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"As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?"

I hope I have it in me to raise a daughter like Furiosa. I wish for the life of me that she wouldn't have to brave the falling world's cruelties, but given the way things are going I'm sure she'll have to face much worse than I have, and my deepest desire is that I can prepare her for some amount of that. Dementus may be an insane psychopath, but he's right about one thing: we are the already dead. So how do we fight for a better future, one where we're not born lost? I don't have any good answers, but I'll keep fighting as long as I can, and hopefully I can ready her to do the same.

2024 | George Miller | Sci-Fi | Action
Favorite First-Watches 2024

“All I need is a decent night’s sleep!”

As a new father, I finally get it: it do be like this. Baby had been throwing up periodically for a few days, so we went to see the doctor, and I’m oversimplifying because y’all don’t need to know every detail of her life but the doc basically said yeah, babies throw up sometimes. We got ourselves our own little Eraserhead bundle, moaning and writhing and spewing.

“In Heaven, everything is fine.”

1970s | David Lynch | Horror

Baby’s first movie was a TV show, we’re so washed. One day I hope my daughter has at least one relationship in her life that’s at least half as beautiful and fulfilling as Kiyo and Sumire’s

My Most-Watched Movies

I have a baby daughter! And she is perfect! Perfect in every way!

My Most-Watched Movies

"We live our simple daily lives, and atrocities shatter the security of our world. It's so overwhelming, and God feels so very remote."

My first time here, so you'll have to forgive the anachronistic comparison, but Winter Light reminds me a lot of First Reformed, even if we ultimately end up somewhere slightly different by the end of it. Fisherman Jonas Persson approaches pastor Tomas Ericsson troubled by thoughts of China's atomic weapons program. How do we keep our faith in the face of the possible extinction of all life on Earth? Where can we find meaning in an empty planet? How can we hear God's words over the atomic thunder?

The pastor replies that although this existential despair is profound, it is nonetheless common, it is part of the universal human experience. We all must confront the inevitability of our absence, whether eventual or sudden, whether us as individuals or us as the human race, and we must find a reason to continue to exist in this teleological abyss. It just gets harder when the timeline seems so short, and when our usual source of answers dries up, when it feels as though God no longer hears our prayers.

This is where we diverge from First Reformed slightly. This isn't the first time that pastor Tomas has been confronted with God's silence. He lost his wife four years ago, and he committed unspeakable atrocities during the Spanish Civil War that he could not reconcile with his faith. Enter Algot, the church sexton, who makes an implicit comparison between Tomas and Jesus. He asks whether Jesus's physical pain on the cross would have been overshadowed by the spiritual pain of his betrayal by his disciples and ultimately by God. Tomas agrees.

It seems that Tomas's faith has been in crisis for a long time now, he just didn't realize it until Jonas came to him with his existential quandary. For years, he has been preaching sermons he didn't believe, serving an absent master. Like Märta, he has given himself to the Other, lived entirely for someone else, for something else, for an idea he had already lost long ago. Perhaps he fooled himself into believing that he might hear the words again one day, but now he is left in the torment of God's silence.

"He thought that his heavenly father had abandoned him. He believed everything he'd ever preached was a lie. In the moments before he died, Christ was seized by doubt. Surely that must have been his greatest hardship… God's silence."

1960s | Ingmar Bergman

"You get bored watching it, and the hitter does, so he tries to swing at it like normal. But it’s already past him, or it waits 'til he’s done swinging. The eephus makes him lose track of time."

The end of time. The last game of the season before descending into the depths of winter, the last game for two teams before they replace game day with fond reminiscence, the last game for the field before it's torn up and buried beneath a bed of brick, the very ground itself gradually fading away into the annals of history. Grasping desperately at the final moment before it all disappears, playing long into the night, refusing to go home after the sun sets, even if the pleasure of the game already departed with the umpire.

And yet — this is no cataclysm, no great tragedy. The point is not (merely) to mourn the ing of this final ninth inning, this ultimate eleventh hour, but (also) to observe its progression, to marinate in its atmosphere, to find ourselves present for its departure. Baseball is a slow game, a game to take at its own pace, characterized by lingering stretches of stillness and sudden flashes of action, the pitcher's methodical routine juxtaposed with the explosive crack of the bat.

The eephus plays with this temporal paradox, both the eponymous pitch and the film taking its name. The eephus makes us lose track of time. It lingers forever in front of us before abruptly vanishing as if it were never there to begin with. We pause to notice the trees, the leaves, the clouds, and ages have ed by the time we return to the game, but the ball remains before us nonetheless, waiting until we're ready, and then suddenly it's gone.

Life is strange that way. We each have our time at the plate; sometimes it moves slow and sometimes fast, and then we swing and somehow it's already gone past. We're all playing on a field already consigned to memory, grappling with a game that doesn't matter, and yet we share this transient madness, bestowing it with collective purpose, keeping score even as the light fades. This too shall , but for now it's ours.

2024

I don't give a shit about baseball, I went to see this because Cliff Blake is a family friend and I was treated to a beautiful piece of meditative slow cinema that's just precisely my tempo, conceived in potent metaphorical language that at this point in my life reads primarily as a text about the age of time and aging/generational shifts and moving on/acceptance, but which has just as much to say about masculine community rituals and homosocial bonding while also being a gorgeous foliage/landscape movie. I didn't expect this to become a new favorite for the 2020s, but here we are.

This review may contain spoilers.

"The previous tenant threw herself out of the window. You can still see where she fell."

HOA got Polanski suicidal. In a narrow sense, The Tenant is all about the struggles of apartment shopping, how you rent a place with a bad community and your neighbors will drive you up the walls. Trelkovsky (Polanski) rents a room from a greedy, unsympathetic landlord ("I won't exactly starve without your 5,000. No. I'm renting the apartment because it's vacant, and because I know they don't grow on trees.") whose other tenants complain about the slightest noise and who conspire constantly to throw out anyone who doesn't fit in, whether by means of formal complaints and petitions or by suicidal ideation. It's almost goofy how Trelkovsky goes around asking everyone he meets how much their apartment costs and how hard it was to find and how nice their neighbors are — that is, it would be if it weren't for the eerie atmosphere.

So, what's going on here, then? Because I think this is about more than just housing woes. The most powerful moments of the film for me are when reality stutters, when something impossible happens and the symbolic world of the film opens up. The first hint at this bending of the rules of existence comes at the previous tenant's funeral, where the priest's eulogy gradually becomes darker and more gruesome, but the first true moment of unreality comes when Trelkovsky is alone in his apartment and sees someone who isn't there, some across the courtyard in the bathroom staring at him, silent, motionless. He continues to have apparent encounters with ethereal apparitions of his neighbors, one of them even appearing to assault him upon his return to the building, but a bystander stares and sees nothing but a man alone, writhing on the ground.

The point of all this for me is to symbolize and visualize the overproximity of the Other. In this sense, the movie reminded me distinctly of Abel Ferrara's Driller Killer, a movie about a man driven mad by his neighbors and by the New York City housing crisis. In that film, however, the violence caused by this madness is directed outwards, back at the Other, while here it is directed inward. Here, the Other is so ever-present that Trelkovsky begins to lose his sense of self. He gradually turns himself into the apartment's previous tenant, until he even s her in her tragic fate, and the cycle begins again. This is The Tenant's final horror: when we don't have a place to live, a space where we can be ourselves, we gradually lose all sense of what that self would even be. The suffocating overproximity over the Other drowns out our own authentic identity.

1970s | Roman Polanski | Horror

"On Earth, nothing was working out, and I wanted to get the hell outta there."

Sort of like if you crossed Starship Troopers with Okja, so it's not quite so much about fascism as it is about the cults of personality that have replaced the political sphere under late-stage capitalism. Mickey is broke and down on his luck, so he sells his life away to a space colonization endeavor under the apparent leadership of failed politician Kenneth Marshal, played by Mark Ruffalo doing a grotesque riff on Trump's and Musk's mannerisms and puppeteered by his food-obsessed wife Toni Collette.

Mickey dies over and over for the expedition, serving increasingly asinine and futile purposes, only to be printed out again and again by illicit cloning technology, and his situation is exceptional, of course, but it makes its point. The despots of the 21st century don't need imaginary future tech to devalue human life in their ceaseless crusade for power, and we don't need to get in too deep with a psychopath loan shark to lose both corporeal and existential agency to the all-consuming pursuit of capital.

When we have to sell our time and our bodies and our very existence in order to survive, our lives were never really our own to begin with. Time to take them back.

2020s | Bong Joon-ho | Sci-Fi

"We'll do a great show, we'll smile, we'll cry big, glistening tears that pour onto the stage, and we'll make their lives a little happier, so they won't have to face themselves. They can pretend to be somebody else."

The self-destructive futility of the arts and entertainment business

There's something beautiful at the heart of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, which at first glance feels like a strange kind of contradiction, but once the movie finished and the more I sit and think about it, the more it feels like the defining tension of the film.

My first impression of the movie as it played out before me was that it was a kind of deglamorization of the traditional nightlife activities that characterize so much of film noir, whether neo or classical. The clubs are dumps on the inside, and the productions are shallow excuses to show off a little skin. Cosmo and some of his girls attend a high-stakes poker game, and it looks like it's being held in the janitor's closet of some cheap hotel. Cosmo himself looks like the kind of person who fancies himself quite the gentleman but who despite his appearance has no real money or prestige.

Taken together, it felt at first like a kind of take-down or send-up of traditional noir aesthetics: these people think they're so slick, but really they're worthless lowlifes who live in the gutter, etc. — but the more time we spend with Cosmo, the more we see that he really cares about the shoddy productions his club puts on, and the movie really takes his perspective seriously. I was fascinated to read that the character of Cosmo was based in part on an impersonation that actor Ben Gazzara did of director John Cassavetes; he seems like such a loser at first, and his productions are so apparently pathetic that it felt like an insult to compare the two.

But what if we love him precisely because he is a loser, because he puts all his life energy into this low-art trash and yet despite this apparent squalor he'd still rather kill than sell out his principles. This is what makes the film's portrayal of Cosmo so deeply human to me, because who among us can really say that they're doing anything different? We all put on our little songs and dances, whether it's writing nonsense on the internet or whatever your personal ion might be, it's only meaningful because of the situation in which we find ourselves, because we invest it with our own meaning, because we imbue it with our own truth.

"Now, you take Carol, right? Take her. Take Carol. 'Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.' No. A dingbat, right? A ding-a-ling. A dingo. That's what people think she is, 'cause that's the truth they want to believe. But you put her in another situation, right? Put her in a situation that's tough. Stress. Where she's up against something, you'll see she's no fool. Right? A little silly, but no fool. Right. 'Cause what's your truth is my falsehood. What's my falsehood is your truth and vice versa."

1970s | Neo-Noir

"Stop acting like strangers!"

A woman under the influence, yes, but the influence of what? Mabel drinks excessively in one early scene, but the longer the movie plays, the more alcohol seems like the least of her problems. Narratively speaking, A Woman Under the Influence follows the increasing tensions and gradual conflict among the of the Longhetti family, which, thematically speaking, frames the story as one about the instability and gradual disintegration of domestic space in particular and of our shared social fabric more generally (the Longhettis apparently host husband and father Nick's work friends often enough for them to complain about having spaghetti again), but what interests me most about it is how this examination relates to wife and mother Mabel's characterization as a "woman under the influence."

There's an intriguing sort of parallax dissonance throughout the film at a structural level, where it naturally creates this desire for resolution at its most basic level but then problematizes that desire when viewed slightly askew. As Mabel slowly loses her safe mooring in her home — and, let's be honest, as Nick gradually loses his own shit as well — we long to see that domestic security re-established. It's hard to see them struggling and not wish that some small sense of normalcy could return to their life. But how well was that normalcy serving Mabel to begin with? Even before the snowball starts rolling downhill, Mabel is clearly anxious, uneasy, on edge — something is wrong, and whatever it is, she doesn't have an outlet for it. She welcomes Nick and his crew into their house after an understandably disappointing night, and he thanks her by policing her behavior and by yelling at her for being too friendly with one of his buddies.

There was a long stretch of the film where I couldn't shake the feeling that despite it being such an intimate character study we hadn't really seen the real Mabel. When we first meet her, she's nervous about sending her kids off to stay with her mother; then she gets obliterated and throws herself at the first man she finds at a bar; then she plays the gracious host to Nick and his fellow workers. Even when she's alone, it feels as though she's trying to figure out how she's supposed to behave, as if seeking approval from some Big Other to guarantee the appropriateness of her actions. But every small other that comes along judges her, whether it's the neighbor afraid to leave his children alone with her or Nick telling her not to let her mind run away with her and ultimately sending her off to an institution. Each time the real Mabel comes close to the surface, she must quickly be repressed.

Mental health concerns are all over the fringes of A Woman Under the Influence, even if they don't quite make it into the lexicons of its characters. There's not a soul in the film who wouldn't benefit from some kind of therapy, but what Mabel or any of them need almost certainly isn't electroconvulsive therapy, which is what she receives in the clinic where her family locks her away. When she returns home after six months of treatment, we see her trapped between two contradictory imperatives: that she not get too excited or show too much emotion — upon returning home and seeing her children for the first time in half a year, no less — and that she "just be herself." This impossible double-bind becomes illustrative of Mabel's situation more generally: her family, her society, her world wants her to be herself, but not too much.

This paradoxical command is the "influence" under which Mabel finds herself throughout the film. It is the influence of the very social fabric that we watch slowly fray over the course of the film, the sense of normalcy for which the film prompts us to yearn. But when we look closer, when we view the film through Mabel's eyes, we see that this sense of normalcy is predicated upon her repression. It is a domestic space where her own father doesn't know how to stand up for her — doesn't even know what she means when she pleads with him. So at the end of the film, when the crisis seems to have been averted and Nick and Mabel slowly reassemble their house, we must ask ourselves: should we feel relief? Is this a victory? Or are they simply rebuilding a system where the real Mabel cannot exist except as a woman under the influence?

1970s | Fav Firsts 2024

What I find so fascinating about The Headless Woman is the constitutive tension at the heart of the film between its narrative structure and its thematic significance.

On the surface, it's about a woman (Verónica, aka "Vero") who hits something or someone with her car (she's too shaken by the incident to get out and look) and who then proceeds to have something of a mental breakdown, forgetting who she is, where she is, what she ought to be doing in any given situation. Someone calls her a car to go to the dentist's office, so she arrives and sits in the waiting room only to realize that she is the dentist and that she's late for work.

Director Lucrecia Martel in tandem with cinematographer Bárbara Álvarez and editor Miguel Schverdfinger echo this dissociative fugue state through the form of the film, framing Vero out of the picture or cutting abruptly between sets and scenes without any time to adjust. Vero is clearly having a hard time, and the movie puts us directly in her shoes, forcing us to experience this trauma as she does. Along the way, however, Martel leaves us clues pointing toward a bigger picture.

While most of the movie takes place in or adjacent to Vero's perspective, it actually opens on three children playing in a field, three children with notably darker skin than Vero, one of whom presumably becomes the victim of Vero's traumatic incident. This racial juxtaposition continues throughout the movie: Vero constantly relies on the help of servants, coworkers, and strangers, all with darker skin, while she glides through life oblivious to the situation around her, unwilling both literally and figuratively to get out of her car and look at the world around her.

Martel and her team mimic this tunnel vision once again at the level of form: at one point, Vero drives to a poor part of town, and the camera refuses to rack focus and show anything outside the car even as the action shifts in that direction. Here we begin to approach the film's deeper symbolic function. It appears to be about a woman experiencing an unsettling trauma, and her story remains an important element of this world, but the movie is just as much about her story as it is about the way that it's only possible to tell her story without telling the whole truth.

One of Vero's relatives tries to talk to her about "that boy who was murdered," but Vero corrects her: "The papers say he drowned." This is why the film's emphasis on form is so crucial. I don't think the point is to say that Vero isn't also a victim in her own right, even if she's largely a victim of her own folly. I think the point is to shift focus and reframe the discussion to include what is all too often left out: class conflict and systemic inequality.

Because the struggles of the bourgeois racial majority always occur against a backdrop of poverty and disenfranchisement that those in power would rather ignore. Because whenever a headless woman hits a poor kid with her car, all she sees when she looks back is a dog.

2008

"Everything's going bad in this world."
"What do you mean, everything?"
"Well, everything… in this world… You know what? If everything's going bad… we're going… bad... as… well…"

Impropriety, disobedience, and misbehavior as existential empowerment and cinematic self-actualization

Tired of the one-dimensional roles that patriarchal society offers women ("we can't do anything" except be a "doll" or a "virgin," depending on your translation, and presumably the original Czech word connotes both), Marie I and Marie II decide to have some fun for a change. They smash food in their face, get hammered while watching a dance at the club, hook up with older men before abandoning them on a train — and the form of the film itself mimics this disorderly conduct with its abrupt changes of color palette and its use of abstract, avant-garde editing techniques.

Meanwhile, the engine of cinema chugs along, churning out the death and destruction displayed alongside the opening credits. Life is too short to live down to men's basic expectations, both existentially and cinematically speaking. By breaking from normative conventions, this ostensible shallow frivolity offers a deceptively deep emancipation. Interspersed among the light-hearted silliness are repeated discussions of what "matters," of "what's supposed to matter… even when someone doesn't exist anymore?" Because it certainly isn't how polite you are at the dinner table.

This playful irreverence thus becomes a kind of cosmic declaration about the state of the universe; "we exist, we exist, we exist," they chant as they march down the street, and they exist on their own , for their own purposes, apart from society's restrictive limitations.

"Can't you smell it?"
"What?"
"How volatile life is!"

1960s | Fav Firsts 2024

special thanks to kailey for writing about this movie in a way that helped me understand it

"Consider the optics!"

Fails doubly as a political thriller: the dialogue and aesthetic are so laughably on the nose as to be almost parodic, and the political messaging is boilerplate conspiracy theory fantasy.

Much like our own, this Brave New World is run by bad people who schemed their way into power by abusing an imperfect system of governance and exploiting a vulnerable, disenfranchised populace, but here these rulers are not the true source of evil, they're merely flawed but ultimately benevolent human beings like the rest of us, and "if we can’t see the good in people we’ve already lost." Barf.

The ultimate villainy resides elsewhere, in the mastermind behind a brainwashing plot. It's a comforting fantasy that distracts from the truth that real evil is much more mundane and banal, that the people in power truly are destroying the planet simply because they're ignorant or short-sighted or broken by the fact that their daughter doesn't love them anymore. Maybe that doesn't make a compelling comic book movie though.

For whatever little it's worth, I went to see this with my brother in law, who is a swell dude, and we had a great time together. Maybe that's all these things are meant to do, after all. Now quiet down and enjoy your brave new world.

2020s | MCU

"This is where I live. This is me. I will not allow violence against this house."

On the violence at the heart of man — and not "man" as an inappropriately gendered generality for humanity, but, you know, men, the male sex. It's no accident that every man in this film with any significant screen time ends up assaulting someone either physically or sexually and every woman with any significant screen time ends up the victim of assault. This is not aspirational cinema, it is confrontational, it is cynical realism.

Some men are more obviously dangerous than others. Immediately after Amy and David Sumner first arrive in Cornwall, Amy's ex-boyfriend Charlie Venner appears ready to rip Amy's clothes off (a promise on which he tragically follows through), manifesting the violence of the male gaze in all its threatening aspect. Henry Niles presents something of a juxtaposition to Charlie as a man whose threat has become unintentional: he has some sort of psychological disability and an apparent history of pedophilia. He just wants to play ball with the kids, but the adults around him worry that this ostensibly harmless behavior will have dire consequences.

David fits closer to the Henry Niles end of the spectrum: he looks like an impotent nerd who only moved to this part of the planet in order to study math, but even before his volcano erupts we can witness the lava slowly bubbling to the surface. His greatest early offense for me is the way he treats Amy's cat; when the cat later turns up dead, I was immediately convinced it was David's doing. When he finally does explode, it almost feels as though the movie is offering us the excuse that he's just protecting himself and his home, but I think the point is rather that the only difference between David and the openly vicious locals is that David is more repressed.

But the ultimate undermining of David's position of supposed moral high ground comes right at the end of the film. Throughout his defensive last stand, he protests that this is his house, despite having moved in so recently that the garage still isn't finished yet, and despite the fact that this is really Amy's homeland, not his. But then, after he defeats his assailants, he packs Henry into his car to drive him off somewhere, somewhere where maybe some of this makes some sense, where everything isn't so broken and wild, maybe the police, maybe Henry's house, but no — Henry doesn't know his way home, and neither, he confesses, does David.

Whether he destroyed it over the course of his retaliatory tirade or simply lost track of what he was fighting for, David has erased whatever domestic space he had when our story began, demolished the hearth stone he defended so desperately. This is the final result of this toxic-masculine violence: the total instability of the domestic sphere. When your house is built on the tectonic plates of a patriarchy so precarious, your house is built to crumble. These mad dogs have built their houses with straw.

1970s | Sam Peckinpah | Fav Firsts 2024

"You raised us to hate those boys, and we do, and now it's come to this."

As with many films on the subject of American national mythology, I feel a lot of Liberty Valance in Shotgun Stories's DNA. To use the language of Ford's iconic quotation, there are two legends here that must contend with fact before the facts are forgotten and the legend is printed: the history of the Father, who sired three sons and then abandoned them to start a new family, and the history of the Scar, the physical residue of a shotgun blast on the back of Son Hayes, the eldest of the Father's first three sons.

Son, Boy, and Kid were all raised by their mother to hate their father and the replacement family for which he left them, but the second family loves their dad. So now that he's dead, his memory becomes a matter of contention, and the feud that fuels the engine of the narrative revolves around the question of how he ought to be ed. "Just 'cause he stopped drinkin', called himself a Christian, got a new life, start a new family, that don't make him a different man." The legend isn't good enough for Son, the facts are worth fighting for, and one of the reasons Son is willing to fight is the scars on his back.

Son's coworkers place bets on how he got these scars, elevating the question of what happened into a myth all its own. We never learn the precise circumstances surrounding them, only that Son was protecting his brothers from their father, and here we begin to see what's at stake beyond the specifics of the Hayes family history. There's a constant tension between this protective familial instinct and the toxic resentment caused by the trauma of its violation. Perhaps it was even in the interest of the boys' protection that their mother taught them to hate their father, but that hatred has taken on a life of its own, and now it's come to this.

With Shotgun Stories, Jeff Nichols maps out the terrain of American domestic space and finds it characterized by these two conflicting emotional instincts. It's precisely this sort of resentment that motivates the political right in our country today — misattributed resentment that the Other is increasingly being given space to exist, that their supposedly once-"great" America has been taken away from them — and as it did with Mama Hayes, perhaps this resentment had originally emerged from a desire for protection, but now it has turned into a purposeless self-perpetuating hatred that threatens the very thing it once sought to safeguard.

Shotgun Stories leaves us with a bright sun over the horizon; it presents us with a scenario where the Hayes family manages to give up its hateful feud in the interest of self-preservation, but even with this shred of optimism it asks us at the same time: what if this were not the case? Taking the film as a text on U.S. national mythology, this question echoes deep into our own future. As a country actively working to criminalize the existence of everyone outside the white cishet norm, can we follow the Hayes family and give up our own hatred for the sake of our love? Or are we doomed to self-destruction?

2007 | Non-Western Westerns

"A zillion years ago, a guy's living in a cave. He goes out one day, bam! He gets chased by a mammoth. Now he's scared to death, but he gets away. And when it's all over with, he feels great."

"Well yeah, 'cause he's still living."

"Yeah, but he knows he is. And he feels it. So he goes home, back to the cave, the first thing he does, he does a drawing of the mammoth. And he thinks, 'People are coming to see this. Let's make it good. Let's make the teeth real long, and the eyes real mean.' Boom! The first monster movie. That's probably why I still do it. You make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything's okay, the lights come up…"

In praise of cinemas as trivial entertainment and cheap gimmickry as salve for global crisis and existential dread. The specifics of Lawrence Woolsey's analogy work particularly well for horror movies, but I think the principle functions more broadly as well.

The Cuban Missile Crisis descends upon the American people at the precise moment that Woolsey wants to release his latest thriller into theaters, and he owes the picture's smashing success not to the fact that it's an effective distraction or a compelling piece of escapism — quite the contrary. The movie reminds its audience all too clearly of the imminent danger on their doorstep: its narrative conceit features nuclear radiation, and Woolsey's William Castle–style Atomo-Vision and Rumble Rama mimic the physical sensations of aerial bombardment. Mant is a hit precisely because it reminds its viewers of the fragility of their existence and their proximity to potential total obliteration.

Thrillers like this allow us to practice being afraid in a safe environment and come out the other side unharmed and with a renewed appreciation for life, which is a peculiar advantage of this sort of gimmick-based art-as-entertainment, but I think all cinema does this regardless of genre. Movies are about life, they are truth at 24 frames per second, they allow us to live many lives and then to return to our own life with a renewed awareness and appreciation for it. 'Cause we're still living, yeah, but also because we know we're still living, because we feel it. Movies — now more than ever!

1990s | Metacinema

This review may contain spoilers.

Ingmar Bergman Mini-Marathon: Part Four

… How, then, do we live with death, whether that of a loved one or our own mortality? Bergman outlines two parallel strains of bourgeois nihilism, and then on the other side of the spectrum delineates two images of the sacred: God and Mother. There's no defeating death, but through the sacred we can find some small shred of meaning or purpose. Cries and Whispers leaves us with one of Agnes's memories, in which she spent a day with Anna and her sisters and felt genuine peace and happiness and expressed a profound gratitude for her life and her place in the universe. After this memory, an intertitle on screen tells us that "thus the cries and whispers fall silent." Perhaps this is all it means to successfully live with death, to find some moment in your life or some element of the sacred that brings you happiness and gratitude, anything that quiets the cries and whispers that haunt existence.

1970s | Ingmar Bergman | Patreon Bonus Content

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This review may contain spoilers.

Ingmar Bergman Mini-Marathon: Part Three

♪ Are you washed—
Are you washed— ♫
♪ In the blood—
In the blood— ♫
♪ In the soul-cleansing blood of the lamb? ♫

The central thematic interplay here seems to be the tension between Christianity and Norse paganism and in particular the dichotomy of guilt and innocence. Karin is of course the paragon of innocence as the virgin whose chastity is a requirement of her task to deliver candles to church. The most obviously guilty party is the band of shepherds who rape and murder Karin, literally violating her innocence and symbolically violating her as a manifestation of innocence as such, but throughout the film all the characters some amount of guilt over her tragic fate.

The first of these is Ingeri, the family's servant who functions as a stark counterpoint to Karin: her pregnant belly draws her in contrast to Karin's explicit virginity, and she opens the film by praying to Odin for aid in juxtaposition to Töre's morning prayer to the crucified Jesus. This establishes an early antagonism between the Christian and Norse gods, but for now the point is why Ingeri was praying to Odin: She wants to get rid of Karin, for which desire she later feels immense guilt. Märeta feels guilty for coveting Karin's affection and for wanting to be the favorite parent, and Töre feels guilty for killing the youngest of the shepherds, whose death eerily echoes Karin's.

Medieval Sweden doesn't offer these unfortunate peasants much comfort, but they find it where they can by seeking refuge in religious customs and traditions. We see this most clearly in Karin's mission to deliver the candles that occupies most of the film's early narrative. Karin wants to sleep in, and Märeta wants to let her, but Töre derives a lot of meaning and purpose from these rituals, and his word is final. But how can anyone find meaning in such a senseless act as befalls poor Karin? Töre first resorts to his Norse roots and exacts vengeance upon the shepherds, but this violence brings him no peace and instead only deepens his misery.

Ultimately Töre turns back to the Christian god and — in what feels like an impossible gesture — begs forgiveness in the wake of his daughter's devastation. He repents and offers to build a church on the site to honor God in spite of all that happened, seeking penance to assuage his guilt, and it seems to work. A spring erupts from the ground where Karin died, and Ingeri washes her face in the water, our principle representation of paganism and guilt subjecting herself to a symbolic baptism. Karin's death becomes a Christ-like sacrifice, absolving the sinners' guilt and cleansing their souls as they wash in the blood of the lamb.

1960s | Ingmar Bergman

♪ Are your garments spotless?
Are they white as snow? ♫
♪ Are you washed in the blood of the lamb? ♫

♪ Are you walking day by the savior's side?
Are you washed in the blood of the lamb? ♫
♪ Do you rest each moment in the crucified?
Are you washed in the blood of the lamb? ♫

Ingmar Bergman Mini-Marathon: Part Two

"One must learn to live. I practice every day. My biggest obstacle is I don't know who I am. I grope blindly. If anyone ever loves me as I am, I may dare at last to look at myself. For me, that possibility is fairly remote."

Autumn Sonata feels like watching therapy to me, not (only) because it's a lot of trauma-dumping, which I understand is increasingly common today in psychiatric settings, but (also, and more importantly) because it feels like both characters are engaging in a profusion of psychological processing and learning a lot about themselves along the way. As the film begins, Viktor reads from Eva's journal that she doesn't know who she is, and from her interactions with her mother Charlotte, whom she asks to visit in the wake of her partner Leonardo's death, she doesn't seem to know who her mother is either — at least, not consciously.

As she recounts her childhood at various points throughout, it gradually becomes clear that Eva's actual mother and her idea of her mother are two very different people. She tells stories of when she was young and how Charlotte would often be away touring as a pianist, and Eva would be so eager for her to return, but when she did return it only made her more miserable. Something similar happens at the start of the film: Eva invites Charlotte to stay with her and her husband, and she fully expects it to be a pleasant time, but almost immediately the two women are at each other's throats, not attacking each other directly but whittling away at each other through subtle implications and ive-aggressive nuance.

As old resentments resurface, we slowly realize that Charlotte doesn't know herself or her daughter as well as she thought she did either. She thought she was just doing her best as a mother, but Eva exposes how she was just doing her best for herself. This reflexive misperception and therapeutic self-discovery speak to a point Charlotte makes by way of something Leonardo said to her: "A sense of reality is a matter of talent. Most people lack that talent, and maybe it's just as well." Perhaps both women have a poor sense of reality, and that's why they struggle to know themselves and the people closest to them in their lives. But for me, this speaks to something universal about the human experience.

Maybe Leonardo is right that some people have a natural talent for understanding the world around them, but in my experience, life is more like the ongoing conversations between Eva and Charlotte where both women slowly come to a greater understanding of reality over the course of it. Charlotte's greatest fear seems to be that she hasn't really lived, that she hasn't been sufficiently present in her life to her loved ones' faces or even her own. As someone who can be quite emotionally distant at times, I occasionally feel this way myself, like I'm just floating through life, not really giving myself to the Other in a substantial or meaningful way. But sometimes what we need is precisely an escape from this reality.

When you're young and life feels so insurmountable, or when you're older and you lose control of what you thought you had, or when you tragically lose a child just before his fourth birthday, sometimes all you need to keep going is the belief that maybe there's a reality beyond this one, whether it's somewhere your son is alive or somewhere you understand your family or just a place where someone loves you, and here I can only think of Eva's sad, beautiful monologue about how in God there is everything and everything exists side by side, good and evil, happiness and sadness, love and hate, and whether there's only one reality or many, this is existence, and if we look closely, we can find God everywhere.

"In the same way, there must also be countless realities. Not only the reality we perceive with our dull senses, but a tumult of realities arching above each other inside and outside."

1970s | Ingmar Bergman | Fav Firsts 2024

Ingmar Bergman Mini-Marathon: Part One

"I wonder if everyone is caged in… You in your cage, l in mine. Each in his own little cube. Everybody."

We're all stuck in our own heads, imprisoned inside our minds, and here Karin provides an extreme example of this painful fact. She was recently released from a psychiatric hospital having been diagnosed with an "incurable illness" that seems to be something akin to schizophrenia, although Bergman never gets technical or clinical with it because that's not the point. The point is the way her disease isolates her from her family, even now that she finally gets to spend time with them again after being literally/physically isolated from them in the hospital. She feels torn between two worlds, unable to bring them together, unable to find harmony: "l can't keep going back and forth between one and the other." The family seems to have a nice time together — they put on a lovely little play, Karin helps her brother Minus with his Latin — but inside her invisible cage, Karin is suffering.

But while this exploration of the mind has an obvious bearing on severe mental health cases, it also speaks to something more basic about the human condition itself. Karin's father David and her husband Martin share a private chat about David's diary, in which Karin discovered his confession that he wants to record the course of Karin's illness. Martin finds the idea repulsive, and understandably so, but so does David. He didn't choose to have the thought, it simply occurred to him, irrational, unprovoked. "Can you always control your innermost thoughts?" Martin has peered into David's cage without understanding the animal within; he has stolen a glimpse into David's mind without the context that informs it. Whether we're suffering from schizophrenia or suicidal ideation like Karin and David or even if we're "not very complex" like Martin, we're all trapped in our own little cube, and we must spend our entire lives trying to understand it.

But this endeavor need not be undertaken alone. Minus feels a different kind of isolation: his greatest wish is to have a real conversation with his father, something more than simple pleasantries. "l wish l could talk to Papa, just once. He's so wrapped up in himself." He feels siloed in a different world from his father, each in their own cage, able to see each other but unable to truly connect. Then, after Karin's moment of crisis, Minus pleads with David, begs him for something to hold on to, and David tells him about love. "l don't know if love is proof of God's existence, or if love is God himself." The two men finally connect, and in their moment together they discuss the very power of that connection itself, particularly as it relates to Karin. "Karin is surrounded by God, since we love her." This is David solution to his internal despair, it's Minus's solution to his loneliness, and it seems to be Bergman's solution to the alienation of existence itself.

We might all be caged in, each in our own little cube, but we have love, and if we surround ourselves with it, then we will be surrounded by God. We may be trapped inside our own mind, but we don't have to be alone.

1960s | Ingmar Bergman | Fav Firsts 2024

"No flesh shall be spared."

Jill is an artist of the apocalypse; her found-object sculpture uses wires and tubes and other mechanical parts to mimic organic forms, but she feels like you can't always tell, as if she's been fighting with the metal and the metal is winning. Humanity itself struggles in much the same manner; here in this dystopian future, people are also fighting the metal and losing. Earth has been polluted with uninhabitable levels of radiation and human genetics are changing forever, so the government institutes a program of mandatory sterilization in order to make "a clean break with procreation."

Enter the MARK 13, a drone apparently designed to eliminate citizens who disobey this new edict by whatever means necessary — and in this apocalyptic hellscape, "whatever means necessary" means violence. So humanity's figurative struggle with metal becomes a literal one as Jill battles with the MARK 13, with little success because the drone is built to withstand the apocalypse and Jill is just a squishy organic human. Shoot the damn thing and it just keeps getting back up. But humanity has a different weapon in its arsenal, one the robot wasn't designed to combat: sex.

The power of Jill and Moses's fucking is so immense that it wakes the drone from its apparent deactivation, rousing the downed beast from its slumber. But intercourse also arouses someone else: the horny neighbor Lincoln, who enjoys watching Jill through his high-power telescope. Here we find the other end of our metaphor's spectrum: if MARK's inhuman violence is the antithesis to the corporeality of Jill and Moses's lovemaking, then Lincoln is a reformulation of that antithesis in a more cynical direction. Jill and Moses's romance is certainly far from utopian, but they seem to share some amount of love for each other even at the worst of times.

Despite their complexities — or, indeed, perhaps because of them — their love is ultimately human, whereas Lincoln represents sexuality as perverse, masturbatory fetishism. Which is an important distinction to make when your message is that humanity's future lies in sex: we're not going to save ourselves by jerking off while watching our neighbor undress. We need to get together, real people really connecting in real space. The biopolitics of the future will spare no flesh, so if we want to survive then there's something very important that we need to do as soon as possible: fuck.

1990s | Sci-Fi | Horror

This review may contain spoilers.

"All your life you think you have time for everything, and then it's just…"

One day, the world began; one day, the world will end. All the nukes do is speed up the timeline. What happens in between is ultimately meaningless on a cosmic scale. And yet, the defining feature of humanity is that these minuscule in-between events take on astronomical importance for us. Nuclear war could be about to eradicate all life on Earth, your one hope to survive the apocalypse could be flying off into oblivion in mere minutes, but you're still gonna spend that extra few seconds chasing down the one you love, whether it's a girlfriend or a sister, even if it's only to die in their arms.

Part of the brilliance of Miracle Mile is that it operates on two levels simultaneously as a cinematic metaphor: when you fuck it up with a girl you love, it does kind of feel like the end of the world; and even if the world's not literally ending within the hour, it is indeed ending, and perhaps faster than we're willing to it to ourselves. The movie is absolutely bonkers, and watching it for the first time having no idea what was going on, my first thought was yes, this is exactly what it feels like when you finally find someone you want to spend your life with and then start to feel them slipping through your fingers. It feels like the world is ending, and you'll do anything just for one more moment together.

This symbolic double entendre is reflected back at the level of theme: at the core of Miracle Mile is an inescapable tension between (1) this existential despair that even if someone didn't push the button to launch the nukes and destroy the planet it's all going to end that way eventually anyway and (2) the romantic idealism that even if we can't escape annihilation and even if our time is ultimately infinitesimal we can still find meaning and purpose in our puny little lives. I was honestly baffled when the movie ended because it so consistently holds these two contradictory ideas together right up until the final credits roll that I genuinely didn't know how it was going to end until it did, and even when it did it still managed to serve each side equally.

Harry says that there must be some sort of cosmic plan for him to find a girl his age who actually knows who Dicky Wells and Vernon Brown were. "The universe was created fifteen billion years ago… and it took thirty years for Harry Washello to find the right girl." This is the romantic fantasy. And yet how could the cosmos have a plan for you if the day that you found your soulmate was the same day that humanity breathed its last as a species? But even as their helicopter sinks deeper into the La Brea Tar Pits, Julie and Harry continue to comfort themselves, imagining themselves compressed down to diamonds by the immensity of time, discovered by some future being, desperately grasping onto some scrap of their togetherness.

I don't want to downplay Miracle Mile's pessimistic edge — the increasing chaos as humanity descends into the abyss of knowledge of its own imminent finality certainly paints an unflattering picture of us as a species. One cabbie's crusade to kill the man who briefly stepped on his vehicle depicts our selfish, petty small-mindedness in stark relief. But it’s precisely because of this pessimistic edge that the optimistic sentimentalism is so striking. The way the movie maintains Harry and Julie's romantic fantasy in such direct proximity with this cynical despair makes it so beautifully human. Yes, we're an ugly species, and yes, we will destroy the planet, but we'll make sweet love to each other before we go, imagining impossible futures even as the palm trees burn.

"I think it's the insects' turn."

1980s | Fav Firsts 2024 | Neo-Noir

Just when you think no one could possibly love Hitchcock's Vertigo more than you do, you watch Guy Maddin's The Green Fog, more or less a remake of the film using clips from other movies and television. But why, you ask? What's the point? Other than expressing what must be a deep fondness and affection for the film, The Green Fog's simplest raison d'être is that it's (for me, at least) extremely funny. Whether it's Chuck Norris in An Eye for an Eye or Scottie in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home or it's just some guy falling unceremoniously into a swimming pool in the scene where Kim Novak dramatically collapses into the San Francisco Bay, recontextualizing these images as Vertigo is endlessly amusing to me. But if we want to go deeper, I think there's something more available here.

Spoilers for Vertigo

One of the many reasons I love Vertigo so much is the way the Judy/Madeleine dichotomy offers such a perfect metaphor for the psychological functioning of fantasy and desire. Scottie falls in love with Madeleine (or thinks he does; he falls as deeply as any stalker can fall for their victim) and attempts to transform Judy into Madeleine (changing the way she dresses, the way she does her hair, etc.). But Scottie never really knew Madeleine, not (only) because they never had a real relationship but (also) because she was never really real in the first place, she was a construct invented by Gavin Elster to cash in his wife's life insurance policy. Madeleine is the perfect representation of psychological fantasy because she never actually existed, she was only ever a figment, a blank canvas for Scottie to project his own image — and Scottie forced Judy to become her anyway.

What if this is how we Vertigo lovers relate to Vertigo as well? Vertigo is a real movie, of course, but so too was Madeleine a real person, in a sense, she just wasn't "Madeleine," she wasn't Gavin's wife and she wasn't Judy and she wasn't the magical third woman between Judy and Madeleine that Scottie imagined her to be. Just as Scottie created a fantasy framework around the idea of Madeleine, so too do we Vertigo Heads construct a fantasy framework around the idea of Vertigo. It was the Sight & Sound Greatest Movie of All Time for a decade, it's a perfect representation of Lacanian psychological fantasy — whatever it may be for us, we construct our own idea of the movie on top of the movie itself, the same way that Scottie constructed "Madeleine" on top of Judy. We turn the movie into our idea of the movie, when in reality it's just a series of images like any other.

What if this is precisely what Guy Maddin is doing with The Green Fog? It turns Vertigo back into a simple series of images, divorced from the iconic, singular specificity of Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece. It shows us how we create a fantasy framework around the movie by showing us the movie without that fantasy framework. It gives us Vertigo without Vertigo, Judy without Madeleine, the real without the imaginary.

Or, I don't know, maybe it was just a fun little gag.

2017 Ranked

"What are you using me for? It's not me you wanted to paint, you said."
"It's you and it isn't you. It's more than you. More of you than you can imagine. If the painting's true, it will be you."

I'm fascinated by the way Jacques Rivette chooses to begin La Belle Noiseuse. I'm fascinated by beginnings and endings in general, but there's something particularly peculiar about La Belle Noiseuse's opening. The first shot shows us a a pair of American tourists at the village inn where Nicolas and Marianne are staying, and the camera repeatedly returns to them as they watch the young couple play their lusty little game, Nicolas supposedly cross with Marianne for taking his camera and photographing him, an apparent pretext for return to their room in a state of excitement.

Why is the entire story, this four-hour epic, foregrounded with these two unknown spectators, never to return to them after the scene leaves the inn? What have they done to earn such structural respect? All they do is watch — but perhaps that's precisely the point. They're outsiders, cultural aliens, and while their gaze provides an audience for Nicolas and Marianne, it also intrudes upon their space, their lives, the film, and this dialectic of being observed and being invaded plays out throughout the rest of the narrative.

At first, Marianne detests posing for Frenhofer; she participates in his artistic process propelled by feelings of resentment, as an attack on Nicolas for saying she would do it without asking her, but eventually she finds a strange pleasure in it, perhaps some sense of purpose. At first, Marianne feels invaded and only entertains the enterprise out of spite, but slowly that spite turns into a kind of pleasure — not exactly sexual pleasure, although this is what Nicolas fears, but something simpler, something more elemental: the pleasure of being seen.

Frenhofer describes painting as "cruel," and this cruelty extends beyond the specificity of painting to art itself and the violation of the gaze in general. When Frenhofer finally finishes his piece, it's too much for Marianne, too much to see herself reflected upon the canvas, to see herself the way others see her, to see something more than herself, the gaze as such manifested before her as she looks upon herself as with the eyes of a stranger, a tourist to her own body. This is the horror of being seen — and how we crave it.

"They say when you're drowning you suddenly see all your life, all the forgotten memories, in a fraction of a second. Is it really possible to capture a whole life on the canvas of a painting? Just like that, with a few traces of paint?"

Previous review

1990s | Favorite First-Watches 2024 |

"The feeling of being forgiven by another and forgiving oneself are so much alike there’s no point in trying to keep them distinct."

On forgiveness, redemption, and expiation. I think Tell is deluding himself in the above quote; the Other's forgiveness feels so significant that we believe it can replace our own, but our true and total salvation lies not with the Other but with the Self. It's not enough that Cirk wants to redeem Tell second-hand, by way of the proxy his father; Tell must ultimately take matters into his own hands. But it’s so much harder to forgive ourselves when we know all our own sins, when we’ve witnessed first-hand the horrors we committed. This is why Cirk must function as a vanishing mediator, allowing Tell to atone by doing it for the Other, tricking himself down the path to expiation by following Cirk's lead, redeeming himself not for his own sake but for the sake of his mirrored reflection.

More words here.

2021 | Paul Schrader

Watched because it's been a year since I quit smoking and because I watched it one year ago when I decided to quit because it's such a delightful smoking movie, but it was interesting to watch after a brief Bergman binge (reviews coming soon) because of the sustained religious themes.

The film opens and closes on guilt, little Josh Brolin confessing his sins, but here guilt is a punchline — even the priest thinks he's coming to confession too often, and all he's confessing is that he snuck a couple cigarettes. The only real religion worth worshipping here is Cinema, so majestic and pure that it overcomes even the well articulated Marxist critique of the Frankfurt School academics. I've never been much of a religious man myself, but that's a doctrine I can bring myself to venerate.

DIVINE PRESENCE TO BE SHOT

Happy New Year Letterboxd friends! May you have as much good fortune with your resolutions as I have with mine.

My Most-Watched Movies

This review may contain spoilers.

"Professor, my dreams grow darker... tell me, does evil come from within us? Or beyond?"

Death came so much earlier in those days, whether it was the symbolic narrative conceit of a blood-sucking vampire or the very real concerns of trade ships carrying plague-infested rats to shore. He is coming, this embodiment of Death, so we have to figure out what matters to us with all due haste, and it seems that what matters most to Thomas is money. He protests that the promotion will benefit them both, but new wife Ellen desperately wants him to stay nonetheless, and he dismisses her concerns as mere fantasy. Friedrich is more obvious in his shallow superficiality, not playing the foil but rather serving as a more honest reflection of the truth that perhaps Thomas is not yet ready to recognize in himself. Ellen's desires reside elsewhere.

I think it would be wrong to say that Ellen desires Orlok, at least if we put it in such straightforward and simplistic terminology. Her pleasure is apparent when they first in their unholy covenant, but it is also mixed with pain and fear to such an extent that she seems to have repressed elements of the experience — or at least that she hides them from the basic men that inhabit her life. This kind of traumatic desire has a clear enunciation in the Lacanian terminology of jouissance: the goal of the psychoanalytic process is to move beyond the pleasure principle into the jouissance of the death drive, into a kind of enjoyment defined not by the simplicity of pleasure but instead by a kind of transgression, and for me this transgression characterizes Ellen's arc through the film.

Death is coming, and Ellen seems to be the only one ready to meet it. Friedrich attempts to run from it, Thomas blunders into it head first; Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz comes the closest to confronting it, but even he finds himself woefully unprepared. These pitiful men need to banish Death from their pathetic little world, and in order to do so they must banish Ellen as well. Feminine jouissance has no place within the phallic order; its security depends upon the exclusion of this transgressive surplus-pleasure. Thus the restoration of this patriarchal society relies upon Ellen's sacrifice, upon her traversal of the fantasy, upon her literalized embrace of the death drive. Death is coming, and while these men might not be ready for it, if Ellen can accept the traumatic truth of her own devious desire, maybe she can come too.

"I am an appetite, nothing more."

2024 | Horror

Big Sparkywife seasonal fav. Not exactly a Christmas movie, but as a text on the impossibility of ethical consumption under capitalism, it's not a bad fit for the holidays. Scrub scrub vs. the world of pure imagination.

Prior review
2023

It's been busier than usual around here this holiday season as we get ready for the baby on top of our usual festivities, so I'm grateful that I finally found time to rewatch what is quickly becoming my favorite new Christmas movie (alongside Carol and The Green Knight). Don't really have anything new to say about it that I didn't say in my original review, I just love the idea that two curmudgeons from different generations can find some sense of belonging in this harsh life. The world may be a bitter and complicated place filled with bitter and complicated people, but there is still hope for a better future if these two different points on the timeline of depressed cynicism can find it in themselves to learn from each other, preserving the wisdom and determination of old age alongside the mischievous vitality of youth.

2023 | My Most-Watched Movies

"You can be cheap. I promise, honey girl. Your best self."

Showed this to my family for our holiday movie night because we were looking for something light and funny and on the shorter side, forgetting until it started playing how extremely horny it is. Oh well, at least my mom seemed to enjoy it. Happy holidays, Letterboxd friends 💜

Prior review here

"This isn't normal. This isn't how life is supposed to feel."

I love polymorphous symbolism, so what I find most compelling about I Saw the TV Glow is the way the basic narrative structure and surface themes also function more deeply and broadly. Perhaps this is a mistake on my part, skipping interpretive steps knowing who Jane Schoenbrun is, but my mind jumps immediately to the Specific — reading the film as a representation of the tragedy of a failed transition or a refusal to come out of the closet — when the General is the reason I've enjoyed continuing to reflect upon the film days after viewing it.

I Saw the TV Glow was sold to me as a descendent of Videodrome, and while I watched with my friend we both found more than a few similarities to The Matrix, but what's interesting to me about these comparisons is that I Saw the TV Glow presents a sort of inversion of those films' arcs, a rejection of the new flesh, a failure to escape the world of simulation and ascend. Speaking more broadly, the film functions as a kind of coming-of-age narrative where the coming of age never occurs, where our hero remains trapped outside the adulthood of self-knowledge.

This idea that you're being held hostage at a distance from yourself, that your life is not your own, that you're being forced instead to live according to the whims of some nefarious supervillain, this all speaks to a sense of alienation and dissociation that feels increasingly common. As technology continues to become a greater part of our lives, our selves become something that increasingly exists outside of ourselves, our spark of consciousness feels increasingly distant from our bodies and our identities, and I Saw the TV Glow speaks to this hyperreality in a deceptively nuanced way.

In a sense, the movie is all about obsession, about our two protagonists' enthusiasm for and preoccupation with The Pink Opaque, but rather than warning off audiences from losing themselves into the abyss of Content, the point is instead that we must more fully dedicate ourselves to our obsessions, that the only way we lose the reality of our selves to the simulation of the screen is by refusing to answer the call to see ourselves reflected thereupon.

Owen's tragedy is that he becomes obsessed with The Pink Opaque but represses his own personal identification with it; likewise, the tragedy of the (post)modern era is that we Consume Content endlessly and with a voracious appetite but do not actively engage with the ideas or the reflections of ourselves found within. We feel a connection to the images, but we don't properly process that connection. We can find a favorite show, but we cannot find our self.

there is still time

2024 | Horror

An empire devours itself in its gluttony for power, while a people starves itself on the crumbs a dream that never was.

All the legacy sequel stuff drags it down, but Denzel effortlessly lifts it back up.

Probably the best movie that my brother-in-law has brought me to since he moved here a year and a half ago.

2024 | Ridley Scott

"It's because people suppress their desires that the world has become so complicated!"

This Transient Life stages an interrogation of traditional Japanese cultural values in the form of a confrontation between a perverse hedonist and a spiritualist. Ozu by way of Suzuki?

Masao is a bit of a failson: his father wants him to get a good job and marry a good wife and carry the family legacy forward, but Masao doesn't want any of those things, so daddy threatens to kick him out of the family. But Masao presents a much greater threat to the institution of family than his father realizes. He commits incest with his sister Yuri, an act that she initially resists but then embraces. So to say that Masao is a complicated character would be an extreme understatement. He's far from your standard protagonist, certainly not a character designed for audience identification, and yet there's something about the way he assaults cultural tradition that feels devilishly alluring.

One of the first (in this case literal) questions Masao asks is whether sculpting requires much faith. He asks this of a Buddhist sculptor master Mori, who is perhaps understandably taken aback. Of course sculpting requires faith! This is precisely the notion to which he's dedicated his entire life! But… what if it didn't? Masao s Master Mori as an apprentice and not only helps rejuvenate Mori, he discovers Mori's dirty little secret: Mori likes watching Masao and Yuri have sex. It gives him strength. The film's central Kannon statue has been crafted by the hands of perverts with the energy of incest driving their hands, and not only will no one ever know, ever care — the statue will continue to perform its function just the same.

While the film functions as a metaphorical confrontation with traditional Japanese cultural values, there's also a literal confrontation between Masao and Master Mori's apprentice monk Ogino, and this scene is what I've spent most of my time since watching the movie thinking about. In the scene, Masao definitely seems to win one over on Ogino: he interrogates the logic of Buddhism, arguing that nirvana and heaven are ultimately undesirable because they cannot contain or permit happiness in his understanding of the concept. Happiness (according to Masao) results from the conscious fulfillment of desire, and by his reasoning this kind of pleasure or satisfaction is antithetical to Buddhist concepts of heaven and nirvana.

As something of an amateur Buddhist — and perhaps more importantly as a card-carrying Lacanian — I don't agree with everything Masao argues. I think that my greatest happiness results from unconscious drives and impulses that delay the immediate fulfillment of desire and that my conscious pleasures are frequently fleeting. But I don't think the point of the movie is to convince the audience to agree with Masao despite his almost demonic allure. The point, rather, is simply to stage this discourse, to force the audience to confront their possibly unquestioned assumptions about the world. The point isn't to go home and commit incest, the point is for us to ask ourselves why we believe the things we believe, whether they're just received cultural traditions or something deeper, something authentically our own.

1970s | Fav Firsts 2024 | Japan

"Rules are rules."

The military into which our protagonist Lieutenant Drogo enlists may remain explicitly nameless, but both narrative and historical context clues as well as a few scattered iron crosses let us know what's going on here. By 1976, Italy was deep in the black heart of the Years of Lead, and far-right extremists were terrorizing the nation. It would still be two more years before the Red Brigades kidnap and assassinate prime minister Aldo Moro, but the resurgence of this type of political extremism was certainly central in the cultural consciousness. So The Desert of the Tartars may not name Drogo's army, but it's clear what's on its mind: fascism.

The primary premise of the film is that Drogo is assigned to a post at the Bastiani Fortress, an old castle referred to as a "dead border station" because it rests on the border between the (again unnamed) empire and the (largely unthreatening) desert. Nevertheless, the rest of the soldiers stationed at the fort act as though an enemy may arrive on their doorstep at any moment, holding each other to the strictest standards of diligence and duty. They run their drills and punish the slightest disobedience with the harshest cruelty, and increasingly it begins to feel as though the pretense of readiness is little more than an excuse for this brutal discipline.

"Rules are rules," but for what purpose? To what end? This is the question that The Desert of the Tartars asks of fascism. Fascist ideology presents itself as the solution to some antagonism, whether cultural or geopolitical, whether it's the instability of the Years of Lead or a nameless war on the horizon, but what if this antagonism is a distraction, its promised resolution a desert mirage? The film plays out as the tragedy of a soldier who didn't know any better, who signed up to serve the cause not knowing the sad truth that the cause is a lie, that the ultimate purpose of fascism is merely the reproduction of this structural violence.

The sadistic discipline and self-destructive violence are not a means to some other end, they are the end in themselves. Fascism does not serve some higher purpose. The cruelty is the point.

1970s | Years of Lead

"Even before we enter the world, we are marked by karma."

Preceded by its reputation, of course — how I hadn't seen it until now when it's so obviously My Shit will forever remain one of life's great mysteries — but while I knew it was a stylish revenge thriller that played a large part in inspiring Kill Bill, what I didn't know about was its rich cultural and historical context.

Our story takes place 20 years after the Meiji Restoration brought centralized imperial rule back to Japan. Lady Snowblood's crusade of vengeance is no simple personal vendetta but an inherited family legacy: her father was killed and her mother raped in the wake of the Blood Tax Riots of 1873, a series of violent uprisings in response to the empire's institution of mandatory military service.

Snowblood's father, a school teacher, was mistaken for an enlistment agent; she and her family were not victims of random acts of violence but of the monstrous violence of history, of brutal social inequity. Their suffering is personal, of course, but it is also political, structural, systemic; it is the suffering of the nation, the inscription upon the body of systems of power beyond any individual's control.

Snowblood inherits this vendetta from her mother, but socio-symbolically speaking, all Japanese citizens inherit this same vendetta from their ancestors. It is the country's legacy, its national mythology, its existential karma: a struggle for agency and justice written in blood upon the snow-white pages of history.

Japanese Spaghetti Westerns?
1970s | Japan | Action

… In this analysis, Christ's plea (and therefore Pasolini's cinematic entreaty as well) is one for unmoderated theological adherence, unconditional love not for one's easy, immediate community but for the true neighbor, the radical Other. To take up the Cause of Christian love is not something one does lightly, at least not in any authentic way. Likewise, to take up the political Cause is not to be done lightly either. Thus Pasolini acts as if he believes even if he does not believe, he advocates for Christianity because its theological doctrine contains elements far more radical than his contemporary political realm (or our modern one, for that matter). Because if we can love Christ unconditionally, if we can truly dedicate ourselves to that theological-political Cause, then perhaps genuine political radicalization remains possible even in an era of fetishistic disavowal and cynical disbelief, perhaps we can resuscitating the proper dimension of the political, perhaps we can finally truly consecrate things once again.

1960s | Pier Paolo Pasolini | Italy
Years of Lead – Precursors
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"Crimes against humanity, hooray!"

Pasolini's two-part investigation into the debasement of human nature. In part one, a young wanderer struggles to keep himself alive in the wastelands around Mount Etna in a long-ago Sicily, initially sustaining himself on insects and small animals while evading bands of soldiers, but eventually he turns to cannibalism. In part two, we move to more or less contemporary and witness the various struggles of a bourgeois family: the apathetic son's dwindling romantic relationship with a political activist, his parents' concerns about him, and their dealings with a couple of shady businessmen. These two separate stories are cut together, each bleeding into the other until it feels as though they might become one.

My diseased brain instinctively reads this narrative structure into the thematic framework of the American Western. In the first part, we have the wild frontier, the site of primordial violence; in the second, we have so-called civilized society, which purports to have peacefully resolved the frontier's savagery. But of course that violence never really goes away, it merely transforms into something more sinister, something that can hide in plain sight, masquerading as progress and enlightenment. As these bourgeois businessmen discuss their dirty dealings, it becomes apparent that they've been conducting monstrous experiments on Jews, whom they compare explicitly to pigs. Meanwhile, the young boy spends all his time lying with actual, literal pigs, manifesting the perverse sexual pleasure of this fascist dehumanization.

This representation of modern-day functions simultaneously at face value and as a metaphor for Italy: Pigsty was released into the country's Hot Autumn, a period of political upheaval that paved the way for the Years of Lead, one of the most violent eras of Italian history. But taken together with the first half of the film, the metaphor operates more broadly than this as well. This is the great progress of human civilization: where once we ate each other in order to survive, now we simply torture our own kind, ostensibly to maintain the privileged lifestyle to which we've become accustomed but belying an obscene depravity.

1960s | Pier Paolo Pasolini | Italy
The Years of Lead