television

Deadwood: The Movie (2019)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

There are certain TV series that are hailed as extremely prestigious or otherwise laudable in their time, and which ultimately fade from public consciousness. For most of my life, I often read about how Moonlighting was one of the most unconventional TV series ever made and was extremely ahead of its time, only for the show to be all but inaccessible due to music licensing issues until very recently, when it came to Tubi, the people’s streaming service. Around Y2K, thinkpieces popped up all over talking about the three contemporary television shows that were ushering in a new era of respectability for TV as a medium: The Sopranos (which remains in the public consciousness), The X-Files (which remains a strong brand in some ways but which was unable to maintain excitement enough to support a reboot/sequel series for very long), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which was so powerful that it created TV Tropes but which went largely underdiscussed in wider culture until recent news of a potential reboot). HBO was the primary place where you could find ongoing series which were stylistic, cinematic, and profound, as made clear in their slogan “It’s not TV; it’s HBO,” and that remained the case for a long time. In addition to The Sopranos, other series like Six Feet Under and The Wire are also strong contenders for the “greatest TV series ever made” epithet. I also remember a strong contingent of people, mostly on the Television Without Pity (R.I.P.)’s message boards, arguing that Deadwood, which ran for three seasons between 2004 and 2006, was the heir apparent to this designation. After finally watching The Sopranos for the first time last year, I’ve spent a few months of this one finally watching Deadwood, and I have to say that those folks have a pretty decent case. 

As a series, Deadwood revolves mostly around Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), who runs a saloon and brothel known as The Gem, in the mining encampment of Deadwood, a settlement in the then-unincorporated Dakota Territory. Nominally, the lead was Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), a former lawman who came to Deadwood seeking a new start co-running a hardware store with his friend Sol Star (John Hawkes). As a series that would play with the tropes and conventions of the western genre, it makes sense that the just Bullock and the conniving, clever Swearengen would have an antagonistic relationship with Bullock as the main character (just as lawmen usually were in these pieces; Gunsmoke is about Matt Dillon, Gunslinger is about secret agent Cord, and Bat Masterson is about, well, Bat Masterson) and Swearengen as the thorn in his side. The show quickly realized that examining the complex compartmentalization of Swearengen’s morality was a much more dramatically rich vein to mine, with Swearengen becoming the most dynamic character while Bullock remains the more static one. Bullock’s first season arc largely deals with his slow realization that Deadwood’s lawlessness demands that he take on the role of sheriff despite his reluctance, as well as his burgeoning romance with wealthy widow Alma Garret (Molly Parker). Bullock has a wife back in Montana, but it’s not a marriage of love but of responsibility, as he married his brother’s widow after the elder Bullock was killed as a member of the Union Army. He is torn between his and Alma’s love and the knowledge that his wife will have to join him eventually (which she does, along with Bullock’s nephew/adopted son at the beginning of the second season, played by Anna Gunn). 

Bullock’s partner Sol never gets as much character exploration, but he serves as the motivator for a wonderful character arc for prostitute Trixie (Paula Malcomson), who starts out as the de facto captain of the leg spreading team at The Gem. She’s initially suicidal but comes to recognize her importance to the community with fits and starts, first by defying Swearengen’s orders to help kill a child who is the lone survivor of an attack by highwaymen who are in his employ, and then later by helping Alma through withdrawals from laudanum (Al had ordered her to supply Alma with the stuff to ensure her compliance when he low-balled her on an offer for her land). She finds herself drawn to the awkward Sol and the two slowly fall for one another, although her loyalty remains split between Sol and Swearengen. There’s also “Calamity” Jane Canary (Robin Weigert), who is frequently the best part of the show, as she pontificates in a state of extreme inebriation about how lost she is in life without the direction that she got from her loose partnership with “Wild Bill” Hickok. (Keith Carradine played Wild Bill during the series, but if you’ve ever heard the name “Deadwood” outside of the context of this series, it’s probably because it’s known as the place where Wild Bill was murdered, so no surprises that he’s not back for the reunion film.) The only person from whom Weigert can’t steal the scene is America’s darling Brad Dourif, whose Doc Cochran finds himself on the frontier on the run from warrants for grave robbing while also being haunted by the sheer amount of death that he witnessed and was powerless to stop during the Civil War. There are dozens of other characters, but you’d be much better served by watching the show (it’s less than 40 episodes) than by my recital of their names and attributes, but these are the ones to know for the purposes of the movie.

The only remaining character of high plot importance not yet mentioned is George Hearst (played by Mr. Delta Burke, Gerald McRainey). The show slowly builds to his arrival; the first season’s central conflict revolves around Swearengen and Bullock’s rivalry, while in the second season Hearst becomes a spectral figure whose impending arrival is heralded by the appearance of Francis Wolcott (Garret Dillahunt), his “scout” whose sociopathic malevolence overshadows Swearengen’s. The man himself arrives in the flesh in the third season, and he is a figure of such pure, unadulterated evil that his present looms over the encampment. All the while, Deadwood itself becomes less and less of a “frontier” and more connected to the U.S., geographically and legislatively, as the future is always coming. Famously, Deadwood ended without an “ending,” as the series was renewed for two additional seasons after season two, only to have the fourth season pulled from under them. As such, the end of that season deals with Hearst—having already demonstrated how little he values human life by having his army of Pinkertons murder the miners in his employ who talk about collective action and possibly arranging the killing of the beloved only son of his lifetime servant—arranging for the murder of one of the show’s most kind-hearted and beloved characters. This action prompts Trixie to attempt to kill him, which fails, and Swearengen chooses to kill an innocent prostitute in his employ and submit her body to Hearst as that of his attempted assassin in order to prevent retaliatory action and protect Trixie’s life. Then Hearst just rides out of town, hands technically clean, free of consequence. Hearst is such a monstrous character that, with only a few episodes left in the series, I told my friend that I hoped the show would pull a full on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and straight up kill the bastard, historical accuracy be damned. Alas. 

But then! In 2019, HBO commissioned a reunion movie to wrap things up. I’m generally wary of these kinds of things. Even when I was a kid I could tell that the Growing Pains reunion movie wasn’t very good, I still remember the gut-punching disappointment of the Arrested Development continuation, and one late night during quarantine I saw Family Ties Vacation and thought I might have already been dead and in hell. Then again, well, you know how much I talk about this. As it turns out, I needn’t have been so concerned, as Deadwood: The Movie is an absolute delight. 

As the film opens, Alma Garret arrives in Deadwood, now officially a part of the U.S. (South Dakota specifically) and connected to the wider world not just by the telegraph that was newly installed at the beginning of season three, but also telephone and even railroad. She is accompanied by her ward, the adopted Sophia (the little girl whose family was murdered in the series premiere), and she is reunited first with Charlie Utter (Dayton Callie) and then with Bullock; the former recommends that Alma stay in the latter’s hotel, Bullock and Star having expanded from hardware sales to hoteliers. Trixie is pregnant with Sol’s child, and she insists upon waiting until the child is safely born before she will marry him. Despite the fact that when we last saw him Doc seemed to be in the throes of consumption, he’s still alive and kicking, and he tends to both Trixie and Swearengen, whose lifetime of drinking is threatening to catch up with him, fatally, any day now. As part of the statehood celebrations, Hearst returns to Deadwood to give a speech as a visiting senator from California; he understands that he’s unwelcome when faced with so many people who have not forgotten what he did a decade prior, but he nonetheless has a minor parade through the thoroughfare. Trixie, still furious about the murder of [redacted], refuses to hide as everyone recommends and instead bursts out onto her balcony to call the murderer a coward to his face. Hearst, incensed upon realizing that he was deceived by a decoy corpse before, demands that the nearly infirm Swearengen help him acquire Charlie Utter’s land, as that tract is vital to his plans to expand upon and profit from completing telephone lines. Then, Utter turns up dead. 

I am of two minds about the way that flashbacks are used throughout this film to make connections to the narrative that came before. For the most part, they play out in brief flashes of moments, almost like stylized memories interjecting into the present. These feel organic, and they’re so short that they’re almost subliminal. On the other hand, there are several that play out for a little too long, all of them concerning Trixie’s failed killing of Hearst ten years ago and Swearengen’s offering up of a different woman’s body to cover for her. Admittedly, this is a moderately complicated narrative development to have to recap for the audience, and I understand that I don’t need this repeated back to me because I just watched the final few episodes a couple of weeks ago, rather than the thirteen years that had passed for those who had watched the series in its original run and were now back just for this movie. Sometimes, the little snatches of the past are beautiful; Al lies in bed with one in a long line of women under his employ who have given him comfort over the years, and as she curls her head to his chest, so too does Trixie curl up next to him, all that time ago but also here and now, and the moments like this were the ones where my breath caught in my chest. For all the ways that I had been impressed by Deadwood, I had rarely ever been moved by it. I liked the way that the relationships developed, and I was shocked by the deaths of certain characters, and I may have rooted for Bullock’s wife to be disposed of so that he and Alma could be together. Six Feet Under, The Wire, and—yes—Buffy had moved me in their time, but Deadwood was something that was a technical marvel to me, a masterpiece of dialogue and dovetailing plotting, a solid and remarkable genre deconstruction. And then, in this reunion movie, they managed to make me not just enjoy it, but find some meaning in it. 

Of course, some of that can be attributed to the fact that all our friends are here! Why, it’s Tom Nuttall, who runs the No. 10 Saloon, and he’s alive! Swearengen’s minions Dan Dority and Johnny are still standing around at the bar at The Gem, waiting for Al to come down and dish out orders that are an order of magnitude above their own cleverness. Samuel Fields is fishing in the stream at Charlie Utter’s property, and Aunty Lou is there to help Trixie with her difficult childbirth! Con Stapleton’s given up on being a goon (or perhaps merely had to find new work since the death of actor Powers Boothe meant that the character of Cy Tolliver had likewise passed) and become a minister! Joanie’s running the Bella Union now and she and Calamity Jane are shacked up together. Bullock and wife have a family of three kids now, and Harry Manning finally, finally got that fire wagon that he was always droning on about. In fairness, Manning’s frequent raising of the issue in the series seems to have been intended to foreshadow the eventual destruction of the original Deadwood encampment by fire, as it was in real life, and would likely have been the series finale if the show had continued. Ironically, Deadwood actually does pull a OUATIH-style historical revision, as the town is still standing in 1889 in this film despite the fact that historically, Deadwood was destroyed in a blaze in 1879. And! At the end of this film, even though we don’t get to see Hearst get everything that’s coming to him, we do get to bear witness to him being arrested for Utter’s killing, and as Bullock carts him off to a cell the people of Deadwood get to kick him around a little (Bullock even considers letting them finish Hearst off!). It’s a very satisfying ending, especially as we also get to see Trixie and Sol married, with Swearengen walking her down the aisle in his final days. It feels complete. It feels whole. 

… Except for one thing. There is simply not enough of E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson) in this movie. That makes some sense, as his role in the show proper had declined quite a bit toward the end. Early on, Farnum’s ownership of the only hotel in town granted him access to characters whose activities he could then report to Swearengen and assist in the barkeeper’s machinations, not to mention that it allowed an endless parade of transient characters to meet and comment upon Farnum and their hilarious disgust for him. Farnum’s weaselly nature, his perpetual dampness of the hand, and his wheedling voice made him the butt of every joke, with his appointment as mayor of the town by a committee allowing him nominal authority and no real power being the ultimate pinnacle of his ridiculousness. As a result of being involved in fewer shenanigans, the show gave Farnum an even more lowly worm for him to belittle and mock, but the audience often found him alone, delivering soliloquies about his social impotence and his anger at his position, and they were always comedic showstoppers. Here, we get to see a little bit of him, as he plays a crucial role in the resolution of Charlie Utter’s murder; he has apparently fashioned a crawlspace in his hotel that allows him to spy on rooms Norman Bates style, and his eavesdropping on Hearst reveals the plan for two of his goons to kill the only witness to Utter’s slaying. Despite the seriousness of the situation, it’s still hysterical to watch Farnum try to get himself out of his latest predicament, and I simply wish there was more of him in this. At least for now we have YouTube compilations.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dark Intruder (1964)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Recently, Brandon texted me to let me know that Puzzle of a Downfall Child—one of my favorite films that I have ever seen and which, when we covered it for Movie of the Month in June of 2019, was almost impossible to find save for a (now deleted) YouTube upload—was on sale from Koni Lorber on Blu-ray for only $10. (We are not sponsored, but I would gratefully accept a free copy if the traffic on the above link is in any way influential.) Brandon mentioned that he thought Dark Intruder would be up my alley, and I realized that I had already acquired a copy of this in a lot of Alfred Hitchcock items some years ago. Dark Intruder is not actually a Hitchcock affiliated project, as it was shot as the pilot for a proposed series to be called Black Cloak, but the crew of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series did shoot it, so it makes sense that the aficionado whose estate sale I attended would have lumped it in there. 

Clocking in at a hair shy of a full hour, Dark Intruder has several points in its favor. Leslie Nielsen plays the lead: a socialite playboy named Brett Kingsford, whose persona belies a fascination with (and some talent for handling) the occult. He has a little person manservant/butler named Nikola (Charles Bolender) who assists him, and he’s friends with Police Commissioner Harvey Misbach (Gilbert Green). If you’re someone like me whose brain has been completely rotted by too many comic book movies, then you probably recognize a very Batman-like pattern in there, simply replacing the “cowardly and superstitious lot” that our apparent layabout aristocrat faces with investigations into the arcane and the mystical. It’s also a period piece, being set in late 19th Century San Francisco, so there’s plenty of handsom cabs, gaslights, and fog to establish the mood. The plot kicks off when Kingsford is visited by his friend Evelyn (Judi Meredith), who asks him to check in on her fiance Robert (Mark Richman), as he has started to become sullen and withdrawn. Kingsford is also summoned by Commissioner Gordon, um, I mean Misbach, to consult on a series of murders. There’s no apparent connection between the victims, but it is clearly the work of a serial killer based on both the modus operandi and that there is a ceramic statuette left behind; the sculptures depict a man with a gargoyle on the back of his head, with each successive totem showing the gargoyle emerging further and further. 

There’s some investigative rigamarole, and it’s moderately engaging. Kingsford goes to consult an Asian mystic (if the film was more specific, I could be too) who burns some incense with him and reveals, in a roundabout way, that there will be seven murders and then the creature will fully emerge. If you’re interested in this, it’s a fairly short time commitment (even if it’s one that I wouldn’t say is particularly worth the effort), so be forewarned that I’m about to spoil the reveal of this sixty-year-old failed TV pilot, if that’s something you can bring yourself to care about. Everybody still reading fine with the reveal? Ok. See, Dark Intruder throws out a lot of ideas, including talking about Lovecraftian concepts and name-dropping Dagon, but what this ultimately boils down to is a bit of a Basket Case situation. Evelyn’s fiance Robert was born with a malformed twin that all believed had died save for the family nurse who kept and raised him, and the murdered people were all party to this in some way or another. If the creature can kill all seven intended victims by a certain night (which also happens to be the night of Eliza and Robert’s wedding rehearsal … or something — this was very difficult to pay attention to) then he and Robert will swap bodies, and he will no longer be a monster. 

There’s nothing wrong with that premise, but I have to admit that as much as I love Nielsen, he does not feel right in this role. He’s playing the character a bit too modernly, with a bit too much of a sneer. This might be a long reach, but the thing it reminded me of the most was the early-aughts Bruce Campbell TV vehicle Jack of all Trades, a campy pleasure of mine in which Campbell plays an American spy named Jack Stiles, stationed on a South Pacific Island in the early 1800s, and doing a bit of a Scarlet Pimpernel thing in his alter ego as the Daring Dragoon. A part of the comedy comes from the fact that Bruce Campbell is playing the Jack no differently than he would play a modern part; the charm comes from how much you enjoy Bruce Campbell saying something pithy and then making a face at the camera, which is not for everyone (more for me!). It feels strange to call Leslie Nielsen’s performance something that feels “too modern” when we’re talking about something that predates the moon landing, but that’s precisely what’s happening. This isn’t the sincere, stoic Nielsen that you get in Forbidden Planet or any number of his appearances across Columbo & Murder She Wrote, nor is it the all-gas no-brakes tomfoolery of his later career. Instead, it’s just a little subtle smugness to him, where he’s a little too above it all and snarky about it, and it’s the same energy that he had in Airplane! It feels wrong, and that permeates the entire piece. 

The design of Robert’s Belial is a mixed bag. The face is appropriately harrowing to look at but is little different from a wolfman design. Dark Intruder is smart to keep this from us for as long as it does, instead showing only the monster’s impressive (and scary) hawklike talons for most of the runtime. Its best sequence involves Kingsford, Robert, and Evelyn having been drawn to meet a reclusive medium, who speaks from beneath a dark cowl with an eerie, distorted voice, and when the protagonistic group leaves, the reveal of those talons from beneath the psychic’s robes is effective. For much of the rest of it, however, wheels are spinning. I was reminded of the last few seasons of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, when the program was retitled as the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and the stories ran for an entire hour block instead of a thirty-minute one. Almost all of those that I have seen suffer a great deal from being expanded to that length, in comparison to the better-paced segments from when the show was half the runtime. Everyone besides Nielsen completists can leave this one off their watchlists, unless you’re merely drawn in by the oddity’s novel mechanical qualities. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Contestant (2024)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Japanese television personality Tomoaki “Nasubi” Hamatsu has lived an incredible life.  As with anyone who’s lived an incredible life, that means he’s doomed to be immortalized in a bland documentary or biopic, often one after the other.  The British documentary The Contestant has bravely stepped forward to get the ritual going, sitting Nasubi down for talking-head interviews about his traumatic years in the public eye, supplemented by late-90s archival footage of the horrors he describes.  The details of his life make for a great Wikipedia page but not necessarily a great feature film, as evidenced by the final half-hour of the runtime spinning its wheels detailing Nasubi’s post-fame charity work instead of sticking to the subject at hand.  Most Wikipedia biographies aren’t illustrated with video clips, though, so I suppose The Contestant saves you the additional time & effort you’d spend opening a second tab for YouTube searches while you’re scrolling on the toilet. 

It feels cruel to refer to Hamatsu by his nickname, since it started as a schoolyard insult.  Bullied for being born with a “long face”, the name “Nasubi” refers to the “eggplant” shape of Hamatsu’s head.  That bullying followed him into young adulthood too, as the aspiring comedian struggled to find a healthy balance between making people laugh vs being laughed at.  His desperation for approval led him to becoming the star of the “A Life in Prizes” game show segment of the Japanese variety show Danpa Shonen, in which his bullying escalated to full-on torture.  At the instruction of producer Toshio Tsuchiya (an obvious villain that the film nudges you to boo & hiss at in his own appearances as a talking head), Nasubi was isolated in a room with nothing but postcards and a rack of magazines for fifteen maddening months, with the goal of earning ¥1 million’s worth of prizes from sweepstakes contests.  Provided no clothes and no food (beyond an occasional packet of crackers to keep him alive), Nasubi’s semi-voluntary imprisonment for “A Life in Prizes” was presented as an experiment to see if someone could survive on magazine contest winnings alone.  Really, though, he was televised as a one-man geek show for an entire nation to mock, often with a nightmarish laugh track underscoring his daily suffering.  As you’d likely assume, the experience fucked him up psychologically, and it’s taken him decades to find any joy or mutual trust in humanity again.

The late 90s and early 2000s were an ugly time for pop culture, most vividly reflected in the early stirrings of reality TV.  Nasubi’s 15 months of fame only slightly predate the most obvious Western comparison points for “A Life in Prizes”—Big Brother and The Truman Show—and it doesn’t feel much eviler than most of what followed that decade.  I’m sure someone could slap together a sinister montage of Jerry Springer clips that would make America look like a vicious hell pit, for instance, and maybe someone should.  Still, even if Tsuchiya’s manipulation of his pet reality star isn’t more extreme than behind-the-scenes stories from the sets of shows like The Bachelor or Below Deck, that doesn’t mean he’s not a monster.  Nasubi barely survived his time on Danpa Shonen, winning over a huge audience of fans with his goofball celebrations of receiving prize packages of car tires, camping tents, and dog food, but that micro-celebrity did not translate to a sustainable career once Tsuchiya ran out of ways to extend the gimmick of his imprisonment.  It took a long time for Nasubi to rebuild his identity and his sense of place in the world after the entertainment industry spat him out, so it’s easy to forgive The Contestant for its third-act cheerleading of his charitable work in the years following the Fukushima nuclear disaster.  That doesn’t make for great cinema, necessarily, but it’s at least a kinder impulse than what guided the last camera crew to center him in the spotlight.

The Contestant is not a great documentary, but it is great trash TV, in that it allows you to indulge in several of the most popular genres of trash TV (reality, game show, true crime) while still feeling morally superior to them.  No matter how much disgust the film expresses for Danpa Shonen‘s exploitation of Nasubi, it can’t get around the fact that its own existence perpetuates that exploitation.  The reason most people will watch The Contestant is to see the bizarre, out-of-context clips of a naked, lonely man starving to death on TV for mass entertainment, so it’s a little rich for the movie to act as if it’s above its subject.  If I learned anything about Nasubi that I didn’t retain from reading his Wikipedia page, it’s that he’s credited for inspiring the association of the eggplant emoji with the penis, since his nudity was censored by producers with a floating eggplant symbol.  Otherwise, the only reason to watch the movie is to watch Nasubi suffer, as opposed to just reading about his suffering in plain text.  It’s the same perverse enjoyment that true crime obsessives get out of looking up crime-scene photos and serial-killer mugshots after hearing about them on podcasts.  I can’t claim that I’m above that impulse either, since I chose to watch this documentary out of my own morbid fascination with its subject; I just wish it had chosen to challenge me a little more and indulge me a little less.

-Brandon Ledet

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

/ swampflix / 15 Comments

I saw I Saw the TV Glow at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, a five-day horror marathon that’s held in New Orleans every Spring.  In an attempt to put my festival pass to full use, I crammed my schedule with new releases, spending noon to midnight at a downtown shopping mall for a four-day stretch of the fest.  I skipped sleep, meals, and parties so I could disappear into The Movies, only seeing friends in passing if they happened to catch me in line for a screening.  It’s likely no coincidence, then, that the Overlook title that has stuck with me most was the one about the self-destructive distraction of niche media obsession.  Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to the isolation-of-the-internet drama We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is about the corrosive isolation of obsessively watching television instead of living a real, authentic life.  It felt absurd to immediately get in line for another movie right after its credits rolled, but I found myself doing it anyway, refusing to wake up from my self-induced screen rot stupor.  It didn’t exactly change my life, but it did make me sincerely question some things about how I’m living it.

Justice Smith stars as a socially petrified suburban nerd who’s afraid to fully express himself to anyone, including himself.  The closest he gets to breaking out of his shell is in watching The Pink Opaque, a 90s kids’ fantasy show about two psychically linked summer camp friends who are geographically separated but still fight supernatural evil as a team.  Styled after retro Nickelodeon programming like Are You Afraid of the Dark? and The Adventures of Pete & Pete, The Pink Opaque is the kind of deceptively complex children’s programming that roots itself in a young audience’s brains for a lifetime, immediately triggering dormant memories & feelings with just a couple still images or a few notes of a theme song.  It’s also a show specifically marketed to girls, so our timid protagonist is afraid to be caught watching it, both out of fear of his homophobic brute father (an unrecognizable, terrifying Fred Durst) and out of fear of what it might awaken in his own psychology.  He finds refuge in an older, lesbian student at his school (Brigette Lundy-Paine) who sneaks taped episodes of The Pink Opaque into his possession, so that their real-life relationship mirrors the psychic link between the distanced besties of their favorite show.  When his only friend asks him to join her in breaking out of the oppressive social & familial ruts of the suburbs, he’s too scared to go.  The show is then abruptly cancelled, reality breaks, and the parts of himself he refuses to confront devour his soul while he suffocates in isolation.

I Saw the TV Glow is the melancholy dark side of the Brigsby Bear moon.  It’s specifically targeted at Millennial nostalgia for vintage, tape-warped 90s media, but like Brigsby Bear it’s clear-eyed in its messaging that disappearing into that media is not a healthy substitute for a real-world social life.  It’s impossible not to read this particular version of that story as a cautionary tale for would-be transgender people who are too afraid to come out to themselves, to the point where Shoenbrun practically reaches through the screen to shake that specific audience awake with the handwritten message “There is still time.”  Even if you don’t need to be encouraged to embrace your true, hidden gender identity, the movie still hits home for anyone who’s ever avoided authentically engaging with their life, body, or community by disappearing into niche media consumption instead.  Like World’s Fair, it’s an emotionally heavy film that touches on themes of suicide, loneliness, and parental abuse.  No amount of Pete & Pete visual references or prop Fruitopia vending machines can ease the pain weighing on its heart.  If anything, its nostalgia for vintage 90s media only gets more sinister the more it’s used as an emotional crutch; the Trip to the Moon-styled villain of The Pink Opaque becomes a stand-in for suicidal depression and his on-the-ground moon minions become gender dysphoria demons who go away if you stop thinking about them but never die if you never confront them. 

The most frequent complaint about We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was that it was mismarketed as a horror film when really it’s just a melancholy drama about a terminally-online teenager who’s so lonely she deliberately loses her grip on reality.  It was bold of Overlook to screen Schoenbrun’s next film alongside the program’s more recognizable ghouls, ghosts, and ballerina vampires, then, since their customer base can be vocally opinionated about what does or does not count as Horror; I can still hear echoes of bros in black t-shirts grumbling after their 2019 screening of Jennifer Reader’s Knives & Skin.  I Saw the TV Glow has a much stronger case for being programmed in a horror genre context than World’s Fair, though, since it depicts a full supernatural breakdown of reality after the cancellation of The Pink Opaque.  Tape warp TV static and monster-of-the-week villains invade the real world of our emotionally-closed-off protagonist with escalating violence the longer he ignores who he really is.  The static even invades his body, literalizing the dysphoric sensation he describes of having his insides dug out with a shovel.  Maybe it’s more of a nightmare drama in the way Ari Aster pitched Beau is Afraid as “a nightmare comedy,” but it’s a goddamned nightmare either way – one that the volatile combination of rigid social norms and insurmountable personal anxiety make countless people suffer every day.   It made me so sad I felt physically ill, and then I immediately disappeared into another horror movie so I didn’t have to think about it for too long.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #199: Sex and the City (1998 – 2010)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

Welcome to Episode #199 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon and Britnee discuss all things Sex and the City, from the groundbreaking television show to its bloated movie sequels and its streaming era follow-up And Just Like That. Enjoy!

00:00 Welcome

05:40 Demons (1985)
10:35 Totally Killer (2023)
13:20 Bell, Book and Candle (1958)

17:40 The show
54:30 The movies

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, or by following the links below.

– The Podcast Crew

Late Night with the Devil (2023)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

It’s easy to get dispirited by the deluge of current pop culture product that’s just nostalgic regurgitation of vintage hits from decades ago.  If you dwell on how much of our current “creative” output is just a distant echo of pre-existing iconic works, you’re only going to see a culture in decline.  Not all pastiche is empty, though.  While most nostalgia bait cites past triumphs for an easy pop of recognition, there are plenty modern throwbacks that sincerely interrogate or subvert the artistic intent & cultural context of their inspirational texts.  For every Netflix special that drags the Power Rangers out of retirement for a nostalgia-stoker victory lap, there’s an absurdist French comedy that subverts & recontextualizes that same vintage 90s iconography into something wonderfully new & strange.  The same day I saw Quentin Dupieux’s absurdist Power Rangers parody Smoking Causes Coughing at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, I also happened to catch a similarly subversive nostalgia piece in Late Night with the Devil, which dialed the pop culture clock even further back for even weirder effect (and won the festival’s Audience Award for Best Feature as a result).  Late Night with the Devil is vintage TV Land horror, a parody of a late-night 70s talk show broadcast that’s hijacked midway by The Devil.  It stokes vintage 1970s pop culture nostalgia as its initial hook, but mostly just uses that temporal backdrop for a sense of comfort & familiarity that can be stripped away for effective third-act scares once the titular Devil is conjured.  It’s also thematically purposeful in returning to that era because it has something specific to say about pop culture at that time, an embarrassingly low bar that isn’t cleared by more routine nostalgia cash-ins like the upcoming Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: Once & Always.

David Dastmalchian stars as a late-night talk show host who teeters somewhere between the post-vaudevillian comedy of Johnny Carson and the cigar-smoke intellectualism of Dick Cavett.  After a faux-documentary prologue sketches out the basic outline of Dastmalchian’s fictional Night Owl talk show (including its imagined ratings war with Carson and its host’s personal dabblings in the occult), we’re submerged in a real-time Sweeps Week novelty episode of the show, supposedly broadcast on Halloween Night in 1977.  Even within that Halloween Special context, Late Night with the Devil mostly functions as a loose collection of 70s kitsch, touching on iconic-to-forgotten figures of the era like Orson Welles, Anton LaVey, and The Amazing Kreskin as if they’re all of equal importance.  Things get dicey when the Night Owl producers restage a real-life version of Friedkin’s 70s horror classic The Exorcist as a shameless ratings stunt, unwittingly unleashing a powerful demon that calls itself Mr. Wriggles onto the American public through live broadcast.  The demonic scares of the film’s back half allow its initial Nick at Nite nostalgia trip to go wildly off the rails in exciting, unpredictable ways.  It also opens the text up for direct, sincere criticism of the era’s professional machismo – interrogating the ways that men nearing the top of the corporate ladder were willing to exploit the vulnerable underlings below them (especially if they’re women) just to scramble up the last few rungs.  Sweeps Week desperation has never been so deadly, nor has inane talk show chatter about “current” events & the weather. 

If there’s anything holding Late Night with the Devil back from achieving greatness as a standalone novelty, it’s that there are so many nostalgia-critical genre throwbacks already out there to match or best.  In particular, its real-time simulation of an actual cursed, vintage TV broadcast is outshone by the Satanic Panic era news report parody film WNUF Halloween Special, which is also framed as a ratings stunt gone wrong.  Not only does WNUF have more politically incisive things to say about the cultural moment it time-travels to for cheap gags & scares, but it also fully commits to the bit in a way Late Night with the Devil doesn’t dare.  Instead of repeating the WNUF trick of breaking up its broadcast with parodies of vintage television commercials, Late Night cheats by bolstering its narrative with backstage drama & impossible “documentary” footage that distract from the verisimilitude of its premise.  It’s a frustrating indulgence at first, but the film eventually makes the most of it in a go-for-broke, reality-bending finale that’s worth forgiving the few shortcut cheats it takes to get there.  If you don’t mind a little logical looseness in your “found footage” horror novelties, Late Night with the Devil is perfectly calibrated Halloween Season programming.  It pulls double duty in both nostalgically calling back to vintage horrors past (which is especially welcome if you’ve already seen The Exorcist and its many knockoffs one too many times) and finds modern political & technological justifications in returning to those well-treaded waters.  It’s not nostalgia bait so much as it’s nostalgia perversion, which is a much more interesting angle than you’ll find most modern pop culture attempting.

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Takes: TV at the Movies

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Sometime around the prestige TV era of shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Wire, there was a lot of inane, hyperbolic discourse about how the boundary between television & cinema had become irreversibly blurred. I never bought the argument that modern Event Television had somehow surpassed the artistry of traditional filmmaking, nor do I believe that should even be its goal. My favorite TV shows tend to be the kind of disposable, episodic entertainment that can only exist in that medium: reality competition shows like Project Runway, animated sitcoms like Tuca & Bertie, clips-of-the-week roundups like The Soup (R.I.P.), etc. I will concede that the modern straight-to-streaming movie distribution model has blurred the distinction between television & cinema, though, if only by making it so the old made-for-TV, movie-of-the-week format now outnumbers how many traditional films get theatrical distribution on a weekly basis. It’s the non-stop need for fresh streaming #content that’s making movies more like television, not some new Golden Age of high-quality TV shows that take 30 hours to tell a decent, self-contained story that could be wrapped up in 100 minutes or less.

If there’s any clear sign that the boundary between television & cinema has become blurred, it’s in the mundanity of modern “The Movie” versions of TV shows. When I was a kid, it felt like a major event when popular TV shows like Pokémon, The Simpsons, and Jackass graduated from the small screen to grander, theatrical “The Movie” versions of their formats. In 2022, the distinction feels arbitrary. In the past month, I’ve seen three “The Movie” versions of TV shows that I love, and none felt especially ceremonious, or even worthy of a standalone review. I did enjoy all three, but they all felt more like good television than great cinema. Here’s a quick review of each, with some thoughts on how they blur the line between the two mediums.

The Bob’s Burgers Movie

Unquestionably, The Bob’s Burgers Movie is the most convincing, traditional “The Movie” version of a TV show I’ve seen this year. Not only was it exclusive to theaters for months before popping up on HBO Max & Hulu (where it has since transformed from TV at the movies to regular TV), but the Loren Borchard-led creative team behind it put in great effort to make it feel like an Event. Throughout the latest season of the show, background characters have been tripping over a dislodged chunk of sidewalk in front of the titular burger restaurant, teasing the giant sinkhole that opens the main conflict of the film. A lot of money was also poured into ensuring there was more depth & detail in the actual animation of the movie to distinguish it from the show, even if most of that effort was just adding shadows to its usual look.

I expected The Bob’s Burgers Movie would escalate the show’s occasional song & dance numbers to a full-blown movie musical, but instead it stays true to their usual rhythms. Structurally, it feels just like a 100min episode of the animated sitcom, stretching the special-occasion ceremony of a season finale to a night-long Event. Everything I love about the Bob’s Burgers show is sharply pronounced in the film; it delivers rapid-fire puns & punchlines, its sprawling cast of oddball characters are universally loveable, and it can be surprisingly emotional to watch them fail & grow (especially Louise’s arc in this super-sized episode). A lot of what justifies its graduation to movie-scale pomp & circumstance is just its length and that added layer of shadows, but both really do go a long way.

Downton Abbey: A New Era

If there’s any film that challenges my snobbish distinctions between film & television, it’s Downton Abbey: A New Era, the sequel to 2019’s Downton Abbey: The Movie. While The Bob’s Burgers Movie justifies its medium jump from television to the big screen in the quality of its animation, there is absolutely nothing that visually distinguishes the Downton Abbey movies from their seven seasons of televised build-up. The main draw of these films is that you get to revisit all of the Upstairs/Downstairs characters you love for another couple episodes of wealth-porn soap opera, except now with a theater full of likeminded costume drama nerds who laugh & sniffle in unison instead of watching it under a cozy blanket (assuming, again, that you caught the latest installment in theaters instead of waiting for it to pop up on the Peacock app, where it has been downgraded to TV again).

As much as the Downton Abbey movies feel like more-of-the-same episodic television, I still have to admit that A New Era was one of my most emotionally satisfying trips to the movie theater all year. I was either laughing or crying for the entire runtime, so there’s no reason why this shouldn’t land near the top of my “Top Films of 2022” list, except that I consider it more TV than cinema, which makes me a bit of a snob. I would be fine with the series ending with A New Era, since it’s come full circle to just being Gosford Park without the murder mystery again, but I’ll keep tuning in forever if it keeps going (if not only to see the continued adventures of John Molesey, the unlikeliest of late-series MVPs). It’s good TV.

Beavis and Butthead Do the Universe

The new Beavis and Butthead movie knows exactly where it falls on television/cinema divide. It pretends to scale up its usual airheaded slacker premise with some sci-fi gimmickry at its bookends (joining the multiverse craze headlined by Everything Everywhere and the new Doctor Strange), but everything in-between those brief scenes is just more-of-the-same retreading of the original show. When it’s not a sci-fi action comedy starring the galaxy’s two unlikeliest heroes, Beavis and Butthead Do the Universe mostly plays like a less funny version of the (excellent, underrated) 2011 reboot season of the show, where our favorite knuckleheads adapt to a world of smartphones & “woke” politics. It’s still very funny, though, and its disinterest in growth or change is obviously a large part of the joke.

Beavis and Butthead already had a proper “The Movie” escalation of its premise in 1996’s Beavis & Butthead Do America, so there’s really nothing a straight-to-Paramount+ follow-up to the show needs to accomplish except to be funny. It was the least rewarding film out of this trio for me, but it’s also the one that best understands the function of movie addendums to television shows in the modern streaming era. “The Movie” versions of TV shows don’t need to elevate their medium to the holy mountain of cinematic prestige; they just need to give their fans a little more time with the characters they love, and to deliver a few solid laughs.

-Brandon Ledet

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Unless we’re discussing titans of the medium like Hayao Miyazaki or Satoshi Kon, I’m shamefully unfamiliar with most anime.  As the last thriving refuge for traditional hand drawn animation, I respect the artistry of anime greatly.  I’m just more of an admirer than I am a “fan,” since claiming that latter designation implies you’re extremely well versed and deeply opinionated about the medium in a way I’ll never be able to match.  Saying you’re an Anime Fan is like saying you’re a fan of superhero comics or Star Trek or any other extremely nerdy artform with a decades-spanning history; you better know your obscure, inconsequential trivia down to the last detail, or you’re in for a gatekeeping headache.  Case in point: I finally watched the landmark anime series Cowboy Bebop for the first time since it popped up on Hulu last year, over two decades after its initial run.  If I were an anime fan, that kind of blindspot would be a source of shame I’d have to hide from my cannibalistic anime nerd friends.  Since I’m a casual admirer, though, I get to walk away unscathed — the same as I did when Netflix started streaming Neon Genesis Evangelion a couple years back.

Unsurprisingly, the Cowboy Bebop series is pretty good.  A mash-up of neo-noir, neo-Western, and space travel sci-fi tropes, it’s fairly accessible to casual anime admirers with an appreciation for old-fashioned genre filmmaking.  I found it to be hit-or-miss by episode, but mostly as a matter of personal taste.  The standalone villain-of-the-week episodes were mostly fantastic—especially the ones that veered into my beloved subgenre of spaceship horror—but I was largely indifferent to the show’s overarching Spike vs. Vicious storyline: a prolonged, vague neo-noir plot with no sense of propulsion or purpose.  If I were recommending the show to a similarly anime-ignorant friend, I’d try my best to save their time with a Best Of list of standalone episodes to burn through: the ones with the killer fridge mold, the virtual reality cult, the mushroom trip, the annoying cowboy, and the deranged clown.  If you haven’t seen Cowboy Bebop by now you likely don’t need to watch all 11 hours of the series; you just need a taste, if not only for general pop culture familiarity.  I likely would’ve said the same thing about the monster-of-the-week episodes of The X-Files, though, and I watched that show religiously as it aired, so your mileage may vary.

Luckily, you don’t even have to watch those five Best Of episodes (“Toys in the Attic”, “Brain Scratch”, “Mushroom Samba”, “Cowboy Funk,” “Pierrot le Fou”) to get a proper taste of Cowboy Bebop.  The series conveniently concluded with a standalone villain-of-the-week movie that also sidesteps the energy-draining Spike vs. Vicious storyline entirely, allowing for one final ride with your new favorite spacetraveling bounty hunters.  Cowboy Bebop: The Movie dials the clock back a few episodes into the series before the bounty hunter crew is disbanded (and partially killed) to offer a taste of the show at its prime.  In this extended, posthumous episode, the crew is attempting to capture bio-terrorists on Mars (styled to look suspiciously similar to 1990s NYC) before they release a deadly virus in a densely populated crowd.  The viral outbreak is planned to be staged at a jack-o-lantern-themed variation of the Macy’s Day Parade, making the film a low-key Halloween movie of sorts.  The crew selfishly bickers among themselves, tries to score the bounty on their own, falters, then reforms at the last minute to save the day.  It’s quintessential Cowboy Bebop in that way.

The problem with recommending Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (subtitled Knocking on Heaven’s Door) as a crash course overview of the show is that it’s way too goddamn long.  You could watch all five of the Best Of episodes I mentioned in less time than it would take you to watch this one feature film, and it never hits the same highs as the series proper at its best.  You’d have to trim 30-40 minutes off this thing to make it an enticing alternative for newcomers, and I imagine even long-time fans of the show had their own patience tested with this two-hour standalone.  Cowboy Bebop: The Movie isn’t Cowboy Bebop at its most creative or most exciting.  However, it is Cowboy Bebop at its most functional.  The main draw of the film is seeing a somewhat scrappy, experimental series funded with proper time & budget to get its details in order.  The personal & professional dynamics among the space crew are never as clearly defined on the show as they are in the movie, where even lesser side characters like Ein & Edward are fully integrated into the daily business of intergalactic bountyhunting in a way that finally makes sense.  More importantly, the animation itself is afforded way more resources to flourish.  On the show, the intrusion of CG animation felt like a budget-cutting measure; here it looks purposefully surreal in a more thoughtfully mapped-out hand drawn backdrop.  Whereas most “The Movie” versions of TV shows go big with their plots, locations, and scope to justify the jump from the small screen, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie only goes big on its look.

If I had only watched Cowboy Bebop: The Movie for an overview taste of the show, I might’ve assumed the series was a lot more creatively limited than what the best bounty-of-the-week episodes had to offer.  It’s a good episode of the series, but it’s too long and too tame to be a great one.  However, I did find it to be a great “What If” illustration of how much more visually spectacular the TV show might’ve been if it had the time & money to luxuriate in production the way the movie did.  It’s fun to look back on the production limitations of the five Best Of episodes I mentioned and imagine them even more visually extravagant in their animation, since I now know what that might look like.  Regardless of that hypothetical, I very much love them as-is.  You might even call me a fan.

-Brandon Ledet

To Die For (1995)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

Nicole Kidman stars in Gus Van Sant’s tabloids-obsessed erotic thriller To Die For as a local cable Weather Girl from the suburbs who cons metalhead teenage dirtbags into murdering her husband. It is maybe the most purely 90s Movie I’ve caught up with since the 90s ended, having blindly stumbled upon it as a recent thrift store purchase because I dug Kidman’s lewk on the poster. Her costars include Ultra 90s sitcom performers Wayne Knight (Seinfeld), Kurtwood Smith (That 70s Show), George Segal (Just Shoot Me!), and the never-less-than-stellar Illeana Douglas (who had at least one guest spot on any TV show you can name) among Van Sant’s usual movie-star caliber cast of players. Arriving just one year after Pulp Fiction, it experiments with the scrambled timeline messiness that became inescapably popular in a post-Tarantino world, applying it to the Joe Eszterhaz era erotic thriller, as defined by 90s titles like Showgirls & Basic Instinct. Danny Elfmann provided the score, which can’t help but recall the 90s suburbia fantasy worlds he helped establish for Tim Burton in titles like Edward Scissorhands & Beetlejuice (which spilled over into the decade in its animated Saturday Morning Cartoon form). The only way To Die For could be more quintessentially 90s is if it were Clueless and, even then, both films share their casting of Dan Hedaya as a disgruntled dad.

Beyond its immersion in contemporary aesthetics & personae, To Die For is distinctly 90s on a philosophical level in its bottomless appetite for tabloid sensationalism. Vanity Fair dubbed the 90s to be The Tabloid Decade in its 1999 retrospective on how news media had changed over those ten years (which makes sense given that it was the decade when the O.J. Simpson trial kicked off the 24-hour News Cycle, bringing tabloid journalism into every American’s living room on a round-the-clock routine). Energized by that growing cultural obsession with Celebrity Criminals, Nicole Kidman plays a tabloid superstar who recalls archetypes of the era like Lorena Bobbitt, Patsy Ramsey, and Tonya Harding (which makes it fitting that I, Tonya later copied from this movie wholesale and turned every last interesting thing about it into a tactless embarrassment). The novel Buck Henry adapted his screenplay from was even “loosely” based on a real-life tabloid sensation: Pamela Smart, a New Hampshire high school employee who really did seduce her school’s least respected teens into murdering her husband. Although Smart was not a Weather Girl in real life, contemporary audiences still would have recognized the iconography of her crime from the supermarket magazine racks and instantly known where this story is headed, so Henry & Van Sant waste no time taking them there. The movie begins with Kidman being mobbed by paparazzi at her husband’s funeral. Her fame is then projected on tabloid magazine-inspired opening credits so intensely up-close that they resemble a Roy Lichtenstein print in motion. A fictional headline that reads “Sex, Violence, and the Weather” could have served as an alternate title if Van Sant really wanted to commit to this sadistic tabloid obsessiveness (it’s what the Lifetime Channel version of the movie would have done, anyway), but we still get the point without him going there.

Since the Pamela Smart story was already familiar to the point where it was practically a modern folktale, To Die For is less about the surprise of her life’s twists than it is about the alluring idiosyncrasies of her character. Kidman’s persona in the film feels like a Mainstream Hollywood mutation of the fame-seeking anti-heroines of John Waters’s oeuvre: Pink Flamingos‘s Babs Johnson, Female Trouble‘s Dawn Davenport, Cecil B. Demented‘s Honey Whitlock, etc. She is desperate to be a famous TV personality at any cost. At first, her path to achieving that dream seems to be exhibiting her bombshell good looks on a local cable network’s news show as their eye-candy Weather Girl. Murdering her husband was only a necessary insurance measure, since he disapproved of her leveraging that gig into bigger opportunities that might have come along – preferring that she settle for becoming a stay-at-home mother instead. It turns out, though, that the murder itself was a much quicker path to televised fame. There’s a noticeable thrill that lights up her eyes once she realizes that the world’s attention is glued to her misdeeds on the screen (and on supermarket magazine racks). By 1995, neither celebrating nor satirizing the attention-seeking narcissism of tabloid-friendly criminals were especially novel; Waters alone was nine features deep on the topic with Serial Mom the year before. Still, the specific textures of Smart’s bizarre circumstances, Kidman’s sweetly cruel performance, and Van Sant’s playfully ironic (and, frankly, patronizing) tone make the film a sadistic delight.

The only hiccup I have with my enjoyment of To Die For is the way Gus Van Sant plays with the order of events. His mix of mockumentary and traditional narrative filmmaking styles is generally fun to watch, but there is a jerky stop-and-start rhythm to their assemblage that makes it difficult to fully lose yourself in the story being told. Otherwise, I’m totally on board with this film as an exercise in 90s-specific aesthetics, especially in its harsh contrast between Kidman’s bubbly femininity and the speed metal riffs that frequently interrupt Elmann’s whimsical score. The film only becomes more impressive the longer you dwell on how I, Tonya disastrously attempted to repeat every single trick in its playbook (which becomes apparent as soon as Illeana Douglas begins conducting her “interviews” from an ice-skating rink) but stumbled on a hypocritical tact of audience-blaming that blew up the entire balancing act. By contrast, Van Sant openly indulges in being captivated by the Pamela Smart story, shamelessly burrowing into its most sordid details and cruelly poking fun at the small-town simplicity of its central players. It might not be as Moral of an approach as the audience shaming finger-wagging of I, Tonya, but it’s at least an honest one. To Die For captures a very specific time in tabloid criminal celebrity by genuinely participating in its full allure, like a Lifetime Original Movie that happens to feature actual movie stars. If nothing else, it’s easily among the career best outings for both Kidman & Van Sant, who have plenty of formidable contenders for that honor.

-Brandon Ledet

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

I remember when the news of Marion Stokes’s death made headlines because of her massive home-recorded VHS collection. At least, I recall the news of that self-produced library being absorbed by the Internet Archive in San Francisco years later, where its unparalleled immensity first became evident. For three consecutive decades, the seemingly anonymous, obsessive woman simultaneously recorded multiple television news networks on 70,000 VHS cassettes. In the hands of a media watchdog organization or an avant-garde digital artist, this project might have been contextualized as a radical act of persevering history. From a non-publicized, self-funded effort from an unknown, private citizen, however, it was treated more as a sign of mental illness. The inherent value of Marion Stokes’s D.I.Y. archive is instantly recognizable to anyone with a passing interest in pop culture preservation – especially given the scope & consistency of her efforts – but the discussion around what she accomplished was initially framed as an unintended byproduct in the life of a hoarder & a crackpot. Recorder, a new documentary that attempts to clarify who Stokes was and why she created such a labor-intensive archive, is an essential corrective to those misinformed assumptions. This movie vindicates Marion Stokes as an absolute fucking genius who know exactly what she was doing, even when those closest to her didn’t have a clue.

I don’t mean to suggest that Stokes’s characterizations as a reclusive eccentric and a hoarder are entirely inaccurate. Her obsessive collection of television news broadcasts extended to other, less uniquely valuable “archives” of furniture she liked, Apple computer products, books, and the tell-tale Achilles heel of many hoarders: newspapers & magazines. It’s just entirely unfair & disingenuous to suggest that Stokes did not understand the full value of her D.I.Y. television news broadcast archive, which was very much a deliberately political & academic project of her own design. At one time in her early life as an ideologically combative idealist, Stokes worked as a legitimate, professional librarian in NYC. Her political associations with Socialist and Communist organizations in the 1950s eventually locked her out of that work, as she was effectively backlisted for her leftist ideals. Her interest in broadcast television as a powerful ideological communication tool began with later appearances on a local roundtable panel discussion show called Input, where she was a regular pundit as a political organizer in the 60s & 70s. Recording & preserving a physical archive of TV news broadcasts became a personal interest to her since even the primordial days of Betamax, but it was the news coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis in the late 70s that really kicked her diligent recording into high gear. As coverage of the event evolved from news to propaganda, she became fascinated by the way TV news was reshaping & repackaging facts in real time – something that would extend to how American crises like police brutality, the War on Terror, and the AIDS epidemic would be covered in the future. This was not some unplanned hoarder’s tic that blindly stumbled into cultural relevance; it was a purposefully political act from the start.

You could easily assemble a hundred distinctly fascinating documentaries out of this one rogue librarian’s archive. Stokes’s tapes are a bottomless treasure trove for an editing room tinkerer, which leads to some truly stunning moments here – particularly in a sequence that demonstrates in real time how all TV news coverage was gradually consumed by the tragedy of 9/11. As this D.I.Y. archive is an extensive cultural record of American society over the past thirty years, the list of trends & topics that could be explored in their own full-length documentaries are only as limited as an editor’s imagination. Recorder does excellent work as a primer on the cultural wealth archived in those VHS tapes (which have since been digitized), as it both explores larger ideas of how media reflects society back to itself and does full justice to the rogue political activist who did dozens & dozens of people’s work by assembling it. The film doesn’t shy away from acknowledging that the project became an escapist & dissociative mechanism for the increasingly reclusive Stokes as the years went on, but it also makes it explicitly clear that she knew the full value of what she was preserving well before anyone else validated her efforts. Was Marion Stokes paranoid that America was being taken over the by the Nazi Right, that the media was systemically racist in how it contextualized police brutality, that all of this raw cultural record would be lost by television networks that claimed they were archiving their own material? Or was she an incredibly perceptive activist who’d be proven right on all those counts, given enough time? Recorder is a great film, but it’s only the first step in giving this visionary her full due.

-Brandon Ledet