If Rectify entertains the possibility that small towns are like prisons, it makes sure we understand that simile is not equivalence. Continue reading Essay: Where I’m Writing From: Comfort, Commodification, and the Small Town as Hollywood Trope (Part II, 2014)
n Fargo, the series’ bloodshed is, likewise, the product of wish-fulfillment-gone-wrong—those who get what they want, the shows wants us to understand, inevitably get what they deserve. Continue reading Essay: Where I’m Writing From: Comfort, Commodification, and the Small Town as Hollywood Trope (Part 1, 2014)
It is difficult to make a good film about great art, of course—save for the rare case of a true prodigy, artistic progress moves at a glacial pace, the product of monomaniacal focus, and years of trial and error. Continue reading Essay: Unnecessary Fictions: The Bullshit Myth of the Lonely Artist (2016)
How much was the product of the poets’ heliotropic tendencies and how much the offspring of the kudzu-like culture of “lyric reading”? Continue reading Essay: Form Dysfunction: On Caroline Levine, Terrance Hayes, and Frederick Seidel (2019)
The history of literature is a history of literary gossip. Continue reading Essay: Death From Above: On Joseph Kaplan’s ‘Kill List’ (2013)
If Frankenstein can be read as a searing critique of Romantic hubris—the folly of “playing God” through science we do not fully understand—then CSI might best be understood as an effort to flip Shelley’s script, rehabilitating science as a form of social control. Continue reading Essay: Hannibal’s a Cannibal: Allegory, Ideology, and Serial Killer Aesthetics (2014)
