I was grooming myself for oblivion and I made it

[sovay]

Having read Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key (1931) for the first time this weekend, I went looking for information on some elements of the plot and discovered in the process that everything I noticed about Jeff Hartnett in Johnny Eager (1942) had already been observed by Gaylyn Studlar in "A Gunsel Is Being Beaten: Gangster Masculinity and the Homoerotics of the Crime Film, 1941–1942," published in Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet, and Peter Stanfield's Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film (2005).

It's a good article. She's looking at queerness in The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Glass Key (1942), and Johnny Eager, which is exactly the sort of thing I enjoy seeing written. It seems to have put me into some kind of crashing anxiety spiral. I recognize that the healthy way to take this news would be to feel validated. I didn't read too much into the movie: I saw exactly what there was to see. (The fact that we cite most of the same lines feels like an argument for intentional barely-sub-text instead of slash goggles.) Instead my current train of thought is running straight into total demoralization: I worry enough about having nothing original or interesting to say. I feel that if I actually read about film the way I write about it, I would have known I wasn't discovering anything with Johnny Eager. I'm wondering now what else I've spent hours trying to articulate properly that someone else has already done the work on and I just haven't found out yet. I am second-guessing my entire resolve to collect my reviews professionally, if they're just going to be ignorant recaps of actual scholarly material.

Basically, this is terrible. The last film criticism I ran into that agreed with me—Carolyn Dinshaw's How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (2012), which I have been meaning to recommend to several people on this friendlist for obvious reasons as well as the rather more personal one that she writes seriously about Colpeper and A Canterbury Tale (1944) and goes even farther than I do in linking his sexuality to the land—I was delighted. But for whatever reason, this one just feels like proof of all the things I try not to believe are true. And it's been there since I was in grad school, since before I even really cared about film. I just didn't know. I should know these things.

Comments

[justice_turtle]

Please feel free to bop me with a dime novel if this is unhelpful or out of line, but my first reaction is "If you were delighted the last time this happened, then maybe the anxiety feelings are spilling over from the rest of your life because you're under a lot of stress right now and brains are assholes". (Well, my first articulate reaction. My very first reaction is to anyone feeling anxious is to offer hugs, but I seem to recall you don't find that helpful, so I won't.)

For what it's worth, I find all your film writing fascinating and insightful. (I think I originally followed you because Lost_Spook linked your Sapphire & Steel review and I was like "This person words good", because when somebody else's words are too good all of mine go away.) I don't read much about movies other than your blog, or indeed watch many movies, which one could interpret to mean that my opinion is irrelevant because I don't know what the shit I'm talking about, but I prefer to interpret it to mean that you're reaching a wide audience, not all of whom would necessarily run up against these kinds of scholarly opinions if they stayed limited to more scholarly formats like print. ^_^

Um. Did any of that help? :S

[sovay]

(Well, my first articulate reaction. My very first reaction is to anyone feeling anxious is to offer hugs, but I seem to recall you don't find that helpful, so I won't.)

I appreciate it as a gesture; I don't find it insulting. It just doesn't in most cases make me actually feel better.

Um. Did any of that help?

Yes. Reality-checking the anxiety spillover is useful and I take it as a real compliment that someone who is not normally interested in movies reads—enjoys—my reviews. Thank you. Now I just have to get the rest of my brain to believe it.

[lemon_badgeress]

I am another person who really enjoys reading your review -- enough that I'm now backing your Patreon! -- and until this year I could count the number of movies I'd bothered to watch in the last decade on the fingers of one hand.

Honestly, I think it's really cool that you can dig up all of this stuff on your own, just from paying attention and thinking, and then have it validated by 'professionals'.

[sovay]

I am another person who really enjoys reading your review -- enough that I'm now backing your Patreon! -- and until this year I could count the number of movies I'd bothered to watch in the last decade on the fingers of one hand.

Thank you for the backing! I would be honored even if you were just following the reviews, but I appreciate the financial encouragement profoundly and will work on getting it through my head that people don't generally pay for things that bore them. Do you mind if I ask if the reviews make you want to see the films, or just enjoy reading about them?

Honestly, I think it's really cool that you can dig up all of this stuff on your own, just from paying attention and thinking, and then have it validated by 'professionals'.

I think that's a much healthier attitude to take than the one my brain went with, and I will endeavor to adopt it.

[thisbluespirit]

*seconds pretty much all of this*

It does sound like the sort of thing brains do when you're in a v bad place, and then everything is negative. :/

Your reviews are well worth reading - and well worth writing.

[sovay]

Your reviews are well worth reading - and well worth writing.

Thank you. My brain has not been in a good place for a long time now; I need a lot of things to change. I am going to keep writing, and working on believing it.

[genarti]

I don't read much about movies other than your blog, or indeed watch many movies, which one could interpret to mean that my opinion is irrelevant because I don't know what the shit I'm talking about, but I prefer to interpret it to mean that you're reaching a wide audience, not all of whom would necessarily run up against these kinds of scholarly opinions if they stayed limited to more scholarly formats like print.

I cosign and second every word of this!

I don't watch a great many movies (and a large portion of what I do watch is movies for which skygiants says "Hey, I think you might like this, let's watch it" to me specifically.) I also don't go looking for movie reviews or criticism very often. But I am always interested by your movie reviews, and I always read them with great enjoyment even when I don't comment. Even when a movie doesn't seem like something I'd enjoy watching, I'm always fascinated by how you write about them and what you see in them.

[sovay]

But I am always interested by your movie reviews, and I always read them with great enjoyment even when I don't comment. Even when a movie doesn't seem like something I'd enjoy watching, I'm always fascinated by how you write about them and what you see in them.

Thank you. That does matter, and I appreciate you making sure I hear it.