#28: In my documentary era

Death By Consumption

11/12/24 - 11/18/24

I lied last week — I keep learning the names of all the little freaks Trump is appointing. In my defense, this is all happening against my will! The media keeps pushing these people's faces into my various social feeds, no matter how much I try to avoid seeing their beady little eyes. This is like the evil version of how I somehow know the difference between Tate McRae and Addison Rae, despite never once clicking on anything to learn more about either of them.

This week, I buried myself in a trippy scifi/fantasy book series, watched an all-time classic movie I had shamefully never seen, attended the DOC NYC festival, and felt sadly disappointed by the new Dune show.

The World According to Allee Willis (2024) — at Angelika Theater

I watched most of this documentary (in limited screenings but will be "on digital" on November 22, whatever that means) with a smile on my face — I didn't know Allee Willis's name before this, but I've known her work my whole life. Her songwriting catalog is insane: Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," a zillion other hits for Cyndi Lauper, Patti LaBelle, Gladys Knight, the Pointer Sisters, Pet Shop Boys... she essentially defined the sound of the late 70s and early 80s. And then, as if that wasn't enough, she became a respected visual artist, and also an extremely early internet tech entrepreneur (working alongside a pre-billionaire Mark Cuban). Oh, and she also wrote the "Friends" theme song, and the music to "The Color Purple". Just casually!

Throughout it all she recorded her life, leaving behind something like 20,000 hours of self-captured footage, which is what makes up the bulk of this extremely efficient documentary. We follow Allee's life from struggling to fit into her straight-edged, white family (her dad hated how much she loved Motown, and when she left home he wrote her a letter that simply said, "Stay away from black culture," which she kept framed on her wall), to all the wild ups and downs of her many careers. She's absurdly charismatic and interesting, so the documentary is a fucking blast, since you just get to hang out with Allee for an hour and a half (alongside her famous friends, like Pee-wee Herman and Cyndi Lauper). There were a few points I wish we could have lingered on and not moved at such a breakneck pace, but it's rare that you find a documentary you actually wanted to be longer. They're pushing for an Oscar nom with this one and I wouldn't be surprised if they got it, based on Allee's charisma alone (also Hollywood loves a story that amounts to: creativity is great!).

By the end, as we see all Allee has accomplished, and how she still didn't feel like she had been creative or productive enough, I was left with a mixture of feelings: sadness for her, that she could never fully sit back and appreciate how much she gave us, and also sadness for myself — if she didn't think she had done enough, what the hell have I been doing? I need to get off my ass and do more! Should I start painting?

SHORTS: SHE STORIES at DOC NYC — at Angelika East Village

My dear friend Emily's short "Is Gay Marriage Next?" (which, when you're able to see it, I DARE you to watch without crying) was part of this year's DOC NYC festival, so last night we got to see her short on the big screen, alongside a handful of other short docs made by women. I don't regularly go to see shorts, but now I feel like I should. It's so fun to see a variety of films — we saw everything from self-produced or student films to films from the NYTimes and The Guardian — and the best news is that if you don't like one, it's over pretty quickly! And then, of course, the best part is getting drinks afterward and dissecting every single frame of each film — the screening lasted for 86 minutes, and after it was over we talked about the films for, oh, I would say, 3 to 5 hours? We didn't get to vote on an audience prize, sadly, but I feel confident in saying Emily's film would have won.

Dog Day Afternoon (1975) — on Criterion

I now know what a crime it is to have never seen this movie. I should never have known a day of peace in my life until now. This is possibly the greatest film ever made, and I'm actually going to put the onus on all of you, for not talking about it more. This was one of those movies where I found myself saying, "I'm having so much fun!" out loud throughout it, in disbelief that movies could ever be this good. Al Pacino is the original trans ally, and in fact, we need him now more than ever.

"Dune: Prophecy" episode 1 — on HBO

I am genuinely so sad that the TV show about scheming space witches isn't that good! How did they mess this up so badly? The vibe is extremely Disney+ (and I do mean that as a slur), with less of a focus on the middle-aged witches and their dastardly plots, and more of a focus on the sexy Gen Z space kids who may or may not fall in love or something. This is upsetting to me! You sell me a TV show based on Emily Watson swishing around brutalist spaceships and plotting evil things, and instead you give me random 20-somethings delivering CW performances? No one wants to get off their ass and make genuinely crazy space dramas anymore!

Shadow & Claw (1981) and Sword & Citadel (1983), by Gene Wolfe — paperback

Actually, strike that, Gene Wolfe definitely wanted to make genuinely crazy space drama. This book series was extremely difficult to read, and I'm talking simply on an effort level — I had to work so hard to understand what was going on. I'm tired! The story follows a torturer in the far distant future, millions of years from now when the sun is dying and humanity has spread out amongst the stars but has somehow fractured, so life on our planet is now something vaguely medieval in nature, but with the occasional robot or alien. It's all very strange! The text is full of nonsense words, so each sentence is dense and difficult, and the story is outrageously meandering. An action scene will come to a screeching halt, in order for our hero to spend a few pages pondering philosophical questions, before we return to the present action and find that, actually, there is no action, that's all over, and also a few major characters died off the page. Or, alternatively, a long philosophical section will be interrupted by a sudden and very brief sex scene.

Because the one thing our boy Gene Wolfe seems to love is women. Literally every woman the hero, Severian, encounters is either an old hag or a beautiful, breasty woman who is immediately very horny for Severian. This is how he describes one character: "Above the waist her creamy amplitude was such that her spine must have been curved backward to balance the weight." That sure is a lot of words to say, "She had big tits"!

I took it all with a grain of salt, since all the characters are skewed by the perception of our narrator Severian, a torturer raised in essentially a monastery, so it's no surprise that once he's on the road his mind is blown by basically any woman he sees. But, thematically, almost all the characters, not just the women, are only hastily sketched out. The overall story is drenched in allegory, pulling threads from various religious texts and other classical literature, so it's no accident that the majority of characters are fairly one-note — after all, no one criticizes, like, Cinderella for not having depth. We're largely dealing in symbolism here, and the only rich inner life the narrator is concerned with is his own.

The series' complexity is its biggest strength, but by far its biggest obstacle. Nothing comes easy as you read it, but even before you start to understand what the fuck is going on, you can already feel how deeply, absurdly rich the world is that Gene Wolfe created. Tidbits are dropped constantly, which are never picked up, but give you the impression of a much, much wider world — there's a brief reference to mice having evolved a written language, and there are frequent mentions of the moon glowing green due to the lush forests that are now on it, but neither affect the plot. The sheer amount of stuff Gene Wolfe created could, in a lesser hand, be smothering, but it all works as adding incredible texture to the puzzle he's building for you. Each new idea introduced is something your brain has to toy over, to decide if it's a puzzle piece worth keeping, or one to admire before discarding and trusting the finished puzzle will still feel complete without that piece.

If all this sounds vaguely exhausting, it honestly kind of is! And yet I deeply enjoyed it. The series has been declared a masterpiece for decades (my queen Ursula Le Guin raved about it, and who am I to contradict her?), but it's also been compared to trying to get through Ulysses. It was by far the most complicated, difficult thing I've read all year, but that only made it more enjoyable, as the more I got through it, the more my brain learned how to read it. They say it's the kind of series you need to read twice to truly understand, and while I can't say I'll be doing that anytime soon, I understand why. But with so many episodes of Love Is Blind: DC still to catch up on, I really don't have the time to start it all over again, sorry!