I've Seen Parts #41
The Vast of Night - Weekend
Firstly, if you’re here because it’s on your school’s summer reading list, or if you’ve suddenly come to strapped to a seat in the next billionaire rocket to space and you need a distraction from all the wealth hoarding, let me kindly direct you to the About page.
Since I’ve been penning small chapters of my memoir here in this section of the newsletter, I thought I’d break it up into three things this week because as a culture of quasi-sentient phone-scrollers we prefer clipped, digestible content over things that actually engage us and ask us to contribute to the mental exercise that is called being alive (kidding, love you all).
Whiny white guilt, maybe (CW: slavery). It has been eight weeks since I started watching Barry Jenkins’s expressive adaptation of the Pulitzer- and National Book Award for Fiction-winning Colson Whitehead novel, The Underground Railroad on Am*zon Pr*me— I have seen four episodes. As it turns out, one episode every two weeks might even be a pace too quick for me, and I’ve been vacillating between pushing ahead or letting it rest. I have been swept away by Jenkins’s previous work—Moonlight naturally left me in tatters and If Beale Street Could Talk made me believe in something again—so I was thrilled to hear he would be given the expansive scope of an entire limited series to lend his sharp, empathetic eye to such a rich story. And yet, during the first episode of The Underground Railroad, I found myself checking the progress bar at the bottom of the screen wondering how much longer it could possibly keep up. This was not an issue of pacing (Jenkins could teach a clock a thing or two), but one of content, laborious and grueling. I thought the next couple episodes might provide a bit of levity, and the wretchedness of the first was necessary to establish the stakes of what was being fled from, but—and call me ignorant—the disheartening tribulations followed. (And so do a lot of opportunities for white players to flex their acting chops.)
I am no stranger to the abominable accounts, both fictional and not, of racism in this country and the practice, institution, and culture of slavery from which all of it continues to dribble like a festering wound. That is part of existing as an American in a nation nursed on the blood of BIPOC. So what was it about this adaptation that made it feel, to me, like such an untimely piece of art? Was it simply the expectation, based on Jenkins’s affinity for ferreting out the elations and bringing light to the sanctuaries of leading a life that the world tries to tear down, that this might be a locus of revisionist storytelling not bound to repeat the same patterns of Black subjugation and torment? Let me be clear about something: I don’t think it’s Barry Jenkins’s duty to be uplifting, nor is it his responsibly to atone for slavery. I also do not I think he employs the same strategies that tactlessly depict violence and trauma for violence and trauma’s sake. All of this, coming from me and my privileged whiteness, of course, and I have read reviews by Black critics who had nothing but praise for the project. So maybe I need to keep watching to see the glimmers of Black joy or motivations for (re)instating this narrative into the cultural consciousness, but right now I can only wonder why— is this catharsis? is it reclamation? is it escape?
More burning questions. I know I said these would be short and that last one wasn’t, so this one will be. The California couple that burned down 22,000 acres of forest and killed a firefighter with their gender reveal party have been charged with manslaughter and other felonies. Will this end gender reveal parties? Probably not. Should I be pleased with this verdict, presumably condemning two people with a newborn(??) to several years in prison? Probably not! This punishment is legal, obviously, and any morality is tied to the loss of life and damage to property (rolling my eyes), but where does this leave recrimination against gender tyranny? Cancel all gender reveal parties, yes, but it’d be foolish to expect that to burn down gender completely. (Am I cynical this week?—more than usual, I mean.)
Gender performance. Actor Tommy Dorfman has opened up to the public about her transition in a shrewd and honest interview with Torrey Peters. Dorfman makes some elucidating points about transitioning not as a reinvention but as a furthering, as well as a valuable insight about the added pressures as a performer: “It’s impossible for me to separate my personal and professional transition, because my body and face are linked to my career.” It’s true that Dorfman is something of a heartthrob and although not headlining A-List productions has still become a recognizable figure—I can attest to having ogled her pre-transition form on Instagram in years past, and became familiar with her due to her friends, fashion, and flesh. As a performer, one’s body is the conduit of their artistry, the thing that contractually binds them to appear as something to be looked at, to signal existence. It is the role of the performer after all to embody, usually emotions but also other bodies—bodies of people other than themselves, in vastly different circumstances, with varying experiences, sometimes as other species altogether. At this point, we can safely say there is skepticism about embodying a body of another race, and we’re getting there with concerns over embodying bodies of other abilities and gender identities, for reasons to do with privilege, power, access, and visibility (among other things). It’s tiring to think there are people who believe this to be a level transference of accountability—people who might, say, condemn Patti Harrison’s playing a cis woman in Together Together because it’s “the same thing.” Some might say the rulebook is still being written for who should be “allowed” to play whom and who should want to play whom—those people should know that the only rule is to listen.
The Vast of Night
dir. Andrew Patterson, 2019
I was hearing good things about this (could not tell you exactly where, but all signs point to one or both of my most frequently used apps, Instagram and IMDb) so I decided to encourage my family to watch it with me. Some of them liked it more than others, and I thought it was just fine.
Since we’re getting into some alien discourse later on this week, I will try to keep these remarks cursory: aliens are scary. This might be propaganda by Big Athropocene, but the possibility of benevolence on the part of any light-year-traveling space entities seems unlikely given the only reasonable explanation for making such a voyage is desperation, and desperate people tend to be more likely to do bad things like institute the Wild West and take away people’s right to vote in Georgia.
Velvet Buzzsaw
dir. Dan Gilroy, 2019
What is the (sad, tragic) German word for when you watch an Netflix Original Film (NOF) on the day of its streaming release just because of Jake Gyllenhaal?
Vertical Features Remake
dir. Peter Greenaway, 1978
I watched a lot of Greenaway short and less-short short films in preparation of my MFA thesis—it’s pronounced “research”—and have only recently begun to explore the features he made later in his career for which he is most known, but not to me. This one is overt structuralist filmmaking in the most engaging way, of course occupied by Greenaway’s obsession with fictitious (fabulated?) history and relying heavily, blissfully on the musical stylings of Michael Nyman.
Vertigo
dir Alfred Hitchcock, 1958
There was a core curriculum class at Colgate University that all were required to take, and most professors of said course assigned this film, including mine. I had never seen a Hitchcock movie before, but had definitely pretended to, so it was good to finally have one under my belt for real, even though I almost fell asleep (watched it via McAir on bed in dark).
V For Vendetta
dir. James McTeigue, 2005
Was a big proponent of this film, which was one of the select few DVDs I brought to college and screened for my new friends with my roommate’s TV hookup— those new friends remained friends if you can believe it. Natalie Portman receiving a buzzcut LOC (live on cam) was the most radical thing about the movie to me when I watched it, even despite the political extremism of this plot, which seemed fanciful at the time but now…
Vice
dir. Adam McKay, 2018
Saw this in one of the little Coolidge Corner Theater showrooms with the usual crew (six to ten strangers). Before seeing it, I listened to Adam McKay’s Fresh Air interview where he told Terry Gross about how Christian Bale’s heart attack research to play Cheney made McKay realize he himself was having a heart attack. Art and life are such lovely bedfellows.
Vitalina Varela
dir. Pedro Costa, 2019
Sincere and slightly sinister, this is the moodiest (using this adoringly) film about long distance I’ve yet seen.
Vivarium
dir. Lorcan Finnegan, 2019
Thought this could be interesting, and then it was, and then it wasn’t— by Act III everything was messy.
Sometimes when I try to think of Imogen Poots I can only think of Imogen Heap, and because I don’t know what Imogen Heap looks like, they have merged into the same person for me.
Volver
dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2006
Cycles of generational trauma 🤝 Men
A crime thriller, mystery, and family drama rolled into one and sprinkled with a dash of irreverence— an Almodóvar delicacy.
Vox Lux
dir. Brady Corbet, 2018
Pop stardom is a prison but pop music? That’s liberation. This and Her Smell were circulating around the same time and that felt very much like a sister act (Sister Act (1992, have not seen)).
Walkabout
dir. Nicolas Roeg, 1971
I can’t say exactly why, but I feel as if I accidentally started watching this and then watched the whole thing. A lot of this film—and others like it—feel motivated by colonial guilt, which is not necessarily bad. Some are played out on a field of atonement and others seek to find some justice in the multitudinous waves of injustice—these approaches are different and not of equal weight. I don’t remember enough about this film to identify it as directed toward one pole or the other, nor do I want to end on a note of enforcing a polarity I just invented right now.
Walk the Line
dir. James Mangold, 2005
This film was screened for biopic week in the Music in Film course that has come up multiple times in these musings already, proof that education persists beyond the confines of the classroom. In late high school, I got into Johnny Cash for about two months and then stopped, but not before posting lyrics to the career-twilight hit “Hurt,” about deep regrets (I was seventeen), on Facebook. Many of his songs still spank, though, including the “Jackson” duet with June.
A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist
dir. Peter Greenaway, 1978
A cartophilic journey where the destination is just as hard to discern on the maps as it is to locate in the excursive account of the fictional Tulse Luper’s journey through/to death—I loved it. Peter Greenaway is enamored with the number ninety-two and I will not be reading something fatalistic into that.
A Walk to Remember
dir. Adam Shankman, 2002
Mandy Moore sings “Only Hope” and then dies. The walk meant to be remembered has in fact been eroded by the sands of time. This movie rings very Christian to me and sometimes flashes through my mind like a shooting star or the burning light of Christ when I think of the word “leukemia.”
WALL-E
dir. Andrew Stanton, 2008
Watched this for a film class, but I don’t remember why. Somehow Disney/Pixar Animation Studios managed to make this, a movie about a trash-collecting robot on a dystopian lifeless Earth, straight. Still, I will begrudgingly admit that it is a good one.
Wanda
dir. Barbara Loden, 1970
I decided to watch this because I heard Amy Seimetz likes it and now I do too. The grit of Wandas emotional and physical geography seem amplified in the grain of this film, which I am hesitant to call “honest” because that is a designation usually attributed to the works of women as if women themselves have been the ones silencing stories about womanhood for centuries. Nonetheless, this film is honest in a way that queer theorist Jack Halberstam might agree is shadow feminism, a manner of (re)presentation that “thinks in terms of the negation of the subject rather than her formation, the disruption of lineage rather than its continuation, the undoing of self rather than its activation.”
Wanted
dir. Timur Bekmambetov, 2008
I used to do a chaotic thing as a teenager where I would stay up late and watch a movie on TV while doing calisthenics in the living room— anyone?
War Games
dir. John Badham, 1983
My family had some friends (of friends, in reality) who had a house that I think of as being deep in the woods, although this was probably just because we had to drive a while to get there. The interiors I remember being mostly wood, and the basement where “the kids,” colloquially, watched this movie was too cold without a sleeping bag and too warm with one. There was a secret room behind a bookcase down there, and also a real sword on the wall. While we were watching this, my dad came downstairs and said he had watched it when he was young, too, and it was odd to imagine there could ever be something we both lived, individually, a thread running back through time. It was also odd to think this when our understandings of what a computer is would have been so different.
War of the Worlds
dir. Steven Spielberg, 2005
Something about this felt very real to watch in 2005, although surely not as real as the original 1938 radio broadcast did for that man in whom it incited cardiac arrest. This was the first disaster/dystopia film I watched that felt viscerally scary to imagine, which might be the definition for a… good movie?
I am demanding a cultural history of the alien mythos, and I am recruiting Jill Lepore for the task. I want to know where, I want to know when, and most importantly—and this is where Jill comes in—I want to know why. Enough with the theories of ancient civilizations being guided by an extraterrestrial influence (an oddly un-anthropocentric turn in what is otherwise a pretty unduly self-congratulating history of mankind), I want to know why the last century+ has seen the surge of alien obsession that it has. I’ve never heard of any Victorians running around insisting that they’d been abducted into hovercrafts and probed by green men, let alone any Late Antiquity Greco-Romans (or were there). Aliens are like vampires in that they are metaphoric, encapsulating, representative of something societal we struggle to face head-on—the surveillance state? ongoing threat of nuclear total war? endangered bodily autonomy? a desire for higher power unsullied by centuries of global exploitation? Jill, do your thing.
War Requiem
dir. Derek Jarman, 1989
Derek Jarman is a filmmaker for whom I carry so much respect, so much adoration, and so much gratitude, and yet I continually engage with some of his work that enters and slips through me like cold brew coffee, but with less of a kick. This is not to say I think he’s overrated or that his profound impact on queer cinema and film art is fallacious; it’s just that I think we lack a shared understanding of many things (nationalist myths?), which does not excise the foundational motivating force I identify as something he and I share, nor does it mean there aren’t still constellations of overlapping concerns, reveries, and admirations. This could be a treatise on devaluing blind hero worship, but I do my share of that, too.
Water Lilies
dir. Céline Sciamma, 2007
Definitely a queeper (a queer + creeper aka slow plot about coming-of-gay-age— I will not be explaining this definition again, as I expect it to be fully folded into the lexicon by then). More collaborations between iconic exes Adèle Haenel and Céline Sciamma, please.
The Watermelon Woman
dir. Cheryl Dunye, 1996
A delightfully contrived, conceptually understated, and surprisingly moving portrait of queer Black womanhood and identity. I have since seen several of Dunye’s shorts, and even though most of them were made before this feature, they all seem to circumambulate The Watermelon Woman, or lead to it, a palimpsest of a revolutionary style. This is not meant to devalue the originality or inventiveness of the prior work, just to posit that magnum opuses do exist and this one has been hugely influential (on me, and others).
Waves
dir. Trey Edward Shults, 2019
Saw this for free at an AMC through my institute of higher learning and did not love it. There were heart-rending and visually striking moments, but I left feeling a little emptier, like the film demanded a lot and gave very little back.
Wayne’s World
dir. Penelope Spheeris, 1992
I don’t remember when or why, exactly, but I did see this, probably found it amusing, and then never really thought about it again until that recent Uber Eats campaign featuring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey in character.
The Way Way Back
dirs. Nat Faxon, Jim Rash, 2013
Forgot that I’d seen this and I’m not sure how I remembered, but it was well into beginning this newsletter. One of the unexpected joys of writing these musings has been recollections of not only the films I’m writing about, but complete others, connected by a circuitous route with several transfers. This movie might be about a water park, or maybe it’s about a station wagon, and it quite possibly could be about both.
The Wedding Banquet
dir. Ang Lee, 1993
I was responsible for screening this for a class I was TAing, but I couldn’t get there until ten or so minutes into the class, so I never saw a lot of the setup. The rest of the film, though, was cheery and cheeky both. If I were writing a book or even essay about tracing the “fag hag” through popular culture, I might rewatch this, because it rejects that.
Weekend
dir. Andrew Haigh, 2011
I watched this gay drama about a blossoming hookup on Netflix while I was not out, which is a term that I’m never that comfortable using because it presupposes or at least seems to suggest that I was withholding part of myself from public scrutiny. While this is certainly true, “not out” can ignore the fact that I was hardly out to myself—sure, I probably fell asleep that night in a fugue of dismissal about how hot the sex scenes were, how covetable the intimacy, but my cognitive gymnastics of the self (CGS?) precluded me from identifying these desires as a matter of sexual identity formation and clung to that of a simply engrossing aberrance. I wish I could insist there was a doggedness with which I would enter into mental dialogues that all concluded with an oblique rationalizing of desire as purely a desire-to-be and not a desire-to-have, but oftentimes it felt like this was happening as an undercurrent, a feed of thought visible but fragmented beneath the surface of eddying perception. Maybe this is a style of dissociation, or maybe it’s denial, plain and simple, but the passivity of these (frequent, mind you) occurrences gives me pause— I might just not have had the language, but films like this surely helped me to learn a few new words.
PLEASE share your own experiences with any of this week’s films in a comment—I’ll include my favorite in next week’s email for my millions of beautiful fans* to enjoy.
*Data pending
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