please watch: "wild nights with Emily"
May. 24th, 2019 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
felinejumperI 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 🐞 (
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Date: 2019-05-25 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-25 01:04 am (UTC)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!