Biopower & Body Politics / Bodies as Politics

"Whose body is this?"

Hugo takes them apart; Ido puts them back together. People switch bodies, lose or exchange body parts, or have their bodies customized for the games. Bodies are everywhere and everything

Alita begins her journey without a body until Ido gives her one that belongs to someone else; this body works for her, but it doesn't fit her, it doesn't properly serve her purposes or match her mental image of…

"If I could only be sure that in changing my life I've succeeded in changing my self."

A doubting nun is trapped with a murderer on death's row during a flood; in consoling the condemned, the nun vicariously traverses her own crisis of faith. Do our acts and our performance affect our self, our soul? How do we redeem ourselves when we've fallen from grace? Or, in more secular terms, how do we live with ourselves when we've done something…

"Hey pretty girl, time to wake up."

There was a time not too long ago when if you asked me what my favorite movie was I might have told you Mulholland Drive. There's a lot going on in the film and I certainly won't claim to understand all of it (something I might have done when it was my "favorite movie"), but I do have a reading of it that seems to answer a lot of the questions it poses,…

Ever since I joined Letterboxd, nothing has scared me more than the idea of trying to write about 2001: A Space Odyssey. The fact that everything has "already been said" about this masterpiece has itself already been said so many times that there's not even an original means of expressing my lack of originality left at my disposal. So with the knowledge that I will probably never be able to fully encapsulate what makes this my favorite movie of all…