The Uglification of Everything

I wish to protest the current ugliness. I see it as a continuing trend, “the uglification of everything.” It is coming out of our culture with picked-up speed, and from many media silos, and I don’t like it.

You remember the 1999 movie “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” from the Patricia Highsmith novel. It was fabulous—mysteries, murders, a sociopath scheming his way among high-class expats on the Italian Riviera. The laid-back glamour of Jude Law, the Grace Kelly-ness of Gwyneth Paltrow, who looks like a Vogue magazine cover decided to take a stroll through the streets of 1950s Venice, the truly brilliant acting of Matt Damon, who is so well-liked by audiences I’m not sure we notice anymore what a great actor he is. The director, Anthony Minghella, deliberately showed you pretty shiny things while taking you on a journey to a heart of darkness.

There’s a new version, a streaming series from Netflix, called “Ripley.” I turned to it eagerly and watched with puzzlement. It is unrelievedly ugly. Grimy, gloomy, grim. Tom Ripley is now charmless, a pale and watchful slug slithering through ancient rooms. He isn’t bright, eager, endearing, only predatory. No one would want to know him! Which makes the story make no sense. Again, Ripley is a sociopath, but few could tell because he seemed so sweet and easy. In the original movie, Philip Seymour Hoffman has an unforgettable turn as a jazz-loving, prep-schooled, in-crowd snob. In this version that character is mirthless, genderless, hidden. No one would want to know him either. Marge, the Paltrow role in the movie, is ponderous and plain, like a lost 1970s hippie, which undercuts a small part of the tragedy: Why is the lovely woman so in love with a careless idler who loves no one?

The ugliness seemed a deliberate artistic decision, as did the air of constant menace, as if we all know life is never nice.

I go to the No. 1 program on Netflix this week, “Baby Reindeer.” People speak highly of it. It’s about a stalker and is based on a true story, but she’s stalking a comic so this might be fun. Oh dear, no. It is again unrelievedly bleak. Life is low, plain and homely. No one is ever nice or kind; all human conversation is opaque and halting; work colleagues are cruel and loud. Everyone is emotionally incapable and dumb. No one laughs except for the morbidly obese stalker, who cackles madly. The only attractive person is the transgender girlfriend, who has a pretty smile and smiles a lot, but cries a lot too and is vengeful.

Good drama always makes you think. I thought: Do I want to continue living?

I go to the Daily Mail website, once my guilty pleasure. High jinks of the rich and famous, randy royals, fast cars and movie stars, models and rock stars caught in the drug bust. It was great! But it seems to have taken a turn and is more about crime, grime, human sadness and degradation—child abuse, mothers drowning their babies, “Man murders family, self.” It is less a portal into life’s mindless, undeserved beauty, than a testimony to its horrors.

I go to the new “Cabaret.” Who doesn’t love “Cabaret”? It is dark, witty, painful, glamorous. The music and lyrics have stood the test of time. The story’s backdrop: The soft decadence of Weimar is being replaced by the hard decadence of Nazism.

It is Kander and Ebb’s masterpiece, revived again and again. And this revival is hideous. It is ugly, bizarre, inartistic, fundamentally stupid. Also obscene but in a purposeless way, without meaning.

I had the distinct feeling the producers take their audience to be distracted dopamine addicts with fractured attention spans and no ability to follow a story. They also seemed to have no faith in the story itself, so they went with endless pyrotechnics. This is “Cabaret” for the empty-headed. Everyone screams. The songs are slowed, because you might need a moment to take it in. Almost everyone on stage is weirdly hunched, like a gargoyle, everyone overacts, and all of it is without art.

On the way in, staffers put stickers on the cameras of your phone, “to protect our intellectual property,” as one said.

It isn’t an easy job to make the widely admired Eddie Redmayne unappealing, but by God they did it. As he’s a producer I guess he did it, too. He takes the stage as the Emcee in a purple leather skirt with a small green cone on his head and appears further on as a clown with a machine gun and a weird goth devil. It is all so childish, so plonkingly empty.

Here is something sad about modern artists: They are held back by a lack of limits.

Bob Fosse, the director of the classic 1972 movie version, got to push against society’s limits and Broadway’s and Hollywood’s prohibitions. He pushed hard against what was pushing him, which caused friction; in the heat of that came art. Directors and writers now have nothing to push against because there are no rules or cultural prohibitions, so there’s no friction, everything is left cold, and the art turns in on itself and becomes merely weird.

Fosse famously loved women. No one loves women in this show. When we meet Sally Bowles, in the kind of dress a little girl might put on a doll, with heavy leather boots and harsh, garish makeup, the character doesn’t flirt, doesn’t seduce or charm. She barks and screams, angrily.

Really it is harrowing. At one point Mr. Redmayne dances with a toilet plunger, and a loaf of Italian bread is inserted and removed from his anal cavity. I mentioned this to my friend, who asked if I saw the dancer in the corner masturbating with a copy of what appeared to be “Mein Kampf.”

That’s what I call intellectual property!

In previous iterations the Kit Kat Club was a hypocrisy-free zone, a place of no boundaries, until the bad guys came and it wasn’t. I’m sure the director and producers met in the planning stage and used words like “breakthrough” and “a ‘Cabaret’ for today,” and “we don’t hide the coming cruelty.” But they do hide it by making everything, beginning to end, lifeless and grotesque. No innocence is traduced because no innocence exists.

How could a show be so frantic and outlandish and still be so tedious? It’s almost an achievement.

And for all that there is something smug about it, as if they’re looking down from some great, unearned height.

I left thinking, as I often do now on seeing something made ugly: This is what purgatory is going to be like. And then, no, this is what hell is going to be like—the cackling stalker, the pale sociopath, Eddie Redmayne dancing with a plunger.

Why does it all bother me?

Because even though it isn’t new, uglification is rising and spreading as an artistic attitude, and it can’t be good for us. Because it speaks of self-hatred, and a society that hates itself, and hates life, won’t last. Because it gives those who are young nothing to love and feel soft about. Because we need beauty to keep our morale up.

Because life isn’t merde, in spite of what our entertainment geniuses say.

As a competitive rower in my long-ago prime I sometimes used a racing strategy called fly and die. Sprinting to an early lead often yielded a fast overall time, even if I couldn’t hold my torrid pace through the finish line.

Some professionals take a similar approach to their desk jobs, starting their workdays with a 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. shift. They are up before the sun—and, more important, before their co-workers—to get a jump on the workday and impress the boss.

Nothing screams go-getter like a predawn email! Getting stuff done early allows them to clock out midafternoon and still look like stars, even if their routines require Ben Franklin-esque sleep schedules and vats of caffeine.

Melissa O’Blenis rises by 4:30 a.m. for prayer and Peloton time before starting her job at the digital consulting firm Argano.

“I just love checking things off my list,” she says. “I need that focus time away from Teams messages, email notifications and text alerts.”

A mother with two sets of twins, O’Blenis, 48, often breaks for her kids’ afternoon sports without feeling guilty or judged. Colleagues jokingly call her Granny because her 9 p.m. bedtime makes the early starts possible. But Granny got the last laugh when she was promoted to a director-level role in March.

More than 90% of knowledge workers want to flex their hours, according to surveys by Slack’s Future Forum . In the pandemic many of us got in the habit of handling personal commitments during standard business hours, then catching up on work tasks later .

Now that the office battle is largely over, fighting a return to rigid, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedules might be workers’ last stand. But managers complain about afternoon dead zones when employees are out of pocket.

The solution for more workers is starting sooner instead of finishing later. Workflow software maker Asana reports that 21.4% of users are logging on between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. this year, up from 19.8% in 2021. About 12% of work tasks are completed before 9 a.m., the company says, compared with 10% before the pandemic.

Early-bird bosses

Gibran Washington and his basketball teammates at Hofstra University used to run at 6 a.m. He maintained his early wakeups while climbing the ranks in food-and-beverage management.

By 9 a.m. meetings, he had already exercised, meditated and put in a couple of hours of work.

“I always found myself more prepared than my colleagues who hadn’t had their first cup of coffee yet,” says Washington, 40, who doesn’t drink coffee. Now he is chief executive of Ethos Cannabis, a chain of 12 dispensaries in three states, and rises as early as ever.

Waking and working ahead of the pack is a common CEO habit, from Apple ’s Tim Cook to General Motors ’ Mary Barra . Even if your ambitions are less grand than the corner office, starting early could help you stand out for one simple reason: The boss is probably up, too, and taking notice.

Matt Kiger says being the first one into the office helped him catch his manager’s eye and advance after changing careers from education to media sales. He would set his alarm for 5 a.m., hop a train from Connecticut to New York and be at his workstation before 7.

“I thought, ‘What is it going to take to break through?’” he recalls. “‘It’s going to take being there when my boss comes in, already at my desk making phone calls.’”

Now a senior vice president for digital sales at Townsquare Media , Kiger, 47, says much of the daily communication among company leaders happens by text and phone from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. It’s possible to succeed as a night owl, he says, but people who sleep in risk missing a window when many executives are awake and accessible. While some working parents can’t swing early-morning meetings, others like Kiger say they are the key to being present at kids’ after-school activities.

Getting the worm

Matt Sunshine—whose surname surely predestined him to be a morning person—wakes at 5:30 a.m. to read the news. Then he cycles or takes a Pilates class and is on his computer by 7.

Sunshine is CEO of the Center for Sales Strategy in Tampa, Fla., which helps healthcare, media and professional-services companies generate leads. He doesn’t expect his 55 employees to follow his schedule but says it becomes progressively harder to get his attention as the day goes on and his calendar fills up with meetings. He also tries to log off by 5:30 p.m. for family time, so working after hours won’t necessarily make an impression.

“If you want to get my attention, a good time to get me is first thing in the morning,” Sunshine, 55, says. “Because people know I’m an early riser, I think that does influence other people to do the same.”

Elvi Caperonis’s morning routine is next-level organised. Her alarm rings at 6 a.m. She goes for a run at 6:30. At 7 she showers and eats breakfast. At 7:30 she opens her laptop and sets a timer for 25 minutes. That’s her first block to focus on the most important task of the day before a five-minute break. She repeats the on-off work pattern throughout the day.

Caperonis, a technical program manager at Amazon , makes a daily to-do list with nine items. She rates one critical, three medium-level and five lower-priority. This helps her work efficiently and in the right order.

The 41-year-old works from home in Florida and often picks her daughter up from school at 2:30 p.m., freedoms she has preserved partly by being highly productive early in the day, she says. Much of her job involves identifying potential risks to a project’s success, and when she sends an early-morning alert it arrives really early for company leaders in the Pacific time zone.

“They appreciate having that information first thing when they open their email,” she says. “In my experience, leaders are also early birds.”

The Uglification of Everything

Artistic culture has taken a repulsive turn. It speaks of a society that hates itself, and hates life.

Working a regular day, even into the evening, is for mere mortals. Those out to impress start well before dawn.

Early-bird bosses

Getting the worm