Dickinson
ISSUE #159
My favorite show on TV is Dickinson. Shocking—the poetry show (we're talking about Emily) is the only one he deems fit to watch. The Daisy follows soft the Sun.
What at first appears to be a Dickinson biography—a faithful retelling of a woman who, locked in her room in Amherst, MA, wrote thousands of poems, published only ten, and became America's greatest literary voice only after she'd died—quickly defies all biopic expectations. Instead, it adapts the poems themselves. Her words appear on screen in golden script so we can hear the music of her words without losing the pleasure of reading them. Each is wound to the theme of an episode, with titles like "Forbidden Fruit a flavor has" and "Forever—is composed of Nows"; each underscores how modern her poetry can be.
It does so by being gleefully anachronistic. Dialogue weaves in and out of today's slang. Needle drops come from Mitski and Billie Eilish. A Regency dance set to ILOVEMAKONNEN dissolves into a steamy opium-fueled blowout. A quintessential scene comes in the first season finale: Emily, spiraling when her love is marrying another, imagines she's attending her own wake, a reference to the poem "I felt a funeral, in my Brain." In a coffin of blue velvet, Emily watches as she's eulogized by Death. He pours a toast to say goodbye to "some basic bitch"; she asks if he'd be open to taking feedback.
What could wind up insufferable is somehow not—Dickinson is hilarious and dreamy at the same time. Episodes alternate between sitcom plots and gauzy explorations of what it means to write. In a favorite, Emily imagines she's part of a circus as a woman covered in tattoos. Nick Cave plays as the audience gawks. In her time, she's nothing but a sideshow act—a woman with something to say and the insistence to artfully say it.
The result is a show that makes Dickinson's poetry feel vital to young women artists today. This week is dedicated to the songs of the show. They suspend a bridge between the past and present, a toast to art that can last for centuries, which all are entitled to create.
I’ve been watching through the films of Danny Boyle. Some examples: Trainspotting, Sunshine, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire. From early on, Boyle was rightfully recognized for his edgy and sophisticated musical taste—the Trainspotting soundtrack alone, from Iggy’s “Lust for Life” through Underworld’s “Born Slippy (Nuxx)”, helped define the tastes of a whole generation.