The world is a scary place right now, so it’s just the moment for a by-the-numbers but expertly executed comedy featuring familiar stars. Reese Witherspoon plays a woman micromanaging her sister’s wedding, while Will Ferrell plays the control-freak father of a second bride. When a remote resort mistakenly double-books the weddings, chaos and crocodiles ensue as the rivals battle for supremacy. Thursday, Jan. 30, Prime.

by Agnes Callard

“It is not good to live one’s life on philosophical autopilot, as most people do,” said John Maier in The Times (U.K.). Agnes Callard fervently agrees, and in her new book, the University of Chicago philosopher argues that Socrates has provided us a blueprint for the only kind of life worth living. If you know of Callard, it may be because of a 2023 New Yorker profile that detailed how she divorced her philosopher husband to marry one of her grad students before the three decided to cohabitate and raise their three boys together. That unusual arrangement, “however amusing it may be for bystanders,” indicates how deeply Callard believes in the Socratic imperative to question received wisdom about how to live. And she’s “right about a number of things,” including that the alternative to living a so-called philosophical life is living in ignorance of what the best way to live might be. 

“This is a book that is charming, intelligent, and occasionally annoying,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. But “the irritation is wholly appropriate,” because, like Socrates, Callard pushes us to think about questions so big we don’t ask them. Most of the things we do in our lives are “dictated to us in the moment by our body (to pursue pleasure and avoid pain) or by social bonds (to pursue pride and avoid shame).” Socrates and Callard insist that we must instead first do the difficult work of deciding what is the good we hope to attain in life, and those two don’t accept flimsy answers. The Socratic method, as most of us understand it, consists of teaching through questioning. Callard turns the practice into an ethic, arguing that we won’t reach definitive answers but we are obliged in life to seek them and can only do so in dialogue with others. “I find this notion inspiring.” 

While some may wish this book offered a more conventional brand of self-help, “Socrates offers neither miracle cures nor lifestyle hacks,” said Tim Clare in The Guardian. There’s “something rather bracing and brilliant” about the way Callard quickly pulls the reader into deeper waters, promising that hers will be a book that attempts to describe what life is for. She later shows a weakness for repetition and overexplaining, and “it’s a shame,” because the result is that “many genuinely interesting insights are buried among the clutter.” Still, she succeeds in explaining why Socrates’ insistence he knew nothing was a profound form of wisdom, and why it’s nevertheless true that the best way to live life is to make of it a journey toward knowledge gained by way of honest dialogue and questioning. “Crucially, it’s a journey we embark on together.”

The filmmaker who uncovered the surreal

David Lynch was “the first populist surrealist,” as film critic Pauline Kael once said. The director merged the mainstream and the avant-garde in works probing the dark underbelly of American life, mixing surrealist imagery, dreamlike sequences, suspense, whimsy, and horror. Masterpieces included Mulholland Drive (2001), a noirish mystery that opens with a fatal car crash in the Hollywood Hills, and the darkly comic TV series Twin Peaks (1990–92), about an FBI agent investigating the murder of a high school homecoming queen in a Washington town. But his most celebrated work was Blue Velvet (1986), in which a college student is sucked into the orbit of a violent psychopath after finding a severed ear lying on a manicured lawn. This juxtaposition of the mundane, the mysterious, and the macabre came to be called Lynchian, and if his enigmatic works left some baffled, so be it. “I don’t know why people expect art to make sense,” he said in1989, “when they accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.” 

Lynch was born in Missoula, Mont., where his father was research scientist and his mother an English teacher, said The Wall Street Journal. His was a happy childhood “of elegant homes and tree-lined streets,” but Lynch was fascinated “by life’s darkness.” A gifted painter, he attended art school, but shifted to filmmaking and studied at the American Film Institute, where he worked on what became his 1977 debut, Eraserhead. The “black-humored” work about a man raising a mutant baby became “a fixture on the midnight-movie circuit,” said Variety. Lynch’s “outré” sensibility “quickly won the attention” of Hollywood machers such as Mel Brooks, who tapped him to direct The Elephant Man (1980), a drama about a sideshow “freak” disfigured by a rare disease, which won eight Oscar nominations. 

Not all Lynch’s works were well received, said The Washington Post. His 1984 adaptation of the sci-fi novel Dune “was a $40 million fiasco.” But Twin Peaks proved “one of the most influential shows in television history,” drawing huge ratings and 14 Emmy nominations. Lynch himself was “an incongruous blend of gee-whiz middle-American and mysterious oddball”—for nearly a decade, he wrote the weekly comic The Angriest Dog in the World, which always featured the same art, and he made daily videos on the weather in L.A. that amassed a cult following. Yet he steadfastly declined to discuss his works’ meaning. “I like things that leave some room to dream,” he said in 1995. “A lot of mysteries are sewn up at the end, and that kills the dream.”