The Art That Knocked Me Over, Kept Me Upright, and Kept Me Going in 2020

And I am healthy, I am whole, but I have poor impulse control

And I want to go home

But I am home…

-The Mountain Goats, “Riches and Wonders”

—

I’m not going to write any ranked year-end lists this time. I’ve been growing more and more uncomfortable with the idea of ranked lists anyway. (Apparently I’m not alone.) I’ll have more coherent thoughts about my discomfort with the practice later on down the line, but if there’s one idea I’m coming out of 2020 with, it’s that art isn’t objective, nor a zero-sum game. It’s so much more cumulative and varied and interesting than the single-dimension conversations we’ve been having about it, and while I can’t yet fully articulate why it makes me so uncomfortable to spit out lists at the end of the year, I want to start leaning into something less structured and more idiosyncratic right now, while I’m still feeling my way through the idea.

So for now, I just want to talk about the art that’s kept me alive this year, in the fullest possible sense. This includes work that was released in 2020, but it also includes the things I’ve come across that came out last year or last decade or even longer ago than that, because art doesn’t come to us in a vacuum, and the stuff I came across that’s new only to me this year isn’t any less meaningful than whatever carries 2020’s time stamp. It’s all still art. In a long, strange, awful year, this is the stuff that knocked me back on my heels, and that picked me up when I was down, and that helped me remember that there’s so much more to the world than the things inside my apartment walls. I can’t wait to get back out there again, but for now, these works are a vital part of what’s keeping me going.

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My husband and I moved to my favorite neighborhood in Chicago in January, after a few years of living on the other side of the city. One of the best parts of moving back was living within walking distance of the University of Chicago’s Doc Films theater, which programs movie series each night of the week around a theme: Movies as Birth Control, a history of vampire movies, quarterly retrospectives. They also show new releases and, occasionally, advance screenings. My husband and I walked to Doc easily a dozen times before the university closed on-campus operations. We saw Parasite in a packed house the week after it won Best Picture (it’s great if you go in knowing nothing, but it’s even greater if you’ve seen it and most people around you haven’t). We saw the first fifteen minutes of Michael Mann’s Thief before the projector broke, and I spent my spare time of the next two weeks thinking only about the opening break-in scene: the rain, the Tangerine Dream score, the green street lights of a Chicago long obsolete, the cigarette smoke and the desperation. My husband has the Blu-ray, and we finally caught up with the movie after we finished moving in to our apartment. We were still getting used to the rumble of the trains just outside the back window of the new place. Even now, I still think about the lighting in Thief every time I see a Metra train go by. The commuter trains have green lights, too, illuminating cars just as empty and desperate as Michael Mann’s midnight Chicago streets from thirty-four years ago.

Our experience with Thief (starting at Doc, finishing at home) proved to be a harbinger of the year to come. First Cow was the last movie I saw in a theater this year, and its tone set the pace for the months that followed it: quiet, insular, a little cold, and full of love. I retreated into my head a little, thinking that we’d be hibernating until maybe June. I started listening to podcast back episodes. Days before Illinois went to a shelter-in-place order, I found myself driving south to help with a family emergency. We weren’t yet wearing masks, but we were washing our hands religiously, and my knuckles were red and cracking as I gripped the steering wheel. I drove alone, with the Yes Yes No segments of Reply All to keep me company, and as night fell over central Illinois I listened to the “Today’s the Day” episode, in which the hosts of wrap up early and just go outside. There’s an encounter with a wild animal in the middle of New York City that made me laugh so hard I cried, which was what I needed in order to keep me from crying in fear and grief. It was the hardest week I’ve ever had to go through, but now, nine months later, the only parts I can clearly remember are the ones that are colored by laughter and relief.

When I got home, we started to hibernate. I settled into a groove of things that I knew: my world had suddenly contracted, and I needed the comfort of the familiar. I picked up Babylon 5 for the third or fourth time, and vowed I’d finally finish it by the end of the year (I made it just under the wire, but my thoughts about the show are an essay for another time). I rewatched Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse three times in two weeks (and I’d do it again in a heartbeat; those colorful frames and stutter-stop animation are like candy that satisfies). I listened to Drab Majesty’s The Demonstration on repeat until I could hear it when I wasn’t listening to music, then picked up their more recent album Modern Mirror and did the same with that. Their gothic dreamwave sound gave my head a space that felt vast and mysterious in a time when my world had been reduced to about a thousand square feet. I rediscovered Talking Heads through Demme’s incredible concert documentary Stop Making Sense; the song “This Must Be the Place” became a quarantine anthem. I started playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild again, mostly as an excuse to go outside without actually going outside, and I finally beat the game. My husband and I dug in for the long haul. We started listening to every record we owned in alphabetical order. I took a detour into Phoebe Bridgers’ work, and as I listened to her album Punisher, I wondered along with her if we’d reached the end of the line.

Sometime in April or May, I lost the will to read. I tend to read things in bursts, saving articles on my web browser and speeding through a book or two every couple of weeks, but the long agonizing wait for the weather to get warmer left me with a pile of books I’d ordered when we first isolated and no desire to read them at all. It’s my own fault for thinking I’d be interested in heavy books about theory when what I really needed was an escape. As it is, the theory is still sitting mostly unread on my coffee table: Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, Catherine Keller’s Apocalypse Now and Then, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World. I’ll get back around to them someday. Instead, I sat on my couch and ate Oreos with Pop Rocks in the filling, and I tried my hand at writing fiction, and I learned that the only toehold I was able to keep on reading was in genre fiction, so I clung to it wherever I could.

The will came back with a vengeance in midsummer. I devoured Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth, and I howled out loud when I finally figured out its core mystery; I’ve reread the book once already this year, and I am still not entire sure how she managed to paint a deft portrait of trauma and survival that is both deeply unsettling and impossibly, impertinently funny. I shuddered when I read Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, and I felt thankful that my own domestic life looked nothing like her memoir, and I felt her explorations in genre reverberate in my head for months afterward. I fell in love with Lindsay Ellis’s Axiom’s End, which happens to be my all time favorite subgenre of science fiction: first contact stories with an emotional core that take linguistics seriously. Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous made my heart crack open, and James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work set the pieces on fire. And finally, John Darnielle’s books Universal Harvester and Wolf in White Van gave me newfound appreciation for the way words can be arranged on a page. His books, like his music, are moody tone poems that I like rolling around in my head.

We kept watching TV and movies, something we’ve always done, but something that felt more urgent this year, even as time spun out into a lazy flat disc. We watched the documentary City So Real over the course of a weekend, calling out street corners and neighborhoods we recognized, wincing over the still-sharp pain of watching our city’s scars be torn by fresh and ever-present old racism. I held on to stories with specific, personal stakes. A few from this year include Sound of Metal, Nomadland, Dick Johnson Is Dead, Sputnik, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and I’m Thinking of Ending Things. And I caught up with movies that transported me to other times and other points of view: Yojimbo, Andrei Rublev, The Haunting, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Heat, Persona, and An American Werewolf in London. It pays to make friends with Doc Films programmers—one such friend has been programming at-home series for a small group of us to watch. She’s shown us teen movie adaptations of classic lit, feminist revenge fantasies, and quarantine stories; I’ve been taking the group slowly through the Alien franchise. It’s been a good year to share art, even if it’s just from a distance.

I showed my husband Avatar: The Last Airbender, True Grit (2010), and Raising Arizona. He showed me Hot Rod, The Big Lebowski, and Fargo. The Coen brothers’ work, in all its good-natured and nasty absurdism, came to color our quarantine in a way that I can only describe as profound. Their work primed us to find the unexpected joy in things. Most of the art I prefer has a grim cast, but the things Josh and I shared this year overwhelmingly have a sense of humor to go with their bite. Palm Springs held up an uncomfortable mirror to my own state of mind, but it made me laugh just as much as it made me squirm. We tried and failed to ration out the TV version of What We Do in the Shadows, which provided a welcome escape for as long as we could make it last.

Some of the laughter’s been alone, too; on long work days, I picked up The Adventure Zone: Amnesty, a comedy RPG podcast that I maintain has some of the best character-based storytelling I’ve come across all year. It’s slightly more serious fare than the rest of the McElroy family’s work, but it still made me laugh out loud in the middle of long afternoons wading through spreadsheets. I have a theory that RPG podcasts are as popular as they are because people like discovering a character at the same time as the person playing that same character; when the people playing the game are really good at it, it makes me understand why people like improv—an art form that, as a Chicagoan, I tend to hold at a safe distance. (My coworker found out I liked The Adventure Zone and recommended the Rude Tales of Magic podcast to me, and about half a dozen episodes in, I can safely say my theory about improv still holds water.)

More than anything, I fell in love with good, grounded character work in storytelling. The culmination of this was finally getting into music by The Mountain Goats, whom I’d tried to like time and again but whose music never seemed to stick in my head until now. It had been a long afternoon in a long work week, and I found myself scrolling through their Spotify page after John Darnielle had tweeted his thanks to their audience for streaming a “nasty little song” of theirs some millions of times, and I landed on the album The Life of the World to Come and the tracklist made me catch my breath. I am deeply suspicious of most Christian music, but I couldn’t resist the idea of a concept album built around Bible verses. The second track (Psalms 40:2) won me over: “We inhaled / the frozen air / Lord send me a mechanic / if I’m not beyond repair.” By the time I hit the midpoint of the album, I heard a lyric (“Take to the hills / Run away / I’m going to get my perfect body back someday”) that made something inside me split open, and I felt like curling up into a ball under my desk. I traded in the dark gothic dreamwave of early quarantine for John Darnielle’s lyrics. I’ve been savoring them, though; I don’t want to burn through too many songs too quickly and miss something important. The I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats podcast proved helpful here; I love hearing intelligent people talk intelligently about the nature of art without spiraling down into navel-gazing. The podcast also introduced me to the pleasures of lo-fi music. I myself am feeling raw and unpolished these days, and half the tracks from All Hail West Texas probe at this feeling in a way I’ve never been able to articulate myself. I know the song “This Year” is important to many, especially in a year that’s been as terrible as 2020, but I think “Absolute Lithops Effect” is the song that’s carrying me over the threshold into 2021. It’s going to be tough, but with a little water, sunlight, and mercy to go along with the grief, I think we might make it.