Month: December 2021

Featured image from The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

I cruised right through 2020, but 2021 decisively kicked my ass. As most people likely to be reading this know, my dad died in the spring. I wrote about his life here. Not long after, I had to euthanize my beloved dog. I wrote about the compounding grief I experienced here. At the same time, shit got stressful at work, due to the same sort of administrative marauding that campuses across the country have seen. This stress has mostly blown over for now, but I must say that I harbor abiding resentment that I had to worry about evil university administrators gutting the humanities the entire time I was trying to cope with the most profound grief of my life. I doubt I will ever again be able to truly say that I love the university where I work. I love my colleagues and students, but the constant reimagining and reorganizing and reprioritizing initiatives that have taken over the institution’s identity are fucking abusive and I am sick of it.

On the plus side, I finished writing my book, and it was published yesterday. I was fortunate in that I have been consistently able to focus on writing throughout the pandemic. This is no doubt because I was working on a book that is NOT written in a strangled academic style and where I did not have to cite a damn thing unless I wanted to. God, it felt so good to take off the sweaty rubber clown suit of professional norms and just write. I took genuine joy in writing, even while I was otherwise overtaken by grief.

I watched 1060 movies this year. That’s a lot, I know. But it’s 200 less than last year, so I have lived up to my vow to cut back. Here’s how I think of it: it’s like eating seasonally. Berries are really good in the spring, so I eat berries, and I don’t bemoan the fact that it’s not butternut squash time yet. Come October, out comes the squash. There have been years of my life where I’ve watched a mere few hundred movies and spent most of my time doing normal person shit. The pandemic is movie time. This shit is ripe. Honestly, I NEVER watch as many movies as I want to. I’ve watched 145 movies just in December (post-grading binge) and my watchlist has been growing *much* faster than I am chopping it down. There are a lot of movies! And the more interested I get in the art form, the more of them I want to see. It’s not a drag, it’s not boring, it’s not repetitive, it’s not depressing: I love it. There is a tipping point (after watching 8 in a row on Halloween I couldn’t look at a movie the next day), but for me it is very high. I don’t play video games and I barely watch sports. I love movies. That’s me. I am not trying to convince other people to adopt my way of life (probably don’t), but I have no interest in being talked out of it. I may rejoin society at a later date, pending certain variables.

This year, though, my film diet saw some noticeable shifts. I watched significantly fewer challenging bucket list titles. This is, no doubt, because my fucking dad died and I was really stressed out for long stretches and I couldn’t sit still and focus the way I have in recent years. In 2020 I watched stuff like Shoah and Dead Souls. In 2021, I watched 18 Adam Sandler movies. It was a different vibe.

I thought a lot about the idea of a “comfort movie.” What movies do people reach for when they are sad or hungover or depressed and they want a movie that works as medicine? I asked around, and the answers I got confirmed my suspicion that this is wildly subjective and idiosyncratic. What did I turn to the day my dad died, when I was in so much pain I could barely move? The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Then I watched Fast & Furious 6. Then Fast Five. At some point not long after I watched Furious 7 twice. Then I watched the early ones and part 8. I also watched MacGruber and Fifty Shades of Black. This is important data! I wasn’t putting on a performance for myself in these moments. I was in desperate need of something to quench the goddamn fire and this is what I reached for. This is what helped. This is what made me feel better when I was in the worst pain of my life. The Fast and Furious movies are about the way that family loyalty can be a super power. Just take the wheel, you know? And I really wanted Vin Diesel to take the wheel for me that week.

Over the months that followed, Adam Sandler made me feel better. Don “The Dragon” Wilson made me feel better. The American Pie Extended Universe made me feel better. Something like American Pie Presents: Band Camp is pure comfort, but instead of a mug of hot cocoa, it’s people getting caught masturbating in embarrassing contexts. Sometimes I drank hot cocoa while I watched, and it was good medicine.

Overall, I watched way more comedies this year than previous years. I watched 25 Lubitsch movies and a whole lot of trash. I also watched a shit ton of action movies and Old Hollywood fare, but that is not a new development. I watched less horror and arthouse titles (though still a lot), because this stuff just did not fall into the right zone of narcotic comfort that I needed to dwell in this year. There were certainly some cross-overs, though: Wishmaster, for instance, is one of my absolute top comfort movies. I fell asleep watching it many a night.

Out of my first-time viewings this year (bracketing the big chunk of Lubitsch, which was delectable), these were my top tier, in chronological order:

• The Crowd (Vidor, 1928)
• Leave Her to Heaven (Stahl, 1945)
• Caught (Ophüls, 1949)
• Artists and Models (Tashlin, 1955)
• The Tarnished Angels (Sirk, 1957)
• Sergeant Rutledge (Ford, 1960)
• Marketa Lazarová (Vláčil, 1967)
• Venus in Furs (Franco, 1969)
• Querelle (Fassbinder, 1982)
• Mélo (Resnais, 1986)
• Center Stage (Kwan, 1991)
• No Home Movie (Akerman, 2015)

And here were the rewatches that were most meaningful to me:

• The Grapes of Wrath (Ford, 1940)
• How Green Was My Valley (Ford, 1941)
• To Have and Have Not (Hawks, 1944)
• All that Heaven Allows (thee times) (Sirk, 1955)
• Written on the Wind (Sirk, 1956)
• Party Girl (Ray, 1958)
• Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959)
• The Leopard (Visconti, 1963)
• Death in Venice (Visconti, 1971)
• Lancelot du lac (Bresson, 1974)
• Thief (Mann, 1981)
• Three Crowns of the Sailor (Ruiz, 1983)
• Tough Guys Don’t Dance (Mailer, 1987)
• The Killer (Woo, 1989)
• The Insider (Mann, 1999)
• L’Intrus (Denis, 2004)
• Gran Torino (Eastwood, 2008)
• Goodbye to Language (Godard, 2014) (in 3D, finally!!!!!)
• Knight of Cups (three times) (Malick, 2015)
• Song to Song (three times) (Malick, 2017)

Claire Denis’ L’Intrus was without a doubt the movie that gripped me the most this year. It was already a favorite, but I spent weeks obsessing about it after watching the restoration. I really needed to put it aside and write other things that I had actual deadlines for, but I did make some progress working through it. Here’s my piece on it. I spent a ton of time on Malick and wrote this piece on Knight of Cups and Song to Song. And here’s what I came up with on Sirk. Out of the other rewatches, Three Crowns of the Sailor and Death in Venice were especially revelatory. I feel like I made big leaps with both, and both are among the greatest movies I’ve ever seen.

I don’t like to rush to come out with takes on new movies (which is part of the reason we do our year in review on Oscar Sunday), but my favorite movie of the year is Titane. Winning Cannes didn’t do it any favors with the highfalutin cinephile crowd, though, and it has suffered an unfortunate hype-backlash cycle. I really want to write a longer piece on it, because I have been disappointed to see most of the people whose opinions I take seriously dismiss it casually after one viewing while the main discourse about it is caught up with extremely shallow issues about whether it’s shocking, offensive, tamer than it thinks it is, etc. In the two weeks or so when people were talking about Titane, I don’t think the discourse really got anywhere. I have watched the movie twice and spent months thinking about it and I’m still very much in the process of working through it. Hopefully, you will see a piece from me about it sooner or later. I also really loved Ferrara’s Siberia and Zeros and Ones and Eastwood’s Cry Macho.

So what’s next for me? With god as my witness, I am going to confront my most humiliating blind spot in 2022: Chabrol. It’s getting more humiliating all the time how little Chabrol I’ve seen. I’ve gotten it in my head that I am going to do a complete chronological watch-through, and so I keep passing on opportunities to watch random titles from the middle of his filmography. This time I’m really going to do it. 2022 is the year when I will watch every Claude Chabrol movie. Hold me to that, please, and see you on the flip side.

The COVID-19 pandemic is by far the weirdest thing I’ve ever lived through. It’s been weird in so many ways, but for me the most acute was the sense early on that pretty much all of us—the entire world—was simultaneously gripped by the same fears: concrete fears about getting sick, profound uncertainty about the future, and a rushing undercurrent of existential angst as we were abruptly torn from our lives. One of the most surreal experiences of my life was navigating panic at the grocery story as we dodged strangers who appeared to be breathing a little too enthusiastically.

One of the very first things that happened on the day when Trump restricted travel from Europe and America went into panic mode was that someone asked me to put together a list of pandemic-themed horror movie recommendations. The most popular movie on iTunes immediately became Contagion. From the point of view of a philosopher immersed in the literature on the so-called “paradox of horror,” this might be surprising. It is a nearly universal assumption in this literature that part of the reason we are able to enjoy the negative emotions we experience in connection with horror fictions is that we in some manner distance ourselves from the content of these emotions. When we see the green slime onscreen and are frightened by it, we are aware at the same time that it’s fictional—that it’s not really going to hurt us—and the distance that this awareness creates is what clears the way for fear to function positively in our aesthetic engagement.

What we saw happening at the beginning of the pandemic was the opposite: we saw a mass urge to dive deeper into a very real fear in aesthetic contexts. Of course, not everyone shared this urge, but it was stunningly commonplace. The question of why people reacted this way is ultimately empirical, but I can think of two possibilities worth considering. The first is self-administered exposure therapy. When I’m genuinely scared of something, I rarely have much success ignoring it. It tears and claws at me until I confront it. I often find that a better coping strategy is to dwell on the fear and try to accept that whatever it is that I’m afraid of might indeed come to pass, but that if it does I will be able to endure it. Perhaps many of us dove straightaway into nightmarish pandemic fictions as a way to confront and process our fears.

The second possibility is that many of us experience the emotional impact of horror films as expressive potency. That is, we value these movies because they tap into our most intense personal fears in a way that is aesthetically exhilarating. Theories of horror that place too much emphasis on distance may underestimate what we are happy to put ourselves through in aesthetic contexts. Few things impress me more than artist who can make me feel something that I can barely stand to feel. Covid has been a time of big, outsized feelings—feelings that many of us have apparently had an urge to dive even deeper into in our aesthetic lives.

But perhaps the most striking thing to me about watching horror movies during the lockdown was the way that so many movies that have nothing directly to do with viruses and pandemics suddenly felt like they were about COVID-19. I had a reciprocal germ-sharing arrangement with my pal Jesse, and even during the lonelier months he came around once a week or so to watch horror movies with me. We constantly found ourselves saying things like, “wow, this really feels like it’s about COVID,” or, “it’s so uncanny how relevant this feels.”

Consider, for instance, John Carpenter’s The Thing. The thing about the Thing is that it could be anyone. Like the T-1000, it can imitate any person it encounters. When someone leaves the room and then comes back again, for all you know they could now be the Thing. The extraordinarily tense middle section of the movie depicts the paranoia that this dynamic generates. As Jesse and I watched the movie together, I started giving him the side-eye. Eventually, I looked over at him and asked, “Bro, you been on Tinder lately? Bumble?” The movie made me vividly aware that every time he leaves my house and then comes back he could have been replaced with a COVID monster who looks and sounds like my friend Jesse.

“Horror reflects society’s fears” is perhaps the most over-used platitude in horror criticism. Of course it does. These observations about what it has been like to watch horror movies during the pandemic give us an opportunity to move beyond the bluntest version of this thesis and consider the rich phenomenology of the many different ways in which horror can reflect the fears of society. The case of Soderbergh’s Contagion isn’t especially interesting: we are now very afraid of pandemics and it’s about a pandemic. It’s more interesting to think about how Soderbergh’s Unsane (which I much prefer), has gained new resonances. Taken literally and in terms of narrative subject matter, it has nothing at all to do with the pandemic. It’s about a woman who is committed to a mental health facility on a false basis and then tormented by a stalker. But the emotions that it explores—feelings of captivity and powerlessness, of being suddenly torn from one’s world—are all too vividly COVIDesque. Moreover, the digital textures of the movie, which was filmed on an iPhone, call to mind the way that our lives have become so pervasively mediated by digital cameras and microphones.

Or, consider Joe Dante’s classic Gremlins. My brother Josh points out that it’s now a COVID movie. You had three rules: keep the mogwai away from bright light, don’t get it wet, and never, ever feed it after midnight. But you couldn’t follow the rules, could you? Gizmo got wet, then he multiplied, then the resulting flock of mogwai were given chicken after the appointed hour. And what is the result? Abject chaos. Gremlins literally swinging from the chandeliers. We had three rules: wear a mask, stand six feet apart, wash our hands. But we couldn’t follow the rules, could we? And what was the result? ABJECT CHAOS.

The horror movies with the most enduring appeal are often the ones that can be about almost anything—the ones that tap into our most fundamental and pervasive fears. I’m talking, for instance, about the place deep down in our collective gut where we don’t really trust society not to fall apart at the seams. Do I really trust my neighbors? They are friendly enough, but will they pillage my house if food shortages become critical? Movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (any version), The Mist, The Happening, Time of the Wolf, and The Purge tap into this fundamental fear, and thus can feel like they are about anything from a war to a pandemic to a natural disaster.

As I write this, the smoke has begun to clear and the world has started to return to something resembling normal. It is a new landscape, where we can no longer assume that the store will have the thing we want to buy and where one’s six-foot personal bubble has taken on new significance, but it is more or less recognizable as the world we knew before the pandemic. Thinking back to the phenomenology of the first few months after the plague took hold is like trying to remember a nightmare the next afternoon. I can recall flashes, but I have trouble immersing myself imaginatively in what it was really like. I am waiting with baited breath to see the next wave of COVID-inspired movies. Sure, there will be highly literal depictions like Songbird, which is too on the nose for greatness (though it does have its trashy pleasures as a piece of COVIDsploitation). What I really look forward to are movies that burrow into the deep, dark undercurrents of the pandemic and immerse us once again in the elusive, nightmarish pall that was cast over the world during those early months. It’s definitely not for everyone, but Abel Ferrara’s Zeros and Ones comes the closest of anything I’ve seen. It has some literal COVID markers (masks, group video chat, and so on), but that’s almost beside the point. It’s like a transmission from the end of the world—dark and muddy and hard to make out, possessed at once with feverish urgency and resigned desolation. And that’s kind of what it was like, wasn’t it?

[These piece is cross-posted from the ASA newsletter. Thanks, Shelby!]