By Jonathan Haynes
Given the miserable state of American life generally, here’s a thing that astonishes me. Two of the best homegrown popular artworks I can think of came out recently, within months of each other, are enormously popular, and are political (I beg you to please stay with me here): Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. You could read each as a defiant argument for the humanities. Of course it’s unclear whether the artists know they’re making that argument, or would say so if they knew.
Listen to how they explain how their new works came to be. Anderson (Esquire): “Vineland was always going to be too hard to adapt, so I stole the parts that spoke to me and just started running like a thief.” Rodrigo (NYT Popcast): “I was really inspired by this book Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux. She’s having this affair with this person and she’s not quite happy, she’s kind of going insane… I was really inspired by all of the ways in which love makes you insane and miserable.”
Wait. Back up. You guys are reading Ernaux and Pynchon? Like it’s nothing. Like it’s just something that you do. Meanwhile I’m sitting here listening to Pod Save America with a gun in my mouth.
After all, these are quintessential LA artists — Anderson out of the San Fernando Valley, Rodrigo originally out of Temecula — who actually get to make art in an industry town that has lost its industry, as devastatingly and, hopefully not but seemingly permanently, as any coal or steel town lost its in the seventies. Brilliant people with decades of experience at every tier of the entertainment business can’t get jobs at CVS or Target in 2026. (I have a friend like this, a superior researcher and writer with excellent pedagogical skills and a stunning depth of knowledge of movie history and culture. If you’re hiring, DM me and I’ll connect you.). But I’m not making the easy point that PTA and OR are privileged to make the art they want. Sure, they have one-percent lifestyles that buy them room to concentrate, instead of lives frantically lived between DoorDash and Lyft shifts. Nor am I saying I’m just glad they’re using that privilege well, though I obviously do think that. I’m not even really talking about them. I’m talking about the astonishing, vertiginous fact that there exists a massive popular audience for their work — an Invisible Republic, if you will — that consumes it not just avidly but ecstatically.
I’ve never actually cried to an Olivia Rodrigo song. I loved “drivers license” in 2021 because of its stylistic mastery; my initial reaction was exhilaration at the rare aesthetic achievement, and I started thinking about the implied connection to the canon of American rock and roll “car songs,” including the previous year’s “Murder Most Foul,” Bob Dylan’s masterpiece about the Kennedy assassination. Great bad trip car songs bracketed the pandemic. Dylan’s arrived in the first month of quarantine, when auto-mobility became a deadly thing. Her song came ten months later, amid the first vaccine roll-out, when it felt safer, but still low-key miserable, to drive your car places.
(Here, my ingenious sister-in-law, the novelist Megan Moores, would interrupt: there is plenty of textual evidence You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is about a romance with a guy with just such an emotional deficit who knows all the words to “Just Like Heaven.”)
Historically, crying to Olivia Rodrigo songs is the primary mode of engagement with her. There is a TikTok genre dedicated to getting deep in your feelings while listening to her songs. My favorite of those that I’ve seen is the guy with red eyes and dribbling snot blurting out the titles of the songs on the new album that turned him into a sniveling wreck: “Fuck you, ‘begged.’ Fuck you, ‘honeybee.’ Fuck you, ‘less.’ Fuck you, ‘cigarette smoke.’” Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is on record as having bawled her eyes out hearing “drivers license” for the first time. Right after the song dropped, there was an SNL sketch about gruff guys wearing flannel shirts getting into their feelings in a pool hall. The whole world was gutted by that song, allegedly. I loved it but experienced it…differently (Dylan, etc.).
But with “honeybee,” Olivia Rodrigo wrecked me too. She did it out of the blue with a couplet on a song that has gotten some flack for being out of the sonic universe of most of the album. It sounds like a Disney tune, a fair description meant as a criticism, to which I retort, one of the most celebrated American directors of all time just released (on the same day as Olivia’s new album) a blockbuster movie that “discloses” that his entire psychic universe — and the universe’s — is organized around “When You Wish Upon a Star.” John Lennon closed the turbulent White Album with a song that was explicitly based on Disney music. St. Vincent did a whole album based on that sound and called it Actor. Olivia Rodrigo, now occasional St. Vincent collaborator, began her professional life as a child actor in Disney shows (do your own research).
The couplet:
I hope I never see what your face looks like going
A face I swear that I could spend my whole life knowing
The purity of these lines is astonishing and lifts the album lyrically (whatever you think of Disney songs) into very rarified company. I think Lorenz Hart, at least the one played by Ethan Hawke in the new Linklater film, would have been proud to have written them. At the exact second I was admiring the craft, the eleven-year-old who sobbed at ET knocked me on my ass.
I hope I never see what your face looks like going
A face I swear that I could spend my whole life knowing
I am seeing a lot of faces going these days: my parents’ faces, the childish face of my now-teenage son, my own face.
The mortal irony of this lyric is that if she got her wish, she’d spend her whole life watching this person’s face going.
Fuck you, “honeybee.”
There is another TikTok from a listening party where Rodrigo plays the new album for fans hearing it cold, a live mic resting on her knee. As the chorus of “stupid song” climbs higher than you expect it to go, the room starts leaking into the audio — a gasp, “oh my god,” and then the screaming. Those people weren’t screaming before. The music made them do it. The screams are the flip side of the sobs, and sometimes done simultaneously. And it’s like Dylan — those verses in “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” in which the words just keep piling up and you never know when or where they’re going to land. Allen Ginsberg said everything in Dylan was “collected into that one column of air coming out of him and the vibration of the sound,” and that fits Olivia Rodrigo even better. And it also fits the climactic One Battle After Another car chase that Scott Ferguson and I worked through on the Money on the Left podcast, Superstructure.
Switched on Pop names the mechanism better than I can: spiraling. On their recent podcast dedicated to You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the musicologist Nate Sloan hears Rodrigo’s choruses as those coin funnels in children’s museums: you set a penny on its edge and it circles the bowl, faster and tighter as it falls, until it loses its orbit and drops through the hole at the center. The Rodrigo chorus does the same — the line winds and accelerates, as she spins out more and more words and lifts ever higher into her vocal register, until it lands on the title phrase and drops out of motion. “Kiss me and I might drop dead.” “I love you more than any stupid song could ever say.” The orbit, then the hole. And it is the same shape Anderson cuts in One Battle After Another: a VistaVision camera with a telephoto lens strapped to the nose of a Dodge Charger, the car running the undulating California hills, the pursuit going on and on over those swells until Chase Infiniti slams on the brakes. Two funnels, two dead stops. And in both cases, a mixed-race girl behind the wheel. Make of that coincidence what you will. I’ll leave that question open, as I imagine that Greil Marcus would.
But the invisible republic that I borrow Marcus’s title to identify is built precisely out of rhymes like that one — uncanny correspondences the culture throws up without being asked, which it falls to criticism only to notice, and to refuse to explain away.
It brings into unwitting communion beleaguered English teachers grading endless piles of AP exams, college students with gender studies degrees graduating into an American void, rock critic Substackers traveling hundreds of miles in The Paranoid Style band tee shirts to see Hamell on Trial in a beloved local music venue that is closing soon (where will we go?), movie-scene-deconstructing 35-year-old YouTubers who can’t get over the color timing in One Battle and issue their manifestos from their parents’ living rooms, lonely denizens of livvieshq on Instagram with “maggots for brains,” and work from home tech guys with moldy Ph.D.s who spend their days busily feeding their careers into AI tools.
This essay is already piled high with allusions, but I must add one more — George Miller’s masterpiece, Babe: Pig in the City. I’m thinking of the scene – it always makes me sob – when Babe saves the Bull Terrier from drowning and the Bull Terrier says “Whatever the pig says, goes” to all the other animals. And so all of these different species — who are, in some cases, even biologically, instinctively, constitutively driven to hate and fear each other, and in others, to blithely ignore each other — must share the jelly beans. Or everyone starves.
And then they become an army.
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