On Television

Welcome to hyperfix’d - a low-stakes publication where I share everything and anything I’m excited about, with anyone who will listen. Happy New Year! As my twenty-eighth birthday approaches, I turn to Ben and Matt,1 whose saturn return famously gave us Good Will Hunting, and fellow writer Akosua T. Adasi, whose musings on birthdays and bidding farewell to the naivety of young adulthood are inspiring me to lead with more intention and focus this year - recent city happenings include Porgy and Bess at the Met Opera, Ruth Asawa’s Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and Lovie at Night Moves 🪩 ✨ Without further ado, here’s new hyperfix’d.

Television, Lauren Rothery 📖

‘Some people, you meet them, and you imagine this movie together. The two of you make a kind of movie, and then it’s over. For other people, what you imagine isn’t a movie, because it keeps going. It’s television. If you can’t see how romantic television is, you’re blind.’

Ever since a friend of mine announced that it was, frankly, embarrassing not to read, I’ve taken it upon myself to recommit to the voracious levels of literary consumption my middle school self possessed. As my reading preferences tend to lean non-fiction, it’s rare for a novel to capture my attention as wholly as Lauren Rothery’s debut, Television, has.2 In Television, an aging A-list movie star lotteries up the entirety of his mega-million blockbuster salary on a member of the general viewing public before taking up with a much younger model. His non-famous best friend and past lover looks on impassively, while recollecting their twenty-odd years of unlikely connection, while an aspiring filmmaker, unknown to them both, labors over a script about best friends and lovers, longing for the financial freedom to make great art.

Television deftly weaves in and out of its non-linear timelines and bold narrations, not needing to revel much in its exposition for us to understand the palpable depth of the relationships at stake. Helen, a realist, and Verity, a sellout, are a reflection of what the other longs for, the contrition of being reduced to spectators in each other’s lives passively simmering between them. Television offers itself as a romantic response to Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, a highly stylized exploration of a new hollywood where very little has changed. Rothery’s novelization of the entertainment industry feels effortless, her capitalistic contemplations uncannily precise, and somehow never stilted in their currency.

While threesome tropes have taken to the cultural zeitgeist with recent behemoths like Marty Supreme and Challengers, the desire to have one’s cake and eat it too has long presented itself as an elusive and incessant means to greatness and self-preservation - look no further than Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues, and Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along.3 Rothery’s title somewhat cynically alludes to the dramaturgical, long-lived reverence of television, where endings feel far less finite than in literature or film. More often than not, television doesn’t know when to end, and the longer a story unfolds, the more likely its protagonist may find themselves running out of direction their life could take, some stories better left in an abiding ambiguity. Still, there’s a wistful hope at the end of Rothery’s Television - an opportunity to rewrite one’s own narrative, if maybe just the right screenplay comes along. Available in hardcover.

On Repeat 🎧 ✨

A few albums + singles I’ve been loving lately, for your hyperfixation consideration:

• Chains Of Love, Charli xcx

• Girl, Get Up, Doechii, SZA

• Porgy And Bess, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong

• Eusexua Afterglow, FKA twigs

• Ragtime, Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty

• Such A Funny Way, Sabrina Carpenter

- signing off with Hudson Williams in Armani and Connor Storrie in Saint Laurent at the Golden Globes. There is nothing more that I love in this world than girls getting their A Star Is Born moment! <3 Other memorable wins of the night include Teyana Taylor for One Battle After Another, Rose Byrne for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and Ejae for KPop Demon Hunters.