1. As I enter my late thirties, I have become hyper-aware of how narrowly pop culture imagines the lives and interiority of women in my age range (and beyond of course). This was a fact I always recognized. But it is only in entering mid-life that I have come to understand just how galling this silence is. It’s strange that pop culture treats a woman’s mid-life as anathema. I have come to recognize this period in my life as the most creatively fertile and personally resplendent thus far.

When I look at the lives of my female friends in their thirties and forties I see rich, dynamic lives that are in no way reflected in the pop culture we consume and discuss. I remember my mother remarking to me when I was still a girl, that your thirties and forties as a woman are some of your best decades as life becomes a more meaningful, deeper experience. The stakes are higher, the pleasures are deeper. Yet when I survey the medium I love, frankly, I get pissed off at the lack of curiosity over this period of a woman’s life. All I can notice in modern cinema lately are the silences.

It is more than just a silence born of the strict racial, beauty, and bodily hierarchies in who is cast and whose stories get told. There is a silence of diverse experiences. Watching film and TV, especially but not limited to the Hollywood variety, you wouldn’t know that for many millennial women they are staving off or not having kids altogether and questioning a lot of patriarchal lies we’ve been sold about how romance should look.

Alongside a good friend of mine I have built upon this curiosity by looking for cinematic examples of women in midlife who aren’t married and don’t have kids. The results are grim but unsurprising.

2. One afternoon while sifting through Letterboxd, I came across a post that raised my eyebrow out of sheer annoyance. Here is the pertinent excerpt from the short, two paragraph post, “Lynne Ramsay deploys her considerable talents to extract the last few drops of blood from the psychotic woman subgenre stone. The effect of so much skill being expended on such well-worn subject matter ends up being depressing for reasons it doesn’t intend.”

I would find this opinion laughable if it wasn’t so confidently deployed. That this Letterboxd user1 believes this so fiercely demonstrates more about their lack of imagination than the usefulness of the “psychotic woman subgenre”. (Is it a subgenre or, in fact, subject matter that has been shaped in a number of genres? Is Die My Love a film about the pejoratively framed “psychotic woman” or just a woman dealing with the common and fraught experience of post-partum depression, unraveling, and maladaptive yearning?)

Quiet as it’s kept, portrayals of women’s madness remains the province of the conventionally beautiful and white, in America’s film canon. But even looking beyond the shores of the American film industry, a mere glance at the history of this medium would tell you that there are so many cultural, aesthetic, racial, and bodily dimensions of the lived experience of madness for women that have yet to be explored on-screen.

There’s so much more to madwomen than what audiences have been granted. Watching films as different as Fronza Woods’ 1979 short Killing Time, Ousmane Sembène 1966 Black Girl, and Alice Diop’s 2022 film Saint Omer, demonstrates the flexibility aesthetically and narratively that exploring notions of suicide, unruly femininity, or the psychological effects of racism upon the African psyche provides cinema.

Die My Love is Scottish filmmaker Lyne Ramsay’s first film in eight years. Millennial megastar Jennifer Lawrence, who was given Ariana Harwicz’s novel by Martin Scorsese, brought the project to Ramsay. She describes the We Need To Talk About Kevin director as a poet. I’ve never been entirely enamored by Ramsay’s work but I have often been thrilled and challenged by it. Die My Love felt trite.

3. Adapted alongside playwrights Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, Die My Love opens with Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) lazily walking through the Montana home of his uncle he has now inherited. “It’s not New York, but it’s ours,” Jackson says, bright with hope. The home is dusty, strewn with leaves and scraps of abandoned furniture. Grace is nonplussed when an unseen Jackson remarks that there’s an office upstairs, “You can write your great American novel up here.” She doesn’t seem touched by that idea at all. This tour of a home gives way to a scene of Grace and Jackson growling and pawing at each other naked in their new home. Sex turned into a visual exercise of the freedom that will soon be lost to the trials of parenthood. In the next moment, Grace is pregnant dancing with Jackson around the kitchen.

The film aims to be a raw, vibrantly moody, unsettling, off-kilter exploration of identity loss and the stifling lack of eroticism in a marriage shifting under the tides of post-partum life. Die My Love aims to exist in the register of the archetypal. But both characters and the dramatic stakes lack a damning amount of detail. Lawrence and Pattinson, then, are asked not to play archetypal representations of the thematic territory the narrative concerns itself with so much as constructs. There’s nothing to hold onto here because Ramsay never cues us into what is being lost for Grace with much specificity.

4. There’s no modern star I’ve struggled to connect with consistently despite their skill and charisma like Jennifer Lawrence. I can recognize her charm and how she carries an energy that can ignite a scene. I can even recognize that she’s become genuinely funny, like when she prods Leonardo DiCaprio in a Variety Actors on Actors video from the last award season in which they discuss their respective work in One Battle After Another and Die My Love.

“I really loved seeing you be a dad in One Battle After Another,” Lawrence says. DiCaprio, who turned 51 years old last November, has a quiet, unconvincing laugh at this moment. “I’m so sad you don’t have a teenage daughter. You’d look great with one.” I never found Lawrence’s previous star persona all that funny. As she nabbed Oscars glory with works like Silver Linings Playbook and blockbuster heft with The Hunger Games franchise, I found her less crassly hilarious and more grating in her ploys to seem chill, down-to-Earth. But after slowing down her career for a few years, getting married, and becoming a mother, Lawrence has shown authentic humor and a curiosity.

5. But, sometimes Lawrence’s charm becomes an oxygen stealing force. She has worked in a multitude of genres and registers. Yet, I can’t think of a single performance of Lawrence’s that excited me enough to desire a revisitation.

6. Alice Birch, who co-wrote the film, was integral to the Amazon Prime reimagining of Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers2, which starred Rachel Weisz in deliciously macabre and spiky dual performances. It’s a work that considers the maternal, familial, psychological, and erotic possibilities and constraints of madwomen. It isn’t just the bones of a good idea like Die My Love, it provides the idea of the flesh, sinew, heart, and tissue necessary to keep it alive in the minds of its viewers. That series continues to haunt me. Once upon a time, I wrote about Dead Ringers for Vulture and I was able to get the word “cunt” in my lede. It is a favorite amongst the work I have written these last few years.

One of the most intriguing ideas about Birch’s Dead Ringers is its consideration of the politics of pregnancy, giving birth, and motherhood. The work exposed a clear understanding that when a woman gives birth in a hospital she is contending with the structures of the medical field, modern science, and the corporate might that guides them both. What has become strange in watching depictions of motherhood and women’s madness across the past year or so is how depoliticized they all are. It is as if the failures of a family aren’t shaped by cultural forces beyond them. It’s as if this madness has no cause beyond the internal, abject tides of the woman beset by such suffering. By placing these mad mothers and madwomen in such limited contexts, the dramatic potential becomes inert.

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Dear Reader,

I had such an amazing weekend enjoying the first truly consistently warm weather in the city. Whenever I mention to people in Chicago that I came here from Miami, I am met with confusion. Why the hell would you leave Miami for Chicago?? The Miami I grew up in, is not the Miami people imagine when they think of the city. They think of endless beaches packed with glistening, taught bodies and thumping clubs and endless mojitos. My Miami was that of resolutely black enclaves, listening to my mom gossip over conch salad, getting Jamaican beef patties after school, and attending art classes with fellow weirdos also trying to put their warring emotions on the canvas. You earn the summer in Chicago. And Chicago summers are unmatched. While it is still very much spring, the weather has turned, giving the citizens of my humble city 80 degree days.

I went to the Renegade Craft Festival in Andersonville with my partner. I picked up a piece of art that now hangs above my desk, jewelry, chocolate brown lip gloss, and a pretty rad X-Files t-shirt.

At the craft festival, while interacting with neighbors and sipping a Blue Raspberry Lemonade whose taste hit me with a wave of nostalgia for my youth, I mulled over how I want to approach these weekly roundups. These weekly roundups aren’t comprehensive listings of everything I’ve read, watched, and listened to in a given week. They are instead a snapshot of what I am interacting with and what’s on my mind. This is a selective list of what I have been reading, watching, and listening to that will be posted weekly on Mondays about the prior week. Sometimes they’ll be published on Tuesdays, like this one, if I am a bit off schedule due to assignments at my day job and more pressing passion projects. But no later!

One film that isn’t listed below is one of my favorites I’ve watched recently: Is God Is. I saw it at a press screening last week and it has been haunting me ever since. I’ll have a piece published at Vulture this week about how the film handles women’s rage, the Southern Gothic genre, and two intriguing trends the film is indicative of. I highly recommend checking it out while it is still in theaters.

Tomorrow at 4pm Central/5pm Eastern I will be on Substack live discussing Is God Is and the future of women’s rage in cinema with Marion Teniade. She published a great piece on her newsletter Teniade Topics about the “rage and redemption” that powers playwright Aleshea Harris’s debut film. Teniade writes, “Is God Is plays as a Greek tragedy, steeped in Southern Gothic horror and styled as neo-blaxploitation. Both Greek tragedies and Gothic horror demand that we watch our heroes struggle against a doom that someone else laid out for them, in their quest for survival and catharsis.” I love doing Substack lives with Marion. This will be a generative and fun conversation. Even if you haven’t seen Harris’s film, which adapts her own play, the conversation will be worthwhile if you care about depictions of women, the South, black familial expectation, and propulsive violence on-screen. I also hope you enjoy these weekly logs. It’s my way of conversing with you wonderful readers more regularly.

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Set It Off (1996) (Dir. F. Gary Gray)
Seen on 35mm at Music Box Theater in Chicago

I got to see Set It Off Tuesday night at Music Box here in Chicago. It played on 35mm (so gorgeous) to a packed crowd for the Sapphopalooza mini-fest. I’ve always dug the film, including when I rewatched it a couple years ago. But upon this watch — beyond marveling at the amazing quartet of central performances, how hot Jada Pinkett-Smith is in the film, and grooving to the soundtrack — I was struck by how the film intimately explores black women’s anger at the structural forces of capitalist hellishness, police brutality, and racialized misogyny that impact their lives, accumulating detritus of loss and grief around them.

Director F. Gary Gray doesn’t bluntly tie these women’s interior lives, decisions, and circumstances to didactic surface level politics espousing the structural forces that shape the lives of poor and working class black folks. The film is more elegant in its imaginings. Beneath the action and humor is a well of emotion and consideration. This is a righteously moving and kinetic heist film that displays black women’s anger and intimate selves with the force and detail they deserve. There’s also a profound melancholy to the survival that the ending limns. But damn even with such emotional heaviness, the film itself remains exhilarating to watch.

Obsession (2026) (Dir. Curry Barker)

Obsession, the film from twenty-six year old YouTube creator turned writer-director Curry Barker, is the kind of film that should have garnered a more visceral reaction from me than it actually did. Obsession has a simple premise: Bear (Michael Johnston) is a very young man harboring an intense crush on a co-worker in his friend group named Nikki (Inde Navarrette). When he comes across a One Wish Willow, his wish for Nikki to love him more than anyone else in the world comes true. After a wordless, sunny montage of the early days of their “relationship”, Nikki’s love turns dark and all-consuming. (Although issues are evident the moment the wish comes true.)

Even with the supernatural framework that engenders his wish, the film doesn’t utilize the horror inherent to that situation. Instead, its filmmaker leans hard on the tropes of the crazy (ex) girlfriend, taking them to their most violent and absurd ends. But it’s hard to argue the film subverts any of these ideas given how narrowly it is imagined and how disinterested it is in the real Nikki. Obsession is pockmarked by a number of issues. The film’s diffused shadows and obsessive adherence to blunt symmetry gives it a limp aesthetic. There are moments worthy of a chuckle but they sit alongside a running, edgelord gag involving Bear’s dead cat. Michael Johnston’s performance is shellacked with wide eyes and awkward physicality that borders on a parody of the Nice Guy who believes the friend zone is actually real.

What the film has going for it is Inde Navarrette’s performance. It is bold, inventive, biting, and revelatory in all the ways the film itself can only dream of embodying. As the film lurches to its obvious, mean-spirited conclusion, it is evident Nikki is merely a vehicle for shocking moments of brutal violence, gross-out dark humor, and male fears of women who are just too much. But Navarrette gives a stunning performance that clearly delineates between real-Nikki’s fear and whatever entity is housed in her body’s malevolent manic pixie nightmare act. She brings such remarkable detail to a character that is ultimately merely a tool for the film’s middling scares and lack of imagination. It isn’t a bad movie overall, I was entertained. But mostly I was frustrated.

There’s a damning scene that touches on the wounds Barker lacks the curiosity and ingenuity to explore. It comes late in the film, so this is spoiler territory. Bear gets urgent texts from Sarah, another coworker who actually has a crush on him and has been worried, to meet immediately. He slips from the bed in order not to wake Nikki, when another moment in which the real Nikki breaks through occurs. While her body is sleeping, she speaks directly to him. “Bear, please kill me,” she repeatedly pleads. She mentions that “she”, as in the entity housed in Nikki’s body, is asleep. She begs to be freed from this hellish prison in which she is conscious of the horror happening but has no autonomy. She is forced to be a silent, unwilling witness to her own life’s degradation. “Is it so bad being with me?” Bear asks. “I’ve never been with you, Bear,” Nikki responds. As she continues to beg to be killed, Bear slinks deeper into the murky shadows of the room before leaving Nikki.

This is a moment of remarkable cowardice. I am not just talking about Bear’s refusal to look at the horror his actions have engendered. Whatever he feels for her is not love or care or even curiosity. He doesn’t even seem to care that who he has been with is not even the woman he said he loved. What I am actually talking about is the cowardice of the filmmaker himself.

This exchange between Nikki and Bear cements what was evident to me earlier in the film: every time these characters have had sex Nikki is essentially being raped. Even as it becomes undeniable to Bear that who he is engaging with isn’t actually Nikki — given the moments of fear that arise when her true self push through to the surface and the concerns from friends who don’t know what’s going on but feel Bear is taking advantage of her — he stays committed to the “relationship”. What makes Obsession interesting at all is in Nikki’s story. The idea of your control over your own body and your life being taken from you by a man you thought was your friend is genuinely terrifying. I couldn’t stop thinking of the fear and terror that would consume anyone’s psyche as they were present in a body they could no longer control, forced to witness repeated sexual encounters you didn’t consent to and the killing of those you love by your own hand. Instead, Barker shapes this premise into a tragedy about Bear’s self-inflicted journey. The movie is so eager to frame him as a victim, it loses out on a far richer line of inquiry and muddles its own story. The more I think about the film, the more damning its approach becomes.

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Hell’s Paradise (anime, 2026)
Season Two Finale

This show took a moment to find its footing in the first season, as it charted the journey of a group of criminals and the samurai who oversee them sent by the shogun to a mysterious island for an elixir that grants youth and immortality. Things take a sharp left turn when they’re confronted by the truth of who resides on the island. But season two was strong across the board. Gnarly, weird, fun, with some great and evocative action sequences. That’s really what I wanted from the second season and I got it.

Sentenced To Be a Hero (anime, 2026)
Season One Finale

I wasn’t quite sure about sticking with this when I watched the first three episodes. It’s an intriguing premise. A fantastical world in which criminals are sentenced to be “heroes” fighting and dying on the frontlines of a war against plague-like creatures seeking to destroy humanity with their rot. When they die they are brought back to life to fight another day. I just couldn’t connect to the lead character or the twee “goddess of swords” who becomes his sidekick after recognizing him to be truly heroic despite his gruff demeanor. But I stuck with it, watching it after work to decompress. I’m glad I did as the characters became more engaging as the cast expanded and developed. Most importantly, the season ends in a fascinating and bleak place that I am curious to see develop further.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (anime, 2026)
Season Two Finale

Frieren takes hold of a common fantasy premise: a hero’s party on a grand journey that successfully destroys the great evil overshadowing their lands. But it twists it into something profound by focusing on the elf-mage of the party, Frieren, in the decades after their win, in which she must face the tender grief that comes with loving beings who live such short lives compared to her. This is an anime suffused with nostalgia and yearning. The story occasionally dips into the past, while the main story concerns Frieren’s journey with a new, smaller party of fledgling champions she mentors. The abbreviated second season is beautiful and evocative. One of my favorite episodes is about a dwarf friend of Frieren’s dedication to building a bridge. Frieren has the remarkable ability to make the mundane gleam with wonder and the outlandish feel lived in. I love spending time with this world.

Sakamoto Days (2025 Anime series)
The last 19 episodes of the 22 episode first season

This was fun and silly and low lift. Which is why I was able to somehow watch the entire season in a week. The anime is pretty much, what if John Wick left the hitman life, had a family, gained some weight and was forced to contend with his past because he suddenly has a bounty on his head? This is best when it is properly balancing its sweetness with irreverence and brutal action sequences. Some notes and turns do not work for me. But I had a fun time. Not sure I’d revisit this season but I look forward to whenever a new season drops.

Absolute Wonder Woman (On-going comic run, 2026)
Issue 19
Written by Kelly Thompson
Art by Hayden Sherman
Colorist Jordie Bellaire

I am running around talking to everyone I know about writer Kelly Thompson’s astounding take on one of my favorite comic book characters with Absolute Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman is a character I have loved since I was a kid. I reviewed Wonder Woman 1984 for Vulture. I have written about her a bit. She’s the most visible, high profile female superhero — and the most underestimated and poorly cared for her parent company. I love mythology and how she embodied the kind of character whose goodness and character is aspirational rather than relatable. I do not say it lightly then that Absolute Wonder Woman, in just 19 issues, has become the gold standard for the character.

Absolute Wonder Woman is one of the best ongoing comics right now and bodies the main universe Wonder Woman comic so dirty, I’d be embarrassed if I was Tom King. (I recently dropped reading it, to keep it buck.) It takes place in a different universe that was shaped thanks to some shenanigans by Darkseid in which the origins of our favorite heroes and villains are dramatically different in a world that tilts toward horror and strife. You don’t need to know that shit. There’s been one crossover thus far with Absolute Batman, but I don’t think you need to be in the weeds of the rest of the Absolute line to enjoy Absolute Wonder Woman. I think this is a great on-ramp for people who know little about the character. Here, Diana is the last Amazon. Taken from her people soon after being born she’s brought to Hell and given to the great priestess Circe, bound to the Wild Isle, by Apollo. The gods seem to not want Diana to survive. But she’s more powerful and caring and bold than they can imagine. So Circe raises her, alongside Diana’s patron goddesses which include Hecate, Athena, Artemis and others. The design and writing of the Greek mythological figures is fucking killer. They feel overwhelming and powerful.

Diana is trained as a witch and a warrior. She’s incredibly powerful in both arenas. She’s kind, curious, perhaps even naive about human nature having been raised in Hell, after all. Less well known Wonder Woman powers like her ability to talk to animals, is used marvelously here. Especially the gentle rapport that develops between Diana and the reborn Pegasus. She carries a big ass sword and three lassos with very different means and histories. Magic is her mistress. Her villains of import include Veronica Cale, Giganta, and Queen Clea. The sharply reimagined take on Zatanna is more anti-heroine than villainess. Diana herself is sharp tongued and witty, as any daughter of Circe would be. She feels like she’s allowed to be more mythical and textured than Wonder Woman is allowed to be in main continuity. Issue 19 wonderfully displays the strengths of this series: its keen interest in inheritance and family, artistic experimentation, and boundless heart. I feel so lucky every time a new issue comes out because I know I will be awed and delighted by each page!

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Light housekeeping….I’ve been meaning to share here some of my recent podcast and radio appearances I’ve made over the last few months.

“The Bechdel Cast” Discussion on Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Can be found wherever you get your podcasts including here.

I typically don’t actually listen to myself on podcasts once the recordings are out. But I thought I’d pass this along since it was such a funny, in-depth conversation. I was able to flex my knowledge about Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, women in horror like the hagsploitation genre, and the classic Hollywood studio system. I also touched on why I didn’t care for a certain character in Weapons, a film I didn’t log on Letterboxd nor have spoken about elsewhere. I’m really happy Jamie and Caitlin invited me back to the show.

Earlier this spring, I also appeared recently on “Code Switch” to talk about Sinnersand “All Things Considered” with Vinson Cunningham to discuss 2016 in black culture. I’m also appearing on LA’s KCRW occasionally to discuss current movie releases in short reviews. I’ll be on this Thursday. Previously, I appeared on KCRW’s Press Play to review Sheep Detectives, The Maintenance Artist, and Mortal Kombat 2.

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Jesus Christ. Honestly, I am not sure what to rate this film exactly. Actress turned writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s second film1 The Bride! is indeed misguided, overwrought, undercooked, and scattershot in its effortful take on the Bride of Frankenstein. Noted cat hater Jessie Buckley’s scrappy and unconventional performance at once holds everything together and reminds the viewer why this is such a doomed enterprise. I came to the film quite late, after witnessing it be lambasted in the press and amongst my friends, whose taste I trust. Less than two minutes into the film I text messaged a friend “This is even worse than you told me it would be” — once I realized how the film was using Mary Shelley (also played by Buckley).

Shelley is a ghost possessing the murdered sex worker, Ida, who is brought back to the ragged land of the living of 1930s America by a punkish Frank(enstein’s monster) (Christian Bale) and a doctor played by Annette Bening. Reborn she has forgotten her full life as Ida. She struggles to maintain control over her body as Mary Shelley’s ghost, utilizing a different accent of course, sputters out a slew of words, in machine gun fire cadence. (When Frank tells her he admires her vocabulary after one such fit, I had to roll my eyes.) Frank names her Penelope, Penny for short, and tells her sweet lies of a life they never led together in order to have companionship. `

The film flutters through a colorful multitude of modes, genres, and aesthetics: a Bonnie and Clyde love story with all the contradictions that implies; glittering Busby Berkeley musical numbers often centering on Ronnie Reed (a Hollywood idol played by Jake Gyllenhaal); crime drama machinations involving a cop played by Peter Sarsgaard and a would-be detective held back by sexism played by Penélope Cruz; a treatise on female rage. For a film so clearly beholden to and obsessed with classic Hollywood — the modality that enshrined the lead characters into the cultural imagination for nearly a century — Gyllenhaal skips past its most instructive lessons.

Classic Hollywood shouldn’t be merely evoked as aesthetic. A useful lesson from this cinematic past Gyllenhaal plucks for visual inspiration: take a single theme and idea then let it galvanize the film; everything should flow from that cohering theme and narrative approach. Classic Hollywood at its best understood structure, characterization, and narrative balance in a way that modern Hollywood desperately needs to learn from. (Did the new Hollywood of the 1970s that modern “auteurs” so revere break people’s brains? Not everything needs to be larded up with subversion and reinvention, especially when there isn’t a strong enough thematic and narrative vision that brings cohesion.)

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After a while, I wasn’t pissed at the movie, but utterly baffled by it. One aspect of the film that left me especially disheartened is the film’s “““feminist””” bonafides. Feminism as a political tool and movement is in a pretty shit place right now in this country. It is amazing to me what gets branded “feminist”, by the right and left and all political actors in this country. It’s so bad that I don’t mention that as part of my political profile because what I mean by feminism and what it has been increasingly marketed as are diametrically opposed. Three aspects of the film provide clarity on Gyllenhaal’s inert vision of feminism:

-The use of Mary Shelley. Gyllenhaal contorts Shelley’s legacy into that of a Forgotten Artistic Woman, whose work was never finished and she was never given her due. All her complications boil down to a single obstacle: being a woman in a man’s world. Does Gyllenhaal know much about Shelley and how she figures into the literary canon? Or did she read jacket copy of a biography and call it a day? Or even worse, did she knowingly flatten the writer to fit into the faux-feminist mold du jour in how past women artists are conceived?

-The montage involving young women bearing painted faces and tongues with the spilled-black-ink-look the rampaging Bride is making famous across the country is quite instructive. These women howl “Brain attack!” and carry guns and cause chaos….why? What is their end goal? What kind of change are they yearning for in a concrete sense? What does this rupture represent? It comes across as another example of faux-revolutionary aesthetics used for markedly pedestrian ends.

-Ida/Penelope/the Bride screaming “Me too! Me too!!” in a larger monologue about women’s rage is so alarming in its turgid provocations and empty spectacle I was taken aback. Is this the best American filmmaking can do in exploring and utilizing the theme of women’s anger toward the misogyny that defines their circumstances??

It is in such scenes that The Bride! reveals itself to be a white feminist nightmare. In which the worst things the white, liberal feminist imaginary can conjure up — navigating lascivious, cruel men; femicide; the man who purports to love you is in fact manipulating you to such a degree it calls into question your entire love affair — are handled without the interiority, friction, and introspection necessary for them to connect. Women’s anger is the solution to such problems in The Bride! and other films of this White Feminist Nightmare canon2. Such anger is righteous but easily thwarted, self-serving, politically indistinct, and emotionally superficial. It would be easy to mark this as a holdover of the worst kind of 2010s “millennial feminism3”. But the truth is the problem is not bound to a single generation and it happens to be more pernicious than it may first appear — bringing up questions of whether the wealthy class of white women artists have the range and understanding to engage with these ideas. They don’t.

Visually (and sometimes narratively) there are intriguing ideas and delights that Gyllenhaal struggles to make use of. Buckley and Bale give energetic performances. Sometimes the bawdy, bright pastiche Gyllenhaal evokes produces a strong image. There is something potentially delicious to the idea of taking two of cinema’s most evocative images — that of Frankenstein’s monster and his Bride — and letting them run loose through the history of film. (There’s a surreal moment during a pivotal scene at a drive-in movie that literalizes and plays with this idea.) But The Bride! proves that even spectacle can be a dead end in cinema.

Note: This started as a Letterboxd review I quickly wrote on my phone. But a cherished friend suggested this was worth putting on my ol’ Substack. So, I continued to puzzle over why The Bride! has baffled and perturbed me so damn much. I’ve lightly polished and spruced up the review. But this subject matter is one I will return to because I think The Bride! speaks to a growing trend in the kind of Hollywood films made for (and even sometimes by) women.

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Paul Newman was one of the first stars I remember falling in love with as a teenager to the point of obsessive scholarship. With zeal, I watched his work, read about him, and collected books about him. The one I treasure most is a copy of the hardcover first edition of Lawrence J. Quirk’s 1971 filmography on the actor. Amongst its yellowed-edged pages is vivid black and white photography, an intriguing introduction, notes on Newman’s theater work on Broadway, and writing about each of his films and the critical response they received at the time of their release. It’s a fascinating critical time capsule and a beautiful book even with its battered, disintegrating cover. I bought it in October 2016 during a visit to Dauphine Street Books in New Orleans’ French Quarter.

The store has since moved from its cramped spot on Dauphine, with its precariously balanced tall piles of books forming a maze of knowledge and treasures I have returned to over the last twenty years. Its wiry, gray haired owner has such a keen eye for curation in the used bookstore. Bookstores can be living, breathing things. At least Dauphine Street Bookstore felt that way to me. I think about the store lovingly whenever I look at Quirk’s book, prominently displayed in my living room. I’ve loved Newman as a star, complex human being, director, actor, and for Newman’s Own. (When it clicked as a kid Newman’s Own was his creation my mind was blown. Who knew a man that hot and fascinating could make such good salad dressing?)

Suffice to say, seeing Cool Hand Luke on a sunny day in Chicago at Music Box, earlier in April, with someone I love, was a treasure. I’ve seen the film a couple times before but not in over a decade and never on the big screen. The packed audience was so plugged into this bold, moving, surprisingly fucking funny, and emotionally profound movie about a dynamic man who is both petty criminal and decorated war veteran, Lucas Jackson. He’s forced into a Florida prison-chain gang camp after being caught cutting the heads off parking meters.

Quick note, while the film is meant to be set in Florida. Jacksonville and other spots were merely used for briefly depicted background shots. Newman didn’t set foot in my home state. They filmed mostly in California. This Jacksonville publication’s article illuminates answers about the production on that front. But the film is so heavily sweaty and sweltering that it plays the South well.

Cool Hand Luke has an expansive, complex rendering of masculinity and its attendant complications. It challenges viewers to believe that even care can be found in the most grueling of places. It argues for the life-affirming power that can develop within friendships between men of different stations and temperaments. The prison warden and the guards use their power to humiliate and degrade their overworked prisoners. Even when some recognize the horror of what they do, they hide under the cover of noting it’s just their job. What choice do they have? Disregarding humanity is baked into the project of incarceration. The film is smart in how it balances between depicting this cruelty and the loving, soul-strengthening bonds that develop between these imprisoned men. I was especially struck with this rewatch by the friendship that develops between Luke and Clarence “Dragline” Slidell (George Kennedy). What starts with animosity on Dragline’s end blooms into respect and love for Luke. Consider that Dragline is framed as the stern head-motherfucker-in-charge amongst the prisoners while Luke is pure chillness, self-expression, and anti-establishment, reflecting the themes of the film itself.

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What Luke deals with for being this way by the prison system is physical, emotional, and psychological torture from those in charge. All the men experience this, but Luke’s utter refusal to compromise himself makes him a particular target for the warden, not so affectionately referred to as The Captain (Strother Martin). He’s a soft voiced but heavy handed asshole who sees himself as a good man even as he sanctions the pointed violence of others including the “Walking Boss” Godfrey (Morgan Woodward) . Director Stuart Rosenberg and cinematographer Conrad Hall make ample use of close-ups of the mirrored sunglasses the ever-silent and hard-edged “Walking Boss” wears. His sunglasses reflect the roiling heat of the region, the heaving bodies of the men, the outstretched road that represents the possibility of freedom and the grueling work the men do in its ditches.

I haven’t read the 1965 book the film is based on. But it was written by Donn Pearce, who is also the credited co-writer on its cinematic adaptation. The book is based on Pearce’s own experiences incarcerated in a prison chain gang in Florida. The balanced authenticity and empathy is born from this experience. His story shows the men being sweet and gentle and curious with each other in ways that makes me wish American cinema today provided more soulful masculinity and considerate friendships amongst the men it depicts.

That the film did this, while an anti-establishment fire courses through its veins, renders it a powerful portrait of masculinity that is as complex as it is tender. Cool Hand Luke was released at a point in American history marked by upheaval, roaring protests, and turmoil over the shifting perception of the horrors of the Vietnam War. Cool Hand Luke is a vibrant character study due to layering in commentary about its own historical context and giving its entire cast moments marked by empathetic curiosity. Luke’s rebellious nature isn’t self-serving. It becomes an emblem of camaraderie and hope amongst the men. That Christian imagery of Luke lying on a table, as if splayed on a cross, after his success at eating 50 hard boiled eggs and winning the bet Dragline set-up is bolstered by the fact the film questions the hypocrisy of the God-fearing Southern folk who brutalize and incarcerate these men.

Beauty exists a hair’s breadth away from emotional devastation in Cool Hand Luke. Mundane beauty and cruelty existing alongside one another is a fact of American life. Yet, the story makes room for such humor and grace. The men grow to love each other and deeply admire Luke, especially through his escape attempts. He gains the nickname “Cool Hand Luke” from Dragline due to his utterly cool demeanor bluffing quite successfully during a card game. This is later cemented by his successful gambit to eat fifty eggs. Newman plays Luke as a man that is utterly self-aware and uncompromising. That knowing, sly grin communicates a world of emotion, longing, and understanding. It is especially potently deployed in one of my favorite scenes in the film in which Luke is visited by his ailing mother (Jo Van Fleet). Their conversation, their physicality, the sorrow brimming in their eyes that remains unspoken marks this as a scene of tremendous emotional depth. It also marks Luke as a more sensitive man than the world would know what to do with.

The Quirk coffee table-film criticism book sheds light on how Newman was viewed at this particular height in his career of the early 1970s. (I think he continued to deepen and be intriguing as an actor and artist. I love what he was doing in his old man roles later in his career too.) Quirk writes about Cool Hand Luke,

“At last came a picture that showcased Newman’s distinctive gifts so forcefully and vividly that to many it stands as his top acting achievement. Cool Hand Luke won Newman his fourth Academy Award nomination, and his admirers loudly protested when he failed to win for this. He was perfectly cast, projecting the somehow valiant rebelliousness of a chain-gang loner in a Southern prison camp.

Guided this time by Stuart Rosenberg, one of the creative young directors who were constantly shifting from television to the film mediums, Newman exhibited a freshness of approach, a raw vitality, a complete spectrum of emotions, all of them right and true, and a sure command of his technical acting-resources that were breathtaking in their impact.

[...]

Here then was Paul Newman at forty-two, within his range one of the finest screen actors of his or any era, at the peak of his powers, in perfect rapport with his role perceptively invading its every nuance and implication, and this time around he brought critics to their feet shouting superlatives in their admiration for a sterling talent well projected in a movie perfectly tailored to his measure.”

Witnessing a star-auteur in motion, in full command of voice, gaze, and what their body communicates has reached spiritual heights for me. Being held in the beam of Bette Davis’ searchlight eyes in All About Eve set my soul aflame, beginning what is now a lifelong preoccupation with how women’s anger is portrayed on screen. Watching Alain Delon in Le Samourai in college was like a lightning bolt hit me, that lit up my nerves and imagination. Witnessing Newman’s crystalline blue eyes and devil-may-care grin in The Sting when I started at my art high school in Miami was another example of such a spiritual phenomenon. I say spiritual because such an experience taps into existential concerns about being alive and yearnings about connecting with other human beings in a way that functions on multiple levels of thought and feeling. I love people. I love to think about the histories, contexts, desires, and events that define us. I’m endlessly curious about people and how differently we all live, think, and contend with the truth that we are ultimately bound by more than we’re separated by.

A great star is about persona and identity formation in public. At their best, they provide cinematic and metatextual considerations of what it means to be human and alive. Although not much lately. I feel the Hollywood stars of today are dramatically lacking on that front. And the kind of character actors I love in films from Hollywood’s beginnings to the early 2000s are being squeezed out of the industry. That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot since listening to actor Kirk Acevedo (who I loved on Fringe) being interviewed for the podcast An Actor’s Despair, in which he gets into the financial and existential crisis of being a middle class character actor in the industry today.

Hollywood isn’t making films that build sharp characterization through distinct character actors who embody their roles so fully you can imagine them being the center of their own movie. The test of a good character — supporting or leading — is if I can imagine a ripe life they have before the movie’s events and after (if they survive). By star-auteur, I’m not primarily referring to the fact that Newman was also a director. What I’m addressing is that his artistic identity formation in public, tending to his own cinematic image, the greatness of his performances, and the care he put into the work renders him an auteur of his films alongside and sometimes even superseding that of the director or writer. I took two classes in college that were integral to forming this perspective on what makes an actor a star and an auteur: Star as Auteur on Bette Davis and Star as Auteur on Cary Grant. I may recoil every time I pay my monthly student loan bill but I would not be a critic without those classes and the support of its professor.

Watching Cool Hand Luke — whose supporting cast included Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton in small, yet engaging early roles — I was reminded that Hollywood of yore had such distinctive, alluring, and human faces amongst its stars and character actors. Newman was in his early forties at the time of filming Cool Hand Luke. Yes, he’s sexy as fuck. But his face with its light wrinkles and exuberance looks human. That is a face marked by history, not a face so smooth it denies it has any sort of history at all. He’s not so algorithmically attuned and polished and optimized and veneered and sculpted like the celebrities we have today. Let’s be honest, their cosmetic work is contributing to a very telling aesthetic and artistic crisis in Hollywood.

Cool Hand Luke is a stunning reminder of the expansiveness of film as a medium and the constellation of stars that have powered it in this country’s past. Hollywood often misinterprets its own history and has yet to learn the right lessons from works like Cool Hand Luke: that a great star makes a cinematic argument for themselves not just a box office one; film is a history of the body which means that people who look unique, not just blandly beautiful are crucial to its success; film can and should reach for affecting its audience emotionally, psychologically, aesthetically, spiritually and not just as a matter of spectacle. After all, the most powerful spectacle film offers is the terrain of the human face.

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Recently, I watched director Susan Seidelman’s 1987 film Making Mr. Right and its dynamics are haunting me. I have been mulling over this sweet science fiction bent romantic comedy since I watched it. It’s an immediately intriguing premise given that it flips the gender dynamics of the Pygmalion myth/Born Sexy Yesterday trope. (A trope I don’t care for, mind you.) Ann Magnuson is distinctly engaging as Frankie Stone, a sharply dressed, kinda weird, and notably kind professional hired to do the PR for an amazing android invented by Dr. Jeff Peters, a socially awkward and gruff but clearly lonely-as-fuck scientist. John Malkovich is on double duty playing the doctor and his bright blonde, dopey, sweet, childlike creation, Ulysses. His creator may have made him for space travel, but Ulysses is more curious about the human beings around him. What starts as Frankie handling PR and helping Ulysses understand social relationships gets complicated by her on/off romance with a sleazy local politician and her growing care for the android.

I appreciated this being filmed on location in Miami. I find Miami so visually vibrant and alive. The swath of Miami Seidelman focuses on lends the film a retro-futurist sheen. Seidelman directs the film with wit and warmth. The film demonstrates the expansiveness of the romantic comedy genre. Yes, romantic comedies can be fluffy and comforting. But thinking that’s all they should be, as modern Hollywood does, is a limiting viewpoint given the genre’s history. I appreciated the questions the film is prodding: How do our professions shape our romantic outcomes? What are the emotional and social fault lines within the ways men and women relate to each other romantically? What does it mean to be human and love another?

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This past weekend was a glorious one for me. I had the pleasure of spending time with people I love. This included a few friends I hadn’t seen since I was in New York in April last year who were in town for a live podcast episode. I was lucky to get to see them both Saturday and Sunday evening. Cropping up through our conversations — whether smoking a joint after a good meal in Andersonville, Chicago or having to raise my voice above the fray of the surprisingly robust attendance on Sunday evening at a tiki bar — I noticed I brought up, in different ways, the value in reexamining old obsessions I haven’t deeply interacted with in years, including some I haven’t interacted with since I was a teenager. But when it comes to film I’ve been pushing myself to be more exploratory, choosing new considerations — like my recent love of Czech New Wave and the work of Hong Kong director Johnnie To — over well-traveled paths. But sometimes it’s vital to see an old obsession with new eyes.

This was my thought today when I fired up Criterion Channel. The package centered on Pre-Code Hollywood director Mervyn LeRoy caught my eye and I decided upon Heat Lightning. I have loved classic Hollywood — treating it as vital history, scholarship, and delicious entertainment — since I was a teenager. I went to an art high school in Miami and thanks to the film classes I took I was quickly introduced to films like The Third Man, To Have and Have Not, as well as the work of actors Bette Davis and Paul Newman. One thing that fascinates me about film history is how much remains out of focus. Every restoration of classics that have fallen out of the purview of cinephiles is a reminder of such. Sometimes a film that is new to me opens a deeper understanding of a time period in filmmaking I love. Such is the case with Heat Lightning, a Pre-Code film I hadn’t heard of that I found completely enrapturing.

Olga, stunningly played by Broadway actor and supporting screen player Aline MacMahon, is the kind of woman American cinema typically doesn’t know what to do with. All rough edges and indomitable will, with seemingly no interest in abiding by the aesthetic or social scripts women were punished for not adhering to at the time.

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Thank you , , , , , and everyone for tuning into my live video with that happened on March 13th pegged to the release of our joint Vulture essay about Sinners and the Oscars, which dropped before the ceremony. Stay tuned for more live discussions in the future. And just a reminder the archive of my Substack live videos…

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Over a lush dinner and delectable dirty martini at a steakhouse in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, I spoke with a good friend and fellow writer about Timothée Chalamet’s recent flaunting of his own artistic and intellectual deficiencies. In a conversation with Matthew McConaughey1, Timothée continued his swaggering plea for Best Actor Oscar glory. Between bits of self-satisfied laughter, the 30-year old actor said in the quote going viral, “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like, ‘hey, keep this thing alive even though it’s like no one cares about this anymore.’ All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership. Damn, I took shots for no reason.”

Timothée’s comments are dismissive and condescending. They’re also far from his previous remarks earlier during the Marty Supreme press tour, “I grew up backstage at the New York City Ballet. My grandmother danced in the New York City Ballet, my mother danced in the New York City Ballet, my sister danced in the New York City Ballet. I grew up dreaming big at the backstage at the Koch Theater [at Lincoln Center] in New York…I’m like a Venn Diagram of the best cultural influences of the 21st century and 20th century.” Moving from ballet, and dance more broadly, into acting has created indelible screen performers who carry a keen understanding that the body is a form of storytelling within itself. It’s also understandable why the actual artists in these fields and the wider public would rankle. The arts are not getting funded in this country. The wealthy no longer participate in cultural and artistic philanthropy. Instead, they’re committed to peacocking their terrible style, yearning to be seen as culturally cool and literate.

I noted to my friend at dinner that Timothée’s comments were bold considering even a passing glance at the film industry reveals an existential and material crisis that speaks to one thing: Decline. The kind of decline that spells extinction. This isn’t just a problem within the country I call home. I think the medium itself is facing a host of issues informed by technological shifts and the financial dynamics of mounting a production. But let’s keep it focused. Hollywood, and yes, American independent cinema as well, is staring down the barrel of a loaded gun.

If you know your film history, you understand that Hollywood has been perpetually in crisis since the first half of the twentieth century. It has been threatened by crises both within and without: Hays Code limitations, the end of the mighty classic studio system business approach due to antitrust decrees in 1948, McCarthyism, the popularity of television, the popularity of video games, the popularity of television again, the popularity of streaming sites like Twitch, the mounting encroachment of AI, and the public’s growing disinterest in the kind of stars Hollywood props up most fervently. The panic about the industry and its future is baked into its very foundations. As a medium tied to evolving technology and egregiously to the whims of capital, these modern threats, while not wholly unprecedented, are dangerous in ways that are genuinely alarming.

But it’s vital to consider what Timothée says just before the viral quote, “I admire people and I’ve done it myself to go on a talk show and go, hey, we got to keep movie theaters alive. We got to keep this genre alive. And another part of me feels like if people want to see it like Barbie, like Oppenheimer they’re going to go see it and go out of their way to be loud and proud about it.” I do think Timothée is unintelligent in terms of how he engages with art but smart in how he has shored up his career and functions as an actor. But there is anxiety at the root of his grating delivery that is worth excavating. Timothée may not fully realize it but he is expressing a fear that exists in Hollywood about its own demise that is definitely not being reckoned with by him and his ilk. American filmmaking — Hollywood and independent — is poised at a crossroads.

Actors like Timothée and filmmakers like Christopher Nolan wax poetic about the importance of movie theaters. Yes, they’re vital to the industry and the medium’s strength of creating an intimate communal experience that regular ass people can afford to attend. (Or at least should be able to.) I would pose a question to such film-workers, why should audiences still support American films when so few of them are worth the time it takes to watch them and these works refuse to engage with the idea(l)s various audiences genuinely care about? Timothée’s energy is better spent preparing his peers for another demonstration of labor action than publicly dunking on other art forms he has neither the skill nor interest to participate in.

Witnessing Timothée’s anxiety underneath the shots he fired, led me to think about the nature between the arts and the public. What happens to an art when it is funded by and made for the wealthy? What happens to an art form when common men and women, within major cities and beyond them, can’t engage with the art due to access and financial limitations? How should we support and understand art that doesn’t engage with people anymore and instead chokes on its own rarefied air? I don’t want movies to become so niche they no longer engage with the public. When an art form is only viable thanks to the good graces of wealthy benefactors it will eventually curdle and die: aesthetically, existentially, and finally, materially.

That note about engaging with the public is an important one. Timothée’s recent press tour is as much about Marty Supreme and award season glory as it is about arguing that the idea of the movie star is still alive. But what does that matter when the films themselves do not engage meaningfully with the concerns, pleasures, and contradictions of modern humanity? What does it matter when the movie stars we’re being offered have tweaked their faces and bodies into a startling sameness that hews toward the most fascistic markers of beauty (extreme thinness, whiteness, whilst weathering no sign of the passage of time)? It is possible for all manner of films — from gargantuan blockbusters to quiet dramas — to have texture, take genuine risks, and trust their audience instead of condescending toward them. Hollywood is in a crisis. And yes, that is a crisis motivated by studio heads who believe you can eliminate risk from moviemaking leading to ruinous decisions. But Hollywood is also in an artistic crisis of the industry’s own making.

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In thinking of Timothée’s comments I found myself picking up Otto Friedrich’s tremendous 1986 book City of Nets. The scholarly book is most transfixing in how it charts Hollywood in the 1940s through its business and political practices that influenced the art made. After the blockbuster success of 1939, Hollywood found itself in decline by the end of the next decade. Anticommunist hysteria disrupted the careers of many talented folks; while a 1948 antitrust decree ended the business practices that made the studio system so powerful and financially viable. The Hollywood film industry — and American film industry as a whole — has convulsed in various periods of strife. But this moment we’re living in feels particularly dire and instructive.

Deep in Friedrich’s book — it is page 628 of my copy — he paints a picture of Hollywood’s cyclical points of decline and the continued worries of the medium’s future with an anecdote involving David O. Selznick, who produced films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Best Picture Oscar-winning adaptation Rebecca (1940). Selznick — who died in 1965 — spent the bulk of his career not bound to any single studio, he was an independent producer.

“Hollywood’s like Egypt,” David Selznick once remarked morosely to Ben Hecht as they walked through the deserted streets at dawn. “Full of crumbling pyramids... It’ll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands.” First, though, everything must be torn down and rebuilt into something else.

The mansion that Billy Wilder found for Sunset Boulevard was demolished in 1957 to provide a site for the new Getty headquarters office building. The Spanish hacienda built on Sunset Boulevard by Alla Nazimova in the early 1920’s, with a swimming pool in the shape of the Black Sea, gave way in 1927 to the Garden of Allah Ho-tel, with bungalows occupied by Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, John O’Hara, and other serious drinkers, and that gave way in 1959 to a bank. The former livery stable that Bette Davis turned into the Hollywood Canteen is now a four-story parking garage. The Mocambo nightclub on Sunset is a parking lot, and all that remains of the nearby Trocadero are the three steps that used to lead to the front door.

On the other hand, the nostalgia business has become very profitable in Hollywood.”

This book was published before I was born so I can only imagine how these landmarks have changed numerous times since. Friedrich’s concluding statement about nostalgia is as instructive of Selznick’s dire quote. Hollywood loves to terraform its own past to make a buck. This approach is always ahistorical. In regurgitating a simulacrum of its own history, the modern industry misunderstands the glories and sins of Hollywood’s past. In many ways, the film industry as it currently stands in this country is confirming and solidifying its own obsolescence. Film will survive as a medium even in the face of modern overwhelming terrors. But I doubt Hollywood, as it currently functions, can.

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It is just past 5am1 in Park City, Utah as I write the first draft of this missive. It is only my first time at Sundance as a critic representing my job at New York Magazine’s site, Vulture. I am here to conduct on-camera interviews with the filmmakers and casts of a variety of movies premiering here2. There’s barely any snow on the ground; locals tell me how unusual that is. I’d go farther and say it is disturbing how disastrous climate change confronts me wherever I go. Even here, amongst the celebrities, critics, film lovers, and locals — far from the shores of my Chicago home — I can’t get away from such worries entirely. We, as human beings, are living in a time of such upheaval and darkness. This has led me to think quite deeply about what my writing nurtures — in myself, in my readers, in the world itself.

What is the value of storytelling in a time when people struggle to make sense of the world and their place in it? In a time when horror isn’t rapping upon our door but is stalking us in our most private and sacred spaces? In a time when people desire such a frictionless existence they are suspended in a false childhood? In a time when the medium of film in America continues to degrade and collapse? In a time when many artists are cowardly in their work and in their lives? In a time when literature is so desperately needed but so few people read? Storytelling is the creative birthright of humanity. Beyond sex, it is our most wonderful and valuable form of connection. You may not be a writer but within your mind is the story you tell yourself about your own life. You will live up to this personally held narrative, for better or for worse.

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Late Friday afternoon3 I had the sincere pleasure of interviewing writer-director-video essayist Kogonada and the cast of his new film zi, which included Haley Lu Richardson, Michelle Mao, and Jin Ha. It was my first interview assignment for the festival and it went even better than I hoped. Part of this is encouraged by the fact that I dug the film. zi was filmed with a small crew in Hong Kong. Kogonada invited friends and collaborators but there was no studio or producer they were beholden to. It was a free-flowing process in which Kogonada was shaping things as they went. There was no guarantee that the experimental footage they were putting together would become a film. But it was clearly a safe, ecstatically experimental, buoyantly creative environment and experience for everyone involved — most of whom Kogonada has previously worked with in various capacities.

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I have been thinking a lot about beauty in all its forms lately — its weight, its power, and the attendant troubles the pursuit of it brings. But beauty has no single meaning or vision. Beauty can be found in the weathered hands of a grandparent or in the colorful swoop of a magnificent bird darting through the air. Physical beauty is taught to young girls as their glorious standard to bear, and foisted upon women as an impossible expectation to uphold. The beauty women are asked to embody is purely physical and tied to youth. The ideal shifts depending on class, station, race, and historical moment. But what doesn’t shift is how heavy a burden of duty and need it is to bear.

I couldn’t have more of a different outlook on womanhood and beauty than that of Elvira (Lea Myren), the young woman at the center of the 2025 Norwegian film The Ugly Stepsister who is defined by her single-minded pursuit of capturing a beauty that is undeniable in order to win the eye and heart of Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth). Written and directed by Emilie Kristine Blichfeldt, the Cinderella fairy tale is twisted into the shape of feminine horror. Instead of centering the familiar Cinderella figure, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), Blichfeldt makes the eldest stepsister her focus, using her to explore the capricious price of obtaining and maintaining the kind of looks that can stave off other losses women are taught to endure. She doesn’t question her mother’s guidance. She’s too myopically attuned to her shallow desire to be with Prince Julia that she accepts the pain of her gruesome procedures.

It isn’t until the last act that the tropes and archetype of the fairytale lock into place. A powder-blue dress that catches the Prince’s attention. The errant shoe. The violent and mistaken approach Elvira takes to fit within the dainty heel. I found watching the film a grueling experience. But I can’t stop thinking about it. The film is successful in its efforts to demonstrate the way the patriarchy deforms the bonds that exist between women and warps how women see themselves.

The longer it goes on, the more horrors are visited upon Elvira’s flesh, molding and constricting it to fit a vision of prettiness that will allow her to marry up and wipe clean her family’s debts. This is what her mother, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), once hoped for in marrying Agnes’ father – but he turned out to be broke and married her for her money, only to die unexpectedly at the dinner table before the icy tensions between these melding families have the opportunity to thaw. His body rots in an upstairs bedroom of the estate throughout the film since Rebekka refuses to give him a proper burial out of animosity and tight finances. For the women in the film, beauty is wrapped up in financial hopes and bodily horrors.

For most of its runtime, The Ugly Stepsister uses the fairytale we know as a springboard for a grimy tale that seems allergic to visual beauty; everything and everyone seems to be in a space of rot. Blichfeldt’s film displays an awareness of the patriarchal constrictions that can narrow the possibilities of a woman’s life, especially in the long ago time and faraway place that is its setting, but the conclusions it draws and its beliefs about the way women relate to each other feels punishing in their honesty1.

The film is gnarly. While, like I said, I find it visually gray to a fault, with few compositions that prove striking, it is the kind of movie you can smell. And it’s rancid. This visceral quality works in its favor to make it memorable if only for how it contorts women’s bodies. Soon enough, Elvira fully leans into the expectations of her culture. This is the kind of movie designed to make you flinch, like when faux-eyelashes are sewn into her eyeline by a surgeon who moments prior sniffs a heap of cocaine from the back of his hand. Blood bubbles up with each looping thread.

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Hello, Beautiful Readers! I have a wonderful treat for you.

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Recent work: A piece at Vulture about Fantastic Four: First Steps centered on Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm, whose character is both the most successfully crafted and a tell for the larger problems that plague the rest of the film. Recently, the episode I recorded many moons ago for the 6 Degrees of Cats podcast has finally gone live. I discuss — you guessed it — cats on film mentioning works like The Third Man (1949), The Witches (1990), and the early entries of the Alien franchise. You can check that out here. Also, last week my interview with director Bing Liu about his new film Preparation for the Next Life went live at Vulture.

The basis for this first essay of the Movies That Fuck column is the five-minute speech I wrote to recite ahead of my screening of Juraj Herz’s Beauty and the Beast (1978) at Melbourne International Film Festival1 in early August for their Critical Condition program. Like the other international critics hosted by the festival, I chose a film to be screened under the broad topic of nostalgia. I immediately knew I wanted to screen Beauty and the Beast because I was so enraptured when I watched it for the first time within this last year. This was after reading a Letterboxd post that complimented the film highly, saying it evoked a vibe similar to the feminist fairytale revisionistic fiction of Angela Carter a lá The Bloody Chamber.

Her 1979 short story collection, which opens with a novella-length take on Bluebeard, has been a remarkable influence on me as a writer. Carter wrote essays, novels, and edited folktale collections. But her most transcendent work is in the short story form, which distills her most transfixing qualities down to their most refined essence. An interest in the macabre, sharp-edged, ravenous sides of femininity; folk story as truth tale; whimsical prose lush to the point of rot. Consider the beginning of her 1985 short story Black Venus, which is appropriate to reference given the seasons will soon be shifting. “Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart. The sun departs the sky in winding sheets of gaudy cloud; anguish enters the city, a sense of the bitterest regret, a nostalgia for things we never knew, anguish of the turn of the year, the time of impotent yearning, the inconsolable season. In America, they call it ‘the Fall’.”

Angela Carter had nothing to do with Juraj Herz’s cinematic fable. But Herz captures what I turn to Carter for and what I believe she was also able to coax to the surface of the fairytales she played with: the way beauty can complicate our understanding of the world to the point of casting a spell upon us; a sincere interest into the minds and hearts of women; revealing the horror within lust; a notable embodiment. It’s that last point that is the film’s greatest strength — an interest in the body as a storybook, a site of transformation, and a venue for bringing texture to the emotional and psychological concerns of these characters.

Movies That Fuck is a column obsessed with the pleasures of the human body as refracted through film. Each essay focuses on a singular film analyzing production, historical placement, and most importantly, its treatment of the body through acting, cinematography, and characterization. This column started as a Letterboxd list (that I continue to adjust and add to) and then became a treatise in the form of my December 2024 essay, Movies That Fuck: Notes on Cinematic Sensuality. At the end of the piece I argued,

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A certain, pernicious strain of nerd won the culture wars and we’re all the poorer for it.

There’s, most notably, the billionaire class of tech-bro fascists who pillage the Earth, degrade the worth of art, and fund right-wing causes. These fucks—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, to name the most high-profile among them—are soul-deadend men so wedded to capital and whiteness that they’ll destroy the planet just to flex their might and punish a world that, despite their power, refuses to fawn over them. You can’t buy cool.

But there’s another strain of nerd that gives me pause. Not because they’re broadly heinous, but because their myopia and entitlement makes them blinkered in their perspective.

Movie fandom — like all pop cultural fandom — has become a diseased endeavour. Whether it’s A24 acolytes or Marvel obsessives, what unites the modern movie fan isn’t taste, but approach. These are folks that treat film, television, comic books, and other pop cultural artifacts as a mirror rather than a portal. Not just in how they evaluate the world around them, but especially in how they see themselves. Moral absolutism reigns supreme. The question, Is the character a good person that reflects my politics?, thrums beneath their conversations. It isn’t about the pleasure of narrative discovery or even finding a spark of communion with a character wildly unlike yourself. It’s about feeling good for liking what you like — and defending it with barred teeth as if any shred of criticism toward it is an attack on your very person. This feels somewhat tied to the warped expectations too many people have for pop cultural criticism, where parasocial bond is sought, not intellectual or emotional considerations that offer historical context.

I have been reading superhero comics with obsessive vigor since I was about 10 years old, poring over issues of Mark Waid’s Born to Run, which established Wally West as The Flash, and later Greg Rucka’s first run on Wonder Woman, which synthesized one of the most dynamic, lovingly crafted versions of the character. I have read and enjoyed my fair share of Marvel properties and will gladly chop it up about my love of Elektra, but in terms of the Big Two, DC Comics has my heart. In my youth, I loved Justice League: Unlimited and the gothic excess of Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum. In high school, reading Ed Brubaker’s take on Catwoman cemented for me that she is the most interesting character in the Batman mythos, including Bruce Wayne himself. When I watched a live stream announcing Greg Rucka was coming back to Wonder Woman in 2016, I fucking cried. My pop cultural taste has evolved since then, but my love for certain characters like Wonder Woman continues to burnish. How could I have known that dreaming of on-screen glory for my favorite characters would wind up being such a devastating monkey paw situation?

This is a question I’ve wrestled with since seeing the James Gunn-helmed Superman in early July. In the mixed press-public screening I attended, I was taken aback by how visceral my distaste for the film felt in my body. In my short, off-the-cuff Letterboxd review and a few asides on Bluesky, I noted that I felt the film wasn’t one I should write about at length. But even my mild suggestion that we approach films made for hundreds of millions of dollars —which dominate all conversations and shape what’s possible for the film industry—with more critical rigor was met with furor and accusations of “spitting bile”. At the same time, the broader conversations framing the film as an artistic slam dunk that justifies the expansion of Gunn’s revamped DC Universe as a pro-Palestine/anti-Israel work started to trouble me. I wasn't going to write about this movie but y'all pissed me off so much, I changed my mind.

My hesitation was as much a function of protecting my peace as an understanding that the film isn’t all that rich of a text to consider. It has all the same problems as other modern superhero epics — problems I laid out in my reviews for films like 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Gunn’s Superman is also visually ugly, poorly developed, relies on audiences to fill in what it refuses to flesh out, and lacks the rewatchability factor necessary for a successful blockbuster.

The repurposing of John Williams’ iconic score from the 1978 film is a tell. Gunn is retracing certain steps that people find integral to the character; steps most potently realized in the collaboration of director Richard Donner and actor Christopher Reeve. But Gunn doesn’t rest on nostalgia, primarily because, while his desire to craft a kind Superman for 2025 is a good impulse, he can’t craft emotional depth to save his life. There’s something remarkably threadbare to what charm the film provides through the successful casting of David Corenswet1 as Clark Kent/Kal-El/Superman, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, and Edi Gathegi as Mister Terrific. It is important for me to note that I could overlook many flaws in the film if the characterization was sharp enough. No actor wholly pissed me off, but the performances didn’t engage me either2. And Gunn’s imprint is the juvenile humor (my kingdom for never having to see Nathan Fillion play a “lovable” asshole again3) and the belief that gesturing at goodness is enough for a film to embody it — both of which contribute to why his Superman ultimately didn’t work for me.

One of the ways people hit back on my criticism of the film’s ugly visuals was to say, “But it’s colorful! It looks like a comic book!” But Superman is a child’s rendition of color. It’s aiming for enchantment but comes across as slapdash, haphazard, and garish in its oversaturation4. Corenswet’s by golly gee whiz schtick comes across as ill-fitting rather than embodied. He looks like he’s in costume for a child’s party, not a living and breathing being whose world we’re becoming privy to. There is a profound lack of awe — which is the cornerstone of superhero media, especially a hero as gleaming as Superman. The wide lenses used to shoot him in tight closeups as he zips through the sky renders events claustrophobic rather than enlivening. This is to say nothing of the CGI abomination that is Krypto, his temporary dog sidekick.

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When Tom Cruise joined Brad Pitt on the London red carpet for the latter’s recent, now highly successful blockbuster F1: The Movie, nostalgia burnished brightly in the eyes of the public and the media apparatus. It was a multifaceted approach. Nostalgia for the kind of powerful, god-like celebrity whose whims shifted culture. Nostalgia for a time when celebrity cool felt aspirational and fascinating rather than calcified within the blithe horrors of hellish late-stage capitalism. Nostalgia for the 1990s, when both men vaulted to a rarefied tier of public-persona power, a time that once was and never will be again. Nostalgia for a version of the United States of America in which many could numb themselves to the soul-deadened devastation this country has always committed. Nostalgia has a political purpose. It is an anesthetic. That this America is plunged in pop cultural nostalgia at the same time it shudders due to the violent cruelty pointed at its own citizens and human beings across the globe isn’t a coincidence. It is easier to subjugate a populace by training them to sweetly obsess over the past and fear the future.

From this vantage point, Brad Pitt’s recent charm offensive as a means of image rehabilitation has both a personal and cultural purpose. On a personal level, with actions like hiring Timothée Chalamet’s stylist Taylor McNeill, Pitt is trying to appeal to younger generations and affirm that he still has a blinding level of charisma, this time with the heft of practiced vulnerability to give it a new sheen. On a cultural level, Pitt’s efforts speak to a desire to rehabilitate the very white, American masculinity he represents. (A masculinity in grave upheaval as embodying it is no longer an automatic guarantee to be handed the world and every desire.) It’s a strengthening of America’s faltering dominance in the cinematic realm. Hollywood today represents the sputtering, tech-industry-fueled dreams of a dying empire. In a time of globally rising femicide rates and misogyny’s entrenchment in all aspects of American culture, what does it mean for a star like Pitt to uphold the kind of masculinity that has gotten us to this place? What does it say that people are so eager to ignore or forget the accusations of domestic violence toward ex-wife Angelina Jolie and toward the children that defended her on the fraught plane ride in 2016 that initiated her desire for divorce? What are the ripple effects, materially, when such a vision of masculinity is enshrined instead of questioned and critiqued?

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“Killing Time” (1979)
Written, directed, and starring Fronza Woods
Runtime: About 8 minutes
The black & white short film is currently streaming on Criterion Channel until the end of this month!

After I published my last newsletter, I became rather unmoored by a series of emotional and material sorrows, including my mother’s complicated health issues which highlighted the fractures in our already strained relationship. I tumbled into an intense suicidal-depressive episode that crept close to two weeks long. I’m trudging my way to solid ground now. In the process of trying not to plan my own suicide, I started to think about suicide on a cultural level through the lens of female madness. This is a subject that lights my soul aflame. I moved away from writing all that personally about my mental health struggles — and the immense amount of growth I’ve made in the last few years navigating some heavy dynamics and events including death, reconnections, lost friendships, and a heinous relationship I am thankful every day for the last 10 months that I was strong enough to get the hell out of.

My previous suicide attempts were bound to the sartorial. I had outfits in mind for each one. Which is why when I first watched the 1979 short film Killing Time, I felt a sense of kinship. When I hear conversations about representation and the need to see oneself on-screen in hyper-specific ways, I bristle. This isn’t why I go to film. I am drawn to cinema to feel, to see worlds and lives unlike my own, to consider the bruising complexities of being alive. When I can’t decide what film to watch on a given evening I ask myself, what life do I want to step into? What vibe do I want to set? More than a portal into my own experiences with suicidal ideation and active planning, Killing Time is a masterwork of off-kilter humor and startling humanity. Clocking in just shy of nine minutes, the short film is a window into a woman’s mind beset by the desire to die. Starring its own writer-director Fronza Woods, Killing Time speaks truths into the cinematic silence of the black madwoman. It’s all the more startling that Woods tosses aside the need to make this woman a spectacle — which is often a profound tension in what I like to call the feminine grotesque.

The Feminine Grotesque is an ethos, sub-genre, and outlook I have spent the last decade defining and exploring. It acts as a guiding principle for this monthly(ish) column. For my Letterboxd list of examples, I defined it as:

“The emotional, social and psychological problems that are specifically connected to the character’s sense of womanhood which provides the meat and gristle of this genre. The questions of women’s pictures turn on their pretty heads in The Feminine Grotesque. The tools of beauty — physicality, dress, makeup — become weapons that wound as much as they empower.

Like women’s pictures, The Feminine Grotesque offers visual liberation from the confining strictures of the patriarchy. No matter how temporary, women are able to see themselves as bold, defiant, vulnerable, sexually realized, selfish, ambitious and hopeful. The films of The Feminine Grotesque obsess over female desire and subjectivity, but even with this strong feminist impulse, the genre is often [marred] by endings that show these women integrating themselves but lacking any hope for a future. In cinema, like in life, it often feels like there is rarely hope for the madwoman.

Madwoman (noun)

A woman who is mentally ill.
A woman with a transgressive place in society because of her anger, sexuality and/or refusal to play by the rules.
A woman ruled by her passions. (see: Taylor, Elizabeth).
A woman of fire and music. (see: Davis, Bette in All About Eve).”

It is in this obsessive taxonomy of female madness that I have gathered and nurtured the stories of women whose madness has often led to the culture around them forsaking their humanity for crude projections. This is especially true when it comes to the story behind the picture that hovers atop this newsletter known as “The Most Beautiful Suicide”.

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When Evelyn McHale jumped from the observation deck of the Empire State Building on May 1st, 1947, the 23-year old engaged bookkeeper had no idea she would become enshrined in a pantheon of madness in which her humanity would be stripped away for the iconography her body could provide. Less than five minutes after McHale cleared the setbacks and landed on the roof of a United Nations limousine that would become her deathbed, cabbie and photography student Robert Wiles cut through the crowd to take the photograph that time and interest would enshrine as iconic. “The Most Beautiful Suicide” would reach far beyond the pages of the Life magazine issue it was published within. Andy Warhol’s 1962 turquoise-sheened reprinting. Music videos from David Bowie and Taylor Swift. Glossy fashion advertisements. McHale is reappropriated, reconsidered, remixed, and cast aside as a vessel for an iconography that has existed long before her fatal plunge.

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Midway through April, at the tail end of Aries season, I turned thirty-six. I never imagined getting to this age. Not from a fear of aging but an inability to be so forward-thinking. Until turning thirty, I genuinely believed I would have killed myself by this point. After last year was marked by heartbreak and hard-won growth, I greeted this new year of life brimming with desire and my eyes trained toward new horizons. My work-related travels to New York and San Francisco were resplendent with fresh oysters and champagne, long walks through verdant new places as spring made her gentle appearance, enlivening conversations over French 75s, mended friendships, deliriously fun late nights, and a renewed excitement for this ragged state of being we call life. Even when conversations turned toward the existential fears of climate disaster and America’s metastasizing fascism, none of my pleasures were shadowed by a fear of being or looking thirty-six. Since entering my thirties, it is as if everywhere I turn there’s another woman around my age—and sometimes considerably younger—publicly and loudly demeaning herself for having the temerity to still be alive after turning thirty. There is a question that hangs like a scythe over the exposed throat of every woman: What could age ever offer a woman beyond invisibility and psychic pain? Far too many women I know agree with the answer patriarchal forces have provided for us: nothing.

Growing up in the hothouse environment of 1990s and early 2000s Miami, I was lucky to have a mother who told me consistently, “Your thirties and forties are your best years as a woman. That’s when the fun truly starts.” She also modeled this for me, fluttering from her downtown office to Miami’s nightlife with a bevy of other fabulous black women — some Caribbean, some West African, others Southern-born like my mother herself. They modeled a version of black adulthood that was bristling with vivacity, discovery, and, most importantly, pleasure. I completely understand the vexation women my age feel about getting older, even if I don’t share it, because this is exactly how we have been taught to regard ourselves. We live in a world where we are bombarded by our own technologically-mediated visage in ways human beings never had to contend with before. I’ve never wanted marriage and kids, so I blessedly don’t have that clock ticking away as a reminder of supposed lack. I’ve never felt that by being single something fundamental was missing from my life. But parsing your own desires from what you’re trained to want by an individualistic, youth-obsessed culture is a difficult and lifelong task. You have to want to push back against these forces for that to have a glimmer of possibility.

In American cinema, there is a false dichotomy for women. You’re either an ingénue or an auntie, grandmother, or sexless mentor who supports the story—but the story is rarely yours. There are exceptions, of course. I can name the white actresses that American cinema offered compelling roles to after turning thirty-five like Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, and my personal queen, Rachel Weisz. But broadly, women are rarely afforded dynamic examples of what middle age can look like for them — especially when they don’t have kids or a more traditional-looking romantic partnership. This fear is bound to no genre. Babygirl, X, and The Idea of You, just to name a few, definitely qualify. When I watched The Substance — writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s body horror excursion into Hollywood, aging, and obsessions with symmetry — I couldn’t help but recognize that this wasn’t a treatise tapping into a fear women share, but a work specifically attuned to white women’s anxieties.

The continuing trend of middle-aged white women in cinema being punished for staying alive long enough to be considered old, or finding sexual fulfillment with exceedingly young men while still feeling downtrodden for being their age, is in fact white women unraveling at no longer being placed on the pedestal that their youth and conventional beauty once afforded them. Black women have never, in the history that has been written since slavery and its attendant structures reshaped the world order, been respected as women. We have not been afforded the full possibilities associated with this gender. So, the dynamics of aging cast a different hue over our lives. Think of the stringent belief that black don’t crack while people point to celebrities like Angela Bassett, all of whom get work done to halt the inevitable and intractable advance of time.

When I see a woman I find attractive and cool reveal a pit of despair on her Instagram stories over the fact she doesn’t look like her 28-year-old self now that she’s in her mid-thirties, I wince. When I witness a young woman who just turned thirty write a preening Instagram caption about being brave in the face of aging, I start to wonder what the fuck is going on with women and why they default to believing what the social forces that seek to keep them powerless dish out. When I witness women in my age group eager to be seen as cool by Gen Z and those coming up behind them, I wonder when exactly they lost their own sense of self—if they had one in the first place. When I hear a woman degrade another for the mere fact of being old, or crowing about their lack of collagen in public discussions, online comments, and pithy posts, it is evident that the performance of vulnerability is its own currency in the modern age. Yet, I am left to wonder, who and what does such public self-flagellation benefit?

Pop culture treats this time in adulthood — from your mid-thirties into middle age — as a boring space defined by loss, routine, humiliation, and responsibility. But if you take a step away from what we’ve been sold, there is evidence all around to confer that middle age actually takes on a multitude of shapes and postures especially when you don’t have kids or you have approached life with a more radical bent toward cultivating community. This isn’t to say I don’t have fears around aging. They just have nothing to do with my looks or how many wrinkles I’ve garnered in the last year.

Instead, I feel a chill when I think of my mother’s growing frailty. Last week, she had a radio frequency nerve ablation to treat her spinal issues that a surgery a year and a half ago didn’t fix. She called me one morning only a few days after the surgical procedure to tell me she fell on the floor while she was sleeping. I felt my heart lurch. I worry about having the money I need to take care of her. I fear what happens internally to the body. I wonder how well my knee surgery will hold up over the years.

While working on this short essay, I came across a black woman peer jokingly sharing the Barbie meme I’ve used as the main picture for this essay. “I didn’t realize aging would happen to me,” reads the excerpted tweet over a picture of Margot Robbie embodying the supreme image of unending youth expected of women, her face crumpled as she cries in her impeccable pastel checkered outfit. When women share such anxious thoughts that root the issues in aging with looking old, do they think about how they are confirming the patriarchal belief that a woman’s worth is wrapped up in youth to everyone, including the generations coming up behind them? When a woman stumbles into public self-flagellation is she looking for truth or for someone to assuage her fear by telling her, “Oh my god, you don’t look a day over twenty-nine”?

This isn’t meant to denigrate women’s worries, but to remind them that these worries are inherited, not natural. In order to dismantle the misogyny that suffocates the possibilities of life for everyone, I implore women to take a good look at what scares them about looking their age. It says a lot that this is the fear I see arise again and again. Did being or looking young ever save any woman from the relentless cruelty of misogyny? When you torture yourself in public about looking your age as a woman beyond her early thirties, whose comfort do you seek? Our faces tell beautiful stories. Your single, precious life is worth honoring. Who and what does such public self-flagellation benefit? It merely affirms the vexatious forces of misogyny that seek to keep women entrenched in violence and fear. Looking young and fitting into the ever-narrowing parameters of what’s considered beautiful in our immediate environment is not a woman’s life purpose.

At thirty-six, I have never been sweeter, smarter, or hotter than I am now. Hotter not because I have winnowed myself down into the aesthetic image black women are encouraged to fill. I am hotter because my fashion sense has become impeccable and I feel a genuine comfort in this singular body I call my own. There has been a deepening of pleasure at my age. Perhaps, this is due to how my relationship with time has changed or the tenderness with which I treat life. When I ponder the new horizons my eyes have been trained upon, I think of the books I have yet to publish, the stories yet to grace the page, the decadent meals I have yet to devour, the beautiful people I have yet to kiss. I think of all the scintillating thrills and surprises life has yet to reveal to me. I think of evenings dancing under the stars in the embrace of someone I love; the raucous laughter of my friends when my carefully timed joke lands; the worn used-books I have yet to clasp between my hands on excursions far-flung from my current home of Chicago.

When I was in San Francisco, I had a perfect day full of movies and food and new connections. Whilst walking through the city I came across a jewelry store. A young Asian-American woman — she looked to be barely in her mid-twenties —wearing blood-red eyeshadow and working at the store helped me figure out what birthday treats to buy for myself. I decided on a thick, gold chain that hangs heavy against my collarbone. I always love the unexpected moments of intimacy that can happen in life. On that day, it was simply the young woman clasping the necklace for me because my manicure made that tricky. “I love your style. It’s sick,” she said with a warm smile. I adjusted my cropped hot pink fur jacket and chuckled softly before saying thank you. I walked out of the store with my head held high and the sun licking against my skin, before devouring a dozen oysters and a crab Caesar salad at a small restaurant nearby.

I am in awe that I have been able to craft such a life against the odds. Every pleasure I experience was fought for against the tides of mental illness, misogyny, racism, capitalism, and abuse. There is so much left to relish, you just have to reach out and grab hold. For as long as this yearning heart of mine beats, the taste of opportunity and pleasure shall rest upon my tongue.

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I just want to thank all my lovely readers for your continued interest and dedication to my writing. I’ve been a bit quiet on here due to traveling and being a touch too hard on myself to make this newsletter polished. Perfection is a trap. This is an important space for me as a writer. Going forward I am going to cultivate this space more holistically and just have fun experimenting with ideas. For paid subscribers, the new columns Movies That Fuck and The Feminine Grotesque will be premiering very, very soon this month.

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what I’ve been up to…

publishing…For work, I reviewed Sinners, a film I found ambitious, bold, fun, but not cohesive.

talking…I got to chop it up with my boys on We Hate Movies about the mid-nineties classic The Craft. In a full circle moment, I was on the Bright Wall/Dark Room podcast discussing Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the lush 1992 film which will be an entry in the Movies That Fuck column which starts for paying subscribers later this week.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the future in terms of what we owe each other and those we leave behind. Sometimes — actually quite often lately — when I’m walking around the city I’ll stop and look at a playground, overrun with the rambunctious force of children, with a wistful ache. I worry about the kids swinging along monkey bars or sliding down some garish colored plastic and think of what they will be forced to navigate ecologically, economically, emotionally. The mood of the time is already apocalyptic. I am not consigning them or anyone else to a life defined only by collapse and the suffering that ferments in its wake. I’m too much of a romantic for that. I still carry hope for the human species, as dim as that hope flickers sometimes.

Let me preface the body of this rant by saying this is written from the perspective of a woman in her mid-thirties with no desire for children. I’ve never wanted them and I never will1. am neutral to kids on a broad level, mostly wishing them a better future and making small efforts so that comes to fruition. I love my niece. I genuinely believe that my ability to thrive as a single woman without kids, with no interest in the playbooks life has casually reprinted for women to follow, is a privilege. Actually, the ability to choose to not be married and have kids as a woman while still thriving isn’t a privilege. It’s a right, restored.

Over the last few years I have noticed increasing hostility toward children and parents that manifests with a veneer of joking irreverence. Calling parents “breeders”. Memes and an overflow of comments spreading across the internet about how dogs are preferable to children in public spaces. There is a variegated division between friends with kids and those without. What do friends who’ve recently had kids owe their friends who don’t? How should a child-free person meet their haggard friends navigating parenthood in the middle? I’m concerned that people don’t know how to relate to each other anymore, or don’t want to give grace to the fact that we’re all suffering together2 in this landscape. The ragged loneliness so many feel, that’s held like a stone in their chests, is so painful they’ve come to believe a good relationship is defined purely by ease and a lack of conflict. But what healthy, loving, open-hearted relationship has no conflict? Conflict is both natural and necessary to the growth of a relationship. The price of opening yourself up to the world — especially with regards to having a sense of community to rely on — is that sometimes you will be uncomfortable, even annoyed.

For a generation that talks so much about ancestors and the immediate failures of the child-rearing care of our parents, it’s odd we aren’t thinking more about our own legacy. Even if you don’t have kids, you still have skin in the game when it comes to the generations coming up behind you. How can we find community if we scorn children and parents? How can we create bonds that will withstand the horrors on the horizon and those already here? How are we supposed to break generational curses if we can’t recognize the way we perpetuate them ourselves?

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