the University begins to return these artifacts one hundred years later, in 2011.

For God, for globe, and for Yale

by YH Staff

The Yale World Fellows Program, which brings 16 professionals from around the world to New Haven, is established. The year-long program allows its fellows to audit classes on-campus, work with Yale faculty members, and sponsor conferences and events.

Yale-National University of Singapore (NUS) opens to students. “I hope that for many more years to come you’ll keep your links to NUS, Yale, to Singapore,” Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loon, tells students at the campus inauguration ceremony four years later.

2011

2002 2007 Yale proposes a satellite campus in Abu Dhabi, but plans fall through one year later when the University fails to reach an agreement with the government of the United Arab Emirates.

2014 The Yale Center Beijing, operated by the School of Management, opens to host conferences, networking events, and speakers. At the Center’s inaugural conference, Yale University President Peter Salovey says: “Today we celebrate something brand new, a physical presence that represents all of our university—all of Yale’s schools, departments, and programs.”

Graphic by Rachel An YH Staff Nov. 4, 2016 – 17

CULTURE Chewing on loneliness

by Meghana Mysore YH Staff

W Requiem for a drink

by Lea Rice YH Staff

T

wo thousand years ago, the Aztecs crafted what is believed to be the world’s first hot chocolate beverage. Two hundred years ago, Dutch scientist Coenraad Johannes van Houten invented the first cocoa powder machine.

Two months ago, Yale Dining took a flamethrower to that legacy.

I wish that I could rationalize why every automated, three-nozzle hot chocolate/cappuccino machine at Yale disappeared over the summer of 2016. Truthfully, I didn’t even notice that they were gone until my hands began to chap in the brisk autumn wind—that is, until I needed them most.

Quickly replaced by polyethylene containers of knock-off Swiss Miss powder, the machines vanished without a trace. Luckily, however, I am an amateur detective who watched a lot of Columbo reruns in my youth, so it only took a speedy 55 minutes of sleuthing on Google Images and an additional 20 minutes of combing through Wilbur Curtis Specialty Dispensers maintenance manuals to identify the lost machine as a 2009 model of the Wilbur Curtis Cafe Primo Cappuccino 3 Station Dispenser.

Finding the brand model, though, did not lead me to the answer to my question: why take away Primo Cappuccinos?

18 – The Yale Herald

A friend tried to console me by suggesting that Yale Dining removed the dispensers to encourage healthy eating habits. I responded by filling my mug with another two scoops of imitation Swiss Miss and a pile of marshmallows that could feed a family of four squirrels through a harsh winter.

It is at this juncture that I turn to the prophetic words of Tom Hanks’s mustachioed conductor in The Polar Express: Here, we’ve only got one rule: Never ever let it cool!

Keep it cookin in the pot, You’ve gotHot choc-o-lat!

We let the hot choc-o-lat cool, folks.

The snow fell before the last of the leaves, and winter is on its way. Can we really face it with self-mixed cocoa powder? If the tongue burn I incurred from sipping my hot choc too eagerly this morning is any omen, the outlook’s not great.

hen I came to Yale, one of the first things I noticed was how much time people spend eating and planning meals.

Throughout Camp Yale, my suitemates and I would plan out every detail of every meal together—where we’d meet each other, which dining hall we’d go to, what time we’d arrive.

Sometimes during dinner, we’d all be together, but none of us would talk. It was almost like the sheer presence of other bodies acted as a safety blanket. Even if we were alone, we could at least find comfort in the semblance of being together with other solo diners. After Camp Yale ended and our schedules stopped lining up, I began to eat alone. At first, the experience was strange. It felt wrong to be entirely alone when so much of college seems to revolve around meeting people, and it was difficult to listen to others’ conversations and not feel like the first person on Mars.

At Yale, loneliness is stigmatized outside of the dining halls on a daily basis. In many ways, Yale prizes a culture of constant socialization where students feel the need to network and add to their their social capital. The process of making friends becomes, at least in part, a game of strategy.

On weekend nights, the pervasive fear of being alone arises again when students go out to parties in the hopes of meeting new people. I don’t go to parties often, but from my limited experience, I’ve noticed a strange generic quality to social spaces at Yale. Despite an abundance of people gathering in one place, they appear simultaneously together and somehow still alone.

In the mass of individuals at these parties, everyone starts to seem faceless. Each person fades into the next, attaining a physical closeness far from true togetherness. If I had to describe what loneliness looks like, it might be this.

And yet somehow the stereotypical images of loneliness at Yale are eating alone or sitting alone on a bench, both of which I enjoy doing regularly. But the next time I go by myself to Silliman to eat my breakfast of eggs and toast, I will not feel as alone as I would at a party, surrounded by people on every side. At Yale, we often think that if we are physically alone we are truly alone, but this is untrue. We try to boil down loneliness to the image of a solitary person, but it is, in fact, everywhere on this campus, especially in the places we wouldn’t think to look.

Ode on the soda siphon

by Eve Sneider YH Staff

M

y mother likes telling me that she used to put soda water in my baby bottle. Before I was eating solid food I was sipping that bubbly. Recent psychological studies have found that a child’s personality is fully developed by the time they reach first grade. You’ve got to start them young, and that’s exactly what the Sneiders did. As a little girl, I preferred sparkly water to sparkly dresses. It was infused in every part of my upbringing, an irrevocable element of family life.

Sunday afternoons meant making “Mixies”—Tropicana orange juice and soda water—with my sister and father. Visits to my grandparents on school breaks meant waiting excitedly at the dining room table while my grandmother concocted her famous chocolate sodas. Forget hot chocolate—seltzer with swirls of Hershey’s syrup and vanilla ice cream was the ultimate holiday treat.

These days, finding a fellow seltzer-lover is like meeting someone from my hometown.

Those of us with a die-hard allegiance to effervescence are in a class of our own. We can discuss the mouthfeels and flavors of various carbonated offerings with the kind of technical jargon generally reserved for theoretical physicists. Last year for my birthday, my sister bought me a water bottle more accommodating of fizz than my battered, blue plastic standby. While other college students spend their extra dining dollars on pints of Ben and Jerry’s and large boxes of Wheat Thins, my friends and I reserve our surplus meal swipes to gorge on Schweppes’ black cherry flavor, or occasionally Polar’s cranberry-lime. And I am proud to announce that I have enjoyed many a bonding moment in front of the soda water tap in the dining hall. While some rook-

ies hit the seltzer button by accident, I know exactly what I am getting myself into. Occasionally the person behind me in line will mutter, “You know that’s not water, right?” I reply firmly: “Believe me, I know.”

Lately, soda water has been making a comeback. In the States, seltzer sales have more than doubled in the last five years, perhaps as part of the move away from sodas with enough sugar (or, even worse, aspartame) in them to shock a horse. But as Rob Engvall wrote in his article “A Millennial’s Guide to Seltzer” (printed in the pages of hipster food mag Lucky Peach), “You don’t get a whole wall dedicated to yourself at the new Whole Foods in Williamsburg by being ‘healthy’—you get it because you’re cool.”

But for the real fanatics, bubbles are more than a passing fad; they’re a way of life. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the “Seltzer Enthusiasts” thread on reddit. “Hey, glad I found you guys,” one comment reads. Another recent post advertises one man’s new online venture: a website for seltzer reviews and a way for him to “catalog [his] seltzer journey.” Limited-edition flavors and more classic varieties are rated on smell, subtlety, intensity, title to flavor, and refreshment level, with a write-up to boot. I could not make this up if I tried.

I have always felt, perhaps irrationally, that my own fondness for fizz is in my blood.

Seltzer is my parents and grandparents. It is burps and laughter after a large meal. Jessica Leshnoff sums it up on her now-defunct personal blog, “lunch at 11:30”: “the JSG (Jewish seltzer gene) makes no sense to me, since Jews by their very nature are a) gassy… and b) complainers. We have very sensitive systems and complain about everything. Why

would we be inexplicably drawn to a beverage that will not only gives us gas but compels us to complain… about how gassy we are? It seems wrong. And yet… we just can’t stop ourselves.”

It is a connection that, at first glance, makes little sense. Seltzer may be hot and trendy right now but to many it still connotes deli culture and Litvaks and oldworld Jewry. And yet, it is hard to imagine my ancestors sipping on soda water in the heart of the shtetl. For much of recorded history, sparkling water has been a luxury beverage, found in mineral springs and enjoyed by those with an appetite for grandeur. But in the 18th century, Joseph Priestly, the English theologian better known for discovering oxygen, thought to mix water with carbon dioxide, making manufactured bubbles a possibility for the masses.

The Jewish tie to seltzer didn’t come until a century after Priestley worked his alchemic magic. Jews arriving on the Lower East Side in the late 1800s quickly took to soda water, the cheapest drink on the market that wasn’t plain old fizzfree. It even earned the nickname “Jewish champagne.” In the words of Jessica Edwards, the filmmaker behind the documentary Seltzer Works, “[seltzer] refers to a time and place we don’t have anymore.”

My mother says that seltzer takes her back to her childhood, even though she didn’t like the taste much growing up.

Her father would always drink the Canada Dry variety, which came in tall, heavy, glass bottles. When he asked my mother to fetch him the seltzer, she had to carry these bottles with both hands. As she recalls this, she describes the glass’s slight bluish tint, laughing a little. “I feel this profound connection to it even though I didn’t really drink it,” she tells me. “It was corned beef, it was lox, it was seltzer.

Seltzer was a refrain. It was one of those quiet Jewish cultural things. It wasn’t done with any intention; it was just who we were.”

My father’s parents didn’t drink soda water when he was young. “Maybe they were too assimilated,” he remarks offhand. But when I ask him for childhood memories of seltzer, they come to mind instantly. One such recollection: a family friend, Dick Rabinowitz, a lawyer who wore impressive glasses and “looked like

a mad scientist.” No matter what anyone else had to drink, Dick only ever had seltzer. For my father, too, the drink was wedded to old-world Jews, their heavy, greasy food, and schmoozing around the table.

My parents returned to their carbonated roots around the same time they met each other. My mother thinks she first acquired a taste for it when trendy imported waters hit the scene in the eighties.

For my dad, Tab came first: “I wanted a tasteless bubbly experience.” Before long, both were drinking seltzer by the gallon.

Much like my mother, my older sister and I grew up toting glass bottles to the table as we set it for dinnertime. Ours were Suntory brand club soda, four for the four of us. For both my sister and I, childhood memories of Suntory soda are plentiful and vivid: the satisfying sound of untwisting a metal cap, or how, in her words, “a freshly-opened bottle sort of burns when you drink from it.”

It can be confusing when something well-worn and beloved to you is hip and cool to everyone else. It is exciting to share a bottle of soda water with the uninitiated, to acquaint them with my old favorite. But in the same moment there’s an impulse to point out that I was there first. To me, seltzer will always evoke the bygone time and place on which documentarian Jessica Edwards commented.

It is a hereditary condition. But the seltzer bottle has gone the way of the bagel.

Like most everything from days of yore, it is being reframed and newly understood.

If I wanted, I could even make a Mixie in the nearest college dining hall.

Graphics by Alex Swanson YH Staff Nov. 4, 2016 – 19

REVIEWS

Defying genre

by Mariah Kreutter

M

ost stories evolve temporally, linearly, each action followed neatly by a consequence.

Others are nonlinear and scattered, told in jolts of flashback and prefiguration. But The Handmaiden, the latest film by South Korean auteur Park Chan-Wook, unfolds like a recurring dream.

The story is told and then re-told, with each retelling gifting the viewer a new understanding of the conflict. It is a lush, moody, atmospheric drama, darkly erotic, imbued with an imminent sense of both death and sex. Half-glimpses of horror and sensuality draw the viewer in, creating a film that is absorbing and seductive even when the action is sometimes repellent.

Loosely based on the 2002 novel Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, The Handmaiden swaps the Victorian setting of the book for Japanese-controlled Korea in the 1930s. It tells the story of Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri), a Korean pickpocket recruited by Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), a con man, to defraud a Japanese heiress named Hideko (Kim Min-hee) of her fortune. Sookee is to act as Hideko’s maid, and the Count (who is actually the son of a Korean farm hand) will woo her, marry her, take her money, and then dump her in a mental asylum. Over time, however, Sook-hee and Hideko become drawn to each other, and what follows is a truly absorbing tale of revenge and romance.

It is not an easy film to categorize: Wikipedia calls it an “erotic psychological thriller,” while the New York Times goes for the more staid “drama, romance.”

But there’s so much going on that genre feels inherently reductive. The Handmaiden is certainly both erotic (there are multiple graphic sex scenes) and critical of erotica as an avenue for the abuse of women. It is not always a comfortable watch, even if the trademark explicit violence found in much of Park’s work (including Oldboy, hitherto known as his masterpiece, although personally I’d wager that The Handmaiden will dethrone it) is largely swapped for suggestive, psychological terror. At other times, it is simply exhilarating, as all great con films should be.

And the final third is a double-crossing sequence that can only be described as deeply, deeply satisfying.

Typical for a Park Chan-Wook film, the art direction and cinematography are spellbindingly gorgeous— sweeping shots of the Korean landscape look like oil paintings, and the Gothic monstrosity of the manor house where the majority of the drama takes place is wonderfully uncanny. By blending elements of Japanese and English architecture, the space created feels both unsettling and repressively traditional. Layers of sliding Japanese doors conceal hidden dark things, studded with peepholes that suggest one of the major themes: the voyeuristic gaze. Austere, Western-style portraits stare ominously down from the wall. One particularly arresting shot shows the house from the outside, windows flickering into blackout. It is a feast for the eyes and an assault on the senses, a lesson in psychological terror and glorious liberation, studded with Park’s favorite motifs (bright red clothing, appendage removal, ominously squirming octopi). But while some scenes are pure Park, others feel reminiscent of Guillermo del Toro (get rid of the supernatural elements and move the house to Korea, and Crimson Peak would fit right in) or Sofia Coppola (the scenes of Hideko’s boudoir are full of soft pinks and whites, delicate laces, jewels, and sweets—pure Marie Antoinette, with the creepiness of The Virgin Suicides).

But while The Handmaiden’s visual triumph is enough to justify its existence, it is far more than a series of pretty pictures. Even at two hours and 47 minutes, with many scenes shown more than once, the film never drags—the twists and turns are enough to keep the viewer fully invested. The central story is one of repression and liberation: men seek to control or possess women, while the women resist and, ultimately, find an escape through each other. Along with the obvious themes of gender and misogyny, the film also explores colonialism. The two main male characters, Fujiwara and Hideko’s abusive uncle Kouzuki (Jo Jin-woong), are both Korean men pretending to be Japanese for personal or material gain. Kouzuki justifies his pretense by stating, “Korea is ugly. Japan is beautiful.” Japanese imperialism in Korea is little explored in Western

media and likely unfamiliar to the average Western moviegoer, but the time period is still intensely relevant to both countries and well worth examining.

And, yes, for all of you out there wondering—The Handmaiden is very, very gay. One could argue that the film falls into the tired trend of presenting oversexualized images of lesbianism for erotic effect.

But it also presents a genuinely moving, satisfying romance between two fully realized female characters, which makes it near-required viewing for fans of queer cinema. The film grapples with performance and voyeurism, and at times it is unclear whether the viewer is meant to be complicit or not. Everyone on screen is performing, both meta-textually (as actors) and within the text, as con artists or as erotic beings. Within the story, the male gaze is presented and violently rejected, while the female gaze is exonerated—but this is complicated by meta depictions of sexualized female bodies by a male director.

It’s complex, but clearly has feminist motivations: one climactic scene that shows Hideko and Sookhee literally dismantling a physical manifestation of the patriarchy made me want to sit up and cheer.

The Handmaiden is intense and idiosyncratic enough not to land with all viewers, but for the art house crowd, it’s a must-see. The film also has plenty of crossover appeal for fans of thrillers, period pieces, and healthy on-screen lesbian relationships.

Frankly, I can’t remember the last time I was this taken aback (in a good way!) at the cinema. If you see a film this weekend, you should make it this one.

See this film and others at Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas New Haven, 86 Temple St. Call 203-498-2500 or visit www.BowTieCinemas.com for advance tickets.

Image courtesy of CJ Entertainment

20 – The Yale Herald

Movies: Moonlight

B

ased on Tarell McCraney’s In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, Barry Jenkins’ extraordinary second film is as much his as it is that of James Laxton, whose precise cinematography tells a story in and of itself. Moonlight (2016) is the 16-year bildungsroman of Chiron, a queer black boy introduced to us during his silent scramble through the shrubs and back windows of Miami. Chiron’s journey, split into three parts, is grounded in his evolving sense of self, an identity inextricable from the unresolvable conflict painfully familiar to minorities in America. Instead of adopting the wavering camera shot typical of the Boyhood genre, a sleep steadicam, classical score, and lush coloring reject the cinematic expectations tied to depictions of poverty, queerness, and blackness. Visually and otherwise, Moonlight is a film crafted to subvert expectations, defy categorization, and assert itself as one of the most beautiful works of our time.

Driven heavily by dialogue despite a reticent protagonist, Moonlight zips through years of plot and monumental events, choosing instead to unfold on dinner conversations and jukebox tunes. The wandering plot doesn’t sacrifice fleshed-out characters, though, and the wonderfully-acted Chiron (played at various ages by Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes) isn’t alone in his multi-dimensional complexity. Neither Chiron’s drug-addicted mother, Paula, nor his father figure, Juan (who is also Paula’s drug dealer), slip into tragic symbols of their respective archetypes; rather, each is a well-defined character whose love for Chiron provokes serious inner conflict. Likewise, Kevin, Chiron’s schoolmate/friend/maybe-something-more, avoids the trap of becoming a lazy caricature used solely to drive plot. Moonlight’s universe of tangible characters packs an unsettling emotional punch in even the most restrained scenes. By focusing on specifics, Jenkins excels in making an intensely personal film that simultaneously projects a ubiquitous reality of American life.

Bathed in crisp reds, warm yellows, and glaring whites, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight still manages to exude an unwavering blue through gorgeous, deliberate repetition. Blue is a defiant stroke of color throughout the film, appearing in Juan’s car, Chiron’s electric blue backpack, the antiseptic background of his high school, Kevin’s t-shirt, and elsewhere. Its repeated infusion, especially washed over the powerful last shot, references the origin story of McCraney’s play. Moonlight’s varying blueness is a claim of fluid identity, of active and passive self-possession, of nuanced and overwhelming self-expression, and of a constant yet ever-changing sense of self. Despite being a work whose power is in its dialogue, the brilliance of Moonlight isn’t easily described with words: the best articulation of it might be through color.

- Nicole Mo

Art: Surprise at The Study

I

can assure you that there will be no greater contrast on Yale’s campus this November than the one in the lobby of The Study Hotel, where, interspersed with the slick, modern furniture and continental decor, resides the The Yale Undergraduate Photography Society’s dazzling fall exhibition. But this contrast isn’t simply the fact that such a vibrant show currently resides in a hotel. In fact, what is at the core of the exhibit is a rigorous demonstration of the capacity of photography to be an immensely diverse medium. Variety of geographical location, variety of compositional qualities, variety of mood: variety of all varieties is, ultimately, the unifying thread to the exhibition.

To give you an idea of the kind of diversity I’m talking about, think an image of a sunset in Southampton placed next to a scene from the Serengeti. Simply in terms of geography, the exhibit will transport you from a beauty store on Chapel Street to a martial arts show in Beijing, from a temple in Bhutan to a chapel in Stockholm. If the photos weren’t so deeply rooted in the places in which they were taken, the show might strain beneath the weight of its own ambition.

The take-away may well have been so flat and vapid as, “Wow, Yale students are really well-traveled.”

Thankfully, this isn’t the case. Instead, what’s perhaps even more striking than the show’s geographic variety is its range of mood and composition. There are images of intensity, like Meg McHale’s, BK ’17, stark photo of two boys heading to work in the fields after school. The boys’ tense yet resolute expressions, coupled with McHale’s revealing title, “Men,” convey the sense of desperate urgency beating beneath the image’s surface. There are also images of exultant repose, like co-curator Kaitlin Cardon’s, TD ’19, “Berber in the Sahara,” in which an ornatelyclad drummer watches as his music inspires jubilation. As far as compositional variety goes, one particularly arresting example is the juxtaposition of the gritty realism of Rebecca Finley’s, SM ’20, “Pretty in Punk,” in which a young woman blows a gum-bubble, with Rosie Shaw’s, CC ’20, “Home—,” a honey-lit pastoral scene practically dripping with warmth and nostalgia. By eschewing any sense of thematic continuity, the exhibition affirms its central purpose of revealing the expansive yet infinitely personal nature of photography.

As Susan Sontag remarked in the essay “Melancholy Objects,” “The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” If you make it to The Study this November—as I hope you do— you will no doubt experience the truth of Sontag’s words.

More than simply being the cheapest worldwide adventure around (save, maybe, Around The World in 80 Days), this exhibition will provide you with the rare opportunity to slip into another’s shoes so that you may return to your own with a new perspective.

- Robert Newhouse YH Staff

Upper right image courtesy of A24 Bottom left image courtesy of the Yale Undergraduate Photography Society Nov. 4, 2016 – 21

BULLBLOG BLACKLIST when you’re about to sneeze

What we hate this week

but then you don’t! :/

prunes

and they cough for a long time then walk away

eco-friendly napkins

when you tell your crush you like them

my problematic celebrity crush

a sad little snack

Flo the Progressive Girl

Febreze i feel like they’re not as soft idk are we addressing the real problem?

“I’m full”

Still uncomf

people who call the buttery “the butt”

can’t relate

Sep. 16, 2016 – 23