I gave up on myself for a while there. I would ruminate over the details of my failures, mostly because I was still in denial, clinging to an idealized version of myself. An idealized version that never existed beyond its silhouette in my restless dreams. Now, the things that feel like the bedrock of my identity originate from events in my not-too-distant past. Enough with fetishizing closure. I’ve had the distinct privilege of having notable experiences, making (many) mistakes, and being forgiven (and not). I forget sometimes to account for the uncommon way my mind works, so this is your warning.
The morning after the election, I prepared to cycle into the office. I embraced my sobbing wife, kissed her atop her head, and bolted off. A crisp, November morning in Chicago, where the crunch of auburn and rust leaves on our patio greeted my senses. The cool air would’ve been startling if the warmth of the beaming sun didn’t welcome me for the day. Donning all black, as one does when dramatic and upset, I tightened the straps of my Chrome gloves as I careened through the streets of Pilsen, Chinatown, and the Prairie District before reaching the lakefront path. There were more cyclists on the road, but the usual nodding pleasantries of recognition were absent - a sense of despair permeated through their glances. The sky began to be enveloped by clouds, where I could see Indiana’s skyline in the distance. Framed by Lake Michigan’s stillness and the encroaching nimbus clouds, all I could see was a red state. As the fall months give way to a chill, the number of people on the path diminishes. Not today. The concrete slabs were now a refuge to many of Chicago’s south side residents. Maybe we all needed a reminder that the sun would still rise.
It would be easy, I think, to fall in line. To embrace our baser, more reptilian instincts. To simply join a chorus of indifference to one’s own fate. I say this having been on that side for a portion of my life, where a life of lack meant that others needed to be punished too. As someone who has seen a lot of lies and half-truths take a hold of my identity, it’s often a painfully prescient reminder that I too have indulged in hate. I hated often and easily. A massive waster of human potential. But that’s a life I’ve actively refused over the last few years. There’s been mistakes in the interim, but I’ve tried. Malfunction isn’t always permanent. But the great cosmic fallacy of it all has been observing more than half of the country embrace the very vitriol that I’ve combatted within myself. It’s confusing, to say the least, and I’ve spent too much time thinking about it, to the point that I’ve felt my reflexes and spirit dampen. I may just be aging, but it feels accelerated and more pronounced than it should be. Perhaps that’s a diagnosis rooted in privilege. I know a stalemate of hypotheticals when I see one.
So, you’ll have to pardon me if I’ve opted to embrace transient zombiehood for the last month or so. With the aid of some THC, I’ve laid supine, stared at the ceiling, contemplating the next move. The joys of the present remain worth treasuring, and the positive memories of the last year have been idyllic - I got married, traveled through Hawaii and New England, cycled more than I ever have, read, wrote, watched, learned, etc, And ultimately, I made a promise to my wife and to myself - I signed away my right to self-destruct. Despite the tumult that defines the present and the unknown future, I have to believe that I will handle it. I’ve survived the darkest aspects of myself. There was no sorrowful procession or rapturous redemption. The pouty public colloquies haven’t resulted in some miracle fix. Nor did speaking bitterness. None of it was tragic because what happened to me didn't warrant some hero’s vindication or pity. It was just work. Day-in and day-out work. Reader, I can’t help but imagine that we're on the same page when it comes to the subject of my disappointment, my guilt, my humiliation, and my shame. You’re as tired of reading about it as I am writing about it.
Not sure if what I'm experiencing is resilience or simply my tendency to cling to life no matter the indignity but I have - finally - carved out a life worth living for. And during these times of despair, it’s hard to believe that it’s the first time I’ve ever treated myself like I was worth something.
Dating back to 2000, I’ve often been at odds with the jingoistic terms in which I was to accept this country. But at the time, I believed in the city that raised me. Chicago was home. In 2020, that home seemingly became scorched Earth. I believed that the grass was not always greener elsewhere but instead, it grew green where you watered it. I’m not sure of that anymore. I haven’t given up on myself, but I think I’ve given up on what I used to call a home. The following essays are about the ten films that I admired most this year. Ten films that I can appreciate anywhere, but when they’re over, I’m back here. And, I think, something will need to change about that soon.
10.
Challengers
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
Don't regret the choice I chose but do regret the mess I made.
I wrote about Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All as part of my 2022 year-in-review. A film involving cannibals, the allegory at play finds a couple of wayward youths attempting to carve out a living in the world. The lead character, Maren (Taylor Russell), finds some modicum of solace in Sully (Mark Rylance), an older man who shares her cannibalistic tendencies. The similarities between the two end there, as Sully’s nihilism and deep-rooted sense of secrecy strikes Maren as both dangerous and erratic. She confesses: “I don’t trust you. It doesn’t matter if I’m right or wrong about that, it matters that I feel it.” I watched the film in the company of a woman that I was sleeping with, one of the many Jackies that have weaved in and out of my life, behind the back of my partner, and it was a line that may as well have been directed at me.
I won’t pretend like I know anything about throuples the way that Challengers writer Justin Kuritzkes does. He and his partner, Celine Song (Past Lives) are clearly working through things. I look at the relationships that make up these two films and I see people involved in exceedingly tumultuous, pain-stricken partnerships that leave everyone clinging to some abstract future while cheating themselves of the present moment. Chalk it up to early and persistent exposure to Radiohead’s discography and a critical misread of most of Woody Allen’s 70s and 80s filmography and you have someone who saw (please note the tense change, reader) romance, relationships, and love as being a matter of unadulterated passions, with little patience for anything other than grand emotional crescendos.
What I admire so much about Challengers is how Guadagnino takes Kuritzkes’ script and presents the whirlwind relationship between Art, Patrick, and Tashi (Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor, and Zendaya) in loud overtures. If Past Lives depicts the inherent sadness of those in yearning through ephemeral, muted gestures, then Challengers is its plain-spoken rejoinder. I mean, it all takes place on the court, where a ball is lobbed back and forth - and where one’s capacity for anything other than game is tested to its absolute limits. We enter into these games of passion, but how could both participants come out losing?
In Patrick, I find a special kinship. While his best friend Art was able to see success - sponsorships and endorsements - by having Tashi as his mentor and partner, Patrick is left to toil away in the minor leagues, having to win challenger trials in order to compete on a professional level. Once considered a prodigy, he’s forced to confront his painful past, and how it was all squandered by his self-involvement. You see it in the film, where he accosts Tashi, now married and with a child, at a luxury hotel - he still clings onto the past and fails to see his own hubris. The contest between Art and Patrick is less to do with their desire for Tashi, and more about reconciling the ebbs and flows of love, an emotional passing shot of sorts, where the fluidity of one’s passions can move right past you. Harness the silence between Nora, Hae Sung, and Arthur (lol) at a bar in Past Lives and see their mental gymnastics at play on the court in Challengers between Art and Patrick as Tashi observes from the stands.
Parts of me are in all of these characters, and I played the game until it got me in trouble. I was once berated for suggesting that I don’t believe in finality. I still don’t. I think memories linger in a permanent fashion, and it’s what we do with them that ends up informing who we are and how we handle loss and grief. I often go back to James Murphy’s All My Friends, reciting the part “I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision for another five years of life.” If I did take that trade, I’d probably live to 500. I’d like to think that Art, Patrick, Tashi, Nora, Hae Sung, and Arthur wouldn’t take that trade either. If they did, I don’t think you’d get the kind of resolutions that Kuritzkes and Song suggest; one where you have to actually make a choice. Otherwise, you risk feeding off emotional highs that leave you feeling like a vampire, aspiring to be everything to everyone all at once, infinitum. We were all characters in these movies, playing different roles at different times, but I’m glad we all decided to stop lobbying the ball back and forth. I’m more content with playing pickleball with my wife, removed from any guiding hands or string-pullers. The memories linger, but the court is accounted for.
09.
The Room Next Door
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar
From death emerges life. Of what masculine emerges the feminine. From the earthly emerges the ethereal.
Film scholar Marsha Kinder coined the term “ Brain-Dead Trilogy” early in Pedro Almodóvar’s career when discussing some of the recurring motifs throughout his now extensive filmography. In her seminal work, “Reinventing the Motherland”, Kinder observes the roles of comatose bodies in Almodóvar’s oeuvre, particularly in films like The Secret of My Flower, All About My Mother, and Talk To Her, where women confronted with near-death see aspects of themselves - their organs donated to other bodies - as a statement on the eloquence of the feminine form, and a rebuttal against “solitude, disease, death, and madness.” The essay, published during the heights of Bush Jr. era politics, is a persuasive piece that almost seems quaint when observing what Almodóvar’s been doing over the last ten years.
Almodóvar’s recent films have expressed a more grounded, more matter-of-fact response to death. There’s a tactile and gritty experience in these films, where pain is felt not just through the mind’s sense of grief or longing, but also through your nerve endings; pulsating, true, and agonizing in a non-lip service sort of way. It may be a product of aging, but you see it vividly captured in 2019’s Pain and Glory and even more so in his new film, The Room Next Door. Whereas Pain and Glory suggested a deeply personal and autobiographical quality to these concerns of death and the passage of time, The Room Next Door, adapted from a short story by Sigrid Nunez and in the English language (as opposed to the Spainard’s native tongue), very deliberately places the audience as spectator, asking us to seriously and emphatically consider the scope of choices before its characters.
Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a novelist on a book tour, hears that her old friend Martha (Tilda Swinton) has been recently hospitalized. Estranged for decades, their friendship is immediately rekindled, where the two open up to each other about their anxieties and accomplishments. And it’s when that level of comfort has been re-established that Martha pitches Ingrid her idea: Martha, diagnosed with Stage III cervical cancer, intends on killing herself, and wants Ingrid to be there to report on her body. Initially aghast, Ingrid relents and the two retreat to the outskirts of NYC, where they live out Martha’s last days before she takes a pill that will put her to rest.
Tired of being shadows in the setting sun, some people choose night. To some, killing yourself is not an expression of freedom but the renunciation of it. For a while, that’s the belief system that I adopted to keep from trying to kill myself again; for the past four years since my last suicide attempt, it’s been a sentiment strong enough on which to hang my heart and purpose. But what Almodóvar et. al. suggests here is murkier, complicating the axiom by providing an alternate paradigm to that perspective; that in agony, choosing death is the acceptance of freedom. It’s a rebuttal against “brain-dead” agency.
I have been given the unique opportunity of examining my life from the angle of having nearly lost it. There are moments, where I go about my usual day-in-day-out activities and am reminded of the barrelling train that was within my fingertips reach or when the light hits the inside of my arms, I’m able to see the scars that ornate my wrists. And then I’m reminded of the patients and particularly their families that are a part of my life, and the stories of losing someone, where their personalities are wiped away and their capacity to communicate has been reduced to a series of blank stares. In these moments, I see echoes of the questions Almodóvar raises: when does the silence of pain become its own statement? When does choosing the end become the ultimate reclamation of agency?
It’s incredibly unimaginative to think that losing the ability to communicate means having nothing left to say. I guess that’s the way Almodóvar suggests knowing when life has reached its inevitable conclusion; sometimes there’s nothing left to say, and with that silence we take our pain away. Brain dead no longer.
08.
Bird
Directed by Andrea Arnold
That’s the problem with miracles; they last such a short time.
My childhood was messy. There were things to be grateful for, but as I’ve aged, I seem to be embroiled in the not-so-savory aspects of it. I’m trying to get to the bottom of me and the answers, you’d think, would come from the root. It’s an ancient riddle; permanently unsolvable but it doesn’t stop me from wasting time in exploring it.
Independence Park was a ten-minute walk from our apartment building. A few classmates from John B. Murphy Elementary lived on Hamlin, the small residential street along the way, and I’d always glance over to see if they were home. Billy, Jarret, Kyle, and Lena . They had what I considered to be idyllic homes - backyards, pets, the luxury of a pale complexion - and lived a comfortable, suburban life on the near northwest side of the city. Or so I perceived. I’d go to the park with my mother, where she’d read her Danielle Steele novels on a bench while I played with other neighborhood kids. When no one was around, I’d simply go to the swings with my Walkman, listening to The Beatles or Elvis Presley on cassette; I’d pierce the skies while listening to Hey Jude or Hound Dog.
As things go: there was a girl. She was older, by about two or three years, and rode her training wheel-less bike around the park from time to time. Blonde, slim, and perpetually beaming, I’d look out for her daily during my summer vacation in the mid-to-late nineties. And one day, there she was, talking to my mother. I was aflutter. This was my chance. Whatever conversation had ended up resulting in me riding on the pegs of her rear wheel, as we cycled around the park. Her hair would get in my face as we barrelled through the arteries of the park, before she’d wrap it in a ponytail. We’d go about doing this for most of the summer. I never had that kind of attention from someone before. She made me feel seen; she would position my hands on her shoulders as we cycled around, letting go of one hand on the handlebar to check in from time to time with a squeeze. I felt a kind of belonging that I didn’t know how to express back then. I still don’t know now. Summer ended and that was the last I saw of her.
I assume that Bailey (Nykiya Adams) felt seen by Bird (Franz Rogowski) in a similar way. She’s lived a difficult life, where at the age of 12 she’s been exposed to violence and tumult. She lives in a dilapidated, condemned apartment with her father Bug (Barry Keoghan) while her mother lives elsewhere with Bailey’s younger sisters and brother. You gather that they’re living on the brink, the lumpen proletariat, with their primary, day-in, day-out concern being to survive. Bird’s clearly part of that too, though Bailey initially has her guard up, with her one tool - her phone - as a means of exercising any agency. She films Bird and his response is of jovial warmth. He is a mythological character in all respects: a man compelled to find his own origins, providing acceptance and vulnerability to all those that need it. In many ways, he’s the kind of man that I aspire to be.
Andrea Arnold, never one for subtlety, opens with Bailey observing birds within a caged overpass. It’s the lens on her phone that’s able to zoom past the fence and observe these birds in flight. And we see this imagery, repeated, frequently. We see her traverse through the streets of Northern Kent, either on foot or via scooter, with her observing birds in flight, serving as a kind of guardian from a distance. In these moments, we see Bailey remember. Scenes from her past pervade her mind, like intrusive thoughts that threaten any modicum of contentment. The way that Arnold realizes these sequences suggests a constant battle between stillness and movement; to question a life of contentment as being fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a box frame, or to embrace a life of impulse and sincerity. Is it possible to embrace both?
If the girl in the park meant anything to me, as I recount her nameless memory in my head for the umpteenth time nearly thirty years removed from the moment, it’s that she realigned my wants. I could have spoken bitterly about the lifestyle that I wanted to live, about having a childhood rooted in lack. But as Bird offers Bailey solace during a week of profound change - from getting her period to being a bridesmaid to her father’s surprise wedding to confronting her mother’s abusive boyfriend - I too saw my loneliness, my disenchantment with my upbringing, my disappointments, etc., fade into the ether during those hopeful moments of hugging the sharp turns and rocky paths of the park in the summertime on her bicycle.
I don’t think it’s out of the ordinary that one adopts certain traits, behaviors, or tendencies from the people they love and admire the most. I’ve done this with many of my ex partners and I think that I’m a better man for it. Maybe that was the genesis of my love for cycling, as I put in another forty miles on an overcast November morning. With Bird and Bailey, one can feel that she’s finally able to take flight.
07.
Juror #2
Directed by Clint Eastwood
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"
I think about the life I have now, and how easily it could have gone another way. An abyss opens up in my mind, where a litany of hypotheticals play out, replaying the ripple effect of choices that led from one event to the next. What could I have done differently? If I’m happy now, is it okay that it came at the expense of others? Was there a way for everyone to get what they wanted? I’m prone to make meaning out of meaningless things; an opera of a jingle, a poem of a slogan.
We gather some interesting details about Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) from the onset of Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2. Three-years sober and a soon-to-be family man with his pregnant wife Ally (Zoey Deutch), Justin, seemingly, lives an idyllic life. What the film becomes is a deconstruction of the character, a man who has seen himself survive the worst aspects of himself, only to be confronted by old demons. It’s the story of a mistake, and how justice takes on many forms.
One night during an intense downpour, on the anniversary of his wife’s miscarriage, Justin is tempted to drink. He swirls the brown liquor in its glass at a dingy, hole-in-the-wall bar, ready to take his first drink in ages. It’s just him and the bourbon. He leaves, never having taken a sip.
He doesn’t know that at that same bar, James Michael Sythe and Kendall Carter (Gabriel Basso and Francesca Eastwood) argue. Known in the community as a messy couple prone to public outbursts, the two continued the trend, resulting in witnesses observing James break a beer glass before chasing Kendall out of the bar, walking out into a torrential downpour. Justin drives through the rain, opting to take the shortcut back home. Ally texts him and a moment later he hits something. The downpour is relentless. He’s at a deer crossing, observes the damage done to his car, and rationalizes. Who wouldn’t in that situation? In court during jury selection, Justin is made aware of the details of the case. It’s here that Justin realizes that he is responsible for the death of Kendall Carter, and that James Michael Sythe is innocent.
Justin ends up on the jury to decide James’ fate. He considers confessing and letting an innocent man go. But Justin knows that if he confesses, no jury would believe a former alcoholic wasn’t drunk behind the wheel. He’d undoubtedly get life in prison. He’d undoubtedly lose out on building a family. He’d lose everything. Some would say that the moral quandary here is easily resolved, that a man that has done something bad should be confronted, swiftly, with the consequences of their actions. I would argue that those that have that frame of mind are of a variety with limited life experience and an even more limited purview of the behavior of human beings. It’s not intended to be dismissive, but plainly speaking, it’s the difference between someone who’s lived and someone who has not.
Eastwood’s film examines the delusions and nuances that leave people clinging onto whatever shred of happiness that they’re afforded in this life. And it’s about the system that’s in place that rarely affords room for nuance. These concepts may not be complementary, but they inform every facet of our lives. For the last five years, I’ve had to confront what it means to be a good person and contend with the inescapable burden of feeling, constantly, that the bad things that I did and didn’t do are what define me. What I see in Juror #2 is a microcosm of my own experiences with perception, of confronting mistakes, and the feeling that second chances are never what they seem, typically rendered with strings that aren’t just attached and pulled but constantly yanked, paralyzing in their cold indifference to anything resembling humanity.
After Jackie posted her tall tale on Twitter, I refused to resign myself to the periphery of life’s frame. I was single, and newly heartbroken after my separation with Yvonne. I would see her on dating apps using photos that I took of her just days before we broke up. Seeing that hurt, and I was ready to rebound. And so I met Maryanne. A few dates in and she would tell me about her own history of abuse and anxieties with men. Was that the moment to tell her of my past? Was I a bad person for not wanting to talk about it? I felt so unprepared, with no idea of how to have those types of conversations. Or maybe it’s something that can’t be prepared for, but simply lived through.
Either way, a Google search a few weeks into our courtship prompted her request to see me right away. She asked to meet outside my apartment, where she told me that she talked with Jackie, and threatened to expose me to the neighborhood lest I delete all her information from my phone in front of her. I was stunned. I complied despite her belittling comments, and would subsequently see yet another person take to social media to disparage my character. I asked for some of my valuables before she left, but was rebuffed. She had a baseball cap that was gifted to me by Yvonne that I liked, a memento that actually meant something to me. It rained that evening while I laid in bed staring at the ceiling, contending with convulsive bouts of panic and anxiety. I left my apartment the following morning, finding the hat along with other valuables sitting in the potted plant that adorned the outside of my building, sopping wet. I tossed the items in a nearby trash can, and would often look over my shoulder after that morning. The sound of sirens in the neighborhood would provoke a small jolt of dread, not unlike what we observe in Juror #2, where Justin, after rendering a guilty verdict onto an innocent man, observes his newborn baby.
That’s what it’s like sometimes, where life feels precarious, where the ground can cave in and unleash a whole new rock bottom, despite all your best efforts to be good. I believe people can change. I have to believe that in myself. I know it’s not a sentiment shared by all. But I would like to live in reality. I would like to think of myself realistically. I would like to believe that I am as grand and central as I actually am; no more, no less. And with that comes an understanding that people are flawed.
After a lot of tumult, I now have a loving wife. I now have a place to call home and a life worth living for. I have survived and dispensed with a lot of shoddy humanity and will likely continue to do so until my heart stops beating. But these days, with a heart that’s fuller, I can say with great relief that I don’t look over my shoulder as much anymore. No longer am I wishing myself out of this world, but rather, happily, getting my footing back in it.
06.
La Chimera
Directed by Alice Rohrwacher
When the revenant came down
We couldn’t imagine what it was
Cudahy Library, sometime in 2006, maybe 2007. Only a semester or two into my undergrad work at Loyola University and I was experiencing a specific kind of agony; a crisis of indecision. I was lonely and lost, feeling like the path that I was on was forced and without consequence. I clinged to what was familiar and similarly, Karina clung onto me. We were both sad people who believed their paths were intertwined. The new environments did us no good, so we held onto each other as respite. I remember, distinctly, sitting in the library alone, overwhelmed with the workload that was in front of me. I felt so positively unprepared, and resented my education, scoffing at having been an A-student in a college prep high school - did they fail me or did I fail myself? I needed a distraction. My friend (to this day; remarkably, gratefully) Vicky, IM’d me and suggested I listen to Sufjan Stevens’ latest album, Illinois. Sufjan what? I never heard of him until then. That first time listening to Illinois in the glaringly lit stacks of Cudahy was life-altering. I never heard anything quite like it and nothing has resembled the profound thrill it was listening to his music for the first time. Sharing the album with Karina, I could only be left somewhat disappointed that her response was anything less than effusive. I reasoned: the things that are the most important don’t and frankly can’t always be shared.
The Italian commune of Riparbella, sometime in the 1980s. Arthur (Josh O’Connor), a former archeologist turned tomb raider, returns home from prison for artifact theft. We first observe him in a trance, following a red strand in his dreams. The fabric belonged to his former love, Beniamina. Her whereabouts are initially unknown, but we soon discover that she’s dead. Arthur is left to dawdle, mourning her death while attempting to figure out his own path; he embraces the actions of his past, tomb-raiding with his goofy friends, in acts of theft that mirror what initially got him incarcerated in the first place. Arthur’s gift, or chimera, is his capacity to locate these grave sites based purely on feeling. It’s what he’s good at, but it’s not what he wants to do. Continuing on this path, he finds Italia (Carol Duarte), a woman who offers Arthur her loyalty and love. But Arthur, stuck plundering the past, still follows the thread of the red strand, finding solace in the past over anything in the present.
Earlier this year, I saw the stage production of Sufjan Steven’s Illinoise at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Despite the fact that Aislinn worked on the project, I remained skeptical of how a musical based on one the most important albums of my lifetime could possibly be translated to the stage. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but I’ve never been more glad to be wrong - I was taken back to that night at Cudahy, listening to Illinois again for the first time. I’d go on to produce art-induced buckets of tears as a result, reminded of the ebbs and flows, the remarkable highs and the dismal lows of the last decade and a half, and how Sufjan’s music would provide me with the soundtrack to commiserate, empathize, and ultimately survive. At the time, Aislinn was my fiance, and I could not have felt more whole at the moment, knowing that this person that I was ready to spend the rest of my life with, could at the very least, understand why the moment would be so overwhelming for me.
Alice Rohrwacher empathizes with Arthur, and observes the man continuously try to escape the agony of his past. But he can’t. For a long time, I was buried in the pit that Arthur finds himself at the end of La Chimera. I chased after the red strand. It took on many forms. A need for understanding, a need for forgiveness, a need for redemption, etc. These sort of self-imposed journeys toward self-improvement ultimately led me feeling inferior and disconnected from the present, producing feelings of resentment in myself. And as long as I’m admitting to embarrassing things, I may as well confess that I hated myself. Tugging at this metaphorical red string, I could choose death like Arthur. I could remain in Cudahy, listening to Sufjan’s music for the first time, and replay the rapture of the moment, ad nauseam, feeling those vigorous endorphins bathe my nerve endings in their nostalgic hue. But that would mean that I would be permanently residing in the past. Or I could lay in bed, side-by-side with my wife, where in the morning through the window shade, where the light presses up against her shoulder blade, I can see her face, and appreciate the messiness of the journey that led me to the present moment.
05.
Anora
Directed by Sean Baker
I was hoping your happiest memory might include me.
I wanted to be a history teacher. In high school, I admired a man named Tim Sheldon. It was his first year teaching at Lane Tech and he was decidedly different from any of the teachers I had before - he was passionate. He believed in the practical utility of what he was teaching. He taught U.S. History and it often felt like he was teaching for the moment; it seems obvious but it was practically radical at the time to have an instructor who didn’t care about teaching for a test, but rather reflected on the culture we inhabited. I remember he asked everyone in the classroom to raise their hand if they were a feminist. There were those, mostly boys, that were reticent or participated half-heartedly, and rather than going about the syllabus for the day, we talked. Talked about what it meant to be a feminist and what we can do to make it actionable. As someone who never had much of a male role model, he was someone I looked up to. I wanted to go to Georgetown, just like him. Life has its own plans and while I initially pursued a history degree at Loyola University as an undergrad, I found myself disenchanted by the rote aspects of my new professors. There were a few that I gravitated toward, but I never had that spark or energy to pursue it further. I’m sure he wouldn’t remember me, but the impression Mr. Sheldon left on me was significant. And just reflecting on him now, and what he advocated for, feels like I’ve let both him, and the younger version of myself, down. He believed in something important; broadly speaking, he advocated for free-thinking and generosity of spirit, things that, overtime, I’ve come to realize are among my deficiencies.
I think of characters in Sean Baker’s films, and reflect on how so many of them would benefit from a teacher, a mentor, or a guide. I don’t mean to sound dismissive, but his characters operate largely on the fringes, occupying spaces that are fraught and easily shakable. Yet their allure is unmistakable. What child wouldn’t want to live near Disney World like in The Florida Project? What young woman wouldn’t find a smooth-talking con man like Mikey in Red Rocket utterly fascinating and worth their time? And even Ani (Mikey Madison), who has her guard up and is skeptical of all the men she encounters as a dancer in a nightclub, can’t help but be impressed by Ivan’s (Mark Eydelshteyn) incredible wealth and agency. He offers her the key things that are absent in her life: stability, financial freedom, and a life free of want.
Maybe it was the loneliness of my Jesuit university experience or maybe I was just unhappy with the decisions I made. Discontent with the path that was ahead of me, and how wildly different it was from my initial expectations. I pivoted. But with that pivot came aspirations for something greater, where my want became impractical and unwieldy. If I couldn’t be what I aspired to be, maybe I could be someone important to someone else. But even that act of perceived selflessness was rooted in a selfish ideal - I’d end up lying to myself in order to feel like I fit-in in other places. I betrayed my aspirations for something phony, for glimpses of joy that would never amount to anything beyond the moment they happened. Which is to say that I fucked around (a lot) and I found out (a lot).
Ani’s blissful honeymoon period with Ivan is brief but recognizable. Initially paid for her company, Ani ends up marrying Ivan while in Las Vegas. The two experience a kind of hyper-opulent escapade that would be considered tacky if it didn’t inspire a modicum of familiarity; it’s the kind of moment shared between lovers that I’ve felt and would bottle into an elixir if I could. The kind of moment where your bodies are tangled up, where you peer into each other’s eyes in the dark, and lose sight of all things beyond that moment. No amount of alcohol, psilocybin, or THC comes close to replicating the feeling. The sort of moment that seemingly produces fireworks from out of thin air, where you rationalize that those fireworks are for your moment, and nothing else.
Like many of Baker’s films, we observe bliss and even success through persistent movement. Sin-Dee and Alexandra in Tangerine find stillness at one location, Donut Time, and it’s there where the two have to confront significant truths about themselves. If anything, movement in Baker’s films are all rooted in fantasy, from the propulsive Disney World sequence of The Florida Project to Tangerine’s fever dream through Los Angeles. It’s through stillness where Baker finds truth, where Ani must be physically restrained to realize that she was just someone that Ivan used to make himself feel better for a moment. I’ve been like Ivan (not rich or the product of the ultra wealthy - just an asshole), and his desire to run, leaving behind Ani and his responsibilities, is exactly the sort of behavior that I would have embraced up until a short time ago.
Even as Ani attempts to negotiate her fate with Ivan’s belittling family, you already see her accept the futility of the exercise. She returns back to where she started, learning a lesson on love that will surely inform all of her future experiences with other partners. Moments ago she was being swept off her feet, fireworks going off overhead while she embraced her new husband in Vegas. Stability. Financial freedom. And a life free of want. And now she sits in an old car, her stuff in the trunk, about to enter the cold and return to her old life paying rent with a roommate. In so many words, I’ve been there and there are few rock bottoms that felt colder than that one.
It was a lesson worth learning but fuck, why’d I have to learn it that way? I was given a chooser’s manual and guidance by Tim Sheldon and a litany of other powerful teachers in my life. Why did I have to learn things the hard way? As Ani sobs, I have to imagine that in the still coldness of the moment, it’s a thought that courses through her head too.
04.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Directed by Mohammad Rasoulof
It's funny how money change a situation
We’re all deep into our second glasses of black label cabernet on Christmas Eve, where I sit with friends of my wife’s family. I’m the youngest man in the room. There are other qualities that I could highlight. Qualities that inform every facet of our individual lives, but the sort of distinctions that we don’t talk about. I’m the youngest man in the room, but I’m also: the brownest, the poorest, the most in debt, a renter, a non-retiree, the most (formally) educated, and a litany of other qualities. We talked about a prominent man in the community, let’s call him Rodya. Rodya lives in an opulent neighborhood in Michigan. He’s the sort of guy who never had to work a day in his life, inheriting a division of his father’s prosperous business. Disconnected from the business, Rodya relies on a hired manager to keep his division afloat. Rodya still collects his paycheck, well into retirement. The nameless worker Rodya’s father hires still runs the company, and has made a fraction of what Rodya makes despite keeping everything afloat.
Mohammad Rasoulof follows Iman (Missagh Zareh), a family man who has recently been appointed to an investigating judge for one of Tehran’s most prestigious high courts. It’s everything that Iman has worked toward, where he brings his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) and two daughters Rezvan and Sana (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki) out for dinner to celebrate the occasion. The scene reveals everything you need to know about these characters from the onset. There’s a sense that Iman has tried, defeatingly so, to impress those in power throughout his professional career, and that he’s finally getting the recognition that he deserves. It’s the women in his life that see what’s going on around them in the world, where a nationwide protest begins to escalate in violence and intensity. Iman remains self-involved, though slowly realizes that his new position wasn’t earned by merit, but by necessity: with the country in turmoil and mounting cases that need more investigation, he’s expected to swiftly render guilty verdicts. The workload is unsustainable and provides citizens with positively no hope for justice, yet in order for Iman to maintain his new position, he must comply.
The opulent Michigan gated community that Rodya finds himself enjoying retirement has issued a warning regarding a muskrat infestation. Early in the morning, during a dense brume floating in from the nearby lake, Rodya hears some rattling as he’s enjoying his coffee. He walks outdoors to the lakeshore and observes some bubbling on the edge of the coast. Thinking it to be muskrats, he goes to his garage to pick up a rifle. He loads his Ruger American, intended for deer hunting, and proceeds back to the water where the fog has intensified, and the swirling bubbles near the edge seem to be increasing. Rodya took aim, pulled the trigger, and shot four rounds. The bubbling intensified, yet continued. He returned back to his garage, reloaded, and proceeded back to the water. He took aim, pulled the trigger, and shot another four rounds. This time, however, Rodya’s neighbor from across the lake emerged from the water.
Protests intensify and so does Iman’s paranoia. With civil unrest swelling, Iman issues out hundreds of death sentences a day. Meanwhile, Rezvan and Sana observe the tumult happening on their streets from their phones. It’s here where we see the contrast between a people’s republic and a surveillance state, as the two rebel against their father’s participation in a government system intended to violently silence dissenters. Najmeh attempts to reconcile the division within her household, but slowly cedes her allegiance to her children, particularly as Iman becomes increasingly abhorrent and confrontational following the loss of his court-appointed weapon. It’s gone missing and he blames someone from his own family. When the family’s address is published online, Iman takes his family and leaves Tehran, seeking refuge in the ruins outside of the city.
Of the eight rounds, only one clipped Rodya’s neighbor. He would serve a 90-day sentence in a minimum-security facility before being let go. Litigation was swift, as one would expect from someone with plentiful resources. He made amends with the neighbor, apologizing profusely to the amateur snorkeler, offering sums of money and gifts to mitigate damages. The neighbor forgave Rodya. However, the neighbor’s daughter did not. The ineffectual baron who coasted on the wealth of his family, who never so much as had to try, is now witnessing the life’s work of his family come to a responding thud. They’re taking him for all he’s worth, and thensome. Rodya was last seen attending a Notre Dame game, weeks after his 90-day sentence, disheveled, thinner, and with more prominent bags under his eyes than from when he entered. I won’t go into the details of who the victim’s daughter is; I have to imagine that if you’re the offspring of someone in that community, their proximity to a silver spoon is a bit closer than my own. But I do think, to a certain degree, there’s a cosmic joke to be told about how eventually, for everyone, the floor gives out from under you.
It’s the profound, capital T Truth that Iman must accept. That the old way of doing things, of embracing a patriarchal system that benefits the few in favor of the vast, will eventually crumble. Whether it’s inherited privilege or a meritocratic ideal, these systems we have in place are in service of one large capitalist hegemony. A hegemony intended to benefit those with power, and those without it - women, POC, the vulnerable - are left to scrap together for crumbs, to turn against each other in spite of
We’re back to Christmas Eve., where we’re counting bottles of wine instead of glasses at this point, as the conversation shifted from local news to national news, and the subject of Luigi Mangione came up. I was initially aghast at the public response, but as I reflected, on the phone with a patient on a December morning, giving them the bad news that the MRI needed to evaluate their profoundly specific diagnosis, will not be covered and that they need to look locally for a specialist in-network, I came to realize that this conversation was but one of hundreds. What we’re witnessing on a grand scale is the floor collapsing under us. I guess the question is, as I peer into the empty bottles of several finished reds, is: how far do we want to go? We have the chance to build something new in place of old empires. My only reticence in celebrating the death of a CEO or Rodya’s comeuppance or Iman’s descent into insanity is: are their downfalls intended to placate, or are we going to build something from the rubble of their past?
03.
Evil Does Not Exist
Directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed.
You run into people in your life sometimes that seem to just know. They know what is right and what is wrong. What is good and what is bad; the impact they make on what and who, how to cultivate the most amount of good, how to prevent any modicum of evil, and how to solve the world’s problems if only everyone else was listening. And there’s what I know, which is comparably limited in scope. I guess I know what I like and what I don’t, what moves me and what doesn’t, what I find beautiful and what I find ugly; and even then, I’m never quite sure.
Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), the local handyman of a small mountain village near Mizubiki Village in Nagano, knows. It’s not necessarily wisdom that he imparts, but rather the respect and standing within his small community is earned through his commitment to routine. He and his adolescent daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), go about their business without a single wasted motion; they collect stream water for their modest cabin, and traverse through the village forest, examining the subtle changes to wildlife. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist explores what happens when those that think they know, begin to take over a space. A Tokyo-based “glamorous camping” company hires actors to run a community forum, where townspeople gather to discuss the basic logistics of such a camping site on their land. The questions are informed and practical - how’s the terrain going to be utilized, the size of the septic tank expected to take up their land, and the environmental concerns of such a project. The answers to these questions are, in a word, insufficient. What follows in an attempt at offering an olive branch between locals and tourists, and the nightmare that ensues when oppressors are vigilant about remaining outside of the frames of their money-making schemes.
I’ve resided on Chicago’s southside now for a few years. The transition from north side living, particularly from the opulence of Lincoln Park to Pilsen, has been stark and difficult to pin down. In Lincoln Park, I often found myself sticking out, the object of stares and discomfort based on the darker pigment of my skin. In Pilsen, the feeling I have is moreso to do with whether or not I’m a fraud occupying the space of locals. Not that the predominantly Latino population occupied the space originally, but they’ve developed roots here that have made some feel like interlopers. The key is that I simply don’t know the language, where everyone’s default is to speak to me in Spanish, only to let them down when I gesticulate my unknowing.
Bittersweet Pastry Shop opened on the corner of Laflin and 21st at the start of the year. I was familiar with their sister store situated in Lakeview, mostly because I would spend an inordinate amount of time across the street at Dark Matter’s Osmium coffee shop. A new space would be a welcome respite to the overcrowded Cafe Jumping Bean or the limited seating of Dark Matter’s Sleepwalk Cafe. Unfortunately, the community seemingly rejected the space initially, where I’d see the storefront riddled with graffiti, citing how these gentrifiers were not welcome. It’s a staple of the neighborhood, where it’s no surprise to see graffiti along the neighborhood’s higher-end restaurant, S.K.Y, with similar tags or broken glass ornating the sidewalk on Allport and 18th Street. Weeks into occupying the brewery space left behind by Lo Rez, Monochrome Brewing on Carpenter St. saw their front door smashed in. There is a division here between those that are welcome and those that are not, and as someone without roots, there’s this anxious feeling of uncertainty and hostility.
What “glamping” offers Mizubiki Village is a chance for an outsider to get rich. It doesn’t benefit Takumi, his daughter, or the community that he’s cultivated. The lack of answers from administration suggests an indifference to the environmental impact that such a massive project can have on a local’s lifestyle. The sense I get from new businesses that enter Pilsen is a failure to live up to the vague, perhaps unspoken, promise of an outsider offering perceived community enrichment, compounded with a failure to answer the essential question of their long-term impact. After the vandalization, Bittersweet pivoted, updating their menu to include items that are exclusively intended for Pilsen’s Latino population. It’s busier now than it ever has been. Monochrome, too, seems to be slowly settling into the neighborhood, with an increased effort to engage the community, with weekly planned events intended to bring members of the neighborhood closer together. They host a massive run club, feature video game and karaoke nights, and bring in numerous pop-up restaurants and food trucks to an area starved for a large community space. Meanwhile, S.K.Y, after about seven years in the area, plans to move to Lincoln Park. TIF expansion of underutilized land remains in stagnation. The bureaucratic speed of development remains as slow as ever.
Part of me looks at the way people respond to these new businesses and I can’t help but feel disenchantment with the neighborhood’s methodology. But then I reflect on Takumi, and what Hamaguchi and Omika are getting at with his character. For Takumi, protecting the community of Mizubiki Village is about more than just preserving his routine - it’s about maintaining the integrity of a home that sustains his family. In Pilsen, this concept of maintaining the integrity of one’s home feels strained and ongoing, where even the most well-meaning newcomers must navigate a tension between renewal and erasure. Perhaps belonging, then, is less about certainty than it is about thoughtful, deliberate steps forward—and knowing when to listen, rather than claim to know. It’s within that gray area that I begin to understand what’s on the line here; if I’m going to carve out a space in this community, I have to ingratiate myself within it and not keep things at arm's length. It’s easier said than done. But I cannot let my own ignorance inform my observations. As granola as it sounds but concepts of good and evil - I don’t think you can really ever know for sure. The world operates in grays and confessing your ignorance seems like the first step toward illuminating a path toward knowing.
02.
Hard Truths
Directed by Mike Leigh
Never trust a man on the subject of his parents. As tall and basso as a man might be on the outside, he nevertheless sees his parents from the perspective of a tiny child, still and will always. And the more unhappier his childhood was, the more arrested will be his perspective on it.
I asked my therapist yesterday if I’ve been too hard on my parents.
Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths is his best film since 2010’s Another Year. The two films examine our natural human tendency to look for happiness and to shield ourselves from pain. A home, ideally, would be the place where we would shield ourselves from discomfort, but what if it’s the source?
The small yellow apartment in Old Irving Park where I lived for my first 18 years houses all the secrets. Press your ear against the walls and you’ll hear only wind and emptiness, but it’s in the one-bedroom apartment that I shared with Abel, Dorothy, and Lucas that shaped who I am now, for better and certainly for worse. We lived hermetically and below our very meager means. My brother and I, to our parents' credit, never went hungry and they certainly never permitted us to forget that fact. If my parents were to tell it, they’d recall with strained consternation, wondering why, at the age of nine, I’d run away from home.
Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a stay-at-home mom who resembles what it was like living with my mother for those 18 years. Pansy bemoans every aspect of her life and those around her. Every exchange she has, whether it’s with her husband Curt (David Webber) or her overweight, practically mute son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) is rooted in disgust or disappointment. Chantelle (Michele Austin), Pansy’s hairdresser sister, struggles to meet her halfway, incapable of understanding how such nihilism creeps up on someone, let alone in her own family. Mother’s Day approaches and the two sisters visit the grave of their mother, with a lunch involving Pansy’s family and Chantelle and her daughters to come.
Leigh stages much of these developments through delicate, reserved observations in contrast. Whereas Pansy’s life is rooted in heated confrontations and sharply bitter rejoinders, Chantelle’s life is full of laughter, if not from her numerous clients than from her daughters, who both have difficult, if not unfulfilling jobs - yet they are able to compartmentalize, appreciating the present moment with family. It’s a pointed difference, compared to say Curt, whose work as a plumber doesn’t carry with it the prestige that Pansy would hope for. Why the hostility?
To live is to exist within time and to remember is to negate time. Pansy, decidedly, operates within the latter, incapable of accepting the present because of the people around her. Chantelle insists that she leaves her husband and son, and while I understand the sentiment, I’m not entirely convinced that it’s the solution to her overarching problem. I think back to my mother, a Polish immigrant with a paralyzed left arm from childhood who survived a life-threatening bout with polio. She lost her mother when she was a child and was abused by her father and a household of three brothers. The tumult she experienced in her early life was enough to make anyone bitter. She had ambitions. She moved to Chicago, met my father, and started a family, effectively replacing her old ambitions with a new conquest. But it wasn’t what she planned for. She became a mother because the alternatives were complacency, sameness, and a Polish upbringing she was trying to escape. And with it came a hostility to anything that resembled her old life. That hostility operated in a cyclical fashion, perhaps unbeknownst to even herself; the path she chose ended up being the path she tried to avoid. With that realization came a sense of unfulfillment. And with each passing day, that unfulfillment ballooned into anger, disappointment, and self-hatred that spilled onto the people around her.
Or so I speculate. At the end of Hard Truths we see Pansy sleeping in the middle of the day and her husband returning from work after an injury. He pulled his back and desperately needs medical attention. Curt’s colleague attempts to cajole Pansy from her slumber but she responds like she always does: with heated animosity. Curt can only sit alone, downstairs in their cold, antiseptic kitchen, waiting. Meanwhile, Moses has a chance encounter with a woman that, with his youth, affords him hope, and to me, a way out and actual meaning. And isn’t meaning itself comforting, rather than sitting idly, alone, berated by emptiness? That emptiness? It’s why I ran away from home, both then and now.
01.
The Beast
Directed by Bertrand Bonello
Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.
I’m torn between the desire of continuing in the past and the fear of ruining the present
Gabrielle Monnier (Léa Seydoux) is asked late into Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast if she can be scared of something that’s not really there. To answer the question on her behalf: yes, you most certainly can.
How honest do I want to be with you, reader, let alone myself, on the subject of me? Writing about and recontextualizing the films of the year, in these annual exercises, are often the subject of great internal consternation, particularly since I entered my thirties. Am I being vain? Who cares about these self-indulgent essays of meandering prose? What I have to say seems to matter less, especially when confronted with the cacophony of global anxieties; from genocide to dictatorships to class warfare, the pangs of my heart are comparably, woefully small.
As I examine these pieces, compiled together, the prevailing sentiment that emerges is acknowledging that true growth only occurs after pain. It may just be me rationalizing that all the shitty things I’ve done and that have been done to me are part of a greater cosmic plan, but it’s what I've been most drawn to this year. My obsession with the ghosts of the past hasn’t yielded any solace, and like many of the characters I discussed (Patrick in Challengers, Bailey in Bird, Art in La Chimera, and finally Gabrielle in The Beast), I ask the same question of them that I ought to be asking myself: what are you getting out of living in the past?
The Beast doesn’t offer me any answers, and instead, like all good art, provides me with more questions. Akin to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Bonello bluntly asks his audience: if given the opportunity to remove all your emotions, all connections to your past and your DNA’s past lives, would you do it? It’s 2044 and the air is no longer breathable. Having lived through numerous poor air quality warnings over the last few years, the imagery is painfully prescient. Gabrielle is considering going through the procedure of having her memories, and her emotions, wiped. It is during this process that we glimpse into her past lives, in 1904 and 2014, where we meet Louis (George Mackay).
Louis is decidedly different in all three realities, which largely speaks to how (white, cis) heteronormative masculinity has shifted dramatically through time. In 1904, he attempted to court Gabrielle, who’s married to another man. It’s an unrequited romance turned tragedy that speaks to everything I used to find romantic; which is to say, if I wanted romance, it had to be of the doomed variety. In 2014, Louis is your prototypical incel, drawn to the Gabrielle of this time (a struggling actress house sitting for an opulent friend). Here, it’s hate that coopts love, where Louis’ emotional intelligence is stunted after decades of perceived rejection. In her isolation, the Gabrielle of this time sees Louis as just another lonely Los Angeles figure, much like herself. Like many of the women in my life, she opens herself up to Louis, and Louis, stunted as he is, doesn’t know what to do with that vulnerability. When faced with the unknown, violence ends up being a survival mechanism.
The present tense narrative in 2044 finds Gabrielle and Louis both considering this emotional erasure procedure. At a nightclub, the two meet and like with their previous interactions throughout time, there’s a stunning recognition of familiarity that crosses time and space. In their uncertainty, they know each other from their past lives. Have I experienced this? Who can say for certain. We tell ourselves stories to afford meaning to life’s events. People have entered and exited my life and I’ve often afforded them larger-than-life qualities based on their impact; some were the cut, some were the salve. The person who entered these dreams was not the person who awoke from it.
To answer Bonello’s question: no, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t trade the joys, the mistakes, the heartbrokenness, the swelling love, the complete and utter tedium, the nervousness of waking up early in the morning to visit Hawaii Volcano National Park with Aislinn, the look on my derpy dog’s face when offering her paw for a treat, the times I let my brother win a game of chess, the day I read Dostoevsky on the lawn near the Shedd Aquarium, the reminder of a memory involving a former partner and not resenting the feeling, the locked-in feeling of out-cycling everyone on the lakefront path while specifically listening to the Challengers soundtrack, the fortune teller’s reading in Mystic, the gorgeous morning dew of Hawaii Volcano National Park as I held Aislinn’s hand, the shared breakfast table in Nashville, the genuine surprise when my brother actually beats me in chess, the lesbian bar where I caught up with an old friend, the warmth of being welcomed into a new family, despite often feeling like it’s unearned, the thought that my brother found someone that makes him happy, the thought that I found someone that makes me happy, the belief that I do deserve love and a family, the hope of getting a moment right by getting on one knee and proposing, the feeling when Aislinn said yes.
There must be beautiful things in this chaos.
Reader, apologies for going so long. I’ve got more to say, too, but lucky for you, it’s New Year’s Eve and it’s time to toast it.