The more I read this textbook, the more overwhelming filmmaking appears. Just like with book publishing, for some reason, I never expected there to be an almost infinite amount of relevant details that have to be addressed in both fields during production for a project to actually come together.

I appreciate how chapters 6, 7, and 8 are put in sequence to highlight the development of an academic debate. It really helps in forming a perspective on the topic.

Concepts I learnt or updated my knowledge on in this reading session: • in medias res • exposition • anti-climax (everyone around me keeps using it as a way to say that the movie ended in an emotionally unfulfilling way, but they never connect it to the ‘why’ of this emotional dissatisfaction. Now I know that it is intrinsically linked with the fact that a movie ends without resolving the developmental sequence and thus leaving the viewer to guess what happened next. A movie that comes to mind is Saulė Bliuvaitė’s “Akiplėša” (“Toxic”). Absolutely nothing is resolved at the end, despite the movie building the relationships between characters or developing the protagonist’s career at the modeling agency for the entire duration.)

I found this article to be slightly disjointed and all over the place, but there is no denying there were some interesting points. I particularly liked the introduction of the ‘fourth look.’ Who knows, I might find a way to incorporate it into my analysis in the future.

I’m going through this book like a wildfire through a forest, but I am not sure how much of the social commentary is actually decipherable to me. I feel like I’m getting the most important stuff about violence against minorities, but if there’s anything concrete in Sterling’s grotesque hallucinations—it’s definitely beyond my comprehension.

Nevertheless, something clicked about the meta structure of this book in chapter 10 for me. Or at least I think it did. It feels like “Cataclysmic Foibles” is a platform, a theatrical space to talk about and comment on violence against minorities. If I understand it correctly, each new edition of CF is a theatrical, highly-symbolized take on a new tragedy that happened to racial, sexual, or other communities that are discriminated against. Accordingly, the book itself, then, is a mix of factual violence and its theatrical depiction in CF. I assume this is why it seems so nonsensical and disorienting to read at first. It’s simply hard to grasp which parts of the text recount “real life” experiences, which of them are from the plot of the plays, and which ones are Sterling and Chachki acting in said plays. It’s definitely the kind of book you need to read more than once to be able to deconstruct what’s going on.