Bad Luck Barking

Dear Editors,

Alan Dean’s review of films by the Romanian director Radu Jude (“Bazin-ga, or RJ: Mysteries of the Organism,” Issue 49) is very perceptive and well researched overall. It gets confused, however, when discussing a scene in Jude’s Bad Luck Banging:

There are Godardian flourishes here and there: when Emi visits the school’s director Mrs. Cănuţă, a girlboss figure attempting to walk a careful line between appeasing the parents and defending her star employee, the dialogue slips into nondiegetic chitchat . Freckles, an oddly named man whose presence in Mrs. Cănuţă’s house is never explained, tells Emi an inexplicable story about a dog who held the rank of major in the Securitate — until he mentions being on set, and it becomes clear that it is the actors who are speaking. Maybe?

Dean can be forgiven for his unfamiliarity with Romanian Communist-era television. As a Romanian-born professor of cinema studies, I can inform him that this scene is a direct reference to the 1973–74 Communist propaganda series Pistruiatul, translatable as Freckles or The Freckled One. The title character is a Gavroche-like teenage boy who takes part in various resistance plots against the Romanian fascist government in the early 1940s. The show was co-created by Sergiu Nicolaescu — a fact that throws into relief the famous director’s willingness to engage in maudlin propaganda and nationalist hallucination on behalf of whichever extremist happened to be in power. As Dean notes, Nicolaescu’s first film after the 1989 revolution, The Mirror, was a fascist hagiography.

In Bad Luck Banging, Pistruiatul is played by Costel Băloiu, reprising his role from the original show, fifty years later. Băloiu has been largely out of the spotlight since his time as a child star, which seems to have been relatively exploitative (he was not on good terms with Nicolaescu, who died in 2013). In Jude’s film, Pistruiatul’s conversation with Emi is about his helper and best friend, a dog named Calu (Horse). The canine actor who played Calu in the 1970s series was indeed a major in the Securitate, a fact that Romanians often joke about. Depending on your ideological inclinations, you might see this as a gesture of bureaucratic absurdism in a decaying Communist autarky; a cute publicity stunt, akin to American cities that elect dogs as mayors; or the ultimate proof that socialist television could not abide the bourgeois decadence of a Rin Tin Tin–like star and wanted to ensure its canine representative had a proper proletarian job.

The choice to cast Băloiu also echoes Jude’s casting of Dorina Lazăr and László Miske as versions of their characters from Lucian Bratu’s Angela merge mai departe (1981). Jude ironically highlights the propagandistic idealism of that older film by showing its protagonists aging, prosaically and realistically, and by repurposing Miske’s Hungarian-accented Romanian as a satire of Orbánite xenophobia.

 — George Carstocea

---

The Big Chill

Dear Editors,

I thoroughly enjoyed Will Tavlin’s evisceration of Netflix (“Casual Viewing,” Issue 49) and his pithy description of it as a platform that “doesn’t just survive when no one is watching — it thrives.” But I was surprised to see no mention of “Netflix and chill,” that once ubiquitous piece of internet slang!

To those who don’t know, “Netflix and chill” was a mid-2010s euphemism for sex, derived from the standard third-Tinder-date suggestion that one forgo expensive drinks at a bar for a relaxing night at his place. It reached peak saturation in 2015, when it inspired a spate of think pieces and bad starter pack memes, and was already tired by 2016 when Netflix attempted to capitalize on it with a “study” about its users’ romantic lives (“51 percent believe sharing a password means the relationship is serious”). The popularity of the phrase was an early indicator that “watching Netflix” wasn’t actually about watching anything, but about doing something else while Netflix was on in the background. Which is to say: we’ve now been talking about Netflix as a platform for not-watching for more than ten years.

More remarkable than the longevity of this open secret is how much that “something else” — that primary activity to which Netflix takes the back seat — has changed. In writing this letter I discovered a B.o.B song called “Netflix and Chill” from 2015. The lyrics go:

I was thinkin’ Netflix and chill, Netflix and chill
I got drink and smoke and dick that’s if you come through for real
I was thinkin’ Netflix and chill, Netflix and chill
I wake up and eat it up that’s a bed and breakfast for real, oh yeah

Yes, this was a real song, describing a real phenomenon! And within ten short years, it’s joined the pantheon of outdated tech songs like Britney’s “E-mail My Heart” and Trey Songz’s “LOL :-).” From our current vantage of what I hope is the peak of Netflix’s slop era, it’s hard to imagine fooling around to Netflix, let alone doing it on purpose, as a plan made in advance. Who would bang to Love Is Blind, even by accident? Instead, like that Hollywood Reporter article says, we’re folding our laundry. Casual sex has found a better backdrop than casual viewing.

 — Marcella Turner-Holt

---

Letters: A Letter

Dear Readers,

The issue you’re currently reading is n+1’s fiftieth, a major milestone. From our standpoint, the magazine is livelier than ever — at once a key node in American intellectual life and a magnet for writers here and abroad. But over the past few years, something has come to our attention: our letters section isn’t a magnet for very much at all!

This hasn’t always been the case. In n+1 Issue 2 (Winter 2005), this section contained eight entries, ranging from a quibble by Michael Walzer about a piece on (what else?) contemporary warfare to a complaint about the magazine’s elusiveness in West Coast bookstores. (The latter situation has since been addressed.) Issue 4 (Spring 2006) contained eleven letters, including an infamous dust-up between James Wood and Jonathan Franzen, and Issue 5 (Winter 2007) contained twelve, running the gamut — as all the best correspondence does — from considered to cranky. (One letter from Issue 5 was from an affable Italian magazine also called n+1: “We were very surprised in discovering some months ago another magazine with the same title we chose in April 2000,” the Italians wrote. “Why did you adopt such a title among the millions possible? What does it mean for you? We are interested in the answer, but not for copyright (we adopted a politics of copyleft).”)

By the numbers, n+1’s published letters peaked in Issue 11 (Spring 2011) with thirteen letters. In the mid-2010s (roughly Issues 20 through 30), most issues of the magazine contained fewer than five letters. Issue 32 contained just one. It’s a shame, because letters are among the most enjoyable parts of the magazine to read in retrospect. Like Acknowledgments sections in books, letters offer a discreet peek under the hood, a sense of the broader community beyond a publication’s editors and contributors. Who was reading this thing?

If one can permit some further self-historicizing on the occasion of this round-numbered issue, a tour through the letters sections in n+1’s back issues yields all kinds of treasures. Luminaries pop up here and there: Zadie Smith, Lewis Lapham, George Soros, and Janet Malcolm all wrote in at various points to quibble with their characterizations. (So did Eileen Myles: “I want to put an end to the idea that I had workshops in my living room, as Moira Donegan writes in her essay on Maggie Nelson. I don’t have a living room.”) Often, especially in early issues, letters addressed the materiality of the magazine: what fonts it used, whether or not one ought to pay for it, how it was packaged. (Issue 11 included a modest lament about the print issues’ arrival in plastic shrink-wrap: “I know this might be a screwy West Coast complaint. . . .”) The best letters approach a piece’s subject matter in some surprising or orthogonal way, like the Issue 23 (Spring 2015) letter from an n+1-reading cop who thoughtfully quoted Samuel Johnson in his response to Mark Greif’s “Seeing Through Police,” or the characteristically soulful memoir-style letter by Emily Witt, who responded to Astra Taylor’s “Unschooling” (Issue 13) with a 1,300-word reflection about her own Minneapolis public school and the “moral foundation” it provided.

We know from our subscription numbers and website analytics that more people are reading n+1 than ever. People often say nice things about n+1 pieces on Twitter and Bluesky, or (often in much greater detail) complain about them on their Substacks. So why the steep drop in old-fashioned correspondence?

One imagines a few plausible factors. Maybe it’s the case that younger readers — always a sizeable faction of n+1’s audience — associate email with school or work, and don’t think to sit down and compose, for fun, corrections or admonishments about, say, the misuse of Bourdieu in the latest Intellectual Situation (Issue 16, inspiring four letters in Issue 17). Maybe our email address ([email protected]!) is poorly publicized? Or maybe the causes of the dropoff go deeper, and everyday letter-writing habits have been foreclosed by the very platforms on which readers now share their reactions, where rapid-fire take-mongering is rewarded over comradely argument and disputation.

It’s probably that last thing. And still, we refuse to abide by the spirit of the times! We know you’re out there, and we know you have things to say. Was there something in this issue that really fired you up or let you down? Still mad about our packaging? Want to keep spreading the good word about copyleft? Annoyed by this letter? We look forward to hearing from you.

 — The Editors