A Love Letter To Cinema

I abhor the platitude "this film is a love letter to cinema" because it's almost always a lazy shorthand to describe a movie that is about movies and references a lot of other—usually better—movies. It's often a form of cinematic stolen valor, where the filmmaker is leveraging your affection for movies in general by showing you familiar and recognizable scenes of a person being transported by the magic of film, in hopes that you'll feel, or think you feel, the same way about the movie you just watched.

Singin' in the Rain gets used for this purpose a lot, which is pretty funny considering a lot of its appeal rests on cinephilia and nostalgia, but it's got the advantage of being a great and wonderful film in its own right. Damien Chazelle's Babylon ends with its main character in a movie palace having bought a ticket for Singin' in the Rain and being treated to a montage of iconic scenes from a variety of films from the past, present and future because Damien Chazelle is a fucking hack and somehow decided that he needed to end his movie with a more grotesque spectacle than the elephant-shitting title card drop that started it. My sincere hope for you, reader, is that you never have, and never will, experience the three-plus hours of wretchedness that is Babylon. Statistically, it's safe to say you haven't and won't.

But Babylon has its defenders! It's been reclaimed by some cinephiles on Bluesky as a rich text, full of specific allusions to stars and films of yesteryear in a way that delights a certain strain of film historian/fanatic. They lovingly document its recreations of iconic Clara Bow outfits, or specific filming locations and gush over its production design and historical references and lament the failures of the marketing department to effectively sell an agonizingly long movie about an era most people do not think about at all. The Wikipedia article for the film states "In later years, the film is said to have developed a cult following," which is so non-committal that it somehow seems meaner than anything I've said above.

A cult film is usually one that is ignored or derided by mainstream critics and audiences, but embraced by the subset of people who see something remarkable and special in it, and embrace it not only in spite of that derision, but often in response to it. Being in the cult means you recognize the magic that most people miss, and the lack of popularity reinforces that your tastes are better and more refined than the teeming masses.

This has been on my mind a lot lately as I've been revisiting Twin Peaks: The Return in weekly two-episode installments at the nearby arthouse cinema. We're a little over halfway through the 18 episode run and I remain fascinated at what a dazzling high wire act David Lynch, Mark Frost, and all of their collaborators have pulled off. From episode to episode and scene to scene it's often difficult to keep track of exactly what's going on; sometimes because there's barely explained supernatural hijinks afoot, and sometimes because it's just two minutes of two people in a room talking and not talking intensely, rattling off names and places that you're expected to put a pin in in case they become relevant six episodes hence when another pair of weirdos finally deign to add some context to the proceedings. I know more than a few longtime Lynch fans who bailed on the show by this point, frustrated at its calculated refusal to abide by traditional narrative structure or format. That said, I know more people who account it the greatest achievement in television history. I see a couple dozen or so of them every week in the theatre as we eat our snacks and try to remember why a character is talking about Richard. No, not that Richard. The other Richard.

I think the thing that cements Twin Peaks' as the crown jewel of the visual arts for me is how well it understands that the resonance of its imagery is stronger when you let the audience do the work of figuring out what it means. The exact meaning of symbols is highly personal, and even when there's a common interpretation, we all (I hope) have a weird little association gremlin inside us that draws unique connections and connotations between things in a way that even the person sitting next to us, watching the same show and sharing the majority of our life experiences would find baffling and befuddling. I never fail to be amazed at David Lynch's ability to combine a set of symbols into something at once generic enough to be widely understood, and specific enough to haunt me, personally, for decades after an initial viewing.

I've also been thinking about artists who are good at nailing the ambiguity in our relationship with art in the run-up to the release of Jane Schoenbrun's third feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. I have been obsessed with Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow since seeing it a couple of years ago for the first time, followed by multiple follow-up viewings as I bathed in its aesthetic and enjoyed the recurring jab of existential terror I experience every time it closes in on its final moments. I also enjoyed their first film, We're All Going to the World's Fair, a microbudget precursor to the more fully realized vision of the latter two films.

Schoenbrun's mode is almost the textbook definition of cult: concerned with niche and occult interests and how we process them in ways that are evocative of earlier works but also deeply specific and personal. I sense that Camp Miasma will be a wider hit than their previous work, in part because it's less brutal and elusive than the first two films, has more established stars in its lead roles, and has a fun marketing campaign. I enjoyed it quite a bit and look forward to rewatching it when I get the chance.

I devoured a few critiques and reactions to the film after seeing it, including this rather withering essay from Harmony Colangelo on why she does not vibe with Jane Schoenbrun generally, and hated this movie in particular. I found it illuminating, even as I disagree strongly with most of the points made within it. I can only imagine the exhaustion of being expected to talk glowingly of a filmmaker you clearly hate because you share a set of cultural touchstones and are part of the same minority. Trans representation in cinema has not been great in volume or quality, so I appreciate a person who knows their shit offering their take and perspective. As I said above, part of a film being "cult" is that its adherents define their love of it in opposition to its detractors. I find that the specific complaints the writer makes about Camp Miasma bounce off my reading of the film because where she sees hollow references and specific (the word she uses is "narcissistic") authorial self-inserts, I see more of Schoenbrun's obsession with the ambiguity of image, audience, and where those two seemingly discrete things meet, merge, and overwhelm one another. Like Lynch's films, Schoenbrun's are interrogative, not declarative. You can certainly soak in the look and feel of the film–a thing that's easy for me to do since I like it quite a bit–but there isn't an easy answer to the question of what the film has to say. This turns out to be almost literally what Camp Miasma is about-about, even as it seemingly offers more concrete answers in its finale, and it's easy to take the film's face value message to heart and read it warmly and affirmatively rather than reckon with the uncertainty that remains after the credits have rolled.