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.
