What a god damn screen presence. Ozark wouldn’t have been worth the miserablism were it not for the masterfully crafted Ruth Langmore, and Inventing Anna wouldn’t be worth the sentimental goop were it not for her mesmerizing command of Delvey — a real person, to be sure, but an enigma, a brilliant person whose intricately calculating capacity for reading people didn’t extend to reading herself (and seemingly still doesn’t — Delvey herself is fascinating to watch, the beautiful irony that she becomes a licit and successful socialite only once she’s under house arrest, maybe that’s emblematic of atomization and loneliness world etc etc there’s some theory slop to be done there). Anyway I think I was saying how godforsakenly foxy Julia Garner is and how I need to find me a lady who can do accents. There’s nothing more fun in hanging with homies or your girl and doin voices. Although I think the woman I’m specifically after here is the character Ruth Langmore. My earliest adult romances were with Southern lasses when I lived at the hippie mountain college down in Black Mountain, a brassy lil smart alec with some twang, aye yiy yiy, what a beautiful thing. We drank brown whiskey and PBR every day, moonshine when we could get it, from one of the actual last remaining old school moonshiners who set up around Weaverville and Boone and smoked King Mountains, $3.50 a pack
