Media Studies Media Studies

Queer Melodrama: Analyzing the Aesthetics of 1987’s Law of Desire

The [final] scene’s juxtaposition of exterior forces, symbolized by law and order, with the interior spaces, realms of sexual freedom, underscores essential dichotomies inherent in queer cinema. These dichotomies are no longer a subtext since the queer experience does not hide between ideas of representability but lies in representation.

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Media Studies Media Studies

Dead Air, Dead Space: Culpability and Collapse in Landscape Suicide (1986), Grey Gardens (1975), and Pictures of Ghosts (2023)

Dead air hangs over once-occupied scenes, landscapes that have caused their own death. A unique kind of rot is represented here: one that is not structural but spiritual, a para-natural abandonment that may one day lead to a collapse that has yet to occur. Perhaps refracted off of the condition of the film’s subjects—prison does not allow for itself nor its subjects to decay—Landscape Suicide sees collapse as a perpetually imminent consequence of the ruin we cause each other.

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