As per my Babygirl review , I've been ruminating on the concept of catharsis and whether it's something that is owed to the audience. With that film, I found its all-too-neat and tensionless storytelling frustrating, specifically because it seemed to be terrified to shame or unseat the audience with compelling conflict. More than ever, our tastes have become dictated by algorithms catered to our personal preferences with the intent of keeping us engaged and when we're not raging over pointless nothingness, we are being siloed away from our peers with beige specificity. Following suit are a new generation of storytellers who are being instructed to mould to the streaming model of media production and tick demographic boxes rather than tell stories that are full-bodied and messy. Topicality, as a result, becomes a major selling point of a new TV show or movie and, as cynical as ever, it's not because someone had a humanistic approach to these issues, but rather, these c...
For the longest time, my biggest fear has been forgetting. I started writing a diary at a very young age because I wanted to remember things the way girls in TV shows did - slumped over their desks, dim lamplight spotlighting the page, manic handwriting scratching out the events of the day. I filled endless notebooks with my adventures and, as my feelings became more complex, I wrote about my constant, exhausting feelings. I was fairly convinced I was writing for an audience of the future, who would stumble across my little words and know what it was like to be me. I've really struggled to think of myself as an artist. Writing poetry or film criticism is not what takes up the bulk of my days and, as a result, does not make up the sum of my life. Shifting into 'art production mode' is not something that comes easy to me simply because most of my day is taken up by trying to stay alive. Much of why I stopped writing a diary and, to a lesser extent, stopped using this blog as ...