Willow Catelyn Maclay

@willowcatelyn.bsky.social

20253 Followers 759 Following

Film Critic (Film Comment, Reverse Shot, etc). GALECA. Co-Author of CORPSES, FOOLS AND MONSTERS Currently writing a book about TWIN PEAKS

a still image of POINT BREAK featuring Keanu Reeves and Lori Petty in bed with one another. They look a little bit androgynous. On black sheets
a still image of Tom Noonan in a medium close-up as Francis Dollarhyde in MANHUNTER
a still image from TROPICAL MALADY of two men on a staircase in a forest
While Craven’s The Last House on the Left gestures towards a Bergman-ian denouement, A Nightmare on Elm Street is more like his Bunuelian ode to American perversity. On a grand scale, it is about the sins of one generation bleeding into the next, but on a more microscopic level, it is fuelled by subconscious and Fruedian imagery, born of teenage hormones, and the realizations of sex and death. If that sounds too intellectual for you: A Nightmare on Elm Street is also about a finger-knived monster with third degree burns killing a group of teenagers one by one in their dreams. We meet Tina first (Amanda Wyss) in the midst of a nightmare. She’s blonde, and wears only a white nightgown. The room she finds herself in is covered in steam, and she’s exhausted, as if she’s been running for a long time. The man chasing her is named Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), and he stretches his arms further than anyone should be able, and he carves up the walls with those finger-knives of his. His skin is marked by heavy burns, and his voice is a madman’s seduction, his smoker’s lungs, a demonic baritone. Craven frames him with the camera a little low to the ground to make the already impressively tall (for an actor) Englund, seem even larger. Tina is pulled out of her dream abruptly, but not before he can have a slice at her lacy bedtime onesie. She wakes up, and realizes the carvings have come with her, and her gown is ruined. Craven uses the rug-pull from Psycho to introduce us to a character who seems like the main character. She’s classically positioned to be the heroine in a horror story like this one: she’s blonde, a little tough, a little smart, and comes from a middle class family. An all-American girl next door, but she’s merely the first victim.
There are no forebears or influences that would help to explain Shelley Duvall’s acting; she doesn’t seem to owe anything to anyone. She’s an original who has her own limpid way of doing things—a simplicity that isn’t marred by conventional acting technique, but that by now she has adapted to a wide range of characters. In the new Robert Altman film, Popeye, from Jules Feififer’s screenplay, in which she plays Olive Oyl, she sings in a small, wavering voice, and she hits tones that are so flat yet so true that they are transcendently comic. Her dancing has the grave gentleness of the Laurel & Hardy soft-shoe numbers, though she doesn’t move anything like either of them. She’s Olive Oyl of the long neck and stringbean body and the clodhoppers, and at the same time she has a high-fashion beauty. The screwed-tight hair twisted into a cruller at the neck seems just what Olive needs to set off her smooth, rounded forehead. She curls her long legs around each other—entwining them in the rubber-legged positions of the cartoon figure—and it seems the most natural thing for her to do.
a still image of Dil from the crying game with the headline THE CRYING GAME'S LEGACY AS TRANSGENDER REPRESENTATION BY WILLOW CATELYN MACLAY
a still image from BLONDE DEATH of Tammy clasping her hunky lover, who is gay, and he is holding a gun. This exact gun reappears in Castration Movie pt 2 iirc.
An image of Evil Dead Burn of a demonically possessed woman peeking out of a panel of wood vertically ripped apart in the middle of the frame
a still image from Chungking Express of a man and a woman draped in the faint golden light of a hip bar, whose red & green painted walls are bursting with deep, resonant, sensual color. She, a femme fatale, with cheap red sunglasses, and a blonde Madonna wig. He, a handsome man without fashion, without a clue, but he is eager to be swept up in the tide of this woman's life. The story of every movie, really.
a still image from Jean Rollin's THE IRON ROSE of a woman in a foggy graveyard surrounded by four gothic headstones
a still image of a female body builder in PUMPING IRON II THE WOMEN
A still from DESERT HEARTS of three women in a convertible on an open highway in the desert. No cars behind them. Just sky
an image of an orange tuxedo cat chomping a vase of roses. The bottle of Mike's cold hard blue raspberry lemonade to the right is camp value
a still from The People's Joker of Vera Drew dressed as Joker the Harlequin in a dreamy purple space
a still image from STALKER. The one of the room with the billowing hilly floor
A still from Black Christmas of Olivia Hussey in close-up frantically answering a chord phone
Mike says "Not Quite Horny Enough".
a still image from Disclosure Day of Emily Blunt holding a device that is emanating light.
a still image of TONGUES UNTIED of a black man with a large hoop earring in closeup, with a cheshire grin on his face
a still image from Je, Tu, Il, Elle of Chantal Akerman nude, leaning up against a wall in front of a bathroom.
The internet phenomenon of The Backrooms has proven to be alluring because it is a community scrapbook documenting the becoming of a modern graveyard. Kane Parsons’s a24 film adapting this internet cultural object gets into trouble whenever the search for meaning becomes desperate. The pull towards the backrooms is the construction of the liminal maze itself, because the incoherence already speaks to the absurd, implausible chaos of a life. Will Soodik’s script tries to reign things in with analyzing voice-over cues of how people naturally build patterns to cope with the abstraction of awareness, and his script gestures to the ills of losing the shape of reality in the wake of A.I., the long-standing trauma of isolation from the pandemic, and the loosening of concrete data. In this respect, Backrooms functions like a Rorschach blot because what it suggests is vague enough for any reading about the ills of modern life to essentially be correct. It gestures to so many images of 21st century horror that they are all functionally within the text. I don’t necessarily believe that the value of a horror movie is found in how it represents the timely terrors, when the central fears of the genre are baked into its dna: the inevitability of death, and the fear of loss. Backrooms is fascinating to me, not because I can recognize where its anxieties are coming from, but in how these fears are coherent within the history of the genre. The endless maze, hidden behind a portal in a lonely furniture store is abject, because it is in the tradition of the dungeon and the crypt in the haunted house. The architecture has transformed into a yellow-tinged, water-damaged office space with buzzing fluorescent hospital lights, and this space feels familiar, and seductive because it is a post-modern purgatorial zone, and life, in and of itself, is something we understand as purgatorial. The other fear in Backrooms is also ancient. Someone is here, behind the corner, in the shadows...
Ethan (Misha Osherovich) and Alex (Nico Carney) are on the cusp of graduation and they have a major problem: they haven’t gotten laid. The two have been inseparable since childhood and the closeness of their friendship has resulted in most of their classmates assuming they are gay. This is a major issue for cis horndog Alex, who is painted with a Jonah Hill-in-Superbad willingness to show how horny he is for ladies and afab non-binary classmates. Ethan, on the other hand, feels familiar in two ways: they’re a sidekick along for the scheming of the gonzo masculine reverie of their best friend and they’re on auto-pilot, drifting through adolescence without anything grounding their day-to-day life with meaning. There’s a thin line in the movies between being a clueless virgin and someone who has gender dysphoria. Osherovich is non-binary (Carney is trans masc) and the searching, wanting look in Ethan’s gaze should open the film up to any trans viewer who has been there before. Alex concocts a plan that sounds an awful lot like a conservative talking point: pose as trans girls in a last ditch effort to quell the gay rumors and get close enough to some of the other girls in the locker room to make a play at romance. If the film has a subversive bone in its body, then it is the lampooning of the conservative fear-mongering of people transitioning for this reason. It is a credit to McCarty, who also directs, that they basically get away with it by treating the complication in the plot seriously and sincerely. The problem with their plan is thus: Ethan realizes she’s a trans woman.
a still image from Desert Hearts of three women in a convertible
It already feels too late for our young protagonists in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s apocalyptic ghost story Pulse. There’s an uncanny sensation when we follow the quotidian details of Michi (Kumiko Aso) as she makes her way into work at a plant shop. The streets seem too empty. The ambient noises of a breathing community are absent. Kurosawa’s brand of horror is bred from an unconscious, tangible dread, and he achieves this by taking things out of the frame that we take for granted. The wrongness that stems from these removals creates a feeling that aspects of modern life have vanished when characters weren’t paying attention. Pulse is immediately effective in this regard, because it forces us to think about what has already disappeared outside of the frame once we are privy to the structure of how the visceral depiction of how things are actually disappearing is shown to us. The great Italian horror filmmaker Lucio Fulci usually composed a central surreal image to warn audiences of the apocalypse that was underway. In his films we were put in a position to be one step ahead of the characters as they caught up to an awareness of mortality that we already have. There is no declaration of explicit intent by way of gore in Kurosawa’s films. Bad things begin happening, but we aren’t privy to any information beyond that of our characters. We discover alongside their experiences, and his command of tone, mise-en-scene, and pace allows viewers to feel like something is wrong from the very first frame. You ever wake up and feel like today would be a bad day?
Castration Movie Anthology is a remarkable example of how contemporary trans cinema can be really bold and unapologetic because of the grassroots nature of its making and distribution. Can you say more about that film and its success? Maclay: Castration’s word-of-mouth reputation has been built almost entirely by trans people discussing it with other trans people. I think it’s important to talk here about Muscle Distribution, a company that trans film archivist and queer historian Elizabeth Purchell started a couple years ago. I think that she is doing a wonderful job centralizing these movies and presenting them to the exact right audience. Through us sharing these films online, whether through Vimeo links or Google docs, or by going to screenings at microcinemas—and Louise has been traveling across North America and Europe getting Castration Movie Anthology out there—a community experience has been created around modern trans films, and it feels not only like Muscle is catering to us but also that it’s being driven by the power that we have as viewers and consumers. Louise just started a Kickstarter for Castration Movie Anthology III—she needed many thousands of dollars and raised it very quickly. This is showing us that this type of circulation, which enables us to use our modest economic means to help get money into the hands of trans filmmakers, can succeed. Maybe we can have an ecosystem of trans films that are on a smaller scale, and it doesn’t matter so much if they break into the mainstream if the trans audience is seeing them—as long as these films are mattering to the community itself.
“The New Queer Cinema” was a term that critics and journalists began using after an influx of hot queer filmmakers made waves at the Sundance Film Festival in the early 90s. These films from directors such as Marlon Riggs, Todd Haynes, Cheryl Dunye and Gregg Araki, among others, rose after a time of hostility and negligence from the American government during the HIV-AIDS crisis. The contradiction of queer American cinema flourishing during what many felt was an extinction event was not lost on these filmmakers. Their films were challenging, playful, angry, sexual, and, most importantly, alive. Time has a funny way of repeating itself: the United States once again has a media personality for a president and queer people (specifically those who are transgender) have been at the mercy of cruel and uncaring legislation, and, once again, a dynamic and explosive valve of queer cinema has risen up. The New Trans Cinema encompasses more than just what has been programmed at the Pickford this Pride, but the selection being shown captures a snapshot of an interconnected community of trans people and queer allies across nations coming together to make art in spite of these dangerous times. These films run the gamut from Y/A inflected political horror (The Serpent’s Skin), a social realist drama about the troubles of transitioning told from the perspective of an unwilling spouse (Castration Movie III), a surrealist and grief-laden trip into the unknown with echoes of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Camp), and a micro-budget tale of fate bringing two gore enthusiasts together through an unseemly discord group (Divine Hammer). Throughout it all, you will come to recognize names and faces like those of Avalon Fast and Louise Weard and distribution companies like Muscle which is led by trans archivist and historian Elizabeth Purchell. These movies are for us, by us, and made during a precarious time when the importance of community is more palpable than ever. ~Willow Maclay
a still image with the phrase NEW TRANS CINEMA presented by Willow Maclay with posters for CASTRATION MOVIE 3, CAMP, THE SERPENT'S SKIN and DIVINE HAMMER
a still image of Marilyn Monroe from GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES from the Diamond's are a girl's best friend sequence
Willow Maclay’s lecture on David Lynch’s “Evil Los Angeles” trilogy (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire) takes a close look at the troubles that women have had in coming to Los Angeles in pursuit of their dreams and finding only nightmares, and how Lynch uses that history to comment on the misogyny within the industry. He complicates the apparatus of horror by not only asking us to empathize with these characters, but taking aesthetic pleasure in their emotional and physical annihilation. The result is a fuller depiction of the misogyny within the industry that gives women the space to approach difficult, if not triggering, subject matter without feeling personally wounded by that depiction. Because he empathizes with the shape of the violence, why it happens, how it happens, and the aftermath therein, his films routinely end up being on the side of the victim.
Obsession is the horror movie of the moment, and there’s nothing to look at in it. Curry Barker and cinematographer Taylor Clemons have two visual ideas that they repeatedly opt for in telling this monkey’s paw story about a manic pixie demonic girlfriend. The first of which is to frame Nikki in heavy shadows or silhouette, and the other is the almost constant usage of underlit shallow-depth of field close-ups and medium shots foregrounding Bear to suggest that he is self-centered and single-minded in his actions. These two visual ideas are coherent within the tableaux of this story about Nikki’s loss of agency and Bear’s insecure manhood, but just because it is logical does not mean that it is exciting or worthwhile to watch. In addition to those two thematic choices of form, the framing is primarily symmetrical, and feels somewhat endemic to a generation of filmmakers who have grown up watching film clips on their phones, or horror movies of the 2010s that were inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s balanced symmetrical framing. When combined with the above techniques, Obsession feels ready made to be scraped for algorithmic scrolling on the apps without losing any visual information, because there is not much to lose in the first place. In theory, this pan and scan approach could make the physical embodiment of the picture suffocating, as Bear has to collapse within the circumstances of his decision, and live with the fallout of what he has done wrong, while Nikki is trapped in her body on autopilot, but it doesn’t evoke as much discomfort as it should. It merely seems like these filmmakers do not have the imagination to consider any other way of moving from shot to shot.
Kermit the beautiful orange tuxedo cat in a yellow sweater
my beautiful and beloved orange cat Kermit sits in a sunny window and he is wearing his red deer sweater.
a still image of Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive. She has tears in her eyes as she sees her lover with someone else
a still image of Ajita Wilson in MACUMBA SEXUAL. She plays a goddess who behaves like a vampire and feasts on the energy of those she seduces
a sample image of Bill Pullman in LOST HIGHWAY bathed in red light and in close up
Kermit my beautiful orange cat looking positively Looney Tunes-ian with an exaggerated face of surprise
one of the famous stills from PERSONA featuring Bibi Andersson and Liv Ulmann posing with one another. Andersson's head gently in Ulmann's grasp. Both staring into the lens
a still from L'ATALANTE of a woman twirling in the ocean in the midst of a superimposed dissolve
a white kitten plays with a strand of string in SHINJUKU MIDNIGHT STORY
a still from SHINJUKU MIDNIGHT STORY featuring a group of trans woman laughing and lined up at the urinal
a still image from David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE. A fractured image of Betty and Rita phasing in and out of a dissolve.
an image of TOUTE UNE NUIT of a man and a woman posed in a room. She is asleep in the bed and he is gazing out the window, staring at the moon
Belle and Sebastian // Lazy Line Painter Jane My Bloody Valentine // Sometimes Cocteau Twins // Pearly Dew Drops 12' Kate Bush // The Big Sky Joanna Newsom // Emily The Supremes // Unchained Melody A Sunny Day in Glasgow // Bye Bye Big Ocean The Magnetic Fields // 100,000 Fireflies Prince // Computer Blue (Hallway Speech Version) Black Sabbath // Heaven and Hell
a still image from SOUTHLAND TALES of wigged dancers lined up in a row like showgirls on a skee ball table in an arcade
a seagull on top of a building on the roof
a still of plated deserts from MARIE ANTOINETTE. Sofia Coppola invents instagram
an image from 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE of cult leader Sir Lloyd Jimmy gesticulating with this hands as his child droogs lurch behind him. The background is lit up with flaming towers of bone
a still image of Diane Keaton in LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR
Re-Wind begins with a deeply provocative image: a dolly shot slides across the cement surface of an abandoned parking lot to expose a severed and decomposing feminine arm stuffed inside of an abandoned refrigerator, and in her grasp is a videotape. The tape is a snuff film and contains footage of the graphic dismemberment and sexual assault of a young woman, and it is one of many tapes that have been left around the city. The introduction of the popular hi8 camera demystified the beauty of 35mm and caused a disintegration in the perception of viewers. It closed the gap between day to day life and the alternative life on TV, or on Video, by presenting something that seemed closer to the grime of the everyday. Anyone with the means could shoot their own films, and guerrilla style filmmaking became easier with the lighter weight of the camera. Sato engages in that technique from time to time, and it is one of his tricks to amplify the validity of what he wishes to show viewers. Like any director of many films, he has his obsessions and observations that he comes back to continuously; among them are urban alienation, voyeurism, and the coherency of those subjects born of modern technologies. The video tape in the clutch of the severed arm acts like a promise of a viral psychotic break in the human condition. Re-Wind suggests that by watching and making movies it had only illuminated a deeper sickness in the human condition as the voyeuristic desires of viewers have grown more extreme as sexual desires have grown more absurd.
Diane Keaton in LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR nude under the blankets in her basement apartment with a smile on her face and a cigarette tilted up in her mouth.
a still image from LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR of studios Diane Keaton in an office space. Amid the clutter, a signage featuring a silhouette of Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre can be seen in the background
a still image from BLOOD TEA AND RED STRING
a still image from ELLE of Isabelle Huppert with a wry smile
The first image of Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women is a classically beautiful Western frame. It’s a deep wide image that stretches into the horizon and shows us the cold, grey snowy mountaintops of Livingston, Montana. The camera remains completely still, all the wonder and majesty of nature, and in the bottom right hand corner of the frame the beacon of an incoming train approaches to interrupt the silence. As the train surges along, the title of the film appears quietly, confined to a small area in the left hand side of the frame. “Certain Women”. With this introduction, Reichardt asks us to begin thinking about her triptych of women’s stories within the broader language of the Western style, and how women fit into a category of cinema where they were usually secondary. Throughout these three stories, we see examples of women trying to tame the wildness of life through Reichardt’s subtle style of observation. There’s attorney Laura Wells (Laura Dern) tucking her oversized rambunctious peach sweater back into her skirt before she heads into court, or homesteader Gina Lewis (Michelle Williams) bound up tight in her athletic jumpsuit sneaking a cigarette after her long run before she reconvenes with her family. Perhaps most prominent is ranch-hand Jamie (Lily Gladstone), in a series of routines, as she feeds her horses, and tends to the farm. The opening frame of the train speeding along the tracks is also one about taming the wildness of life. Montana is an enormous place full of little people who feel enormous things.
a still image from THE SERPENTS SKIN of two girls (Alexandra McVicker and Avalon Fast) in bed with one another, lit in a deep blue and surrounded by candles
Takashi Miike’s reputation in the West was coupled alongside arguments of misogyny in horror that began to percolate with the torture films of the mid-00s, but Miike can only be called a misogynist if one is looking at the surfaces of his pictures. In the case of his Masters of Horror episode Imprint, his reputation as a filmmaker with a devil-may-care attitude about violence against women reached a fever pitch. The truth of Imprint was deeper, reflective and intertwined with cultural assumptions of Japan by North American audiences. Imprint is based on the short story “Bokkee, Kyotee”, whose title is an Okayama idiom which translates as, “really scary”, and Shimako Iwai worked in collaboration with Miike for the adaptation of her short story. Set in a brothel in one of Japan’s downtrodden red-light districts during the Meiji period (1868-1912), the story centers a bedtime conversation between a young sex worker and her insomniac patron. The story carries the form of a dramatic monologue, and the patron’s part of the conversation is omitted, leaving the reader with only her words. The resulting effect forces the reader to use their own imagination to fill in the gaps, and it strengthens the emotional integration with the narrator, while doubling to intensify the voyeuristic feel of the reader as well. She goes on to describe a litany of horrors she has witnessed or experienced firsthand including starvation, disease, murder and rape while making references to bloodshed, demons and hell. Iwai’s literary craft is rooted in quotidian observation and the sordid quality of the story manifests in the narrator's acceptance of her lot in life. Her words are meant to exaggerate the circumstances of those who work within the brothel, but with the indulgence of the worst punishments one can imagine through genre, she echoes a deep history of women’s melodrama in her home country (for cinephiles, consider the work of Mizoguchi or Narause)......