Matthew Kinlin: Five years on since the original publication, what motivated you to return to and expand the book into Midnight Double Feature: Director’s Cut?
Kenneth M. Cale: Sweat Drenched Press, its original publisher, asked me a couple of times to expand Midnight Double Feature, but I turned them down. However, we noticed there was an issue with the print-on-demand version of MDF, and, as we would have to do another proof anyway, I reluctantly said I would try to do something with it. Soon after that, I hit upon a structural idea which really excited me, and this version of MDF grew from there.
In the original, there were two cinemas, a sci-fi one and a horror one, with a double-bill playing in each. In the expanded version, the two new screenings doubling the length of the book. These are not new genres, though. These are the familiars of the original cinemas, and they share stylistic and thematic elements with the original ones. This gives a symmetry to MDF’s overall shape which wasn’t present in the original. It’s palindromic almost. MDF feels like a complete, finished work to me now. I was so glad C22 wanted to put it out after the demise of Sweat Drenched.
MK: You’re known mainly for digital collage and glitch art. Midnight Double Feature: Director’s Cut combines both handmade and digital collage. Can you talk a little about that?
KMC: A lot of the doubles in MDF are intentional, but something that wasn’t really planned was that the book marked an important change in my work, my transition from analogue collage to digital. The book is almost exactly is half and half. “Trapperkeeper” and “Time’s Wound” were the first wholly digital pieces I did. I remember being struck by the possibilities of glitch and digital and really excited by them. I’ve been exploring those possibilities ever since.
MK: I liked the neon ENTER at the start of each section. It felt perverse and nocturnal, akin to something like the opening credits to Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void or Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive. We are being ushered into a secret space. What were your intentions here?
KMC: A threshold for the dweller. The turning of a page as the opening of a door. Besides, what poet can resist a liminal space or two?
MK: In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes, “When the image is new, the world is new.” The book opens with the beautiful line, “At night, these images slip through the skylight of the mind.” Can you speak about this impressionistic approach?
KMC: I guess the idea comes from Jess Walter’s novel, The Zero. In Walter’s novel, which is about the aftermath of 9/11, the main protagonist suffers from amnesia. The gaps in his memory echo the great holes in the ground where the Twin Towers used to be, and the events of the novel take place in the vicinity of Ground Zero. With MDF, though, it’s more the imagined trauma around a series of events may or may not have taken place. And as we move from cinema to cinema, we’re mapping out this psychic terrain. And as were in among the shadows and the fragments, an impressionistic approach felt the way to go.
MK: In The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa writes, “Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality – it’s all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I’m attending here is a show with another set. And the show I’m attending is myself.” What are we watching in Midnight Double Feature: Director’s Cut?
KMC: The detritus of memory. Guilt or denial ravaging the mind like fire through a forest. The refusal to acknowledge your own actions and culpability. The mind has a way of revealing itself to itself, and if we choose to look away, it will find more engaging ways of bringing things to our attention. Here, that’s through the cinemas. We often watch shows or films as a distraction. But we can only distract ourselves so much for so long.
MK: I kept returning to this short line, “Now is collapsing.” It seems to capture the disruptive elements of your work. You later describe being, “Caught between non-word and non-thought. Between non-thought and non-image. So I linger.” How are you exploring the present?
KMC: The “Now is collapsing” line comes from “Outer Malad”, and that poem was partly inspired by Phillip K Dick’s novel, Martian Time-Slip. The present, or the very fabric reality as we know it, suddenly giving way like a sinkhole is a very PKD concept. Where he would externalize the exploration of that idea, I went internal. With MDF, when I was writing these poems, I felt a growing sense of darkness on the horizon and within us as a society, and I think these poems are exposing that darkness to the light in that hope of exorcising it. Sadly, our daily lives have only accelerated further since these poems were written and that darkness has deepened. The information overload keeps in a constant state of flux, a low-grade feverishness too. I wonder what effect all that has on our psyches. How does this horror and chaos and misinformation we experience as we scroll through image after image on our devices impact us? We all know we could do more to stop these terrible forces who have wormed their way into power – how does our subconscious cope with our own complicity in their actions? These are interesting questions, and ones without easy answers. “Between non-thought and non-image” could be us continuing to hide; but it could also be the last sanctuary we have from the reach of these dark forces.
MK: Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me looks at the ceiling and replies to Donna Hayward, “Why are you so interested in who I’m going to see at night? Night-time is my time.” What is your relationship to night?
KMC: An ambivalent one. I’ve always been attracted to cityscapes at night. I spent about five years living in Asia, and one of my favourite things was exploring cities like Seoul and Osaka when the sun went down. I loved the neon and night air, and I think that’s had a huge impact on my collage aesthetic. On the other hand, I’ve suffered from periodic bouts of insomnia for as long as I can remember, so I’ve spent many nights lying in bed unable to shut off the thought-tap. It’s probably why I’m such a fan of Beckett. I see a lot of Beckett and insomnia in MDF.
MK: William Gibson opens Neuromancer with, “The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Your writing has a dayglo feel with descriptions such as, “u were a fever of fever of brilliante, minarets, coin slots.” There’s a similar blurring of the biological, technological and erotic in your glitch art. What is the appeal of these accelerated elements?
KMC: I’m not sure. I never go into the creation of collages with a preconceived idea of an overall composition, or even with specific images in mind. Usually, I’ll just flick through photos until I come to one that grabs me, then work quickly and instinctively from there. Of course, there will be things you gravitate towards more than others – certain images, colours –but I really try not to question or overthink things. I’m often surprised by what I come up with. I attempt a similar thing with the poems, but the process is slower and more exploratory, the editorial voice harder to please.
MK: The goddess Venus appears throughout Midnight Double Feature. What is her role?
KMC: Right now, I see Venus as a kind of Virgil figure to whoever our Dante is in MDF, guiding them towards integration, or oblivion, or both. But my thoughts on Venus change each time I come back to the work.
MK: This expanded Director’s Cut of Midnight Double Feature features an ending that substitutes J.G. Ballard’s Marilyn Monroe, scorched with radiation burns in The Atrocity Exhibition, for Michelle Williams. You describe, “Michelle Williams supine across Martian landscape. Michelle Williams as landscape.” Can you discuss the coda?
KMC: “Coda” came from watching a film called My Week with Marilyn. In that film we are watching Williams, who experienced the tragic loss of her husband Heath Ledger only a year or so before filming this movie, playing another tragic figure, Monroe, shortly after she suffered a miscarriage in her own life. There are many echoes and reverberations going on there, but I think the poem is mainly about our relationship to the 20th Century. In The Atrocity Exhibition, it’s important to remember that Monroe and Reagan and Kennedy were all contemporary figures when Ballard wrote it. Reagan, for example, wouldn’t even be president for another decade or so after those chapters were written. So – why not use a contemporary actress like Williams for the landscape instead someone like Marilyn Monroe, who died decades earlier? We need to investigate contemporary figures imaginatively to make sense of the world around us, to fully understand what we’re dealing with. Also, I think there’s a need to get out from under the 20th century and its ideas, “the doldrums of past imagination”. Although we’re 25 years into the 21st century, it feels like we are still operating within the framework of the 1900s, still playing by its rules in material ways. It’s like we’re so spooked by the present, we’re afraid to look to the future, and so we end up looking backwards, and holding onto these mid/late-20th Century cultural icons like Monroe or The Beatles like talismans, hoping that they will somehow how lead us unscathed to the 50s and 60s in this century, rather than properly confronting the past as it manifests in our present. Obviously, by heavily referencing The Atrocity Exhibition, a book written in the late 1960s, there’s a fair bit of irony going on in “Coda” too.
MK: Lastly, if you could screen a double feature at the end of the world, what two films would you show?
KMC: Tarkofsky’s Nostalghia. Jim Henson’s Muppet Treasure Island.
This chapbook may be ordered here from C22 Press.
Matthew Kinlin lives and writes in Glasgow. His published works include Teenage Hallucination (Orbis Tertius Press, 2021); Curse Red, Curse Blue, Curse Green (Sweat Drenched Press, 2021); The Glass Abattoir (D.F.L. Lit, 2023); Songs of Xanthina (Broken Sleep Books, 2023); Psycho Viridian (Broken Sleep Books, 2024) and So Tender a Killer (Filthy Loot, 2025).
