This post is part of a series, Girlblogging. Read the introduction here. Maybe you have seen this image: five outlines of a head (turned sideways in profile), each holding (in its mind’s eye) one of four images of apples stamped (from left to right) in decreasing order of detail, except for the last head, which is empty. This is an image of images, an image about how imagination works.  At its most basic level, imagination is image visualization. When you think of an apple, what do you see?  In The Love Witch (2016), witchcraft looks a lot like imagination—energy concentrated […]

This post is part of a series, Girlblogging. Read the introduction here. In the music video for The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” (1997), lead singer Richard Ashcroft walks down a blue-gray London street, bumping into passersby, bowling over the girls and pissing off the guys. When you’re famous and beautiful on film, these are things you can get away with. Ashcroft represents a thoroughly contemporary creature—the 20th-century star, who, on a small screen  today, looks more or less like the 21st; the detached, ambivalent, self-involved face of the modern urban world; the flâneur with somewhere to go, or something to […]

As a girl—I mean, when I was younger—I would watch films about beautiful girls in the hope that I could somehow learn beauty, the fairytale story; that, by proximity, beauty would rub off on me; that I could contour myself in its image, or put it on. I was irrevocably convinced that beauty would save my life.  Beautiful girls live life on easy mode. People give you whatever you want when you’re a beautiful girl. This is sort of true, but nothing in life is free. In return, what they demand is you.  Jennifer’s Body is a film about best […]

This post is part of a series, Girlblogging. Read the introduction here. Also, in New York, American Psycho screens tonight at the Paris Theater with director Mary Harron present in a tribute to producer Ed Pressman. The orchestral sting slices through the opening credits; perfect drops of blood rain down like vinyl balloons or the forms in a photorealistic painting: taut and shiny, artificially self-contained. When they splatter, the punch line lands. It was a joke all along—not blood, not really, just a false appearance—an emulsion drizzled across bone china; the screen expands to reveal a chef’s knife descending upon […]

Girlblogging is the online expression of a certain kind of girlhood: a condition not strictly defined by youth or gender, but—per the French theory collective Tiqqun in Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl—the quality of being “the model citizen as redefined by consumer society.” The lace and ribbons are just bells and whistles. At its core, girlhood is the aesthetic of the unequal power-relation.  The Young-Girl who constructs reactions and critiques, the girlblogger, manages to be both the consummate consumer and the consummate consumer good. Though she is wounded by them, she derives a certain pleasure from the […]