"You're asking for it! You're Dying for it!"
New work, I Saw The TV Glow and a meditation on expectations.
I think it will be easier for me to actually do this newsletter if I don't have to make every one of these a Giant Production! So Hiya! Hope you're all doing good! Here's some random media thoughts:
TWIN PEAKS S1 - I now understand why you lot never shut up about this show!!! Also aware I am decades late but 90% of the men in theirs show urgently need their shit rocked!!!
THE SUBSTANCE [2024] - Proper write up on this possibly pending, but the more I think about this film's relationship with food the more it drives me round the bend! I think it is just fascinating to me that there are just about tenable readings of this film as an embrace of monstrosity but EVEN within that it must be known that food and fatness are unequivocally gross.
SURFER ROSA [1988] - On the note of things I have finally gotten round to years late, this bangs! Tony's Theme I love u dearly!!
Okay so this newsletter has mostly to say that I finally got round to writing my piece on what I thought about I SAW THE TV GLOW and it's whiteness. People really wanted this from me immediately and I felt a lot of internal resistance to it and was trying to figure out why? Like…I'm a film critic and an endless yapper - why would I be reluctant to write about a film?
Once I sat with I realised that the main issue was that it felt like white people were seeking permission from me to talk about the racial issues in the film that they could see with their own eyes. And it's a frustrating thing because I do also appreciate the value of a good essay in clarifying an issue, but I resent the idea that my work exists to provide an easy Authentic Black Opinion for people to refer to. I'm interested in exploring films and art and lovingly (or hatefully) taking a scalpel to them, the tools are informed by my experienced and positionality, but they aren't inherent! Thinking like that is often how you end up with well-meaning white people being swindled by charlatans whose Blackness obfuscates an imprecise or simply empty craft and politic. Outside of my own annoyances, this has cropped up in relation to Palestinian resistance and the violence of the state of Israel. It can feel like some people are stalling and waiting for a saviour with the correct set of identities and level of “articulateness” to tell them what to think and do. And it’s like…the world is in front of you! You don’t need an identitarian shield to say apartheid is wrong, to say genocide is wrong, to say action needs to be taken.
With all that said, with the help of David of Unwinnable Editor fame I finally figured out a way I wanted to do this shit on my terms. And that came with Unwinnable doing an issue on the horror of suburbia, which lets me engage with the racial dynamics but actually contextualise them within history and power and my experiences rather than just the “Jane made a very white film and plonked a Black person in there doesn’t that suck” essay. Pulling on the style of Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors, Ian Penman's biography/memoir for himself/general musings I've gone for a fractured approach. Is it 14 mini essays of 100 words or is it one big 1400 word essay? That's for you to decide. I'll give you one segment of the essay(s) below and for the rest you'll just have to go to the source and grab a copy of the magazine here!:
“Schoenbrun makes colouring book cinema. Fill between the lines with your own experiences. Your own childhood. Your own hyperfixations. Your own rabbit holes. Your own references. Your own alienations. Your own anxieties. Your own parents. Your own nightmares. Your own desires. Your own disgust. But you can't just plug in experience for developed scripts or characters or worlds. Schoenbrun’s work often falls apart when you refuse the invitation to project and look at what's actually there - or if you just can't fit your world between the lines that they draw. Then all that's visible is outlines bathed in pink mist.
Anyone who's been with me to the cinema….or the theatre….or in front of the telly…or at a gig…or on the street…knows I can be a bit Animated when it comes to engaging with art. I think a healthy dose of pantomime, Nollywood and audience plant cheering over-wrote that bit of the politeness chip implanted at birth in English hospitals. At one notable bit of dud dialogue in I Saw The TV Glow, I audibly groaned while (as I later learned) my friend was sobbing right next to me. I still don't quite know what to do with that. “
I’m less online lately, but whsiper on the winds and maybe you’ll fine me! Always appreciate your support whether that’s verbal, financial (ko-fi.com/tayowrites) or whatever else.