This is the grave of Carole Lombard.

Born in 1908 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Jane Peters grew up with money. Her family was locally prominent with money that went back generations. However, her parents hated each other and in 1914, her mother took the kids and moved to Los Angeles. The parents did not divorce, but she basically grew up with a single mother. Even so, money was not a problem–both sides of the family had it. She was a very athletic child. One day, in 1921, the director Allan Dwan was looking for some cute kids for a picture named A Perfect Crime. Lombard was just old enough (and just young enough too) that when he saw Lombard dominating a baseball game, he thought she’d be perfect for his film. Her mom was down with that and a career was born.

It took awhile for her career to take off though. She actually screen tested for the role of the girl in Chaplin’s The Gold Rush–one of the 10 best films ever made–but didn’t get it. But because her mother knew the columnist Louella Parsons, she got a screen test in 1924, won a contract with Fox, and became Carole Lombard because Jane Peters was too boring (Jane Wyman was evidently not too boring for some reason, even though her actual name was Sarah Mayfield; who can tell what was a good name for an actor back then). She did a bunch of smaller parts and a couple of bigger ones. But in 1927, she was in a nasty car accident and had scarring on her face that required plastic surgery. She thought her career was over. But Mack Sennett came to the rescue. He had cast her in some stuff and he was a big fan and he dedicated himself to promoting her big time when she was ready to work again. The scar never went away, but the makeup artists took care of it. Sennett lived up to his pledges too, giving her the nickname “Carole of the Curves” to promote her beauty.

Luckily for Lombard, her return also coincided with the rise of the talkies and she was good at those, unlike a lot of silent actors. She was smart and witty and funny. Comedies would eventually become her mainstay and she credited Sennett with helping her here–she really wanted to be a dramatic actress but Sennett had trained her in comedy. She started working with William Powell, they fell in love despite being very different (he was something of a snob by reputation and was much older, she was a big time party girl and swore like a sailor) and got married. That didn’t hurt her career either. They divorced in 1933 but remained friends.

Lombard hit the big time when Howard Hawks cast her in Twentieth Century with John Barrymore. This pioneering screwball comedy was a huge hit and made Lombard a real star. She became a queen of the screwballs. She started working a lot with Fred MacMurray, notably in 1935’s Hands Across the Table, directed by Mitchell Leisen, another major comedic success. She and MacMurray had great chemistry and they soon did other films such as The Princess Comes Across, Swing High Swing Low, and True Confession together. 1936’s My Man Godfrey was another classic screwball, this time working with her ex-husband William Powell and directed by Gregory La Cava. She and Powell of course had fantastic chemistry. Both were nominated for Academy Awards. Then came Nothing Sacred, in 1937, with Frederic March and directed by William Wellman. This was her color film debut and was another major success.

In 1936, Lombard became serious with Clark Gable. They married in 1939. The marriage was not without its problems, including Gable fucking anything that moved and her wanting a family but being unable to get pregnant. She also converted to the Baha’i religion around this time, which her mother had done a long time ago. She was working less of course due to all this and she didn’t want to do comedy anymore. She wanted to be a serious actress. She wanted to win the Best Actress Oscar too and so took a bunch of roles in films that were well-received but didn’t really put her over the top. These include John Cromwell’s 1939 film Made for Each Other with Jimmy Stewart, Cromwell’s other film from that year, In Name Only with Cary Grant, George Stevens’ 1940 film Vigil in the Night, and Garson Kanin’s 1940 film They Knew What They Wanted. She did get a nomination for the latter, but did not win.

The problem with these films wasn’t that they were bad. It’s that audiences wanted to see Lombard in comedies so they didn’t sell well. In 1941, she decided to return to comedy with Alfred Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which was very much what the public wanted to see. He later claimed that he only did the film as a favor to Lombard and it’s true that it is about the most un-Hitch like film in his catalog. Then came To Be or Not To Be, which one of my all-time favorite comedies. Ernst Lubitsch directed her and a hilariously self-centered Jack Benny as actors in Nazi-occupied Poland who get involved in the resistance. Her part was actually fairly small, but she got top billing and so was OK with that.

The film was released in February 1942. But it was released with great sadness, despite being unbelievably hilarious. That’s because in January 1942, Lombard was in Indiana raising money for war bonds. She was such a huge star and was patriotic and people happily paid to see her. She raised over $2 million on that trip. She was flying home and after refueling in Vegas, the plane was rising and crashed into the side of a mountain. Everyone on board was killed, which also included 15 soldiers. Lombard was 33 years old. The reason for the crash was that the nation was scared about Japanese attacks so the lights that would normally guide planes out of the Las Vegas airport were shut off and….welp. Her next film was to be They All Kissed the Bride. Joan Crawford got the role to replace her and then donated her entire salary from it to the Red Cross to honor Lombard.

Carole Lombard is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California. Gable would marry twice more, but when he died, he asked to be buried next to Lombard.

If you would like this series to visit some of the people Lombard worked with, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Jack Benny is in Culver City, California and John Barrymore is in Philadelphia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

The post Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,989 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

When I was in high school, a YouTuber uploaded a parody trailer for The Shining, recut as a heartwarming, father-son comedy. All it took was a well-placed “Solsbury Hill” needle drop, along with some clever editing and a cloying new voice-over, and the Stanley Kubrick horror classic now feels family-friendly. I was thinking about that parody trailer and the ways in which a filmmaker can manipulate her viewer as I was watching Dolls, a new short film written and directed by Geena Rocero and produced by Lilly Wachowski. It concerns a private investigator who’s been sent to infiltrate a purported cult that claims to be a self-help group, exclusively for trans women. (From Louise Weard’s latest Castration Movie installment to Grace Byron’s new novel, Herculine, separatist politics abound in trans women’s art of late — understandably so, I should think.) The score, by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Susie Ibarra, is appropriately unsettling: a mix of lingering piano riffs and sudden, intense bursts of strings, all of which reinforces the framing that, yes, this is a cult. But the moments of tenderness between its members as they bond and process their trauma at times left me wondering otherwise. Is it all just music and angles? Does a gathering of trans women only seem sinister because we are always, even perhaps to ourselves, going to be seen as suspect?

Dolls screened as part of NewFest in New York on Monday after premiering last month in Atlanta; you can stream it here through October 21. Rocero’s project was shown alongside seven other short films by and about trans women (personal favorites also included Nana Duffuor’s Rainbow Girls and Kylie Aoibheann’s The Dysphoria), and it did so to a sold-out house, something that delighted Rocero though didn’t exactly surprise her. In a phone interview a few days before the screening, she told me that she knew the event would be packed. “I sent all my friends texts and emails in all caps with stars around it, ‘This will sell out! Buy your tickets!’” she said. “Now, from what I’ve been hearing the past few days, there are no more tickets left. Looks at my texts! I told you, guys!” Still, she continued, “it’s very exciting,” as is the future of Dolls, which Rocero may or may not be expanding into something more feature length, possibly alongside Wachowski. She hinted at the possibility over the course of our interview, during which we also discussed her enduring fascination with “unhinged female characters” and coming into her own as a teenage “pageant diva” in the Philippines.

Hi, Geena! Forgive me for being so bundled up. The temperature dropped here in New York, and my big prewar building hasn’t turned on the heat yet. Where are you calling in from?

I’m in New York, too. I live here. There’ve been a lot of exciting things happening with the New York Film Festival and all. I’ve been seeing a lot of incredible films. Sentimental Value, by Joachim Trier, was so emotional. I cried … I don’t know how many times because it’s about sisters and it made me remember my sisters. I saw The Secret Agent — I’ve been a fan of the director Kleber Mendonça Filho for a while. Its setting is in a rural part of Brazil, and all of the shots of the fiesta celebrations reminded me of when I was joining pageants in a rural mountain province in the Philippines. I also got to see Claire Denis—

She’s one of your favorite filmmakers, right?

She’s the reason! I got to see her new film, The Fence. I got into her work at the beginning of the pandemic, right around when I was writing my memoir, Horse Barbie, and not long after Criterion launched its streaming platform. My dear sister, the filmmaker Isabel Sandoval, was the one who told me about the Criterion Channel, which had a showcase of Claire Denis’s films at the time, and I just went crazy with it. I love Beau Travail in particular. Watching that film was what made me decide that I was going to become a filmmaker — scripted films, particularly, because I’ve directed and produced unscripted, documentary-style projects before. It was all so revelatory, digging through her filmography, and then to be watching her new film at the festival and listening to her speak, it was just this [sighs], just such a full-circle moment. Oh, and then I’m planning to see Jafar Panahi’s new film that won the Palme d’Or.

You mentioned your memoir and the documentaries you’ve made. Obviously, Dolls is fiction. What does fiction allow you to do as a storyteller that, say, sticking to the straight facts of a thing would not?

I used to have a production company that was only producing documentaries, docuseries — nonfiction projects. When I was writing my memoir, I had this realization that I have lived this, you know, very cinematic life. The trans beauty pageants. The very strict, pageant-oriented world of Catholicism we have in the Philippines. Did you know that our trans beauty pageants exist because of Catholic celebrations? We celebrate many different saints in the Philippines. Usually it’s a five-day celebration, and on the Sunday the main event for the whole family is a trans beauty pageant right on the street. Kids go, moms holding their babies … Sometimes, it’s held right in front of the church. I’ve done many, many pageants where the dressing room was in the church, in front of all the saints, and it’s nothing! It’s just part of our culture. Writing about all of that in my memoir made me want to play even bigger. Fiction just allows me to play and explore on a greater level. The pageant diva in me still wants to perform, but creating worlds to play in through writing and directing take precedence these days.

Let’s talk Dolls. One of my favorite things about the film is how ambiguous it remains for much of its run. There’s a group at the center of it. We’re told it’s a cult that claims to be a self-help group for trans women, and the unsettling score and palpably sinister vibe of it all certainly reinforces that framing. But while I was watching it, I did start to wonder if it actually was empowering these women and if it appeared sinister only from the outside in because a room full of trans women is inherently suspect to some people. I found that tension and confusion really interesting. Where did the idea for it come from?

Some people close to me were going through some really intense, painful experiences. One friend was dealing with chronic pain taking over their body. Another was going through the emotional pain of a breakup. Another was grappling with the aftermath of childhood trauma. As I was processing all of this with them, the idea for a story about group-therapy sessions came about, which I then twisted to make something more sinister out of it from the music to the looks. It’s a short, so it had to be a self-contained story, so there is an ending that kind of hints at what was actually happening. But I did try to create a world that could be returned to.

Would you expand on the story, if the opportunity presented itself?

Oh, it is definitely happening. [Laughs.] That’s as much as I can say, but yeah, it’s being developed.

Does whatever it is you’re hinting at have anything to do with a certain producer, i.e., Lilly Wachowski?

Umm … Let’s just say it’s being expanded. That’s as much as I can say. [Laughs.]

Got it. Along with writing, directing, and producing the short, you also star as the leader of the cult at its center. How would you describe her?

I’m definitely inspired by Glenn Close in various films, Tilda Swinton in Suspiria … I’m really interested in unhinged female characters and really wanted to explore the duality of how charming she would have to be while still having this sinister aspect really oozing out of her. I wanted to create the sense that there’s definitely a manipulative aspect to her, but at the same time I don’t want to give too much away upfront.

I love that you brought up Suspiria. Your use of movement in Dolls really made me think of Suspiria while watching.

Choreographed by Tyler Ashley!

Who also plays a cult member.

I was very interested in using choreography as a way to better manage an ensemble cast, to have a lot of people onscreen without it feeling overstuffed. Choreographed movement allowed me to do that.

There’s a moment at the end when Valeria, played by Macy Rodman, smiles and does this one-arm movement to Yên Sen’s Yan, who then does it back to her, call-and-response style. It said so much about how deeply imbricated Yan had become without having to spell it out. You mentioned Isabel Sandoval earlier. I’m curious, because obviously in real life we’re allowed to be friends with other trans women without it being a sign that we’ve fallen into some kind of cult, who are the trans women artists you turn to for commiseration, and support?

Isabel is definitely one of those people. When I first finished this film’s script, I sent it to a trusted circle of people who I know will be able to take our friendship out of it and give me unbiased feedback. Zackary Drucker is another person that I talk to all the time about these things. I speak a lot with my trans mom that gave me the nickname “Horse Barbie.” I’ve known her since I was 15, back when I was first starting in trans pageants. What amazing, beautiful years those were, becoming this trans pageant diva, traveling all over the Philippines, and learning the ropes to make it work wherever we were going. I go back to those elements to find my sense of play and sense of freedom when I’m creating things. I’m very inspired by watching other performers. Like I said, I love seeing unhinged, complicated female characters — trans women, particularly. I love attending Baby Tea Brunch of Charlene and Tyler Ashley, and I obviously loved getting to watch the late, great Cecilia Gentili in her one-woman show, Red Ink.

More and more trans filmmakers have attracted mainstream notice and support in recent years: Isabel Sandoval, as we’ve discussed, and also people like Louise Weard, Nyala Moon, Jane Schoenbrun, Morgan M. Page, Chase Joynt, Tourmaline, Kristen Lovell, Sam Feder, and obviously many more than I can name off the top of my head. Simultaneously, there’s been an anti-trans backlash in just about every sphere of American life, from politics to culture and entertainment. I’m curious, from your vantage point, how this may have affected the kind of opportunities trans filmmakers have access to.

I recognize that. With Horse Barbie, I was shopping it around for a bit, but then there was the strike and now with that political context, I know that I’m still pushing it as an artist. It’s heartbreaking to see what’s happening, to really see what’s happening in my industry, but I’d like to believe that they’re still there, the producers and possible partners who will perfectly match whatever it is we’re making. As much craziness is happening, people are still speaking up. There are people like Cate Blanchett and the Duplass brothers providing funding and support for trans filmmakers. I also know that I’ll always be obsessed with creating, with following that instinct. Creating is a form of self-preservation for me. It’s a spiritual refuge whether I’m writing or researching or tracking down a book I want to read for some bigger project. Creation never ends.

Related

• Making It As a Model Meant Hiding I Was Trans
• Do You Ever Fantasize About Running Away?

dredgen-dumbass:

Ds9 newspaper again

Aphorisms from Austin O’Malley’s Keystones of Thought, 1914:

• Revenge is often like biting a dog because the dog bit you.
• Education is only a ladder to gather fruit from the tree of knowledge, not the fruit itself.
• Humility is the sister of humor.
• Think what you have to say, and then don’t say it.
• Men that believe only what they understand can write their creed on a postage-stamp.
• A fallen lighthouse is more dangerous than a reef.
• The best blood will at some time get into a fool or a mosquito.
• Comedy smiles from a neutral intellect; humor laughs from a favoring intellect.
• An essential quality of beauty is aloofness.
• The picturesque is the romantic seen.
• The worst miser is the learned man that will not write.
• To laugh at yourself is real life, never acting.
• Put your purse in your head and you will not be robbed.
• A critic at best is only a football coach.
• A gentleman seldom meets rude persons.
• It is yesterday that makes to-morrow so sad.

“A little learning striving to explain a great subject is like an attempt to light up a cathedral with a single taper, which does no more than to show for an instant one foolish face.”

Recently I, like a lot of people who make their living by creating things, have been thinking a lot about so-called AI. I have been forced to do this because so many companies have been stealing the output of people like me in order to train their large language models, despite the fact that we own the copyright to them. I find myself, along with thousands upon thousands of others, in a ridiculous situation wherein I am constantly told that as a historian soon my services will no longer be necessary because software will just do all the thinking for us, and that my skills are worthless. Ironically, were the companies who have stolen all my work to train their models to pay me for them they would, however, go bankrupt. No one is willing to attempt to explain that contradiction.

Of course, it is laughable to think that AI, such as it currently exists, will ever be able to do the work of historians. All it knows how to do is guess the next word in a series of sentences based off of a slurry of everything ever created. It can’t analyse, or make new discoveries, and it certainly can’t read, for example, fourteenth century Bohemian batarde hand in manuscripts. That has not stopped tech CEOs, none of whom apparently understand what historians do or what history is, from dreaming of a world where humans don’t do any of the work that makes us human.

All of this is incredibly depressing, and even worse, incredibly stupid. I hardly need to tell you that. It is also incredibly reminiscent, to me, of several early modern legends about people who try to get out of work by creating something approaching ‘life’.

The legend that I think about most in this context is that of the golem, because I am unable to think about anything other than Prague for prolonged periods of time. For those not in the know, a golem is, more or less, a being made out of clay, much as Adam was by God (amiright) and then animated, usually through writing in the mud on its forehead, or by putting something around its neck or in its mouth with the same writing on it. As a general rule, said golems are created in order to do the bidding of the individual who created them. The golem has a long and interesting tradition within Jewish culture and in the Middle Ages it was generally just being reported that some people had managed to create them.[1] By the seventeenth century it was reported that a certain Rabbi Eliyahu in Chlem had gone so far as to create one.[2]

The Prague golem, which is probably the best-known version of the type was alleged to have been created in the seventeenth century, during the rule of the Emperor Rudolph II (1552-1612) (shout out to a real one), but to be honest, we don’t have any real written records of this specific tradition until the nineteenth century.[3] Anyway said story goes a little something like this:

In the sixteenth century, Prague’s Jewish community were the subject of periodic violent attacks. That’s … just a fact. However it was one that the famous Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (c. 1524 -1609) was not happy about. In order to do something about it, he went down to the banks of the Vltava, just to the West of the ghetto and collected a bunch of clay. He then moulded a large man out of the clay, and through a series of rituals, brought it to life. To do that he placed a magical word – the shem, which is the unutterable name of God – somewhere. I think I have heard of the shem on the forehead most often in this context, but I have also heard the mouth version. The golem was named Yossele and could do all sorts of cool stuff like make himself invisible. It could certainly terrorise the goyim when they were acting a fool.

Because the Rabbi was a conscientious employer, he would remove the shem from the golem’s mouth every Friday evening so homeboy could have the day off with everyone else. In most versions of the story, one Friday the Rabbi was busy with something else and forgot to take the shem from the Golem. Furious at still existing, and lacking the oversite of Rabbi Loew, the golem went on a rampage, killing several people, until the Rabbi managed to show up, and remove the shem. The golem fell into pieces and the bits of clay were then stored in the attic of the Old New Synagog. Varying legends say that it is still there today or that it was eventually removed and buried out in Žižkov.

You may be thinking ‘Very cool story Eleanor, but why do we care about this in the context of AI?’ I am glad you have asked me the question I put into your mouth, thanks.

The answer lies in interpretations of what the fuck we are meant to make of this story. According to the historian Moshe Idel, the golem as a legend serves largely to reinforce the idea of a hierarchy within Jewish culture. Those who held deep knowledge of Hebrew language had the ability to work complex magic.[4] This is a very good way of convincing kids to study hard at Yeshiva, I think we can all agree.

If you are enjoying this post, why not support the blog by subscribing to the Patreon, from as little as  £ 1 per month? It keeps the blog going, and you also get extra content. If not, that is chill too.

It is also rather like what we are currently experiencing in the breathless coverage of AI from our entirely captive and credulous press. I am thinking particularly of the ridiculous ass letter written and signed in 2023 by a few hundred AI bullshit artists, I mean, ‘experts’ about how AI poses an ‘existential threat to existence.’[5] I will save to the clicks – they do not mean as a result of it using up the last drinkable water on Earth, or the way it encourages young people to harm themselves. They are pretending that the predictive text machine is gonna start a nuclear war or something.

This is essentially the same thing as the golem stories, because what they are attempting to do is position themselves as a sort of priestly class with access to forbidden, arcane knowledge that must be feared, respected, and obeyed. They believe themselves to be the Rabbi Loew of this story. This justifies the obscene valuations on their companies, and the ridiculous salaries they pull down for inventing Clippy 2.0. At least it does according to them, the people who are trying to sell this to you.

Unlike the Prague golem story, however, AI doesn’t actually do anything good or useful. At least our good friend Yossele was doing something for his community until he very much wasn’t. All AI knows is say there’s four Rs in strawberry, be automatically added to your phone, eat up resources, and lie.

There’s another golem story that I think is also pertinent here, however. A children’s version of the story exists, that has real ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ vibes. In it, Rabbi Loew decides that a way the golem can help out around the ghetto is for him to get busy making porridge for the hungry. This was all very lovely, but one little boy was never satisfied with the one bowl of porridge that he received, and spent a long time watching the golem. On the Friday when Rabbi Loew forgot to take the shem from the golem he swung into action, and ordered the golem to make porridge. The golem obliged and got to work, but the trouble was that the kid didn’t know how to get the golem to stop making porridge. It continued to make more and more porridge which flowed first out of the pot, then down the street, and eventually under the doors of the Synagog itself. Luckily Rabbi Loew noticed the porridge flow, and led his congregation into the high ground of the cemetery where they managed to survive. Eventually everyone had to eat their way through the porridge for several weeks after, and no one found the golem again.[6]

This, to me, is also rather like our current predicament. In theory, AI was created to do a bunch of stuff for people that we didn’t want to do. In theory it’s meant to be doing our meeting minutes or doing book indexes, or making spreadsheets for us. In reality it can’t do any of those things. What it can do is make a bunch of totally sub-par pseudo ‘art’ where uncanny valley looking underage girls with huge boobs are your girlfriend. The internet is awash with this garbage, all of which was built on the work of actual artists who have not been remunerated for it. We are drowning in a sea of pablum, because some people are children and unable to realise that limits are important.

Further, the porridge story overlaps with the more common golem story in that it highlights the necessity of human oversite in order to make an automaton useful. There’s no way for a creation such as this to understand context. You tell it to make porridge – it makes porridge. If you don’t watch it 24/7 – it might go on a rampage and start harming people. Humans still need to be involved the entire time in order for such an invention to be useful. So you may as well get humans to do the thing because you aren’t actually getting out of any work here. You are simply creating a new form of labour.

More to the point, doing the work oneself is often what makes the resultant product worth it. We appreciate beautiful paintings or drawings because of the dozens of hours that good examples require. Worthwhile writing is the result of deep intellectual work on the part of those who write it. If you are not thinking about the things you produce, then they inherently have no meaning. To believe that one can extract humans from this equation is inherently childish, and even dangerous.

Whatever the theoretical meaning of golem stories, the underlying message is the same. Just because one can do something, doesn’t mean one should. This is something that we have been pretty clear on for two hundred years. A soul is required for work to be safe and meaningful. Any attempt to convince you otherwise is hubris at best, and just a straight up scam at worst.

We are teetering on the edge of the collapse of this particular bubble, and there’s no doubt that ordinary people who didn’t waste precious resources generating sub-par horny images are going to pay the price. Unfortunately, there is very little I can do for us in that regard. What I can do is highlight the fact that the people of the past already answered the philosophical questions surrounding this particular bad idea for us. As we are constantly told that the arts and humanities have no value, and that we can have machines do that work for us, I think this is an important reminder. To be human is to do the work. For better or worse.

[1] A really good study on all the people discussing this can be found in Moshe Idel, ‘Golems and God: Mimesis and Confrontation’, in, O. Krueger, R. Sarioender, A. Deschner (eds.), Mythen der kreativitaet (Lembeck: Lembeck O, 2003), 224–268.
[2] Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 296.
[3] The earliest reference we currently have comes to us from 1837 in Berthold Auerbach, Spinoza: Ein historisher Roman, Vol. 2. (Sttugart: 1837), pp. 2-3.
[4] Idel, Golem,
[5] Kevin Roose,  ‘A.I. Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn‘, The New York Times. 20 May 2023. <Accessed 25 October 2025> 
[6] A delightful illustrated version of this story can be found in the gorgeous children’s book The Three Golden Keys by Peter Sis. (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001).

For more on Prague and Czech history, see:
A short history of Jan Hus – the protestant leader you never heard of
On Prague, preaching, and brothels
My fav saints: St Procopius of Sazava
On martyrdom and nationalism

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My book, The Once And Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society, is out now.

© Eleanor Janega, 2025