Justin Wyatt wrote a review of Flickers of Film in this past summer’s issue
of Cineaste—it’s not a particularly
glowing review, though Wyatt takes some pains to appear even-handed,
complimenting some parts of the book more than others. Written more for my own
personal agenda (which I will explain below), Flickers of Film ultimately was an unapologetic, idiosyncratic
attempt at negotiating the ambivalences of nostalgia for film and the analog
era in the age of digital cinema, with particular attention to Hollywood production.
I guess I should be flattered by the fact that someone as accomplished as Wyatt
took the time out of his busy schedule consulting with people in the industry
on “market research” to acknowledge what was frankly a pretty minor and
unambitious little work in a magazine as prestigious as Cineaste. But maybe that itself is telling—something I wrote about
the economics of Hollywood in the post-industrial age really got his attention.
Of course, comments like saying my work
is “naïve” are kind of a cheap shot, not to mention condescending. But then I
think Wyatt represents a class (within and outside academia) that is completely
out-of-touch with some of the actual on-the-ground economic realities involved,
so I guess it’s all relative.
He puts forth something of a “graduate
student” argument—criticizing the book for not being the one he would have
written, instead of engaging with what the book is actually trying to do. But I
suspect that’s the problem—we have fundamentally opposed ideas on the subject
of Hollywood’s investment in nostalgia, and Wyatt’s review—coming from the
perspective of the industry—is less about dealing with my book in good faith
and more about defending an outdated economic model that is coming increasingly
under strain (particularly in this political climate). Maybe that’s not what he
intended, but that’s the general effect nonetheless.
Which reminds me—Wyatt puts a lot of
stock throughout his criticism of my book in the idea that the filmmakers
didn’t “intend” some of the ideological positions I take the movies to task
for—which strikes me as awfully convenient. It doesn’t matter what was
intended—what matters are larger hegemonic norms that continue to be
perpetuated.
(And, on a not entirely unrelated note,
Wyatt’s belief that since filmmakers don’t “intend” to perpetuate troubling
narratives about the value of labor, consumerism, historical distortion, and so
forth, and therefore shouldn’t be held responsible for those messages, sounds
an awful lot like older Disney fans who try to claim that Song of the South isn’t racist just because “Uncle Walt” didn’t
intend it to be. We should kill off this idea of intention once and for all. At
best, it’s a slippery target; at worst, it’s morally irresponsible).
Take, for example, this one passage
from his review:
The tone is accusatory, no more so than
when Sperb singles out Disney Chairman Bob Iger for a bevy of Disney staff cuts
while enjoying a significant increase in his own yearly bonus. Not to diminish
concerns over labor in the new economy or the inequities in media industry
executive versus staff salaries, I am less convinced that Sperb is bolstering his
argument by layering in this additional level of analysis or by taking easy swipes
at capitalism.
The
original passage in question from my book is as follows:
Also significant is how the
acquisition of these brands allowed Disney to consolidate certain sections of
production and distribution—such as the complete gutting of LucasArts
videogames in 2013—and thus further downsize labor in an effort to reduce
costs. Since the initial purchase of Pixar in 2006, Bob Iger has worked
aggressively to cut work staff across the Disney Universe:
650 staffers in 2006
1,900 in 2009 (mainly from theme parks)
450 in 2010 (ImageMovers)
250 in 2011 (mainly film studio and interactive personnel)
60 in 2012 (Disney Interactive)
300 in 2013 (Disney film studio and LucasArts)[i]
Meanwhile, Iger’s own
personal earnings increased by 13.6% in 2011 alone.[ii] Added
to this are the accusations that Disney/Pixar, LucasFilm and others conspired
for years to keep wages down even before the merger.[iii]
Thus, any celebration of aesthetic potential given the avenues available to
audiences and producers today always feels premature; increased consolidation
of media brands may open up the creative possibilities for transmedia
storytelling, but it also restricts the opportunities for a rejuvenated and
healthy labor pool in the era of media convergence.
To
be clear, Iger’s negative treatment of workers at Disney is a pretty minor point in the larger
context of the overall book (literally half a page), but the fact that he
highlighted that passage as opposed to others says a lot about his narrow agenda (and, seriously, what’s the issue with another “easy
swipe at capitalism”? I suspect it could handle a few more. Someone’s just
worried about their consulting fees).
Passages
like these make Wyatt, “Vice President of Primary Research at NBCUniversal,” come
across as little more than a corporate apologist. And all of this also brings to
mind my central quibble with some
academic work which engages in the field known as “media industry studies”:
what does it add to our understanding of the industry that goes beyond what the
industry is already saying about itself? What sacrifices do such scholars make
in the name of “access”? What’s the space for critique without being appropriated
and incorporated back into the system? Wyatt’s own work on “high concept”
Hollywood movies is a perfect example of this problem—research that was less an
insightful deconstruction of the industry and more a fancy academic repackaging
of what was already established practice by the studios.
It’s clear to me that Wyatt was looking
for the kind of book whose data could enhance Hollywood’s existing understanding—and
thus manipulation—of the nostalgia market. But—and this is the crux of the
tension—I knowingly sought to write a book which was rejecting those industrial
ambitions, which refused to offer any kind of material for the kind of market
appropriation Wyatt is seeking, while also acknowledging the very real and resilient
power of nostalgia nonetheless (including very much, but not exclusively, my
own).
The
challenge in my book—and I know I didn’t entirely succeed—was how to create a
space for a critique of postindustrial capitalism in the context of Hollywood’s
digital transition which acknowledged and perhaps even embraced nostalgia’s
elusive ability to engage us in historical questions, but could still elude
Hollywood’s intensely reflexive awareness of nostalgia’s power to 1)
manipulate—frankly—millions of consumers who possess various degrees of
self-awareness and 2) block more complex historical questions which might
actually challenge many of the assumptions about the impact of postindustrial
capitalism by imagining possible alternatives.
I was trying to articulate a kind of nostalgia
ultimately that people like Wyatt couldn’t repackage into a PowerPoint
presentation for investors.
And the fundamental flaw in his Cineaste review is that Wyatt does not
acknowledge two of the most important aspects of my book—1) that I state
upfront that it’s a polemic—fair or otherwise—one which takes as its target
exactly the kind of status quo that he seems quite invested in defending, and
2) the central notion of “self-theorizing nostalgia,” which is an attempt at
negotiating exactly the above frustration of reconciling the very power of nostalgia
with the industry’s own aggressive awareness of its aesthetic convenience and value
as commodity. If my theory of nostalgia sounds frustrated, that’s because it
was (as I wrote in the book, btw). Without acknowledging these aspects of the
project, the potentially valid criticism is empty.
* * *
Anyway, that wasn’t what I really
wanted to say. Reading the Cineaste
review reminded me of a longer blog post that I’ve long wanted to write, yet
put off for several personal and professional reasons. As the book receives
more attention, I realize that perhaps Flickers
of Film is difficult to appreciate without the backstory of my own life
while writing it. I have told friends in the past that it’s really a book about
“subtext,” and so maybe it’s best to finally get on with it.
The project begin (unknowingly) in the
spring of 2011 when I was teaching at Northwestern. I was assigned a course
called “Digital Cinema” in the department of Radio/Television/Film. At first I
was terrified, since it wasn’t an area I was particularly comfortable with. But
I embraced the challenge—in part because I thought professionally it would be a
useful area to strengthen. This wasn’t the first time I’d reviewed digital
cinema scholarship, but it was my first really sustained engagement—and as
often happens I become more focused and even fascinated with material after
spending an entire term negotiating it through new research, lesson plans,
class discussion and student writing.
Doing prep work for the class
introduced me to Michael Crichton’s Looker
(1981), a dystopic satire about an evil corporation’s plans to create digital
copies of glamorous models and then kill off their real life counterparts,
with the hope that their stored versions will provide an endless supply of free, "post-human" labor. It is also a brilliant satire on our modern superficial
obsessions with beauty and perfection—the idea being that a computer can
achieve a level of perfection that a physical human body never could
(definitely prescient, mostly before the era of photoshopping and
post-production retouches). The film was a huge inspiration for Flickers of Film with its vision of
digitized labor in a post-industrial age, though ultimately it was not as
central to the final book as I long envisioned it to be.
It was also hugely popular with
students—in the spring of 2014, students at NU broke out into applause
at its conclusion, loving the mix of sharp and prescient cultural satire with
cheesy 1980s Hollywood thriller aesthetic. Looker
continues to hold a special place in my heart—that perfect scholarly storm of
finding that rare media text which 1) fits the research agenda perfectly; 2)
hasn’t been talked about much by anyone else; and 3) is just a whole lot of fun
to watch on its own.
By the summer of 2011, I wasn’t
thinking much yet about a book project on digital cinema. I was finishing final
revisions on Disney’s Most Notorious Film
and polishing Blossoms and Blood for
prospective publishers. I had an idea for an essay about digital labor and Looker by then, but not much else—and
whatever specific ideas I had at the time (it’s admittedly hazy now) didn’t
consciously involve any sustained interest in nostalgia.
No, mainly what I was thinking about that
summer was my job. Northwestern didn’t feel like a long-term situation at the
time, especially after I was made to sweat out the prospect of my possible reappointment
for the coming academic year (a reoccurring theme, it would occur). And so I
made the difficult decision to leave Evanston to go to take a position as
Assistant Professor (Limited Term) in the English Department at Michigan State
University because I thought I would have the opportunity to work towards
something more lasting.
My first semester at MSU was intense—on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, I taught Film History at 9am, then Introduction to Film
around noon, and finally a 400-level special topics theory seminar at 5pm.
Given the success of the “digital cinema” class at NU, I pitched the idea for
“Film Theory After Film,” merging my interest in the digital with the English
department’s focus on overtly theoretical courses. During this time, the idea for “I’ll
(Always) Be Back” began to come into focus. I revisited the theories of
postmodernism by Fredric Jameson, since a lot of scholarship on the digital touched
on the postmodern to some degree. For context, I began the class by having the
seniors read Jameson’s famous New Left
Review article.
And it was only after doing the lecture
and discussion that I begin to appreciate how much his ideas had unknowingly shaped
my own approach to digital cinema and would prove to be a major influence on Flickers of Film since his aesthetic
critique, which I still find useful on its own, is also rooted in a sustained
attention to post-industrial late capitalism (though I deliberately did not
cite his work very much ultimately, since I feared some academics’ aversion to
Jameson’s work would make the effort more trouble than it was worth—and I
wasn’t really interested in revisiting the history of postmodern theory in this
context anyway).
During this first semester at MSU, I
wrote an initial draft of “I’ll (Always) Be Back,” which would prove in retrospect to be the
very first part of the book. At the time, I was primarily looking at
the piece as its own article, but I also knew that it could be the start of a
larger project on digital cinema (though I didn’t yet know on what exactly).
Teaching “Film Theory After Film” definitely planted ideas in my head, and
brought me up to speed with scholarship at that point in time, but any more
ambitious idea for a book was unfocused. Back then, my interest was largely
limited to the perception that there was some kind of implied post-industrial
kinship between the exploitation of labor in Hollywood and the exploitation of
labor in academia. And, given my teaching load, there really wasn’t much time
to think about any other writing projects anyway.
At the end of that year at MSU, I found
myself back in the unemployment line. The department found a couple other folks
they liked more than me—the kind of pattern which can really start to wear on a
guy’s sense of self-worth after a while. Despite working myself to the bone in
the classroom, despite two book contracts with university presses, despite
(oh . . . by the way) winning an SCMS Writing Award . . . oh, well.
It was definitely a time to reflect on
a number of things, but mainly—in classic neoliberal logic—I just tried hard
that summer to stay positive, focus on my writing for the time, and hope that
something else emerged. I finished indexing and proofreading on Disney’s Most Notorious Film and then
final revisions on Blossoms and Blood.
This was an important time for the latter, as I really went in and ruthlessly
trimmed a lot of the manuscript to make it a much tighter book. I cut roughly
15,000 words largely just by tightening up the wording throughout. It went from
being a good book to a great one—my best.
It was also that summer—spurred in part
by the insistence by search committees that my work needed to follow a clear
research agenda—that I began to think more seriously about how this idea of
“nostalgia” had long been a central concern through almost everything I’d ever
written. To me, nostalgia was never something that was particularly interesting
on its own—it had more resonance in dialogue with other issues such as reception
studies, historical consciousness, industrial contexts, and so forth. And so I
didn’t think of it seriously for its own sake for quite a while.
I used to pride myself on my
intellectual curiosity—searching out new, interesting ideas and having the
writing skill and discipline to see those projects through. I never
particularly desired to tie myself down to any specific research area. I wanted
to always be finding something new—something that provoked me—and then find a
way to write about it. And, much as I’ve been made to feel shame over it over the years, I
won’t apologize for that ambition—then or now. I won’t apologize for my level
of scholarly production all these years. Others will never match it--that's their problem. I’m proud of my eclectic body of work over the
last 10 years, much as others in the profession have tried to find ways to
dismiss its significance.
But I also recognized the need to have
a job. And so I tried harder to focus my research agenda on questions of
nostalgia (which wasn’t necessarily inaccurate, just I feel unnecessary).
And,
by fortunate (not so much) coincidence, I realized too around this time that nostalgia was
really what Flickers of Film was
going to be about—with the transition from celluloid to digital in
post-industrial Hollywood being the specific historical context. So, at the end
of that summer, I tried plugging away at more material beyond the “I’ll
(Always) Be Back” stuff. I wrote a first (very different) draft during this
time of what would eventually become the Jump Cut article—and later book chapter—about the new “nostalgia films” (Hugo, The Artist) and the TRON chapter (while I don’t agree with
much of Wyatt’s specific criticism of that chapter—yeah, sorry, Hollywood does
exploit free fan labor—I do agree that I could never quite get a handle on how
to conceptualize that material).
Ultimately, not too much of useful
substance emerged from that summer of new writing in retrospect (though the other two books crossed the finish line nicely). But I had to do
something to keep trying to move forward. When the fall arrived, I found myself
back at my old grad school alma matter, Indiana University—this time as a
Visiting Assistant Professor. It proved to be a very bittersweet experience,
but it’s true what they say (speaking of nostalgia)—you really can’t go home
again.
Here, my approach to Disney
(appropriately the subject of my dissertation) began to evolve. I was asked to
teach two sections of a course entirely on Disney, which proved to be the most
challenging and perhaps influential task of my teaching career—so much so that
I ended up writing about the experiences in an article that’s set to appear
either late this year or early next in the Journal
of Film and Video.
I wrote that article for three main reasons—one, to show
how seriously I take my teaching; two, because so many of the challenges in
teaching Disney (such as how to negotiate one’s nostalgia) echo across so much
of my other scholarship; and, three, I wanted to fight the frankly infuriating
perception by some that somehow teaching Disney is easy.
Perhaps, just as important was that Disney’s Most Notorious Film was finally
published in the fall of that year. Overnight, thanks to this article, I found
my work exposed to a level of visibility I had never experienced before. And,
much of the attention, frankly, was not flattering—as random strangers online
were suddenly accusing me personally of the same kind of “reverse racism”
nonsense that often appears on the internet when anyone points out
uncomfortable truths about the world.
If you’ve read the Disney book, or the Cinema Journal article, you’d know that
none of this kind of rhetoric is new or surprising—what did catch me off guard
was the specific level of attention my book actually got. In a depressingly
ironic way, it all proved a point I’d been trying to make since I began
pitching the dissertation to my committee—that there was just *something*
unique about Song of the South that
always seemed to get people’s attention.
Indeed, after news of my book’s
imminent publication first broke the previous spring, the papermill Theme Park
Press rushed Whose Afraid of The Song of
the South? through production in order to beat my book to press and offer
its own “But Walt Meant Well” counter-narrative (though my book was much more
thoughtful and even-handed than critics tried to claim). Insecure proponents of
that book felt the need to trash my book on Amazon in some misguided attempt at
building their own junk book up. If the other one was so strong on its own,
they wouldn’t have needed to rip me personally.
(I’d be more sympathetic to the other
book if the weasel publisher didn’t misrepresent himself to me through email
correspondences earlier that year in an attempt to steal an early copy of my
book for his own author’s use—but that’s another long story I don’t want to get
into).
Magnified by the challenges of teaching
Disney around that time, the reaction to my Disney book was thoroughly
demoralizing—I became more much skeptical of most people’s ability to engage
with complex historical questions (as I would go on to write about in Flickers of Film). It was a complete
reversal of what was in Disney’s Most
Notorious Film—I set out in the book to show how much more complicated and
nuanced actual Disney audiences were, and yet ironically their kneejerk
reaction to the title of my book (because we all know none of them bothered to
really read it) undermined the very respect
I was trying to give them in the book itself.
And, more importantly, Disney’s Most Notorious Film didn’t help
me land a job—all it accomplished was generating a lot of undue vitriol
directed towards me by some on the internet. Think about it—this was my
dissertation, this was my life’s work in a way, and I couldn’t imagine a more depressing
outcome—to be without a job and publicly embarrassed to boot. And this was
all magnified exponentially by the fact that it all went down while I was back at Indiana, my
PhD alma mater. The one place I thought I was respected. Nope--you really can’t go home again.
So, in the previous two years to that
point, I had had 13 different interviews for tenure-track jobs (in total now
I’ve had close to thirty), but could never unlock the, let’s say,
“idiosyncrasies” of search committees. But I thought I had done everything that
was asked of me as a teacher and a scholar—I could not have built a stronger
profile. I really thought I was working towards something bigger, something
better. But, as it turns out, I was just heading towards the unemployment line.
For the second time in two years, a department had thrown me back on the
same garbage heap of cheap disposable labor where they’d found me. This was a new
experience for me—for a decade up to that point, I’d always been in a position
at several different schools where I was rewarded for my efforts with more work
if I wanted it.
But not in East Lansing. Not in
Bloomington. Since I had done everything I thought I was capable of doing, to
no effective end, I felt like I had run out of options and out of hope. For a
couple of months there in the late spring/early summer of 2013, I had given up
on life about as completely as I had the courage to. People who talk about the
“coward’s” way out don’t have the first goddamned clue what they are talking
about.
* * *
Anyway, somewhere in there, I think my
old colleagues back at Northwestern took pity on me and quite out of the blue
that June offered me my old job back. Of course, I accepted, though it was hard
to be too ecstatic. My three years at Northwestern overall were by far the
happiest of my professional career, so I can’t complain (and don’t want to
sound like I am). With one telling exception, they let me teach what I wanted
to teach; the resources and the students are second to none. It’s also not a
coincidence that the bulk of my writing occurred while I was there.
But when I
came back to NU, after my experiences in Bloomington and East Lansing, I wasn’t
so naïve anymore. I knew—whether it took one year or five—NU too would eventually
dump me once they hired enough permanent faculty (and indeed that was exactly
what they finally did in 2015). So, as happy and relieved as I was to be back
at NU and now living in my beloved Kenosha, Wisconsin, it was impossible to shake
the overwhelming depression—the feeling that all my work inside and outside the
classroom was worthless in the eyes of others and that eventually I would be thrown
back on the garbage heap of cheap labor.
With about two months to go before I
started my job back at NU in September 2013, I moved to Kenosha. That might
strike someone as odd—but the reality is that I lived right by the Metra
station in downtown Kenosha and the direct commute every day to Evanston was
actually a pretty painless and even quite enjoyable one. The separation of work
and leisure that these two disparate locations afforded me was clarifying. I
spent the day working hard in Evanston and then took the train out to
Kenosha—something of a tourist town anyway, really—and thus every night felt like a
mini-vacation.
But I am getting ahead of myself. I
find Kenosha to be a hauntingly beautiful town—a former auto manufacturing hub,
Kenosha tried to reinvent itself as a tourist destination in the wake of economic
hardships of the post-industrial age—though throughout the city, remnants of
its manufacturing age still linger. A big part of its tourism identity is
grounded in a celebration of its past. Drive-in restaurants, trolley cars,
WWII-era baseball stadiums, museums, traincar diners—in its own admittedly
modest way, Kenosha perfectly symbolizes the all too common nostalgic reimagining
of the US’s transition from 20th Century manufacturing-based economy
to a 21st century customer service-based one.
Along those lines, there was also the
old Keno Drive-In—though, sadly, that didn’t make it in Kenosha much longer
ultimately than I did. Its last film screened in early November 2014, before
the long winter set in. But when I first moved there, the drive-in was still
plugging along. There was something about the Keno in particular that not only
symbolized my love for the city of Kenosha but also embodied the tangible
impact of the digital transition in Hollywood that I had been teaching about in
digital cinema classes at IU, MSU and NU.
Small independent theatres—especially
drive-ins—were the ones taking the brunt of the financial hit as a result of
switching from film projection to digital projection. That’s what I tried to write about here (which also does a good job of gesturing towards my affectionfor the larger city). Ultimately, I did not really write about drive-ins in the
book, but I think the Keno itself—as well as the Fordist era nostalgia of
Kenosha in general—proved to be just the Muse I needed at the time to finally
get serious about Flickers of Film.
It is not a coincidence that the book’s cover is an abandoned drive-in (though
I will be the first to admit I got lucky finding that image).
So, it was at this moment (the late
summer 2013) that Flickers of Film
started to really come into focus—a combination of wanting to say something,
anything, and having the time finally to say it. That summer, I would spends my
days sitting at the Simmons Library in Library Park—literally across the street
from my apartment—slowing chipping away at the manuscript a thousand words at a
time. At night, I would walk down to the beach at Lake Michigan or hike the
many eerie streets of the town.
I started with revising the Jump Cut material (which would
eventually become bulk of the second chapter), then “Digital Decasia,” then
Pixar, then back to revising Disney and TRON
(which over the years had become such a blockage for me that I deliberately set
it aside, waiting until the last possible second to rewrite, heavily—but, like
I said above, it never quite came together like I wanted).
The book, like the writing process, followed
its own idiosyncratic logic—for which I make no apologies. But, to be clear, I
did not get serious about finishing a draft of Flickers of Film in late 2013 and into early 2014 because I was
consciously trying to contribute scholarship to any particular field—I was
writing it because I was trying to hold on to my sanity amidst a downward
spiral of depression and isolation (it is not a coincidence that “death”—as in,
the death of film—is a motif throughout a big chunk of the book), and I was
just trying to bring together all these different things I wanted to say. I
didn’t care then who would actually read it. I wrote it for myself. Flickers of Film was “my substitute for
pistol and ball.” So, I was just writing and writing—when
it was over, I thought, I would try to figure out what it (not me) was trying to say.
There was, however, some precedence for this approach—with both Disney’s Most Notorious Film and Blossoms and Blood, I wrote an entire manuscript only to discover
that the respective introduction didn’t work anymore. In both cases, I ended up
writing an entirely new introduction from scratch (with only a few leftover
pieces used here and there) and so I knew better than to try and write an
introduction the third time around before I finished the rest of the project
(this is a model since followed again with Strangers
in Our Own Land—a first draft of the chapters themselves is mostly
finished, but I’ve only begun to chip away at the intro).
Of course, Flickers of Film is heavily influenced by my own nostalgia (hence “self-theorizing nostalgia”)—how
overwhelmingly powerful but also deeply unsatisfying it is; how it can be a
guide—both constructive and destructive—for the future. In a sense, the book
began in 2011 with the difficulty in trying to reconcile my deep nostalgia for
the original Terminator movie (1984)
with that destructive clown of a governor they had in California at the time. I
think I struggled with the TRON chapter
most of all, ironically, because it was the one that came the closest to most
directly articulating the objects and frustrations of my own personal nostalgic
investments (and, back in 2012, that chapter more than the “I’ll (Always) Be
Back” one is what gave the book project its first real focus on nostalgia).
But, and here’s the final thing, it’s
also very much a book about my relationship with my own young daughter. The
secret truth--the real "subtext"--is that some of the movies I’m harshest on (Wall-E, The Lego Movie) are also the ones that I have deeply warm
memories of watching with my own child. My daughter’s great affection for Wall-E, for example, was a source of
great nostalgic comfort to me through all those awful times at places past. Taking her to see Lego Movie at the old Keno is one of (many) fond memories of Kenosha. Part of the
frustration expressed throughout the book is the continual sense of nostalgic manipulation
as not only a child of the 1980s but also as a father now myself. And I suspect
the book’s ambivalence cannot be fully appreciated outside of that.
* * *
So, I wrote what I wanted to say during
a very difficult time in my life. Maybe I could have taken more time with it—making
it more like the project Wyatt (and a search committee or two I know) wanted to
read. One can always say that about an academic book, I think. It would have
become something very different, though, and Flickers of Film is nothing if not a particular snapshot of a
particular time. There were at least three issues at work in my decision to
publish the book and move on to the next project—one was that the aspects of
the project which made it so timely (the digital transition) was also what
would quickly make it so outdated; another was it wasn’t ultimately the grand
project I wanted to be working on (that was Strangers,
which I’d already put off for five years); and finally I thought having it
close to, or under, contract would help me on the job market one last time (ha
ha, right?). So, I started sending it out to publishers. But I’ve embraced now
that I don’t need to prove to anyone anymore that I know how to bring a quality
writing project to conclusion.
I guess there’s still some subtext that
remains, but I’m stopping here. You get the idea. But I would like to end by
noting that anyone who dismisses Flickers
of Film as merely cynical fails to see how much the book struggled to find
a pathway for hope.
