ENG 281: Fall 2025 Resources #3

“I just came here from Deep River, Ontario, and now I’m in this dream place. Well, you can imagine how I feel.” The dream place in Mulholland Drive is Los Angeles; the dreamer is Betty Elms, a small-town girl, Canadian as apple pie, hoping to conquer Hollywood Babylon on her own well-scrubbed terms. We don’t have to imagine how she feels because Naomi Watts makes Betty’s emotions—her actorly ambitions, her romantic yearning, her desire to transcend her own jitterbug contest winner origin story—so plangent and sincere that any boundaries between her headspace and our own get dissolved.

There’s a sense of cosmic irony that a movie explicitly dramatizing the ingenue-to-movie-star pipeline ended up playing like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Watts was 31 and mostly unknown when David Lynch cast her on the basis of a headshot (“This is the girl”). She emerged out of the other side of her soul-and-body-baring tour de force in Mulholland Drive as an A-lister sought by every director in the business. The mid-film sequence in which Betty (who’s been nervously prepping for her big audition in between palling around with Rita, the amnesiac femme fatale she found passed out in her apartment) unexpectedly blows away a roomful of casting agents doubles, quite intentionally, as Watts’s own coming-out party. She’s so sexy and scary and surprising when delivering corny soap opera lines with weathered old Chad Everett that it doesn’t seem like there’s anywhere left for her to go.

At that point the movie doubles back and turns itself inside out, and Betty becomes somebody else entirely. It’s a great parlor trick, but it’s also deeply, ineffably sad. Every time I watch Mulholland Drive and our heroines enter Club Silencio I wince; when Watts wakes up as Diane (this is the girl?), I pine for sweet Betty. Over the past 24 years, I’ve probably talked about Mulholland Drive with a hundred different people who’ve had the same Pavlovian response to Watts’s work—a futile, desperate sense of possessiveness over a performance that belongs to history and to all of us. Well. You can imagine how we feel." — Adam Nayman

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"It's a documentary about the Indonesian death squads of the mid-1960s who tortured and killed communists. But it's also a film within a film, as director Joshua Oppenheimer urges the ageing gangsters to recreate their acts on increasingly elaborate scale (prosthetics, props, drag outfits, soundtrack, location shooting). They grin and mug just as they also take it very, very seriously... It's often said of documentaries that they deserve to have as wide an audience as possible. This doesn't deserve; it demands – not for what it says about present-day Indonesia or even about its former horrors. But because almost every frame is astonishing." - Catherine Shoard, The Guardian

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In Paul Thomas Anderson’s career-defining—and century-defining—2007 epic, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis drills a hole. As Daniel Plainview, he digs deeper and deeper into the sub-humanity of man and the black heart of American history. Plainview has a competition in him, and Day-Lewis has a way of making it seem like all of that bile is ever on the verge of bursting out of his veins, through his skin. When it’s quiet, as There Will Be Blood often is, there is still a seething—and when it gets loud, Day-Lewis conjures sounds more reminiscent of a demonic beast, or a derrick, than a man. There are too many scenes here that are the scene, a testament to both Day-Lewis’s command and the nearly insurmountable task put before him: to carry a Great American Film on Plainview’s crooked legs. When Plainview announces “I’m finished!” to his butler as the end-credits score swells—minutes after delivering the now-iconic “I drink your milkshake” monologue, seconds after panting maniacally over his rival’s bludgeoned skull—it can be heard as a declaration of accomplishment. He has dragged us into the hole with him, covered us in blood and black gold until we can’t find the way out. This is one of the defining performances not just of the 21st century but in all of American cinema—a totemic, epic work against which all other so-called “great” performances must be measured. —Gruttadaro

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"Spike Jonze and the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman concoct an intricate, scrambled parallel universe populated by anxious, itchy people, some appearing really to exist. The hero is Mr. Kaufman himself (Cage), a screenwriter struggling to adapt THE ORCHID THIEF, Susan Orlean's nonfiction meditation on flowers, obsession and Darwinian theory. He is tormented by writer's block and by his twin brother, Donald (also Mr. Cage)… This is a remarkable, impossible movie — about itself but also about its own nonexistence — and one of the most formally audacious, intellectually charged American movies in quite some time." - A.O. Scott, The New York Times

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Enelow, Shonni. "Open and Shut: Acting and Attachment in Good One." Reverse Shot (June 10, 2024) ["A few weeks ago, I ran into an old friend from acting school who has had substantial roles in major movies and told him about some of my recent writing about film acting and visual art. I mentioned the art history terms absorption and theatricality, both coined by Michael Fried to describe a transformation of painting sometime in the 18th century, as artists started to get anxious about over-performing for their viewers (about theatricality) and instead began to paint works that projected their self-enclosure and disinterest in their audiences (often images in which figures are absorbed in their represented activities). Hearing this, he started talking about attachment theory, which traces adult neuroses to the child’s secure or insecure attachment to their parents. The film actor, he told me, must not project insecure attachment. You cannot be needy. The audience will be repelled. You also cannot be avoidant. The audience will get bored. Instead, you need to project a security that the audience will come to you––even if you don’t actually feel it. That’s what good film acting is"]

Fensom, Sarah. "Familiar Touch." Reverse Shot (June 20, 2025) ["Familiar Touch, Sarah Friedland’s debut narrative feature about an octogenarian woman entering a full-time memory care facility, exists along the edges of the coming-of-age film. Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), a chic Southern Californian, must manage new and pre-existing relationships within her changing circumstances and state-of-mind—much like her typically teenage counterparts in the genre. Friedland pulls many of the usual emotional levers—anger, rebellion, sexual angst, and the desire for freedom—but it’s set to the pace of Ruth’s life—how she moves, thinks, breathes. The film’s adagio rhythm doesn’t mean it’s sedate, however. Familiar Touch is a deeply kinetic work. Friedland, who is also a choreographer, infuses the film with graceful bodily gestures and overtures to the senses. In its bounty of movement and sensorial pleasures, it finds its compassionate voice—even though the memories of the life Ruth lived before she entered the care facility are slipping away, her body is still expressive, still free to actively experience being alive. It’s rare for a work of art about cognitive decline to focus on what is rather than what’s lost."]

Giroliman, Mars. "What is Speculative Fiction?" Southern New Hampshire University (September 21, 2021) ["With subgenres like fantasy, science fiction, horror, alternate history and more, speculative fiction is an encompassing genre that freely explores possibility and impossibility alike."]

Goi, Leonardo. "The Current Debate | James Gunn’s Superman Battles Fatigue." Notebook (August 7, 2025) ["A far cry from Zack Snyder’s po-faced take, a new “Superman” tries to square the idealism of its hero with the irreverence of its director."]

Runquist, Karsten. "Wes Anderson's Existential Trilogy." (Posted on Youtube: June 7, 2025) [An analysis of The French Dispatch, Asteroid City, and The Phoenician Scheme.]

Shields, Chris. "Ghost Trail: Search Options." Reverse Shot (May 29, 2025) ["The protagonist in Jonathan Millet’s Ghost Trail goes by many names, among them Saleh and Amir. His real name is Hamid, but this, like his true purpose in Strasbourg, is something the viewer learns only later as Millet’s subtle and complex film unfolds. Millet and Florence Rochat’s script weaves together identity (cultural as well as personal), nationality, suspicion, loss, revenge, and justice into the strands of a tautly wound rope that vibrates with dramatic and political urgency. Millet has crafted a humanist spy thriller set amid the lingering memories of the Syrian civil war and the atrocities perpetrated by Bashar al-Assad’s regime that is both satisfyingly tense and gently hopeful."]

Smith, Gavin. "Teeth Bared: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight." Reverse Shot (July 11, 2025) ["“Am I African?” Bobo asks her mother. “No… It’s complicated” comes the response. “Are we racists?” she asks during a visit to her grandparents, who live in town. “Certainly not,” mum firmly replies. “Where would you get that idea?” (Grandma adds, “We have breeding, which is better than having money.”) But all of this is contradicted in nearly every interaction between the child and the family’s servants, the stern but at times affectionate Sarah (Zikhona Bali) and the dour Jacob (Fumani N. Shilubana). A virtually nonstop succession of small, often semi-oblivious humiliations and high-handed bossing—“I could fire you if I want,” Bobo tells Jacob at one point—fully register the child’s casual and unreflective attitude towards the two Black people she encounters on a daily basis. In this she is propogating the low-intensity racism of her family, especially her mum’s. Even when Bobo plays with Black children, she treats them like servants. She only truly comes face to face with the otherness of Black resistance for the first time when she peers through a slit at an incarcerated “terrorist” who looks back at her before withdrawing into the darkness."]

West, Stephen. "Byung Chul Han - The Crisis of Narration." Philosophize This! #232 (July 7, 2025) [MB: We are homo fabulan, and in our immersive world of competing (as well as controlling) narratives, it is important we learn to distinguish between "story telling vs. story selling." Episode Description: "Today we talk about the book The Crisis of Narration by the philosopher Byung Chul Han. We talk about the history of storytelling. Walter Benjamin's distinction between a Paris fire and a revolution in Madrid. The effects of social media on memory. Story telling vs story selling. AI as pure Intelligenz lacking Geist. The ability for stories to give shape to suffering. The importance of boredom for self-discovery."]

"Where is the Revolutionary, Anti-Fascist Art?" Best of the Left (September 2, 2025) ["The way people consume almost every variety of media, entertainment, and art is different now than it was only 10-15 years ago. That means that the way protest music, revolutionary art, and even mass market productions and performances are going to be different, feel different, and likely find you in different ways than in the past. But the drive to create never dies and art will always be part of the resistance to oppression."]