Amid the series of increasingly alarming dumpster fires that define our contemporary moment, BoJack Horseman might seem not quite relevant.1 Sure it’s a hilarious, moving, and original tour-de-force of animation,…
Archive for 2020
The Traumic: On BoJack Horseman’s “Good Damage”
Lauren Berlant
1957-2021
Undead Language
“How could the person who promises a secret to a ghost still dare say he is a historian?” —Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” On her first work trip to…
Staying Alive
Severance is so fun — and funny — that it’s easy to overlook how much it’s also about sustained, ongoing, and eminently ordinary loss. This fact is surprising given the…
Screen Time, or the Postviral Internet
[P]erhaps it is more accurate to say that the internet almost wholly consists of the past. It is the place we go to commune with the past. -Bob, in Ling…
Genre Fever
The start of COVID-19 also marked a return to Ling Ma’s 2018 Severance — a historical novel set in the recent past, in which a deadly virus originating from China…
A Ghost with a Camera
Candace Chen recognizes the photograph immediately. It’s one of the best-known portraits from Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1980-1986), and its two figures are drenched in a yellow-orange…
Too Much to Miss
“After the End came the Beginning.”1 So starts Ling Ma’s Severance. But before the End came a party in New York City. In the summer of 2006, before the viral…
Familiar Zombies
On April 19, 2020, in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, Kelly Davio tweeted, “What zombie movies got wrong about the actual apocalypse, part 1,487: they…
Killing Us Softly
I can trace the beginning of the end to March 9. On that date, I started receiving last-gasp emails from retail stores that had me on record as a customer….