Why Iranian women are risking everything

Why Iranian women are risking everything by burning their hijabs

Iran is in revolt.

By Jonathan Guyer 

A picture obtained by AFP shows a demonstrator raising their arms and making the victory sign during a protest in Tehran for Mahsa Amini, on September 19, 2022. AFP via Getty Images

It was not an isolated incident of police violence in Iran. But the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody last week has captured the country’s attention.

Amini was visiting the capital of Tehran, coming from the Kurdish province in the country’s northwest, and Iran’s so-called morality police detained her, allegedly for wearing the mandatory headscarf improperly. Several hours after entering police custody, she was in a coma. She died two days later. Iranian police claimed she died after a stroke and suffering cardiac arrest, but witnesses say she died after sustaining blows to the head, and shocking photos that spread online of Amini intubated in a hospital have galvanized the nation.

Protesters have since taken to the streets in more than 50 cities across Iran. Authorities reportedly have killed as many as 36 people during demonstrations. The government has also restricted the internet, so the complete picture may not be available. But the growing arrests of human rights defenders, activists, and journalists are particularly troubling.

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Demonstrators have defied the repressive government regularly in the past several years, often expressing economic grievances. Women have been central to Iranian politics of resistance since the 1979 revolution, and before. What’s different about these protests is the diversity of people out on the streets and the widespread nature of Iranian resistance, in cities big and small.

The government may weather the emerging movement. Or Amini’s tragedy could prove to be Iran’s Mohamed Bouazizi — the Tunisian street-seller who self-immolated in December 2010 and helped catalyze the mass protests across the Middle East and North Africa that came to be the Arab Spring.

Across the country, protesters are chanting, “Woman, Life, Freedom.” Those words have resonated deeply because they’re affirmative and unifying, says University of Sussex professor Kamran Matin. “This triangular slogan is uniting different strands of discontent in Iran,” he told me. “This slogan has united every section of Iranian society which has some sort of grievance against the government.”

Why Iranian women are burning headscarves

In response to Amini’s death, Iranians are demanding an end to mandatory hijab laws and burning the scarves in powerful displays of refusal. In Tehran, they have been chanting, “We don’t want forced hijab.”

That’s connected to the police’s purported reason for detaining Amini, but the act of protest carries multiple meanings. Negar Mottahedeh, a professor of gender and feminist studies at Duke University, likened the images of Iranian women burning their headscarves to the bra-burning of the 1960s. Bra-burning meant many things at once: an expression of feminism and liberation, but also a broader rejection of the Vietnam War and of capitalism. Similarly, the images from demonstrations across Iran over the last week object to compulsory veiling and the morality police, but also against a paranoid, controlling state that has sought to police women’s bodies.

People gather in protest against the death of Mahsa Amini along the streets on September 19, 2022, in Tehran, Iran. Getty Images

The so-called morality police, an independent unit that has been around since 1979, don’t only enforce headscarves but a variety of regulations, including mixed-gender gatherings and prohibitions against drinking alcohol. During the late 1990s when Mohammad Khatami was president, Iran instituted a number of reforms, but his successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, reversed these. The current president, Ebrahim Raisi, a conservative, has maintained such restrictions and emboldened officials to clamp down. Authorities in Iran take it upon themselves to interpret the codes, and enforcement can be arbitrary and violent.

Human rights researchers note that the morality police in the past few months have resorted to violence more frequently.

Even if the protests don’t immediately result in transformative change, they’ve forever changed the debate on compulsory hijab in Iran, says Tara Sepehri Far, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “There’s no going back,” she told me. “Yes, police can pretend this never happened. But it did happen. Women took off their headscarves, walked down the street, and the debate has moved forward.”

The boldness of Iranian women in the face of a police state has been one of the enduring dynamics of the country’s street politics. “From the very beginning of the revolution in 1979, women were at the forefront. They were walking shoulder to shoulder with men in front of tanks and guns, and they were seeking a different kind of government, an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist government,” Mottahedeh told me.

The 1979 revolution overthrew a corrupt, US-backed dictator and brought together a disparate opposition, including leftist and Islamic groups. But the political faction that took power after the revolution succeeded, which still rules today, began to implement religious-based laws that discriminated against women.

Women in the streets of Iran during the May 1, 1979, demonstration. Christine Spengler/Sygma via Getty Images People hold up a photo of Iranian woman Mahsa Amini as they participate in a protest against Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi outside of the United Nations on September 21, 2022, in New York City. Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

Mottahedeh emphasizes that many of the initiatives of the country’s first supreme leader, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in the immediate post-1979 moment were about controlling women’s bodies, their careers (excluding them from being judges, for example), and their appearance. Back then, some of the first revolts against the revolutionary government were about the right to abortion, the right to divorce, and the right for a wife to have a say about who her husband’s second wife was going to be.

Despite severe restrictions, women have continued to push back. “It’s really important to focus on women’s resistance and resilience inside of Iran, and not see them as victims,” says Sussan Tahmasebi, executive director of the human rights organization Femena. “Iranian women — even though they deal with a lot of discriminatory laws, structural and legal discrimination — they have always taken every opportunity to advance their lives.”

Another important element of the ongoing mobilization relates to Amini’s Kurdish identity. The Iranian government has, over the years, painted Kurdish activists as separatists seeking to delegitimize the Iranian state. But now with demonstrations so dispersed across the country, the Kurdish minority’s prominence in the protests may reflect the fact that Iranians are becoming more sensitive toward the injustices inflicted upon the ethnic and sectarian minorities in the country. The national character of the protests that elevate the life of a young Kurdish woman provides crucial recognition of their plight.

Matin, who studies Iranian and Kurdish politics, noted that the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” originates from Syrian Kurdistan. “The Kurds have always led the way in resistance against what I would describe, even in kind of scientific terms, as a semi-fascist state,” he said.

What’s next for an Iran in revolt

The demonstrations come at a time when the socioeconomic conditions in Iran are extremely tenuous, with a large portion of Iranian society impoverished. This is partly because of the impact of US sanctions over the Iran nuclear program, as well as the broader global economic conditions and the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. The country’s economic troubles are likely to persist without a return to the Iran nuclear deal. Then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the deal in 2018, and obstacles to its revival remain frozen despite diplomacy between the Biden administration, Iran, and world powers, leaving intact intensive economic sanctions on Iran. And without the money to address Iranians’ underlying grievances, the state is likely to flex its strength to deter social unrest.

Ali Vaez, an analyst with International Crisis Group, grew up in Iran and has been taken with the images of boys and girls fighting back against government forces. “These are scenes that were unimaginable 10 years ago, 20 years ago,” he told me. “This is a society that the Islamic Republic clearly is no longer able to control. With repression, they might be able to buy time, but they are not going to be able to address the underlying drivers of these protests.”

It’s impossible to know whether the protests will carry on and grow, as they have in the 2017-18 economic protests or the massive 2009 Green Movement protests, led by a presidential candidate at the time. One thing that’s certain is that protests in Iran are becoming more frequent, says Vaez, which shows the degree of discontent. “We used to see this kind of outburst of public ire once a decade in Iran,” he told me. “Now it’s becoming every other year, basically, and it’s becoming more ferocious, more violent.”

The demonstrations appear to be a spontaneous movement. But a leaderless revolt is also by extension disorganized. That may make it less likely for the movement to grow beyond a street movement into something that can transform Iranian policy and governance.

Two enduring forces also stand in the way of political change: a geriatric supreme leader who is completely averse to change, heading a regime that is willing to deploy brute force against its people. (By coincidence, the protests began the same day as news broke about Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s ill health and as the conservative President Ebrahim Raisi has left the country for the United Nations General Assembly in New York.) The discontent in the state and its crisis of legitimacy has been on display since the low voter turnout in the presidential election won by Raisi last year.

Now, the Iranian authorities are arresting activists, organizers, and students. “What concerns me is the escalation of the crackdown — they’re going to try to really force the protests to die down,” said Sepehri Far.

Such a brutal response to the mass protests will further expose the brittleness of the Iranian government. “It reflects the total incapacity of a political system to listen to its own population,” Vaez told me. “So there is a clear divide between state and society in the country — there is no doubt about it. But this is a system that still has the will and a fearsome capacity to repress.”

 

The Man Who Understood Democracy:

AMERICAN PURPOSE.com

The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville

The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville
by Olivier Zunz (Princeton University Press, 472 pp., $26.49)

Alexis de Tocqueville, an aristocrat by birth and heart and a democrat as a matter of principle, loved liberty and feared a relentless pursuit of equality at the expense of it. His fears were not groundless: Most of his family had been guillotined in the Terror of 1793–94 that followed the French Revolution. The French, he wrote, “want equality in liberty, and if they cannot have it, they want it still in slavery.” Instead of siding with reactionary legitimists, including his own Ultra-royalist family, he contended that Europe must eventually follow the example set by democratic America.

Tocqueville’s parents were imprisoned following the Revolution, but survived the execution planned for them by Robespierre only because he was guillotined first. The family benefited from the Restoration, and after the Revolution of 1830 Tocqueville swore loyalty to the new regime—hesitantly. His political position was precarious, his career prospects slim, and eager for personal independence, he set out for America with his friend Gustave de Beaumont to study penitentiary systems and test his suspicion that the key to France’s future could be found in America’s present.

In The Man Who Understood Democracy, Olivier Zunz captures not just the ambiguities of Tocqueville’s thought but his essence as a person. Tocqueville emerges in Zunz’s account as an original thinker who could see the weaknesses in his own case without losing conviction. Throughout his life, he strove to fend off both reactionary royalists and radical socialists, yet saw his country caught in cycles of revolutionary violence and tyrannic entrenchment. In crystalline prose—often rewriting sentences twenty times, never picking up his pen before he had read some pages of Montesquieu, Rousseau, or Pascal—he gave every sentence the weight of mathematical truth. Even in his shabbiest moments, he remained intellectually honest: He supported scorched earth tactics in Algeria but could still see the speciousness of la mission civilisatrice.

Tocqueville and Beaumont, during their nine-month trip in 1831 and 1832, saw the greater part of the United States. They witnessed the expulsion of the Choctaw Indians, saw the merciless caning of a black man in Baltimore, spoke with everyone from John Quincy Adams to Andrew Jackson, and confirmed that women in America were far freer than those in France. The young men traveled through New England and the frontiers, from the Ohio River to the South, where they saw how slaveholding had cut the region off from the North both economically and morally. The lessons Tocqueville learned from these experiences would form the foundations of Democracy in America.

It is to Zunz’s credit that he has managed to summarize the core of Tocqueville’s thought without reducing its subtlety. His prose style, moreover, is serviceable. Perhaps the bracing effect of reading lots of Tocqueville has saved him from academic verbosity. But if his prose is inoffensive, it is also impersonal. His sentences remind me of IKEA-furnished homes: clean, functional, but could belong to anyone. There is no personal voice, no hint of humor or irony, in the whole book. It reads like a textbook.

Even Tocqueville, I feel, was not immune to the European intellectual’s snobbish-yet-lumpen disdain for American culture. Anticipating Gore Vidal’s quip about the “United States of Amnesia,” Tocqueville noted that Americans tended to forget their own history: They lived day-to-day, like an army in the field. He maintained that no country in the world had so few individual geniuses as America, yet he thought that the general level of education was remarkably high—even solitary settlers knew their Shakespeare. But the feeling I get when reading Tocqueville is that he, unlike many English visitors to America, was more unsettled by the country’s mortal sins than its uncouth citizens. Slavery shocked him more than indoors spitting.

Tocqueville suspected that some of the country’s cultural imperfections—like the “utter barbarity” of serving oysters for dessert—were products of America’s national infancy but worried that other such flaws were characteristic of democratic societies in general. He thought the majority’s leaden tyranny was so stifling that no great American writers were likely to emerge. That is a funny view to take right when American letters were really flourishing. Zunz misses several opportunities to mock Tocqueville for similar pronouncements—should it not make us somewhat skeptical towards Tocqueville’s (sometimes) just-so sociology that he would say such things while barely speaking English? Maybe not, but Zunz skirts the issue. Still, Tocqueville’s fears that an inclination toward leveling might give rise to new forms of despotism was not empty. He knew that dissent can be silenced more effectively by ostracism than by law. Even where interracial marriage was legal, social mores made it exceedingly rare.

Yet no country could compare with the United States. Tocqueville saw that Americans, by eschewing administrative centralization, had solved the ancient problem of how to preserve a large republic. He believed that political associations, often pejoratively called “factions” by Americans themselves, were the social basis of liberty: They served as a bulwark against the type of democratic despotism that “leaves the body alone and goes straight for the soul.” In words that seem to prophesy the coming totalitarianism, he warned that the state could grant hollow liberties only to better subjugate its citizens: “It does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born.” With this passage, Tocqueville shows that democracy’s most skillful partisans have often proven to be its most perceptive critics.

On the matter of race, Tocqueville advocated the full and immediate emancipation of slaves in French colonies, and he took note of the “feudal condescension” with which American women in the South beheld their slaves. His personal secretary, Arthur de Gobineau, wrote Essay on the Inequality of Human Races—which claimed that miscegenation would inevitably lead to civilizational decadence—and sent it to Tocqueville, who, in November 1853, wrote back objecting to his racial “fatalism.” Humans were, Tocqueville thought, unified in equality. Gobineau should have expected the rebuff since Tocqueville had already in 1842 taken the view that “the classification of races according to their physical traits was a materialist doctrine—which, like a corpse, would never produce more than a bunch of earthworms.” In a similar prophetic vein, he foresaw that Gobineau’s theories would be embraced by American slavers and German racial fanatics.

For someone who mistrusted materialism as Tocqueville did, he nonetheless knew the importance of material conditions. Zunz dutifully notes that Tocqueville missed some things: He neglected to study the mercantile harbors of New York and Boston and overlooked the new cotton mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. Still, I think that Tocqueville, like Karl Marx, came to understand that ideas can be expressions of property relations. He traveled to Ireland and Britain, where he observed Manchester’s bottomless poverty. He saw misery on such a scale that he could only compare it with Dante’s Inferno: “From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage.”

In Tocqueville’s political career, he promoted public welfare reform. In private, he wrote about the Revolution of 1848, making many of the same points about class conflict that Marx made in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Unlike Marx, however, Tocqueville thought the origin of 1848 could best be explained by the socialist rhetoric of the workers’ leaders, what he called their “revolutionary religion.” It would have been interesting to know what Zunz thinks of Tocqueville’s conclusion, but he merely notes that 1848 “has been a topic of profound debate.” This is characteristic: the book introduces us to Tocqueville’s thought but engages very little with it. Occasionally we’re told in passing that Tocqueville said something “correctly” or that he misstated some fact, but that’s about the extent of its critical engagement. It is not so much proved as assumed that Tocqueville was basically right.

Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup forced Tocqueville out of politics and presented him with new evidence of the recrudescence of Caesarism from the crushed hopes of revolution. In exile, he wrote L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution. He believed that the pre-revolutionary period was characterized by certain social and material improvements: Feudal obligations were eased, peasants owned more property, and individual rights were increasingly recognized. Hence, he wrote,

It is not always going from bad to worse that leads to revolution. What happens most often is that a people that put up with the most oppressive laws without new complaint, as if they did not feel them, rejects those laws violently when the burden is alleviated.

A few years ago, cadres of the Chinese Communist Party were instructed to study Tocqueville’s conclusions. In learning how to snuff out liberty, they paid a grudging compliment to the subtlest of liberty’s champions.

“The Fabelmans,”

With “The Fabelmans,” Steven Spielberg Finally Phones Home

By Michael Schulman Thee New Yorker

The director’s new film is a retelling of his parents’ troubled marriage and leads the pack in the Oscar race. 

“Seventy-five years of life experience went into this,” Steven Spielberg told the crowd at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month, before unveiling his latest film, “The Fabelmans.” This world première was perhaps the biggest curiosity at tiff: it was the first Spielberg-directed movie to be entered at a film festival, and its subject is the director as a young man. At long last, here was Spielberg’s song of himself: a bildungsroman from the filmmaker who has shaped nearly half a century of the American popular imagination. Whatever you think of Spielberg as a director, “The Fabelmans” is noteworthy as a kind of skeleton key that unlocks his cinematic world: the shark, the extraterrestrial, D Day. It’s as much a movie as a pop Freudian event.

“The Fabelmans” follows a nuclear family’s implosion and the filmmaker who emerges from the wreckage. When we meet the young Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord), he’s about to see his first movie, Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth.” The date—recalled with precision, like that of a nation’s founding—is January 10, 1952. Outside the theatre, Sammy’s father, Burt (Paul Dano), an engineer who understands machines better than he understands humans, explains the mechanics of the moving image. Sammy’s mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a classical pianist with an artist’s vivacious, erratic soul, says that movies are like dreams. “Dreams are scary,” the boy retorts. He’s awestruck but terrified watching DeMille’s train-wreck scene, which he can exorcise from his nightmares only by re-creating it at home with a toy train set and an 8-mm. camera. “He’s trying get some kind of control over it,” his mother intuits, while his father dismisses Sammy’s interest in filmmaking as a “hobby.”

The suburban idyll crumbles as Mitzi becomes closer to Burt’s co-worker and best friend, Bennie (Seth Rogen), a cutup who has a borscht-belt charisma that Burt lacks—the kids call him “Uncle Bennie.” As a teen-ager, Sammy (now played by Gabriel LaBelle, a nebbishy dead ringer for Spielberg) becomes even more enamored of the movies, corralling his friends into making Westerns and war flicks. One juvenile effort, “Escape to Nowhere,” is a clear forerunner of “Saving Private Ryan”—Sammy’s attempt, as he tells his veteran dad, to simulate “your war.” Moviemaking is Sammy’s retreat from the disquieting family dynamics, but it also leads him to what he doesn’t want to see. Splicing together his home movies of a camping trip in Arizona, he spots his mother and Bennie canoodling in the background and realizes that the domestic unit called “the Fabelmans” is doomed. It’s no wonder that the adult Spielberg wanted to film suburban kids on bicycles: boyhood was his lost Eden, the castle that came crashing down.

Spielberg’s œuvre is often seen as an expression of boyish wonder, but “The Fabelmans” makes clear that its primary impulse is terror and trauma. The film only lightly fictionalizes his parents, Leah and Arnold Spielberg (to whom “The Fabelmans” is dedicated), and “Uncle” Bernie Adler, who became Leah’s second husband. Leah and Arnold both died within the past six years, and Spielberg said, at the Toronto première, “This film, for me, is a way of bringing my mom and dad back”—which may be another way of saying that he couldn’t have made it while they were alive. At a press conference the next day, Spielberg appeared in warm-dad mode, wearing sneakers, a blue suit, and a gray sweater-vest, and explained that the movie, like a lot of existential reckonings, emerged from the pandemic. “What is this going to mean for humanity?,” he recalled thinking as he followed the news in 2020. He was in a “vulnerable” age bracket, facing his own mortality and perhaps that of his species: “I thought, This is something I gotta get out of me now.” Stuck at home, he started Zooming with Tony Kushner, his writing partner since “Munich” (2005), four hours a day, three days a week. Spielberg compared Kushner to a therapist; Kushner, sitting onstage with him, joked, “I should have charged by the hour.”

“The Fabelmans” may be an invitation to put Spielberg on the couch, but he hasn’t exactly been a closed book all these years. “ ‘E.T.,’ ” he once said, “was about the divorce of my parents, how I felt when my parents broke up. I responded by escaping into my imagination to shut down all my nerve endings crying, ‘Mom, Dad, why did you break up and leave us alone?’. . . My wish list included having a friend who could be both the brother I never had and a father that I didn’t feel I had anymore.” In an “Inside the Actors Studio” clip that has circulated online, James Lipton, discussing “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” makes quick psychoanalytic work of Spielberg: “Your father was a computer scientist; your mother was a musician. When the spaceship lands, how do they communicate?” The director, grinning strangely, replies, “You’ve answered the question.” He made “Hook”—which imagines a grownup Peter Pan who has become a workaholic dad—after becoming a parent himself. “Saving Private Ryan” followed a fifteen-year-long rift with his father; Spielberg resented Arnold’s role in the family’s disintegration until his mother explained that it was her fault, too. “I spun around and realized I had been putting too much blame on the wrong person,” Spielberg said, in 1999. “That’s when I began to try to figure out how I could earn my father’s love back.”

“The Fabelmans,” though, dispenses with metaphor. Its most intriguing scenes hover around taboos, and you can feel the director itching to avert his eyes. It’s uncomfortable for anybody, especially a good son like Spielberg, to contemplate the sexuality of one’s mother, but it’s an unavoidable subject in his family story. After the Toronto première, Spielberg joined the cast onstage and explained that he took an interest in Michelle Williams—and ultimately cast her as his mother—after seeing her in the erotic drama “Blue Valentine.” (How’s that for Freudian?) In one unsettling scene, Mitzi, in a moment of exhibitionism, dances in her nightgown during the Arizona camping trip, and Bennie turns on the car headlights to give Sammy light to capture it on film. One of his sisters, mortified, warns their mother that her nightgown is see-through, but she’s undeterred. Later on, when Sammy shows his family the footage, Mitzi tells him proudly, “You see me.” Only too well: when he discovers the intimate moments between her and Bennie, he forces Mitzi to watch the damning outtakes, catching the conscience of a mother who has let an uncle usurp a father. All this time, we thought we were dealing with Peter Pan. It turns out that Spielberg was Prince Hamlet.

Sammy’s queasiness at his mother’s lust inevitably makes his own sexuality a minefield. The family moves from Arizona to Northern California, a land of goyim where Sammy is persecuted by sandy-haired, anti-Semitic bullies who remind him of towering sequoias. His sexual awakening comes courtesy of a Christ-loving shiksa goddess who fetishizes Sammy as a “handsome Jewish boy,” just like Jesus. We’re not in “Portnoy’s Complaint” territory here—Spielberg has little taste for perversion—but we’re not that far, either. One of Sammy’s sisters points out that his homemade movies have no good parts for girls, a nod to Spielberg’s blind spot for female characters. For most of his career, daddy issues (“Hook,” “Catch Me If You Can”) have blocked out mommy issues. But “The Fabelmans” is a corrective, giving Williams, in her Gwen Verdon-brassy mode, a role that may well win her an Oscar.

​​The film’s warm reception at tiff, where on Sunday it won the festival’s People’s Choice Award, signalled that “The Fabelmans” is now at the head of the pack in this season’s Oscar race. (This is the first in a regular column in which I’ll be covering awards season and the business of Hollywood.) Williams, especially, is a strong contender, even stronger if she runs (fairly or not) in the Best Supporting Actress category and sidesteps the more crowded Best Actress field. Judd Hirsch, who has a brief but indelible role as an older relative teaching young Sammy about the thrills and perils of the artistic life, is a good bet for Best Supporting Actor—in Toronto, his last shot got exit applause. But Spielberg himself has a spotty Oscar history. His breakout film, “Jaws,” was nominated for Best Picture, in 1976, but he was passed over for Best Directing, with a documentary crew on hand to immortalize his humiliation. Even as his hitmaker status cemented, Spielberg became notorious for losing Oscars: for “Close Encounters” (he lost to Woody Allen, for “Annie Hall”); for “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (Warren Beatty, “Reds”); for “E.T.” (Richard Attenborough, “Gandhi”). In 1986, “The Color Purple,” his adaptation of the Alice Walker novel, was nominated for eleven Oscars (but not Best Directing) and lost them all. It wasn’t until 1994, with “Schindler’s List,” that Spielberg pulled off a Best Picture–Best Directing coup, but it hasn’t happened since. In 1999, he won the directing prize again, for “Saving Private Ryan,” but it infamously lost Best Picture to “Shakespeare in Love,” which was backed by an Oscar-ravenous Harvey Weinstein. Even in more recent years, as Spielberg has aged into a Hollywood elder statesman, his serious movies (“Lincoln,” “The Post,” “West Side Story”) have got lost in the Oscar shuffle. But “The Fabelmans” asks Academy voters to consider Spielberg in a new light: not as a success story but as a wounded boy who found salvation in the movies.

Of course, cinematic memoir is nothing new—Fellini had “Amarcord,” Truffaut “The 400 Blows”—and “The Fabelmans” joins a wave of autobiographical movies by high-profile directors. In recent years, we’ve seen watchful boys and troubled adults in Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” and Lee Isaac Chung’s “Minari,” to name a few. This year’s crop includes Sam Mendes’s “Empire of Light” (starring Olivia Colman as a woman based on Mendes’s mother) and James Gray’s masterly “Armageddon Time,” set in early-eighties Queens. The best of these mine the tension between childhood memory and the revelation that comes with age and distance—the double vision that brings into focus a beloved nanny or a broken dad or a disadvantaged schoolmate. “The Fabelmans” takes an uncomfortable look at the hard stuff, but, if it feels more indulgent than the others, it’s because Spielberg is also in the business of self-mythologizing. “The Fabelmans” has a crowd-pleasing finale that sparkles like a Hollywood origin story, placing Sammy in a lineage of filmmaking giants—a new kind of family to replace the fallen Fabelmans. The film feels, in some ways, like a prequel to existing I.P.: the Big Bang of the Spielberg multiverse.

A late subplot, in which Sammy inadvertently mortifies one of his tormentors after filming him playing beach volleyball, reveals a more complicated relationship to the camera than Spielberg has previously let on: it’s a cocoon for Sammy to hide in, but it’s also a weapon. (Spielberg once said, “I wanted to do ‘Jaws’ for hostile reasons. . . . It terrified me, and I wanted to strike back.”) At the Toronto press conference, Spielberg ruminated, “I’ve always been able to put a camera between myself and reality, just to protect myself,” a defense mechanism that he was forced to set aside to make “The Fabelmans.” Kushner, playing therapist again, pushed back: “I don’t think that he actually does keep the camera between himself and real life in any of his movies. I think the thing that makes him who he is and makes those movies as great as they are is that there’s an emotional depth and power in everything he does.” The camera may have made the young Spielberg feel safe, Kushner went on, but the thing that makes you feel safe tends to “lead you back to the truth, which is: the world is not safe.” There are always sharks in the water. ♦

What Happens When the Brain Goes Quiet

What Happens When the Brain Goes Quiet but the Heart Continues Beating?

By Daniela J. Lamas NY Times

Dr. Lamas, a contributing Opinion writer, is a pulmonary and critical-care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

The headlines might make you think that Anne Heche died twice. First on a Friday, when the actress was declared brain-dead. And then again on a Sunday, when her body was disconnected from machines so that her organs could be donated.

It would be easy to assume that these headlines are unique to this event, the fault of imprecise language or constraints around the timing of obituaries. But they actually reveal a much deeper and pervasive lack of understanding about what happens in that liminal space between the declaration of brain death and when a heart stops beating.

During this period, which could last for days, doctors and nurses must care for the body of a patient we know to be gone. It is an uncomfortable process in many ways, but there is a clear and necessary process that ultimately allows the lifesaving act of organ donation — just recently, in fact, the United States recorded one million organ transplants since 1954. And because brain death and organ donation are sensitive topics, so rife with misconception, it is essential to get the language right and to be open about the steps that health care providers take.

It all begins with a catastrophe. An accident. An overdose. We gather at the bedside with our lines and tubes and procedures. Minutes pass. Hours. Sometimes days. And then there is the moment when we realize that even as heart and lungs and liver and kidneys have started to improve, this patient will likely never wake up or breathe on their own again.

Often, by this time, the neurologists have already been involved. There might be a CT scan that shows early signs of damage — swelling, the brain tight within its bony cage, normal structures obliterated. Sometimes we have cooled the patient’s body to give the brain the best chance to recover and must wait until it has been warmed again before we can make any determination about what is left. It is at this point that we talk about the testing required to declare brain death.

The first time a patient of mine was declared brain-dead was in my intern year. She was a mother, as I remember it, and had come in after her heart had stopped during a drug overdose. By the time her heart started again, her brain had been without oxygen for too long. I watched as the lead neurologist went through the steps of the brain death exam that by now have grown familiar. He shined a light in her eyes. Her pupils did not react. He injected cold water into her ear with a syringe, moved her head quickly back and forth, pinched the beds of her nails, each test trying to elicit reflexes that were tragically absent. In the final test, we stopped the ventilator and watched for long seconds that turned to minutes as her body made no attempt to breathe.

It is during this process that we shift from thinking solely about our patient to thinking about the possibility that they might become an organ donor. This means that we call the regional organ bank, the nonprofit that is responsible for recovering organs from deceased donors. A federal mandate requires us to alert the organ bank in such cases, whether a patient is a registered organ donor or not. As the organ bank begins to review the case from afar, we talk to the family.

By now, they likely know what has happened, but we need to say the words. That there are two ways to die, because your heart stops or because your brain stops working, and that the testing that we have performed means that their loved one is legally dead. And then, as they try to get their mind around the fact that this person they love still has a heartbeat on the monitor but has died, they ask about what comes next.

Studies have shown that families are more likely to consent to organ donation if that request comes from someone who is specifically trained to ask, and that this request should be decoupled from the declaration of death itself. This makes sense. I am their loved one’s doctor — not someone who should be thinking about the organs that could save someone else’s life. So we doctors are instructed not to bring up organ donation, not to say that an organ donor representative will reach out to them, but instead simply to say that a member of another team will talk with them about next steps.

I think that generally is enough; in their grief, families do not wonder why I didn’t bring up donation or feel misled, but it is always a moment when I feel pulled between my two mandates — one to this person and the family and the other to whatever it is that comes next. Though television shows would have you believe that the same doctors and nurses are also caring for the patients who will receive these organs, that is not the case. We never know where they will go.

Discomfort grows more acute in the coming hours or days, when a patient has been declared brain-dead but their heart is still beating as a result of our medicines and machines and they are being worked up as a potential organ donor. This is the time between that Friday and Sunday, the space between death and donation. Now a member of the organ bank is helping to direct the patient’s care from behind the scenes. Asking us to check labs. To do procedures.

The first time I had to do a bronchoscopy on a brain-dead patient, sliding a camera into the airways to visualize the lungs, I kept reminding myself that I was doing this to help save the life of someone who could not breathe. A colleague told me that when he does a cardiac catheterization on such a patient, to see if the heart is viable for donation, he knows the patient is gone and yet he still gives numbing medicine before he nicks the skin. I have seen our nurses talk to patients still, even though they have died, even though they are no longer present to hear the words.

I will confess — back in my intern year, with the mother who had overdosed, there was a part of me that resented the organ bank representatives. And I think that’s a natural response, in a way, to this moment. We are asked to perform the rituals of critical care on deceased patients, so that their organs can go to someone else.

Years later, I no longer feel this way. Maybe it’s because I have cared for enough transplant recipients, and for those who died waiting for organs, that I know how remarkable it is to be able to donate. Maybe it is because I have seen so many tragic deaths that have no positive ends, nothing for anyone to hold on to after. Maybe because I have realized that in these moments, I am still caring for my patient and their family — I am doing what I can to make sure that their wishes are carried out and that some aspect of them persists, even in death. So we do the procedures. We check the labs. The family visits. The life is over, but there is this coda.

My patient’s son held his mother’s hand as they wheeled her body out of the intensive care unit. I remember that. He was wearing a baggy sweatshirt; he must have been a teenager. Her death certificate will mention only that first date, when we declared her brain-dead, because that is the day she died. There is no second death, as much as it might feel that way, despite what the headlines suggest. That second date, the punctuation mark at the end of the story, is the moment when loss turns to hope, when a stranger gets a second chance at life.

 

 

The Anglican Church’s ‘Kick in the Guts’ to Gay Parishioners

The Anglican Church’s ‘Kick in the Guts’ to Gay Parishioners

Divisions over the acceptance of homosexuality have proved intractable both on a global level and inside even liberal-leaning countries like New Zealand.

Justin Welby, center, the global leader of the Anglican Church, leading the opening service at Lambeth in Kent, England, on July 31.Credit...Gareth Fuller/Press Association, via Getty Images

By Pete McKenzie NY Times

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Craig Watson has spent his life searching for a church that accepts him fully as a gay man. After having left the Baptist church, Mr. Watson thought he had found it within the famously progressive Anglican faith in New Zealand.

Then came what Mr. Watson called a “kick in the guts.” In late July, Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury and global leader of the Anglican Church (known in the United States as the Episcopal Church), affirmed as church policy a 1998 statement that rejects “homosexual practice as inconsistent with scripture.”

“We are looking for allies,” Mr. Watson said, “and they are not an ally.”

Divisions over the acceptance of homosexuality have raised doubts about whether the Anglican Church can remain united, a conflict that has played out both on a global level and inside even liberal-leaning countries like New Zealand, where some Anglicans have broken away to preserve traditional teaching.

These tensions have pulled at the Anglican Church, which has 85 million members worldwide, for decades. In 2003, the U.S. Episcopal Church consecrated V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay priest, as bishop of New Hampshire. American Episcopalians underscored this departure from convention in 2015 by permitting same-sex marriages.

Conservative Anglicans, many from traditional African congregations, denounced the moves as inconsistent with the Bible and retaliated in 2016 by suspending the American church from key positions within global Anglicanism. In recent years, however, national churches in ??Wales, Scotland, Canada, Brazil and Mexico have voted to permit clergy to either officiate or bless same-sex marriages.

The divisions were on display again last month at Lambeth, the Anglican Church’s decennial conference, where the 650 bishops in attendance argued over the treatment of lesbian, gay and transgender Anglicans.

The archbishops of Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda did not attend Lambeth in protest of “biblical revisionism” by liberal churches. Some other conservatives attended but refused to take communion alongside clergy with same-sex spouses, who were welcomed to the conference for the first time.

Simultaneously, more than 170 bishops — largely from North America and Britain — signed a statement emphasizing the “holiness of LGBT+ people’s love.” Liberal Anglicans challenge conservatives’ interpretation of biblical statements around same-sex relationships and point to, among other things, the Bible’s emphasis on love for others as justification for changing traditional teaching.

Archbishop Welby aimed to bridge the gap. He said at Lambeth that churches with liberal views on homosexuality would not be punished. But he also sought to mollify conservative bishops, who represent a majority of Anglicans worldwide, by affirming the 1998 statement calling homosexuality inconsistent with Scripture.

The archbishop said that for churches in many countries, changing traditional teaching on same-sex relationships “challenges their very existence.” At the same time, he noted, churches elsewhere face “derision, contempt and even attack” if they fail to support gay and transgender worshipers.

That equivalence drew new criticism from liberal Anglicans like Mr. Watson, who is a leader of Diverse Church, an Anglican advocacy group in New Zealand that describes itself as “a network of rainbow Christians.” He left the Baptist church after being pressured into what is known as conversion therapy, a discredited practice that aims to “reverse” the sexuality of gay people.

“I don’t think Justin Welby understands how important it is for L.G.B.T. people to feel affirmed by the Anglican Church,” Mr. Watson said. “He’s willing to put the inclusion of conservative people who reject homosexuality above the inclusion, safety and love” of L.G.B.T.Q. people.

Vicars and wardens from at least one New Zealand parish, St. Peter’s on Willis, wrote to their bishops that “many of our parishioners have suffered a body blow to their sense of belonging, and to their ability to trust our leadership.”

Mr. Watson said that Lambeth “created a massive amount of upset for me,” adding that “it brought all those questions back for me: Am I OK? Am I living a lie?”

He said he also felt it signaled to other Christian denominations in New Zealand that teachings critical of gays, lesbians and transgender people were acceptable. “Anglicanism is well regarded as the most progressive major church in New Zealand,” Mr. Watson said. “Its position signals to other churches that their stances are OK.”

The New Zealand church is known officially as the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, signifying its Maori, general Anglican and Polynesian branches. While the New Zealand Anglican church as a whole, said Peter Lineham, an emeritus professor of religious history at Massey University, “sits very firmly” with more liberal churches in the United States and elsewhere, it is split internally.

The Anglican churches in larger New Zealand cities are often more liberal, while those in rural areas and in Pacific countries that the church also represents, like Fiji and Tonga, are often more conservative.

The New Zealand church compromised in 2018 by permitting bishops to decide whether clergy in their regions could bless same-sex marriages. A minority of New Zealand Anglicans were infuriated by the compromise and split away to form an independent church the next year.

Jay Behan, the bishop for that independent group, denounced the 2018 decision as “anti-Christian and anti-Anglican.”

In an example of how the global divisions over homosexuality have been cemented, Australian Anglicans sought to intervene in New Zealand, even though national churches traditionally avoid interjecting themselves in each other’s affairs, Dr. Lineham said.

At the time, the Sydney diocese said the 2018 decision was “contrary to the teaching of Christ” and urged New Zealand’s Anglicans to divide their church into two branches, one evangelical and one liberal. The Sydney diocese does not bless same-sex marriages or ordain women as priests.

Dr. Lineham said that the archbishop of Sydney at the time, Glenn Davies, had made it clear to New Zealand Anglicans that “this is something to split over.” Mr. Behan and Mr. Davies both said that the interventions did not influence the decision by some New Zealand Anglicans to separate.

Among the bishops who remained within New Zealand’s church, only some permitted blessings for same-sex marriages. The Diocese of Auckland permits them and treats them as an endorsement of such relationships’ morality, for example, while the Diocese of Nelson does not.

Just as they are split over the status of same-sex relationships domestically, Anglicans in New Zealand are divided over what their response to the global controversies should be.

Mr. Watson, who hopes the Anglican Church remains united, called on New Zealand’s bishops to fight more actively to bring conservative churches along on reversing traditional teaching on same-sex relationships and supporting L.G.B.T.Q. people.

“We’ve got New Zealand sitting on our hands doing nothing. We need to throw our hands higher and be a bit louder to be a part of this,” he said.

But Neill Ballantyne, Mr. Watson’s co-leader at Diverse Church, said that Anglicanism’s conservative and liberal wings might be “irreconcilable” — and that a formal split may be good.

“There’s a sadness in that, but a hopefulness, too,” Mr. Ballantyne said. It might allow a liberal church to “explicitly affirm L.G.B.T. people.”

Archbishop Welby himself has wondered aloud whether Anglican unity can be achieved.

“We should seek with passion the visible unity of the church,” he said at Lambeth. “But that is very difficult.”