Or, perhaps, simply from my darker sensibilities.
Since I'm between jobs again, once I'm done with the morning's scanning of job listings (I can only spend so much time reading job descriptions till the words stop making sense), I find myself watching a lot of movies and TV.
Yesterday was not a banner day for me.
I started with Mike Flanagan's The Midnight Club. I've enjoyed every one of Flanagan's series on Netflix (the Haunting of Hill House, the Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass) and am definitely looking forward to what he does with the Fall of the House of Usher. So I figured I'd check out Midnight Club. I should have taken a cue from this for the rest of my day, but 10 minutes in I realized that watching a series about terminally ill teeanagers really wasn't cutting it for me. So I went looking elsewhere.
For some reason, I ended up watching Men after this. Not sure how this seemed like a good idea, but at least there weren't any terminal teens to worry about. Instead I got a rather demented look at the evils of the patriarchy, culminating in one of the most bizarre sequences I've seen in recent memory. (I'm not being dismissive about the theme here, just not interested in getting bogged down in discussions of it.) I found it a fascinating, but rather off-putting experience.
I segued from there to the 1973 The Wicker Man (let's face it... the less said about the Nic Cage 2006 remake, the better). Anyone familiar with both Men and the Wicker Man will see how that segue is not as arbitrary as it might seem, but who am I to share that with you here? Suffice to say, this one is equally damning toward men, in this case a central character who seems definitely deserving of his fate by the end (though that could be attributed to my lack of tolerance for foam-at-the-mouth Christians).
On a run here, beating me down with dying teens and reprehensible males, I tried checking out a relatively recent, modern retelling of Frankenstein. What I wasn't bargaining for was one of the most brutally horrific retellings of this I could imagine. I had to stop halfway in when I couldn't bear what was being inflicted on the monster. I will likely revisit this one later to see how it ends, but I was not in the right headspace yesterday to finish that journey.
At that point, I was persuaded to take a break from my excursion into the dark side and went out to the kitchen to start making dinner. That's when I realized just how much my viewing had messed with my head and my mood and realized I needed to get away from myself. I turned on Galaxy Quest and enjoyed the rest of my evening.
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