But when you’ve seen enough of them on screen, as I have, a certain apathy sets in. It comes from watching the same event, time after time, character after character carrying the burden of their family and friends’ shock, crisis, and varying degrees of acceptance. It’s an exhaustion thoroughly steeped in the function-first narrative machinery these scenes tend to become. Because they prioritize resolving the emotional arcs of the surrounding straight characters over interrogating the queer experience, the protagonist becomes a vessel for various inflections of trauma. Their joy, banality, and simple existence suppressed in service of a grand lesson. That lesson often comes at the cost of most, if not all, of their interior complexity. I’m not saying this moment isn’t important or shouldn’t be framed as such. It’s an inflection point in any case, even in the rare “gay utopia” movie (honorable mention below). The best films that buck this reductive trend, or don’t feature a coming out at all don’t absolve the queer character of that truth. They just don’t make that moment the currency of their existence. They get to the juicier stuff: the much more interesting living beyond the confession.

Scarfing down these kinds of films, not just as a pre-pubescent lesbian but, now, a cinephile with a point to prove, has taught me there is a gaping distinction between the hollow and the visceral. Today, I’ve done you the courtesy of unpacking some of the best, through the lens of their climactic moments, each traversing their queer emotional terrain with a novel approach and refreshing honesty unbeknownst to movies like Love Simon, The Prom or Danish Girl. And all with one common quality. Consider it a pride gift from me to you.

«Spoilers ahead»

Pariah (Dee Rees, 2011)

Alike, a seventeen-year-old poet in Brooklyn, spends her days code-switching between the feminine armor her mother Audrey demands and the butch reality she lives with her friends. She’s a totally different person inside and outside. An AWESOME conceit. Her attraction to Bina, a reckless and sexually confident classmate, forces Alike to shed that armor, layer by layer, until there is nothing left to hide behind. Not to mention, her poetry serves as the raw, unfiltered outlet for the self she can’t speak aloud. The physical toll of the disguise she maintains daily, stacked atop the emotional burden, makes her eventual breaking point inevitable. And as comes naturally with intense social masking, the moment of climax is eruptive, Alike’s first true opportunity to put it all on the line for #realness.

Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997)

Lai Yiu-fai and Ho Po-wing, a gay couple, travel to Buenos Aires hoping to reset their troubled relationship, but the city only amplifies their disconnect. Lai Yiu-fai masks his insecurity with aggression, picking petty, vicious fights. Po-wing retreats into silence, vanishing for nights at a time, leaving Yiu-fai to spiral into jealousy and rage. Through the gradual erosion of intimacy between them, the emotional peak occurs when Lai Yiu-fai, stripped of his performative toughness, collapses on the floor sobbing after a devastating, silent reckoning in their cramped apartment. The connection he values is out of reach, but not for lack of trying. The fixing and breaking buttons in his mind are just homologous, triggered by the same desperate need to be held.

Big Boys (Corey Sherman, 2023)

Jamie, a loquacious and guileless young boy goes on a camping trip with his classically homo-averse straight teen brother, warmhearted adult cousin and her pulchritudinous boyfriend. While his brother tries to impress girls and maintain his nonchalant facade, Jamie remains on the sidelines, quietly observing Dan. The dynamic shifts when Jamie and Dan get separated from the group on a hike, where his new, developing feelings toward him unravel to a point of no return (particularly when his friend down under betrays his composure during a handsy encounter.) The moment of self-confrontation at the end of the movie, sees young Jamie tell pulchritudinous hunk that he thinks he’s handsome. This is a refreshing ending for several reasons. One, he offers up his truth as a sort of quiet promise he made to himself. And two, it sidesteps a more obvious and predictable choice, his brother finding out, chastising him or worse, with no sacrifice of intensity.

Appropriate behavior (Desiree Akhavan, 2014)

Shirin, a twenty-something bisexual Iranian-American woman in Brooklyn, is left on her ass after her girlfriend Maxine breaks up with her. The breakup stems partly from Shirin’s refusal to come out to her traditional Persian parents, which put a large strain on their relationship. The film follows Shirin’s messy life as she moves in with strange roommates, takes on a new job and attempts to reconnect with Maxine. Her quest for okayness leads to some distinctly awkward sexual encounters as she tries to prove her own desirability and figure out who she is outside of her relationship. The turning point is a gradual realization that she has been performing “appropriate” behavior for her family and her ex, rather than living authentically; and the climax is dressed as a standard confrontation but it cuts real different: Shirin finally admits her bisexuality, delivering the incredible line, “I’m a little bit gay.” But the anticlimactic rejection of the moment itself, with her mother uttering a simple no, is exactly the honesty a movie with such unvarnished grit deserves.

These films have more in common than their queer subject matter though. They also don’t treat coming out as the climax. Syllogistically speaking, they all appreciate identity beyond a singular event. A coincidence? I think not.

Honorable mentions

No queer movie list would be complete without at least one of Emma Seligman’s beauties. Shiva Baby & Bottoms deserve their own post (extra shoutout to the joyous gay utopia that is Bottoms) , so I’ll just leave it at that for now.

This second pride-edition post will be the last until July. I’ll be tied up moving and writing scripts during that time.

In the interim, feel free to catch up on some of the SL hits! :

What you just read is an unvarnished quote from a coming out letter I emailed to my parents on the brink of my freshman year of college, over 5 years ago at this point. Today, as a sort of pride month special, I’ll be sharing various chronological chunks from that letter, one because I think it’s incredibly funny and two because it’s revelatory.

Don’t get me wrong, emailing a coming out letter might be as egregious an act as sending a plate back at a restaurant with a written note of grievances about the dish. But it was totally in character for me and nowhere near the apotheosis of evasive behavior I had engaged in up to that point. Mustering up the courage to revisit this letter, I’ve taken it upon myself to squeeze the best lines for all they’re worth. To interrogate my motives as a character, and parse through what was behind it all.

Before all that though, a newsletter update:

Over the past few weeks I’ve been messing around with different series to make here that would be fun and sustainable once I start film school in a few months, one of those is the Game Show which, if you aren’t aware, is in the works. But in an effort to increase my bandwidth for this and the other offshoots of the newsletter (Movie Meditations & Tidbits), I’ve decided to suspend one existing series that was already victim to some severe neglect: Artist interviews. However, that doesn’t mean artist conversations won’t happen here, they’ll just move to the Bonus section of the newsletter and occur less frequently. You’ll find the Eric Barone interview and future features there, alongside specially curated content available at just $5/month.”

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Chunk 1

“I will say it a couple of ways for clarity. I like women. I am attracted to women. I am gay. I am a lesbian. I don’t like men. I am not attracted to men.”

This is the opening line; an interesting way to start because it’s so obviously aflame with perturbation. Reading it actually takes me back to the frustration I was feeling at the time. The months of back and forth exchanges surrounding my assertive abstinence from all matters of heterosexuality. The walking around eggshells my folks were doing in response (and perhaps in preparation). It was all tumult in my head, with absolutely no resolve. So this letter came at a time when I was ready to rip the bandaid.

Chunk 2

“I still have bouts of self loathing today (otherwise known as internalized homophobia). I stepped outside of your lenses of tradition and found that there is an entire generation of accepting and progressive individuals who are willing to fight for positive change and improve the lives of queer youth and adults alike.”

Defensive posturing is an inevitable step forward from the last. This statement seems to function as a counter-argument to several potential responses, one being something like “your life is going to be much harder if you’re gay” which I had heard remnants of in the direction of other gays throughout the years.

Chunk 3

“Straight is the default. Straight is the norm.
Compulsory heterosexuality” affects people of every gender, but it’s mostly been studied as something that affects women.
This is because compulsory heterosexuality easily ties in with the misogyny that causes women’s sexualities and even identities to be defined by our relationships with men.”

More context dumping from the iconic Lesbian Masterdoc to lighten the load and appeal to my folks, who are fierce academics before anything else. It was also an attempt to narrativize my experience, given all the years where this went undetected by them. Not that I had to do any of this, and in hindsight, knowing how strongly they became advocates for me and queer people of all kinds, I could’ve just left it at Chunk 1 and hit send.

But then I wouldn’t have a post for this week.

Chunk 6

“I have questioned it for as long as I can remember. For what feels like my entire life.
Which not only makes me a great liar but an awesome suppressor of feelings and emotion.”

Lol. Not exactly a sound flex, but we’ll let it stand. This chunk, in much fewer words, captures the quirky way I discuss my coming-of-age inquisition into gayhood and subsequent self-denial turned repression. If my life were made into a series of crucial vignettes from near-fetus to adult, in An Angel at My Table fashion, every age would contain its own very overt, very gay reckoning, which I’d pass off as ‘normal straight behavior’ until about 15.

While I didn’t feel like this letter in particular was the time to describe all the crushes I had on math teachers, friends and public figures, there was certainly no shortage of that. I chose, instead, to be cheeky in some moments and flat out perturbed in others.

Chunk 7

“Another thing I would reference for convincing was my “desire” for fictional men/male celebrities. Then I began to understand that allowing myself to feel “attraction” to unattainable attractive male figures was a very safe way of hiding. I would never have to interact with any of these people. It was like a “safe bet” if you will.”

During the soft-launch phase that preceded this email, I would do things like: stay silent when my mom or siblings invited input on whether a guy in a show was hot, demonstrate the gap of nuance when told that I had at one time vouched for the attractiveness of said men on tv (mind you in the peak of my denial). This chunk is a way of combatting the confusion this may cause to the untrained hetero eye. Lining up my defense even further perhaps

Chunk 8 & 9

“But since accepting myself, and allowing myself to live, I no longer feel muted or broken, or like there is something wrong with me. There is no longer a lingering voice in my head trying to convince me that I will be happy with a man one day.”

“What excites me about the future is not only pursuing my passions but being able to finally explore relationships, dating and have social balance and normalcy.
I am optimistic and a big contributor to that optimism would be 2 supporting parents… but regardless, Thank you for listening.”

A bit of hopeful ingratiation to finish things off. An invitation to step forward into reality if you will. As I read how I ended the letter, I experience the relief I felt while writing it. This moment so many build up as a cataclysmic, cinematic turning point was finally behind me. Despite all the defensiveness on display in this letter, I maintained at least some sense that this email wasn’t life-ending for me. Cuz it wasn’t. Unlike many queer kids coming up in exactly the wrong environment to thrive, I knew I would be just fine in the end.

There’s more than a handful of organizations doing phenomenal work for queer people across the country that deserve all the eyes and dollar signs. Here’s just a few I’ve stayed in tune with the most:

https://www.theokraproject.com/

https://www.pointofpride.org/

https://genderlib.org/

And on the opposite end of the same spectrum, here’s pattiegonia listing off some FREE queer resources prime for the taking:

Next week, I’ll be rounding up some of the formative queer films as a way of interrogating why some coming outs on screen can ring hollow, despite what they reveal about character in a purely functional story sense, and why some feel hard earned.

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Firstly…..Happy pride! I’ve got an extra gay-saturated post coming to you next week of the listicle variety.

But for now, if you’re gay and subscribe to this newsletter, DM me and I’ll send you a Benjamin or two.

HOPEFULLY this is the first and last unsubsidized pride handout my humble but mighty subscriber count will permit.

Some quick housekeeping:

Attached to the Scribbled Loose publication site is a my substack user page (@alexxsjohnson) where I write notes with updates ab posts for the week, restack stuff worth reading and share other pithy things that might’ve been tweet worthy in a pre-Elon America.

In case you’re not aware of where to find this short-form fodder :

Click me!

It’s also come to my attention that my comments are set to subscriber-only?? rUdE. I’ll fix it asap.

Back to it.

If you’ve even dipped a toe in the filmtok algorithm, you’ve probably encountered all the “styles” of film argumentation that circulate the platform. They start with pithy, click-worthy hooks and swiftly morph into vociferous arguments, defending the merit of their interpretation. The most sophisticated of them at least. But even if you’ve gone beyond a dip, perhaps taken a few laps, you probably see filmtok content in the exact same way that the casual, toe-dippers do: frivolous personal musings of equal legitimacy. This isn’t always wrong. But within that generalization is a chasm as great as the distance between the words you use describe a dish and the eating the meal itself. Today, I’d like to imbue the same sense of clarity that this revelation conferred to me when I first heard it, shifting the value proposition of every filmtok video and written analysis I’d encounter thereafter. And if you’ve heard of these distinctions before, as I am reheating nachos here, I hope my spiel, stacked atop my nascent preoccupations as a writer/filmmaker, can infuse a freshness that you fancy.

The chasm is poetics and hermeneutics. Two theories defined by their philosophy on how to discuss art. Poetics asks how and Hermeneutics asks why. For poetics, the question is how a film is constructed to produce a certain effect (singular). It seeks input from technical and formal attributes to understand how it came to be broadly understood by an audience through its craft markers. The question of Hermeneutics asks why films generate (divergent) effects across any number of interpretive frameworks, examining how cultural, ideological, and subjective contexts shape its varied reception. These methods of study, especially when it comes to film analysis, are best understood alongside the following complexity: They are competing theories but their approaches are complementary, amounting to a holistic understanding of a film as an art object, made with intention and consumed with interpretation. Starting with what I call the “meal” known as hermeneutics and working our way to the “recipe” of poetics, I’d like to delve into how a poetics-only approach constricts complete understanding and narrows our view of what a film actually does.

Hermeneutics is considered the dominant framework of institutional film criticism for its emphasis on interpretation and critical theory over technical analysis // receptiveness to political and social critique in film studies. Which tracks even off a glance (despite this having been the case for decades).

Some standardly hermeneutical movie critiques I’ve enjoyed:

Black Girl Watching

One Fetish After Another: PTA Exploits Black Women and Averts Revolution

*Spoilers for the plot of One Battle After Another…

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9 months ago · 3157 likes · 11 comments · Brooke Obie

Metaphors of Extractive Capitalism and Fabulation in Nope

https://online.ucpress.edu/afterimage/article-abstract/51/1/27/200366/Metaphors-of-Extractive-Capitalism-and-Fabulation?redirectedFrom=fulltext

kate <3

'Michael' is a movie about nothing and no one.

Michael Jackson is the whole business of money and sex mixed up with something primitive and deep. […] Michael Jackson would have to be invented if he didn’t exist…

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2 months ago · 1397 likes · 175 comments · kate <3

I call these meals, mostly because they insist a taste. To go beyond the overt, agreeable takeaways of what’s written down in a recipe and the overt, agreeable takeaways of what that meal might look like to engage in a totally different type of conversation. No matter what the meal turns out to be, tasting it will always introduce a new branch of ideas.

Like a delectable ice-cream sundae, minus the cherry, the puzzle-solving appeal of a hermeneutical movie review cannot be easily denied. Characterized by the distinct intellectual voice of the critic, they usually interlock with a specific social/cultural framework and work backwards, sideways and forwards, to “expose the unexamined assumptions on which a text may rely (political, sexual, philosophic, linguistic).” Or to reconstruct the broad reception of its meaning within the filmmaker’s authorial approach, which can summon evidence of artistry or narrative (Jordan Schonig of @filmandmediastudieschannel)

This is largely the reason why there are few, if any, books made for the purpose of espousing the theory of hermeneutics. There are, on the other hand, several books on the theory of poetics.

Reason being, Hermeneutics-based analysis need not justify itself. As the broadly adopted framework, hermeneutical works of analysis concern themselves most with justifying the expanses of their specific lens of interpretation and the conclusions they draw from it. But poetics, in excluding the implicit and subjective, adhere to a totally different standard that isn’t really considered “critique” at all.

Three out of the four books in the image above were authored by David Bordwell, the preeminent pioneer of poetics. In his book, Making Meaning, he also dives thoroughly into hermeneutics, as the oppositional concept, in order to develop his argument. He’s the man I’ll be quoting throughout the rest of this piece (proper citations r for big money playas) and you’ll learn soon that this is less for the sake of glazing and more to prop up my dissidence. Poetics function more as movie roadmaps than critique, predicated on the “concrete assumptions embedded in the filmmaker’s craft.” An agreed upon meaning that all films inherently work to communicate. That meaning being “the result of deliberate and founding choices” that relate to form and style. “Sometimes these are articulated by practitioners; sometimes they must be inferred from the product and the mode of production” (Bordwell).

While hermeneutics focused insight might work to discuss how the themes of spectacle in NOPE comment on the entertainment industry’s exploitative nature, Poeticians like Bordwell would work from, say, the understood fear brought about by the opening shot remaining on a suspending bloody shoe to draw conclusions about the visceral impact of the image and sound cut together to create a trauma. Or from the production restraints that shaped the use of drone-mounted camera technology for the cloud sequences. He describes these poetical interests as “stable creative acts whose situational logic can be investigated.” These recipe-like qualities are not designed for dispute in the way that a hermeneutical breakdown of how class dynamics play out on screen might be. “Poetics is thus not another critical “approach,” like myth criticism or deconstruction.” This emphasis on construction doesn’t make poetical analysis any less interpretively valuable though. After all, a film is first an arrangement of formal choices perceived sensorially before it is absorbed as a constellation of meanings, affects, and associations. Which is why, for me, the dichotomy here is not a matter of right or wrong but of started or finished; reformist or revolutionary; recipe or meal. Bordwell championed poetics as the most sound approach to analysis, but the pro-rationalist, subjectivity-averse methodology with which he stakes his claim is where I discover the gravest neglect.

I cycled through a few different metaphors that I’ll list here for their lingering effects:

2D / 3D

2D = Poetics: The technical blueprint.

3D = Hermeneutics: The unique immersive experience.

Above Ground / Underground

Above ground = Poetics: The visible architecture of film.

Underground = Hermeneutics: The hidden currents beneath.

Blueprint / Living House

Blueprint = Poetics: The architectural plans

Living House = Hermeneutics: The house as experienced

I found the Meal / Recipe conclusion to be the strongest embodiment of my argument, followed by the Reformist/Revolutionary analogue.

A strictly poetical analysis of film stops at the green light of comprehension, just short of every avenue of social context and critical engagement there is. These are things Bordwell sees as necessary to “sidestep” as a way of understanding artistic construction beyond seeking to “decode” a message in a narrative. But in this same breath, he stipulates. Much more than a simple acceptance of the fact that “we cannot keep critics from building up implicit and symptomatic meanings; nor should we” Bordwell yields that the “poetic rigor” he advocates for “offers the occasion for inferential elaboration.” This elaboration is “performed on the basis of “schemas” every viewer has on hand,” which are the mental knowledge structures, expectations, and cultural conventions we employ to make sense of a movie. Because every film, whether we acknowledge it or not, expresses a worldview and is shaped by material and cultural conditions, these inferential elaborations are integral to the experience. This remains true regardless of whether the filmmaker is aware of those implications. He further defends this dynamic in, Poetics of Cinema, when he expands on a model of spectatorship that recognizes the viewer as an active, conscious participant, always actively building meaning with their real-life experiences and knowledge of cinema to process a film’s cues.

To employ my reformist/revolutionary analogy, a reformist approach to political change has never ushered in a true transformation. A reformist would, to be precise, empathize with a poetics-only perspective. To uncover how a film functions within an existing paradigm is to improve its ability to serve its current purpose. To optimizes a static experience. Poetics refines understanding, yes, but in prescribing an objective status to a film, it also avoids any substantive challenge. It strips films down to commodities that vary only in their value proposition. Not to mention, it drives a sizeable wedge between "expert" and "consumer." Those who read recipes cannot necessarily make them, but anyone can eat a meal.

Hermeneutics ushers in a revolutionary potential as an accessible path to new understandings. An opportunity for generative, counter-intuitive insights. While scholars like Susan Sontag would argue a traditional interpretation (hermeneutics) “impoverishes” art by focusing on hidden meanings, beyond what’s immediately felt and constructed on screen is a wide scope of assumptions that maintain an established order that can dupe us all. “Reformist” poetics becomes capable of turning revolutionary when it goes beyond the broadly observable and technically surmisable to ask: “Why do these formal choices exist in this particular way under capitalism?” When both are applied practically, hermeneutics could use a poetics’ analysis to reveal how specific formal choices serve ideological functions and poetics could use a hermeneutics ideological critique to enhance formal analysis and reveal how cultural production both reflects and reproduces commodity fetishism.

If we are to recognize that films hold the potential to reflect and transform culture, we must also recognize the importance of the role we play as consumers who engage the material and exist in the world that birthed it. Even while understanding the techniques, precise measurements and cooking times, to refuse to go deeper, eat the dish and discuss what effects it has on the tastebuds, what social contexts that effect emerges from that, is to starve. But you can’t technically arrive at a meal without a recipe. There’s always something to trace backwards from the meal, to understand it further, if your heart desires. And for the sake of fairness, let’s say movies are not the sole source of sustenance in this metaphorical universe. You don’t have to eat the meal, or even make it, to enjoy the experience. And once it’s in front of you, you could just look at it. Smell it. Jiggle it around. In this regard, the experience of a meal, recipe to completion, cannot solely be judged on taste. Hermeneutics’ revelations of taste-appeal need grounding in concrete formal analysis. A recipe to trace and a plate to assess. These are the baseline, comprehensible qualities any laudable film take might build upon. “If you and I see a driver swigging out of a bottle and swerving his car along the road, we’ll probably both suspect that he’s under the influence. The conclusion isn’t guaranteed: The bottle might contain iced tea, and he might be avoiding roadkill we can’t see. But our inference about DUI is more plausible. Films rely centrally on just such garden-variety inferences; it’s one of the ways in which narratives trade on real-world knowledge.” The recipe is but a first step toward an experience and the finished meal a step removed from the last. Stopping there, to simply read the ingredients again or size up the plate, depends entirely on your hunger and curiosity for the meal itself.

This morning, while adding the final touches to this post, I came across film creator, Derrick of simireviews, discussing the current “is it really that deep?” discourse, which seeks to encourage a stronger relationship with the sensory experience of a film sans analyzing it into the ground after. In the video he references a the Sontag book I did earlier, a book of essays with the same critique of the “taming” effect of interpretation, which she saw as a way to control and domesticate art by extracting a “true” meaning. I certainly agree that watching a film expressly for post-game analysis is a wackadoo modus operandi. It undermines the whole experience. I also reject the notion that one “true” meaning exists for any film. I believe both in the sensual immediacy of a cinematic encounter (reading the recipe, making it, savoring the eye-candy of the result) and in the dialectics of a medium that does not, and will never, exist as a fixed entity but as several interconnected and complex processes. In order to appreciate this second half, I prefer to go beyond the ostensible to eat the meal, and taste the flavors. Eating the meal is actually my favorite part. As a result, I’ve been known to favor hermeneutics, a preference reflected in how my metaphors lean partial to the culturally relevant. But so does this newsletter. The difference is that, here, maintaining an interest in what lies beneath doesn’t come at the expense of what lies above, the path that gets us there. That’s the goal at least.

Perhaps it's reasonable to demand far less from the humble TikTok review to preserve their succinct, pithy powers of swift single-minded analysis. If you could call it that. Most are off the cuff anyway, not committing to either or dipping in and out of half baked, though valiant, attempts at symbolic explication and technical reasoning. I think that keeps the genre alive. But the next time you scroll, don’t deny the urge to pull out the sorting bucket. At the very least it might help you sift through your algo with a little more discernment. Or help you call the spade when a bloke’s spewing something far from any formal or theoretical reason… and then proceed to enjoy the entertainment value of the nonsense :)

Speaking FAR from nonsense willbryanfilms on TikTok makes some of my favorite poetics forward commentary on the platform. You’ll often find him discussing manipulations of camera, blocking, cinematography, editing etc. that inform a feeling.

Here’s a great video of his about how “great movies will teach you how to watch them.”

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8sFPA2H/

As expected, most people go hermeneutics-only mode on Tiktok.

These are my favs in that herd:

• chickyven

• indiaysabel

• hennyondatok

• stoobs

Thanks for reading today’s post, which indubitably betrays the SL “short reads” promise.

<3 Back to average length next week! HAPPY PRIDE <3

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On deck:

• A cool tale of iterative ideation in horror themes vis a vis Obsession, The Simpsons and an old short story

• Dope insights from The Creative Act on tuning in to the creative frequency

• New logo… in case you haven’t noticed; PLUS Game Show updates

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In Season 3, Episode 7 of the Simpson’s, “Treehouse of Horror II,” Lisa, Bart and Homer endure three distinct nightmares. Lisa’s, in particular, where Homer purchases a monkey paw that grants three disastrously claused wishes, happened to serve as the final inspirational punch to Curry Barker’s Obsession, a film on a tight track to break all the debut horror records in the book.

My Letterboxd Obsession Review

But before Barker employed its insights, ignited by the deeply human noumena of the “curse concept”, the Simpsons’ writers room had. The original source material? W.W. Jacobs’ short story, ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ which begins in a cozy cottage, where a comfortable family gets paid a visit by a sergeant who’s come to tell of his travels abroad. A trip where he acquired a Monkey Paw that supposedly grants three wishes to three separate men. The White family, quick to succumb to intrigue, call dibs and begin making their wishes. Their son is the first to fall, after a wish for £200 mutates into a £200 compensation on account of his brutal death at the workplace … the other two follow, with adequate and corollary disaster.

This nesting doll of intertextuality represents a particularly compelling concept coined by Rick Rubin I’ll refer to as “source sensitivity,” the practiced capacity to remain open to creative input from outside the self, cultivating open receptivity: like tuning a radio frequency, adjusting our minds to quietly listen to inspiration’s ‘whispers’”

“We are all antennae for creative thought. Some transmissions come on strong, others are more faint. If your antenna isn’t sensitively tuned, you’re likely to lose the data in the noise. Particularly since the signals coming through are often more subtle than the content we collect through sensory awareness.”

But my interest in this lovely creative aphorism is less about the principle of it and more about what it says about how meaning is made and transmitted throughout genre filmmaking. Today, that genre is horror.

W.W Jacob’s short story “The Monkey’s Paw” was published in 1902 and it has certainly made its rounds in the horror sphere (ie. it was Stephen King’s primary inspiration for Pet Sematary) Needless to say, as one of the most influential horror stories of all time, I can’t help but shove a magnifying glass up the arse of such legacy to discover, Why? How? and What sustains its enduringly iterable essence in terms of the meaning it carries to each film that inherits its thematic DNA?

Jacobs built his reputation on humor, and with a range showcased by his much darker tales, his career serves as a compelling illustration of the well-studied, psychologically-backed intersection between humor and horror. But his reputation was also built on his authenticity. A perhaps under sung ingredient to his special sauce, he was deeply shaped by the working-class realities of the maritime workers around him—that includes dockworkers, longshoremen, and bargees within London’s docklands. As a young chap growing up in the Wapping docks of Britain, he would regularly absorb the misadventures of the trade, most directly from his father who was a wharf manager. For this, his work maintained a refreshing fidelity to local cockney dialect and thus slotted into a comedic style that was more refined than caricature, but less high brow than upper-class literary satirists like Oscar Wilde or P.G. Wodehouse. Through a detached, third person perspective Jacob drew from an irony and suggestive restraint that allowed him to absorb (and editorialize) the many absurdities one might gather as a fly on the wall during a common maritime story, which likely included a colorful spectrum of petty rivalries and romantic entanglements.

These maritime anecdotes-turned-macabre preoccupations find themselves in “The Monkey’s Paw” where Jacobs juxtaposes the mundane and the monstrous. Where a family discovers the terrible price of their wishes. Whether the paw’s power springs from the psyche or the supernatural, the sheer ambiguity of its evil, and its implication of ‘random’ cruelty is uniquely unsettling. A narrative whose horror lies in the callous indifference of a curse you willingly invoke. A timeless paradigm of the psychological depths that elevate horror beyond mere shock. Every wish and ensuing curse becomes a mirror reflecting the dominant anxieties of an era. For Jacobs, economic insecurity, for Barker, romantic alienation, and for the Simpsons, a rare three-fold of celebrity culture, political idealism and Consumerism. The curse mechanism particularly makes way for a moral ambivalence that nurtures characters’ understandable desires for wishing whatever they do. It encourages an open-ended dread that spans the lengths of human selfishness and desire. The curse’s enduring power, in my assessment, comes from how the vehicle, perverse and pervasive in consequence, exposes the nasty below the mundane and exploits the unassuming to create a horror that’s deeply personal and ravenous for the human emotional voids.

If you’re reading this and you’ve been a subscriber for longer than a week, you might have noticed our new branding, a stunning novelty I owe to my friend Luke Gil, who’s also cheffing up on the episode layout for the game show!

We are absolutely hawking for submissions so share the link if you’re a friend or a foe or if you’ve got a movie take you’d love to get off your beautiful chest.

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About my film school decision :

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I also find it utterly absurd that it’s entirely within reason, during this crucial, often solitary step to pick your nose..or any orifice for that matter, flash an odious sneer at spiraling intervals, listen to music at the loudest volume and sing along, or order delivery without sharing a LICK; all in a day’s work. It’s the kind of flexibility that feels like a privilege. But it’s also a curse, trapping us between embodied, analog thought and structured digital expression. Ruts in this liminal space are unavoidable.

If I am to regard anyone as a prime embodiment of success forged in front of a computer screen, whose genre-bending, experimentally distinctive films exist in bespoke worlds defined by characters who’ve lived their lives through media that shaped their identity, that person would be Jane Schoenbrun.

If you’ve seen The World’s Fair or I Saw The TV Glow then you understand me when I say, the work they produce seems impossible without a boundless labyrinth of inner-worlds, each configured to accommodate their visceral, hermetic experiences of early life as a trans person during the internet age. So, it more than follows that Jane describes their work as “from the subconscious,” finding ideas and images within themselves and trying their best “not to overthink it” all. But they don’t just listen to their subconscious, they honor it. As Jane told Autostraddle in a 2022 interview: “Any time I’m waking up remembering a dream, especially when it’s happening over a period of time, I tend to listen. That’s my subconscious serving me something I need to figure out. ( . . . ) Conscious thought is a very limited way to walk through life and developing tools through which you can listen to your subconscious will lead toward a much more fulfilling existence.” [Source: Autostraddle, April 13, 2022]

Given these imaginal, abstracted strategies from the writer/director of the new and anticipated, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, I’ve come to think that success in the computer screen period of the process mostly falls upon opposing the descent into the overthinking impasse, and in turn strengthening access to the grassy green pathways of the “anything could happen” mentality.

To break such ground, a lofty reset feels in order. One that conjures up the power of stepping away and catching the vibe again. So, I’ve developed a list I think Jane would approve of.

1. Reading your old journals

Revisiting the most volcanic moments of expressive urgency isn’t exactly a joyride. In fact, it’s torturous. It reminds you of the bygone, or thoroughly ossified, patterns of the young mind. But if you’re lucky enough to have such a rich archive of trying times or boisterous reflection, you’d be down right wrong to watch it collect dust indefinitely. If and when you do decide to sift through, you’ll be rewarded with a token to an emotional time-machine.

2. Misc. Side Projects

A side project is an escape from obligation into willful adventure. This could be anything from enhancing the utility of an everyday accessory (see image above) or escaping into a different script that’s been on the back burner, an offramp Jane admitted to in Autostraddle: “Like a psycho, I procrastinate by writing the next next thing.”

3. Find something provocative in nature

…and snap a pic. Keep it. Stare at it. Imagine its complex origins. On a morning stroll last week, I saw this cacti plant with arrestingly fungi-like spores in bright yellow hues. How does something so drably green and rough around the edges decide to peacock to such extremes? What does this specimen look like on the inside? I could go on, but the point is, nature is mesmerizing, sure. But these expressionistic, spontaneous sightings offer an unsettling beauty, unmatched by anything else. Or anything under a roof at least.

4. Make a meal (from the heart)

The heart wants what it wants. Counsel with yours. Make that sandwich you saw on instagram. Fail at it and munch on the sack of walnuts in your ingredient ass apartment. It’s a win-win; you either end up with an edible sandwich or the satisfaction of dauntless trial and error.

5. Find a CURSED image.

The edge-seekingly curious act of digging through the dark tunnels of the internet for imagery that jolts the senses (non-perniciously!) is a lost art. I still think about the, now ancient, version of YouTube, when the algorithm wasn’t views-based. The corollary is clear: the automated, systematized nature of the internet today has replaced that of the whimsically pragmatic 90s era sites developed by users themselves around hyper-specific interest groups. Early-internet style adventure and discovery isn’t as attainable. And while my instincts drive me toward the creepy, absurd shit, you might find the same gratification sourcing old My Little Pony collectors content, or something of the like...

I’ll let you use your imagination… But I did find a link that happens to combine both old-school web design language and horror imagery at this link.

6. Organize ur space, organize ur mind

The parallel cannot be understated. A clean hive is a clean mind. Do yourself, and your house guests, a solid and revitalize the swag of your room. Hey, you go deep enough you might even find that journal you thought you lost forever.

7. Crack that book back open

There’s a self-affirming satisfaction in returning to a book that temporarily lost its mojo, especially when the reason was day-to-day distractions rather than it being a dud. My personal principles on the dearness of time tell me to drop any books that I don’t enjoy within the first 30 pages. You do you though.

8. Waving hi to friends in the sky

You thought I meant birds? That’s base level stuff. You discover so much when you look up. Some things, almost as inscrutable as the fugly-beautiful cacti down below. Like any half cogent individual, I find this best accomplished on a walk, especially on trails hospitable to the treasures of sky and earth.

Share Scribbled Loose

Thanks for indulging today’s listicle; trust that this format will return (artist process exploration + misc list). But for now I’ve distilled today’s into a TikTok if that’s of any interest to you.

To conclude I’ve laid out a few more of the highlights from Jane’s creative insight on Autostraddle.

• “When I write a character, I try to write them somewhere between 60 to 80% fully formed and then the other 20 to 40% comes from the human being I’m collaborating with.”

• “I tried not to let my preconceived ideas I had during the years I spent preparing get in the way of the reality of being on set. (...) It’s semiotics. You have to very simply see what is in front of you and discover what it means for this thing that you’ve been planning for so long.”

• “I think there’s something comforting in seeing an extreme representation of a feeling that you’ve always had, a feeling where desire and horror get caught together in a mouse trap. It’s a comfort and you seek it out. (...) darkness is like a hug”

Only a few episodes have dropped of Katie Dippold’s new sinister seaside apple tv show centering on an obscure mayor’s filibustering attempts to boost tourism on his lackluster island in spite of rampant allegations and substantiated sightings of cursed activity leaving everyone on tenterhooks.

My favorite of these sightings happens in episode 3 and involves Mr. Mayor and a reclining chair, but that’s among a hefty handful of foolhardy, borderline slapstick scares, all nowhere near as unsurprising as finding out Dippold is a comedy writer and Hiro Murai, of Atlanta fame, is the director behind her vision.

These MERE first three episodes have brewed up such a strong opening half that I feel comfortable saying this is the best show streaming right now, and for no reason stronger than its robust helping of wry, sardonic jokes and genuinely wicked, skin crawling beasts, brutes and ogres propagating the island’s curse and making an absolute fool of the mayor, who doesn’t believe any of the voodoo shit is real. A perfect “villain” with a cause: COVER IT UP

This show is Katie Dippold’s approach to the question what would happen if we fucked up cozy little town? And it answers first, with a rotation of considerable genre classics.

• A histrionic yet charming man in charge

• The foreboding feeling of violent, unceremonious doom

• A mostly complacent group of townspeople slowly getting high off the fumes of anarchy

But it's the way these components are wielded that makes it such an intoxicatingly balanced blend, in no small part thanks to the skillset Murai once brought to Atlanta. As he states, “The horror of this show comes from these characters interiority” … “an anxiety or fear they're suppressing,” which serves as the source of both the comedy and the horror. This builds “a tone where these anxious and overwhelmed people” express their emotionality “externally through tension or fear."

Character is the blueprint and like all wondrous series-length concoctions, the landing pad for great comedy-horror is minuscule. According to program creator Katie Dippold, the journey to stick it, finding the perfectly suitable slant of comedy and scares, was long and intrepid. Unsurprisingly, the show started in a more comedy-heavy territory, but her proclivity for the horror genre tempered the mix to align with her taste: a pb&j with emphasis on the pb. In fact, she didn’t care for a pure comedy version of the show at all (I mean who on earth wants a jelly-only sandwich). And to the brilliant credit of the final product, it really does thrive off its moments of unfettered calamity, only flavored for sport with the highest hanging fruit off the humor tree. She wanted to stray as far away from parody as possible.

“I want to watch a show that’s taken seriously and you’re really invested in the characters.”

And that she did.

Matthew Rhys portrays Tom Loftis, the island mayor; a slightly squirrely figure whose lack of constituent respect generates so much ridicule that it fuels 80% of the comedic atmosphere. With a primary objective to obscure the strange happenings of the island, his general vibe of uneasiness has thoroughly mutated into an ingratiating clumsiness even his staff can hardly work past. But as a “widowed” father of one, his efforts preserve a moral purity that makes him easy to root for, especially since the absurdity of the town horrors are hard to believe outright. But, this purity doesn’t shield us from the compromising lengths he’s willing to go to curry favor with the town, everything except confronting the truth: an ever-lingering, cursed truth that he turns a blind eye to every day. The fodder of old wives’ tales, passed from household to household since the town’s colonization, sowing fear across every inch of the island and taking lives in the process. The catastrophic a trail his leadership leaves behind, is as demonstrable as the horror of this show and the thematic gumption follow suit.

Katie says she became a comedy writer as a response to the “horrors of life,” …“making jokes because the situation was tense.” Part of the joy she gets from watching a horror movie is the cathartically amusing comic relief that comes from delighting in the “magic trick” crafted on screen. That delight maps out crisp and clean onto the world built of Widow’s Bay, a show I suspect nods at the very real life horror of feckless leadership and multicultural denialism in this country, a corollary of a cynically suppressed outlook on the world that forsakes any sense of the part you play in shifting the narrative.

To draw a parallel, I’ll cite a line from a piece by Current Affairs, aptly titled The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon, on The Tonight Show’s empty husk of a late night host, not at all dissimilar to Mayor Tom Loftis or the control covetous blights in charge.

“…insistence on a radical non-engagement with reality: a position that, in our current political climate, … is itself an aggressively political act”

Quotes and process detail from HOLLYWOOD FIRST LOOK and Jonatan Blomberg from MovieZine

More Movie Meditations

Today:

• How novice wins over knowledge, with words from the Scottish image savant herself

• Calling all the film obsessed for a GAME SHOW in development

Lynne Ramsay’s debut feature, Ratcatcher (1999), opens with a shot of a boy wrapped in a lace curtain. This metamorphically evocative image sets the stage for a gut punching story of a young boy burdened by a destructive environment and a grave mistake. This was her debut film, might I add. Meaning everything that came before, her life, her training, her successes, her failures, shaped what became this inscrutably poetic capsule of boyhood in Scotland. To make a film with the level of artistic gumption on your first go is a high order, but it can be done.

See. Shiva Baby, Sorry Baby, Get Out, Joyland… to name only a few.

Conventional wisdom would advise you to believe these preternatural successes are a product of intense knowledge absorption. Shoot as much as possible. Read as much as possible. Watch as much as possible. But Ramsay’s Ratcatcher “strategy” maintains the exact opposite.

What you might not know is that Ramsay didn’t train in writing and directing in film school but in cinematography! It was there that she realized it was the wrong track. She started to feel somewhat confined by a choice she made with an understanding that gaining the the hard skills of a cinematographer, which is a track somewhat standardized in approach, would be an easier way “in.” Yet, she has zero regrets. In this interview with Elliot James she says “it’s good to know every part of your skill,” which perhaps makes her next words of advice that much more attainable: “stick to your guns.”

“If you try to do something that everybody likes, it’ll never happen.”

She’s adamant about the ways “in” that exist beyond the constraints of hegemonic influence. A very “don’t bend or break” mentality I especially appreciate. It’s this mentality that gave her the confidence to assemble the team behind Ratchatcher who, notably, were “a bunch of filmmakers” who’d “never done anything” and just got out of film school. Her Director of Photography had never shot a film before. Practically no one on set had either. And for this a “real purity” was cultivated. It’s the major component in the singular magic of a debut film.

There’s a crucially charmed naivety within a crew of novices. A sensitivity that can’t be restored after the first go around. The usual hesitation toward a request like “build a canal” in the absence of a real one flies without debate, a task the Ratcatcher team accomplished!

With a high concentration of experience, sure, many-a excellent debut has been made. Of course bolstered by a combined sharpness of vision, as incisive as it was determined.

But a cluster of raw, fervid desire to go there, whatever it may take, is a force capable of just the same, maybe with an even higher concentration of spirit than the former could ever hold.

On a newsworthy note, a SCRIBBLED LOOSE GAME SHOW is on the horizon as I gather players for incoming episodes!!!

If you’re here, or at least if you’ve been here a while, you’re well aware of the ethos behind this publication. We care about the stuff behind the stuff, particularly MOVIES, the precise impetus for…

It’s a twisted version of a movie-guessing game that I’d bet BIG money you’ll love, especially if

• You walk away from movies with hot takes no one else has

• You think every movie is saying more than its saying

• You turn every film into a theory worth defending

All the rules, regulations and submission instruction is here for the taking.

Submission status - OPEN

Got movie takes?

Share your theories, thoughts and interpretations to puzzle the players!

CLICK HERE for the form

Film selection rotates periodically. Check back if the current selection doesn’t speak to you.

Free episodes available at https://www.youtube.com/@scribbledloose

…with bonus episodes releasing here for our honorable paid-tier creative comrades.

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Scribbled Loose Show: The Game Show

Guess the film. Or get lost in what it means

The Scribbled Loose Show is a film-based game show about interpretation first, identification second. It explores how people construct meaning through deeply personal readings of movies and how those meanings can obscure as much as they reveal.

Participants submit bold, original claims about a film’s deeper significance, structured across four escalating rounds, building up to a multiple choice round:

Round 1: Story Interpretation (includes one or more of the following, depending on how revealing or elusive each provided claim is)

• Culture/Theme — the film’s core meaning/critique through a cultural lens

• World — the film's constructed reality: world, system, society

• Characters — insight into 1–2 key figures and the role they play (emotionally, culturally, psychologically etc)

• *NEW* Craft — thoughts on a moment of visual, performance or stylistic impact that achieved a certain effect for you

Round 2: Plot Reconstruction

• Plot — an abstract but accurate narrative arc

Round 3: Key Quote

• Line — a single line from the movie

Round 4: Multiple Choice

• Five probable movie picks, one correct

With a group of 2–3 players per episode, the Host curates these submissions, moderating their integration into the game, facilitating play, and withholding the film’s identity from the players until the final reveal.

How It Works

Players and special guests are presented these interpretations without context. They engage with each claim as a standalone cultural argument, attempting to identify the hidden film as new layers are revealed.

During any stage prior to the final round, Players may privately or publicly lock in a guess with the Host.

• Earlier guesses earn more points.

• Players may revise (un-lock) their guesses later as play continues on, but doing so forfeits the maximum score from earlier rounds.

• All private lock-in guesses are revealed to viewers on screen.

In the final round, all Players must state their answers aloud.

The Point of It All

The hope behind this show is simple: to get people talking about movies the way they actually experience them, messy, passionate, contradictory, personal, and in doing so spark comedically chaotic discussions about the parts of movies that can make them such powerful cultural conduits: shared human experience through authentic attachment to meaning. Through that process, conversations about film start to become not just debates over quality or taste but dope opportunities to engage more deeply with the ideas, values, and human experiences behind artistic expression (or “art objects” to put it less romantically, which I believe is an especially crucial practice to recognize the inventive voices in the margins that resist the dominant, capital-driven logic of commercially washed media.

But for that to really work, it needs to reach a lot of people with strong, varied perspectives.

So if this idea resonates with you, please share the link with anyone who loves movies, debates movies, or can’t stop thinking about them after the credits roll.

Interested in being a player?

Shoot us a DM on Insta or TikTok.

Happy submitting :)

While you’re here, subscribe to the newsletter! You’ll get on-demand updates on new submission links and all our other offerings.

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For the first few minutes my mind is clear and a hope for a swift descent into the dreamscape is still alive. The temperature in my room is just right. I don’t regret the combination of PJ pants and tank top I put on after my shower. The last whiffs of incense roam the air and I sink into the joyous idea of the next morning, when I’ll awaken with the shining eyes of restfulness to take on my creative tasks with a full tank… until more time passes when my mind chooses the wrong turn at the fork between precious recharge and esoteric brainstorm. Now, it would be an entirely different story if the ideas I was churning out at the wee hours of the night were frivolous by a morning’s reflection. But to my dismay ;) much of the stuff keeping me up, typing sporadically into my notes app, actually makes it into the final draft. So the question becomes, are these sparks of ingenious exclusive to the dark bedroom hours? Could I just as easily reach such novel territory during my dedicated daytime writing sessions. Science says great ideas tend to “strike” at night because the prefrontal cortex that’s involved in everyday inhibition and control weaken during those hours, not to mention the heightened state of relaxation lowers anxiety (which is wildly disaffirming to the bubbling baseline levels of anxiety I feel at night about things spanning from the state of the world to “when is my cool new bag from Japan gonna arrive.”) I guess I’m far more adept at dealing with those.

Knowing the clear perks, my plan to regain a healthy slumber schedule must account for at least half an hour of half-asleep idea generating. Not in a calculated way because that would destroy the stress-free essence of the whole thing. But to do that, I have to address a few natural impediments: screen time at night, setting off the creative mind is notoriously hard to stop.

Lucky for me, there’s obvious solutions to both of these.

Writing manually unlocks swaths of processing potential and it removes the stimulus. It forces you to slow down, think clearer and engage the kind of meditative practices that make for a seamless transition to bedtime. I tend to be a google docs warrior during the day but diverting my efforts toward the modest notebook has been a rewarding shift. I’m itching to do it much much more.

Another excellent compliment to the zero-screens in the bed policy I’m chasing is an alarm clock—which doubles in functional value when you consider the honorable, worthwhile goal of staying off screens for at least 30 minutes after you wake up. I personally haven’t been the best disciplinarian when it comes to this, but we grow stronger and stronger every day!

On my search for the perfect alarm clock, several lines of mid-century vintage flip clocks from the 70s caught my eye, most of which are made in Japan. I recently purchased this beautiful orange one from Lumitime which I found DEADSTOCK on eBay; a nice, dichotomously cohesive pop to my muted but rich decor predilections.

There’s also a lot of great ones made by Sankyo, Seiko and Copal. While they do run you a chunk of change, I think inviting a sense of analog whimsy into your life is worth the investment if you can. I particularly enjoy the model I got because there’s no am/pm on the dial, meaning every night you have to set the alarm for the next day, a welcome addition to my nightly unwind routine.

*Update: the no am/pm got a lil tedious. Will be purchasing a different one for the cribbo but keeping this one for display purposes. A great lesson in finding the optimal in-between of utility and luddism. I made note of this on the Great Creations catalog, where I shout outed these babies.

I’ve of course trodded the medicinal path for improving sleep and I must say, most of it plateaus after a relatively short period of usage and/or deters me with the drowsy side effects (I’m ofc talkin melatonin).

So instead, I’ve gotten into my herbalist bag and relied on another pair of tools that go hand in hand.

Like I hinted at earlier, a room that smells divine soothes the mind. I like to burn some incense while I’m doing my nightly rituals and burn it a good 10-15 mins before hopping into bed. Yes it makes a difference. But don’t ask me. Ask ur neighborhood aromatherapy aficionado. Read an article about it. For the sake of everything we hold dear, don’t ask ChatGPT.

While the synthetic melatonin most people are used to taking has diminishing returns, I’ve become a huge proponent of plant-based solutions, specifically the concoctions made by the folks at Wooden Spoon Herbs. I grew up with health freak parents who stocked up on this kind of stuff weekly so I’m afraid it’s my own fault for being this late to the party.

Last night I was rocking with the Magic Magnesium Blue Lemonade powder to sip during a movie. They also make a cherry Magnesium Glycinate version but a simple zero-frills capsule of MG is probably the most effective vehicle, if they’re all natural ofc. I’m taking them on a trial run at the moment to find out if their muscle relaxing, anxiety reducing perks prove resonant by the 4-6 week signifier. TBDDD!

Dive in for yourself if you’re intrigued!

You also can’t go wrong with a classic cup of tea, if you’re me, preferably something piping, minty or tangy to revitalize the senses. A cheeky lil sleep mask doesn’t hurt either!

I’m nothing if not a ravenous consumer. For more thoughtful recs of excellent artistry in watchables, listenables, displayables, readables and playables, check out the Great Creations page that I stay stacking.

Next up this week:

• Another bonus video as I figure out the recurring format for the series, this time with more happenings on the writing front!

I streamed the entire season of BEEF the minute I got through the OPPRESSIVE Netflix login code barrier and I am completely blown away. The first season of Beef hit me in the same way Get Out hit me in 2017, in no small part due to my connection to the tone and the sharp social commentary they both nail. The cinematic network of my brain grew two sizes when I watched them. Lee Sung Jin, creator of the show, notably writes from hyper-specific personal experience, which I think allows him to get as granular as he does to make something that is so incredibly pure of emotion, heart and revelatory humor. His writing is a conduit for the shadow self, the deepest, darkest conscious and subconscious impulses that have the potential to drive us farther and farther from firm moral ground. And it’s the same meaning-making mouthful I latched onto this season, which follows two calamitously intertwined couples wrapped up in the high stakes world that is working at a high-profile country club.

Lee Sung Jin is one of one, and because his work is so dialed into symbolic excavation and complex character study, I’ve taken a few days longer than usual to write this post.

I spent that extra time doing some much cherished research. Research involving the mechanisms behind human decision making. As my primary guide, I looked to Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature. I found this an important step before starting this post because character is behavior and behavior is psychology. These are the thought processes that build character and, as as evidenced by personal screenwriting enrichment, build more complex, resonant characters than ever before. The book introduces 18 laws of human nature, each detailing the emotions that color our thinking, discerning the rational from irrational and exposing the invisible unconscious motor behind those moments we struggle to justify. Lucky for me, the structure of this book maps out nicely onto the characters from this season, the feature I’d like to focus on however the meticulous imagery of this season cannot be understated.

The younger couple is the first one we see but the second one we hear.

Ashley is certainly a self-identified charmer. She projects a humble, naive softness that not-so-easily wraps around an equal but opposite disposition of conniving and arrogant. Needless to say, the wrapping paper is low ply. She works at the country club with a boyfriend she’s so passionately in love with she can’t bear the mere 30 seconds they spend apart while he’s taking a piss. I’d guess, while not episode canon, that they do most of their pissing together. If I could assign her a law it would be the law of envy and the law of compulsive behavior, which individually encapsulate her formed behavior from childhood, the instinct to compare herself with others and solicit approval, living in constant fear of being cheated on.

Austin wears his heart on his sleeve and shares a complete, borderline sycophantic infatuation with his girl Ashley. He operates with a transparent sense of morality, the type that mopes around when they can’t save a dying bee with a pinky’s drop of water and good vibes. We later learn of his singed past with an abusive, emotionally exploitative mother who, in his adulthood, apologizes for how she treated him, which serves as great precedent for his willingness to forgive others that becomes ever so relevant to where this couple ends up. Meanwhile, Ashley’s origins point toward some real abandonment issues from parents who, in the present day, won’t give her the time of day whether on the couch or at a football game. As a conceivable reaction to this, she dreams of creating the tight-knit family she never had. But even before we learn these things about each of them, which is much, much later in the season, the insecurities, anxieties, and patterns of repression they’re subject to is palpable. It shows up in the small gestures. The extra contrived last word of glee Ashley punctuates every conversation with or the way she’s ready to deploy a moralizing dose of passive aggression to turn Austin to her side of the argument. Or the silent, almost imperceptible pain in Austin’s face when he can’t solve a problem and his conflict averseness getting him to eat his words.

Lindsay feels emptied by her work environment that she hares with Josh, her husband and verbal sparring partner. He and Lindsay work in somewhat of a partnership, him as manager and her the interior designer at the country club. Thankfully, they’ve developed their own coping mechanism for the reality that their relationship is so chalked full of resentment, they struggle to even pick up on each other’s obvious, consolable pain. She deals with it by chatting up other men to hookup with and he visits online sexual chatrooms. Lindsay likes to think of herself as socially superiority, so she needs the validation of those she finds more attractive, successful or happy than her, feeling threatened by their every win. She’ll also do anything to achieve that superiority, including blackmail which is a vibrant thread throughout the show’s moral depravity. Law of aimlessness suits her well as a woman who’s lost her greater sense of purpose in life, unhappy in her career and dreaming of missed opportunities.

Josh radiates feelings of inadequacy and unresolved trauma, the makings of many a great character. He’s swift to appease those whose good grace burgeons his status, or at least maintains it so it’s not hard to understand why he lets all the club’s members run him over with minuscule favors and special requests. By all intents and purposes, he’s a cuck… with a porn addiction to compliment. But you can tell he gains something from acts of service, even when it feels mildly exploitative. Maybe confidence or purpose. He’s a giver who’s lost his way in a job that forces you to confront your unhappiness. His character aligns with the law of grandiosity because often on the other side of an avid giver is a man who’s fallen prey to a natural tendency to overvalue their own brilliance, a self-absorption that leads to defensiveness and neglect of the facts.

The most alluring part of these two couples in chaos together is the way they hold a mirror to each other. They uphold the same patterns of behavior with a 20 year age gap. Despite me associating them with certain laws, given the same pattern of emotions govern all of their behavior, there is substantial overlap. The tagline for the poster could’t be more spot on.

“EVERY COUPLE MEETS THEIR MATCH”

Josh and Lindsay cling to their youth. All the times they had and will never have again. Ashley and Austin feel the invincible allure of youth, naive in all the places J and L are jaded. Both couples shoulder the weight of the world and how to find a comfortable place within it. and all four’s dilemmas stem from the greed, self-interest and loneliness of capitalism.

There’s no doubt that a real love lies below the messy surface between both couples. And they’ve all given way to repression, shortsightedness and role-playing, rules that conceal the “dark side,” present curated personas to the world and seek immediate gratification, all things prone to upheaval. When you think about it, how could they not? Without genuine connection and emotional safety in their lives, they live in trepidation of the future. Although I didn’t mention them the 2 auxiliary couples, Ava and Troy, Chairwoman Park and Dr. Kim are powerful pillars to the same framework. This season was another hearty class commentary that illustrates with new clarity, the things that tear us apart are structural. They implant a loneliness as difficult to discern as it is corrosive to meaningful connection and economic security.

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• A personal update of creative trajectory

• NEW Great Creation shout out

• Letterboxd reviews that tickled me

I spent the bulk of last year covertly preparing two applications. One to NYU and one to Columbia. I spent that summer, and change, prior to the application deadline in New York. I was there for an internship with, now institutionally depraved, Skydance Media, which swallowed Paramount (aptly) upon my exit and soon after opened its jaws to Warner Bros in another ruthless effort of cost-cutting and human-forsaking.

Some of my favorite industry publications covering calamitous mergers like these and more:

The Entertainment Strategy Guy

The best writing on entertainment strategy including a weekly "Streaming Ratings Report", unpacking what shows and films are winning the streaming wars.

The Industry

Daily Film & TV News Direct to You.

Hope For Film

We need a vibrant alternative to mainstream culture, especially a non-dependent cinema ecosystem. Let's build it together & examine what got us here in the first place -- including how we can each build our own sustainable & generative creative practices.

By Ted Hope

And if you’re into the robust and very necessary anti-film school attestation →

Too Much Film School

Studying films, old and new

By Matt Price

I decided around that time that New York City was where I had to be and (thankfully) that decision has been reinforced by a smorgasbord of fortuitous revelations like a) Every comedic genius I happen upon, love and adore lives in Brooklyn or b) this crazy good bakery I can’t get enough of is in Sunnyside Queens. And of course, a thriving cascade of yoked fellow filmmakers on the prowl… not to mention learning about the tried-and-true savant faculty belonging to each school.

I hit the submit button in December and what followed was a slow drip of copium.

Studying film in undergrad, I became privy to the overwhelming improbability of acceptance to one of the BIG 3 (NYU, USC, AFI_ _ _ Columbia) and while I believed it couldn’t be any more “improbable” than carving a momentous career out of the dust, I still couldn’t help but cozy up under the blanket of doubt. So I researched. I convinced myself of the many existing avenues toward a career as an independent writer/director beyond that of the film school pipeline. But none were as accessible to me as a applying, which would offer me the chance to do again what I got to do in undergrad, except on a much more dedicated, macro level: Make films, develop a gutsy slant on the form, and subsequently express the snowballing pile of thoughts I have about the world, expanding farther with every ounce of humanity stripped from those who need it most. Maybe it’s naivety, maybe it’s impatience, but as anyone keeping up with the industry knows, nothing is set in stone, everything is up for the capitalist slaughter and community is never as important as it will be tomorrow. Film school will never be a fast-track to a flourishing career. But for me it’s a dunk tank to a sprinkler… and I’d like to get drenched in the quickest way I can.

So I got into both NYU and Columbia! dubs in chat

As far as which school I will do such drenching in: TO BE DETERMINED. I’ll throw an update on this post by next week when I decide and I’ll “substack tweet” aka write a note on the SL page.

FINAL UPDATE - I’ve chosen NYU

On the plane to see apartments and campuses in the city, I finished a book I haven’t found the slightest urge to put down since I started it.

Luster is about a black woman living in NYC, working a mostly dead end job and getting swept up in an unprecedented relationship that causes a hemorrhage in every corner of her life, which does stretch itself far enough to include a literal medical hemorrhage. But even considering this and its many other magnetic events, what makes it a knock out is the sometimes depressing, sometimes spirited, always surprising ways she assesses it all, good, bad, trivial, monstrous disaster. That is to say, Edie, the protagonist, couldn’t bore you with a single thought, even if she watched paint dry for an entire chapter. A vibrancy owed to none other than Raven’s masterful incision, breathing life to the parts of young adulthood, artistry and love that are easiest to coast through.

Letterboxd thrives at the intersection of dribbling intellectualism and irony-pilled proclamation, but reviews as of late rarely throw their darts down the middle, at least according to my feed. On that note, and in lieu of a movie meditation this week, I’ve rounded up some of my recent favs, mostly teetering toward one end of the pole. Better assembly to come? For now:

Next week

• A brand new edition of the recently debuted dialogue meta of the Movie Meditation

• Film school selection final update

• First Bonus edition VIDEO post?

And more…

Quick sidebar: I caught this at the theatre closest to me (Flix Brewhouse, formerly an Alamo Drafthouse) but the hunt for my tried and true movie theatre continues. Suggestions are welcome! I’ll be starting film school in NYC this fall so throw some darts in that direction why don’t ya.

Before The Drama, I revisited two of Borgli’s formative films, the most recent, starring Nicolas Cage, Dream Scenario (2023), and the other starring Kristine Kujath Thorp, Sick of Myself (2022). The latter, my favorite, channeled a perverted take on the attention economy with a woman hell bent on stealing the limelight from her pretentious artist boyfriend to achieve her own fame. What I loved about this film was its willingness to go there when it comes to bodily disfigurement via volitional illness (spoiler, she takes dark web drugs to self induce skin disease). It really commits itself to examining the perilous physiological interplay of a woman wedged between insecurity and the twisted validation.

Dream Scenario mirrored many of these untethered cognitive extremes with the tale of a college professor stuck in the liminal space of other people’s dreams, presenting as neither friend nor foe but something in between, and perhaps even more freakishly imposing. Dream Scenario thrives off an emotional landscape as pernicious as the last, with a similarly daunting visual style. As a fan of both worlds, what imprints me the most is their weaponized mundanity, laying in the folds and waiting to dubiously unmask themselves as drivers of chaos. This quality emerges with particular force during meal times. In Sick of Myself, conversations are hijacked by Signe’s developing attitude of total social disgust. She struggles to hide her look of physical pain across the table from her boyfriend and his friends. Paul (Dream Scenario) is burdened by parallel career resentments and a gaping feeling of inferiority, made the clearest at an early dinner conversation with a former colleague where he asks pointed questions about her status before accusing her of scholastic fraud. Paul, too, is sick of himself and, will soon square his twiddling reality with the dreamed up projections of strangers and kin; just like Signe squares her insatiable need to be a sobbing headline story with a world who eats it up without hesitation.

Going into The Drama I expected the same caldron of dormant explosives, bubbling up forebodingly in a darkly comedic stew. I hopped on a phone call after the screening. Here’s what my friend Bryce and I have to say about it.

<SPOILERS AHEAD>

Alexx(Me): All right, dude. What a...

Bryce: How do we even start, bro?

Alexx: I want to start with a thematic statement. And it’s that... Well, more of a question. Do you think it’s possible for couples to start over after that kind of discrepancy in whatever it may be? I guess we should keep it to this. But, like, that’s obviously the question, the main question it’s posing. It’s stated, like, three different times, beginning, middle, and end. And I... I understand that ambition of, like, tackling that question in a different way, in a very unique way. I did not expect that reveal at all. Did you expect it?

Bryce: No, man. Oh, my God.

Alexx: Their relationship started off in a performative way.

Bryce: Definitely. Definitely

Alexx: And I feel like it ended that way, too. Maybe that’s the point. He literally met her with this idea of, like, seeking the perfect image of a meet-cute, under the pretense of pretending to know what she’s reading. Like, the fucking thing started off as a fraud.

Bryce: Oh my god dude yea

Alexx: But I do think that what it had to say about the way that we are desensitized to the school shooting phenomenon in this country was way more interesting than what it had to say about, like, relationships. But I also appreciate what it the discussion it foments about whether someone can truly change.

Bryce: Yes. I agree.

Alexx: Because it... Like, the complete lack of ability for... What’s his name? Charlie? For Charlie to exercise any empathy toward Emma is insanity. It is reactionary to the fucking tea, dude.

Bryce: What I thought about that shit is, like, you could tell, like, the difference in how they were brought up. I think... Okay, a lot of the film is talking about is, like, darkness and how, like, that type of, like, childhood trauma and hardship can, like, mold you into a better, more mature person later on in life. And you can tell he’s never encountered any sort of, like, anything.

Alexx: God. That’s an amazing point. He wants a pristine life that doesn’t exist. It’s a public image.

Bryce: Bro, because, like, he literally crumbled at, like, the fucking… at the prospect of, like, oh, like, this is so shocking. And it, like, can really, like, ruin his entire world. Like, it should not have gotten to that point.

Alexx: This is his primary traumatic event.

Bryce: Which is... It says a lot.

Alexx: Yea. And it becomes about everyone else reckoning with this thing that happened to her, without really flipping the mirror back to ask how the fuck she’s dealing with it or where she’s at now. Oh! My theatre’s biggest laugh was the knife moment. And the computer recording where Emma’s like “you’re ass is gonna die first.” There were so many awesome comedy moments. And I couldn’t get over her joining an activist group against gun violence. Second swings like that, that’s what being human is about.

Bryce: snickers yea for sure

[Break]

Bryce: Rachel was so fucking annoying.

Alexx *laughs* Yeah, yeah. And let’s talk about the DJ and the heroin.

Bryce: The same way Rachel was judging Emma for her mistakes, I feel like that’s... Like, they were kind of projecting their, like, own insecurities onto the DJ who was doing heroin. Like, why does it matter she does heroin? Like, it’s had nothing to do with you and your wedding.

Alexx: Exactly. I feel like they were projecting their own insecurities onto her and, like, just being judgmental for no reason. Like, not for no reason, but just to... as a way to escape from things that they’re hiding from each other. Good character there.

Bryce: Dude, a lot of it worked. It’s just I have a problem with the fact that like, the revelation of what she did or what she didn’t, almost did, it just didn’t warrant the response that it got… It just felt kind of like, it felt kind of forced. But they still made it work?

Alexx: But like, the absurdity of that reaction, I feel like, is the engine for the whole thing. And, you know, like them freaking out about something she did when she was 15. When the other couple was talking about some shit they did a minute ago. The different ways they qualify stuff. The selective understanding. I think that was a really interesting conversation that the movie was having. But the ending...

Bryce: Yeah. It’s just that ending. But everything else pretty much worked for me. The performances were really great.

Alexx: Yea I was disappointed by it a bit. Like those tidied up rom com endings I hate. But I really enjoyed what it did visually. I enjoy that he’s still playing with surrealism. And the ways that it kind of blurs temporal lines when they’re having these arguments in the house.

Borgli definitely followed through on what I think he does best: eerie, squeaky contradiction, caught in the act through conversations with misaligned people whose primary concern is the optics of their actions. And it milks its comedic absurdity with some seriously great laughing moments, my favorite of which involve flashes of the past, child, version of Emma imposing onto her present self in ways that feel both disconcerting and uncomfortably revealing of the general collective numbness on mass shootings in America (particularly the causality of them) Despite our qualms about the ending, what resonates with me symbolically is Emma’s radical honesty and willingness to put the darkest parts of herself on display, even as it ostracizes her brutally and unceremoniously. Even as everyone around her chooses to present sanitized versions of themselves. Charlie is thus forced into a dance of discovering the empathy below the noise, what truly lies underneath his polished façade. It becomes a question of whether he is capable of change. The ending, of course, offers a potential yes… even after you’ve coped in the most eruptive, emotionally close-fisted ways possible just like the world around Charlie defaults to.

Nevertheless, a world without the kind of romantic vibrancy these people exude is not one I’d care to live in, much like the bleakness of world without peanut butter, rap music or trans people. Those who grant the rest of us license to be bold, seek oneself fully and refuse to settle.

Then there’s those outside of the maximally inclined. A distinct group of people, hermetically sealed from all noise, who genuinely prefer it simple. These people, which I tend to identify with, are the outfit repeating, probs vanilla sex enjoying lot that find confidence, calm and satisfaction in abstaining from the flashy and new while celebrating the lowest common denominator of things that they enjoy. Things that require little resistance to indulge in tastefully. Unconcerned with the frills or trends. Instead, they focus on what matters most to them: practicality.

They hold on to the things that fulfill that standard for dear life and scoff at the mere suggestion of switching it up. They relish the getting dressed in the morning, unburdened by extensive choice, and the reliance on the knowing is, in its own way, a source of excitement.

Speaking from personal routine, I love the frictionless experience of waking up every morning and throwing on one of seven pairs of pants that all go with every single shirt, sweater or jacket I own, with few exceptions. It looks exactly how I want it to, by its very design. Knowing that everything I own and might acquire in the future can adhere to an organized standard of things I enjoy in small quantities, unlocks a sense of freedom for me.

For those freaking out over the seven pants thing, I raise to you this question:

Why would I need more pants than there are days of the week?

The particular few I describe aren’t as extreme as say, Phineas and Ferb. Rather, they adhere to outfit formula in varying combinations over and over again (guilty), and perhaps even one hairstyle to accompany it (also guilty).

Like 2 of my favorite fellow low bun loyalists, Grace Wales Bonner (left) and Robby Hoffman (right), who rock the style without no fail.

Robby Hoffman swiftly became one of my favorite comedians last year for her fired up counter-culturally opinionated style. She’s also a force in tv comedy, with recurring roles on Hacks, Rooster and her own series that’s soon-to-come.

Grace Wales Bonner creates incredibly dialed in clothing out of vibrant juxtaposition. She’s a fashion designer who captains her legendary namesake brand, Wales Bonner, and was appointed the creative director of Hermès as of October 2025. Her eye is thrill seeking, focusing in menswear, and draws outside the lines with the influence of her Jamaican roots and European tailoring.

These two artist’s outputs are anything but formulaic. Their work has a nonconformist quality that pushes itself further and further into tonal upheaval. The question I beg is whether people like Grace and Robby have happened upon a cheat code for creating without bounds, eliminating monotonous aesthetic choice in favor of surplus brain power toward much more important efforts of creating. Or does an innate sensibility, leading them toward simplifying certain matters of self, make them keenly equipped to churn out work that speaks volumes.

I’m no scientist. And they say it takes three to form a pattern, but the precedent for the innovating uniform guy isn’t exactly unspoken for…

Outfit repeating scrutiny has survived decade after decade, but real ones know its a special sauce indicator. MIND SAUCE. Keeping your most loved, reliable garments in consistent rotation is a sign of mastery in my book! I also find it profoundly human to return to the things we love for comfort and renewed pleasure.

I talk about matters of style more “creative exploration newsletter” implies for reasons I often expound. I’m obsessed with style not only as an access point to expression, but as craft that’s poured into by individual hands at every step. I enjoy riding for brands with a sustainable ethos as much as I love a good vintage hunt because that fast fashion company sending you targeted ads for a below average baby blue tank top that’ll fall apart within the span of a year keeps finding ways to amplify their conniving and seductive tactics.

Second hand shopping is as accessible as it’s ever been. So why settle?!

I am in fact wearing my newly beloved, vintage Margaret Howell MHL cardigan as I type this… which I copped for wayyyy lower than retail and have been wearing the shit out of, as the previous owner(s) did with thoughtful care before it was bestowed on me.

P.S for any doubters, 20 bucks is an immense steal for those whose senses stay attuned to things like natural fibers and design detail.

Thanks for your time this week!

Today,

• Words on the manic loop of taste making

• A brand new Movie Meditation on an underrated work of German comedic ingenuity.

• A refreshed look at the Best Picture winning One Battle After

But FIRST some prideful shoutouts

Monday night’s Oscar ceremony was a mixed bag, but if you’re a sentimental value head like myself, you came out smiling ear to ear . YES JOACHIM AND THE FAM! Not only that but Michael B Jordan was bestowed his long awaited (and deserved) Best Actor award for his smashing performance in Sinners, which, from a record stomping 16 nominations, SWEPT up a grand total of 4 oscars! <Big day!>

I take offense when a movie, book or song slips under my radar, especially when the thing plants its seeds of bliss into my soul. I can’t help myself from asking why I couldn’t discover it on my own. BUT this affliction comes from a place of what I call insatiable tastemakerdom. I picture it as a castle-ish structure within my mind that’s always sparsely furnished with the things I’ve seen, read and heard, the rest strewn about in boxes like they’d be inside the home of a fervid traveler, stuck in a transitory state of arrival and departure. Just outside the cave are unclaimed discoveries, accompanied by the restless hunger to find what’s next before even opening the boxed and putting things away. The good news though is when I manage to pitter-patter down the winding stairs of this castle into the great outdoors, I recognize the beautiful, communal qualities of taste making. I can interpret, with total clarity, that the cultivation of meaningful insights and stimulating knowledge, those yummy qualities of taste development, are contingent upon the generosity of others who point our attention toward what we might never have noticed alone. It’s why apps like letterboxd are dear to my soul, where I can take in the palettes of my reputable homies and touch noggins through an invisible wall of artistic investment.

Speaking of…

I am often in search of films to catch up on that deploy comedy with delicacy and tact. Not downright comedies but inter-genre comedies (comedy dramas, comedy thrillers, comedy horrors… comedy romances, if I’m forced). Sure, my palette for drama is always open to those meditative, zero-frill works that offer mere sprinkles of levity, if anything. Like last year’s Train Dreams or a recent horror I caught by Damian McCarthy Oddity. Those films that are coal black in tone and justifiably so, not relenting due to virtue of impact. But as far as my core cinematic appetite is concerned, I like a little sugar with my medicine. The films I love contain punchlines to be traced, but not in a gratuitous way. When the comedy is baked into things as intrinsic and circumstance and structure, I’m on board. Those “life throwing the gnarliest shit straight into your eyeballs and forcing you to make heads or tails of it” moments.

Toni Erdmann, a Maren Ade joint, is one of those films that manages to capture lightning in a bottle: absurdist comedic recklessness that preserves a raw, visceral humanity. It tells the modest story of familial turmoil between a prank-loving father with spontaneous eccentricities and his emotionally distant daughter who’s more invested in her career than matters of relationship—across the board.

The reckless abandon, emerging via circumstance and character, was by far its most captivating quirk and it kept me thoroughly captivated for its entire 2 hour, 43 minute run time, which I watched on a plane mind you.

<SPOILERS AHEAD>

For one, the movie is truly thrust into chaos when kooky father Winfried adopts an alter ego to disrupt his daughter, Ines’s rigid corporate world and pierce through her shield against closeness. This is a moment that unlocks a world of embarrassment for Ines that puts their central conflict, the struggle between genuine self-expression and societal performance, at the forefront. The humor that ensues refuses to pander to easy catharsis.

The complexities of their individual characters are to thank, as diverse in motivation as they are temperament, which seems to drive the film’s dependably unpredictable energy.

Ines’s socially self‑conscious disposition is wielded as a barricade against vulnerability, She measures every interaction by its professional stakes and resists anything that threatens her composed exterior. So, when she’s forced into excruciating situations engineered by her father, a reckless abandon manifests, in both of them, that can only come from extended periods of deep repression.

These moments happen in unorthodox ways.

On the tamest end, she uncharacteristically explodes into a vivacious karaoke performance in a stranger’s home

On the extreme, she strips down to the nude during a work party when she feels trapped in a tight dress.

But the extreme case isn’t immediate. It’s built up to periodically, after each moment plants a crack in her carefully manufactured persona and watching it felt like an invigorating release, which is swiftly escalated by the total inconceivability of the act to the everyman.

These stand-out moments of absurdist comedy have the distinct emotional resonance that many quirked up comedy-dramas don’t have the complexity to hold.

On OBAA

When I first saw it, I was an undeniable fan of One Battle After Another. Admittedly, as a socialist and film obsessive who’s regularly starved from scraps of progressive promise in film, I came out of the theatre with heart eyes and warm tingly feelings of optimism. Those feelings though have since been tempered by a few important structural and material reflections, the most pressing of which was triggered on Monday night when the movie won the coveted Best Picture award, subsequently hurling all qualms I had been ruminating on to the pressing surface. I owe this enlightenment, largely, to wonderful reads like this one, doing the thoughtful dissection, and to my anti-establishment predilection compelling me to reckon with the inevitable fact that a movie with this much institutional acclaim more than likely fails at acknowledging the grittier, less glamorous truths of its story. As it turns out, its sidelining of Black characters, its choice to then prop up white figures off the backs of those characters, and its glossing over the systemic injustices at the heart of the story are evidence enough for such skepticism. And in light of recent PTA interviews surrounding the film, his blatant circumventing of political conviction is equally off-putting. While the movie was a total blast, thanks to its energetic direction, striking visuals and electric cast, I would be speaking out of naivety to ignore the shortcomings of its revolutionary message.

Read Brooke Obie’s wonderful piece here:

Black Girl Watching

One Fetish After Another: PTA Exploits Black Women and Averts Revolution

*Spoilers for the plot of One Battle After Another…

Read more

9 months ago · 2845 likes · 11 comments · Brooke Obie

Good riddance! Reflection and dissection is a beautiful thing. Let us all be stirred with emotion and compelled to sit with films long after they end. Cheers to more bangers in the new year, which we will go see in a movie theatre alone or with the homies.

It’s hard not to acknowledge my grandma’s interrogative efforts as part of her evangelistic duties. She’s no casual woman of faith but a full-fledged co-pastor and founder of a decades old, well attended church, where I spent many hours of my childhood. Her questioning continued with “would you consider yourself a Christian?” My answer was one she likely recalled from my quasi-dissertation, No. I softened some of my words in that essay to things like non-religious and secular, but reality lies in a term as stern as atheist. My strongest creative, political and existential convictions envelop this egalitarian, humanist understanding of the world, unbound by religious doctrine and its wide-ranging social implications, good and deeply bad. It’s important to recognize both, and while my essay might have taken upon the thesis of the bad, there are many thoughtful advocates of the religious persuasion I find to be stalwart allies of unfettered compassion and social good, none of which shift my worldview.

In this position, I diverge from every single member of my family and I was well aware of the invisible contract this deviation would sign. An indefinite series of persuasions, lobbied by all members of kin, siblings excluded. But the pros of the contract far outweigh the cons. Lingering in the abyss of the unspoken has never been a strong suit, nor instinct, of mine. I’d rather sit in the fumes of my dirty laundry, letting it waft through all the spaces I inhabit, than sit silent, clean and principally unaccounted for. Since writing that piece I’ve not only enjoyed the bountiful catharsis that comes with self and value advocacy, but also a world opening itself up to me, a confidence in community, and the quiet reassurance of witnessing others you’ve long revered championing the same values, alongside the transformative effects of more and more principled work ringing out around the social landscape.

I’m not a stranger to contentions of identity. Since coming out I’ve traversed seemingly endless roads of misunderstanding, dismissal and distortion, the most vivid being the time I defended not shaving my legs… and not dissimilar to that, dressing according to my own personal style. As discomforting and cornering as situations like this are, they remind me of why the hell I keep it pushing. Why I want to make films that shape these discussions in a nuanced, radially inclusive, irreverent way. A conversation I had with some friends in the tech sphere fluttered me with the same sense of urgency, wherein they boldly rejected my every claim that the billionaire class is the fundamental obstacle to a functioning society, even after arriving at the classic contradictory sentiments such as advocating for rich people to become as rich as they want for “taking the risk,” while simultaneously reflecting on the ways that their parents were stifled economically as immigrants in this country. What was most stunning though was the nature of our discussion, ending with enmity set aside and congeniality preserved. I believe what made our “debate” a healthy one was the slant of curiosity underlying it. Sure our disagreements were, are, severe, but I didn’t approach them with the audacity of believing I could change their lens on a single thing, and they carried that same regard. What I find just as important to a healthy approach to debate is refusing to give credence to a debate status at all. A debate implies a winner and a loser. The form is completely siloed from the complex reality that people can, in fact, hold diverse opinions and still arrive at the same conclusion. Moral alignment is not a strictly logical framework. Emotion plays a crucial role.

There’s a spirit of radical optimism about Christians who constantly pitch themselves to atheists that I can’t help but marvel at. Frankly, I try to channel that same juice myself to “keep the faith” amidst the authoritarian consensus. My greatest wish is for every person, religious or not, to direct their beams of judgement toward systems of oppression and exploitation and their beams of acceptance toward the diverse humanity struggling within them.

In further spirit of Scribbled Loose, I want to recommend a book with the express mission of roaming the rich tapestry of America, religious communities included, and unraveling the many profound ideological divides and cultural legacies with a sharp, sensitive style of nonfiction storytelling.

I really enjoy Sullivan’s writing style. It’s irreverent, introspectively so, with an adventurers tilt that keeps on giving.

For more recs for Watchables, Readables, Listenables and MORE, visit the Great Creations Catalog.

In an uno-like fashion, if you don’t have a tile to play, you must pull from the scrap pile: “the boneyard.” The player who runs out of tiles first wins the round. THAT’S IT. The rules are muchhhh simpler than I imagined and also much more snappy. This quick stint of bias-bunking turned my original stance all the way around. Stacking tiles now feels juvenile, entry level, a short lived dopamine hit while a classic game of dominos has SAUCE beyond compare. Was this mini-investigation trivial? Maybe. But I believe these small, willful gaps in knowledge are stacked with abundant whimsy, a value of primary social interest.

I judge just about every interaction I have with someone new by three metrics. The first one being whimsy. I’ll tell you the other two, eventually, but without whimsy, they drastically lose their effect. Nothing excites me more than a humorous slant and there’s nothing quite as relieving as enduring an awkward encounter and soon after discovering that the person you endured it with doesn’t take themselves seriously. The natural angst dissolves with their easy self-deprecating jab, or even a gentle tease in your direction, like a needle pricking a balloon. The energy they exude is that of most honorable high vibration, rendering the whole exchange an effervescent blip so it doesn’t linger in your brain grooves for several days after, forcing you to gawk at the myriad of ways that person finds you pathetic. This is a simple example of whimsy saving the day but it’s this kind of levity that turns almost every “difficult” encounter upside down. The person who refuses to take themselves seriously is, more likely than not, the person who doesn’t jump to judge. They wait for the perfect opportunity to sprinkle their humorous flavor into the mix, even the eerie political discussion mix whose organic squabbly flavor begs for a jolt of clarity. The disarming kind of clarity that only humor can provide (especially with the progressive groundedness to match). Worth clarifying however, you don’t have to be as funny as Chris Fleming to be humorous. The waters between humor and comedy are often muddy but humor is confined to sensibility. Inseparable from whimsy, humor is a predisposition to plucking out the absurdities of the everyday whereas comedy, the funnyman’s craft, is a strategic toolkit deployed to express one’s humor, often resulting in more laughter versus the smirking recognition humor begets. The other two qualities happen to also personify comedian extraordinaire Chris Fleming— loose hinges and radical empathy. This mouthful of qualities are the cornerstones of engrossing conversation ;)

But first, some praise from Marc Maron

He’s right. And also happens to vindicate all three pillars for unboring interaction. Chris is the dude that breaths new life into your soul when you’re fed up with facade-induced internet bullshit. He lifts your spirits by shaking up your whole way of thinking. But his takes aren’t inaccessible. He poofs up images you’ve probably never heard of but you’re certain to have felt. The parallels he draws are wildly unifying yet born from an unruly specificity he wields like a wand. You don’t have to understand his references be seen by them and his attitude is everything but exclusionary. He’s inviting and disrupting all at the same time and he does it “in” a character unbound by gendered expectations or behavioral uniformity (if you’ve seen somebody move around a stage like him I’ll give you 50 bucks). The Chris Fleming playbook is having no playbook at all and putting yourself in the shoes of every community on the planet to stir up something real and provoking.

But none of this fodder does it justice. Go watch his new special on HBO max, Chris Fleming: Live at the Palace, and then watch the one before that. He’ll get you right. He’ll treat you you real nice. He’ll shake your whole shit up.

For more recs and obsessive chatter on ideas, makers and moments, you know what to do.

My brain burrows into this dichotomy often, mostly because of a burning desire to remain authentic at all times, except the mere act of thinking about the measure of my authenticity eliminates that possibility altogether. For a long time, I questioned which behavioral coding was a truer reflection of me— the chaotically outgoing embracing all spontaneous bursts of energy or the stoically introspective speaking in measured, deliberate fragments. I thought maybe the me rested somewhere in between the outgoingly chaotic and stoically introspective. The balanced version that is the least encumbered by insecurities, obligations, pressures etc… but that’s a mythos, a transitory image. We will forever be affected by our influences and the varying degrees to which we are is not a gaping hole for falseness. Pursuits of the “truest” you are MOOT without the anchors of an ethical value system built on accountability, moral uprightness, awareness, and compassion. The rest tends to fall into the trappings of self-indulgence which is…

I see the self as always two degrees from the surface, above it or below, repressed or released, oscillating between becoming and being, never truly known but always present. Like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle but for consciousness, kinda.

Turning the dial to the cinematic frequency, “swing” characters are some of the most exciting to write (and watch). Nuanced, psychological complexity is extremely difficult to crystalize on screen for a number of reasons, mostly because you can’t pin down their behavior. A recent favorite example is Sonny Wortzik in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, introduced to us as a high-strung opportunist bank robber that slowly unravels into a man confronting the collapse of his masculine ideal and his fantasy of rescue as the consequences become out of his control. They don’t operate on sound logic and in a screenplay where actions are behavior, you can’t exactly follow a single motivational thread. And why would you want to? Single-minded characters fall flat, regardless of how intricate the worlds they reside in are. A character who comes from an environment where they had to fight to get their needs met doesn’t have to be passive. They could actually be aggressive. People are far more complex than the easiest conclusion. I’ve been making a more focused effort to map out the inner worlds of my characters and it brought me to a few focal points.

• Avoid Over-Categorization:

Emphasize the why behind actions not the broad strokes of superficial labels in order to avoid surface-level stereotypes and instead delve into the underlying psychological mechanisms.

• Understand Drive and Personality as two distinct things

Every character represents a strategy developed to meet psychological needs, often rooted in early experiences which shape personality and drive in conscious and unconscious ways

• Focus on the core issues and motivations and let that trickle into outward behaviors.

Build from the inside out rather than from observable traits inward.

I re-watched Parasite this weekend alongside the storyboard book and it was absolutely invigorating.

There’s something about tracing movements and compositions, shot for shot, that really unlocks the kind of conceptual momentum Bon Joon Ho was building off of. What makes it feel even more multi-dimensional is how even with the blueprint in front of you for every shot, the cuts still feel invisible and I found myself having to rewind several times to witness the translated glory.

I wish storyboards were as widely available as scripts because watching a movie with both on hand is an especially illuminating experience that I recommend to all, film junkie or not. But just don’t do it on the first watch!

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