hbo’s succession is an insane fucking show because remember when they said “he never saw anything he loved that he didn’t wanna kick just to see if it would still come back” and when they said “life’s not knights on horseback. it’s a number on a piece of paper; it’s a fight for a knife in the mud” and when they said “you know this is just fun, right? there’s no god, there’s no anything. there’s just people in rooms trying to be happy” and when they said “what could you possibly kill, that you loved so much, it would make the sun rise again?” and when they said “i love you. i can’t forgive you” and when they said “i wonder if the sad i’d be without you would be less than the sad i get from being with you” and when they said “the good thing about a family that doesn’t love you is that you learn to live without it. you’re needy love sponges and i’m a plant that grows on rocks and lives off insects that die inside of me” and when they said “we think these grand horror things, at times like these, these ice shelves are gonna come at us in the night and take our heads off. its not true. he was an old bastard. and he loved you” and when they said-
I’ll stop goncharov posting soon but can I just say how fascinating it is to me that the genre we picked was cold war mafia movie? because if you had asked the internet a month ago what kind of film tumblr would invent, if tumblr were to invent a film, the answers would have been way more woke. a queer coming of age romance or a sexy heist with a super diverse cast or live action infinity train or whatever.
instead, the hive mind, the collective, latched on to something with much narrower boundaries, with stricter rules. no cold war mafia movie would have “good gay rep” or “a happy ending”, like you might expect tumblr to want. we want, we made, something rife with hidden truths, deception and manipulation, suppressed and sublimated emotions. it’s a movie rife with symbolism and suggestion, a text that needs to be unpicked and puzzled over, not one that spoonfeeds us a morally pure protagonist.
the website famous for our shithouse reading comprehension made this complex metatext about methods of interpreting an ambiguous artwork and that’s given me more hope for humanity than I’ve gotten from the internet in a long goddamn time
One reading of what Mr. Utterson suspects the possible relationship between Jekyll and Hyde, and the 'ghost of some old sin', might be is that Hyde is his illegitimate son, but between Hyde entering through Jekyll's back door (literally and metaphorically), Utterson having a nightmare of Hyde breaking into Jekyll's bedroom while he's sleeping and forcing him to do his bidding in the middle of the night, and thinking of shenanigans around Jekyll's bed a second time, another theory he might have is that Hyde is Jekyll's secret lover, either estranged or ongoing, and between those two possibilities, the latter would be far more dangerous to Jekyll in social and legal terms if it were to be discovered or used to blackmail him.
For historical context, the novella was published in 1886, though as we will later find out, the only information we are given about the temporal setting is that the story is set in the 19th century, though it can't be any earlier than 1850, if you do the math based on Jekyll's age. Homosexuality between men in the UK in the form of sodomy was punishable by death until 1861, during which the Offences Against the Person Act was passed to amend the penalty for sodomy from death to a minimum of ten years in prison; later, and just prior to the novella's publication, the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 criminalized any and all acts of homosexuality between men (not just sodomy), including those done in private with no witnesses — even a mere affectionate letter would suffice as evidence for prosecution — to the point where it became known as the Blackmailer's Charter (source); this would later be the act under which Oscar Wilde would be found guilty of 'gross indecency' in 1895 and sentenced to prison.
Meanwhile, it wasn't uncommon for upper-class men to have illegitimate children, and while potentially scandalous, it would not necessarily be life-ruining — though of course, the concern in that case could be that Hyde has other information he is holding over Jekyll's head as blackmail, including possible relationships with other men that would be both scandalous and illegal during this time period.
Nikita Gill, from Your Heart is the Sea: Poems; "The Difference Between Alone and Lonely,"
Experience: Learning the right way to connect the dots.
“If it got me to you it was worth it.”
the way Katya’s lipstick stained Sofia’s lips like when Sofia’s wine stained Katya’s dress and how later they are both stained in blood screaming crying throwing up
therapy can't replace getting so angry alone in your room you feel lightheaded
At this rate, the meme is going to get us to actually make watch parties of Scorsese films and have analyze time afterward. Which I’m cool with, so please don’t pass me over on the invites.
February. Cool sheets and warm limbs. Champagne truffles. Lace bras. Long afternoons in the library and evening dance courses. A full agenda. White chocolate. A trace of perfume on a cashmere scarf. Love letters by Woolf and Nabokov. Lipstick kisses on teacups. Evening walks in rosy-cool dusk. Tender sensuality.