We Don't Talk (About Film) Anymore

my struggle to start pitching again

Since I was laid off from my job three days ago, it seems that my new full-time job, aside from applying to new jobs, has become having opinions. I’m suddenly full of opinions since I guess I have nothing better to do, and I need to put them somewhere. Many of my kind readers assured me that they would like the opinions to keep coming. So, here we go. More opinions and thoughts.

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The last thing I pitched before my apartment burned down was an article about why the internet wants to fuck Rust Cohle. It was for The Daily Beast, and it remains an article that I am genuinely very pleased with and very proud of – a solid fusion of my strengths writing about pop culture and fandom desire (shout out to Allegra Frank, a real dreamweaver of an editor). But before my apartment burned down, pitching freelance stories had increasingly become a zero-sum game. Layoffs and dwindling budgets force editors to keep tight with a select stable of writers, or only accept pitches on easily digestible mainstream topics. Editors I used to hear back from stopped replying to me, and when they did, I’d receive a familiar answer: “It’s just a little too niche for us.”

Of course, this was a hilarious lie. The things I was pitching were not niche. I know this because in the years prior, my pitches on the exact same kind of stuff, the kind of stuff I like to write about, that I’ve been pitching and writing about for years, were getting accepted. Quite frankly, I don’t even think I write about anything that is genuinely niche or outsider (a sentiment I expressed in a previous blog post), and truthfully I would actually like to immerse myself more in proper niche, outsider art. The only problems with my pitches were that they weren’t pertaining to whatever popular Netflix slop was getting shoveled into the piggy mouths of consumers or, at the time, in relation to one of only two films that outlets were letting anyone write about: Dune 2 and Challengers. I’m not kidding, it felt like every single publication I visited to scan their recent output and get a sense of what they were looking for had about 5-10 useless articles each about Dune 2 and Challengers. They were one or two forgettable clickbait essays away from someone positing what Tashi, Art, and Patrick’s sweat all tastes like.

After opining about America’s sweetheart Rust Cohle back in February, I kept at pitching with much less of a spring in my step. Where I once approached offering my opinions about entertainment with enthusiasm and zeal, I was now growing tired of my good ideas getting rejected because I didn’t give a fuck about, I don’t know, the sexual politics of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. I was tired of allowing things that I was excited to dig into get cast into perpetual oblivion because in the short window of their relevancy every editor decided they would rather muse on something like, I don’t know, Godzilla and King Kong’s gay relationship (I’m just making stuff up here, but wouldn’t it be funny if there actually were published articles on these topics?). I was tired of writer friends telling me that I deserved to be writing for higher-profile, better-paying publications, as if I wasn’t trying to do that every single day of my life. I was tired of being told “This is a great idea, but we just can’t take it right now.” You know who can’t take it right now, or at all, or anymore, as a matter of fact? ME!

And then a funny thing happened: my apartment burned down. To be exactly precise, it didn’t “burn down,” but it’s easier – and darkly funnier – for me to say that it did. The building is still standing, but it scorched quite a bit and was rendered entirely uninhabitable for anyone without what the owners are currently pursuing, which is years-long rehabilitation and reconstruction. But my own bedroom and virtually everything in it was destroyed, a mixture of being burnt up from where the fire hit the most violently, which was at the back of the building, along with being squashed into a pile of wet, unrecognizable rubble by the sheer force of the fire hoses. As you can imagine, I went through a very intense jumble of new, unpleasant emotions, feelings, and thoughts when this was all happening (my roommate and I were lucky, as we were not at home when the fire occurred), one of which I still haven’t managed to shake: that writing about film is pointless.

In the moment of the disaster, that feeling makes sense, doesn’t it? Compared to the scope of such a catastrophic tragedy, writing about film does seem pointless. Writing about why girls on Twitter want to fuck Matthew McConaughey’s character from True Detective, or about the hottest movie versions of Dracula, or about Conner O’Malley videos all just suddenly seemed to me like a hugely existential waste of my time. Helping no one, benefiting nothing, contributing to a cycle of worthless pop culture journalism that is getting worse by the day. I’m not saying all of this is patently true (though, I do believe that there is at least a nugget of reality here), but it’s what the experience of losing my home and most of the objects that I’d carried with me since I was a child felt like by comparison. A stupid, trivial, insignificant endeavor.

As I got my life back on track and settled into a new home in South Brooklyn, I slowly but surely eased my way back into reviewing films at my usual haunt, Paste Magazine, where I continue to do so a few times a month; or, if not there, then at their latest acquisition, the salvaged wreckage of The A.V. Club. You can still see my published writing from time to time, waxing poetic on new releases like the latest Will Ferrell comedy disaster or, this month, a slate of extremely fake February movies. But the desire to pitch original essays and features has never returned. I have no ideas pertaining to movies or pop culture, and nothing inspires me. I watch films and TV shows just about every day and I enjoy them, but my mind is a total blank slate. It does feel like the experience of the fire broke something semi-permanent in my brain, and those immediate feelings in the aftermath about how pointless my creative pursuits are have continued to echo for what is now approaching a full year. Whenever I muse briefly to myself about whether there’s potentially a film I could expound upon, I am overcome with the unshakeable conviction of, even if there was, who the fuck cares?

I understand what most of you are probably thinking, what my therapist has done her best to assure me of, what my boyfriend lovingly scolds me for because I know it’s what I’m guilty of doing all the time. That I’m being too hard on myself. But the truth of the matter is that this is genuinely how I feel even if, at the same time, I don’t really believe it’s completely true. There is this battle happening in my head right now between believing that writing about movies is frivolous drek while also understanding that that’s not totally the case. Obviously, readers enjoy reading the insights from writers they admire, and obviously I once derived joy from offering such opinions. I LOVE having opinions and forcing them onto other people. I want to write this kind of stuff about movies again, I want to come away from art feeling inspired to talk about it and emboldened to offer my analysis beyond the standard 1000-1500 words of my regular film reviews.

And for me, there is a huge difference between a review and a feature. In a feature I am, in a way, offering up a little piece of myself; it feels more vulnerable to say to an editor, “I have this idea about this thing, it is my idea, and I’d like you to trust me to unravel it further, in my own special little way,” even if it’s something silly like “The Top 10 Movies I Forgot Came Out This Year.” My reviews certainly involve tapping into my creative voice, but they are far more formulaic. They have more of a strict, internal outline that I have been reusing and refining over and over for years, and they are subject to more rigorous edits. Their topic doesn’t tend to change either, even if the subject does; what did I think about this movie? Good, bad, or — worse— something in-between? It’s a tried-and-true recipe, whereas pitching features requires a little more improvisation, a little more risk throwing in some spices and seeing how the flavor comes out.

For a while, I’ve felt that a lot of this resistance to pitching stemmed from some worsening confidence issues I’ve had in the past couple years. In spite of my resolute in my ability to write well, I have a habit of convincing myself that I am not very smart, that my opinions are unfounded, and that I should rightly assume other people must know better than me. I do think that when it comes to film, a lot of my peers do know more than me, and I, in turn, could stand to know a bit more about film history — but, crucially, I am never equally willing to grant myself the kindness that not only do I actively make effort to engage with films outside my wheelhouse in addition to reading books on filmmaking and film history, that I might possibly know more about film than some others. Like, at least a few! Ultimately, I do believe that my self-esteem problems are contributing to all this on some level, subconsciously dissuading me from offering up my opinions to editors because in my mind I’m like, well, what do I really know anyway? But, again, another huge piece of this puzzle is that I simply do not have any opinions anymore.

To make things worse, I have very much dialed down my use of Twitter to near-zero, popping in only to spread the word of my unemployment, pay respects to David Lynch, and occasionally retweet my boyfriend’s jokes in the hopes that they pop off and he becomes a star. In addition to the fact that I’ve literally never used TikTok, I’ve found myself even more on the outskirts of the pop culture zeitgeist than I already was. I just don’t really know what’s going on anymore, and I don’t really care to know. While it’s been a boon to my mental health during a moment in the world where the stream of bad news is quite relentless, I used to generate some ideas based on the dumb things I’d see go viral and now I plainly do not know what those are anymore. I have no idea what’s going on online based only on the videos of guinea pigs I watch on my Instagram explore page. If I was already feeling somewhat “How do you do, fellow kids?” in my aims as a pop culture journalist who doesn’t really care what people younger than me are doing even before I turned 30, I have truly nestled myself into that role as I barrel into my new decade.

So, where does that leave me? It’s a question I’ve been afflicted with in the months that I’ve been wondering where do I go in my writing career if I have nothing I want to write about. I can and continue to write about new release films, but the role of “Staff Writer Film Critic” is about as endangered in the journalism landscape as [insert one of the thousands of animals humans are driving to the brink of extinction on a daily basis here]. As one of many contributing writers, I can only review so many films per month at Paste and AVC, so it is very much not a stream of reliable income. It’s why I turned to the Gotham Writer’s Workshop for some inspiration, signing up for a Creative Writing 101 class in the hopes that getting back to the foundational basics of creative writing might stir something since left dormant within me.

And it has, although not in the way that I thought it might. My aspirations for film writing are still squarely where they were, but the class has managed to open up another wellspring that I had turned the faucet off on at some point before the fire: myself. Importantly, writing about things in my life that make me uncomfortable, that force me to expose my weaknesses and fears and challenge me. When my teacher brought this idea forward during one lecture and forced us all the engage with it, it did break some sort of dam. I was suddenly writing down a list of all the things in my life that I wished I could forget, a list of pivotal moments, a list of pivotal people, as my teacher encouraged us to tap into these more volatile memories and extract artistry from them. Again, another thing that my therapist had clocked a few months prior, but I was not quite willing to reckon with just yet: I had experienced trauma that I didn’t want to talk about, but doing so one day might unclog my creative faculties like the Debrox I dropped into my ears a few days ago to soften up some earwax.

Writing about oneself and one’s life casts a limited net in the media market – also, I don’t really want to just go around trying to pitch editors on me, me, me – and while I’ve ruminated on the idea of pitching some personal essays about stuff like the fire, I’ve been held back a little in part by the consideration that I may very well get rejected again and so what’s the point, but also the idea that I’d have to have my words heavily edited and modified to some extent – to whatever the whims of the editor and publication are. I don’t really like that thought, having to censor myself and my experiences for someone else based on a series of often arbitrary formatting restrictions. I’ve reached a juncture in my writing career where I am already so unwilling to kowtow to the demands of clickbait journalism; to write about topics that only serve to further dumb down readership and culture in the same way that the suits in charge of the studios pull the strings on the worsening tastes of movie audiences. Maybe I’ve been guilty of some of that kind of writing in the past, and what the hell, maybe I’ll indulge in it a little in the future (as a person desperately in need of streams of revenue, I can’t say never). But in this moment, right now, I do not want to do it. And I will not bend myself to do so.

So, here we are, back at this newsletter. A newsletter that I knew would come in handy for me someday, that I knew I should never delete because I recognized that it had potential. Somehow, I must have known that someday I would genuinely be in need of a space to be unfiltered in what I wanted to write about, in expressing things that I felt could not be expressed anywhere else, and in revealing pieces of me that I quite literally needed to exorcise in a grandstanding form of creative self-therapy. I have finally freed myself of the anxiety of wondering when I’ll start pitching again, because more importantly I am finally overcome with the desire to write creatively again at all. I need not inhibit myself further than I already have, worrying about making my writing agreeable to editors who are working under the tyrant thumb of Big SEO. Rather, I will now allow myself the courtesy of letting my creative process lead the way, creating whatever space I might require in my journey to getting all the words out.

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