Alexander Rocca is a doctoral candidate in American literature at Columbia University.
Alexander Rocca
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Writing on Public Books
From Berlusconismo to Trumpismo
With America’s national neuroses thrust into collective view by the ongoing election season, the lure of long-form TV is more powerful than ever. Fortunately for the soul that abhors primary numbers, there is another way to experience the libidinal thrill of the current political climate, for buried deep in Netflix’s catalog is an Italian series […]
Let’s All Inhale: Pynchon Goes to the Movies
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Paul Thomas Anderson makes a revealing comment about his artistic choices as a director: “If you can convince yourself that there’s some link to reality, then you can justify anything.”1 He’s talking about the famous “milkshake” line from There Will Be Blood (2007), but he might just as […]
Linklater’s Gooey Realism
Richard Linklater’s acclaimed Boyhood is an ambitious film about a Texas boy named Mason, a millennial everyman played by Ellar Coltrane, as he matures from ages 6 to 18. Along the way, he proceeds through the more or less familiar milestones of middle-class life, including, among others, recognition of a disenchanted universe (magic is a […]
Return to the Fold
At first glance, Rectify may seem like another variation on that favorite TV conceit of recent years: a damaged, asocial male struggles to reconcile with the modern world (see Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Sopranos, True Detective—the list goes on). And in broad outline, this Sundance Channel (now SundanceTV) original about a recently released death […]
Dreaming in the Multiverse
The American Southwest has long been associated with unsavory scientific research, from Manhattan Project nuclear experiments at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to the only recently acknowledged Area 51, preferred vacation spot of aliens the universe over. But in American Elsewhere, Robert Jackson Bennett’s latest work of speculative fiction, the little town of Wink, New […]
