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T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2019 | 15culture
Part of being a parent to a 4-year-old is
surrendering yourself to the routines
and rituals that govern your child’s day.
For my son, Max, that means always let-
ting him be the one who gets to push the
elevator button in the morning, and
keeping the chicken nuggets from ever
making contact with the mac and cheese
on his dinner plate. And when he wants
some recreational screen time, it means
allowing him to see the only thing he’s
wanted to watch for the past several
months: “Yellow Submarine.”
I can’t quite remember how this 1968
animated musical movie inspired by the
Beatles became Max’s go-to viewing
material. I don’t know how it overtook
TV offerings like “PAW Patrol” or
“Thomas & Friends,” so unerringly cali-
brated for contemporary tots, in his
imagination. But now, twice a day, he
and I sit on our couch and watch hand-
drawn versions of the Fab Four set off in
their comically elaborate watercraft,
sing their beloved songs and rescue
Pepperland from the music-hating Blue
Meanies.I was about 10 when I discovered “Yel-
low Submarine” for myself, in the throes
of an infatuation with classic rock — too
young to realize the Beatles’ speaking
voices were provided by other actors,
and at an age when I thought the mov-
ie’s pun-filled dialogue was the height of
comedy. (Told not to throw a potentially
dangerous switch, Ringo, voiced by Paul
Angelis, replies in his Scouse accent,
“Can’t help it — I’m a born lever-puller.”)
It later became an entry in my DVD li-
brary, when keeping a DVD library was
still a modern thing to do.
Max is too young to enjoy the arch
wordplay of “Yellow Submarine,” its lay-
ers of pop-cultural reference and self-
reference. (Someday Max will appreci-
ate the joke where John Lennon, voiced
by John Clive, says that the Sea of Holes
reminds him of Blackburn, Lancashire,
and Geoffrey Hughes’ Paul McCartney
sings to him in reply, “Oh, boy.”) But
there is still plenty for a viewer his age to
savor. More than enough has been said
already about how the music of the Bea-
tles — simple, joyful, repetitive — could
have been engineered in a lab to burrow
into a child’s mind. But something spe-
cial happens when these songs are
played alongside the animated se-quences in the movie to make them that
much more memorable.
Lennon singing about “a real nowhere
man, sitting in his nowhere land” may be
an abstract idea to a preschooler, but il-
lustrate that with the cartoon of a funny,
furry beast called the Nowhere Man,
spinning on concentric circles in a realm
of empty space, and it suddenly makes
sense. And what developing mind can
resist the sequence in “When I’m Sixty-
Four” where ornate renderings of the
numbers from 0 to 64 are counted on thescreen? It’s what you’d get if “Sesame
Street” were much more transparent
about its mind-altering influences.
These are all observations that can be
gleaned after just a couple of viewings;
then there’s the version of “Yellow Sub-
marine” that reveals itself after you’ve
slipped beyond the event horizon and
watched it dozens of times.
To me, the film is endlessly intricate,
like an illuminated manuscript or a re-
ally good “Simpsons” episode. With ev-
ery viewing, I seem to find a new sightgag, a pun or a clever line reading that I
hadn’t picked up on before. (It took me a
good 33 years to understand why, in a
scene where the Beatles are trying to
sneak into the Blue Meanies’ battle
corps, a suspicious soldier would ask
them, “Are you bluish? You don’t look
bluish.”)
To Max, it’s a malleable collection of
smaller narratives: In one 10-minute
span, it’s a madcap romp through a
boardinghouse of undefined dimen-
sions, populated by wild creatures; inanother, it’s an action movie where, in a
daring overnight raid, the Beatles re-
cover stolen musical instruments from a
bandstand surrounded by sleeping Blue
Meanies. Every genre and type of story
that my son can imagine seems to be
contained within its generous bound-
aries.
And when we watch together, the
movie becomes a lightning-round test of
whether I can explain to Max all the
sights and sounds that he doesn’t quite
understand: Why do the rank-and-fileBlue Meanies all wear caps that look
conspicuously like Mickey Mouse ears?
Why do the psychedelic denizens of Pep-
perland turn silent and gray when the
Meanies attack them and take their mu-
sic away? What is George Harrison’s
moody “Only a Northern Song” about?
What’s an oscilloscope?
By their very nature, the Beatles al-
ready appeal to a child’s affinity for
groups and teams with distinctly de-
fined members, and “Yellow Subma-
rine” amplifies this effect by flattening
out the foursome and reducing them to
just a couple of key personality traits:
Ringo is forlorn and goofy; John is intel-
lectual and wry; Paul is vainglorious
and charming; George (Peter Batten) is
mystical and arcane.
For a while, Max seemed to compre-
hend the band members only as car-
toons; once, when he saw photographs
of their mop-topped noggins on the
cover of “A Hard Day’s Night,” he didn’t
show even a glimmer of recognition, as
if they were entirely different entities.He’s only recently started to understand
that the Beatles were real, live people
who played music together, and that he
can still see Starr or McCartney do it.
(He hasn’t asked yet why he can’t see
Lennon or Harrison, and I hope it’s a
while before I have to explain it to him.)
There’s one more aspect of “Yellow
Submarine” that I never really appreci-
ated until I started watching it with my
son. At the end of the movie, after the
Blue Meanies have been subdued by a
rousing performance of “All You Need Is
Love” and are sent running for the hills,
the Beatles extend them an olive
branch. The Meanies are invited to join
their onetime enemies, and they, the
Beatles and the people of Pepperland
celebrate by singing “It’s All Too Much.”
Even if it’s only in a cartoon, it’s heart-
ening to think there are places where
conflict eventually gives way to healing
and reconciliation. I hope this point
doesn’t feel quaint to Max by the time he
is old enough to understand it.‘Yellow Submarine,’ my 4-year-old & me
The animated musical
about the Beatles delights
a father in new waysBY DAVE ITZKOFFA toy inspired by the 1968 animated musical “Yellow Submarine,” which has plenty for young children to savor. Right, the DVD version.PHOTOGRAPHS BY TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMESWith every viewing, I seem to
find a sight gag, a pun or a clever
line reading that I hadn’t picked
up on before.In May 2017, Jia Tolentino declared the
personal essay dead. “The personal is
no longer political in quite the same
way that it was,” she wrote in an essay
for The New Yorker’s website. Five
years ago, readers salivated over “it
happened to me” essays posted daily
on women’s websites. But after the
2016 presidential election, such pieces
started to seem petty, self-indulgent,
naïve. Still, Tolentino, who once edited
this kind of writing for The Hairpin
and Jezebel, found herself occasionally
nostalgic for the authorial voices that
developed during the personal essay’s
heyday. “I am moved by the negotia-
tion of vulnerability,” she wrote. “I
loved watching people try to figure out
if they had something to say.”
Now a staff writer at The New
Yorker, Tolentino has made her own
foray into self-study in her absorbing
first book, “Trick Mirror: Reflections
on Self-Delusion.” The book is a col-
lection of nine original essays, some of
which have their roots in writing she’s
done for The New Yorker; each is a
mix of reporting, research and person-
al history. Her voice here is fully devel-
oped: She writes with an inimitable
mix of force, lyricism and internet-
honed humor. She is the only writer
I’ve read who can incorporate meme-
speak into her prose without losing
face.
Unlike the digital personal essayist
in her description, Tolentino considers
the modern self not as something to be
exposed or exploited, like a mineral
deposit, but as something to construct
and critique. She finds her subject in
what she calls “spheres of public imag-
ination”: social media, reality televi-
sion, the wedding-industrial complex,
news coverage of sexual assault. To-
lentino wants to know how Americans,
particularly those of her generation,
have adjusted to life under late capital-
ism. What happens to people when
they are forced to compete for the
smallest bit of security? Who do webecome when we’re always being
watched?
The brief answers to these questions
are: not very good things, and not very
good people. The book’s first essay, on
the “feverish, electric, unlivable hell”
that is the internet, makes a good case
for the degradation of civic life in Mark
Zuckerberg’s America. Posting on
Facebook or Twitter “makes communi-
cation about morality very easy but
makes actual moral living very hard,”
Tolentino argues, in part because so
many jobs require online engagement
— which in turn lines the pockets of
tech moguls. We often confuse profess-
ing an opinion — posting, liking, re-
tweeting — with taking political action.
Meanwhile, social media makes us feel
as if we’re perpetually onstage; we can
never break character or take off our
costumes. Channeling the sociologist
Erving Goffman, Tolentino explains
how “online, your audience can hypo-
thetically keep expanding forever, and
the performance never has to end.”
The work of being yourself online is
relentless, exhausting. Women, she
suggests, are especially familiar with
this kind of “self-calibration.” Some,
like Kim Kardashian, manage to profit
off self-exposure, while other women
(or sometimes the very same) endure
digital harassment. Even as online
movements such as #MeToo have
forged female solidarity, they have also
pressured women to be vulnerable, to
cede control of their own stories — in
the same way, not incidentally, that the
online personal essay industry once
did. And if the personal essay is dead,
the internet is still very much alive.
Tolentino concludes that only “social
and economic collapse” could rid us of
this digital plague.
This kind of fatalism, dispiriting but
perhaps fair, runs through the book.
(In the introduction, Tolentino de-
scribes writing the book in the spring
of 2017 and the fall of 2018, a period
that included the Unite the Right Rally
in Charlottesville and the Kavanaugh
hearings, and that produced so much
despair.) In an essay on exercise cul-
ture and “optimization,” Tolentino
notes how her own exercise regime,
which consists mostly of expensive
barre classes, is both “a good invest-
ment” and “a pragmatic self-delusion”
— she is training herself to “function
more efficiently within an exhaustingsystem” from which she cannot escape.
Later, in an essay on scam artists
and confidence men, she depicts capi-
talism as the ultimate scam — one
exposed once we reckon with the
arbitrariness of success, or even of
survival. We’re not all Billy McFarland,
the scammer behind the Fyre Festival,
but, in a country transformed by finan-
cialization and the gig economy, Ameri-
cans are all making risky bets. To-
lentino persuasively compares betting
on stocks to crowdfunding money for
medical emergencies: “if you’re super
lucky, if everyone likes you, if you’ve
got hustle... you might end up being
able to pay for your insulin, or your leg
surgery after a bike accident.” Over-
whelmed by the injustice she sees
around her, she reflects on her own
“ethical brokenness”: “I have felt so
many times that the choice of this era
is to be destroyed or to morally com-
promise ourselves in order to be func-
tional — to be wrecked, or to be func-tional for reasons that contribute to the
wreck.” You can refuse on principle to
use ridesharing apps or to rent from
Airbnb, but you might end up panicked
and sweating on another broken-down
subway train, late to a job that doesn’t
cover your travel expenses but that
expects that you, like a savvy scam-
mer, will figure something out.
These are distinctly millennial senti-
ments, the complaints of a generation
that has come into political conscious-
ness only after investing so much in
false meritocratic promises. Tolentino’s
earnest ambivalence, expressed often
throughout the book, is characteristic
of millennial life-writing, and it can be
contrasted with boomer self-satisfac-
tion and Gen X disaffection in the same
genre. Though she never presumes to
be anything like the voice of a genera-
tion, Tolentino is a fair representative:
Now 30, she graduated from college
into an economic recession, watched
her parents sink into debt and from theage of 16 has worked multiple jobs
simultaneously. In many ways, “Trick
Mirror” is a cri de coeur from a writer
who has been forced to revise her
youthful belief in American institu-
tions.
Several of the essays are about
losing faith: in institutionalized reli-
gion, in the American dream, in the
kindness of others. In “Ecstasy,” a
lovely meditation on selflessness in all
its forms, Tolentino writes movingly
about leaving the evangelical church in
which she was raised. In her post-
religious life, she has sought and found
bliss elsewhere: during late evening
walks, at music festivals, on drugs. It’s
the book’s strongest essay, as well as
its least vexed. In it, Tolentino dwells
more easily among contradictions: “I
can’t tell whether my inclination to-
ward ecstasy is a sign that I still be-
lieve, after all of this, or if it was only
because of that ecstatic tendency that I
ever believed at all.” She writes beauti-fully about her desire for self-tran-
scendence and how it led her to writ-
ing, a tool she uses to understand
herself.
As a reader (and a fellow millenni-
al), I could have done with more es-
says like “Ecstasy,” in which contradic-
tion felt enriching, or generative,
rather than imprisoning. I credit To-
lentino for examining her complicity in
the structures she critiques, but at
times I wished that she would go easi-
er on herself, or that she’d keep work-
ing to transcend the contradictions she
observes. I’m not sure that criticism is
always a form of amplification, as
Tolentino fears it is, or that the line
between feminism-as-politics and
feminism-as-branding is as “blurry” as
she at one point suggests. She has
realized that moral purity is a “fan-
tasy,” but she might also acknowledge
a more hopeful truth: Though the
shearing forces in our lives inevitably
compromise us, they need not paralyze
us. “I am complicit no matter what I
do” can be both a realization reached
after rigorous self-reckoning and
something like a dead end. Just be-
cause you can’t fix climate change with
your own consumer choices doesn’t
mean there’s nothing to be done.
With this in mind, Tolentino’s insist-
ence that we move beyond the person-
al may be her most trenchant political
insight. “Feminism that prioritizes the
individual will always, at its core, be at
odds with a feminism that prioritizes
the collective,” she writes in her essay
on scammers. Elsewhere, she under-
scores the importance of building
solidarity among social groups. What
she likes about a drug like Ecstasy, she
explains, is that it literally produces
empathy. While on it, you care about
more people than you would think
possible: “It makes the user’s well-
being feel inseparable from the well-
being of the group.” Ecstasy expands
our understanding of the collective.
This is a productive self-delusion, the
kind of fantasy that inspires rather
than cripples. It is a personal experi-
ence that Tolentino gracefully politi-
cizes — an ephemeral feeling that, if
we take it seriously, we might use to
bring about a better world.Agony and Ecstasy
Maggie Doherty’s first book, “The
Equivalents,” will be published in
March.BOOK REVIEWTrick Mirror:
Reflections on Self-Delusion
By Jia Tolentino. 303 pp. Random House.
$27.BY MAGGIE DOHERTYJia Tolentino.ELENA MUDDRELEASED
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