Hello, my lovelies! I have complied a list of the articles that I recommend from the past week. I even included one about my beloved true crime.

On the 24th, Jack Virnich explained why we need deadpan (and Aubrey Plaza) for Fandor:
“Amidst the turbulence of the modern age, there is something attractive about the idea of emotionally shutting oneself off from the world. In terms of performance, a deadpan delivery perfectly reflects this desire. Actors such as Aubrey Plaza, Steve Carell, and Kristen Stewart champion this style of acting, and they’re not alone. Deadpan has a long history. It’s utilized across movie genres and around the world. More significantly though, deadpan can be interpreted as a form of defiance — the only way of dealing with the absurdity of modern times.”

Also on the 24th, S.E. Smith explored how Westworld fetishizes bygone eras for Bitch Media:
“The denizens of all three worlds are subjected to violence and trauma, over and over again, in service of their white masters. Their memories are erased, over and over again, but the damage lingers as some characters begin to grow self-aware. This grand experiment comes at a tremendous cost to the hosts being used like chess pieces to fulfill masturbatory fantasies. While the show positions the conditions in the various worlds owned by Delos as problematic, when the uprising comes, it’s engineered—people come to consciousness as a result of programming by white men, performing in a different type of puppet show. Even the rebellion is racialized.”

On the 25th, Stuart Jeffries asked if true crime is evolving or running out of material at The Guardian:
“But maybe demand is outstripping supply. Haven’t the juiciest cases already been cherrypicked? Surely there can’t be many more unreported cases as captivating as Andrew Jarecki’s The Jinx, a six-part HBO documentary in 2015 that, unusually, sought to implicate rather than exonerate its subject, Robert Durst. Nor, surely, can there be a repeat of The Staircase…”

Also on the 25th, Audrey Naftule used Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me to make a case that David Lynch is one of the greatest horror directors of all-time for the Phoenix New Times:
“Perhaps the most perfect Lynchian ‘hero’ is Lura Palmer. Initially just a plastic-wrapped cipher that an entire town projected their hopes, sorrows, and desires on the original Twin Peaks TV series, 1992’s hated-upon-release prequel film Fire Walk with Me turns Laura into a rich, three-dimensional tragic figure.”

Nicole LaPorte at Fast Company contemplated the death of Hollywood’s middle class on the 25th:
“Streaming companies like Netflix and Amazon have changed TV and the entertainment business in innumerable ways, particularly since Netflix started to air its own original programming in 2013. Almost all of the focus on this upheaval has been on viewers’ first-world problem of too many good shows to watch or the corporate gamesmanship between iconic Hollywood conglomerates and the tech giants who seek to usurp them in delivering the world its entertainment. Left out of the conversation are the workers whose livelihoods are being upended in the process.”

Enjoy, though “enjoy” probably isn’t the best word regarding that last article.