In Polyester, John Waters skewers the melodrama’s achy-breaky conventions by ramping them up to 11.
PositionContributing Editor
JoinedJanuary 16, 2019
Articles10
Spencer Williams is from Chula Vista, California. She is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection TRANZ (Four Way Books, 2024) and the chapbook Alien Pink (The Atlas Review, 2017). She received her MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Newark and is currently a PhD student in poetics at University at Buffalo.
The wig is the central motif of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, an expression of hyper-femininity that also functions as a mask in how it draws the eyes up and away from her face, the cacophony of glitter brushed above the eye as well as the palpable loneliness swirling inside of it.
At its core, Spencer is a film about belonging—or more aptly, about one’s failure to belong.
In my personal canon of films used to scope out how far a new friend is willing to indulge my rotted taste, Adore sits comfortably in the top five.
To view Body of Evidence through the lens of Camp is to acknowledge the film’s aesthetic merits despite its emotional ineptitude.
How do you begin to tackle the subject which has overthrown any semblance of normalcy in your life? How do you begin to write into that monster which has grown tall enough to lock you in its shadow indefinitely?
While Lynn Shelton’s Touchy Feely is interested in its characters quirky dynamics and arrested developments, the film is moreso about the destabilizing force of contact.
Lynn Shelton’s camera in Humpday is a scalpel, opening the flesh of male-on-male anxiety with precision and nuance.
Though I wouldn’t come out as a trans woman for another four years, Laurence Anyways felt like a map to the puzzle that was my body, a dysphoric labyrinth of ill-fitting limbs and inarticulate desires.
As much as The Miseducation of Cameron Post is about finding salvation within one’s self, it is also about finding hope and protection in the arms of a chosen family.
