For when you give up, way before you’ve even tried.
Nosferatu is wonderful, well-paced, campy when needed, drenched in dread, and quite bold in its depictions of self-destruction, narcissistic helplessness, and the vanity of certainty. Where it really shines, though, is in it's wrestling with want, and what it means to actually get what we ask for.
Media about media is usually quite boring, and feels particularly flat when attempting to reflect on the media industry itself. Television seems to offer us an avenue for real reflection, but why are the pieces that do this well those which have the least interest in intentionally reflecting on anything?
Violence is back at the forefront of our conversations, and that old specter — of war as for war's sake, as something bigger than itself — is floating back into view. But why are we so willing to let it in?
For all their great successes., the Dune films suffer from a reflexive secularism common in modern cinema that makes engaging with its world almost impossible.
A year in review through seasons and spreads.
What discussions of male loneliness and its symptoms miss is a deep social problem that is coming for everyone, but which has just hit men first — a loss of transcendence. Institutions that previously offered this to men have been gutted, leaving them completely on their own. And what could be more lonely than pure interiority?
On Little Liberties An interesting news clip from the 1980s has been making the rounds showing initial reactions by Californians to the implementation of a law that reduced the legal maximum blood alcohol content for operating a motor vehicle from 0.15 to 0.10 (still well above today’s 0.08). In the clip, we are treated to… Continue reading In Defense of Drunk Drivers
As sadness has lost its cultural cache, the cult of psychopathology has continued to grow, and in the transition we've lost sight of a terribly important condition: melancholia.
Just as it was for the surrealists of the early 20th century, serious political work has been subsumed by the instinctual and libidinal. Is it surprising, then, that self-satisfaction has become the reward sought by the most politically extreme?
For a certain type of cultural critic, the apparent sexlessness of contemporary American film is a real concern. We still have hot movie stars, and cultural norms have shifted such that more than ever can be shown onscreen, but something seems to be missing. So what is it?
Jitter 