What I've been reading and watching

Freud, gay failsons, and the French

What I’ve been reading (spoilers)

A couple of years ago, I began—then never finished—an essay about the physiological parallels between post-traumatic hypervigilance and the homosocial attunement required for cruising among men (is there a difference between scared and horny?). A few pages into Daniel Lefferts’ Ways and Means, his protagonist Alistair makes a similar connection as he flees New York City only a few steps ahead of assassination:

He realized that keeping an eye out for potential assailants and seeking out biceps and succulent backsides were in effect identical activities: that he registered perusers and possible pursuers with the same hyperacute focus and the same libidinal force. It was as if his suspicion, like a parasite, had taken over the mechanism of his desire.

To get the most out of Means, which came out last year, it might help to know a thing or two about psychoanalytic theory. But considering that most of what “we” know of it is largely osmotic, decontextualized, referential—that is to say unconscious—a working knowledge of Freud isn’t necessary to enjoy this bourgeois-novel-cum-political-thriller¹.

The action of Lefferts’ elaborately plotted debut mostly takes place in the year leading up to President Donald Trump’s first term, as Alistair, a white gay undergrad with an expensive education (private school, NYU Stern, etc.) slowly realizes that his good looks and mathy brain aren’t quite enough to deliver him from middle-class ignominy into the elite lifestyle he believes he so richly deserves. He’s in a triad with Elijah and Mark, two other white gay men who also can’t seem to attain (or in the case of Mark, the second son of a self-made slumlord, retain) the kind of wealth that Alistair can only imagine.

Though all three men are aware of their privileging relative to most other Americans, their inability to exploit it to the hilt is more passive than principled: Alistair yearns for inclusion in the social stratum his liberal arts mother raised him to disdain; rather than get a job, Elijah leeches off an amoral shock artist who trolls 2016 Chelsea in a MAGA hat in hot pursuit of attention; and Mark, considered by all to be a decent guy, fantasizes about running his father’s manufactured housing empire a trifle more justly, but would ultimately prefer to be bailed out by his ill-gotten millions. Through his throuple, the naive and lonely Alistair—at 22, he’s convinced himself that a robber baronetcy is the only way to financially support his downwardly mobile mother, Maura—is brought into elbow-rubbing distance with Herve, a fracking billionaire with a particular interest in desperate young white men. With no postgrad job offer to show for his six figures of student debt, Alistair sleepwalks into Herve’s sinister plot to harness the Trumpist death drive and use the underclass to overthrow the government². Will he and his boyfriends be able to stop him?

Striking a smart and sensitive balance between subtext (Alistair shrugged weakly, with adolescent helplessness) and text (Mark knew that Alistair’s father had died when he was a child and that his mother never remarried, and he sometimes wondered if Alistair’s involvement with him and Elijah had been his most sustained exposure to a couple), Lefferts breathes authenticity into Alistair, Mark, and Elijah’s messily arrested development. Driving each man’s learned incompetence is a lustful rage for Daddy, which can only be satisfied by usurping or replacing him (as the beginning passage suggests, the word libido appears A LOT in this book).

Generally speaking, I find people like these characters largely unsympathetic, and yet our author kid-gloved me into something like grace: how can these failsons be bad people when they’re not even real people? Unlike most disaffecteds, however, our trio’s search for the appropriate love object—that is, another grown-up residing in the present, rather than someone who “can revive in them the picture of the mother and the father,” as Freud wrote—parallels a real-life mission with much higher stakes: the fate of liberal democracy.

Lefferts’ literary talents are so prodigious that Means’ weaknesses—and there aren’t many—have little to do with technique. Sophisticated and controlled, his writing skews more toward impressive than beautiful, which makes its moments of tenderness all the more affecting: in his infancy, Alistair and the doting Maura passed whole days in what it felt beside the point to call happiness. But even his most astute insights are occasionally hampered by a kind of emotional vertigo. His ambitious plot’s fissures tend to gather around behavior that doesn’t quite make sense, even when you account for the ego’s machinations: Herve’s lapses in shrewdness and Maura’s lack of non-motherly dimensions come to mind. Similarly, Lefferts’ ventures into the actual lower classes—that is, the people to whom Alistair is prone to comparing himself, but only when he needs to rationalize his rapacious aspirations—can ring hollow. While on a highly suspicious errand for Herve, he meets a young maintenance guy who immediately knows something’s up and asks the city slicker who he works for. The question was piercing in its intelligence, reports the narrative. It was actually a very normal question for a person to ask, under the circumstances! We learn to expect this condescension from Alistair—whose failure to ask intelligent questions ends up getting him into deep trouble—but every so often it seems to issue directly from his author.

Means’ happy ending completes the puzzle perfectly, with our gays financially secure, returned to the couple form, and freed from their neuroticism while more or less politically unchanged. Perhaps this is why, despite its undeniable brilliance, it’s somewhat dissatisfying to me. Nevertheless, this novel is fiercely intelligent and highly entertaining. At turns funny, sexy, and scary, it’s the kind of book I want everyone to read so they can talk about it with me. Even now, looking back over this review, I wonder if I’m being too harsh, if I’m projecting my own psychodrama onto a story that, in its final pages, has Maura reflecting thusly: Renounce, renounce! It was the hardest and simplest thing to do. Renounce your object, abandon your singular infatuation, give up whatever yearning blinds you to everything but its endpoint, diverts your energy away from everything but your pursuit, justifies whatever harm, whatever waste, your quest entails. Renounce, renounce, and see how your love flourishes.

What I’ve been watching

Film

• Cecil B. Demented (2000): While far from my favorite John Waters, the charming Demented is one of his most prescient. The vicious glee with which his cult of terrorist filmmakers (his twist on the Symbionese Liberation Army) kidnap a Hollywood darling (Melanie Griffith) and use her as anti-establishment agitprop is only rivaled by Waters’ hilarious lampooning of everything that’s still wrong with the industry 25 years later: IP-mining for mindless prequels and sequels, the elimination of art house and repertory theaters, the slow squeeze on independent filmmakers (Waters himself hasn’t made a movie since 2004’s A Dirty Shame), and the anti-intellectualism that plagues American culture at large.

• Babygirl (2024): The sweet Christmas treat that confirmed Kidman’s motherhood and turned me into a Dickhead. Wrote a little toward why I thought Babygirl’s treatment of “kink” worked so well on Twitter.

• Kid Galahad (1937): I’m no Bette Davis fan, but her chemistry with the inimitable Edward G. Robinson and the pitch-perfect Wayne Morris is the balance this Curtiz-helmed boxing romp needs. Remade four years later with supporting player Humphrey Bogart as the star in The Wagons Roll at Night, then again in the early sixties for Elvis Presley, Galahad is kind of like if de Palma’s Snake Eyes (1998) was cute, fun, and still didn’t pass the Bechdel test. Jade didn’t care for it, but I had a good time.

• Story of Women (1988) and Querelle (1982): The French have been PMO. You know I hated Coralie Fargeat’s substanceless The Substance (2024), with its clunkily-rendered American misogyny; while I quite liked The Beast (2023), its portrayal of the American incel/mass shooter was so off as to, again, veer into misogyny (this review expressed some of my other misgivings very well); I refuse to see Emilia Pérez (2024) because its reputation precedes it (wow, yet more misogyny…), and according to Twitter, Mexican viewers are also not loving a foreigner’s lighthearted and proudly unresearched take on the horrors of drug cartels. Over the past few weeks, I watched two enjoyable French/adjacent films: Isabelle Huppert’s dynamic turn as abortionist Marie-Louise Giraud, one of the last women to be executed in France, in Story of Women, and Fassbinder’s final film, the colorfully concupiscent Querelle, based on the novel by Jean Genet. Consider my palate cleansed.

• Evil Does Not Exist (2023): I went into Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s rural drama thinking that it was a horror movie? And it’s not? Which isn’t to say that something horrifying doesn’t happen, but when you spend the first half of a slow-as-melting-snow meditation on harmony, community, and family expecting a jump-scare…well…it definitely does something to the experience. Interesting cinematographic decisions by Yoshio Kitagawa, often more thought-provoking than revealing, for better or worse.

Reminder that I’ll send you a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content if you screenshot your donation to any of fundraiser for Palestinians trying to survive within Gaza or relocate to safety. Gaza Funds is one place to get started.

Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.

1. Go ahead and read into that “cum.”

2. One of the chapter titles is “Lumpenproletariat,” and I’m still trying to decide how ironic it’s meant to be.