“Can You See My Brain Open Wide Now?”: 23 from 2023
It’s still chilly enough to warrant at least a few layers and a winter jacket, and the grey skies that diffuse the sunlight into nature’s fluorescent office bulbs muster what energy they can to emulate something like daytime. It’s February 8th and I’ve put off writing something about my favorite films (or culture, if we want to be inclusive) of 2023 for a month and a half. The urgency wasn’t there, I posted the list naked and alone on Instagram, shorn of the usual faux essay prelude and PhotoShopped collage of images from the works in question. Not even on my Medium nor on the WordPress blog that I’ve had since I was 13. I was shirking an excuse to write, but also avoiding the temptation to contrive some connection between the art I had consumed in the last year, the trajectory of my career, and their collision with current affairs. So I just sat with the writer’s block or the laziness or whatever you can call it.
The hope of experiencing art and culture, with each new or new to you work, is that it will remind one of humanity, be it the audience’s or the artist’s or the people outside the venue or whatever permutation of recognizing flesh and blood and feeling. Both essential and maybe harder to come by these days, even in the most formally adroit and challenging works, as our humanity writ large is a pawn of any number of forces, systematic and oligarchical and political. Digital technologies make it easier to flatten humanity, and artificiality is now a vessel through which to better understand the authentic. My therapist recommended I read Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger. Ironic.
I wrote a book last year with the express purpose that hopefully it would be a useful and fun resource that people could share with their friends, loved ones, and communities. I saw my own community shift and contract and expand and deepen. I was interviewed by one of my heroes. I had my heart broken. My book got recommended by the New York Times coincidentally (?) on my late father’s birthday. I made new friends on Fire Island. I tried shrooms for the first time on the beach in Provincetown. I went to Critics Camp in Connecticut and learned new things about writing and myself. I went to LA and talked with a cute boy until midnight in a pizza joint. I got kicked out of an Alamo Drafthouse. I lost my job. My book was named one of the best books of 2023 by NPR. I went to Vegas and realized I will never go back. I found new reasons to be politically engaged and committed. I saw through the illusory and transient moment of professional success so that it could be a vehicle to deepen my friendships. I am living through a US funded genocide.
I watched dancers rush and barrel on stage as if their life depended on it. I watched the former First Lady of the Philippines make the discotheque a political theater. I watched Anne Hathaway tweak her persona into pulp lesbian vibes. I watched Julio Torres queer Kafka’s labyrinthine bureaucracies. I watched performance art about wanting, wanting, wanting. I heard the soft, juicy sounds of the steelpan during the “High School Mambo”. I saw the tension between politics and plot play out in the desert. I felt transported, by scent, to the time when I found out my parents were people too. I watched the return of the mean teen comedy. I watched Rachel Weisz and Rachel Weisz pull themselves apart from the whole. I saw an Afghani woman slowly come to terms with her own alienation. I saw a French Korean adoptee shed the illusions of her identity. I watched Todd Haynes shatter another prism of the self. I witnessed Beyoncé in the flesh. And on-screen. Three times.
But the image that stands out to me in all the things I watched, felt, and experienced is of Alexandra Tatarsky, that versatile, elastic mad clown, stuffing their face full of onions. In their solo show Sad Boys in Harpy Land, their artistic paralysis in times of empire and war and atrocity reaches a nirvana like catharsis. Describing an excised Goethe piece (from Faust, Part II), Tatarsky talks about how Hell is a room where you’re forced to press your face into chopped onions to release the cries of all humanity. Up until this moment, Sad Boys revels in the manic, strange, and unhinged, articulating artistic block as wildly gestural and crazy and beautifully formless. However resonant their early wails about the world falling apart may be, it is the humor that drives these moments. But as the show careens to the end, Tatarsky pauses, overwhelmed by the roles and identifiers that she has been cast in and the ones she wants to grab hold of on her own terms. After the audience has migrated from their seats to the stage, she stops the show dead in its tracks. Each half of an onion in hand, she buries her eyes into them. She feels just when one thinks one can’t feel anymore.
They don’t wail, not in the comically exaggerated way they did at the beginning. Not like the meme of that dog engulfed in flames. They let out a whimper, a gasp. A whisper of despair that’s much louder than any scream.
The art and culture that made this year’s list made me feel alive and human. It’s the kind of criteria that certainly is imbued in nearly every list that anyone makes. But these moments of grace, humanity, divinity, and the complex ties they have with horror, cruelty, and atrocity have begun to mean more to me with each passing year, month, day.
It is that aliveness that I will continue seeking out in the loved ones around me and the art that I am grateful I get to share with them.
23 from 2023
23. Afire/Aguá
22. The Lesson
21. Barbie/American Fiction
20. Oppenheimer/Here Lies Love
19. Poor Things
18. All of Us Strangers
17. The Holdovers/Joy Ride
16. The Killer/Magic Mike’s Last Dance
15. A Haunting in Venice
14. La PRÁCTICA
13. De Humani Corporis Fabrica/Problemista
12. Das Sofortvergnügen/Rotting in the Sun
11. Kokomo City/West Side Story (2021) in Concert
10. No Hard Feelings/Fallen Leaves
9. ANSELM in 3D/The Boy and the Heron/How to Blow Up a Pipeline
8. A Thousand and One/The Five Devils
7. You Hurt My Feelings
6. Bottoms/Blue Jean/Eileen
5. Dead Ringers/ birth/rebirth
4. Return to Seoul/Fremont
3. The Renaissance Tour/Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé
2. May December/Wolf Play
- Sad Boys in Harpy Land
“Everybody’s Lookin’ for Something”: 21 from 2021
It was a long year of looking at the lives of others, and even one’s own life, as if through a glass pane, or a warped lens, the recognizable contorted into the surreal or the uncanny. A sprint to what was once quotidian and comfortingly banal tainted by a hideous awareness of the effort of it all to do just that. As what was considered, various privileges notwithstanding, “normal” melts memories of smiles into clownish rictuses mocking the very idea, the only solace left is understanding what little solace is left, and that it’s found in strange in-between spaces of not being the subject or the object so much as in the action itself. Looking, gazing, seeking.
Forgive the histrionics of making broad statements about the world or whatever, but, as others smarter than myself have observed, the pandemic was just an accelerated version of what was already happening. It is then, most dishearteningly, something from which we have learned so little, other than to be swept up in temporal and phenomenological slippages and distortions. Everyone is along for the ride. Yearning, desiring, wanting.
I suppose I was most drawn towards films about looking this year, or the ones that yank you out of that state to force you to evaluate what you’ve been looking at or looking for. It’s a push and pull between dream states, the process of looking the only haven, the only escape. It is ongoing and ceaseless. It’s all that’s left.
Here’s 21 films from 2021.
Read the rest of this entry »All Those Glittering Years: On “Follies”, “Friends: The Reunion”, and the Road They Didn’t Take
Look at these people, Aren’t they eerie?
Look at this party, Isn’t it dreary?
I’m so glad I came
— Sally, ‘Don’t Look at Me” from Follies (1971)
The Friends set is not crumbling. The Russian dressing colored couch in Central Perk is not in tatters, and the moths haven’t eaten at the corners of its upholstery. The foosball table in Joey and Chandler’s apartment isn’t in pieces. The garish purple paint in Monica’s apartment isn’t wilting and weeping off the walls. Everything is as it was, unmoored by time. Well, except its cast. One by one, they tacitly enter the soundstage, walking through time the supertext of the scene. And with pop up clones of the sets that have traveled across the country, the world, Friends doesn’t exist so much as the ghost of 1990s pop culture and its sweeping influence; it is its mummification.
The Exterminating Angels: Fake Friends’ “This American Wife”
Inever wrote the essay about my sort of-ex that I had intended to, one that started out drawing the ironic comparison between his flawed communication style and inconsistent articulation of his desires with the fascination he had (which he then shared with me) in the flawed communication style and inconsistent articulation of desire, of the women on the Real Housewives of New York. It was intended to be a poisoned lollipop of a personal essay, a mode I generally avoid, vacillating between the mild transgressions of someone who didn’t know what they wanted, the person who got strung along, and the perhaps unusual pop culture artifact that functioned as the bridge between them. But that essay and its banal details — the improprities of a fuckboi are seldom all that interesting — would have been its own green screen backed, ill-lit framed confessional. It would have been both something truthful and attention seeking, not so much inauthentic as necessarily theatrical, and, had it been published, another invitation to flog oneself publicly. It could have all been a grandiosely told lie, but that would not really have mattered; the only thing that did matter was the impulse to narrativize something like heartbreak into something that was consumable.
There’s little else to do with one’s feelings these days. You feel them and then what? If there’s no one to perform them for, did they ever really happen? The question of whether a performance is still a performance if there’s no one there to watch isn’t new, but the ways in which it’s been inverted (if there’s nothing to watch, did anyone perform?) does feel strikingly of a recent moment, a recent condition.
Housewives, Interrupted: On Time, Memory, and the “Real Housewives of New York” Season 13 Premiere
For a brief moment, as it was both truly brief and momentary, The Real Housewives of New York returned to its quasi-anthropological (or at least by Bravo standards)/Lauren Greenfield-esque roots. In the premiere episode of its 13th season, the reality TV show paused to show us a reality that was beyond the grip of producers and could not be manicured or performed or contrived in the way that many of us reductively understand how reality TV functions. It was just about time and space for a second: the relentless streets of New York on March 1, 2020, everyone going about their lives, walking around, talking, the beautiful symphony of chaos that’s come to be associated with the city. The little card on the bottom left taunted as a piece of painful dramatic irony for the viewers, and in a few seconds, the show cut to October, five months later, New York now a ghost town. We’re still not so far removed from that, even if the city is trying to revive itself and approximate an impossible normalcy. But the juxtaposition between the starkness of a New York alive and kicking and the Chantal Akerman-esque emptiness is still close enough to feel, the transition, the feeling of time and space themselves, still tangible. (And didn’t the pandemic feel horribly contrived in its own way, as if produced by a vindictive god to get the most dramatic reaction shots?)
I Like Things That Look Like Mistakes 