My little monster co-worker used the T-slur today and I told him not to because its insensitive and he started arguing that its not (he's cis) and then later he called me the n word??????? And I told him to never say that again and that I was going to get him fired and he said "why do you take things so seriously, i was just joking!" and I told him that literally never matters and he was like "fine i just wont talk to you" and i was like good..... i cant believe this! i can't beleve how offended people get when you call them out for being racist/-ist in general instead of stopping to think like hey maybe my comments have ramifications im so mad.

LOOK AT THIS

none of the actors in tortilla soup are mexican american lol mexicans are one of the most overexposed latin cultures and the least represented by actual mexican actors…….. mostly 8/10 of times “mexicans” will be played by argentines, puerto ricans, or cubans bcs their physical (spanish or spanish appearing) features are valued more. (in the case of pr or cubans its a double edged, fetishizing sword unless theyre actually white latinas - who are usually the ones casted- so no shade tea hunties). the fact that its thought people from an area as huge as latin america can all play each other is stupid doo doo fucked up too. like, surprise, indigenous american people have varied traits just like everybody else and that shows up in their mixture w white people. not to mention what the legacies of africans and slavery have on each individual country in terms of concentration and features. and i truly believe predominant mexican indigenous features (after of course predominant african features) are valued less/less euro-appealing than a lot of the rest of latin american mixtures that have produced more euro-agreeable features (often leading to their "exotic" fetishization/~foreign features on lighter skin so im not saying they have it better either).

Ideal Double Features - a work in progress

Mulholland Drive
Sunset Blvd

Demons 1
Demons 2

Tenebre
Opera

Side Effects
Symptoms

The Iron Rose
Carnival of Souls

Fascination
Thirst for Love

The Blob
Night of the Comet

Night of the Hunted
Red Desert

Dress Rehearsal
Opening Night

Vampyres
The Living Dead Girl

In My Skin
Trouble Every Day

The Damned
The Night Porter

All The Colors of The Dark
A Lizard in a Woman's Skin

Blow Out
Berberian Sound Studio

The Stepford Wives
The Blood-Splattered Bride

Blue Velvet
Fire Walk With Me

The Misfits
The Last Picture Show

On Seeing and Not Seeing Myself in Frances Ha and Being Brown In My 20s

I turned 20 last March. While 19 is a culmination of your teens and the last hurrah of irresponsibility, 20 comes in fast and hard and not in any good way... It lacks the privileges of 21 and it forgoes the laxness of the previous year. Suddenly you’re faced with the most cliche of dilemmas that nobody has prepared you for - the quarter life crisis. For while most of us graduated high school around 18 and had 19 to (relatively) mature in a new environment, in the eyes of the world you’re still a child. But, much like dick sizes, the public’s perception of age is lacking in middle ground. To elaborate on this sophomoric analogy, while dicks are either seen as small or large, with age you’re either young, or you’re old, and 20 - is old. You’re now expected to know what to do with your life even if a month before it was granted you wouldn’t know what you were doing the next week. In short, you feel like you have to get your shit together or you’re screwed, overnight. And some might argue that the 20s themselves are the middle ground between adolescence and adulthood, but frankly, when your family now sees you as a Woman or Man and your college major is taken to be a real statement of future plans, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s when you’re laughing over something flippant that would’ve been just funny at 19 but you’re immediately hyperconscious of the implications of at 20 and you hope nobody sees the flash of worry in your eyes. And with all these big decisions comes big responsibilities but most importantly - taking charge of your own life, and that brings us to Frances.

Frances Ha is the story of a woman who, as Laurence Olivier once reductively said about Hamlet, and I’m replicating in redutiveness now, can not make up her mind. But more than that it’s a story about being indecisive and in your 20’s and the tragicomedy of watching your friends move up in life while you’re still, well, floundering. And what it captures about this time so perfectly is the sincere wish to see them move up combined with the unstated self pity that comes from not taking the initiative to move yourself up in the same way. As we all struggle to balance out our good times from our responsible times in the rocky transition from 19 to 20 and 21 and 22 and so on, we have to learn to calculate exactly how relaxed we can allow ourselves to be when it comes to our own situation and how supportive of our friends we can be at the same time without falling into a general inertia where other people’s triumphs begin to exacerbate our stasis, which almost always lead to bitterness. And while bitterness along with angst is one of the defining feature of the new 20s, it is really never a good look, especially not in the long run. Frances’ triumph in the end is that she /does/ take initiative for her life, instead of letting her life move on around her, and she owns up to her responsibilities and her reality in a way where she can remain productive in her industry of choice, even if not in her original role of choice, and still be happy. What Frances does, and what we all have to do at some point, is negotiate her dreams with her reality and come out in a way that is still in line with her passions. It’s not giving up on an ideal, its moulding that ideal into a new and feasible shape. However, all that said, there’s more at play inFrances Ha politically where old New York, and specifically Brooklyn, the new gentrification capital, looms over our middle class white, heterosexual, and conventionally attractive female protagonist.

For starters, almost everyone in the entire film is white. This is undeniable and unignorable; for a film set in one of the most diverse centers in the world, the cast is resoundingly vanilla. From Frances’ best friend who can apparently afford TriBeCa (and her affluent boyfriend-cum-husband and publishing career) to her housemates who consider hiring a maid with no apparent stable income and $1k+ rent per person, the world Frances inhabits in New York is one of entitlement and white affluence even when Frances herself is decidedly middle class. Tellingly, it is only when Frances goes home to Sacramento and finds herself a ready made role to slip into and relative comfort (the end of which is her mother asking her “How much longer?”), that we see the first people of color in the film at a small cafe dinner engaging with Frances intimately as though they were high school friends. Frances in New York is continually contrasted with her upper class surroundings as an ingenue who approaches things with innocence, even while her well-off but also more cynical best friend calls out the “self-aware” image of her “artist” housemates’ flat (to paraphrase, “only rich people can afford to be artists in New York”, a phrase which holds more weight when considering Frances’ artistic ambitions and continual thwarting of it by her own self-sabotage and lack of fall-back options). While Gerwig (Frances) makes pains to show this contrast, there is still an air of ignorance and willful blindness surrounding class issues and especially race in both the film and modern young adult culture (whatever that may mean). While being middle class may make Frances feel poor in New York, the film only but scrapes the surface of what it’s like to actually be poor in New York, or predisposed to poverty and less opportunities in New York. As a friend once put it,

"I suppose my quibble is that everyone knows this is a temporary situation for those characters and they’ll be living happily in their thirties in maybe not their chosen career but something adjacent and equally satisfying." (x)

While this is a sort of poverty, it is only a relative and conditional one. It’s hard to see so much of yourself in a film, but know that your options for yourself, if you are a person of color, queer, disabled, plus-sized, etc. are much more limited and going to be 10x harder to obtain. But, true to the spirit of the film, we would be wrong to let any potential limits lead to self defeat and owe it to ourselves to expand these narratives, and explore the problems that relate to us, at a point in our lives when telling our stories and figuring ourselves out is crucial. Going into any film, these are the processes we have to work through. We take what we relate to and throw out the rest, we are forced to pick and choose our way through a privileged narrative to find the bits of truth throughout and while we’re used to it, someday there will be a Frances Ha who doesn’t have all the opportunities or connections that this one does, but still finds their happiness at the end regardless, and that’s what we can all hope for and look forward to.