In spring 2023 Hannah Meyer was 26 and living with a girlfriend when she had taken to DMing semi-strangers and asking them for coffee. Emily Schultz was one of the semi-strangers. We first met at a literary reading on a cold night and Hannah assumed we would get a single coffee, exchange a handful of messages, and that would be it. Instead, it would be two years before we would break up and eventually start writing this article together, processing how and why our age-gap relationship happened.

A San Francisco by-way-of Boise, Idaho transplant, Hannah was due to start the MFA program at NYU. Emily was 49 and just about to publish her fourth novel. Hannah was surprisingly nervous on the first date. Emily asked her what she wanted to drink and told Hannah to find somewhere in the café to sit. As Emily ordered coffee, Hannah pretended to rifle through her bag, eager to give her hands something to do. “I might as well have mouthed peas and carrots like a background player.”

Hannah and Emily talked about writing, queerness, and art modeling. Emily let slip that her marriage was open. Later Hannah wrote in a novel she would send to Emily to read, “I felt the particles between us condense and quicken.”

Within 30 minutes of leaving the café, Hannah had texted her cousin, asking:

How old would u date?

Not sure. Sixty? No, too close to my parents age. Are you seeing someone older?

Maybe.

Send pic.

Not sure how old she is.

SEND PIC.

Hannah sent her a photo and she approved.

Emily had been out as queer since Hole’s “Miss World” topped the alternative charts. She later partnered with a man, Brian, and then felt a little bit invisible. When she became a mother, even more invisible. After the pandemic Emily and Brian had decided to open the relationship again. They’d done so a few times before, sloppily, and well before polyamorous jargon was popular. Back then they were just slutty and unusually honest about it. Now, they agreed to solo-date (meaning they wouldn’t date the same person). One of the mature things they discussed this time around was what if something became love? “We’d try to have that person be part of the family,” Brian said. “How?” Emily asked. They didn’t exactly hash out a plan.

Emily had her old radical beliefs that love shouldn’t be possessive, while Hannah was fluent in contemporary relationship discourse. But for Hannah, the age-gap attraction went deeper than politics. It spoke to her first inklings of being gay. “I was 12 at the time, and the first woman that I had a crush on was born in 1975. She was my voice teacher. I didn’t know exactly how old she was then, but I knew that we were certainly of a big and legal age difference. I would bike downtown hoping to run into her. It was a romantic blueprint because I admired and was attracted to her.”

At first, Hannah had referred to herself as a “late Millennial” and Emily did hopeful math. That could mean early thirties, she thought. After making out with Hannah on the lawn of the Ramble one afternoon, Hannah revealed her age: 26. “Twenty-two years difference?” Emily said as she sat up. “You are the age of my abortion.”

When Emily told Brian Hannah’s age his eyebrows raised for a long beat, then he laughed. “You got yourself a cub!” But Emily hadn’t forgotten less positive age-gap references, like her own when she was 20 and dating a person in their thirties. Then there’s Marc Maron’s “Doomed Clown” stand-up bit.

The bit goes, “I hate when people see an older dude with a younger woman, like, ‘I know what that’s about.’ No, you don’t…If you ever see an old guy with a younger woman, just picture him as a doomed clown.”

Doomed clown or not, there was something about Emily’s dark Gen X sensibility Hannah was drawn to. She might admonish Emily about her molestation jokes when showering together, but Hannah could look into Emily’s eyes and see countless wars protested, economies collapsed, hopes drained like a bottle of Fruitopia.

We introduced each other to new music. Sometimes it took and sometimes it didn’t. Emily took Hannah to a Patti Smith show one New Year’s—“Hannah was a bigger fan and knew more about her than I did. Once, I texted her a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘I’m on Fire’ by Electrelane. My grandma likes that song, she texted back.”

“Emily had experienced many things that I hadn’t. A C-section. Back tattoo. Marriage.” Hannah secretly assumed Emily was going through a mid-life crisis. A spiritual reckoning. Marital problems. Why else would she want to have sex with a 26-year-old on a beanbag chair in her writing office?

From the start, Emily saw Hannah as smart, talented and ambitious. In her journal she also troubled over what Hannah might want from her: networking or a novelty thrill. “I always thought a more interesting version of The Graduate would be from Mrs. Robinson’s perspective,” Emily said. “I didn’t know I’d end up living it.” (Emily first saw the film on VHS. Hannah first watched it on streaming.) We began the relationship with a lot of optimism, but Emily realized she had never felt so old before. Trying to keep up was thrilling, but exhausting.

“I didn’t know what I was or what I could be to her,” Hannah continued. “Emily said writing was like an addiction for her, while I second guessed every third sentence. Writing, like love, like everything else in life, seemed to come easily to her. The only thing that I was better at was running.”

“I should’ve known something was up then,” Emily says. “I was hoping for a jog and talk at the McCarren track, but Hannah decided to smoke my ass.”

The biggest change in the first year of our dating was when Hannah became “single.” She broke up with her girlfriend and moved into an apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. While sex on a rock in Central Park was on Emily’s bucket list the reality, and arthritic pain, of these hookups was more uncomfortable than the fantasy. Emily looked forward to spending time at the apartment but realized this too could also get complicated. “Hannah was now in an apartment with three roommates: bartenders, baristas, and young men recovering from Mpox. To be fair, it was exactly how I’d lived in my twenties.”

“I never lived with a bartender,” Hannah corrects.

“What did that one girl do, the one who tried to steal my bagel?”

“She worked at the UN.”

One evening we were lying in Hannah’s bed, post sex, talking about books and writing. “We were in the slow stages of getting dressed when we heard voices. ‘Is that your roommate?’ I asked. When we walked out to the living room, I saw a guy in their kitchen. He looked around my age. That’s not a guy, that’s a dad, I realized. I wasn’t meeting someone her roommate had brought home—but her entire family. Don’t shake my hand, I thought. Thankfully no one else did.”

Hannah was also on dating apps, looking for someone more full-time to come into her life. She wasn’t ready for what came with dating someone whose time was taken up with a child. “I felt there were rules. Stated or not,” Hannah said. “We could text at certain hours. Hang out 1-2 times a week. And sleepovers were rare. I am not a particularly jealous person, but became incredibly jealous of her and her life. I both wanted her and wanted to be her.”

Psychologist Justin Lehmiller writes that a significant predictor in happiness in age-gap relationships is how other people perceive the relationship. Among Hannah’s friend group Emily was known as “Hannah’s Mommy Girlfriend.”

Emily’s son met Hannah and we tried to do movies and museums together as a way to bond, but our trio didn’t really get the ah’s and nods of rainbow family approval that one gets in New York. Instead, people saw Hannah as the older child when we were out together.

Despite the complexities, Hannah and Brian had become friends. (To Emily’s consternation they have exactly the same boundary pushing personalities.) “I now had three people to make happy,” Emily realized. “It’s easy to assume the person with two partners is getting double benefits from the situation. The truth is multiple people are asking for consideration at the same exact time.”

Over time, Hannah realized her own insecurities prevented her from seeing Emily clearly. In her mind, she did fashion her into Mrs. Robinson. “An older woman who was using a younger man to sublimate. I rewatched the film midway through our relationship and was struck by how mean Mrs. Robinson was to Benjamin.”

Given all these pressures, Hannah and Emily broke up…for a day. Brian ended up sitting them down for a counseling session, telling Emily and Hannah that to succeed they had to find the overlaps in our lives and focus on those. “The big thing in common would be writing but as I learned in these talks for the article after, Hannah was intimidated by my career,” Emily says. “I didn’t understand—I saw we had no reason to compete.”

In September 2024, Hannah and Emily’s family traveled to Provincetown, Massachusetts for a long weekend. It was an attempt to prove this relationship structure could work. We all stayed in a two-bedroom cottage near the ocean where it was post-season idyllic, yet Hannah wondered how the dynamic would evolve had we all been there for three weeks or three years instead of three days.

Hannah and Emily played with her son in the pool then dropped him off with Brian before heading to the beach to watch the sunset and smoke pot. “I was shivering after the pool and Brian had given me his Irish fisherman sweater to wear.”

Behind an abandoned boat on the beach later that night Hannah was feeling too stoned. “I was extremely conscious of the parts of my body that were touching sand and the ones that were touching Emily’s skin. While we were having sex, I became conscious of the fact that I was only wearing Brian’s sweater and my socks. After, Emily seemed nervous and I became nervous.”

“I was actually hallucinating spiders in the sky,” Emily amends.

For Hannah, this last trip was one time in a handful in which our roles were reserved, in which Emily seemed much younger. “I felt panicky and aware that she was higher than I was, so I gave her my own solid option, ‘Do you want to go inside?’”

Normally, the sexual and the familial were separated by a 45-minute drive between Greenpoint and Bushwick, and now the distance was a five-minute walk from the beach to the cottage. “I kept trying to swallow my lips to keep from laughing. Their son was sleeping and Brian immediately seemed to read the situation. Emily: really high. Me: Less high but unable to formulate a plan. He put on the TV and settled on The Lost Boys, according to Emily, ‘a Gen-X classic.’”

And there it was for Hannah. She saw an intuition and understanding of another person that she did not have with Emily or anyone else at that time. Hannah recalls, “Ironically, the closer that I got to Emily’s family the more I wished I had already found a primary partner. It was difficult to observe a solid life partnership play out in front of you and not feel as though your own chance was slipping away.”

Realizing from this vantage point that maybe she wasn’t poly after all Hannah can admit, “I was only able to have feelings for one person. The real problem was that I wanted a wife and I didn’t know how I would find one.”

The tragic thing about all breakups is these kinds of obvious reasons only present themselves after everything is done. Lacking clarity, our relationship limped along for a few months after the trip, then we broke up for real.

Besides the poly stress, one of our biggest challenges was our different communication styles. Hannah had a cell phone from age 12 on. Emily grew up with a landline in the family home, and wasn’t allowed more than a 20-minute call. Hannah likes to diagnose and analyze whereas Emily prefers to treat feelings like a Midwesterner talking about the weather: worth remarking on but not for long. Hannah says, “When I texted asking her how are u feeling? She would say Good if she was feeling positive, and Okay if she was upset. Emily preferred ‘not to get into it’ in text.”

A year after we broke up, Hannah was graduating from her MFA. The room at NYU was bright with energy that day and Hannah thanked Emily from the stage before she gave her reading, “Which of course she nailed, making everyone in the room laugh and lean in. I felt elated for her to have this moment,” Emily recounts. “Her father David and I sat together, meeting for the first time in the three years of knowing Hannah. I was surprised at how kind he was; I hadn’t expected her parents would accept me, even as the now-platonic much older friend. Although I was nervous, he was an easy person to feel comfortable with and converse with, just like Hannah. Afterward at drinks, he said to me, ‘I want to thank you for being there for Hannah.’”

Emily was touched by the acknowledgement and she realized the problem with the Mrs. Robinson narrative is that it ends abruptly, without understanding of who Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson were as people, what they gave each other before moving on in their lives. She hadn’t been able to give Hannah everything, yet with her father’s words, Emily saw that she had at least been able to give something.

Looking back Hannah says, “One thing that Emily said to me was how in long relationships, there are old, long-standing resentments about things that you never bring up. On one hand, this feels generationally opposite to how I was taught to approach relationships: by talking about every little thing. Now I think there is something to be said for accepting a person’s flaws and limitations and taking them as they are.”

When questioning her continued desire to date “the olds,” as Hannah still calls them, she wondered if what she enjoyed was their experience, the lack of tentativeness. Emily always thought her lifestyle as a novelist made her less mature than her peers, but she is starting to accept that experience displaces youth, no matter what.

In the deepest part of our relationship, we each wanted the other to be our age, to see the world as we saw it. A fantasy, since neither of us would be who we were if that could come true.

Hannah Meyer is a writer from Boise, Idaho based in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her essays and short stories are published in Hobart, Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Lilith Magazine, La Petit Mort, and elsewhere.

Emily Schultz is the author of the novels Little Threats, and The Blondes, which was an NPR Great Reads selection. Her forthcoming novel is Miss Psycho. A cofounder of Joyland Magazine, her writing has appeared in Elle, Slate, Vice, Writer’s Digest, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in Brooklyn.

It’s The Devils, plural, for a reason. Not only was there director Ken Russell, working through the end of his faith by adapting Aldous Huxley’s novel about a medieval convent taken over by sexual hysteria. There was also Derek Jarman, plucked by chance from experimental theater anonymity to design the 1971 film’s sets. And what sets. Unlike in most films the sets became part of The Devils’ spell. In Jarman’s hands the town of Loudun is the psychogeographical model of its denizens’ madness: the white fortress walls, the tiled torture chambers, its crucifixion fields. With the 4k restoration of the uncensored version now touring, Medium Cool is excerpting Jarman’s diaries from the making of Russell’s film.

Reading these entries now I’m struck by the studio-ness of The Devils: epic sets, the department squabbles, the suit visits. It was a major co-production, making Russell’s surprise at how much the studio loathed the completed film seem genuine. “They read the bloody script didn’t they!” he was reported to have yelled. With the director later begging Jarman to design his adaptation of The Who’s Tommy, Jarman would have been poised for his Hollywood debut as a designer. He decided otherwise, and embarked on a career of his own as a resolutely independent director, video artist, discover of Tilda Swinton, and LGBTQ activist before his death in 1994. But here, back before The Devils was the most notorious studio film ever made, read about champagne-soused takes, wasps invading the production, and the director accidentally blowing up the set.

The Devils restoration screens at Lincoln Center as part of the 2026 New York Film Festival and opens in wide release on October 16th. The following are entries from Dancing Ledge, by Derek Jarman.

January 1970, Upper Ground: I was dreading coming back to London as by Christmas I had very little money and no way of heating the warehouse at Upper Ground, with the exception of the small office I’ve made of my bedroom. I can just afford to keep the ‘pither’ stove going, but it does nothing except keep the water from freezing in the lavatory. The old coke water-heater swallows up fuel, and you have to lay in at least half a ton at a time. The holiday in Excelmans [Paris] solved the problem for a couple of weeks as the fridge was well stocked and the building centrally heated. On the train waiting to return home, I noticed a girl carrying two heavy suitcases. Something about the way she was dressed and her long hair told me she was English, so I shouted out of the window that there was a spare seat in our carriage, and she clambered in. Throughout the eight-hour journey we chatted about the theatre and painting. Janet Deuter was teaching at Hornsey in the experimental light and sound department. She was a friend of Ken and Shirley Russell so she told me of their new film project, The Devils. When we parted company she told me that she’d tell Ken about me, as she was convinced we would get along.

I soon forgot about this. But a day later the phone rang and Ken asked me if he could come over — ‘Tomorrow’. OK I said. ‘I’ll be there at eight in the morning,’ and at eight he arrived in the freezing empty warehouse at Upper Ground. He was bowled over by the building and while we huddled over mugs of tea I pulled out the odd drawing from Jazz Calendar and the Don, plus various other projects I had worked on. After looking at them briefly he asked me to design The Devils. I was quite taken aback by the suddenness of this offer, as I’d promised myself that after Don Giovanni I would never design again. I asked him if I could think it over, and he gave me twenty-four hours. ‘In the meantime can Shirley come to tea to meet you?’ In the evening I rushed out to see Women In Love. On the strength of that, and conversations with a few friends, I decided to plunge in...

February 1970 Ladbroke Grove: I sit up stairs on the livingroom floor among the bric-a-brac which invades every corner of Ken’s home. His latest addition is a portrait of Hedy Lamarr. Shirley makes coffee while Ken and I thrash out ideas. My architectural history, the years with Pevsner, stand me in good stead.

The town of Loudun is an enormous task. There’s the exterior as well as the interiors to consider, and also a large number of sets for Louis XIII’s court in Paris. I’ve brought a bottle of sepia ink ink and the finest rapidograph, which I use to make meticulous drawings of the sets, stone by stone, after initial (very rough) sketches. An art director, George Lack, is drawing these up into proper plans and elevations, and students at the Central are building a scale model of the exterior.

The whole lot is to be built at Pinewood. My source books are Ledoux, Boulee and Piranci’s prison series. All detail is sacrificed to scale as I want the sets as large as possible, and as forceful as the sets from an old silent.

May 1970, Pinewood: The journey out to Pinewood Studios is a nightmare. I’m usually up by 5.30 to get there by 8.30. So much of the time is spent waiting for trains and in the evening it’s worse unless I manage to hitch a lift. Yesterday I came out with Ken in the white Rolls for a meeting with the American investors — a gang of Hollywood mafia, who took the model of Loudun up to the lot where it was dismembered with a breadknife while they argued about its size. They posted studio assistants to mark its limits on the ground. They spent half an hour dissecting three months’ work, and at one point attempted to jettison the cathedral. The set is apparently going to be the largest since the ill-fated Cleopatra. Later, Ken called to say he’d been battling with them all day. Although he’s saved Loudun, we’ve lost the sets for Louis XIII’s palace, except for the theatre and perhaps the library; so the original design will never be realized — a historical film shot entirely in sets.

17 August 1970, Pinewood: We started filming after months of preparation. The great white city is nearly complete on the lot and has become a tourist attraction. You could almost pay for it with visitors’ fees. It cost £97,000. The finish of the white machine bricks (rather than the stone of the drawings) was decided upon in the plaster-rooms where they have brick and stone moulds of every description. I had various sections painted with more usual brick colors — yellows and reds — but looked dowdy on the glittery surfaces. Today we take up the catafalque with its shrouded figures: the whole of the studios are devoted to us as we’re making most of the props and furniture as well. A few special pieces, amongst them the life size crucifixes of the nuns’ chapel, are being sculpted by Christopher Hobbs; the crucifix is from the Isenheim altar (in polystyrene with a gesso finish). We found an authentic sixteenth century brank, a skull mask made in limewood. It’s in fragments but we’re going to restore it for the burning sequence, for which Christopher is also making a half burnt Oliver Reed out of latex.

The bald nuns have caused quite a stir. At first they refused to have their hair cut off, but the producer bribed them with an offer of 150 pounds and two wigs each.

September 1970, Northwood: I just picked up the tail-end of a conversation between my parents, who are washing up in the kitchen having insisted on me leaving it to them. Whatever Dad had said, Ma replied, ‘I’m so glad our children haven’t grown up normal, they’re so much more interesting than their friends.’

Lunch with Max Adrian, which brightens up the day no end. I found him in bed with the lady who is covered with the most revolting plague sores, eating a sandwich lunch on set. He said why didn’t I join them, as she couldn’t go to the restaurant looking like that: it would put everyone quite off their food. Max sat at lunch today eating cherry pie surrounded by empty plates. When I asked him what the plates were for he said, ‘For the bones.’ He recalled that at his twenty-first birthday party his mother looked him up and down and said, ‘Max, you are really quite ugly but at least you’re clean.’

Work is a minefield: the courtiers came down to the set this morning with horrible plastic roses in their hair. I told them to take them out, which most of them did quite willingly— but alas I didn’t know that the designer’s powers do not stretch to hair and a dispute began which came within an hour’s breadth of stopping the film. The whole thing was conducted with the utmost pettiness. The extras can be as stubborn as mules. They insist on wearing watches, never take off their rings and carry newspapers around with them, which come out the moment Ken shouts ‘Cut!’

Rushes are like bingo. Each of us votes for his favourite — one, three, four or whatever. Ken sits at the back with the lighting cameraman, David Watkins, who usually gets his way. Watkins, who always wears plimsolls, reminds me of a bad-tempered sportsmaster. One expects him to take out a whistle and blow it. He doesn’t like me very much, probably because everyone calls me ‘the artist’ and the sets, rather than his lighting, are the continual topic of conversation.

Today, Charlton Heston was sitting in the projection-room — he has a hide like tanned leather.

Revolting afternoon at the plague pit: it is composed of dummies and extras made up as corpses. Ian laid in gallons of real blood from the abattoir — splashed all over the place, it attracted clouds of wasps which made it almost impossible to act dead. Ken, as usual, stormed around, the bodies shifting as a wasp flew too close even when the cameras were turning. Nothing was right; the blood was a disaster. In the end he made me bring bottles of ketchup from the kitchens, which made everything worse as the wasps preferred it to the real thing. There was a huge row this morning about the houses on the lot. I’d taken down some shutters without consulting Ken. He’d seen them at an early stage of the design, and was expecting them on the buildings. ‘I can’t trust you, I can’t trust you. In future you’ re going to bring me everything to be signed.’ He looked like the mad empress from some B movie — waving his cane, his long hair flowing, wearing a smock and enormous rings on every finger. He left the set shouting to the air, everyone looking at each other rather embarrassed. I quietly carried on and tried to ignore the whole affair.

October 1970, Pinewood: The wilder scenes in the film are fueled with champagne, which sometimes arrives with breakfast. In the cathedral Ken has a drum-kit
brought in and drums away loudly to whip up fervour. The set is closed, and there are wild rumours all over the studio about ‘orgies’.

I’m back at Bankside every night, exhausted, often as late as ten. I’m up at 5.30 to reach the set by 7.30. Ian Whittaker picks me up in his car, on Southwark Bridge, bleary-eyed at about six. I work most Saturdays and often Sunday. Life as I knew it has ceased to exist.

May-September 1970, Ladbroke Grove: Ken asked me what would most upset an English audience. Louis XIII dining al fresco, carelessly shooting peacocks on the lawn between courses. ‘Impossible,’ said Ken. ‘How would you do that?’ ‘Make some dummies, stand them on the lawn and detonate them. ‘No, you’d have to shoot real peacocks. It wouldn’t work otherwise.’

Later, this scene crept into the film in the garden at Pinewood. Ken dressed his Huguenot extras as blackbirds, which the king shot while nonchalantly talking to Richelieu. At one moment our Louis said campily, ‘Bye, bye blackbird.’ ‘Marvellous,’ said Ken. ‘What do you think of that, Derek?’

‘Oh I suppose it’s OK,’ I said half-heartedly. I didn’t want to be the kill-joy. The idea had transformed from the steely, vicious concentration of a scene from The White Devil to a farce. ‘Do it again,’ said Ken, and into the film it went. My sensibilities about what was appropriate were violated. A flip joke in a nasty little garden at Pinewood, instead of a great abstract topiary set with strutting peacocks. In a very dark mood I returned to Bankside.

December 1970, Pinewood: Ken and his camera crew were tempers frayed come the end of filming in December. When the day for the great detonation of the walls of Loudun arrived, when all the charges were laid and we were ready to go; Ken, who had been very moody, said, ‘I’m not having this fucked up’ and climbed on to the camera to film it himself. The signals that had been organized to let the explosives experts know we were rolling were primitive; and Ken, waving his arms in the argument around the camera, set the whole lot off. The camera stood idle, and as the dust and debris descended from the massive explosion everyone stood around dumbfounded. The next ten days were spent restoring the walls to get the shot.

Almost every waking moment of 1970 was spent working on The Devils. When I began in January I had no idea that a film of this size completely usurps your life. And by the time I emerged from Pinewood in December, the easy life of the sixties — designing and painting — had gone for ever. It was now impossible to pick up all the threads. Painting was the major victim: I continued it over the next ten years very sporadically. After the intense pressure under which a film is made, it seemed undemanding — and the isolation in which it was pursued, enervating. However, in the autumn the first of my own films took off with the help of Malcolm Leigh; to be followed by a whole series of Super 8s which gradually, without my realizing it, relocated my work. Although much of my time at Pinewood was spent in the constructions of sets, every now and then my presence on the set was necessary. In fact, Ken attempted to keep me there full-time; and I discovered (imperceptibly) how a feature film ran. There was no better director to learn from, as he would always take the adventurous path even at the expense of coherence.

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The 1990s may have been the golden era of the commentariat gravely asking in editorials and special reports, “How far is too far?” But so many of the films from that time seem deflated after losing the contexts they sprung from. Then there’s Crash. Unlike other transgressive movies of the era, David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the J.G. Ballard novel about the collision of sex drive with four-wheel drive has only grown in both esteem and prescience. In its own cold, metallic way, Crash continues to tell us about ourselves and where we’re going. Despite being a teenage Ballard obsessive, I hadn’t revisited Crash until last year and was stunned at the precision of the film, and the still intense sexual content. Emily Schultz had never seen it before, making this a perfect pick for Cinema Dirtbag.

As it turns out we both have very personal stories to share about Crash, including that time we almost got in a car accident with Cronenberg.

Brian J Davis: I am at an advantage here. You’ve never seen this film, and J.G. Ballard was for me probably what Tolkien was for you growing up. So ask me anything.

Emily Schultz: Let’s start with the basics. When you saw the film what was your reaction? Being a Ballard fan.

BJD: I didn’t like this film the first time! While watching it I couldn’t suppress the visuals of the novel in my mind. Ballard is not a very emotive writer, to say the least, but he was incredibly lucid and visual. Ballard himself thought this film was better than his novel and having seen this a couple of times in the last few years, I now agree. It’s stunning and the thesis of this movie is only getting more correct.

ES: I can see how you managed to have an in-theater “experience” with this movie — I mean it’s the first 10 minutes and we’ve seen three sex scenes and all these people talk about are their orgasms.

BJD: If you think your friends’ polycules are too much, be thankful they’re not crashing cars…yet.

ES: I’m quite shocked by this movie already. And by all that light traffic in Toronto.

BJD: Here’s Ballard’s point. In the early ’70s, he saw how technology and media was starting to alienate us from our bodies, and culturally he saw this in advertising: how cars and sex were being combined. Think of Helmut Newton’s infamous Citroën ad. The car crash as sexual climax was Ballard’s way to open everything up. The violence would break through the alienation.

ES: I remember the first time I understood that the word “sexy” actually referred to sex, the act. It was when I was 10 and saw an ad featuring a woman wearing leather on a motorcycle. It just clicked for me.

BJD: Maybe a couple of things clicked for you with that.

ES: Very true!

BJD: You shared, so I’ll share my story of getting it on in a theater during Crash. And I will do my best to protect the identity of the other person— they’re kind of famous now. First, this is the important part of the story: I was at my peak transgressive, more alternative-than-thou stage, but I brought the most normal person I knew to see Crash, and I do remember wondering, how is this going to go? We’re watching it and I’m like, I’m not connecting with the film but slowly I realize that Crash is, completely unexpectedly, driving my date into such a state that by the final reel way too much is happening in the theater, and it was definitely finished in the car afterwards and…wait for it…that was in the parking lot of a mall.

ES: You were still young though, like 19 or 20?

BJD: Don’t try to defend me.

ES: Where would you rank this with Cronenberg films?

BJD: Again, as I’ve revisited this movie it’s now up there with The Fly or Dead Ringers, and maybe his best. But what’s interesting is you would think this had been some long gestating passion project for Cronenberg, but he was relatively unaware of Ballard. It was really producer Jeremy Thomas’s project. And there is a great, idiosyncratic documentary out now that I recommend, The Storms of Jeremy Thomas. But both of them are absolute gear heads.

ES: Now let me tell our Cronenberg story. Okay, it was our last day of living in Toronto before moving to New York.

BJD: We were living in a warehouse across the street from Deluxe, the film lab.

ES: We were walking past the parking lot and I have to say, this was completely our fault because we probably were arguing about some travel detail, and not looking. Then this outrageous silver sports car—

BJD: I described it at the time as an Italian Batmobile.

ES: It stops just in time before hitting us. Like an inch from our shins. Thank God there’s a great driver. But we all look at each other, very Canadian and apologetically, and then I realize, that’s David Cronenberg in that car. The day I’m leaving Toronto and it’s David Cronenberg!

BJD: And I look at David Cronenberg and I swear he and I had the exact same thought at the exact same time, which was: Damn that would have been ironic because he/I directed the movie Crash.

ES: There’s a lot of realizations in the moment you’re about to be hit by a car. I know!

BJD: I do think that this is some of the best usage of 1990s Toronto in a film. The east side is still the east side, and all this concrete brutalist scenery is shot in North York. It’s all soulless expressways and towers. That Toronto turned out to be the perfect Ballard city.

ES: What I find interesting about James Spader and Holly Hunter, having been in the same accident and now meeting at the junkyard and being turned on, is this idea that your most traumatic experiences could emerge as a part of your sexuality. That is brave storytelling.

BJD: You’re absolutely right—that very contemporary idea is why this film has had a reputational rebound, because it continues to speak to us. It had its defenders at the time and won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes but the press, especially in the UK, loathed it and its US release was delayed by a year of just ratings battles.

ES: Where is Holly Hunter in her career at this point?

BJD: I believe she went right from Home for the Holidays with Robert Downey Jr., to Crash. And that, kids, is called range. Roger Ebert had the best compliment of Crash. He said it was as if an AI looked at our culture and determined we like cars and sex, and outputted this film for us. And that is down to Cronenberg’s obsessive detailing in this film and the way scenes are built so coldly and logically. This is not a verbal film; it could almost work as a silent film.

ES: So they’re joining this sort of underground club that recreates famous celebrity car accidents?

BJD: Just think of it as Crash Club.

ES: Got it.

BJD: I do wish there was more of this celebrity obsession material from the novel. Spoiler alert that Elias Koteas’s character dies in a crash…at the end of a movie called Crash. Grow up, people. But in the novel his character Vaughan dies while trying to crash into Elizabeth Taylor’s car and that was probably too high a legal bar for the film to suggest. Fair enough, but the ending does lose some conceptual power.

ES: Can we talk about Elias Koteas?

BJD: The Canadian De Niro.

ES: He’s great in Zodiac. But I think the first time I was aware of Elias Koteas was in Some Kind of Wonderful.

BJD: And he was in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the same time as being in early Atom Egoyan films. My favorite Koteas performance is as the DJ in Exotica. We should continue this “Toronto Ennui” series, and do that film next.

ES: I probably wouldn’t have been able to watch Crash in 1997. I was happier with, like, Go Fish. This part is really sinister: Spader is watching his wife’s car being crashed into by Koteas. It’s like a cuckolding with cars. And now they’re racing through Cherry Beach.

BJD: With wantonly displayed Ontario license plates. This film is openly Toronto…except for this scene. I know this only bothers me but the translight outside their condo set is totally New York City.

ES: I’m too busy watching this extremely explicit sex. Actually, I’m almost starting to get bored with how much sex there’s been.

BJD: That’s part of it. The film wants to have the numbing effect of too much sensory input. But I also suspect that the next time I see you in a car you’re going to be revving the engine for an extra minute more than you need to.

ES: Should I tell my story about being hit by a car?

BJD: Yes and—I’m asking this merely because Crash is currently playing in front of us—was it sexy?

ES: It actually was bonding. I had been out with an ex-boyfriend, and we had discussed a lot of the things that had happened in our relationship. We were quite drunk and had completely come to peace about everything. We were crossing the street and a car was making a left-hand turn. We didn’t see him. The next thing I knew I was on the pavement looking at my friend and one of us asked, Did we just get hit by a car? We both blacked out on impact. The car hit me, and he blacked out on impact from the force with which I hit him.

BJD: Oh wow. And the driver of that car was Denis Villeneuve?

ES: No! It was a car of college kids. But the amazing thing is nothing happened to us! We were fine. We did go to the hospital and get x-rays. My knee hurt for a month but that was it.

BJD: I find it so interesting that your car accident had this emotional dimension to it. That’s not that far away from this film.

ES: It changed my life because I really took a serious career turn after. I remember right before the car hit us, we were talking about, of all things, Who was that Christian metal band that dressed in yellow and black?

BJD: Stryper!

ES: Right? And what if my final thought on Earth was something so stupid? So I started writing my first novel that month.

BJD: I think one of the magnificent things about the movie is the tone—it’s sustained from beginning to end. It’s almost if you’re watching the movie with a concussion, in terms of how slow and methodical it is. It’s a consistent wobbliness.

ES: Oh what just happened?

BJD: Vaughan crashed, off screen. Which was probably both a stylistic choice, and to save money. And again, one of the only flaws in an otherwise fantastic adaptation is that his ending in the film lacks the power it has in the novel.

ES: Now James Spader and his wife are chasing each other. Notice they never wear their seatbelts?

BJD: That’s kind of like going raw for them.

ES: Now he sent her car down a hill.

BJD: Consensually.

ES: One flaw with this final crash scene is this. Where are the dozens of Canadians trying to out-helpful each other?

BJD: James Spader hasn’t blinked for a whole minute while he’s seeing if his wife is dead or not. And it’s not concern, it’s excitement. That is some acting. And it’s very much Cronenberg’s ending—something that would be very difficult to convey in a novel.

ES: I do get this ending. When I got hit by that car, I suddenly had an awareness of death that I had not had before I was 27 years old.

BJD: So a traumatic experience can become part of you in a way not entirely negative?

ES: True, but I don’t think I needed to have sex after getting hit by a car.

BJD: Don’t knock it till you try it! Which is what I think the tagline of Crash should have been.

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I cut Ducks using the most recent Blu-ray edition of the series, and Adobe Premiere Pro. All footage comes from season one of HBO’s The Sopranos. Some foley and transitional music cues were added to patch the scenes together.

Black and white was both an aesthetic choice and a necessary one as the pilot episode has completely different cinematography than the rest of the season.

Of course, a go ham-fair use experiment like this would have the lifespan of an FBI informant on Youtube. But you can always share or download Ducks from Vimeo here.

We’ll be back in September with weekly content including film commentaries, author interviews, and more!

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During FIFA Women’s World Cup of 2023 Emily Schultz and I watched two of the most intense films about soccer: Alan Clarke’s The Firm from 1989 and The Damned United from 2009. Here’s a replay of that post, though in retrospect we also want to recommend, as a chaser to these profiles in psychopathy, the nicest film about soccer: Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl.

Alan Clarke’s final film, The Firm (1989) is a sustained 90-minute heart attack of class resentment and knife violence. Gary Oldman plays Bex, a football hooligan and real estate agent navigating his double life in yuppie-ascendent Britain. In Clarke’s Elephant—his most known film—he used the poetry of the Steadicam to implicate the viewer in a relentless murder tour of Belfast during the Troubles. In The Firm he uses it to sync our pulse rates with Bex as he sprints from failed rumbles and Stanley knife slashes with other aging football gangs, to a final breakdown with his wife, played by Oldman’s then real-life partner Lesley Manville. Not much of it is about the game itself, and that’s the point.

The Damned United (2009) is a graceful and gritty adaptation of the novel by David Peace that details the 44 days of Brian Clough as failed manager of Leeds United, the most feared British team of 1974. Michael Sheen has a blast with the dogged and aggravatingly confident Clough while screenwriter Peter Morgan reaches the peak of his historical theatre-stylings that began with The Queen.

Both films are about love—point of fact, The Firm opens with “That’s Amore!” over images of vandalism and window smashing. But it’s obsessive, corrosive love that hides just under fandom’s tear-streaked face.

We’re in the New York, so we’re calling it soccer for most of our discussion, excepting for quotes and specific references. Please don’t jump us in the car park after.

BRIAN J DAVIS: Emily, you’re coming into this commentary recording right from having played your best game of the year?

EMILY SCHULTZ: It should have been 2–0. But we won at 2–1. I really don’t enjoy The Firm, by the way. Technically, it’s masterful, but the violence is so…first personal.

BJD: It’s true. When we first watched this, you were watching through your hands and asking things like, “Is the baby okay?”

ES: It really is the filmmaking. It’s so intense.

BJD: I now understand sports through you. I never in my life got it before. And I enjoy watching soccer with you. I enjoy it until they pan to the fans and I see flags painted on faces and I cringe so much.

ES: You like sports but not fandom?

BJD: I love the drama of sports but something strange happens in the stands. And here’s our first look at young Jay Simpson, who you may know as Foz from Peep Show, or Rod Senseless in Black Mirror.

ES: Is that it for actual soccer in the film?

BJD: That’s it. It’s all knife crime from here on in! And that’s the point. That these gangs ruined the game in the ’70s and ’80s.

ES: I relate to the game. I do not relate to these….

BJD: Yobs? Bootboys? Shitmunchers?

ES: I’ll bring the soccer. You bring the British.

BJD: I’ll use this moment to explain the absolute shallow depth of my connection to the United Kingdom. When I was twenty, I had dropped out of art school — please sit with that for a moment.

ES: Quite the accomplishment.

BJD: Thank you, it gets even more shameful. And after a year of me doing nothing, my family was concerned, and my brother was living in Brixton then, so they borrowed money from my grandmother to send me to the UK so I could “find my roots.” And that wasn’t the best thing for me at the time, because apparently my roots included: getting tossed out of a party at the ICA, then throwing up behind one of the lions in Trafalgar Square and passing out. And I remember this giant of a man, maybe not even a “bobby,” it could have just been someone who wanted to murder me asking, “By any chance are you an American?” And I mumbled, “Canadian” to which he replied, “Jolly good. Carry on.”

ES: That didn’t happen!

BJD: Totally did! We have to talk about the filmmaking. This is what Alan Clarke did so well. Like Elephant, it’s immersive trauma.

ES: He’s very much, How about a cup of tea and some trauma, love?

BJD: It’s so focused though.

ES: It’s honing in on one character, Bex (Gary Oldman), at one particular point in his life.

BJD: As he makes horrible decisions. And this is really what was happening then with football gangs. They were taking on the vestments of yuppies, taking middle-class jobs.

ES: But like functional alcoholics going on a bender over the weekend?

BJD: Exactly.

ES: Sorry I have to stretch.

[Break for Emily to stretch her soccer injuries.]

BJD: This is my favorite Gary Oldman performance of all time, by the way.

ES: He’s great, but this character is so loathsome.

BJD: This is what I was left with the last time I watched this. Here you have working class gangs with their own shadow leagues—local and even international—and their own celebrity captains. It’s their way of clawing power back from the submissiveness of fandom. They’ve made themselves stars and negated the game.

ES: What we would now call toxic fandom?

BJD: One of the things England is actually good at is subcultures.

ES: You learned some things passed out in your own sick in Trafalgar Square! It was good for you.

BJD: Here’s the most chilling scene. Bex lives two blocks from his parents still. He’s in a very small world. And in his childhood room, full of football posters still, he has his weapon stash of knives, and axes and then he practices!

ES: I love this scene. It’s almost novelistic in how alone we are with him.

BJD: This is one of the most terrifying things I could think of: Gary Oldman practicing beating someone with a telescoping baton. Imagine seeing that face right before you die.

ES: Wait, where is this actor from?

BJD: Nick Dunning from The Tudors! Literally every co-star in this film went on to The Tudors, The Crown, or Game of Thrones.

ES: I have such a wife-connection with Lesley Manville. She is the only woman in this world of men and she just doesn’t want the football gang meeting to wake the baby up.

BJD: She carries a lot here as the only person with sense.

ES: The knife tattoo scene. I can’t watch. There are far too many blades in this film.

BJD: The rumble scene. This kitchen sink handheld approach is much more intense than any studio fight scene. You feel everything.

ES: I don’t like this part. [The youngest member of the gang has his face slashed.]

BJD: And the fact that the rival gang look like members of an over-the-hill New Romantic band makes it so much scarier. Like, they should be singing “Don’t You Want Me” in a Dorset pub instead of doing this.

ES: I’m so glad they don’t show the revenge face slash scene. And to be honest, they do cut away from the worst throughout.

BJD: It’s that immersive Steadicam filmmaking. But yes, from here on in this feels like a horror film, just in terms of dread.

ES: I understand anger. I don’t understand ritualized violence.

BJD: I think it goes back to this attempt at power. This is their revenge against the degradations of the class system. Bex’s life looks okay, but the reality is he’s in a terraced house and—oh shit, no, no, not the scene of the baby finding the Stanley knife! I’m looking away.

ES: Goddammit, I saw it!

BJD: They’re back from the hospital and now the great Lesley Manville scene. She just slaps the shit out of Gary Oldman while shouting, MY baby! MY baby! Like she’s firing him from parenthood itself.

ES: No one fights on screen better than actual couples. Now he’s at his parents and this scene got to me as well. You want his parents to tell him to cut this shit out but…

BJD: His father is helping him plan what will be his final fight! It’s multi-generational. And now he confronts his nemesis Phil Davis, who would later be a teacher in the magnificent and underrated Notes On a Scandal.

ES: The first time I saw this I did not see this ending coming.

BJD: Here’s the kicker. No pun intended. The film switches to mockumentary and during the interviews his gang declares Bex a martyr. I seriously thought that it was going end like Cannibal Holocaust, where the camera crew-within the film are torn apart.

ES: Really?

BJD: I mean, it is a pub full of drunk men chanting “England!” while wearing Union Jack shorts. Nationalism is not only evil and infectious, but also utterly ridiculous.

ES: This is such a well-made, well-acted movie…I still don’t enjoy it.

BJD: Going from that, to The Damned United, which we just started, I want to say the United Kingdom, maybe, just maybe, takes football a little too seriously. Probably to the detriment of their mental health.

ES: And it opens with a title card: The nation is in trauma after having failed to qualify for the World Cup. Hope that doesn’t happen to us this week! [Ed. note: The US Women’s team failed to advance to finals, setting off Emma Haye’s dramatic turnaround of the team.]

BJD: Since this is a biopic, technically, let’s circle back to that for a second. The way to do it is to take the “make shit up” route. Like this movie.

ES: It’s so much better to be able to write that way.

BJD: You don’t get a lot of protagonists named Brian in films.

ES: Were you named after Brian’s Song?

BJD: I was absolutely named after Brian’s Song.

ES: Why aren’t we watching that?

BJD: It’s terrible. And The Damned United is key for me understanding you and sports. Brian Clough really believes in sportsmanship and the beauty of the game and teamwork, and believes that’s what wins at the end of the day. That’s you! You are just like that.

ES: I won the sportsmanship trophy in high school.

BJD: Of course you did! This movie is also Moby Dick set in British football. Man gets obsessed with white whale—taking over Leeds— and is dragged down by it.

ES: He comes off as a bit of a cock during this first act. But that changes once we flashback and see his journey from the bottom division.

BJD: This is the beginning of Brian Clough’s psychic wound. They’re a bottom ranked team and they’re playing Leeds United, the top ranked. And the Leeds manager, Don Revie, snubs him, thereby setting a years-long resentment in motion.

ES: We were the bottom ranked team tonight and beat the top ranked.

BJD: And what was the score again? Tell us!

ES: Should’ve been 2–0.

BJD: His downfall with managing Leeds was his obsession with Don Revie. Nemesis is such a classic story device. It shouldn’t be slept on! And this nemesis started out as a love object.

ES: He’s leaving fresh oranges for the visiting team and polished wine glasses for the manager. It’s date planning. For a man who won’t pay any attention to him!

BJD: Without getting too esoteric, I think obsession ends up taking us away from the thing we love.

ES: I’d completely agree with that. Wow. Look at Brian Clough’s playing. Damn, those legs!

BJD: Are you exclaiming about Michael Sheen’s legs and ball play?

ES: Going to be honest. They’re very: nice to see you!

BJD: He’s trying to change how Leeds plays and again this so you. He hates cheating and so do you. I think it actually breaks your heart.

ES: In soccer yes. I feel if you have skills, you don’t need to cheat. But in life…there is cheating involved.

BJD: Maybe that’s where you two differ. Every great character has a flaw and his is that he believes the world should think like him. He’s shocked that it doesn’t.

ES: Okay. I hate saying this. These men look a little too old for professional soccer. Maybe it’s the chain-smoking.

BJD: They were an aging team, and it is the ’70s in Britain. Self-care was basically Dunhills and Chivas Regal. I like that they give us the final grim score just as they’re screaming and fist-pumping on their way out to the field. It’s hilarious.

ES: And it’s cheap. They don’t have to show the game and crowds.

BJD: There’s nothing scarier than when the coach gets quiet, is there? He looks so unhinged and it’s so great for Michael Sheen to get to play such a nice guy/psychopath.

ES: When it comes to soccer it’s a fine line. Wait. They won. 2–1!

BJD: You just jumped up and fist-pumped like you’re watching a real game.

ES: I did! But you know I really enjoy playing much more than watching as a fan.

BJD: It’s the same with novelists. If reading other writers was a prerequisite for the job, a lot of writers would be in trouble!

ES: New topic! He just told his team to smile more. Telling people to smile does not go over well.

BJD: Especially with people from Leeds.

ES: This is really a love story between him and two men. His assistant coach is almost his first partner and Don Revie and Leeds—

BJD: His new one! I think what makes for an unhappy relationship is simply that someone chose the wrong person. This also reminds me that this is the third Timothy Spall film we’ve seen this month.

ES: We really should do the Dream Demon/Spencer double bill.

BJD: Brian Clough! This is a biopic sin. Calling the character by his full name, constantly.

ES: And in the third person.

BJD: He has the egomaniac tendencies towards that. But there’s even other characters saying things like, I have advice for you, Brian Clough.

ES: He doesn’t change in this film. I do kind of like that and that’s a very novelistic thing.

BJD: He never stops shooting his mouth off. He just refines it. And we haven’t mentioned it yet but this is a well-crafted film. Everything’s spot on for recreating the 1970s. And the cinematography is the right kind of good looking: smoky and handsome.

ES: He can’t let go of Don Revie. He’s reading about him on the beach in Brighton. I wish he had a social media blocker to use.

BJD: When you’re starting your career it’s so easy to think you have this one special nemesis, and you don’t realize you in fact have many. You have nemesi.

ES: It’s more that it’s easy to think there’s no room for you if other people are already in those positions.

BJD: That’s a very polite way of saying I would murder my rival.

ES: Oh my God. He states his own full name while being fired! Brian Howard Clough. He one-ups biopics.

BJD: Take this scene at BBC Leeds where he’s booked to be interviewed the day he’s fired and they secretly bring on Don Revie to be interviewed beside him. This is the one thing I thought could never be historically accurate and I even said out loud. Come on! And it one hundred percent happened.

ES: This is an on-air slide tackle he’s about to experience!

BJD: What would you score these two films in a game?

ES: I don’t know. This one is the easier watch, but The Firm is such a ferocious character study, even if I watched it through my fingers.

BJD: How about 1–1?

ES: 2–1. Because The Firm would definitely cheat.

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Crust punk. Rave twink. Middle-aged Substacker. I have more identities to answer for in my life than Bob Dylan does. Yet around Y2K I was mostly pretending to be an adult—that stage you do right after your teen years that also allows space for the next generation to be stupid. That means I missed out on the worlds of nü metal and its hip-hop cousin, Eminem.

In 2001 in the UK there were concerts one month apart by Eminem and a pre-allegations Marilyn Manson that collectively shook that nation’s parents and commentators. Photographer Neil Massey was there.

This isn’t about exported rock stars though. Massey knew the fans were as interesting, if not more so, than the artists and instinctively captured the crowd as well. Collected decades later in a photo zine, the images are a mirror for the viewer to see yourself in, no matter when or how you punched your troubled teen card.

Printed in a limited edition of 100, copies are still available through Massey’s site.

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When writer Peter York first published Dictator Style in 2005 there was no way he could have predicted this look’s American revival in 2024. And there is a cheekily elegiac tone to his book, as if to say there was a sunsetting of dictatorship culture. After opening with a quote of “In Every Dream Home A Heartache” York points out the then-dominant billionaire taste was “the dressed down wooden beams of new Silicon Valley money.” At the time, no one rich and all-powerful wanted to actually look it. Fast forward a few election cycles.

While the idea of bad/good culture itself is root coded into every capitalist project from colonialism to neoliberalism, any dictator’s sartorial choices can still be a hilarious respite from years of that boot on your neck. Really? You’re wearing that to the show trial?

According to York, you too can get the look with the following rules….

“Have Yourself Everywhere”

“Think Hotel”

“Have Important Oil Paintings”

“Go For Gold”

“Big It Up”

“Think French”

“Involve Brands”

Dictator Style is out of print but can be bought through Abe’s.

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Madonna is back and she’s releasing a new album this summer, Confessions 2. Much like Madonna, we’re relaunching too, and while Medium Cool is under renovations we wanted to re-post one of our wildest talks on Cinema Dirtbag, when we worked our way through Madonna’s 1990s filmography.

For our generation, talking about Madonna is like early humans discussing the Sun. It’s going to involve a lot of gesturing and pointing at something we don’t quite understand but regard as lifegiving, albeit in a terrifying way. Especially as Emily and Madonna are homegirls—Madonna’s family being from Pontiac, Michigan and Emily’s being from Berkley, a mere 20 miles away. That’s why we thought doing a 1990s Madonna movie installment of this column would result in a passionate conversation between myself and Emily. It eventually did, but only after spending three months struggling to land on a film good enough to talk about. We were reminded that cinema was the one media Madonna could never quite conquer as a lead actress. It seemed a matter of bad timing and chronic miscasting, combined with a backlash from the pearl clutchers of the Clinton era who were pushed over the edge by her brand masterpiece, Sex.

As it turns out, Madonna’s greatest performance was a version of herself in the 1991 tour documentary, Truth or Dare. Countless celebrities, from Bob Dylan to Taylor Swift, have attempted to frame their own narrative through self-produced documentaries, but it’s never been as quotable, filthy, and fun as when Madonna did it.

BRIAN J DAVIS: Should we give a warning to all the new subscribers from your popular essay? That usually on Medium Cool we’re doing things like talking about Madonna for two hours?

EMILY SCHULTZ: I think people like both Madonna and abortion rights!

BJD: Madonna was probably your last pop star. Right before you got all very serious.

ES: I was already very serious by the time this movie came out. I was moving into my depressing music era.

BJD: I don’t think there would have been Riot Grrrl in the 1990s without Madonna in the 1980s.

ES: Hmm. Keep going.

BJD: The part of Riot Grrrl and Madonna that’s shared is that they’re both about the revolutionary power of the brat—and way before anyone else tried. They both present teenage-centric feminisms.

ES: I mean at age 13 my friend Kristy was the one of us that was big into Madonna and because of Madonna, and especially True Blue, we had conversations about abortion where she had views that surprised me that then opened my mind. We had conversations about sexuality, the fact that Madonna thought it was okay to be queer. True Blue was actually the first album I ever bought.

BJD: I didn’t realize Madonna’s genius until the 1990s. I disliked 1980s Madonna, and it’s not because I was a tiny punk snob. I loved pop music too—I did do Belinda Carlisle drag for lip syncing at school.

ES: I’m sure you knew every word.

BJD: That the Go-Gos wrote themselves! Okay, I guess I was a tiny snob. But it was around Like a Prayer that Madonna started changing how she worked. She was sort of pulling a Bowie by doing his hustle of Victorian collecting of different subcultures. Here’s some alternative hip-hop. Here’s some ballroom culture. And it’s all going through the Madonna-mill. That made her incredibly successful, and artistically successful as well. There is nothing better than “Like a Prayer.” But it also opened her up to the criticism that stuck with her: the queen of appropriation.

ES: That drove many, many cultural studies classroom discussions at the time.

BJD: Let’s restate our mission to find a good Madonna film. What I’ve realized after we gave up is that quite simply the universe said to Madonna Louise Ciccone of Pontiac, Michigan: You’re going to be successful at most everything in life…except film. Stay away from film and you’ll be fine. More than fine actually.

ES: I suppose we have to get Dangerous Game out of the way first.

BJD: Even though I loved most of Abel Ferrara’s berserk 1990s films, I had never seen Dangerous Game until last week. And I like the filmmaking of Dangerous Game—but I hate the ideas in the movie. It is truly an ugly film for its ideas.

ES: I hated every minute of it.

BJD: But at the same time, we both said… best Madonna performance ever?

ES: They put her through things that they should not have.

BJD: I think it’s fair to quote Madonna in full on Dangerous Game and leave it at that.

“You have control over your performance when the camera is going, but you can take that performance in the editing room and completely change the character. That’s what happened to me with Abel. Because it was an entirely different movie when I made it —it was such a great feminist statement and she was so victorious at the end…He took my words off me and turned me into a deaf mute, basically. When I saw the cut film, I was weeping. It was like someone punched me in the stomach. He turned it into Bad Director. He’s so far up Harvey Keitel’s ass, it had become a different movie. If I’d known that was the movie I was making, I would never have done it, and I was very honest with him about that. He really fucked me over.” —Madonna

BJD: So from the peak of Truth or Dare—which was the highest grossing documentary of the decade—to the Sex book and Dangerous Game, which was barely released, and then Body of Evidence, and League of Their Own—it was only 24 months!

ES: That’s insane. So peak Madonna was all in two years?

BJD: You know I have such a soft spot for 1990s erotic thrillers. Even the bad ones. Even Jade I can say nice things about. But Body of Evidence was like an erotic thriller written by an A.I. It’s not fun, and it was filmed in Portland. Portland!

ES: From the long tradition of Your honor, she killed him and the weapon was…her body! I think that’s just Madonna catching things at the end of the cycle, right?

BJD: Exactly. That’s the problem of being at the rarified level of pop culture. You’re going to be out-of-touch quicker than most people. Madonna makes an erotic thriller, but it’s at the end of the cycle, after all the good scripts are gone. She makes a violent indie movie, but it’s not with Tarantino. It’s with an actually insane director.

ES: But look how much fun she’s having in Truth or Dare.

BJD: I know the feeling of being able to say “This is our last night in fascist Toronto.”

ES: Now I’m trying to remember how explicit this simulated masturbation scene during “Like a Virgin” is.

BJD: Oh, there’s some reaching.

ES: I mean, is it any different from Mötley Crüe?

[Emily is genuinely impressed as the choreography progresses.]

BJD: I’m so thankful for being groomed by Madonna.

ES: I really do like this next part of the film, though. It’s her homecoming to Detroit. I might cry.

BJD: It’s the homeland. And this would be classic reality TV now, right? The constructed moment that is felt authentically, but is also completely contrived.

ES: Right, like her brother being there—Martin, the problem brother.

BJD: You worry about the sex scenes in your books and your family reading it. Madonna’s worried about her family. She’s just like you!

[Her stepmother complains about the intensity of the show.]

BJD: Oh my god, that is a Michigan mom. “It was just exhausting, the show. Just exhausting to watch it. It was like being stuck on the Lodge.”

ES: She didn’t say that last part!

BJD: I think this movie does capture Madonna as a person. She’s fucking hilarious, and filthy, and quite frankly a goofball.

ES: And that’s what I was going to say about Dangerous Game. The scenes where she was the best are where she’s actually being herself. Whereas the other roles she went after… I mean, Evita of all things?

BJD: It’s genuinely difficult for one of the most famous women in the world to disappear into a role. Good god, the high school best friend scene!

ES: This is pre-Facebook and Madonna has to literally deal with this woman, in person.

BJD: And this poor woman, this moment is probably the highlight of her life.

ES: Hey, she made it into the movie, with her kids, and she’s telling the story of her and Madonna’s friendship. This is such a wonderful setup where they’re interviewing them separately about what they remember.

BJD: And now she’s asking Madonna to be the godmother to the new child she’s pregnant with. And Madonna responds with such a perfect, see you next Tuesday-deflection. “That’s a very important decision so I’ll think about it. And my assistant has all your numbers.” This is how you do fame: brutal yet humane at the same time.

ES: She tells her she loves her, though.

BJD: I do believe it’s an authentic scene. I know we keep saying that this is the roots of reality TV. But there’s no reality TV as good as this movie.

ES: Okay, can we... Oh, my God, the mother’s grave montage.

BJD: “I wonder what she looks like now. Just a bunch of dust.” You know there’s such a naiveté about Madonna. She almost gets away with everything. So this is the famous scene where her then-boyfriend Warren Beatty warns her against doing this all on camera. He’s not wrong, per se.

ES: No, he is wrong! Because look what’s preserved. Magical moments that will never be again. Madonna in her youth, being sassy, having fun. And owning the room every single time. Now we have New York Pride in 1991.

BJD: It should be said that this documentary is so iconic that there is a documentary about this documentary, that follows the dancers and the effect the film had on their lives. And make no mistake, this is the real reason for the critical backlash against Madonna. From the right-wing, because she put scenes of New York Pride—of her dancers being out—in a wide release movie. Then you had the media getting a bit fancy with their stank and saying it’s all contrived nonsense. In between there are people who were like, to be honest I am a little freaked out by the Sex book.

ES: My friend Kristy saved up her babysitting money for weeks and bought Sex on her 18th birthday, the day she was legally allowed.

BJD: All right, what’s your favorite photo from the Sex book?

ES: You’re putting me on the spot. What’s yours?

BJD: Maybe the urinal photo? The Udo Kier sequence?

ES: I think there was one of her squeezing a bottle of sunscreen onto a woman and she’s holding it like it’s a penis.

BJD: Pop stars of this level do not take Madonna-sized risks anymore, let alone humping a rotating bed on stage.

ES: Wait, music on, please!

[Emily cranks the volume for “Holiday.”]

BJD: Okay, newly blonde Emily. Blonde versus brunette Madonna?

ES: It sets up a dichotomy of the authentic brunette Madonna who’s taking on serious material and compositions versus—

BJD: Oh shit, it’s the fellating-an-Evian bottle scene. I just noticed the waiter behind in the background just staring.

ES: How happy do you think Evian was with this scene?

BJD: Like, high-fiving across the board table happy. But I think we could have done without this ten-minute-long Fosse tribute ending.

ES: It’s a lot of theater kid energy. It’s getting pretty sappy here, actually. We might need to do some shit talking.

BJD: Okay, at the end of the day, did Madonna make a movie about how much her employees love and need her?

ES: They didn’t make it themselves, did they?

BJD: “Hey Madonna, we made this thing for you. It’s about how awesome it is to be around you. When we just want to sleep.”

ES: Ouch.

BJD: Oh, we’ve been way too nice to Madonna.

ES: We probably have.

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With producing work taking up my summer this will be the last Monday column until September, when we’ll also launch a Medium Cool revamp.

This spring I started a novel days after finishing a different novel. I know! I thought it was a strong concept, got a few chapters in, right around the deciding mark—which for me is fifty pages. Then I realized, “Wait, I feel like I’m watching a two-star movie on a flight. How am I not interested in my own story?”

There was nothing technically wrong with it, but there was a cardboard cutout feeling to my avatar who I had no connection with; she just felt, well… dull. In other words, I let myself get carried by the idea, and the idea wasn’t original enough.

If you let this kind of malaise stand it could affect the overall health of the work. At the risk of sounding cynical, every editor or producer has seen ten different versions, this month, of whatever you’re working on. Be that a novel, short story, or spec script. Thinking positively though, editors and producers are also waiting for the writers doing that one thing differently. How do you know that you’re the original one? The good thing is that you’re going to be the first person to know.

But where does originality in writing live? Is it in plot and complications? A little bit. If you take an improv class, they will teach you to find your second and third idea faster, and avoid settling on your first, and probably expected idea. That is the same process as a first draft for writers and, like performers, you can train yourself to cycle faster through it.

While invention is important, I really believe intention is maybe more important for long-form writing. The more of you that you put into your work the more it will be original.

If we look at three quotes from people who don’t write novels you can see what unites them across their disciplines.

“Put your feelings in there. Don’t paint some shit like you don’t care.” —Joan Mitchell, painter

“There is no recipe. It’s a guessing game. But what we have to do is guess correctly.” —Marco Pierre White, chef

“Any composer for musical theater can write a bad song, but writing a ‘wrong song,’ one without purpose or meaning, is a far greater sin.” —Stephen Sondheim, composer

Originality, for all of them, comes out of a sense of purpose. Something personal and singular to you that connects you to this work. And that means you’re the only one who will bring it over the finish line.

This you-factor is the most unreplicable thing in the world. Don’t be afraid of the quirky parts of you, the stories from your life which can be spun in. If you’re facing down a manuscript that’s coming off as boring, I suggest you try putting in what’s missing: you.

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With World Cup mania starting, I’ve been thinking of that old cliché where the coach informs their players not to get laid before the big game, with the idea that you need to save up energy for a better performance. As an amateur soccer player I can reveal… it’s kind of true. I’ve lost more than one game in finals where I watched our best player show up, googly-eyed with love. Her game off the field was good, but on the field that night… very weak.

This made me wonder if this is true for writing as well.

Now, we’re in a cultural moment that’s adverse to mixing talk of sex and career, or even to speak about the sex in our work. But if you know me—pause for laughter—it’s a topic I refuse to leave in the ownership of old-school chauvinist novelists. So I asked myself: have I too sat at the keyboard and put up a “Not now, babe, I’m writing” hand?

I started doing personal math and compared it against the dates of my Word files and some tracking apps. It turns out I wrote my last two novels not entirely abstinent, but definitely during cooler-than-usual times.

It looked like I did choose writing, when needed, and now I can say anecdotally: doing it does get in the way of writing. It makes sense. We only have so much physical and emotional energy, and our writing requires intense memory work drawing on all five senses. We’re locked in a relationship with our characters. (Not to mention clocking long chair hours.)

If you’re partnered this is probably a discussion to have, if you haven’t already. For singles there are lots of ways to deplete your energies—like trying too hard to get some—and it can impact our pages. And for those who are abstinent by choice it may be some other activity taking away your vital forces.

Is it time this week to say “not tonight, honey” to it all? See if you can fall in love with your book instead.

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You’re not crazy. The blurb industrial complex has gone into overdrive in the last few years and part of every book’s publicity plan is getting upwards of ten new blurbs if possible. This has meant pressure not only for those who ask for blurbage, but those who get asked. The tide may be turning but the pressure is still there. In my 15-year career I have accrued 10 pages of pull quotes, written by reviewers I don’t know from major publications around the world. Some of them are even complimentary. I also already have blurbs from absolute giants of both literature and the bestseller list, and I went through Preston Sturges–levels of striving and screwball comedy to get to them.

But there’ll always be the request: Nah, we’re going to need blurbs that mention this new book specifically.

So then I’m off to talk to the only people as awkward as I am: other writers. The sad thing is the quest for my own blurbs has started to take up the emotional space that I used for something I genuinely loved doing: writing blurbs for other people.

For me that’s part of the bargain of this art form. After all, those aforementioned giants helped me out with a few donated adjectives and that means I should use whatever clout I have to help my own friends, former students, or strangers. (And yes, in that order.) Yet the frenzy of the last few years has transformed this rite of passage into something like a desperate Kabuki play.

Here’s how to ask for a blurb in 2026 and make it a little less cringe for everyone involved.

Wait until the writer is little a less famous

By this I mean fame is seasonal, especially for writers. For two months every couple of years my photo and book covers get around and pop up on your social media and without a doubt this is when I get the most blurb requests. Think about it. This is right at the moment I’m most exhausted and frantic and wondering if my book child will live or not. Not only that, your blurb request is sitting beside “I saw you on TV” emails from second cousins.

The sweet spot for asking is six months after an author’s book publication date. Trust me, we’re in a whole different mindset by then. Desperate for contact and validation, we just want to know that someone remembers our name.

Have your editor or agent ask

I don’t know why, but having the request come through an intermediary makes my response so much easier to write and I tend to be clearer about whether I’ll be able to look at a book or not. The personal touch is always nice—see below—but there’s something about professional distance that can’t be discounted. Also, it’s your agent and editor’s job to support you.

Be nice

Write a fan letter. And do not use AI; we really can tell. I don’t expect someone to have read every book, but if you can say something nice, it’s never not pleasant. And it would make me want to reciprocate.

Until it’s time to not be nice

Look in the mirror. We fell into this weird career because we were good at being alone, easily distractible, and dreamy. It’s a little frenetic just doing creative brain work and most of us don’t get our daily tasks done without many sticky notes and To Do lists scattered everywhere. These reminders and deadlines are really, really necessary.

Hi, I know you’re really busy, but it would mean so much to me if you still have time to add a few words of support for my book. My editor has said she’d like me to have blurbs by TK DATE.

Now I have something I can write on my calendar and you will likely get a blurb. Do they actually help? I’ve appreciated every blurb I’ve received and kept them on my website for years. I know a couple of them have opened doors, but at the end of the day it’s the writing that matters, not the adjectives.

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TV series and Marvel movies have lied to you. No one cares about a minor character. Your main character is your star and that star expects the best lines and most screen time, or in this case, page time.

A successful novel needs a POV in all meanings of the term. Your world needs an entrance point through a character, as well as the novelist having a voice of their own to make their writing stand out.

Putting aside linked short story collections, the sure sign of a weak novel is too many characters, diffuse action, and a wandering eye. This applies whether it’s a literary novel or a genre book and please know I speak from the experience of having written a 500-page historical novel with eight goddamn individual POVs. At the time I thought I wrote a “brilliant ensemble piece” but the truth is I wrote a novel without committing to who the book was really about.

But let’s look at someone who continues to get away with it… Agatha Christie. Don’t even think of the movies, because every adaptation cuts or amalgamates two or three characters from the novels. You can’t call any of her supporting characters deeply written, but they are acutely described and do the job of fulfilling a type. The real stars are always her detectives, whether that’s Miss Marple or Monsieur Poirot.

So how do you find who your star is and how do you treat them?

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If you’ve read this newsletter for a while you might know that we have a son named Henry, and Henry is autistic. Nothing has changed our creative lives like Henry has, but we generally don’t foreground that in our conversations or professional talks. We made the decision long ago to always try to put Henry’s voice first and make sure his struggles and hard work, going from nonverbal to speaking, mattered more than anything we experienced as parents. But as Henry has grown older, his agency has also grown. One of those ways has been through filmmaking, where he’s learned the tools of communication, storytelling, cooperation, and flexibility. (And the occasional star fit—also an important skill.)

Three years ago Brian came back from a two-week location shoot and Henry, then eleven, asked “Can I make a movie too?” We gave him a budget of $100 and a choice of neighborhood locations in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He sat beside us and, with a few prompts, wrote script directions and suggested dialogue. Henry’s biggest inspiration was The Bad Guys book series, resulting in his own self-contained mythos, which is now at thirteen installments of freeform genre mashups. Like his inspiration, the Australian writer Aaron Blabey, Henry is aiming for twenty volumes. Perhaps not coincidentally, Henry and the Last Dinosaur 13: The Land Down Under is set in Australia. Though we filmed it in an old quarry in the Hudson Valley.

Early on, Henry began to build his life around film. (Wonder where he picked that up from?) Time had been a hard concept to grasp due to his autism and he used to hate it when we looked back at old photos. If we talked about the past, he would proclaim, “Back to the future now.” But writing down film release dates on the calendar for movies he wanted to see became his own understanding of how time works. Making films, and putting up with everything from our scheduling to waiting for batteries to charge, has taught him what time is: patience and effort.

While making his first films, dialogue was still difficult for Henry to perform and we had to help with voice over. Three years and many episodes later the budgets are still—mostly—$100, and filming days last about one hour of acting for him. But Henry is performing all his lines now and there is one more important milestone to this episode. This is the first script that Henry wrote completely—so we held back on adding notes like, “Are you sure you need another dinosaur battle?”

With the exception of a few improvised Australian beer jokes here, this is all Henry. We asked him for a message to the viewer, and he said: “Thank you! It’s awesome you’re watching my newest and latest release. I hope to see you again next time.”

He just came back to add, “Please subscribe to my channel” because he is our child.

Many thanks to Hannah Meyer, Olivia Jampol, Roberta Colindrez, Jennifer Makholm, and JD Davis for their help over the series.

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When A24 announced last month they were rebooting The Texas Chainsaw Massacre into several properties to be developed by Glen Powell, it came out in conversation that Emily Schultz had never seen Tobe Hooper’s 1974 film.

I think “film” is reductive here in describing Chainsaw. It’s more like Hooper weaponized experimental cinema and soundscapes to trap us in the worst day of anyone’s life, all to chronicle the downfall of the American dream. It’s an experiment in creating antimatter that has never been replicated. When Emily suggested Chainsaw as a Cinema Dirtbag commentary, I demurred. I thought maybe Emily was a better person for having never seen it. Then I watched Chain Reactions, a fascinating documentary that interviews superfans Patton Oswalt, Karyn Kusama, Takashi Miike, Stephen King, and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas— the film writer who has most altered my way of thinking about genre over the years.

Heller-Nicholas recalled t…

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This Monday writing prompt is for paid subscribers. Paid subscribers can also book a one-on-one chat or Zoom with Emily, schedule permitting. Book it here.

Putting books aside for a moment, I also write scripts with my partner. Some are adaptations, some are originals. People ask me how does that literally work? As if they envision us side-by-side at the laptop like the Gershwin brothers with all hands on the keys.

The truth is most of the work is first done on a beat board—index cards taped to a board or wall to hash out the major beats. (Skip this step of screenwriting at your own peril.) We’ll drink Red Bulls, discuss, act out, argue, and move cards until we’re both happy enough to start writing. And the writing stage? It’s passed between us by the act. He takes the Final Draft file, then I take the Final Draft file and so on. That means there are days at a time we don’t know what the other is up to and that’s when things happen, as it did with an original script this week.

Emily: How is the draft going?

Brian: We’ll need a new final act.

Emily: Why?

Brian: The antagonist and protagonist became friends.

Emily: How?! They wanted to kill each other.

Brian: They started talking and they ended up getting along.

While writing a novel, it’s not that much different. The distinction is just the person you might be arguing about the next plot turn with is yourself.

I generally have two parts of myself when I’m at the computer: the part that wants to do everything as I envisioned it and take the straightest road to my destination, and the part that wants to rebel. She’s the one letting scenes run too long, dialogue get crazy, and the characters do things I didn’t mean for them to do! Both sides are important. The editorial taskmaster can’t win every time, or the book will be a drag—for the writer and the reader. There’s something to be said for letting the characters or the plot persuade you to take a twisty and even treacherous path once in a while. A novel without spontaneity can feel very, very dull. Like being on a guided tour for 300 pages.

You have a certain obligation, I think, to protect your work even from yourself—to guard its originality, and not allow yourself to dampen its spirit by chopping out all of the impulsive or curious moments.

This week…

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I think I fell into being a novelist because serial relationships have always kind of suited me. And the relationship with a novel you’re writing—six months to two years—has around the same lifespan.

We covered when to know your book is done, as in pencils down. But pros here know that’s only the start of a book’s life. There’ll be agent submissions, and agent edits, then publisher’s edits. And then hopefully publicity. That’s when it goes right, and it is still a lot of work. It’s easy to stay stuck in a novel, especially during the submission and edits stage—unready to move on. You can feel like you’re in a time loop of small changes and final touches.

But you have to keep writing, so when do you let your head turn and start working on that new thing? (And I know you nonfiction writers are staring at your slutty writing schedules packed with book proposals, articles, and pitches, and asking what’s the big deal? For fiction writers, it is different.)

One of the reasons novelists have to start right away on a new project is to avoid large gaps in our careers. Because of publishing’s still-seasonal schedule and the length of time it takes to set up a book deal and then get it out in the world, you really must keep writing. If you get caught up in promoting and haven’t started anything new, it’ll take you awhile to come back down to earth again, and get back to your regular life before you roll up your sleeves.

For me, with my new novel, this happened once I got agent notes back — and two final notes from my partner — that wound up being MSG for the whole book. A couple of hours of final touches and it felt like the book was ready. And the very next day I wrote the first fresh page for something completely different. Now, a single page isn’t a relationship of course. But you never know what it could become.

As an exercise…

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A lot of times we start writing with a big concept in mind rather than the details: the conflicts, nuances of a character or their story. That’s understandable. Concepts are exciting. But a concept can quickly put down its foot and say, “I’m the most important thing here.” And yet, a job or career is instant world-building and also puts your character in interaction with others.

Not only will your character’s chosen field free up your narrative space for other things, it’s something you can always come back to when you’re lost. What are your character’s actual life skills? Who do they tend to meet or cross paths with, and how can you use those to accelerate the plot?

This is far from nonnegotiable—sometimes you’re writing a character ungrounded in life—maybe their path is still uncertain. And yet a job can be easy shorthand for your character’s desires: thwarted, achieved, or otherwise.

That said there are possible downsides. Since writers do stick to what they know more often than not, the campus novel is well-covered territory. Likewise, giving your characters the job of “novelist” isn’t the flex you think it is after fifty years of postmodernism. To do either means you should try for a big swing. I already took “Campus novel but add a rabies-like virus.”

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During the industry strike that inspired this Substack, we discovered Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick of Me, at a video store no less. We instantly bonded with the twisted Norwegian sensibility and, from our couch, even declared Borgli the new Buñuel. Of course, there are personal reasons for that, as you’ll see from our 2023 commentary that we’re re-posting here. In the film Signe works in a café in Oslo. Thomas, her oblivious boyfriend, is a conceptual artist getting famous for his installations of stolen furniture. Suffering as his nameless plus one at dinner parties and gallery openings, Signe hatches a Munchausian plan to attain her own media-friendly notoriety, one that includes taking a medication that will eventually alter her life.

It will be interesting to see how Borgli settles into studio filmmaking with The Drama, and its megawatt stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, when it releases this April 3rd.

Brian J Davis: Emily Schultz, what’s it like to have a boyfriend who is a famous conceptual artist?

Emily Schultz: I don’t know. It’s been so long since then.

BJD: I know! And I decided I want to talk about being shitty-famous and my shitty-famous breakdown ten years ago. I have never done this because the only thing worse than being shitty-famous, is talking about being shitty-famous.

ES: You should define shitty-famous versus—

BJD: It’s a couple of things. One, I’ve made some pretty good art in my time. But I got famous for my dumbest art. That doesn’t feel so good. Also, at the peak of everything, I was doing nothing but press for months, and it really wasn’t the same as having a good career. I was merely painfully available.

ES: Honestly, if anything, you made way more of a living as an artist when you were an unknown.

BJD: And that was feeding into my breakdown moment. I was being profiled by People Magazine, just like Chris Burden would be. At the same time your father was dying. So, I realized none of this matters. I just wanted to get through it, and maybe it would end. And then a couple of weeks after that I had a 12-hour day of interviews. Nine a.m. with the UK. Ended the day at 9 p.m. talking to someone in Australia. And then I lay down on the bed and screamed into the pillow because I never wanted to hear myself talking ever again. Then the next day I stopped. I kept my commitments and whatever exhibition schedule was set, but I decided I didn’t want this. I’m going back to writing. Being a DP. Anything. It took me a while to figure out I wasn’t upset with myself, or my work. It was the bullshit coming out of my mouth in order to partake in this thing.

ES: That’s the intensity of viral fame.

BJD: Fame is all viral now. Viral fame may be a redundant term.

ES: But there are famous people who are still permanently famous. We’re not them.

BJD: That’s celebrity. I constitutionally couldn’t be. I remember after my epiphany there’d be emails from Buzzfeed and The Guardian, or The Daily Mirror, and I would delete them, unread.

ES: What the fuck?

BJD: I would! And it was total freedom. And now that I realize that those emails aren’t coming back… I kind of regret that part a bit.

ES: It was also the worst year in my life and I know that only made things more stressful.

BJD: This is what this film really set off inside me. That I wanted to think about that time and how it changed us, almost physically.  And how culpable I was in it. I was entirely culpable! Being shitty-famous is an unforced error, like Signe in this film. But there is a difference between me and them.

ES: What’s the difference?

BJD: The difference is one day I lay down on the bed and screamed into the void I had manufactured.

ES: You’re right. There is an immense parallel between this movie and what was happening in our lives ten years ago. He’s getting famous. She is falling apart. Literally, pieces falling off of her.

BJD: I feel horrible about the gender dynamics that, despite your entire remarkable career, my quick burn internet fame was somehow important enough that your publisher at the time included me in your bio. 

ES: [Grumpily] Multiple publishers have included you in my bio.

BJD: I’d dump me at that point!

ES: It only made me work harder in order to defeat you.

BJD: There will be people who read this and say “Nice problems to have,” and that’s part of the problem too. That just reinforces that fame is the greatest value to achieve in life. Like, “How dare you consider it an illness or addiction?” You know what? You do a 2 a.m. Skype with German morning television. See how fulfilled it makes you.

ES: I don’t want us to portray this film as entirely about fame. It is about self and representation but also—

BJD: We haven’t even pressed play yet we’ve been thinking about it so much.

ES: Play it!

BJD: And welcome to Norway’s idea of a romantic comedy!

ES: This opening scene is playing so differently for me now that I know what’s going to happen.

BJD: They’re performing a dinner out as part of his art. It sets the tone for the entire film. And, interesting, she asks for credit as part of his art early on.

ES: This opening montage where he’s demeaning her in all these little ways.

BJD: And big ways.

ES: The resentment between them. It’s so well acted.

BJD: I wonder if that’s because of the no fuss no muss story. This is more or less a short story amount of plot and leaving that much space for the actors and not burying us with too much backstory keeps them in the moment all the time.

ES: Oh my god. The dog attack scene.

BJD: And she tells stories after about being the hero. This is why we’re so attached to her. As writers, we’re constantly polishing whatever story we need to tell during a day.

ES: Not just writers. Everyone is rewriting their experience now to suit their needs in whatever moment. The first time I saw this I thought she was so traumatized by the attack she couldn’t remember correctly.

BJD: She’s so alone that she needs to believe she was the hero. And that’s why we give her these 97 minutes. She’s covered in someone’s blood, and doesn’t clean up just so she can go home and maybe get her boyfriend’s attention. And even then—

ES: He takes so long! Agonizing minutes before he realizes she’s covered in blood. Really, now that I watch this a second time, I see that Signe is acting these moments.

BJD: I still feel sympathy for her, but nothing she is doing is accidental. She is contrived, but we’re all in a grandly contrived culture now.  Oh my God. Their food is so clean. I bet it was foraged.

ES: She’s saying the quiet parts out loud now at dinner parties.

BJD: Attention is giving her power! “At least it’s a small gallery, so the reception won’t look empty.”

ES: He did change the show title though, based on her criticism.

BJD: Everyone gets grace notes in this film. These are not cardboard characters acting out a thesis.

ES: The fake allergy scene. I love this scene. Actually, I’m in love with this entire movie.

BJD: You know, it was just ten or twelve years ago that only TV shows needed good ratings. People didn’t need ratings.

ES: Oh my god,  you’re right.

BJD: I looked at the reviews. Critics either loved the movie or they loathed it. And I think those ones did misinterpret it. In no way is it saying there aren’t people with lethal allergies, for example. It’s just charting Signe’s lowest common denominator approach for recognition.

ES: And he is still not acknowledging that she helped him with his art!

BJD: “I try not to let it control my life.” She’s starting to speak in prepared statements. There is a medical term for this happening in public. [Checks Google] Depersonalization! Seeing or hearing yourself in the third person. Have you ever felt that onstage or TV?

ES: I never felt that until I had to promote a novel during the pandemic. During Zooms I would feel lost in the moment, not sure if I was saying something I had said in a podcast that morning, or five minutes before.

BJD: I love everything about this movie. I would risk friendships to recommend this film.

ES: It puts us so completely in Signe’s world that we can’t help but empathize with her. We’re right there along with—

BJD: Her terrible decision making! Like deciding to take banned Russian antidepressants that cause a disfiguring skin disease, for attention.

ES: In the news article on the disease there was a flash frame of her with the condition. Everything in this movie so thought out.

BJD: It’s as streamlined as Ikea furniture.

ES: Everyone is this film is so disconnected or lonely. Even the dark web drug dealer wants Signe to hang out with him and his concerned mom.

BJD: And she does. Again, this film hands out the grace notes and it’s the secret to these kinds of characters.

ES: Lidexol. So White Noise.

BJD: One of the great reasons to buy the Blu-ray is the director interview and learning things like: Lidexol is based on the Norwegian word for “suffering.”

ES: That’s what really clicked in this film for me. What starts off as a game, or a crazy scheme, becomes an addiction.

BJD: Shout-out to Kristine Kujath Thorp. She’s performing a version of Signe “discovering” the onset of her skin disease, so it’s a performance within a performance and that is so fucking hard to do and she does it.

ES: One thing I want to say about that performance aspect of Signe is you can set out to do something so hurtful to yourself and still wind up genuinely helpless.

BJD: Let’s not forget to say: this movie is also completely hilarious.

[Thomas poses like a doofus during a photoshoot with stolen furniture he’s going to stack in a gallery.]

BJD: And that is shitty-famous, folks.

ES: It’s about vanity too. Look at him. He’s doing this while she’s destroying her beauty.

BJD: I don’t know if she’s destroying her beauty. During this first stage of her disease, her scarring is ornate and even floral.

ES: Well, she’s making herself more unique, I suppose?

BJD: Okay, here is my favorite thing this film does. As she’s making herself sick, she has all these fantasies of becoming famous for it: TV appearances, an alternative modeling career, a sold-out funeral. And when I first heard the plot of this film my expectations of what it would be like were more in tune to her fantasy scenes, and it’s not. Her fantasies fail. The film undercuts those. Her modeling career isn’t like the fantasy, it’s in fact a disaster. Her fantasy version of “success from illness” is what a lazier satirist would have stayed with.

ES: This is the best scene. This is every moment I’ve ever had with a doctor compressed into one.

BJD: A beautiful cameo from Anders Danielsen Lie, the costar of The Worst Person in the World. And now her sexy hospital selfie! My brain and heart have melted into a pool of confused awe.

ES: But her boyfriend hasn’t even told her friends she’s in the hospital.

BJD: And he brings her his cover story to make her feel better!

ES: “I mentioned you too. Not by name. But indirectly.”

BJD: One of my favorite scenes—he starts performing as the supportive boyfriend in front of a swooning woman on the bus.

ES: The sex scene. It’s such a tragedy. She fantasizes about him asking “How are you doing?” and it’s enough to make her orgasm. “Tell me about my funeral. Are people turned away?”

BJD: The critics who called this a cruel film aren’t that wrong. But it’s cruel with purpose, in the way Buñuel was.

ES: I feel like I’ve known so many of these characters. Intimately.

BJD: It has the simplicity of a myth to it. She gets what she wants. She’s famous. Then she destroys it because she can’t stop making herself sicker.

ES: That’s really my take. It’s about addiction, not to drugs, but to behavior.

BJD: My favorite boyfriend moment. He asks her not use that corner of their apartment for her interview and photoshoot because that’s where he did his interview and photoshoot!

ES: The face-melting nightmare. Got me again.

BJD: The key to Signe is that she doesn’t have inauthentic emotions. Even if she’s causing her own illness, she’s feeling things authentically. Thomas tells her—casually, offhandedly—that he thinks she’s brave for publicly talking about her skin disease and she breaks down. It’s the greatest moment of her life.

ES: This is my favorite image in the film. Walking across the square in slow motion, famous, tossing her hair. She’s disfigured herself for this moment, but she’s ecstatic. And now, like a novelist at Barnes & Noble, she’s arranging her magazine cover to be on top.

BJD: You know, maybe this is the remake of A Star is Born that we actually needed. A really dark, Norwegian comedy version of a A Star is Born.

ES: Now he’s walking into a furniture store despite the fact he is famous in Norway for stealing furniture.

BJD: He can’t stop. Neither of them can stop.

ES: I’m not questioning it. I’m marveling at it!

BJD: Now her interview scene at the diverse modeling agency. It is as good, if not better than any Buñuel/Carriere scene for impeccable farce. Every beat is perfect and I can’t even breathe while watching it. Here’s an example of cruelty with purpose. It’s the modeling agent who is so cruel but she thinks she’s the best person in the world.  She’s going to injure her arm patting herself on the back.

ES: Signe is asking her friends to toast to her bravery and modeling contract. This isn’t a fantasy?

BJD: It isn’t. She’s really like this now. “Thanks. We know what H&M is.” Scandinavian shade is the coldest.

ES: When I saw this before, I thought she and Thomas were on the same side—but they’re not. He’s only angry at the friends for what they say about him.

BJD: During the photoshoot she almost wins. I love that they let her get so close to a win, with everyone sharing these “I can’t believe she’s actually good” expressions, before it all falls apart again.

ES: Is bleeding from the scalp normcore?

BJD: And that’s how you feel after a 12-hour interview day! I think this fashion shoot crew are cowards. Benetton would be photographing the hell out of her collapsed on the ground in a puddle of blood. That would be a Benetton centerfold in 1993.

ES: I never did it, but I remember girls literally collected Benetton ads for their lockers.

BJD: They’re such a forgotten part of radicalization in the 1990s. All things aside, “Regardless” is an amazing name for an overpriced bullshit fashion line.

ES: I said before her fantasies are about connecting. I take that back. Not in this fantasy when she confesses everything and gets a book deal.

BJD: She’s hoping to do the American-style hustle of playing both sides of sin and redemption. But it’s not going to work in Europe! These people invented Krampus.

ES: I’m surprised that the boyfriend sticks around through everything.

BJD: Again, this movie actually has so much heart. They have each other.

ES: I think it might not be the best relationship.

BJD: Show me a good relationship!

ES: I’m trying!

BJD: We all are.

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We’ve all been at a party in a great conversation circle, but then you say something you think is brilliant or cutting and the response is not what you’d hoped. The mood cools, people look around and mumble things like, “I really need to go say hello to my ex’s new girlfriend.”

Readers can also react this way to when you make a misstep. For either fiction or nonfiction creating tone is about being precise in your word choices and sentence structures, and finding a rhythm that suits the genre and material, but it’s more than that too. It’s about decision making and reading the mood of the room you’ve created. If you’ve been told you have “tone problems,” it’s usually a signal that you need to go back over your whole project and smooth it out—that you nailed the tone in one place but not in others.

In my forthcoming novel, the biggest change after…

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