____

About four months after my mother and I recorded three hours of my 96 year-old grandfather recounting the wild story of him accidentally circumnavigating the globe, he died. I was working at a bougie private rooftop restaurant in West Hollywood which catered to the nouveau riche when my father called saying that if I wanted to have a final goodbye, I better race over to Cedars Sinai Hospital. I did, parked in the rotunda right outside the emergency room entrance, and ran inside just in time to tell him I loved him as he took his final breath. It felt like he waited for me. He was the last of my four grandparents to go.

In the days that followed his quiet, peaceful passing, I listened back to the recordings of his story, done haphazardly on my iPhone in 2014, while driving around Los Angeles in my Honda Fit. Like a ghost, his fraying, slightly German-lilted voice drifted through my car speakers, his penchant for clearing his throat a distinct comfort as I held onto the memory of sitting at his white, plastic tabletop in the breakfast nook of his apartment. The night that he died, my parents and my parents' closest friends went to Du-Pars, a 24-hour diner where I ate steak and sunny side-up eggs. I took an entirely too-close photo of the plate and uploaded it to Instagram with the caption #comfortfood. Somehow I believed my followers would know something tragic had happened in my life without me directly saying so; sometimes it feels entirely bizarre to know that we’ve all accepted a life where we are perennially making slide shows for our friends and strangers. After the meal, I sat in my car and listened to the recording for a while, as my grandfather, Julius, spoke in oddly plain terms about his uncommon journey round the earth. A man seemingly phased by nothing.

And then, somehow, I lost the recordings. I had to get a new phone and did not back up my voice memos. By the time it dawned on me that I could go back in the cloud to listen again, the opportunity had vanished, and, with it, the finer details of his circuitous route. It was like I had dreamed the whole thing up, which strangely feels fitting for what his story was, and is. My whole life I had assumed his story to be apocryphal. How does one “accidentally” sail around the earth in a complete circle? It was told to me with the same hyperbole with which we describe Christopher Columbus, discovering America as one discovers a crumpled twenty in an old pants pocket. As it turns out, the story is neither apocryphal nor hyperbolic, though, like so many familial stories, it had been shortened for the sake of cogency, or even poetry. Julius did travel around the world in a complete circle, but, since he was neither compelled to take this journey, nor aware of the circularity of what was to come when he started his first leg of it, it might be more appropriate to say that the unnatural circumstances of his life put him on a path that, by happenstance, drew a crooked circle around the earth. He started as a teenager in Hannover, Germany, traveled from his hometown to London via train, then, from the United Kingdom via steamship, around the horn of Africa to Sydney, Australia, where he boarded a bus to Brisbane and stayed for two years; then, a post summoned him back onto a steamship to San Francisco, California, from which he hopped on a cross-country bus to New York, and then to New Jersey to reunite with his family, shortly before enlisting in the United States Army to be deployed, in Germany, where he ran into his brother on the battlefield.

Read more

In his massive, site-specific installation exhibit nebulously titled “OPEN” at the Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, the Icelandic-Danish, Berlin-based artist Olafur Eliasson claims he is “not looking for a single, clear answer.” In behemoth contraptions made from a cornucopia of industrial materials, Eliasson poses questions about humanity’s self-perception, gathering us all inside the ever-expanding systems which govern our lives. What bravery to present anything that doesn’t come with preconceived answers and hope for its own mission. It is all well and good to intentionally center a piece of art on questions alone, but to be purposefully uninterested in answers seems astonishing to me. How does one sit comfortably in a question mark?

Eliasson’s gargantuan work, both in terms of scope and mission, plays with the viewer’s literal perception of spatial dynamics. In form this translates to pieces which challenge the eye in direct and indirect ways, as with “The listening dimension,” in which large, semicircular tubes mounted within wall-sized mirrors give the initial impression of hovering circles in infinite space. Eliasson’s work is persistently cheeky, using incomplete materials and finite edges to elicit considerations of endlessness. He employs materially defined terms to suggest undefined existences.

Without a careful eye, the exhibit can risk dallying with the more nefariously broad aspects of capitalist art. I worried that Eliasson’s challenging questions, posted on multiple walls like the space’s reading room, if viewers are “open” to a series of questions, might seem like they could be appropriate on mass-produced wall art found in stores like Target. “AM I OPEN,” the questions all begin, “to vulnerability?” or else “to wonder?” or “to engaging fully with my senses?” Outside of the installation’s context, these questions can induce an eye-roll.

But within the context of the artist’s most wildly inventive constructions, the questions implicate the viewer in the engagement of, and activation in, the piece in question. In “Pluriverse assembly,” which uses a room-length LED projection screen in front of a series of electrical ballasts, control units and motors which constantly, and imperceptibly, shift the positioning of a panoply of mechanical pieces, the museum-goer is faced with an infinitude of possibilities of light. Shapes are being constantly created anew in a shadow play which suggests whole universes, or the meeting with God implied through Stanley Kubrick’s recurring black slab in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Other pieces play with infinity and plurality through more simple plays with light and mirroring. In “Observatory for seeing the atmosphere’s futures,” viewers are invited to stand underneath a towering structure which pierces the Geffen roof. Staring up through the escalating reflections at the small window of natural light, it becomes impossible not to see the self, an infinite version of the self, ascending into the daytime sky.

——

I remember when I first started watching soccer, around the time of the World Cup in 2014, I started to see European jerseys everywhere I went. It wasn’t that there was some global change in which suddenly everyone, like me, had discovered the sport at the same time, but that once you recognize something as part of your own life you begin to actually see it more regularly. I had no cause to notice a Barcelona kit or a Liverpool scarf pre-2014 because I didn’t even know the clubs which produced the merchandise. This is a common occurrence known as the Frequency Illusion, a cognitive bias which creates the false perception that a thing exists more often than it actually does after one becomes aware of the thing’s existence. The bias is also known as the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon thanks to Terry Mullen, who wrote to the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1994 about his inability to unsee the phrase “Baader-Meinhof” after learning about the 1970-1998 German group of the same name.

Recently, I’ve had another Baader-Meinhof-esque cognitive bias I’ve had a harder time dismissing. With a sudden and increasing alacrity, I have been considering what it means to be male, and have seen gender in all things. My maleness, something I have not previously considered as a matter for debate, has become more porous. I have gone from tacit acceptance of the label I was given as a child to curious, if frightened, appraiser. It feels a bit like removing a piece of art from the corner of a closet you forgot you put away years ago, and though it seems similar to what it was when you got it, your perception of life, of art, of representation, has morphed considerably - and so has your understanding of the piece itself. Or perhaps it’s a classic novel I read in high school; my gender has become like an old copy of Willa Cather’s My Antonia, or John Williams’s Stoner, stories I assumed whose meaning and purpose was already canonized and which could not be re-evaluated. As a cinephile, I understand how the classics can be re-evaluated over time (indeed that ability to change over time is what often makes the film so special), but I have nonetheless been surprised at this revelation in how I define myself.

This sudden reconsideration kicked into high gear, a bit embarrassingly, through LinkedIn; I have been seemingly stuck in a two year period of endless job hunting. Though I technically have three jobs, none of them provide neither financial solvency nor a profound sense of purpose, and since capitalism can make us feel like no amount of sheer effort is ever enough, I often feel no more productive than my cat-like and aging dog. Most job applications now have a diversity section of voluntary disclosure, and it has become a sticking point of self-evaluation. For one thing, I am constantly debating if I should mention that I have a disability as someone who deals with the fervently seismic waves of Major Depressive Disorder. I wrestle with the label, but being that it is legally recognized as such and that I have survived two suicide attempts, should I mark it?

More pressingly lately has been the previously simple drop-down menu to disclose my gender. Some applications list the options as “male,” “female” or “other” (how diminutive, that “other” which is inherently othering). Some applications have a third option that just says “prefer not to disclose,” which too feels strange and challenging, as if all gender-queer people would choose hiding in lieu of being misgendered as cis. Both in terms of gender and disability, I wonder if my selection matters to anyone but myself - which, depending on the day, can make me either more or less eager to identify the way I want to identify.

I don’t know exactly when, but at some point selecting male felt wrong, or at least not entirely correct. Choosing it as my option felt like being cleaved. Choosing that preference “not to disclose” felt wrong too; I do want to disclose. It’s just that I am not sure yet how. It is a persistently thorny torn in the side of queerness that we seek to exist as living challenges to structural binaries, yet frustratingly must self-label in a desire for self-actualization. In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson calls this “irresolution.” “On the one hand,” she wonders, “the Aristotelian, perhaps evolutionary need to put everything into categories— predator, twilight, edible— on the other, the need to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live.”

Noticing my own irresolution with gender has been singularly distressing, because, as in all things, I find it hard to move forward without having a certain completeness of knowledge. This aversion of mess, coupled with a genuine pleasure in research, has probably prevented me from moving forward with any number of artistic ideas. And now, with identity, I have wondered how I can declare that I am non-binary if I am still unaware how to define what that means. But, if a globally respected artist like Olafur Eliasson can mount a major exhibition with an acute disinterest in clarity - and in its place a curiosity for un-knowledge - why can’t I indulge in an identity that is inherently in flux?

I am trying to understand that the “irresolution” is also liberatory for almost the same reasons. Convenient though it is, I know that my own journey to a new kind of gender identity did not begin or end with LinkedIn job applications. More accurately I might point out that, over the last couple years, as I’ve built in fits and starts a solo show structurally based on the surrealist writing of Italo Calvino, I have inadvertently forced myself to confront some base stories which I am only beginning to dismantle. Some of those stories are political (the tenuous line from Holocaust survivalism to Palestinian subjugation) and some are about the nature of art-making itself (the poisonous notion that one cannot begin to create without knowing the end). But because the show is predicated on several lines between several realities, I have unconsciously asked myself to further question one of the foundations of my own existence. It has become clear to me lately that the interconnectedness of how I write, perform, create, think about politics, have sex; how I talk, how I listen, and how I advocate - all of these modus operandi exist within a challenging wholeness of being. A wholeness that I no longer think can be held within the singular definitions of binary gender. The very film which I have long considered a personal favorite, Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), exists on an endless plenitude of possibilities. My queerness has always, subconsciously, reached into every realm of my existence.

While thinking in this new way feels mostly intellectual and as a matter of the heart, I have noticed that considering myself as neither here nor there has created an exhilarating brain tingling and physiological connection I could not have previously predicted, much more powerful than when I inadvertently came out as bisexual via a fluff piece in Elle Magazine (long story). It feels not unlike how I sometimes feel after leaving a session with my EMDR-practicing therapist, or like the handful of times I’ve taken mushrooms. It is like a wedge has been slightly lodged between the hemispheres of my body, awakening long dormant nervous systems and buried memories (one of which has curiously been the time when a stranger at a party in Bushwick drunkenly told me I had “lesbian energy”).

It also feels like a “splinter” in my mind, as Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) relates to Neo (Keanu Reeves) in The Matrix (1999). Directed by trans siblings The Wachowskis, the film has morphed over time into a key trans text, dramatizing as it does what so many non-binary and trans folk feel about public versus private personae, how capitalism exacerbates heteronormative gender roles and empty moneyed pursuits, and, most importantly, the distinct feeling that something is not quite right.

Though I’ve seen the film perhaps more often than any other in my life, I rewatched it on the encouragement of a trans friend who insisted upon it after I told her how I’m feeling. And, because I am more or less indulging in my own Baader-Meinhof bias, wherein so many things I previously assumed to be non-gendered have revealed themselves to be supremely so, I cannot walk away from the film, or the Eliasson installations, without learning something more about me. “You've felt it your entire life,” Morpheus tells Neo, “that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad." Being a biblical allegory of a film, it is perhaps unsurprising the quote is something of an adaptation of Matthew 7:3-5:

"Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye' while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye"

But what if I don’t want to remove the log? My friend Jon reminded me of Theodor Adorno’s riff on Matthew, that the “splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.” Indeed the magnifying glass has led to an unraveling of my guts, and I am becoming interested in the violence. Baader-Meinhof in my mind, I entered into Eliasson’s piece “Your sunset shadow” almost seeking out representations of my multitudinousness. His most audience-reliant piece, the shadow play is dependent on people walking across a set of eleven white and yellow color filters on LED projectors which create silhouettes on the far wall. No matter where one stands, or how one approaches the wall, there is no way to create a uniform shadow of the self. One is always split into several copies; though the intensity of the shadows and the scales can shift, there is a permanence of silhouetted echoes. Walking through the projections with one of my closest friends, moments after telling them about my fractured sense of identity, I felt as if I had stumbled onto an otherworldly gift.

Neo gets his answers in The Matrix. Unlike Eliasson, the search for infinity yields definition. Though it surprises me to say it, I believe I am probably growing more comfortable with the not-knowing than the knowing. I am living in the in between, striving for solace in uncertainty.

The truth is that it is difficult for me to remember facts and figures, even when (or perhaps especially when) it concerns my own personal life. I will make myself additionally guilty here of being quite basic in telling you that oft-repeated cliche of innocuousness, that certain moments blaze through my memory despite their relative nothingness. For example, I remember, and turn over in my head quite frequently, a simple hand-waving gesture Al Pacino made as Shylock in the 2011 Broadway production of “The Merchant of Venice” at the Broadhurst. It was the money lender’s first scene, Act I, Scene III, and the legend moved his hand in an elegant summons to urge Bassanio to sit.

I’m not sure why I remember it so vividly. Perhaps I was enamored then, as I still am now, of Pacino’s ability to be so enjoyably present in every moment; the Actor’s high-water mark regardless of material. Whatever the case, my point is really that my brain doesn’t always hold on to bigger things. I have best friends for whom I still have to consult a calendar to remember their birthday.

Though I’ve seen more movies than I care to count, I can’t remember the first one I saw with Hannah. I couldn’t tell you if it was at a movie theater (probably the Arclight Hollywood, in those days, may she rest in peace) or on her then-beige and suede couch in her apartment in West Hollywood on a tiny Roku TV that now lives with my in-laws. It’s possible, too, that it was at my apartment then, which I shared with my dear friend Miriam, in Eagle Rock; that couch was cloth and grey, a mid-century modern that I mostly used to support me while rewatching the entire James Bond cannon for the umpteenth time.

I do remember in the fall of 2018, in our first year together, going to Paoli, Pennsylvania for fake-Christmas (one week early, cheap flights) and watching Serendipity (2001) with her parents and her sister, Jess, a John Cusack-Kate Beckinsale romance that would eventually, inevitably, become something of our cinematic touchstone. Though, at the time, I must admit I was more interested in bonding with my eventual father-in-law, a Dutch cartoon character of a human being who made me wheeze laugh as we teased the film out loud, a choice which probably made Jess disapprove of her younger sister’s romantic choice for some time.

I now would tell you the film is one of the most magically romantic films of the 21st century. Not without its deficiencies, but those more unsavory moments and late 90s aesthetics are persistently washed over by a cosmic dime-store, armchair philosophical motif that elevates it past its own frustrating obstacles into something divine, genuine and touching. It has a solipsistic circularity and is endlessly comforting. One of the things I suspect that Hannah and I both love about it is how it unleashes a longing for a type of love centered on mutual respect and challenge, rather than convenience or expectation.

When we got home from Fake Christmas, I remember we saw Mary Poppins Returns (2018) on Real Christmas, an industry screening at Disney that did not grasp our attention as much. Then in 2019, I know we watched the Paddington films and Titanic (1997) while curled up on the aforementioned beige couch, a series of comfort we sought after some unexpected medical problems and with it, itinerant communication stumbles. We sought love and understanding on the screen, in films that all address broaches in class, as we learned to grow together.

Later in 2019, I went to Arizona for a couple of months to perform in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at the Phoenix Theatre Company, and I remember one night during our brief long-distance era that we watched a film simultaneously while on a muted FaceTime call. But I don’t remember what film. I do, however, remember sneaking glances to the FaceTime call and thinking about Hannah’s cherubic and angelic face, the soft folds of the white tank top she wore while resting her head on her band, as if holding a platter, staring at her screen while I pretended to stare at my own. I remember how the distance made me remember even clearer the way her skin felt; absence doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder, but it can clarify memory like a bas-relief.

When she visited me in Arizona, I remember we saw Parasite (2019) at a Harkins Cinema in Scottsdale, and immediately craved Korean food the second we left the theater. We drooled over barbecue while feeling galvanized by Bong Joon-ho’s anti-moneyed class screed, a genre hybrid we could barely comprehend, so intricate was its tale.

I’m sure that, between the summer of 2018, when Hannah and I met, and the spring of 2020, when I joined the social media app Letterboxd and started officially tagging my film watching activity with notes on whom I’d seen certain films with, we saw many more than the six or seven I just listed. But maybe memory isn’t supposed to be concretized like that. Letterboxd tells me that, since March of 2020, when the pandemic began, and when Hannah and I watched the Luca Guadagnino, Tilda Swinton-vehicle I Am Love (2009), we have seen 148 films together. But do I really remember every single one? I do remember in July of that year watching The Parent Trap (1998), being simultaneously impressed with Lindsay Lohan’s legit British dialect and just how hot Dennis Quaid looked as a sommelier in Dad jeans. And, apparently the next day, Hannah and I watched The NeverEnding Story (1984) for our short-lived fantasy film podcast “Dance Magic Dance,” both of us looking to the other like, “this is a classic of the genre?”

Later that year, I convinced Hannah to watch Dodsworth (1936), an early William Wyler globe-trotting romance that had us both spellbound, a movie about a rich man who cannot but continue to push the women in his life as far to the background as possible, something that Wyler and cinematographer Gregg Toland made manifest through reliably crisp, deep-focused photography. I bought my engagement ring to propose to Hannah not long after that; as Hannah ate the singularly uncommon and charming movie snack of radishes dipped in salt, I pictured ourselves in villas across Europe, tuxedos and ball gowns and all.

When Christmas season came around, Hannah and I went on one of our first of many Nancy Meyers kicks, watching The Holiday (2006), during which Hannah made repeated lewd gestures about what she might do to Jude Law if given the chance. We laughed and cried as Meyers penchant for personifying wealth took her characters in and out of love, and I marveled at how living with Hannah could frequently be like living inside your own, neverending sitcom.

For our podcast in 2021, we watched E.T. (1982) and had her father as a guest, and debated the differences between fantasy and science-fiction even as we both agreed it is perfect. We also watched Donnie Darko (2001) which we vehemently disagreed on (I think its a modern-day masterpiece; she thinks its drivel), before coming back together for Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), which we half-watched at our friend’s apartment because we both forgot we had homework to do.

The podcast died but theaters came back and we saw The Truffle Hunters (2020) at the AMC Burbank 8 inside the strip mall, and we both cried; possibly out of relief of being inside a movie theater again, but possibly also because Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s portrait of old Italian men on the hunt for mushrooms was as gorgeous as it was sweet. We were engaged by then, and everything started to take on a significance and a weight I didn’t expect, as if everything pre-engagement was a warm-up to the real memories of a lifetime bonding together. Of course the universe doesn’t pretend to know about old human traditions of monogamy, but maybe the brain can be tricked; the possibility of a long-term partnership turns into the certainty of it, and suddenly watching a documentary about foraging simultaneously is a story being crafted in real time to tell children down the line, or friends, or in a Substack post. Time stretches in a movie theater like taffy, compounded by uncommon love.

Hannah and I later went to New York that year while I went back to school, and we saw Titane (2021) at the New York Film Festival. Julie Ducournau’s nauseating body horror sent us, paradoxically, to get late-night greasy Chinese food at an Upper West Side childhood haunt of the Pilkes family, and we joked about what it would feel like to give birth to a car.

In November we went to Woodstock for a romantic Thanksgiving, and while I tried my hand at cooking an entire feast from scratch like a total fucking lunatic, we watched Peter Hedges’ Pieces of April (2003),  an early-aughts relic that feels charmingly comfortable as a time capsule, highlighted by a use of digital camcorder that would’ve irked me had I seen it on its release but now seems inspired. Hedges is very caring for his characters, and his compassion really comes through in a very optimistic portrait of post-911 New York that never comes off as twee or saccharine. We then saw House of Gucci (2021) at a local Woodstock picture house, spoke in incessant and vaguely offensive Italian accents while driving through the nighttime snow, and then consumed a slew of Hallmark Christmas romances, none of which require mention at this time.

Also in New York, Hannah and I saw Groundhog Day (1993) for the 7,000th time but the first time in theaters, an experience at the Nitehawk in Williamsburg that made me cry hot tears into my buttered popcorn. A few weeks later we watched Netflix’s newest factory-made documentary, The Tinder Swindler, a true tale of a man who gives women their own experience of Groundhog Day by courting them before robbing them blind. We turned it into an Instagram parody that we insisted remain at a confounding length of four and a half minutes.

I still remember the feeling of watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) together for the first time on my great Aunt Laurette’s old, dilapidated pinkish, suede-ish couch we inherited in the West Village, a sort of posh counterweight to the decrepitude of Tobe Hooper’s masterpiece. That experience was washed down weeks later in the snow, in the mountains of Mammoth, in California, where we watched Crossing Delancey (1988) with my parents, a pure romance of idiosyncratic Jewish love by the queen herself, Joan Micklin Silver.

Last year, our first back in Los Angeles, Hannah and I both worked through career change and unexpected strife. We leaned on easy TV like “Love Island” and old seasons of “Project Runway” to quiet our disrupted brains. But we also fell in love with Nany Meyers again, whose forays into bourgeois love felt as decadent as Meryl Streep’s pain au chocolats in It’s Complicated (2009), a bit of frivolity that helped us escape while urging us to dream for days of grassy, windswept relaxation in the California countryside. We sunk into Thelma & Louise (1991), a first for Hannah, and remembered that liberation of the self is more important than a sack of money. We indulged in Practical Magic (1998), a witchy crime-romance that made us long for days spent in impeccable New England cabins, even when they’re actually in the Pacific Northwest, even when magic means danger and death.

It’s exciting to me to think about how our film experiences are only in their nascence. One of the things I love most about being with Hannah is that even something as seemingly innocent as art consumption is never premeditated, which means that whatever we throw on the TV, or choose to see at a theater, or even on an airplane when we press “play” at the same time, is that it will always be a reflection, in some way, of where we are, emotionally, in that moment. We’ll watch love stories when we’re feeling cozy; horror when the veil is at its thinnest and skeletons hang from our neighbor’s balustrade. We’ll still watch British reality when we’re trying to turn off, but just as likely we’ll watch something challenging and introspective. For years now I’ve been marking films on Letterboxd seen together with a simple “w/ hannah” - a tag that, quite unwillingly, has elevated the experience and the memory of films as silly as the kids theater movie Camp (2003) as well as the the earth-shattering ones like the recent May December (2023). It is the greatest gift of all, to know that there are no bad films, nor even good ones. There is time spent “w/ hannah” and there is time I barely remember. How the simplest truths are often the most profound, that art is at its best when enjoyed with those you love.

Subscribe now

A still image from To My Father (2008), Abdel Salam Shehadeh’s documentary on the evolution of the occupation in Palestine. Courtesy of the Palestinian Film Institute.

Despite this being my first full year as a professional critic, I spent most of it indulging in older films I hadn’t previously seen. I became a contributing writer for Slant Magazine and published some other work in Boing Boing, The Harbour Journal and Salon; but, really, I’ve yet to see most of 2023’s more awards buzz-worthy films. The end of the year, a time in which I would typically catch up on the hottest films, coincided with the burgeoning war in Gaza, and my appetite for new work was strangely diminished. It was as if I needed to perpetually time travel to periods that have already passed, and yet those films sometimes offer up the keenest insight into territory in which we all now find ourselves.

Instead of a traditional year-end review, I’m offering this list of twenty films I discovered for the first time; some films which have bizarrely missed my eyes over the years (Frances Ha, The Insider, and Paris, Texas, to name a few) as well as a handful of rarer titles I was privileged to see in some even rarer locations (Territories at the Tate Britain’s Isaac Julien retrospective and To My Father which was presented by Bret Hamilton in Los Angeles courtesy of the Palestinian Film Institute are two I feel especially lucky to have seen). 

Movies of Myself is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Presented in alphabetical order, here are my favorite new (to me) films of 2023.

1. All My Good Countrymen (Všichni dobří rodáci) (Vojtěch Jasný, 1969)

“Everything is different now. They will hear you sing.”

Though made four years earlier than Federico Fellini’s Amarcord, All My Good Countrymen frequently feels like Jasný’s own autobiographical circus-like romp, but with the intention of infusing those warm childhood remembrances with a slightly parodic and mournful tone. Jasný’s film laments the long period of forced collectivization on an especially communitarian village, by emphasizing the individualism of its disparate characters. The one constant here is a magnificently shot, changing landscape - the force of nature always winning out over the totalitarian greed of vapid local politicians. Like watching history as if told through Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s brush.

2. The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, 1970)

The Italian master of horror and suspense may have peaked early with his first feature. A strange tale about an American expat writer with writer’s block who gets sucked into a murder investigation  that warps himself and his girlfriend, Crystal Plumage is as warm as it is unnerving. Here, the vibes are just right; imagine you’re getting cozy under a blanket in the middle of winter as the maestro Ennio Morricone’s dizzying score, infused with some creepy children's choir mixed with the dubbing of Italian to English. It all makes for a magnetic brand of cognitive dissonance. The 4K transfer is sexy as hell, the blood is flowing, the shadows cast a pallor of insatiable mystery. Lots of stellar phallic imagery and voyeurism, a multi-pronged gaze that implicates all.

3. Clifford (Paul Flaherty, 1994)

There’s really only one reason Clifford makes this list and it’s because of Martin Short’s barrel-twisted performance of an overgrown child hell-bent on sociopathic destruction. Short’s physicality will remind you of Chaplin but the way he twists and turns his voice and gaze like a plastic, animatronic doll recalls the depths of hell. It’s hilarious. The movie itself is as nonsensical as it is blistering. The whole thing feels positively beamed in from outer space. Look at this pull quote from Roger Ebert and then tell me it’s not an accidental ringing endorsement: 

“It's not bad in any usual way. It's bad in a new way all its own. There is something extraterrestrial about it, as if it's based on the sense of humor of an alien race with a completely different relationship to the physical universe.”

4. Czech Rhapsody (Vojtěch Jasný, 1970)

A companion piece to All My Good Countrymen in everything but name, this is a short form documentary that puts into stark contrast the themes of its fictional, larger brother. Faces and bodies process towards the screen in open defiance and simultaneous resignation of Russian invasion, the disruption of their lives as inevitable as the changing of the seasons. Banned as well, this crosses the threshold from documentary to poetry, a snapshot of provincialism threatened by the false promise of progress.

5. Demon (Marcin Wrona, 2015)

More than anything, what Demon provides is a film of Immaculate vibes, a real heavy horror with some solid moments of comedy, all in service of giving voice to Poland’s tricky relationship to its own mass erasure of the Jews. Having just come from Poland to cover the 48th Polish Film Festival for Slant, I can attest to the icky way much of collective memory about the Holocaust is shakily buried and neglected, which is the exact kind of collective inaction or action that breeds nefarious ends. Great use of both Jewish folklore and wedding culture. Wrona’s untimely death remains one of global cinema’s worst losses in recent years.

6. Frances Ha (Greta Gerwig, 2013)

After Barbie’s surprising streak of rebelliousness, it should be no controversy to point out Greta Gerwig’s high level perception. Her early work with the mumblecore movement showed that she is especially tuned into the ways artists and people on the fringes of “normal” capitalism deal with heartache and failure, and in Frances Ha there’s such a special consideration for how brutal we can be to ourselves in the pursuit of some nebulous future. I think the instinct to label this as improvisatory is probably due to its plethora of New Wave references but really this feels more acute and in lockstep with memory, less random and more deliberate than the French in that all of the moments (especially, perhaps, what gets thrown away like a line about not being able to leave places) feel interrelated, a series of logical, cascading beats coalescing into a vast tapestry of New York angst and love and humor. I honestly hated how much I related to this movie, made me feel awful in the best ways. Gerwig is just so smart and so special, and Baumbach’s direction here as well, that even its more immediate and cutesy needle drops are pretty forgivable in its context. I get it now.

7. God’s Country (Louis Malle, 1985)

Earlier this year, I dove deep into Malle’s body of work. In particular I was most taken with Malle’s documentary work, especially Phantom India (see below) and God’s Country, which, if nothing else, features Malle's most breathtaking, jarring and emotionally resonant ending moment in his career, a rippling freeze frame cemented in time. The lead-up to it, a community ambling through life, the vast space America has to offer, a bunch of humble servants to the land and each other in small and incalculable ways, slowly devastated by the same political engine they are told to trust. About as cogent a political message a documentary has ever had, but also one of profound humanity. I don't know if I breathed at all during the segment with the interviewee who talked about the church's hypocrisy, and being invited into these people's homes, from a time simultaneously out of time and forever in consciousness, is a gift of domestic bliss. Malle's entire career is just about bearing witness, isn't it?

8. How Far Away, How Near (Jak daleko stąd, jak blisko) (Tadeusz Konwicki, 1972)

   

At the Polish Film Festival this year, jury members were invited to screen a film that has been particularly influential on their career, and the director Filip Bakon chose this outré whirlwind of a rarity (which is alternately translated with and without the “away”). Both metaphysical and metatheatrical, Konwicki (who was more primarily thought of as a novelist) dances with nihilism in a film about an anonymous office worker seemingly lifted from the pages of a Calvino novel. As he drifts he contemplates the possible reasons his friend was found dead many years ago. Like a giallo mystery if filmed by a Frankenstein’s monster of Fellini and Bergman, Ho Far, How Near stretches the fabric of time and space in a constant battle with itself. Delightfully provocative and extremely unnerving.

9. The Insider (Michael Mann, 1999)

Russel Crowe’s performance of a man with increasingly repressed agony, a rule follower who has been pushed into deeper and deeper corners of impossibility and hopelessness, has to be one of the best in Mann’s canon. Pacino is incredible too, of course, and it’s just great how all of this two-sided beast gets communicated mostly via light and angles and repeated motifs of ever-dissolving spaces. The sushi restaurant scene - in which two desperate men accuse the other in a back and forth about good versus bad intentions - is a master class of editing and staging. Ultimately a film about how there is no such thing as objectivity in a capitalist system. Made me want to have a cigarette.

10. I Signed the Petition (Mahdi Fleifel, 2018)

Fleifel’s 2018 short, which is currently viewable on the Criterion Channel, pairs images of a placid apartment in Berlin with audio from a seemingly innocuous phone call. What coalesces is dream-like images of the ongoing Nakba in Palestine with a cogent and often funny conversation about the relative powerlessness of fighting a war from abroad, disembodied voices of a disembodied land. Quietly quite moving.

11. It’s Complicated (Nancy Meyers, 2009)

Fully three hours too long and I loved every second of it. Not much more than a vacation into the bizarre other species of the ultra rich; it is gorgeous. Shot like a Sunday brunch. Utterly incredible performance from Meryl Streep and also John Krasinski who anchors the B cast with aplomb. Delightfully strange and impeccably scored. The most Éric Rohmer of Meyers’ films: all bourgeois talk, lots of frivolity, plus chocolate croissants. A perfect film.

12. The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)

The source material here, Raymond Chandler's pulpy novel, is thick with mystery but clean with answers. Marlowe is both cynical and honest in a world that is quick to lie and desperate for power. Altman's adaptation, by acerbic contrast, is much messier. For one thing, few lines of dialogue are spoken, apparently, to be heard clearly - overlapping with others or nearly whispered to the self, like concatenations inconspicuously put next together. It's a world that's barreling towards delirium, and inside of it is just one stray cat genuinely interested in knowing at least some kernel of truth. As with many Altmans, the joke is less funny than it is sardonic and wry, no less visible than in the film's stunning final moments, a pretty wild reversal from Chandler's novel in which righteousness is given center stage. Gould's performance - sweaty, angry, hilarious - is as good as it gets, filtering a character that lives entirely for himself through the prism of the camera lens, letting us in to someone who'd rather just light up a cigarette on your front porch. If you ever want an example of how to craft an opening sequence in a way that perfectly lays out what your film is about without calling attention to it, this would be the obvious number one.

13. No End (Bez końca) (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1985)

Kieslowski’s quietly haunting tale of grief and woe, and how the things we inherit when others die are their struggles as well as their memories. No End’’s argument is in its alternately cynical, alternately hopeful title; life as an ellipsis, impossible to shake off, impossible to leave behind. There is no recourse for staying on the sidelines of social struggle. How relevant is that? So well acted it feels more connected to his documentary work in all its unshakeable verisimilitude, even as ghosts literally roam the carpeted floors of these drab spaces.

14. Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984)

America in all of its neon hues, a vast story both beautiful and a little nuts, where we’ve all forgotten where we’ve come from or towards where we might be heading. All these images, matte and color all at once, red sweat stained hat and the yellow of Stockwell’s raincoat, a faded blue sedan. America as an image of what it once was, washed-out and all. Contradictions and self delusions of grandeur, all communicated within fifteen minutes, the soft pastels of the sky like a memory. Maybe Shepherd’s most elegiac script, these sparse sentences and mirrored words (all the talk about who sees who and how in the brothel are just exquisite) and Wenders is there to render it all with a masterclass in spatial dynamics, moving bodies and cameras about with such rigorous specificity. What a stunner about patience and forgiveness, an honest appraisal of how some guilt and some pain just doesn’t fade away.

15. Phantom India (Louis Malle, 1969)

Malle’s predilection and unique talent for finding simple, yet challenging metonymic images and compositions reaches its apex with the final shot of this six hour plus miniseries, in which a group of men must use the entirety of their body weight (including the crowns of their heads) to push a cart uphill, as cars drift by as reminders of (literal) side by side industrial development. Malle is interested in what makes India an evergreen persistent image of man’s ties to the earth and to each other, but is also interested in taking down preconceptions of Eastern wisdom. For example, Karma is not a holistic view of a society’s belief in the possibility of a better future, but a bitter system that enables the continual exploitation “of man over man.” This paradoxical notion fuels the entire portrait, but there’s also what Malle calls the “most personal” film of his career. Sometimes this manifests in literal ways - Malle’s own body shows up on screen, his intimate reflections make their way into the script - and sometimes in more abstract ways - as in the constant structure of Malle’s caramel-like French translation superimposed over an interviewee’s English or Hindu. The effect warps into a strange dissonance, as if Malle himself holds the multitude of philosophical and political worldviews that encompass a country as vast and as diverse as India. Like in that famous opening scene of Vanya on 42nd Street, bystanders stare into the lens in alternately challenging and flirtatious glances. The camera, being as it is a stand-in for Malle himself, invites an entire populace into the personal, even as it gawks or awkwardly stands by. Malle has a hard time reconciling this country which steadfastly roots in the past with a caste system devolving into classism and capitalism with the western notion of a sensual and mystical utopia, and maybe what we’re really meant to take away from it all is that no place is better for having been tampered with. Everyone must push their way into the future, or else none of us will budge at all.

16. Show Me Love (aka, Fucking Amål) (Lukas Moodysson, 1998)

Screened on glorious bigscreen thanks to the essential newbie of Los Angeles’s arthouse cinema scene, Mezzanine. Moodysson so totally gets the textural specificity of teenage chaotic love, all the weird absolution of puberty and learning what an identity is. Love the genre of stumbling into queerness, an aesthetic of fluidity within teenage binary thinking. So joyous and adolescent in the best ways.

17. A Tale of Autumn (Éric Rohmer, 1998)

The fourth of the prolific French filmmaker’s so-called Tales of the Four Seasons, A Tale of Autumn is a web of bizarre love and contradictions that, in their intricacies, wheels back around to become altogether quotidian. Éric Rohmer is the cinema-poet of human fallacy, and I am never not happy to be swept into his knotty, deceptively simple compositions and performances. Possibly the most honest filmmaker that came out of the Wave.

18. Territories (Isaac Julien, 1984)

    

“For me, my active-passive experience of Julien’s filmography began with his experimental documentary Territories(1984). Shot on both Super 8 and 16mm film, Julien sought out a ‘style for political remembering’ the Notting Hill Carnival, a space of ‘resistance within Caribbean communities.’ Utilizing as it does a cavalcade of found footage and sound from mainstream media sources, Territories calls upon the work of Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983), itself a poetic assemblage of flaneur-like cinema, asking us to engage with questions of police brutality, class, war and sexuality in more experiential, haptic terms. The film felt like a logical starting point for this wildly labyrinthine exhibition, a Deluezian disruption of both narrative and museum expectations, asking us to examine both political and documentarian structures in a recreation of a new association. Rather than cohesion, Julien gives us representation, a chance to understand life in Notting Hill at this moment, in this place.” 

More here.

19. The Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman, 2009)

    

Elia Suleiman’s sardonic reflection on the absurdities of life under Israeli occupation, feeling frozen in place in a land that was once yours but now merely exists as a dwindling space of little acts of either rebellion or resigned defeat. Cycles of resistance that diminish in power if only because the quest for peace seems increasingly fruitless. What Suleiman can squeeze out of the daily horror in terms of wry humor is pretty remarkable; a Benny Hill-style chase through a hospital corridor, Suleiman himself being lovingly slapped behind pillars of a bar, and a man being relentlessly followed by the eye of a tank as he casually takes out the trash are all particularly inspired. But what really comes through is the impossible task of finding inspiration when daily life is so heavily policed, even in memory - these perfect, Wes Anderson-esque frames within frames - stripped of vivaciousness. The scene in which Suleiman recreates an artificial image of a Free Palestine for his slowly dying mother is filled with an anguish unusual for Suleiman’s dry style that commits to the vagaries of cruelty that apartheid life really creates. A gorgeous film of quiet resilience.

20. To My Father (2008, Abdel Salam Shehadeh)

Thanks to Bret Hamilton, the Palestinian Film Institute and Los Angeles’s The Robinson S.P.A.C.E. for this one. Traces the history of the photograph alongside the history of Israeli occupation, an escalation of accessibility coinciding with an acceleration of violence against Palestinians. A stunning photo and video essay inside an archival project. Memory is a weapon, and it is also a gift. What we do with it matters. Let people live.

Free Palestine 🇵🇸 🍉

It has become increasingly impossible these days to write about Gaza without feeling pressured to state your empathy, for all people, up front. This is because, unlike most humanitarian disasters, there is a persistent expectation for egalitarianism. If you speak in solidarity with Palestinian civilians, you are expected to also grieve for Israelis. Nothing is assumed. But, more likely, you will be noxiously accused of antisemitism, of being self-hating, of siding with Hamas, or celebrating death, and even, all too frequently, removed from your job. It may even be argued that you are not actually Jewish, as Avi Mayer just egregiously asserted in The Jerusalem Post. Sometimes the most vitriolic antisemitism comes from inside the house.

Even as a Jew, or perhaps especially because I am a Jew, I have found it difficult to write anything of consequence since October 7th, because the horrors are being communicated at an alarming speed; the Palestinian civilian death rate is exploding at a dizzying level, just passing 10,000. 4,000 were children. By the time you read this, it will already be outdated. We are told this is being done to defeat Hamas. We are told it is necessary to keep Jews safe. In some circles, the claim is made that these figures are actually Hamas’s fault. “They use human shields,” so goes the banal argument, without a pause to consider why a soldier shoots anyway. As it stands, if the numbers froze at its current horrific count, we would still never be able to wash the blood cleanly from our hands. It matters, of course, when you start the clock, and these numbers are generous; they do not take into account 75 years of occupation. And yet these numbers will only grow, and balloon, and I fear that no amount of repentance will ever be enough.

Lately I’ve been wondering what has happened to people’s imaginations. It isn’t so much that people can’t imagine a future, but that the one they indulge in seems to always confuse peace with silence, and a return to the status quo. But the silence that gets awarded and the status quo that gets defined are modes that are resting almost entirely in the hands of Zionists and their apologists, who cannot seem to reconcile the strange irony of their own identities. It has always been bizarre to see a Jewish-majority government and military act as the aggressor in a brutal system of apartheid. But discomfort with the truth, a truth that has been verified and classified as such by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israel’s own agency B’tselem, and other reputable organizations, does not make it not so. The same people who want you to know that Hamas is designated as a terrorist group have no patience for legal designations when it prevents them from holding the moral high ground.

Even as the death toll rises in Gaza, pro-Israel voices litigate the meaning of genocide, and even, in some places, whether or not numbers can be trusted. President Biden cast doubt on the figures, a tactic of erasure from the highest office in the world that quite clearly sows the seeds for further destruction, and an abject refusal for future attempts to memorialize the mass murder of a body of people. As Jews we are all too familiar with the practice of indulging in such a historical denialism in real time. Our greatest tragedy, the Holocaust, one of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed, has been invoked, ad nauseum, diluting both that tragedy and the one currently unfolding to the point of incomprehension. Imagining Hamas as a logical continuation of the Nazis is easy, but it’s also deeply illogical. Our identity is too wrapped up in the horrors of yesterday; our pain is enormous but it is also inextricably linked. It is no more special than the pain of others, and if we cannot imagine what that pain is like, we risk alienating ourselves even further into deeper, more irrevocable holes. Or, as James Baldwin wrote in Life Magazine in 1963, “you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” We are in danger of losing that literacy. As I wrote in 2021 in a piece drawing on the 1956 Holocaust documentary Night and Fog by Alain Resnais, the lessons of the Holocaust are only serviceable when we understand we are part of a larger fabric. Never again must mean never again for anyone, anywhere.

This self-alienation has catastrophic consequences. We have forgotten how to imagine a humanity that extends beyond ourselves. We have heard even half-way liberal voices unwilling to learn what a free Palestine even means, asking in increasingly defeated terms, with shoulders permanently shrugged, “what else” Israel is supposed to do. The question reeks of myopia. It stinks of ignorance. The question suggests an answer of brutalism: Palestinian civilian death is accepted and even expected as a matter of course, and there is nothing that can be done to answer violence save for even worse violence, even worse crimes. It assumes a supremacist understanding of culture, and of identity. Why should Israeli life be protected at the expense of Palestinian life? More to the point, how exactly does carpet bombing Gaza make Israelis safe, or Jews in the diaspora safe? The approach is not only strategically inept, it is morally reprehensible, and fails to imagine a world in which all people live in dignity, and respect.

Many of us grow up in Jewish education being told to hold fast to a mantra of “never again,” but if we can only repeat the phrase as a stalwart of self-protection, we have failed. We have failed to understand our own Jewish education; biblical tales of displacement and the real life lessons of extermination are only useful insofar as they can be morphed into teachable allegories for all othered people. As Jews we are always susceptible to hate speech and crimes, but we have to imagine a world in which we can extend that mantra to others. Moral courage and consistency requires the ability to understand our liberation is only possible through collective liberation. Anything short is meaningless. But Zionism, a project whose logical end-goal is ethno-nationalism, suppresses that imagination. It conditions us to believe our existence is inherently more valuable by erasing the very existence of the Arabs that were there before the colonists arrived. The persistent rallying cry that Israel was a “land without a people for a people without a land” is deliciously cozy until you learn that 750,000 people were driven from their homes to become refugees in their own backyard. This history is rarely taught within Zionist institutions, and so we are left to imagine why a population of people are upset we are even there. It is an absence of education that breeds ignorance, and even more dangerously, hatred.

In the days following the seventh, several people have asked me why I have not been speaking out about “our side.” American Jews have been told for so long and so forcefully that their safety and identity should be intrinsically tied to a militarized occupier that we cannot imagine that life on the other side is made up of the same stuff as we are. What is “our side?” Perhaps obviously the side in question is the Jews. But if I’m being asked to either align with an Israeli soldier rather than an innocent child, simply because the soldier and I both come from the same diaspora, then we have completely lost the thread of what humanity means. The bare minimum of solidarity requires the ability to see past the markers of identity. Should I relate more to a White cop than a Black victim of the cop’s violence? A friend pointed out to me a helpful mirror in The Matrix Resurrections (2021), in which Neo (Keanu Reeves) reflects on the seeming endlessness of the humans war with the machines: “I’m back where I started,” he says to Bugs (Jessica Henwick), “like none of it mattered.” “What you changed,” she assures him, is what nobody believed could ever be changed… The meaning of ‘our side.’” As Darren Mooney argues, the film helps us understand the danger of false binaries. It is why I, and so many others signed on to this letter from n+1, which neatly lays out the false conflation of Zionism with Judaism.

Zionism has become a shock collar on the Jewish people; it requires us to identify so closely with the Israeli government that any utterance against policy is brandished as unfiltered antisemitism. Yet this perspective imagines that Israel is simply a continuation of the Jewish people writ-large, a conflation of a people with a government that most people would consider in itself anti-Semitic. Thirty-seven states have made attempts at outlawing the non-violent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which specifically targets companies like Sabra, Starbucks and Puma for profiting off of the apartheid. The escalation of criminalizing free speech has obvious consequences but more than anything it only metastisizes the notion that Jews are a monolith. 

In other words, one of Zionism’s missions is to equate Judaism with Zionism, and, by extension (and perhaps more prominently these days) its opposite. This is also its great victory. If, like me, you grow up with the notion that the two concepts are inextricable, that you have an indigenous claim to Palestine, and that everyone who disagrees with this notion is anti-Semitic or, worse, for Palestinians, a naturally born terrorist, it becomes incredibly hard to view Israeli colonialism with a clear-eyed objectivity. It means you’re likely to object to that very term, colonialism, even though this was expressly part of Theodor Herzl’s language. It also means you’re likely to center antisemitism as the subject of the day, and not the threat of extinction of Gazans. To break out of that perspective requires an imagination of an existence different from your own. While we fret over what is and is not antisemitism at home, entire Palestinian families have been wiped cleanly from the registry.

Of course this is not an either/or scenario. Antisemitism and Islamophobia are, like all systems of hatred, on the rise. I hear and see a lot of fear. I share that fear. What breathing human wouldn’t? The problem is that most reports of antisemitism are classified as such by the Anti-Defamation League and even less serious outlets like StopAntisemitism.org and JewBelong (that latter of which is unironically advertising the threat of gas chambers on billboards over Brooklyn and East LA). The ADL has routinely stated its stance, in league with the Trump Administration’s own declaration, that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are one in the same, and has effectively become nothing but a walking apologia for Israel’s far-right Knesset. But even if every single report of anti-Semitic hatred was verified and real, no one has been able to explain to me why the potential of anti-Semitic attacks at home is answerable by more war abroad. Imagining a world where Israel “doesn’t exist,” has become more pressing to Israel apologists than imagining the world that currently does, in which 4.5 million Palestinians are not given equal access to the prized and falsely branded democracy Israel touts. I cannot fathom how a real genocide unfolding in real time has routinely been washed over by an imagined one that only exists in our worst nightmares.

Of the many questions being asked by people who would rather throw up their hands than sound the alarm for decency is why Palestinian advocates, and people on the left more broadly, aren’t asking for a release of hostages, or for a condemnation of Hamas’s attacks. Condemning Hamas has become such a meaningless request on the right that even The Onion stepped in to satirize its zombie-like persistence. Nevermind the fact that the United States spends 3.8 billion dollars a year on Israeli military spending, and that Biden just authorized an emergency 14.3 billion, but I have trouble imagining what protesting against Hamas would materially affect. Is there a single American leader currently accepting thousands of dollars from a Palestinian equivalent of AIPAC or StandWithUs, two right-wing organizations trafficking in abject Israeli propaganda, so that their voice is persistently, uncritically aligned with Hamas? We have so few weapons as everyday people; there is no recourse here but to protest, and to ask those in power to use some of their imagination as well. We lobby what we can, in the hopes for what might be.

A few weeks ago, I was arrested alongside three hundred or so other Jews and allies for a civil disobedience action led and organized by rabbis and members of Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. We blocked the rotunda at Capitol Hill, chanting Lo yisa goy el goy cherev/ lo yil’medu od milchamah: Nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. For the people who see and hear these chants and whose only response is: these are not real Jews, I wish they could imagine a world where our safety was achieved through the liberation of others. We can no longer live through retribution. If we can’t learn to cast it off, our undoing will be our own making.

Click here to support a ceasefire

Click here to read Arielle Angel's essay for Jewish Currents

Click here to donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund

Subscribe now

But first it was Tex X. Andrew Bergman’s original spec script slapped on the cheeky but overly ambitious homage of a title to Malcolm X, imagining its fish-out-of-water hero as the center of an anachronistic concept as simply explained as “1974 in 1874.” That was all well and good, but it wasn’t until producer Michael Hertzberg brought on Brooks that the film’s notorious cavalcade of chaotic fourth-wall breaking really started to emerge. The film’s final title, a purposefully nonsensical one that is only meant to haptically reference the genre upon which it plays, is a mini word salad that immediately sets up the film as a zany deconstruction of Western tropes. When Brooks brought the title idea to his wife, the enigmatic actor Anne Bancroft, she exclaimed, “it makes no sense!” And, of course, that’s the point.

Modeling the writing room of Blazing Saddles in the same fashion as the infamous sketch show Your Show of Shows (1950-1955), at which he met his best friend and the late legend Carl Reiner, Brooks brought in the then relatively unknown stand-up Richard Pryor and two freshman writers, Norman Steinberg and Alan Uger. A room of Jews and a Black comic to re-shape a Blaxploitation Western as a Blaxploitation Borscht Belt yiddishe spoof. Like the saga of the film’s name, Blazing Saddles thrives as a film in conversation with the lineage of tropes it seeks to acknowledge, and from which it necessarily departs. There is perhaps no better indication of the seriousness of his endeavor than the original offer that Brooks apparently made to John Wayne for the role of the Waco Kid over a commissary meal (though he loved the script, Wayne turned it down, fearing his fan base would not accept his presence in such a vulgar parody). Brooks then turned to Gig Young, whose eternally cherubic yet aging face had provided for a metric ton of mileage in Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? in 1969. But Young was an alcoholic, and could not get past the first day of shooting without spewing green vomit over his jail cell set. Method acting this was not, though one of Wilder’s more memorable inflections as the Kid is in how he guzzles whiskey like a baby sucking down milk from a bottle.

Brooks and company exploit a remarkably pared-down canvas to utilize a dastardly anarchic paint job. The plot is as simple and as Western as white bread and baked beans, the kind that ignites the film’s infamous crescendoing fart symphony. As Blazing Saddles opens with a thrilling earworm of a title song by Frankie Laine, whose career was made famous as the singer of “Rawhide,” Blazing Saddles announces itself with whip crack sound effects and a rustic title font across a backdrop of arid mountains and plains, keeping with the style of post World War II Westerns it clearly satirizes. The lyrics promise the arrival of a hero who will take care of “bad men near and far,” but more interestingly here, to “conquer” fear and hate. 

The film itself takes place about a decade after the emancipation proclamation in an unnamed expanse of desert. With a gliding crane shot over a stretch of laid train tracks, Joseph F. Boric captures a landscape so familiar to the American west, you might think this is Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns (1957), for which he also provided cinematography. Migrant workers are in the midst of sweating over their hoisted pickaxes, berated by Lyle (Burton Gilliam), a bright red-shirt clad lackey, who insists a fainting Chinese worker should be docked a day’s pay for “napping on the job.” Despicably cruel yet cruelly hilarious, so begins the film.

It is revealed that Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman), a robber baron employed by the Governor William J. Le Petomane (Brooks), must go through the small and tranquil town of Rock Ridge in order to complete his railroad project. Hedy Lamarr, the real life celebrity of Hollywood’s golden age, sued Brooks for the unsanctioned use of her name, and it seems Brooks and company only invoked her for the running joke that everyone calls Hedley, Hedy. Regardless of his name’s spelling or pronunciation, this Lamarr is keen to finish his railroad project for the simple desire to earn a buck. He hires Taggart (Slim Pickens), to bring his gang through town on a mission of murder, pillaging and rape. Like Stanley Kubrick did in Dr. Strangelove (1964), Brooks employs Slim Pickens by turning his frequent presence in Westerns and his popular perception as a ruthless hired hand on its head, as the rotund teddy bear plays here something more closely resembling an enthusiastic moron.

Taggart and company kill the sheriff, which leads the town full of White men named Johnson to petition the mayor for a new sheriff - which Lamarr uses as an excuse to scare everyone away with the only type of person they’d find too repulsive to stomach: a Black man. Enter Cleavon Little as Bart, whose obvious advantage as a far more intelligent human (and with remarkable pantomiming skills) keeps him alive. Little is unceasingly charming, his wide smile, impossibly white teeth and honeyed voice making him difficult to dislike. With the help of Jim, formerly known as the Waco Kid (Wilder), Bart helps to defeat the rising tide of unchecked, racialized capitalism by invoking the one weapon which defeats all: community solidarity. 

And yet, that plot hardly matters. Brooks’s most cogent film and maybe his most hilarious to boot, Blazing Saddles is a consistent, unceasing play of promiscuity. The film has become the poster child for meaningless arguments against political progress. When people suggest the film “couldn’t be made today,” they may have a point - but not because Blazing Saddles is offensive, or, (to use that diminutive and overused nothingness moniker) “problematic,” but rather because its biting comedy is uncommonly righteous. From its opening scene, in which scores of Chinese and Black migrant workers slave away on railroad construction, Brooks, Pryor et al present othered people as coy, smart and subversive, as when the crew sing Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You” from the suggestion that they should be happy with their labor, a sequence which sees them cooing racists into self-humiliation. When Brooks’s permanently cross-eyed, pantless and drunk Le Petomane is introduced, a massive, smoking cigar perched on his lips like something out of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, he pleads to his aides that “we’ve gotta protect our phony baloney jobs,” and then suggests handing out paddle ball toys “in lieu of pay.” Le Petomane is deliriously uncorked, but underneath that is the depiction of a legislature that cheats its own people out of money and eagerly rushes into the destruction of a town for capital gain. The mayor is only amenable to the suggestion that a Black mayor get hired when Lamarr manipulates him into thinking he could be thought of in the annals of history alongside Abraham Lincoln, an absurd proposal that suggests sometimes our outward facing shows of progress are merely opportunistic flights of fancy.

Even the underdog is skewered. Victims though they may be, and as evidenced by their ridiculously uniformed names, the residents of Rock Ridge are the epitome of small-town American isolation and homogeneity. Their communal peace is only possible via deliberate eschewing of new ideas and new faces. One of the funnier runners is a constant built-in censorship of derogatory words via formal trickery, making them land with a thump when they are fully said, and heard. The people that wield the many epithets are always racist, always ignorant, never glorified, nor never apologized for. When the town gets together to write a note of “displeasure” at the Mayor’s choice of sheriff, their racist outcry is met with the literal braying of a herd of cows that are, improbably, filtering through the aisles of the town church.

Brooks’s comedy further denigrates the mythic quality of hypermasculinity endemic to the Western. Lamarr’s bizarre and wayward desires are exemplified by his seeming objectum-sexuality, as in his clear erotic interest in a small metallic sculpture and, later, a forest-green rubber ducky over which he panics when he thinks it's lost. Mongo (Alex Karras), a walking boulder of destruction, expresses a “crush” he has on Sheriff Bart after the latter defeats him with a Bugs Bunny style telegram-bomb. When the entire enterprise devolves into an all-out brawl on the back lots of Warner Bros., a cowboy and a gay Busby Berkeley-style dancer immediately fall in love, a literal collision of perceived normativity in sexual and masculine performance. And then there’s Gene Wilder. Whatever Brooks’s initial intentions were in casting the Waco Kid, he eventually had to go with a New York Jew as a mythic icon of the West in league with Clint Eastwood, his clenched and unshaven jaw wistfully reminiscing of quick draws and deaths. A mirror to the writing process behind the scenes, Bart and Jim is a pair of a Black man and a Jew, gleefully poking at and examining a complicated history of racial and religious solidarity.

Between the jabs at racial, sexual and class-based othering, it's easy to forget the utter downpour of anachronisms and Hollywood in-jokes. Amongst them all, Brooks has Count Basie’s band playing Bart’s entrance into Rock Ridge; the Waco Kid’s proclamation that he “must’ve killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille;” Lamarr’s passionate assertion that he is due for an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor (which, sadly, did not come to pass in reality for Korman); Bart running away from danger by doing an “impression” of Jesse Owens; and Madeleine Kahn’s unnervingly stupid and charming performance as Lili Von Shtupp in the song “I’m Tired,” which has clearly been crafted to mock Marlene Dietrich’s in Destry Rides Again (1939) in the vein of the same showstoppers Brooks himself once performed as a young Jew in the Catskills. Jack Starrett, whose whiskey-soaked blathering as Gabby Johnson is labeled as “authentic country gibberish,” is a barely disguised facsimile of early Western mainstay Gabby Hayes, his shaggy and wiry beard as big as his torso. During a languid flashback of Bart’s childhood, Brooks plays a Sioux tribe leader as an Eastern European Jewish immigrant, speaking Yiddish to the indigenous people behind him in allowing a Black family to traverse part of their land. As silly as its presentation is, Brooks seems to purposefully play with the sometimes tricky imbricated relationships of Blacks, Jews and Indigenous peoples. Like he’s done so many times himself, Brooks has Little put on the Klan clothes of his oppressor in one of many steps to ensure his own liberation. But the film is also content to merely poke fun at the genre’s reverence for legends of old; when the people of Rock Ridge initially object to banding together to save their town, Bart convinces them by reminding them that they’d “do it for Randolph Scott,” whose barrage of Western film appearances frequently saw the six foot three stallion saving innocent people from almost certain death. Even the poster’s tagline - “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break” - joyously recalls W.C. Fields’ 1941 metatheatrical comedy, repurposed here for a movie in which othered members of Hollywood fight back through the screen.

All of these references and stretches of the fabric of reality make Blazing Saddles something of a meta-text commentary on Hollywood studio filmmaking writ-large. By situating his parody within the context of the Western, Brooks implicates the entertainment industry in the systemic mistreatment of Black, Jewish, Chinese, Indigenous, Female, Queer, and, as Olson Johnson bitterly, and bitingly admits in the film, “even the Irish.” Given that the film was written at the tail end of the sixties and made in the early part of the seventies, when popular conceptions of American empire and conquest were no longer seen as de rigeur, it becomes hard not to look at Blazing Saddles as a satirical recrimination of audience’s willingness to see Westerns as apologia for imperial destruction and incursion into the land. Of course in the end, Blazing Saddles is mostly a fart-filled slapstick comedy, but none of it would work quite so well without its fortified base of clear-eyed politics and social mores.

Which isn’t to say Blazing Saddles is infallible. Even by the standards of 1974, the film isn’t exactly egalitarian. There are only two women with significant roles in the film, one of whom is a sex-crazed and talentless burlesque performer (stunningly played by Kahn, who was nominated for the Oscar), the other a bleating, racist school marm (Harriett Johnson, as played by Carol Arthur). One of the less savory jokes is the suggestion that Bart’s penis is so large it is enough to justify an oft-repeated and racist stereotype about Black men (though, apparently, the joke was intended as von Shtupp confusing Bart’s genitals for his gun). Though the film does dismantle the uber masculinity of the Western male stereotype, it does so through an instance of gay male stereotyping, portraying its few queer characters as comically effeminate and physically weak.

Still, the film is, on the whole, remarkably progressive, and Brooks has Bart and the Waco Kid fortify the perspective that racism is a tool wielded by idiots with set design. Really. In an attempt to fool Taggart and Lamarr’s roving, traveling circus of Nazis, bandits, fascists, KKK members and more, the two band together the railroad workers with the Rock Ridge residents to build an exact replica of the town. The ensuing brawl results in the destruction of the fake Rock Ridge, and Blazing Saddles explodes into a Hieronymous Bosch level of Earthly chaos. A set within a set is revealed within the playground of Warner Bros., at which Dom DeLuise directs a tap-dancing musical in tails with a legion of gay dancers, as the burgeoning brawl bursts through the cheap cardboard walls. The undying plasticity of Hollywood’s creations extend into a commissary-set food fight where whipped cream pies are tossed by Hitler-costumed background actors. The explosive climax reaches its inevitable conclusion as Bart, the Waco Kid and Hedley all head to the famous Mann’s Chinese Theater in present-day Hollywood to see… Blazing Saddles, where the braying cows from the earlier town hall scene are cordoned off beyond the concession stand in the same manner as would a Batman suit. Such labyrinthine cycles of metatheatrical solipsism are par for the course for Brooks, but rarely has his films had such a mirthful combination of genuine political critique and playful homage. As the Waco Kid leaves his popcorn behind, and the two head off to “nowhere special,” they really just ride their horses to the back of a limo car. One last joke about the true nature of our horse-riding cowboys: they’re just actors, off to the next movie set. So too, was Randolph Scott.

Subscribe now

Share Movies of Myself

It isn’t that Vidéothèque doesn’t have items for sale, as the narrow, exposed-brick walls of its twenty-year home is adorned with custom made, auteur-inspired tee-shirts, (some by perennial master designer Nathan Gelgud), esoteric film books, old copies of Film Comment, original Japanese poster prints of films by Jean-Luc Godard, beat-up VHS tapes, cassettes, vinyls and - yes - DVDs and Blu-Rays for purchase. But Vidéothèque’s main mission is rentals. For about five bucks, you can take home anything by Fellini (or just about anyone else in the 45,000+ collection of titles) for seven nights. Still, at least once a day, someone will come in and ask how much a copy of Powell & Pressburger’s 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes costs. “That’s a rental, sir, but I’ll check the used shelf."

The shop’s owner, Mark Wright, hired me in the early months of COVID, in 2020, when he noticed that I was coming in a couple times a week to rent the early work of Orson Welles and Agnès Varda, and innocently asked if I “needed a job,” without knowing I had surreptitiously just lost three. “Yes, of course.” The shop became a haven, and a library from which I inhaled cinematic knowledge, like a drug, or maté, consuming as much as I could without getting fatigued on my own exploding brain.

For anyone who has visited the store, one of only a handful such places that remain in this country, it becomes quite clear quite quickly that it is less a retail shop and more of an immersive experience. It is organized didactically, guiding a visitor from one section to the next with surprising logic. For the most part, aisles are not organized via genre or decade, but by director, and by country, or region. Enter the African shelf and be greeted by sub-sections devoted to Senegalese pioneer Ousmane Sembène. In the Classics, you might find workman-like directors like Delmer Daves, or Budd Boetticher. Take a trip to the Netherlands and find Antonia’s Line (1995) and the Vanessa Redgrave-starring Mrs. Dalloway (1997) in a mini-section devoted to Marleen Gorris. Okay, fine, I put it together myself, but what other shop in the world has a Marleen Gorris section? Vidéothèque has sections devoted to horror mainstays Wes Craven and John Carpenter, but it also has Don Coscarelli, whose 2002 film Bubba Ho-tep with Bruce Campbell is (as far as I know) the only Elvis biopic to feature the singer teaming up with JFK (Ossie Davis) in battle against an Egyptian mummy.

Vidéothèque is where I found Quentin Dupieux’s Deerskin, when it came out in 2020, which led me down the rabbit hole in finding Jim McBride’s 1967 auto-fiction satire of cinema vérité, the enigmatic David Holzman’s Diary. That led me to watching Krzysztof Kieślowsk’s Camera Buff (Amator, 1979), which led me to write a piece for Vague Visages about how all three films, disparate as they are, all capture the distinct hypnosis of cinephilia. My first published piece, the essay can be traced as the first point in my own self-rediscovery. When people ask me why physical media is important, or why I choose to work at a place that many people would egregiously label as obsolete, I point to my own journey as self-evident rebuttal. Only at a place as carefully curated as Vidéothèque can a customer’s curiosity be stoked as specifically as this, where glancing at the Safdie Brothers section might lead you to consider the work of the late, great Lynn Shelton, whose shelf is mere inches away.

The streaming model is unsustainable. Earlier this year, Netflix announced a 35% reduction in the amount of titles it offers (yet still raises costs every year), and while the convenience of endless scrolling across innumerable platforms makes physical stores like Vidéothèque feel unnecessary, there is still the larger question of library capability. With more than 45,000 titles, Vidéothèque has become something of an accidental archive. It matters that the store carries Fred Niblo adventure films forever on the shelf, because, as of this writing, none of the director’s thirty films are streaming. What happens to our art matters, and with platforms acting cavalierly about their holdings (not to mention how they treat their artists in the present, ongoing SAG-AFTRA, WGA and IATSE supported strikes against the AMPTP), it becomes ever more important to indulge in the art of discovery.

After twenty years in South Pasadena, Vidéothèque is moving this month to Highland Park, a change in location precipitated by yet another commercial landlord with a devil-may-care attitude about community preservation. Whatever replaces the store cannot magically recreate the engagement of a shop that allows, and indeed encourages, spontaneous and expansive increases of knowledge. Vidéothèque is that rare kind of place that remembers that all forms of art are meant to be engaged with, not passively consumed; that the cinema is a place for empathic growth. Even if your engagement with film doesn’t grow beyond the shelf for Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli’s animated wonders, you’ll still have taken a trip to Japan. And at Vidéothèque, the documentarians are just around the corner. Who knows what you’ll find there?

As Vidéothèque prepares to reopen, it is raising money to help cover the costs of an unprecedented move. Please consider giving to the shop’s GoFundMe, here.

Subscribe now

One of the more potent images in Todd Haynes’ short, unauthorized biopic on the ill-fated life of Karen Carpenter, is a smudgy close-up of the American singer as a block of nearly unreadable text obscures her Barbie doll face. It is the scene where Carpenter, dramatized by all the Mattel company’s most famous icon, and voiced by Merrill Gruver, performs at the White House for President Nixon. Reading the text exactly was impossible on the bootleg version which I found on the free streaming platform DailyMotion, though it roughly says something about how Nixon’s Watergate scandal would coincide with the Carpenters peak in popularity. I could not provide you with an exact quote.

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988), a forty-three minute exploitation of the television crime documentary, has evolved to become as much about its grainy, pixelated, strangely colorized mutation in its online, illegal circulation as its original intent. Focusing on her brother Richard’s, family’s and the music industry’s control over her, the film patently refuses to be hagiographic, subverting the biopic genre with every shot. Filmed on 16mm film and using Barbie dolls as stand-ins for human beings, Haynes zeroes in on Carpenter’s famed struggle with anorexia nervosa by using the iconographic toy as a conduit for a larger conversation about the imposition of impossible beauty standards on women and celebrities. But the dolls also serve to highlight the plasticity of American suburbia in the years after the peak of the Civil Rights era, a period of regressive politics emphasized by Nixon and the imperialist destruction of Cambodia and Vietnam. This extremely complex imbrication of thematic elements is further compounded by the way the film has since been received and circulated, its unconventional production mirrored by decades of VHS warbling and uploading. Though the film is relatively easy to find nowadays through sites like YouTube, Vimeo & DailyMotion, the variety of quality is significant, and the treasure hunt-style requirement of a viewer allows for an even deeper relationship to the film’s challenging material; just as the truth behind Carpenter’s tragic demise remains elusive, so too does the full extent of Haynes intent. Both the roguishness of the film’s construction and the digital decay of its imagery in the years since account for an erosion of the mythology of Karen Carpenter’s death, the facade of conservative White America and the canonization of the American dream.

Last week, for Slant Magazine, I reviewed Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie. Though I deeply admire Gerwig’s fourth directorial feature (in part for its surprising streak of subversiveness), it does, I must concede, ultimately feel impossible to separate from Mattel’s hand in creation. But, seeing as how both films induce an engagement with the doll’s rubbery yet robotic movements in a mutual investigation of how women are persistently saddled with a prison-like set of standards, it has become natural to connect Haynes and Gerwig - albeit on opposite ends of a relationship to capitalist oversight.

Haynes' film begins with a sensationalist reconstruction of the moment Karen Carpenter’s dead body is found. Her mother’s wails (“Karen… oh GOD! HARRY! It’s Karen. HARRY!”) puncture the stillness of the frame, which blacks out into a gravitas-filled narration that promises to take us back to the moment and the place where this horror all began: the white-picket fences and manicured lawns of suburban California. The titular song fades in to replace the narration as Barry Ellsworth’s camera tracks alongside the neighborhoods of Downey, and we are thrust into the origins and pitfalls of the Carpenters as they amble through a fastly-exploding pop music career. 

Haynes frames the whole film like a television special, with a couple inescapable diversions: one, that all of the characters are played by Mattel dolls, and two, that much of Karen’s creative success is recontextualized as tortured products of a woman slowly dying from the inside out. As the film goes on, the presence of the Barbie dolls becomes so normalized that it is the inclusion of the human body that feels so intrusive: the pillaging of Cambodia, Nixon’s press conferences, extreme close-ups of mouths and eyes. At one point the film segues into a quick, antiquated breakdown of what constitutes anorexia, framing it as the relentless desire for beauty and not, in fact, a need for control. Haynes thus simultaneously plays in the sandbox of the genre tropes and destroys them, implicating the viewer in the systematic destruction of the female form. Haynes and Cynthia Schneider, who co-wrote the screenplay, also indulge in a deliberately hackneyed and expository form of dialogue, as in an early scene where Karen’s mother and brother discuss his music and are surprised to hear the beauty of Karen’s voice emanating from the floor above; by utilizing the antiquatedness of both form and content, the film deconstructs the mythology and canon around several American icons at once, asking us to interrogate our value system as the site of some of our most potent victims, namely female artists and foreign bodies.

Superstar was not Haynes first film but it was certainly the one “that authorized him as a promising director of alternative cinema,” as Mary R. Dejardins argues. Shot while he was still an MFA candidate at Bard College in New York, the film quickly became something of a cult object thanks to its relative illegality. The film received several cease-and-desist letters from the Carpenter estate over the use of Karen’s music, with Mattel swiftly joining in; but the film has persisted nonetheless, “via bootleg videotapes, semi-secret screenings, and eventually DVD-Rs and downloadable mpegs.” Now that the film has entered the online era, there is the further passing on through VHS tape transference, a process that accentuates the strange amateurishness of Haynes construction. There is also, therefore, a consolidation of audience; where once the passing down of the film was done through semi-secret screenings and backroom introductions, now the same happens on free streaming sites that are too slow to take down the uploads on claims of copyright infringement. The film pops up regardless, like a massive game of virtual Whac-a-Mole. “The truth will out,” as Shylock says in Act II, Scene 2 of The Merchant of Venice. Except the truth here is entangled in a mess of audiovisual degradation, legal issues and the desperate attempts of a family to keep their child’s death mired in mystery: Todd Haynes points out that her legacy is still being “controlled” and that the reasons behind her anorexia are explained away with a shrug. And it very well may be to the film’s benefit. Instead of being legitimized in traditional circles, the film’s orphan status allows it to be interpreted and digested by a wider range of erstwhile cinephiles. It can be seen as a skewering of Hollywood mythmaking, as a rescuing of Karen Carpenter’s legacy or as massive queer subtext.

Within the world of film studies, the term “orphan” film is notoriously elusive, but if we consider Paolo Cherchi Usai’s assertion that “an orphan film is a film outside commercial preservation programs and newsreels, silent films, avant-garde works, documentaries and others,” Haynes’ film more than fits into a history of unclaimed work. Usai historicizes film distribution by pointing out that post-1908, “you could get the print from the production company or from the distributor. You could show the film, but the film was supposed to go back home to their parents.” Dan Streible defines orphan films even more broadly, asserting that “the universe of orphan films includes nearly every category of motion picture outside of commercial theatrical movies.” While the debate rages on about what is considered an orphan film and what is not, it seems abundantly clear that Superstar’s cult status is thanks, in large part, to its off-kilter do-it-yourself distribution system. The film exists in a strange nebulous zone wherein its artistic ownership is clear but the passing of it has descended into a spider-web of artistic circles and rooms for education.

There is, of course, a double-edged sword to this: it can be processed and received in any manner of interpretation, yet it cannot be officially recognized as the masterpiece it is in any institutional manner. But really its greatest power is in its refusal to canonize its subject matter. Because Haynes has cut down Karen’s life and professional success (and downfall) to a mere forty-three minutes, he avoids any trappings of more typical Hollywood biographical fare, and in so doing removes any possibility of hagiography. Where instead we might get scenes of artistic inspiration and markers of career ascendancy, Haynes focuses on her short-lived marriage to Tom Burris, a brief stint in rehab, and a handful of markers of patriarchal capitalism. Thus, Karen’s story is presented to us with all of its real-life brevity, and, in a strange bit of irony, the brevity of the film’s presence in legitimate circles. Superstar lasted about as long in the public eye as did its central star, relegated forever to its orphan status, its elusivity ironically part of its permanence.

It is in the film’s queer reading that the film has enjoyed some of its most lasting effectiveness. Thirty minutes into the film, after Karen’s reliance on Ex-Lax to perpetuate her weight obsession is outed, her brother Richard finds another box on her coffee table. The two get into an argument, with Karen resorting to blackmail to prevent her brother from revealing her relapse to their parents. “If you [tell them], I’ll tell them about you and your private life.” The insinuation is clear here; though Haynes admitted to having “no evidence” of Richard’s supposed closeted homosexuality, the open-endedness of the threat could also allude to Richard’s confirmed public Quaalude addiction. Either way, Karen Tongson argues that this scene might resonate with “others who might also feel fearful of making mistakes in such a master-planned scenario,” a type of walking on pins and needles especially present for queer audiences. But it isn’t just the dialogical suggestion of queerness, its in the film’s subsequent undergroundedness that further marks it as such. Though the film is remarkably available now, the film still exists in a clouded substratum of controversy, passed along mostly in arthouses, classrooms and word of mouth. This “peer-to-peer” information highway, says Ernest Mathijs, when considered in conjunction with the film’s politics of interpersonal control, repressed sexuality and body horror, gives it a distinctly queer edge.

It is further not hard to imagine how Superstar can be seen as a transgender text. Haynes transfers Karen’s bodily rebelliousness into the cage of an ossified and tortured Barbie doll, an object that is easily handled but stiff and immovable nonetheless. There is a veritable limit to what she can do to change the way her body looks and is perceived, and so is resigned to destroying it for want of something new. Tongson argues that the Carpenters’ “aberrant normalcy” is inherently queer, a sort of cat-eating-its-own-tail version of The Brady Bunch that digs a hole so deep into the cookie-cutter version of suburbia it eventually reaches the other side.

The queer aspect of the film exists on the margins of a film that exists itself on the margins, a layering of secrecy and shame also found in the sociopolitical climate of the peak of the Carpenters’ success. Haynes frames their timing on the music scene in ironic terms at the start, when the narrator says this “smooth-voiced girl… led a raucous nation smoothly into the seventies.” The Carpenters’ music exemplifies a relaxed Californian stereotype and is a solid metonym for Haynes and Schneider, in service of a critique of a reactionary era of politics that saw the destruction of Southeast Asia, a zombified continuation of Reagan Economics and the marginalization of the gay community. This overtly leftist framing of the Carpenters era of dominance is expressly only possible because of the film’s outside status. Haynes and Schneider accomplish this partly through the montage which depicts the Carpenters rapid ascendance, capped off by a coveted singing engagement at the White House for President Nixon. Framing it as such suggests that the Carpenters could be part of Nixon’s broad campaign to silence the subversion of capitalism and militarism rampant in the sixties and seventies, especially because the song that Karen is shown singing is “Sing,” which, even for the duo’s cheery standards, exudes a platitudinous plasticity. “Sing a song of good, not bad” is a tremendously surface-level lyric as bombs rain down on Vietnam. Haynes inputs images of destruction abroad over images of Karen and Richard singing in spotlit venues, an Eisenstein-esque editing sequence that posits their music was an instrument in the apparatus to quiet dissent, or, at least, to distract from imperialist violence.

There is further the lack of discussion that the film counterintuitively highlights, as in the notable exception of HIV/AIDS from public discourse even as the disease raged onwards. The lack of political attention being paid to the epidemic has become a lasting legacy for President Ronald Reagan, but it is also the “segregation by Mattel of Barbie from discourses of sex,” says Glyn Davis, that subtextually informs much of the film’s action (in Gerwig’s film, Simu Liu and Ryan Gosling are consistently engaging in a clueless and hilarious ping-pong of non-sexual, yet explicit banter). Yet, Davis also argues, the Barbie doll is emblematic of two strands of mainstream conservatism: simultaneous sexual repression and “compulsory heterosexuality.” We can think of Superstar as being an ironic revealing of the messy underbelly underneath the suburbs, but it is also in Mattel’s and the Carpenter’s relentless control over the subject that only undergirds the messiness that lies therein.

In addition to Haynes infamous use of the doll in an otherwise live-action film is a substantial amount of irony and Brechtian distanciation. Part of this is done through a deliberate indulgence in outmoded principles of filmmaking, and this is utilized no more effectively than in the aforementioned foray into an eyewitness-style explanation of anorexia. In the film’s current, kaleidoscopic format, throngs of women appear as nebulous masses while a clinical female voice explains the affliction. “Sufferers desperately want to be thin,” she robotically says, as Ellsworth zooms in on a faded medical textbook. Human bystanders on the street pose infantile questions directly to the camera like “do anorexics ever get hungry?” as Haynes, who also edited the film, montages several shots of a variety of foods, which, in the movie’s dilapidated digital status appear as monochrome goops and blobs. This inadvertent morphology of the image ironically helps to bolster Karen’s point-of-view and that of any anorexic, further engendering an identification with the subject. Because of this, “there is a subjective as well as a corporeal erosion,” as Rob White argues, which “makes space for these rattling fragments of other people’s opinions, taunts, and demands.” In this way, the film’s evolution from production to circulation to cultish found object creates an even deeper relationality than would otherwise have been possible. Instead of receiving the information on anorexia as a pat explanation for Karen’s sickness, we skeptically wonder if everything - including the medical establishment - is in some sort of collusion to bury Karen’s life and career.

Watching this period of pacified turmoil get turned into a garbled soup of pixels and mangled Mattel dolls makes it all the more disorienting. The doll's consistency as an icon of the American toy industry is subverted at every turn, here a metonym for a slow eating-away of the female body, there for those on foreign soil. A lot of this is only compounded by the image degradation, as is its legal status as a banned object. Despite the Carpenters and Mattel’s best efforts to silence the film out of existence, it persists like a housefly that never saw the point in leaving. And as it gets passed down and the quality worsens even more, the same only deepens its cultural status as “an illicit object,” as Lucas Hildebrand states, “a forbidden pleasure watched and shared and loved to exhaustion.” Perhaps the same can be said of Karen Carpenter herself, passed along callously between family members, brief love affairs, industry executives, conservative politicians and the audience willing to project all manner of attitude onto a woman with an exceptional voice and an unchallenging musical array. Haynes represents this barrage of attention and desire through multiple, strained montages, so she is “eaten away audiovisually,” says White, “these invading images… recur to increase the impression of trauma and fracture.” How fitting, then, that the fracture is amplified by a continuous process of copy and paste, reducing this story of abuse to its barest elements. 

Rumors of a restoration for Superstar have persisted for a long time. In 2016, an anonymous organizer launched a Kickstarter campaign to do such a thing (along with films by Superstar’s cinematographer, Barry Ellsworth, and Christine Vachon, a longtime collaborator), and further rumors subsist that a recent Orphan Film Symposium included a secret, coveted restoration as a finale. The suggestion of its existence is tantalizing for obvious reasons. At its barest level, being able to see blocks of text and images in focus with correct colorization could bring out an entire new level of reception that hasn’t existed since the film’s premiere nearly thirty-five years ago. What would it be like to see the images of food in their harrowing detail, for example, or the emaciated details on Karen’s face as the film continues on? The elusivity of the film ironically being one of its major calling cards, it is further easy to wonder what might be lost if the film was more readily available and seen more widely in a restored form. The restraining order that Richard Carpenter and the Mattel Corporation have on the film are unlikely to go away anytime soon, but imagining a world where it does is simultaneously exciting and disappointing. What if the New York Film Festival aired it as part of their annual restoration programming? Would a suped-up, institutionalized version of Superstar have a diminished impact? As it is, finding the film on back channels and in such mutated forms echoes a marginalization of its content: Karen pushed to the brink, to the outskirts of daily life, as a panoply of patriarchal systems restrict her to her prescribed functions. Perhaps the long awaited restored version would take away a key element of the film’s reception, erasing an audience of people on the margins themselves, looking for their own bit of representation in the back alleys of the internet.

That is, after all, where Karen Carpenter’s legacy seems to want to be.

Subscribe now

Works Cited

Geller, Theresa L., et al. “The Incredible Shrinking Star: Todd Haynes and the Case History of Karen Carpenter.” Reframing Todd Haynes: Feminism's Indelible Mark, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2022, pp. 256–257. 

Haynes, Todd, et al. “Karen Carpenter: Getting to the Bare Bones of Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.” Todd Haynes: Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2016, pp. 26–27. 

Hildebrand, Lucas. Inherent Vice: Access, Aesthetics, and Videotape Bootlegging, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2006 

Mathijs, Ernest, and Xavier Mendik. “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.” 100 Cult Films, British Film Institute, London, UK, 2019, p. 190.

Newman, Nick. “Help Restore Early Films from Todd Haynes, Christine Vachon, and Others.” The Film Stage, 23 June 2016, https://thefilmstage.com/help-restore-early-films-from-todd-haynes-christine-vachon-and-others/. 

Streible, Dan "Saving, Studying, and Screening: A History of the Orphan Film Symposium," in Film Festival Yearbook 5: Archival Film Festivals, ed. Alex Marlow-Mann (St. Andrews Film Studies, 2013), 163.

Tongson, Karen. “Whiteness and Promises.” Why Karen Carpenter Matters, Faber & Faber, London, UK, 2022, pp. 15–16. 

Usai, Paolo Cherchi. “What Is an Orphan Film? Definition, Rationale and Controversy.’” Orphan Film Symposium. Orphan Film Symposium, 23 Sept. 1999, Columbia, University of South Carolina. 

White, Rob. Todd Haynes. University of Illinois Press, 2013

June 16, 2023. The Ritz Carlton Hotel, Singapore.

I’ve just enjoyed a very productive and successful week of business meetings and social gatherings with valued co-workers and long-time business partners and friends. My professional career got kickstarted here, over fifteen years ago. Singapore, the city of the Merlion, holds a special place in my heart. It is here where work became synonymous with fun, and where my twelve year journey of living and traveling through Asia began.

As I enjoy the comforts of 5-Star hospitality, I can’t help but notice the exuberance of modern day privileged life: white linen lined king size beds, $85 champagne breakfast spread with a donut tower, a baked-goods bread monster, the Ritz lion logo in cocoa powder engraved into my oat-milk cappuccino froth. This places boasts the twelfth best bar in Asia, with sour plum hibiscus infused cocktails, marble floors more slippery than ice, mother of pearl inlay ceilings and carefully curated artificial scent cannons, firing on all cylinders; today’s idea of a successful manifestation of true corporate identity. Here, twenty-nine floors above everyone else, the bar looks over an evermore impressive Singapore skyline, with tropical rain clouds menacingly sweeping in.

Back to back meetings from AM to PM, social events from here until there, small talk for days and liquid libations into the nights - all this leaves me craving something else. I go for a morning run along the Marina Bay, a spectacular vision into the cities of the future, its impressive modern architecture with vertical gardens and pools in the sky, contradicted only by a few remaining stately colonial buildings.

The bay, once part of the Melacca Strait, is now a large converted sweet water reserve, with man-made air conditioned tropical gardens and immense towering metal trees. Seamlessly levitating on a grassy knoll is a gigantic statue of a human baby. There are scenes of polar ice caps melting projected onto an oversized abstract building in the shape of a lotus flower. I feel personally responsible for more of the same: we visit Universal Studios with its foreign worlds made from plastic, steel and cement, transposed onto this tiny island state. Ancient Egypt, Jurassic dinosaur lands, a New York avenue and a fairytale castle; all these artificial features now stand where once a quaint fishing village gave way to a hotspot for tradesmen, merchants and pirates.

What if I had none of this at all? Would it be possible to experience a more simple life? To step back in time and live a more basic existence?

A few years ago, a friend of mine referred me to www.docastaway.com, a travel agency, of sorts, specializing in offering just this: to exist, for a brief amount of time, and have absolutely nothing, except for what nature has to offer. One does not choose between king and queen beds, but instead between various levels of isolated exposure and comfort - or, really, the lack thereof. Yes, I thought, this is something to go straight to the top of my bucket list. To pay someone money in order to be left on a deserted island with nothing: a good juxtaposition to my privileged every day life. And so, at the dial of a button, a taxi appears to whisk me away, from this (perhaps wrongfully perceived) artificial, sterile and commercial world.

If you were stranded on a lonely island, what are the few things you would bring?

1. Backpack

2. Knife (Swiss army) and Flint

3. Sunscreen, hat and sunglasses

4. Mosquito spray, Epi pen, first aid kit, toothpaste,

   dude wipes

5. Hammock with mosquito net

6. Blow up pillow

7. Swimsuit, dive booties, goggles and snorkel

8. Journal and pen

9. Sketch pad and pencil

10. A book (Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake)

Suggested by others but decided against for a lack of space in my pack:

1. Duck tape

2. Rope

3. A flask and/or cooler for beer

4. Fishing gear

5. Tent/Mattress

Off I go, into the chaos of Kuala Lumpur’s airport, which reminds me of the other side of Southeast Asia, where things mostly are not pristine nor perfect.

I missed my connecting flight. A tip: when traveling, expect the worst. That way, if things go wrong (and they likely will), you don’t have to be disappointed. With this mantra, I arrived at the location in Indonesia at 4 PM. My smiling driver, a DoCastaway local boatman, took me through the province, past shanties and fields of green with their herding water buffalo. Soon, we set out on a speed boat, and from a tributary, slam into the crashing waves of the wide open sea. After a very bumpy two and half hours, we reached a small silver speckle of land, which appeared, hovering, on the horizon. Like a paradise out of a catalogue: crystal clear reef, white sand beach, palm trees leaning to and fro, and a thick jungle at its core. I shouldered five gallons of water and say, “Salamat Soré and Abak Abar! See you in four days!”

The sun sits low and there was a strong evening breeze. Time to find and set up camp quickly, I’m at latitude 0°45’38”S, so nightfall will hit fast. I opt for the western most point of the island to get most of the remaining daylight. Hammock up. Find firewood. Damp is the theme so I’ll save that for tomorrow. I sit in the sand and watch the countless hermit crabs do their dance. The sun melts into the horizon in a radiant amber kaleidoscope. For a brief moment, it feels like true paradise. But then: Rookie Mistake #1: my headlamp must have turned on during transit. With the batteries dead, darkness ensues, and loneliness sets in. Castaway 0 : Island 1.

The jungle comes alive. The sand moves. Eagle size bats swirl above. I doze off in the sand but that’s just the start. Something crawls over my foot. A decent size crab on its way home into the woods. Just let me be, I come here in peace. I blindly try to locate my things. Jungle Juice works and keeps mosquitos at bay. No sandflies, thanks the Island Gods. I stumble and slice open my toes. Castaway 0 : Island 2. Slow down. Compose yourself. Safety first. I remember Bear Grylls: get off the ground and avoid snakes, scorpions and the like. I curl up in my hammock but struggle to find peace in this silky cocoon (I’m a belly sleeper and prefer my pillows at just the right firm). I sway and look at the stars and tape up my first wound. First priority, don’t get hurt. Waves lap below into a nice lullaby. I get some sleep, yes, but the dark seems endlessly long.

When dawn comes with its gentle overcast sky, it is a welcome sight. Time to explore and build a bed. Bamboo driftwood galore, so let’s king-size this beach! After a couple of hours, the frame looks quite good. Thirsty and sticky, let’s go for some coconut brekky. Whack it on a rock - no. Impale it on some driftwood - no. Tear off the husk by hand - no. Stab it with a bush knife like a maniac - bingo! Castaway 1 : Island 2. I can do this (and not cut myself)!

Malicious purple-gray clouds move in. Wrap up camp and cover my pack in a plastic bag. Cold air whips up a flurry of sea foam, so I take cover under a tree. Might as well keep busy and start building a trap, so I find some bendy stalks and strip them of leaves. Soon high tide and choppy currents make way for turquoise; glistening sun and calm. The reef is incredibly shallow and wide, so I wade out to snorkel where the waves break. I take a good peek at the drop off below. There are angel fish hovering, butterfly fish soaring, parrot fish chomping on coral, trigger fish nesting, and electric blue damsels darting. Currents pull and I think; let’s not take any risks. I pick up 2 spider conchs on my way back. Bait for dinner later? Back to making traps. I make use of plastic bottles and a rubber tire found on the beach. Again the sky darkens. Storm #2 lasts a good hour, and I’m just glad it’s by day. It’s pelting down. Four days of this, and I start to doubt myself. It’s amazing how weather can change one’s outlook on life.

The occasional distant fishing boat crawling by but other than that, it’s really just me.

I have a special affinity for tropical islands and life under the sea. As a kid I was disgusted by the smell of a dive mask and couldn’t stand its confinement around my head. Twenty years on, I learned how to dive. I’ve seen worlds under water, made of my dreams. The majestic manta fly-by’s of Nusa Penida in Bali; the ship wrecks of WWII at Subic Bay in the Philippines; the moray eel ballet off the coast of Thailand; the tornado of jackfish at Sipadan Marine Preserve in Malaysia; the early morning grooming routine by thresher sharks on Monad Shaol off Malapascua Island; the 10,000s of sardines moving through the Cebu Sea like a gigantic electric carpet; the sea turtles and lava caves of Kauai, Hawaii; and a sunken city inhabited by 200 hammerhead sharks at Japan’s southern most point Yonaguni. I love diving, I love sea life. I used to complain about reefs being increasingly more empty but then eat a massive seafood dinner on the beach the same day, only to remain equally hypocritical and oblivious. Now, more informed and another twenty years on, I no longer eat any animal product. Connection to, and respect for nature has taken on more importance in my life with every year that the world drifts toward an unstoppable environmental crisis. It’s the least I can do.

Will the rubbish discarded by those who care less help me catch the animals I adore? Will I have to kill and live off the sea?

The Mentawai Sea around me shape-shifts gradually, yet instantaneously, from crystal-clear aqua and an endless teal mirror, to a frothy dark gray carpet with turquoise and emerald underbelly. The wind picks up again, hitting my camp and swiftly transporting my belongings into the jungle. Rookie mistake number two: setting up camp to see a nice sunset, not face away from prevailing winds. After a dip in the ocean to wipe off my grime, I apply more jungle juice and sunscreen, inviting in sweat and sand, all over again.

What time is it? I finish my fireplace and collect some semi dry wood. Time really does seem to stand still until dusk rushes in to wipe out any feeling of hope and control. After many attempts, I get a fire going using pages from my notebook. A warm orange glow envelopes the canopy above. I sit and relax and think of the world and the part we play in it. I read in my book about the least known of the five biological kingdoms: fungi. The mysterious world of mycelium, mushrooms and more. The wind picks up again nicely fanning my fire. Stars slowly disappear and distant lightning illuminates the dark horizon. Please not another storm. I catch a massive hermit crab under a coconut shell. Do hermit crab taste good? I don’t recall ever seeing them on a menu. I’m hungry but not desperate. If you can escape, I’ll let you be.

Soon, a drop, more lightning, and then thunder. I count the seconds between: 2, 3 kilometers away. Pack up camp again, stow everything away, and take shelter. I still have no roof. Rookie mistake number three: roof first, king size bed later. The rain
hits hard and now I feel truly desolate, and exposed. When the lightning hits, the crackling electricity seems tangible through the sand. I look at the tree I am
huddled up against, a scorched black stump, clearly hit by a flash some time in the near past. I love to watch thunderstorms from behind a window and under a roof, but right now, in the open mouth of nature, I’m scared. High tide waves are smashing into my fire and quickly drowning it, making it dark again. I wait out the storm for what seems like twenty minutes; or maybe it’s been two or three hours. What time is it? I feel insignificant and tiny, trapped on a small patch of land out in the humongous wide open sea - and yet, free. I think of all those with no place to call home and no roof over their head, living every day like this. This is a truly humbling experience. When stars emerge again, I seek comfort in my modern day suspended sleep contraption. And just before I doze off, a couple of shooting stars help put me at ease.

A faint hue of pink in the sky, the dawn’s early light, is a much anticipated sight. I wonder how my family is doing and wish I could send them a signal. I dream of banana pancakes. It’s Sunday morning, after all. Or is it? I wake up to what looks like white doves tussling over berries in the trees above. The hermit crab is gone - good for you. A peculiarly cantilevered palm tree poses for the perfect silhouette against the candy floss hued sky. I get out of my swaying hammock and take some pictures, moving around for the perfect angle. I look at this tree and realize that plants can’t move. I know this, of course, but never really realized. They can’t move down the beach to hang with their buddies, they don’t travel to foreign lands, they can’t hide from a thunderstorm. That tree will just be stuck in this one spot for ever. I watch the critters in the sand: sea spiders, half-inch ants, hermits, and what looks like a mini scorpion. Reptilian tracks with claws and tail are right by my sleeping quarters. My coconut scraps have been stolen overnight. Rookie mistake number four: don’t let the harvest sit out unprotected. Castaway 1 : Island 3.

On Father’s Day, I make a breakfast of water and a vitamin gummy. Finishing my wicker basket trap takes literally all day. With nothing else to do, a tedious task becomes meditative, and even fun. The perfect white sand beach, occasionally interrupted by some fallen palm trees which look like gigantic fingers reaching into the sea.

My lonely footsteps in the sand are just about every Swiss person’s idea of paradise. Again, lizard tracks in the sand. Is he following me or was he patrolling the strip before me and I didn’t notice? Either way, I’ll stay out of your way.

At first glance, the island’s jungle looks like fifty shades of green. But at closer inspection, just about every tree has its unique flower, or bud or fruit: large upside down pyramid-shaped rubbery green fruits, bulbous yellow plastic tomatoes, and blueberries which smell like fresh grass. The white flowers look like small peacock crowns. None of these are edible, I presume. The forest, meanwhile, is a mossy wonderland of decomposing organic matter. My book tells me the lichens clasp to every tree in symbiotic exchange of exchange. These lichens are cool: they can survive cosmic rays in outer space. They can even be resuscitated after ten years of dehydration. They are resistant to radioactive energy. They beat me, and just about everything else, at survival. No better time than to marvel at nature’s mysterious ways.

Mushrooms adorn every tree trunk. Magic, perhaps, but not the time to try. They look like they’ve taken it upon themselves to build a tiny winding staircase for the jungle gnomes. Still need to spot those. A big ass lizard rustles the leaves above, snacking on a presumably tree-climbing variety frog. I thought my hammock would be off limits but I guess reptiles climb trees. Hey, it’s your home, not mine. This place is bananas. But why no bananas? Instead lots (and lots) of coconuts. Most out of reach but a fair few I can swing a long bamboo pole at.

Don’t fall on my head. I would rather not be part of that statistic. Hard to beat the fresh cool juice of a coconut. If it’s green, it’s too young and does not have enough juice; yellow is good and sweet. But brown ones are tricky: occasionally good, or occasionally half-fermented, and not the kind of fermented fruit juice I usually like so much! This makes me wonder why there isn’t any coconut beer? A few of my friends warned me of the laxative effect too many coconuts can have. So far so good, legs crossed!

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure: I make a beach chair from discarded styrofoam (of which there is plenty). I read about a company specializing in growing mycelium (the building blocks of which all fungi and mushrooms are made) into renewable and environmentally friendly packaging and building material. Oh that will be the day when humanity stops covering our planet in plastic. Fungi will still be here, humans probably not. I pry the sea slugs out of the spider conchs. It looks at me with two tiny googely eyes. Sorry buddy, I feel bad and you don’t even really look like an animal. Could I eat you? Probably, but your slime does not appeal. Guilt sets in, but so does hunger: bait you are. With the trap finished, in it goes. I dream of a barbecued fish on a stick.

I read some more. Can fungi save our planet from destruction? Whack! A coconut lands six feet away. Phew. I was careful to set up my hammock under trees without coconuts. Castaway 2 : Island 3. Due to overwhelming demand from various friends, I’ve made my own version of Cast Away’s Wilson: coal on coconut with a leafy pony tail and all. I suppose I’ll call it Coco. I laugh at myself, and they seem to laugh back. Again, I struggle to light a fire. I brought lint from my dryer, supposedly a perfect tinder, and eventually my campfire casts its warm spell over an already idyllic scene. Normally, I would be pre-occupied grilling vegan sausages and cracking open beers; how nice it is to just sit and watch the flames eat the damp island wood, instead. My dinner tonight: electrolyte powder and coconut juice. My growling stomach and slight light-headed nausea makes me feel “I’m starving,” as people would say, and my shins are scratched up, my back is sore, and I have sand in curious places.

Another night, another day, time standing still and yet the days somehow rush by. I feel it’s time for a beach walk. I notice my traps are gone. I find one a good fifty meters down the beach, smashed by the tide, but no prey inside. Rookie mistake number four: rubber tires are buoyant. Castaway 2 : Island 4.

The beach is pristine but I can’t help but feel anguish for all the rubbish piled up like a border between land and sea. Why are we doing this to our planet?

On my next snorkel expedition I find a sizable China clam. The kind rich people like to put in their bathrooms as soap dishes. This could be my saucepan to boil down some hermit crab. But speaking of hermits, aren’t I one of them just now? So, eating them would count as cannibalism. Coconut laxative coming on strong. Rookie mistake number five. Enough said. I’m now feeling a constant slight headache. Maybe I can use my damaged trap as a basket and just scoop up some fish? I put my mask on and snorkel away. Dozens of fish just nearby yet always an arm’s reach away. None stupid enough to just swim in. I wait, I chase, I pounce, I sweep, I lunge, I grab, I stretch, I ambush and ultimately fall. If I saw myself I’m sure I would find it hilarious. Two opposable thumbs and a brain. Motor- skills. A fairly sophisticated trap as a tool. Doesn’t matter: No fish.

In a rare feat for me, I finish my book. A key question it raises but cannot answer: is nature inherently competitive or cooperative? How relevant.

I draw. I paint. I sit. I wait.
I miss my loved ones, more than ever.
I consider myself reasonably fit and outdoorsy but people on some television shows do this for over a hundred days, in arctic climates. Mad respect.
One more peaceful campfire, starry night and just in time, my time is up.

“It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.” - Arthur C. Clarke

With an air of bewilderment, my local friends pick me up where they dropped me off. Pictures with a strange white guy. We exchange stories without words. I am glad I get to return safely to dry land.

Did I run around naked on the beach? Well yeah, a bit, because when else was I going to do that? Have I learned to appreciate more, everything I take for granted? Absolutely. Next time I would bring a blow up mattress and fishing line. But then again, wouldn’t that be “cheating?” Could I have actually survived, and for longer, without water, a knife and my electrolyte power gels? Absolutely not. Did I figure out the meaning of life? Not yet but I’m a big step closer. Was it the life-enriching experience I hoped for? Yes.

Final score: Island wins.

Now back on mainland Indonesia, I eat a very tasty street food breakfast, and see I have sixty-eight unread messages on WhatsApp in addition to 345
unread emails.

I’ll save those for tomorrow.

At the airport on my way home, I couldn’t help but stop at a Dunkin’ Donuts and dig into a couple of glazed treats. This would have made good fish bait, I think to myself.

Next time.

So, Ritz Carlton or Castaway island? As they say in Asia: Same same, but different. In this case, very different. Both fulfilled me deeply and very much made me look inward, and at the same time made me evaluate my place in this world from a distance. Above all, the stark contradiction between the two made me very much appreciate the life I am privileged to live.

Steven Rambousek, June 2023

“The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.” -

Aristotle

Subscribe now

One of the greatest jokes ever put to film happens in an early segment of History of the World Part I (1981), in which the inimitable writer-director Mel Brooks emerges atop Mount Sinai, as Moses, to deliver the commandments to the Jewish people. Brooks, no stranger to the self-referential and the meta-theatrical, fills out the frame with massive, gray-scale styrofoam boulders the likes of which Cecil B. DeMille would’ve drooled over when he made The Ten Commandments (1956). Here, in fact, Brooks clads himself in Charlton Heston’s red robes and thunder-struck white beard, and, clutching three cheap stone tablets announces the coming of God’s “fifteen-” then, dropping one, mutters, “oy” under his breath, and amends his announcement to “ten, ten commandments!”

I’m hard-pressed to think of a more concise representation of who Brooks is and the kind of comedy that makes him so appealing, even at the tender age of ninety-seven (it was recently announced that Brooks will be this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award winner at the Oscars in 2024). In just a few lines, the gag is at once unapologetically Jewish, cinematically referential, and incredibly, wonderfully, stupid. In the director’s commentary for Young Frankenstein (1974), when the image of a laboratory office sign announcing after-hours brain deposit times comes up, Brooks off-handedly says, “I like cheap jokes.” But it’s more than the cheap and the silly that makes the master of satire so special; it's the combination of the ridiculous and the obvious with an assertion of his own Brooklyn-born, Borscht Belt-raised Jewish diaspora self into the world of the secular and the strange. 

Brooks was “never religious,” as he claimed in a 2013 episode of American Masters, “but always terribly Jewish,” and it is this particular alchemy that has made him the most enduring patron saint of the secular American Jewish diaspora. Brooks’s projects, from his writing on Your Show of Shows (1950) through to his unexpected reprisal in History of the World Part II (2023), on Hulu, have only highlighted his singular identity and his endless love of anachronistic Yiddishisms, film history, and the intersection of Other identities when haphazardly placed in worlds in which they had never previously existed.

Another way of putting this, in Brooks’s words, is that his comedy is “New York humor.” As he writes in his memoir, All About Me!:

“New York humor is not just Jewish humor. It has a certain rhythm. It has a certain intensity and a certain pulse. Lenny Bruce, Rodney Dangerfield, Jackie Mason, and stand-up comedians like me were not simply Jewish. They were New York - there is a big difference.”

But, regardless, it feels difficult to separate Brooks from a consideration of Jewishness - New York or otherwise - from his comedy. His first star-making turn, alongside his lifelong best friend Carl Reiner in the 2000 Year Old Man act, is nothing more than a crotchety-old Jewish man who's just a little bit bothered by an exceptionally long life.

“Part of my motive for doing the 2000 Year Old Man was to preserve the Yiddish dialect and the sounds that I grew up with. I was doing my grandparents… hearing those voices always made me feel safe. The [character] is a feisty fellow, a tough guy, and a survivor. He’s the Eastern European immigrant Jew, pronouncing himself forcefully.”

This is where Brooks always felt the most magical to me, as a young Jewish kid from a Conservative household in a secular world. Like Brooks, I grew up looking for cinematic signifiers of who I was and who I could be. Mel fell in love with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, and that first great Jewish American transplant behind the camera, Ernst Lubitsch. I grew up on many of those names, too, but also Brooks, himself, who helped me understand that generational identities and traumas could be celebrated and expressed, rather than apologized for, and hidden.

As a kid, Brooks’s comedy was an apologia for thinking fart jokes were funny, but as an adult I am more drawn to the way he indulges in both a post-modern interest in the meta-cinematic and an entirely unique, psychoanalytically puzzling doubling of himself with Hitler and Jewish trauma (and sometimes all at the same time). In The Producers, Brooks satirizes show business capitalism by depicting an especially gay musical in praise of the fuhrer with the now infamously famous “Springtime for Hitler.”

It is easy now to watch the film and laugh with a cozy familiarity, but the modern eye belies how dangerous it must have been for a first-time director to mount a film mocking the exterminator of nine million lives, six million of which were Jews, as early as 1967. Brooks would later return to Broadway musicality in a fairly toothy, even by today’s standards, send-up of the Spanish Inquisition.

In his 1983 remake of Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not to Be, (1942), Brooks dances with dangerous theatricality in a world where a theater troupe is thrust into the world of espionage and fighting the Third Reich. Brooks plays an actor playing multiple Nazis, a dizzying dissolution of lines of fascism and of reality and, though Brooks could never be accused of being an outwardly political filmmaker, what could be more dangerous than a Jew donning the very skin of his own people’s most profound tragedy?

Perhaps Brooks’s most hilarious iteration of this strange cosplay is in the 1978 NBC television special Peeping Times. In the style of a found home video tape, Brooks plays Hitler in a variety of quotidian, domestic situations with his wife Eva Braun. As Hitler, Brooks goofs off and does a series of silly dances and poses. James Cromwell, who plays NBC’s “Rare Footage” director, claims that Hitler was a “secret admirer of Charlie Chaplin.” Unable to indulge in his love of winking at the audience, Brooks also whistles the tune of his own “Springtime for Hitler.”

What’s most striking about the four minute sketch is that Brooks, a New York Jew, is playing Hitler as if he was, too, a New York Jew. He and Eva squabble over the cost of a bill, the ingredients in the food, and whether it's ok to squash a bug. For all of cinema and television history's collective satirizing of Hitler, Brooks stands alone as a Jew in the literal embodiment of the man himself. Chaplin famously, and magically, parodied Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940), but Chaplin wasn’t Jewish, and there’s something distinctly bizarre and cathartic about Brooks’s approach. “How do you get back at him?,” Brooks rhetorically asks in an interview he did for 60 Minutes, “You bring him down. You make the world laugh at Hitler.”

Of course, Brooks’s films are not just Jewish parodies. Arguably his sharpest film is Blazing Saddles (1974), a send-up of Hollywood westerns in which Cleavon Little plays a Black sheriff determined to keep his post with the help of Jim (Gene Wilder), a former gunslinger. Much of what the film’s reputation rests on today is both the film’s risqué treatment of Black-White relations and this extended scene of monumentally loud, beans-induced farts.

Co-written by Richard Pryor, the film is more or less about reinvesting in radical solidarity for the purpose of defeating racist capitalist goons, yet filtered through a prism of Western iconography, Borscht Belt Yiddish theater and Black comedy. It was also his “beginning of [a] complete disregard for reality,” delighting in anachronisms and a persistent breakage of the fourth wall in pursuit of what Conan O’Brien calls the “altar of silly.”

In the same year, Young Frankenstein pronounced itself with a meticulous blend of cinematic verisimilitude and nostalgia with the idiosyncratic modern wit of his and Wilder’s silliest concoctions; it’s a seamless creation. With their pathos and humor in perfect lockstep, the film is a stunning, behind-the-scenes mirror to the monster they create on screen. Blazing Saddles, Spaceballs (1987), History of the World: Part I and The Producers might all be funnier, but none of them have this level of craft, punctuated by the crisp precision of Gerald Hirschfield’s nostalgia-ridden cinematography. I find something new every time, but I really don’t think anything has ever made me laugh harder than Cloris Leachman’s offering of Ovaltine and then reacting like she’s been slapped when Gene Wilder denies.

 Brooks mentions that Wilder was trying to cram in more scenes in production, and he had to tell him to let it go, and that the thing was done. But, then it turned out there was some post-production still to do, and Brooks writes, “luckily for me, I wasn’t finished.” Has there ever been anyone as joyous about their own work as Brooks?

Of course to most people Spaceballs - thanks to its reference point of Star Wars - will forever be his most enduring. Like much of Brooks’s genre work, the film just becomes a canvas for the stuff that tickles him the most, mostly here ancient Yiddish and Jewish comedy filtered through the bullshit of Hollywood merchandising. Though the movie today feels more like a pastiche of Brooks’ basest ideas, it remains his most lasting in the zeitgeist.

When not behind the camera, Brooks produced a handful of especially warm, idiosyncratic dramas. Chief amongst those is David Lynch’s star-making turn as the director of The Elephant Man (1980), a leap-of-faith hiring that sparked a lifelong, unusual friendship between two categorically different filmmakers. Click here to see Lynch’s lovely little tribute to Brooks at the AFI.

Like any Dad-joke heavy comedian, Brooks’s output isn’t always great but always charming. Silent Movie (1976), with a plot strangely similar to Blazing Saddles, carries with it such a technically proficient ode to silent cinema that it almost forgets its supposed to be funny; yet, gentle and warm, relying on the physicality of Dom DeLuise and Bernadette Peters over their facility with language. For all its distinctly impressive referentiality to Alfred Hitchcock, High Anxiety (1977) lacks the comic panache of Brooks’s masterpieces, save, of course, the recurring and blindingly idiotic sight gag of having the camera zoom in too much, an homage to Hitch’s distinct formalism:

Arguably Brooks’s lowest moment behind the camera is the 1991 screed against corporate capitalism in Life Stinks in which Brooks plays a billionaire intent on winning a bet in which he lives amongst Skid Row’s unhoused, yet the ethos of it is so earnestly good-hearted it’s hard not to like it. As a Jew, Brooks saw Los Angeles’s burgeoning housing crisis as akin to the Holocaust of his own people, motivated to do whatever he could to give voice to a population left continually on the fringes of a so-called evolved society. Brooks has never been expressly political in his work, but it's worth noting he once turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom offered by President Bush in protest against the Iraq War, and all of his films - from the rebuke of racialized capitalism in Blazing Saddles, to an exposé of the cash-grab Hollywoodism in Spaceballs, to the clear-eyed connection between poverty and misogyny in Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), to a skewering of classism in The Twelve Chairs (1970) - have the feeling of someone who implicitly uses satire to advocate for a more just world.

He’s also just the master of a dumb joke. Brooks remains an activating source: both comedically and culturally formulating during his and every subsequent generation. Sometimes watching a filmmaker or actor’s work supersedes considerations of genuine quality; it can be like cuddling up with a warm blanket and a mug of hot chocolate. Or Ovaltine. In Brooks’s case, the warmth is the point. That, or make your laugh so hard you fart. It’s good to be the King.

…

My great aunt Laurette died on Saturday evening, a few months short of her 100th birthday. She lived, since the 1970s, in a co-op loft above Union Square in New York, a place she bought for $300,000 in cash (“well above our budget, but I wanted it so badly.”) She estimated the apartment is now worth $3.5 million, or at least that’s what someone recently paid for her neighbor’s spot.

This week I’ve been thinking about sound - and its ability to conjure up the other senses like a web of interlocking systems - which has me thinking about ghosts and the way memories are imbricated in the structures around us; the intangible force on the tangible world, little gusts of wind that are somehow thicker than brick and mortar. As I took the East Village Poetry walk, I passed an Italian restaurant where, eight years ago, Laurette and I had lunch a few days before I left the city for Los Angeles, for what I thought was the last time. She ordered octopus because she had never had it before and told me that any age was a good age to try something new.

Other ghosts came up too; the start of the walk’s location, the famously old and steadfast Trinity Church, was the location where I last saw my ex-girlfriend perform in a bizarre musical comedy that heavily featured Molly Cyrus’s canon. The poetry walk’s focus on beat poetry was a reminder of a collaborative theater piece I did that reimagined the construction of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) as a fever dream made inside a mental institution akin to that in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Miloš Forman, 1971). We took it from the East Village’s Classic Stage Company to an arts festival in Nottingham, England and thought of ourselves as delegates of the New York avant-garde.

So much of New York changes year to year, often because of predatory gentrification that privileges the white and the wealthy; Jim Jarmusch’s voice reminding me that the Village was once a predominantly Jewish neighborhood was a sober reminder that Laurette was, similarly, a dwindling member of her generation within my family. With her gone, I wonder if her memory will live on in the walls of whomever occupies that place next. Will they know, somehow, that its previous occupant was traveling into her 90s even though her husband was long gone, or that she held a passion for skiing and mushroom hunting? Will they know that she walked to her job for as the executive assistant to the CEO of Trojan, some forty blocks for several decades? That she loved live theater as much as me? Or that she was fond of a joke where her jaw dropped at something surprising and had to physically pick it up off the floor? Who will produce the audio walk that includes her story? Because she was both the last of her generation and essentially, the last of my familial ties to the city, it can feel like a certain tie has been severed.

Travel, ghosts and buildings. In Olga Tokarczuk’s mesmerizing patchwork novel Flights (2017), the Polish author describes this particular relationship with this devastating description of travel fatigue, as told through a cab driver:

“He said that death marks places like a dog marking its territory. Some people can sense it right away, while others simply start to feel uncomfortable after a time. Every stay in any place betrays the quiet ubiquitousness of the dead. He said: 

‘At first you always see what’s alive and vibrant. You’re delighted by nature, by the local church painted in different colors, by the smells and all that. But the longer you’re in a place, the more the charm of those things fades. You wonder who lived here before you came to this home and this room, whose things these are, who scratched the wall above the bed and what tree the sills were cut from. Whose hands built the elaborately decorated fireplace, paved the courtyard? And where are they now? In what form? Whose idea led to these paths around the pond and who had the idea of planting a willow out the window? All the houses, avenues, parks, gardens, and streets are permeated with the deaths of others. Once you start feeling this, something starts to pull you elsewhere, you start to think it’s time to move on.’”

Or, sometimes, wandering around New York, thinking of the sounds of the beat poets and those diasporic survivors I come from, I feel like Tilda Swinton in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film Memoria, searching for a sound only I can hear. “Why are you crying? These are not your memories,” asks an intimate stranger. But if they’re not mine, whose are they? Perhaps they belong to us all. Laurette would’ve thought so.

With much left to be seen, here’s my list of ten of the year’s best thus far, in alphabetical order, with links to the film’s original reviews.

1. Creed III (Michael B. Jordan): Popular cinema is in such a state these days that most franchise entries should carry a warning sign. But the Creed films continue to carry the flag for American popcorn movie-going. The fight choreography here is just electric - and rivals any other boxing film ever made. That it also boasts compelling questions about assimilation and institutional racism is just impressive. Undoubtedly something of a step-down from the first two, the third entry still solidifies Jordan as an interesting new voice behind the camera, even if his on-screen presence is here swallowed up a bit by the more forecful Jonathan Majors.

2. De Humani Corporis (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel): Originally reviewed here. A stunning and rare feat. The directing pair’s latest takes up Frederic Wiseman's ethos by plunging us, literally, into the human body. Shot in various rooms and back hallways of French hospitals, the film is a rare glimpse into an all-together foreign realm. Though the movie is shot with novel access, it recalls cinema's early days, when English photographer Eadweard Muybridge used the new apparatus to answer some of science's more persistent questions of bodies, human and otherwise, in motion.

3. The Eight Mountains (Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch): Originally reviewed here. The film charts the ups and downs of the friendship between Pietro and Bruno (played as adults by Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi) and touches on themes of class division, memory and regret, and people’s relationship to the land across its nearly two-and-a-half hours. It’s a vision of the Empyrean that sneaks up on you, proving to be more than the sum of its disparate, photogenic parts. This is a beautiful and provocative story about a profoundly rooted friendship, and one that’s obsessed with the consequences of living freely and asking us to consider that which we leave behind in the pursuit of personal enlightenment.

4. The Innocent (Louis Garrel): Originally removed here. Role-playing, theatricality, and slippery love quadrangles. It’s safe to say that Louis Garrel’s The Innocent, with its story of knotty love and escalating bouts of petty thievery, is his strongest to date, and by a considerable margin. Individual characters are bathed in their own distinctly muted neon hue, as if existing in a comedic French version of Sin City. These and other cinematic flourishes infuse the breezy romance with the Hitchcockian tension of a cat-and-mouse caper. Who is the innocent of the film’s title? In lieu of the narrative complexity of a traditional heist film, Garrel focuses on the cosmic complications of multiple characters stumbling toward self-betterment. As lies and truths unravel, with unspoken feelings coming to the fore and changing perspectives, the characters flip from victim to criminal, from friend to lover, from imprisoned to liberated and back again. The innocent, it turns out, isn’t a single character but the person inside us all, playing at the version of ourselves we’d rather be.

5. John Wick: Chapter 4 (Chad Stahleski): Like The Good Bad and The Ugly meets Amélie. Arguably the best of the entry of the franchise based on the breathtaking set pieces alone, but Stahleski’s film deserves some major credit for creating such a textured, Odyssean epic very much in dialogue with cinematic history. The film’s final climb up the Sacré-Coeur is the surprising yet inevitable conclusion to Buster Keaton’s indelible influence on modern film.

6. Knock at the Cabin (M. Night Shyamalan): Shyamalan has become something of an acquired taste in recent years, and Knock at the Cabin isn’t different from his past work in embracing some frankly silly irrationality. Yet, this is easily one of Shyamalan’s best: tight and taut and extraordinarily well acted from top to bottom. Shyamalan’s unapologetic love and optimism for humanity bursts at the seams, and whatever umbrage some might take with his screenwriting is quashed by a man whose understanding of the mechanics of tension-building is only matchced by the director’s mentor, Alfred Hitchcock. The story - a grappling of sorts with the difficulty of assimilation in a world veering head-first into oblivion - is Shyamalan’s most prescient yet.

7. The Maiden (Graham Foy): Originally reviewed here. One of the stronger feature debuts of recent memory, the film suggests a pointillist depiction of loss—of impressions and feelings, the way we remember how a leaf was illuminated by the lights of an approaching train, how a helicopter roared overhead between massive cloud formations. Here is an evergreen curiosity for how our everyday world shapes us in big and especially small ways.

8. Master Gardener (Paul Schrader): An unusual turn for the master of cynicism, in that the film displays an uncommon optimism and sympathy for some people far on the fringes of society. The cogency and precision here - in telling the story of a florist and his muse, marries the rigidity of landscape architecture to a story of redemption. Edgerton and Weaver play marvelously off eachother in what might be Schrader’s most Bressonian film yet. Cynicism be damned.

9. The Stroll (Kristen Parker Lovell, Zackary Drucker): Originally reviewed here. Some films are little acts of revolution, simply in their very existence. A searing ode to the fortitude of Black trans sex workers in New York City's Meatpacking district pre-gentrification, the HBO Documentary reifies the importance of bearing witness.

10. Tótem (Lila Avilés): Originally reviewed here. A film of unexpected beauty, using Sol (Naíma Sentiés), a precocious nine year old, as a conduit for exploring the quandaries of a family navigating matters of love, heartbreak, class, innocence, and, perhaps most prominently, mortality. What her father is dying of and how soon begins as a kind of mystery. In place of fast answers, Avilés’s camera moves to the rhythms of youthful discovery and impending grief, in the process opening a searing window into one middle-class family’s love for one another.

Share

For Isaac Julien, whose entire filmography elicits a direct engagement with the myriad of political and sociological forces that he has collided with as both a queer and Black artist - police brutality, mass disenfranchisement, the perpetual bloody perpetuation of British empire - the very act of a museum exhibit (and certainly one in an institution as embedded in a certain kind of national pride as the Tate Britain inherently is) constitutes the potential for a dialogical engagement with the very idea of ambivalence. Taking its name from a Nina Simone lyric, What Freedom Is To Me, the UK’s first retrospective of the filmmaker’s work, runs until August 20th at the Tate, and is constructed in such a way as to encourage what Julien calls a “mobile spectator.” Instead of ushering patrons in a predetermined and (typically) chronological order of consumption, Julien’s exhibit has an inherently anarchic quality to its set up, in which it is, theoretically, impossible for any two viewers to experience the breadth of Julien’s work in just the same manner. Like Sleep No More, the ever-popular New York theater production which calls upon haunted houses and theme parks in a bric-a-brac adaptation of Macbeth and Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), What Freedom Is To Me creates the potential for an inherently subjective rendez-vous with Julien’s enormous body of work.

I see a particular kinship between Philbrick’s writing and Julien in his discussion of musician Julius Eastman’s chamber music piece Gay Guerilla, about which Philbrick argues that the enigmatic avant-garde artist “refused to let his piece circulate affirmatively” in preparation for a performance at Northwestern University, instead reaching for a “flaming and dissonant call to assemble around the structural violence that remains fundamental in the present.” (132) This type of deliberate balance between aggressivity and passivity, of being both included and excluded in spaces of White, heteropatriarchal power, feels cosmically aligned with Julien’s both active interaction with and denial of museological norms. By directly denying attendees a more “logical” path through the history of his own work, Julien emphasizes the evergreen nature of the destructive powers he challenges in his films. 

For me, my active-passive experience of Julien’s filmography began with his experimental documentary Territories (1984). Shot on both Super 8 and 16mm film, Julien sought out a “style for political remembering” the Notting Hill Carnival, a space of “resistance within Caribbean communities.” Utilizing as it does a cavalcade of found footage and sound from mainstream media sources, Territories calls upon the work of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), itself a poetic assemblage of flaneur-like cinema, asking us to engage with questions of police brutality, class, war and sexuality in more experiential, haptic terms. The film felt like a logical starting point for this wildly labyrinthine exhibition, a Deluezian disruption of both narrative and museum expectations, asking us to examine both political and documentarian structures in a recreation of a new association. Rather than cohesion, Julien gives us representation, a chance to understand life in Notting Hill at this moment, in this place.

A year before Territories, the British Black community was rocked by the police’s not-so-secret cover-up of the death of twenty-one year old Colin Roach at a station in Stoke Newington. As protests broke out in 1983, Julien made his first film, Who Killed Colin Roach?, an explicitly activist piece of documentary video art which he presents at Tate with a collection of his photographic art. “I insisted that my camera be engaged in politics,” Julien says of the piece, which, in defiance of a police force that refuses the camera, acts as witness of both the Black community and the cops that refuse the gaze. The irony of that negotiation feels especially prescient now, as police forces Stateside find ways to escape bodycam culpability or, in some instances, using the instrument as a tool for shoring up power.

“For Eastman,” as Philbrick argues, “gayness was not just about who you slept with but also named a desire to ‘match,’ or be like, Afghani and Palestinian resistance fighters and study militant tactics alongside global freedom struggles.” (123) Eastman and Julien, both working in similar times of high-frequency anti-gay sentiment, see the possibility of identity as a form of revolution. This seems especially evident in another early Julien work, This is Not an AIDS Advertisement (1987), and in his most famous work, Looking for Langston (1989). The former calls upon marketing aesthetics to, perhaps counterintuitively, celebrate Black and queer love at the height of the HIV epidemic; shot on Super-8 color, the ten minute short radiates in pink and purple with a sensualized score. Langston, meanwhile, a reclamation of sexual identity through a reimagined collective history, supposes what the present might look like if reframed through a historical lens of unabashed freedom and joy. Using a multimedia approach of intercut archival photographs and piercingly pretty black and white cinematography overlaid by readings of Langston Hughes’ poetry, Looking for Langston presents Black homosexuality as a historic, dream-like act of resistance. 

The exhibit at the Tate presents a host of other Julien films - the Cannes-awarded Young Soul Rebels (1991); his exploration of the psychoanalytic theorist Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Mask (1995); the post-colonial interrogation The Passion of Remembrance (1986) - but it is these early Super 8 experiments in which Julien seems to be most preoccupied with questions of creating revolutionary art in the context of canonizing systems, and which make the opening gambit to the exhibit the most provocative.

As I left the exhibit and strolled through the Tate’s permanent collection, with these questions rolling around my head, I came upon Antony Gormley’s Three Ways: Mould, Hole and Passage (1981-1982; lead and plaster). The three sculptures, made from casts of Gormley’s own body, are specifically designed to disrupt the massive space of the gallery. A museum goer either has to walk around the structures or through them, but there is no way to avoid the massive bodies with comically large holes at the mouth, anus and penis, respectively. The sudden appearance of them, and the demand to be dealt with, reminded me of the way Julien’s films ask us to embody a history of a subjugated people; to experience their privacies, their pains, but also, importantly, their successes and joys. Gormley’s work asks us to treat the body “as a place” (Tate), in the same way that Julien and Eastman insist upon the tactility of human experience. 

Though technically part of a separate exhibit, the same charge seemed to motivate Harold Liversidge’s Auto-Destructive Art - The Activities of G. Metzger (1963). A silent black and white 16mm film, Liversidge’s portrait of the revolutionary Jewish artist Gustav Metzger echoes the Holocaust survivor’s tradition of revolt against systems of capitalism he saw as especially destructive of humanity in its proliferation of “systems of war.” As a Jewish leftist myself, the reminder of Metzger’s work in the context of anarchic artists of ambivalence such as Julien felt particularly cosmic - which is when I turned around and saw a video of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece from her performance at Carnegie Hall in 1965. The legendary performance piece, which Philbrick included in our course in the fall of 2022 on the Body Politic, could be said to be an uber piece of ambivalence as political performance. Audience members were invited to symbolically cut pieces of Ono’s clothing as she sat center stage, and the performance becomes something of a meditative confrontation with man’s uncommon capacity for casual violence. Perhaps the piece doesn’t have the ambivalence with which Philbrick writes of in his book, but Ono’s placidity suggests a kind of nonchalant acceptance of our shared, violent reality.

Ultimately, as I left the Tate and walked along the Thames on an unseasonably cold day in June, I found it difficult to question a rising cynicism. I wondered if, by being situated with accepted institutions of state-sanctioned art, the Tate is, admittedly without express purpose, legitimizing work that demands to act in revolt. But then this type of work is only useful as far as we can use it - on the streets, behind a camera, or in any other avenue of activist art. In that sense, witnessing can be an act of ambivalent rebellion.

Subscribe now

When I know I have a trip planned on my calendar, I like to watch the films that have come out of the place that I’m going to. I don’t remember how or when I started this mini-tradition, and frankly I’m not sure what I’ve learned from it. Most places are shot as approximations of other places, as in the recent Scream VI, shot in Toronto and meant to be New York but so obviously, hilariously, Canada.

Perhaps the best breakdown of this bizarre phenomenon is Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself. A cinematic tour of the thousands of locations within this enigmatic city, the film is a deconstruction of Hollywood’s iconography - but also a love letter to the art of pastiche, and to the city itself, perennially more diverse than the one-track town it is inevitably painted to be.

I was recently in England, again, for the express purpose of attending a conference in Birmingham, a city I knew solely as the home of the football team Aston Villa. Villa was once the toast of English football but has since become synonymous with mediocrity. Their respectable finish in the 2022-2023 season notwithstanding, Villa has been on a decades-long run of being competitive but something of an afterthought to bigger clubs in London, and those further up north. Like Chicago in the States, Birmingham is also known for embracing the ironically depreciative moniker of the “Second City,” since, in this case, the wider metropolitan area of 4.3 million people makes it second only to London.

A simple search on Letterboxd or Wikipedia drums up a paltry list of films that have been set in or shot in the West Midlands. In one of the stranger instances of a city being used as a city somewhere else, Steven Spielberg used the streets of Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter and of the historically industrial Digbeth to stand in as Cleveland, Ohio in Ready Player One (2018). While Spielberg uses Birmingham’s distinct melange of old English architecture and rusted corporate steel to suggest a future, in 2045, of society’s dereliction at the hands of capital greed, the current day Digbeth is really a hipstery center of Americanized coffee shops and muralized graffiti. On one of my evenings I ate a vegan burger at a restaurant that seemed plucked from Brooklyn.

Thanks to its geographical location, Birmingham has the distinct feel of a gateway city. Conventions, conferences, construction. With less fidelity to the architecture of the past more commonly felt or seen in other English and European cities, Birmingham seems to be forever building itself up for more and more commerce. Perhaps that’s what drives Locke (2013), a brisk thriller in which Tom Hardy plays the titular character on a harried road trip from Birmingham to London in a single night. Director Steven Knight keeps us locked in the car with Locke, as he deals with a barrage of phone calls from his wife Katrina (Ruth Wilson), his alcoholic coworker Donal (Andrew Scott), his son Eddie (Tom Holland) and Bethan (Olivia Colman), a lonely woman from Croydon with whom Locke had a one night stand that resulted in an unintended pregnancy. Hardy’s Locke speaks with a sing-songy calmness that belies an evening in which the massive concrete pour project he’s overseeing and a birth by his one time mistress both threaten to destroy a carefully curated suburban life, and the film exists in an opposite geographical fidelity to Ready Player One: firmly, thematically ensconced in the working class meat and potatoes of Birmingham but only in invocation. No shots in this movie of Birmingham’s steep, metallic roads; just a man and a thousand voices.

The blood in Locke is all off screen, but it is bludgeoning and uncomfortably present in The Firm (1989), the Gary Oldman and Lesley Manville-fronted football film that dramatizes everything but the sport. Alan Clarke’s bleak presentation of hooliganism’s naked violence is here presented as so sober and so distilled it often drifts back around into a strange surreality. Its rawness makes it hard to imagine the film was actually made for television, a genuine confrontation for a nation dealing with regressive Thatcherite politics and an increasing class divide. Goldman leads a firm in fight scenes almost comically chaotic; there is no sense of choreography, or of order, just a bunch of mealy-mouthed aspirational morons seeking enlightenment through empty bouts of misplaced anger. The suburbs then were the fields for retribution as scores of emotionally stunted men in business suits channel a lifetime of frustration into knife fights without any of the precision of a John Wick film, but none of that sport-induced brawling seems to exist much now. Though reports still come out from time to time of such a thing, the suburbs of Birmingham seem to have settled into the placid pleasantville it was once intended to be, while classism and economic frustration merely lurks under the surface.

In Richard Billingham’s Ray & Liz (2018) and Atom Egoyan’s Felicia’s Journey (1999), that icy placidity is revealed as thin cover for rot, decay, murder and sexual degradation. Ray & Liz has the distinct tactility of cigarette burns and stained carpets, of perpetual stasis and mutilating regret, all filmed in uncomfortably pretty 16mm film. But as I walked through the winding streets of Birmingham’s city center, which suggests San Francisco if the bay city was drained of its characteristic color and views of the sea, I felt like I was walking on the set of Egoyan’s adaptation of William Trevor’s novel; sun-baked streets of eerie nothingness. Like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), Egoyan considers what might be hiding under our dreams of plastic-wrapped middle-class utopias. Bob Hoskins, playing a man masquerading as a gentle catering company head chef even as he kidnaps and murders young women in his musty inherited estate, turns in a performance so unnerving you might believe, as he does, that his sociopathic, blood-soaked path isn’t actually all that bad.

Not every movie out of Birmingham reflects a mood of dreary existential dread, though even the comedies seem to be buried in a thick cloud of nihilism. Peter Watkins made a light satire of pop-culture consumerism in the 1967 film Privilege, a movie that bravely wonders if the sensation of Beatles-inspired rock music was simply a psy-op to gin up more nationalistic pride. The decidedly bonkers I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle (1990) tells you everything you need to know in the title, as Dirk Campbell attempts to stuff an exorcism priest (Anthony Daniels, of C3PO fame), a Clouzeau subplot and a horned-up semi-autonomous haunted bike into the same plot. Meanwhile, Christopher Morahan tried to capitalize off of Monty Python’s rock-star celebrity by putting John Cleese in the role of a desperately uptight school headmaster in the positively unfunny Clockwise (1986).

It is probably unfair to ascribe some sort of meaning to the tapestry of films that are tied to any one place. What other cities might object to a conclusion drawn from a handful of disparate, unchallenged portraits? Of the many blind spots in this cinematic history is a film that has yet to reflect the area’s dense ethnic diversity, a city which boasts a 31% Asian population (including 17% Pakistani) and 11% Black. Though what might be discerned is that Birmingham is a city, as others, still reeling from Thatcherite politics and uncompromising police brutality, economic disparity and of teenage angst. For a city as big as Birmingham, its presence on the cinematic map is relatively miniscule and somewhat unremarkable, yet bursting with righteous indignation.

None of that was all that visible as I walked from the city center out to the University of Birmingham, for three days - but I did see plenty of overgrown bushes, leafy streets and massively tangled flower beds struggling to coexist with a metric ton of steel and concrete. One morning I went to the city’s botanical garden when scores of school groups happened to be on an outing outside the city, studying, amongst other exhibits, a greenhouse where a newly renovated butterfly chamber artfully displayed the short, yet extraordinary lives of these ubiquitous winged creatures. I wondered if the best signs of life don’t actually exist on the permanence of a movie screen. Perhaps, like the butterfly, we burst into life with more verve than any film could capture.

Subscribe now

Share

Louis Malle’s career has often been saddled with non-complimentary complimentary labels like “undefinable” and “difficult to pin down,” but this has always seemed lazy to me. It seems to me what people really mean is that Malle was never content to settle into any one genre, which is at least topographically true. His career, which roughly spanned the five decades of 1954-1994, ranged from the darkly cynical nihilism of doomed lovers in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows, 1958) to the downright goofy and sardonic Crackers (1984), a loose remake of Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street (1954), both of which chronicle the lame attempts of some lovable losers to pull off a major heist; the behemoth six-hour masterpiece documentary of L’inde fantôme (Phantom India, 1969) to the mythological surrealism of a deconstructed Alice in Wonderland in Black Moon (1975). His later collaborations with André Gregory and Wallace Shawn led to the deceptively simple My Dinner with André (1981), with its false sheen of improvisation and Atlantic City (1980), a sympathetically grimy pastiche of New Jersey’s gambling hub on the pier with an impossibly young Susan Sarandon and a rejuvenated Burt Lancaster, a technicolor portrait of desperation which Malle himself considered closer to a documentary than any of his fictions. Besides My Dinner with André, however, Malle is probably most well-known for a string of examinations of the meeting point between adolescence and adulthood, a precarious intersection where morality is forever hanging in the balance. The somewhat autobiographical Au revoir les enfants (1987) focuses on a web of children at a Catholic boarding school as they unknowingly hide a handful of Jewish refugees; Zazie dans le Métro (1960), a bizarre French New Wave-adjacent romp through the Parisian streets pits a ten year-old as our P.O.V.; the loosely plotted Le souffle au coeur (Murmur of the Heart, 1971) controversially gave us the incestual story of a fifteen year-old growing up with the titular condition in 1950s France; despite its prickly reputation, due to the underage exposure of a teenage Brooke Shields, Pretty Baby (1978) cast a palliative glance on sex workers in 1917 New Orleans; and in Lacombe, Lucien (1974), Malle asked us to consider what might lead to the radicalization of an ignorant farm boy and into the relatively welcoming embrace of the Vichy government.

Malle’s career is made even more broadly impressive by a slew of documentaries he made in his home of France, his adopted home of the United States, and in his eternal fascination with the paradoxical, ever-changing and yet evergreen nature of India. At just twenty-five, he won the Palme d’Or in 1957 for his work with Jacques Cousteau in The Silent World, and then nearly thirty years later exposed the detrimental effects of Reagan’s economic plan on rural America in God’s Country (1985), perhaps the most astonishing and cogent work of his career. 

It’s in Phantom India that Malle made something of a thesis for his career, however. Always interested in simple, yet challenging metonymic images and compositions, Phantom India reaches its apex with the final shot of this miniseries, in which a group of men must use the entirety of their body weight (including the crowns of their heads) to push a cart uphill, as cars drift by as reminders of side by side industrial development. Malle was interested in what makes India a persistent image of man’s ties to the earth and to each other, but is also interested in taking down silly fetishistic and racialized preconceptions of Eastern wisdom. For Malle, Karma is not a holistic view of a society’s belief in the possibility of a better future, but a bitter system that enables the continual exploitation “of man over man.” This paradoxical notion fuels the entire portrait, but there’s also what Malle calls the “most personal” film of his career. Sometimes this manifests in literal ways - Malle’s own body shows up on screen while his intimate reflections make their way into the script - and sometimes in more abstract ways, as in the constant structure of Malle’s caramel-like French translation superimposed over an interviewee’s English or Hindu. The effect warps into a strange dissonance, as if Malle himself holds the multitude of philosophical and political worldviews that encompass a country as vast and as diverse as India. Like in the famous opening scene of Vanya on 42nd Street, bystanders stare into the lens in alternately challenging and flirtatious glances. The camera, being as it is a stand-in for Malle himself, invites an entire populace into the personal, even as it gawks or awkwardly stands by. Malle has a hard time reconciling this country whose caste system steadfastly roots it in the past with the Western notion of a sensual and mystical utopia. Maybe what we’re really meant to take away from it all is that no place is better for having been tampered with artificially. Everyone must push their way into the future, or else none of us will budge at all.

My Dinner with André, meanwhile, a film of some deception since André Gregory and Wallace Shawn’s presences as themselves belies a highly scripted tightrope of autobiographical fiction, is the kind of wily work that changes and morphs with each viewing. Like a great novel, the film’s receptivity is largely dependent on the viewer’s position at the time of viewing. It is a glorious insight into the contradictions of an artist at work, a damning testament to the capitalist degradation of the same, a portrait of upper class hypocrisy, a rumination on the challenges of matrimonial harmony, and, perhaps most of all, an ode to the avant-garde and postmodernist artists that have contributed, however indirectly, to some of our greatest works.

But, for my money, Vanya on 42nd Street has always been Malle’s crowning achievement. The definitive text on the American studio acting system that was birthed from the influence of the Russian titans Stanislavsky and Chekhov, 42nd Street is cinema’s most timeless adaptation of Uncle Vanya. Dramatizing all the play’s nooks and crannies while simultaneously melding the theatrical within the cinematic with breathtaking simplicity, the film is, at its best, a paramount example of the universality of art and literature.

In My Dinner with Louis, a paratextual little documentary where Wallace Shawn interviewed Malle over dinner in Atlantic City, the director mused on what made film, above other arts, so special in looking into our collective consciousness:

“The plot is always a pretext… always those moments when the unspeakable is hinted [at]... film medium is the only medium where you can catch those little glimpses of what’s inside you.”

Malle, who also described his “ideal spectator” as someone who leaves the theater with more questions than they had coming in, peered with relentless grace. It is a gaze of infinite empathy, and of love. In Malle’s world, we all have the possibility of humanity. It’s there, if we just bother to look.

*I was fortunate enough to publish my first peer-reviewed piece on the film and its various intersections with the films Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021) and Cold Souls (Sophie Barthes, 2009). You can read the full text of that article, here, in The Harbour Journal out of the University of Montréal, which I just presented at the Association of Adaptation Studies conference at the University of Birmingham.

Subscribe now

Share Movies of Myself

Share

Subscribe now

What is this?

Back when I was a senior at Emerson College, I decided to start a blog. At first it was called Krooked Kop, which I think was a weird inside joke I had with the brilliant writer and satirist Alida Nugent about Boston cop dramas. Then, I changed it to The Nomad, for when I got #serious about writing. That blog stuck around for a few years, a place for me to turn my more latitudinal thinking into prose, and I miss having that forum to freely publish think pieces and bad poetry (really bad).

Enter this Substack

I’ve been a contributing film critic at a few places, and I plan to continue writing for more and more places as my career moves forward. But I also have a growing list of pieces I’ve been wanting to write: round-ups of director filmographies I’ve just completed, reflections on this or that just-passed celebrity, or reasons why I think baseball is the world of sports’ most cinematic game. In short, Movies of Myself, which takes its name from the Rufus Wainwright song, will be a place for me to explore some of the various media, pieces of theater, political moments, plates of food and more ephemera that make up me, Greg Nussen.

This is a free blog, but if you feel so inclined to throw me a few dollars for my writing, I’d be forever indebted to you. One of my many goals over the next couple years is to get to a point where I can fully support myself through my writing and film programming efforts, and this is part of that plan. Regardless, I’m so thrilled to have you here, because there’s a lot to read out there, and I’m lucky to have you. Genuinely - thanks for reading. Greg

Subscribe now