Like many recent sadcoms, BoJack Horseman offers viewers a gloss on a hostile affective world in which connections between people are easily shattered.1 BoJack is a horse in pain “all…
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Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman
Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman
Good, Likeable People Who Love Each Other
“Hey, you see those people?” BoJack says to ten-year-old Sarah Lynn at the start of BoJack Horseman’s third episode, looking out at the live studio audience of Horsin’ Around. Sarah…
Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman
Introduction: We are all in the gutter
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,…
Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman
Contemporaries Essays, Severance
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Severance
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Severance
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Severance
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Severance
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Severance
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…