Patti LuPone doesn’t like movie musicals. On a 2017 episode of Andy Cohen’s talk show Watch What Happens Live, the legendary actress was asked about the 2012 film adaptation of Les Misérables – having originated the role of Fantine in the West End, she knew a thing or two about the show. There’s a brief pause to call Madonna “dead behind the eyes” in Evita before she says, “I don’t know why people assume they can do musicals or make movie musicals without ever having been involved with the process of making a musical.” 

Movie musicals of the 21st century are a shadow of their former selves. In these risk-averse times, the focus is on adaptations from the stage with bankable stars at the helm – think Chicago, Into The Woods and Mamma Mia. But since 2020, even that’s been slimmed down. Musicals aren’t even marketed as musicals, lest anyone feel tricked into watching one. The movie musical is in dire need of resuscitation. 

From 2010 until 2019, movie musicals had occasional critical and commercial success. Studios stuck to bankable options from theatre: Les Misérables made $435m at the box office, earning enormous acclaim (though not from Patti LuPone) and the Best Actress Oscar for Anne Hathaway. Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, an outlier to the genre in that it’s not based on any pre-existing IP, may largely be remembered for its infamous Oscars gaff but it made $433m at the Box Office and remains just one of three films to gain 14 nominations at the Oscars, winning six. Rob Marshall’s Into The Woods tried to replicate the success of Les Misérables, returning $212m for Sondheim’s dark fairytale fable, but Michael Gracey’s The Greatest Showman blew box office expectations wide open with a $428m return, continuing to impress itself on musical culture with a Broadway adaptation currently in the works. One of the rare times when a musical film becomes fodder for musical theatre. 

Directors stacked their casts with talent from both the world of film and theatre. Anna Kendrick was paired with Broadway royalty Jeremy Jordan for The Last Five Years, while Les Misérables puts Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway next to Aaron Tveit and Samantha Barks. One could argue the reason Into The Woods failed to land as well as its predecessors was its lack of stage talent integrated with screen actors, despite Bernadette Peters, Imelda Staunton, and Amy Adams all having appeared in versions onstage. 

The formula was simple: bankable names and well-known theatrical material that will travel well. And then, in 2019 – Cat-astrophe. 

It had all the makings of a smash. Oscar-winner Tom Hooper (Les Misérables) was back in the director’s chair. There was a large, starry cast: Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen and noted cat lady Taylor Swift. Sequins and fur were out: motion capture was in. Ignoring the staple costuming of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Marmite musical, Hooper once again integrated stage performers into the cast, casting Zizi Strallen, and two principal dancers at the Royal Ballet, Francesca Hayward and Steven McRae.

But sitting at 19% on Rotten Tomatoes and with endless jokes about it – even from its own stars – Cats turned into a catastrophe. Critics tore it apart. Audiences either hate-watched or didn’t watch at all. Part of the blame fell to Tom Hooper – and not just because of the accusations by VFX teams of his behaviour during post-production (#ReleaseTheButtholeCut). Cats is already a divisive musical, but the film adaptation was a mess. The decision to turn beloved actors into motion-captured cats that looked like sleep-paralysis demons certainly didn’t help. Odd casting choices, unfinished VFX, bad reviews, bad reception, failure to make its big budget back – Cats changed the game. With such a wild failure on their hands, executives got cold feet. Musicals were box office poison.

And then, in 2021: a change. Across theatres and streaming in the UK and US, sixteen movie musicals were released. Some bombed hard, some middled. But from out of the pack, kicking and shouting, two entered the ring to battle as awards season kicked off. 

Steven Spielberg’s remake of 1961’s West Side Story and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s adaptation of Jonathan Larson’s Tick, Tick…Boom! showcased the real spectrum of modern musical theatre. The former was the balletic Sondheim epic, the latter Jonathan Larson’s prelude to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rent. Two very different musicals, two very different adaptations. But each capitalized on the two things the movie musical needs to survive: talent and spectacle. 

Adding little plot-wise to his remake, Spielberg relied on theatrical talent to bring this tragic tale to life. Casting the then-unknown Rachel Zegler as Maria, as well as Broadway performers Ariana DeBose (Hamilton) as Anita and Mike Faist (Newsies, Dear Evan Hansen) as Riff, suddenly gave Broadway fans a reason to buy a ticket. I dare you to watch Faist dancing circles around Ansel Elgort in ‘Cool’ or Ariana DeBose leading the charge in the famous ‘America’ dance break and not feel goosebumps. They’re as electrifying on screen as they are onstage. 

Even behind the camera, the right talent can transform the reception of a movie musical. Tick, Tick…Boom!  showed that with the right people behind the camera, even actors with no musical experience (ie. Andrew Garfield) can give a career-defining performance. Nobody understands musical theatre like Lin-Manuel Miranda and it was his deep familiarity with the genre that gave the film its edge. Musical numbers are earned and gorgeous to watch, effortlessly integrated into the overarching plot while providing the showmanship we crave.

There was, of course, one minor problem. For all their talent, their spectacle – neither film could be considered a commercial success. West Side Story made just $74m globally on a budget of $100m. Tick, Tick…Boom! grossed just $115,585 on its limited theatrical run before Netflix released it worldwide. Yet, their Rotten Tomatoes scores are 92% and 87% respectively. Critics like it, but it doesn’t translate to ticket sales. Is it a lack of star power? Limited time in theatres? Or just a general indifference to the genre as a whole, as proved by other 2021 flops In The Heights and Dear Evan Hansen? 

So it’s no wonder studios are turning to trickery. Wonka marketed itself as a whimsical, fun-for-the-whole-family movie, not a musical. It did incredibly well, showing at cinemas across the world for months after its initial release, making $629m on a $125m budget and earning general critical praise. Despite a critical pasting, Mean Girls made over $100m on a $36m budget, using an Olivia Rodrigo song for its trailer over one of its many musical numbers. The numbers don’t lie. But I believe there is a way for the movie musical to retain its soul AND make their production budgets back.

For the risk-averse, adapting Broadway musicals will continue to be the way forward. Pre-existing IP will get people into cinemas considering it’s vastly cheaper than a theatre ticket. But with the right people hired to make these adaptations, the goal of achieving critical acclaim and commercial success could become far more balanced than it is now. 

The talent aspect is simple: hire people in front of and behind the camera who understand musicals. Listen to Hannah Waddingham when she tells you to hire theatrical talent because “they won’t let you down”. Fundamentally, they know how to get the best out of the genre and that translates on-screen. Hopes are high for Jon M Chu’s upcoming two-part adaptation of Wicked, which remains one of the most successful Broadway shows of all time (having made over $1bn since it opened in 2003). Leads Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba) and Jonathan Bailey (Fiyero) are Tony and Olivier-award winners respectively, but also well-known faces on screen. 

They’ve also been paired with megastar Ariana Grande and bonafide movie stars like Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Yeoh – surely, the safest combination one could create for a movie of this size and scale. Even director Jon M Chu is no stranger to the genre, having directed 2021’s In The Heights on top of countless music videos. When you have directors, actors, writers, cinematographers and choreographers who understand the complex syntax of the musical, the end product becomes so much stronger. It’s a delicate balancing act, but getting people who love the genre usually makes the films better.

Spectacle is harder to quantify. Why do we watch movie musicals? We want to see things that are impossible within the boundaries of a theatre space. Think of Gene Kelly dancing in the rain, of Dolly Levi and the whole of Yonkers putting on their Sunday clothes, or the Grease car flying up into space. The musical has always pushed the boundaries of what a camera could capture and we need that pioneering energy back. La La Land proved that even the everyday can be spectacular, whether that’s cars jammed on a freeway or Ryan Gosling walking down a pier. Bring back the spectacle and you bring back the reason for the movie musical’s existence. Wicked’s magical world can be expanded infinitely on a film in a way it can’t in the theatre – it might be the best reason for adapting it for film. One can only hope that the unimpressed reaction to their initial trailer in February encouraged them to get back into the editing suite before Part One’s release in November. But for this autumn’s other musical offering, a grittier visual feast awaits. 

As we approach the international release of Joker: Folie à Deux, the creatives behind the film have done everything they can to not call it a musical (despite previously saying it was). A Variety cover story, an awkwardly phrased answer at a press conference, and an insistence at every turn before its Venice premiere that this film is NOT a musical.  

Yes, Joker: Folie à Deux is a world away from In The Heights or Mary Poppins, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a musical. Someone meaner than me might even call it a jukebox musical, which opens up a whole different can of worms. You might ask why Todd Phillips and co are so afraid to call it what it is. Do they consider the ‘musical’ to be a lesser genre that may prevent them from winning Oscars? Or, as I strongly suspect, did marketing intervene and say ‘For the love of Gene Kelly, stop calling it a musical or people won’t see it!’.

I could say they don’t know what a musical is, but they’re smart people. Lady Gaga’s in it, of course she knows what a musical is! But it’s now seen as the kiss of death to use the dreaded M-word. Audiences don’t like musicals, we’re told. But, the money’s been spent, the film’s been edited – let’s market it differently and hope no one notices all the singing and dancing. And by the time they discover the truth, the movie’s already got your money, so what can you do? Early reviews of Joker: Folie à Deux from Venice have been mixed. The Independent called it ‘edgy and disturbing’, the BBC ‘an underwhelming, unnecessary slog’. Hannah Strong’s review for Little White Lies called it “a film of half-measures, lacking ambition in a way that is at least mildly more entertaining than its predecessor”, though puts that positive down to the inclusion of music from half a century ago. Of course, the moviegoing public will have to wait until October 4th to judge for themselves, but arguably the ban on the word ‘musical’ has had the opposite effect. 

Successes in the last decade have proved that, with enough confidence in the genre, the movie musical can thrive critically and commercially. There is an audience out there for these movies and with the right people behind them, they will sell tickets. Wicked and, to a certain extent, Joker: Folie à Deux, are going to be an enormous test and I’m praying that the creatives and audiences come through. If they don’t, it could be Bye, Bye Birdie for the whole genre.

There are few names in the history of queer cinema that provoke as much of a gleeful – or disgusted if you’re in polite society – reaction as John Waters. Over the decades, the man has gone from a midnight movie troublemaker to being a well-known celebrity of sorts, in no small part thanks to a brilliant guest spot on The Simpsons that queered many of the world’s children (including myself). His filthiest pictures (Pink Flamingos, Polyester) have been restored and celebrated, but those that came later are often considered lesser than his more provocative earlier works.

Serial Mom and A Dirty Shame are two such examples and, arguably, are two of his best films in spite of their critical and commercial failure and, most importantly, studios that loathed what he’d made. Though they came ten years apart – one celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year, and the other its twentieth – the pair are pitch-perfect extensions of Waters’ brand of suburban satire. They are the kind of films that, to some extent, present as “mainstream” without actually being designed for that kind of audience, which is precisely why the mainstream rejected them.

To truly appreciate each one requires diving into what makes them treasures individually and what makes them relevant even today, and Serial Mom is an ideal place to start. In his book, Mr. Know-It-All, Waters described the picture to studio execs as “not the usual John Waters movie about crazy people in a crazy world, but a movie about a normal person in a realistic world doing the craziest thing of all as the audience cheers her on!” This is exactly what Waters delivers with Beverly Sutphin, a play on the ideal sitcom mother that Leave It To Beaver’s June Cleaver once represented, but with the twist being that she’s also a serial killer.

Serial Mom is designed to subvert expectations of what “normalcy” really means and what that very idea can do to a person. Beverly, played by an exquisite Kathleen Turner, is, as a character describes her, “about as normal and nice a lady as we’re ever going to find”. She’s also a foul-mouthed murderer who will take out anyone who sets her off. These personalities aren’t a rigid dichotomy, Waters suggests, but rather two halves of a whole – the most abnormal people are those who present themselves as pillars of proper society.

Practically every one of the film’s scenes plays into this imbalance, with all of Beverly’s niceties being contrasted by her sheer relentless villainy. Sure, she’s happy to make breakfast for everyone in the household and recycles her garbage so well that the neighborhood trash collectors adore her for it, but she’s also willing to mentally torture someone via prank call for stealing a parking spot and murder someone for not rewinding their VHS tapes (which, in fairness, is a crime). And Beverly, ultimately, is someone to root for in her crimes – she may be doing bad things, like hitting someone with a phone for wearing white after Labor Day, but that ties into the twisted way we all sometimes wish we could get away with a little retribution for our pettiest grievances.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Serial Mom isn’t Kathleen Turner’s portrait of a serial killer, but the way that this brand of violence infiltrates every single facet of “proper society” in Waters’ hometown and cinematic staple Baltimore. This is not limited to the teenagers who watch Blood Feast and masturbate to Deadly Weapons, but extends to everyone in her vicinity. Take an establishment that Waters has clear contempt for, the church itself, and how the pastor’s sermon amidst Berverly’s murder spree is about capital punishment. They cite Jesus Christ himself as someone who would (or should) have spoken out against it in the midst of being publicly murdered, and a foolish public nods in agreement at such an inane statement all the while clutching their pearls at murder happening in their hometown.

If anything, Serial Mom’s relevance has only increased tenfold in the thirty years since it came out. It isn’t just in its eerie prediction of the 90s media spectacle that was the OJ Simpson case, (the film came out just two months prior to his arrest and subsequent showstopping trial) but in the way that true crime has become embedded in American culture beyond any reasonable sense. The third act court case – as much a spectacle as Simpson’s – is not just a laugh riot, but a clear condemnation of the way that people perceive those in the spotlight. It is something of a timeless criticism, one made obvious by the presence of Patricia Hearst as a juror – herself someone who was perceived by the public as both victim and monster when she went through a public court case in the 1970s related to her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. At her guilty verdict, she famously sighed, “I never had a chance” but Waters’ defendant blessedly did.

“Let’s make a gore movie about mom, or, better yet, a TV series” – a line uttered by Beverly’s own son, before he begins to sell the rights to their life story for a TV movie – is an even more scathing critique now than it was in 1994, as is Suzanne Somers’ cameo to play the “feminist heroine” that is our murderous mother. We now exist in an era when every other new streaming series is dedicated to exploring the tales of serial killers, from Ryan Murphy’s endless collection of true crime reenactments (his latest, Monster, first tackling Jeffrey Dahmer and, now, the Menendez brothers) to practically every single cold case (and sometimes even open ones) getting its own documentary miniseries.

Even in the face of such atrocities, people are drawn to criminal actions and behaviors that are deemed insane. It’s hard not to think about how Beverly Sutphin would be getting this kind of treatment herself, with even Waters’ film winking at the audience through the opening text crawl that specifically addresses it being “based on a true story” (even though it certainly was not). That people didn’t understand Serial Mom isn’t a total surprise, as Americans are not especially fond of witnessing their own shamelessness, and Savoy Pictures hating the fact that a murderer got away with it feels like a relic of a more censorious era than the 1990s. But it’s the definition of a cult classic that now gets screened regularly on Mother’s Day, and a brilliant picture that continues to age like fine wine.

Waters’ thesis on American normalcy is taken to even greater extremes in A Dirty Shame, his “final film” (pending a comeback with his adaptation of his own novel, Liarmouth), which is one of his most forgotten and underrated films that also happens to be one of his absolute best comedies. If Serial Mom was about playing up how even the most normal people could hold murderous intent within them, A Dirty Shame was about showing how natural it is to be abnormal.

From top to bottom (and vers), it’s a queer cinematic treasure about the way society tries to shut down anyone with an identity that is declared abnormal. It feels like Waters purposely looked up every kink or sexual act back in the early 2000s – bear culture, cunnilingus, adult baby diaper lovers, sploshing, exhibitionism, mysophilia, masturbation, good old fashioned threesomes – just to populate his film with things that the average viewer would find shocking. And, well, that’s exactly what he did. While it isn’t much of a shock these days (or even back then for queer viewers), it certainly was for the MPAA, who branded it with the dreaded NC-17 rating that cursed it to oblivion and a horrendously recut theatrical version. It is, however, a completely ridiculous film, a riotous little sex comedy inspired by the sexploitation films that Waters loves and spliced into his own cinema (including Serial Mom).

The film centers around two groups: neuters and apostles. The former – proudly declaring that “neuter means normal” – are the kind of people who believe repression is the only way to live. They’re willing to lock a young woman up in her childhood bedroom simply to stop her from embracing her exhibitionist ways, they hand out flyers and rant about how “perverts are taking over the neighborhood” and they hate any showcase of sexuality, even down to just a simple public display of affection like kissing. Suzanne Shepherd and Mink Stole lead the brigade as Big Ethel and Marge, with their crusade against sexual deviants coming across as overtly idiotic. But in spite of its absurdity, down to the idea of forcing a young woman to go on Prozac to calm her sexual urges, this kind of behavior is grounded in reality.

Once again, Waters’ scathing criticism of society is at the forefront of this film and taps into how cyclical this kind of behavior is. Big Ethel and Marge aren’t so far from the way that conservative politicians used (and continue to use) to persecute gay men with a national platform and others would encourage conversion therapy to “fix” queer people. Just as Anita Bryant once terrorized Florida, now we have Ron DeSantis banning queer education and stripping trans people of their rights. This extends beyond the United States, with even the United Kingdom playing host to some of the most vocal bigots in the world, like JK Rowling, who use their platform to harass trans people and prevent them from accessing healthcare. These people weaponize their perceived “normalcy” against those who are not, and position anything remotely “other” as monstrous.

But Waters knows that this is untrue, and instead frames the other as nothing but truly immaculate. The apostles are the film’s true gems, with even the most annoying of queer subcultures (bears, with all their grrs and woofs) being treated as part of a holy collective that will free these neuters from the shackles of repression. At its core is none other than Ray-Ray, played by Johnny Knoxville, who serves as a Christlike figure who can not only resuscitate people but bring them pleasure beyond their comprehension. Where most films would shy away from emphasizing that “spreading love” can and should include “through sexual means and pleasure”, Waters commits to showing that sexual freedom and embracing one’s identity is the only way to be truly liberated.

The mother-daughter duo of Sylvia and Caprice Stickles (the latter better known as Ursula Udders), played by Tracey Ullman and Selma Blair respectively, are a perfect means of showcasing the struggle between neuters and apostles. Everything about life in the normal/neuter world is one of misery, with the unhappy Sylvia (who won’t even have sex with her husband, played by Chris Isaak) literally locking up her daughter to ensure that she can’t go out dancing and showing off her “criminally enlarged breasts”. In her sadness, Caprice sits around watching The Red Shoes and lamenting that she can’t be out dancing to Billy Lee Riley’s “Red Hot”, showing off her body to a number of men, including her biggest fan, Fat Fuck Frank. The moment she is liberated via accidental head injury (the film’s means of “change”), Sylvia realizes that this kind of treatment is a mistake. And, while it sounds idiotic, there’s something truly sincere and lovely about Sylvia and Caprice’s relationship and the way that the two bond when embracing their identities – one as a “cunnilingus bottom” (a title bestowed to her by Ray-Ray) and the other as an exhibitionist.

That beauty extends to the way that A Dirty Shame plays into everyone’s favorite queer film trope of “the found family”, as the apostles are all loving and accepting of each other’s identities. Every single one of Ray-Ray’s followers gets at least a brief moment to shine, their commitment to the bit extending beyond just a chance to laugh at actors like Jackie Hoffman masturbating furiously or Hearst (in her fifth Waters film appearance) holding up a bottle of poppers in an attempt to save Ray-Ray from the sex nullifying powers of Prozac. As much as Waters wants you to laugh at the jokes he’s presenting, he’s also fairly committed to the uniting power that comes with bonding with other weirdos.

Twenty years after A Dirty Shame’s release, queer people find themselves faced with discourse about respectability politics. In an era where more and more identities are becoming part of the mainstream, and people have gotten the chance to truly connect and develop, queer people who are comfortable with the status quo find themselves falling into the realm of the neuter. Rather than succumb to the idiocy that is “No Kink at Pride”, with queer people willing to throw each other under the bus for being “too sexual” at an event that celebrates their liberation, A Dirty Shame presents an ideal alternative: all kink at pride. Down to its very climax, in which everyone in Baltimore has become a sex addict and Ray-Ray climaxes all over the world (and screen), John Waters is offering a hand to all those who have ever felt persecuted for their sexuality, not only to come with him, but to cum with him.

As many have noted in the past, genius is never appreciated in its time, and to look back at these two movies is to bear witness to a genius at work. John Waters himself has joked, “Is it perverse that I like my later films better than the early ones that made me ‘the King of Puke’?” and it’s easy to see why. It isn’t just as he says “they’re easier to watch and the acting is better”, but, rather, that they’re genuinely great and dense films. Beneath all the goofy humor lies a real love, not just for the history of art (both music and film especially, which Waters liberally references) but for the collection of weirdos that he always places on screen. No matter how “normal” they might seem at first, they’re all a little crazy and strange, and that’s what makes them so beautiful. To him, the characters of Serial Mom and A Dirty Shame aren’t people to be looked down on or chastised, but to be cheered on in all their filthy, monstrous ways, and there’s nothing more beautiful than that kind of radical acceptance.

The heterosexual man is a rarity in Pedro Almodóvar’s oeuvre; as Paul Julian Smith notes in ‘Desire Unlimited’, a reviewer at the Spanish daily periodical El Mundo complained upon the release of All About My Mother (Todo Sobre Mi Madre) in 1999 that he “failed to recognize himself” in Almodóvar’s depiction of Spain: “a nation exclusively composed of lesbians, drag queens and junkies.” In Almodóvar’s capable hands queer desire flourishes, and under his playful directorial gaze gender and sexuality are treated as fluid, constantly being made and shaped rather than standing as fixed entities of identity.

As Isolina Ballesteros writes in ‘All About Almodóvar’, “Homosexuality here enjoys the same ‘taken-for-grantedness’ as heterosexuality, and coexists easily with transvestism, transexualism, and pansexualism. The ‘non-revelatory’ nature of gay identity in Almodóvar’s films mirrors the director’s […] reluctance to engage in identity politics and to endorse its often rigid categorizations in favor of ambiguity and queerness.” Fluidity is similarly embraced with respect to gender in Almodóvar’s films and casting choices, which treat gender as paradoxically all-important and largely irrelevant.

Law of Desire (La ley del deseo) is considered a turning point in Almodóvar’s career – the first of his films to explicitly focus on homosexual desire. It centers around prominent film director Pablo (Eusebio Poncela), who is enamored with his younger lover Juan (Miguel Molina) and ends up in an unwilling possessive relationship with Antonio (Antonio Banderas). Antonio, the son of a conservative politician, fixates on Pablo after watching his most recent release and has his first homosexual experience after calculatedly seducing him. Pablo, preoccupied with thoughts of Juan, considers the tryst to be a throwaway incident, but Antonio’s desire proves to be all-encompassing. Due to his conservative family, Antonio insists that Pablo signs his letters using an assumed feminine name, and similarly, Antonio addresses him as such; Pablo adopts a different gender identity in writing in order to pass as having a heterosexual and conservatively appropriate relationship.

Trans identity is dealt with more explicitly in Law of Desire through Pablo’s sister Tina (Carmen Maura), who is a canonically trans character in the film but portrayed by a cis actress. Conversely, Tina’s cisgender former lesbian lover is played by trans actress Bibi Andersen, a public figure to Spanish audiences of the time of release and thus a bending of traditional gender casting that would have been recognizable to the viewer. Maura’s performance as Tina has been characterized as excessive and exaggerated in its femininity; Almodóvar not only has Maura acting as a man who has transitioned into living life as a woman, but, as Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit note in ‘All About Almodóvar’, Maura’s exaggerated performance of femininity serves to “simultaneously hid[e] and theatrically expos[e] the construction” of female identity while driving home the notion that cis women are themselves often forced into performance of gender by the patriarchy.

Tina’s performance in Cocteau’s The Human Voice, a role she is cast in by her brother Pablo, allows her the literal stage to vocalize her feeling of being jilted. Pablo, Tina, and Ada – Tina’s former lover’s daughter whom she has left in Tina’s care – form an unlikely family unit that serves as a narrative foil to the tension, thrill, and violence of the male love triangle formed by Pablo, Juan, and Antonio. After Antonio murders Juan so as to be the only object of Pablo’s affection, and Pablo becomes the prime suspect in the case, Pablo suffers from a car accident that leaves him amnesic. Tina visits him in the hospital, claiming that his “amnesia leaves [her] with no past,” and reveals to him their shared traumatic family history – that she had an affair with their father, breaking up their parents’ marriage, and then followed him to Morocco, where she transitioned, as they had decided before leaving. In a startling moment of reveal, Pablo asks Tina “Did you decide, or did he?” to which Tina replies “Does it matter?” During an emotionally charged moment that could be read as taking the matter of transness flippantly, Almodóvar reveals his overarching ethos toward gender and identity politics: “Does it matter?”

Almodóvar’s most internationally successful film, All About My Mother, further complicates his depiction of transness and gender on screen. Manuela (Cecilia Roth) is a nurse and single mother to Esteban, an aspiring writer who dreams of the world of the stage. After Esteban loses his life in a freak accident, Manuela leaves Madrid for Barcelona in a quest to find Esteban’s father, who is now living as a woman by the name of Lola. Upon arrival, she reunites with an old friend Agrado, a transgender sex worker again played by a cis actress (Antonia San Juan), who claims that Lola has disappeared after cleaning out her home. Agrado takes Manuela to the convent to help her find work, where they meet Sister Rosa, an impregnated nun. A circle of female community is soon formed between Agrado, Manuela, and Sister Rosa, whom Manuela ends up taking in and caring for in a pseudo-maternal manner.

Early on in the film, Agrado goes on a diatribe, claiming that she “can’t stand the drag queens…[who] confuse transvestism with a circus. Worse, with mime! A woman is her hair, her nails, lips for sucking or for bitching.” Here a cis actress portraying a transwoman decries those who participate in drag culture, though she is herself merely performing transness. Alongside this, Almodóvar had featured drag prominently in earlier films, even appearing in it himself on multiple occasions as Isolina Ballesteros notes.

The Mexican film critic Núria Vidal wrote in The Films of Pedro Almodóvar that Almodóvar “is concerned with suspending that distinction between artifice and truth which has so oppressed sexual dissidents of all kinds.” Almodóvar’s playful casting and emphasis on performance force his audience to suspend disbelief and preconceived notions of gender, and who can perform as whom. Truth and authenticity in his films exist only within the context of the film’s framing and narrative, with Almodóvar pulling and manipulating the strings.

Within the logic of this particular film, Almodóvar argues for an alternative to the patriarchal family unit, one that is maternally and communally led. Womanhood here becomes nearly synonymous with motherhood and caretaking – from Manuela’s caring for Rosa throughout her pregnancy to the actress that Manuela works for as an assistant, Huma Rojo, looking after her co-star Nina. Paul Julian Smith writes in Desire Unlimited that All About My Mother differs from its predecessor, Live Flesh, in that “the bond between the characters is not sex, but rather simple solidarity.” This solidarity “is based on the breaking down of barriers…the themes of the film, weighty but never ponderous, point to a cohabitation without limits.” (The theme of maternally led non-traditional family units and friendships as family are further explored in later Almodóvar works, including Volver, which centers around a matriarchal lineage and intergenerational patterns of trauma, and Parallel Mothers, which follows the intertwined paths of two women who meet and bond in the maternity ward.)

Manuela finds a new family in her female friendships in Barcelona, with Agrado and Sister Rosa and Huma, even after Sister Rosa reveals her pregnancy and her fear of HIV positivity given that Lola is the “father.” Manuela tells Rosa that Lola “is the worst of a man and the worst of a woman,” and that she stayed with Lola after her transition because “apart from the tits he hadn’t changed.” In her absence Lola is treated as a hybridized gendered figure, at once a woman and not, seemingly as she did in her own life; following the modification of her body her behavior toward Manuela remained patriarchal and controlling, causing Manuela to wonder aloud to Rosa “how could someone act so macho with a pair of tits.” Gender in Almodóvar’s cinematic world is as much behaviorally and performance-based as it is biological; the violence of patriarchy and machismo has itself been the focus of subsequent films, perhaps most notably Volver.

All the world’s a stage, and for Almodóvar this manifests in intricate nested narrative structures, of performances within performances in his films. The viewer is watching actors perform in an Almodóvar film, and the actors are themselves often acting on the stage or in film within the film’s narrative, a layering of characterization and performance that is also used to subvert traditional gender norms and roles. In All About My Mother, Huma and Nina are starring in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire. When Nina is unable to perform due to her ongoing struggle with addiction, Manuela steps in to play Stella, a full circle moment as she played the same character in the same production when she first met Lola, then Esteban, who starred opposite her. In this recurrent performance of the role, Manuela is allowed the opportunity to work through on the stage her difficult feelings toward Lola, and to channel the grief over her son’s death into performance.

Again in ‘All About Almodóvar’, Ballesteros writes, “All About My Mother deals, among other things, with the power of live performance to activate agency and to create solidarity among women.” When Agrado is given her turn on stage, she details the cost of her transition for the captive audience, claiming that “you are more authentic the more you resemble what you dream of being.” Agrado’s speech, which details the construction of her present physical body, embellishes the nature of her gender and identity as fluid and able to be morphed—as itself a construction. Here Almodóvar points to an authentic selfhood to be accessed through performance and representation, applicable both in the context of Agrado’s gender transition and in Manuela’s journey of self-discovery and grief processing.

The viewer is introduced to Lola only in the film’s final scenes, at Sister Rosa’s funeral after she has passed away during childbirth from AIDS. Rosa’s family entreats Esteban, Rosa and Lola’s child, to Manuela’s care. Manuela is here given a second lease on life in the form of a second Esteban to raise as her own. She takes the baby to meet Lola, who tells him “You’re with Dad.” Later, when Rosa’s mother interrogates Manuela as to who she allowed to meet the baby, Manuela tells her “That woman is his father.” The gender designations and gendered identifiers of parenthood are again muddled in this dialogue; it is perhaps important to note here that Spanish is itself a gendered language, with male and female identifiers built into the language itself and its usage. The seemingly contradictory nature of these lines is emblematic of the fluid approach to gender that Almodóvar embraces and proposes through his work. The film is dedicated to “all the actresses who play actresses, to all the women who act, to men who act and become women, to all mothers,” pointing to the relationship between performance and lived reality, particularly as it relates to gender.

The notion of gender as performative and its counterplay in lived reality reappear as motifs in Bad Education (La mala educación), which features a nested narrative structure and was noted upon release to draw upon the director’s own biography. Film director Enrique (Fele Martinez) is suffering from writer’s block when he is paid a surprise visit by Ignacio (Gael Garcia Bernal), a former boarding school friend and his first love, an actor who now goes by the name Ángel. Ignacio gifts him with a story, “The Visit” which follows a transgender woman, Zahara, who returns to her childhood Catholic boarding school in an attempt to blackmail the priest, Father Manolo, who abused her, threatening him with a story that is also titled “The Visit.”

In a flashback, the childhood love affair between the two boys, seemingly inspired by Enrique and Ignacio themselves, plays out; the boys are discovered by Father Manolo and it is implied that Ignacio suffered from abuse at the Father’s hands in an attempt to evade punishment, only for Enrique to be expelled regardless. Enrique is thrilled by the story and tells Ángel that he would like to adapt it to the screen; Ángel insists on playing the lead role of Zahara. At this point it is made clear to the viewer that previously interspersed scenes of Garcia Bernal dressed as a woman are scenes from Enrique’s movie.

Enrique ultimately learns that the real Ignacio, who had been living as a woman, had passed away several years prior, and that Ángel was actually his younger brother, Juan. The ridiculous yet entertaining layers to Garcia Bernal’s performance are laid bare here: he portrays Juan, who is himself portraying Ignacio in real life and Zahara in film. Garcia Bernal plays a cis gay male who is performing transness for the camera and an eventual audience. Bad Education takes Judith Butler’s conception in Gender Trouble that “all gender is performatively constituted,” to its logical extreme until gender identity is so buried and obfuscated between layers of performance and storytelling that it is nearly impossible not to notice their malleability and fluctuation.

The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito), described by Almodóvar in its original public announcement as “a horror story without screams or frights,” takes the theme of gender fluidity and transness in a twisted and sinister direction. The film follows Robert Ledgard, a doctor who has perfected a synthetic skin for burn victims and has illicitly tested it on Vera, a young woman whom he keeps under lock, key and surveillance in his home. Over the course of the film, it is revealed that Vera is in fact Vicente, a young man from a nearby village whom Ledgard believes defiled and sexually assaulted his (now deceased) teenage daughter at a wedding.

Ledgard, a skilled plastic surgeon, molded Vicente and his body into Vera through a series of gender reassignment surgeries. Kept captive, Vera acts as though she has developed genuine feelings for Ledgard in order to eventually make her escape, killing him and another in the process, and returns to her mother’s dress shop to deliver the film’s final line—“Soy Vicente”—revealing that he ultimately still identifies as male.

The Skin I Live In depicts an unusual perversion of transness, in which on one hand transness is meted out as a punishment in an act of vengeance by Ledgard. On the other hand, the viewer is directly confronted with the confusion, pain, and consequences of being forced to live in a physical body that does not match one’s internal conception of one’s own gender. As Susan Stryker wrote in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” “The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science…It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born.”

“Vera” is a monstrous construction of Ledgard’s creation, and “her” body is treated as monstrous even by its inhabitant, Vicente, who did not himself wish to transition. Here gender is revealed to be all important in the particular situation of being trapped societally in the trappings and context of a gender other than your own. Performance is equally paired with spectatorship, acknowledging the role that external perception plays in gender identity. It’s confusing sometimes to be a girl, particularly if you haven’t yourself chosen to be one.

“Vera” is shown rejecting gifts of dresses and makeup, and thus rejecting the gender that has been chosen for her. Performance is here used as a means of survival; “Vera” is merely a character that Vicente plays until he can escape his captors and reclaim his true gender identity in the public eye. Identity and authenticity are explored in that ultimately, what Vicente holds to be true is the reality that he has chosen for himself.

The weight of the psychological damage done to Vicente after years of gendered performance can be felt through the emotional confrontation by “Vera” at the film’s conclusion. There is a sterility and brightness to the scenes of this film, in line with the clinical and medical context of Ledgrand’s gender-based experiments. It is a film that is deeply unsettling in both its premise and its execution; fittingly, there is a visceral and bodily reaction to this film, as dread and fear descend upon the viewer as the story unfolds.

In an interview with June Thomas for The Advocate prior to the release of Julieta in 2016, Almodóvar said “I made a point to include [gay and transgender] characters, because they were part of my life. I tried to treat them with the same naturalness that I would bring to a housewife or any other character. I wasn’t talking about their problems, or The Transgender Problem – I was saying that they exist and their lives are as legitimate as any other.” Almodóvar has approached the subjects of gender and transness with signature cheek and playfulness throughout his career.

In doing so, he reveals gender to be fluid, malleable, and constructed, something that is performed and reflexively witnessed. As viewers, we are afforded entry into worlds devoid of the rigidity of gender, sexuality, and identity that mark our own world; Almodóvar offers us visions of alternative manners of being and living in a largely heteronormative and cisgender society through the normalization of queer and trans life, and novel pathways of being in community and solidarity with one another.

When Drive arrived in UK cinemas in the summer of 2011, few could have anticipated its impact on popular culture. Ryan Gosling’s star was well and truly on the rise, satin jackets were officially cool again, and tracks from its brooding, other-worldly soundtrack would soon find their way onto the playlists of film fans. One of those people was Redg Weeks.

“I was already a bit of a soundtrack head,” he muses. “I’d come from working with electronic music on my old record label and one of my favourite scores was Solaris by Cliff Martinez, so when Drive came out I was blown away by it. I waited for the credits at the end and I literally took notes.”

Drive struck him as the perfect fit for Invada Records, the Bristol-based record label he’d been managing since 2008, which was at that point known for its eclectic, experimental output. Inspired by what he’d heard, he immediately got on the phone.

“I noticed that Lakeshore Records had been involved with the soundtrack, so I contacted them and got through to Brian McNelis straightaway. It turns out he was the music supervisor for Drive. I told him who I was and he was like, ‘We don’t really want to do vinyl. Do you want to do vinyl?’ I was like, ‘I’d love to do vinyl, please.’”

Invada had never released a film score before and Weeks was mindful that he hadn’t consulted the label’s co-founder Geoff Barrow, known for his work with Portishead and Invada’s own BEAK. As it turned out, Barrow had recently watched Drive on a plane and was thrilled with the signing.

“I think he was in Australia at the time,” Weeks recalls. “He rang me and I explained ‘There’s this film called Drive. You should try and see it. I hope I haven’t sort of overstepped my position here, but I’ve signed the soundtrack, so that was a massive thing.”

Drive was something of a coup for Invada, though hardly off-brand. Co-founded in Australia at the turn of the millennium by Barrow and fellow musician Ashley Anderson, the label had always been buoyed by a can-do, benevolent spirit. If the duo liked an artist and could help platform them, they would, which led to an early focus on hip-hop and beat-driven releases, including those of Anderson’s own Katalyst project. When Barrow returned to Bristol in the early 2000s, he teamed up with entrepreneur and promoter Paul Horlick, aka Fat Paul, to establish its UK arm.

“Geoff and Paul had this vision of putting out music that they would come across,” Weeks explains. “Bands like Gonga, The Heads, and a lot of Bristol-based, avant-garde experimental bands.”

When Weeks was invited aboard, the label had already established a distinct identity of its own. Having worked at NRK, an electronic label born in the early 1990s, Weeks was aware of Invada’s reputation and saw potential in its unique direction. “My first job was to evaluate where the label was and to make some kind of business sense of it. It had plodded on and I think it was haemorrhaging quite a bit of cash and it was pretty unsustainable. There was a big scene change at the time. Independent music had kind of surged forward again and I think there was a healthy appetite for what we were doing.”

Following the release of BEAK’s debut record in 2009, Invada began to expand its reach internationally, licensing the album to American label Ipecac, which helped solidify its reputation on the global stage. But while Drive was Invada’s first major soundtrack signing, there was another score closer to home that would play its part in establishing Invada’s film credentials – DROKK, the project Barrow originally composed alongside Ben Salisbury for 2012’s Dredd, based on the graphic novels published by 2000 AD.

“Their score ultimately didn’t get used, but for Geoff, 2000 AD is a massive part of his life. We made a pilgrimage to Oxford, met them and explained that we had this unused score, named after a swear word in the Dredd universe. They were really gracious and said, ‘If you want to release it, you’ve got our blessing.’ So we did. And it blew up. 2000 AD let us put their logo on the back of the record, so it was almost like an endorsement.”

DROKK’s surprise success and the enthusiastic reception of Drive’s first pressing on wax came at a time when the vinyl revival was entering full swing, with soundtracks playing an integral role in the scene.

“As a label, we were very much aware that we didn’t want to kind of tie our flag to the masthead as an out-and-out soundtrack label, because we weren’t that. We had a vested interest in soundtracks, but we didn’t just want to ring up any record company and go, ‘Yeah, we’ll release this because it’s a soundtrack.’ We wanted to curate and we wanted to be discerning, we didn’t want it to be like, ‘Oh, we’re going to be a soundtrack label.’”

Alongside the work of fellow UK-based soundtrack label Death Waltz Records, the early 2010s would see Invada ushering in a shift in the UK independent music scene: there was success to be found in releasing film scores on vinyl, as well as conventional artist records, although there was much to be learned from the latter.

“We wanted to treat the soundtrack like an artist’s record,” Weeks explains. “We know it’s not that, but we want to put the same effort we would put into an artist’s album into a score, whether that’s a film, TV, or video game score. We didn’t want to just be a faceless label that does licences.”

It’s in that spirit that Invada sought to build relationships not just with international labels, but artists themselves. Early releases from composer Brian Reitzell, whose Hannibal soundtracks were released on the label between 2014 and 2016, laid the foundation for the way the label would look to work with composers moving forward.

“When we were doing Hannibal, Brian came over to London,” Weeks recalls. “We met up and spent a couple of days together. Brian curated all of the Hannibal stuff on his own and spent hours and hours on it.”

Another musician whose enduring relationship with Invada would prove invaluable was Clint Mansell, who helped Weeks secure the rights to one of their most coveted releases: Cliff Martinez’s Solaris score.

“I chased that record,” Weeks recalls. “But I was talking to Clint Mansell one night and he said to me, ‘Do you want me to write a letter to 20th Century Fox?’ He’d done work for them on other things and he wrote a letter saying, ‘To whomever this may concern, these are my friends…’ And it massively helped. I got an email back and that deal was in the bag. And that’s been one of our biggest score releases in the last 14-15 years.”

Having already cultivated an impressive catalogue by the mid-2010s, Invada was finding itself becoming something of a tastemaker. Offers emerged to release a wider range of titles, yet Weeks and the team remained mindful of their roots. They couldn’t release everything, but they remained eager to advocate for releases on other labels that felt like a good fit for their established audience.

“There were certain things you’d get offered and things we missed out on that we wished we’d had, but we brought in a few scores that were nothing to do with Invada. I never went after Mica Levi’s Under the Skin, or Clint Mansell’s Stoker, for example, but I’d seen both in the cinema and loved them. I contacted Milan Records and said, ‘I know it’s your property and I know you’ve planned a record, but can we buy some for our webshop?’ It’s not because we wanted to pretend that it’s our release, but we had a ready-made audience in the UK and we must have bought 500 units. We were happy to do that.”

Following DROKK, Barrow and Salisbury were commissioned to create the score for Alex Garland’s Ex Machina in 2015, which would help foster a relationship with A24, which continues to this day. Alongside similar partnerships with the likes of Netflix and major US record labels, this has bolstered Invada’s output significantly.

“That was ginormous for us,” Weeks states. “Ex Machina really cemented us as a label that was putting out a lot of really great soundtracks, but it also happened to be Geoff’s label. People really started to understand that we were curating what we wanted around that time.”

While Barrow’s name had helped build Invada’s profile in its early days, he and Weeks were keen to ensure that, despite familiar names and high-profile intellectual properties, the music always came first. “I guess it’s a bit like Jack White,” Weeks muses. “He’s got his pressing plant in Detroit, but at the end of the day, you want things to run on their own merit. I think we’ve done enough to kind of earn our status. We don’t have to lean on that and it’s great. Ultimately it’s become its own entity and that was always what we wanted – to keep our underground integrity where all of a sudden we’re working with major Hollywood film companies. That was the beauty of the label.”

Weeks’ approach to releases still holds true to the ethos upon which Barrow and Anderson established Invada, be it a Hollywood production or a project closer to home. In particular, one release holds a special place for Weeks – the soundtrack to Mark Jenkin’s Bait.

“That’s one of my proudest moments,” Weeks enthuses. “I was in Wadebridge in Cornwall and there’s this cinema called the Regal. It was the summer of 2019 and I remember seeing the Bait poster with Ed Rowe on it… I came back to Bristol, saw posters for it and went to see it. When the credits came up at the end, you could have heard a pin drop. Everyone was transfixed by it.”

Weeks promptly texted Barrow to explain what he’d seen, eager to find out more about the score.

“I said, ‘I know this sounds weird, but it’s a thriller meets a sort of art film based in a Cornish fishing village and the score is like Aphex Twin.’ It was a hard one to explain, but there were no credits for the score, so I found Mark on Instagram and messaged him.”

For two days, Weeks waited for a response. Jenkin later replied, surprised by Weeks’ enthusiasm for a soundscape that he didn’t even consider to be a score.

“I asked him who did it and he explained that there wasn’t really a score and that it was just him on his keyboard. I said that it was brilliant and asked him if we could release it, but he didn’t really know what to say. Eventually, we met up when he came to Bristol for a short film festival and we ended up putting out Bait. And I love that score. I didn’t care how many units it sold, because the people who love it truly love it.”

Invada’s ability to release a major score, such as Drive or the Stranger Things soundtracks, doesn’t necessarily facilitate a smaller passion project like Bait. For Weeks, the approach to each project has always been the same.

“I don’t see the difference,” he states. “Of course, I understand the sales are bigger, but I’m proud of both of them. That’s what I think the true spirit of Invada is: we’re not just chasing money here. We have to have records that sell and we have to have certain things we know we can do, but I see no difference between the score for a Netflix show with a billion streams and an eerie fishing drama set in South Cornwall. I’m not trying to make out that we’re anything other than what we are.”

Of all the powerful scenes I saw at the cinema in 2023, there is one that has truly stuck with me. It’s not from an award winner, blockbuster, or similar critical darling – the moment occurred during the sports documentary Ronnie O’Sullivan: The Edge of Everything.

Film fans may be forgiven for not having caught The Edge of Everything, not least because it is a documentary about snooker, but also – fittingly for a subject nicknamed ‘The Rocket’ – since it had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cinema presentation before quickly landing on streaming. As a snooker fan old enough to have witnessed O’Sullivan’s prodigious sporting career in its entirety, it was a must-see for me, yet even entering the film with a solid interest in the subject matter, I was not prepared for the raw and honest truths about mental health that the film would confront me with.

Throughout a career built upon a combination of natural talent and self-disciplined improvement, Ronnie O’Sullivan has been unmatched in the snooker world both in success and duration, winning three major tournaments already in 2024 at the age of 48. Yet despite being overtly transparent and refreshingly honest media presence for over 30 years, O’Sullivan has remained an enigma with a complex public persona.

Common descriptors of O’Sullivan are a mixed bag reflecting different eras, incidents, and appearances. Simultaneously regarded throughout his career as a prodigious yet down-to-earth genius with a rebellious streak by some, and a troubled, disrespectful, entitled loud-mouthed provocateur by others, there has been – until recently at least – an unusual lack of consensus of who Ronnie O’Sullivan is off the felt table.

One thing that has changed significantly since O’Sullivan turned professional in 1992 is his relatively recent ‘G.O.A.T.’ status, breaking and equalling records in the sport to a degree that has made him undeniably the greatest player of all time. Another change over the last 30 years (one that I contend is much more profound), is that both society and the sporting world have collectively wrestled with the concept and importance of mental health.

Sam Blair’s comprehensive documentary effectively outlines the achievements and events that have defined a sporting career, including following O’Sullivan’s run to a seventh World Championship title. But the film also delves deep into the psyche and inner workings of a driven and ambitious yet troubled person. Benefitting from the unfiltered and candid nature that has seen media training averse Ronnie often run into trouble, The Edge of Everything captures a series of raw and honest interviews, fly-on-the-wall portraiture, and intimate sound recordings, and places them alongside archival materials to uncover the man behind the cue.

Part One: The Edge

The complicated and unresolved trauma that followed from his father’s murder conviction at the beginning of his career is shown to have instigated a character change in O’Sullivan, with the resulting turmoil categorised by pundit Clive Everton as a mixture of “depression and rage.” Described further by O’Sullivan himself as a mixture of “self-doubt, and self-sabotage, and hatred towards myself”, these dark times are captured in the tragic response from O’Sullivan upon winning significant prize money for completing the sport’s fastest ever 147 maximum break – described by Stephen Hendry “as the greatest moment in any sport ever” – exclaiming, “Money’s not important to me, I just want to be happy.”

The inherent discomfort and inner turmoil exacerbated by the psychological intensity of his job mixed with addiction issues, anxiety, self-doubt, stress, and depression led to a long and ongoing rehabilitation process. Snooker fans will be long familiar with hearing about O’Sullivan’s love of running and his work with psychiatrist Professor Steve Peters, but here they are shown through an unflinching lens.

When the issue of mental health first explicitly arises in the film, Ronnie pokes fun at the term with a smilingly sarcastic “hashtag mental health” before acknowledging a wider societal change. Where previously his off-the-table behaviour would be remarked upon negatively and scrutinised, now, “all of a sudden it’s cool…I was twenty years ahead of the game, mate.” Deliberately self-effacing, this ambassadorship of openly discussing his own trials and tribulations is described elsewhere in the film by friend Ronnie Wood as “the very noble job of saying how fucked up he is inside.”

The Edge of Everything is able to go beyond typical sporting documentaries because of its unprecedented access, which captures the insecurities, self-doubts, and inner torment in striving to achieve. O’Sullivan’s willingness to allow the filmmakers to document this perhaps highlights a key contradiction in speaking openly about mental health; the unfiltered openness that often leads O’Sullivan into media trouble when discussing the landscape of snooker is also responsible for this admirable vulnerability that makes the film so arresting. Fear of judgement or reprisal often leads to collective silence, and at a time of readdressing the media’s historically cruel and intrusive response to public breakdowns, the film reexamines these moments throughout O’Sullivan’s career with the addition of his own voice and personal context. It shows remarkable resilience that the fear and anxiety captured throughout the film – leading up to O’Sullivan facing opponent Judd Trump for the world title – are so palpable, almost unbearably so.

This culminates in the scene that struck me so deeply. As the pressure alleviates, the film’s score rises, the crowd cheers, and the camera dramatically zooms in to newly-minted champion O’Sullivan’s embrace with runner-up Trump, with John Virgo proclaiming on the commentary, “He’s the greatest player in the world!” However, just as the triumphant moment is set to peak, a radio frequency sound effect signals a switch to a microphone picking up O’Sullivan’s intimate conversations unheard by the crowd and on the television broadcast. As the opponents share a lengthy emotional exchange of mutual admiration, O’Sullivan breaks into a hidden howl of “It fucking kills me!” – a jolting gear-shift from seasoned mentor to a still-struggling soul.

As O’Sullivan embraces his children and hides his face from the crowd, we hear “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t. I can’t do it. It’ll kill me.” The delivery is tortured, and the film’s audio reveals a hidden and heartbreaking tone of the sheer mental toll that the victory and journey have taken on him.

The scene is shocking for many reasons beyond the intentional interference employed by the filmmakers. The scene presents a truth so often not seen or heard in sports viewership and for that matter, in cinema. Aside from revealing a usually shielded moment, it is a shocking disruption that the film’s narrative is not resolved through victory alone, as we are so used to seeing both in fiction and non-fiction.

While it would be naive to not acknowledge that the world of sport at large is dogged by outdated sensibilities, steeped in traditional values and old-fashioned ideals, it has also been an area of surprisingly progressive openness regarding mental health. Alongside O’Sullivan, there has been a growth in the number of hugely successful sports that have been open about mental health issues during or after their career, including Tyson Fury, Dame Kelly Holmes, Jonny Wilkinson, and Simone Biles. However, this is often in the form of interviews or withdrawal from competition, rather than in the heat of the moment. Stigma still exists around admitting mental health struggles while maintaining an athletic career.

Despite having portrayed a person so deeply invested in trying to create their own happiness and overcome their inner demons over a period of several years, The Edge of Everything is unflinching in showing that mental health issues can be and often are ongoing, debilitating, all-consuming, and are not resolved by the successful pursuit of a goal or external moments of victory.

In exploring why this scene had such a powerful, emotionally devastating effect on me that I can’t quite shake, it occurred to me this is something that I’m not used to seeing in cinema itself. While it makes sense to capture this sentiment in a documentary about a sportsperson who has become an unlikely and long-standing ambassador for mental health, is a similar message present in fiction feature films?

As with spectatorship around snooker and other solo competitor sports, there is an inherent human tradition of creating narratives based around competition itself and overcoming adversity, but there also seems to be a deep-rooted tradition of creating hard-hitting sports dramas that are resolved through physical transformation and victory, or just as commonly, loss and tragedy. In this sense, perhaps cinema has fallen behind the actual sporting world in its treatment of underlying mental health issues.

Part Two: The Fight

An interesting counterpoint to The Edge of Everything while exploring male mental health in cinema is to see the same scene presented out of context on YouTube with Bill Conti’s ‘Going the Distance’ from the finale of Rocky overlaid. Admittedly O’Sullivan has “gone the distance” of the gruelling tournament, but it is a strange juxtaposition with footage from a documentary asserting that these marathon achievements are also the antithesis of the inner peace he so desperately seeks to find. Its usage is understandable for a standalone clip celebrating the victory but is also perhaps a choice that reveals a wider sense of how intertwined the drama and the anguish featured in both cinema and sport have become.

Cinema narratives are often a reference point for quotations promoting self-motivation and/or working through depression – both Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua have quoted or paraphrased “The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows” from the famous Rocky Balboa monologue. This is an understandable source of inspiration for boxers, but it is also one that has pervaded wider self-improvement rhetoric.

The Rocky franchise set the quintessential cinematic sporting precedent with its classic underdog story – on and off screen – with both tales promoting overcoming adversity through sheer determination and will against the odds. Throughout Rocky, Balboa’s insecurities and mental anguish are disguised by an outward happy-go-lucky yet self-effacing charm. The only possible victory for Rocky is to find self-worth through transposing the search for inner peace onto his own physicality, undergoing a transformation culminating in the much-imitated training montage, and ending with a final fight in which it is only possible to sustain or equal a physical beating in the ring with Apollo Creed. The message is one of winning through going the distance, but it is at the risk of losing everything.

It is, of course, unlikely that the film would have resonated so widely or won Best Picture had Rocky solved his issues in a more peaceful way, and the franchise can at least be admired for seeing Balboa repeatedly facing a continuing saga of similar struggles against the odds rather than total self-fulfilment through a fight. However, both the self-actualisation and mutual respect that Rocky Balboa finds with opponent Apollo Creed come only from the life-threatening, unprecedented physical pummelling of an amateur who has upgraded to a world of professional punishment.

Elsewhere, it is a common narrative that often plays out to more tragic ends. In a fictional depiction of cue sports, Paul Newman’s Fast Eddie is so deeply into the world of gambling in The Hustler that he loses his love interest Sarah to suicide, choosing to continue hustling rather than walking away from the game to be with her. Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler sees Mickey Rourke’s over-the-hill and all-but-forgotten wrestling star Randy “The Ram” Robinson stuck in a demeaning, emasculating job whilst unable to find the emotional ability to reconcile his relationship with his estranged daughter, but instead of choosing to age maturely and face repeatedly trying to confront and resolve the source of his inner turmoil, Robinson opts for certain death by resurrecting his wrestling career one final time.

These readings are not in any way to denigrate these films as at various points I have related to both films in seeking to understand my own mental health issues. I have certainly used Rocky as inspiration to keep going, and have also empathised with the inherent self-destruction of Mickey Rourke’s Robinson. For me, it was somehow easier to see reflected the approach pushing through life’s challenges irrespective of personal toll as some kind of valour, or similarly, to choose solo self-destruction as a preferred alternative route to creating a dialogue. To paraphrase Bruce Springsteen’s original song for The Wrestler, this always saw me leave with less than I had before.

Transposition of mental anguish onto physical pain is taken to new heights in Doug Liman’s 2024 reimagining of Road House, in which Jake Gyllenhaal plays Elwood Dalton, an ex-UFC fighter tormented by memories of killing a former friend in the octagon and subsequently leaving the sport altogether.

Taking up the position of an (unusually slow to respond) security manager at The Road House bar, Dalton is initially calm and favours conflict resolution yet is still willing to use his mental Rolodex of cruel physicality to disarm an enemy. Seemingly unable to feel pain, or at least carrying it as the trope of physically wearing your emotional baggage, Dalton’s only Kryptonite is the memory of killing his friend.

‘The Love of a Good Woman’ is an often necessary part of the formula to produce instant cinematic on-screen recognition of masculine equilibrium and stability. In Road House, love interest Ellie is a confused mixture of archetypes thrown at the wall: ‘the worried caregiver’ meets ‘damsel in distress’ meets ‘independent woman’, although this is still preferable to ‘the dead wife’, ‘the missing daughter’ or ‘the woman he genuinely loved that double-crossed him’ as the alternative route of instigator for an action plot.

Regardless, Gyllenhaal’s Dalton reaches a new height in cinema for a man who cannot be open about his emotional issues. Even when the film has concocted a scenario in which Dalton is entirely alone in the middle of an open body of water with Ellie he is unable to open up about his past. This creates an unusually surreal exchange between the two isolated characters:

“So, where are you from?”
[4-second beat]
“Me?”

Dalton is suddenly too vulnerable, preferring to deliver the “you don’t want to know me” line instead of talking about his past. Ellie’s Adrienne-esque character persists in trying to save Dalton despite this and of course, is rewarded by being kidnapped as emotional capital, all so Dalton can have a narratively acceptable emotional breakthrough and more importantly for the film, a justification for violence.

Dalton ultimately deals with his mental pain and trauma of killing someone by…killing a lot more people. He finishes off the Bad Guys with no repercussions before hopping on a Greyhound bus to disappear. So goes a male fantasy oft repeated throughout cinema history: the strong, silent, invulnerable hero that saves the town, smashes and crashes, hits and quits, and goes from zero to hero in under two hours.

The separation between fantasy and reality is something most audiences do not struggle with, but it is another link in a chain of a more insidious underlying narrative of masculine trauma response in film, rewinding from the original 1989 Road House through action movies to Bond to Westerns, right back to the inception of cinema. It has created a language – or lack thereof – of dealing with feelings, grief, trauma and depression with actions, and not words. If stories do indeed form part of our self-identification and provide motivation, where other disciplines are learning to talk about mental health, could the cinematic lineage of the strong, silent type be seen as archaic? Further, if cinema is part of our collective psyche, is the portrayal of equating the overcoming of mental adversity with victory (and often physical violence or sacrifice) setting a flawed precedent for addressing inner turmoil?

Part Three: The Finale

Although The Edge of Everything stood out to me for its honest depiction of actual conversations around mental health, it also provided a familiar, aspirational victory narrative; let’s not forget that Ronnie O’Sullivan is a hugely successful sports star. Yet the open discussion is refreshing, both to camera and in candid moments, and victory comes without familiar monologues of self-pity and revenge.

Even in the films I have most admired that depict men’s emotional suffering in recent years, there is still a lot that men do not seem able to say on screen. This is a reflection of the traditional male pride and famous inability to open up that many men experience, myself included and various films have captured this suffering in silence, such as Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun and Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy. This honesty is part of what makes both films so affecting, and in their respective, powerfully emotional finales, both Paul Mescal and Will Oldham walk away, tragically unable to admit just how much trouble they’re in.

This is not to suggest that storytellers should create films with convenient happy endings or drama-less arcs, but as someone drawn to these issues, it still feels taboo to see substantial male dialogue on these issues on screen unless it’s played for laughs. The profoundly lost character is instead often left to dissipate. Therein lies an uncomfortable challenge for the fiction feature film in the modern age, particularly in genres that often fixate on the external, the transformative, and the triumphant. How easy or appealing would it be to create and sell an oppositional work of film that articulates internal struggle or wider invisible illnesses in a non-catastrophic way?

Much modern discourse on cinema is rightfully focused on onscreen representation and I found this, somewhat unexpectedly, in The Edge of Everything. The raw and intimate depiction of a person on the edge of breakdown was a meaningful mirror for me, and perhaps the closest I’d seen my own experiences of depression, anxiety, burnout, stress, and the pressure of just trying to get somewhere. Even though I am admittedly a terrible snooker player, the emotional representation was immensely powerful to me.

Every day people pour their blood, sweat, and tears into achieving their goals and/or just simply getting by. To continue with sporting analogies, it is often the norm to leave everything on the field. We become trapped in a high-risk, high-reward cycle of survival in an enforced competitive environment, whether we like it or not: from school and good grades to jobs, interviews and performance reviews, side hustles and long hours, external comparisons and self-scrutiny, finding meaning or some kind of inner peace, and just the whole general providing, thriving, surviving thing. Even in our most basic lives – the lives that sit outside of the extraordinary tragedies and traumas that the world presents – getting through life is a marathon.

O’Sullivan is an advocate for continuous and holistic self-improvement. Although it is a familiar cinematic narrative to see a male character reach the peak of their physical skills and abilities to overcome adversity, or otherwise disappear into avoidance and the quicksand of self-destruction to tragically succumb to it, it is refreshing to see a documentary subvert and tackle these familiar themes with a realistic, human vulnerability, and a focus on the importance of addressing mental strength rather than solely physical prowess.

The victory arc of The Edge of Everything is not what the filmmakers highlight as O’Sullivan’s major career triumph; what the film commends most highly is his commitment to an ongoing formula for survival. Unlike fiction feature films, its conclusion is neither tragic nor wholly victorious. Despite winning, there is a sense that the true battle continues and despite breakthroughs and resolutions addressed within the film, including O’Sullivan overcoming addiction or finding peace with his complicated relationship with his father, these things are by no means signalled as solutions to underlying difficulties.

In the epilogue, which sees O’Sullivan laid on a bed in a deliberately confessional fashion, the finale of the film sees a final expletive-laden impassioned outburst of victory, which seems to be a triumph over the sport itself, rather than within it. Ronnie exclaims, “I’ve taken control of my life and that is it, the most important thing is that I’m happy”. He outlines a refreshing unwillingness to no longer endure a continual beating from his line of work as a route to meaning, instead choosing to navigate it in a way that will offer personal happiness and contentment.

This epiphany comes from the intentionally therapeutic reflection employed; a revelation that surprises even O’Sullivan who expresses that he doesn’t know where it came from. In choosing to end here, The Edge of Everything is a statement on continuing conversation, on the importance of words and self-work in looking to find long-term acceptance and existence, where a freeze-frame Rocky ending only provides a temporary solution. If fiction features continue to push narratives mostly resolved through climactic violent action or tragic consequences, it could be offered as a logical conclusion that there is little self-identification for those who don’t seek either of those options.

At a time when the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has proclaimed that “mental health culture has gone too far” and that “as a culture, we seem to have forgotten that work is good for mental health”, it seems more valuable than ever to have openly candid representations of the realities of mental health on screen. The sinister undertone of such statements is that for people living with mental health issues, it is simply a lack of resilience that is the real problem – itself an “it’s not all sunshine and rainbows” fallacy.

Public representation and open conversation are a necessity if such cruel, misinformed attitudes are ever to change. For those of us who scream internally, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t. I can’t do it. It’ll kill me” but have been long led to believe that we should keep getting hit and keep moving forward despite this, The Edge of Everything at the very least provides an alternative role model in Ronnie O’Sullivan.

In Showing Up, the 2022 feature from celebrated independent director Kelly Reichardt, a peculiar relationship between a human and a non-human occurs. Lizzy, a 40-something sculptor played by Michelle Williams, is a few days away from an important solo exhibition. Taciturn and tense, she divides her life between a full-time job as an admin assistant at a local art college, meticulously finishing her sculptures, and taking care of her ginger tabby cat Ricky. It’s the mischievous Ricky who brings a poor pigeon into her life, whom the distressed sculptor saves from the jaws of death and subsequently ferries around in a cardboard box for the majority of the film’s runtime while the pigeon recovers from its ordeal. “When in doubt, shoot birds”, says Reichardt. On her sets, there is always a second camera assistant that shoots birds. This cinematic credo led Reichardt to make a short film called Owl (2019) which is essentially comprised of a medium close-up shot of an owl before it flits away.

Animals have been consistently featured in Reichardt’s films. Dogs, cows and horses, each to a different extent, inhabit their own bioegalitarian spaces, providing a necessary nuance to the filmmaker’s revisionist agenda. Their presence highlights the vitality of human existence and the complexity of female experience, yet Reichardt transcends the seemingly anthropocentric constraints that privilege the human over the nonhuman protagonist.

As Laura Staab deftly notices “Reichardt’s cinema waver[s] in the in-betweens of ‘not this, but that’”. Never explicitly feline, avian, canine, or equine, Reichardt’s cine stories offer a vital ecofeminist and biophilic perspective on human and animal “becoming with” as Donna Haraway puts it in her book ‘The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness’. Animals in her films undoubtedly serve a symbolic function, yet Reichardt portrays them as material, tangible, and agential beings without imposing a ‘story’ on them.  This is the heart of Reichardt’s idiosyncratic style and spirit – in its non-possession of the filming subject, be it human or non-human.

Doreen St. Félix in her recent New Yorker profile of Reichardt describes her as “[America’s] finest observer of ordinary grit”. Reichardt’s oeuvre centres on those who have been around though, at times, we don’t necessarily know – or come to know – what exactly they have been through. A Kelly Reichardt human protagonist usually finds oneself in a precarious situation, caught in the middle of an arduous journey like the frontier pioneers in Meek’s Cutoff and the young and jobless Wendy on her way to Alaska in Wendy and Lucy. They are often at odds with the world, being the female other or the marginalised other – they are outcasts, renegades and nonconformists. “My films are about people who don’t have a safety net,” notes Reichardt. Reichardt herself, after her first feature River of Grass (1994), a Malickesque not-quite-romantic story of two discontented outlaws trying to run away from their suburban lives, could not make another film for more than 10 years. In the words of Todd Haynes, Reichardt’s mentor and friend, Kelly was unfortunate not to have “a film school background, a calling-card short, some connection to money, or a penis.”

A Kelly Reichardt non-human protagonist typically serves as a companion, like mixed breed Lucy in Wendy and Lucy, or, more emblematically, as a marker of hope and rootedness like the eponymous cow in First Cow. Undeniably Reichardt’s favourite nonhuman subject is her own dog Lucy who made her screen debut in her second feature Old Joy (2006). Prominent for its subtle deconstruction of masculinity, Old Joy is a tale of impossible friendship between two old friends, Mark and Kurt, who reunite for a camping trip in the Cascade mountain range, yet are unable to restore their connection. The film’s non-human protagonist is Mark’s dog, Lucy. In Old Joy, Lucy is an indicator of Mark’s settledness: his first child on the way, he has a house and a job, whereas Kurt appears to be an unsteady hippy-like character. Lucy is Mark’s pet – symbolically the first step people take to creating a nice nuclear family.

In the spirit of non-possession, evocatively and empathetically, Reichardt films Lucy’s presence with gentle attentiveness and respect. Cinematography Peter Sillen’s camera observes the dog running up, down and around the human protagonists, exploring the trails of Oregon, and Lucy, seemingly, does not have a plot ‘function’. She is there on her own terms, not as a puzzle in the story. Old Joy conveniently fits in what Anat Pick calls “the cinema of letting be”. In one scene, Mark and Kurt, worn out and vexed about not finding Bagby Hot Springs, make a fire on the side of the road where someone has dumped a couch. Mark and Lucy are sitting on the couch illuminated by the warm light of the fire; Lucy, sitting on the left side of the couch, is practically invisible, yet is fully in the frame. She is just there sharing the space with the human characters.

The creation of Old Joy sheds even more light on Reichardt’s sensibilities of non-possession of the subject. In an interview with NYFF Director Kent Jones, she recounts how she had approached her longtime collaborator, writer Johnathan Raymond, to “lend” her a story which takes place outside and where she could “write a dog into”. This is how Lucy ended up in the film. Jokingly, Reichardt admits that for her a film has to have three elements: a road, animals, and nature.

Two years later Lucy stars in Wendy and Lucy, alongside Michelle Williams as Wendy. The female and the canine come together to tell a story of loss and sacrifice. Deceptively simple, Wendy and Lucy is already ambiguous in its title. Who is Wendy and who is Lucy? Both could be either, and both equally matter. The film revolves around Wendy as she makes her way to Alaska to be employed at a fish cannery. We find Wendy and Lucy in a Walgreens parking lot short of money and prospects. After Wendy’s failed attempt to shoplift some dog food for Lucy, she gets arrested, and upon release, Wendy realises that her beloved dog is gone. Eventually, Wendy finds that Lucy has been taken in and rehomed, but in the end, she does not claim the dog back. With tears in her eyes, she promises to come back to Lucy. But will she?

In Wendy and Lucy, Lucy’s role is more potent than in Old Joy and as if to assert Lucy’s visibility and agency, Reichardt includes her name in the title. Having said that, Reichardt approaches filming her in a similar non-possessive manner. Sentimentality is anathema to the filmmaker’s portrayal of animals. After all, it’s not a Lassie Come Home or Marley and Me kind of film. Reichardt’s camera lets Lucy be. When Wendy tries to sell some cans at a recycling facility, Lucy, on the leash, leaves the frame and re-enters it when Wendy pulls her back. Be it bioegalitarian ethics or transspecies solidarity, consciously or instinctually, Reichardt allows Lucy to leave the frame and appear again not as a trained cinematic performer but as a dog – because that is how and who she is. Whether a dog or an actor, Reichardt wants them to attune to each other’s becoming or way of being. “To be one is always to become with many” Haraway reminds us, pointing out the folly of human exceptionalism. So becoming one is always becoming with.

Speaking of trained animals, Reichardt straight-up hates working with trained animals. “Treat narcissists” she calls them for not being able to establish a relationship with an actor since what they are trained to have is a relationship with treats. Similarly, working with actors, Reichardt tries to limit the element of artifice. She does not run lines but rather asks her actors to learn to live, to be, like their characters. For Meek’s Cutoff, the actors learned how to pitch a tent and make fire without matches. For Certain Women, Lily Gladstone learnt how to tend horses and do the ranch chores. For First Cow, the actors went camping for three days and learned how to skin a squirrel. Filming chores, routines, and ‘non-eventful’ episodes, the filmmaker ultimately trades the artificiality of the carefully constructed genres for the interstices, in-betweens, and thresholds where something close to the mystery of life materialises.

While filming dogs in all their canine way of being, Reichardt portrays her bovine and equine protagonists in a more symbolic way. First Cow, her seventh feature, is a complex story of two wayfarers on the margins trying to make it. Like typical Reichardt protagonists, Cookie and King Lu are obstructed by social and economic hurdles of the 1820s Oregon and in order to increase their chances for upward social mobility, they steal milk from the only cow in the vicinity which belongs to a wealthy British trader to make oily cakes.

First Cow’s prologue alone – taken from William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell – hints at the necessity of connection with another being so as to secure protection and eventually solace. “The bird a nest, the spider a web, the man friendship”, the English mystic wrote in 1793. As the nest and the web are extensions of a bird’s and a spider’s way of being, so is friendship for a man. Therefore, the role of the cow in First Cow is rather symptomatic of one’s striving for security and peace. A cow – a much-desired commodity in the 1820s – could provide Cookie and King Lu with a way out of Oregon to their bigger dream – a hotel in San Francisco.

In Certain Women, horses perform a similar symbolic function. The film weaves together three stories of three women in small-town Montana, each of whom has her own trials and tribulations. Jamie (Lily Gladstone), the heroine of the last story, is a rancher who spends her days on the farm tending to horses. Long repetitive winter days are interrupted by the appearance of struggling graduate law student Beth played by Kristen Stewart with whom Jamie falls in love, albeit unrequitedly.

The horses that Jamie tends to – routinely and respectfully – emphasise Jamie’s connection with the land and her scant prospects in urban America. Moreover, they highlight Jamie’s queer subjectivity. Confident and skilful with horses, Jamie is shy and terse with Beth. She seems more comfortable with animals than people. In the film’s most moving scene – when Jamie comes to see Beth on a horse and offers her a ride to the diner – the horse for Jamie becomes almost a destrier (a mediaeval knight’s horse) signifying courage and devotion. Quite transgressively, with a subtle sexual undertone, the horse riding scene emulates a moment of intimacy and desire between the women as they are riding through the night.

Showing Up expands Reichardt’s animal menagerie to include two new animal protagonists – the tomcat Ricky and the injured pigeon. Ricky (in fact played by two feline actors) is akin to Lucy the dog – a loyal companion of a lone artist (a trope long noticed in popular culture). The avian character, on the other hand, omnipresent in Reichardt’s other films, moves from the periphery to the centre for the first time. There is a potent sense of parity between the wounded pigeon and the sculptor; the parity between nonhuman and human lives.

Of all birds, Reichardt chooses a pigeon – a bird that does not have a romantic public image. To most pigeons are an annoying token of modern city life, a nuisance that is dirty and abundant. It is not a colour-splashed songbird Reinhardt is after, but an ordinary bird that is anonymous, commonplace, peripheral just like Lizzy – an artist on the margins, far from a bourgeois lifestyle; the artist with a day job, a malfunctioning boiler and at times an unsympathetic landlord. The wounded pigeon is yet another burden on Lizzy’s shoulders (“Go die somewhere else!”). However, it is an average pigeon and not some extraordinary event that requires Lizzy to show up: for her work, for her family and for life. Lizzy’s existence is a repetitive cycle of pencil pushing and sculpting and it is the bird that brings some chaos to her routine. As cheesy as it sounds the pigeon symbolises freedom and the disorder of which creative life is made. Having recovered his wing, the pigeon sets itself free in the film’s closing mise-en-scène. “I guess it’s ready to go”, remarks Lizzy.

From Old Joy to Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt’s camera registers animals non-possessively, as bodies, forces and intensities. Her non-human protagonists are left to their own devices embodying life and nature. Like Agnès Varda’s gleaners, Kelly Reichardt gleans episodes, ordinary moments, chores, and routines that reveal the everyday politics of her human and animal protagonists, their ontological co-existence and attentiveness that one must attune to see beyond the gaze of her camera.

 

Act 4

There is neurodivergent (ND) solace to be had within all of Anderson’s works – perhaps because you can take a scene at random and find a stratum of information encoded in the images, dialogue, performances, set decoration, editing, soundtrack and overall rhythm. This glut of harmoniously arranged creativity serves as a sensory stimulant, with every moment offering intense magnetism to a viewer otherwise subject to executive function lapses.

I had been slightly terrified about how Anderson would respond to a piece that seeks to map such a specific set of interpretations onto his work. I asked how he felt that this piece was being written. His response put paid to the terror and galloped off to a place where there is no stigma, only appreciative angles.

“How do I feel? You know, the interesting thing is people who identify as neurodivergent often have particular focus in their perception of things, a different way of processing information. I like the idea that there’s an audience who is, in a way, paying extra special attention and seeing the movie differently. Possibly seeing the movie more the way I see it, as a filmmaker, and also getting more out of it, a more careful focus. But the main thing is: what does that lead to? I hope and feel that it’s creating an emotional experience that’s different, because it’s an emotional experience that might be inspired by getting more of the details, pulling more of the thing in. I wonder if that makes sense and I wonder if that is true.”

It makes sense and I hope that it’s true.

While each frame in every film is the world in a grain of sand, there is, yet, one that stands out as the peak of ND-coded characters who (it could be argued) exist in older form as junior stargazers Woodrow and Dinah in Asteroid City. Looking back to Anderson’s 2012 film about juvenile love, Moonrise Kingdom, the two preteen protagonists exist uneasily with everyone except each other. 12-year-old Suzy (Kara Hayward), is volatile, prone to lashing out at her parents (with savage remarks), peers (by throwing scissors), and herself (by punching a mirror).

Orphaned cub scout Sam (Jared Gilman) is initially mocked and dismissed by his fellow scouts and remains focused on survival skills, such as orienteering, making fires and the art of escape. Suzy and Sam meet after he goes backstage and finds her dressed as a raven during a church production of Noye’s Fludde. Their subsequent letter-writing correspondence becomes a plan to run away together to a peaceful cove in New Penzance that the map calls Mile 3.25 Tidal Inlet. In the final scene of the movie, we see that Suzy, a bookworm with a poetic imagination, has rechristened it ‘Moonrise Kingdom’. To push poetic imagination a mite further, we could say that ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ symbolises a neurodivergent sanctuary where we can be unmasked and free.

Hayward’s performance is that of a tightly coiled spring whose desperate emotional state is masked by a distinct style, immaculate eye make-up and Sunday School shoes. While capable of sweetness when she feels safe, when this security is whipped away, rage and rawness return tenfold. There is an incredible scene that takes place after the runaways have been found and taken to separate homes. Suzy’s mother Mrs Bishop (Frances McDormand) is sponging down her daughter in a bathtub while being gently condescending. “We women are more emotional,” she says. “I hate you,” replies Suzy, a stone wall, but only moments later when talking about loving Sam, she is totally exposed, even if her mother does not register it, distracted as she is by the fact that Suzy has pierced her ears with fishhooks.

“These parental relationships are a form of negotiation where they’re trying to diagnose you. They’re trying to work out, ‘What’s wrong with you? Why is my child odd?’ ‘I’m not going to take what you’re saying seriously, because I know you’re weird,’” says Crawford, who sees Moonrise Kingdom through a very specific lens. “To me, it’s about two autistic children who find each other and they’re both autistic in different ways. Sam is sort of allowed to be – he’s allowed to be interested in scouting and to have his little obsessions, whereas Suzy isn’t. I think that’s really where gender difference manifests itself in childhood: who’s a freak and who’s not a freak. Wes Anderson is so good because you have socially awkward women. And that’s not something that we’re allowed to be. What I love about Suzy Bishop is that she doesn’t really care.”

Art is a Rorschach Test and neurodivergence is not a monolith. While Crawford sees autism in Suzy, I see emotional dysregulation, a symptom of executive dysfunction. Neuro-imaging has revealed that activity in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala (sites of the brain associated with control of daily tasks and regulating emotions) are altered in the ADHD brain. And while the clichéd image of ADHD is of a hyperactive boy who can’t sit still or concentrate, it can be the case with girls and women that hyperactivity manifests through an unstable mood. “They are often emotionally intense and reactive, even if they try to hide aspects of this response. They tend to become upset quite easily and ‘over-react’ to stress, feeling easily overwhelmed, hassled and wound up,” writes Dr Joanne Steer in the book ‘Understanding ADHD in Girls and Women’. I read this to Samantha Hiew, who says that she agrees but would add more context: “Emotional dysregulation always has a trigger, it is not something that bursts out of the blue. People might be more likely to be dysregulated, especially girls, if they feel rejected, or not accepted by their peers. And when that happens, it’s zero to 100, it is intense. And that’s because we feel more in our body – the brain of someone with ADHD typically feels, hears and senses before they think.”

Hiew deploys the term “amygdala hijack” for when we are so emotionally overwhelmed that nothing makes sense and we go into meltdown. “You could either melt down and blurt out in anger and then scream, or you can shut down and lose the ability to talk because you are so sensorily overloaded,” she says. The only recourse when this occurs is to take oneself or be gently taken to “a quiet room to slow down and regulate and breathe. Because it’s very hard to reverse things once it starts.”

Act 5

Wes Anderson’s cinema is a controlled environment that calms my sensory overwhelm and makes me feel safe before stimulating a feeling of being alive, moved by the characters and in awe of a supportive universe whose organisational principles give their emotions a chance of making sense. Perhaps the most profound aspect of Anderson’s cinema, which produces a dopamine fiesta in my body, has to do with tonal scope. He holds the worst of his characters lightly with a worldly humour that swerves any judgement of their deeds. “Rudeness is merely an expression of fear. People fear they won’t get what they want. The most dreadful and unattractive person only needs to be loved, and they will open up like a flower,” M Gustave proselytises to his staff at The Grand Budapest Hotel, only to play this out, post-jailbreak, when he finds that protege and accomplice, Zero, failed in that he: could not find a safehouse, did not bring false whiskers or fake noses and, the final straw, forgot to bring any of his signature scent: L’air du panache. M Gustave delivers a deeply cruel rant and asks why Zero – an immigrant – bothered to come to Zubrowka. Instead of snapping back, Zero sorrowfully answers, “the war” and M Gustave sags, in a manner of a ND person, post-meltdown, when we realise that we have lost sight of the other and taken aim at a valued relationship.

Feelings are expressions of the release of chemicals in the brain; dopamine means anticipatory pleasure, serotonin and oxytocin mean a positive connection to someone else. On the other hand, stress triggers cortisol and brings on anxiety. ADHDrs are known to have reduced levels of dopamine (and norepinephrine), and a higher level of cortisol than those without ADHD and some of us are prone to quick fixes – not all of them healthy – in pursuit of feeling good again. Luckily for M Gustave, Zero instantly forgives him and their bond continues, leading to serotonin all round, including for the invested viewer. As Samantha Hiew says, “Creativity is the most sustainable dopaminergic pleasure and that can come from any source – appreciating art is a form of creativity.”

M Gustave delivers a passionate apology to Zero that is full of self-recriminations building to the sincere observation that, “This is disgraceful and it’s below the standards of The Grand Budapest…I apologise on behalf of the hotel.” The fact that a character’s misery and the hilarity of their expressiveness is contained, simultaneously, in the same moment is familiar to the self-aware neurodivergent, for it feels ridiculous to be routinely felled by tiny and predictable complications. This duality harkens back to the Charlie Chaplin line, “Life is a tragedy in close-up and a comedy in long shot.” When I put this to Jason Schwartzman he says, “I live for that” and tells me an anecdote about watching Rushmore with an audience for the first time:

“They laughed in a couple of places I hadn’t expected. At first I thought that they were laughing at me, at how bad I was. I was like, ‘Why are they laughing? That’s not supposed to be funny’. I was like, ‘God, that’s not funny. That’s supposed to be so serious!’  And then I realised, ‘Oh, that IS funny because it means so much to him [Max]’. Conversely, on Asteroid City, I remember seeing it and people weren’t laughing in places. I realised, ‘Ah, they’re not not laughing because it’s not funny, they’re not laughing because it’s sad to them.’ It really is how you choose to land. One thing that I really love about working with Wes is all these things are in play, yet they don’t have to be so defined. Sometimes I’ll say to Wes, ‘Do you think it’s this, or is it this?’ and he’s like, ‘Both?'”

The orderly aesthetic of the Andersonverse is in support of this “bothness”. His stylised visual signature – so ripe for shallow parodies –  is a way of not sacrificing any detail that could enhance story or character or mood. “I make them [the films] orderly, in a way, to try to efficiently communicate information, to get things across as clearly as we can,” says Anderson, “Because often I feel like I’m trying to put a lot of information in one frame or one sequence and I want to try to figure out how to do it so it really all is clear.”

As part of this drive for clarity, Anderson does something autism-friendly by familiarising us with a location before the action begins. An introduction to ‘Asteroid City’ involves a camera tour around every key site – a 12-seat luncheonette, a motel, an advert displaying a meteorite crater, a ramp leading nowhere – each decked out in soothing colours and clearly labelled in an inviting font. Only then does Augie’s car whizz into view. The framing device of the film as a play means that we witness the miracle of Edward Norton’s playwright Conrad Earp describing his ‘Asteroid City’, then, hey presto, it appears and the light of the desert sun is neither warm nor cool but always clean and, above all, unforgiving. The effect of an imagination spitting out a world fully formed is not just a neat visual trick, it is extremely moving to a ND person who struggles to communicate the basics. Not only does Anderson have a unique imagination, he has the wherewithal to communicate it to the army of sensitive creatives who have built it from scratch. This feat is awesome and melancholy, as it brings home how far our lives are from this sophisticated dream world.

“I like the level of control, because the real world so often feels out of control,” concurs Crawford, “Things aren’t managed, things aren’t symmetrical. Things aren’t organised. That can be really distressing. I’ve learned to cope more as I’ve gotten older. We acclimatise. If something’s not at a perfect 90-degree angle, it’s not the end of the world, but it can feel like it. Whereas in a Wes Anderson film, it would be the end of the world. It would never happen. It’s not allowed to happen. Because if it did happen, it wouldn’t be on camera. It wouldn’t be on film. It’s really special that when you watch a Wes Anderson film you know that nothing’s going to be out of place. I know that I’m going to be in a safe space when I enter.”

Hiew traces this sensory sensitivity back to its source, “There is a part of the human brain where people receive sensory input from their environment, whether music or birds singing, or what you see in bright daylight or darkness, what you feel, what you taste?” These are all feelings that are heightened in neurodivergence. She continues, “We’ve seen brain scans for autistic children early on in infancy, where they are going through such a huge amount of brain development and the connectivity is so sophisticated. That’s why a lot of autistic kids are known to be quite clever, but also prone to sensory meltdowns because the amount of information that they get from the environment is so much more than a brain without this sensory receptivity.”

Extreme sensitivity isn’t all bad, because when the stars align you feel more fucking alive than anyone has ever been. Perhaps the deepest source of pleasure (never to be taken for granted by an ND person) is the feeling of being connected to another person, directly or through their art. Our culture has conceived of the word ‘parasocial’ to describe one-sided relationships with parties (often famous ones) who don’t know that we exist, however this does not describe the life force that can flow between art and its appreciators, sparking hope in places where despair has dominion and reconnecting us with something sacred that had drifted out of view.

Hiew points out that, “Those of us who have masked so much in our lives don’t know which of our identities are us. Mindfulness is good at helping neurodivergents because it can enable us to come back into the present, to appreciate what we have.” She argues that the cinema of Wes Anderson is so absorbing that it induces a state of mindfulness without us even having to try. “When you watch something, you’re having a 3D experience with the sound and visuals and the feeling. It almost forces your brain to notice the colours, because he has this amazing way of creating a set that puts you in tune with what is happening with you. It makes you more mindful without knowing it.”

Nothing external – not the most loving person, not the most profound work of art, not sex, not drugs, not rock ‘n’ roll – can be a permanent panacea for feeling out of tune with wider society. It’s more that in a moment of mindfulness (or a feature film’s worth of them) we experience a glimmer of the rapture available to people with our wiring and, powered by that flash of clarity, can choose to prioritise the past-times that speak to our most authentic selves.

Epilogue

“There’s no wrong way to feel”

There are films that harness some aspect of what Anderson does in terms of being ND friendly: the pastel confection of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; the swooning Technicolor of Douglas Sirk’s body of work; Guillermo del Toro’s immersive nightmares; the saturated 1950s colours in Todd Haynes’ Carol and the playful cinematic grammar of his forthcoming May December. In short, every filmmaker that plays with “bothness”, crafting a fantasy brocaded with recognisable details that offers both escapism and coded meaning.

More thrilling, still, are films that use switches in form to illustrate internal shifts for their characters. In Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal, the sound is turned down to convey the overwhelm of Riz Ahmed losing his hearing; in Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge, Matilda Lutz is shot like a music-video Lolita, replicating the perspective of her rapists until she becomes the vengeful protagonist and the camera rebirths her as a hunter. Gary Ross’s Pleasantville is all black and white until sex and culture causes colour to enter the frame. Xavier Dolan’s Mommy has an aspect-ratio shift that lands as euphoric, fleeting freedom. These types of choices bring home the fact that being in the world doesn’t always hit in the same way. This is true for everyone, but in my neurodivergent experience, it is extremely pronounced. Sometimes I feel locked out of society – my struggle to communicate siloing me off into solitude – and sometimes I feel like a glorious part of it all. What makes the difference most often, most always, is to do with individual people and whether they show up.

This is why it all comes down to Richie Tenenbaum and the way his despair and survival is framed by Wes Anderson. “It was very quiet and very private, the way we shot it,” says Anderson, “We did it very late in the movie, in part because Luke Wilson has a beard and the hair and it all gets cut off, so you have to shoot it at the right place in the story.” They were filming in an abandoned mansion in Yonkers, “Luke was very ready. The people working together were so bonded and connected by then. Probably, the mental health of Luke and Bill Murray was starting to take on what was going on with their characters.”

Through the script, Anderson throws in a comrade that Richie cannot see, but we can. After he has completed the scissor stage of beard-cutting, smoothed foam onto his face and shaved one neat line off his facial hair, Richie says to the mirror, “I’m going to kill myself tomorrow”, even though the plan is to do so right away. It’s a line originally spoken by the actor Maurice Ronet in Louis Malle’s 1963 despair poem, The Fire Within. The effect is that a solitary misfit has the ballast of cinema history tying him to another. There are bonds closer to home, too. A perspective flip occurs immediately after Dudley finds Richie collapsed in the bathroom and releases a scream, silent beneath the soundtrack of Elliot Smith’s Needle in the Hay. Now, Tenenbaum after Tenenbaum receives news of his attempt and dashes to the hospital, like The Society of the Crossed Keys distilled to pure urgency. It’s clear that Richie cannot grasp the extent of his connectedness to other people. He is an avatar for everyone whose sense of alienation blocks an awareness of the love in their life.

A sense of alienation can arise from lambasting yourself internally for not being “normal” or “straightforward” and a vicious spiral can arise where the freakier one feels, the more one self-isolates. It can feel dangerous to reach out from this place of heightened sensitivity in the knowledge that even an unintended slight can cause us to slide deeper into the well. Conversely, this is also a yawningly receptive state for kindness, acceptance and the wisdom that says: this loneliness is very human. Wes Anderson’s cinema is populated by idiosyncratic lost souls who somehow cling on to their place within blood and/or found families. The qualities that make them miserable Anderson, their creator, celebrates as part of their humanity. To normalise the pain of existence and to tell stories where it is the status quo – just standard-issue emotional furniture – is to give audiences permission to feel their feelings cleanly without the additional burden of judgement on top. The Godfather star, scion of the Coppola dynasty and mother of Jason Schwartzman, Talia Shire, has something to say on this subject, via her son. Over to Schwartzman:

“When my dad died when I was younger, my mom said to me, ‘There’s no wrong way to feel.’ I didn’t know what that meant. Later, I remember looking around and everyone was crying but I wasn’t crying. Then I was like, ‘Am I a bad person because I’m not crying?’ So, you’re judging yourself for how you feel, rather than just feeling, right? To me, that’s what Asteroid City is about. In many ways it’s like, ‘Just keep feeling it’. Don’t try to think about it too much. It’s like grief, it’s a process. With Wes, there is no wrong way to feel.”

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Introduction

The most remarkable thing about Richie Tenenbaum’s suicide attempt in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums is that it moves to the rhythms of entertainment and is all the more devastating for it. The set-up foregrounds Raleigh St. Clair foetal on the sofa, having just found out that his wife has cheated on him many times. His experimental subject, Dudley, tries to uplift him with a word game, which in itself is moving as Dudley is usually found passively vibing. Only in the background does Richie slip into the bathroom to shave his beard and cut his wrists.

Over the next 90 seconds, through the use of music, beat-matched editing, montage, homage to French cinema, character acting from an ensemble cast and Anderson’s signature tragicomedy, the screen is flooded with two extraordinary waves of feeling. The first is the loneliness of someone who has decided he does not belong to this world. The second arrives at the speed of family, friends and stalwart Dudley hot-tailing it to be with him in hospital: not only does Richie belong to this world, he belongs to a tribe that accepts him at his lowest.

There are countless reasons why a person can feel incoherent in the course of normal life, and the extent to which it is helpful to pathologise this is a matter for each individual to decide. Yet, as someone diagnosed last September – as an adult in my 30s – with both ADHD and autism, I find ‘neurodivergence’ to be a revelatory label for now. Even so, I hope to eventually find a more inclusive expression of my existential struggles. For, as Charles Bramesco [friend, LWL contributor, man about town] recently wrote in his Asteroid City review, “We’re all contending with interior dramas about which everyone else knows nothing.”

To avoid making general claims about an experience that is infinitely diverse in its presentation, this piece will cleave to my own trials; however, I know that I am not alone as a neurodiverse person in feeling both represented and soothed by Anderson’s cinema. Weighing in with her own experiences will be Lillian Crawford, whose amazing Moonrise Kingdom episode of the Autism Through Cinema podcast sits sweetly in the centre of a career that includes both cultural criticism and improving access to cinema. This latter project currently takes the form of relaxed screenings at the BFI and The Garden Cinema. She writes a complementary column that illuminates the sensory experience of being a neurodivergent audience member.

Act 1

The term ‘neurodiversity’ (ND) was coined in the 1990s by Australian sociologist, Judy Singer, as a celebratory alternative to clinical diagnoses like ‘autism’ and ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’ which often came with the tag that a person was abnormal and needed to be fixed. She argued that “Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general.” These words were published in The Atlantic in 1998, where she added, “Who can say what form of wiring will prove best at any given moment?”

Her challenge has grown into the Social Model of Disability, which tells us that a person is not necessarily disabled by their health conditions, but by society’s failure to adequately accommodate their needs. Whether ND conditions are best framed as differences or disabilities is a hotly contested subject that I wish to swerve in the name of trying to clarify aspects of my ND experience through the characters that Anderson tends to portray. Simultaneously, the heightened production design is an entry point to the fact that environmental organisation plays a huge role in determining ND quality of life. Indeed, Anderson’s devotion to form offers almost a platonic ideal in terms of a familiar, colour-coded and signposted universe where chaos is tamed (at least visually speaking) and emotionally messy characters are dignified by a pristine aesthetic.

Out of a perceived or real pressure to blend in, neurodivergents tend to have social anxiety and believe that we need to mask both that social anxiety and our true selves in order to be accepted. “This is particularly the case for neurodivergents who have not been diagnosed until later in life who have accumulated a lot of coping strategies as a result of pretending to be something that we’re not. These coping strategies are workarounds we have found to get the job done or coexist amongst neurotypicals,” says Samantha Hiew, a Renaissance woman with a dizzying range of qualifications. She has a PhD from UCL in Cancer Virology and Childhood Leukaemia, and has worked as a model, presenter, and communications lead. Following a diagnosis of ADHD at the age of 40 Hiew founded ADHD Girls, a social impact company with a dual mission to “empower girls and women with ADHD to thrive in society” and “improve neurodiversity understanding via intersectional lens”. To that end she works as an Intersectionality & Neurodiversity Professional Speaker and Consultant, speaking at events and going into workplaces with the purpose of empowering the neurodiverse and educating the neurotypical.

Hiew explains that masking manifests in different ways for different people, however a common one for ADHDrs is, in an effort not to blurt out interrupting thoughts, we repress and forget them, ending up silenced and drained by trying to spot the right cue. Whereas autists who would instinctively self-soothe through stimming (repetitive movement and/or sounds) may exhaust themselves by trying to squash this impulse or find the most socially palatable version of it (like playing with their hair). Longterm, it’s a losing game to find acceptance by routinely betraying ourselves. Hiew says that ND people often swing between extremes and some try to cope with their innate difference by pursuing a perfectionist personality. This resonates deeply as someone who lost years to an obsessive pursuit of the so-called “perfect body”, a doomed goal onto which I projected nothing less than transcendence from all my problems.

There is a dialectical breadth to Anderson’s cinema in which things do indeed look perfect, but it isn’t the vacant sheen of a car commercial or the misleading glamour of an anorexic model, it is more like the polished glass cases within an exhibition curated to let a cornucopia of curios shine. There is a satisfying conflict that I experience watching films which combine the hopelessly aspirational (aesthetics and wit) with raw profundity (insoluble emotional problems). There is no simple or straightforward way to parse his work, just as there is no simple or straightforward way for an ND person to move through the world. As Hiew says, “The harder we try to fit into society, the more we feel like we don’t belong, and the more it causes complications inside our minds: anxiety, depression, or feeling dysregulated because we aren’t accepted even in our closest sphere.”

Act 2

Masking is not a thing in the Anderson-verse. Time and again, he finds humour in the kind of anarchic emotions that would have an ND person melting down, before finding a place for them within an ordered, quick-marching scene. Characters may be deadpan and restrained, but they do not plaster on a smile and say, “Fine, thanks!” when they are not fine, thanks. “Of course it was dark, it was a suicide note,” Richie responds to friend-and-love-rival, Eli Cash, after waking up in the hospital. Dialogue is written along a spine of abrasive integrity, with even peripheral characters seeming to emerge from a shroud of personal depths.

In The Grand Budapest Hotel, a role-call of Anderson collaborators show up for barely a minute of screen time to play a retinue of moustachio’d hotel concierges aka The Society of the Crossed Keys. After freshly-sprung jailbird Monsieur Gustave H puts in an emergency call for their mysterious powers, one by one they perform riffs on the same ritual: take the SOS call; hand over a task to their lobby boy; lobby boy steps in for anything from flavouring the soup to administering CPR; call the next moustachio’d hotel concierge. Bar Bill Murray who appears briefly once more, none of these actors are seen again, having fleetingly had fun with their personalised take on a secretive and exacting man.

“If you are in an environment that supports you to be yourself, and you have the privilege to unmask, then it is a good way to heal,” says Hiew. Unmasking is something that can happen alone in the dark of a movie theatre and I now understand why the onscreen evocation of raw-yet-precise emotional frequencies causes a dopamine surge in my body. “We’re all looking for that thing that helps us get over our past,” Hiew explains further. “In order to do that, we need to understand what makes us unique. Unmasking and being authentic helps us get there.” Wes Anderson’s cinema is too vast to be reduced in any one way, but it is an arena where having inappropriate feelings is the norm. We can let down our censors and laugh at absurd sources of suffering and the trying task of staying connected to our nearest and dearest – a pursuit that, perhaps, motivates Anderson’s filmmaking in the first place.

“The short answer is yes, I think,” he says, when I put the question to the filmmaker. “Well, it is part of a motivating factor. Most of my time I spend with my wife and daughter, we have lots of fun together and we go places together, but my movie life is a separate thing and a second family, in a way. Often with some of the cast members in the movies, I don’t see or rarely see them except for when we work together. Then, when we’re working, we see each other every day. Every day at dinner, whether people were working or not, they’re all talking about the thing we’re doing together. It kind of binds us.”

I ask if there’s a unifying principle that binds his collaborators, beyond talent, as he often works with the same cast and crew over many years or even decades. “Unifying principle, I don’t see one. I think there’s no principle. It’s the people who’ve chosen to want to stay with me and who I’ve had good experiences with. Their personalities can be so sharply different.” He gives a bottled sense of his varied collaborators. “Milena Canonero has a group that moves with her from place to place. And the group is very focused on her and she’s Italian and has a funny and wild way of communicating. Adam Stockhausen has a vast team, but he works with a quiet, precise method. Bob Yeoman is always very funny.”

“Maybe there’s something in that about creating a world, or a family, and the familiarity of, ‘Oh, this person is here and they’ll do this thing that we’re used to them doing,’” says Ben Adler, an associate producer on Wes Anderson’s films. “Jarvis [Cocker] will be somewhere doing a song, and singing it in the movie and recording it, and then he’ll play it in front of people as a concert. In the same way that families and groups have their traditions, I think that’s important to Wes, and makes it extremely special for all the people involved.”

Londoner Ben moved to Paris from the UK to study film in 2006 and was first hired by Anderson in 2009 after responding to a mysterious Craigslist post stating that an international director was looking for an intern. Ben worked as an assistant on Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Grand Budapest Hotel before becoming an associate producer on Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch and Asteroid City. He is often involved in something he believes is crucial to a Wes Anderson production: pastoral care. A collective spirit is fostered as the cast and crew live together during the shoot: “There are no trailers, there are no five-star hotels, you’re not getting room service and there might not even be a minibar in the hotel rooms but everybody’s eating breakfast and dinner together, before and after the shoot. It really fosters an environment more like a theatre troupe or a summer camp – a family, really. I think Wes knows that everybody making the film will have a greater experience if it’s like that and, in some way, maybe that feeling does make it onto the screen.”

On top of this, there are often special touches and activities off-camera that would slot right into the movies themselves. To wit: the actors in The French Dispatch were gifted a pair of locally made slippers (“Charentaises” – a speciality of the Charente region where the film was made) which became the unofficial uniform of downtime. The existence of the Asteroid City production village in Chinchón, Central Spain gave rise to a tennis tournament, Bob Yeoman’s movie nights, all washed down with Bryan Cranston’s tequila. Meanwhile, the chef of the local hotel made mealtimes a curated voyage around the regions of Spain. “I have a burgeoning obsession with the numerous varieties of gazpacho thanks to that experience,” says Adler, adding, “The kind of people that are coming on this adventure with Wes are generally up for a side project. Fun and unexpected things tend to develop and happen almost constantly.”

The view from the other side seems to chime with Adler’s description of a wholesome, familial, protective and – first-and-foremost – creative environment. Actor Jason Schwartzman confirms that this has been the case as far back as Rushmore, Anderson’s second feature. Schwartzman, aged 17, became the precocious and imaginative schoolboy, Max Fischer, and a friendship hit the ground running. “Wes and I were in this hotel and we would have dinner almost every night together in his room. We would talk about movies, the next day’s plans and what we were thinking about,” recalls Schwartzman, tracing a line between what moved him then and still does now. “It’s this continuation of life and work that I remember was so important to me. It’s still the same thing. It’s just that the dinner table is bigger.”

One major thing that can make an ND person feel safe to unmask is the feeling that the other has, in their own way, done the same. Authenticity calls out to authenticity. When Schwartzman talks about Anderson inviting collaborators, not just into his process but into his personal space, it resonates as a collective intimacy that makes its way onto the screen. Although there is a uniform mode across any given ensemble, each actor makes a strong personal impression and feels very much like themselves, even as they expend great effort to hit specific marks and deliver dialogue at pace. If Jean Luc Godard was right when he said that every fiction film is a documentary of its actors, Wes Anderson makes documentaries about actors showing something real to each other and supporting each other to do this exposing work.

Per Schwartzman: “It’s so wonderful because you realise how much people want to be together and talk to each other and how unique it is. The work is hard and there’s a camaraderie every night afterwards.” At the centre of this camaraderie is the head of the sports team, scoutmaster Anderson. The care that flows to and from him is especially crucial for Schwartzman who counts Anderson as one of his closest relationships outside of his blood family. Their 25-year friendship is threaded around their storytelling adventures. “Our whole relationship has always been so encouraging in terms of going off and finding new interests. Wes is endlessly curious and always searching for new things. Our relationship has a lot of that so it’s a building up of a store of positive scar tissue,” He corrects himself, “ – all scar tissue is positive, I guess.”

This nurturing interpersonal dynamic is the expression of an ideal, as, for ND people to thrive, we need loving encouragement and even cheerleaders who see us unmasked and still believe in us more than we believe in ourselves. It has a growth effect on Jason’s faith in his acting range, too. “When I read the part in Asteroid City, I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is farther than me. I don’t think I can do this.’ But Wes was like, ‘No, no, no, you gotta grow.’ Going into this territory that was unknown for the both of us was really scary and fun. There’s no one that I’d rather do that kind of thing with than him. We love each other. He’s pushing me to go to places that I haven’t been before while knowing where I’ve been.”

Act 3

Alexithymia means “having no words for a feeling or thought” – to elaborate: “The cognitive inability to encode, identify, and describe one’s own and another person’s emotions.” [source]. Ironically, when the doctor dropped that term in the middle of my assessment, he gave me a word that sped backwards across memories of relationship frustrations. I realised that I have a strong affinity for emotionally legible artforms because when I see certain feelings portrayed I gain the ability to identify them in myself, like a monkey recognising itself in the mirror for the first time. Wes Anderson characters, by and large, sit on an iceberg of emotion that colours their presence without them ever owning it, per se. As Schwartzman puts it, “I feel like they’re quite emotional, the movies, in the way that it is when you’re sitting next to someone and you know that they’ve got something inside. But they’re not talking about it and you’re like, ‘Gosh, I can feel this. But we’re not talking about it.’”

“It was entirely about emotions,” says Anderson about Asteroid City. “The form is a kind of concoction. We want to entertain the audience. But the way we wanted to do it with that one was… We thought we were creating some kind of poem that even we didn’t fully understand.”

At the outset of Asteroid City, Augie (Schwartzman) has yet to tell his four children that their mother died three weeks ago. They have arrived at their desert town destination, monogrammed luggage lashed to a clapped-out car, for the Junior Stargazers Convention, to which inventor Woodrow (nicknamed ‘Brainiac’ by his deceased mother) has been invited to compete for a cash prize. Although the time is never right to break news of this nature, Augie sits Woodrow and his triplet kid sisters – Pandora, Cassiopeia, and Andromeda – down to finally level with them.

The death is announced with a brisk and respectful transparency usually observed between colleagues of many years, rather than a 40-something man and his children. “It was intense,” says Schwartzman, “because, I was like, ‘I don’t know what they know or don’t know or believe or don’t believe about really everything – specifically something like death.” He cautions them against believing platitudes (time doesn’t heal all wounds, at best it’s a band-aid) while conceding there is a limit to how much he can explain about this loss when the girls have no concept of time. Their reaction is vague, as none of them – not least Augie – can grasp the significance of this absence. (Who amongst us could?)

The accepted conventional version of this scene would have someone falling to their knees and screaming at the heavens, but there is authenticity to the mannered quietness here. “It’s how I have emotional conversations, I don’t get hysterical,” says Lillian Crawford. “I find it so much more moving to see someone fighting to be articulate. Being autistic, for me, means that I often have 1000 things swimming around in my head, I have a million connections being made all at once. And I’m trying to grasp at it, and place it, and connect it, and tie it down in a way that someone else might understand, trying to remember that other people aren’t in my head.”

Samantha Hiew thinks that alexithymia (and a variant ‘dyslexithymia’, meaning “the wrong words for feelings”) may be the neurodivergent quality that has the biggest impact on intimate relationships: “You can often feel like you’re stuck in a mental prison where you really want to reach out but you can’t do it in the right way. You might get misunderstood. And maybe it’s a delay in processing thoughts as well. It might not be that you cannot feel, it might be that there’s a delay in feeling. Something else down the road might trigger a particular memory that will then make you feel something that you forgot to feel a few weeks before.”

INTERMISSION

Please click to read Part 2.

Last summer a man I’d once met to talk about a script he had written invited me to go for coffee. I decided to throw caution to the wind; the slim chance I might get a script editor credit on a feature film just about outweighed the stranger-danger aspect of the situation, and that I was voluntarily going to listen to a man talk about himself for an unspecified amount of time.

His meeting place of choice was not a conventional coffee shop, but a co-working space (where we were the only customers) that resembled someone’s front room: a mishmash of chairs and tables that meant while he sat in a regal armchair I was hunch over on a folding garden chair. He offered me a cereal bar retrieved from the depths of his satchel. I declined.

My description of this scenario would be unfair if it weren’t for the conversation that ensued for the next two hours. As for the (albeit very vague) purpose of the meeting, we discussed some of my proposed changes: something I didn’t feel necessary was the gratuitous descriptions of the imagined women in the script. My concerns over repeated use of terms like “tits” and “arse” were quashed when he asserted that it was fine “because it’s set in the ’90s”.

The topic of my own work and interests eventually rolled around. When I mentioned the films of Joanna Hogg, they were dismissed as “pretentious”. I put on my coat and stared longingly at the door after we talked about I, Tonya. I had enjoyed the film and even read the script, but all its merits were eradicated by his assertion that it was “derivative”. For our extended stint in the glorified furniture yard, I paid £7.

Aside from this story’s value to a secondary school internet safety class, you might be wondering why any of this is relevant. Well, this man is a Film Bro, and as much as the experience made for a good anecdote to tell my friends, his behaviour reflects the misogyny that pervades the world of male film appreciators. I want to take you through how the Film Bro was conceived, what exactly one is, and how the stereotype is changing.

To understand the history of the Film Bro, you have to understand the etymological origin of the word ‘bro’. In the mid 20th century bro was popularised among the Black community as a slang abbreviation for brother. By the 1970s the word was no longer associated with just familial connotations, being used to refer to any male friend.

There’s a glaring contrast between this definition and the modern-day, overwhelmingly white, meaning of bro. As with so many other aspects of Black culture, bro was subject to appropriation. Surprisingly, the 1992 film Encino Man was a significant junction in this process. Katherine Connor Martin of the Oxford English Dictionary points out how the script describes the white characters as having “been bros since grammar school”.

By the late ’90s, bro had shifted from being a signifier of friendship between men to representing a kind of fratty masculinity among guys who like to party. At this point, I like to imagine that Chad stopped mid-beer chug, got his dudes together and told them that bro effectively lends itself to compounding. Terms like bromance and brohemian entered the cultural lexicon and, somewhere in the never-ending process of creating broisms, the Film Bro was born.

But an etymological analysis of the term doesn’t really tell you what a Film Bro is. Urban Dictionary defines a Film Bro as someone who “views themselves as a huge film nerd” despite having a “mostly surface-level knowledge of movies”. This is the definition that informs most people’s understanding of the term and I have certainly met people who fit this description. However, I’ve come to realise that ‘Film Bro’ is not a fixed idea; it’s a sprawling web that contains at least three major subtypes.

The first is the “surface-level” Film Bro. This is the quintessential Film Bro, epitomising the term as it first emerged in mainstream media back in 2017. It’s the film slogan t-shirt wearing guy I met on the first day of my film degree who thinks the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are Christopher Nolan, David Fincher and Quentin Tarantino; he’s responsible for the hoards of film-centric Instagram accounts that regurgitate the same films from IMDb’s Top 250. I think of this subtype as the gateway drug of Film Bro culture, from which someone might graduate to one of two levels of full-blown Film Bro-dom.

The second is the “turtleneck-and-Tarkovsky” type. He’s the pretentious one, smoking a cigarette at a house party while cornering a girl with unsolicited viewing recommendations. This Film Bro has gained notoriety by making appearances on the dating scene, immortalised by the Instagram account @beam_me_up_softboi.

The third subtype, occupying the darkest corners of bro culture, is the “cause-for-concern” Film Bro. He idolises the problematic male protagonists of American Psycho, Fight Club and A Clockwork Orange. He’s probably partly responsible for the onslaught of think pieces about the perceived dangers of Joker and contemporary anxieties concerning on-screen violence in general.

For the most part, all three Film Bro subtypes subscribe to the same established film canon: the films are critically successful, they fuel critical discussion and they often have a penchant for narratives that either objectify or subjugate women. What truly unifies the three types of Film Bro is how these values are expressed: through the gatekeeping of what is essentially mainstream cinema. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard remarks like “you probably haven’t heard of it” or “you wouldn’t get it”. This is particularly harmful because gatekeeping and insidious misogyny help to uphold a patriarchal film industry.

In 2020 Jack Loney wrote an article for Lithium Magazine entitled ‘How Critics Created the Film Bro’. He argues that Hollywood, specifically male directors, are stuck in a cycle of making films that cater “almost exclusively to men like [them]”. Because critical circles are also “overflowing with men’”, the film will receive both commercial and critical success and be placed within the “Good-Movie canon”. The male viewers’ opinions, which are often misogynistic, are then “validated through the narrative of [their] favourite film” and its positive critical reception. Loney cites the 2020 Academy Awards as a perfect example of this “circuit”; Joker, with its controversial depiction of male violence, received 11 nominations.

There are, of course, other forces quietly working away to reassert these patriarchal values. For example, there’s the “Frat Pack”, the nickname given to a group of male comedy actors (Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Steve Carrell, among others). As the name suggests, they’re a filmmaking fraternity who held a monopoly over mainstream comedy for the best part of a decade. The only female-led comedy film to rival their success, at least commercially speaking, was 2011’s Bridesmaids. These male collectives are impenetrable and, consciously or otherwise, they prevent a greater diversity of creators from entering the mainstream.

In a since-deleted article titled ‘The Cult of Paul Schrader’, a writer for Facets magazine pointed out that until fairly recently male-centric narratives were also lauded as “better” films than those with female leads and stories. Not only is there a dire representation of women behind the scenes, but audiences have long been conditioned to regard female-centric films as lesser forms of art. Despite their faults, it’s sad that films with female leads like Twilight and The Fault in Our Stars, both of which were marketed to teenage girls, have become the subject of intense mockery within film culture.

So while I can poke fun at Film Bros, for me to lay into them would be counterproductive. The Film Bro didn’t invent himself, the industry did. If we want them to go away, we need to look for answers higher up.

And this might just happen; the industry’s status quo is shifting. In addition to #MeToo, this generation’s Frat Pack, Team Apatow (Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, et al), has been shaken by allegations of sexual misconduct against James Franco. Rather than enabling this behaviour and allowing patterns of toxic masculinity to be repeated, Rogen has said he has no intention of working with Franco again. Even the sordid allegations against Armie Hammer, the ultimate Preppy Bro, have revealed that bro culture is more than a meme-ready joke; it breeds a very real threat to women.

We are also seeing a trend towards increased diversity both on- and off-screen. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, a film deeply interconnected with Korean culture, wasn’t made for Film Bros; its success is so important because both neither its inherent values nor its widespread critical acclaim were dictated by white, cisgender men.

Likewise, female-led films are no longer relegated to the realm of rom-coms and family dramas; Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, an intimate portrayal of female subjectivity, won the 2021 Academy Award for Best Picture. Even the most change-averse awards bodies are pledging to diversify, disrupting the typical patterns of only male-oriented films receiving award recognition. As a result, Film Bros no longer have a monopoly of knowledge over the themes explored in mainstream cinema.

My advice? While we wait for the patriarchy to crumble, next time a Film Bro tries to talk about Fight Club, just walk away.

Since the pandemic began I’ve had plenty of time to soul-search about the role of the arts during a crisis. The value of most industries seems to pale in comparison with the life-saving work carried out by frontline workers in the NHS, yet on an individual level we’ve never been more in need of, say, a film that chimes with our sense of humour, a book with a gravitas that matches life, or a song with a melody that stirs delight. The arts offer rejuvenating distractions from the heavy news cycle, and can go further, deeper and more precision-guided to soothe our loneliest pangs or plant the seeds of an awakening to the true ways of the world.

“I want to love more than death can harm,” writes Ocean Vuong the poet, essayist, novelist and teacher in ‘The Weight of Our Living’, a 2014 essay for Rumpus, published shortly after he lost his uncle to suicide. Vuong invokes the image of a poem as a fire escape, a place that people who feel too raw to communicate through the codes of conventional conversation can climb onto to share their reality. “I want to leave the party through the window and find my uncle standing on a piece of iron shaped into visible desperation, which must also be (how can it not?) the beginning of visible hope.”

The idea that being recognised in the depths of despair can save your life is something I believe in. During my worst eating-disordered years, I got most of my nutrition through the written word. I copied out fragments of prose and held them like amulets, convinced that a day would dawn when their wisdom would turn a key that restored my health. The loneliness of illness is hard to convey. There is a difference between occasionally feeling alone and the grip of an alienation that makes you question whether you are human in any sense beyond the immediate physical. In this state, meaningful communication is elusive. Everyday conversation can’t hold the SOS that sweats out of you.

How magical, then, to find a passage written by someone that gets it. The relief is sensual, spinning into awe for the solace that art provides. What an endorsement for staying alive it is to know that the record holds artworks that diagnose your strain of suffering and frame it in a hopeful context.

For me and for Vuong’s uncle, crises occurred inside our minds where no one could see them. This is the norm in cases of private mental anguish, yet now we, as a global population, are experiencing a shared crisis in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, although the severity of its impact is shaped by individual vulnerability and socioeconomic status.

What’s more, writing now in early June, the centuries-old fight for racial justice has been reignited in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis, whose last words, “I can’t breathe,” already haunt the public memory as the last words of Eric Garner in New York in 2014 and Seni Lewis in London in 2010; both Black men killed by police officers. Institutional racism is a crisis that has never gone away; it permeates the arts and is on our shoulders to rectify.

“The most important thing that art can do is make us think,” writer Olivia Laing told the BBC Radio 4 programme Start The Week on 11 May, “it’s a tool for thinking round all kinds of situations.” Laing’s most recent essay collection, ‘Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency’, was written pre-COVID-19, with climate change, AIDS and Brexit in mind. She believes that art needs to be grounded. “I have a strong and slightly puritanical view that the duty of the artist is to bear witness to reality.”

She put the book together as an “antidote to anxiety and despair… It’s an introduction to artists who have lived through intensely hard times, and who have made work that manifests emotions of joy and hopefulness and that create utopias that remain available to us.” She makes a careful distinction between achievable utopias and irresponsible fantasies sold by career politicians. “There’s a difference between thinking of utopias, and being in cloud cuckoo land, which I think is very dangerous. You can gauge a difference between those two different imperatives. Often it’s politicians who are creating fantasies that aren’t actually liveable.”

There are politicians hiding behind fantastical rhetoric on all levels of the arts, from secretaries of state down to gatekeepers of individual institutions. The purveyors of culture must get their houses in order, connect with their audiences with integrity and recognise the message of Black Lives Matter, that all must be accountable for creating shared power. Too often in the current climate, workers who pursue a living expression of equality incorporating diverse culture and values into their organisations discover intense resistance to their principled challenges, and so are further disenfranchised by organisations that continue to speak publicly about commitments to diversity.

Jemma Desai is a researcher, writer and a film programmer, with 15 years experience of working in the British cultural sector, largely for high-profile, predominantly white institutions. She is also a South Asian woman who grew up in London to immigrant parents and this year quit working for the BFI and British Council after a period of research and dialogue made her more cognisant of the cumulative impacts of institutional racism on marginalised arts workers’ health and wellbeing.

As many marginalised arts workers do everyday in a variety of contexts, in the year prior to handing in her notice Desai made whole-hearted overtures to decision makers at the institutions she engaged with, offering action plans to redress the systemic racism and raising consciousness via detailed testimonies of how marginalisation had affected her own career and health as well as those of her colleagues embodied in difference. It eventually became clear that, despite superficial sympathy, there was no serious will to prioritise the dismantling of a culture of white supremacy.

Desai has since made public a tour-de-force research paper called ‘This Work Isn’t For Us’ the result of 18 months of reading, thinking and dialoguing with non-white cultural workers (and a lifetime of being one). In it, she quotes an anonymous source who summarises the disconnect between ideology and reality in the cultural sector: “No one cares about us and our bodies. But this is supposed to be a space where empathy is encouraged, we’re in the game of illustrating stories to make people empathetic and no one is basically. The people in charge aren’t. They’re just interested in power.”

While these war stories make a career in the arts a dubious sell, there are people out there committed to the matter of how Black, ethnic minority and other institutionally disenfranchised groups can get their start, considering that the sector is dominated by people who do not look or sound like them. “It’s much harder when you face structural disadvantage and different kinds of soft and explicit prejudice,” says Neil Griffiths, a onetime activist, fundraiser and stock market analyst for the Financial Times who is now dedicated to the charity he co-founded, Arts Emergency. “There are plenty of programmes that can catapult people over the fortress walls, but they soon drop out. In the sector it’s referred to as ‘boomeranging’.”

Arts Emergency secured charity status in 2013, after being conceived in 2010 by Griffiths and the writer and comedian, Josie Long. Both grew up white and working class in Southeast London and joined forces after the coalition victory, at the beginning of austerity. “We were both in our mid twenties,” Griffiths recalls, “and she was like, ‘We’re both really lucky. We’ve come from backgrounds that weren’t traditionally in the arts.’”

Arts Emergency provides people aged 16-18 from non-privileged backgrounds with a trained mentor for a year and then access to a network of 7,000 arts and humanities professionals until they turn 25. “Our intention,” Griffiths says, “is to be a thread through an individual’s journey in the same way that we look back and see our peer community and our lucky breaks were a thread that kept us on a path.”

Griffiths is driven by a desire to transform both individual lives and the overall integrity of our political landscape. “We’re seeing now a populist right-wing government who have failed so badly. They tried to combat an actual plague [the coronavirus] with spin, and media manipulation and different narratives and specious arguments and straw-men arguments. Marginalised voices matter more than ever now because we need to hear the real story. We need to hear the truth. We need to hear that through art platforms. We need to hear that through public discourse. It’s literally a matter of life and death.”

An art platform offering 20 different voices, albeit those of established authors, can be found in Penguin Perspectives, essays written in response to Covid-19 and now available as a free ebook. (A donation of £10,000 was made by Penguin on behalf of participants to booksellers affected by the crisis.) Essayists include bestselling fantasy author Philip Pullman, former Children’s Laureate Malorie Blackman, vivid chronicler of femininity Deborah Levy, and Holocaust survivor Edith Eger who implored readers to “Find an arrow to follow to the good that can come.”

“My hope was that it would offer a little bit of an alternative to the news cycle,” says Sam Parker, editor-in-chief at penguin.co.uk, formerly digital editor at Esquire. We are speaking in May at the height of the lockdown. “The story has moved very fast. For obvious and understandable reasons people are preoccupied with the latest news about the virus and the politics around it. The two questions we put to the authors were: ‘What is this moment revealing about yourself and about us?’ and ‘What do you hope it changes in the future?’ The pieces are all very different, but a lot of the feedback that we saw consistently on social media was that it was nice to read something that was a bit slower. That was the short-term hope: Can we create a small space where we’re addressing this issue but in a slightly more contemplative way.”

Parker usually reads every day but during the first few weeks of lockdown he found it hard to concentrate. “I really struggled to focus. I felt like it was a dereliction of some kind to take my focus off the news and enjoy reading a book.” His focus of late has returned and he has been doing “nostalgic reading” and reading about nature. I ask what he thinks art does for the human soul. “What’s important in this time is to be able to access a range of emotions about it [lockdown]. It probably wouldn’t be the healthiest thing to only be angry, or only be scared, or only be slightly excited or hopeful about some elements of it. You need to be able to access a range of responses and art is a really great way to do that and to give yourself space to feel a few different things. So, I guess that’s what it gives the soul: access to different ways of feeling.”

Despite the fact that Britons have turned to various artforms to help them through the lockdown, huge question marks remain over how creative industries will fare once public life resumes in full. While cinemas in England are now allowed to reopen the same is not yet true for theatres, galleries, museums and live music venues, and although the government’s £1.5 billion support package is welcome it has come too late for venues that have already made major lay-offs.

Parker believes it would be a real shame “for the arts to be sidelined in whatever comes next. There’s going to be a recession and there’s going to be difficult times for everyone and for society. What’s happened in different points in history is that almost the first head on the chopping block is the arts. That’s something we should be really careful to avoid, because mental health is going to play a big part in the fall out of this, however it goes, and art, like nature, is essential to help mental wellbeing.”

No doubt because of my personal history, I see mental wellbeing as a site of sanctity that must be tended to and preserved, even when we are unimpressed with ourselves and think we deserve to suffer. Is it possible to make a space for our souls to bloom in their entirety? The world is burning. The news is an infinite scroll of death, devastation and disappointing leadership, while our ongoing state of social distancing means there are scant opportunities “for the simple harbour of a hug” (words from the poet Grace Nichols).

The temptation can be to languish in hysterical despair and to deny the opportunity for relief because it feels like a gross indulgence, but who does it serve when you make yourself an invisible martyr to the ills of the world? As my friends pointed out when I said I wanted to jump out of a window, Boris Johnson isn’t considering jumping out of a window. Or, as my dad put it, don’t let the bastards grind you down.

A way back to my full size is through poetry. So much cultural exchange occurs on social media now, with half an eye on whether the watching panopticon will validate or puncture the offering. Poetry is a private connection from soul-to-soul. “There’s a reawakening that occurs as you read. It opens up some responses that you have on a human-to-human basis,” says Neil Astley, editor of ‘Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times’. Published in 2002, and arranged by theme, this is a pop star on the poetry anthology scene. Front and back covers are adorned with endorsements from famous names. A Jane Campion quote says: “These poems distil the human heart as nothing else.”

Astley founded his poetry publishing house, Bloodaxe Books, in 1978. It has been his mission ever since to take poetry out to a wider audience. “I want to both publish poetry for an existing poetry readership, as well as take poetry out to a readership that might not normally have access to it, or who think that it isn’t for them.”

The success of ‘Staying Alive’, which has sold 250,000 copies to date, was not by chance. Frustrated that his poets weren’t reaching the audiences they deserved, Astley took a tactical approach. “I was convinced that there was a book that would break through into wider readership if it had the right kind of poems, and had an avenue, so I produced a proof of it a year before publication, and sent it out to about 100 well-known people who I knew loved poetry. That’s how we got those endorsements on the cover of ‘Staying Alive’.”

By chance, the anthology was published shortly after 9/11, leading to interest from an American publisher and emotional readings in New York City. “Meryl Streep read ‘Begin’ by Brendan Kennelly and that whole audience of about 700 just erupted in applause because it spoke to them so personally,” Astley remembers. “I read a poem by Imtiaz Dharker called ‘They’ll Say, “She Must Be From Another Country”’ and again that got spontaneous applause because people connected with it so strongly.”

One of Astley’s favourite poets is Imtiaz Dharker, whose work has been published for over 20 years. “She was born in Pakistan and grew up in Scotland and then moved to India when she eloped with a Hindu. Her poems are ones that I think a lot of people have connected with because they are all about the modern world and living in different cultures and not being confined to one country or one culture.”

‘They’ll Say, “She Must Be From Another Country”’ cuts two ways: as a celebration of personal difference and a critique of those intolerant towards difference. It is confident and playful, with a rhythm to die for. The poem is made for people akin to Dharker to look inwards and affirm their identities and it is made for those unlike her to look outwards and appreciate identities different to their own, but for art workers with power there is a responsibility to do something with the enhanced awareness that should follow ritual gorgings on other peoples’ stories. We must react to the cries about systems close to home that are hurting people and deprioritise a white-knuckle grip on personal status.

There is a distinction to be made between the arts as a public workspace, and the arts as a source of private solace. When it comes to our private life, the case for art is that it nurtures our souls in secret. One of the poems that I copied out during the bad days is on page 106 of ‘Staying Alive’. This is how ‘The Waking’ by Theodore Roethke starts:

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear
I learn by going where I have to go

These lines might seem simple to readers who have never been scared to face the day. To me, who used to feel that way, they opened up space to exist at my own pace. Art can justify a pause to feel yourself made whole and to reach out to others from a place of wise generosity, which is richer than fear. There are other things in life that induce this feeling – such as friendship and nature – but when those are beyond reach, there is renewal stored in unassuming objects: a familiar DVD, a speaker hooked up to a favourite song, a poem beat-matched to your heart’s desire.

Astley is used to receiving strong personal reactions to the work he puts out. Readers email him about particular poems. “One person said that they’d left their husband as a result of reading Mary Oliver’s poem ‘The Journey’ [‘But little by little, as you left their voice behind, the stars began to burn’]. It had helped them see their life.”

This is evidence of how art valorises the quiet stirrings we have to live by bolder instincts, and evidence of the badass brilliance of Mary Oliver, who has said that nature and poetry saved her from her childhood. She used to go out into the woods close to her home with a notebook where she found mental space in physical space. Her seminal poem ‘Wild Geese’ reaches out to people with half a leg off a fire escape, telling them that they belong here still:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.