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Darling

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Darling

Article

Darling is a recurring film in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 27, 2025 and January 14, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “The screening of Darling (1965) at Film Forum”; “Watching Darling (1965) on my computer as it gets light outside”. It most often appears alongside Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, Dirty Mag, KGB Bar.

Metadata

  • Category: Films
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: October 27, 2025
  • Last seen: January 14, 2026

Appears In

None.

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Autumn Secrets
October 27, 2025 · Original source
Printed pdf of Paris Review Anne Sexton poem that Celia keeps on trying to read to me out loud. The Anne Sexton is a thirty-six page poem, and Celia keeps telling me that it’s the most beautiful thing in the world. She keeps on reciting passages. ‘She didn’t have friends, children, sex, religion, marriage, success, a salary or a fear of death.’ and ‘Astonished light is washing over the moor from north to east.’ and ‘At this time of year there is no sunset, just some movements inside the light and then a sinking away.’ Stop trying to read this to me out loud, I keep on saying to Celia. I’ll read it later in my head. I’ll read it once I have a printed-PDF. I’ll suspend my disbelief and read your beautiful poem about art and love and loss and other things, too sometime down the line. Lying on my floor. Once I have a hard copy. Once I have everything I ever wanted. Tuesday, October 21 The screening of Darling (1965) at Film Forum is nice. All about a very beautiful and very selfish girl who cannot bear the consequences of her own actions. She whirls through London and Italy and is momentarily relieved, towards the end of the film, to learn that it is not too late. The scenery is black and white and lovely, and our heroine likes Italy because she finds it more religious, though she dislikes Italy on the other hand, because she mourns the distance from the real love of her life. Things escalate further. Overnight. In an instant. It is, indeed, she is dismayed to find, too late. The ending leaves me feeling quite uneasy. Probably because the souls of all the characters have been pretty much scrubbed and examined and turned inside out and back again, and the conclusion really has to be that these beautiful and mostly trying-their-best people, are pretty bad-to-the-core. Are you staying for the next screening, the staff at Film Forum ask us, well after the lights come on. We have stayed tucked into the seats at the theater. Kept my legs tucked into my sweatshirt in the theater. It has become, I’ve realized recently, difficult to determine the proper times for things. When to stay, when to go. No, no we’re leaving and sorry about that, we say to the staff at Film Forum. It is only two in the afternoon so there is plenty of time to pace around the newly and suddenly eternally rainy city. Looking for a hotel lobby. Looking for a wooden umbrella. A humidifier. Chamomile tea. A job. A meeting. Algorithmic knowledge pertaining to things like; how to spend a day, how should a person be, how to optimize health and intellect. How to buy a Life Well Lived. Wednesday, October 22 In July, I was in a small hotel in Bourton-On-The-Water. There was a chipped ceramic bathtub with feet on it and nice eclectic lamps and the air was humid and gray and cool in the evening, even in summer, this is kind of how things are in much of England, where the climate is somewhat more temperate. I made some decisions, then, which I remember now because they pertain in large part to promises I couldn’t keep. I promised to be a Secret Keeper, for one, and to move forward kind of sober minded and steadfast and without interest in petty resentments or high volatility reactions. I was lying on the floor on the phone, then, by an open window, in the thick of a week full of walks and cable-knit-cardigans. And so one imagines a different sort of life in the quiet mist, and one is very sure about it in the moment. And then back in New York, some solitude on the plane, shifting whims of my own, yes, but mostly of others. I was able to hold onto all of this for a while. Not for forever, though, because there were a few more weeks after that. And I did say everything, to everyone, back in New York. Mostly because I felt like I had to and because I did try to grasp at discretion and couldn’t, but now there are all these secrets spilling all about. I can feel them everywhere in the air. All the things I meant to hold close to my chest, I mean. It is ruining everything, if I’m being totally honest about it. I have tried to be more bright about things, but some basic facts remain. And before I tried to be more bright about things, I did try everything else. Thursday, October 23 Trying something else as in: Boundless Energy. The day flies by. Everyone is upset about the way things are articulated all the time, and so I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Explaining myself, that is. Saoirse teaches me how to breathe both up and down but also side to side at pilates training. The studio is full of light and very clean and very crisp and the movements, up and down and also side to side, remind me of being a dancer or a child or someone who is very quiet and precise. Afterward, Saoirse and I share chicken at the bar at Gramercy Tavern. A nice restaurant. The nicest one. The walls are decked in fall decor, and since Saoirse taught me how to breathe and move one hour ago, I have begun to feel quite alive. Are you nostalgic for a certain type of beauty, or for being the sort of person who feels of and entitled to beautiful things? Saorise wears a Burberry scarf and a Burberry coat and she is very composed, and so I trust her opinions. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, October 27 From 7:30pm at Night Club 101 — Domino Reading Series returns with Evan Donnachie, Armon Mahdavi, Erin Satterthwaite, Jade Wootton, Nick Dove, Izzy Capulong, and Chesea Hodson.
Inline links: Night Club 101, Domino Reading Series
How To Break Paralysis
January 14, 2026 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, January 5 Start the year at Cassandra’s apartment, and then a few days pass kind of breathless and stranded in this way. Her bedroom looks over St Vincent’s Ferrer, and it is light filled and sweet. Cards and paper star cut outs hung on red ribbon stream down the edges of the cream walls. A seashell necklace, Mary Magdalene portrait, books of Adorno and Mary Gaitskill. The bible. When my friends leave for the day, I do not. Rush of opening doors and boots on wood and winter air, and then they are gone. Cassandra’s apartment is very clean. It strikes me, somewhat uneasily, that everything I touch appears slightly less precise when I’m the one returning it to its proper place. Face oil left off kilter and kind of dripping. A little bit bad at treading gently in this place where I am a guest and everything is delicate and gorgeous. Wearing my friend’s Adidas pajamas and drinking water and taking Advil in thick blue translucent pill form. Writing down the things I no longer care to reflect on. A lot can happen in a year, I tell Cassandra, but then again, a lot can happen in one day or one hour or one minute, even, so best to be kind of chill about it. We go to Heidelberg for herring and brown bread and hot raspberries in ice cream and apple strudel at night. We go to CVS for baby food and tooth brushes and nicotine gum. The evenings uptown are more sparkling and quiet. Back at the apartment, and I can’t stop talking about all the things I want to do or places I want to move. California, Switzerland, El Salvador. Uptown, to a four bedroom apartment with my four best friends. Lying on Cassandra’s couch wearing a blue sweater under a gray blanket and drinking flower power kombucha this morning. Cassandra gets ready for work and offers general hospitality. Eat any fruits and vegetables you want, Cassandra tells me. She lists them like a game. Ad libs. She was teaching me how to type cast a person as “Lego” or “Dust Bowl” or “Victorian Orphan,” last night. Blueberries, shallots, pickles, seeded mustard from the Amish farm stand. I tell Cassandra that she’ll come home to find I have devoured all of her arugula with my bare hands. Later, I wear Cassandra’s blue sweater and black ballet flats and take my own belongings clutched in my arms in a cab downtown. Am I crazy, or did you take my black ballet flats, Cassandra texts, that evening. We discuss an exchange. Tomorrow’s plans. My polyester black gown bartered for Cassandra’s blue sweater and black ballet flats. We’ll meet at mass, lunch, The Frick, The Met, the play, the party. The light is blue gray in my apartment, and all the windows steam over when the hot water is on. All the windows steam over because my apartment is very small, and because the bathroom has no doors. A New Year should feel psychedelic, not sluggish, one of my friends said, a few days back. Psychedelic??? I said. What about crisp and clear???? After my dream where there is No Air Left, I come to consciousness with concerns about redemption. Something about bad habits and something omnipresent left unsaid. Sun and light and real sort of detox incoming and yes this has all happened or is happening or needs to happen soon. Sirens outside the foggy window. Gentle winter sunrise. Watching Darling (1965) on my computer as it gets light outside. The Schlesinger film where Julie Christie whirls about all thrilled to find it’s not too late, even though, of course, it is. Back on my phone, I’m checking prediction markets and trackers and fortune tellers and all the things I’m trying to avoid for religious and also paranoid reasons. My fears are all confirmed. Reading the stars. That voice in your head telling you everything will work out fine is wrong, they say. Sound of shattering glass crystallizing outside my open window this morning. I can sense, therefore, more than see, bright morning light starting to seep through. Thank God. It was a few days of gluttony last week. Last days of bohemia, but it was different from the bohemia of before. Different from the times that we were all manic from the wind and cold and early January where everything or nothing happens all at once. Everything used to be reeling. I miss Butterfly Club. Ex-best friends are forever. I’ve been talking about being ascetic for reasons of necessity, and also because simulated intensity can only do so much when it comes to keeping a life pure. Morning, now, and I don’t remember my dreams but I jolted awake ready to chase the same thoughts in circles. Washington Square Park is bright and feeling like spring today, because the snow is melting and the trees and lights are coming down. Pine piles looking a little lonely under the park archway. Something a bit melancholy about it. Dead and gone. Nothing to overthink. Cassandra comes downtown for mass and black ballet flat retrieval, and then she goes uptown to clean her apartment and do good things so she can be a good person. Your apartment is already so clean, I want to tell Cassandra. Cassandra is telling me about the only girl in the world who are funny. I went to tell Cassandra about someone who said me and one other girl and one specific nun are only girls who are funny, but the conversation moves on before I can assert my piece. And I think I’m mostly funny when I’m being mimetic, anyway. Better at knowing funny than at being funny myself. Cassandra is telling me about childlike wonder. Washed my face with La Rouche Possay cleanser and Japanese milk toner and did Big 6 Lymphatic drainage which is supposed to do things like give you the whites of your eyes back and also cleanse your insides through and through, this morning. Procured a Celsius and cool minty zyn from the fridge. Procured green juice and cliff bar and sat in Prada boots, for a while, on the edge of my bed. I do feel confident things will work out in the end, Cassandra texts me. Only if no spiritual blockage with vice or isolation, I text her in response. What if we had seven more hours of daylight, my friend said tonight, but I like it when it is four pm and I’ve completed my day of obligations and the fading daylight matches a sense of completion. I wore a tan skirt with no tights because they all keep running and a black long sleeve tee and sneakers to do venue tours and other obligations. I thought you were coming from the gym when I saw you wearing shorts, my friend said, after I ran into him on the street. I’m not wearing shorts, but I am wearing sneakers because I keep on procuring mysterious injuries, I said in response. It was a strange December and then a good January, incoming. Good, because it is quiet. Good, because I think I sense things picking up. Can I see a menu, I asked the bartender, at a dive bar, later that night. There is no menu, because this is a dive bar, the bartender told me. Can I get something warm, I asked. The bartender fired up the kettle. Imagine seeking out attention to get only the negative aspects of fame like stalkers and rage, my friends were saying, at the dive bar. Imagine selling out your friends to cloy for low hanging fruit. Imagine turning twenty-six. Imagine playing pool. Imagine moving to Los Angeles, California, or San Salvador, El Salvador, or Geneva, or even Austin I would move anywhere, I was saying to my friends. I would move across the country or even the world and become very sweet or even very bored. My friends were talking about people for whom spectacle is just real life. You assume that everyone is excited to go back to real life, and then you realize that they have no real life. So these are the people that you’re supposed to avoid. And then after that, everyone was talking about religion again. Which is sort of crystallizing to be the topic these days, or even this year. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, January 14 A few good downtown art openings tonight (6pm - 9pm) — At 56 Henry; works by Yifan Jiang and Sareh Imani. At Entrance; Seth Cameron’s first New York exhibition in six years. At Post Times; Elberto Muller solo show.
Inline links: 56 Henry, Yifan Jiang, Sareh Imani, Entrance;, Seth Cameron’s, Post Times, Elberto Muller

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