scumbelievable

500

Some of you may know this already, but when I started this Patreon I was dirt poor and had just barely scrabbled my way out of stealing to eat and digging change out of the couch to pay rent. I spent a decade of my life regularly unable to afford essentials, and I never once imagined 500 people would care enough about my work to subscribe in sup...

In the Flesh: Raised by Wolves

Raised by Wolves is deeply strange by the visual and thematic standards of American science fiction. It feels much more akin to something like The Prisoner, spare and arresting, its human drama both direct and primordial, or like the wildly inventive symbolist comics of Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius. Bronze-...

You Love to See It: Downfall

“Show the man inside the monster” is, as Hitler-focused art and scholarship goes, about as prosaic as it gets. A little sentimental music can make you feel sympathy for a rock with a face on it, so conjuring up a few tears for little Adolf’s troubled boyhood or whatever doesn’t amount to much beyond basic narrative competenc...

You Love to See It: Dredd

When movies employ slow-motion shots, the point is almost always to emphasize how cool something is within the context of an action scene. The Matrix’s influential “bullet time” and its slow pans around martial artists suspended in time mid-strike are effective methods of guiding viewer observation toward a single act...

You Love to See It: Vision

Vision, horror cartoonist Julia Gfrörer’s third and latest graphic novel, is a once-in-a-decade piece of art, a pitch-black story of domestic suffocation set at the end of New York’s Gilded Age. Eleanor, a not-quite-widowed spinster whose fiance's death has left her socially and economically adrift, lives with her brother Robert an...

You Love to See It: Princess Mononoke

“Life is suffering,” the leper Osa husks from within his caul of soiled bandages. “It is hard. The world is cursed, but still you find reasons to go on living.” On his deathbed, his body rotting, this quiet man finds words of clear-eyed guidance for a visiting stranger. This single moment of human connection is as moving as ...

You Love to See It: Mulholland Drive

Two women writhe and gasp in a coolly modern bed made up with the kind of crisp linen sheets and dark comforter ubiquitous in the late 90s and early 00s. Like all of Lynch’s love scenes it has a florid, almost soapy quality to it, the kind of emotional hyper-realness — think BOB’s demented laughter in Twin Peaks and F...

Fuck Moral Art

In Melanie Tem’s under-read werewolf classic Wilding, a brutalized and neglected young woman named Deborah struggles to find the strength to abandon her newborn child. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, banned for obscenity for many years in multiple countries, a married man estranged from his wife by the death of their infant son m...

You Love to See It: Seven Samurai

In a raging river, the self-declared samurai Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) holds a child to his armored breast as he flees downstream from a burning mill. Then, slowly, the shock of adrenaline fades. Kikuchiyo freezes. “This baby... is me,” he cries out loud. The blunt-force generational trauma of one war orphan rescuing anoth...

Skin/Bone

You dream of completion behind acid-etched glass, the water cloudy with disintegrating matter shed during your rehab. Something went wrong when you were Iterated back from Muscida. You've been floating here ever since while smeared faces and muffled voices circle you.

Locked joints quiver beneath baggy skin and coils of atrophied muscle. T...

You Love to See It: Hagazussa

The rape scene which marks the beginning of Hagazussa’s final act takes place both on and offscreen, the goatherd Albrun’s body below the neck and the man violating her both excluded from the suffocating close-up on her face and the face of the rape’s orchestrator, Swinda. The moment’s significance exists only between the two wo...

You Love to See It: Come and See

Elem Klimov’s Come and See ends with a grief-stricken and traumatized Belarusian boy, Flyora, shooting at a picture of Adolf Hitler he finds lying in a puddle. The scene is intercut and overlapped with footage — both real and fabricated — of Hitler’s life, which plays in reverse until the dictator appears as an infa...

In the Flesh: The Skin I Live In

The Skin I Live In is a horny, nasty two-hour soap opera of hidden parentage and surgical forced feminization larded with Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s signature twists, reversals, and protracted hostage situations. Where Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face — the film’s most obvious inspiration — plays its emot...

In the Flesh: Jennifer's Body

A stylized, vision-driven mess is always preferable to competently made factory shlock, and no matter the failings of its hokey CGI and Diablo Cody’s limp and convoluted screenplay, Jennifer’s Body still has something genuine flickering at its core. Its story about the thoughtlessly exploitative relationships young women form with o...

You Love to See It: Showgirls

There’s nothing quite like Elizabeth Berkley’s performance as Nomi Malone, a human tsunami of desire, anger, mental illness, and almost primal stubborn independence. As the heroine of Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas’s cult classic Showgirls she’s half Gandolfini, stormy emotions and powerful but fragile confidence,...

A Town Full of Babies: Queer Life and Children's Media

Image taken from Strange Suspense Stories #60, artist Jack Kirby, pub. Fawcett Comics, August 1962

Over the past two decades, “adult who consumes primarily children’s media” has gone from a reviled fringe identity — think Bronies, adult male fans of the My Little Pony revival, monopolizing co...

In the Flesh: Stalker

Three men stand on the threshold of a place of power, a place where by the manifestation of inner desire the nature of the self is irrevocably exposed. One fears that to enter would mean facing his own venal nature. Another uses the same thought to cloak himself in sarcasm and worldly ennui. The third contemplates destroying this pl...

You Love to See It: No Country for Old Men

“The coin don’t have no say,” the widow Carla Jean Moss explains to the hit man Anton Chigurgh. “It’s just you.” Coming as it does at the end of a film concerned primarily with the primate ingenuity and mythologized moral codes of violent men, actress Kelly MacDonald’s quivering line read hits like a broadside, splintering Chigurgh...

In the Flesh: Sonic the Hedgehog

I walked in on our houseguest (long, irritating story) watching Sonic the Hedgehog earlier this evening and decided to stay for the last forty-five minutes, so now you all get to suffer with me through this incomplete review. First and foremost, Ben Schwartz gives the most obnoxious, charmless voice performance I’ve ever heard. There ...

Sales Tax

Hey gang, starting June 1st Patreon is going to be charging sales tax on pledges. If you could go to your pledge settings and adjust for taxation (it’ll walk you through it) before the 1st, I would so appreciate it, though I understand if you need to reduce or delete <3 Thanks, as usual, for everything <3

EDIT: If your pledge alrea...

You Love to See It: Wake in Fright

At first it seems as though Wake in Fright, Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 thriller about an English schoolteacher stranded by bad luck and dumb decisions in a desolate mining town, will be a familiar kind of story. A small town with a sinister secret, good-natured locals concealing some conspiracy behind their ruddy faces and welcoming smiles. ...

You Love to See It: In the Mood for Love

Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love is a film composed almost entirely of minutiae. It has no dramatic set pieces, no driving plot. It’s a movie about the formation of an emotional state and the slow, quiet failure of that state to manifest in life. It’s a movie about two people passing on a narrow staircase, about th...

You Love to See It: Tampopo

A young man reaches around his lover, cracks an egg on the edge of a bowl, and deposits the yolk in his mouth. He holds it on his tongue as he passes it to her with a kiss, the golden membrane slithering over the irregular surfaces of their teeth and tongues, conforming to the shifting flesh and jostling bone of their intimacy. For an almost unb...

You Love to See It: Madeline's Madeline

For most of the runtime of Madeline’s Madeline, the titular character’s (Helena Howard) life is a shuttlecock swatted back and forth between her mother Regina (Miranda July) and the director of her experimental theater troupe, Evangeline (Molly Parker). The two maternal figures alternately berate and exploit the teenage Madeline, wh...

You Love to See It: Men In Black

Vincent D’Onofrio’s grotesquely oddball turn as a gigantic extraterrestrial cockroach wearing the hollowed out and rotting skin of an asshole farmer and abusive husband is perhaps the most memorable aspect of Men In Black, a cynical and pro-surveillance state but otherwise unimpeachable ‘90s action flick. The leprous ...

You Love to See It: Batman Returns

Batman Returns, Tim Burton’s odd and piquant superhero film, is about the pieces that compose a person. Outside of this film I’ve never much cared for Batman or his beloved rogues gallery, or for superheroes in general, but something about Burton’s movie just feels right to me. It breaks the character of Batman into i...

In the Flesh: Shin Godzilla

Shin Godzilla’s meeting scenes — and there are a lot of them — are among the funniest, most crushingly honest depictions of bureaucracy in action that I’ve seen. Watching the Japanese government hem and haw about what might or might not be a gigantic radioactive marine reptile plowing its way through an urban center is as blackl...

You Love to See It: Manhunter

A serial killer brings his blind girlfriend to the zoo to touch a sedated tiger. It sounds more like the setup for an off-color joke than the premise of one of the hottest psychosexual scenes of the 1980s. Manhunter, Michael Mann’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon, makes the scene its centerpiece. Mann shoots ...

You Love to See It: Possession

Anna sits on the couch beside her husband, Mark, who wants to talk to her about her sudden dereliction from their family. As he whines and wheedles she remains expressionless, listening without comment or affect. Actress Isabelle Adjani’s mouth is open just the slightest crack, her huge, pale eyes only mostly focused. The scene be...

You Love to See It: To Live and Die in L.A.

The car chase in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. is so instantly engrossing, so visually inventive and muscular in its pacing, that since seeing it I’ve struggled to engage with other chase scenes. Asshole secret service agent Richard Chance’s 1985 Impala careens down the concrete embankment of the L.A. riv...