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.