Annotations — Week 07

Apple rankings, life-changing films, Lolita, and fashion neuroses.

A favorite film.

The Fall (2006), Tarsem Singh

I will never shut up about the saturated visual potency of this film. Initially a box office disaster (which baffles me, because it is gratuitously beautiful), The Fall —one of my favorite films — is finally getting the recognition it deserves. It pays homage to visually striking art films like The Color of Pomegranates and The Inner Scar, but with a more tangible plot. It is stunning, but I don’t need to convince you. It speaks for itself. It’s available to stream now on Mubi, which has a deal right now where you can get three months of the service for just $1. (This isn’t an ad, I’m just really excited about it and had to share it with others.)

I watched it again with Ed last week. I’d been trying to convince him to watch it for months, and he finally gave in. He agreed: it is, indeed, a visual masterpiece. It made me a little emotional, realizing that a film like this could never be made today — not with our obsession with budgets, efficiency, and immediacy. This film took four years to make, and Tarsem Singh insisted on minimal CGI, a bold choice that paid off tenfold. To me, The Fall represents over-the-top, almost self-defeating dedication — it cost $30 million to make and earned just $3.1 million — to authenticity and beauty. Singh said he went bankrupt making it, and that he’d do it ten times over. That kind of attitude feels almost rebellious in today’s landscape of half-hearted, corner-cutting projects, where directors and producers prioritize speed and profit over excellence.

Just commit to the bit! Be excellent, or don’t make it at all. If it’s crap, start again. There’s nothing worse than watching something and knowing it was rushed, that creative pressure came from the need to turn a profit rather than the desire to make something meaningful. I’m more cynical than usual these days, but can you blame me? In a world hell-bent on automating and flattening the dimensions of everything beautiful and life-giving, these are the films I want to see — films that torment and nearly destroy their creators, who put everything on the line so the rest of us can partake in their beauty.

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A perfect podcast.

This podcast brings together all of my favorite worlds — fashion, literature, art, and psychology — into one. In some ways, discovering it has given me permission to talk more about fashion here. I’ve avoided the topic in the past, worried that it would undermine my credibility as a "serious writer," whatever that means. Yet here’s Karl, arguably one of the greatest writers of his generation, doing exactly that: talking about clothes.