![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
felinejumper) wrote2019-05-24 08:08 pm
please watch: "wild nights with Emily"
I know we all know about Wild Nights with Emily, right? Here is the trailer in case you missed it.
I saw it a bit ago but JEEZ YOU GUYS, I LOVED IT SO MUCH I RECOMMEND IT SO STRONGLY, and now I am going to gush about it!
It feels like the movie version of a fanfiction that caters to aaallll of my buttons: the business of artmaking, girls (ok, yes, women, but also girls!) in love, excellent jokes about the Brontë sisters, effective meta-narrative on history's pliability and who-tells-your-story, caretaking of the body. It also has a super tight running time (1h24m!), and some serious belly laughs. The only important characters are women. And they are killer.
In addition to catering to the "jokes about English lit" crowd, it features a truly astounding ending—devastatingly dignified. I went from giggling to silent crying in the span of about 30 seconds, and it didn't...feel weird? It felt marvelously paced and sincere and powerful.
Not only is it girls! in love!, but Molly Shannon's Emiy worked unexpectedly wonderfully for me—her Emily feels fun and quirky and, you know, a touch melodramatic. All thatr eturned a measure of joy to her poems that I'm not sure I ever had before. (I have not, historically, been a major E.D. fan but I am doing a real 180° on that). That's also why it feels a bit like fanfiction; fic has rescued or illuminated a number of canons for me, and Wild Nights, in it's bawdiness, counterweights the traditional E.D. narrative.
It was SO GOOD and so worthwhile; absolutely adding to my ad-hoc lesbian film collection. Again, the ending was just....stunning.
Vague Black Sails and Wild Nights spoilers: oh my god, my themes of "meta-narrative on history's pliability". I love how both Nights and Black Sails allow their queer characters to have happiness even when history misremembers them; and I fucking love that they give us versions of the story that are happy and satisfying. The sound of the eraser in the end slew me, in precisely the same way the meta-ness of Black Sails slew me -- this is a story, this is a maybe-story, this is a story that someone is telling you and therefore, you can tell your own. And that your story operates, in the end, quite independently from you, the real living breathing person who has to inhabit the body.
This was also illuminated by a tweet from Joseph Fink about the ending of GoT, which I think highlights why Nights and Black Sails are SO satisfying, in the end:
"So the anger [at the ending] comes not because the story ended badly but because we were reminded at the end that it was only a story, nothing more, and that feels like a loss.
— Joseph Fink 🐞 (
no subject
no subject
Ugh you're SO welcome, I am so glad to be able to give this gift.
You don't need to know anything about Emily Dickinson, necessarily, although anything you do know will add to the experience? Just know that everything biographical about her is like "she was mysterious and lonely and aloof and no fun at all" and...well. Molly Shannon is lots of fun!
no subject
no subject
no subject
I can't wait!
no subject
I have to say I *mostly* liked it when they put in renditions of her poems, but the black northern soldier in the tomb with her for "I died for Beauty" just did not work for me. It seemed awfully heavy-handed, especially since they didn't take up an argument about the extent of her abolitionist sensibilities anywhere else.
no subject
For me, it's about fairness. A story owes something to the characters. You can torture them, kill them, but you can't force their personalities to change to match an ending that doesn't suit them. It's not fair to them.
no subject
I am so terribly excited for everyone! Very frustratingly it is not yet on any streaming services, which has really hindered me throwing several watch parties already.
And YEAH the Black Sails parallels are...whew! Intense! I wish you the best of luck with history & scholarship feelings!
no subject
It very much deserves said excitement (and you even have the icon!). I genuinely thought it was a joke trailer when I first saw it and then. This happened to me; I'm looking forward as well to anyone/everyone else's takes.
no subject
Yes I TOTALLY agree about that critique, all of it (it felt so out of tune with that moment in the film!) which is a shame; I would have loved to know more about her political activism. And when the Union soldiers were used as a counterpoint for the editor -- iffy as well, because...that was serious business an deserved either proper treatment or to be given a fully fleshed out set of jokes, if that makes sense, since in general I felt that was the tactic that they were using to confer dignity/humanity.
Do you know -- was "I died for beauty" originally a abolition poem? If yes then 😦 I have to think much harder about that.
And to the rest YES I adored adult Sue, god I loved pretty much everyone and everything (excepting above); it hit so many story beats so well.
I am also so so enjoying the write-ups, which are 50% "this is perfect" and 50% scholars being like "this use of data and story telling is an affront to how I want to think of women"
no subject
no subject
Benjamin Friedlander has a (paywalled) 1998 article "Auctions of the Mind: Emily Dickinson and Abolition" that seems to trace the strands of abolitionist rhetoric in her work; he describes her usage of it as "oblique" and points out "She was, in other words, almost certainly well informed on the subject, but chose consciously (for whatever reasons) to keep close counsel with her beliefs" which I feel like in the contemporary environment is legible as a pretty clear signal of its own.
There's also this manuscript excerpt from Andrea Brady from this year that I think is really good and gives a clear look at racist+Orientalist stuff in her writing, and how it relates to her lyric project around constraint. I also like the counterpoint reading she provides of Philip's Zong! after if you want to check that out.
After all of this I still haven't found any precedent for reading "I died for beauty" as being about slavery -- it's definitely a provocative approach, but I don't know that it's a particularly historically-sensitive one, since I don't see much evidence that there was a rhetoric of using "truth" to mean "justice" or "the truth that slavery is wrong"--Friedlander extensively discusses a Frances E W Harper poem "The Slave Auction" featuring "woman, with her love and truth/For these in sable forms may dwell" but that seems quite distinct to me.
I did feel like the moment with the Union soldiers staring down Higginson was at least *more* effective than the poem, I think because they had a reaction that made sense and gave them the same dignity of wit-as-observers-of-folly that Emily and Sue got. But the two bits together do seem like an awkward sideswipe at avoiding-but-not-avoiding the messiness of taking up abolition and racism overall.
Uh, this kind of got away from me as a response but ... I learned a lot! :o)
no subject
Yessss, I've been thinking a lot about endings this month! I don't watch GoT because reasons, but it has been fascinating to watch fannishly mainstream reactions (I say, casually dismissing a million fans crying out in agony) to something.
I absolutely think it's about respect, although I often frame it as dignity, or sometimes wholeness of character -- the entire arc should be a cohesive person, and the entire story should hang together as a...unfinished piece, or finished insofar as it clearly weaves into the rest of the (unspoken) world. And I know endings are hard, they are, but also! Professional storytellers! It also feels often like a confusion about what stories are supposed to be doing for their audience, why they've been made—but also, I am spoiled rotten in fandom with an abundance of respectful endings.
Anyway I have no feelings about this whatsoever, clearly.
You've opened a beautiful door
(And I will!)