Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

Stein Visiting Writer and acclaimed novelist Rachel Kushner — author of “Creation Lake,” “The Mars Room” and more — spoke to a packed room at Margaret Jacks Hall on April 30 for an extraordinary colloquium on cinema’s influence on her fiction. 

“This is like the moment when a new episode drops. We’re going to have a new, fantastic moment,” said Nicholas Jenkins, the director of the creative writing program, as he introduced Kushner to an eager audience. 

And fantastic it was.

Kushner began her lecture, “My Life at the Movies,” by expressing a desire to share her approach to culture. Over the next hour, Kushner invited audience members into a world of cinematic influences, diving into a series of stills and shots from various film and photo projects that have inspired her oeuvre. 

The idea of authority rested at the heart of Kushner’s talk. According to Kushner, people can demonstrate their authority over a subject in different ways. 

“You never want to be rigid or claim an authority that isn’t yours to share,” Kushner said. “When you look at a movie, you have authority over what it is you are seeing and your own takeaway.” 

The authority in writing, Kushner said, is the capacity to witness what one sees and appreciate the beauty in it. The beauty and emotion she finds in interpreting cultural objects, particularly movies, is what she uses to weave the emotional and structural fabric of her novels.

Kushner discussed novelist Myriam Gurba’s “Creep” — in which the narrator likens her family to that of “The Munsters” (a popular sitcom) — and Brett Easton Ellis’s “The Shards,” which features a rendering of a Kim Wilde video in prose. According to Kushner, both are instances where pop culture becomes more than a backdrop, serving instead as a character’s lens and a scaffolding for their identity and voice. 

Kushner herself often emphasizes film in her fiction. By placing her characters in scenes where they watch movies, she allows cinema to filter into the story and offer broader commentary on society. Sometimes, the characters’ reactions to the films are her own — sometimes not. The point is always to find beauty in cinema and offer a take no one else can.  

Kushner also spoke of the impact that Don DeLillo’s book “Underworld” had on her. Specifically, his usage of Robert Frank’s notorious documentary on The Rolling Stones, “Cocksucker Blues,” (1972) inspired her to consider incorporating film into her stories.

“I didn’t know you could write something like that in a novel,” Kushner said, referring to a passage where a character reflects on gender, voyeurism and the acoustics of sound in Frank’s film. “After that, I wanted to try.” 

Playing the audience a clip of Frank’s documentary, Kushner wove in one of her favorite lines from DeLillo’s novel, where protagonist Klara Sax comments on the patronizing nature of The Rolling Stones. 

“‘It was interesting how all the women in the film were girls or became girls,” Kushner said. “The men and women did all the same things — dope, sex, picture taking — but the men stayed men, and the women became girls.’” 

This line was met with silence from the audience, as the room was enchanted simultaneously by the black and white footage and its scathing critique. According to Kushner, meditations like these inspired her to explore the personal subjectivity with which characters interpret film.

Later, Kushner shared an example of when she wrote a little-seen Italian documentary by filmmaker Silvano Agosti into her novel “The Flamethrowers.” The documentary, called “D’Amore Si Vive” (1984), features a nine-year-old boy named Frank who speaks with a strange eloquence about sexuality and adulthood. 

In Kushner’s novel, her character recounts viewing the documentary and being struck by this child’s machismo. The boy is reimagined, his story altered and stylized — but the discomfort and allure remain. Kushner reminded the audience that this is fiction: he film is shaped, manipulated and divorced from its original version. 

Agosti’s film was but one of many flicks Kushner folds into the architecture of her fiction. She spent the remainder of the hour flipping through more influential scenes from obscure pictures, including Erol Flynn’s revolutionary epic “Cuban Rebel Girls” (1959), James Benning’s “California Trilogy” (1999) and Barbara Loden’s “Wanda” (1970).

Kushner’s characters encounter these artifacts from the cluttered debris of American life, with factors such as class and gender informing their perception of them. It’s all part of the continuous partnership between life and art, image and prose and reality and performance, said Kushner.

If there was a thesis to Kushner’s talk, it was that writers must assemble a private toolbox of influences and use them unapologetically. 

“There’s a gap between the source material and the thing I make of it, which is where fiction happens,” Kushner said.

The bold writer must wield the courage to shape and manipulate art into their narratives. The power of authority in literature is that it is wholly subjective. It is a tool for interpretation and an invitation to bend unspoken rules. Kushner’s worlds, haunted by the grainy textures of unsanctioned VHS tapes and half-remembered films, are evidence of this. 

For those in the room, Kushner’s lecture left a clear invitation to look harder, borrow well and write what only you know.

A previous version of this article misspelled Don DeLillo as Don DeLilo. The Daily regrets this error.