CRYING IN THE LOCKER ROOM

Vanderpump Rules rebooted its cast for the most recent season. Gone are Tom Sandoval and Ariana Madix, now replaced by starry-eyed upstarts who actually work at the restaurant and dream of making it big. Of course, what it means to “make it" has changed drastically since the show premiered in 2013. Two of the new cast members are male cousins that make incest-adjacent OnlyFans content together. Another is a girl who stars in erectile dysfunction ads for hims.  But the true star of Vanderpump 2.0 is Shayne Davis, a pure-of-heart model/actor who works mostly in vertical dramas. On the show, he leads with his journey to sobriety. Raised by parents who smoked crack with him as a teen, it took a drug deal gone wrong (in which he was shot in the chest three times) to get clean. He’s since been 10 years off alcohol, 12 years off meth, 12 years off fentanyl, and two and a half years off marijuana, mushrooms, DMT and ketamine. During the season reunion, Shayne gets choked up talking about the response he’s received from viewers struggling with addiction, how it makes him feel like he’s finally useful. “You can bench press all day and get to the 315 lb bench (which I did), but it didn’t increase my actual feeling of worth,” he says with tears in his eyes. “I didn’t feel that until I started being there for other addicts.” When I watched this, I started bawling. God bless Shayne Davis. 

I’ve been working my way through Kenji Mizoguchi’s filmography over the past year and finally got to this one. It’s about a woman who runs off with her husband’s apprentice. They spend the rest of the film as fugitives, with adultery being punished by crucifixion in Edo-period Japan. The movie isn’t so much a sweeping romance as it is a meditation on love as a totalizing event. How the mere fact of “being in love” can place you and your lover in a state of exception, outside the laws of the state.  At one point, Mohei the apprentice tries to flee from his love, in hopes of turning himself in and saving her life. She catches up with him and pulls him to the ground. They lay there in the dirt, wrapped in each other’s arms. “No matter what happens to us, I never want to leave your side.” She is bound to him like a heavy boulder. I start weeping. Alain Badiou loved this film, especially its ending, in which (spoiler) the couple is led on horseback to their execution. One of the final images is of their hands clasped tight, a serene smile on both their faces. "These crucified lovers never desired to die,” writes Badiou. “ The shot says the very opposite: love is what resists death.”  Lately I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a one-act play, and I keep wondering how The Crucified Lovers could be adapted for the stage. In my head, it takes place in a modern day pharmacy and ends with the couple being swatted.

The PS1 classic Final Fantasy Tactics has always been a blindspot for me. So when a remaster for the Switch was released at the end of the year, I jumped at the chance to (finally) play it. And it definitely holds up, especially in its writing. But what surprised me most was the centuries’ worth of history that occurred off-screen. Massacres and mad kings that are never seen, but referred to in hushed tones by characters, just before they murder their own family members. And while there’s an included encyclopedia that maps out the timeline, I find myself having to pause and Google the names of different archdukes and religious sects.  So to help me fall asleep, I started watching FFT lore videos before bed. There’s a well-made series I’m quite fond of, with a soft-spoken British narrator and classical background music that lulls me into a dream state. But the details of the game’s cosmology can make me emotional. Tales of lazy deities who delegate their jobs to lesser gods. A celestial kingdom that’s run “more like a Corporation rather than a Pantheon,” as one Youtube comment puts it. There’s a Christ-like myth that turns out to be a con job, the Jesus-analog (referred to in game as “Saint Ajora”) being a reincarnation of the vengeful god Ultima, posing as a savior to bring about her violent return. Japanese role-playing games often end with you fighting a version of God from the Old Testament, portrayed as a corrupted, self-serving entity. The message is that turmoil continues up the chain of command, through every tier of ascension. A forever war rages in heaven. Paradise must start with us. 

This reel from the drag queen Nicole Paige Brooks (from Atlanta, Georgia) came up on my feed the other day. It’s part of a trend where you show old pics of yourself from the 90’s while the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” plays over the montage. People in the comments are gagged by how handsome Nicole was as a boy. I don’t know why this particular video hit me so hard. Of course, there’s the obvious: the passing of time, the slow fade of beauty, nostalgia for a 90s gay scene I never experienced. But it's also my new ear for the longing in the song, combined with the striking features of Nicole Paige Brooks out of drag. Since seeing the reel, I’ve been playing “Iris” on loop and thinking about my first boyfriend, ten years older than me, who played bass for R. Stevie Moore and told me the hottest thing two men can do is hold hands in secret under the dinner table.

Love Story is not a good TV show. But much like The Crown, it's hard to turn away from palace intrigue. What gets me is how American their fable is. The seduction of a cool girl by a failson, ensnaring her into his family’s curse. Every line of the fairytale brings her closer to that Grimm brothers rug pull. On dark nights of the soul, I stay up late researching the doomed couple for reasons that remain unclear. And I’ll find myself scrolling through r/JohnAndCarolyn, a sad, perverse subreddit. Typical posts include the sharing of video stills from their nuptials, with the caption, “I hate this ending for her…” Speculation over JFK Jr. having ADHD and dyslexia. A video of Carolyn at a Calvin Klein fitting in 1993. At the end of the clip she tells a model, “That’s cool honey, don’t worry about it.” That was pure vibe, writes a user in the comments. I’d frame that moment 😭, says another. It’s apparently one of three recorded instances of Carolyn Bessette's voice. I find the other two, listen to them both, and start to cry. Tragedy imbues the banal with a surplus of meaning. The entire subreddit pores over the minutiae of her normie day-to-day, finding significance in every stray gesture, every pap photo where she’s smoking a cigarette. They yearn for an operatic life, as sick as that sounds. And as a lurker, I understand the impulse.