"And let me just put it to you with startling bluntness is President Trump Gatsby or Tom?"

"And I'll let you kind of imagine why I've even posed that question — because it's infused with new money, anti-establishmentism, and a motto — Make America Great Again — that to my mind borrows from — whether it means to or not — one of the great lines in Gatsby, which is when Gatsby says to Nick, 'You can't repeat the past? Of course you can.' I mean, what is MAGA other than a pleading to reclaim a past that's so central to this book?"/"It's a very interesting question of, I mean, with Trump, is this old money or new money? What elite does he or doesn't he belong to? And certainly his own mythology is that he's been, and I think our colleagues have written a lot about this, about his sense of outsiderness, his sense of the Manhattan elite, the Manhattan establishment, the fancy know-it-alls and eggheads who he was, you know, desperate for a long time to join, who always sort of rebuffed him, or went to his parties, but didn't necessarily accept him into their midst...."

That happens almost half an hour into "100 Years of ‘The Great Gatsby,'" today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast. That's Michael Barbaro asking the question and then A.O. Scott answering. 

It's mostly a solid discussion of the novel and not political... though there's also this near the end:

"Some people will say, best show an empty glass: Someone will fill it..."

Wrote Philip Larkin, in a poem called "Party Politics," analyzed by A.O. Scott, in "A Poem About Waiting, and Wishing You Had a Drink/Our critic A.O. Scott walks you through a poem that speaks to his mood right now. It’s called 'Party Politics,' but it’s not about those parties, or those politics." (NYT)(gift link, because there's some great analysis and images too, including a photo of Philip Larkin sitting on the floor and dumping a Pee Wee Russell LP out of its album cover).

The party seems to be a cocktail party, but you can see that he's talking about human interaction more generally. If you want those in control of the flow of liquor to fill up your glass, are you better off drinking the whole thing and standing there with an empty glass, or better off holding onto it in the half full — half empty! — condition?

By the way, I recommend not reading past the photograph of Philip on the floor with that record he wants to play for us. There are 4 more paragraphs, and they raise a separate topic — whether Larkin was "canceled" and is supposed to stay canceled — and it's an insulting distraction from what is otherwise a delightful essay.

Here — here's Pee Wee:

"[T]he behavior of these social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies."

"Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity and mob behavior, and its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life."

Writes the NYT film critic, A.O. Scott, in "And Now Let’s Review … A.O. Scott conducts his own exit interview as he moves to a new post after more than two decades of reviewing films."

"Since I have to wrap up soon, do you have any strategies for ending an interview well?"

Michael Schulman asks Dick Cavett at the end of "Dick Cavett Takes a Few Questions The legendary television host talks about his friendships with Muhammad Ali and Groucho Marx, interviewing Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis, and finding a new audience on YouTube" (The New Yorker). 

Cavett answers:

Often I would do it very badly. I would rush it, hadn’t saved enough time. I almost called a guest by the wrong name but caught it, thank God, or whatever gods may be. What’s that from? “I thank whatever gods may be.” It’s a poem that’s often recommended as good religious thinking. “I thank whatever gods may be for my indomitable soul”? Hmm.

"Hollywood doesn't appear progressive to me. What I see is unrestrained capitalism topped with a thin layer of virtue signaling."

Says the top-rated comment on "Are the Movies Liberal? Everyone knows Hollywood is progressive. But look at the films it churns out. They tell another story" by A.O. Scott in the NYT. 

I only skimmed the article. It's a ridiculous straw man. "Everyone knows"... but what "everyone knows" is actually not true, as the film critic explains citing examples of various recent films that I have no interest in seeing. I didn't "know" it, didn't think it, and would prefer to read an article about the things the film critics "know" that just are not true.

"'Hillbilly Elegy,' published in June of 2016, attracted an extra measure of attention (and controversy) after Donald Trump’s election."

"It seemed to offer a firsthand report, both personal and analytical, on the condition of the white American working class/ And while the book [by J.D. Vance] didn’t really explain the election... it did venture a hypothesis about how that family and others like it encountered such persistent household dysfunction and economic distress.... He suggests that the same traits that make his people distinctive — suspicion of outsiders, resistance to authority, devotion to kin, eagerness to fight — make it hard for them to thrive in modern American society.... The film is a chronicle of addiction entwined with a bootstrapper’s tale.... The Vances are presented as a representative family, but what exactly do they represent? A class? A culture? A place? A history? The louder they yell, the less you understand — about them or the world they inhabit. The strange stew of melodrama, didacticism and inadvertent camp that [director Ron 'Opie' Howard] serves up isn’t the result of a failure of taste or sensitivity. If anything, 'Hillbilly Elegy' is too tasteful, too sensitive for its own good, studiously unwilling to be as wild or provocative as its characters. Such tact is in keeping with the moral of its story, which is that success in America means growing up to be less interesting than your parents or grandparents."

From A.O. Scott's review — in the NYT — of the movie "Hillbilly Elegy." The movie has a 26% rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

I watched the trailer and suffered tremendously from the music, which is emphatically not hillbilly music:

I mean, the point seems to be that other people are unsophisticated, and that swelling, heavy-handed soundtrack is as unsophisticated as you can possibly get. And how about that ham acting? I don't know about the real-life people Vance wrote about in his best-seller, but these Hollywood folk are awfully backward!

And I tried to read his book. I meant to get back to it, but I never got past page 40:

Destroying store merchandise and threatening a sales clerk were normal to Mamaw and Papaw: That’s what Scots-Irish Appalachians do when people mess with your kid. “What I mean is that they were united, they were getting along with each other,” Uncle Jimmy conceded when I later pressed him. “But yeah, like everyone else in our family, they could go from zero to murderous in a fucking heartbeat.” 

That’s what Scots-Irish Appalachians do... ? I can get by without getting that sort of thing hammered into my head a thousand times.