Winter 2024/2025 Media Log
Who needs months anyways
It’s 2021, I sit in a Berkeley kitchen, writing a monthly media log. It’s 2025. I am (metaphorically) on Mars. I am writing a monthly media log.1
I mean, I’m not on Mars as much as I am just generally disassociating, wishing I could be as seemingly detached as Dr. Manhattan.
But I mean, no, of course I don’t wish to be detached. My whole reason for being - why I love stories, and writing about stories - is my belief that the world is interconnected, is all the better for it, and that stories are one of the ways we stay connected.
So here I am, starting the fifth year of this sporadic newsletter the same way I started the first year. Turns out there’s a lot to talk about!
Wicked (2024) Is That Girl
Let’s get this out of the way: even without having known me in adolescence, if you picture in your mind the stereotypical awkward and shy White suburban girl whose mom bought them the Wicked Original Broadway Cast Recording from Barnes & Noble and felt like someone finally got her, man, you know exactly who I was in adolescence. I was, in my boyfriend’s words, a That Girl. A dork who sang in choir and wasn’t interested in mainstream music like pop or hip-hop, no sir. I was a loser, an outcast, but I was secretly smarter and more sophisticated than everyone else. As Sarah James writes in her essential essay “Wicked: Haters to the Left, Please”:
To teen-aged me, Wicked might as well been called “How to Feel Special Despite Being an Unattractive Nerd.” Like all teenagers, I thought I was socially awkward and ugly and also that I was the only person in the world to posses this combination of traits. (link here)
Like other magical wish fulfillment narratives I’d glommed onto - Matilda, Harry Potter - Wicked told me that one day I’d have my own metaphorical magical powers, and that I’d get the guy. I’d go from being Not That Girl to That Girl, for real.
James’ essay tracks her horseshoe trajectory from a Wicked lover to a Wicked hater to a Wicked defender through the lens of feminism, unpacking how our society demeans art aimed at teenage girls. I’ve gone on the exact same journey. Like James, I decided to pursue theatre seriously as a career, and felt obligated to shit on so-called non-serious theatre like Wicked2. I stopped being a Wicked hater a long time ago, but until Jon M. Chu’s film came out, I still carried myself as a reluctant Wicked defender. When my co-worker saw the stage production for the first time this fall, and then the movie, and beamed with joy about how much they loved it, I was still dismissive about my past as a Wicked fangirl. “Oh yeah, I used to like Wicked,” I’d say, completely betraying the middle schooler who had a copy of Wicked: The Grimmerie and performed “What Is This Feeling” in the eighth grade talent show.3
I was skeptical about the film for a few reasons. It was a modern Hollywood studio picture, which meant it was going to have ugly CGI out the ass, when they could have just made it animated and saved us all some heartache. Ariana Grande was playing Galinda, and while I know she began her career as a Broadway baby, I was so used to her inability to enunciate as a pop singer that I was dreading her renditions. And worst of all, it was going to be part of the trend of tentpole franchises bloating their run-time by splitting their films into multiple parts. If the entire musical could be told on stage over 2 and a half hours, why did Wicked (2024) need to be longer than that to tell half the story?
And then I saw it. Twice.
Reader, everything I was skeptical about? I was completely wrong.
Sure, we can quibble about how a digital camera just shoots differently than a film camera, giving Wicked (2024) more muted colors than the technicolor marvel that is The Wizard of Oz. But given that limitation, director Jon Chu does everything in his power to bring life to this world, from planting 9 million tulips to doing as much as possible on practical sets. Oz feels like a grand, tangible fantasy world, like Middle Earth. Ariana Grande is sensational. Messy personal life or not, I’m rooting for your Oscar, girl. And how do you NOT end a movie with “Defying Gravity”? Matter of fact - Wicked (2024) reminded me that the stage show truly speedruns a lot of its plot. Here, it gets room to breathe. In the stage show, you just take for granted that everything probably looks like what you remember Oz looking like. Here, Chu and the entire production team really build this world, this world of talking Animals, magic, and creeping fascism.
Wicked (2024) tells a better story than Wicked the musical…and in my opinion, a better story than Wicked, the original novel by Gregory Maguire. Don’t get me wrong: we have Maguire to thank for Wicked’s political heart. If Maguire hadn’t constructed this story about standing up to fascism amidst the scapegoating of oppressed people and being labeled a terrorist by the state, Chu’s film wouldn’t have half the power that it does. Indeed, there’s a subset of people who will never forgive the musical for its watering-down of Maguire’s material. The great Mads of Cinema Cauldron (who is not one of those people, by the way), recaps some of the changes to the source material in her excellent essay, “goodness knows the wicked die alone” (spoilers ahead):
A revisit of Maguire’s text reveals much left on the green room floor by Stephen Schwartz. Overt same-sex intimacy between Elphaba and Glinda is axed; Fiyero’s darker skin and death at the hands of the Oz police state are whitewashed; Nessarose’s transformation into the Wicked Witch of the East is erased outright; the euphemism of the green elixir the Wizard spikes Elphaba’s mother with as roofies is made much more innocent. (link here)
I like everything about Maguire’s novel conceptually - a queer revisionist fairy tale showing us the bleak heart beating underneath a childhood favorite - but don’t like its execution. Broadway Wicked definitely sanitizes the whole thing. Wicked (2024)’s strength is the way in which it brings back the bones of the book. The history of Animals, who are animals capable of human speech, in Oz and their subsequent persecution is one of the most important parts of Maguire’s books. On stage, it’s rendered in a couple of scenes by a man playing a bipedal goat. In the movie, you get subtle but crucial storytelling moments like the original mural of Shiz University:
Or the custom devices that non-bipedal Dr. Dillamond (Peter Dinklage) uses to get around in a world that has refused to make things accessible for him, which feels extremely intentional for a film whose production set new standards for on-set accessibility.
Something else that is technically cut out from Maguire’s book is Elphaba’s ambiguous gender. But as Mads argues, it finds its way back into Wicked (2024). Mads explores the way certain scenes are applicable to the trans experience, such as the sequence at the Ozdust Ballroom:
As [Elphaba] walks down the stairs, the crowd parts. All eyes are on her – disgusted and confused. This sequence stings for any trans person who’s been scoffed at for wearing clothing that doesn’t conform to the birth gender. There’s a specific type of spiteful amusement and disgust reserved for being clocked in a dress – even supportive folks view it as a spectacle, even if it’s one they’re positive towards. (link here)
Another reading of Wicked (2024) I’d like to bring to your attention is Dawn Monique Williams’, called “Do I have to be green to be seen?” Williams writes of her trepidation before watching Wicked (2024) due to its casting:
Anyone who has worked with me in at least the last decade or so has likely heard me rail against the sublimation of the other. This is an academic-y way of saying that I am typically not a fan of taking someone with a marginalized identity and layering another form of masking/erasure/marginalization on top of that…I was worried about what it might mean to put a Black woman under all that paint, to cast an actor with Dwarfism and then hide him by making him a CGI goat…With so much sublimation of other happening I was nervous I wouldn’t like the film. (link here)
Spoiler alert: she loved the film. But she ends the piece with a question that I think is worth pondering after I’ve spilled so much ink on the metaphor and allegory and applicability of Wicked:
So yes, Black women should get to play Elphaba. Yes, Black women should star in fantasies. And yes, Black women should get to play green characters. What I want to know though is, can you see me if I’m not green? Why can’t a Black woman express her anger, rage, hurt, truth? Why can’t someone with Dwarfism tell you if they are feeling silenced or erased? Why can’t you listen when the person using the wheelchair tells you they would rather you not push their chair uninvited? Why do humans need so much allegory (green women and goats) to face the realities of the harm we cause one another every day? (link here)
Link Roundup:
“Wicked: Haters to the Left, Please,” Sarah James writing for The Toast
“goodness knows the wicked die alone,” Madeline Blondeau for Cinema Cauldron on Substack
“Do I have to be green to be seen?", Dawn Monique Williams for Blackfuturist Shakespearean on Substack
“The Wicked Movie Made One Huge Improvement to the Stage Show,” Rebecca Alter writing for Vulture
The Long Shadow of Stephen King, AKA, An Ouroboros of Horror Content, AKA The Thin Line Between Homage and Ripoff, AKA, Let’s Talk About Goosebumps on Disney+
One of my favorite bits on the absurdist television show Search Party happens in its final season. The protagonist, Dory Sief (Alia Shawkat), after a years-long quest for meaning, has started a cult. One day, she is non-fatally stabbed by a stranger. Her ex-boyfriend, Drew (John Reynolds), tries to pick up some clues from the weapon that was left behind - a letter opener engraved with the following words: The Jesper Society. I don’t remember how, but Drew tracks this letter opener to somewhere in Maine, and the following sequence ensues:
In case you’ve never read the Stephen King book, or seen either the 1990 TV miniseries starring Tim Curry or the more recent film adaptations, this entire subplot is a reference to IT and protagonists who call themselves The Loser’s Club. I wouldn’t quite call it a parody, even though it is hilarious and is taking the piss out of the acting in the 1990 miniseries in particular4. The humor primarily comes from the real situation that Drew finds himself in - he’s looking for answers about someone who attacked his friend, the Jesper Society are entirely focused on themselves and don’t give him any straight answers, he cuts through their exposition about the eldritch horror that haunted their town because he’s in a different story. The actors cast as the Jesper Society - Lou Diamond Phillips, Illeana Douglas, Michael Ian Black, and Scott Adsit - play things perfectly straight, and convince me they could star in the inevitable second miniseries adaptation of IT, because IP is a flat circle. Which is what I’m here to talk about.
John Reynolds also has a recurring role on Netflix phenomenon Stranger Things. Stranger Things is a tv show that I’ve long had a strained relationship with. It is well-filmed, well-acted, and has never hidden the fact that it is intentionally inspired by Stephen King and other staples of 1980s supernatural horror. In their original pitch for the show (when it went by the name Montauk), creators The Duffer Brothers said:
Montauk is an eight-hour sci-fi horror epic. Set in Long Island in 1980 and inspired by the supernatural classics of that era, we explore the crossroads where the ordinary meet the extraordinary...emotional, cinematic and rooted in character, Montauk is a love letter to the golden age of Steven Spielberg and Stephen King – a marriage of human drama and supernatural fear. (link here)
My issue with Stranger Things is not that it is indebted to lots of 1980s stories that you could be watching instead. It is that it’s almost never had anything interesting or original to say about what it’s homaging. It’s a shallow, empty repeating of something that came before. It expects its audience to be invested in its story because it remembers Poltergeist, E.T., Firestarter or IT. If the kids hadn’t been so well-cast, I doubt it would have gone on for five seasons, because the story just isn’t there.5
So color me surprised when I watch Goosebumps: The Vanishing, the second season of Disney’s take on the classic 90s franchise, and walk away with a need to defend the Duffer Brothers!
Goosebumps is a pretty famous IP in its own right. R.L. Stine’s books are the stuff of Scholastic Fair legend, the original 90s TV show is fondly remembered6, there was a movie with Jack Black. This is why many people find it odd that Disney didn’t just adapt any of the 200 plus Goosebumps books outright. Instead, each season of Disney+’s Goosebumps tells an original story, with some light and loose inspiration from different Goosebumps books. The first season, which I will come back to, had each of its teen protagonists deal with a spooky situation based on an original Goosebumps book - Say Cheese and Die, The Haunted Mask, etc. Eventually they realize that everything is connected, and it all comes back to our favorite Living Dummy himself, Slappy.
The second season didn’t even try that hard to connect things to the books. Rather, it draws inspiration from Little Shop of Horrors, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, andThe Thing. And much like Stranger Things, Goosebumps: The Vanishing has nothing to add.
Oh, and there’s people dressed in hazmat suits trying to enter an underground (upside down?) world, and the aliens look a lot like Demogorgons. And I mean, a lot. I know it would help if I had a picture to show you, but they don’t make screencap fansites like they used to. Just trust me that the Duffers have grounds to sue.
This was a huge disappointment, because I actually loved the first season of Disney+’s Goosebumps. Besides pulling elements from the books themselves, the plot of Season 1 sort of blends IT and A Nightmare on Elm Street. The adults have the same melodramatic call to arms as The Jesper Society/The Loser’s Club once they realize He/It is back. The teenagers have to deal with the sins of their parents, which involved someone burning to death - someone who’s back for revenge.
Unlike Stranger Things, which would just conjure up these tropes and have done with it, Goosebumps actually has some shit to say. Harold Biddle, the ghost of the kid who burned to death in his house, is both a straight and subverted version of a Goth 90s Bullied Kid. We are initially primed to view him as just a misunderstood loner, who turned evil in death, but as we watch him in flashbacks, we see the times where he was the bully. Instead of each of the teens being a rough analogue to classic Stephen King kid character, we get some unique and affecting characters. Take Isabella, the neglected overachiever who suppresses her rage in real life and takes it all out online as an anonymous troll. Or Lucas, the dumb dirtbag prankster who has to come to terms with the fact that his daredevil father committed suicide. Anyways, go watch Season One of Disney+’s Goosebumps.
To give Stranger Things its due before I wrap this up, I think Season 4 is when it finally had something to say. While once again it is lifting from one of the greats - Vecna’s ability to kill you in your mind is very Freddy Krueger7 - it is using that framework to say something about the Satanic Panic, a very dark part of the 1980s, and very related to Dungeons & Dragons, which has been part of the show from the start. And where Freddy’s victims are just canon fodder, we get to know Vecna’s targets and why they have the insecurities that he’s able to leverage. Which is a very Stephen King approach to character, something I wish they’d utilized more in earlier seasons.
In Memoriam: David Lynch
In 2010, I watched David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive for my film class. I didn’t know what I was getting into, but I certainly wasn’t expecting to be terrified by a nightmare creature in a jump scare8 in this story about Hollywood. In the end, I found this dreamy but bleak movie utterly compelling, even if I didn’t understand what it was about. I’ve been drawn to neo-noirs about Los Angeles and the film industry ever since.
Sacrilegious confession time: Mulholland Drive is the only David Lynch film I’ve seen, outside of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. As readers of this newsletter know, I only got into Twin Peaks four years ago. So I was a little surprised that David Lynch’s recent passing hit me as hard as it did. Having had some time to reflect on it, I think I can pinpoint a few reasons.
Lynch’s films explore dark subjects, but based on everything we know about the man, he didn’t run his film sets like a dark dungeon in some pathetic method bid to make his actors experience real suffering. In his book Catching the Big Fish, Lynch had this to say:
I hear stories about directors who scream at actors, or they trick them somehow to get a performance. And there are some people who try to run the whole business on fear. But I think this is such a joke—it's pathetic and stupid at the same time.
When people are in fear, they don't want to go to work. So many people today have that feeling. Then the fear starts turning into hate, and they begin to hate going to work. Then the hate can turn into anger and people can become angry at their boss and their work.
If I ran my set with fear, I would get 1 percent, not 100 percent, of what I get. And there would be no fun in going down the road together. And it should be fun. In work and in life, we're all supposed to get along. We're supposed to have so much fun, like puppy dogs with our tails wagging. It's supposed to be great living; it's supposed to be fantastic.
He goes on:
Right here people might bring up Vincent van Gogh as an example of a painter who did great work in spite of—or because of—his suffering. I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn’t so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don’t think it was pain that made him so great—I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.
One of my favorite films from last year, I Saw the TV Glow, is heavily influenced not only by Lynch’s aesthetics but his thematic interests. As Lex McMenamin writes for Them:
Lynch’s oeuvre is obsessed with the fragility of our shared reality, and the sudden and shattering violence that can wrest us together or apart. Twin Peaks in particular is fixated on the horror of the home and the nuclear family…That surrealist representation of the American suburban home – and the particulars of how that container can be hostile, if not entirely destructive, to queer or trans selfhood – is written all over Schoenbrun’s 2024 feat I Saw The TV Glow. (link here)
Not only has Lynch had a significant influence on the current generation of queer filmmakers, like Schoenbrun and Vera Drew, his work has resonated with queer audiences more generally. Lynch has a tendency to center women and treat outsiders with empathy. There’s the subtextual queerness of some of his most iconic characters, like Laura Palmer, and the explicit queerness in Mulholland Drive. And perhaps most memorably, especially in our current climate of transphobia, there was the Twin Peaks character Denise, a trans woman (played somewhat problematically by cis man David Duchovny), a character who Lynch’s self-insert Gordon Cole defends in this meme-worthy way:
Lastly, his death feels extra poignant and tragic, coming as it does on the heels of the Los Angeles wildfires and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Lynch had emphysema, which he naturally chalks up to a lifetime of smoking tobacco. In an interview he did with Sight and Sound last year, he describes his new normal:
I can’t go out. And I can only walk a short distance before I’m out of oxygen…And now, because of Covid, it would be very bad for me to get sick, even with a cold. (link here)
David Lynch wasn’t a perfect guy; by all accounts, he could be difficult as a parent or a paramour. But at the end of the day, he seemed fundamentally interested in celebrating the world in all its wonder and weirdness, whether through his weather reports or his art. Rest in peace, king.
Link Roundup:
“David Lynch on music and innovation: ‘I like to call it experimentation’”, Sam Wigley writing for Sight and Sound
“David Lynch Keeps His Head”, David Foster Wallace writing for Premiere
“‘Fix Your Hearts or Die’: David Lynch’s Work Has Always Been Deeply, Powerfully Queer”, Lex McMenamin writing for Them
“David Lynch Built Queer Worlds For Me To Thrive In”, Tracey Anne Duncan writing for Huffington Post
“In the Closet with Laura Palmer”, Alexander O’Connor writing for Gayly Dreadful
“Why the late David Lynch was a director for society’s outcasts”, Amelia Hansford writing for PinkNews
“‘He Was the First to Show Me Another World’: LGBTQ+ Artists React to David Lynch’s Death”, Samantha Allen writing for Them
Fast Film Takes
The Batman (2022) is a too-long, perfectly okay Batman movie. We as a culture obviously need to take a break from superhero movies, and while on the one hand, I respect movies like this and Captain America: The Winter Soldier9 for trying to be Serial Killer Noir, but with superheroes, and Paranoid Political Thriller, but with superheroes, on the other hand…I’d rather watch Zodiac and Three Days of the Condor. But what I did like the most about The Batman was how Riverdale-ian it was. Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) referring to someone as a Drophead with utmost seriousness has the exact same energy as everyone on Riverdale talking about the hard street drug Jingle Jangle. It took itself seriously but still was in a heightened world.
Red One (2024) is certainly not a movie that anyone needs to see, and is depressing when considered from the angle of The State of Cinema These Days. That being said…I can’t help myself, I love a dirtbag, degenerate gambler with a heart of gold character. This is 50% of the appeal of Hardball for me. I’m working on an entire essay about Allen Francis Doyle from Angel. And Chris Evans - who should ALWAYS play scumbags, in my opinion - in Red One joins my pale, raven-haired gambler-with-a-heart-of-gold trinity. And the world-building, slight as it is, reminds me of my beloved The Librarians, which is always a good thing.
You Can Go Home Again: Fanfiction, Angel, and Me
In my second edition of Bildungsroman Blitz ever, I wrote about grappling with my love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer in light of new and resurfaced allegations against Joss Whedon. As I wrote back then, “Joss Whedon, the show’s creator and executive producer, was an abusive and vindictive boss whose behavior on sets from Buffy all the way up to Justice League in 2017 have done irreparable harm to untold numbers of cast and crew members.”
I focused a lot on the experiences of Charisma Carpenter, one of the original cast members of Buffy who went on to have a larger role in the spin-off series Angel. In my essay about Shannen Doherty from October, I recounted how I actually watched Angel before Buffy, and I think that those first episodes of Angel laid claim to most of the part of my brain that holds my core emotional memories before Buffy even had the chance to get there. Buffy is by far the more consistent and rewarding show - its highs are Peak Television and its lows are still good fun - but something about Angel - specifically, the first nine episodes of Angel - permanently altered my brain chemistry.
That something is Allen Francis Doyle.
Like I said above, I’m working on a whole essay about Doyle that you can all look forward to. One of the best parts of my resurgent hyperfixation is all the great fanfiction I’ve read over the past few months. Gonna save my specific recommendations for the upcoming essay, but engaging with the Buffy and Angel fandom in this way was another reminder that these characters and these worlds are more than just the one guy who created it. Like I said in my previous media log, I can’t wash my hands of this universe because it’s a collective achievement of so many people.
Even if it occasionally makes me post things like this:
Sarah Marshall voice: It was misogyny all along!
This doesn’t really fit anywhere else, but I wanted to share this anecdote from before I saw the film. I was talking to my boyfriend about how much I loved Norbert Leo Butz as Fiyero on the Original Broadway Cast Recording, and how I preferred singing Fiyero’s songs. I started singing “Dancing Through Life” (“The trouble with schools is…”), and realized in horror that I couldn’t remember the words. Maybe liking Wicked really was a thing of my past!
I particularly love the beat where Illeana Douglas and Lou Diamond Phillips have their over the top charged moment when she reveals she has a family, implying a past romance between the two.
I don’t have time to get into it here, but I once crafted an angry Twitter thread comparing Stranger Things to Riverdale and the art of homage, if you’re interested.
Not by ME - I am haunted by whatever version of Night of the Living Dummy I saw to this day.
Shout out to Robert Englund’s guest spot.
Although famously, whenever somebody calls The Winter Soldier the best MCU movie, I regret to inform them that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is actually the best MCU movie.