To see so much of myself on screen screen made me hurt, yes. It also made me feel less weird, less perverse, less alone. Other men experienced this? Other men felt this? Other men continue to feel it decades later? The sense of validation was indescribable. I would not want to be warned against it.

Now I’ve actually experienced being triggered, a phenomenon I’d only ever really viewed from a remove, almost academically. I’ve really gone through it, felt truly awful, felt like I wanted to shrivel up and blow away, felt like I wanted to puke my whole insides out. And while I can only speak for myself of course, I now really do believe that trigger warnings do more harm than good. 

What would have happened had I seen “TW: child abuse” before watching that episode of Supersex? Well, not much in my case, as it was a paying gig I was obligated to do, and I’d have watched it anyway. Moreover, without knowing beforehandhow similar it was to what I’d gone through, I probably wouldn’t have given the warning much thought. I’ve been at this for a while, and I’ve seen plenty of rough stuff. 

But had I seen a trigger warning, I’d have steeled myself for it. I’d have braced for impact, and thus the impact would have been lessened or even lost. The catharsis I experienced, that feeling that something inside me that was festering and poisonous was being violently forcibly expelled — so much for that. So much for that sense of validation, the gift of the knowledge that I’m not the only one. So much for the tremendous, miraculous privilege of being that moved by a work of art, of having a work of art speak directly to things inside myself I couldn’t even bring up on my own. This brought them up alright, pretty literally. I’ll never forget that. I wouldn’t want to go back.

Earlier this month I had the most violent reaction to a work of art I’ve ever experienced. I wrote about how and why I was triggered and what it taught me for Decider.

Mourning a coworker you’ve never physically met is a motherfucker. You grieve, and when people ask why you apologize instead of unburdening. Caveats, explanations, I can’t imagine what the people who were really close to her must be feeling. (The last of these, at least, has the benefit of being heartfelt.) Who am I, you ask yourself, to miss this person who was only ever a face on a Zoom call to me? To be this upset is stealing valor, you say to yourself. To be this sad is embarrassing. 

But to have worked with her, been inspired by her, felt in some way bettered by your time with her, and still somehow be embarrassed to miss her? It won’t do. No, it won’t do, if only because it’s so difficult to imagine Cecilia Gentili being embarrassed herself. She could not have amassed such a record of concrete accomplishment, in so many fields and on so many fronts, if she’d wasted her time apologizing for how she felt. If she felt strongly enough about something, in fact, the world would hear about it.

I wrote about Cecilia Gentili, a co-writer and colleague of mine in the New York Times trans solidarity letter campaign, for Defector. I’m very sad she’s gone.

I am a little embarrassed by how hard Cecilia’s death has hit me. It feels like stealing valor, you know? Based on her memorial last night the number of people whose lives she transformed for the better — and I mean hand to hand, person to person, on a retail basis — is beyond count. That’s even before you get to whatever exponent of that number benefitted from the work she did or the example she set.

I’m one of the latter. I worked with Cecilia in organizing the New York Times trans letter campaign, which I can say without fear of contradiction would not have been what it was without her. It’s not just the doors her name opened, the connections she worked, the people impressed enough by seeing “Cecilia Gentili” listed at the top to sign beneath. It was the sense that she would not be wasting her time with this if it weren’t important, or wasting her time with the rest of us if we were doing a rotten job. If Cecilia was on board, then we were on the right track.

I never got to meet Cecilia in person. We arranged everything over the internet, so she was a face and voice on Zoom to me more than anything else. But that was enough. That’s how she thanked me one time for helping to get the project off the ground, and I remember she just seemed so happy that people from outside the community were doing things like that. I mean, what can you even say when Cecilia Gentili tells you “good job”? “You’re very welcome, important figure in New York City queer history, I appreciate it”? I think I just blushed and grinned.

Cecilia was a part of the best thing I’ve ever done in my life and now she’s gone. That’s hard. That’s fucking hard. Thank you, Cecilia. Thank you so much.

We’d all love to be remembered at our best—some great thing we did or said, a life we touched or changed, a moment of pure pride or bliss. Tom Wilkinson will forever be remembered with this photograph. His legacy is encapsulated in a hilarious image of him doing a tremendous job as a beloved character in a fantastic scene from an original and righteous and perfect movie. That’s tough to top.

I wrote about Tom Wilkinson and his Michael Clayton baguettes for Defector.

My kid is not a vocal viewer. Actually, as they’d be the first to tell you, they are a weirdly un-vocal viewer. Together, and largely at their insistence, we’ve marathoned all of The Golden Girls and Cheers and are currently working on Seinfeld; as they themselves are quick to point out, they’ve laughed out loud at these, three of the funniest shows ever made, maybe four times. Mostly they just smile and nod affirmatively. Yes, they are aware of the Seinfeld episode about the woman who just says “That’s so funny,” and are looking forward to it. For people like them it’s so rare to see yourself represented on screen.

So their reaction to the most brutal sequence of torture scenes they’ve seen in their young life gave me pause. It happened in the sixth episode of the second season of The Wheel of Time, showrunner Rafe Judkins’s adaptation of the monolithic epic fantasy series by the late Robert Jordan and his literary heir Brandon Sanderson. The episode is called “Eyes Without Pity,” and for good reason. 

In the storyline at the center of this episode, the character Egwene al’Vere—a young woman whose nascent magical powers make her one of the show’s co-protagonists—is imprisoned, enslaved, physically and psychologically tortured, and finally broken. As a lowly damane, she is being turned into a living weapon by her overseer, or sul’dam, Renna—an agent of the brutal, American-accented Seanchan empire, a colonial power that spends the season wreaking havoc in the land our heroes call home. 

The gist of it is simple. Egwene has been fitted with a magical collar, linked to a corresponding magical bracelet on Renna’s arm. As long as she’s wearing the collar, she can do no harm to Renna; the mere thought of reaching for a weapon sends agonizing waves of pain throughout her entire body, and should she manage to land a blow against her tormentor, she will receive multiple times the pain herself. (The BDSM influence on all this is unmistakable, undeniable, well explored by the fandom, and confirmed by Jordan himself, so no, you’re not crazy.)

Now Egwene has a simple task: She must pick up a pitcher of water and pour Renna a cup. Unless and until she abandons all hope of escape and any belief that she’ll be able to use the pitcher as a weapon to hurt Renna, the magically induced pain makes so much as touching the pitcher impossible. No matter how many times Renna says “Pour the water, Egwene”—a mantra along the lines of The Marathon Man’s “Is it safe?”—it simply can’t be done.

Until, finally, Egwene breaks. She reaches for the pitcher. She pours Renna the water without pain. And immediately, after day upon day of this torture, Renna dumps the water on the floor. “Good girl,” she tells Egwene.

My 12-year-old kid turns to me at this point and says, “This is a good show.”

This is the opening of the long interview I conducted for Defector with actors Madeleine Madden and Xelia Mendes-Jones about their work as Egwene and Renna in the central storyline of The Wheel of Time Season 2. It was my kid’s first exposure to what I (and they) would consider great television drama, and it involved two actors of color, a woman and a nonbinary person. I thought this was exciting, and my nonbinary kid did so too, so I had to dig in. This is very personal to me, and I hope you enjoy it.

2023 was the first full year of my adult life in which I did not suffer from depression and anxiety. That’s pretty much the story of my year, full stop. I spent 365 days feeling happy. That’s unreal to me. I literally didn’t think it was possible for me. Yay!

My depression/anxiety had become quite debilitating in retrospect, and before I took a new med (ask your doctor if Rexulti is right for you!) starting in June last year, one of the biggest problems it caused for me was an inability to feel safe and comfortable experiencing new art. I’m a TV critic, and I’m determined to keep a roof over my family’s head, so I gutted through quite a bit, but this is the first year in a long time where I feel like my heart is open again.

So first I’d like to show off my favorite music of the year: ABSOLUTE BEST OF DAVID BOWIE: STARDUST EDITION, a 110-song playlist I made as an exercise. It covers every era and album, plus the major singles and collaborations, with an emphasis (of course) on the things I like best. I’ve listened to it nonstop since I made it. David Bowie is my favorite musician and the most life-changing artist I’ve ever encountered. I adore him so much but spent years away from his music. It felt like coming home.

(Just note that the original 1965 versio of “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving,” the all-in-one medley version of “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise),” and the Tin Machine song “You Belong in Rock n’ Roll,” which are on the playlist as it exists on my computer, aren’t available on Apple Music and they’re hard to find anywhere else. He’s really purged Tin Machine II for some reason!)

2023 is also notable for being the first (and second, and third) time I watched Cabaret. This film hit me like a freight train, from out of nowhere, like Nightbreed did in my teens and Velvet Goldmine in my 20s. I have never, never, never seen a musical theater performance like Liza Minnelli in that film. She makes even the other greats look like Clapton coming on stage after Hendrix. They’re not even playing the same instrument. I know that I’m corny and sentimental and lachrymose and prone to hyperbole, but watching her sing that final song is like looking at the face of god to me. Utterly poleaxed by this. Can’t get over it.

Since I started watching new/new-to-me movies seriously again late last year, I’ve been keeping a running list. Not Letterboxd, that feels like homework to me and I need at least SOME of my media consumption to be a pastime, but it helps me keep track of what I’ve seen and what I’d like to see. My favorite movies of 2023 are:

1. The Zone of Interest
2. Skinamarink
3. May December
4. Godzilla Minus One
5. Killers of the Flower Moon
6. Oppenheimer
7. Barbie
8. M3GAN
9. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
10. probably The Outwaters (very mixed on this one but that ending is like nothing I’ve ever seen)

Still haven’t seen Poor Things though, which really seems up my alley.

Which brings us to the thing I’m qualified to talk about: television! Here’s my top 10 for the year. I’m very proud of how little it looks like any other critic’s (none of the big consensus faves are on mine bc i either don’t like or don’t watch them lol), but in general there was a ton of variety this year on critics’ best-of lists, which I think can only be good for TV and criticism. Everybody loves dramedies but me though.

1. Dead Ringers (Prime)
2. The Idol (HBO/Max)
3. Copenhagen Cowboy (Netflix)
4. Foundation (Apple TV+)
5. Billions (Showtime/Paramount+)
6. Fargo (FX/Hulu – reserving the right to raise this if the ending kills)
7. The Fall of the House of Usher (Netflix)
8. The Wheel of Time (Prime)
9. Perry Mason (HBO/Max)
10. Silo (Apple TV+)

I have a piece coming out in the Los Angeles Review of Books about the lurid tone I like in a lot these shows, so that will be exciting.

I also watch AEW wrestling all the time. I don’t really care about its ups and downs, I always have a ball.

Finally, in terms of my own work, here’s what I’m proudest of:

My Los Angeles Review of Books debut, which is also the first time my wife Julia Gfrörer and I have collaborated on a prose piece together. It’s about one of our favorite genres: the sad sex movie, or to use Julia’s term, the Erotic Bummer.

Got my first film-related pitch into the Times, with this piece on Killers of the Flower Moon and Scorsese protagonists.

I got a pretty consistent essay-writing gig at Decider — here I am on Oppenheimer, Barbie, Hostel, and Angus Cloud.

Also for Decider I did a list of ten great recent horror TV shows to check out. I love making up the canon as I go.

I interviewed several showrunners of my favorite shows: Billions’ Brian Koppelman & David Levien, The Wheel of Time‘s Rafe Judkins, and Foundation‘s David S. Goyer.

I wrote about Godzilla a lot, for some reason, in Blood Knife, Welcome to Hell World, and Decider.

I got into Defector with this piece on queer and trans wrestlers dealing with regional anti-LGBTQ+ legislation as practitioners of a traveling business. 

I helped organize the Freelance Solidarity Project strike support campaign for the WGA and SAG/AFTRA strikes. 

Finally, one day I read a New York Times piece on trans kids at school, thought of my own kid at school, got real fucking mad, and sent a DM to the great organizer Eric Thurm. As a result, NYTLetter.com happened and humiliated the most important newspaper in the English-speaking world into (not completely but largely) knocking it the fuck off, no matter what the suits fucking say about it. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.

Happy new year everyone!

A group of writers across multiple disciplines have launched a campaign in solidarity with Palestinians against the ongoing war on Gaza. If you’d like to sign on as I have, please click here.

Not many actors can say they embodied a masterpiece in a few minutes of screentime. I certainly doubt that’s what Burt Young had in mind when he appeared on The Sopranos back in 2001. But the lovable Rocky alum’s turn as an ailing, elderly hitman who’s got one last burst of violence in him is getting held up as one of the veteran actor’s most memorable roles for a reason. In a handful of scenes in a one-off performance, Young gets his nicotine-stained fingers on nearly everything important aspect of the show. It’s a role seemingly written to illustrate what this show is about, with Young selected to give the demonstration.

I wrote about the late Burt Young’s one-episode role on The Sopranos as a microcosm of everything good about the show for Decider.

AI does not feel like the future, at least not the future I want. It feels like I’m watching a robot take a shit. It feels like I’m being forced to consume some kind of vile digital excrescence — a Silicon Valley Salò. Resnick, O’Brien, and Kelberman’s grotesque floating heads and their meaningless drivel got there ten years ago. It’s simply taken the real world this long to catch up, or more accurately, fall down.

I wrote about Live Forever as You Are Now with Alan Resnick, the old Adult Swim infomercial that predicted the vileness of AI to a tee

Pollo del Mar wants to be hated. As a bad guy (or heel) in the NWA—the National Wrestling Alliance, a professional wrestling company owned and operated by the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan (no shit!)—it’s her job to get heat, i.e. the boos and jeers and chants that separate professional wrestling’s villains from its heroes. There’s just one problem: She’s a drag queen, and it’s made her too popular. 

“I would love to be a true heel in the world of professional wrestling,” says Paul Pratt, Pollo’s real-world alter ego. “But it’s ultra-challenging, because the moment I walk through the curtain, people erupt. They know that drag queens are supposed to be sassy and bitchy, so even when I say horrible things to people, they’re like ‘Yass, bitch, read me for filth! The library is open!’ It’s so frustrating. I just called you a piece of trash! You’re not supposed to like it!”

For my Defector debut, I spoke with pro wrestlers Pollo del Mar, Nyla Rose, Anthony Bowens, Sonny Kiss, and Kidd Bandit about how they, and professional wrestling in general, are handling the anti-LGBTQ+ moral panic.

Right there you can see that Cloud’s range is astonishing, and this is what the contention that “he’s just playing himself” gets so wrong. Cloud and Fez may have had a similar vibe in casual conversation. But to access the comedic timing required to pull off that blackly hilarious interrogation scene, in which he conveys the largely accurate idea that the Jacobs’ lives are even more fucked up than his own? To convincingly portray a guy so thoughtful and attentive that a good girl like Lexi would grow closer to the town’s top drug dealer than to any of her own girlfriends? To voice the audience’s anguish as the adorable little psychopath Ashtray goes down in a hail of cop bullets? And to seem like exactly the right person for the job in every scenario? Any one of these tasks requires real talent, real effort, real work as an actor. Cloud did it all, and did it so seamlessly and so absent of ostentation that many viewers didn’t even notice his labor.

And when I say he’s the gateway between Euphoria-as-melodrama (complimentary) and Euphoria-as-thriller (also complimentary), I mean it. Take a look at the episode I consider to be the show’s masterpiece, the fifth ep of Season 2, “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird.” It’s a showcase for Zendaya first and foremost, as she first has a mortifying emotional battle with her friends and family when, first at her house and then at Lexi and her sister Cassie’s, they attempt interventions to get her clean. It’s absolutely savage work by Zendaya, as raw and riveting as any of the New Golden Age dramas of yore.

But by the end of the episode, all the manipulation and gaslighting and guilt-tripping is over. Rue’s no longer lambasting her mother for being a shitty parent or accusing her best friends of betraying her or airing out other kids’ dirty laundry to take the focus off of her — she’s on a high-speed foot chase with the cops, breaking into houses, jumping over fences, landing in catctuses, and generally participating in crime thriller antics. Again, the transition is so seamless that you barely realize you’re suddenly watching a different kind of show until you’re knee-deep in some unsuspecting family’s backyard with the police on your tail.

What happens in between? Fez. When Rue has exhausted all of her family and friends, it’s Fez she turns to. When she tries to rob Fez’s grandmother’s meds, it’s Fez who turns her away. She approaches him via the show’s first brand of ugliness, the reality of addiction and confrontation, and departs him for a journey deep into the second variety, the heightened kill-or-be-killed reality of a Boogie Nights, a Pulp Fiction, an American Psycho. Fez is the fulcrum.

I wrote about the late Angus Cloud and his crucial, wonderful work on Euphoria for Decider.

I’d read, and loved, a lot of fantasy novels before I made my way to Cook, and I applied many of the life lessons learned therein to my own life. (Not to mention my body: I have the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my left arm and the war cry of the Golden Company on my right.) Cook’s revisionist tendencies are of course influential to and present in the work of George R.R Martin, while I see a lot of Robert E. Howard’s earthy affect in Cook in turn. (Superhuman martial and coital prowess notwithstanding, Conan is nothing if not the original just-some-guy fantasy protagonist.)

But until I encountered Croaker and Company, I had never imagined that my own experience working for wizards, or for any of my other shitty bosses, could be captured in fantasy fiction.

The Taken, with their outsized personalities, unforgettable idiosyncrasies, and total lack of scruples? They’re Upstairs: the people who run the show, oblivious to the lives of those beneath them when they aren’t busy trying to make those lives worse. They all work together when they have to and do a terrifyingly good job of it, too, as awful people in our own world so often do. But when that need passes, they’re at each other’s throats, as awful people in our own world so often are. And no matter what, we’re forced to go along with their lunacy to earn a living, if not stay alive.

For my Blood Knife debut I went long on how Glen Cook’s Chronicles of the Black Company reflect the universal human experience of working for horrible bosses. (If you’ve ever been curious about my time at Wizard, this one’s for you.)

I don’t think I’ve posted about it here, but for the past couple of months I’ve been involved with a group of organizers from the Freelance Solidarity Project in developing ways we as culture writers, freelance or otherwise, can show solidarity with the striking workers of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. Their fight is our fight!

To that end, we developed a pledge people can publicly sign, agreeing to support the strikes in various ways through our writing. We also came up with a nice simple statement anyone can slap into any piece they write: “This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the [series/movie/etc] being covered here wouldn’t exist.“

If you’re in the position to do so — this includes podcasters, folks who write about TV and movies just for fun, you name it — please sign the pledge and start using the statement. Power to the writers, power to the actors, solidarity forever!

The other organizers of NYTLetter.com and I have released a final statement on our exchange with Times leadership regarding its coverage of trans people. It can be read here. Thank you for your support.

Speed Racer is a sight for sore eyes. Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s 2008 follow-up to The Matrix trilogy feels like an anticipatory antidote to a decade-plus of same-y superhero blockbusters kicked off by two of that year’s other major releases, The Dark Knight and Iron Man. Where the former was dour and the latter was merely workmanlike, Speed Racer feels like an explosion in a Skittles factory, edited to feel like a dream. From the start, shifting timelines flow in and out of one another, juxtaposing the high-speed auto racing that is the title character’s forte with flashbacks to his troubled childhood and Greek-chorus commentary from a slew of racing announcers in a panoply of languages. At varying points, the film depicts a futuristic city in which airborne vehicles soar between Day-Glo skyscrapers; a cross-country race that rockets from an underground catacomb to a sprawling desert to a treacherous ice cavern; and a boy and his pet chimpanzee getting hopped up on candy and riding a cart through a swarm of factory employees on Segways, while Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird” blasts in the background.

What you don’t see: gas pumps. Or fuel tank covers. Or exhaust pipes and the plumes of smoke that go with them. Or cars that either are or resemble real-world vehicles, giving their manufacturers the advertising power of product placement. Speed Racer’s futuristic world (its exact timeframe is unclear, but the dates affixed to various events in racing’s past place it in a sort of alternate future-past reality) has been effectively denuded of the propagandistic power of your average automobile-based movie. The carefree world of Pixar’s Cars looks like a Detroit-sponsored dystopia by comparison. No gas, no masters: The world Speed Racer creates runs entirely on science-fictional fuel.

I wrote about the feel-good fossil-fuel-free future of Speed Racer for Polygon.

After that, I was like, “Holy shit, there are no limits.”

I contributed to an oral history of the Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly by MEL Magazine’s Isabelle Kohn. Weird job, great times, fun article!

Money moves the plot of Spielberg’s Michael Crichton adaptation at an almost molecular level. Both the arrival of outsiders to Isla Nublar and the escape of the dinosaurs are motivated by cold, hard cash. After a velociraptor kills a worker in the opening scene of the film, his family launches a $20 million lawsuit against parent company InGen. We later learn from the park’s mousy lawyer, Donald Gennaro, that the incident gave the park’s insurance company and its investors second thoughts about backing the project, prompting the hiring of outside experts Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, and Ian Malcolm to inspect the park. Without the concerns about continued cash flow, our favorite paleontologist, paleobotanist, and mathematician would never have felt a single tyrannosaurus-foot impact.

“Spared no expense”: I wrote about Jurassic Park‘s carnivore capitalism for Polygon.

Dredging up Nightbreed from the depths of my personal canon at the present moment — imagining us in the place not of the pitchforks-and-torches humans but the gloriously bizarre creatures they choose to persecute — has given me unexpected solace. The post-coronavirus society in which I wish to live is one of herd immunity and mutual aid, one where workers whose vital services we take for granted are justly compensated for their indispensable labor, one where the art that sustains our spirit is created by artists we strive to support, one where health care and housing are recognized as universal rights.

I wrote about the Clive Barker film Nightbreed and our need to reimagine the post-apocalypse for the Outline.

Are professional wrestlers just the world’s most muscular theater kids? To quote wrestling legend “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, who appeared on last night’s episode of WWE’s Monday Night Raw: Hell yeah.

Broadcast live without an audience for the first time in history, both Monday Night Raw on the USA Network and last Friday’s episode of Smackdown on Fox stripped wrestling down to its bare essentials: a ring, a microphone, and wrestlers to use both. The result was less like the WWE’s usual played-to-the-rafters gladiatorial spectacle and more like tech week for a black-box production. It showcased the performers at their weirdest, wildest, and most, well, theatrical.

I wrote about the strangeness of wrestling without crowds for Vulture.

When I think about Stephen King’s The Stand, which I have done with some frequency since I first read it in 1994, there’s one passage that always leaps out at me. It’s a description of the novel’s villain, Randall Flagg, a bad guy with such a magnetic presence that King would reuse him across nearly a dozen other books and stories in various guises. In The Stand he’s effectively the Anti-Christ, an ancient, grinning, denim-clad psychopath with magical powers. With little or no knowledge of who and what he really was, Flagg wove in and out of 20th Century America’s violent fringe movements — he was a member of the group that kidnapped and brainwashed Patti Hearst, for example — before emerging to lead a totalitarian nation-state based in Las Vegas (!) after a weaponized flu virus wipes out over 99 percent of the world’s population.

It’s during this phase of his life, which we experience in the pages of The Stand, that Flagg takes unto him his bride, a schoolteacher named Nadine Cross, who for reasons unclear (to her, him, and the reader) had been destined all her life to wind up in his clutches. During the grotesque and violent consummation of their relationship, his human shape melts away, revealing the demon beneath. This shatters Nadine’s sanity, but it also provides her with piercingly clear vision of this supposedly all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful entity’s chief limitation: He’s a moron.

…and now it was the shaggy face of a demon lolling just above her face, a demon with glaring yellow lamps for eyes, windows into a hell never even considered, and still there was that awful good humor in them, eyes that had watched down the crooked alleys of a thousand tenebrous night towns; those eyes were glaring and glinting and finally stupid.

Forgive me for the oft-repeated comparison I am about to make — I am but a writer of thinkpieces, and such is our lot — but does that sound like anyone you know?

I wrote about Stephen King’s The Stand and Our Present Moment for the Outline.