This essay offers a bold counter-reading to the charmed popular reception of Heated Rivalry, a 2025 HBO television series whose passionate depiction of explicit gay male sex and long-term romantic longing has been hailed as a revolutionary installment in the history of queer media representation. Fawaz identifies how the show’s central formal conceits—including its association of gay sex with competitive sports, the plot’s rapid-fire leaps across time that heighten sexual longing, the eroticization of romantic miscommunication, and the depiction of gay sex in the absence of gay cultural contexts—actually work to transform queer eroticism into a mirror image of heterosexual desire in its most dysfunctional expressions. Fawaz argues that audiences’ fanatical obsession with the show’s central romantic relationship between two closeted professional hockey rivals might demand a collective reckoning with the romance genre as a popular formation that can no longer adequately compensate for the real failures of the contemporary sex and dating scene, gay and straight alike, to provide meaningful or sustainable intimacy.
This essay describes the 2.3-acre Hollywood Hills estate of the late director David Lynch—known as “the Compound” to his collaborators and fans—as a unique film studio that played a crucial role in Lynch’s creative practice. Assembled over the course of the 1990s as Lynch purchased and remodeled a series of contiguous properties, the Compound was the decisive environment of Lynch’s multimedia experimentation over nearly three decades of work in Los Angeles. Nieland explores the Compound as a material space and an assemblage of technologies and personnel that shaped key feature films like Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006). The Compound became increasingly visible in documentaries about Lynch’s “art life,” in later media experiments like his YouTube channel “David Lynch Theater,” and in its 2026 sale after Lynch’s death. In but not of Hollywood, the Compound served as both home base for the construction of Lynch’s auteur brand and the studio infrastructure of his late modernism.
This article by Laura Westengard, part of the dossier “Mulholland Drive at 25,” uses the lens of decomposition to show how Mulholland Drive (2001) demonstrates the multiplicity of life that always already exists within individuals that are falsely perceived to be singular. Turning toward rot as a model for queering an understanding of life, death, and self, this article provides a framework for analyzing the film's overlap and divergence of characters, the jumble of temporality that challenges a linear narrative, and the recursive merging, gaps, and doubles, offering us a vision of a kind of reproduction that occurs within, outside, and beyond normative understandings of self/other, life/death, gay/straight. Positing the film itself as decomposing corpse, Westengard suggests that the queer proliferations of rot open up not only a new reading but a queer way of engaging life, death, and the messy entanglements of existence.
This article pertains to the new film, Miroirs No. 3, by the Berlin School stalwart, Christian Petzold, one of today’s most celebrated German-language filmmakers. It comprises a lengthy interview with Petzold about Miroirs, with discussion of its location in former East Germany, its re-shot ending, and its numerous influences, along with memories of his erstwhile teacher and collaborator, Harun Farocki. Petzold recounts how the new film returns to a family milieu some 26 years after his breakthrough The State I am In (Die innere Sicherheit, 2000) as well as to the Grimm’s fairy tale “The Burial Shroud,” the basis for Ghosts (Gespenster, 2005). The interview includes a discussion of Petzold’s own refugee family and its relationship to Nazism. The piece also comprises an introduction about the titles of Petzold’s films, especially his interest in double figures under the influence of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Rebecca (1940).
This article recounts the genesis of the Horror Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Relationships with the independent horror filmmaker Romero, the non-profit foundation and archival collection created in his name, and the city of Pittsburgh that Romero called home for most of his career are all explored. Romero’s landmark feature Night of the Living Dead (1968) plays an important role in Lowenstein’s personal as well as professional life: he screens it at his bar mitzvah party, and he relies on its lessons to give him hope in the wake of the anti-Semitic killings at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. Lowenstein’s experience hosting a screening of Romero’s Bruiser (2000) in Pittsburgh with the director in attendance is juxtaposed with a screening of Queens of the Dead (2025) in Pittsburgh with its own director: Tina Romero, George’s daughter.
This article maps the connections between David Lynch’s unproduced script, Ronnie Rocket, and his 2017 series, Twin Peaks: The Return (aka Twin Peaks season 3). Focusing on the “Dougie Jones” sequences set in Las Vegas, Nevada, this short article draws parallels between Lynch and Jacques Tati, particularly in their use of slapstick and modern built environments to create physical humor.
Adopting film critic Melissa Anderson’s “acteurist” approach to Laura Dern in Lynch’s Inland Empire (2009), this essay explores Naomi Watts’s role in Mulholland Drive (2001), putting media scholar Mary R. Desjardins’s ideas around the “recyclable” nature of the female film star in dialogue with Naomi Klein’s theory of the “digital double.” If the Hollywood dream factory recycles, and alienates, female stars whose visage appear onscreen, what to make of the selves curated today for social media—especially among young women? Providing a close analysis of the prophetic declarative “This is the girl,” a revealing motif throughout the film linking Betty’s imagined Hollywood “dream place” to the film’s lackluster LA backdrop, this essay unpacks how Watts’s dual roles as Betty Elms and Diane Selwyn reflect the ways in which the abjection of the would-be Hollywood ingenue, either endured or witnessed from behind a screen, can warp a woman’s sense of self.
This article introduces the dossier “Mulholland Drive at 25.” What did Mulholland Drive (2001) say about female fantasy, suffering, and desire at the turn of the twenty-first century, and how might that matter today? Rather than debate Mulholland Drive’s degree of feminism or the extent to which David Lynch himself proved able to create feminist cinema, the authors of this dossier approach the film as an intricate text that frustrates traditional interpretive approaches based on the specter of the “male gaze” and the assumption of coherent, consistent character subjectivities. Consulting canonical feminist and philosophical texts as well as contemporary queer theory, sound studies, and star studies, the dossier authors write from the perspective of differing generations and disciplines, offering a lively array of critical reads.
This article, part of the dossier “Mulholland Drive at 25,” argues that the “sweet dreams” of the women characters in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) invite viewers to “feel like feminists.” Engaging the writings of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex alongside Beauvoir’s 1959 essay on the myths of Brigitte Bardot, Marso finds subversive feminist dreamscapes in Lynch’s film. Feminist sweet dreams exist within the onscreen interactions of Betty/Diane with Rita/Camilla as the two women characters simultaneously navigate the demands of patriarchy and the mythic expectations for “becoming woman.” Lynch’s film demonstrates both gaps and overlap between gendered fantasies and ugly realities, inviting disorienting and uncomfortable feelings for viewers. These feelings, Marso suggests, can be interpreted and mobilized towards “feeling like feminists” such that viewers seek and find a feminist future within current conditions.
This article, part of the dossier “Mulholland Drive at 25,” argues that the telephone plays a critical role in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) by disturbing concepts of identity and placing telephonic technology near the heart of the film’s meaning. Drawing on the theories in Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, and other sources, Aghamohammadi limns how the images of telephones in the film disrupt communication and pluralize identities rather than securing them.
This article attends primarily to an important but little-known corpus of films, produced around the middle of the twentieth century, which document and dramatize the pearling industry of northwest Australia and the Torres Strait. It observes that the settler Australian pearl-film—represented here by Lee Robinson’s The Pearlers (1949) and King of the Coral Sea (1954), and Frank Bagnall’s Pearlers of the Coral Sea (1960)—both relies on the knowledges of Central Indo-Pacific seafarers and tends to culminate in those knowledges’ obsolescence. A close viewing of King of the Coral Sea reveals deep tensions between technologies of submersion, tensions that intersect with racialization, cultural and historical erasure, and the transformation of marine places into nationally regulable space. The article turns, ultimately, to the Aboriginal Australian filmmaker Wayne Barker’s Cass: no saucepan diver (1983), a documentary short which ironizes the settler Australian pearl-film while subverting the effacement of pearling subjects and histories.
The author relates his youthful love of baseball and how a family trauma led him to exchange his ambition to play professional baseball for an ambition to become a playwright. Now an established playwright, he investigates the film Eephus (Carson Lund, 2025) from a dramaturgical perspective. He focuses on the film’s lack of overt dramatic action, and how the characters function like a seriocomic Greek chorus, developing themes of time, loss, and mortality. The author then applies these themes to the predicament of playwrights and screenwriters in the post-COVID age of dwindling in-person audiences and cultural timidity. The essay concludes with the affirmation that these artists will continue to seek out avenues for creativity in the face of these diminishments.
