Obsessions This Week: August 20-26, 2023

Ahoy! The theme this week is THINGS I AM STILL ENJOYING.

Aug 26, 2023

Weekend (left) and All of Us Strangers (right)

Andrew Haigh’s romantic drama Weekend came out in 2011, when I was living in Denmark after college, and I remember going to see it multiple times with different friends. The Yorkshire-born Haigh questions and complicates ideas that an American filmmaker might not, which is why I’m so hyped for All of Us Strangers, coming December 22. Apparently it’s a love story about Paul Mezcal and Andrew Scott, who play neighbors who fall in love just before one of them starts being haunted by his dead parents. COUNT ME IN.

I love Haigh’s quiet sensibility, his economic use of dialogue, and the way he portrays early intimacy as the striptease between intellect and chemistry that it is. His HBO show, Looking, was a ponderous, mystifying show about queer people in mid-2010s San Francisco, but it had a great cast and a surprisingly nuanced portrayal of an interracial gay relationship at its center. Haigh is on the short list of writer-directors whose output I will always make a point to see.

🏴‍☠️ Pirates in love

The show that made me low-key internet famous and high-key annoying is finally coming back after a very long hiatus. Obviously, claiming the HBO show Our Flag Means Death had any material impact on my life is an understatement. It so defined last year for me that I failed my driving test the day the first season ended due to emotional overwhelm. And I have been loud enough in my proselytizing to watch this show that friends and internet strangers I’ve converted lit up my texts and DMs this week with news that Vanity Fair dropped a first look at season two, supposedly coming in October.

On the show’s appeal, I think the article says it best:

After years of television shows and movies that built up the potential of queer romance only to stop short…the fervor for Our Flag Means Death “says that shows in the mainstream aren’t delivering that promise or that setup, and we have. That’s really why the fans have gone wild for it.”

Ugh, so true. Fans of Con O’Neill and Vico Ortiz will be especially destroyed by their quotes. Read the piece with caution, as it is basically edging disguised as PR (and we celebrate that!).

🎨 Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody at The Broad

My mom was in town last week, and we went to see this deeply emotional exhibit on Haring, pop artist extraordinaire, who died at 31 in 1990.

I love Haring’s political art— specifically the way that he showed sex as joyful and liberatory, and how he highlighted how the true violence of the eighties was done by Reagan and the so-called religious right. If you’re out in these streets, let this serve as your biannual reminder to go get tested for HIV (please! I love you).

Tickets are $22, but The Broad releases a handful of free, timed tickets on Wednesdays at 10 AM online. I urge you to go if you’re in town; the show closes October 8.

👭 Bottoms

I’m wrapping up this newsletter just before heading to the Alamo Drafthouse near my DTLA apartment to see Bottoms with my friend Alanna, so I can’t comment on it yet, but I’m always going to celebrate when a young queer Jewish woman makes a movie. Writer-director Emma Seligman was born in 1995! Can you imagine?! And it’s a comedy about lesbian incels? We’ve come so far as a culture! By which I mean, I love when a new generation shows people my age (and older) what’s going on with them.

💗 Fanfiction for fun and profit

I had the dubious pleasure of explaining to someone in my life this week that Fifty Shades of Grey originated as Twilight fanfiction, and shame on me for thinking this was common knowledge. But now, you won’t be able to say I never told you.

On that subject, many (!!!) fanfiction writers have been making their way into the mainstream in the 15 years, and with IP scrubbing comes profit. Famously, or perhaps not— I don’t know what any of you know anymore— Cassandra Clare is one of those fabled successes, a fanfiction writer in Harry Potter fandom once known for steamy Harry/Draco stories who now has a career as an author of original work and three seasons of a TV show under her belt. And author Naomi Novik, a fantasy writer I was introduced to by my friend Shannon, is still involved in fandom in a big way.

Why am I talking about this in my Substack? Well, fan communities are, for better and for worse, a huge part of what makes a show or book or movie “zeitgeisty”. Even if you’re not in the Reddit forums or on AO3 repping your favorite piece of media, you experience fan culture by proxy when stories, concepts, and language developed in fandoms makes its way to the marketing pushes of the present. This hit me in a huge way when OFMD showrunner David Jenkins captioned an Instagram post about the new season of his show with this:

A “ship” in fandom means a relationship the fans are obsessed with, so Jenkins’ caption is a double entendre referring to both the literal pirate ship on the show, and the potential emotional devastation awaiting the show’s central couple. The tone of his post is also highly keyed in to the fact that fans of this show live for the angst. This is a cultural digest, and I think it’s worthwhile for me to bring this somewhat insider-y but by no means exclusionary context to a general audience. I find it cool and exciting when showrunners engage with their fan base on this level; he’s teasing us in our own language!

🌈 A final note on the week

You may have noticed, as I have, that everything I’m obsessed with this week (and most weeks) is either by or about queer people. That’s not technically the theme of this newsletter, but it is true that I sincerely think art made by people outside of the mainstream (sexually, intellectually, racially, ethnically, etc.) is often the most compelling, insightful, or edgy. It’s also usually ahead of the curve, whether by a special clairvoyance afforded to the marginalized or by the material fact that they often create the culture. We can talk about that and even debate it in the comments, if you want! Talk to me.