I finally watched Castration Movies i, ii (& iii, but we'll talk about that later)(SPOILERS)

Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage screens at BFI Flare for two sold-out screenings on the 22nd and 23rd March, and will be distributed by Matchbox Cine in the UK.

These reviews, much like the films being reviewed, are long, so after a certain point, I am going to ask you for money, beloved. Paid Subscriptions are £5/month, thank you in advance for your patronage.

i.

I'm a nerd.

I remember rumblings of an indie film that got censored by Warner Bros. I turn up to the Prince Charles to finally watch the film, The People's Joker, and it shoots me straight through the eyes with an effect like the purest cocaine. This is my kind of movie. Another indie film was sailing through my periphery at the time, so in the post-film Q&A, when Vera Drew mentioned "Castration Movie i" as genius cinema, I knew the universe was goading me to watch it, because that's how me and the universe works – I hear about something, and then I get smacked in the face with it, and then I get my crap together and set my mission to watch it. That was quite literally one calendar year ago.

I grew up on the internet alongside a bunch of trans women – tumblr dot com, and for the purposes of this article, unnamed ancillary sites, will produce that effect. If you're queer woman on the internet, and not a bitch about it, you'll find yourself hanging out with trans girls – or, at least, those of them that are on that side of the internet, which is not for the weak.

Whether it's because we shared the same interests (nerds), or had similar experiences of rejection from the gatekept "traditional womanhood", or whether it was just that I'm queer and tend to end up hanging out with other queers on the internet, my girlhood was formed alongside trans girls. I daren't even touch the word "girlhood", because it implies to most some sanitary, pretty thing. I am a woman, but it hurt to get here.

Ergo - stories about incels, internet cults, the limits of "woke", and complicated relationships to the body and expressions of gender are kind of my shit, actually. I remember a post I made on Tumblr when I was a kid that got 0 notes, but I still pinned it to my profile – something along the lines of "this internet shit is insane. I can't wait to see what films we end up making about it."

Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps feels like it starts off with a very clear message – it's not the 90s, but just play along, OK? The 90's in indie cinema, and its accompanying lack of rigid cinematic structure and camcorder kit, provides this lack of culpability, a distance, which sets the stage both for a reading of disassociation and alienation from the mainstream. No better way to say it than the film looks like how life has felt recently. Nostalgic, in a sense, but without the romanticism, and with iPhone. This would not have worked on an iPhone.

I fear I'm going to bring up Tumblr a lot in this review, but the structure of this film reminds me of the absolute whiplash the platform could give you in a single post. It's basically a meme at this point - you read the top paragraph, and empathise and take on the information of OP. Then the next reblog completely dismantles that idea with whatever information comes next and calls OP dangerous. It's at this point, knowing there's a whole bunch more of the post, that you suddenly realise that this is an unsettled argument, someone "wins" by being the last person on the thread, and if you have any internal integrity at all, you're going to have to make up your own mind, at least to yourself – and not "cheat" by seeing who was victorious by the end.