There’s a tension between tasks in my life (necessary, important ones, but also trivial ones) and the capacity to devote myself to projects and pursuits I find rewarding for their own sake or because I think maybe I have something worth contributing. I can’t speak for others, but when I, personally, was an academic, despite whatever levels of administrative headache or demoralizing assignment grading or whatever, I still felt as though the mission to think and explore and write (or create) remained an integral part of my days and my identity. This isn’t to paint a rosy picture of things, or to romanticize our higher education system—believe me. I only mean that I could square some sense of my vocational self with what I was doing, on paper, in reality, regularly. Since leaving academia, such pursuits have diminished into remainders and sidebars of my life, even though the impulse to pursue them is probably stronger than ever. Sometimes I experience this tension as the condition Thoreau posited as “quiet desperation.” I think, I’m part of that mass of men. But I don’t want to resign myself to such a life. So I think restlessly about ways to reconfigure things.

It’s not that I have a bad life or that I’m looking for another career change. I have worked very hard to gain what I’ve gained. I simply want more opportunity to exist in a flow state, to read novels and histories, to teach myself Latin, to re-teach myself guitar, to write criticism and fiction and essays, to try my hand at more drawing and watercolors, to explore the finer details of the filmographies of Charles Marquis Warren and Su Friedrich, to talk with people about all of these things, and so on.

I don’t ever expect time and space for all of it. Life is short, and I have other important things going on in mine, too. But I believe I can adapt to allow for more of them.

Guy Davenport, in some ways a paragon of intellectual and creative activity for me, wrote in letters to Hugh Kenner about his unsuitability for married domesticity, his sometimes debilitating anxiety, his ambitions that were rarely “worldly.” I recall one letter in which Davenport sort of disinvites Kenner from staying with him as a houseguest, as planned, because he’s simply been too flustered and depressed leading up to the visit. One gets a picture of GD as more nervous, cattier, moodier than one might have had before. Seeing this side of him, via personal letters, helps flesh out the imposing and lively intellect that animates his stories and essays. It seems to me Davenport was one of those figures who benefits from quiet, ordinary routine. This freed his imagination. I can relate to this setup, as the kids say.

Meanwhile, I suspect, activity and extroversion fertilized Hugh Kenner’s genius. He traveled the world and changed jobs and had a family and, aside from his main beat as a scholar and critic of English literature and modernism, he taught himself computer programming and wrote books on R. Buckminster Fuller and Chuck Jones. He was a polymath with many touchpoints in the world.

Now, a brief aside to make what is possibly a very obvious point: I don’t know very much about Kenner’s personal life that isn’t included in his own letters to Davenport, but I get the sense that he probably was not practicing egalitarian distribution of gendered labor, in terms of things like changing diapers, preparing meals, or cleaning the bathroom. The leisure of many brilliant people has often rested on the labor of many other people, some of whom were also surely brilliant, but had no outlet, or no “rooms of their own.” By contrast, though I could be wrong, I get the impression that Davenport, who later in life never remarried and whose longtime companion, Bonnie Jean Cox, lived in her own home, at least did a lot of his own chores. These kinds of time and labor commitments matter when we’re talking about how much energy and availability one has to live the life of the mind.

The advantage of the Hugh Kenner type of intellectual form is that chaotic stimulation serves as fuel rather than distraction. It requires a lot of energy, rather than conserves energy, but once the system is going it’s very productive. This type of person is often “working in public,” pinging between projects, and is undeterred by unfinished tasks because they simply accumulate so many finished tasks. This isn’t a bad approach to writing, thinking, debating …

When I write, I often do so while sitting in the unfinished basement of the townhouse we rent. We don’t allow our beloved cat in down there unaccompanied, in case she gets into mischief; but she loves time in the basement. So I’ll frequently hear her pawing at the door to the basement stairs. She sinks her claws into the wood at the bottom edge of the door and pulls on it. It gets loud. The entire door shakes. Occasionally, with time, she is even able to shift the door sufficiently to open it on her own, which is impressive. Most of the time, though, I stop what I’m doing and walk up the stairs to open the door and let her in. We then have a ritual where she descends half the steps, prances over onto the top of a mid-sized bookshelf, stepping onto a Gordon Ramsay cookbook that sits atop a pile of other cookbooks, and then I pet her for a minute and tell her she’s great while she nuzzles me. Sometimes I’m able to get back to what I was attending to before; other times I need to monitor her like she’s a toddler, trying to tear into boxes or eat something she shouldn’t eat. (Did Guy Davenport ever have to worry about this with his cats?) She might then sleep somewhere, including my lap, for a while. Then she’ll want to be let out of the basement. And often she’ll start pawing again to return a minute later, starting the cycle anew. None of this is conducive to flow state.

All this is to say that this pattern shows up a lot in my life, not so unlike my dream the other night. I want to do something, may even have started to do something, but I’m prompted to divert my attention from that action and focus on these very close-at-hand matters instead. Then, whenever I look back and take stock of what I’ve done on my own projects, I think: “I’ve failed to see through what I wanted. Next time, another time, tomorrow, maybe.” And so it goes, repeatedly. I keep trying to see out these important parts of my life in the crevices of that life.

Again, I don’t want to be resigned to this.

Possible Solutions/Resolutions

1 Organization. Currently I jot down notes and paste information in a lot of different places, which is messy. I want to reduce the number of places where I put down raw material, and also implement a more regularly clearinghouse schedule for myself, where I go through and record, reroute, rewrite, and discard as I see fit.

2 Redirection #1. I’m continually learning good ways to redirect my attention when I notice that I’m doing something passively. So if I have five minutes while I’m in a waiting room somewhere, maybe instead of aimlessly browsing soccer subreddits, I can add another source to a research bibliography, or pull a little notepad out to sketch something. This all has to do with intention and mindfulness. If you’re busy for a stretch, and then suddenly you find yourself with a totally free hour, it can be easy to do nothing by just “doing whatever.” I’m not saying that a person has to always be productive. I’m saying that we can train ourselves to select activities in our leisure that we will be glad to have done, rather than activities that make us think, “why did I waste time on that?”

3 Working in public. This is very hard for me on multiple levels. I don’t like when people see something before I’m ready to share it. (Even if I share something bad or unfinished, which is often the case, it has to get to a point where I feel comfortable sharing it with said qualifications. Even these Substack ramblings: I basically write them up to the point where I feel 51% comfortable sharing them publicly, and I hit send.) Some people have an enviable ability to pull up a draft or document of their work-in-progress and sharing it with whomever, and these people also frequently have an impressive record of polished work. (Hi, Andy!) This is not my temperament, for reasons that probably have to do with my upbringing. But I would like to become more comfortable sitting in this kind of discomfort, because in the long run I think it may bring me good results.

4 Don’t wait to communicate. I write this as someone who is very behind on emails and messages, and who will send out a few more of them to friends today or tomorrow. I find I can put off corresponding with people if I fear I don’t have time to say anything thoughtful. There’s a reality to this fear, but I probably let it overwhelm me; the benefits of communicating more quickly and frequently, however, are likely worthwhile. They will spur activity and stimulate further ideas.

5 Redirection #2. Because distractions are inevitable, I want to get better at mentally sublimating distractions. Embrace them, overtake them, don’t let them overtake me. Find a new way to continue the thread of my focus.

That all said, I have a short list of writing projects that I want to work on soon, especially after I finish reading a few big books I’m in the middle of (including The Tale of Genji, which I’ve already put on hiatus a few times and am nowhere close to finishing, and John Cowper Powys’ Wolf Solent). I don’t want to give anything away here, but I will probably try to put my money where my mouth is and work out at least some of these projects “in public.” Some of the things I want to explore and write about in months ahead involve some Hollywood literary adaptations; Ivan Illich; Cristina Campo; topics in a few national cinemas I’d like to dig into; some under-examined pockets of film criticism; some close readings and textual analysis of a handful of films; thoughts on one or two painters; a short story. We’ll see.

Believe it or not, this counts as the first film festival I’ve gone to that wasn’t taking place in a city where I already lived. Throughout my life, whatever I was doing with myself, I typically lacked either the resources or the flexibility to jaunt over to Rotterdam, Venice, Vancouver, Udine, Bologna, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, and so on, “just” for the privilege of watching movies.1 Three or four days of exclusively old movies, on old prints, isn’t everyone’s idea of a hot ticket event—but, as evidenced by the extremely quick sellout of passes this year, it’s certainly some people’s idea of a hot ticket event. Myself included. (More on this later.) So we purchased passes, reserved a hotel room, and took the quick road trip from Ithaca to Rochester for a long weekend. I had three conjoined priorities: see some good films on good prints, catch up with friends, and have a great time with my fiancée, as it was also the weekend we were celebrating our anniversary. (Priority #4: don’t get incinerated by an uncontained nitrate fire.)

So why nitrate? Why is this sort of a festival a to-do for anyone other than film preservationists? The answer isn’t one single thing, surely, but to me a big part of it was how a good nitrate print is said to look. I remember reading, decades ago, about the “nitrate epiphany” some people experience, which can transport a viewer to an entirely different way of perceiving movies that has been largely lost to history. The qualities of light, shadow, and depth seem to be sufficiently different from what we’ve been used to seeing the last 75 years to provoke this epiphany. Because nitrate is so flammable and dangerous, and institutions are rarely equipped to project the prints, the chance to experience this is rare.

As many people I’ve read and spoken with over the years have attested, sometimes the nitrate epiphany as such never quite seems to arrive, and the visual differences may seem to have more to do with this or that specific print than with “nitrate” as opposed to acetate safety film. I, too, would admit that my first encounter with nitrate was a little more attenuated than I’d hoped; there were some beautiful films on beautiful prints, but I didn’t have that “a-ha” moment. What I had, instead, were glimpses and little shifts of perception. The depth of the image in some shots, some compositions, felt more palpable—almost stereoscopic in effect. The people and objects captured in the image would come alive in a certain way that seemed to present a different way of recording and presenting three-dimensional space. The extent to which this was down to nitrate prints, versus being some old or original prints well-preserved, is obscure to me. It didn’t mark every minute of every film I saw. But there was also enough of an encounter with something new that makes me take people at their word if and when they report that they have the epiphany.

The opening night film was Cecil B. DeMille’s Why Change Your Wife? (1920), on a print that DeMille owned personally, struck in 1925, and which looked fantastic. Philip Carli deftly accompanied the screening on a piano that was as old as the reels. I’m no expert on DeMille’s work in general; I often find the movies interesting, sometimes very good2, but I’m also far from the level of investment of, say, Luc Moullet. In the film, a man loves his wife, who is always trying to improve him and cultivate him; his head is turned by another woman, leading to divorce; after the divorce, the first wife decides to vamp it up a bit, herself, now that he’s single again. But the charms of Why Change Your Wife? exist largely beside the somewhat prosaic and simple plot elements. It was during some shots, where actors’ bodies were arranged in some tight front-middle-back compositions, that I started to notice what I attributed to the “depth” of nitrate stock, and what I sometimes registered as a stereoscopic effect—faint shades of late Ken Jacobs stuff. This perception waxed and waned over the course of the next three days, but always I was impressed by the material history of these prints.

From a spectatorial standpoint, other themes, emerging gradually over the following days, concerned the management of less appealing realities. Let’s talk for a minute about how bodies function in theaters. Constant sitting can be uncomfortable, even painful—in my case, this is especially true if I’m not able to extend or move my left leg freely for long periods, as I’ve been fighting a back-and-forth battle with tendonitis for a few years. The Dryden Theater at the George Eastman is actually a pretty good theater for sightlines, at least if you’re on the taller side. (I’m six feet.) But if you’re not so tall, it can be a hassle—and my fiancee, as well as other people I witnessed, were frequently inconvenienced by larger individuals, often sporting big hair and/or a hat no less, arriving late to a screening at sitting right in front of their line of sight. This even happened a few times where a shorter person sitting in front deliberately got up to shift over and give the tall person their seat, as if the cinema spirits were deliberately mocking spectators in the row behind them.3 Fellow taller audience members, I just ask you to please spare a thought from time to time for the people behind you, and perhaps compromise, pick a different seat, even slouch just a bit if you suspect you’ll block someone’s view. Still, I had a conversation with an archivist and historian in attendance about this, and he pointed out quite reasonably that maybe we only expect perfect sightlines now because we’ve become so accustomed to watching things in our homes.

There were two nitrate films that I skipped in the program. One was Un chien andalou, which I’ve seen many times, because my knee was in pain and I simply needed to move it and stretch my legs. The other was Mitchell Leisen’s 1939 Midnight, which I’d also seen before. It’s a good movie, but Ashley and I were also celebrating our anniversary that evening, so we prioritized a leisurely dinner without having to worry about rushing off to make another screening. No regrets for our choice, but Claudette & company, we’ll make it up to you someday.

The second morning began with a shorts program, and frankly I couldn’t do more justice to it than Joshua Minsoo Kim’s superb Letterboxd review of one of the films included in the series, Footage of Atomic Blast at Nagasaki (1945), which situates that sublime and awful footage within the larger “argument” of the entire series of shorts, which also included a very funny screen test for Imogene Coca, a Chuck Jones cartoon (Tom Turk and Daffy), a pair of Oskar Fischingers, a beautifully shot piece by Arne Sucksdorff (the film’s and filmmaker’s importance hailed by Senior Curator Peter Bagrov in his introductory remarks), and more. My favorite inclusion in the program, and my favorite piece of the first half of the festival, was Karel Zeman’s gorgeous 1949 cosmological journey through textures and prisms, Inspirace [Inspiration], which plays with glass and water and light in ways that I’d never seen before.

The three (or four) feature films that followed this program were marked by a kind of tenuous conflict between romance and non-sentimentality, between grit and hope. Bagrov’s introducing of Helmut Käutner’s love triangle film Under the Bridge (1945) posited that it was, if not the director’s masterpiece, likely the biggest statement film that he made, for reasons that had to do with its production under Nazism, but avoiding all explicit mention of the war or the Nazi party. I’m not sure I followed along and understood the full extent of the “statement” being made, but it’s a good, downbeat film; I’ve seen just a few others by Käutner, and know some of the basic contours of his career overall, and while I have not gotten a handle on him yet as an authorial figure I certainly remain intrigued.

This was my second time seeing When Tomorrow Comes (John M. Stahl, 1939), which I think is a lovely film. I agree with a point made by my fiancée afterward that the first section of the film seems to gesture in a very interesting direction that the rest of the film doesn’t seem to take (i.e., all the bustling, women-centered union activity); but the detour that turns into an entirely new destination remains pretty captivating to me, especially in the hurricane-church sequence, whose weird spare beauty feels so graceful and humble.

The last film of day 2 was David Lean’s This Happy Breed (1944), which chronicles many years in a family’s life in the interwar era, from the day they move into a house to the day that the matriarch and patriarch move out. Some recurring themes of the weekend are on full display here—romances that are out of synch, children disowned and dishonored, and cats. One of the other recurring themes of the weekend, at least as far as the feature-length films were concerned, was color photography that veered away from the eye-popping saturation one often associates with “beautiful old prints” of Technicolor movies. The colors in This Happy Breed are full of beige, deliberately so. As cited in the program notes, cinematographer Ronald Neame worked to make the Technicolor “less glorious.” We saw something similar in Norman Taurog’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) on the last day, whose images, shot by James Wong Howe, are often remarkable—but certainly more muted and subtle in color than one might expect.

Day 3 opened with Camille (George Cukor, 1936), famous for its Greta Garbo performance. I had never seen it before and I think that my response was on the more reserved side, overall; the second half seems stronger to me than the first, but is also strong in part because of how things are set up in the first half. So maybe a second viewing in the future will see me come around to it in a big way. The print was beautiful, and preceded by a last-minute addition, Joan Fontaine’s screen test for Rebecca, where one of the dresses she wears in the test appears also in a scene in Camille. (By the way, features at the NPS were generally preceded by nitrate trailers of an assortment of films; the most tantalizing in my opinion was the trailer for Goodnight, Sweetheart [1944], a Republic film that I think I have to seek out.)

After this came a program of avant-garde films, each one short but not that short. I had seen Joris Ivens’ Philips-Radio (1931) before, and its emphasis on the craft but also the repetitive and mechanical aspects of labor remains a striking sort of portrait. I also think I may have seen Jean Renoir’s The Little Match Girl (1928), with Catherine Hessling, but I’m not completely certain; at any rate, it’s a good film that teeters between darkness and whimsy—although I also must admit that my knee started to hurt quite a bit while sitting there watching, and it was at the end of the film that I decided I would skip what was cued up next, the Buñuel/Dalí classic, as mentioned, which was going to screen to a photograph accompaniment. That would have been cool to see, I’m sure, but I can’t say I made the wrong choice for myself in the moment.

I should mention that I didn’t go to the lectures that were scheduled into the weekend’s programming. This is not for lack of interest, but—we were already sitting a lot, we needed time to eat and to stretch our legs, etc. The films had to be prioritized over the lectures.

Day 3 concluded with two screenings, the second one being Midnight, which as I said I also missed, but I did see José Leitão de Barros’ Ala-Arriba (1942), a not-always-smooth but quite interesting hybrid of folk melodrama and semi-anthropological documentary. In a Portuguese fishing village, a romance between a young man and a young woman of different classes of fisherman runs into some obstacles; if you like Araya (1959) or Stromboli (1950), you will find this film of interest, although it boasts no Ingrid Bergman.

Then there was the final day. The question hovering in the back of my mind was whether we’d stay for the Blind Date with Nitrate, where the identity of the last film screened remains a mystery until the curtain rises. (Last year’s pick, a film from Nazi Germany, was a very controversial choice for obvious reasons.) I had a two-hour drive back home, and had to work the next day; was it worth it for us to stay in Rochester until, perhaps, 7pm? But before we got there, NPS showed the aforementioned Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which I found pretty enjoyable in its meandering, episodic, aw shucks way. Slightly distracting: Tommy Kelly, who plays the title role, looks alarmingly like my nephew when he was a few years younger. Also great casting: the kid (David Holt) who plays Sidney.

Overall, I would say that the festival choices seemed to hover in the “worthwhile, but not masterpieces” category, for me. But NPS saved the best for last, in terms of feature films, with Visconti’s remarkable, wide-ranging Bellissima (1951), boasting a terrific Anna Magnani turn, and which I’d not seen before, followed by this year’s Blind Date with Nitrate, Jean Cocteau’s amazing Orpheus (1950). Once I realized what the pick was, I felt suddenly energized and knew I had to stay in Rochester and watch this on the big screen rather than head home early. I think Cocteau is an excellent and important filmmaker but suspect Orpheus is a level above anything else he ever filmed; it’s just spellbinding, as far as I’m concerned. The gloves, the reverse motions, the trick angles, the oneiric lull throughout, all of it does what great cinema tends to do, which is to seem to go beyond our experience, suggesting the unseen strangeness of reality, while also feeling utterly immanent, tactile, simple, like the building blocks of the art are all right there in front of us. Which of course they are.

I have no profound lesson to pull away from my first taste of nitrate, nor any captivating summaries to offer. The pleasures and mysteries apparent in the films this weekend dovetail with the joys of catching up with friends new and old and seeing movies, including old movies on good old prints, in crowds of people who are interesting in seeing this stuff. Another recurring theme of the weekend was the emphasis on patient and loving labor among the curators, projectionists, and other staff involved in bringing this festival to life. People were cited by name, and the crowd applauded appreciatively each time. This is nice to see when the content delivery mechanisms of our leisure can so often seem automated and lifeless. Peter Bagrov, in some closing remarks, suggested something else—although it’s great that the Nitrate Picture Show has become a success, and a hot ticket item, perhaps we should consider the less heralded opportunities to show up and partake in the continuation of (film) history. The FOMO/scarcity mindset of screenings, series, and festivals that are “hot,” and which sell out quickly and which might require undue levels of expendable income or leisure time to participate in, should ideally not come at the expense of the superficially less splendid glories of (in Bagrov’s example, say) a beautiful print of Visconti’s The Damned, which played at the George Eastman recently to a far more modest audience. Perhaps (celluloid) film culture, whatever that is or will continue to be, can find a more robust middle ground where preservation and continued exhibition may be more equitably distributed and celebrated.4 Either way, I’m very glad I went, and hope I can make it back for future installments.

Cheers.

A generation later we see a different sort of fantasy, where Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character Tom in (500) Days of Summer emerges from a night with the object of his affection, Zooey Deschanel (Summer). Tom doesn’t hijack a real public performance on his morning commute to work; instead his mundane walk becomes expressionistic, its performative aspect laid over reality like a filter—apt in an era of Photoshop; Instagram came the year after the film’s release. As with Ferris’ shenanigans, the music of a generation earlier than the hero’s own provides the foundation. Ferris nods to Wayne Newton & the Beatles for his public audience; Tom sets his private triumph to the soundtrack of Hall & Oates. (500) Days of Summer gestures toward the world encroaching at that point, the world where one’s earbuds are firmly lodged in at all times, where the world is remade in pursuit of a personalized aesthetic curation. The scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off stages a celebration for us to experience, and the scene from (500) Days of Summer invites us to experience someone imagining a staged celebration. We may discern a shift.

Two cherry-picked examples don’t make a sound historical argument, of course. There’s nothing particularly important about the characters or movies I’ve used here. I’m simply trying to illustrate a hunch that I have, and sketching things out that I may take up later, to be more closely examined, rigorously tempered, and favorably reinforced.

I think there may be a history to uncover, painstakingly, about the shapes of our fantasies about public attention. These fantasies, extrapolated from something like the two examples I’ve chosen here, might have shifted in some interesting ways over time, namely with successive waves of online activity. Put as vaguely as this, it all sounds quite obvious, and yet I think there are more specific things I’m trying to pin down that I’ve not yet seen expressed elsewhere. I think, also, that there is fruitful way to link this to something else that seems emblematic for our current moment, which is the imagination of oneself spectating as a constant readiness to be seen and reproduced. Consider the “hype reaction.” Every lively spectator in this TikTok clip, for instance, is acutely aware of their being recorded, and aware that they may only get half a second of a viewer’s attention. There is a story to tell about how people, at large, have changed in terms of their existence in public, their existence as images for themselves, their existence as images for other people, and the various ways that the concept of selfhood adapts to such ideas.

@redbulldancethe hype reactions say it all 💥😆 @JesseAlexanderSykes 🎤 @Timbaland #dancer#dancerbattle #streetdance #timbaland

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

If I’m feeling slightly alarmist and pessimistic about all this, I’d put it this way: I worry that we are pushing forward, as a population moving out of the Gutenberg parenthesis, into states of consciousness that involve ever less “self-awareness,” but ever more “self-consciousness.” Perhaps another way to frame it is to say that we are becoming acutely more aware of, and welcoming of, our inevitable surveillance and recording. (I know this isn’t the complete and literal truth; digital natives also have effective ways of camouflaging and hiding.) Still: imagine no longer experiencing surprise, awe, or joy without always being aware of the way your face must look when you feel these emotions …

In order to make sense of our age, maybe, one must imagine Ferris Bueller “looksmaxxing.”

Relatedly, after meaning to get to it for many years, I finally started to read Victor Klemperer’s LTI (which is, so far, incredible). In this book Klemperer documents some of the linguistic changes and behaviors that characterized the Third Reich. What a lot of people went along with, perhaps unthinkingly, becomes the fodder for his weathered and fierce analysis.

In this general spirit that I record notes and observations—whether private, or shared with friends, or shared publicly—about the sea changes in human behavior. We’re living in interesting times. It may be useful to have some records of some of the shifts and habits and assumptions, years in the future. All of us who care to record such perceptions will play a small role in keeping them for the future.

Algorithms have recently shown me some videos of schoolteacher-influencers; some of them are fashionistas. As I indulge the household god of the phone screen for a few moments, I see a succession of looks and poses that simply emphasize how much the clothing each day serves as a costume. “What I wore in a week as a middle school teacher.” In this case the outfits are all homages to the 1970s, but without rhyme or reason—certainly with absolutely no bearing on what a K-12 teacher might do or wear. Three piece leisure suit on Tuesday, track suit on Wednesday, bellbottoms and blouse on Thursday? Sure, whatever. All of it feels tryhard; it feels narcissistic. It feels “off” to me.

But let’s advance a step further for a minute, and grant something else. I suspect these teachers are also trying to find a way to communicate or bond with their students. The question then is not a matter of authenticity; it’s a more practical question of attention capture through aura. Preteens on their phones aren’t going to care if you are dressing authentically, quietly, tastefully like a 1970s educator might have dressed. But they might care if they recognize that you are committed to the bit, in a manner of speaking. You’re fun, you care about details. Wear your tracksuit, fam.

A structure like this characterizes a great deal of contemporary life in my eyes. Something feels off, perhaps unreal, and yet I can discern or rationalize why someone is doing what they’re doing. People who make reaction videos tend to exaggerate their responses in ways that anticipate “engagement.” There’s a strong, mugging performance of concern, empathy, enjoyment, etc., that plays well for thumbnails and clips. Remember, in a hypersaturated information environment, extremity establishes signal amidst noise. There’s an adaptive reason for all these changes, however idiotic those changes might be.

I was telling a friend, re: some shameless online clout seeking, about a family story from my youth. My sister, as a toddler, would go reaching for some object she wasn't supposed to play with. If my parents would catch her, they’d say, “stop, I see you!” And my sister would cover her eyes and keep going because she reasoned that if she couldn’t see anything while she reached for the forbidden object, neither could they. Social media performance often feels like a version of that.

Months ago, Robert Mariani’s “American Diner Gothic” essay aroused some discussion, which I glimpsed from afar. I finally read it and was struck by how much of it is devoted to the description and re-description of a constellation of markers of what the author calls, half-seriously, American diner goth. Mariani has a theory (“economic mobility dies, suburbs become psychic deserts, and Discord becomes more real than your cul-de-sac” … “geek equals goth equals left-behind American”), and he has numbers to reinforce his argument. But he seems really interested in, let’s say, a quasi-phenomenological reckoning with the new arrangements of signals that wouldn’t have made sense a generation ago. “The dinergoth core is the pierced-up, gender-fluid Amazon warehouse worker who streams on Twitch, writes fanfiction, wears a furry tail to raves, runs an OnlyFans, and dreams of voice acting while working nights at the fulfillment center.” I think his aesthetic bemusement is coming from a place very much like the one I describe above: a sense that things are off, the signs don’t match up and flow together organically to him. He’s trying to make sense of it. You can judge for yourself how successful he is.

Katherine Dee’s response is both skeptical and supportive of Mariani’s argument. I’m not a paid subscriber to Dee’s newsletter so I don’t know what she highlights as the real new developments of 2020s culture, but she tweaks some of the American Diner Gothic ideas about the origin of all these changes.

“Your curiosities, because you were 8 or 14 or 16 or even 21, visiting home from college, were things like: where are these kids buying the cat ears? Where did they find that choker? How do they know about Inuyasha? It turned out they were going to the Hot Topic at the far-away mall, the one that was considered the “trashy” one. Hot Topic opened in 1989. The founder was from Alton, Iowa, and his whole business model was to bring downtown alternative culture to suburban mall kids who would never see downtown. By 2005, Hot Topic was making almost a billion dollars a year. This was only briefly an urban thing, and it was an urban thing before Rob and I were born. What was ultimately mainstreamed was specifically suburban and exurban. The infrastructure for distributing alt identity to provincial America predates the commercial internet. It’s a chain store that opened when the Berlin Wall fell.”

She cites The Craft (‘96), and the West Memphis Three; these kinds of things are forerunners to the American Diner Goth. I don’t have very strong opinions, certainly less any theories, about this particular type. But, perhaps like the half-huckster, there are emerging several new permutations of old figures, and anyone who cares to sort through everything will keep doing so.

In William Maxwell’s late novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, the narrator pieces together events from his childhood and speculates on the lives of some of those he once knew. He extrapolates, with the benefit of age and experience, from concrete observations of behaviors and patterns and deviations he noticed in childhood. The culturologist, I think, attempts something similar.

Some recent viewing/reading, for anyone interested:

Some might say that this was a small hassle to go through for the $175,000 prize. People have pointed out that DeWitt seems to have been suffering from some executive dysfunction; she herself admitted that she was in no mental state to respond to things as efficiently or as effectively as she might have liked.

The dividing line seems to be whether people find DeWitt’s predicament sympathetic or not. Some play their sympathies on the world’s smallest violin. “Boo hoo, I can’t find WiFi in Amsterdam to inconvenience myself a little bit in order to accept $175k. Working people around the globe jump through many more hoops for much smaller amounts of money constantly!” Sometimes you have to do some unpleasant things, and delay or compromise on what you want, of course, especially if you’re going to get something in return.

Myself, I remain sympathetic to DeWitt: I love her work and I think she is an actual genius. The promotional character of “literary culture” today seems to be about hype, about “bookishness” more than books. I say this not to mock any serious writer or publisher who plays the game as a practical matter; but ultimately all of this is kind of nonsense, isn’t it? Anyway, the Windham-Campbell Prize may have required some promotional activities, but the Zach Campbell Prize, if I were wealthy and such a thing existed, would ask no such thing of her. It would just provide a fat check that says “Thanks!” in the memo. She doesn’t need to prove anything. She’s 69 and has surely written some of the most brilliant work in English in our century. She can decide on her own priorities and the rest of us can do what we can to support her future endeavors. (In other words, I agree with Henry Oliver: “Just give Helen DeWitt some money.”) What’s going to be best for the author and for the reading public?

All that said, I’m also amenable to the idea that, in general, we too often allow ourselves to slip into a kind of learned helplessness and dependency and fail to receive gifts provided for us. I don’t make this claim about DeWitt specifically. But I can see why people might be frustrated to hear that someone felt they couldn’t send a couple more clarifying message, make some arrangements, and block out mere days or weeks, in order to receive a substantial sum. Ultimately, for DeWitt, the time and energy required to focus on writing and on her own well-being were more important than accepting Windham-Campbell’s requirements. The money could, and should, help her work; but the money, and the publicity, are not her goals. I think that’s what some of us have also found admirable, in a bittersweet way, about her account. “Just let me finally work on my stuff!” How many of us have made that our rallying cry?

For my own reasons, I have been thinking lately about death and finality and how to make sense of a person’s life. Some of these words were composed before I started to think about this in an acute way recently. But all of what I’m sharing is infused by this perspective. Forgive me if I wax a little wistful re: taking stock of a life trajectory. Not trying to be too cheesy.

“I want to find a way of life where I don’t have to think about money, one way or the other.” The book reviewer Michael Dirda said this while describing his attempts to negotiate his talents and aspirations with his working class upbringing and his complicated relationship with his father. The “one way or the other” refers to either being so financially secure he wouldn’t have to worry about money, or being of such modest means that he wouldn’t ever worry about keeping up with the Joneses.

I have thought about these problems a lot. A reasonably intelligent but impractical young person, I figured that I should simply pursue what I wanted, jump through whatever hoops I needed to, and then things would work out, “one way or the other.” If only, I think, I could go back in time to my younger self and give some proper advice in a way that I might have listened to it!

People don’t usually like unsolicited advice. The most well-meaning and useful words may be received as paternalistic meddling and micromanagement. If you tell people that they have choices, that they have some measure of agency, you’ll find that they very often don’t want to listen to it. (We all want to be free to make our own mistakes. And that’s what we do.) Some people are comfortable with their helplessness; some even most comfortable when helpless. We can become attached to this modality because at least this provides a story for ourselves about why our lives have not turned out as we hoped; and perhaps we receive a modicum of the care and attention from others that we might have wanted, had we been successful. I’m not immune to these limitations. But I don’t want this to be my identity, and that’s a lesson I think many people are still yet to learn.

And if people don’t usually like unsolicited advice, solicited advice may not work as directed, either.

My old instructor and friend Brian Price, who wrote a thought-provoking book exploring regret, aligned advice with what’s possible, because, generally, “we do not regret what works, only what failed to work. We crave the possible as a solution to a regret that we can only anticipate and never know, since in choosing the possible, we opt for what has worked at least once before.” Regret, meanwhile, concerns itself with the impossible. If I might first toy with one impossible embarkation and, indeed, counsel my younger self, trying to shield him (me) from the harsher blows that life has in store, I may be trying to think through things that aren’t possible: I can’t undo a previous marriage or a previous career choice, for instance. To the extent that I regret anything about my past choices, in whole or in part, I am confronting the persistent reality of things I have no way or hope of changing.

Meanwhile, advice, good or bad, taken or ignored, makes sense when considered from the familiarity of the actions and context to which it would apply (what, BP notes, “has worked at least once before”). We expect, or at least hope, that the similarity of past experience models for the future experience something that may benefit us. Or at least we hope it blocks us from some harm. The best pieces of advice I have for myself—younger, present, and future selves—stem from an understanding of how I might face a reality I can’t control or predict, and how I might face the fact that I cannot completely predict my own subjectivity. Zach, start saving money for your future now (because compound interest will help you); start lifting weights now (you will only benefit mentally and physically, and wonder why you didn’t take it up sooner); be judicious when indulging your various appetites (because you won’t understand at first how they’ll affect your sleep, your anxiety, your wits, your executive function); und so weiter. I could go on and on if you let me, if I let myself. In all these cases I’m thinking about preventing future regret by not repeating what I did, or failed to do, previously.

I’ve also been thinking about a less, let’s say, defensive character to the way I might approach advice. The metaphor I hold in my mind is that of paths. Others can show us the way, but we have to determine what we will take. Discernment in choosing and walking paths—not simply judgment about taking the “right” ones, but also some modicum of holistic wisdom about the inevitability of trade-offs, the power of fortuna, and so on—is a crucial part of one’s education. There are perhaps shades of Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster here: we are always learning for ourselves, however much we’re also always learning with others.

So I can’t alter my life path to date, and being stuck in regret might only torment me with its presentation of impossible realities. But if I think about regret as a precondition to adjust the next steps on my path in a way that opens onto experiences I don’t already know, I might get somewhere I will like being. I can’t tell you how to do it yourself, but (paradoxically?) perhaps you could read these words and figure it out yourself. Call this by whatever name makes sense to you: empowerment, agency, courage ...

Consider Blake Edwards’ lovely 1984 comedy Micki & Maude, in which Dudley Moore starts an affair with Amy Irving, though he’s married to Ann Reinking. Moore’s character is deceptive but not malicious; he intends to do the right thing, the honorable thing, as he sees it—but he’s weak, or the timing is off, or unforeseen circumstances make the possibility of a solution impossible. Without giving the whole story away to those who haven’t seen the film, Micki & Maude arrives at a point where Moore is faced with a dilemma very much like one that kicks things off. A person could think, correctly, that our bumbling hero has learned nothing from his mistakes. (Faced with a situation similar to what he’s been through, he fails to make different choices.) Yet we could also say that the narrative is an unrepeatable process, and that there is novelty—non-familiarity—in this “repeat” situation, in that he is now facing it as a different person, and one who perhaps even loves better than he did before.

We can only toss over so much jetsam; most of the baggage stays with us in some form. As we age, the sheer content of our past accrues weight, and our opportunities narrow. We can’t start over or reinvent ourselves at 40 or 50 or 60 in the same way as we can when we’re 15, 20, or 25. In fact, attempting to do so can be disastrous and only underline the tragicomic futility of our situation. (If someone chases after youthfulness itself into old age, this is a sign not of a youthful soul, but of disorder and sadness: something has gone wrong for this person! I say this with compassion, not contempt.) YET—this is important—this is not our doom. It behooves us to remain open and to keep developing. I want to think that the task of living entails understanding that our encroaching mortality need not be our enemy, and it is impossible to learn this lesson “early.” I don’t know if each individual human has a telos; I suspect we do (a belief my younger self did not share!). If so, I do not think the meaning of our life emerges only at our peak, but only in a totality that we can not apprehend in medias res.

Or, maybe Ted Leo put it all more beautifully and succinctly:

Or come from out of the tunnels we dig in
To see that tunneling's not living
And working doesn't work
Or come to find that loving is labor
Labor's life and life's forever

As a bonus unrelated to anything in this post, please enjoy this discussion at your leisure:

I'm a non-smoker, but how charming is the moment around the 50' mark when Berger and Silverblatt light up cigarettes?

There are effects to this flattening of historical time into a literary present. As Adrian Martin has suggested,

there’s something about being a child of television that cultivates a taste for everything that is obscure, ephemeral and fragmentary in the art of cinema – a hunger for everything that is in some way perverse, and a tolerance for anything that has long been barred from legitimacy or respectability. Catching that crazy title on late night TV, taking a punt on that unknown video with the lurid cover, getting absorbed in that trashy telemovie on the cable channel that seems to show nothing but trashy telemovies ... This kind of cinephilia thrives – as was once said of the great surrealist film aficionado, Ado Kyrou – on “surprise rather than certainty, discovery rather than satisfaction”.

This openness to surprise and discovery is, frankly, salutary in an over-saturated, overdetermined information environment. A linear or cyclical historical understanding provides us with context, but the flat forgetfulness of our present moment—unintentionally reinforced by the framing of films through a literary present—requires that we learn to navigate on our own. We won’t do that if we focus on certainty and satisfaction. Or to put it another way, we won’t learn to exercise agency and “feed ourselves” if we happily eat what algorithms and authorities serve us.

I’ve been reading some of Serge Daney’s criticism lately, with no real purpose in mind. The way that he would write about films had a moral urgency connected to the medium’s past and of the history of culture, politics, and economics more generally. Even when he doesn’t specifically describe a film, but only mentions it in passing, the context can make it feel vitally important. The stakes are sometimes so powerfully sketched out that one feels (or, at least, I feel) an impulse to see an inconsequential French drama from 1978, or a short film that played at a few festivals before historical oblivion, because then the big picture will become richer and clearer. This is not because the films are always presented as great works or hidden gems in themselves. It’s because they fit into a textual and contextual tapestry. The seriousness of Daney’s thought requires a free play of curiosity rather than the compulsion of FOMO and the scarcity mindset that would only be amplified in the decades since Daney’s death in 1992. By this example we can help ourselves be active rather than merely reactive in our viewing, our thinking, and our talking.

What’s more, Daney’s work—like so much great criticism—orients at least as much as it describes or evaluates. If we understand the concept of ekphrasis broadly, or example, we can grant that not all ekphrasis is direct description of the image, but rather a scaffolding of context: a way of positioning the reader to understand the elements through something more than mere enumeration of what they are. In this spirit, there’s much to ponder in a book that I’m only in the middle of reading, Alexander García Düttmann’s So What, or How to Make Films with Words, published a few years ago by Northwestern University Press.

“Does making films not always, to some extent, amount to making films with words, with the meaningless letters of which words are formed? It is not simply the case that one can forgo seeing a film because of an idea whose linguistic expression can substitute for the visual experience or of the unfolding of the idea in a succession of images. Rather, a film cannot be seen, because description or enunciation can never capture the blindness of its experience, just as they can never capture the blindness of its idea. Only a letter can. How to make a film with words means: how to seal a film with a letter as a consequence of what happens to a film’s idea and a film’s experience in the film itself.”

García Düttmann then cites an old Film Culture article that claims there’s little to see in Blow Job that can’t be adequately described; as if words and film are interchangeable. But in fact the function of language itself is for one thing to stand in for something else, in a way whose doubleness we apprehend; and so film—which may not be “a language”—nonetheless is like a language in at least this respect, that its existence as film involves being a thing while also standing in for another thing or in fact many other things (the thing it’s recording, the thing it’s emulating, the thing it’s evoking, its illusion, or its hidden contents to be bracketed off).

In an essay on Duras (however roundabout it is about being about Duras), García Düttmann opens first by reflecting on what it means to have an idea. Having an idea is something anyone can apparently do, and having had an idea, one is presumably compelled to share it with others (all part of the “imperative to network,” an ideological compulsion that one has “a duty to resist”). Even an idea is “a slogan, a password, an order from the sphere of communication, since networking demands that we ceaselessly generate new ideas, since having an idea, communicating it, and “putting it out there” is what makes everyone just like everyone else, the first act of resistance is to draw out, in the concept of the idea, whatever stands in the way of its communicative appropriation and unsettles the “democratic” right to the idea.”

Consider García Düttmann’s resistance to the cod-democratic networking-imperative around “ideas” an outgrowth to Marguerite Duras’ refusal, in and around her great 1977 film Le camion aka The Truck aka The Lorry, to make her film any kind of a conventional representation of the thing it is supposed to be. In Le camion, the author famously sits down with Gerard Depardieu to read through a script for the film that we are [not] watching. “Le camion is not acted, it is read, and it was not rehearsed. If it had been rehearsed, it would have been a different film.”1 Le camion is possibly my favorite of Duras’ films (I’ve seen almost all of them), but I’ve only seen it once, and have chosen to sit with it only as a fading memory as I write these words because I may approach it differently in one of the next installments. That is, for me, the film is not what Duras talks about with the film, because what I remember has everything to do, primarily, with the physicality of the writer and the actor at the table, and “free-floating” shots of trucks and roads. This only seems to be undescored by Duras’ opposition of the performance, from both director and actor, to textual authority; these things pull furthest away, she suggests, from the realm of writing.

Duras again: “Cinema knows that it can never replace the written text. It nevertheless sets out to replace it.”2

Just as a film might possibly be defined as a surplus, an opposition, or—in general, in short—a relation to a text (note to self, but not to be deleted for publication: does AGD’s notion of the idea root to text, or is it distinct, or is this a case of overlap?), a text can then extend further out and back toward the sensuous audiovisual realities of a film. Writing and filming both involve the production of something to stand in for an absence, a standing-for, but the what is elusive and open to interpretation. The absences to which the presences relate are not simply explicable through analogy, substitution, or cataphasis.

In Jean-Daniel Pollet’s 1966 adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s Le Horla, Laurent Terzieff (the only actor to appear in the 38-minute film) plays a solitary man who comes to believe that a threatening entity, known as the Horla, inhabits his room with him. The Horla is not directly perceptible; it is only through its traces on the physical world, such as the flipped pages of a book, or the water and milk consumed unseen overnight, that announce his presence. Pollet’s film is relatively faithful to de Maupassant’s short story, but he introduces some elements around audio recording that of course would not have shown up in a story published in 1887. Terzieff’s character narrates his thoughts into a microphone and records them on tape; he plays music on vinyl. In this respect, the tactility of the analog sound media opens up a few new doors. First, it justifies classification of Le Horla within a broader body of films that explore a constellation between truth-seeking, insanity, and audiovisual recording or surveilling devices that amplify or fragment sensory experience—so, group it into consideration with works like Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973), The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), Gloria Mundi (Nicos Papatakis, 1976), The Shout (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1978), Arrebato (Ivan Zulueta, 1981), Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981), and Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, 2008). Second, the use of audio recording in Le Horla expands the range and underlines the importance of the indexical trace in the story’s (and the narrator’s) apprehension of the entity: you don’t see the thing, but rather you see the physical effects of what the thing does. The Horla is, however, silent, and it is the narrator who (though he has no one to talk to onscreen) produces an audio diary of his experience. The repeated image of the tape recorder in an otherwise empty yellow boat (yellow paint also being a motif throughout the film, a way that the protagonist marks objects around him) attains resonance from the suggestion that this may end up being all that is “left” of the narrator who, in turn, in time, is believed to become invisible—because dead. Does he dive out from the yellow boat into the embrace of the sea? We don’t see it; yet …

Serge Daney wrote a few words about Le Horla, or rather inspired by Le Horla, back in 1967 for Cahiers du Cinéma. I say “inspired by” because this piece tells you almost nothing about the film, what it looks and sounds like, what it’s about, what story it’s based on, and yet it bears the brilliant and penetrating mental infrastructure that Daney’s pieces so often providers their readers: a way of looking fresh and understanding more deeply what was actually happening. Daney suggests that Pollet is a kind of “travel filmmaker,” and that these filmmakers’ works were like the slow-motion performance

“of a body diving into water. … A body that will dive into the water knowing everything there is to know about the temperature of the water, the height of the diving board, and the art of swimming. Despite his knowledge, we often see him drown; life’s slightest gesture is enough to overwhelm him, to render every precaution useless and the realities to embrace ever more rugged. But we know that great travelers only ever make their preparations for the pleasure of seeing their plans thwarted.”3

Daney asserts that Pollet “films between the death sentence and death.” I thought about this characterization when watching Varda’s Lions Love (1969), centered on three hippies who seem to have existed in a kind of hedonistic yet mildly anhedonic malaise, simply waiting but waiting for nothing—and experiencing the great big world “outside” their daily routines as a joke told at arm’s length. TV and a Bloody Mary!

Much of the second half of Lions Love involves this trio hanging out, watching news coverage of the assassination of Robert Kennedy, providing running commentary. They are affected; they can’t believe that the shooting of Andy Warhol and the (fictional) suicide of Shirley Clarke have all happened at one—it’s too much. But the news event of Kennedy’s shooting, however it makes these characters feel, ultimately an audiovisual phenomenon whose presence is not so dissimilar from a play (McClure’s The Beard) or a movie (Lost Horizon)—or even a landscape, in the case of the “landscape dinner” that they enjoy in the style of eating TV dinners in front of a TV screen.

I ventured a general hunch at the beginning of this missive so let me venture another one: certain form of media-proximate militancy exist and continue because they are a reaction of overcompensation to people’s political inefficacy. (We are more like the trio in Lions Love than we care to admit, in other words.) In cases where people insist that other individuals, just private civilians, should respond to artworks in a particular way, the aesthetic dimension of the sensus communis becomes the detour, or a release valve, for the pressures of unfulfilled political action. We can’t enact revolution or reform, and lose belief in our ability to do so, and thus we retreat to the battlefield of perception and affect. And we start battling out on domains that stand in for absences, but we won’t get anywhere until we better recognize what and why those are …

(As usual: more to come.)

As always, I’m continually trying to figure out how to fit a life of creative and intellectual pursuit into a routine of work, household duties, partnership, and so on. Future installments here will be the fruit of some of these practices, I hope, and those should start coming soon. I haven’t written or published as much as I’d have liked over the past few months. In the meantime, I’m trying to do what I can to read, write, watch, and listen to interesting things; to be at least a little present in the natural world; and to foster conviviality in whatever ways I can.

For now: a small curation of images and things indicative of what’s kept me buzzing lately in some kind of way, helping me to grapple with problems or to feel different kinds of pleasure or wonder, prompting me to keep asking questions, to want to keep asking questions.

More soon—

“In the domain of body culture, which also covers the illustrated newspapers, tastes have been quietly changing. The process began with the Tiller Girls. These products of American distraction factories are no longer individual girls, but indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics.” (Siegfried Kracauer)

“Only as parts of a mass, not as individuals who believe themselves to be formed from within, do people become fractions of a figure.” (SK)

“Although the masses give rise to the ornament, they are not involved in thinking it through. As linear as it may be, there is no line that extends from the small sections of the mass to the entire figure. The ornament resembles aerial photographs of landscapes and cities in that it does not emerge out of the interior of the given conditions, but rather appears above them.” (SK)

“Everyone does his or her task on the conveyor belt, performing a partial function without grasping the totality. Like the pattern in the stadium, the organization stands above the masses, a monstrous figure whose creator withdraws it from the eyes of its bearers, and barely even observes it himself.”

“Educated people—who are never entirely absent—have taken offense at the emergence of the Tiller Girls and the stadium images. They judge anything that entertains the crowd to be a distraction of that crowd. But despite what they think, the aesthetic pleasure gained from ornamental mass movements is legitimate. Such movements are in fact among the rare creations of the age that bestow form upon a given material. The masses organized in these movements come from offices and factories; the formal principle according to which they are molded determines them in reality as well. When significant components of reality become invisible in our world, art must make do with what is left, for an aesthetic presentation is all the more real the less it dispenses with the reality outside the aesthetic sphere. No matter how low one gauges the value of the mass ornament, its degree of reality is still higher than that of artistic productions which cultivate outdated noble sentiments in obsolete forms—even if it means nothing more than that.” (SK)

Aside from video documentation of it, I haven’t seen Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament, an art/video installation that explores some ideas developed in Siegfried Kracauer’s famous essay through YouTube dance videos. It seems as though Bookchin’s piece playfully reiterates the mass ornament via editing techniques (a la Multiple SIDosis) to represent aesthetic phenomena that do not otherwise emphasize this mass aspect, when seen in isolation. I’m intrigued by how contemporary subjects, i.e. people, might themselves abdicate a certain pocket of subjectivity itself in order to conform to the fragment of the mass ornament they inhabit …

Films and TV shows sometimes seem to use needle drops as cheat codes, imparting (or importing) aesthetic richness and emotional resonance that the movie or TV hasn’t “earned.” Think of how heavily Oliver Stone’s Platoon relies on Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” (admittedly not a pop song, last I checked). In my crankier, more cynical moments I suspect that Stone just looked at a rough cut of his film and made a note for any moment he wasn’t sure what to do: “press play on the Adagio on this scene, too.” A mediocre romantic moment can be gussied up with the application of the right song; a routine montage immortalized through something catchy. Movies, like those of Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson, might use licensed music extensively as another lever for the authorial pulling. (I don’t deny that sometimes it can be done very well!)

Plus, as an overall trend, the mild fetishism for needle drops among discerning audiences gets to be a bit much, a vicious little self-perpetuating tryhard cycle. I’m always reminded of the time I sat through Guardians of the Galaxy, and Chris Pratt starts dancing to “Come and Get Your Love.” Yes—yes—we all enjoy that Redbone song. Good on the music supervisor Dave Jordan, or whomever. But if all movies were like that, I simply wouldn’t watch movies. I’m already a little tired of the ostentatious way so many “moments” get engineered for what, we’re eagerly prodded to understand, is a truly epic needle drop. It can come across as a little disingenuous, like when someone aggressively performs a “casual fun” persona in a way that only calls attention to how hard they’re working to try to convince you they’re not working.

Matching a really good pop song (especially a more obscure one) to a film sequence can take some good judgment even if all one is doing is trying to create a little frisson of recognition in the viewer. More interesting, however, are the marriages of songs and sequences that build meaning beyond the moment of recognition. I have no theory of needle drops here. But I am inclined to mention a few that I’ve thought about a lot in recent years. What follows are discussions of bits from The Wanderers (Philip Kaufman, 1979), Take This Waltz (Sarah Polley, 2011), and Mississippi Masala (Mira Nair, 1991); and I’m including a clip and discussion of the ending of that last title, so if you haven’t already seen Mississippi Masala and don’t want it “spoiled,” go watch it now.

When I watched The Wanderers just a year and a half ago, a few things surprised me about it. One was the broad comedy throughout. Another was the way that it sculpted with the materials of nostalgia. In this sequence above, Ken Wahl and Toni Kalem play sweethearts after a quarrel. They encounter each other while seeing news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on the TV display outside a store. In this moment of public mourning, the national tragedy is imparted through mass media screens (also consumer goods), but it’s also experienced in an embodied way in the crowd of people, and these two people finding each other in the crowd. Dissolve to a close-up on Wahl in a bowling alley and his wordless, tearful shot-reverse shot gazed shared with Kalem, before they’re united in the same frame in a two shot (her smile, then his smile), reconciled, before the dissolve again.

Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” is an essentially perfect song, so you could understand any filmmaker’s impulse to slap it on top of a scene for effect. But the construction here is different, and deeper, because it is about the very creation of nostalgia through the paths of young love—which, of course, are so often generic when seen from a distance, but feel anything but generic when experienced by an adolescent. These two people are coming of age, coming into adulthood, but also coming into a generational identity, one that is tied to media-disseminated events like JFK’s death, and tied to popular music. Succinctly, this passage from The Wanderers underscores a key cultural-historical moment (the rise of the boomer), but also, sets up a canvas against which the later introduction of Bob Dylan’s music stands in relief (in a risky move that I think pays off).

Take This Waltz tells a bittersweet story about the unraveling of one romantic relationship and the creation of another. I have found it bubbling up in my memory from time to time in the months and years since I first watched it. One of the most affecting scenes comes when Michelle Williams and Luke Kirby take a ride together. The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” already ensconced in media history for other reasons, is a wonderful choice here because, first, it’s fun; second, it’s old (but not too old); it’s also tied to what is essentially a children’s ride and its lights and colors. Polley’s choices here serve the material really well. Williams’ character is assessing some feelings awakened in her by her new “friend,” but in this moment she is not thinking so much as experiencing. She lets go of herself by the end. (In this you might say her internal drama takes the path not taken by Leanna in Craig Finn’s heartbreaking “Luke and Leanna.”) And the abrupt stop, the ugly lights turning back on: what a tremendous précis for the picture the whole movie, I think, conveys about relationships.

Lately Mira Nair has been in the background of the news for other reasons, but let’s none of us overlook the fact that she’s made some great cinema. Mississippi Masala, in particular, is an excellent movie and its ending is one of the most moving I’ve ever seen. I’m still trying to figure out why. Roshan Seth’s Jay returns to Uganda, the home from which he’s been long estranged, and visits a market; his posture towards the country, and by extension to black Ugandans, remains “complicated” but shows some kind of progression beyond the racialized resentment he has harbored at being pushed out so many years before.

What I find deeply affecting and effective about this ending has a lot to do with the music. This song, “Mundeke” by Afrigo Band, is beautiful and joyous, and I love its varied soundscape, the different vocal registers. As with the scenes I’ve highlighted from Take This Waltz and The Wanderers, the nonverbal element of the passage is important. In those other films, there is a shared, romantic relation between two people, which the respective songs expand in combination with the images. In this instance, the construction is a little more complicated and perhaps tenuous. Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury are frolicking and kissing in the Southern landscape, which is the (lovely but conventional) resolution to the coupling element of the film’s narrative, but this piece with Seth is the other crucial element. The character of Jay, in his mature years, has understood something finally about what home means and what he can retain or leave behind in his old age. We might grant that it seems like an obvious choice to group the theme of hope, or renewal, with the figure of a small, silent child (whom Jay ends up holding in his arms, after the child has touched his face). But it’s not the “symbol” here that is moving, at least not alone; what pierces me seems to come down to the timing.

When the deeper voices enter the song, and the camera pans over again to the dancing woman, this produces an ever so slightly new feeling. Then the woman singer’s voice on the lyrics again, at a slightly higher pitch, and the camera pans back left to focus on Seth and the little child and the child’s guardian. Hold it for just a few seconds. Then cut to credits (“For Mjaan”). I adore the decision not to cut on a big beat, an obvious moment of transition, a breakdown, the chorus. Something about the “discorrelation” (my apologies to Shane Denson), the seeming randomness of the moment of that cut, embodies—I think—a sensuous knowledge of the way that life exists in patterns that are both perceived and not perceived. We embrace the future, the child, the possibilities; we acknowledge the past, the traumas, the losses that can be remembered but never recovered. There’s a powerful tension there. It’s both, always, and it keeps moving.

I’ve been spending less time on Twitter lately. I spend even less time on the few other platforms on which I have accounts, and I rarely ever post. When I do visit Facebook in particular, I scroll on my feed and see—in addition to advertisements—all sorts of Content that looks more or less like this:

Of course the particular images and videos have some relationship to my own browsing habits, though it’s not always clear how the connections were formed. Sometimes the material is benign, like MovementbyDavid, a pale fellow who posts a lot of flexibility and fitness videos with helpful tips and encouragement. Frankly, if I must have this kind of stuff on my feed, I don’t mind David at all—he seems like a very nice guy, and informative. Or otherwise it’s relatively innocuous, like the Shuffle Mamas, who seem inescapable within my Facebook feed the past month or two. I actually get a lot of hip hop dance tutorials lately. Why does the algorithm think I want to learn to shuffle and c walk? Maybe I do and don’t yet know it. I can’t dance well at all, and my devices can tell. They know that I am (I must be) a little more likely to pause my scroll and watch 14 seconds of some broccoli top German kids in enormous Jordans do an air walk.

But none of it makes my life any better. I’m not looking to kill time; I feel like time is already quite precious, and I don’t need more things to consume so much as I need more time to work with it all, more time to reflect and connect, more people to share it all with.

And so it’s disheartening that the networks and platforms and apps that would seem to connect us nonetheless nudge us toward passivity and lowest common denominator consumption. If I sound like a third-rate echo of a Jerry Mander or a Neil Postman, well, so be it.

Note, above and throughout, the blandness of neutral tones in McMansion(esque) interiors, with few items on the walls, few items at all that don’t look like they were drop-shipped in the past week, little if any evidence that the places are actually lived in. Of course, often, they aren’t; it’s artificial; “everyone knows” it’s fake and everybody consequently accepts the hustle of content production. There’s a whole world of producers and consumers who simply live and breathe the operational aesthetic of Content grifting.

I can safely ignore the vast majority of this stuff, but I admit I’m hooked in frustration, from time to time, by the engagement bait that poses as cerebral, wise, or mentally stimulating. There are varieties of mindless Content that, I’m embarrassed to say, successfully catch my attention and make me roll my eyes like a teenager whose parents just told him he couldn’t go the big party.

Sometimes these kinds of posts explicitly invite participation from their audience (post the answer in the chat, or argue about the premise). Otherwise, they seem to exist to provide a veneer of thoughtfulness without the substance of thought. “Just so” facial expressions, plenty of pursed lips, raised eyebrows, gentle knowing nods, and sidelong glances.

The more energized version of this performance of know-it-all hot-takeism is the “let me break it down for y’all” opinionation of “critical thinkers” regurgitating the talking points of their faction on the day. I don’t have a TikTok account, but it seems that TikTok is especially full of these types. I prefer to avoid. I think the deluge will only get worse.

Anyway … anyway. I don’t post all this because I’m trying to “critique” or “demystify” the low hanging fruit of monetized spectacle on Facebook and other platforms. I wanted to share this because, first, I noticed I was driven to slight, chronic hostility and started taking screenshots of all this stuff, and in sharing perhaps I can exorcise my frustration; and second, I hope this Content stands in sharp, sharp relief to the possibilities that internet platforms once provided in greater abundance. There have been opportunities for people to communicate instantaneously—or asynchronously—with people across the world, at length or in little exchanges, and this remains a wondrous affordance. I don’t take it for granted. I like maintaining any possibilities for what amounts, now, to being an “underbelly” of the internet (an undernet?), and which is one more expression, perhaps, of samizdat within the attention economy. We seek nourishment, not the feed (how’s that for a slogan?) …

Let me say this, for those of you who’ve made it this far. We can still talk about ideas and books and art and also interesting tangible, material things. If any of this resonates with you, reader, please reach out; you (yes, YOU) probably have some good things to share, and I may have one or two ideas to offer you, in turn. There remain opportunities for community.

Why? The biggest change, as I see it, and the biggest obstacle to the task of reinvigorating various discussion platforms that some people sincerely want back, is the information environment. Circa 2005, social media as we later came to know them were in their infancy, and if people used the internet to establish their elsewhere communities, they would often use such things as, yes, listservs, blogs, and message boards. But now we’ve amassed an exhausting generation’s worth of social media wreckage. We are all inescapably living in a world shaped by Facebook/Meta, Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter/X, and countless apps. Because we are often obligated to participate in this world in some form, or to understand that most of the people around us are participating, and because phone apps have supplanted a large chunk of larger-screen web browsing, it is more difficult to find the time and resources to read and write in the ways that the slightly older forms of elsewhere community took.

I’ve been thinking about how to bridge certain gaps or meet certain demands, then, re: open, long-form, substantive text discussions within groups, while remaining attentive to years and generations of change—changes that have to do with technology, yes, but also spiritual or cultural disquietude.

Conversations and approximations of conversations still occur. Obviously. However, in the decrease of higher quality group discussions that capitalize on these affordances, people have often moved into less public, less archived, or less accessible communications. There are things unsaid, or said sotto voce, that point to a widespread dissatisfaction. Two books I’ve read this year shed some light on this. One is new and the other is a little less new.

Nadia Asparouhova is a thoughtful and probing writer on contemporary internet culture and related areas. I appreciate the way she tackles problems top-to-bottom in her extended pieces. A lot of Silicon Valley or rationalist/postrationalist types take “thinking from first principles” as a license to reinvent the wheel, over and over, and consequently do or believe many dumb things that are only “justified” via spreadsheet-flowchart substitutions for actual thinking. This does not apply, however, to the patient, observant research and musings of Asparouhova.

Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading (Dark Forest Collective, 2025) explores the shadow side of how memes have shaped discursive behaviors. Whereas memes spread through virality (exposure is good! we want more visibility! replication is desirable!), antimemes are slippery, resist containment or measurement, and skew toward the private and the gated. As I think of it, memes are tempered and strengthened through enduring publicity, with a spotlight, and antimemes emerge wherever the bright public lights cast shadows in the memetic ecosystem. They are also a “defense mechanism” against cognitive overload, including the burden of heavy or official truths (and untruths).

(NB: Though Girard’s theory of mimetic desire makes an importance appearance in the book, I’ll echo Asparouhova’s note for the reader—she’s writing about (anti)memetics, e instead of i there.)

Antimemes might be cultural taboos or “uncomfortable truths,” whisper networks, open secrets, hidden languages; antimemes may be information that is socially unsafe to know or to speak, or simply information that doesn’t seem to fit in more public, visible, or durable paradigms. (Asparouhova cites the persistence of Daylight Savings Time in the US—a policy that almost no one seems to like—as an example of how difficult it can be to sustain and act on antimemetic thoughts. Calls to end DST consistently fizzle out because attention shifts elsewhere after little spikes of focus twice a year, other priorities crowd it out.) People guard the expression of some of their thoughts, or silo it, or forget it, unless and until there are inflection points after which some dormant/popular ideas suddenly burst into fuller public view in the wake of a new situation, or people who function socially as “truth-tellers.” (There are similarities here to what Timur Kuran calls a “preference cascade.”) Asparouhova’s book is not an endorsement of any particular political position and she does not link antimemetics intrinsically to any faction; this is simply part of how everyone partakes in the current attention economy. Thus, even a designation like “truth-teller” should be read as a functional description; a “truth-teller” in this memetic/antimemetic environment is not necessarily someone who tells what Asparouhova, or any individual, would call Truth, but a trailblazer who plays a role in the reorganization of previously de-emphasized and hidden ideas.

Asparouhova highlights a moment, years ago, when the second active shooter in a week roamed the San Francisco neighborhood where she worked. She, concerned and anxious about the threat of violence, messaged her co-workers, “Wow, what’s up with our neighborhood lately?” and received responses about how the shooters suffered a lack of resources and many hardships, they deserved good wishes, etc. Embarrassed, she responded apologetically. “I didn’t know it was a faux pas to express fear of active shooters at the workplace, instead of empathy for those who might be trying to kill me.” Whether a person “relates” to this response or not, one can see how there are always things one might want to say, or even ask, that seem harmful or at least socially “expensive” to express.

“Antimemetic ideas often grow within dense, high-context networks.” For instance, antimemetic chatter occurs when there’s a group text thread among co-workers complaining about a new corporate policy that, in meetings and in hallways, everyone seems to embrace. The riffing grows out of a highly contextualized understanding of voice and audience. At the very least, haven’t you ever nudged someone trustworthy next to you and whispered, “Is it just me or …?”

I’m providing only a selective and high-level gloss on the book, which is short and easy to read, but idea-dense. In addition to describing the phenomenon and the conceptual basis of antimemetics, Asparouhova also points to some practical advice regarding attention. When Asparouhova departs from the example of Jenny Odell (“how to do nothing”) because she doesn’t want her agency to be defined in a constant stance of friction or opposition—instead she wants to move more nimbly, “from a place of ease and confidence.” I think that’s important; refusal and non-participation are valuable tools but I suspect it’s more helpful long term to think less of critical defiance and more of positive agency. We have to learn how to see through things, see what’s not otherwise legible to our systems, work within and without them.

While Antimemetics offers an insight into how the dynamics have come to be and how they manifest and what one might want to do about them, I think it may be the task of other books to “connect” with her theory and deepen the sense of what to do with these practical tools and why to do those things with them. One such book, for me, was published over fifty years ago.

There’s a very good chance you know who Thomas Merton was. For those who don’t, he was a Trappist monk who wrote many excellent books and essays, and died at age 53, from a bathtub electrocution, in Bangkok in 1967, in the middle of a long journey to learn more about Asian religions and religious practices and to open up further dialogue between “East and West.” Charismatic and worldly in character, Merton spent his adult life trying to run away from profane celebrity, to live a life of contemplation and adoration of God. One does not have to be a Catholic, or a Christian, or a believer in any particular creed to benefit from his writing, though so much of his work quite explicitly grapples with what it means to follow Christ in the contemporary world.

In the 1960s Merton released Raids on the Unspeakable, a loosely interwoven collection of essays that stand out from much of his other work because (as the author himself puts it), this book hadn’t necessarily “been to seminary.” He cites a special affection for this oddity; it doesn’t seem to fit in or fit any easy classification. One of the key topics is the nature of reality, or more precisely, the reality that isn’t—cannot be—measured, marketed, or proclaimed by authority.

“The Unspeakable. What is this? Surely, an eschatological image. It is the void that we encounter, you and I, underlying the announced programs, the good intentions, the unexampled and universal aspirations for the best of all possible worlds. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience, the void which drawls in the zany violence of Flannery O’Connor’s Southerners, or hypnotizes the tempted conscience in Julien Green. It is the emptiness of “the end.” Not necessarily the end of the world, but a theological point of no return, a climax of absolute finality in refusal, in equivocation, in disorder, in absurdity, which can be broken open again to truth only by miracle, by the coming of God.”

In the opening essay, Merton describes the rain outside his cabin:

“Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By “they” I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market.”

Merton listens to the rain because it reminds him that the world moves according to rhythms he has “not yet learned to recognize.” This overpowering rhythm he contrasts to the way of life of “the city,” which is not quite meant literally, but rather names the posture of existence which refuses to learn to recognize the rhythms of the rain (and everything else). The people of the city might have some faint inkling of the existence, the reality, of the rain, but they are consumed by their various obsessions, instead. They are enthralled to what Merton calls a basic lie: “only the city is real.” Throughout the book’s essays, which take different tones and forms, there is a motif of an escape. In one of the most moving passages, Merton explores the theme of “mercy” and contrasts it with “obsession.” An obsession overwhelms and compels; mercy sets free—it is a gift, superfluous, lawless, extra. “Law is consistent. Grace is “inconsistent.”” All that is SERIOUS, official, powerful, i.e., bloodthirsty, cancerous, domineering can come undone in an instant. But it represents an entirely different perception of the world’s (ir)reality, and it entails some separation from the demands placed upon one’s attention by the world.

Both Asparouhova’s explanation of antimemetics and Merton’s notion of the unspeakable refer to perceptions of realities that are illegible, or marginal, to the totalizing operations of the world we might call (though neither Asparouhova nor Merton do) the spectacle, after Guy Debord. They involve attention that is, in a sense, “misplaced.” Asparouhova is theorizing the activities and behaviors that actually happen in the contemporary (online) world; the private group chats and whisper networks. Merton, meanwhile, pre-internet obviously, addresses a public of individuals who are there reflecting before their own consciences. Let me quote him some more, and at some length, because in three paragraphs he provides a compelling explanation for why the world disorders the self in the way that it does, which I suspect may expand our understanding of Asparouhova’s diagnosis of cognitive overload and conspiratorial open secrets, a condition which tries to deny personal need and to elevate belonging in a worldly authority:

“Such is the ignorance which is taken to be the axiomatic foundation of all knowledge in the human collectivity: in order to experience yourself as real, you have to suppress the awareness of your contingency, your unreality, your state of radical need. This you do by creating an awareness of yourself as one who has no needs that he himself cannot immediately fulfill. Basically, this is an illusion of omnipotence: an illusion which the collectivity arrogates to itself, and consents to share with its individual members in proportion as they submit to its more central and more rigid fabrications.

“You have needs, but if you behave and conform you can participate in the collective power. You can then satisfy all your needs. Meanwhile, in order to increase its power over you, the collectivity increases its needs. It also tightens its demand for conformity. Thus you can become all the more committed to the collective illusion in proportion to becoming more hopelessly mortgaged to collective power."

“How does this work? The collectivity informs and shapes your will to happiness (“have fun”) by presenting you with irresistible images of yourself as you would like to be: having fun that is so perfectly credible that it allows no interference of conscious doubt. In theory such a good time can be so convincing that you are no longer aware of even a remote possibility that it might change into something less satisfying. In practice, expensive fun always admits of a doubt, which blossoms out into another full-blown need, which then calls for a still more credible and more costly refinement of satisfaction, which again fails you. The end of the cycle is despair.”

Merton’s words also call to mind for me Ivan Illich’s warnings about the manufacture of dependencies. If Antimemetics is a useful map for the information environment we’re always wading through, Raids on the Unspeakable anachronistically serves to enhance and amplify the call that Asparouhova makes to attend to our own attention. We do not simply want to “ignore” or “oppose,” but to do the thing that is superfluous, that breaks the rules, that moves in between, and attends the festival.

Whenever possible, we remember to live in the rain, not in the city.

I’ll try to keep that in the back of my mind, as I keep going.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers’ declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
—from W.H. Auden, “Night Mail”

Once upon a time, people would sometimes just drop in on one another without making plans first. This informality played a part in the enrichment of one’s social life, in the sense that you might share a cup of coffee or run an errand with a friend of a friend, or someone who lived down the block. Today, when entire generations claim to be terrified of making (or accepting) a phone call, when approaching any stranger in the street is often judged creepy or dangerous, when making a plan to meet and sticking to it seems like a quaint idea, it sometimes feels as though this openness has been replaced by a guardedness, and many forms of sociality that once appeared to be second nature have grown strange, stifling, corny, and cringe. I thought about these sorts of changes and more recently when revisiting Mark Rappaport’s 1985 film Chain Letters, a complex fiction film about a network of ten or twelve characters whose interactions—presented usually, but not entirely, one-on-one—hinge upon involvement in romantic entanglements, situationships avant le lettre, semi-friendly interrogations, and, yes, chain letters.

By the way, when was the last time someone received a chain letter in the mail? (Or even a chain email? My guess is the last one I remember receiving would have been in the mid-2000s.) And yet, forty years ago, the chain letter was a common enough trope and conceit that, at least in fiction, people—even fairly “normal” characters—might go ahead and send some off to mere acquaintances of theirs. Ex-husbands of women they’re seeing; estranged siblings; things of that nature. The ways that characters in this film relate to one another, talk, share physical space, all seem to be faded and fading evidence of a very different world than the one we live in. Recognizable, but remote and unreachable. Some of this is symptomatic: Chain Letters is, like any other cultural artifact, a record of its time and place. Some of it is artistic: Chain Letters is a deliberately styled and meticulously constructed object consonant with the style of its writer-director’s other fiction films, all of which involve heterogeneous groupings of people and interests. The patina of time has only made the inscrutability of Chain Letters even more appealing.

I could pick out almost at random examples of how the film, and the characters in it, seem to operate in a way that’s just alien enough to our contemporary permissions of socializing and personal space. For instance: Rick (Robert Schenkkan), a macho man who’s introduced as part of a couple, with Tracy (Marilyn Jones), has apparently invited a guy he’s just met and doesn’t even appear to like very much to drop by and watch him exercise at the gym.

That guy, Greg (Reed Birney), takes him up on this—and shows up out of the blue while Rick is working the punching bag. There’s some erotic tension here as one man needles the other during the latter’s workout.

Greg: “Why say things you don’t mean?”
Rick (defiantly): “How come you know what I’m talking about, and I don’t, huh? How come is that?”
Greg: “Some people can’t face themselves. They think they’re one thing and then they find out they’re something else.”
Rick (putting his glove to Greg’s face): “You’re talkin’ about faces, what if I broke every bone in your face?”
Greg: “Why do what you don’t want to do, instead of what you want to do? I’m not gonna force your hand. It’s no good unless you make the first move.”
Rick: “It’s like you’re talkin’ some weird language or something. Like a code I can’t crack. We’re in America, talk American, damn it.”

It’s a delicate maneuver, you see. Who’s cruising whom. Rick’s gay desires are obscure even to himself. Greg, bisexual, is at ease. Rick leans back, invites Greg over to him, grabs the back of his neck with a gloved hand—but tenderly, almost—and then whispers something in his ear. Greg hands Rick an envelope. There is a fantasy shot insert (a motif of the film, extended to multiple characters), a medium close up of the two in embrace as Greg kisses Rick’s neck. It’s fantasy, but it’s not; Rick and Greg do enter into a relationship. We’re seeing an anticipatory crystallization of things to come.

These fantasy sequences that punctuate Chain Letters, expanding briefly on the fears and desires of individual characters, illuminate dim corners of the characters’ psychologies but do not present summary truths about them. They, too, are obscure and obfuscatory. We only ever have partial information. Generally these sequences seem to be private and tied to one individual’s interior state at a time, but late in the film, one character, Beth, demurs from an injection at the doctor’s office because she seems to flash back to a paranoid fantasy of her boyfriend Paul’s.

Here’s the general picture. Chain Letters is not exactly a movie that one “spoils” but if you’d prefer to see the film yourself first and parse out the web of relationships, skip this paragraph. Paul (Mark Arnott) is a disabled veteran with paranoid fears who’s seeing two different women at the start of the film. One of these girlfriends, Eva (Ellen McEllduff), is actually in a relationship with Paul’s brother Phil, played by David Brisbin. (Paul and Phil are not close.) Paul’s other girlfriend, Beth (Rappaport veteran Randy Danson), has some of her own romantic connections. There’s even one very interesting brief scene in which she meets Eva at a restaurant, because, she says, meeting “the other woman” allows her to get a better sense of what any men she’s seeing see in her. Phil, meanwhile, also pursues an old flame of his, Evelyn (Joan MacIntosh), who is currently seeing the aforementioned Greg, and who used to be married to Steve (Daniel Davis, who shows up briefly in the first part of the film, and then has a more concentrated stretch of screentime in the final half-hour). Steve deals in surveillance equipment and paranoid Paul knows him by reputation; meanwhile Steve spots Beth (whom he doesn’t know) in public a few times, and seems interested in her. But Steve also ends up in a relationship with Tracy, who is introduced initially as Rick’s girlfriend—Rick is the macho man who randomly encounters Greg and Evelyn outside on the street, and asks for a light. There is also a pair of sex workers with the delightful names of Babra [sic] and Abracadabra; future filmmaker Tom DiCillo plays Bob, a small role; actor and artist Byron Utley has one scene as a hustler. The film opens with a man in red Chucks, who will show up again, too; he doesn’t seem to be directly connected to the rest of the characters, but then again, maybe he is. There are a few other speaking parts, and a few other connections fleshed out that I haven’t mentioned, but this is a basic sketch of the relationships. Most of the scenes are short, with editing and transitions that can feel abrupt and disorienting by design. (I say by design, because Rappaport includes a few sequences that are edited with a smoother and more connected timespace gradient, including a passage in which characters in three discrete spaces are linked by the device of a Western playing on TV.) The answers to many questions, and the significance of certain shots or actions, remain unclear. Laying it all out, it sounds like a Pynchon scenario.

There isn’t exactly a “story” in a conventional sense; there are sequences, and developments, and patterns. I think that simply understanding the web of relationships, and forming trajectories from what might seem like random nuggets of information, is part of the point of the story, as such.

Government conspiracies about viruses and chain letters form one important thread throughout. This is spearheaded by Paul’s delusional (or maybe not?) fantasies and reinforced by the presence of a few characters who earn their daily bread from activities that support the military-industrial complex (surveillance, chemical warfare). Another specter seems to be the assemblage of HIV/AIDS (i.e., a fatal consequence following points in a network of erotic connections), the constant play of implicit versus explicit queer desire, and the risks associated with coupling of any sexual orientation. The somewhat oblique manner of dialogue as described above, between Greg and Rick, exemplifies a lot of the exchanges in Chain Letters. It often feels as though two characters are speaking past each other, even existing in different fictions or realities, despite both wanting to reach mutual understanding. “It’s like you’re talkin’ some weird language or something. Like a code I can’t crack.”

Phil, giving a college lecture, provides an early clue; he’s talking about ovaphagous shark fetuses. “Ova meaning egg, phagous from the Greek meaning … not what you think: ‘devouring.’” In trying to anticipate where his students’ minds are headed, Phil is in fact airing out his own thoughts. At a later point he asks Greg (who is sleeping with Phil’s ex, Evelyn, but interested in men, too), “Am I what gay men want?” But after Phil says goodbye to Greg, he says aloud to himself: “Fruitcake … wait ‘til I tell Evelyn.” Phil is straight or, perhaps, bi-curious, but mostly it seems like he wants and seeks validation. The thought of a gay man wanting him sparks his curiosity. He’s very different from the character Rick, however, who disavows his desires as long as possible, even while his knees buckle to them. When Rick finally begins to own his desires for other men, he still expresses them violently. He’s stunted; he knows no other way.

The tone of the film shifts throughout with nuanced jumps. Some scenes feel observational, “realist.” Others might be a little ironic and play with genre tropes. A bit of absurdist anti-realism crops up here and there, such as a violent exchange between Paul and the talk show host he’s watching on TV. The climax produces a tense and mournful effect that always sees to take me by surprise with its power, despite having seen Chain Letters several times. Like so many great works of art, it retains its mystery even as one understands it better.

In the 1990s, Mark Rappaport made the creative documentaries for which he’s perhaps best known (Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, From the Journals of Jean Seberg), and in later years his audiovisual production has centered on different forms of video essay. These different modes and periods of his career share important concerns, including a curiosity about all the ways that culture (including popular culture) seem to guide and rearrange our private lives. They also seem to be marked by relatively distinct breaks, or transition points. The fact that Rappaport hasn’t made a fiction movie like his earlier efforts Casual Relations (1973), Mozart in Love (1975), Local Color (1977), The Scenic Route (1978), Impostors (1979), or Chain Letters for many decades is regrettable—not because he hasn’t been active since, but simply because the look, feel, and cosmology of that particular run was (and is) so singular, so powerful. I would say that there’s nothing quite like it in American cinema, and I think that’s a mostly true statement, but then again, Mark Rappaport is my go-to yardstick when I encounter more recent, excellent works such as For the Plasma (Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan, 2014), Slow Machine (Joe DeNardo and Paul Felten, 2020), or Invention (Courtney Stephens, 2024). Whether the makers of those films have seen the work or not, they all exist, for me, as Rappaport’s Children.

Rappaport’s fiction films represent thickets of coincidences, threats, discoveries, doubles, traumas, and echoes. Decoration (wall art, paintings) is important: a world immersed in images and patterns. Coincidences emerge but their significance often remains impenetrable. Is the intended effect meant to be humorous? Frustrating? Is it supposed to build toward a larger explanatory climax? For many a casual viewer the films may appear dry, alienating, too weird to become fully immersive. Nonetheless they exhibit a peculiar pull. The characters are a bit like characters that show up in Gilbert Sorrentino’s novel Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things: explicitly and self-consciously presented as flat inventions, and yet—yet—curiously gripping, anyway, as they occupy the surface of the work while we set our eyes upon it.

In recent years, Rappaport’s works have been presented and shared digitally and I’ve been grateful for this—both for the chance to look at these films, myself, and also for the opportunity for others to see them. I wish there were even more opportunities for people to see decent quality presentations of all his work. Frankly, Mark Rappaport is one of the great artists of post-classical American cinema and yet he still doesn’t have his due. That’s why I’m offering this little not-quite-essay: simply something to pique someone-anyone’s curiosity, and direct one more open-minded person that way. As times change and attention shifts, and gets shifted, it’s useful to keep banging the drum for those who deserve it. Rappaport is one of those figures who, rather than providing simple answers, ask the questions that awaken us to the strangeness of our worlds then and now and in the future.

Meanwhile, the thoughts below on Loves of a Blonde, and Jean Collet’s review, provide some interesting talking points.

I warm to Zach’s call to shine a light on “things forgotten, overlooked” in the ever-expanding catalogue (dustbin?) of film criticism’s history. It just so happens that, shortly before reading Zach’s recent piece, I had stumbled upon a precise example of this kind, which really struck me. I found it in the course of researching accounts of Miloš Forman’s Loves of a Blonde (1965) for a lecture to be delivered at the Summer Film School in Antwerp, where my partner Cristina Álvarez & I annually participate.

It’s a review from Cahiers du cinéma, no. 176, March 1966. The author is Jean Collet, who – I think it is fair to say – is rarely cited today in any language, although he was well-known (and prolific) in the ‘60s as a champion and follower-around of Jean-Luc Godard (on whom he wrote a decent book that exists in English translation). He was on the scene, and active, for a long time: until November 2020 when he died, he was surely among the few who could still testify to the path that French film criticism had taken from popular publications like Télécine and Télérama, where he began contributing in 1953 at the age of 21, through to Cahiers, the scholarly Études cinématographiques series, numerous ciné-club introductions and discussions, and eventually television – where, as a producer, he innovated with the ‘Chamber TV’ series that included gems by Moullet and Akerman.

Collet wrote numerous books (about Truffaut, Fellini …), and ceased writing for publication only in 2015 at the age of 83. According to the obituary tribute by Charles Tesson, Collet was influenced alike by Communist and “spiritualist” traditions, but leaned more to the side of those who “had faith in God and faith in cinema”. Tesson also points out the central imagery in much of Collet’s writing about cinema: light, but even more particularly fire, flames – and, as he declared, “it is this flame that we must communicate” in film criticism.

Here is the slide from my talk that includes the opening (in my translation) of Collet’s ‘first release’ (in France) review of Loves of a Blonde.

What is striking in this review is that, as sized up by Collet in 1966, Forman – at that point known only for his short films and one previous feature, Black Peter (1964) – already hits cinemas complete with a ‘public image’, a sedimented idea of what a Forman film is and how it goes. And the critic’s task, as Collet sees it, is precisely to dislodge, in the reader’s mind, the pernicious effects of that instant stereotype which is apt to obscure the true nature of the film in front of them.

So, Collet embarks on a process of description – or rather, redescription. If there ever was proof that description is, always and already, also an act of analysis, this is it. Collet evokes the elements that are ‘expected’ of Forman by the clued-up cinephile viewer of ‘66 at the very start (opening credit sequence) of Loves of a Blonde: a pop song (about how love makes a boy a ‘hooligan’); the ironic smirk in the presentation of the singer (Forman even includes a few moments of the poor girl waiting blankly for the playback to begin); and a general air of ‘realism’.

But Collet needs us, as his readers, to quickly get beyond these preconceptions about Forman, and look deeper. So, strict realism is transcended by the hint of a ‘dream-life’ suggested by the song and its lyrics. Maybe, in the course of the song’s performance, we will even get past our ‘prior prejudices’ about such a generic, ‘kitsch’ piece of music. And, above all, Collet takes us past the credits into the first images of the fiction proper: ‘the blonde’ and her best friend, huddled in bed and whispering to each other.

And here Collet uncovers what he takes to be the true logic of the film, a logic of what he calls a profound and positive indiscretion: “After the girl given as spectacle, there’s the hidden girl. After the over-confident voice, there are confessions and whispers. After exhibitionism – the secret”. And it is the film’s mission to gently unfold and probe those secrets – that’s cinema’s license for indiscretion.

Collet’s point – so economically and deftly conveyed in just the first few sentences of his quite detailed review – is not only that cinema is an art form which can burrow beneath the regime of instantly-given appearances (stereotype, cliché, etc.); he’s also alerting us to the fact that those appearances are formed/informed by the baggage of media-fed expectations that we often carry into a screening. It is a lesson we sorely need to remind ourselves of, more than ever, in 2025!

© Adrian Martin, 10 August 2025

The gaze of Gull-Maj Norin is one of the most striking features of Murder Melody. Norin seems haunted, almost disassociated, throughout much of the film. Her eyes, her facial expression, her looks down or offscreen, anchor her otherworldly performance. It makes an impression. Norin had a relatively short career and stopped acting a few years after this film. What if she kept going? What if she crossed over into other film industries and found success in them, too?

Even when she’s looking at someone or something, the large, wide, dark eyes are expressive and full of … I’ll call it unfulfilled feeling. The great David Cairns wrote about Norin’s eyes in Murder Melody, too, and contrasted them with the features of Angelo Bruun, the actor who plays her estranged husband. The facial characteristics of these two performers provide the film with constructively ambiguous material.

The starkness of some of the sets, with shadows on the walls, coincidentally rhymes in faint ways with other work …

Bodil Ipsen was a beloved actress before she became a director, and several of her works (not Murder Melody) were directorial collaborations with Lau Lauritzen, Jr. Murder Melody was produced in a Denmark occupied by Nazis; Ipsen and Lauritzen’s 1946 Cannes Grand Prix winner The Red Meadows confronted that occupation in its immediate wake. There are scenes in that later film that feel desolate and uncertain; shell-shocked, even. Throughout, backgrounds are often pure black, corresponding to scenes outdoors at night, yet giving a slightly expressionistic or “irrealist” quality. Morose, leisurely paced but compelling, The Red Meadows imparts a strong sense of mood and atmosphere and I suspect from my small sampling that these are key strengths of Ipsen’s work (with and without Lauritzen). In this scavenging age of vibes, this is perhaps something that will lead to her greater reclamation in years to come, among publics that will be receptive to Old Movies at all. I’m only guessing.

A friend sent along a link to this AI-generated video essay on “The Cinema That Never Was,” all the films, which presents a picture of, let’s say, possible cinema histories corresponding to possible worlds. I think this particular AI doc hews a little too close to what I think of as “magic of the movies” montages, the sort of cherry-picking arrangement of clips played at Oscar ceremonies or before multiplex screenings.

Yet the counterfactual remains a powerful and productive of our understanding of history, cinematic or otherwise. (For example, I’ve linked before, I’m pretty sure, to So Mayer’s list of ten imaginary films, which invites us to think through several “what if” possibilities over the past generations of cinema.) These kinds of exercises are interesting but I also think they may have different effects in our postliterate environment as opposed to a more strictly literate one. Generated media will be able to “imagine” for us—through the mathematical approximation of content previously provided—slick sketches of surfaces, surfaces that had heretofore also seemed to accompany depths that we once knew or hoped or perceived were there also.

Should there be a Bodil Ipsen “filter”? Do we want the face of Gull-Maj Norin to become a meme? A reaction gif? Does her expressive face become at best a moderately heavier data point when some series of prompts approximates the look and the vibe of a 1940s Scandinavian film?

I don’t think, realistically, we’re “in danger” over this. I’m interested in alternatives and solutions to problems, not endless lamentation. And yet, when I see the apparent and evolving sophistication of vibes-based media production, I do wonder how much we’re scavenging wood just to hurl onto the bonfire.

Will there be a comeuppance?

Spencer Tracy—who somewhat implausibly played an older brother to a deeply unlikeable Wagner in the very good 1956 film The Mountain—encouraged his younger colleague to lean into his villainous roles, and Wagner is convincing and threatening in this role. He’s an example of about eight different kinds of what we call these days “toxic masculinity.” He’s presented as a bit of a mama’s boy; he doesn’t respect his father’s legacy because his father was poor (“holes in his shoes”). He sulks, pouts, and raises his voice, but he also plays smooth and charming for his audiences when appropriate.

Each of the characters in the film seems to have a loose double—a shadow, a repetition, an echo, or a counter-weight. Dorie Kingship (Joanne Woodward) is murdered and “replaced” by her sister Ellen (Virginia Leith), almost in a faint premonition of Vertigo, or Psycho. The Kingship mother, absent, “sent away” by her husband for an indiscretion, echoes Bud’s mother (Mary Astor), doting, sexless (except insofar as she’s Bud’s own “best girl”). Bud Corliss’s absent father is mirrored by the aspirational father(-in-law), Leo Kingship, a wealthy industrialist. Bud himself is balanced by Gordon (Jeffrey Hunter), and both instances neither of these young men is quite what he seems at first, to viewers or to other characters: Bud is a social-climbing killer rather than a sociable, honorable striver, while Gordon is not the milquetoast egghead he initially appears to be—he works for the police and demonstrates a calm confidence and authority. (Meanwhile, Wagner and Hunter were two up and coming actors in the 1950s, both signing with Twentieth Century Fox earlier in the decade, and appearing together in several films and publicity campaigns. Wagner, Hunter, and Leith all had roles in 1955’s White Feather, directed by Robert D. Webb.)

A Kiss Before Dying is arguably the most famous feature film directed by Gerd Oswald, whose other better-known titles are a few more late 1950s works (such as Crime of Passion and Screaming Mimi) and some television, including well-regarded episodes of The Outer Limits. Oswald had a gift for composition, at least in the work of his that I’ve seen to date. Upon revisiting this film recently I was struck again not so much by its quality—I think it’s only a moderately artistically successful movie, overall—as I was by its craftsmanship and compositional boldness, a boldness that rarely if ever feels showy or precious. Instead, the world on display here is rich and thick with suggestion without seeming to “get in the way.” Slowing down to peek at some of the choices or motifs can be the most direct way to parse the visual storytelling.

Some of the takes are long, and the camera movements active, fluid. The film is shot in CinemaScope, and Oswald is not afraid to stretch the staging so that characters or are either end of the frame.

But it’s usually not a flat image, either; as seen above, or below, a plane in the background introduces depth and provides a more rounded sense of the space the characters inhabit, and perhaps inflects a shot with more dramatic tension. Think it’s funny that we have these Bud up in the top left, and Gordon down in front center-left? Well—it resurfaces as a salient point later on in the movie.

Or here, framing a library shot almost like a mise en abyme, the stacks like a hall of mirrors …

And ideas in one shot will be reconfigured into a new arrangement; after Bud has found his book on poisons in the library (above), he’s in among all the shelving of a chemistry lab (below) …

He’s single-minded but sneaky; look at those eyes as he follows Dorie out of a restaurant.

The murder scene itself is tense and dizzying. It’s emotionally resonant less because of Bud’s thoughts or plans—he’s icy, almost reptilian, not deep—but because of the pathos of Dorie’s trust. Woodward handles this thankless task well. Over and over again, she’s demure, accommodating, accepting of her boyfriend’s abrupt harshness and his paternalism.

Earlier in the film, when discussing her pregnancy, Dorie says, “It’s all my fault. It’s always the girl’s fault.” When Bud first nudges Dorie down a flight of bleachers in an attempt to trigger a miscarriage, a foreshadowing of his subsequent (and successful) murder attempt later on, she recovers herself and doesn’t express the slightest accusation that he’s forced her to plummet: her fall down the bleachers is her own fault. It’s internalized for her, this constant being at fault, and she’s not listening to the alarm bells that would go off in a more incredulous, more alert state of mind.

Perhaps she comes across as too easily manipulated and browbeaten when she says this. I get the slightly different sense that she’s meant to be an incredibly sheltered person, unawakened to the darker tendencies of life and the dangers of violent men, and thus readily assumes some of the patriarchal truisms of “blame” when it comes to a pregnancy. Her credulity sets the stage for her sister Ellen, who is also fairly trusting and sheltered character, but whose mind is, crucially, a little more probing, suspicious. This has self-preservation benefits for her. She enters the picture upon returning to town, and Bud soon starts dating her—because Ellen is, like Dorie was, a path for him to the Kingship wealth. One can imagine how the rest of the movie proceeds and what Bud attempts to do next.

After rewatching the film and looking up a few things about it, I found a twitter thread by Matthiew Housiax that I thought conveyed a great summary of what the film does, or is, visually. He writes that Gerd Oswald and cinematographer Lucien Ballard “craft some wonderful widescreen images of a beautiful and prosperous postwar America that is rotting from the inside out, populated by unfeeling or absent patriarchs and Ripley-esque social strivers.” There’s a menace in this environment, with all its prosperity, and postwar filmmakers—Sirk, Fuller, Aldrich, here Oswald—immediately seized upon ways to depict its less visible aspects. When Bud visits the Kingship Copper Mines, source of the patriarchal wealth toward which he aspires, he says, “Looks like the center of creation!”

A few notes on the afterlives of A Kiss Before Dying. Some of you may know Bob Dylan has painted numerous scenes from films, as if copying or emulating screengrabs; he’s done at least two paintings inspired by this one.

Iliana Rocha has a poem, “Elegy Falling Forward & Down,” which opens,

In A Kiss Before Dying, Robert Wagner pushes
his girlfriend off a roof, making it look like suicide,
in order to detonate her womb’s
bomb himself. Joanne Woodward’s
character, the great disruptor by the very nature
of her womanhood & her wealth. My mother
says, Yeah, he probably got the idea to kill

Natalie Wood from this role, & she is more
than half serious. …

In light of all this pessimism about the toll of wealth and status, I’m reminded of the Burroughs quote from Naked Lunch: “America is not a young land. It is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting …”

“Swallow poison, swallow sugar
Sometimes they taste the same”
—Big Thief, “All Night All Day”

A long distance move is behind us now, but we’re still unpacking and organizing. Plus there’s an entirely new town, and new part of the country, to learn and get used to. Chicago is, of course, very flat and laid out on a grid. Easy to navigate. Ithaca is the opposite of all that. And now that the Cornell students are coming back in, I can see how even in this small town, traffic and lines can seem to be troublesome.

I’m also in between jobs, since I had to leave my last, office-based position, and I’m looking for my next role—ideally a remote position, but something local would be good as well. (If you happen to know my background at all and think you might have a lead or a connection, please feel free to ping me—I’m happy to talk.) Suffice it to say that this is another project that takes time and energy.

I. So Long, Chicago

I lived in Chicago longer than anywhere else. Ten years ago, having already been there for six years, my life changed rapidly and many of the support systems and the sense of direction I had in my life vanished. And I spent the past decade rebuilding my life from the ground up. I acquired some new and better habits. I stumbled my way through my last years of academia before I decided to leave it behind. Rationally speaking, that probably was one of the better life decisions I’ve made. Nevertheless I have felt like I’ve been missing something of a vocation ever since. The second career I made for myself, with no small amount of hard work, has been good to me though it doesn’t scratch all the same itches that sent me running toward a career to be spent—at least nominally, at least partially—in pursuit of the life of the mind in community.

More of that will come, in time, regardless of my next professional steps. Maybe I’ll find some new opportunities for it here in Ithaca. In some sense I believe I have only ever tried to find my way back home, and this is especially true since my life blew up in 2015. And if you’ll overlook the absurdity of the comparison, I take a little comfort in the idea of arrival, like Odysseus, in (an) Ithaca after a decade of (mainly spiritual and mental) wandering.

Meanwhile, the exit from Chicago felt rushed and unceremonious. We didn’t get to say all the goodbyes, hit up all the spots, that we wanted to. Not by a long shot. Perhaps it only means there’s unfinished business there.

The much-maligned “Midwest nice” became a meme to imply that people were only superficially nice but actually mean-spirited and judgmental, but I think this is, itself, a superficial and often inaccurate understanding of the phenomenon. I like a lot of the Midwestern spirit, the range of Chicagoan attitudes and postures. They came to feel like home to me.

Earlier this spring, driving back home one night along Lake Shore Drive from downtown after a long and stressful day, a song called “End of Beginning” played on the radio. I’d never heard it before. I learned later it was by Joe Keery (“the Stranger Things guy?”), styled as Djo, and it had been a TikTok hit for a while already. The song is a stylistic emulation of an earlier moment’s stylistic emulations of an even earlier moment, and maybe it’s a bit cheesy to like it, but damn if it didn’t hit hard as I cruised along LSD with the lights of tall buildings flanking me in the dark.

And when I'm back in Chicago, I feel it
Another version of me, I was in it
I wave goodbye to the end of beginning

II. Monoculture

Katherine Dee proposes that the ephemeral vibes constitute a certain normative touchstone for culture:

Last year, I wrote about the never-ending carousel of “aesthetics,” where what I’m about to describe is most obvious. The identity isn’t any individual aesthetic (cottagecore, dark academia, coquette, whatever). The identity is the act of aesthetic curation itself. The ability to navigate between different modes, to know when to deploy which references, to remix and synthesize—that’s what matters now.

These fads are our monoculture.

Elsewhere, Dee suggests a different way of understanding the expression of sincerity in our current media environment. I think it’s useful to try to think about these new adventures in postliteracy in ways that don’t seek only to condemn or celebrate:

TCC [what Dee designates as the true crime community, a type of fandom] is what that looks like in a mediated world. It is why TikTokers post videos of themselves crying in their cars. It’s not because they’re narcissists, or they want fame and fame alone. They can only understand and experience their emotions, and by extension, themselves through media depictions. It is not enough to cry: You must cry with yourself, through the screen. It must be a TikTok, or a tweet, or a micro-blog.

Meanwhile, tangentially, Ran Prieur has written,

I've said this before: postapocalypse fiction is full of cults, but I think cults mainly happen during apocalyptic times and not after them. Right now, with everyone losing faith in the old systems, and LLMs that feed back beliefs, and the general difficulty of checking facts, I think we're entering a golden age of cults.

III. Criticism

My friend Matt Clayfield invited Adrian Martin and me to discuss a few things about film criticism in a freeform way. You can listen to an edited version of the conversation on Matt’s Substack, Weariness Makes a Good Mattress. I don’t sound like someone who should appear as a guest on a podcast, because I was running on just a couple hours of sleep and using my sub-optimal laptop microphone. (I also—thoughtlessly, unforgivably—lack an Australian accent.) So, sorry for the roughness I bring to the discussion. But you should listen to the chat anyway, because of Matt’s good work bringing everything together, as well as the thoughtful responses Adrian gave to the questions!

IV. Films Watched

My reading slowed down considerably this summer, mainly because I’m rarely able to get more than through 10-15 pages at a time. I’m sure that will pick back up soon enough. I have been able to watch a trickle of films though. A few words on some of them, for the curious. Newer films first. Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025) seemed like a polished nothingburger. I wouldn’t say it’s artistically bankrupt like such elevated horror attempts as Longlegs or The Black Phone—it’s better than those— but nevertheless consists mainly of a lot of posturing and vibing, little substance. Benedict Wong’s hungry snappy hand gesture was my favorite bit. Last Breath (Alex Parkinson, 2025), about an underwater deep sea accident and rescue, succeeds when it’s focusing on suspenseful, logistical storytelling, but is pretty thin in its more nakedly “human interest” elements. Friendship (Andrew DeYoung, 2024) has a lot to recommend it but I’m not sure how much it coheres. Or rather, I don’t think it’s exactly trying to “cohere” and failing, but even if it hits its unconventional target, I’m not sure I’m fully convinced by the particular prickly shape it makes. It feels like 50% a Tim Robinson sketch, 25% borrowed vibes from an “A24 horror” template (even though it’s not a horror movie of that type), 15% topical sensitive drama, and so on—in short, a bricolage of some things that maybe all do work better when they aren’t welded together. Stand something like this up next to Milos Forman’s Taking Off or Alan Arkin’s Little Murders, and you’ll see how wide the gulf is, in my opinion.

I enjoyed many things about The Hidden (Jack Sholder, 1987) but thought it lost some steam the more it leaned into its science fiction explanations. (To be fair, it doesn’t try to “worldbuild” with “lore” like a 2025 movie would be all but forced to do.) Bob Clark’s Loose Cannons (1990), meanwhile, doesn’t work up enough steam to lose any in the first place, unfortunately. I caught up with James Whale’s 1936 adaptation of Show Boat, which I confess I found a real slog, despite its cast, and despite the care with which it approaches many of its images. A revisit of Larry Clark’s Bully (2001) left me with mixed emotions; Clark is a tricky filmmaker because he’s clearly working with the raw material of cheap tricks, but it’s hard to say definitively that he’s ever ending with a cheap trick. The highlights of what I’ve watched in recent weeks have been some titles by Želimir Žilnik (Little Pioneers, Early Works, and Marble Ass), as well as another Yugoslavian Black Wave classic, The Ambush (Živojin Pavlović, 1969). These all seem like wonderful, humane, exploratory works that engage with their world and all the customs and political conflicts and contradictions, and do so in a way that can surprise. Imagine that!

V. The Finger Lakes Environment

There are a lot of wasps around here. We saw a baby bat crawling on the sidewalk. One is likely to spot deer, rabbits, and chipmunks at various points throughout the day. The occasional appearances of outdoor cats in our neighborhood torment our indoor-only Vivien Leigh, who is friendly and affectionate to humans but does not like other felines. The vistas and waterfalls that can come into view suddenly when driving or walking around Ithaca are breathtaking. One of these days I’ll take a little trip to see locations associated with the likes of Nabokov and Pynchon.

I hope and plan to be back before the end of August with something other than another “junk drawer” installment. Until then: cheers, my friends.

At one point in the discussion Adrian talks with host Peter Labuza about the difficulties of focusing and sustaining attention in film criticism, journalism, etc. Loosely paraphrased: “We can publish a great article and everyone loves it, shares it, retweets it, and a week later, it seems to have been forgotten!” In other words, the life and afterlife of thoughtful film criticism, or thoughtful writing in general, is hard to sustain. I suspect this has only worsened over the past ten years. The algorithmic content mills churn out new variations on tried-and-true material. That veneer of novelty or innovation is what allows something to make a quick splash among its public, and then vanish. There is so much verbiage, so much information, and such a premium on newness and (ostensible) relevance, that claims advanced in a painstaking piece of criticism—however insightful—seem to depreciate far too rapidly, like driving a new car off the dealer’s lot. After all, some new poll about the 64 best TV shows of the 21st century probably just dropped. (Quick, let’s rehash, is Twin Peaks: The Return “television” or “cinema”!?)

You may be familiar with the idea of thought-terminating clichés, which sink debates into uselessness because someone trots out one of these TTCs and assumes the conversation is over—because, as conversation, it is. I think there’s a comparable, if reversed, discursive mechanism (perhaps someone already has a good name for it) that we might describe as “short-lived conversation starters.” What are your favorite ___? Who's the best ___? Is ___ ideologically sound, yes or no? These sorts of questions, or frames, are good at eliciting quick and easy responses, perhaps even little fiery discursive volleys, but rarely seem to result in discussion of intellectual substance, nuance, or generosity. The questions themselves might seem fertile, since they provide immediate engagement, but they’re typically not.

One way out of this morass of pseudo-debate is simply to ignore a lot of it, avoid it, and to embrace that one’s activity—in the attention economy—simply, probably won’t matter. Anti-mimetic, non-algorithmic behaviors and discourses are just not going to win games they aren’t designed to play. They won’t get the most likes-shares-and-subscribes. The shape of the interactions is not so easily captured by our dominant metrics. Good. Leave those metrics to them. Fail your way out.

As wild-haired buzzword guru & snake oil salesman David Shing says, the “attention economy” is an old way of speaking. We might want to look to intention rather than attention. Well: one intention I have in months ahead is to dedicate some entries to extended consideration of interesting ideas and writing that may have been overlooked or under-explored. That’s right. Let’s take up Adrian Martin’s challenge here.

So here’s my open request. I want to make this participatory, and something that allows others to take up suggestions, if they want. Email me, or comment below, and share the names of pieces of film criticism, theory, etc., that you think introduced compelling ideas or methods but which did not enjoy the sustained engagement they deserved. I’m interested in what people recall as interesting things forgotten, overlooked in the rush for newer takes.

• Books, essays, articles, twitter threads, video essays, all fair game

• Academic pieces, critical, essayistic, creative, what-have-you

• Any era: resurrect something by Iris Barry, or spotlight an anonymous Tumblr post that made you think some new thoughts

• Feel free to promote something you made yourself

I ask only that people suggest relatively specific, discrete items to grapple with. Not entire bodies of work, or subfields of study. What do you think merits some extended (re)consideration? What pieces still need response, revival, corroboration, expansion, embellishment, or microscopic review? I’m interested in learning about and diving in to some of these. Maybe I won’t get to each suggestion, but then again maybe someone else will.

I’m not a big account, so I expect participation of this old school sort will be low and slow. That’s fine; that’s great! But if anything comes to mind for you there, reading this—reach out, speak up.

This summer, my partner Ashley R. Smith and I will be relocating to Ithaca, New York, where she'll assume her role as Assistant Professor of Screen Studies at Ithaca College. I am extremely proud of her and I know intimately how hard she has worked, how dedicated and adaptable she has been, and how she has navigated many obstacles and done many good things on her way to this destination. I'm thrilled she has an opportunity to teach and do research at a single, supportive institution. This means, of course, we will be leaving Chicago, an adopted home for both of us, and it's a bittersweet departure at best, because we've loved it here. I'll probably write more about that sometime in the future. But our future awaits in a small town as hilly and zigzagged as Chicago is gridlike and flat; we'll have steep inclines and waterfalls and new places to get used to. And in the weeks ahead we will continue planning a big move and trying to address the eight thousand things we need to do here before we get there.

I'm looking forward to seeing what's up in the bookstores and the big Ithaca used book sale, and Cornell Cinema and Cinemapolis, and the Finger Lakes Film Festival, and the George Eastman Museum and (definitely) the Nitrate Picture Show up in Rochester, and also the farmer's markets and co-ops, and hiking and running trails, and much more.

There are still things I will need to work out, professionally. I also might approach this newsletter differently in the near future. (Or I might approach it the same way I have been.) Meanwhile, if you're in that part of the world and we haven't already been in touch, drop me a line! Cheers.

Throughout the BBC Office, Ricky Gervais’ David Brent demonstrates how much he wants his interlocutors and his audiences to buy in to the fact (i.e. his fantasy) that he’s effortlessly tuned in the the “vibe.” He instinctively guards against self-knowledge, and tries to impose responses on those around them. That’s probably what they’ll say, you’re probably thinking this, he’s going to appreciate that. He ventures forth language for other people, language he imagines himself and others will experience. To a journalist, he supplies copy:

Popularity, even celebrity, is the framework through which he experiences himself.

I pointed out something similar in a previous AO installment: David unself-consciously projects his fantasy of viewing his ego-ideal from the third person, as if in a celebrity profile:

“If I make them laugh along the way, sue me. And I don't do it so they turn round and go ‘Thank you David for the opportunity, thank you for the wisdom, thank you for the laughs.' I do it so, one day, someone will go ‘There goes David Brent. I must remember to thank him.’”

Crucially, in this fantasy, David is imagining himself not as the recipient but as the observer of this hoped-for result or consequence of his fantasy’s actualization. Surveillance fantasy.

“What do I mean when I say that the movies provided a transcendent frame? Think of Annie, in Sartre’s Nausea (1938) who, trained up on movies, could only conceive her own life as a series of what she hoped to be “perfect moments”, where the idea of perfection was entirely shaped by cinematic representations of it. Think of all the people whose sex lives can only be experienced as sex scenes, and for whom the fulfillment of sexual desire is to that extent the fulfillment of a desire to be the star of something. Think of all the times music has moved you as you were driving late at night on an empty highway, and the only sense you could make of being moved in this way was to imagine that your life, at least briefly, had been given a soundtrack.” (Justin Smith-Ruiu, “Star Systems”)

This last observation of JSR’s calls to mind a 2010 commercial that struck me as a little weird when I first saw it, because of the phrasing of the voice-over: “This moment reminds me of “Sweet Disposition” by The Temper Trap.” Hold on, what? Shouldn’t that be the other way around? Shouldn’t the song remind you of moments—of experiences, sensations, places, people? (AdWeek published a piece about that very song as a ubiquitous piece of commercials and movies back then; fifteen years later and it’s still in commercials.) Perhaps there needs to be a third line added to the meme “I will not eat the bugs. I will not live in a pod.” I will not have a sweet disposition. There’s no need to think of one’s life as a succession of one-perfect-moments that remind us of songs that advertise things. Because if one internalizes that need, this is the end game as I see it: sunk in the kitschian sink, the slop bucket: we learn to experience our lives as certain types of movies, except those movies, however hyperpalatable, are imitations of imitations of imitations.

This isn’t only a matter of how people view themslves as individuals. In the New York Magazine piece from a few weeks back, one of the interview subjects phrased something in an interesting way, interesting in the way the Rhapsody commercial guy was interesting. He said, “I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating.” What a grammatical double layer: nobody thinks something is considered cheating. I do not have the argument fleshed out but on an intuitive level I am convinced that there is a rhizomatic connection between (1) this agency-avoidant manner of speaking, and (2) Rhapsody “Sweet Disposition” guy, and (3) the scenarios outlined in the block quote from Smith-Ruiu above, and (4) David Brent from The Office. These all seem to embody aspects of a new discipline of selfhood that is rooted in, let’s call it for now, an a/v spectatorial dissociation.

(Tangential, but related: think about all the talk about how “hot” is an adjective that used to be something one person said about another’s appearance based on a feeling elicited in the observer. But now, at least among some cohorts, it’s a label one ascribes to oneself on the basis of one’s confidence, as if assuming the role of that observer. This kind of slippage seems highly unlikely without a technological apparatus that allows one to experience oneself, on demand, from an “objective” position. [Tangential to the tangent: this might be the closest anything in Attendance Optional has come to some of the ideas I tried, clumsily, to explore in my doctoral research on early video technology.])

At some point in the future, all the ways people have been theorizing about slop will seem quaint. With the benefit of hindsight we’ll know what fears were exaggerated and which consequences were unanticipated. I don’t want to dwell too much on it until and unless I become interested in interesting questions about it; in the meantime, I want to pay as little attention to it as possible. Too much of it is extremist kitsch, pabulum but heightened. Slop reconfigures the already known into the appearance of novelty, to diminishing returns.

Not to skate too near to grooves worn well by Kracauer and Adorno 80+ years ago but there is an approach to culture, which is consonant with algorithmic taste-making but also with a lot of “fan” culture, in which someone wants more of the same. I know what kind of romance book, epic fantasy trilogy, or true crime podcast I like, and I want something that scratches exactly that itch. But just different enough to be new.

I once stumbled upon a subreddit discussion about (I think) romance novels, and the way people expressed their tastes in the comments seemed strange to me, like I was learning about an entirely new type of reading. The readers debated whether certain things in the book should only happen after the book hits 30% or 40%, and so on. (The reference to percentages rather than page numbers indicates, of course, that these books are being consumed on e-readers, which may or may not have further implications; I don’t know.) I admit I cringe at the prospect of treating literature with this “have it your way” mentality, but to be more open-minded about it, I’ll say this approach to fiction evinces a certain vernacular formalism. There is a sense that this is where things should go, this is the appropriate tempo during this section, this is the appropriate texture for a scene or a character. This type of character should be likable, this type of character should be unlikable, and that type of character should be mostly unlikable at least until a sufficient point in the narrative that a subplot makes them newly “relatable,” and so on. Deviations, departures, shocks, and surprises—particularly stylistic shocks and surprises—are harder pills to swallow in this framework. But the people like what they like.

There is a connection between this mode of cultural consumption and the way that it also helps produce people’s identities. “Stans.” Fandoms and alignments, woven into a blanket of signals for others who will pin you down on the basis of your (public) tastes. And thus we experience ourselves, we “self-fashion,” on the basis not simply of our loves and our allegiances, but of our anticipations of how others will interpret and respond to those things.

“We are, you see, social animals who also evolved from a world of natural perils and predatory enemies; we are naturally disposed simultaneously to entrust ourselves to the community we belong to and to fear what lies outside its discernible boundaries. The whole progress of humanity toward an ethos of civilized accord across great distances and despite great differences has been achieved by the gradual and agonizing expansion of our circles of sympathy beyond the limits of the immediately familiar. When we fall back upon our atavistic instincts, we are predisposed to believe what our fellows tell us and to disbelieve what strangers say. And then also we are, depressingly enough, organisms, and our minds operate at only the speed and with only the capacity available to them through the neural complexity and electrochemical processes of the brain. In the ‘information age’, in which the sheer algorithmic velocity of communication within ever more integrated circles of association outpaces the workings of our feeble analogue intellects by an effectively infinite degree, it is only natural that delusion of even the most preposterous kind can easily become a widespread contagion.” (DBH, “Swimming in Circles”)

What's next? I don’t know. A kind of samizdat of the attention economy, which I've mentioned before, or a shadow network of preserved (“throwback”) selfhood antithetical/orthogonal to the New Self, the New Flesh? I have been collecting these notes and started to write them out with the idea that they would organize into something more like a thesis. That ambition dissipated soon enough. It takes me too long to write these—not because I’m spending long hours agonizing over research or diction (obviously not!) but because I don’t quite have enough bandwidth in my life to support writing sessions of any real substance.

Still: more to come here, some personal news, and also, I think, I want to write a little more analytically about some films soon. I hope whoever’s reading this is safe and well.