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

[thawrecka]

You're just having a bad time and everything makes you feel worse, is all. I always find money worries cause me to have a negative self-worth spiral, too, FWIW.

[yhlee]

*support support*

[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

[davidgillon]

If you extend your argument, then most film critics are just recapping each other. There's a movie at the core of everyone's criticism, and it's the same movie, with the same plot and characters and themes both conscious and unconscious. A certain intersection of insights is only to be expected.

You write fascinating reviews, I don't particularly care if someone else has made the point elsewhere, because you make that point your own and you make it well.

[moon_custafer]

To quote Dr. Buckaroo Banzai, “if it was obvious, everybody would be doing it every day.”

You and one other critic hardly constitute “everybody.”

[selkie]

*sneaks in, grabs Tiny Wittgenstein, chloroforms him with prejudice*

There is nothing new under the sun but that doesn't mean you can't point out eloquently and with delightful, illustrative language when a guy likes dick. Thematic, metaphorical dick.

You do good things. Now I am going to remove your brain and give it a week on Plum Island. It can stay in that abandoned pink weird house and watch the sawgrass sway.

[gwynnega]

This sounds like a bad attack of impostor syndrome. Even if you draw some of the same conclusions about films that other writers do, your film writing is elegant and interesting and unique.

[thistleingrey]

*supports*

Dinshaw is very, very smart. I haven't read that book, but I've read a good chunk of her earlier work. That said, there's room for many voices, and you are also very, very smart.

[shewhomust]

As an undergraduate, I suspected I was less clever than my peers because they read criticism and I just wanted to do close reading of the text. Forty years on, I have the certificate to say I'm not dim. And the attitude to say that a personal close reading is always worth doing. And you do it so well.

(That's a steamroller in the icon. I don't hug, I'm British.)

[cmcmck]

'A Canterbury Tale' is the greatest film of all time! :o)

[asakiyume]

As others have said, it's likely the vicious burden of stress that is letting Tiny Wittgenstein get so much airtime in your mind.

But this moment will pass.** I wonder if Gaylyn Studiar has a Tiny Wittgenstein too. I wouldn't be surprised if she does; they're disconcertingly common. You can't see it in a professional bio, of course; in *those*, people are unapproachable gods. Like the person I know who reads a million dead languages and has a Kuiper belt object named after them.

**would pass much sooner if we had universal income and healthcare but that's a conversation for another day....

[kenjari]

I really like your film writing, and I agree with what everyone else has said about the quality of it and your insights.
As for finding the same observations you have made in another article, that absolutely does not invalidate you as a film critic or the writing you produce. I was just in the Beethoven section of my music library and counted 4 biographies published since 2005 alone (and that was just a very quick, casual count). I am completely certain that were I to read all 4, I would find several of the same points about Beethoven and his work being made. And no one is calling any of those musicologists impostors, derivative, etc.

[drwex]

In our household we refer to these things as "brain weasels" and they are a constant concern. I'm sorry that your brain weasels appear to be attacking you and hope you find a good antidote soon.

[kore]

Yeah, that sounds like your brain beating you up. I don't know this other person and don't know how well they write (and in fact most academic writing puts me off). I love films and love how you write about them. That counts.

Your reviews and the badassery thereof

[shelivesdeliciously]

Another long time reader chiming in here to say that your informed, insightful and poetic reviews consistently level bad movies up to fascinating and good movies up to fantastic. Reading about someone else catching the same things you caught in a movie, far from making you look ignorant (which fwiw does not even compute, it's like trying to imagine an orange bluejay), I'm guessing made most of us immediately think "that reviewer must be ridiculously clever to catch the same things as Sovay. Yay for the existence of such people!" Very much hoping things start looking up for you (literally looking up can make you feel better, it's some weird psychological thing, I recommend it).