Drama · Eco · Eco-horror · Essays
Scars and Their Stories: Exploring a Scene from Jaws
What does a scar tell us about a person? Where they’ve been, what they’ve been through, the style in which they conduct their lives. A scar is a reminder, an[…]
Category: Essays
Human Sacrifice in Brigadoon: The Fate of Harry Beaton
Brigadoon is a quasi-origin story that is closely associated with the way stories transform the reality of the recent past. Communities, societies, and nations survive by means of having sacrificial[…]
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Activist & Political · African American · Essays · Franchises & Series · Race · SF & Fantasy · SF/Fantasy · Societal Trends
Star Trek: Voyager – “Tuvix” and the Warped Humanities
If Deep Space 9 demonstrates how the casting of African American commanders in chief – and their election – may constitute or create a backlash disguised as “progress,” it has[…]
Directors · Drama · Essays · Writers & Critics
He’s Thinking of Ending Things: Charlie Kaufman’s Breakup Letter to an Entire Age
Where Reid spends pages and pages absentmindedly ruminating on the many very painful, and very human, distinctions between Self and Other before losing himself in a tonal mess of relationship[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Essays · Societal Trends
The Many Shades of Blackface
Editor’s Note: As part of Bright Lights’ ongoing campaign to challenge dogmatic viewpoints and advocate for nuanced analysis of cultural controversies, we present Graham Daseler’s powerful discussion of one of[…]
#MeToo · Activist & Political · Animation · Commentary · Essays · Women in Film
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and #MeToo: Reclaiming a Classic
Editor’s Note: In an era where dogma rules and layered approaches to cultural creations are considered problematic, we repost M. C. Myers’ brilliant and timely analysis of Disney’s Snow White[…]
Essays · Pandemic · SF & Fantasy · War
Nuclear Realism and Memories of Extinction in the 1980s: Testament, The Day After, and Threads
Excerpted from the author’s new critical study, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades (Oxford University Press, December 2021), with the kind permission of[…]
Directors · Essays · Romance · Writers & Critics
Vertigo and Lolita: The Supreme Love Fictions of the 20th Century?
But these reflections bring Vertigo down to “depressing” reality. The view that reality is a downer redeemable only by “exalted seeing” is the basis for James Harvey’s disparagement of 1950s[…]
Not as we’d like but. . . . See you down the road anyway. I hope.
What I want to lose here is any suggestion that there’s only one solution to the problem of getting through tough times together. * * * Three Billboards outside Ebbing[…]
Actors & Personalities · Colonialism · Drama · Essays · Historical & Epic · Philosophy · Religion & Spirituality · Writers & Critics
A Passage to India with James Fox: Understanding a Curious Country through an English Film
Near the close of our Skype meeting, my conversation with James Fox turned inside out. He enquired if he could ask me a question. He then tried to assemble the[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Essays · Historical & Epic · Silents
A Film Divided Against Itself: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)
D. W. Griffith died on July 23, 1948. To commemorate this seminal figure in cinema history, we repost BLFJ regular Gordon Thomas’s deep dive, which first appeared in 2016, into[…]
Essays · Hollywood · Literature and Film · Westerns
In the Country of the Dream: On Cliff Booth, John Wayne and Joan Didion
There is almost certainly nowhere in America, probably even the Western world, as infamous for its venality and ambiguities than Didion’s home for three decades: Hollywood, Los Angeles. In Once[…]
Drama · Essays · Religion & Spirituality
Reflections on Relational and Individual Fulfillment by Way of Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story
Dare to step together into an “usness” that has no guarantees but the shared vision of belonging, whose embers you agree to slowly tend. History provides the furnishings that are[…]
Drama · Essays · Literature and Film · Westerns
“You Don’t Know the Story”: Horseman, Pass By and the Misprision of Hud
We must dissect why Hud succeeded with reviewers and audiences alike, but to differing effects. The task at hand is not merely to provide a clear analysis of the issues[…]
Essays · Feminism · Women in Film · Work and Workplace
Making Space: Proxima Reckons with Working Motherhood in the Movies
Sarah is a good astronaut because she is a mother, not in spite of it. And she is a good mother because she is a good astronaut. If Sarah were[…]
Infinite Jest: The Big Lebowski
“What makes The Big Lebowski seem so circuitous is that, in moving from A to B to C, the plot keeps dawdling at points of interest along the way, stopping to admire the scenery before picking up and moving on. That’s essentially what Quintana and Brandt and Da Fino are: local color. It’s a movie about the pleasure of the journey, not the arrival at the destination.”
David Lynch in Hell: Finding Resolution in Twin Peaks: The Return
Today, February 24, is Twin Peaks Day, the day Special Agent Dale Cooper came to the titular town to investigate the murder of Laura Palmer. Apropos that, we’re reposting Matthew[…]
Animation · Counterculture · Cyberpunk · Digital · Essays · New Genres
A Brief History of Slip and Failure: Cyberpunk and the Headroom for Nostalgia in Back to the Future
In refusing to be neither something different nor more of the same, Back to the Future II’s re-filming technique within the original via new VistaGlide technology offered – rather –[…]
Troubling Mastery: Scorsese’s and Kubrick’s Psychosexual New York Odysseys
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position. – W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux-Arts” (1940) “It’s also a film I cherish[…]
Born on a Meat Hook: On André Øvredal’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)
“We grow up, but do we ever forget how afraid of ourselves we are?” * * * The books parents protest about are the best at converting children into bookworms.[…]
