One true highlight of the festival for me was the chance to talk with energetic young artists and filmmakers at the various parties around town throughout the week. During Saturday’s press luncheon I had a fun conversation with the talented actor Antonio Marziale, who recently starred in the 2018 Netflix film
Alex Strangelove, just a day after I’d watched his edgy new gay short film
Starfuckers, which he also wrote and directed. His daring short shows a ton of promise by crafting an atmospheric Hollywood revenge tale that’s both innovative and distinctively rendered in a poetically compressed timeframe. Later at the filmmaker party on Saturday night, I also enjoyed talking with Fredgy Noël about her new short documentary
The House of Labeija, which re-contextualizes some key members of that legendary drag-ball house, first introduced to the world in Jennie Livingston’s 1991 classic documentary
Paris Is Burning. I’d been teaching my students in my summer course about Crystal Labeija, the house’s founder, only a week ago, so I look forward to seeing Fredgy’s short when it begins streaming at noon today on the festival’s website for viewers anywhere in the world to watch.
Provincetown has always been and still remains today a collectivity of inspired and spirited misfits, coming together at the edge of the world to advance our creativity and create social and artistic change. As a longtime resident of Boston, I’ve been a regular year-round visitor to Provincetown for nearly three decades now, and I’ve been attending and reviewing the annual film festival for almost two of those decades. (The festival will soon be celebrating its 25
th year in 2023.) Witnessing the collaboration of everyone who organizes such a fantastic film festival every year has provided me with many real lessons in community-building, and what a unique community of people it continues to be. As this year’s Filmmaker on the Edge honoree Luca Guadagnino hilariously summed it up during his conversation with John Waters at Sunday’s awards ceremony, “The only two people here who aren’t perverted are you and me, John.”
Although I was born just a decade after the release of The Beach Boys’ 1962 debut album
Surfin’ Safari, their music always felt to me kind of like the playfully distant past, steeped as it is in a carefully cultivated sense of pop nostalgia. Nevertheless, the legendary story and career of Brian Wilson still retain a certain allure for me, and it’s clear why so many other longtime listeners are equally drawn in by his continued trajectory through pop music history. Brent Wilson’s recent documentary
Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road presents perhaps the most personal view of Brian Wilson’s contributions to that history, a truly close-up portrait in terms of artistry, musicianship, and emotion, along with insightful analysis and commentary from the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Don Was, Linda Perry, Jakob Dylan, and even Nick Jonas (whose own career was launched, just like Wilson’s, in a popular band with his two brothers). The result is a film that’s intimate, moving, and at times heartbreaking in its exploration of Wilson’s art and world.
Brian Wilson’s guide and sidekick throughout the documentary is
Rolling Stone writer and editor Jason Fine, whose easygoing and gently calibrated interviewing style helps to relax Wilson’s nerves and allay his anxieties about participating in the film, a very particular sort of skill that Fine has developed since Brian Wilson has been his “beat” at
Rolling Stone since 1995. The majority of the documentary shows the two hanging out over a series of interview lunches at the Beverly Glen Deli, and mostly just driving around the streets of Los Angeles with a dashboard camera to revisit key landmarks from Wilson’s past, while talking and listening to music together. The ultimate impression those conversations leave is that Wilson must be among the sweetest musicians on the planet, one whose persona and disposition have been characteristically misunderstood by some throughout his time in the music industry, while also being unrelentingly championed by others who could see and understand the full picture. In examining both Wilson’s music and prominent factors from his upbringing and family,
Long Promised Road travels some significant mileage to provide many important details and subtly fill in those gaps.
The aspect of Wilson’s experience that moved me most is just how much he’s survived, and how much loss he’s faced. His brothers Dennis and Carl (his closest Beach Boys bandmates, alongside band members Al Jardine and Mike Love) had both died at relatively early ages, dual tragedies that still register painfully in his eyes when Fine asks about his brothers. Wilson remarks that he wants to hear Dennis’ only solo album released during his lifetime, 1977’s celebrated
Pacific Ocean Blue, when they get back to his house because he says that he’s never listened to it before at all, astoundingly, perhaps a willful avoidance of the memories it might dredge up. He sits back and listens intently and excitedly, clearly impressed with the songs as Fine streams them for him on a laptop. Based on Fine’s praise, I went back after watching the film and listened to Dennis’ “River Song,” the album’s opening track, and it’s indeed a fantastic creation that obviously owes a debt to Brian Wilson’s orchestrations of The Beach Boys’ classics in the studio years before.
Similarly, the film’s commentaries by fellow musicians gave me a whole new appreciation for Brian Wilson’s craftsmanship on some of the best songs from The Beach Boys’ catalog: “Good Vibrations” (which I previously had no idea was recorded at
four different studios from verse to chorus to verse, but I can definitely hear that element in the song now), “California Girls,” “Long Promised Road,” the endlessly haunting “In My Room,” “Sail On Sailor,” and especially the seminal numbers from 1966’s
Pet Sounds like “God Only Knows,” which famed music producer Don Was breaks down into separate vocal and instrumental tracks to demonstrate how ingeniously they’re layered. Bruce Springsteen speaks precisely about how the songs gave Wilson access to “the joyfulness of an emotional life,” which he could then share with listeners. The great singer-songwriter and producer Linda Perry perceptively notes how Brian Wilson’s competitive spirit has kept him in the game all the way up to the present moment, a competition not just with The Beatles’ album
Rubber Soul, but mainly with himself. She comments that when she watches Wilson perform today, she sees not age but “fucking history, and continuing to make history.”
That thought returns to the notion of survival. Wilson and Fine openly address Wilson’s history of mental illness and his eventual diagnosis with schizoaffective disorder. Wilson mentions that from his youth onward, he would hear voices in his head taunting him and criticizing him, which seems linked to how his father, who’d managed The Beach Boys early on in their career, would verbally abuse him and often took things too far. For a sensitive artist like Wilson, it’s as though his mind became entrenched in a form of post-traumatic stress in the wake of that intense early criticism that he’d internalized. Wilson was fortunate to meet and marry his second wife Melinda just as his mental health was hitting its lowest point, a relationship that’s consummately recreated by actors John Cusack and Elizabeth Banks in the 2014 Wilson biopic
Love & Mercy. Melinda has remained a steadfast partner and loving guardian to Wilson ever since, and the couple have adopted and raised several children together. As Elton John remarks, Wilson deserves as much praise for the integrity of his personal life as he’s received for the brilliance of his music.
After I watched the documentary, I noticed how many film critics online mentioned in their reviews that they found Wilson’s seeming lack of responsiveness to Fine’s interview questions to be “frustrating” because Wilson often simply states (and re-states) plain facts rather than rationalizing. Yet that seems to miss the point of Fine’s intentionally delicate, intuitive approach to interviewing Wilson, an approach that wisely takes the issue of neurodiversity into account. I’d suggest that the important part isn’t just documenting
what Wilson says when he responds during interviews with Fine, but rather showing
how exactly Wilson responds. For instance, there’s a stunning moment when Fine tells Wilson that Jack Rieley, who’d managed The Beach Boys at one point and also helped to produce their 1973 album
Holland, had recently died. Wilson lets it sink in, says he wasn’t aware, asks how Rieley died, and stares ahead blankly. Then we realize that he’s quickly wiping away tears. A minute or two later, he says to Fine that it broke his heart to learn of Jack Rieley’s death, and it’s clear that Wilson is someone whose mind just processes emotions differently, and therefore causes him to express his emotions differently. Earlier in the film, he also tells Fine that it’s been three years since he’s had a friend simply to sit and talk with, and then we know where the profound solitude, insularity, and loneliness at the heart of a song like “In My Room” arises from. I think it’s something that every wonderful musician who still performs with Brian Wilson on stage today seems perfectly aware of, and it’s something that the audiences who enthusiastically embrace his live performances at his concerts know as well. They’re amazed and grateful that he’s still here to create and perform for us despite the difficulties, and Brian Wilson is just as amazed and appreciative that he’s made it through everything, too.
With the pandemic continuing throughout 2021, it was another highly unusual year for cinema, as movie theaters here in New England faced lengthy (and often quite sudden) shutdowns and hesitant re-openings as public health parameters shifted locally and globally. Some cinemas and theater chains didn’t survive those changes and the subsequent loss of film audiences when more people retreated to streaming films online at home. Somehow, I was able to keep myself going to see movies in person at cinemas throughout nearly the entire year, though the rollout of worthwhile new films was slow and halting, as film companies carefully measured and re-calibrated what might be worth releasing and when. Release schedules continued to get jostled around as film releases were postponed and timed for when they might get the best kind of audience response at the box office. Therefore, as with my year-end post for 2020, just three movies lingered with me most throughout 2021, and in each case, I was drawn to them as much for their subtle emotional pull as for their narrative and visual craft. I felt like these movies spoke to my own levels of sadness at the ongoing state of the world and offered some consolation and distant yet intimate company via their artistry.
It’s fitting that Heidi Ewing’s moving and relatively little-seen gay Mexican immigrant romantic saga
I Carry You with Me was my favorite movie in a year when Jane Campion’s much-lauded, quasi-gay Western tragic epic
The Power of the Dog could win Best Picture (and Best Director) at the Oscars. While Campion’s novel-like film is certainly finely made, intricately deployed, and superbly acted, its mystifying effect on the mostly straight audience that I saw it with seemed to be its intended goal, whereas a gay male viewer like me could easily see the planted curveballs coming.
I Carry You with Me has fewer tricks up its sleeve, perhaps because it wears its heart more openly there, which isn’t to say that it’s a simple story, nor one that’s simply conceived. Based on the actual relationship of two of Ewing’s gay friends, Iván (Armando Espitia) and Gerardo (Christian Vásquez), a chef and a teacher, respectively, the film follows the two young men from their initial meeting at a club in Puebla, Mexico in the ’80s through their struggles to immigrate to New York City, to nearly the present day and their celebration of their time together running a restaurant there. I was engrossed in their story and right with them every step of the way, and the immigration scenes especially were some of most powerful I’ve seen on film. Their romance is equally well-developed and sincere, at a time when more movies still need that sort of earnest depiction of gay male characters.
Drama and hardship aren’t left out of the picture, of course, since Iván is a closeted and married father of a young son when he and Gerardo first meet, and both face intense and overt familial homophobia during their youth and upbringings. Machismo and the masculine pressure to conform in erasing any form of effeminacy in boys runs rampant throughout the culture, one in which fathers like Gerardo’s and Iván’s are pressured to punish and cruelly abandon their own young sons for the boys’ inability to meet their society’s unfair masculine standards. For that reason, it’s also quite uplifting and reaffirming to watch a gay film in which the characters can all transcend those hardships and eventually overcome their obstacles to actualize their dreams. The moment when Iván’s chance at fulfilling his ambitions finally arrives by happenstance in the kitchen of a Manhattan restaurant was perhaps the most moved I felt at the cinema this past year.
The best innovation of the movie is the twist in its latter half, when we meet the characters in their older incarnations; rather than using actors, all of the characters are simply portrayed at that point in the film by the real-life people themselves. It’s the perfect way for Ewing to balance the often dreamlike tone of the film’s first half and to allow these two men to claim their own story, as well as giving the audience a true opportunity to get to know them. (Also, it makes sense that the director would shift into documentary mode since her best-known previous films were documentaries.) Despite the acclaim that
I Carry You with Me received at the Sundance Film Festival and at a few other awards ceremonies, it’s dispiriting that the movie earned under $200,000 at the box office upon its official mid-year release, which had been delayed by several months. Cinemas across much of the country were still just beginning to open up again at that point, and audiences were still somewhat wary of going to see movies in person at a movie theater, so clearly those factors were part of why few people have found the film. In an ideal world that would surely not be the case because this is an artfully rendered and deeply human movie that deserves to be widely seen.
Robin Wright’s
Land, her feature directorial debut, was actually one of the first films that I saw at a cinema up in Maine in 2021, way back in late February, just after a shutdown of several months had closed the cinemas there. I didn’t expect to be as emotionally affected by the movie as I was, probably due to a combination of the film’s subject matter, the circumstances in which I watched it by myself in the back row of an almost empty theater, and mainly seeing it at the time when I did, during the first winter of isolation and solitude at the worst point in the pandemic. Just as central to the movie’s power is Wright’s enduring performance as Edee, full of soul and gravity, which lasts for the entire length of the film. Even more impressive, perhaps, is how nearly all of the movie takes place at a single location, inside and around a small cabin high up in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming (though the actual filming location was in Alberta, Canada).
Edee has retreated there from city life, determined to live in the mountains alone on her own terms, in spite of the difficult conditions and warnings from a local man who drives her up the mountain and hesitantly drops her off. Much to its advantage, the film doesn’t reveal the reason why Edee has fled her former life until almost the end of the film; she only mentions that she didn’t want to be around any other people. She experiences some peace in autumn and tries to grow more accustomed to living on the land. As the season turns brutal and her winter alone on the mountain takes serious hold, however, her situation indeed disintegrates rapidly from grim to desperate to catastrophic. On some level, we know that her plan for this to happen was semi-intentional, that she in fact no longer wanted to be alive, and yet she’s able to force herself to continue to survive by focusing on thoughts of her sister Emma, to whom she speaks early in the movie before going permanently off the grid.
Her character comes quite close to meeting a painfully gruesome and untimely end, and then she’s saved by a shy and kind-hearted local hunter named Miguel (played by the extraordinary Mexican actor Demián Bichir) and his caring but skeptical friend Alawa (Sarah Dawn Pledge), who’s a nurse in a nearby town. After Edee’s health gradually returns, Edee and Miguel become friendly over time and begin to open up to one another, with all the right notes of chemistry and trust between the actors, until Miguel eventually disappears from Edee’s life without notice or explanation. She soon persuades herself to try to track him down, once she’s feeling fortified enough to interact with other human beings again and face civilization. I typically resist movies that seem to pile on the heaviness, but where the film went next in briefly re-connecting Edee with Miguel made perfect sense to me, again an absolute testament to the strength of the acting. By the end, the movie becomes a study in grief and how we navigate it, share it, help each other survive it, and then if we’re lucky, how we attempt to emerge from the shadow of it and move on. Although the source of Edee’s grief is far more tragic than anything that I’ve ever lived through, I related instantly and intuitively to her feeling of being unable to persist anymore, and I felt inspired by how she finds a sense of resolve through her friendship with Miguel to gently push herself forward. Not many films have made me cry twice, but
Land was one of them.
The Green Knight, based on the medieval English narrative poem about young Sir Gawain, is the latest film that I’ve loved by David Lowery, who’s among the best American filmmakers working today. As with his previous films
A Ghost Story and
The Old Man & the Gun, Lowery again constructs a picaresque adventure tale in a way that’s never really been presented before, handling the inherent slipperiness of time and the scope of humanity in relation to it with both inventiveness and a relaxed sensibility that embraces subtlety and abstraction. His relationship to the original tale of Sir Gawain is grounded enough for all the signposts of the legendary Arthurian romance to remain recognizable, yet he reimagines and expands on plenty of the details to place his own cinematic mark on the text. The casting of Dev Patel as Sir Gawain, certainly, puts a significant contemporary spin on Gawain’s journey to find the Green Chapel where the treelike and thick-trunked Green Knight (resonantly voiced by Ralph Ineson) lushly resides, after Gawain swiftly beheaded him as a challenge during a dinnertime tale-telling at his uncle King Arthur’s Christmas feast. The deal is that the Green Knight will then return the blow and strike Sir Gawain’s neck to behead him in exchange exactly one year later.
From the importance of honor to the enduring power of nature, the various literary meanings and interpretations linger as echoes throughout the movie, while Sir Gawain’s own legend spreads throughout the land and he becomes a kind of medieval celebrity whose quirky, youthful abandon makes him crush-worthy and enviable. Puppet shows pop up in towns across the countryside, where children crowd in to watch playful re-enactments of the Green Knight’s beheading and foreshadow the one that’s predicted to befall Sir Gawain in return. Along his winding quest to find the Green Chapel, Gawain encounters a skeleton at the crossroads swaying in a rusty iron cage, a band of punky thieves and swindlers who plunder his goods and leave him for dead, an ominous talking fox as his somewhat faithful guide and sidekick, naked giants who roam silently across the land, and a Gothic castle with a Lord (Joel Edgerton) and Lady (Alicia Vikander) who share a seductive interest in Sir Gawain that’s both platonic and sexual, prompting a rather special appearance of Gawain’s magical green cloth belt that gives him his trademark brand of mojo throughout the film. Vikander appears in two roles in the movie: as the mysterious Lady who heightens Sir Gawain’s erotic experiences on a new and more electric level, while having also portrayed his peasant lover Essel earlier in the film.
The style of the movie reminded me more authentically of the totally awesome ’80s adventure tales like
Labyrinth and
The Dark Crystal than any other movie I’ve seen since then, though scores of other films have attempted to approximate that winning formula and fallen short of achieving it. (Lowery has also professed to being a major fan of Ron Howard’s 1988 fantasy epic
Willow.) But the detail-rich imagery and mesmerizing auras that Lowery evokes throughout
The Green Knight are far more ambitious and maturely realized than any of its well-meaning predecessors. The payoff when Sir Gawain finally arrives to kneel before the Green Knight in the secluded oasis of his Green Chapel feels both knowingly subdued and grandly opulent. It’s a finale that takes its time with plenty of silence and a sense of dutiful purpose, before it segues via Sir Gawain’s momentary panic into one of the greatest “my life flashed before my eyes” sequences that’s ever been committed to film, as Gawain is plunged headlong into ruling his own kingdom and the ensuing waves of public chaos and familial tragedy and personal loss. How the movie allows Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to peacefully part ways and take their leave of one another aspires to a higher notion of storytelling. Rather than simply proclaiming Gawain’s honor for his courage and willingness to lay down his life as promised, the film’s ending also asks us what it means to let someone fulfill his own narrative mission, as well as what it means to have mercy on the brave and vulnerable who surround us.
The return of the excellent GlobeDocs film festival here in Boston this past weekend found the
Boston Globe’s annual documentary film festival in its seventh incarnation and its first “hybrid” year, with select films screening in person at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline and the Brattle in Harvard Square, as well as streaming virtually online, so that viewers could watch some additional films remotely at home. The three documentaries that I enjoyed most in this year’s festival are also the films that I’d most anticipated watching, and as always, the subject matter was rich and diverse: from tracing acclaimed pop singer/songwriter Alanis Morissette’s rise to stardom over 25 years ago in
Jagged, to exploring the lives and works of celebrated LGBTQ comic book artists and graphic novelists in
No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics, to movingly recreating via animation the turbulent immigrant journey of a young gay man from Afghanistan in the brilliant
Flee.
I’d been curious to watch Alison Klayman’s
Jagged ever since Alanis Morissette publicly denounced the film last month and somewhat distanced herself from its depiction of her life from her teenage years to the present, saying that she wouldn’t be appearing at any film festivals or release events in support of the documentary. Alanis is candidly interviewed in her home for a good portion of the movie, and I can imagine that such in-depth interviews do probably get fairly tiresome over time, especially when trying to articulate one’s personal views on such long-ago memories. Then when they’re shaped into a filmmaker’s own narrative, re-sequenced, and subjected to editing, often what the interview subject intended to convey can come across quite differently. Morissette mentioned that being interviewed during the pandemic after the birth of her third child also made it more difficult to feel emotionally steady throughout the filming.
This is especially true when the topic of Alanis’ early relationship experiences with older men who were involved in her career arises. She’s already handled that sensitive subject expertly in the lyrics of her own songs, both in one of her first runaway hits, “You Oughta Know,” and what I consider to be the finest song in her catalog, “Hands Clean.” While she makes a point of saying that she chose never to be vindictive in those songs or to publicly shame anyone in particular, she also looks back and realizes how vulnerable she was when she was still just a teenager. Those songs were intended as a clear warning to younger and underage women about the kinds of predatory dangers that seem to be dressed up in the guise of some romantic pursuits, and in a way, Morissette was a boldly prophetic figure of the #MeToo movement long before it existed as such. In part, this was an aspect of her music that helped shape her appeal to her core audience.
Jagged focuses mostly, however, on the album release and extensive worldwide tour for
Jagged Little Pill back in the mid-’90s, and how exactly she became associated with her co-writer and producer Glen Ballard while landing a record deal with Madonna’s Maverick “boutique” label. We see plenty of archival footage of Alanis and the guys in her touring band back in those days. If there’s an aspect of her life that the documentary left me wanting to learn more about, it was her relationships, but for the reasons mentioned above, it’s also obvious why she would now be working diligently to keep those kinds of details about her life strictly private. The film does cover some of Morissette’s family life in her early years growing up in Canada, now perhaps juxtaposed with the shots of a savvy businesswoman speedily handwriting her way through boxes of special-edition autographed vinyl copies of
Jagged Little Pill at her home before they’re shipped off to fans. Despite that distancing, the film does close with a very sweet rendition of her recent song “Ablaze” while she’s holding her young daughter and performing the song remotely for Jimmy Fallon’s late-night talk show. I was hoping to see more about that side of Alanis.
For its very different approach to a pop cultural rise into mainstream visibility, I found Vivian Kleiman’s
No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics both informative and entertaining. I’ve always paid only peripheral attention to comics as an artistic medium, so the documentary was more of a learning experience for me at times. The film provides a consummate overview of the history of how LGBTQ comics gradually transformed from an underground, anti-censorship driven phenomenon in the wake of the Stonewall Riots into a widespread communal artistic enterprise in the ’80s and ’90s, and finally to gaining mainstream recognition through the event of a cultural touchstone like Alison’s Bechdel’s
Fun Home (and its ensuing, Tony Award-winning musical stage adapation) over the past fifteen years or so. A wide array of cartoonists and graphic novelists are interviewed, both from a roster of older, more established comic book artists and a diverse line-up of younger emerging “next generation” LGBTQ figures as well.
I was particularly interested in seeing some of the inner processes of drawing and reproduction that go into making graphic novels, which the interviews with Alison Bechdel detail in fairly intricate fashion, showing elements of her hand-drawn style in close-ups while she’s working. Another figure who’s central to the documentary and whose work was fairly new to me was Howard Cruse. The founder and editor of the
Gay Comix anthologies in the early ’80s, as well as his own well-known gay comics creation
Wendel, he’s referred to in the documentary as “the godfather of gay comics” and sadly died quite recently near the end of 2019, when the documentary was in the process of being completed. He seemed to be an ongoing fixture in the LGBTQ comic book community that many of his contemporaries and younger artists sought out for advice about the business. We also see some moving domestic scenes of him and his longtime partner hanging out together at home in their older years, alongside corresponding images from a comic book that he created about older gay people who are often left out of the cultural LGBTQ discussion.
I’d heard wonderful things about
Flee, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary about his friend Amin Nawabi, who grew up in Kabul as a boy, immigrated with his family to Russia to escape war-torn Afghanistan, and then eventually settled as an asylum-seeker in Denmark. Winner of the Documentary Jury Prize for World Cinema at Sundance, the film certainly lived up to all of its advance notice. In addition to rendering the director’s own extensive present-day retrospective interviews with Amin in a calm animated palette of (mostly) soft pastels, the movie reimagines Amin’s own earliest memories from 1984, when he’s running through the streets of Kabul with his Walkman and listening to the band A-ha’s notorious New Wave classic “Take on Me” in his earphones as a young child, up through roughly 1995, when he finally successfully flees from Moscow to Copenhagen as a teenager after a halting series of attempts to immigrate, harrowing setbacks in dark forests and on stormy oceans, and the various struggles and re-connections with his family. During his adolescence as he’s watching Jean-Claude van Damme action movies on television alongside his older brother, Amin also gradually begins to realize that he’s gay while gazing at the images of the muscular actor. Amin’s sexual identity is an important aspect of the film that underscores and highlights all of Amin’s other qualities and perceptions: his shyness, his melancholy, and his attentiveness, as he starts to grasp his own sense of outsiderdom on numerous levels.
Even in the context of animation, the documentary retains its sweeping narrative scope, yet we come to know Amin most closely through the moments of his smallest but most significant encounters and reminiscences. For instance, late in the film when he secretly flees toward Copenhagen as a refugee, he’s being covertly transported and smuggled in a vehicle with another young man, who’s slightly older than Amin, as his only fellow passenger. The two are talking quietly while lying down side-by-side on the floor of the truckbed so as not to be seen, and the other nameless youth notices that Amin is entranced by his gold necklace, which he then sweetly and generously gives to Amin as a gift just before they part ways to their two separate destinations at the airport. Amin laments that he never even found out the name of the other young man since Amin’s memory of him had such a profound and lasting effect on his life. Amin eventually goes to university, does post-doctoral work at Princeton, speaks at conferences about his experiences, and marries his husband Kasper in Denmark to settle down together in the countryside, when the animation on the screen briefly shifts to an actual shot of the trees and waterfront where they live. In the opening voiceover of the documentary, Amin equates home with safety, and it’s clear by the end of the film that he’s finally found both.
Christina Pugh’s fifth and latest collection of poetry,
Stardust Media, is also for me her finest, though I could honestly say that about all of Pugh’s previous books, too, because fineness is the central quality that links her five volumes stylistically, at the level of attention, perception, and intelligence. Whenever I begin reading one of Christina’s books for the first time, I know that those properties are inherent from the start, so I never feel as if any grand proclamations about the work are even necessary since I know its character intuitively at the outset. I met Christina Pugh exactly twenty years ago now, when we taught a course together at Emerson College back in the spring of 2001, and I already admired Christina’s poetry at that point in time as well; therefore, I’m honored that we’ve remained close friends over the past two decades, through correspondence, phone conversations, and in-person reunions, mostly for dinners, poetry readings, and visits to the cinema. (I use the word “close” intentionally, in part because I consider Christina to be a true practitioner of the art of closeness. These days, that art is increasingly rare.) Our friendship has persisted across distances and weathered the changes and upheavals that we’ve witnessed both nationally and globally throughout that span of time. Only a few months after we taught our course together, the events of 9/11 transpired when Christina was living and teaching on Staten Island, and in a certain sense, it feels like that was the incipient moment of everything we’ve all endured culturally since then. As Christina writes at the end of “My Twenty-First Century,” the poem that opens
Stardust Media, “When the towers blazed, / I’d stood on the shoreline, seared as I had ever / Been, and carefully watched that smoke cross the water.”
Awarded the prestigious Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press in Amherst,
Stardust Media was released in April of 2020, right after the world had initially shut down for our ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. After living through the past year and a half of intermittent lockdowns and quarantines, vaccinations and their days of after-effects, continually exhausting news cycles, and widespread social interiority as we all retreated into our own private spaces, the deeply insightful poems in
Stardust Media now make me feel like it’s a prophetic book. Thematically, Pugh’s focus throughout the collection fixates on our contemporary networks and technologies, the various forms of social and visual media that connect and separate us simultaneously. Her stance is equally one of openness and resistance to the types of sweeping changes that those technologies have brought to our culture and to the art that we create; the poems are both engaged critiques and participatory observations. Pugh does not exempt herself from our digital landscape, which would be the easy decision for a poet to make. Rather, she endorses and questions earnestly her own place within it, which doesn’t mean, of course, that her own position is always comfortable. When one of the poems in the book is titled “I Don’t Know How to Make a Website,” we know the sort of interrogative and self-reflective territory that we’re in.
That particular poem, actually, is one I’ve kept returning to, mainly for its direct association with Robert Frost’s brilliant sonnet “Design.” Pugh’s poem counterpoints “website” with “web-sight,” and a contemplation of spiders and the secret hazy cobwebs they spin opens the connection to the “dimpled spider, fat and white,” holding up a moth on a white heal-all in Frost’s poem, an image that encouraged Frost to wonder about the origins of its symbolism in one of his greatest questions: “What but design of darkness to appall? — / If design govern in a thing so small.” Pugh’s own response couldn’t be any richer: “An
if around design, that / white heal-all, keeps haloing the web-sight.” It’s a perfect metaphor for Pugh’s poetry itself, a kind of literally intricate web-weaving, suspended up in a tucked away corner for those who seek it out, softening the angles of the room, gauzing our gaze as we sharpen our vision to see it more clearly, in order to match Pugh’s artful vision. She guides her readers to that point and trusts them from there.
Perhaps that’s why, a little bit later in the book, Pugh tells us straightforwardly that “Frost would have junked the telescope.” As much as she looks outward (at nature and art, at color and light, at shape and texture), she’s essentially an inward-looking writer, a poet of complex human nuances and details. “I love my life in a nautilus shell,” she writes in one poem, plainly and revealingly. That’s not to say I would ever situate her with the people of our current younger generation who’ve tunneled and burrowed so far inward via social media. Pugh’s book is titled
Stardust Media for a reason, instead of some other brand of more familiar or less evocative media. The collection’s title poem, which takes its epigraph from Cocteau Twins’ vocalist Elizabeth Fraser, pushes toward the boundaries of the transcendent that we most often find through music, and certainly through the Cocteau Twins’ songs that devise their own language; “the Sirens would have / never sung in words — so their semitones / unspooled the way that bodies pool and crash / together, raptured after sex.” Other well-known musicians appear throughout the book, from the realms of pop, folk, blues, and alternative rock: Kurt Cobain, Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, Charley Patton, Steely Dan, and most transfixingly, in a sequel to the book’s title poem, Ian Curtis of Joy Division (“he reached for / a magnetic field from far within that foaming [. . .] // place a stone inside / the music”). Together, they all provide a sort of under-voice for the collection, or maybe they even loosely cohere as a disparate chorus of the underworld, an inverted heaven that the book’s title again seems to suggest.
If those aural spirits provide
Stardust Media with its haunting soundtrack, then the volume’s plethora of visuals construct for us its endless chain of glowing screens of every size, our handheld devices and laptops with their luminescent wallpaper. Early in the collection, “Smartphone Inlet” presages that trend through a deft comparison of embroidery to texting, reaching back for contrast through history to eras when “women / would brood like robins on inchoate / letters pulled airily from cloth,” but whose “words were never / lit from within, the way that ours are.” Pugh dances back and forth from the clack and chime of a manual typewriter’s carriage in “Toll,” to stolid Ohio barns along the interstate highway (“Sky-blue / with white roofs. Wait, isn’t sky-blue brighter / than any sky you really see?”), to a meditation on Krzysztof Kieslowski’s cinematic masterpiece
Blue, to “the promiscuity of television,” naturally, “its screen, I mean, since it flickers to anyone.” And so our present-day technologies are met in Pugh’s poems, ultimately, with a democratizing embrace, although more tangible physical artifacts also maintain their foothold: Italian Renaissance art, handcrafted lace, Luigi Ghirri’s photographs, James Turrell’s geometrical lightscape installations, the spotlit set design accompanying a stage production of David Lang’s composition “Where you go,” which inspires a moving dedication to Pugh’s husband, Richard DelVisco (alongside echoes of another major theme of the book, the recent death of Christina’s father).
