I first came to Katharine Coldiron’s work on the pages of LARB, where I quickly fell in love with her critical eye. She is the kind of analytical writer I wish I could be: searingly sharp in observation, deeply persuasive in an inconspicuous way, and also incredibly funny. It was only sometime later I came to her fiction and began to understand that these techniques are the foundation of all her work. Coldiron writes about human failure and human strangeness and human longing in ways that ask us to pay closer attention. Her critical-creative oeuvre disturbs the status quo not just through unconventional plot turns and lines of argumentation, but also through exquisitely rendered detail that estranges us to what we thought we already knew and understood. In her latest collection of essays, Out There in the Dark, she builds on the work of a previous book, Junk Film: Why Bad Movies Matter (2023), which conducts close readings of a series of films that are artistic failures. In doing so, she discloses what makes a particular kind of failed film decidedly and unequivocally Not Good but also strangely piercing—simultaneously surprising and painful in such a way that demands a closer look. “How films are is interesting enough to write about,” Coldiron says in the Introduction to Junk Film, “but how films affect us is a murkier and more intriguing set of questions.” Out There in the Dark extends her discussion of not just what is happening technically and narratively in a work of moving image art, but also how it makes its meaning once it enters the human mind and heart. I have been lucky enough to call Coldiron an interlocutor for a while now and wanted to probe deeper into her thinking behind this new brilliant and at times haunting book to explore questions of just what makes a single film (or a genre or trope or theme replicated across a set of films) move us affectively and how such cinema shapes us not just superficially, but on a deeper level, secretly and covertly, in those private spheres of meaning found only in (to play on the collection’s title) the dark.
Your exquisite essay collection Out There in the Dark investigates the many ways film—and the film industry—has shaped American culture and the narratives of the American West. But it also speaks to how a set of films has shaped you personally. The book reads to me like autocriticism, but it’s also an extraordinary exercise in deeply entertaining cinematic close reading. You touch on this a bit in your author’s note, but could you talk about your personal relationship with both film and literature—both moving image storytelling and/versus language on a page?
Autocriticism! What a perfect word for what I’m doing! I wish I’d come up with it. (Where were you for the four years I was failing to sell this thing!?)
I could answer this question for days. When I look back, it seems like books and film have been competing neck and neck for my attention, passion, avocation since I was a little girl. The choices I made over time led me toward books as my career, but it wasn’t a conscious choice between the two forms so much as a series of choices that led me, unwitting, away from film. That happened in ways I mourn (I still wish I’d pursued that DGA program), but it also got me here (I get to play at the edges instead of work in the thick of it).
As a child, I was a voracious reader, but I was also a voracious watcher of movies—and movies more than TV, against the general habits of my generation. The movies I most loved were strongly rooted in Western narrative patterns; for instance, because of how often and how early I was exposed to Star Wars, I immediately recognize/d Joseph Campbell. That recognition was shored up by everything I was reading.
Much later I came to learn that I understand film more instinctively than I understand books, which might be a surprise to anyone who knows how many book reviews I wrote between 2017 and 2020. However, in primary education, heavy readers do a lot better than film freaks, and my family understood books and how they could encourage me to excel in that direction a lot better than they understood the same thing in movies.
The instinctive way I react to cinema, and the dizzy passion I feel about all things film, keeps looping me back to it, sometimes unexpectedly. As evident as it is from my choice of career that I love reading, writing, and books more than most people, I love movies even more.
In terms of the specific language of your question—I tend to be excited by both books and films that don’t translate well to the other medium. Stuff that you can do only with words on the page, or only with an audience watching a moving picture, is the stuff that gets my blood moving. Both media can tell stories in approximately the same ways, but each medium has completely different artistic possibilities.
“Storytelling, I have averred elsewhere, is the most powerful way to keep ourselves from the void,” you say in the author’s note to Out There in the Dark. One of the reasons I find your criticism so evocative stems from your attention to both what is happening inside the film—the plot, the characters, the blocking, the lighting, the cuts, etc.—and also outside the film. You consistently offer rich historical context and intriguing anecdotes about the filming of the movie itself, from the controversies around casting to each film’s reception. In other words, it strikes me that you are as interested in conducting a close read inside the film as you are in exposing the paratextual mythology around the film. You then elegantly pair this criticism with some aspect of culture that intersects with your everyday life. With this in mind, I kept wondering: how did you go about choosing which films to study? Did you start with your personal experience and find the film that spoke to it? Or did you start with a film and fold in life thereafter?
I often got a similar question about Junk Film, and even though that book is a whole different animal from this one, the answer is actually the same: I picked movies about which I had something to say, usually something that I had the temerity to believe no one else could or would say. In Junk Film, that was usually a particular set of insights, while in Out There in the Dark, it’s an occasion on which the film became intertwined with my life.
For most of these, the essay released thoughts and ideas and memories that had been bottled for years or decades, rather than the concept of the collection being an artificial prod for me to crash things together. I’d been watching Apocalypse Now and thinking about my father from the time I was a teenager. It all seemed inevitable once I linked an idea or an experience with a film: how else can I write about my money troubles and my mom troubles without writing about Mildred Pierce? There’s no other movie at the top of my mind that interleaves so beautifully with those issues.
A different example of how this came about is The Misfits. I already knew a lot about Marilyn Monroe from a different project, and this final film of hers, the only one in which she speaks basically like herself, mystified me. I knew there was an essay to be written about my opinion of the film, but I didn’t know what the heart of the essay was until I 1) learned that mustangs weren’t native to North America and 2) started work at the stable. All these events happened years apart, so I had to wait a long time for the whole thing to come together, but I took notes and read books and remained patient. Et voila.
Throughout the collection, you play with the idea of cinema as masquerade for what is real or authentic or genuine. But you also implicitly argue in many places that cinema is also a means toward exposing the real or authentic or genuine. As you note in the first essay of the collection in discussing The Wizard of Oz, when it comes to the titular character, viewers must hold two seemingly opposing truths in their minds at once: “he is great and powerful, and he is a flimflam artist: both.” I see this tension between authenticity and façade in a lot of your short stories, too. In fact, your beautiful and unsettling collection Wire Mothers (2024) borrows its title from the Harry Harlow experiment in which infant monkeys had to choose between two kinds of false mothers: one made of wire, who offered food, or one made of fabric, who didn’t. The epigraph to your collection reminds readers that the monkeys often chose the fabric one, even if that meant not getting fed. Here again surfaces that question of artificial versus real, though this particular experiment complicates that binary in really compelling ways (as do, I would argue, all the short stories in the collection that follow that epigraph). What do you think draws you to this particular theme?
Oh, Lindsey, what a beautiful set of things to say. Thank you so much.
There’s a complex, personal answer to this question. Various influences in my youth caused me as an adult to be honest to a fault—my husband says he’s never met anybody who has such an intense relationship to the truth—in everything. It’s a major engine of my writing, all my writing. I have to tell the truth, and if I don’t know what the truth is, I have to learn, even if I have to write an entire book to discover it.
When I was around 16, something happened in my family that made me grapple with two oppositional truths. Objectively, that grappling has been something of a gold mine for me as a writer. In life, it was painful.
A simpler answer has to do with movies and novels, how both are falsehoods or artifice and yet they are not mendacious. I love being told a story, as long as I know it is not true and no one is trying to trick me into thinking it is. That’s what a movie is. And it’s compelling to occasionally recognize that the storytellers exist.
This is fascinating and—I think—has absolutely served as a foundation of your fiction, not just in the way you magnify minutia until it means something totally different (a kind of defamiliarization) but also through your narrator’s tone and affect in delivery, which is so often disarmingly matter-of-fact. Do you think this sense of being unabashedly truthful has served you as a book reviewer and critic, as well?
I mean, probably. This question reminds me that one of the last reviews I wrote for Locus was a negative review of a Sarah J. Maas novel. This probably was not wise; Maas is an enormous hit as a writer, and people don’t generally like being told they have bad taste. But it never even occurred to me to write something positive, because the book wasn’t good, and why would I, should I, say anything but that about it?
Now I’m convincing myself that this kind of truthfulness is actually bad for me as a critic.
The idea you note above of being told a story that is fiction but not wanting to feel tricked reminds me of the technique you talk about a lot in your work: day for night. It’s a filmmaking mechanism that acknowledges the illusion so the viewer and those inside the world of the fiction are both, together, equally enmeshed in the façade.
That’s an interesting read on day for night. I’m pretty confident that most viewers didn’t notice it when it was most in use, pre-1970, and I bet that a lot of viewers don’t notice it even now. But filmmakers definitely use this “equally enmeshed” philosophy in innovative ways, especially now. The Vourdelak and Annette both had main characters who were puppets—really advanced puppets but still clearly puppets. I thought that was smart craft-wise (a lot less expensive than digital effects, a lot less dicey than practical options), but also an acknowledgment of cinema’s inherent fakery. And then there’s The VelociPastor, which has typed cards that say “VFX: Car on fire” in place of an actual car on fire, so the filmmakers wouldn’t have to buy and then destroy a car.
It’s all fake, and creators who take advantage of that fakeness, rather than trying to reshape it into realness, are several steps ahead.
Speaking of taking advantage of fakeness, so much of Out There in the Dark is interested in frustrating the tropes that are associated with the American West. You and I both live in the Western United States, but in two radically different versions of it: you’re based near LA, I’m in Salt Lake City, Utah. In Junk Film, you spoke about the concept of “the imagined West” which you define as “a largely ahistorical Western environment that […] focusses on white settler perspectives rather than indigenous ones” and that “has a multifarious reach” in shaping assumptions about the region. Could you talk about your desire to probe the tropes of the West in moving image storytelling, in particular the genre of the Western?
Ooooooh. Well, I fell in love with the Western in college and then fell in love with the West as an adult. In an independent study, a professor led me through the movie Western from Stagecoach to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I watched the whole filmic myth of the American West be created, refined, questioned, and then destroyed—in one semester—and it was glorious.
The Western is probably the most clearly defined, most by-the-numbers genre available, but the list of ways someone can walk in and complicate that genre is infinite. I love that. I love both ways: the (unacceptably racist and problematic) myth, and the (depressing and consistently incomplete) reimagining.
Simple Westerns are wonderful for their comfort: good guy and bad guy clearly defined, fully recognizable characters, good guy wins. Later Westerns are wonderful for their ability to complicate these ideas: unclear who’s good and bad, not-so-pigeonholed characters, deeply uncertain future. Neo-Westerns are wonderful for their varying distance from the original and their desire to invoke some-but-not-all of the ideas of the genre. I love ‘em all.
That said: my love for the actual American West is equal parts uncomplicated and indefinable. I feel happier in a desert than I do on a beach, and I feel myself relax in a way I can’t explain whenever I cross the Rockies. This is my home.
Your notes here about the evolution of the Western make me think about one of my favorite filmmakers, Akira Kurosawa. George Lucas has gone on the record saying Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) was a major influence in writing Star Wars from a kind of “underdog” perspective. And there’s also the famous controversy over his Yojimbo (1961) being the source material for Fistful of Dollars (1964) itself a spaghetti Western directed by Sergio Leone and shot in Italy. Whatever the ethics, the form of the Western really does seem, as you note in Junk Film, “imagined”—it’s linked to the region but the term seems to signify something altogether more elastic. More global and slippery.
Well, here’s the part where I explain that I lifted the concept of the imagined West from someone else. The historian Richard White came up with it in 1991 in his book “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West, which is maybe the most annoying title for a major text I’ve ever heard. It’s a powerful idea, the point where the myth becomes more famous than the truth—and that idea I stole from Liberty Valance.
The resemblance between samurai movies and Westerns is pretty well acknowledged in genre studies, and even I called on it when I wrote an essay about Kill Bill for a new anthology on Tarantino. The practice of seizing ideas and sticking them in other genres is also pretty well acknowledged, whether that’s Lucas stealing pretty much everything from Kurosawa (The Hidden Fortress is even more outrageously similar to A New Hope) or George R. R. Martin writing All My Children except with dragons. I’m certainly interested in how the Western translates to other places—the Australian Western, especially as George Miller envisions it, and of course spaghetti Westerns. But I’m an American, and the American Western will always be the most compelling kind for me.
I guess the thing I really want to say about this is that everything is a remix. Everything is stolen from everything else. Even my own work is borrowed glory; there would be nothing there without the films I write about. Just a suburban woman trying to figure shit out.
I see you thinking through questions of ambiguity so much in this essay collection. Maybe it comes back to your discussion about the Wizard being both a confidence man and The Great and Powerful, but I found myself becoming somewhat convinced throughout the collection that film asks us to linger in different forms of ambiguity. It strikes me that this could be because film as a medium depends almost entirely on a kind of oscillation between varying degrees of mimesis. As you note at one point, Meryl Streep is an evocative actress for you because she “disappears without becoming invisible.” And elsewhere you conduct an absolutely brilliant reading of a scene from Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce when the sexual intimacy rendered reads to you as nonconsensual despite the director claiming in interviews the character is very much giving consent (as for what the actress playing the character believes, that’s a whole separate story). In short, I love how this collection consistently directs us toward moments where the fiction of film breaks down and there is something more jarring at work, something that feels almost ultra-realist and thus uncomfortable. (I’m thinking of your discussion of the last scene of The Misfits here, too.) Am I right to pick up on this as an interest of yours, this focus on ambiguity? What does ambiguity do for you as a reader or viewer?
Oh, yeah. Sometimes I think ambiguity is how I know I’m alive. There’s a moment in The French Lieutenant’s Woman when the metatext and the text lock eyes with each other. I remember virtually nothing else about that movie except that single moment, when Streep falls down and it’s not clear whether she’s okay and they should keep the scene going, or not, and the actors signal that uncertainty to each other. I’m sitting up straighter just thinking about it.
In Junk Film, I wrote “We never fully believe we are part of a movie, unless we are children or fools. We are bespelled by what we see on the screen in a particular way, and it’s a kind of magic to which we consent.” You wrote it a lot more intelligently: “oscillation between varying degrees of mimesis.” The degree to which we succumb to that mimesis depends on too many factors to name, but we always interpret it as mimesis, not as reality. If we squint, we can always see the man behind the curtain.
There’s a bright line between real and fake in most of our minds, but the places where it gets dark and fuzzy are the places that interest (or appall) me the most. Documentaries, reality TV, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. To destabilize this, perhaps the most meaningful distinction by which we live in the world—what is real and what is not—is incredibly powerful, and storytellers from Buster Keaton to Fox News know it.
You’re making me realize as I answer this that some of my most significant epiphanies have had to do with accepting ambiguity, whether that was “there is no such thing as objective truth” or “no one else constantly thinks about what’s happening in the minds of performing actors” or “the American West is a mixed bag at best” or even “you will never be able to choose one kind of writing to specialize in.” The list goes on.
The last thing I’ll say about this is that intellectual discomfort, which ambiguity often inspires, is undervalued. I think a lot of people like to stay intellectually comfortable, and I feel sad about that, because it limits their vision. I don’t always put down books or movies I don’t like, because examining why sometimes leads me to a new or interesting idea. It’s part of how I wrote Out There in the Dark, was by writing stuff that made me uncomfortable to think about. I don’t think there’s any other way to grow.
Katharine Coldiron is the author of Ceremonials, Junk Film, Wire Mothers, and Out There in the Dark. Her work as a book critic has appeared in the Washington Post, the Guardian, theTimes Literary Supplement, and many other places; as an essayist, in Conjunctions, Ms., Booth, and elsewhere. She and her books have been profiled in three countries on radio and television. Find her at kcoldiron.com.
Lindsey Drager is the author of four books of speculative fiction. Her novels and stories have won a 2018 Shirley Jackson Award, a 2020 NEA Fellowship, the 2022 Bard Fiction Prize, a 2025 Pushcart Prize, and a 2025 O. Henry Prize. She is the fiction editor of West Branch literary journal and a faculty member in the PhD program at the University of Utah where she also volunteers in the University Prison Education Project. https://www.lindseydrager.com/
Photo: Modern Tintype