2023 Grab Bag O' Fave Raves (Pt. 3)

Movies, Music.

Pt. 3 completes my year-end roundup (Pt. 2, Pt. 1). I liked some films; I liked some records.

Movies

Barbenheimer. I wrote about Barbie as a study of icons and mirrors and how what we ask for from icons changes over time; I wrote about Barbie vis-à-vis the glittering social-realist Trojan Horse of Saturday Night Fever. My big takeaway from Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was a grave reminder of how consistently the U.S. has shit the geopolitical bed. We didn’t take the rise of fascism seriously in the 1930s because it would have meant helping communists, so fascism spread, then we refused to have the Russians on our team when we shared a mission against Hitler and we ended up escalating the Cold War. Also we alienated the very Eastern European Jewish braintrust we’d roped in to develop our capabilities, because again oh noes the commies. And it’s beyond the scope of the movie to go into how scads of fascist ideology came from… America. Our wackadoodle pseudoscientific literature and anti-immigrant rhetoric.2 And Nolan does, smartly, draw an unspoken but profound parallel between Nazi rallies and our grotesque and near-manic intoxication after Trinity succeeded at Los Alamos. An imperfect film and a story with some voices left unheard (civilians of Japan and greater Los Alamos), but a strong, coherent statement.

A 2017 J. Robert Oppenheimer postage stamp from Sierra Leone.

2. Fascism, again. While not an outright “fave rave,” I was haunted by Steve McQueen’s new Occupied City, a city symphony of Amsterdam with gorgeous, soft, gleaming golden-light streetscapes in the present-day Dutch capital, set jarringly against the sober, unflinching narration of life and events in the same places under Nazi occupation. It’s removed from an overt authorial point of view, allowing viewers to draw their own commonalities between visuals and audio — and this aspect often unsettled me because I wanted to be sure of where McQueen himself locates those parallels. The contemporary filming happened during Covid, beginning with the shutdowns of spring 2020, and I couldn’t tell whether he was building an implied “this is fascist” ominousness into his footage of shopkeepers boarding up their windows or a handful of cops milling around a small anti-shutdown protest, or empty streets at night. I found the emptiness quite placid! There was great beauty in those scenes. Yet something he’s wonderful at as a filmmaker, particularly with his Small Axe anthology, is capturing the energy of people congregated tightly together. His creative métier is the intimacy of communal joy and shared struggle. In Occupied City all the people just hanging around in throngs circa 2020 may make me queasy in a kind of “hey, weren’t we all supposed to be social distancing?” PTSD trigger. But it does, whatever his intent, bring me in more viscerally with the claustrophobia felt in the close quarters of attics and basements in resistance homes. Occupied City was completed before the current wave of bloodshed and brutality in Gaza, and that’s a blank we as the audience can and should fill in. Let’s break the cycle of trauma before it passes down to future generations.

3. May December. How to imbue looming dread into a situation where the “worst” has already passed — when we meet the boy in the Mary Kay Letourneau–analog relationship he is well into manhood and appears to be in not-abnormal mental health. Director Todd Haynes never fully strips the surface layers away, never turns it into an A24 horror. There are cracks in the crown moulding, yes, but the foundation doesn’t need to crash and burn for us to understand Haynes’s moral position, which is that age-gap pairings involving a minor and a full-grown adult are not only wrong but can have lengthy repercussions that reverberate across families and communities. Haynes being Haynes though, he’s more interested in the cinematic appeal of the dread, especially when he can hire Julianne Moore to fork off of her naïve, erratic suburbanite from 1995’s Safe.

4. The misfits of Léa Mysius’s The Five Devils and Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up. 2023’s best French bisexual interracial paranormal kitchen-sink melodrama (with karaoke scene), and 2023’s best post–Andrei Rublev narrative feature about the personal, solitary work of craft (but also an unsentimental look at the depressive, spacy, often barely functional people in various strata of the creative life).

5. Restorations, retrospectives, archival stuff. Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon (1981). Jean-Luc Godard’s frustrating but ever-luscious Contempt. Jacques Rivette’s L’Amour Fou (1969/1972). The World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul at Lincoln Center. At the Anthology Film Archives, the Kleenex/LiLiPUT road movie shot in 1982, and the Shopping Worlds series. At Light Industry, the Fassbinder clips Ian Penman showed. Also at Light Industry, the handful of 1960s films associated with composer/artist/Fluxist/occasional screen presence Yasunao Tone as addenda to the “Region of Paramedia” exhibition on him.

Music

You know me. I like scholarship. I like musos on shore leave from the academy. I like when upstarts go sideways. I like when refinement goes a little gaudy. I like queer hippie cabaret acts’ Great American Songbook home recordings a half-decade before disco. I like obscure Canadian Dan Bejar ripoffs changing a flat on the border of sophistopop and East River Pipe. I like early, mysterious Felt. I like the Doug Yule era of the VU. I like wyrd British Isles harmonies. I like when people are adept with language and bother to write lyrics, although we all go nonverbal sometimes too.