Porcelain promises

Allison Bunce's Ladies (2024) so beautifully photosets the crystalline haze of a sexual awakening that the thought experiment assigned by its writer-director-editor seems more extraneous than essential to its sensorily soaked seventeen-minute weekend, except for the queerness of keeping its possibilities fluid. The tagline indicates a choice, but the film itself offers something more liminal. Whatever its objectivity, what it tells the heroine is real.

It's more than irony that this blurred epiphany occurs in the none more hetero setting of a bachelorette weekend, whose all-girl rituals of cheese plates and orange wine on the patio and drunkenly endless karaoke in a rustically open-plan rental somewhere down the central coast of California are so relentlessly guy-oriented, the Bechdel–Wallace test would have booked it back up 101 after Viagra entered the chat. The goofiest, freakiest manifestation of the insistence on men are the selfie masks of the groom's face with which the bride's friends are supposed to pose as she shows off her veil in the lavender overcast of the driftwood-littered beach, but it's no less telling that as the conversation circles chronically around partners past and present, it's dudes all the way down. Even jokily, their twentysomething, swipe-right femininity admits nothing of women who love women, which leaves almost literally unspeakable the current between ginger-tousled, disenchanted Ruby (Jenna Lampe) and her lankier, longtime BFF Leila (Greer Cohen), the outsiders of this little party otherwise composed of blonde-bobbed Chloe (Ally Davis) and her flanking mini-posse of Grace (Erica Mae McNeal) and Lex (Tiara Cosme Ruiz), always ready to reassure their wannabe queen bee that she's not a bad person for marrying a landlord. "That's his passion!" They are not lovers, these friends who drove down together in Ruby's SUV. Leila has a boyfriend of three months whose lingering kiss at the door occasioned an impatiently eye-rolling horn-blare from Ruby, herself currently single after the latest in a glum history of heterosexual strike-outs: "No, seriously, like every man subconsciously stops being attracted to me as soon as I tell him that I don't want to have kids." And yet the potential thrums through their interactions, from the informality of unpacking a suitcase onto an already occupied bed to the nighttime routine of brushing their teeth side by side, one skimming her phone in bed as the other emerges from the shower and unselfconsciously drops her towel for a sleep shirt, climbing in beside her with such casual intimacy that it looks from one angle like the innocence of no chance of attraction, from another like the ease of a couple even longer established than the incoming wedding's three years. "He's just threatened by you," Leila calms the acknowledgement of antipathy between her boyfriend and her best friend. It gets a knowing little ripple of reaction from the rest of the group, but even as she explains for their tell-all curiosity, she's smiling over at her friend at the other end of the sofa, an unsarcastic united front, "Probably because he knows I love her more than him."

Given that the viewer is encouraged to stake out a position on the sex scene, it does make the most sense to me as a dream, albeit the kind that reads like a direct memo from a subconscious that has given up waiting for dawn to break over Marblehead. It's gorgeous, oblique, a showcase for the 16 mm photography of Ryan Bradford at its most delicately saturated, the leaf-flicker of sun through the wooden blinds, the rumpling of a hand under a tie-dyed shirt, a shallow-breasted kiss, a bunching of sheets, all dreamily desynched and yet precisely tactile as a fingernail crossing a navel ring: "Tell me if you want me to move my hand." Ruby's lashes lie as closed against her cheeks as her head on the pillow throughout. No wonder she looks woozy the next morning, drinking a glass of water straight from the tap as if trying to cool down from skin-buzzing incubus sex, the edge-of-waking fantasy of being done exactly as she dreamt without having to ask. "Spread your legs, then." Scrolling through their sunset selfie session, she zooms and lingers on the two of them, awkwardly voguing back to back for the camera. She stares wordlessly at Leila across the breakfast table, ἀλλ’ ἄκαν μὲν γλῶσσα ἔαγε λέπτον δ’ αὔτικα χρῶι πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν to the life. Chloe is rhapsodizing about her Hallmark romance, but Ruby is speaking to her newly sensitized desires: "I just really hate that narrative, though. Pretending that you don't want something in the hopes that you'll get the thing that you're pretending that you don't want? Like, it just doesn't make any sense." It is just not credible to me that Leila who made such a point of honesty in relationships would pretend that nothing had happened when she checks in on her spaced-out friend with quizzical concern, snuggles right back into that same bed for an affectionate half-argument about her landlord potential. "I'm sure there are dishwasher catalogues still being produced somewhere in the world." Still, as if something of the dream had seeped out Schrödinger's between them, we remember that it was Leila who winkled her way into an embrace of the normally standoffish Ruby, who had her arms wrapped around her friend as she delivered what sure sounded like a queerplatonic proposal: "Look, if we both end up single because we both don't want kids, at least we'll have each other. We can have our own wedding." The last shots of the film find them almost in abstract, eyes meeting in the rear view mirror, elbows resting on the center console as the telephone poles and the blue-scaled Pacific flick by. It promises nothing and feels like a possibility. Perhaps it was not only Ruby's dream.

I can't know for certain, of course, and it seems to matter to the filmmaker that I should not know, but even if all that has changed is Ruby's own awareness, it's worth devoting this immersive hangout of a short film to. The meditative score by Karsten Osterby sounds at once chill and expectant, at times almost drowning the dialogue as if zoning the audience out into Ruby. The visible grain and occasional flaw in the film keep it haptically grounded, a memento of Polaroids instead of digitally-filtered socials. For every philosophizing moment like "Do you ever have those dreams where you wake up and you go about your day and get ready and everything feels normal, but then you wake up and you're still in bed, so you're like, 'Oh, was I sleeping or was that real?'" there's the ouchily familiar beat where Ruby and Leila realize simultaneously that neither of them knows the name of Chloe's fiancé, just the fact that he's a landlord. Whatever, it's an exquisite counterweight to heteronormativity, a leaf-light of queerness at the most marital-industrial of times. I found it on Vimeo and it's on YouTube, too. This catalogue brought to you by my single backers at Patreon.

I wish to express my strenuous distaste for this week starting off with the curtain rod falling onto my head as I stepped into the shower with such force that spatch heard the noise of stainless steel onto skull from the bedroom. It hurt appallingly. It still doesn't feel so hot. I called after-hours care and was duly presented with a checklist of symptoms of concussion and brain bleed to watch out for, an activity not exactly compatible with attempting to plunge myself into unconsciousness for the few short hours before I need to be functional for already scheduled calls and appointments. I would like to know who I need to sacrifice to get a break. I always liked haruspicy. I know it's your own liver that counts.

Current events currenting as they are, I appreciated reading about Gertrude Berg and hearing the news from Spaceballs: The Sweatshirt. spatch came home with T-shirt swag for the latest Wes Anderson film and it is almost parodically minimalist with its screen-print of Air Korda.

I enjoyed Agatha Christie's Ordeal by Innocence (1958) so much that I am mildly horrified to discover that of the one film and three television adaptations to date, none appears to be simultaneously faithful to the novel and good. It doesn't push its interrogation of the amateur detective as far as Sayers or Tey, but it does care about what the question of justice looks like when the first fruits of a well-intended posthumous exoneration are neither closure not catharsis but instant rupture down all the fault lines of resentment, distrust, disappointment, and malice that the open-and-shut obviousness of the original investigation glossed over. Was justice even the spur to begin with, or just a belated alibi's anxious sense of guilt? The plot wraps up like its dramatis personae all had somewhere else to be, but until then it hangs out much longer in its misgivings than many of Christie's puzzles. Some of its ideas about adoption and heredity have worn much less well than its premise, but I liked the scientist explaining that his work in geophysics is too technical to afford him to be absent-minded.

In all the studio-diorama aesthetic of the video for Nation of Language's "Inept Apollo" (2025), the shot of the Tektronix 2205 made it for me. I grew up with a 2465.

Under the circumstances, I had different weird dreams than I would have expected: writing a poem, watching some incredibly threadbare film noir with no waking equivalent, hearing a performance from a musical theater star ditto. I am beginning to think the pop culture of my dreams actually is the hell of a good video store next door, leavened in the last few nights by dreams of re-reading real-life authors currently in storage like P.C. Hodgell or Joan D. Vinge. I remain physically fried, news at nowhen. At least the rain seems to have kept off the neighborly leafblowing which perforated so much of yesterday. The news continues to feel like stupidly lethal cosplay, which I remember from the last round of this administration, which doesn't make me hate it less.

Apparently our particulate pollution levels are officially unhealthy for sensitive groups, which explains not only the light brass tint to the afternoon but the rather massive asthma attack I had instead of sleeping for the entire morning. The day before, I couldn't enjoy the rain because it came with a headache so skull-crunching, I actually sort of passed out from it at a terrible hour to the rest of my schedule. I was under non-joking doctor's orders to rest up this weekend and it has not vaguely happened. I keep being light-headed, ear-ringing, unfocusable. My brain feels like a flickering commodity and I don't like worrying about false flags.

As it turns out, what goes on with my hand is that it's going to have arthritis, but with any luck on the same glacial timeline as the kind that runs in my family, and in the meantime I have been referred back to OT. Maybe there will be more paraffin.

My parents as an unnecessary gift for taking care of the plants while they were out of town—mostly watering a lot of things in pots and digging the black swallow-wort out of the irises—gave me Eddie Muller's Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir (2001/2025), which not only fits the theme of this year's Noir City: Boston, but contains such useful gems as:

One of the most common, if wrong-headed, criticisms of film noir is that it relegates women to simplistic archetypes, making them Pollyannas or femmes fatales, drippy good girls or sinister sexpots. People who believe this nonsense have never seen a noir starring Ella Raines.

Ella Raines is indeed all that and a drum solo on top, but she is not a unique occurrence and I can only hope that people who have not been paying attention to Karen Burroughs Hannsberry or Imogen Sara Smith will listen to the Czar of Noir when he writes about its complicated women, because I am never going to have the platform to get this fact through people's heads and I am never going to let up on it, either.

Anyway, I learned a new vocabulary word.