THENEWYORKER,MARCH30, 2020 5
OPPOSITE: EVERETT; RIGHT: ILLUSTRATION BY MENGXIN LI
In 1996, the prescient American artist Mark Tribe recognized that the
Internet is more than a virtual showroom for conventional work—it’s a
category-evading artistic medium in its own right. He started a Listserv
for like-minded thinkers and named it Rhizome, a botanical term (then in
vogue with semiologists) that describes an unpredictable, always expanding
network. Over the years, Rhizome has grown from an upstart into a stal-
wart nonprofit based in New York and affiliated with the New Museum.
It commissions and preserves digital art, and exhibits it, too, notably in
the continuing series “First Look: New Art Online” (at rhizome.org and
newmuseum.org). The contents are as multifarious as the medium. Curious
how pixels stack up to paint? Scroll through the eight-person show “Brushes,”
which ranges in tone from airy and calligraphic (Laura Brothers’s “Deux
Blue”) to memelike and manic ( Jacob Ciocci’s animated GIFs). Binge-watch-
ers can catch a three-part musical episode of Shana Moulton’s surreal pseudo
soap opera, “Whispering Pines,” whose housebound heroine indulges in self-
care routines that—spoiler alert—turn her into a goddess.—Andrea K. Scott
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MOVIES
A Beautiful Day
in the Neighborhood
Tom Hanks, starring in Marielle Heller’s new
film as the singular Mr. Rogers, complete with
cozy knitwear and matching homilies, not only
re-creates every quirk of the character’s gestures
and speech but prevents what could have been
the mushiest of fables from sliding over the
edge into sentimentality. The story turns on
the plight of Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), a
journalist who is sent to interview Fred Rogers
and finds himself revealing the cause of his scars,
both physical and emotional. This redemptive
encounter is played out in a low and subtle key;
Heller, as she proved in “Can You Ever Forgive
Me?” (2018), has become something of a special-
ist in damaged souls. With strong support from
Susan Kelechi Watson, as Vogel’s wife, and Chris
Cooper, as his sad and loutish father.—Anthony
Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 11/25/19.) (Stream
ing on Amazon, Google Play, and other services.)
Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day
The German director Rainer Werner Fassbind-
er’s five-part, nearly eight-hour television se-
ries, from 1972—one of his most unusual and
self-revealing projects—defies political shib-
boleths of his artistic milieu. It’s centered on
one extended family in Cologne, and on the
romance between a factory worker named Jo-
chen (Gottfried John) and a receptionist named
Marion (Hanna Schygulla). Jochen, who’s de-
voted to his job, designs a device to increase his
colleagues’ productivity—thereby threatening
their bonuses. Meanwhile, his grandmother
(Luise Ulrich) recruits the whole family to help
her illegally turn an empty storefront into a
nursery school. Fassbinder fills the series with
ordinary troubles—the shortage of affordable
housing, casual racism, hostile bosses—and
dramatizes the practical power of working-class
people to improve their circumstances. With
grand cinematic flourishes—a gyrating camera
on a factory floor and at a café table, rapturously
colorful visions of romance, and hair-trigger
comedy of pratfalls and narrow escapes—Fass-
binder exalts the intrepid exploits of the hidden
heroes of daily life. In German.—Richard Brody
(Streaming on the Criterion Channel.)
Hail, Caesar!
Joel and Ethan Coen’s inside-Hollywood com-
edy, set in 1951—amid McCarthyite inquisitions
and sexual taboos—is scintillating, uproarious,
substantial, and playfully personal. A handful of
Hollywood Communists kidnap Baird Whitlock
(George Clooney), the hunky star of a New Tes-
tament epic; Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), the
studio fixer, needs to bring Baird back. Eddie,
a devout Catholic in a Jewish-run business, has
many other troubles to deal with, including
a pregnant aquatic star (Scarlett Johansson),
a Western singer (Alden Ehrenreich) cast in a
drawing-room comedy, a pair of prowling gossip
columnists (both played by Tilda Swinton), and
a quartet of clergymen who vet the Christian
drama’s script. With loose-limbed performances
and jazzy visual rhythms, the Coen brothers
gleefully riff on the essence of Hollywood and
the idiosyncratic personalities that find sur-
prisingly free expression there. They contrast
traditional belief systems, religious and polit-
ical, with the new gospel of movies—their own
American faith, which comes to life onscreen.
Released in 2016.—R.B. (Streaming on Amazon,
YouTube, and other services.)
Harlem Nights
This boldly original, boisterously idiosyncratic,
yet introspective drama—a gangland tale, set
briefly in 1918 and then mostly in the nine-
teen-thirties—is the only movie that Eddie
Murphy has directed to date. He also wrote
the elaborate story, about a night club run by
a gambling-ring operator named Sugar Ray
(Richard Pryor), whose adopted son (Desi Arnez
Hines II), a trigger-happy orphan, grows up to
become his right-hand man, an impetuous trou-
blemaker called Quick (Murphy). The film is a
whirlingly divergent romp, blending agonizing
violence with outrageous humor; above all, it has
the feel of oral history, of lives and times rescued
from oblivion. It features a host of extravagant,
exciting performers (including Della Reese and
Redd Foxx), and the plot involves some out-
landish twists, but the comedy is dead earnest.
With a labyrinth of brutal threats and subtle
double-crosses, fatal misunderstandings and
deft evasions, Murphy brings to life a teeming,
fabled past that undercuts nostalgia with authen-
tic visions of danger. Released in 1989.—R.B.
(Streaming on Netflix and other services.)
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Deanna Dikeman
In 1990, when this photographer’s parents were
in their early seventies, they sold her child-
hood home, in Sioux City, Iowa, and moved to a
bright-red ranch house in the same town. At the
end of their daughter’s visits, they would stand
outside as she drove away, arms rising together
in a farewell wave. For years, Dikeman captured
those departing moments; the resulting por-
trait series, “Leaving and Waving,” compresses
nearly three decades of adieux into a deft and
affecting chronology. The pair recede into the
warm glow of the garage on rainy evenings and
laugh under the eaves in better weather. In
summer, they blow kisses from the driveway.
In winter, they wear scarves and stand behind
