023. CULTURE/VULTURE.

ordinary rhythms and misadventures.

Welcome to ISSUE 023: CULTURE/VULTURE 🦅

Prose on prose on prose! I’ll keep it brief since this month we have loads of exceptional criticism, culture writing, and fiction on the docket and I don’t want you to lose steam before you climb this wall of text for yourself. 

“3 Days in Cannes,” by our own Poetry Editor,

Nilay [cc]

, reviews this year’s Cannes film festival. In addition to highlights from the star-studded releases, Conraud offers an inside glimpse into the festival industry itself, exfoliating the effects of such cultural events on the minds and bodies of attendees, residents, and the city they call home.

Zach Mackenzie’s “Torrential” foregrounds the madness of mundanity–food, friendship, and fantasies. Its narrator moves through the aisles of a health store searching for… something, but finding mostly grief and alienation. Who hasn’t lost their cool doing the groceries? 

In Adrianna Michell’s review of Charles Burnett’s The Annihilation of Fish (1999), she collates the film’s distribution and its place among Burnett’s other works, and tends to the film’s representation of commonality despite (or because of) difference, noting that “a lack of understanding need not preclude love.”

Using her own experience of motherhood as a springboard, Samantha Roche provides an argument for a certain kind of feminist political responsiveness derived from her readings of speculative genres.

And lastly, to satiate, once again, our penchant for film criticism and culture writing, we have Melynda Payne’s “Feeling Raw About It.” A la bell hooks, Payne writes about the experience of spectatorship for Black girls, considering which media objects in particular appeal and how they come to be digested, metabolized, and externalized once more by their audience.

Read this issue with a bucket of popcorn for its optimal effect. 

We hope you enjoy.

abby

| editor-in-chief

3 Days in Cannes by Nilay Conraud [Culture]

Torrential by Zach Mackenzie [Fiction]

Review of The Annihilation of Fish (1999): On the quotidian and the humane by Adrianna Michell [Culture; Non-Fiction]

Wisdom as a Sword: The Modern Feminist Plight Needs Speculative Fiction by Samantha Roche [Culture; Non-Fiction]

Feeling Raw About It by Melynda Payne [Culture; Creative Non-Fiction]

3 Days in Cannes by Nilay Conraud | Substack

In the car that takes me to the train which takes me to the bus which takes me to Cannes, Juliette Binoche is on the radio talking about the festival’s opening, about Meryl Streep, and about working for the present–more than the history–of cinema as this year’s Jury chair. Twelve hours later, I’m stepping foot in Cannes for the first time, close to sunset. The Belle Epoque buildings drenched in golden light look like they are modelling for a perfume ad, like they are about to remove everything but their high heels with effortless elegance. I loudly wheel my suitcase up hills, across cobblestones, and through narrow, sidewalk-less streets in which I easily picture tanned, blonde children of old money playing barefoot, but where, instead, a big black car with stained windows speeds by every few minutes, disrupting the peace (and threatening my life). I arrive at the one-bedroom apartment I paid almost a month of rent to share with three strangers over four nights, and am greeted with the cheer of friends who have always known each other. Boundarika, Léo, and Selin are first-timers too. One hour from now, I will clock that they are go-getters, and fear for my introverted life. Two days from now, I will be exhausted and deeply grateful to them for it. In 100 hours, I will be hugging them good-bye fondly, promising to meet again.

The first night’s gala is a buzz. Having forgotten all my blazers–on which I counted to elevate otherwise smart-but-plain outfits–I resort to improvising, borrowing clothes from Boundarika, and praying they let me in. Pearls of sweat form on my temples as I watch my roommates change into tuxedos and princess dresses with assorted soirée gloves. Your wardrobe can be your death sentence in Cannes, but in the end, I believe organizers care less than they threaten to, and having been let into the Grand Palais, I’m perfectly happy looking like my elegant friends’ bodyguard. After the screening of Partir un Jour, we go for a drink into what looks like a perfectly normal pub if it weren’t for the (not one, not two, not three) four security guards at the entrance. This sends shivers down my back; I know I’m about to be brutally ripped off for a beer. There, we meet a duo who just came from the same screening. They met last year at a human rights fellowship in Sarajevo. When life imitates art, I don’t ask questions, I just bask in it as long as I can.

I get a minute to stroll on my first morning, after I find myself denied entry to a full theater—I trusted an 8 AM screening to be easy to access; rookie mistake. The festival as a village is a worthy sight in its own right. Once a year, this small, seaside town becomes a concentrate of Paris, New York, Hong Kong, and other busy places with money. Nonchalant artists come into buildings and shops still exhaling their vape’s smoke, while fashionable people speed walk on the Promenade, a French word for a leisurely walk. I see more people than I can count pacing back and forth, multitasking during their important telephone business meetings. There is an entire ecosystem called the industry here to buy, not watch, films. Outside the Carlton, specifically the back doors, half-moon crowds of determined fans form in the hopes to see a celebrity emerge. A few meters away, Léo runs into Ari Aster, whose unobtrusive face and use of wired earphones make him blend in anonymously with the crowd. It’s a strange experience to be at the center of it all. I make a mental note that it’s important for artists to live in big, bustling cities. This way, they are constantly reminded of what they are up against. Despite all of this, Cannes residents remain friendly.

Time allows you to squeeze in five films per day, if you’re lucky and brave, and if you’re astute enough to book screenings in buildings in the same vicinity. Regardless, you’re bound to spend your days alternating between dark, air-conditioned theaters and the blindingly sunny and effervescent Croisette. From harrowing social dramas (Case 137, Adam’s Sake) to socialite hedonism (yacht parties, to witness or partake in), or from Stalin’s Great Terror (Two Prosecutors) to shrieking crowds at the sight of Pedro Pascal’s right shoulder outside the Eddington premiere, all in speedy alternation, Cannes is not for the epileptic.

Having walked the red steps, it’s time to slowly wean off the Croisette at the end of Day 2—I’ve booked a screening at the Cineum, one of the few cinemas too distant from the city center to arrive at by foot. After a 6 euro veggie wrap consisting of greens and corn, I take the bus with a crowd of festival-goers and irritated locals, which inevitably gets stuck in traffic. We get there too late to be let in, but stay for the open bar event an hour later. I drink three or four Campari Spritzes on a stomach full of lettuce and meet about a dozen people, of which a non-negligible percentage is Americans abroad for the first time (what a baptism!). I let my jaw relax into a French accent to assert territory. There’s free Cannes festival posters, and I come away, pleased, with 1974.

At this point, I’ve slept seven hours over three nights, and I feel locked the fuck in. If the festival felt like a simulation before, now it’s a collective hallucination where nothing exists but compulsively refreshing the ticketing website and the silver screen. Stubbornly married to its decadence, Cannes will do everything to make you forget the world beyond its sparkling glass dome. I come out of Sound of Falling shaken and moved to tears. Hoping to collect myself enough to write all my thoughts down, stepping out of the Agnès Varda theater I am instead once again assailed by heat, sunlight, hustlers, and cameras pointed in all directions. In that moment, fiction has bled outside the frame and into a world that feels just as unreal. Looking around, it’s hard to believe it’s May 2025. It’s as if the darker the times, the brighter the theme park. Whatever made cinema once synonymous with escapist fantasy has been translated into the detached bubble of the elite, with reality and its horrors conveniently kept within the boundaries of an 1.85:1 aspect ratio. If at all.

Day 3, when the name of the game for a lot of people is to queue all day to hope to get into Eddington, I adopt the strategy of booking back-to-back screenings in the Cineum. No queuing, no sunlight, no rushing, no glamour. I’m happy as a clam. I cry in front of La Misteriosa Mirada del Flamenco and dry up in front of Qui Brille au Combat. Fatih Akin’s Amrum is described by someone on Letterboxd as “Nazi kid doing side quests,” and there is in fact something whimsical about the protagonist’s naive mission to make his mother happy by collecting the necessary items for some honey and butter on white bread, à la Hitler Animal Crossing. Though I can understand the qualms about “yet another Nazi film,” I have qualms about yet another fascist take-over, and parallels don’t seem superfluous at this time.

With the luxury of seeing films almost no one has seen before, I go into most theaters blind, fed nothing but word-of-mouth recommendations from other festival-goers, like people must have done before, making the promise of a good film hushed, precious gossip. I also run the risk of walking into what I think is a film and ends up being a conference. Like Boundarika, who expected a talk about the film How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies and found herself among entrepreneurs looking to, literally, make millions. Some nights, when we walk up the hill back home, we tell each other films we saw from start to finish. Other nights, this isn’t necessary, because we’ve all just come out of the same film, like Dalloway, which unanimously leaves us in wide-eyed disbelief at its mediocrity. We bump into people outside who confirm the sinking feeling that came over them five minutes in. There’s always something jolly about the opportunity to hate something French, together. 

When the time for our last midnight screening Sons of the Neon Night comes, I’ve forfeited all pride. At the sight of the first grayscale images wherein stylish, moody men shoot everything on sight, I snuggle up into my seat, non-verbally communicating that I am not to be awoken. Half an hour later, my roommates are snickering and I open my eyes: a third of the theatre has been emptied, and clusters of people keep heading towards the exit. We debate whether to also leave this plotless display of high production value for which we deprived ourselves of much needed rest, but stick it out. The cast and crew are in the room. 

I keep worrying I won’t remember all these films properly. With the chaos of the festival and the saturation of images, it’s hard to both write thoughtful reviews and be in the moment. I remember Juliette Binoche’s words and choose to focus my attention on the present. Anyway, I’m skeptical of my brain’s ability to solidify anything when I haven’t accessed REM sleep all week. But if anything is burned into my retina, it is the French Riviera’s sun or the camera flashes. I watched a dozen films in three days, and came away sunburnt. 

Torrential by Zach Mackenzie

It rained Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Cameron hated the way it collected on his glasses. He never carried the right cloth with him to wipe the droplets off. He had a box of them at home, somewhere. Each one individually wrapped in the kind of plastic that was filling the sea.

He hopped out of his car and dashed across the parking lot, sloshing his soggy sneakers through deep puddles. A stream of shoppers pushed past him, shaking their umbrellas dry at his knees. Cameron tugged the corner of his t-shirt and wiped his lenses. The water spread into a greasy smear, worse than if he had done nothing at all.

The list was short. A can of beans for soup, a bag of frozen fruit (any), whatever produce looked alright, enough toilet paper for the weekend, and a large bag of coffee. The others were bringing most of the groceries. Everything pickled, humanely slaughtered, or hand-dug out of the ground north and west of the city.

Shoppers accumulated behind him as he attempted to yank a cart from the carrel with two hands. He struggled for just a moment. A man’s long arms reached over to shake the cart loose, as if he was helping. His sleeves brushed the top of Cameron’s head.

Long Arms was probably expecting a gesture of appreciation, but Cameron said nothing, did not look up. The cart popped free. He rolled inside.

Adriana had called to invite him after he muted the group chat. “Where’ve you been? Are you alright?” Around, yeah. Just too busy to keep up with the messages.

She had shrugged, or laughed, or maybe asked him what he was up to, but he couldn’t remember which it was because then she was talking about a long weekend in someone’s family’s cabin. Peak leaves, yadda yadda. Everyone else has signed up for meals, can I put you down for Sunday lunch?

He wasn’t busy, but he couldn’t think of another reason to say no.

Across the world, cities were being burned, people crushed, openly obliterated in the cruelest of ways. All around him, people continued about their days. He watched them in disbelief as they buzzed around. The store was small enough that even when it wasn’t busy, someone was rubbing up against you, reaching for a pear or rice cereal that you were unknowingly blocking. Cameron stood motionless near the entry, slack-jawed and eyes sunken. He watched as the shoppers searched for unblemished produce, examining berries, bags of potatoes, apples, and checking lettuce for brown spots. Watched them toss the moldy and unwanted back. His fists tightened around the cart’s handle, knuckles whitening.

He suddenly felt a thump, which shook his attention away down towards his feet. A child, loose from its caregivers, spun into Cameron’s leg. They looked up at Cameron with a tight face, eyes full of tears. He patted their head and began to look around. “Who are you here with?” he asked as the child began to silently cry, their mouth producing squealing whimpers.

As soon as Cameron made eye contact with her, the child’s mother ripped them away with a single tug. “I told you to stay with me,” she snapped, never once looking back at Cameron.

He skipped the produce section and headed straight for the center of the store. Best to leave the vegetables for the end, so as not to bury them.

Adriana was taking an evening train from the city. Cameron would pick her up at the station and drive them the rest of the way to the cabin, about an hour or so. He checked his watch and then his phone. No messages. She said she would text when she was on her way, but maybe she forgot.

He looped the aisles and filled his cart. He had left the house too early.

You should eat something, Michael would have said. He should eat something. He had a full breakfast: oatmeal with fruit and honey, turkey sausage, black coffee. But that was hours ago. Yesterday, Aunt Helene had called and told him that she was fasting for peace in the Middle East. The Pope ordered it.

“I said, I don’t know what my not eating is going to do for anyone else, but I’ll try it. I was fine for a while. I usually don’t eat anything until around nine anyhow. Well 9:30 rolls around and my stomach is talking to me so I go to reach for the fridge and then I stop as soon as I grab the handle. I just stand there instead, squeezing that handle as hard as I can. I do it again at noon and one and two. Every time I felt hunger, I prayed. I prayed until it became as perpetual as the grumble in my stomach.” Cameron pictured her in her kitchen, grasping the phone receiver with two hands, which was silly because she didn’t have a landline phone anymore, and the kitchen he was imagining was his grandmother’s. She covered the speaker to cough. “I think I’ll do it again tomorrow.”

So he wasn’t fasting, but he wasn’t exactly eating, either.

He checked his watch, checked his phone. Pushed his cart over to Prepared Foods.

Salmon maki, tuna salad, whole wheat wraps filled with limp greens, sealed in cellophane and stamped with yesterday’s date. Cameron stood back a bit, peeking his head between the shoulders of the post-gym crowd. They formed a solid row, shifting one by one as they plucked a container off the shelf, examined its caloric contents, and set it down again. Onto the next. He stuck an arm through a gap between two bodies and pulled a curried chicken sandwich from the case. A woman turned her head and stared. He must have grazed her with the container.

“Sorry,” he mouthed, before joining the checkout line.

The bill came to just under $40. He packed everything in two brown paper bags and rolled them over to a cafe table by the window. Adriana would probably insist on splitting gas for the ride to the cabin. She was good like that.

He thought about calling Helene. He’d eat his sandwich first. The thing about curried chicken salad is that it made him want a coffee - paper cup, no lid. It reminded him of the cafe he used to work at where he had to mix the stuff in giant stainless steel bowls. Pre-cooked frozen chicken, chunks of lifeless, dry, cubes of meat, salvaged only by the greasy slicks of mayo and yellow curry powder, cumin, coriander. He’d eat his lunch at 10am, apron on, sitting on top of an upside down 5 gallon pickle bucket: chicken salad and red onion on rye, hot coffee.

He took a bite. The sandwich was more texture than taste.

The shoppers pushed their way through the checkout lines. They made small talk. Cashiers asked how their days were going. If they liked this or that brand of cracker, ice cream, paper plate, candy bar.

“Is it still raining?” the cashiers asked, though they could see that it was through the large windows behind them.

“Oh yeah. You’re lucky you’re in here,” the shoppers said. “We have more stores to go to - out in all this rain.”

Cameron’s phone buzzed in his pocket, three times in a row. He had to stand up a bit to dig it out. Pants too tight. Adriana’s train was delayed. He clenched the sides of his phone and pushed it down on the table without responding. 

A group took over the table behind him. They wrenched their chairs out, squeezing by Cameron as they took their seats. One of them knocked him with an elbow, didn’t notice the impact, or at least they didn’t acknowledge it. Just then, a heat started building inside of him. It started in his chest, shaking as it grew up to his ears and down to his toes. It opened his mouth and started shouting “ALL OF YOU ARE SICK. ALL OF YOU.”

He could hear the shouting, but he wasn’t sure where it was coming from. He felt his hands pulling at the top of his head, or maybe they were someone else’s. A crowd started gathering not quite next to him, but nearby. Their eyeballs accelerated the heating.

But nearly as soon as it had started, it stopped. Cameron’s mouth shut. He took a breath in through his nose and looked around before picking up the remains of his sandwich, tossing them in the trash, and walking back to his car.

The windows were fogged up from the rain. He had nowhere to go but home now, bags packed for the weekend. He turned the car on and let it heat up as he pulled a cigarette from his pack, opening the window just a crack to let the smoke out.

He must have shut his eyes for just a moment. The tap on the driver’s side window shook him awake. His cigarette was out, ashes on his lap. He brushed them to the floor and squinted at the stranger beside him. 

“Are you okay?”

For a moment, he thought it was Michael. They had the same build: broad shoulders, square chest, filled in everywhere. But this person was wearing a name tag, and they had a carabiner with a dozen keys dangling from their belt loop. 

“My manager asked me to make sure you’re not having a crisis or something.”  

Cameron sat up straighter in his seat. “Yeah, I’m okay.” 

The clerk smiled and placed a hand on the roof of Cameron’s car. “Cool. I’m glad. Hey, sorry to ask, but do you have another cigarette?” 

He nodded and reached for his pack in the center console. As he was fumbling to pull one out, the passenger door opened and the clerk slipped inside. 

“Is this alright? I’m not supposed to smoke in front of customers. Health food, you know?” 

The clerk looked younger up close. Cameron had probably at least ten years on them. He fished his lighter out of his pocket and leaned over them, cupping the air around the flame. They sat in silence for a moment. Cameron cracked the passenger side window open. 

“Sorry I was acting crazy in there,” Cameron said. 

“Doesn’t matter to me. That store is full of lunatics.” The clerk paused to exhale. “Not that you’re one, I mean. Well maybe you are, I don’t know. But I mean the people who just walk around oblivious to anyone or anything outside of themselves. People come in here and drop wild money on food for their whiny ass kids and bark at me when I pack their eggs wrong or something. I’m so sick of it.” 

“I can only imagine.” 

“It’s nuts, man.” The clerk started fidgeting with the radio, turning the volume way up. “I love this song,” they said as they drummed at their knees with their hands. 

Cameron wondered what would happen if he put the car into reverse with this clerk in his passenger seat. He checked the time. He had another 45 minutes until the train would arrive. He ran the scenario through his mind. Pulling into a dark corner of the parking lot, scrambling to the backseat, taking the clerk into his hands and mouth. He wondered what the clerk’s belly would feel like if he laid his head on it and shut his eyes. 

He reached for his cigarettes again, barely brushing the clerk’s thigh in the process. But they were already opening the door, already saying thank you, take care. See you around next time maybe. He watched as they jogged back towards the store, propping their hood up to protect themself from the rain. 

Through the bright windows, it almost looked cozy inside there. Dry and warm, an abundance of organized nourishment. A trick of the eye, like when you catch a glimpse of other people’s living rooms walking by on a winter night. The nothing-specialness of company on a Sunday evening, laughter around a long table, projected out onto the street for passersby.

Within a few hours, he’d take his dear friends by the hands, look into their eyes, and smile. Someone would open a bottle of wine and pour a glass for everyone, every last drop. They’d ask him how he’s been, avoiding any mention of Michael. The murmur of being together would fill the room, intoxicating them, washing over the differences that time had dug between them. They’d stay up late. Too late. When the last of them would call it a night, Cameron would take his things up to the bedroom at the far end of the hall and flop down into the stiff twin bed in the clothes he wore all day. 

In the morning, he’d return to his car to look for his phone charger. He’d let it die overnight. Hungover and hoarse, he’d rifle through the collection of forgotten things on the floor until he’d stumble upon it. A note, scrawled on the back of his grocery receipt. A phone number and a request.

But until then, he’d sit in this parking lot, close his eyes again, and try to wait out the rain. 

Review of The Annihilation of Fish (1999): On the quotidian and the humane by Adrianna Michell | Instagram

The Annihilation of Fish, directed by the pioneering filmmaker Charles Burnett, is perhaps most notable for its distribution history, or lack thereof. After premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, a 1999 review in Variety lambasted the film to such a degree that it failed to gain distribution, forcing Fish into hiding for over two decades. It’s almost charming, a history like this: it reminds us of a bygone time when gossip rags could make or break a film and “the film critic” signaled both a sustainable livelihood and a status as tastemaker—in this case, to disastrous effect. Now Fish, like its central characters, has a second chance at life with a new 4k restoration by UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation. And if cinephiles have held a candle for Fish as long and as fiercely as its character Poinsettia has for her long-dead Puccini (yes, that Puccini), then they will be rewarded by a film that is so well-crafted, so singular, that it earns its event-status. 

That we might lament what could have been if only Fish had been given its due 20 years ago is, likewise, the affective register of the movie: what could have been, if only. The film operates nostalgically as each character reckons with the consequences of a lost future. No longer young and full of promise, the future lacks the glimmering sheen of possibility that it once held.

Fish opens upon a 70-something James Earl Jones sitting in a church in New York. Jones plays the buttoned-up Obadiah Johnson—or “Fish” as he prefers to be called—who, as soon as we’ve met him, begins to fight his demons—quite literally. A demonic force named Hank menaces Fish daily, locking the man into a Sisyphean wrestling match against an invisible challenger. Fish’s convulsive attack leads to his institutionalization, which the film leaves as an ellipsis. Soon after we meet Poinsettia, played by Lynn Redgrave, who contrasts Fish’s tender and methodical qualities with her boisterous and exuberant personality. The two are opposed in every way: Fish’s ironed clothes stand against Poinsettia’s flowing silks; Fish’s silence amplifies Poinsettia’s loud, off-key wailing; Fish is a Jamaican man and Poinsettia is a white woman. 

But since The Annihilation of Fish plays into Hollywood genre conventions—though helmed by Ur-independent LA filmmaker Charles Burnett—they do as opposites are wont to do: they attract. Fish is soon released from the institution and makes the trek to Los Angeles, the central location for Burnett’s oeuvre. As Fish leaves the other patients mournfully say their goodbyes in a brief but tender scene that establishes the humanity which will be afforded each character for the remainder of the film. People who are often forgotten or hard to love still remain loveable, and are lovingly rendered by Burnett. 

Based on a screenplay by novelist Anthony C. Winkler, The Annihilation of Fish performs a tonal feat, walking the line between comedy and melodrama, sentimentality and farce. Under Burnett’s direction the film treats its characters with a sensitivity not at odds with its humor but afforded by it. Likewise, composer Laura Karpman’s exceptional score sonically captures the mood with lilting, countervailing notes that seesaw between tragic and epiphanic. Redgrave and Jones’s uncanny performances should alienate the audience, but somehow, whether by virtue of their earnest delivery or Burnett’s thorough construction of a strange but lifelike world, become familiar, even comforting. 

Burnett gives the same treatment to Poinsettia who, admittedly, is much harder to feel affection for than the sweet and gentle Fish. Poinsettia drinks heavily and is desperately in love with the ghost of composer Giacomo Puccini. She screeches out his arias and murmurs sweet nothings in the ear of her unseen lover, whom she wants to marry more than anything. After two chapels refuse to marry the half-apparent pair, Poinsettia flees to the same LA boarding house at which Fish has just happened to arrive. The old house is managed by Mrs. Muldroone (with an “e” at the end, as she would remind you), played by Margot Kidder, the third character in the film’s trio—unless of course you count Hank and Puccini. The Victorian house’s faded wallpaper, much like Poinsettia’s dusty silk robes, indexes a bygone decadence aspired to but never achieved. Yet with the arrival of Poinsettia and Fish, the house comes alive once more. 

So begins a cycle of quiet care. Poinsettia goes out drinking, mourning her lost love and lost youth, only to pass out in the shared hallway. The ever-hygienic Fish takes her in, worrying over her sleeping on the dirty floor. In the morning Poinsettia brings the racial undertones of the encounter to the fore by falsely suggesting Fish may have assaulted her to Mrs. Muldroone, who remains unsympathetic. Fish remarks on the violent history of miscegenation (“In Jamaica, a white woman would only be fed bread and water for a week if she kissed a Black man”), but the scene is couched within the genre’s upbeat quality that maintains a balance between social commentary and the characters’ growing affections. The pair eventually come together over day-long games of gin-rummy and Poinsettia’s role as “referee” between Fish and Hank. As they begin their love affair, they don’t deny their differences but find commonality in, as Poinsettia puts it, the fact that “We’re old.”  

On the surface Fish has little in common with Burnett’s other works. Yet take To Sleep with Anger (1990) for comparison: both treat unseen forces and folkloric practices with a degree of realism—that is, the film treats ghosts as actants, not delusion. In doing so, the films evince a fundamental compassion that goes beyond mimesis to insist upon humanity, generating a sort of realism of affect, if not realism qua reality.  

And both films demonstrate a commitment to the quotidian, focusing on the everyday experiences that make up a life. In Fish, the titular character ritualizes his daily fight with the unseen. Fish throws Hank out the window with encouragement from Poinsettia, and the tree below shakes from the impact when Fish does so. Burnett achieves an affective and thematic result from this astonishingly simple choice: on one level, visually denoting Hank’s impact is really funny. And even funnier with repetition. But on another level, it treats Hank as real and conveys how real he is for Fish. This brief gag provides the emotional scaffolding upon which the film will rely later on (particularly when Poinsettia shoots Hank). If not for the physical representation of Hank’s impact (pun intended) then the audience would be less equipped for an empathetic response to Fish’s despair in the event of loss.

In that sense, The Annihilation of Fish evinces part of Burnett’s central ethos. In “Inner City Blues,” Burnett articulates that a “story has the effect of allowing us to comprehend things we cannot see”: those uncomfortable and ecstatic feelings, the messy and ad hoc relationships we form and sustain each day.  And if one successfully represents the unseen, then “film can be a form of experience, and what is essential is to understand that one has to work on how to be good, compassionate. One has to approach it like a job.” One has to throw their demons out the window each day. And if annihilated, one must find a way back to themselves through the hard work of quotidian forgiveness. 

Burnett seems to argue that to direct with sensitivity, to create truly empathetic art, one must treat the fantastical as real and the real as fantastical. The leaves must shake because we must feel that, at least for Fish, his demon is real. And from that subtle choice the film’s entire spirit arrives: a bright compassionate story of real love and loss, refracted through two haunted characters. 

Fish eventually finds his way back to Poinsettia because, well of course he does—I mean, the film is, at bottom, a romantic comedy. But by mobilizing genre expectations, the film heightens how the couple reunite (since we need not worry about the if). Poinsettia and Fish only reconnect once Fish’s commitment to Hank is affirmed. Though she cannot account for why Fish might desire his daily wrestling match—a ritual akin to cruel optimism—Poinsettia must reconcile with this desire to reconcile with her lover. The film asks Poinsettia to accept that even if you love someone, you may not fully understand them. In fact, perhaps you cannot understand those you love, since there may always be some inaccessible part of them that belongs to them. Burnett reflects these limits of understanding formally, as does the screenplay: characters often speak in parabolic phrases, taking a circuitous route to communicating meaning. But a lack of understanding need not preclude love. The film proposes that the most loving act is to cross the borderlands of understanding; to love another you don’t have to believe what they do: you simply have to believe in their belief.  

Burnett reflects these limits of understanding formally, as does the screenplay. As a result, you can’t quite access what certain things mean, but you can access how they feel. And so, The Annihilation of Fish instructs us to love life, love loving, have sex and like it, have sex with your aging body, be crazy, feel the passion for an invisible lover so deeply, be so consumed by it, that you sing opera (badly) in the streets. Feel it all, feel it intensely, be open to life in all its ordinary rhythms and misadventures.  

I saw Fish at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) this past February. In the Q&A that followed, Burnett turned each question into a reminiscence. He found a way to talk about his old producers, friends, people who worked on the film in some way. It was as if the thematic and formal questions of the film were only answerable for Burnett through the story of the past and the people that inhabited it. Likewise, Fish is more concerned with people than with verisimilitude or straightforward answers. It’s people who give meaning to the past, that give us future purpose. Upon leaving the theatre my cheeks hurt from smiling. I think that concomitant ache and ecstasy is a fitting response to the film.

Wisdom as a Sword: The Modern Feminist Plight Needs Speculative Fiction by Samantha Roche | Website | Substack | Instagram

I remember anxiously breastfeeding my newborn daughter in the Australian summer of 2019, bushfires raging across the country. I was covered in milk and tears, and the sky was relentlessly dark. Even though everything in my body was unfamiliar, it felt more comfortable to me than the frightening reality beyond the window. We were stuck indoors — no knowledge of when the ash clouds would stop, when the air would be safe to breathe again, or what we’d be left with after the apocalypse. I usually turn to novels to escape, but since that fiery December, my books have read like road maps.

Comprehending the climate crisis and a future for our children can be debilitating, and as democracies fail before our eyes, it's hard to know who to turn to for support. It takes devoted practice to create safe spaces, while simultaneously keeping anxiety at bay. I think it’s why authors use their craft to challenge different containers for critical conversations. It’s much more inviting to push dialogue in fiction, as opposed to debating keyboard warriors online. Important ideas lose curiosity and care when conflict is personified in echo chambers, and wicked problems are impossible to talk about with nuance if segregation is deeply embodied. So how do we shape-shift together, embracing others as one of us? How do we continue the feminist plight and loosen our grip on isolating ideology? Is there a way back to talking and connecting? To authentically access different positions of history, power, privilege, culture, class, lived experience, and intersectionality, we require relationships. And relationships are almost impossible to sustain if we’re fixated on personal destruction. 

When our social and technological landscapes are saturated with rivalry, it’s almost expected to feel lonely. But we must not forget, some of the safest confidants are science fiction authors. They’ve been writing thought experiments for decades. When Australian author Tim Winton is mad—at fossil capitalism, environmental degradation, corporate corruption—he uses the pen as his sword, and he battles ideas, not people. His latest novel Juice examines the interaction between humiliation and justice, humility and loyalty, morality and hope, and he frames his question using the word ‘juice’ to convey multidimensional themes: energy, fuel, motivation, courage, and so much more: No more juice in the tank for the journey. Do you have the juice to hold them accountable? 

Instead of direct critique on individual monsters, speculative fiction takes an imaginative lunge. The most valuable provocations are those that turn away from nihilism, and toward honourable relationships. In an essay Winton wrote for The Monthly, he stated that Juice was written to “contribute a ripple to the rising wave of moral indignation and action that’s rolling through our communities.” His writing isn’t a stab at corporate giants (although at first glance, it reads that way). Juice is a story about the dilemmas of passivity alongside social and environmental destruction, posing “a disturbance mighty enough to sweep away business as usual and seize the future from those who are right now, committing crimes against our children.” There are no clear answers, but what Juice alludes to is the moral weight of our generation, while examining self and the other with equal attention. When we choose accountability, we participate in a kind of moral imagining: to push, persuade, bend, and bother, until we’re closer to joining hands in the struggle. For Winton, his process is to help us to contemplate one of the most important relationships of our time: our shared humanity. Though our looming future in his fictional reality is disturbing, he offers a story of social foreboding. 

The familiar narrative about socialists versus billionaires can be much more playful and contemplative in the pages of fiction. Booker prize winner Eleanor Catton has also written a thrilling commentary on the schemas of politics and capitalism (and a guerilla gardening collective) in her novel, Birnam Wood. It’s not just a cautionary thriller — it’s a lesson in examining binaries. Her work is one where the social division is less obvious, and the characters are real and complex enough to mirror everyday social dilemmas. In an interview for the Guardian, Catton said she wanted to stop readers playing ‘the polarised blame game we are all used to in contemporary politics.’ She adds ‘you wouldn’t be able to say: these are my people so they are obviously the good guys. These are the people that I despise so they are obviously the bad guys.’ In the depths of despair, it’s more comfortable to follow the familiar tropes—fuck the patriarchy! fuck capitalism!— but what about the shared commitment to resist all the ways our ideologies are internalised? What can we say about the actions, decisions and behaviours that constrain us everyday? 

Compelling questions and radical thinking is not new territory for science fiction writers. Though our cataclysms feel looming, decades of critical thought must not be forgotten. Ursula K. Le Guin always tempts complex conversations, embracing something that feels closer to collective freedom. Would we rather live at the whim of hierarchy and superiority, or try practising harmony? Through Le Guin’s fantasy writing, science fiction, essays, and poetry, she poses critique of capitalism (The Dispossessed), gender binaries (The Left Hand of Darkness) and familial relationships (The Hainish Cycle). While social constructs and ideological constraints lure us into false norms, Le Guin helps us to comprehend a more just and radial reality. And we all know the world desperately needs more expansive thinking to overcome social binaries (not more corralling to echo chambers). 

There’s a difference between enacting ideas to communicate, and embodying ideas by proxy. If we’re absolving responsibility from thoughts, and people, and place, then we’re no better than the monsters in our dystopian novels. Sure, it’s momentarily satisfying to foster an echo chamber where thoughts and feelings will always be validated, but do we learn anything there? Speculative fiction holds an important cautionary tale for the modern feminist plight: what are the consequences of stepping aside from the world, as if we are not part of it?

Five years after the fires, my daughter and I now notice the eucalypts growing back, even though many will never recover. The charcoal limbs and desolate hills are remnants of a landscape that was once tumbling with life. My social and natural environments feel much closer to the worlds that Winton, Catton, and Le Guin created — perhaps more evidence that nihilism and naive optimism is failing. As we continue to use our intelligence to enact hierarchies over each other, I wonder, is collective liberation further along on this path? The apocalypse is upon us, and every feminist will need a map in and a map out.

Feeling Raw About It by Melynda Payne | Substack | Instagram

There’s a line from a movie I think about constantly. In the second act of Kill Bill - everyone’s favorite “post-feminist” Quentin Tarantino blockbuster - our unnamed protagonist played by Uma Thurman squints down at young Sarah, whose mother Thurman just killed, and says kindly, “When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it…I’ll be waiting.” In this moment, Sarah, behind the camera frame, is the audience, stunned by the blood spilled so suddenly, yet intrigued by the opportunity that presents itself. Enticed by the extension of vengeance, and in turn, a prolongation of the melodrama.

When the camera turns towards Sarah, the young Black girl whose mother was just killed, she is staring back at Thurman, rather nonchalantly. Much can be analyzed about Tarantino’s racial politics in this Martial Arts meets Western with shades of Blaxploitation, but Tarantino implies more in this dynamic than he could ever intentionally portray in his over-the-top canon. Sarah is the collateral damage to this white woman’s rage. Our beautiful blonde hero (this was before the days of the complex female anti-hero, when it was imperative that woman=good!), is the moral heart of this story and her moral objective is seeking revenge by any means necessary. Sarah’s rage is meant for another day, another sequel. Will that day ever come? Only if she’s still feeling raw about it.

This phrase, “if you still feel raw about it…” has rattled around in my brain since I first saw Kill Bill, when I was about 15. The lofty notion from our otherwise pragmatic protagonist - that one can ever grow up, past the rawness. Maybe it’s a hope for herself, to which she clings like a talisman. The white space that lies in Thurman’s pauses, drips with so much earnestness that one almost believes it.

But it is not just because of the masterfully directed and acted scene that I think about this line. Like Thurman, I hope dearly that the pain will trickle away. But I feel raw about everything. My pain, the pain of many other Black women before me and no doubt after, is more typically described as a burden like heavy baggage. But to me it feels sharp and constant, like a large swath of flesh skinned on the concrete. The opportunities that seem out of reach, the love that has been voided, the earned accomplishments treated like baselines - feel symptomatic of this wound. There is so much to be mad about, and it has simply  become our cross to bear. In her Substack, Madwoman and Muses, Angelica Jade Bastien ponders this quiet rage, “For as much as American culture loves to watch a previously exalted beautiful white woman mentally disintegrate in public, it considers suffering a black woman’s burden to bear in silence or she’s made into a flattened spectacle.” That’s the pain of oppression, one that isolates and shuns - this is also where the rawness manifests. And though there is some comfort to be taken in the collectiveness of that hurt, it doesn’t make it any less true. 

I grew up at a time that felt unintentionally curated by melodrama. SZA’s CTRL punctuated my life pining in dorms. Lana Del Rey’s ouvre soundtracked shifts at my minimum wage jobs. Lady Bird played at a movie theater during winter break. My sensitivities were deemed canonical, at least by my popular contemporaries. Yet, I always questioned: are these signals of cultural and emotional anxiety really supposed to cling to my brain as much as they do? Does my want of more in life, signify ambition - as I told myself soothingly - or does it represent a fundamental misalignment with what I needed versus what I would ever be able to get? 

One would imagine that my popular Black role models would help me clarify those questions, their voices connecting to me like an electric, disembodied nerve. But the void that oppression produces is undefined, saccharine, and perpetual. The cultural critic Greg Tate spent his entire career analyzing cultural aesthetics in relation to capitalism: “since the corporate class dominates symbolic production, art has become a capitalist comprador, out to protect commodity values rather than those of classical bourgeois culture.” Historically this classical Bourgeois culture has meant art for the sake of art. This could be painting because the land brings you tears, or writing an essay as a means to define yourself outside the capitalist grind. Post-structuralism, an embracing of multiple meanings to a text, is a useful tool in this contemporary age of art, one where art can mean those things, but is also a means to some sort of materialistic gain. Tate argues for further introspection into Black art and Black culture by explaining that we need “writings which ask hard questions about where our culture stands in history, what total liberation means to black people living now, and how black art can continue to express that desire for freedom.” So while my Black Role Models represent the dreams and joys of me and many other “madwomen,” it is dangerous to blindly attach oneself to their production, to their rawness.

“Love me even if it rain

Love me even if it pain you”

- SZA, (Garden) Say It Like Dat

Will the pink, unfettered edges of my sores ever scab over? I have thought about this many, many times. The rawness is hard when life feels stilted because of it. When the sky only reflects that darkness. But the depth of that pain I believe, at its very root, is the nexus of beauty. Bastien says this of the affliction: “But the beauty of surviving as a madwoman is in shaping your narrative with your own voice and your own desires rather than that being defined for you.”

When you can hear the shards of agony in Lauryn Hill’s tragic and angelic “I Gotta Find Peace of Mind.” When you laugh at Issa and Molly’s volatile and loving quips in Insecure. When you read and are first acquainted with painful consumption in Sharon G. Flake’s “The Skin I’m In” - then hope feels tangible. These visionaries have spun the melodrama into faith.

The rawness is vile and exhilarating. My life has consisted of moments that burn bright and then crash like a shooting star, and maybe I would do it all again, because now I know I can withstand it. I don’t want my purpose to just be defined by the pain that exists in me. But I do want it to be the defining of the Love that fights against it. 

Thank you for reading paloma, a monthly art and literature magazine. For information on submitting your work, please see the Submission Guide. You can find us on Instagram, and you can catch up on past issues here.

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