Hi,
Welcome back to Continue Watching! We’re writing this while recovering from All Too Well: The Short Film, which was released as part of Red (Taylor Swift’s Version), though emotionally we might never move on from it. In fact, it has left Kashika so shook that she has written this issue’s essay about it, when on Saturday she told Shahana that she’d not be able to write one at all.
Speaking of unexpectedly feeling too much in the year of our lord 2021, Shahana watched Sex, Love & goop and lived to call it “moving.” She is as surprised as Kashika, even more so that she wrote over 1,500 words praising a show created by a company that sold something called Moon Dust.
As you can tell, this issue is heavy on feeling too much, which is never a bad thing even if it is an inconvenient thing, so just to pace you, we’ll give you some TV news first.
And Just Like That has a teaser and a release date! December 9 couldn’t come soon enough because it’s been a while since all of us hate-watched something together.
Part two of the Gossip Girl reboot, a show we had blissfully forgotten about, is out on the 25th. We don’t know if we can take any more Tavi this year, you guys!
If you’re into epic high fantasy shows (bless you), then we have good news for you.
We cannot deal with how old the Stranger Things kids have gotten!
Season 15 of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia is out on December 1. Only Kashika is shocked by this because she doesn’t like asshole leads.
And now, here’s what keeping us busy these days:
CURRENTLY WATCHING
Kashika
Parks and Recreation: A rewatch because my brother is watching it for the first time. We’re on season two and while I remember season one being super painful to get through, I didn’t remember the show being so, so problematic in parts. It’s still super funny, but the fatphobia, racist jokes, and general unpleasantness in some of the scenes is a shock. Sometimes I worry that we’ve all given Mike Schur too much credit and we’re all collectively in denial about it. Also, I cannot look at Andy the same way after Chris Pratt has become who he is today (I hope everyone’s seen that cringe!max post he wrote about his fiancée/wife). Streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Confession - I'm not watching anything else right now because of, you know, life.
—
Shahana
Little Things: Most of my friends watched a few episodes and dropped it, and while I agree that Little Things says absolutely nothing and was about a boring couple doing boring things every day, there was something about watching Kavya and Dhruv go about their lives that I found charming. Maybe it was the actors’ natural chemistry, the way they talked, the things they did, that all felt relatable somehow. The newest season, however, seems to have lost whatever intangible thing made it good. The actors feel like they just met (and I chalked it up to being intentional, because the couple is meeting after 14 months apart, but I’m midway through the season and they’re still uneasy), they fight constantly but resolve nothing, and they’re trying so hard to say Important Things™. This is the first time since I watched Behind Her Eyes (a truly bonkers show, fyi, with a plot twist you will NEVER see coming) that I considered watching something at 1.25 or 2x speed. Streaming on Netflix.
Mr. Sunshine: I watched The Handmaiden a few years ago and have been in love with Kim Tae-ri since. Which is great, because Mr. Sunshine is a Korean period show, which I love, starring Kim Tae-ri, who I love. Mr. Sunshine is set in the 1900s and focuses on Eugene Choi (Lee Byung-hun), born a slave in Joseon who escaped to the US in his childhood and became a Marine Corps officer. He returns to Joseon for a mission, where he meets and falls in love with Go Ae-shin (Kim Tae-ri), who is part of a (secret?) civilian militia. Obviously, there are obstacles in their love story, namely class and an existing fiancé. At the same time, Japan is trying to colonise Korea and Eugene gets caught up in the fight for independence. I’m only a couple of episodes in and the show looks and sounds great as of now, but there are 24 episodes and a lot of historical detail I need to keep looking up, so this will take a while to get through. Excitement is me! Streaming on Netflix.
We hope you have a great Monday. Remember, there’s a long weekend coming up so you can catch up on all your shows/sleep then. Hang in there!
Continue Watching (and reading!),
Kashika and Shahana
I Do Not Have The Time For This But I’d Still Like To Say Four Things About All Too Well: The Short Film
By Kashika
1) How dare you, Taylor?
I am having an exceptionally busy and frantic weekend, and after trying to assuage my guilt for telling Shahana I will not be able to write an essay for this issue, I made the mistake of watching All Too Well: The Short Film. BIG MISTAKE because now I wanna die. No, really. I am absolutely wrecked after being forced to relive all my stupid, intense, dramatic, useless breakups in the span of 14 minutes. I am 31, just like Taylor and just like Dylan O’Brien who plays Jake Gyllenhaal (I know not technically but COME ON), but I was also once 19 and ‘in love’ like old Taylor and like Sadie in the short film, who was told by her boyfriend that he was not making her feel stupid, she was making herself feel stupid. As if that’s a real thing.
2) Thank you, Taylor.
Thank you for existing in my lifetime, thank you for being my age, thank you for being so intense about things that other people might have moved on from, and thank you for never shutting up about your exes because that is exactly what they deserve. Thank you for your genius, for your talent, for your red lipstick, for 1989. Thank you for always shitting on Justin Bieber because he broke up with your best friend. Thank you for casting a kid from Stranger Things in this short film and making her my God. Thank you for the line—And I was never good at telling jokes but the punch line goes/I'll get older but your lovers stay my age. Thank you for practically spitting out the line Not weeping in a party bathroom/Some actress asking me what happened/ you, that's what happened, you. And, finally, thank you for validating my theory that Jake Gyllenhaal is a piece of shit.
3) Only you get it, Taylor.
There’s one scene in the short film where Sadie and Dylan have a dinner party for his friends but he’s being weird and aloof with her so they have a fight about it while doing the dishes after everyone leaves. There’s a lot happening in this scene and there’s too much symbolism for me to grasp, but in the end, just as she starts crying after he’s hurt her, dismissed her and made her feel like she’s imagining things, he hugs her and says “I don’t want to fight”. He says I’m sorry a hundred times without stopping, a gesture I’d have found romantic at 20 but now I know that this is not an apology. This is how you shut up a “Mad Woman.” FUCK.
4) I’m sorry, Taylor.
I’m sorry for not being an All Too Well devotee before you released this short film. It is 100% my mistake and I totally deserve the 1000 depressing-ass emotions I’m feeling right now after listening to it properly for the 70th time in four hours. Look, 1989 will always be the album that connects me to you. Nothing will ever top that. But I should have paid attention to All Too Well and that’s on me. Now, of course, as you can see, I will never stop talking about it because, with this short film, you have taken my heart, squeezed out all the blood, ripped it into 13 pieces and handed it back to me. You know the worst part? I’m not even mad about it.
Shows mentioned:
All Too Well: The Short Film - YouTube ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Sex, Love, and goop Wants To Talk About and Fix Our Sex Lives—I Might Let Them
By Shahana
I’m going to start this essay with a disclaimer. When I pitched this essay for this issue, I was fully prepared to watch Sex, Love, and goop and get angry at or make fun of it. The show literally begins with Gwyneth Paltrow claiming she founded goop to “unearth cutting edge ideas that could really help optimize our lives.” This, in the past, has included vampire repellent, coffee enemas, silk toothbrushes, vaginal steamers, and a necklace named The Shift, a “simple, tech-free mindfulness tool” that you exhale into, meant to be a “subtle reminder to stay mindful even when you’re not using it.” Paltrow and a lot of other similar wellness-touting influencers have made a career and a lot of money by telling us that our lives are terrible and could be made better with a simple fix: spend copious amounts of money on products they sell. Paltrow has and continues to reinforce insecurities we’ve lived with forever, and then sells us the idea that the best version of ourselves is simply a goop product away, that we can all look and feel like Paltrow, if we just take the Paltrow-approved supplements, apply the Paltrow-approved serums, and try the Paltrow-approved diets and regimens.
While it’s one thing to sell someone candles that smell like vaginas or orgasms (whoever’s vagina smells of “citrusy bergamot, geranium, and cedar juxtaposed with Damask rose and ambrette seed,” let’s talk), it is quite another to venture into more serious territory. The trailer and the show summary suggested Sex, Love, and goop was aiming to try and fix serious relationship problems couples were going through, and those problems were about sex. This is the same goop which has been pulled up multiple times for making dubious claims about their products (goop was sued in 2018 for selling jade and rose quartz eggs that were meant to be inserted in vaginas, and were marketed as a way to “balance hormones, regulate menstrual cycles, and increase bladder control.”) The basic concept here was simple—the couples are paired with sex therapists who would help them fix whatever issues they were facing.
Midway through the first episode, I found myself realising this wasn’t what I had expected at all. There is a clear effort to keep the cast diverse in terms of age, race, and sexuality, and genders, and their problems are surprisingly relatable and banal. Married couple Damon and Erika are struggling with sexual incompatibility—he believes she’s sexually conservative and has no idea how to turn her on, she wants to “have an orgasm before a baby.” A couple in their 60s, Joie and Mike, are struggling with mismatched libido and ageing. Another married couple, Rama and Felicitas, need to change the dynamic in their relationship; Felicitas feels like Rama has become her third child and she doesn’t desire him anymore. Lesbian couple Camille and Shandra are dealing with past experiences with homophobia that colour their sex lives and body and personality issues that they feel affects their sex life from being better. These are very ordinary issues that could happen to any of us, ones that some of us may even be going through. The fact that these are real couples making themselves extremely vulnerable on camera is never lost on us; the show forces the viewer to face and understand that, and you can’t help but feel a degree of tenderness towards them.
There are times when the therapy on Sex, Love and goop feels like we’re watching something we’ve seen so many times. Somatic sex and intimacy expert, Darshana Avila makes Shandra and Camila use a mirror to look at their vulvas and describe what they’re seeing, and it feels trite and hackneyed. But what comes after is a session called sexological bodywork, a practice banned in most parts of America because it involves actual hands-on work by the therapist. While I’m not sure if the practice itself is something me or most viewers would be into, the way Darshana speaks to the two women and gently coaches them into speaking to and for themselves felt truly striking. Shandra feels pain whenever she has penetrative sex, and she wants to try sexological bodywork to see if it helps, and as Darshana trains her on active consent, she asks her, “I’m gonna check in (at every step) and see if you’re really on board for it or not. Because if you’re not, what’s gonna happen?” Shandra replies, “I’m gonna tense up.” Avila shakes her head, and says, “No, we’re not gonna do it. That’s the one rule. If you don’t want it, it’s not gonna happen.” In a different session, Darshana senses that Camila isn’t enthusiastic about what they’re doing and is trying to make up for it by pretending to be, she shuts it down immediately. Darshana reminds them, constantly, that they may have consented to be filmed, they may have consented to the therapy, they may have consented to be naked in front of other people, but that consent can be revoked at any time, on camera. She continuously reminds them that while they may have agreed to go through sex therapy, it would still bring up feelings they may not have expected and that it was okay to feel them. It’s a simple thing, that consent can be given and taken away at any time, something feminists have been screaming themselves hoarse about for decades, and yet, it still needs to be said. The session results in Camila’s realisation about her insecurities with her body, and that in turn leads to a sudden terror at the awareness of a camera filming her in her underwear; her fear is palpable, and so is her desire to be “open and cool and confident.” In that moment, so many of us are Camila, and being told with patience and understanding that both feelings were valid and, most importantly, okay, felt truly revolutionary. Watching this couple slowly shed their feelings of internalised shame at their sexuality and their bodies felt truly heartwarming.
There were, of course, times when I wasn’t sure what I was watching. Somatic sexologist Jaiya Ma wants to teach Damon and Erika what kind of sex they’re both into, and that what they think they’re into might simply be them adopting what the hetero-cis societal construct says they should be into. She gives them a demonstration of something that’s supposed to be an “energetic” orgasm with her own life and business partner, and I honestly have no idea what that was supposed to be. However, when Jaiya makes Erika and Damon try various things that they react to, Damon slowly realises that his wife is in no way as sexually conservative he thought she was. But the reason I described the show as moving, was when they turn the tables to see what Damon reacts to and the penny drops for him—his sexual persona, which he had been certain of and confident about forever, was never who he was. Damon cries on the table, and later, so does Erika. Erika learns that the way she’d been preparing for sex her whole life was the way she prepares for a pap smear—sex with her husband was meant to be loving and fun, but the two had been going about it so wrong that she and her body had learnt to treat it as an invasion. In preparing for pain before every sexual encounter, she was unknowingly shutting down any avenue for pleasure.
Another episode where I just stared at my screen uncomprehendingly was episode five, which involved couple Dash and Sera, who get paired up with family constellations facilitator Katarina Wittich. They do something where the couple sent energy into someone else, and then everyone acted it out, and it resulted in something that honestly resembled the improv classes my theatre club back in college did. I’m not sure how watching other people act out generational trauma helped the couple resolve their relationship issues, but if it worked, I’m happy for them.
Barring the family constellations, the other episodes really are wonderful to watch. Tantric healer Amina Peterson works with the older couple Joie and Mike to try and help them understand what each other wants. A common thread I found between the heterosexual couples is how little the men understood the women they’re with and what turned them on. Each therapist, when working on their problems together, had the men work on understanding what foreplay looked like, what desire could and did look like outside their individual understanding of it, and to take pleasure in giving their partners pleasure. I was literally watching the men understand, practice, and learn to love what “This is only fun for me if this is fun for you” meant, and for this reason alone, I applaud Sex, Love, and goop.
What I did particularly enjoy was watching Amina work with Joie on battling her issues with her body. The two women stand together in front of the mirror, and as Peterson talks about her preconceived notions of what an “attractive” and “desirable” body is supposed to look like, I found myself sitting up and listening a little more closely. Going further, Amina takes off her own clothes, then says, “My breasts, they’re not where they used to be... But who told me that breasts were supposed to look a certain way?” There is no forced empowerment message here; Amina doesn’t force herself or the viewers to yell “My body is beautiful and I love it!” The thing she asks, repeatedly, is to question the voice inside our heads that tells us that a certain part of our body is attractive and a certain part isn’t. “We all want to be desirable, but whose voice is that? Is this voice that’s telling me that my stomach should be a little bit flatter or my butt should be a little bit bigger, is that even someone that I desire? Why are they in my bedroom?” And while I hated that I agreed with Paltrow, as she said, “I drive myself really hard to not age and to not be disappointed in the way I look, and I’m still disappointed in the way I look,” I can’t admit that I felt differently. I believed I was an empowered woman, but I haven’t stopped asking myself if the person I want to look like is someone that I find desirable. I don’t have an answer yet, but at least, I have begun to question it. In a culture that treats sex as shameful and refuses to acknowledge it as something that can and does lead to bigger problems, Sex, Love, and goop opens up and facilitates conversations that are honest and necessary. “Our culture teaches us it’s not okay to not know about sex, or to not know exactly what to do,” Sex, Love, and goop says. Even if all that the show teaches us to do is ask, it has done enough.
Shows mentioned:
Sex, Love, and goop - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐1/2
RECOMMENDATIONS
We get so many requests for TV show recs from friends, so we’ll get to them here in every issue.
I've gotten in the habit of binge rewatching older shows, but when I finish them, I feel a void. I also want to wean myself off binge-watching like mad, so what I want is a show that isn't very slow. It should be interesting enough that I can watch a few episodes a day, but not something that makes me finish the whole thing in a day or two. I know this is a tricky ask, but if anyone can meet it, it's you guys.
P.S. No K-dramas with 70-80 minute episodes please!
When you get into a TV rut like that, a safe option is to start a new genre. And because we know you, we know that you’ve never tried anime. So, we recommend that you start with one of the most iconic anime ever—Death Note.
Based on the manga series of the same name written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata, Death Note is centered on high school student Light Yagami, who discovers a mysterious notebook: the "Death Note," which grants the user the supernatural ability to kill whoever’s name is written in it. The series follows Light as he decides to use Death Note and his God-like alias Kira to massacre people he decides are immoral so he can create a crime-free society, as well as the efforts of an elite Japanese police task force to stop him.
Extremely good writing and brilliant pacing aside, Death Note forces you to really think about your own idea of ethics and morality. In that way, it is similar to Breaking Bad, where you watch the main character start out ambiguous and then progress to all-out villainy. Every character is well-thought out and layered, and the cat-and-mouse game between the detective and killer is thrilling to watch.
Streaming on Netflix.
We hope you enjoyed reading this issue as much as we loved writing it. Please write to us if you have any feedback. We look forward to your emails, comments, tweets, and DMs with requests, criticism, recommendations, and anything else that you want to tell us. You can also follow us on Instagram here. And if you haven’t already, do subscribe!