I hope I’m not the only person here to have had a rather regrettable and naughty July. I’ve slept till noon on disgustingly hot mornings with all the usual symptoms: shirt grossly clinging to the slick of my back, cotton mouth, phone not actually plugged in etc., etc. All this is to say, my routine has left me bereft if not in a peculiar mood. To satiate this feeling of mine I’ve indulged in a genre of film I’m aptly diagnosing as Nightsweat.
If you scroll on the Criterion Channel website today (because the correlation between the average Static reader and Criterion subscription member is?) you will see new and hot featured collections such as “Summer Romances” or “In the Deep End: Swimming Pools On-Screen.” The former describes itself as featuring entries with “passions [that] sizzle in scorching summertime tales of desire,” while the latter provides “dangerously seductive” backdrops for thrillers which involve Alain Delon looking good for two hours. This may work for some, and while I cannot speak for their whole list, I do know one thing, which is that The Graduate and Roman Holiday can only take a depraved insomniac like me so far.
This is why I propose that Nightsweat is for those whose lonely summers are characterized by the inescapable presence of doom. Beneath the haze of dog-day nights, reality slips into glitchy psychosis. It is digital intimacy. Nightsweat craves everything hot, grimy, and dirty: like Nine Inch Nails decimating stereospeakers and Neon discotheque night clubs, or my personal favorite, Willem Dafoe as Gas. Nightsweat is my take on the dystopian and the erotic.
I’m no expert, but I sure can ruin a circadian rhythm. Here are six films that fit my Nightsweat canon for yours and my pleasure alone.
1. Kaboom (2010)
Who else is up and horny for the end of the world? Interested in downloading a sex dream on acid into your frontal lobe in one big zip file? Armageddon is just another day on campus for Smith, a film major who’s RA not only happens to be the Messiah, but also James Duvall. Between hook-ups, final exams, and hallucinatory visions, Smith and his friends stumble into a surreal underground cult conspiracy that might actually bring about doomsday. A “pastime for idle hands and genitals,” Araki’s neon, sticky fever dream treats the apocalypse like foreplay. (Dir. Gregg Araki)
2. Demonlover (2002)
On a feverish summer night, nothing gets me going more than corporate espionage, illicit 3D manga pornography, and global monitoring. Poorly received at the 2002 Cannes Film and by the French press and public, Olivier Assayas’s erotic thriller Demonlover explores the covert dirty wars of companies fighting for control over internet sadomasochism sites. Existing in a cooly stylized liminal sphere of its own, Demonlover features an ambient score by Sonic Youth and performances from Gina Gershon and Chloë Sevigny, which combined does more than defy its decade old critique. Plus, any film described by Robert Eger as a “sleazy bottom-feeder” sounds right up my alley. (Dir. Olivier Assayas)
3. eXistenZ (1999)
It is an impossible feat to pick only one Cronenberg film for this list when every single entry of his works impossibly well at capturing exactly what Nightsweat encompasses. Videodrome has the dread, The Shrouds has the dystopia, and Crash has the hot (James Spader), but eXistenZ combines all three in a deliciously unserious way. Released just weeks after The Matrix, Cronenberg’s take on Y2K doom and ’90s video game–era aesthetics has it all: gooey organic effects, bizarre new tech like MetaFlesh Game Pods—and Jude Law saying, “I have this phobia of having my body penetrated.” (Dir. David Cronenberg)
4. Variety (1983)
Re-released for its 40-year anniversary two years ago, Bette Gordon’s gritty, slyly funny, and “scuzzbient” Times Square porno-theater noir is as much about the violence of the male gaze and voyeurism as it is about narrative control. Written by former sex worker and postmodernist author Kathy Acker, Variety is a slowburning of a woman’s awakened sexuality after she takes a job tearing tickets in an adult movie theater. In layman’s terms, a quasi gender reversal of Taxi Driver with long and eerie static shots of the archival underbelly of New York City. (Dir. Belle Gordon)
5. Lost Highway (1997)
Meow meow, it’s Lost Highway! An obvious pick to anyone who has seen it, a man becomes another man, a woman becomes two, a dream lives within a dream, and all the while staticky VHS tapes reel in the background of perverse summer nights. Lost Highway is perhaps Lynch at his darkest – a rough, erotic, and feverish descent into one man’s psyche. The film drives you into madness and absurdity right off the bat, 100mph down the freeway blaring Trent Reznor, and then later coyly pulls you in with Patricia Arquette and This Mortal Coil. Lost Highway is the epitome of Nightsweat; it’s thrilling, sexy, and most importantly, sweaty. (Dir. David Lynch)
6. Lovely Andrea (2007)
Bondage is work. Work is bondage. There are films that challenge form and then there’s Lovely Andrea, which ties it up and suspends it from the ceiling. Hito Steyerl’s meta-cinematic docustyle short film begins with the search of a bondage photo from 1987 before spinning into a larger web of surveillance, internet kink culture, and performance art. X-Ray Spex, Depeche Mode, and Spiderman tie together her narrative about the uncanny power of images and their transmissibility in the early 2000s. Arguably my favorite short film of all time, Hito’s editing style raises more questions than answers, exploring sexuality in a uniquely thrilling way. (Dir. Hito Steyerl)