Dream Lovers
A break from The Screen and a return to The Theatre (sort of), a femme fatale I can finally get behind, and some thoughts on the "end" of good TV.
I’m back with another installment of various film, TV, and yes, even (shudder) theatre thoughts, and I think we’ve all lucked out that I am writing this before having yet seen Ari Aster’s new film Beau is Afraid. That said, I’d be remiss not to acknowledge the buzzy, seemingly divisive new release from one of the newest darlings of the horror genre and his three-time collaborator (and two-time-in-one-month ignorer of reports of alleged sexual predators in its purview) distribution/production company A24. I don’t fall squarely into either camp of Ari Aster superfan or fervent hater, but I’ve followed and been excited by the prospects of his work since Hereditary started earning buzz at its Sundance premiere. I also largely credit Aster’s work as the straw that broke this crybaby’s back to finally delve into the horror genre.
After years of assuming I was averse to horror, too scared to watch the Saw installments or to check out Insidious with all of my high school friends (though reading their plot descriptions on Wikipedia), my fascination with what potential, horrors critics continuously alluded to in Hereditary started to lead me down to the epiphany that I didn’t hate horror — I just hated goddamn jump scares. But the idea of horror? Psychological horror? Dread? Staring into the face of evil? It got me curious to the point that at the time of the announcement of Midsommar, I was in search of a copy of the screenplay; I read it furiously in one day; buzzed about it for weeks; and found myself actually seated in a movie theater to watch the gory affair.
I love Midsommar. I don’t love Hereditary, though those particularly dark elements of it that initially drew my intrigue are by far my favorite parts. And since Midsommar, I’ve been eager for Aster’s next feature. I’ve read a copy of Beau’s script as well (and have seen the short film on which it’s expanded) and have been excitedly anticipating this bizarre epic.
Even though Midsommar is one of my favorite movies, I find many easy criticisms of Aster’s work. His set pieces are overly-provocative almost to a fault, his depictions of mental illness — though they might be personal to him — leave much to be desired (and don’t get me started on how he features disability as a whole), and his metaphors are often unsubtle. But even if it doesn’t always work for me, I never see the pretentiousness that many of his critics do, and his increasingly ambitious scale within his works doesn’t strike me as that of someone with too much confidence to win, but enough vision to never entirely lose. I don’t think he wants us to believe he’s smarter than he really is, and while I know this is the same mentality that has caused me to be overly generous with pieces like Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, or Alex Garland’s Devs, I’d just rather see filmmakers commit to the vision that matters to them. I’m a believer that there will always be at least one person that connects to your vision, and unless that vision is, like, Joe Rogan promoting horse tranquilizer, ain’t that just the beauty of creativity?
Anyhow, I’ll be seated for Beau is Afraid soon, and I’m sure there’ll be much to love, admire, detest, and feel ambivalent about. And there is certainly much to consider as we continue to watch the trajectory of a studio like A24 (a trajectory I touched upon when I wrote about Spring Breakers) perhaps being the sole studio successfully producing and promoting unusual work while also being able to do so because they are, above all, marketers who have cornered a part of the industry. But I’m glad these movies get made, and I hope they continued to get made — not just by Aster, but by all sorts of creatives with ambitious, perhaps self-indulgent visions that are entirely theirs.
The industry is in a precarious spot at this moment, but it will never die. It never does. People will always be creating. And I hope if something as alienating as Beau is Afraid can bring out an audience, there will only be more room for works to transcend restrictive studio notes and old-fashioned ideas of what “sells,” — and maybe even create new pathways for creative works to thrive outside of the system.
Am I crazy about the fact that these opportunities often come to cis white guys before they come down to anyone else? Absolutely not. But I get far more satisfaction watching studios give Ari Aster a budget for Beau is Afraid than I do seeing Spielberg get to remake West Side Story. The studio system is not going to save aspiring filmmakers like me and like many of the people I love, but if it’s gonna tank itself nonetheless — fuck it. Let ‘em go all in on Aster.
And on that note, a little less on movies this week: A couple of weekends ago, I saw Writers Theatre’s closing night performance of Once the Musical — a show very near and dear to my heart — plus, what the hell is going on with TV right now? And some recommendations as the thought of “dream lovers” permeate my brain.
Falling Slowly for ‘Once.’
“So, if you want something /
And you call, call /
Then I'll come running.”
There used to be a podcast I was a fan of called Crybabies, cohosted by Susan Orlean (God, remember that spell where she was amazing on Twitter?) and comedy writer and performer Sarah Thyre. As a sensitive person myself (see: my above reflections on horror), I enjoyed the question the hosts asked of their guests in each episode: “What are your cry cues?” AKA, what were the cultural works that without a doubt, whether it was the first time you encountered them or something you returned to often, would make you cry? I liked that question because it understood a phenomenon I always felt a bit embarrassed about: There were movies, TV episodes, or essays that would make me weep, and the fact that they made me weep was a reason I’d continuously return to them.
I remember I was talking about the podcast to a guy I used to be friends and comedic collaborators with — another sensitive romantic who wanted to write a great love story just as much as they wanted to be a touring stand-up. Like me, he was also taken with this idea of “cry cues,” and we started to treat it like a party game or icebreaker. We’d ask our friends what their cry cues were, and would occasionally update each other with a new one that came to mind.
I never finalized my list, but there were a few pieces that regularly came to mind: Spike Jonze’s Her, a couple of episodes of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Melissa Broder’s So Sad Today essay, “Love Like You Are Trying to Fill an Insatiable Spiritual Hole with Another Person Who Will Suffocate There,” and Once the Musical. Familiarity with these works may vary for many, but I started to piece together a particular genre they all lived within that I now affectionately call “We had each other for a minute, didn’t we?” There are other works that fit into this category — Richard Linklater’s original Before Sunrise and Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood For Love likely two of the most popular and overly romantic entries in the canon.
Once the movie falls into this category, too. It’s a movie I liked a lot since it came out, being the only 13-year-old at the Swell Season show at Ravinia (imagine that scene). But since Once the Musical toured a decade ago, I found myself strangely preferring the adaptation even more. But maybe it was because the musical was the one that made me weep.
The conceit of Once in either iteration isn’t complex: A guy and a girl (who are only credited as such) meet in Dublin. Guy is an Irish-born-and-raised busker with broken dreams of a music career and an old girlfriend who fled to New York City for something bigger. Girl is a Czech young mother, also passionate about music, whose husband has left her alone and with limited resources. Over just a handful of days, they make music, persuade one another to pursue their dreams of more, and as you can imagine, fall in love. But as is true of all works in the “We had each other for a minute,” genre, it’s just a passing moment — a meaningful, unforgettable, but ultimately unsustainable intersection of lonely souls.
There’s a funny convention of the plot that is necessary for any other piece of it to work, and that is you must believe that Guy is a once-in-a-generation musical genius whose music immediately captivates anyone in his presence, elevated by the chemistry of the (manicish pixish dream) Girl who has faith in him.
It should not work. But it does. And that’s because the music… well, it’s pretty fucking beautiful. You might remember (as my partner Joe did) the song “Falling Slowly” playing on a loop on alt radio stations like WXRT, but the collaboration between musicians Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová makes for a transcendent connection. You can believe that within this simple story, their music — and thus, this brief relationship they have together — is something cosmic because those feelings are true and blue in the compositions. It gets a little icky the more you look into it — Hansard and Irglová had a real-life relationship that followed the making of the film and carried them through a second album together, but Irglová was 19 and Hansard 37 when the movie came out — and Hansard had known Irglová since she was 13. Whatever that means on an interpersonal level, good or bad (my instinct always leans “bad” with these things), there’s a real brief, intertwined, troubling, sad, but passionate connection that existed between Irglová and Hansard at the exact time they worked on Once, and with those feelings inextricable from the music, the songs are elevated beyond the usually tripey bullshit you’d expect from a folksy singer/songwriter duo who write about lost love.
Where I think Once the Musical takes the work of the film and then excels — beyond uh, not explicitly having a 19-year-old and 37-year-old in a relationship — is the way the stage show utilizes the heightened reality of a musical to play with the boundaries of diegetic and nondiegetic sound. Yes, Girl and Guy are really playing “Falling Slowly” together on a piano and guitar in a music shop, no one is breaking out into song outside of the plot. But as they begin to play together, strings join in… and more guitars, a bass, percussion, a full chorus…. Those sounds aren’t being produced “in-universe,” inside the shop — but they come alive and permeate the world around them as they play. And every song they play together follows until those auxiliary orchestrations are actualized in their final collaborative act of recording a demo.
I am not positioned to know the relationship between Irglová and Hansard, what it means to them, whether it was right to happen, etc. And we’ll never know about the sustainability of Guy and Girl should they have ever had each other for more than a minute (personally, I think that there are many signs that outside of being a wonderful musician, Guy probably sucks as a partner). But the time capsule of those relationships and everything they mean — and how the world was full of music, “once,” for the briefest of moments — exists in the songs, capturing an ephemerality that words alone often struggle to convey.
Sometimes, I think about some night after a comedy show on my birthday when I was feeling down, and my friend (the one who had his own list of Cry Cues and who was partnered at the time) stayed with me a little longer in the parking lot after the theater had closed and the Wednesday night crowd had disappeared. He was going to walk me a little ways before biking home when I confessed I didn’t know how to ride a bike myself. The prospect of anyone trying to help me ride one in adulthood was always deeply embarrassing to me, so I’m not entirely sure why, at that moment, I let him try to teach me how. We were both too tired and tipsy for it to be successful, but there was a casual vulnerability to this mundane act. Finally, after a couple of falls and a few laughs, we gave up — “Some other time,” I offered. I thanked him for cheering me up on my birthday, he told me I was wonderful, and we exchanged “I love yous,” before parting. “I love you,” wasn’t unusual. I’ve always been a big “I love you,” person with my friends, and we had exchanged those words before. But this one time, it felt different.
We have since gone our separate ways after multiple consequential friend group shifts. Nothing ever happened, and the quiet intimacy of that split second never occurred again. But I always wondered if I imagined the electricity of that exchange and if just briefly, once, we felt something we hadn’t felt before, and never returned to again. ✿
The Good, the Bad, and the Prestige TV.
What the fuck is going on with “prestige” TV?
Sorry, that was blunt. Let me re-phrase — is TV good still? Will TV be good after this season? Is art dead?
Similar questions have been getting tossed around, particularly with the concurrent final seasons of HBO’s Succession and Barry and the basically, probably (confirmed?) last season of Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso. I’ve rolled my eyes at the hand-wringing over the “end” of the Golden Era of Television. TV will be fine, there are plenty of ongoing or anticipated shows in the mix to keep it sustained, and regardless, placing the death of the Golden Era of Television squarely on the shoulders of two four-season shows that have been airing for five years or less and both had a gap halfway through their runs of at least two years is… a little embarrassing? The pandemic eliminated our sense of time, but let’s not forget that Succession and Barry’s return last year came after a couple of years of us not watching Succession and Barry, an interruption that came after we only got used to Succession and Barry for two years. It is of course the strength of those two shows that given all that, there’s a sense of an era ending, but it’s still a little silly.
That said, Succession and Barry are ending alongside what is increasingly looking like the demise of HBO as a brand — not just in name as the app will start going by “Max” a week before the dual Succession/Barry series finales, but as it starts to be evident that David Zaslav doesn’t seem all that interested in the reliability of HBO’s content that has been consistent in a way really no other channel has been, cemented since The Sopranos premiered in 1999 and laid the groundwork for what we now call prestige TV.
It doesn’t help that both Succession and Barry have been really fucking good in their fourth seasons thus far, not just demonstrating a mastery of the prestige TV genre, but pushing what it can do through writing and directing respectively. Succession’s episode three gamechanger may have been prematurely hailed as an all-timer, but it pulled off an understanding of writing for a serial format that has been lost since Netflix popularized the binge-model, obscured since JJ Abrams decided the best way to get ahead of the audience seeing where your story is going is to just do the opposite of what they’re expecting, or poorly-executed since How I Met Your Mother demonstrated the worst possible way of committing to your darlings. Succession overcame all three of these frequent disasters by 1) embracing and writing for a release model that requires patience and plotting — or building the series around the question, “Who will succeed Logan when he dies?” 2) knowing that it just makes the most sense based on the plotting for Logan to die, and thus, not shying away from it or serving disingenuous twists, and 3) knowing that if Logan dying is inevitable, the audience can see it coming, so how do you commit without forcing it, stay true to the emotional arc of the series, and surprise the audience? You do it in episode three, and you make us sit with it before moving on to the aftermath.
With Barry, it’s been evident for a while that this show — not quite a comedy, not quite a drama, not quite a horror, not quite surreal, and not quite grounded — defies convention, but now with Bill Hader behind the camera for every episode of season four, that in-betweenness of Barry and the cinematic influences that have been held so dear by Hader are cranked up to 11.
So it is all the more disappointing that “Max” may be disregarding its role in the transformation of television not only when it is still home to two of the best shows on TV, but two shows that are pushing the medium. And for as good as The Last of Us was and as good as The Other Two and Hacks are (shows whose lifespan I am mountingly nervous about), the promise of where TV could go next hangs in the balance.
Who picks up the baton?
A year ago, I would’ve thought Apple TV was a surprise frontrunner. Between Ted Lasso and Severance, Apple TV made a shocking case for itself. But Ted Lasso has fallen mighty far from grace, both with its surprise final(? can someone please confirm) season and its severe dip in quality. You might remember from my last newsletter that I was nervous about the show, but my early concerns were mostly about its approach to themes. Fortunately or unfortunately, Ted Lasso’s messaging around mental health isn’t all that concerning when it’s messaging about frankly, anything, is an enigma. The careful plotting we’re seeing come out of Succession’s writers’ room isn’t even on the same planet as whatever has been happening over at Lasso, which probably isn’t helped when all three of the male leads are writers, producers, and now have characters with equal status quo, resulting in several scenes between Ted, Beard, and Roy that feel like a writers’ room riff that never made it through a round of punch-ups (or someone thinking, “Hey, do we need this?”).
Wednesdays have not been for the boys, because season three of The Mandalorian was just as bad, if not more soulless (debate the merits of the Disney conglomerate versus the Apple conglomerate in the Discord). It is not lost on me that aside from the usual Disney-fuelled budget workarounds and the probability that Pedro Pascal is just too expensive these days, a good portion of The Mandalorian was filled with non-Pascal-rate characters who also only wear helmets. For everyone wondering why The Mandalorian adored Mandalore lore for the bulk of this season, I believe the answer is probably because faceless extras and voiceover work sure don’t cost much! I know I’m a fool to believe any IP property won’t disappoint me eventually, but there was a time where The Mandalorian was genuinely promising, and its use of The Volume as a replacement for green screen (especially in season one) was a commitment to possibility. Silly me. And while Andor has demonstrated it could be the new source of Star Wars possibility, if Mando is any indication, we should all be wary.
Maybe once Severance returns or if Yellowjackets can maintain traction, we’ll know the true state of TV, but there’s certainly room for concern. If HBO once sat atop the throne of quality, who is now our only hope? ✿
Something to Spare:
”Every Night, I Hope and I Pray.”
I haven’t been watching movies as much as I normally do this year, but I’ve been amping my movie-watching back up and have really dug this combination of first-time watches and rewatches.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) is my first time watching a Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but the timing was impeccable as it really shares a lot with the “We had each other for a minute,” subgenre. It is a cage to love someone. It is a cage to know you will never be happy without them. It is a cage to know you'll never be happy with them. I think the racial commentary is imperfect and it took a while for Fassbinder’s tonal style to work for me, but when it came together, boy, it came together. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is currently streaming on HBO Max (is the clock ticking for such screenings?) and Criterion Channel.
Bound (1996) and Manhunter (1986) were both rewatches of neo-noirs I first watched early in the pandemic, and both rewatches were illuminating — whether it was time or my own tastes changing.
Bound just rules, and the more you learn about the movie, the more it’s a pleasure as an insanely tight screenplay, a helluva debut from the Wachowski Sisters, and a fine example of a film that managed to be both sexy and responsible, representational and frivolous fun.
Manhunter rules too, for many of the same reasons, and on a personal level, certainly, because I’ve been on a Michael Mann kick that has turned him into possibly my favorite director. Manhunter was my first Mann movie outside of being forced to see Public Enemies with my parents in 2009, and now that I understand his oeuvre better, a lot of what didn’t initially work for me felt like the clouds parting upon rewatch.
Some of Mann’s best frames are here in the cinematography and in the staging/symbolism too: Shots like Will starting in shadow and Molly in light in their bedroom; the use of windows for Will as a parallel to mirrors for Francis Dolerhyde, something that can reflect but that can also be used as a partition for observation; Will's final act to stop Dolerhyde taking place through a literal smashing of the window; or the two-shot of Will and Jack on the beach, its adherence to the 180-degree rule making it so that Will is presented chest forward and bare towards Jack, while Jack is presented with his back turned towards Will... Theses choices put to shame any underhanded critiques of Mann as a substanceless filmmaker. The style is the meaning, and Mann is the man.
Both Bound and Manhunter are streaming on Criterion Channel. Bound is also available on Paramount+.
Dream Lover (1993) is a lesser-seen erotic thriller starring James Spader from the era of erotic thrillers starring James Spader that I was surprised to find I dug more than most people. I do love a good erotic thriller, but not many meet the mark for me. In all of the ways I can’t stand a movie like Basic Instinct, Dream Lover succeeded. A great erotic thriller is more interested in the sick little games than the money, makes you genuinely wonder who is the hero and the villain, and makes you seriously doubt what is truth and what is paranoia. I thought Dream Lover hit the mark (and also is an obvious precursor to a movie like Gone Girl). Dream Lover is also on Criterion Channel, or Tubi if you don’t mind ads!
That’s all for ya now. I’ll see Beau is Afraid soon enough, catch up on more movies, and look forward to the season premiere of The Other Two before it gets unceremoniously canceled. Both Showing Up and How to Blow Up a Pipeline — two of my favorite movies of 2023 so far — are almost out of theaters, so if you haven’t seen them yet, please try to check those out. Ta-ta for now!