amber can walk

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 ...

The past few of years have been marred with a kind of weightlessness. There have been and continue to be people who joke about still feeling stuck in 2019, how it doesn't feel as though it was 6 years ago at all, how it's hard to feel present when time feels like it's constantly being stolen from us. Not just pandemic-wise, but spending most of our lives working jobs we don't like or in bus stations, waiting to get to those jobs or pretty much just anywhere that isn't with people who value us beyond what labour we can provide for them.  As a result, I have formed some theories about why I seek out things I know will disturb me or piss me off. In my abandoned blog post on disturbing media I attempted to write a couple of years ago, I argued that affect is very grounding and that taking the cultural litmus test of what you can and can't endure keeps you assimilated to a certain extent, even if it's based on having an overly negative reaction to a taboo topic. ...

  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...