My first apartment in Baltimore was the upstairs of a 100-year-old rowhouse in Charles Village. No AC. Moved in at the end of July, some of the hottest days of the year. A little bit of fan did a lot, but that kind of heat forced me to readjust to a new kind of languid lifestyle for at least a third of a year. Humidity wasn’t something I ever had to deal with, neither in my Oregon upbringing or in the thin and cool air of the Rockies. My first full summer, Faulkner was all that really made sense to me (and five summers later, it looks like I’m about to finally finish a 1000-page story collection by him that I started in the depths of 2020). There’s a violence to his sweltering prose, a brain-melting kind of insanity that at once shuts the body and demands erratic motion.
Few films captured this, and none of them were Faulkner adaptations. As much as I believe The Tarnished Angels (1957) to be, on the right day, Douglas Sirk’s best movie, it’s faux-New Orleans hardly fits the bill for the more typically rural malaise of Faulkner. Nor does the conventionality of The Long, Hot Summer (1958) do any justice to the “watery” words Faulkner wrote. In cinema, he’s more tonally influential on the uncited works—or perhaps not directly influential, but refracting the same ether.
When I think of Faulkner’s humidity in cinema, I don’t think of Burning (2018), a film I love but is more direct in its conversation, I think instead of the way Margaret Qualley’s hair kinks in Stars at Noon (2022) or the school admins laze under the fans as they pour more tea in A Brighter Summer Day (1991). Both films, in their moment-to-moment, depict how a certain kind of heat kills, a certain kind of heat deteriorates. Qualley walks around Nicaragua in the same dress she wore yesterday, surviving day-to-day on what she can get out of sweat-soaked pheromones. A Brighter Summer Day exists in a world within a world, where teens roam lawlessly through the marshal lawed streets of Taiwan in the 1960s, creating their alternate, parallel society of gang violence adjacent to their parents’ militarist paranoia, with their boiling resentments added more steam to the thick, hot air.
Recently, I finally saw Amy Seimetz’s debut as a feature filmmaker, Sun Don’t Shine (2012), a lovers-on-the-run riff more in line with the Badlands (1973) camp than the Bonnie and Clyde (1967) knock-offs—more a River of Grass (1994) than a True Romance (1993). The film opens with Kate Lyn Sheil gasping for breath, struggling for her life fighting Kentucker Audley in the Florida mud. They’re playing Crystal and Leo, whom we’ll soon find out are driving somewhere to dispose of the body of Crystal’s husband, whom she believed was cheating on him. They’re not going very far, and not very fast. Their car keeps breaking down in the heat, Leo thinking it's the radiator that just needs topping off with some water. The heat’s strangling everything to death, even the machines.
There’s an anxiety-ridden neurosis bleeding out of Sheil and Audley’s performances that could be considered emblematic of Millennial tendencies, but it feels much more elemental here. As they stand on the side of the highway, the skin on Sheil’s face is turning hot red in front of the heavy greens and golden Vision3 hues filling the screen behind her. Sheil’s the best of her generation of actresses, alive revealing a thousand mysteries at once behind her eyes. Directed by Seimetz here—herself one of the greats of the American indie boom of the 2000s and 2010s—it’s hard to read where the performance ends and physical discomfort sets in. Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), the humid, sweaty conditions of the filmmaking process marinate themselves on screen, with actors seeming like they’re about to pass out from heat stroke even more than it looks like they are making decisions about their performances. Sun Don’t Shine is the kind of masterpiece where it doesn’t matter what I think about most of the film, because its one rumination on the summer heat is enough to elevate above so many other films for me.