Elizabeth Cantwell, Author at Bright Wall/Dark Room

It’s not just the idea that the station = a box that’s compelling me to draw these maybe obtuse, maybe overly-academic, maybe seemingly random connections. John Carpenter has built these ideas of superposition and coexisting states into the very thematic structure of Assault on Precinct 13.

The Courage To Teach

Elizabeth Cantwell·

Issue 142: Teachers

One could fairly criticize Reggie Dunlop (Paul Newman)—“player-coach” of the Charlestown Chiefs in George Roy Hill's chaotically raunchy Slap Shot—for a wide variety of character flaws and professional failings, but he is true to the letter of St. Francis de Sales’ wisdom: Be who you are and be that well.

One Must Imagine Talking Heads Happy

Elizabeth Cantwell·

Issue 141: Jonathan Demme

The Talking Heads are strange truth-tellers, joyfully angry people, persistently interested in the power of art. And in Stop Making Sense, collaborating with Jonathan Demme elevates their music into something truly transcendent.

The Chest You Cave In May Be Your Own: How Do You Read the Ending of The Thing?

Elizabeth Cantwell·

Issue 137: Winter

It’s human nature to want answers. It’s also human nature for those desired answers to tell us something about ourselves.

I Can’t Run This Club Forever

Elizabeth Cantwell·

Issue 133: Heartbreakers

It’s not Benny’s fraught relationship with Kathy that generates the central heartache in The Bikeriders—it’s the way Johnny looks at Benny and wants so badly to see a kind of son, a reflection of himself, a person who could love him for who he always wanted to be.

A Game Everybody’s Already Playing

Elizabeth Cantwell·

Issue 129: 1999

Much like The Matrix, released only a few weeks prior in the spring of 1999, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ plays with the question of whether we really inhabit the reality we think we inhabit. But whereas The Matrix posits systemic and structural forces keeping subjects in the dark, eXistenZ presents a more realistic version of our potential subjection to a simulated reality.

From Goddess to Human Being: Tracy Lord’s Journey in The Philadelphia Story

Elizabeth Cantwell·

Issue 119: Katharine Hepburn

In The Philadelphia Story, Katharine Hepburn pulls off an impressive trick: creating a character we struggle to identify with—who distances herself from others purposefully—but whom we can’t help rooting for anyway.

Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick | Art by Tom Ralston

Maybe So, Sir, but Not Today: The Fragile Humanity of Top Gun: Maverick

Elizabeth Cantwell·

Issue 115: Best of 2022

Top Gun: Maverick is not, at its heart, a story about what one man can achieve. Instead, it's an exploration of whether Man even matters.

Nothing Like Wrestling With a Moral Dilemma, Is There?

Elizabeth Cantwell·

Issue 110: 1987

No one really changes. But, Broadcast News asks, isn’t that kind of beautiful?

There’s No Need To Make Life Tougher Than It Has To Be

Elizabeth Cantwell·

Issue 107: Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll

It’s a tricky thing to blend highly stylized artifice with real emotion, and perhaps David Lynch's Wild at Heart doesn’t always get it right. The attempt, though, is pure rock ‘n roll.

We Have To Live Out Our Precise Experimentation: Batman Returns and the Abject

Elizabeth Cantwell·

Issue 102: FUBAR

Other, more recent superhero films may claim to be grim—and certainly achieve a gritty, surface-level style—but in Batman Returns, we have something that seems to deliver an underbelly of actual darkness: upsettingly discolored bodily fluids, thrillingly unhealthy psychosexual games, raw fish, toxic sewage, and a semi-catatonic ‘hero’ who barely speaks.