Maybe some of my readers can verify my perception that there’s been an uptick in young people describing relationships in terms of obsession. The phrase “I want a boyfriend/girlfriend/partner who’s obsessed with me” pings on my radar quite a lot these days, maybe somewhere in the ether between Reddit and Love Island. The word has a connotation in that phrase that seems orthogonal to interest — it doesn’t really matter what about you your hypothetical dream partner is obsessed with, just that they are.

This may be what twenty-six year old director Curry Barker is picking up on in his runway box office hit Obsession, a story about Gen-Z attempts at relationships gone wrong. The sort-of-protagonist/sort-of-villain Bear (Michael Johnston) is obsessed with Nikki (Inde Navarette), and wishes for that obsession to be returned. He isn’t visibly interested in Nikki beyond what he wants from her, and neither is the movie, which gives us the bare minimum of her in dimly lit bars and parking lots before Bear’s wish comes literally true.

Obsession is excellent at horror fundamentals, managing to be extremely scary with the bare minimum of supernatural gimmickry. No ghouls, no telekinesis, no crawling on the ceiling. Inde Navarette’s ability to convey menace within the approximate bounds of physical plausibility will be studied for decades. But I can’t think of Obsession as a great movie, because there’s not a single character foothold to stand on outside of the central horror performance — a performance in which a person loses agency completely.

There’s a scene where Nikki (but not 100% Nikki, as she’s under the influence of the Wish) asks Bear, seemingly for the first time in the years that they’ve known each other, what he wants to “do”. Bear cannot answer this question seriously. He semi-ironically responds that it would be fun to be a food critic, but not in a way that even belies interest in food, more so just that he’s seen Ratatouille. Yeah, no wonder he couldn’t get a date without resorting to demonic mind control!

In my own writing, especially when I’m writing in a genre, I increasingly frame character primarily in terms of interest. This is why I say that graduate students (whose whole lives are defined by their interests) are the ultimate protagonists, and I’ll say that again!

It could be that this relentless flatness of character is Barker’s strategy for conveying the film’s messaging: that relationships without interest can never be anything but obsession, possession and dominance. But I also worry that this is how Gen-Z filmmakers see their peers by default, as living entirely within a techno-media bubble that provides them with nothing but the most surface-level sense of what they can explore and become.

The Invite dir. Olivia Wilde

I found the press-cycle drama surrounding Olivia Wilde’s last directorial effort Don’t Worry Darling (2022) to be really funny, but to me that movie’s actual failure boiled down to a straightforward genre mismatch. Wilde isn’t a sci-fi person, and that’s fine.

Increasingly, I think that very few people are qualified to make sci-fi films. In fact, if I learned anything from Disclosure Day, it’s that not even doing sci-fi successfully in the past means that you can or should do it on a continuing basis.

It therefore makes more sense to view The Invite as a natural progression from Wilde’s first feature, Booksmart (2019). In both films, the directorial hand is very present, especially in the shot choices. But where Booksmart’s gestural style leaned sophomoric and on-the-nose, The Invite dials it into grown-up director realm, using creative framing to wring all the cinematic potential out of four people in an apartment. The progression works thematically, too. Booksmart was about teenagers discovering their relational and sexual selves, and The Invite is about re-negotiating the same thing decades into adulthood.

Movies are facing a crisis of set decoration. There is a profound loss of what friend of the publication Samantha refers to as “the Art of Stuff”. Not to bring up Disclosure Day again, but to prove my point, look at these images from an 80s Spielberg versus a contemporary Spielberg.

The first image is densely detailed, realistic but also incredibly character-specific and interesting. This second image makes me want to claw my eyes out. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around what appeals to directors and production designers about this stylistically ambiguous, extremely clean Airbnb look that refuses to convey character information.

What grinds my gears about our stuff-hostile design landscape is its inadvertently classist outcomes: it makes characters wealthy by default by thoughtlessly placing them in oppressively clean houses full of coffee table books. These spaces never look like a cleaning service didn’t come through thirty minutes ago.

The first thing I noticed about The Invite was that the set dressing of the San Francisco apartment the entire movie takes place in doesn’t suck. There’s even some significant Art of Stuff happening in the Seth Rogen character’s office. Even still, my guard was up for a narrative about rich people presented without reference to their wealth. But The Invite is not that! The unattainability of the space is confronted early, and explicitly plays into the characters’ mid-adult crises. This gives the film a grounding in setting completely absent from our dislocated Airbnb dramas.

Rashida Jones’ script avoids another of my most hated streamer-era plagues, which is irrelevant small-talk dialogue in the service of (I guess?) realism. The Invite happens in near real-time, Rope-style, and during this time the characters are never not talking about what the movie is about. This makes them come off a little insane, which is fine, because they’re movie characters! The performances more than support the script’s riskier character swings. Wilde in particular is magnetic and funny, making it easy to forget that she’s also directing at the same time. And that is an achievement that will make Don’t Worry Darling, to paraphrase Jack Black in School Of Rock (2003), “a funny little footnote on [her] epic ass”.

Maddie’s Secret dir. John Early

Kate Berlant and John Early are kind of an anomaly in the industry, in that they are comedians whom I find funny. Comedies not entitled Napoleon Dynamite are a hard sell for me, but I went into Maddie’s Secret interested to see how the Berlant/Early sensibility would translate to a feature.

Turns out director/writer John Early’s ambitions go way beyond that — Maddie’s Secret is an out-on-a-limb exercise in tonal balance, relentlessly but reverently parodying the tropes of “bad” movies while also being a good movie itself. Somewhat analogously, Early is a man playing a woman as the title character1, but chooses to make Maddie a dimensional person to be sincerely invested in. As if that wasn’t risky enough, it’s also about bulimia. There’s no way that this precarious mix will “work” for everyone who sees it, but it certainly did work for me, as evidenced by the fact that I couldn’t stop laughing.

I’ve been thinking about ways to portray technologies in film without passively accepting their insidious and pervasive place in our lives. Director Robert Eggers has said the following with regards to contemporary-set films, which he refuses to make:

I agree with Eggers that photographing a cellphone is very similar to death. But I do not agree that this is “just how life is,” not in actuality, and definitely not in cinema. We do need to tell contemporary stories, and Early does it successfully here.

Set at a viral food content mill called “GourMaybe” Maddie’s Secret satirizes the social-media-based plunder and distortion of what is literally the most basic human activity. The characters engage with social media, but importantly, the camera doesn’t indicate that we should be interested in what’s on their screens. There’s a distinction I can pull out here between screens in the frame as objects of attention, versus characters using screens in a frame that has its own separate visual interest. And all of the shots in Maddie’s Secret go for broke on over-the-top cinema.

Here’s a few examples of the former. And man, you really get what Mr. Eggers is talking about.

It’s hard to even pull an example of the latter from Maddie’s Secret because the screens are rarely static or in focus. Here we have Kate Berlant (and the camera) in motion, announcing that Maddie’s recipe video has “SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND VIEWS.”

And Maddie’s subsequent (almost in motion) reaction. We never get a good look at the screen here, and we don’t need to!

Phones make unfair demands on our attention and lazy filmmaking legitimizes those demands by duplicating the actual experience of looking at them. The great thing about movies, though, is that we get to choose what we see.

Soundtrack

In The Modern Library Classics edition’s introduction, writer Jane Jacobs1 mentions Dickens’ concerns about “the soul-destroying monotony of the built environment”. This refers to the factory and repetitious brick houses that make up Coketown, Dickens’ fictional suburban textile mill town run by the Jeff Bezos-esque Josiah Bounderby.

The phrase “built environment” stuck in my head as a useful way to describe the spaces we live in, work in, wait for things in, and pass through every day. It was also the first thing I thought of when I came out of A24’s new movie Backrooms.

Backrooms the concept originated with one image of a nondescript commercial interior, with a caption imagining it to be a place you could get stuck in forever if you (in game dev parlance) “no-clipped” through the boundaries of reality. This image inspired a whole world of spooky media, culminating in the movie. The massive appeal of this media makes sense: we’ve all been in rooms like that for longer than we can stand, spaces that feel awful for reasons we can’t quite pin down.

I’m a long-time reader of McMansion Hell, one of the best blogs on the internet. Architecture critic Kate Wagner makes fun of terribly designed rich person houses in meme-ey annotated images like this.

Wagner’s work provided lots of laughs during my study breaks while giving me a vocabulary for understanding current-day vernacular architecture and its common failures. It also taught me that there are serious consequences to these failures. Our built environments affect us psychologically and physically. People deserve to live and work in buildings that are intentionally planned, comfortable, and beautiful. Careful architectural thought is not just a matter of aesthetic preference: people actually suffer when it’s abandoned.

This brings me to my personal read on Backrooms: it’s a horror version of what bad architecture can do to us.

If I’m going off of its textual plot and characters alone, I rate Backrooms as an average horror movie. But there’s a more interesting movie in there about the failings of our architectural imagination. This movie asks a really salient question: does a bad built environment create bad people?

The film begins prodding at this question before we ever get to the Backrooms proper. Outdoor establishing shots of San Jose zero in on series of identical suburban tract houses and characterless commercial buildings. Our protagonist Clark (Chiwetel Ediafor), a frustrated architect, lives in the hellish logical endpoint of postmodern architecture2: a vaguely pirate themed furniture store. He sells pieces that replicate designs from past eras. He can’t escape this place, either. He has been kicked out of, he emphasizes, his house by his ex wife.

He wanders through a wall in the basement of the furniture store into the Backrooms, which are really just more of the same: an endless sequence of awkwardly un-designed spaces. Objects pop through the walls, copies of stuff from a more intentionally built past that no longer make sense outside of their correct context. There are living beings in there too, and they have the same problem.

In a horror narrative sense, I could feel the limitations of this setting. We’re led to assume that the Backrooms are pseudo-random, like a procedurally generated video game map. We already know that nothing has a specific meaning, so the tension of these initial scenes deflates. If it’s really endless and plan-less, what is there to learn and discover? The movie isn’t interested in what the Backrooms actually are or how they came to be. Even the Psycho-esque debrief in the final minutes can’t come up with anything too specific to say.

The answers could never be as compelling as the vibes. The movie is scariest when it leans into the ambient dread of the environment and its unknowable inhabitants in found-footage mode. Outside scenes exploring the psychology of the two leads are tiresome non-sequiturs, only linked to the visuals with a hand-wavy CBT metaphor about being stuck in behavioral patterns. It’s strange that this Gen-Z cultivated concept, directed by a literal twenty year old, is so concerned with the relationship problems of middle aged people. Wouldn’t the best version of this be 100% found footage, with 100% young people?

But this movie did resonate with young people, and people generally, to the tune of $260 million dollars, making it A24’s highest-grossing release ever. I think the film’s resonance is the exact same as that initial image’s resonance, in spite of its mediocre script. The real story happens in the images: we see a man enter a nauseously undesigned, random, and distorted postmodern built environment. We then see him take on that environment’s characteristics. Instead of fixing himself, Clark embraces the Backrooms and what they make him, not knowing or caring that he deserves better.

Backrooms got me thinking about buildings in media a bit more broadly, and I found a connection in an unlikely place. I think that we can see very similar architectural horror stories play out in our current reality TV landscape. Much of reality TV deals in human misery, and much of this misery happens inside of what I can only describe as insidious architecture.

Think about the “pods” in the Netflix show Love Is Blind.

I guess on some level this space is supposed to be inviting. Think a little harder. Are you really going to fall in love with a person while trapped inside of a Wayfair-themed prison cell? Or are you going to enter an infatuation psychosis by talking to a blue lava lamp wall that tells you it also enjoys playing pickleball?

Love Is Blind’s production designer, a man named Dave, could not be more on the nose in terms of his design inspiration: in an interview3, he mentions a single reference: Alex Garland’s 2014 sci-fi/horror film Ex Machina. In case you need a refresher, in this movie a man falls in love with a robot.

Once the contestants pair off and escape the pods, they are installed in the most crushingly generic apartments of all time, places that seem to purposefully emulate the unease of a not-great hotel room. This is where the shallowly forged relationships crash and burn.

Love Island’s custom architecture is even more ambitious. The “villa” is a huge and topographically unknowable structure made of mostly shiny white surfaces that doesn’t refer to any kind of building in the real world. It’s purpose-built for the show’s mechanics, which involve putting young single people in close proximity to each other and providing gamified opportunities for betrayal.

The people on this show behave in insane ways, which is the entire point and the fun of it. And how on earth could they not? Anyone would behave bizarrely in an environment as bizarre as this. It may as well be another planet.

I could go on and on with this: the Bachelor Mansion, the Summer House house4, the rich-person compounds of Selling Sunset — all of them containing people pushing each other to the brink emotionally for the benefit of the camera. Charles Dickens wouldn’t have any trouble figuring this one out. It’s not just them, it’s the buildings.

Soundtrack

Maybe this shared experience is part of why my friends and I have our famous and wonderful Film Club. We are recreating the discussion-based class environment on our own terms: about movies.

This month I was honored with the Film Club commissionership (thank you Erin). I decided to give my citizens three movies to choose from, with the theme of mid-century American film. In a textbook display of unemployed behavior, I went down a research rabbit hole / caffeine-fueled thought spiral with each of them, so I figured I would write up and expand my notes for this publication.

Because, as Uncle Rico once said, you might as well do somethin’ while you’re doin’ nothin’!

The Hays Code

One of the most salient facts of American film history is the Motion Picture Production Code, or Hays Code — the system of censorship implemented in studios from 1934 to 1968. It limited what could be shown in ways you’d expect (no sex, drugs, violence) but also restricted what ideas could be explored via “moral guidelines”, hampering nuanced exploration of human behavior and all but eliminating criticism of religious institutions.

It’s hard to exaggerate the Hays Code’s impact on American thought and imagination, especially during the tenure of hardline Catholic enforcer Joseph Breen (1934-1954). There’s a quote that I hit over and over again when I research Breen, published in a 1936 magazine, that describes him as having “more influence in standardizing world thinking than Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin”.1

One of my theories-of-everything is that the Hays Code set the United States back culturally about thirty years, and we never fully recovered. The more I learn about the history of the era, the less crazy that idea seems.

Great films still got made during the Hays era, some of the best of all time. The actual enforcement of the code was case-by-case and often porous. Smart filmmakers could work around and under the guidelines, and occasionally straight up get away with stuff right under the noses of the less-smart censors. And restrictions inspire creativity: it’s not surprising that the film noir, with its obscuring shadows and double speak, flourished at this time.

This is the main lens that I take when looking at mid-century American films: to what degree and how do they get their ideas across against the censorship? For my film club picks, I chose three of my favorite films that pushed boundaries in notable ways.

Rope (1948)

Rope’s notoriety is obscured by Hitchcock’s later, more famous American work: Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1955), Vertigo (1957), and North By Northwest (1959). Still mainly known for what amounts to a cinematic experiment, Rope is filmed in continuous takes of about ten minutes, as long as reel capacity allowed. The transitions are pretty easy to spot, often obscured by a brief push into an actor’s back. The effect of this is a rough simulation of real-time action, in line with the story’s stage-play source material of the same title.

The experimental emphasis kind of buries the lede: what makes Rope remarkable is its near-explicit centering of a gay couple.

They don’t ever kiss or say that they’re lovers, but the nature of the relationship would have been easily legible to audiences at the time, because even straight couples were under significant expressive restrictions onscreen.2 Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger) are constantly in two-shots, speaking intimately, unambiguously presented with the behavioral and visual grammar of a romantic pairing. Besides that, Rope’s source material was even more explicit. It was so well-known that the story was about “it” that Montgomery Clift steered clear of the project for fear of outing himself.

These gay men happen to be murderers. Brandon and Phillip strangle their friend David in the film’s opening moments and hide him in a chest that they proceed to serve dinner off of. Later, their former school mentor Rupert Cadell (James Stewart) joins the party. Back in their school days, Rupert initiated Brandon and Phillip into a philosophy that rationally justifies killing inferiors.

For my money, this is James Stewart’s career-best performance. With his ambiguous sexuality and shakily held ethical theories, I think he has more interesting layers to play in this single party than in the entire plot of Vertigo.

I was blown away on my most recent watch by the slow build of dread in the film’s energy, as Stewart and the entire supporting cast slowly realize that they are not having a normal day. The only real feeling of discontinuity happens in the film’s ending, when Stewart’s character abruptly negates his radical ideas in order to bring about the necessary Code-approved moment of justice.

Rope’s frank examination of the murderous fascist psyche is nearly as impressive an allowance under Breen’s Hays Code as its socially integrated gay couple. My thinking is that these two threads essentially cancelled each other out: it was ok to talk about killing because gay men were doing it, and it was ok to present gay men onscreen because they were killers, and would ultimately be punished. The thematic content of the film allowed for its queerness, and its queerness in turn allowed for its thematic content.

Central to Brandon’s pro-murder pitch is the framing of killing as a good substitute for artistic endeavor:

“I’ve always wished for more artistic talent. Well, murder can be art too. The power to kill can be just as satisfying as the power to create.”

Ok, talk about the democratization of art!

For obvious reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about the often nakedly envious authoritarian resentment of artistic skill and process3. If you can’t create -- you don’t have the talent, but more likely you don’t have the diligence, the curiosity, and the empathy -- then what’s left but to plunder and destroy, all while demanding the same social reward as the creator?

Night of the Hunter (1955)

Night of the Hunter is a tough sell for people who don’t watch many pre-modern films. Even in 1955, it was a throwback. British actor-turned-director Charles Laughton and cinematographer Stanley Cortez were interested in returning to the more purely visual language of silent film, a magic lost in the talky sauce. For them, the invention of sound was as recent as the invention of the iPhone for us. And look, I get it — I want to return to 2007 roughly twelve times per day. The acting and dialogue are melodramatic and theatrically outsized, aiming for poetry more than realism. In many ways, the film reads more thirties than fifties, aligning with the Depression-Era setting of its story.

The film opens with Robert Mitchum’s iconically sinister Harry Powell debriefing with God about his recent murder spree.

Night of the Hunter is based on a 1953 novel of the same title. The censorship negotiation for Laughton and screenwriter James Agee’s adaptation would took place in 1954, the which is the same year that Joseph Breen retired. Timeline-wise, I can’t determine if Breen had already checked out or not. In either case, it’s astounding that a movie about a preacher who serially marries and kills women got made.

What I do know is that the main point of negotiation was around Powell’s religion. The compromise with the censors involved emphasizing that he was a fraud, not an actual ordained and practicing minister. This comes through several times in often heavy-handed dialogue, to remind the audience that murder is not included in a correct interpretation of Christian ethics.

He might not be a card-carrying member of the clergy, but the film does nothing to dissuade the audience from viewing Powell as a true believer. The guy talks to God when no one else is around. Night of the Hunter is clear on its messaging: religion enables and excuses misogyny.

Mitchum’s Powell is the top billed monster, but he has a rival in the iconically named Icey Spoon, a local woman in everyone’s business. Icey barks at widowed young mother Willa about the urgent necessity of a husband, while also denying that women could actually desire men. You can and must want marriage, but you can’t and won’t want sex, which is only available to you within marriage. Confused by these contradictions, Willa marries Powell at the near-coercion of her community, with the secret hope that the union will afford her some degree of affection and intimacy.

Powell shoots down his latest wife’s desire for him as unclean and ungodly, emphasizing that sex cannot be divorced from the reproductive process. Willa has no choice but to take on her husband’s logic, joining him in the local church to spew puritanical rhetoric. It isn’t enough. In Powell’s eyes, her self-defilement ultimately warrants death.

Hollywood films almost never told women that marriage could be the source of their problems. Night of the Hunter suggested that it could kill them.

Happy, love-based marriage was the default Code-approved ending of women’s stories on screen. Alternatives to marital bliss/subjugation could be portrayed and indulged in temporarily, as long as they were finally negated by a wedding.4 Laughton and his crew provided a horror version of the loneliness-courtship-marriage sequence that made real on screen the domestic horrors endured by women watching.

The response from religious groups after Hunter’s release had an interesting denominational split. The Catholic Legion of Decency didn’t care that a Protestant minister was killing people, but condemned the film specifically for its portrayal of marriage. Protestants had a problem with the whole thing, denoting the film as morally objectionable for all audiences. The movie was considered so dangerous that it was outright banned in some cities.

Night at the Hunter failed critically and financially, sending Charles Laughton to permanent director jail: he would never make another movie.

It’s perhaps understandable that 1950s audiences didn’t know what to make of Hunter. The horror genre hadn’t yet handled the close-to-home spheres of marriage and family as a source of menace. Mitchum’s holier-than-thou monster wasn’t anything like the easily spotted villainy of Dracula or the Werewolf or the Mummy. For the first time, the wolf was in sheep’s clothing, and the call was coming from inside the house.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

Ernest Lehman’s novelette5 Sweet Smell of Success was untouchably radioactive IP. The story’s villain, Harry Hunsecker, was a thinly veiled Walter Winchell, NYC gossip columnist turned radio host and rabid Joseph McCarthy booster. Think the Rush Limbaugh of the fifties, but way more powerful.

At the height of Winchell’s influence, adapting the property carried the threat of actual retribution. He was known to sic his buddies in the FBI on people for personal offenses, such as trying to date his daughter. That bizarrely-motivated protectiveness of a female family member made its way into the story too, in Hunsecker’s central goal of breaking up his sister’s engagement.

For our villain, Joseph Breen, Sweet Smell of Success was an absolute non-starter. In 1949, he listed three reasons why:

1) 'the suggestion of an incestuous love between the columnist, Hunsecker and his sister, Susan'; 2) 'the use of a marijuana cigarette planted on an innocent party'; 3)'the final scene in which the girl strips herself, accuses the lead of attempted rape and (apparently) brings about his murder at the hands of her enraged brother -- which constitutes murder without any indicated punishment'6

In addition to Breen's hard no, the Red Scare made it impossible for a film with even a mildly explicit critique of a McCarthyite to get made. In 1956, post-Breen and post-blacklist, things got more doable, but a film that was basically a teardown of every major American institution (press, police, politicians) was still a very hard sell.

Burt Lancaster, noted crazy person and outspoken McCarthy hater, was just the guy to make it happen. His production company Hetch-Hill-Lancaster was riding high on a critical and commercial smash, 1955 Best Picture winner Marty. When HHL submitted the novelette to Production Code administration, they got the same “nope” elicited seven years earlier. Whatever. They went ahead with production anyway, hiring American born and Scottish raised director Alexander Mackendrick to helm the film and celebrated playwright Clifford Odets to re-write Lehman’s initial script7.

If Night of the Hunter aimed to restore the grandeur of the silent era, Sweet Smell charted a path towards cinema's modernity. Sound is used to its fullest potential. Words are bullets: the central power struggle between conniving press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) and dictatorial columnist J.J. Hunsecker8 (Lancaster) played out across tables in crowded clubs, via legendarily biting dialogue.

Visually, MacKendrick and cinematographer James Wong Howe brought Lehman’s story outside. To heighten the frenetic energy, they started and ended most scenes in the streets of Manhattan, one of the first ever attempts of nighttime on-location shooting in the city.

What makes Sweet Smell of Success so special to me is the wealth of information we have on the process of its creation. After his directing career, Alexander MacKendrick became a teacher. His CalArts lectures were collected posthumously into my all-time favorite book on filmmaking, titled, appropriately "On Film-Making”. MacKendrick brought some very self-effacing British energy to his intro to the film as a case study:

"It is a film I have mixed feelings about today, and I am writing about it here to illustrate some problems in the structuring of a screenplay, not because I mean to claim that it is an important work. It isn't."

I hate to contradict the Professor, but yes it is. I can't think of a more important work on every level from its era. But maybe it's this same humility that allowed MacKendrick to be so transparent with his process in the first place. He didn't need to be the genius auteur whose creation sprung effortlessly from his special mind. He was happy to tell us how he did it: collaboration, tons of work, pushing through every just ok version of a scene to get to the final great one. In his words, re-written and re-written, and re-written and re-written.

Like Night of the Hunter, Sweet Smell was a box office flop and received no awards. Per Mackendrick, critics "resented the savagely unflattering picture that the film presented of their profession, or at least of that subsection of it.” But Sweet Smell’s influence endures in every movie about an American man willing to use the necks of others as rungs in the ladder of his ambition. Uncut Gems and Marty Supreme owe it their DNA. The 1957 moviegoing public wasn’t yet ready to inhale what American success actually smelled like.

Soundtrack

Netflix betrayed me on the disc front eventually, so now I make an effort to invest in physical copies of movies that I love. The commentary tracks are still the most important part for me, a value-add for home viewing that streaming services don’t seem interested in providing.1

I was lucky enough to see the 1968 horror classic Night Of the Living Dead for the first time last year in a packed theater. As much as I like to think I know film history, occasionally I’ll see something that feels so far ahead of its release date that it rearranges my internal timeline, and this was one of those movies.

Imagine you’ve never seen a zombie. The idea of a flesh-eating undead being isn’t seeded in your imagination yet, let alone built into your cultural lexicon. You grew up in the era of Hays Code censorship: you’ve never seen more than a little blood on screen, definitely not the entire contents of a human abdomen, and definitely not family members literally eating each other. Further imagine that you’ve never seen a black hero in a horror film, and now you’re seeing black actor Duane Jones organize a last stand against the apocalypse. That’s what the experience of seeing Night of The Living Dead would have been like in October of 1968.

At the nearest Criterion Collection flash sale, Night of The Living Dead was a no-brainer of a pickup2, and of course I went straight to the commentary track.

Night of the Living Dead’s commentary track might be the oldest I’ve ever heard that features the filmmakers, rather than a film historian. Director George Romero introduces it as “a movie we all got together and made a couple years ago” now “finally released on video.”

After some digging, I figured out that by “video,” Romero was referring to Laserdisc. Commentary tracks were invented for that format — the very first being included on a 1984 release of King Kong. This would date Night of the Living Dead’s commentary track to around 1994, the year of its 25th Anniversary Laserdisc release.3

The voices are Romero, actor/production assistant Marilyn Eastman, actor/producer Karl Hardman, and co-writer/associate producer John Russo. I had to look that up, because they don’t identify themselves by their roles.

It’s also kind of impossible to track who’s talking because they never say “I” — it’s always “we”. We decided to shoot on 35mm black and white rather than 16mm color, either because it cost less or because we had already shot the test that way (they don’t remember). We built the zombie corpse out of a hobby store skull and modeling clay and ping pong balls for eyes. We borrowed (actor) Russ’ mom’s car and then wrote a car crash into the movie when mom wrecked the car for real during shooting. We used driving gloves as a way to identify Johnny as a zombie, because “Russ was not Robert Redford, and we needed some way to recognize him.”

This commentary track is Auteur Theory’s worst enemy. No one takes personal credit for the ingenuity of the filmmaking, or for the movie’s success and acclaim. I’m pretty sure the word “director” isn’t uttered once. It’s more like listening to a group of friends hanging out and laughing about their past shenanigans than a professional film crew explaining their work, because it is.

George Romero and his pals, classmates at what is now Carnegie Mellon, got their start making TV commercials in Pittsburgh in the early 1960s. The group theorizes that their obsessive attention to detail was born out of a need to satisfy their clients exact specifications. If they got some small thing wrong about the product or its desired image, they couldn’t sell the commercial.

It was these ten friends who pitched in $600 dollars each to spin up a feature film company, Image Ten. They initially wanted to make a drama, but for a first feature, horror was a better financial bet. Night Of The Living Dead was written by Romero and Russo based roughly on ideas from Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend.

My biggest takeaway from the commentary is that Night of the Living Dead’s cinematic legacy — its near wholesale invention of the cinematic zombie, its racial politics, its prescient and reflective horror vision of the United States crumbling in a crisis — was mostly not planned for or aspired to by the filmmakers.

In particular, the groundbreaking role of Ben wasn’t written for a black actor specifically. On the casting of actor Duane Jones:

“The fact that we went with Duane in the role… we shouldn’t take credit for casting a black man the way people talk about it. What we didn’t do was change the script, but in fact Duane changed the script.”

The character was originally conceived as a “tough-guy” truck driver, which was at odds with how Duane Jones wanted to represent himself onscreen, so he ended up re-writing most of the dialogue. The resulting character is a mix of its original writing and Jones’ interpretation. He’s neither a stereotype nor a model minority, more layered than what the group might have come up with if Romero and Russo had attempted to contrive the role for a black actor themselves.

The filmmakers describe themselves as “kind of oblivious” to the significance of Jones’ performance, but:

“One thing we weren’t oblivious to, though… we always had black actors in our commercials…. We kind of took pride in giving people work that had a tough time getting it… that was part of our nature, so we didn’t blink at casting a black actor in this role.”

They didn’t envision their project as having a specific bent of commentary towards race, but they practiced what we now refer to as colorblind casting.

“Whatever political overtones are in this film… I think is much more a reflection of the way our particular group of friends were thinking at the time…That way of thinking was not uncommon or avant-garde or anything, it was just that it hadn’t been in a horror movie.”

The best instincts of the group came out in the resulting images.

Lack of intention doesn’t make the achievement less real. I don’t think it’s fair to say that we as critics are simply projecting our own values onto the film. Everything is right there in the movie. The ideas were discovered in the process of making the film. Night of the Living Dead provides a very clear example of this, but it’s true to a greater or lesser extent of every movie.

Every process from writing to prop and costume fabrication to editing and color grading has the potential to elevate the work beyond its original set of ideas. If no one ever made a film that was better than them, that expressed values that they couldn’t yet articulate directly, then we probably wouldn’t have many great films. When you eliminate process, you eliminate the possibility of this type of synthesis.

It’s important to articulate this stuff for myself right now. I’m feeling a lot of dread around what’s been happening in the past few years, which is nothing less than a full-scale techno-corporate assault on the value of process in filmmaking and in the arts more generally. I read a recent technical paper describing a AI-assisted suite of filmmaking tools that is very tellingly entitled: “Intention Is All You Need to Create Your Own Hollywood Blockbuster Movies”4 Yikes!

The paper begins by confidently misdiagnosing the fundamental problem with the film industry:

“When asked why Hollywood feels stagnant, insiders often point to a lack of diverse, original stories and an overreliance on superhero blockbusters and franchises with built-in audiences.”

The paper goes on to imply that the reason for this reliance on unoriginal films is that filmmakers are unable to execute original ones. Rather than, maybe, conglomerate film executives having a fiduciary responsibility to deliver massive profits to shareholders who do not care about movies. This absurd premise forms the justification for a proposed LLM-assisted filmmaking tool, which purports to help filmmakers “be more creative” by rapidly turning their initial ideas (i.e. their intention) into scripts, storyboards, and eventually (they hope) digitally generated final images. LLM generated content is available to be inserted at every step.

Even when “just used as a tool,” generative AI always involves an elimination of process. Usually the process is dismissed as tedium: a barrier to creativity, rather than a facilitator of creativity. The imagined ideal world of these technologists is one in which the individual, “anyone with a story to tell”, can convert the contents of their brain into a movie directly and instantly. I can’t even begin to imagine how bad the films resulting from this type of anti-process would be.

And an anti-process is necessarily anti-social. Eliminating process eliminates collaboration. Eliminating collaboration eliminates friendship, and I can tell you from experience that making a movie with your friends is a peak human experience!

There’s an argument that AI tools are simply the latest in a long tradition of technical innovation. I would say that AI tools are categorically different in that they involve mass-scale theft, but I’d also say that any technical innovation that eliminates a creatively fruitful and creatively social process has always been worthy of criticism.

Despite the obviously un-fun implications, it’s not surprising to me that AI’s promises would appeal to people. This interview with Christoph Walz articulates our larger cultural issue really well.

A results oriented culture is also, by definition, a consumer culture. We’ve been conditioned for decades to believe that what matters is the getting of stuff, not the self-transformative processes by which stuff can be made, so the results-oriented ethos of AI is a logical conclusion of an idea we’ve broadly already accepted.

Romero’s follow-up to Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead (1978), is set at a shopping mall. We learn from the commentary track that the mall was the entire idea for the movie:

“I didn’t want to make a sequel… it was actually the guys that owned the shopping mall… friends of ours here in Pittsburgh. I went for a tour of the mall one time, and they actually had these crawl spaces above the shops, with self defense supplies. They were too small to shoot in but they were there. And that’s what gave me the idea. And it was Dario Argento who called up, from Italy, and said ‘would you like to do a sequel,’ and having seen the mall, I said ok, maybe I can do it.”

Romero is more of a grown-up filmmaker here, actively interested in satirizing what he’s seeing in society, but he still has a strong ethos of discovery via process. The physical space of the mall provided the biggest idea, and that idea was developed by collaboration. In the commentary, he emphasizes the importance of keeping the planning loose, so that anyone can contribute on the day.

The zombies in Dawn of the Dead gather at the mall by the force of a semi-conscious pull. It’s explained in dialogue that this was “a very important place to them” in their human lives. But it’s the non-zombies who become obsessed with the place, gleefully taking everything that they need and a whole lot more, hoarding valuables for the future, even though the likelihood of that future even existing is increasingly slim.

Shopping malls were a new concept at the time, and it’s not surprising that Romero recognized them as symbolic of a growing consumer mindset. The same metaphor wouldn’t really work now. Digital technologies make our consumption so immediate that we don’t even have a sensical physical space within which to set a satire about consumerism. By contrast, malls now feel like relatively healthy third spaces, where what we can buy is at least guardrailed by the need to find it in a store.

Romero and his friends didn’t set out to create the zombie, but the zombie provides us with a symbol set for understanding the world we’ve created. Not a premeditated, fully baked allegory, but a framework of images to help us think about what we need to think about: class, race, mindlessness, pandemic, irresponsibility, cruelty, consumption. We are what we create, not what we consume. Intention is not all you need.

Some Stills From My Latest Super 8 Rolls

Soundtrack

In the case of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, the flood of takes included the words “emotional terrorism”. This phrase hooked into my brain a bit. Even though it was used as a compliment, I don’t think it’s the right way to describe what Zhao has done with her first post-Marvel effort. I don’t even think it makes sense to view Hamnet as a sad film.

If I had to, I’d define “emotional terrorism” as putting upsetting events on the screen to generate an emotional reaction, which is usually lazy filmmaking.1

Zhao’s film feels more complete than that. It made me very emotional, but not necessarily in the expected “devastating” moments, and not even for any obvious textual reasons. For me, not knowing why I’m crying is a good indicator that a film isn’t resorting to unfair emotional manipulation. If you’re bypassing my prefrontal cortex entirely, you’re probably doing something significant with images and sound, and with ideas that are more complex than “death is sad” or “art is life affirming”. I only understood why I reacted the way I did after the fact — the following two-part notes are me trying to be more precise about that.

Magic/Courage

A few years ago, I read a book called Screening Space: The American Science Fiction film. I don’t remember buying it, but this is the type of weirdly expensive pseudo-textbook I would have used my former place of employment’s “educational enhancement” budget to grab for free due to its tangential relevance to my work.

There was a passage in that book that I think about all the time, containing a way of thinking about science, magic and religion.2 All three are framed as ways to understand reality, or to “reconcile man to the unknown”. Both science and magic offer processes to improve our situations. In magic, we don’t know how those processes work. Religion, rather than offering a process, puts us into the hands of a higher power: redemption happens without our intervention.3 Religious rituals are primarily celebrations or re-enactments of a divine fait accompli. Both religion and magic require faith, but crucially, magic is optimistic about humanity’s ability to change its own destiny, while religion is pessimistic.

A push and pull between these different understandings of reality felt very present to me in Hamnet. Jessie Buckley’s character Agnes is half-wild, spending most of her time in the forest. The daughter of a local medicine woman, she lives in utter confidence of her ability to change her destiny by means of processes that she learned from her mother.4

Hamnet’s camera puts us in a world where magic stands on equal footing with both religion and science. Magic and nature are connected, and the ground truth of Zhao’s cinema is nature. Agnes’ credibility is visibly beyond question. I can be snarky about Etsy witches and astrology on my own time.

Stratford-Upon-Avon’s new Latin tutor Will5 (Shakespeare… ever heard of him?) also has a special way of understanding reality. Before Agnes places her full trust in Will, she asks him for a demonstration.

Tell me a story that moves you.

Agnes and Will get married, and like many married people, Agnes has an uneasy truce with her in-laws and their religion. She’ll play ball so that she can be with Will, but she won’t adopt their worldview.

I made a vow the night my mother died. I will go to your church, but I shan’t say a word there.

Despite her confidence, Agnes’ processes of magic prove to have limits to their efficacy. No amount of words or plant combinations can reverse the course of her and Will’s daughter Judith’s fatal illness. And while Hamnet reveres Agnes’ craft, I think that the film posits the existence of a different and more objectively real kind of magic, which is human courage.

Hamnet and Judith are as close as any two people can be, so close that they can easily embody each other’s personas.

You swapped places to hoodwink me again.

Will you be brave?

Will asked Hamnet to take care of the family while he’s in London on business. In response to his father’s charge, Hamnet takes responsibility for his sister’s situation, and does one more swap.

This is my life. I give it to you. I give it to you, Judith.

I have a memory of sitting in the hospital room with my dad a few weeks before he died. With an almost comically chipper and unflinching demeanor, he told my brothers and I that he planned to “keep making people smile” for the amount of time that he had left. He knew that his death would be difficult, but he made a decision not to succumb to fear. Seeing him choose to be brave gave me more comfort in my grief than any ritual, religious or magic, ever could. Those things can help, but as I think Hamnet argues, courage can help more. I came away from my father’s death feeling more armored than devastated, because he showed me how to face the rest of my life.

Chloé Zhao’s cinematic agenda isn’t to terrorize us emotionally, but to convey some much needed optimism: courage is real, it can be accessed by anyone (even a little kid), and it can make life materially better every time we choose it.

Story/Intent

I think it’s a nice piece of awards-season synergy that Hamnet and Sentimental Value arrived in the same year. Both are about fathers who re-establish communication with their alienated family members via a work of narrative.

Narrative, and writing generally, is a means of understanding and externalizing our values in a form that can be shared with others. This is also why writer’s block is painful: you’re trying to exhume a chunk of your interiority.

Hamnet captures the “everyone’s mad at each other” phase of grief really well. Agnes and Will are at odds about their understanding of their son’s death. Agnes sees it as a failure of her magic, and an even worse failure that Will wasn’t even present to say goodbye. Will knows within the depths of himself that Hamnet’s death was an act of courage, but he needs to craft a new story to make this idea real, and to enact the necessary farewell.

While I’d probably consider Sentimental Value to be the more skillfully constructed film overall, Hamnet has a leg up in one way. Sentimental Value contains a montage of a character reading a script and slowly realizing that it’s amazing. The acting does a really good job of selling it, but we still have to heavily use our imaginations about the emotional impact of this fictional movie within a movie. Hamnet on the other hand has literal William Shakespeare’s literal Hamlet (ever heard of it?).

Counterpoint: is the text of Hamlet awkwardly shoehorned in to serve the emotional purposes of this story? In other words, isn’t O’Farrell’s imagining of a hidden meaning in this four hundred plus year old play kind of a stretch? Yes, but we stretch every time we have a personal interpretation of a work of art. For example, I don’t actually know if my interpretation of Hamnet is what Zhao intended, either!

Zhao’s staging of Hamlet is less about what’s actually happening, and more about how it lands with Agnes. She’s pretty explicitly not tracking the plot6, but she feels what she needs to feel. Critic David Ehrlich put this nicely in his review7 for IndieWire:

“Hamnet derives its simple but overwhelming power from the disconnect between intention and response.”

You don’t need to know why you’re crying. It’s better if you don’t.

Soundtrack

What I did not anticipate was that the bottom of the pan would be prominently embossed with an Amazon logo.

Due to the seduction of convenience, I now own an Amazon branded product that will literally outlive me. I picture it pulled from the rubble, centuries or millennia from now, and wonder how the archaeologists of the future will understand its strange markings.

Needless to say, I’ve been thinking about the Pixar animated film Wall-E a lot lately, mostly because it’s hard to argue that we’re not careening at full speed towards the future that it envisioned.

A sort of standard criticism of Wall-E is that the more conventional back two-thirds of the movie doesn’t live up to the legendary dialogue-free first act. To that I say: I’m not interested in debating the pacing of a film that’s so deeply thoughtful in its ideas and crystalline in how it conveys them.

In 2008, Pixar asked a very salient question: what happens when corporations govern?

In the masterclass of exposition that is Wall-E’s opening sequence, we learn that the mega-corporation Buy-N-Large has expanded into every aspect of public life on earth. There are of course massive BnL stores, but also BnL banks, BnL transit, and a BnL CEO in lieu of an elected head of state, played by a jarringly live-action Fred Willard in PSA clips.

If I were writing this six months ago, I would have said that we don’t literally have a sitting CEO in charge of the federal government, but that tech companies govern us in slightly less obvious ways. Haha! First part of the statement no longer true, but tech companies still govern us in slightly less obvious ways, a few of which I will mention briefly.

By controlling how information is disseminated online, Meta has the ability to shape reality to their interests with close to no accountability for the social consequences.1 When a smart phone is necessary for work and transportation, Apple’s monopolistic2 grip over the devices is a by definition a grip on the rhythm of our lives. SpaceX and Amazon’s CEOs are in a race to determine how, when, and which human beings will travel to space. In my thinking these activities amount to governance, but despite mission statements about “connection” and “not being evil”3 , these organizations obviously optimize for profit over human flourishing. We do not elect their leaders, and we are not allowed to know how they make decisions4.

What happens when Buy-N-Large governs is, firstly, ecological ruin. Earth is reduced to a smoggy trash heap, but luckily BnL also sells deliverance. CEO-in-Chief Shelby Forthright cheerfully declares a state of global emergency and directs his customers to the BnL Starliners, ready to whisk earth’s population away on a “cruise”.

In the meantime, our titular trash compactor robot has become a custodian of humanity’s material past, pulling artifacts out of the rubbish heaps and bringing them back to his garage-house for archiving.

Wall-E loves his physical media — it’s all that’s currently available. His favorite is a VHS of Hello Dolly (1969), in which he observes behaviors such as singing, dancing, and holding hands.

The quiet of Wall-E’s existence is derailed by the arrival of Eve, a slick plant-seeking robot from the Starliners. Despite Eve’s initial attempts to destroy Wall-E, he is smitten with her.

Wall-E is primarily a love story, which is important to its overall thesis on what people actually need (spoiler: each other). You wouldn’t peg a robot with a crush to yield the most affecting portrayal of romantic desire since In the Mood For Love, but the abstraction of the sexual and the social from what Wall-E is feeling distills it into something like romantic Everclear. You’d follow her to space too!

When we actually get to space, we learn more precisely what B&L’s services did for its customers.

Everything on the Starliner Axiom is automated, leaving passengers to sit back in their hover chairs and purchase “everything you need to be happy” with the tap of a touch-screen positioned in front of the face. Wall-E envisions space as a place where corporations can operate without annoying stuff like countries or physical landscapes to get in between them and their customers.

During his quest to find Eve, Wall-E meets John and later Mary, whose existences have been reduced to reclining and consuming. They do not see other people without the mediation of the screen, nor do they touch them. This is Wall-E’s social vision of the future: tech has created a convenience singularity that allows for total isolation.

We know from the live-action advertisement that this state of things was progressive — originally only disabled individuals were shown using the hover chairs.

People are depicted playing golf in the ad, but robots do it for them now while they watch from the chairs. In my business we call this “feature creep”.

The design of the people in Wall-E is a perfect visual communication of what's happening -- they are atrophying, losing bone structure due to lack of use. This makes them look like adult-sized babies. BnL has quite literally infantilized their customers, rendering them unable to perform basic tasks or even recreational activities without their services. Even the captain of the Starliner has nothing to do but the morning announcements, which makes him a weak protection against BnL’s endgame of keeping its customers in space forever.

I’m hoping our bones will hold up for a while longer, but Amazon, Uber and the tech industry at large are clearly interested in taking normal, healthy aspects of life in communal society, condemning them as too time consuming or too difficult, and then selling them back to us for a monthly subscription fee. The pitch for these services is always some version of “freeing up time for what really matters”, but functioning as people in the world does matter, and convenience isn’t happiness. The line between human labor and human function might be fuzzy in places, but we are going to need to make that distinction, because tech companies won’t make it for us. An infantilized customer is a perfect customer.

One crucial difference between our current reality and the Starliner is that we don't yet have highly sophisticated robots: for now, other people mostly create these conveniences for us. Human labor is not even actually eliminated, just shunted to a growing swath of the population that can’t make ends meet with more traditional (and more dignified) forms of employment.5

I've been trying to make sense of what it means when films show us a wrong path and we proceed to sprint down it. I understand that not every person has seen and deeply internalized the messaging of this animated movie. However, it seems that when tech CEOs do watch cautionary sci-fi, they seem to be delighted by the possibilities presented, using them as literal blueprints for dystopia.6

In light of that, what can a prescient film actually do for us? Guess what: I don’t have a great answer. I know that I’m better equipped to understand the time I’m living in because I’ve seen Wall-E, which probably means that many others are as well. But what’s happening is still happening. We’ll never get a control group to find out what the world would look like without Wall-E, or without Strange Days7, or without The Matrix, or any particular film. We don’t know who we are without cinema, in both senses. Film is a mirror and an appendage.

Wall-E itself is optimistic on the power of film to affect change: Wall-E wouldn’t have known to love Eve if he hadn’t seen love in Hello Dolly. In turn, he shows John and Mary how to connect meaningfully with each other without the mediation of technology, starts a robot uprising, inspires the captain to override the autopilot, and also teaches the door security robot how to wave hello.

There’s something beautifully recursive here: Wall-E is a movie that tells us something about being human, in which someone learns how to be human from a movie.

My recommendation? Cancel your subscriptions, go to the movies. Also, does anyone have an angle grinder I can borrow, and maybe a welding mask?

To keep this thing reasonable, I won’t include every Coppola who has ever lived, and I won’t attempt to be exhaustive about anyone’s body of work. The following rankings are in ascending order, and I have helpfully included any relevant wine pairings.

Let’s begin!

Romy Mars

The youngest Coppola rose to viral fame last year when she made a video of herself making pasta with vodka sauce (appropriately Italian), because she was bored, because her parents (Sofia Coppola and Thomas Mars) grounded her, because she tried to charter a private helicopter using her father’s credit card, because she wanted to see her camp friends. I will admit that this is extremely funny.

She also apparently dropped an EP this year, which I haven’t listened to because she’s a child. We’re going to check back in on young Romy’s work in five to ten years and see if she can get on the board.

Does she have a wine? No, she’s not of drinking age!

Gia Coppola

We have to be realistic here: Gia Coppola is definitely the Coppola that Elle Woods hired to direct her application video for Harvard Law School.

Gia made her debut feature Palo Alto (2013) at the age of 26 as the result of a pivot to filmmaking after she “felt burnt out” as a photographer. Relatable! The idea for the project came about because she “befriended James Franco”1 — Palo Alto’s script is a loose adaptation of his collection of short stories of the same title.

Palo Alto is not a bad movie. Its portrayal of teenage life at a certain time and place feels honestly rendered, often brutally so. I’d view this effort more favorably if it were the first entry in a larger filmography that built on its strengths, but Gia has only directed one follow-up, Mainstream (2020), which I’m told has Jake Paul in it. I’m not willing to watch a movie with Jake Paul in it, so we’re not going to find out about that one.

Gia also has a few music video credits, including Carly Rae Jepsen’s Cut to the Feeling. This pop song is in my opinion one of the best of the 2010’s, so I expect a lot from any director taking it on.

This is somewhat confusing. I had to check multiple times to confirm it was not a behind the scenes supplementary. After a few more watches I talked myself into the concept, which might be to engage with the filmmaking language in the song by exposing the filmmaking process. What I do like about this music video is the revelation that Gia seems to supply her sets with a semi-automatic prosumer-level espresso machine.

In summation, I feel at best neutral about everything Gia has ever done, and that is why she is unfortunately last in the adult portion of my power ranking. Only room for improvement here!

Does she have a wine? Yes, a red blend with a cat on the label!

Roman Coppola

Gia is by no means the first Coppola to direct a music video — her uncle Roman is prolific in the field, with almost forty credits to his name. These include songs by The Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, Phoenix, Daft Punk, Fatboy Slim, Green Day, and as we’ll cover later on, his nephews’ bands.

I find music videos hard to assess, but Romans’ have never grabbed me as particularly memorable or innovative, even when they’re for songs that I love. He’s no McG, in other words.

Roman is also a producer of many of my favorite Wes Anderson movies, most of which also star his nephew Jason Schwartzman. Has anyone had a more nephew-based career?

All of R. Coppola’s work of major impact to me has been in support of another member of the family as the more primary artist. Therefore, he can go no higher than next to last on the power rankings.

Does he have a wine? Yes, but he went rogue! RC Reserve Syrah is NOT on the family label. Don’t accuse Roman of wine nepotism!

Talia Shire

Talia Shire, née Coppola, has a fairly extensive acting resumé, but you know her from mostly two things: Connie Corleone in The Godfather (I-III) and Adrian (YO ADRIAN) in the Rocky movies. These are iconic roles, but Talia’s specific impact on me is small in its scope compared to others. I am ultimately more interested in the offspring that she produced with the late Jack Schwartzman, as we will discuss.

Does she have a wine? I cannot find one anywhere. If any of my brothers had a winery and didn’t make me my own wine, it would be so over for them, let me tell you.

Robert Schwartzman

Most people of my generation know the younger Schwartzman brother from his role opposite Anne Hathaway as Michael Moscowitz in The Princess Diaries (2001), but I know him from his day job as the frontman of the band Rooney. Robert also prioritized that line of work: the reason he didn’t reprise his role in Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (2004) is because of his touring obligations with the five piece pop-rock outfit.

If you are interested in understanding my exact taste in music in the year 2007 AD, look no further than the below.

Eagle-eyed viewers will notice Robert’s mother Talia Shire in the beginning of this video!2

When I was a kid, I had no idea that Robert was a Coppola. Looking back, a lyric from the band’s debut single Blueside stands out as distinctly of the family:

I’ve been given my brush and plate/ where will I paint my life?

Deciding what kind of art you’re going to do is the core anxiety for every Coppola (see: Lost in Translation (2003))

Robert also has an entire film career that is mostly known to me as the reason why I haven’t gotten any new Rooney albums. Will the forthcoming movie with Nick Jonas impact my rankings in the future? Almost certainly not!

Does he have a wine? No, sorry, nephews don’t get wines!

Francis Ford Coppola

An extremely bold and brave statement: The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather II (1974) are both really good movies. As pure cinematic experiences, they are not overrated even a little. Every time they’re on, my head gravitates towards the screen like a magnet.

However, I have at times felt frustrated with how these movie are viewed and interpreted, especially when people (read: men) talk about Diane’s Keaton’s character Kay with a disturbing amount of casual derision. More generally, I struggle with the functional glamorization of violence and misogyny inherent to the gangster genre, even when these movies purport to critically lens the worlds they portray.

Friend of the publication Brandon was able to articulate the unease that I feel towards this type of movie really well:

I think there is some water in the argument that [directors like] Fincher and Scorsese make it look very cool and cinematic to do bad and violent stuff, and so therefore their very clear textual choices to make the point that those things are bad and you shouldn’t do them are kind of disingenuous. Like, maybe don’t make it look so cool to take drugs and do violence to people if those things are so bad! But I guess the alternative to that is every movie is some version of Requiem for a Dream and everyone is just bummed out going to the movies.

Kind of disingenuous is a great way to put it. Regardless of what Coppola’s goal was with his film’s messaging, if he even had one, the Godfather movies factually encouraged mob activity in the US. But like Brandon points out, I also don’t expect or want every movie to be some kind of morally airtight analysis of human behavior for the betterment of society.

For me, the undeniable filmmaking excellence displayed in The Godfather doesn’t translate to a belief that Francis Ford is a “genius”, or even the best director in his family. I also did once tweet that I like Kong: Skull Island (2017) more than Apocalypse Now (1979), and I will not disavow that statement today!

In my mind the best thing that Francis Ford Coppola ever created is not a film, but a filmmaker, which we will discuss further down the page.

Does he have a wine? Yes, obviously, he has all of the wines!

Nicholas Cage

Nic lands very high on the list because I can’t think of many Coppolas, or even many actors period, who have created the sheer number of memorable cinematic moments that he has. Here is just a small sampling of those moments.

Does he have a wine? No, but as of last year, he’s allegedly launching a bourbon.

Jason Schwartzman

I want you all to know that this penultimate spot was heavily contested between Jason and Nic. I am giving Schwartzman the Elder the edge here because his impact on me crosses mediums: not only is Jason one of my favorite actors, but he is also a founding member of Phantom Planet, my favorite band. I believe myself to be among most devoted Phantom Planet fans currently living. Go to any Phantom Planet show in Los Angeles, and you will find me near the front, along with a group of men in their late thirties to early forties who also attend every Phantom Planet show.

Listen, I don’t care that YOU don’t care about this band. For better or for worse, Phantom Planet is mostly known for the OC theme song. The OC is a show that I have not seen a single episode of. That theme song is to this day one of my favorite songs of our current century (music video dir. Uncle Roman).

Jason eventually parted ways with the band to focus more fully on his acting career. This was ultimately a fruitful decision. I’ve written more about Jason’s acting in the context of Wes Anderson’s work here.

Does he have a wine? Nope.

Sofia Coppola

I’ve circled the “nepo baby” discussion in my mind a few times without finding much of value to add to it. The children of the Hollywood elite can certainly be annoying when they’re mediocre at what their parents are known for, and unintentionally hilarious when they describe their discovery of the creative arts without making reference to their parents’ professional involvement in it.

On the other hand, I’m not sure what we want from these people. Is it really surprising that kids are predisposed to do what their parents do? Would we prefer them to become accountants, lawyers, or tennis coaches? We can justifiably worry that their success is at the expense of more diverse and deserving artistic talent, but that problem is hard to quantify.

I think that Sofia Coppola is the greatest “nepo baby” of all time, not just because her output is of the highest quality (in my opinion, superior on average to her father’s), but because her films are incisively critical of the rarified spaces that she grew up in, and in the privileges that allowed her to become a director when she was still in her 20’s.

In his review of Somewhere (2010), Roger Ebert says that “Coppola watches this world”. This is as good of a summary of Sofia’s work as a whole as it is of Somewhere in particular. Sofia isn’t going to tell us everything she thinks about how she grew up. Instead, in her understated and observational visual style, her work shows us the consequences of wealth and fame to a person’s humanity.

In Somewhere, A-list actor Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) goes through the motions of enjoying the sex, drugs, fast cars, and public adoration that come with his success in movies. We aren’t shown the origins of this success — in the negative space it’s understood that he’s good at acting but not passionate about it, obviously handsome, and probably lucky. He’s also completely miserable.

When you can have anything you want at any time, you’re not incentivized to become anything, and you might become nothing. When Johnny breaks down crying on the floor of his room in the Chateau Marmot, it’s because he’s realized that’s exactly what’s happened to him.

The urgent business of survival makes us human and connects us to others. Wealth and fame can take that away. Family ties become immensely high-stakes and fraught, because they can become the only link a famous person has to the ground truth of their humanity. Johnny clings to his relationship with his daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning), but struggles to find anything of value to give to her.

There’s a seemingly throwaway moment in the film where Cleo explains the basic plot of Twilight:

“He’s a vampire, and his whole family’s vampires.”

Sofia knows better than anyone the danger of bloodlessness running in families.

I could tell you how each of Sofia’s films are similarly moving and intelligent, but I will instead leave you with some pictures of the nepo G.O.A.T. herself displaying her impressive film camera collection.

Does she have a wine? Of course she does. Multiple, including a Brüt Rosé and even a line of canned sparkling wines.

I planned on including my thoughts on Hit Man in a round-up post, but my dislike of it is actually so profound that I thought it might warrant therapy some further discussion in a dedicated post. If I include a normally unwarranted amount of plot spoilers, it’s because I do not want you to see this movie if you haven’t already.

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but we’re all victims of a psychological operation, or psyop. I believe that there was a concerted marketing effort to create an illusory aura of “good movie” around this very bad movie. Critics and consumers alike fell for it. This mass hysteria was aided and abetted by the type of film bros who talk about movies as though they were competitive sports. There are a few key words and phrases to look for when identifying a psyop of this nature:

“It’s so much fun!”

“It’s a delight!”

These words convey a nebulously positive vibe, but do not say anything specifically positive about the film. You also might hear something like the below:

“Glenn Powell is a star!”

“Glenn Powell’s chemistry with Adria Arjona is electric!”

I fear we’re experiencing a similar psyop around Glenn Powell’s career more generally. Everyone keeps screaming at me about this person’s star power, but I haven’t yet seen him in anything that isn’t either embarrassing or military propaganda. Arguably this is a matter of taste, but even if Mr. Powell’s barely-different-from-Ryan-Reynolds schtick works for you, I don’t think you can honestly say that he isn’t shoehorned into this particular role in a way that strains credulity.

In Hit Man, Mr. Powell plays Gary Johnson, a college philosophy professor with kind of greasy hair and wire-framed glasses, who lives alone with his cat and has a hard time with dating post-divorce. Upon being introduced to this characterization, I wanted to ask the movie the following question: hey, do you think I’m stupid? Some leading men can pull off transformational performances like this1, but let’s please not kid ourselves about Mr. Powell.

Gary stumbles into a side gig as a fake hit man for police sting operations because he’s preternaturally talented at acting in addition to looking like Glenn Powell. Gary teams up with a lovable group of misfits (Retta, Sanjay Rao, Austin Amelio) who are just doing the honest everyday work of ensnaring vulnerable people into agreeing to break the law and then arresting them. Fun!

The movie spends an inordinate amount of time showing Gary playing increasingly zany versions of a hit man, customized to the target of the sting. This plot-agnostic sequence seeks to make us understand that Mr. Powell can do comedy in a number of ways, but NEVER in a way that compromises his core competency as a performer, which is being muscular and handsome. Many reviewers have made excuses for this part of the film by describing it as “funny”, but I did not laugh.

The actual story doesn’t start until thirty minutes in. On this note, let me get on my structure soapbox for one second. Structure is not about dictating the content or pacing of a story. It is about making sure that a story actually happens on the screen in a timely fashion. Structure prevents boredom. Unless you find a half hour of no story to be “Fun!”, the front half of Hit Man is almost unbearably boring. Because I was sitting on my couch, I had to fight the urge to get up and do something else.

The story starts like this: on one of his stings, Gary meets Madison (Adria Arjonia), a young woman looking to eliminate her abusive husband. They hit it off in a dorky and genuine meet-cute manner: Madison connects to Gary’s real self when it peeks through his performance of “Rod”, the cool-guy hit man persona for this particular job. Or at least that is the impression I got from the scene. Gary instead concludes that what this abused woman wants is a man who can and does kill people, i.e. Rod, and subsequent scenes seem to agree.

Gary calls off the sting and strikes up a relationship with Madison, remaining in character as Rod. Gary has to hide Madison from his co-workers, because fraternizing with the targets of police entrapment is WRONG. The pair start secretly hooking up in what appears to be an AirBnB. This is where much of the “chemistry” and “sexiness” happens, according to many people.

I am sure that Ms. Arjona is a talented actress, but what the script provides for her is a character that oscillates between being powerless and casually bloodthirsty with no logical progression or motivation, summing up to one of the more insulting portrayals of a woman in my recent memory.

The back half of the runtime (again, there is no structure) meanders into a Bonnie and Clyde situation where Gary has to cover for Madison when she actually kills her ex husband. This culminates in an ending that very clearly states that killing someone is fine if it makes you happy. Hit Man is a rare film that is both pro-cop and pro-murder, which is kind of impressive when you think about it.

I would request that you do not “it’s-not-that-deep” me on this one. This movie begins and ends with literal philosophy lectures. Hit Man gestures towards saying something about the malleability of identity and the grey areas of morality, but does so with the laziest possible writing and directing, hoping that Mr. Powell’s winning smile will distract you for long enough that you won’t care.

One of the movie’s poorly executed running gags involves the signal phrase “all pie is good pie”. This line was apparently lifted directly from the true story2 that inspired Hit Man, but to me it is emblematic of the film’s attitude towards itself and its audience. Netflix would like us to accept that all content is good content, and that all Glenn Powell is good Glenn Powell, but I don’t agree. We actually deserve a really excellent pie.

If you want to see a movie with a nuanced take on murder, please watch Anatomy of a Fall (2023). It’s way funnier than this. If you want to see a sexy action comedy with two super hot people, watch Out of Sight (1998). Jennifer Lopez’ performance will blow you away.

Another symptom of the Hit Man psyop is film bros bemoaning the fact that the movie didn’t get a wide theatrical release, because a movie as “fun” as this was “meant to be seen in a movie theater!”. In general, my ethics dictate that all movies by definition deserve to be seen in a movie theater, but I may need to start making exceptions if films made by streaming companies continue to look this oppressively characterless regardless of the talent in the directing chair. At this point, it might make more sense to just say that any movie made for Netflix is directed by Netflix.

Sensing my anger, Hollywood execs put their heads together and came up with a plan to get Hacking Cinema back on board with Mr. Powell’s campaign for Movie Stardom: Twisters was shot on film.

Unfortunately, this worked. I will be seeing Twisters this weekend, but my vigilance with regards to the Glenn Powell psyop remains unshaken. Keep your heads on a swivel, hackers.

1

Today’s movie of interest is I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun’s A24-produced second feature about television’s ability to liberate, the discovery and suppression of queer identities, and the unimaginable horrors of boredom that haunt the American suburbs. I had a hard time organizing my thoughts on this film, so I’m going to format this post as a series of questions, which I’ll do my best to answer.

What’s the purpose of a movie being weird?

A survey of online reactions to TV Glow will reveal that many people consider this movie to be weird. I agree, although on an absolute scale there are much weirder films out there. To make explicit what weird means in this context: TV Glow is substantially different from mainstream narrative films in its images, cadence, and narrative techniques. It’s unconventional even for A24, a production company that has built a recognizable cultural presence around its films’ left-of-center aesthetics.

TV Glow’s setting is surrealistically boring, dark, and quiet. Schoenbrun tells us everything we need to know about the film’s ambiguously located suburb in terms of what we don’t see — most of the scenes are set at night, where everything outside of the characters fades into a deep, hazy black. In the fictional TV show that the two main characters bond over, The Pink Opaque, we see unsettling horror imagery, but no standard horror movie narrative beats materialize. The dialogue is at times awkward and stilted. The story unfolds slowly, but isn’t easy to track.

Towards the end of my second viewing of I Saw the TV Glow, a young man sitting behind me couldn’t stop laughing. It was unclear why until after the credits rolled. He turned to his friend and said something like “I have to really live my life.” He was deeply affected by the ending of the film. Before he could articulate it, what he felt came out of him as laughter. TV Glow’s weirdness worked for him, or maybe more accurately it worked on him.

I might re-describe weird here as expressionistic. An expressionistic film uses images and sounds less in direct service of a linear narrative, and more to induce an emotional state in the viewer. Filmmakers are often told to “show, not tell”, but there’s a third way to convey a film’s messaging — not showing and not telling, but instead making the audience feel it — radiating the message somatically.

In terms of its textual story, TV Glow relies too heavily on telling: there’s a few lengthy monologues, and its hopeful addendum to its largely dark story is literally spelled out in chalk. But these limitations seem insignificant next to Schoenbrun’s visionary expression of the experience of growing up with a heavily suppressed inner identity.

To be queer in a heteronormative world is to feel unsettled, disoriented, confused, and disembodied, and Shoenbrun’s directorial choices make the audience feel it too. And this feeling crosses the boundaries of identity — the young man behind me was likely not trans or queer, but he connected to the core idea: the need to live fully and honestly in the time we have.

When you talk about this kind of filmmaking, it’s hard not to talk about David Lynch, the most successful and influential filmmaker who operates in the expressionistic mode I’m describing. You don’t have to look hard for directors who attempt to imitate his style, but very few do so successfully.

In Lynch’s films, every bizarre line of dialogue, every uncanny-looking set and every unsettling sound is meant to evoke a feeling. In order to operate this way, you need to be really clear on the feeling you’re attempting to evoke. If you’re not, it’s empty style, and the very definition of pretension — just weird. Schoenbrun’s ideas are clear and urgent, which is why they are able to channel Lynch’s influence more effectively than any filmmaker of the decade so far.

I can think of another purpose for weirdness in film: it can act as sugar for the pill of darkness. The back half of TV Glow depicts a person whose act of self-denial and ultimately self-betrayal is destroying them. It’s very sad, very dark, and easily the scariest component of the movie. However, I would argue that if it were portrayed with full visual realism and naturalistic dialogue, it would be unbearable to watch. A degree of weirdness can remind us that we are watching a movie, and therefore allow us to engage with what we’re seeing more safely. The heavier the film’s content, the more weirdness is appropriate to make it digestible.1

I’ve heard several people caveat their appreciation for TV Glow by saying that it’s “not for everyone”. This is disappointing to hear. I think what people mean when they say thi s is that not everyone will be entertained by it, which may be true. But I do think that I Saw The TV Glow is for everyone, or at least, for everyone willing to be transported and potentially changed by a film.

What’s up with Phoebe Bridgers in the middle of the movie?

On of the weird things about Around the midpoint of I Saw the TV Glow, Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddie (Brigette Lundy-Paine) go to a concert venue bar that is also a filming location of The Pink Opaque. There, we see a full performance by Sloppy Jane and Phoebe Bridgers, singing an original song.

On paper, pausing in the middle of the movie to point the camera at a very famous musician sounds gratuitous, but it’s not as crazy as you’d think.

Songs are concentrated capsules of very specific emotions, which is useful to filmmakers. Sofia Coppola famously builds playlists encapsulating a film’s emotional content during or even prior to the writing process. These songs influence the score or in many cases literally become the score.

Schoenbrun’s mid-movie concert isn’t exactly unprecedented either — it’s the most direct David Lynch reference in I Saw the TV Glow. David likes to put song performances around the midpoints of his films, at a pivotal emotional moment for his characters.

The performance in TV Glow works for the same reasons it works in Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Mulholland Drive.

During the pandemic, David Lynch would often supplement his daily weather reports by recommending a song that was on his mind that day. Like Sofia, David has music on the brain all the time. His musical interludes take a part of the creative process and puts it into the text of the film.

Schoenbrun takes this concept one step further in TV Glow, commissioning an entire soundtrack’s worth of songs by their favorite contemporary musicians and then putting those actual musicians into the film. And hey, if you’ve got Phoebe and Hailey’s phone numbers, why the heck not?

Who’s our generation’s Bruce Springsteen?

Ok, yeah, this question is a little tangential to the two prior, but again, this is my blog. When I thought more about I Saw the TV Glow’s soundtrack in connection to its themes, I couldn’t help but think about Born to Run.

Baby this town will rip the bones from your back

It’s a death trap/ It’s a suicide rap

We’ve got to get out while we’re young

‘Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

Like I Saw The TV Glow, Born to Run warns us that a life we don’t want in a place that suffocates us can be spiritually and perhaps literally fatal (death trap). In Claw Machine, Bridgers and Sloppy Jane express that same displacement in their own indie-melancholic style.

I think I was born bored

I think I was born blue

I think I was born wanting more

I think I was born already missing you

This got me thinking about the theoretical continuation of Bruce Springsteen’s work as America’s musical poet laureate. If you’d asked me who our generation’s Springsteen was going to be five years, I would have said Taylor Swift. She was selling out stadiums and putting out number one albums, AND seemed committed to forging a meaningful authorial vision in her lyrics.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that Swift has stepped up to the plate in this regard — she’s not nearly as interested in America as America is in her. More people are listening to her than ever, but she’s not broadening the scope of her music’s concerns to match. For all of the literary references she tosses into The Tortured Poets Department, her songs are ultimately still only about one thing — Taylor Swift. She has anxiety, angst, and anger aplenty, but mostly in regards to the plight of being Taylor Swift.

To be fair, I only judge Taylor this harshly because she seems to hold herself to extremely high standards and welcomes massive fame and influence (and the money that comes with it). She even explicitly references “her legacy” in her songs. I still think she’s a generationally talented songwriter — and if anything, she underestimates her own gifts.

Meanwhile though, Bridgers and her cohort of indie-folk-rock colleagues have quietly (or loudly) positioned themselves as America’s next rock saviors with lyrics that are not only more substantially poetic, but also about a broader range of topics.

What’s even more exciting is the near Taylor-level of fan enthusiasm that these women inspire (as my eardrums can attest). How lucky are today’s teenagers who get to grow up going to shows like this?

Is boygenius a three-headed twenty-first century Springsteen? We’ll see! If this is just the beginning of their careers, either together or separately, I’m excited about the ground they could cover in the future. To put it like Julien Baker on $20, there’s so many hills to die on.

The blog is back.

I Told Ya

If you’ve read this publication, you may have noticed my strong ability to bring up British actor Josh O’Connor even when he’s not featured in the films that I’m writing about. In analyzing any performance from Willy Wonka to James Bond, I’m quick to share my viewpoint: I think Josh O’Connor could do that.

Josh is a special actor with a versatile skill set. He’s able to generate empathy for a character even when their behavior is maladaptive or despicable.

Exhibit A:

Josh makes interesting acting choices when he doesn’t have to. He goes above and beyond what a role might require in its conventional execution.

Exhibit B:

With the release Luca Guadaningo’s Challengers and the widespread notice Josh’s performance has garnered, all I can say is well, well, well. It’s nice to be proven right!

Challengers

Challengers is my favorite film of the year so far. It’s a deeply engaging and sexy adult drama, something we’re suffering from a dearth of. But more importantly to me, it’s a strong contender for the best tennis movie ever made. In fact, I’m not sure there are other strong contenders.

To illustrate why I think this, I’ll start by reviewing the opening of another tennis movie from nearly twenty years ago.

This monologue1 uses tennis to make a point about the role of random chance in life. The idea is valid (albeit kind of obvious), but if you’ve ever played tennis you’ll know that the metaphor isn’t really apt. The ball teetering on top of the net situation does happen, rarely, but it’s usually meaningless in comparison to the choices and effort leading up to and following it. If anything, it can be relief for the outcome of a point to be momentarily down to luck.

Tennis isn’t primarily a game that teaches you to accept randomness - it actually gives you an overwhelming excess of control. There’s a reason for the idiom “the ball is in your court”: tennis is responsibility. Even at a casual level, the game involves a constant and brutal confrontation with the limits of one’s own capabilities in direct comparison to another person.

Does that sound suspiciously like another aspect of the human experience? Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan said it: “It’s a relationship”.

There’s a difference between setting a drama in or around a particular world, and making a drama about a world. Unlike the example above and most tennis movies ever made, Challengers is specifically about the type of people that tennis creates, the mindset it fosters, and the relationships it breeds.

We start with Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) , doubles partners.

Doubles creates intimacy. Success as a team requires an intense unity of intention and action. If you watch doubles on TV, you’ll notice partners usually touch hands between every point, as if re-aligning their frequencies. Art and Patrick’s physical closeness isn’t just a hint at their sexuality, it’s how doubles partners actually act.

Are they in love? Functionally, yes! They wouldn’t have won the US Open junior doubles title if they weren’t. But doubles also necessitates a hyper-awareness of the differences within a pair, of individual strengths and weak points. Like any couple, Art and Patrick are uniquely positioned to destroy each other.

Playing against someone is its own, differently flavored type of intimacy. You don’t win a tennis match by ignoring what’s going on with the person on the other side of the net. Tennis is a personal confrontation, and Tashi Duncan is the ultimate confronter: focused, direct, aggressive. The teenaged Art and Patrick would do anything for some of that energy to be directed at them.

Tashi raises the stakes of Art and Patrick’s junior singles final: whoever wins can have her number. This may be a bit of unintended (or maybe intended) wordplay. In tennis, “having someone’s number” means a familiarity with their weaknesses to the point of easy domination2. Tashi will allow one of these guys to have an upper hand, for now, but not before she sees some really good tennis.

This is a brilliant inciting incident because it creates an entire narrative engine: Tashi turns Art and Patrick’s sexual energy into tennis energy, which in turn drives their competition for her, complicated by their maybe equally intense feelings for one another. What I admire most about Justin Kuritzkes’s script is how focused it is: every scene is a verbal or physical competition between some permutation of these three characters. The overall structure of the film mirrors the final match between Art and Patrick, including who’s winning. Acts are sets, scenes are games. I’ll say it again: the best tennis movie ever made.

Maybe the closest comp to Challengers is not a sports movie at all, unless you consider venture capitalism a sport. I was reminded of The Social Network (most obviously) by the urgently kinetic score, but also the framework of flashbacks set against the final showdown that they led up to. Both films are driven by a powerful triangulation of characters — the implosion (and explosion) of a close friendship brought on by a seductive third party.

One criticism I’ve seen is that Guadanino & co. don’t fully delve into the emotional consequences of the dynamic that these characters have embroiled themselves in. I would argue that Tashi, Art, and Patrick are realistically stunted people, raised essentially from birth to do one thing (tennis), with only one language for expressing themselves (tennis), trying to piece together intimate lives the only way they know how (by playing tennis).

Tashi seems to be aware of the repercussions of this lifestyle, at least at the beginning. She’s grateful that her parents didn’t send her to tennis boarding school, and takes steps to become a more well-rounded person — she chooses to go to college so that “hitting a ball with a racket” isn’t the only thing she can do. Tellingly, we never learn what her major is.

Art is the most successful player, but also the most equipped to experience emotions outside of the sport, wishing his wife would love him regardless of his tournament results (reasonable ask, one might say). Art tries to escape what tennis has made him. Patrick on the other hand accepts it with a nihilistic shit-eating (and extremely sexy) grin.

Who comes out on top? Well, to paraphrase more than a few grand slam trophy acceptance speeches, it doesn’t ultimately matter: tennis won today.

:)

Rating the Tennis

I’m gonna give the accuracy of the on-screen tennis in Challengers a B-, which is pretty disappointing given the overall quality of the movie. The movement is reasonably good from all three leads. Giving Josh’s character a quirky playing style was a smart move to mask some of his awkwardness.

The bad: Art bounces the ball before hitting it when starting a rally, which no one does. Hit it off the drop like an adult! The way they grip the rackets is wrong about half the time, which is actually crazy. Luca, please hire me as grip consultant on Challengers 2!

Federer Crying

May December

When I was chewing through my thoughts on May December, I was reminded of Roger Ebert’s review of Blue Velvet (1986). I love Blue Velvet; Ebert didn’t.

And yet those very scenes of stark sexual despair are the tipoff to what's wrong with the movie. They're so strong that they deserve to be in a movie that is sincere, honest and true. But "Blue Velvet" surrounds them with a story that's marred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots. The director is either denying the strength of his material or trying to defuse it by pretending it's all part of a campy in-joke.

I track what Ebert is saying here, even though I disagree. The tonal mismatch he’s describing happens in many lesser films, but I see everything that David Lynch does tonally as completely deliberate and designed to make you feel a certain way in reference to the subject matter. Blue Velvet is uncomfortable to watch in part because of its bizarre mannerism, and that is on purpose.

May December and Blue Velvet operate very similarly. Both explore the moral rot beneath the surface of the American idyll, but Todd Haynes’s version engages with camp even more directly, using almost absurdist humor to satirize the gross hypocrisies of heteronormative culture.

This is how you get lines like “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs” followed by a melodramatic music sting. It’s weird and uncomfortable and (I think) funny, but it’s also pointing to the Julianne Moore character’s total oblivion to the evil she’s enacting. May December works as both campy melodrama and a searing indictment of the ways abusers are normalized, protected, and pandered to; a rare film that is simultaneously entertaining and deeply challenging.

Saltburn

This movie really made me think, mostly about how annoying it was. Any further comment from me is just going to be unstructured complaining. Friend of the publication and my unpaid creative consultant John Salazar’s Letterboxd review covers everything, so with his permission I am re-publishing it here in full.

Rosamund Pike describes her friend as stylish but disappointing because there’s nothing underneath. Who knew she was also describing this movie!! Except the style was subpar and the substance wasn’t anywhere to be found. There were moments of sexiness but nothing that lingers. I’ll respect anyone who puts their favorite college hits in their movie tho no matter how little they work.

Thank you John!

Comment below: what’s your college hit that you’d put in your movie no matter how little it works? I’m gonna go with this:

Wonka

This portion of the blog post is addressed to pretty much all of my friends and family: I don’t get why you people thought Wonka was going to be so bad. Maybe you think Chalamet is an annoying actor, but tell me, who would you have cast?

Ok, to be fair to you, I do think Timothée is operating a bit outside of his range here, but he is wholly committed to this kind of impossible acting task. I strain to think of someone who could do better (maybe Josh O’Connor, but I say that about everything).

“The trailer looks cringe!” — all of you people.

Paul King directed two of the best family films of the century, and you’re out here doubting him based on the trailer? Grow up!

This movie did not need to exist, and it did not need to be a musical (I won’t remember any of these songs), but even with this questionable prompt Paul King was able to pull off a completely entertaining and well-crafted piece of cinema for kids and adults. It’s pretty much always funny when it’s trying to be funny, especially when it’s utilizing its deep roster of British character actors to pull off goofy bits (Tom Davis and Matthew Boynton were standouts for me).

This is not a Wonka “origin story” in any meaningful sense — the character presented here has no connection to the guy in the book or the Gene Wilder screen version, who if we’re honest, was kind of the original eccentric (read: psychopath) CEO. Instead, Chalamet’s young Wonka functions like Paddington — a non-arcing protagonist who arcs the world around him for good.

Wanna hear an insane thought I just had? I think that Paul King could have actually pulled off Cats. As in Cats (2019) dir. Tom Hooper. I don’t know how, but he would have figured out how to make that radioactively weird IP digestible and maybe even charming. That is his power! Please respect it!

The Holdovers

I used to stay at my midwestern university over Thanksgiving break, so the premise of The Holdovers struck an instant chord with me. Alexander Payne is probably the best working director making straight-ahead adult dramas (let’s pretend Downsizing didn’t happen), and this effort hits it out of the park — it’s an instant Christmas classic and probably my favorite of Payne’s to date.

The script (by TV veteran David Hemingson) is light on structure, playing out in the episodic way that long winter weekends tend to actually go. This results in a movie that doesn’t have one major plot development, but rather a grab bag of situations. The common thread is that everything expressed through the characters is deeply insightful, honest, and emotionally resonant. This is the type of movie that you can only write and/or direct when you’ve got a lot of life experience and a lot of empathy.

Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) is a smart but underachieving kid at Barton Academy, dealing with classmates who don’t like him, one parent who’s abandoned him, and another who he’s lost permanently. He’s been kicked out of three boarding schools so far — military school is next if he screws up again.

Between the script and Sessa, the characterization of Angus nails that period of late adolescence when everyone expects you to act like an adult while you’re still not completely in control of your behavior. Angus knows who he is and what his values are, but he’s not able to enact that in a non-abrasive way, and therefore is understood by no one. It’s painful and frustrating to feel like your hands aren’t on the steering wheel of your life, and even worse when you’re running on a deficit of love and attention. This brings to mind shades of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows — a vivid portrayal of what it’s like to be a young person bolstered by an astonishingly real-feeling performance.

The other half of the two-hander is Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a classics teacher whose minor idiosyncrasies have pushed him, largely alone, to the margins of life. He stays there not really out of fear, but because for the most part he likes where he is. Mr. Hunham is a holdover as much as Angus is — stuck in a comfortable extended adolescence of his own creation.

The pair has enough overlap and difference to clash, argue, and ultimately understand, knocking one another loose from their emotional entrapments. There’s something old-school about the sincerity and straightforwardness with which these characters arc and grow, matching The Holdovers’ 70s-era title design and color grading. It’s the kind of Christmas miracle that only Mr. Payne could pull off so well.

Poor Things

My wierdo fave Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ newest film has the same basic premise as Barbie — a woman discovering what it means to be a woman, what it means to be human, and how those two concepts relate and overlap. It’s equally as ambitious as Gerwig’s effort, and for me, a little more seamlessly successful.

Poor Things draws from the Frankenstein narrative template, but it’s important that Emma Stone’s Bella isn’t really a monster or a man-made creature. She’s a woman getting a do-over of her life. Her accelerated rate of development means there’s no time for her to be successfully conditioned and indoctrinated — she’s able to start again without the prejudices and barriers that ruined her life in the first place.

Yorgos is at his most interesting and powerful when he uses extreme (and extremely uncomfortable) situations as symbols for universal human problems and power dynamics. In Poor Things, the sex is literal, but also symbolic of women’s desires and humanity more generally, which men normalize and control.

Mark Ruffalo’s smarmy gentleman Duncan Wedderburn is attracted to Bella because she doesn’t follow the rules of “polite society,” which he allegedly hates. Of course he only hates it when “polite society” is limiting his behavior, not Bella’s.

Wedderburn’s (funny) extreme feelings of betrayal, disgust, and heartbreak over everything Bella does is spot-on — men are conditioned to believe that women are hurting them or hurting society when they don’t submit to male control. The flip of this is that women become good at coping with oppression, with its effects easily rationalized, tamped down, drugged, or painted as minor and selfish to complain about. Not the case for Bella though!

An especially cool dance scene is a microcosm of how the movie works overall — it’s a visual metaphor for Bella’s unrestrained humanity and Duncan’s desperate attempts to squelch it for his own comfort. Bella can’t help but move, Duncan tries to channel that movement into something socially acceptable.

You could argue that the ideas explored are somewhat surface level. I mostly agree with this — a more specific and probably more disturbing version of this movie could have been made (more likely if Yorgos had written it). We’re not going deep on anything, but the survey course feels worthy given how much fun we’re having in the process. If Barbie was feminism 101, Poor Things might be feminism 201 in Yorgos’ wacky-land. The world, performances, and film techniques are compelling enough that the runtime feels earned even when it’s not narratively necessary. I just like being here.

And like Gerwig in Barbie, Yorgos is having an absolute blast playing with his visual world. You can identify a lot of influences — Jaques Tati, Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel, Terry Gilliam — that all coalesce pretty seamlessly into a steampunk fantasy Europe. Barbie and Poor Things can be seen as in conversation with each other — if you don’t love the approach of one, you might love the other.

Anyone But You

It is my hope that every year will bring us a production as mired in unhinged celebrity drama as 2022’s Don’t Worry Darling, the release of which was really my Christmas.

2023 presented only one clear candidate: an original R-rated romantic comedy starring Sydney Sweeney and Glenn Powell entitled Anyone But You. The foundational chapters of this film’s behind-the-scenes True Hollywood Story (involving a disgruntled girlfriend and a seemingly intimate trip to an Australian Zoo) are well documented, so I will not detail them here. This is not a gossip publication!

While the Sweeney/Powell affair doesn’t come close to rivaling the Don’t Worry Darling debacle in terms of complexity, number of players involved and iconic moments, it did ultimately work on me as a marketing ploy. I marched to the Burbank AMC 16 for a late screening of Anyone But You prepared to judge the film on its merits!

Unlike Don’t Worry Darling, which was a sci-fi film created by people who seemed to hate sci-fi, Anyone But You understands what genre it is and leans into those conventions enthusiastically, which is refreshing. On a humor and charisma level, I unfortunately don’t think Sweeney and Powell have the juice. But Anyone But You also fails on a more basic level. Maybe I’m just a stupid idiot*, but I found a lot of this movie pretty difficult to track, which I think comes down to unclear screenwriting on a scene level.

Example: after their initial meet cute, Ben (Powell) and Bea (Sweeney) have a Great Date (TM), which concludes with them falling asleep on Ben’s couch. The next morning Bea gets up and leaves. Not because she doesn’t like Ben! Not because she’s the love ‘em and leave ‘em type! Not because she has a meeting to go to! Not because she has a train to catch! Not because she needs to go walk her dog!

She doesn’t know why she left either, and to convey that to the audience, she tells her sister on the phone that she doesn’t know why she left. So eventually we find our way to the next story beat, but it’s weak and unclear. A version of this type of muddy writing happens in half of the scenes, which adds up to character confusion across the entire movie. It’s possible that adding caveats and ambiguities to a character’s actions might come from a desire to make things realistic, but clarity is always more important than realism, especially in a comedy.

Here’s the concept that I try to hold myself to: every thing that happens has to just be one thing. If you have to use the word “but” a lot to describe a character’s action or motivation, it’s not clear enough.

*and it’s possible I wasn’t fully sober.

If you’ve ever driven through the California’s San Joaquin Valley, it’s easy to guess why Modesto native George Lucas imagined his hero’s home to be a farm on the edge of the galaxy. If you grew up there, you’ve known it all along: The Valley is Tatooine.

Yes, I call it The Valley. Everyone is allowed to refer to their valley of origin as The Valley, apologies to Paul Thomas Anderson and the Haim sisters.

When I was a very small child, I was under the impression that whenever my family traveled from Fresno (or Clovis to be really specific) to Los Angeles or San Francisco, we were going to a different planet, although I was confused as to how that transition was so smoothly accomplished by car. This was in concept a reasonable thing for me to think: that’s what Luke Skywalker had to do to get to anyplace interesting.

Star Wars was central to my world, but in the same way that water is central to a fish. Every baseball bat was a lightsaber to me. My mom’s vacuum cleaner was R2D2. Even back then, it never made sense to say that Star Wars was my favorite movie — that’s like when Christians say their favorite book is the Bible.

Coincidentally, or maybe not coincidentally at all, it was another of George Lucas’ films that would turn me into a Movie Person (TM). Up until I was a young teenager, the films I loved brought me out of my world. American Graffiti was different — it came to me where I lived and spoke to me about my life. If I can point to a moment where cinema grabbed me and never let go, it was the night I first watched the whole thing in ten-minute YouTube clips on my parents’ computer.

I went into the 50th Anniversary screening this past summer a bit worried that through my grown-up eyes, I would find American Graffiti unworthy of the place it holds in my life. I shouldn’t have worried— it isn’t perfect, but it’s great: deeply affecting, rich in its meaning and symbols, and still the definitive film about the California that I grew up in.

Time/Place

Critics usually frame American Graffiti as a film about a time — the moment in America just before the Vietnam War brought an end to our national adolescence. I’d argue that the film is about the seduction of nostalgia, but its depiction of that particular time is so vivid that it has become known primarily as an object of nostalgia itself. The screening I attended seemed to confirm this — my friends and I were the youngest people in the theater by probably 35 years. The film’s tagline is “Where were you in ‘62?”, and its enduring audience is mostly people who can answer that question.

American Graffiti is about that time, but its place axis operates independently from its time axis. Its world is as recognizable to me, a kid who grew up in Central California in the 2000’s, as it is to my father, who grew up somewhere else (Long Island) in the 1960s.

Modesto, Fresno and the other agricultural hubs along Highway 99 are not the Spingsteen-ian death traps you’ll find in other films about the American heartland (see: Badlands released in the same year). They were and mostly still are fairly well-resourced cities, places with everything you could need to live a regular, middle-class life, especially if you’re lucky enough to be born into one already. The choice to leave the Valley isn’t about survival or necessity — it signals a desire to become something greater.

American Graffiti circles its characters around that place-specific choice and its consequences over the course of one night. Curt (Richard Dreyfus) and Steven (Ron Howard) are on the eve of their departure for college “back east”. Steven is ready to “get out of this turkey town”, but Curt is balking. He can’t name his hesitancy, sheepishly grinning when pressed by Steven about it. It’s a pull of backwards inertia that speaks an appealing truth: if he stops moving, life will stop challenging him.

Some have already made the choice to stay, and it looks irreversible. Local street racing king John Milner is five or so years out of high school but still bumming around with his younger friends, waiting for the next challenger to roll into town.

Where Steven can’t wait for time to move him forward and Curt has his hand over the pause button, Milner’s relationship to the passage of time borders on phobic. His nightlong adventure involves being stuck driving around with the personification of his fear: fourteen-year-old Carol (Mackenzie Phillips) the youth that exposes his age.

When Milner is pulled over by a cop, we learn that it’s his birthday — a milestone that he isn’t able to acknowledge, let alone celebrate. His adolescence in this virtually problem-free town is too strong of a drug to quit.

“I’m staying here, having fun, as usual”

American Graffiti frames nostalgia as a seductive force, one that Curt is on the precipice of succumbing to the way Milner already has. While en route to attend one final high school sock hop, Curt encounters the movie’s most enduring and powerful symbol: a young woman (Suzanne Sommers) driving a white Thunderbird at a stop light.

She’s exactly what Curt is subconsciously looking for — a reason to stay. In his search for her, Curt encounters versions of who he could become if he chooses not to get on the plane the next day.

While roaming the empty halls of the high school, he bumps into an old teacher, Mr. Wolfe, who himself returned home after just one semester at an East Coast college.

“Why’d you come back?”

“I decided I wasn’t the competitive type.”

Life is easier as a medium-sized fish in a Modesto-sized pond. Mr. Wolfe appears to be at peace with his decision. He also appears to be sleeping with a high school student.

When Curt’s search leads him out into the streets, he accidentally sits on a car belonging to a member of The Pharaohs, and is non-optionally invited to ride along on some of their minor criminal activities.

The Pharaohs enlist Curt to help them steal from The Elks Lodge, an extremely boring quasi-masonic club of old men who have recently awarded Curt a scholarship. Both the Pharaohs and the Elks are confident that Curt could find a worthy place in their membership.

Either way, the Modesto version of the future is looking kind of grim. But Curt again focuses in on the idea of an old home made new — that the girl in the T-bird could still want him. A last-ditch attempt to contact her leads him to seek out Wolfman Jack, the Valley’s god of music.

Sound/Nostalgia

American Graffiti has a fully diegetic soundtrack, meaning all the music heard in the film is also heard by the characters. And with the exception of the live band at the high school dance, the music comes from the radio, spun by DJ Wolfman Jack (played by the real guy, neé Robert Weston Smith). American Graffiti’s set of carefully chosen pop songs is a huge part of the film’s nostalgic power, but they’re not just accurate period pulls — the songs drive the emotional content.

Wolfman Jack is an omnipresent character, influencing the story over the air waves, and linking the characters together when they’re separated spatially. This is why Kurt needs to find him — he’s the only person who can connect him to every other person in the Valley, including the girl in the T-bird.

“The Wolfman is everywhere”

The film’s opener on Rock Around the Clock is iconic, but an early needle drop of Del Shannon’s Runaway signals the film’s most important thematic content.

And as I still walk on I think of / the things we’ve done together

While our hearts were young

Nostalgia and music are tightly linked — we imprint on the sounds in the air when we’re young. Songs become time capsules that we fill with the heightened emotions of a particular era of our lives.

I’m lucky that I’ve been able find new soundtracks for every stage of my life — not everyone does. Milner’s nostalgia-induced regressiveness is evident in his rejection of music that’s different from what he loved a few years prior as a teenager — he shuts off the radio when he hears newfangled “surfin’ shit”.

“Rock and roll’s been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died”

The Skyliner’s Since I Don’t Have You is the emotional centerpiece, hitting at the end of the night when the characters are coming to grips with what they might be losing in the morning.

I don’t have plans and schemes

And I don’t have hopes and dreams

I don’t have anything

Since I don’t have you

It’s fitting that the album cover for the record features The Skyliners posed on an airport tarmac — where the characters’ final choices will be made.

Music is only one half of American Graffiti’s cultural equation — it’s also arguably one of the most important car movies ever made.

Machine/Art

America’s cultural link between cars and freedom is on one level pretty obvious: suburbia makes it impossible to go anywhere or do anything without one. The car is necessary for a basic level of human mobility, let alone as a means of escape.

I don’t think that’s the whole story of Americans and their cars, though. Take a look at the initial confrontation between Milner and his street racing rival, a diabolically cool Harrison Ford in his first-ever film role as Bob Falfa.

Yes, these guys are going to race, but their jabs here are concerned with aesthetics.

“What’s that supposed to be, sort of a cross between piss yellow and puke green, ain’t it?”

“Man, you call that a paint job, but it’s pretty ugly — I bet you have to sneak up on pumps just to get a little air in your tires”

In American Graffiti, the transportive powers of the vehicles are kind of a given. What’s more important is the value of the cars as art objects.

Earlier in the film, Steve gives Terry temporary custody of his 1958 Chevrolet Impala, which understandably causes Terry to lose his mind. He promises to “love and cherish” the vehicle, which has instantly raised his social status in the community.

I think there’s a reason that the aesthetics of car design exploded the same time suburban sprawl did. Automobiles gave suburbanites art objects that they could make their own, share with others, and be proud of. If you’ve ever been to a car show, whether it’s the Concours D’Elegance or local kids parked outside of the Foster Freeze on a Friday night, you know what I’m talking about.

Valley car culture endures 80 years later, in a different form. Now it’s more about sheer size.

We lost something significant when we stopped viewing cars as art, maybe as significant as the loss of vernacular architecture to cookie-cutter tract housing and grotesque McMansions.

I wonder if the chord that American Graffiti strikes with me above all is that in almost every scene, it shows young people engaging with and creating their own forms of culture in a remote environment, which is ultimately the story of my own adolescence.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Let me be up front: my main issue with superhero movies is that I do not want to see them anymore. I will not be viewing any more live-action Marvel films under any circumstances, because I’ve recently decided to respect myself.

I did see Spider-man: Across the Spider-Verse, mostly because I work in animation and I was trying to be a good citizen. The reaction to the film from animation professionals at large was that it either ruined their life or changed their life, depending on if they worked on it or not, respectively.

Spider-man stories are fundamentally about one person’s relationships and how they are affected by responsibility. When done well, they’re compelling on an intimate, human level, not a global will-we-save-the-world level. The Tom Holland films only halfway worked because they were only halfway Spider-man movies: the character stuff was good, but the Marvel bullshit kept getting in its way.

This is why Sony’s first animated Spider-verse entry felt like such a breath of fresh air by comparison. It was just a Spider-man film, and an exceptionally humorous and visually inventive one. There is plenty of that same charm and fun in Across The Spider-Verse, but ultimately, the infection of Marvel bullshit wins out. The multiverse elements that were tolerable in Into the Spider-Verse feel closer to the narrative slog that we get in the live action films.

Marvel’s biggest problem, other than corporate creative bankruptcy, is its endless raising of the stakes. To combat this, they gesture towards grounding stories in the personal consequences of the seismic main plot events — usually a character potentially losing a family member. But even the most profound of tragedies feel silly and pointless when taken in the context of half of humanity being erased, or whatever it is this time. That’s basically the problem with Across the Spider-Verse.

The “multiverse” was originally a way for comic book writers to create different versions of stories and characters while technically maintaining narrative continuity across the brand. It never had value as a narrative device in and of itself. In the movies, both Marvel and DC, it’s become kind of the logical endpoint of stakes inflation: if the end of one world is not big enough, where can you go but the end of ALL of the worlds? Turns out, all of the worlds are actually a lot less interesting than one world. Everything can be undone, so nothing has actual consequences.

Much has been made of Across the Spiderverse’s visual ambition and experimentation, but I don’t think that throwing as much chaos and color as possible into every frame is actually good. My eyes were constantly readjusting. I didn’t immediately clock that the different universes had different visual styles. On a shot level the work is hugely impressive (everyone who worked on this movie should be very proud), but the net effect is a look that competes with the story for attention every second of the film.

Both narratively and visually, multiverse movies take incoherence and disunity and turn them into values that we’re expected to embrace. Making disorganization part of the text of your film does not immediately turn that disorganization into good cinema (even though academy thinks that it does).

Smoking Causes Coughing

I didn’t catch Quentin Dupieux’s Smoking Causes Coughing during its brief theatrical run in March, so I saw it when it came out on Hulu in August. Does that qualify it as a summer movie? Yes, because this is my blog and I make the rules.

Dupieux is a French director who by a miracle of the cinema gods is allowed to make incredibly bizarre and goofy 80-minute movies about whatever he wants. These premises include a tire that kills people, a suede fringe jacket with magical powers, and two guys trying to use a giant fly to make money.

Smoking Causes Coughing is about Tobacco Force, a team of superheroes whose powers represent the deadly chemical components of cigarettes: Benzene (Gilles Lellouche), Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi), and Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra). They are sent on a group retreat to improve team cohesion by their boss, who is a little rat guy who looks like this:

On the retreat the Tobacco Force (and some interesting guests) take turns telling stories, which we see play out, turning the movie into an anthology. Everyone has a nice time until the evil Lézardin threatens to destroy planet earth (annoying).

Dupieux has a lot in common with Rüben Ostland: both directors are interested in experimenting with the parameters of the social contract. Ostland frequently does this by throwing natural disasters at his characters (avalanche, shipwreck) and then watching how they react and treat each other. Dupieux does the same thing, but with more un-natural happenings (giant fly, murder tire, world-ending super villain).

This mode of commentary is sharpest in Smoking Causes Coughing’s built-in short films, which deal with the uncomfortable realities of inhabiting a human body. In one, a woman becomes murderously disaffected with her husband and friends when a magical perspective-granting helmet allows her to hear her own thoughts, and in another, a young man nonchalantly goes with the flow when his aunt accidentally runs him through a wood chipper (he’s fine, it doesn’t hurt that much).

You might be thinking that none of this sounds like a movie that makes any sense. Correct. I find Dupieux’s movies to be inspiring for their creativity alone, even if they’re not the most cohesive watching experiences — it just feels good to know that people are capable of that kind of bonkers originality. And if you’re willing to go there with him, you’ll be rewarded by how smart his dumbness is.

Bottoms

I unfortunately came of age during the Apatow era of comedies (00’s through 10’s), which I would define as movies made by improv comedy guys with close to zero cinematic sensibilities. I could never put a finger on why I didn’t like them, but in retrospect I think it’s a brand of humor that’s at best tangential to and at worst antagonistic towards character and story. There was also an apathy that seemed to permeate those films, like they were too cool for any sincere attempt at social satire.

Bottoms might not mark the official death of the Apatow era, but it’s putting a few nails in the coffin. This is an actual movie with characters and sequences that is directed by an actual director. Emma Seligman has seen movies before, and she has enjoyed them!

The premise of Bottoms is absolutely goofy: two girls start a fight club in the hopes that the cheerleaders they’re crushing on will join and, via a chain of barely coherent teen logic, want to kiss them. This is actually a hugely ambitious idea because it’s entirely execution dependent. It is not topical, it is not high-concept, and it doesn’t even have a lot of obvious humor built into it. But Seligman & co understand that funny movies are less about funny things happening, and more about everything happening in a funny way. This means humor coming from every aspect of the filmmaking, not just the jokes — the set design, scene construction, and even music queues all feel carefully put together in support of a cohesive comedic vision.

Instead of trying and failing to capture the high school experience of the moment, or of any particular moment, Bottoms creates its own world. In this world the crosstown rival football team is literally murderous, there are no smart phones (thank god), and Marshawn Lynch is the history teacher. In the final act things veer into a level of absurdism that might be a bit much for some to stomach, but I think the big swing pays off — this movie might become something of a cult classic.

Ayo Ediberi and Rachel Sennot are plausible-ish playing about ten years younger than their age while still leaning strongly into their respective comic personas. Ediberi’s sincerity lends emotional heft to what would otherwise be a feelings-light script, and Sennot is just relentlessly funny. She has the ability be both disarmingly charming and a huge idiot, a performance modality that has historically been reserved for men. In the Apatow world (maybe minus Bridesmaids), women behaving badly usually end up the butt of the jokes and the losers of the movie. Bottoms feels like a settling of that score.

Talk to Me

I think that Jordan Peele has incorrectly calibrated my expectations for the current state of horror by making movies that are so well-crafted and packed with complex ideas. In the general case, we ain’t aiming that high, and that’s ok! Last summer’s Barbarian was a great example of the genre firing on all cylinders while not taking itself very seriously.

On the other hand, Ari Aster’s massive influence has introduced elements to the genre’s popular entries that are actively un-fun. Aster’s movies are just as thoughtfully designed as Peele’s, but he confuses horror with horrific — the scariness mostly comes from putting upsetting stuff on the screen. As much as I don’t like his work, his imitators are so much worse, leaving us with stuff like Talk to Me, which is neither thoughtful nor fun!

Talk to Me sets its Aster-esque tone early with a cold open depicting some grisly and apparently random violence against a completely abysmal color palette.

The premise of Talk to Me is not the problem: it’s kind of an ingenious supernatural spin on Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners (1990). A group of teenagers have access to a sculpture of a hand with supernatural properties. When you hold it and speak the titular phrase, you are able to communicate with and optionally embody a random spirit from the incorporeal realm. It’s like a spooky version of Chatroulette! But be careful, if you do it for more than sixty seconds, those spirits might stick around (they immediately do it for more than sixty seconds).

Kind of hilariously, this is treated like a fun party game with a risk only moderately higher than doing a keg stand. This is perhaps a comment on social media culture, and how people will do any objectively insane thing to capture a viral moment, but the characters seem genuinely nonplussed by the implications of talking to dead people.

It’s not outside the realm of possibility for kids to be this stupid, but I think you need at least one character who is at least curious about what this occurrence could mean. Typically, this would be the protagonist! With no one to care, we don’t get to explore any of the potentially interesting questions raised by the premise. Instead, Talk to Me goes in the Aster direction of beating us up with horrific imagery. In particular, head slamming. If you think Alex Wolff is the king of slamming his own head into stuff, wait till you see what Joe Bird brings to the table (his head, forcefully). At about the turn into the third act, the logic of the film becomes actually untrackable. The ending is clever, but it isn’t earned by the storytelling.

If I were to re-write Talk to Me, I would make it about grad students in archeology who found this hand thing on a dig. See: John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987).

More movies should be about grad students (this was actually one of Midsommar’s strengths). The great thing about grad students is that they are young and immature, but they also really want to find out about stuff!

65

This is another Spring release that I streamed over the summer. It’s really bad, and you shouldn’t watch it, but I think it’s bad in an interesting and funny way. If Talk to Me ruined an great premise with lazy execution, 65 contains an example of a premise that’s just terminally bad.

Based on its trailers, 65 seemed to have lot going for it. Adam Driver and dinosaurs? I strain to think of a more appealing combo! What could go wrong?

First red flag: the premise is dealt out via text on the screen. Over some really nice looking outer space CGI, they allege that we are about to see a pre-historic, pre-human civilization on a planet called Somaris. This claim is complicated when the representative of that civilization turns out to be Adam Driver, one of our more famous human beings. In the following scenes, we are asked to accept not only that the pre-humans of Somaris look exactly like humans and speak English, but also that they have replicated many aspects of human culture, such as hanging out on the beach for fun, and not having free health care.

That’s right, Adam Driver’s character Mills (suspiciously human-sounding name) has to go on a two-year intergalactic work trip in order to earn enough pre-human money to treat his daughter’s illness that involves coughing. On the work trip, the ship he’s piloting hits an asteroid field and crash lands guess where? Earth, with dinosaurs!

It’s really interesting timing, too: he touches down just days before the mass-extinction causing asteroid is scheduled to hit, giving him and the one surviving passenger (Ariana Greenblatt) extra incentive to get to their escape pod or whatever. Under the end credits, we are shown a montage depicting the ensuing post-dinosaur course of Earth’s evolution, but without comment on if Adam Driver’s visit has any causal relationship to it.

Yes, this is very silly, but I do not want to be the guy who’s overly concerned about plot elements being logically airtight when it doesn’t actually matter. Plenty of great movies don’t make a ton of sense. But in this case I think it does matter, for a handful of reasons.

First, because I spent the first thirty minutes of the ninety-minute runtime wondering if I had read the title card correctly. Second, the extreme lack of care about the premise in 65 is symptomatic of a lack of care about any other important story craft element. The movie is poorly paced and painfully cliched in its character work.

The third and biggest problem is a mismatch of tone. 65 takes its dumb-ass premise dead-ass seriously, while also failing to make it believable. It did not need to be this way. Think about why a movie like Flash Gordon works: the tone matches the level of logic. We get that it’s ridiculous, and we lean into it.

Sci-fi actually has a long tradition of aliens looking exactly like human beings, which like Flash Gordon and thirty percent of all Star Trek episodes, this movie could have embraced and had fun with! Wouldn’t it be great if Adam Driver got to wear an outfit more like this, instead of what appears to be a fitted Under Armor long sleeve?

Here is why:

The Manhattan Project and the decade or so of physics leading up to it have been mid-tier obsessions of mine since I was a teenager. Christopher Nolan’s handling of any kind of science-adjacent material has not been to my taste. Thus, apprehension. Between that and the choice to focus on Robert Oppenheimer, who is in my opinion a very boring guy, the whole project sounded like a recipe for not-happy Christine.

I feared that Barbie would land in my personal uncanny valley — I have a deep terror of Pee-wee Herman, the Jim Carrey Grinch, and other similarly real-but-unreal forms of live-action media. However, the trailer didn’t fill me with a nameless dread, and as we all know, Ryan Gosling is our greatest actor.

I would probably have seen Oppenheimer out of obligation/ respect/ masochism anyway, so partaking in the now-legendary double feature seemed the right move.

I think it may be too soon to understand what the long-term impact of the Barbenheimer phenomenon will be, but packed theaters are never a bad thing. My verdict is that both movies are good, but I wouldn’t immediately categorize either as great.

Oppenheimer

The most unbelievable thing about the Manhattan project is its timing.

The neutron was the key ingredient. Its lack of charge makes it the perfect subatomic baseball — it won’t deflect when you shoot it at other charged stuff, like atoms. Throw it at a nervous wreck of an atom like Uranium or Plutonium, and the target splits apart, spewing out energy, and also a handful more neutrons. Ensue chain reaction, ensue bomb.

Thirteen years before Hiroshima, we didn’t even know the neutron existed.

The discoveries needed to make the nuclear bomb possible all happened, one after the other, in near lockstep with the rise of Fascism. None of these discoveries were motivated by the possibility of weaponization — the men and women making them were interested in understanding the fundamental nature of matter. They shared their discoveries freely with international colleagues, because that’s what scientists do.

If the scientific timeline were delayed by even a few years, we may never have opened the gates to the nuclear hell we still live in. The path we chose wasn’t inevitable — we could have chosen another one, and should have. But for physicists in the 1930s, the line between the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of destruction wasn’t just blurred, it was invisible.

Enrico Fermi is famous for saying “Ignorance is never better than knowledge”. He may have been wrong, at least for his own time. Did we need to know about the structure of the nucleus? Was that pursuit worth it, if we ultimately used what we found inside to wipe out two cities?

I think these are interesting questions, but Oppenheimer can’t slow down to think about them.

Nolan is completely uninterested in the composition of individual shots, so all of his storytelling happens in the cuts. The more complex the ideas he’s swinging for, the more complex his cutting gets. This has mixed results for me (Tenet haters raise your hand). It’s also a bit of a problem with the specific material of Oppenheimer: the non-linear, fractured, and pacey approach can work in many cases, but when you’re dealing with a cast of 20+ white guys who all have small but important variations of the same job, you get a movie that’s pretty hard to track.

No one thread of the story is followed for long enough to get a feel for any of the characters other than Oppenheimer: Feynman, Fermi, Szilard, and about half a dozen others were only ever the screen for seconds at a time, gone before you could clock their significance. (Really really funny to have one of the like five shots of Jack Quaid as Feynman to be him playing the bongos though.)

Easily the best sequence in the film is the actual Trinity test. It’s pure Nolan cinematic excellence in pacing, suspense, and detail richness. By comparison, the endless scenes of people talking about Communism and espionage feels like a waste of space.

I’ve never thought that Robert Oppenheimer himself was the most interesting guy in the whole drama of the Manhattan Project. The leader, sure. Tortured, I guess? But the best lens through which to examine the tragedy of how discovery turned into calculated mass murder? I am still not sold.

The (CGI-free!) visuals depicting Oppenheimer’s creeping foreknowledge of what nuclear physics could unleash were effective, but they’re front-loaded in the movie and don’t come back much. For most of the film, we don’t live in the allegedly special world of Oppenheimer’s head, but instead in the boring, windowless rooms of his interrogations and hearings. Even though I can only name Trumbo (2015) as an example of this, I spiritually feel that I have seen a guy interrogated about his dubious Communist affiliations one million times.

Cillian Murphy’s performance is good, but the material doesn’t allow him to turn the subject into anything other than the same frustrating cipher he is at the outset. Oppenheimer didn’t technically do any of the science that made the bomb, and he didn’t stop it from being used, despite knowing how horrific the results would be. He’s by definition a reactive character. All Nolan can do is try to show us the enormity of his inner conflict. Having him hallucinate his colleagues faces flaking off is a moderately creative way of doing this, but I can’t say it was especially affecting.

Maybe it worked better for others — it’s possible that I’ve thought about this topic so much throughout my life that I’m kind of numb to it now. But in general, if you can’t strike a deep emotional chord while depicting people reacting to arguably the worst thing that’s ever happened, I’m not sure how successful the entire exercise was. This is in huge contrast to Dunkirk, which made me cry in the theater. It was so good at conveying the emotional experience of living through a horrifying time and (for the lucky ones) coming out the other side. Where Dunkirk was huge and experiential, Oppenheimer is small and talky.

But Josh Peck pushing the big red button??? Can you believe???

Barbie

I think that Greta Gerwig is very possibly our generation’s answer to someone like Steven Spielberg. Even though she came from a mumblecore-ish, indy background, she seems to be interested in making huge, enduring movies, and in bringing a high level of filmmaking craft and sophistication to those commercial efforts.

The Warner Bros Barbie project was an interesting test to this theory. IP-driven studios have a fun habit of hiring interesting filmmakers and apparently just paying them to stand on the set while their machinery turns out a generic product. However my optimistic thinking was that Lady Bird and Little Women bought Gerwig just enough pull for the studio to actually let her cook, so to speak.

Pleased to report: I was correct! I don’t think that the result is a perfect movie, but its overall massive success means that Gerwig is going to be able to keep taking huge swings, at least for now.

And Barbie is a huge swing. It’s also a type of movie that we just don’t see anymore. A good comp might be the Robert Zemekis classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988): both are triumphs of production design and analog effects, both are densely-written character-driven comedies, and both are about a kid’s thing, but made for adults. Roger Rabbit still has the edge for me in terms of plot construction, but I think Barbie could end up with a similar legacy.

The sets are huge, real, and packed with thoughtful and funny details. It’s a live-action cartoon in the best way: every shot is packed with the type of visual gags that can only come from specifically crafting the environment to the story. Even the characters are kind of in awe of the world they inhabit: Kate McKinnon’s “Weird Barbie” character quips “thanks, I built it” when showing off her elaborate diorama map to an impressed room of Barbies.

The comedy comes from everywhere: the characters, the staging, the way that the individual scenes play out. Gerwig gives every sequence and set piece a clear direction, drawing from a deep set of film references — the fictionalized Mattel offices are straight out of Jaques Tati’s Playtime (1967), but with an energy of corporate mayhem that reminds me of Hudsucker Proxy (1994).

Barbie’s content apparently made B*n Shap*ro and other online reactionaries mad, which is always funny and good. A lot of the (unnecessary) defense of the film against the right-wing furor seems to say that you shouldn’t project political meaning onto a movie about a doll, but I think that’s selling Gerwig & co short. Barbie is a deeply political film! It doesn’t present a philosophically airtight version of feminism, but it’s definitely about gender, which, like it or not, is a political discussion.

On my first viewing, I had an impression that Barbie fell backwards into a mild form of assumed gender essentialism. Through its humor, the movie appeared to be at least symbolically engaging with the idea that mens’ and women’s interests and values are completely and necessarily disjoint. Men like Rob Thomas, women haven’t seen The Godfather, ect, ect. After my second viewing though, I think my reaction was a bit knee-jerk. Barbie is about the system of symbols that we use to describe and enforce gender, and their complex relationship to our actual selves.

The main arc of the movie is Barbie’s journey from symbolic to actual womanhood, in a world that is outgrowing her value as an aspirational figure. This connected for me during America Ferrera’s monologue (which should earn her an Oscar nom). In it, she specifically talks about Barbie as a representation:

“I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.”

Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling Ken (who is perfect) discovers that the real world contains an entire construct of male-ness that could serve him and the other Kens very well: the patriarchy! The Kens’ attempt to re-create a male dominated world minus two or so millennium of actual oppression within Barbieland is very, very funny. Ultimately, though, Ken is disillusioned by the symbols that he discovered in Century City (he doesn’t even like horses). On a human level, the patriarchy fails to provide identity. Barbie’s thematic endgame is to posit that our gender symbology fails to serve anyone, but with the acknowledgement that women are the ones materially damaged by it.

This isn’t perfectly executed: the script gets a little hand-wavy and overcrowded with ideas in the second act, which is likely why the messaging didn’t land for me the first time I saw it. Ferrera’s monologue itself is great, but repeatedly paraphrasing that speech is turned into a plot mechanism, which feels like a C+ solution to a blank space in your script where you’d type in “insert character realizations here”. By the end, we’re talking about what it means to be human, let alone a woman, which is quite literally the biggest topic there is. I admire the ambition, but scaling down the thematic slate could have made Barbie more instantly get-able.

Mattel’s willingness to engage in self-roasting in the ultimate interest of selling more dolls is also interesting to ponder. Can a movie that is funded by and in promotion of a corporation actually be anti-corporate? Maybe not in a really strict sense, but I think Gerwig taking advantage of Mattel’s capital to make something with this much artistic and cultural merit is… wait for it… good. The idiots with the money will be forgotten, but film is forever.

On the other hand, Anderson’s animated films (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs) have always made perfect sense to me. In stop-motion, he and his crew are literally playing with puppets and miniatures, so we don’t have to worry about what the intent of that artifice is — it’s just built into the medium. While I appreciate the design of films like Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch just as much, I’m usually more on the fence about the purpose of the visual and tonal rigidity within the context of live-action.

Regardless of how you evaluate Anderson’s individual films, though, I think it’s a net positive for cinema to have directors with clear artistic interests, even if it doesn’t connect for everyone every time. His films are fun, funny, interesting, and look amazing — not a ton to complain about.

It wasn’t until I watched Asteroid City that Anderson’s style began to reveal a deeper layer of purpose, at least in my own understanding. I think there’s a good reason for the laying out of sets and props in his frames like he’s getting ready to pack them up to go on a hiking trip. Check out this video, which explains a principle used in the studio of conceptual artist Tom Sachs.

The point of knolling is that it allows you to see all of the materials and tools at your disposal. When Anderson populates his scenes with deliberately placed objects, he is not just creating background texture to fill out the frame. He wants us to SEE everything.

Sachs’ and Anderson’s work seem deeply connected: both have an intense interest in the meaning of objects and physical spaces. For Sachs, (and for Anderson in Asteroid City) it’s particularly those objects that are uniquely embedded in the American experience.

If the material worlds that your characters inhabit matter to you deeply, why would you NOT want to film them this way?

This became clear to me during Asteroid City for a reason: I’m just as interested in the stuff of this particular effort as Wes is. The titular fictional town is the perfect storm of Christine Gerardi aesthetic obsessions: mid-century industrial design and architecture, the American Southwest, and space-related technology.

An extended shot early in the runtime that introduces the town is has got to be most impressive example of knolling in motion ever created. It shows us everything — the diner with its menu items painted on the front, the crater accessible by a gated chain-link runway, the one-pump filling station, the auto motel. The half-built highway overpass to nowhere. The space research laboratory with telescope. The lineup of vending machines where the American essentials can be obtained: coffee, candy, cocktails, ammunition, real estate. Everything will serve a narrative or symbolic purpose in the story that is to follow. It’s important for us to see it all.

What’s unique and crucial to Asteroid City is its framing device. It presents a twilight-zone style television show (hosted by Brian Cranston) about the production of a play, Asteroid City. Everything in widescreen color is the play, which is interspersed with black and white vignettes of its behind the scenes dramas. For most (read: normal) directorial styles, this might get confusing, but here it’s actually really easy to follow. Anderson lays out the mechanism clearly and succinctly, like all those tools laid out on the workbench.

In Asteroid City, nuclear test explosions shake the chairs in the diner regularly. The play’s action is set during the annual convention of the Junior Stargazers, where Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), an off-duty war photographer, is chaperoning his teenage son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) to the event with his three young daughters in tow. Augie’s wife, the kids’ mother, has just died. Everything that happens to and around Augie feels like a portent of doom.

He meets fellow parent Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johannson), a Hollywood actress in between film roles, who has brought her daughter to the event. She has a black eye, which is fake. She explains that the character she’s preparing to play doesn’t literally have a black eye, just psychologically.

Then doom personified shows up, in the form of a brief visit from an extraterrestrial. Despite all of the ribbing that Anderson takes for portraying everything in mundane deadpan, he knows how to create moments of genuine wonder. The alien’s reveal felt as weighty and astonishing to me as it did for the characters.

The governmental reaction to this world-altering incursion is as all-American as the hot dogs and chili served at the Stargazers’ dinner: the town is quarantined, the military alerted, and the witnesses interrogated.

The existential questions posed by the extraterrestrial’s appearance send the visitors to Asteroid City into various types of tailspins. Some are inspired to create art about what they’ve experienced, including one of the funniest original songs I have ever heard in a movie.

As the characters lose their grip in the text of the play, the lines of the movie’s framing device begin to get slippery as well.

Brian Cranston suddenly appears two layers out of place. Performers break character when their scene partners make unexpected acting choices. The actor portraying Augie, Jones Hall, walks off the set in a confused panic about the play’s meaning, and what his performance means within the context of it.

This is where Asteroid City becomes an entirely different type of Wes Anderson movie: as he breaks down the boundaries between the meta-layers of the film, Anderson is also breaking the barriers that he’s established over his entire career with his audience. If his prior films presented intricate dioramas without comment, here Wes invites us to stand with him over his art project and asks us what we think of it. His style has always been loud, but this feels like the first time we’re hearing Anderson’s voice, in the form of Jones Hall’s desperate plea for guidance:

“Am I doing it right?”

That feels like a really important question right now. On top of the world kind of falling apart generally, our mechanisms for freely creating meaningful art are in disarray. The margins of error under the thumb of profit demands are increasingly slim: even for an established director like Anderson, failure is seeming like less and less of an option.

Asteroid City pipes this anxiety into our ears during the opening credits:

Last train to San Fernando / Last train to San Fernando

If you miss this one / You might not get another one

A lot of people do NOT think that Wes doing it right, or worse, that what he’s doing is trivial and easy to replicate (you’ve seen the tiktoks and AI-generated parodies). So what do you do as an artist when the mushroom clouds (symbolic and/or literal) are getting closer and closer? Did you actually make anything of value in the first place if the entire endeavor feels like it’s running out of steam?

The director of the play, Schubert Green (Adrien Brody) doesn’t have a clear idea either. He advises the actor:

“Keep telling the story”

In the play, Augie and Midge are both professional artists: they connect over the fact that their lives revolve around the “next thing they plan on doing”. This doesn’t leave a lot of space for reflection on why they are doing it, or what the long term impact will actually be. One long-term impact is their children — they’ve both raised high-achieving creatives. At the end of the play, Woodrow shows his grandfather his plan for next year’s Junior Stargazer science project. He’s already in “next thing I plan on doing” mode.

When you’re more interested in your work than anything else, your work inevitably becomes a part of you in a deeper way than it does for a normal person. Midge comments that she doesn’t know if she’s actually experienced every emotion that she pours into her acting roles. For Jones Hall, the role of Augie is encroaching on his psyche, causing him to actually feel the grief that he’s portraying on the set of Asteroid City.

Our art makes us as much as we make it. We don’t know how it’s going to shape us at the outset. That’s part of why generative AI is so horribly useless to humanity. Even if it could in theory make something we’d like to consume, It doesn’t do for us what art does for us because we aren’t making it. It can’t.

I’ve always been a bit confused when people speak glowingly of the performances in Wes Anderson’s movies. The actors, kind of famously, are not doing a ton in terms of emoting. To be fair, I think I’m having selective memory and plenty of actors in these films are conveying emotions, but Jason Schwartzman’s performance in Asteroid City really affected me, and I’ve been trying to understand why.

It could be that this observation is colored by my own personality, but the hardest conversations I’ve ever had in my life probably came pretty close to resembling Wes Anderson dialogues. Sometimes when we’re hurting so bad, all we can manage do is flatly state the facts of what’s happening to us.

“We’re in grief”

It’s possible that the mannered restraint that Anderson uses in both the writing and the performance actually edges closer to reality than film conventions have trained us to think. The loudest Augie ever gets is when he’s instructed to yell out a line in a screenplay while helping Midge rehearse — performing what a strong emotion is supposed to sound like. When the messiness of the emotions do come up, words often don’t. Augie’s father-in-law (Tom Hanks), reeling from the death of his child, can only register his frustration at Augie with “RRRRRRRG”.

I’m manifesting it now — Jason Schwartzman for Best Actor. Am I crazy?

Or maybe I’m the real Wes Anderson character. Much to think about!

This is my blog and I can do whatever I want, so I will talk about one movie that I saw in theaters, two older movies that I rented on DVD/bluray and watched for the first time, plus some extra quick takes.

Beau Is Afraid (2023)

I do not enjoy Ari Aster’s work, but I will always show up for it. His movies make me deeply unhappy, but they are original and uh, interesting (derogatory). And if you think about it, my impulse to torture myself by watching them is actually the most Aster-esque thing about me.

I’m not just a baby who can’t handle a few human faces smashed with a hammer. My issue with Aster is less about content and more about tone. His films are exhaustingly bleak even when they engage with a kind of black comedy. Showing unthinkably bad things happening with a sense of grim, matter-of-fact realism is ultimately a way to get an emotional response out of an audience that has little to do with story. My frustration with the films comes from feeling a bit cheated and manipulated by that tactic.

It might be useful to compare Aster with an arguably similar director, Yorgos Lathimos. Both of them basically turn their intrusive thoughts into movies, but Lathimos’ feel more digestible to me because of the goofy weirdness with which he executes them with.

Because of this, I thought Aster moving into more comedic territory could be a good thing. And in the first forty minutes or so of Beau Is Afraid, it is. The opening sequence of Beau attempting to leave his apartment is classic bad-day comedy shenanigans, with a tolerable dose of Aster darkness on top.

Once Beau does get out of his neighborhood (after getting stabbed), things go sideways tonally. A scene involving blue paint brought me right back into the classic Aster not-fun zone. Then we get a tangential surrealist sequence in the middle of a movie that’s already sort of doing surrealism as its baseline.

This sequence is given a lot of import, but does nothing for Beau as a character. After that it’s just more misery until the terminal reveal of the entire film which is also, um, a real head scratcher in terms of tone. That is followed by even more misery until we abruptly roll credits.

If you relate strongly to the one (1) idea that is being expressed in the film (mother bad), I’m guessing you might find nuance in the particulars or feel more for Beau, but otherwise, you’ll be in the “ok I get it” zone with another hour to go. This ordeal might have been worth it if Beau got even a minor redemptive moment that wasn’t immediately followed by a graphic corpse. He doesn’t — it’s a roller coaster that only goes down. I’m left wondering what the point of this exercise was even for Aster himself.

Anyway, can’t wait to see what this crazy kid cooks up next!

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Watching older movies entails learning a visual and narrative grammar. The language of film evolved over decades, so depending on when a movie was made, it may lack elements in terms of cinematography, dialogue, and acting that we’re used to from modern cinema. It can take a lot of practice before you’re able to get past the old-ness of old movies. Every once in a while though, you’ll find one that is years or even decades ahead of its contemporaries, and that actually invents some of the film language that you’re used to seeing. A Matter of Life and Death is one of these.

My friend Walker told me to watch this movie, and I went in knowing nothing about it. Not to be dramatic, but it’s one of the most incredible things I have ever seen in my life. Incredible not just for the 1940s (a great movie decade) but for all time. I would definitely send this movie into space as proof to the aliens that we’ve accomplished something here.

Michael Powell and Eric Pressburger were British writer-director-producers who headed a production company called The Archers. This type of cohesive creative team was unusual for the assembly-line studio system, even in Britain. They even had a creative manifesto that outlined their filmmaking principles and independence from studio influence.

A Matter of Life and Death centers on a British bomber pilot who narrowly escapes death when he jumps into the ocean from his shot-down aircraft. Because he was supposed to die, representatives from the afterlife, referred to as “the other world” attempt to collect him. He’s forced to argue for a reprieve from death based on the fact that he’s fallen in love. I love an afterlife bureaucracy movie, and this is the best one, sorry to Beetlejuice.

This was made about a decade into what I’d call the Technicolor era (the process was invented in the mid-twenties but wasn’t widely used until after the Depression). I’m not exhaustive on the development of color techniques, but A Matter of Life and Death looks better than any color film I’ve seen from this period.

The opening titles kind of invented the color blue. Check this out.

It’s very rare to see super deep blues like this in early Technicolor films.

Following that, there is a TEXT CRAWL in outer space (does that sound familiar??) which transitions into a tour of the galaxy arriving at the Milky Way and ultimately Earth.

“This is the universe. Big, isn’t it?”

Once we’re actually on earth the color continues to be impressive. A lot of these shots honestly look like they could be from the 1970s or later.

The craziest images in this movie aren’t actually in color — the “other world” is monochrome. It’s actually filmed on Technicolor stock without the color added, which apparently gives a it pearlescent quality. The design of the other world is insane. It’s kind of an areligious hyper-modern sci-fi dreamscape. With matte paintings, they were able to achieve a massive sense of scale. I was absolutely screaming when I saw this stuff so I can only imagine what it must have been like to experience it in 1946.

Maybe the wildest effect in the whole movie is the full-scale functioning escalator that goes up the the other world. Look at this thing.

They actually built this thing! It had 106 steps that were each 20 feet wide. By the way, the title for the American release was Stairway to Heaven, because American censors couldn’t handle the word “death”.

The movie doesn’t take a side on whether or not the “other world” and its inhabitants are real, but it is emphatic that they are real TO David Niven’s character. The consequences of belief are important whether or not the belief is in reference to anything factual. The pilot might just be having a brain-damage related hallucination, but he’s still actually experiencing these things. Visions are powerful, just like the movies.

The initial idea for the movie was a propaganda request from the British government — they asked The Archers to create something that could improve British-American relations at the end of the war. The love story that Powell and Pressburger came up with is an aspirational allegory for what the two nations could be together, and more generally an optimistic socialist vision of post-war internationalism. This plays out largely in the film’s ending trial sequence, which hashes out the history of the US and Britain, touching on imperialism and multiculturalism. The propaganda of it all is certainly there, but it feels as sincere as the filmmaking is generally.

By setting itself in the afterlife, the movie squares up to the primary reality of what WWII was, and what war is generally — an experience of death. Either you die, or someone you love dies, or you kill someone. In this film, though, death isn’t the end of the individual, and the war isn’t the end of humanity. It’s a big universe, if you’re willing to imagine it that way.

Sex Lies and Videotape (1989)

I admire Steven Soderbergh so much because he makes so many different types of movies. Heist (famously). Biopic. Comedy. SciFi. Legal Drama. Nascar Heist. Whatever This Is. And This.

Soderbergh’s debut feature, Sex Lies and Videotape, is by necessity an exercise in narrative minimalism. The twenty-six year old director had a budget of $1.2m, four actors, a couple of houses in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and just a month to shoot.

My question for discussion: how do you create a compelling story with just people talking to each other? Let’s start with the log line. Per imdb:

A sexually repressed woman's (Andy Mcdowell) husband (Peter Gallagher) is having an affair with her sister (Laura San Giacomo). The arrival of a visitor (James Spader) with a rather unusual fetish changes everything.

So, the situation is sister/husband affair (tough) and James Spader being an absolute freak (classic Spader). The “changes everything” part is where the story is.

The protagonist, Andy Mcdowell’s character Ann, goes from:

A. Ostensibly happily married, but in conflict and competition with her sister.

To

B. Leaving her husband, and reconciling with her sister.

This is what I like to call a disillusionment plot: the main character’s status quo is shattered by a confrontation with the truth. In Ann’s case, it’s the truth about her husband, her sister, her sexuality, and herself.

When you don’t have physical set pieces, conversations have to be the main plot events that create change. That doesn’t mean that you’re just talking through your character arcs — you are showing how your character changes through what they learn in the conversations.

Spader’s character Graham is a textbook antagonist, by the definition of the antagonist as the provoker of the protagonist’s change. In some ways, he’s a symbolic character — he embodies Ann’s confrontation with the truth.

The confrontation begins immediately when Graham and Ann meet. Being kind of a weirdo, Graham lacks the social normativity that has been preserving Ann’s complacency about her life. As soon as he sits down in the living room, he asks her a question that she’s not ready to answer.

“How do you like being married?… What about it do you like?”

Ann is only able to answer this in vague platitudes:

“You know the cliche of the security of it. Well, that’s true. And we own this house. It’s a nice house. And John was just made junior partner, and I really like that.”

Later in the evening, he asks her directly about her sister, Cynthia, who we already know is having an affair with John.

“Are you close?”

Ann says that she thinks Cynthia is “extroverted”.

Ann and Graham connect on an interesting level — she thinks sex is overrated, he’s impotent in the presence of others. She later learns that he deals with this problem by making videotapes of women talking about their sex lives. The tapes are also symbolic within the story — they represent an honesty about sexuality that Ann has been unable to access either in her marriage or in therapy.

Against Ann’s warnings, Cynthia makes a tape with Graham. This forces Ann to face up to the actual differences between herself and her sister. Whether it’s consciously or subconsciously, Ann is in competition with Cynthia and frames herself in opposition to her. Part of why Ann doesn’t want to deal with her sexuality is because she doesn’t want to act the way her sister acts.

The conflict with her sister over their attitudes towards sex clues Ann into the fact that John is likely cheating on her. She confronts him, but he lawyers his way out of it, painting her as paranoid for interrogating him based on her intuition rather than “evidence”.

Soderbergh reveals the evidence in a completely visual way, utilizing a dialogue setup from one of the first scenes in the movie. We are left to watch McDormand emote how the discovery affects her character. This is the low point of the disillusionment plot.

She decides to have Graham make a videotape of her — with nothing to lose, she’s ready to confront her sexuality, whatever it is. After the taping, which we don’t see yet, Ann is empowered to break up with John, who rages at Graham’s role in it:

“Mr. Honesty, right? Mr. Apostle of Truth?”

In a nice structural twist, we see the contents of Ann’s tape as John watches it after beating up Graham. Ultimately, Ann turns both the camera and the interrogation around on Graham, forcing him to come to grips with the exploitative nature of his videotape program and his own self-disgust.

This is really smart writing — while Graham was the antagonist to Ann, she conversely was the antagonist to him, causing him to confront the truth about himself just like he did for her.

Extra Quick Takes

Lost in Translation (2003)

Finally watched this for the first time. While it certainly owes a lot to the work of Wong Kar Wai, what Sofia Coppola accomplished visually is pretty undeniable. But at this stage in her career she was more interested in visuals than she was in ideas — twenty years later, the content doesn’t hold up. The biggest issue (among several issues) is the use of Japan and its inhabitants as a metaphor for white people’s alienation, which is kind of orientalism by definition. I did laugh at Scarlett Johansen character’s describing her quarter life crisis as basically not knowing what type of art she should do. That felt… very Coppola.

The Quiet Girl (2022)

This movie feels like a sister film to the Truffaut classic The 400 Blows (1959), in that it puts you into the shoes of a kid to whom stuff just keeps happening. It’s about a very different kid in a very different circumstance, but it’s just as vivid and moving. Absolutely beautifully filmed in rural Ireland, and the 1:1.37 aspect ratio makes it feel even more timeless.

Renfield (2023)

This movie stars Nic Cage at Dracula, but still manages to be generic and boring. How? It somehow fails to be a vampire movie and is instead a cop movie. Why does every action comedy have to involve cops and organized crime???

Strange Days (1997)

It might be tempting to write off this Bigelow-Cameron teamup as an excessive, goofy, oversaturated, worse version of Blade Runner, but the more I thought about it, the more important it seemed to me. It’s ultimately a deeply optimistic movie about the possibility of choosing something different than what technology chooses for us.

Lists like these always send me into a panic about how many “important” movies I haven’t seen. There are functionally infinity movies. I have seen many of them, and I will see many more. I will never see some of them, and that is fine. It’s NOT a waste of time for me to watch Drive (2011) again, ok?

The various directors’ ballots that came out were more fun to read than the actual list. Especially RRR director S.S. Rajamouli’s:

I do not agree with everything he’s got going on here (Mel Gibson TWICE?) but we love a director with clear personal film values.

Where’s my ballot? I’m so glad you asked!

I took the assignment a bit more at face value than my guy S.S. My attempted criteria here is movies that exemplify what the art form is capable of, or expanded those capabilities in a significant way.

• Fargo (Coen Brothers)
  This is admittedly kind of personal — the Coens are my favorite filmmakers, the ones who put it all together, and Fargo is probably the most complete example of everything they excel at. Humor, violence, meaning, darkness, joy.

• Night of the Hunter (Laughton)
  This 1955 thriller eclipses even Citizen Kane for me as a movie that invented entire sections in the dictionary of film language. On top of that, it pushed thematic boundaries around religion and gender to a degree that’s almost miraculous for its time.

• Double Indemnity (Wilder)
  A near-perfect example of one of the most native expressions of cinema, the film noir.

• The Rules of the Game (Renoir)
  I re-watched this recently and it was as jaw-dropping as I remembered. Remains undefeated in the satirization of the wealthy. A movie that literally provoked riots.

• Blue Velvet (Lynch)
  I have a lot more to say about David Lynch that will have to wait for a different post. Transgressive, funny, challenging.

• Duck Soup (McCarey)

  The Marx Brothers’ anarchic anti-war satire remains one of the few pure comedies that I really love. This movie invented “chaotic energy”.

• Diabolique (Clouzot)
  Kind of the ur-horror film for me. Predates and in many ways surpasses what Hitchcock did with Psycho.

• 2001 A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
  Yep.

• Spirited Away (Miyazaki)
  Miyazaki respects animation in the ultimate way, by using it to reach towards the outer limits of imagination.

• Stage Door (La Cava)

  SEE BELOW

Stage Door (1937)

My oddball draft pick is Stage Door (1937), an ensemble comedy-drama about aspiring stage actresses starring Katherine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers. It’s not on the BFI top 100 list at all, but I’m going to argue that it should be.

I heard about this movie while learning about the Hollywood Studio Club, a boarding house for women in the film industry that operated from 1917 to 1975. The movie was mentioned a few times as having been inspired by the Studio Club and other boarding houses like it, so I watched it. And watched it again the next day. And a handful more times since then.

Stage Door isn’t a movie that stands out visually, but watching it was a mind-bending experience for me. It’s funny in a more specific and relatable way than even the best screwball comedies of its era, and the thematic content feels stunningly current.

I recently read a book called A Women’s View: How Hollywood Talked to Women 1930-1960. In it, film historian Jeanine Basinger defines the genre of the “woman’s film” in mid twentieth century Hollywood:

A woman’s film is one that places at the center of its universe a female who is trying to deal with the emotional, social and psychological problems that are specifically connected to the fact that she is a woman. These problems are made concrete by various plot developments, and since they are often contradictory, they are represented in the story as a form of choice the woman must make between options that are mutually exclusive.

The presentation of the woman’s world allows for both an overt indication that women should lead conventional lives and a covert form of liberation in which they are shown doing something else or expressing anger about this need for conformity.

In other words, most films about women from this time period were finally normative even when they presented women with alternative modes of thought and behavior. The character’s choice to embody a traditionally female role in society is usually dressed up as a choice of embracing love. Love for a man, usually, and love for a child, sometimes.

A Women’s View barely mentions Stage Door, only pointing out that in it Katherine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers enact their respective public personas. The point is important especially for Hepburn (we’ll circle back to it), but there’s no deeper analysis of the film. This got me thinking, does Stage Door even fit into Basinger’s definition of a women’s film? It’s hard to argue it wasn’t marketed towards women. It definitely centers women and their problems. However, it doesn’t primarily put women in a position of choosing between mutually exclusive life paths.

Despite the restrictions of the Hayes Code that necessitated covertness in the first place, Stage Door’s liberation of women is for the most part overt and uncompromising. I can’t name another film from the Hayes Code era that does this. On top of its near-unprecedented feminism, Stage Door talks about class and privilege in a way that feels as relevant to this year as most of the films that are actually coming out this year.

How The Hell Did This Movie Happen?

While it’s been kind of lost in the shuffle of film history, Stage Door was a notable movie in 1937. It wasn’t a smash hit, but it turned a minor profit at the box office and was nominated for four Oscars, including for its director, Gregory La Cava. This kind of made me wonder if there was anything about this guy that made him particularly capable of directing a feminist masterpiece.

The answer is: not really. La Cava’s filmography is pretty typical of a mid-tier studio system director who successfully made the transition from silent films to sound. Leading up to Stage Door, he made some successful screwball comedies for RKO, including She Married Her Boss (1934) (lol) and My Man Godfrey (1937), which was his biggest star vehicle to date with William Powell and Carole Lombard. This effort probably earned him the credibility to take on a Hepburn/Rogers project.

From what I can tell, Stage Door came together by normal studio means, largely as a part of RKO’s ongoing attempts to resurrect Katherine Hepburn’s career during her legendary post-Oscar “box office poison” phase in the late 30’s.

The source material for the story is a popular Broadway stage play of the same name, written by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufmann in one of their three collaborations. Ferber is the only person involved in the film’s development who might have self-identified as a feminist — she was known for writing socially-conscious novels that center women dramatically (most famously, Giant).

Most accounts emphasize that the movie is very different from the play. This is true on a superficial level — play has a broader focus than the film, following more plot lines with more characters. Without film industry censorship, the play is able to be more explicit in its plot details. Interestingly, the play is very anti-Hollywood — there are two plot lines where characters essentially sell out for easy money working in the movies.

The changes are significant, but Edna Ferber’s biggest ideas make it to the screen. The play and the film are fundamentally about the same thing — women striving uncompromisingly towards artistic goals.

From what I’ve read, adapting screenwriters Morrie Ryskind and Anthony Veiller drew from the actresses real-life conversations, and the cast improvised some of the dialogue on set. This tracks with the incredible realism of the female friendships in the movie. It’s also important to what Stage Door became thematically — the film’s most subversive feminist content is carried more in the subtext of the dialogue and the acting than in the surface-level plot events.

Gender/Subtext

The most immediately striking feature of Stage Door is the way it centers women simply in terms of casting and screen time. The film features a deep ensemble cast of comediennes who are frequently all on the screen together in conversation. This is where La Cava’s directorial contribution was most notable — the group shots in Stage Door are really well composed.

Some cast standouts include Andrea Leeds as the talented but struggling actress Kaye Hamilton (this performance was nominated for the Oscar) and a twenty-six year old Lucille Ball as Judith, a suit-wearing, cigarette-smoking young lady whose comedic energy radiates off of the screen.

Unlike the women’s films of Basinger’s definition, love for men isn’t on the table in Stage Door as a serious dramatic element. The desire for a career and to simply survive in New York City is allowed to exist without major consideration of more normative alternatives.

The opposing perspective comes from the bad guy — stage producer Anthony Powell (Adolphe Menjou). He hates that the young women whom he exploits are attempting to have careers at all:

“Something aught to be done about these girls who come to New York and try to go on the stage. They’d be so much better off at home raising families”

By putting these words in the mouth of its villain, Stage Door directly questions the norms that the Hayes Code typically enforced and venerated. On this level, Stage Door’s liberation of women is completely textual.

The only story beat that would seem to pay lip service to Hayes Code normativity is when Judith leaves to get married at the very end of the film. However, it’s treated less as a joyous conclusion to a character arc and more as a major bummer. The guy in question isn’t even in the scene.

This stuff is great, but I’d argue that the film’s most subversively feminist content happens sub-textually, particularly in the Ginger Rogers plot line. Rogers’ character, Jean Maitland, attempts to leverage Anthony Powell’s sexual interest in her to advance her acting career. In doing so she walks the line between playing ball with a predatory system and protecting herself from its worst dangers.

At the beginning of the film, boarding house girl Linda (Gail Patrick) is in a bit of a transactional situationship with Powell — he gives her expensive gifts and brings her to dinner. What she supplies in return is implied. This is apparently going smoothly for Linda until Powell sees Jean at a dance practice.

Jean quite literally dances away from Powell when he tries to talk to her. She later remarks:

“I didn’t like the way he looked at me… He makes you feel like you aughta run home and put on a tin overcoat”

Powell invites himself into Jean’s dressing room after her dance performance at the club that he partially owns. In the conversation that follows, Jean defensively antagonizes Powell while also encouraging him to patronize her. Her cringing reaction when he finally leaves says it all — she doesn’t want to engage with this creep, but he could be the foothold that she needs to survive.

After this, it becomes clear that Jean has taken Linda’s place as Powell’s new favorite young actress. Linda warns Jean about their mutual friend’s modus operandi:

“His routine is pretty much the same with all the girls. It all ends up with a quiet little supper in his penthouse, with champagne and all the trimmings and the view and all that…. Harcourt’s the butler…. he’s very deaf. You really won’t have to bother to scream for help.”

That last line is pretty stunning — through the humor, Olga is implying that Powell is a rapist. Aware of the danger, Jean still decides to take Powell up on his offer of dinner at his apartment in the interest of securing her job at his club and potentially landing a larger stage role.

After filling up on free food and champagne, Jean makes the executive decision to abort the mission before Powell can get aggressive with her. If she’s not completely faking drunkenness, she’s heavily leaning into it, while acting as weird and annoying as possible in an attempt to turn off her attacker. It works.

Jean’s subversive escape strategy is mostly legible in the subtext of Rogers’ fantastic performance. You could in theory read the scene as Jean actually just getting too drunk and not a woman narrowly avoiding rape. But we know what’s going on, and we can feel that Ginger knows what’s going on too. It’s a career highlight for Rogers as an actress. In this scene more than any other, Stage Door bypasses its male audience and speaks directly to women.

As soon as Jean is escorted away by the butler, Powell is seen opening up a “little black book”, — he’s looking for his next victim. This ends up being Katherine Hepburn’s character, Terry Randolph.

Class/Privilege

Katherine Hepburn was raised in a prominent progressive east coast family, went to Bryn Mawr, and was successful theater actress by the time she was twenty-five. Wealth and intellectualism were not just facts of her background — they were baked into her persona as a movie star.

Hepburn playing a rich kid who shows up to the low-rent theater boarding house with a whim to try out acting would have been very on the nose for audiences in 1937. The writers knew this and used it — the script leans into what the public already thought of Hepburn and dissects it with a scalpel. Every one of her character’s actions demonstrate the effects of class status and access to wealth — effects that she’s completely blind to.

Stage Door’s portrayal of upper-class delusion is truthful without being ungenerous or nihilistic. Terry is not a bad person, but she has to reframe her perception of herself in order to become a true friend to the other girls.

Terry’s wealth mindset is on display from the moment she walks into the boarding house. To the amusement of the girls watching, she requests a room with a private bath and mistakes the weekly rate for a nightly one. She has no material need to be there anyway — she’s doing a kind of poverty tourism, remarking to Jean that she’s always wanted to live in that type of “atmosphere”.

Jean: “If I had your clothes I’d scam out of here plenty fast and leave you here with your atmosphere”

Terry judges the other boarders harshly for the things they do for survival — accepting free meals from sketchy men, taking jobs that are beneath them, and masking their frustration and sadness with sardonic humor.

Kaye: “They do make a lot of noise, but it’s just to keep up their courage and hide their fears”

Terry: “Well now what do they have to be afraid of? Certainly they’re young enough to have courage.”

This last line is important. Terry is framing the actions of the women as the lack of a virtue. This feels very well-observed: privilege often manifests as pride in some perceived moral value that is trivial to embody when you have access to unlimited resources. Courage is easy when you have a safety net. Not stealing is easy when you don’t need anything. Honesty is easy when the truth is always working in your favor.

The safety net is shown to us explicitly — her dad cuts her off financially in the next scene, but makes her promise that she’ll come back to the family home if she fails. And failure is an option — Terry isn’t demanding instant success. Like many people with a large advantage in life, she has a deep belief in meritocracy.

Terry assumes that Kaye doesn’t have to worry like the other girls, because she’s already proven herself to be a great actress. Kaye actually can’t get work and is literally starving. When Kaye passes out in Powell’s waiting room, Terry uses some of that unearned courage to barge into Powell’s office and yell at him. This is arguably a way to leverage one’s privilege for good, but it’s not really helpful and Terry still doesn’t get it.

Their less-than-chill encounter doesn’t stop Powell from attempting to corner Terry in his apartment, just like he did to Jean. Terry employs a different strategy for dealing with the situation. She uses her society connections to expose Powell’s lies about his family situation, effectively blackmailing him into giving her the role in the play that Jean and Kaye failed to land. We’ll learn later that on top of this, Terry’s father made an investment into the production, banking on his daughter’s public failure.

Meritocracy does come back to bite Terry — she’s simply bad at acting. Unlike Kaye, she doesn’t have a lot of difficult life experiences to draw from. It’s only when Kaye commits suicide (another moment that I can’t believe made it past the censors) that Terry is cracked open enough emotionally to bring out a believably human performance on stage.

A Comparative Analysis Feat. The Women (1939)

Shortly after seeing Stage Door, I watched a more well known film released two years after, The Women (1939). This film is directed by George Cukor, who famously went on to direct Katherine Hepburn in the film that launched her back into super-stardom, Philadelphia Story (1940).

The Women is absolutely stunning to look at. MGM clearly threw everything they had at this production, including the latest film tech — there’s a mid-movie Technicolor fashion show sequence that must have been completely mind-melting for audiences at the time. Also, a few of the scenes take place in what I can only describe as a 30’s version of Equinox, which really sent me through the roof.

The Women has an arguably feminist concept: there are no men in the cast. This conceit comes from the film’s source material, a stage play written by Clare Booth Luce.

As a gay man who had himself endured incredible oppression, George Cukor is on paper a much more credible director to be creating a feminist film than Gregory La Cava. On top of that, the script was written in part by Anita Loos, the author of my favorite feminist text of all time, the novel Gentleman Prefer Blondes.

Despite all it has going for it, watching The Woman right after Stage Door felt like a major letdown: it suffers in comparison to its lower-budget, visually basic counterpart on an ideas level.

The Woman falls squarely into the normative pattern that Basigner talks about. It hides the men from the audience, but centers them narratively. The women characters are wholly focused and defined by their relationships or lack thereof with their husbands.

This isn’t to say that The Women contains no feminist content at all — like Basinger describes, it presents anti-normative ideas (including the possibility of divorce), but shoots them down by the end of the film. Hell, the very last shot of the movie is Norma Shearer rushing towards camera to embrace a barely-off-screen man.

It’s certainly a film with a lot of merit on a lot of levels, but compared to Stage Door, The Women feels more like a spiritual precursor to Bravo’s The Real Housewives series than anything else.

Not to say that’s bad! I love Bravo!

In my last post, I did an arguably too-detailed breakdown of the Apple TV show Severance, to get a better understanding of how its writers created plot tension over the course of a season.

I also posed a question about another show that I had just watched, which was:

How does Derry Girls Season 3 use the medium to CONVEY THEME?

Sitcoms and Theme

Situation comedies don’t normally have season or show-level themes like prestige dramas. This is because:

A. It’s a sitcom, it’s not that deep.

B. The goal of a network sitcom is usually to continue for as long as possible, so it’s logistically not feasible.

But sitcoms almost ALWAYS have themes on an episode level. The more I think about it, the more I realize that the sitcom is the most theme-driven form of TV there is, especially in terms of social issues. Because the stories tend to be focused on interpersonal conflict, they provide a convenient venue to talk about how we should live and relate to one another.

Not to make this a whole college thesis, but I’d go a step further and say that sitcoms, especially family sitcoms, function as a tracker of cultural change that can present Americans with new ideas or reinforce social normativity.

This has been the case since the beginning of Television. Two mid-century examples: I Love Lucy depicted a remarkably progressive vision of domestic life for its time. On the other hand, Leave it to Beaver is to this day a shorthand for the conservative fantasy of suburban American idyll.

The social function of the sitcom continues into this century. A really obvious one: Modern Family is not a show that I would consider to be ambitious or even thoughtful, but it’s impossible to argue that the show is not attempting to say something about the modern family.

To non-exhaustively name some more examples off the top of my head: The Middle, Malcom in the Middle, Black-ish, The Goldbergs, Bob’s Burgers.

The most important variant is the workplace sitcom, work being the most dominant arena for social interaction outside of the home. The Office, Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, Abbot Elementary, Superstore.

More adjacent to the family sitcom is the teen sitcom, which puts it focus on the problems unique to growing up in a particular time: Freaks and Geeks, Boy/Girl Meets World, That 70s Show, Drake and Josh.

With varying degrees of focus and success, all of these shows do what sitcoms have done since the 1950s: comment on social themes via comedic situations involving interpersonal conflict.

Derry Girls: A Half-Hour Sitcom

Derry Girls is a sitcom both technically, because it is a comedy with half-hour episodes that aired on a network, and functionally, because it does what sitcoms do as I’ve described above. But it’s not a standard sitcom experience.

Derry Girls transcends the format in a significant way: it has a show-level theme, which gives it an emotional resonance more on the level of a limited-run drama or a feature film.

What I want to break down in this discussion is how it expresses its theme, in particular in its third and final season.

There are two big things that set Derry Girls apart from a regular sitcom.

1. It’s about something.

Sitcoms are usually pitched around a premise that can serve as a reliable generator for conflict-driven episodes. They are not often focused on any one topic. Derry Girls, however, is about showrunner Lisa McGee’s experience of growing up in the final stages of The Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. Within its period context, Derry Girls is a story about coming of age during a violent conflict.

2. It had an intentionally limited run.

Derry Girls will not be continuing past its third season. This gave McGee and her team an opportunity to write a unified show with an impactful thematic statement.

It’s a disservice to Derry Girls’ theme to try to boil it down too much, but if I had to take a crack at it, it would be the following: You have to continue living your own life when the world around you is falling apart. Beyond that, you have to imagine a better future for yourself.

Like almost all sitcoms, the episodes are discrete stories that don’t directly build on each other narratively. While a drama would use an ongoing story to convey its theme via one or two main character movements, Derry Girls instead uses its episodes to build a case for its theme over the course of a season.

Each episode takes a slightly different angle. Some episodes have clearly identifiable sub-themes, others don’t. In their totality, the episodes present a multi-dimensional view of what it means to come of age in a crisis.

Derry Girls is also very different from a standard sitcom in how it handles serious thematic topics within its episodes.

Usually the social themes in sitcoms occur in the context of fairly light everyday situations, but there are times when they engage with more serious topics. This in some cases results in moments of seriousness where the comedy is deliberately and explicitly put on pause.

You can probably think of some famous examples. Like this one:

Sometimes these moments are genuinely affecting, but in many cases they come off as very, uh… after school special. One metric of sitcom success might be how organically it can deliver thematic content alongside humor.

Derry Girls is special because it puts the funny and serious stuff in the same moments. This not only makes both elements more effective, it ties directly into the show’s primary thematic observation about living in crisis. Life does not pause when things get bad. We don’t get a dramatic sitcom moment. We get our lives, continuing, differently.

A Character Recap

Derry Girls is primarily a teen sitcom and secondarily a family sitcom. As with all teen sitcoms, its success hinges on the depiction of a believable and funny group of teenage friends.

Lesser shows often rely on their characters simply hating each other to generate conflict. This is more depressing than funny, and also implausible. People are not friends for no reason — we have to understand why they like each other.

The characters in Derry Girls are deeply unified while also deeply individualized. They’re constantly in conflict with each other, but their underlying solidarity and affection for each other is stronger than their conflicts.

Erin

The first scene of the pilot episode gives us a voiceover of a diary entry in which Erin describes her life as a sixteen-year old in Derry soundtracked by the Cranberries’ Dreams, with the immediate reveal that we’re not hearing Erin’s voice — the diary is being read aloud without permission by her cousin, Orla.

In addition to introducing us to the show’s comedic sensibility, this intro shows the seriousness of what’s happening in Derry and establishes Erin as a storyteller: she is actively adding a narrative layer to her experiences of growing up.

Orla

Orla is comic relief within a comedic cast. She is unique among the characters in that she doesn’t have visible problems or objectives — she moves through life in a state of blissful oblivion. “I love me wee fingers”, she observes, looking at her fingers.

Orla almost never drives the plot, but the show uses her innocence and joyfulness to make its most important thematic points.

Clare

Clare is the archetypical “neurotic one”, highly reactive not so much to the armed conflict surrounding her but to the horrors of adolescence. Out of the group, she has the most personal resources to actually escape Derry and have a different future from her parents.

Clare often serves as an audience surrogate, meta-commenting on what’s happening and pointing out absurdities.

Michelle

Michelle is Clare’s opposite — the “cool” friend. She is the only one operating from a place of near total personal confidence, at least that we can see. This gives her the function of group instigator and leader.

Her shell is designed to be cracked — the season finale crucially explores how the conflict created and ultimately breaks down Michelle’s hard exterior.

James

James is Michelle’s English cousin who has come to live with her family when his mother abandons him, leaving him to integrate himself with the titular Derry Girls.

He is kind of a quintessential coming-of-age character: more than any of the others, he has to figure out who he is. The fish out of water dynamic is one of the basic ingredients of the show’s comedy, and also central to its ideas around personal identity.

The Adults

A central question of the show is whether these kids will have a different future from their parents. Erin’s mother and father, Mary and Gerry, and Orla’s mother Sarah serve as a point of generational contrast with the main cast.

Unlike most sitcom parents, they are complete people with desires and frustrations that don’t always involve their children. Crucially, Mary is a sub-protagonist of Season Three, going through her own coming-of-age drama.

Season Three

Ok, let’s get into the episodes. I’m going to attempt to focus on the thematic content rather than the plot of each episode, and in particular how the ideas build on each other across the season.

Episode 1 : What type of future will we have?

We open on a videotaped documentary created by the teenagers about their lives in The Troubles, re-establishing the idea of Erin as a storyteller, and here specifically, a screenwriter.

Erin: “Do not start on the script again! The script is a masterpiece!”

Michelle: “The script is boring, Erin. It doesn’t even make sense, what’s it about?”

Erin: “Peace.”

Michelle: “I am so fucking sick of peace! It’s all anyone ever bangs on about!”

Through Michelle’s self-centered lens, this exchange provides the historical framing of the season: we are approaching an inflection point in the conflict. As a people, the Northern Irish will have to decide what they are willing to do for peace.

The episode finds the teens on another sort of brink — they’re about to find out if they passed their tests allowing them to matriculate to their last year of high school.

Their sardonic headmistress Sister Michael indicates that they may have reason to worry about the results, launching Clare into a spiral about the implications.

Clare: “It means no GCSEs, ergo no A-levels, ergo no University, ergo the end! Passing those exams were our only chance. … We’re girls, we’re poor, we’re from Northern Ireland, and we’re Catholic for Christ’s sake!”

Erin: “Oh my God, she’s right! What type of future will we have?”

Michelle: “We don’t need to worry about the future, Erin. If we fail, well… our ma’s are gonna wipe us out, and dead people don’t need jobs”

Clare’s logic shakes the group into an awareness of ways in which their future could be compromised. They have a lot stacked against them already. One thing going bad could lead to everything going bad.

In the main comedic sequence, the kids sneak into the school to view their test results ahead of schedule, but instead end up getting framed for the burglary of the school’s computer equipment. This lands them in police interrogation, where they’re faced by none other than Liam Neeson as the investigator. They get out of this high-stakes situation in the most mundane way possible, by enlisting their uncle Colm to bore the cops into letting them go.

The threats to their future in the episode end up not being so serious — all of the kids escape culpability for the burglary and pass their GCSEs. Sister Michael was just messing with them.

Sister Michael: “I didn’t say you failed. I implied you failed”

Erin: “Why?”

Sister Michael: “Bit of a slow day”

The more serious threats are omnipresent but unspoken. This is one of the bigger subtextual questions that the show poses — how do you deal with forces that are outside of your control, but could determine the course of your life?

Episode 2: Who do you think you are?

Episode two introduces Mary, Erin’s mother, as a character with significant thematic function. The episode opens with everyone in the house needing something from her. She snaps.

“Will you all just please shut up? I am sick of it! I am sick of the boiler, the vouchers, the fountain pen, and the bastardin’ pop tarts. I am sick of the fact that I am responsible for everything in this house, you useless, useless shites!”

This isn’t just about being overwhelmed. It’s about who Mary is as compared with who she wanted to be and who she could be.

While Mary re-evaluates her life and reads Wuthering Heights, the girls’ high school is making dubious contributions to a national charity effort, Children in Need. This involves Clare taking a vow of silence and Jenny Joyce, the teens’ school rival, dancing nonstop for twenty-four hours.

The centerpiece of Children in Need is a talent show, which provides a real incentive: the winners will perform on TV. This is a big deal. Television functions as both a window and a portal to the world outside of Derry. In the teens’ logic, a corny bit on a local channel could lead to a life of wealth and fame — a different future.

Meanwhile, Mary’s identity crisis if accelerated when a plumber is called to the house. He is incredibly attractive, but more importantly interested in English literature. This mutual interest causes a bond that looks a bit sketchy out of context, leading Erin to believe that her mother is having an affair.

This puts Erin into a tailspin moments before the talent show:

James: “Maybe you should speak to her, Erin”

Erin: “And say what? How could you do it? How could you betray Daddy like that? How could you make me doubt everything I ever knew? Who even are you, Mammy?”

The gang put on a rousing performance of the Spice Girls’ Who Do You Think You Are. It is a fun and period-appropriate pop song, but it’s also a clever choice for the episode’s sub-theme around identity.

It’s revealed that Mary and the plumber are actually taking a night class in English literature. The sneaking around was because Mary was afraid to share this side of herself with those who rely on her as a wife and mother.

Mary: “The idea that someone like me could go back to school, it didn’t seem possible.”

Gerry: “Let’s make it real, if it’s what you want. There’s nothing you can’t do love, nothing.”

Mary has been granted the latitude to envision something bigger for herself. This concept of ideating the future will come up throughout the season.

Erin, still a teen, has a very teen reaction to her mother’s personal breakthrough:

“I wanted to be the first person to go to university, and you are absolutely stealing my thunder.”

Episode 3: What lives do we want to live?

The entire cast is going on a day trip to the resort town of Portrush, documented on videotape by James:

“Portrush, with a Protestant, unionist majority. Yet many Catholics risk traveling there every summer. Why? Cause it has a cracking big dipper!”

This is an important framing. They are essentially going into enemy territory to ride roller coasters. Is it scary? Probably. But it’s also fun. To what extent can fun win out over fear during a crisis? Derry Girls would argue that it can win quite a lot.

When the train breaks down, the teenagers (minus Clare, who has been left alone on the platform) are bored. Erin suggests having a conversation, like “normal people”

“There’s lots we could talk about… like our hopes, our ambitions, our dreams… what lives do we want to live, what legacy do we hope to leave?”

Everyone comes up blank on this one except for Erin. This is building on the idea of self-ideation that started in the prior episode. How do you retain your ability to imagine your own future when the world around you is crumbling?

Teen delusion really helps. Like, actually. Erin’s romanticized self-narrativization might not be mature or realistic, but she’s protecting herself from despair. If you can’t think of yourself as able to “leave a legacy”, you probably won’t even in the best of circumstances.

Episode 4: Shut the fuck up about your near-death experience

Sister Mary gives the teens a special assignment — to clean up her recently deceased aunt’s house over the military-controlled border in Donegal. She could do it herself, but she quite understandably “doesn’t want to”. As in the previous episode, the dangers of the conflict are overshadowed by the possibility of a good time: Michelle views the errand as a prime opportunity for adult-free “drinking, dancing, and riding”.

This isn’t technically a Halloween episode, but it functions as one — we get lots of comedic spooky vibes and also a framework for a more explicit discussion of fear, a sub-theme that was hinted at in the previous episode.

The trip begins with an ominous portent: an old woman screams at them about the devil in Gaelic. Soon after, James hits his head and passes out. Upon waking up, he relates a near death experience that draws absolutely no interest from the girls.

Later, a storm zaps the power, contributing howling winds and thunderclaps to the soundscape. An old photo apparently of Sister Michael’s long-deceased husband sparks Erin to “feel a presence”, and the kids imagination does the rest. What was supposed to be fun turns terrifying.

Smash cut to the next morning — all the teens are sleeping soundly, bathed in warm sunlight. Fear is a feeling, and like any feeling, it’s temporary. For James, it precipitates a realization of what’s important to him.

He confesses his feelings for Erin, and they kiss. This is witnessed by Michelle, who has her own fear response in one of the funniest exchanges of the season.

Michelle: “You sick, sick bastards. This is incest!”

James: “No it’s not!”

Michelle: “Yes it is, James.”

James: “We’re not related”

Michelle: “Oh, and that makes it ok, I suppose?”

James: “Well, it makes it not incest.”

Michelle is afraid of having to choose between James and Erin, potentially losing them both. This is perhaps the first crack we see in her armor all season. She can’t articulate it, but she needs both of them deeply. This will come into play in a significant way in the Season’s finale.

Episode 5: This is our rebellion

This is the only episode that focuses entirely on the adult generation, building on the ideas presented in episode two around Mary’s growing self-redefinition.

Mary and Sarah prepare for their twenty-year high school reunion. This will involve facing people from their past, in particular Janette Joyce Formerly O’Shea, the mother of their daughters’ nemesis Jenny Joyce.

Janette Joyce Formerly O’Shea has attained wealth and status from marrying a surgeon. She not only refuses to acknowledge their existence until loudly prompted, but laughs when Mary tells her that she is going back to school for English literature.

But Mary & co have something on Janette Joyce Formerly O’Shea: what happened the night of the Leavers’ Disco, 20 years ago.

A montage of real war and protest footage brings us into a flashback to of the class of ‘77 Leavers Disco (the Derry equivalent of senior prom), with a new cast portraying the teenaged versions of Mary, Sarah and their friends, including a young Janette Joyce. Throughout the episode, we cut back and forth between this night and the reunion twenty years later.

We understand immediately that the dance marks an abrupt end to their youth, and with it an the end to their freedom. Adulthood is an inevitability and looks the same for everyone: “jobs, husbands, kids”.

In response to this impending wave of oppressive reality, the teenagers are debating doing something that is technically illegal: giving themselves stick-and-poke tattoos.

While this is an incredibly mild form of deviance, it’s deeply important to the kids on a symbolic level:

We’re told who we are and what we believe in. It’s all curfews and barricades and roadblocks and rosaries. For once, let’s do something purely because we want to do it. This is our rebellion!

In an effort to prove that Janette Joyce formerly O’Shea is no better than they are, the present-day women dig up photographs from 1977 and finally reveal their tattoos to the men in their lives. The men do not care, not even the older generation:

Ach, I’m not bothered by that love. Sure your mother had a tattoo!

This is another beat in Mary’s character arc. By taking the pressure of perfection off of herself, she is taking another step to being who she is, rather than who her circumstances have made her.

This story not only gives Mary a moment of personal catharsis, it lends important context to the main 90’s-set story. We understand the generational aspect of what Erin and her friends are up against: the conflict is an inheritance. It’s easy to imagine that history will repeat itself ad infinitum, but the season finale will show us how the cycle breaks.

Episode 6: Bigger than God

While Episode Four was the functional Halloween episode, Episode Six is actually set during Halloween, but more importantly Derry’s famous Halloween festival, which will feature a performance by Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim.

This event is perfect for the penultimate episode, because it’s a natural escalation of stakes. It’s hard to overstate how important concerts are for teenagers. Seeing a popular musician live, especially when you live in a town where that isn’t an everyday thing, can be a near-religious experience. Michelle makes this idea literal:

“Norman, we are not worthy to receive you. Only say the word and we shall be healed.”

The main comedic plot is classic get-to-the-concert shenanigans, but the thematic point of the episode is how joy and pain exist in close proximity to each other. This is expressed via an emotional high point juxtaposed with an emotional low point.

The high point happens when all the shenanigan-ing pays off and the kids arrive at the concert as VIP guests. The images are important here:

Minor detail, they end up getting kicked out of the concert, but Clare runs into her crush and has her first kiss. High point, part two.

Immediately afterward, Erin’s dad arrives with bad news. Clare’s dad isn’t well. In the next scene, they learn that he’s dead from a brain aneurism. We see the aftermath of this in a slow-motion montage.

This is the first incursion of tragedy that’s not interlaced with humor, breaking the show’s template for how it talks about serious topics in a sitcom context. Interestingly, the event has nothing to do with the Troubles. It’s something everyone has to go through eventually.

This drastic tonal shift works because it’s so straightforward and so visual. It’s showing us and not telling us what the impact of this moment is to the characters.

Going back to my initial assesment of the depiction of the friend group — this moment of group catharsis and love wouldn’t be so easy to pull off if the warmth wasn’t built into every episode.

A nice and I think significant detail that I noticed on my third (or fourth or fifth) viewing was Orla enveloping the others with her angel wings. This leads us into the finale, which begins with Orla.

Episode 7: A ghost story they'll hardly believe

The last episode centers on a historical flashpoint — the Good Friday Agreement, the peace treaty that would effectively end The Troubles in 1998. After a montage highlighting moments from the entire series, we open on BBC news anchor Donna Traynor:

“Could this be the end? Forever? No going back? Because if this could end decades of violence, death, and fear, then surely any concession, however difficult, it worth it.”

Orla watches this. She has just turned eighteen and is registering to vote. She’s handed a copy of the peace treaty.

“Is it any good?”

Orla walks out of the government building and drowns out the noise around her with her walkman, kicking off a euphoric, semi-surrealist dance-run sequence through Derry soundtracked by Dario G’s 1997 dance-pop hit Sunchyme.

Orla’s very good vibes are interrupted when she gets to a British military checkpoint. She stares at a soldier in the eyes.

“I need to get past.”

The dance sequence is a microcosm of the series thematically. Orla is a both a character and an idea — she’s an embodiment of the joy that can continue, and needs to continue, in a crisis. The darkness and violence she was born into could have killed her spirit, but it didn’t.

Another important thematic thread in the finale involves Michelle, a character largely defined by her unaffected exterior.

In a casual conversation with the surly shop owner Dennis, we learn that Michelle has an older brother, Niall, who’s a paramilitary prisoner.

This is kind of a huge character reveal — the conflict has had a direct effect on Michelle, but she’s never once mentioned it. This feels a lot more realistic than how a more conventional show would have handled it, which might have involved ominously telegraphing her inner wound at random times.

Crucially, it comes out how Erin feels about the situation — she doesn’t think that Niall should be released from his internment.

Michelle: “He’s my brother.”

Erin: “He killed someone.”

This exchange is pretty much everything horrible about war condensed into two sentences. The heated argument that follows is the first time in the season that the group is put at odds in a serious way.

Michelle and James choose to attend Jenny Joyce’s 18th birthday party over Erin’s and Orla’s. Due to the wealth of the Joyce family, the party is objectively better.

The free champagne and sushi is not making Michelle happy, though — she’s losing her closest friendship. When Erin and Orla show up, having ditched their own party, the group puts aside the disagreement without coming to any conclusion.

Michelle: “You weren’t wrong. I mean, you weren’t right, either. There’s no answer to any of this, is there?”

Clare ends up sabotaging the Joyce shindig and relocating it to Erin and Orla’s original venue, where Erin has a conversation about the peace treaty with her grandfather. This moment is pretty unprompted, but at this point the show has more than earned its soapbox.

Erin: “…. What if we vote yes, and it doesn’t even work?”

Grandpa: “And what if it does? What if no one else has to die? What if this all becomes a ghost story you’ll tell your wains one day? A ghost story they’ll hardly believe.”

Yeah, this is about the point where I started crying I think.

This conversation leads directly into all of the characters on the dance floor, unified in celebration. Again, these moments of pure joy are really important.

The show ends with a reprise of The Cranberry’s Dreams played over James interviewing Erin for his video documentary, intercut with real footage of the Good Friday agreement’s ratification.

“I’m not sure I’m ready for it. I’m not sure I’m ready for the world. But things can’t stay the same, and they shouldn’t. No matter how scary it is, we have to move on, and we have to grow up. Because things, well they might just change for the better. So we have to be brave. If our dreams get broken along the way, we have to make new ones out of the pieces”

This puts into word what the Season has shown us over its seven episodes. You have to keep living, you can’t surrender to fear, and you have to imagine a better future.

James: “You should write that down.”

Erin: “Well maybe I will someday.”

Takeaways

The best way to convey theme in comedy is to integrate it into the mechanisms of the humor. Derry Girls’ joke generation thrives on juxtaposition: objectively dark things are happening to the characters, but they react as though it’s normal because to them, it is. This is not only really funny, but again, it’s telling us a truth about what it means to live in a crisis.

If you’re really great, you might get a chance to just come out and make a thematic statement the way Derry Girls does in its final episode, but you only get that by consistently doing it the no-cheating way.

You don’t need narrative continuity to have character and theme continuity. Even with completely separate stories in each episode, you can build on ideas and change your characters in significant ways.

Avatar (2009) holds a bizarre space in our cultural landscape — it was wildly successful financially and considered groundbreaking visually, but failed to make an impact as a movie as much as it did as a movie event. I don’t usually hear people say they like Avatar, let alone love it, without preemptively admitting that the story is derivative and basic and Jake Sully is kind of lame.

Even if you are baffled by the popularity of the original Avatar thirteen years later, you were likely curious as to what mad lad Jimmy has been cooking up all this time. While prestige directors are now attached seemingly at random to increasingly bland franchise movies, what you never have to doubt is James Cameron’s belief in his vision.

Tár on the other hand has actually lost money (it made $5.7m against a $35m budget) but its impact on the film landscape has been outsized, at least within the industry. Martin Scorsese has basically hailed it as saving the art form, which may be a bit dramatic (sorry to dunk on Marty two posts in a row. I do love him!).

What the movies have in common, and what makes them both exciting, is that they are both wildly ambitious. Their directors are GOING for something.

So what are they going for? I don’t think the answer is necessarily simple in either case, so I want to try to unravel my theories a bit.

Tár

I saw Tár in theaters with a group of friends. We agreed that the movie was beautiful looking, impressively huge in its scope and kind of mind-bending in the specificity with which it portrayed the world of classical music. Beyond that, we all had different reactions.

One of us thought the movie was pretentious. Another thought that it was a self-righteous critique of of cancel culture. I myself just had an incredibly fun time, but I understand both of those reactions.

I can see reading this film as pretentious if you think it is taking on Lydia Tár’s point of view. I don’t think it is. I think it’s roasting her to death in every scene, just without explicitly judging. She’s pretentious, but at least in my view, the movie isn’t.

And this is the main reason I loved it. I wonder if there is an even more specific German word than schadenfreude for the pleasure of watching a pretentious person be completely oblivious to their own pretension, because that’s what I felt for three hours, and it was amazing.

It makes sense intuitively to think of Tár as a movie about cancel culture because on some level it is — a person gets cancelled in the movie, in the true 2022 sense of the word. Plot wise, that’s what happens. But I don’t think the film is interested in giving us a take, hot or otherwise, on cancel culture.

Tár primarily examines the moral implosion of a person with a lot of nuanced and realistic detail. So realistic that many people thought that the movie was a biopic.

We can say with some safety that Lydia Tár is not a very good person, but she isn’t entirely bad either. This is one of the most frustrating features of not-good people in real life. You have to question your own indictment of them, because they are bad in ways that are not as obvious as what your intuition (or Twitter.com) wants to tell you.

Director Todd Field is clearly well-versed and interested in the world of classical music, but I think that there’s another very good reason that Lydia Tár is a conductor.

What’s the number one question every regular person has when they see a conductor conducting an orchestra?

Is that person waving their hands with a stick… actually doing anything?

We are told that yes, they ARE doing something, and that it’s very important to the orchestra, and that conducting is a difficult job that takes years of training. And I’m sure it’s true. It IS true.

But I still have the feeling that the conductor might not actually be doing anything. I do not want to correct this in myself. In my opinion, it is a healthy mindset to have, not just of conductors but of any kind of creative leader.

Field wants us to wonder if Tár is actually doing anything, or if her entire profession and source of public credibility is fraudulent. By doing so, he’s inviting us to be skeptical of the role of the film director — of himself.

Filmmaking, like an orchestra, is a team sport. It doesn’t happen without everyone doing their individual job well. With that being true, do directors deserve the amount of authorial credit we give them? And importantly, the amount of power?

Regular people become abusers when they gain power that they are unequipped to use ethically. The second we call someone an artistic genius, we give them almost unassailable power. I don’t even need to point out all the ways this has played out in the film industry. The world of art, whether it’s classical music or film, is a great place for bad people to hide.

Anyway, this movie made me really, really, glad that I’m mostly into pop music.

Avatar: The Way of Water

As a viewing experience, the long-awaited Avatar sequel was a bit of a head-scratcher for me. I wish that I could simply enjoy this movie alongside the many film nerds who claim that it “owns bones”. In some ways it DOES own bones, but in other ways it does not own bones. These qualities are present in the film at the same time, leaving me with a reaction that can only be summed up with the following gif:

Here is a brief breakdown of what I liked and disliked.

Good: Visual realization of the world. It feels incredibly immersive. I want to be there for three hours.

Bad: I do not like the design of the Na’vi characters themselves, who still fall into the uncanny valley for me despite thirteen years worth of vfx improvements. They are FUN to look at, but I wonder if that’s because they are just… funny looking. The new water-based Na’vi don’t help either — they have huge eyes which make them look like they belong in a much more cartoony movie.

Good: This movie does not DRAG the way similar movies of this runtime drag, which I attribute to solid plotting. Nothing about it makes you want to stop watching it. Compare this to similarly-lengthed or even shorter Marvel films that feel completely interminable.

Bad: Clunky to the point of being hilarious exposition. It doesn’t seem like Cameron cares about the WHY of anything. Hand-wavy dialogue and voiceover explanations seem meant to convey the (goofy) world-building logic as quickly as possible so we can just get to the action.

Good: Whales!

Bad: The characters and thematic elements are still incredibly surface level. We get the same main villain with the same goal: kill Jake Sully, because… because. The conflict between the Na’vi and the humans has not evolved beyond replacing one environmental McMuffin with another (whale based) one.

Everything I’m saying here minus the whales is also true of the original Avatar. This raises a question for me — what was the point of making more of these, instead of a different high-budget blockbuster? This is kind of a rhetorical question because obviously the studio wanted the money again. But what was the point for Cameron?

Cameron didn’t feel the need to add more depth to the characters, to make the world feel more grounded, or to make any of it more adult or nuanced. Correct me if I’m wrong about this, but these are not implausible goals for a thirteen-years-later sequel.

Cameron liked Avatar exactly the way it was. He just wanted more of it.

And that’s fine! Clearly everyone else wanted more too! And if I’m honest, I’m gonna go back for more as long as he keeps making these, even if it’s just to laugh at the funny looking blue people.

Ok, I want to talk about one more thing. Take a look at this.

I had a viscerally negative reaction to this review, but it took a bit of thinking to understand why.

Maybe it just comes off just a bit obtuse to claim that you don’t know how a film like this is made in 2022. I’m not sure what technical aspects of the film were new to the reviewer. We have seen digital characters in movies before. We have seen digital characters interact with live action characters. We have seen live action characters in digital environments. We’ve seen water simulations, extensive ones, in nearly every Marvel film. You’re not going to see a seam. They won’t leave in anything resembling a seam.

Maybe the “I don’t know how” part bothers me because I know exactly how. The “how” is massive amounts of painstaking, very manual, human labor.

This is not to diminish any of the technical work on this film, or the work of technologists in the industry in general. Engineers and technical directors come up with incredibly innovative solutions for the unique challenges of each film. But where the rubber hits the road is when hundreds and hundreds of artists use these technical solutions, which are simply tools, to execute the shots.

The complexity of the images is not a direct function of the sophistication of the technology behind them. It’s a function of artist hours. Artist hours that are over-compressed and under-paid.

It’s not entirely the reviewer’s fault that he doesn’t know this. The studios do not want the public to understand that there is a labor crisis in the vfx industry, so they portray the work done as being magically technical, as if a clever computer program just spits the images out.

Vfx-heavy films are highly profitable, and they would be (slightly) less so if the vfx workers who break their backs to make them were more fairly compensated and got proper rest. The vfx industry needs a union. I wish more critics understood this and were vocal about it.

Anyway, here’s a good response:

I watch television all the time, so I should know something about it. But whenever I wonder if I should take a crack at a TV pilot script, I gulp audibly and try to instead think of something else as quickly as possible. Statistically speaking though, the overwhelming majority of screenwriting that actually occurs is for television, so I do need to figure something out.

This post is me trying to reverse engineer how great TV is written on a season level. I am going to start by saying some very obvious things, and hopefully build up to less obvious things.

What is Television?

Martin Scorsese won’t like that I’m saying this, but I’ll begin with the premise that there is no FUNDAMENTAL difference between film and TV. They are both made of the same stuff — filmed narrative.

The practical difference is the amount of filmed narrative.

Traditional three act film structure is a product of the typical runtime of movies, which itself is a product of initially: the capacity of film reels, and persistently: the length of time we can reasonably sit in a movie theater. This specific 1.5-3hr length lends itself to one main character movement with clearly delineated changes at roughly set points along that runtime.

There’s no limit to how long a TV show can go. Unless we’re talking about a one-off special, the total amount of filmed narrative is always a lot longer than a movie. This opens the medium up to different structural schemas on a season or even multi-season scale.

The one constraint TV does have is episode format, the two most common being the one hour drama and the half-hour comedy. Streaming has made the exact runtimes within the formats more flexible (you can have a two-hour Stranger Things finale, for example), but they’re still roughly adhered to. What I am interested in is how those chunks of runtime are actually used to build a season-long narrative.

Questions

When I watched the last episode of Severance, I screamed at the TV multiple times, to the probable concern of my neighbors. When I watched the last episode of Derry Girls, I cried in an airport. Safe to say these shows both “worked” for me. So my two big questions are:

How does Severance Season 1 use the medium to BUILD PLOT TENSION?

How does Derry Girls Season 3 use the medium to CONVEY THEME?

Since I am finding these breakdowns are kind of lengthy (sorry), I’ll cover Severance in this post and Derry Girls in a subsequent one.

Spoilers! Please watch Severance.

Severance: A One-Hour Serialized Drama

I didn’t like the first two episodes of Apple TV’s Severance, to the point of rage-drafting a negative review in my head. I didn’t think the show’s split memory conceit was a very cogent allegory for actual labor abuse. I was also vaguely butthurt by the show’s vilification of Modern office design, one of my semi-problematic aesthetic faves.

What Severance IS NOT was distracting me from what Severance IS. It is not a particularly deep show in terms of social commentary. It is not “mind-bending” or “galaxy-brained” (sorry to all of the show’s promotional material). The sci-fi elements are not particularly complex or compelling by themselves.

Severance is just a really good thriller. Allegory aside, the split memory mechanism is the fulcrum of a dead simple but highly effective plot engine.

I want to try to break down Severance’s plot design and figure out why it’s so great at creating tension. To define that concept for the purposes of this discussion:

Narrative tension is the viewer’s state of not knowing what will happen next, but being very invested in the outcome, i.e. Holy shit what’s about to happen???

Plot/Character

The “which is more important, plot or character” question has been debated by writers and critics for literally millennia. Even Aristotle, who was kind of the most prolific blogger of Greek antiquity, had a take on it — he was a big plot-first characters-second guy.

Sorry to Aristotle, but the rough consensus now is that in the ideal case, the character’s journey of change will directly cause the events of the plot. Those events in turn will shape the character’s ultimate endpoint. So you can’t really say that one is more important than the other — they should be tightly interlocked.

For a character to generate plot, they need motivation to act. Some screenwriting teachers will say that well-written characters are all trapped in some way, either by their life circumstances, or mentally, or physically, or emotionally. Their initial motivation is to escape their trap. Usually their initial strategies for escaping will not work, and they will need to change.

Severance has two main characters who are trapped in very different ways, and uses the space of a television season to fully develop both of them. Most thrillers involve an element of investigation as part of the plot. We want to find out what’s going on along with the characters. What Severance achieves with its dual protagonists is essentially two character-driven investigation plots, one from the inside and one from the outside of Lumon, its mysterious evil corporation.

I think this is Severance’s secret sauce. The two lines of investigation are plot levers (term I made up) that allow the writers to crank the tension in a way that you couldn’t do with just one main character, or one central investigation plot.

Let’s look at how this is set up in the pilot.

The Pilot

Helly (Britt Lower) wakes up locked in an empty conference room with no idea of how she got there. A series of questions asked via intercom confirm that she has no memory of the outside world. Mark (Adam Scott), the person on the other end of the intercom, opens the door.

Cut to a few hours prior. Mark is outside, in his parked car, crying. He enters the headquarters of Lumon, a company that does… we don’t know what. When he goes up the elevator to a “severed floor”, he loses all memory of his outside life, essentially becoming a clone of himself for the duration of his workday. His outside self has no knowledge of what goes on inside, either. I’ll refer to the two versions of Mark as “inside Mark” and “outside Mark”.

Mark works in the Macrodata Refinement department along with fellow severed employees Irving (John Turturro) and Dylan (Zach Cherry). Their ostensible job, sorting numbers by their perceived emotional charge, is certainly weird but not really important to the story. Their department is supervised by an outwardly friendly corporate goon named Milchik (Tramell Tillman), who reports to the outwardly terrifying manager, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette).

Mark’s task for the day is to onboard a new employee, which is Helly. Helly doesn’t want to be there, and tries to escape. We learn that she was hired to fill out the team after the sudden departure of Petey (Yul Vazquez), who was Mark’s best friend at the job.

Helly

Helly’s entrapment is literal, and her desire for freedom is straightforward. She is in a strange place against her will, and she wants to get out. We don’t need any information on her backstory or inner life to understand this.

Importantly, we get the sense that Helly’s resistance in this situation is an anomaly. She has zero patience for the placating corporate patter that has apparently worked on other severed “trainees” inside Lumon. She’s funny and perceptive. We want her to get out of there, really bad. Thanks in large part to Britt Lower’s extremely good performance, we have instant investment in Helly, which is one half of the tension equation.

Helly is allowed to leave the severed floor, but the outside version of herself goes right back inside. She is shown a video of outside Helly consenting to her entrapment. This is the big mystery element of her plot line, and of the entire show — why is Helly’s outside self working against her?

Mark

Meanwhile, outside Mark is experiencing a different kind of entrapment. His wife has recently died. When he’s not at his job, which is effectively an eight-hour blackout, he drinks and watches TV in his Lumon-subsidized apartment, unable to cope with his loss.

Mark has a dark but goofy sense of humor and a warm relationship with his sister Devon (Jen Tullock), even tolerating her incredibly weird husband (Michael Chernus). These traits are crucial to our investment in him even though he’s as passive as Helly is active.

At a dinner party that his sister drags him to, we get a sense of what severance does for Mark. When one of the guests describes it by saying “that version of you is trapped there,” Mark gets defensive without being able to articulate why he disagrees. He can’t admit that severance is a sort of a semi-suicide — it allows him to skip half of his unhappy life.

And the end of the pilot, Petey finds outside Mark. To this version of Mark, he’s a perfect stranger. But Petey has somehow disabled his severance procedure, giving him access to both his inside and outside memories. He confronts Mark with the possibility that his severed job may be, well, fucked up.

Mark is unwilling to believe this. What Petey is saying is a threat to his only relief from his personal hell.

To summarize these character setups: Helly is trapped physically, Mark is trapped emotionally. Helly’s hell (haha) is Mark’s escape. Mark’s hell is where Helly is trying to escape to.

The Episodes

While many serialized shows maintain some level of delineation between their episodes in terms of plot content or even theme, Severance is pretty much a continuum across its nine episodes. I didn’t start my analysis with this assumption, but as I break it down I see Severance as an open-ended mega movie.

I can identify three groupings of episodes. Along with the pilot, these groupings can roughly map to three-act film structure in the following way:

Pilot (Act 1): Setup of the main characters and their entrapment.

Episodes 2-4 (first half of Act 2): The characters’ entrapments deepen. Their initial strategies to escape do not work, which will force them to change.

Episodes 5-7 (second half of Act 2): After a turning point, the characters take action based on how they are changing.

Episodes 8-9 (Act 3): A major action is planned and executed. Payoffs and reveals result from this.

Episodes 2-4: Entrapment

The first set of episodes add detail to both the inside and outside worlds, develop the entrapment of the two main characters further, and introduce complications and obstacles to both of their situations.

In these episodes we see a stark contrast between Mark’s passivity and Helly’s action. Helly is intrinsically motivated. Both versions of Mark needs to be pushed — on the outside by Petey, and on the inside by Helly. In a movie, you’d have to get him to act quickly to get the second act going in under thirty minutes, but a TV show affords the space to create a realistic buildup to him acting on the information he’s receiving.

Much of the office plot is driven by Helly’s inventive but somewhat boneheaded attempts to escape. Inside Mark works against this, trying to get her to instead acclimate to the situation. He does so partially to help her, but more importantly to defend the idea that being in a severed job is good. Even when he finds a contraband map of the office drawn by Petey, he’s resistant to taking any action, instead repeating corporate policy as if he believes it.

Helly pushes back against inside Mark’s attitude, pointing out his betrayal of the one thing that actually mattered to him, his friendship with Petey:

Helly: “You’re more loyal to this place than to your friend”

Mark: “I’m loyal to how it felt around here before you showed up.”

Mark wants everything to go back to normal. He resents that Helly is pushing him to change.

Despite Mark’s best efforts, Helly is caught and punished for her escape attempts. The punishment is the psychological torture that Petey warned outside Mark about — the employee is forced to apologize for their crimes until a machine registers that they genuinely mean it. This is the worst thing that we could imagine happening to Helly. We are invested in her because of her ability to resist, and this punishment is specifically designed to break that down.

Meanwhile, Mark’s passivity is being challenged on the outside as well. When Petey dies as a result of his partial brain re-integration, Mark is drawn to the funeral, unable to completely squelch his curiosity. There he is confronted by Petey’s daughter, who summarizes his problem with a clarity that he lacks in himself:

“You ever think maybe the best way to deal with the situation in your life isn’t to shut your brain off half the time?”

On the inside, the final blow in the assault on Helly’s spirit comes not from her abusive Lumon bosses but from her outside self. When her by-the-books “resignation request” is finally processed, she’s shown a video of outside Helly denying both the request and her humanity.

“I am a person, you are not.”

Her outside self will never let her out. This is the ultimate entrapment, which leads to an ultimate act of desperation.

Helly attempts to kill herself. She is stopped by Mark. This is a turning point on a character level for both of them, and I would argue the structural midpoint for the entire season. Helly realizes that she can’t solve her problem alone, and inside Mark realizes that something is deeply wrong that requires his action.

Episodes 5-7: Changes

In these episodes, the characters change in ways that allow them to fight back against their entrapments. This leads to escalation in opposition. The combating forces set in motion generate suspense-filled moments, which I’ve been terming oh shit moments, because that’s what I said when they happened.

Helly’s suicide attempt causes Mark to finally understand the depth of Lumon’s corruption and its affect on those he cares about. While he’s been the head of the Macrodata Refinement department since the pilot, inside Mark becomes an actual leader.

This change in Mark pulls Helly out of her deep despair following her outer self’s message. Her memories began when she woke up on that table — she has functionally never experienced another person caring about her. Her attempts to escape on her own have failed. She must open herself up to allowing others to help her, and to helping them as well.

Changes occur in more minor characters as well:

Irving meets a man from Optics and Design named Burt (Christopher Walken, that’s all the description you need), sparking an interdepartmental Romeo and Juliet story. This emotional cataclysm will cause Irving to question his religious devotion to the Lumon. Burt’s “retirement,” which is essentially a death, brings him to the terminal point of his arc:

“Let’s burn this place to the ground”.

Dylan, who has less respect for the institution but still lives within its constructed reality, comes to understand along with Irving that Lumon uses a system of mythology and rumors to pit him against fellow employees in other departments. Importantly, Milchik uses a mechanism called the “overtime contingency” to access Dylan’s inside mind outside of work, in the process accidentally revealing to Dylan that he has a son. Dylan physically fights Milichik when he is denied any further knowledge of his outside family.

The inside group is becoming aligned towards a goal — to find out what the company is actually doing and who they are on the outside. As a result, the opposing forces escalate to work against them.

Cobel is a particularly well-designed counter to the protagonists — she works on the severed floor but is herself unsevered. Outside of Lumon, she keeps tabs on Mark by posing as his next door neighbor. This positioning gives her the ability to throw obstacles in the way of both the internal and external investigation plots.

On the inside, Cobel orders the team to be surveilled by Miss Casey, the severed floor’s “wellness counselor”. Security is tightened to work against interdepartmental communication, and Mark is sent to the “break room” for the usual psychological torture.

On the outside, Cobel impersonates a lactation expert in order to gain access to Mark’s sister, who has just had a baby. Oh shit. This is a devious incursion — the sister is Mark’s main emotional support system and the only person he trusts completely, and now she’s liable to be compromised because outside Mark has no idea that Cobel is inside Mark’s boss.

Episode seven gives us an important moment that the show’s high-level design promises — the point where the inside and outside investigation plots intersect.

Outside Mark seeks out the woman who re-integrated Petey’s memory, Reghabi (Karen Aldridge). Finding Reghabi leads to a confrontation with Graner, the Lumon security goon tasked with eliminating her. Oh shit. Reghabi kills Graner, allowing Mark to bring his high-access key card into work. This transfers both information and access to inside Mark and Helly. Again, this event is directly caused by Mark overcoming his passivity. Character → plot.

Outside Mark then has a bit of a drunken breakdown, sabotaging his new relationship with his sister’s doula Alexa (Nikki M. James). In the aftermath of this outburst, Mark re-assembles a photo of his late wife that he had torn up. We recognize the woman in the photo — it’s Miss Casey, the wellness councilor from inside Lumon. Mark’s wife isn’t dead. Oh shit.

This is a purely informational payoff in the sense that it’s not earned by a particular character action — the show could have simply shown us this photo at any point. If used less judiciously, this reveal could have come off as cheap or obvious, but I sure didn’t see it coming (I screamed). It also has an important function — it instantly raises the stakes of Mark’s story. Will he find out that his wife is in fact alive? Will they reunite? This re-upping of investment cranks the tension going into what is basically our third act.

Episodes 8-9: Payoffs

These episodes are all about action, payoffs, and reveals. We’re sprinting towards the answer to our big question — will Mark and Helly be free, or not? But because this is a TV show and we can always have more story, we might not get as definitive an answer as we would with a movie.

Using Graner’s access card along with Dylan’s recent experience, the team is able to put together a plan: Dylan will stay late and trigger the overtime contingency in the security office, which will allow the inside versions Helly, Mark and Irving to become conscious outside of work. Once this happens, they will all attempt to make contact with a trusted person and tell them what happens inside of Lumon.

There are two major outcomes on the line. One is the biggest mystery of the season: who is outside Helly? The other is if outside Mark will be able to find his sister without Cobel stopping him. Cobel is at this point pretty unhinged, so we know she’s capable of doing any kind of damage. This is classic GSO (goals, stakes, obstacles). The goals are clear, the stakes are high, the obstacles are scary. We just gotta play it out. The playing out of this situation constitutes the third act of the mega-movie that is Severance.

We also have a built in time constraint. Because triggering the overtime contingency requires flipping two switches on opposite sides a control panel, (usually a two-man job) Dylan has to physically strain to keep it on. This gives the sequence urgency on a scene level, and fills something as simple as someone being pedantic at a party with tension.

At the moment of the switch, Mark is at his brother in law’s and sister’s house party. Having no context for who anyone is, has to figure out who outside Mark trusts while hiding the fact that he is inside Mark from Cobel.

Cut to Helly. She’s Helena Eagan, the daughter of the Lumon CEO. She’s about to give a speech at a political gala promoting the severance procedure, which she has voluntarily undertaken for publicity purposes. Oh shit.

I don’t remember how much of an actual surprise this reveal was. If it’s obvious, it’s obvious because it makes perfect sense. I don’t think any other explanation would have worked here. It’s also important that this reveal is completely earned by Helly’s and Mark’s actions. A worse version of the show might have just given us this information arbitrarily at the midpoint, or even the end of the pilot.

Inside Mark is able to find his sister and tell her about Lumon. She processes this information in a very normal way, which given the time constraints is not nearly fast enough. Cobel puts together that Mark is inside Mark. She contacts Milchik, telling him to go to the security office and stop Dylan. Knowing that Helly is likely also unsevered, she heads to the Lumon gala. Now we’re really in a race against the clock.

Helly is about to give her scheduled speech. She has to decide whether or not to tell the truth and denounce Lumon. Cobel finds her at this decision point and attempts to dissuade her, telling her that her friends will suffer for it.

Back at his sister’s house, inside Mark finds the picture of his wife.

“She’s alive”

Helly decides.

“Everything they’ve been telling you is a lie”

Finally, Milchik is able to stop Dylan. The overtime contingency switches off.

Credits roll. We’ve been given two majorly satisfying payoffs, but we’re still dying to know what’s going to happen next. How will Helly’s statement be received? Will Mark be able to rescue his wife? What the hell is Lumon actually doing?

With this absolute club banger of a finale, the writers have basically guaranteed themselves a second season. A second season that will have Alia Shawkat in it!

Takeaways

A great way to create compelling TV is to have multiple character arcs driving plot action and affecting each other. Bonus points if these characters are trapped in very different or even opposite ways.

Investment is important. This doesn’t mean making every character uniformly likable (Helly is much more likable than Mark), but you have to make the viewer care about what’s going to happen to the characters.

Mysteries are good, but the answer needs to matter. Ideally, the answer to any mystery will be revealed by character action. Curiosity is good, but motivated curiosity is better.

Keyboard

One last note. I was so obsessed with the vintage Data General terminals featured in the Lumon office that I built myself a replica of the keyboard.

No regrets, praise Kier.