The week between Christmas and the new year is one of my favorites. Seven days of suspended animation: not just a stoppage of work and obligation, but of general culture and communication, of dates to make and shows to attend and content to consume. The post-holiday blues typically have a delayed onset until about mid-January (at least for my SSRI-riddled synapses), and the year’s final week simmers like a hot spring, my own private temporal purgatory.
Smarminess aside, the holidays can be tough, and I am glad you’re here and making it through. I hope that you’re not working, and if you are working, I hope it’s slow enough to justify reading a pop-culture blog by that off-putting guy your friend knows. Year One of Blood Jump is in the books, and it really means so much to me that you’ve subscribed. And entered the emails of five to seven of your friends and family members to subscribe them, too.
There’s a good chance you’ve had your fill of best-of-the-year lists by this point, and if you haven’t, Killers of the Flower Moon is very good. I love making lists of things but don’t particularly love other people’s lists, so in lieu of that, we’re running through a rapid-fire round-up of my most -est consumptive practices of the year. 2023 superlatives, baby! Let’s begin.
Best multi-genre call for climate action
It is not easy to tell people you’re a fan of a band called King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard, and even more difficult to admit they exist on the periphery of jam-band culture. The Aussie weirdos are obnoxiously prolific, with 25 studio albums and 16 live albums under their belts in a little over ten years (a clip that suggests a focus on quantity over quality that they frequently disprove). But for all their high barriers of entry, Gizz is happy to cover the cost of admission: first with the muscle of their output, which spans from its prog root note to reach from jazz to funk to metal to infinity, and second by generally being little sweeties. The band has dropped out of festivals for booking other acts with a history of violent rhetoric, they’ve donated merch proceeds to trans-rights activist groups, they performed in drag in Tennessee to protest the state’s asinine ban of public drag performances. In 2023, they turned their attention to Gaia.
King Gizzard released two major studio albums this year—threaded through a constant chain of live cuts, bootlegs, and side projects—that see either side of our precious Earth’s demise from climate change. The first is PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation, a double-bass prog-metal nightmare that pins the hopeless angst of watching the world crumble to high-concept sci-fi that lands somewhere between George Miller and a 20-sided die. You get the gist from the 18-word title, but PetroDragonic Apocalypse supersedes its own gimmick by way of carefully constructed hooks and thrilling, thrumming riffs that rock hard enough to make the descent into hell feel like a good time. The album is a feat of athleticism from drummer Mike Cavanagh, who pummels the skins through stories of a dying race that guzzles gasoline (“Motor Spirit”), witches, black cats, and an inexplicable Beowulf (“Witchcraft”), and oil-hungry dragons (“Gila Monster,” “Dragon”). The album reaches from Rush to Metallica to Tool without the exclusionary dread of any of the three and makes its dire call to action palatable with a Heavy Metal playfulness. But if PetroDragonic Apocalypse permits King Gizzard to has some fun, it does not budge on the severity of what Earth faces: album closer “Flamethrower” sees the world burn at the carelessness of “complacent fucks” and permits the band a righteous anger at our preventable, if inevitable, doom.
What comes after the end of the world? King Gizzard’s second album of 2023 is the synth-based, chromatic The Silver Cord. Billed as a Yang to PetroDragonic’s Yin, The Silver Cord trades a plummeting terror for dusty, new-age spirituality, a crystal ball left untouched for years on a basement shelf. The album comes in two forms: a short, accessible 27-minute cut precedes an 88-minute extended mix that recalls the double-digit minute remixes of Nile Rodgers and Donna Summers. The shorter cut is a fine showcase for Gizz’s hook factory, but it’s the extended mix that allows the band to flex, turning a postapocalyptic vision quest into a blissed-out, doom-tinged rave. There’s something stubbornly resilient about The Silver Cord, which weaves themes of birth and rebirth through album-opener “Theia,” an outstretched arm toward a creator, through “Extinction,” a loose recall of PetroDragonic’s gleeful pessimism. It is difficult to reckon with the utility of hope when the writing on the wall is as bolded as climate change’s certain consequences, but The Silver Cord remains quixotically optimistic in the face of death.
Best modern classic to inspire a loosely related political tangent
It was a quiet year for Ridley Scott, with only one feature from the prolific director to make it to the big screen. 2021 saw both The Last Duel, a career best, and House of Gucci, a movie so mids I’m not sure whether I watched it or breathed it in like a blast of subway-tunnel air. Scott is a fascinating, if inconsistent, director, so I took Napoleon’s release as an opportunity to cross off a blind spot with Thelma & Louise.
Thelma & Louise is a nearly perfect movie, an airtight vehicle for two stellar leads and one that retains its urgency up to and through its ubiquitous ending. I happened to watch the movie shortly after Susan Sarandon was dropped by UTA for her remarks at a Pro-Palestinian rally, and as much as I enjoyed Scott’s film, I got hung up on what feels like a return to McCarthyism in response to dissenting voices toward America’s support of Israel. I ended up writing a bit about it on Letterboxd, which I’ve excerpted below. I realize that quoting your own Letterboxd review is extremely corny, but it’s an issue I feel strongly about and something I haven’t discussed yet via Blood Jump. So, without further ado:
I've seen a handful of Zionists label the October 7th attacks as "Israel's 9/11." It feels like an apt comparison on a few different levels. The attacks were unconscionably brutal, destabilizing on a scale large enough to reshape the rest of one's life. They were especially troubling amid rising global trends of antisemitism, and it’s horrifying to think how they might inspire similar acts of violence. But the metaphor might work even more powerfully in its subtext. In the months since, the attacks have been refitted as a bellwether for the same sort of nationalist cynicism that carved the path for America after September 11th.
We're again abandoning our capacity for nuance and empathy—this time, for Palestinians—in an attempt to win back some sense of security that likely never existed in the first place. And, like 9/11, the militaristic response (brandished as a "right to defense") has so far outpaced the initial attacks that any semblance of justice seems an absurd claim. We keep hearing this is a complicated issue; Palestinian children continue to die.
And now we’re seeing America’s response to October 7th repeat another note of its conservative history. Melissa Barrera was fired from Scream 7 for posting pro-Palestinian content to social media; shortly after, Susan Sarandon was dropped from her agency for similar action. It’s an infuriating trend, if not entirely surprising: Sarandon has long been a beguiling scapegoat for neoliberal frustration around Donald Trump’s election because of her support of Bernie Sanders (?!), and a material response to her politics was almost inevitable.
It’s disappointing to think how it might affect her career, especially after returning to something like Thelma & Louise, a triumph of filmmaking all around and casting chemistry in particular. More troublesome is her firing’s signal toward a return to McCarthyism. America’s reactionary boot on the neck of communism dug the same tread that sees a willfully dishonest erasure of the boundary between antisemitism and anti-Zionism play out in today’s discourse. Our country has long lent its unconditional support to Israel, a policy that has fueled a genocide against Palestinians for as long as I can remember. A turn against vocal dissent guarantees more blood.
Thelma & Louise celebrates righteous, thrilling justice. I hope that the children dying in Gaza find peace more easily won. Free Palestine.
Best genderfluid Virginia Woolf adaptation featuring Billy Zane
Orlando has one of the clearer fulcrum points in modern movie history. Sally Potter’s 1992 adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel brings an androgynous but declaratively male Orlando (Tilda Swinton), an Elizabethan nobleman, to a masculine crisis after witnessing his first death on a battlefield in the Ottoman Empire. He faints and wakes in a liminal chamber between his world and the next, and after washing his face in baptismal waters, discovers that he has awoken a woman. “Same person. No difference at all ... just a different sex,” she says to her reflection with a knowing grin. It is a beautiful, if frustrating, declaration: Both a simple and confident punctuation to an exhaustingly dishonest discourse around gender and queer rights and a painful reminder of how long this battle has been fought.
And it has been fought for so, so long—Orlando sees its bewitching narrative span 400 years, from 1603 to the movie’s modern 1992. On her deathbed, Queen Elizabeth I (played here in another feat of queer dexterity by Quentin Crisp) promises to bestow her riches to Orlando under one condition: “Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old.” Orlando obliges by lending their body to eternity, suspended in time within and outside of their inherited castle. They dabble in art and poetry in the 15th century, bureaucracy in the 16th, lost love and failure and success along the way. Woolf’s novel is ambitious and irreverent to form, and Potter sticks the landing of a difficult adaptation with a joyous and poetic structure. Themes bleed and bend to and from each other, as do timelines; at one point, bored senseless at a table of aristocrats that count Alexander Pope and Joseph Addison in their company, Orlando escapes into a hedge maze and emerges in the next century, madly in love with Billy Zane. May we all be so lucky.
Orlando is a story with either foot in the surreal and the sublime, made all the more magical by Aleksei Rodionov’s lush cinematography and Michael Buchanan and Michael Howells’s art direction. Orlando’s castle is shot like a delicacy; long segments are performed with skates on a frozen Thames river; there is enough care in construction to somehow make a 91-minute movie that spans four centuries feel unabridged. And, for the lengths it takes to underscore the difficulties women (and anyone else who defies gender norms) face against patriarchal societies, Orlando lands on a note of jubilant optimism. Perhaps the movie’s nod toward angelic skies foresees its own enduring legacy: in 2017, BFI commissioned Orlando: The Queer Element, a multimedia art project on the intersections of science and gender; the cancelled 2020 Met Gala was themed around Sandy Powell and Dien van Straalen’s impeccable costume design; this year saw the release of Orlando, My Political Biography, a documentary by Paul B. Preciado that calls upon over 20 trans and nonbinary folk to retell Woolf’s text. The fight for gender equality and queer rights has endured for hundreds of years and likely will continue for hundreds more; those years have and will be suffuse with enough love and beauty and art to amount to hope.
The writing I’m most proud of in 2023 :-)
Launching Blood Jump has consumed the better chunk of my writing time this year, which was otherwise pretty busy—weddings, work, and travel are not conducive to long hours at a desk. Still, I knocked off 14 issues of this little rag at about 2,500 words a pop, and I’m feeling good about it! With all due respect to Blood Jump, though, my favorite piece this year was on the late, great Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, written originally for Bright Wall/Dark Room and later republished on rogerebert.com. I grew up on Ebert’s writing, and getting a byline on that site was a real joy. I’ve linked the essay here and excerpted a bit of it below.
Road trips, even the lousy ones, are transformative. You gain perspective, you lose patience, you resolve to finally sign up for an E-ZPass, to never again drive the length of Pennsylvania. The bleary-eyed you who sheds luggage from your shoulders after a day in a sedan is not the same person who plugged addresses into Google Maps to time the perfect playlist weeks before. It feels silly to wax on about innocence and experience while describing, say, an eight-hour drive from New York to Virginia, but the road really can change you, man. Time and distance work such an alchemy that whenever I return home from a trip, I look back at the person I was before I’d left as something of a fool: look at this dolt, cherubically loading suitcases and planning pit stops. How could he possibly know what’s in store for him? How could he have forgotten to pack his Lexapro?
Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild is a lot of things—Renoirian screwball, Gen-X The Odd Couple, defense for the reggae mixtape—but it’s a road movie first and foremost, and it introduces its lead, Charlie Driggs, as a man untraveled. Played with dopey precision by Jeff Daniels, Charlie is a golden retriever of a Reaganite, eager to climb the ranks of his job on Wall Street and content with the grass on his side of the fence. Building a career in the big city implies some degree of worldliness, but Manhattan can be deceptively hermetic.
The movie is beautifully shot by Demme’s longtime collaborator Tak Fujimoto, and begins by tracing the boundaries of Charlie’s home, gliding down the East River like a moat and clocking its exits on the Manhattan and Queensboro Bridges. Charlie reads like the kind of guy who might loathe New York had he not been born and raised on Long Island, but his world starts and ends between the Hudson and the Atlantic, and he navigates it as if it were Cedar Rapids. He is the selfie you take while you top off the tank, coffee still hot and odometer at zero.
***
Jonathan Demme was an artist’s artist. The late director cut his teeth grinding out sugar-pop flicks for Roger Corman before breaking out with critical-darling comedies in Handle with Care and Melvin and Howard, the latter netting two wins and three noms at the ‘81 Academy Awards. Demme parlayed that success into one of the most eclectic bodies of work among modern American filmmakers. He crafted monumental romcoms in Something Wild and Married to the Mob, he took winning Oscar swings with Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, he shot the greatest concert movie of all time with Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense.
The most reliable metric of consistency among Demme’s sprawling body of work is its quality; he never quite did the same thing twice, but he always did it well. He married his wide-netted taste with a discerning ear to the ground in New York’s Lower East Side, keeping his art hip without feeling sweaty. Jonathan Demme’s movies are just so timelessly cool, and you feel cooler for having watched them.
Blood Jump’s top-ten movies of the year
Like the scorpion on the frog’s back, I cannot deny what is in my nature. Here are my ten favorite movies of 2023. I’ve linked to the one’s I’ve written about in prior issues of this newsletter. I am sorry. I yam what I yam.
Otherwise, that’s a wrap for Blood Jump in 2023. Wishing you all a safe and happy new year, and thank you from the bottom of my heart for subscribing.
Beau Is Afraid
Killers of the Flower Moon
Showing Up
The Iron Claw
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. If you enjoyed this issue, please encourage a friend to subscribe. I will see you again soon for the first issue of 2024.