And Another, and Another, and...

Welcome back! Before we get to the complaining, some book announcements: Dead Teenagers #2 is coming your way April 15. So is the re-issued Dead Teenagers #1, which sold out its first print run. (Thank you!)

In the meantime, DILF: Did I Leave Feminism is still available, in both book and smell form. You can also pre-order Be Not Afraid, which will be out in collected edition in July. People seem to be connecting with it already, so that's nice.

I was shocked by how angry I was when One Battle After Another won Best Picture at the Oscars. I knew it was going to win; everyone did. I wasn’t a maniacal Sinners partisan — I liked it a lot, but I wasn’t nearly as invested as most fans. I had every chance to come to terms with One Battle After Another’s existence, and its inevitable onslaught of awards; I knew that no-one would want to talk about the Gender of it all, because I knew about the precedent, wherein every time some woman calls PTA “bro cinema” and/or says she doesn’t want to watch There Will Be Blood with her boyfriend, a horde of self-consciously leftist tastemakers descends on her to accuse her of setting Women and Feminism back 7,000 years. 

I even understood that One Battle After Another was unavoidable; that even though I knew full well I would hate it, given my feelings about basically every man attached to the project, I would not be allowed to hate it, that it would keep being pressed upon me as Relevant and Revolutionary and Important, that it would not stop until I caved to the constant ambient pressure to come on, just give it a chance. 

I gave it a chance. I hated it. I knew that I hated it 20 minutes in, when the radical activist who gives speeches about the right to abortion somehow forgets that abortion exists during her deeply unwanted pregnancy, and I never came back around. I hated it more because it was literally inescapable, like, no, you WILL participate in the rehabilitation of Sean Penn and you WILL think it’s a comedy romp that inspires you to fight the Oppressor and you WILL do this NO MATTER WHAT BECAUSE IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT YOU WANT, which is exactly how I’d expect Sean Penn to pitch his own rehabilitation, plus or minus a few whacks with the ol’ baseball bat if I seemed unwilling. 

So a movie I hated won some Oscars. So what? Who cares about the Oscars, really? I did, and I didn’t expect it. I wasn’t ready for the bitterness — the resentment, the gnawing anger, the grating metallic mental refrain that an injustice was done and not undone and no, I cannot just drop it. Everyone else looks at One Battle After Another and sees a movie. I see Sean Penn with a baseball bat. I see 50-something Leonardo DiCaprio’s teenage girlfriends. I see a 2020 interview with Fiona Apple:

Anderson had a temper. After attending the 1998 Academy Awards, he threw a chair across a room. Apple remembers telling herself, “Fuck this, this is not a good relationship.” She took a cab to her dad’s house, but returned home the next day. In 2000, when she was getting treatment for O.C.D., her psychiatrist suggested that she do volunteer work with kids who had similar conditions. Apple was buoyant as Anderson drove her to an orientation at U.C.L.A.’s occupational-therapy ward, but he was fuming. He screeched up to the sidewalk, undid her seat belt, and shoved her out of his car; she fell to the ground, spilling her purse in front of some nurses she was going to be working with. At parties, he’d hiss harsh words in her ear, calling her a bad partner, while behaving sweetly on the surface; she’d tear up, which, she thinks, made her look unstable to strangers. (Anderson, through his agent, declined to comment.)

… The relationship had warped her early years, [Apple] said, in ways she still reckoned with. She’d never spoken poorly of him, because it didn’t seem “classy”; she wavered on whether to do so now. But she wanted to put an end to many fans’ nostalgia about their time together. “It’s a secret that keeps us connected,” she told me.

I see this, and then I see that nobody cares. 

Paul Thomas Anderson wasn’t the only creep to be nominated for an Oscar this year. He probably wasn’t even the worst one. The other hot movie that I hated, Marty Supreme, was directed by Josh Safdie, who, along with his brother Benny, allegedly oversaw the sexual assault of a 17-year-old girl on the set of their movie Good Time. The story begins — grit your teeth now, because I’m sure going to — with the critically hailed Safdies casting a 17-year-old girl they found on Instagram as a sex worker.