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It’s eviction time! West Wilson’s time on Summer House has reportedly come to an end. “West was not picked up for the next season of the Bravo show and will not return when cameras start rolling over the July 4 weekend,” TMZ reported Monday afternoon. “That said, our sources say the door isn’t completely closed and it’s possible he could pop in for a cameo at some point.” Wilson’s departure comes after the disastrous love quadrangle that has left the entire cast reeling, and Andy Cohen rolling his eyes.

After he had little to say at the cast reunion but plenty so say on his own podcast, West’s departure seemed inevitable. His Summer House roommate Jesse Solomon wept one sitting one seat over from him at the reunion, unsure how the friend group could survive all this betrayal; Lindsay Hubbard, Summer House HBIC, was incredulous, asking what West and Amanda Batula have planned now that they’ve put a dozen careers, friendships, and feelings at risk. Away from any accountability to his friends/co-workers, West has gone into detail about a three-hour on-camera conversation he had with Kyle Cooke, his relationship with Ciara, the status of his friendship with Jesse, and more.

Bravo hasn’t confirmed any of the upcoming season’s cast, and didn’t respond to multiple outlets reporting West’s eviction. Was it that there truly wasn’t a way for the show to move forward with him still summer-ing as part of its cast? Or was it that he decided to take his beta blocker prescription and collection of non-talents elsewhere? Or was it that the show’s summer shooting schedule simply interfered too much with cozying up to random white girls on Stanton St? Maybe all of the above, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the final straw was how little he appears to care about his relationship with Bravo. Not only does he give more insight on his own podcast than he does confessionals or reunions, but West also appears to speak about Summer House, as a show, with a level of contempt. (Can someone tell me what he is … without it? A Midwestern silly goose whiteboy with sports trivia and a roster…? Like that’s hard?) He says, on his podcast, that he cares about his friendship with Kyle outside of “this fucking show,” but his behavior (sleeping with Kyle’s estranged wife) says otherwise.

Paige De Sorbo’s season eight read of West remains even more true now than it was then: “So we couldn’t understand how the fame and like the lights and camera were so much more enticing than like, your real life. Like, we live our real lives, and then there’s a camera. We don’t live our real lives because there’s a camera,” she told West. “I mean, we had two people [Lindsay and Carl] have the worst summer of their lives, and you’re in our group chat being like, ‘This is the best season of the show. This is so exciting.’ We were like, two people’s lives are literally falling apart.”

And what about Amanda? If West has nothing without Summer House, Amanda, who has spent a decade on the show, surely has even less. Maybe she fits into In The City, which already has another resident psychopath (Kenny), but who wants to plan a party with the woman who risked everyone’s summer job for a fling?

Other Summer House thoughts

Enough of Meija, sorry:

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Now that her charade of accountability at the Summer House reunion is over, we can get into the nitty-gritty. There are still dozens of questions for Amanda Batula, questions that she completely ignored or did not answer, and a few follow-ups she wasn’t asked. West agrees that he’s an incorrigible womanizer when pressed, but Amanda enjoys a victim narrative at the reunion, perhaps for the benefit of Kyle, who still loves her. (Of course he wants to think of her as manipulated and isolated! That’s the wife we’re watching him try to reconcile with this season on In The City!)

The most satisfying moment of the reunion, for me, was a question from Mia: “Amanda and West, did you honestly just come forward because there was so much speculation? Or were you guys going to continue to lie to us?” Now that’s a question I want answered. In the best-case scenario, what was the plan here? When were they going to share this with their friends, let alone the rest of the world? Amanda wakes from her slumber to give one answer that sounds real: “To be so honest, in that moment [we] came forward because of the speculation, because there were a lot of things I was still trying to understand and figure out, including the Meija situation,” she says. Mia again: “So it had nothing to do with, like, hurting your friendship with Ciara? It had to do with figuring out if West was actually exclusive with Meija?”

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My group chat is still buzzing with questions left outstanding after the reunion’s final part aired. (A great comment from , after Amanda said that she’s only been in a bubble thinking about herself: “We know!”) I treated this like an assignment:1 what would I have asked Amanda?

1. If you weren’t thinking about the potential (and likely) fallout from this relationship — in your friendship with Ciara, in your breakup with Kyle, in the larger friendgroup — what were you thinking about?

2. What did you think when you saw West leaving thirst comments under Ciara’s IG posts weeks before you announced your relationship?

3. When you say “sorry” to Ciara, are you apologizing for lying to her, or for having feelings for her ex?

4. Even though I don’t buy this part of the story at all: what did you do the day after West told you he had feelings for you?

5. Did you expect the cast to press West on his relationship with Meija?

6. West agreed with Andy that it seems dangerous to be in a relationship with someone with very clear commitment issues. What makes you certain that, despite embarrassing Ciara, Meija, and himself, he won’t embarrass you?

7. Did West detail his private conversations with Kyle about your marriage to you?

8. Do you believe that Kyle is still in love with you?

9. What do you make of your reunion performance?2

10. You had a conversation on the beach with Mia where you said you were “skeptical” of West, and that you’d “cut West off in one fucking second if she looked at me.” How do you reflect on that conversation now?

11. How did you prepare for the reunion if you didn’t watch this season of Summer House?

12. What makes West not good enough for Ciara but good enough for you?

13. “I’ve stopped watching the episodes because I cannot handle the idea of thinking about all the nasty shit people are going to say about me afterwards.” How do you have such a clear idea of what fan response to this relationship will be, but you couldn’t foresee Ciara and Kyle’s response? (From the texts: “I’d really like it if we could talk. At least so I can understand how you’re feeling.”)

14. In the reunion, you said that there were times you lost sleep and didn’t eat just thinking about the fact that your feelings for West existed. Did you think about telling Ciara when you first felt you were starting to have feelings for West?

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15. Is there a version of events where you kept denying your relationship with West, kept your hookups secret, and came to the reunion apologizing for making a mistake? Since lying isn’t off the table.

16. You said West is the only man in the house who has stood up to Kyle. What do you make of your friendships with Carl and Jesse?

17. Do you think there’s a path forward for your friendship with Ciara?

18. Why do you think West is ready for a serious relationship right now?

19. West said repeatedly that the Summer House friendships are important to him. Are they important to you?

20. For better or for worse, in good ways or in bad, does West act a different way on-camera than off?

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21. What personal reactions were you most surprised by at the reunion, or which ones didn’t you expect?

22. When did you know your marriage to Kyle was over?

23. Who did you think the audience would side with in your breakup with Kyle?

24. You apologized to Ciara for “betraying her trust.” What have you apologized to Kyle for?

25. Do you think West should’ve gone after you when you ran offstage crying?

26. How were you so convincing when you told your friends that the rumors with West weren’t true?

27. Who wrote the statement announcing your relationship?

28. How close was Kyle and West’s friendship in your eyes?

29. Did you know that West and Ciara were having sleepovers in the fall?

30. How does it land for you that the cast believes West is manipulating you?

31. Do you see any commonalities between West and Kyle, and what personality you’re attracted to?

32. West admitted to resenting Ciara after fans criticized him in the aftermath of the season eight reunion when he was no longer the fan favorite. The audience doesn’t support your relationship — do you think he will resent you the same way?

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There are two cardinal Bravo reunion sins: the “who cares, why does this matter” (a favorite tactic of Kelly Killoren Bensimon) and the “that’s personal” (a favorite of Ramona Singer). My eyes glaze over every time I hear either one. The castmates care, and so does the audience; Bravo stars have shared marriages, divorces, “xc,” devastating friendship breakups, fertility journeys, sobriety journeys, relapses, and situationships. Amanda Batula is guilty of both reunion sins, but West Wilson’s behavior is so bad in the reunion’s second episode that he outranks her. That’s how bad.

Amanda is the one to flee the stage, but it’s West who is in the hot seat. Ciara, Kyle, and Linday deliver blistering burns, but it’s Dara who ethers him. Good episode! Here’s where I think we stand. (Unranked this week is Bailey Taylor, who was pretty quiet.)

West Wilson

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It would appear that the game plan was just to lie and stay alive. When Amanda Batula and West Wilson entered the Summer House reunion after untold months of lying to their close friends, respective exes, and the war-torn Bravo nation, the only thing on their agenda was silence. West said he wanted to clear up the timeline — this “sex scandal” was really a “hanging out with my friend’s ex-wife and my ex’s best friend scandal,” according to him (at least a sex scandal sounds like someone enjoyed themselves). Amanda said she wanted to apologize and take accountability, but by the end of the reunion’s first aired hour, she neither apologized nor took accountability. Even the answered questions, brusquely and with a sigh, were as unconvincing as the unanswered ones.

Maybe this would be believable if Amanda and West showed up sickeningly lovey-dovey, or at least performed a functioning partnership. They shoot for Before Sunrise (that “baby, you’re going to miss that train” type of love, where we push them closer together even as circumstances seem to pull them apart) and land somewhere around the final moments of The Graduate: What the fuck just happened and where are we headed next?

I interviewed Ciara Miller for the Glamour cover story that was referenced in the reunion’s opening minutes; I watched three Summer House seasons in five days to prep for it. Here’s my power ranking of the reunion’s first episode: who comes out best, worst, and simply breaks even. (Unranked are Dara, Sabrina, and West’s secret girlfriend Meija, none of whom are in this episode. Also unraked is Levi, Bailey’s imaginary friend, and Katie DeLuca, Amanda’s.)

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There should be a word for when you hear someone else’s insecurity — like the way one specific type of white girl on TikTok makes them jealous, or the person who always felt that they didn’t know how to order well at a restaurant, or even the way their glasses look in photos — and it’s just the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard. Not in a cruel way, like you’ll listen and affirm their point of view, but ultimately, let’s be serious. It’s just not that deep. Your own insecurities, however … I mean my goodness … I tend to them and nurture them and gorilla grip them so tightly.

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When Amanda Batula and West Wilson slink into the Summer House season 10 reunion, by the looks of the trailer, they appear to be a united front. By the season’s end, Amanda was contemplating a separation from her husband, Kyle Cooke, while West appeared to reunite with his ex, Ciara Miller, after a rocky few years of the silent treatment.

But the Summer House reunion trailer starts on March 31, when Amanda and West confirmed their relationship. (It is hard to believe that two months ago, the only person I knew from Summer House was Ciara, and only because she was on Traitors US.) “We’ve seen the growing online speculation, so while this is still very new, we wanted to provide some clarity,” the pair wrote in a statement that could not have been more opaque. “It was never our intention to purposely hide anything … We’ve shown up for each other as friends over the years, through all the highs and lows, and what’s developed recently was the last thing either of us expected.” Kyle interrupts one of Lindsay Hubbard’s confessional tapings to tell her to check her phone. She reads it and sighs: “For the love of God.”

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It has been a difficult period for Drake since the Kendrick Lamar lyric heard ‘round the world: “When I see you stand by Sexyy Red, I believe you see two bad bitches.” It was the diss on a double-layered cake of disses. On an era-defining run of a handful of songs, Lamar both confirmed every rumor you’d ever heard about Drake, and collected every serious (and sometimes unserious) critique into a series of brutal wallops. Drake is a pedophile, Drake is a culture vulture, Drake is soft, Drake is corny, Drake fell off. In response, the Canadian rapper tried unsuccessfully to sue himself out of the generational rap beef; now, with a trio of album releases on Friday morning, he’s decided to rap his way out.

You’re not going to believe this, but in the triptych of “Iceman,” “Maid of Honour,” and “Habibti,” there are Drake songs about his reluctance to trust a woman. There are Drake songs about disloyal friends and attention-chasing women. There are Drake songs about not trusting a woman but wanting to be in a long-distance relationship with her anyway. There are Drake songs about not trusting a woman because she wants a transactional relationship, and there are other Drake songs about wanting transactional relationships. There are Drake songs that offer women designer liquors and designer bags, and there are songs that resent women for wanting designer liquors and designer bags. There are several songs that play like confessionals — the kind befitting a gossipy reality TV show, not the Catholic Sacrament of Reconciliation. These are messages of retribution rather than requests for forgiveness. There are several Drake songs about a persistent, all-consuming loneliness that can only be filled by a woman who wants nothing and requires nothing and has no needs or tastes or desires or qualities despite loving Drake and having a “real” body. (Rapping that with abs from outpatient ab-etching is crazy.) Anyway: Do you know where Drake could meet a good woman?

The albums are divided into “his,” “hers,” and “his songs about being mad at hers.”

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Before Bravo placed the Housewives at the center of culture, the network aired a single season of Being Bobby Brown. Cameras followed Whitney Houston and her husband around, capturing every smirk, every sneer, every mid-retail therapy dance break. I wasn’t allowed to watch it except for the few times I was allowed to watch it. It was the original hood but a runway quality: the contrast of Whitney Houston, the Voice and the glamour, rolling her eyes at her husband, spending time with her daughter, running errands. The clips are hard to come by, but the show was closer to cinéma vérité than anything currently on Bravo. Some scenes wouldn’t be out of place on The Comeback.

One of my favorite scenes happens on Mother’s Day, when Bobby Brown plans a “surprise” for his wife. “It’s a hell to the no,” Whitney begins, her displeasure obvious. “I don’t care what you say, I’m not going if anyone else is going.” Bobby tells her to go put on her hat and her sneakers. “Yeah, okay, alright, uh-huh,” she storms off, her yorkie trailing behind.

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What was your favorite gossip from this year’s Met Gala? In years past, we’ve had some heavy hitters: Channing Tatum and Zoe Kravitz making their unofficial carpet debut, the reveal of Cynthia Erivo and Lena Waithe, that time Riccardo Tisci, then the creative director of Givenchy, spent the night with Frank Ocean, and then missed Frank Ocean, even that one time it was robbed by Sandra Bullock and seven of her friends.

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Zendaya won’t be there, but Beyoncé will be: The Met Gala is tonight! This year, the gala will also celebrate the opening of the Condé Nast galleries, which will now house the Costume Institute. (Relegated to the basement no more! Per the NYT: “Housed in the 11,500-square-foot space that used to be the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gift shop, the fashion galleries will now be the first thing visitors see when they walk into the Great Hall.”)

Beyoncé is co-chairing, alongside Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and Anna Wintour. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos, are “honorary co-chairs,” aka paying for the party and the exhibition. Tickets to the gala, which funds the Costume Institute, start at $100,000.

This will be Bey’s first time at the gala in a decade (is this the start of the rock album promo?); Zendaya is taking a break between The Drama and The Odyssey/Dun3 promo.

The livestream starts at 6. I’ll be in the chat! Hopefully, Law Roach leaves the pixie cut at home. Subscribe so you don’t miss out, and I’ll see you there.

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For months I have cataloged the rise and continued rise of a sexagenarian Timothée Chalamet known as “Club Chalamet.” She is a full-time healthcare tech worker or something, but a fuller-time supporter of all things Timmy. She’s traveled to Crema in Italy, saw Wonka five times, and supported him through Best Actor Oscar losses to Adrien Brody and Michael B. Jordan. And now, I am disappointed to report to you, Club Chalamet’s watch has ended.

But oh what a time it was to be blocked and unblocked and blocked again (this time on every platform) by Club Chalamet!

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Surprise! Zoë Kravitz and Harry Styles are starting a new chapter, and so are we. “Lemme Say This,” the pop culture podcast I co-host with my best friend (and frequent Hung Up character witness) Peyton Dix, returns April 30 from Higher Ground.

In the months since we went off the air in October, Club Chalamet has renounced her standom, a Bachelorette season was canceled, Teyana Taylor put Paul Thomas Anderson in several endearing headlocks, and I have decided Kelsea Ballerini and Chase Stokes are White Bennifer.1 Peyton and I have thought a lot about how we wanted “Lemme Say This” to continue and who would be our best partner moving forward. There’s this couple who founded Higher Ground … maybe you’ve heard of them?? … the Obamas. The team at Higher Ground is so smart and fun to work with, and we’re so excited about the relaunch. (You can read more about it here.)

The good news is that I get to keep working with my best friend, who makes me smarter, funnier, and hotter at every opportunity.2 Like in college when I ripped my tights because I thought that looked cool (“you look like you came from a broken home”), and when she holds a gun to my head and tells me to watch Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. The better news is that if you like “Lemme Say This” — or if you’ve never listened and want more of what you read on Hung Up — we’re working on giving you a lot more of the same3 in the best way.

Once a week, we’ll meet to hang out, talk shit, and keep you abreast of the latest in internet brain rot. We’ll go deep on the Summer House reunion4 seating chart and long on who’s about to flop at the Met Gala. Listen to the first episode back on this Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts :)

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Michael
This is the type of greed they talked about in the Bible. You can’t say Michael, the Michael Jackson biopic executive-produced by the singer’s family and starring Jackson’s nephew Jaafar, doesn’t deliver on its purpose. It is a movie meant to deliver you straight to YouTube or to Spotify, driving up the musician’s streams in a way the estate can monetize. It accomplishes that completely: Michael does remind audiences how good Michael Jackson’s music remains. It also reminds audiences how batshit everything surrounding him remains, too. This is an exercise in image mismanagement, a biopic so banal and passive that you look forward to the music sequences not even because they’re good (sometimes they are), just for a reprieve from another scene of cornball chaos.

To “sanitize” Michael Jackson’s controversial history, the child sexual abuse allegations, or even to strip his biography of complication entirely — that’s an undertaking that requires at least some sort of vision. Michael is as thorough as a five-paragraph essay that’s returned to your desk with a big red “See Me.” It’s not a complicated character study, nor is it laboriously hagiographic. Michael cycles through random trivia before dropping you off at a big song-and-dance setpiece, and then does that again and again and again.

It moves almost episodically: Michael meets Berry Gordy. Michael works with Quincy Jones. Michael watches Singing In The Rain. Joe Jackson gets his belt. Michael buys Bubbles. Michael wants to get his music played on MTV. Forget insight, none of these scenes lands with any real meaning. A young Michael talks about wanting to make a new sound from the Jackson 5 and find his own voice, and then we cut to a completed “Off The Wall.” He says it’s egotistical to make a self-titled album and then he watches some horror movies, and that’s how we get “Thriller.” Jaafar Jackson does a fine impersonation, but neither the movie nor the script gives him any interiority. There’s none of the strangely swaggering sensuality that made watching the real Michael Jackson feel exciting. Every Moonwalk, every body roll — got no change, sorry brotha.

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It is hard for me to see a tall (-ish?) dark-haired British man holding hands with a gorgeous light-skinned black woman and not think: Another version of The Drama? Already? But no, really, Zoë Kravitz and Harry Styles have held hands in Rome, in Brooklyn, in London, and at the airport. Now they will hold hands at the altar: Page Six reports that Kravitz and Styles are engaged.

“He is completely smitten. He would jump off a cliff for her,” a source close to the couple told the tabloid. Kravitz, they added, “is on cloud nine.”

I am often right except for the rare examples when I am wrong:

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Maybe she’s extending her arms for a hug or reaching for another fry. Maybe it’s revealed when she pulls off a layer, or when she absentmindedly rests her chin in her palm. She could be on the F train, at the movies, in line ahead of me at the hair store, nodding along on a Zoom meeting: I love seeing a girl’s emotional support inner-wrist tattoo, the tattoo she got when she was 19.1

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So now you know why I rushed to get my associate’s degree in Summer House. Last Friday, I sat down with Ciara Miller and a recorder to talk about … everything. It was her first public statement in detail about how she feels about her (ex) best friend hooking up with her ex-bf, what she’s thinking about going into the reunion, what it was like being the first black woman on the show, and how it feels for the internet to hate her taste in men, for her housemates to call her scary, and what her support system looks like in the middle of one of the most dramatic Bravo scandals in recent history.

I came out of cover-story retirement for this feature because I genuinely thought it spoke volumes that, as Ciara’s friend group implodes, she didn’t rush to react. Instead, she posted about Trans Day of Visibility and her local LES Girl Scout Troop. “I know I had a couple more hundred thousand eyes on my stories and on my profile, and I wasn’t quite ready to say anything. I posted what I felt needed to be acknowledged, and that was trans visibility, protecting the dolls, and then the Girl Scouts,” she told me. “I was a Girl Scout from kindergarten to a senior in high school. I earned my Bronze and Silver awards. My first community was my Girl Scout troop. A lot of TV is just so gluttonous, I think you have to give back in some way. I just wanted to shed light on something that needs a little bit of light.”

There’s a racial undertone to the way Ciara is treated in the house that I wanted to dig into as well, particularly this season. It’s weird to me that last season Lexi Wood acted so intimidated by Ciara, and that this season Jesse Solomon was obsessed with Ciara until he basically asked West for permission to pursue her. (The irony that bro code between West and Jesse is stronger than the friendship between Amanda and Ciara apparently…)

read the full interview on glamour here

Anyway! If nothing else, I wanted to know when you find out your seating assignment for a Bravo reunion, and also this:

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I stand before you (via email) as a woman who watched three seasons of Summer House over the course of, like, five days. That is how dedicated to drama I am.

Now I can explain the Summer House drama in terms that devoted Hung Up readers will understand. Imagine Leah Remini, best friend of J.Lo, suddenly popped out with Ben Affleck. Imagine Busy Phillips was spotted kissing that random musician Michelle Williams was married to for a year (government name: Phil Elverum). Do you remember that one photo of Natalie Portman and Paul Mescal? Now imagine the same photo if Natalie Portman were best friends with Phoebe Bridgers. Ciara Miller literally argued with Amanda Batula’s ex-husband (and fellow Summer House co-star) Kyle Cook about Kyle’s treatment of Amanda… and Amanda still dated Ciara’s ex-situationship (and, again, another fellow Summer House co-star) West Wilson.

On Friday afternoon, a week after the news of a romance between Amanda and West shocked everyone, Amanda Batula announced her decision to not give af.

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Five pages into Belle Burden’s blockbuster memoir “Strangers,” the author learns her husband is having an affair. It feels like something of a small victory that the affair is our introduction to her husband; the affair defines him, against his will, as much as it does Burden herself (against her own will, too). A Daily Mail story quickly assembled the proper nouns: Belle Burden, granddaughter of Babe Paley and daughter of urban planner Amanda Burden, was married to Henry Davis, a hedge-fund executive. They were together for 20 years, two homes, and three children.

“At 6 a.m., James [what she calls Henry] walked into our bedroom fully dressed, in heavy boots and a black parka, the same clothes he’d worn the night before,” Burden writes, referring to the night the affair came to light. “He was holding a large canvas tote bag. His green eyes were narrowed and icy, an expression I had never seen before.” James announces that he wants a divorce. Burden tells him that his mistress’s name, which she learned the night before, didn’t come up in a Google search; she thinks maybe this whole thing is an elaborate scheme. James pulls out his phone and shows Burden the mistress’s recent promotion announcement. “He looked proud, impressed,” Burden writes. “And then he walked out the door.”

Last month, Variety reported that Gwyneth Paltrow would star in an adaptation of the memoir for Netflix. But who should play her husband, the ice-blooded man who puts up more of a fight for the pre-nup than the custody agreement? The book’s most shocking moment is so shatteringly normal: the first time James returns to their house in Martha’s Vineyard, ostensibly to tell their two daughters about the divorce, he turns to Belle and asks her to make him a sandwich. And, worse, she does.

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The James character feels like a real casting coup. It’s not so important what Henry Davis looks like, how tall he is, or what color hair he has, only that he can play charming and an asshole in equal measure. Burden’s memoir moves between describing the beginnings of their love story, when they’d write each other nearly every day, and the end of it, when he entered into pre-nup negotiations explicitly to punish her. She was 50 at the time of the divorce, and her husband was three years older. Paltrow is 53 now. For James, I’d say, 45 is too young, but 60 might be too old.

In an ideal world, it might’ve been William Hurt: you buy him as loving but aloof just as much as you buy him as detached. Maybe he’s too beautiful, though real beauty should come with a slight sense of hostility: I’m so beautiful I can do whatever I want. Here are some other men I’m thinking about:

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I read a New Yorker list last year of some of the best movies about New York City. (It avoided, deliberately, the more obvious choices such as movies made by Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, and Woody Allen.) Chantal Ackerman’s News From Home was on the list, as was Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret. I was so very happy to see that A. V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One, with its stellar Teyana Taylor performance, was on the list (even though I didn’t care for the ending). “Everyone has their own New York, even people who don’t call it home. That’s why it’s tough to pick favorite New York movies: on the one hand, so many good ones have been made about it, but, on the other, none of them gets it quite right,” New Yorker film critic Richard Brody wrote. “Which is to say that no one has caught the city exactly as I’ve imagined it and experienced it. (I’d bet that every New Yorker feels the same way.)”

I wanted to adapt this question a bit: What’s the best movie about your home, interpreted however you’d like? It could be a movie about where you live now or the place where you grew up. When I think of growing up in Tulsa, for instance, I think less of Oklahoma! or even Killers of the Flower Moon, but of that scene in Lady Bird at the grocery store when her mom tells her she can’t buy a magazine (very my dad), and a second later she tells a dumb lie for no reason to a boy she likes (very me).

My favorite movie about New York is that scene in Mistress America where Greta Gerwig descends the red steps in Times Square and exclaims that this is the place where everything happens. No, really, it’s You’ve Got Mail, or Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco, or Mean Streets and Goodfellas and The King of Comedy, or Spike Lee’s 25th Hour. God, but it’s also Moonstruck. And it’s also In The Cut and Half Nelson and Working Girl and Coyote Ugly and Crooklyn and Crossing Delancey!

The most New York movie is the documentary The Cruise, a movie that is so alive with the tension of being a transplant in this city, of loving it enough to really hate some of it, but still standing in wonder before it all. All those movies speak to different parts of New York and why I love it: being broke, making it big, being in your twenties, being a fuck-up, falling in love, being right, getting wronged.

So what’s your answer? What movie shows your home the way you see it, or the way you remember it, or how you’d want it to be known?

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I think Ciara Miller should buy a gun.

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