This month in The Drama Club: A story about Evan, my favorite non-English album of the year, the return of television's most unhinged world, and a conversation from a hotel bed I'm not entirely sure I should be telling you about. Let's go →
Each month, I recommend two movies: this month you’ll have to go to the theater to see both. At the end of this section, you’ll find a list of some releases coming this month.
I want to tell you a story about someone named Evan. Evan and I met in 2019 and we immediately found ourselves inside of a lot of poetry. Song lyrics, texts that flowed through lyrical patterns, passages of books we would take photos of for each other, and, most importantly, literal poetry. A few months after we met, I shared a poem by Federico García Lorca with him. I didn’t think much of it, honestly. It was just something beautiful that I loved and I thought he would too. He called me around ten minutes after I sent it and told me he had cried as he read the words. From that point on, Lorca sat underneath our entire relationship. When Evan passed away last year, I scoured his quickly disappearing apartment for his copy of Lorca’s poems. I never found it. At the time, I didn't know historians had spent decades discoursing around an unfinished play by Lorca. Last week, I thought of Evan as I sobbed through the credits of La Bola Negra, a new film inspired by that very work. Following the lives of three gay men in radically different time periods and realities, La Bola Negra lives somewhere in the cross-section of Atonement and Call Me By Your Name. When the familiar Grindr notification abruptly announces our arrival in 2017, the shock of it took my breath away. The film understands that we spend so much of our lives searching for love, only for it to arrive suddenly and knock us out. Even when we know love is about to turn a character's world upside down, we are somehow unprepared for the weight of it. It is incredibly moving, beautifully shot, and, like most epic films about gay love, deeply devastating. It’s a film that will live at the center of the conversation come awards season. I wish I could discuss it with Evan.
SPOILERS FOR ‘YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING’ AHEAD.
The first question I ask anyone who has seen You Can See Everything is whether or not they think Elizabeth Holmes genuinely did not understand “Who’s on First?”. The Abbott and Costello comedy routine arrives in the first 90 minutes of the film and creates one of its most confounding moments. Holmes, an undeniably intelligent person, initially claims she understands the routine but is then unable to name the player who is on first. Filmmaker and storytelling enigma Nathan Fielder sits next to her on the couch in complete shock. He questions her repeatedly, trying to determine whether she's being honest or simply lying to protect the narrative that her brain works differently from everyone else's. Much like the entirety of You Can See Everything, the sequence is a staggering exercise in trying to understand something that might be fundamentally unknowable. An hour later, Fielder himself seems unsure of what he's experienced with Holmes. He finds himself face-to-face with a fiercely invested Amanda Seyfried, who suggests that Fielder might be just another man who has fallen for Holmes' con. Whenever someone answers my question about whether Holmes understood the comedy routine, I immediately ask them another: Would you understand “Who’s on First?” if you'd never seen or heard it before? Most people sit with the question for a moment before telling me they think they would. I'm fascinated by this confidence. I am, of course, aware that I've set a trap with my question. They've already heard the joke, so how could they possibly know how they’d respond? They can't exactly erase it from their brains and give it another go. And yet, here they are, certain they would have figured it out. I then question the intelligence of my friends because a convicted fraudster may or may not have understood a comedy routine from 1938. This is what Nathan Fielder has done to me. I consider the possibility that maybe Holmes really is different from the rest of us, her brain consistently operating in ways ours never could. Then, I wonder if I too have been conned.
More November Movies To Be Ready For:
Club Kid (November 6)
Godzilla Minus Zero (November 6)
Wild Horse Nine (November 6)
Paper Tiger (November 13)
Elsinore (November 20)
Each month, I recommend two pieces of music: something new and something I have recently returned to. At the end of this section, you’ll find a list of some releases coming this month.
At the end of September, Belgian pop star Angèle released “Love Triangle,” a collaboration with indie darling Caroline Polachek and French electronic legend SebastiAn. Within thirty seconds, I was convinced someone had broken into my brain and made a song specifically for me. Nocturnal, impossibly slick French house production, bilingual lyrics delivered with the sexual confidence of someone who has never once been rejected, and enough after-hours glamour to make the whole thing feel vaguely illegal all came together to immediately earn the song a spot on my tentative best songs of the year list. Three weeks later, Angèle released her third album, Instinct, and I fear we have a situation on our hands. This is one of the best pop records of the year. Full stop. And yet, somehow, it feels like no one Stateside is talking about it? Blasphemy. Songs like “Dis-le” and “F4ck 4ever” are lush, immaculately produced European pop confections, with hooks so immediate and production so crisp they practically demand a sound system that costs more than your rent. And then there's the small matter of the guest list. SebastiAn. Justice. Soulwax. Angèle has assembled some of the most influential electronic producers of the last two decades and put them to work making an outrageously sexy pop record. It's an embarrassment of riches and nobody involved appears remotely interested in exercising restraint. But the real thrill of Instinct is that Angèle doesn't need the marquee names to deliver something extraordinary. “Une seule vie,” a standout that smashes the sleazy, distorted sensibilities of bloghouse into a glittering pop song, pairs its ferocious production with lyrics about time slipping away, losing yourself, and becoming someone you never wanted to be. All of Instinct operates in that delicious contradiction. This is music that makes you want to take your clothes off while occasionally confronting you with the terrifying realities of being alive. It's aggressive, sultry, playful, and so effortlessly cool that you don't need to speak a word of French to understand what Angèle is saying. More importantly, existential dread has absolutely no business sounding this hot.
Last month, I DJ'd in Los Angeles and opened my set with an audio clip of Joni Mitchell from 1988 where she said, "I made it kind of my life's work to figure out what love was. To analyze my capacity for it, hopefully, to increase my capacity for it... always with the optimism that if I was properly prepared and was capable of loving, that love would come to me." I found the interview among a litany of clips of musicians talking about where their creative and personal lives intersect, something I've been exploring at the beginning of my DJ sets lately. Even though I have always liked Joni’s work, I wasn't expecting it to be her words that would affect me enough to warrant a DJ set opening. Twelve years prior to that interview, she released Hejira. This month, the album turns 50. There is something almost impossible about listening to a record older than you are and finding yourself so completely inside of it. To me, Hejira is a collection of songs that seem to exist in the wind whipping through an open car window. Joni mostly wrote it while she traveled across America, falling through lovers, strangers, and stretches of highway where she seemed to reconsider everything she thought she knew about herself. Its title comes from the Arabic hijrah, meaning migration or departure, though Joni understood it as something closer to running away honorably. I love that because, really, sometimes you have to leave something behind without needing to decide whether or not it was wrong. What I keep returning to is how little certainty there is on Hejira. Joni wants to be alone until she doesn't. Joni wants to be loved until love threatens the freedom she's worked so hard to have. Joni looks at other people's lives with envy, then back at her own with equal parts gratitude and disbelief. I wonder whether she ever found it exhausting to be so aware of herself, whether she ever wanted to stop thinking about love long enough to just experience it. I sit in my living room asking these questions of Joni as though I haven't spent years asking them of myself. It’s true, I've pulled apart relationships, studied my mistakes, tried to understand the people I've loved and the versions of myself that existed alongside them. I've wondered whether there is something else I need to learn before the kind of love I want can finally find me. And, God, it is exhausting to be so determined to understand your own heart that sometimes you forget to let it do its job. At this point, I just hope I remember to look out the window from time to time and watch the sun set over the mountains.
More November Albums To Be Ready For:
daine – In Endless Awe & Agony (November 6)
Shygirl – Swallow! (November 6)
Trentemøller – Trentemøller (November 13)
bby – 2 (November 20)
Björk – Björk Orkestral with the Hamrahlíð Choir (November 27)
Each month, I recommend two pieces of television, which means less and less these days but for our purposes, television means anything you can stream that isn’t structured as a film. At the end of this section, you’ll find a list of some releases coming this month.
There’s something so delectably feral about Yellowjackets. From the beginning, the show has been nearly desperately unhinged. The lack of fear in the writers' room has allowed the show to take some enormous swings (some of which did, unfortunately, not land as well as others), but it doesn't take away from the thrill of watching. And now, with the fourth and final season arriving this month, it has one last chance to completely lose its mind. I don't think there's another show on television quite so comfortable with being this deeply, magnificently fucked up. Cannibalism, teenage girlhood, religious hysteria, buried trauma, and Christina Ricci behaving like an absolute psychopath somehow coexist inside a show that can be genuinely terrifying one moment and laugh-out-loud funny the next. There are times when the mythology gets away from itself, when the writers seem almost as lost in the wilderness as the girls they're writing about, but I'd take that over another impeccably plotted television show that never once surprises me. What has always fascinated me about Yellowjackets is its refusal to let its characters escape the people they once were. The wilderness isn't just a place where terrible things happened. It's something that’s infected these characters to the point where, decades later, it is still making demands of them. As the show’s finale approaches, I am not entirely certain I need everything to be tied up with a pretty bow. That’s never really been Yellowjackets’ thing. Give me the answers, sure, but after all we've been through together, I think we've earned one last spectacular act of depravity.
Sometimes a really great premise can just sell me on a thing. For example, 12 12 12, a new show coming to Apple TV+ this month. It’s a heist show and, frankly, it does not appear to really be breaking any sort of genre boundaries. However, its title comes from its structure, which is what has me interested. Each episode moves between three timelines: the 12 months of planning leading up to the heist, the 12 hours during the heist itself, and the 12 days following the heist. See, that’s very me. Yes, let's manipulate time. Let's be forced to piece things together. Let's feel got when we realize a detail from twenty minutes ago suddenly becomes the most important thing in the room. I love being made to feel like I've figured something out, only to discover that I've actually been an idiot for the last six episodes. Will 12 12 12 be any good? Who knows. But the structure alone has convinced me to give a show about people stealing money approximately six hours of my life. I respect that.
More November TV To Be Ready For:
The Gilded Age - HBO (November 1)
All’s Fair - Hulu (November 4)
The Greatest - Amazon Prime (November 4)
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power - Amazon Prime (November 11)
The Good Daughter - Peacock (November 12)
Each month, I dig into one cultural topic that feels unavoidable. Sometimes it’s a moment, sometimes it’s a movement, and sometimes it’s just a question I can’t stop thinking about.
“When I was a kid, I prayed to be beautiful. I knew life would be easier. When you’re beautiful, you can get away with anything. People want you. They see you and they feel something inside of them that allows you to get away with being dumb or being poor or whatever other thing you have anxiety about.”
He’s running his hand through my chest hair while his eyes stay on the hotel room ceiling. I am watching his face, navigating his thoughts through his blinks and breaths. He’s quiet for a second, a first for the night. Since he walked up to my table at the hotel bar downstairs, words have been falling out of his mouth. Smart words. Honest words. Words that make me want to just shut up and listen.
“You don’t think you’re good looking?”
He doesn’t look away from the ceiling as my question lands. He shakes his head. He inhales sharply. He smiles. Without moving his head, he looks at me through the corner of his eyes.
“No.”
It’s definitive. There’s nothing I can say to change his mind. Someone told him that once or he saw something on a cover of Men’s Health or maybe he just spent one too many nights walking home alone from a gay bar. No matter how he got to that conclusion, it’s been concluded. Still, I can’t help myself.
“I disagree.”
He says nothing. He runs his hand across my chest and slides his legs under the sheets. I watch him. I wait longer than I usually would. He opens his mouth to say something but changes course. I tilt my head, a lackluster attempt to elicit a response. Then, almost as though he were a child admitting something to an adult, he whispers.
“Thank you.”
He turns toward me, making direct eye contact and letting his hand drift to my abdomen.
“You’re really interesting.”
“You think so?”
“You’re very put together. I feel like you have this thing you’re doing where you can be super professional and play that role perfectly. You were doing it downstairs. You had your two phones and you were on a call, right? You were performing for everyone. Not in a bad way. You were showing people you are a professional. Then, when you saw me, you switched. Suddenly you were a hot guy. You adjusted your sitting position, pulled at your jacket collar, smirked and said, what, something like ‘hey.’ You tried to melt me with that. And it worked! I was impressed. And now, here, you’re watching me and I see you trying to make sense of me. You switched again. This version of you is probably the most intense? You just took your clothes off like it was nothing. You asked me what I wanted and you gave it to me. Your eyes are somehow both intimidating and full of childhood wonder, so it works. It’s… it’s intriguing.”
I exhale. His precision is overwhelming.
“And I am not saying anything mean about you. I hope you get that.”
“I do.”
“Smart gay men who are attractive do this. You—”
“You find me attractive?”
“I do.”
“Do you think I’m beautiful?”
He knows I am not fishing for a compliment. I am in data-gathering mode, trying to understand more about his thing about beauty and gay men. But he doesn’t answer my question. That stings a bit more than I anticipated.
“I think you like being witnessed.”
Bullseye.
He lifts his eyebrows, alerting me it’s my turn to speak. I pull myself up, resting on my elbow. His hand slips and lands on my underwear. Neither of us acknowledges it, but he keeps it there.
“I have spent a lot of time falling in love with people who don’t want to be witnessed, which I think is really, really weird. They want to hide and yet they pick me? It’s happened like three times in a row. And I’m not, like, trying to rip people open by seeing them but—”
“You like ripping people open?”
I give him a look as though to say, ‘wouldn’t you like to know?’ He returns the look with a, ‘I thought we were going to find out.’
“I think maybe part of why I am here is because I can see people.”
He thinks about this. I continue.
“A lot of gay men would fuck Hitler if he had a six pack.”
He nods immediately.
“And I can appreciate a great body, sure, I am happy people take creatine or whatever, but I really just want to know people. For me, it’s rewarding to know people. I talk to strangers—”
“Least surprising thing you’ve said all night.”
I playfully slap his face and he laughs.
“I’m sure you easily strike up conversation with people no matter where you are.”
“Correct.”
“And you don’t want anything from them.”
“Correct x2.”
“And what about me?”
This surprises me.
“What about you?”
“What do you want from me?”
I get a little closer to him. He pushes his glasses up. I smile at him. He gets nervous.
“What are you doing?!”
“I just want to look at you and see you!”
He shuts his eyes. I smile wider. He’s really cute when he disarms himself. He has nice arms and a symmetrical face. His hair is long, which he dislikes, but I find charming. He looks like he’s been backpacking when, really, he’s just been spending the last two months getting ready to move out of a two-bedroom apartment in Prospect Park without a specific destination. That's what he told me at the bar, anyway. When I asked him in the elevator where he wanted to live, he shrugged. He said something about capital gains taxes and an ex-boyfriend he doesn’t want to move closer to. All of it made sense at the time. It still does. I just wish I knew a bit more about why he came up to me.
When he opens his eyes, he’s armed again.
“I don’t want anyone to see me.”
“I gathered that. You’re my type.”
He shifts his leg under the sheets to be more on top of me. I keep eye contact while I speak.
“It’s easy for me, is what I’m saying. Seeing people. Being seen. Everyone’s so scared. Gay men are fucking terrified. Of what? That someone won’t think they’re hot? I’m not saying I’m hot. I just know someone’s going to think so. Maybe not the person I want, but someone. So I go first. I’ll expose myself and run into the street to prove I have something to lose but still want to be emotionally available. That way they know I’m not an imposter. Like you said, I switch, right? I—”
“I didn’t mean that in a negative way. It—”
“No, I know. It was astute. I’ll be thinking about it for a while. I just mean most of us don’t know what to do when someone actually offers intimacy. Real intimacy. Not some elaborate way of getting railed.”
“Well, of course. But I think it's worse than that.”
“Worse?”
“Yeah. Because when a guy comes around and actually treats us well, we get even more scared.”
I nod. I do my best not to let memories flood.
“It's easy at the beginning, right? You like the attention. You like the mystery. And then you get close enough that someone starts to actually see you, and suddenly you can't just project all your shit onto them anymore.”
“Right.”
“And I don't think we like that very much. Faggots don't want mirrors. We want someone to project onto. We spent so much time growing up hiding from people, and now we're supposed to just let someone see everything? I mean, sometimes I wonder if that's why we're all so desperate to keep our options open. Get too close to someone and suddenly you need somewhere else to put all that stuff.”
He stops, like he’s said more than he meant to. He watches me file it away.
And then the words slip out of my mouth.
“It's horrible that me being good at understanding people doesn't mean I know what they're capable of giving me.”
“You just switched again.”
I stay still.
“Give me your hand.”
I give him my left hand.
“No, your right hand. You’re right-handed, right?”
I swap.
He flips my hand over and wipes my palm. He looks diligently. I watch him. He raises his eyebrows, I raise my eyebrows. He traces the lines that run east-west. He exhales wide and makes little noises with his mouth. I can’t tell if he likes what he sees or if it’s even about liking it at all. I realize maybe I am out of my depth with this guy.
“Your heart line is broken.”
“I didn’t need you to look at my hand to tell me that.”
He looks at me.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
He returns his focus to my hand. I look out the hotel window. A motorcycle zooms by. I blink hard, coming back into the room. When I return my eyes to him, he’s looking at me.
“Am I annoying you?”
“No? No, you are not.”
“Are you sure?”
I grab his face.
“Yes.”
For a moment, he’s many people I have loved. I see their faces. He sees me warp reality for a second, I know he does, even if he doesn’t know where I am going. I don’t care. For a moment, it’s worth going back and remembering. I kiss him. No, I do care. Fuck.
He kisses me back. It’s not particularly erotic. I want to pull back, to look at his face, but he keeps my mouth at his. We just stay like that, breathing into each other's mouths, each of our minds doing the weird dance gay brains do when sex returns to the menu. He pulls back just enough to speak, his face an inch from mine.
“When was the last time you had sex?”
The question catches me off guard. I consider dodging it. I don’t.
“Saturday.”
“Oh my God! I am in bed with a harlot!”
“I don’t think you need to act so surprised.”
He sits up a little, puts his hand on my chest and looks me in the eyes.
“I bet you have a lot of Leo in your chart. I feel like sex is really important to you.”
“It is.”
“Why?”
I flutter my eyelids.
“I like feeling desired.”
“Well, shocker!”
He wants more.
“I don’t… ah, I’m not sure what to say.” I move to sit on top of him. “I did a lot of work to love myself, and I do. But, unfortunately, nothing compares to when a guy looks at me from across a room and I know he wants me. It’s just different.”
I press my hands to his chest. His hands crawl up my back. We look at each other for a while. This is my comfort zone, just watching a guy watch me watch him watch me. It wasn’t always. I used to find any excuse to look away. One guy I dated hated that. He’d grab me by the mouth and tell me to look at him. At the time, it was incredibly sexy. He needed to see my eyes, and he made sure I knew it. I’d swallow hard, look into his hazel eyes and whimper, ‘Hello.’ He’d tell me I was a good boy, and we’d go about our day.
I don’t particularly miss that.
I count four breaths and then I speak.
“Why did you come up to me downstairs? What was that?”
He smiles.
“Did it make you feel good?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I slide down and rest my head on his chest. Our bodies are all over each other.
“You made me feel wanted.”
“Right. And you liked that.”
“Of course I did.”
His eyes wander back to the ceiling.
“Well, you saw me come in. Right?”
“Yes, I did.”
“We locked eyes and we told each other a lot, didn’t we?”
He’s right. We did the thing gay men do where we have a full conversation in one look that to a stranger might appear to be a futile glance. But for the gay community, that look is an enormous data dump. We confirm we’re both gay, we tell each other if we may be interested, we summon a bit of mystery as to how we could connect, and, if it feels good, we welcome a move. That's not exactly what happened when he walked into the bar a few hours prior. We locked eyes and smiled, but before we could get into the juicy bits, the hostess was bombarding him with her energy. By the time he looked back, I had returned to my phones. I had switched back into professional mode.
“We did the thing, yes.”
“But I needed to hear you say it. I needed you to tell me you wanted me.”
His hand is still resting against my lower back.
“I needed you to tell me that I should come up to this room. Not because I need you to fuck me. But because you telling me you want to would be the highlight of my weekend. When you asked me if I wanted to come up and hang out? I was rock hard.”
“You’re welcome.”
He laughs a little smaller than I had hoped. There’s something he’s not telling me, but I won’t pry. I can tell he’s the type of guy whose secrets keep him safe from getting too hurt. That part is obvious.
He is my type, after all.
“So, maybe, we’re really similar, Arya.”
“Yes, maybe we are.”
Our eyes sit with each other for a moment too long. He cocks his head.
“Is this you trying to seduce me?”
I laugh and fall off him.
“No! I mean, sure, if that’s what you want. I just – you have me thinking now and I don’t know if I want to fuck you or if I just wanna keep talking until the sun comes up. Is that crazy?”
“No, it’s not. But I can’t stay up until the sun comes up. I have investor calls in the morning.”
After all this, here comes capitalism. Of course.
“Do you want me to fuck you?”
He looks over at me. He smiles as he responds.
“I do, but not tonight.”
I smirk a bit.
“Same.”
It's the first time we've explicitly agreed all night. No analysis, no back and forth, no pontificating. Just not tonight. And, really, what a relief.
We stay like that for a while, just looking at each other and trying to make sense of who the other person may or may not be. Or, at least, that’s what I am doing. Eventually, he takes his glasses off and places them on the nightstand. Without looking back at me, he asks if he can stay the night. I say yes, of course. I wait for him to turn back to me. When he does, there's something different about his smile. I can't figure out what.
We guess what time it is. Neither of us is even remotely close to the late hour it actually is. He snores quietly while I look out the window and do my best to fall asleep. When the alarm wakes me up the next morning, I forget he is there. Only on my walk to the bathroom do I see him. He’s asleep on his chest, his arms in perpendicular lines to his torso. Even at 6am, he is beautiful.
As I turn on the shower, I hear him rustle. He says something I can’t make out. While I rinse my body under the scalding water, I think I see him slip past the bathroom door. When I come out, I call his name.
No answer.
He's gone.
I walk back into the bathroom, wipe the steam off the mirror, and start my skincare.
I know we'll never speak again.
