please watch: "wild nights with Emily"

[felinejumper]

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 🐞 (planetoffinks) May 20, 2019

Comments

[felinejumper]

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"

[digsdigsdigs]

I know basically nothing about Dickinson, which is embarrassing for me at this point, but from my light snooping since watching the movie, arguments for her abolitionist cred rest mostly on the sheer fact of her acquaintance with Higginson and on what seem to me to be pretty strained readings of her metaphors of bondage, fugitivity, and mastery -- as eg here.

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)