Issue 11: OUT OF THE PAST is here 🕰️
Plus: an exclusive newsletter feature on Desert Hearts by Rein Losier, our MUBI picks, launch party, and latest call for submissions!
Issue 11 + launch party
NOW PLAYING: we just launched Issue 11: OUT OF THE PAST… 🕰️
Travel back in time with our latest issue of expanded criticism on period films. From Igbo Landing in the 1900s to Edo Period Japan, and 18th-century Brittany to Calabasas in the 2000s, this issue is all about revisiting the past. Plus, scroll down for our exclusive newsletter feature on Desert Hearts.
Check out Issue 11:
We’re also hosting a launch party in Toronto TOMORROW, Thursday, November 28th! Join us for a cozy evening of film readings, reality TV trivia, and tea:
Newsletter feature: Desert Hearts (1985)
Promise me there’s no one else out there
by Rein Losier
I was a cowboy or cowgirl or cow with you in another life. The movie plays and I’m not holding your hand. Blue shirts, blue eyes. I wish I could remember exactly what it felt like to sit with you and watch this. Memory rewritten by the amount of time we’ve spent discussing it.
Last time they introduced me to someone they said, this is the person I would find in every timeline. Clowns, coffee drinkers, valley dwellers, grave robbers. I introduce you often as my roommate even though we moved away from each other some time ago.
This movie is our favourite. We have a list of every movie we’ve watched at our self-proclaimed gay movie nights. Brokeback Mountain comes 17th, if you were wondering.
Desert Hearts calls to the innate fantasy that runs both of our lives: the almost complete absence of either love interests’ biological family, each of them getting to run away from their responsibilities, and looking hot as fuck in cow(boy) gear at a ranch.
I had to Google at least five times whether desert was spelled with one or two S’s. I got almost all of my formal education in French, but I do remember an ESL teacher a few years ago telling me that deserts have little in them, so there’s only one S, versus desserts are plentiful. This wasn’t a good analogy for me given my tendency to imagine lots in the arid lands. It’s difficult to remember that they’re often projected as empty landscapes.
I’m not sure what it says about us that the story we most identify with happens in the desert, a place often associated with a void of life and feeling. Sometimes I feel that there’s something missing in me, a void that if filled would make me a person, human.
My partner and I drove down to the desert last fall at my request. I had spent the past few years thinking about it, needing an escape from life. The thought of being alone, having peace, the noises of the city long gone filled me with something more than joy. I knew that in a place so empty I would fit right in. The part of me missing would be missing in the nothingness I would be entering.
But when I got there, I was scared of all the life. The badlands were completely desolate in daylight and I felt soothed, but at night I ran into strange plants, kangaroo mice, not-so-wild dogs, two hogs, and thousands of brilliant white spider eyes sticking out of every bush. I could do nothing but hide in my bed, away from prying eyes, ears. In a place I thought would feel at home, I was still the odd one out.
I rewatched this movie recently, and it filled me with great dread about relationships. I read it as more of a heartbreak, capturing something that would become nostalgia but never love. I always feel that way when I see real relationships, foreboding about what terrible thing is going to happen to everyone involved.
The first time I saw this movie, I didn’t catch the main plot—I was too busy thinking about open plains and blue cowgirl fits. I thought the main character had moved to the desert to recover from divorcing her husband but she had actually moved to do the divorce. After a quick Google search, I discovered that Nevada was a popular destination to file for divorce, given their lax residency requirements. I was overlooking so many of the themes in the film and creating my own.
I texted them recently and asked what they remembered from the film—they remember sepia tones, greys, generally sandy dust over every scene. They were right.
What I remember most is the green and blue. Blue outfits, blue tones, blue colour schemes. Rewatching the movie, what scenes of blue I found were so short I almost missed them.
What shocked me the most about the movie was how I had remembered all these scenes, empty and devoid of people, just the two of them horseback riding alone, out in the desert alone, all this space without another soul.
Rewatching it there wasn’t a single one.
This is another desert entirely. It’s loud and full of people: community, love affairs, conflict, chosen families, friendships, and weird dudes.
But it was easier to put all that aside and picture over and over again grabbing their hand and getting on the train, not having to worry about what happens after, just focusing on escaping what’s here for the emptiness beyond the black screen at the end.
I was busy creating an empty desert of our fantasies, while the desert was full of life, chugging along, not a single blue cowgirl outfit in sight.
Rein is a genderqueer multimedia artist living in Toronto with their lover and subway riding dog.
Our MUBI period piece picks 🎥
In The Mood’s editors curated a watchlist of period pieces from MUBI’s library. Check it out and get a free 30-day trial below 👀
Submissions OPEN for Issue 12 🔮
We’re now accepting submissions for Issue 12: THE FUTURE until January 1st, 2025. Check out our submission guidelines here:
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