Watched Squid + The Whale for the first time in a year last night and realized how well written it really is. It resonated more to me now having lived in New York longer and noticed that the relationships between some of my most literate friends are really some of the most dysfunctional. Bernard—the arrogant faded-novelist father—tells women “don’t be difficult” when they displease him, a sentence that seems to sum up an type of urban personality (not unlike Murray Thwaite in Claire Messud’s excellent The Emperor’s Children, which Baumbach is adapting right now). Intellectuals who don’t know how to be challenged themselves are a certain kind of backbone of New York society.
Anyway, Noah Baumbach. Props.
