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…
Fucked Up and Being Lost 1 How to justify a hunch? What is the necessary methodological approach to an essay predicated on bringing out the differences between characters who are lost, others who are fucked up, and trying to see in this distinction two eras of American film? Our provocative proposal claims that many a character from American cinema of the seventies falls into the former category; …
In ‘The Altar of the Dead’, Henry James might appear at his most morbid, but one way of thinking about James’s work is the attenuation of cause and effect. Here, a man goes each day to church and lights a candle to the various dead who are no longer in his life, including and most especially Mary Antrim, a woman he was due to marry. There, he sees a younger woman who is lighting …
1 He knew he wasn’t quite as good-looking as the film star, but also knew that when someone would make a passing comment about how he resembled him, he took it as a compliment, of course, and on occasion as an opportunity. He supposed there were women he slept with who did so as a drunken tease: in the dark and from an inebriated perspective, they were sleeping with a celebrity. But he told …
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…