The Perfect-Length Movie

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Evan McMurry, the senior editor on our audience team.

Evan’s latest project has been finding 100-minute films to watch—in part a reaction to today’s bloated budgets and run times. He also enjoys reading anything by John le Carré, listening to Future Islands’ synth-rock arrangements, and visiting the two fart machines on display in Baltimore.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The Culture Survey: Evan McMurry

The arts product my friends are talking about most right now: Future Islands, an emotive synth-rock band from my adopted town of Baltimore, has united my circle in a way that no band has in a decade. Parents, siblings, friends, neighbors—all with disparate music tastes—are eardrunk on this band. Most fascinating: All of us have said some version of “This isn’t the type of music I normally listen to, but …” I think that the band’s crossover appeal comes from the combination of simple, sticky melodies and the honed arrangements, which are all bouncy bass lines and just-right tambourine accents. The sum of the sound is more analog than you’d expect, and more fun.

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: Lately I’ve been trying to thread this needle by watching what I call the 100-minute, $20 million film. Remember those? Before Marvel gave everything cinematic-universe gigantism, there were films like David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, a quick study of the frenemy-ship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, which cost an estimated $20 million to make. Clocking in at 99 minutes and featuring a cast that could fit in my Prius, the film is a clinic in brisk storytelling.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: Jennifer duBois’s debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, is a tale of a character who resembles the chess champion and dissident Garry Kasparov, and a young woman about to die from Huntington’s disease who joins in his opposition campaign against Vladimir Putin. Much triteness has been squeezed from “bucket list”–style premises, but duBois’s writing is cliché-free. No one in her novel lives life to its fullest; instead, they make blinkered attempts to transcend their metaphorical and literal prisons through devotion to battles they can’t win. Do they fail? And in failing, do they succeed?

Another title that stood me on my head, almost literally: Stephen J. Pyne’s How the Grand Canyon Became Grand. If an intellectual history of the Grand Canyon sounds a bit pretentious, it is. But it’s also a fascinating retrospective, tracing early European explorers’ initial impression of the canyon (they saw it as an inconvenient pothole on their road to imperialism), John Wesley Powell’s popularization of it as a geological record of American ancientness (Hegel features in this more than you’d think), and the canyon’s current status as an Instagram backdrop. Pyne recounts how the canyon forced American painters to reorient their bearings; rather than looking up the incline of mountains, which used to be a common focus for their naturalistic works, they learned to look down into the gorges of the canyon. His argument made me hold the prints of the paintings upside down. Talk about a book changing your viewpoint. [Related: How to survive running across the Grand Canyon]

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love: The first album I ever bought was R.E.M.’s Monster, a fact that used to make me feel young but now makes me feel old. Monster was disdained upon its release, and gained a reputation as the CD you were most likely to encounter in the used bin at The Wherehouse. Now almost 30 years old, it comes off as sophisticated and playful. The honking tremolo of Peter Buck’s guitar, Michael Stipe’s gender-ambiguous vocals, even the bear/cat creature on the cover—the whole album rattles. Holding it all together is “Strange Currencies,” both the most straightforward love song the band ever recorded and a refracted pop-fugue of unrequited longing. The tune recently received a boost when it was featured in the second season of The Bear, but some of us have had it on repeat since ’94.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: Located just blocks from each other in Baltimore, the Maryland Science Center and the American Visionary Arts Museum both have fart machines. One of the machines teaches kids (and adults) about the science of gas; the other one hides in a basement with all the smirking bawdiness of a John Waters film. I don’t think this pairing is intentional, but it captures the low-key essence of this smart, eccentric town. And yes, I have visited both in one day.

An author I will read anything by: John le Carré, though “anything” in this case involves quite a lot of books. I’ve read all of his major titles, including the Smiley trilogy and many volumes beyond, yet there’s still a lot of his late-1980s and ’90s stuff I haven’t gotten around to. Le Carré remained strong, right up until the end: Agent Running in the Field, the last novel he finished before his death, wasn’t his best, but it would have been almost any other writer’s best. Crackling with, among other topics, Brexit, Trump, and our era’s twining anxiety and idealism, it reads like the novel of a 29-year-old, not an 89-year-old. My guy probably had another three bangers in him when he died. [Related: John le Carré’s scathing tale of Brexit Britain]

The last debate I had about culture: My friends and I have been discussing the far-right nationalist faction of the metal scene, and to what extent it has disappeared. Ten years ago, if someone recommended a metal band, you had to do your research to ensure that their demon growling wasn’t masking pro-Aryan propaganda; it turned me and others away from the genre. However, I recently attended Maryland Deathfest and found a welcoming, LGBTQ-friendly atmosphere free from that former edge. I’m not sure whether this is a scene-wide phenomenon or whether metal has self-sorted along ideological lines the way so much of our culture has.

The last thing that made me cry: Jonathan Terrell’s “In the Mirror,” about the passing of his brother, got me in the throat. I recently lost my father, something that a few months later I still haven’t a clue what to do about. Grief snags me in unguarded moments, not the least when I look in the mirror or see a picture of myself. I have much of my father’s face, especially his mouth and cheeks, so I can’t smile without feeling the stab of his absence. Terrell’s song helped me rethink this ghostly tap on the shoulder as a blessing, even if it doesn’t feel like one: “Brother, my biggest fear / is to lose you in the lines / as time rolls by / and not see you in the mirror.” Better to be reminded, however gutting, than to forget.

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