With Eyes East

There was this TV special that aired on Bravo in 2004 called The 100 Scariest Movie Moments, and the number 11th most scary moment came from this movie called Audition. You had these talking heads, including three American filmmakers: John Landis, Eli Roth, and Rob Zombie, and they’re going on about how disturbing this movie was. Landis found it so unsettling he didn’t even like it. This is still profound to me. First of all, there’s no better word of mouth for a horror movie, I think, but more than that, I boyishly appreciate this very open appreciation by Americans of foreign cinema — I’ll take that anywhere I can get it. So cool did I find it, it must have rattled around in my brain for long enough that I turned it into an issue. Wait a minute, why this one? What makes Audition different?

JASON: Women have always been cast in horror movies largely as the peril.

JESSE: I think during the ‘70s and ‘80s, especially in the ‘70s you had the-the kind of trope of the final girl getting molded and kind of coming part of pop-pop culture.

PETER: This is why we have final girls instead of final boys. It’s not because of a grand feminist statement about the strength of women, it’s because of the fact that we can’t show men being weak. We can’t show men being frightened. And most of all, we can’t show men being sexualized.

JASON: I am the one in danger, I need rescue, look how helpless I am, you know? So I think especially the 70s and 80s but throughout the years since horror movies began, really, um, they’ve always shied away from being the horrific element, and they’re always put there as something for the horrific element to-to terrorize, you know? They’re the victims.

JESSE: And there wasn’t really a lot of room for females as villains or females as the-the horrific element.

JASON: Being a member of the queer community, I began to think about how horror has represented women in horror and also as the horrific element and often it comes down to things like transgenderism, which is fascinating. You know, we had Norman Bates in Psycho, you know, Buffalo Bills from Silence of the Lambs, Bobbi, Dressed to Kill. Sleepaway Camp, you know, the infamous Angela reveal at the end. You know, and-and these ways of sort of what it means for a female to be the slasher villain, you know, they were always, um, somehow explained away through hysteria. You know, or-or revenge plots.

Of course, this isn’t to say there aren’t women slasher villains. It’s just me strongly suggesting…

PETER: One of the most iconic slasher movie villains of all time was a woman.

JASON: We can’t miss out people like Pamela Voorhees.

PETER: Pamela Voorhees.

JAN: Uh, Friday the 13th.

PETER: Has my heart and soul.

JASON: You know, she-she’s, she’s, like, literally everyone’s grandmother, um, of female slashers.

PETER: She’s just a mom who wants to do right by her son.

JASON: You know, we have Tiffany from Bride of Chucky.

PETER: Tiffany, uh, from the Child’s Play series.

JAN: God, there’s the twist in Sleepaway Camp, so I’m not sure if that counts.

JASON: Mrs. Loomis, Scream 2.

PETER: Uh, some of the Scream villains.

JASON: Jill from Scream 4, uh, spoilers. Sorry about that, but you should’ve seen it by now if you-you haven’t.

PETER: Uh, Urban Legend.

JASON: Beverly Sutphin, Serial Mom. John Waters, it’s, uh, from the ‘90s.

PETER: In the 2000s, there’s a movie named Orphan.

JASON: Mother Martha as well, from, oh, I’ve actually forgotten the movie that Mother Martha is in.

PETER: And then even more so in the 2000s and 2010s, H-Happy Death Day.

JASON: You know, we had Lori from Happy Death Day. Although can you count her as a slasher killer when she kind of only kills one person once, according to her?

PETER: You have a whole lot of female villains who are part of slasher groups, um, like the Firefly Family from House of 1,000 Corpses / The Devil’s Rejects, uh, you have two of the villains in The Strangers.

JAN: I Spit on Your Grave comes to mind.

JESSE: If you look at a movie like I Spit on Your Grave, t-the female is the main force of the violence in the movie, but that-that’s completely justified within the context of the movie. So, you know, that-that’s kind of as close as you get.

JAN: But I think the formula is mostly a guy going around and killing people.

PETER: There are more of them than you would think, but we mainly, when we think about, like, the big slasher villains…

JAN: You had Halloween, you have Jason, you have The Nightmare on Elm Street.

PETER: Basically we’re talking about Freddy, Jason and Michael Myers.

JAN: Texas Chain Saw Massacre, those are all the classics, and those are all guys.

JASON: We don’t have, uh, a Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees equivalent of, just, the shapeless evil in a, in a female form, which I think is fascinating.

The hysteria I saw from those filmmakers is matched by a broader critical consensus — this is one of those movies. It’s got a reputation. And just look at the key image here and tell me what you see. That’s a lady, and she’s holding something, which automatically suggests action — women, apparently discontent with nouns, have turned to verbs. The representation of male slashers and horror villains is not only numerically superior and possessed of a greater cultural cache but also almost uniform — more tangible, easier to reach for as a default. If it’s normal, even perversely, the female equivalent would be at the very least surprising. And maybe we don’t know, in 2004, to contain that shock? Are we telling on ourselves when this freaks me out? Put another way, is it sexist to be scared by Audition?

JAN: No. It’s not sexist to be scared by Audition.

There’s some horror movies, I go, “Well this is unpleasant. Why do I want to be here?” You know. Ugh.

JESSE: Most of my horror experience comes from the West.

JASON: You know,  being in Scotland, uh, and especially being the age when the Internet was still so early, Japanese cinema and what it was doing was so unknown to me.

JAN: At that time, in America, they were putting out all those, uh, really cheap, formulaic films. You didn’t really relate to most of the people and you just wanted them to die. But when you watch, like, a Japanese horror film, they were more cerebral, they were social commentary.

JESSE: Uh, Ringu and Ju-On.

JAN: This is what’s actually happening now, but we’re going to use these ghosts as a metaphor.

JASON: From what I know of Japanese cinema at this time, it was a time when the international audience was starting to take notice.

JAN: Any foreign film, even, like French or Spanish or Norwegian, they all have different cultural influences of how they deal with the scary thing, versus, like, the generic American formula.

JESSE: Tons and tons of remakes got-got spit out in the early 2000s.

JAN: Like, I feel like they’re willing to push it a little bit more.

JASON: I have really mixed feelings about Takashi Miike. I-I think that his-his movies can either be brilliant or they can completely fall flat for me. Uh, and it seems like there’s no middle ground.

JAN: I like that he does body horror and how does it. It looks very practical. It looks and feels real when you watch it. So it gives you that extra creep factor. And extra uncomfortable factor. Um, and the stories are just so jacked up.

How do I communicate my feelings about Takashi Miike? They’re complicated, and as silly as that is, it’s inescapable.

JASON: Takashi Miike is-is almost kind of daring me to look past this just crazy violence.

JESSE: Well I don’t know if I, if I say I enjoy his work.

JAN: I used to pride myself on watching gory films, so whenever I saw Takashi Miike’s name on anything, I wanted to watch it.

JASON: The-the amount of blood this guy will put in his movies is insane.

He sets the bar pretty high, and he’s my go-to when I think of cinema violence. If the early gore-fests of Peter Jackson or a film like Riki-Oh are tempered by comedy, Takashi Miike probably thinks his movies are pretty funny, but there’s no tempering.

JAN: I think the-the hardest scene that I ever watched was with, uh, Ichi the Killer. That scene where he’s, like, hooked and they’re spilling grease on him.

Everyone has a line, and mine is women. But Miike’s not some punk, you know? There’s nothing subliminal or deniable about it. And he’s an artist, and that just fucks me up. Take that moment from Shinjuku Triad Society which I’m not gonna show you, because I don’t want to look at it again. You got this overhead shot, it’s an interrogation room, and the policeman takes the woman, slams her onto the table, takes the metal chair, slams that onto the woman — smash cut to the title screen. And that’s, like, really cool… But then, how much does he mean it?

JASON: As a therapist, it’s so hard to sit and watch it and not start to analyze, sort of metacontextualize the-the direction and the man behind the camera. You know, so, I have to really reel myself back in. ‘Cause I’m like, “I want to know who you are. What is this? Why?”

Do I believe Takashi Miike is sexist? I don’t think you can function in society if legitimately containing all the rage against women he’s depicted on screen, so probably, he’s just like you and me — average. He’s a jokester. All of his movies, of which there are about 100, are funny in some way or funny for being deadly serious, because he’s all over the map with genre.

JESSE: He’s kind of scattershot, he’s all over the place. If he has ideas, that maybe-maybe two or three of ideas, two or three of his movies could be congealed into one more cohesive story.

JASON: And video game voiceovers? And I was like, “What?” It’s like, pick a genre, dude, like chillax.” No More Heroes 2? I was like, “Okay, great.”

What drives him as an artist? What does he believe? What does he think about women? He has put everything on the board, like a Where’s Waldo, and we’re just scouring, looking for that red and white sweater of his truth. And that really only becomes a problem with a movie that feels as deliberate as Audition. This is a movie that comports itself, where a lot of what I’ve seen from him is throwing everything against the wall like walls insulted his mother. Not only that, but in sharp contrast to his usual shtick, this movie is notorious for an extensive sequence where a woman brutally tortures a man.

JAN: So the guy’s wife dies.

JESSE: Him and his friend decide to use an audition for a film as a front for him to meet a prospective wife.

JAN: Which was gross.

JASON: During the audition process, he finds this girl he’s very enamored with. Um, she’s very quiet, and over the course of the movie, he develops a relationship with her. He ignores a ton of red flags.

JESSE: It just kind of spirals out of control at that point.

(speaking Japanese)

JAN: So in 1999 it came out.

JESSE: I-I think I first saw it probably in ‘04 or ‘05.

JASON: I saw it upon its DVD release in the UK, so that was 2004, so I would’ve been 16. Still a child, although I’m sure at that age I would’ve told you I was an adult.

JAN: A bunch of my friends totally pirated this film, watched it and then, like, kept talking about it. They wouldn’t tell me, like, what happened, they would just say, “Dude, the last 15 minutes, the last 15 minutes, last 15 minutes, yo.”

JESSE: Always been a big horror fan, and at that point in time, I made some new friends who were also horror fans, and that– Audition was-was talked up. It was hyped up as the-the big movie to see, like, the-the absolute grossest.

PETER: It’s cropped up in many lists of best horror movies or scariest horror movies.

JAN: And they were like, “Highest walkout rate ever.”

JASON: Like everyone, you know, I saw the picture of Asami holding the piano wire with the rubber gloves and I was like, “Ooh, this looks brutal, yeah,” you know, I found it in the, in the strange and international section at HMV.

JESSE: We finally watched it and-and I was like, “What-what did I just see?” You know, like…

JAN: I’d watched so many gory things and then I get to this film and it’s– it broke me.

JESSE: My immediate reaction was, um, I feel like I need to watch this again, but I don’t really know if I want to.

JAN: I don’t know what it is about those last 15– I have seen so many gory things and crazy stuff, but something about– I guess how it was delivered?

It’s my belief you don’t make a movie this effective by accident. And so we have all these competing ideas, like Japanese auteur filmmaker, 100 movie-filmography, purity of concept, stilted presentation — this is world-class horror in 15 minutes inside a two-hour movie. What’s that hour 45 about? You know, something I noticed when talking to people about Audition, and this is consistent with my own experience, you forget a lot of the details.

JAN: Uh, so, this guy. (clears throat) I guess his wife left him?

HARRISON: She died.

JAN: Oh, she died. Okay. That’s even worse.

I forget about the secretary, the girlfriend character, you might forget why he’s single, or who the victims are. This is a mystery unto to itself. You forget the contours of the production, because when you look at that hour and 45 minutes, it’s not very good.

JASON: I went in with my heart racing, ready to experience all this blood and viscera and instead I got a domestic movie for about an hour?

JAN: Oh, my God, this movie kind of drags.

JESSE: I think some of the-the things that work in the movie weren’t intentional.

JASON: I feel like I’ve had to do my own work, you know, the movie has not given me something to work with. I’ve made something out of the movie.

The movie’s also got some of the Miike quirks, like those really long takes of static wide shots which usually grind his movies to a halt. Watch the first ten minutes of Dead or Alive and then just turn it off.

JESSE: There’s two or three scenes in the movie that kind of always get brought up or-or steal all the attention, but I think a lot of it works in the slower scenes are the-the… the more buildup works as horror and then just as storytelling in and of itself.

JASON: Overall I think it’s a good movie, you know, I– not brilliant, I would not say it’s brilliant, by any means, because I think it’s too ambiguous and unclear and not intentionally.

JESSE: That’s a lot of the stuff that Miike doesn’t get praise for, that he can actually do, even though that’s not what he-he’s known for.

JASON: So I think that he’s… he’s strange, he’s dichotomous, and at the same time, I think, “I don’t know which part you want me to focus on?” you know, so I find it ultimately directionless.

But what if the mundanity and flatness is part of the design? If easing the audience into a false sense of security, even tricking them into thinking this movie ought to be underestimated, is something to pull off, is that what he did? Well, Audition is originally a book, by a fellow named Ryu Murakami, and reading the Wikipedia description and corroborating testimonials from literary critics, it’s the telling of a sequence of events — straightforward — like our plot summary. Miike’s film appears to be, then, a transformative adaptation. So no matter what it is, he’s doing something. And you can’t deny the results. So what the hell is he doing?

JASON: The idea that I have is that it-it does have a point it’s trying to make, and we’re all trying to figure out what that point is, so that’s a fail against the movie.

It’s a puzzle, but on that metatextual level — questions like “What’s wrong with this director?” and “Is this really the movie?” so we’re not immersed. It’s an imperfect conclusion, but let’s call it an invitation to return, like James Sunderland. You watch the movie the first time and it’s a shock to the system and maybe you lose some of what you’d been thinking. Second time through, you start picking up on things. This is the second time I’ve seen Audition and I had it wrong. I was good with the straightforward account, but this time, I found that not everything that happens… happened.

PETER: Asami drugs Aoyama. But the thing is that, before he actually drinks the drug, he is already experiencing hallucinations.

JESSE: I watched it last night, me and my nephew were sitting there talking, like, “Where was the line?” Like, “Did it happen, did it not happen?” Like, “Did– you know, did the guy get– did he get his foot cut off? Did he get tortured? O-Or did he wake up?”

PETER: This particular movie which is, it’s very stylishly done, it walks a very fine line between a realism, a hyperrealism, and a fantasy version of itself.

JESSE: I feel like my opinion would change each time I watched it, which I guess is a testament to, you know, to how… the filmmaking itself.

PETER: As our protagonist starts to become more enmeshed with, uh, our antagonist, sort of more saturated colors, particularly reds come in. Um, until we just start moving into straight-up fantasy territory.

JESSE: When you-you have him having dinner with her, uh, the little montage they’re having dinner, and then you cut back to that later and more is revealed, is that more of the story coming out or is that him retroactively putting stuff in that-that he– did he block it out or is he just making that up?

PETER: As the tension builds, the film itself winds up becoming more unreal and more colorful.

All of the visions of her apartment and the guy in the bag are based on nothing. He doesn’t actually visit her place. And on top of everything, she’s a bit of a blank slate. Her story doesn’t check out — although people have any reason to lie in that sort of situation, even the men are lying — but she’s also wearing all white and a lot less makeup than the other auditioning girls. He could easily imprint a story onto her.

JASON: For me, wh– everything happens up until the hotel room, when they sleep together. And I think after that, and for me, we have two branching plotlines. One where the warnings are founded, and one where the warnings are not founded.

JESSE: I feel like a lot of the movie is-is in the main character’s head, either out of guilt, maybe he-he’s… making assumptions about the character.

PETER: I think I lean more towards the torture really did happen, than that it completely didn’t happen.

JASON: And once she disappears, what we are watching is the, we’ll call it the “bad timeline,” where she is totally lying to him and she is gonna kill him. And she does suffer all this horrible stuff and isn’t over it, and we go down that path leading to him being drugged, tortured and then her eventually being murdered. But at the same time what we get towards the end when he starts to flash out of it, when he’s in, when he’s really in the midst of the horror, what we actually get, another side of it, is the alternative timeline where she is more open to him, you know, she really, she tells him much more of the truth.

JESSE: The-the ending, the very ending, you know, the last shot of the movie is her-her staring at him — presumably she broke her back — you know, and she, and she’s reciting the line she said earlier about being so happy.

JASON: You know, I-I’m really struck with the “I want to tell you the truth,” you know, “I want you to know all of me” stuff that she says. I think in that alternate timeline towards the end, that’s what she’s actually doing. And it allows him to respond openly and she can accept him. So then what happens is they-they go on and have a relationship together that doesn’t involve her killing him. So to me, I mean, to me that’s two-two very different outcomes, but you know, I quite enjoy the idea of it being kind of allegorical, albeit slight-slightly conservative and allegorical. And kind of looking at, “Well, what if?” “What would he do here?” “What about that?” You know, and kind of offering you alternatives and allowing you to decide which version of events did happen.

I also think this is a story about guilt. The main character cheated on his dying wife with a s– with a– with someone who he sees everyday — I almost said “subordinate,” but I don’t know how much that would’ve factored into the morality of him, the character, or the movie itself — at the time.

JESSE: I do think it’s a film that would almost work better present day than it did then, with, uh, with, you know, a lot of stuff like the Me Too Movement, a lot of people getting called out, for being abus– uh, abusing their power.

PETER: Whether we’re talking about the H– going on in Hollywood or if we look at the pickup artists or the incel movement or any of these sort of things that just reduce women down to basically indistinguishable mass that are accepted or rejected based on, like, minor variations and not something you have to personally make much of an effort to accommodate.

I think the main character views his own attraction as lecherous — and yet he takes no action against it. The son’s high school girlfriend — he moves away from her, but she’s still there in the dream. And then with Asami, he recognizes it’s a fraudulent scenario, but falls in love. So the darkness at the heart of the film is not hormonal psycho rage like in those other ‘90s “women are evil movies,” and I don’t think it’s revenge, either. I think it’s an almost theological belief in the righteousness of his own punishment. This is a Silent Hill movie. And that’s just my interpretation — copyright infringement.

JASON: Rewatching the movie recently, I was really struck by how much they discussed loneliness. How much connection that Aoyama misses.

JESSE: Throughout the movie, multiple times, he turns the picture away of his wife.

JAN: I don’t know if it was like a way for her to regain control of something. What she did at the end was just to make sure that he could only live with her. So she was, like, the ultimate yandere over there.

PETER: When we get down to it, it is, it is really about the danger of how this sort of misogyny just blinds people.

JASON: But I think what really strikes me with Audition and what I take from Audition is about gender roles. Um, and also about power differentials, um, in society.

JESSE: I think it’s, it says a lot about guilt. I think the main character has guilt. Um, being-being, you know, a widower and-and trying to get back in that– the dating game or-or marriage, ‘cause he-he says he– at one point he’s gonna marry her after-after, like, a date? Two dates?

JASON: Asami is-is going to give him oral sex and then all of a sudden it’s the receptionist– the secretary, sorry, and then it’s, you know, the son’s friend, you know, and-and I think it’s this kind of psychosexual guilt about the-the objectificatoin of-of these women and kind of, you know, throwing them away and emotionally closing, so it’s-it’s a very, it’s a very powerful theme.

PETER: That women cease to be unique individuals and just become the sort of vague ideal, and that if you meet enough of them, you will eventually just happen across this platonic ideal of a woman that– who will then accommodate herself around you.

JASON: About how the, sort of, the male gaze is put towards women and how women are meant to conform to that. Um, you know, I think which is really– comes out in the audition sequence, uh, which has about every genre you can imagine. You know, you go from the kind of awkward girl showing suicide scars, you know, to girl taking her top off and flashing her breasts to, you know, to-to people saying they don’t want to be there, you know, and….

PETER: There is a certain brand of criticism of this particular movie that views it in terms of karmic justice.

JASON: You know, Aoyama is punished for his objectification of women.

JESSE: I don’t think she’s shown in an unfavorable light, as-as vicious as she is at the end of the movie. Y-You clearly see what– the horrible things that-that was done to her. If they’re real.

JASON: I don’t think that he’s punished for the right thing. Asami’s k– uh, inflicting of this torture on him is something that’s not overly about him, it’s about a kind of projection of him in her mind, so he’s not particularly punished for his own actions, his own actions are simply led– simply lead to him being open to her abuse. Although that’s a da– I think that’s a dangerous word to use with Asami. I heard it, heard it in my head and I went, “Oh, wait, hang on.” (laughs) So… guess I want to backtrack on the word abuse from Asami.

JESSE: Uh, I like that she’s shown, she’s shown to be vulnerable in the movie. But– but she is damn creepy when she gets down to, uh, to the violence. When she’s just, “Deeper, deeper,” when she’s, ugh, the needles man, those– needles in the eyes, those really got me– And the foot, throwing the foot against the window, I was like, “Oh, that is just… too much.”

JAN: And she did it on the floor of his own home, so it was also kind of like a partial home invasion, like, um, that whole thing where they always say that people are usually murdered by or hurt by, uh, people that they know, that really kicked that, too.

JESSE: Looking at, looking at everything she uses, all the implements she uses in the movie, between the-the needles, the garrote, everything is very fine and delicate, whereas you look at something like, you know, American movie, your guy uses a machete, a butcher knife, something large and very phallic, like, what does that say? You know, this– what-what– something’s being said there.

PETER: As western audiences, we have a strain of narrative that comes from, uh, Christian morality plays, which were entirely about people getting what they deserved from the perspective of the writer.

JASON: Well, you know, if you, if you have sex, you will die. Especially if you’re a woman. Little less common, you know, men die because they make mistakes in western slashers. Women die because they have undesirable traits, you know, if she has an opinion, she will die. You know, is she gratuitous in her sexuality? She will die.

PETER: There’s a lot of film criticism and there’s a lot of criticism about horror movies that centers around what the view– what– what views the horror movie itself, uh, has about justice. Audition, it jumps out at a western audience because of the fact that it does things that we do not do in western, uh, horror movies.

JASON: My, you know– w-when I was drawn to Audition, I was drawn to the idea that it was a woman committing that violence. I can say that, and that’s a kind of sexist idea.

JESSE: Somewhere, it’s just kind of in-in our brains that-that it– that doesn’t seem as-as likely as a male serial killer, Jason Voorhees-type character slashing people up, or doing violent, bloody things. So we see it and it’s a shock to our system.

JAN: If it was a guy doing it to a girl, we’d be so desensitized because it happens all the time in horror films, like, women being brutalized.

JASON: You know what? I wanted my female Michael Myers to come out with the knife, you know?

JESSE: And of course, uh, you know, you get a-a pretty girl doing something like that, and it, and it’s just– throws everything off.

PETER: Masculinity within the horror genre, uh, does not allow for things like being frightened or being terrorized.

JAN: And she looked like she was enjoying herself.

PETER: If they do get frightened or terrorized, then that reads as weak to the American audiences, and that they deserve to die rather than being sympathetic.

JAN: When the guy looks like these are– they’re enjoying themselves it usually looks kind of like detached and metnally not there. And that glee actually added to, like, how fucking terrifying that scene was. (chuckles)

JASON: The idea that a woman is capable of that violence should not be surprising. And if it is surprising, we need to look at why it’s surprising.

PETER: On a fundamental level, he does not have the ability to discern that she could be a predator.

JESSE: I think there is a double standard, um, even if it’s only because we’ve been conditioned that females are the victims.

JASON: I think that-that’s really the theme that is running through Aoyama-Aoyama’s story, is, you know, who is the woman he sees versus who is the woman she is.

PETER: Like, I think what-what makes Audition stand out, particularly for people who are in the horror industry is the fact that it does center on a female villain, but she is terrorizing a man.

JASON: I wouldn’t want to villainize people who are scared by that, but I would want them to consider it and look at it and try and understand it and try to change that perception for themselves.

Rather than a morality play, it’s a movie engineered for an emotional response, and in that regard, it is successful. And has been, clearly. Perhaps the men who have a strong reaction to it are not necessarily sexist but feeling guilty — and that’s something we can all relate to.

JAN: I’m on Twitter @janniballector.

PETER: Well, I have my own horror movie podcast that you have been on more than once. If you want to hear Harrison talk about Godzilla, you can definitely find me on my own podcast, uh, which is Dead Times, which is a horror movie podcast where we talk about horror movies. And also, Cats, the musical. And then you can also find me on the Twitters @Loki1001.

JESSE: I’ve kind of been on an extended hiatus for a while, um, I-I’ve had some babies, so, that, uh, kind of happens, but, uh, I did have– do have– a-a Dragon Ball podcast with my good friend, and I believe your good friend, Donovan Morgan Grant. Uh, that’s called The Next Dimension, you can find on Apple iTunes, uh, Pocket Casts, Spotify, I believe. All that good stuff. Um, we have done an episode in a while, um, but we did cover Dragon Ball from start to finish, Dragon Ball Z, anyway, start to finish. Uh, and that was, that was a wild ride. Um, I’m very proud of that.

JASON: The only thing I would want to promote, uh, is good mental health. Uh, you know, um, a-as I said, I’m a working therapist. I am doing online sessions, so regardless of where you are in the world, I am open to working with you. Uh, I especially work, I mean, I work with everyone, but I do especially have, um, queer, LGBTQIA+, uh, experience, uh, you know, so if you do want to work with me, you can find me at autonomycounselling.org. Uh, that’s counselling with two L’s, and if you want, you can send me an email at autonomycounselling@hotmail.com. Even if it’s just to ask a question, reach out. Right now within the pandemic, mental health is just so important, so I can be a structured help for you or I can just point you in good directions.