This Week, We Ask Just One More Moment for:

• Shiva, God of Death
• Lily, Best of Actors
• voyeurism
• rabid fan cultures
• the return of weird!

Take a second to thank scb0212 and wallflower for contributing this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

The Guardian features co-stars and directors celebrating the life of Tom Wilkinson after his passing this week:

[Tony Gilroy]: We were spoiled on Michael Clayton and, again, on Duplicity; spoiled scene-after-scene, take-after-take, by Tom’s unshakeable ability to be natural no matter how outrageous the demand – stripping naked in a midwest deposition, burning through mad monologues, brawling with Paul Giamatti in slow-motion on a rain-swept airstrip, surrendering to a wordless, one-take, pas de trois assassination. Tom arrived every day with a gentle, slightly bewildered front that fell away as you realised the depth of his secret preparation and how eager he was to surprise. There’s a moment in Clayton where he needs to shift instantly from beatific maniac to cold-blooded litigator. It was our second day shooting with George, we were on the streets, it had snowed unexpectedly, the paparazzi were swarming, and we’d never rehearsed the scene. Everything was happening too quickly. Panic was looming. Suddenly, on the monitor, there was Tom – teeth beneath the smile – plugged-in, tuning it all out and ready to roll. Arthur Edens was alive, and we were in business.

In Slate‘s ongoing annual critics’ conversation, Esther Zuckerman dives into why Lily Gladstone’s portrayal of Molly Kyle is the performance of the year:

Yes, Gladstone possesses a naturalism that is hard to learn, which is maybe why people wrongly assumed she was a non-actor in Certain Women. She brings a similar quality to Morrisa Maltz’s The Unknown Country—her other film this year, for which she won a Gotham Award. That delicate road-trip drama about a woman driving through America to grieve her grandmother does pair her with nonprofessionals. With her open face, ready to listen, Gladstone is able to meld into the fabric of the land that Maltz is portraying. What she accomplishes in Killers of the Flower Moon is different. I feel like people keep ignoring her early scenes of flirtation with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest to make their points about how the movie doesn’t serve her. But those beats—when he first picks her up in his car and she tells him to get a move on; when she invites him inside her home and teases him for his greed—are just as crucial as the ones where she is bedridden.

At Bright Wall/Dark Room, Rose Gottlieb considers the difference between watching and understanding in Hitchcock’s famous manual for voyeurs:

So here is the real demand Rear Window makes on Jeff: it does not ask him to dangle over the windowsill, nor to exit the role of voyeur, but simply to see. When he looks out his window at a beautiful young dancer partying with a set of eligible bachelors, Jeff calls her Miss Torso, and wonders which handsome man she will select. The end of the film proves this is a blunt misreading of the woman. In fact, as consistently as Jeff observes his neighbors, he misunderstands them. By no accident, he is depicted as propped up on an easy chair, watching seemingly-stereotypical dramas play out on flat surfaces, just like us viewers in our comfortable seats. He’s watching his neighbors’s lives like you might watch a bad movie: sit back and let the clichés roll. But watching a good film demands more than just keeping one’s eyes open and following the plot. We interpret. Lean forward. You can watch a Hitchcock film just for its thrills, but you’d be missing the point. 

Compare and contrast the years of Doja Cat and Taylor Swift vis-a-vis their fan cultures with Abe Beame at Complex:

Fan service is an increasingly murky proposition for celebrities. In Swift, we see the incredible rewards an artist can reap from slavishly, and brilliantly catering to your base. Her Eras Tour, the culmination of this decades-long work, could wind up grossing $2.2 billion, which would make it the highest-grossing tour ever, one that actually impacted local economies, and has added an estimated $200 million to Taylor’s net worth. […] Doja has been reluctant to engage with her fan base in an open and generous manner, which of course is her right. She doesn’t want to pander and rightly fears the illusion of good faith exchange with a large, faceless, online hoard of millions. She doesn’t follow her friends online to prevent the sort of manic speculation market surrounding celebrity social media traffic cops. She explains, “I’ve been anxious and I’ve been depressed and I have body dysmorphia. I don’t like talking about that stuff because I don’t need to. Seeing the responses to that is not something I can handle. I’m a snowflake. I’m sensitive… I have a big fear of performativeness.” She’s intensely self-aware, which counterintuitively isn’t a great quality to have as a celebrity.

And good news, everyone! Anil Dash at Rolling Stone assures us the Internet is about “to get weird again”:

For an entire generation, the imagination of people making the web has been hemmed in by the control of a handful of giant companies that have had enormous control over things like search results, or app stores, or ad platforms, or payment systems. Going back to the more free-for-all nature of the Nineties internet could mean we see a proliferation of unexpected, strange new products and services. Back then, a lot of technology was created by local communities or people with a shared interest, and it was as likely that cool things would be invented by universities and non-profits and eccentric lone creators as they were to be made by giant corporations. Take the web browser itself — it was originally created by Tim Berners-Lee at a publicly-funded research laboratory, and the most popular early version was created at the University of Illinois. And as the web took off, individual creators often tested the limits of what their web browsers could do, with popular sites like Geocities letting millions of regular people build individual websites with wildly different (if often awful) aesthetics and designs.