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Sheryl Lee as Glinda in Wild at Heart

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BOUND (1996) dir. The Wachowskis

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The Gleaners and I (2001), dir. Agnès Varda

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“To admit your surprising attachments, to trace your transformation over the course of a long (life) sentence, is sentience — that’s what I’ve learned. The pain of paying attention pays me back in the form of eloquence: a sound pleasure.”

Lauren Berlant, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” Cruel Optimism

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American movie, 1999

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“Justine’s history of painful sex takes on much the same trajectory as Dorothy’s romantic one. ‘This memory [of sexual violence], with its ugly eroticism, was not in the least arousing; however she recognized something compelling in it, a compulsion akin to that of a starving lab animal which will keep pressing the button that once supplied it with food, even though the button now jolts its poor small body with increasing doses of electric shock’ (235-36). The story of the starving lab animal suggests the bare relevance of content to what drives a being toward what negates it: the unbearable experience of being stuck in a way of being in life in the face of unlimited need is also the experience of competence at a certain form of living. The ‘poor small body’ wants food, gets shocked, and is compelled to return to the place of pain by the possibility that shock will convert to food. Or, the small animal is compelled to return because returning is what it knows how to do. All the creature might know and know how to do is reduced to that one habit. The smarting beast is not using his smarts: knowledge is useless. It is compelled to create a form of living through repetitions that do not gratify it. But they do gratify it too, in the sense that this is a scene it recognizes. Recognizing oneself when one has survived shock provides a foundation for a mode of survival that is more than just a failure to die.”

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism

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And as many have pointed out, Israel had always intensified its bombing campaigns on Gaza around days like thanksgiving, Christmas and now the Super Bowl. The last time I said this around Black Friday people lost their minds thinking Palestinians want to make everything about themselves. The truth is, no other country emboldens Israel in its actions more than the United States. Have whatever thoughts you want about this, but it's laughable if you can't tell by now how this genocide has been orchestrated since day one. We have a whole history of evidence as to how Israel utilises the absence of eyes on Palestine to carry out its heinous crimes with the least amount of international fuss.

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Isabelle Huppert, Amateur (1994)

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Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987)

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THINGS TO COME (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2016)

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All attachment is optimistic, if we describe optimism as the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene.

But optimism might not feel optimistic. Because optimism is ambitious, at any moment it might feel like anything, including nothing: dread, anxiety, hunger, curiosity, the whole gamut from the sly neutrality of browsing the aisles to excitement at the prospect of “the change that’s gonna come.”

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism

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Edouard Vuillard (français, 1868-1940), Le Vieil Arbre, entre 1932 et 1935, peinture à la colle sur papier, 72 X 113 cm, Paris, musée d'Orsay

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this is a Maggie Cheung/Irma Vep appreciation post

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Juliette Binoche in Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)

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I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, Dir. Patricia Rozema, 1987.