“Since the beginning, I’ve said, ‘I’m not going to get involved with my image.’” – Charlotte Rampling

Posted on February 5, 2026 by sheila

It’s her birthday today.

I first saw Charlotte Rampling in Angel Heart, where she has one hauntingly weird scene: a rumpled schlubby Mickey Rourke visits her to question her. Her apartment is filled with strange artifacts, beautifully placed. The decor is a mixture of lush-bordello and shabby-chic. There is the creepy sound of the piano, the one striking notes, and the clinking of her spoon against the side of the cup. Every sound has clarity, adding to the sense of her character’s strangeness. There’s her quiet intense voice, measured, yet with dark knowledge beneath it. Her light blue eyes seem to see right through him. Charlotte Rampling is a beautiful woman, but there is an unnerving quality to her beauty. It is not come-hither beauty. It is beware-beauty.

I had no idea who she was. I was instantly intrigued and began keeping my eyes peeled for her. She’s my kind of actress. Fearless. Un-pin-down-able. Doesn’t seem to give a fuck. Doesn’t care at all about her beauty, except this it is one of the many useful tools in her arsenal. Throughout her career, she has resisted classification and type-casting and she also just doesn’t recognize any limitations. She does not make “careerist” choices. She hasn’t waited until she’s elderly to start making brave bold unconventional moves. She started OUT that way. (I always think of Rampling and Helen Mirren as similar: both of them started out making attention-getting controversial choices in what films they appeared in. They refused to be “someone’s girlfriend”. They never took boring roles. The pressure on beautiful young women to only do certain kinds of things is super intense. It takes … balls … to resist. Gena Rowlands. Theresa Russell. Bibi Andersson. Charlotte Rampling is one of THOSE.)

Angel Heart was striking, but when I rented 1974’s The Night Porter (with Dirk Bogarde) I realized who I was dealing with. Charlotte Rampling made herself known to me. If you want to understand her as an actress, start here. She was in only scene in Angel Heart. She’s in almost every scene of The Night Porter and she is such a disturbing and dark presence you almost can’t look at her.

In my wild 20s, I wanted to wear that as a Halloween costume, but cooler heads prevailed.

She is one of the scariest actresses of that lucky generation who “came up” in a time when directors/writers – often men – were creating these monster parts for women requiring great skill and courage. You don’t cuddle up to Charlotte Rampling, in the same way you don’t warm to Gena Rowlands or Theresa Russell (eve if you love them. They scorn your love somehow. Not as humans, but their characters are so remote and self-obsessed – or even mad, and their madness warns you off). You admire, but you also step back. All can do as an audience member is sit back, shut up, stop wondering why they are so DIFFERENT from other actresses (where is the inspirational closure, where is the self-empowerment message, where is the resolution, where is the clarity?), and let yourself be overwhelmed. They are frightening titanic figures.

Her performance in The Night Porter is shocking, and I don’t shock easily. The clips are age-restricted so you have to click through. Here’s her first entrance.

I wanted to point your way towards a wonderful piece by Stephen Metcalf from 2008 – which has stuck in my head all these years – about The Verdict, and one specific scene between Paul Newman and Rampling.

In 2011, she showed up as Kirsten Dunst’s and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s mother in Melancholia, one of my favorite movies of the last 20 years. She’s as sour as a lemon in Melancholia, and her attitude sits on top of simmering rage. She’s not conventionally “motherly” and her presence serves as a biting commentary on why her two daughters are the way they are.

She’s not the lead, and only shows up in a couple of scenes – but like other great character actresses – when she shows up she almost single-handedly justifies the film’s existence. I reviewed the film when I first saw it at New York Film Festival in 2011.

This is not meant to be a career retrospective. There are so many more roles I could mention! She works constantly, and mostly in challenging unconventional work. She’s not afraid of working with younger newer film-makers. If their vision is intriguing, she’ll take a chance on them. She does not shy away from risks. She’s all about risks.

I did want to point your way towards Lian Lunson’s beautiful spiritually-meditative film Waiting for the Miracle to Come, filmed primarily on Willie Nelson’s Texas ranch, and starring Willie Nelson and Rampling as a retired vaudeville couple, waiting for their daughter to return to them, the daughter they gave up.

It’s a beautiful movie, and Lian – who has directed primarily documentaries and concert films – created something truly special. Charlotte Rampling’s character lives her life as Marilyn Monroe, has created her entire persona as an homage to Marilyn, and is so lost in the fantasy she LIVES this way. Instead of pathologizing her, though, Lian embraces her – as does Rampling. She may be a little bit like a Tennessee Williams character but let’s not forget, Tennessee Williams always said he wrote about survivors, that he never once wrote about a “victim”.

I had the great pleasure of interviewing Lian about her film which you can read here. The image of Lian and Charlotte Rampling going to see Merle Haggard in concert in Texas will not leave me any time soon.

Finally: for some years now, Charlotte Rampling has been traveling with a recitation show called Night Dances, where she performs Sylvia Plath’s poetry, accompanied by cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton (who also directed), playing Benjamin Britten’s solos for cello underneath. It sounds riveting!

Rampling has done it everywhere, throughout Europe and England and Ireland, as well as in the States. Why didn’t I go see it when I could? Here’s a review of the show in the New York Times.

With minimal movements and eerie concentration, Ms. Rampling spoke 11 of Plath’s lengthy, elusive poems, all performed from memory. Sometimes she stood and confronted her listeners. (Or was she confiding in them?) Other times she spoke while reclining on an ottoman, or propping herself up with her arms. In more narrative poems, like “Edge,” her delivery was restrained yet purposeful; in emotional poems, like excerpts from “Three Women,” she was swept up in the moment, as if struggling with how to express herself.

Rampling continues to inspire and astonish.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“I don’t need to ‘tell’ the story…The story is being told from itself by following the different moments in different locations.” — Mia Hansen-Løve

Posted on February 5, 2026 by sheila

One of my favorite contemporary film-makers is Mia Hansen-Løve. Hansen-Løve is interested in how people listen, how people walk and move through space from point A to point B, she’s interested in the locations where they live, the conversations they have about philosophy, film, politics. She is interested in rhythm, in questions, in the in-between moments when we move from.one place to the next.. Many critics (and regular people, but I’m mainly talking about critics) look for answers. They want answers, they want clarity of intent. I’m so bored by “looking for correct answers”, and I’m bored by writing like this: “This film is good because it reflects how I see the world.” or “This film is bad because it displays the wrong attitudes.” “This film is bad because it doesn’t include what I personally think it should include.” “This film is bad because it doesn’t state outright what it is about.” and etc. I don’t just dislike this attitude: I deeply distrust it, since it comes out of adherence to ideology (what ideology is irrelevant, the result is the same). Hansen-Løve is not a binary kind of filmmaker. She doesn’t think that way. Ideas are there to be played around with, taken on, discarded, discussed.


Mia Hansen-Løve

Hansen-Løve is the child of two philosophy professors (Things to Come is clearly somewhat autobiographical), and she herself has a Master’s in German philosophy. She got her start as an actress when Olivier Assayas put her in a couple of his films. There was obviously a kindred-spirit thing between them and they eventually became romantically involved. They were together for years, have a daughter together. What is interesting here is to consider the way Assayas’ films and Hansen-Løve’s films “talk” to each other, the influence Assayas had on her, but also the other way around. There’s a lot of common ground.


Olivier Assays and Mia Hansen-Løve

She made a couple of short films in the mid-2000s before graduating to feature-length films. She directed her first feature film – All is Forgiven – when she was only 25 years old. All of her films can be seen as part of the continuum of her interests, style, and sensibility. All of it was present in her first film. She arrived this way, in other words. She’s developed, of course, as a film-maker, but her work was recognizably hers immediately. Her sensibility is not commercial, which makes it gratifying that her films have gained worldwide accolades.

My introduction to Hansen-Løve was through her second film, The Father of My Children (2009). (Her first film, All Is Forgiven, was not released here theatrically until last year. More on that in a bit.) The Father of My Children is a psychological study of a film producer who plays many roles in his life. He hustles, he gets things done, he’s a workaholic, he’s a loving father to three daughters, he lives in one of those French country houses filled with ritual, relaxation, beauty, respite. But he is in trouble. Hansen-Løve was just 27 years old when she made this, but she shows an uncanny understanding of life at different stages, and an ability to imagine herself into the shoes of a middle-aged man. Her empathy is wide-ranging.


Father of My Children (2009)

The guy is in deep shit financially because of his involvement with a film directed by an erratic difficult “auteur” (shades of Lars von Trier). He tries to hide this from his wife. Hansen-Løve isn’t interested in plot so much as she is in how life impacts people, how they react to things, what they do in response. She is disciplined in her focus.

2011’s Goodbye First Love is a film I truly love: it so accurately captures the overwhelming feeling – the agony and ecstasy – of first love. Hansen-Løve does not work in clear-cut binaries. The guy in the film is sincere in his love, but equally sincere about his future plans, which will take him away from his teenage love. It’s devastating.


Goodbye First Love (2011)

The title isn’t Hello First Love. It’s about the crucible of falling in love when you’re a hormonal teenager, when love is do-or-die, when your whole world is love and first sex and passion. Then of course there is also the torment when you realize it’s your FIRST love, not your FOREVER love.

The first film of Hansen-Løve’s I was assigned to review was 2015’s Eden. I’ll be honest: Eden blew me away: here’s my review. There is a central character, but he is not really what the film is about. What the film is ABOUT is the French house-music scene, and its development over a 20-year period. The “scene” is the lead character.


Eden (2015)

This may sound like a cliche but her films are about the rhythms of life itself. The passing of time is a major factor in all of her films. The healing of old wounds, the creation of new wounds, the conversations had over dinner, at a pub, the in-between moments of beauty or boredom. Her films sometimes take place over a long period of time – Eden is the most radical example. Important to note, because it’s a distinguishing characteristic of Hansen-Løve’s films: she doesn’t care about “aging” her actors with makeup, or “signifying” the passage of time visibly (hair color, wardrobe, whatever). The same actors play the same characters when they’re young and old, with no visible change in appearance, and you’re just supposed to buy that they’re older now. You do buy it. All the focus on creating “believable” aging seems unimportant when you watch Hansen-Løve’s films. Eden might be off-putting to regular audiences because of this, and because of its length, but it’s worth it. It may be her most personal film. Submit to its rhythm. Stop waiting for a plot. Stop waiting for Hansen-Løve to state herself clearly. Her films don’t work like that.


Eden (2015)

Finally, came 2016’s Things to Come, starring the great Isabelle Huppert as a philosophy professor whose marriage breaks up after many years, launching her into a new world. You may think you know what the film is going to be, based on the plot description. But it’s not that at all! The real events happen here in the smaller moments, the conversations, arguments about politics, a cross-generational relationship (not strictly romantic, but not un-romantic either), the moments of silence and repose where thoughts swirl around. Thinking can change things as much as action.


Things to Come (2016)

This was the film where Hansen-Løve was criticized for not being feminist enough (whatever that means: the film stars Isabelle Huppert as an independent free-thinking intellectual woman who finds her own way in life after her marriage disintegrates. So … that’s pretty feminist, oui?) There were (ridiculous) grasping-at-straws criticisms like: With all of the philosophers name-checked in the film, why no mention of Simone de Beauvoir? Or women at all? People were truly upset. Hansen-Løve addressed these criticisms in interviews. She thought the whole thing was all a bit silly, and wasn’t interested in people who watched her films that way. Here’s my review of Things to Come.


Things to Come (2016)

In 2021 came Bergman Island, which I waited for with impatient anticipation. Bergman Island stars Tim Roth and Vicki Krieps (from Phantom Thread) as filmmakers heading to Fårö island (known as “Ingmar Bergman’s island”), for a writing retreat. The couple stays in Bergman’s actual house, complete with windmill.


Bergman Island (2021)

There are uneasy undercurrents in the relationship: Roth’s character is more successful than the younger Krieps. Indeed, he is celebrated, and gives a lecture on Bergman during their stay. She feels blocked creatively. She exists in the shadow of her boyfriend, not to mention the great and omnipresent INGMAR. (Is this reflective of Hansen-Løve’s own feelings during her relationship with the older and more successful Olivier Assayas?) At one point, she asks her boyfriend if he would listen to the plot of her screenplay, so she can get feedback. (Uh-oh.) Halfway through Bergman Island everything changes. The whole structure of the film changes. New characters show up. To say more would be to ruin the delight of the experience (I went into it cold, purposefully avoiding the festival buzz).

2021 also saw the long-delayed international release of her very first film, 2007’s All is Forgiven.


All Is Forgiven (2007)

It never got a theatrical release here in America and had long been virtually un-seeable to American audiences. I was so excited, and even more so when I got the assignment to review it for Ebert. It’s amazing to see how fully-formed Hansen-Løve was, even at 25. It’s like Orson Welles. Or Chantal Akerman. Artists who need no gestation period. They hit the ground running. Here is my review of All Is Forgiven.

If it were easy to make films like Hansen-Løve’s, more people would do it.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Titus Andronicus

Posted on February 4, 2026 by sheila

My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew

Titus Andronicus

This is body horror at its most horrible. This is the play featuring the following stage direction:

Enter a Messenger, with two heads and a hand.

Like …

There are so many decapitated heads. Hands are lopped off left and right. A tongue is cut out – during a rape. There’s definitely violence in his plays, and there are also decapitated heads floating around from time to time … but Titus Andronicus is gruesome to a degree where it becomes absurd. Not that it’s funny but … maybe it is a little bit?

Titus Andronicus takes place in ancient Rome but the plot, as it were, lines up with the Revenge plays, common in Elizabethan theatre. There’s an onstage murder in the first scene, if I recall. The bodies pile up. Some are thrown into this pit in the forest, a seething terrible spot, which some scholars connect to the “hellmouth” of the medieval mystery plays, still in recent memory for the Elizabethans, and probably still existing here and there as part of a tradition. The play doesn’t feel real in any sense of the word. It feels Dante-an. The pit exists in a surreal symbolic space. Mark Van Doren calls the play “Shakespeare’s one unfeeling tragedy”, but the pit pushes it into the supernatural. This isn’t just a hole in the woods. It’s something else. The witches in Macbeth would hang out there.

I’ve never seen a production of Titus Andronicus. I have no idea how a production would handle the pit! Bodies are thrown into it. Sometimes living people are trapped down there and you hear their voices coming out from the pit. I imagine it’s a challenge to stage. Has anyone seen this done live? I’d love to hear how they portray the pit. I’m reading it, and thinking, “Huh … how would you actually pull this off”.

Throughout, there are references to hands, heads, ears, tongues … all of which we see amputated at different spots in the play. The whole thing is about a power struggle, so body imagery = body politic. The body politic at the play’s opening is in pieces, its body parts amputated all over the place.

There are so many sons in this play, and even a grandson, and everyone wants to avenge some wrong done to them or to a family member. Someone steals the throne and also steals someone’s wife. A Goth Queen “steals” her place beside the Emperor and she’s got an army behind her. She also has a lover – Aaron the Moor – and during the play they have a child, who is mixed race, and described in dehumanized language. It’s all pretty racist. That being said, Aaron is the best character in the whole thing. He’s a villain but you see his reasons. He’s clever.

There’s one slight moment of humor when a clown appears, but other than that …

To Titus’ credit, he does not shame his daughter for being raped by two men (who also cut out her tongue and lopped off both her hands, while everyone else is standing around chatting onstage). Poor Lavinia, staggering back onstage without hands or tongue. Speechlessness is a recurring motif in Shakespeare: Iago, Perdita, Hero, Cordelia, Hamlet’s “the rest is silence” and etc. Plays are about words. Shakespeare is about speech. So pay close attention when he silences someone.

My favorite part of this play is Lavinia eventually using Ovid’s Metamorphosis to communicate who raped and mutilated her. There’s also a moment where she “writes” in the sand with a stick. But the use of an actual book – a book Shakespeare himself knew so well (Stephen Booth goes into this influence extensively, and how heavily Shakespeare borrowed from Ovid). So it’s a cool moment, Lavinia using this book to impart her terrible message. You can look at this as a meta-moment too, as in Shakespeare acknowledging his own influence. We are used to having the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans available to us, but it was new in Shakespeare’s time. A lot of new translations were coming out at the time, and the rise in literacy (comparatively) meant these things spread, were taught in schools, and would be widely known. Shakespeare wasn’t a college-educated guy (that we know of, anyway) but grammar school was heavy in Latin and Greek. And writers of Shakespeare’s generation were using this stuff as launch pads for their own work. We’ll see it in Comedy of Errors, a frank imitation of two of Plautus’ plays put together, but Shakespeare added another set of identical twins to Plautus’ one set, for … no reason except to add to the confusion. Either way, everyone would have recognized this material.

I just think it’s cool for Shakespeare to include Metamorphosis in his play, and have a mutilated woman use it to communicate … because that’s essentially what he was doing as a writer (at least early on). He used Ovid/Plautus/etc. as scaffolding: early on you can still see the scaffold. Later, even if he was inspired by something else, he re-invented it to such a degree it became his.

Quotes on the play

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“Often I pretended to a cameraman to know less than I did. That way I got more cooperation.” — Ida Lupino

Posted on February 4, 2026 by sheila

It’s the birthday of actress and director Ida Lupino. To give some perspective on her unlikely and inspiring trajectory: she was born into a theatre family dynasty. By the time she was 14, 15, she was playing adult roles. She was British, but Hollywood beckoned. She was in a couple of pre-Codes, a glamorous “woman” (still a teenager), with platinum blonde hair.

Much more after the jump:

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February 3, 1959: The Day the Music Died

Posted on February 3, 2026 by sheila

Tribune-1959-02-04

Buddy Holly was #13 on Rolling Stones’ 100 Greatest Artists list, and John Mellencamp wrote a very touching couple of paragraphs about Buddy Holly as the ultimate hillbilly, and how important that was:

I was just a little kid when I first heard Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue.” You may not understand what it was like being about nine years old in 1957 or ’58, but it was quite a treat. All of this music was just coming out of nowhere — Memphis and Texas. I was in a band when I was in sixth grade, and we played “Not Fade Away.” You shouldn’t even be in a band if you haven’t played that song. It’s two chords, beautiful melody, with a nice message. Holly’s songs never really left my consciousness.

Okay let’s go for it: Post – and so many clips – below:

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Frankenstein: interview with Taylor Gonzales

Posted on February 2, 2026 by sheila

I had a lot of fun talking with Taylor Gonzales about all things Frankenstein on his popular web series where he interviews all kinds of cool people. We raved about Kate Hawley’s costumes, the performances, the creature makeup, Victor Frankenstein’s red gloves, and more. Taylor was a wonderful host! I’ve met so many nice people writing this book, I swear. We need nice people and we need to find each other! Thanks for having me, Taylor!

The book does appear to be fairly hard to find now. Hopefully that will change!

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2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: The Taming of the Shrew

Posted on February 2, 2026 by sheila

My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona

The Taming of the Shrew

A popular one, but a tough one! There are elements in Petruchio and Katherina’s dynamic which we will see centuries later in 1930s screwball comedy: where two people who seemingly despise each other are actually sparking with attraction, and the fun of it is seeing the hate turned to love. You could see this as an early “draft” of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado, whose war against not just each other – but the opposite sex in general – is a mask for the deep tender love they have for one another. It’s an extremely effective dynamic. But that’s not all there is with Shrew, and productions that don’t contend with it tend to falter, or … it seems like they are trying to retro-active the whole thing, and somehow gloss over all the “wives obey their husbands” blather, not to mention the fact that Petruchio literally starves her, imprisons, her, beats her … I mean, it’s awful!

The whole play ends with a lengthy monologue from Kate where she urges women to obey their husbands. This is why trying to make this into some female-empowerment proto-feminist piece doesn’t really work. It’s kind of like Rhett Butler raping his wife into loving him. I’m sorry but I just go by the text.

On the flip side: Petruchio and Katherina aren’t even really IN this all that much. They have two major scenes, but their shenanigans are mostly off-stage, like their chaotic wedding, and a lot of the abuse. We hear about these things, as the very complicated plot – which has nothing to do with them – swirls on around them.

It does feel like something has been unleashed here. Chronology is just guess-work, but whatever way you slice it, Taming of the Shrew breaks new important ground. In Shakespeare’s other early plays – the Henry VIs, Titus Andronicus, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Comedy of Errors – Shakespeare reaches back into either Greek/Roman antiquity or “recent” English history (200, 300 years ago). The plays take place in Italy, or in medieval England. The English plays focus on monarchy, so everyone in it is a King or Queen. Lofty ground. The “Induction” for Taming of the Shrew though appears to take place right now. You feel the closeness of Chaucer’s England, the pubs and townspeople and bawdy joking around and drunkenness. Not rich people, not monarchs. We haven’t seen this before (and, actually we don’t see this all that much in Shakespeare, in general). The Induction is the framing device for Shrew (although we never come back to the story! The frame is incomplete! Like, what happened??)

The actual “taming of the shrew” is the play within the play, and the play within the play takes place in Italy, so it’s almost like Shakespeare is revealing the artifice of his own theatrical tradition. The Induction goes on for a long time with multiple scenes, feeling very close to the ground and so real there’s confusion as to why the play never returns to the device. There’s lots of speculation about a missing epilogue, etc.

The play is filled with “suitors” in disguise. Everyone dresses up like a tutor of some sort. How many tutors do two shrewish sisters need?

Because that’s really the big reveal. Bianca is seen as the nice desired daughter. Kate is uncontrollable. But honestly, Kate’s behavior seems understandable at first: she knows she isn’t loved or valued by her parents. And by the end, the super “nice” Bianca is revealed as even worse!

Quotes on the play

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On This Day: February 2, 1882/1922

Posted on February 2, 2026 by sheila

“I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone — me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces’ and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922.”
— Sylvia Beach, publisher of Ulysses

February 2 was also the day James Joyce was born in Rathgar, 1882.

Joyce always looked for patterns. The symmetry of those two events happening on the same day – his birthday, and the publication of the book it took him 7 years to write (“If it took me 7 years to write it, people can spend 7 years reading it.”) … was not a coincidence.

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“I still keep my watch two hours behind.” — Lisa Marie Presley

Posted on February 1, 2026 by sheila

It’s her birthday today.

Her absence still seems a little unreal. My reaction to her untimely death was so strong – and had nothing whatsoever to do with her dad, but with my own experience of her presence in the culture – an experience which seemed generational in nature – and all of this felt like a unique phenomenon … one I had never thought about, actually, until she died, so I tried to put into words. I launched my Substack with it. I was invited to come speak to an NYU class on non-fiction creative writing to discuss it! Which was fun. It ended up being about things other than Lisa Marie, about my generation, and how we absorbed things, without an Internet. What she somehow meant. I try not to speak for my generation – because we are not a monolith. What I AM talking about is a time period, and how people of a certain age experienced certain things: we all remember where we were when such-and-such. Lisa Marie’s death seemed to hit us harder than other people of other ages and I was curious as to why.

So here it is.

Someone turned the lights out there in Memphis: Lisa Marie Presley

Last year, I read the book Lisa’s daughter Riley Keough put together from her mother’s cassette tapes, where Lisa dictated her memories. It’s a painful read, but I am so glad it exists.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are sung people laugh.” — Langston Hughes

Posted on February 1, 2026 by sheila

langston-hughes.jpg?w=890

The Blues always impressed me as being very sad, sadder even than the Spirituals, because their sadness is not softened with tears, but hardened with laughter … of a sadness where there is no god to appeal to.
— Langston Hughes

It’s his birthday today.

The 20th century is incomprehensible without Langston Hughes. Or, at least, incomplete. No understanding is possible without taking into account his work and his legacy.

Consider the complicated in-real-time responses his work generated – because it tells its own story:

Hughes got a lot of flak from the rising Black middle-class at the time: they thought the forms he used – jazz rhythms, slang, colloquialisms – lacked dignity and weren’t a positive representation of the community. One middle-class Black newspaper referred to Hughes as a “sewer dweller”. To contrast, Countee Cullen, another extraordinary poet of the Harlem Renaissance (post about him here), used European literary forms, i.e. sonnets, and regular meter and rhythms, and called for Black writers to embrace the rich tradition of white European literature. At the time, and in the moment, there was an informal – or even formal – “I reject Langston Hughes and embrace Countee Cullen” thing going on (or the opposite). There was not a consensus around either of these guys. This was a fraught conversation in the ‘teens and ’20s. Still is.

An individual is assumed to speak for all (and sometimes required to speak for all), not just by outsiders but by the community they “represent”. Whichever way it goes, the aforementioned “otherized” community will be pigeon-holed, stereotyped: there are real-world dangers attached to this. Dehumanization doesn’t happen overnight. Dehumanizing comes from a scarcity of different kinds of voices. It is much easier to “otherize” the unknown. Sometimes the call comes from inside the house, and you’re criticized by “your own” for not performing to their expectations, or for going against the prevailing consensus. It feels like the next stage in species evolution is to
1. realize we’re all in this together
and
2. seemingly conversely, accept that no group is monolithic.

I experience a version of this as a woman. The shit I’ve gotten has been 90% from other women, and even saying this is seen as a betrayal by the “group” I am a part of. You’re called a “pick me girl” or a “cool girl”. No. I am an individual. I reject assumption of agreement. I don’t like required consensus. I have also been lectured by men who think I am not feminist enough, which is just so ridiculous.

In regards to Langston Hughes, these issues are more obvious in retrospect. During the Harlem-Renaissance period, Cullen, Hughes (and others) wrote essays calling for fellow Black artists to follow their individual example, and these examples were often in opposition to one another. It was a vigorous cultural debate. This is good, I think! We need more of this, not less. It’s healthy! In college, I took a class on the Harlem Renaissance in college, and this is where I first encountered many of these voices (beyond Hughes, that is, was in our high school curriculum). In the college class, we read all of these essays where writers proclaimed their views on writing, on being Black, on being a Black artist, on what Black writing should (and should not) be. Much of this played out in the pages of The Crisis, the NAACP’s official magazine.

Now onto Hughes and his work:

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