Why "Mortal Cinema"?

You might have noticed the new name.

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When I first joined Substack, it was in search of something to replace Twitter, and they’d just started the Notes interface that looked a little bit like it. I didn’t have a blog, nor the inclination to start one yet, but I could see that Twitter was not just becoming a problem politically, but functionally too. I was, by default, “LYT’s Substack.”

When all of my other outlets collapsed at once — you are never safe, even when you think you’ve diversified sufficiently — I decided to go all in on Substack, and doing so in a way that anyone who might remember my writings over 25 years would be able to find me again. Unlike others of my vintage, I’ve been all over the place outlet-wise, including some that didn’t give me a byline at all, and others that ensured I did more backend work and less front-facing glory. However, to the extent that I’d ever had a following, I wanted whatever and whoever was left of it to find me. “ill LYTeracy” was a fun bit of wordplay I’d used for personal columns at some other places, but none of them are ever likely to claim it from me, as it isn’t really a name that’s usable without me. (Unless they wanted to promote my archives, which, LOL.)

That said, as the guy who renamed Topless Robot, I should have thought about it a little longer. “Topless Robot” was a site named for SEO around 2008, based on the notion that comic-book/video game nerd types were all lonely males in their basements searching the web for topless pictures and robot toys. It worked at that time, but by 2013, fandom had diversified thanks to smartphones and everyone — not just nerds — being online at all times. A WWE publicist was extremely snide to me over the name, not wanting it near his “PG company” (oh the irony), and Universal refused to let me cover the junket for one of the Minions movies because “It’s a kids’ movie.” Disney was shutting me out from things without explanation, and since they now owned Marvel and Star Wars, my two main traffic-getters, that was a problem. Besides which, I had always wanted to incorporate the Village Voice branding somehow, rather than constantly having to explain I was repping one of their publications. So we got The Robot’s Voice…shortly before Voice shut the whole thing down.

I saw the same thing happen, to a lesser degree, with Badass Digest becoming Birth Movies Death, though I think Badass Digest was actually a great name. It wasn’t quite a fit for what they were selling, though — the sexual-assault-accused editor (whom I won’t name because I’m sure he ego-googles) may have thought it was “badass” to have his followers harass creatives who weren’t sufficiently politically correct for his noble self-proclaimed feminist declarations of righteousness, but I certainly didn’t.

The point being, “ill LYTeracy” is a hell of a name to have to give to publicists. You always have to spell it, for one thing, and if they don’t happen to know me (never assume they do), it makes little sense and says nothing about the content of the site. “Mortal Cinema,” a URL I’ve owned for over a decade now, has multiple meanings, and I love them all as relates to the content here, in addition to actually sounding like the name of a movie site you might vaguely think you know (in general, not a real previously existing one).

First, obviously, there’s the play on “mortal sin.” When I started this Substack I didn’t know exactly what it would be; what has become clear is that movies and atheism/biblical historical context are the two top subjects here at this time. There’s flexibility for others and room for more, but the mortal sin/cinema dichotomy describes the majority of my pieces. Then there’s my general philosophy of criticism, that nobody’s opinion of art is “objectively” better: I’m just one man, i.e. mortal.

But Mortal Cinema can mean something else if we loosen up the word “cinema.” The theater of the mortal is the drama that is human life itself, and that also ropes in the religion factor. I feel called to write about atheism because it used to distress me, a lot, to think about death and oblivion, but hearing Julia Sweeney perform Letting Go of God gave me a lot of comfort in my stance and belief, or disbelief, and I want to be able to pay that forward if I can in any way.

And to the extent that there’s more content than that here — fast food, toys, my life — these are very much mortal concerns, and parts of life as a human on this Earth at this time. I’m a person in middle age (as of this writing) who very much feels the trappings of mortality, and a deep, healing love of cinema. All of it.

You’ll also see in the top logo that it’s “Luke Y. Thompson’s Mortal Cinema,” technically. When I first registered the URL, I couldn’t find anybody using the name. I searched recently and saw one video using the term. Others may have their own mortal cinema to deal with, in the sense that I’ve explained it above, but this is mine.

Who knows. Those of us who lived through the post 9-11 blogosphere remember the embarrassment of Pajamas Media, particularly when it tried to rebrand as Open Source Media only to get sued over the name. If I change it back to ill LYTeracy you’ll know why. But I’ve had a Mortal Cinema site before, briefly, after The Robot’s Voice went down — it didn’t last because I depended on hosting from someone whose money ran out much more quickly than he thought. It’s time to bring it back.

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