january 19th/20th, 2026

 truly freezing out there today, but i made the perilous trip to rogers park for "annabelle's delight" (afternoon caffeine with friends on a weekday). loren + i watched rohmer's 'claire's knee', a true stinker in a body of work that has been mostly hits.

i first had sex with a 40 year old man when i was 16 years old. having an opportunity to be around older gay people was probably the preferable outcome compared to the weird, reclusive shape my life was taking at the time (although maybe i wish i met the guy in like a sharing your feelings group instead of a motel). the feelings of a young abused person towards those that abuse them is a subject that i think deserves to be written about/explored artistically, which is a tough needle to thread. rohmer fails (with gusto!) to give his young girls in this film the humanity necessary to let such a story unfold, which just fucking sucks. laura + claire, our girls in question, exist literally in our narrative as vessels for jerome's semi-gamified advances. loren mentioned that their lines (notably laura, the younger girl, delivering a mountaintop monologue about how she loves older bearded muscular men) read like they're written by a guy writing pedo self-insert fic (my words, paraphrased) which really summed up what i took away from the film. if a woman who was abused as a 16 year old by a 40 year old cant identify with the character in your film who is 16 and about to be abused by a 40 year old then you probably fumbled.


i spent the night contrasting this to araki's 'mysterious skin', which manages a position that is simultaneously more graphic/violent and also much more loving to its survivors. it's an interesting sort of reversal of how i approach these two directors that i love, since araki is so frequently the bombastic, overwrought, a guy who has fun with violence and rohmer taking his time around every corner - yet, the results (in these cases) bear out the opposite.

i really struggled reading letterboxd reviews (my bad) on claire's knee; i have no qualms with a film tackling horrendous subjects but it feels like at a certain point one must be comfortable with saying a director is doing harm/straight up bad work. i think i "got" claire's knee, and what was there to get was just not well formed. you gotta watch the bad ones too i guess. stoked for an aviators wife rewatch so i can remember why i like this guy.

finishing with a photo from Ryan McGinley's early works after loren + i had a really neat discussion last night about his body of work. it's crazy how much worse he got.


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