Content warning: This article contains mentions of disordered eating and body dysmorphia. 

At 5 a.m. on a given school day in 2019 or 2020, I was awake, running on four hours of sleep and my dissatisfaction with the reflection I saw when I shambled out of bed to turn off my alarm, turn sideways and lift my shirt to see my waistline in the mirror. Forty minutes later, I sat in the passenger seat of my parents’ car, half awake, while my twin sister drove. It was still dark out when she dropped me off at the gym on the way to her manufacturing technology class.

Since the previous night, dread had settled in my stomach. The first thing I did at the gym every day was run for 10 minutes — a mile and a quarter — on the treadmill. This is not a long time, but I had just started running and was neither in the best shape nor taking good care of myself, making these 10 minutes one of the things I’ve looked forward to least in my life. Hating it this much, of course, made it harder.

I allowed myself five minutes of procrastination in front of the locker room mirror and considered my playlist — would *NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” make my treadmill experience move a millimeter away from “torture” and toward “fun” today? If Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)” (a workout music staple embedded in my life since my pre-middle school years as a gymnast) came on, would I be able to listen to the whole song or would I have to use all my non-premium skips on Spotify until “Beggin’ on Your Knees” from “Victorious” played? Sometimes, only that level of obnoxious self-confidence injected into my eardrums was able to keep my legs moving and shove aside my distress. 

The treadmill was a fight — with the machine that pulled my feet backward, with my hand that kept increasing the speed for some godforsaken reason, with my body that wasn’t strong enough to feel anything but pain and panic as I made it keep going. If I was only a few minutes into this fight, I could listen to most any song on the playlist. But by the end of 10 minutes, only a few deterred me from letting the black belt turning under my feet pull me down and throw my body against the wall opposite the mirrors like it seemed bent on doing. 

My treadmill playlist was called “i probably want to die but IT’S WORTH IT.” This is exemplary of my attitude toward exercise at the time. The fact that I saw this as a not-at-all-concerning, funny joke says almost as much as the name itself. I was embarrassed by my workout music. If anyone asked what I listened to when I worked out — or more likely, if I worked exercise into a conversation in search of validation for my pain — I said, “I listen to the most annoying music when I run. All that matters is that it has a good beat. I would never listen to it when I’m not on the treadmill.” Harsh criticism for the *NSYNC songs I absolutely did turn to top volume when driving anywhere alone, and to which I delivered what I thought were quite emotionally moving performances. Perhaps it is less harsh criticism for Selena Gomez’s “Who Says” or the “Lemonade Mouth” soundtrack.

In high school, I had no music taste. I tried to gauge what my friends were listening to and followed suit. These tended to be less upbeat songs, and the overwhelming majority were by male artists — Tame Impala, The Shins, The Strokes, Wallows.

The treadmill was the only place I felt like I could listen to the songs that didn’t fit into the music taste I was supposed to have. I listened to my happiest songs there. They weren’t what anyone wanted me to listen to or things the person I wanted to be — someone respectable who was impossible to shame — would listen to, but that didn’t matter because they propelled my body toward its own role in that respectability. If it wasn’t clear from the playlist’s title, I ran on the treadmill in high school because I wanted my body to change, to be just a little bit thinner, to be admired, to make up for all my uncertainties in who I was and who I should be and how I should appear to everyone around me. 

Most of the songs on the playlist follow the same quick rhythm, loud and prominent enough to cover the hammering of my feet. The lyrics tend to be vengeful — following themes of proving your superiority to someone who has wronged you. I heard Taylor Swift’s “Mean” — “All you are is mean / And a liar, and pathetic, and alone in life / And mean” (don’t you want to start sprinting?) — and knew that if I kept running faster, I would feel a twinge of pride, like I had discovered something — discipline? control? effort? — that other people didn’t have. I heard “It’s Gonna Be Me” and thought if I turned the pace up to 8 miles per hour instead of 7.5 then I would look like the person who anyone I wanted would want. I heard “She’s So Gone” (a “Lemonade Mouth” gem) and thought about anything I disliked about myself: any failures, any times I slept an extra hour instead of going to the gym in the morning, any times I ate something more than what I’d planned for dinner. I was convinced that I could sprint away from the version of myself afflicted with these lapses in self-defined perfection.

Of course, I could not outrun myself. And even if I could, I was running in place.

I hate treadmills. There was not a day I didn’t dread stepping onto the machine, when pressing the start button didn’t require reminders that if I didn’t run, I would have to face my own consequences: angry insults of my body and my lack of obedience, guilt for the next week, greater limitations to food that I no longer deserved or needed. There were rare moments — matters of seconds — when I started running and the right song came on, and I felt the surreal joy of having ascended out of my present life and body. But then that body reminded me it was not superhuman and could not be escaped. Besides, it was starved of food and sleep, and I could do what I liked with it, but not without it making the work as difficult as possible. 

If you like the treadmill, fine. If you hate it but run on it anyway for whatever reason you can justify, fine. I will personally never set foot on a treadmill again. I promised myself that in my freshman year of college. I don’t care that I actually enjoy running now, or that I can run 14 times as far, or that my average running pace now is faster than the fastest pace I set on the treadmill, which made me fear my limbs would rip off. 

The last time I ran on a treadmill was in the fall of 2020. I had started running outside and could comfortably run several miles, but on a treadmill in an overheating room in the CCRB, I hardly convinced myself to go a single mile. This discomfort was partly because treadmills are devices of monotony and despair, but it was also because running on this treadmill felt like running on the treadmill at the gym in my hometown.

I thought staying away from treadmills would prevent this feeling, but the songs, marred by association, are almost as bad. I listened to the workout playlist from start to finish while writing this. My first observation: Kelly Clarkson isn’t good. But many of the songs are. If I heard most of these for the first time now, I would make a mental note to add them to my running queue the next morning. 

But when I listen to G.R.L.’s “Ugly Heart,” the sandpapery sound of the treadmill is ingrained in the music itself. The beat is the sound of my feet hitting the belt. It feels like overheating and the inability to breathe. I remember my feet spinning endlessly. My brain panics and asks, “How long before I can hit that red stop button?” and I can’t convince myself that I’m hundreds of miles and multiple years away from that treadmill, sitting in a café in another town, with legs up on the chair across from me.

The song can’t be good anymore. The song is self-hatred. The song is the treadmill. Pavlov was onto something.

Somehow, these songs can’t just exist as songs now. They are imprinted by their circumstances, and playing one means playing one of those experiences too. I associate most songs with the first time I played them or the time in my life when I played them most excessively. I relate Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” to 11 p.m. walks home from the bakery I worked at last year. I could listen to Lauv’s “Modern Loneliness” in the dead of an actually cold winter, and the song would melt down my emotions and re-bake them into the mold they fit in the summer of 2020. 

Sometimes, I worry that if I listen to a new song when I’m not having a good time, I’ll never be able to happily listen to that song again. I consider if I should postpone finding new music until I reach peak happiness so that all songs can be used as antidotes to sadness, worry and depression rather than harbingers of them. But the connections are rarely that strong, and even when they are, they aren’t often that bad. The treadmill songs are an exception.

It’s possible to carry songs with me and let their meanings change as I do. “Mean” and “You Belong With Me” have both escaped ruination despite being on the playlist. I think I’ve listened to Taylor Swift so frequently in the years before and after the treadmill that these songs elude entrapment in any given era of my life. But many hold on to their original context even if I try to change it. They are like perfumes, smelling strongly of a time, a version of myself, a mindset, a routine, a web of thoughts, worries, friendships and cares. Is it possible to bring a song back into my life and change its meaning, to wash it of the stains that have been soaked in for years?

A few months ago, I created a playlist called “treadmill song reclamation.” I can leave *NSYNC and Kelly Clarkson and Selena Gomez in my past, but I’m still a runner who needs good music, which many of those songs are. I recently tried running to “Ugly Heart,” but my mind stuttered when it came on. I got anxious and didn’t want to run anymore. When I skipped the song, I felt okay.

Cascada’s “Everytime We Touch” seemed worthy of reclaiming. The first time I heard this song since high school was last semester. I was in fellow Arts writer Laine Brotherton’s apartment. She, Sarah Rahman and I were sitting on couches planning our platform to run for Managing Arts Editors. I had become good friends with Sarah and Laine in the process of making this platform. Sarah used my phone to queue music and played “Everytime We Touch.” Laine said it was a great song. I nodded. The song felt new there. It was hard to feel the panic of the treadmill when I was sitting with friends, comfortable and safe and witnessing them enjoy this song with none of the connotations it had for me.

I ran down Liberty Street a few days after this. The sun was just starting to rise, and I noted that 35 degrees is still too cold to run without gloves. In the spirit of immediately jolting me awake, “Everytime We Touch” was the first song on my queue. 

My first thought when the song played was of that moment spent listening to it with friends. The picture of myself listening to this song on the treadmill is still clear, but it’s not the only picture.

Songs collect memories like tape collects dust. If overused, they can’t collect any more. “Ugly Heart” may have picked up too many treadmill experiences; no others can stick, and I may have no choice but to abandon it. But there are some that may still have patches of adhesive.

Daily Arts Writer Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.

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Near the end of “Oeuvre, Unfinished,” a film created by Business graduate student Madeline Sun Woo Kim, protagonists Anna (graduating Music, Theatre & Dance senior Alyssa Melani) and Leo (graduating Music, Theatre & Dance senior Atticus Olivet) sing to each other in front of a campfire. The screen is mostly dark, their faces lit only by the flames. Leo plays the guitar while they sing quiet lines from “This Is It,” a song composed by Evan Chung (graduating College of Literature, Science and the Arts senior) and Bredan Dallaire (Music, Theatre & Dance class of 2025) for the film, broken by laughter. The scene transitions to a dance sequence. Leo and Anna remain the only subjects in the darkness. The dance is slow. They simply hold each other in the firelight. 

In the film, which premiered on April 19 at the Michigan Theater, this is the most moving scene. It draws out what the entire film aims for: the connection between two people who meet by chance — first in an art gallery in front of the fictitious painting after which the movie is named and then similarly in parallel universes. The campfire scene takes place in one such parallel universe.

The film is an impressive debut for Kim. The production and music by rising Music, Theatre & Dance senior Ryo Kamibayashi both help, but Kim’s writing and the actors who bring it to life are what make the film meaningful. Melani and Olivet’s chemistry is as believable when they first meet in front of the painting as when they play an 1800s artist and his muse. It is also there when they play modern-day high school students telling each other about their dreams (which feature the same artist and muse dynamic). Kim’s writing gives this chemistry somewhere to run with lines that are often sweet and funny. Anna shyly tells Leo that she thinks there’s a reason she is drawn to the painting. Leo responds with a question: Does she think that, if everything happens for a reason, there’s a reason they met? She is caught off guard but admits that there must be. They build a little world of these exchanges — the words of two people who hardly know each other but feel inexplicably like they should. 

The film is not rife with drama or conflict, but it doesn’t need to be. It reads more like a painting itself than a typical narrative. It is a picture of Anna and Leo, of their worlds and their love.

I must return to the campfire scene because the film never succeeds at painting this picture more beautifully than in that scene. The scene is simple, no fanfare. Leo and Anna are the only people there. They aren’t in a public space. They aren’t in a city. They aren’t having an adventure. They aren’t running under streetlights yelling to each other and lighting up the night with their joy and love. It is a gentle, quiet, isolated moment, just between the two of them. The outside world may as well have ceased to exist. Kim trusts their love to hold its own without a big set piece. Instead, it consumes the scene. 

I consider it a mark of success if a film so viscerally depicts something as to make the audience deeply desire it for themselves. This could be a metric by which to weigh art about romance especially. Any good art about romance (or romance we are rooting for; we can ignore any stories of misguided love here) should make the audience long for what the characters have — to have someone you love as much as they do, to be with someone who would sing with you by the fire. With this scene, with Melani and Olivet, with this film, that is what Kim has done.

Daily Arts Writer Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.

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On April 19, the Michigan Theater’s largest auditorium will show a film mixing magical realism and romance, starring two University of Michigan students in a multi-universal story of small connections that wind up meaning everything. 

The film, titled “Oeuvre, Unfinished,” is the product of years of work from Business graduate student Madeline Sun Woo Kim, who graduated the University in December 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in Film, Television and Media.

In fall 2020, the University sent students home from Thanksgiving through the end of the semester to finish classes on Zoom. Kim returned to her family’s home in San Jose, Calif. She planned a trip to Korea for Winter Break and, per pandemic guidelines, had to quarantine for two weeks before traveling. During those two weeks of bored isolation, Kim brainstormed scripts she could write.

“That’s where everything started,” Kim said in an interview with The Michigan Daily. “At the time, I was thinking about the importance of human connection and how much people take for granted — at least I’ve taken for granted — before COVID. Like these small encounters and small conversations that can happen between two strangers anywhere, like in a museum or in a coffee shop.” 

“Oeuvre, Unfinished” features scenes in both these locations. The title refers to a painting of a field of flowers which art student Anna (Music, Theatre & Dance senior Alyssa Melani) and chef Leo (Music, Theatre & Dance senior Atticus Olivet) are both inexplicably drawn to. Anna visits the painting every day in its art museum. The two meet during one of these visits — in this universe, anyway.

Kim started writing a screenplay and fantasized about shooting the film in Seoul, where she was quarantining, or New York City, a place with many potential art museums. But it wasn’t until January 2022, after she graduated, that Kim sat down to finish the script. She wrote through January and February and showed the script to her friends, who encouraged her to produce it.

“That motivated me too,” Kim said in an interview with The Michigan Daily. She had never made an independent film, though she worked as an assistant director, editor and supervising editor for three different upper-level U-M production classes, in which students form a team to shoot and produce a student-written TV pilot or feature film. While in these classes, Kim had little time for her own projects. 

In her final semester, she was part of a production class for a pilot called “Weaksiders.” This is where she met U-M alum Sydney Spaw, one of the directors, and Music, Theatre & Dance senior Timmy Thompson, a producer. Thompson asked Kim, who had been supervising editor for “Weaksiders,” to edit a web series he was making. The two became close working on these projects, and when finding people to help her with “Oeuvre, Unfinished,” Kim asked both Spaw to co-produce and Thompson to be an associate producer. She reached out to the “Weaksiders” directors of photography, U-M alum Nick Ferraina Nick Ferraina (LSA class of 2022) and LSA senior Kevin Lazzaro and recruited people via email through the Film, Television, and Media Department.

Kim sent out a casting call for actors as well, and spoke about her thoughts at the time. She said, “(I thought) no one would really audition since it’s not for a class credit or anything … it’s just an independent film.”

She said she was surprised by the number of auditions, a number she couldn’t remember exactly, but was somewhere in the range of 15-19. 

Kim held auditions anywhere she could, from a collection of classrooms in North Quad and the Modern Languages Building, to the study area in her apartment. The actors read from the sides Kim prepared — the moment Anna asks Leo if he thinks there’s a reason they met and similar transitional scenes where the dynamic between the actors was most important. Kim read Leo’s lines for the potential Annas and Anna’s for prospective Leos. She looked for people she could imagine together — these characters needed to believably fall in love in six different universes. She also sought an Anna who she says, “I saw at least a little bit of myself in.”

On the first day of auditions, Melani and Olivet auditioned. Kim usually asked actors to read just one of the prepared scenes, but “both of them were just so good. I wanted to hear more, so I asked them to do all the sides,” Kim said. After the week of auditions, Olivet and Melani still stuck in her head.

Kim still needed the painting that would bring them together. From the beginning, she had wanted to write “something with paintings.” Anna loves the painting, but she senses that it is missing something. In the first alternative universe, we find out the missing piece was her — this universe is set in the 1800s, where Leo is an artist painting a version of the canvas from the art gallery with Anna in it. An impressive painting was essential to the film. While writing the script, moving between Ann Arbor and San Jose, Kim considered who she could ask to paint it.

“I thought about asking (Art and Design) students,” she said, “but … this would be a really long process.” She wanted a 28” by 22” oil painting, and “(oil paint) like, never dries,” Kim laughed. “You have to repaint, repaint.”

Instead, she looked for artists in her neighborhood in San Jose and found HooSSo Art Studio, a prep school for high school students considering studying art in college. The studio owner and teacher was a man named Jong Min Lim.

Kim asked if Lim could do three paintings for her: the original painting from the art gallery, titled “Oeuvre, Unfinished”; a similar painting to hang in Leo’s restaurant, which he shows Anna because it reminds him of the first painting and a painting of a ring, which Leo brings as a gift for Anna only to find that she already wears an identical ring. 

“(Lim) told me that he’d never gotten that kind of request before because he usually teaches students, and he doesn’t really do any freelance painting,” Kim said.

During our interview — which took place, per Kim’s suggestion, in a multimedia room in the Duderstadt Center on North Campus — Kim turned to one of the desktop computers and pulled up pictures of the paintings. The painting of the field, now in a thick gold frame, drew my eye down a path through soft, impressionistic yellow flowers. The second painting featured an expanse of similar, purple flowers. The ring painting was more realistic, the lines of the dark green gem at the front cleanly cut. Little rainbows seem to reflect from the surrounding crystals.

“I had to ask him to paint the girl separately,” Kim said. When they shot the scene in the universe where Leo finished the painting, they carefully taped the painting of Anna to the canvas with artist tape.

The other expensive, unsure-where-to-find-it prop was the Victorian dress Anna was meant to wear in the second universe. Where could Kim find a dress suitable for the 1800s setting? She planned a day to scour the thrift stores of San Francisco in search of old dresses in a dark green to match the ring. She left early in the morning — if a 19th century dress had been put out on a thrift store floor, she would get to it before someone else. Several thrift stores in, she found a deep green dress with puffed shoulders, tapered sleeves and ruffles sidelining the buttons down the front.

It was perfect, but, Kim said, “It took up a lot of our production budget.”

So did the hard drive she left the room to retrieve in order to show me scenes from the film. Kim described it as “reliable.” I would have said formidable. The hard drive was the size of a brick. The University doesn’t technically allow students to borrow their film equipment for non-University projects, but Kim convinced someone within the FTVM department to lend lights and, for a week, two Black Magic cameras. Thompson had a camera they used for most of the other scenes.  

The most important shooting location was the art museum. The University of Michigan Museum of Art was Kim’s first choice. 

“For obvious reasons, they wouldn’t let me take down their painting and hang up mine,” Kim said. She shot B-roll around the museum, but then had to find an alternative — a place that looked enough like an UMMA exhibition room.

“I think I visited almost ten locations within campus to find a place that could look like a museum,” Kim said. It had to have white walls and no “weird floors; it couldn’t be carpet or anything.” The gallery in the Duderstadt didn’t meet these standards — not to mention that the walls were the wrong material. She thought she could find a classroom with plain white walls and looked in the Walgreen Drama Center and the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, as well as an art studio a 15-minute drive away, but each location had its pitfall.

Her perfect gallery, with no fabric walls or carpeted floors, was WSG Gallery in downtown Ann Arbor. The owners let Kim’s crew take down, rearrange and hang up their own paintings. 

With one painting housed, Kim had to find the restaurant where the second would hang and where Leo worked at the film’s start. The crew found the Chop House, a high-end steakhouse down Main Street already decorated with paintings. Kim’s would fit in perfectly, but she expected they wouldn’t let the crew shoot there or would at least demand a high fee. She was pleasantly surprised when they were told they could be there for free if they came before business hours. Kim just had to get in touch with the manager to confirm the shoot days.

“And he was never there,” Kim said. She got an email from the other employees, but the manager was unresponsive. She started going to the steakhouse every day, trying to catch the manager in person. She asked if he was there, and the employees told her, “No, but he’ll be back tomorrow.”

She returned the next day, and they told her, “He’s out right now, but he’ll be back tomorrow.”

Her persistence paid off eventually, and Kim confirmed the crew’s permission to shoot at the restaurant with the “very very nice, just very busy” manager.

The art gallery and restaurant are part of only the first of the film’s six universes. Kim showed me the scene in which Anna and Leo meet before the camera zooms into the painting, emerging in an art studio in the 1800s. The transition from one universe to the next and then up to Anna in her Victorian gown was one of the most difficult to shoot. In the end, Kim had them shoot the scene backward and reversed it in post-production.

“I told (Olivet) to paint backward,” Kim said. “That part doesn’t have any dialogue, thank God.” 

Kim’s background as an editor influenced her directorial decisions on set and helped her in Zoom meetings with the directors of photography to make shot lists. In the third universe, a high school Anna and Leo meet in the greenhouse. They filmed this scene — one of the crew’s favorites — in the Matthaei Botanical Gardens. This was one of the most fun scenes to shoot, Kim said as she found it in the timeline on Premiere Pro.

“First of all, the greenhouse is just really pretty,” she said. “So I think everyone was just really excited to get cool shots.” The botanical gardens’ second floor allowed for an arial shot. The scene opens looking into a pool of water, where Leo is reflected, an homage to the parallel universes. Anna comes in, and Leo says, “I just didn’t know if you’d show up.” Anna answers, “I needed a break, and I love the greenhouse.”

During production, the cast and crew totaled 25 students. On a given day, 10 or so were on set. Now, as the film nears the end of post-production, Kim meets with one or two collaborators at a time. The morning before our interview, she met with Spaw, who recorded sound on set, to finish editing Melani’s audio and make it less “echoey.” Kim is doing most of the other editing herself. She wrote the film’s final scene that morning. They had shot it, but Kim hadn’t finished Anna’s voiceover at the time of shooting. She’d gotten Spaw to record the voiceover before our interview. 

Music, Theatre & Dance senior Ryo Kamibayashi is composing the film’s score. The classical, beginning theme and title sequence music is finished, and when Kim showed me a scene in which Anna sketches and walks to the museum, gentle piano notes made me wish I, too, were on a calm walk through the city on the way to a gallery. 

“I really love the music,” Kim said. She sat back in her chair and seemed to listen closely, though she must have heard the music many times before. I wondered if she was taking in her project, nearly complete. 

Making a film as a student with a crew of other students, and following it through to completion, is not easy. Doing so at the University of Michigan is made more difficult by the school’s lack of support for independent projects like this. Kim found a way around the gatekept equipment, but there was no loophole to make up for the holes in the FTVM program itself. As others have criticized, Kim noted how few editing courses the University offers. As she and Thompson try to color grade — one of the final steps in their post-production — it frustrates her that she was never taught how to do this. The computers in the Duderstadt multimedia rooms have access to DaVinci Resolve, the standard color grading software, but there is no course that teaches students to use the program. Consequently, Kim and Thompson are “experimenting” with the program.

“It’s such a waste,” Kim said, for the school to give access to this software without access to the knowledge of how to use it.

As she figures out the rest of the film, Kim balances school work with editing. She started a masters of marketing program in June at the Ross School of Business. Creativity has been part of her life since she was a kid, inventing complicated zombie card games for her friends to play. She wanted to be a lawyer when she started college at Boston University, but when she stumbled upon a film production course, she said she loved the “creativity of it and the freedom I had with storytelling.” When she transferred to the University of Michigan, her mind was made up to pursue film, but as much as she loved production courses, her opinion changed by graduation.

“In the real industry, it’s harder to get the role that you actually want, and most likely you would have to start out as a (production assistant),” she said. “Not to say that a PA is a bad job, but I didn’t want to get coffee for other people, move traffic cones, yell at pedestrians.”

Kim wanted another way into the industry, and while debating what to do post-graduation, she received letters and emails from the Business School about the Masters program. She thought, “Why not?” When the program accepted her, she decided to enroll. Marketing seemed to combine creativity with her passion for film.

Now, Kim plans to go into marketing in the film and television industry. Her one-year program ends this April, and she hopes to move to either Los Angeles or New York. LA seems more probable because she already lives in San Jose.

“And (because of) the weather,” she said. “And LA’s the place to be if you’re in film.”

After the premiere, Kim will submit “Oeuvre, Unfinished” to festivals. In an email after our interview, she informed me she has already begun this process. She has applied to a few grants for the film and finished an almost year-long process applying for the omptiMize Social Innovation Project, for which she gave her final pitch the week before our interview.

“(It is rare for) an Asian American woman to direct, write and produce a film,” Kim said. This was one of her main points in her pitch. She discussed the diverse crew she worked with and her commitment to encouraging diversity in projects she leads. In the pitch, which she shared with the Daily in a later email, she wrote that the film was not just a film but “an advocacy of diversity and inclusion, and it is a promise to other women of color that their art deserves to be created, be seen, and be heard.” In her email, she told me she received $7,000 from optiMize, most of which she used to hire a colorist from Company3.

U-M alum Christine Park, Kim’s co-production designer, is making posters for the film, which they release on Instagram each week leading up to the premiere. Kim plans to print and hang more posters around campus. These posters feature the paintings and photos of the actors from a Victorian-themed photoshoot by Music, Theatre & Dance senior Korrin Dering. 

When audiences watch this film, Kim wants them to see something that reminds them to be in touch with other humans. In her email, she reflected that, similar to the film’s message, her cast and crew were, she said, “able to build a strong team because everyone just connected with one another.” For Kim, what could have been small connections in production classes became friendships, collaboration and the creation of something meaningful with a public premiere.

“I want this film to be a message,” Kim said, “for how important it is to not take any small encounter for granted.”

Senior Arts Editor Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.

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akdjhfkjahgkhg. (Am I the only one who pronounces keyboard spam differently depending on which letters it uses most? This would sound different if it had lots of Es and Hs.) The intro should be unconventional too, shouldn’t it? How do I do that? I was told, “Just don’t write an intro. That’s unconventional.” But that’s giving “this is daring” energy./ First of all: This may be my one opportunity to publish brackets. We should be allowed to use them more. In the name of unconventionality: [ ] / um. / Why did I decide to do this? / We are Arts writers. Art cannot escape convention. Every film, book, song and designer coat collection is built on the dictations of those before it. Even works that break conventions can only do so because those conventions exist. / … But also. / We cannot escape convention. It surrounds us. We form society and smaller cultural sects that, while created by and malleable to individuals, turn back to instruct and categorize us. We follow conventions to avoid conflict, because we don’t know how to exist outside of them, or because they are so inherent to our daily lives that they have become invisible. / I asked these writers to find conventions and point them out. Or to tell me about the times they broke conventions. Or tried to. Or thought we should get rid of a convention — even if it’s harmless, convention gets old. / And there’s one more part. My favorite part. / Language. / As writers, we are constrained to its conventions. These writers have taken language and moved it to other formats, molded it into fiction, paired different writing styles in a single piece, pulled it through their personal stories, used it to invite discourse from YOU, the reader, or looked a language convention in the eye. / Right, so here we examine and question the conventions of art, culture and language. / That’s it from me. Enjoy.

Senior Arts Editor Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.

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When cinematographer Carolina Costa first read the screenplay for “Fancy Dance,” written by Erica Tremblay (“Little Chief”) and Miciana Alise (Debut), she cried. Costa, the film’s director of photography, said in an interview with The Michigan Daily that when movies make her cry, she often feels “manipulated into (crying).” This script was different.

“It was truly the emotions I was feeling,” she said.

The film, which Tremblay also directed, tells the story of Jax (Lily Gladstone, “Certain Women”), an indigenous woman caring for her niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson, “Three Pines”), whose mother has gone missing. The film premiered at Sundance in January.

“I think the character of Jax was one of the things that immediately attracted me to being part of the project,” Costa said. While she couldn’t relate to every aspect of Jax’s upbringing and living environment, she identified with the “blockages in life” that Jax encountered as a queer woman.

Jax exemplifies a character whose story Costa likes to tell — “characters that are not perfect and sometimes characters that we haven’t seen on the screen,” she said. Indigenous women, especially Queer indigenous women, are rarely centered in films, if they are portrayed at all. The characters “just felt human” to Costa. Jax makes mistakes, doesn’t know how much to tell Roki about her mother’s disappearance and is inexperienced in her new caretaker role. But from the script’s characterization to Gladstone’s performance, Costa described her story as “delicate and beautiful and … real.”

With her cinematography, Costa said she hoped to maintain the characters’ humanity by portraying them without judgment and without objectifying or victimizing them. She and Tremblay were inspired by filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s camera work. Arnold films characters with empathy, and with a certain freedom.

“Even though the camera is extremely precise in what it’s telling and what it’s showing — and not showing — it is also not precious,” Costa said. “The camera was lucky to capture that moment in time, and I think that was the heart of how we wanted our camera to move and portray these people.”

For some projects, making the careful choreography of each line, color and movement clear is what works best. But this precise, “symmetrical” way of looking at the world felt wrong for “Fancy Dance.” Costa didn’t want every shot to feel “constructed.”

The film’s scenes may appear like moments captured by chance, but Costa has an intention behind the camera positioning, movement, lighting and colors in each one. Before shooting scenes in a strip club, she studied similar scenes in other films and found that many felt biased toward the perspective of men watching the women. This perspective could lead to a perception of the club workers as victims, which Costa sought to avoid throughout the film. To avoid this objectification or romanticization, she limited her use of a long lens and placed the camera at the eye level of the women working in the club rather than from a lower angle looking up.

“There’s no need of re-victimizing indigenous women over and over again,” Costa said. Tremblay and Alise held this belief when writing the screenplay as well, not wanting to represent their communities as victims. While violence is implied in the film, it is never explicitly shown: In a scene where a woman is found dead in a car, we see the man who opens the car door and the reactions of her relatives when they receive the phone call about her death, but we never see her body.

“You see how it’s affecting these people and their community, (which) is much more impactful than actually showing a body,” Costa said. The focus on the living characters and their responses keeps the film real and emotional, deepening the characters’ humanity rather than attempting to shock the viewer. The visual focus on reaction makes the unseen violence scarier, while the overuse of images of violence against indigenous women might have taken away its impact.

Tragedy is implied again at the film’s conclusion. The final scene, in which Jax and Roki dance at a powwow, is one of Costa’s favorites because it “has so much beauty, but you know, also, what’s going to happen after the movie.” The scene makes Costa cry each time she watches it.

The powwow was one of the most complicated scenes to shoot, specifically when it came to lighting. Costa considered using a crane or a big light, but that not only pushed the film’s budget but “felt wrong for the kind of style we were going for, which was much more contained.”

The solution came to Costa in a dream: She lit the set with construction lights, which were used at many of the Oklahoma powwows the crew visited in preparation for the scene. The blue lights made sense to her, too, because blue was already significant to the film. When Roki finds her mother’s stripper clothing and a DVD of them dancing at a previous powwow, the TV in the scene is blue, as is the moonlight illuminating it. Blue is Roki’s mother. It is also safety — Roki and Jax’s house and porch are blue. The club where Jax meets her lover Sapphire (Crystle Lightning, “Trickster”) is a different shade of blue, signifying another source of safety for Jax. Costa described how this color is often coded as symbolic of the past, of danger or of a cold environment. Its symbolism is different in “Fancy Dance.”

“We started playing with (the color blue) first because (Tremblay) and I talked about the importance of the moonlight in the story,” Costa said. The scene when Roki finds her mother’s things is one of only a few lit with moonlight. It is used again when Roki and Jax run through a cornfield at night, one of the most difficult scenes to film — Costa had to put a light on a crane to simulate moonlight while characters moved. Even in scenes not lit this way, Costa wanted the lighting to feel natural. She used streetlights and, in the final scene, the construction lights to make the lighting “part of the environment.”

When beginning a project, Costa said, “I like to start from zero, from scratch.” She laughed, adding, “I like to start, like, as a baby” and discover the particular style and cinematography techniques with which to approach a film’s “visual grammar.” She is careful when choosing which films to join. She admitted that “sometimes (she) might not be the right person for the project, even if (she likes) the project.” When she reads a script and feels a connection to the story and characters and understands “why these people are moving through the world in that way,” those are the projects she takes on. That sort of connection provokes ideas — images, colors, music — of how she could tell the story visually. When she doesn’t find a connection, “nothing comes up.”

Regardless of the specific cinematography Costa uses in a film, her approach always “comes from empathy and looking at people from a human perspective.” This empathetic approach extends to how she leads her film crews and supports the directors with whom she works.

Costa is now a first-time director of two short films, while also working on a new project’s cinematography. She has begun submitting the first short to festivals and recently wrapped production for the other short. Costa seems ever interested in trying something new with filmmaking, as long as she is expressing something human and true.

Of “Fancy Dance,” she said, “I think we did capture something that is honest about these people.” That achievement of honesty seems to be the heart of her work.

Senior Arts Editor Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.

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Only some of my sisters are dead; I wear their clothes. I remember them in the red canvas skirt I wore today, in the denim jacket that’s almost a bathrobe and almost too long, in the windbreaker patterned with Time Magazine covers. If I have met these sisters, I am not aware of it. Their clothing is washed, stains scrubbed out, worn or loose threads replaced with new, strong ones and knotted to keep their hems intact by the time I find it on a rack in a vintage store, slotted between others that aren’t my style or wouldn’t fit me. 

Why is vintage clothing special to me? I told myself I would stop buying fast fashion at the end of high school, but proceeded to slip up whenever I saw something through a store window and immediately went from thinking it was cute to thinking I couldn’t live without it. I still guiltily returned to the Urban Outfitters website at the end of stressful days. In the past year, this has stopped happening. I enter a traditional clothing store and find nothing I like. Everything feels sort of false, like it’s not really clothing at all but pieces of flimsy, unworn materials that I worry would cause me to lose all sense of identity should I put them on.

When clothing feels like it could fall apart at any moment, I worry that life and wear will destroy it; when I know there are hundreds of identical copies of that piece of clothing, I worry that I can’t give it a distinguishable meaning before its seams break or its frail threads rip. 

When I look through a vintage store, the clothing already has an identity. It often has lived decades longer than I have. I can trust it not to fall apart. Even if it is not one of a kind, its path has diverged so much from any copies that it feels unique anyway. Fingerprints stay in clothing; the DNA of people who made and wore it remains in the fibers. There is care sewn into it, from the original maker, the vintage store owners who rescued it from death in a landfill and the previous owners, who cared for the clothing before it got to me. Those owners are the sisters I mention. We have not met, but we share the same clothing, we care for the same clothing and the life of that clothing binds our lives together. Vintage clothing is not immortal; no clothing is. But it is less mortal than I am. Wearing something that I will likely outlive makes me uneasy. Receding into the vintage denim coat that drops to my ankles, my mortality is extended by its enclosure in something that will live on. My life merges with those who have worn it before and will wear it after me.

I like things to outlive me. Maybe I want to avoid dealing with loss and would prefer everything to stick around at least until I’m gone. If you read “clothing” and “sisterhood” and were waiting for me to mention “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” I will. I read this book and the next three in the series in middle school, when I had to walk to the library after school and stay there until my mom finished working and could retrieve me. I sat in one of the chairs in the library’s minuscule “teen” section and read, noted my place and returned to my book the next day. I never checked a book out. The four friends (“sisters”) between whom the pants travel agree that they shouldn’t be able to fit in the same pair of jeans. I assume this magic is not present in the vintage clothes I wear. I can only picture their previous owners by the fact that they fit into something that also fits me. They are outlines, at best. Maybe I know their waist measurements, but not their height. Perhaps we have similar genetics in some way, giving us similar bodies, perhaps we molded our bodies into similar shapes of our own accord or perhaps we don’t look similar at all — maybe one sister bought something too small, another too large.

Sisterhood is a form of immortality, or at least prolonged mortality. By sisterhood, I mean connection and friendship. Sisterhoods don’t have to be founded in material objects, but these can help with that mortality. They inherently involve sharing things — ourselves, our lives, our jokes, our flaws. Tying people together via a more durable, stable material object can create something less tenuous. I have been involved in several “sisterhoods” of traveling objects. I bought the book “Kiki Man Ray” by Mark Braude and told my friends they would all have to read it — the sisterhood of the traveling “Kiki Man Ray.” Other film writers and I went to The Getup Vintage on State Street and I saw a Beatles shirt hanging high on the wall, white with colorful squares across it. It cost more than $100, too much for even me to justify spending on a T-shirt. What if we all bought it? We could share it. (Well, I could technically own it and lend it to other writers if they so desired).

“Sisterhood of the traveling Beatles shirt,” texted one writer. One sister. 

“Exactly.”

I bought the softest pair of jeans that I own at Malofta Vintage, a vintage store in Kerrytown. The jeans are so well-worn that the waistband is fuzzy in places. The measurement listed on the tag would have been too small for me, but because they seem to have been some previous owner’s favorite jeans, they fit comfortably. The sisterhood of vintage clothing is not necessarily a way to have my presence or body remembered, but a way of being remembered by sharing something, some part of myself and my life, intertwined with those of others. There is — or there was — someone out there with not just the same favorite brand or style of jeans, but the same pair of jeans as me. 

Clothing can be a box. It is created with limits of fabric and thread, and I must find the clothing that can properly contain me in particular. I like fitting into things. Clothing. The red skirt. And friendships. Communities. Sisterhoods. I like to create them using shared objects because of those objects’ immortality — that feeling that there is a way of making space for myself in the world.

My one real, biological sister — twin, at that — flies helicopters. She texted our family groupchat a week ago, telling us she had gotten her private license. An update two months before told us that she had made a mistake while flying — a stupid mistake, something she knew but messed up for no reason — and sent the helicopter diving toward the ground. She and her instructor survived by luck. Mathematically, they should have crashed based on how the propeller was moving and how fast the helicopter was going.

In my life of literature classes and vintage shopping, I can ignore my mortality. Hers is insistent, constant. I could always be about to find out she has died.

When someone’s mortality is that apparent, I have to find her in as many material objects as I can, in case I need something to turn to, rather than having her life entirely wiped from mine.

I cared about clothing in high school; she didn’t, but she liked the things I bought. When I got sick of them, I gave them to her: a green bomber jacket, a red faux leather one. She has taken my old clothes and bought me some clothing. It is inherent to our sisterhood. She has touched the red suit she bought me for Christmas; her DNA is still in it, and that trace of her is as immortal as the clothing allows. We can sew ourselves into the clothing we own and share; does it not make sense to wear clothing that we can trust to outlive us?

Vintage clothing is strong. It can take on the world. It won’t fall apart and leave me once again trying to find something to make myself identifiable, to make myself fit.

Senior Arts Editor Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.

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Have you heard about the rock doc at Sundance this year? You’re thinking of a non-parody version of “This Is Spinal Tap,” aren’t you? Incorrect. Wrong rock. I’m talking about those things the characters become in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Yeah, those rocks. They know things. 

Deborah Stratman’s (“The Illinois Parables”) “Last Things” is in Sundance’s Final Frontier category, which I think of as the “these films are stranger than the others” category. It’s the rock doc.

The film traces history from the beginning of time to the present day as seen by rocks. Narrators (Valérie Massadian, “Milla” and Marcia Bjørnerud, debut) speak in French while structures — sometimes molecule shaped, other times more fractalline, like snowflakes — form and spin on a black background. It is unclear if these forms are in a vacuum or backed by a galaxy. What is that blackness? The narrator tells us the forms have existed far longer than we have. Once we are gone, they will remain.

Much of the film consists of what appear to be microscopic images of rocks, revealing their internal organization at the non-human equivalent of a cellular level. The variation of these structures is fascinating. Some are sharp crystals. Others look like frozen sea anemones with white tendrils reaching across the screen.

Music accompanies these images, harsh notes with long pauses, more sound than score. A steely, cutting clang makes the crystals feel like knives, formidable and emotional. Rather than observing the rocks, we are invited to feel what it might have been like to exist with them as the earth threw life in and out of turmoil over millions of years.

Other parts of the film feel more like a typical documentary. People interact with rocks both in labs and in the natural world. In a lab, a man discusses an aggregate rock, one of the earliest rock types to form in the solar system. Later, the French narrator returns as a woman enters a rock cave. As she descends into the dark, a heartbeat becomes louder — the heartbeat of the cave itself. While Stratman focuses on what we can learn from studying rocks, she also characterizes them. In “Last Things,” rocks are just as alive, if not more so, than humans.

As I watched the film, I almost believed in the life of what I knew were inanimate objects. From far away, the rocks pictured were as motionless as ever, but in the microscopic close-ups they moved and changed. I realized something was happening, even if in everyday life I wasn’t aware of it. That stillness was an illusion. These objects were recording information.

How do we interact with things that dwarf us in age? If the film is their story, what part do humans play? The film shows a stone permanently dented from raindrops before it was solid enough to fend off their eroding effect — “raindrop autographs older than the pharaohs.” When a man leaves the rock face he studies, the camera focuses on the hand print he left behind; as much information as he took, he also left a mark in the stone. The film doesn’t just tell us we are insignificant, having been on earth so fleetingly, but shows how we communicate and learn from these objects.

There’s a post-credit scene. A break dancer performs on the pavement of a busy street. The camera closes in on his hands brushing the asphalt, lingering on the sidewalk’s chiseled and smoothed surface. We now know what that pavement contains.

“Last Things” is only 50 minutes long, and any longer would have been too much. But the film strikes a rare balance, centering on something non-human while maintaining its humanity. I smiled at the post-credit scene, thinking, “Next time I walk across the sidewalk, what will I think? What would I ask it if I could?”

Senior Arts Editor Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.

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(In the voice of Kurt Vonnegut at the beginning of “Slaughterhouse-Five”) Listen. No, pay attention. You can’t sit back and passively watch this one. This is a film you must see, hear, read. And I say “must” for a reason. 

So many films are praised for being “unlike anything seen before” that the compliment feels empty — I’ll throw it at Alison O’Daniel’s (“Night Sky”) “The Tuba Thieves” anyway. “The Tuba Thieves” questions what a film can do more than any film I’ve seen at Sundance this year.

The first scene shows us a leaf blower. Bright aqua subtitles read “[leaf blower]” and then specify the blower’s precise decibel level. Soon after, we are in a room with Nature Boy (Russell Harvard, “There Will Be Blood”), where he takes a hearing test requiring him to repeat words back to a moderator sitting in a separate room on the other side of a glass panel. Shortly after that, we watch an unidentifiable group of people steal tubas at a high school football game. The scenes don’t tell a clear story. There’s not an obvious point of similarity between one and the next.

Intertitles tell us the locations of California high schools from which tubas (and later other instruments) have been stolen, giving us a stolen instrument count from each. These notations trace the nonfictional part of the film; these robberies really did occur between 2011 and 2013.

The film is creative nonfiction, an oxymoronic-sounding genre that in this case involves combining documentary and fiction. The nonfictional part depicts the instrument theft. The fictional scenes center on Nature Boy’s girlfriend Nyeisha “Nyke” Prince (“Savage/Love”), a pregnant, deaf woman who plays herself and Geovanny Marroquin, debuting as himself, a drum major at one of the high schools whose tubas were taken.

Other scenes don’t strictly fit the category of tuba-related documentary or fictional scene: wildlife camera footage of mountain lions drinking from a pool of water, an upside down highway shot more effective than any I have seen, where the camera flies backward through an underpass and around curves with an energy that pulls the viewer along, even as the purpose of this scene remains elusive. While these scenes are disconnected and confusing if I tried to justify their existence as related to a story, they work by drawing the viewer away from that need for clear narrative toward the experience of the film as a complete piece of art.

I quickly realized the disparate scenes were probably not going to tie together in a traditional narrative and wondered why I was so compelled by something I didn’t know how to interpret. What was it about? Stories make films captivating, and there wasn’t much of a story.

In her work with film, sculpture and other media, O’Daniel, who is deaf, explores sound by combining it with image and performance. “The Tuba Thieves” is akin to an interactive art exhibit: The audience is invited to experience something with multiple senses, let it envelop them for an hour and a half and leave them wondering how to interpret it. They hold an overarching idea of its sensibility rather than a detailed plotline.

The characters and events of “The Tuba Thieves” are less important than sound, the underlying subject and narrator. The stories are bound by interactions with sound and its absence. Nyke and Nature Boy have expressive conversations in sign language while relative silence surrounds them. The original leaf blower is followed later by scenes from the highway, providing a dull, humming soundscape. This is interrupted by purposeful, entertaining sound in various musical performances. During a concert, a family discusses their family member in sign language while music pulses around them. 

Subtitles usually feel like an afterthought that, on their own, give only a blurry idea of events. In “The Tuba Thieves,” they do more — color coded for spoken or signed dialogue and often written to include a certain cadence. Decibel levels are noted. When musical instruments are played, the subtitles include descriptions of the type of sound they make — a note is “[stretched]” and the spaces between the letters in “stretched” are themselves large, an evocative visual representation of what typical subtitles would only hint at. O’Daniel explores sound, but particularly its relationship to film.

How can language itself tell a story? Not always the way we imagine it doing so in film. When Nature Boy takes the hearing test, he becomes irritable, takes off the headset and switches to sign language, combining all of the words he was asked to repeat in a story told dramatically with the motions of his hands, extending to his arms and whole body. He gives life to the story with this language. There’s an appreciation for sign language here that I haven’t seen — an acknowledgement not only of its existence but of what it provides both “speaker” and “listener.”

The film’s title card alone treads the line of the intersection between language and sound, the places they intersect and diverge. Nyke opens a closet door and we see only her hands. They sign the letters comprising “The Tuba Thieves” while subtitles tell unfamiliar viewers what she is saying. It is somewhere between a spoken and written title. It contains meaning but also movement, objective interpretation and the individual intonation of Nyke’s quickly-moving fingers. It gives us an image, hints at a voice, and then it is gone.

Senior Arts Editor Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.

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The Michigan Daily film writers love to watch and discuss films at the cutting edge of storytelling and there is no place better to do so than the Sundance Film Festival. After two years attending the festival only online, writers and editors for the Film Beat have trudged through snow and taken planes, trains and automobiles to arrive at Park City, Utah. Our coverage will include the premiers of dramas, romances, documentaries and everything in between. Welcome to our discussion on films made with Oscar winners and first-time filmmakers alike.

At Sundance this year, film writers Maya and Erin watched Elijah Bynum’s (“Hot Summer Nights”) “Magazine Dreams.” We had high expectations after hearing the film’s premiere received a standing ovation. The film stars Jonathan Majors (“Lovecraft Country”) as bodybuilder Killian Maddox, who is bent on fame and recognition at any cost. The writers responded to the film differently and decided to do a joint review to include both perspectives.

Maya: I can’t believe he got that ripped for this role.

Erin: That was incredible.

Maya: I want to be careful with how I articulate my thoughts. It’s not that I thought the film was bad, it was just incredibly difficult for me to stomach. But that’s a good thing. It unnerved and challenged me as an audience member. “Magazine Dreams” tells a story of self-destruction and anguish, the kind that you struggle to sit through — especially when told through such a talented artist as Majors. 

Erin: Majors’ performance was captivating; he gave everything to this role. His ability to pull off the intense anger Killian feels at times while also showing his insecurity, shyness and hope, with unrealistic dreams that he is perhaps too determined to fight for, is amazing. With his intensity and authentic portrayal of all aspects of a quite complex character, Majors captivates the viewer, forces them to empathize with him even as they question some of his decisions because those decisions still make sense. Of course he’s this angry. We want him to change, but this will not happen at the expense of deviating from his character.

Maya: Majors deserves praise not only for how he surrenders himself completely to Killian by accessing his troubled head space, but for the sheer dedication and commitment on Majors’ part to convincingly portray a competitive bodybuilder. Majors is formidable as Killian; his jaw-dropping performance is uncomfortably real. Killian trains obsessively, eats nauseating amounts of protein and injects himself with steroids — his lifestyle is laborious and all-consuming, and Bynum spares the audience none of his brutal reality. Majors was unrecognizable, disappearing beneath Killian’s agony — just “believable” wouldn’t do his performance justice. 

Erin: It’s certainly not easy to watch. The world seems against Killian: Following his parents’ death, he lives in a food desert with his grandfather (Harrison Page, “Lionheart”), surrounded by subtle and outright racism. When he goes for a run down the street at night, he is followed by a cop car. In a scene where he yells at a man in a diner who attacked him earlier, the fear from the other customers feels, while semi-justified, more dramatic than it would have been had he been white. Scenes like the one where he lifts massive weights until he can’t breath and collapses on the floor of his garage aren’t pleasant to watch either.

This film succeeds because his anger feels motivated despite this discomfort. As much as I often wished he acted differently, his actions never felt thrown in for shock value. This believability made it impossible not to care about and root for Killian, which is what makes movies compelling.

Maya: I struggled throughout this film to process my conflicted feelings, as my empathy for Killian was frequently challenged and overshadowed by how unsettled his choices made me. No doubt the product of childhood trauma and his unforgiving circumstances, Killian often feels an impulse to control, and this often manifests in violent outbursts. Though he doesn’t end up physically hurting anyone, he poses a clear threat to himself and others. Killian slams his head through a car window in a moment of rage, and even brings firearms to public places — in those moments the audience questions what his true intentions are. 

Erin: I think a part of that uncertainty about his intentions comes from him having multiple, conflicting desires that shift throughout the story. The film gives a nuanced discussion of wanting control and superiority. Killian’s body is his way of taking the control that he lacks in all other aspects of his life. This idea develops later in the film: Does he want control, does he want to be remembered or does he want to look down on someone when he feels so looked down upon himself? He googles first “how do you make people like you?” and later “how to make people remember you.” In this second search, he scrolls past options about meaningful friendships and lands on those related to leaving a legacy and doing something bold and unforgettable. When characters seek universal, impersonal recognition rather than making personal connections, the distance created by that impersonability often extends to the audience. But we clearly see why Killian desires a legacy and fears vulnerability, making the discussion provocative and devastating, rather than draining the viewer of sympathy.

Maya: I was interested by the choice to not make Killain interested in sex in spite of his need for control, not centralizing sexual identity to his character. Films often portray men with control issues, especially those that concern physical appearance, to exhibit compulsive sexual behavior. Killian is hyper masculine and obsessed with scrutinizing his physique and when he does relinquish a degree of control in interactions with others, he seeks to form emotional bonds rather than gain physical pleasure. His genuine desire for connection makes his failure to form relationships all the more heartbreaking. During an interaction with a sex worker, a naive Killian desperately wants to feel close to her — only to be pushed away and scolded when he tries to kiss her. “No kissing,” she tells him. He tells her he no longer wants to sleep with her and leaves. 

Erin: The seamless character motivation allowed me to trust Bynum as the director as well, which isn’t something I can say about many films. The film was surprising without ever feeling unbelievable based on what we know of Killian’s life. In other films, when the screen goes black midway through, I fear the film has reached an unsatisfying ending. When the screen went black in “Magazine Dreams,” I felt no such uncertainty. Because of how well Bynum clearly understood the character and his story, I was confident he wouldn’t end the film prematurely. The ending itself was deserved, the definition of the “surprising yet inevitable” ending my screenwriting professors have preached.

After watching the film, we texted Zach, the other film writer who joined us at Sundance. This was his response:

Zach: I’m at the same time devastated (cause I missed it and Jonathan Majors is one of my favorite actors) and ecstatic (cause it was good and Johnathan Majors is one of my favorite actors). 

Senior Arts Editor Erin Evans, Daily Arts Writer Maya Ruder and Film Beat Editor Zach Loveall can be reached at erinev@umich.edu, mayarud@umich.edu and zloveall@umich.edu.

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