Does anyone remember Rob Schneider’s Deus Bigelow: Male Gigolo? It was the SNL alum and professional pity-receptacle’s first big feature, built on the cache of goodwill he earned for his role in Judge Dredd as an amateur pity-receptacle. It was the movie so bad it propelled Roger Ebert from his role as the guy you sit through to hear Siskel’s movie reviews to being a household name in angry movie reviews. If you don’t remember it, it’s ok, because, as I learned when fact-checking my memory of the quote “fat chicks need love too, but they gotta pay”, I don’t remember it either. Turns out that quote’s from an episode of Family Guy I swear I never watched, but somehow got stored alongside 1999’s foremost documentary on male prostitution.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ new movie, The Lobster, manages to offer an incredibly pure glimpse into what people expect from love by throwing them into a dystopian world that’s gone so far as to enforce it into meaninglessness. This extremely bizarre and dark film, by all counts Lanthimos’ kindest, poses questions about what makes love work, how do people come together? By putting its characters into its absurd love-hotel, draping them in demands to co-habitate, and making love a question of life and death, The Lobster asks, ultimately, what is the chemistry of chemistry?

About halfway through its first season, Starz’s The Girlfriend Experience takes an interesting and purposeful pivot away from the themes of the movie it takes its name and early cues from. The first four episodes are content to simply follow its clever and willful young protagonist, Christine Reade, as she explores a cluster of overlapping worlds: escorting and law, the young and the old, the hungry and the powerful. Like the movie, this section of the show is mostly satisfying a curiosity about what that life might be like, how much fun it would be to dip yourself into that level of drama. In many ways, this early section is an effort to bring the viewer into the experience of Christine’s johns – to put her in the spotlight and let us experience the girlfriend experience for ourselves.

Early in the third episode of AMC’s new adaptation of the classic Garth Ennis schlock-comic Preacher, the sheriff of the small town of Annville, Texas, Hugo Root, finds himself chatting with a couple of mysterious assassins about an awful monster they’ve come to town to slay. The subtext of this scene is that the assassins are of course hiding the real truth from the sheriff, and in order to protect this hidden truth they’ve employed a bit of intimidation. They see this small-town lawman and assume if they just craft a monster horrible enough, he’ll walk away. The scene ends, though, on a different note. Sheriff Root, on his way out the door, tells them a bloodcurdling story about a real life monster, a man who hid a violence so deeply that he passed himself off as gentle for 30 years before revealing the horror inside of himself. The point of the story is clear: He’s not intimidated. Yet he leaves quietly anyways. Here’s a plot with a message in it

The opening shot of Starz’ new series, The Girlfriend Experience (inspired by the movie, The Girlfriend Experience), tells us quite a lot about what’s on the mind of its protagonist Christine Reade. It’s an over-the-shoulder tracking shot, following her as she walks down a hotel hallway towards a door, and that’s all. After she arrives at the door a new scene begins where her friend Avery shows off some of the benefits of life as an escort, but to focus on this would be to miss the glorious solitude of that anonymous walk to the end of the hall. Here’s Christine, knowing exactly what she wants to do and how to do it, until that door opens and she has to interact with the living world again.