Month: December 2022

Categories
Music

The 10 Best Albums of 2022

We’ve witnessed the hard downfall of music titans, the rise of others, all bringing into focus one single, important question: can we separate art from the artists? Depends on who you are. Sometimes it’s doable. Sometimes it’s downright unforgivable. 2022 made us ask ourselves a lot of these questions, all while incorporating the act of questioning the artist into the music itself. This year, reggaton reigned supreme, lo-fi indie-rock suddenly became not so lo-fi, and electronic dance found ways to borrow and re-invent itself. Artists not only challenged themselves, but challenged audiences in how they thought about and perceived them, the result being the most modern approach to music production we’ve seen this millennium. Here are the 10 best albums of 2022.

10. KING HANNAH – I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me

Earlier this year, Liverpool duo King Hannah took to the stage at LA’s Moroccan Lounge. The air was incendiary, the crowd positive, and the sound unique. After ripping through their opener “Well-Made Woman,” vocalist Hannah Merrick quivered, “Wow, hi, sorry we’re nervous, we weren’t expecting so many people.” The house lights came on, to which there was only about 15 people in the audience.

There was something genuine about that show. It felt like the perfect live representation for the album’s intimate, delicate soundscape. Part Portishead, part PJ Harvey, part trip-hop, part acid jazz, I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me is a solitary album that takes you to a place as it uses its tools wisely. Unapologetic in its approach, the album title speaks for itself: it’s another way of saying, “You all don’t have to agree on me, but I’m gonna do my thing.” And when they conjure up that feeling like a kindle of fire, in performance, with everywhere to spread, they could be one of the greatest duos in the world.

9. BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD – Ants From Up There

Georgia Ellery has had quite the busy year. Aside from fronting her other band Jockstrap, she also had a hand in Black Country, New Road’s sophomore (and rumored to be last) album, Ants From Up There. And on her main instrument no less, the violin. But it’s hard to pin down what’s really at the heart of this record. It flourishes with lush instrumentals that seem to drift and sway all around you until you feel like you’re in the middle of an instrumental cyclone. But that’s perhaps the best part of this record – you don’t mind getting lost in it. In fact, it implores you to get lost in it. Soon enough, woodwinds sound like brass, strings get mistaken for percussion, and keys take the place of vocal melodies. It’s a very complex, post-rock record: you can practically feel how much time was spent on it in the intricacies of its layers. But the best way to listen to it? Pick a song from random, loop the album, and just let everything wash over you.

8. HORSEGIRL – Versions of Modern Performance

Chicago’s Horsegirl made an impressive run up to their debut album, Versions of Modern Performance, via a good amount of international airplay. Having established a growing audience overseas, one could easily mistake them as British (even we could’ve sworn they were British). Low-end, clean electric guitars, lyrics that seem far more mature than they could reach, it’s like something straight out of Interpol. Chicago never really got their “post-punk” band in the early 2000s, no band that truly rang with the heart of the city. But that changed with this record, although 20 years after the phenomenon. They sing of young romance, quarter-life existential dread, making a resonance with a city attachment that hasn’t been felt since Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. And for the first time in a long time, the streets of Chicago felt romantic again.

7. STEVE LACY – Gemini Rights

Lacy has made quite the trajectory over the last ten years since his time in The Internet, going from working with Vampire Weekend and Kali Uchis to his now seminal three album run. But Gemini Rights shows more of a maturity while still keeping a foot in his youthful radiance. There’s not a single minute on Gemini Rights that doesn’t allude to fate. Do you ever wonder what it takes, all the little moments that have to happen at exactly the right time, for two people to fall in love? The mission makes it feel nearly impossible, and Gemini Rights paints this phenomenon on a celestial backdrop. It really does feel like outer beings are in command of us outside of our control. Why do the circumstances have to happen in such way? It feels as if we have to relinquish our fate to something of a higher power. But when it does, it really feels as if stars are aligning (“But I could be your girlfriend/’Till retrograde is done.”) But Gemini Rights restores our faith in self-trust. No one’s going to tell us everything will turn out just as we planned, but we just have to trust ourselves that it’ll all turn out alright. Because it always does.

6. HAAi – Baby, We’re Ascending

Australia’s HAAi quickly came up in the electronic dance scene this year, not only because of her collaboration with Jon Hopkins, but due to her unique blend of eclectic electronic music. Drum ‘n Bass, jungle house, and UK garage all surface on this record, amongst others, lending to a seamless sonic journey through a record that doesn’t quite end where it begins, a natural flow of what feels like bouncing around a multi-room club like London’s Printworks or Manchester’s Warehouse Project. But she finds the elements of each genre that complement each other. It’s an education through the history of electronic music in what feels like a brisk 60 minutes, and we should all be signing up for the course.

5. JOCKSTRAP – I Love You Jennifer B.

As the linear expanse of original music production continues, as we embrace new technologies, new techniques to express ourselves, we begin to leave behind new methods as well. Then, this pool of old tech will eventually come back into fashion. What begins to happen, is that we start to contextualize it: not see it as “old” or “new,” but instead see them as tool sets, different muscles to lean on, and use the “old” as an instrument itself.

I don’t think Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye knew what they were cooking up when they started jamming at London’s Guildhall School of Music. Ellery, a violin player, and Skye, a synth geek, were only using the tools they had available to them, but stood far away enough from the source material to arrange their placements where they saw fit. I Love You Jennifer B. has these, too. With an influence from Tori Amos and Joni Mitchell just as much as Aphex Twin or Squarepusher, the album takes elements of these varying sources and arranges them to live together peacefully. Theoretical musicians will be studying this album for years to come, which already feels like an ancient relic.

For an album that sounds so much like the future, it maintains a foothold in the traditional. Ellery’s lyrics elevate these stylistic grooves to actual formulaic songs, baring such elements that one can dare call them a singer/songwriter’s. But it’s not. This is electronic music used emotionally; the last brace of human touch before surrendering to an electronic world.

4. ROSALíA – Motomami

In all its glitch-poppiness, Motomami works best when you think of it in its different modes of apparition. In its chopped-and-screwed state, it feels like there could be many versions of each song on the album. Just like how one could argue the best version of a movie is all the dailies strung together, one could argue the same with this record with its varied takes in full strung together. But its choppiness is where it finds its rhythm. I honestly could not tell you what she’s singing or spitting about, but her aggressive delivery lets me know that it’s coming from a place. But within it, she paints a disjointed portrait of herself, asking us to put the pieces together. Motomami feels like such a futuristic modern art piece that some people won’t be able to relate to or interpret it (even for us it had to be an acquired taste). Some will be frustrated with it, or perhaps, she’s just building the foundation for something new.

3. ALVVAYS – Blue Rev

This album conjures up many images: the dissolve of a relationship, the smell of your first car, wind in your hair, the last summer before college. Alvvays has been on a steady rise the past eight years making their way around the college radio circuit early on, but nothing could have foreshadowed the sonic depth they would arrive at on Blue Rev. Its sound harks back to how a good an alt-rock band sounded like in the 90s – lots of guitars, lots of distortion, an analog shimmer, mixed in a way that doesn’t sound like mud nor does it sound like it can be achieved in any other fashion. Like the colored layers of technicolor film, the chemical reactions seep into each other to create a Kodachrome look for the ears: pastel, mosaic, light-trails across a screen that fade all too quickly but last long enough so we can cherish them, creating one of the best rock records of 2022.

2. WET LEG – Wet Leg

Wet Leg’s Wet Leg feels like a fever dream, a desperate longing to be somebody else: the perfectly flawed, unapologetic version of oneself. Hailing from the Isle of Wight, Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers took the rock scene by storm in 2022, easily becoming the most consistently talked about band ever since their first singles released earlier this year. Cheeky mumbled verses, epic guitar licks, undeniable charm, and British humor all fed into their rise regardless if you could relate to them or not (we didn’t even know what a chaise longue was until this year). But everyone should be able to relate to them, because Wet Leg is about becoming the best version of yourself you always wanted to be. And aside from all that, it’s just a phenomenal rock record from start to finish, each song better than the last.

1. BEYONCE – Renaissance

We could list the contributions made by the many collaborators on this album: Honey Dijon, Mike Dean, Giorgio Moroder… we could go into the specifics of the technological aspects or the complexities of these tunes. But more importantly, this album is a history lesson in dance music, a retribution in taking back your happiness and finding a way to fall back in love with yourself, time and time again. The weekend this record came out, one could hear it on just about every dance floor in every club in their city, a calling card to rally the troops and go into a zone where all time stops, biology ceases to age our bodies, no matter how brief (“Ass getting bigger…”). That’s what a dance floor can do to you, and if this record is playing – a seamless, constant 120 BPM – it feels as if everyone is the same age, all of our bodies in a race against time. This record doesn’t just use dance music as a genre, but as a vessel, an outlet to transport one’s mind into an ageless body, that thing we find ourselves to be so uncomfortable in most of the time that we forget how to love our flaws. It’s an opportunity to lose all inhibitions. We spend so much time trying to find a fictionalized version of ourselves within us, that we forget the key to finding our real selves has been on the dance floor all along. Go find it.

Categories
Film

The 10 Best Movies of 2022

Avatar 2 grosses a billion dollars in two weeks, Top Gun: Maverick resuscitates the summer blockbuster, Glass Onion spends a week in theaters after Netflix spent nearly half a billion dollars on it, the Will Smith Oscar slap heard around the world, and, maybe, the first best film of this new decade. A lot happened in the world of film this year. Were we disappointed in how Black Adam took up 90% of screens across the country? Of course. But were we disappointed in how Twitter gaslit Sony into re-releasing Morbius theatrically only to lose more money? Not one bit. 2022 has been another indication of a shifting of the tide, a balancing act where headlines boasted “10.8 billion hours streamed” instead of “33 million dollars in its first week.” It’s nothing new, but we think that these outlets of exhibition are becoming less of a “do or die” situation, and more of a marketing tool that plays into the theatrical experience as a whole. Maybe in 2023, they’ll be two sides of a coin that can’t exist without the other. Here are the 10 best movies of 2022.

10. BONES AND ALL

Premiering two films this year as the man who never seems to stop working, Luca Guadagnino reunites with Timothée Chalamet for a different kind of romance film. Reminiscent of Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Bones and All lends itself best in its outlaw-ish-ness, starring up and comer ­­­Taylor Russell as a drifter with innate cannibalistic tendencies who’s constantly on the run, forced to repress her true desires. Featuring probably Nine Inch Nails’ most romantic, gentle score yet, Bones and All blurs the line between being madly in love and having no choice but to squander, which, at its heart, is about stripping away identity; tearing away all the politics on the surface to fall in love with someone’s dirtiest flaws, bones and all.

9. EO

How does one make a movie about a donkey? And how does one make it interesting? EO defies all expectations. One would think it’d be a sweet animal film, but the result is a surrealist exploration of how the animal kingdom is truly at the mercy of humans. Following a stray donkey named Eo as it makes its way across Europe, the film’s POV constantly switches. From Eo’s perspective, we see the dangers of the world seeped in red in a very impressionistic way: drone shots, strobe lights, lasers, heavy synth score, all told in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. It’s a story of an animal seeking agency, while seeing the beauty and evils of a world for the first time, urging the viewer to rethink about how humans interact with other ecosystems.

8. BANSHEES OF INISHERIN

Is there any director that’s more of an “actor’s” director (besides PTA, of course) than Martin McDonagh? For twenty years now he’s been writing esoteric, imperfect, genuine characters for the actor, trusting them enough to direct themselves from the page. Banshees is perhaps the pinnacle of his approach. Centered around a stagnant farmer, Padraic (Colin Farrell), who is content with his abysmal life and feels no need to pursue higher reaches, the film follows him as one by one, the ones closest to him chose to leave his life. The dry-wit and dark humor shine through here more so than his previous films, but the main theme here is loneliness. Plotted against a backdrop of a very small island, every character seems to be in the background of every scene, proving that every human needs another human to survive, to discover themselves vis-a-vie one another.

7. DECISION TO LEAVE

Part police procedural, part romance, Decision to Leave brings Park Chan Wook back to the international awards stage. When a police detective becomes romantically involved with a murder suspect who has a history of leaving her partners in the most auspicious ways, he soon becomes dead-set on making sure this murder is never solved. The film begs the question: how are we to maintain a relationship if what binds us together only lies in the unresolved past, constantly tethered to us? And what happens to us when that tie is mended? As futile as his goals are, the film builds to a deeply ironic, yet deeply tragic climax that only the keenest of audiences will be able to foreshadow, which only grows with more fascination as it sits with you.

6. THE FABELMANS

Of course it wouldn’t be award season without some sort of Spielberg effort in contest. It’s hard not to like The Fabelmans, Spielberg’s semi-autographical account of how he fell in love with filmmaking. Full of awards-bait and wit, The Fabelmans runs a tad 15 minutes longer than need be, but damn is it charming. Showcasing career defining performances from Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, and even David Lynch, the film dives into adolescent doubt, and highlights how one constantly reinvents their relationship with their craft.

5. TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

With probably the funniest set pieces this year, Triangle of Sadness sets up Ruben Östlund as perhaps the best satirist filmmaker working today, and boy does he love to see the proletariat suffer. Östlund’s humor here is a little more surface level than that of his previous work, more accessible. His critique on modern economic inequality makes for some of the most comedic sequences this year, as Triangle follows the upper echelon of the rich and wealthy on an exclusive yacht cruise whose crew is so dedicated, they’ll go to great lengths to satisfy their guests needs. What follows is perhaps the best compilation of comedic moments all wrapped into one film. Some will be frustrated by watching it, but if you’re a fan of the most awkward and uncomfortable scenes in film, you will LOVE this movie.

4. TOP GUN: MAVERICK

Having been indefinitely pushed due to the pandemic, Top Gun: Maverick finally made its way to theaters this year. While giving both domestic and worldwide box offices a jolt of resuscitation, it also brought back a moment of reminiscence with a big-budget summer blockbuster, the kind we haven’t seen since 2019. But aside from being a popcorn, eye-candy flick, it’s also a masterclass in writing for the screen. All one needs to watch is the opening sequence to know that we’re dealing with a flawed, but ambitious character. Gone are the days when you can still discern some glimmer of a human story within an inflated, overwhelming budget. But Top Gun: Maverick reintroduced the idea that a big-budget blockbuster can still be a critical darling as well.

3. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

If there was a common, overlying theme in film and TV this year, besides donkeys, it would be the multi-verse. Touched upon by Dr. Strange and Russian Doll, Everything Everywhere All At Once used the thematic element to touch upon people’s hearts. Whereas other films used it as a cinematic thrill and gimmick, EEAAO used it as a way to discover the best version of yourself. What first begins as a film about intolerance in our lead of Michelle Yeoh, the film uses the gimmick as a vessel to explore what your life could become, or could’ve been like. Coming off 2016’s Swiss Army Man, the DANIELS became the directors that shot straight to our hearts with a most endearing message, reminding us what we’re capable of when we keep an open mind.

2. AFTERSUN

It’s okay, you can cry. It’s okay to cry. But don’t let me be the one to convince you. Let this film do it instead. I won’t bore you with details; trying to tell you what this movie’s “about” will just sound like homework. I can tell you this though: this movie will mean a lot of things to many people. Just go on the film’s letterboxd page and scroll through the disparate reviews varying from a half star rating to “masterpiece.” I can’t exactly tell you what it means to me either, but I think I can approximate to you how I felt.

We will never truly know our parents. We will never be able to fully comprehend the fact that they were just like us at one time: an autonomous body free to do whatever they pleased, a human being with agency, far from the responsibility of parenthood, still discovering who they’re meant to be before caring for new life became their priority. They had dreams too once: goals, ambitions, heroes, struggles, other lovers…

So go ahead, it’s okay to cry. Because life is like sitting backwards on a moving train: you can only see what’s behind you, you can only see the past. I’m not going to be the one to tell you to see this movie, because frankly, I don’t care if you choose not to see it. This is a film that exists outside of itself. You’ll keep waiting for the “ta-da” moment, but it will never come, because the film is about the “thing” that already happened, a place you get stuck in, a pain you can’t erase.

So, what did this movie make me feel? The desire to become a better person in THIS present time, the time happening right before me. So, call your mothers, call your fathers, call your sisters, and reconcile while you can, because soon they’ll only be memories you sift through, and you’ll be left wondering why you never got to know them better.

1. TÁR

Imagine having directed only three films your entire career and all of them were A+ films – not only incredibly watchable, but films that leave you baffled by how they just tower over you, how they paint their protagonists as larger than life. In the ballsiest performance of the year, Cate Blanchett plays Lydia Tár, a well-esteemed classical composer who’s performed and achieved just about anything a composer could do in the classical world, who’s thrusted into a world of accusations by one of her former pupils. After having gone into the movie convinced Tár was a real person (thanks Twitter), this writer even left the theater still fully convinced Tár was a real person. It wasn’t until a week later when we discovered she actually isn’t. But y’know what? The film’s better that way. One could argue that Tár is the best biopic of the year, because it feels like and was shot like a biopic. Even the film’s first scene feels like an organic conversational interview that just seems so real, you believe Blanchett’s playing a real person. And that’s what the best kind of cinema can do: paint a vivid portrait of a deeply flawed, real character, and surround them with a cast in hopes they’ll be pushed to becoming a better person.

One could argue that this is a film centered around “cancel culture,” but that’s merely the venue the film takes place in. In this writer’s humble opinion, this film is about the past. And we’re not talking about history or historical events, but it’s about past-ness, the tense of being past, and it appears in the various interpretations of this film: references to the role Judaism and antisemitism played in the history of music, Gustav Mahler’s troubled history of manipulative behavior, the denazification of the classical music world, and above all, the buried history of the film’s lead. We fear the worst when we believe someone has a preconceived notion about us, convinced they see through our façade that we’ve worked so hard to build and perfect. A film disguised as a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, Tár is a film of bottomless intrigue. We’ve seen reviews that have dubbed it “the first ‘best’ film of this new decade,” but only time will be able to make that judgement. But here’s one takeaway that we’re dead-set on: like Darth Vader, like Daniel Plainview, like Hannibal Lecter, the character of Lydia Tár will forever haunt the history of cinema.

Categories
Music

How Nostalgia Filled the Music Festival Void in 2022

What’s the easiest way to make a buck? To cash in on people’s nostalgia of course. The live music industry was decimated from 2020 to 2021. So much so that, when festivals made their return this year, if it seemed like prices were multiplied 1.5 times, well, it’s because they were. The live music industry took such a hit in the last two years that it’s trying to quickly re-find its footing and push its finances back into the green. But doing so won’t come with originality or innovation.

The “nostalgia” festival circuit is nothing new to the industry, or at least not to Southern California, with a sleuth of revival festivals popping up just before the pandemic (see Cruel World Festival or Just Like Heaven). And given LA’s dearth of alternative music festivals, the city proved to be fertile breeding ground for Goldenvoice and Live Nation to recoup their finances from the past two years.

The first round of nostalgia festivals seemed to be spearheaded by This Ain’t No Picnic, Goldenvoice’s new alternative crown jewel based in Pasadena. With a lack of indie/alternative festivals in Southern California, after the fall of FYF Fest, a void for perhaps LA’s biggest genre scene was gapingly left open, leaving Goldenvoice (the predominant presence in SoCal, and owners of FYF) to craft a weekend festival that would perfectly fit the previous FYF audience. With a lineup featuring headliners Strokes and LCD Soundsystem, and a reunion from Le Tigre, they quickly picked up where they left off by curating a festival with the cornerstones of the genre.  

But perhaps the biggest and most recent nostalgia fest to take place isn’t in Southern California, but Las Vegas. The brand new When You Were Young festival boasted a lineup of bands that hit their peak in 2007: My Chemical Romance, All American Rejects, Paramore, Avril Lavigne, and AFI too name a few. What at first looked like a deliberate cash grab, turned out to be not just that, but a very lucrative cash grab. After selling out in mere hours, a second day was soon added. Then after that sold out, a THIRD day with the same lineup was added. It became so popular that, even before the first installment took place, When You Were Young already announced NEXT year’s lineup and dates (goes to show you how readily available all these acts were).

Other fests have basked in the nostalgia haze as well. Some examples include Smokin Grooves in downtown Los Angeles for classic soul/RnB, Palomino festival in Pasadena for old school country, and of course the hip-hop throwback showcase Rock the Bells. But it’s not just festivals, entire tours with nostalgia acts have been in the works. Summerland Festival reps itself as the “90s alternative rock tour,” featuring bands like Everclear (who founded the festival), Marcy Playground, and other semi-notable acts from the 90s alt-rock, one-hit-wonder craze.

When You Were Young – Courtesy of Jenn Five/Kerrang

The success of these festivals and tours goes to prove that, just like how there’s a sub-reddit for everything, there’s also a festival for every genre of music, and then sub-genre. Live entertainment groups are now cashing in on already built-in audiences: why take the risk in creating something new and fresh when you know what will already sell and be successful?

But it also prompts the question, do people care if they come off as old? Out of place? Outdated? How far can age actually go? How far back into the past does one have to reach before they’re treading into an audience that won’t even show up and represent? Identity crises are nothing new, but don’t even those nostalgic fests and audiences have an expiration date? One can keep bringing back what used to be in fashion, but how much of the old is too much?

And it goes without saying, that even just relying on nostalgia acts isn’t a guarantee for success. 2022 has had a sleuth of mishaps and unfortunate events as festivals and tours tried to make their comeback this year. Live events are not just raising ticket prices, but are cutting corners in hiring inexperienced staff for cheap, resulting in logistical nightmares in running a festival: long queues, angry festival goers, and a desperate need for strong attendance have tainted many events. Spain’s Primavera is one of the main examples that succumbed to these mishaps this year. In bringing back the festival after a three year hiatus, Primavera not only hiked up ticket prices, but also oversold tickets in an attempt to make their money back from the previous two years, resulting in extreme bottlenecking with large crowds in tight spaces with low-paying staff.

But event logistics aren’t the only things making tours and festivals unreliable this year. In addition to artists still contracting COVID, one just simply can’t predict the laws of nature. Las Vegas’ When You Were Young festival had to cancel its first day due to extreme winds, while the long-awaited Rage Against the Machine reunion had to be cancelled after vocalist Zach de la Rocha tore his ACL just a few shows in.

Needless to say, this business model of banking on nostalgia is only a phase. People will only be able to take so much of the past that it’ll eventually dilute itself, until the point where audiences need something fresh. Festivals are now in a tug of war with themselves between banking on what is reliably successful, and what is new, cool and innovative. It’s one thing to be “cool,” but to be cool AND successful? That’s nearly impossible.

But are nostalgia festivals here to stay? As long as audiences like to remain in their comfort zones, absolutely. Nostalgia will always have an audience. But will that take away incentive to fund new, innovative festivals for growing audiences? Absolutely not. Perhaps the next generation of festival goers will be ones that actively challenge themselves, that go against habits like leaning on nostalgia as a crutch, and learn to embrace the constantly changing live music landscape.

Featured photos courtesy of Jenn Five/Kerrang

Categories
Film

Cinema in 2022 was the Year of the Donkey

Note: This article contains donkey spoilers

In 2015, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published an article on why humans are fascinated with what they called “animal films,” or, films focusing on animals as their subjects rather than humans. It came to the conclusion that the phenomenon was attributed to the fact that, for the first time in history, a species (humans) has the ability to not only study and reflect on themselves, but to also document and research other species.

The cinema of 2022 seems to have brought that phenomenon to a heightened experience, albeit centered around an animal not so commonly focused on or documented. The donkey (Equus Asinus) seems to have taken the animal spotlight this year, particularly in films pushing for awards attention. Films such as Triangle of Sadness, Banshees of Inisherin, and EO have not just casted donkeys into the limelight, but gave them actual narrative-centric, stakes-heavy roles, even going so far as to make them protagonists in their own right.

But why now? Why this particular animal in this particular year? Well, the first thing one thinks of when they hear the word “donkey” is humor. On top of that, what donkeys also offer, or at least in these particular films, is companionship, thus making the animal great for sidekick roles that add a levity of humor (Shrek, etc.) 2021 and 2022 have had their fair share of ironic humor and wit. Comedy has become so “real” now, that what we used to joke about has now become commonplace. That’s not to say that the humor has gone, but our jokes have now become more of a reality than we previously thought.

With that in mind, no other animal embodies the levity of ironic humor quite like the donkey. Think of a donkey’s purpose: it’s indifferent, lazy, and doesn’t have much of a role on a farm aside from scaring off predators and pulling carts. Its only thought is to survive to the next day. Throughout pop culture, even stretching as far back as fairy tales and fables, the donkey has been the laughing stock of farm animals, which sadly gives it its gloomy reputation (Town Musicians of Bremen, Winnie the Pooh). But it also makes the perfect representation of ironic humor in 2022.

Donkey
Banshees of Inisherin

A donkey doesn’t make an appearance in Triangle of Sadness until about two-thirds through the film. But when it does, it’s used as a plot device in perhaps the most ruthless casting of the animal this year. When the upper echelon yacht cruise full of the rich and wealthy is shipwrecked, the affluent passengers are placed on an equal playing field with the yacht’s crew when they don’t know how to care for themselves, flipping the film’s theme of inequality upside down. Starving for food, they come across a donkey, and, well, you could guess what happens next….

The animal is definitely used in a darker comedic sense here, but why not any other animal? Would it have had the same effect had another animal been spared? The donkey tends to be the lowest on the totem pole. They’re a species that always gets the short end of the stick. And when it’s slaughtered, it’s merely a representation of irony dying, the cascading caste system that has descended upon the yacht-goers after being marooned.

But pity humor isn’t the only trait the donkey inherited this year in cinema. The animal also took on the role of companionship, with Banshees of Inisherin going so far as to cast the animal in a supporting role as Pádraic Súilleabháin’s (Colin Farrell’s) sidekick. As everyone starts to leave Padraic’s life due to his toxic trait of being stagnant with his future he begins to become more and more attached to his donkey, the only familiar face that stays behind. Where Triangle sees the donkey as pity-less humor, Banshees breathes life into the animal by casting it through the lens of loyalty. However, as Padraic pushes the ones closest to him away, he also puts the last shred of his donkey’s loyalty at risk, which ultimately dies in the end as well.

But aside from Donkeys perishing in the spotlight, the year in film has also casted them as main characters. The Jury Prize winner at this year’s Cannes film festival, EO follows a donkey that goes astray as it makes its way across Europe. It starts at a circus, where we see our donkey set free by an animal rights group and drift from one owner to the next, oblivious as to what’s carrying him each way. Along the way, he influences the outcome of a soccer match, becomes the mascot for a small town’s celebration, and is even brought into the company of Isabelle Huppert. But the most important element of this film is the stark contrast to our other two previous examples. What this film does that the other two don’t is give our donkey agency, an attempt to overcome the limitations placed upon itself, much like the preconceived notions humans already have when they hear the word “donkey.” Whereas Triangle and Banshees showed the fate of a donkey through a human lens, EO takes the POV of the animal, with the result being a surrealist, stylistic vision showing ultimately how humans interact with the animal kingdom.

Donkeys don’t tend to hold a soft spot for many people. Humans have put them to many uses over the years, including entertainment purposes. And these films go to show that they truly are at the mercy of the humans around them. People tend to argue what the most dangerous animal in the world is, when they’re blind to the fact that humans who are the most dangerous. To return to the article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in our fascination with animal films, in our ability to record and document other creatures, we in turn often forget the implications and consequences of such actions, unaware of the interruptions we cause in their ecosystems. The cinema of 2022 seems to have flipped this perspective through empathy. In showing these consequences from the POV of the animal kingdom, the year gave us a necessary view of how, in studying other species, we also inadvertently record their demise.