Week 14

Week 13

I would go farther than this article and echo what others have said: it's no accident that colonial nostalgia is being weaponized by the wealthy against Mainland Communism. "Make Hong Kong Great Britain again" says it all, and so succinctly too.

This peek into the economics behind BUMBLEBEE helps contextualize it in the broader turn toward "progressive" female-focused mega-entertainment, and how that relates to downturns in both the toy and movie industry.

Reading between the lines of Bloomberg's virulent anti-Catalan bias, it's pretty plain to see that Catalonia has its own objectives that Spain is wisely trying to accommodate.

Week 12

40 years out, Spanish fascism casts a dark shadow.

Congratulations to Bolivia.

Week 11

Sarah Jones recently gave a rundown of some prominent liberal conspiracy theorists on Twitter, with the offending tweets and their authors gathered here. She also linked to this unusually thorough essay on the nature of conspiracy thinking, which extrapolates from some overlapping case studies.

I felt sheepish recognizing that I've been sucked in by some of these people before, and that some of my thinking verges on conspiratorial. I do however hope my approach is dialogical rather than monological. That's part of the purpose of my blogpost roundups. I want to juxtapose the contradictions and see what results. Maybe that will mean finding new information that overwrites the old, or perhaps new information shows up wanting compared to what I've read before.

I think many people have suspected this, but it's nice to see it written so bluntly and persuasively: the more left-wing parties compromise, the better right-wing parties get at snatching those votes. On the other hand, parties that remain steadfastly leftist can fight off both right-wing and center-left challengers.

The idea of approaching Errol Morris' new book as insight into the author appeals to me. Not just because Morris sounds unhelpfully dogmatic about his side of the dispute, but also because I'm interested in works that lay bare their authors' beliefs.

BIG LITTLE LIES

A key to understanding the rigor of this show is how thoroughly it rejects the possibility, raised by Jane, that "violence is part of Ziggy's blood." That would imply that she's to blame for hypothetical acts of violence on his part, or indeed any fallout from her fateful encounter. When in fact she's a lovely person and a very good mother, and that's never in doubt to those reading between the lines.

Instead, the finger is pointed where it really belongs. When Ziggy finally reveals the kid who's been hurting Amabella, I exclaimed "Oh my god" out loud. I knew it, but his revelation closed the enormous circle this show had been drawing. Everything made sense and it was just as horrible as it needed to be.

There's an unusual inversion to the Greek chorus conceit in BIG LITTLE LIES. The onlookers are just ignorant commentators, and the main characters' problems can't be reduced to snide quips. Everyone's pain is deeply felt and expressed. Outsiders can't understand, nor do they want to.

(Crucially, none of the supporting characters play much of a role in what unfolds. Celeste, Jane, Renata, Bonnie, and Madeline are changed forever, while the community at large can only smirk from afar. To give any more weight to the glib outside perspective would be to deny the seriousness of what was really happening in Monterey.)

Week 10

East and Southeast Asia will soon become a major trading bloc all their own.

Here's something unexpected: for decades, indeed almost all of post-war US American history, it was the Democrats who benefitted most from gerrymandering. Recent Republican gerrymanders can therefore be seen as an overcorrection, though of course anything the Republicans do will have a more pernicious motivation.

No amount of alcohol use is safe, as all benefits of moderate drinking are outweighed by the risks. Bleak, honestly.

Kelley Dong on Twilight.

Week 9

Before Ross Perot came Pat Buchanan, and before him: David Duke. Great epidemiology here, though I'm going to add that Buchanan's influence lives on quite literally through The American Conservative, a publication I monitor for trends in the conservative netherworld. More than just a symbolic forebear, Buchanan's influence persists to this very day.

Speaking of epidemiology. More proof that the scientific can't fully be understood without the social.

Really needed this argument that Abe is a lame duck with constraints facing him on every side.

I always thought my need to document disappearing places was something personal and melancholic, maybe shared with a few others at most. Turns out there are thousands upon thousands of others, and they've been digitally archiving the real world with obsessive intensity. I'm amazed at the connections Kate Wagner was able to draw from this phenomenon, many of which dovetail with my own perception of life under capitalism.

The economics of K-Pop. Hard not to feel like the best years are behind us, and that K-Pop is destined to become smaller and more niche. I've definitely been wondering how a group like Loona can expect to see any revenue with all the money lavished upon it by BlockBerry.

I was surprised how much this article describes my own experiences online. (And yes, let continental drift take Facebook away.)

Week 8

Another enticing Cinema Scope review, this time for MANTA RAY.

I hate the framing of articles like this. The title suggests that, because 'neither side' is happy with a minimum wage increase, this is just some unsolvable crisis with no known solution or root cause. But actually parsing out the situation reveals a well-known dilemma: the workers demand better pay, and the bosses don't want to pay them more! Could this story be more familiar? Whatever your opinion about the best approach, it helps nobody to make the problem into an abstraction when a straightforward description is both easier and clearer.

In other Hong Kong news.

I liked this essay on Bergman's FANNY AND ALEXANDER a lot. I admire the film plenty, but it's among the few I feel more distant towards. Reading at as the terminal point of Bergman's drift into the world of dreams, the fullest expression of his subjectivized cinema, makes me eager to rewatch it.

Although the Democrats did end up winning back the House, I can't argue with Richard Seymour's view from afar.

Week 7

The fact that this crisis is "slow-moving" just means it isn't being treated like the genuine emergency it is.

My girlfriend recently finished reading Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird. When she asked if I'd heard of it, I knew that I had, but my best guess was that it was something that'd passed through The New Inquiry's orbit a few years back. Anything more specific was beyond my recollection.

The guess was closer than I thought. Shortly after, my girlfriend sent me an essay written by none other than Hannah Black, a writer/artist I admire very much, and whose work I may even have encountered for the first time through this review of Oyeyemi's novel. Re-reading it now, her review is a work of art all to itself. The novel, still a structuring absence to me, opens up into a densely-layered creation through Black's reading. A lot of thought went into both written works.

(I often encounter film reviews which have that effect on me, but persuasive book reviews seem much rarer. Between this serendipity and the force of Black's writing, it feels like a celestial alignment has brought Boy, Snow, Bird back to my attention, and I'd be foolish to let it slip away in digital fog again.)

Week 6

A few weeks ago, I wrote a little about Shinzo Abe, his bulletproof premiership, and what it could mean for Japan's pacifist Constitution. Today, I encountered this eerie analysis of a group called Nippon Kaigi, a religious right-wing group that has ascended to high levels of the LDP administration. With roots in the backlash to Japan's 1968 student movement, it is especially chilling that they've bided their time for so long, building power and influence all the while.

An important note: while US Americans might not find anything exceptional in the phrase "religious right-wing," in Japan the context is rather different. For one thing, Japan's history of fascism means that conservative movements tend toward revisionist history, as the above interview lays out. But even less obviously: in Japan, one of the world's least religious countries, an explicitly religious ideology carries an antagonism toward dominant society not present elsewhere. So while the authors are rightfully careful not to mis-label Nippon Kaigi a "cult," it is nevertheless unusual to see such an alliance between the right wing and Japan's marginal number of believers. Their political success is highly ominous, and something to watch closely as Abe embarks on his third term.

(While I found the early parts of that conversation to be a woolly thicket of names, citations, and contexts, the core issues and stakes are much clearer.)

An introduction to Walter Rodney, written by Angela Davis.

Week 5

What a striking way to read Mia Hansen-Love's new film. I hope to see it soon.

This week I began looking into a new issue at Viewpoint Magazine, entitled The Lost Revolution: Yugoslav Women’s Antifascist Front between Myth and Forgetting. Tijana Okić and Andreja Dugandžić give a helpful introduction here, and so far I've found a lot to savor in Chiara Bonfiglioli's intersectional meta-analysis of activist biographies.

Week 4

I always look forward to Cinema Scope's TIFF coverage. This capsule review, by Michael Sicinski, is my favorite so far.

The death of David Foster Wallace was also the first time I heard of him. I was 17 at the time, and just beginning to explore the world of "adult" literature. Coaxed by grieving fans, I embarked on my own fandom that would span several passionate years. He remains an important figure for me, but I haven't seriously engaged his work since reading The Pale King in 2016. The shadow of his abusive behavior hangs too heavy. And while this conversation with Clare Hayes-Brady, an American literature scholar with a keen interest in Wallace, doesn't exactly persuade me, I do think her point near the end could be helpfully generalized:

FDB offers a much-deserved apology to Malcolm Harris. There are a lot of US American left factions online, and this whole ordeal clarified several things to me.

How will we ever overcome intergenerational trauma?

Can't debate them, can't fact-check them. Sounds like a noble failure, but a failure all the same.

Okinawa has spoken, though I doubt Abe will listen.

"As unlikely as it would’ve sounded at this time four years ago, when he trailed Democratic nominee Anthony Brown by double digits in the polls, Larry Hogan—a first-time Republican elected official in one of the bluest states in the country—is now the second-most-popular governor in the United States. According to a Morning Consult poll this summer, 68 percent of Maryland voters approve of the job Hogan is doing." Why? The article has a lot of useful information about Hogan's treachery regarding Baltimore, and it seems Maryland Democrats outside the City have turned a blind eye to it all.

Acid Corbynism is here to stay. But what happens when the trip ends? I believe it was Alex Williams who tweeted a while ago that the British left will need to come prepared with an array of social movements, so as to stave off Tory antagonism and corporate media attacks.

Reading this exhaustive polemic against fatphobia infuriated me.

Five Tokyo Centers. Of course Shinjuku has my vote...but I made a fair few visits to Shibuya, Roppongi, and Azabu-juban as well. Smaller gems of memory, but precious in their own way.

(And I visited Tokyo Station last summer! At night, when it was too dark to appreciate my surroundings much, but still. Ueno looks pleasant too.)

Iceland and Greece, two incredible case studies. (I'm fascinated by all the retrospective work going on about the financial crisis.)

Origins of the copyleft.

The US' future belongs not to the majority-minority, but the outright minority.

And guess what: I posted that last link days before Kavanaugh was confirmed! On these blogpost roundups I've been doing, I try not to focus too much on US micro-scandals. Partly because it's pointless and draining to keep up with all the back-and-forth, but also because international politics matter a lot more to me now. As the world transitions from its unipolar post-war status quo into a multipolar geopolitical future (with China as the probable center of gravity), I'd rather not entertain the US' illusions about itself as the world's most important country. However, the Kavanaugh ordeal does seem to signal something seismic, and I think Adam Kotsko's read on the situation is both the sharpest and most clear-headed. In discussing a "crisis of legitimacy," might we perhaps consider that the Republicans have regarded the Democrats as an illegitimate political party for at least several decades, and that their actions in office reflect this party-wide belief? If a broader crisis of legitimacy is indeed emerging, it would be commensurate with views Republicans have long held about the rest of us. The critical question faced by outsiders to this intra-class conflict (as most of us are) is what to do now that the stakes are finally clear, knowing that the pathetic members of our 'opposition party' are damned if they do and damned if they don't, so to speak. Here again, Kotsko grasps the severity of the situation: either remove the Republicans from power and begin making drastic structural changes, or accept a low-grade, indefinite state of emergency that runs the risk of igniting into actual civil war at any time. If ever there were time in this country for a politics of cautious optimism, that time has absolutely and unequivocally passed.

MDFF18

I AM NOT A WITCH [3]

A bit too deadpan at first, and the static, symmetrical compositions don't help. But once those quirks are dropped, there are plenty of sharp observations on the trials -- both aspirational and punitive -- of womanhood. As always, the line between "good girl" and witch is conditional, so Shula is tasked with navigating those arbitrary boundaries herself. The emancipatory title is never hers to proclaim, so circumscribed is her autonomy. Director Nyoni's impishness is just the facade atop a rigid social structure. Underneath, sadder realities lie in wait.

FATHER'S KINGDOM [3.5]

Sorry for the inactivity. In addition to attending a film festival this past weekend, I was also deathly ill with some kind of virus. The sickness began over a week ago, and by Friday afternoon I could barely even walk anymore. My recovery over the weekend was long and slow, but I do feel almost 100% again. And, I'm ready to write about what I watched.

FATHER'S KINGDOM was something neither I nor my girlfriend had ever heard of. We saw a trailer for it during the Maryland Film Festival's sneak preview, and it was sufficiently intriguing that we tried to make room for it in our schedules. My girlfriend ended up volunteering on Thursday, the only night we could see it, so I had to drag myself over to the theater, falling apart at the seams, and watch it alone.

But I'm glad I did. The history this film covers is genuinely amazing. Father Divine, a black preacher active in the early 20th century, managed to win millions of followers to his idiosyncratic cause. Natural charisma notwithstanding, the biggest part of his success was a program of comprehensive economic uplift: communal living, sustainable small businesses, and food for all who came hungry. That an African-American man could spearhead what amounted to a Communist sect at the height of the Great Depression, operating across the Jim Crow USA..."unbelievable" doesn't even describe such impossible feats.

And yet there's plenty of archival material for director Lenny Feinberg to draw from! Father Divine was a hugely significant figure, so the era's newsreels paid close attention to his growing movement. Through the presentation of such footage, Feinberg helps Father Divine feel just as real as any other legendary civil rights activist. There he is, like MLK, leading ecstatic crowds against the twinned evils of segregation and poverty. How could US American history hide such an influential figure? Well, part of the problem is that Father Divine claimed to literally be Jesus reincarnated. As the Second Coming of Christ, he promised to give his followers eternal life, a heaven on earth that must have been irresistible to those suffering under the Depression. It's not hard to see how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. presented a more respectable figure for canonization. Father Divine, by contrast, seemed a conman at best and a fanatic at worst.

Still, he did not just talk the talk, he walked the walk as well. Father Divine's followers adored him for it, following him across the Eastern US Coast in thrall to his utopian program. The momentum grew unstoppable. Before long, a mass movement was born out of this one man's evangelical convictions, fighting back against the excesses of capitalism at a truly desperate moment. However, despite his radical fight against racism and poverty, Father Divine's own theology emphasized the power of the individual. He rejected welfare as undignified, beseeching his worshippers to uplift themselves instead. A positive disposition could do what government money could not. So there was a radically conservative side to Father Divine too. As is typical in Protestant theology, a steadfast devotion to God -- expressed through the dignity of hard work -- is the only thing that can redeem and save one's weary soul.

(Father Divine also preached absolute celibacy, as practiced through gender-divided living spaces. So not every aspect of his belief system was emancipatory. But I'll get to that soon.)

Whereas modern preachers and politicians demand work from the poor, Father Divine offered that work himself. Through such businesses as deeply discounted barbershops, he would employ his own followers and use their earnings to fund the movement. Buildings would be bought for living space, business, or even to make civil rights statements (i.e. buying homes in all-white neighborhoods, or beachfront properties where black people were forbidden to swim). Redemption through labor was not an impossible demand coming from Father Divine. He would employ you, feed you, and provide a place to live if you consented to his ethic of hard work. Not a bad bargain in the 1930s, especially for those experiencing segregated poverty.

It's hard to grapple with Feinberg's film without basically recapping the whole thing. I haven't even gotten to the real shocker: not only are some of Father Divine's followers still alive, so was his second wife until just last year! In making FATHER'S KINGDOM, Feinberg was able to film Father Divine's surviving congregation. They now reside in the man's palatial Pennsylvania estate, keeping alive his message of racial harmony and communal peace. At mealtimes, his followers deliberately seat themselves next to people of the opposite race. A white person is flanked by black people, and a black person is flanked by white people. They alternate like that, side-by-side, all the way around the table, with Mother Divine at the head. She, a white Canadian, married Father Divine in 1946 at the age of 21. It was an enormous scandal for a white woman and a black man to marry, especially considering their age difference. But marry they did, and for the next 71 years, she would carry on her husband's mission, living long past his own death in 1965.

...Okay really, I want to stop writing soon!! But I haven't even mentioned the person in orbit to this congregation, a gay man whose partner of 26 years struggles to understand the compulsion. The man believes Father Divine's claims of divinity, yet he cannot sacrifice his own life as the others have. He is forced to worship from afar, helping the remnants of Father Divine's congregation while their numbers shrink. There are only about 20 left now, as Mother Divine passed away during the production of FATHER'S KINGDOM. So this history is not even past yet. Father Divine's wife was alive until last year, and his Peace Mission continues to this day, secluded but devout as ever. Few films I've seen give such an impression of history's undiminished presence. Feinberg was very lucky to have filmed when he did.

--

(Lastly: I should mention that Father Divine was more complex than the deity he claimed to be. Though he comes off as genial and kindhearted in the archival filmstrips, several darker aspects announce themselves too. He had a first wife who passed away long before Father Divine himself did. That presented a problem for his theology of eternal life, and so he largely ignored her in sickness, right up until her premature death. There are also intimations that he may have had a 'thing' for young, white female followers. Several newspapers of the day published accounts of sexual mistreatment at his hands. However, while I'm inclined to believe these women’s accounts -- and they're not implausible, since the man operated what was essentially a religious cult -- it's important to remember that these stories were published in the Jim Crow era. Father Divine's properties were often targeted by the KKK, and it's not hard to imagine journalists of the day having white supremacist sympathies. Furthermore, none of the claims were ever proven. Which, again, doesn't mean they aren't true; but given the context, hopefully you can see why those tales of forced 'miscegenation' might deserve more skepticism than usual.

One more thing...there are some painful interviews with a woman who lived as a child at Father Divine's estate. Her family joined the Peace Mission and moved her there with her sister. But children were forbidden from associating with family members, since according to Father Divine, God is every person's true parent. So this woman was kept separate from her sister and other family members, up to the point of having to treat her own grandmother like a stranger. It all sounds extremely traumatic and misguided, and the interviewee has clearly spent decades coming to terms with her emotional deprivation. So I don't want to give the impression that I wholeheartedly admire Father Divine or his movement. Rather, I think he achieved some remarkable things while simultaneously overreaching and doing harm to others. The story of his life defies belief, but in remembering and appreciating it, we must also consider those whose lives were profoundly damaged by his.)

BLACK MOTHER

Beautifully harsh, achingly tender. Life in all its misery, but there's still love to be found, for oneself, one's history, the ancestors who embody those earlier times; and, crucially, for the women who safeguard the newest lives of all. People, in streets and forests, living on an island crisscrossed by rivers, carved out by waterfalls, and surrounded by oceans. Their eyes, looking into Allah's lens, talking without speaking, voices perpetually elsewhere. They sing, and laugh. They tell stories. The camera listens.

MY DEAD DAD'S PORNO TAPES

As you might guess from the title, it veers dangerously close to archness and irony. But Charlie Tyrell overachieves, packing his 15-minute short with naked honesty and elaborate stop-motion animation. I wasn't expecting cycles of abuse to figure so prominently; nor did I expect I'd see my own family mirrored in the filmmaker's...Tyrell is able to posthumously forgive his father's sins, but I doubt I'll be so lucky. In his story, patriarchy finds a way of making better men, and growth needn't be stopped by emotional barrenness. Which does seem to be true of his family. For me, though, the bitter will always overpower the sweet.

PUMPKIN MOVIE [3.5]

Sophy Romvari’s short screened as part of the Maryland Film Festival’s Unortho-Docs program. These selections were meant to spotlight the interplay of fact and fiction, and while many other films were ostentatious about their method, Romvari’s is rather subtle. Though she and her onscreen friend Leah are friends in real life, the stories they share are not their own. Rather, they were submitted via Twitter at Romvari’s request, then recounted by Romvari and her friend as if the two women had experienced them all. It’s a naturalistic way to find commonality between women’s experiences, no less true for Romvari’s sleight of hand. Afterward, at the Q&A, several audience members wondered if the stories were true, if the women had experienced them all personally, and if their Skyped conversation really was a yearly tradition. That Romvari’s demystifications came as a surprise shows how skillful a construction this 10-minute short film really is.

PALENQUE [4]

A visually confident short set in San Basilio de Palenque, “the first town in the Americas to have broken free from European domination” and, sadly, the last one whose descendants still live there. History’s immense weight is surely felt, but director Silva’s style is laidback, content to meander with his subjects through their daily routines and pleasures.

OPTIMISM

From Deborah Stratman, whose recent feature THE ILLINOIS PARABLES I missed while it was playing. Judging by OPTIMISM’s hazy, wintry beauty, I’m sorry to have done so. Stratman’s tactile use of celluloid and sound provided a pure sensory pleasure as I attempted to parse out her film’s motifs. I don’t know that I gleaned much on first exposure, but the attempt was rewarding all the same.

MADELINE'S MADELINE [4]

While introducing her newest film, Josephine Decker expressed gratitude to the Maryland Film Festival for being so supportive of her work. Though not a Marylander herself, she has attended 7 of the last 10 MDFFs, regardless of whether she had a film premiering at the time.

I'm also glad that the Festival has made a point of programming her work. Josephine Decker is one of my favorite newer filmmakers, and I've been anticipating MADELINE'S MADELINE since it was first announced at Sundance. To see it with a big crowd at MDFF18 felt like an affirmation of Decker's adventurous sensibility. This new film sees her liquefying narrativity even further, despite its story seeming more linear on the surface. After the screening, Decker explained that time spent in theater school gave her a stronger appreciation for dance, improvisation, and group co-consciousness. The research she did for MADELINE'S MADELINE reshaped her working method, and judging by the results, she's more willing than ever to leave crucial context unspoken. Note the several consecutive power shifts at the film's end, expressed mainly through suggestion. Madeline acts out her abusive relationship with her mother; Madeline's mother leaves the room, never to return; Evangeline attempts to recuperate Madeline's defiant performance into a theater piece; but as the cast and crew grow uneasy, Madeline leads a hallucinogenic coup d'etat against Evangeline.

All these scenes are legible through social interaction. The characters' motivations have been inferred over time, giving Decker the space to experiment with their convergences. Her cinema is an interpersonal and collaborative one, layered together through the creative energies of the people involved. That may be true for most films, but rarely is the process so transparent as in Josephine Decker's films. Her actors elide screenwriterly proclamations in favor of simply sharing a space. Body language, emotional outbursts, and creative blocking are how she gets us into their heads. Accentuated with frenzied edits and unexpected images, Decker's films ask the audience to be as intuitive as their maker. Their refusal to compromise is nevertheless open, generous, and inviting to anyone curious enough to feel their way through.

¡LAS SANDINISTAS! [4]

There's been some disagreement about the Sandinista Party on my Twitter timeline lately. Though I've not seen such statements myself, I have seen it claimed that tankies are defending the Party against anti-government protestors. This has raised the ire of other non-tankie leftists -- not to mention actual Nicaraguans, whose descriptions of the crisis strike me as the most nuanced. At root, the question is whether the Sandinista Party is carrying on the Nicaraguan Revolution or betraying it, furthering the cause or selling out revolutionary Nicaraguans.

¡LAS SANDINISTAS!, which was directed by a white American woman, might seem an unlikely intervention in the dispute. However, Jenny Murray has chosen to document a crucial component of the Nicaraguan Revolution. The women she films were not just participants or fellow travellers, but active leaders in the Revolution. They abandoned school, domestic life, and family attachments to carry out an underground insurrection against the Somoza Dynasty. Bona fide revolutionaries one and all, these women were transformed by their experiences of leadership in the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). No longer could they tolerate a Nicaragua hindered by pre-revolutionary gender-based hierarchies. Many of Las Sandinistas went on to play an active role in reshaping the new Nicaragua, ensuring that their fellow citizens would have access to food, education, and healthcare. "Women's work," once pejoratively defined by smallness, now denoted the Sisyphean task of rebuilding a ruined country from scratch.

As if overthrowing a militarized dictatorship weren't enough, Las Sandinistas were called upon to rethink the state and its role in Nicaraguan society. There are truly no blueprints for such an undertaking, despite the historical examples of Russia, Vietnam, Kenya, and others. No country can skip the years of collective labor which bookend that day of national triumph. But Nicaragua also faced an even greater challenge: imperialist aggression from the USA and its Contra allies. As such, the Sandinistas' hopes for a peaceful reconstruction were hardened into anti-imperialist resolve. Male revolutionaries unilaterally seized control, re-marginalizing their female comrades. Chauvinist vainglory swallowed up the uneasy process of redistributing social power. After being liberated by revolutionary warfare, Las Sandinistas once again became second-class citizens in their own country.

In the telling of Murray and her interviewees, this domestic counter-revolution was never undone. Daniel Ortega, current President and former revolutionary, basks in the glow of a rewritten history which privileges him as Great Man of Nicaragua. Meanwhile, Dora María Téllez has gone on to form the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), a breakaway opposition party with intentions of fulfilling the Nicaraguan Revolution's radical promise. She and other female Sandinistas deplore Ortega's personal and political misogyny. They rally against him as an anti-choice r*pist, one whose protracted leadership has devolved into corrupt complacency. Nicaragua's current unrest cannot be separated from this decades-old crisis of legitimacy in the Sandinista Party.

I was aware of Ortega's pro-life policies, but I had not known of his own personal misogyny. However, it makes sense that his disregard for women would be continuous across both domains. Unhappy as I am to learn of his betrayals, I am still heartened by the counter-narrative presented in ¡LAS SANDINISTAS! It's clear that Nicaragua's true heroes are, in fact, its many heroines. The example of Dora María Téllez and her comrades will live on as a noble alternative to left phallocentrism. Whatever its stylistic shortcomings, this film is an indispensable work of political history.

UPDATE (September '18): It has come to my attention that some on the left consider Dora María Téllez to be leading a right-wing defection from the Sandinista Party. In the spirit of accountability, here are my sources of new information:

afgj.org/nicanotes-the-mrs-is-not-left-or-democratic
afgj.org/nicanotes26

Some light research would seem to confirm there are indeed pictures of MRS’ Ana Vijil meeting with Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. It seems strange to me that the MRS would continue using left-wing language in defense of a right-wing agenda, but perhaps that’s a strategic choice to siphon support from the Sandinistas? I couldn’t say.

In my eyes, the most troublesome aspect of this dispute remains Ortega himself. The accusations of sexual abuse against him are very credible, and I remain suspicious of Nicaragua’s anti-abortion policies. At this moment in time, with no foreseeable end to the current crisis, I can’t speak in favor of Ortega’s presidency or the anti-Sandinista protestors. More information on the subject would be very welcome.

STRANGELY ORDINARY THIS DEVOTION

Out of the ordinary, this short film.

SHAKEDOWN [4]

A wonderful film I hope to rewatch many times. For now, some context from Leilah Weinraub herself.

Most of the videos in this film come from a period of several years, starting in 2002. These are Weinraub’s, but there is also archival footage from the early 90s and more recent material from the 2010s. Weinraub spoke of her interest in the Shakedown club as an economic unit maintained almost entirely by black lesbians. She was an integral part of the experience, and so this is not an outsider’s ethnography. She recalls Shakedown as a utopia, wherein the unique energies of its core staff, performers, and customers coalesced into something unrepeatable. Police harassment would eventually contribute to Shakedown’s closure, which dissolved this transitory shared utopia. Weinraub and Egypt are still in touch, as can be seen from their filmed reminiscences, but utopias can’t be preserved in their entirety. So SHAKEDOWN, the film, is Weinraub’s quixotic attempt.

(She has known several utopias in addition to the Shakedown club, citing a lesbian anarchist school and her current setup in New York. As a result, SHAKEDOWN is not [altogether] mournful, since this is not the only meaningful memory in Weinraub’s life. Melancholia is less needed when other happinesses exist.)

I am also someone who’s drawn to fleeting utopias. Often I’ve found them in other people, but I have trouble sustaining that utopian energy between us. Group chemistry can be utopian too, yet it’s just as vulnerable to sudden collapse. These days, my surest utopias are the places I’m fond of. My love for cities, buildings, and beaches can go unrequited so long as the passion remains. Others can be a part of those big impersonal spaces too, but I seem to deal with people best as abstractions, as fellow travelers beyond my reach or understanding.

Perhaps my utopian thinking has been hurt by this absence of people. And maybe those liminal zones mean more when they’re shared with other people. Regardless, the utopian impulse remains strong in me, and I expect to be following it for years to come, wherever it leads me. In SHAKEDOWN, I see (and feel) a kinship in honoring that same impossible yearning.

A PAGE OF MADNESS [5]

Played with accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra, who specialize in scoring silent films. And they certainly made the correct choice in treating A PAGE OF MADNESS as a horror film. Their wailing, dissonant, unearthly score further fermented the wretchedness of Kinugasa's images. I was terrified at points, overwhelmed by both sound and sight simultaneously. The no-intertitles approach is contemporaneous with Murnau's THE LAST LAUGH, while many of Kinugasa's optical distortions are like Man Ray with a narrative context.

Not that A PAGE OF MADNESS represents a rationalization of avant-garde techniques. If anything, Kinugasa pushes silent film technique to its farthest boundaries of intelligibility. Explosive edits convey the chaos of mental collapse while ghostly images dance across his lens, deranging whatever narrative is meant to contain them. Without benshi narration, A PAGE OF MADNESS demands immersion and intuition to smooth a story out of its jagged rhythms. I would consider myself lucky to see anything half this adventurous in 2026.

MAGIC BULLET

Played before Nathan Silver's THE GREAT PRETENDER...on which, more soon.

I was shocked to learn that Amanda Lovejoy Street was a first-time director! She already has a great command of tone, as evidenced by her guidance of Rosemarie DeWitt through that dourly funny infomercial scene. A lifetime of dissatisfaction manifested through brief irruptions of depressive disgust, the joyless exchanges of sex and advertising.

(Also! My sister and I fantasized for years about owning a Magic Bullet when we were younger. Not that MAGIC BULLET deals with our oddball fixation in any real way, but surely no other As Seen On TV device would have worked here. There's just something about them...!!)

THE GREAT PRETENDER [3.5]

In some ways, the biggest surprise of MDFF2018. My girlfriend hadn't seen any Nathan Silver films previously, while I'd only watched -- and rather disliked -- UNCERTAIN TERMS. I held off on buying tickets for this, his newest film, until I remembered how annoyingly hard it is to access Silver's filmography. Whatever we thought of THE GREAT PRETENDER, at least I wouldn't have to chase it down later for curiosity's sake.

I don't mean to sound so dismissive, but I think it's important you grasp my ambivalence about UNCERTAIN TERMS so that you can understand what a revelation THE GREAT PRETENDER was to me. Willful unpleasantness has become a badge of honor in some circles that see themselves pushing back against an encroaching PC culture. I don't think Nathan Silver sees himself that way, but his proclivity for damaged individuals wreaking havoc on one another qualifies him all the same. So something like UNCERTAIN TERMS, in which an adult man gets flirtatious with a teenage girl, accrues cultural (and critical) capital simply for not playing nice.

Defenders of ugliness will tell you that *of course* everyone knows it's gross for adult men to get romantically involved with teenage girls. Not every film needs an editorial viewpoint so you know the filmmakers disapprove of what they're filming. Against these objections, I point to: reality. There's a fundamental misapprehension at work here regarding niceness and its supposed antithesis. At the bottom of every Nice Guy is an ugly truth about masculinity's self-image. Therefore a toxic man is not the opposite of a Nice Guy, but rather his fullest expression. So to embrace masculine dysfunction is not a transgressive gesture. Rather, it is a reification of the dilemma supposedly being 'solved.'

Again, I'm not accusing Nathan Silver of making some kind of mistake. This is a critical fallacy more than an artistic one. But it's worth keeping in mind when considering broader cinema circuits. Watching THE GREAT PRETENDER made me realize how similar Silver's career trajectory is to both Hong Sang-soo's and Noah Baumbach's. These three artists once made rough, intermittently funny films about dysfunctional men and the women they ensnare. Now -- if THE GREAT PRETENDER is any indication -- Silver has joined his spiritual companions on a new endeavor: self-reflexive and structurally intricate relationship dramas with "strong female leads." Regressive masculinity meets its match in progressive femininity, even if the gains for these women remain incremental. Adding more humor probably hasn't hurt either.

Without being too cynical, I imagine these newer models play better than the old ones would now. Male self-absorption is passé; female "empowerment" is in. But if there are new structural incentives for such reconfiguration, I would still question the ability of any man to make an epistemological break with their previous worldviews. Silver, Hong, and Baumbach have not lost their interest in self-destructive people. What's changed is their formal approach to that ongoing theme. THE GREAT PRETENDER folds in on itself like a colorful square of origami paper; Hong darts in and out of metaphysical slipstreams; and Baumbach is now using classic screwball style to orchestrate his deluded creations' encounters. They are each refracting (and refining) the narratives that compelled them to make films in the first place.

Yet even as their styles evolve, masculinity itself is not keeping pace. So there's this issue of how to reconcile with a world that's rapidly leaving behind the men that populate Silver, Hong, and Baumbach films. I don't blame any of them for not figuring that out (have any of us?), but it's telling even so that they haven't. Men exist, and they will continue to do so, and as long as these three artists are interested in heterosexual stagnation, their films will reflect this reality. Which brings me to maybe my only real complaint with THE GREAT PRETENDER, and a small one at that: each man and each woman of the central cast of four sleep with one another, but neither the two women nor the two men do. Their sexual intrigue stops right at the heteronormative boundary. That doesn't make the film worse, or incomplete, or retrograde, or any such negative descriptor. Silver is examining the considerable woes of male-female coupling, as is his prerogative. On the other hand, wouldn't allowing for gay attraction be exactly the kind of exit that's denied to these four unfortunate lovers?

SOLLERS POINT [3.5]

Another fine film from Baltimore's hometown hero. I'm a little too eager to finish writing about the film festival to dig any deeper right now...but, this seems like an evolution for Matthew Porterfield without compromising his established style. It played to sold-out screenings and widespread admiration from festival-goers, who also had lots to ask the director and his crew at the Q&A I attended.

For his part, Porterfield hinted at something new as his next project: a film set in France, far away from his native Baltimore, that would follow a middle-aged rapper's attempt to connect with his growing son. Not trying to be gossipy! Just interested in seeing this prominent regional filmmaker step up to international film production. If I recall, post-production on SOLLERS POINT took place in France, so Porterfield's experience there is what germinated the potential project. It would be a big change, but I'm down if he is.

Week 3

It's been a hectic week, and I haven't had much time to read anything at all. What little free time I've had has been spent on errands and naps. So since I haven't read many digital things, I thought now might be a good time to highlight the books I'm reading:

First and most significantly: The Great Uprising, by Peter Levy. In his book, Levy takes a three-pronged approach to understanding US American history of the 1960s. He spotlights a trio of cities as case studies through which to understand race-related "riots": Cambridge, MD; Baltimore, MD; and York, PA. 

The first of these is a small city I don't know and have never visited, located somewhere out on Maryland's jagged Eastern Shore. Levy wrote a book on the city's history previously, so he is able to tease historical significance out of personal familiarity. I've just finished reading this section of the book, and it ably accomplishes what Levy intends: the de-familiarization of "riot" history and imagery, replaced with a fuller understanding of structural racism's role in segregated poverty. In Cambridge's civil unrest, Levy sees the beginnings of a rhetorical/political shift away from civil rights toward "law and order."

(This is, not incidentally, a subject explored with great depth and dexterity in another book I read recently: Elizabeth Hinton's From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime).

I'll admit: for the first 80 or so pages, I wasn't sure I needed this much information. But once Levy starts examining the mass media coverage of Cambridge, it's impossible to ignore the misdirection employed by commentators. The gap of several hours between a Black Power speech and a nearby fire is elided; a Fire Department entering a majority-black Ward "fear[ing] for their lives," when in fact black residents helped them put out a fire; the persistent underdevelopment of Cambridge's Second Ward obfuscated under claims of "new public housing" and other minor investments. Levy arrives at a rare and powerful rhetorical stance, one where the truth is so obvious that lies begin to reveal themselves unprompted.

Now that I've finished the Cambridge section, I look forward to Levy tackling Baltimore (where I currently live) and York (a half-hour from my hometown, spiritual sister city Lancaster). It was these latter sections that caught my attention in the first place, but now I better understand both his scholarly background and this book's project. It's my good fortune that the rest of the book will speak to my own position, a subjectivity not omniscient but situated, not universal but helpfully particular.

Some other books I'm working through right now: Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which he wrote just blocks away from my current apartment; Platform Capitalism, by Nick Srnicek, a personal favorite I've been reading aloud to my girlfriend during long car rides; and The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, which she's been reading to me at night before bed. Our selection of that last one came from her interest in horror fiction, but also from the news that Mike Flanagan would be adapting it for a Netflix TV series (premiering in just two weeks now!). Most likely, we'll wrap the book up before the show's debut so we have something horror-related to savor during October.

Week 2

Quite by coincidence, I happened across a general interest website that concerned psychological conditions. It hosts a variety of short, simple articles about psych buzzwords. This is not a rabbithole I'd ordinarily want to enter, and the leading questions posed by the articles only increased my trepidation ("Is Narcissism the New Norm?"). However, there is a degree of nuance to their coverage of narcissism, in both its 'normal' and pathological versions. This article delineates the difference between normal and pathological narcissism, noting that normal narcissism is just the healthy attention-seeking all human beings perform. The hot button topics, like selfies and social media, are dismissed as corrupting influences.

Likewise, this one, about parents' overvaluation of their children, would seem to provide fodder to boomer scorn of 'participation trophies,' 'snowflakes,' and other generational stereotypes. But closer reading suggests almost the opposite: it's okay to see yourself on the same plane as others, and dangerous to feel superior. From this framing, it's hyper-competitiveness and privilege that fosters narcissism, not inclusion/'coddling.' I was also interested in the observation that warmth produces high self-esteem, while narcissism is detached from it.

A recurring theme in these articles is that pathological narcissism is a way of protecting abnormally low self-esteem. The lay perception of narcissism is that narcissists genuinely believe they're superhuman, belonging to a higher echelon of humanity than their worthless fellows. But to believe this about narcissists cedes ground to their illusions. Narcissists are very fragile, and they will melt down spectacularly at even the smallest displays of defiance. These explosions are defensive and reactive in nature, used to avoid self-reflection and force submission by the offending party. While they may be able to feel some empathy, it's highly conditional, and trying to get acknowledgment from a narcissist can be draining to the extreme.

(Especially if you're a woman, and the narcissist is a man).

Note that the synthesis I'm attempting here is not exactly scientific, nor have I carefully vetted the articles. I'm speaking from a mix of personal experience and educational/professional experience in Applied Behavior Analysis. I'm trying not to overstep the limits of my knowledge and make baseless generalizations.

Moving on:

Jed Dietz founded the Maryland Film Festival 20 years ago and has served as its Executive Director ever since. Yesterday he announced his retirement. A "nationwide" search to replace him will soon begin. From my street-level view, it seems like Dietz deserves a good deal of credit for building up the MDFF and spearheading the Parkway Theatre's revitalization. I can't imagine life as a cinephile in Baltimore without them. At the same time, I don't know everything that's gone on behind the scenes in that time -- though I've heard some faint whispers. I also don't know much about Sandra Gibson, who will serve as the Interim Director starting November 1. According to the MDFF's announcement, she "became intimately familiar with the Maryland Film Festival through her work on our Strategic Plan as part of our collaboration with DeVos Institute of Arts Management." ...See any familiar names? I wonder where that money trail leads.

The Korean War may finally end.

Brexit masochism reaching its fullest expression. Richard Seymour weighs in.

More on England, and the whole Western crisis of legitimacy. In tweeting this article, Dan Hancox adds that the centrist era is hardly a lost utopia, citing the Seattle WTO protests as one among many ferocious disputes.

I've felt for a while now that China has its own Internet already. Google ex-CEO Eric Schmidt suggests as much here. (Though, of course, his use of 'freedom' should be taken to mean 'gameable by right-wing media/advertising companies.')

Another piece of the infinite puzzle that is US global hegemony.

I don't even know what to say. I despise Abe, and nothing in all these years of power has seriously threatened his position. It's clear that there's a strong conservative bloc in Japan, and that whatever left factions remain are facing a formidable enemy. If Japan renounces pacifism -- as Abe keeps hinting -- the shadow of Imperial fascism will haunt East Asian relations to an even greater, possibly unmanageable degree. What a nightmare.

In a similar vein: Narendra Modi's worried me for a while, and it appears the seeds he's planted are growing roots. (Surely some of this is just alarmism about young people, but even granting that, which parts aren't? It remains to be seen.)

An excellent post from a truly great thinker. I've grown annoyed with simplistic debates over poptimism, but something is changing, and we're already navigating this rocky terrain. How do we treat corporate products boasting of superficial diversity? How much of this is earnestly clueless liberalism, and how much is cynical PR pandering? And how to defend intersectionality from the people who see potential for profit in it?

Last for now, and pertinent to the above: this podcast interview with Nancy Fraser highlights a lot of complex questions. In reintegrating domestic, socially reproductive labor with its masculinized + waged counterpart, Fraser takes what she calls an 'expanded view' of capitalism's more recent mutations. This is my first real encounter with her, and though I'm only halfway through the interview, I like what I hear so far. Her wikipedia page suggests she's been a sharp critic of 'identity politics,' which...does concern me a little. But I'll definitely be looking to engage her frameworks further, hopefully in book form.

Week 1

Read:

Sean Gilman articulates my ambivalence toward Tsui Hark's JOURNEY TO THE WEST film better than I ever could.

This country should not exist. (But what's with that one unattributed N-word the author chose to include?)

Netflix meets Nollywood. Looking to learn more about it myself.

Numbers on the decline of HK film. No action being taken yet, unfortunately.

UN rights chief condemns China's treatment of Uighur Muslims. What interests me about this story is that it builds on a rhetorical sleight of hand. Ajit Singh notes that the original report referenced in the above article was not from the UN as a whole, but rather a few questionable 'experts.'

Well, can we? Most financial analysis goes over my head, but it interests me, and I hope that reading it will improve my understanding. At any rate, the following passage is crystal clear:

Same issue from another angle. This article cites Mehrsa Baradaran, who visited Baltimore to discuss a book she'd written on race and finance. I was very impressed; her book's high on my reading list.

Water shortages as potential organizing issue for multiracial cross-class coalitions.

I may be visiting Malaysia next year, but even if I weren't, Malaysian politics has been plenty attention-grabbing. From afar, Mathahir's anti-corruption measures do seem like his greatest achievement. Being interviewed by Xinhua would also suggest that, despite whispered concerns, he has no ill will toward China.

And on that subject: with all that goes on there (and all the debates about whether it's a Communist or capitalist country), China is never far from my mind. Here's Fidel Castro on China's economic miracle, and here's a close look at some Belt & Road Projects that China's initiated. Venezuela is also a diplomatic beneficiary. Lastly, a primer to electronic music in China.

Hun Sen wins again.

I find this quite endearing.

More and more, it seems as if THE HELP will become the 2010s DRIVING MISS DAISY. Not only does Viola Davis regret her involvement, but so too does Ava DuVernay. The latter tweeted a link to this article and said THE HELP made her quit PR. Without their career adjustments, this decade in cinema would look quite different.

Bilge Ebiri is good at describing his favorite directors.

I've come to rely heavily on Patrick Blanchfield to featherdust cobwebs off the US American psyche. Also nice to know I don't need to genuflect before boomer hero Bob Woodward.

And finally: I'm going to lodge a strong objection to the way Nick Pinkerton characterizes left-leaning art criticism. While that mode of writing doesn't lack for "pale-minded liberals," it's intellectually dishonest to cite Amanda Hess as the tendency's standard-bearer. We are not receiving marching orders from a cryptoconservative NYC media institution. We are drawing on the pain of our own lives, choking our way through private miseries with little hope of change or redress.

Nick Pinkerton was perhaps the first critic I learned to identify by style in the Reverse Shot collective; I've cherished his writing for nearly a decade now. But, while much of this essay series is magisterial, his conflation of milky liberalism and socially-conscious arts writing doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It's a strawman whose only purpose is to support the profoundly-misguided assertion -- shared as hard truth, via proxy Eric Bentley -- that misogynists have deeper, truer insight than the 'morally upright.'

I feel ungenerous criticizing Pinkerton so directly, but if he's not going to engage with the left coalition pushing back against white phallocentrism in art, then I don't owe him any courtesies either. I'd also rather address this directly, as opposed subtweeting about how 'certain people' are constructing a fortress against much-needed critical realignment. Gotta name names! But with all that said, I'd never write so much about Pinkerton if I rejected his critical point-of-view altogether. I ignore artists/critics whose sensibilities I don't share; it's because I read him regularly that I feel compelled to comment now.

S I M U L A C R A

About a week ago, my girlfriend suggested I watch her play a video game she'd found online. She had a feeling it would be fun to play through together, and that it would engage my aesthetic sensibilities while we played. She was very right on both accounts :)

The video game is called Simulacra. You can play it on a laptop, as we did, but it can also be played on a phone. Without having done so myself, I would highly recommend that option, much as I'd recommend watching UNFRIENDED on a laptop. I'll explain why shortly.

Simulacra hails from Malaysia, where a small programming team worked on this game and a shorter predecessor, entitled Sara Is Missing. In this expanded followup, the missing girl's name is Anna. The player, as an unnamed interloper, finds her phone and begins looking through it for clues about the owner. Everything seems perfectly ordinary, except that no one has seen Anna since the last time she contacted them on her phone.

Yet this isn't a digital space any of us would know. Simulacra offers a fully-imagined, elaborately-visualized ecosystem of Apps and digital infrastructure. Taking place in 2017, its world is nonetheless speculative, tweaked just enough to require a learning curve for its computer-savvy audience. As for the outside world, I'm not entirely sure where the game is meant to take place. Everyone speaks English, though the actors are mostly people of color. Perhaps it's a lightly fictionalized Malaysia, or perhaps it's LA, where several of the actors live in real-life. Maybe it's just some nowhere-space of globalization -- that liminal online space we all inhabit now -- where money, sexual attraction, and social status fluctuate with the day's events.

In the world of Simulacra, everyone seems to be employed in the digital economy. Amusingly plausible website names like "BunnyHop," "BigFour," and "Phresh Ideas" proliferate. The men, as they present themselves through text message, appear terrible without exception. Communicating in a mix of 'clever' references, sexual propositions, and hair-trigger aggression, they speak as if they share some wretched hive-mind consciousness. It's our bad fortune that two of them will prove integral to solving Anna's disappearance: Greg, her inconsiderate boyfriend; and Taylor, a dorky suitor who expects you to laugh at all his witless jokes.

(Their voice acting, it must be said, can verge on the amateur, especially in Greg's case. But if their words don't convince when spoken, the written messages exude plenty of beta-male believability.)

Even before the genre elements announce themselves, this is already a compelling alt-history of the present. In making digital life just unrecognizable enough to seem strange, Simulacra re-sensitizes its users to the terms and conditions we've all accepted without reading the fine print. Its gamespace is constructed as a vertical rectangle...in other words, a phone screen. Through this gamespace, we are given access to a fictional assemblage of apps, user profiles, and interpersonal relationships. It may seem strange to occupy the role of impostor, but this positioning only heightens the feeling of a pre-existing reality just outside the frame. Phones contain the world, but they also imply that world's miniaturization. They open outward, endlessly, as a way to overcome their own physical smallness.

Let's pause briefly and consider the phone as a reconfiguration of the cinematic space. Cinema began in aspect ratios like 4:3, echoing the tools of photography that birthed it. Then, as technological development progressed, spatial grandiosity took hold. The widescreen frame allowed for dioramic detail, permitting one's eye to roam across a series of landscapes. And while televisual language has long since recuperated this expansionary effort of cinema, for now it pays to remember the hubristic impulse behind the shift from square to rectangle.

We are at least a decade into the smartphone era. If personal computers posited some nexus between cinematic depth-of-field and hyperlinked infinity, smartphones have further compressed the interface that crystallized this digital relationship. Strangely, in this long transitional period, the rectangle form has not been replaced. Efforts to return to the square, i.e. the Apple Watch, always struck me as weirdly form-less, like some over-literalization of the pixels that constitute digital space. I don't need to be reminded of those pixels. The rectangle form still feels most natural and intuitive to me, even as I recognize that cinematic rectangularity was itself a rupture, a willful break with equilateral tradition. Does that make me the nostalgist?

Anyhow. Returning to Simulacra, there is a double uncanniness involved in its mystery. Not only are we piecing together an unknown person's life through digital shrapnel, we are also constructing an alternate reality through what the phone normalizes for us. Ridiculous App names like Jabbr and Spark soon become second-nature, just like Tinder and Twitter before them. It's as if, in the few hours it takes to play Simulacra, we are reenacting our own decade-long acculturation. Toggling between text message, emails, Apps, and photo/video galleries has become totally normal to the presumptive player of Simulacra...if, that is, they're under the age of 40 or so. I can't imagine this game being navigable to anyone over a certain age. Much like UNFRIENDED, the game's formal radicalism suggests an age limit: you must be this young to play this game (or, to watch that movie).

But where UNFRIENDED couldn't help adhering to narrative linearity, this new articulation feels both hyperflat and fathomless. Freed from cinema's chronological demands, Simulacra replicates the network experience, where each node on a grid connects to other nodes that are themselves gateways to infinite access. These nodes can be websites, but more often they are people: strangers, lovers, family, or the endlessly shifting acquaintanceships we make online. What the game gets intuitively, in a way that can barely be articulated to Luddites, are the micro-rules of such an etiquette. The unanswered texts at the end of a taxing conversation with one's parents. Pregnant pauses in a troubled relationship. That mix of coziness and emotional turmoil in a long-running text with your best friend. Anna's life would seem ordinary if it weren't for the fact that she'd gone missing. This is the great promise of countless mystery stories, the lurid search for secrets inside familiar reality. Simulacra distinguishes itself by taking this voyeurism online, where the possibility for immersion in a stranger's life is more complete than ever. We can pick up this phone and text the people Anna knew, generating new clues even while we're perusing her old text messages.

In the films of Hitchcock and De Palma, breaches of privacy often happened from afar, mediated through cameras, binoculars, or peepholes. Simulacra suggests this distance has shrunk to the space between your thumb and a phonescreen, and that, correspondingly, so has the space between superego and id. Obsessive curiosity, once a (nominal) state of exception in the social world, has become the norm. In broadcasting personal information, the private is made public; conversely, strangers remain unknown to us only if we wish, only if "Facebook stalking" isn't the more tempting option. Deregulated, this libidinal economy tends toward overconfidence and, in some cases, spectacular collapse. (The "public meltdown," with its confusion of intimacy and assembled audience, might serve as an emblematic metaphor for this entanglement of Self and Other.) The dichotomies are collapsing, a process both facilitated by and embodied in smartphones. As the primary tool for divulging our psychic reserves (and exploring those of others), it is their shape that conditions us, their whispered suggestions that we follow. At time of writing, Simulacra represents the fullest deconstruction I've seen of this particular device, and as such, I propose it to be a key text in the emergent post-cinema canon.

Some caveats worth a mention: it's disappointing that Anna's disappearance becomes mostly pretext by the game's end. As this alternate phone-reality unspools, we're given more opportunities to interact with Greg and Taylor, two rather loathsome men whose mere presence on Anna's phone feels intrusive. Greg's boundary-pushing machismo is the flipside to Taylor's nice-guy ingratiation, and since Anna herself is the structuring absence, it falls on these unwelcome interlopers to fill the gap. Whatever narrative drive this choice provides, the effect is somewhat enervating. And while the game's resolution does venture into some eerie and suggestive places, I can't help feeling that the early moments of Simulacra are its strongest. Long after the story resolves, what lingers is that uncanny familiarity of a phone (and a world) which is not ours, but could be. Simulacra explicitly engages with the hyperreal in recognition of the many ways that 'reality' has changed. There is a prominent citation of Baudrillard; there is an equally prominent citation of Black Mirror. Whether or not you find meaning in those signposts, it's the gamespace itself that most persuades.

Sexism Overwhelms Skillful Construction

20. THE LADY VANISHES

CW: gaslighting, rape, abuse, misogyny

This is it, the Hitchcock ur-text I've been looking for. Everything good and bad about Hitchcock can be found here, and frankly the movie is something close to unreadable considering all the conflicting impulses. I'd call it incoherent but it's actually something more like ambi-coherent. It is equal parts territorializing and deterritorializing, rigorous and destabilizing, oppressive and sympathetic.

To begin: there is something the best Hitchcock movies do that connects with what my girlfriend and I call Female Horror. The best examples are MARNIE and THE BIRDS, although a case could be made for VERTIGO as well (despite its male POV). Hitchcock films are torture devices. They turn the screws in desperate people as they search for a way out of overpowering directorial control. It's not for nothing that some people, most notoriously Noah Berlatsky, have read Hitchcock's narrative engines as delivery systems for punishment. Yet because identification is never so simple, we are never just adopting the role of punisher (or punished) as viewers. We oscillate between roles, taking sadistic pleasure in the torment being meted out while also thrilling at our own helplessness.

It's for this reason that Hitchcock films cannot easily be condemned as misogynistic, though of course they often are. Misogyny is just one among many tools Hitchcock uses to produce his desired effects. There are certainly films which use misogyny for male pleasure, such as THE 39 STEPS. In that film, being handcuffed to a woman and slowly seducing her is a form of wish fulfillment for male viewers identifying with the male protagonist. It is not impossible for women to enjoy THE 39 STEPS, but to do so would involve ignoring or minimizing Madeleine Carroll's subjection to Hitchcockian control (this is the choice faced by men as well).

I'm not arguing that there's no place for women in Hitchcock, though I wouldn't blame anyone of any gender for finding all of this aversive. What's really challenging about Hitchcock is that his best films are *about* misogyny as much as they *are* misogynistic. I'm still a little reluctant to discuss MARNIE with total openness, but suffice to say that my own psyche fused with Tippi Hedren's in that film. Tippi Hedren suffers plenty of vileness at Hitchcock's hand in MARNIE, and of course we're all aware of the man's treatment of her offscreen. Yet MARNIE is as much a chronicle of the character Marnie's agonies as it is the generator of them. For me, watching it was one of the most profound experiences of excitement and terror that cinephilia has given me. In Hitchcock's film about women, his treatment of them is inseparable from the effect generated.

Now, is this proof of his genius? To make form and intention one in a total unity of artistic expression? Down that path lies the dismissal of female suffering, the instrumentalization of it for artistic truth. That is the path of praising Kubrick for THE SHINING's profound terrors while minimizing the real abuse of Shelley Duvall as our conduit for them. None of this is easy, and I absolutely want to leave it up to each viewer to judge the value of a film in which misogyny is inflicted on women for artistic effect. I would of course encourage men to think more critically about artistic production, as these well-known stories often get swept under the rug in defense of the sacrosanct "artistic process." But equally I am interested in interrogating whether (and if so, how) Hitchcock films can be pleasurable for women and people of various other gender identities.

In THE LADY VANISHES, Hitchcock's system of punishment is so flawless that it twice threatens to alter the ontology of his scenario. Margaret Lockwood, suffering from a head injury, becomes alerted to the lady's vanishment and asks around her train cabin where her companion has gone. Every single passenger gives her some variation of "there was never another lady with you" and/or "you're imagining things." We suspect this is some vast conspiracy, but it could in fact be true! We don't know the extent to which Hitchcock has manipulated us as viewers. It could be possible that there was never any lady at all, or that Margaret Lockwood hallucinated a remembered face onto an unrelated passenger. Hitchcock even goes so far as to visualize Lockwood's hallucinations, tricking us into the first person POV. When Lockwood then proclaims that she must have hallucinated, we also can't discern if the conspiracy is anything more than our shared delusion.

Hitchcock modulates this supreme destabilization by revealing first one lie, then another, to indicate that Lockwood's character is at least partially correct. As the audience, we take these cues to mean there is duplicity at hand, casting suspicion back on the conspirators. But until these lies are revealed, we are not sure if the Master of Suspense is pulling an even longer con on us. It's particularly devious that Hitchcock allows Lockwood to be partly right (there was in fact a lady) only to re-establish doubt right after (it could have been Madame Kummer, not Miss Froy). The structural tricks he uses to confirm our suspicions and then undermine them is some of the most skillful, deliberate filmmaking I've seen from him.

Hypothetically then, this could be a movie about the weaponization of misogyny to make women doubt even reality itself. It would be a movie about gaslighting in which we as much as the main character can't know anything for certain, a perceptual wooziness maintained for an hour or longer. That would be a terrifying route to take (and in some ways MARNIE takes up this existential fracturing two decades later, to predictably unnerving effect). But Hitchcock mostly wants to play with our expectations, and he's happy to side with Lockwood once he's had his fun. THE LADY VANISHES is never so surreal as in the moments after the titular act. It then transitions into a more familiar British murder mystery, of a piece with previous Hitchcock films of his European period.

And that would be quite alright if it weren't for Michael Redgrave, who enters the film in order to perform an upsetting routine of invasion and privacy violation. This is played for laughs by Hitchcock, a cheeky little battle of the sexes to oppose our romantic leads before their eventual union. But as often in Hitchcock, the light-hearted skit is off-key. Hitchcock has no awareness of what it feels like for women to tell men to leave a room and for men to flaunt their power by disobeying. It is not a struggle among equals but a rebellion by the oppressed to oust her oppressor. Again, remembering THE 39 STEPS, Hitchcock often likes to put women in humiliating situations of powerlessness to watch them squirm, only to pass these moments off as foreplay to a zesty sexual dynamism. Except it doesn't work in THE 39 STEPS, and it doesn't work here either. Redgrave is too domineering of a presence, though he disavows his monomania with humor. He acts as if he wields no control, yet he worms his way into Margaret Lockwood's life against her repeated protestations. Hitchcock's plot may ultimately take her side in the mystery, but it takes Redgrave's side in the romantic overtures. The film is divided between a struggle against conspiratorial menace and a movement toward romantic annexation.

Hitchcock usually takes one route or the other, often depending on the protagonist's gender. So it's bizarre that here Lockwood is both protagonist and object to be acted upon. It frustrates identification, as she is empowered and disempowered in turn. Hitchcock is an untrustworthy director in the extreme, but he has made several films which express a feminine terror in the face of unknowable power. THE LADY VANISHES feints at doing the same, only to reveal itself as another jovially chauvinistic trifle from Hitchcock's earlier years. I guess it says something about me that I prefer his deep dives into paranoia and dread over his earlier, funnier movies. But I can't help feeling those latter works compromise themselves by delighting in male power at the expense of their female leads. It bothers me increasingly, even as I know Hitchcock will later forsake these tendencies for something stranger and more disturbing. THE LADY VANISHES employs the whole database, bringing together matter and anti-matter to vaporize any intuitive response. It's mystifying, and I'm glad I found it, but I'm more aware than ever how the "bad" Hitchcock movies operate.

21. THE 39 STEPS

Big step up in terms of craft, and that's no knock on THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. Those wide open Scottish vistas in particular give Hitchcock a lot of new maneuvering room. But it has a mean streak regarding women. Madeleine Carroll is a prop for a majority of the film. Only her charisma redeems the demeaning role.

Added to my Netflix Queue: 2/28/2008. Almost a decade.

22. THE RING

It'd be a mistake to lean too much on THE RING being Hitchcock's only original screenplay. While not averse to pitching in himself on later films, he seemed content to let others take the lion's share of that particular task. Evidently it was not where he felt his contributions were most fruitful. Perhaps delegating the screenplays to others more excited by them left Hitchcock freer to focus on visual expression. In that regard, THE RING is a verdict: images > plot.

Before auteur theory took a turn for the individualistic and self-aggrandizing, it was a way of finding ghosts in the film industry machine. One can see some sexism in Hitchcock's writing of the unfaithful love interest, but the woman problem is hardly unique to THE RING. If anything, his mature films are imbued with meaner and more pervasive misogyny. So this isn't the smoking gun that indicts Hitchcock as a woman-hater. A return to auteur theory's holistic framework exposes a more difficult truth: filmmaking is wholly amenable to its constituent misogynists. But the sexism of industrial film production is best thought of as a tendency. For every Hitchcock, you have a G.W. Pabst. Keeping in mind the exceptions (and, of course, the marginalized people gradually assuming the means of production) prevents fatalism about what films are capable of doing. We know that men use them to consolidate personal power. What might a filmmaking process that divests from power look like?

23. DOWNHILL

Oh cool, a film about a boy whose upper-crust status is tarnished (twice!) by petty, conniving, vindictive women. Like JAPANESE GIRLS AT THE HARBOR except, you know, reprehensible instead of heartbreaking.

To be fair, I'm sure at this point in his career Hitchcock was just filming whatever he was handed. However he seems to have had no success in salvaging such risible material. There are some clever subjective shots and nice foreground-background blocking strategies, but otherwise this is the most inessential Hitchcock film I've seen yet.

24. THE FARMER'S WIFE

This film centers on a man who, upon being rejected by the "undesirable" women he deigns to court, mocks them for their appearances, body sizes, and personality defects, even going so far as to induce a tearful nervous breakdown in one. After discussing his proposals among themselves, the women become jealous and reconsider the offer, only to discover that their suitor has inappropriately proposed to his long-time employee, thus sparing him the supreme indignity of settling for these second-rate substitutes.

In case you were wondering how misogynistic this film is (or how funny).

While watching THE FARMER'S WIFE, I speculated on how it was that Hitchcock transitioned into the suspense films he's best known for today. His early career apparently features quite a few melodramas, as well as broad comedies of this sort. How did he come to zero in on thrillers? Financial success surely played some part: because of Hitchock's adeptness at the thriller form, his thrillers must have been favorably received, therefore persuading the studios to continue hiring him for more of the same. Directors, like actors, can be typecast based on past success.

Yet on a deeper level, I wonder if Hitchcock and his financiers considered these other populist forms beneath him. Perhaps his technical precision was thought to be best suited for highly-structured, well-paced thrillers. Of course, in hindsight, it's easy to find proof for that proposition in Hitchcock's career. But comedies and melodramas require meticulous technique as well. All the best of them are as technically-accomplished as any well-made thriller. Preminger, for example, could not have achieved what he did in FOREVER AMBER if he weren't already such a consummate craftsman, as had been proved by LAURA and FALLEN ANGEL.

I think there's a gendered bias to what films are considered worthy of a skilled director. The masculinized thriller is likelier to attract acclaim among male audiences and film industry figures than an effective melodrama. If Hitchcock regularly excelled at making thrillers, and if those thrillers were beloved by audiences for their masculine virtues, my guess is that Hitchcock's career was shaped by such preferences. Hitchcock himself didn't seem to mind either, building a legend for himself out of the Master of Suspense label. (Somehow I doubt he would've settled for Master of Melodrama.)

While he began his career as an anonymous craftsman, promiscuously applying his talents to various genres, the intense specialization he would become known for is part of what made him an early auteur favorite. And I don't think it's a coincidence that many of those admirers were men, directors who would themselves be both denounced and celebrated for their masculinist tendencies (Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer). Film history is not a neutral and impartial evolutionary process, but an ongoing effort in which men elevate other men to positions of influence. In taking the long view of Hitchcock's career, one can see just how deliberate a construction this really is.

Lesser; and Seemingly Less Toxic?

12. NUMBER SEVENTEEN

To be honest...after a bout of celebratory daydrinking, I caught very little of what was going on. But what I did absorb was a formal sensibility liberated from the tedium of exposition, a frenzy of images decoupled from plotting. Energetic, thrilling, chaotic, visual, kinetic...I liked it a lot.

13. I CONFESS

14. STRANGERS ON A TRAIN

15. THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

16. SECRET AGENT

Furthering THE 39 STEPS' comic inversions, marriage in SECRET AGENT is a foreign object to all involved. To Mr. and Mrs. "Ashenden" it is a bemusing facade, to the General and Marvin it is an accursed impediment. A game for all to play until the counterfeit married couple decide it might suit them after all. Hitchcock seems to have great fun tweaking this most solemn of social conventions in his 30s films, yet by the end his phony lovers stumble their way into real romance. Madeleine Carroll, here as before, manages to strike a winsome balance between insouciance and affection. How unfortunate that Hitchcock seems intent on belittling her throughout. His impish love stories would feel much more earned if Carroll weren't made to suffer such indignities along the way.

17. YOUNG AND INNOCENT

It's the wrong man accused once more, but this time with an interestingly sexist angle. YOUNG AND INNOCENT opens with a suspicious scene of the male lead fleeing a corpse that has washed ashore. Two young women see him departing and interpret it as proof of his guilt. When all three speak to the police, the man claims he was leaving to get help. The women are having none of it. They persist to condemn him for his actions, persuading the entire crowd of their viewpoint while the man looks on helplessly.

In Hitchcock men are often the playthings of fate. They are tossed into situations beyond their understanding, sometimes on purpose or sometimes just by sheer bad luck. But in YOUNG AND INNOCENT we can see the political limitations of Hitchcock's favored structure. The mistaken young women are not viewed with hatred per se, yet the man's desperate quest for absolution is what garners sympathy. Hitchcock stacks the deck: we know this protagonist will triumph in the end, but is it not perfectly reasonable for witnesses without our omniscient perspective to suspect him? And what about this dead woman anyhow? Doesn't she deserve all these efforts to stop her apparent killer?

By making the man's accusers women, an uncomfortable facet of Hitchcock's style is revealed. For men are often not innocent, and women are frequently all too correct in their assessments. It is not good practice to regularly focus on male virtuousness threatened by uncomprehending onlookers. And Hitchcock, a sexual predator himself, is certainly not one of his unjustly accused male innocents. Yet he spent much of his career returning to this scenario, envisioning variations on plausible deniability to his enraptured audiences. Could he have been deliberately promoting disbelief in criminal accusations? Were all these films rehearsals/tutorials for himself and other men under the spotlight? I would not ordinarily assume bad faith on the part of an artist, but few other directors are so (in)famous for being master manipulators.

The wrong(ed) man often appears as an apolitical archetype in Hitchcock. THE 39 STEPS perfected the formula early, and it appears to have had a primal appeal to both Hitchcock and his viewers. I am however wondering now if it isn't an elaborate alibi. An epistemological argument for granting leniency to men in suspicious circumstances. How guilty was Hitchcock, in the final score? And how guilty did he believe himself to be? How much time did he spend, in his art and in life, obsessing over unwanted accusations? I am inclined to believe art imitates life with Hitchcock, that his preoccupations shaped him to the core. There may well be no bottom here.

18. THE SKIN GAME

Not bad at all! An early critique of the spirit of capitalism, something so odious even white British people find it offensive. Among the better early Hitchcocks, perhaps because he was working with more layered material than usual.

However, I'm a little off-put by its climactic tragedy. It's not that Hitchcock handles the spiral of shame poorly or even insensitively. Rather, I'm not sure how sterling his motives are in revealing a young girl's disreputable secret, thus driving her to suicide. It recalls his own sadistic predilections a little too closely.

This is part of the trouble with abusive artists. Even when the films are otherwise commendable, real life looms darkly over their work. Parallels, unbidden, suggest themselves. THE SKIN GAME's theme of class precarity isn't so different from Pansy Osmond's predicament in The Portrait of a Lady, but Hitchcock isn't Henry James. So his film ends up seeming suspect where James' novel feels profoundly sympathetic to the plights of its women.

I hope it's clear enough by now that I'm not watching all the Hitchcocks I can just to denounce them one-by-one. In some cases, my feelings about Hitchcock and his films hardly dovetail at all. What I'm trying to discern is when (and how) life's ugliness putrefies art. Especially because Hitchcock is such an influential figure, I'm curious about how his psyche has infiltrated this medium he was so instrumental in shaping. The correspondences are obscure and inconclusive so far, but some things are indeed becoming clearer. I have one more British film to watch, and then I'll be taking a lengthy break before embarking on his American works. Hopefully this informal database will be of use to other people, but if not, I think it's at least given me some insight.

19. MURDER!

Flatly paced, and Hitchcock seems hamstrung by the dull Sir John character. Herbert Marshall's performance never evokes much more than cursory intrigue.

Also, the weight of psychological deviance coming down so heavily on the "half-caste" "female impersonator" is...concerning.