Day 2.2: Hale County, This Morning This Evening and OnlyFans Chatters

[sunshowerdandelion]

Today I watched an interesting documentary and read an utterly depressing (though utterly hilarious - maybe) article.

• Hale County, This Morning This Evening (RaMell Ross, 2018)

I think this is the closest I've come to experiencing a 'literary fugue' documentary. You know those scenes where the author goes off and describes a scene with maximum showiness, poise, and detail? Where the immediate focus of the scene is a bit odd? A scene that immediately comes to mind is Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping where she describes the flooded Fingerbone home (with the furniture blindly tapping against each other, the pine tree mirrored in the water). This documentary has what I felt was the film equivalent: long shots of sweat pouring on concrete, close-ups of hands, parts where the filmmaker follows a butterfly or a column of smoke shot through with sun - it's very literary. Of course you have to be in a certain mood to enjoy all that, which I fortunately was. Also, as I am not from the U.S., I very much appreciated the different perspective on black people in America. In the stuff I've watched, black people are usually depicted as victims or set alongside big-P Problems, so I really loved how people are just allowed to exist in this documentary.

• I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter. It Wasn’t Pretty (Brendan I. Koerner, 2024)

Gosh this article. The journalist spends time working as a chat ghostwriter or a professional RP-er and finds (surprise) that the world of OnlyFans chatting is deeply cynical and capitalisticked to hell. Candidate for worst job maybe. Internships on Discord, pathos, and fake motivational quotes from Benjamin Franklin. A must read.