It has become a truism that we recover from a break-up as we might recover from drugs, and science proves it: that the level of oxytocin flooding the brain resembles the pleasure principle of a good fix. The removal of the loved one, or the drug, leaves us bodily distraught. Is there any filmmaker who has coincided with this idle scientific fact and turned it into an aesthetic ongoing first princi…
A Desire Beyond Bodies Some insist that sex is back, whether it is The Substance, Babygirl, Poor Things, Challengers, Die, My Love, or Love Lies Bleeding. Noticing this return to sex in cinema. Lisa Laman notes: “2023 features like Oppenheimer, Saltburn, Poor Things, Mars One, and so many others kept the tradition of unforgettable cinema sex scenes alive and well. These features were especia…
How to make the metaphysics of Kafka, physical? There is often a sense in Kafka’s work that persecution is contained by paranoia and that the sense of reality conjured up is simultaneously an inner feeling and a cosmic force, with the writer’s greatness resting centrally on showing us a world that isn’t quite our own, but that manages to make evident almost all our fears. In Ousm…
1 I would see him walking the dog most afternoons. This was several years ago, during a virus that left most people with time aplenty. I was living alone in a flat near Pilrig Park, and I often sat on a bench even during the winter months, reading a book, and with a flask of tea and a hot water bottle to keep me warm. I nodded but never said hello. But at a moment when contact with strangers was f…
Never Rarely Sometimes Always possesses ambiguities that can seem prejudicial, others, inferred. Is the boy on the bus, Jason (Theodore Pellerin), a pest? Is this figure the central character Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), and her cousin (Talia Ryder) meet on the way to New York from Pennsylvania, a sleazy guy or a helpful stranger? Could he be both? When Autumn speaks to a health worker at an abortion…