Elegy for the American Imagination

Sophie Turner as Lara Croft

Amazon Prime Video has released first-look promo art for their announced Lara Croft: Tomb Raider TV series. Irish actress Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones) has the lead, and appears remarkably like the video game character, though her measurements look more realistic. Turmer becomes the third live-action performer to depict Lara Croft, after Angelina Jolie and Alicia Vikander. Amazon also becomes the third studio to control the adaptation rights.

I’m sure Amazon’s production will be fine. The mere fact that previous adaptations have received lukewarm reviews and middling revenues, before descending into development hell for the sequels, proves nothing. And audiences’ overwhelming indifference to video game adaptations like Super Mario Brothers, Resident Evil, and Street Fighter tells us nothing worth knowing about yet another adaptation’s likelihood of commercial success. I’ll keep an open mind.

But seriously, who wants another Lara Croft adaptation? What market niche demanded we try this again? Streaming TV services require truly massive audiences to ensure manageable amortized budgets, so Amazon certainly expects enough viewers to show interest. Their willingness to invest in a thirty-year-old franchise, which hasn’t released a new game in eight years, says they want something audiences can snuggle into, like a favorite blanky.

My friends know where I’m going with this, because I’ve said it so frequently. This is another reiteration of Hollywood’s persistent fear of innovation. Tomb Raider joins Frank Herbert’s Dune, Stephen King’s Carrie, and Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man as franchises which have been adapted three times, not counting sequels. Second adaptations are looming for the Twilight and Harry Potter novels. TV networks keep resurrecting shows like Battlestar Galactica and Hawaii Five-O.

Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft

This partly reflects changes in the media landscape. Sarah Kendzior writes that, as networked computer technology makes it possible for writers and designers to work from anywhere, the Big Five studios have become unreceptive to portfolios from applicants who don’t have a Los Angeles-area return address. Giblin and Doctorow describe how consolidation between studios, agencies, and distributors turn creativity into a package deal, not an artistic exploration.

But recent events have convinced me something deeper is afoot. Those who control the levers of power have so much riding on their decisions that they dare not attempt anything imaginative or risky, because they have too much to lose. The creatives controlling Hollywood, Broadway, and Nashville are highly visible, because we expect their inventive stories to charm our intellect. But the same moribund imagination plagues our politics and economics.

Democratic politicians run on promises to resurrect past economic promise. From President Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In,” to President Biden’s promise of a post-Taco Republican “Epiphany,” to the very existence of  Hilary Clinton, Democrats keep yearning for a storied past, probably in the 1990s. Meanwhile, President Taco’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, locates greatness in a lost era, like King Arthur or Pecos Bill.

Violence is always a failure of imagination. The violence we’ve witnessed this month in Venezuela and Minneapolis reflects a power structure terminally allergic to compromise and innovation. Just as Hollywood can’t imagine new blockbusters, forcing them to revisit Star Wars and Batman, our leaders can’t imagine governance without burning cities like General Sherman. Faced with disagreement, the administration’s deputies can only imagine gunfire on unarmed minivan moms.

Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft

Eidos Interactive released the first Tomb Raider game in 1996, the same year President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal protection to same-sex marriage, and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which placed work requirements on federal poverty protection. There is no causal relationship between these, of course. But Lara Croft’s return definitely calls back to another time when America’s government attacked the defenseless.

Put another way, Lara Croft, Lucasfilm, and the Department of Homeland Security all promise their audiences that they don’t have to think. They allow Americans to subsume themselves into a property they’ve always enjoyed, whether it’s a game, a movie, or a lily-white national complexion. But to maintain that promise, the execution must become increasingly extravagant: more explosions, bigger confrontations, louder guns.

Business, media, and government leaders can’t imagine new approaches—at least without jeopardizing their chokehold on power. They offer the same loud, but ultimately disappointing, options we’ve purchased before. Challenging the monopoly is too costly for working creatives, no matter how imaginative, to even try. So we repeat the same dull, unimaginative techniques, hoping the outcome will somehow be different.

Somebody must be first to break the cycle. But without guaranteed returns, the establishment will remain too scared to try.

Return to Tim Burton’s Gotham

Sam Hamm and Joe Quinones, Batman ’89

Gotham reels with the Penguin’s recent death and Max Schreck’s disappearance, and a gang of Batmen are ready to step into the gap. But Batman himself doesn’t want the civilian help, especially when the Joker gang uses the crowd to create chaos after an armored car heist. Fortunately, the hero the city really needs emerges: District Attorney Harvey Dent. Sure, Batman offers the city blunt-fisted justice, but Dent offers what the city really needs: justice.

Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie and its 1992 sequel were commercial successes, but their downmarket approach divided comics purists. Warner Brothers especially tarnished the movies’ legacy by replacing Burton with the more pliable Joel Schumacher, turning the franchise into a merchandise factory. Probably the greatest loss was Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent, whose story began in the first movie before vanishing. So DC brought original screenwriter Sam Hamm aboard to complete the unfinished arc.

This version of Harvey Dent is ambitious, hoping to apprehend both Batman and Commissioner Gordon. (Notwithstanding that he’s engaged to Gordon’s daughter Barbara.) He’s also proudly, assertively Black, having worked his way out of Gotham’s chronically impoverished Burnside neighborhood. But Dent isn’t Burnside’s only Black hero. A young martial artist, clad in black and yellow, has begun defending the neighborhood’s streets by night. Just in time, too, because the city has mobilized the National Guard.

Movie and comics fans alike already know Dent is doomed to become Two-Face, a criminal whose morality relies on a literal coin flip. Hamm’s interpretation resembles Aaron Eckhart’s performance from The Dark Knight, in that it’s driven not merely by crime, but by a belief in absolute binary justice. Importantly, in this story, Two-Face isn’t his name; he never stops being Harvey Dent, a local hero who believes in bringing justice to Gotham’s unrepresented side.

Hamm’s story owes a visible debt to Frank Miller’s 1986 revisionist classic The Dark Knight Returns. Not only the Joker and Batman gangs, or a city that requires intervention while resenting those who intervene. Hamm also pilfers Miller’s theme of Batman getting older, questioning his ability to save anyone. Unlike Miller’s Batman, Hamm’s version is introspective enough to question whether he might be making circumstances worse. Especially when his brute-force justice gets poor Gothamites killed.

A splash panel depicting some of artist
Joe Quinones’ preliminary sketches

Hamm’s pacing straddles the difference between movies and comics. His cinematic swoop carries him from talky exposition scenes, straight into choreographed action, never hammocking in just one style. But he also recognizes the importance of maintaining the momentum not only within the story, but between issues. This story originally ran as a six-issue limited series, and Hamm inserts cliffhangers that would’ve carried the story between issues, but which vanish seamlessly in the collected single volume.

Movies differ from comics for one important reason: actors get older. Recent comics-based movies have required Hugh Jackman to have the same body at age 55 that he had at thirty. In movies, characters can’t recur forever; story arcs, once complete, must end. Artist Joe Quinones draws Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne getting grey around the temples, wheezing with exertion, and planning for his legacy as a hero. Time, in this notably timely comic, clearly passes.

Quinones doesn’t just draw Batman as Michael Keaton. He also includes remarkable depictions of franchise actors like Billy Dee Williams, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Michael Gough as they appeared in the middle 1990s. Marlon Wayans and Winona Ryder, who reportedly had handshake deals to appear in further Batman sequels, also appear. Quinones’ attention to detail emphasizes not only who the actors are, but what unique traits they could’ve brought to this story, had it been filmed.

Between them, Hamm and Quinones recapture Tim Burton’s rococo style. They depict Burton’s comedically tall buildings and close-packed streets, the kind of art-deco frippery that gives his earliest work its distinctive style. Hamm’s dialog captures Burton’s trademark lilt, while Quinones draws scenes from Dutch angles that give still images a high-speed dynamic. I can’t quite determine who involve Burton was in creating this story, but it really looks like something he might’ve shot around 1995.

Not that it’s a lifeless time capsule. It addresses politics, economics, and racial dynamics that were implicit in the original movies, but went largely unaddressed. In that regard, it looks like a hybrid of two different stories which might’ve been written twenty-five years apart. I realize not all comics fans like Burton’s movies, or the coarsening effect they had on the comics market. But for his fans, this is the sequel Joel Schumacher should’ve made.

“The Wild Robot” and the Problem with Metaphor

Fink the fox and Roz the robot in Dreamworks’ The Wild Robot

Chris Sanders (writer/director), The Wild Robot

When the service robot identified only as Roz washes ashore on a rugged Pacific Northwest island, it wants one thing: instructions. It races around the island, pestering wildlife with its preprogrammed spiel of helpfulness, cheer, and obedience. The animals won’t have it. Until circumstances make Roz responsible for an orphaned hatchling goose, which imprints on it as his mother. Suddenly Roz has purpose and a mission.

This film’s creators intended a message. Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) is a complete cypher, even to herself, until nurturing the gosling Brightbill defines her. A local fox, Fink (Pedro Pascal), initially sees Brightbill as an easy appetizer, but Rox manages to turn him into an ally. As the island’s wild inhabitants teach Roz to become a mother goose, they also learn together to overcome their natural enmities and live in trust.

For its intended audience of older children and their parents, this inclusive, communitarian message should ring true. I appreciate the intention behind it. The thesis, that nobody on the island is beholden to their natures, and can unify to protect their homeland against encroaching human technology, seems timely. As powerful forces in American society find creative ways to divide citizens and enflame culture-war animosities, the moral of overcoming division matters.

I enjoyed the underlying conceit. In less judicious hands, Roz could’ve become needlessly messianic, especially in later scenes, when her manufacturers try to reclaim her from a flying platform, literally on high. But Roz isn’t a messiah; like Paddington Bear, her guileless attempt to manufacture a place in life inspires those around her to evaluate their own choices. She makes everyone better, not through exhortation, but through simplicity and action.

However, there we encounter the problem with this storytelling approach. Linguist George Lakoff contends that human communication depends heavily on metaphor, the comparison of one form to another. Hope is the thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson wrote. (That’s a simile, yes; bear with me.) Dickinson doesn’t contend hope is a literal bird, but that it has sufficient bird-like qualities to bear the comparison, which she justifies in succeeding stanzas.

But any metaphor, pushed sufficiently hard, breaks down. Is hope migratory? Does it hunt or scavenge or live on carrion? Is hope a sweet songbird or an aggressive Canada goose? Metaphors are, by necessity, inexact, and don’t support extensive scrutiny. Many birds are dangerous to handle, bear diseases, and could kill humans. They also have a frustrating tendency to leave at predictable intervals, which undermines Dickinson’s metaphor.

This movie presents the differences between animal species as something Roz can overcome through honesty and innocence. The animals that disparage Roz for her attempts to teach Brightbill to fly come around to her position, slowly at first, simply because Roz’s need for purpose inspires them. Eventually, they learn to trust her enough that she inspires them to trust one another and huddle together during a violent winter storm.

Except, animals aren’t human communities, which could hypothetically pause their divisions to work together. The movie shows predators like foxes and grizzly bears consciously choosing not to eat prey animals—something they cannot do, because their digestive tracts can’t process vegetable matter. I’m reminded of Timothy Treadwell, the notorious Grizzly Man, who thought his big-heartedness defended him from grizzly bear attacks. Spoilers: the bears he loved killed him.

The broken metaphor leaves me struggling. We need the message of overcoming inherited divisions to resist the corporate invaders who would steal our resources. From Bacon’s Rebellion to today, wealthy oligarchs profit when they keep ordinary people divided and belligerent. This movie tells audiences that, supported by a shared purpose, we can overcome those divisions and unite to protect our island from the third-act invasion.

But it conveys that message in language that doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Grizzly bears aren’t disobedient puppies which need trained out of their aggression; they are muscular predators whose consumption serves an important role in forest ecosystems. Anthropomorphizing animals works well in movies like Disney’s Robin Hood, which shows animals outside their habitat, enacting human roles. The forested island ecosystem behind the story undermines this division and gives false ideas.

Please don’t misunderstand me. This movie has received accolades for its storytelling, visual design, and message, and I wouldn’t take anything away. But misplaced metaphors give honest, well-meaning people like Treadwell false ideals about how nature works. The idea that predators can stop being predators because they learned from an honest, naïve ingenue, teaches child audiences falsely optimistic lessons about how animals, and possibly human societies, work.

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 18^th and became an immediate success. The fourth Fear Street movie, Prom Queen, shipped on Netflix on May 23^rd, 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.

Justice, Doubt, and Modern Storytelling

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

Clint Eastwood (director), Juror #2

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.

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.

Living in the Wallace & Gromit Economy

Wallace unleashes his newest invention, NORBOT, on his hapless pooch Gromit
in the new film Vengeance Most Fowl, now on Netflix

I’m a fan of Nick Park’s Wallace & Gromit films, since I first discovered the original short films on grainy, probably bootleg VHS in the 1990s. The humor operates on the same principle as Mr. Bean or Red Dwarf: a well-meaning but incompetent protagonist bumbles into situations far above their heads. Wallace, Bean, or Rimmer are momentarily embarrassed, but consistently come out ahead, without really learning anything.

The films present Wallace as a garage inventor and shade-tree mechanic. Though the first short film has him successfully build a moon rocket in a weekend, subsequent films consistently harp on the same theme, that Wallace’s inventions create more problems than they solve. They require added steps, break down frequently, get sabotaged by rascally varmints, and otherwise create needless kerfuffles. All just to less efficiently butter his breakfast toast.

Though that theme runs through nearly every film, short or long, I don’t recall it looming as large as in the latest entry, Vengeance Most Fowl. Throughout Act One, Gromit, the wordless dog character who’s secretly the brains behind the operation, keeps indulging Wallace’s invention mania. However, he longs to complete his necessary tasks and switch over to the activities which give his life meaning: gardening and knitting.

Wallace, however, persistently misunderstands Gromit’s need for meaningful work. He sees both gardening and knitting as repetitive work, which automation can eliminate. Therefore he introduces his newest invention, NORBOT, a self-actuating garden gnome that literally takes jobs right out of Gromit’s hands. Though wordless, Gromit’s Claymation facial expressions make clear the disgust he feels without tasks to occupy his hands and brain.

Thing is, I understand, somewhat, Wallace’s motivation. For years, advocates of Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism have claimed that technology will render work obsolete a week from next Tuesday, and we’ll have limitless free time to… well, to do whatever. More recently, TechBro types have extolled what they falsely call “Artificial Intelligence” to take writing, music, and art away from the nerds by strictly automating it.

Such advocates see work as burdensome, something to outsource. Socialists have historically considered work as something imposed by the economic order, something we can abandon because our high-tech do-funnies will absorb the tedium. TechBros, by contrast, see workers and their jobs as an undesirable sunk cost that they’d rather abandon. Either way, work becomes something to abolish, replacing ordinary humans with machines, computers, and heuristics.

NORBOT represents only the comical reductio ad absurdum of this mentality. It snatches the pruning shears from Gromit’s paws and, in mere seconds, transforms his lush English garden into a topiary extravaganza completely devoid of character. It subsequently steals Gromit’s yarn and knits Wallace another outfit exactly like the one he always wears. NORBOT works fast, cheap, and efficiently, but without personality or meaning.

Socialist writer Barbara Garson admits she thought the capitalist class forced workers to work. Only after visiting workplaces and watching the ways employees extract meaning from standardized work, did she realize that work said something about workers’ souls. People don’t work because overseers and debt collectors force it. They work because what we do with our hands, what we create with our brains, defines who we are.

Economist John C. Médaille similarly observes that, if you watch how people spend their free time, it frequently resembles work. Left to their own devices, people might grow vegetables, build Shaker furniture, write novels, perform home improvement, rebuild classic cars, or paint. Although some people certainly drink beer and watch television, complete forfeitures of experience, most people, given the opportunity, seek work to define themselves.

To a limited extent, advancing technology has made such meaning easier to create. Inventions like the steel plow and combine harvester meant that growing crops required fewer workers. In former days, most peasants farmed from sheer necessity. Now, most people can choose whether they want to cultivate the earth, or whether they’d rather make meaning elsewhere. Therefore I’m no absolute Luddite, and embrace technology to a point.

However, I’d contend we’ve surpassed that point. Early Twentieth Century inventions made work more productive, and homemaking more efficient. However, as Research and Development has superseded invention, most “new” technologies simply complexify existing machines. I struggle to imagine any technology that’s improved our lives in the last thirty years. Made us more productive? Sure. But happier, healthier, better developed? I got nothing.

Watching Gromit get his hobbies stolen, I felt the pang of familiarity. We’re all watching capitalists extract meaning from our lives, sometimes without malice. We’re all Gromit now.

The Matrix and the Messianic Lie

Much of the advance publicity surrounding The Matrix Resurrections focused on Act One’s satirical nature. The movie mocked the production house, Warner Bros., by name, for their demand for a lucrative sequel, whether the art demanded it or not. Warner, in a remarkable show of grace, leaned into that mockery and included it in the PR packet. Sounds cool, I remember thinking, but not compelling; I’ll wait for home video.

Now that it’s streaming, I find myself struck by what the PR omitted: a much more fatalistic tone, admitting that the original trilogy’s prophecies fell flat. The original movie remains relevant and talked-about a quarter century after its release, but its messianic promise of deliverance from corporatized autocracy seems naïve now. We haven’t escaped the machine, this movie warns us. If anything, it’s stronger now than it appeared in 1999.

The movie begins with Neo, having returned to his pre-liberation name of Thomas, working a soulless corporate job, like he did in the first movie. Instead of toiling in the anonymous cube farm, however, he now occupies the corner office, and has personal confabs with the corporate straw-boss. But he’s profoundly dissatisfied, treating his malaise by chronically overdosing psychiatric medications. Then word comes that Warner wants a sequel.

Fans embraced the first movie for two defining characteristics: cutting-edge visual effects, and long, maundering philosophical monologues. We who are old enough to remember the first movie, without the historical baggage that followed thereafter, probably remember feeling almost vindicated by the Wachowskis’ take on the decade between the Cold War and 9/11. That decade was slick, shiny, and frequently fun, but also stultifyingly boring in its safety.

Thereafter, some aspects of the first movie seemed downright prophetic. Scenes of urban destruction and gun violence looked eerily like footage of both 9/11 and the War on Terror. It’s hard to watch Neo and Trinity piloting a helicopter gunship into a skyscraper, without remembering the street-to-street fighting of the Siege of Fallujah. The videogame-like violence would become only worse as footage of American drone strikes became cable news fodder.

Unfortunately, if the first movie evidently recognized the boredom of safety, and the violence which boredom begets, the sequels fell flat. They pushed heavily on images of neo as messianic deliverer, whose unique person promises to challenge the system. As Agent Smith increasingly possesses everyone and everything, remaking the Matrix in his self-serving image, the movie promises that Neo, operating alone, will reset the changes and release the captives.

Christians worldwide have, certainly, believed their singular messiah would bring that promised deliverance. But often, instead of acting boldly in trust that Christ would vindicate the just, Christians used the promise of future deliverance to sit idly by, expecting Jesus to fix everything. Christians tolerated, if not outright participated in, war, slavery, exploitation, and empire. Molding ourselves to the world is okay, if the Messiah will triumph eventually.

Mass media in the post-Matrix decades has embraced the Chosen One myth. Rey Skywalker, Captain America, Katniss Everdeen, and even Keanu Reeves’ own John Wick have raced headlong into pits of vipers which seems insuperably large, and emerged triumphant. Despite occasional interludes, like the cinematic Les Misérables, American corporate media keeps promising a singular messiah that will redeem us from… well, from America, mostly.

Meanwhile, The Matrix Resurrections acknowledges directly that conditions have gotten worse. English-speaking conservative parties repeatedly promise to actively make oppression more oppressive, while progressive parties limply pledge that, under their supervision, things won’t get much worse. War, disease, and poverty have gotten worse, not better, since 1999. As Ian Haney López writes, the machinery of oppression proves infinitely capable of adapting to every direct challenge.

This movie takes that adaptability literally. A machine learning heuristic seizes the heroes that previously challenged the Matrix, and turns them into the Matrix’s driving engines. It uses the very human embodiment of justice to fuel injustice—shades of Republicans appropriating one orphan MLK quote to proclaim themselves the real arbiters of fairness. This movie admits that we who believe in freedom must adapt faster than the oppressors.

Hovering over San Francisco streets, Neo realizes something the original trilogy missed: if he hoards the power of salvation, then he’s already failed. The messianic impulse may begin with one individual, but unless it radiates outward, unless others join the kingdom as priests and kings themselves, messianic deliverance will never arrive. Humans, even messiahs, eventually die. The final shot abjures the sequels, and restores the “we”-centered salvation the first movie promised.

Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen, Part 2

This essay follows my prior review, Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen. In the review, I attempted to avoid spoilers. In this essay, I make no such effort; if you would like to watch the movie, please do so before reading any further here.

Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) has had it with your myths, in Damsel

When Prince Henry tosses his bride, Princess Elodie, into the dragon’s chasm, on one level we witness a conventional myth. Like Jesus or Orpheus, Elodie must pass through the grave, defeat the chthonic monster, and return bearing the truth. On another level, we witness an uncomfortable reality that past myths elided: that the truth our hero brings from beyond the grave isn’t what we want to hear. And we don’t know how that truth will change us.

Tolkien and Lewis aggressively embraced fairy tales in a specific context, following the degradations of two world wars. Both fought in World War I before becoming scholars, then sat helplessly through World War II and the Blitz. As Christians, both men believed true morality existed, but they couldn’t see it around them. So they sought moral certitude in distant lands and times, an evasion of the present which Lewis himself acknowledged outright.

Today’s fairy tales, like the movie Damsel, emerge from a different context. Where both Tolkien and Lewis yearned to restore divinely anointed god-kings to their fairylands’ thrones, we live in the backwash of colonial empires, unable to pretend the past we admire consisted of unadulterated goodness. No matter where we live, our land was seized from another people, maybe recently, maybe centuries ago. But literally everyone lives on stolen land.

Damsel enacts this myth in stark realism. Queen Isabelle of Aurea and her superficially charming son, Henry, live on land stolen from the dragon. They admit this during the closing rituals of the marriage ceremony. They must propitiate this distant past through continual sacrifice, through the blood of those descended from the original settlers. Aurea’s continued glittering prosperity relies on someone reënacting that original conquest.

Here we might benefit from consulting prior religious scholars. Émile Durkheim believed that religion begins by extoling the people’s innate virtues; God, Durkheim believed, came late to religion. What Durkheim called “primitive” religion simply preserves the people’s shared virtues by ritualizing them. Mircea Eliade went further, seeing the liturgical calendar as a continuing reënactment of the religion’s founding moments. We walk forever in our prophets’ shoes.

In this regard, Queen Isabelle acts not as her nation’s political leader, but its priest. (No commoners speak in this movie; every character is aristocratic, or an aristocrat’s courtier.) She enacts her nation’s founding sacrifice, preserving peace and stability through blood. Sure, she uses a technicality to weasel out of the actual sacrifice, making beautiful foreigners pay Aurea’s actual blood debt. But the forms matter to national religion, not the spirit.

Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) and Prince Henry (Nick Robinson)

Passing through the grave, Princess Elodie returns with the capital-T Truth that Aurea’s founding myth is a lie. Aurea’s founding king attacked the dragon, not to preserve his people, but to enlarge his own glory; he slaughtered the land’s original inhabitants, the dragons, purely for spite. The dragon appears monstrous to living humans because mythology has created this terror, but Truth says humans must abandon this belief and confront their own guilt.

The parallels with modernity are so stark, they need acknowledged but not explicated. As an American, I realize my Anglo-Saxon ancestors seized this land from its prior inhabitants. But that’s what Anglo-Saxons do, as they also previously conquered Britain from its Celtic inhabitants. Not that those Celts were innocent, as their mythology describes seizing Britain from Albion, a terrible giant whose exaggerated evil resembles that of Elodie’s dragon.

Every human nation sits on conquered land. Every nation also has founding myths to justify that conquest. Virgil invented a conquest myth to justify Roman military might, and India’s earliest Vedic poetry is a fight song in praise of seizing a neighboring tribe’s women. Only recently has public morality evolved to consider conquest unsavory, mostly after two World Wars, when technology made conquest both visible and grisly in wholly new ways.

Damsel ends with Aurea’s capital in flames. Though the camera lingers on Queen Isabelle’s death, we know nothing of the civilians caught in that conflagration. Because although every myth and fairy tale agrees that exposing the Truth will liberate the oppressed, we don’t know what comes next. The Bible claims that the triumphant Truth will simply conclude this Age. This movie follows the scriptural precedent, burning human kingdoms down and sailing into a vague future.

Lewis and Tolkien loved fairy tales because they believed their mythology could address modern questions without modern moral blurriness. Damsel arguably takes the same tack. However, it proceeds from an assumption that the mythic past wasn’t as pearly as prior generations believed.

Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen

Millie Bobby Brown as Princess Elodie in Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Damsel

What is it with filmmakers chopping off Millie Bobby Brown’s hair? The haircuts are explicitly gendered, too, or anyway counter-gendered. In her first featured role, Intruders, she gave herself a weirdly genderless half-bob to emphasize the show’s supernatural themes. Stranger Things obviously involved her learning how to be a girl. Now, in Damsel, another self-inflicted haircut signposts her transition from “princess” to “warrior queen.”

Any analysis of Damsel necessarily involves admitting this is a movie for mainly young audiences. Grown-ups will almost obsessively notice the prior media products this movie pinches from. This includes obvious borrowings from LotR and Game of Thrones, and less widely viewed fare, like 2019’s Ready or Not and your nephew’s latest Dungeons & Dragons campaign. There’s even a helpful map carved into a wall, guiding player characters to safety.

Younger viewers, unburdened by prior experience, will probably enjoy this movie, simply for MBB’s character. Princess Elodie spends nearly half the movie onscreen alone, sometimes accompanied by a CGI dragon. She’s dressed inappropriately for the environment, still wearing her wedding dress, and has no tools, weapons, or food. She extemporizes survival gear from whatever comes to hand. Princess Elodie is, admittedly, gripping to watch.

Queen Isabelle tempts Elodie from her icy, impoverished homeland by promising her son, Prince Henry, as a groom. Elodie, though a princess, is reasonably self-reliant, and chops wood herself to provide for her subjects during an unusually bitter winter. But Prince Henry and the Kingdom of Aurea offer Elodie the opportunity to see a larger world and live without constant fear. Despite her youth, Elodie acquiesces to this arranged marriage.

Unfortunately, the movie’s trailer already spoiled the twist that caps Act One: the marriage is a lie. Isabelle and Henry need Elodie as a sacrifice for a nameless dragon whose mountain overshadows the kingdom. Cast headlong into the dragon’s lair, Elodie must struggle not only to escape, but to uncover the long-simmering ancestral lie that makes her sacrifice necessary. Because her survival doesn’t matter if Queen Isabelle sacrifices Elodie’s sister.

Robin Wright, who kick-started her career playing a similarly betrothed ingenue in The Princess Bride, portrays Queen Isabelle with the same oily deceit she probably learned from her co-star, Chris Sarandon. (Yet another cinematic borrowing.) Meanwhile the dragon, voiced by Iranian-American actor Shoreh Agdashloo, seems transplanted from Shrek—yes, seriously. Because Elodie’s and Shrek’s dragons share character motivations entirely female in nature.

Yes, that’s a stereotype, but a useful one.

Robin Wright as Queen Isabelle in Damsel

Elodie’s character arc isn’t new, or even particularly recent. The “Princess Rescues Herself” trope certainly predates my awareness of fantasy literature: almost from the moment Tolkien solidified the genre’s standards, fans began rewriting Arwen-type characters into greater self-reliance. But MBB invests this road-tested story arc with the gravitas she brings to characters like Eleven. Elodie is strong, not because it’s a genre boilerplate, but because she has no other choice.

Brown conveys her internal transformation externally. She’s thrown into the dragon’s pit still wearing her satin wedding dress, without tools or weapons. The more determined Elodie becomes to survive, the more pieces of her elegant gown tear off. She fashions bandages from her skirts, a glowworm lantern from her sleeves, a climbing piton from her corset stays. Piece by piece, the emblems of luxury transform into the tools of survival.

This results in an outcome that may give some parents pause: the more resilient and self-assured Elodie becomes, the more naked she becomes. That’s also where the hair-chopping comes in, as her long, elegant tresses become an impediment to survival. Elodie emerges victorious and muscular, but also showing plenty of skin. She saunters into her triumphant scene reduced to torn, scorched undergarments, looking like a Frank Frazetta splash panel.

Given the movie’s primarily young target audience, this nakedness, coupled with some Game of Thrones-ish violence, will give some parents pause. It doesn’t rely on explicit sex or coarse language, and anyway, most middle-grade viewers have probably seen content more graphic online anymore, so tweens and early teens will undoubtedly enjoy it. If your kids are grade-school-aged, though, maybe consider watching beside them, just in case.

Some prior critics lambasted this movie for unrealistic standards. Eldie outruns fire, survives catastrophic injury, and handles a sword correctly the first time she grabs one. Apparently some people find this implausible in a movie with an immortal fire-breathing dragon. Picky, picky, picky. The movie’s intended audience will have no such qualms; they’ll simply enjoy watching Elodie survive. And parents will enjoy watching their kids enjoy it.

This review continues in Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen, Part 2

Cowboys and the Power of Storytelling

From left: Jaimz Woolvett, Morgan Freeman, and Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven

I saw Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven in the cinema when it was first released in 1992, and loved it. Then I didn’t watch it again for thirty years, until this week. Given my family’s conservatism, I grew up surrounded by Westerns, especially John Wayne and James Arness, but my parents specifically exempted Clint Eastwood. My mother disparaged Unforgiven as, in her view, a return to his youthful form of violence for its own sake.

Then as now, I felt Mom misunderstood what happened. When it came to dispensing actual violence, Morgan Freeman’s character, Ned Logan, can’t actually stomach it; he’s grown a conscience in his old age. Eastwood’s William Munny feels every human emotion while sober, and can only become the killer he once was after numbing himself with alcohol. Their ally, the self-proclaimed Schofield Kid, likewise feels every inch of pain.

Rewatching Unforgiven in adulthood, however, I noticed another theme which teenaged Kevin missed. The characters spend remarkable swathes of time telling one another stories. From the moment the Schofield Kid enters Munny’s homestead, he demands to know which among the many legends of Munny’s violent exploits are true—legends which the Kid repeats giddily. The Kid enjoys stories he’s heard, and wants to become a story himself.

Almost simultaneously, the contract enforcer “English Bob” enters Big Whiskey, Wyoming, accompanied by his official biographer. This author, Beauchamp, almost matters more than English Bob himself. Beauchamp has dedicated himself to setting English Bob’s exploits in print, preserving Western storytelling for an Eastern audience thirsty for lurid adventures. When Beauchamp discovers English Bob’s stories are fabricated, he drops his ally and attaches himself to another storyteller.

Beauchamp is himself a fabulist, who uncritically repeats stories of White men dispensing karmic justice, protecting innocent (White) women, and taming a land wrested from savage Indians. He describes a world where judicious applications of White male violence bring order to a putatively disorganized land. His character’s entire point, of course, is that he abandons his preferred story when Sheriff Daggett humiliates English Bob and offers an alternative story.

Much of what we believe we know about the American West comes from fabulists like Beauchamp. People who survived the West told their stories to an uncritical penny press, which devoured their frequently ridiculous memoirs. We remember Wyatt Earp, and forget his arguably more accomplished brothers, because Wyatt survived and had a press agent. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show sold an almost entirely fake account of western settlement.

These characters and their hyperbolic stories made good fodder for the nascent film industry. Early stars like Tom Mix, who pioneered the white-hat cowboy mythology, presented a world of moral absolutes, swift civilian justice, and libertarian freedom. Mix bequeathed the reins to similar morally unambiguous performers like the “singing cowboys,” Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, then to the cowboys my parents loved, Marshall Dillon and Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn.

We mustn’t forget, however, that these performances served a social role. Tom Mix corresponded with the rising social tensions which preceded World War I. Rogers and Autry sang their sermons during the Great Depression, while John Wayne and James Arness flourished during the Cold War. John Wayne arguably kept trying to re-fight the early Cold War well into his seventies, limping along, mortally wounded by exposure to nuclear test fallout.

Owen Wister’s genre-defining Western, The Virginian, begins not with character or action, but with a preface lamenting the disappearance of cowboys. The cowboy, to Wister, represents an absent ethic in American life, a moral purity unadulterated by civilization’s decadence. Just as Homer believed true Greek greatness ended with the Mycenaeans, and Arthurian romance locates chivalry among knights of yore, Westerns imply American greatness happened “back then.”

The spaghetti Westerns which made Eastwood’s career, with their moral ambiguity and their casual brutality, arose as the Cold War dragged on interminably. The Italians who made these movies, including Eastwood’s mentor Sergio Leone, witnessed firsthand how flag-waving stories of bygone national glory looked pale against events actually occurring in Europe. They presented a counter-narrative of the cowboy West as brutal, amoral, and already dead.

By 1993, however, even that counter-narrative had become disappointing. Eastwood presents the differing stories of America’s West—the Kid’s romantic savagery, Beauchamp’s redemptive violence, Daggett’s tales of law and order—as equally disappointing. All characters, in this West, wind up equally lonely, aiming for the same cold clay. “The Wild West,” this movie acknowledges, never existed; it was a story we told ourselves. Like all stories, it has to end.

And That’s No Moon Either

Charlie Hunnam (left), Michiel Huisman, and Sofia Boutella in Rebel Moon

The Netflix movie Rebel Moon Part One isn’t as terrible as online buzz might suggest. Let’s start with that controversial thesis. Please don’t mistake me, it isn’t timeless art: a cadre of reviewers, professional and amateur, have skewered the movie’s numerous weaknesses. Its blatant ripoff of Star Wars, for one, and its reliance on director Zack Snyder’s trademark fight choreography, intercut with abrupt breaks into silly slo-mo cartoonishness.

However, I’d like to avoid the obvious and manifold shortcomings, and spotlight one overlooked strength. Pre-release press coverage emphasized how Snyder initially pitched the screen treatment to Lucasfilm as a “more mature” take on Star Wars. He reworked his treatment as a standalone feature only after Lucasfilm’s parent company, Disney, passed. This made me cringe, because filmmakers frequently think “mature” is a synonym for “violent, hypersexual, and visually murky.”

American culture often treats children as twee and precious, incapable of handling life’s harder edges. Disney, of course, notoriously sanded all the sex, and most of the violence, off Grimms’ Fairy Tales in their feature-length animation. Children’s books, movies, and TV shows model chaste heterosexual romance, and only stylized violence, reducing war to ballet. European media does something similar, but not to the same degree.

This includes the original Star Wars. According to historian Garry Jenkins, Lucas modeled the original movie on 1930s Flash Gordon serials he watched on his parents’ black-and-white TV. His parents considered Flash Gordon acceptable viewing, because of its strong moral backbone, its clear division between heroes and villains, and no sex. (The episodes also broadcast out of sequence, which is why Lucas dubbed the first movie “Episode IV.”)

We’ve watched former child stars polish their adult bona fides by embracing sex, violence, and moral flimsiness. Countless former child stars, like Anne Hathaway or Lindsay Lohan, attempted to cleanly divide themselves from their childhood roles by appearing topless onscreen. Miley Cyrus’ live national meltdown continues to haunt her career even after she’s tried to atone. Achieving adulthood in mass-media culture means rejecting the preciousness of childhood.

Director Zack Snyder (promo photo)

Snyder attempts something similar in Rebel Moon. The movie’s protagonist, Kora (Sofia Boutella), is a battle-scarred veteran fleeing her past. She aspires to live in rural, agrarian simplicity, hiding from her former commanders, but she also rejects overtures of romance. She describes herself as too hurt to love; her words form a lament, but her tone is boastful. Her story dribbles out gradually, but basically, she enjoys being damaged.

Despite Kora’s best efforts, the war finds her. When the Imperium murders her village’s headman and leaves a garrison in the barn, Kora decides to run. But before completing her escape, she interrupts the hard-bitten local garrison attempting to sexually assault a young village maiden. (Rape, here mercifully averted, has become the go-to form of low-friction motivation for movie protagonists. It’s sloppy and low-hanging fruit, but audiences react strongly.)

Having tied her fortunes to the village, Kora accepts the responsibility for organizing the resistance. Here’s where the movie’s one redeeming quality emerges: Kora accepts help from villager Gunnar (Michiel Huisman). Gunnar teases out the backstory Kora has concealed during her self-imposed exile, and in doing so, recognizes the injured orphan girl beneath her warrior-woman façade. The script treads lightly in admitting this, but Gunnar falls in love with Kora.

Gunnar is everything Kora wants to avoid being: generous, nurturing, and committed to his people and community. The more he uncovers Kora’s deep internal scars, the more he wants to relieve them. He’s impressed by her fighting skills, but they don’t define her. Instead, he sees her with levels of nuance and complexity which she has tried to reject, and in stray quiet moments, tries to steer her toward healing.

There we find this movie’s moral heart: one character accepts the most cynical possible interpretation of events, and even revels in them, while the other wants to nurture the whole heart, scars and all. Only fleetingly does Snyder admit this openly, but it lingers tacitly beneath the entire narrative. Though the surface-level story addresses the villagers’ resistance to Empire, the deeper story describes the tension between nurturance and violence.

Please understand, this movie isn’t good. Snyder borrows liberally from fifty years of blockbusters and B-movies to create a smorgasbord of reheated tropes. Even that wouldn’t be so bad, but the movie doesn’t appear to be having much fun. If we pause these glaring objections, however, and look at the less-obvious moral themes, this movie has something going on. Hopefully Part Two will give it flesh.

Another Product of the Armageddon Factory

From left: Mahershala Ali, Myha’la, Jula Roberts, and Ethan Hawk

Netflix’s apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind is subdivided into six roughly equal parts by interstitial title cards, like TV episode titles. While many creators behind streaming “television” have tried to position their series as multi-episode movies, this film feels like a compressed treatment for a later TV serial. This comparison becomes extremely pointed by the indecisive cliffhanger ending which resolves nothing, as though punting to the next season.

Overworked preppies Amanda and Clay Sandford (Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke), burned out in Manhattan, spontaneously book a Long Island holiday cottage. They’re somewhat distressed to find unreliable internet and cell service, but hey, it’s an adventure. Except, on the first night, G.H. Scott and his daughter Ruth (Mahershala Ali and Myha’la) arrive, claiming to own the cottage. New York’s under blackout, they explain; can they borrow their house back?

This movie has few speaking characters. Besides the Sandfords and Scotts, we see the Sandfords’ teenagers, Archie and Rosie (Charlie Evans and Farrah Mackenzie). Archie’s defining characteristic is he checks out girls; Rosie obsesses over 1990s pop culture, especially the sitcom Friends. Very late, Kevin Bacon appears as a survivalist neighbor; besides a brief appearance by a Spanish-speaking hitchhiker, Bacon is the only evidence that working-class Long Islanders exist.

Writer-director Sam Esmail bases this movie on Rumaan Alam’s novel. Therefore I wonder who exactly, Esmail or Alam, dropped the ball so badly. This movie reads like a masterclass in how to alienate your audience. Though different plotlines frustrate in different ways, we could summarize the magnitude of disappointment thus: the creative team introduces interesting questions, then ignores them. They expect us, the audience, to do the heavy lifting.

First, we never know exactly what’s happening. Apart from isolated flashes of information dropped without context, all we know is that we know nothing. The Sandfords and Scotts are trapped inside the house, reliant on outdated information and a noncommunicative government. Every attempt to leave the house ends in one catastrophe or another. It’s impossible to read this separate from the COVID-19 lockdowns that ended shortly before principal photography began.

Both the Sandfords and the Scotts are relatively well-off. Throughout the movie, their cottage never loses electricity or running water. Their supplies of coffee and alcohol remain limitless. Yet living in proximity brings out prominent tensions, fueled substantially because the Sandfords are White, and the somewhat richer Scotts are Black. Amanda even engages in frustrated, self-pitying monologues that reveal her poorly sublimated racism.

Oh, and the monologues! This movie consists primarily of conversations, but they aren’t really conversations. Every character has a thesis statement, and apart from the occasional bread-n-butter dialog to move the story along, the characters mainly discourse at one another. This is a Very Important Message Movie, and the characters remind us of that constantly. They don’t even interrupt the action to discourse; they interrupt discourse with occasional action.

As we approach the movie’s culmination, both Amanda and G.H. offer up monologues that, in another movie, might’ve come before the climactic confrontation. Except there’s no climactic confrontation. We reach the moment where experienced genre authors would’ve brought the families’ braided narratives together to unlock the secrets, and… the movie stops. Rather than resolving the manifold threads it’s introduced, the movie halts. Sad trombone noises.

I already anticipate counterarguments. Life is frequently disappointing, and lacking in resolution. In the technocratic apocalypse depicted herein, most people would never receive meaningful explanations. But this isn’t real life. Novelists and screenwriters make decisions—or, in this case, don’t make decisions. I’m reminded of “deep literature” I read in college, and wrote chin-pulling considerations of moral themes, when I really wanted to ask: “Why did the author stop mid-story?”

One suspects that Esmail and/or Alam raised interesting questions, then thought their responsibility done. This often happens in self-consciously “literary” writing, which often treats resolute answers as facile. The author ends with a discordant note, sometimes mid-action (as here), and expects the audience to contemplate the unresolved questions. I suspect the creative team wants us to ask ourselves: “What’s left when our machines, entertainments, and busywork disappear?”

Instead, I ask: “What screenwriting workshop did these guys drop out of?” Esmail made his reputation on similar morally ambiguous TV series, like Mr. Robot and Homecoming. TV audiences accept unresolved themes, expecting they’ll resume next episode or next season. In feature films, it simply feels like the creative team expects the audience to finish what the writers started. That’s a disappointing, rage-inducing conclusion to a good start abandoned.

Richard Madden and the Systems of the World

Richard Madden in Citadel, with Prianka Chopra Jonas

Watching Amazon Studios’ recent over-the-top spyfest Citadel, I couldn’t help wondering why the MC, Kyle Conroy, looked suspiciously familiar. Oh, yeah, because he’s played by Scottish actor Richard Madden, who attracted global attention in 2018 when the ITV/BBC thriller Bodyguard became an international streaming sensation. Though Madden plays Conroy with an American accent, both stories feature Madden as a war-scarred veteran dragged back into somebody else’s war.

These two vehicles play very differently. Bodyguard is a conventional British police drama: gritty, unsentimental, and character-driven. Citadel is campy and overblown, despite its largely serious tone; it resembles the unintentionally silly James Bond films that murdered Pierce Brosnan’s take on the character, and prompted the series reboot with Daniel Craig. Bodyguard is often visually murky, with jarring handheld camera work, versus Citadel’s oversaturated colors and elaborate sound design.

Importantly, Bodyguard features real-world politics. Madden’s character, Police Sergeant David Budd, fought in Afghanistan, and now works for London’s Metropolitan Police. He’s assigned to protect the Home Secretary, a powerful office within Britain’s Cabinet. Early episodes contrast Budd’s PTSD scars with Secretary Julia Montague’s strict authoritarianism; after an abrupt tonal shift, later episodes pit the Met’s civilian Counter Terrorism Command against MI5’s militarized Security Service.

Citadel features two fictional intelligence agencies. Both the titular Citadel, of which Madden’s Conroy discovers he’s a deep-cover agent, and the enigmatic Manticore believe themselves heroic. Citadel hunts and bags potential terrorists, while Manticore hunts Citadel, which it believes has grown corrupt. Both agencies have elaborate technology, an army of agents, bottomless funds, and global reach, despite being non-state actors. Who, we wonder, bankrolls these feuding Illuminati groups?

What these series share, besides Richard Madden, is a prior assumption that massive, shadowy systems control our lives. David Budd must investigate crimes which could destabilize British government, fighting an enemy that can make evidence vanish from locked rooms and air-gapped computers. Kyle Conroy (dba Mason Kane) must unlock secrets which two quasi-legal agencies want buried, many of which involve himself. Both men ask: am I sure I’m representing the good guys?

From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, multiple mass-media properties asked whether our lives are falsified. The Matrix, Dark City, and Star Trek’s later holodeck episodes spotlighted the idea that “reality” is only what we accept as reality, and powerful people can deceive our senses to condition our acceptance. Citadel and Bodyguard signify a shift away from reality itself, onto the people who control our ability to perceive reality.

Richard Madden in Bodyguard, with Keeley Hawes

We live, both series imply, beneath powerful structures that speak in our names, and make moral decisions for us, but which we don’t control. Nobody elected the Citadel, and while Secretary Montague was elected MP, she achieved her executive position through intra-party horse-trading. Violence, strategic deception, and force of law compel us to accept these unelected power structures, because we can do nothing about them except join opposite-number violent organizations.

Perhaps these themes are unsurprising. As we’ve acknowledged systemic concerns like “structural racism” or disaster capitalism, we increasingly understand how little individual control ordinary people have. Politics, economics, and war aren’t gods we can petition in temples; they’re forces, like hurricanes, that destroy everything they encounter. Doing right in politics or economics changes nothing, because we’re individuated and lonely, and the forces are systemic, impersonal, and huge.

Bodyguard and Citadel drew my attention because of Richard Madden, demonstrating how essentially powerless Madden’s characters are, despite their shared dedication to law and justice. But once aware of these themes, I started seeing them everywhere. Heart of Stone, a Netflix showcase for Gal Gadot, features a similar non-state intelligence agency that pervades everything, yet is so elusive that even MI6 can’t root it out.

The recent Equalizer movies with Denzel Washington, Netflix’s The Grey Man with Ryan Reynolds, and the Mission Impossible movies mostly don’t impute non-state actors with the kind of reach (and finances) only available to governments. However, they frequently feature government corruption, incestuous relationships between money and power, and people who profit unfairly from the status quo. These malefactors oppress our heroes, who often go rogue to root out corruption.

However, these heroes are equally defined by what they can’t do as what they can. There’s no Chosen One, no Neo or Luke Skywalker to establish a just world. Rachel Stone, Ethan Hunt, Robert McCall, and Richard Madden might remove corrupt operators, but they can’t dismantle unjust systems. They (and therefore we) can only reset broken systems to the status quo ante. Reality now exists, but reality is historically unfree.

New From the Stephen King Factory!

Sadie Harper (Sophie Thatcher) investigates the dark recesses
of her house, in Rob Savage's The Boogeyman

Rob Savage (director), The Boogeyman

Dr. William Harper is better at dispensing psychological advice to his clients, than at following his own principles. Recently widowed, he and his two daughters have dealt with his wife’s passing by refusing to deal with it. But a walk-in client tells a story of intense suffering, as a nameless monster has apparently destroyed his family, one by one. Neither man realizes that, by telling the story, they’ve let the monster into Dr. Harper’s house.

This movie takes a similarly titled 1973 Stephen King short story as its inspiration, but not really its source. It dispenses with the story’s driving characters by the end of Act One, and focuses primarily on Dr. Harper’s teenage daughter, Sadie, played by Sophie Thatcher. Sadie tries to maintain balance between her father, who remains terminally mired in denial, and her sister, Sawyer, who has become frightened of her own shadow.

Although this movie doesn’t faithfully adapt King’s story, the screenwriting team of Scott Beck, Bryan Woods, and Mark Heyman have created a story that could’ve come whole-cloth from King’s repertoire. There’s the family conflict, the tension between science and preconscious fears, the monster older than time, and the resolution that… well, shelve that temporarily. Because this particular resolution is less interesting than the journey to reach that point.

The walk-in client, Lester Billings, vandalizes the Harper house, including the late Mrs. Harper’s art studio, which has remained sacrosanct since her meaningless death. William and Sadie then find Billings hanging in Mrs. Harper’s walk-in closet. They think they’ve endured the worst already, but that night, little Sawyer hears voices coming from her closet. The monster has invaded the Harper house, though nobody believes Sawyer. Yet.

Sadie Turner embraces the pain of her mother’s passing ardently. She wears her mother’s clothes, displays her mother’s artwork, and hasn’t thrown away the last brown-bag lunch Mom packed, although it’s gone rancid. Sadie embraces mothering her sister, because the pain and responsibility give her life meaning. But she hasn’t learned to trust others, or recognize their pain as equally real to hers. Her peers make that process no easier.

Watching the monster unfold, I couldn’t help recognizing Stephen King components. The monster lives in closets, basements, and disused rooms—the id of suburban American homes. Compare Pennywise, who emerges from the municipal sewer. Like Pennywise, we eventually learn the monster is older than time, that it feasts on its victims’ fear, and that once touched, it never entirely goes away. This is a Stephen King monster rewritten by ChatGPT.

Likewise, this movie recycles conventional Stephen King themes of family trauma, isolation, and lack of community. Without visible neighbors or friends to rely upon, or traditional networks like the church or Lion’s Club, the Harper family must fight their grief alone. However, as each survivor exists at different stages of Freudian development, they’re all ultimately alone. Modernity is lonely, in Stephen King’s world, and trauma makes everything worse.

King’s novels usually feature a congeries of outcasts, loners, and misfits unifying to confront an overwhelming horror. We see this in The Stand, or his Castle Rock novels. But at the risk of repeating myself, the Harper family most closely resembles the Losers’ Club that confronts Pennywise. When we see the monster, it even has the janky, seriocomic tone of Pennywise’s primordial form from the 1990 TV miniseries.

So let’s revisit that resolution we previously shelved. (Spoiler alert.) The Harpers have, together, finally accepted the Boogeyman is real and inside their house. They pause their differences, band together, and destroy the monster, though it costs them dearly. Then we see a family-based, very huggy moment where they accept one another—another King trademark—before Sadie discovers the monster is defeated, but not dead.

Stephen King has become such a thoroughly reliable commercial brand that Beck, Woods, and Heyman can create a Stephen King story without King’s actual involvement. Like sweatshops producing unlicensed Louis Vuitton, this movie is an okay knockoff that should satisfy casual fans, although dedicated purists might notice some wonky stitching. It’s scary, sure, but it works primarily by providing audiences with tropes they know and appreciate.

Some professional critics disparaged this movie’s reliance on jump-scares and conventional haunted house atmospherics. Fair play, perhaps, though the jump-scares made me jump. But between those jolts, this movie provides a story so familiar, you could wear it like a Snuggie. And all what a certain subset of the audience wants: the comfort of knowing they’re watching a familiar, time-tested Stephen King story.

Those Who Walk Away From Tinseltown

While the multi-union strike promises to halt Hollywood for months, a parallel story is emerging: the box-office success of Sound of Freedom. The true-ish story of Tim Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad attracted massive advance buzz, and tapped into an already-popular theme to debut at #3, behind major-studio franchise giants. At this writing, it’s cleared six times its published budget, without major-studio backing or distribution.

Much coverage has focused on how accurate the movie is, or isn’t. But that’s another discussion. More interesting, the studio behind the project, Santa Fe Films, made the movie, found a distributor, then found another distributor after the first one bailed, and printed and shipped for under $25 million. In a movie landscape dominated by surefire blockbusters, where mainstream studios won’t dust their shelves for that money, the return on investment is huge.

Compare the major-studio blockbuster returns. Avatar: the Way of Water cleared over $2 billion for 20^th Century Fox, but on a budget of at least $350 million (reports differ) before distribution. That’s more absolute dollars, but largely the same rate. The latest Marvel movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3, grossed $850 million on a $250 million budget, a narrow-enough rate to constitute a virtual loss. Disney executives have announced tightening Marvel and Star Wars releases behind dwindling returns.

The Big Five studio conglomerates rely on franchises to remain afloat. Sound of Freedom came third in its opening weekend box office; first and second were the fifth Indiana Jones movie and the seventh Mission Impossible. Conglomerates keep returning to franchises like the Transformers, John Wick, Fast and Furious, and James Bond. (Okay, James Bond is an MGM property and therefore not Big Five. Stick with me.)

Then there’s sequels that nobody actually wanted and fans despised, like a fourth Matrix movie, every attempted Predator sequel, and the entire Jurassic World trilogy. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: the Hollywood mainstream is so creatively bereft that they can’t even breathe new life into existing successful properties. Only through constant saturation marketing have they persuaded audiences to view the pablum they keep dribbling out.

Meanwhile, Sound of Freedom is only the latest movie from Christian-themed indie production houses to draw returns well beyond its budget. Prior pious hits like Courageous, Fireproof, and Same Kind of Different as Me have attracted large audiences and robust returns despite their art-house budgets, narrow target audiences, and often unreliable distribution. They go outside the Hollywood mainstream for their funding and promotion, and audiences reward them for it.

Don’t misunderstand me. Several recent Christian mockbusters have been real stinkers, like the God’s Not Dead quartet, or Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas. Kirk Cameron in particular needs to realize he’s outlived his Eighties sitcom popularity, and reconsider his life’s choices. And the Christian mockbuster industry leans heavily conservative, parroting the existing moral and religious views of its largely sectarian audience. My opinions here are not uncritical.

However, a certain subset of right-wing Christians have successfully reverse-engineered an alternative Hollywood structure to make, distribute, and showcase their artwork. Their smaller studios must compete for talent, and their margins are narrow enough that they can’t waste the audience’s time with piffle, meaning they have to know their audience, and both give them what they want, while also denying them what they think they want.

Mainstream Hollywood has become highly vertically integrated. As Giblin and Doctorow write, the major agencies, talent scouts, and studios have merged. Therefore making a mainstream movie pitch means entering with a screenwriter, star, director, and designer already signed. Without competition for talent and content, the resulting returns (such as they are) don’t roll into the next movie; they go into executives’ and shareholders’ bank accounts.

Hollywood has become an unfree market. Striking for better conditions and improved contracts will bandage the wound, but it won’t fix the underlying problem, that under the current system, prices don’t float, and the major studios are more likely to collude than compete. In this one circumstance, however, participants have a solution that other mistreated groups don’t share: they can walk away and build their own system.

Our society has other underlying problems which participants must work to fix; poverty, racism, and corruption come to mind. We can’t just walk away from these problems, because we have only one government, only one nation-state. In this unique case, however, walking away is possible. There’s already a model of how others have done it. Hollywood’s mistreated grunt laborers should grab their tools and go.