Kellie Herson

Apr 17, 2024 | brightwalldarkroom.com | Kellie Herson

[Editor’s note: this essay was originally published in May 2018]For reasons that are unclear to me now, my friends and I spent most of our teenage years watching the same dozen or so movies over and over again. Some were standard mid-‘00s PG-13 comedies. School of Rock and Bring It On were reliable crowd-pleasers.

Apr 5, 2024 | brightwalldarkroom.com | Kellie Herson |Dylan Fugel |Elizabeth Cantwell |Michael Moreci

Much like The Matrix, released only a few weeks prior in the spring of 1999, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ plays with the question of whether we really inhabit the reality we think we inhabit. But whereas The Matrix posits systemic and structural forces keeping subjects in the dark, eXistenZ presents a more realistic version of our potential subjection to a simulated reality.

Nov 8, 2023 | brightwalldarkroom.com | Kellie Herson

In my past life teaching gender studies, I loved hearing my undergrads share their feminist “click” moments—a term borrowed from Jane O’Reilly’s 1971 essay “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth” to describe the incidents that make us realize our individual experiences are part of a larger, politically structured whole.