Davey Davis's Blog, page 4

What I've been reading and watching

What I’ve been watching

I recently stumbled across Let There Be Light, the 1946 documentary directed by John Huston. Narrated by his father, actor/patriarch Walter Huston, Light follows a cohort of young veterans receiving in-patient treatment for PTSD, referred to as “nervousness” and “psychoneurosis.” While it was produced to educate the public about the mental health effects of war, the government ended up suppressing this unexpectedly life-affirming little movie until 1981 for fear of its effect on recruitment. Perhaps this is why Light, as Kent Jones writes for Reverse Shot, is a specimen of failed propaganda: everything that made Huston an artist, “his instincts, his extraordinary sensitivity, his way of honing in on the issue at hand like a water witch with a divining rod,” ultimately undermines the military agenda. Indeed, all of the films he directed for the Army Signal Corps—despite being considered among the finest made about World War II—were either unreleased, censored, or banned outright.

I don’t think I need to go into the hypocrisies and contradictions of mental healthcare provided to grease the meatgrinder, so I’ll stick with my aesthetic impressions1 . I adore American narrative films from this decade for many reasons, chief among them the way people speak. You see these tendencies in Light, all the more enchanting because they’re unscripted: the use of the interjectory Why at the beginning of a sentence; words and expressions like sweetheart, fella, photograph, That’s a boy, Take it easy, and at all pronounced as a’ tall; stronger, sharper regional and ethnic accents, some of them eliciting Looney Tunes lampoons of film noir icons like Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson. Because their doctors are at work on their unconscious, the documentary’s subjects, a diverse group of traumatized vets living together in an (integrated!) institution, are given the freedom to express themselves in uncertain, abstract, and emotional terms, leading to moments of poetry, as when a soldier talks about a pleasant dream he had of his family sitting around the dinner table “admiring each other.”2

That some kind of review board could see Light’s examples of psychological healing as a threat to American military interests is tragic, but not unfounded. Followed to its logical conclusion, any modality that (mostly) regards its patients as people will go on to undermine the violence upon which these institutions rely. The fact that Light exists today feels something like a miracle.

Vanishing Point (1971) has been on my to-watch list since Death Proof (2007), one of the only Tarantino films I consider salvageable. I was pleased to find that age has not diminished the excitement of Richard C. Sarafian’s Odyssean cross-country speed bender (whose muddled politics are revealing, if nothing else). Think Easy Rider (1969) meets The Warriors (1979) in a white Dodge Challenger. I’d love for someone to program a film series around omniscient-seeming disc-jockeys and/or diegetic radio: The Warriors, Do the Right Thing (1989), Groundhog Day (1993), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)…

There is sincerely no need for anyone to watch Am I Ok? (2022), Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne’s sleepy straight-centric lesbian awakening com/dram, but I will never deny that Dakota Johnson has an ineffable charisma. Her placidity should be boring, and yet—! I imagine that being raised by Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas is a very dramatic situation, possibly involving partying and colorful scarves, which might cultivate an unusual groundedness (or depression, which it seems that the low-affect Johnson has struggled with) in a certain kind of child. At any rate, she’s one of my favorite nepo babies.

In Stahl’s beautifully saturated Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Cornel Wilde is merely cute. In the black-and-white Shockproof (1949), a lesser Douglas Sirk, he’s actually pretty sexy as Griff Marat, a true-blue parole officer who falls in love with the blonde (Patricia Knight) he’s trying to save from recidivism. Forgettable movie, but he does take his shirt off a few times.

What I’ve been reading

Herculine by Grace Byron: A twenty-something conversion therapy survivor flees New York City for her ex-lover’s trans-girl commune—an Island of Misfit Dolls in the heart of rural Indiana. Named after Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-century French intersex person who was forced to live as a man against until her death by suicide, the commune is a repository for traumatized young women whose gender is indeterminate for everyone but themselves.

That Byron’s debut comes out the same year that Torrey Peters is re-releasing her ten-year-old novella, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, is a serendipity of sorts. Like Byron herself, Herculine’s protagonist, an aspiring writer who looks up to the Hot Freelance Girls (her nickname for the trans women writers who enjoyed a brief window of upward mobility back in the Buzzfeed and Jezebel days, when Representation Mattered), lives in the shadow of the now-defunct Topside Press literary scene, of which Torrey is perhaps the best-known member. Though it deals in demons rather than vaccines, Herculine shares with Infect cult dynamics contrasted with the sad suspicion that T4T isn’t the nostrum that some would have us believe. “Loving trans girls is hard, even when you are one,” our heroine reflects—and this is before the spinning heads and human sacrifice.

Sun City by Tove Jansson: Jansson writes perfect novels. The shifting perspectives of City’s tenderly wrought weirdos, freaks, and obsessive-compulsives, all living and working in a 1970s Floridian retirement home, coalesce in one of the finest, and strangest, examples of Americana I’ve had the honor of reading. “Few things are more pleasurable than a book about a place written by someone who loves that place, because true love will be as honest with shortcoming as it is generous with praise.” I wrote that about The Summer Book, set in Jansson’s native Finland, and it applies here, too, with her outsider portrait of one of the most vexed states in the Union. Jansson’s unflinching affection makes me believe that anything—even the truth—is possible.

What I’ve been looking at

“The Clock”: Nes and I lost about 90 minutes in the dark MoMA staging room screening Christian Marclay’s 24-hour montage, which depicts a full day using only film and television clips that reference time: Meryl Streep in The Deer Hunter (1978), Nicolas Cage in the National Treasure franchise, a shootout in 3:10 to Yuma (2007). Watching it, you become hyper-aware of time while it flies by, a diverting yet numbing experience not unlike playing a very good video game. We could have stayed longer, but had somewhere to be.

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1

Some of it—like somatics, inner child work, and lots of brusque but genuine affirmation—is startlingly familiar to us contemporary woo types.

2

Even more quaint than the language is a state-funded American medical facility that is clean, comfortable, well-staffed, and seemingly operated without coercion (though this is, of course, part of the propaganda, too). Why, it’s positively European!

Body scan

Legs: Last time I wrote about how I eat. This time I’m writing about how I walk.

While I love walking, I often feel as if I do it incorrectly, as if the way I move from one place to another isn’t just clocky (a persistent concern) but ineffective, as if the thing that’s preventing me from moving naturally is also preventing me from moving at all (which of course isn’t true, or else how would I be getting anywhere?), and as if what’s natural must necessarily be optimal, and also as if there’s an essential walking style that I failed to learn at some point in my development, which doomed me to totter between two stiff, Bellmer-like limbs that I don’t have control over and which I wouldn’t know how to operate even if I did1.

And yet I do have some control over how I walk because of course I change it, as we all do, depending on where I am and who’s around, consciously and even unconsciously altering my shape and stride (length, cadence, weight distribution, and point of contact with the ground) from how it is when I’m home alone (putatively the most “natural” version of how I walk, though who can be sure) to something more suited to working in an office, cruising at a party, passing a group of men on the street, entering the women’s bathroom at Barclay’s with Jade (who looks like a woman), entering the men’s bathroom at the airport with Nes (who looks like a man), pressing through the dance floor toward the DJ, dashing through the train station, or finding a seat in my gynecologist’s waiting room. When I want or need to look less gay (which is sort of like passing as a man, but not quite), I square my hips and shift my ballast upward into my shoulders, although this intervention—like deepening my voice or dethroning my gestures—is a lot harder to maintain than you’d think. Sometimes the whole thing backfires, making me even clockier, and so What’s the point? I think, as I do when someone sees me at the beach in Speedo briefs and calls me Ma’am anyway, although fears of this minor kind of humiliation fly out the window when I’m not in New York City, a place where I mostly feel free to do what comes “naturally,” which is to mince in a way that my butch boyfriend loves to parody (which I find amusing and even validating, perhaps because it reinforces something that doesn’t always feel quite real to either of us and perhaps my dad used to do it, too, though without Nes’ good-natured self-awareness), because once you’ve been chased, or bashed, or asked to leave an establishment because you looked wrong—and a good 25-95% of looking wrong is moving wrong, I’ve learned—you’ll take your chances trying to pass, at least sometimes, maybe. I mean, I guess it just really depends, doesn’t it?

But of course, as I said, doing what comes naturally doesn’t feel natural when I’m in public, and the feeling just gets worse when I try to correct myself based on a series of hunches, experiences, and biases that have led me to the dimly-held conclusion that “correct,” in this context, the context of walking, means “not comfortable,” and so there I am heading down Driggs to the Bedford L or whatever trying to enforce symmetry between the left and right sides of my body2 while contradicting the instinctual movements of my arms, shoulders, and wrists before, during, and after I take each step, a process which entails the dicing of every moment of locomotion into stills that I continue to study long after they’ve become irrelevant, although whether this means from foot to foot or block to block depends on who’s watching and of course who’s watching includes me, because this whole time I’ve been observing myself in order to achieve my “natural” style of walking, that is, the way that looks the most normal, feels the most effortless, and gets me to Point B with a minimum of resistance, but since this style cannot ever really be known (that is, qualified, reproduced, and tested in any kind of systematic way), I’m shit out of luck here.

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1

Just discovered a paper on “late medieval apotropaic devices against the spread of the plague” that depict vulvas on stilts! VULVAS ON STILTS. I, too, would feel safer from the evil eye with one of these bad boys in my cloak.

2

Or the feminine and masculine sides of my body, from the traditional Chinese perspective.

Can a novel that only has cis characters be “trans literature”?

Regular DAVID readers may remember that my forthcoming novel, Casanova 20: Or, Hot World1, doesn’t have any trans characters. I began writing it in a state of exhaustion caused in part by the cis contempt elicited by my second novel, X, a fairly well-received little book with a trans protagonist. After that experience, I wanted off the ride! But since that’s not an option in this lifetime, I took my frustration out on a new character—a straight-identifying white cis man named Adrian—by cursing him with an extreme and unrelenting beauty. In this condition, Adrian would shoulder what the world offers gender-nonconforming people as our best-case scenario for a public life: a violent intersection of sexualization, objectification, and infantilization.

Can a novel that only has cis characters be “trans literature,” even if the author themself is trans? Must it be? In the past month, these almost rhetorical questions have graduated from artistic considerations to material concerns: can Casanova be said to be trading in “gender ideology,” as the Trump administration calls it, if such an agenda (should it exist) is only subtext? After the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) updated its grant application guidelines per Executive Order No. 14168, the answers could be the deciding factor if a transsexual like me were to seek federal funding for a new project2—like, say, my fourth book. Interpreted as the administration intends, these guidelines now bars all trans artists from NEA funding.

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I wasn’t planning on applying for an NEA grant this year, but these new guidelines, ironically enough, brought to my attention the fact that I would actually be a pretty good candidate. What if, you know? But I’m lucky and privileged enough that I don’t need to rely on said funding to do what I do, and that’s partly because I knew going into this whole working-artist thing that I couldn’t rely on institutional or familial support. Like Riley MacLeod, who writes that while it still hurts to see such an explicit focus on erasing trans people from the arts,

I always thought this would happen, one way or another, and I built an artistic world that didn’t need such institutions to survive and thrive. These decrees aren’t some kind of “end” to trans art, and whatever overtures these moves make toward eradicating it can’t help but fail, because I don’t believe we’ve ever truly needed cis people’s support to do our work, and there is an entire world out there outside of national organizations and grants.

I take heart in this sentiment, if not much else3. Although I knew what January 20 would bring, this shock and awe is having its intended effect on my body. I’m fine—certainly more so than the friends, acquaintances, internet mutuals, and strangers who are suffering more uncertainty, deprivation, and fear. So why can’t I bring myself to eat? Why have my autoimmune symptoms roared back to life after one of the longest remissions I’ve ever had? Why do things with the potential to affect me directly feel sort of weightless, while the things that are, for all intents and purposes, personally symbolic (like those cowards at RAINN removing all mention of trans people from their website) cause me to break out in a cold sweat?

I mean, I know why. The body will do what it will. I’m grateful that this includes writing DAVID, so thank you for being here. For now, I’m going to get back to work.

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1

Cassa, as my boyfriend calls it, will be published by Catapult (US) and Cipher (UK) this December.

2

The new guidelines also ban the promotion of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws, in accordance with Executive Order No. 14173. I wonder how Black artists and artists of color, even the cis ones, can hope to secure funding with these guidelines in place?

3

Although if you’re looking for something grounding, Sarah Thankam Mathews’ latest is a good place to start.

What I've been reading and watching

Since I last wrote one of these, I’ve watched a score of films, read seven or eight books (not including my own, as it moves through the copyediting stage), saved eight or nine interesting articles/essays to my “Articles/Essays” spreadsheet, and seen one Broadway play: “GYPSY” starring the sensational Audra McDonald as Mama Rose1. I wish I could write about all of it, but considering that I’m in the thick of the Valentine’s Day Extended Universe™ that is being polyamorous and, you know, everything else, I can only do so much.

I’m not really a trigger-warning type of person, but the book and film I’m reviewing today both depict graphic, terrifying violence. I recommend them very highly, with the caveat that I found them challenging to read and watch, respectively. Please take this into consideration before reading and be gentle with yourself when you can.

What I’ve been reading Trauma Plot by Jamie Hood (out March 25)

With her second memoir, a beautiful and formally original meditation on misogyny, memory, and art that’s at turns harrowing, lovely, and sharply funny, Jamie Hood makes a powerful case for trauma as a worthy literary subject. Challenging Parul Sehgal’s infamous takedown of the so-called trauma plot, Hood examines the now-trendy conflation of the “first-person industrial complex”—i.e., what happens when you convince marginalized writers that, as Jia Tolentino once put it, the “best thing they have to offer is the worst thing that ever happened to them”—with women artist’s personal stories of sexual violence. As Hood writes:

“What troubles me…is the wholesale idea of our relation to writing as unexamined, crude, and lacking in competence with self-reflexivity, humor, and play. Like there’s no reason to write about trauma except to make a buck. Like if you talk about having lived through something awful, that’s all you’ve ever talked about or ever will. Like you have no agency inside a story you yourself choose to tell.”

Grounded in her graduate studies of the modernist confessional, and in particular the work of her beloved “suicide girls” Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, Trauma Plot is in search of time lost to PTSD. Like a hall of dissociative mirrors, Hood’s series of past selves—speaking to us in the third, second, and first persons—navigate school, work, relationships, and therapy while fighting to live lives of pleasure and meaning under the specter of traumas repressed, relived, and constantly anticipated. Readers of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life, one of Sehgal’s subjects, tend to clump into two camps: those who feel that its “accursed” protagonist’s suffering is realistic, and those who don’t. Hood’s own experiences with rape, poverty, substance (ab)use, and sex work, and the ambient violence that subtend them for women and queer people in particular, throw this schism into stark relief. “For me,” she writes, “[A Little Life] was one of the only novels I’d read that saw how pervasive intimate violence is in our lives, and how shadowy, how stigmatized, how great the pressure to stay stoic in facing it, to weather violence without complaint.” How can women writers who have undergone the unspeakable2 pursue “self-making” when their very lives have rendered them “unliterary?”

I’ve loved Jamie’s writing, particularly her criticism, for years now, but I didn’t want to read Trauma Plot, knowing it heavily featuring the epithet “rape girl,” which she used to disparage herself in the wake of the grievous violence done to her. I knew it would be too difficult, a suspicion confirmed within the first few pages; while interesting, engaging, and intellectually rigorous, Trauma Plot is a book I had to force myself to begin and to finish, crying on the G train in the process. Once, I literally threw it away from me, as if it were on fire. While I honor Jamie’s fear and despair, it’s her fury that gave me what I needed to make it to the end. Perhaps that’s what got her there, too. As she writes near Trauma Plot’s conclusion,

“But I have to remember I’m not writing this to be believed. I’m writing to open space in myself for other books, to offer solace—I hope—to others who’ve lived through this. I can’t write for my worst readers, and there’s no amount of evidence that would satiate people, there’s nothing to do or say that could make a person ‘good enough’ as a victim. It’s why people like us best when we’re dead. As if death is the only proof possible, like: oh dear, see what happened to that poor girl, and now she’s gone. Better we can’t speak. Better our corpses be the books left behind us, interpretable to everyone but ourselves.”

What I’ve been watching Nickel Boys (2024)

David Canfield compared Ramell Ross’ first non-documentary narrative to The Zone of Interest (2023) in the way it “reinvents the language” for movies about a “dark historical chapter.” I haven't read the 2019 Colson Whitehead novel on which Nickel Boys is based—about Elwood and Turner (Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson), two Black teenagers incarcerated in a boys’ reform school in 1960s Florida—but its literary influence is obvious in Ross and cinematographer Jomo Frey’s approach to visual storytelling. Making use of symbolic interstitials—Southern Gothic aphorisms like eerie country roads and unexpected gators—as well as surprising yet fluid inversions of perspective, Ross and Frey show us that much can be seen, and even exposed and revealed, when the eyes are averted, whether from fear, submission, or dissociation.

This is not to say that Nickel Boys is a work of misdirection. We see unspeakable, but unfortunately still see-able, acts of violence, primarily against Black children and young men. It made me afraid, disgusted, triggered, angry, and despairing. At one point I thought about leaving the theater, but something inside me said, “No, you must witness this, especially because you’re white.” But then something else inside me said, “Okay, that’s actually stupid.” While I did stay, I actually didn’t have to, white or not, and doing so didn’t do anything for the people who suffered the very real, and ongoing, injustices that Nickel Boys renders. When analyzing this work of art, I think makes more sense to think about what is gained—that is, what my body learns—by seeing and hearing it, despite myself.

If Nickel Boys had any lesson for me, personally, it’s that suffering together in acts of defiance is heaven compared to suffering alone. I think this is something that I know intellectually, but that needs to be known by my body, perhaps reiteratively, in order to keep it that way. If art can do anything, it’s preparing you to learn this lesson in real life, or reminding you of the times that you’ve learned it in the past. Because although Nickel Boys depicts a great deal of physical and spiritual abuse, some of its most wrenching moments are when a person reckons with it alone, whether because they are forced to, or because they cannot bring themselves to share it. Luke Tennie as Griff, a Black boy who is murdered for not throwing a fight with a white boy put on by the white man (Hamish Linklater) who runs the camp, gave such a powerful performance of loneliness that I forgot what that he was an actor; in the boxing ring, his cries of rage, frustration, and fear before making his fatal error (suicidal choice? overwhelmed mistake?) were almost more affecting than the more straightforward scenes of nightmarish physical brutality. Torture is dehumanizing, which is why people resist it even when that resistance leads to even worse suffering, if not death. But as Nickel Boys shows us, this resistance has its costs, in the present and far into the future, so much of it manifesting in isolation—the price of survival.

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Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.

1

Jade’s Aunt Laurie got us tickets. Thank you, Aunt Laurie!

2

I love how Hood eviscerates this canard. “[T]rauma has a language; we just convince ourselves otherwise so we aren’t forced to face it. Or perhaps we’re convinced it’s unspeakable by those who wish us not to speak it, who know silence protects them. So someone says being gang-raped is ‘beyond’ representation, a statement that’s demonstrably untrue…I’ve written one hundred thousand words on my trauma. Is that unintelligibility? Rape effaced me and yet I speak it. It stole my face and my name, and I’m still fucking here. It remains in me. We live in rape’s presence, and its presence infests us. This pretense of wordlessness is a tool of the tormentor. It doesn’t serve.”

An aging homosexual becomes set in their ways

I love my weekdays because they’re almost always the same. Just thinking about this sameness provides a satisfaction that’s almost better than pleasure. Having laid out this itinerary, I return to it over and over again, like a penitent to her rosary:

7:30 am: Wake up without an alarm.

7:30-8:00 am: Stretching, yoga, or light calisthenics. Tidy room.

8:00-8:15 am: Shower and dress.

8:15-9:00 am: Make pour-over and eat breakfast (lately it’s been oatmeal with peanut butter and a few dates to balance the coffee’s heavenly bitterness). If there’s time, read or listen to the news1.

9:00 am: After saying goodbye to Jade, begin the day’s work at the desk a few feet from my bed.

Weekends I love less. Unless I’ve been out until dawn the night prior (an increasing rarity), I don’t sleep in anymore. I wish I could, if only for the indulgence of it, but I don’t need to like I did in my twenties, when I was always stringing together three jobs working swing shifts, graveyards, and overnights. What’s more, every lost morning hour feels like two, especially if the rest of the day isn’t spoken for. For someone like me, anything could happen is not promising, but a threat. It’s not that I’m itching to be busy all the time—I’m actually quite lazy. But for anything to feel either productive or restful, it has to be on my terms, which are, invariably, that I have decided to do it in as far in advance as possible.

“Aging homosexual becomes set in their ways,” is a cliche that I’m beginning to see in a different light. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to recognize which “ways” serve me—order and consistency—and which don’t—spontaneity and surprise—and have adjusted accordingly. I still welcome variety but only in specific contexts, if you can even use variety to describe the punctuated chaos I occasionally, almost dutifully, permit myself. I’m reminded of Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Lottery of Babylon,” about a society in which a game of chance has been imposed upon all citizens, creating a “monstrous variety” in which both luck and misfortune are constantly at play. The story begins: Like all men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all I have been a slave.

As an artist, I’ve found that the most effective discipline is not imposed, but embraced with a desire bordering on desperation. Discipline is not a box within which the work is found, but a scaffold upon which it is accomplished. (As I’ve said before, I think of art as disciplined play. Not far off from what you were doing as a kid, only now you’re the one deciding that it’s time for recess.) I guess what I’m trying to say is that discipline makes your life easier, so if your version of it isn’t doing that, it might be worth giving it some more thought.

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1

Democracy Now! or Heather Cox Richardson’s daily “Letters from an American.”

Body scan

Mouth: I wolf, if I’m being honest. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that I noticed this habit. Why would I, as an American long accustomed to rushed, low-quality meals eaten in front of a screen1?

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How can nothing be so tiring?

Rather appropriately, watching a David Lynch film is a lot like meditation. Even an enthusiastic viewer of his slow, at times even tedious, films may get bored or sleepy1. (Jade, who remains sturdily conscious for most movies, is herself a Lynchian lotus-eater.) This isn’t to say that nothing interesting or funny or shocking happens. As any Lynch fan knows, they often do. But whether the outcome is dreadful or comedic, the late director’s pacing—with its glacial dialog, measured tracking shots, and self-referential symbolism (architectural chevrons; Hitchcockian molls; trick mirrors)—tends to make work out of paying attention. How can nothing be so tiring? If you’ve ever tried to meditate, you know what I mean by this.

But then the payoff happens. Suddenly a scene, or a series of them, will transcend its own tedium, creating a vacuum that’s instantly flooded with this electrical, indelible feeling. Like my experience of meditation, whether on a yoga mat or a stretcher sheet, Lynch’s movies are made from an effortful slowness that produces, without warning, pleasureful sensations that “addictive” and “satisfying” don’t adequately describe. As happens when I set out to meditate, I must sometimes force myself to turn on a Lynch film, even one that I have already enjoyed. I hope it goes without saying that I almost never regret attempting either.

Some of the Lynchian payoffs that come to mind are musical: Isabella Rossellini or Dean Stockwell singing in Blue Velvet (1986). Others culminate without language, like what happens behind the diner near the beginning of Mulholland Drive (1999). Still others make use of conflicting affects, like fear and titillation, to deliver the viewer into something reminiscent of catharsis, but ultimately more akin to orgasm: a purgative that’s anything but purifying. I’m thinking of the scene in lost Lost Highway (1997) where Alice (Patricia Arquette) is forced to strip by her trick/boyfriend, Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia), in a room full of faceless mobsters. Oh god, I’m gonna panic, I thought when I saw the henchman raise his gun to her temple. The payoff was that I didn’t, and that when Alice shortly after tells her lover, Pete—who accused her of enjoying this terrifying humiliation—that he will never have her, I had the intensely agreeable urge to climb through the screen and join her in laughing in his face.

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While revisiting Twin Peaks: The Return this week, another payoff jumped out at me. In episode 6, an absurdly happy child is hit by a truck on the semi-suburbia of Twin Peaks, Washington. The score takes an abrupt minor turn as the child’s mother (Lisa Coronado) runs into the road, seizing her son’s broken body from the asphalt and wailing into the sky.

The swift tonal transition from uncannily saccharine to melodramatically overwrought2 is almost embarrassing: this boy’s death looks and sounds and feels like a Lifetime movie. (Remember, this is an episode of what was originally an ABC TV drama infamous for reveling in soapy camp like a pig in a fresh puddle of mud). And there are all these details that take you out of the scene. Could the driver that mistakenly waved the boy through the crosswalk have done something more more authentic, than that “Oh, BROTHER” facepalm? Why are none of the dozens of bystanders rushing to help? Isn’t it cringe, the way that Carl (Harry Dean Stanton) watches the boy’s soul depart his body within, or as, one of Lynch’s characteristically lo-fi special effects: a primitive, piss-yellow cloud?

But then Carl goes to where the mother crouches in the street and puts his arm around her. They look into each other’s eyes. We can still hear her cries as the camera floats back to the bystanders, who weep as she does—clinging to each other, holding themselves—and you realize that they have realized that there is no helping a corpse. Unlike them, the mother doesn’t look away from Carl or cover her face. Nor does he look away from her. He doesn’t even flinch. For a few long moments, she suffers nakedly, and he witnesses. The scene ends when the camera moves to a nearby power line crackling with energy. In this payoff, the electrification is literal, as it so often is with Lynch, son of the atomic era.

What would David Foster Wallace, who wrote about the production of Lost Highway in 1996, and who died two years after the creation of Twitter, think of those split-screen TikToks that pair a front-facing video with ASMR (usually of random items being crushed, sliced, or otherwise reconstituted), I guess because we can no longer stomach 30 seconds of standup comedy without something to distract our eyes along with our ears? Would he find them as watchable as I do? Would he, to ask a related question, agree with me that Lynch’s films can be boring or sleepy? I guess what I’m wondering is, how much do I owe my impression of Lynch—that his work is like meditation—to my internet addiction?

Social media conditions us to seek out the most provocative and upsetting content our phones can dredge up, to the extent that anything less than totally engaging is almost unwatchable (there’s that word again: watchable). Seeking the next dopamine hit while avoiding unanticipated3 depictions of violence, targeted ads, and anything else we’d rather not consume at the moment, we’re forced to remain on both the offensive and the defensive, states of arousal in which it’s impossible to be truly curious, only overstimulated. In this perpetual hypervigilance, our every feeling—from anger to amusement—is corroded by paranoia. (To wit: Oh, you thought this was a rabbit?) Being online reminds me of learning how to high-five as a kid, when the excitement of this coordinated connection was haunted by the possibility of the other child pulling away at the last minute (Too slow!) or worse, slapping you upside the head.

As our attention spans succumb to death by a thousand cuts, I wonder about trust’s relationship to time. Which is, incidentally, the only thing you need to meditate, because it’s the only thing you actually have4.

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1

I include all three seasons of Twin Peaks. Cahiers du Cinéma, after all, did refer to the third season as the best film of the decade.

2

Feel free to reverse these adjectives at will.

3

If not unwanted…

4

There are no ideal conditions for meditation, as Lynch confirmed in an anecdote about one of his best sessions, which happened within earshot of a jackhammer.

Who can say it? (Part 3)

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Earlier this month, shortly after Meta announced a relaxation of its hate-speech rules and suspension of fact-checking for Facebook and Instagram, The Intercept leaked examples of newly permissible language from the company’s internal training materials. Going forward, hate speech like “immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit” and “gays are freaks” are now non-violating on those platforms. This expansion of non-violation also includes trans people, with the transmisogynist “tranny” now no longer considered a “designated slur”12. As others have noted, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to be following the lead of Elon Musk, who loosened the rules around hate speech on X (formerly Twitter), except for the word “cis,” which is now considered a slur.

While the targets of these updates are crystal-clear, the language justifying our violation is mostly gibberish. Meta’s propagandistic new “Community Standards” are poorly written, leading to confusing and even contradictory “rules” that will ultimately provide the company with more cover for arbitrary enforcement. On Meta, while “allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness3” are not permitted, “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation” are. Why? Because of “political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’” (What is this final clause trying to communicate???) On Meta, accusing someone of mental illness is not allowed—unless you are accusing them of being trans or gay (given “common non-serious usage of words like “weird,”” which as we’ve established means nothing). Of course, “mocking people for having or experiencing a disease” is simultaneously not permitted, so even if we were to accept the ableist denigration of mental and physical illness, or disability’s conflation with being trans or gay, by Meta’s own internal logic these things are unacceptable.

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In Vittorio de Sica’s Umberto D. (1952)—an Italian neorealist drama about an elderly man struggled to stay housed—the eponymous character gently chastises the girl who works as a maid in his pensione for neglecting her schoolwork. “Certain things can happen if you don’t know your grammar,” he tells her. “Everyone takes advantage of the ignorant.”

Unfortunately, knowing my grammar doesn’t protect me, or anyone, from these so-called Community Standards. While it’s clear that the people who wrote them have no respect for language, it’s unclear how much of this disrespect is strategic, or merely the side effect of an anti-intellectualism so entrenched that the Kafka-esque is now, if not unintentional, then comfortably unconscious. What percentage of these new rules are dog whistles? Parapraxes? The verbal slop served up by dozens of stupid cooks (and their chatbots) crowded into a single stupid kitchen? With social media billionaires like Zuckerberg and Trump—who have already facilitated union-busting, election fraud, genocides, and many other evils—it doesn’t really matter, does it?

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1

Whether this word may be applied to minors is unclear. The leaked materials say that the following is no longer subject to removal: “Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl).” However, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said that this was a mistake.

2

People who aren’t transfeminine can catch strays—I know I do—but we can’t fail to point out that this word is designed to humiliate women specifically.

3

One wonders what “allegations of intellectual capacity” could possibly mean…

On eating the frog

There’s a productivity technique known as “eating the frog,” which means you tackle the day’s most difficult task first thing in the morning. I’m a frog-eater by training, having been raised by obsessive workaholics who considered waking up at 6am to be sleeping in.

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What I've been reading and watching

What I’ve been reading (spoilers)

A couple of years ago, I began—then never finished—an essay about the physiological parallels between post-traumatic hypervigilance and the homosocial attunement required for cruising among men (Is there a difference between scared and horny?). A few pages into Daniel Lefferts’ Ways and Means, his protagonist Alistair makes a similar connection as he flees New York City only a few steps ahead of assassination: He realized that keeping an eye out for potential assailants and seeking out biceps and succulent backsides were in effect identical activities: that he registered perusers and possible pursuers with the same hyperacute focus and the same libidinal force. It was as if his suspicion, like a parasite, had taken over the mechanism of his desire. To get the most out of Means, which came out last year, it might help to know a thing or two about psychoanalytic theory. But considering that most of what “we,” as a culture, know of it is largely osmotic, decontextualized, referential—that is to say, unconscious—a working knowledge of Freud isn’t necessary to enjoy this bourgeois-novel-cum-political-thriller1.

The action of Lefferts’ elaborately plotted debut mostly takes place in the year leading up to President Donald Trump’s first term, when Alistair, a white gay undergrad whose expensive education (private school, NYU Stern, etc.) isn’t quite enough to deliver him from middle-class ignominy into the elite lifestyle he believes he so richly deserves. He’s in a triad with Elijah and Mark, two other white gay men who also can’t seem to attain (or in the case of Mark, the second son of a self-made slumlord, retain) the kind of wealth that Alistair can only imagine, despite his good looks and mathy brain. Though all three men are aware of their privileging relative to most other Americans, their inability to exploit it to the hilt is more passive than principled: Alistair yearns for inclusion in the social stratum his liberal arts mother raised him to disdain; rather than get a job, Elijah leeches off an amoral shock artist who trolls 2016 Chelsea in a MAGA hat in hot pursuit of attention; and Mark, considered by all to be a decent guy, fantasizes about running his father’s manufactured housing empire a trifle more justly, but would ultimately prefer to be bailed out by his ill-gotten millions. Through his throuple, the naive and lonely Alistair—at 22, he’s convinced himself that a robber baronetcy is the only way to financially support his downwardly mobile mother, Maura—is brought into elbow-rubbing distance with Herve, a fracking billionaire with a particular interest in desperate young white men. With no postgrad job offer to show for his six figures of student debt, Alistair sleepwalks into Herve’s sinister plot to harness the Trumpist death drive and use the underclass to overthrow the government2. Will he and his boyfriends be able to stop him?

Striking a smart and sensitive balance between subtext (Alistair shrugged weakly, with adolescent helplessness) and text (Mark knew that Alistair’s father had died when he was a child and that his mother never remarried, and he sometimes wondered if Alistair’s involvement with him and Elijah had been his most sustained exposure to a couple), Lefferts breathes authenticity into Alistair, Mark, and Elijah’s messily arrested development. Driving each man’s learned incompetence is a lustful rage for Daddy, which can only be satisfied by usurping or replacing him (as the beginning passage suggests, the word libido appears A LOT in this book). Generally speaking, I find people like these characters largely unsympathetic, and yet our author kid-gloved me into something like grace: how can these failsons be bad people when they’re not even real people? Unlike most disaffecteds, however, our trio’s search for the appropriate love object—that is, another grown-up residing in the present, rather than someone who “can revive in them the picture of the mother and the father,” as Freud wrote—parallels a real-life mission with much higher stakes: the fate of liberal democracy.

Lefferts’ literary talents are so prodigious that Means’ weaknesses—and there aren’t many—have little to do with technique. Sophisticated and controlled, his writing skews more toward impressive than beautiful, which makes its moments of tenderness all the more affecting: in his infancy, Alistair and the doting Maura passed whole days in what it felt beside the point to call happiness. But even his most astute insights are occasionally hampered by a kind of emotional vertigo. His ambitious plot’s fissures tend to gather around behavior that doesn’t quite make sense, even when you account for the ego’s machinations: Herve’s lapses in shrewdness and Maura’s lack of non-motherly dimensions come to mind. Similarly, Lefferts’ ventures into the actual lower classes—that is, the people to whom Alistair is prone to comparing himself, but only when he needs to rationalize his rapacious aspirations—can ring hollow. While on a highly suspicious errand for Herve, he meets a young maintenance guy who immediately knows something’s up and asks the city slicker who he works for. The question was piercing in its intelligence, reports the narrative. It was actually a very normal question for a person to ask, under the circumstances! We learn to expect this condescension from Alistair—whose failure to ask intelligent questions ends up getting him into deep trouble—but every so often it seems to issue directly from his author.

Means’ happy ending completes the puzzle perfectly, with our gays financially secure, returned to the couple form, and freed from their neuroticism while more or less politically unchanged. Perhaps this is why, despite its undeniable brilliance, it’s somewhat dissatisfying to me. Nevertheless, it’s fiercely intelligent and highly entertaining. At turns funny, sexy, and scary, this is the kind of book I want everyone to read so they can talk about it with me. Even now, looking back over this review, I wonder if I’m being too harsh, if I’m projecting my own psychodrama onto a story that, in its final pages, has Maura reflecting thusly: Renounce, renounce! It was the hardest and simplest thing to do. Renounce your object, abandon your singular infatuation, give up whatever yearning blinds you to everything but its endpoint, diverts your energy away from everything but your pursuit, justifies whatever harm, whatever waste, your quest entails. Renounce, renounce, and see how your love flourishes.

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What I’ve been watching

Film

Cecil B. Demented (2000): While far from my favorite John Waters, the charming Demented is one of his most prescient. The vicious glee with which his cult of terrorist filmmakers (his twist on the Symbionese Liberation Army) kidnap a Hollywood darling (Melanie Griffith) and use her as anti-establishment agitprop is only rivaled by Waters’ hilarious lampooning of everything that’s still wrong with the industry 25 years later: IP-mining for mindless prequels and sequels, the elimination of art house and repertory theaters, the slow squeeze on independent filmmakers (Waters himself hasn’t made a movie since 2004’s A Dirty Shame), and the anti-intellectualism that plagues American culture at large.

Babygirl (2024): The sweet Christmas treat that confirmed Kidman’s motherhood and turned me into a Dickhead. Wrote a little toward why I thought Babygirl’s treatment of “kink” worked so well on Twitter.

Kid Galahad (1937): I’m no Bette Davis fan, but her chemistry with the inimitable Edward G. Robinson and the pitch-perfect Wayne Morris is the balance this Curtiz-helmed boxing romp needs. Remade four years later with supporting player Humphrey Bogart as the star in The Wagons Roll at Night, then again in the early sixties for Elvis Presley, Galahad is kind of like if de Palma’s Snake Eyes (1998) was cute, fun, and still didn’t pass the Bechdel test. Jade didn’t care for it, but I had a good time.

Story of Women (1988) and Querelle (1982): The French have been PMO. You know I hated Coralie Fargeat’s substanceless The Substance (2024), with its clunkily-rendered American misogyny; while I quite liked The Beast (2023), its portrayal of the American incel/mass shooter was so off as to, again, veer into misogyny (this review expressed some of my other misgivings very well); I refuse to see Emilia Pérez (2024) because its reputation precedes it (wow, yet more misogyny…), and according to Twitter, Mexican viewers are also not loving a foreigner’s lighthearted and proudly unresearched take on the horrors of drug cartels. Over the past few weeks, I watched two enjoyable French/adjacent films: Isabelle Huppert’s dynamic turn as abortionist Marie-Louise Giraud, one of the last women to be executed in France, in Story of Women, and Fassbinder’s final film, the colorfully concupiscent Querelle, based on the novel by Jean Genet. Consider my palate cleansed.

Evil Does Not Exist (2023): I went into Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s rural drama thinking that it was a horror movie? And it’s not? Which isn’t to say that something horrifying doesn’t happen, but when you spend the first half of a slow-as-melting-snow meditation on harmony, community, and family expecting a jump-scare…well…it definitely does something to the experience. Interesting cinematographic decisions by Yoshio Kitagawa, often more thought-provoking than revealing, for better or worse.

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Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.

1

Go ahead and read into that “cum.”

2

One of the chapter titles is “Lumpenproletariat,” and I’m still trying to decide how ironic it’s meant to be.