#vinson cunningham

[gothicseverance]

I think a lot of [Severance] has to do with the life unlived. What would happen if I fell in love with a different person? What would happen if I didn’t have this condition? All of these different questions start to get explored and it quickly becomes difficult to reconcile who has the rights to experience and to call themselves a self.

—Critics at Large

Gif by @emziess 🖤

[metaphrasis]

[A critic is] someone who […] loves experience. I think it’s a disposition that comes even before attention to art. It is someone that looks at any phenomena and wants to extend their life by paying attention—by analysis—[by wanting] to juice this aspect of experience for all that it’s worth. Someone who is, in one way, battling death by saying I can extend this moment, and this one, and this one by way of attention. And so the best way to practice that disposition happens to be on art and therefore, [the critic] uses their taste, uses their standards, uses their whole apparatus of judgement, really, to express a kind of joy of being alive at the same time as the thing.

— Vinson Cunningham's response to the question, "What is the work of a critic today?" on The New Yorker's Critics at Large podcast

[theblackestofsuns]

R. Fresson’s illustration for Vinson Cunningham’s theatre essay on Jean Toomer in this week’s New Yorker magazine.

[gothicseverance]

One thing that you should see on Severance is this interesting question, to me, a legitimately interesting question, post traumatic question of, am I allowed to be happy again? Like if my innie self experiences happiness, will the outie, can the outie self cede to that? Can that be permissible? That's an interesting philosophical question that I do think the show is handling and maybe shows a way for us to start to engage with the trauma question in such a way that isn't just, you know, X happened, therefore I do Y.

—Critics at Large

Gif by @emziess 🖤

[gothicseverance]

There is a kind of double that is called the Gothic Double. And it has to do with exactly that period in the 19th century when this kind of disturbing doppelgänger starts to appear in fiction. And one reason for it, which is really interesting, is because of the expansion of British Empire. I mean, I'm talking mainly about English literature, which is what I know best here. You start to get all kinds of ethnic myths and ideas that creep into England and into the literature. You get, you know, the Celtic Fetch, which is this uncanny double, the German Doppelgänger, the English have their Wraith, and all of these figures are terrifying. And so what you start to get in the literature of this time is horror moving from a location, moving from a place like the haunted house —which is a kind of double itself of the home — to the self.

—Critics at Large

[gothicseverance]

Severance is doing all kinds of stuff with [Freudian theory]. Elevator? I think the elevator is all about suppression and repression, down down down, getting rid of all that other stuff, and then the little bits of the outies that start to come out, those are like little signs of neurosis, that are sending up flares from the interior, and the whole project of Severance is, much like psychoanalysis, to try to go back into what has been repressed and reconcile it with your social world outside.

—Critics at Large

[gothicseverance]

Trauma has been seen in the past, and in the recent past, as the source of doubling. There was a huge trend in psychology in the 1980s where suddenly left and right people were getting diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, otherwise known as multiple personality disorder. This was a very rare condition that suddenly shot up in diagnostic popularity in the 1980s, widely believed at the time to result from suppressed memories of child molestation that you had to kind of create, branch off another version of yourself who could cope in real life because the terrified, molested child self had to kind of be repressed and hide.

—Critics at Large

[theblackestofsuns]

Mikkel Sommer’s illustration for Vinson Cunningham’s review of Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal in this week’s New Yorker magazine.