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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.
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I don't normally wish Dreamwidth had a "like" button, but I want to spam one right now.
Late to this party because I'm wildly behind on my RSS feed, but this made me think of fiction and the general truism that there are no new plots. I don't care whether somebody somewhere in a book I've never heard of has told a similar story or had a similar observation. I care that this is the place where I've encountered that tale or that epiphany, and that the execution of it is beautiful. I have a file on my computer where I save bits of description to help inspire me to get better at it, and in catching up on your posts today the most recent addition to the file is "the bitter little lines of his brows and mouth stand out like scars." You have your own section in the file. Nobody else has that except me, where I'm keeping a list of the interesting descriptive lines I come up with in the hopes that eventually I'll be able to do it as well as you do, or even half so well.
This isn't exaggeration. It was your movie posts that made me think, "description, I want to be better at it -- especially description of people -- maybe if I study
you make reading about a movie as good as watching a movie
I'd say better than. Because the other thing I'm trying to learn is the ability to see these nuances in the first place -- not to just absorb the surface experience or see through to the underlying structure (which is a skill I do have), but to bring all the little touches of character into high relief. I need the free time and the access to watch more of these movies after reading reviews of them, so I can compare the map to the terrain.
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Late replying to this comment because of work and plumber and power outage, so do not worry.
I have a file on my computer where I save bits of description to help inspire me to get better at it, and in catching up on your posts today the most recent addition to the file is "the bitter little lines of his brows and mouth stand out like scars." You have your own section in the file. Nobody else has that except me, where I'm keeping a list of the interesting descriptive lines I come up with in the hopes that eventually I'll be able to do it as well as you do, or even half so well.
I really don't have a good response to this. Thank you. This—
This isn't exaggeration. It was your movie posts that made me think, "description, I want to be better at it -- especially description of people -- maybe if I study sovay for long enough I'll learn how."
—is an astonishing thing to hear and I believe you, even if I am having trouble making my self-esteem feel the same way. Thank you for telling me. That is not an effect I expected at all from starting to wite about film.
I need the free time and the access to watch more of these movies after reading reviews of them, so I can compare the map to the terrain.
I hope they live up to their reports. I try very hard to write about the movies I actually see, not the movies I'd project.
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I know that the gut/subconscious/brain chemicals/however you want to term it do not necessarily respond to facts, but I figure there is little if any harm in applying them regularly anyway.