Nearly 20 years ago, my high-school calculus teacher introduced me to a book that would, although I didn’t realize it at the time, permanently reframe the way I thought about music. Written by the journalist Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life was a study of the 1980s independent-music landscape—of bands that had unconsciously responded to the commercialism found on MTV and mainstream rock radio by going underground, and by getting very weird.
The comedian Shane Gillis is fond of joking about all of the things he knows he looks like: a high-school football coach; a possible parking-lot rapist; a police-brutality skeptic, someone who asks to “see the rest of the body-cam footage before we jump to any conclusions.” He’ll pose as a recognizable genre of buffoon or creep, before subverting those expectations.
Ever since C. Auguste Dupin pinned the death of a Parisian mother and daughter on an escaped orangutan, the murder mystery has remained one of mainstream culture’s most enduring, flexible, and popular narrative formats. The lonesome detective—with a stern constitution, hair-trigger nonsense detector, and endearing alcohol dependency—is a reliably compelling protagonist, capable of crossing legal lines and meting out justice.
Across five decades, the cartoonist Daniel Clowes has written about a wide array of outcasts: the high-school best friends wrestling with their transition into adulthood; the middle-aged grouch searching for the daughter he never knew; the sex-obsessed malcontent fixated on his ex-girlfriend; the many other dropouts, weirdos, and natural-born screwups who feel drawn from real life.
This story contains spoilers through the Season 4 finale of Barry.After everything he’d somehow survived—the stash-house shoot-outs, the brushes with law enforcement, the prison beatings, the time he’d found himself tied up in a chair opposite someone who was absolutely ready to kill him—even Barry wasn’t surprised by his own death.