The 2020 Retrospective, or an epic exercise in futility (Patreon)

Woof. That was a year, wasn’t it?

2020: pandemic hell-world year full of fascism with a slight dent to fascistic power at the end. Going into 2021, we’re afforded the luxury of seeing Trumpist fascism be somewhat abated in favor of generic neoliberal capitalism. Which is to say we’ve gotta fight, all day and all night, as my activist comrades chant every Sunday. The defeat of Trump is a victory, I suppose, although his movement won’t go away and will eventually resurface with a more competent demagogue (whether that demagogue will turn out to be Tucker Carlson or Nikki Haley depends on the events of the next couple years). But y’know, I’ll sleep a little easier without a conversion therapy addict in the cabinet. I’m glad I can now wage open war on my country without fear of being shoved into a camp. Now to wait until everyone gets their COVID vaccines so we have one less potential killer lurking around us.

My own experience of 2020 basically mirrored the year’s ambivalent political tone. I don’t want to go too much into my personal life, but it should suffice to say that last year I experienced a massive upheaval of my circumstances, which manifested in a sprawling saga of trauma and horrific shocks. But a lot of great things happened as well: I got to make a living wage as a freelance writer, El and her amazing family adopted me, I embraced my spiritual and religious side, came out as pansexual and polyamorous, scored my own apartment, adopted my darling little kitty cat Naomi, and I completed my associate’s degree. That’s just a smattering of last year’s victories, but any one of them would be an amazing mark on a hell of a year. For my part, I am humbled by and grateful for the seismic changes I underwent during the past twelve months, and look forward to experiencing their tessellation this year.

So, as a media critic it’s my job to keep my finger on the pulse of the neoliberal consensus by playing watchdog to the world’s media. Perhaps because of the busy year I had, I failed to perform this task adequately, and can only recommend a small handful of media because that’s all I consumed. Excuse moi. I only saw one 2020 film that properly captivated me, which was His House, a masterpiece of indie horror piercing the intersection of the refugee crisis and UK austerity (with Matt Smith as a government paper-pusher no less, in the best casting of his career). On the music front, I loved Seeming’s The Birdwatcher’s Guide to Atrocity, which you can often find me blaring to the bemusement of my poor cat. I also quite liked Clipping’s Visions of Bodies Being Burned, their follow-up to their masterpiece There Existed an Addiction to Blood, which doesn’t quite reach the heights of its predecessor but is still some of the potent popular music being produced today. I also dug the shit out of what I heard from Run the Jewels’ new album. I should really finish listening to it one of these days.

Embarrassingly, you already know my opinions on the sum total of 2020 books I read, as I reviewed Talia Lavin’s brilliant Culture Warlords and Michael Brooks’ final sneer of insurgence Against the Web for you lot. Both are good, although I preferred the Lavin book. Weirdly, the only medium I had a comprehensive view of last year was television, which I watched too damn much of, oh god, pass me the brain bleach. Still, I saw some legitimately good TV last year; enough to occupy a section of its own. So here’s a run-down of the best in 2020 TV from this queer ass bitch with ADHD:

Devs

The joint masterpiece of the year. Alex Garland has an acceletarionist’s obsession with the Weird and hauntological power of technology and science with none of an accelerationist’s fetishization. Devs is an exquisitely directed and powerfully acted odyssey through quantum computing and deterministic eternalism, paradoxically treating science as an inherent reflection of human drive and avarice while also being the maw of the future that envelops us and supersedes our access point to it. This is Garland’s masterpiece, and considering he directed and wrote Ex Machina and Annihilation, that’s no small acclaim.

The Haunting of Bly Manor

My other favorite show of 2020. Building on the tremendous groundwork of The Haunting of Hill House (which I also loved), The Haunting of Bly Manor takes Mike Flanagan’s approach to canon-surfing to the next level, boasting more polish than Hill House and a funner, more sapphic sheen. The spatiotemporal fuckiness is as powerful as ever, and finding a way to expand the power of Henry James’ already brilliant and suggestive novella The Turn of the Screw is no small feat. If The Haunting of... ends here, that’s okay. Mike Flanagan and company have turned out one of the masterpieces of 21st century TV, the equal of Hannibal, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and Mr. Robot. Speaking of which...

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power Season 5

You knew this was coming. Everyone who follows me on Twitter has seen me effuse about She-Ra. It’s my favorite show, boasting everything I love: radical inversion of the entire canon of SFF, psychological and political nuance, a gorgeous color palette with amazing design work, and queer bullshit. Season 5 is hardly the show’s peak; that was Season 4, a show almost too intense to be children’s TV. By comparison, Season 5 is a bit rote, but it’s still She-Ra doing what it’s good at and ending with a healing declaration of sapphic love. I miss this show everyday and I will be stunned if something even half as good as it comes along.

Star Trek Picard: “Nepenthe”

This show wasn’t very good, with its schizoid refusal to be about things or tell stories, but it had its moments, my favorite of which was “Nepenthe,” a Star Trek: The Next Generation reunion that could have been a wankfest but instead chose to be a beautiful meditation on trauma and healing. This is everything Star Trek is good at, and I hope Picard Season 2 chooses to be like “Nepenthe.”

Dispatches from Elsewhere: “Simone”

Sigh. Dispatches from Elsewhere. You were a perfectly nice show for 9 episodes and then near completely ruined yourself with an execrable finale that made a convincing case for banning men from writing television. Still, the highlight of the show was trans actress Eve Lindley as Simone, a compelling, funny, and gorgeous character only partially ruined by the ending which retrospectively makes the show a tutorial on being a chaser. The episode dedicated to her is a perfectly nice short film in its own right though, doing a surprisingly good job of capturing the pitfalls and paradoxes of transness with a stunning performance by Lindley. Skip the rest of the show, but watch this episode as a standalone thing. It’s good, and only slightly ruined by what follows it.

Doctor Who: “Fugitive of the Judoon”

My antipathy to the Chris Chibnall era of Doctor Who is well documented on Twitter, to the annoyance of some dear friends who quite like Chibnall’s run. Chris Chinballs’s brand of utilitarian pseudo-woke Doctor Who does nothing for me, but sometimes he lands a brilliant writer like Vinay Patel or Ed Hime for an episode a year. Thank god he does, because Patel fucking scored with “Fugitive of the Judoon,” a delightful excursion in an alternate Doctor Who that puts even the Davies and Moffat eras to shame with its vision of the Doctor as a wandering emigrant woman of color who fights space police and wields guns. Jo Martin for Fourteenth Doctor, please, and Vinay Patel for show runner. Or at least give Patel a series of novels about Ruth!Doctor. Come on, guys. That would own.

I want to wrap up this post by making an announcement about the setup of this Patreon. Perhaps a few of you have detected some lethargy in my recent Dreams of Orgonon posts. To be quite honest, my enthusiasm for that project has greatly diminished, particularly as I’ve written about my ambivalence towards The Dreaming. Going into Hounds of Love, this is quite alarming, as Hounds was always going to be the high point of writing Dreams of Orgonon. As such, while I’m not planning on retiring Orgonon, I intend to decelerate it over the coming weeks in favor of writing projects I feel more passionate about. My apologies to those who this disappoints, but I need this. Clinging to a project I started three years ago, when I was an unhappy egg living in an abusive household, has been bad for my mental health, and I need to reevaluate my approach to the Kate Bush blog before I return to it. I suspect I will come back to it, perhaps even very soon, and I think I’m going to finish the blog someday, if with an altered posting schedule. In the meantime, I want to focus on one-off essays dealing with the subjects I’m most passionate about. I hope you enjoy those, and thank you for your support and reading. My readers have genuinely saved my life, and I love you all. Thank you for keeping me here. I look forward to writing things which I hope you’ll enjoy this year and many more.