Filmsuck

Happy 110th birthday, TW! In this episode of Filmsuck we're reveling in the mind-blowing film adaptations of Tennessee Williams' great plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), and Night of the Iguana (1964). The most celebrated American playwright of the mid-20th century, Williams' riveting explorations of tormented sexuality, lacerating family trauma, the sick cruelty of the dominant culture, the desperation of the marginalized, and the "devouring" face of God make for a surreal and unforgettable cinema of excess.

This is, in a way, a continuation of last week’s special Anti-Valentine’s Day episode about “peak libido” and unsexy cinema and television, because we’re talking about the supposed counter-example of Bridgerton, which is getting raves for its red-hot period-piece sexiness. Special guest co-host Emily Robbins helps Eileen fathom the Regency romance subgenre in order to understand the phenomenon that is Bridgerton, which is such a huge hit on Netflix, it’s kind of…bizarre.

Today in honor of this awful holiday we're doing an anti-Valentine's Day episode, lamenting the dreary unsexiness of most film and television of our time. We're wondering if it's part of a much larger phenomenon--the depletion of erotic energy in our collective existence that's running alongside the depletion of other planetary resources. That's the topic of the book we're discussing entitled Peak Libido: Sex, Ecology, and the Collapse of Desire by our very special guest, Dominic Pettman, university professor of Media and New Humanities at The New School for Social Research.

In the latest Filmsuck episode we take on the depressingly timely topic of fascist aesthetics, in terms of historical development and cinematic representations. For example, did you know that the success of the notorious white supremacist film Birth of a Nation (1915) inspired both a resurgence in the Ku Klux Klan but also their adoption of the full white-hood-and-robe uniform featured in the film? And that before that point, KKK members had dressed in motley carnivalesque costumes more similar to the Q Anon rioter outfits worn to storm the capitol building on January 6th? Some other questions we consider include: why are the Nazis, whose professed ideology was arguably anti-art, anti-intellectual thuggery, frequently portrayed as highly cultured dandies in movies? And--if we consider the dapper Nazi villains of Hollywood as part of a fascist continuum with the Germanic tribe cosplay of the Q Anon rioters--is there such a thing as a fascist aesthetic?

Dolores and Eileen talk All About Fran--i.e. writer-humorist-raconteur-ultimate New Yorker Fran Lebowitz--in the new Martin Scorsese docuseries Pretend It's a City, now playing on Netflix. We celebrate Fran L., "public wit," mordant naysayer, and the last bohemian standing, representing a lost gritty urban paradise of art, books, music, and hanging out smoking, drinking, and eating with fellow creative types. 

Happy 2021, all! Here's our first episode of the bright new year, featuring Filmsuck's new co-host, Dolores McElroy! We're talking about Oscar Wilde as wit, socialist, decadent, and aesthete, whose ideas about the fabulous lives that belong to the people by right and the importance of embracing the fantastical in art can readily be applied to the mass art of film. Part of the suckage of cinema in our time can be traced to the societal embrace of realism and moralism in art, both tendencies opposed by Wilde. We focus on the eerie and opulent black-and-white 1945 MGM adaptation of Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as our favorite of the many Wilde adaptations--you know, the one with the great, gruesome Ivan Albright painting shown in Technicolor? Take a listen.