Hey everyone — as you might have imagined given the fairly chipper tone of last night’s newsletter, it was largely pre-planned and scheduled. I don’t know if I had the words to fully change gears and provide a proper tribute to the late Justice Ginsburg, so I decided to just finish what I was working on and try to put some of the intense feelings I was processing into writing today. I hope you can understand, and should you have found anything in the previous Distancer in poor taste, please accept my apologies.
Stay strong, everyone
I’ll let Ruth Bader Ginsburg sum up her own life and legacy by linking to this stirring essay she wrote back in 2016 about her advice for living. No matter your opinions or persuasions, there’s something in which you can find inspiration. Perhaps her most sage nugget: “When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out. Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.”
Here’s about as crazy a pivot as you can get — my writing soundtrack today has been a DJ Candlestick chopped not slopped Soundcloud mixtape of Selena. Houston legend does a Houston legend. (I apologize to the people who might read this paragraph and think I’m speaking a different language.)
Also, today marks the 20th anniversary of recent recommendation Best in Show (still available on Hulu, but only through the end of September). If you’re a fan, you might want to check out a recent interview with Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara on Vulture about the making of the film. I got a kick out of it!
Lastly, if you mostly know RBG as the queen of dissent on SCOTUS, don’t let her work for the ACLU Women’s Rights Project from 1972-1980 go unappreciated. The fight for gender equality is unfinished, and the work continues today.
Now, what you came for…
DAY 191: RBG (available on Hulu)
If you’re looking for a one-stop shop to learn about the journey of Brooklyn-born Joan Ruth Bader to the Notorious R.B.G., Julie Cohen and Betsy West’s Oscar-nominated documentary RBG ought to do the trick. It’s a remarkably thorough look at the life and work of a legal and cultural giant that never loses sight of Justice Ginsburg as a human. The documentary does not quite fall into the trap of pure hagiography, but the filmmakers also don’t bother to disguise that their film is a celebration of RBG’s legacy.
This member of the so-called Silent Generation was crucial in giving voice to the concerns of groups ignored and dismissed by society. Because RBG fought for herself to have a seat at the table in a chauvinistic legal world, both in academia and in practice, she was able to use her power as a litigator and later Supreme Court Justice to fight vigorously for all women to receive an equal opportunity. Ginsburg was an inspiring humanist who told women that they were granted certain rights and dignities just by being themselves. She believed so fervently in advancing the cause of equality and was so unwavering in her convictions that she inspired loyalty and friendship from unlikely corners. RBG was a traveling buddy with her ideological opposite on the court, Antonin Scalia, a now seemingly unfathomable friendship that the film documents lovingly.
RBG also shows how Ginsburg hit her stride in the past decade or so as her scathing dissents from the bench went viral. Her refusal to mince words in an era rife with prevarication and equivocation struck a chord with a younger generation. If society already places little value on the opinions of women, it places even less on the opinions of older women. RBG’s refusal to go quietly when she still has so much to say has made her an icon for the social media era. Funny enough, as Cohen and West point out, her outsized persona is at odds with her relatively quiet personality. (In other words, that Kate McKinnon impersonation – which the documentary shows RBG watching for the first time in a moment of pure cinematic joy – is not all that accurate.)
While RBG does follow a pretty cookie-cutter biographical documentary format, it manages to overcome staleness by focusing heavily on the ideas and virtues animating their subject. We see not just Ruth Bader Ginsburg but also who she inspired – and how she did it. It’s a worthy and inspiring testament to a great American.
P.S. — I untangled a lot of this recommendation from a 2018 piece I wrote that tied RBG to another biographical documentary that opened that same summer, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall