A Beautiful Tragedy: Reimagining the Blacklist
“Even the most cynical satire is half in love with the object of its barbs; there is a part of every constrained creative that loves their shackles and will make great play of rattling them.”
D.M. Palmer
Tightrope Walker: Dirk Bogarde’s Post-War Rebellion
“Rejection is the purest form of rebellion. Bogarde was never embraced by Hollywood in large part because ambivalence is not a bankable asset. He left too many questions unanswered.”
The Unforgiving Concrete: Lodge Kerrigan’s Cinema of Estrangement
“In Lodge Kerrigan’s first three features, he asks audiences to consider those left in the wake of his central characters…”
New Targets: Assassins at the End of History
“The 90s variant of the hitman archetype became entangled in the disorientation of the time, prone to the same neurotic preoccupations as the cultural cadres warring around them…”
The Perennial Schmuck: Elaine May’s Disappointing Men
“May was banished at a time when male auteurs were granted an unprecedented amount of latitude. She was treated as a liability rather than a maverick, and it’s difficult not to read that assessment as gendered.”
Feeling Like a Winner: Elliott Gould’s Hollywood Hot Streak
“Gould’s persona upended traditional notions of cinematic masculinity in its appeal to a generational fatigue and ambivalence; his sexual magnetism eschewed the amatory codes of the traditional leading man.”
Small Screen Sanctuary: The Rise of Auteur TV
“It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when television’s so-called Second Golden Age began; however, by the 2010s, it was understood that Prestige TV had begun to fill the gap left by the demise of cinema’s mid-budget tier.”
That Building Had It Coming: Distance and Disgust in the Anti-Comedy Playground
“In Alverson’s hands, anti-comedy becomes a new kind of gothic — it is the world viewed through a warped, sinister lens; a fresh excavation of the unspeakable through outsized comedic strategies.”
Constructing a Madman: Lee Harvey Oswald’s Screen Life
“In our attempt to fill in the gaps of the Oswald character, we recast him again and again, hoping that the latest iteration will reveal a previously hidden angle.”
Don’t Expect Roses: Growth, Transformation and Illusion in Tony Blair’s Britain
“The ghosts of the divisive past that New Labour set out to consign to history’s trash heap reared their heads, presaging a politics that would cast off the Blairite technocratic order.”
Follow That Dream: Generation X and Addiction Cinema
“In a climate of secular uncertainty, the addict’s commitment to something larger took on an almost religious significance; the user was transformed into an intrepid traveler.”
The Art of Hardly Trying: Dean Martin’s 60s Swing
“As the 70s dawned, survival for Dean Martin became a matter of staying on the horse and waiting for the culture to loop back in his favor, to mature into the venerated relic who had come direct from the bar.”
Choose Death: Gregg Araki’s Apocalyptic 90s
“Gregg Araki’s 90s films feel like prophecies of a cataclysm that never happened.”
Mystical Ennui: Peter Cook at a Distance
“Peter Cook was never able to bridge the distance between his personal world and his many creations, and one gets the impression that he derived a certain satisfaction from keeping people guessing.”
The Irresistible Bulldozer: Judy Holliday’s Brief Comic Swing
“Holliday’s persona is one of shrewdness in the face of unrelenting condescension; she perfected the art of playing the outwardly ditzy blonde who lulls those around her into taking her lightly.”
Visions of the Future from 1995: Touching with Synthetic Hands
Visions of the Future from 1995: Touching with Synthetic Hands by D.M. Palmer: “These films posited that to dream in public, to build new worlds on this freshly privatized terrain, was to risk new and previously inconceivable forms of personal ruin.”
Visions of the Future from 1995: I Am the Law
“The capacity to dehumanize has always been present in cinema; to witness the vanquishing of enemies on the screen has served a cathartic function for every society in which cinema has taken hold.”
Visions of the Future from 1995: The World Is Screwed
“‘Waterworld,’ ’12 Monkeys’ and ‘Tank Girl’ posit that when a civilization collapses, many of its customs will be upheld through authoritarian means…”
The Only Thing Real: Meaning and Maturity in Post-9/11 Cinema
“9/11 was a psychic wound that fostered a new relation to the world, and those who grew up in its aftermath struggled to digest its lessons; some fell back onto intransigence, while others internalized the damage.”
Recovery, Survival and Extinction: Abel Ferrara’s Exile Cycle
“Few artists have dreamt more boldly and defiantly in their exile than Ferrara; he has faced up to the dark towers of commerce and coercion, the systemic violence that is rationalized and sanctioned to peak efficiency by the prevailing conditions.”