She picks herself up and carries the pieces of the broken fossil home, back where she lives with her sick and elderly mother. She picks away at the stone and wet sand with her bare hands, intent on prying a large rock out of a crevice, until she loses her balance and slips, the rock tumbling beyond her reach and smashing open on the crags below. The waves behind her froth on the beach, relentless against the dull gray of morning. She struggles, her face telegraphing a weathered ennui bordering on resentment. I’ve lost count of how many times now I’ve watched Kate Winslet hike up her wool skirts and climb the rocky walls of Lyme Regis, England, digging through mud and fossilized shit.

Here are two women kissing in the dark, because there’s no electricity yet and because their husbands are one argument away from sending them to an asylum before they go off to war and die. The trend has the commercial appeal of a sideshow attraction in some ways, as if saying, Oh look, here are two women gazing at each other. Though I don’t know why this trend in Hollywood exists right now, or what its objectives are, I imagine it may have to do with the idea of there still being something inherently transgressive in the public imagination about openly depicting lesbians at all, let alone women-loving women from long ago. I welcome it, this heady cocktail of my favorite artistic elements: women, fashion, and the past. I’m always moved by their beauty, even when the films themselves are deeply flawed in some way or another.

In just the past few years, several have garnered critical and commercial success: Portrait of a Lady On Fire, The Favourite, Carol, just to name a few. It’s indulgent, but I’m delighted by the noticeable influx of lesbian period dramas, or “sapphic stories by the sea,” as my friends and I like to call them. Without that name, though, I was pretty much adrift, unsure of where and what my body was. Just a hormone imbalance I and a pill could manage that. Finally, my haint had been given a name and could be rendered powerless. As though this physician-herself a woman, too-were saying, Go! Be sick in silence no more. So when the diagnosis came at last, it felt like a long-awaited benediction. I convinced myself that this was normal, that I was “normal.” I remember (not in any literal way, but by hazy impression) the many mornings and afternoons between teaching classes or going to meetings where I would crawl into bed, unable to get up or start my day because I physically did not have the strength to do it. I’d been living untreated with the worst of my symptoms for well over four years at that point. In August 2019, my new doctor formally diagnosed me with major depressive disorder, i.e.

I burrowed into whatever on-screen distraction I could find. The dark well of loneliness that only a Midwestern December can bring had taken on a new depth and stillness. It was a painful time: I’d come out more publicly to my family as queer only a couple of months prior, all in the midst of powering through a detructive and inevitable breakup. I watched Ammonite for the first time about a year ago in the dead of the Wisconsin winter, when it was below zero most days and already pitch-black outside by 4:00 p.m. “It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found,” D. A paradox at best, hypocrisy at worst, to make a bid for understanding, even while I chafe at the gesture. Even more absurd: My use of we here is yet another feint against being perceived. Absurd, how often what we need to say the most is the very thing we positively cannot say-not without risk, not without the inevitability of great pain to our former or imagined selves.

Ammonite lesbian scene