My Problematic Fave: A juicy question with many answers: Catherine Breillat. Dollarama. Nina Simone's version of "I Loves You, Porgy" (it's not on Simone, she saves it from Gershwin, it's just the one I love). I would say Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives or Deconstructing Harry, but I think it's okay to enjoy those (so bleak and revealing, they are basically a confession), it's more problematic that I love Manhattan.
First Movie I went on a Date for: Sweet Home Alabama, a double date with my neighbourhood friend and two guys from another school we met hanging out (as teens do) after school hours at the playground. He thought I was crying during an emotional scene where Reese Witherspoon visits a grave in her hometown (A grandparent? Childhood dog?), but I was a cynical 14-year-old, and not then or now a Rom Com girl, and was trying to muffle my laughter.
My Movie/TV Character Style Icon: Julia Stiles in Hamlet, Kiera Knightley in Love, Actually, Satine in Moulin Rouge, Maggie Cheung and Nathalie Richard in Irma Vep.
The First Sex Scene I Ever Saw: I can't remember for sure, but probably Titanic.
… and it made me feel: Confused: it gave me absolutely no information on what sex actually is, only that there were certain signals I would one day understand (like the men who laugh knowingly when they see the fogged up windows). Also afraid: it seemed sex would always leave some trace, and you could not hide it from anyone. Also romantic: sex was fun and actually fine, no one was hurt by it or punished for it (although it did happen right before they hit the iceberg, but this was not a coincidence that my young mind internalized.)
Best Needle Drop: Most of the songs in Rushmore (but maybe "Oo La La" by The Faces the most). I didn't even know what those songs were when I watched it at 15, but I knew that they were perfect.
I Wish this Fictional Meal Existed IRL: This meal does exist, but I have never seen the timpano from Big Night out in the wild, and although it seems like something that is better in theory than in execution, I'm not sure I'll feel fully satisfied if I never try one.
Untouchable Classic that I hate: How do I even pick! Citizen Kane does very little for me (except Welles, who I find quite hot), 2001: A Space Odyssey is glacial and so British (I do think the scene approaching the monolith on the moon is fab), Bresson leaves me dry (a symptom, perhaps, of him casting actors because they're hot), I find Parasite shallow, I only like the scenes in Stalker before and after they go to the Zone, and I can't get past Jeanne Dielman's melodramatic ending (which became an irritating staple of art house film).
Celebrity I had on my wall as a teen
Frank Black Francis and Karen O.
My film/TV OTP is: I can't think of a time when I felt the ending of a film or show should have been different, I like when characters come together, I like when they fall apart.
The Reality TV Show I Would Win: I think it's obvious that my true place is not as a competitor, but as a judge.
When I was 17, I bought a bottle of perfume at a Sephora in the New Jersey suburbs with my Christmas money. I had been watching Laguna Beach and wanted a pair of Chanel sunglasses, but several adults told me I couldn’t handle the responsibility of a fragile luxury object. That I was encouraged to purchase a glass bottle filled with perfume instead, succinctly highlights the way parents exert personal preference over their children and call it logic. Anyway, my mom and I smelled a shelf of scents and found ourselves dazzled by one in particular: Hypnotic Poison by Dior.
Hypnotic Poison opens with notes of syrupy plum and apricot before drifting into a mixture of gentle florals and Brazilian rosewood. Its basenotes include sandalwood, vanilla, and musk—a blend I find incredibly difficult to resist even as I’ve attempted to develop a more sophisticated taste in perfume. Also in its base is almond, Hypnotic Poison’s most divisive note. Some find that it smells like Play-Doh. Others, like me, find it completely intoxicating, like an amaretto sour dribbled down warm, velvet skin.
When I was 24, I attended a screening of Gerald Kargl’s cult horror film Angst (1983) at Spectacle Theatre in Brooklyn. My tastes had shifted significantly since my Laguna Beach days, and I frequented screenings at the small theatre, which specialized in rare and forgotten films. Angst had been sufficiently hyped at Spectacle. I had watched the trailer numerous times while bored at work and listened to the minimalist synth score by Tangerine Dream’s Klaus Schulze while riding the subway. I marvelled at Zbigniew Rybczyński’s inventive and highly kinetic cinematography; the celebrated Polish filmmaker apparently rigged the camera to a moving ring around the protagonist’s body, portraying his frenzied movements from an intimate angle. This was years before Darren Aronofsky used SnorriCam in Pi (1998), shocking dorm rooms across the country.
In Angst (also known as Fear), a psychopath (Erwim Leder), freshly released from prison, kills a family in an Austrian suburb. The film was largely banned in Europe upon its release due to the grotesque nature of its violence (the main character tortures his victims before killing them, and at one point, drinks their blood and vomits over one of their bodies). It’s a fiercely nihilistic blend of abnormal psychology, paranoia, murder, and necrophilia. Though Angst remains fairly obscure, it’s become a transgressive right of passage for young cinephiles interested in a growing anti-canon, that includes films like Żuławski’s Possession (1981) and Eckhart Schmidt’s Der Fan (1982).
"During the Angst phase of my life, I cared only for extremes."
During the Angst phase of my life, I cared only for extremes. I no longer wore perfume, or even deodorant, really. I just smoked cigarettes, doused my hair in drugstore dry shampoo, and wore the kind of thrift store clothes that one doesn’t really attempt to wash. Only my stolen American Apparel thongs and the TJ Maxx socks my mom gave me on holidays got dropped off at the laundry. I was probably repulsive. But that was kind of the point—I wanted to blend in to the spaces where I felt I belonged and appear alien everywhere else. My bottle of Dior had run out my second year of college.
As I sat in the back row of the darkened 30-seat theatre waiting for the film to start, a woman around my age shimmied into the seat next to me. She practically reeked of plum, Brazilian rosewood, lily of the valley, vanilla, sandalwood, and rich, controversial, Easter candy almond.
The person in the projection booth was playing Schulze’s score, and as the drum machine thrummed, I worked up the courage to talk to her. “This is so random but… are you wearing Dior Hypnotic Poison?” I asked. I’ve seen it happen before and since—there’s a kind of sly smile one wears when someone guesses the scent she’s wearing, like she’s grateful for being recognized but disappointed by being found out. “Yes,” she said. She was drunk and unruly, and we became instant friends.
But I was narcissistic then (as I am now), and I wanted to know how our lives overlapped more than I wanted to know about her alone. I wanted to know about the Hypnotic Poison to Angst pipeline. I asked her if she was excited about Kargl’s film, what she knew about it, how she liked the trailer, if she liked obscure horror, if she came to Spectacle often, if she was into occult books. I asked and asked, and she batted questions away the way cool people do—people who know that too much context can ruin a crush. She had just wandered into the theatre and was curious.
We whispered during the trailers and finally shut up as the film began. We watched as the protagonist, who is based on the Austrian mass murderer Werner Kniesek, gets out of prison; then aggressively eats a sausage at a gas station cafe while eyeing two young women, and soon attempts to kill a cab driver. We saw him exit the cab and run manically through the gray Austrian woods before breaking into a remote mansion. Inside the palatial home, we watched as he discovers a disabled man in a wheelchair and then attacks his mother and sister—tying the sister to a door and strangling the mother.
While the killer was drowning the disabled man in a bathtub, the woman sitting next to me abruptly rose from her seat and ran out. As I watched the killer wake up from a delusional dream on top of one of his victims, covered in her blood, I felt the emptiness of the space next to me. Desperately, I tried to sniff the last lingering notes of almond—hypnotic poison.
When I was 17, I bought a bottle of perfume at a Sephora in the New Jersey suburbs with my Christmas money. I had been watching Laguna Beach and wanted a pair of Chanel sunglasses, but several adults told me I couldn’t handle the responsibility of a fragile luxury object. That I was encouraged to purchase a glass bottle filled with perfume instead, succinctly highlights the way parents exert personal preference over their children and call it logic. Anyway, my mom and I smelled a shelf of scents and found ourselves dazzled by one in particular: Hypnotic Poison by Dior.
Hypnotic Poison opens with notes of syrupy plum and apricot before drifting into a mixture of gentle florals and Brazilian rosewood. Its basenotes include sandalwood, vanilla, and musk—a blend I find incredibly difficult to resist even as I’ve attempted to develop a more sophisticated taste in perfume. Also in its base is almond, Hypnotic Poison’s most divisive note. Some find that it smells like Play-Doh. Others, like me, find it completely intoxicating, like an amaretto sour dribbled down warm, velvet skin.
When I was 24, I attended a screening of Gerald Kargl’s cult horror film Angst (1983) at Spectacle Theatre in Brooklyn. My tastes had shifted significantly since my Laguna Beach days, and I frequented screenings at the small theatre, which specialized in rare and forgotten films. Angst had been sufficiently hyped at Spectacle. I had watched the trailer numerous times while bored at work and listened to the minimalist synth score by Tangerine Dream’s Klaus Schulze while riding the subway. I marvelled at Zbigniew Rybczyński’s inventive and highly kinetic cinematography; the celebrated Polish filmmaker apparently rigged the camera to a moving ring around the protagonist’s body, portraying his frenzied movements from an intimate angle. This was years before Darren Aronofsky used SnorriCam in Pi (1998), shocking dorm rooms across the country.
In Angst (also known as Fear), a psychopath (Erwim Leder), freshly released from prison, kills a family in an Austrian suburb. The film was largely banned in Europe upon its release due to the grotesque nature of its violence (the main character tortures his victims before killing them, and at one point, drinks their blood and vomits over one of their bodies). It’s a fiercely nihilistic blend of abnormal psychology, paranoia, murder, and necrophilia. Though Angst remains fairly obscure, it’s become a transgressive right of passage for young cinephiles interested in a growing anti-canon, that includes films like Żuławski’s Possession (1981) and Eckhart Schmidt’s Der Fan (1982).
"During the Angst phase of my life, I cared only for extremes."
During the Angst phase of my life, I cared only for extremes. I no longer wore perfume, or even deodorant, really. I just smoked cigarettes, doused my hair in drugstore dry shampoo, and wore the kind of thrift store clothes that one doesn’t really attempt to wash. Only my stolen American Apparel thongs and the TJ Maxx socks my mom gave me on holidays got dropped off at the laundry. I was probably repulsive. But that was kind of the point—I wanted to blend in to the spaces where I felt I belonged and appear alien everywhere else. My bottle of Dior had run out my second year of college.
As I sat in the back row of the darkened 30-seat theatre waiting for the film to start, a woman around my age shimmied into the seat next to me. She practically reeked of plum, Brazilian rosewood, lily of the valley, vanilla, sandalwood, and rich, controversial, Easter candy almond.
The person in the projection booth was playing Schulze’s score, and as the drum machine thrummed, I worked up the courage to talk to her. “This is so random but… are you wearing Dior Hypnotic Poison?” I asked. I’ve seen it happen before and since—there’s a kind of sly smile one wears when someone guesses the scent she’s wearing, like she’s grateful for being recognized but disappointed by being found out. “Yes,” she said. She was drunk and unruly, and we became instant friends.
But I was narcissistic then (as I am now), and I wanted to know how our lives overlapped more than I wanted to know about her alone. I wanted to know about the Hypnotic Poison to Angst pipeline. I asked her if she was excited about Kargl’s film, what she knew about it, how she liked the trailer, if she liked obscure horror, if she came to Spectacle often, if she was into occult books. I asked and asked, and she batted questions away the way cool people do—people who know that too much context can ruin a crush. She had just wandered into the theatre and was curious.
We whispered during the trailers and finally shut up as the film began. We watched as the protagonist, who is based on the Austrian mass murderer Werner Kniesek, gets out of prison; then aggressively eats a sausage at a gas station cafe while eyeing two young women, and soon attempts to kill a cab driver. We saw him exit the cab and run manically through the gray Austrian woods before breaking into a remote mansion. Inside the palatial home, we watched as he discovers a disabled man in a wheelchair and then attacks his mother and sister—tying the sister to a door and strangling the mother.
While the killer was drowning the disabled man in a bathtub, the woman sitting next to me abruptly rose from her seat and ran out. As I watched the killer wake up from a delusional dream on top of one of his victims, covered in her blood, I felt the emptiness of the space next to me. Desperately, I tried to sniff the last lingering notes of almond—hypnotic poison.