Obsessions This Week: June 25-July 1, 2023
For years, friends have listened to me obsess about TV, film, podcasts, articles, and whatever else I'm hyperfixated on that week. Now you can, too.
What am I looking at?
This is a mini cultural digest of everything I’m loving, hating, and pondering. For years, friends and family have listened to me obsess about TV, film, podcasts, video games, essays, news articles, etc., with the kind of tolerance and tacit encouragement that comes from knowing it is as unstoppable as the tides. Over time, folks wondered if there was somewhere I kept track of all the things I loved and thought they might like. This Substack is a space for those recommendations, for absolutely anyone who wants them.
I hope, if you’re here, you’ll find something to love.
Listen to this while you read:
As you may have heard, I had a terrible break-up last month and I may have spent four weeks in bed listening to the Indigo Girls and reading romance novels. If you’re in the middle of it, too, I recommend “Dairy Queen” for crying, and “Hammer and A Nail” for when you’re done crying.
I will not stop talking about Just Jack and Will and you can’t make me.
This week, after the Supreme Court delivered a slate of predictably retrograde opinions setting affirmative action and gay rights back decades, I became obsessed with Just Jack and Will. This podcast dropped the same day as the SCOTUS nonsense, and it’s a timely antidote: in each installment, two of the actors from (my beloved) nineties sitcom Will & Grace rewatch an episode of the show that made them famous. I came for the behind-the-scenes anecdotes, but the funniest bit is that Eric McCormack (who played the eponymous Will) regularly rewatches the show and considers himself a fan in real life, while Sean Hayes (who played his best friend, Jack) has supposedly never watched an episode.
If you know me in real life, you know I am not always a ray of sunshine, and as a consequence, the media I love tends to be… lighter. Sillier. Funnier. I need the laughs. I love comedies, fantasy, sci-fi, romcoms, camp— stories that don’t take themselves too seriously. I think they’re worthy of examination and praise, not in spite of their lightness, but because making people happy in a difficult world is surprisingly skilled work. The art is to conceal the art, as they say, and the things that make us laugh are doing some invisible heavy lifting. In its first two episodes, out this week, this podcast does an admirable job of explaining the craft behind the cultural touchstone that was Will & Grace.
Hayes, who just won a Tony for a play I saw in its first run at The Goodman last year, lowkey considers the character who made him famous an annoying idiot he would avoid in real life. It’s fun to watch him slowly get charmed by Jack in real time.
For the second episode rundown, the duo’s guest is famed sitcom director Jimmy Burrows, who directed every single installment of the original run and latter day reboot. It’s fascinating to hear this giant of Must See TV-era television give a brief technique lecture about how four-camera sitcoms used to get made.
I have nothing against The Bear, but my anxiety does.
Having said that, it stresses me out to the point that I considered upping my Prozac. As a loud and proud native Chicago girl, may I interest you Bear aficionados with more authentic Chicago content?
A true chonkasaurus has been found in the Chicago River.
Via my friend Emily Ellis, an ode to the Chicago hot dog:
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Big budget Hollywood movies are alarmingly sexless!
I love meta conversations around media, the conversations behind the conversations we see on Twitter and TikTok. Everyone is Beautiful And No One Is Horny is a great example: an essay by R.S. Benedict from February 2021 that I’ve been obsessed with for months. Benedict talks about how in so many Hollywood movies right now, everyone looks completely perfect, and no one has sex. Describing a scene from the 1997 film “Starship Troopers,” Benedict writes:
[T]he scene that anticipated our current cinematic age the best does not feature bugs or guns. It is, of course, the shower scene […] On the surface, it is idyllic: racial harmony, gender equality, unity behind a common goal—and firm, perky asses and tits.
And then the characters speak. The topic of conversation? Military service, of course… No one looks at each other. No one flirts.
A room full of beautiful, bare bodies, and everyone is only horny for war.
Benedict makes the point that what we see on screen impacts the way we live, and how we think about the way we live:
A generation or two ago, it was normal for adults to engage in sports not purely as self-improvement but as an act of leisure. People danced for fun; couples socialized over tennis; kids played stickball for lack of anything else to do. Solitary exercise at the gym also had a social, rather than moral, purpose. People worked out to look hot so they could attract other hot people and fuck them.
No one is having enough sex. Well, I can think of one or two people, but not enough of us. Sit with that and get back to me.
Further recommendations:
The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante is a visual novel-type video game I recently spent three days playing on my laptop. It’s a mixture of fantasy, politics, and roleplaying the Inquisition. It was incredibly difficult to get a happy ending, and I kind of respect that.
A friend and I saw “No Hard Feelings” in theaters last Sunday, and I could not be happier that Jennifer Lawrence has returned to comedy. It’s not as raunchy or as cruel as the trailer might have you believe, and I fell completely in love with the co-star, a musical theatre actor by the name of Andrew Barth Feldman. My friend Janie informs me that I’m late to his fandom.
My mother, who has an iron stomach for dystopia in spite of being the world’s most charming children’s singer-songwriter, told me to read the 2020 novel Leave the World Behind, about people on vacation in the Hamptons when the end of the world creeps up on them.
Because I already worry about the end of the world every day, I will instead recommend Viola Davis’ memoir (listen to it on audiobook, her performance is unreal). It’s just as sad and disturbing, but with a little more hope at the end.
Wrap it up, babes.
I’ll send this digest out once a week on Saturday afternoons. It’s totally free, but Substack is giving me the option to ask for $5 a month or $30/year if you really want to pay me for this.
If you’re not vibing with me, let me recommend the three friends whose Substacks inspired me to create this one. Gina DeLuca is the millennial successor to David Sedaris and writes satire and cartoons over at Rejected. Alanna Bennett, my favorite screenwriter and co-teacher of a Zoom-based romcom class we created, gives soothing media recommendations at Getting Cozy. Eileen Tull, a Chicago-based writer-performer who blew my mind when I saw her at Sappho’s Salon years ago, writes Is This Film School, her journey to watch every movie.
Let’s hang out again in your inbox sometime.