Editor’s Notebook

In assembling this issue, it struck me anew how grotty and gross cinema got in many mainstream films released circa 2024. Was this a caution-to-the-wind artistic reflection of a world gone mad, heralding the return of the repressed in the political unconscious? A pandemic-era resurgence of sex and horror in so-called body genres for viewers who spent the weirdest years of their lives rotting in bed? Or a mirror of the anxiety and hype surrounding AI, virtualization, dematerialization, and disembodiment, both inside and outside of the film industry? (A heady cocktail of all of the above, I would imagine.) I must admit that I like a lot of these unhinged films and TV series. Some of them simply reflect a moment when so many millions have given up on one another, and on any vision of a shared future. Others go for broke in order to wear their hearts on their sleeves, offering a counterpunch to the easy temptations of cynicism.

Whatever the case may be, I saw a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and various other human liquids on-screen so far this year. These ranged from mildly naughty commercial films, like Luca Guadagnino’s moisture-drenched Challengers, Shawn Levy’s gore-drizzled Deadpool & Wolverine, and Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s dildo-and-decapitation fest Drive-Away Dolls, to calculatedly perverse horror genre pictures like J. T. Mollner’s ear-splitting Strange Darling, Ti West’s OTT porno-horror throwback MaXXXine, and Oz Perkins’s devilish murder-puzzle confection Longlegs. None of these pictures match the wicked calibration of humor and horror about the body—and the body politic—that Coralie Fargeat limns in The Substance. The film’s injections of transgressive jouissance and hideous abjection culminate in a blood-fountain of film history references, from The Student of Prague to The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Elephant Man, The Thing, and Carrie, creating an absurdist fable of the vile, the ridiculous, and the nightmarish that feels uncomfortably resonant with the current state of things.

A collective study of the abject threads together some of this year’s most interesting shows and movies. As Julia Kristeva wrote in the final paragraphs of Powers of Horror, the “demystification of Power” can be aided by “abject knowledge.” My year-end must-rewatch list for a moment in which audiences are “going through some shit right now” (as the saying goes) remains haunted by Kristeva’s drift. At the time of writing in the bleak autumn of 2024, I would include True Detective: Night Country, as rebooted in an anti-Lovecraftian mode by showrunner Issa López; Rose Glass’s noirish bodycentric Love Lies Bleeding; Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s eco-crisis drama Evil Does Not Exist; Jane Schoenbrun’s antinostalgic horror gem I Saw the TV Glow; Agnieszka Holland’s brutally effective dispatch Green Border; the grubby grandeur and unwashed clothes of Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera; and Luna Carmoon’s lovingly mucky coming-of-age film Hoard. When this emphasis on the abject goes missing, as it largely does from the monochrome vision of Ripley, Steven Zaillian’s Patricia Highsmith adaptation, it serves to reflect its life-denying and sociopathic main character.

The productions of Glass, Hamaguchi, Zallian, and Schoenbrun are discussed in this issue by Michelle Devereaux, Brian R. Jacobson, Elizabeth Alsop, and FQ contributing editor Caetlin Benson-Allott, respectively. Devereaux explores Love Lies Bleeding for its opening of a critical space for theoretical dialogue with Stanley Cavell. Jacobson frames Evil Does Not Exist as a microcosmic reflection of ongoing environmental catastrophes from which everyone lives “downstream.” Alsop discusses how Zaillian’s Ripley resonates with Highsmith’s novels while also providing sly commentary on the dead-eyed hustlers of our own era.

Benson-Allott argues in favor of Schoenbrun’s vision of “life-affirming horror,” a concept that could be considered the motto of much of the year’s best cinema and television. The all-important writing that appears in one of the frames of I Saw the TV Glow—THERE IS STILL TIME—could also be rendered as a question: “Is there still time?” While rightly seen as a trans allegory, the film also allegorizes the state of cinema itself. As Benson-Allott writes, “many trans fans of the film appreciate how its gender-nonconforming protagonists find themselves through the permeable boundaries between lived reality and media fantasy.” At the end of I Saw the TV Glow, its protagonist, Owen (Justice Smith) is depicted working in a hellish place called the “Fun Center,” which serves the joyless functions of family entertainment.

But Owen also carries a glow within from youthful contact with a cult horror TV show, The Pink Opaque, and its linked fans, especially Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine). Accessing this glow can be painful, but it is necessary and it could be beautiful, whereas denying its existence entails a living hell. Perhaps it exists somewhere between Kristeva’s concept of “bedazzlement” and Eliza Steinbock’s theory of “the shimmer.” (As the Radiohead song “The Numbers” goes, “The future is inside us / It’s not somewhere else.”) Schoenbrun’s graffiti might be read as a classic il faut: there is still time—because there must be, there must have been, there needs to be, there needs to have been, there will be, no matter what.

This issue also offers a major retrospective essay on film history. FQ Editorial Board member Noah Isenberg revisits the complicated production history of Hans Karl Breslauer’s silent German film Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City Without Jews, 1924), a landmark critique of antisemitism that turned one hundred this year. An in-depth interview with Sandi DuBowski conducted by FQ contributing editor Amy Herzog covers DuBowski’s most recent film, Sabbath Queen, about Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, who is both a practicing rabbi and a drag queen. Lau-Lavie’s protests against the 2014 Israeli invasion of Gaza ten years ago have resonated with audiences at film festivals attempting to reckon with the ongoing obliteration of cities and the massacres of civilians there.

Rounding out this issue are two reports from the summer festival season, one by FQ Editorial Board member Jean Ma from a reframed and refreshed Flaherty Seminar, which relocated this year to Thailand and focused on the cinematic concerns of the Global South; and one by writer Giovanni Vimercati, who traveled to Locarno to check in on the current health of film festivals in general as a going concern in the age of streaming. Finally, FQ contributing editor Ramzi Fawaz weighs in on a somewhat surprising contribution to discourse around the body in the films of 2024: the children’s movie Inside Out 2. In describing the poignancy and refreshing complexity of what is currently the box-office leader of the year and the highest-grossing animated film of all time, Fawaz adds a refreshing note of badly needed hope that avoids the twin traps of toxic positivity and cynical despair that plague the land.

Returning to the theme of abjection as a lens on the body politic, Martin P. Rossouw’s review in this issue of Seung-hoon Jeong’s book Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema analyzes Joeng’s theory that cinema can “shed light on abject lives.” I noticed certain resonances with this idea on my own visit to the Venice exhibition Your Ghosts are Mine: Expanded Cinemas, Amplified Voices (Qatar Museums/Doha Film Institute/Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art), which began as adjacent programming to the Biennale and ran beyond the Venice Film Festival. This retrospective at the Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti, curated by Matthieu Orléan of La Cinémathèque française, and accompanied by screenings from April to November, contained selections of more than fifty features and shorts from the Middle East and Africa on themes such as “Ruins,” “Fire,” “Exile,” and “Fantasma.”

The retrospective format, while overwhelmingly broad in scope, allowed visitors to browse more widely than this year’s current releases. Recent productions by luminaries like Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari (Land of Dreams) and Elia Suleiman (It Must Be Heaven) supported films perhaps less well-known in North America, including Wissam Charaf’s Dirty, Difficult, Dangerous, about a Beirut scrap-metal seller in love with a domestic worker, set in a world where bodies are capable of transformation into metal, and Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s essay-like visual poem set on the streets of Lesotho, Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You. Mosese’s film opens with this provocative text: “Out of these ruins and ashes, I’ll knit you a new face and a new pair of eyes.” The situational irony of importing these films into a palace did not escape the organizers or the hosting venue, I’m sure, and I cannot have been the only carbon-spewing visitor struck by the mountain of contradictions in my privileged experience of sampling this buffet of cinema within such an opulent setting, one redolent with layers of postimperial hauntings in a sinking city surrounded by rising seas.

The concept of “homemade mutant hope machines,” developed by Ben Walters in his PhD study (at Queen Mary University of London) of the queer performance collective Duckie, has influenced my thinking about futurity for many years. So it’s a pleasure to welcome “Dr. Duckie,” as he is known affectionately by many, as interim managing editor of FQ while candidates are sought for this post. The journal gains from his editorial experiences as deputy film editor and cabaret editor at Time Out London, and as a columnist for FQ (between 2007 and 2011).

The FQ Editorial Board also benefits from three valuable new additions. Professor Dawn Keetley of Lehigh University is a leading scholar of horror, with publications of books, anthologies, and articles on folk horror and the folk gothic. Professor Novotny Lawrence of Indiana University Bloomington brings multifaceted expertise as Director of the Black Film Center & Archive at IU and as the author and editor of key books on Black cinematic experiences and popular culture. University of Cambridge Professor John David Rhodes, the author of the BFI Film Classic book on Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, shares his important and wide-ranging research on experimental and mainstream American and European cinema. I close here with sincere thanks, for all of their expertise, to the staff that work with FQ so diligently for UC Press, including journals director David Famiano, journals manager Jessica Chesnutt, journals production manager Holly Irish, marketing manager Lorraine Weston, and copy editor Carl Walesa. —JMT