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Hollywood’s New Lesbian Plot

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Moira Donegan on Drive-Away Dolls and Love Lies Bleeding.

Jeet Heer

April 10, 2024

Love Lies Bleeding(A24)

In the last few weeks, Hollywood has given us Drive-Away Dolls (directed by Ethan Coen, who also co-wrote it in collaboration with Tricia Cooke) and Live Lies Bleeding (directed by Rose Glass who co-wrote it with Weronika Tofilska). Although very different in tone, the two movies have some striking commonalities. Both are set in the late 20th century and take familiar genres (the buddy road comedy, the erotic thriller) while featuring lesbian lead characters.

To talk about this trend, I spoke to Moira Donegan, a frequent guest of the The Time of Monsters, who sees the movies as evidence of “the lesbian plot” becoming Hollywood fare. She locates both films as exercises in nostalgia for a period when actual lesbian culture is rapidly changing.

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Gaza and Elite Accountability w/ Connor Echols / The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer
byThe Nation Magazine

Many of Joe Biden’s closest advisors are now well-ensconced in the sinecures reserved for the elite, working at think tanks, academia, and major media outlets. Normally, they could expect to have future jobs when the Democrats retake the White House. But this cozy situation is being disrupted by ongoing reporting showing the extent of their complicity in the Gaza genocide and other US crimes in the Middle East. I spoke about this with Connor Echols, managing editor of Responsible Statecraft, who wrote an excellent article on the efforts to hold these officials accountable.

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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.


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