Joanna
Arnow

The first time I wrote about Joanna Arnow’s work, I described her debut feature film The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2023) as a major contribution to the girl pervert canon. A girl pervert, as I define it, is a female character measured by her curiosity toward sexuality and sexual exploits—sometimes playfully, sometimes desperately, and always earnestly.  

These same descriptors could also apply to Arnow’s canon at large. Her oeuvre is tied together by a desire to capture a subjective reality, an experience true to someone, while also maintaining legibility for the audience peering in.  

Much of Arnow’s work centers on miniscule but palpable internal shifts which alter an otherwise unvarying life. Sex, performance, work, and family dinners all occur in technically similar rhythms in cycles, yet the flavor of each repetition is always mutable, shifted not by exterior change but by the emotional ebbs and flows of internal life. 

In The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, Ann’s life is mostly predictable: a low-level corporate job, family nearby, and a decade-long dom/sub relationship with an older man who is not her boyfriend. In the same way that i hate myself 🙂 (2013) forgoes catharsis and epiphany for a fizzling cycle of articulated dissatisfaction into fumbling sexual reunion, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is disinterested in traditional narrative arcs. The details of Ann’s life stay largely the same because Arnow understands that in reality, we must keep the job, dine with our parents, and maintain imperfect intimate connections, in order to survive. What changes—and sometimes changes intensely enough to seem to alter the very flow of time—is Ann’s internal emotional state. My favorite Arnow image is of Ann decked out in “fuckpig” fetish gear (a pig’s nose, a microskirt, a ballgag), masturbating on an apartment rooftop, bored out of her mind. It’s true that what is thrilling one day can be frustrating the next and then feel anew the day after that one. And it’s true that these shifts can happen for no reason at all.  

“Do you think people can change?” Ann asks her dominant Allen at the beginning of The Feeling …. Arnow’s work at large provides an answer. People don’t just change, they change constantly. There’s the wall of succulents in our otherwise drab work lobby that’s sometimes struck by sunlight, stunning on an otherwise unremarkable day. Arnow’s work sees life as a process of constant, incremental change. Cycles and shifts that can be attributed to little but can define an entire season. Her work isn’t a trite plea to embrace every minute with sugary gratitude. It just encourages us to take a curious, cool peek inside.

Veronica Phillips, 
a Los Angeles-based culture writer and critic who specializes in film, sexuality, and digital trends, helms the gender and sexuality site High Femme.