Tracking Esther down at an after-hours club and marvelling at her artistry, he resolves to propel her into pictures. The number she performs at the club, “The Man That Got Away,” is one of the most astonishing, emotionally draining musical productions in Hollywood history, both for Garland’s electric, spontaneous performance and for Cukor’s realization of it. The song itself, by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin, is the apotheosis of the torch song, and Garland kicks its drama up to frenzied intensity early on, as much with the searing pathos of her voice as with convulsive, angular gestures that look like an Expressionist painting come to life. (Her fury prefigures the psychodramatic forces unleashed by Gena Rowlands in the films of her husband, John Cassavetes.) Cukor, who had first worked wonders with Garland in the early days of “The Wizard of Oz” (among other things, he removed her makeup, a gesture repeated here by Maine), captures her performance in a single, exquisitely choreographed shot, with the camera dollying back to reveal the band, in shadow, with spotlights gleaming off the bells of brass instruments and the chrome keys of woodwinds.

I look around the room and I see a laundry basket in need of optimization, an unsatisfactory rug, house plants that should be growing more. I need better tupperware, a kitchen remodel, some trick to clean my exterior windows that isn’t just me spending hours cleaning my exterior windows. Instead of looking around my living space with gratitude for the soft comfort I’ve built for myself, inflected with my peculiar tastes and preferences, I see lack. And that dissatisfaction becomes a sort of lingering fog, dampening my experience of the world.

The scroll doesn’t make you feel jealous, per se. I don’t even think it makes you feel shame, at least not in the way we usually think of it. It’s aspirational: it makes you feel like if you could just find the capital and discipline, you could touch perfection too.

Remodeling is the attempt to find “the one best way” with our physical spaces; wellness culture is “the one best way” with our bodies; productivity culture is “the one best way” with our work lives. And like all quests for optimization, they’re sinkholes.

If you’re an interior designer, if you see home space as an artistic tapestry, I get this; I believe you. But I also believe that we’ve collectively become very good at mistaking the feelings of optimization, organization, and control for fun. Organizing your fridge is not fun. Neither is watching someone do it. It is satisfying, and it is satisfying because it offers a flicker of control amidst the natural and amplified chaos of our lives.

instead of directing attention and energy towards the sort of structures that could make us feel less insecure — whether unions or deeper friendships or school year reform — we focus it on the self and the space around it.

But the very idea that we can “fix” this mindset is, well, optimization culture. “Fixing” suggests altering or shifting the existing parts. This bullshit requires dismantlement. But what does that even begin to look like? For me, it’s looking at my body, my self, and my spaces through the eyes of a friend who loves me the most. It’s extending that posture of grace for others. It’s talking back at the part of me that worries something is “off-trend” or will “look dated.” It’s finding that busted-ass coffee maker funny. Annoying, sure, but annoyances are part of the rich tapestry of life. It’s figuring out the parts of my living space that are precious to me, as we did in the Friday thread this week, and extending that feeling. Not the cost, not the aesthetic, but the feeling.

It’s remembering, over and over again, what a blessing it is to be simply, overwhelmingly, satisfied.