Lindy West - Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema

I love making fun of movies. I love turning a piece of criticism into a piece of entertainment. I love pointing out a plot hole that makes a superfan write me an angry e-mail. I love turning my unsophistication into a tool. I love being hyperbolically, cathartically angry for no reason. I love being flippant and careless and earnest and meticulous all at once.

Shit, Actually is inspired by a series of essays I started at Jezebel, in which Id rewatch successful movies from the past to see how they hold up to our shifting modern sensibilities. That concept has grown even more relevant in recent years, as grappling with those shifts has become something of a national obsession. What do we do now with beloved cultural works that dont hold up? What do we do with the oeuvre of beloved people who fail us? Are we allowed to like imperfect things that mean something to us?

A few of those Jezebel pieces became extremely popular, none more so than my Love Actually rewatch, which to my great joy still makes the rounds online every December (Im told that some families now read it aloud each year la Twas the Night Before Christmas). Love Actually is in here, along with some other favorites from that series, spruced up and expanded for freshness.

But Ive also added a whole bunch of new ones! If youre wondering about my methodology for those, I selected movies that fit at least one of three categories: 1) cultural phenomena that took over the Earth, 2) movies I was personally obsessed with, or 3) movies I picked because it seemed like someone should talk about them. Lots of things are missing. Dont think about it too hard.

I started my career as a snotty twenty-three-year-old (!) film critic who was, to be honest, less interested in film than in exploiting my column inches to write jokes. As I grew older (I am thirty-eight now) and graduated from a local to a national platform, I shifted from writing about movies to writing about politics, and my writing, of necessity, became increasingly serious. After the bone-deep vulnerability of my memoir, Shrill, the exhaustion of writing political columns both during and after the 2016 election, and the careworn scream of my second essay collection, The Witches Are Coming, I am excited to be writing some goofy jokes about movies again.

And Shit, Actually is that! But what I began working on as a silly book for release into a darkness I understoodthe demoralizing grind of public life under Donald Trumpis now to be a silly book for release into a darkness I dont.

I finished writing Shit, Actually six weeks into the COVID-19 stay-at-home ordersix weeks of trying to think of funny things to say about Face/Off while worrying about a friend on a ventilator, six weeks of mustering comical outrage over Harry Potter plot holes while the president went on television to suggest that the ill try drinking bleach. Meanwhile, Trump and his party (whom, in a previous book, in a previous life, I might have described as morally bankrupt but now feel comfortable calling FULLY FUCKING DEMONIC) have been flagrantly funneling taxpayer-funded relief money to the richest and least deserving while the rest of us sit, isolated, trapped in our homes, as everything we know and love crumbles into uncertainty.

As shelter-in-place stretched on and I began adjusting to my new, smaller, lonelier life, I started to find a strange comfort in the task of making this book for you and thinking about it in your hands and homesthis silly, inconsequential, ornery, joyful, obsessive, rude, and extremely stupid book.

More than anything I want this book to make you feel like you are at a movie night with your best friend (me). I had no way of knowing, when I proposed Shit, Actually back in 2017, that Id be writing it in a time when movie nights with your best friend no longer existed.

Writing this, in a way I could not have guessed, has made me feel less alone. Thank you for being my friends. It kept me afloat knowing you were there.

Love,

Lindy