Erotic thriller recommendations from Allison Davis, what I'm reading about the group-chat Pentagon leaks, and three summer-jam contenders
Roundup 04/17/2023
Greetings from Read Max HQ! Every week, I pick out some worthwhile and often overlooked books, articles, movies, and music to recommend to paying subscribers. This week I’ve got:
SPECIAL GUEST!! award-winning magazine journalist and screenwriter Allison Davis recommending her faves from the Criterion Channel’s new “Erotic Thrillers” collection;
what I’ve been reading about the extremely stupid and funny leak of classified Defense Department documents to a Discord server called “Thug Shaker Central”; and
three nominations for Summer Jam 2023
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Now, the roundup. First, as always, a dispatch from the future:
Allison Davis’s favorite erotic thrillers
There’s no one I know who appreciates the (tragically lost!) art of the erotic thriller more than my friend Allison Davis, a fact that really became clear to me when she and I shared an office space and she put up a huge, framed 9 1/2 Weeks poster. So, when I saw that the Criterion Channel had put up a big collection of erotic thrillers to stream, she was the first person I texted. I asked her to recommend some favorites for Read Max subscribers; please enjoy! -- Ed.
Probably because it’s 100 percent about to be the horny time and our brains are in our pants--or maybe because there’s the constant (real or not) king-is-dead-long-live-the-king discourse about sex scenes in movies, the Criterion Channel has decided to do our libidos a favor and curate a selection of Erotic Thrillers this month.
Slutty E-Thrill nerds can rejoice. None of the obvious movies are included in this survey of the genre; there’s no Fatal Attraction or Basic Instinct or Unfaithful. It avoids the Big Erotic Three directors--Adrian Lyne, Hoe Esterhaz, and Paul Verhoven--in favor of relatively lesser-known works. There are a few of the genre's building blocks (DePalma’s Dressed to Kill and Body Heat) and a few familiar faces (Bound, Last Seduction, Poison Ivy) but even the most well-known movies in this line-up are the deep cuts of your standard indie movie theater round-up.
As a scholar of the genre (since I watched The Crush on cable TV without permission at age eight), I’m excited to have some new inductees into the canon. Pleas to “bring back the erotic thriller!” have opened the gate to a recent spate of new erotic thrillers that seek to update or reinvent the genre (there’s a new Fatal Attraction tv adaptation; Nicole Kidman’s staring in an A24 produced May/December erotic thriller; Rian Johnson’s Fair Play brought sleazy back to Sundance this past January), but, just in case those suck, it’s soothing to know there is an untouched trove of erotic thrillers to explore.
But where to start in a film snob’s list of horny thrillers that doesn’t include Showgirls? I have a lot of opinions about this and multiple group chats ignored my attempts to start a discourse, so I took over Read Max with my slutty little recommendations.
5. Dream Lover, 1993 (Dir. Nicholas Kazan)
An Architect (fantastic movie trope) meets a dream woman: she’s hot! She’s independent! She went to Swarthmore?…! They bone, marry, and procreate so fast he ignores all of the red flags until it’s too late and SOMEONE (won’t say who) gets strangled. It’s a different spin on the well-trod fear of sexually forward single women that secretly want more than just a fling (the same anxiety that underscored Fatal Attraction.)
4. Bedroom Window, 1987 (Dir. Curtis Hanson)
Most notable for unlocking a surprising level of hunkiness in Steve Guttenberg. (I said what I said.) This movie holds a special place in my heart: An erotic thriller set in Baltimore; starring problematic queen Isabelle Huppert as a legendarily dismissive femme fatale, and, a legitimately interesting cat and mouse with a serial rapist at the center of it. Come for Guttenberg’s eyelashes, stay for a scene at a bar called the Nevermore, say “hey this is pretty good!” during a really suspenseful courtroom scene. (The movie’s only real problem is that nobody drinks Natty Boh?)
3. The Last Seduction, 1994 (Dir. John Dahl)
This movie is just so good. Linda Fiorentino is an iconic anti-heroine, truly the best femme fatale in any erotic thriller. Her character, Bridget Gregory, is a scheming, sultry sexpot but also has been granted the gift of an inner life and character development and motivation, and isn’t just a one-dimensional receptacle for male anxiety/desire/semen, etc. That’s feminism, baby! Also, she inspires the belief that any woman can and should wear a vest.
2. Call Me, 1988 (Sollace Mitchell)
A plucky New York journalist who has grown tired of her milque toast boyfriend, becomes fascinated by phone sex with an anonymous obscene caller who might also be a murderer. Basically: the same energy of every date I arrange on Feeld, so while it’s not a great movie, it’s a strangely resonant one. I relate so hard! Also, I found this raised more compelling questions about getting in bed with strangers than the Cat Person adaptation that’s going to disappoint everyone. I categorize this as a bad movie that should be watched for its potential to have been an excellent one and for the scene where someone masturbates with oranges. :)
1. Double Feature: Poison Ivy, 1992 (Dir. Katt Shea) and Bound, 1996 (Dir. Lana Wachowski and Lily Wachowski)
If I ever live out my dream of programming an erotic thriller festival line-up, these two movies would have to be shown together. They yearn to be in hot and heavy conversation with one another. In Poison Ivy, high school students, proto-emo-teen Sylvie (Sara Gilbert) and teen vixen Ivy (Drew Berrymore) become fast friends until it turns out Ivy is a full-on psychopathic frenemy. It’s too late though Sylvie, and Sylvie’s dad, are fully in Ivy’s thrall. This movie is better than it has ever been given credit for: it’s a fascinating slow-burning exploration of the ways intense female friendship inspires all sorts of complicated feelings and desires and resentment--but also horniness--that can’t yet be understood. The way these girls swing from warm fuzzies to hot almost-kissies to ice-cold stabbies, is thrilling… and the way that a male figure--in this case, Daddy, for some Freudian flavor--acts as a catalyst for that emotional journey is what makes this movie more than just an erotic thriller, it’s basically a Gender Studies PhD candidate’s dissertation, but with amazing costumes.
If only Ivy and Sylvie could have talked through their feelings, they might have been able to double date with Violet (Jennifer Tilly) and Corky (Gina Gershon, all butch, be still my heart). I don’t think I need to say much more than “Gina Gershon fixing pipes in an extended scene,” but Bound is the rarely seen well-executed non-hetero erotic thriller. Violet, desperate to get out of her relationship with a dangerous Mob dude, meets Corky, who can’t resist her. They fall in love and the sex scenes are incredible (thanks to Susi Bright acting as a proto-intimacy coordinator). In a different writer’s hands, Tilly’s exploration of the sapphic could have been manipulative, “means to an end” seduction, the film resolves in a love story, where the horny male presence isn’t something that destabilizes female bonds, but strengthens them when they realize they only way to get power and pleasure they want out of life, is by being together…..and killing him.
Bonus: If I were to improve Criterion’s list, I would add In the Cut and The Crush. Also, Batman Returns is just for the Selina Kyle parts, which is primo Erotic Thriller Inspo. Also, Single White Female, but that’s being added to Criterion on May 1st so you don’t have too wait long. (Is it possible I have a type?)
-- Allison Davis
You can find more of Allison’s work at New York magazine and in shows like Fleishman Is in Trouble.
What I’m reading about the Great Discord Leak of 2023
On Thursday, federal investigators descended on North Dighton, Mass., and arrested 21-year-old Air National Guardsman Jack Teixera, accusing him of leaking hundreds of classified Pentagon documents--not to foreign governments, not to investigative journalists, but to a group of 20 teenage weapons and gaming enthusiasts in a chat called “Thug Shaker Central.”
I’m obviously absolutely mainlining stories about this, which is hands down the funniest and most “Read Max” news story of the week. It makes me giddy to read the words Thug Shaker Central printed over and over again in The New York Times.
But, okay, what was Thug Shaker Central? The short, if not particularly illuminating, answer is that it was a small Discord server (i.e., gamer Slack chat room), created as an offshoot of a larger Discord server organized for fans of the the YouTuber Oxide, who makes videos about military weapons and gear. “Thug shaker” is a sort of ambiguously racist meme and associated video whose use cases range from Rickrolling-type bait-and-switch jokes to high-dada avant garde (but no less ambiguously racist) meme-making; on Twitter, Oxide said that the offshoot Discord had been created by guys he’d banned from his chat, and was named “Thug Shaker Central” because he’d also banned thug shaker memes in the chat. (Not to overstate it, but there is a sort of parallel between this and Lowtax banning Lolicon and giving rise to 4chan.)
Oxide should not be confused with “wow_mao,” another relatively small YouTuber who specializes in what can best be described as historical and political shitposts, on whose Discord server the leaked documents were first shared outside of Thug Shaker Central. Though he is far from the main character of the leak story, wow_mao gave an interview to The New York Times and made a funny video about the whole episode. (“The CIA or FBI had to watch my latest upload, ‘Bladee in Five Years’… I’m a shitposting internet microcelebrity and I want to keep it that way.”)
For a sense of what Thug Shaker Central itself was like, there’s a hilarious Washington Post story by Shane Harris and Samuel Oakford featuring a long and detailed interview with one member of the chat. The piece as a whole does a pretty good job of getting across both the poignant camaraderie of this kind of group chat between lonely and bored young men, and the objective, almost charming stupidity of all its participants:
United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God, the group of roughly two dozen — mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers. But they paid little attention last year when the man some call “OG” posted a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon. […] The gathering spot had been a pandemic refuge, particularly for teen gamers locked in their houses and cut off from their real-world friends. The members swapped memes, offensive jokes and idle chitchat. They watched movies together, joked around and prayed. But OG also lectured them about world affairs and secretive government operations. He wanted to “keep us in the loop,” the member said, and seemed to think that his insider knowledge would offer the others protection from the troubled world around them.
The funniest and most important detail of the piece, I think, is that the addled zoomers in the Discord didn’t really even care that much about the leaks, much to Teixera’s chagrin:
Late last year, a peeved OG fired off a message to all the members of the server. He had spent nearly an hour every day writing up “these long and drawn-out posts in which he’d often add annotations and explanations for stuff that we normal citizens would not understand,” the member said. His would-be pupils were more interested in YouTube videos about battle gear.
“He got upset, and he said on multiple occasions, if you guys aren’t going to interact with them, I’m going to stop sending them.”
The distance in motivation and politics between an Edward Snowden and a Jack Teixera probably tells you a lot about the distance between 2011 and 2023. In an excellent piece on his newsletter Forever Wars, Spencer Ackerman calls this “The Chud Era of National-Security Leaks”:
In other words, OG didn't leak for patriotism, principle, or even money. This motherfucker leaked for that most ineffable thing, something nonmaterial but nevertheless hyper-real in the logic of the poster, and particularly the right-wing-chud poster: clout. […]
Not to be dramatic, but OG here is the future of "national security" leaks. I'm not saying there won't also be Mannings, Snowdens, and Alburys, because there will. There will definitely also be Cozy Bears and Fancy Bears. But the national-security enterprise has to be understood as an economy, not just a geopolitical instrument. Reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin a decade ago called that economy Top Secret America, and estimated at employing almost a million people. Fast-forward several years, and a recent CNN piece pegged 2.8 million people as having some kind of access to classified information, with nearly 1.2 million of those having top-secret clearances. On Thursday, CNN reported that the Pentagon plans on stovepiping more classified information in response to those leaks. But the Security State is a growth economy, and it will not get in the way of its own economic interests.
The writing about The Chud Era has been on the wall for a few years now. So much classified information has been published on the forums for the tank simulator War Thunder since 2020--generally for the purpose of settling pointless arguments--that there is an entire Wikipedia chart dedicated to cataloging it all:
It extends, at least according to internet legend, even further in the past than War Thunder. I also had a vague memory of a goon from the legendary message board Something Awful getting in trouble for posting classified information; according to message-board lorekeepers, this did happen, maybe more than once, though of course that’s impossible to confirm:
What else I’m reading
I loved this Jaime Brooks essay about the technological and economic forces that structure songwriting and recording (and star-making)--rigorous, thought-provoking, and educational:
With “Maybellene,” Berry had arrived just in time for the beginning of a new era in music. One that his very specific skill set turned out to be ideally suited for: he wrote the songs, played the lead instrument, and choreographed his own stage show. A job that once required a crack team of performers, arrangers, and songwriters could now be done beautifully by one guy if you plugged him into a large enough amplifier. He even refused to tour with backing musicians, on the basis of his contention that it wouldn’t make sense to pay anyone to learn his music because every rock musician on the planet already knew it from his records. For decades, he would just show up to the venue on his own and play with whatever local rhythm section could be assembled on short notice. There had never been anyone like him before, because there simply couldn’t have been. We didn’t have the technology.
“There’s a reason every hit worship song sounds the same” by Bob Smietana: Turns out all the things that are annoying about the regular music business are true about Christian music too!
“Fred Lee Crisman fights the Deros” by Tanner F. Boyle. I enjoyed this piece about the intersection between the proto-U.F.O. craze “the Shaver Mystery” and one of the 20th century’s most interesting men:
Shaver historian Richard Toronto noted that Palmer and Shaver’s publication of tales from the underground “tapped into a vast, marginalized group of citizens that did in fact hear voices.” The magazine received a barrage of letters vouching for Shaver’s stories and seemingly confirming their reality. A couple of these letters came from a notorious figure in both the paranormal and the parapolitical: Fred Lee Crisman. While he pops up throughout the history of fringe events, Crisman was perhaps most well-known for the attention Jim Garrison directed his way during his storied investigation into the JFK assassination. One of Garrison’s press releases stated that Crisman was “engaged in undercover activity for a part of the industrial warfare complex for years.” Rumors further circulated that Crisman was one of the “three tramps” spotted at Dealey Plaza and suspected in connection to the assassination. Outside the realm of JFK, Crisman played a major role in the Maury Island incident, one of the first UFO cases to receive national attention beyond Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting.
Three contenders for Summer Jam 2023
April is a bit early to peg a Summer Jam, but it’s nearly 90 degrees here in New York and I need something that reflects the vibe.
“I Been Young,” George Clanton
“Times Square,” Jam City feat. Aidan
“Hi 5,” Frost Children
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Not to nitpick Allison Davis but Selena Kyle was definitely not in Batman Forever, she was in Batman Returns.
However, the smoldering chemistry between Jim Carrey's Riddler and Tommy Lee Jone's Two-Face in that film was off the Bat Charts.
e: guess it's been updated in the article now, i retract my nitpick