With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, FQ columnist Caetlin Benson-Allott rejects streaming recommendations aimed at edification and instead embarks on her personal quest to find and understand the distinctive and therapeutic pleasures of cinematic escapism. Noting that escapism has been neglected by film theorists and critics—dismissed as an undignified, unsophisticated form of spectatorship—she suggests that this oversight explains her difficulty in identifying films that grant that particular kind of pleasure. An overview of her past and present cinematic guilty pleasures, from the B-grade horror movie Leprechaun (Mark Jones, 1993) to romantic comedies like Sleepless in Seattle (Nora Ephron, 1993), helps answer the question she poses: If I don't know how to articulate the value of escapism, how can I find it when I need it?

FQ columnist Caetlin Benson-Allott identifies a new, noteworthy pattern in North American cinema: independent filmmakers crafting narratives about African-American rural women struggling to survive oppressive white communities. Centering her discussion around Nia DaCosta's Little Woods (2018), Jasmin Mozaffari's Firecrackers (2018), and Tate Taylor's Ma (2019), Benson-Allott suggests that these films allow viewers to glimpse the intersections of race, gender, and geography rarely explored in mainstream media.

FQ Columnist Caetlin Benson-Allott explores the long-standing relationship between alcohol and cinema-going. She traces the history of this growing trend in movie concessions, beginning with cinema's debut at the Grand Café de Paris, whose menu certainly included alcohol. Noting the physiological effects of alcohol consumption on the viewer, she argues that moderate drinking can make mediocre movies more enjoyable. Alcohol has also helped shaped the current landscape of cinema exhibition by providing a profitable revenue stream for independent and microcinemas in addition to helping them foster a sense of community.

FQ Columnist Caetlin Benson-Allott explores the complex ethical dimensions of Free Solo , Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin's Oscar-winning documentary about Alex Honnold's death-defying “free solo” climb of El Capitan, Yosemite's legendary three-thousand-foot granite cliff. Benson-Allott asks how our understanding that Honnold could die on camera, a probability that the film reflexively acknowledges, violates the spectatorial contract that exists between films and their audiences. She also probes the gendered strategies employed by Free Solo 's in its representation of risk, which she discusses in comparison to other documentaries, including Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man and The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner .

Between 2014 and 2018, a cycle of artistically-ambitious and philosophically-complex scary movies have enlivened U.S. horror filmmaking. Popular with critics if not always with genre fans, these films comprise an alternative cycle to the contemporaneous conservative horror hits that are making record profits in the U.S. and abroad. The films of the current horror renaissance borrow from international genre conventions to assemble thoughtful allegories for contemporary American anger and despair. Featuring families perverted by fear or prejudice, deeply flawed heroines, and abject heroes, Creep (Patrick Brice, 2014), The Gift (Joel Edgerton, 2015), The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015), It Comes at Night (Trey Edward Shults, 2017), and Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018) focus on the psychological repercussions of supernatural monsters and paranormal events rather than on the extraordinary threats themselves. In this manner, they acknowledge that America's core values are corrupt and its status quo untenable.

Character-centered storytelling helped High Maintenance take off as a web series and become one of the most celebrated shows currently airing on HBO. But the series’ success across both platforms raises the question: what is the difference between a web series and a television series? Between 2012 and 2015, the High Maintenance web series adopted an innovative approach to serial storytelling by privileging contiguity over continuity, accumulation over connection. The web series comprises nineteen short episodes, each a single vignette allowing a brief glimpse into the life of one protagonist or social group. The series facilitated an additive model of episodic narration that fit its narrative premise and its vision of Brooklyn, even though it never quite realized the diversity its model allowed for.

Women-led serials have been getting a lot of attention lately for bringing “the female gaze” to the small screen. Jill Soloway—the television auteur behind Transparent (Amazon, 2014–) and the recent adaptation of Kraus's novel, I Love Dick (Amazon, 2017–)—even taught a class on “The Female Gaze” at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016, defining it as “an intersectional gaze” and “a SOCIOPOLITICAL justice-demanding way of art making.” But the female gaze is actually a very vexed concept. Since it was first invoked via exclusion in Laura Mulvey's foundational “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1975, it has been haphazardly defined more often by what it is not than by what it is. Three current series— I Love Dick , GLOW , and Insecure —all explore how women empower themselves through experiences of abjection: states of vexation and alienation that disrupt their expectations of or participation in social life. All three shows demand respect for their characters by figuring defeat, failure, and desperation as stages women must pass through to challenge patriarchal cultures. While all three shows feature diverse casts and strong female leads, I Love Dick and GLOW introduce characters of color only in supporting roles that contest but never destabilize the white protagonists' racial solipsism. This strategic but facile gesture reveals how far these shows have to go to confront the entangled injustices of social inequality. To incorporate the experiences and insights of women of color meaningfully, their creators would have to abandon the narrative commitments and familiar pleasures of white feminist television, which still needs to decenter whiteness both narratively and figuratively. Insecure 's trenchant comedy thus provides a model for future feminist television. Its self-critical but antiracist humor challenges white feminism's and television's historic neglect of black women.

Read in the context of the recent U.S. presidential election, Jackie (Pablo Larraín, 2016) and Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016) inspire important questions about how women are remembered and valued in political and media culture. Jackie explores Jacqueline Kennedy's orchestration of President Kennedy's funeral and legacy, and in so doing provides an inauspicious reminder of how long and how easily Americans have conflated celebrity and politics, how willingly that national audience has embraced national images over national substance. Christine , also organized around one woman's mediation of a violent death (in this case her own), recreates Christine Chubbuck's world in the weeks leading up to her on-air suicide not to explain her actions but to frame the questions that suicide leaves behind. Both films revisit and revise the biopic genre and its inherent limits while also illustrating its political potential. While Jacqueline Kennedy was already part of the U.S. cultural pantheon and Christine Chubbuck was not, both of their biopics use violence, death, and the questions they leave to help viewers think about the ways that women are and are not remembered, let alone mythologized, in an enduring patriarchy.

In July 2016, Diamond Reynolds broadcast the murder of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, by Minnesota police using Facebook Live, a new video-streaming service. Facebook had begun offering live video streaming in order to increase its market share and profits, but Reynolds's video radicalized the platform while also exposing several myths undergirding viewers’ investment in live media, notably the fantasy of shared experience across distance. Reynolds's FB feed is but one of a great many recent videos of black men and women suffering and dying from police violence, yet its platform invests it with a unique feeling of immediacy. This pain and shock might best be described as horror, were it not for the ongoing commercial misuse of that term. This article investigates horror as an affect in order to understand the profound impact that Reynolds's video has had upon U.S. media and politics.

Wes Craven (1939–2015) wrote and directed horror films that changed the genre for audiences and filmmakers. The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) engage savage violence to critique a self-satisfied complacent culture, while A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) uncover new philosophical significance in the slasher subgenre. Craven has often been dismissed as merely a genre filmmaker, yet his effect on his genre was profound, precisely because he established genre conventions instead of following them.

This final column for Film Quarterly by Caetlin Benson-Allott interrogates the stakes of closure and similar narrative conventions through an examination of the films Europa Report (2013) and Gravity (2013).