Cinema and the Screen of the Self

Philip Sorenson reviews Laura Henriksen’s “Laura’s Desires.”

By Philip SorensonFebruary 14, 2025

• Poetry

• Film

THE POEMS IN Laura Henriksen’s first full-length collection, Laura’s Desires (2024), examine the blurred edge between speaking and listening, between seeing and being seen. Laura’s Desires, in other words, examines what it means to have a self, with multiple definitions and blurry boundaries. In these poems, the self becomes other selves—doubled in mirrors, in movies, in our dreams and in others’ dreams, in sex, and in the different Lauras who haunt this book. While Henriksen refuses any definite conclusions about the self and settles on unknowability, she also emphasizes the difficulty of escaping from ourselves and our desires. Each person desires, but the full shape of those desires is blurry. Henriksen longs to know, and perhaps in knowing she, or we, can take flight from ourselves. However, her “perfect plan is foiled / by the inscrutable nature of the experience / of having a self.” We are all trapped, caught in our own individuality, that which makes us different from one another.

Difference is a significant feature throughout Laura’s Desires—the difference between people, the difference between subjects and objects, the difference of politics and bodies and genders. What is criticism? the book seems to ask. What is poetry, what is memoir, what is confession? In asking these kinds of questions, the book acknowledges difference while also longing to escape that difference. Of course, in the end, we’re all limited to our point of view. From that position, though, we are given an opportunity to connect and exchange with others. Laura’s Desires finally favors an intimate, interpersonal, and unfolding present, experience that changes even as it is written.

Henriksen’s book is broken into two sections: “Dream Dream Dream” and the longer “Laura’s Desires.” While turned toward different topics, each section works to express the speaker’s self through memory, cultural ephemera, and the contemplation of both. While considering various other works of art and entertainment (Hellraiser [1987], A Nightmare on Elm Street [1984], Twin Peaks [1990–91]) in “Dream Dream Dream,” Henriksen mostly considers pop music as a point of entry. Though, as she writes, dreams and pop songs and movies blend. For example, she writes about Lil Baby and Gunna’s “Drip Too Hard.” She “was listening to Hot 97, or barely listening”; then she started to nap, falling into “a fitful kind of sleep,” and “the loop of a guitar line […] was irresistible to the extent that it coated my dream like moisture in a cave.” Henriksen tells us that the chorus in “Drip Too Hard” ends with “Every other night, another movie getting made.” Songs and movies and dreams become signs for each other: “I am interested in the way the movies are also dreams. Diamond-studded, insistent, hallucinogenic dreams.” The radio, too, “as a metaphor for dreams is a good one.” Radio transmissions suggest a dreamlike hovering. The waves search for antennae over rooftops, landing here, landing there, offering “the mystery of someone speaking to you in your room who is not in your room.” The radio suggests a “shadow between presence and absence, communal and private.” And dreams seem to arrive from another source, even if we are their lone creator and sole spectator.

Radio and film and dream pulse with desire throughout these poems. They also can push us toward oblivion. In her discussion of the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” Henriksen writes that what “animates” the song is “the power of longing, the fear that longing might grow to such a fever that life is dreamed away, waking reality eclipsed by a vision of love.” Sometimes desire does not actually emanate from the self but leads instead to the self’s negation. Sometimes the speaker seeks oblivion: “the temporary abdication / of the numb despotism of being anyone / at all.” If not oblivion, then perhaps another role, another life. As she wonders in her reading of the rock band Heart’s “These Dreams,” “Who isn’t compelled by the idea of leading another life?” And in her own dreams, she is metamorphic: “In dreams I am not myself.” Sometimes, she tells us, she is an owl; she “can change constantly” or “can be unfixed, and in this way imagine a deeper stability, not contingent on the illusions of [her] attachments, but the depth of [her] intricate and flexible connections.”

These strange transmissions from dreams, movies, and radio relate our wishes back to us or offer us new wishes. I could invoke Freud here, but instead, I’ll borrow from Henriksen’s own strategy, and turn inward to turn back out. When “A Nightmare on My Street” by DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince was released, I was in middle school. I’d stopped sleeping. Staying up every night, insomniac, I quietly listened to the radio. In bed, the opening strains of “Nightmare on My Street,” which mimic the Nightmare on Elm Street theme, began to play. The movie seemed to bleed into the song, the song into the movie, and the song superimposed itself onto my endless sleepless nights. In “Dream Dream Dream,” Henriksen considers Nightmare through a similar entanglement between screen and viewer, between art and audience: “propelled by rage and repressed guilt and fucked up desires […] feeding the ambient fears of not only the characters but also the audience, sitting in the dark theater, identifying in complex ways with the story.” The film absorbs the audience’s feelings as the audience absorbs the film.

Laura’s Desires is about seeing and being seen, not just by people but also by art itself. It’s about desire and media’s role in awakening, associating, and transforming it. This or that “Laura” is trapped in herself and seeks escape: “I’m just / trying to distance myself from how / undeniable my own lived experience is.” Of course, we can’t really. We’re all caught, but art functions as an escape (“a window, a mirror, a camera, a door”) because it lays bare our selves, our desires, and even comforts us with life’s impossibilities.

Orgasm is offered as escape, a kind of apophasis. Maybe more than that, though, is the act of looking: scopophilia, voyeurism, and cinema. The primary focus of the book’s second half, the essayistic long poem “Laura’s Desires,” is Bette Gordon and Kathy Acker’s 1983 film Variety. Though direct and plainspoken, “Laura’s Desires,” unlike “Dream Dream Dream,” is broken into poetic lines and lifts sometimes into moments of incredible lyricism:

Eventually everyone needs
a woman to appear at a distance and
burn like science fiction’s distant cities,
with medical training and the memory
of six or seven summers on the water,
draped in silver from the hidden
filth of icicles.

Variety, the movie at the center of the poem, explores themes of looking, of gender, desire, objectification, and power. The protagonist, Christine, played by Sandy McLeod, takes a job as a ticket taker at a porno theater, the Variety. Henriksen narrates and analyzes the film, addressing both its historical context and its possible social implications today. Most interestingly, she connects the movie to her own thinking. She notes that “one big critique of the movie at the time / was that it didn’t have enough sex in it, / it wasn’t pornographic enough, it was a tease.” Henriksen then gives us the voice of Christine narrating “pornographic / scenes in a dispassionate, almost / trance-like state to her boyfriend, / Mark.” The critics of the film’s sexlessness, Henriksen argues, “don’t recognize / their twin in Mark, sitting there / useless, unwilling or unable to / receive what Christine is offering.” Narration empowers Christine, as it does Henriksen. Christine’s summaries of the movies she sees at the Variety reorient us toward her, the speaking subject. Similarly, these poems reclaim eros, subverting sexual objectification.

Just as Christine steers our gaze, the speaker of the poem powerfully steers us through the film and beyond, including an “elaborately organized group / sex experience”:

I felt myself become
more and more central to my friend’s
conscious awareness and experience,
I felt her watching me watch her
girlfriend’s transforming face,
and so I performed my watching.

Of course, she acknowledges that recounting an experience is always troubled by the limits of perspective and doubts of one self, then questions her own doubt: “I wonder what I would be like if instead / of doubting any decision I make, I doubted / my social training,” a training that suggests she needs “someone to tell [her] what to do.”

Laura’s Desires attempts to understand the network of one self in relation to others. In considering her “obsess[ion] with Twin Peaks,” Henriksen writes that that obsession had “to do with the pleasure / of hearing the name Laura repeated / with such frequency.” More so, for Henriksen, the real center of Twin Peaks is not the protagonist Laura Palmer’s victimization but rather her power of insight: “in dreams, speaking backwards, / we know she knows everything.” Laura Palmer’s death reveals her power over the community and the community’s subterranean interconnectedness. This Laura, nearly an “avenging angel” in Henriksen’s reading, fills the “Pacific / Northwestern sky.” She halts industry and “transform[s] the social / and erotic lives” of everyone, all bound together under her diaristic gaze. Like a ray of light or a radio wave, Laura Palmer is an etheric substance flowing through the community. She’s herself and not herself.

We are all caught up in the screen of the self—the tension between self and other, and between versions of our self. Others, the characters in film, the singers of pop songs, become further players on that screen, other faces in the self. There is a pleasure in watching, or at least a desire to watch, the self “sucked under a current,” totally erased, temporarily, between absolute certainty and persistent doubt. As summaries unspool in Laura Henriksen’s debut poetry collection, the speaker ultimately suggests that “we might resist / the pressure to summarize at all.” We might cease to seek a simple knowing and move toward finding freedom in obscurity.