Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun, 2026)

[The Narrator Returns]

Jane Schoenbrun's next film will be titled Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which they reportedly described as being a cross between Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Friday the 13th. Additionally, they told Gregg Araki that it will be

all about sex—essentially a movie about learning to enjoy sex after transition. Pre-transition, it wasn’t that I was asexual—I had plenty of desire—but having good sex in the wrong body was impossible. What was available was full dissociation, which is obviously a theme in the first two films. … This is literally what my next movie is about, learning to enjoy sex. Just a fun movie about learning how to overcome sexual trauma and stop dissociating during queer sex.

This will shoot this summer with a release next year from Mubi, and it stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson.

[Never Cursed]

Jane Schoenbrun's next film will be titled Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which they reportedly described as being a cross between Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Friday the 13th. Additionally, they told Gregg Araki that it will be

all about sex—essentially a movie about learning to enjoy sex after transition. Pre-transition, it wasn’t that I was asexual—I had plenty of desire—but having good sex in the wrong body was impossible. What was available was full dissociation, which is obviously a theme in the first two films. … This is literally what my next movie is about, learning to enjoy sex. Just a fun movie about learning how to overcome sexual trauma and stop dissociating during queer sex.

This will shoot this summer with a release next year from Mubi, and it stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson.

This sounds great. I am begging them to come up with literally any other title for the thing.

[The Narrator Returns]

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

I'm beginning to get the sense that Jane Schoenbrun is quite the Videodrome fan.

[bdsweeney]

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

I'm beginning to get the sense that Jane Schoenbrun is quite the Videodrome fan.

Despite not being as fond of I Saw the TV Glow as many were, this looks pretty fun.

Anyone recognise which Blue Nile/Paul Buchanan song that is? Shazam isn’t helping.

[Finch]

I thought the font used for the cast and crew names as well as "Coming To Theaters Soon" was the same used for Twin Peaks.

[Matt]

Oddly, the trailer seems to have disappeared from the EW site linked, so here it is on YouTube.

I thought the font used for the cast and crew names as well as "Coming To Theaters Soon" was the same used for Twin Peaks.

Oh, definitely. Schoenbrun proudly wears her influences on her sleeve and is a huge "Twin Peaks" fan. And apart from the clear references to Lynch and Cronenberg and the Friday the 13th series, there's a reference to A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors with the punk outfit/mohawk wig.

[cantinflas]

Anyone recognise which Blue Nile/Paul Buchanan song that is? Shazam isn’t helping.

Seems that's because it's a new song created for the film called Pain Is the Heart of Love

Singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Alex G (aka Alex Giannascoli) has composed the original score for Jane Schoenbrun’s upcoming horror feature Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. He has also collaborated with The Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan on an original song (Pain Is the Heart of Love), which is featured in the first teaser trailer

[Never Cursed]

Won the Queer Palm at Cannes!

[Noiretirc]

Jane Schoenbrun's next film will be titled Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which they reportedly described as being a cross between Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Friday the 13th. Additionally, they told Gregg Araki that it will be

This will shoot this summer with a release next year from Mubi, and it stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson.

This sounds great. I am begging them to come up with literally any other title for the thing.

I jumped to this thread precisely because of the title!

[brundlefly]

Oddly, the trailer seems to have disappeared from the EW site linked, so here it is on YouTube.

I thought the font used for the cast and crew names as well as "Coming To Theaters Soon" was the same used for Twin Peaks.

Oh, definitely. Schoenbrun proudly wears her influences on her sleeve and is a huge "Twin Peaks" fan. And apart from the clear references to Lynch and Cronenberg and the Friday the 13th series, there's a reference to A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors with the punk outfit/mohawk wig.

Trailer.

[The Narrator Returns]

The Cannes reactions made it sound pretty distinct (if naturally building) from TV Glow in ways the trailers still seem to be hiding in favor of that same vibe, I would not have guessed from them that this is by accounts an out-and-out comedy in addition to everything else. It’s probably better when I feel confident a trailer isn’t showing me the whole movie.

[The Narrator Returns]

I saw this last night and can confirm it’s out-and-out goofy like the trailers do their very best to hide, and looking at the cast list will give you a good idea of that (my favorite is Kevin McDonald not dialed down at all from an average Kids in the Hall sketch). I laughed quite a bit and once again found a lot of truth in the Schoenbrunian ideas about how our favorite art becomes extensions of ourselves; one big scene is about getting a movie’s iconography stuck in your head until it becomes a mental music video for an “uncool” song you love, which may not resonate for you but sure does for me. The whole is a stranger beast than TV Glow or World’s Fair, making the metaphors less metaphorical than ever but with that hammer clarity muddled into dots only a particular movie loser could connect (said affectionately and as a self-diagnosis, though it’s more of an issue that I don’t care about slashers than it was with creepypastas or Buffy). I look forward to August when I can try to sort out this combo of troubling ache, blatant and moving wish fulfillment, and sour satire that it all but admits is out-of-date. And I certainly look forward to hearing the final needledrop again, which calls back to a throwaway line from TV Glow to sum things up clearer than Schoenbrun does.

[albucat]

Glad to hear it. I read Jane's book and it's kinda just TV Glow 2.0 for about 80% of its story, which gave me some worries about Camp Miasma. I'd love to see something much stranger than that.

[The Narrator Returns]

I was also worried about this being a retread and, whether you're into what it's doing or not, it's setting its own path while still being recognizably theirs. It feels like a bit of a response to how quickly their style hardened into the generic "Schoenbrunian", and I'm not surprised the book might be the trend towards self-parody that prompted this outright parody.

[Lowry_Sam]

I (regrettably) passed on this a few weeks ago when it closed Frameline (SF LGBTQ film fest), I figured I could spare myself $30 just to see it at The Castro a month or so early (I was getting annoyed with the renovations by the end of the festival which makes the theater noisier). No matter how weird it is I doubt I will find it worse than Rose Of Nevada which I went to instead (and my first walkout in years).

[Never Cursed]

"So what?" is the phrase I kept repeating to myself as this dragged on, presenting banal truths and half-formed pop-cultural observations as secret knowledge. Why is it impressive that this film, or the characters in this film, can accurately discuss the tools of filmmaking ("that's a split diopter shot", Hannah Einbinder says, after about ten seconds of the most obvious split diopter shot since de Palma gave up the ghost)? What do the endless namechecked or alluded references to other movies (Sleepaway Camp, Videodrome, Sunset Boulevard) or the parade of cameos (Sarah Sherman, Quintessa Swindell, Patrick Fischler, Eva Victor sporting an insane haircut, Louise Weard as "Queer Assistant", that one guy from The Kids In The Hall) mean? What does it matter that Schoenbrun can present, dutifully, as if fulfilling an obligation, a list of the problematic aspects of slasher films or the making thereof? Yes, they can be so homophobic, and transphobic, and sexist; yes, they function by depicting violence against youthful victims, frequently comely young women in states of undress, using phallic instruments that symbolize adolescent libidinal desire and the approach of sexual maturity. Yes, they have always been made by money-grubbing businessmen and corporations that care about profit over artistic significance (as have all Hollywood movies). But so what if Schoenbrun cannot string these occurrences and modes of analysis into a coherent story or a capacious aesthetic approach? Camp Miasma is a vacant film, lacking a real narrative or much to offer an audience that isn't somehow with Schoenbrun already. Very little happens, and the film spends long stretches of time on pastiches of slashers and their tropes after having already proved its ability to deconstruct them. There is no allegorical meaning in or powerful conclusion to Schoenbrun's dark fable, only a cloudy recounting of their sexual maturation through art. Schoenbrun's passionate cinephilia is evident and sincere, but awkward and hollow in the absence of any function but reference to idiosyncratic interpretation and growth. Their film is very literate and intertextual, but equates referencing and applying this knowledge. They have come out swinging hard in favor of "the movies" (the film's other constantly-recurring aesthetic is a slavish devotion to symbols of movies themselves, a reverential glee at filming VHS covers, video rental stores, film reels, movie posters, DVD cases and players that they hasten to add are just so old, dust-covered, and decrepit...), but they disavow film's power to do more than bring two people together.

Let me be the first to claim that Schoenbrun is capable of doing more than this. I Saw The TV Glow was just as thunderingly obvious and particular to Schoenbrun's life experience as Camp Miasma, but it worked on other, more interesting levels. It sustained a bleak tone without ever succumbing to misery porn or self-pity and made a specific kind of self-denial (refusing to acknowledge one's transness) universally comprehensible and relatable. The prison in which Justice Smith's character has trapped himself sparks self-recognition in most introspective viewers; I Saw The TV Glow is such a painful and successful work because of that powerful cringe response. If Camp Miasma's purpose is to discuss becoming sexually comfortable in a new or newly-changing body, it is far too particular and immature to work in the same way. Its central juxtaposition of orgasm and death, the petite mort with The Big Sleep, is as old hat as the slashers that used it as an aesthetic device, and the literalism with which these themes are invoked (the villain is named "Little Death", the in-universe film is credited to one "Ray Blanchard" in a movie with a graphic description of autogynephilia) makes it more difficult for a general audience to apply the lessons of the film to their own lives. Why make a movie about the allegorical power of movies to influence our own lives and then make it literal and particular and only accessible to people who have already accessed it?

Or maybe the problem is just me. I've felt as out-of-sync with "relevant" movies as I ever have this year; there isn't that much that has made me want to go out to the theater and see new work, and a lot of big populist hits (the torturous Speed Racer being the most egregious example) fell flat when I caught up to them, as though everyone who had seen the movie and written about it had watched a different, more fun version of the film than the one I had just seen. If I were just less uptight, would the dumb "Little Death" joke work for me? I don't know, something about hating the experience of watching this movie got to me on a level worse than just the disappointment it inspired.

[Mr Sausage]

The film has such a particular tone and style that if it doesn't gel with you I imagine the thing will feel intolerable no matter what it's doing. So this may never be a movie you'll like. But I think I can defend it as not being vacant.

The movie is collapsing numerous distinctions (binaries...get it?), and the most important one is between conceptual and immediate. A trope it's parodying is when a intellectual-type is too in their own head, so the movie has to break them out of that habit and get them to commit to 'life' in some immediate, in-the-moment sense. Except here, the main character isn't taught to break out of her intellectualizing distance and embrace immediacy, but discovers her authentic self by embracing intellectualized distance as a form of immediacy, becoming a subject through becoming an object, seeing the art she adores not as a displacement for direct feeling but as the only language through which to conceive of and therefore experience feelings. The movie gets that love and sex have both physical and conceptual aspects, and it makes that both Einbinder's personal realization as well as the overall guiding aesthetic. One of the reasons the film so joyously enumerates all the tangible particulars of movie love is plain fetishization, especially in its sexual aspect. Fetishization itself is both immediate, the worship of specific details carefully observed, and conceptual, as worship by nature contains a heavily intellectualized element: it needs an idea to thrive. The film is being fetishistic.

The touchstone here is Cattet and Forzani, whose project is very similar, involving fetishized object worship whose extremity ends up pulling apart, analyzing, and reconceptualizing the conceptual basis of genre film's own fetishized visual language, while also luxuriating in the very tactile physical and sonic worlds of those films. The pair are both participants in and observers of the kinds of Eurotrash genre films they adore, so their films avoid both didacticism and mere recapitulation, becoming a third thing. Their project is more classically feminist than Schoenbrun's movie, which is more...intersectional? But they're both using quite different styles and registers to explore a similar collapse of subject and object in the movies, to examine love and sex at its most fetishistic through sudden shifts in perspective. Schoenbrun incorporates the perspective shifts more directly in terms of the drama, while Cattet and Forzani make it purely formal, but there is a similar sense of displacement and refraction within very immediate filmic worlds.

Camp Miasma's founding concept is the playful idea that art dreams us rather than vice versa, which is just another way of saying that our access to reality, including the nature of ourselves, comes through the languages we have devised in order to express it. Filmic language is not a mere representation of reality but a mode of accessing it, since how can we engage with an aspect of reality unless we're aware of it because it's been named, ie. conceptualized and delineated? For Schoenbrun evidently, many important aspects of the world were first experienced through the films they watched. Despite being 'problematic' (unlike you I found the scene cataloguing the series' various sins to be deeply funny and knowing, a joke both on the problematic 80s and leftist critique tendencies) Schoenbrun doesn't try either to reject or correct slashers, they embrace them as the wider language in which people from her generation especially understood themselves and their environment. There are troubling aspects to this, eg. the unabashed sex and violence, but the movie embraces the conscious participation in many of those troubling aspects as joyous, freeing, and expressive. I found this moving in an age of public shunnings and moral rejections, and applaud Schoenbrun in bucking expectations by being an outwardly progressive filmmaker willing to have a complex, positive experience with material they might be expected to cancel.

Again, I don't want to persuade you to like the movie as the film's wavelength is so peculiar, but I'm hoping this shows how the movie isn't merely the filmmaker indulging in their own private fixations, that there's more going on here, and that it is generalizable.

[Never Cursed]

I appreciate your taking the time out to write this, even if I think the movie (perhaps unintentionally) is doing different things than you describe. I haven't seen a Cattet and Forzani film, though I have Let The Corpses Tan and Reflections In A Dead Diamond somewhere in the unwatched stack, but I hope their use of this approach towards genre film isn't so ponderously anti-intellectual as Schoenbrun's. Einbinder's character's embrace of a distanced fantasy as a way into comfort with direct, emotional intimacy is an idea, but one that I don't think leads anywhere productive, either for the film (as it triggers the collapse of the movie into what might as well be a dream sequence) or for its viewers.

Is the purpose of art, and of thinking about art, organizing it within intellectual structures and mining meaning from it, really to drive internal revelation about one's self? I think that can be a purpose of art. I've had experiences with works of art, both "high" and "low", that have done that (including I Saw The TV Glow, which makes me think that Schoenbrun is motivated by making art that does this - not a criticism, just an observation). But I think Schoenbrun unfairly reduces externally-motivated intellectualization of art to a joke, and in doing so dismisses what those kinds of analyses can bring to a film and veering dangerously close to the reductive "filmmaking/filmviewing is therapy/an empathy machine" philosophy that has gotten some traction in the last few years after some cinephiles rediscovered Ebert. I don't think it's fair to reduce even the shittiest slasher to just "flesh and fluids" and how images of the flesh and fluids might make the girls watching it gasp (to say nothing about how this is yet another "sex and death" joke). While I didn't find it funny (which, again - probably on me), you are right that Schoenbrun is very literate and accurate in their skewering of both '80s aesthetic mores and hand-wringing leftist responses thereto, which is not the same as that accuracy signifying something useful. I too find the relentless projection of contemporary politics upon all forms of media analysis unproductive and tiresome - I identify as a progressive, I hate reactionary scolds, etc. - but to paint all intellectual reactions to film that don't connect to the internal with such a broad brush limits what one thinks they can do. If that is true, and criticism is art, then Schoenbrun's grammar for understanding their reality is surprisingly limited. The extremity of their critique, and their unwillingness to depict externally-directed film analysis as more than mere political posturing or a smokescreen for corporate greed, says more than I think they intended.

Separate question, on an unrelated topic: does horror occupy a similar space now in American film that westerns and the collection of crime and mystery movies that would become known as film noir did during the studio era? Obviously the modes of production, acceptable subject matters, and degrees of corporate centralization are completely different between now and then, but I wonder if there is a commonality between the talent that those genre films attracted then and horror attracts now. If there is, I wonder if that commonality runs through the relative ease with which westerns, noirs, and horror films can work as commercially non-risky allegories for particular moral, psychological, or political issues. Would horror be as inescapable now if it were viewed as the same kind of lowest-common-denominator shock entertainment that it was twenty years ago (not saying that horror at that time necessarily was bad, or that everyone thought it was bad, but it was definitely less "respectable," whatever that word means, to make a Saw or Final Destination movie in 2006 than it is to make Obsession, Backrooms, or Camp Miasma in 2026)?

[Mr Sausage]

But I think Schoenbrun unfairly reduces externally-motivated intellectualization of art to a joke, and in doing so dismisses what those kinds of analyses can bring to a film and veering dangerously close to the reductive "filmmaking/filmviewing is therapy/an empathy machine" philosophy that has gotten some traction in the last few years after some cinephiles rediscovered Ebert. I don't think it's fair to reduce even the shittiest slasher to just "flesh and fluids" and how images of the flesh and fluids might make the girls watching it gasp (to say nothing about how this is yet another "sex and death" joke). While I didn't find it funny (which, again - probably on me), you are right that Schoenbrun is very literate and accurate in their skewering of both '80s aesthetic mores and hand-wringing leftist responses thereto, which is not the same as that accuracy signifying something useful. I too find the relentless projection of contemporary politics upon all forms of media analysis unproductive and tiresome - I identify as a progressive, I hate reactionary scolds, etc. - but to paint all intellectual reactions to film that don't connect to the internal with such a broad brush limits what one thinks they can do. If that is true, and criticism is art, then Schoenbrun's grammar for understanding their reality is surprisingly limited. The extremity of their critique, and their unwillingness to depict externally-directed film analysis as more than mere political posturing or a smokescreen for corporate greed, says more than I think they intended.

You've kinda flipped from accusing Schoenbrun of making an impenetrable private universe out of their personal obsessions to accusing Schoenbrun of making absolutist general statements in a polemic. Neither are true, but I could at least see where the first one was coming from. But I don't think you make a film this particular and personal in order to tell everyone 'how it is'. Like a lot of personal films, this one's just exploring a perspective, one where love, sex, art, intellectualism, and the detritus of pop culture become the platform for personal ecstasy. It's another voice in what a grad school professor of mine called Queer Optimism.

I'm just not sure where you got the idea Schoenbrun was being so exclusive. She picked a subject--I don't think this excludes other subjects. I don't see how the movie could be anti-intellectual when it rejects the anti-intellectual trope of busting the nerd out of their intellectualized distance. What started as a joke, the 'Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain', becomes the very technique driving the ecstatic apotheosis at the end: a subject observing itself as filmic object. The film's humour is both an overly self-aware person's defense mechanism (this is the reductionism) but also a defense mechanism against sentimentality: it shows where the limits are. But just look at the tone of the film, its tender goofiness, exaggeration, artifice: what else is this doing but letting us know not to take all of this too seriously or too literally. These are silly ideas, but they're also important ideas; this is a bonkers way to represent trashy entertainment, yet it also feels so joyous and incisive. There is a wonderful balancing act going on in the movie between high and low, the serious and the ridiculous, the permanent and the ephemeral, art and trash, sex and death. It's good fun and, I think, touching. For a movie that climaxes (I know, I know...) with a crucial perspective shift, I think the best way to look at the thing as a whole is that it's opening up another perspective on things.

Just to focus in on the "flesh and fluids" line: the film cannot believe this, about either slashers or sex. Surely you don't believe Jane Schoenbrun would make a movie centred entirely around the transformative potential of a slasher film franchise while thinking slashers are "just" anything. If Schoenbrun's at risk of anything, it's making too much out of slasher films. But I think the humour save them there. So, yes, there is a sense where slasher movies are base entertainment working on base drives (much like sex is, on some level, just bodies crashing into each other), and remembering that can be grounding--but they're a lot more, too, and the film explores that 'a lot more' in glorious and often goofy detail.

I agree with you about the tiresome abundance of therapy and therapeutic concepts in horror. It was my least favourite aspect of Backrooms, for example. But I think Camp Miasma is closer to classical Hollywood character development. I mean, what's organizing the main character's development isn't therapy concepts but the movies, and what they embrace is all aspects of themselves rather than one or two socially approved ones. I don't see any reason why Schoenbrun would be arguing this is the purpose of the movies, but I think they're making a point by locating personal fulfillment and development in oft-dismissed pop culture ephemera rather than more traditional avenues of personal betterment, like therapy, the family, the church, what have you. Isn't there something classically queer about embracing pop culture ephemera as personally transformative, an expression of one's hidden but authentic self? Queer people have been excavating the nooks and crannies of normie pop culture for evidence of a queer sensibility for a long time, and while that's fallen away somewhat as media has become more open about queer sensibilities and lifestyles, I think embracing that idea again is appropriate for the subject of 80s movies. And horror movies have had a particularly interesting overlap with queerness: just sticking to Schoenbrun's subject, there's Sleepaway Camp's bizarre transness, Child's Play's story of boys and their relationships with dolls, Hellraiser's leatherdaddy fetish aesthetics, and then maybe the gayest horror film ever made, Nightmare on Elm Street part 2. I can't think of anything for Friday the 13th, so maybe it was the most appropriate series for Schoenbrun to make the immediate reference point!


Anyway, Let the Corpses Tan and Reflections in a Dead Diamond are brilliant. Definitely check them out. Very different tone and style. Much more of an experimentalist ethos, but tied to this wonderful sense for texture. Some of the most physically embodied and yet psychologically abstract movies I've ever seen--I don't know how they pull that off.

[The Narrator Returns]

Well said. Someone who loves Psycho ‘98 as much as they (or I) do understands and loves the intellectual distance needed to have that idea and see it through, and even moreso loves its notion of how a queer person watching or replicating any movie will get mixed into its source code and end up seeing an important and maddeningly indirect shadow of themselves in it. It’s not a joke about that nor does it simplify that beyond the real mess it is to think about. I tried and failed to write a big essay on TV Glow because of that, the space where “that’s me on-screen” (or I guess “that’s an empathy machine on-screen”) is inadequate at best but there really are pieces of you there that you need to see where all the dots are never getting fully connected. Ask me about how both of these last Schoenbrun movies are about mid-to-late-period R.E.M., you sure won’t get a concrete answer but you’ll get a lot of very impassioned and personal web-weaving.

[Never Cursed]

You've kinda flipped from accusing Schoenbrun of making an impenetrable private universe out of their personal obsessions to accusing Schoenbrun of making absolutist general statements in a polemic. Neither are true, but I could at least see where the first one was coming from. But I don't think you make a film this particular and personal in order to tell everyone 'how it is'. Like a lot of personal films, this one's just exploring a perspective, one where love, sex, art, intellectualism, and the detritus of pop culture become the platform for personal ecstasy. It's another voice in what a grad school professor of mine called Queer Optimism.

I'm just not sure where you got the idea Schoenbrun was being so exclusive. She picked a subject--I don't think this excludes other subjects. I don't see how the movie could be anti-intellectual when it rejects the anti-intellectual trope of busting the nerd out of their intellectualized distance.

To be clear, I don't think Schoenbrun is being consciously exclusive or anti-intellectual, and I agree that this film is not some kind of polemic about "how it is" - I'm not sure how a sexual coming-of-age movie could be. And sure, on some level it isn't fair to ask Schoenbrun to bring a perspective to their own personal experiences that doesn't reflect how they lived them. But I don't think I've contradicted myself - I think the movie is too absorbed by its own aesthetic obsessions, and in (hyperbolically, in my view) glorifying the (true, positive) personal development that came from them, inadvertently makes an argument against intellectual approaches to film.

As to the claim that the film rejects a particular kind of anti-intellectualism, I unfortunately disagree.

Spoiler

Is the last third of the film not an overextended, self-conscious invocation of this very trope? Einbinder is magically brought into the fictional world of Camp Miasma layered with her own anxieties and life experiences, an experience that proves so powerfully transformative that she explodes in bloody orgiastic passion. It is as extreme a version of "busting a nerd out of intellectualized distance" as I can imagine, and that Einbinder and Anderson are intellectually talking through it does not negate that fact.

If I had to pick another component of pop culture of which all this reminds me, it's Tenet's mantra/koan: "don't try to understand it; just feel it." I like that movie more than this one, which is on some level a failing or perhaps a disease of mine, but I didn't believe Nolan there and I don't believe Schoenbrun here. Again, maybe this is all on me.

Just to focus in on the "flesh and fluids" line: the film cannot believe this, about either slashers or sex. Surely you don't believe Jane Schoenbrun would make a movie centred entirely around the transformative potential of a slasher film franchise while thinking slashers are "just" anything. If Schoenbrun's at risk of anything, it's making too much out of slasher films.

If the film doesn't believe this on some level, then I'm not sure what its attitude is towards this line, which is placed in the mouth of a character with the wisdom of years and moral/(un)intellectual superiority. If I had to try and pin it down, I think the movie's trying to have it both ways. Slashers are meaningful and meaningless; art and garbage; everything and nothing; sex and death. Trouble is, when the film says a genre of art contains both so much and so little, the stuff around the "so little" part takes on new, to my eyes toxic meaning by association. (I also don't think there's anything new, exciting, revealing, or interesting in playing this game of extreme opposites in art by itself. I think there's a difference between juxtaposing or balancing extremes and asserting as the start rather than the end of an argument that one thing is two, opposed things, and the movie does the latter from its awful title on down.)

Again, I think this might just be on me. Oh well.

Ask me about how both of these last Schoenbrun movies are about mid-to-late-period R.E.M., you sure won’t get a concrete answer but you’ll get a lot of very impassioned and personal web-weaving.

How are Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and I Saw The TV Glow about mid-to-late-period R.E.M.?

[The Narrator Returns]

Thank you for asking. I did mean that at least a little rhetorically, mostly for TV Glow which has the one line about 90s Michael Stipe being foxy to a still-closeted queer kid but would almost all be me describing New Adventures in Hi-Fi or Reveal and drawing lines. But this one is bookended by R.E.M. and it makes it a lot easier to see why Schoenbrun keeps going back to them. They were the first “queer” music a lot of people heard back in their golden days and the feelings brought up by a lot of their music feel tied to the Schoenbrun sensibility: oblique and interior but with the joy/pain/confusion of figuring oneself out muddled in. Nobody could be less of a figurehead for what you see as an accidental anti-intellectualizing argument than Michael Stipe, man made a career on writing and living so much in his head that he didn’t want the lyrics printed until late. But as the band went on and he could express himself and his sexuality more freely, he found a way to thread that intellectual distance with more emotional clarity, trying on masks and finding the simple and moving truth that resulted from them. “Nightswimming” is covered at the start which is some of the most personal he ever got (boy did “They cannot see me naked” keep reverberating in my head when I watched Sleepaway Camp the other night), but it rolls end credits with a song from their penultimate album, whose lyrics are amusingly close to a plot summary (“At the summer camp where you volunteered…”) and ends up saying what this is going for more clearly than Schoenbrun wants to; not to reject analysis but to “enjoy yourself with no regrets”, including the academicizing parts. All from a guy where you literally couldn’t understand what he was saying at the start!

[Never Cursed]

This I can buy, even if it doesn't make me feel any better.

[Mr Sausage]

To be clear, I don't think Schoenbrun is being consciously exclusive or anti-intellectual, and I agree that this film is not some kind of polemic about "how it is" - I'm not sure how a sexual coming-of-age movie could be. And sure, on some level it isn't fair to ask Schoenbrun to bring a perspective to their own personal experiences that doesn't reflect how they lived them. But I don't think I've contradicted myself - I think the movie is too absorbed by its own aesthetic obsessions, and in (hyperbolically, in my view) glorifying the (true, positive) personal development that came from them, inadvertently makes an argument against intellectual approaches to film.

The only anti-intellectualism you've been able to find is taking single lines of dialogue out of context and then assuming they must be literally true. To wit:

If the film doesn't believe this on some level, then I'm not sure what its attitude is towards this line, which is placed in the mouth of a character with the wisdom of years and moral/(un)intellectual superiority.

Seems like you do know what it means, and it's apparently 'these films have no intellectual merit and nothing much going on in them.' Which is so incorrect on the face of it that it's hard to know what to say. You keep saying variations of "this might be on me", but I don't think you really believe that.

On a literal level, the line is an insecure, self-conscious person belittling their own interests so they don't seem uncool. Their whole character development is to embrace this aspect of themselves and no longer belittle their interests, intellectual ones included. They literally, on the level of story, perform their own intellectual interest as a way of finally orgasaming during sex.

If I had to try and pin it down, I think the movie's trying to have it both ways. Slashers are meaningful and meaningless; art and garbage; everything and nothing; sex and death. Trouble is, when the film says a genre of art contains both so much and so little, the stuff around the "so little" part takes on new, to my eyes toxic meaning by association. (I also don't think there's anything new, exciting, revealing, or interesting in playing this game of extreme opposites in art by itself. I think there's a difference between juxtaposing or balancing extremes and asserting as the start rather than the end of an argument that one thing is two, opposed things, and the movie does the latter from its awful title on down.)

Allow me to be unabashedly intellectual: this is just dialectics. I'll let my favourite dialectician, William Blake, voice it: "Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence."

As to the claim that the film rejects a particular kind of anti-intellectualism, I unfortunately disagree.

Spoiler

Is the last third of the film not an overextended, self-conscious invocation of this very trope? Einbinder is magically brought into the fictional world of Camp Miasma layered with her own anxieties and life experiences, an experience that proves so powerfully transformative that she explodes in bloody orgiastic passion. It is as extreme a version of "busting a nerd out of intellectualized distance" as I can imagine, and that Einbinder and Anderson are intellectually talking through it does not negate that fact.

The invocation is "self conscious", the act is surrounded and set off by "intellectually talking though it", but the thing is still anti-intellectual? Even your own language belies your claims. Einbinder's climactic moment involves embracing her own intellectual project: Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain, which Einbinder's insecurity led her to mock first in order to forestall anyone else mocking it, only to learn the person she feared would mock it in fact lives it, and teaches her to do the same. Her whole character thrust is to become confident in and unapologetic about her own analytic, conceptual tendencies. It's so open and explicit in this that, if you don't see it, it's because you don't want to.

[Never Cursed]

On a literal level, the line is an insecure, self-conscious person belittling their own interests so they don't seem uncool. Their whole character development is to embrace this aspect of themselves and no longer belittle their interests, intellectual ones included. They literally, on the level of story, perform their own intellectual interest as a way of finally orgasaming during sex.

Huh? Gillian Anderson's character says the "flesh and fluids" line, not Hannah Einbinder's, and she does so in direct response to Einbinder's extended over-intellectualizing of slashers (hence why I said the line "is placed in the mouth of a character with the wisdom of years and moral/(un)intellectual superiority"). I'm not sure what you mean by this, as the arc you describe happens to Einbinder's character, not Anderson's, as influenced by Anderson's retort. The movie absolutely takes Anderson's position on this attitude; it caricatures intellectual readings of film as a method by which insecure people defend themselves and then sweeps them aside. That rubbed me the wrong way.

Seems like you do know what it means, and it's apparently 'these films have no intellectual merit and nothing much going on in them.' Which is so incorrect on the face of it that it's hard to know what to say. You keep saying variations of "this might be on me", but I don't think you really believe that.

I don't mind the rest of this post, but I do mind your saying this. I was really looking forward to this movie, saw it in pretty ideal conditions (packed house full of 20-somethings like myself, all of whom were really into it in a respectful, excited way), and had a really painful experience in the theater, but one for which I don't blame the film or Schoenbrun or anyone else but myself. I didn't like the film, I didn't respond to what I thought it was doing, and I felt alienated from my peers, all of whom were laughing at jokes I didn't find funny and responding emotionally to something that didn't move me. I really wanted to, but I didn't. I felt uncomfortable and separated from the audience, which is probably why I simultaneously felt so motivated to write a negative response to the film and why it was so difficult (personally, no one here did anything) to do. After I did, another user here reached out to express their sympathy at those feelings, which I appreciated.

So yes, I don't actually feel all that confident that my stance on the film works outside my own head (even if I don't think the substance of that critique, or my interpretation of the "flesh and fluids" line, was actually that slashers have no intellectual merit). When I kept saying that my negative response might be more idiosyncratic than I wanted it to be, I wasn't being smarmy or sarcastic or trying to prove a point. In not liking the film, I felt left out, and I would appreciate being given the benefit of the doubt when I said so. Hey, if you want, you can take my strong emotional response to the film as another point in its favor.