Arts & Culture

Queer Horror: The Horror of the Unrealized Self

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Spoilers for I Saw the TV Glow (2024) and Interview with the Vampire (2022-). I have a visceral fear of being buried alive. To waste away slowly, trapped and confined and rotting away in a place where no one can find me. Suffocating under layers of dirt, not able to live or die. Watching I Saw the TV Glow, in which a character is buried alive, I could not help but think: what an apt metaphor for the queer — and especially transgender — experience. 

I Saw the TV Glow is a psychological horror movie directed by Jane Schoenbrun following Owen and Maddy through their teen and adult years as the TV show they are obsessed with, The Pink Opaque, leads them to question their identities.

Arts & Culture

“Emily in Paris” Season 3: Tedious, Repetitive and a Tad Ridiculous

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As a student from France, I am often asked to comment on Emily in Paris. For the first two seasons, I gladly defended the series and its eponymous protagonist, a twenty-something Midwesterner sent to Paris by her PR company to provide an American perspective to its newly acquired French office. 

As I wrote in The Sun last year, I found Emily in Paris to be light-hearted and awfully predictable, but also quite funny and often on the mark when it came to comparing French and American cultures. I dismissed the critics who attacked the show’s depiction of Paris as a city where it never rains, where people never take the métro and where you can live for months without speaking a word of French. Not all television has to be realistic, I would say. Emily in Paris was what you binged when you wanted to escape, to decompress and to watch attractive people adorned in glamorously over-the-top clothing.

Arts & Culture

Temptation Island Tempts Fate and Viewers

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Overall, Temptation Island is fascinating. It’s a social experiment, an edge-of-your-seat thriller and a dumpster-fire reality show all bundled in one. It consistently provides everything one could ask for in a reality series: people that make really poor decisions, and too much alcohol for anyone’s own good.