Here's to a new world, of gods and monsters
I’ve been, for want of a better word, maintaining this substack for 18 months now. The first piece I wrote for it - YES CHEF - on the violence and rebirth of cinematic kitchens, came about after coming back from California and watching The Menu at a drive-in theatre, and becoming obsessed with Joel McHale’s monstrous chef, appearing in fragments in season two of The Bear. Then I wrote about a stand-up comedy special, grappled with queer representation during a Good Wife rewatch.
After that, I ended up - consciously or not - shifting away from cultural criticism and mostly ended up writing about myself, and the still complex relationship I’ve got with freelancing; the freedom it offers, but the uncertainty that comes as a part of that deal; the frustration of needing to reintroduce oneself to editors after any period of time away from working; the burnout that I went through in the spring (and then spent far too much of the summer talking about.
With all of this in mind, it won’t come as a shock that I don’t think any of the last few essays that I wrote for this newsletter - more anxious dispatches than anything else - are particularly good pieces of writing. They’re circular and self-cannibalizing, and in the end they’re all basically three ways of saying the same thing. So, after taking some time away (they said, writing this on three hours sleep and still in the throes of jet lag), it dawned on me that the best thing I could do was return this newsletter to first principles, in terms of both its own mission, and myself as a writer.
The long and the short of it is that I miss writing about movies. The budget for any kind of film writing publication feels increasingly spare, and I feel like I can count on one hand the number of places that will frequently take pitches on film. It’s the first thing I wrote about with any kind of regularity as a freelancer - I’ll always take the excuse to talk about an early essay for Little White Lies about Derek Jarman and is an art form that I continue to love and have an increasingly strong desire to write about. I want to talk about my problems with Ti West’s X trilogy; the relationship between languid suburban landscapes and the threat of violence; theatrical transformation in adaptations of Vanya and Henry V; the iconography of John McLane’s string vest. These are stories that I’m sure I’ll pitch to publications up and down cyberspace, but I know not to hold my breath about them getting accepted. So the hope is to write about them here; if I was feeling truly ambitious I’d plan on writing a piece every week (not least because it would keep in the habit of watching films) but that seems unlikely. Talking to another film writer about the prospect of a substack, she mentioned the dread of needing to maintain it regularly, to write X pieces every Y days. Maybe not doing this is a sign of a better relationship with freelancing.
In James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, the first instance of a sequel being better than its originator, and one of the best horror films ever made, Dr. Pretorius offers a toast to Doctor Frankenstein, to "a new world of gods and monsters,” a phrase that I’ve always associated with the magic, and wonder, empathy and terror, that cinema can create. So it was always going to be the perfect name for a new look version of this newsletter, one with more intent and focus, one that forces me to write about something other than myself.
The tagline for the newsletter is rooted in another one of my favourite moments in the history of the medium; the end of Sunset Boulevard, one of the best films of all time. Descending an ornate staircase, grip slipping on the final frayed edges of her sanity. She thinks she’s in a climactic scene of Salome, and that Cecil B. DeMille is behind the camera, directing her. She breaks out of the scene to offer some kind words about “being back in the studio making a picture again,” something she hopes to never stop doing, all for “those wonderful people, out there in the dark.” This line has, for me, always been what cinema is for and about; the strange power of sitting in the dark watching things projected onto gigantic screens, at once intimate and singular, spellbinding and erotic. There’s nothing quite like it, and I hope that, in trying to write about it more again, like Norma Desmond, I can try and find my way home.