Brimming with Pathos

Emily Wells interviews William J. Simmons about “Love and Degradation: Excessive Desires in Queer-Feminist Art.”

By Emily WellsMarch 20, 2025

• Gender & Sexuality

• Memoir & Essay

THE FIRST TIME William J. Simmons and I met after a lengthy online correspondence, we went to Los Angeles’s beloved Skylight Books—Will needed a new copy of Anna Karenina. When we found only the Penguin Classics edition, Will asked the salesperson for a copy with the then-recent movie tie-in edition cover featuring Kiera Knightley, and I knew I’d found a real-world friend. Fittingly, Will’s writing dissolves all distinctions between “high” and “low” art, and takes seriously the aims of cliché and stereotypes.

In his new essay collection, Love and Degradation: Excessive Desires in Queer-Feminist Art, Will writes on Lana Del Rey, Charlotte Brontë, Félix González-Torres, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Sir Steve McQueen, Glenn Ligon, Barbara Kruger, and Kristen Stewart—​figures who, in his words, represent his “saviors, obsessions, and losses.”​ We conversed over email about art that makes us frenzied with recognition, idols like David Lynch, and the generative possibilities of this recognition in queer-feminist and other art.

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EMILY WELLS: In some ways, Love and Degradation picks up where your last book, Queer Formalism: The Return (2021), left off. In Queer Formalism, you asserted that “all discourse is autobiography,” and in Love and Degradation that “being a fan and being an interlocutor/scholar are the same” thing. Can you say a bit more about the free association and positioning of your obsessions, and the role of autobiography in your writing?

WILLIAM J. SIMMONS: In graduate school, I told my professor—who was a very famous autotheorist and poet—that I really wanted to interview Lars von Trier, whose films have (problematically) had a huge impact on me. She replied to me, quite pointedly and judgmentally, “I have no interest in interviewing my heroes. It just never occurred to me.” I felt very exposed and embarrassed and paranoid, like I had been called a phony or a starfucker. There’s no doubt I am the latter, but I think that there can be an authentic desire to be in proximity with people who we will never know yet nevertheless find provocative, beautiful, enviable, repulsive, and/or brimming with pathos.

Sometime later, she interviewed an iconic singer for a fashion magazine. I scoffed, and then immediately sent her an email being like, “Wow, cool interview!” I think this has immense pedagogical value. Placing ourselves next to our heroes and claiming that we are equals is an important activity. Young people who are not cis white men are often told that their obsessions and interests, and indeed their autobiographies, are niche, excessive, anti-academic, trashy, or otherwise irrelevant to “serious” critical discourse. Or that those obsessions must be legitimized using the language of the academy to have any value. The fact that there has to be a whole academic discipline called “pop culture studies” blows my mind. It seems that everything must pass through the gaze of the professor or dissertation adviser, which is also the gaze of the policeman or the landlord.

Above all, being able to write about oneself is a form of privilege. Having a venue to write about Lady Gaga and Kristen Stewart and your ex-boyfriend is a rare opportunity afforded by race, class, gender, ability, and so on; autobiography comes from access. So, in a not-so-progressive sense, I am simply exercising my privilege because gatekeepers have, from time to time, said yes. While it would be disingenuous and self-aggrandizing to say that all my work has a political function, I want it to. I want other people to be able to have that fantasy of a life where the world’s objects of culture, both loving and inhospitable, offer some comfort, where they return our affection, hatred, and ambivalence. I want to do everything I can as a teacher and writer to encourage others to take up the privilege of self-disclosure wherever they can, and mobilize that privilege to ends that are not only deconstructive or denuding but also joyful.

That self-disclosure is taken up quite directly in the book’s intro and conclusion chapters. In the latter, you speak of breakups—with academia’s languages and a partner, who is addressed directly by the speaker. How did you decide to synthesize these?

I try to tell students (and myself) that everything that is happening to them, everything around them and everything in history, everything that has brought them harm and joy, is happening all at once. All those various pains and pleasures and dangers are equal, because you are experiencing them in time, together.

I was working through these academic questions while I was mourning my breakup, and both left me with too many words and with no words at all. How can you write anything when you’re speechless, so speechless, yet so filled with speech that all you can do is write about how you want to die and become someone else? One breakup I could brush off as being the fault of institutions, which surveil you and treat you like a stupid fucking baby. The other I could not blame on some external structure. I knew it was my fault, the result of my failures. The institution was unhandsome; the person was beautiful. I want them both to just be neutral now, but I do not believe that writing offers any kind of release or outlet for grief—so they will always be there, their respective ugliness and charm sitting silently. As Anne Carson writes in “On Hedonism”: “Beauty makes me hopeless. I don’t care why anymore I just want to get away.”

Speaking of hopeless beauty, there are several through lines that feel so pertinent to the immense loss we are facing in Los Angeles right now. I’ve long held that California is about delusion: we live, often outdoors, in a place that will inevitably be destroyed before our eyes, taking our physical health with it, and believe the untruths necessary to continue to do so. I think of the German émigrés’ truisms about L.A. being both paradise and hell, of Mike Davis’s coining of Malibu as “where hyperbole meets the surf.”

Totally. It makes me wonder if delusion is afforded by privilege. When the white, heterosexist, and capitalist delusions that prop up a city like Los Angeles go up in smoke, we see how those fantasies come at the expense of those whose access—geographical, psychic, expressive—has been curtailed. I think about the iconic Chicana lesbian photographer Laura Aguilar’s self-portrait Will Work For #4 (1993), in which she stands in front of an art gallery with a sign that reads “Will Work for Axcess.” Yet even when a certain kind of access is granted—homeownership, for instance—it’s always contingent on the machinations of a class that is hostile to anything that would allow nonwhite, queer, femme, etc. persons to thrive. 

In an essay on Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag (2016–19), you write about approaching the show without having done any research:

I experienced the critic’s or historian’s worst fear: I loved the show for the same reasons everyone else did, and the reason that everyone else loved it was exactly because of its appeal to individual relatability—a community of people relating in the same way, but differently.

I remember talking with you years ago about our shared love for David Lynch—an artist who takes cliché very seriously!—and frustration with many of the ways others expressed connecting with his work. We spoke from a place of juvenile protectiveness. You’ve really pushed past that previous perspective in Love and Degradation—writing that the viewer’s desire to identify with the protagonist in Fleabag requires faith “in the belief that the story has a future, that feminism has a future, that collectivity has a future, that belief has a future, that I myself have a future.” Can you say more about how this kind of identification can be generative?

“Juvenile protectiveness” is the best possible way of describing the aim of academia and criticism! We all want to believe that we have the hottest take, the most incisive reading, the most rigorous stance, the most progressive posturing. But we are all just consuming, desiring bodies floating in the void and sharing infantile responses to things. And David Lynch is a great example of why this juvenile protectiveness is so futile. His work is radically democratic, even though it is relentlessly gatekept by (largely male) hipsters. He just wanted to talk about transcendental meditation and creativity and getting along! He didn’t give a fuck about postmodernism—and neither should we!

To your question about identification, I think Lynch is also a great example because his work is also about radical identification. None of us can really be as fabulous as Laura Palmer or Audrey Horne or Laura Dern or Naomi Watts. But we deserve to believe we can be, that we can be quirky or excessive or melodramatic or too beautiful or too sad for this world, and we deserve those things without reproach.

There has been so much talk about representation on-screen, and that discussion often takes the necessary form of specific bodies in specific roles making specific political statements. It’s also necessary to think about the affective configurations with which we can identify on-screen, irrespective of the bodies we see. We must expand the range of emotions and ways of relating to media that are available to nonnormative folks, who are often told that they can only relate to media, art, and literature in a critical and oppositional way. Maybe “identification” is just another way of saying “enjoyment.”

Representation includes not only bodies and roles but also forms of enjoyment that surpass traditional critical/complicit binaries. After all, it must be said that Lynch’s work was not “diverse” in the way that we expect media to be diverse now, and it was often brutally unkind to women. Still, so many people who do not identify as cisgender white men love his work, despite the fact that one could say that there isn’t anything specifically in his work that is “for” them. Anyone and everyone deserves to look at Laura Palmer and say: “It me!” Everyone has the right to be glamorously trapped in an unending cycle of despair and have that be okay at some times and unbearable at others.

You’ve included an essay on Barbara Kruger’s Picture/Readings (1978), which combines images of exteriors of homes with narratives of imagined inhabitants. One of Kruger’s protagonists, Gail, is a sort of Lynchian stereotype: a listless, beautiful woman who sits around smoking and thinking about her hypermasculine boyfriend who works at a gas station. You write:

The cliché, the stereotype, and the melodrama all move, for we are always rearranging ourselves in proximity to them, and within that rearrangement might lie the pleasure of veins protruding from skin or the pleasure of rejecting such saccharine reductions of experience.

When did you begin to focus on work that explores the generative possibilities of cliché?

A text to which I frequently return is Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008). Berlant writes about how an engagement with problematic or normative media can be a necessary refuge, even when that media seeks to erase the experiences of the Other. It felt like a powerful tool to reconsider the oppositionality that we expect from Others, especially people of color, who are relentlessly positioned in a state of forced criticality that is devoid of enjoyment. At the same time, I remember being extremely embarrassed writing that essay about Kruger and thinking: “Wow, if she ever reads this, she will think I am so fucking corny!” And she would be right! Oooooh a gay guy who wants to be a listless, beautiful stereotype of a white woman? Never heard that one before.

My own embarrassment aside, there is so much value in studying normativity without jumping immediately to critique. This is not to advocate for a blithe politics of sincerity or freedom from critique. It is just to say that many marginalized subjects live with the constant expectation of oppositionality, and looking at the cliché can be a necessary site for deconstructing who is allowed visual pleasures and who is only allowed visual dangers. Maybe, for me, it all comes down to the fact that growing up in a culturally decrepit rural area and then moving to the “big city” and deciding that you’re going to start sucking dick is the biggest cliché of all. We are all trying to escape something, and I think that’s what Lynch’s work is about, too. Yet, as he shows us at the end of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), we can’t escape it: Laura Palmer realizes the endless loop she is caught in and she screams into the void.

A number of people saw my first book, Queer Formalism: The Return, as being optimistic, and, in my most delusional moments, I think maybe it is. Maybe the book came from a delusional space, a world where we can will ourselves to be different people and have a fresh start. I wanted to believe, in Taylor Swift fashion, that I could put an end to one era and begin anew. I wanted to rid myself of the pressures placed on my writing (indeed all queer and feminist writing) by the academy. So, this book contains essays where I forced myself to adhere to those constraints and others where I wrote around them. Some are transitional, such as the essay on Kruger and Rosalind Krauss that asks what it would mean if we (rightly) considered Kruger to be a poet. I want to believe that we can all have multiple loves, multiple obsessions, and multiple ways of writing.

I referenced Lynch in the title, though, because some part of me wanted to recognize the sinister elements of the cliché. In the essay on Pablo Larraín’s Spencer (2021) in Love and Degradation, which also includes Barbara Kruger’s work, I wrote: “You are always, only ever, your past self. It is the very worst version of you, the first thing you ever did, and you did it wrong […] You will never grow up, and you will never get better. You will never improve, and that’s a promise.” I believe that is as true as any reparative reading of the cliché.

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Featured image: Photo of William J. Simmons by Christen Webb.