Right there. Oh my God, right there. Oh my God. Fuck. We're getting somewhere true. Deeeeep inside something true. I feel like...I have something to say. Can you hear me? Can you feel the seeds of it inside me? Do you understand it? Tell me you understand it, damn it. Give me somewhere to come safely. Warm.

Fucked. Deeply, thoroughly, pregnantly, chrysalisly fucked. I haven't been this undone—this sickened in a scalding way—by a film since maybe Wild at Heart. But it's a kind of sickening that stings in a convicting way. The hydrogen peroxide way. Some of Portman's crude-black ick is my own. I recognize it...in incognito Google searches; in festering, unspoken worries; in ways I overtake a conversation; in ways I eclipse people I love when I say I'm trying to understand them; in ways I dig for vulnerability in other people like a kid digging for candies in his mom's purse; in ways I try goofily and sometimes harmfully to be seductive; in ways I write. Whether or not Haynes recognizes it in any way more personal than academic, I am not qualified to say.

I understand what people mean when they say this movie has an academic remove, but I don't believe it has to be received that way. I understand what they mean when they say it's campy, but I think you could lose it that way. It feels more apt, maybe, to say it contains camp than that it is campy.

We write a lot about implicating the viewer and the culpability of the voyeuristic audience, but I find it's pretty rare my own face actually flushes and my heartbeat actually quickens and my chest knots up, recalling those old moments of being caught; a child, a lie, and a parent. This movie is rare.

And, of course, Haynes is no parent of ours and we are no children. And I don't think he's after a scolding—either of himself or of us. And I still have my old perennial skepticism of Brechtian distancing meta-devices. They are diagnosticians. They can encourage me to reflect on the nutritional value of the food I'm so ravenously scarfing down, and maybe even on why the hunger is so engulfing, but they cannot make me healthier—they stop before that, sick to the stomach. Of course, even when it doesn't contain a meta-device, film is often purely diagnostic. I think of Kubrick and Lynch; Kubrick whom I respect, and Lynch whom I love.

I watched Wild at Heart last year in a theater with a friend who is very free. It is just him and the art. If it leads him to cry, he cries hard; if it leads him to laugh, he laughs loud. Divorced from any worried-over interpretation of intention, he has the peaceful self-assurance to let his unadulterated reaction speak to him about himself, and then of the movie. And sitting there next to him was the first time it really sank in how funny Lynch so often is. His filmography's been so intellectualized and academicized (understandably) for a filmmaker who really is more interested in setting loose into us images of such an immediacy, it makes our hearts a mad rumpus. I used to come to Lynch's films wondering what I should draw from them. Now, I just try not to stop them from enveloping me. Wild at Heart is hilarious, and grotesque, and devastating, and sinister. The execrable abuse writhing just off its stage, at its core, is as difficult to stomach as anything in May December, if somewhat less disguised and insidious.

Wild at Heart bowled me over, but May December made me hack my way to its heart. Through a swamp of Brechtian distancing techniques, through cattails and cloying humidity, through deafening congregations of mosquitoes, I had to work at drawing close to the heart of this film; who is, of course, Joe. But I wonder if this isn't a bit closer to Brecht's original "learning-play" idea than many of the meta-devices it has since spawned; that this, in a slightly more literal sense than normal, becomes an exercise in empathy. Joe's story is not served up for our consumption, since we've now diagnosed such a thing to perpetuate and ramify the cycles of abuse it attempts to depict. We must bring our own empathy, so poisoned or excised is it from this film.

Sailor's jacket, lest we forget, is "a symbol of [his] individuality, and [his] belief in personal freedom," no less than Joe's butterflies are a symbol of a metamorphosis we never see culminate. If anything, we focus on the crumbling. That line in Wild at Heart is so funny to me because it cuts right through all the chatter about the subtlety or cliche of symbols. Chief among the tiredest cliches are butterflies and leather jackets. But here's his heart. You can represent it academically or sophisticatedly or soap-operatically or melodramatically, but you'll still be highways and hellholes away from his heart. What is more emblematic of "epistemic relativism" than one's "recipe for blueberry cobbler"? The attempts to understand are attempts to apprehend. And the heart is wild; it bleeds through all the paper with all the words forming all the stories. Who knows exactly how much Todd Haynes intended Joe to bleed through; maybe he hoped the whole enterprise would be a cynical, self-reflexive exercise. But the heart is beyond understanding, and wild, and it bleeds through.

There's a sense the diagnosticians are wondering about the efficacy of their own shining tools—Scorsese about a story he's making his own; Gerwig about an IP she knows by definition cannot be truly liberated; Anderson about the vitality and utility of his own self-eclipsing technique; Nolan about the ineluctable nature of film to mythologize and egotize; and Haynes about the self-defeating, doomed-before-it-began artistic search for truth. That they ended up making the movies says something—whether hopeful or cynical, I am not sure.

Personally, I hope the stories get healthier, and that, whenever they are, the overwrought mania for Meta slips away for lack of necessity. "You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep." Art has always, always lied. This is the truth. But the heart is beyond understanding, and wild, and it bleeds through.