Post-post
Against the prefix’s most popular misnomer
My two favorite movies last year were brutally-funny depictions of women living in fictionalized versions of real hell. On opposite ends of hellscape America, HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT trails a homeless teenager in New York and TANGERINE two sex worker friends working the Highland/Sunset corner of Hollywood. Both star first-time actors playing characters based on their own lives and an ensemble cast full of their nonactor friends. Both were directed by white men smart enough to see where the best stories were, rewarded for their curiosity with the best movie they had ever made.
(And both were curved by the Academy this year, an institution that definitely prefers white people in imaginary paradise.)
HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT follows Harley, a homeless street kid in New York City, through a few days or weeks of being alive. Harley is played by Arielle Holmes, a former homeless street kid in New York City whom one of the Safdie brother-directors scouted during a random encounter in a subway. This serendipity led to him paying her by the page to write about her life, and eventually to star in a movie based on her writing.
Here she stars, alongside several homeless friends, in a curated continuum of her own recent past — getting drunk in parks, slashing her wrists outside a library, going to a psych hospital, getting released and immediately shooting up, spanging for change, shoplifting & reselling 5-hour-energy shots, fucking her abusive boyfriend on a street corner, making out with her dealer, spontaneously joyriding on the back of her dealer’s dealer’s motorcycle, and shuffling a backpack between homeless shelter to $15/per night Junkie Airbnb to public bus to Dunkin Donuts, all soundtracked by grinding doom synth.
An effusive Richard Brody wrote that it “seemingly expands the realm of possible experiences, offering moments and situations that create emotions one might hitherto have thought impossible to feel, actions that would have seemed impossible to undertake.” (Impossible, anyway, for a New Yorker critic.)
Arielle Holmes gave a lot of interviews surrounding the release of the film and I’ve read or watched all of them. She dropped out of high school when she was in tenth grade. Her mother was an alcoholic who died before she met the Safdie brothers. Her father a European tourist who donated his DNA while on vacation, and whom she’s “seen a few times”. Her love interest, Ilya, played by Young Hollywood-anointed Caleb Landry, was written around her real love interest, Ilya, an addict who hung out on set during production and died of an overdose shortly after the first screening. She currently lives in Hollywood with Caleb, the actor who played her deceased boyfriend.
It’s a pretty singular origin story, but TANGERINE’s is just as strange. Writer/director Sean Baker lived a few blocks from the corner of Highland/Sunset and thought the seedy street corner would be a good place to set a story, so naturally he went wandering around the area with his cinematographer looking for “people to collaborate with.” After lurking the street for three weeks he stumbled on future star Mya Taylor outside the LGBT center. In a Jack In The Box, she introduced him to Kitana Rodriguez, the film’s other star, who came up with the plot for the script. Neither had ever acted in a film before.
The movie they made together spins through a single day in the lives of a spurned woman and her best friend. They both happen to be very poor trans sex workers, on a day that happens to be Christmas Eve. In scenes haggling with mean clients, arguing with cops, kidnapping a sidepiece, smoking speed, singing in bars, and throwing down in Donut Time, the two of them marry a brutal miasma of circumstantial despair with enough blinding charisma bright to power Candlelight Lane. After I finished watching for the first time, my friends and I sat for a full minute in total silence; in other words it’s the best Christmas concentus since EYES WIDE SHUT.
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Mya Taylor, who just won an Independent Spirit award for her performance, ran away from home at age 18. She went to live with a relative who “put me to work in the streets.” It was an unlivable situation so she decided to move to LA. She did, and became homeless. She had just started transitioning, with the help of the Hollywood LGBT center, when she met Sean. In a feature for The Guardian, she said, “All I wanted was to live a normal life. And I just did not get the chance. Until I got into this movie.” Which was, by the way, shot on an iPhone 5.
The film writer Steven Shaviro said, during an interview about his use of the term postcinema: “A medium doesn’t necessarily change formally, but it gets repurposed.”
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This century’s culture writing has imposed a lot of abuses on us and one of them is the prefix post. postpostmodern. postinternet. postcapitalism.
If this decade has a unifying zeitgeist, it’s an enormous amount of enormous social problems, most of them so overwhelming in scope — police chief accused of choking teen/seas are rising at fastest rate in last 28 centuries/the scariest part of Kesha’s story is that it isn’t at all unique/63% of Americans don’t have enough savings to cover a $500 emergency, the headlines change but not the motifs— that nothing but a critical mass of organized action can make the slightest difference.
I think there’s only one real exception to this helplessness-rule, a problem that might actually be a symptom, and it has to do with language. With the way our realities are mutating at the pace of app updates, so quickly and strangely that we don’t have language capable of keeping up with our actual experiences. The only way to even come close is to constantly invent new ways of communicating, and attempting this might be one of the only real differences a person without much institutional power can make.
Sometimes they do. New expressions are shoveled into the cultural vernacular from its marginalized edges and then chewed up by a branded content video in your insta feed at about the same rate you can finish a mediocre Netflix Original. In her instant classic piece for The Fader, Doreen St. Felix wrote about the inventor of ‘on fleek’: a sixteen year old black girl from South Chicago who “gave the world a word” but never saw a cent from the corporations that inevitably ate it alive.
The fleek case study is so zeitgeist-sad: have any teenagers invented a word yet for being trapped in the specific period of time when the tech revolution has made obvious another world is coming while this one is still paying $9 an hour and trying to backdoor into our iPhones? In the words of the hyper-percipient Jia Tolentino, “Contemporary life means being hyper-aware and worse off than ever.” We’re not post-anything yet. We’re the last people paying the sharpest possible price for whatever comes next.
So if we’re still doomed, for the moment, to prefixing and portmanteau-ing words into oblivion, more accurate than post — (“after”) would be peri — surrounding.
Peri is context being perma-available in another layer of reality, a cord (bow or noose) of information wrapped around every piece of art. Know thy self, know thy enemy, and know thy meme: in peri-everything the medium isn’t necessarily the message but context is synonymous with communication. Peri assumes pre-existing knowledge. Peri knows everything is curated-fake anyway and just vaults over the fiction/non-fiction fence.
And in film’s own language, pericinema is articulating worlds of experience that used to be mostly separate from and invisible to its lexicon. HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT and TANGERINE both do this but its agitprops are more than indie movies: Kylie Jenner’s snapchat films are pericinematic. Last century’s cinema (and a lot else) worshiped the ideology of the closed systems of genre and auteur theory; in this one genre’s dead and auteur’s over and genius is just another buzzword synonym for that ultimate buzzword, neoliberal. This wave of peri- is multi rather than singular, but it’s also specific rather than “universal”. It’s collaboration and blurred relations, all the old things plus the new combinations moving around them, a mess of influences too intertwined to isolate.
