Watching Won’t Wash You Clean

In Return to Reims, Eribon writes about an adulthood that does not arrive with success. One can acquire language, status, and a name, and still continue assembling oneself out of shame, rupture, and other people’s expectations.

Russia is once again learning to see itself through someone else’s eyes — through the eyes of Merezhkovsky’s Vasyuta: “some milk, maybe… but I don’t feel like it”. And that “I don’t feel like it” is enough to describe today’s reaction and the war.

I now see My Own Private Idaho not as a film about beautiful rootlessness, but as a film about the difference between those who have an “afterwards” and those who don’t.

Why No Skin Off My Ass matters not only as a film, but as a trace of a queer culture that had not yet become polite, institutional, and safe.

The Masturbator’s Heart speaks of death calmly, almost matter-of-factly, as something simply pencilled into the schedule.