For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 surveillance paranoia thriller The Conversation, which recently screened at Prytania’s Classic Movie Series.
There is currently an American remake of Andrei Żuławski’s monstrous divorce meltdown Possession in the works, to be directed by Smile‘s Parker Finn and produced by Robert Pattinson. The project is both catastrophically misguided and totally understandable. Just a decade ago, it was difficult to access the 1981 political psych thriller through any official, legal means, which afforded it a kind of cult-curio prestige. The full-bodied mania of Isabelle Adjani’s performance in out-of-context clips in which she writhes in a tunnel while smashing her groceries against the concrete wall got passed around the internet enough that it gradually became a staple of online film culture, though, initiated by its copyright-infringing use in the Crystal Castles music video for “Plague.” A few expensive physical-media reissues & short streaming-platform stints later, and Possession is now an official part of the canon. There’s even enough evidence to argue that Adjani’s interpretive-dance tunnel freakout is the most influential movie scene of the current moment. It was cited as direct inspiration for at least three of last year’s biggest horror-heroine performances (Nosferatu, Immaculate, The First Omen), and now some poor actress will be tasked with retracing Adjani’s exact steps in a mainstream remake removed from its original cultural & political context — the final stage in legitimizing any once-subversive piece of art.
Adjani’s interpretive-dance freakout is now so cinematically ubiquitous that it’s influencing procedural dramas about tense parent-teacher conferences, not just horror flicks. The Norwegian film Armand is mostly structured as a stage play in a single primary school classroom wherein two couples argue about a physical altercation between their 6-year-old sons, as mediated by a timid schoolteacher and her hard-nosed administrative higher-ups. In the initial telling of the story, the titular child Armand is accused of having sexually assaulted his playmate in a school bathroom, an event that neither (unseen) child has the full vocabulary to communicate to the confused, horrified adults. Every parent and school employee has a hidden, selfish agenda in how they react to this crisis, which is slowly teased out in a web of secrets & resentments that link the two families far beyond the transgression they’re currently debating. It’s Armand’s mother Elizabeth who’s afforded the most complex internal life, though, as performed by Renate “Worst Person in the World” Reinsve. As the intensity of the parent-teacher conference escalates, she has a full psychotic breakdown that destroys all decorum by releasing something monstrously inhuman in the room, transforming a small-scale drama into a full-blown psych thriller merely by laughing & crying with violent intensity at unpredictable intervals. Armand might have gotten the title, but the movie is Elizabeth’s story.
It’s when Elizabeth steps into the school’s hallways & empty classrooms that the movie goes full Possession. The whispered rumors that spiral out of that closed-door meeting haunt her like vengeful ghosts as they echo off of every hard surface to the point of supernatural cacophony. Her public-figure role as a semi-famous actress combines with the scrutiny of her mothering technique to give her the feeling of constantly being pawed at from every direction, which is literalized by the imagined hands of fellow parents roughly groping her flesh in interpretive dance. The proceedings are coldly clerical in nature, but there’s an erotic violence to the tone that reverberates throughout the building, frequently turning moments of heated intimacy into physical abuse as parents & staff siphon each other off into empty rooms. Whether abuse is learned or inherited and whether you can ever fully separate truth from spin provide the film a thematic justification for what’s mostly just an excuse to rattle the audience, often through unexpected nosebleeds, fire alarms, and thundercracks. First-time director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel is playing a game of tonal precarity here, unlocking something intangibly evil in a parent-teacher conference the way Possession unlocks something intangibly evil in a simple act of adultery or, more notably, a trip to the grocer. My comparing Reinsve to Adjani is probably doing her performance no favors, but she does hold her own among other recent actresses who’ve explicitly stated that’s where they’re drawing their inspo.
It’s entirely possible that no one making Armand had Possession in mind during production. As the nepo-grandbaby of Ingmar Bergman & Liv Ullman, Tøndel has plenty of under-the-surface menace to pull from just within his own family’s cinematic legacy. Where & when he chooses to break from reality in this psychological meltdown felt Possession adjacent to me, though, especially by the time the cast breaks into violent, abstract dance. By default, it’s a more compelling, interpretive use of Possession’s influence than any straight-forward Hollywood remake could be, regardless of whether the influence was conscious. The influence is unavoidable right now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do something new with it.
I have been aware of George Dureau’s legacy as a local artist for as long as I have been aware of local art, but until now I’ve only ever seen a toned-down, smoothed-out presentation of his actual work. Dureau was an edgy, confrontational presence in the early decades of his notoriety, but by the time I was old enough to explore local art galleries on my own in the 2000s, he had become a respectable cultural ambassador for the city, delivering commissioned works of public art for institutions like NOMA & Gallier Hall. The only time I’ve ever seen his image outside of self-portraits and still photographs is in a made-for-PBS documentary about the process of constructing Mardi Gras parade-floats, titled From the Ground Up. Introduced to him as a venerated public artist, I assumed his personal work was as safe & kitschy as George Rodrigue’s, but Dureau was much more provocative than that. He had just already gone through the John Waters trajectory of outsider-art iconoclast turned Respected Filth Elder before I was around to see the transformation. Thankfully, the new documentary George Dureau: New Orleans Artist is here to correct the record.
George Dureau: New Orleans Artist is a documentary portrait of a classic French Quarter eccentric, crudely stitched together from the stories & works he left behind. The movie itself is ragged in its construction, seemingly assembled from whatever scraps of interviews with Dureau could be found on YouTube and molding camcorder tapes, with little attention paid to their mismatched sound quality. Despite enjoying an active social & professional life in the city for over eight decades, only eight interviewees are included in this hagiographic portrait, which either feels lazy or cowardly (depending on how divisive other participants might have found his personality or art). The filmmaking team of Sergio Andres Lobo-Navia & Jarret Lofstead are inconsistent in the final edit on when to illustrate those interviewees’ anecdotes with location-specific images captured around the city and when to just repeat triple-exposure shots of oak tree canopies filmed from below as a place-holder background image for the audience to zone out to. Still, no matter the moment-to-moment quibbles I had with the presentation, I left overall grateful for them giving this subject a feature-length treatment in the first place.
As a slideshow of art stills, New Orleans Artist is thrilling. Dureau thought of himself primarily as a painter and was frustrated by the curational attention paid to his photographs instead. Both mediums are presented with equal weight & importance here, drawing a throughline between the macho, muscular models he scouted to photograph in his home studio and the classical figure paintings that resulted from those studies. A homosexual lush with a warm but caustic demeanor, Dureau is portrayed as his own worst professional enemy, self-sabotaging his way through The Art World as he blew easy opportunities in order to maintain a vague personal integrity that only he fully understood. This self-driven conflict is mostly explained in his relationship with infamous NYC photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whom both the film and Dureau himself argue photocopied all of his best visual ideas in less interesting, crueler works that made a lot more money in a market that thrives on cruelty. Dureau’s own work could cynically be seen as exploitative towards his nonprofessional models, whom he often sought for their differences in race & physical disfigurement. Mapplethorpe is presented at length as both an example of Dureau’s self-sabotaging professional combativeness and as an example of how this same work could be truly exploitative in the wrong hands.
A better movie might have focused entirely on Dureau’s warmly bitchy clashes with Mapplethorpe and the mutual influences of their work as contemporaries. There’s a specificity & purpose to that subject that’s missing in the film’s broader recollections of Dureau’s life in the city, which often devolve into “Ain’t dere no more” nostalgia and understandable-but-rote mourning over the devastation of AIDS & Hurricane Katrina (both of which Dureau survived relatively intact). By the time local art gallery owner Arthur Rogers explains that the French Quarter of the 1970s was different from today because it was full of “true eccentrics” then, I was nauseated by the obliviousness to the city’s ongoing art-scene counterculture; speaking of it purely in the past tense is embarrassing, not validating. Dureau’s work is powerful enough to speak for itself, though, and it loudly speaks over any good-old-days distractions from the film’s few interviewees. His work feels especially alive when compared with Mapplethorpe’s, seeming much cooler & kinder than his more famous frenemy’s (which was blurred at local screenings, presumably due to copyright issues). No one would have hated a side-by-side Dureau/Mapplethorpe documentary more than George Dureau himself, though, so it’s probably for the best that the only feature-length documentary of his work to date is about his relationship with New Orleans instead, something he did have genuine affection for.
Welcome to Episode #232 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss the earlier works of this year’s Best Director Oscar nominees, starting with Sean Baker’s porn-industry buddy comedy Starlet (2012).
00:00 Apology/Goo 05:03 Kinda Pregnant (2025) 10:19 The Vietnam War (2017) 14:17 The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) 18:35 Rats! (2025)
23:39 Starlet (2012) 41:48 The Childhood of a Leader (2015) 58:30 A Prophet (2009) 1:13:22 Revenge (2017) 1:28:36 Cop Land (1997)
Christopher Landon has his heart set on reviving the slasher, and he only has one plan on how to pull that off. In Happy Death Day, Landon combined the slasher with the time-loop Groundhog’s Day comedy, hoping to bring some novelty to a horror template that’s been stale since at least the late 1990s. In Freaky, he combined the slasher with the 80s body-swap comedy, and now, as a producer & writer on the latest slasher-mashup Heart Eyes, he has repeated the gimmick by combining the slasher with the mainstream romcom. All of these novelty mashups have a killer logline premise and a few amusing individual gags, but they’re not doing much to revive the slasher on its own merits. If anything, by comparing & merging the slasher with other genres decades beyond their own respective expiration dates, Landon is making a dispiriting admission that it is an effectively dead medium. It’s like improvising a full meal out of several incongruent, insufficient portions of leftovers before they get tossed out or mold in the fridge. Sure, it’s filling, but it’s also desperate and ultimately unsatisfying.
To be specific, Heart Eyes combines the early 2000s third-wave slasher with the 2010s straight-to-Netflix romcom, inadvertently calling attention to how long both genres have been culturally dormant (and how dire of a state they were in when they were most recently relevant). The romcom plot at its center is purposefully tropey as a They Came Together-style parody of the genre, complete with verbal references to decades-old relics like Notting Hill, My Best Friend’s Wedding, and 10 Things I Hate About You. Olivia Holt (doing her best Kate Hudson) stars as an over-worked, under-compensated marketing professional whose latest, failed ad campaign has put her job in jeopardy. Mason Gooding (doing his best Ryan Phillippe) co-stars as the hotshot ad agency hunk who’s threatening to take over her job but, wouldn’t you know it, they end up falling for each other despite the professional conflict. Of course, this swooning reverie is broken when a masked maniac who only kills lovers—only on Valentine’s Day—interrupts their meet cute with meaty cuts, hunting the unlikely couple during their first after-hours business meeting together while they desperately insist that it is not a date.
If there’s any thematic justification for this clunky genre mashup, it’s based in a cynicism against modern romance, as annually escalated by the cultural Valentine’s Day ritual. Heart Eyes ties its slasher-romance premise to a longer violent-romantic literary tradition, citing Romeo & Juliet, Bonnie & Clyde, and Jack & Rose as iconic couples who meet a violent end in their respective stories. In practice, though, its only real commentary on the nature of romance is mired in current, derisive assessments of love in the internet age, as typified by social media envy, dating apps, incels, kinks, throuples, etc. It’s a rallying cry for anyone frustrated with the state of modern romance, offering ironic, gory counterprogramming for people who groan at the very mention of Valentine’s Day, an emblem of a great societal failure. Thankfully, the mascot of that counterprogramming is at least well designed: a leather-hooded figure with glowing hearts for eyes and a full arsenal of deadly weapons, including some Cupid arrows for the sake of holiday-specific branding. The reveal of that mysterious killer’s identity is a bit of a letdown, but the mask is memorably distinct and the kills are memorably brutal, which is more than most rote slashers deliver.
Speaking of romantic traditions, the Valentine’s Day slasher is a subgenre with its own history of unrated gems, namely Valentine & My Bloody Valentine. If Heart Eyes has a permanent place in the greater horror canon, it’s as a novelty to be watched on that specific holiday, the way dedicated horror nerds plan their calendar around titles like April Fool’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Christmas, and New Year’s Evil. That seasonal context is much more forgiving to its charms than the context of Christopher Landon’s career project of saving the slasher through an ongoing series of genre mashups. As a blending of the slasher and the romcom, Heart Eyes feels disappointingly out of date and insincere, especially when compared to more conceptually thorough mashups like last year’s slow-cinema slasher In a Violent Nature. So much of the modern slasher’s current state is defined by nostalgia for past successes, with recent revivals of Scream, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Slumber Party Massacre being typical examples (along with broader pastiches like Ti West’s X trilogy). Tying that revival to other long-stale genres like the romcom and the body-swap comedy doesn’t exactly imply progress or innovation; it’s a lateral move at best.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the 2017 road-trip dramedy Please Stand By, starring Dakota Fanning as an autistic Star Trek obsessive on the run.
Very early on in the first year of Swampflix, I reviewed a bad-on-purpose horror comedy called WolfCop, about a werewolf who’s “half man, half wolf, and all cop”. I remember having fun with the absurd novelty of that film’s premise and throwback 80s aesthetic, but I also remember finding the plot-heavy journey to those pleasures to be frustratingly tedious. A decade later, not much has changed. WolfCop director Lowell Dean has a new straight-to-Shudder horror film called Dark Match that repeats all the exact highs and lows of his werewolf-cop movie, except now mapped to the milieu of 1980s regional pro wrestling circuits. Infinity Pool & Possessor cinematographer Karim Hussain makes great use of Dark Match‘s late-80s setting by submerging its hyperviolent pro wrestling matches under a thick layer of VHS haze, often shooting its actors in uncomfortable, drunken close-ups like an unexperienced videographer operating the era’s bulky cameras for the very first time. The story also works its way up to a fun, bloody bar-napkin premise once it lures its minor pro wrestling promotion out to a backwoods cult compound for untelevised death matches, which turn out to be a Satanic ritual involving novelty weapons themed to Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water. The problem is that it’s a long, trudging journey to the over-the-top joys of that core premise, repeating all of the sins and virtues of WolfCop along the way.
If there’s anything that’s improved about Lowell Dean’s high-premise genre exercises in the past decade, it’s in Dark Match‘s tonal progression towards sincerity. Wrestling hall-of-famer Chris Jericho hams it up as the rural cult leader who’s engineered the death matches that liven up the third act, but he’s mostly included as a prop. Aisha Issa stars as our POV wrestler, Miss Behave, who’s the most talented grappler on her promotion’s roster but has to play heel due to the small-town racism of the venues they entertain. A stunted career spent putting over bubbly blonde white women leaves the Trinidadian cynic in an eternally rotten mood, which makes her sharply aware of the sour vibes at the Satanic cult’s pro wrestling sleepaway camp long before the death matches’ decapitations & disembowelings. The resulting tension falls somewhere between a straight-to-streaming knockoff of Get Out and a straight-to-streaming knockoff of Green Room, paling in comparison to either overt reference point. Thankfully, the four killer wrestling bouts at the center of the film liven things up with some true, gruesome novelty, and the sincerity of Miss Behave’s journey to that violent escalation prevent it from devolving into winking, smug irony. Unfortunately, those matches make up less than a third of the total runtime, and the remaining scenes of sincere drama are effectively dead air.
For a much more efficient, satisfying version of what Dark Match is going for, check out the 2011 novelty horror Monster Brawl, which simulates a feature-length pro wrestling Pay-Per-View where all of the combatants are Famous Monster archetypes: a werewolf, a mummy, a zombie, a Frankenstein, etc. However, please keep in mind that everyone I recommend that movie to absolutely hates it. Dark Match only truly comes alive during its gore-gimmicked pro wrestling bouts, having obvious fun with the visual textures of vintage TV broadcasts of the sport (despite the implications of its title). Monster Brawl maintains kayfabe for its entire runtime, never breaking from its TV broadcast premise for jags of dramatic tedium. That fully committed format leaves a lot more room for supernaturally violent in-ring action, which is the only reason an audience would stream one of these novelty horrors in the first place. Given that Monster Brawl is loved by seemingly no one but me, maybe it doesn’t matter that Dark Match falls short of its fully-fleshed-out ideal. Maybe all that matters is that, like Lowell Dean, I’m still wasting my time on disposable trivialities like this ten years since our last passing moment together. Regardless of whether the movies that bond us are any good, we are brothers in schlock.
The first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidential term have surprisingly been defined more by the daily stunts & shenanigans of unelected government official Elon Musk than they have been by the actions of the president himself. Sure, Trump is signing a relentless barrage of hateful, unconstitutional Executive Orders that are threatening to crumble decades of social & economic progress in a matter of days. That was fully expected, though, especially if you paid any attention to the “Project 2025” agenda advertised during his election campaign. Musk’s overt, oligarchic influence on these Executive Branch actions have been just as nefarious but much more bizarre, especially as an extension of the failed meme humor of his current reign as the Villain King of Twitter. It’s not enough that Trump & Musk are wielding institutional power to reshape America with a straight-up Nazi agenda; they’re also irony-washing that Nazi ideology through several layers of internet meme humor, so that their above-board, bought-and-paid-for coup is read as a humorous prank meant to “trigger the libs,” not to welcome in a new, shameless era of American fascism. Between Musk’s “DOGE” branding, his juvenile obsession with the numbers 69 & 420, and the bar now being so low that his executing a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration now qualifies as a “dog whistle,” it’s clear that we’re living through America’s first 4chan presidency. Evil has never been so inane.
If you catch yourself wondering how, exactly, we got here over the last few years, I’ve seen no better explainer than the 2020 documentary Feels Good Man. A 90-minute history lesson on the memeification of a cartoon stoner frog may sound trivial in the context of America’s Nazi takeover, but Feels Good Man somehow does a better job explaining & contextualizing that far-right political shift than any other film I’ve seen – predating and overriding all of those QAnon docs that auto-populated on every streaming service in the years following the January 6 coup attempt of 2021. The stoner frog in question is, of course, Pepe the Frog, the breakout character from alt-comics artist Matt Furie’s cult series Boys Club. A soft-spoken San Francisco stoner who’s been drawing goofy frog doodles his entire life, Furie confides that Pepe is the Boys Club character he most personally identifies with . . . which is a brave thing to admit given the character’s eventual perversion and radicalization in the Hell pits of 4chan once it escaped the pages of his comic book. A single frame of Boys Club in which Pepe explains to his burnout roommates that he urinates with his pants completely lowered to his ankles because it “feels good man” was a funny enough image that it started getting shared on the internet outside the context of its source material and, as the movie argues, somehow snowballed into Donald Trump becoming the 45th President of the United States.
I have a general affection for Anthropology of the Internet documentaries that immortalize disposable online ephemera for cinematic prosperity, especially when they capture the sinister atmosphere of the Internet’s dankest dungeons (see also: the Russian dashcam compilation The Road Movie, the evil-clown sightings doc Wrinkles the Clown, and Jane Schoenbrun’s Slenderman doc A Self-Induced Hallucination). Even so, Feels Good Man does a better job than most at explaining how its own subject’s online virality led to real-world consequences outside niche meme forums. It chronicles Pepe the Frog’s transformation in the hellfires of 4chan from loveable frog to “the new swastika”, explaining how users who identified with Pepe as much as its creator had to force the frog to “go dark” to protect him from “normies” (i.e., women) who might identify with him as well. Because 4chan is an attention-economy culture that mostly traffics in “ironic” racism, this effort manifested as Pepe becoming a mouthpiece for Nazi rhetoric and an online dog whistle for alt-right C.H.U.D.s. Making Pepe as bigoted as possible became a kind of online game, and it gave real-world Right Wing ghouls a way to signal to the keyboard Nazis at home that the Trump-led establishment shared their values without abandoning their more buttoned-up, traditional voter base. That co-opting seems a little quaint now that Elon Musk is Sieg Heiling on an official government stage, but it was a major stepping stone that led us here.
The half of Feels Good Man that explains how 4chan memes created a new Nazi America is populated with all the expected demons of 2010s alt-right ascension. Pepe’s Nazi radicalization was directly inspired by Steve Bannon’s political strategy to “flood the zone with shit,” which has become the go-to playbook for the Trump-led Republican Party. During the infamous street interview when Richard Spencer is punched in the face by a protester, he’s explaining his Pepe the Frog lapel pin to a reporter at the moment the fist connects with his jaw (which the movie graciously repeats in several loops for our viewing pleasure). Pepe is even transformed into a direct stand-in for Trump himself, outfitted with a new smug facial expression and a Trumpian wig. Most critically, former Infowars blowhard Alex Jones is sued for copyright infringement by Matt Furie after using Pepe’s image on a fundraising campaign poster, marking Furie’s too-little-too-late attempt to reclaim his intellectual property from the worst people alive. The half of the film that’s about Furie’s astonishment & unpreparedness for the Internet’s hateful perversion of Pepe is adorably naive and populated with fellow alt-comics artists who are sad to see their friend suffer in this exponentially shitty shithole of a world: Lisa Hanawalt, Johnny Ryan, Aiyana Udesen, etc. Their attempt to reclaim Pepe and save his reputation was heavily outgunned, though, since the opposition included literal White House occupants.
It’s easy to roll your eyes at the twee preciousness of Furie’s pleas for good vibes and kindness as opposition against the hateful scum who’ve stolen & desecrated his art, but I appreciate the sentiment. I could not have sat through an exhaustive recounting of how 4chan “elected a meme as a president” and ushered in a Fourth Reich for the LOLs without a little kindness & levity. Being reminded that there are still sweet, reasonable people in the world who are oblivious to the deep well of evil on the other side of their computer screens was a calming counterbalance to the infuriating co-opting of meme culture to enact real-world fascism detailed elsewhere in the film. Five years later, it’s clear which side of that divide is winning the Culture War, but it’s also clear that they cannot create anything substantial themselves worthy of sharing & celebrating; they can only pervert, corrupt, and drain the humor & life out of previously existing art & language (which explains their more recent fondness for generative A.I.). As evidenced by the interstitial animations that imagine what it might be like if Boys Club had been adapted into a psychedelic Adult Swim sitcom instead of a Nazi dog whistle, Pepe deserved so much better than the hell-world we live in. He’s a cool frog.
Welcome to Episode #231 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss a grab bag of 90s movies about well-meaning teachers confronted with the violent chaos of inner-city schools, starting with the 1997 Sam Jackson vehicle 187.
00:00 Welcome
01:55 Presence (2025) 02:56 The Brutalist (2024) 06:14 The Cranes are Flying (1957) 08:17 The Lives of Others (2006) 14:39 It’s Complicated (2009) 18:13 Two Days in Paris (2007) 20:48 Willard (1971) 23:12 The Colors Within (2025)
28:17 187 (1997) 50:06 Dangerous Minds (1995) 1:03:17 Sister Act 2 – Back in the Habit (1993) 1:24:16 High School High (1996)
The coming-of-age anime drama The Colors Within is about a teenager with extreme synesthesia who forms a synthpop band to express her unusual relationship with color through song. It’s a much gentler picture than that descriptor implies. Naoko Yamada’s color-pencil sketchbook vision is exceptionally quiet for a story about teenage rock ‘n rollers and exceptionally pale for an animated movie about the divine beauty of color. It celebrates the soft smears of color you see when you view the world without eyeglasses. It dwells in the dead air of band practice as the collective idea of a song is just starting to materialize, before it has any foundational structure to cling to. The three members of the band are each fragile recluses who spook easy, to the point where you’re skeptical that they’ll ever have the courage to perform for an audience. When all that restraint melts away during the climactic concert, however, the relief of its release feels good enough to make you cry.
Our protagonist is an adorable, shy teenager who can only relate to the people around her by reading the colors of their auras. Her sweetness and mental abstraction are a kind of social liability, so her only real friend at her Catholic boarding school is a well-meaning nun who encourages her to find “secular ways to honor God” outside the official curriculum. The opportunity to do so presents itself when an older, more rebellious classmate drops out to work at a local bookstore, and a panicked schoolgirl crush inspires her to demand they start a band together to keep in touch. A third lonely, shy musician who hangs around the bookstore brings the project together, but it’s a triumph that mostly manifests as long stretches of downtime between sparse songwriting sessions.
While our protagonist’s synesthesia is presented as a defining character trait, it really doesn’t affect her journey to self and communal discovery except in providing the language to express something she can’t otherwise vocalize. This is mostly a story about youthful, innocent yearning, both in romance and in art. Every member of the band has a secret, both in their unexpressed attraction to each other and in the ways their individual duties to education, work, and religion conflict with their art project. A lot of their yearning is just the desire to spend more time creating that art, finding it difficult to engineer opportunities to all meet in one place, working on one idea. I remember finding time to practice to be an eternal struggle back when I used to write songs for punk bands in high school & college, but I also remember the times when everything aligned just right for us to play songs together satisfying my soul like few other joys of my youth. It’s easy to be nostalgic while returning to that distinctly teenage headspace, so the story can feel like it’s set decades in the past despite all the smartphones and laptops.
The music our trio of sweethearts eventually plays together is catchy, soulful, and well worth the effort of waiting through the stunted progress of its writing. It’s also the music of dissociation, finding immense beauty, joy, and creative expression through the distinctly intangible sounds of synths, theremin, and guitar feedback. Synthpop is a perfect aesthetic choice for a character who sees the world through hazy, swirling aesthetics. It gives her a way to reinterpret her visions of color into the sounds of color, in the process expressing her love for her bandmates in a more direct way than she could previously express anything about anyone. None of the routine prayer nor rigid interpretation of God’s will at her Catholic boarding school ever approaches anything so purely divine. Thankfully, there was one cool nun around to help her see the positive value in those secular pleasures without feeling any unnecessary, residual shame for the indulgence. This is how I remember writing songs with my friends feeling at that age, but that is not at all how I remember my own Catholic schooling.
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