For the past couple of weeks, if you’ve driven into Chicago on eastbound Interstate Highway 290, you might have noticed something odd about the digital billboard at Canal Street, the one right where the highway sinks beneath the old Chicago Main Post Office. This billboard — it’s toying with you. Its surroundings couldn’t be more ordinary: A Holiday Inn sits to the south, an American flag slumps against a pole, traffic zips past. Yet every minute or so, slipped between ads for deep-dish pizza and Houston disaster relief, comes a comically prosaic fake-news headline: “Woman Spills Coffee” and “Nonsense Halted Amid Safety” and, more pointedly, “Clocks No Longer Tell Time” and “New Plan to Replace Old Plan.” Maybe you nodded. Maybe you thought nothing at all.
Either way, these messages, a temporary installation from British artist David Shrigley (through Sept. 17), and part of the EXPO Chicago art fair, are not advertising anything. Nothing other than, say, a vague feeling of dislocation, a casually inserted surrealism, intended for a country descending into self-parody, upheaval and paranoia. In fact, you could say the same for chunks of the new fall arts season: Almost a year after the presidential election, like other Americans, artists and filmmakers and authors and musicians are trying to make sense of a country churning through alternative facts and Nazis and presidential tweets and stagnant wages, and what they are seeing is:
America the Unrecognizable.
America the Upside Down.
“My worry is we are losing our radar for truth,” said Kevin Young, the acclaimed poet and author (and soon-to-be poetry editor of the New Yorker). His latest book, “Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News,” out in November, is a history of America’s affinity for the false and what it reveals about us. “Art does something different. Art makes up things. Art tell stories and fibs. But then art also deposits us back into the world. So what do we make of a world where it doesn’t matter what’s true anymore? What are we to think when everything is all just opinion?”
Of course a lot of the movies and books and television shows and art exhibits this fall were planned long before anyone knew the political climate of 2017 — indeed, many were made likely with an assumption that Hillary Clinton would be in the White House. But as you’ve probably heard: Art has this habit of molding itself to the shape of its times and reflecting back our hopes and fears and temperaments, regardless of what artists intended. And lately? The United States has taken the shape of a caustic, frenetic movie trailer, hyping the unimaginable — Civilizations fall! Assumptions vanish! No one is safe!
Movie theaters, fittingly then, will be particularly stuffed with tales of the flimsiness (and erosion) of our seemingly solid foundations. There are new films that kick the tires of military service (Richard Linklater’s “Last Flag Flying”) and persistence of gender roles (“Battle of the Sexes,” about the 1973 Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs tennis fiasco), consider the lies of suburbia (George Clooney’s “Suburbicon”) and small towns (the Stephen King chiller “It”), question the durability of humanity (“Blade Runner 2049”) and the universe itself (“Star Wars: The Last Jedi”). “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” written and directed by British playwright Martin McDonagh, tells the story of a mother (Frances McDormand) attempting to shame some morality into her local police after they ignore her daughter’s murder.
Expect institutions to crumble every weekend.
On Chicago stages, however, one of the fall’s few overtly of-the-moment productions is “The Minutes,” a new Tracy Letts comedy debuting in November at Steppenwolf. It’s set at a city council meeting, and according to Steppenwolf artistic director Anna Shapiro (who will direct), the play is “about the stories this country tells itself, the ones that get right at the spine of the nation’s foundations.” She said Letts had been writing the play before the election, “but by then, so much of what’s happening now, the questioning of our system of government and who’s running the government, was already seeping (into the arts). After the election, the security of the bourgeois class, who didn’t always feel insecure — they’re impacted. Now it’s not an intellectual or spiritual conversation. It’s practical. You see everything through a post-November lens, and it can’t lead to an indirect response.”
She explained that in the days after the presidential election, she felt “embarrassingly shocked that so many people felt a certain way. When you program an arts institution, you’re supposed to understand the world you live in. And I felt blind and deaf, but I knew whatever the (response) would be, I would make certain it wasn’t indirect — I couldn’t take a lot of metaphor on top of so much rude awakening. And Tracy was already on it.”
Expect this cultural whiplash to be a familiar refrain in coming months: On TBS’ “The Last O.G.” (Oct. 24), Tracy Morgan plays an ex-con unable to relate to his old neighborhood, a now-gentrified Brooklyn; John le Carre’s “A Legacy of Spies” finds George Smiley, the brooding hero of his spy classics, surrounded by a new generation of operatives impatient for results. The Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago has a particularly prescient show opening Sept. 14: “Revolution Every Day,” a look at how women endured the pace of daily upheaval during the Russian Revolution.
But tonally, also expect a bleakness — a unnerved quality heard in some of the titles alone. Bookstores will have “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century” and “Jumping at Shadows: The Triumph of Fear and the End of the America Dream.” On FX, “American Horror Story: Cult” opens with blood-curdling screams as Donald Trump is elected president. St. Vincent’s next album (out in November) is “Fear the Future”; and the new LCD Soundsystem reunion record, an uncharacteristically downbeat work named “American Dream,” has the song “How Do You Sleep?” with a less-than-hopeful chorus:
One step forward/ And six steps back
If you hear a ring of naivete in some of this, it’s the knowledge that many Americans have never shared a reality — a pop culture perhaps, but not an America.
This is a country where the president declares “We are one family” two days after trying to block transgender people from serving in the military, a nation that in a single summer delivers both the white nationalist vision of Charlottesville, Va., and a flooded Houston moving past differences to stay alive. It’s America the Unrecognizable depending on where you stand. Last fall, in an episode of “Saturday Night Live” days after the election, was a modest, thoughtful sketch featuring Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock throwing cold water on an election-night viewing party: Well-meaning urbanites found themselves horrified that America elected a racist, but Chappelle and Rock could only shrug.
Smartly then, the way massive change looks a lot like everyday existence depending on your class and race is at heart of several new correctives this fall: “We Were Eight Years in Power,” the new Ta-Nehisi Coates essay collection (October), considers the legacy of the Obama administration and race and how much has been gained; Sarah Silverman’s “I Love You, America” on Hulu (Oct. 12) promises a cross-country interview show with ordinary Americans that crosses ideological fault lines; in Hyde Park, at the DuSable Museum of African American History, artist Fabiola Jean-Louis explores slavery and European nobility through an exhibit of remarkable paper gowns (Nov. 4), while at the Hyde Park Art Center, “Wall of Now: Children of the Wall” uses the fabled Wall of Respect mural on the South Side to consider the way some walls can build community.
One of the best scenes in director Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project” (Oct. 13), his touching follow-up to his iPhone-shot drama “Tangerine,” is when a honeymooning couple find themselves accidentally booked at Magic Castle Inn, a low-rent hotel full of families barely getting by, several poverty-lines removed from the Magic Kingdom down the street. The couple grows panicked and rude, having stepped too far into this alternate America, where facades are pastels, the sun is brilliant, but peek behind any door — it’s a sort of movie set of false promises, every bright front concealing squalor. There are no villains, just single parents and neglected children in a nation that allows access to a Waffle House, but the only medical facility in the neighborhood is shuttered.
“We made the film pre-election,” Baker said, “and I think I am more concerned now about the people represented in this film than when I made this film. The election made the issues in it a lot worse. And remember, this is about children. Everything that was moving forward in terms of public programs designed to protect our most vulnerable — it’ll be needed even more now. And these people are not just in Orlando. We focused on that area because this is what’s happening in the shadow of the supposedly most wonderful place on Earth. It’s not for the sake of cheap irony — but the irony is extreme.”
Were Shrigley’s billboard to stand by a road in this Orlando, you imagine its characters wouldn’t notice: Irony is not hard to find in America, and mostly it’s free.
Why the United States believes what it believes, and trusts who it trusts, is a subject so complicated and tangled you can’t expect any single work this fall to unravel the answers. Yet Kurt Andersen, novelist, co-founder of Spy magazine, former editor of New York magazine, public-radio host of Studio 360, cultural omnivore, offers a kind of unified theory of America, a road map to where we stand in the weeds. You see it coalescing throughout “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, A 500-Year History,” his new book, a tidy, surprising coherent argument considering how much ground is covered: He starts with the nation’s beginnings, the foundational myth in our bloodstream, that anyone in the United States can be anything, and worship anything, they like. He runs through the Salem witch trials, Book of Mormon, relativism of the 1960s, sitcom laugh tracks, Oprah (“Barnum-esque promoter of her dreamworld”), New Age philosophies, UFOs — he argues what began as a promise of religion freedom has, centuries later, become a funhouse reality where we believe what we feel like believing.
“Understand, we were a country that created itself,” Andersen said in a phone interview. “Meaning, there were no pre-existing norms or sense of truth. We were coming here to create a society from scratch, which is a lot like writing a novel. And the country is practically a work of art. We just made it up as we went along. A simple way of saying this: American Individualism. We’re believers in wacky dreams, and in moderation that’s a virtue. For centuries, it was. Now, it’s overwhelmed the prudent part of our character.”
As Daniel Moynihan once famously summarized (and Andersen quotes in “Fantasyland”): “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
On the other hand, a part of the American character is admiration for the hustler who makes his own reality. The gold standard was P.T. Barnum, the subject of “The Greatest Showman,” a movie musical in December, starring Hugh Jackman as the infamous hype man. He’s also played this season by Donald Trump in the White House — a comparison the president has heard often and considered (on “Meet The Press,” no less) a compliment, a reminder that the first lesson in being seen is getting attention.
This image of a pretender improvising his way to power is so familiar and cynical, the twist to ABC’s “The Mayor” (Oct. 3) — about a Chance the Rapper-like artist who finds himself elected mayor of his hometown — is that huckster decides to do a good job.
This ability to shape reality in our image is nothing new for art, of course — arguably, it’s what every artist sets out to accomplish. But the blindspots of the impresarios of their own realities clearly have a fresh relevance: Evanston’s Jeremy Piven, with a bit of Barnum swagger, plays a tech pioneer in the CBS drama “Wisdom of the Crowd” (Oct. 1) who builds an app for crowd-sourcing criminal evidence — what could go wrong? Jonathan Dee’s “The Locals,” one of the late summer and early fall’s buzziest novels, tells the story of how a wealthy investor, fueled by the housing boom and unrepentant ego, buys up a middle-class town and steadily transforms it into his own upscale image.
The trouble about custom reality, though — it’s a short hop to American surrealism, the anxiety-laden kind in Darren Aronofsky’s “Mother!” with Jennifer Lawrence (Friday) or the karmatic sort Larry David meets on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” returning to HBO on Oct. 1. And eventually, you long for the directness that Shapiro yearns for. Prophets of Rage, for instance, a supergroup built from members of Public Enemy, Rage Against the Machine and Cyprus Hill, releasing its first album this fall, is a reminder of what protest art once resembled — angry, pedagogic, plainspoken. At EXPO Chicago (Wednesday through Sept. 17), Aram Han Sifuentes, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is creating a space for visitors to work on protest banners. It’s an extension of the “Protest Banner Lending Library” that she set up at the Chicago Cultural Center last spring.
“A lot of the banners we make are really weird and ugly,” she said. “Like, there are unicorns on the fabric. So there is an element of humor. But it’s deeply sincere.”
Protest works that are this straightforward almost resemble nostalgia — except there’s an even livelier vein of protest nostalgia. Steven Spielberg’s “The Post” (Dec. 22), with Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, tells how the Washington Post stood up to the Nixon White House and published the Pentagon Papers. “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House” (Sept. 29) features Liam Neeson as Deep Throat himself; expect both “Marshall” (about Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall) and “Darkest Hour” (about Winston Churchill) to play to many Americans as reminders of what leadership resembles.
Of course, none of those are explicitly works of protest. But it’s not hard to imagine buying a ticket as protest, or picking up “Courage Is Contagious: And Other Reasons to Be Grateful for Michelle Obama,” a slender book of homage by acclaimed writers (Oct. 24), as protest. Or attending Joe Biden’s book tour (Chicago Theatre, Dec. 11) as protest. Buying a copy of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s new memoir “What Happened” (Sept. 12), however, is trickier: Depending on how you take that title, it’s either a vivisection of defeat or, thrust into America the Upside Down, a fair question:
Where am I?
Twitter @Borrelli
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