For nine months in 2018 I paid my rent by helping wealthy families get their children into college. Later, when the Felicity Huffman stuff emerged, the work seemed pretty benign by comparison: I always refused to outright ghostwrite anybody’s homework or admissions essays, and at no point did I Photoshop anyone’s face into a scene of athletic triumph, even though like everybody in my generation I was serviceable at Photoshop. But the work still felt bad and unredistributive, like I was pretty actively concentrating wealth in the hands of the few, and I’m happy not to do it anymore.
My official job, for which I charged handsomely, was to help kids write their college admissions essays and sometimes practice for the verbal parts of the SATs. I also usually ended up listening to stay-at-home Gen-X dads talk through their art practices or novels in progress—I was able to muster up a lot of enthusiasm about these things and suspect this quality was why I continued to get new work. Anytime I met a new family, I took careful notes afterward about how the parents talked to the kids, whether the siblings were mean to each other, and how well-adjusted or damaged everyone seemed by wealth. The work felt easiest to justify when I could imagine that it was in the name of social science, like I was taking a kind of census of the ruling class.
In May, after a pair of twins I’d helped get into Dartmouth left for a summer-long bike tour of Thailand, their dad, a hedge fund manager and sometime street photographer, gave me an email address for their neighbors. He said I’d really like them: the parents were extremely loaded and insecure about their son’s future, and could likely pay me enough to live on until September. Most of the families I’d been working for were leaving for the summer for Europe or upstate. I sent an effusive email.
“We forgot to sign him up for camp,” Howie’s mother told me apologetically as she showed me around their house, which was two stories and beautiful, full of high-dollar sunlight and weird lamps. Possibly they owned the whole brownstone. She and her husband were famous documentary filmmakers whose work I’d been superficially aware of for a long time, but even so, I wasn’t sure how they afforded the life they did, until a Google search a few days later revealed that one of them had recently been named a MacArthur Genius and the other was a descendent of the actual MacArthur family. It occurred to me that this was the most prestigious source of income I would likely ever receive, however indirect the trickle-down.
My task was to come by a few afternoons a week and help Howie, who was seventeen, write a slam-dunk college admissions essay. He wanted to go to film school and had, his mom whispered to me, very ambitious ideas about where he could get in: only the country’s top program would do. “But I don’t think his grades are quite up to it,” she said sadly. “That’s why we need to knock the essay out of the park.” (This was how all the parents I worked for talked.)
She led me upstairs to a second-story kitchen, which was painted a color that I thought was very brave. Howie sat at a big table in the center of the room, eating a stone fruit and looking at a laptop. He stood up to shake my hand congenially, which none of the kids I’d worked with had ever done. “Hello!” he said, chipper and a little formal. He nodded at his computer screen. “I’m watching Gossip Girl.” I looked: he was.
We spent our first few meetings just getting to know each other, shooting the shit in what I told his parents was an elaborate brainstorming process for which they paid me the clean and indefensible sum of $60 an hour. Howie was extraordinarily likeable and easygoing, with a self-assuredness I couldn’t remember any of the boys I knew in high school possessing. Possibly this was what extreme wealth was really good for: well-adjustment and charisma. He appeared untroubled by any of the problems that were supposedly plaguing the nation’s adolescent and postadolescent boys. He wasn’t, for example, at all interested in Reddit or right-wing memes. Jordan Peterson came up at one point and he’d never heard of him, and anyway didn’t seem alienated enough to ever be redpilled. He was very nice to his mother, at least when I was around, and he looked at his phone only a moderate amount.
Was this normal? I didn’t know very many members of Gen Z except for the handful I’d met through my job, most of whom had been surly and mean to me. But Howie just seemed affable all the way down. And he was so cute! He looked like a farm animal. His big thing was that—with apparently no hang-ups or self-consciousness about following in his parents’ footsteps—he loved movies and dreamed of working in Hollywood. He had, for six weeks the previous summer, worked as an unpaid intern in the Midtown post-production room of the movie Mamma Mia! 2: Here We Go Again, I think via a family connection. (The summer before that, he’d gone to some kind of summer institute with Sasha Obama.) Every day, he said, he’d watched the crew tinker with a single scene of the film—occasionally fetching coffee or printing out documents, but mostly just passively watching the post-production come together. The scene in question, which he estimated he’d seen probably six hundred times, comes at the movie’s end; the credits play over it. It’s a dance sequence set to “Super Trouper,” which was coincidentally my favorite ABBA song. “What happens in the scene?” I asked him. The movie wouldn’t be out until July.
“It’s hard to explain,” he said. “Haven’t you seen it six hundred times?” I said. He said it involved a meeting of history and the present and that I’d have to see it for myself, which I promised to do—I love history.
I asked what drew him to his parents’ profession. “I think a great movie can make the world a better place!” he said sincerely. Did he want to make obtuse, arthouse left-wing documentaries like his parents? (I’d just watched one of their films, a dreary cinema vérité situation about intermodal transportation, on Kanopy). No, he said—he dreamed of making commercial blockbusters—but good ones, which he said we were witnessing a dearth of in our contemporary moment. “I would never make a superhero movie, those are dumb,” he said. “But I want to do like a really good, warm, inventive rom-com. A space opera at some point. Mamma Mia!’s great, but musicals are a little ambitious—maybe later in my career.”
Was Howie gay, or just a poptimist? I found his devotion to the culture industry sweet but difficult to agree with. Lots of my friends had been hustling for years after graduating from prestigious colleges to get gigs like the one Howie had been pubescently handed, and most had given up and applied to law school or jobs in marketing. Meanwhile, at the same time that I was working with Howie, I also had a part-time job as a research assistant for a film theorist, who was publishing a collection of capsule reviews of the 100 worst-ranked films on Rotten Tomatoes. I also worked a few hours a week as a proofreader for a VC-funded glossy called VOM Magazine, which specialized in aggressive short-form content about fashion (its slogan was “a finger on the pulse and a finger down your throat”). Everyone I knew had at least two jobs, including the theorist, who wasn’t even a millennial. (She wrote copy for a trendy dental care startup on the side, in exchange for free teeth-whitening.) It all made me feel like culture, whatever that was, was basically threatening and untenable, and no place to locate political optimism.
Still, after spending a few afternoons at his beautiful house, I wished the best for Howie, whose relentless enthusiasm was quickly winning me over. He wanted, he told me, to write about his experience with the Mamma Mia! crew for his application essay, the prompt of which was “Why I Want to Go to Film School.” It would be due that autumn.
I liked this idea a lot. I’d seen the first Mamma Mia! movie years ago, and could already envision the essay: a kind of wide-eyed account of Howie as a conspicuously young creative-class laborer with an obscene degree of inherited cultural capital, doubling as a flashy demonstration of our combined analytic prowess would be sure to wow the admissions committee. Plus it could be an ideological vehicle for Howie’s utopian feelings about the filmic form, which—probably—indexed a spirit of Gen-Z optimism that I could spend the summer learning about and possibly assimilating into my own life!
At the same time, the essay’s 1000-word word limit was very short, and it occurred to me that I would have to have to stretch out the writing assignment in order for it to take all summer and thus pay my rent. I decided to construct a kind of general liberal-arts curriculum around Mamma Mia! 2: Here We Go Again—to use the movie as an empty slate on which to practice whatever introductory critical or hermeneutic modes I was in the mood for, and then to craft some writing assignments around those lessons. My idea was that some of those assignments could be used as starting points for the essay draft, which we’d think about in greater depth later.
We started out by screening the first movie one afternoon. In the Mediterranean spirit, I brought an olive pizza over to Howie’s parents’ house, and Howie found us a torrent.
The plot of Mamma Mia!, I reflected, watching it for the first time since its release in 2008, was ripe for generational analysis. The film’s structuring conflict is that Meryl Streep is worried that her millennial daughter Sophie, played by Amanda Seyfried, will be judgmental about how many men Streep slept with (three!) during the ABBA-soundtracked ’70s. Consequently, Streep withholds the possibility that all of them might be Sophie’s father. Sophie, who initially seems to be a kind of cryptoconservative hetero-normie intent on marrying her cheesy Eurobro boyfriend Sky (Sky, in turn, brings the film a flavor of real-estate drama by promising to make, basically, an Airbnb page for Meryl’s charming-but-dilapidated Greek hotel), eventually finds out and essentially says: OK boomer, your sexual history is totally fine. Instead of ditching her boyfriend and pursuing free love like her mom, Sophie gets married, with all three of her possible dads in attendance, and then she and Sky stay on Streep’s utopian island and put all their energy into building a website.
As the movie wound down I concocted a plan to discuss the ways in which it registered the relationship between the New Left logic of sexual liberation and the late-capitalist precarity that disabled it under Reagan’s long shadow, plus illustrated the internet-enabled export of real estate markets to far-flung places like this picturesque Greek isle. But I had a hard time articulating all of this to Howie, or possibly to myself. Instead we got stuck on what it meant that, at the end of the film, one of Sophie’s dads comes out as gay, which we theorized somewhat meaninglessly about for a few minutes until it was time for me to leave.
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Whether or not I was an especially good pedagogue, I really liked going to Howie’s house, where sometimes his parents would offer me espresso or fancy sandwiches. Plus, our work—which mostly involved sitting in an air-conditioned apartment and watching people sing power-pop anthems in the Mediterranean sunshine—was way more fun than anything else I was doing. Most days I would ride my bike between my apartment, Howie’s parents’ house, and the VOM offices, after which the evenings seemed kind of threateningly empty. I tried to fill them by reading articles about climate change and meeting up with friends at the park.
A bunch of my friends were leaving in August for grad school or various research fellowships. Somehow it felt like half my social group had gotten Fulbrights, which became a topic of intense scrutiny and competition. “Oh, teaching or research?” everyone kept asking each other, eyebrows raised nastily.
That was my question too. Was I imparting anything to Howie, or just passively observing the weird new life-rhythms of zoomers? Howie was by far the most contemporary person I’d ever met, and almost everything about him bewildered me. All his friends, he said, were bisexual; three of his teenage neighbors were in a queer throuple and had been profiled as a group by New York magazine. He had a roster of fussy, 21st-century food allergies, and he vaped! He was born on September 11, 2001. And he spent real money that he’d earned walking dogs within a made-up economy internal to a video game I’d never heard of. One afternoon, he showed me his three Instagram accounts, which functioned like a sort of turducken of decreasing wholesomeness—one for his relatives to follow, with images from track meets and prom; one for raunchy, inscrutable memes; and one with just a handful of followers, on which he posted hazy candids taken at parties.
Throughout June and July I refined our Mamma Mia! syllabus. We spent whole sessions watching single scenes, breaking down the camerawork and composition. We read queer-theory deep cuts about camp and the aesthetic gestures of the musical. I had him practice rhetorical analysis by performing close readings of ABBA lyrics, which was a mean trick because the Swedish pop group wrote all their songs by randomly consulting a rhyming dictionary and the lyrics thus signified very little. We rewatched clips of the film and talked about Greek austerity; we read Perry Anderson on Syriza. Analyzing the cast of local villagers and workers who compose the film’s literal Greek chorus, we spent what I calculated to be exactly $45 of my time discussing the labor theory of value.
I was making everything up as we went along and had no sense of whether any of it was taking hold. The movie offered a convenient program for discussing a lot of massive and depressing issues—homophobia, economic inequality, the racist decay of the EU. No injustice seemed to faze Howie, but I wasn’t sure if it was because he was failing to pay attention or because he was a member of a more evolved generation than mine. Everything I’d learned in college—Howie’s coveted goal—had reinforced in me a set of essentially pessimistic and suspicious interpretive methods, and I worried sometimes about eventually grinding Howie down, but he was so cheerful and cute that he seemed like a totally ahistorical person, pure contemporaneity. It was like he’d been born so long after the end of history that history failed to register on him entirely.
He was not an especially gifted writer, even compared to my other students. But he was engaged when we talked about movies, and after a few weeks I convinced him to show me some of the short films he and his friends had shot with his iPhone. They were pretty good. My favorite had the makings of a stoner buddy comedy, and was framed as a parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Howie said he’d wanted to find the perfect midpoint between Kubrick and his other favorite movie, Pineapple Express). He showed me the first scene, which was subtitled “The Dawn of Dank.” It depicted Howie along with a group of teenagers in a wood-paneled basement, wordlessly playing a video game. After a few minutes—cannily soundtracked by the same thudding Strauss that opens 2001—a slightly older kid walks down the basement steps holding a Juul, black and shimmery like Kubrick’s monolith. From below, the camera zooms in on the Juul-monolith as the character takes a huge rip, and then they all pass around the Juul and also a big bong that someone pulls out from behind the couch.
“The Juul is supposed to represent the arrival of a new epoch,” Howie told me, beaming. “It symbolizes that we smoke weed now.”
This confession felt like a big step toward my unspoken goal of turning our relationship into an honest and democratic dialogue between two comrades, rather than the transactional exchange it really was, and I asked him what would come after this scene. “We haven’t filmed it yet,” he said. “We want to cut to a scene set in the future, like in ten years. We have this plan to all reunite then, as adults, and finish making the movie when we’re all super successful and editing technology has gotten really good. Then it’ll tell the story of our lives as young professionals, but we’ll still smoke weed together.”
I wasn’t sure about this. Wasn’t Howie’s generation supposed to be uniquely attentive to the precarity of the future? Why was he so secure about the future of both his creative career and of the world-historical conditions that would enable him to have one? What if one of his actor-friends died in a school shooting, or committed one? What if movies stopped existing and all we had left was Amazon Prime Originals and TikTok?
But I told him his movie was a great idea and reminded me of Boyhood, a film I loved in an embarrassingly ardent and identificatory way. At this he rewound the video excitedly. “That’s Ethan Hawke’s nephew!” he said, pointing to the actor with the most expensive-looking haircut.
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All summer I stayed up late, stoned, watching Mamma Mia! 2 with more rigorous focus than I’d seemed able to apply toward anything else, possibly ever. I listened to ABBA Gold constantly, soundtracking my routinized days. Here we go again, I’d think, riding my bike into Howie’s neighborhood.
As the movie’s posters became ubiquitous over the course of the summer, I’d been trying to figure out from Howie’s context clues whether Mamma Mia! 2 was a sequel or a prequel. Finally, he told me that it was “a sequel and also a prequel.” I found this very funny and somehow appropriate to our relationship, within which I felt myself both regressing—sometimes I talked like a teenager around him; I couldn’t help myself—and also mimicking the authority of a much older person who I hadn’t yet become. Instead of telling Howie about all that I made him read the poet Dana Ward’s great essay “The Squeakquel,” in which Ward uses the second Alvin and the Chipmunks movie as a site from which to consider the nature of the commodity under historical time. I hoped it would kickstart his essay draft, which still barely existed despite my little assignments.
I finally saw Mamma Mia! 2 on an afternoon in late July. I used my MoviePass. MoviePass was this great, almost utopian thing that was apparently, according to the steady stream of business writing I read all summer, doomed to fail. I didn’t even use it that much—between Howie and my job at VOM, which was slowly pivoting to video, I felt like I basically had enough of the cinema in my life—but its inevitable failure bummed me out a lot, and it felt good to pay my monthly dues, like I was contributing to something before it collapsed.
It felt so good that I joined DSA as well, which seemed even more utopian and redistributive than MoviePass, and which also sent you a nice card to carry around in your wallet. But I didn’t use that card much, either. The couple I lived with were active members of working groups and were always talking about their inspiring new socialist friends, but I didn’t seem to share their knack for the slow boring. I guess it was clear to everyone that I mostly joined out of FOMO.
Was socialism also merely experiencing a brief effervescent moment before an inevitable crash? That was how lots of things had been feeling all summer: optimistic, but in an obviously and tragically short-lived way. There was poor Howie, whose oversized ambitions for the near and distant future were tempered by the fact that he was in all likelihood not going to singlehandedly revive the form of the midmarket blockbuster. He probably wouldn’t even get into film school! And then Cynthia Nixon was running for governor, which was a very nice idea that was clearly never going to work. (When, in early September, she did indeed lose the primary, it made me want to sleep for three days like Carrie in the Sex and the City movie, another timeless classic from 2008.)
Everything felt, actually, remarkably similar to how things had appeared to me in 2008—like a sequel to that moment of Obama-inaugurated, recession-modulated optimism. Or maybe a prequel, like we were somehow, in our moment of inflation and supposedly high employment, prior to that historical moment, with its reoccurrence (here we go again) just around the corner. I’d been younger than Howie in 2008, the year the first Mamma Mia! movie had come out, and a vague range of cultural forces, like anthemic indie rock and the new president, seemed to promise a kind of cosmopolitan liberal future that I was eager to take my place in. Now, having any kind of desire at all about the future felt naive and adolescent, and I was skeptical about Howie’s excitement about the promises of college. I thought a lot about quitting my job. I would have, if I hadn’t liked Howie so much.
By the time I went to see Mamma Mia! 2: Here We Go Again, in which Howie’s name appears in very small print toward the end of the credits, I had an unsubstantiated hunch that the movie might in some way answer to the uneasy feeling of historical repetition that I’d been sensing. A prequel and also a sequel! That seemed just right to me.
The viewer learns early on in Mamma Mia! 2 that the original movie’s charismatic star and anchoring force, Meryl Streep, has tragically died. This seemed, I thought as I settled into my seat, like a dark premise for a jukebox musical, and it was true that the whole film felt muted and defeatist compared to the jubilant 2008 original. The mise-en-scene is a little darker; the ABBA songs are all second-rate because all the good ones got used up in the first film. There’s a sequence, starring Sky the real estate–savvy husband, set in a sleek new tower in New York’s financial district. At one point some of the background characters talk about how austerity has devastated the Greek fishing industry. This was what all those sunny, utopian subway posters had been advertising?
The basic structure of Mamma Mia! 2, following the reveal about Streep’s death, is to cut scenes from Sophie’s life in the present—puttering around the Greek isle, planning a memorial service for her mom, realizing she’s pregnant—with parallel scenes from her mother’s youth in 1979: travelling through Europe, having flings with Sophie’s potential fathers, also realizing she’s pregnant. The conceit, of course, is that their lives look very similar, forty years apart—that history, inherited, repeats itself. But, I thought, stoned and distressed, the repetition was all wrong! The scenes set in the late ’70s were so fun, with their random sex and disco heels. Everything set in 2018 just looked like 2018, dour and financialized.
The credit sequence, though—Howie’s contribution to the film—is where things get very strange, and where Mamma Mia! 2 belatedly announces itself as a true avant-garde project. Breaking from the outdoor mise-en-scene of the rest of the movie, the scene opens on a dramatically spot-lit stage. A figure emerges, stepping into a sea of writhing bodies. It’s Cher. With lights trained on a face from which the long arc of history has been Botoxed away, she begins to sing “Super Trouper,” an iconic anthem about how you can be a pop star with an amazing life but still be depressed. Suddenly the actress who plays young Meryl, along with her girl gang from the 1970s, appears, and joins the performance. But then Amanda Seyfried and her husband are there too? And dead Meryl Streep? Soon every character from the 1970s timeline is dancing with their aged-up 2018 avatar, history and contemporaneity stomping along together to the song’s militaristic time signature. Death is fake, and time has collapsed! Ghosts of 1979—the year of the Volcker shock and of the inaugurations of Saddam Hussein and Margaret Thatcher—intrude on the present and they all do karaoke together, singing exuberantly, psychotically, about the emotional power of spectacle. It redeemed the whole movie, I thought.
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When I saw Howie the next day I told him, with great excitement, about the idea I’d had for his essay while watching Mamma Mia! 2: he should structure his admissions essay so that it mirrored the insane, hallucinatory narrative architecture of the film’s final minutes, a triumphant meeting of form and content would somehow bridge a hybrid analysis of Mamma Mia! 2 as a utopian, almost Bergsonian deconstruction of historical time with an account of Howie’s own banal involvement with the film, which itself—in the way all boring underpaid labor stretches time into new shapes—would be described as a kind of temporal experiment. He should, I told him, get very stoned and write out a vision of himself in the future, as a filmmaker, or at least as a film student—and then make that character interact with his current self, like at the end of the movie. “And!”—I added, pleased with myself—“you can incorporate some of the language and tools we’ve been working with this summer.”
Howie was agreeable to this, because Howie was agreeable to everything. He promised to write something up while he was away. Later that week, his mom had reminded me when I’d arrived that day, Howie and his parents were leaving for a two-week trip to the Mediterranean. I’d never been to Europe or anywhere else, and felt a twinge of real envy, for the first time, toward Howie’s wealth. After all our lessons, here he was just literally going to Greece! And I would just spend twelve long, stretchy days in my hot apartment. This setup seemed very unfair. Sourly, I told Howie to please not forget about his assignment, no matter what he was doing and seeing on his fabulous vacation.
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He did not forget about his assignment, which he handed to me the next time I saw him, typed up and freshly printed. I was surprised, glancing at the essay, to see that it was not about Mamma Mia! at all. It was not even about Mamma Mia! 2: Here We Go Again. It was about Howie’s own two weeks in Greece, which had apparently not been a vacation whatsoever but a work trip, part of an experimental participatory documentary filmmaking project on Lesbos. Howie wouldn’t tell me anything else about the project, no matter how much I asked, but I gathered that it involved documenting the atrocities faced by refugees. “I can’t believe the depths of suffering I saw,” Howie said, a little stiffly.
I started reading. The thing about Howie’s essay was this: it was wildly, extravagantly good. I don’t know if his parents helped him write it; I guess it doesn’t matter if they did. But the 800-word piece of writing he showed me was beautiful and clear, a descriptive, empathetic, pared-down account of a series of conversations he had had with people who had lost their claims to statehood. I haven’t gotten back in touch with Howie to get his permission to reprint it here, but I will say that it found Howie working in a new and unfamiliar mode, one I was truly moved by. Unlike the mean, hard, grandiose assignments I had given him all summer about cinema as time-image or whatever, it was not at all theoretically ambitious; it didn’t attempt to interpret the idea of abjection, or witness, or even history. It was not showy or exuberant or formally avant-garde. It was simple and declarative, made economical use of scene-setting and characterization, and had sentences of alternating lengths. It ended with Howie asserting, frankly and confidently, that he wanted to become a filmmaker so that he could continue doing work like the good work he did on Lesbos. It sang.
I felt insane. “This is solid,” I said, after I’d read it twice.
“I didn’t follow your prompt,” Howie said.
“No,” I agreed, comprehending all at once that the things that had felt important to me all summer were not the things that had felt important to Howie.
“It wasn’t a very helpful prompt,” Howie said. Did he need to say that? Something had inverted itself very quickly. “I wanted to think about something actually, like, meaningful.”
When it became clear that I had no feedback to give, Howie did not quite fire me, but he and his parents made it apparent that I was free to do other things with my time. I spent a while feeling a little bereft, alarmed by the emptiness of my days. After a couple of weeks, around the time Howie was starting twelfth grade, my roommate convinced me to come to a meeting of a direct action group she was working with. Lots of people brought their children to the meetings, she said, and they always needed childcare. I stole an expensive video camera from the VOM offices. My idea was, I’d get to know the kids for a while and then we could try, together, to make a movie.
