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!