industrial cannibal utopia

Cannibalism is probably the diet with the worst rep. It seems to inspire nausea in those who even think about it, but, personally, i don’t experience any visceral disgust when i ponder people meat. For one, i was raised catholic, a religion which cannibalizes the son of god as part of a sacred ritual. I’m confident catholicism installed all sorts of masochism into my supple young brain, not that cannibalism is innately masochistic, but, you know, it can be. The way jesus did it it certainly was. Actually the layers of masochism run pretty deep in the last supper. Lotta salt poured on a lotta emotional wounds during that meal.   

Then there’s my veganism. Regular meat grosses me out, but since people meat isn’t really a thing i ever encounter, at least knowingly, the idea of it feels like an exciting novelty, like the insect burgers in the Becky Chambers space operas. Doesn’t sound tasty but i’d like to try one.

Once, someone poked an ant off my foot and popped it into her mouth. My response would have would been about the same, i think, if she were eating an actual human foot, which i imagine would taste similar to that ant (but of course a much different texture).

Here’s a chestnut to grace your next zoom party: ask everyone if they had the opportunity to try people meat, would they do it. More specifically, i like to ask people if they would eat me if i died, with the knowledge that i fully consented to this use of my corpse. I assumed most people would, like me, say something like, “yeah sure, wouldn’t mind knowing what people taste like.” In fact, a sizable majority says something like, “no way would i ever do that, that’s absolutely revolting.” 

At a reading in Minneapolis back in 2018, Dame Charlie Jane Anders brought up something like this topic, remarking on how curious it was that humanity has more taboos around cannibalism than it does around killing other people, when, evolutionarily, cannibalism has more going for it than killing. Sometimes, when i think of all the dead bodies we produce, seems an awful waste.

Naturally, all this had been a buildup to a defense of Ms. Lovitt from the musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.  For the very first time in my life, i am not being sarcastic: i think Ms. Lovitt’s culinary output is generally sound and a more enlightened society would recognize her innovation.  Which isn’t to say i defend murder! But she doesn’t kill anyone, that’s all Mr. T. We can think of the Demon Barber as a machine, that’s what original stage director Hal Prince was all about: the guy’s a metaphor for the industrial revolution. The demon barber machine produces corpses and Ms. Lovitt utilizes the base materials, creating meat pies so tasty it inspires droves of people to chorus, “damn, that’s good! More hot pies!” It’d be one thing if her cannibal pies sucked, or even if they were merely passable, but everyone loves them. 

I’m sorry but that’s inspirational. I mean when life hands ya lemons. Wouldn’t it be nicer to merrily feast on tastefully anonymous dead people, instead of dressing them up in clothes and putting them in boxes to rot, or just burning them away into ash, as if we, the living, are nervous to confront the various uses they can provide. “A Little Priest” is such a refreshing song, because it’s about stripping people of their pretensions, especially people who happen to be dead. “What a nice frame what’s his name has, had…has!” sings Ms. Lovitt, reminding us that under cannibalism we can, after we die, continue actively contributing to society.

But this is an industrial cannibal utopia, a lofty dream impossible to realize. Mrs. Lovitt’s dream world does go up in flames by the play’s climax. Cannibalism is probably unhealthy anyways. Probably her customers suffered some amount of digestion issues. Not to mention the merriment of her customers is entirely dependent on the fact that they don’t know they’re eating people. If she were to announce, “hey everybody! you’re eating man!” the jolly consumers would likely vomit. They would likely consider themselves poisoned.  

Yet in that nineties western horror movie Ravenous, human meat is like a superfood, so packed with rich nutrients it grants colonialist white people immortality and scary mega-strength. They’re like Draculas, eager to never die, harnessing their sinister powers to exploit humanity down to our very bodies. At one point near the movie’s end, the lead cannibal, surveying some kind of cannibalistic carnage, throws out his arms and merrily proclaims “manifest destiny!” So maybe cannibalism is actually too healthy.

The movie’s director, Antonia Bird, emphasizes the hardscrabble grime of this familiarly greedy lifestyle. There are gross close-ups of human meat stew, cluttered unkempt sets, and naturalistic lighting, so it all feels lived-in. Those who indulge in cannibalism take on a bloated appearance and come across as too pleased for their own good (drenched in blood and generally looking like a corpse, a cannibal colonist perks “I feel terrific!”). While cannibalism is often thought of as the ultimate act of culinary desperation, the iconic Donner party, in this movie it’s a sick indulgence of an anything-goes frontier.

The cannibal men are quite banal, they talk about eating people both like it’s a lofty endeavor and like it’s a health fad, like bone broth or something. So many characters die, the movie feels like a slasher. Final girl is a native woman, but she’s not really in the movie much. What little screentime she has is cool: there’s a memorable part where she pounces Guy Pierce with a knife, because she’s in a paranoid situation where anyone, or everyone, in this military fort could be a cannibal.

We don’t get to see our colonist cannibals industrialize their diet, but we can assume this would be part of their conquest. Perhaps people are afraid of cannibalism’s monstrous potential, because it must have a little innate appeal: humanity by and large doesn’t mind consuming dead things for nourishment. And by and large, humanity doesn’t mind finding reasons to treat people as disposable non-entities. There’s almost a feeling of dreary inevitability around the idea of industrialized cannibalism, evoked in the dystopia novel “Make Room! Make Room!” and its film adaptation with the much less excited title Soylent Green. I haven’t read that book, or seen all that really quite boring movie, but i have marveled at the book’s paperback cover, and i know the concept. If populations continue existing and growing within an unstable capitalist expansion, it’s maybe only a matter of time before our efficient, economical, and dehumanizing methods of food production fully utilize the stuff of people for its materials.

All of this is my vegan propaganda.

more about cannibalism

I feel blessed typing this, i’ve evolved to the level of gay where i not only enter other people’s places from the back, but i also enter book series from the end.  Most recently, i finished Cassandra Khaw’s Rupert Wong novella trilogy, going backwards from The Last Supper Before Ragnarok to Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef. I began this series a year a half ago, so i don’t remember LSb4R very sharply, except i know it’s my favorite because it features a tonal curveball and supercute lesbian wedding that’s unforgettable and probably my favorite thing any book did in 2019.   

The whole series is a dreamboat, and I like how it includes cannibalism, that’s right, people eating people, a topic i return to as if it were a friend i enjoy hanging out with, and, in a way, it is. For a series with “cannibal chief” in its first title, there isn’t that much cannibalism in this brouhaha, but that title is basically a joke. Rupert doesn’t get to do a lot of cooking. He spends most of his time trying to cool the apocalyptic drama between all of the divinities, like every sorta god from every sorta pantheon. Cannibal cooking is a sidenote in Rupert’s stressfully paranormal life, the messy, dreary job that provides a banal foundation for his tenuous existence.

Though there are memorable scenes of the cannibalistic culinary arts. The second novella, Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth, opens with a cannibal cook-off. Wonderful, beautiful gore prose, including jokes about how to truly utilize a penis in a meal. It’s a good time. I like this narrative approach to cannibalism, where it’s part of a relatively basic, and comic, job, not a major, soul-shattering gross-out, and not a metaphor for class exploitation or something like that. It’s dehumanizing, sure, but all labor involves some amount of dehumanization.

Rupert is wry about his ability to work with human remains as if it’s meat like any other. It makes him queasyish, but he adapts, managing to semi-pretend it’s not human corpses he’s flavoring. Pretending people aren’t people is also pretty common to everyday labor. Rubert’s feelings toward his cannibal tasks are entirely relatable. In my own food preparation jobs, i would pretend the meat was fake vegetarian meat because i don’t like touching dead stuff. 

Rupert excels at his ethically questionable job. I’ve gotten hungry reading how he prepares some of his people. One detail that sticks out from that mentioned cookoff: eyeballs filled with a kind of lemon jelly. Sounds great.  

This problematic excellence is shared by cannibal baker Ms. Lovitt, somewhat praised in my previous post, but Rubert is more self-aware, and painfully so. Ms. Lovitt buys into capitalist goals, hopeful her people bakes will reward her with a gorgeous seaside home. Rupert has the added disadvantage of working within a capitalism that’s cosmic in scope. He doesn’t entertain any hopes of his profession rewarding him so materially, his only real hopes are for his wife so he’s selfless in that way. He’s certainly a capitalist though, the series begins with him union-busting some demons beginning to organize.    

Cannibalism fits right in with a cosmic horror perspective. It highlights the insignificance of humanity much like how the solar system does.  That’s why i like it when it’s a minor part of the story, a casual detail concerning a character’s occupation. Much of cosmic horror has an epic scope, which i usually don’t really get into. By epic i mean lots of action, spectacle, tedious moments of awe, the ingredients for a religious experience, which is about the tackiest sort of experience there is. 

The Rubert Wong series is a borderline parody of cosmic horror, so there’s lots of action and spectacle except it’s funny so i liked it. I’d like seeing comedic cannibalism in more cosmic horror, or maybe better yet in a sci-fi horror, like maybe a sci-fi story about a stranded spaceship where the astronauts ultimately need to eat each other because their technology messes up that bad, or on a space colony where cannibalism develops into acceptable practice because that’s the best meat around in outer space, the taboo around eating people maybe dying with the last of the earthlings, because maybe these outer space cannibals are the last people, the rest of humanity destroyed in ecological collapse on the planet earth.

I feel 70% sure the last people will be cannibals. 

body horror spa

All my most body horror experiences are because beauty. Like once i was idly picking at my aged pink pedicure, and i absently peeled off an entire toenail (the second smallest) along with the polish. The quick jolt of pain was annoying, sure, but the shock of it was the worst. It felt way too easy to pick off a part of myself.

The more trangirlish the beauty treatment is, the more it resembles an unfortunate kink, which is funny because that’s what transphobes think being trans is, but THAT’s funny because it’s cis people with all the most unfortunate kinks (truly!). Electrolysis, a word i’m doomed to mispronounce, is the only guaranteed way to get rid of facial hair. It’s kind of like getting a tattoo except the needle also zaps your pores with a laser. The one true way to kill a goddamn hair follicle. Cis girls do this for their mustaches sometimes, but they’ll never equal us trans for sheer magnitude of forestry. Dysphoria itself is a body horror sensation. It sometimes feels like i’m inhabiting a corpse, like my body itself is already dead and it’s waiting for the rest of me to catch up. 

Which is all to say i was immediately smitten with Dhonielle Clayton’s The Belles, because we just have so much in common. It’s a novel where a revered class of magical beauticians can provide any kind of bodily transformation a person could wish. Including, it’s mentioned in a newspaper headline, sex changes (newly legal in this world), and i guess i appreciated the shoutout, minor as it was, when so many fantasy novels will involve shapeshifter magic and not even mention the massively obvious tran possibilities. These sorcerer beauticians are celebrities. The fanciest and best are basically royals.

But their powers do more nasty stuff than the cosmetic touch-ups they perform on people’s facial bone structure. Although there really isn’t much difference between the two, which is kind of the point of the novel. It’s all magic where people’s bodies undergo painful changes in compliance with an authoritative power structure. There’s an evil queen involved and everything.

When you’re living in a society, subversive beauty is difficult to achieve.

I usually don’t enjoy thinking about my skeleton parts altering their shape. Even so, I daydream about reshaping my face’s bone structure on a fairly regular basis. I haven’t decided if I want to, and I probably never will decide. I’ll probably die before I know what kind of skull I want to live with, and I’m a little resentful that the choice even exists. I should be stuck with my skull, like what a marriage is supposed to be.

Marriage is awful though, so i guess i’m actually glad to throw myself in whatever kind of torture will make me more into my own body.  I can admit there’s something horrific about this specific pursuit of an uncanny ideal. But horrific in a cool way.

I love how The Belles includes gore. Feels to me like YA has gotten gorier over the last ten years, which is different from more violent. Dystopia stuff like The Hunger Games where Katnis kills whoever with whatever weapon, that’s more like basic violence, but weird and epic transformations of a body is gore, like in Melissa Albert’s The Night Country where, spoiler kinda, the patchwork girl falls apart near the end. Or the way teens are utterly diced in slasher movies, always way more artistically than how a psychopath would truly stab someone to death.

But going back to The Belles, most of it is sweetly descriptive, with memorable passages devoted to cute, petite finger foods. The novel practically smells like macaroons and floral perfume. Violence, or hearing about violence, happens unexpectedly. The effect is like hanging out in an extremely posh spa where every now and then someone throws up and dies, but the snacks are great and adorable. Which actually is how i imagine posh spas would be like in real life. Every spa is already a body horror spa, but full disclosure, I’ve never really spaed. I don’t want to give away too many of this novel’s surprise grisly details, but i will say there’s a memorable mention of a failed attempt to improve a dog. Wings are involved. It’s one of the more brutal dog deaths i think i’ve ever read. All of my favorite gore has an element of beauty to it, and this pup’s end is most startling for being kind of gorgeous and wondrous.

I recently read the sequel, The Everlasting Rose. That one feels less like a body horror spa and more like a political thriller where there’s a torture garden prison. No dogs die, but there is a miniature elephant that wears nail polish.   

trap slashing from a distance

Lately i’ve been watching the Final Destination and Saw movies. Feels like i’m stuck watching them, suffering an abundance of downtime in service of my neovagina’s rigorous dilation schedule. It’s somehow relieving to see normies going through much worse pain and body horror than i’ve been going through during my surgery recovery month.

In these two generously sequeled franchises, the traditional slasher killer recedes into a nostalgic figure from the sepia-toned 20th century, back when there was not a cell phone in sight, just people living and dying in the moment, being butchered by a flesh-and-blood individual wielding a good ol’ fashioned sharp object. Here in the 21st century, even getting murdered is an alienating experience. Unstoppable psycho boogeymen and their victims no longer directly interact the way they used to.

It’s debatable whether or not there’s an actual killer character in the FD movies. You could say the killer is just a supernatural force, the very spirit of the grim reaper and nothing else. But this spirit’s style of offing people displays at least as much personality as any of the people offed. The girl protag in FD 3 refers to them as a vicious, living presence, gendered masculine, which, okay, this reaper is a fully bodiless entity, but i agree men suck if that’s her implication (the boy protag describes the reaper as more of a force than a consciousness, but he’s a bro so probably wrong).

Our reaper mostly takes out folks in an unnecessarily whimsical way, tinkering banal environments into death traps, almost like flexing their embedded dominance over every aspect of our mortal world. Confident and catlike, this disembodied killer enjoys toying with victims. They’re full of fake-outs and winking reminders of their inevitable approach. Perhaps most brutally, they’re fond of playing a bit of easy-listening 1970s music. Their tinkery, teasey style is so distinctive it’s the recognizable throughline of the series, as much a piece of mascot-level icon fashion as Jason’s ski mask.               

The Saw movies give the audience a killer who’s an actual person. Sort of. Jigsaw is excessively fleshed out. His backstory expands throughout the sequels, if anything an overkill of context for his homicidal, sadistic tendencies.

He doesn’t slaughter to hammer home a person’s insignificance, like the FD reaper does. His traps are personalized. With a stalker’s enthusiasm, he dives into a victim’s life story and frames his torture as a milestone, like a graduation or marriage. None of this detracts from the grimy, industrial isolation of his death traps.

Jigsaw prides himself on not killing. Stuck up and righteous he’s hands off for the actual deeds. The way he sees it, if someone doesn’t have the fortitude to root a key out of their eyeball, the very key that will free them from a rusty death contraption, then they really kind of killed themselves didn’t they.

A typical Jigsaw trap will involve self-mutilation, pitting victims against each other, and some kind of grim entanglement between body and machine. One memorable trap in Saw VI harnesses the victims’ breathing to power the press of an instrument crushing their ribs, and the two people caught in this machine must compete in a holding-your-breath contest, as one will be freed when the other dies.

Also, there’s always a technological mediation between Jigsaw and the victim, a tape or video recording, frequently combined with puppet theater. The technology may be lo-fi, but it’s a stark reminder of the victim’s lonely death. There’s no pleading with their killer, no way to attempt, however futilely, to make an impression on him. For the victims, their killer is so disembodied he could be dead, and he is dead starting in Saw IV. This feels like an especially early aughts expression of anxiety about technological loneliness. Jigsaw and his victims are profoundly connected in that they experience a true expression of his scary self, a torturer engineer at heart. But are they really connected? You know, since they’re not both conscious in the same room at the same time.             

There may be a 20th century prototype for this indirect method of trap slashing from a distance. Memes tell me Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is Saw for kids, but first of all Saw is Saw for kids. That’s right, Saw is for the children. Well, ok, adolescents. I saw Saw as an adolescent, when it was the hot new horror, and i think that’s a solid age to appreciate all the deconstruction of bodies. Still, that chocolate factory story is more unsavory. And how dare anyone conflate Jigsaw with Willy Wonka. They are very different souls.

William Wonka is an eccentrically complacent, self-absorbed capitalist, and the “deaths” he causes are freakish factory accidents, not intentional, judgmental slaughters. He’s a slave-holding landowner disconnected from the idea that human life has any worth. Isolated in his capital and power, he doesn’t need to face any consequences, a big reason why he’s wildly meh if kids nearly die on a tour of his property (or die, as it is in the musical adaptation, which is more violent than the book and movies (actually only the girls definitively die, on stage and everything, fitting in with the horror genre’s tendency to kill women more nastily than men)). The original book emphasizes the avuncular capitalist’s frustration that people don’t simply follow his rules. In the Glass Elevator sequel he gets a whole lament about it. Roald Dahl out here siding with the horrifyingly blasé patriarch.

While Jigsaw is a moralist murderer, which means he’s extremely intentional, like scary intentional. He’s homicidally invested in the idea human life has worth. His torture traps are meant to inspire his victims to push themselves beyond what they thought they were capable of. He’s like a coach. Coach loves his games. You could make a good Saw type movie where a body instructor goes too far.

At the end of the day, though, the inspiration is all his. He loves to rave about the will to survive, the human body’s capacity to endure and heal: desperate rants of a dying coach, who needs all the inspiration he can get, dying and all. An additional woe for coach is the fate of his future son Gideon, who ends in utero from a drug thief’s careless door opening. Faced with these tragedies, he decides his next best bet at a legacy is rebirthing people through torture and then grooming some survivors into accomplices/copycat killers. The franchise increasingly has this weird focus on breeding (in Saw VI, a middle-aged woman’s life is deemed more worth saving than a younger sad boi’s, because she has kids and he’s lonely).   

As mentioned, in a majority of the Saw movies, coach Jigsaw is dead, resurrected in flashbacks and videos. I like this bit of the series, the way it continually embellishes the past, often as if it’s a twist and not just the filmmakers sharing story details previously withheld. It’s loopy and obnoxious, i appreciate it.

There’s something delightfully absurd about a serial killer who recruits enough help to continue his idiosyncratically complex slaying beyond the grave. Following his involved processes down to the puppet theatrics. I like to imagine him instructing, “now be sure to have the puppet crash through a barred window, sheltered in a cage, with the tape recorder playing and strapped around his little chest.” In that inimitable drawl of his! 

Although it’s unclear exactly how much of the post-mortem preparations are his own specifications. Coach wanted a legacy, but, even before his death, his selfhood is lost in the composite nature of his designs: while he remains barely alive in Saw III, his first known accomplice goes against coach and kills people in traps they can’t escape from. His intentions are lost to the point that his most rogue accomplice uses one of his contraptions to murder his widow Jill by The Final Chapter (which of course isn’t the final chapter).

By the way, The Final Chapter is the most frustrating of the series: it has the best trap (garage, obviously) and the best bold costume choice for coach (a backwards baseball cap), but it’s also a parade of hot women dying gorily. They’re so eager to kill Jill they use a dream sequence to do it twice. It’s conspicuous because the other Saw movies are pretty equal in the suffering distribution between the genders.  

I hear the newest Saw, Spiral, is a critique of police. This isn’t entirely new to the series. Jigsaw is a prolific cop killer. At one point i think in Saw V, someone proclaims “my entire department is dead!” which is funny and great. But I would be surprised if the new Saw actually goes saws out for the police state. The franchise only shows the most basic kind of cop corruption occurring (evidence planting), and it’s depicted as an anomaly, not the norm. They certainly don’t touch the overwhelming racism of american pigs. But i haven’t seen Spiral so i don’t know. Maybe it is the first major abolitionist horror movie.

But as far as i’ve seen, these aren’t really statement movies. Even the stuff about health insurance in Saw VI is as much a narrative device as it is a commentary (yet more motive for coach). Same goes for FD. These are franchises all about novel ways to depict death, placing death in a void without selves and direct human interaction, outside of the traditional slasher narrative and its traditional values, its basic stories of good against evil, all that virgin final girls and lumbering stocky murderers.       

closet/basket case lesbians (british ed.)

Not a lot makes me happier than lesbian nuns, and Rose Glass’ Saint Maud concerns just such a person, except also not at all. My girl Maud may not be a nun, but i assumed she was one from a glance at the movie’s poster, plus she showcases the austere, demure and grandmotherly authoritarian presence I associate with the cloister life. In actuality, she’s a sketchy at-home caregiver and religious visionary.

Some viewers will probably say she isn’t really a homo either. Such people probably think gay sex is the apex of gay, when in fact a gay apex is weird shit like, oh i don’t know, levitating in the throes of overwhelming desires that cannot be acted on or even acknowledged. And yearning obviously, a gay apex is the act of yearning itself.

As far as the audience sees, Saint Maud’s only relationship is with the woman she cares for, Amanda, a dying dancer who openly romances another woman. She assigns herself the mission of converting her heathen patient, displaying a suspicious amount of interest in her charge’s life. Justifying her self-appointed quest, she tells herself an entire soul is at stake, but i think that’s a convenient excuse for a motive.

To me, her real motive becomes clear in the scene where she confronts Amanda’s lesbo lover. Believing she convinces her to leave them in peace, satisfaction radiates from our saint’s face.  Undeniably chipper, she immediately approaches Amanda about maybe going out to a dance performance together, which sounds an awful lot like a date. What a coincidence that Amanda’s salvation requires the exile of the other woman competing for her attention. I have to wonder what Maud’s angle is, like exactly how would checking out a dance performance together help her convert Amanda? Are we to believe that Maud is buttering up Amanda to earn her trust and more effectively sneak god stuff into their conversations? I don’t buy it, Maud!  Girl wants a date.

All is not well in this gay yearning. Maud seems dogged by a mean god. Spooky cyclones appear in pints of beer, transforming the beverages into unholy yanic symbols (or maybe I just see vaginas in everything). She fully floats during a Joycian firework show. Apparently at any given moment, her face might contort going oogly-boogly bug-eyed while she groans unearthly noises. Interpreting these unpleasantries as punishments from a wrathful god, she practices creative self-injury in attempts at appeasement, harkening back to the golden era of flagellation. Textbook repression, translating a forbidden crush into an asexual and aggressive supernatural force. What gay hasn’t been there?

Early on in their relationship, Amanda’s a bit flirty with Maud. She gifts her a William Blake book, inscribing it with a cute nickname for her strange care-giver, i think it’s “my angel.” My angel! No wonder Maud’s god gets pissed.  The Christian god is a self-professed jealous asshole. So the threat to this god’s power isn’t only from Maud’s repressed desire; the bigger threat is the alternative vision of divinity offered by Amanda. Instead of a patriarch sadist who’s into body-horror play, Amanda shows Maud the possibility of shifting worship onto a bemused, flirty woman.

Of course, given this movie’s genre, Maud and Amanda’s relationship inevitably results in violence.  Maud’s violence only makes her seem gayer to me. She won’t allow herself to be Amanda’s service top, so what other kind of carnal interaction can she have with her?   

Without this homo explanation, Saint Maud wouldn’t make much sense to me. I don’t know, without gay the whole world doesn’t make sense to me.

But what else is causing Maud’s visions to escalate? What else inspires her god’s ire so brutally? Sure, we could say Maud is the victim of a horribly violent patriarchal deity, aka the Christian god, and/or she is the victim of hallucinogenic madness, but i’m here to tell you she is the victim of heteronormativity. If Maud isn’t a closet/basket case lesbian, why does her attempt at a het hookup inspire a nauseating flash-think of maybe the movie’s most disturbing image? She clearly associates het sex with gruesome death.

You know who else associates het sex with gruesome death? Edgar Wright i guess! In his movie Last Night in Soho, the boyish filmmaker is serving a surprisingly lesbian experience (probably due in part to his co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns). First of all, there’s time travel, and way back in 2019 Amal El-Mohar claimed time travel for the girls who like girls, pointing out all the newly released lesbo time travel books*, including her gorgeous novella This is How You Lose the Time War (cowritten with Max Gladstone). She relates this specific literary bounty to feminist anxieties of historical erasure. Two years later along comes this movie, in which a fashion school student, Eloise, crushes on Sandie, an aspiring singer she shadows during nocturnal time warps to the 1960s. Eloise learns Sandie’s history is doubly erased: Sandie’s intermingled victimhood/criminality and subsequent evolution into stability are both lost. By the way, i’m going to out the movie’s twist, but i thought the twist was kinda telegraphed anyway.   

In the time travel sequences, our entirely alive protag is set into the position of a ghost. She voyeuristically haunts Sandie’s life, appearing as an apparition reflection. In one of my favorite moments, the Eloise reflection-ghost, disturbed to see Sandie mistreated, bangs against the mirror barrier until she breaks out for a short embrace. It’s an affecting image that put my mind into a trippy place, because it’s like an audience’s desire to break through the screen and comfort suffering characters, and then i thought about the audience as like a ghost before the reality of a movie, witnessing events without the ability to enact agency over them, and aren’t movies more alive than us in many ways, i mean they’re more widely seen…trippy, right?

When Eloise, entranced, watches Sandie perform the song “Downtown,” it feels like an expression of what it’s like to be the enthralled viewer of a good movie, who is also a gay girl. Like, the girl’s crushing! All besmitten, Eloise goes on to copy Sandie’s looks, most noticeably her hair. Gay!

Sandie wants to be a PG-rated singer, but, as a psychedelic backstage sequence emphasizes, she quickly learns show business is a scummy world of blowjobs and heroin. It all leads to sex work, which leads to serial homocide volunterism. Sandie’s johns/victims pester Eloise as glitchy, blurred shadow people, the movie’s most frequent equating of het sex with terror. Sometimes, the john ghosts even re-enact their final bedside come-on moments.

Then there’s the moment Eloise tries fucking a nice flirty guy in her haunted boarding house room. The mood is killed when she starts living through the moment Sandie was seemingly murdered in the very same room. Lost to a horrified fit, Eloise flaunts an oogly boogly face to make Saint Maud proud. When Eloise learns Sandie wasn’t murdered, but had in fact pulled an Aileen Wuornos, she concedes all the guys that Sandie killed deserved it. Being chill with the mass murder of men might be Eloise’s gayest characteristic.

I like the twist that Eloise’s landlady is Sandie all grown up, this allows for cool ambiguities with the supernatural logistics. Maybe older Sandie is reliving the sixties flashbacks as Eloise lives through them, and maybe she’s somewhat aware of Eloise’s tagalong presence. Perhaps the explanation for the time travels is Eloise entering the memory-infested dreamscape of her landlady. I appreciate withholding explanations for the magical happenings, and there’s a lot of mysterious stuff going on. Like, Eloise can see (or hallucinate) her mom’s ghost, kinda gratuitous since this ability never impacts the plot at all, but I like that. Touches like this gave the movie the feel of a YA-novel, especially considering the first act is fully a coming-of-age, first-year-of-school story, a lighter take on the themes of Julia Ducournau’s Raw.

I haven’t really gone into how Eloise is afraid of going crazy because her suicide mom did, and the movie toys with the possibly that all the spooky stuff is is aspects of a nervous breakdown. I could try relating her mental crisis to her closeting, the fact she’s terrorized by het sex and doesn’t open up to the idea maybe she wants to make love with Sandie, but eh, i won’t do that beyond this sentence.   

    To sum up, i view these movies as having the same important moral: be gay or be more scared of life.