My final column at Film Comment: on Jonathan Demme’s Citizens Band

As some of you may be aware, Film Comment is going on an “indefinite” hiatus during this uncertain time. There have been a lot of layoffs at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Lincoln Center itself is struggling. While this is very upsetting news – not just for me personally (although that too) – but for all the hard-working editors and production people over at Film Comment, who have done their damndest to keep things going, hosting a daily podcast talking to critics about what they’re watching while they shelter-in-place (I was a guest on one of them, to talk about Jean Arthur and Dead Ringers, because that’s what the weirdness of quarantine has brought me to), as well as putting together what may very well by the final issue of the magazine, the magazine that has been around for almost 60 years. It’s devastating. I have a gigantic piece in the final magazine (I wrote about the difficulties of writing it in this frightening time), and so I’m proud to at least be a part of this historic moment. Maybe Film Comment will come back. There was an outcry against the announcement. We are losing so much, stuff that won’t come again, media has already collapsed, outlets are no more … without these things, what will we become? As everything gets corporatized, as corporations take over independent voices, we ALL lose.

I am so grateful I spent the last year writing my column. Every two weeks it came out. It is now a healthy archive (next month will mark the one-year anniversary of “Present Tense”), and at least I got to do it for a year, and not just a couple of months. There’s enough there for a book, and many of them are pieces I have wanted to write for decades (in some cases; like the one on 1970s tomboys). I am especially proud to have been the first person to dig into Sylvia Plath’s heretofore-unknown cinephilia. I didn’t want to just use the column to spout my opinion. That piece involved mounds of original research from primary texts. I’m proud that I wrote about things not just interesting to other film critics, but to people from other disciplines – poetry, and … hockey. I highlighted female directors like Martha Coolidge, Sophia Takal, and Maryam Shahriar, and I wrote about little-known and under-seen films I have wanted to celebrate for years: Arizona Dream, Used Cars, Angel Baby, Out of the Blue, and What Happened Was…. I wrote about acting topics which have always fascinated me, as well as small things I’ve wanted to highlight: the romantic subtext of Ripley and Hicks in Aliens, Frank O’Hara’s love of movies, moments of “back-ting” in cinema, the genius acting of female comedians, the art of the death scene, and watching a film alone as opposed to with an audience. I’ve also highlighted actors I’ve always wanted to write about: from Marlon Brando’s physicality to Jean Arthur’s voice, the torment of Nick Nolte, Kristen Stewart’s magic, and the threatened-vulnerable-hyper-machismo of Matthias Schoenaerts. Woven into all of these pieces are things I’ve been thinking about for a long time: loneliness, mental illness, the damage that gender norms do (in the pieces on Matthias Schoenaerts, tomboys, Daughters of the Sun), the “Miracle on Ice,” Edward Hopper, the essential work of Olivia Laing, the beautiful-agonizing tension between men and women, acting technique, David Foster Wallace, the importance of teenage-girl fans, Walt Whitman, I even threw in a paragraph on Jensen Ackles’ genius in Supernatural … you know: Me. My fingerprint. I always want you to know a piece is by me. If I only had to write about film, I’d be bored out of my mind.

And there’s more. Outliers. Martin Scorsese’s recent Bob Dylan concert film, Rolling Thunder Revue, and an interview with Memphis director Brett Hanover about his documentary-hybrid Rukus.

So I closed out the column with a piece on a film I adore, Jonathan Demme’s wonderful ensemble film Citizens Band (aka Handle with Care), an underseen 1977 film, early on in Demme’s career, starring a gorgeous Paul Le Mat. They don’t make movies like that anymore.

Thank you all for reading.