The Scary of 61st is a triumph of unseriousness.
In Antisemite and Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre describes what he sees as the psychological underpinnings of WWII-era antisemitism. One key element he notes is a childlike playfulness on behalf of the antisemite:
The anti‐Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. . . . They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words . . . They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.
Sartre, Antisemite and Jew, 13
What this playfulness does, in Sartre’s mind, is gird the aggressor from all reproach, as they are simply playing, and to take them seriously is a sign of a fault in and of itself. They know they’re being stupid — that is the point. Their aims are serious, but their expression thereof is not.
The Scary of 61st (2021) shows us two roommates — Noelle (Madeline Quinn) and Addie (Betsey Brown) — moving into a posh Upper Eastside apartment that may or may not have been owned by celebrity pedophile and child-trafficker-to-the-stars Jeffery Epstein. Trouble besets the two almost immediately, with Noelle becoming paranoid upon finding ominous tarot cards from the previous tenant, and Addie being struck by intense night terrors. A few days after moving in, a mysterious girl (played by Dasha Nekrasova) shows up under the auspices of completing post-move-in paperwork before quickly revealing her true intention — to discover the mysteries of the Epstein scandal from the newly occupied apartment. The film is comprised of a number of sex scenes, schizo-psychedelic montages, and close-ups of bodily fluids that ultimately culminate in the murder of a manic (or potentially possessed?) Addie in the apartment’s basement. Sprinkled throughout are scenes with Addie’s videogame and porn-addled boyfriend, Greg (Mark Rapaport), and a number of self-insert references to what parts of NYC are and aren’t worth living in
In writer/director Nekrasova’s own words, 61st came to be because she “had the will and the emotional momentum1” to make a movie in the wake of Jeffery Epstein’s death, when the fate of the case and of his accomplices was still in the air. In interviews with the young auteur, it becomes clear that the creation of this movie was a very important project to Nekrasova, but not a particularly serious one: she states that she “felt very motivated to make the film. [She] felt a real urgency to make it as quickly as possible” but that she produced a full-length feature simply because “[She] had never made a film really before and wanted to.” She states that she “really [admires] meticulous filmmaking,” like that of Stanley Kubrick, but that she chose how to costume her characters by asking questions like “what do adults wear? A little business suit?” An air of playfulness hangs over her descriptions of the creative endeavor, but unfortunately, this playfulness seems to be more of a defensive posture than any proof of true creative freedom within the project.
While the concept of 61st is undeniably interesting, and while recognizing that making a feature-length film during the Epstein death crisis about the Epstein death crisis is indeed impressive, the film hangs itself on its inability to take the artform (or its characters) seriously. Take Addie — the woman seemingly processed by a Prince Andrew-adjacent demon — for whom the whole ordeal has the most tragic outcome. At various points, we see her physically and spiritually embodying the collected energy of the Epstein crimes, attempting to act out imagined scenes from the Lolita Express and performing a public masturbation ritual in front of Epstein’s townhouse. But even in these scenes, what could be striking is almost immediately undercut by a late-2010’s ironic twinge that leaves the scene bereft of emotion (and which Nekrasova has played with in not-so-subtle ways in the past2). At one point, we see Addie and Greg having sex, when Addie asks Greg to “fuck [her] like [they’re] on a plane” before specifying that it should be a Boeing 7273, to which he agrees, before she asks “how old am I?” When he correctly states her age, she repeatedly demands “younger” with Greg counting down years, until the sex is aborted when Addie cries for him to do it “like [she’s] 13!” Greg, the consummate gentleman, tells Addie that he is in fact not a pedophile and will finish himself off at home before leaving her alone, distraught.
Similarly, when we see Addie seemingly becoming fully possessed, she enters a semi-fugue state and walks to Epstein’s townhome, groaning and writhing upon arrival, masturbating with a motion that looks like she is attempting to start a lawn mower, before the audience is treated to a close-up shot of her rubbing vaginal fluid on the metal JE adorning the building’s door. This is only one of the numerous shots where the film asks us to watch Addie masturbate and play with the aftermath for no apparent reason other than to be shocking (or stupid).
Noelle and the mysterious girl are not treated with any seriousness either. During one of the manic research montages (before they have sex because Noelle “has never done this with a girl . . . but [she] want[s] to!”), we see the girl attempt to disprove the Epstein bedsheet noose theory by, fittingly, creating a makeshift noose out of orange bedsheets, tying it to the handle of a murphy bed, and “leaning forward forcefully (yeah right!)” to the point of near suffocation. In perhaps the only actually funny scene in the movie, we see the girl sputtering and gasping for air until Noelle cuts the noose, to which the girl almost immediately retorts “it’s bullshit, that wouldn’t work.”
It is in scenes like these that the boring unseriousness of 61st is the most glaring. It is not that the film should’ve been self-serious — that would have been boring in its own way. There is a place for camp and goofiness in horror, and joking sexual depravity is a trope almost as old as film itself. But 61st does not do camp, or joking sexual depravity, or goofiness — it instead stands back from itself, points, and says “this is stupid, right?” We see it in the direct quotes from Eyes Wide Shut; we see it in the incorrect naming of Ghislaine as Glenn Maxwell; we see it in Addie masturbating with a Prince Andrew ceramic hand bell; and we see it in Noelle and the girl repeatedly calling Greg “retarded,” “a faggot,” “gay,” etc. with the most strained delivery possible. In an effort to forestall legitimate criticism of itself and the tropes it necessarily employs, the film acts intentionally stupid, draining any potential for intrigue.
This seems to be the raison d’etre for the film in many ways. The Epstein saga was terrifying, but it was funny to make a movie about cute young women becoming red-pilled. Psychosexual horror is intense, but it is stupid to have a possessed girl ask to be fucked on a specific model plane. The driving force here is not even ironic distance, it is paranoid contempt for having to be serious at all.
Dasha Nekrasova is not an antisemite, nor is 61st an antisemitic movie. However, the tactic Sartre describes in his book has moved far beyond the purview of young male fascists and political ideologues to become a more general strategy for cultural battles. Everyone knows that irony ruled the day from the ’90s to the 2010s, but the rejection of seriousness at all is something else. The Discordians and Operation Mindfuck did something similar in the ’70s, but there was some ostensible goal to their intentionally unserious and stupid art. Good little Stirnerites that they were, they used unserious, stupid art to critique what they saw as the false objectivity (or faux-subjectivity) of such cultural organizational tools as religion, party politics, conspiracy groups, etc. As annoying and arrogant as they were, they themselves failed to accept the logical conclusion of the ironic detachment they championed — that at base, caring enough to make fun of caring is still caring. And as we know caring is cringe.
This is where the reality of Nekrasova’s achievement becomes clear. In her fear of any avenue of legitimate criticism (of form, story, or style), she has created a movie that cares so little about itself and its subject matter as to barely be worth considering an original piece at all. It is, most charitably, a series of sloppy vignettes mashed together from bits of Kubrick and the new French extremity, without any of the care for the final product that the aforementioned relied upon to make their absurdity stick. In her life outside of 61st, Nekrasova is clearly desperate to be seen as a legitimate artist, and outlets like The Times have done a good job of selling her as such (“You know how some people are always talking about wanting to direct a movie and co-host a popular podcast and be on the most popular show on television? Somebody has done all of those things: Dasha Nekrasova4”), but there is a fear of the openness required for legitimacy that leads to her undercutting her own production. It could not be more clear that this is a Red Scare movie5.
Unfortunately, in its childlike desire to not be teased, The Scary of 61st takes its director far too seriously to offer any insight into her actual creative capacity, and takes its subjects too unseriously to offer a film worth watching.
Jitter 