On Tragedy, Fate, And Inevitability.

- God, I can't tell if we're connecting or if I'm creating a bad memory for you in real time, but I can't help it. - No, we're connecting, Dad. It's okay. It's okay.

MAY DECEMBER (2023) dir. Todd Haynes

TOM HOLLAND as PETER PARKER in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

i have often imagined what snow would be thinking during the forcefield scene in catching fire where katniss finally convinces him of her love for peeta. thinking about how snow eventually uses peeta as a weapon against katniss, i always thought that snow looked at the scene and was already thinking of strategies to use katniss's love against her. 

but, the more i think about it, that doesn't make sense. at the time, snow did not know anything about plans to rescue the victors. so, why would there be any need to use katniss's love as a weapon? there wouldn't be. as far as he was concerned, he had full control of katniss's fate and her death was a matter of when, not if.

so, i think that snow, wherever he was, was having one of his classic coryo moral crises. because the task that he gave katniss– to prove that she was actually in love with the person that she used for survival– was supposed to be impossible. of course, it would be impossible. right? because lucy gray never loved him and only used him, right? of course, coryo… 

so, i think that seeing that katniss was actually in love with peeta freaked snow out more than anything and sent him into full crisis mode as he works to find another way to justify his victimhood.

but this crisis would not fully be resolved until he finally had the boy who somehow miraculously won the heart of a survivor trapped in his control. and now that snow had him, he would do anything in his power to prove that katniss, when it came down to it, would betray peeta for her own survival. and so, he turned the boy she loves into a mutt set on killing her. 

and i like to think snow's last glimpse before the mob of citizens rushed him at the end of mockingjay was of peeta, a boy who was programmed to kill his love, running to prevent katniss from dying. and snow finally understood that, after everything, katniss could never really kill peeta. because they truly loved each other.

and i like to think that his last thought was of lucy gray and sejenus, finally coming to the irrefutable, horrifying (to him) conclusion that relationships based on survival weren't destined to fall apart. that they could be real, interwoven with pure love. that he was not the victim of nature, but rather the gamemaker of his own hell.

and then i start cackling.

MAY I BURN. MAY YOU SEE IT; DEVOTION THAT SWALLOWS YOU WHOLE

George Bataille // @inbredlamb // Richard Siken Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out // Olga Koroleva with grandfather // unknown // Richard Siken "Planet of Love," Crush // Otto Künzli Ring for two people / Brooch for two people // Ada Limón "The Good Fight," Bright Dead Things // Phoebe Bridgers Scott Street

starring emma stone ✰ poor things (2023) dir. by yorgos lanthimos

rust cohle is The character that i’ve seen called a sociopath (in the shallow, “this is a flawed person who does things i don’t understand” prestige tv fan way) who obviously, like, cares the most. he forms his entire life in response to people. he’s in louisiana because of his daughter. he leaves louisiana because his relationship with marty and maggie is ruined. he spends his time away on fishing boats, marty’s hobby. he needs to save every child he can (or force himself to bear witness if he can’t) because he couldn’t do anything about his daughters death. he carves little visages of men out of empty beer cans while he’s talking. he loves humanity so much it eats at him. don’t know how people can get any other idea in their head, watching that show

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights.

The Card Counter, (Paul Schrader, 2021)

Hannibal, Dolce: Season 3 episode 6

Richard Siken, Crush

I forgive the world because it has you .

it makes sense to me that maggie is the one capable of saying something cutting to rust, if only by being the only woman in his life who isn't dead. the whole crux of the conflict, in terms of the state of the soul of true detective, is rust and marty's denial that all men's weakness, sadism, beliefs, mistakes disproportionately destroys the lives of women and children, and the men who do it get to just keep truckin, sometimes with guilt heaped on. they just get away with it over and over and it kills women and girls. I think of rust's, "she sounds sad, marty, like a person on their last legs" about dora after visiting the bunny ranch. how dora was predated on by her father ("why wouldn't a father bathe his child?"), ended up with charlie lang, and was then marked as a target because charlie showed her naked pictures to his cellmate who he hated.

marty's whole hang up is just a classic cop one. he's the good guy and he hunts the bad guys. rust doesn't think he's the good guy, he's just another bad guy hunting bad guys, but that's still denial. when he passes a tide of hallow rationalizations to maggie, they suddenly sound like exactly what they are. normally rust has been monologuing to male audiences -- papania, marty -- who balk and seem defensive or quietly suspicious, but when maggie is the audience you realize rust actually sounds exactly like marty giving his stupid "you gotta decompress" schtick. she's not hung up on any of his actual ideas, doesn't take a single one seriously, because it turns out they're a baby blanket. in rust's phrasing, they're just the encouragement of illusion so he can get through his reality. that scene coming so soon after rust saying, "when I think of my daughter, what she was spared." he just can't do it yet. despite all his efforts, he just can't look at anything head on, not until the end, when he's in that syrupy blackness experiencing his loved ones. he only edges up to the truth, keeping himself mostly at arms length. he gets right on top of it in that same monologue, "she spared me the sin of being a father." the death of women in girls in this season are redemptive; the childress' seem to use them as some kind of baptism. when they're not around to destroy, the men who destroy them are spared of being the men who destroy them.

marty is always under the impression his intentions are good. "was that a down payment?" and marty chews him out for "joking" about his moment of decency, but it was absolutely a down payment. rust clocked it correctly, most of the reason marty was mad was because he was attracted to beth, and he started blustering some rhetoric and then gives beth a twenty, hissing out a white hot, "do something else," like an accusation. but marty goes through all the motions of a hero, so to beth he looks like one. he slaps his daughter and calls her a slut for doing the kinds of things he does with women. he beats on the men she was with so he can feel like a Father and a Hero then vomits in front of his car because it was all just clumsy violence and cowardice. rust knows he isn't doing any good, but he still wants some of that redemption; he tells maggie his little screed about man-woman drama because he wants her to accept it. he knows the women and girls pay more to live in the same world, they don't get away with just existing while men get away with it all, but knowing that doesn't bring him any closer to looking at it head on. he's still asking maggie for something: accept it, get on the same page, spare me, and maggie says no, at least right then. eventually she does, then ultimately she doesn't.

anyway, I think it's interesting how different it feels to hear rust say what he says in that scene. you suddenly realize exactly how his words fall on the ears of reality. "at the end of the day you duck behind rationalizations just like the rest of them."

BEE LB, from "friction polish"

okay so true detective season 1 has been my hyperfixation for years now and it has left a giant void in my life like… nothing will ever be this good ever again. so in case any of you feel the same way I made a list of media that helped me with getting into a mindset that at least somewhat resembles the true detective s1 experience:

- Memories Of Murder (2003)

- Sicario (2015)

- Arrival (2016)

- The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti

- Better Never To Have Been by David Benatar

- Saint Maud (2019)

- The Florida Project (2017)

- both Galveston and Between Here and the Yellow Sea by Nic Pizzolatto

- books on the show itself: Time Is A Flat Circle by Melissa Milazzo and True Detective And Philosophy (Blackwell)

- anything by Lovecraft tbh

- also anything by Zapffe :)

- The Devil All The Time (2020)

- Negative Space by Yeager

feel free to add onto my list please I am begging you