67. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

Directed by Tay Garnett
Written by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch
Starring Lana Turner, John Garfield, and Cecil Kellaway

Is road fever a kind of FOMO? Maybe for some. But Frank doesn’t seem too invested in sightseeing or local culture or catching up with friends around the country, which I don’t think he even has. My creative projects have always been an effective, albeit self-serving, way of reconnecting with my people both near and far. The rhetoric of community-building in (white, straight) radical circles has often struck me as overblown, but zine culture in the mid-to-late-2000s really did make me feel like I was part of something. That didn’t last, of course. Keeping up correspondence with the readers who filled my P.O. box with heartfelt missives soon grew enervating. Maybe it’s because I wrote about mental illness; who wants to spend all their free time swapping stories with strangers about trauma and the struggle to stay sane? I still have those letters in a filing cabinet, along with flyers from shows, old bands’ CD-Rs, fading tour Polaroids, zines my friends wrote. My impulse to preserve and archive the ephemera of my life has necessarily grounded me in place: I need a permanent location in which to house all my shit. Call it domestic-adjacent — which might be an apt descriptor for what Frank ultimately wants with Cora. Sometimes I wish I lived as close to the beach as they do, less for the swimming and more for that mystical peace that moving water can provide. God, what to do with this meat sack of a body? Women’s swimsuits aren’t my style, but going shirtless in the sun just screams bro. I’ll figure out something before my Florida vacation with the in-laws in April. It’s been spilling out of me more on social media and IRL: all the things I do to make my outside and inside feel less misaligned. What scares me is that, if I don’t spell it out (or even if I do), my friends will always see me as a boy. That I will, too.