There’s nothing punks and metalheads love to debate more than authenticity and scene cred, so that’s the only critical lens I could think to apply to the no-budget slasher Blood Sick Psychosis. Set in Philadelphia’s D.I.Y. metal scene, Blood Sick Psychosis is a dual throwback to SOV camcorder horrors and the earlier metalsploitation trend of the Satanic Panic era. So, I’d argue it loses a few punk authenticity points for indulging in retro genre pastiche instead of being true to its era. It clearly admires no-budget horror “classics” like the Canuxploitation slasher Things, Tina Krause’s surrealist headscratcher Limbo, and the Paloma Brothers’ home video gross-out Hallucinations, only modernizing its feature-length homage to that era with an updated crust-metal soundtrack and a few stray shots of cellphones. It’s a loving copy of a pre-set SOV slasher template, presented in the exact way most of the movies it emulates are seen by modern audiences: frequently interrupted by ad breaks on subscription-free streamers like Plex. Whether you find that style of pastiche charming is a question of taste, but the movie opens with its villainous lead having a Crispin Glover-sized emotional breakdown while wearing a River’s Edge promotional t-shirt, so you can’t say you were not warned.
Where Blood Sick Psychosis racks up its punk-cred authenticity points is in the way it continues the true mission of retro SOV slashers: documentation of its filmmakers having a good, wholesome time. Like all great regional, no-budget horrors, it’s basically community theatre. Blood Sick Psychosis drags its audience through a guided tour of the drive-in movie theaters, squat basement music venues, and cheesesteak shops of modern Philadelphia, all presented through the prism of VHS tape warp. No detail in its plot about a depressed metalhead loner who goes on a senseless killing spree with his acid dealer matters as much as its survey of a local D.I.Y. show starring the Philly-based black metal band Spiter, who encourage their audience “to kill yourself for Satan” before serenading them with the mantra “Suicidal bloodfucker, vampiric bloodsucker”. This is an on-the-ground document of a scene and, even though I’ve never been, I’ve always gotten the impression that Philly is the exact performatively cold & cruel D.I.Y. subculture captured in this gnarly self-portrait. Even when the camera cuts away from reality to indulge in LSD vampirism, paranoid rants about bodily mutations, and the ritualistic slaughter of animals, it still plays like a charming little caricature of the City of Brotherly Love.
Punk infighting about posers & stolen valor has always been incredibly tedious, and I don’t mean to participate in it with any sincerity. I just thought it would be fun to pick at this movie from that angle, since it’s about the exact scene-obsessed dipshits who would care about that kind of thing. In its most telling scene, our two LSD-crazed serial killers chat outside the Spiter show about how annoying it is that punk screenings of Extreme Cinema are all tagged with trigger warnings now, both voicing a genuine frustration with modern punk culture sensitivity and, by the time the conversation reaches its punchline, mocking the reprobates who would oppose that sensitivity. Its playdough claymation credits, Jackass-style “creepy crawl” home invasion pranks, and spectacularly lazy Dave “The Rock” Nelson cameo (seemingly a direct homage to legendary pornstar Amber Lynn’s half-hearted participation in Things) are all overt signals to the audience that it’s just having a laugh, often at its own expense. That willingness to self-satirize really helps smooth over the overtly retro genre nostalgia and slasher-standard misogyny that creeps in at its weakest points. Personally, I’d be more interested in a version of this movie that actually reflects the tools & textures of its digital-video times, but this movie wasn’t made for me. It was made for the cold-hearted metalhead brutes of Philly, who appear to be having a lot of fun.
Longtime readers of the site will know that I’m not just a writer who likes to amble through my reviews, but that I like to preamble them, too. It’s one of the various little tricks that one might pick up at the Royal Baton Rouge Academy of Writing Tricks, or from watching too many video essays of widely varying quality on YouTube. Instead of just beginning this post with “Bros is very funny” and then going into a listing of some of contributors to its existence as a filmic product that you might want to go and see, I’ll throw a bunch of pieces of seemingly unrelated information at you that will, if I do my unpaid job correctly, make sense as all of the ideas flowing through me coalesce over the course of the essay: the number of times that I saw the trailer for Colossal, the mockery that I once endured for sharing information I had recently read about Abraham Lincoln’s possible bisexuality with a friend in high school, David O. Russell, Maggie Fish’s most recent video essay, and everyone’s favorite topic, Twitter discourse. Fun fact: in grad school, one of my professors told me that they got the impression that I just sat down and started writing with no plan, and they were right! They also once sent me an email in response to my soft inquiry about a PhD program letter of recommendation with the advice that I should really start with professors who gave me an “A” first.
Anyway, a little bit further ado: of late, when I tell people about the movies that I’ve been seeing, there are those who want to talk to me about the text itself, and those who know more about The Discourse. (For those who might be interested, Erstwhile Roommate of Boomer hatedDon’t Worry Darling.) Bros was undoubtedly doomed to be part of The Discourse, not just because of the film’s content, but because of its polarizing and contentious star, Billy Eichner. For the uninitiated, Mr. Eichner is a comedian whose first big break was on Fuse’s Billy on the Street, in which a tall, sassy gay man wandered NYC and handed money to people he encountered for answering pop culture trivia questions, sort of like a Cash Cab for pedestrians. What made the show work was the interaction between a flamboyant host who could best be described as a “bitter theatre kid” and the people he encountered and his “man-on-the-street” interviews with them; that having been said, live unplanned interactions are always a gamble, especially in a place like New York. Not everybody who is out and about in the world is going to want to play with you, and although it’s part and parcel of this kind of content that it’s partially about catching people off guard and pushing them towards (not out of the edge) of their comfort zones, there are also going to be people who just don’t want to participate, and part of being good at that job is recognizing those signs. Notably, one interaction that I’m shocked made it to air was one in which Billy continues to hassle a single mother of four about her lack of interest in La La Land, repeating the name of the movie and the phrase “it has Oscar buzz” over and over again until he sounds like he’s talking gibberish. You can watch it here with some commentary tweets below. On the Street was still in production not that long ago, but I doubt this would be put on television in 2022; it assumes that we the viewership will find the interviewee to be unreasonable and “crazy” because she eventually tells Billy off, but after watching Billy continue to engage a woman who’s clearly trying to be left alone about something as vanilla as La La Land, we’re on her side. At least I am. From there, Eichner had a recurring role on Parks & Rec and then co-headlined the Hulu sitcom Difficult People for a few years, although I mostly know him from his appearances on American Horror Story.
We’ll circle back around about Billy. In the meantime, the synopsis: Bobby Lieber (Eichner) is a podcaster who has everything but love. He has a dream Manhattan apartment, is the incumbent recipient of an LGBTQ+ award, will soon be the curator for the city’s first LGBTQ+ museum, etc. This is most obvious in his group of friends, which includes his lady best friend and her husband as well as two gay couples: one has just learned from their surrogate that they will be having triplets, and the other has just announced that they’re expanding to a throuple, while Bobby drifts from one empty sexual encounter with anonymous Grindr torsos to another, trying and failing to convince himself that he prefers it this way. At a club, he has a chance encounter with a handsome gym bunny named Aaron (Luke Macfarlane). The two flirt and Billy Bobby self-deprecates and makes no real secret that he expected Aaron to be an ignorant meathead, but they charm each other nonetheless. They flirt and kiss, but Aaron disappears – his fast, Batman-like offscreen exits an early indicator of his fear of commitment. From there, all of the normal romcom stations-of-the-canon stuff happens, with the early miscommunications, the bumps in the road, the familial warmth and swelling this-could-be-the-one-ness that precede the Act 2 complication, said Act 2 complication, etc. You’ve seen one of these before, I’m sure. If you’re anything like me, then at the point in the movie when things start to seem like they’re going well, you start to wonder when the other shoe is going to drop: Who’s going to be tempted? Is someone going to cheat? It does seem to be leading in that direction when Aaron’s old hockey teammate from when they were in high school comes out of the closet and he and Aaron are flirting at a holiday party, but since this isn’t When Harry Met Sally or whatever, they just have group sex. Instead, it’s a visit from Aaron’s family that shakes up the dynamic, as Aaron asks Bobby to be a little less himself around them, and when there’s a disagreement at dinner about education, Aaron also overreacts. The two part ways and Aaron is caught with his old teammate in a compromising position, and so we get our big mid-film break.
Here’s the thing about Eichner. He’s not a bad actor. He is, however, a branded one, and his brand, for better or for worse, is comedy that is caustic, acerbic, and confrontational, regardless of the role. There’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to break out of that mold, either, and create (or at least try to create) something with a little more gravitas and seriousness. There are several sections of this film in which Bobby opens up about how being gay created barriers for him, and how hard it is to break through societal boundaries to find success in a world that devalues you while still being your true self with all of that criticism and negativity internalized, even from people that you love. The more traditionally masculine Aaron admires Bobby’s confidence to live without concerns about how others perceive him, which is at the root of his commitment issues, while Bobby has convinced himself that he can’t rely on anyone but himself, which is the source of his. To me, Eichner sells these scenes, but I know that won’t be the case for everyone. First of all, you’re automatically not going to see this if you’re a dumb ding-dong who sees a black mermaid or a gay rom-com and fly into a rage because you’ve been trained like one of Pavlov’s dogs to froth at the mouth when you see extremely cynical corporate media schemes masquerading as progressive media because your master taught you to bark woke woke instead of woof woof. When I watched these scenes, Bobby was talking about me; I heard my own experiences and the experiences of so many that I know. For some people, failing to empathize with Bobby would be a moral failing because the American audience is composed of a lot of people who completely lack empathy for those who are different from themselves. For others, the extent to which you can empathize with Bobby is going to be based on how much you’re able to empathize with Billy, which for a lot of people is not very much. And I don’t blame you, because that’s his brand: the dance partner he came with and the horse he rode in – his acidity. Like Nathan Fielder and Tom Green, he has a public persona that blurs the line between reality and character. On that front, the movie worked for me, but I don’t begrudge that it might not work for others.
Recently, Magge Mae Fish put out the second part of her series about The Hero with a Thousand Faces author Joseph Campbell; in particular, this one covers Campbell’s troubling dismissal of contemporary criticism of the Nazis (for those needing to peg this to a specific time frame, Campbell was Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence College from 1934 to 1972, and Hero was published in 1949). In the video, Fish succinctly summarizes an important point about cultural criticism that is forever being missed (or in the cases of intentional right wing con artistry, intentionally suppressed): many cultural commentators look around themselves at a highly managed garden of “canonical” literature and scholarship and treat that space as if they have entered an inherently natural, unguided forest of discourse. That is to say, they would walk out into a metaphorical yard with perfectly trimmed grass, a man-made picnic table, and highly curated flower beds and begin to examine it and make judgments about the “natural” “world” based upon something which is almost entirely the result of deliberate cultivation – and pruning. This is a vital part of understanding our entire world and the way that the machinery of power operates: for centuries, the gatekeepers of Western academia suppressed any literature that was not explicitly pro-Christianity (Catholic or Protestant, whichever was in vogue at the time), male-focused, male-created, European-curated, and heterosexually-dominated, and then looked around at the patriarchal, white, heteronormative, messianic text that was left behind and deemed what they saw to be the platonic ideal of art. Religion is the same; politics are the same. Regressives will look at the rise of equality and egalitarianism and are threatened by it, call it wokeness and decry it without realizing how absurd they look while doing so, because to them, maintaining the status quo of a manicured lawn gives them power, even if calling it “the natural order” is a pathetically transparent lie.
That suppression of non-mainstream ideas is inextricable from larger cultural repression over time, and it’s text and metatext with regards to Bros. While announcing the opening of the museum, Bobby projects an image from the tomb of Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum, two ancient Egyptians who were buried together and whose images are intertwined with one another in the same visual language as other depictions of intimate relationships in art of the same era. Even the editorial tone of the introduction of the Wikipedia page about the couple that states “They are notable for their unusual depiction in Egyptian records, often interpreted as the first recorded same-sex couple, a claim that has met considerable debate” [emphasis added] is sneering, a microcosm of how all queer scholarship is treated in larger circles. That’s part of the point of the use of the image in the movie: queer art has been burnt, buried, and obscured, and the lack of it in our society is not a reflection of a lack of queer history (or a sudden explosion in queer people as part of some some bizarre conspiracy theory), but its suppression. That’s the whole reason that you and I were never taught that Abraham Lincoln was probably bisexual based on his own writings, and why people are in such intense deinal of the possibility and the evidence in favor of understanding the man through that lens, including my otherwise very smart high school classmate. If the world of the film and the world we live in was one in which this hadn’t happened, there wouldn’t be a need for an LGBTQ+ museum, because queer people would already rightfully be recognized as an integral part of all history, not some derivation from the norm that needs its own special space – and there also wouldn’t be a need for Bros, because queer audiences would have always had gay (and bi, and pan) romcoms alongside the deluge of Runaway Brides, Pretty Women, French Kisses, and You’ve Got Mail…ses. In short, culture at large has such “they were roommates” goggles with regards to queer history that even when some bit slips through the cracks, it’s easier for people with pitifully limited critical thought and lackluster imagination to conclude that gay people suddenly sprang into existence in the Twentieth Century and that any statement to the contrary is libtarded revisionism.
When texting about the movie with my friend, he said “I’m not mad at straight people for not paying money to go see a gay romcom.” And that’s a perfectly reasonable point of view, especially because Eichner can be such a polarizing figure, but I don’t blame him for being mad about his art failing to reach people. A part of me thinks that maybe we should be mad, and the only thing holding me back is that defending the perfectly good—but not necessarily great—Bros just isn’t the artistic hill I want to die on. For one thing, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making a film where every single person in the cast, even those playing presumably straight people, were queer (other than celebrities playing themselves, like Debra Winger), but the discourse online isn’t led by rationale and empathy, it’s already weighted in favor of pseudo-intellectual self-described “public thinker” con artists (and their bots, disciples, and disciple bots) stoking indignation in an ignorant populace. Because Eichner made a movie with an all queer cast, this film was fighting from the start against the same reactionaries who respond to announcements that such-and-such organization is specifically looking to recruit a certain quota of people from this-or-that group of people who didn’t win the privilege lottery with frothing screaming that NASA is too woke now or that they’re cancelling their Sports Illustrated subscription because curvy women don’t get their dicks hard. They are not the majority (if they were, they wouldn’t be so angry or trying so hard to turn back time*), but they are the loudest and most noticeable voices.
*They don’t want to turn time back too much, of course. The Jordan Petersons of the world want to return to a very specific time of European white domination of culture, when women looked like Betty Draper because they weren’t allowed to hold positions of power and when they complained about it doctors doped them up with amphetamines. If Peterson had a public meltdown because he couldn’t get off toYumi Nu, he really wouldn’t want to live in a time when beauty standards skewed more Venus of Willendorf and Venus of Dolní Věstonice thanVenus Pudica. Remember, to them, “tradition” means “whatever I want, regardless of history.”
I don’t blame a creator for getting frustrated that there’s no way to know how successful their comedy would have been if it weren’t for straight up bigotry. And further, that as a minority creator, knowing that you have to succeed and failing is an injustice all its own. When my friend that I was texting with about the movie told me that he was specifically turned off by Billy’s tweets, he sent me a screenshot of one message in which Eichner had written “Even with glowing reviews […] straight people, especially in certain parts of the country, just didn’t show up for [Bros]. And that’s disappointing but it is what it is.” I don’t look at that and see a temper tantrum, but it is an unavoidable fact that, because of the brand that Eichner has built for himself, many people will, rather than an earnest expression of frustration against a system of inequality through the lens of someone seeing it in the trenches, their work being riddled with bullets. When I went searching for those tweets in order to link to them, I discovered that they had been deleted, but one of the words I searched for in Eichner’s archive while looking was “Universal,” which led me to a link to this Deadline article announcing production on the film. When I first went to that page, the very top article that appeared on the trending sidebar was this one, about the box office disappointments of David O. Russell’s Amsterdam, and “What This Means For Upscale Movies.” Russell’s history of abuse of his cast and crew is legendary, but he still gets to distance himself from his failures despite the fact that maybe nobody wants to go see this guy who was abusive on a set in a movie directed by this fucking asshole. The deck is always stacked, in the entertainment industry and in life, to allow for men like Russell to fail over and over again and blame everything but the director while the Olivia Wildes and the Eichners of the world are told that the failure of their art to penetrate a system that has been manicured and cultivated to keep them out is the fault not only of their art but of themselves.
None of that will ever really sit right with me, but it’s also true that this movie didn’t reach gay audiences, either, and not just because (as in the case of my friend referenced above) Eichner’s public persona has made him seem unlikable. Within the actual text of the film, there’s a much larger discussion about intersectionality than the marketing, which focuses almost entirely on the romance between the two conventionally attractive white male leads, lets on. Bobby has a fat friend, but he’s not an integral part of the story, and I would be much more willing to write an angry letter of protest on his behalf if one or both of the male leads had more profound problems than “I’m trapped in a glass case of toxic masculinity” and “I hook up with hot guys on Grindr but not, like, circuit queen hot.” The truth, whether he wants to admit it or not, is that Eichner has really only reached this level of success because he actually mostly conforms to Eurocentric beauty norms. If it were someone who looked like Bruce Villanch up there on the screen getting rammed by Luke Macfarlane, this movie (a) wouldn’t be made at all, and (b) some of this backlash would look less… personal. And, of course, (c), every gay blog on earth that did a write-up of the movie would be riddled with “well actually” posts in the comments section that contain nothing but body-shaming under the false banner of medical concern; that’s not relevant to this particular discussion, but in case you didn’t know, it is depressingly omnipresent. I saw one tweet that mocked the movie for being about Eichner’s own image issues, since it can (reductively but not wholly inaccurately) be said to be about how not finding Billy Eichner attractive is a moral failing. And if my other friends who were so sick of seeing the trailer that they never wanted to see the film (like me with Colossal, since that came out during the height of my MoviePass usage) are anything to go by, that overexposure of the marketing to the people most likely to see it might have done more harm than good.
So … Bros is very funny. I got a lot of good laughs out of it, had a lot of fun seeing a lot of unabashedly queer people yuck it up, and there was a country ballad at the end that made me tear up. And I know that there are a lot of people who would read that and be either utterly confused or irrationally angry, but at the end of the day, it’s the truth. Even if you’re not queer, when this comes to rental, maybe throw some dollars its way, so in ten years time, we can get a truly, loudly, unconventional queer movie in mainstream theaters, just in time for all the crops to fail. See you next time!
It probably comes as no surprise that I am a man whose limited social media use includes following the Twitter accounts of several Buffy-related content producers. I used to follow the one and only Mrs. Sarah Michelle Gellar on Instagram until I got sad that her manager was making her do the same branded social media content that fame bottom feeders like Patreon-less YouTubers and people who make cakes that are 80% fondant are doing; I felt like Sideshow Bob shivering upon learning that “TV’s bottomless chum bucket [had] claimed Vanessa Redgrave.” No judgment on our adulated SMG, of course; I love her like Broadway queens love Patti LuPone. I’m just saying everybody needs to go stream BTVS on Hulu like, right now, so that she never has to do another one of those unless she actually wants to. So, of course when I heard that Her Excellency was going to be in a new movie that was being billed as the high school version of Strangers on a Train, and that I didn’t even have to leave the house to see it, well, of course I was going to.
At 28 minutes into Do Revenge, the traditionally attractive Drea (Camila Mendes, of Riverdale), having convinced gawkishly gorgeous Eleanor (Maya Hawke) to do revenge with her, gets excited:
Drea: First we have to fix (pulls Eleanor in front of a mirror) … this. We have to do—
Eleanor: Please don’t say “makeover.”
Drea: —a makeover! Yay! (jumps up and down)
Eleanor: (with vocal fry) Feels problematic.
Drea: It is, but it’s fun!
Do Revenge presents itself as a pretty conventional movie, and in many ways it is, despite its winking self-awareness that it’s trafficking in cliches. Prior to this scene, when Eleanor is offered a tour of her new high school, she responds “I mean, as a disciple of the ’90s teen movie, I would be offended if I didn’t get one.” It’s borrowing from a deep, deep well: high school-set literature adaptations, the sharp wit and ear for dialogue that permeates the mean girl movie canon, and revenge thrillers. The film opens with narration from Drea, who fills us in on how, from humble beginnings, she has clawed her way to the top of the social hierarchy at Rosewood Country Day, an elite private high school in the Miami area. “They all want me as a friend or a fuck,” she says. “I’m worshipped at Westerburg and I’m only a Junior.” Wait, no, shit, that’s Heather Chandler. The words are different, but the speech is the same: it’s the end of her junior year, and she’s done something or other with Teen Vogue. Her friends are mostly vapid hangers-on, and although she thinks of herself as a scrappy underdog, she’s just an Alpha Heather with good publicity. She’s also dating star student Max (Austin Abrams), a weaselly little rich boy who happens to be class president. Since they won’t be seeing each other, he asks her to send him a sexy video, which is then leaked to the whole school. She ends up painted as the aggressor when she punches Max in the quad, and it nearly costs her the scholarship she depends on.
Humiliated, Drea spends the summer friendless, working at a tennis camp for rich girls, a group that includes Eleanor. When the girls there also get their hands on the “leaked” video, Eleanor names Erica (Sophie Turner) as the distributor, and is impressed with how swiftly Drea ruins Erica’s life, planting cocaine on her and remaining calm in the face of Erica’s furious accusations. When Drea has car trouble at the end of the summer, Eleanor drives her back, and they bond, with Eleanor relating a particularly traumatizing story about being outed as queer by a girl she had a crush on, who also told gossipy lies about Eleanor being a predator. Eleanor also happens to be transferring to the same school as the girl who bullied her, which is also Rosewood Country Day. On the first day, Max gives a speech which appropriates the language of resistance in order to distance himself from accusations that he was the one who leaked Drea’s video, shames the people who shared and viewed the video, and humiliates Drea by making her stand up in the assembly. He also announces the formation of the new school club “The Cis Hetero Men Championing Female-Identifying Students League,” which is to be exclusively male and straight, for men to become better allies (I fear I’m underselling the intentional tastelessness and invoked odiousness here, but he’s just awful). Eleanor and Drea run into each other again in the bathroom, and agree to each do the other’s revenge: Drea will get close to and socially destroy Carissa (Ava Capri), the girl who outed and started rumors about Eleanor, and Eleanor will get close to Max and help Drea get her own vengeance, and then they act out the scene transcribed above.
You might be asking yourself where Sarah Michelle Gellar is in all of this; she’s the headmistress of the school who’s heavily invested in Drea’s academic success. Although her scenes are too few, too brief, and too infrequent (although every single entrance made me gasp and say “She looks amazing“), her presence is felt throughout the narrative, and that’s not just me singing her praises. All our favorites are here, blended into a pastel smoothie: one part Mean Girls if Janis Ian used to be Regina George; one part Jawbreaker if Vylette’s makeover was arranged by Julie in order to get back at Courtney; two parts Heathers if Veronica allied herself with Betty Finn instead of Jason Dean; there’s even a little zest of that scene in Cruel Intentions where Reese Witherspoon distributes copies of Ryan Phillipe’s catty little journal to the whole school, except this time it’s copies of Max’s data that proves he’s faking his apparent progressivism, from the top of his stupid earrings to the tips of his “masculinity reimagined” painted nails. And I’m not just projecting that; both movies use Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You,” for goodness’s sake. And that’s not even getting into the (frankly inspired) choice to have the school uniforms uniformly look like Cher Horowitz’s Martha’s Vineyard Easter attire (which gives the whole thing aD.E.B.S. flair). It’s like a greatest hits album, right up until the moment that it suddenly isn’t anymore: well-worn and funny until everything gets turned on its head. I won’t spoil the very Patricia Highsmith twist here, but it disrupts the complacency with the familiar into which the audience has been lulled in a clever way. You thought that just because there was a scene in this movie where someone gets a tour of all the school’s cliques like in She’s All That and Ten Things I Hate About You that it meant you were going to ride the whole thing out in your comfort zone, but there’s something fresh and new here, too.
I’m not really sure what demographic this movie is aiming for, but I’m in it. A few years back, I asked about the decade’s successor to the legacy of the Heathers -> Jawbreaker -> Mean Girls pipeline and nominated New Year, New You as the heir apparent, but there’s something new and fun here. This one is also theoretically aimed at the contemporary teen market, what with the inclusion of Riverdale‘s own Betty with Cabelo, Outer Banks hunk Jonathan Daviss, Alisha Boe from Thirteen Reasons Why, and Stranger Things actresses Hawke and Francesca Reale. (After the recent and dreadful He’s All That, I can only presume that the rest of the cast is filled with TikTokers and former Disney sitcom children.) At the same time, the soundtrack, like the films from which the narrative cribs, is very 90s focused. Aside from the aforementioned Fatboy Slim, the soundtrack also features tracks from The Cranberries, Meredith Brooks, Harvey Danger, the Symphonic Pops, and even The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, if you can believe it. Drea and Eleanor first bond while the dulcet tones of Third Eye Blind’s “How’s It Going To Be?”, and, because someone wanted to make me happy specifically, Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon.” And yet there’s also more contemporary music like Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish (although the simple fact that I, a man in my thirties, knows them could mean that they are no longer cool).
Something finally clicked in my brain during the opening 20 minutes of Climaxwhere I’m now on-board with everything Gaspar Noé is putting out. It’s not the most dignified position to be in, I know, but I like to think it’s because Noé is hitting a new visual & emotional maturity in his recent work – not that I’m backsliding into a juvenile edgelordism that would make his usually flashy, trashy ways appealing. This year, Noé has released a pair of cursed sister films that stretch out De Palma’s signature split-screen sequences into feature length. In Vortex, that side-by-side framing is used as a somber visual metaphor for the ways an aging couple can live separate, isolated lives in a shared, intimate space. In Lux Æterna, Noé drops the thematic pretense and instead simply deploys the split-screen format to actively attempt to melt the audience’s minds. It’s the most authentically “psychotronic” movie I’ve experienced in a while, a signal that Noé still has a little Enter the Void pranksterism left in his bones even if time has softened his sharpest edges.
Lux Æterna opens with arthouse actresses Charlotte Gainsbourg & Beatrice Dalle casually chatting about the cultural misogyny that overlaps between the modern film industry & Old World witch trials. We then see that misogyny in action. Dalle struggles to exert directorial control over a chaotic film shoot of a ritualistic witch burning – featuring other film fest regulars Abby Lee, Karl Glusman, and Félix Maritaud as self-parodic caricatures. As Dalle’s authority is constantly undermined by her cast & crew, all semblance of a functional workplace falls apart horrifically and spectacularly, recalling other recent feature-length stress-outs like Black Bear, Birdman, andHer Smell. Only, Noé uses that familiar set-up to conjure a vivid vision of Hell, likening the scenario to Häxan more than to other behind-the-scenes film set dramas. This culminates in a stunning technical breakdown of the set’s LED screen backdrop, which flashes alternating strobes of red, green, and blue in a blinding finale designed to be suffered more than enjoyed. In LuxÆterna, filmmaking is witchcraft, in that pure-evil supernatural forces can be summoned from the most mundane rituals, and women are always the ones who are burned.
In Vortex, Noé reckons with the pains & limitations of his body, particularly the ways his heart & brain will inevitably fail him after years of hedonistic drug abuse. Here, he reckons with the pains & limitations of his profession. Lux Æterna is a horror film about the stress of behind-the-scenes film set squabbling, a nightmare about a bad shift on the clock. Since it was sponsored by the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house, though, it still has to make those shifts from Hell seem cool, and it ends up being just as much an aesthetic celebration of strobe lights, leather jackets, and sunglasses worn indoors as it is a workplace nightmare. It never returns to the laidback mood of its opening, where two badass women chat about movies & witchcraft, but even its eye-scorching conclusion is beautiful & hip in its own vicious way. It’s an all-around stunning experience, one that mercifully lasts less than an hour to spare the audience unneeded suffering. It also helpfully opens with a warning for anyone vulnerable to epileptic fits, so make sure to consult your doctor before subjecting your brain.
2022 has gradually shaped into Dario Argento’s comeback year, something I never dared to expect from the 82-year-old Italo horror legend. The low-key giallo revival Dark Glasses is Argento’s first directorial credit in a decade and easily his best in twice as long. He was also shockingly great as the lead performer in Gaspar Noé’s Vortex, his first acting credit outside cameo roles & narration tracks. Of all the various ways Argento’s comeback year has taken shape, though, the least surprising has got to be his in-name-only producer credit on She Will, cosigning a younger artist’s work. Not only is Argento making movies again; apparently, he’s also entering his “Wes Craven Presents” era.
That stamp of approval goes a long way in Charlotte Colbert’s debut feature, especially since it’s an indictment of the macho, abusive brutes who occupied every director’s seat when Argento first started making artsy horror pictures in the 1970s. Is Malcolm McDowell’s pretentious, villainous abuser-auteur supposed to be a stand-in for Jodorowsky, for Polanski, for one of Dario’s fellow giallo greats? It doesn’t matter much, since the film is less about his behind-the-scenes crimes than it is about his victim’s delayed revenge. Alice Krige headlines as an ice-queen film actress whose star has faded; she channels her lingering resentments from that child-actor abuse on McDowell’s sets into a witchy, supernatural revenge. The mechanism of public #MeToo callouts simply isn’t enough; only black magic evisceration will do.
I very much vibe with She Will‘s burn-it-all-down political anger, so it’s a shame I couldn’t also vibe with its filmmaking aesthetics. Between its ominous shots of the woods and Krige’s mutually destructive relationship with her young nurse (helping her recover from a double mastectomy), it just ends up playing like a watered-down, VVitch-ed up version of Saint Maud. It’s well considered thematically, like in how the soil at Krige’s Scottish health retreat is enriched by the ashes of locally burned witches, strengthening both her skin and her witchy powers. Its most exciting ideas are just presented in the limpest nightmare-sequences around, with time-elapse nature footage edited together in the Elevated Horror equivalent of an Ed Wood montage. I almost want to say the film is worth it for Krige’s performance as the icy lead, but truth is she had a lot more to do in this same register as the mentorial witch in Gretel & Hansel. There just isn’t much to see here that hasn’t been covered by its sharper, more vivid contemporaries.
Regardless, I still think a “Dario Argento Presents” project is, by default, a more exciting turn for the actor-director-producer’s late career phase than an actual Dario Argento film. Dark Glasses is only interesting within the context of his larger catalog and can only feel like a faint echo of former glories. By contrast, throwing his name by newcomers like Colbert helps them get platformed at film festivals like Overlook and streaming services like Shudder, where She Will has earned a lot more sincere praise than I’m giving it here. It’s an investment in the future of horror filmmaking instead of a victory lap for its faded past, which according to this film was a lot more spiritually & morally bankrupt than we’ve ever fully reckoned with.
It used to be that Hellraiser movies went straight to VHS. Now they go straight to Hulu. Most entries in the decades-running cosmic horror franchise are remembered as late-night, ill-advised video store rentals, the kinds of disposable novelty horrors you’d squeeze in between viewings of titles like Ice Cream Man & Dr Giggles. In 2022, the series has been upgraded to prestige television instead, with David Bruckner’s Hellraiser playing like the HBO series version of Clive Barker’s Hellbound Heart. The new Hellraiser is unrushed, low-lit, and plotty. It’s shot in the same bespoke-leather browns as Nü Gössïp Gïrl, offering the same post-CW melodrama as this year’sThe Batman. It might be television, but it’s at least high-quality television, which means it eventually reaches some euphoric highs once it’s done wrapping up an overlong prologue – like that new show your coworker insists gets great three seasons in if you just stick with it.
Hellraiser achieves a gruesome delirium once it fully lets loose, so it’s a shame all the elaborately gnarly images from its final half hour are in service of such an overall restrained, somber drama. It could have been a real stunner if it just lightened up a bit, both literally & figuratively. Considering that Bruckner’s previous films The Ritual & The Night House weren’t exactly lighthearted romps either, it’s clear he delivered exactly what he was hired to here, so it might just be an awkward pairing of auteur & source material. Bruckner continues his participation in the modern Metaphor Horror trend with a story of a recovering drug addict whose illness drags her friends & family into a symbolic hellworld. Instead of being drawn to the Hell Priest’s puzzle box as a painful gateway to horny transcendence, she sees it as an easy score to pawn off for drug money and, later, as a weapon to be wielded against the fake friends & BDSM demons it unleashes. I’m not sure what the point of making a Hellraiser film is if you’re not interested in the ways prurient desire and the overlap of pain & sexual pleasure can lead to personal destruction, but I guess Bruckner fills the time well enough with his own preoccupations with Trauma Metaphors and expansion of the puzzle box’s “Lament Configurations” lore.
After a full hour of place-setting & narrative justification, the new Hellraiser finally reconfigures into its best self: a haunted house free-for-all. While the original 1987 picture is a domestic melodrama that mostly plays out in a cramped attic, Bruckner sets his cenobites loose in a gigantic Eyes Wide Shut mansion, with plenty of darkened corners for the freaky little fuckers to hide behind. All of the new cenobites are exquisitely designed; Jamie Clayton is a stunning presence as Nü Pïnhead; and there are enough “degloving events” to gross out even the most jaded gore hounds. You just have to push past a lot of modern muck to get there, from the sexless, humorless addiction metaphor at its core to the eye-scorchingly bright ad breaks that violently disrupt its murky prologue. This might be the best Hellraiser movie in decades, but it’s just as indicative of the worst horror trends of its time as the direct-to-video sequels that feature cenobites growing camcorders & CD players on their heads. The industry just happens to be in a good enough place right now that television-level mediocrity is still relatively top-notch.
Like a lot of film nerds, my October ritual is to cram in as many new-to-me horror movies as I can before Halloween passes by. Outside of attending film festivals, Spooktober is my favorite time of year to share titles & takes with my online movie buds, but it can be an exhausting, self-defeating effort if you don’t find enough balance in your movie diet. You cannot watch 31 new-to-you slashers or 31 new-to-you zombie comedies without getting sick of the genre. So, that search for balance often sends me to the outer limits of what can comfortably be categorized as horror, which is where you find genre-defiant headscratchers like Medusa. A loose, dreamworld descent into hedonism & blasphemy, Medusa indulges in some Saved!–style Evangelical satire, purgatorial coma ward occultism, hints of Exorcist body possession, and violent street attacks from history’s least-cool girl gang. It only qualifies as horror because that’s the only genre that can accommodate its loopy nightmare logic. Thankfully, that edge-of-horror grey area is where the greatest movies ever made tend to dwell.
The thing holding Medusa back from achieving that greatness isn’t its resistance to categorization; it’s the high bar set by its fellow genre-defiant South American contemporaries like Good Manners, Ema, Bacurau, and Electric Swan. It’s visually striking throughout, relying on some tried-and-true neon lighting & synthpop aesthetic cues to trigger a pithy “Pure Cinema” Letterboxd review or two. There’s just not much that actually happens between its opening & closing bookends, when we meet a misogynistic Christian girl gang in a near-future Brazil and when they’re collectively possessed by the feminist spirit of a wanton woman who’s been wronged by their kind. Like the demonized, sexually liberated woman they fear so much, the movie effectively slips into a coma between those two points, lucidly dreaming about Evangelical vocal choirs, spon-con influencer videos, atheist dance parties, and sex in the jungle. It gradually emerges from that comatose delirium as feminism & hedonism spread through the woman-beating girl gang like an infection, culminating with the girls finally snapping out of it in high-pitched screams to the camera. I was anxious for them to wake up & reorganize the entire runtime, but I guess if I wanted to watch a sharper, more propulsive version of this story I could always just revisit Ema.
Comparisons to other recent South American genre-benders are easy to make here, since that industry has continued to share a post-Buñuel dream-logic approach to narrative structure, each film lightly surreal in its loose progress of events. The slow-motion music video loopiness of Medusa likely shares more in common with Jennifer Reeder’sKnives & Skinthan any of its localized contemporaries, though, and it often feels like a bigger-scale, slightly bigger-budget version of that American indie. It just also not any more coherent or streamlined. The runtime crosses the 2-hour barrier for no particular reason other than its dripping-IV momentum never allows for its badass images to flow to the screen with any urgency. Still, the Christian girl gang’s conversion to feminist liberators is a satisfying emersion from that pious, medicated dreamworld. It may not be the most finely tuned example of its kind, but it’s at least one of the few body-possession horrors you’re likely to find that isn’t just another riff on one of the usual suspects:Body Snatchers, The Exorcist, The Thing, etc. If you watch enough horror movies, that kind of novelty is invaluable, especially this time of year.
There are two immediately obvious reasons why the special effects horror comedy Monkeybone is worth revisiting in 2022: its director and its star. Henry Selick’s upcoming Wendell and Wild is his first feature film since 2009’s cult favorite Coraline, and it appears to be perfectly in rhythm with the stop-motion nightmares for kids that have defined his career. Not only is Monkeybone Selick’s only live-action film to date, but it also happens to feature another beloved 90s figure who’s making a comeback this year: Brendan Fraser, who’s soon to launch a Best Actor awards campaign for Aronofsky’s The Whale. Fraser is in his wacky, live-action Looney Tunes mode in Monkeybone, as opposed to the dramatic vulnerability mode he brings to films like Gods & Monsters and, presumably, The Whale. Trapped in a literal nightmare-world induced by a coma, Fraser’s comic book artist protagonist goes to war with his own cartoonish creations in a physical version of the Hot Topic mall-goth fantasyscapes Selick made his name on in A Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s like a dispatch from an alternate universe where Tim Burton directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, one made even more fascinating by the fact that it flopped hard on its initial release – investing $75mil on a $7mil payoff.
To my shame, I don’t want to spend much time praising what Selick nor Fraser achieve in Monkeybone. No, I want to praise Chris Kattan. I outright groaned when Kattan’s name showed up in the opening credits, expecting the SNL veteran to be voicing the titular, annoying cartoon monkey sidekick character as an extension of his Mr. Peepers sketches. It turns out that Kattan is totally innocent on that front; Monkeybone is voiced by John Turturro, the scamp. He’s also supposed to grate on the audience’s nerves, as evidenced by Fraser’s constant efforts to get him to shut up & go away every time he opens his obnoxious little mouth. For his part, Kattan doesn’t show up until about an hour into the runtime, playing the corpse of a gymnast who died in a horrific accident. Through convoluted cosmic circumstances that involve a deal with Death herself (played by Whoopi Goldberg, naturally), Fraser’s comatose cartoonist takes over the gymnast’s body mid-organ donation and flees the hospital into an unsuspecting world. Kattan’s physical acting as an animated corpse with a broken neck and organs plopping out of its open body cavity had me absolutely howling with laughter. It was the quickest I’ve ever turned around on a famous actor’s presence in a film, encountering Kattan’s name with dread, then finding his performance so deliriously funny that I almost threw up from the physical exertion. I suppose it’s also worth pointing out that another 2022-relevant actor played a major part of that movie-stealing gag: Better Call Saul’s Bob Odenkirk as the perplexed surgeon who trails behind the undead gymnast, continuing to harvest his organs as they fall to the ground behind him. It’s sublimely silly.
As screechingly funny as Monkeybone gets during Kattan’s third-act zombie run and as wildly imaginative as Selick’s coma-induced Land of Nightmares set designs can be, its legacy mostly resonates with a what-could’ve-been melancholy. Selick might have become a household name if this film didn’t flop so spectacularly. Or at least we wouldn’t get his work confused with Tim Burton’s quite so often. Grimmer yet, Fraser, Kattan, and Rose McGowan (playing a humanoid-cat cocktail waitress, of course) have all gone public with stories of behind-the-scenes sexual abuse from major Hollywood players in the #MeToo era, haunting the film with questions of where their careers might have gone in a better world. In the aftermath of those revelations, Fraser’s getting his late-career comeback, McGowan’s become a self-appointed spokesperson for the movement, and Kattan has continued to live in relative, semi-retired anonymity (give or take an affectionate shoutout in this summer’s Nope). I don’t know that Kattan deserves the same red-carpet career revival as his co-stars, or if the actor would even be interested in a proper Kattanissance if it were an option. I do know this, though: his performance is absolutely the highlight of Monkeybone, somehow outshining all of the cheeky monkeys, cyclops babies, Guernica bulls, and Nazi Mickey Mouse prison guards that Selick packs into the frame. It would have been an interesting relic even without Kattan, creating an amusement park dark ride version of the kinds of grotesque cartoons that only aired on late-night Comedy Central in the 1990s. Still, Kattan’s late-in-the-game intrusion is what pushes it over the line from interesting to essential.
Every Halloween season, it’s customary for me to get suckered into at least one mediocre, mainstream horror that wouldn’t turn my head any other month of the year. This October, I was ensnared by Smile, which has been effectively guerilla-marketed at baseball games & Today Show tapings by attendees with creepy, direct-to-camera stares in a way that’s bound to catch anyone’s attention. A major studio horror from Paramount Pictures, it was the #1 movie in America its first couple weeks of release, less than a month after the similarly off-putting Barbarian led the box office its own opening weekend. The people are hungry for this kind of conventional, jump-scare driven horror right now, so Smile seems like as good as any state-of-the-union check-in on mainstream horror that I’ll likely find this year. In that Spooky Season context, it was perfectly cromulent.
When compared to the grim, grey days of 2016’s Mental Illness Metaphor horror Lights Out, Smile at least registers as a sign that the industry has improved. In terms of the two films’ depictions of mental health crises, those improvements are miniscule. Lights Out cruelly asserts that suicide is a heroic act for the mentally ill, so they will no longer burden their family. Smile softens that messaging to say the mentally ill should isolate themselves, so they don’t infect others with their mania. In this case, suicidal ideation is a curse passed from victim to victim like VHS tapes in Ringu, infecting each poor soul with a demonic presence that smiles at them so intensely they kill themselves, passing on the trauma-curse to whoever’s unfortunate enough to witness the violence. Between the grinning Depression Monster presence of The Babadook, the Snapchat filter smiles of Truth or Dare, and the chain e-mail curse distribution path of It Follows, Smile is made entirely of pre-existing building blocks borrowed from much more creative works. It’s basically a greatest hits collection of late-2010s horror tropes, the kind you’d expect to find on a Target end-cap CD rack.
The post-Hereditary trauma-monster trend forces Smile to participate in a mental illness metaphor it’s too vapid to tackle with any nuance. There are multiple scenes where uncaring therapists, boyfriends, and siblings line up to recite the dictionary definition of “trauma” to our cursed protagonist, explaining how they learned in their online research that mental illness can be . . . you guessed it, hereditary. Maybe the recent “elevated horror” trends from smaller studios like Neon & A24 have led the industry down a treacherous path, since more by-the-numbers chillers from major players like Paramount don’t pay enough attention to the meaning behind their scares to pull off these Trauma & Grief metaphors with any credibility. Still, artsy-fartsy mutations of the genre have at least helped steer the industry’s visual aesthetics into some exciting directions. We’ve finally left the greyed-out, fluorescent-lit dungeons that mainstream horror lurked in for the entirety of the aughts, emerging into lightness, humor, color, and atmospheric tension that’s been missing from the genre since at least the 1990s. Smile might not know why Ari Aster’s camera twists its establishing shots upside down, but at least it’s borrowing from something that’s more interesting to look at than Saw.
Of course, none of Smile‘s relationships to its horror contemporaries really matter in the moment. Its jump scares rattle; its trauma-monster creature design is memorably bizarre; and its constant rug pulls continually prompt you to question reality. That’s all it really needs to pull off to succeed at the one thing it’s supposed to do: entertain horror-hungry audiences its opening weekend in October. By next year, Smile will be replaced by another high-concept, low-creativity horror novelty from a major studio with a knack for attention-grabbing marketing gimmicks, forgotten to time by everyone who’s not a total nerd for this stuff. I just like thinking about what those disposable Halloween Season novelties indicate about the horror industry at large, because I happen to be one of those nerds.
We’re all familiar with Dr. Manhattan and how he exists everywhere at once now, right? Like, it’s not just comic book nerds; the meme(s) mean(s) that everyone knows the whole deal, right? So if I were to describe to you those three panels, but in each one, I’m saying:
It’s 1998 and my mom has rented The Stepford Wives for us to watch while my dad is out of town.
It’s 2004 and I’m sitting in a theater watching the modern version of The Stepford Wives.
It’s 2022 and I’m sitting in a theater watching the modern version of The Stepford Wives.
…you get the effect I’m trying to achieve, right?
Don’t Worry Darling is the sophomore picture of one Olivia Wilde, who delivered a stunner with her freshman flickBooksmart. I first saw the trailer before Men when I caught that in a May screening, and was captivated by it, and I’m glad to say that it delivered for me, even if it isn’t for others. Florence Pugh stars as Alice Chambers, who plays house all day in her gorgeous Midcentury modern bungalow located in a perfect little cul-de-sac. Each morning, she sees off her husband Jack (Harry Styles) as he and all of the other husbands in the neighborhood drive off to work in their pristine 1950s cars (I’m not a car guy and I guess there’s not a lot of overlap between car guys and this movie, since there would normally be a list of cars in the IMDb trivia by now, so your guess is as good as mine; I’m certain at least one was a Chevy and that’s all I’ve got). They’re all residents of a company town called Victory, and Jack and all of the men work for Frank (Chris Pine) on something called “progressive materials,” which is of course classified. The gals spend their days with housekeeping and idle leisure — shopping, spending long days creating perfect meals, drinking poolside, scrubbing bathtubs, keeping fit with ballet lessons from Frank’s wife Shelley (Gemma Chan), and making beds. Of course, it’s not the 1950s we know, and we’re tipped off by this from the film’s first moments, where we see the Chamberses hosting a party with an interracial couple (with the Loving V. decision still a decade away) and living in a desegregated neighborhood, as evidenced by the presence of Margaret (KiKi Layne) and Ted Watkins.
All is not peachy keen for everyone in Pleasantville, however, as Margaret is going through a difficult time. Some time before the start of the narrative, she believed that she saw a biplane crash in the desert hills that surround the town and went into the Headquarters’ restricted zone with her son to find it; only she came back alive, and Alice’s best friend Bunny (Olivia Wilde) in particular is judgmental of the whole situation. For Alice, however, things are perfect: she has her handsome husband, her perfect life, and her gorgeous friends, and he’s getting a promotion! That is, until she sees a plane crash over the ridge as well and, going to inspect it, comes upon a reflective, man-made structure that gives her a surreal vision. She awakens back at home, but it’s as if the veil of her reality has been pierced, and as more traumatic events take place in Victory, she begins having nightmares and hallucinations that affect her sense of reality. And, as you would expect, nothing is as it seems.
Almost five years ago, a new employee joined my company, and in his icebreaker, they were asked, If you could live in a fictional tv or movie world, what would it be? Their response? “Mad Men,” they said. “I really like the late 50’s and 60’s. I know the time is not fictional but the show is. I’m not a big fiction fan. That time period had the best designed cars, furniture, homes, fashion, etc.” I’ll leave aside that this person voluntarily said that they were not a “fan” of “fiction” (although woof), because I had my own collegiate phase in which I refused to read non-fiction and said of all non-fiction works, saying “They’re all the same, it’s all about white people having a spiritual experience at the expense of colonized peoples or some person thinking that they can’t climb a mountain only to realize that they can,” and then I would perform what is colloquially known as a “jerk off motion.” I get that I can be closed-minded too. But I was also completely agog that my new colleague sat down and watched Mad Men and the lesson that he absorbed from it was “Dan Draper is cool,” rather than “nostalgia without inspection is poisonous and insidious.” When I mentioned this to a friend, I was surprised to learn (as a person who ended up watching the show rather late into its run) that there was actually a fairly large misaimed fandom for the AMC show during its heyday. The lesson I took from that day is that some people are very easily won over by candy-coated Midcentury modernism, so much so that even when the text is blindingly obvious in its intent to convey the message that the past is always worse than you think. The show’s timeline overlapped with the lynching of Emmit Till and the assassination of MLK and intentionally so (it would often skip a year or two between seasons, so when a contemporary event fell within the scope of the narrative, you knew it did so with purpose), and that’s just the big picture stuff, not even getting into the social normalization of casual littering, child abuse, and just about every bigotry you can name. And yet some people only noticed the Noguchi coffee tables and the Coupes DeVille.
Supposedly, Pine’s character, the enigmatic Frank, is based on self-titled “public intellectual” Jordan Peterson (not the one who’s a MEN.com exclusive), the Canadian social media personality who subsists on a diet of nothing but meat and who exercises by stre-e-e-etching to find something new each day in the media to take personal offense to, and then makes his indignation about black mermaids and She-Hulks the subject of his personality while calling other people “snowflakes.” If he is a stranger to you, bless you, summer child, and look no further into the existence of this man. If he sounds slightly familiar, it may be because he went on a recent multi-site frothing-at-the-mouth/crying tour because Sports Illustrated put a woman on the cover that didn’t make his dick hard. Some of that is lost when casting sends over Chris “Kirk but a Chad” Pine to stand in for a man who looks like a ghoul on a good day. I can see how that intent may have been clearer in the script, given that Frank has created an environment in which the strict 1950s gender roles of breadwinner/homemaker is enforced in more ways than simply socially, and it’s not just that he owns the whole company town like Hank Scorpio, but his endless pablum of radio-delivered doublespeak sounds exactly like the purposely dense nonsense talk of Peterson. Where it fails is in the fact that Pine, with his lantern jawline, piercing eyes, and taut abdominal muscles, doesn’t look like Jordan Peterson; he looks like a movie star. And while those who have seen the movie and know its twist could argue that Frank might not really look as good as he appears to us, given that another character is seen as their un-idealized self at a different point, but I’d also argue that the difference between the “normal” and the “idealized” versions of that character are minimal (Janey Briggs looked more different in her before-and-afters).
I made two notes immediately after watching this movie. The first, “People want to live in Mad Men and it sucks,” I think we’ve already discussed in detail above. The other, “Trying to recapture ‘the glories of the past’ and all of the purported good thereof also sucks.” L.P. Hartley famously wrote as the opening line to The Go-Between that “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” It is perhaps the greatest malady of modern man that he is still so susceptible not only to lies about an imagined “better” (or worse, “great”) past, so trapped within the limited horizon of their self-awareness that they can’t seem to understand that there is no going back to “innocence” because “innocence” isn’t a time in the past, it’s a time in your past, that continuum of moments that all took place prior to the day you realized that something you didn’t realize you had was gone, and maybe had been gone for a long time.
Within Don’t Worry Darling, the Victory Project is the modern incel’s fantasy about what they’ve been tricked into believing about the past. Narratively, it’s so similar to the Stepford chronicles from which it cribs heavily that it wouldn’t be something novel enough to comment upon if it weren’t for just how beautiful and expressive everything is. Cinematically, the movie is breathtaking, with shots of an impassable desert, an impossible community, and all of the furniture, architecture, and style that harkens back to a time that never really existed. There are a few pacing problems on occasion, but special style points must go to the crew for all the work of blurring the lines about how much of what we see we can actually trust. As Alice starts to experience hallucinations and surreal nightmares, the imagery is effective and fascinating. I can only hope that the 5-star “Harry is hawt” reviews from children can do enough to balance out the 1-star “hur hur feminists will like watching this movie with their cats” reviews from CHUDs to ensure that people decide to, uh, do their own research and make up their own minds.
Swampflix 