The Radical Sincerity of <em>The OA</em>
During the two hours I spent talking with Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij in February, the conversation eddied its way around the following topics. The movies of Krzysztof Kieślowski. The neuroscience of trauma. The painter and novelist Leonora Carrington. Noise shows in San Francisco. Hilma af Klint and the origins of abstract expressionism. Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette. Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast. Cassandra and the gift of second sight. Adam Curtis’s HyperNormalisation. The scourge of irony. Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. The serenity of Le Pain Quotidien. We were sitting at the dining table of what seemed to be an Airbnb apartment in L.A.’s Los Feliz, but it felt at times as if we’d been accidentally transposed into an upcoming novel by Don DeLillo.
Marling and Batmanglij, if you haven’t encountered their work or deduced from the above, are probably the two most erudite people in Hollywood. Within the larger, seamier confines of the entertainment industry, they stand out like a pair of unicorns on the Las Vegas strip. Their partnership works so well, you sense, because they’re like two halves of the same brain. Marling, who’s 36, is the gentler of the two, soft-spoken and intentional, while Batmanglij, who’s a year or so older, is fierier and more passionate. She’s blond, and wearing a rainbow-colored sweater over houndstooth pants; he’s dark-haired, and dressed in black. The musician Sharon Van Etten, who stars in their Netflix series The OA, told me over email that Marling is “very sensitive. Intuitive. A caretaker. Collaborative. Zal is intense. Thoughtful. Driven.” The two complement each other, Van Etten said, but they also push each other, and each other’s work, to the limits.
It’s easy to imagine a world in which they never met, never found their niche in filmmaking, never made it to the position they occupy now as creators of one of the of the Peak TV era. Marling sometimes imagines a timeline wherein their movie never made it to Sundance in 2011 and she became an environmental lawyer instead. Somehow, though, everything fell into, and then Netflix happened. Silicon Valley’s incursion into the entertainment world meant that suddenly a major corporation with colossal spending power was willing to green-light a series about an interdimensional traveler who goes by the name OA: Original Angel.
