Editor’s Notebook

I often leave the multiplex elated and feeling weird about having fun while the world outside collapses. A quartet of offbeat mainstream films from the first half of this year that induced this feeling—Mickey 17 (Bong Joon-ho), Sinners (Ryan Coogler), Final Destination: Bloodlines (Zac Lipovsky and Adam Stein), and The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)—are dedicated to the idea that time is running out. This is one of cinema’s oldest themes. Yet all four films deny that the answers lie in mere survival. Winning might be off the table for now, but retaining one’s humanity in the crisis is not.For this reason, these films, for me, are not limited to being guilty pleasures (although that surely is part of the fun they intend). The cinema of escapism here offers the paradoxical impression that there’s no way out, or, alternatively, the possibility of a different future, albeit one accessible through the eye of the needle as the clock ticks. This mission is both impossible (to invoke another 2025 blockbuster) and necessary. Cinematic joy drives these very different movies in very interesting directions that leave me feeling less alone about living amid increasingly bleak historical contradictions and collective complicity in destructive systems. It’s good to be reminded that so many others feel not just that the time is out of joint but that laughter, art, and love remain possible and potent.Bloodlines has the same basic premise as the second iteration of a certain presidency: if you saw the nightmare coming, and if you thought you had temporarily escaped your fate, think again. The film’s negativity and surprisingly rigorous rejection of American mythologies of individualism and freedom is droll and also allows for strange Hitchcockian detours into sadistic visual practical jokes that double as EHS PSAs for home and garden. Mickey 17, meanwhile, literalizes the idea of a fate worse than death as working for a tech-entrepreneur politician (Mark Ruffalo) in outer space. Its goofy preemptive strikes on the very buffoons it presciently predicted would rise to power are doubly hilarious because of the film’s delayed release date, which allowed its audiences to laugh uncomfortably in a funhouse mirror at the figures busy wrecking the real world. The Phoenician Scheme, in sharp contrast, uncomfortably flirts with sympathy for its oligarch (Benicio del Toro), pressing the buttons of its pearl-clutching liberal audience in classic Lubitsch style. (In essence, Anderson has made a gleefully unacceptable Ninotchka for our time.) But ultimately Anderson, like Lubitsch, locates evil in the pursuit of cruel power, and, like Bong, identifies class warfare by the rich as a force that destroys everything it touches.Of these four films, Sinners poses its larger questions most compellingly, and without denying any of the nightmares of history that Coogler limns. Set in the 1930s, it depicts twin gangsters (both played by Michael B. Jordan) contending with singing vampires in an isolated slaughterhouse-turned-juke joint. The film’s overall drift, especially as encoded in its epilogue, implies what art might be able to do—and, importantly, what art cannot do—in a struggle that never ends. It’s clear that Coogler’s film is rooted fundamentally in a vision of the blues as a complicated joyful art woven from sorrow, one that rejects cultural assimilation while engaging in constant adaptation and remixing. Its blues is oriented, as John Akomfrah argues about this musical tradition in his documentary The Last Angel of History (1996), simultaneously toward the past, present, and future. In one of Sinners’s tour-de-force musical scenes, featuring bluesman Sammie Moore (Miles Caton), the ghosts visually conjured by his notes and singing connect, in an Akomfrah-like fashion, the African rhythms of the past with the Afrofuturist rock music to come. Sinners also fulfills another long-standing dream of cinema critics, regarding the ways in which immensely popular movies might yet prove capable of containing and refracting deep social contradictions at the highest levels of commercial and popular success and cinematic artfulness. Yet it also confirms the contemporary mainstream film industry’s (over)reliance on the comedy, sci-fi, and horror genres to reach grown-up theatrical audiences with feature films in the era of streaming.I also found myself arrested most recently by the humane sense of humor threaded through the proto-cinematic collage-work of filmmaker Isabel Coixet. In her exhibition at PhotoEspaña this summer in Madrid, Aprendizaje en la disobediencia (Studies in disobedience), humor and joy form prelude to such “disobedient,” fragmented, and sideways modes of seeing. One set of collages uses lighthearted English texts to deliver its commentary, from “Finally, everyone had taken a picture of everything” (2024), to “Moving the fuck on” (My kind of airline, 2024). A harsher picture features a startled face above the blunt information “You were an accident” (2024). In another wry but illuminating collage series, Coixet pastes Spanish texts over children’s faces, including the provocation “Podrían existir otras potencías” (Other powers could exist, 2023). If so, I would like to think that these might well include laughter in the face of oppressive forms of power.FQ doesn’t offer themed issues, but in opening a new volume, this issue comes close—by serendipity, and not by design. The problems of pleasure are among the more long-standing questions in film criticism—ever since Adorno persuaded Benjamin to drop Micky Maus from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” if not before. Investigating this topic now dovetails the concerns of this journal with a certain structure of feeling, something in the air. That T-shirt slogan from the 1980s expressing solidarity between losers kept springing to mind as I assembled this issue: “Are we having fun yet?” A dossier on cinema and pleasure, collectively edited and written by Diana W. Anselmo, Caetlin Benson-Allott, Maggie Hennefeld, Lorenzo Marmo, Darshana Sreedhar Mini, and Girish Shambu, makes for urgent reading as it investigates this topic from a variety of critical perspectives, from Hennefeld’s explorations of subversive fun for women in early cinema to Mini’s reflections on the complexities of Indian soft-core porn.Adrian Schober’s feature on the film criticism of Pauline Kael focuses on Kael’s idea of “blissing out” at the movies, in general, and the arc of her engagement with and eventual disappointment with Spielberg’s movies, in particular. Revisiting Kael’s battles with Andrew Sarris in the pages of this journal, starting with her opening salvo, 1963’s classic “Circles and Squares” (FQ 16:3), Schober argues that Kael’s essays (for example, against 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars, but in favor of E.T.) represent a Romantic critical stance grounded in ideas about the sublime, wonder, and pleasure in cinema as a popular artform. With this article, FQ revisits one of its most controversial and powerful writers, giving the journal the opportunity to offer pages from our past by way of illustration.Luise Mörke, in a retrospective on Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Les Saignantes (celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year and set in 2025 Cameroon), discusses the subversive fascinations involved with deliberately “dilapidated” images made by a filmmaker who subverts commercial norms while commenting on collapsed and corrupted futures. Bekolo’s film asks a question in its first set of intertitles that has only grown more pertinent now that the world has reached the year in which it is set: “HOW CAN YOU MAKE A SCIENCE FICTION FILM IN A COUNTRY THAT HAS NO FUTURE?” In 2025, this query resonates globally.Writing about Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, Anthony Michael D’Agostino considers the filmmaker’s collaboration with Nicole Kidman on a mainstream fiction feature film about BDSM that puts middlebrow pieties through the wringer in the name of an expanded humanism. For D’Agostino, the film unfolds the meaning and function of its protagonist’s pleasure as a potential mode of resistance to internalized bourgeois (neo)liberal subjectivity and the shallow rhetoric of corporate doublespeak about progress and equality. Laurie Ouellette’s column, “The Deobjectification of Pamela Anderson,” charts the star’s multiple reinventions over the decades, combining Anderson’s interests in lifestyle television and radical politics with her recent reemergence as a documentary subject (in Pamela, A Love Story) and a powerful leading actor (in The Last Showgirl). Ouellette revisits Anderson’s past and present, opening new lines of critical appreciation for this increasingly complex and multifaceted public figure. Whose pleasures, and what pleasures, are two questions that emerge from conversations between D’Agostino’s and Ouellette’s columns and the other essays in this issue.Equally fascinating is a sustained interview with Errol Morris by Matthew Sorrento exploring Morris’s recent work for Netflix, including the explorations of conspiracy theories in Wormwood and CHAOS: The Manson Murders, as well as Morris’s forthcoming film on Ukraine. Their discussion of the obsessions of the venerable documentarian with truth and posttruth seem more relevant than ever. Also regarding Ukraine, a screening event report by Anna Tropnikova on Iryna Tsilyk’s Rock. Paper. Grenade turns into a hybrid profile as Tropnikova follows up by interviewing the filmmaker about processing individual and collective trauma without losing the ability to laugh at things that are “kind of funny, but not that funny.” Not a bad motto for this age.With this issue, FQ welcomes two new members of its Editorial Board, Ramzi Fawaz and Caetlin Benson-Allott, and a new contributing editor, Darshana Sreedhar Mini. Professor Fawaz, of University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Professor Benson-Allott, of Georgetown University, both previously served as FQ contributing editors and columnists. Fawaz’s column, “Imagination Unbound,” has ranged widely, but has recently covered a series of three films recently released for children—Inside Out 2, The Wild Robot, and Wicked—that have resonated with powerful ideas for all ages. Benson-Allott’s column, “On Platforms,” while equally wide in scope, has often focused on horror, including recent films by Jane Schoenbrun (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow) and Coralie Fargeat (The Substance). The research of Professor Mini (also of University of Wisconsin-Madison) on Indian cinema has now appeared in two consecutive issues, including the dossier contribution mentioned above in this issue and a coauthored article, with Professor Monika Mehta, on the films of Leena Manimekalai. FQ also expresses gratitude to its copy editor, Carl Walesa. -JMT