Fresh Air - Remembering Architect Frank Gehry

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

Frank Gehry, whose steel and titanium curved structures seemed more like sculptures than buildings, died last week at age 96. His masterpiece was the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain. He spoke with Terry Gross in 2004 about finding his design voice.  Also, we remember Raul Malo, the lead singer and songwriter of The Mavericks, the country band with rock and roll roots. Justin Chang reviews ‘Wake Up Dead Man,’ the newest ‘Knives Out’ mystery movie starring Daniel Craig.  Follow Fresh Air on instagram @nprfreshair, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter for gems from the Fresh Air archive, staff recommendations, and a peek behind the scenes.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Fall in love with new music every Friday at All Songs Considered. That's NPR's Music Recommendation podcast. Fridays are where we spend our whole show sharing all the greatest new releases of the week. Make the hunt for new music a part of your life again. Tap into New Music Friday from All Songs Considered, available wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bean Cooley. Today, we're going to commemorate Frank Gary, who was one of the most famous and influential architects in the world. He died, last week at the age of 96. Frank Gary designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which architect Philip Johnson described as the most important building of our time. He also designed

the Disney Concert Hall in L.A. and Seattle's Experience Music Project, a music museum inspired by Jimmy Hendricks. Gary's work has been described as looking more like sculptures than buildings. When Scott Pelly of 60 Minutes profiled him in 2002, Pelley said, quote, Gary is to architecture what Einstein was to physics, what Picasso was to painting, what Jordan is to basketball, unquote. We're going to listen back to his 2004 interview with Terry Gross. At the time, his latest project was the music pavilion at Chicago's new 24 and a half acre Millennium Park. Like his Guggenheim Museum, the exterior of his music, pavilion has curving, billowing, floating shapes, shapes that actually are made of heavy, hard

steel. Terry asked him how he started working with those steel forms. I came into architecture at the height of modernism. After the war, decoration was a sin, purity, functionalism, all of that stuff. So it was an era of purity and Functionalism, a lot of glass and steel high-rises. Right, and it became very cold and inhuman and lifeless. Probably some people yearned for bringing decoration back, and they tried it for a while. I went a different route. I thought it was possible within the aesthetics of the day to find a way to express feeling

and humanistic qualities in a building. And I got interested in movement, the sense of movement, having a humanistic effect on an inert building. And there are examples in history of that. I've alluded, I've talked about it before, the Shiva dancing figures from India that a multi-armed dancer in bronze

and the best ones, when you look at them and turn away and look back, you're sure they moved. I was fascinated with that sense of movement. And since our culture, when I started making my work, was a moving environment, planes, trains, cars, whatever.

I talked about it and I thought about it, but I wasn't clear about it until I started experimenting quite accidentally with fish forms. Let me ask you about fish. I mean, fish, as we all know, have, they have spines, but they're so flexible and they can bend and curve. What was the parallel you saw between fish and what you wanted to? to do in your architecture? I was interested in movement, and I loved the drawings of Hiroshima and the Japanese woodcuts of carp, and I loved the quality of them, and I always thought they were very architectural. I also thought a fish as being on earth 300 million years before man,

and when my brethren started to regurgitate the past in the postmodern movement, as it was called, the past, they were regurgitating was anthropomorphic. And I said, well, if you're going to go back, you might as well go back 300 million years before man to fish. And, you know, it was sort of a sarcastic remark and kind of, I didn't even realize what I was talking about when I said it. And I started drawing, whenever I saw one of those postmodern buildings,

I would angrily sketch in my book pictures of fish. And I made a 35-foot wooden fish for the fashion house in Italy for an exhibit. And the 35-foot wooden fish. was very kitsch and very embarrassing-looking object. But when you stood beside it, it had the same character that the Shiva dancing figure, you turned her way and looked and you thought it moved. And so quite accidentally, I found myself into a language

that I was really looking to find. And like everything else, it happens by accident. So you were looking to find a way of making something very stable That expressed movement That expressed movement And you found it through the form of the fish And how does that connect to the forms that you've used in recent architecture? Well, I then made shapes

I started to say what could I Do to this wooden fish That would make it less embarrassing as a piece of kits And I cut off the tail and I cut off the head And I cut off the fins and I started to abstract it. And I made a shape, an abstracted, let's call it a fillet of fish,

that I used in a show, an exhibit I did at the Walker Art Museum. And it still had that quality of movement when you look back and looked around. And I made that out of a wooden frame and covered it with metal. And so that was the beginning of a language. And I took that language into the buildings. But, you know, in some of your buildings, including the new Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago

and the Disney Concert Hall and the Guggenheim Museum, those kinds of curving shapes, they're not made out of what, I mean, they're made out of steel or titanium. And how did you realize that that would be, how did you start working with titanium as a medium for something that would be really firm and stable, strong, but also moldable. Not moldable, I guess it's more, I don't know, are you molding it or are you, how are you getting the shape? Okay, here's how you do it. I do maybe 50 models. They look, sometimes they look like crumpled paper, so people think I crumple up paper and that's how they get there.

and I do and I analyze the shapes and as though they're structures with the computer to determine whether I'm within the budgetary constraints and over time I slowly evolved these shapes and

refine them and then you've got to decide what skin to put on it, the exterior surface a long time ago you know buildings are a wall and a roof, right? Mm-hmm.

And usually the wall is a different material than the roof. And I wanted, a long time ago, tried to make the buildings into one shape. I thought if I could make it one piece that I would have a lot of flexibility. So metal roofing is tradition for centuries. and there's a tradition and there's a detailing tradition and there's a

performance tradition so that you can rely on it not to leak not to get you in trouble if you follow the rules of it I started making the whole building I started to take the roofing material

down and make the walls part of the roofing material so it all was one material and the choices then were copper and then you have stainless steel and you're pretty much limited to a palette like that now copper when you put it on a building turns very dark for about 10 years and it's kind of morose so it's unless you pre-green it and when you pre-green it it looks kind of phony to me so

so I reject that and I started using stainless steel and when you go to Bilbao and you use stainless steel Bilbao is a city that has a lot of rain and a lot of gray skies and stainless steel in gray skies goes dead you'll see that the stainless steel in Millennium Park will will go quiet it when it's cloudy.

It won't shine. Because it's so reflective, so it can reflect the sky. Yeah, it reflects the sky. And if the sky is gray, it reflects the gray sky, and it goes gray. In Bilbao, that would have been difficult. And I found titanium by accident that in a gray sky it turns golden and shines. And so I used it in Bilbao. It's very expensive.

The reason I didn't use it here. it would have increased the budget by a lot of money. And since these shapes were not, it wasn't one whole building, they were mostly vertical, I think they'll be okay. I want to read you a list of descriptions of the Guggenheim Museum that you built in Bilbao, Spain, as written by journalists. a pile of improbably huge fish, fractured tinfoil flowers, a fantastic dream ship, all sails, full sweeping upstream,

Marilyn Monroe's wind-assisted skirts, an exploded artichoke heart, vast hulls of a ship that used to loom over a shipbuilding town, a prehistoric beast advancing with leg and foot toward the water, an explosion in a sardine factory, a monstrous flower, a fairy tale castle. What do you think? Yeah, it's fine.

You know, I try to describe it, but not in those kind of terms, no. You were born in Toronto, and for four years, you moved with your family to a small mining town in Canada called Timons. Timons, Ontario. Yeah, where your father worked for the distributor of slot machines and pinball machines. Boy, old pinball machines were so great. I mean, they were so, they were kind of like billboards or neon sides. They were like things that would light up and all kinds of like pictures and stuff. Did you love the design of those pinball machines?

They were always in the basement somewhere in my house. And I used to play with them and help them fix them and stuff like that. Yeah, I guess so. You know, when you go through a childhood like that, and it was a tough one because they were tough times for the family. And you tend to want to cut that part of your life off. So you don't think about it very much. Forget about it. But he was involved with the carnival business in a way and used to bring those kind of people home.

And I met, as a kid, I met a lot of them. There was a blind boxer, a black guy that used to babysit me, I remember. the good thing about it all was the mix of people that I was exposed to as a kid which has helped me in life I mean one thing I think you have not forgotten about

from that period you've said that you were exposed to a lot of anti-Semitism in this small mining town and did that contribute to the fact that you changed your name when you became an architect from Goldberg to Gary Well, it was a factor in allowing myself to be convinced by my ex-wife that it was the most important thing to do, I guess.

I didn't like the idea of changing it. Why was it so important to her? We were going to have our first child, and there had been a lot of anti-Semitism. I experienced, she experienced, and And she said she didn't want to bring a kid into the world to go through that. The name at that time was a caricature. There was a radio program called the Goldbergs. Right.

Sort of character, caricatured. And so, and I took a lot of heat for it. And, you know, I didn't want to do it. My father hated me for letting her do it. My mother went along with it. And after she did it, I was so embarrassed. Every time I met somebody, I told them. So, but you wouldn't go back to Goldberg now, too late, right?

Well, I'm married to a Panamanian girl, Bertha, who threatens to go back to, she'd like to be Bertha Goldberg, she says. But I doubt if we'll do it. Well, you've made the Gary name too famous. I think my kids, my son, Sam, flirts with it, Because he wants to be an architect, so he may just want to get rid of the Gary name for a while. Now, your first building that really got a lot of attention and that ended up being pretty controversial was your own home. You had moved into a small two-story cottage, is that a fair word for it?

And you kind of designed a new home around it. And if you look at it, like in a photograph, you have this two-story building, and then around that, You have, you have, there's sheet metal and plywood. Corrugated, metal. Corrugated metal. And then on the second story, there's like chain link fencing around it. And it almost, it almost looks more like an assemblage, you know, like an assemblage sculpture than architecture because there's so many, it's so mixed media. And like the textures all seem to be kind of conflicting.

And you're not really sure what is the purpose of the chain link fence on the second floor? Is there a purpose for it? Is it just there as like another material to contrast with the other materials? Well, there was a purpose when I did it. What was the purpose? The kid was two years old and his room had a door to the outside to the terrace. And the first day I was there, he started climbing down the wall. And so we put up the chain link fence with the idea of that it would be safe.

It'd be like a safety place for him to play on the upstairs outdoors of his room. And then once I started, committed myself to doing that, I then started to do things with the way it looked, I guess, and proportioned it. But it didn't work. It didn't work. Yeah, yeah. Well, I started doing that. But I had played with it because chain link is.

the most despised material ever. People hate it. And yet they use it so prevalently all over the world. And I'm trying to figure out how it could be so despised and yet so used and so much denial about it that people use it. And then they say, well, no, no, that's a tennis court. But it's a damn chain-link fence. So I decided to study. I liked that idea of things that people deny exist and tried to see if I could figure out a way to make it better or usable. Since they were going to use it anyway, maybe I could help them make it look prettier. And I started to explore the qualities of it that I thought were, as a material. It works like a scrim. If you look at it straight on, you look through it. If you look at it

on the angle, it closes up like a scrim does. And there are different weights of it and different coatings on it. And so I did a whole lot of research on it. By the time I got to the house, I was playing with it. I had the beginning of a language with it. Do you still live in that house? Yes. Still have the chain link fence on the second floor?

Yes. Even though there's no baby. He climbed over the chain link. It didn't work. He climbed over it. When he got a little older. No, right away. Really?

Over it and out. That's some athletic baby you had there. Yeah, he was something. So do you still, what are your gut feelings now about chain link? Well, I don't use it very much, even though I've figured out how to use it. People sometimes ask me to use it, and I refuse. But I've done some things with it. I'm not against it.

I just haven't been too interested in it. We are designing a new house, though. Oh, you're designing a new house for yourself? Yeah, from scratch. Where? In Venice, California. And I'm working on it now. What's the most important thing you want that you don't have now?

A garden. I bought a piece of land that'll give me a garden. That's nice. And will there be a kind of architectural design around the garden? Yeah, I'm doing a, it's a half-acre lot, and so I'm building several pavilions. Oh. More like the Philip Johnson House, New Canaan, where there's a living room, and then there's a separate room, a building for bedrooms and stuff. Huh.

So it'll be like two separate houses. Yeah. Why do you want that? I'd like to live in the garden. Okay. More outdoors. You can do that in L.A. Yeah, I guess so.

I guess so. Well, thank you so much. Congratulations on the completion of the Pritzker Pavilion, and thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you very much. Frank Gehry, speaking to Terry Gross in 2004. The world-famous architect died last week. He was 96 years old. After a break, we remember Raul Molo, lead singer of the Mavericks, who died this week at age 60. And Justin Chang reviews the newest movie in the Knives Out franchise, Wake Up Dead Man. I'm David B. and Cooley, and this is Fresh Air.

Last weekend, Raul Mallow and his veteran roots music group, The Mavericks, were scheduled to play at a tribute concert in their honor at the famed Riemann Auditorium in Nashville. The concert was held as planned, and among the other genre artists taking part were Steve Earle, Patty Griffin, and Jim Lauderdale. But Raul Molo himself wasn't there. Fighting cancer for the last few years, he won. watched from his hospital room last weekend as a special feat of the concert was streamed to his bedside. Raul Molo died Monday at age 60. Raul Molo was born in 1965, the son of Cuban

immigrants in Miami. In his early 20s, he became the guitarist and lead singer for the Mavericks, a genre-bending band that lived up to its rebellious name. They played punk clubs in Miami Beach, but with a mixture of music that embraced not only Latin rhythms, but roots music, rock and roll, and country. The Mavericks recorded such popular hits as Here Comes the Rain, and all you ever do is Bring Me Down. Their most recent studio album was last year's Moon and Stars, and their eclectic LPs over their four-decade career,

included an all-Spanish album and a tribute to Motley Crew. In 1995, the Mavericks released Music for All-Mexam. occasions, which included the hits All You Ever Do Is Bring Me Down and Here Comes the Rain, and the opening track, Foolish Heart. Terry Gross spoke with Raulamalo when that album was released. She began by playing the opening song, Foolish Heart. Foolish Heart. You made me we. Foolish Heart. Foolish Heart. I'm yours to keep.

You're the one that's still with me. Foolish heart. Don't set me free. Roll Mala, welcome to fresh air. Thank you. Some people, I imagine, might think it's incongruous for a Cuban American to be a country singer. Did it ever seem that way to you? Sure. It still does sometimes.

But, you know, I never gave it a second thought. I mean, it is what I love to do, and my parents, you know, certainly have supported me in doing so. And, you know, I grew up in a pretty musical household, so there was all kinds of music around, always. I mean, we listen to everything from Hank Williams to Celia Cruz to Sam Cook to Bobby Darren. It didn't matter. What was your neighborhood like when you were growing up? It was a good neighborhood.

You know, it's Cuban immigrant neighborhood, and not very rough, but hardworking people, blue-collar. people working every day for a living, you know, just trying to, you know, just trying to stay in the game. So what was the club scene like in Miami when you started playing in bands? It was, it was, it was pretty wild, actually. You know, there wasn't a lot of country music, to say the least. I think we were the only country band actually playing in these clubs.

They were original music clubs, which was the good thing. What do you mean original music clubs? Well, they were clubs that allowed the bands to come in and play their original music. Instead of, you know, instead of bands coming in and doing like four sets of covers, you know, all night. So at the time, you know, we were allowed to certain creative freedoms, you know, where you could basically go on stage and play whatever you wanted. And sometimes it led to interesting. interesting nights because we'd be right on after, you know, some punk rock or some heavy metal band.

And here we were playing, you know, I fall to pieces or crazy arms or something, you know, just something that sounded old and country. And, you know, they didn't quite know what to do with us, but they found themselves having a good time and digging it. And that was the whole point, you know, that we were trying to do, that we're still trying to do, is to bring people in that would normally turn away from country music. We want them to go, well, no, this is cool. I want to go buy a Patsy Kline record. I want to go buy a Hank Williams record and that kind of thing, you know.

And listen to the music. And, you know, it was an interesting time because it really allowed us to do whatever we want it. Now, all the country people who you've mentioned, you know, Hank Williams, Patsy Klein, they're among the early country performers when country was still not dressed up in a lot of studio accoutrements? Right. Is that, that's what you prefer? Well, you know, that's not only in country music. I mean, in pop music as well, you know, basically you have...

True enough, yeah. We have people now that, you know, you don't even have to be a good singer, you don't have to be a musician, you don't have to be anything. You know, you just got to be this little image with long hair and ripped up jeans and throw a flannel shirt and we'll make you sound good, kid. You know, don't worry about it. And that's the way it goes in all kinds of music. I mean, so, you know, there is something to be said about the old way of, like, just going in and actually having to sing. What a concept. And actually having to play your instruments, you know.

That's the problem I have with a lot of today's music. What year did you actually move to Nashville? I think I moved here. I'm trying to think. I'm going on three years that I've actually been living in Nashville. Did you go into Culture Shock at all? Was it a very different place in what you were used to? Well, it certainly is a different place.

I mean, you know, Miami and Nashville, there's a big difference. Number one, you know, you don't have the big Latin influence. that you do in Miami. So that's a big part of the change. But quite honestly, I've really enjoyed living here. And I call it home now, and I do like it a lot. And I do miss certain things from home, you know, the coffee, the people talking about Fidel, you know, the old men playing dominoes at the park.

talking about how, you know, they're going to do this and they're going to do that to Fidel. But so I do miss a lot of that, you know, but I'm gone all the time and I'm on the road, so you don't really have time to even think about it. You know, when you get home, if, you know, my parents just moved up to Nashville as well. Oh, really? Yeah, so that's a little bit of Miami moving up. you know, a bunch of Cubans moving up to Nashville. So I like that.

You know, that's fun now. Now, you're talking about the different influences that you've drawn on and all the different kinds of music you listen to. On your new CD music for all occasions, you do a song that I know from my past. This is something stupid that Frank Sinatra... I mean, the song isn't stupid. The song's called Something Stupid.

And Frank and Nancy Sinatra recorded it back in 1967. It rose to the top of the charts. You do a duet of this with Prisha Yearwood. What inspired you to record this? Oh, you know, it's, I don't know. It's just one of those songs that I grew up listening to, and we wanted to do a duet with Trisha. And, you know, we start going through all the different kinds of scenarios,

what kind of song can we do? And we didn't want to do the typical country music. duet, you know, we didn't want to do a George and Tammy Wynette song, we didn't want to do a John Cash and June Carter song, so we just, we found this one, and we gave it a shot, you know, we just thought, well, you know, we'll just, we'll see how it goes, we'll give it, you know, worse comes to worse, we'll have a laugh. And when we were done with it, we really liked it, and we kept it on the record.

I like it, too. Before a play, I just want to ask you one thing. Didn't you always think when Frank Sinatra and his daughter Nancy sang this together? I mean, don't the laws of God and man prohibit a father and daughter from singing a love duet like this? Yeah, but it's Frank Sinatra. The rules don't apply to him. Okay. He changes him, baby. So here's the Mavericks recording of something stupid from their new album, Music for All Occasions, with my guest singer Raul Molo. I know I'd stand in line until you think you have the time to spend an evening with me.

And if we go someplace to dance, I know that there's a chance you won't be leaving with me. And afterwards we drop into a quiet little place and have a drink or two. and then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like I love you I can see it in your eyes that you despise the same old lines you heard the night before and though it's just a line to you

for me it's true and never seemed so right before I practice every day to find some clever lines to say to make the meaning come true But then I think I'll wait until the evening gets late and I'm alone with you The time is right your perfume fills my head the stars get red and all the night's so blue And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like I love you. That's Raul Molo and Tricia Yearwood from the Maverick CD Music for All Occasions. Raul Mallow spoke with Terry Gross in 1995. More after a break, this is fresh air.

I know you had an earlier album, I believe, independently released, in which your songs were, some of them were more political. Is that right? Mm-hmm. Were you writing different kinds of songs then? No, I wasn't writing different kinds of songs. Well, I guess in a way I was. I mean, you know, part of that, that whole, the feelings behind all those songs is that, you know,

you basically have your whole life to write your first record. So these were songs that I had written, you know, know, in all my years there in Miami since I started writing songs, you know, and they were, they happened to touch, you know, political, social nerves, you know, and there's still songs that I play live, you know, we still sing these songs live, and they're important to us, but I realize now that, that at that point in time, you know, those, those, you know, those songs were written from a real personal point of view and to tell you truth I had a problem at the time wanting to put those songs on the record I

was outvoted by everybody else I don't regret that they're on the record and I don't regret the record that was made but I always felt that they were a little too personal you know the album was was very much about the life and times of the Mavericks in Miami and and I always always thought that, well, you know, the people around us know what these songs are about, but, you know, the rest of the world or the country won't know unless we got it and explain it to them and then, you know, we go out and play. And it's that whole scenario. But that's, you know, that's my take on it, you know.

Gee, could I ask you for an example of a lyric that was very personal? Sure. You know, and hell to paradise, the song about, my aunt leaving Cuba and coming over here was inspired by her but anybody who's been in Miami knows somebody who's been through this because we all came over from somewhere and the funny thing was when we were touring this song this this album I remember going to all parts of the country and and playing the song and explaining it there's a little part on the show where I explained the song and and I remember having all kinds of people, all walks of life, coming up to me after and going, wow, you know, I remember

older generations. I remember, you know, seeing the Statue of Liberty when I came over from Poland or from Czechoslovakia or from other parts of Europe, you know. And so it touched, it touched a lot of people's nerves, you know, in that, and it not only dealt with the Cuban immigrants, but I think it were all immigrants in this country. and we all came over from somewhere. So it was neat that it affected other people. And one of the lyrics is, this 90-mile trip has taken 30 years to make.

They tried to keep forever what was never theirs to take. I cursed and scratched the devil's hand as he stood in front of me. One last track from his big cigar, and he finally set me free. That's the last verse on the song from Hell to Paradise. Raul Molo, speaking to Terry Gross in 1995. The guitarist and lead singer of The Mavericks died this week.

He was 60 years old. Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews the newest film in the Knives Out Murder Mystery Series. This is fresh air. Our film critic, Justin Chang, recommends Wake Up Dead Man, the latest film in the Knives Out Murder Mystery series. Like its predecessors, it's written and directed by Ryan Johnson, and stars Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc. In the new film, Josh O'Connor plays a Catholic priest who teams up with Blanc to solve a whodunit in his parish.

Wake Up Dead Man also features Jeremy Renner, Carrie Washington, and Glenn Close, and is streaming now on Netflix. Here is Justin's review. When I was in my early teens, I was both a devout churchgoer and an avid reader of mysteries. One of my favorite writers was P.D. James, whose Anglican faith informed her fiction in subtle ways. For James, the plotting and solving of murder was a grisly yet profoundly moral undertaking. A detective story, she wrote, confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe, in which problems can be solved by rational means. The new movie Wake Up Dead Man, Ryan Johnson's latest whodunit, after Knives Out, and Glass Onion, is too funny and slyly over the top to feel like a Petey James story.

To my knowledge, James never incorporated body-dissolving acid, or the old poison beverage switcheroo trick. But in his own crafty way, Johnson is also using mystery conventions to open up a spiritual inquiry. The story takes place in and around a Catholic church at a small town in upstate New York, where a junior priest named Judd Duplentacy, played by a terrific Josh O'Connor, has been assigned to serve. Unfortunately, he's forced to work under Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, whom Josh Brolin plays as an angry fundamentalist firebrand, spewing hatred and contempt for gay people, single moms, and the entire half. hellbound secular world.

Although Wix's behavior has reduced church attendance, he's surrounded himself with a small group of loyalists. The most devoted is Martha, who keeps the church running. She's played by an amusingly nosy Glenn Close. There's also Carrie Washington as a sharp-witted attorney, and Jeremy Renner as a sad-sac alcoholic doctor. Kaley Spaney plays a famous cellist. who donates large sums to the church, in hopes that God will heal her chronic pain.

Two characters feel like sharp cynical jabs at American conservatism. One is a formerly liberal writer, played by Andrew Scott, who since drifted rightward. The other is a failed young Republican politician turned aspiring YouTuber, played by Daryl McCormick. With the best of intentions, Judd tries hard to break Wix's hold on his flock, and lead them into deeper faith in God. But he succeeds only in making an even greater enemy of the Monsignor. And when Wix is fatally stabbed in the church, and on Good Friday, no less, suspicion immediately falls on Judd. But Judd insists that he's innocent, and before long, the private investigator Benoit Blanc, played once again by Daniel Craig with a courtly

southern drawl comes knocking oh i'm sorry um are you open always you're right yeah uh-huh sorry uh-huh there's no easter mass oh i'm sorry i'm sorry you're welcome come in thank you Come in? Thank you. I don't want to take you away from your priestly duties now. Do I? Well, isn't this something? Right? It's hard to be in here and not feel his presence. Whose? Oh, God. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're not a Catholic. No, very much not, no. Blanc believes that Judd is innocent and enlists him to help Saul. the murder, which won't be easy. Wix is the victim of what is known in detective fiction as an impossible crime, one that seems to defy rational explanation. At one point, Blanc gives Judd and

the audience a crash course in the work of John Dixon Carr, the undisputed master of the impossible crime novel. Since Carr is another of my favorite writers, Johnson's next-level genre geekery almost had me levitating out of my seat. Wake Up Dead Man may not be the best movie I've seen this year, but in some ways, and I don't often say this kind of thing. It feels like the movie that was made most for me. That goes for its ideas as well as its genre trappings. Just as the first two Knives Out movies skewered racism, classism, billionaires, and tech bros, Wake Up Dead Man takes sharp aim at what it sees as the intolerance and insularity of the Christian right.

The political jabs aren't always subtle, and sometimes the petty, ill-tempered parishioners sound too alike in their strident bickering. But that just makes Father Judd all the more appealing a character, as he sets out to humbly yet radically love his community. Given how good O'Connor has been lately, in movies like Challengers and The Mastermind, it's saying a lot that this is one of his best performances, and one that elevates this snarky, satirical murder farce to a genuinely contemplative plane. Even as tensions mount, there's more than one victim, and possibly more than one killer.

The movie becomes a kind of theological debate, pitting Judd the earnest believer against Blanc the fierce skeptic. Who emerges the winner? Let's just say that with a puzzle as satisfyingly constructed as Wake Up Dead Man, God really is in the details. Justin Chang is a film critic at New Yorker magazine. He reviewed Wake Up Dead Man, now streaming on Netflix. On Monday show, Zadie Smith, her critically acclaimed best-selling first novel, White Teeth, was published when she was 25 in the year 2000.

Now she's 50 and is looking at life as a middle-aged woman and is thinking about the current generation gaps, including between millennials and Gen Xers. Hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube.com slash This is Fresh Air. We're rolling out new videos with in-studio guests, behind-the-scenes shorts, and iconic interviews from the archive. Let's close with some more music by the Mavericks. Walking down the boulevard, I don't need no lucky charm today, not today, not today, because I got rid of them in my feet.

I got my pockets full of dreams today, I just can't wait. I'm going to see my little girl before the sun goes down there, there's nothing left to do but to do the town today, what a day. I'm on a meteor at a station at a quarter to three, because she's finally coming back, coming back to me today. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Brigger is our managing producer. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shurrock.

Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman and Julian Hertzfeld. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldinato, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaliner, Susan Yucundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nespray. Hope Wilson is our consulting visual producer. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bean, Gould.