The novelist as fictional character

by | Oct 24, 2026 | Culture | 0 comments

Culture Brief 2026-10-24

Ideas in Circulation

The novelist as fictional character

A cluster of new films is turning real writers into suspects, ghosts, and unreliable narrators of their own myths.

Two prestige releases this week — “A Talent for Murder,” with Helen Mirren playing Highsmith as a woman haunted by her own Ripley, and “Fatherland,” with Sandra Hüller as Thomas Mann’s daughter returning to a shattered postwar Germany — both treat canonical authors as unstable protagonists rather than subjects of reverence. The appeal isn’t biographical accuracy; it’s the idea that a writer’s psychological machinery (Highsmith’s cruelty, Mann’s exile guilt) is itself the most interesting plot available. Expect more of this: it’s cheaper than adapting the books themselves, and audiences already have the cultural shorthand.

Can AI make anything, or only mimic the shape of feeling?

Three unrelated stories this week converge on the same anxiety: that AI-generated culture replicates the gestures of meaning without its substance.

Travis Knight’s defense of stop-motion as irreducibly handmade, Jean Garnett’s dissection of AI skincare ads that stage “purification” as a visual genre, and a Quebec publishing scandal over an author’s undisclosed AI use are really the same argument from three angles: craft is being redefined as the one thing a machine can’t counterfeit, even as machines get better at counterfeiting its surface. The emerging consensus isn’t anti-AI hysteria — it’s a sharper vocabulary for naming what’s missing when something merely resembles effort.

The AIDS crisis as live cultural material, not history

Nearly fifty years on, a wave of theater and film is treating the epidemic as unfinished business rather than period tragedy.

Mark Harris’s essay is the center of gravity here, arguing that this surge of AIDS-themed work — Daniel Fish’s staging of a Kramer-Fauci C-SPAN clip, Rent’s thirtieth-anniversary reckoning, a stack of new memoirs and films — isn’t nostalgia but a search for template: a precedent for how institutions fail during a public health catastrophe, legible now because of pandemic memory and ongoing attacks on public health infrastructure. The anniversary industrial complex (Winehouse at twenty, Reich at ninety, Rent at thirty) usually signals exhausted culture; this particular anniversary is doing the opposite work.

Capital as the new villain in international art cinema

Lee Chang-dong’s long-awaited return treats private equity and redundancy with the moral seriousness once reserved for war.

Lee’s first film since “Burning” follows two couples destabilized by a private equity buyout, and both the Guardian interview and the Times review treat it as a deliberate escalation: the quintessential twenty-first-century horror story isn’t a monster but a term sheet. Lee frames depicting the disenfranchised as “our moral responsibility” — a claim that reads differently coming from South Korea’s most internationally decorated director than it would from a Sundance debut, and signals where serious international cinema is pointing its anger next.

Books, Film, Music, Art Worth Attention

Fatherland — Sandra Hüller anchors a luminous fictional account of Thomas Mann’s return to a divided postwar Germany, reviewed as among the best films of the fall by both the Times and the Guardian’s extended Hüller profile.

Possible Love — Lee Chang-dong’s first film since “Burning,” a quietly devastating study of two couples undone by financialization, winner of the grand jury prize at Venice.

Wildwood — Travis Knight’s stop-motion adaptation of Colin Meloy’s novel, notable less as a kids’ fantasy than as a statement about handmade labor in an AI moment.

You Can See Everything — Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary interview with Elizabeth Holmes, discussed by the Theranos reporter who exposed her as a hall-of-mirrors exercise in performed reality.

Ryu Murakami’s death at 74 — the loss of Japan’s “enfant terrible,” whose subversive fiction (including the novel behind “Audition”) shaped a generation of dark Japanese storytelling well beyond genre horror.

The Imaginary Invalid — Bill Irwin’s self-adapted Molière, praised as a reminder of what live clowning can still do that screens cannot.

Essays Worth the Read

What Can We See in All the Recent Art About AIDS? Mark Harris surveys a genuine wave of new AIDS-themed work and argues it functions as a usable past for thinking about institutional failure during catastrophe — not elegy but instruction manual. The essay rewards attention because it resists the easy “we’re finally ready to look back” framing in favor of something more urgent and specific.

Deskilling the Body Melanie Challenger’s essay argues that technological convenience is quietly eroding basic embodied competencies — sensing, navigating, remembering, choosing — not through dramatic rupture but incremental atrophy. It’s a sober complement to the AI-and-craft conversation happening elsewhere this week, grounded in philosophy of embodiment rather than culture-industry complaint.

The Uncanny Catharsis of the AI Emomercial Jean Garnett names and dissects a new advertising subgenre — AI-generated skincare ads staging emotional “purification” — with enough precision that the essay functions as a small taxonomy of a feeling everyone has had but no one has described this well.

One Thing Worth Reading Deeply

What Can We See in All the Recent Art About AIDS? by Mark Harris is the piece to sit with this week. It connects a scattered constellation of plays, films, and books — Daniel Fish’s staging of Kramer and Fauci, the Rent anniversary, new memoirs and documentaries — into a coherent argument about why this particular catastrophe has become usable material again, decades after it might have seemed safely historicized. Harris doesn’t let the work off easy for reaching backward instead of forward; he asks what it means that institutional collapse during a plague is suddenly legible to audiences in a way it wasn’t ten years ago. It reframes an entire season’s worth of disparate programming as a single, deliberate cultural response to the present.