Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun, 2026)

[Mr Sausage]

On a literal level, the line is an insecure, self-conscious person belittling their own interests so they don't seem uncool. Their whole character development is to embrace this aspect of themselves and no longer belittle their interests, intellectual ones included. They literally, on the level of story, perform their own intellectual interest as a way of finally orgasaming during sex.

Huh? Gillian Anderson's character says the "flesh and fluids" line, not Hannah Einbinder's, and she does so in direct response to Einbinder's extended over-intellectualizing of slashers (hence why I said the line "is placed in the mouth of a character with the wisdom of years and moral/(un)intellectual superiority"). I'm not sure what you mean by this, as the arc you describe happens to Einbinder's character, not Anderson's, as influenced by Anderson's retort. The movie absolutely takes Anderson's position on this attitude; it caricatures intellectual readings of film as a method by which insecure people defend themselves and then sweeps them aside. That rubbed me the wrong way.

My bad. I misremembered who said the line.

But the film bears out none of the things you're saying, which is what so puzzles me. It's like you heard a problematic line and just stopped there. Like it was enough for the sentiment to be voiced at all for the movie to be condemned on that alone, and then the whole of the movie is read through the lense of that one line rather than vice versa. You've badly misread the film--I don't know how else to put it. The whole thing Anderson's character teaches Einbinder's is that, to properly enjoy sex, they need to embrace their own dissociation. The route to non-intellectual pleasure lies through intellectualization, not in rejecting it. The detritus of pop culture, be it junk food or junk films, is the source of both pleasure and knowledge. Self-awareness is reframed from a method of avoiding intimacy to the method of experiencing intimacy. The film is pretty explicit about all that. So why cling to a reading the film cannot be making?

And the line isn't actually about slashers. It's about sex. You'd have to believe the film were dismissing sex, too.

Seems like you do know what it means, and it's apparently 'these films have no intellectual merit and nothing much going on in them.' Which is so incorrect on the face of it that it's hard to know what to say. You keep saying variations of "this might be on me", but I don't think you really believe that.

I don't mind the rest of this post, but I do mind your saying this. I was really looking forward to this movie, saw it in pretty ideal conditions (packed house full of 20-somethings like myself, all of whom were really into it in a respectful, excited way), and had a really painful experience in the theater, but one for which I don't blame the film or Schoenbrun or anyone else but myself. I didn't like the film, I didn't respond to what I thought it was doing, and I felt alienated from my peers, all of whom were laughing at jokes I didn't find funny and responding emotionally to something that didn't move me. I really wanted to, but I didn't. I felt uncomfortable and separated from the audience, which is probably why I simultaneously felt so motivated to write a negative response to the film and why it was so difficult (personally, no one here did anything) to do. After I did, another user here reached out to express their sympathy at those feelings, which I appreciated.

So yes, I don't actually feel all that confident that my stance on the film works outside my own head (even if I don't think the substance of that critique, or my interpretation of the "flesh and fluids" line, was actually that slashers have no intellectual merit). When I kept saying that my negative response might be more idiosyncratic than I wanted it to be, I wasn't being smarmy or sarcastic or trying to prove a point. In not liking the film, I felt left out, and I would appreciate being given the benefit of the doubt when I said so. Hey, if you want, you can take my strong emotional response to the film as another point in its favor.

Sorry it rubbed you the wrong way, but you seemed so confident in your readings while at the same time saying you weren't sure. I frankly didn't know what to do with that. Again, I don't mind that you don't like the movie, it's a very peculiar one that's not going to work for everybody. But I am a bit stymied at my inability to make any inroads or seemingly get my point across. I'm not used to getting such resistance from someone who keeps saying they're unsure. And at the same time, I'm frustrated by what seems like a need to justify your negative feelings by discovering some kind of secret moral error in the film. It's not the first time, either: you found Sinners secretly racist, The Substance secretly misogynist, and now Teenage Sex and Death... secretly anti-intellectual. Seems like whenever your opinion is at an extreme enough variance from the consensus, you try to get the film to eat itself by reading it as committing the very sin it's rejecting.

You're just so off base here. No one makes a whole film about the vital importance of a horror franchise on the main characters, whose very title is flatly conceptual, whose main character ends up living out her own intellectual project and her preteen obsession simultaneously, and somehow believes slasher films are beneath intellectual notice. Surely you see how unlikely that is?

[Never Cursed]

I'm sorry for frustrating you, but I think we're talking past each other at this point, and I'm not enjoying it anymore (like I've been saying, my fault, not yours). But I can respond to what you've said.

Spoiler

Let's eschew the "flesh and fluids" line (and I don't think it's a defense to say that it's really about sex, as even if it is, we're back to the same sex-is-violence thing) and go to the other thing you've brought up. I don't think we agree as to what Anderson and Einbinder's sexual gratification-by-dissociation is employed to mean in the film - in brief, you're taking it as a sign of accessing pleasure through intellectualization, where for me it's the exact opposite, a conscious choice to detach from reality and let go of the words that help explain it. The dissociation that the two employ is spectatorship and self-objectification through another's eyes (again, note the mocking running "Ray Blanchard" reference through the film, naming a quack academic sexologist who postulated that trans women are "autogynephiles," or aroused by the idea of themselves as women) rather than self-awareness. They do not imagine themselves, but rather, Little Death gazing at them. On the basic level of invoking academic concepts, this is a performance of intellectual interest, but I don't think it uses the ideas coherently. I think the film is aware of all these concepts, but neither relates nor distinguishes them well, even while paying endless lip service to the methods by which films function. Spectatorship and self-objectification are meaningfully distinct from dissociation and fantasy, and they connote different things, especially when it is women/femme/trans people that are being gazed at. I agree that taking one line out of context and examining the whole movie through it as a lens would be an unfair and unproductive method of reading a film. But a lot of separate elements within the film cohered in my viewing to suggest an unintentional anti-intellectualism: the aforementioned categorical slipperiness in the context of voluminous, encyclopedic technical and theoretical film knowledge; the repeated name-checking of a bigoted, anti-trans academic as author of queer sexual fantasies; the mockery of creative conceptualization and theorization as anathema to creativity and pleasure alike (putting the words inherent to those practices in the mouth of a confused filmmaker and her evil, money-grubbing superiors). I know what the film is saying it's doing. But what is it doing?

I'm frustrated by what seems like a need to justify your negative feelings by discovering some kind of secret moral error in the film. It's not the first time, either: you found Sinners secretly racist, The Substance secretly misogynist, and now Teenage Sex and Death... secretly anti-intellectual. Seems like whenever your opinion is at an extreme enough variance from the consensus, you try to get the film to eat itself by reading it as committing the very sin it's rejecting.

Okay, but all of these movies at least attempt to demonstrate some kind of strong moral compass (anti-racism, anti-misogyny, pro-queer-self-discovery), thus opening the success of these efforts to criticism? Two of these (the Schoenbrun being the exception) were quite openly attempting to make political statements using their main characters. I've seen and discussed plenty of movies that I've hated that didn't inspire strong moral or political reactions. I'd say my reaction to Sinners and Camp Miasma were relatively similar, in that I thought they were well-intentioned movies whose conceptual incoherence and general poor quality of writing led them to say things counter to their stated intentions. (Though Jane Schoenbrun is a MUCH more talented filmmaker than Ryan Coogler - someone ought to give them Sinners-level money to make a big swing, even if I end up hating it as much as this). I think it is very easy, on the other hand, to make the case for The Substance as a giddily and intentionally misogynistic film. Brian C did as much in the dedicated thread when he observed that the movie hates "everyone and everything." So I don't really see the pattern that you are describing.

It also disheartens me to read that you think I am "trying" to get movies to do anything, particularly to destroy themselves with their own strengths. I promise you, I'm not "trying" to make them do anything. And if it somehow pertains to "the consensus," what was the "consensus" on The Substance, and what is the "consensus" on this film that just came out and which I didn't read any reviews of prior to the writing of my first post?