No Vagina in Sight: The Queer Case of Junior

Femininity, far from being nature, is the quality of the orgasmic force when it can be converted into merchandise, into an object of economic exchange, into work. –Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie (2013) When Junior debuted in 1994, it was not the first time Arnold Schwarzenegger had played opposite Danny DeVito in a film about motherhood, reproduction, […]

Barely Legal: An Interview with Eliza Hittman

Set in director Eliza Hittman’s native Brooklyn, It Felt Like Love (2013) evokes a place far from the sidewalks of Bedford Avenue or the Greenpoint of Lena Dunham’s Girls, and closer to the working-class borough of Dog Day Afternoon (1975) or Saturday Night Fever (1977). In it, we follow the listless fourteen-year-old Lila (newcomer Gina […]

This Is the Rhythm of My Life: Failure in Claire Denis’ Beau Travail

“To fail in everything, it is true, will always remain possible.” –Derrida, Specters of Marx In Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999), the eminence of doom is almost palpable; from the foregrounded terrain of war, to the protagonist Galoup’s (Denis Lavant) exclusion from the taut brotherhood of legionnaires and his reflections on mortality, it is a […]

Radical Intimacies: Harmony Korine’s Gummo and Spring Breakers

Harmony Korine continually recasts, perverts, and transforms a narrative that is held dear within the American imaginary—the coming-of-age story. From his work as the writer on Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), to his first film Gummo (1997), and now, with the bikini-clad wonder of Spring Breakers (2012), Korine offers explicit portraits of adolescent bodies behaving badly. […]