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Knock Knock (2015) and The Self-Destructive Paranoia of Misogyny

  Most people watched Hostel (2005) when they were teenagers.  I can't actually verify this statement but there are definitely certain generations of people who came of age during the torture porn boom of the 2000s and tried to watch as many of them as possible to prove how much disturbing and offensive material they could put in their brains before they lost their stomachs. I grew up as a child too young to remember 9/11 and too immature to read the cultural criticism related to the sub-genre, to sit and think about what it was implying about American culture or masculinity or the human body. It was all about affect. And that worked perfectly fine for me at the time. Eli Roth doesn't make movies for adults. You might think that the ratings and content of his films argue against this, but I've never been more convinced watching his 2015 paranoid home invasion gender crisis fable Knock Knock that this man has continually, but not consciously, cultivated an imagined teenage...
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INTERNET BRAIN ROT, or I'm an Artist I Swear, Not Just An Annoying Nobody On The Internet

Can a piece of art be dated before it has even been released? The internet is nebulous and wide and unbelievably segmented and small. I tried to write about a small part of it in 2022 and INTERNET BRAIN ROT emerged. Not fully formed, of course. In a lot of ways, I am releasing an unfinished work. It has made me anxious to think I could not make something timeless. However, it's two years later. My life and mental state have changed dramatically. I've gone through intense periods of grief, change and depression since then.  Not releasing this chapbook sooner is a regret I will have to live with. There was no time to put it out. I couldn't physically work on it most days and it just sat in my Google Drive, haunting me with its deficiencies, the way that the future kept coming and my work stopped feeling relevant. Poetry itself is a dated art form so writing a poem called ' simp ' for example and then putting it out in the world in 2024 felt...cringe. There isn't...
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Being A Lonely Pervert Is A Hard Job But Someone's Got To Do It: A Treatise In Four Parts

Last year, one of my most rewatched films was Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), a film revolving around four people whose lives become entangled due to their various sexual neuroses. It's a film very interested in infidelity and what it takes to make relationships work. In general, I find the misery of heterosexuality, as portrayed in many a film, tedious. So, I avoided this film specifically because I assumed that it would be another film people enjoyed because it had straight people screaming at each other in it. Sex, Lies and Videotape invited me in through its depiction of loneliness and perversion, both of which are aspects of being alive that are often mocked and derided. The serial killer is lonely and perverted. The stalker is lonely and perverted. Your average middle class married couple are not typically lonely and perverted, not unless the film ends with some kind of violent climax (I'm looking at you, American Beauty !).  The film follows An...
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The Queen of Underground Cinema: Sarah Jacobson and The Mess of Movie-Making

It's very romantic to view the creative process as an inherently transgressive one, and making movies should be, as it's one of the most collaborative modes of making art. However, filmmakers are at the mercy of production companies funding their projects, who in turn inform the market and decide what will sell. People who have no connections within the industry, aren't rich and aren't willing to comply with a company trying to churn out another forgettable money-making sequel/revamp/remake, don't seem to have much of a chance at all. Nostalgia has been a burden on culture, and maybe it always has been, but particularly recently, we cannot escape it. I'll admit myself it's really hard to not look back at the past and think 'it seemed so much easier to get an interesting and unique film made back then'. The 90s in particular seemed plentiful, with some of my favourite directors like Gregg Araki, Cheryl Dunye and Ngozi Onwurah making formally interesti...
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