I kind of stopped using this. And renewal is coming up, so to justify paying for that, I had to think about why I stopped using this. And it comes down to a lot of things: depression, the need to prioritize keeping family happy over writing, but, also, fear.
It’s not that I haven’t been reading or watching movies. I have! I’ve been reading a bunch of old pulps from the 20s-40s, and watching a lot of old movies, foreign movies, and old made for tv horror movies. And there for some reason I have an almost unshakable sense that I’m not allowed to write about this stuff, and that I might not be allowed to be watching it at all.
At lot of it is OCD. I’ve struggled with OCD since I was a child and I’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out when a rule is Real (as in: silently agreed upon by society as a thing we must punish people for) and when my brain is making hoops for me to jump through. I’m less good at insisting I don’t have to navigate the hoops. OCD is scary. You really feel like you might Die from breaking one of your invisible, impenetrable rules. You know logically you won’t but that doesn’t make things any less scary. It’s just easier to Avoid things that set off the Fear. But the problem there is this: eventually OCD eats everything you enjoy and you are paralyzed in fear just sitting on your couch because what if you mess a blanket up and everyone decides to murder you about it. So you might as well just watch the damn movies.
Another problem is Who I Am As A Person which is: nothing and nobody. I am semi-employed, mentally ill, developmentally disabled. Nobody who has power to help me believes me when I say I’m trans. I get to hear someone call me by my own name maybe once a month if I am lucky. I am not a Person in the eyes of most strangers. I get this. I see myself in the mirror, how I stand and walk. I see my hands held awkwardly. I hear how I speak, halting, stuttering, slower than the people around me. The only evidence I have a mind at all is my writing, something most people never see. So, as an Unperson, who the hell am I to have an opinion on Anything?
On the other hand, it is so boring to be the tragic disabled adult child who is incapable of independent thought. I play the role well but it makes me act like an asshole because I resent it, even knowing why I am put there and that somebody needs to be the lowest figure in a giving hierarchy. I need some sort of mental stimulus that has the lowest possible risk of upsetting that hierarchy, and it could very well be this blog. The people who need me to be mindless burden will likely never see it, and it will keep me from snapping at them.
Which brings me to my third stumbling block: the culture of fear in progressive spaces on the internet. As always I am speaking of progressive spaces because that is what I have experience with, I don’t know what the conservatives are doing. But in progressive/leftist/lefty/whatever the appropriate term is today spaces, there is an omnipresent feeling of surveillance. A lot of this overlaps with OCD and the general undiagnosed familial delusional disorder that I appear to have inherited. A lot of my fears are around surveillance. But it is not just me.
We are all very scared of each other. I am afraid to write about older films, and pulp stuff, because a lot of it contains plot elements that could be considered problematic. Sometimes it’s straight up racism. Sometimes it’s smaller, insidious sexisms. Sometimes it’s just that a movie has a lot more boobs in it than would ever fly today. But there is such a culture of surveillance, fear of contagion, and culture of harassment in left-leaning internet spaces that I have been terrified to engage publicly with anything. The last thing I want is people calling swat teams to my mother’s house because I said an episode of the Hammer Horror tv series from the early 80s was good. That’s an extreme example but I have seen worse things happen to people for less.
I don’t want to get in trouble for being a white guy who is enjoying Hong Kong action movies, or pulp horror, or the random melodramas that play constantly on Criterion 24/7. Being accused of being Problematic means you lose your entire support system, and I don’t have that much of one to begin with.
On the other hand: I think this stifles curiosity. It curtails the natural human urge to play and explore and replaces it with a learned fear response. And I resent that. How come I have to recoil when you raise your hand to show you how well trained I am? How about you stop hitting me?
Of course the answer is that human beings need hierarchy, we are social animals hard wired for it. It’s how we became….I don’t want to say dominant species because I actually believe that’s probably some kind of ant, but so successful as an animal: our ability to organize ourselves. So I can’t resent it too much, because you might as well get mad at a blue jay for being territorial. That is just what they do.
But I’m bored. I am so bored. All I do all day is house work and job applications. I started using the Criterion 24/7 as a desperate grasping attempt to keep myself from going full Yellow Wallpaper while doing laundry. I am bored. And I want to write. I must write to prove to myself I exist.
And more so: I think we have a right to be allowed to explore behind the same ten things everyone else is also watching. I think it can only be good for you to explore beyond what is being marketed to you. To find hidden gems and random movies, old stories, short films, strange bits of animation history, building blocks of the genre. To things that are out of print, watch things that only have a janky internet archive copy because of copyright weirdnesses.
I understand arguments that this is pretentious and therefore harmful but it doesn’t have to be. I don’t see why it can’t be a state of play. Of exploration. Of seeing what is Out There and what Exists and what you can Learn from it and Do with it. I understand the fear of older movies, and the fear of cultural appropriation I do but are you not bored with the same ten things everyone else is watching/reading/listening to? I know I am.
Which is to say: I plan to be a lot more active on here in the coming months. Ideally, I want to make one post a week. It might not always be a movie review, especially when Top Chef has a season going on, but A Post at least. I want to stop being afraid. I hope you are with me.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 