This week's cinema outings have included two films that feel like they form a sort of bookends in my mind and counterpoints (endpoints?) to my thinking this past year. All of it based in films like The Menu, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, and other fish out of water films that put ordinary people among the monstrousness of the "other"-- be that socially, economically, or just someone far cooler. Earlier this week, Saltburn, which I went in thinking that it was a Dangerous Liasons-type thriller about the corrupting forces of the wealthy on some young Dickensian everyman, which was very much NOT that. And then last night, Eileen, which seemed to be about a young girl pulled under the influence of an older and more glamorous and very blonde Anne Hathaway who surely would be a corrupting force (also very much NOT.) It got me thinking about expectations and how we subvert them across all genres, especially the sorts of books and movies that seem to change course subtly midstride.
While it's not something I ever intend to do, so many writing projects have somehow went on this trajectory. I begin with an idea, a kernal, a small little flame. I may try to guide its path and hem its fences, but pretty soon, it's gone and burned the house down in an an entirely different way. A series of Valentine's love poems becomes a nod to the me-too movement. An ode to my favorite horror movie becomes about class and labor. Sometimes I don't even notice the shift until the drapes are on fire. But then of course, you look back at the beginnings of the work and it was there all along. The matches too close to the fire. The smoldering furniture. I've often tried to track back and see exactly when things changed. Overlook was not just a love letter to my favorite horror movie, but was written smack dab in the middle of covid lockdowns, when the rift between those who had the luxury of staying home and safe were pitted against those who still had to mind the trenches. Even when I was home for a few months, it was written under the shadow of eventual return. The entirety of COLLAPSOLOGIES is informed by that dynamic, which carried through the next year and into the fall of 2021 when I was contemplating leaving my job as part of the great resignation. It's there in the plague letters and working girl's grimoire, and of course, bloom, which is specifically about the pandemic. It's probably even in unreal city, though that is set to be part of another book entirely.
I always laugh when asked about intentionality in my poems or even in my art, and think about all those years of college and grad school studying literature and how much of what we read is probably not at all what the author intended. Or maybe they intended something wholly other, and yet, here we are.
