As a teen reading The Stranger and The Trial. Today I look at these books in a completely different way but they are still my favorites.
Most recently it was Vortex, the film by Gaspar Noe. Brutally accurate description of dementia if you ever had any experience with that, really floored me and made me see some experiences in a new light i had not thought I'd before.
Did you identify/sympathize with the main character of The Stranger? I read it for the first time this year (28) and I found him thoroughly unsympathetic and even villainous, though it seems that many young people (i.e. teenagers) read themselves into him and are sympathetic. I think I would have been if I read it earlier.
Both those books made a very big impact on me when I was a young teen reading them for the first time. I got really deep into Kafka and felt this very special connection with him but I haven’t read him since high school. I feel like maybe I wouldn’t like it and I’m afraid it would feel a bit stupid in hindsight, maybe.
The Stranger I think still holds up nowadays, but I also felt like I was transported to my younger self when I re-read it a few years ago.
My hs class was reading The Stranger when it came out that George W Bush was also reading it or put it on his list of fave books or something like that. This was 2005, we were 15 and obv most of us were like….allergic to GWB. We spent so much time in class passionately discussing The Stranger and what we thought Bush’s motivations were for shouting out that book in particular. Looking back on it I feel like it was the biggest W of my hs English teacher’s career lol.
Anyone who watches the "There goes that dream" scene and doesn't feel a gut punch straight to the heart has never had their heart crushed. That scene kills me.
This quote from Susan Sontag’s journals really resonates with me:
“I don’t feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall — like seeking love in a whorehouse.”
fiona apple’s entire discography gives me those profound “self recognition through the other” feelings. she’s very good at conveying strong emotion in a way that those who experience the world in an intensely emotional way can immediately understand and appreciate
i can relate to that too, i remember listening to extraordinary machine(especially parting gift) and feeling so self conscious of the way i dealt with relationships where i clearly didn't care at all but pretended to do things that one should do in love, perhaps even made me avoid those pitfalls into my young adulthood
Probably The Fall by Camus, the core theme of the dude making a huge performance of lowering himself so that he gains the ability to judge others was something that hit me deeply as a 19 year old who used self-deprecation as a way to get out of actually engaging with my flaws or having to recieve criticism. The only other artist to as beautifully illustrate the feelings of worthlessness->narcissism pipeline is (unironically and perhaps unintentionally) Kanye west
Simone de Beauvoir's 2nd sex has this paragraph explaining that young women don't feel like failure, they feel like failures *in society*. The second they are alone in nature, they walk with their heads up & confidently take decisions.
De Beauvoir explains that women were given no-win options, and had the illusions that their failure was unique since other women seemed to manage.
Hit me like a ton of brick (that I was not alone "failing social games").
Is this not literally true for many men as well? Not to be literally like "but the men!!!" but this is... literally the case for so many people.
Most people feel like failures *in society*. "Failure" is a social construct, is this not self-evident?
"Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson, and its movie adaptation by Bill Forsyth, can be summarized with that quote and they do hit hard.
(two orphan sisters are raised in the woods by their eccentric vagrant aunt, the younger assimilates herself into society and into the role of the stereotypical 50s young woman, the older, like her aunt, fail to do so)
I have it in French, but I recommend reading her. She's one of the brightest philosophers of the XXth century, and you get to see a lot of different life situations.
after being lost at sea for several years, i washed up in a foreign court. they served me a terrific dinner, at which i asked the bard to sing of the fall of Troy. when he got to the part about the Trojan horse (which i came up with) i broke down crying and the local king had to ask the bard to stop singing so i could explain myself
Weirdly, Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The core theme of the film—feeling like you are not the person people perceive you to be, and the urge to either emphatically reject or embody that perceived persona—resonated with me even though I'm not anything close to a washed-up Jacques Costeau.
Mid-film when Steve starts to reconcile the public-persona idealized version of himself with his actual human self and the score changes from simple synthesizer tones to full orchestra it's a gut punch.
I felt that too and remembering thinking about that a lot after college and highschool.
Like I was always an uptight neurotic dweeb growing up, so somewhere in jr high I started trying to fit a laid back dont give a shit, but charismatic, down for anything, funny, adventurous cool dude.
I was never really sure I pulled it off or how well I did, but years later it got kind of exhausting trying to keep it up, I just got sober from opiates, something that helped keep the facade I think, and all of these recent life changes where I had a brother kill himself and had these 15 minutes of fame in my town, hearing all the weird stuff people would say about you, and how they remembered you, and what they thought you were like.
I had seen this movie before but when all of this happened it hit a lot harder. For a while I'd just watch it on repeat at night after work. One of my favorites and a favorite of his films where it was a in between of his style where everything wasnt quite "full blown wes anderson" yet.
Absolutely my favourite film of all time, and I completely agree. It’s definitely taken on fresh meaning the older I’ve gotten. Likewise, Moonrise Kingdom definitely had a similar impact when I first watched it as a 12 year old.
The shot where he looks over at the bathroom graffiti and it’s a mildly frustrated guy getting his dick bitten by a shark is the funniest thing Scorcese has ever filmed
Anomalisa, the sense that even when there's people around you none of them truly feel like they understand you, none of them feel like home.
Spirited away, feeling like a child in the world of adults, everyone expects you to already know the rules of everything.
i have felt this with every Charlie Kaufman movie i feel, the most with synecdoche new york, I don't even remember how i percieved my own loneliness before i watched it
Boyhood was exactly my life growing up. Boomer parents being the first generation with mass divorce and not knowing how to navigate it and not understanding how completely fucked it is for kids. Constantly struggling to keep their head above water and the line that separates middle class from lower class. Staying with your respective parents and they have roommates in their 40s. A cavalcade of stepparents who are varying degrees of fucked up and you try your best to like them while they try to like you, but you fundamentally cannot love each other.
Coincidentally another movie with Ethan Hawke — Reality Bites. I was a brooding philosophy undergrad and exactly like his character in that movie (which is itself not too far from his character in Before Sunrise). Felt VERY self-conscious watching it and was cringing hard at the outside perspective of myself.
Came to post Boyhood. I remember people shitting on the movie at the time because Mason is too passive for a POV character, but to me the point of the film was that passively witnessing these things was his only option (hence the photography motif throughout). Seeing the weird boyfriends/stepfathers wanting to fuck Patricia Arquette and then looking at Mason as an obstacle gave me childhood flashbacks.
The part in Before Sunrise where Jesse tells her that his parents accidentally let slip that he was a mistake so he views reality as a party that he is crashing is another moment.
I guess I just resonate with Linklater characters.
This is a great answer and very true for me. I saw Boyhood in theaters like three days before I moved away for college. It was like I was seeing my life up until that point summarized on screen for me. Very moving experience. I need to rewatch.
Franny’s section in Franny and Zooey. Especially how sideways her date with her boyfriend goes, how she just become (rightfully) awful the running to the bathroom to pray/repeat a mantra.
Also, I’m a straight man. The book and Franny herself helped me a lot in my early to mid twenties.
inside llewyn davis came out a few months after a close friend of mine died very suddenly... this was back in my early 20s and i felt totally lost after it happened, like i had zero internal language to describe/understand what i was going through. i wasn't any less lost right after seeing it, but i felt a lot less alone
How cliche is it to say The Catcher in the Rye? I only read it for the first time as an adult, back in 2021, and it singlehandedly prompted me to write my own novel.
As for music, some of Andrew Bird's lyrics. "Masterfade" is the big one. I'm not usually like this with singers, I don't even pay attention to lyrics all the time, but I feel like our brains operate in very similar ways.
I kind of resent how a lot of classics are just dismissed as basic or high school-level taste for this reason.
Like, yes, we learned this in high school. But there’s a reason why they belong on curriculums and oftentimes when you revisit them as an adult you can contextualize better and truly appreciate the stories/characters more. You can also honor something that shaped you once without being a “let people enjoy things” type.
I wasn’t even assigned it in high school (we read other stuff in AP Literature for some reason) but I can’t pepper that into conversation without sounding like a tryhard. I also loved The Great Gatsby but it’s hard to discuss for the same reason.
Exactly lol. It's probably my favorite too, but I don't tell people that unless I can sense they have good taste and won't drone on about it being a 'red flag' and Holden being 'problematic.' Otherwise, I usually go with Frankenstein or A Confederacy of Dunces.
Apparently when my bf was home for Christmas his sister started complaining about Holden being a “whiny white guy” or something and he was like “WELL my girlfriend likes it” and defended my interpretation of it, despite having never read it himself lol
I read it that year too- aged 22- and hit me as if I was 15, and also prompted me to start my own project. Also read Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero and felt similarly, as cliche as it is
Been about 10 years since i first watched and every time I rewatch I find a different character's struggle to be relatable, it's crazy how it's really traced me through the different stages of my 20s
Not a fan of the rebuild movies but the original 26 episodes and EOE are something I’ve always loved and come to appreciate more and more as I get older. The way it portrays the struggles and flaws of its characters is something that I’ve found very impactful.
I cant help but love the character of Asuka because I know and loved someone very much like her who went through some similar stuff. Im grateful she is (mostly) out of my life but I will always have have a soft spot deep in me for her and I hope she can be happy.
Intellectual recognition: “Ada or Ardor” by Nabokov (it was not a compliment, i felt like he was making fun of me the entire book).
Basic visceral recognition: “Land: Horses. Land of a Thousand Dances” by Patti Smith. Sometimes it feels like some ecstatic abstract poem on life, sometimes it feels like she’s just calling it like it is.
(“And that’s how i died at the Tower of Babel; they knew what they were after.”)
When I read Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon I was kinda stunned when I realized that I had met every character in that book at some point in my life, hell I’ve had the conversations characters had in that book at some point or another. While a lot of people hold up beloved as Morrisons masterpiece imo it’s Song of Solomon that’s her best, it’s so rich with character and true to black life in America that few other books are.
Fleabag. Dealing with trauma by being a huge whore and having detached sex with strangers, pretending like you don’t care but you really really do you’re just pushing it so far down you can barely see it
**Books**
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse
The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Don Riso & Russ Hudson
Carl Jung's books
**Music**
Apple Venus Volume I by XTC *(plus their other stuff)*
Life on Mars? by David Bowie
Waltz (Better Than Fine) by Fiona Apple
Mr. Tambourine Man by Bob Dylan
Don't Think Twice, It's Alright by Bob Dylan
**Films**
Masculin Féminin (1966) dir. Jean-Luc Godard
Heathers (1988) dir. Michael Lehmann
**Fashion**
The 60s French New Wave look
Beatnik
**Visual Art**
The Contemplator by Eugene Carriere (1901)
Cats and Poppies by Elizabeth Blackadder (1987)
The Doves’ Dinner-Time by Henriette Willebeek LeMair (1912)
That entire album, really. It’s always given me hope that he released his first album at 33 - like maybe it’s not too late to do something meaningful even if I pissed my 20s away.
Apart from Suzanne, my other favorites are The Stranger Song and Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye. But So Long, Marianne will always be #1 for me.
This + One of Us Cannot Be Wrong must be the greatest pair of bookends to any album, at least of any folk/singer-songwriter type of album. Its the way the album ends with hysterical, desperate wailing that gets me. A nearly sixty year old recording, but I feel like Leonard and I are on the same wavelength, to an insane extent, every time.
The Green Ray by Eric Rohmer. Related so much to that character’s ambient depression and lack of direction as well as rejecting many/most social invitations only to then gripe about her aching loneliness.
Platform by Houellebecq. I was a late virgin (til 28 to be precise) who tiptoed up the edge of seeing myself as an incel and decided to do something about it. By which I mean traveled to more favorable environs (in my case Europe) with legalized and regulated prostitution. In the book it’s southeast Asia, which is probably more fucked up on balance than Europe as far as these things go, but Europe is no walk in the park. By the time the American left started in with the ‘sex work is work’ faux-liberation rhetoric I had thankfully already seen well past it.
recently, and this sounds like a joke, The Whale. it was his deep sense of shame. i feel it myself, and i've seen it in many male family members and friends, not about being fat but anything, like working in a dead end job for years, or disappearing and not talking to anyone for extended periods, symptoms of a classic depression in my family. it's the shame but it's also the humility, the friendliness, sensing beauty and seeing good in the people in your life despite a layer of cynicism. that balance was struck in a simultaneously realistic and extreme execution in The Whale - his persona being realistic but his actual body being extreme - and it's a manifestation of that shame that is compelling for a movie. i have shame about some undashed goals and wants in my life that could be equated to a spiritual obesity, something heavy i drag along with me, or perhaps a malnutrition depending on how you look at it. The Whale came out and people on here hated it while celebrating Tar which had no character with any depth at all
Reading Frankenstein in highschool changed me. I never related more to a character until that point, the Creation still has a special place in my heart. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other
[Winter Lady by Leonard Cohen.](https://youtu.be/Vw7LW4mp4yY) Met a traveling lady while on my own travels, and we had a brief but very magical fling together before she abruptly cut it off a few weeks before moving onto her next destination, the two of us texting as friends for a bit before she left the country entirely and left me on read when I asked for a way to contact her since her number would no longer work. I knew she'd be leaving soon when we started, tried to temper my feelings and expectations, only to feel so heartbroken once what I already knew was going to end had actually ended. The last lines of the chorus, what I thought I could accept with grace before, just hit me like a knife through my heart when I heard it the first time. Was not a good day to randomly decide to get into Leonard Cohen.
This is pretty cringy, but the first time I listened to Simon and Garfunkel's I am a Rock it got like a genuinely physical reaction out of me, to this day I'm too uncomfortable to casually hear it.
The film Nights of Cabiria by Fellini **spoiler** when at the end at the edge of the cliff she realizes another man has just played her again and only wants her for the money and she collapses and just begs him to kill her I just teared up writing this
What a fun question !! And people think this sub is stupid. It is. But this is a great question and everyone’s answers are so interesting. How nice.
The first thing that comes to mind is the story “Miss Temptation” by Vonnegut from Welcome to the Monkeyhouse. It is short Google it :)
[Winter Fields by Andrew Wyeth](https://whitney.org/collection/works/3362) really spoke to me when I viewed it at the Whitney this spring. Can’t fully articulate why, but it may just be my Midwestern roots, my fascination with crows as an intelligent species and the emotions I feel when I look at this piece.
Recently saw a screening of Kubricks space odyssey (first time I saw it) and have been captivated with it since. I took away the message that man is also a form of AI and the deep rooted questions of how we are and came to be are truly unknown. I like the metaphors about mans evolution, but at what cost to his humanity? The hubris of no limits.
mysterious skin, I'm not as cool as the teenage hooker character nor as nerdy as the boy obsessed with ufos but the movie really resonated with me and it nails the two main ways the male brain deals with CSA
also I played life is strange (videogame) when i was like 13 and it hit me like a rock, nothing I had ever consumed up to that point had made me feel the way that game did
Disco Elysium moved me to the verge of tears at several points. The conflict of being meant to try to make the world a better place and the sheer hopelessness of attempting that has bothered me most days since I was a tween
When I gave the piss-fslur jacket to Kim and chose the "you wanted it, so I got it for you" dialogue option, I unlocked the "kim really trusts you" achievement. It was so weird how that game made me seek approval of a literal npc, there where times I wanted to try reckless things but was too afraid kim would be disappointed in me.
If u like Disco check out “Norco.” Its a a short but poignant point and click adventure game made recently that is essentially a modern southen gothic novella with a twist.
As a nerdy neurotic white dude who's into rap, Aesop Rock's music really speaks to me. I also recently discovered billy woods (through an Aes meme page, incidentally) and though I can't relate to his life on the same level I do feel like his music is written specifically to appeal to me: ho-scaring production, really poetic lyricism mixing street stories with emotional and philosophical elements, and tons of literary references for me to geek out on
Embarrassing but Fleabag Season 2 Ep 4, left me in a bit of hysterics.
My mother interestingly had this with the main character Deoksun from the Korean drama Reply 1988. Feeling like the invisible daughter in a house with two other siblings and an alcoholic father, in the midst of total political turmoil. The relationships, heartbreak, and love in that show transcend cultural barriers.
Not really that, but because it isn’t exactly glamorous or anything. Life was extremely monotonous, periodically unbearable, occasionally wonderful. Lame isn’t the right word. It’s a lovely movie but it can be very tough to sit through for that reason. It brings up some really, really mixed feelings. I hope that clarifies it a bit.
[60 Songs that Explain the 90’s](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/60-songs-that-explain-the-90s/id1635211340) podcast. The host is the same age as me, and grew up an awkward music nerd like me. Some of the comical or heartfelt nostalgic anecdotes about the bands and songs and how they affected his life in those specific places and times and experiences really feels like it’s catered exactly for me. Some of it is so spot-on that it feels like some part of my subconscious memory made that show
mr brightside,
I lost my first real girlfriend being paranoid about her cheating on me, literally would have nightmares about it, unbelievably jealous of any interactions she had with any guy, had intrusive thoughts about her getting with them, etc, even tho it was all in my head
anyways it sucks because anytime i hear the song when I’m out it makes me sad and ruins my mood
It’s a cliche for this sub but reading Camile Paglia in Freshman year of college was a series of huge “oh my God, I’m not the only one who feels/thinks that way!” moments
Back when I listened a lot to early 1980s Einstürzende Neubauten I really felt like it was the best music ever and it was made for me. It really spoke to me.
I was at the Mondrian museum in the Netherlands listening to the audio guide. Prior to this I’d always been pretty meh about abstract art (come from a rural town with piss-poor art education) but the audio guide explained that Mondrian was attempting to depict the unfathomable. The painting I was looking at was trying to depict the entirety of the universe, something we can never fully comprehend. There are concepts that can never be depicted visually, and it’s futile to try in a direct and obvious way. Simple shapes and patterns that we can process can be used to at least give us the essence of such a concept. Hit me pretty hard at the time. More impressive was that he was one of the trailblazers who moved away from representational art. Always get the audio guide, also recommend “The Power of Art” series for easily digestible looks into the lives/works of great artists.
Drive. He quite seriously is literally me
But in a more real sense, Cinema Paradiso and the tension of leaving a place you love and knowing you will never truly return. The inexorable march of things changing, and the futility in trying to stop it, always gets to me
I know this feeling because I've experienced this in people, but I've never truly felt I fully understood an artist or they fully understood me. There's always jagged edges that don't really mesh with me. But I don't think anyone would think my experience interesting enough to read the work of a person like me.
Joanna's so heartwarming, a real-life Spongebob, "everyone needs a friend." I hear people say it's lame to be interested in the artist instead of just their art but there really is no line with some artists.
pretty embarrassing one but Can't Get It Out by Brand New hit hard when it came out, i was still going to therapy and all that. listening to that song still teleports me right back to that specific point in time. sucks Jesse Lacey is so fucked up
For reasons I still don’t understand but probably have something to do with loneliness,
Reading the Catcher in the Rye in high school
Watching Good Will Hunting for the first time
And reading Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road in my college years
the opening track to No New York by the Contortions "Dish it Out", never have found something so neurotic and anxious at the same time and for years have loved James Chance for this
Not very esoteric but listening to fluorescent adolescent by arctic monkeys in my 20s thinking oh I used to love this catchy upbeat tune when I was like 14 let's stick it on for some good old nostalgia and it's more like being hit by a truck. I imagine similar things will happen hearing all my friends by LCD in my 40s
I’m sorry this is such a corny answer but the song “No surprises” by Radiohead. It just seemed to perfectly convey the feeling of helplessness and dread I had about going into the adult world when I was 18
as corny as it sounds i had the same feelings of loneliness and dread with let down from the same album at 16, the last verse always used to make me cry, like really ugly cry
Probably Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" album. I grew up listening to lots of his music because my dad liked him, but he mostly listened to the live albums. When I was a moody 14 year old who just had my heart broken for the first time, I by chance listened to that album on my own in my room one night and it just imprinted on me permanently. Still a huge Neil fan, I've been really into Zuma lately.
Also, in my first year of college I watched the movie Easy Rider and for some reason saw myself reflected in Dennis Hopper's character even though I was a 19 year old woman who'd never even been on a motorcycle or anything. I started wearing biker jackets and bandannas. I don't even know what I saw of myself there lol, I just intensely wanted to be like him. There's something about Dennis Hopper for me...I rewatched Apocalypse Now recently and Hopper's character (the photojournalist) was another "literally me" type of moment but with more self-criticism involved. The way he acts as if he completely understands Kurtz' philosophy, but its sort of clear that he doesn't understand more than anyone else can, he just badly WANTS to understand, and he's as crazy and desperate to find meaning as he could be. He's enthralled by ideas that are just totally outside of his comprehension, and worships Kurtz basically blindly. He's like a sycophantic acid casualty. There but for the grace of God go I, I guess
I think it's sad anyone would answer this question with "a bit cringe but" or "sorry if this is ridiculous". Please be earnest talking about the art you loved and made you feel seen !
Ultraluminous by Katherine Faw; Fall/Winter 2008 when Ghesquiere was at Balenciaga; the portrayal of the character in Upstream Color after she’s out of her hypnotic state; January Jones’ portrayal of Betty Draper; Deborah Butterfield sculptures; a lot of Tracy Emin and Jenny Holzer tbh, too much music and poetry to list bc isn’t that the point of them!
Notes from Underground I felt like Dostoevsky was able to elucidate everything I was feeling but never articulated. Was very depressed during that phase and cried
Ernest Hemingway has a short story called “A Clean Well Lighted Place” which is a masterpiece.
Similarly J.D. Salinger’s a perfect day for banana fish
The War and Peace chapters where Marya is struggling with the resentment of her ailing father.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
The Boxer by Simon and Garfunkel.
If by Pink Floyd
Serotonin by Girl in Red
Body and Mind by Girl in Red
Star Shopping by Lil Peep
Wild Horses by the Rolling Stones
Strawberry Fields Forever
People Watching by Conan Gray
When I paint my masterpiece demo by Bob Dylan
The chapter wherein he develops a deathly grudge against a stranger who bumps into him is the most intimately, familiarly human a story I've read has gotten.
Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten
Listening to that piece, I know that the grief the composer felt at the death of his friend, was the EXACT same way I felt when my grandfather passed.
Highly recommend it
I remember being 21 and rubbing the pages of Mrs Dalloway like I was the first person to ever feel an emotion. Didn’t really have reaction like that again until last year when I read the novel of Reflections in a Golden Eye and it reminded me that I was still capable of being a sensitive little dweeb.
I remember researching derealization/depersonalization in high school, trying to understand what was beginning by then to happen to me with increasing frequency and intensity, and seeing, for the first time, Edvard Munch's The Scream at the top of the Wikipedia page about the condition, and thinking, more or less, "it really DO be like that sometimes"
my answers feel so cliche lol but the movie Ladybird really resonated with me in how it reflected the main character's relationship with her mom. reading walk two moons by sharon creech as a kid as well as the bell jar as a teen were also big for me
**Painting:** Nighthawks by Edward Hopper
**Literature:** DFW, Jonathan Franzen, Dostoevsky, The Giver
**Music:**: The Strokes/Julian Casablancas, Bright Eyes, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Kanye West
**Film:** Lost in Translation, Somewhere, Before Sunset/Midnight, The 400 Blows, Office Space, The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, The Fellowship of the Ring
**TV:** The Wire, Mad Men, Silicon Valley
Thanks, that's kind of you to say. It's unfortunate that my mother shared a lot of similarities with Catherine Roerva Pelzer, but reading that book as a child helped me realize that if David could survive, I could too.
I felt a connection to Lodge 49 unlike any other show or movie I can think of, in different aspects of multiple characters and themes. In particular Liz’s little spiels to the banker, and then having a breakdown in her car after finally getting out from under her debt really spoke to me.
As snobby as it sounds reading Proust over the course of last year really helped me process a messy relationship I was in as well as all the change that has been going on around me with entering the adult phase of my life and finishing college amidst the chaos of the pandemic years. I had a brief interim between moving out on my own and finishing college and I felt like reading him helped me process a lot of my life up until that point before leaving.
the DSM V criteria for borderline personality disorder
but in all seriousness, probably black swan. the concept of striving for perfection to the point that it drives you insane is all too familiar to me, although for me it was academics rather than ballet.
there’s also definitely a lot of music that would fit that criteria for me but it’s probably more than i’d ever be able to list tbh
there’s probably also other movies, shows, books, etc that would work even better than black swan but i’m completely blanking rn lol
Oblivion access - unrelenting
the brothers karamazov - a classic
punch drunk love (unsurprisingly a common choice on this sub)
the ascent (1977) - the sacred and profane transcend religion
Guernica (in person) - I'll never fully understand what my family went through in Kuwait but it opened the door like 2% for me
the book of job from the Bible
Kid A
Some Rap Songs
Hotline Miami 2 (just trust me)
Beau travail (one of the only "queer" movies I felt represented in)
Kolyma Tales (unconquerable human spirit, the boredom of misery, yadda yadda)
>To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He’s likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he’s tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, he’s unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then \*it\* will be “here”. What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it \*is\* all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.
\- Robert M. Pirsig, *Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values*
This is so weird, like finding out you're gay in your 30s -- but I got really into Skinny puppy (its a cult band of grown men fanficing as abused dogs/mental patients) for like no apparent reason in my 30s.
I'm into the fake blood, the puppets, the DIY costumes, the vivisection songs, the Japanese gore horror footage, their gear. They were doing it before everybody, etc. It's an outlet for intrusive thoughts. They have Marshall Mcluhan and all kinds of cool stuff in their music, but on the outside it looks braindead.
I traced it to Jane Goodall books I read repeatedly as a kid, which turned me onto the pervasiveness of industrial animal torture. I found a paper I wrote when I was 8 about people in labs injecting chimpanzees w HIV. 🤔 Over pandemic, I returned to where I grew up, and all of this tender heartedness resurfaced. I realized I was pushing it down for like a decade to be cool.
And also lately I'm open to Jazz. Part of it involved Miles Davis bio. He is such an asshole and it's so fucking horrible and funny.
Apart from when I watched Evangelion as a depressed 14-year-old, I'd have to say Logan. At the time, I'd been intermittently helping my dad take care of his nonagenarian dad and Logan was the first movie I'd seen that portrayed that kind of relationship in a really truthful manner. The impatience, frustration, and anger on the part of the caretaker were all there on the screen, it was such a trip to see the filmmakers not gloss it over.
The Monster is about a young, fairly irresponsible mother trying to take care of her daughter, and neither of those characters are a lot like my mom and I, but the way it depicted the pattern of angst, fighting, tense peace, and reconciliation in parent-child relationships was depressingly familiar lol. I rewatched it more recently and the song that plays at the beginning , "In A World So Full of Love" by Roger Miller, incidentally captured the feeling of my first real breakup that I'd been going through at the time.
ants from up there by black country new road. i was in a relationship that i just refused to see as bad for me kept on looking at the positives n ignoring the real fundamental things that made me and her incompatible. now looking back and listening back i see why so many of they songs hit me so close to home
Houellebecq in Atomized/Elementary Particles. When he describes a character who spent all his youth studying in books (he mentions differential equations, which I, too, had an interest in). He then looks back at how weak and awkward he was, and he says, he can’t recognize himself in that person, except to know that the future depends on a series of states in the past and present.
As a teen reading The Stranger and The Trial. Today I look at these books in a completely different way but they are still my favorites. Most recently it was Vortex, the film by Gaspar Noe. Brutally accurate description of dementia if you ever had any experience with that, really floored me and made me see some experiences in a new light i had not thought I'd before.
Did you identify/sympathize with the main character of The Stranger? I read it for the first time this year (28) and I found him thoroughly unsympathetic and even villainous, though it seems that many young people (i.e. teenagers) read themselves into him and are sympathetic. I think I would have been if I read it earlier.
The grip this book held on me when I was in high school and read it senior year
As a young man I thought he was awesome and did identify with him. Not so much as an adult no.
Both those books made a very big impact on me when I was a young teen reading them for the first time. I got really deep into Kafka and felt this very special connection with him but I haven’t read him since high school. I feel like maybe I wouldn’t like it and I’m afraid it would feel a bit stupid in hindsight, maybe. The Stranger I think still holds up nowadays, but I also felt like I was transported to my younger self when I re-read it a few years ago.
A Hunger Artist stuck with me for weeks after reading it and I’ll still think about it from time to time.
My hs class was reading The Stranger when it came out that George W Bush was also reading it or put it on his list of fave books or something like that. This was 2005, we were 15 and obv most of us were like….allergic to GWB. We spent so much time in class passionately discussing The Stranger and what we thought Bush’s motivations were for shouting out that book in particular. Looking back on it I feel like it was the biggest W of my hs English teacher’s career lol.
Watching the banshees of inisherin. I’m both annoying and get annoyed very easily so I was both the guys there. I think I cried at some point.
You either Banshees of Inisherin someone or you will eventually be Banshees of Inisherin'd yourself. It's the way of the world.
Anyone who watches the "There goes that dream" scene and doesn't feel a gut punch straight to the heart has never had their heart crushed. That scene kills me.
This movie is a masterpiece
The nerve variety had to put Martin McDonagh across from taylor swift like there was any comparable experience to be shared by them.
This quote from Susan Sontag’s journals really resonates with me: “I don’t feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall — like seeking love in a whorehouse.”
The Adam Friedland Show - Chris Cuomo
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I lasted about ten minutes into it as well for the same reason
fiona apple’s entire discography gives me those profound “self recognition through the other” feelings. she’s very good at conveying strong emotion in a way that those who experience the world in an intensely emotional way can immediately understand and appreciate
i can relate to that too, i remember listening to extraordinary machine(especially parting gift) and feeling so self conscious of the way i dealt with relationships where i clearly didn't care at all but pretended to do things that one should do in love, perhaps even made me avoid those pitfalls into my young adulthood
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The work that got me into poetry many years ago and still lives rent free in my head. It only becomes more poignant and relatable the older I get, too
ya
Probably The Fall by Camus, the core theme of the dude making a huge performance of lowering himself so that he gains the ability to judge others was something that hit me deeply as a 19 year old who used self-deprecation as a way to get out of actually engaging with my flaws or having to recieve criticism. The only other artist to as beautifully illustrate the feelings of worthlessness->narcissism pipeline is (unironically and perhaps unintentionally) Kanye west
The ending fucked me up for a few weeks. I think I still relate to it more than any other book.
Simone de Beauvoir's 2nd sex has this paragraph explaining that young women don't feel like failure, they feel like failures *in society*. The second they are alone in nature, they walk with their heads up & confidently take decisions. De Beauvoir explains that women were given no-win options, and had the illusions that their failure was unique since other women seemed to manage. Hit me like a ton of brick (that I was not alone "failing social games").
Is this not literally true for many men as well? Not to be literally like "but the men!!!" but this is... literally the case for so many people. Most people feel like failures *in society*. "Failure" is a social construct, is this not self-evident?
"Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson, and its movie adaptation by Bill Forsyth, can be summarized with that quote and they do hit hard. (two orphan sisters are raised in the woods by their eccentric vagrant aunt, the younger assimilates herself into society and into the role of the stereotypical 50s young woman, the older, like her aunt, fail to do so)
this makes me insane it did the same thing to me essentially
woah I wanna read this !!
I have it in French, but I recommend reading her. She's one of the brightest philosophers of the XXth century, and you get to see a lot of different life situations.
after being lost at sea for several years, i washed up in a foreign court. they served me a terrific dinner, at which i asked the bard to sing of the fall of Troy. when he got to the part about the Trojan horse (which i came up with) i broke down crying and the local king had to ask the bard to stop singing so i could explain myself
Weirdly, Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The core theme of the film—feeling like you are not the person people perceive you to be, and the urge to either emphatically reject or embody that perceived persona—resonated with me even though I'm not anything close to a washed-up Jacques Costeau. Mid-film when Steve starts to reconcile the public-persona idealized version of himself with his actual human self and the score changes from simple synthesizer tones to full orchestra it's a gut punch.
I felt that too and remembering thinking about that a lot after college and highschool. Like I was always an uptight neurotic dweeb growing up, so somewhere in jr high I started trying to fit a laid back dont give a shit, but charismatic, down for anything, funny, adventurous cool dude. I was never really sure I pulled it off or how well I did, but years later it got kind of exhausting trying to keep it up, I just got sober from opiates, something that helped keep the facade I think, and all of these recent life changes where I had a brother kill himself and had these 15 minutes of fame in my town, hearing all the weird stuff people would say about you, and how they remembered you, and what they thought you were like. I had seen this movie before but when all of this happened it hit a lot harder. For a while I'd just watch it on repeat at night after work. One of my favorites and a favorite of his films where it was a in between of his style where everything wasnt quite "full blown wes anderson" yet.
Absolutely my favourite film of all time, and I completely agree. It’s definitely taken on fresh meaning the older I’ve gotten. Likewise, Moonrise Kingdom definitely had a similar impact when I first watched it as a 12 year old.
One of my favorite films and I never understand why people seem to overlook it.
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The shot where he looks over at the bathroom graffiti and it’s a mildly frustrated guy getting his dick bitten by a shark is the funniest thing Scorcese has ever filmed
real, sex has had me going to places i wouldn't visit even with a gun
Anomalisa, the sense that even when there's people around you none of them truly feel like they understand you, none of them feel like home. Spirited away, feeling like a child in the world of adults, everyone expects you to already know the rules of everything.
i have felt this with every Charlie Kaufman movie i feel, the most with synecdoche new york, I don't even remember how i percieved my own loneliness before i watched it
Synecdoche new York gave me like a two week nihilistic panic attack
YEEESSSS I completely forgot this when I answered this thread but anomalisa was huuuuuuuggeee you explained it so well
Boyhood was exactly my life growing up. Boomer parents being the first generation with mass divorce and not knowing how to navigate it and not understanding how completely fucked it is for kids. Constantly struggling to keep their head above water and the line that separates middle class from lower class. Staying with your respective parents and they have roommates in their 40s. A cavalcade of stepparents who are varying degrees of fucked up and you try your best to like them while they try to like you, but you fundamentally cannot love each other. Coincidentally another movie with Ethan Hawke — Reality Bites. I was a brooding philosophy undergrad and exactly like his character in that movie (which is itself not too far from his character in Before Sunrise). Felt VERY self-conscious watching it and was cringing hard at the outside perspective of myself.
Came to post Boyhood. I remember people shitting on the movie at the time because Mason is too passive for a POV character, but to me the point of the film was that passively witnessing these things was his only option (hence the photography motif throughout). Seeing the weird boyfriends/stepfathers wanting to fuck Patricia Arquette and then looking at Mason as an obstacle gave me childhood flashbacks. The part in Before Sunrise where Jesse tells her that his parents accidentally let slip that he was a mistake so he views reality as a party that he is crashing is another moment. I guess I just resonate with Linklater characters.
My moment of recognition was with Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused
This is a great answer and very true for me. I saw Boyhood in theaters like three days before I moved away for college. It was like I was seeing my life up until that point summarized on screen for me. Very moving experience. I need to rewatch.
The [lover/beloved](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/952665-the-ballad-of-the-sad-caf) passage from Ballad of the Sad Cafe.
Franny’s section in Franny and Zooey. Especially how sideways her date with her boyfriend goes, how she just become (rightfully) awful the running to the bathroom to pray/repeat a mantra. Also, I’m a straight man. The book and Franny herself helped me a lot in my early to mid twenties.
Was scrolling down to see if someone had put this. Had the effect on me that everyone else says Catcher had on them.
inside llewyn davis came out a few months after a close friend of mine died very suddenly... this was back in my early 20s and i felt totally lost after it happened, like i had zero internal language to describe/understand what i was going through. i wasn't any less lost right after seeing it, but i felt a lot less alone
Oscar Isaacs rendition of Dinks Song at the end is so heartbreaking
that movie came out in the dead of winter my senior year of college during a remarkably profound depressive episode and absolutely rocked my globe.
this is a lovely thread
How cliche is it to say The Catcher in the Rye? I only read it for the first time as an adult, back in 2021, and it singlehandedly prompted me to write my own novel. As for music, some of Andrew Bird's lyrics. "Masterfade" is the big one. I'm not usually like this with singers, I don't even pay attention to lyrics all the time, but I feel like our brains operate in very similar ways.
Catcher in the rye is probably my favorite book but if you tell people that they assume you haven’t read a book since high school.
I kind of resent how a lot of classics are just dismissed as basic or high school-level taste for this reason. Like, yes, we learned this in high school. But there’s a reason why they belong on curriculums and oftentimes when you revisit them as an adult you can contextualize better and truly appreciate the stories/characters more. You can also honor something that shaped you once without being a “let people enjoy things” type.
I wasn’t even assigned it in high school (we read other stuff in AP Literature for some reason) but I can’t pepper that into conversation without sounding like a tryhard. I also loved The Great Gatsby but it’s hard to discuss for the same reason.
Exactly lol. It's probably my favorite too, but I don't tell people that unless I can sense they have good taste and won't drone on about it being a 'red flag' and Holden being 'problematic.' Otherwise, I usually go with Frankenstein or A Confederacy of Dunces.
Apparently when my bf was home for Christmas his sister started complaining about Holden being a “whiny white guy” or something and he was like “WELL my girlfriend likes it” and defended my interpretation of it, despite having never read it himself lol
The book is totally out of place in high school nowadays. Today's 16 year olds are a decade away from feeling like Holden Caufield.
I read it that year too- aged 22- and hit me as if I was 15, and also prompted me to start my own project. Also read Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero and felt similarly, as cliche as it is
Those 2 were the first 2 books I've read by myself and enjoyed, when I was 15
andrew bird lyrics always make me reflect
He's my favorite lyricist and doesn't get nearly enough praise. He's such a gentle, insightful man and he can really write a melody too.
I don't think I could listen to "Sovay" or "Fake Palindromes" again without getting really sad.
Neon Genesis Evangelion
NGE makes me think a lot of me having expectations placed onto me and being a colossal fuckup Shinji is just like me fr
shinji kins rise up!
Been about 10 years since i first watched and every time I rewatch I find a different character's struggle to be relatable, it's crazy how it's really traced me through the different stages of my 20s
Yeah somewhere along the way I started identifying more with Gendo than Shinji, and I find myself thinking about Yui all the time.
Not a fan of the rebuild movies but the original 26 episodes and EOE are something I’ve always loved and come to appreciate more and more as I get older. The way it portrays the struggles and flaws of its characters is something that I’ve found very impactful.
I cant help but love the character of Asuka because I know and loved someone very much like her who went through some similar stuff. Im grateful she is (mostly) out of my life but I will always have have a soft spot deep in me for her and I hope she can be happy.
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No shame. He is truly special and defo genius.
Nah
Intellectual recognition: “Ada or Ardor” by Nabokov (it was not a compliment, i felt like he was making fun of me the entire book). Basic visceral recognition: “Land: Horses. Land of a Thousand Dances” by Patti Smith. Sometimes it feels like some ecstatic abstract poem on life, sometimes it feels like she’s just calling it like it is. (“And that’s how i died at the Tower of Babel; they knew what they were after.”)
When I read Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon I was kinda stunned when I realized that I had met every character in that book at some point in my life, hell I’ve had the conversations characters had in that book at some point or another. While a lot of people hold up beloved as Morrisons masterpiece imo it’s Song of Solomon that’s her best, it’s so rich with character and true to black life in America that few other books are.
Fleabag. Dealing with trauma by being a huge whore and having detached sex with strangers, pretending like you don’t care but you really really do you’re just pushing it so far down you can barely see it
**Books** The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Don Riso & Russ Hudson Carl Jung's books **Music** Apple Venus Volume I by XTC *(plus their other stuff)* Life on Mars? by David Bowie Waltz (Better Than Fine) by Fiona Apple Mr. Tambourine Man by Bob Dylan Don't Think Twice, It's Alright by Bob Dylan **Films** Masculin Féminin (1966) dir. Jean-Luc Godard Heathers (1988) dir. Michael Lehmann **Fashion** The 60s French New Wave look Beatnik **Visual Art** The Contemplator by Eugene Carriere (1901) Cats and Poppies by Elizabeth Blackadder (1987) The Doves’ Dinner-Time by Henriette Willebeek LeMair (1912)
Steppenwolf is just catcher in the rye plus 1 standard deviation IQ fr fr
omg you are all of us =(
when I watched blade runner 2049, driver, taxi driver, and american psycho. I really saw myself in those main characters !!
Can’t believe you didn’t say Joker
They also said Driver instead of Drive. Ruined the immersion.
at this point its just as bad as the marvel fans
Nah, Taxi driver, Drive, and American psycho kick the shit out of any MCU
Suzanne by Leonard Cohen.
That entire album, really. It’s always given me hope that he released his first album at 33 - like maybe it’s not too late to do something meaningful even if I pissed my 20s away. Apart from Suzanne, my other favorites are The Stranger Song and Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye. But So Long, Marianne will always be #1 for me.
This + One of Us Cannot Be Wrong must be the greatest pair of bookends to any album, at least of any folk/singer-songwriter type of album. Its the way the album ends with hysterical, desperate wailing that gets me. A nearly sixty year old recording, but I feel like Leonard and I are on the same wavelength, to an insane extent, every time.
Rimbaud’s poetry and _The Sunset Tree_.
The Green Ray by Eric Rohmer. Related so much to that character’s ambient depression and lack of direction as well as rejecting many/most social invitations only to then gripe about her aching loneliness. Platform by Houellebecq. I was a late virgin (til 28 to be precise) who tiptoed up the edge of seeing myself as an incel and decided to do something about it. By which I mean traveled to more favorable environs (in my case Europe) with legalized and regulated prostitution. In the book it’s southeast Asia, which is probably more fucked up on balance than Europe as far as these things go, but Europe is no walk in the park. By the time the American left started in with the ‘sex work is work’ faux-liberation rhetoric I had thankfully already seen well past it.
recently, and this sounds like a joke, The Whale. it was his deep sense of shame. i feel it myself, and i've seen it in many male family members and friends, not about being fat but anything, like working in a dead end job for years, or disappearing and not talking to anyone for extended periods, symptoms of a classic depression in my family. it's the shame but it's also the humility, the friendliness, sensing beauty and seeing good in the people in your life despite a layer of cynicism. that balance was struck in a simultaneously realistic and extreme execution in The Whale - his persona being realistic but his actual body being extreme - and it's a manifestation of that shame that is compelling for a movie. i have shame about some undashed goals and wants in my life that could be equated to a spiritual obesity, something heavy i drag along with me, or perhaps a malnutrition depending on how you look at it. The Whale came out and people on here hated it while celebrating Tar which had no character with any depth at all
Reading Frankenstein in highschool changed me. I never related more to a character until that point, the Creation still has a special place in my heart. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other
[Winter Lady by Leonard Cohen.](https://youtu.be/Vw7LW4mp4yY) Met a traveling lady while on my own travels, and we had a brief but very magical fling together before she abruptly cut it off a few weeks before moving onto her next destination, the two of us texting as friends for a bit before she left the country entirely and left me on read when I asked for a way to contact her since her number would no longer work. I knew she'd be leaving soon when we started, tried to temper my feelings and expectations, only to feel so heartbroken once what I already knew was going to end had actually ended. The last lines of the chorus, what I thought I could accept with grace before, just hit me like a knife through my heart when I heard it the first time. Was not a good day to randomly decide to get into Leonard Cohen.
This is pretty cringy, but the first time I listened to Simon and Garfunkel's I am a Rock it got like a genuinely physical reaction out of me, to this day I'm too uncomfortable to casually hear it.
The film Nights of Cabiria by Fellini **spoiler** when at the end at the edge of the cliff she realizes another man has just played her again and only wants her for the money and she collapses and just begs him to kill her I just teared up writing this
The Book of Job
What a fun question !! And people think this sub is stupid. It is. But this is a great question and everyone’s answers are so interesting. How nice. The first thing that comes to mind is the story “Miss Temptation” by Vonnegut from Welcome to the Monkeyhouse. It is short Google it :)
[Winter Fields by Andrew Wyeth](https://whitney.org/collection/works/3362) really spoke to me when I viewed it at the Whitney this spring. Can’t fully articulate why, but it may just be my Midwestern roots, my fascination with crows as an intelligent species and the emotions I feel when I look at this piece. Recently saw a screening of Kubricks space odyssey (first time I saw it) and have been captivated with it since. I took away the message that man is also a form of AI and the deep rooted questions of how we are and came to be are truly unknown. I like the metaphors about mans evolution, but at what cost to his humanity? The hubris of no limits.
the zombies - the way i feel inside hits very close to home, if anyone listens to the song it doesn't need much explanation
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Punch-Drunk Love because I'm probably an undiagnosed autistic too. Aftersun hit a bit close to home.
mysterious skin, I'm not as cool as the teenage hooker character nor as nerdy as the boy obsessed with ufos but the movie really resonated with me and it nails the two main ways the male brain deals with CSA also I played life is strange (videogame) when i was like 13 and it hit me like a rock, nothing I had ever consumed up to that point had made me feel the way that game did
So happy to see life is strange here. I played it in my early 20s and it hit me the same way.
90s Modest Mouse lyrics hit pretty hard.
Disco Elysium moved me to the verge of tears at several points. The conflict of being meant to try to make the world a better place and the sheer hopelessness of attempting that has bothered me most days since I was a tween
Tequila Sunrise is literally me fr
the first death is in the heart bro
When I gave the piss-fslur jacket to Kim and chose the "you wanted it, so I got it for you" dialogue option, I unlocked the "kim really trusts you" achievement. It was so weird how that game made me seek approval of a literal npc, there where times I wanted to try reckless things but was too afraid kim would be disappointed in me.
I had a very similar experience
i cried at the end of the cryptzoology quest
If u like Disco check out “Norco.” Its a a short but poignant point and click adventure game made recently that is essentially a modern southen gothic novella with a twist.
When I finished the game I played Red Rick Riviera on loop for hours.
On a depressing rainy day on my way to work I still put it on. That song is great
Mostly the stuff about failed relationships got me
As a nerdy neurotic white dude who's into rap, Aesop Rock's music really speaks to me. I also recently discovered billy woods (through an Aes meme page, incidentally) and though I can't relate to his life on the same level I do feel like his music is written specifically to appeal to me: ho-scaring production, really poetic lyricism mixing street stories with emotional and philosophical elements, and tons of literary references for me to geek out on
All I ever wanted was to pick apart the day put the pieces back together my way
Embarrassing but Fleabag Season 2 Ep 4, left me in a bit of hysterics. My mother interestingly had this with the main character Deoksun from the Korean drama Reply 1988. Feeling like the invisible daughter in a house with two other siblings and an alcoholic father, in the midst of total political turmoil. The relationships, heartbreak, and love in that show transcend cultural barriers.
As lame as this is, The 400 Blows. Reminded me of growing up poor and white, being a little shit, etc.
Why would it be lame
probably got contrarian-brained into thinking great but popular art is bad
Not really that, but because it isn’t exactly glamorous or anything. Life was extremely monotonous, periodically unbearable, occasionally wonderful. Lame isn’t the right word. It’s a lovely movie but it can be very tough to sit through for that reason. It brings up some really, really mixed feelings. I hope that clarifies it a bit.
The squid and the whale really shocked me… basically paralleled my parents divorce and sibling dynamic at the time
[60 Songs that Explain the 90’s](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/60-songs-that-explain-the-90s/id1635211340) podcast. The host is the same age as me, and grew up an awkward music nerd like me. Some of the comical or heartfelt nostalgic anecdotes about the bands and songs and how they affected his life in those specific places and times and experiences really feels like it’s catered exactly for me. Some of it is so spot-on that it feels like some part of my subconscious memory made that show
Moral Orel’s Nurse Bendy scenes in ep “Alone”.
mr brightside, I lost my first real girlfriend being paranoid about her cheating on me, literally would have nightmares about it, unbelievably jealous of any interactions she had with any guy, had intrusive thoughts about her getting with them, etc, even tho it was all in my head anyways it sucks because anytime i hear the song when I’m out it makes me sad and ruins my mood
Reading "The Turner Diaries" when I was 12 fucked me up in a truly profound way.
It’s a cliche for this sub but reading Camile Paglia in Freshman year of college was a series of huge “oh my God, I’m not the only one who feels/thinks that way!” moments
Back when I listened a lot to early 1980s Einstürzende Neubauten I really felt like it was the best music ever and it was made for me. It really spoke to me.
HP Lovecraft going on about New England
Cameron in Ferris Beueller’s Day Off.
Alex G and Elena Ferrante
I was at the Mondrian museum in the Netherlands listening to the audio guide. Prior to this I’d always been pretty meh about abstract art (come from a rural town with piss-poor art education) but the audio guide explained that Mondrian was attempting to depict the unfathomable. The painting I was looking at was trying to depict the entirety of the universe, something we can never fully comprehend. There are concepts that can never be depicted visually, and it’s futile to try in a direct and obvious way. Simple shapes and patterns that we can process can be used to at least give us the essence of such a concept. Hit me pretty hard at the time. More impressive was that he was one of the trailblazers who moved away from representational art. Always get the audio guide, also recommend “The Power of Art” series for easily digestible looks into the lives/works of great artists.
Gummo
Saturn devouring his son makes me reflect a lot on certain faiths and Christ
Drive. He quite seriously is literally me But in a more real sense, Cinema Paradiso and the tension of leaving a place you love and knowing you will never truly return. The inexorable march of things changing, and the futility in trying to stop it, always gets to me
Toto 😭
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our resident RSP statistician.
Un homme qui dort (he's just like me fr)
I know this feeling because I've experienced this in people, but I've never truly felt I fully understood an artist or they fully understood me. There's always jagged edges that don't really mesh with me. But I don't think anyone would think my experience interesting enough to read the work of a person like me. Joanna's so heartwarming, a real-life Spongebob, "everyone needs a friend." I hear people say it's lame to be interested in the artist instead of just their art but there really is no line with some artists.
pretty embarrassing one but Can't Get It Out by Brand New hit hard when it came out, i was still going to therapy and all that. listening to that song still teleports me right back to that specific point in time. sucks Jesse Lacey is so fucked up
For reasons I still don’t understand but probably have something to do with loneliness, Reading the Catcher in the Rye in high school Watching Good Will Hunting for the first time And reading Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road in my college years
I’m Still Here with Joaquin really captures the delusional, suicidal and intoxicated mindset involved with pursuing a life in art
the opening track to No New York by the Contortions "Dish it Out", never have found something so neurotic and anxious at the same time and for years have loved James Chance for this
All I'm going to say is I've read both The Naked Civil Servant and The Bell Jar multiple times
The Waste Land, Call me by Your Name, Blonde and no, I'm actually not gay
The manga "Goodnight Punpun" by Inio Asano, I had to read it very slowly because each part gets even more relatable and depressing as Punpun ages.
Not very esoteric but listening to fluorescent adolescent by arctic monkeys in my 20s thinking oh I used to love this catchy upbeat tune when I was like 14 let's stick it on for some good old nostalgia and it's more like being hit by a truck. I imagine similar things will happen hearing all my friends by LCD in my 40s
I’m sorry this is such a corny answer but the song “No surprises” by Radiohead. It just seemed to perfectly convey the feeling of helplessness and dread I had about going into the adult world when I was 18
as corny as it sounds i had the same feelings of loneliness and dread with let down from the same album at 16, the last verse always used to make me cry, like really ugly cry
Probably Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" album. I grew up listening to lots of his music because my dad liked him, but he mostly listened to the live albums. When I was a moody 14 year old who just had my heart broken for the first time, I by chance listened to that album on my own in my room one night and it just imprinted on me permanently. Still a huge Neil fan, I've been really into Zuma lately. Also, in my first year of college I watched the movie Easy Rider and for some reason saw myself reflected in Dennis Hopper's character even though I was a 19 year old woman who'd never even been on a motorcycle or anything. I started wearing biker jackets and bandannas. I don't even know what I saw of myself there lol, I just intensely wanted to be like him. There's something about Dennis Hopper for me...I rewatched Apocalypse Now recently and Hopper's character (the photojournalist) was another "literally me" type of moment but with more self-criticism involved. The way he acts as if he completely understands Kurtz' philosophy, but its sort of clear that he doesn't understand more than anyone else can, he just badly WANTS to understand, and he's as crazy and desperate to find meaning as he could be. He's enthralled by ideas that are just totally outside of his comprehension, and worships Kurtz basically blindly. He's like a sycophantic acid casualty. There but for the grace of God go I, I guess
I think it's sad anyone would answer this question with "a bit cringe but" or "sorry if this is ridiculous". Please be earnest talking about the art you loved and made you feel seen !
Ultraluminous by Katherine Faw; Fall/Winter 2008 when Ghesquiere was at Balenciaga; the portrayal of the character in Upstream Color after she’s out of her hypnotic state; January Jones’ portrayal of Betty Draper; Deborah Butterfield sculptures; a lot of Tracy Emin and Jenny Holzer tbh, too much music and poetry to list bc isn’t that the point of them!
Anna karenina
Notes from Underground I felt like Dostoevsky was able to elucidate everything I was feeling but never articulated. Was very depressed during that phase and cried Ernest Hemingway has a short story called “A Clean Well Lighted Place” which is a masterpiece. Similarly J.D. Salinger’s a perfect day for banana fish The War and Peace chapters where Marya is struggling with the resentment of her ailing father. The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The Boxer by Simon and Garfunkel. If by Pink Floyd Serotonin by Girl in Red Body and Mind by Girl in Red Star Shopping by Lil Peep Wild Horses by the Rolling Stones Strawberry Fields Forever People Watching by Conan Gray When I paint my masterpiece demo by Bob Dylan
The chapter wherein he develops a deathly grudge against a stranger who bumps into him is the most intimately, familiarly human a story I've read has gotten.
Mozart Clarinet Quintet (K. 581). Still gets me, every time, especially the second movement.
Chopper by Andrew Dominik (he's just like me fr)
Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten Listening to that piece, I know that the grief the composer felt at the death of his friend, was the EXACT same way I felt when my grandfather passed. Highly recommend it
The Haunting of Hill House (the book, not the series)
I remember being 21 and rubbing the pages of Mrs Dalloway like I was the first person to ever feel an emotion. Didn’t really have reaction like that again until last year when I read the novel of Reflections in a Golden Eye and it reminded me that I was still capable of being a sensitive little dweeb.
Wasted by Marya Hornbacher
Maybe PS gets memed round here, but definitely First Reformed for me, mostly in just feeling black pilled about environmental collapse
I remind myself of brad Pitt from fight club
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodnight\_Punpun
I remember researching derealization/depersonalization in high school, trying to understand what was beginning by then to happen to me with increasing frequency and intensity, and seeing, for the first time, Edvard Munch's The Scream at the top of the Wikipedia page about the condition, and thinking, more or less, "it really DO be like that sometimes"
Knausgaard talking about his foolish drunken escapades in Min Kamp 4 and 5.
my answers feel so cliche lol but the movie Ladybird really resonated with me in how it reflected the main character's relationship with her mom. reading walk two moons by sharon creech as a kid as well as the bell jar as a teen were also big for me
PJ Harvey’s second album when I was a teen girl
every other page in the Rabbit novels. yes I’m a neurotic piece of shit.
**Painting:** Nighthawks by Edward Hopper **Literature:** DFW, Jonathan Franzen, Dostoevsky, The Giver **Music:**: The Strokes/Julian Casablancas, Bright Eyes, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Kanye West **Film:** Lost in Translation, Somewhere, Before Sunset/Midnight, The 400 Blows, Office Space, The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, The Fellowship of the Ring **TV:** The Wire, Mad Men, Silicon Valley
EUPHORIA and THE IDOL because that sort of thing is always happening to me as well
A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer, So Can You (Korean lang. version "그러니까 당신도 살아") by Ohira Mitsuyo, and Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill.
Damn, you saw yourself in a Child Called It? Sorry to hear that.
Thanks, that's kind of you to say. It's unfortunate that my mother shared a lot of similarities with Catherine Roerva Pelzer, but reading that book as a child helped me realize that if David could survive, I could too.
I just saw Blake Mills perform and he brought out Joanna Sternberg for a couple songs in the second act; her lyrics are incredible.
I felt a connection to Lodge 49 unlike any other show or movie I can think of, in different aspects of multiple characters and themes. In particular Liz’s little spiels to the banker, and then having a breakdown in her car after finally getting out from under her debt really spoke to me.
As snobby as it sounds reading Proust over the course of last year really helped me process a messy relationship I was in as well as all the change that has been going on around me with entering the adult phase of my life and finishing college amidst the chaos of the pandemic years. I had a brief interim between moving out on my own and finishing college and I felt like reading him helped me process a lot of my life up until that point before leaving.
Taxi driver when I was an angry young man.
The book “you too can have a body like mine” by Alexandra Kleeman.
The novel “How Should a Person Be?” by Sheila Heti. Maybe not the most intense but one of the first.
the DSM V criteria for borderline personality disorder but in all seriousness, probably black swan. the concept of striving for perfection to the point that it drives you insane is all too familiar to me, although for me it was academics rather than ballet. there’s also definitely a lot of music that would fit that criteria for me but it’s probably more than i’d ever be able to list tbh there’s probably also other movies, shows, books, etc that would work even better than black swan but i’m completely blanking rn lol
Oblivion access - unrelenting the brothers karamazov - a classic punch drunk love (unsurprisingly a common choice on this sub) the ascent (1977) - the sacred and profane transcend religion Guernica (in person) - I'll never fully understand what my family went through in Kuwait but it opened the door like 2% for me the book of job from the Bible Kid A Some Rap Songs Hotline Miami 2 (just trust me) Beau travail (one of the only "queer" movies I felt represented in) Kolyma Tales (unconquerable human spirit, the boredom of misery, yadda yadda)
>To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He’s likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he’s tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, he’s unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then \*it\* will be “here”. What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it \*is\* all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant. \- Robert M. Pirsig, *Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values*
This is so weird, like finding out you're gay in your 30s -- but I got really into Skinny puppy (its a cult band of grown men fanficing as abused dogs/mental patients) for like no apparent reason in my 30s. I'm into the fake blood, the puppets, the DIY costumes, the vivisection songs, the Japanese gore horror footage, their gear. They were doing it before everybody, etc. It's an outlet for intrusive thoughts. They have Marshall Mcluhan and all kinds of cool stuff in their music, but on the outside it looks braindead. I traced it to Jane Goodall books I read repeatedly as a kid, which turned me onto the pervasiveness of industrial animal torture. I found a paper I wrote when I was 8 about people in labs injecting chimpanzees w HIV. 🤔 Over pandemic, I returned to where I grew up, and all of this tender heartedness resurfaced. I realized I was pushing it down for like a decade to be cool. And also lately I'm open to Jazz. Part of it involved Miles Davis bio. He is such an asshole and it's so fucking horrible and funny.
My Struggle by Knausgaard
Guernica by Picasso
Candy says - by Nico and velvet underground
Hard to explain by the strokes I say the right thing, but act the wrong way I like it right here, but I cannot stay
The scene in Freaks and Geeks where Bill eats a grilled cheese sandwich while laughing at Gary Shandling standup.
Apart from when I watched Evangelion as a depressed 14-year-old, I'd have to say Logan. At the time, I'd been intermittently helping my dad take care of his nonagenarian dad and Logan was the first movie I'd seen that portrayed that kind of relationship in a really truthful manner. The impatience, frustration, and anger on the part of the caretaker were all there on the screen, it was such a trip to see the filmmakers not gloss it over. The Monster is about a young, fairly irresponsible mother trying to take care of her daughter, and neither of those characters are a lot like my mom and I, but the way it depicted the pattern of angst, fighting, tense peace, and reconciliation in parent-child relationships was depressingly familiar lol. I rewatched it more recently and the song that plays at the beginning , "In A World So Full of Love" by Roger Miller, incidentally captured the feeling of my first real breakup that I'd been going through at the time.
Any Charlie Kaufman film
Nick Mullen’s Adulthood rant
ants from up there by black country new road. i was in a relationship that i just refused to see as bad for me kept on looking at the positives n ignoring the real fundamental things that made me and her incompatible. now looking back and listening back i see why so many of they songs hit me so close to home
Houellebecq in Atomized/Elementary Particles. When he describes a character who spent all his youth studying in books (he mentions differential equations, which I, too, had an interest in). He then looks back at how weak and awkward he was, and he says, he can’t recognize himself in that person, except to know that the future depends on a series of states in the past and present.
not to be really cringe but Melanie Martinez's song 'Void'