Life is a circle that we begin drawing at birth and complete at death. Surely, you’ve heard this analogy before. It’s just one of the many poeticisms used to make sense of this amorphous existence. But less talked about are all the full circles that exist inside life’s larger ring: the mini revolutions we collect throughout the years — things that not only make up a life, but make that life worth living. Comedian Maria Bamford’s new Netflix documentary, “Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story,” is a shining ode to both the big picture and its small details, arguing that a life without detours and surprises is no life at all.
While it deals in cycles, Judd Apatow and Neil Berkeley’s documentary is linear, tracing Bamford’s life from her early years growing up gifted and strange in Minnesota to her time performing idiosyncratic, character-filled stand-up, to a midlife informed by it all. And though its structure is conventional, its subject is anything but. Most comedians are — how do I put this gently — known to be some level of unwell. (Whether they understand that is another matter.) Bamford, on the other hand, has made a career out of being so deeply in touch with her mind and self that it would frighten the average neurotypical viewer if it weren’t so damn funny.
That fear is partially what “Paralyzed by Hope” seeks to scrutinize and change. Here, Bamford is as honest and casually hysterical as she’s always been, discussing mental illness with the candor such a stigmatized and distorted topic deserves. She’s unafraid to go deep and dark, naming feelings and investigating mistakes. It’s disarming and occasionally exhausting, but that’s the point: If such repetitive heaviness is difficult for the viewer, imagine how it is for the person experiencing it.
But at the risk of becoming trite, “Paralyzed by Hope” embraces the light that comes with radical honesty. For Bamford, comedy is a chance to close those mini-revolutions and understand the otherwise inconceivable by connecting with the audience. Her family and experiences are integral to her act and essential to strengthening those ties. Accepting that she’ll always be looking toward the end of life’s circle, she’s delighted to fill its contents in the meantime. As Bamford’s friend, comedian Gary Gulman, says toward the film’s end: “Those interactions are antidepressants, and she’s created so many of these little antidepressants.”
Say what you will about the first and second couples at the heart of “The Diplomat” – and by now they’ve generated plenty of gossip fodder – but nobody would question the resilience of their unions. Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) and her husband, Hal (Rufus Sewell), have certainly had their ups and downs; the series begins with them contemplating divorce just as Kate is thrust into an ambassadorship to Britain.
The more politically seasoned Hal manipulates Kate into staying with him, kicking off a multi-season barrage of wheedling and scheming that culminates in President Grace Hagen Penn (Allison Janney) picking him as her vice president.
Over four seasons of Debora Cahn’s transatlantic political drama, Kate has been instrumental in keeping the highly tenuous special relationship between Britain and America from crumbling, even as her boss and husband insist on taking jackhammers to it.
Grace is indubitably corrupt, and yet her devotion to her husband Todd (Bradley Whitford) is nevertheless true. Sure, occasionally Todd must scream underwater to keep his head from exploding. And yes, a fourth-season subplot finds the first gentleman hightailing to London to find some purpose beyond perusing wallpaper swatches. Well, that and placing some distance between him and his wife’s unnerving autocratic behavior.
Even so, during their daily check-ins, Grace and Todd still call each other babe and exchange declarations of love. When Grace finally sets all of America’s alliances aflame, Todd remains standing by her side.
It’s a miserable political and marital state of affairs when a Netflix hit’s radioactive relationships make a person nostalgic for eras when first and second Ladies were intellectual forces respected by their husbands. Neither Dr. Jill Biden nor Michelle Obama dimmed their light to appease right-wing sexists bent on characterizing their professional achievements and eloquence as emasculating.
In that respect, Hillary Clinton showed them and us the way: When her husband Bill won office, the first lady chaired a task force that delivered a massive health reform proposal doomed from the jump. We will never know if we’d have universal healthcare by now if a man had run the task force, but Republicans taught voters to distrust any first lady who aspired to do more for Americans than bake cookies and tend the roses in the White House garden.
Contrast those misty memories with Monday’s connubial proof-of-life photo-op featuring Donald Trump and his oft-absentee wife, Melania, signing an executive order creating a task force on women’s health. This was a rare appearance for the first lady, who many assume can’t stand her husband. One can’t imagine why.
“Look at her. You think she’s easy? She’s not so easy, but she’s very smart,” the president assured assembled reporters before signing the order and remarking, “I don’t know if her signature means anything,” while handing the pen to his wife.
When he tried to seal the moment with a kiss, the first lady turned her head, leaving him to lip-lock her hair instead. He then patted her hand, mumbling, “Good job.”
And Kate? All she does is clean up her husband’s messes. Following his advice to blackmail a loose-cannon Prime Minister into resigning causes her reflux to erupt with a vengeance. Hal’s part in a secret plot to purloin a Russian doomsday weapon from a sunken sub and her efforts to keep the enemy from finding out trap her in a perpetual cycle of dashing to bathrooms. America’s president named Kate to be her sin eater, and occasionally she has to barf up her guilt to keep her prevarications straight.
Working for the Penn administration is an ambassador’s nightmare and hell on the esophagus. Without a partner, it would be untenable. Without Kate, Hal and the stalwart staff surrounding them, our international relations may very well be in tatters.
The Penn administration will never be confused for Kennedy’s Camelot, and nobody in their right mind would characterize the Clintons’ or the Wylers’ marriages as ideal.
Like Bill and Hillary, Kate and Hal are working on their relationship despite Kate’s extramarital flings and Hal’s penchant for skullduggery. Their marriage is on thin ice. But their shared devotion is more plausible than whatever deal the Trumps have struck.
To watch these real and fictional partnerships play out without doubting their credibility is… I don’t know, is uplifting the word? Soothing, maybe.
It makes us fondly recall a past when first ladies competently delivered coherent speeches from podiums and made strong policy advocates. When presidents reached for their wives’ hands and their spouses responded in kind. It was a nicer, smarter time.
Yet Kate and Hal’s working partnership earns them few points with Grace and Todd. The thing is, Todd isn’t stupid. He’s malleable and clueless about a lot of things, including whether it’s appropriate to interpret a female colleague’s nervous vomiting as an indicator that she’s pregnant. But when Grace survives an assassination attempt, Todd is genuinely shaken. When the president requires an emotional backstop and perhaps a bit of reining in, the first gentleman exercises his own version of diplomacy. When it suits him.
Hal’s mastery of persuasive dark arts makes him a perfect partner for a president who surreptitiously and proudly moves to upend the international power structure. Still, Todd doesn’t like the way Hal and Grace giggle together in secret.
We’re attracted to “The Diplomat” for many of the same reasons Aaron Sorkin’s “The West Wing” kept liberal viewers rapt during the George W. Bush years. The Penn administration has none of the idealism or conscience that drove Martin Sheen’s Jed Bartlet, whose vision Janney’s press secretary, C.J. Cregg, and Whitford’s deputy chief of staff, Josh Lyman, worked to preserve as best as they could.
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It’s both entertaining and frightening to see the same actors portray an effective marital alliance devoted to trashing norms and weaponizing American exceptionalism.
But that’s also why this show works. In real life, the political class favors men like Hal much more than women like Kate, although (and because) Kate is truly Hal’s better half, morally speaking. In Britain, the charismatic Todd embraces his special envoy status with verve even as he suspects he’s out of his depth.
As America watches the president’s wife treat him with the same disdain he shows the rest of the world, a competent political union, however strained, is somehow reassuring. If the Wylers can survive the nightmare of American politics, maybe we have a chance too.
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe's startup Mind Robotics announced the appointment of Doug Field as president in a major coup for the CEO's secretive robotics project.
Field was a VP of special projects at Apple, where he was the de facto head of the company's ultimately unsuccessful Project Titan effort to make an autonomous electric car. He had a previous stint at Apple as VP of Mac hardware engineering, but he left the company in 2013 to become Tesla's chief vehicle engineer, where he helped oversee the Model 3 sedan. He left Tesla in 2018 and rejoined Apple. In 2021, Field was hired by Ford to run the automaker's electric vehicle and software di …
Researchers at Stanford, Caltech, and UC San Francisco say that recent experiments with mice reveal that their brains are actually two different organs. They extended this finding to human brains. One brain consists of the midbrain and forebrain, which control language and reasoning and are the seat of consciousness, while the hindbrain runs sleep, breathing, hunger, and heartbeat. — Read the rest
Researchers at Stanford, Caltech, and UC San Francisco say that recent experiments with mice reveal that their brains are actually two different organs. They extended this finding to human brains. One brain consists of the midbrain and forebrain, which control language and reasoning and are the seat of consciousness, while the hindbrain runs sleep, breathing, hunger, and heartbeat. — Read the rest
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