28 THENEWYORKER,MARCH9, 2020
enough. But that’s not what’s going to
help us win in November.”
Tiyale Hayes, BET’s senior vice-pres-
ident of consumer insights, showed pie
charts with sobering statistics: twen-
ty-one per cent of black men surveyed
in February said that they were excited
about a candidate; forty per cent said
that they were satisfied but not excited.
“If I were another country with a bunch
of bots, I’d be trying to attack these peo-
ple right here,” he said.
Another panel addressed how to get
more black men to the polls. “You can’t
just expect us to show up on your be-
half,” the rapper Clifford Harris, Jr., who
goes by T.I., said. “We’ve already, in uni-
son, said Bloomberg ain’t it. I don’t care
how much money you throw around.”
“We don’t need all the money in the
world, but it does take resources,” An-
drew Gillum, the former mayor of Tal-
lahassee, who narrowly lost Florida’s 2018
gubernatorial race, said. “Do you know
how much money we spent trying to get
old white people to vote for us? And I
don’t say ‘old white people’ as a pejora-
tive—older white people are, in my state,
consistent voters.” He continued, “They
get mail pieces several times a week.”
T.I. screwed up his face. “What’s a
mail piece?”
Over drinks, attendees weighed their
options. “I think it’s Elizabeth”—War-
ren—Zip Gould, the founder of Gaia
Green Earth, an energy-tech firm, said.
“Everything’s been so patriarchal on this
planet for the past six thousand years.”
“I’ve been a Bernie Sanders hater for
about four years, but I’m really warming
up to him right now,” Quentin James,
the founder of the Collective PAC, which
supports African-American candidates,
said. He wore a beige porkpie hat. “But,
ultimately, the person who I think could
help us win elections most is Michael
Bloomberg. None of this shit is possible
without winning the Senate, and, to win
the Senate, you gotta win fucking states
like North Carolina, Alabama, Missis-
sippi, Texas. You need a ton of fucking
money to do it. It’s Bloomberg who has
it. That’s a conundrum for our commu-
nity. Yeah, I hear the stop-and-frisk shit,
I get it. This is about power.”
Which candidate was T.I., who had
on a large diamond pendant, rooting for?
“Bernie,” he said. “He’s not as snazzy and
cool. He don’t have, like, quick one-liner
1
THEPICTURES
LADYFROMSHANGHAI
C
athy Yan, the director of “Birds of
Prey,” the new DC Comics movie,
starring Margot Robbie as the anarchic
antiheroine Harley Quinn, became a
big-studio filmmaker the same way that
Hemingway describes going bankrupt:
gradually, then suddenly. In 2018, shortly
after going to Sundance with her first
feature, “Dead Pigs,” a satirical look at a
rapidly modernizing Shanghai, she landed
a meeting with Warner Bros. “I put to-
gether a sizzle reel,” Yan recalled the other
day, sipping a matcha oat-milk latte in a
coffee shop near her apartment, in SoHo.
“But it was not your typical sizzle reel.”
To a homemade remix of “Diamonds
Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” Yan set a col-
lage of clips that embodied the worst of
modern womanhood: “Like, scenes from
‘Bachelor’ proposals, the De Beers dia-
mond commercial, Kim Kardashian’sCathy Yanvampire facial, Fox anchors talking about
women, Trump saying ‘Grab ’em by the
pussy’”—stuff that might make a girl
want to smash the patriarchy. “After I
showed the video, there was just silence.”
At thirty-three, Yan is the second
woman to solo-direct a modern super-
hero film, after “Wonder Woman”’s Patty
Jenkins. The theme of “Birds” is female
revenge, its style an explosion of glam
and grunge. Harley, who has been
dumped by her boyfriend, the Joker, goes
on a rampage around Gotham in short
shorts, a rainbow tinsel jacket, and Gwen
Stefani pigtails; her weapon of choice is
a paintball gun with the force of an
AK-47—annihilation by glitter bomb.
Yan’s look is more professional. With
her honey-blond bob, tortoiseshell ear-
rings, and navy coat, she could pass for
a consultant, a job that she briefly con-
sidered when she was an undergrad at
Princeton. “Everyone was doing it,” she
explained. (Remember, kids: friends don’t
let friends apply to McKinsey.) “I re-
member my case interview. I was, like, ‘I
don’t care how many Ping-Pong balls
are in the vending machine.’” Instead,
she went to work at the Wall Street Jour-
nal and eventually landed a position re-
porting in Hong Kong. Improbably, the
Journal may be responsible for her film
career. “Digital was just starting, and they
literally shoved a video camera in my
hand and said, ‘You’re young, shoot some-
thing,’” Yan said.
Stepping out into a cold rain, she
strolled toward Chrystie Street. “I’m a
global wanderer,” she said—she was born
in China, grew up in Virginia, and went
to high school in Hong Kong—“but
New York is my home.” She based her
Gotham on the city of the eighties, a
burg with grit and heart: “I’m sick of
seeing post-apocalyptic visions of Go-
tham, where everyone’s homeless and
being all sad.” On Grand Street, she
stopped to join a crowd gathered on a
handball court. An amplified voice ad-
dressed the group in Mandarin. “Oh
yeah, I forgot, happy Chinese New Year,”
Yan said. “I always feel so bad, because
it’s hard to celebrate it in America, and
there are so many freaking days of it.”
She approached a stand selling Chi-
nese-style beef jerky, produced in Queens.
One of the venders, dressed in an em-
broidered red jacket and a crown, with
a phony Confucian beard—Caishen, thepunch lines, but if you look at his history,
where he started in politics, from march-
ing for civil rights, I think if you care
about being fair and decent, and being
represented by a fair and decent human
being, then I think Bernie’s the best can-
didate. Now, if you don’t give a fuck about
that and you just want to get to the
money...” He shrugged.“O.K., cool.”
—Sheila Marikar