Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap | On ‘Fargo’ | Bright Wall/Dark Room

The One I Love (2014)

“I know that this is irrational, self-sabotaging behavior. I’ve never seen The Wizard of Oz or The Sound of Music simply because my godmother keeps telling me I must; once a critical mass of my peers became obsessed with the Lord of the Rings series, I had to make peace with the fact that I would never watch it. And because I am a Film Bro™ who is friends with many other Film Bros™, I avoided both Heat and Jackie Brown until 2019. Again: I recognize that this is irrational self-sabotage. It is, in this case, especially irrational behavior given that my number-one all-time celebrity crush is mid-‘90s Robert De Niro. “

—Kellie Herson, “Robert De Niro in the ‘90s” | Bright Wall/Dark Room

“For Veronica, so defined by her pursuit of the truth at all costs, to act like this one unpalatable reality can be neatly sliced away from the person she has grown to care for—it reveals the depths of the loneliness she’s lived with. And it calls to mind the daily acts of forgiveness and forgetting so many women undertake. Every uncertainty about the men in your life that you push to the back of your mind, every doubt about the extent of their understanding or loyalty, everything you choose not to wonder about—that’s what it means for Veronica to take Logan back after this: the paper-cut compromises you make when you’re young and don’t want to be alone, because life has trained you not to expect better from the men you love.“

-Isabel Cole on Veronica Mars

“Veronica Mars and Philip Marlowe share this: the palpable sense that their cynicism exactly stems from their compassion, that their hardness is the scar tissue of a heart they can’t stop the world from breaking over and over.“

—Isabel Cole, “We Used to Be Friends” | Bright Wall/Dark Room

“My mother keeps things as a way to try and hold onto a past that is already gone and, now that I am in my 30s, I’ve started to struggle with keeping too. When I was younger, I gleefully disposed of things I didn’t think I needed any longer. Now, I wonder about all those things I let go of― my prom dress, college pots and pans, notebooks filled with messy scribbles―and worry that my fervor to be tidy is also an effort to try and erase a sad family story, instead of recognizing that coming to terms with that story is also an aspect of healing.”

-Arielle Bernstein, “Sparking Joy” | Bright Wall/Dark Room

Only I Know the Secrets: Breaking Down ‘Under the Silver Lake’ | Bright Wall/Dark Room

“We will never understand all of the strange and horrible and perfect and wriggling things in nature.”

-Elizabeth Cantwell on Upstream Color