Obsessions This Week: November 26–December 2, 2023
The Puritanical gaze, Sondra Locke, and Andrews Scott and Haigh.
🎬 You have to see All of Us Strangers
Friends, I could not have loved this movie more. I won’t spoil the plot, but it is the finest1 movie I’ve seen this year. Writer-director Andrew Haigh has been a favorite for over a decade; I think I saw Weekend three times in theaters.2 He’s a poet of loneliness and a deeply gifted filmmaker with limitless love for his characters. I credit a former mentor with the idea that a writer’s talents are proportionate to the limits of their empathy, and Haigh’s compassion appears infinite.
My friend Tracy invited me as her plus-one to an early screening (its wider release starts December 22), and both of us wept like we were on drugs when the credits rolled. Haigh’s storytelling elides simple exposition; he is a master of visual and verbal economy.
As a writer, Haigh articulates microgenerational differences between a certain subset of white gay men with precision. (There’s a brief discussion of AIDS between Andrew Scott’s Gen X Adam and Paul Mescal’s Gen Z Harry that made me cry.) But as a filmmaker, Haigh uses that intensive observation to locate queerness in everything more broadly, making the quotidian strange. When creative writing teachers talk about finding the universal in the specific, this film is what they mean.
The actors are so universally superb that, as Tracy said when it was over, it didn’t feel like we had been watching people act. Watching a movie that deals so heavily with childhood, loneliness, and belief, I realized that the movies— like family, like the afterlife— are founded on a comforting lie that we have to accept in order to transcend. With our families, the artifice is that relation breeds intimacy, or that we can really know the strangers in our own homes. The comforting lie of the life of the world to come sparks divine urgency in the present. Watching a brilliant film, we know we are being lied to, that the actors are playing characters, and we know that they know that we know. We are all knowingly participating in the lie, because profundity can sometimes be reached through artifice. That’s how I felt watching Andrew Scott and Claire Foy in this movie, whose performances must be seen to be believed. It was a form of worship.
👦🏻 You don’t have to see Please Don’t Destroy’s movie
On the other end of the spectrum of cinema is this very silly confection:
In honor of my sister’s birthday earlier this week, I will credit her with my love for Please Don’t Destroy, the digital comedy trio that’s SNL’s heir apparent to The Lonely Island. Hannah got me to watch their new movie, Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain by loaning me her Peacock login. Also, Ben Marshall remains the only redheaded man I find attractive.
It is purely goofy and really made me laugh, and was a lovely showcase for Meg Stalter, whom you probably already love from her role on Hacks. I love comedies that bridge the millennial-Gen Z humor divide, and the jokes hit.
🕺🏽Speaking of SNL
It’s nearly three weeks old already, but I’ve only just seen this perfect SNL sketch feat. Timothee Theeeee Chalamet:
Sherman: But why is this happening to me?
Yang: Are you a straight woman who’s tried poppers once?
Sherman: Yes! Oh no!
✨ Speaking of comedians
Two of my favorite comedians came out with great stuff this fall:
Claire McFadden’s Lime Lady
Beth Stelling’s new special, If You Didn’t Want Me Then, got a great write-up in the NYT
🚓 Speaking of women
Last week, my friend Shannon and I attended a screening of Sondra Locke’s Impulse (1990), about a crooked cop working the vice squad as a lure for Johns. There was a smart Q&A afterward with film historian Karina Longworth, whose terrific podcast, You Must Remember This, covers “the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century,” and Locke’s story had been part of her season on “The Erotic ‘90s.”
The TLDR is that Locke was blackballed by actor-director Clint Eastwood, her longtime lover, after she sued him for palimony. He left her and kicked her out of their shared house during the making of this very film. Impulse was one of four films Locke directed, and it was fascinating to revisit, for all the reasons Longworth detailed (consider me a new Theresa Russell fan).
For people my age, Clint Eastwood is famous primarily for being a senile Republican, so I can’t say there was any love to lose there, but the story made my blood boil. It unfortunately colors the only Eastwood-related thing I have ever loved, which is Pete Davidson and John Mulaney dragging The Mule on SNL’s Weekend Update back in 2019.
👰🏻 Speaking of marriage
“No liberal women should marry Republican men.” Obvious, but worth talking about amidst all the panicky media about how rightwing men aren’t getting laid, and how progressive women are destroying the fabric of America. Thank you as always to
for articulating the point:Underlying all of this is the assumption that women ought to sacrifice their core beliefs and principles so men don’t have to be lonely or cook their own dinners…Women are taught that it is noble to lose themselves inside their marriage. To give up everything for home and children, even themselves. I often wonder how many stories, how many scientific breakthroughs, how many plays, musical scores, and innovations, have been tossed onto the pyre of human marriage.
⛪ The Puritanical Gaze by Carlee Gomes:
I’ve linked before to other pieces exploring how horribly Puritanical American movies are in this moment, and how we arrived here (including in my first-ever newsletter). But the problem hasn’t resolved and so I will keep obsessing about it.
The essay asserts we American audiences are “a pleasure-and-sustenance-deprived populace living under the late stages of neoliberal capitalism,” and this impacts the art we make and how we sit with the art that’s made for us.
We are continuously, constantly cryogenically freezing cultural outputs from the past to be consumed in the present. But these artifacts are deranged ghosts of what they once were, distorted visions of the familiar, a signifier of a feeling we once had, all of the thing’s original meaning and emotional resonance stripped away in order to serve one purpose: automatic consumption that generates capital.
This is, to say the least, not a very sexy time in which to live.
It’s a dense essay I’m still parsing, but it’s worth a read, especially since the cries for desexualizing our already-castrated movie culture come from both the right and left of the political spectrum— and sometimes, I’m not sure people know what they’re really arguing for.
We’ve been stripped and socialized out of any real political energy and agency. Our ability to consume is the only thing remaining that’s “ours” in late capitalism, and as a result it’s become a stand-in for (or perhaps the sole defining quality of) every aspect of being alive today — consuming is activism, it’s love, it’s thinking, it’s sex, it’s fill in the blank.
You know who brought sex to the movies? Christopher Plummer.
👽 Doctor Who said trans rights
You know ya girl loves David Tennant and Catherine Tate, but I thought the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Special (one of three?) was especially cool given the UK’s more mainstream transphobia, the casting of trans actress Yasmin Finney as Donna’s daughter, and Tennant’s recent activism in honor of his reportedly non-binary child.
Preachy, yes, but adorable.
👀 What I’m looking forward to
Netflix is teasing a TV show version of One Day, the David Nicholls book-turned-Anne Hathaway movie, both of which destroyed my life circa 2011. Everyone who loves this book feels slightly guilty about it, but it rules. Catch me crying in 2024!
I’m seeing American Fiction at an LA screening next week, which looks sharp and prescient. Also, Jeffrey Wright is one of our best actors, and I’ve missed him.
Dan Levy’s directorial debut, Good Grief, is coming out early next year.
A friend told me to check out Frybread Face and Me on Netflix, which has been getting a lot of underground buzz and is produced by Taika Waititi, who seems to be financing all of indigenous film right now.
See you next week!
Past Lives was a close second, Passages a distant third
The only other movies I’ve paid to see more than once in theaters are Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Brokeback Mountain, Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Guess the theme.
All the shows, podcasts and books you mention make my head spin--it would be like a whole new hobby to get into current culture.
I really liked your first paragraphs about artifice generating hope: With our families, the artifice is that relation breeds intimacy, or that we can really know the strangers in our own homes.
Dating a Republican man, I will say that some of the above is true. But there are also benefits:
it is ridiculously easy to win a political debate with a Republican, because liberals tend to rely on facts, while Republicans rely on sort of an abstract "make my day" logic. If your Republican is reasonable, he will take up some of your ideas.
in a more Republican community, my relationship with him was like an alliance: people that might have otherwise dismissed me took a distant respect, because they knew him and liked him.
Lyz has a great point.