Dispatch from MacGuffins - May Culture Diary

Cosplaying knights at the Max offices, Isabella Rossellini at JFK, music to drink spritzes to...

May Movie Diary:

• I SAW THE TV GLOW got under my skin, a psychic body horror that depicts the double edged sword of media escapism as something that can first liberate our sense of self and later trap our identities in a morass of nostalgia and regret. There’s an intensity and urgency to the characters’ identification with fictional characters that feels specific, accurate, and completely new.

• THE BEAST: I saw The Beast with Camille (who designed the titles for this column!) and Cindy at IFC. I love the film’s opening, a green screen fantasia setting up the elements that will repeat in a variety of settings throughout the movie. It works best for me as this first theoretical exercise, a distillation of a Greek tragedy two people are doomed to repeat. In classic French form, it insists on conflating the impulse to hurt women with some more expansive vision of “love.” The American directors its middle section is inspired by (Lynch, De Palma) at least recognize this as bloodlust, not love. 

• LILITH: I watched Lilith (1964) with Jason, a cartoonist with a surprising degree of face blindness given his talent for capturing someone’s portrait in a handful of accurate brushstrokes. He can’t distinguish between the three brunettes who surround Warren Beatty, one of our great Snacks. Beatty plays a traumatized (handsome) soldier who volunteers to work at an insane asylum in an apparent fit of altruism. The idyllic sanatorium is admittedly far cheerier and full of (beautiful) women than the cramped, dank childhood home he’s returned to after the war). Lilith was the final feature of both director Robert Rossen (The Hustler) & legendary cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan (Metropolis, Gance’s Napoléon, Eyes Without A Face), and both filmmakers are doing beautiful, unsettling work. A pivotal sex scene gets under my skin: Jean Seberg writhes in the grass, her neck arching beneath superimposed footage of glittering water, which has sinister significance for both disturbed lovers. The sequence feels both indebted to cinema’s impressionistic past and prescient of its morally ambivalent future. Just don’t ask us to name the brunettes who interrupt them.

• REN FAIRE: I went to a screening of Lance Oppenheim’s new doc-series Ren Faire (out on Max in early June).