When Orson Welles directed, wrote, and starred in “The Lady from Shanghai” (which I discuss in the clip above), he was thirty-two years old, and the character he played, Michael O’Hara, an Irish seaman and aspiring writer, played no older. Yet the movie and his performance have the retrospective air of rueful age. The key theme in Welles’s work is regret, lost opportunities, near-misses, fearsome or poignant falls, lives turned into ruins of past glories and shadows of earlier strength. He accomplished so much so soon (making “Citizen Kane” at age twenty-five, by which time he was already, thanks to radio, an international sensation), yet he seems to have spent his headlong rush of a life looking back to the fork in the path and bemoaning the road not taken. Whatever it took to clash on the world stage with the monsters of media, he paid for, with a Mephistophelian price. Welles’s hyperbolic yet wistful voice-over in “The Lady from Shanghai” leaves a hint that its protagonist will go on to write his book; it doesn’t suggest that he’ll end up very happy. On the radio the other day, talking with the critic David Thomson and the host Kerri Miller, of Minnesota NPR, about “Citizen Kane,” I offered the reason for its enduring, and likely invulnerable, pre-eminence in the history of the cinema: it’s the movie where the director came out from behind the curtain and made himself the ubiquitous master of ceremonies for the unfolding action. It turned out, for Welles, to be a position of terrible vulnerability, and “The Lady from Shanghai” suggests, among other things, just how badly he had already been burned during his time in the sun.
Goings On
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week, online, in N.Y.C., and beyond. Paid subscribers also receive book picks.
Dept. of Medicine
How to Die in Good Health
The average American celebrates just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five. Peter Attia argues that it doesn’t have to be this way.
By Dhruv Khullar
Infinite Scroll
The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher
Byung-Chul Han, in treatises such as “The Burnout Society” and his latest, “The Crisis of Narration,” diagnoses the frenetic aimlessness of the digital age.
By Kyle Chayka
Daily Comment
The Supreme Court Asks What Enron Has to Do with January 6th—and Trump
The former President notwithstanding, the government’s position in Fischer v. United States is unsettling.
By Amy Davidson Sorkin
Elements
The Highest Tree House in the Amazon
In 2023, conservationists and carpenters converged on Peru to build luxury accommodations in the rain-forest canopy.
By Allison Keeley