Mental 📸: Fritz Lang, Kelly Reichardt, Mailer, Steven Pressfield

Strange last week or two—I’ve been super busy with client work and also really anxious. As a result, my media consumption has slowed slightly, but I’ve still been able to consume some great stuff:

🎬 Metropolis (1927)

This was my first time seeing the more complete version that was released in 2010; I’d previously seen one of the abbreviated versions in a film history class I took years ago. It was much weirder and angrier than I remembered. A lot of strange details, like the pentagram in Rotwang’s laboratory, stood out to me. Needless to say, it’s absolutely visually stunning.

I know Lang later rejected the film’s conclusion as simplistic, and of course that’s true. Thinking about that made me realize how the viewer can so easily slip into a certain condescension when viewing historical sources—I didn’t consciously think of the conclusion as simplistic (more “cute” or “quaint”), though of course if a modern artwork put forward such a naïve view, I would likely need to be hospitalized from my tremendous eyeroll.

🎬 Showing Up (2023)

I adore Kelly Reichardt’s work, and I was thrilled to see her pair up again with Michelle Williams. I thought it was a fantastic success. The realities of creative struggle and failure stood out to me, though it was the touching treatment of the complex relationship between two frenemy creators that carried it.

🎙️ Various Steven Pressfield interviews

I’m not always on board with a literal interpretation of Pressfield’s stuff on past lives, the muse, etc., but a lot of what he says resonates with my experience of the psychology of creativity. His writing advice is super helpful—both directly and indirectly. It’s also pretty nuts that his agent is 98 and the same guy who originally sold On the Road.

📚 The Naked and the Dead (1948)

I’m about 75% of the way through it now. As always, I adored the “time machine” segments. Red’s section stood out to me, and kind of reminded me of sections of Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy, and I have a soft spot for that one (Lethem’s The Brooklyn Crime Story seemed to have some resonances of that text, which I thought was cool). One of my favorite details is Mailer’s consistent hint that General Cummings might not be clear on his own motivations in shaping military policy around his petty conflicts with a subordinate (Hearn)