The New Yorker Radio Hour - Perfume Genius Talks with Jia Tolentino, and Anthony Lane Examines Outbreaks in the Movies

Episode Date: May 19, 2020

The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino has been following the artist Mike Hadreas, who records as Perfume Genius, since his first album; he has just released his fifth, “Set My Heart on Fire Immediately.��� He sings about his life and his sexuality in a style that evokes Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison—simultaneously vulnerable and swaggering. “That’s the music I’ve listened to my whole life . . . but felt like there was always not completely room for me in the music,” he tells Tolentino. Plus, Anthony Lane, having completed an extensive review of plague-theme cinema, shares three picks with David Remnick: a German silent picture nearly a century old, a gritty piece of realism from the golden age of Hollywood, and a more recent film that everybody’s been watching these last three months. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. David, hi. Anthony, this is your first Zoom call? This is my first Zoom call, and maybe my last, you know. E.B. had to help. So that's what children are for. Usually when I get a recommendation from one of our writers, it's something like, here's three good history books to take to the beach, or here's everything you need to know about SoundCloud rap. but when I called Anthony Lane the other day,

he just finished a binge of movies about plague and pandemics. How many films did you watch or watch part of together? I watched as many a gigolo, I suppose, about 20 or 30. And those are the ones which are basically about, disease comes into a lot of movies, but it doesn't hang around. But in fact, one of the first signs that the pandemic of pandemic movies was starting to happen was when everybody started to watch.

Contagent again, which is the Stephen Soderberg film. Now, do you rank Contagent pretty highly? I do. I mean, people now saying, oh, I liked it all along, whereas in fact they weren't that key in the first place. But now it's very hard to watch in a standback way because you just, you do tend to sit there. That's right. They do that. That's exactly what you do. Don't touch that credit card. Did this one make your top three or four? Yeah, yeah. So let's listen to a little excerpt. Yeah, this is, this is Contagent.

Hello? Hello? Mr. Barnes? Yes. This is Dr. Mears from the Centers for Disease Control. Hi. Hi. I believe you may have had contact with Beth M. Hoff last week. Yeah, I picked her up at the airport. What's this about?

How are you feeling today? Pretty crudy, to be honest. Head is pounding. I probably picked up some sort of bug. Where are you right now? I'm on the bus, heading to work. I'd like you to get off immediately. Wait, what? What's going on? Where?

Where? Where? Where? Where? Where's the bus, Aaron? Um, uh, Lake and Lindale. Can you tell me what's going on? Lake and Lindale. I really need you to get off that bus. Listen, it's quite possible you've come in contact with an infectious disease and that you're highly contagious. Do you understand?

I want you to get off now. I'm getting off. I'm getting off. No, no one would I do. Don't talk to anyone. Don't touch anyone. That's the most important thing. We'll send somebody to meet the bus.

Okay. I'm on my way to you now, Aaron. I'm on my way to you now, Aaron. Looks like he gave the disease to about 14 people on the way off the bus, coughing, gripping the pole. Yeah, the pole, it is very clever in a way that it's very good on surfaces, and it educates you into things that we do know now anyway. But that actually counts as one of the more relaxing parts of the film, I'd say, you know. But there is one of the strange things about the film is it's very scary, as well put together. But it can't resist the upswing at the end.

It can't resist the finding of the vaccine by the brilliant scientist and given what care the rest of the film has taken to try and reproduce the ways in which these things actually do pass and mutate. It doesn't pay much attention in the end to what a search for a vaccine is going to look like. It's an interesting case of the Hollywood ending needing to improve on life rather than reproduce every fear. Anthony, is there a second film that we should look at?

There's about 20 other films you'd like that, but I think there's one going back a long, long way. And this is Faust. Faust from 1926, directed by F.W. Mournau. And I was watching this thinking it would as it would be a historical, you know, curiosity. But Mournau, he was making it in the shadow of the recent Spanish flu. So people actually had been thinking about Plague, not long before. And Plague plays a major part in it. because one of the first things that happens is that Mephisto, who's taken a, you know, in a proper life and death struggle with archangels, has said, look, I can strike this town down. Let's see how we go. So what he does is to bring plague into a town. There's a wonderful famous image of Mephisto looming over this little German town. And the plague creeps in. We see the plague creeping in. And people starting to keel over from it. And what's interesting, of course is we see people having fun when the plague strikes.

You know, you see, as in all medieval films, people will do nothing but tumble and do acrobatics. But the idea of fun being cut short, people are always enjoying themselves when the plague strikes. It's therefore, there's a biblical sense of possible vengeance, that you have earned this by being irresponsible citizens. Faust is in some ways indebted to that, but it becomes, as always with Murnow,

as in Nosferatu, which he'd made a few years before, he's very interested in the way that darkness can creep upon us and also in the way that light can flare out and defeat it. Faust is, who's thought of as a wise man with skills and medical skills in the town, is asked to come and help, and then says that he can't help. The plague is insuperable.

He would need to have greater powers. Cue the powers. And so, in other words, the deal with the devil is made for quite altruistic reasons. He wants to be the sort of person. person who can cure a plague, which I think has a certain twist to it in the first place. If there is a movie, I think, which after having trawl through quite a fair number of these, if there is a movie that you should see, because it's in itself a good movie,

regardless of the circumstance which we find ourselves, that's Panic in the streets, the Alar Kazan movie for 1950. Herewith recorded is the story of a silent savage menace. how for three days a great American city found itself outside the United States of America. The events, incidents and emotions of the people who were a part of it who found time running out

as they looked into the face of mortal peril. So it's before streetcar and before on the waterfront. But he's already interested in working people and in their ordinary lives. And that matters a great deal in the film. So a guy comes ashore from a boat in New Orleans and he's shot and dies, but at the autopsy, they've realized,

in fact, he's had a pneumonic plague. It then becomes, you've got to find the baddie who shot him, not just because he's committed a crime, but because he may be infectious. And if the baddie, in this case, is played by Jack Palance, you're thinking, uh-oh. Jack Palance, he's basically like the virus just in a black shirt. He means sort of, you know, he looks like,

it doesn't look like he's uninfected in the first place. It's affected with being Jack Pallens. And so Richard Widmark, who's the doctor with the public health, comes in, finds out and starts to immediately take action. And the really interesting twist is the extreme skepticism that Widmark shows towards public information. Because in this case, if you publicize it, Jack Palin's going to skip down. So there's quite a lot about fresh freedom, interestingly, in this. And Whitmark is fantastic

because he's doing good in the film but he's not a do-gooder. And when he tells people off for kind of thinking in a, for thinking in too naive a way as he does, politicians and mayors and other than cops and forth, he does so with a kind of sneer and a snarl

as if he really means this. And he knows, because he knows what's at stake. So it stops the film from becoming sappy and I think we're going to see a clip. There's no reason for panic. Our only chance for full cooperation, Clint, is to inform the public. You agree?

No. The minute he prints it, the men we're looking for will leave the city. Now, I've told you once and I'll tell you again. Anyone leaving here with plague endangers the entire country? The entire country hasn't got it we have. A woman died here last night. This problem lies right here in our own community. Community?

What community? Do you think you're living in the Middle Ages? Oh, come now. Anybody that leaves here can be in any city in the country within ten hours. I could leave here today and I could be in Africa tomorrow. And whatever disease I had would go right with me. I know that. Then think of it when you're talking about communities.

We're all in a community, the same one. Wow, that is resonant. What is the upshot of watching all these films? In all honesty, I thought there were some wonderful films here, and so many little bits of films as well. But I also, because inevitably you sit there comparing it with the experience we're all going through in our various ways in the moment, you sit through thinking,

Or where's the lockdown bit? Where's the boredom bit? Where's the confusing public signals? Where's our experience of this? Where's the thing when you can't go across town and see your aged parent or the kids can't see their grandparents? There's almost none of that. And I can see why, because watching two hours people in a household not getting on with each other, you know. Who wants more of that at the moment? Yeah, you can get that at home. You can get that at home, exactly so. Let's let the real life movie end soon so we can watch these. Exactly. So we can all go out to an actual movie theater and get lots of health-giving sodas. And then, because, you know, James Bond has already been delayed once. It's supposed to be in November. And if it's any longer than that, I'm... We've suffered enough. I need James Bond in November come what may.

Anthony Lane, thank you so much. Thank you so much, too. Anthony Lane is the New Yorkers film critic. And you can read his essay, Our Fever for Plague Movies at New Yorker.com. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Gia Tolentino is a staff writer and the author of last year's bestseller, Trick Mirror.

Music is one of Gia's great passions, and for years she's been following Mike Hadrius, who records under the name Perfume Genius. He has an album just out called Set My Heart on Fire Immediately. Gia Tolentino talked with Perfume Genius recently. Yeah, I mean, first, like, how are you? What's the vibe like? I don't know. I got the hardest part is that I had envisioned this whole way that this was supposed to go

and even visually how I was going to feel, how I was going to be, you know, that required people and it required being right. Right. Right. And so now I'm trying to figure out of way, how can I, how can I have that same energy but just like with in my bedroom or something? Yeah. I've been a fan of perfume genius for a long time. I remember listening to his first album, which was called Learning.

Learning came out in 2010, and I think that one of the songs that people still talk about from it is the third track, Mr. Peterson. It's a really sad song. It's about a relationship with a teacher. And things get really dark, but the song almost, like it sounds like Seven Swans-era Sufion Stevens. It sounds like here comes the sun. sort of this really, really intimate, really carefully written bedroom pop. He sounded different than than he does now. His new album is called Set My Heart on Fire Immediately.

And it's a rock album. There are a couple of songs in it that seem to reference this 50s, Roy Orbis and Elvis kind of thing. There's kind of a 90s grunge sound. One of the 50s leaning songs, his whole life. And it begins with this sort of beautiful instrumental that then breaks into the vocals

where he's singing in this, like, almost swaggering way. Half of my own is doing. I kind of was inhabiting classic ideas and classic ways of, like, of singing. And that's not really satisfying, but there's also this, like, undercurrent of something else or something supernatural or, you know, kind of trying to meet those two things. Yeah, I mean, the sort of elvicey thing that you're doing a lot on the album.

Like, as you were writing for this album, as you were putting it together, what was, like, can you tell me more about feeling that vibe build, that sort of, those sort of like old Americana structures? I think a lot is just because that's music I've listened to my whole life. I still carry it around all the time, but felt like there was always... not completely room for me in the music. Yeah.

But inhabiting that specific like map and like the swagger of some of that singing and how they're like being really ultra vulnerable, but also like have this really intense command and like confident at the same time. It felt good. And it felt good to be singing about the things I care about. Don't you know you're queen? Perfume Genius's real name is Mike Hadrius. He is now 38, and the world of his music is a sort of implicitly and explicitly queer universe.

One of the songs that I think he's best known for is the song Queen off of the album Too Bright. At one point he sings, don't you know your queen, cracked, peeling, riddled with disease. It's this playful, like, sumptuous kind of rejoinder to these narratives about queer bodies. And it's this, like, lush, like incredibly strong taunt. It's amazing. Do you find it, like, classifying your music as queer art, do you find that reductive or do you find that, like, essential? It's essential to me.

But, and I have no problem with that at all, but people do. And I don't want that to be, like, a barrier to be being able to have other people listen to it. I mean, it's just the flip side to everything. Like I talk about the emotional content on my music all the time. And then I feel like sometimes that is like a sacrifice to how smart and technical and like actually deliberately I'm making this good music. You know what I mean? Yeah. But at the same time, the emotional content is honestly way more important to me.

And being a queer musician and that idea and talking about those things is way more important to me. Yeah. I was reading something in an interview where you were when you were talking about, um, kind of the freedom of not like kind of desiring the freedom of not needing to convince people of your right and the ability to do what you're already doing well i mean it's even like leaked into my daily life where i just want to grab like 10 people and like move to like a by a big ranch and live with them and just make our own world but then i'm leaving behind a bunch of people that don't have the luxury of leaving like you know and i need to stay and be helpful to the people that can't just

like, you know, go to the desert and roll around with me. Yeah. So I interviewed Hadrius actually before his last album, No Shape, came out. And I still remember this, you know, something he told me at that interview, which is that when he was a young teenager, the world gave him this idea of himself that he found really hard to shake. He was the only openly gay student at his high school. He was bullied pretty brutally.

He was beat up. And he dealt with a lot of trauma. And there's this really interesting way in which you can see his whole trajectory as a musician as a way of processing and getting free of this trauma. The first albums were very inward. They were cathartic. And all the pain was right there on the surface. And that's what it was. To Bright, the third album, you started to hear him become defiant.

And then his last album No Shape, which came out in 2017, it felt like this really profound breakthrough. And it began with this song called Other Side that contains this almost surprise moment of exaltation and joy in a way that hadn't really come into his music before. It was like watching a chandelier shatter when that moment kicks in. I feel like every record is kind of like aspirational. Like, I wanted to be really like more liberated and free, but it was, it was kind of aspirational that I wanted those feelings.

And so I was thinking about them and reaching for them. And now I kind of feel like that more. Yeah. In a couple of interviews, you talked about that, like, kind of 12-year-old idea of yourself being so kind of sticky that, like, for a while it prevented you from seeing either how you've changed or how the world's changed. how the world's changed, that, you know, this image was just sort of dominant. And I, and I was wondering if you still feel like that, if you still feel like those, do you feel all of those selves with you? Um, I think I feel all those phases less now than I used to.

And consciously, maybe. I think, I think I felt like I had to, to keep them all, like heavy on my mind to try to warm them up and soften them and make them feel better for a while. And I don't really feel like I need to do that anymore. Do you think about how you want your music to make people feel? Or do you just let that happen? I do. I mean, I want them, I mean, I guess they want them to feel like I do.

But because it's been so freeing for me to like, like, if I make a song where where two things that are competing are existing at the same time and I've been told my whole life that I have to just pick one but then I make like four minutes where they can be just next to each other I mean it doesn't fix anything

or solve anything but it just makes you feel less lonely for four minutes and that's what I hope can you give me an example of those two things that that would be I mean like the last song on this record is very sad it's probably to mean right now

the saddest song that I've ever made. But I mean, there's some sweetness and hope to it. I mean, the whole idea of that song is that all the stuff that I think I'm reaching for and trying to access and longing for and trying to go to, what if it's ultimately nothing? Like, I wasn't anywhere before this and I'm not going anywhere after, you know? But also in that song is that other people are with me. And if this is all there is, then, you know, I want to be with you.

There's just okayness to it not being okay. There's this sense throughout this whole new album of Hadrius sort of willing himself into an equilibrium in the midst of things that might feel chaotic or uncontrollable or sad. And, you know, there's a very obvious correspondence between that movement, that sort of movement and that sort of effort. the kind of experience of being alive right now. There is this sense, I think, for all of us that, you know, all we have is what's in front of us. All we have are the little moments of kindness that other people are extending to us and that we can extend to other people. And it's got to be enough. Staff writer Gia Tolentino, talking with Mike Hadrius, who records his perfume genius.

His new album is Set My Heart on Fire Immediately. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for joining us this week. See you next time. The Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avae Carrillo, Riannon-Corby, Cala Leah, David Krasnow,

Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Danny Bonner, Meng Fei-Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.