Despite All My Rage
On Tenderness
Once again: If you aren’t already doing so, please educate yourself on the genocide in Gaza and what you can do to help call for a PERMANENT CEASEFIRE NOW.
I briefly considered ending this year out with a list of things I liked or similar, but as a former culture journalist I’m always slightly bemused by that idea. I used to think it was SO IMPORTANT — actually, I used to think I (EYE, ME, MOI) was so important, that my thoughts about what things I had listened to and watched this year must make it out there into the world. I no longer feel this way. If you had told 26-year-old me how little about my own life I’d be broadcasting I would be incredulous. There’s no way I would have thought that I would go more interior, grow quieter, as I got older. In fact, the more interesting I’ve become (and I do believe I am more interesting now), the less I’ve wanted to say about it. Funny that.
That’s why I almost didn’t start this newsletter, because I felt my essay days were done. Not because I don’t like the way I think or what I like; in fact, I think my tastes now are even better than my arguably great tastes as a young writer and consumer of things. And I do still share my ideas, but not directly. I share them through scripts, through conversation with friends, through the work I do in podcasting and TV and film and…
I guess the difference between 26-year-old me and 40-year-old me is mainly that I still share myself but I don’t need anyone’s approval. I still like being a source for what’s good. The joy of sharing a thing I like is still there, but I don’t need it to be widely shared. In fact, sharing one thing with one person has a greater currency now. My love language is “giving gifts” and telling someone about good music or a good movie is a form of gift giving in my view.
Anyway, that’s three long paragraphs to explain why I’m not doing an end of the year Best Of THIS WAS GREAT 2023 list. Though Feist’s latest record is excellent and you should listen to it.
Instead of a retrospective, I came into this post today thinking about a few things I’m excited about for the end of this year, namely a handful of films that have landed in the last weeks of December. Two in particular: POOR THINGS and ALL OF US STRANGERS have held me in a kind of thrall since they were announced (POOR THINGS and that dick window, especially, got my attention).
When I’m really excited about a film, especially these days, I tend to avoid reading or watching anything about it because I’m really averse to spoilers, even tonal ones. So I’ve been avoiding anything about both of these films as much as I can, but the odd thing still leaks through (a weird dance scene in POOR THINGS is haunting my feeds; thank you algorithm). This desire to avoid the films in question, however, has run directly up against how fucking charmed I am by the chemistry between Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott on this press tour they’ve been on. Which leads me, finally, to the thing I’ve been thinking about this last week that inspired the title for this newsletter. In an on-stage interview to promote the film at a screening (I’m not sure where, and the internet isn’t helping), Andrew Scott said something I absolutely loved. In describing the chemistry between his and Mescal’s characters, he shared that he was thrilled to bring this gay love story to the screen in part because it wasn’t about fucking. It was about tenderness.
“Tenderness is radical,” he said.
TENDERNESS IS RADICAL, she writes, in all caps, to emphasize the point. And this is where I feel my own emotional landscape has traveled to, where my work comes from, and why I feel less of a need to broadcast my thoughts, interests, and outlook. The older I get, the more tender I feel, both outwardly and inwardly. And that tenderness is fragile and painful sometimes, but it’s also beautiful and loving and intimate. A kiss, not a slap. At 26 I was all slap, full of anger and ready to deploy myself loudly at any given opportunity in part because to say THIS IS ME is to build a fence around myself, to fortress myself up and make it all safe and on my own terms. The work of the last many decades for me has been to get closer to myself, to tear down the fortress and to probe around the tender parts. To get vulnerable. Which is, Andrew Scott tells me, very gay. And very radical. And boy am I cool with both of those.
The more tender I get, the better my work is. So I’ll end this post, and this year, with a toast: To radical tenderness in 2024.