Dr. Morbius

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Walking Through Fire

Categories: (un)popular entertainment

I’ve already written in a more general way about The Girl Who Played With Fire on my own blog, but I had a lot of thoughts rattling in my head about it–more than I put into that review. There’s also been a lot of discussion of these movies in on the feminist blogs I read, so I thought I’d make some comments here, too. This movie is built around the rape scene and general abuse of women in its predecessor, so sensitive readers are hereby admonished that this may contain triggers. I also need to note that I haven’t read the books on which these movies are based. I’m ONLY writing about the movies. I understand that there are some major differences.

For the most part, I don’t approach movies with any particular ax to grind, so I don’t default to a feminist or a queer reading of most movies. Usually, individual movies will suggest the critical tools that are most useful to understanding their value (or lack thereof). For example: my main cinematic drug of choice is horror movies. By their very nature, horror movies suggest psychoanalytic readings. Freud works. So does Lacan. I tend to use Jung when I approach horror movies, because I think he best explains the enduring appeal of horror movies even after they’ve lost their power to actually scare the viewer. You could use a feminist scalpel to dissect horror movies, or a sociological scalpel (especially given the interesting tendency of horror movies to mirror the social climate of their milieu), but these are secondarily useful, given that horror movies are specifically attempting to manipulate psychological effects in more radical ways than other kinds of movies. I also think that the greatest movies reward multiple approaches.

I don’t know that the Millennium trilogy is composed of “great” movies. Almost certainly not. But I do know that they are specifically tailored to a feminist viewpoint. And when they are subjected to a feminist critique, they are a serious muddle. On the one hand, they cast Lisabeth Salander, their title character, “the girl”, as a defiantly queer heroine who spits in the face of the patriarchy. On the other, they cater to the fantasies of middle-aged white men by providing them with a secondary protagonist to act as a surrogate. This is most obnoxiously played out in the first film when, seemingly out of character, Lisabeth, decides to become sexually involved with Blomqvist, the male protagonist. Given the systematic abuse of the character both in the text of the first film and in the revealed back-story in the second, this stands as a stroke fantasy for Blomqvist’s middle-aged het male identifiers. Blomqvist is a necessary character from one other point of view, too, given that most of the men in these movies are such monstrous avatars of misogyny that he functions as a kind of apologia. At least these films are smart enough to let Lisabeth Salander stand as the heroine of the story, though she tends to vanish from this role from time to time in the second movie. I note on my own blog that Lisabeth strikes me as Holmes to Blomqvist’s Watson, and Holmes sometimes vanished from his stories, too, all the while remaining as the driving presence. Continue reading →

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Reading Habits

Categories: (un)popular entertainment

It occurred to me this week, and not for the first time, that my therapist might raise an eyebrow toward my reading habits. Shortly after I began transition in earnest, she started suggesting women’s lit to me, as a way of starting the process of socialization. The first book she recommended was The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, which I had already read and enjoyed, though maybe not as much as she would have liked. She smiled approvingly and further recommended a book by Kris Radish, who I had not read. So a couple of days later, I picked up The Elegant Gathering of White Snows at the public library and started reading it right there. My public library has some mighty comfy reading chairs, so this was no hardship, really. I chose not to check it out. After about twenty pages, I decided that it just wasn’t for me. This happened again with the next writer she recommended, and eventually I realized that she and I were not going to see eye to eye on literary matters. I started heading her off at the pass by having a book with me every time I showed up at her office, usually something daunting and intellectual like Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem or Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. It’s not that I don’t like women’s literature, or books by and about women, however you want to define it. Heavens, no. I mean, I named one of my dogs after Flannery O’Connor and my favorite writer of horror fiction is not H. P. Lovecraft or Stephen King, but Shirley Jackson. What seems to butt against my therapist’s suggestions is the fact that I do have fairly well-developed literary appetites, and some of those appetites are decidedly un-feminine.
Continue reading →

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Marriages and Infidelities

Categories: (un)popular entertainment

I’m a bit late to the party when it comes to The Kids Are All Right (2010), Lisa Cholodenko’s comedy of manners about a lesbian couple whose children seek out their sperm donor. It’s a droll movie that shades into painful drama with deceptive ease. It’s good. Very good. You should see it if you haven’t already. It’s a film that begs the question of why doesn’t Annette Bening have an Academy Award yet? All well and good. But it does raise some questions.

From my perspective, there are two elephants in the room in regards to this movie. First: For a decidedly queer movie from a queer filmmaker, there are surprisingly few queer people in front of the camera. As in none. Second: The plot twist that drives the second half of the movie, in which Julianne Moore’s character, Jules, has an affair with Paul, Mark Ruffalo’s character, is a cliché, and an obnoxious one at that. The movie actually does deal with both of these issues, but it’s debatable whether it deals with them successfully.

Taking them one at a time:

While I don’t demand that gay characters be played by gay actors, its galling to see an entirely straight cast playing gay characters in an era when Newsweek magazine is decrying the “fact” that gay actors can’t play straight characters (and why doesn’t this impediment flow the other way? Hmm?). The timing of the movie is unfortunate in this, and it’s compounded by the fact that Cholodenko is herself a lesbian and would presumably have no blinders on when it came to straightwashing the movie. It’s obvious that she’s aware of the problem because she comments on it directly in the text of the movie: When quizzed by their son about why they prefer gay male porn, Jules explains that in lesbian porn, the actresses are all played by straight women. “It’s so inauthentic,” she adds. This is probably the funniest line in the movie, given the casting, but it’s also kind of a bitter pill. On the other hand, the actors Cholodenko does have are so good that it suggests that there were no better choices available.

The second issue is more vexing, given the underlying patriarchal meme that all a lesbian needs to turn straight is a good fucking from the right man. Fortunately, this is demolished by the movie–Jules repudiates the idea that she is somehow straight and she repudiates Paul in the end, too–but should it have been raised in the first place? I don’t know. In the context of the movie, it does rise organically from this particular story and these particular characters. Jules is demonstrably having a mid-life crisis even before Paul shows up, and such people often do stupid things. This is compounded by the fact that some lesbian women actually DO occasionally have sex with men, even once they’re in touch with being lesbian, and this is NOT indicative of some latent heterosexuality (or even bisexuality), so the movie could claim some level of verisimilitude if it wanted. I just wonder if it couldn’t have explored Jules’s crisis in some other way. It might not have, given the film’s plot for Paul: he wants a family and he wants Jules and Nic’s family. This comes to a head when Nic rages at him that it’s HER family and he can bloody well go out and get his own. It’s a terrific moment, and it wouldn’t be possible without Jules’s dalliance with him.

In any event, it’s a lot to think about. Fortunately, the movie grounds all of this in a very closely observed depiction of Nic and Jules’s marriage, the details of which suggest that the movie as it actually plays probably could NOT have been made by a straight filmmaker. The way Jules and Nic behave with each other betrays too much knowledge of lesbian culture, from the therapy-speak they sometimes use to the details of their sex life together. The second funniest moment in the film comes when Nic pulls a big comforter over herself while Jules is goinq down on her: “I’m cold,” she says. “I’m suffocating!” Jules replies. Oh, and there’s the vague disappointment visible when they realize that their children are totally hetero. Mostly, though, it’s a celebration of marriage, and a timely one at that. It suggests that Jules and Nic’s marriage is exactly like anyone else’s marriage, which is to say that it’s like no one else’s marriage at all. Because no two marriages are alike.

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Face to Face

Categories: Uncategorized

So, I feel kind of embarrassed that I clicked on the news links for pictures of the first successful full face transplant last week. I’m not entirely sure why I did it. It’s more complicated than just the attraction of a freakshow–not that I think the man who received it is a freak, just that some of the people who look at him may be doing so for the same reason people used to go to sideshows. This is part of why I’m embarrassed to admit that I clicked the link. But not all of it.

I’m fascinated by plastic surgeries. I’ve spent hours looking at the before and after pictures of people who have received facial feminization surgeries. I’ve even had consults myself. FFS is kind of a raw nerve for me. On the one hand, I don’t actually think I need it. On the other, I like the idea that it would reduce the chances of random people identifying me as trans. I think my motives in this are similar to C. L’s motives for getting breast implants (as detailed in her interview here). There are times when I’m sure that this is the crazy part of my brain talking, because I know perfectly well that I look fine. If you saw me on the street, you probably wouldn’t think twice. Be that as it may, when I look in the mirror every morning, I see the male face I wore for a couple of decades staring back at me. I don’t know that bankrupting myself on FFS would even change that perception for me. It’s all in my head, but the impulse remains.

All of which got me thinking about Eyes Without a Face, the great 1960 French movie about a mad plastic surgeon who kidnaps and murders women to harvest their faces in a vain attempt to restore his own daughter’s ruined face, and how it completely demolishes the beauty myth as an instrument of patriarchy. The movie portrays an attempt to enforce a standard of beauty by force. The recipient of our mad doctor’s radical treatments never asked for them. At the end of the movie, she retaliates against her oppressors and wanders into the night.

It goes without saying that Eyes Without a Face is a ghastly movie if you’re even a little bit squeamish. It’s notorious for its scenes of surgical gore, expertly faked. It looks real and it’s filmed with a striking clinical clarity and dispassion. It’s less obvious that this is a feminist movie, given the outrageous violence perpetrated against women in it. But it is. It’s an indictment of what patriarchy values in women: beauty and obedience. During most of the film, Edith Scob’s character wanders through her father’s palatial mansion with a featureless mask. To the world, she’s dead. The combination of this plot point and the visual of the mask suggests that a woman without beauty is a woman without identity. There are persistent images of animals in cages–especially birds–that further suggest that Scob is imprisoned by her father’s obsession and that her function is decorative, like a songbird. The actual depiction of Scob’s disfigurement suggests the horror patriarchy feels for the physical bodies of women, though it’s greatly exaggerated for effect. Also built into the fabric of the film is the doctor’s accomplice, a nurse played by Alida Valli. Her character is a stand-in for the way that patriarchy co-opts women themselves as enforcers of unrealistic beauty standards.

Trans women feel that enforcement more keenly than most, I think. We’re sometimes held to an impossible standard relative to cis women in order to even be accepted as women, so I feel for Christiane Genessier, the character in Eyes Without a Face, because she’s an avatar for anyone who submits to the surgeon’s knife in order to have her identity as a woman, or even as a person, validated.

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Secular Myths

Categories: (un)popular entertainment

“Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman governor, and because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early Church with paganism. In great personal danger she continued to teach and publish, until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril’s parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.” –Carl Sagan, Cosmos

One of the things I’ve come to love about Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is the sheer effrontery of the way it re-writes the end of World War II. All movies about history are fiction, Tarantino seems to be (truthfully) saying, so let’s wallow in that freedom. Anyone who watches movies for history lessons deserves what they get. Or to quote another film by another filmmaker, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The Myth of Hypatia–and Carl Sagan relates a myth, not historical fact–is a kind of Rorschach test. Are you a bibliophile? Then this is a horror story. Are you a feminist? Then this is a portrait of the patriarchy at one of its lowest moments. Are you a scientist? Then this is a parable about academic freedom. Are you an atheist? Then this is your worst fears about religion made flesh. What you take from this is in large part what you bring to it. The atheist in me has a few problems with this, because one of the core questions an atheist needs to ask herself is this one: do you care that what you believe is true? As it turns out, this particular atheist does care, so The Myth of Hypatia is a bit of a disappointment to me. No matter how much I may want this story to arm me against the religious and the superstitious, it’s bullshit and I can’t in good conscience use bullshit as ammunition against bullshit.

This disappointment does not extend to Alejandro Amenabar’s recounting of the myth in Agora (2009), however. Because, you know, it’s a movie, and just like Tarantino, Amenabar is rewriting history for his own ends (though he rewrites considerably less than Sagan even as he adds romantic subplots). I don’t have to care if a movie is true. I only care if it’s good theater. Continue reading →

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A Fractured Fairy Tale

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, cis-o-rama, teh tranz

While it doesn’t indulge in the same kind of thematic miserablism of other movies about transgender sex workers, Olaf de Fleur Johannesson’s The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela (2008) still can’t avoid the fact that at least part of its narrative–arguably the dominant part–is constructed from a cisgender man’s preconceptions of who transgender people are. The conceit of the movie is that it’s half documentary and half fiction, mixed together in such a way as to obscure the lines between the real and the fake. The director himself calls this shambolic portmanteau structure a “visiomentary.” You can probably see the flaws in this approach without even seeing the movie, but I’ll elaborate anyway.

The movie begins with its central character, a trans sex worker in Cebu City, The Philippines, speaking directly to the camera and swearing to tell the truth and the whole truth. This is Raquela Rios, essentially playing herself. The filmmakers spend a good deal of time following Rios through her life, which includes interactions with her family, attempts to find employment outside of the sex trade, clubbing with her friends, and generally walking around the city. This is where the film is heavy on the documentary and while it’s letting Raquela speak for herself, the movie is on pretty firm ground. Raquela is bright, funny, optimistic, and gregarious. Were she in different circumstances, she would undoubtedly be a success at whatever she did. The same might be said for her friends, Aubrey and Olivia, who also make their livings as “ladyboy” sex workers. Unfortunately, the filmmakers can’t leave well enough alone. They also start the film with a title card that says, “Raquela is transsexual. A chick with a dick,” and once the movie acquires a narrative, the attitude behind that pronouncement seeps into the whole enterprise. Continue reading →

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Rolling the Bones

Categories: (un)popular entertainment

“Ain’t you got no men to do this?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t,”

Movies don’t usually have an overt thesis statement, but this exchange from Debra Granik’s stark indie hit, Winter’s Bone, serves pretty well.  It’s a familiar kind of movie–it’s a hard-boiled detective film–with unfamiliar trappings. We don’t get the mean streets of the city at night. The movie is set in the Ozarks. And we don’t get the cynical, hard-drinking private eye, either. Rather, we get a seventeen-year-old girl who is just trying to keep her family together. We do, however, get most of the plot points of film-noir detective film, but given the other elements of the film, it all seems fresh and new. Certainly, the power dynamics are different when you have a poor teenage girl rather than a hardened detective, but she perseveres with the same stubbornness and moral rectitude of a Philip Marlowe or a Lew Archer.

This film is also a portrait of the wreckage left by late capitalism, envisioned by the film as a stark winter of discontent, possibly as a new dark age where established institutions like law and education have completely failed and where the feral world of drug trafficking has taken their place. Granik and her cinematographer, Michael McDonough, capture all of this in a cold, desaturated style that casts its setting as vaguely post-apocalyptic. This is the world that men have wrought, the film suggests, and the men are absentee landlords, either literally as in the case of our heroine’s missing father, or figuratively as weak, venal characters. Women are left to clean it all up, and frankly, it’s a shit job.

Ree Dolly, played by the a-MAY-zing Jennifer Lawrence, is this film’s version of the private eye, and a more unlikely candidate for the job is hard to imagine. At least Marlow and Archer had contacts and the resources of their clients. Ree has only her own determination. This doesn’t stop the film from throwing her into those brutal situations in which hard-boiled detectives sometimes find themselves. It doesn’t stop the goons in the employ of the film’s bad guys from kicking the shit out of her. In the traditional hard-boiled story, these kinds of scenes are designed to show how tough the detective is, and to knock the detective so far down that it seems that there’s no way back up. It serves the same function here, but the inequality between the opponents throws it into even starker contrast. Ree’s major antagonist is Merab, played with stony resolve by Dale Dickey. In a lot of ways, she’s Ree’s doppelganger, in so far as she’s stubborn and not above getting her hands dirty. She, too, is cleaning up the messes left by her men folk.  It seems oxymoronic to claim Merab as a feminist villain (meaning that she’s not a villain because she’s a feminist, by the way), but here she is. Both characters function as everywomen, as two sides of the same coin.

The auteurist in me looks at this movie and compares it to Granik’s first film, the similarly titled Down to the Bone, in which Vera Farmiga plays a rural housewife and mother struggling with drug addiction. Like that film, Winter’s Bone is bracingly unglamourous. Like that film, it links poverty with drug addiction as inextricably linked. Like that film, it’s about a woman trying to keep her family from getting sucked into the downdraft. Both films find the kind of stark beauty in poverty that one finds in depression era photography. Auteurs in the purest sense tend to make the same movie over and over again. It appears that Granik is doing exactly that, but she’s discovered, like many directors before her, that she can smuggle her thematic concerns to a wider audience by framing things in terms of genre. That’s the main difference between her two films. She links Winter’s Bone to the plot and visual style of a film noir thriller, while she was content to just turn her camera on the characters in Down to the Bone and let them play things out without genre archetypes. Good as Down to the Bone might be (and it IS very good), I think Winter’s Bone is probably stronger for it.  It lets the story set the hook, then it reels the audience in for the rest.

Winter’s Bone should still be in theaters. Down to the Bone is on DVD and is currently available for instant streaming from Netflix.

–Dr. Morbius

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The Multiplexes Giveth…

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, let's hear it for the ladies

“So do we get to watch Steel Magnolias?” That was my long-suffering girlfriend’s response when I told her about this particular writing gig. This is an ongoing joke between us. Every so often, she’ll ask if I suddenly like Steel Magnolias and I’ll tell her that I still don’t like it and she’ll mutter something like “the estrogen isn’t working.” My take on that film is similar to Manhola Dargis’s take on Nora Ephron in an interview she gave to Jezebel earlier this year:

“Sometimes I think women should do what various black and gay audiences have done, which is support women making movies for women. So does that mean I have to go support Nora Ephron? Fuck no. That’s just like, blech.

One of the things that most annoyed me about Steel Magnolias was the Julia Roberts character, who contracts one of those diseases whose main symptom seems to be a tendency for the character to get more beautiful. In film circles, it’s known as Ali McGraw’s Syndrome and dying beautifully is a hallmark of weepies.  Women are never asked to go all Robert De Niro when it comes to looking bad on screen, and it’s particularly egregious here. The only time I can remember actually seeing a major actress get anywhere near what dying from an incurable disease might really be like was in Mike Nichols’s Wit, in which Emma Thompson’s prickly English professor is confronted by the unpleasant facts of the end of her life. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a legitimately great movie and you SHOULD see it, but I’ll never, ever watch it again myself. It looks too much like my mom’s slow death from breast cancer, and I imagine it looks like what my own death might be like at some nebulous time in the future.

Which brings me in a roundabout circle to what’s on my mind today. Continue reading →

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Introducing: Doctor Morbius

Categories: Uncategorized

[I’m so pleased to announce the debut of our next contributor, long-time commenter Dr. Morbius! Do yourself a favor and check out the movie reviews on her blog, because they’re amazing! And now she’ll be doing the same for us at The Second Awakening, plus tossing in our usual mix of feminism, trans-activism, and merciless burns of the New York Times. So without further ado, take it away, Doc…]

My initial reaction to C. L.’s invitation to contribute to The Second Awakening was along the lines of Jeff Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: “I can’t help but feel like there’s been a mistake.” I’m an amateur and untrained feminist, and I said so to C. L., to which she replied: “Amateur and untrained is how we do things at TSA!” So I guess I’m qualified to be here.

I’m guessing that most of the people who read TSA have no idea who I am, and that’s understandable. I mostly write about movies on my own blog(s) to a small audience that’s probably not much larger than my own circle of friends. Therefore, introductions are probably in order. My name is Christianne. I’m a movie addict. I’ve been writing about movies for my own edification since I was a teenager. I used to fill thick spiral-bound notebooks with movie reviews. I’ve been publishing my movie writing on the internet since 1997 on a vanity web site called “Monsters from the Id,” and later on my blog, “Krell Laboratories” (I have a thing for Forbidden Planet, as might also be evident in my nom du guerre, “Doctor Morbius”).  I was published in a book on horror movies called “Horror 101” in 2007. I presented a seminar on transgender imagery in mass media at the Southern Comfort Conference in 2005.  I’m currently a screener for a film festival, though I’m prohibited from saying which one. I also used to run a video store.  Those are my bona fides.

I’m also trans.

Movies and being trans are probably what I’ll write about here in varying combinations. I might even write about trans movies, but, frankly, trans portrayals in movies are usually such a festering cesspit that I may not have the intestinal fortitude to do that very often. When the most empowering cinematic depiction of being trans that I can think of is Bugs Bunny, I know that thinking about it will drive me to pistol and ball eventually if I’m not careful.  Still, I might have something to say about the curious subgenre of transgender kung-fu movies or the persistent transgender themes that crop up in the films of David Cronenberg. Or something like that.

That’s all for the future. Right now, I’d like to talk about a little bit of political synchronicity that happened to me yesterday. Early in the day, I read this piece by Dr. Jillian Weiss over on Bilerico, in which she basically gives up on politics in favor of hands-on activism. The whole piece is dispiriting and disillusioned and all I could think of while I read it was my own collisions with politics over the last year or so. In December, I attended a meeting of my town’s board of aldermen to speak in favor of a non-discrimination ordinance. I live in deep red-state bumfuck, so the very fact that this ordinance was even being considered had me a little bit gobsmacked. I almost wish that it wasn’t being considered at all, because it would have spared me the spectacle of a parade of fundie Christian pastors, each with a story of how terrible GLBT people are, replete with the usual comparisons to child molesters, polygamists, and drug addicts, and of how an anti-discrimination ordinance would infringe on their freedom of religion and freedom of speech (“Thou shalt not bear false witness” being one of the more fungible beliefs, I guess, because this ordinance, like all others like it, would have done no such thing). One particular speaker for the opposition wanted to know how people were supposed to identify “real” transsexuals and was in favor of some kind of identifying badge–I’m not kidding about this; he really suggested this. Fortunately, this guy was shouted down and not by someone from the GLBT continuum, but by an audience member who was Jewish. All told, there were about twenty speakers against the measure and only three in favor. It failed on a 2 to 4 vote, and I went home feeling EXACTLY like Dr. Weiss doubtless feels right now (or how I surmise that she feels based on her Bilerico post).  I didn’t have quite the same kind of let-down after lobbying my state legislature as part of a GLBT lobby day a few months later, but when I got the email from the organizers after the end of the legislative session informing us all that they hadn’t moved any of the initiatives on our agenda, it was still demoralizing. Anyway, as I say: I think I know how Dr. Weiss feels.

The second thing that happened was a phone call from the local Democratic Party inviting me to an organizing meeting for the upcoming campaign season. Two years ago, I might have jumped on it. This year, on this particular day, after reading Dr. Weiss’s post-mortem on the ENDA debacle, I’m hesitating. On the one hand, I really want to work against guys like Mister “Bring Back the Pink Triangle” and his clerical enablers, because keeping people like that out of politics is a matter of life and death. Further, GLBT issues do better locally than they do nationally (I mean, there are places in friggin’ Utah where it’s illegal to discriminate against GLB and T people; Utah!). Tip O’Neill was right when he said that all politics is local. On the other hand, I don’t believe in the Democrats right now. I have a problem with the idea that a choice between a far right and a center right party is any kind of viable political choice at all. It took me a long time to come around to the idea that conservatism is a march to the tar pits, but I firmly believe that these days and when I see Democrats tacking to the right, it makes me weep for the future. Lately, and not for the first time, I’ve been thinking that Sweden or Denmark might be lovely places to live. And then I think of the portrait of Sweden provided by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and I realize that life is a shit sandwich for women everywhere, no matter how progressive the government might be. That’s doubly so for trans women.

All of which makes my little obsession with movies seem frivolous in the end, but it’s what I know most intimately. I go to movies like other people go to church. In the absence of any kind of religious belief, art is where I find transcendence (only very occasionally, unfortunately). Even in the face of late-capitalist civilization, I think there’s still great meaning in human expression. Hell, in the face of late-capitalist civilization, I think art is even MORE important than it’s ever been.

So this is what I have to contribute.