who’s afraid of lydia tár?

That many audience members apparently mistook Lydia Tár for a real person to me says less about Tár‘s sharp verisimilitude and more about the degraded landscape of contemporary American cinema, where practically the only movies permitted to exist outside the Marvel Extended Universe are biopics. Still, the genius of Tár lies in its counterfactual hyperrealismContinue reading “who’s afraid of lydia tár?”

lesbian fascism on TERF island

In the years leading up to World War II, many suffragettes became fascists. I don’t just mean that they harbored fascist sympathies, but that they continued to agitate for women’s emancipation as active members and leaders of fascist parties. Both the general presence of women in British fascism and the suffragette-to-fascist pipeline in particular areContinue reading “lesbian fascism on TERF island”

pretty straight, pretty conventional

In an essay published as part of Post45’s recent cluster on Sally Rooney, Claire Jarvis claims that the plot of Rooney’s novels is that “straight sex is not a disaster.” She writes: “Both Marianne and Connell find pleasure in their pretty straight, pretty conventional sex: they’ve tried other things, and they haven’t liked them asContinue reading “pretty straight, pretty conventional”