12 Questions for David Marchese
The host of the New York Times 'The Interview' podcast on curiosity, authenticity, extracting a sense of vulnerability from his subjects, medically assisted suicide, and more.
I first came across David Marchese’s work on a rainy day in Berlin this past February, where I was, in the unbearable cold, doing research for a book I’ve been working on for quite some time. I received a call from my mother, who asked me, before hanging up the phone, if I’d ever listened to the New York Times interview podcast, and, she said, if not, then I should. ‘You mean The Daily?’ I responded. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s the one The Daily releases on the weekend, but it’s a whole different thing, it’s like a long recorded interview with a politician, actor, or anyone who’s famous really, usually from the… you know, society/culture world.’ Iterations of this conversation are an almost everyday occurrence. My mother regularly asks questions like if I’d watched the most recent Seth Meyers Closer Look segment on something hypocritical Trump said on a plane, or about a plane, or if I’d tuned in the night before to watch Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert’s opening monologue, or, more often, if I’d put on CNN to see what Kaitlan Collins had said that morning about Stephen Miller, or had asked Stephen Miller, and if I’d noticed Kaitlan Collins’ supernatural ubiquity, her frightening work ethic, how she seems, twenty-four/seven, to always be on air, covering the White House and Capitol Hill through the morning and afternoon, then going on to host her own show at night, enduring this schedule on a daily basis. Kaitlan Collins is only thirty-three, and look at all she’s accomplished, my mother might add, before asking if I’d seen what Jamie Stelter (née Schupach), the NY1 anchor, happened to be wearing on air that afternoon. ‘No.’ I’ll respond. ‘It was so crazy!’ She’ll say, before adding something like: ‘Oh, by the way, who’s this Bad Bunny guy? He was on Fallon last night. I couldn’t understand him at all. He’s always on SNL now, for whatever reason. By the way, did you watch the latest Weekend Update? It was actually really funny.’
‘No, I mean yeah, I did see it. But just a few clips on YouTube, not the whole thing.’
My mother, seventy, is under the impression that my generation still watches live TV, or that the first thing I do after a long day’s work is put on CNN for a few hours to see the nuance of opinion between Kaitlan Collins and Van Jones on what type of fascist authoritarianism Trump’s floor-length tie represents. There’s no point in disabusing her of this notion, for if she knew the truly fractured way my generation consumes media, how disengaged everyone seems to be about our haunting political reality, she’d be somewhat shaken and disturbed. I do, actually, from time to time, watch clips of interviews on mainstream platforms like CNN, CBS (60 minutes, for now), and MSNBC. I read the New York Times almost every single day and I still, the more fraught the political situation, take somnambulant pleasure in watching John Oliver, Jon Stewart, and Seth Meyers perform their dated, oft-lazy, hackneyed material. While others, in fact most people my age or in my social, cultural circle see lamestream media as a complete waste of time, something backward and dumb, I see it as a kind of perverse comfort food, a guilty pleasure that reminds me of a simpler, pre-2015 period when everything appeared to make a little more sense. But now, in a time where it seems the world is falling apart while I endure a variety of my own never-ending personal issues and grief (this is just adulthood, and I must, at thirty, begin to accept that), mainstream media outlets tend to provide a form of sedative relaxation, especially when compared to the confusing and ever-expanding independent media ecosystem, where everyone has a platform and ostensibly the most advanced, personal yet objective angle on any conceivable issue du jour—well of course.
To believe in the power and credibility of conventional institutions is outdated and lame. Yet, (I’ll reiterate), when I read the Times or watch Jon Stewart I feel connected to a simpler cultural era where only newspapers, magazines, and channels existed, and not every moron was so easily able to platform their take with the sneaky implication that they deserve to demand your attention, and that, in fact, it’s their birthright to demand your attention. So, because I love her, I indulge my mom, and my connection to mainstream platforms (American institutions) makes me feel more connected to her, to the love between mother and son that must be respected and acknowledged. While the legacy of Ronald Reagan, Trump’s MAGA movement, along with the decades long influence of far-right stalwarts like Alito or Thomas, will have you believe that most media institutions are hellbent on destroying the nuclear family and tearing communities apart, the effect has for me been the opposite; I respect and understand how others might have had a different experience with the atomizing consequences of popular media, but I think two conflicting truths should be allowed to exist in a kind of earth-shattering harmony; maintaining a connection with mainstream platforms allows me to indulge in the illusion of safety, the warmth of childhood, and thus avoid confronting how messy the world, which is to say the information ecosystem, has become; I think unfettered capitalism is more to blame for atomization and isolation, and everything from mainstream media to the most niche-yet-vitriolic cultural debates are the very outcome of existing in a greed-driven atmosphere; the focus on the problem is in fact misguided. To maintain the idea of cozy comfort in front of the TV with family, the never-ending discussion that books, movies and television programs can spark, I indulge my mother and Talmudically discuss what happened in the news, what happened on television—I’ll discuss how Kaitlan Collins relentlessly nudges Trump’s illiterate Barbie doll press secretary, and I’ll talk about how odd it is that Bill Maher had dinner with Kid Rock at the White House and spoke for fifteen minutes about Trump’s surprisingly indelible charm, or how Kristi Noem (Noem like Gnome), the United States Secretary of Homeland Security, doesn’t know the definition of habeas corpus, yet takes part in an endless stream of propagandistic videos where she’s portrayed, heroically, assisting ICE agents in deporting Latin American families. We’ll talk at length about these issues, and about what the pundits on various news networks and infotainment programs have had to say on the matter, as well as which ones we do and do not happen to agree with. But, with all that mentioned, I did not happen to, on that frigid winter day in the middle of January, listen to the new episode of The Interview, where I was told by my mother that a man with a name like Davis Matchaisy had a contentious back and forth with the Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington. And she said I should really listen to it, primarily because of how insolent Washington behaved during the interview before, somehow, this man named Matchaisy managed to get Washington to shed his defenses and portray a sense of vulnerability. My mother liked how Matchaisy talked about his combative interaction in the episode’s short intro, and she mentioned how it all reminded her of my antagonistic interview with the writer Richard Hell. (Example: throughout our interview, Hell refused to be associated with the term punk, or the concept of punk—a unique perspective from someone who’s credited with starting the punk rock movement.) ‘Just take a listen,’ my mother said. ‘You might find it interesting.’
Upon acquiescing and opening up the interview, on bluetooth headphones during a long walk with my dog through a muddy park in Mitte, I proceeded to judge David Marchese with an almost cruel form of severity. My initial reaction was, simply, that he was kind of annoying. Indeed Washington came off as more annoying, and strange, if not incredibly rude, but I didn’t like the way that Marchese seemed to cower, and appear to intentionally make himself small in the presence of Washington’s celebrity. It seemed like it was all a disingenuous tactic where if Marchese appeared obsequious and mousey he’d have the right to occasionally, from time to time meekly, challenge Washington with a surprisingly irreverent and personal question and, therefore, extract information. I thought, at the time, that this deliberately nebbish approach was pathetic and that for the most part it didn’t work. I dismissed Marchese as a commonplace, unreflective manipulator, a b-grade interviewer, and, cavalier, moved on with my day through the Berlin grime, the dark gray snow. I told my mom this, and surprised, she responded: ‘Really? I thought it was good.’
It’s always been my mother’s dream, I suspect, for me to be a visible member of the mainstream media, for her to turn on the television and either see me interviewing someone of tremendous talent and power, or being interviewed for the sake of my own tremendous talent and power. It’d be a sign of me fulfilling my potential, that I’d made it and was respected by credentialed professionals. Almost every American grows up with the desire to fulfill and surpass what their parents had failed to accomplish, or never dared to accomplish. For some it’s becoming a doctor or business tycoon, and for me, for a while unconsciously, it was being acknowledged and respected as a writer, as a figure with an aesthetic sense of lyricism and a vast array of opinions as well as, one hopes, unique observations; a spiritually alchemic combination of all those aforementioned traits. My ensuing love for the act of writing itself, for attempting a form of transcendence through my work no matter the awards or recognition that might come as a result, has ended up as counterintuitive to fulfilling the institutional respect my mother desired, at once for herself, and then, by the corollary of failure, for me. At thirty-years-old with only a semi-successful publication on Substack (which many disparagingly insist on calling a blog), and, I should add, an unpublished novella, I can’t help but feel like I’ve let my mother down. In our interview, Marchese writes: ‘I am inclined to reject that one has any moral or personal obligation to family beyond the moral or personal obligations owed to any human being. Which is, basically, to be kind.’ With this I disagree. No matter how much I know better, I can’t shake the desire to not only fulfill a personal sense of potential, but to fulfill a sense of potential that can be perceived and admired by respected institutions, an expectation that has come to haunt me. To some degree, this burden has become my very American, undesired obligation; if this awful personality disorder of American megalomania did not exist, I’d have several years ago settled in Europe to a life of middle-class comfort and anonymity.
Why did I judge David Marchese with such ferocity? What did this, and does this, say about my own insecurities in regard to the work I’m doing and where I’m at as a writer? This was a question, following the long listen to the Denzel Washington interview, that I couldn’t stop asking myself. In other words, the interview stuck with me, and, in other words, if it were, like most podcasts, really a senseless piece of shit, I wouldn’t have been thinking about it, and it certainly wouldn’t have evoked such a period of introspective reflection. It’s a general rule, at least in my opinion, that no art (or interview) is good or bad. Nothing is good or bad (bah!). Things are either memorable or forgettable, and if something is memorable, it was at least worthwhile, which is to say not a waste of time. And, like kismet, I must have come across it for a reason. On another long walk through the five-pm dark of a Berlin winter, I chose to listen to the interview once more.