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Nicholas Rombes here. Literature. Film. Archives. Liminal spaces.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 6
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- Sep 16, 2026
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- Jul 15, 2026
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Laura Dern’s inland empire (opens the original)
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Laura Dern’s serial appearances as “a woman in trouble” in David Lynch’s work seem to grow richer as time passes. Dern first appeared in Blue Velvet (1986), then Wild at Heart (1990) continuing through Lynch’s last film Inland Empire (2006) and his final television work Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). In many of these roles Dern is either witness to or involved with characters who deliberately take on roles: auditions, rehearsals, conversations about pretending to be
Underground Desires (opens the original)
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Probably like a lot of people, I loved underground cinema before I knew there was a name for it. My first encounter with the term was in a book that only used the word once, and not in relation to a certain category of films but a specific film: Underground U.S.A. (1980) directed by Eric Mitchell, who had acted in several Amos Poe films, most notably The Foreigner (1978). The book was Midnight Movies (1983) by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, whose sharp, knife-like prose and generous, half-
Fernanda Melchor and the Lost Art of Evil, Revisited (opens the original)
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Last year at around this time my essay “The Lost Art of Evil: On Fernanda Melchor’s Circuits of Transgression” appeared at The Metropolitan Review. The basic take was that well-meaning critical appraisals and reviews of Melchor’s work were so eager to position it as a critique of (fill in the blank: neoliberalism, toxic masculinity, etc.) at the expense of the sheer aesthetic power of her work. <a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CN
Julia Kristeva's Powers (opens the original)
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In the winter of 1989 I had finished my first semester of graduate studies in English at Penn State University and received, in my campus mailbox, comments from my professors for the “Introduction to Graduate Studies” class all new grad students had to take. I remember I earned a “B,” which is not too good. Akin to a “C” in undergrad classes, I was told. The typed comments about my performance were kind, but blunt. In essence, it said: Nicholas seems like a nice person and a tenacious worker, bu
El Proyecto Terciopelo Azul in Mar del Plata, Argentina (opens the original)
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Back in 2012 I had the privilege of attending the 27th Mar del Plata International Film Festival, where my year-long experiment writing about Blue Velvet at Filmmaker Magazine was translated into Spanish, by Nicolás Britos, as El Proyecto Terciopelo Azul, and served as one of the festival books.<a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href="https://substackcdn
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