#26: An actually fun election
Death By Consumption
10/29/24 - 11/4/24
The big day is here, like it or not. How are the vibes where you are? Terrible? I'm surprised to hear that! Are you stocking up on liquor, to survive the night? Guns, to survive whatever happens next? No, no, I'm only joking, I'm sure it'll all be completely fine. Remember when America voted for Kelly Clarkson over Justin Guarini, thereby sparing us from the unimaginable horrors of living under a brutal Guarini regime? I'm sure we can pull it off again.
There's a chance that, this time next week, I'll be writing to you and commenting on how amazing it was that everyone finally snapped out of their mania, how in a mere 6 days we saw media literacy rates skyrocket, neighbors embracing neighbors, bombs disassembled, assault rifles melted down and turned into printing presses and plows, etc. etc. It's either that or Death By Consumption will continue to exist, but as a weekly screed, covertly scribbled on toilet paper and furtively passed between the gulags. See you there!
Conclave (2024) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park
Should I become Catholic? This movie, with all its cardinal divas swishing down marble halls, made it seem appealing for the first time in my life. If nothing else — and I know such a thing would probably be impossible on many practical levels, but bear with me — Conclave proves we absolutely need a Pope reality show. This was Survivor: Vatican.
If you love dignified men of a certain age getting into catfights, then boy are you going to love Conclave! Ralph Fiennes delivers every line with extreme gravitas even though his character is basically “what if Regina George was also Nancy Pelosi?” Stanley Tucci is as handsome and world-weary as ever, but also spends the whole movie being like, “What, ME become Pope? Impossible! Unless...” which doesn't get any less funny the 10th time he does it. John Lithgow plays John Lithgow, which everyone always loves so why change it up now? And Isabella Rossellini is there to remind us that, no matter what those pesky cardinals get up to, nuns are the original divas.
I can’t overemphasize how surprised I was by just how much FUN I had watching this. It's an election that's actually highly enjoyable to sit through, which felt particularly on-the-nose this year, but I'll take it (in the film, someone says something to the effect of, "Are we supposed to just pick the least-bad option?" which got a half-delighted, half-pained groan from this Brooklyn audience). And, look, I won’t spoil anything here, but the twist at the end is genuinely shocking, a rarity these days. My initial reaction was, “Oh noooo, they’re doing this?” but I actually thought they handled the twist reasonably well, thankfully. And that’s all I’ll say about that, because you really should go in unspoiled.
The movie is probably a hair too long, but what movie isn’t these days? And, anyway, I hardly noticed, the plot flying by at the pace of some of the best 90s thrillers. At multiple twists and revelations, our audience genuinely gasped, or even outright yelled. We were all watching it like it was reality TV, or sports. I swear to the Catholic God, at several points a straight bro in the audience literally yelled, “Let’s GOOOOOO,” like he was watching those other Cardinals compete. Someone else in our theater gave a shocked, “Giiiiirl…” so we really got the full spectrum of straight-gay reactions, proving Conclave is the film of the year for hes, shes, and theys — just in the nick of time, something to bring us all together. I truly think Conclave can heal the world. A perfect film.
Revenge (2017) — on MUBI
After The Substance, it was only a matter of time before I saw writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s debut Revenge. And, damn, what a debut! My main question is, if this was her first feature film, how did she get this large of a fake blood budget?!
The story is a simple one: after she’s raped and left for dead, a woman sets out for revenge on the men who did it to her, in the process transforming from a seemingly spoiled Barbie figure to a blood-splattered psycho killer. Just like The Substance, watching it is a full-body experience at times, the gore piling up in truly nauseating amounts. And also like The Substance, there is nothing subtle about the film — it’s a subversion of typical male-gaze flicks (the main male actor spends a solid 15-20 minutes of the film completely naked, dick flapping in the desert breeze, and while the female hero is similarly undressed at times, the camera doesn’t linger on her in nearly the same way). It's a Mad Max-esque desert brawl, a horrific anti-fairy tale, a twisted fantasy of some really bad guys finally getting their dues.
Between this and The Substance, it's so exciting to see a director bursting into the world, fully formed with a clear vision and distinctive style, like a female Quentin Tarantino without the foot fetish or weird obsession with saying the N-word. I already need her next movie!
I Saw The TV Glow (2024) — on MAX
I wanted to like this more than I did. It's gorgeously shot and dreamy, but I think it was overhyped and also wrongly billed as a horror. Donnie Darko isn't a horror film, I will die on that hill, and neither is this. That said, I'm probably the wrong audience for this film, one because I'm cisgender, and two because I'm not really a Donnie Darko fan (I'm not a hater, either! I'm Donnie Darko agnostic), and those two movies share a fair amount of DNA. I can imagine, though, for the right kind of person this movie really hits to the core, but for me it was just okay. And that's okay!
Nevada, by Imogen Binnie (2013) — paperback
This book has very little plot — a trans woman in NYC gets dumped, steals her girlfriend's car, and drives to Nevada, where she meets a guy who may or may not be trans — but the plot is beside the point. The point is, as Imogen Binnie explained in her afterward, to focus on two characters on either "side" of transition — "post-transition" and "pre-transition." As Binnie stated, the majority of trans media is too focused on a cis audience, which means focusing on the "more interesting" bit in the middle, when someone struggles with their gender and then figures it out and then transitions. But she wanted to explore the messy parts we don't talk about or see as often, to show that transness is so much more than a before and after, that it's a process of figuring yourself out, much like pretty much any of us go through to varying degrees.
The book is definitely a Millennial book, and very 2013, written in what I could only think of as an extremely Buzzfeedy style. Characters will sometimes "say" sentences or "reply", but more often the dialogue we get is a lot of: "James is like, What," or, "Maria's like, Haha, fuck." More than a few paragraphs — or even chapters — just end with a simple, "Whatever." And while I thought that style would annoy me, I found it true to the characters, who are desperately trying to shrug their lives off, with booze and drugs and general disaffectedness, so of course they're always just, like, Whatever.
I loved this book. The characters are free to be messy, figuring stuff out on the page in what felt like real time, and I found myself disagreeing with them a lot, while at other times I would think: oh shit, that is extremely profound. I feel like this book must have helped a lot of people realized they were trans over the years, which is particularly ironic because the whole back half of the book is about one character trying to convince another character he's trans, mostly unsuccessfully. It's so impressive to pull that off, to give us two distinct personalities, who are in opposition more than they're in agreement, who each feel like a true-to-life trans experience (he says, cisly). It's still so rare to see trans characters allowed this level of nuance, but many current trans writers credit this book for giving them the push they needed, which is no small thing.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier, by Percival Everett (2009) — paperback
My journey continues to read every word ever put down by Percival Everett, and has finally reached what many describe as his masterpiece. This book, about a man whose mother names him "Not Sidney Poitier," who confusingly grows up to look exactly like Sidney Poitier, is an absurd tale of ridiculous people acting insane in unfortunately recognizably American ways. It has the tone of The Jerk, the so-stupid-it's-smart wordplay of Catch-22, and the merciless satire I've come to expect from my beloved Percival. Not since discovering Vonnegut in high school have I found an author who, as you turn the pages, you can practically hear cackling with glee as he wrote. I think he's written something like 24 novels, and I hope we get at least 24 more.