Dolly Parton Gone: America Lost Its Last Saint

The news came quietly, the way deaths do when the person was so large you assumed they were permanent. Dolly Parton — 11-time Grammy winner, songwriter, philanthropist, cultural institution disguised as a human being — has died at the age of 80. Her family confirmed it. The rest of us are still loading.

I don't write eulogies. But I also don't pretend that the death of Dolly Parton is entertainment news with a sidebar. She was the architect of her own mythology in a way that the Kardashians have spent decades trying to reverse-engineer and never quite cracked, because Dolly's version was built on something they couldn't manufacture: genuine warmth that somehow coexisted with absolute strategic genius. She knew exactly what she was doing. She just made sure you loved her too much to notice.

While the world processes that, the rest of the industry spins forward the way it always does. Ryusuke Hamaguchi — the director who won the Best International Feature Oscar for *Drive My Car* just five years ago — is heading back into the race, this time with *All of a Sudden*, Japan's official submission. Neon is reportedly planning a wider campaign. Hamaguchi returning to that category is less a surprise than a confirmation: he is simply operating at a level most directors reach once, if at all.

Meanwhile, Prime Video is moving ahead with a *RoboCop* series, and the casting of Dan Stevens as Officer Alex Murphy is doing the thing good casting always does — it makes a project that sounded like a bad idea feel like it might not be. Dan Stevens has a quality that a lot of leading men don't: he can play earnest without being dull, and RoboCop is, at its core, a story about a man trying to remember he was one. That tension needs an actor. They may have found one.

And on Netflix, Jessica Chastain arrives in *Heartland* — a country music thriller from writer-director Shana Feste, hitting the platform in November. Chastain in a thriller set in the country music world is a combination I didn't know I needed until this exact moment.

But all of that is footnote. Dolly built a library for children who couldn't afford books. She funded the Moderna COVID vaccine research. She turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice because she didn't think she'd earned it. She had earned it. That's the joke. That's the whole joke.

They don't make them like that anymore, and they never really did.