Hannah Gadsby / Godzilla

I’ve been meaning to revive this newsletter, with or without pasta, and my friend Patrick noted tonight that I had an experience that, almost certainly, no other human being has ever had: I watched Hannah Gadsby perform live, followed immediately by watching Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

The movie was only just released tonight, and tonight is when Hannah Gadsby was in Austin. It’s possible, I suppose, that someone else who was in the theater also went to a late-night showing of Godzilla, but I doubt it—the show started late, and ran long, so you would really have to be determined to make a double feature of it.

I don’t have a lot to say about Godzilla, which is mostly bad—but which was well-timed, since it was a very stimulus-heavy way to let my brain do something while I processed the Hannah Gadsby show, which I will not spoil in any real way in this email.

But I do want to talk about it, because it is a lot. I liked Nanette, the Netflix special that made her suddenly famous, but it was more an admiration for her honesty, creativity, and craft than a deep and personal connection to the material. Which makes sense, of course—Nanette was not for people like me, except to ask us to question things about how we move through the world in ways that, because of the community I’ve been fortunate enough to have around me for a lot of years, I’ve grown accustomed to questioning.

But Douglas (the new show, it’s called Douglas) spoke to me on a different level, and it’s one I’ve only just begun engaging with at all, so the timing was—lucky, I guess? But also, it was A Lot, which made the two hours of incoherent chaos between Godzilla and King Ghidorah a welcome break.

Douglas is mostly jokes, but it’s also mostly about the toll it takes to exist in a world that was built by people who take for granted that everyone who moves through it is like them. At other points in my life—even quite recent points—I might have admired Douglas with the same distance that I did Nanette, but I’ve been in therapy, which is great and which I highly recommend, and I’ve been engaging with stuff that I had previously shoved in a corner for most of my life. I’m not gonna get into all of that in what you presumably clicked on expecting it would be an Olive Garden newsletter, but I’ll just say this: I connected with Douglas because, while the world is very much built for people who possess my social attributes, it is not particularly kind to people who possess my nervous system or trauma profile, and those are ideas that it is not always easy to hold at the same time. And because Gadsby spent two-plus hours tonight talking about those things in ways that were extremely inclusive (minus, you know, some pointed-but-fair jokes about Americans that I suspect she leaves out in other parts of the world), I engaged with the material in a really profound way that, while not entirely pleasant, was the sort of thing that helps you recognize what art is for, and that was a really powerful thing. (Godzilla didn’t do that, so much.)

I said no spoilers, and I meant it, but there is one thing that she talked about that I’m going to bring up, which is the Renaissance-era idea artists are all Special Geniuses. She’s an art historian, as Nanette goes into, and she seems to get a great thrill out of challenging canonical ideas about art during her performances, which I also relate to, as someone who likes putting my fingers on fancy things and drawing funny mustaches on pictures of important people. And she talked about the extent to which that idea is bullshit—that the role of artist, which has been cast as to interpret and project a world, and that of the audience, which has been seen as to receive it, is actually much more complex and nuanced than we ever seem to allow it to be. Being in the audience is a creative project, too, and experiencing someone else’s story is an interaction with them that requires work and energy and effort and talent and creativity and heart and intention.

Which is why I picked tonight to revive this newsletter, I think, because I wanted to acknowledge that, and write it down. (And if learning that Hannah Gadsby talks about art history in her new performance ruins anything for you, I do apologize.) It really is all a lot to take in, someone else’s experience of navigating a world that was set up to be difficult for them just because the people who set it up didn’t bother to think that anyone else would be using it—but when you engage with that, you make the world a little friendlier and easier to get through for other people who diverge from the ones who named all of the things in it, and that seemed like a thing that was worth taking away from someone else’s art tonight.