Great short films are like windows on a ship. You look outside them, and you can see a tossing, furious sea, the ocean waves reaching up the porthole, submerging your perspective for an instant. Or you look out and see an endless night. Or glittering stars. Or a sunrise, the kind of sunrise you figure […]
Culture
The Best Short Films of 2022
Little Lad-ification
by Ella Gray
A 2007 Starburst commercial introduced the world to the Little Lad, a caricature of an old-timey foppish boy. The Little Lad dances about, tapping his toes and proclaiming his love for berries and cream.
Sex, Youth and Power in Julia May Jonas’ Vladimir
by Megan Jones
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas is a novel with, as is increasingly prevalent in modern literary fiction, an “unlikable female narrator.” But her unlikability stems from her refusal to sugarcoat the realities of aging and its attendant loss of power.
Race Against Time: How White Fear of Genetic Annihilation Fuels Abortion Bans
by Carla Bell
Still, in the foreseeable future the country will be, as Elliot puts it, “mostly brown.”
The Naked and The Damned
by Julia Sirmons
“He was soon to become the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany,” reads the tagline for Luchino Visconti’s 1969 film The Damned. It’s an improbable caption for the image below it: a man in drag.
Nothing New in the West
by Clement Obropta
The Old West is an invention, as fake as a ride at Disneyland. It’s a desert filled with paradoxes.
I Know Who Orville Peck Is
by Robin Gow
Often, I tell people, “I like the word queer both for my gender and my sexuality because it makes me feel free.” I love the capaciousness.
Transgressive Divadom in Hedwig and the Angry Inch
by Robert Stinner
The diva, by definition, surpasses her surroundings. Her towering presence commands attention, and everything else fades away.
And You Yourself Calliope:
A Conversation with Rosie Stockton
And of course, it’s always important to say that gender, like genre, is a racialized structure.
Fragmentary Pleasures
by Yasmine Eve Lucas
Before meeting Phil and Elizabeth, I’d hypothesized that longings for pity, care, or power might motivate or inform BIID desires.
