On the Question of Whether One's Butler Should Be Made to Enjoy Things

I am told—by whom, I could not say, because one does not generally ask the names of the people who tell one things, that seems terribly forward—that there is a new spy picture on the little box that Father's IT man installed in the east sitting room for reasons that remain unclear to me, something called Apple TV, which I had assumed, reasonably I think, was a boutique that sold apples, and I was disappointed to learn it is not, because a boutique that sells only apples is exactly the kind of charmingly pointless business one could get behind, one apple, beautifully lit, resting on a plinth, four hundred dollars, and you know, I would have bought several. Instead it is a service. Everything now is a "service," which is a word people use so that you will not notice they are asking you to do work—to select something, to remember a password, to sit through a preamble—before you are permitted to have the thing you already paid for. It is, if you think about it for even a moment, and I do try not to, exhausting.

The picture in question stars a Mr. Ryan Reynolds, whom I understand to be Canadian, which I am told is a country, and whom the critics—and here I must pause, because "the critics" are a species of poor I find genuinely fascinating, in the way one finds a very small, very determined insect fascinating, people who watch things for a living and then write down what they thought, as though anyone had asked, as though the watching itself were not already the entire and complete reward—the critics, at any rate, are apparently delighted. "Witty," they say. "Star power." One imagines them typing this from a folding chair. One imagines the whole apparatus: the badge, the screening room, the little cup of lukewarm coffee someone hands you because you have agreed, in exchange for a movie ticket you did not pay for, to have opinions on a schedule. And they call this a job. They call it a beat, I believe, which is such a violent word for what amounts to sitting very still in the dark, and yet they treat it, I am told, as aspirational. People go to school for it. There are, apparently, more people who wish to review the spy picture than there are people needed to review the spy picture, and this strikes me as the saddest thing I have heard all week, and I heard about a bridge collapsing somewhere on the news Marguerite leaves on in the kitchen.

Here is what I cannot get past, and I have tried, I really have tried, sitting with it over lunch, turning it over the way one turns over a stone to see if there's anything interesting underneath, which there almost never is: the entire economy of this "streaming," as they call it, the reviewing of it, the discussing of it, the arguing on the little phone about whether the plane sequence in the second act "earns" its runtime, whatever that means, earns, as though the film owed somebody money, is built entirely around people who could simply not do this. Who could, instead, be somewhere pleasant. And they choose the folding chair. They choose the lukewarm coffee. One does wonder—and I mean this with the fullest tenderness, truly, I am not a monster—whether anyone has sat these people down and explained that there is another way to live, a way that does not involve a "beat," a way that involves, say, a house in Gstaad and a person named Enzo whose entire professional function is to agree with you about the snow. I am not asking them to want what I want. I would never. I am only asking whether they know it is available. Because a critic, you understand, is a person who has been given free entry to the one thing that makes leisure bearable—someone else doing the deciding for you—and has responded by turning it into a deadline. One simply cannot watch that and not feel something crack, quietly, somewhere behind the sternum.

Ryan Reynolds himself I have no complaints about, none at all, he seems by every account a hardworking and pleasant sort of man, if "hardworking" is the correct term for standing in front of a camera and being handsome about espionage, which frankly sounds like several of my cousins' weddings. Acting, as a profession, has always confused me less than the professions built around watching acting, because at least the actor is, in some technical sense, in the room, doing a thing, wearing the coat, remembering the line about the Swiss account. The critic is watching the man wear the coat and then going home to describe, at length, the coat. And this is treated, in whatever circles treat such things, as a career, as a calling, when it is so plainly just a very long and very public way of saying "I saw a thing before you did," which, you know, one simply feels for anyone whose entire self-worth is staked on the sequence of who saw the coat first.

Father, when I mentioned all this to him over the telephone—he is in Gstaad, Enzo says the snow is only adequate this year, which frankly is its own small tragedy—Father said the thing he always says, which is that none of this would be a problem if the people in question simply stopped, and went and did something else, anything else, and I said but Father, someone has to write the little star ratings, and he said did they, though, did they really, and I confess I did not have an answer for him, because when you turn it over, the way I said I would, there is no law, is there, compelling a person to sit through the plane sequence and rate it out of four. It is entirely, achingly optional. And that, in the end, is the whole of it, the whole disappointment, distilled: not the movie, which I am sure is perfectly fine, star power and so on, but the vast, quietly devastating discovery that so many clever, capable people have looked at the enormous unclaimed leisure of the world—the whole apple boutique of it, gleaming, four hundred dollars, nobody making you buy it—and have chosen, every one of them, the folding chair.

One does hope the coat, at least, was a good coat.

—Cynthia, from the good chaise, the one that faces away from the television