Thursday, July 24, 2025

The “Epstein Files” and Conservative Economics

One of hundreds of photos of Donald
Trump with Jeffrey Epstein

If I despise one product of contemporary journalism most, it’s the “think piece” written by editorialists trying to keep neutral. In order to make meaning from ongoing events, like the Jeffrey Epstein “files” controversy, they want to appear cool, dispassionate, above the fray. Six years after Epstein’s spurious death in custody, the Trump administration refuses to release the files which Trump’s voters absolutely know exists. The first factional rifts have opened in Trump’s electoral base.

Too many “think pieces” have promised to explain to us outside Trump’s base why the Epstein files have proved capable of dividing the faithful. But I’m reminded of Duncan J. Watts, who observed that explanations must first explain things. Especially when dealing with unique or unexpected conditions, commentators fail to explain, and simply describe. I keep seeing journalists describing the controversy, the participants, the unanswered questions, but failing to explain anything, lest they appear partisan.

Explaining these events means first understanding the participants, especially the base. I grew up in a deep-red household, and internalized longstanding conservative beliefs. Let’s start with the core conservative economic principle: that hard work, honesty, and dedication lead to financial reward. Whether that means working hard as an entrepreneur to cultivate your business, or working hard as an employee to advance your boss’s goals, self-sacrificing labor is the only key to economic freedom and self-reliance.

Of course, if hard work were enough, then farmers would be America’s richest laborers. In Aristotelean terms, hard work is necessary—if you sit on your hands, you certainly won’t flourish—but it isn’t sufficient. Generations of conservative Americans got their first jobs and realized they saw no reward, no matter how hard they worked. When this happened, I changed my prior beliefs. Other conservatives refused to change, insisting that the world must be wrong.

Growing up Republican, so much political discourse I observed reduced to one underlying question: who’s stopping me from getting rich? If core beliefs can’t be wrong, then their failure to bear fruit must come from someone causing that failure. Immigrants undercut wage values, queer people change the social fabric, welfare recipients separate survival from work, Jewish bankers distort the value of money, or whatever. My poverty proves someone else’s culpability, failure is always externally caused.

Sexual perversion provides a useful metaphor to understand this external blame. From the medieval blood libel, to the Satanic Panic, to QAnon, “they” identify the people destroying our society by their sexual abuse of children. Jeffrey Epstein gives us something these prior blame points didn’t, because Epstein’s sexual abuse of children happened. We have named victims, sworn testimony from reliable adults, and a lawful chain of evidence, something almost no prior child sex scandal had.

But something else is also happening with Epstein. Conservative scaremongers have settled on a list that includes people whom progressives regularly hold responsible for society’s ills. Epstein’s list, if it exists, includes billionaires, financiers, hedge fund operators, landlords, and others who make their living off other people’s work. Conservatives seeking someone to blame usually land on small, powerless outgroups. This time, they’ve turned their ire on a cadre of powerful people who actually cause harm.

No wonder Trump’s administration submarined the investigation, despite having campaigned on it. The groups previously blamed for conservatives’ failure to flourish, including immigrants, Jews, and “welfare mothers,” were too poor and marginal to fight back, and it served powerful people’s interests to let the out-groups fight. For the first time in meaningful numbers, conservatives are tuning their attention to a list that includes lawmakers, landlords, and others. The powerful find themselves forced to close ranks.

I doubt whether the “Epstein files” really exist. When conservatives decided that somebody must be culpable for their poverty, they assumed that documents and paper trails must exist. Conspiracy nuts like Dan Bongino and Alex Jones reassured audiences that evidence surely, definitely existed, and would surface any minute now. Pam Bondi’s famous “It’s on my desk” claim was probably a utilitarian lie, like “the check is in the mail,” to defer consequences onto the future.

Trump’s True Believers ginned themselves to believe this list existed, and would provide the vindication they’ve spent their adult lives seeking. Then the administration committed a rug-pull. Whether officials were lying then, or are lying now, hardly matters. What matters is that, for the first time within my lifetime, conservatives have more than circumstantial evidence and innuendo of who, exactly, is keeping them poor. And for the first time, their outrage may hasten some consequences.

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

History, Horror Movies, and Literary Critique

Michael B. Jordan (center) and ensemble prepare to face the monsters, in Sinners

In late spring 2025, two movies dropped close enough together to be essentially simultaneous, and therefore comparable. Sinners, written and directed by Ryan Coogler (Black Panther), hit cinemas on April 18th and became an immediate success. The fourth Fear Street movie, Prom Queen, shipped on Netflix on May 23rd, and landed with a thud. These movies share significant overlap, so why did one succeed, and the other splat?

Both movies are historical reconstructions. Sinners recreates a pre-Hays Code gangster film, but with a primarily Black cast, adding the burdens of Jim Crow onto Prohibition-era themes. Around the halfway mark, it shifts from a musical gangster drama into a horror film, painted in shades of Quentin Tarantino. But throughout, it retains its core of Black Americans struggling to assert their identity in an era of overt, legalized bigotry.

Prom Queen, set in 1988, attempts to capture the experience of a 1980s “dead teenager” slasher flick. That’s all it does. Unlike Sinners, which unpacks multiple layers of Black experience and the economic dislocation of the post-WWI world, Prom Queen tries to return viewers to the era when audiences got giddy, giggly, and possibly horny while watching masked evildoers hack their way through hordes of pretty, sexually precocious youth.

Both movies are freestanding. Though Prom Queen joins an existing franchise, viewers needn’t watch prior Fear Street movies to understand most of this one. I had definite quibbles with the original trilogy, but overall liked it. But without the connection to the existing movies, this one feels adrift. The original trilogy existed in conversation with prior generations of horror film canon; without that, this one appears merely lurid.

Sinners shows two Black men who share one goal: to build a distinctly Black space in segregated Mississippi. Their Club Juke aspirations, where Black musicians sing Black songs to Black audiences, bespeak a desire to simply exist, without the need to propitiate White gatekeepers. But a trio of local Whites demands entry anyway. Yes, the trio are supernatural monsters, but that’s ancillary. At root, Whiteness defines them, and their demands.

White Americans have a history of expecting admittance to Black spaces: blues clubs, Juneteenth parades, the entire disco subculture. But when White people arrive, they begin making exorbitant demands, expecting the existing Black infrastructure to assuage their White fears. I say this as a White man who frequently attends Black church; I know Whiteness makes aggressive, high-handed demands on Black identity. We eventually drive Black people from their own spaces.

Set aside everything else that happens in Sinners. Pause the time-shifting griot magic on the dance floor, the Smokestack Twins’ need for cash in a cash-strapped community, or the bloodthirsty monsters that eventually besiege the club. Those are trappings, but the movie is really about Black people building Black spaces, and White people demanding admittance. Viewers needn’t ruminate upon these themes, but these themes drive the movie.

The killer prepares to dispatch another interchangeable teenager in Fear Street: Prom Queen

Similarly, the original Fear Street trilogy uses the trappings of past cinema: 1990s horror comedies, 1970s slasher flicks, and 2010s psychological horrors. But again, these are set dressing. The movies are about inherited guilt and the degrees to which the living bear responsibility for their ancestors’ sins. The movies don’t foreground those themes or demand answers from the audience, but they exist behind the garish surfaces.

The best horror narratives have a definable spine that says something about us, the audience. The Call of Cthulhu asks what might happen if God were ultimately hostile to human needs. Cujo depicts a mother reduced to helplessness and the inability to keep her children safe. Night of the Living Dead, made during the Cold War, asks what happens when buried secrets rise up and demand admission.

Again, audiences don’t need to spend time mulling over these themes. But we also need them there, to give their narratives meaning. Jason Voorhiees and Fredde Kruger say something about class divisions and suburban anomie, and when studios remove these themes from sequels to focus on gross-outs and bloodbaths, the resulting movies just don’t work. Horror succeeds or fails based on what it says, or doesn’t say, about us.

By contrast, Prom Queen uses the original trilogy’s trappings, but forgets the driving themes. Like countless Freddy sequels, it dresses up pretty, and spills copious blood, but it doesn’t feel larger than that. Some themes exist, but only laterally, and without connection to the original trilogy’s message. Like too many sequels, it’s all style, no substance. But without substance, it’s easy to forget, and audiences probably will.

Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Justice, Doubt, and Modern Storytelling

Clint Eastwood (director), Juror #2

Nicholas Hoult (center) in Juror #2, with Leslie Bibb (left) and Adrienne C. Moore (right)

When Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is the only juror to vote “not guilty” on the first poll, we’re clearly meant to remember Reginald Rose’s 1954 classic Twelve Angry Men. Like in that classic, Kemp speaks brave words about the meaning of justice and the importance of deliberation. Unlike in Rose’s classic, we already know Kemp’s real reason: he has doubts about the trial’s underlying premise. He believes that he, not the accused, might be guilty.

Therein lies the difference which has arisen in the seventy years between these two movies. In 1954, as America still recovered from its post-WWII hangover, filmmakers at least pretended to believe that justice existed, and humans could reach it through dialectical means. Whether audiences shared that belief, or even pretended to share it, remains debatable. By 2024, doubt and ambiguity were the presumed background of storytelling. The idea that rationality could uncover truth was passé.

Unlike Rose’s classic, which confines virtually all action to a single room, director Clint Eastwood swings the action widely throughout the Savannah, Georgia, environs. Kemp and another juror (J.K. Simmons) perform unauthorized investigations at the scene of young Kendall Carter’s purported murder. Another juror prolongs proceedings with technical maneuvers she learned from true crime podcasts. Kemp and his pregnant wife agonize over the proceedings together. He knows these approaches are all strictly against jury protocol.

Meanwhile, Kemp struggles with one secret: a recovering alcoholic, he was at the bar where Kendall was last seen alive with her boyfriend, defendant James Sythe (Gabriel Basso, The Night Agent). Kemp didn’t drink, but he wanted to. If his wife, employer, and others discover he came within inches of violating his sobriety, he’ll lose everything. But protecting his secret means concealing what came after: he definitely hit something near the spot where Kendall died.

As Kemp uses jury procedure to delay a verdict, and allows others to do likewise, his internal conflict becomes more all-consuming. He cannot confide in lawyers, jurors, or his wife. The one person he shares with, his sponsor Larry (Kiefer Sutherland), doubles as an attorney, and warns him that coming clean will create seismic legal repercussions. So Kemp suffers in silence, knowing that only bad options remain for him. The jury room becomes a battlefield.

The longer we watch Kemp struggle with his secret, the more we realize: for this movie, ambiguity is the point. We don’t watch Kemps struggle because we’re seeing the character overcome obstacles on his way to the resolution. We certainly don’t watch because today’s society acknowledges moral complexity and doubt as the normal course of events. No, rather than seeing ambiguity as something characters pass through while approaching resolution, ambiguity has become its own point.

Admittedly, Hollywood moral ambiguity isn’t novel. Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum played grim antiheroes generations before movies like Training Day and Gone Girl left audiences with no clear heroes to support. But this movie goes further. We don’t have to sort the respective characters’ loathsomeness while deciding which one is right. We simply have no foundation from which to interpret events. The script takes extraordinary steps to avoid presenting steps to a clear narrative resolution.

Kemp even manages to convince himself he’s innocent, before surrendering to doubts and re-convincing himself of his guilt. Prosecutor Faith Killibrew (Toni Collette) begins the trial absolutely convinced of defendant Sythe’s guilt, but becomes increasingly doubtful as the jurors descend into infighting. Yeah, her continued prosecution while she doubts her own case is an ethical violation. But it’s nickel-and-dime stuff compared to the wild violations of procedure that Kemp encourages to assuage his guilty conscience.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t yearn for the moral certainty of John Wayne movies, which clearly delineate heroes and villains. The only story tension comes from whether the heroes will win, which is no tension whatsoever, since outcomes are as inevitable as a medieval morality play. Ambiguity is more than just realistic, it’s a narrative motivator, as audiences seek to untangle the truth concealed behind the rationalizations which characters write and rewrite for themselves.

But this isn’t that. Though the movie implies that truth exists, it subverts every tool to discover it, leading to an irresolute “lady or the tiger” conclusion. In Gone Girl, everyone’s manifold sins are unveiled, and everyone faces consequences. Here, we just flip-flop along for most of two hours, before the final shot, a literal stare-down. Ambiguity has become its own justification. Doubt no longer motivates the story, because it apparently now is the story.

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

The Meaning of Life in “The Life of Chuck”

Mike Flanagan (director, from a Stephen King novella), The Life of Chuck

Albie Krantz (Mark Hamill) explains the harsh truth to Chuck, in The Life of Chuck

Late in this movie, title character Charles “Chuck” Krantz (Benjamin Pajak) has a heart-to-heart with his grandfather. Albie Krantz (Mark Hamill), an accountant, does that terrible thing adults inevitably seem to do: he urges Chuck to abandon his dreams and get a “real” job. He doesn't mean anything malign. Albie just wants the grandson he raised to have a future that doesn't include poverty and a career-ending injury.

This encapsulates the moral ambiguity underlying the movie. More than the apocalyptic opening act, in which the universe's existence balances on adult Chuck's survival, this admonition dives into why Chuck makes the decisions he does. The movie unfolds in reverse sequence, and what happens in each act only makes sense from what we see next-- which is actually what Chuck experienced previously.

Grampa Albie, whom Chuck calls by the Yiddish term Zaydie, sees accountancy as more than a job. He describes the complex numerical relationships in his clients’ finances as the distilled, clarified maps of their lives. He has the same nigh-divine attitude to bookkeeping that Galileo had to astronomy: the numbers show us how God moves in our lives and illuminates our way.

Chuck, a middle-school dance prodigy, has the power to stir audiences’ souls with his body movements. For him, dance is communication. He tells his audience a story, and dance is a conversation with his dance partner, a tall eighth grader named Cat. He became the first kid in school to master the Moonwalk because, while dancing, his body was so thoroughly attuned to his mind. A survivor of childhood trauma, Chuck only feels completely integrated with himself while dancing.

In other words, Albie sees the world as a scientific relationship of mathematical forces. Chuck sees it as emotional truth. But the joy in Albie's eyes announces an emotional bond with his numbers, while Chuck has mastered the physical calculus of dance. On some level, each understands the other's sentiments. But Chuck has only one life, and can't do both.

Every dancer, actor, musician, and author has faced the question: is this all worth it? Most of us, sooner or later, say “no.” Rent and groceries cost too much, and we're getting old. Dancers are especially vulnerable to this, because they're susceptible to disabling injuries that rock stars and novelists never face. Even those rare few working artists, who get paid for a while, quit because they can't buy a house or raise kids.

Chuck Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) cuts a rug on the streets of Boston, in The Life of Chuck

In that light, urging kids to relinquish high-minded dreams early, can feel like an act of mercy. Why let them linger in false hope when they could make a living, earn equity, and join a community? This goes double for dancers, who are about as likely to retire because of disabling injuries as NFL players. If you can spare kids from disappointment and disfigurement, perhaps you should.

Yet it's impossible to convey that message to children without telling them something else: “You're going to fail.” And because children are children, deaf to nuance and the exigencies of time, they hear that as “You are a failure.” Protecting kids from a heartless, hostile world causes them to internalize a message of self-abnegation and defeat. Parents don't mean it, but almost inevitably, they teach kids to dream small.

The movie hedges on when Chuck bifurcates into the artist and the accountant. Yet this is clearly a step on this route. At various points, Chuck re-learns the lesson that demonstrating autonomy is equal to disappointing his Zaydie. Like many Stephen King stories featuring child protagonists, this one carries the moral that becoming an adult means becoming small enough to fit this world's demands.

Except, in reverse order, it doesn't.

Adulthood, for Chuck, means accepting small, fiddling responsibility. By the time we see Zaydie warning Chuck to dream small, we've already seen that he becomes an accountant and gets married. But dance as an act of communication remains part of him. His climactic dance with Cat repeats itself on the streets of Boston when circumstances remind adult Chuck's (Tom Hiddleston) that he's most truly himself while using his brain to control his body.

Because even when adults accept small dreams in exchange for security, that dreaming child survives. Kids yearn to be artists, or builders, or heroes, not only for ourselves, but because these are social roles. Big dreams aren't selfish, they tie us to our people and communities. Chuck and Zaydie aren't really at odds, even when they disagree. They just have different routes to the same goal.