The Unloved, Part 96: Hail Mary

The Unloved is eight years old today. I always hoped, back when, to reach such a milestone, but to be alive for it is something else entirely because this has grown from a plea to a forgotten wishlist. The things I want most from contemporary cinema, the fearlessness of the films I’ve championed here, have been supplanted by a calculating too-muchness I cannot stomach. 

The Unloved is eight years old today. I was 22 when first this idea found purchase. When I had my curiosity validated by my heroes. When I got to start unloading a short lifetime of grievances on an unsuspecting public. When people I respected started to tell me I was on the right track. That I wasn’t crazy. 

The Unloved is eight years old today and I wanted to go back in time. To re-discover a person I’ve loved for longer than I know how to communicate, who gave us the cinema as we know it now, to remember a time I was not alive for, in which a work of art could surprise you so much it might shake your faith. It might change the world.

The Unloved is eight years old today and I may not have changed anything, may not have done more than changed the minds of a handful of skeptics looking for an excuse to revisit some oddball might-have-been, but I do this not because I know my own value as an artist, a critic, but because I believe still in this artform. I believe that we may change things in our own small fashion. I believe in art still, the way Godard believed in it in 1985 when he tipped the earth ever so slightly off its axis. We can still do so if we try. I want us to try. 

The Unloved is eight years old today and I want to thank you all for reading and watching and knowing it exists. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You make this worth doing. The hours I’ve spent hearing my own voice spat back at me, the hours of keys on a laptop clicking, the things you can’t make exciting or poetic, the minutiae of trying. It’s worth it, of course it is, because I do believe that this is what I’m meant to be doing, but that means nothing without you. Thank you. 

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