In 2024 I published my first and only essay off of Substack in an online lit/art magazine titled “The Big Ship.” Recently, while looking to attach it to my portfolio I found the site no longer exists. This is the original, unedited essay.

Joan of Arc has garnered a cult fascination since her heyday in the 1400’s—gripping the hearts of not only the French people, as the Patron Saint of France, but the hearts of women worldwide, especially stitching herself into the soul of cinema with her earliest appearance being by none other than George Méliès himself in 1900. Since, she has flooded the bloodstream, invading its corners with countless adaptations—some inspired, some less so. Her presence on camera is essential to cinema studies, every first-year film history class will have you watch Carl Dreyer’s doubtless masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc, where she is expertly portrayed by Marie Falconetti in one of the greatest performances to every grace the screen. However, outside of cinema, outside of theory, outside of your film history 101 class; Joan exists. More than Marie Falconetti’s performance, or Dreyer’s masterful direction, or Godard’s influence on cinema—at the heart of the picture lies the portrait of a martyr.

To understand Joan’s influence is to understand the accepted story of what happened, much of her story has been muddled by popular conceptions and misinformation. One common myth, beloved by many millennial “witches,” is that she was burned for witchcraft, for the sole reason of divine intervention. The idea being she was executed for being a woman who claimed to speak to God, and in such they attempt to adopt her as a representation of their own feelings of oppression. While not wholly misguided, this perspective can only be accepted if the only two things known about Joan are that 1. She had “visions from God” and 2. She was burned at the stake. Knowing everything that happened in the three years between her first vision and her execution reveals a complete and more sinister story.

Her cinematic presence tends to focus on two parts of her life, both with explicit story beats that show up in all adaptations, similar to the beats necessary to the New Testament, Joan’s depictions share important moments that solidify her mythology but often divulge into interpretations of how she gets there. These dichotomous sections are represented plainly by Rivette’s 1994 6-hour epic Joan the Maid I & II, which neatly splits itself into a double with The Battles and The Prisons. Joan’s life is always split with this duality, her military campaigns and visions then her imprisonment and burning. Two parts I will refer to as her righteous fury and holy suffering. Some, like Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc or Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc focus solely on her imprisonment and execution, while others, like Rivette’s Joan the Maid, Fleming’s Joan of Arc, or Preminger’s sloppy Saint Joan seek to portray both sides. Rarely, however, do any adaptations seek to just portray the battles. Not only do we have explicit proof of her trial as church records in France, but more than that—Joan is her martyrdom, portraying her as just the soldier of God would feel like a betrayal to the audience, her mythology is hinged on her death, and so her characterization is build around her suffering.

Joan’s righteous fury begins when first received her visions at the age of sixteen while living in her home village of Domrémy, France. The visions were from three Saints, Saint Catherine, Saint Margaret, and Saint Michael the Archangel. They gave her a list of tasks to complete to free France and re-establish French sovereignty. Her first task was to crown the Dauphin, the eldest son of the King of France, as the new King, her second—end the siege of Orleans and reclaim the city from occupying forces. Bringing the Dauphin to Reims and crowning him King Charles VII, then joining French forces in reclaiming the city she swiftly succeeded in her Heavenly decrees. These two beats show up in similar ways in all adaptations, while Preminger paints her as a magical figure, a messiah of vengeance swooping down from the heavens enacting the power of God to end the siege and retake Orleans, Rivette paints her as a woman, human, capable of great feats through faith and conviction alone. Whether she was divinely influenced or just a monumental figure she completes her tasks and begins her own tragedy.

After losing the support of the King, Joan begins leading her own raiding parties until eventually being captured by the Burgundians and sold to the English. Her entire life leads to this moment, the end of it, the miscarriage of justice, the betrayal of her homeland and her God, Joan becomes a pawn to fate canonized by her pain. Her campaigns only inform her martyrdom but martyr she will always be. Joan is imprisoned by the English, she is put on trial by the catholic church, the English want her dead, and her King she crowned does not interject. Joan is put through a rigorous sham trial, led by bishops and cardinals with political motivations, she is tortured and given two options: renounce your visions ,remove your men’s clothing, and return to your women’s dress or be executed. Joan holds strong for some days, but after brutal torture and fear of fire, Joan cracks. Like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, or Peter when he denies him at his trial, Joan herself breaks—she removes her soldier’s garb, she renounces the saints and the visions in promise of freedom, or at least life in a church prison where she’d be safer, Joan abjures as a repentant heretic but is placed back in the English prison.

The abjuration is short lived as she soon removes her dress and returns to her uniform, stating that as long as she is guarded by English soldiers, she would be dressed as a soldier. Portrayed more violently in Rivette’s Joan the Maid, the moment Joan puts back on her uniform is after English guards attempt to rape her, a fate she was sure to endure her entire life imprisoned by men. The possibility of rape for Joan was not just the suffering she would endure but it would also be a defilement of her values. Joan was a virgin—a fact she held near to her heart, the English guards’ assault of Joan would be an attempt at shattering these values and the relationship with the God she loves so deeply. In an unjust ultimatum, she opts to protect herself from a life of the cruelty of men. For her relapsed heresy she is handed to the English and subsequently burned, producing her mythology and countless depictions of her crucial moment, holding the broken sticks of her pyre in the shape of a cross as unholy fire surrounds and engulfs her. Joan dies alone, surrounded by her enemies, no rescue from the king, she is abandoned. It’s said God works in mysterious ways, and we are to trust his process—that he will deliver us—but it’s hard to look at this fate and believe he delivered her or had to deliver her in such a cruel way.

Joan of Arc died in 1431, ‘delivered’ to God, her final moments spent begging for a cross so she could love him till the end while he let her suffer. Twenty years later the Hundred Years War ended, the French came out victorious, Joan had delivered on her promise to free France at the cost of her life. When she began her campaign morale was low, the major cities were under English control, the French had no king—Joan came as an angel of fire, sweeping through the land, igniting the hearts of the people, and burning out the English colonization. For it she died a martyr, on a stake, a figure of the warrior Christ, wielding a holy blade for France. Joan’s story is biblical, a new new testament, one that fights against oppression with holy revolt, her death only the nail in the coffin, or the palm—God is on their side.

Canonized the Patron Saint of France on May 16^th, 1920, her feast day the same as her execution; May 30^th. A few years after her canonization Dreyer began his masterpiece—The Passion of Joan of Arc. She had just gained a renewed interest from the French public and the film thrust her into stardom. Dreyer’s adaptation, based directly on the manuscripts of her trial, paints a portrait of a young woman in anguish. A human girl, only 19, intelligent, strong in her convictions, but tortured and oppressed. Joan’s suffering is the centerpiece of the work, and the centerpiece of all works that would succeed it, Dreyer and Falconetti’s souls intertwine with the spirit of Joan to produce a deeply humanist, horrifying, and melancholic portrayal. Joan’s passion, much like Jesus before her, is one of suffering and anger, the suffering and anger many women since Joan’s time have come to deeply resonate with.

Glimpsing the connection between Joan and the modern woman, the third film of cinema’s most enigmatic, influential, and controversial problem child—Jean-Luc Godard’s 1962 film Vivre sa Vie marked a tonal shift in his career. Replacing the satire of his first two features with a depressive ennui. Godard presents a somber depiction of prostitution in Paris, the role class and gender have in propagating it’s oppressive structure, and the suffering of women under it. Split into twelve vignettes, we follow a young woman in Paris as her life falls into the void, from losing her apartment because she can’t pay rent, to being coerced by pimps into prostitution, and finally to her execution. Nana mirrors Joan as the modern woman, her collapse and death not as high stakes but devastating nonetheless. Godard at his most didactic points at the reflection and screams “evil has only mutated!” Anna Karina, who plays Nana, literally mirrors Joan’s passion, going to see Dreyer’s classic, Godard has Karina recreate Falconetti’s suffering in the cinema as the film plays. He frames, composes, directs Karina to become Falconetti, and Nana—Joan. She must embody the very suffering Joan experiences, she must internalize the unholy fire, the torture, the gendered violence Joan faced. Nana doesn’t watch The Passion of Joan of Arc, Nana stares into a mirror projected onto a screen, she doesn’t see a story about a woman suffering hundreds of years ago, she sees herself suffering now and she sheds the same restricted tears Falconetti gave Joan, because in all ways Nana is Joan.

It was no secret Godard loved Dreyer, as well as Bresson, both of which made their own Joan of Arc films. Ironically Bresson’s released the same year as Vivre sa Vie. If Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc didn’t thrust her into the role as cinema’s eternal love child, then Godard’s massive influence on film and film theory most certainly did. Yet, history and theory feel only a piece of her portrait, she remains a cultural phenomenon among women and queer people, many who likely have not heard of Carl Theodor Dreyer or Vivre sa Vie. To understand, examine, and construct the phenomenon of Joan of Arc we must construct the archetypes she embodies—righteous fury and holy suffering.

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Joan isn’t the only religious woman to gain a cult following, in 1981 Polish director Andrzej Żuławski released an unhinged and disturbing metaphor for his own divorce: Possession. Following the collapse of a marriage in West Berlin, Possession has garnered a ravenous and hyper-fixated audience, enamored by lead star Isabelle Adjani’s performance as Anna. Anna’s behavior is erratic, rapidly changing, angry, extreme, and above all glittered with an esoteric religious fervor. The entire film frequently references God or uses metaphors of Mark’s, Anna’s husband played by Sam Neil, Madonna/Whore complex of his wife to portray a breaking apart that destroys themselves as well as others around them. Whether Żuławski intended it or not, Anna’s behavior has resonated with an underlying emotion in it’s audience, a feeling of hysteria that has been projected on women since the advent of psychology. Anna represents a caged fury let loose, a caged fury that has been internalized by the traumatized, a caged fury many wish to unleash. Anna’s rage is erratic and destructive outwardly, she kills and maims, she destroys but it’s a cleansing destruction, a freeing destruction, she garners love and respect despite her chaos because chaos is her virtue, and the virtue of many marginalized by order.

Juxtaposed with Mark’s behavior, which is contained and ordered even as it slowly comes undone, Anna appears as the greater of two evils. She destroys while Mark at least attempts to save. Such has caused the film’s cult following among women and alienated it from largely male audiences. Those who see through Mark’s eyes see him as patient and responsible; ordered. While Anna was destructive and erratic, but for those who see through Anna’s, who’ve lived through Anna’s, the subtlety of Mark’s treatment reveals a character that is obsessed about sexual possession. Frequently when Anna and Mark fight he brings it back to sex, who or what she’s fucked, while admitting and committing his own infidelity. Sleeping with Anna’s friend, with their son’s teacher, the Madonna reflection of Anna’s whore. Mark’s entire complex revolves around sexual possession of women. Mark’s behavior throughout the film is likely not isolated, Anna’s fury becomes righteous when glimpsed through the lens of an anger finally able to be let loose.

Towards the end, when Anna and Mark rekindle their relationship, it’s one drenched in blood and fire. Their mutual destruction has welded them back together, they’ve both killed, they’ve both destroyed, Mark’s order has become undone with an embrace of a laissez faire attitude. They stand in their tiny kitchen, in their small West Berlin apartment, and Anna utters the words “Do you believe in God? It’s in me” before they collapse onto the floor and complete their destructive merger. The trauma, the mutual destruction, the merge, these elements of righteous fury are what make Anna so captivating, she bleeds and destroys in a holy anger that is allowed only to reside in the hearts and minds of many women, she is an outward expression of an emotion that is only allowed inside.

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This phenomenon is not contained within just cinema. in 2017, singer and composer Kristin Hayter released her first project under the name Lingua Ignota, a four song EP titled Let the Evil of His Own Lips Cover Him on Bandcamp, donating all the proceeds to a non-profit organization for domestic abuse. The EP would begin a six-year journey of emotional exploration of grief, fury, suffering, and enlightenment through the lens of religious and esoteric themes. Later that year she would release her second project; a five song EP titled All Bitches Die. The project exudes an anger and hatred deep rooted in the soul of a woman scorned, calling upon hellfire and imagery of the Book of Revelations while basing the subject matter around Angela Brown’s When Battered Women Kill. The character known as Lingua Ignota was born through the fire of a life of abuse and as an expression of the intense emotions that follow. All Bitches Die places Hayter in the shoes of a destructive force, a force of pure hate, as she washes over the world bathing it in the fire of her pain. Her first full length LP Caligula continues this anger, calling upon themes of vengeance and death while utilizing heavy metal elements to call upon the rage that’s often associated with that genre while also having the ultimate outlet to express her wrath. Despite this, she oscillates between a softness and anger duality that forms an image of a fragile woman flailing in anger and pain hoping to hit something, or someone, until the day someone stops her rampage with the softness she needs. Songs like Fragrant is my Many Flower’d Crown epitomize this dichotomy, painting the portrait of a woman who dons the beauty and softness of a flower crown but swings a hammer of wrath at all who’ve wronged her. She ends Caligula with the repetition of one line, a line so important to Hayter it was printed on much of her merch, a line that clarifies the duality of her flower crown and holy hammer—All I want is boundless love, all I know is violence.

Her final album as Lingua Ignota, Sinner Get Ready, was released in 2021. It signals a mass change in the emotions of the previous two, while trace elements of her other compositions remain—especially in songs such as I Who Bend the Tall Grasses, this third and final album trades the bombastic, explosive sounds for softer harmonies carried by piano or organ with blues/folk elements. Songs like the somber Pennsylvania Furnace mark the end of anger, replacing her screams of fury with begging whimpers, she compares herself to an old Pennsylvania folk legend of a man killing his dog by throwing it into a furnace only to be turned on by the other dogs who subsequently give him the same treatment. That same year Hayter would release a statement accusing the frontman of Daughters, Alexis Marshall, of an intense emotional, physical, and sexual abuse that severely damaged her spine. In the track Repent Now Confess Now Hayter speaks the line “The surgeon’s precision is nothing/No wound as sharp as the will of God/Repent and He will abundantly pardon/He will take your legs and your will to live” calling upon the abuse she faced and comparing her abuser to God himself, as an oppressive and angry force. God as the master, returns to his place in the Old Testament as vengeful, angry, destructive, abusive—Hayter’s relationship with this God is confused, in this way God is the abuser, a master that holds her leash and punishes her at his will, like the man who threw his dog into the furnace, and she the dog, they will die together.

She ends Sinner Get Ready with The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata, in which she repeats the line “Paradise will be mine/Paradise is mine,” indicating a hope of escape from the abuse of her God, hoping for the warmth of a kinder one, a softer one. She ends the song with “Loneliness my master/I bow to him alone/I bow to him alone” replacing abuse, anger, fear, suffering with hope—a hope built on journeying forth into the unknown, alone. In 2023, Hayter announced she would be retiring the name Lingua Ignota, and the music made under it, stating this part of her life is behind her. She would adopt the new name Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter and announce her latest project Saved! Which released later that year. Saved! Trades the metal elements for holy blues, even covering an old American folk song titled The Poor Wayfaring Stranger. The first single she released for the album All Of My Friends Are Going to Hell call upon her previous anger but from an enlightened standpoint, one where God protects her and punishes those who wronged her. Lines like “I can’t pretend I’ve done better than you/I walked in the dark and lost my way too/But I’m on my knees in the place where I fell/Begging God ‘save my soul, please don’t send me to Hell’” exhibit her freedom, free from the darkness and rage she once felt, ending the song with “But I wanna rise from the place where I fell/Jesus said, ‘Get some new friends cause these ones are going to hell’” Hayter gives up her vengeance to fate and simply seeks to save herself from the people who hurt her. The nail in the coffin of her rage, her suffering, comes in May This Comfort and Protect You, where she calls upon Caligula’s famous line, “The lord shall mend your broken heart/And hold your aching soul/His boundless love will make you whole/May this comfort and protect you.” She no longer only knows violence, she’s found her boundless love, the warmth of God, whatever that may mean to her, comforts and protects her

Hayter’s journey is one many women face, one of abuse, anger, pain, many who never find their boundless love, they cry to the heavens begging for more than the violence they feel divinely ordained, an unfairness in the nature of their lives. Joan of Arc, Kristin Hayter, Anna, Nana, Mother Jeanne of The Devils, Sister Cathleen from Novitiate, Holy Mother Mary herself—victims of a patriarchy that seeks to control them sexually, repress their emotions, while using their bodies. Mother Mary has become a symbol of this oppression, divinely used, and repressed by God herself, she is the ideal woman in the eyes of men—the virgin child bearer, the womb without the taint of sex, the mother whose duty is solely motherhood, who only suffers to bare the death of her son. Mary’s role, her symbol, has taken root in the oppressed, whose sex is seen as degeneracy, Mary represents a silent holy suffering, one where she plays her role, she bares the child and suffers his loss. For her suffering she is rewarded nothing real—a place at the side of her abuser, a God that uses her body for narrative and symbolic purposes. Mary isn’t even granted her own pain, only given personhood by the women who look to her now in their relation to her oppression, they grant her suffering outside the suffering of her son, suffering that is her own.

This obsession with God and Christianity begins to feel absurd and contradictory, if God himself is such an oppressive force than where do all these feelings come from? Christianity as a structure is hinged on the oppression of women and the empowerment of men, so why do so many young women resonate with the images of nuns, an image of their own oppression? Is it purely aesthetic, an obsession with the strange ritualistic esotericism Christianity embodies? Some strange mass phenomenon of cultural Stockholm Syndrome? The core tenant of Christianity is suffering, Jesus suffered, and man is doomed to. To get to heaven man must suffer the burden of his decisions, salvation only comes through suffering, through sacrifice. In this way suffering is given purpose, meaning, many are given a warmth that their suffering has not been wholly in vain. That there is a reason for what they feel, even when they get that feeling of warmth from the augur of their suffering. Pain becomes a virtue, if all you ever feel is violence then violence begins to feel like boundless love.

Though holy suffering is only one part of the whole, righteous fury has its place in the relationship. By believing in God there becomes a place to point anger. A single force, rather than a multi-faceted structure, God can be targeted as the progenitor of pain. The love for God in such becomes iconoclastic, one where God exists, Christianity is accepted, but God and his followers are the villains, perpetrators of suffering and for such targets for vengeance. God is the face of man, man becomes embodied by a single entity and for that a sponge of deserved hate. Hayter exhibits both of these sides in her music, often switching between a feverous love for God and a disgusted anger towards him, Anna has the same relationship with Mark. Her Sister Faith and Sister Chance, battling for whether she hates her God or loves her suffering.

Towards the end of her album Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain sings a line that has scattered the corners of the internet since it released, in Sun Bleached Flies she notoriously says, “God loves you, but not enough to save you.” A line that has resonated with fans of the album, a line that exhibits the duality, God as the perpetrator of suffering and the suffering as a virtue. God does love you, the suffering is how he shows it, God loved Joan and killing her is how he showed it.

The nun, the martyr, the holy warrior, these images represent women who have suffered under the collective face of religious oppression; The God of man, and in this way the love for these images, for religion, is not really a love for God, or for Christianity, it’s a love for those who suffer, a want to protect, a reflection of the self. Like Nana staring at the death of Joan of Arc on screen, religious iconography becomes a mirror to stare into, see past iterations of yourself who suffered the same, feeling a want and need to comfort them the same way you crave for yourself.

Summers. Summers. Summers.

I wet the bed until high school

The rapid weight gain

The “Golden Child,” the favorite

All I remember, summers.

The anger, the fear.

Walls of houses that make me nauseous

The shower behind the curtain

And summers.

Hypersexuality. Self-objectification.

Isolation. Frustration. Cycles of failure.

Bad grades. Dropping out. Quitting jobs.

Rapid weight loss. Suicidality. Emaciation.

Drug abuse. Inpatient. Treatment centers.

Religion. Hate. Love. Co-dependency.

Summers. Lev asking why I always relate to angry women.

Summers.

Gifts. Money, Praise, Expectations.

Why did his wife hate me so much?

Transexuality. Self-harm. Running away.

And summers.

Age regression. Immaturity. Blotted memories.

Borderline personality and psychosis.

Gaslighting. Rapid switches from self-hate

to self obsession. I want to be saved.

Summers. Summers. Summers.

Discomfort. Incorporeal. Picture perfection.

You loved me the most why do you haunt me?

Why do I feel on edge whenever you’re around?

I was your favorite,

why don’t I want to see you?

Why do I want you to die?

That which nourishes the soul.

The body needs food

The mind does too

Of mind and body

are from the primal

The body needs water

as does the mind

both are derived

from the animal

The body wants sex

the mind needs it

but any sensation

of pleasure will do

The third is nourished

not by properties

or quantities

not by need or want

The third does not desire

but longs, yearns

for that which is not

consumed

but consumes

the effervescent glow

that dances around

the perception

The guests around the

table, wafting in the scent

the glimmer of sunlight

reflecting off the pool

the rubbing of skin

atop the bed sheets

Prayers and Hymns

rushing water drowns

uneasy hearts

restless souls slumber

in flower beds

whispers heard only

in the whistling breeze

responses in the bristles

of the fluttering grass

orange lanterns through

the sky’s soft zeppelins

reverberate in

reflections of fleshy mirros

dream, Alice, in imaginary

deific habitats

Living Image

Image, photograph

legs, arms, lungs, stomach

pastiche of a person in time,

space, and place

feed yourself another day

Image person, walk

the Earth seeking

without finding

clenched jaw

clenched jaw

I would give you the world

I don’t want the world

but I would take it

if you gave it to me

Ode to Sleepwalkers

Shambling street sheep

Unknown time of night

zombie intoxicants

shunnin the western sun

stumble and fall

under street lamps

reveal ashamed reveries

held under the moon’s gaze

tossed cares litter streets

for freedom from the week

laughs hide the anguish

of tomorrow’s guilty conscious

???

blood, blood, blood, blood

blood, blood, blood, blood

blood, blood, blood, blood

All I have are recurring

words, phrases, idioms

crowding my head

screaming to be said

why is it always blood?

“why” is there sometimes

“dejected” too

“blood” makes the most appearances

I have spent my life slowly killing myself. Dredging through more and more self-mutilating rituals, accumulating traumas, destroying communities. I have stumbled through these 28 years in a daze of dissatisfaction like a disease consuming my decrepit soul and bursting from the boils of my rotting corpse coating every environment I’ve stepped foot into with viscous acid. I have been slowly killing myself, at least my body. My “self” died long ago in the backseat of my mom’s car at some distant hour of the night I was too young to recall, parked in the driveway of a woman I didn’t know. My body, with its bloated tumor festering inside, shambled around since like the muscle spasms of a beheaded chicken hoping to screw it back on. Eventually the body collapses, accepting its fate, entering its next stage of existence.

I can’t say what happens to chickens after they’re beheaded and their body finally gives in, if they have a soul or where it goes. I can’t say the same about anything or anyone else. I can say what happened to me, if I had a soul, where it went, where that zombie ended up. Now as I lie in wait on the precipice, trying to piece together the carnage, I can look back and see clearly the gate I entered. A drab metallic doorway to a quaint apartment. Black sticker lettering crinkled on slick slab of aluminum. “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate” or “abandon all hope ye who enter here.” The famed phrase that stood over the entrance to hell in Dante’s Inferno just before he scampered through the corridors of eternal torment. The poetic irony only now visible to me, in my mundane comedy, the self-exalting descent of the last year and a half. Only now does it seem all too obvious what was blatant to everyone else then, written by some dilettante English undergrad believing each word is the next great novel. Only now, after all is said and done, and my descent to this rock bottom is fulfilled, lying here in my dark well, my Purgatorio, can I see that I was who plastered that door with those words.

By the time I walked out that same door for the last time, the letters were gone, corroded by the waste I laid there. My corpse was in the worst state it had ever been in, all the fat on my body had been consumed by the parasitic infection. After the fat, it cannibalized my muscle. Friends and family either gasped in horror or broke into tears at the sight. What was inside, hidden by post-mortem spasms was leaking out. They weren’t disgusted as much as afraid. I was sick and they were terrified it was terminal, but to me it was too late. I died all those years ago, this was my facade, or my punishment. Where I went was a beautiful house, nestled deep in the recesses of Flatbush, removed from the metropolis, ten minutes from school. It was supposed to be respite, a long rest after the beginning katabasis. “We hope this will be a peaceful and restorative experience for you.” A small sunroom, shoddily converted into the mask of a bedroom, no bigger than a modest walk-in closet. The size wasn’t a concern, I never needed a lot of space after spending the last year on a couch. It was cold. So cold. The latch on the window was broken so it never fully closed, and the radiator would increase the sound of it’s disjointed hum until it burst boiling water all over my things, and at one time, my hand singing the skin to a red gangly rash. But it was a space of my own. A place I could retreat to, where books scattered the floor in piles and flowers hung across the ceiling. This cold hamlet was a homebase, at least for the time, it was quiet and quiet was what my body needed.

Maybe I felt it was meant to be the final resting place, a six foot plot where a weary body and soul would once again be one, the treaty to end the war. But my body never gave out, that rotting sludge that sat inside my chest degraded, withered, siphoned it dry but it still. Kept. Going. There were days and nights and days and nights where I thought it was my last, I shivered under the pile of blankets I used to keep myself warm and hidden from the constant whispering through the thin aching walls. Days and nights where that pale specter felt fading from the facade. But it never did. In that dark, cold hole the longing dwelled. A candle with nothing but a flickering ember on it’s limp wick.

This grave I lied in, with haunting whispers, frigid air, and only the faint flicker of an ash stained pool of wax seemed unending. The undead was now in a coffin where it belonged, refusing to rest. A decrepit tomb for a rotting carcass that ached to move but lacked the strength. For a time, I thought the room was haunted. I began to believe a dark entity took up residence in this strange closet, siphoning me of my strength, emotion, ability to think. Scrambling my thoughts into a fuzzy haze. Some poltergeist that inhabited the pale walls, but I had known this entity a long time, it was beyond these walls, beyond even myself. I felt it in those houses I grew up in, beyond those gates of hell. I read it in the books of Bowen, Waugh, and Danielewski. It visited the Brontës to Virginia Woolf to Marguerite Duras long before finding me. Countless have known this haunting beyond those that could survive it, much less write its name. It was beyond walls, bodies, souls. Beyond space and time. It existed anywhere it wished at any time, from the moment God damned us out of the garden or the first primates began to walk upright. It had always been, will always be, as long as there was us—there was it.

There I lie, freezing in some forgotten hole buried in the back of Flatbush. I went to class, I went to work, I went “home.” 6 hours of class scattered between 10 hour shifts, essays, reading. Barely sleeping, pinching pennies. Two eggs for breakfast, an apple for lunch, a quarter of pasta and jar sauce for dinner. Three sleep aids at 8:30 to sleep through the night and avoid the hunger. Wake up at 5:30 and start again. The whispering slowly became clear conversations, the conversations became scolding. The winter began to settle in and the room became colder, the space warped, cluttered, smaller, tighter, claustrophobic. Books were knocked on the ground, scattered my floor-bound mattress, clothes strewn wherever there was room. I found a fourth blanket on a fence one night in Prospect Heights coming home from work. It helped keep more warm while the towels that littered the radiator never stopped it from bursting. This was “life” now.

I spent a week in a hospital. After nearly collapsing in the street on my way back from classes I had to leave early, sitting paralyzed on the living room chair I rarely visited. Tears streaming from my opaque eyes I was dragged to spend a week in inpatient care. I knew I had to be there, I knew I had to go, I needed help and rest—neither of which I received. The harrowing experience that drove me deeper into my psychotic hole, ending in fits of maniacal laughter and a patient coup was only survived by the mornings I spent visiting the side window where the sun shone through over the city vista. Each step I took to climbing from my pit seemed to push me further in.

In my haunted house of growing whispers, shadowy corridors, and derealization I would at times muster the manic strength to drag myself to the bar and get so piss drunk I would awake at some distant subway stop at 5 in the morning. Shambling home with an ache in my heart and fear in my mind. That’s how I spent my Christmas in purgatory, that’s how I ushered in the New Year. Whenever I got back to my freezing anchorhold, shivering and delirious, I’d pass out for only a few hours before waking again in a fit of panic, shame, and guilt now with the added symptoms of an aching head, nauseous stomach, and sore body. Fighting hangovers with nothing but eggs, fruit, and more coffee than most Americans drink in a month only attributed to the increasing delirium. Drinking now meant I would be vegetative for at least two days. I was no longer the girl who could run around the city, work an 8 hour shift and go back out the same night hungover. Every hangover left me bedridden for days.

This never stopped the drinking, it was the only time I felt clear minded and alive, energetic and focused. The only barrier to drinking was thoughts of calories, bloating, micronutrients, I couldn’t drink every day because the fear of gaining weight was stronger. I was wedged between two curses, propped up but crushed by my own self-destructive tendencies. When one eased the other got heavier, my balancing act was keeping me from plummeting back into total darkness, spiraling into the shadowy corridors of my unsustainable new home, the same depths that plastered “lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate” on my last gateway. If hell was the caverns below, complete blackness, changing corridors of unreality where all the boulders I forged—which now propped me up just above—toppled down with me waiting for the moment my frail bones finally collided with the floor so they could collide with me, crushing my weak body and desecrated organs through sheer force of gravity, then purgatory was the wedge I was trapped between.

By December I survived suspension, I survived through suspension, as long as I was not falling I was alive with at least the promise of some distant light I could barely see, the flicker of embers on the limp wick of a dead candle. The semester had ended, work was steady, at times it seemed I may even be able to climb out of this hole if only I could loosen myself from the opposing forces that kept me floating above the dark cavern in perpetuity. The hopes would come and go, wash and wain. Blacked out on Christmas at some dive in LES, similarly on New Year in the West Village. Compensate the calories of overindulgent drinking with under-indulgent eating for the week. I was wriggled to free an arm, or a leg, or even to give my crushed ribs some breathing room so I could lift even a finger. Progress seemed like progress, no matter how slow. Only the haunting shame and guilt halted me, begged me to lose myself in the abyss rather than climb to the top.

Fits of tears in public competed with fits of splitting rage in my bedroom, both accompanying the self-loathing slime eating me. Silvia died last summer, reborn as Juna—a sickly inner child formed by fantasy of youth I never had. She loved the sun in her window, and touching flowers, she sat in gardens and dreamed of lying in her mother’s arms crying into her shoulder—an act that would disgust both my mother and I if it ever actually happened. She was born of fear, pain, and the desire to escape, a regression into fantasies of love she never had, all to protect the guilty heart that panged sharp pains in her chest. She could not have the strength to climb to the top of her hole, nor the anger to drop back to the depths, she was built by and for the suspension. Juna wanted to wither there, between those rocks, centuries to pass as her emaciated figure would emaciate more, turn to dust, forgotten, erased in an eternal rest. She was only weak and tired, all she wanted was to be nothing.

I, Christopher to Sofia to Silvia and now Juna, was born January 31st, 1998. When I was 18 years old I promised myself if I didn’t get my shit together by 27 I would just die. At 27 I tried, and failed, many times. In January of 2026 I turned 28. On my 28th birthday I took the friends I had left, my closest loved ones, out to my favorite bars to do what I do best: drinking and drugs. By the end of the night I was countless drinks down tripping on shrooms during the coldest weekend of the winter. Below freezing temperatures that warranted advisories on being outside. I sat idly by, wishing I had the strength to fight my urges as my friends enjoyed doughnuts in the train station and I sipped hot black coffee, shivering under three layers of blacker attire. Fear of the cold comforted by the promise that on this night, for once, I would not be braving the frostbitten walk home alone. A promise interrupted by the fate of too much liquor. I found myself abandoned by the two companions who were supposed accompany me.

As I sped through the blackened streets of Flatbush trying to get to safety before succumbing to the surrounding night my shadow elongated under the flickering glimmer of street lamps. Lanky, small, in a long black coat with the collar propped up to cover my face from the biting wind. That shadow nosferatu followed my tracks, I stared into it’s expressionless black face as each step felt like air under my numbing feet. My vision began to blur, black spots started forming, my eyes would flutter shut and I’d shake them back open. I just needed to make it home. Ten minutes in the abyss felt like eternity. Until I found myself at the doorway, scrambling for my keys. I opened the door greeted by the two who scurried quickly off the train. “Draw me a bath” is all I said, and began removing the convoluted laces of my heavy boots.

The warmth and steam that built in that bathroom flooded my body, brought blood flowing through my thin veins again and as I undressed I was unburdened by the dysmorphia that usually plagued me. Covered by the haze of intoxication, I stared at the ghastly figure in the mirror. The ghost that haunted my walls, the shadow somnambulist that stalked me on the night streets now had a face, color, deep blue bug-eyes that stared back. I could see her so clearly now, the ribs protruding through her skin, the vertebrae piercing the back that always hurt rubbing against the floor of the tub or the seats of the subway. Anything that touched it shot stings through her nervous system. I saw her, she saw me, the skeleton in the mirror, the vampire in the shadows, the boney corpse that shambled through this last fall and winter only kept alive but the discorded efforts of friends turned hospice nurses while she slowly killed herself. I called Abby.

I was disgusted and pleased with the image, it’s what I wanted, to wither, hated the burden it put on everyone around me. To carry my emotions and health whenever I was around. My mom’s tears at my visage in a tank top, her begging me to be careful not to get sick because I “didn’t have the strength to fight it.” Abby’s gasps in horror, protecting me from falling so I never shattered a bone. Mag’s feeding me or getting me warm clothes. I was a patient, terminally ill, kept alive only by the hard work and prayers of those who loved me as I needed to learn to love myself. It was this night, as I lay in the bath on the phone rambling about nothing of consequence at 3am that I realized I couldn’t die here in purgatory, whether I wanted to or not, something kept me alive and I had to choose to keep living, if not for my sake but for it’s.

When I finally loosened the wedge’s grip it was never the rocks that held me in place, suspended above an abyss, but my own grip on them fearing what lie below hoping to climb to the top. I climbed to that place in the middle, searching for the control I lost underneath, control that dragged me out of the spiral before, hope that kept me grasping at the light at the top of the well. I couldn’t drag myself any further up but still feared what lied below. That control and hope that first gave me the power to climb now kept me in hopeless decay, completely powerless in my own demise. I had to let go. I didn’t have the strength to climb, so I fell. The darkness below was far more shallow than I expected, I didn’t plummet back to hell but hit the ground almost immediately. Neither me nor the boulders that kept me in place reached a velocity enough to shatter my body, only leaving light kisses of bruised knees and scraped skin.

I left home, I left my job, I cancelled my residency and crawled to the bottom of the hole to curl up, lick my wounds until I could try again. The conceit of purgatory is the wait. It does not lead to damnation but purges damnation from the soul. Purifies it. The abyss below was not hell, the darkness below me was not torture but stillness. I just needed to allow myself to wait, stop for a moment, let go and release my own punishment. If I ever wanted to reach Heaven I needed to heal, and to heal I needed to rest.

My winter in purgatory ended with a change of setting. Birmingham, Alabama. Two months in some facility atop a hill dropped in the middle of the city. After solitary, a ‘convent’ nestled deep in the Appalachian mountains. Nowhere and nothing. Rest and recovery. Purification of the cancer that now had the rest it longed for it’s entire life, it was always right below me, all I had to do was allow myself to stop holding onto the shame and guilt I punished myself with. I was not God, and whatever that means, I was not my judge, jury, and executioner. I was now just Catherine, those names—Silvia the Sinner and Juna the Punisher—laid to rest. I was judged and the verdict was forgiveness. I no longer needed torment, if I ever needed it to begin with. I just needed to trust something else for once.

‘Sudden arose
Ianthe’s Soul; it stood
All beautiful in naked purity,
The perfect semblance of it’s bodily frame,
Instinct with inexpressible beauty and grace.
Each stain of earthliness
Had passed away, it reassumed
Its native dignity, and stood
Immortal amid ruin.

Upon the couch the body lay,
Wrapt in the depth of slumber;
Its features were fixed and meaningless,
Yet animal life was there,
And every organ yet performed
Its natural functions; ‘twas a sight
Of wonder to behold the body and soul’
—Queen Mab, Shelley

As recounted time and time again—that Cassandra curse, trick of the devil or designation of Saints, the crux of my rise and fall and rise again—imbued new meaning into my surroundings, a weltanshauung, but also an immutable desire for more, a need for revisit, prophetic consistence. Seized by the intoxication of something so profoundly interesting happening, a truer addiction revealed itself, one that pursued me my entire life: excitement in the waves of mundanity. This constant pursuit is what led me to the irreversible conceit of self-destruction.

The vision itself,

‘In that misty message, of a graveyard prairie
A wasted raven field, blood-shot empty eyes
Fogged through glass disks
On a leather masquerade
Rifle in hand, Lilith’s slime in veins
Dropped to the abyss, hand only reaching
The empty depths below’ 
–Ode to a Saint, self

A subject of annihilation, waste, decay.

‘Let the axe
			Strike at the root, the poison-tree will fall;
And where its venomed exhalations spread
Ruin, and death, and woe, where millions lay
Quenching the serpent’s famine, and their bones
Bleaching unburied in the putrid blast,
A garden shall arise, in loveliness
Surpassing fabled Eden.’
 –Queen Mab, Shelley

A warrior of ideals long-lost, bloodied in a haze of smog, painkillers, needles, inhuman brain sludge. This image was my mentor and guide, but became the diviner of a desire to induce vision itself, the intoxicating sensation of sight was overwhelming. It gave me purpose, not just as a self-determining revolutionary performing active theatre of cruelty—but the power of being chosen for some higher purpose, beyond the realm of the material, a creature finally granted access into the sublime so long lost and in that I was removed from the godforsaken boredom of rationalization. No longer just a rejection of conformity I now held the means of rebellion and the motivation to topple the ever efficient machine. I saw myself realizing what I always knew: I was a prophet, an oracle, a mystic of immense feeling. I was to bring about destruction and utopia: but first I needed more visions. I began an alchemical experimentation of substance concoctions

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Literature

Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky’s monstrous masterpiece of literature based on the rise of the Russian Nihilist movement has been a “thing” I’ve wanted to dive into ever since I learned one of my most beloved films—Godard’s La Chinoise—was loosely based on it. Like my experience with La Chinoise, I was intoxicated by Demons in the opposite way Godard or Dostoevsky wanted me to be. Where satire was written I had taken influence, where disdain and absurdity was meant, I found admiration. The character of Pyotr Stepanovich was so dastardly manic and manipulative with so little care for anything but utter chaotic ruin I felt profound giddiness any time he showed up spouting his nonsense “politics” and stumbled through collapsing the careful aristocratic web of his father’s hometown. The ensemble sitcom presentation of characters with confusing overlapping Russian proper names, a heavy emphasis on exploring the absurdities of Russian aristocratic social law, and the long establishing introduction build a bit of a wall to climb before getting to the true meat of the story—but if you manage to hoist yourself up, look at the breadth of burning, rotten flesh that covers the landscape on the other side it will reveal one of Dostoevsky’s most honest and devastating tales with moments of cinematic prose before the idea of cinematic really existed.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

A novel I had been recommended for years and never found the proper motivation to spend the actual money on, partly because I couldn’t differentiate between the tumblr-esque “dark academia” tag it picked up in its many years of acclaim, dragging along with it a feeling of vapidity that’s normally associated with the literary preferences of the tumblr era, and the artistic value it actually has. In truth, it’s both, there is a tumblr appeal, a sensationalized plot of murder among preppy college students who wear business casual to their highly selective Greek class. It does appeal to a the sort of 14-15 year old Gen Z who sat in the back of class, othered by their classmates, protecting themselves with a self-conceit of superiority—but it wants to appeal to that kid. That’s what Tartt is trying to do, not give that child the escape of self-aggrandizement they so desire, she’s at least attempting to rip that child from their stupor and show them: these fantasies only destroy. Whether she succeeds, unfortunately, is beyond her as soon as she breathes the writer’s sigh of relief, wiping her hands clean of it, and sending it to her editor.

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

The first great Russian novel, I admittedly began reading for class, assigned only to read the first chapter “Bela” I found I couldn’t stop there. I got my hands on the relatively short story and hastily read through the rest. An introduction to what would become an important thematic characterization to me: the Russian superfluous men. Pechorin as a listless, existentially bored, dissatisfied thrill-seeker with the rapid extreme mood swings to match won me over immediately on presentation. From his lengthy monologue on trying everything, from books to high society women, and still being so bored he must travel to his description of a duel personality presenting as wanting to be loved, desiring “evil,” and convincing himself he’s so happy despite the obvious contrary was like staring into Alice’s looking glass. A mirror that reflected myself through time and dimension, I finally found someone that had related my internal and utter dissatisfaction with reality in a character from a Russian romantic novel written in 1839. Pair that with Lermontov's gorgeous descriptions of the fickle weather of the Caucus mountains it was easily one of my favorite experiences of the year.

Queen Mab and Notes by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I had spent months scouring bookstores for the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, seemingly underrepresented compared to some of his contemporaries (especially Keats), I finally got my hands on a large copy of selected poetry and prose. The first poem, the beginning work chosen to start this hefty brick of a book, is his revolutionary long-form Queen Mab paired with his personal notes on the subject. I knew Shelley to be a bit of a rebel but I had no idea of 1. how intelligent he actually was and 2. how progressive. Queen Mab tells the strange story of a woman who is taken away on a dream by an ethereal fairy, in classic Romantic fashion, and subsequently shown her perfect egalitarian Utopia juxtaposed to the violent war torn failings of humanity’s Earth. Finishing the vision with a promise that we will tear each other apart until we root out the problem ‘Let the axe/ Strike at the root, the poison-tree will fall;/ And where its venomed exhalations spread/ Ruin, and death, and woe, where millions lay/ Quenching the serpent’s famine, and their bones/ Bleaching unburied in the putrid blast,/ A garden shall arise, in loveliness/ Surpassing fabled Eden.’ and rebuild our paradise. Written in 1812-1813 and influenced by the revolutionary writings of William Godwin, Shelley’s Queen Mab paired with his notes are highly progressive and revolutionary ideas even for our modern era with foundations of Hegelian dialectics, pre-marxist labor theories, existentialist abandonments, proto-feminist critiques of prostitution and many other radical ideas—it’s no wonder Marx admired Shelley as an early socialist thinker lamenting the regret of his early death.

Ars Memoria by Jacob Rakovan

A haunting exercise in poetry that utilizes a mixture of alchemical text and Appalachian folk traditions in magic and storytelling to ruminate on the death of Rakovan’s friend who passed from opiate addiction. Rakovan’s long-form poetics exercise reveals the grotesque feelings of memory and addiction through visceral, violent language. I read the whole poem twice in one day to really take it in but only upon reciting it at one of my poetry readings did I feel the intensity of it weighing down on the silent crowd and myself as I steadily increased the pace of each line on each page. It’s by far one of the most memorable reads of my year and haunts my own memories as it presumably haunts Rakovan’s.

Honorable Mentions

• Eugene Onegin by Aleksandr Pushkin - A similar tale of a superfluous man told in verse rather than prose, and I had the unique pleasure of reading Nabokov’s translation of it.

• Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg - A more obscure Gothic novel that blurs the lines of autobiography and fiction into what feels like an early ergodic text.

• Reveries of a Solitary Walker by Jean-Jacques Rousseau - An autobiographical text that I read when I needed to read it the most, following the later years of Rousseau’s life in exile he ruminates on his pains and pleasures in social rejection while holding fast to the philosophies that got him there.

• Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - A hilarious and strange telling of the classic Faust tale turning into an almost absurd romantic fantasy in verse. Deeply pleasurable and riveting read.

Cinema

The Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987) dir. Eric Rohmer

Notoriously, there is simply nothing I love more than a movie about girls who blur the lines of friendship and immerse themselves in the whimsy of life (see my adoration for Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974). However, I am also not a particular fan of Rohmer’s work. I find most of it to be bland and formic—even bland in its formality!—with a sprinkling of conservative politics that litter almost all of his films. Despite this, I still find myself giving him a shot and being repentantly disappointed, with myself and the film, each time. But, even a broken clock is right twice a day and I walked into Metrograph with a bag of shrooms and a dream and came out eyes dazzling and colorful—and not only from the psychedelics—with a spiritual connection to Jessica Forde’s Mirabelle.

Magic Farm (2025) dir. Amalia Ulman

I was first introduced to the works of Amalia Ulman while attending School of Visual Arts for Film in 2021, though not related to the degree as the paramount creative mind of NY based Argentinian artist and filmmaker Amalia Ulman (whom I also had the great honor of meeting this year!) is far too boundary pushing for the feeble curriculum of SVA’s film program, and was almost instantaneously taken by her feature debut El Planeta. When I learned she was finally releasing a second film, and that it would be playing at Angelika (where I was working at the time!) I was ecstatic and utilized my movie theatre employee perks to ensure my ability to see the film as soon as possible. And then I saw it again. As per usual, Ulman utilizes the unique nature of her creative dispositions to craft a unique, inspired, color-splashed fantastical satire on modern media and exploitation. One part a pulpy and experimental moving painting and one part a clever exploration of the internet age’s obsession with Orientalizing the “third-world.” With Magic Farm, Amalia Ulman only solidifies her position as one of our most interesting contemporary filmmakers.

I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar (1991) dir. Phillipe Garrel

There are moments when the best thing for your mental health—especially when it is at it’s lowest—where it is best and healing to grab your blankets and pillows, place your laptop screen in front of your face, lay on the floor, and pirate a french film about heroin addiction while eating Bonne Maman jam with a spoon. And I’d be lying if that moment came only once this last year. Though, by far, the best experience was with Garrel’s chic 80’s sheen of “opiates are the lover’s drug” in that they design a destructive co-dependency that to my borderline addled mind found almost as intoxicating as the central drug itself.

The Wolf Knife (2010) dir. Laurel Nakadata

A film that exploded into the view of a lot of indie cinema fans this year, including myself. With lo-fi DIY filmmaking akin to the 90’s introduction of digital cameras or Cassavete’s 60’s indie movement and a story of lesbian yearning, trauma, and escape it’s no wonder as to why it became a sudden phenomenon this summer. Nakadata interweaves the tenderness and violence of two impoverished girls living in Florida as they encounter and run from a series of exploitative and malicious encounters with creepy older men while finding increasingly confused connection in the chaos of teenage love for each other. Heavy at all times whether in it’s unreciprocated emotions or it’s actual violence, the pace oscillates between rapid and patient as the two girls lives unravel and their relationship complicates itself. Above all, interlaced with a feeling of loneliness in a world connected more than ever.

Anchoress (1993) dir. Chris Newby

As I said, 2025 was fuckin hard. Throughout I found myself in states where lying in darkness and isolation, pirating films on my laptop screen, was the only thing I could bring myself to care about. Being prone to the purposeful self-harm of religion in my darkest moments, from the meaningful fasting to self-punishment to sacrificial isolation I often seek comfort in relation to the many oppressed women of religious history. Nuns, mystics, anchoresses. In one of these moments, as I decided to hyper-isolate myself after feelings of extreme shame overcame me one week, I found Newby’s forgotten film Anchoress. Following the lives of a family composed of three women and their father in the middle ages, each one is uniquely exploited by the patriarchal society and male authority figures that made it up. From our titular character becoming an anchoress to avoid marriage to a local penal authority only to be exploited by the local priest she sought her comfort in, to her younger sister being then married off in misery to that same authority, and maybe the most devastating: their mother being accused of witchcraft by her own husband then summarily executed for it. The film is laden with three devastating and interconnected tales of misogynistic oppression in church, state, and family. that doesn’t end in the setting but translates very similarly to the modern age.

Honorable Mentions

• House of Tolerance (2011) dir. Bertrand Bonello - Similar to the themes of Anchoress this hard-hitting and devastating depiction of misogynistic violence utilizes the past to juxtapose the present in depicting how misogyny has hardly truly changed.

• Soy Cuba (1964) dir. Mikhail Kalatozov - A masterpiece of cinema for a reason, four vignettes on the exploitation of the Cuban populace under American imperialism through captivating and beautifully composed imagery.

• Near Orouët (1971) dir. Jacques Rozier - In the same vein of “girls who blur the line of friendship on an adventure of whimsy” Rozier’s lengthy beach vacation stole my heart and had me obsessively spouting “Orouët” in public for a week or two after.

• The Mastermind (2025) dir. Kelly Reichardt - Another slow burn Reichardt starring the ever increasingly charming Josh O’Connor as a bumbling art thief desperate to express his autonomy in the failed and dismal life he’s lived.

• My Winnipeg (2007) dir. Guy Maddin - Semi-documentary film that paints the bleak city of Winnipeg with the fantasy and memory of it’s director’s love/hate relationship to his home town.

(p.s. many of these films are available to view on my cinema archive)

In her absence, I was visited by a shattering prophecy, a life-altering image, holy or damnable. Organizing, compiling, and compartmentalizing my feelings, systematizing all the distresses of past and present. Visions of imminent societal collapse with the inevitable descent of the American dollar. The global fiat network crumbling instantaneously under its own lofty weight, a fisher’s net snapping in excess. First panic, then unending war. Perpetual conflict waged by heroes of our time—20-something extremists, strung out from malnourished opiate consumption, unsustainable ideologies manipulated and extorted by the former state now lying in ruin, unfettered by the threat of its violence.

Ideologies fade, war will be war for war’s sake, violence for violence’s. Any forced complacency will break under the whiplash tension of instant freedom, replaced by abandoned, drug-addled violence. From the boiling, bloated carcass of the Leviathan a new beast is birthed, a taxidermic phoenix bursting from the rotting corpse. A shaky hand-stitched Chimera of difference. Ethereal, a blood-and-glue paste-together myth of others.

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Amid many changes in my life—including my own name—I wrote a lengthy journal entry that was meant to be the start of a new project that overshadows the chaos of the previous pages and shed me of the intensity of what I’ve been for so long. I unpacked my thoughts and behaviors, my feelings, experiences, ideology, and perceptions of a world that in many ways confounds, disillusions, and opposes me. As the exercise went on for a multitude of pages I began to enjoy the writing and thoughts that were pouring out of me and realized I had already written what I felt would be the best way to begin the series of essays I am going to be writing based on my entries, in full transparency of myself.

These pages exist in a completely translucent state, my deepest reflections on myself, life, and behaviors—many of which are shrouded in a dichotomy of shame, pride, regret, and admiration—due to this I have paywalled this specific project as a means of protecting my fragile heart and possibly sustaining myself in my struggle to survive. Thus, I present the introductory essay: ‘Observations I: Notes on Ennui & Comfort,’ adapted to prose and beautified by revision. - J.

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The idea that the world will one day end, or that it already has, has permeated the human imagination since our beginning—from mythologies to real-world events to modern media—the idea that everything we know as real, that we perceive as immortal, will perish haunts and excites us. Yet, even in this doomsday consciousness, in these mythologies, events, and media the common perseverance of us is ever-present. A leftover understanding of the role of extinction muddled down through the generations, a longing for annihilation, a collective self-aggrandizement, or just a hope that the world can and will change—the prophecy of devastation remains tucked away in the back of our minds.

Noah’s Ark, Ragnarok, Revelations, Mad Max, Fallout, Stalker, The Cold War, Pompeii, the Greek dark ages—our real and imagined eradications—all revolve around the construction of our survival. Even some our most cynical conceptions—such as Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream—still contain the sliver of our continuation, tortured as it may be. What does die, what must die, is the past. When we imagine the end of the world, what we really picture is the end of social order, the end of our status quo, the death of the Leviathan. In this total death, we are always granted the rebirth of a new future, the “end of the world” is a reset, rather than a real “end.” Marx’s material dialectics tell the same cyclical story, the inevitable collapse of civilizations, the converging of social contradictions in an explosive progression of economics. Worlds have ended for many lives before us and, God-willing, will continue to after us.

In the time of Pompeii, or the collapse of Rome, or the Greek dark ages, when their worlds seemed far smaller and catastrophes seemed far more devastating, when Ragnarok or Biblical floods could actually destroy your entire universe, it was much less taxing to conceptualize. In the mass information age, these “world-ending” collapses fail to compare to the mythologies we have cultivated. When world wars involve the entire world, and nuclear warfare hangs over our shoulders, when climate change encroaches slowly each season, when Katrina level crises happen each week. New corpses strewn through the streets of Palestine and Lebanon show up on our phone screens every morning, when inflation continues to skyrocket but wages stagnate, global pandemics rage on while the public ignores it, the homeless populate every street corner and the only futile solution the state can devise is their genocide. When the specter of fascism puppeteers our government, when capital seems eternal, the collapse is upon us and how can we begin to care? it’s been upon us for decades, we’ve been waiting for it.

In 1928, nestled between The Great War, The Spanish Flu, and World War 2, Polish poet Bruno Jasieński attempted a modern apocalypse myth. I Burn Paris is one part a fantasy and one part a prediction. Jasieński simultaneously conceives a creation and catastrophe myth. A modified bubonic plague is released in Paris by a disgruntled factory worker, quickly contained in a strict military quarantine while the city fractures. Warring factions take hold of sections of the city and try desperately to survive the imminence of death. Chinese Maoists, Fascists, American corporatists, Soviets, French royalists, their age-old enemy the communards, and others—split into their respective areas, all trying to utilize this collapse to forward their own ideology and take ownership of the famous city for themselves. Through an ensemble of characters, we learn about the beliefs and histories conflict with each other, and have interpersonal conflicts, all while a plague rages on around them. As the factions fight over resources and land they slowly dissipate, one by one the leaders succumb to the unavoidable miasma. By the end of the novel all the characters have passed, either by plague or warfare, no one survives. Their infighting inhibits them and the city is left in ruins, with their corpses, their ideologies decay to dust and blow away in the toxic wind.

As a stout Marxist-Leninist, Jasieński does not end the story there. In the depths of the city, separated from the plague, the chaos and death—political prisoners lie in wait. Communists confined to underground cells for ideological crimes. In the ashes and ruins of Paris they rise from their dungeons and take to the streets. Capital has burnt itself to the ground and they are free to impose their political will. Even in Jasieński’s fever-dream apocalypse of a genetically modified super-plague, published in the midst of real world-ending catastrophes, he manages to conceive not only survival, but change. The product of Jasieński’s revolutionary optimism, a Marxist ideal, the inevitable consequence of industry does the hard work and all that’s left is to build utopia. In the face of total collapse, only in the face of total collapse, the meek finally inherit the Earth.

Jasieński conceives his new utopia only when facing the end of the old one. Like the world’s most famous revolutionary figure before him, I Burn Paris becomes its own book of revelations, a biblical fantasy of the end of oppression. Jesus and the disciples imagined the end of Rome, Jasieński imagined the end of capitalism—Jesus’ dream came to fruition, Jasieński’s is at best in progress—but more likely dead in the water. In I Burn Paris all the factions fail to enact their future on the dying city, their fighting leaves them vulnerable to the primordial devastation of the super-plague and one-by-one they fall victim to its unfeeling omnipotence. Jasieński in all his revolutionary optimism and loyalty to the Soviet Union could not conclude an end to this story where even the Bolsheviks are organized enough to impose their will—instead relaying the responsibility of tearing down the status quo to natural forces and releasing hidden political prisoners into the streets of the desecrated city, ripe for rebirth when returned to its natural state.

Mark Fisher notoriously said in his world-famous contemporary analysis of modern capital, Capitalist Realism, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Industry is so ingrained in our minds that even in its rubble we’d struggle to let it go, conditioned to the ebbs and flows of its influence, the only freedom we could imagine from it is if it freed us itself—a slow suicide. Revolution is a dream long-passed, even the provocations of modern Marxists ring hollow, fantasies that act more as identifiers than achievable tasks. “Revolution” is a castrated symbol rather than an actual future. Like the burning of flags or the chanting of protests, it’s mention is a mere wink at the work of others—others that pass that same wink on in a never-ending game of ritual non-action telephone. We all recognize the need for radical change but not the consequence of standing against the state, so we lie in wait for the change to enact itself.

It remains that the end of the world is not the end of the world, the apocalypse is only the autumn of society, like the seasonal death of Earth’s flora simply waiting for rebirth. This leaves us, then, with questions—what is the end of the world? Why is it so linked to our collective psyche? What will happen? What will it look like? In Donna J. Haraway’s seminal work The Cyborg Manifesto she writes “We have all been colonized by those original myths, with their longing for fulfillment in apocalypse.” Haraway’s groundbreaking feminist essay on the integration of nature and modernity is largely about these myths. Myths that connect as one mutual origin, a unified species, she seeks to deconstruct and dismantle their basis and replace them with “the cyborg.” a myth that inhabits and unifies not our similarities, or the assimilation of differences, but a collective of those differences. An amalgamation of various experiences, identities, and sexualities melded into an all-encompassing hybrid of natural and technological.

Haraway’s deconstruction of the origin myths deconstruct the apocalypse myths as well, the necessary dual link from beginning to end is just another dichotomy to be removed. She says, “To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be in dialectic of apocalypse with the other.” To be One is impossible, there is no “One” but a series of others being mashed into a synergic existence. At the heart of this assimilation is the origin/apocalypse dichotomy, the birth/death cycle that we are born the same and we will die the same. The cycle itself is opposed to otherness, to be outside the cycle is to be rejected, the origin myth and its eventual end, are to oppose otherness and assimilate rather than to accept its diversity. It’s hard not to see why this preoccupies our imaginations so much, the apocalypse is not just the apocalypse—it’s the fulfilment of Oneness, the purification of otherness, but in this need for fulfilment we must remain in its aftermath otherwise fulfilment continues to be elusive.

The purification in the apocalypse is seen most evidently in the Christian iteration, the holy will literally ascend to heaven at God’s side while the sinners who rejected him will be left to fend for themselves. The righteous will be made into One while the other will either repent and assimilate or be purged. Despite this oppressive state of apocalyptic worship, the end grips us on that boundary, those who would be purged. The end of the world inhabits the minds of queer people especially, when I asked some friends their relationship with the end of the world they all responded relatively similar—a spectrum of ambivalence to excitement and anticipation. If our collective relationship with the end is one that seeks to keep the other outside the One, then why do we seek its annihilation? We don’t. We seek its purification, not in ours but theirs, the boundary seeks the apocalypse to end apocalypses. The end of otherness by the destruction of Oneness. When we imagine the world’s end we imagine the end of society, we imagine the end of life as we know it and the ability to remake it. The prospect of a new world—a different one, where the boundary is not the boundary—is the dream of all the marginalized. In this the apocalypse needs a new origin as well, one that is not unifying but bastardizing, one from the “them” and not the “us” of the status quo. The apocalypse cannot be one that purifies the wicked or rewards the righteous, it cannot be one of dichotomies. The apocalypse must be a fire that melts dialectics into a thick molten goo, a chimerafication of differences.

Marxist revolutionaries and far-right Christians alike imagine the destructive purification, the respective eradication of their others, sinners or bourgeoisie—the apocalypse will cleanse the world of the evildoers and grant us utopia, the meek will inherit not only the Earth but the power vacuum left in the ashes. In Anarchist-Communism, founding father of Anarchism Peter Kropotkin says “But it seems to us that the masses of the people, which have always been magnanimous, and have nothing of vindictiveness in their disposition, will be ready to share their bread with all who remain with them, conquered and conquerors alike. It will be no less to the revolution to be inspired by such an idea, and, when work is set agoing again, the antagonists of yesterday will stand side by side in the same workshops. A society where work is free will have nothing to fear from idlers.” The only purification collapse will bring is the annulment of our social contract. The “others” of our status quo, sinners or bourgeoisie, in the dust will only exist in the minds of survivors. We would be freed from this contract, to continue this war with them would be to concede to rewriting it, re-instating order, reviving the Leviathan.

To utilize collapse is not to rebuild society, to pay old debts, to seek vengeance on past enemies but to breathe in the fresh air of freedom, renewal, and common ground. Hierarchy will remain hierarchy as long as we seek old world punishments, the oppression of chaos, of difference will return if we hold onto its rules so tightly when they vanish. Class and state cannot dissipate if we cannot release ourselves first by attempting the most radical gesture at our disposal. When meeting our mirror image in a field, instead of fighting for the role of man and slave we share our bread. Releasing ourselves from dichotomies, becoming a multi-form beast of myth, the chimera.

In 1974, fifty years ago now, iconic French New Wave director Jacques Rivette would release his masterpiece. A kaleidoscopic dreamscape that feels like falling into a bed of flowers, swallowing you up in the white pedals of a thousand daises—or perhaps more aptly softly tumbling down a rabbit hole. Celine and Julie Go Boating, an odd three-and-a-half-hour epic taking inspiration from the surrealism of the Czech New Wave, the dual cruelty of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, and the fantastical absurdity of Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking Glass. It's confounding, iconoclastic, radical, wondrous Paris has become entwined with my soul, becoming one with my identity. Though this strange world inhabited by phantom ladies, grips all who find the time to commit to it’s whims—not entirely from what it is but also what it isn’t. Celine and Julie Go Boating IS a made-up world, a place where sense is thrown away and two women can be cosmically bound so tightly together they’ll entirely reject their jobs, their rent, their lives. Yet it remains grounded in clever wordplay, lies, and an intensely intimate love. Rivette crafts a world that is and isn’t otherworldly, one that is a distance away but only a short one, one that can be real through the collective manifestation of a universal tulpa. It really is a wonderland, and that wonderland can very much be a reality.

In 2020, I received my associate’s degree in film. I spent three years working towards it, wasting a year in a daze of apathy only shaken out of it by a professor who loved a script I wrote. My first script. I spent the next two added years doing and re-doing what I should have already done. I retook classes, fixed my grades, wrote, started clubs. I failed a lot, but I tried. Something I hadn’t done before in my fifteen or so years of schooling. I tried and felt unstoppable, insatiable. I dealt with politics of the school, of the nation. I went to protests, I met people, formed real beliefs, I became embroiled in the world—for the first time, I was a person. During this same time. Around my second-to-last semester of community college, as I was rearing up to begin applying to schools, planning large projects and my future, an international pandemic swept the world. Everything I had built crumbled. My films, my connections, my fundraisers, my personhood. All suddenly gone, turned to a fine dust by the negligence of people who will never know I exist. I finished my final two semesters online, I passed with high grades, I turned my low two-point-something GPA into a 3.4. I went to School of Visual Arts. I had just spent two years locked in a house with my parents and I craved the freedom and the bright lights of the city I fell in love with as a child. I signed whatever loans were available, I accepted starting as a first year student, I needed to be free of that house.

I was older than most of the people in my classes, I was 22-years old at the time, while everyone around me was new, young, fresh, budding. I felt uncomfortable forming relationships with them, I found it hard to relate in any way. I made one friend and quickly became disillusioned with the school, its curriculum, and the film industry. My attempt at normalcy had failed, I left after a year and returned to the home I sought so desperately to escape. I was deep in the throes of new gender dysphoria, and I had embarrassed myself after self-destructively sabotaging my own final film. All of this seems inconsequential to a French film from 1974 about two women going on a surreal magical adventure but understanding the context in which I first watched this movie, the context of my life, is understanding the context in which it gripped me and continues to grip so many others.

That summer is when I watched it for the first time, At 3am in the coveted darkness of my parents’ basement, lying on the velvety blue sofa that resides down there, the soft glow of my television screen burning into my retinas. I watched two women reject everything—rationality, truth, careers, money—I watched them “throw their lives away.” Stuck in a lull, not watching much of any cinema, terrified and heartbroken at the idea that I just wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars and five years of my life—I was finally alive again, not reborn but entirely new, a fresh birth bursting from the other side of the mirrors I despised looking at. The person who was laying on the couch was long dead. Decaying into the cloth, fungus covering his corpse. He was killed by a world that sold him dreams, fantasies, a better life—then stole them back as soon as he paid up. Now replaced with a strange new ghastly being from a parallel world. This new person, this unearthly being, who took solace in her ugliness, her nothingness, her wickedness, no longer dreamed, no longer fantasized, she just was. For the first time a spirit was born of this flesh, a spirit that no longer cared.

I have attempted to write about this film all year. Each time I found myself in the same place, I wanted to write about this film, this piece of cinema I hold so dear to my heart. I wanted to do it justice, I wanted to write something as sprawling, clever, intimate, fantastical, and intelligent as Rivette’s magnum opus. But time and time again, all I could write about is myself. The circumstances of my first viewing, the collapse of my life, the mental state I was in, gender dysphoria. Each time I sat down and wrote that’s what came out. I tried to write about Alice in Wonderland, wordplay, Juliet Berto, fantasy, romanticism—but it all felt contrived, phony. Now we’ve arrived in the new year, 2025, and it’s Juliet Berto’s birthday. So, I’m going to finish this essay and I’m going to release it as is, letting everyone gawk at the lives I’ve lived.

Yet, this feels like the purpose of the film, as a reflection, a mirror to look at myself in. A journey through my own looking glass, a version of me that hadn’t yet fully manifested, a blurred shadow trailing behind me as I sifted through this strange new world I was spiraling down into. Behind all the cleverness the magic still exists, the love, the happiness, the wonder, the freedom—perhaps behind the cleverness is where we’re supposed to be looking, behind the intelligence of it’s craft lies a mirror, or a rabbit hole, or a boat being manned by a beautiful phantom beckoning us to throw away our inhibitions and take the plunge.

Western culture has warped our understanding of sacrifice. It’s been twisted, removed from its role in the fervor of change, siphoned of its selflessness—if it exists at all. “Save yourself,” a designation of individualism, even the Christians have disposed of their deity’s ultimate communal ethos in favor of the Roman mocking. “Save yourself,” a condemnation of their countless martyrs and their God, turned into a fool’s errand, a worthless effort. “Save yourself, tell others they too can save themselves but only by themselves.” Whether Jesus—hanging there on that cross, using his final breaths to beg forgiveness for the very men who mocked and tortured him—was a God, or a metaphorical character, or just some revolutionary doomsday prophet; his life, and the Christian theology that grew from it, revolve his death. His sacrifice.

This sacrifice is so important to Christianity that they center it behind every altar, on every wall of every church, around the necks of every faithful. The machine of his demise is the symbol of faith, his demise is the crux of reverence. To call upon the true meaning of this symbol, from the swathes of the faithful would be unthinkable. To ask them to give a piece of themselves for others, as that piece of Christ hangs from their shoulders, would propagate the ire of everyone from the populace to the pope himself. Give a little time every holiday to dish out food to the poor, give some money during the offertory and judge those who don’t, give your old clothes to Goodwill—the extent of our sacrifices to others. Simple extensions of what we do to save ourselves. But asking to give, to relinquish a piece of yourself, a piece of your body and soul is a cross that would be a waste to bear.

Yet, even outside the dead God, hanging limp on that hill, the saints are held to the same revered martyrdom. From political prisoners to repentant heretics to simply the most devout victims, the catalogue of saints, those who have been canonically recognized as making it into Heaven, saved by our rosaries and their acts of extreme faith—are more often than not those who gave up their flesh for something bigger than themselves. Their sacrifice granted them the greatest gift they could imagine: eternal paradise by their God’s side. Now an act of such ideological devotion is only an exercise in futility. Belief, an intangible and useless abstraction, dying for it is a waste of your life—despite historically the canon telling a different story. Arguably one of the most important figures in Christianity—especially to the French, a people who have famously reconciled their own deaths—is their patron saint: Joan of Arc. Joan’s sacrifice sits in a unique position for examination. Due to the period, the importance of her actions, and work of the French state, she solidifies herself as an existent Christ figure with tangible benefits. Through martyrdom she completed her divine tasks, granting the French their freedom and land from English occupation. The circumstances around her death and story are political, purposefully manipulated propaganda, despite this, Joan remains a figure who died for her beliefs, she donned a man’s dress, she endured the torture from her church, and in the light of her pyre she held her wooden cross high and awaited her seat by God. She completed her quest, through death, France was free.

Today, such extreme acts of reverence and penance are deemed objectional at best—despicable at worst. Yet, because Christianity has built its foundation on sacrifice it cannot completely remove the idea from its tenets, despite whatever the popular thoughts of the time are. Creating a strange contradiction in ideology and accessibility, the paralysis state requires that extremist acts be eradicated, ideologies be snuffed out while the Catholic Church seeks to retain its place of power through increasing membership. Like other structures of power have in the past sought to deal with such social contradictions on their deathbeds, like white supremacy assimilating non-Anglo whites into its ranks as civil rights movements gained traction, like patriarchy attempting to remove its homosexual history as gay rights grew in strength—structures of power seek to remain in power even in contradiction to themselves—the Catholic Church had to remove extremism from sacrifice.

Perpetuality politics, the state of suspension, ceaseless capitalism demands paralysis. The eternal sameness of everything, the removal of crises, the removal of change. Thought, discontent, irritation, cannot be removed. But the will to do so, the call to action, can be stomped out in the hearts of the public. The Catholic Church was built on acts of revolutionary sacrifices, acts of giving one’s body to fight occupation, oppression, suppression. Like all extreme ideologies that gain enough strength to garner the true fear of status quo, the realization set in that they could not be stomped out and so they must be subsumed. Christianity, once a band of rebels against a stronger force now holds a position as one of the most powerful political entities in history. With this designation it must retain its power, through assimilation of contradiction, through the acceptance of paralysis, through the removal of its own soul. We are no longer asked to give for others, but to give for ourselves. Sacrifice remains because it could not go, but what we sacrifice and who we sacrifice for has changed. This simple shift has removed the communal reverence and moved it to a state of individual shame.

Don’t fight for the trans-woman being harassed on the street, don’t wear your Palestinian flag pin to work, don’t attend protests, be careful what you say online, don’t start any trouble it won’t do you any good. They aren’t acts of empathy, emotion, compassion, anger, ideology—they’re acts of suicidality. Self-destructive naivete. Instead of allowing yourself to be crucified, burned, eaten by lions, stoned to death just give up sex, don’t drink, obey the law—be the upstanding citizen the martyrs, our God, wasn’t. Go even further. Eat healthy, don’t smoke, get your exercise, get your rest, be punctual, be a hard worker, don’t get angry, don’t get too sad, don’t be emotional. Acts of service disguised as sacrifices of self-determination. Service to perpetuality, sameness, status quo. Acts of shame disguised as reverence. Shame in service to eternal rationalization. e so ashamed of eating, develop that disorder. Retain control of yourself. Be ashamed of that cigarette, it kills you. Retain control of yourself. Did you go for a run this morning? Retain control. Your anger is immature, control your emotions. Retain control. What do you have to be so depressed about? Retain control.

Acts of service disguised as act of self-control disguised as sacrifices. To sacrifice, to truly sacrifice, to give your body and soul to others—as Joan of Arc did, as the martyrs did and do today from the Christians of the past to the Palestinians of the present, as Christ did—is an act of service, though an act of service to something other than the fabric of our universe, other than the God of our daily lives, other than the continued suspension, other than order. To give to a force older than order, older than paralysis, the force of fear in the hearts of all perpetuators, the inevitable chaos of the planet’s spin, the miniscule slowing of its rotation. That same force that scrambles words of the climate, the 70-degree New York City November. The force that makes the American war machine send billions to Israel for genocide while trying to maintain a public image of trying to stop it. The force that Hobbes’ Leviathan tries to strangle, the force that the noble savages embody, the force of the slave achieving his consciousness. The inevitable, the collapse, the progress, the change, the chaos. To act in service of this old God is not only a foolish waste, a naïve suicide, but a dangerous game as well—and so it is granted by reactionaries, through their insistent condemnation, the status of being a truly revolutionary act.

“Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie.” – V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution

To sacrifice is to give yourself for the other, to sacrifice is to live without fear of death, to live without fear of death is to oppose perpetuality. In the era of pure human commodification, to live perpetually is to maximize gains and minimize losses. Every body lost is a blow to the margin, every body lost in opposition is pure liability. Food for reactionaries to cry in anguish at their political instability, to attempt at enacting heftier cultural manipulations on sacrifice. Each Christian martyr would be a fool, Joan of Arc’s and Aaron Bushnell’s immolations both acts of unsuspension. Jesus’ crucifixion unassimilable. Calls to collapse, calls to change, the reframing of their acts, testaments to their achievements. “He saved others, let him save himself” they laughed, but saving himself would sacrifice the others.

I had contemplated and dreaded this post since July ended, I’ve been so busy with everything and had no time or urge to write this when there are more important things to write, but I needed to get back on track. Things are unstable, money is non-existent, only from the kindness of strangers have I been able to avoid becoming trans-ient. I missed June’s post—which was arguably the most important post I needed to write, but we’ll get into that later—I missed it due to issues with my laptop that have now luckily been solved for free. Albeit with the voiding of it’s warranty, but I digress.

Trans Girl Suicide Museum

by Hannah Baer

Trans Girl Suicide Museum. A phrase I continuously roll around on my tongue. I found Hannah Baer’s deeply personal essay on the table of a McNally Jackson in downtown Brooklyn, I couldn’t afford it but I also couldn’t resist it. Trans Girl Suicide Museum. The act of being watched to death. An archiving of your decay. The common trans girl spiral into blackness, perceived totally by the public. I’m barely into the book, maybe around fifty pages. It’s my second backup, I keep it mainly as light reading when I’m indisposed. “light” reading. “easy” reading. Trans Girl Suicide Museum. I find myself drawn to it even now, returning to it in my thoughts every day. The phrase alone is alluring, the idea of suicide, the idea of dying being linked to your identity and the act of it being gawked at. I think about it every day. I’m dying, I feel like I’m dying, I’m not dying, but I am “dying.” I am seeking to die. Seeking to spiral.

This is why Trans Girl Suicide Museum is so important, the trans girl death spiral. Not suicide suicide. Sometimes suicide, but most times not. The trans girl death spiral, the suction into inhumanity, down the drain, self-destruction. chaos. Trans Girl Suicide Museum. Trans Girl Suicide Museum. Trans Girl Suicide Museum. I’m writing a book, inspired and motivated by the Trans Girl Suicide Museum, the death spiral, chaos. I’m calling it Within Chaos and I want it to illustrate the death spiral. Not in the way that Trans Girl Suicide Museum does as a catalogue of personal events but in a way that illustrates the ideas, the concepts, the feelings that make up my death spiral and my beliefs and my yearning for the drain.

Near to the Wild Heart

by Clarice Lispector

I’m nearly finished with my second Lispector novel, which was ironically her first and in reading it I’ve come to grant Lispector a place as one of my favorite authors. While Near to the Wild Heart is an obvious precursor to more monumental works, she manages to capture something so viscerally raw in her stream-of-conscience writing with a prose that is poetically frantic and energetic. Her novels tend to revolve entirely around the mundane, events that are critical to individual lives but still everyday—she deconstructs them to their barest bones, atomizes them, rips them to shreds to uncover what’s happening inside, what makes them tick. The Passion According to G.H. is extreme, uncovering the innards of a roach, but Near to the Wild Heart still seeks the same thing: to understand. To understand a marriage, the two women involved, even the man, to understand how they found themselves here in this situation, it seeks to understand their every thought, feeling, anxiety. Lay them bare for us to take in, watch every insecurity unfold.

Neon Genesis Evangelion and Asuka Langley-Soryu

I finally sat down for Neon Genesis Evangelion. Before beginning I had frequently been told that I am very much like notorious character Asuka Langley-Soryu, even being told I’m “the most Asuka person I’ve ever met.” Every time someone says something like this to me I feel warm and exhilarated—after all someone has thought about and understood me enough to attach my personhood to a characterization. I had heard some whispers about the unpleasantness this implies and this only peaked my curiosity.

Asuka Langley-Soryu, the fiery red-headed “Second Child” and pilot of the Eva-02 is a complex case of insecurity and overcompensation. Asuka, despite being a massively important character, does not get introduced for eight whole episodes and in meeting her immediately leaves you with a sense of antagonism that becomes confusing as she begins to take a far more center-stage role. She’s loud, boisterous, self-obsessed, self-aggrandizing, and incredibly cruel to deeply troubled protagonist, Shinji. She is, by all means, meant to be incredibly obnoxious and distasteful. Especially when juxtaposed to the two other children we have followed thus far, Shinji and Rei, who are quiet, reserved, and troubled. Asuka acts as a foil, mostly to Shinji, incredibly self-assured compared to his deep insecurity, explosively loud to his quietness, headstrong to his self-doubt.

However, as the show goes on we begin to witness Asuka fail to live up to her own expectations, while Shinji comes into his own and eventually passes her. In this moment, her sense of self begins to crumble around her, breaking down as she realizes she is not perfect and she can’t be—sometimes she will fail. We begin to learn more about her, her life, her mother, her relationships with other people. We begin to get a fully picture of this 14-year old girl with the world on her shoulders, we see how she’s not an opposite to Shinji but exactly the same, a deeply insecure child with abandonment issues and deep-seeded anxieties about her place in the world. Where Shinji internalizes it and isolates, Asuka twists it and internalizes a need for perfection, she has to be the best because otherwise she becomes nothing. As she begins to fail she begins to come apart, and her need to achieve that status again becomes more and more desperate which only causes her to continue failing. Asuka becomes stuck in a vicious cycle where her entire personhood revolves around what she can accomplish, and when she can’t accomplish that her personhood vanishes and her ability to accomplish anything at all vanishes with it.

When I was 21 I took an intro sociology class, I had prided myself on my knowledge of the subject already being decently well read and intelligent, deeply embedded in Marxism and politics, and heavily interested in philosophy. I had developed a relationship discussing these topics with the professor and had established myself as a well-informed and intelligent member of the class. One day I had zoned out, lost concentration to the noises in my head. Which can happen from time to time. During this I was asked a question. I didn’t hear it and was unable to answer anything coherent—in front of the entire class. I felt disgusting, I spiraled, I cried and cut myself at home, I was so furious with my stupidity I considered dropping the class and just rotting in bed. Obviously in the end I finished it, the professor even gave me a letter of recommendation, it didn’t reflect my perceived intelligence—it was simply a mistake I had made that I almost made worse by my tendency to self-defeat.

I can overreact, whenever I feel stupid, or condescended to, or embarrassed I snap. People have seen this happen, many times, its not something that I’m proud of and have tried to work on but that feeling of someone looking down on me, not respecting my ability to understand the world around me, to grip the insecurity I have inside me and wave it in my face trips a booby trap in my heart. Now seeing it depicted in Asuka, and knowing everyone else sees it as well almost made me feel sick. I had been told I’m like characters before, Anna from Possession, Erika Kohut from The Piano Teacher, etc. but usually I find that amusing. They have quirks I often find endearing albeit strange. But being recognized in Asuka felt almost humiliating, nauseating while also warming. It meant that they not only saw my insecurities, my wrath, my suffering but they saw where it comes from, the stem of my insanely neurotic behavior and they felt for me. Maybe annoyance, but in time empathy. Asuka Langley-Soryu is such a deeply complex and and developed character I instantly loved her and her reflection of myself, it made the end of her arc hit even harder.

Righteous Fury, Holy Suffering

In June it finally released. My first non-self published essay. A deeply personal, cultural, and artistic exploration of women and religion. I wished to examine the reason “God,” Catholicism, and religious mania seem so prominent with modern women, including myself, despite the overt oppression of women under the rule of these ideas. I analyze Joan of Arc, Anna from Possession, Nana from Vivre sa Vie, the haunting orchestra’s of Kristin Hayter, and the sublime horror of Mother Mary. All on The Big Ship.

The Warm Glow of the Summer Sun

During the month of July I went to the beach. My parents go down and spend a week every year, I usually pass in order to avoid the cramped awkwardness of sharing a small space with them. This year would have been especially bad. I was only saved by the grace of my two friends who came along. In fact, the only reason I put myself through that nauseous claustrophobia was so they could experience the town trapped in the nostalgia of my childhood—Seaside Park, New Jersey.

I don’t wish to get into the deadnaming, the anxiety, the disorder of a vacation, it all rolled off my shoulders like droplets of water plummeting to the sand after leaving the saltwater of the Atlantic ocean. I hadn’t even internalized how miserable of a week it should have been until I was recounting the stories to a friend who aptly pointed it out. None of it mattered because I lived a life that week that I had dreamed of since I was a child, I ate fruit, and bread, and soft-boiled eggs. I had picnics on the beach, nights on the boardwalk, cigarettes by the ocean, I sun bathed until my skin was bright red, I felt the scorching radiation of the that center star blanket me and didn’t want to move. I lived a life of beauty, romance, decadence, hedonism. I felt love and let it fill me up, and I let my own out entirely. I talked, and smiled. I smiled. I saw the horizon of the ocean as the sun set behind it. Wafting in the gentle waves, a strong edible metabolizing in my mind. It was a moment of unbridled magic.

Angels

I had to return home. I had to get back to daily life. Return to the struggle of scrounging for food, and money, and work. I returned with a golden baroque angel broach and two marble white angel earrings. The image of these beautiful, ideal but distorted bodies. These heavenly creatures, their human forms, endowed with a light I dream of. I found them occupying my thoughts most times of the day, their sweet songs penetrating my eardrums. I wanted to be like them. So light, so romantic, so otherworldly, indescribable, indiscernible. I internalized their image in myself, I returned from that week in Eden and vowed it would be reality.

I needed that light within me all the time, penetrating my soul. This is all I desire from this short life anymore. Holy light.

A human hand can be soft or tough, large or small, complete or incomplete, violent or loving, but it will always be warm. A series of biological processes to protect our fragile bits ensures that. The warmth may vary slightly, a punch may be thrown with more heat than a hug, though even a hug is unique for each one given, but it always evens out. Body temperature always returns to its baseline of a breezy 98.6°F (36°C). To many, however strangely, many like Blue—touch is always hot, it burns, it blisters the skin causing pain even when it doesn’t intend to.

         Blue was found by rescuers locked in a horse barn, abandoned, and emaciated, starving to death. We have no knowledge of who his previous owners were but considering how he was found it’s safe to assume Blue’s first couple of months weren’t ideal. Blue’s relationship with touch has become muddled by violence, confused and terrifying—each touch, no matter how soft, is violent. His skin trembles at the thought, he retreats even when you pet him, crouch down lower your hand and he won’t concede. Blue’s of touch is not one of just the past but one of the future, touch isn’t just violence that has happened to him it is violence that is happening and will happen and each time he allows touch he allows violence.

            To be touched, in any way, is an ecstatic experience, one of intense emotion, anger, hate, love, excitement, sensuality, fear. The warmth of others can be overwhelming, a trade of blood rushing through veins, a transfer of warmth between two. Body temperatures intertwine with each other, syncing to the baseline warmth, but touch can trade more. A kiss can trade saliva, love, tongues for the time being, pleasure, along with warmth. Wrestling, an old masculine pastime, can trade respect, pain, adrenaline. Sex can trade all of these. Warmth is manageable, your body handles that on its own without you ever being conscious of its processes. Saliva, tongues, respect, adrenaline, pain, love, pleasure—these are more difficult, they require a conscious effort to remain mutual for an even trade, a wrestler may not have to worry about evening the trade as their goal is to dominate their partner, but a lover doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, seek domination. Pleasure, love, adrenaline, respect—all seek to be evenly traded between two interconnected bodies.

            Trading touch evenly is a delicate, sensitive task, one that can’t be done in fear or anxiety. To trade touch evenly you must have already traded trust, and trust is a gambit. A risky trade, there’s no guarantee that you can trust anyone and in this way trust is a gift, a gift you hope someone will handle carefully and will gift you with in return, There’s no guarantee on either of these things, they may drop it, crack it open, maybe they’ll never trade theirs. Maybe they will and you’ll be the one to stumble and fall one day, crack it yourself, or maybe it will shatter. Yet, you need to trust that they won’t, even when they might, they probably even will. Trust is fragile. It’s also repairable, though sometimes it’s not worth repairing. To trade evenly you not only need to trust in trust, but you also need to trust in others, both of you must hold each other’s trust, cracked, bruised, and repaired.

            If you trust in them, but they don’t trust in you, if you attempt an even trade but theirs is one of domination, as if wrestling, then touch is violence. Whether it’s a domination of fear or a misguided conditioning. If they only want to take, to never give, to take pleasure, love, adrenaline but never give, touch is a violent act. A fight, a wrestling match, a battle—the prize simply being control, domination of the supposed opponent and over the self. If touch is a trade for you, and you give but they only take, touch becomes eternally violent, it begins to burn. A trade is a mutual give and take, and if this trade has always been a violent give but never receive, taken but never given, to take yourself feels violent.

            To take touch, to take someone’s warmth, to take their love, their pleasure, their spit, their adrenaline, their respect, and give the same in return begins to feel as violent as the one-sided trade. Mutuality becomes violent, the warmth of touch begins to burn all the time. To take at all never feels right, it always reminds you of violence, but you have now become the violent one. Taking what you feel you are not owed, as someone who took what was not owed from you. You must give all, completely, wholly, more than they could ever manage, to compensate for what you feel you don’t deserve. Or, you can withhold giving ever again, hoping no one ever tries to give to you, holding onto your trust, your love, your pleasure as your own. If they do, and you withhold, if you refuse to let go of your trust, refuse to attempt a mutual trade and they continue to attempt with you, you have become the violence.

            Blue is afraid of touch, he yearns for it but fears its implications, he overcompensates for the touch he believes he does not deserve. Blue cannot become the violent one though, he has no power over us, his trust in us is one of parent and a child, he has no true control over us like we do of him. Even if his touch were to turn violent, and he were to sink his teeth into my flesh, his violence would not be wholly violent, it would be understood as fear, a fear he let overtake him. If my touch were to become violent towards him violence towards me would be understood, maybe even praised by the community. Still my violence has power to it, a social hierarchy, our disproportionate power would reveal itself as an overreactive violent response, one meant to reinstate control. He would be put down; I could legally kill him. His trust can only be given to me, he cannot take trust from me, I don’t need his trust because I have control, the trade of touch will never be mutual. There will always be an implication of violence between us which he will always need to fear.

            In this, touch reaches a social stratum, to be touched by a parent is not a mutual trade they hold all the power. A child must place all trust in a parent and a parent doesn’t need to place any trust in the child, in this way the violence is whole from a parent, the trust is wholly unbalanced, and the damage is complete. A child’s relationship with their parent will always have an undercurrent of violence. If the child were ever to react to the parent, to defend itself with any violence, the parent would always have the social authority to crush the will of the child, to break its spirit through an overreach of violence. While measures have been made to ameliorate the violence towards children, the execution has been poor, and violence extends past the limits of physical touch. The child has little legal authority or social capital and in this way even the violence of touch is uneven, even a violent trade is not mutual.

Touch between a man and a woman has the same unevenness, a trade devoid of mutuality, a mutuality that cannot be achieved because a man, no matter how much he attempts to remove himself from it, to even the ground, will always have a social system that empowers him over her. The trade can never be evenly made, there will always be a power dynamic and in such there will always be a violence to touch. An uneven subtext. Just as my touch to Blue is one of violence, because he knows at any moment softness can become anger and there’s nothing he can do. Just as the trust a child places in a parent can easily be shattered and never repaired because a child has no power over a parent. Then just as a woman’s trade of touch with a man will always have an implication of violence, it will always be one of fear, of anxiety, of uncertainty. Touch in this way can never be even, the trade can never truly be mutual between them. The imbalance turns all soft warmth into a visceral burn.

            There are many who treat touch as merely a trade, they break it down into its parts rationalize love into mutual distrust, it protects them from the dynamic of power. The trade can still be made on this mutual ground, the trade will be even, mutual, safe—but it will be an even mutual nothing. Touch will become just that, touch. There will be no attempt at trading love, pleasure, adrenaline, respect. Touch will happen, safely, mutually, but there will be nothing gained. Swathes of the population prefer this, it makes it easier not to worry about intimacy, love, pleasure, implications. The trade is just a trade, a trade of nothing and nothing is a lot lighter to carry. Though they have deprived themselves of something more, something greater, they have deprived themselves of heaviness, of warmth, of touch.

            Yet, the trade is not just a trade, even the trade of nothing holds within itself the uneven subtexts, the looming violence. Even in a trade that assures itself to be devoid of connotations, of barter, of trade, holds itself accountable to the leviathan. The overarching structure it exists within will tip the scales. If ten pounds of bricks and ten pounds of feathers weigh the same then someone is leaning on the bricks, waiting to throw them at the owner of the feathers. The trade of nothing, even with its pretense of mutuality, exists on a scale that is fundamentally tipped. The bricks and the feathers may measure up the same mass but the influence on the scale, on the weight of the bricks, tips it in their favor so even then the dichotomy of light and heavy are uneven opposites, no longer diametrically opposed, unbalanced by the influence of a scale that favors the bricks.

            Ultimately touch comes with the final notion that it will always separate, there will always be a space between you and the other, however miniscule, unseen to the eye. Warmth will transfer, the trade will happen, but it will always be separate. For this reason, the trade of nothing is possible, and for the same reason the violent domination as well. The heavy trade will hate the separation, touch won’t just be a barter between two, but an impossible equation of turning two into one. Touch will seek to annihilate this separation, merge itself into the skin of the other, the ultimate mutual trade—the need to never trade, to be wholly each other. The flesh of two slapping together as if it just needs to do it the right way so it can transcend the physical space and remove the separation. The trade is alchemical, magical, impossible. In knowing it’s impossibility you accept the futility of trying; you accept wanting to anyway. The alchemical trades hope. Hope that we are not truly alone, that the scales are not omnipresent, that the imbalance is not an intrinsic part of our existence. That we are a part of something separated only by an arbitrary system, the alchemical trade posits that we can not only rebalance the scales, but that we can remove the scale from the equation. Even a trade of hope between two entities is unbalanced, but we can hope for a rebalance, a removal of balance, of the dichotomy balance requires, and return to that whole if we only keep touching.

May is the bell of new life for most, the month we are compensated for the dreary rain of April, the month the flowers bloom, the grass is fully green again, the birds chirp every morning. For most, May represents beauty, life, return to the safe warmth under the sun. For me May represents irritation, tall grasses, clothes that make me feel bad, sweat, itchiness, gnats, and above all that same warm sun. The blistering heat of its UV rays bearing down on us for an even longer period of time. It sits in the sky, smug in its omnipresence, in it’s oppressive gaze, burning our skin and killing our cells. Knowing we have to love it because we need it more than it will ever need us. The sun is a cruel God and May is the beginning of it’s peak season. To me that is not cause of celebration but for disgust, those glimmers of gold steal a piece of me every year, the passion and excitement I usually hold close feel siphoned from my hands and only granted back to me in October when the sun’s gaze begins to recede and I can once again receive my audience with the moon earlier and earlier.

The oppressive structure of the sun is one where I must endure it’s constant pressure all while carrying out my tasks as if it’s not there, on my shoulders, whispering in my ear, taking my life. So here I am, completing my task, searching for my voice, my soul, my passion back and… only claiming dust of what’s left. I haven’t been writing. I’ve been struggling to want to, to know what to say, to breath air into anything. I blame the sun but perhaps it’s not entirely it’s fault. Though those rays continue to haunt me. While I don’t write I do plan, figure out ventures moving forward, finding some structure and above all watching, reading, and listening. So May was a month of stress, listlessness, emptiness, boredom, and television.

I Saw The TV Glow

Jane Schoenbrun’s second feature film I Saw The TV Glow is making its rounds in theatre's right now. I went to see it. I missed the other trans film event of the year, The People’s Joker, and I’m not particularly interested in catching up to that one but I loved Schoenbrun’s debut We’re All Going To The World’s Fair and knew this was another project scored by beloved indie darling Alex G—despite how I feel about non-diegetic music in films—I was interested. Above all, it was about being trans, I never felt my experience with being trans was that universal, that it was ever really captured by anyone other than me. I felt like the outlier in the “trans journey” and thus I expected to enjoy I Saw The TV Glow, but not have this intense emotional connection with it. Then, as I sat in that theatre, and I watched the grainy filter placed on top of the digital footage flick on, I watched as a little boy stared at his TV screen the same way I had stared at him. A commercial for some cheesy fake show that doesn’t really matter, the camera cuts to us in the POV of the television. He stares at us, we stare at him. Within his eyes carried something and nothing. Nothing for him, those eyes seemed empty and lost, but they carried something for me—my memories, my emptiness, my eyes—locked inside this young actor, Ian Foreman, staring at me. In this moment I knew I was wrong and that something was here, placed specifically for me. I remembered my childhood, my teenage years, my post-graduation and early 20’s, my life now.

In a scene later in the film, when the metaphor has been smashed on your head to the point where missing it is only deliberate, Owen—that little boy now grown—utters the words “I waited for her to show back up, force me underground.” The context of what he means doesn’t matter, he needed someone else to push him. Make it acceptable, loveable, possible. Time flies in Owen’s life, the years pass by as he lives in a purgatory of fear, a purgatory I found myself trapped in post-graduation. I think of my purgatory, a period I thought had extended well before my graduation, a period I wrestle with daily in regret, a period I blamed on the pandemic, my parents, my cousin, friends, work, Eastern Pennsylvania. I blamed anything I could. Unlike the nightmare fiction of I Saw The TV Glow I don’t get those years back, I can wake up, go underground—and I have—but those years are still gone and only forward exists. Time does slow again, I feel de-aged mentally as if I was a newborn but the years don’t return, not really. Time returns, it returns to normal and that’s all there is, your new life, new time, there is always still time.

Duet for Cannibals

When I found out about dear beloved icon, and personal inspiration, Susan Sontag’s film career I had to watch immediately. Going home that night and choosing a peculiar film named Duet for Cannibals, a title that caught my attention instantly, I had no expectations, no information on what this film would be like—I didn’t even know it was foreign language until I started it. I knew nothing and was surprised to find how suited it was for my specific tastes. Duet for Cannibals follows a man who takes a strange job working for a politician, doing menial normal assistant jobs while also living in his house and often taking care of his wife. The circumstances of this job are strange as it is but only get stranger as the secrets and dynamics of this couple unravel and meld. Like much of Sontag’s writing the film feels not only non- but anti-didactic. It doesn’t wish to teach any lessons, sell any messages, it just seems like an exercise in thought and image. Coming out in the same year as both Godard’s Masculin Féminin and Bergman’s Persona it’s unusually in the same vein as both, a strange centrist between Godard’s hyper-politicism and Bergman’s artistic catharsis. Having a scene that was near identical to the moment in Masculin Féminin where the kids all share a bed while also including themes of duality and persona swapping that I have always traced back to Persona. Even containing an image that could only lend itself as an inspiration for Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. All of these strange occurrences in a film that feels so massively influential yet seems so unknown, despite being the work of such a colossal name in 60’s art. Stranger still is that I noticed these patterns and strings and took nothing from them, it all seemed to lead to nothing, a similar experience I had to reading Sontag’s seminal work On Photography. Sontag continues to allude yet influence, and that seems to be the crux of her fame.

My Life as a Godard Movie by Joanna Walsh

In between slowly parsing through Donna Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto and my required reading of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for book club I decided to throw in a little break. An 80-something page essay about the relationship one woman has with the complex dynamic the French New Wave has with femininity. Especially it’s biggest name and one of my favorite directors—Jean-Luc Godard. Walsh’s writing style, particularly her formatting, is uniquely reminiscent of something I tried in high school when I was a young budding burnout unsure what I was doing with my life. She also writes in a deeply personal voice, talking specifically of her direct experiences and positing herself almost as the main character—hence the title. While Walsh is a ciswoman much of the relationships she had with Godard’s New Wave films (i.e. Breathless to Week End) mirrored much of my own experiences first delving into his cinematography. I was merely pawing at the idea of transsexuality at the time, the Christmas break of my 2021-2022 semester, I had watched La Chinoise twice by this point as well as Contempt for class but I was mostly new, intrigued, and enamored by this strange French communist. I watched the fifteen features he made during the New Wave era in the span of a week, including rewatches of Contempt and La Chinoise.

In the essay she writes “The woman industry relies on one woman being more beautiful than the rest, who are both more woman—as femininity is what has been worked over—but less woman for being background to the beautiful woman. Because I do not look extraordinary, there is no way for me to look at all. Because my body’s only ordinary, I imagine something monstrous.” She ultimately ponders the dilemma she feels she shares with Godard—"How to critique femininity and still look cute?” Whether Walsh knows it or not she describes, what I feel is a common experience for transwomen and their relationship with womanhood. Being trans relies on an understanding of gender theory on some aspect, understanding the role beauty has in oppressive structures such as patriarchy. Whether through reading of theory or simply the experience had with the way the world treats you, you have to learn that ultimate beauty is not the goal—and yet, it remains in the image of the woman, it remains at the forefront clawing at you from the inside. You feel less woman, far less woman, because your beauty is not the beauty of the woman. Only through extensive surgery and treatment and a mix of genes can this ideal be reached, and still that boundary being crossed leaves you at the bottom of the spectrum, the boundary is simply the grasp at “passing.”

I have had my own struggling relationship with the New Wave and Godard’s depiction of women, considering myself a radical feminist of sorts I understood the worthy criticisms one of my favorite director should be getting for his depictions. I understood the role the women played in this era, the struggle they were forced to contend with as objects of beauty—the subject of Delphine Seyrig’s documentary Be Pretty and Shut Up!—Yet knowing this I couldn’t break myself of their spell, I was enamored by not only them but the films as a whole; the colors, the compositions, the framing, the movements, the breezy dialogue, the iconoclasm—I had never seen a film be so openly communist before Godard—I couldn’t help but love them and loving them made me feel worse. “How to critique femininity and still look cute? may seem trite, egotistical, shallow. But the issue is prominent within feminism—if beauty is an oppressive structure, is it wrong to be beautiful? should we be actively rebelling against it? It’s hard to not be beautiful, it feels bad to not be desired but when desire is a tool of oppression is there really an answer to the dilemma?

Announcements

To end our month of May I’d like to announce some things—I am currently in the works to move to NYC! Subletting a friends room for the summer I’m hoping to get myself established and find a place of my own. Money will be tight for awhile and life will be rough, and because of this I’m adding an option for a premium subscription, no more than $5, it’ll act more as a donation as I won’t be hiding any essays or anything behind it but if you like what I do and write and want to see more it would be very welcome.

Also as I said last month I am being published in The Big Ship, an art publication for an essay on religious mania in cinema. I have been trying to get myself published for some time now and now that I have accomplished it I am planning to dedicate more essays here again soon—starting with an essay called On Touch that I have been sitting on for a few months as I sent it through publication circuits, it’s one of my favorite essays and I am excited to finally share it publicly so that will be coming in the near future.

April showers bring May flowers and the transition from the itchy warmth of electric heat to the natural humidity of spring and summer. A reminder of the past, the slow switch to long sunny days comes with the reminiscence of a time when the hard part of the year was now over. The days where you could run through the streets without a care because there was no school, no job, no money, just the vast, limitless potential of dreams. Dreams we all ignored. Dreams we ignored for reality, only to find reality is hard, now all we can do is remember the past because it is just a dream.

The 90’s Shoegazer

I found myself enamored with the bands of this somewhat niche—now revived—musical movement. Built on the strong use of distortion pedals, the “shoegazers” of the early-90’s created dreamscapes of muted, heavy, slurred guitars that really captured the false memories of a youth that no longer exists. Bands like Lush, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, Lilys, Swirlies, and Drop Nineteens differ in approach but all capture the same feeling—teenagers in rebellion. It’s no wonder that these bands, and their dreampop counterparts, appealed so heavily to queer kids at the time and their forced need to rebel. Even now as the genre’s revived with bands like Beach House, Alvvays, and Winter, the appeal to the queer youth and the rebellion of being queer connects. The romanticism of a world rejected by the people who can, and must, reject it—shoegaze, and dreampop, embody the false memories, regrets, dreams, freedom, and love of teenage summers.

Gregg Araki

In the same vein, a director known for his explorations of the surreal worlds of queer youth and frequently utilizing a lot (a LOT) of shoegaze—Araki’s LA is a false memory, a dream and sometimes a nightmare. The bright neon lights of Nowhere, or the hyperviolence of The Doom Generation or even the grounded terror of Mysterious Skin—Araki’s films always have a warmth to them, but not a comforting one, not one like curling up to a fireplace on a snowy night but a warmth that makes sweat trickle down your back and stain your shirt. Araki’s warmth is a heat, a heat of summer, of youth let loose, of uncomfortable sunburns, it’s dangerous but free and in the freedom, and subsequently the danger, lies the dream present in these summers forever.

Empire Records

It’s rare my mom recommends me a movie that I’ll actually enjoy, her tastes tend to contradict mine and she doesn’t quite understand what it is I look for, but everyone can capture lightning in a bottle at least once and she managed to understand me, if even briefly, when she first told me to watch Empire Records. A mid-90’s ensemble RomCom about a group of teenagers working at a dying record store before graduating high school, Empire Records is a misguided ideology on display that’s hopeful yet the cause of our current state. A group of kids who work together to save what they love, and a manager who cares about more than making money. A fantasy world where capitalism isn’t the problem as a system but greedy business men are. Empire Records believes capitalism can coincide with the interests of the people, even if you have to sometimes fight it. Empire Records is an ideal neoliberalism, one that believes in the fight within the system. While modern liberals still believe this, probably because of these films from their youth, they don’t fight. They don’t organize block parties to save businesses from being subsumed by franchises, they vote and hope that saves it for them. There’s a strange mutual aid within Empire Records that’s missing from the modern iterations of this belief—suffocated to death by capitalist realism, rebellion snuffed out by cynicism. Despite the strange chimera of beliefs the films of the 90’s often had, that romantic youth exists inside the film, while they fight they also yearn and cry and scream and love. They are teenagers in the most tumultuous time of their lives, the future is ahead of them and it is terrifying yet they all band together to love each other so madly it saves a piece of freedom from the clutches of rationalization.

Immaculate

Off topic of the entire piece but I felt a need to discuss this film since I don’t tend to watch new movies these days as I focus on trying to capture my feelings through art and rarely do they coincide. Though I did go see Immaculate. I had some time before an electrolysis appointment and they were doing the $6.66 deal, not to mention I’m a sucker for nuns, so I went to see it. I’ve never been huge on Sweeney as an actor but I was hoping this would change my mind, I knew it was a bit of a passion project for her which she worked diligently on getting made so I thought “maybe this will be the one that makes me see what everyone else sees.” It didn’t. In fact it just solidified what I already believed—I don’t think she’s great, or even good, I think she fails to ever connect with her own characters or the characters around her and instead just memorizes her lines like a high schooler in their first play. Not only that but the entire film lacked an esoteric fervor that I feel is necessary when making a heavily Catholic film. It trades the insanity of Catholicism with a worldliness and science that just feels unwelcome in this world, like a protestant-ized convent castrating transubstantiation, and all mysticism, from its very ethos its a Catholic film of the Marvel era that made me wish I just rewatched a Ken Russell movie instead.

April has been the month of dreams, dead ones, ones that no longer exist, rotted figs on my dying tree. It’s paralyzing to see it all in hindsight, and sometimes beautiful to think of what could have been, though we can only choose one and we have to keep climbing towards it even if sometimes we like to look back at the others.

Before we begin, I want to make note of spoilers for the following films/series: Sharp Objects,

I began March in a stupor, a prolonged psychotic episode of paranoia and dissociation, a lot had fallen on me at once, my mom’s health rapidly failed, my long-time friend and I stopped talking, I was dogpiled on twitter for… saying that we shouldn’t praise Birth of a Nation? I stopped smoking, started smoking, then stopped smoking again, among many other things. It was a period of turmoil for me and what I spent my time doing reflects it. Most of my month was spent writing and rewriting an essay on the dual anger and reverence God commands, especially in young women, the belief in him that gives way to the hate towards him. Written in my elevated state of pain, anger, and anxiety it was… a mess in a lot of ways, requiring a huge overhaul that only displayed the breadth of the dream-like state I was in. The essay itself, much like the subject matter, was angry, chaotic, unorganized and only through the grace granted to me through my own will was I able to come out and hopefully fix it. The anger towards God remains, his will is a parasite in my ribs, but hate only harms me.

Sharp Objects

During the peak of my episode I did the only reasonable thing—I sat down and watched Sharp Objects, two days I spent lying on my couch, disorder compounding, rotting, watching the lives of another family unravel before me. Sharp Objects captures something more than a compelling mystery and small town pressures, it captures the relationship of a mother and her daughters to an extreme—it captures the cycle, the men, the control and lack thereof that poisons these relationships. Sharp Objects is extreme but poignant. In a time where everything horror wants to be Possession, Sharp Objects is the one that actually accomplishes it by not being Possession. Amma and Anna command the same respect, reverence, and innocence despite their heinous crimes because their crimes are only an elevated extension of our own feelings.

Ken Russell

I began parsing through the Ken Russell collection on Criterion, a bit too late unfortunately, but having already seen The Devils, Altered States, and Lair of the White Worm I was excited to what psycho-sexual horrors he could concoct in some of his lesser known films. Starting with Gothic I was instantly hooked to continuing this run, while the horrors are far more muted they are still ever-present and now glittered with a homoerotic fervor that made it an all-time favorites. What Russell accomplishes with Gothic is what all biopics should seek to accomplish—an understanding of its subject matter as people who live lives, not stories. Russell crafts characters out of their circumstances, their traumas, their feelings, he throws away the story itself completely warps it and in turn understands the people involved better than if he actually depicted that fateful night classics were written. A couple nights later I watched Salome’s Last Dance a far more niche project from him, lower budget, but just as extravagant, and of course, homoerotic. Led by a performance—akin to Marie Falconetti’s Joan of Arc, the only film performance she’s done—Imogen Millais Scott delivers a sensual and horrid Salome, one of seductive violence and soft egotism. However, bleeding into our current month, I watched The Boy Friend, a film that trades religious psychosexuality to focus Russell’s maximalism solely on costume and extravagance. The Boy Friend, is a bombastic, stylistic, and meta-experience with a structure similar to Young Girls of Rochefort, a costume design reminiscent of Donkey Skin and a set direction akin to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg all while placing the stunning Twiggy as the lead. It’s an experience that allows Russell to completely let loose and create some of the most beautiful images in his career.

Poor Things

I only wanted to briefly discuss Yorgos Lanthimos’ newest film and what I felt watching it, while enjoyable, entertaining, with fun, whacky performances… it’s all in spite of itself. I rarely found many of the actors, especially the supporting roles, really ever connecting with the characters they were playing. It seemed to me as though many internalized the caricatures rather than seeing them as actual people, which takes away from their performances and their ability to feel anything emotionally going on. That aside though, the big controversy with this film was “how feminist is it?” and to that end I’d say—not very. It’s littered with unifying women myths and individual perspectives. It designs the “woman” as a universal experience, one that all women are rather than constructing “woman” as something designed by circumstance. More egregiously is the understanding of society’s role in the exploitation of the “woman.” The men in the film all tend to be created characters of individual personalities, they’re caricatures of men but of those men they only exist in the realm of their micro-experiences, they are men who aren’t exploitative towards women because they’re men and that’s how men are taught by their world, they are men who uniquely evil and exploitative for their own individual reasons. Maybe it could be more forgivable but all of this is done in the most heavy handed way possible, at times fearing the audience wouldn’t understand it so it crushes them with a didactic boulder. It may be too much to ask for American cinema to be anything radical these days but I can’t help but beg the same question—is this really the best we can do?

Flower Crowns

I began my month of March in a state of distress, worlds crumbling around me, I found myself filled with a dual anger and suffering which lead me to this fantasy. A dream illustrated so beautifully in Lingua Ignota’s song Fragrant is my Many Flower’d Crown, where she sings “the blood of many foes sustains me/ and heavy is my hammer swinging round/ and soft are their throats/ and soft are their skulls/ and fragrant is my many flower’d crown.” Kristin Hayter, also known as Lingua Ignota, paints something deep, steeped in blood and tears. The image of the dual woman, whose anger is only a reaction of defense from her sorrow, one where the softness of flowers is for no one because her hammer keeps them far away. The flower crown a symbol of a softness that is so desired, but a softness that is too risky to allow. Amma wears her flower crown as Persephone, the dual Goddess herself, the soft spring and the harsh winter. Stuck between two worlds, one of freedom and one of confinement. The flower crown one of soft royalty, but softness as a virtue is oppressive in itself. To be soft is to be mystified, mythologized, the princess wears a flower crown because the woman must be soft, sensitive, she cannot swing her hammer no matter how angry she is.

The month of February has been an especially difficult time, my physical and mental health failed me, my choices have come back to bite me, my world is changing, morphing from something terrible to something worse. I watched one new film along with many other rewatches, all revolving around a similar theme—anger and suffering. During the early days of the month I spent a week in inpatient after a catalytic event had dipped my mental health greatly, after that more of my decisions have impacted my physical health, causing me to be out of work for a full week and a half. Despite this I have been working, writing, submitting, seeking my voice to be heard.

Il Demonia

Il Demonia, or its English equivalent simply Demon, is a film I don’t even remember where I found. It laid near the top of my watchlist and convinced me it was simply a schlocky Italian horror B-movie. As I watched it I quickly realized that’s far from the truth, Il Demonia actually follows the deeply depressing and infuriating treatment of a young woman by her family and peers who deign her a witch and a demon after she obsesses over a man she loves, but does not love her. They, including the man, abuse her, blame her for all of their troubles, and eventually seek to destroy her, killing a young woman in need. Il Demonia touched my heart, greatly saddened me, for what I described as somewhere between Valerie and Her Week of Wonders in its surreal absurdity and Mouchette in its depressing hyperrealism, Purificata—our tortured protaganist, is tormented by esoteric and very human elements as she desperately seeks the love of a man who used and discarded her. Il Demonia is “All men are brothers, and brothers only love each other” personified, she is a victim of the world of men.

PJ Harvey

This month did mark the time I finally delved into legendary indie rock darling PJ Harvey, listening to Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea and the This is Desire? I found myself obsessed with the two albums, especially This is Desire? which I fell asleep to one day during a tougher moment of the month and woke up having had surreal and confusing dreams where longing was the overarching theme. From this, and my inability to recall the specifics, I began recounting my dreams in a journal as to remember the things I feel when I’m not conscious. Beside that Harvey exudes a tough chic in her music and presentation that inform the soft ballads as well as the bombastic rock songs.

Swirlies and Seana Carmody

I discussed Swirlies, a bit underappreciated Boston shoegaze band from the 90’s, in my post all the way back in September but I have gone to return to them, listening to two more albums. As well as reading up on the nature of their ship of Theseus timeline. One thing that gained my attention was the duality of Christina Files and Seana Carmody. What confused me is that Carmody left the band in 1994, despite me being convinced she was the vocalist on their album They Spent their Wild Youthful Days in the Glittery Worlds of the Salons, which was likely Files. I have listened to Carmody’s solo work extensively and the vocals between her solo work and her work on Swirlie’s earlier projects to Files work with Swirlies sound near identical, but what really threw me for a loop, was trying to find clear images of Seana Carmody, or Swirlies in general. I’m unsure who to actually decide is this woman whose voice has touched me, for everything is unclear, all images labelled “Seana Carmody and Swirlies” seem different. Not to mention her near appearance to Christina Files, it became difficult to discern who was who, and harder to discern who was who with Swirlies. This means nothing, but a strange little experience I had with a band I’ve come to enjoy greatly.

X-Files

For anyone familiar with my social media, you have probably noticed a quick spike in my posting about the 90’s hit cable television show—The X-Files. During my time in the hospital, before being transferred to inpatient I had to spend a night in the emergency room. During my time there I watched reruns of the show on the hospital TV and instantly fell in love with the two stars; David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. A common phenomenon for fans, as it has been noted many many many times the intimate and palpable chemistry, and frankly, sexual tension the pair share. Between each case of aliens or cryptids holds a stare slightly too long, a sentence spoken slightly too breathy, the cases take the backseat in what is essentially long seasons of two characters who are trying their hardest not to eat the other whole. I’ve been so preoccupied with this experience I’ve completely shirked any duties towards cinema and focused entirely on voraciously consuming every episode of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully being five seconds away of recreating the "comfort” scene of Novitiate.

Dreams

As noted earlier I’ve begun noting the dreams I have, they’re infrequent and range from psychological fears, such as the dream I had the final day of February in which I returned to the psych ward and the fears of my lack of control returned with me, to absurd such as the dream I had last night where Justin Bieber killed himself. I seek no meanings in these dreams, just an experiment in seeing what happens when I’m not present.

February has been a month, a long, difficult, insufferable month. I wish for it to be behind me in March, but even now as I write this I feel the coil of barbed wire draining my fragile heart of its blood. Even a few days ago I smashed a beautiful ceramic flower pot I had and collected the pieces, I wanted something to love that was no longer whole, I wanted to love the pieces of something instead of the something repairable, something meant to be beautiful. The pot, in all its smashed pieces, sits near my bed where I sleep, I love it more than when it was whole, shoved in my closet waiting for a flower that will never come. Now it is the flower, by itself, broken, shattered, deserving of more love than it feels.

I won’t be watching films as much this year as I did last, I will watch what and when I want but I won’t forsake a chunk of every day so I can watch a new movie. Due to this I spent much of the month on rewatches.

Novitiate (2017) dir. Margaret Betts

One of the reasons I have neglected my Substack duties so much this month is that I was writing essays for other publications, one of those essays was on Margaret Bett’s Novitiate starring Margaret Qualley. A strange little moment where a film after 2010 effected me in such an intense way. I immediately rewatched it two days later. As I said I have written a full 3000-word essay on this so I will not be going into too much detail here, but a film that so ravenously captures a deep-seeded internalized emotion present in, what I think is probably, most women found it’s way into my heart. For a full explanation of what I mean by that, keep an eye out for Novitiate: Hunger, Shame, and Paradise in the upcoming first edition of Why Not? an Art and Culture Zine. Release date currently unknown but updates can be followed here:

Kyle's Twitter (Editor of Why Not?

The Piano Teacher (2001) dir. Michael Haneke

A film with a reputation for it’s depressing content, that I’ve known about for a few years, now I finally sat down and watched it after hilariously being told “it was made for me.” Whatever strange implications that has aside, the reputation is earned, after the two times I watched it this month all I could think is “why didn’t anyone love her? Why didn’t anyone save her?” Incredibly bleak, relatable, and heart-wrenching, built all on the back of the incredible and brutal performance by Isabelle Huppert.

Romance (1999) dir. Catherine Breillat

I first watched Romance on my birthday, the last day of the month, January 31st. It sunk its claws into my brain, especially in relation to the type of month I was having. Felt like the culmination of all these films. Everything listed here I watched two times since the beginning of the year, the perfect exploration of womanhood and women’s sexuality. A completely damning depiction of the way men hate women, pure anger imbued into an hour-and-a-half of the sexual exploitation of women. Breillat deconstructs womanhood, sexuality, heterosexuality, and love in such an explicitly depressing way.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Mulholland Drive

These aren’t new watches but rewatches after some time away from them, Mulholland Drive specifically was a special experience. I have a notable obsession with a specific genre of film that revolves around two women being cosmically linked to each other—see Celine and Julie Go Boating, Persona, Daisies, Duelle, La Ceremonie, etc. Mulholland Drive feels lifted directly from the spirit of Rivette’s masterpieces and transcribed into the dark 90’s chic of Los Angeles, a task only suited for David Lynch. And with my rewatch of Mulholland Drive came a rewatch of the bleakest, most depressing movie ever composed; Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. The bleakness of this film is in the similar vein of The Piano Teacher and Romance, or even Andrzej Żuławski Possession, in that all of it feels uncannily real and psychotically relatable. That these are real women, being torn apart by the world of men around them, and all they ever get for any of it is treated as villains, until they are undeniably the victims in their own deaths. Laura Palmer is spiraling and like Bobby says at her funeral “everybody knew she was in trouble, but we didn’t do anything. All you good people. You wanna know who killed Laura? You did! We all did.”

Usually I also talk a little about the music I’ve been listening to recently and the books I’ve been reading but I’m kind of hyper-focused on these films and have no interest in really changing gears on the topic, where I stand I listened to the new glass beach album Plastic Death, I got into Bar Italia as well specifically their album Tracy Denim, but otherwise mostly the standard on-repeat albums—Twin Fantasy, some Weyes Blood, some Clairo, some Bright Eyes. I’m also reading Multatuli’s Dutch classic Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company for book club along with trying to find time to read Donna J. Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto, a strange little essay that I’ve only read and reread the first ten pages of so far but have been looking to read for a long time now.

As with every January, and every birthday in every January, it’s been a long month of rapidly changing extreme emotions. January’s are long and the rest of the year flies by. But unlike January, and every birthday in every January, this post is unusually short for my obsession with films of women in pain occupies the corners of my psyche and thinking of all the other things that happened in January feels trite.

Crash (1996) dir. David Cronenberg

Starting off strong with what is easily Cronenberg’s magnum opus, a complete culmination of the entire thesis of interest since his start—an intimate exploration of violence, sexuality, and the ever-progression of technology’s affect on the melding of both. He touched upon this melding in Videodrome, and a little less so in eXistenZ, both of which I watched this year as well, even his most recent film Crimes of the Future explores transgressive sexuality and it’s relation to pain behind the ham-fisted arc about microplastics that unfortunately takes over about halfway through. Crash is the opus of his work in that he throws away pretense of plot and it becomes pure meditation, a film so poignantly described by its star, James Spader, as “about sex and car crashes.” In essence that really is all its about, sex and car crashes, nothing else happens. The characters slowly get into crashes and in doing so explore their sexuality with each other, and nothing else needs to happen. In fact if anything else DID happen it would ruin the level of voyeurism present, that’s what designates Videodrome to a lesser exploration despite being very similar in subject matter. Crash has nothing else to watch, there is no story, no character arcs, no plot, there is only sex and car crashes, and so it begs the question—why am I watching this?

You are watching it for the sex and the car crashes, you enjoy the sex and the car crashes, maybe you yourself are a little turned on by the transgressive nature of the film, maybe you are the one whose sexuality has melded with violence, with masochism. Maybe just the idea of exploring it is enough, maybe the theme, the meditation, is interesting enough to sit through what is in essence a montage of masochistic and sadistic sexual scenarios, but Crash’s forced reconciliation with voyeurism and sexual transgression is not only its strongest element but also a recurring theme throughout this list.

Raw (2016) dir. Julia Ducournau

Keeping with the theme of sexual transgression and violence, Ducournau’s debut feature film Raw is the pinnacle of the “cannibalism as longing” trope (which is hardly a trope if you ask me due to there being far fewer films that explore that than you’d think). I had been recommended Raw for years since it came out and kept putting it off, until this year I was fairly weary about violence in film—unsure what I could handle. Raw was revelatory when I finally sat down for it, pure extreme emotion forced outwardly through the exemplar performance of it’s lead Garance Marillier. All I really feel the need to express about this film is how appealing it makes the cannibalism, it captures that strange urge to bite into something soft, to crush in an embrace something adorable. Ducournau finds the lover’s urge to taste the blood of their partner and projects it into the audience. No scene better accomplishes this than the centerpiece sex scene between Marillier’s character Justine and her roommate Adrien, played by Rabah Nait Oufella, in which Justine sinks her teeth into her own arm, letting the blood flow out to prevent herself from taking a chunk out of Adrien’s neck. For a film so centered around sexuality and sexual awakening this is the climax, as the audience you can feel the pure relief and pleasure on Marillier’s face as she bites into her own flesh like the sensation of biting into the softest, juiciest peach you’ve ever had in your life.

The Doom Generation (1995) dir. Gregg Araki

I considered just putting Araki’s entire “teenage apocalypse” trilogy here since I watched them all, and some, and they caused Araki jump to one of my all time favorite directors. However I ultimately narrowed it down to this one, strange, dark film. I found Araki’s work to be generally a continuation of the same satire Godard was doing, often very heavily influenced by his 60’s work, The Doom Generation really epitomizes that satirical continuation. If Nowhere is described as “90210 on acid” than The Doom Generation is Pierrot Le Fou in the mind of a nihilist shoegazer, the cynical counter-culture wasteland of the teenager. The Doom Generation is the 90’s counter-culture, it recognizes the hyperviolence of American society, the sexual fascism of patriarchy, the anti-queerness, and it creates the teenage fantasy of running away from it as it collapses on itself. It’s hard to describe a film so visually bombastic, it’s something that above all needs to be experienced, what Araki captures in the entire “teenage apocalypse” trilogy is being an outcast, especially a queer one, and none really capture that quite like The Doom Generation.

My Own Private Idaho (1991) dir. Gus Van Sant

A film that is so paramount to queer cinema I watched once and then a week later watched again. Imbued with a dreamy western Americana aesthetic reminiscent of Mojave 3, especially their song Love Songs on the Radio, and loosely based on Shakespeare’s Henry IV—what I found so compelling about My Own Private Idaho is its use of Henry VI’s structure to explore the relationship of queerness to heternormaty in modern society. Keanu Reeves’ character Scott Favor, the eccentric Prince, lives a life of rebellion, he sells his body, steals, tries various drugs, and runs rampant through America. His mischief is conflicted with the soon-to-be passing of his father who wants to give away his inheritance unless he straightens his act up, becomes presentable, creating a dilemma to whether Scott should choose a heternormative life of wealth, or commit himself to a queer rebellion.

this internal conflict is only elevated by his relationship and juxtaposition to his partner-in-crime, Mike, played by the late River Phoenix. Mike represents an opposite of the life Scott lives, Mike doesn’t have an inheritance to fall back on, a family to protect him, he doesn’t live like this for fun—he lives like this because he has to. The conflict of heternormaty and queerness within Scott comes to a head when Mike makes it clear the feelings he has for him, the conflict elevates to a clear line: love and freedom or wealth and safety.

There’s an intertwining of fathers and relationships with fathers and how this informs and affects queerness throughout the film, Mike doesn’t know his and Scott’s is vehemently against his counter-culture lifestyle. Mike is far more comfortable with his identity and sexuality than Scott, who is even disgusted at the idea of a man loving another man, despite Scott’s prostitution which he justifies as “only for money.” The internal conflicts of the characters mixed with River Phoenix’s fatigued performance has caused this to resonate with queer audiences for decades.

The Devils (1971) dir. Ken Russell

Ken Russell is a visual giant, creating maximalist scenes of sexuality and religion, it’s baffling that it was ever considered a “criticism” to say he was obsessed with it. If you ask me we were lucky to get to see inside the sensational mind of Ken Russell as much as we did, someone who so intimately understood religion as oppressive, political, and sensual, none of his work has ever truly expressed his understanding of these three things as much as The Devils. Very loosely based on the true story of Urbain Grandier, Russell manages to explore the political goals of the witch hunts, the less-than-pure behavior of Grandier, and both of their oppression of women while never failing to create extraordinary and fantastical images of religious transgression. What really sells The Devils, however, is Oliver Reed as Urbain Grandier, for one his imposing physique portrays a priest unlike most visual imagery—one with broad shoulders and a large chest, he towers over everyone as a figure of hypermasculine strength. Reed’s appearance and performance that carries itself with the self-importance of a man who sees himself equal to Jesus make his downfall all the more potent and devastating.

Alucarda (1977) dir. Juan López Moctezum

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To put it bluntly, Alucarda is a pretty schlocky horror satanic panic B-movie with a bit of a sexploitation issue. I became obsessed with it in October. There are a lot of valid criticisms of a film like this, but sometimes loving something is loving it despite its flaws. There’s wonky performances, weird writing, and maybe not the best queer representation in the form of director’s intention. Yet, Alucarda won my heart in it’s extravagant visuals similar to Russel’s above, images of sexually transgressive religion and witchcraft that give an outcast orphan girl the power she craves.

The best part, however, is Alucarda’s relationship with Justine, two girls who share a room in a convent become extremely close, probably closer than they should be. Alucarda becomes obsessed with her, equating them as two mirror images and wanting them to spend eternity together leading her to selling her soul to the devil. It’s clear the director’s intention was not to make this relationship seem healthy, yet while Justine’s not as obsessed with Alucarda she still seeks to spend the time she has with her, she wants to be close to her and they even sell their soul together. In a lot of ways the queerness of Alucarda and Justine is maybe not meant to be portrayed as healthy but in the fashion of two gay girls in a convent together becoming one seems like a beautiful notion to me.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) dir. Jaromil Jireš

I have written about this picture in my October post and I’m planning on writing a full essay on it in the coming new year so I will keep this brief. This is a difficult film to discuss, it is brilliant and problematic, the main issue the film has is with Valerie herself, more so the actress who plays Valerie—who was thirteen at the time. There’s a sort of continuous argument about the use of a thirteen year old actress rather than an adult actress to portray a thirteen year old in a film of this nature, which will be the subject matter of my essay on the film, so treat that simply as a heads up.

However, that aside, the film is brilliant, not only visually is it absurd, surreal, and horrifying but the terror it brings is existentially and systemically genius on a level equal to Godard’s Contempt without all the issues of pure intellectualism I feel Contempt struggles with, again all of which I will go into further in a future essay. For now, I will say this film has broke the mold for what I’m planning as my next cinema exploration, Czech New Wave, I can’t recommend enough or stop talking about it because I do truly believe it’s brilliant.

Belle de Jour (1967) dir. Luis Buñuel

Continuing with the surrealist theme I finally sat down and watched a feature length Buñuel, I had always had a fear of delving into surrealism, as something that would truly disturb me, I had seen and been fascinated with Un Chien Andalou but to sit down and watch a full feature length film of similar imagery haunted me. Belle de Jour has haunted with me in the same similar fashion to Un Chien Andalou but not for the same reasons. For one, the ever-enigmatic Catherine Deneuve stars as a confusingly complex character, the bourgeois housewife who fantasizes of the violence often unwillingly enacted on poor women due to social circumstances she’ll never be in. However, more importantly, what most stuck out to me is the similarities it had to a lot of New Wave films at the time, Belle de Jour felt like a direct satire of New Wave sensibilities—particularly those of poster child Jean-Luc Godard.

Much of the film centers around Deneuve’s character’s fantasy of becoming a prostitute and her frequent dream-like hallucinations of masochistic sexual scenarios. Without delving too much into analyzing the film or surrealism itself, the ideas of surrealism surround a belief that what is being portrayed is necessarily reality through the unconscious mind. In Valerie and Her Week of Wonders the surrealist elements seem more absurd, but creatures, like the vampiric stranger, represent an unconscious reality of a figure of power who is preying upon the young girl. In a less absurdist, more grounded way, Belle de Jour satirizes Godard for being a wealthy born Marxist, making films about poor people he will never be, especially one of his early masterpieces Vivre sa Vie which follows the life and downfall of a prostitute. The film ends with a scene where after everything became too dangerous for her, after her consequences became too real, her husband now wheelchair bound after her abusive customer shot him… she wakes up. In a scene that would now be considered lazy, the titular Severine “Belle de Jour” Serizy wakes up. All the danger, the consequences, gone, and in this way it’s reminiscent of Godard’s films of the proletariat—Anna Karina can play a prostitute who gets shot and killed at the end of Vivre sa Vie but none of it is real for her, she’s an actress, he’s a filmmaker, once it wrapped it’s like waking up from a dream.

The Addiction (1995) dir. Abel Ferrer

Finding a good vampire film, one that truly captures the vampire’s simultaneous metaphorical designation of social fear and their dual humanity, is increasingly difficult so coming upon Abel Ferrera’s The Addiction after being so deep into vampire filmography was revelatory. Instantly jumping to the top of my list of vampire films and vampire portrayals, Ferrera manages to personify the real nature of modern bloodsuckers. Coated in a academic counter-culture chic, The Addiction is everything Only Lovers Left Alive wishes it was and more— an exploration of addiction, nihilism, and how they inform each other and destroy the world around them. The titular addict vampire Kathleen, played by Lili Taylor, sells everything about this as she skulks the urban streets of New York at night, brooding and spouting philosophy that only justifies her thirst. Lili Taylor’s performance is what solidifies the film for me, she masquerades a tortured PhD student, angry at the world for its cruelness, and taking it out in violent ways. Even before she’s turned she begins the film furious about the crimes the US committed and got away with in Vietnam, she exudes a desperate, existential anger that not only is massively prevalent in the modern era but also perfectly represents the struggle of a vampire.

Duelle (1976) dir. Jacques Rivette

Rivette tends to be one of the most unanimously beloved but also most underrated of New Wave directors, likely due to the sheer length his films mixed with him only making two films during the peak of the New Wave. Despite this I find him to be one of the most compelling directors ever as well as from the New Wave, his use of improvisation and unconventional storytelling weaves some of the most original and interesting films ever created. Like Godard I believe there never has been and never will be a director like him again, while Godard’s intimate understanding of cinema and politics established his uniqueness, Rivette’s connection with acting and his actors established his. His relationship with Juliet Berto especially was the singularity for some of his greatest work, films such as Celine & Julie Go Boating, Out 1, and, of course, Duelle.

The appeal of Rivette is always a strangeness, an impenetrable, unexplained magical realism, in Celine & Julie Go Boating the magic is subtle, even grounded to an extent. In Duelle it becomes pure fantasy as Juliet Berto and Bulle Ogier take the roles of celestial princesses, the sun and moon respectively. An out-of-this-world concept that I could only imagine would be mishandled if it were made today, something akin to a superhero film that cares less about anything supernatural and more about the relationships within the battle between the princesses. Like the name implies, the two celestial daughters duel, but they’re also dual, they are two parts of one whole system. In the highlight of the film they transform into magnificent dresses representing their parental star and gravitate around each other. In this we get a complete and unmistakable glimpse of what has been a underlying theme of Rivette’s films for awhile—duality.

The Unbelievable Truth (1989) dir. Hal Hartley

With the Criterion Channel adding a Hal Harley retrospect came the advent of a new generation of Hartley fans, myself included. While I watched The Unbelievable Truth a few nights before the retrospect was announced, something that has happened to me a few times now, I rewatched it a week ago from the retrospect along with its counterpart—his following film Trust. The rewatches really solidified the importance of these films for me, so deeply intertwined with understanding the roles of patriarchy and systems within American culture they take a strange dreamlike state that pushes the explorations to absurd extremes.

In The Unbelievable Truth, Hartley’s first feature length film, he takes the role of patriarchal society to explore the way it attempts to strip women of identity and autonomy through a conflicted sense of sexual possession and male aggression. A father who pushes his daughter to modelling for money only to be infuriated at all the people who can see her body now, an ex-boyfriend who violently attacks anyone who looks at her even when he’s with someone else himself. The Unbelievable Truth is steeped in a strange hyperbole that’s really just a reflection of true American culture, tied together nicely with a the disaffected, dreamy, and cynical performance from it’s lead star, Adrienne Shelly.

Possession (1981) dir. Andrzej Żuławsk

I had to save the best for last, a film that I have heard so much about for so many years I finally sat down and watched, and then I watched again two days later, and then again a couple months later, and then one final time of the year a week ago. Possession is increasingly difficult to describe, especially without devolving into hyperbole, I have watched it four times this year and I still can’t really tell you what it’s “about.” I know as much as the other Possession fans that it’s based somewhat on the director’s own divorce, but not exactly how, in what way. I can, however, tell you what I, and what I think others find so addicting and mesmerizing about this film—Isabelle Adjani, it’s Isabelle Adjani. Of course it’s Isabelle Adjani, it couldn’t be anything other than, she carries everything about this picture, a performance that feels so extremely manic that it captures a rage many, especially women, feel but never get to truly release. That is the essence of the obsession, especially among women, Isabelle Adjani’s character Anna represents an emotion, a longing mixed with anger and suffering, that many women carry with them and never allow themselves or are allowed to express, to let go. So through Anna there’s a catharsis, a relation, an understanding, through everything Anna remains the victim of the film because her anger, her pain, her emotions are so outwardly present and understood that you can never view her as a monster, only as a rage that has been caged and hidden for so long—now released, and the world rightfully deserves what she creates.

Love is a hunger and like a starved dog I have no control, seeking the flesh of any passerby who would dare let me partake in divine communion, their holy blood. Snarling and growling to warn them of the pang, baring my teeth so they know to come near is to risk violence, outright barking if they approach too close. Knowing only in my mind I whimper for them to heed none of my warnings. If none work, if they tempt anger, starvation, desperation, if they ignore my threats and reach their hand out in warmth, I will snap my jaw down and clamp it shut. Gnawing at the raw flesh in my mouth and savoring every second, feeling the hot blood drip down my throat cooling on my tongue, it will stain my teeth red and I will not let go. I will attempt to tear the entire limb, I will hold on for dear life, hoping that they come even closer and I can get a chance to taste the rest. Love is a hunger and to love me is to be consumed entirely by mine.

I spent the transition of October into November in Ireland, travelling around the eastern coast. I flew into Dublin, drove to Dundalk where I stayed for a couple days and then drove up to Belfast where I stayed the rest of of my time. Some friends jokingly said the trip would “cure” me and despite me laughing it off, in some ways it did. It opened my eyes to a life I always wanted but was never granted for various reasons, I came back and the first week was depressing, back to the life I hate after glimpsing a life I love, not knowing where to go. It didn’t help that I returned to find my entire room flooded and now needs to be entirely renovated, which has delayed my ability to write regularly. Despite this I do feel rejuvenated, despite the struggles, the whiplash of coming back, I do feel relatively good, maybe even better than before, but there’s no sure way to tell anymore.

This month I had the pleasure to be introduced to an avant-garde 60’s folk/jazz singer Brigitte Fontaine, whose music I quickly became enamored with. Specifically her experimental masterpiece Comme à la radio which blends a mystical southern American folk sound with French jazz elements to create this overall dark and eclectic sound culminating in one of the best songs on the album, Le gougron, which progressively builds speed to amp up energy like a spinning camera until exploding and fizzling out on the last song Le noir c’est mieux choisi.

In ways of hunger I watched Julia Ducournou’s feature debut Raw, a film that very explicitly explores the hunger pangs of burgeoning sexuality, especially in the repressed youth. I found myself hyper-fixated on its portrayal of love and sex as a deep-seeded starvation that must eat and eat and eat without every being fully satisfied and only through self-control will it not be all consuming, it will always hunger. There’s something cruel about never being satiated for such a ravenous hunger.

In other hungers I rewatched Abel Ferrera’s The Addiction as well, an undoubtedly complex film that attempts to bring the vampire metaphor into the modern age. The hunger in The Addiction is, obviously, not one of love. As the title suggests Ferrera brings vampires into the 90’s not just as addicts, like the failed and terribly trite Only Lovers Left Alive attempted in 2013, but also as the drugs themselves. Their immortality, their eternity, their hunger, becomes addictive in itself, they overpower their victims, bleeding them of their senses and blaming them for not being strong enough. Kathleen, our main vampire, when turned is commanded to tell her attacker to leave, to go away, and that because she can’t—whether in fear or just in human weakness— she deserves to be turned, to be addicted. From here Kathleen uses this same line on all her victims, positing herself as simply the augur of what they themselves are doing, taking responsibility out of her hands and placing it on their shoulders.

On the subject of Jarmusch’s obnoxious mess Only Lovers Left Alive the influences from Ferrera’s The Addiction are more than prevalent but lack in substance or weight, which is much in the style of Jarmusch’s typical filmmaking. Often viewing himself as the great new American auteur, borrowing heavily from those before him but diluting what made them great. His first film Stranger Than Paradise very much wanted to evoke Cassavetes’ early work, especially with his very own debut Shadows, but fails to really do anything nearly as well. Stranger Than Paradise borrows ideas, involving improvisation and unconventional filmmaking techniques but simply does not have the strength to actually stand as anything. For one, in Stranger Than Paradise the biggest issue it faces is that it’s characters feel obtuse and two-dimensional, their relationships unbelievable at times, for Cassavetes, understanding people on a macro level enables his characters to feel like real people, giving them real emotions, and real experiences. Cassavetes work is a scripted portrayal of the real world, Jarmusch’s is a scripted portrayal of a scripted portrayal of the real world.

A similar issue arises in Only Lovers Left Alive in that, like in The Addiction, our vampires are highly intelligent brooding blood addicts with a propensity for showing the audience what they know. In The Addiction Kathleen is a PhD philosophy student working on her dissertation, her constant spouting of existentialism throughout the film never comes off as obnoxious, or try-hard, because she seemingly knows what she’s saying and she knows how to say it, in this way her intelligence isn’t a threat but instead it’s alluring. It also serves a purpose, Kathleen must break the three realms of violence in Dante’s seventh circle of hell, she commits violence against others, violence against herself in addiction, and violence against God in her proclamations of us all as sinners. In Only Lovers Left Alive Jarmusch could only manage to make his vampires sound like they just finished reading some Wikipedia articles, namedropping classic authors and the scientific names for random plants and animals they come across. None of it is as intelligent as they seem to think, but more so reads as a middle schooler who desperately wants to be intelligent, which ironically is apt for someone like Jarmusch who desperately wants to be an intelligent American auteur like his predecessors. I hate using the word “pretentious” as its misused religiously, but if anyone is it’s Jarmusch, someone who yearns to appear intelligent by spouting things he thinks are important but just aren’t. It doesn’t help that it’s Tom Hiddleston who’s doing it most of the time, it’s far more bearable when his sizably more talented counterpart, Tilda Swinton, does it.

Love is a hunger, and hunger is a deep yearning, a yearning that often manifests in melancholy— as to yearn is to not receive. I also had the pleasure to watch another Chantal Akerman film this month, who never disappoints. Her 1994 film Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60’s in Brussels deals with hunger, with yearning, not as viscerally as Raw or The Addiction but just as violently. A shorter film in Akerman’s catalogue, clocking in at only an hour, doesn’t leave it without enough time to delve into the deep emotions of our main character Michele, a high-school girl skipping class to galivant around the city. Like much of Akerman’s work it has a slow build leading to a titular moment, we watch as Michele shacks up with a stranger at a movie theatre attempting to make some mysterious boy jealous, only occasionally dipping back to talk to her friend Danielle about going to a party that night. As the day goes on and Michele waxes poetic with her new friend about the woes of existence and love, we begin to get the sneaking feeling that this mysterious boy she’s attempting to make jealous isn’t really a boy and isn’t that mysterious to us. Akerman has never shied away from exploring her sexuality as a queer woman in the 60’s and 70’s, with her feature debut Je, Tu, Il, Elle exploring the end of a queer relationship between two women, culminating in a lengthy sex scene the camera does not hide from. In the 90’s with this past 30 years behind her she looks back with the classical romantic glasses of melancholic love and watches herself deny what she wants until we come to the scene where she has to accept that while watching a boy take the hand of the girl she loves, her friend Danielle, and slow dancing with her to James Brown’s It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World. We sit for a full minute as we watch Michele’s face twist and contort to express the sadness of a girl whose heart is fully breaking and realizing this world is not for her. It’s one of the most violent moments in any of the films I watched this month, being forced to witness the face of this teenage girl shift to represent her world crashing down on her.

Love is a hunger and hunger hurts, the pangs of starvation never to be fully satisfied because to be satisfied is only at the full sacrifice of another, to love is to sacrifice yourself to hunger’s perpetual nature or to it’s bestial verbosity. You can either choose to share in the hunger with another, neither of you becoming full but learning to be content without, or you can submit and consume in gluttonous emptiness, carving a bloody path in your wake.

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Teeth

I’ve abandoned thought, logic, reason

all that remains is a rabid dog

the gnashing of my mangled jaw scares

but only because I myself am scared

Time

Time goes around in a constant circle

leaves will turn yellow, then brown,

then they will fall to the Earth

Come Spring they will sprout again

beginning the cycle anew

Arm

I will continue to gnaw at my arm

tearing the flesh that holds on

I will pretend it I want it gone

but I will never bite through the bone

Sun

The sun beats down on my face

scorching my skin blood red

I continue to write these poems

posturing them as acts of sublimation

lying to myself that they’re about more than me

Poetry

In the 21st century poetry has died

it falls flat in our hands

in my hands

the need for efficiency

for understanding

Contradicts the love of love

replaced by the need

the need to live

the need to work

the need to exist

Antithetical to the codes

the roundabout sentences

the long-winded

unnecessary language

that the poet yields

Genesis

Adam damned us so he could understand

if forever is a place we go when we die

why bother staying alive

Asleep

I don’t remember falling asleep last night

yet I am awake

but only half, only partly

another part stuck somewhere in a dream

far better than here

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