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34: Pieces of the Year That Was

We made it.

Every year for the last five or six or so–basically, every year since I finished grad school–has been awful and hard and also somehow good at the same time. I don't know how much good it does to reiterate the sentiment any more. I suspect that the years feel hard because there's so much out there that we're aware of and can't control: a firehose of information and crisis, accompanied by a chorus of scolds telling us we're not doing enough to fix anything, and a different chorus of trolls mocking us for our own powerlessness, or for being foolish enough to try to make things better. I looked back on the goals I set for 2022 this week, and they made me laugh, because those goals were set by someone who had the best of intentions but also no idea about what was coming down the road for her.

I have a pet theory that the art we find most meaningful is the art that helps us to make sense of disaster, whether the crisis is personal, imminent, or at a remove. I think we're all trying to assemble meaning for ourselves, which is why I'm so drawn to criticism in the first place. I like to pull things apart and try to understand them, down to the smallest pieces I can find. The small pieces make the most sense, maybe because they're the easiest to hold. It's impossible to sum up an entire life–or an entire disaster, or an entire year–without experiencing it from the inside, and it's impossible to explain how it all works without experiencing it from the outside. Those little fragments of meaning help, though.

My 2022 was a year of grieving and growth, of making the discovery that I can say yes and no to things, and that I can't control the outcomes, but I can go along for the ride. There's a thrill of horror in that discovery, emphasis on both thrill and horror. It's been an astounding year for horror as a genre, particularly in the movies. My favorites took the bones of the genre and reassembled them in unexpected ways, each one with stunning cinematography. NOPE challenges the idea of horror-as-spectacle, questioning our instinct to gape and to stare. Mad God renders its painful little world in excruciating detail, warping space and time in its characters' attempts to bring an end to the cycle of violence altogether. Crimes of the Future might be body horror, but its packaging proves to be funny, almost gentle, neo-noir, with the mystery at its heart not a murder but the hope for survival of the human race. We're All Going to the World's Fair presents a life-and-death existential struggle on much more personal terms, chronicling the mental state of a deeply lonely teenage girl through copypasta-style internet videos.

I'm not much of a TV watcher, but I did make time for Severance, and I finally managed to catch up with Chernobyl. One is speculative fiction, the other historical drama, but both are about people trying to find ways to live in systems that were not set up with the well-being of actual humans in mind. Both are workplace dramas, and therefore about the mundanities of problem-solving. I would also argue that both are horror as well, the kind that forces the audience to confront everyday depravity, even under extraordinary circumstances.

Some of the books I read followed this same thread of horror as well, of ordinary people doing the best they can with the impossible or inhumane.  John Darnielle writes about a moment of violence involving an oyster knife in Devil House that I'll not be able to forget. Tamsyn Muir's Nona the Ninth is peppered with other, stranger violences, but the wonder of both these books is that none of the horror feels exploitative or unnecessary at all. They're almost gentle in their humanity, even in the scenes that do drip with blood. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel is closer to the science fiction quarter of the SF-horror spectrum, but Mandel is frank about the existential questions her characters must face as they go about their work and lives. So is Don DeLillo in White Noise, which I caught up with this year. I fell hard for his prose about "the grubby little corners of the human heart" and about the attempts to blot out existential dread with busyness and data and the fluorescent glow of the supermarket lights. I also caught up with The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, both rich wells of prose that grapple with loss, with coming to terms with the people we've lost in all their flaws, and with coming to an understanding about ourselves as well: existential horror in all but name.

The non-horror books I appreciated most have to do with asserting a sense of self in theoretical and practical terms. A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib gave me a window into the idea of performance and American Blackness. Queering Wesley, Queering the Church by Keegan Osinski proved to be an illuminating synthesis of two identities.

I spent a significant amount of time catching up on movies I've missed this year. My podcast cohost Kevin and I actually intentionally built a segment into our show to that purpose: every week, one cohost picks a movie that the other cohost hasn't yet seen. Sometimes those choices mesh thematically with the new release we're reviewing. Other times, it's good to have an excuse to talk about a movie we both like after panning a dud. Kevin introduced me to Kurosawa's High and Low, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, and the screwball comedy The Lady Eve in this segment, and my moviegoing year was richer for having seen them; I keep thinking about the sunglasses the killer wears as he's cruising the alleys at the end of High and Low, his face transformed into a malevolent skull with shiny pits for eyes. Some good friends of mine introduced me to the joys of early Sam Raimi; we watched Evil Dead II together via a Zoom call, hooting whenever Bruce Campbell got doused with fake blood.

One of the other threads of 2022 for me was grief. It's in vogue, I think, to make art that is explicitly About Grief, and it's also in vogue to dismiss art that is About Grief when the metaphor is so plain. I'm all for chastising stories where the metaphor is the entire point, but we live in unsubtle times, and sometimes these times necessitate just coming out and saying how you feel about something directly. After Yang, Aftersun, and Marcel the Shell with Shoes On are all movies that confront the loss of a loved one gently but firmly, through long, slow shots and elliptical editing, with a focus on specific, tactile moments. The documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is more expansive than its fictional counterparts, but no less powerful, especially when it returns again and again to the image of a yellow-orange pill bottle, each one representing countless lives ruined by pharmaceutical abuse and medical neglect.

We all grieve; we all grapple with grief in different ways. Jamie Loftus's podcast Ghost Church explores the American religion of spiritualism, which started as a prank and became a conduit for belief for people who have unfinished business with the dead. Loftus is so good at presenting an argument and coming at it sideways; she doesn't take her subjects for granted, nor does she assess them at face value. Her investigative work is funny and sober, and she takes herself seriously least of all.

Many of the books I mentioned previously could be considered as explorations of grief as well as horror, but there are a few additional books I read that are explicitly about sadness. Michelle Zauner's memoir Crying in H Mart caught me several ways, but never more than Zauner's descriptions of food. As sustenance, sure, but most importantly as an expression of love, and as a way to stay connected with her mother's family, and as a legacy her mother gave her after passing. Becky Chambers' Monk and Robot books are about the main character mourning lost self-image of the person they thought they were, then casting about for a new purpose. They're small and self-contained, a rare version of a utopian society that actually makes sense on paper.

As I alluded to in the beginning, 2022 was not all pain and horror. This year was also a chance to step back into the light, to acknowledge that the world has changed forever, and that it's time to adapt. (Crimes of the Future gets at this with a surprisingly gentle sense of humor.) The art that worked most explicitly in this vein for me was music. Renaissance by Beyoncé, MUNA by MUNA, The Loneliest Time by Carly Rae Jepsen. and Dance Fever by Florence + the Machine all harness the energy I've been saving up for the last two years; they make me want to get up and dance and run and be outside, breathing air into my lungs as hard as I can.

I felt that exuberance–and some trepidation–in the shows I went to this year. I caught a show for mewithoutYou's Farewell tour at the end of a long winter, sweating at the edge of a mosh pit and nervous about getting too close, but wanting to lean up against their wall of sound anyway. When I saw Manchester Orchestra around the same time, one of their openers, a band called Michigander, articulated that same feeling with a song called "Reds," which talks about edging onto thin ice, the kind of butterfly-stomach feeling that makes you want to get out of the car and off the road altogether. Tears for Fears' "The Tipping Point" and Paramore's "This Is Why" manage to lasso that same feeling: I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, and suddenly I get the feeling that it's all wrong.

There was one show where everything felt all right. (This wouldn't be a year-end wrap-up if I didn't mention the Mountain Goats, would it?) Every Mountain Goats show is special, but the one I caught this year felt like riding a windstorm. John Darnielle can be chatty on stage sometimes, and he'll surprise even himself with his tangents. This show he got on the topic of being a lapsed Catholic, and on sharing a community with other Catholics and lapsed Catholics that he'll never be able to shake, and he demonstrated that community by singing the hymn "On Eagles' Wings" impromptu. Nearly a quarter of the crowd in the room joined in, all of them united by a belief system that many of them–Darnielle included–no longer subscribe to. I'm not Catholic myself, but I was raised by a lapsed Catholic, so the gist of the song, and the emotions driving the moment, made sense to me, even though I know I was missing some of the particulars.

If you stuck it out to the end of this newsletter, as well as this year, thank you. Please enjoy this cake by Alli Gelles, which might honestly be the piece of art I've thought about the most this year.

‌‌Thank you for reading. This post is free, so feel free to share it. If you have any thoughts, or just want to drop me a line, you can get in touch here.

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This past year felt like an inflection point. I've written (and spoken) more consistently this year than I have in any year previous, and I can feel the difference as I continue to stretch and grow. I'm just getting started. Let's go get swept up in 2023.

What I wrote (and talked about) this year that I'm proudest of:

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Sarah Welch-Larson

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