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I was grooming myself for oblivion and I made it
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.
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.
no subject
Thank you.
Dinshaw is very, very smart. I haven't read that book, but I've read a good chunk of her earlier work.
I'd never read her before; I gathered that she does not work primarily with film, but her analysis of A Canterbury Tale is—barring one place I think she's just wrong, and that happens—the best and closest I've encountered. What else do you recommend?
That said, there's room for many voices, and you are also very, very smart.
I appreciate and strongly prefer the existence of other smart people, even when I am in terrible mental shape. I never want other people not to be intelligent or perceptive; I just want to feel that I am not so totally trailing the pack.
no subject
The many voices thing is not a pack thing, and for the better, IMO. Sometimes they coincide, sometimes not.
no subject
Thank you.