My previous soap opera exposure is limited. As a child, I watched 7de Laan with my ouma. I had a brief but memorable period of watching Binnelanders every day in Grade 10. Besides that, I have occasionally dipped into EastEnders and HollyOaks. But, watching Isidingo for the first time, I feel like I’ve really missed out on something—an era of television that we will never get back due to budget cuts and the foreign (read: American) models we are copy-pasting into our localities (as referred to by one TV history panellist).

I am watching Isidingo the way Willoughby did—as one would the Sunday omnibus. The key difference is that SABC+ allows me to dictate the time of the broadcast, which, I think, runs counter to the sense of community and shared time I imagine people who watch current soapies feel. Even when a new major series has its 15 minutes of fame on our small screens, we do not watch it at exactly the same moment. Maybe watching the evening news, something else I intend to start doing, can give one some sense of this. As a general rule of thumb, though, smartphones and tailored feeds run counter to this kind of consumption. I’m not saying that we should all strive to go back—that’s not how progress or technology work—but I do feel like the difference between flipping open a phone and flicking on the TV should be noted.

I used to be a lot less reliant on streaming services, but something shifted during lockdown, and now I default to their inconvenient convenience. However, I have oriented myself towards American or otherwise global media for much longer. The series which I have found myself compelled to watch from beginning to end (or to the end of the seasons available on a given streaming platform) over the last few years have all been American—House, The Mentalist, Law & Order: SVU, and, most recently, Bones. Even though I grew up in the country with the highest number of HIV positive people in the world, the kinds of AIDS-related media I consumed outside of educational programming were gay movies set in 1980s America and a documentary called Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt.1

Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ are all American platforms, and, whilst their content offerings are sometimes decent, I find it depressing that I have sunk so much time into their services when our local equivalents are struggling. (That said, PBS and NPR are likely going to be struggling in the near future, and the media industry in America and elsewhere is looking pretty bleak—whether that be news outlets, movie studios, or video game studios.)

DSTV and SABC are both faring poorly for a variety of reasons—streaming services, social media, and, in my opinion, an externally-oriented hyper-globalised media landscape (and audience) chief among them. Perhaps I possess an overinflated sense of my own significance and believe that, by consuming content offerings outside of the streaming centre, I can save these organisations. Perhaps I ask too much of myself and others to reorient themselves. However, in my own capacity, I think it is worth trying.

In the meantime, I would like to indulge in a little bit of retroactive nostalgia, as my generation tends to do, and propose some suggestions should anyone with a vested interest in localised broadcasting services have read to this point.

When I am speaking of ‘local’ broadcasting, I am not only speaking to the South African context (in which I think it can be a charged term, given our national proclivity towards xenophobia). I am speaking of any context that is not directly plugged into one-way globalised chains of distribution. What I’m really advocating for is glocalisation—“the simultaneous occurrence of both universalizing2 and particularizing tendencies in contemporary social, political, and economic systems,” as defined by Britannica. In this, it is possible for us to appreciate our own and others’ creative outputs without sacrificing one for the other.

If we do not tend to our own contexts and consumption habits, we risk losing more than a long-running soapie here and there. Industries will dwindle. Jobs will be lost. Terminological development will stagnate.3

What happens if centralised, fact-checked “minor” language news broadcasting4 ceases? What happens to our knowledge of our particular time and place outside of our screens and social circles? What happens to our shared television culture when we spend hours of our day engaged with monolingual content produced within a media ecosystem unlike anything that exists outside of its borders?

On a dreamier front, what would happen if we built bridges between our various worlds of hyper-local content and, copyright law permitting, built the equivalent of radio.garden for televisual media? What if we combined our propensity towards flitting between platforms and content with access to television channels from around the world, unplugging ourselves from what Helen Aeberli dubs the “soft power americana” of an Americanised internet? What if we broadened our horizons, and, in keeping with the theme of the IAMHIST, de-centred media histories and, therefore, media futures?

Those of us who have the time to care about local broadcasting should not be complacent and take our media institutions for granted. We should make a conscious effort to engage with public programmes, local or otherwise smaller streaming platforms, community radio stations, print publications (the state of print media in South Africa is a topic for another day), or other outlets. It may not be enough to combat the broader issues of algorithmification or Americanisation, but it’s a step in the right direction.

I’m sure that these problems look different depending on where you are5, and I am interested to hear insights from people coming from languages, geographies, and perspectives outside of my immediate frame of reference. Send me your dreams, complaints, and strategies for supporting and reviving local media ecosystems!

I went to the International Association for Media & History (IAMHIST) biennial conference two weeks ago, and I felt more inspired, stimulated, and engaged than I have felt in a long time. Everything felt emplaced and impassioned and, for the most part, far removed from one of my biggest bed-bugs—the over-theorisation of the Archive (the capital 'A' is imperative) without actually familiarising oneself with its catalogue or talking to the people whose professional and scholarly pursuits revolve around its holdings.

This year’s theme was ‘Decentering Media Histories and Practices,’ and presentations were suitably broad. On the first day, I presented on selected HIV/AIDS-related material in my university's archives and special collections. After that, I listened to presentations about colonial-era medical films; recordings of Japanese war criminal executions in Singapore after the Pacific War; historical game studies; women on stage and screen in 1930s China; film classification in Hong Kong; Irish filmmaking in the 1910s and 2020s and the reuse of audiovisual archival material in Northern and Southern Ireland; South African wildlife film archives (and the shortcomings therein), 1920s women film censors, film editing, religious cinema, and television history.

The South African television history panel, which was a prelude to an edited volume on the same subject set to be released later this year, prompted me to follow up on something I first encountered on a billboard near the airport a few months ago: SABC+, the national broadcaster's free streaming service. It has a decent selection of back-catalogue episodes of iconic, long-running soapies—amongst them are New South Africa classics like Muvhango, 7de Laan, and Isidingo, all of which have ceased or, in the case of Muvhango, are about to cease airing. (Generations is still going, and this is my public mental note to watch it.). You can also find childhood gems like Takalani Sesame (which I distinctly remember watching as a young child even though I certainly didn't understand it) and a Zulu-dubbed Spongebob (which I did not know about until we stumbled upon it when we were first scoping the SABC+ offerings). They also have an option to watch live-TV news and programmes, and links to various radio shows.

During our initial browse, Max and I decided to try out Isidingo. After making a 26-episode-sized dent in the 184 episodes of the first season (the only one available on the platform), we are hooked.

Thanks to the Wayback Machine and Wikipedia, I stumbled upon an article about Isidingo from 2006 written by Guy Willoughby that holds true to my viewing experience:

“I mean, what's more consoling than TV folks riding the same genteel roller-coaster as you and I? We take sweet relief in identifying with these people - Isidingo cleverly covers all social types, from barflies to board directors - knowing they have unending problems too.

Because it doesn't tie up neatly in an hour, the life-parallel is truly seductive.”

There are many reasons why I love Isidingo. It captures the moment of nation-building television so well. The characters—their quirks, their sayings, their dramas—are memorable and believable1. For the most part, the dialogue in Isidingo feels real—more real than the majority of television dialogue I’ve encountered. LA Times TV critic Robert Lloyd attributes this to “a luxury of space that makes [soap operas] seem more naturalistic” when compared to shows that air weekly and/or with a more limited number of episodes per season. Isidingo is particularly good at this, though my opinion on this is perhaps unduly influenced by the show’s local flavour and its ability to hit close to home.

Besides the part-and-parcel infidelity and intrigue, the show is set against the backdrop of a just-post-apartheid mining town, rife with opportunity to unpack myriad sociopolitical tensions, including but not limited to: racism, disciplinary hearings, strikes, trade unions, affirmative action, tribalism, a murder-suicide (that was really just a murder), theft, the criminal underworld, and small town life. My most recent Isidingo session was particularly nail-biting because one of the characters who I thought of as a decent ou (as I’m sure many other characters would phrase it) is turning corrupt. I couldn’t deal with it. I am officially invested!2

‘Tis the season for holiday parties: for feeling one’s mask melt away under a stream of champagne bubbles, for dissociating in the back of a taxi, for conversations marked by drawn-out silences that seem to hold the power to alter the course of one’s life. It is a time marked by aimless wandering around properties you have never been to or pointed wandering around your own, a host in search of an ice bucket. Is there a better feeling than losing yourself amongst a sea of unknown bodies, a pulsating throng of ballgowns swaying in time to instrumental renditions of Nat King Cole? Do you see that pianist in the corner? An old friend of the protagonist? If you squint, perhaps you will see my form replace his, a testament to my propensity for performance amidst the heat of summer, or, in this case, a fireplace keeping the frost at bay. If you decide to sing along, you may feel your voice lost to the air, varnishing the floors alongside shards of glass and wet paw prints. Throw in a model on either arm and a Hungarian salt-and-pepper seducer, and you have the opening party of Eyes Wide Shut (1999), albeit a summertime adaptation.

You are Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and are undertaking an exercise in social mobility. A doctor to the wealthy, wealthy yourself, you find yourself on your haunches, attempting to rouse a woman from an overdose in one of the many carpeted rooms in this mansion. Your wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), is teetering on the brink of infidelity with an older man, draping her arms around his frame languorously. On the night following this party, in the comfort of the family home, smoking weed procured from a tin in the medicine cabinet, your love life seems awfully fractured, Bill. The idea that your wife thought about having an affair last year, when you and her and your beautiful daughter were vacationing in Cape Cod, is too much to bear, too cantankerous to your already-fraught masculinity. You must escape. You must find Nick, the pianist whose role I assumed earlier. You must enter a profound state of ego-death and inertia, and experience an existential dread underscored by piano keys.

Eyes Wide Shut was Kubrick’s last film and took 400 continuous days to shoot. It saw the eroticisation of a man who was known for action and adventure, for being traditionally attractive, for flexing his muscles, for dealing with his daddy issues in fast cars and faster planes, but who was not known in this intimate way. The camera work renders one nauseatingly close to the characters, forcing one to walk backward as they approach the frame, forcing a confrontation with their interiority. It seems that Tom Cruise represented a sanitised, slightly homoerotic, masculinity, that was lustful in its exclusion of sex, at least in any explicit form. Yes, Risky Business (1983) saw Cruise’s Joel Goodsen call up and develop feelings for a sex worker, and Interview with the Vampire (1994) remains, in many respects, the gayest title in his filmography, but there is something about Eyes Wide Shut. Maybe it’s the fact that Joel Goodsen was a teenage boy looking for a quick thrill, and Dr. Harford is a grown man with real needs and desires and hang-ups, perhaps too close to our own. After all, it has been theorised that Kubrick pursued this project with manipulation in mind - the antisemitic insults hurled towards Bill in the book are transfigured into homophobic slurs; Cruise was kept away from the set when the scenes of Alice’s naval-officer fantasy were shot. Maybe Interview with the Vampire, whilst imbued with a diabolically libidinal undercurrent, was too fantastical, a monster movie wherein Tom Cruise’s Lestat is far away from who he really is. Seeing him kiss his wife, both real and acted, as they stand naked, embracing in front of a mirror to the croons of Chris Isaak, is uncanny, even though it had been done before in films such as Days of Thunder (1990) and Far and Away (1993). Attempting to discern the extent to which their intimacy and the requisite disintegration thereof adds to this.

Eyes Wide Shut contains multitudes (don’t we all?). It is, in many ways, a meditation on heteropessimism.1 The moment that shatters Bill’s view of his world, that of his marriage and wife, comes in the form of his wife’s confession of lustful thoughts for another. The fact that she holds this propensity should not shock him as much as it does - no matter how unhinged her delivery may be. The notion of the husband as philanderer, and the wife as victim, is pushed to its brink. The couple’s ‘real and imagined’ adventures are equated after the fact, a dream from which they can awaken and continue in spite of the turmoil rendered. It seems that every movement alludes to, but never leads to, the act, a drawn-out prelude to incoming atrocities. The Hungarian pours Alice’s champagne down his throat in an act of defiant flirtation; Bill is on the brink of menage when he is called away to assist with a medical matter. At the party, mouths are a tongue extension away from a kiss, threatening to crack open the façade of marriage as an institutional sham.

Bill stands as a proverbial million, a drop in the ocean of proverbial billions. He can afford to pay for as many cabs as his heart desires, to rent a mask and cloak for $200 above the rental price, to live in a glamourous New York apartment. But he is still suspect, caught out, in danger; for all his trying, he cannot - and will never - access acceptance in spaces made for the upper ranks of his (not his) corner of high society.

Bill stands as a conduit through which the viewer can reckon with their own depravity. He comes so close to reaching beyond the veil, behind which we stand alongside him. The contents of this film are, in and of themselves, not as shocking as they could be, but are framed as such, shrouded in a sinister air, which does the trick. Prior to my recent rewatch, I recalled this film as having more loose ends than it does. Somehow, I missed its circularity, how artfully constructed Bill’s odyssey is, and, most importantly, the point. Its tone is bizarre, but it works. Time is stretched to the point of inertia. We are wallflowers enmeshed in the velvet drapes.

All of this is to say that Eyes Wide Shut is about masculinity and the crisis thereof. Bill is forced to face his own inadequacy time and time again. He cannot prevent his wife from fantasising about other men (reminiscent of the toxic monogamist notion that one needs to turn one’s thoughts away from unfaithful desires as readily as one turns one’s body away from an inviting party, something that makes my head hurt even whilst being in a monogamous relationship myself). He cannot save the sex workers he encounters throughout the film, not for lack of trying. He cannot buy his way into the hearts and minds of those who stand above him. A respectable doctor such as himself can still get the breath knocked out of him by a group of teenagers mocking his presumed queerness. He may love his wife more tenderly than she does him. Prior to the night that spans the bulk of the movie’s length, he has never lied to her, and unravels under the weight of it all whilst cradled in her arms.

I was around 13 when I first watched I Am Sam (2001). I listened to the soundtrack many times on the way to school, a CD comprised entirely of Beatles cover songs. Since then, I have developed into a budding scholar of critical disability studies and adjacent fields, have turned into the kind of person who balks at The Big Bang Theory. So, it seems only natural that when contemplating the wealth of disabled characters swimming in my memory bank, Sam crops up. He was someone whom I retrospectively regarded with a certain level of contempt; defined by a lack of dignity, punished due to the fact that he has the mental age of a seven-year-old (despite having fathered and raised a child virtually singlehandedly). Upon re-watching it, I realised my mistake. The problem does not lie in Sam and his characterisation, nor the movie’s plotline, but in the visceral, hard-to-watch ableism that trips him up every step of the way.

In many ways, I Am Sam is a radical piece of representation, first and foremost for its portrayal of a fleshed out intellectually disabled character, and second in its depiction of him being a father. Such baseline requirements should not be called ‘radical’; the reason I use this word is because I cannot find anything remotely like this in the canon of disabled characters that have peppered the silver screen and curriculum vitae of Oscar-nominees over the last century (most of which, including Sean Penn, are non-disabled). Sam’s overcoming goes against the grain of typical disability narratives of triumph over an internal sense of adversity. His story is instead concerned with how difficult life is in an ableist society. Even pieces of criticism from the time of the film’s release attempt to keep this character pacified and stripped of autonomy, with reviews going so far as to say that the movie roots for the wrong side – Sam’s retention of custody of his daughter – where the viewer’s common sense dictates otherwise. Sam’s recovery is not dependent on changes in attitudes by himself or others, nor does it hinge on his disability being conceptualised as something separate to him a la person-first language. It is instead marked by the acquisition of his dignity – and his daughter – by way of a fight for what is just, for what every human being deserves: the right to provide their child with the utmost love and care that they can, and to retain this right so long as their relationship is healthy and happy. 

Sam Dawson (Sean Penn) is an intellectually disabled Beatlemaniac who works at Starbucks. He had a one-night stand with a homeless woman which resulted in a pregnancy; on the day of the baby’s birth, the woman leaves him standing at the bus terminal, catapulting him into single parenthood. He names the baby Lucy (Dakota Fanning) after the Beatles song, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, and they are happy. Sam is supported by his neighbour, Annie (Dianne Wiest), and his friends who host weekly movie nights and provide a sounding board for Sam’s parental questions and shopping choices. Lucy, a bright student, regresses as she turns seven due to her fears of surpassing her father’s intelligence, and grows somewhat ashamed of his disability, saying to a classmate that she was adopted. After a wrongful arrest for solicitation and an altercation at Lucy’s surprise party, Lucy is taken into care, and Sam is only permitted to see his daughter twice a week, supervised and stifled. His friends suggest that he contact a lawyer in order to regain custody. The lawyer, Rita (Michelle Pfeiffer), initially brushes off Sam’s pleas, but takes his case out of embarrassment when he shows up at a work function, providing the perfect opportunity for her to prove to begrudging colleagues that she is not cold, and, contrary to popular belief, does indeed do pro bono work. What ensues is a courtroom drama concerned with an ethical dilemma: of whether or not Sam should retain custody of Lucy, whether or not people like him are suitable to raise children at all. It is heart-wrenching in its severity, and ends with Sam being manipulated into the admission that he is not Lucy’s best option. Lucy winds up in foster care, and Sam tries to better his financial situation in order to prove that he is, in fact, a good father. Although reticent at first, the foster family eventually see merit in Sam’s fathering abilities, and do not push for adoption, but are still involved as parental figures in Lucy’s life.

Track 1: Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

And the Lord said, ‘Let there be Lucy.’ Lucy is the centre of Sam’s universe. The feeling that so many speak of when they first hold their baby seems to permeate every day of Sam’s life with his daughter. She is a diamond in his heart, a source of light in a life that has been filled with unkindness and misunderstanding. When looking at him, she does not see anything other than ‘Daddy’.

Track 2: Two of Us

There is something intoxicating about the montage of Lucy’s early years: idyllic trips to the park, swings a-swinging, a father looking on with pure adoration. Images of single fathers are few and far between, and disabled parenthood is virtually invisible on-screen. Sam’s approach to parenting, one marked by drawing from the resources one has in order to get by, is by no means exclusive to his experience. Yet it is treated as inferior, insufficient to meet the needs of his child. Rita gets a medical doctor with an intellectually disabled mother to testify that she had a brilliant experience of love and support growing up. Sam runs up to the stand and hugs her in gratitude for her testimony. Mr. Turner (Richard Schiff) overrides the success of the testimony, deducing that, since her grandparents took care of her much of the time, that this woman has a qualitatively different – better – experience than that which would be afforded to Lucy. Sam does not have a family to fall back on or a well-paying job, and is ostensibly not smart enough to teach his daughter about menstruation on his own – all of which are ridiculous justifications for what everyone is thinking: that Sam is not worthy of the precarious and difficult task of bringing up a child because he is different from – below – everyone else. Throughout the trial, there are doubts about Sam’s ability to handle parenthood on his own, to which Rita retorts that no one parents entirely alone. We get by with a little help from our friends. When looking at Sam’s journey into fatherhood, one cannot ignore Annie, his agoraphobic neighbour, in her quasi-grandmotherly support of Sam, fielding questions about nappy-changing and crying and sleep, babysitting Lucy when Sam is at work. We also cannot ignore the role of his friends, his work, and his routine in constructing a life that is relatively manageable, all things considered.

Track 3: You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away

Like all parents, Sam can be embarrassing. The difference here is that his embarrassing behaviours occur with little to no regard for the social contract. They are noticeably autistic, indicative of a certain rigidity that people outside such a mind struggle to penetrate. I am sure that when I first watched this, I felt the same thing. Now, though, I find myself able to relate. The reason that I choose not to behave as Sam does when a piece of my routine changes is because I have been able to mask my discomfort by way of teenage angst or total dissociation. When watching Sam, many of us may cringe at his forthright displays of thoughts, feelings, frustrations. Is this reaction due to the almost alien nature of someone expressing themselves as they truly are, because we cannot do that, or because we are afraid to do so? Afraid of pulling back the veil of social niceties and the expectation to adapt to and understand everything that life throws at us for fear of appearing ‘stupid’?

Track 4: Mother Nature’s Son

Who better to raise a child than someone who has raised themselves? We find out that Sam was institutionalised when he and Rita are traversing a whiplash-inducing traffic jam in her Porsche. He never knew his father, and his mother wanted nothing to do with him. One of the men who ran the institution, a stand-in for a father figure, abused Sam, a point which is used against him by Mr. Turner as he hurtles toward a breakdown. For most of his life, Sam was tasked with looking out for himself, to a higher degree than most. In the same way that some children of abusive parents are brilliant parents because they bore witness to what not to do, Sam has a running start on how to look after something precious and small, entirely its own, because he has had to do that for himself. When first coming to grips with being autistic, I thought about the odds of my child being autistic, having higher support needs than me, being someone I could not reach. I have grown beyond these neuroses, for the most part, but they do force me to beg the question: how does one kill the Hans Asperger in one’s head? These unspoken anxieties have no doubt informed my treatment of others as well as myself, my lens of the world and my place in it. And I am at least aware of them. What about those who aren’t? Those who, when watching I Am Sam, pity him, but do not believe in his competence, and, subsequently, the competence of anyone like him?

Track 5: Across the Universe

A major talking point within the trial is that intelligence does not factor into one’s ability to love. There are few things that boil my blood more acutely than conversations around mental age. I Am Sam entertains many such conversations, most notably when the trial comes to a head and Mr. Turner, who notes Sam’s mental age as seven, asks what will happen when Lucy turns eight. My instinctual response to that is ‘Yuck’, followed by rage, for a number of reasons. Firstly, seven-year-olds do not hold down jobs (unless within the context of child labour), pay rent, have sex (willingly), raise children. Secondly, even if they are only referring to IQ (which they are decidedly not), IQ is a poor way to measure someone’s faculties – even if it is built around aggregates with regards to calculating mental age, it should not be a primary source in building a case against one’s ability to parent, or do anything, in fact. Thirdly, mental age is an archaic and reductive way of looking at things. I know this movie is 20 years old, so it can be granted some grace regarding clinical language and appropriate terminology, but the advent of mental age as a measure is not obsolete; it has remained alive and well in the cultural lexicon of intellectual disability and requisite issues around institutionalisation, and I feel that I have a duty to dispel such thinking. Just because Sam cannot answer Lucy’s inquisition into why men are bald does not mean that he is fundamentally flawed, lacking in some intangible measure of acceptable cognitive functioning.

Track 6: Don’t Let Me Down

In order to prove himself, Sam takes on dog-walking in order to generate supplemental income, trying to make money to show the Judge how responsible he is. This, alongside his fear that maybe she is better off without him, results in him not visiting Lucy regularly whilst she is in foster care. Her foster mother, Randy (Laura Dern), berates Sam for his absence, and assures him that she will not see Lucy hurt again. When faced with a visit from her father, Lucy is furious at his absence. She thinks that Sam forgot about her, an insecurity which, I think, also works as a projection of her guilt; she blames herself for the mess they are in, something that is made clear earlier in the film, and thinks herself to be older, wiser, and more responsible than she is. She cries, resists her father’s attempts at placation, allows her seven-year-old stubbornness to be eclipsed by a hug.

Track 7: Golden Slumbers

Many have accused this film of being overly sentimental. I wouldn’t counter that claim, per se, but I would argue that it drives the story forward, and is at times a necessary lens through which to view difficult subject matter. Sam stretches the limits of allotted contact time by hiding in a tree and throwing origami at his daughter’s feet as she trudges toward the school doors. He reads Green Eggs and Ham to her every night, and, even when she is scared of being able to understand more than him, encourages her because he loves hearing her read, grow, grow up. In many ways, he is the dad of which we dream, for ourselves and for our children. When Sam buys an apartment closer to the foster family’s house, Lucy walks there every night, blankie in hand, repeating the cycle at the behest of Sam and Randy alike. It is this exchange between a makeshift mother and father duo that ultimately lets Randy see that Sam is good at being Lucy’s father, and that to throw him under the bus at the next hearing would be bad form. Similarly, it shows Sam that Randy is good at being Lucy’s mother, and can be trusted to help him in raising her. Personally, I like the way a cup of hot chocolate at midnight oozes nostalgia, or a tearful testimony makes one think twice about one’s biases. Bring on the sentimentality. Bring on the tears. Sometimes, it’s for the best.

Track 8: I’m Looking Through You

There is an undercurrent of eugenics in how people look at Sam – from coffee shop patrons to Lovely Rita. He is treated as simultaneously virtuous and pitiable. These attitudes stick to Sam’s clothes like stardust, and, regardless of the façade of blissful ignorance that some may see, he is aware of them. At a cafeteria, Sam wants to cover Rita’s bill, too, and takes his time counting his change. She suggests, with brusqueness and condescension, that she pay for it. He is taking too long, and she cannot bear to watch what must be a humiliating spectacle play out. But he does not yield, and instead goes for the jugular in a retort reminiscent of Samuel L. Jackson in A Time to

Kill: she thinks like them, does not see him as her equal. By the end of the film, Sam has been transformed in the hearts and minds of those around him: from untouchable to lovable, from a problem to a person. This change of heart is not the point at all. It never has been. Rita’s life is shown to be irrevocably transformed by Sam’s presence, reminiscent of the age-old trope of marginalised characters existing to better the lives of those around them. Except Sam does not exist for Rita; if anything, she exists for him. As do most of the other characters, in some way or another. The only person for which he exists is Lucy, and rightly so.

Also, like the previous issue, she is the first issue of a series. This series is entitled Sad (Girl) Theory (which I shall unpack later), named after Audrey Wollen’s theory of the same name in which she proclaims that women’s sadness is a radical act, among other things. Some titles due to be examined in this vein include Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House, Jane Eyre, and other cool and funky stuff. The goal is to have a collection of analyses of Sad Girls akin to a Sylvanian Family - one that seems to sit sulkily upon the shelf gathering just enough dust to glow at golden hour.

(Psst: there’s a Substack Reader App now, and it’s a pretty groovy way to dedicate a digital pocket to newsletters that are usually relegated to our overflowing inboxes.)

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I’ve been thinking about being a creative online and exactly what that means. I like spewing my thoughts into the void, and having that void speak back in a meaningful way. I try my best to keep everything categorical and to pepper in the personal without it becoming too overwhelming. That being said, my favourite kind of writing - at least in this sphere - is something along the lines of criticism-cum-creative-non-fiction. So, I’m going to start putting more of myself into my work - whether that be my words, my art, or my music.

I want this newsletter to be more than just a slew of movie reviews. I want to inject it with theory and wit, and treat it like I see other online writers treat their Substack babies: as a journal that one is comfortable having those you know and love peruse. That’s what I wanted to do when I first thought of starting a newsletter a year before I launched this one, but I didn’t know how to do it. I supplemented this desire with separation: Medium is for essays, Substack is for criticism, and Patreon is for paywalled tidbits. I considered making my ‘Highly Recommend’ segment a Patreon-related thing, but my only Patrons at this point in time are my mom and my boyfriend (I love you!), and I want my voice to be available to as many people as possible. I’m still figuring out how to build the structure and schedule of this newsletter with elegance and grace in terms of subsections and the types of content it contains, but I’ll get there. The Good, The Bad, and The Rain Man is getting a makeover.

I have a deep-rooted fear of unintentional theft, whether it be of ideas or traits, and here you will find me rationalising that many people who publish their own newsletters have a recommendations section, and blogs are built on structured oversharing. Writing is a practice, and writing is praxis. But this notion of unintentional theft is reminiscent of many neurodivergent experiences. We’ve seen the memes a la ‘when you walk out of the cinema and adopt the personality of the main character’. This is a fairly common experience, but, on a broader scale, relates to masking. Masking - whether it be one’s autism, queerness, trauma, or personality disorder - is making the best of a bad situation.

Upon rewatching Muriel’s Wedding, it’s evident that this lies at the heart of her character.

Muriel Heslop is an aimless twentysomething whose primary pastimes include listening to ABBA for hours in her room and fantasising about/fixating on weddings. She’s got daddy issues, fake friends, and next to no employment prospects. So what’s a girl to do? Get a blank cheque from your mom to buy a resale cosmetic kit from your dad’s mistress and steal your family’s life savings, of course. Use this money to follow your ex-friends to Hibiscus Island. Reconnect with a high school acquaintance who smokes like a chimney and seems to be the only person who doesn’t see you as nothing. Lip-sync Waterloo with her, and, upon facing the music of your felony at home, move to Sydney with her. Don’t forget to base your personality on a lie, change your name from Muriel to Mariel, and relish in any and every opportunity to escape yourself.

Her character is less than admirable. Pathological lying is an objectively undesirable - if not flat-out reprehensible - trait. But it is understandable.

‘You’re useless.’ ‘You’re embarrassing.’ ‘You can’t type.’ ‘You don’t wear the ‘right’ outfits.’ ‘You don’t do your hair right.’ ‘You aren’t on our level.’

These statements are spat at Muriel by friends and family, offensive and crass in their assault on her person. By all accounts, she sees herself as others see her: the epitome of failure. More specifically, as a failure in the land of women. The only woman who accepts Muriel for who she is, is Rhonda, a woman who is effectively her platonic partner, and it takes her an entire movie to figure out that this acceptance is enough to catapult her towards a path of self-love.

Audrey Wollen’s Sad Girl Theory rests upon the idea that a woman’s sadness (and its physical and emotional implications) can be seen as resistance. Sadness isn’t passive, and Muriel’s misery is too palpable to be seen as such. Wollen asserts that sadness is not an individual ill, but rather a collective experience, and that a woman’s sadness holds a particular flavour. One can taste Muriel’s sadness in billowing wedding dresses, red lipstick, an oversized bottle of champagne, the burnt grass of her father’s garden, and the aftermath of a broken beanbag. In this regard, Muriel’s despair manifests itself as a result of and as a resistance to a lifetime of rejection.

Muriel Heslop/Mariel Van Akel is something of a femme fatale in that, though thoroughly oozing anti-charm (a-la Michael in The Boys in the Band) and lacking in long-term strategy, she is an unstoppable force driven by her need to overcome what she understands to be her failure in womanhood. The key to this success is marriage - not love. Call me ludicrous, but I think that the narrative arc of Muriel’s quest for marriage is a radical choice. Though the position of marriage within this movie is not strictly feminist in that it is still seen as the purpose of a woman’s life (both in terms of the epoch at hand and the views of the protagonist and surrounding characters), there is an air of autonomy in Muriel’s decision to embark upon an obsessive path towards her own big day. The film also doesn’t make the wedding the pinnacle, but rather an aesthetic high-point surrounded by other dramatic circumstances. Muriel’s reinvention marks her ascension of past failure, not the commitment to a man.

Dramas centred around the elusive Feminine Experience are almost always mired in compulsory heterosexuality. Muriel’s Wedding is no exception. This usually plays out under the auspices of a broader issue: we are conditioned and expected to construct our lives around monogamous romantic partnerships. This expectation is amplified for women. Tick, tick, tick, find The One or else you will be lonely and your life will be meaningless. Rhonda’s role as a friend - a consistent, complex, reliable friend at that - adds to the subversion present within this atypical narrative. What is most interesting to note, I think, is that Muriel has reclaimed the expectations of womanhood - specifically the institution of marriage - as a special interest.

I have been thinking about this for a while. The notion of pathologising ‘restricted’ or ‘limited’ interests is complicated. My main issue with certain versions of this paradigm is that it negates the functionality that interests can hold. I haven’t come across that many examples that address the aetiology of special interests. I’ve rambled about a certain dichotomy of special interests before. Within this dichotomy, if you’re going to be seen as weird, you have two options: express an interest that makes it seem that this weirdness is intentional, or express an interest that allows for a greater chance of seeming ‘normal’.

For example, a weird girl whose personality is carefully constructed around interests such as makeup, fashion, and pop music is, within a neurodivergent context, making a pointed effort to gain social acceptance as the ‘right’ kind of girl, just as a weird boy obsessed with football trivia can be seen as the ‘right’ kind of boy, even if his interest in football is seen as overly involved. On the other end of the spectrum, a weirdo whose personality consists of alternative music, androgynous clothing, and defiance is attempting to market their weirdness as an embodiment of counterculture, rather than as an organic facet of their experience of the world. As previously mentioned, I have used this example before, but I think it presents this dichotomy well, and I am going to keep exploring it.

Getting back to Muriel, her obsessions with marriage and ABBA, and her pursuit of her own wedding, are more than a manifestation of special interests: they act as a lifeline. Special interests are not arbitrary. Perhaps some seem to appear out of the blue, but I think that many serve a purpose. Re: the acceptable vs. countercultural example, special interests are functional in both circumstances. Weirdo A wants to fit in, and their interests are expressed so as to foster social approval, whilst Weirdo B, perhaps after botched attempts at fitting in, decide to own their rejection by amplifying it and actively alienating themselves from the status quo.

When Rhonda is learning to walk again, she sighs, ‘How can you stand this?’ (‘this’ being the fact that Muriel has to offer care to her disabled friend, whose narrative is, in my opinion, one of the better narratives of a newly-disabled person; she is sexy and fun and chain-smokes throughout her rehabilitation, surgeries, and adjustment to a different life, which is quite unlike the tragedy that often marks stories of sudden disability apropos Born on the Fourth of July, Million Dollar Baby, Me Before You, or even The People vs. Larry Flynt). Muriel replies by saying that, before she got reacquainted with Rhonda and moved to Sydney with her, she would sit in her room and listen to ABBA songs all day, and that now her life is as good as an ABBA song - as good as Dancing Queen - which means that she doesn’t need to listen to ABBA anymore, at least not in the same way. This speaks to the emergence of special interests as supports for the harshness of the outside world. I take my preoccupation with Tom Cruise as a prime example of a special interest that serves a purpose, and also as one that runs parallel to Muriel’s changing relationship with ABBA. Muriel trying on a dress in every wedding shop she can find in the Yellow Pages and asking the hostesses to take photos for her sick mother or ailed sister (all lies, of course) allows for a sense of purpose and connection, however fleeting or false. Muriel morphs into Mariel, and regresses back to Muriel, largely because she realises that she holds more power than she thinks. After her big white wedding, in the flat of her husband whom she found in the Personals, David asks her why she would go through with marrying someone she doesn’t know. She retorts that he did the same thing, to which he says, ‘I want to win.’ She responds: ‘Me, too.’

Interests - neurodivergent or otherwise - can foster easier social interactions, aid in emotional processing, and provide feelings of safety when you engage with them. Rattling off Tom Cruise trivia made me seem entertaining in my eccentricity, and making lists of his movies in chronological order gave me a sense of purpose, however arbitrary that may seem to an outsider. I have changed in many ways, and, though Tom Cruise lore isn’t as prominent a feature in my life as it used to be, it still has an important place in my heart and brain. Like anything in life, my interest in him and his work ebbs and flows.

Muriel’s Wedding is an iconic, garish, and memorable tragicomedy. There’s something about it that sticks in one’s memory far beyond Waterloo and ‘You’re terrible, Muriel.’ The way that she embroils herself in a life that she so desperately wants to be hers haunts viewers, because we can identify with aspects of her depravity and desire to be a different version of herself. Muriel, we love to cringe at you, and we love you for all your awkward edges.

Watch it on: Google Play, Vudu, or, if you’re like me, your parents’ DVD copy.

Rating: a Super Trouper Sad Girl/10

Let me preface this issue by saying that I do not stan Mel Gibson.

I am not going to enter into an extended artist-versus-art semantic minefield, but I will say that I am not advocating that one supports people whose actions are dubious at best (@ Gibson’s extensive history of abuse, homophobia, racism, antisemitism, etc.). This piece is an unpacking of a character that he played and does not reflect my views on him at all.

This issue marks the first instalment in a series called The Intimacy Issues. The aim of this series is to provide insights into representations of love, admiration, and closeness that fall outside of the ‘normative’ understandings of intimacy (all within the sphere of media, course).

Some examples of the pieces of media I am going to use include The Night Manager, Vanilla Sky, Bladerunner 2049, and more, so get excited! I am also open to suggestions :)

That being said, let’s dive in.

Warning: Mentions of abuse, trauma, and Corona-time.

Conspiracy Theory was released in 1997 and stars Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts. Mel Gibson plays Jerry Fletcher, a conspiracy theorist cab driver who, enamoured and aided by the object of his affection, Alice Sutton (Roberts), sees his worst nightmares come true. 

The film opens with a montage of him rattling off various conspiracy theories, warning the passengers of his cab of the dangers of fluoride in terms of its ability to ‘weaken your will’, new $100 bills containing tracking devices, and the fact that similar tracking devices in animals are one step away from tracking devices in our children. Watching this film 25 years after its release is eery given how the last two years have mired the world in mistrust and a pathological need to pick between the absolutist poles of total autonomy (see: anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, COVID denialism, insurrection of various political motivations) and total obedience (see: the perpetuation of the moralisation of disease so that one is peer-pressured into feeling like a failure regardless of what steps you take to ensure safety thanks to a Twitter feed) in response to the chaos around us. You will find that many of Jerry Fletcher’s claims - or at least their constructions, in the more outlandish/dated examples - echo the walls of text that one can unearth from subreddits such as r/greatawakening and QAnon theories reposted to your aunt’s Facebook page. 

Jerry Fletcher is a simple man. He never enters his apartment the same way twice. He likes talking to people. And he loves Alice Sutton more than anything else that this planet has to offer. After he retires his cab at the end of each day, he parks and watches Alice through binoculars, tuning the radio to whatever she mouths as she sweats her troubles away on her treadmill. The song that marks this film’s narrative is Franki Valli’s Can’t Take My Eyes off You. Every time I hear that song, I think of Jerry Fletcher.

Jerry’s experience of the world is characterised by ‘delusion’ and misunderstanding. Neurosis is arguably at its worst when paranoia proves itself warranted. You are scared that there is a spider lurking in some dark corner of your room, dismiss your anxieties as irrational, sweat yourself to sleep, and, upon waking up for a glass of water, discover said spider on the wall next to your bed. It feels as though you have been duped both by the cosmos and yourself. In Conspiracy Theory, Jerry finds himself in a similar situation, only on a much larger scale. 

Jerry’s very being is fuelled by this neurosis. Apropos his never entering his apartment the same way twice (and many similar compulsions), he is convinced that they are out to get him. Whether their weapon is fluoride, pounds of killer beef, or federal agents, it is ready to be engaged for an attack at any moment, the enemy waiting to pounce, to destroy his freedom.

After he leaves Alice Sutton’s office at the Department of Justice, having given her the details of his latest conspiracy regarding satellite launches and earthquakes having emerged as a new conglomerate set on mass destruction, Jerry is kidnapped by men in dark suits and wakes up to a slew of torturous activities in an unfamiliar location. The torture is on account of a grain of truth that has been extracted from one of his seemingly ludicrous newsletters, and the fact that his exposure of this tidbit is dangerous to the operation to which these dark suits are tied. This sequence is harrowing, to say the least.

‘Who have you been talking to, Jerry?’

‘I don’t know. I drive a cab. I talk to lots of people.’

He is pressed for answers that he does not possess, and, upon escaping their talons and attempting - with great futility - to relay these happenings to Alice, blubbering with a gun in his hand, he is restrained and handcuffed to a hospital bed.

The rest of the movie plays out in a similar cat-and-mouse fashion, and I shan’t divulge all the details (for I highly recommend seeing them for yourself), but what I will say is that Jerry’s predicament speaks to the predicament of many lonely people in the present day, if only metaphorically for some.

Involuntary commitment to mental health facilities has hardly disappeared within the first fifth of this century. Nor has confinement as a whole, which has become a contentious and traumatic issue; whether people agree or disagree with the context of such confinements (and whether or not they are self-imposed or externally enforced), people are lonely. Their worlds are theirs and theirs alone. Jerry and others like him are the embodiment of such individualism and insularity.

Alice’s visit to Jerry’s apartment (after his elaborate escape from the hospital and death) is unnerving. His quirks - the placement of a beer bottle on his door handle, highly flammable wallpaper (in preparation for a swift escape that feels perpetually imminent), padlocked fridge, padlocked coffee kept inside of said fridge (to keep the beans fresh), newspaper clippings obscuring any and all surfaces, and myriad copies of The Catcher in the Rye - unsettle Alice in that she had believed that perhaps deep down, the level to which Jerry was misunderstood still fell within the parameters of ‘normality’. Of his Catcher in the Rye compulsion, he speaks of his need to purchase it every time he enters a shop, and, if it cannot be found within that particular shop, his need to source it elsewhere. Why? Because it makes him feel normal. 

Gibson’s portrayal of Fletcher is over and above unhinged. The restless energy, the breathlessness that marks all of his interactions, the futility of words - their failure, how inexpressible they render their host in terms of his experiences - make for a memorable character, even if for some this is merely an example of a tired archetype: the Conspiracy Theorist. However, I think that the overwhelming amount of public fatigue in the face of such an individual is a chief reason to engage with this film. It allows the viewer to see the Conspiracy Theorist for what they are: a scared, lonely person, grasping at any and all straws to make meaning and sense of the chaotic world in which they live, as we all are.

We learn that Jerry was a subject in the MK Ultra program. Allow me to (briefly) infodump: Project MK Ultra was a highly unethical human experimentation program run by the CIA between 1953 and 1973. The goal of the project was to research and identify drugs that could potentially weaken individuals during interrogation. The forms of psychological and physical torture that subjects had to undergo included the forced ingestion of psychoactive drugs, electroshock treatment, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and other forms of abuse. Upon hearing this, it makes more sense to the viewer that Jerry is a jittery mess with trouble expressing himself and remembering information that appears so simple for the average person to retain. Jerry is, after all, a trauma babe.

The only constant within his tumultuous universe is Alice. When Alice is in his apartment, she notices photorealistic drawings of her horse from her younger days, a creature Jerry noticed in a picture on her desk when visiting her office the day before. More significantly, when they make their escape via a quasi-trapdoor, Alice notices a rendering of her and her horse taking up the majority of the wall in the makeshift saferoom. She has no idea how Jerry has come to be in possession of such an image, nor does she have any idea of how much he truly knows about her. (Btw: I am not going to give it away.)

I believe that Jerry Fletcher’s obsession with Alice Sutton stands as a primary example of the insular nature of love in a crumbling world. His attempts at intimacy are primarily indirect, the 1997 equivalent to the multiple mini-Instagram-stalks so many of us carry out in the midst of an overwhelming crush. Their dynamic is also complicated, caught somewhere between a mutual saviour complex, a father-daughter guardianship, and romantic love. This complexity is heightened by the way in which Jerry’s feelings surface (i.e. the mini-stalks). He is hungry for knowledge about the woman with whom he is enamoured, just as he is hungry for knowledge about the latest and greatest top-secret espionage operations. And, because of his tenacity and skill, he can acquire it fairly easily.

If you need any more convincing, it is fair to say that this film has something for everyone: action (see: Jerry wheeling down a passage with his eyes taped open trying to escape from the bad guys), psychological intrigue (which involves everything I unpacked above, and more), and a relational arc that is far from a typical romance, but is as poignant, if not more so.

This movie is moving and takes some unexpected turns. Among the only things I can fault it for are its love theme (cliché and poorly used at times), and the fact that Mel Gibson is Not The Vibe in terms of his status as an actual person in the real world.

(I don’t think that my ratings are all that helpful in terms of gauging how enjoyable or engaging something is, as I enjoy most of the things that I watch to completion, but if I had to rate it, I would say 8,5/10).

Available on: Netflix.

This newsletter is also available on Medium and in audio form on Spotify.

Legal drama is a pillar of television as we know it today. Shows that fit this description are comprised of various subcategories: whodunnits designed to spark debate amongst viewers until the very end, personal drama interwoven into members of the legal system’s dealings with cases that come their way, or a rogue (but brilliant) figurehead at odds with the hegemony in which he exists. Think CSI’s Horatio Cane, Law and Order SVU’s Olivia Benson, Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison, etc. Oftentimes shows combine the aforementioned elements to form a complex and cohesive whole. I think that many voracious TV-watchers have a comfort crime show. Mine and my parents’ is A Touch of Frost, starring David Jason, which ran from 1992 to 2010.

Frost is epic. I’ve probably spent about 300 hours watching and rewatching the 42 movie-length episodes of which it is comprised. My mother and I know the contents of each episode based on title alone, but still manage to blank out on enough to forget the path taken to the concluding twist. The series itself is all grey skies, saxophone licks, and soggy sandwiches abandoned for a criminal takedown. There is little continuity between episodes barring a handful of characters and a few references to older cases, but one could pick it up in Season 1 just as easily as one could pick it up in Season 8 with little feeling of being lost. This is largely because of the 42-episodes-in-18-years situation (which amounts to roughly 2,3 episodes per annum), and is also due to the fact that each episode is around 100 minutes in length. I feel like presenting these factors at the forefront of my argument for why this show is legendary, you-have-to-watch-it, etc. is probably not the greatest thing to do (I have heard that I have a tendency to sell great things short by listing less than admirable facts as an introduction to a person or a topic). But bear with. I shall redeem myself and my favourite televised rogue.

William Edward ‘Jack’ Frost is an ADHD icon, and I shall tell you why. He is a mess - his paperwork is perpetually disorganised or lost within the void of his ‘filing system’ (i.e. a drawer stuffed with various documents, or a desk piled high with case files and tax returns) to the point where he loses a winning lotto ticket worth £1 000 000 and finds it after the window in which he could claim it. He keeps sandwiches in his desk drawer, old cigarette butts in the ashtray of his car even after ostensibly quitting (to placate the craving with an olfactory reminder), never eats his greens. He is incapable of conforming to authority (we love insurrection).

It is precisely this chaos that makes him so brilliant. Frost carries a set of keys that seems more akin to an anvil, because he possesses every possible key for every possible commonly-available lock imaginable (which comes in handy for unwarranted snooping in suspects’ homes). He is also relentless in his pursuit of justice, however seemingly antithetical that justice stands in relation to the trappings of the legal system in which he finds himself to be a loose (but contributing) canon.

A Touch of Frost is gripping, and is a much-treasured relic in terms of long-running detective shows of television eras past. Check it out if you, too, are a messy ADHD icon in need of seeing a projection of yourself stumble and succeed on the silver screen.

Rating: 8/10

Available on: BBC Britbox, ITV Hub, and Prime Video (or if you really want to commit, buy the DVD Boxset)

I went to see Free Guy (2021) in the cinema because 1) my boyfriend likes gaming, 2) Ryan Reynolds is entertaining, and 3) we felt like going to the pictures and couldn't find anything else palatable besides this. That being said, I don't think I've enjoyed a movie that much in a long time. We walked out of the theatre feeling seen and pleasantly surprised.

The premise is as such: a bank teller, living an ordinary life centred around routine and blissful ignorance, finds out that he is an NPC within a popular video game and hacks the algorithm from the inside, developing sentience and free will in his status as homegrown artificial intelligence manifest. Along the way, he falls in love with a player’s avatar, saves his world, and frees his fellow non-playable friends from the trappings of the script of Free City (the game in question).

A Google search yielded nothing regarding intentional or explicit autistic representation, but the target audience of Free Guy (namely ‘gamers’) says enough regarding how characters have been constructed as relatable iterations of the viewers’ clunkiest and most unmasked selves. The same can be said of most movies based on ‘nerdy’ interests (I’m looking at you, Ghostbusters). But Free Guy is different. Sure, the nerd-turned-hero trope is nothing revolutionary. Where this film stands out, though, is the fact that the face of this litany of traits of social awkwardness, reliance on routine, limited interests, and naivety is Ryan Reynolds - 2010’s Sexiest Man Alive Ryan Reynolds, Superhero Ryan Reynolds, Rom-Com Veteran Ryan Reynolds.

I am not outlining these testaments to Reynolds’ fame and glory to say, ‘Autistic people can be hot,’ because there are too many questionable components to that statement for it to hold any weight as a radical or liberating conviction (and what it often relays between the lines is ‘Not all of us are unable to speak or institutionalised or are unable to engage with the world in a meaningful way,’ which is more obvious in its ableist enforcement of the functionality dichotomy). What I am saying is that instead of autistic traits being wrapped up in meekness or, conversely, predatory ignorance quasi-The Big Bang Theory, we have been presented with a critically-acclaimed and world-renowned actor playing a character so obviously on the spectrum with humour and grace, and with all the complexity of Ben Affleck’s Christian Wolff in The Accountant minus the ever-present trauma narrative of actively autistic characters.

What is more, is the fact that the subject matter and referential nature of this movie targets arguably the most canonically autistic subculture out there - gamers.

Free Guy is the life of a sexy autistic action hero. It is also the story of what an autistic utopia may look like.

Pre-epiphany, Guy’s day looks something like this: he wakes up, looks out his window, bids his goldfish hello, switches on the news (which reports on the chaos that consumes his city on a daily basis), picks out a blue shirt and pair of chinos from an array of identical items, gets a coffee (with cream and two sugars), cracks an unintentional double entendre at the barista, walks to work at the bank with his security guard friend, Buddy, surrenders to robbers, and grabs beers at the beach.

The social hierarchy is determined by whether or not you wear glasses. ‘Glasses-people’ shoot up the city, surround themselves with hot girls, and pride themselves on their luscious lives of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. They are also players - i.e. real people. The NPCs are unaware of this, and Guy’s enchantment by a glasses-wearing woman leads to him stealing the glasses off of a robber’s face amidst his usual surrender. This marks a turning point in his life, because now he knows how to work the system for his benefit and the benefit of others. It just so happens that ‘working the system’ (with the single-minded goal of getting the girl of his dreams) is his savant skill. Is Guy’s balancing of obligations to the rules of the system and striving towards attaining his desires the perfect metaphor for what masking ought to be? I think yes.

Free Guy’s love language (however contentious that concept may be) is manifest by acts of service. He wants to make his community better. He wants everyone to have the freedom that seems so easy to grasp. And he does it all whilst subverting the wishes of the corporate overlords that stole his ‘soul’ (code) and its ephemera in order to build the hellscape that has become Free City.

I felt seen when I saw him stumbling to kiss a girl he loves (which, as an action, isn't available as a playable option within the workings of the game). I felt seen by his scripted awkwardness and attempts at humour. I felt seen by his simultaneous comfort in routine and hunger for the freedom that comes with newness. I felt seen by his aspiration for a self-driven and organic existence within his world.

Guy masks by unmasking. He is unequivocally himself, which leaves players and their avatars in disbelief. How can he have an NPC skin and ‘deny it’ (as he doesn't even know what an NPC is until about halfway through the film)? How can he have action and thought seamlessly independent from the rules? These questions are seemingly unanswerable, at least from a ‘player's’ standpoint. And yet his agency and awkwardness change his world for the better.

The only qualm I have is the somewhat questionable portrayal of ‘Dude’, a rip off of Guy developed by the company in order to turn a profit from Guy’s popularity. Dude is a clichéd caricature of a ‘stupid strongman’, effectively, which is a bit uncomfortable to watch if one has a shred of awareness of the pervasive mockery of intellectual disability or a seeming lack of intelligence that permeates popular culture.

I’m not going to dissect/give away every square centimetre of this film, but I highly recommend it if you're in the mood for good old-fashioned autistic gaming representation, however nefarious that may sometimes be.

Rating: 9/10

Available on: GooglePlay Movies