Editing covers many different tasks over the full course of a video or movie workflow, and there’s plenty of articles and other content out there you can read to break down those workflows and what individual people’s roles are, but I also think of them as different skill buckets requiring different types of attention.

It goes without saying that different editors will like or dislike the various buckets to different degrees, and possibly be better or worse at the buckets to different degrees; but an editor does have to be professionally competent in every bucket to function long term in the career. I would say you have to find your own enjoyment in each of these processes too, or eventually you will burn out.

On the other hand, editor culture can sometimes be grumpy and editors like to share some complaints about things that, ironically, is basically their core job function. I personally find it funny — I think every job has its constituent amount of grousing, and I don’t think jobs can really exist without stress. The way to survive any endeavor long-term is to have more eustress than distress, but each have their own level of bitching.

So I thought it would be fun to introduce these buckets, editors’ primary complaints about those aspects of the job, and then the reason they’re actually fun really. Then the difference between a filmmaker who needs to edit something and an editor is the difference between whether you’re grousing for fun or actually really can’t cope with handling this responsibility.

They’re arranged sort of in order of project workflow. Sort of. This is not a general workflow guide.

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Skill Set 1: Media Management

This is everything that involves organizing, labelling, and preparing the actual media assets, every type of file that affects how they are interpreted by the editing program, and how the editing program itself is formatted for editing particular types of film, video, and video-adjacent content.

A note that historically, “editors” actually didn’t need to do a lot of this, as post production had a large system of assistants, post-producers, and various other helpers and gofers to present editors with cleanly structured and ready-to-edit project files. I have never seen this in the wild and these days only hear tales of it from grizzled old hands who refuse to take a job unless some 20-year-old does half their job for them and that 20-year-old was around in the days where “non-linear editing” meant running a system of reels on tape.

In my personal experience, if you don’t know how to manage media yourself, you’re not gonna crack it at this editing thing these days.

Common grousing: “This isn’t my job, I should be editing right now.” “Who the fuck labelled these clips?” “These people do not understand nomenclature.” “This folder is garbage, there is no organization in this project whatsoever.” “I have literally never seen this filetype before, whereven did they find this asset?” “But why can’t proxies have more than four channels of audio?”

Skills required: Patience; organizational skills; minor technical and troubleshooting skills; translating workflow technical documents and creative style guide documents into literal hierarchies of bins and sequences; watching things like render bars, transcripts, previews, and proxies load without losing your mind.

Why it’s fun actually: You can listen to music. You can make sure your project file and everything it connects to looks and feels the way you want it. You can get excited by the possibilities. You can fall down Internet rabbit-holes about obscure codecs trying to solve a transcoding problem and end up feeling like you’ve peered into the underlying databit information structure of the universe. You can feel like you’re getting away with wasting time on company / client dime when you damn well know you’re saving dozens if not hundreds of hours of workflow problems downstream and actually making everyone’s lives easier and happier. You are packaging a gift for your future editor self.

Skill Set 2: Stringouts, Assemblies, and Selects

This is where you go through all the beautifully, cleanly organized assets in the project file and start mucking them up in order to chop the chaff away.

You group multicamera shoots and nest sequences, create b-roll or dailies stringouts to send to clients to look at and for you to grab from later, place markers all over the timeline, make clips all sorts of pretty colors according to a schema that helps you find important things, and even, if you’re super brash, delete clips you damn well know will offer nary one single frame in the final cut from the project file1.

This section is distinct from media management because it’s about the content of the media itself rather than its containers. It’s the part where you’re facing effectively infinite possibilities and choosing the first pathways.

I’m also counting in this bucket things like creating the first assembly cuts from scripty notes.

Common grousing: “Who shot this? How did they even get hired?”2 “Oh my god, if I’ve told them once I’ve told them a million times, if you can’t genlock then use a slate!” Premiere specific, “Seriously how have they figured out AI clip extension but I still can’t batch sync audio? Fuck this I’m using Resolve.” “Okay I guess they call this b-roll, but like, it would be nice if it had anything to do with the subject matter.” “Yup. Two different camera bodies at different color temperatures and exposure levels, shot up against a window during a windy partly-cloudy day. Coloring this is gonna suck.”

Skills required: Patience; organizational skills; ‘an eye’ for high quality moments, performances, and compositions; consistency and clarity of communication; basic project management and team management; team coordination; workflow management and design; clear high level evaluation of noise to signal ratios regarding your specific project needs.

Why it’s fun actually: Flat-out, do you like puzzles? Do you like Lego or building blocks or collage? This is processing art, where you’re both familiarizing yourself with the content, creating a larger view ‘master plan’ of the art you’re preparing to make, and also letting it wind into your subconscious as you move the pieces around. I swear half this job is the actual mouse clicking and hotkeys, the other half is done while you sleep and your short-term memory cache decompresses. You also get to get excited when you do, actually, see some beautiful shots or performances or just rad content your team put together and you’re like, “Yes, this is gonna be fun.” You’re planting the story seed.

Skill Set 3: Story and creative editing

This is the part of editing called editing, commonly associated with editing, and is what you’ll see an ‘editor’ in a movie doing if you see a movie that shows an editor editing (you’ll never see a high-octane snappy edit of an editor ingesting footage and confirming proxy transcode settings).

It technically consists of two vastly different responsibilities: cutting, and storytelling.3 Cutting is the assembling of image and sound together in a sensible order that tells a story, and storytelling is making editorial decisions about what story to tell.

An oversimplistic way to say this is cutting is deciding where to place a reaction shot to a line of dialog, storytelling is deciding whether that line of dialog even belongs in the final movie. As this is a vast subject with many books written about it, I will settle the distinction there.

I’m going to talk a little bit about AI in the next section, but this is the section that is relatively AI-risk free. AI can do some specific and narrowly defined types of cutting. It can’t do any type of storytelling. AI tools will only help the cutting constituent to how well the AI tool designers bother to listen and engage with the people who use them.

Common grousing: “Noooo, they didn’t get it! They didn’t actually get the shot!” “Ugh, settle. Settle! Did they even bring stabilization?” “The hell did they shoot this near, an active fire station under construction and hosting a concert? This audio is garbage.” “Ugh continuity. Ugh. Continuity. Oh here we go… nope. Fuck sandwiches.” “They didn’t get the insert? I’m not gonna crop in. Will look like shit.” “Yeah just you know leave the coffee cup in frame, no viewer will notice, no one will comment about it. /s” “Ya can’t polish a turd.” “Yeahhhh…. this guy is uh… not television ready.” “Framefuck it.”

Skills required: Patience. Taste. The eye. How to tell a story. A severely critical ear for dialog, interview, and voiceover on the fundamental what-words-actually-mean and what-people-will-understand level. How to tell a story. A long memory for lost and forgotten takes. An uncanny intuition for when the person on screen is about to stop doing the thing. An unconscious muscle memory codex of hotkeys you use without even remembering what the key combinations are or what the function is called anymore. Eye tracing. Eye lines.4 How to tell a story.

Why it’s fun actually: I mean this is what people get into the editing for, so you better be just really taking joy from the process or please just hire an editor. Also you get praised for good editing, which is not true of any of the other skill sets on this list. And you get your own sense of personal ownership of the final story, no matter what the director says at the Q&A.

Skill Set 4: Taking notes and client engagement

This is the section that causes the most noisy editor grousing, which I don’t like because I learned very early in my career how to give this skill area equal weight to the beloved actual-editing area above, and sometimes I beef with how often editors beef with clients. Editing IS a customer service job, and one of my most frequently praised traits from former and returning clients is my calmness and responsiveness in dealing with their notes, worries, and concerns.

This also isn’t to say that the client’s note should always be taken. This skillset includes being able to convince clients, occasionally, on the better path; or show them that path so they can convince themselves; or realizing that their belief that one thing is a problem is actually a separate problem somewhere else on the timeline.

This part of the job is translating the client’s pain-points into opportunities for elegance. As such I find some editors’ complaints and disrespect about clients is sometimes a red flag to that individual’s actual editing skills.

Lastly, this is the skillset that is entirely, 100% AI-risk free. Sorry tech bros, but the reason clients can’t edit for themselves is not because they don’t understand the buttons or the program or anything—editing is, actually, very easy on a ‘this thing does that’ level—it’s because your job as an editor is to prompt them, not vice versa.

The creative skills and responsibilities that make a producer or a client is not only different than an editor’s creative skills and responsibilities, in some cases they’re non-overlapping magisteria. The reasons why clients can’t already edit for themselves are the exact same reasons why they can’t formulate prompts that would successfully instruct a machine on how to do it for them.

There’s just no AI system that will ever translate “Make it pop” prompts into solving the actual lack of ‘pop’ the client feels. My favorite quote on this matter is a dumb BusinessWeek adage, but nevertheless it is the job: “So their complaint is wrong? Then their complaint is wrong. Their pain is real, even if it doesn’t make sense.”

Another useful quote is that, “Clients give you what they think the solution is. It’s your job to figure out what the problem is from there to find the real solution.” AI cannot do this, we’re not even talking AGI level mere consciousness but prosocial theory-of-mind shit. The things you understand if you learn human relationships.

All the above said, in any collaborative situation you’re going to have communication issues, disagreement, and time spent going back and forth over how to solve a problem instead of just sitting down and solving the problem. 90% of conflict is merely definitional: people being unaware they’re not even talking about the same things, and thus misinterpreting the other person’s statements.

Common grousing: “If I change that, I have to change everything!” “WHY WOULD THEY WANT THAT CUT—— that’s the best part!” “I can’t use footage they never shot.” “THIS! THIS is why you never just say, ‘We’ll fix it in post!’” “Yes, I’ll just use the ‘make it pop’ plug-in.” “Seriously, she just sat there right behind me watching me framefuck clips back and forth, like I’m just some meat extension of her brain to edit with herself.” “I literally do not know what this guy’s problem is.” “We can’t fit the full five minute clip in this 2:30 video, sorry.”

Skills required: Patience. Creative listening. Emotional management and empathy. Customer service. Ability to explain yourself clearly. Ability to choose battles and know when to let go. Ability to admit when you’re wrong. Ability to persuade when you’re right. Personal hygiene. A clean and orderly workspace. Ability to attend meetings, write emails, and hold phone conversations.

Why it’s fun actually: Collaboration. Collaborative game theory: if you win, everyone wins; if they win, you win. Praise; and, if you’re really good at your job, respect. Learning new things, accepting new challenges. Having a new person to talk about your favorite movies with, when that one cut “reminds you of…”. A built-in audience for your work. New friends.

Bonus fun actually: Personally? I sometimes like having a checklist of tasks to do the creative editing with rather than having to be entirely self-directed, so rounds of review and feedback can sometimes help you really get in the zone in a way where the first rough or larger bulk of editing can feel overwhelming.

Skill Set 5: Finishing editing and QC

Technically this could have been included in the media management section ,but I think there’s a completely different technical world and attention mindset you need to get into when you are packaging, exporting, and distributing a project. This one is one of the few buckets that I actively do not recommend editors do to their own work, because editors can become blind to their own errors through sheer familiarity of the content.

Finishing editing and QC is assembling the final product with all of its mastered parts: the final, colored, SFX composited, graphics-overlaid visual component and it’s fully mixed-down and mastered sound design exported into every format and type of file required across every platform it will go to, and every type of sidecar and embedded media and metadata file that goes with it.

During this you have to be constantly checking that every element remains exactly where it belongs, no glitches or errors occur in any part of the process, no mistakes are burnt into the final result, the outputs are indeed to the specifications required (which often requires some other ‘monitor’ than the editing program you’re using), and in some cases you have to be able to watch your work — no matter how long it is — over and over again about a half dozen times without your eyes glazing over.

Common grousing: “Mother. Fucking. Dropframe.” “Why did it export like that?” “How did no one see that?!”5 “Magnets. How do they work?” “[Deep intake of breath] Captions are not subtitles. They are a completely different protocol.” “Captions are fragile, don’t mess with the captions.” “Ugh, fucking captions.” “I fucking hate captions.” “This is not how it looked on the other monitor.” “Oh, this whole time we were editing in REC2020 color space goddamnit.” “…. I … mannnn…unbelievable. I forgot that one checkbox. AGAIN.”

Skills required: Patience. A very intense eye for detail. Babysitting render bars without losing your mind. An ability to memorize a cornucopia of technical terminology, 75% of which have names like 608-1, Rec709, MXF, LKFS, and PAR.6 Intuitive and reflexive knowledge on how to reduce moire, artifacting, jutter, aliasing, banding, and other weird shit nobody knows about but every lay person can see. Technical troubleshooting skills. The ability to translate extremely detailed and thorough specifications documents into buttons and checkboxes hidden in sub-sub-sub-menus most editors daren’t tread. If you can swing it, programming and debugging skills. If you’re a superstar, video engineering skills, but that’s asking a lot.

Sadly this is an area I also excel at moreso than many editors so I’ve become the go-to “Dane, why is this broken?” guy at every editing job I’ve had for the past decade.

Why it’s fun actually: You’re a fucking wizard to most people. You can call a random master control person or engineering type video dude across the country and hold a full phone conversation that sounds like arcane psychobabble from the maddening void. You become very hard to replace, and there is high demand for editors that can figure this shit out. Occasionally troubleshooting becomes an adventure and you learn some really wild and random stuff about things you didn’t ever conceive existed. Adobe actually takes your reports and assigns an engineer to you.7 Occasionally occasionally…… occasionally!: a video engineer will respect you, and that means the world.

Why it sucks actually: Every business or client you work for will progressively push you away from the actual editing editing and towards this because you’re the only one they know who can do it. You will have to constantly push back so that you can do the other stuff.

Skill Set 6: Paperwork, project management, and… business

Guess what? Editing is an office job.

Every asset has metadata on a computer level, but it also has metadata on a human communication and exchange level; frequently financial and legal! An easy example is music cue sheets, tracking literally every music track you used and the amount of time it is heard on-screen to the second, a requirement for making sure your production doesn’t get super sued.

But every job has their trackers, their reports, their KPIs, not to mention HR documentation, timesheets, benefits management, election periods. Sometimes you live in the world of CMSs or MRCs or anything that takes a .csv, and yes this is not just alphabet soup you’ll learn against your will but is not as universally applied cross-industry, less across industries, as you’d like, meaning that every new work place is a brand new pile of paperwork terminology.

And spreadsheets. I do not believe it is possible to be a professional editor without becoming intimately familiar with spreadsheets, on the “Oh wow I didn’t know spreadsheets could do that!” statements from your clients level.

Many larger post-houses have post-supervisors, post-producers, and post-managers, but most of the time you have to do a lot of that stuff yourself and be as much of a boss to your clients as your clients are your boss.

And if you freelance and work from home etc, you are running a independent business and have to know how to file taxes and hire entertainment lawyers and accountants and generally keep your own ship afloat with no boatswain to blame for capsizing.

Also a particularly niche skill good for a video editor to have is the technical writing skills to create workflow documents and reports.

There’s just paperwork, is what I’m saying. Always paperwork.

Common grousing: “I’d rather go home, but nope, just here copying filenames into a giant spreadsheet.” “Dude we need a tracker for all the trackers.” “Honestly I’ve forgotten where to find that information, it’s somewhere in Google Drive.” “I can’t even find the information I’m looking for in this document.” “Didn’t we sign this last year?” “Damn it, gotta update the template then.” “Fucking tax season. You know if you translate 25% to time rather than money, that’s three months of work the government’s taking from you?” “Dude at this point I Slack it, email it, AND submit it through the webportal.”

Skills required: Patience. Reading comprehension. Writing. Technical writing. The ability to follow up. The ability to follow up doggedly. Browser bookmark-fu, which is small-town doge scale footwork. Google-fu, which is a few necessary defensive measures. PDF editing-fu, which is like Crouching Tiger gravity-defying stuntwork for many middle managers. Excel-fu, which is like The Matrix bullet-stopping stuntwork for many middle managers. Bureaucracy-fu, which is a life skill at any rate. If you’re clever, basic coding skills. If you’re super clever, the ability to convert metadata files to human language files to let the computer do the paperwork for you.

Why it’s fun actually: You can listen to music. You can grouse about it to literally any colleague and they’ll be on your side, it’s a get-away-with-grousing free card. And if you own your own business, some of those documents are actually cool precious intellectual property rights ownership stuff and certificates and other neat stamped things to look at and put in your filing cabinet treasure box. If it’s a neat enough stamped thing, you can mount it on your wall.

Skills Sets 7+: Specialized post work

I’m not going to enumerate all these, but these are essentially the type of specialized post jobs that generalist editors are not necessarily expected to handle themselves…

…yet.

Graphic design, motion graphics, visual effects work, compositing, color, sound design, and so on.

Many of these have basic functions you will be required to know: you may not be a colorist, but you need to know how to color correct footage. You may not know sound design, but you need to know how to edit and clean sound. You may not know how to create motion graphics, but you should at least know how to make some basic text and keyframe things. Any of these things you can do within your own editing program is fair game for employers to expect from you; it’s when you start needing other programs that you have to start negotiating scope of project and rates.

But there is never any downside to learning any of these skills. It’s all upside every time.

Common grousing: “No, that is not what I do. Let me find the contact of this one I know, I’ve worked with her before, she’ll be able to achieve this.”

Skills required: Patience. The ability to learn.

Why it’s fun actually: Learning is fun. If learning isn’t fun for you then this whole post is null, you’re not making it to skillset one. Also if you happen to end up being the one person who figures out some weird cross-specialist technique, you become the person everyone hires to perform that technique (until other people figure it out, which, don’t bother trying to hide how, that’s both not gonna work and also it’s super rude and unprofessional).

Why it sucks actually: There’s just too much in any one specialty set for anyone to master all of them at the highest level. I’m a generalist so I can do most things really well and some things very well. But on specialist stuff I’ll never be one of the greats. And there’s a frustrating time vs. capacity vs. options in figuring out what’s really best to learn next — a genuine paradox of choice.

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The Umbrella Skill Set: An attention span

You may have noticed that every single skillset starts with patience.

Patience is one side of the coin. The other is focus.

To be honest, literally everything you do in editing is super easy. A lot of editors like to really lean into the storytelling and creative aspects — a narrow sub-set of only one single bucket of the above-listed skills — as the essential special sauce that makes a good editor, but even the storytelling and creative aspects come downstream of learning how to iterate over the same actions over and over and over and over again until it’s right.

I have an unromantic overly technical definition of editing, which is that it’s all media management, media management turtles all the way down, just shuffling media clips and instructing the program to read them correctly until they’re in the timeline for the right amount of time in the right order. The only nuance is how the Finder window manages media versus how the editing program manages media versus how the timeline manages media and so on. Then you export it (another form of media management) and you’re done.

Now. An attention span in this sense is about how you manage attention as is more related to choice than character. I have a colleague who is severely ADHD, but he is a good editor. I had another colleague who could lock in on a task for hours but hated editing because it bored him. You need both focus and patience.

That’s why there are still directors who, even if they edit their own stuff for cost-savings measures, don’t edit professionally. Because even if you can do the things, you can’t keep doing it if you don’t have the attention span for it.

The underlying foundation of all my skills is my ability to attend to them.

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It’s delivered as my duly acknowledging response to FilmStack Challenge #11, posed by of :

And so, FilmStack, here is your challenge for this month…

1. Write about a film or TV show that gives you a profound sense of awe, curiosity, and adventure, aligning with your own definition or interpretation of “childlike wonder.” This can be a scene, a moment, a frame, or the story itself.

   Or…

2. Film and/or edit something that you feel encapsulates childlike wonder. Take that state of mind, and communicate it to your audience through images and sound. Feel free to use archival footage as well!

Let me tell you, I would have really, really liked to take on the second option. Feeling kinda the need for it.

But for time, I’d like to fire up one of my old hot takes from the ashes of forgotten Discourse, about a movie I don’t see people talking about much these days, that really was not much loved when it came out:

Terry Gilliam’s Tideland (2005) is the most honest movie about childhood and imagination.

Tideland starts with an introduction by Gilliam himself describing his attachment and motivation to tell the story, ending with him announcing “I’m 64 years old, I think I’ve finally found the child within me. It turned out to be … a little girl.”

Though apparently earnest on its face, the strangely lit black and white frame with the sides of his face keyed too high and a looming shadow over his right shoulder (frame left), as well as Gilliam’s reputation for surrealist humor, meant that this introduction did the movie no favors in getting people into the vibe of the piece, as I distinctly recall the strained and uncomfortable laughter in the theatre to this line when I first saw it. I had hoped that it was just a special introduction for the screening I went to, but it turned out to be burnt right into the DVD edition I later bought. It’s an unfortunate choice regarding the experience of the film, but it’s not really incorrect in terms of Gilliam’s self-expression or spark of recognition in the book he adapted.

Tideland follows Jeliza-Rose, the imaginative and precocious child of a couple of heroin addicts. When her father, played by Jeff Bridges1, discovers her mother has died of an overdose, he runs himself and Jeliza-Rose off to a remote family farm in Texas for fear of being arrested. There, he ODs himself, and Jeliza-Rose is left to fend for herself with a strange witchy taxidermist neighbor Dell and her severely cognitively stunted brother Dickens.

This is not a pleasant movie, which is why critics hated it, viewers mostly stayed away, Gilliam fans were mixed, and my friends didn’t appreciate my hot take. One friend I told my take to literally stopped what he was doing, turned to me and said, “C’mon Dane. No. Don’t even go there.”

But I stand by it. Tideland is about childhood imagination and wonder in a way that is uncomfortable and disturbing, but is honest.

One of the key terms in Gilliam’s introduction, and a rule he seems to have stuck to closely, is “innocence”, and what that means from the perspective of a person who does not really understand the context of the world around her.

Tideland is shot predominantly in horizon-bending wide angle lens, doing the double duty of making the world loom large around Jeliza-Rose while circling the focus in on her. As a ‘child-eye’s view’ it’s less lower angle and more self-centered and expansive.

Self-centeredness turns out to be a major operand running through the concept of innocence here. Jeliza-Rose is not disturbed by the things that happen around her because she doesn’t know anything else. She helps her parents shoot up because it’s a mere chore they have taught her to do. Not knowing that the things are bad or wrong or dangerous, she mostly using imagination to keep herself occupied while her parents are comatose under heroin, building worlds out of the small bits and pieces she has around her, like her doll’s heads.

When she ends up alone with her father’s corpse, the movie plays with our awareness of her awareness of his death: on the one hand, she’s used to him not moving for long stretches of time, and things like rotten gasses emitting from him aren’t anything different than the flatulence he’d perform around her to make her laugh. On the other hand, as his ‘sleep’ stretches onward she escapes further and further outside and more and more into her imagination as a necessary reaction to avoid facing a hard truth she’s too young to truly understand.

She’s not the only one whose innocence covers up for the audience’s awareness of darkness. In one memorable scene, Dickens and Jeliza-Rose are playing, and Dickens, laughing, tells Jeliza-Rose about how he used to like kissing his grandmother because “her mouth would dance in mine like a goldfish.” Squealing in delight, Jeliza-Rose starts darting her tongue around in imitation of the goldfish, Dickens picks up the game, and the two go about giggling and wagging their tongues in perfect childhood mimicry of what we know to be an incestual molestation of a mentally retarded child. Jeliza-Rose and Dickens do not, is the dissonance the movie confronts us with, which is a hard thing to ask of an audience.

But, that’s the thing about childhood. You don’t really understand the things that are bad or wrong or weird until adults tell you. There are certain things you don’t like because they hurt or scare you or you’re not socialized to understand them, that are often less real than the actual dangers you’re facing. Children are afraid of the shadows under their own bed but that doesn’t make them know that a grandmother’s kisses should not under any circumstances feel like a dancing goldfish. How would they?

Innocence is self-centered. We the audience watch Tideland expecting Jeliza-Rose to realize what’s wrong, grow up, or be saved, but the climax is interesting because it doesn’t come out of Jeliza-Rose maturing, it comes out of her being frustrated and angry with Dell and Dickens not giving her what she wants. Once she realizes her dad won’t wake up and Dell won’t leave her alone, Jeliza-Rose stomps off and intermingles with the injured passengers of a train accident2 so that she can run away.

This ending drove people crazy, and was a key complaints in many reviews and discussion of the film. I’d then ask, “But really, remember how many playdates at that age ended with a kid getting angry and just taking all of his toys home with him?”

Let’s put this discussion into context with what I think people expected out of a movie like this.

Tideland’s story belongs to a certain subgenre of which I have no name, the sort of children’s fantasy adventure coming-of-age story where the theme is “The Power of Imagination™” as the youth escapes from either a boring or bad personal “Real World” into a parallel universe where they get to evade dragons and big heavies —who often reflect the child’s antagonists of the real world — before defeating them and then usually returning to their former life bringing some of their magic powers back or deciding that the parallel magic world is far better and quitting quotidian reality for good. The characters are almost always shyboys and quirky girls. Think things like Labyrinth, The Neverending Story, and literally everything Neil Gaiman has ever written.

These stories have a built-in metanarrative: fantasies about how fantasy saves us, and in fact are preferable really to the problems reality cause. They rely on presuming certain values about what youth, imagination, and innocence mean, mostly positive. These qualities underwrite the character’s access to magic and the ability to sometimes even literally imagine themselves out of physical danger.

In Tideland, however, the real world, and its dangers, never really go away. Youth, imagination, and innocence can all have an obverse side that is also just selfishness, escapism, and ignorance. The power of imagination is strong enough that the kid doesn’t grok the abjection of her very unhealthy surroundings.

In commercials we like to show children drawing stars and singing beeps and boops to themselves to play at being astronauts. We don’t tend to show the times children tell other children that astronauts are stupid or stars are boring or stop making those weird noises with your mouth. Parents tend to share memes about their kids saying something precious like, “My Christmas wish is for world peace!”, a thing I actually wrote on my list for Santa when I was 8. They don’t tend to share the times their kid punches another kid in the back of the head for cutting in line, which I also did when I was 8. Media doesn’t really like looking at the dark side of childhood, and where bullies or misbehavior is shown, it’s never in the realm of imagination, creativity, or play.3

Another way of putting this is that “Tideland” is the anti-Neverland. In both locations, the characters never grow up: Dell is a taxidermist who freezes life from fully rotting into death (and is stuck in sentimental nostalgia for Jeliza-Rose’s father), Dickens is an adult with a child’s mind, and Jeliza-Rose is the Wendy that leaves to go grow up somewhere else. They are childish, child-like, and a child respectively. But here, eternal childhood is the very thing that makes the place disturbing rather than enchanting — a Neverland you don’t, actually, want to go visit.

Certainly Gilliam could have tried making a statement like this without pumping the volume to 11, but I don’t think trying to show the dark side of childhood wonder would have been as parsable and understood if it were subtle.

Also, Tideland comports to Gilliams twisted, surrealist sense of humor. I think another fan expectation was that Tideland would be something more like Time Bandits, a charming children’s adventure where a boy runs off with little people to steal treasures from various realms and historic epics. But Gilliam can swing ‘imagination’ and ‘whimsy’ both ways. In The Fisher King, imagination frees; in Brazil, it traps. Tideland is to Time Bandits what Brazil is to The Fisher King.

I’m not saying it’s a great movie to watch about childhood. I’m saying that it’s honest, and that I appreciate it. It sparked recognition in me in how it showed children playing, the way they started with simple ideas and worked themselves up until their inner worlds overtook them, much like how I mentioned Bridge to Terabithia gave me that same recognition in a previous FilmStack challenge.

The difference is that Tideland acknowledges something important, and it’s those moments when you think back to things that happened in childhood, and your stomach drops, and you realize how problematic that memory actually was. It could be something you caused, like when I almost burned the house down by leaving a lit candle on my bed, or a friend you played with who later turned out to have some issues your parents separated you from, or a time you thought you were participating in something fun and whimsical and it turned out to offend or hurt someone.

Tideland tells that all from the child’s-eye view and sets its coda by how Jeliza-Rose interprets and reacts to things. She has no parents, so the parents don’t provide the directions or lessons. Left to their own devices and without the guardrails of adult supervision, then, a child’s view of the world can be very disturbing to adults. Such is the remarkable honesty of Tideland.

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During the Lost Week of December (between Christmas and New Years) and the slow starting early days of the year, I trimmed my to-read shelves of some shorter, snappier works. I found myself thinking of them, but not as reviews. Nor even as responses to their actual themes. I didn’t want these responses lost, so I wrote them down.

They are tangents. Inspirations. Spin-offs. Free association rabbit-holes.

They have so little to do with the original books that I will not state which books they refer to, as that will not clarify these responses. Since none of these books are canonical classics, I’m not trying to send you hunting for clues to reveal them. Any characters mentioned by name are not in the book I’m referring to. You won’t figure out what books they are, and even if you do, there are no prizes.

Nevertheless, I will list the books in footnotes for the curious.

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Here they are:

Book I

Robinson returned to France, this time to meet an American rather than his friend Krasna. Krasna was a time-traveller, but the American was a spy. If anything, the American was not just contemporary but caught in the now, a now so profound it was a trap.

Robinson and this American Spy should not have gotten along. Where his eyes followed the road-lines of infrastructure to imagine factories beyond the horizon, she pointed at discarded panties in bushes. Where he accounted for the agencies and agendas that shaped the environment, she found them a tedium of middle management. Where he sought an intellectual method of transcending the quotidian, her objectivity derived from dissociation.

And yet. The reason they met, after all, is because they were searching for the same thing. And yet. Despite their differences, his contemplation against her profanity, his earnestness against her conniving, and his morality against her cynicism, in the end she was the one who actually found it.1

Book II

I like to joke that the Southwest is full of cults because there are vast, open tracts of land there that you can pitch a few tents upon and not die, at least immediately, of cold.

A common explanation is that the desert exhibits a spiritual pull in its vast expansiveness that makes communities ripe for magical thinking. As a born-and-raised desert dweller, that’s a correct assessment of the effect of the landscape on the psyche. But also, cultists’ interest in the desert because of those attributes are completely uninteresting to me because of my familiarity with those attributes. In the end, the cheap and remote land is the thing.

Somewhere in my mid-20s I came to the conclusion that cult leaders and con artists are all using the same psychological tricks for arguably the same, or at least similar, objectives. After I experienced an abusive relationship, I discovered the same can be said of abusers.

I’d like to pretend that knowledge has inoculated me against joining a cult, but after all, I’ve been both scammed and abused. The one benefit that insight has given me is recognizing what has taken over the US federal government.2

Book III

Krasna mailed me a picture of a woman at the end of a pier. Despite the fact the picture did not move, it plus his letter made cinema.

Books are filled with all sorts of anticinematic techniques: epistolary novels, oral histories, discourses between philosophers sitting in, if not an agora, then at least a coffee shop. It is the deposition, specifically, that is the most cinematic dialog.

In this deposition, there is a woman walking on a beach. In this woman is the narrative’s transcendence into the world of cinema. However we should never see her on screen. We are stuck in the barrack, chained to the wall.

When she appears, the character’s narrative broke. I have not yet decided if her appearance broke our narrative.3

Book IV

The Blind Argentinian sends his regards from India. He has discovered another ancient labyrinth, this one made of water instead of sand. Two gods in lovemaking speak the world into existence, which speaks of a demon, which speaks of a corpse, which speaks to a king, who listens to the corpse in order to ward off the demon.

There is a pun here to be made between onion-skin, the derogation of cheap pulp paper, and onion layers, the format in which these whispers trickle down from Platonic god lovemaking reality into existence to our own ears as fables. What other ogres are literature made from?

Like in the Bible, there is a great flood at the beginning, and then kingdoms to populate after. The proliferation of kingdoms remind me of the Grand Italian’s dialogs between Marco Polo and Ghenghis Khan, but it is definitely the Blind Argentinian who took this journey.

Like the Blind Argentinian’s more-than 1000 books, these are night tales told in the bedroom, and horny. There is, in fact, one branch of the labyrinth where a trans woman becomes both a wife and a husband split between two households.

In both the labyrinth made of sand and the labyrinth made of water, the storyteller’s head is at stake.4

Book V

Now I have something for Krasna, that memory obsessive. A woman made of forgetting. A man made of desire; or: a magic penis. Fate written in the stars, but the stars are more visible on history’s skin than in the sky over the city lights.

But Krasna would dismiss such a cozy curse. Like a sparkling vampire, agelessness here is youthfulness, and youthfulness is fullness, and the emptiness the characters feel is the limitations of their youth. This novel literally preaches faith in novelty, and history’s echoes is ego’s timestamp.

Between the financial crisis and the tyranny was an interregnum of stalled maturity, where “young adult” both described teenagers and 20-somethings. Here we find its apotheosis, and it’s a nondenominational demon who is defeated with his own situationship. 5

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Now, before I close the former spreadsheet for good, here’s what titles it contained in chronological order. Bold are theatrical screenings, italics are rewatches. Dates are included if they’re older releases, in other words from years previous to 2025 or 2024:

1. Santosh

2. Bloody Axe Wound

3. Nightbitch

4. Woman of the Hour

5. Alice, Darling

6. Wicked Little Letters

7. The Last Showgirl

8. Candyman (2021)

9. The Watchers

10. Babygirl

11. Babes

12. Hard Times

13. Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)

14. Coffee & Cigarettes (2003)

15. Myth of Man

16. A Real Pain

17. Flight Risk

18. Hatching

19. Flow

20. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

21. The Brutalist

22. Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

23. Grand Theft Hamlet

24. Wendy and Lucy (2008)

25. The Wild Robot

26. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

27. Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone (en español)(2001)

28. Mickey 17

29. Black Bag

30. Novocaine

31. Él (This Strange Passion)(1953)

32. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

33. Nightshift (1981)

34. Submarine (2011)

35. Blink Twice

36. Death of a Unicorn

37. Wicked (Part 1)

38. Party Girl (1995)

39. El Planeta (2021)

40. Secret Mall Apartment

41. A Working Man

42. Catch and Release (2006)

43. Conclave

44. The Shrouds

45. Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001)

46. Arizona Dream (US cut, 1993)

47. Sinners

48. Saint Maud (2020)

49. Bonjour Tristesse

50. Cry-Baby (1990)

51. Billy Madison (1995)

52. Clown in a Cornfield

53. In & Out (1997)

54. Summer of 69

55. To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)

56. Fresh Kills (2023)

57. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (Jane Austen a gâché ma vie)

58. Final Destination (2000)

59. Final Destination 2 (2003)

60. Look Who’s Talking (1989)

61. Final Destination 3 (2006)

62. The Phoenician Scheme

63. The Beach (2000)

64. Magic Farm

65. Only Lovers Left Alive (2014)

66. Materialists

67. Zola (2001)

68. Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant)

69. Sing Street (2016)

70. Dogtooth (2009)

71. Bunker (2021)

72. I am Not a Witch (2017)

73. You Were Never Really Here (2018)

74. Familiar Touch

75. Actual People (2021)

76. Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets (en español)(2002)

77. F1

78. Better Man

79. Sorry, Baby

80. This Closeness (2023)

81. Eddington

82. Superman

83. Glass Onion (en español)(2022)

84. Oh, Hi!

85. Harvest

86. She-Devil (1989)

87. Weapons

88. Together

89. Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

90. Strange Days (1995)

91. The Fast & the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

92. Boys Go to Jupiter

93. The Final Destination (FD4) (2009)

94. Chances Are (1989)

95. Honey Don’t!

96. Blue Steel (1990)

97. Kick-Ass (2010)

98. Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass

99. Bob Trevino Likes It

100. Help! (1965)

101. Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban (en español)(2004)

102. Caught Stealing

103. White Material (2009)

104. Freeland (2020)

105. Josie & the Pussycats (2001)

106. Sugar & Spice (2001)

107. Him

108. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021)

109. I Saw the TV Glow

110. One Battle After Another

111. Heat (1995)

112. The Sting (1973)

113. East of Wall

114. Witness (1985)

115. Love the Coopers (2015)

116. Something’s Gotta Give (2003)

117. The Mastermind

118. Tower Heist (2011)

119. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

120. Barbarian (2022)

121. Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

122. A House of Dynamite

123. K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)

124. Hollywood 90028 (The Hollywood Hillside Strangler) (1973)

125. Psycho Beach Party (2000)

126. Frankenstein

127. Idiocracy (2006)

128. The Loveless (1981)

129. Die My Love

130. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982)

131. The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

132. Sentimental Value

133. In the Loop (2009)

134. Sasquatch Sunset

135. Left-Handed Girl

136. Elio

137. The Night Before (2015)

138. Train Dreams

139. Wake Up Dead Man

140. Hamnet

141. Metropolitan (1990)

142. Marty Supreme

143. Night of the Comet (1984)

144. Science of Sleep (2006)

145. Gremlins (1984)

146. Bugonia

Analysis

I wrote extremely few Movie Recommendations this year; some of that was about not having the time, but the rest was about not having a lot of movies really hit me that hard. I enjoyed most of what I watched this year, but I think the number of movies I want to remember (watch again, own on BluRay, keep in the Discourse) is less than in 2024 despite seeing more films:

Myth of Man

Él

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

Nightshift

The Shrouds

Arizona Dream

Sinners

Fresh Kills

Sorry, Baby

Eddington

Oh, Hi!

Phantom of the Paradise

Strange Days

Boys Go to Jupiter

Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass

Bob Trevino Likes It

Him

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (I actually bought this blind on BluRay)

One Battle after Another

East of Wall

The Mastermind

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

A House of Dynamite

Hollywood 90028

Frankenstein

The Loveless

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains

Sasquatch Sunset

Left-Handed Girl

Train Dreams

Hamnet

Marty Supreme

That’s 32 of 146, which is 21.9% — a higher percentage than last year and above the 20ish I thought might be the cap of movies a person could take inspiration from per year in my 2024 roundup:

That comes to 21 movies or a little more than 1/6th of the movies I watched. Not bad. Also that’s about how many movies I listed as wanting to remember in 2023, when I watched far more movies, so maybe a person can only take about 20 feature films’ worth of inspiration a year.

What’s funny though is that I feel less inspired this year from the movies I watched overall. Whereas Sinners, Eddington, One Battle After Another, and Marty Supreme were great theatrical experiences, nothing made me want to advocate for it as much as I Saw the TV Glow did in 2024. The Shrouds and Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass accidentally felt like a repeat of the Crimes of the Future and Mad God pairing that happened around when I started this Substack, and that unjustly deflated the sense of NEW CRONENBERG! and NEW HORROR STOP MOTION! that my brain says they deserve, but that my emotions aren’t matching in internal passion.

Which brings me to:

I do think I watched too many movies in 2025.

In 2024 I had intended only to watch 100, and ended up watching 115 features. This year I let go and watched 146 features (plus a ton more if you count submissions I screened for a festival).

In comparison, on Substack people are sharing Letterboxd Wrapped graphics showing 200, 250, even sometimes 300 movies a year. That’s too much, man. Or that is to say, to each their own, but unless you’re very active in the festival circuit or a paid film reviewer, I think overconsumption begins somewhere around the 175 mark, or a movie every other day. Movies are better if you take them slow and take them in. Otherwise they become a ‘feed of content’ even if you’re intellectually and politically opposed to that framing of cinema by the streaming services.1

It seems counterintuitive for a filmmaker to want major film buffs to watch less movies, and in fact I wish the general population went to see more movies, particularly in cinemas; but I like movies to be memorable and be remembered. The more movies you watch, the less individual movies stick with you no matter how good they are.

In that sense maybe the reason why 2025 feels more ‘mid’ than 2024 despite looking back over the list and remembering 50% more good movies, is BECAUSE the same amount of attention (my own) is split between 30 instead of 20 movies.

Something to consider for the film buffs out there.

On the obverse side of that logic is the idea that many titles may represent not so much trying to find individual good movies, but watching entire franchises or filmographies or delving into a period of history or whatever. That’s probably where a lot of massive lists can come from, where it’s less “I watched Winter Light finally!” and more “I watched every Bergman film available to me this year.”

One of my ‘projects’ in this regard has been trying to make sure 50% of the movies I watch are directed by women. From the 2024 round-up:

After a surge of improving numbers from 2016 to 2021 to roughly about 20%, there was a retraction to roughly about 12%. Historically the numbers hovered between about 2.5 and 5%.

I don’t personally see any substantial reason why women aren’t given the opportunity to direct movies as often as men except historical and embedded sexism. If there’s any industry where clearly women and men are on equal footing in terms of skill, ability, and merit, telling visual stories through the production of motion pictures seems like it should be a pretty even playing field.

I failed in 2025 as well as 2024. 42% of the features I watched were directed or co-directed by women.

I will keep tracking next year, but I think next year that number is going to be far lower, because I want to shift my focus toward my 100 Original Concept Features lists.

When I made that list the first time in 2024, I found myself wishing I had caught quite a few titles I had missed, as well as curious about a lot of titles I hadn’t even heard of. I’m also, frankly, wanting to do a deep dive into Angel and other faith-based distributors and get a sense of what they’re up to. I figured I could roll some of those 2024 originals into my other stuff, but it was hard to balance that with my 50% female objective.

This year I really want to explore that 2025 originals list. That means sacrificing one sort of demographic for another.

The interesting thing there is that the 2025 list is still weighted more female than average:

this list has 22 female directors composing about 18.8% of the 118 directors included.

Whereas only 8% of top 100 grossing films had women directors according to USC Annenberg (pdf alert):

That means the top 100 grossing original films had 3x as many female directors than the top 100 grossing films overall.

It turns out there’s a higher correlation between original concept films than high grossing films in terms of demographic diversity. The fact that faith-based films are solid and dependable independent sellers but never reach blockbuster status2 shows the originals list has a lot more ideological diversity as well.

All in all if you want unique stories from more idiosyncratic filmmakers, the originals list is the way to go.

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Let’s call them cinema-native films, stories and experiences built for theatrical projection first before becoming known in other formats.

I ended up learning a lot more about the North American domestic film market than I thought such an activity would provide and discovering a lot of movies I would have never have previously heard of, even as an avid cinephile to follows the trades and has access to limited distribution screenings here in NYC.

What are “Original Concept Films”?

I slightly mis-titled the first article because I called them “original scripted films” instead of “original concept films”, but “scripted” in the industry implies no documentary, concert, and event films, which in and of themselves can be experiences originated primarily for cinema screens.

I chose “original scripted” over “original concept” because the latter can set up the false expectation that each film is an idea you’ve not heard of before — this falls into “no new ideas under the sun” and “everything is a remix” territory I don’t want to get into. Plainly spoken, an original concept is merely a work that does not draw upon previously existent and familiar intellectual property to bring in fans of previous work into new work. The idea is conceived as a movie from scratch, for the purpose of being a movie.

To repeat: “original concept” does NOT equal “a novel premise,” it means it does not draw from previously extant IP.

Working on a project like this, you quickly discover how vague the definition can be. Last year, I excluded Barbie as an “original film” because it was based on previously known franchised characters, even if it was the first widely released big budget feature film and not based on a book, comic book, video game, or other medium of storytelling, but merely a brand. However, last year I included Biblical adaptations, which this year didn’t seem correct, particularly when there are plenty of faith-based movies and sometimes a Biblical times set movie that is nevertheless an original story.

This year saw a couple-three event movies released by musical artists in tandem with their music work: Taylor Swift’s The Official Release Party of a Showgirl , The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow, and to some degree the science-fiction movie Ash that was directed and scored with original music by Flying Lotus. The third movie, to me, clearly counted, whereas I was not going to include Taylor Swift’s promotional movie until I accepted Hurry Up Tomorrow. Maybe I’m wrong to include them, maybe I won’t include similar event films next year, but doing this project for two years has already shown me the importance of event films of various sources1 to theatrical exhibition, and it seems wrong at this point to exclude products specifically designed to be theatrically exhibited and not really any other format.

There’s also a ton of biopics from across history and cultures, which raises the question of whether ‘life rights’ counts as previously extant IP, particularly of a recognizable public figures such as Jeff Buckley or the bandmembers of Led Zeppelin in a documentary, or the 3 different boxers, Mark Kerr (The Smashing Machine) Claressa Shields (The Fire Inside), and Christy Martin (Christy) each with their non-documentary narrative films. I exclude biopics adapted explicitly from published biographies, but I include biopics that seem to be written from original research.

One Battle After Another provides another such dilemma, in that it is “inspired by” rather than “based on” the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland. As a huge Pynchonhead who recognizes and appreciates the hard tangential turns PT Anderson took to make the movie his own story, it’s still too set in what Pynchon established to be considered an original concept film. It is not included in this list because I consider it an adaptation, particularly since there’s been clear communication about the novel’s and movie’s relationship to each other, generating a lot of cross-analysis and inspiring people to cross media to experience the story in different ways.

This decision, unfortunately, means I cannot include my beloved Sanatarium under the Sign of the Hourglass on this list either, as it is based on Bruno Schulz’s work, despite the fact that watching this movie is nothing like reading the book. Moreso than One Battle After Another, it is truly “inspired by” vibes and a few general plotting points and otherwise a work straight out of the Quays’ psyches and workshop. But they say it’s an adaptation, so therefore it is.

As a last example, Bollywood cinema regularly throws me for a loop, as Indians are masters of multi-media phenomena with free exchange between music, film, promotional, and tabloid production, usually based on an impressive mixture of both biographical people, historical events, and religious myths, sometimes making it unclear which part of the IP is really the movie or the entire campaign around it.

Thus, you can see that this is not exactly an easy task to parse through, and some decisions on what constitutes an “original concept” can excise a wide variety of work or include a lot of stuff that would make people looking for original narrative films grumble.

If you have any beef with any listing being a truly “original concept film”, let me know! This project will shift over time as I see fit. Also it’s difficult to track down what many movies are based off of, so if I included any that are actually adaptations, I can remove it and add something else later.

The Rules

• Original script, documentary, or event: no franchise, remake, sequels, prequels, establishing franchises, off-shoots or spin-offs, serials, nor… even adaptations.

• Meaningful US domestic theatrical release: over $500k gross and multiple weeks in cinemas.2 Avoiding streaming services just throwing into a single screen to win awards.

• Ranked by box office revenue as pulled from The Numbers at the time I made the list. Total box office may have shifted over the last week or will in the next few.

• Asterix means I’ve seen it myself.

• Descriptions are custom written myself either from seeing the movie, or put together from a combination of IMDb and Wikipedia listings with an eye to expressing both the story and the appeal the movie should have while avoiding any negative or derogatory editorializing.

• Genres are composed of widest acknowledged genre listings on IMDb and Wikipedia, in as few words as possible.

Rules that changed from last year:

• No longer capping number of writers to two, as that was overly punishing to documentaries and animations particularly.

• No longer excluding event films.

Without further ado….

Sinners *

Written & Directed by Ryan Coogler | Action Horror

A music-infused Southern gothic about identical twin brothers Smoke and Stack whose attempts to found a blues venue is sidelined by vampires summoned by the reality-warping power of local crooner Miles’ voice.

F1: The Movie *

Dir. Joseph Kosinksi, Written by Joseph Kosinksi & Ehren Kruger | Sport Drama

A Brad Pitt vehicle (pun intended) about a racecar driver who returns to Formula One at the behest of an old friend to mentor a rookie driver and save their ailing team.

Weapons *

Written & Directed by Zach Cregger | Dark Comedy Horror

Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian features a similarly POV-and-chronology jumping narrative about the mysterious disappearance of every student from a public school classroom — except one.

Elio *

Dir. Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian, & Domee Shi, Written by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer, Mike Jones | Animated Family Adventure

Left alone with his aunt as his legal guardian after his parents’ untimely death, Elio channels his feelings of alienation on Earth into the attempt to be abducted by actual aliens, only for them to heed his call and bring him in as an ambassador to prevent an intergalactic war.

One of Them Days *

Dir. Lawrence Lamont, Written by Syreeta Singleton | Buddy Comedy

Ambitious waitress Dreux and talented but directionless Alyssa discover Alyssa’s boyfriend has blown their rent money, sending them on a comedic adventure through their neighborhood of colorful characters in pursuit of means of making it back before they are evicted.

Marty Supreme *

Dir. Josh Safdie, Written by Ronald Bronstein & Josh Safdie | Sports Dramedy

In Josh Safdie’s first feature film directed without the collaboration of his brother Benny, Timothy Chalamet races for his Oscar as a table tennis champion (loosely based on real-life Marty Reisman) whose surprise upset and need to pay off his debts gets him into trouble with an eclectic variety of 1950s New Yorkers burned by Marty’s narcissistic ambition.

Materialists *

Written & Directed by Celine Song | Romantic Comedy

A cynical matchmaker played burnt out by the literalization of the dating “market” seems to have found her perfect pairing in rich and handsome Pedro Pascal, but is still held back by her lingering feelings for poor ex-boyfriend and handsome Chris Evans.

Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl

Written & Directed by Taylor Swift | Documentary Event

Music, music videos, behind-the-scenes, lyric videos, commentary, and reflections on the production from Taylor Swift on her twelfth studio album cut into a “movie musical event” designed to enable fans to participate in a nation-wide release party.

Heart Eyes *

Dir. Josh Ruben, Written by Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon, & Michael Kennedy | Dark Rom-Com Horror

Some Valentine’s Day counter-programming mixes romcom with slasher horror when two rival but flirtatious diamond ring marketers accidentally get confused as an engaged couple by the Heart Eyes Killer.

Flight Risk *

Dir. Mel Gibson, Written by Jared Rosenberg | Action Thriller

An Air Marshal transporting a fugitive to trial finds herself locked in a plane with a sadistic contract killer flying high above the remote Alaskan wilderness.

Him *

Dir. Justin Tipping, Written by Skip Bronkie, Zack Akers, & Justin Tipping | Sport Horror

Premised around the pun of GOAT as “Greatest of All Time” and the Satan-coded animal, Him follows the extreme hazing and exploitation of a college football star with a head injury as he is invited to champion’s ranch to be scouted for the NFL.

The Woman in the Yard *

Dir. Jaume Collet-Serra, Written by Sam Stefan | Horror

After her husband’s death, the mother of two children must protect them against a nefarious veiled lady who shows up in the yard of their struggling rural farm.

Black Bag *

Dir. Steven Soderbergh, Written by David Koepp | Espionage Thriller

The second Koepp / Soderbergh collaboration to be released in 2025, Black Bag follows a super spy as he investigates his friends, his colleagues, and his own wife after she is suspected of betraying their intelligence agency.

Together *

Written & Directed by Michael Shanks | Horror

A body horror about codependency featuring real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie who, after a wayward encounter with a mysterious sinkhole in the forested backyard of their new house, find their bodies attracted magnetically and their skin sticking to each other.

Companion *

Written & Directed by Drew Hancock | SciFi Thriller

A sort of reverse Running Man comedy thriller about a deeply affectionate robot who learns her goofy awe-shucks boyfriend is framing her for murder.

Novocaine *

Dir. Dan Berk & Robert Olsen, Written by Lars Jacobson | Action Comedy

A banker with congenital insensitivity to pain decides to use his disability as a superpower to save the cute new colleague he’s romantically interested in after she’s kidnapped by bank robbers.

The Phoenician Scheme *

Dir. Wes Anderson, Written by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola | Dry Comedy

Wes Anderson’s signature diorama-like style and characteristic dry humor is given a relatively action-packed and surprisingly spiritual makeover in a movie about wealthy businessman Zsa-zsa Korda trying to execute a final deal with the help of his daughter, a nun, whom he hopes to succeed him.

Bring Her Back

Written & Directed by Danny & Michael Philippou | Horror

The Philippou brothers return with a folk horror about orphaned step-siblings targeted by their foster mother for an occult ritual.

Drop *

Dir. Christopher Landon, Written by Jillian Jacobs & Chris Roach | Thriller

A single mother on a highly belated night out in a high rise luxury restaurant receives a series of threatening DMs threatening to kill her young son unless she poisons her date.

Good Fortune

Written & Directed by Aziz Ansari | Comedy

An inept angel life-swaps a struggling gig worker with a wealthy venture-capitalist.

Friendship *

Written & Directed by Andrew DeYoung | Dark Comedy

Is the cure for male loneliness Tim Robinson’s special brand of cringe comedy as he falls into a not-necessarily-reciprocated bromance with his charismatic new neighbor?

Love Hurts

Dir. Jonathan Eusebio, Written by Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, & Luke Passmore | Action Comedy

A Ke Huy Quan vehicle about a retired criminal working as a realtor, who gets pursued by his crime-lord brother back into the underworld.

The Last Rodeo

Dir. Jan Avnet, Written by Jon Avnet, Neal McDonough, & Derek Presley | Faith-based Drama

A rodeo star returns from retirement to save his grandson and reconnect with his faith and his family.

Death of a Unicorn *

Written & Directed by Alex Scharfman | Horror Comedy

A father and daughter hit a unicorn on their way to a retreat with his employer, a superrich, privileged family of pharmaceutical billionaires, who intend to use the unicorn’s body for its curative properties but for the creatures in the dark who want it back…

The Smashing Machine

Written & Directed by Benny Safdie | Sports Drama

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson stars as real-life MMA and UFC champion Mark Kerr in this biopic helmed by Benny Safdie writing and directed his first feature film without his brother.

Becoming Led Zeppelin

Dir. Bernard MacMahon, Written by Bernard MacMahon & Allison McGourty | Music Documentary

As the title describes, this documentary focuses on the four members of Led Zeppelin as they worked their way into the music scene of the 1960s and eventually met in 1968 and formed in the dawn of the 70s.

Eddington *

Written & Directed by Ari Aster | Dark Comedy Thriller

Set in a fictional New Mexican small town, Ari Aster returns us to the height of the pandemic lockdowns as Joaquin Phoenix’s Sheriff Joe feuds with Pedro Pascal’s Mayor Garcia amongst a postmodern Western backdrop of a close-knit community losing their minds and realizing all their worst anxieties in conspiracy theories.

Sketch

Written & Directed by Seth Worley | Family Fantasy Adventure

A family must unite to stop the quirky monsters that came to life from a young girl’s sketches after they fell into a strange pond.

Presence

Dir. Steven Soderbergh, Written by David Koepp | Horror

The first Koepp / Soderbergh collaboration of 2025 is a haunted house story from the ghost’s POV told in first-person long takes.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

Dir. Kogonada, Written by Seth Reiss | Fantasy Drama

Colin Farrell’s and Margot Robbie’s characters get to hang out in important moments of their respective pasts after meeting at a mutual friend’s wedding and then finding a portal.

Good Boy

Dir. Ben Leonberg, Written by Alex Cannon & Ben Leonberg | Horror

Not originally slated for theatrical release, the trailer for this haunted house movie from a pet dog’s POV went viral and caused the distributors to expand to cinemas by audience demand.

The Alto Knights

Dir. Barry Levinson, Written by Nicholas Pileggi | Period Crime Drama

Robert DeNiro faces off against himself as both famed NYC mob bosses Frank Costello and Vito Genovese.

Truth & Treason

Dir. Matt Whitaker, Written by Matt Whitaker & Ethan Vincent | Historical Drama

The true story of Helmuth Hübener, a German teenager who resisted the Nazis via guerrilla pamphleteering. An extended version exists as a streaming miniseries.

Honey Don’t! *

Dir. Ethan Coen, Written by Ethan Coen & Tricia Cooke | Crime Comedy

The second in Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s Lesbian Crime trilogy stars Margaret Qualley this time as a small town PI who investigates deaths she thinks are connected to a strange church while trying to protect her teenage niece. Note: though part of a thematic trilogy, this is an original story with original characters and therefore NOT a sequel to Drive-Away Dolls.

The Senior

Dir. Rod Lurie, Written by Robert Eisele | Sport Drama

The true story of Mike Flynt, a 59-year-old who returns to his former college to play football as a linebacker.

Hurry Up Tomorrow

Dir. Trey Edward Shults, Written by Trey Edward Shults, The Weeknd, & Reza Fahim | Psychological Thriller

Taking the concept of a ‘visual album’ to the next level, this feature length film about an insomniac musician struggling to keep his tour going was inspired by a time The Weeknd lost his voice during a concert, and pairs with his album of the same name.

Brave the Dark

Dir. Damian Harris, Written by Dale G. Bradley, Lynn Robertson Hay, & Nathaniel Deen | Coming-of-Age Drama

Based on the true story of a high school teacher in 1980s Pennsylvania who takes in one of his students who is homeless and been arrested, hoping to help him graduate and uncover the traumas of his past.

Shelby Oaks

Dir. Chris Stuckmann, Written by Sam Liz & Chris Stuckmann | Horror

The most-funded horror film on Kickstarter, Shelby Oaks follows a woman who searches for her missing sister, a paranormal investigator, in a mysterious abandoned town.

Rental Family

Dir. Hikari, Written by Hikari & Stephen Blahut | Dramedy

A good vibes Brendan Frasier vehicle about a struggling actor who joins an agency in Tokyo to play stand-in family roles for strangers.

Keeper

Dir. Osgood Perkins, Written by Nick Lepard | Horror

Prolific filmmaker Osgood Perkins returns with a cabin-in-the-woods horror about a couple on a romantic getaway who discover a sinister presence tied to the cabin’s haunted past.

Shadow Force

Dir. Joe Carnahan, Written by Leon Chills & Joe Carnahan | Action Thriller

A divorced couple and their son team up together to outrun the parents’ former employer: a shadow ops unit sent to kill them.

Fight or Flight

Dir. James Madigan, Written by Brooks McLaren & D.J. Cotrona | Action Comedy

Josh Hartnett plays a mercenary who finds himself having to protect his own target when both of them are attacked on a jumbo passenger plane.

After the Hunt

Dir. Luca Guadagnino, Written by Nora Garrett | Psychological Drama

A ripped-from-headlines dark academia drama about a college professor stuck between her student’s #metoo accusations against her colleague and the professor’s own secrets

Hell of a Summer

Written & Directed by Billy Bryk & Finn Wolfhard | Horror Comedy

A genre throwback about a group of summer camp counselors targeted by a masked ax killer.

Relay

Dir. David Mackenzie, Written by Justin Piasecki | Thriller

A fixer who assists whistleblowers while hiding behind a relay service for the deaf gets involved with a new client who seeks his protection from a corrupt corporation

The Fire Inside

Dir. Rachel Morrison, Written by Barry Jenkins | Sports Biopic

The true story of Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, an Olympic boxer and the first American woman to win a gold medal, who returns home to financial insecurity and lack of supporters or endorsements

Rule Breakers

Dir. Bill Guttentag, Written by Jason Brown, Bill Guttentag, & Elaha Mahboob | Drama

Inspirational film about a Middle Eastern woman who educates young women despite it being prohibited by law.

Dangerous Animals

Dir. Sean Byrne, Written by Nick Lepard | Horror Thriller

A surfer girl must figure out how to escape the serial killer who abducted her on his boat before he feeds her to sharks.

Eleanor the Great

Dir. Scarlett Johansson, Written by Tory Kamen | Drama

Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut features June Squibb as a nonagenarian who wanders into a Holocaust remembrance group in NYC by mistake and tells the story of her dead friend as if it were her own.

No Other Land

Dir. Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, & Hamdan Ballal, Written by Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, & Hamdan Ballal | Documentary

A self-distributed documentary by a Palestinian-Israeli activist collective that recorded the destruction of communities and forced displacement in a “firing zone” that Israel declared in Palestine.

The Legend of Ochi *

Written & Directed by Isaiah Saxon | Family Fantasy Adventure

A shy Carpathian girl discovers a wounded (but adorable) baby “ochi” and goes on a quest to bring it home while reckoning with the buried history of her own parents.

Sorry, Baby *

Written & Directed by Eva Victor | Dark Dramedy

A dryly humored but sensitive drama about a PhD student recovering from sexual assault who nevertheless takes over her assaulter’s university position while navigating panic attacks and other difficult aspects of her recovery.

Ella McKay

Written & Directed by James L. Brooks | Dramedy

A lieutenant governor struggles to balance her ambitions to rise in the ranks of political leadership while dealing with her exasperating family.

Oh, Hi! *

Dir. Sophie Brooks, Written by Sophie Brooks & Molly Gordon | Dark Comedy

A couple on their first romantic getaway are in the middle of spicing up their sex life with some minor bondage when questions of their commitment to each other sends everything hilariously out of control.

Game Changer

Dir. S. Shankar, Written by Ranjeet Bahadur, Sai Madhav Burra, & Rajendra Sapre | Action Thriller

Bollywood movie about an IAS officer who fights against a corrupt system for fair elections.

Christy

Dir. David Michôd, Written by Mirrah Foulkes, Katherine Fugate, & David Michôd | Sports Biopic

The true story of Christy Martin, America’s best-known female boxer in the 90s whose husband, who is also her coach, attempted to murder her.

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (Jane Austen a gâché ma vie) *

Written & Directed by Laura Piani | Romantic Comedy

A bookseller, writer, and hopeless Austenite romantic is accepted to a Jane Austen residency she never applied for, where she tries to defeat writer’s block while navigating a love triangle of her own.

Splitsville *

Dir. Michael Angelo Covino, Written by Michael Angelo Covino & Kyle Marvin | Comedy

An “unromantic comedy” that follows an affable private school coach who gets in an absurd menage-a-quatre after his wife Ashley leaves him to experience all the dating FOMO she fears she’ll regret and he sleeps with his best friend’s wife after learning they’re in an open relationship.

Pets on a Train (Falcon Express)

Dir. Benoît Daffis & Jean-Christian Tassy, Written by David Alaux, Eric Tosti, & Jean-François Tosti | Family Animated Adventure

A thieving raccoon and a police dog team up to save the animal passengers of a runaway train.

Riff Raff

Dir. Dito Montiel, Written by John Pollen | Crime Comedy

A family reunion gone wrong as ex-criminal Vincent is unexpectedly visited by his ex-wife and their son while celebrating the holidays with his new wife and step-son.

Blue Moon

Dir. Richard Linklater, Written by Lorenz Hart, Robert Kaplow, & Elizabeth Weiland | Biopic Dramedy

Ethan Hawke plays Lorenz Hart as he slips away from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s opening night production of Oklahoma! to complain to a bartender and piano player about the musical’s success and Hart’s career failures.

Opus

Written & Directed by Mark Anthony Green | Thriller

A journalist travels to the compound of a newly returned pop icon who has twisted plans for the crowd of fans and journalists he’s summoned.

Kuberaa

Dir. Sekhar Kammula, Written by Divya Prakash Dubey, Krishnakant Jonnalgadda, & Sekhar Kammula | Action Thriller

A beggar is conscripted by a corrupt businessman to be registered as the owner of a fake company to transfer and hide newly-found oil wealth, only to get wrapped in a web of investigations and plots.

Green and Gold

Dir. Anders Lindwall, Written by Missy Mareau Garcia, Michael Graf, & Anders Lindwall | Drama

A Wisconsinite farmer bets on the Green Bay Packers to win the Championship in the hopes of saving his farm.

Mirai

Dir. Anil Anand & Karthik Gattamneni, Written by Varadaraj Chikkaballapura, Ratheesh Earatte, & Karthik Gattamneni | Fantasy Epic

A Bollywood movie about a warrior who must protect nine sacred scriptures that hold the power to make mortals into gods.

Dead of Winter

Dir. Brian Kirk, Written by Nicholas Jacobson-Larson & Dalton Leeb | Action Thriller

A woman saves a teenage girl from kidnapping in a snowbound area of Minnesota far from any town or cellphone service.

The Ballad of Wallis Island

Dir. James Griffiths, Written by Tom Basden & Tim Key | Dramedy

A wealthy lottery winner on a private Welsh island pays a folk duo to reunite and perform for him.

The Home

Dir. James DeMonoco, Written by James DeMonoco & Adam Cantor | Horror

Pete Davidson plays a former foster child ordered to work community service at a retirement home, only to find strange and sinister occurrences related to the elderly tenants.

Eden

Dir. Ron Howard, Written by Noah Pink & Ron Howard | Psychological Thriller

A true story isolated island thriller about a group who settle on an island only to fall to distrust and discord.

Bad Shabbos

Dir. Daniel Robbins, Written by Daniel Robbins & Zack Weiner | Comedy

David brings his Catholic-raised fiancee and her parents to a Shabbat dinner to meet his parents, only for everything to go terribly wrong.

Sentimental Value *

Dir. Joaquim Trier, Written by Eskil Vogt & Joaquim Trier | Drama

An actress’s estranged, out-of-work film director father returns to her life to plead his case that she should star in his long-simmering masterpiece, a meditative feature about their family’s history of suicide and role in Nazi-occupied Norway.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley

Dir. Amy Berg, Written by Jeff Buckley, Mary Guibert, & Ben Harper | Music Documentary

A behind-the-scenes, newly-released-footage look at Jeff Buckley, a talented musician who only released one album before his untimely death in 1997.

October 8

Dir. Wendy Sachs, Written by Nimrod Erez, Inbal B. Lessner, & Wendy Sachs | Documentary

A documentary that explores the rise of anti-semitism on college campuses and across social media after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.

Bone Lake

Dir. Mercedes Bryce Morgan, Written by Joshua Friedlander | Erotic Thriller

A couple schedules a secluded getaway at a mansion only to find it is double-booked with another couple who begins hooking them into plots and mind games.

The Damned

Dir. Thordur Palsson, Written by Jamie Hannigan & Thordur Palsson | Folk Horror

A 19th century remote village is threatened with starvation after a supply ship wrecks right off the coast, leading to a widow to make an impossible decision.

The Surfer *

Dir. Lorcan Finnegan, Written by Thomas Martin | Thriller

A retro Ozploitation thriller featuring Nicholas Cage as the unnamed “The Surfer,” an estranged father attempting to buy the decadent beach house property of his boyhood in order to reconnect with his son, only to face off against a gang of violent surfers lead by a manosphere guru who try to take away everything The Surfer owns.

It Was Just an Accident

Written & Directed by Jafar Panahi | Thriller

Iranian director Jafar Pahani is currently threatened (once again) with incarceration for his recent movie about a former political prisoner encountering his sadistic former jailhouse captor and rounding up his fellow ex-prisoners to exact revenge.

Twinless

Written & Directed by James Sweeney | Dark Dramedy

After losing his twin brother, a young man joins a support group for “twinless twins.”

My Dead Friend Zoe

Dir. Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, Written by Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, Cherish Chen, & A.J. Bermudez | Dramedy

An Afghanistan veteran keeps her friendship alive with an Army colleague who died, in the process alienating her estranged Vietnam veteran grandfather.

Valiant One

Dir. Steve Barnett, Written by Eric Tipton, Steve Barnett, & Daniel Myrick | Action Thriller

The survivors of a US helicopter crash on the North Korean side of the DMZ must protect a civilian tech specialist while finding their way out without the help of the US military.

Magazine Dreams

Written & Directed by Elijah Bynum | Psychological Drama

An amateur bodybuilder with body dysmorphic disorder becomes obsessed with becoming a Mr. Olympia champion, even as his ambitions push his mental health to the edge of breakdown.

Anemone

Dir. Ronan Day-Lewis, Written by Daniel & Ronan Day-Lewis | Psychological Drama

Daniel Day-Lewis stars in his son Ronan’s feature debut about a troubled recluse whose brother tries to convince him to reunite with their family.

Ash

Dir. Flying Lotus, Written by Jonni Remmler | SciFi Horror

An astronaut who awakens alone on a strange planet with amnesia must decide whether to trust a man who claims to be there to rescue her.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You *

Written & Directed by Mary Bronstein | Psychological Dramedy

An in-your-face (literally composed mostly of extreme close-ups) story of a therapist herself falling into psychic disarray over the stresses of caring for her special needs child and simmering attraction to her colleague, both while her husband is away.

The Mastermind *

Written & Directed by Kelly Reichardt | Historical Drama

A caper film set in the 70s about an out-of-work artist who steals some valuable paintings out of a local museum, only for the heist to fall apart.

In Whose Name?

Dir. Nico Ballesteros, Written by Nico Ballesteros & Shy Ranje | Documentary

18-year-old Nico Ballesteros started recording this documentary about Kanye West in 2019, which covers six years during which West unsuccessfully ran for president, broke up with Kim Kardashian, and struggled with bipolar disorder while gaining newfound infamy for antisemitic public outbursts.

The Unholy Trinity

Dir. Richard Gray, Written by Lee Zachariah | Western

Pierce Brosnan and Samuel Jackson lead a classic Western set-up about a young man traveling to Trinity, Montana to avenge his father’s death.

Sneaks

Dir. Rob Edwards & Christopher Jenkins, Written by Rob Edwards, Erica Harrell, & Dylan Hartman | Animated Sports Comedy

An anthropomorphic talking shoe must find his other half and his way home after a conniving sneaker collector steals it from his owner, a high school basketball player.

My Mother’s Wedding (North Star)

Dir. Kristin Scott Thomas, Written by Kristin Scott Thomas & John Micklethwait | Dramedy

A long-delayed release of Kristin Scott Thomas’ directorial debut about three sisters returning to their family home to attend the wedding of their mother, who has been widowed twice before.

Harbin

Dir. Min-ho Woo, Written by Min-Seong Kim & Min-ho Woo | Period Drama

A South Korean biopic about the Korean independence activist Ahn Jung-geun, who assassinated the first Japanese Prime Minister, Itō Hirobumi, in 1909.

Rosario

Dir. Felipe Vargas, Written by Alan Trezza | Horror

The titular protagonist travels to New York City to sort through her newly deceased grandmother’s belongings, but while waiting out a winter storm, strange entities take control of her grandmother’s corpse.

Secret Mall Apartment *

Written & Directed by Jeremy Workman | Documentary

The story of a guerrilla artist collective, headed by Michael Townsend, who built a secret apartment in the Providence Place shopping mall in Rhode Island that they were able to use as a meeting place to coordinate their street activities from 2003 until they were caught in 2007.

Good Bad Ugly

Written & Directed by Adhik Ravichandran | Action Comedy

NOT a remake of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, this Tamil film follows a retired gangster who must return to his old ways after his son is wrongfully convicted.

Hard Truths *

Written & Directed by Mike Leigh | Drama

A story of two sisters in London, the relatively jovial Chantelle and the embittered and irascible Jean-Baptiste, who lays a trail of verbal abuse wherever she goes.

Cleaner

Dir. Martin Campbell, Written by Simon Uttley, Paul Andrew Williams, & Matthew Orton | Action

A former soldier turned window cleaner must rescue hostages from extremist activists who intend to murder them to send a message to the world.

The Baltimorons

Dir. Jay Duplass, Written by Jay Duplass & Michael Strassner | Comedy

A Christmas tale from mumblecore master Jay Duplass about a man in need of emergency dental surgery who strikes up an unexpected romance with his older dentist.

40 Acres

Dir. R.T. Thorne, Written by R.T. Thorne, Glenn Taylor, & Lora Campbell | Post-Apocalypse Thriller

A family of farmers descended from Civil War migrants must defend their homestead against cannibals.

The Shrouds *

Written & Directed by David Cronenberg | SciFi Thriller

Cronenberg’s body horror meditation on grief after his wife’s death follows an industrial video maker Karsh, his dead wife’s sister, and her ex-husband as the three fall into a web of intrigue and paranoia after Karsh’s “shroud” graves, designed for the bereaved to view their loved ones’ remains as they decay, are desecrated.

Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie

Written & Directed by David Bushell | Documentary

A remembrance tour of Cheech & Chong’s lives and professional collaborations while on a roadtrip to “The Joint.”

Sacramento

Dir. Michael Angarano, Written by Christopher Nicholas Smith | Buddy Comedy

Single and carefree Rickey convinces his married and soon-to-be-father friend Glenn to take a road trip to Sacramento.

The above 100 movies were listed in order of domestic box office returns. As I did last year, I am including here some additional original concept films I saw myself in cinemas released during 2025, even though they earned far less. They are arranged chronologically by when I saw them, not by box office receipts:

Santosh

Written & Directed by Sandhya Suri | Crime Drama

A non-Bollywood Indian independent film about a widow who, because of an inheritance law, takes over her husband’s position as a police officer and discovers firsthand the injustices and corruptions of her small village police forces.

Bloody Axe Wound

Written & Directed by Matthew John Lawrence | Horror Comedy

The daughter of a prolific supernatural serial killer who tapes his victims’ murders and rents them out as slasher flicks at their local video store is ambitious and impatient to take over, setting off events that fall quickly out of her control. Full disclosure: I am friends with the co-cinematographers of this feature.

Myth of Man

Written & Directed by Jamin Winans | Science Fiction

In an abject future where periodic red dust storms turn all unprotected humans to dust, a deaf-mute woman discovers a scroll that she believes asks her to assemble a troupe of people with specific auras to sing a song that will return a spirit to earth to save humanity.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

Written & Directed by Rungano Nyoni | Drama

A family patriarch’s death splits the women in his family into the older generation who grieve him out of ritual and superstition while fighting over his estate, and the younger generation who grieve his abuse they independently must recover from.

Familiar Touch

Written & Directed by Sarah Friedland | Drama

Told from the perspective of an elderly woman succumbing to cognitive decline as she tries to adjust to life in a memory care clinic, sometimes while forgetting why and how she got there.

Boys Go to Jupiter

Written & Directed by Julian Glander | Animated Dry Comedy

A viby lo-fi vaporwave animation about a teenage hustler named Billy 5000 who tries to get $5000 out of a glitch he found in a delivery app to move out of his dead-end Florida suburban life, instead running into strange beings possibly from another dimension.

East of Wall

Written & Directed by Kate Beecroft | Drama

A widowed horse trainer sells her ranch to a Texan horse dealer to try to keep her business afloat so that she can take care of the various orphaned and abandoned children in her community.

Left-Handed Girl

Dir. Shih-Ching Tsou, Written by Shih-Ching Tsou & Sean Baker | Drama

Sean Baker collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou’s directorial debut about a left-handed girl in Taiwan who believes that her “Satan’s arm” is driving her to petty theft as her family tries to keep afloat running a small night market noodle kiosk.

Commentary

Why is this list important?

Regardless of whether Netflix or Paramount buys Warner Brothers, the number of movies made will decline and the focus will be on IP management over talent development. The four brothers by the last name of Warner who founded the studio in 1923 did so to make and release newfangled ‘motion pictures’ within a burgeoning industry we now call the film business — the modern CEOs couldn’t be less interested in movies themselves, preferring to see their job as managing the decline of theaters while mining IP rights to buy and sell like any sort of financial asset. I have personally edited interviews in my day job with some studio execs who see their primary competitor as YouTube, and the only way to compete, as they see it, is to make film production as cheap as YouTube content. Since YouTube content is user-uploaded, its cost to Alphabet is zero. If YouTube is the competitor, we might as well just shut all the cinemas down and close shop.

But of course YouTube is not the competitor, because feature films are better than 99.9% of people whipping out their cellphone and recording their cats’ antics, their political rants, or their political rants dubbed over the antics of cats. This is obvious and self-evident, that in a world where human beings can watch whatever on YouTube to entertain themselves, they still choose other media to attend to, because of their special qualities that make them valuable to read, listen to, watch, and pay for.

This buyout is particularly frustrating because Warner Bros had a particularly stellar year. Turns out making successful product does not incline CEOs to prefer production over financialization. Meanwhile, despite healthy growth of both audience and interest in theatrical exhibition (PDF alert), 2025 box office is only up 1% over 2024 despite original predictions hoping for 8% increases, a stumble largely attributed to reduced number of titles available for audiences to show up for after the production disruptions of the pandemic, labor strikes, and now AI disruption.

So if we want more butts in seats, we have to make more movies. And since the studio conglomerates are consolidating, they are making less movies. And since they’re only interested in financializing IP rather than developing talent, they’ll continue to constrict the number of original movies coming out year by year for the foreseeable future.

That puts special onus on audiences to check out original films, sure, but it’s also an opportunity for smaller shops, indie labels, and NonDē to fill the void of demand. In between, theater execs should realize that most film execs do not have their best interest in heart and tinker with unique ways to remake theatrical exhibition, of which partnering with original filmmakers and filmmaking collectives is probably a good idea. Distributors also have a role in finding new ways to connect original features to screens in the communities that want them outside of the reflexive and probably no longer useful ‘limited run to expanded release’ approach.

However, I recommend you browse this list for to-watch adds, because it offers a lot of stuff you cannot get from the franchise tentpoles. Faith-based films once again battle with horror over who has the most dedicated and reliable audience. Special interest docs and indie family adventures rub shoulders. I’m under the impression that only about 5% of films per year are directed by women3 — this list has 22 female directors composing about 18.8%4 of the 118 directors included. There are foreign films, American black cinema, and conservative documentaries.

To appropriate my reasoning from last year, you may not find yourself interested in many or even most of these titles, but as a “major film goer” is defined as someone who sees about 6 movies theatrically per year, I’d be surprised if you can’t find six movies on this list that you like.

For more to add to your watch list:

To read more of my FilmStack posts:

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The Treatment

On a Personal Note, 'I Saw the TV Glow' (Filmstack Challenge #6) + Filmstack Challenge #7 Reveal

Full disclosure: the style of this particular piece is lifted directly from Justin Horton’s crackerjack of a Junebug essay, which to this day ranks as one of my personal favourite pieces of film criticism on the whole of the worldwide web. I implore all who wander here to graft it onto their eyeballs…

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7 months ago · 32 likes · 11 comments · Charlotte Simmons

So let me tell about Lucia Berlin.

A fun activity to do to get to know someone is to go to a bookstore and each buy a book for the other person to read. This idea went viral for some first or early dates, but I applied it for a while to just general hangs as well, for anyone who was interested. Thus, one time I went to The Strand with my friend Natalie, and she bought me the short story collection A Manual for Cleaning Women based off some reviews she had recently read.

I had never heard of Lucia Berlin, but her short stories sparked recognition for me hard.

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Here’s the thing. I was born and raised in Albuquerque, NM, and part of growing up there includes being taught local literature in English class. However, most of what was taught as New Mexican literature wasn’t really my experience with New Mexico. You have the fantastic Rudolfo Anaya, who exquisitely covers the small town Chicano coming of age story in Bless Me, Ultima. The Adults in My Life all liked Tony Hillerman, who populated frontier mysteries with native Hispano and Indian characters. My nerd friends were aware of New Mexico’s attraction to sci fi and fantasy writers, especially around Santa Fe and Taos, like George R.R. Martin.

But Lucia Berlin described the parts of New Mexico I lived in. Herself an alumnus and later professor at UNM, she was college educated but not MFA / prestige. She was an alcoholic who found herself surrounded by alcoholics. She lived in Albuquerque’s exurban communities — the sort of casitas carved out of what used to be ranches along Rio Grande Blvd, which could also have been Carñuel heading into the East Mountains or the hippy libertarian amalgam off-the-gridders on the West Mesa or my own Tijeras community, where poor people in humble but affordable houses and worked full time at Wal-Mart lived right next to upper middle class people with three story McMansions and huge plate windows who worked at Sandia Labs, but nevertheless barbecued together and groused about politics and bankers.

In the short stories of A Manual for Cleaning Women, you meet kind Diné dry drunks with delirium tremens who get you chatting at Angel’s Laundromat with dark but hilarious jokes, working artists with domestic issues that make the sort of Southwestern bleached-cow-skull-on-brown-and-orange-landscapes paintings the populate local gallery walls and sell enough to pay rent, long walks and chats along the Bosque del Apache while looking at the herons, and women in jeans and cowboy boots who fall for their abusers. These are my people. Some of them are dumb but they care. Most are quite smart but lack ambition and don’t really develop potential. They get along with each other, despite their drama and gossip. Berlin cuts to their hearts and souls concisely, and without any pretense to showcasing wit. It’s all observation, not observation humor.

It’s not all set in New Mexico: she’s also lived in LA and NY and Idaho and Mexico, and in a couple of short stories she talks about her experiences from a few years in her teens living in Chile. Other than Chile, she has weirdly been to places connected to me through my own experiences or family. She also worked as a nurse and has a healthy sense for body horror and the material dimension of the human condition.

Berlin and I vibe, then, on the same spectrum. When she writes its as if she’s talking to me on a patio overlooking the foothills, while we drink and she smokes. Her words smell like my father on a fall night.

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A Manual for Cleaning Women sparked my first feature-length script. I didn’t even think about it, or consider it, or plan it. After reading the short stories, I was particularly attracted to one called “Strays,” about a community of alcoholics sent by a recovery program to an isolated area of the desert (I believe south of Los Lunas) where they are put to work rebuilding the abandoned military derricks they live in and eventually take over management of the program themselves, as if subtly abandoned and reborn. I set that story at the center and filled much of the rest of the script with details and plot points from either other parts of Berlin’s stories, or my own memories and knowledge.

I blasted out 81 pages in a week. I workshopped those pages and got notes, and then I figured if I am to finish this script, I should get the rights to the stories.

This was in 2019. My friend Pablo helped me out and called around to find the rights. The publisher said some production company holds the option but couldn’t tell Pablo which. I was told to contact them again in April, which I did. Still not available, call next April (2021). I did, still not available. Meanwhile, it didn’t seem worth it to develop a script I do not have the rights to. I moved on to writing two other feature scripts based on my own original concept to avoid that issue.

Then the news hit that Almodovar, of all people, was signed on to develop a feature based on A Manual for Cleaning Women with Cate Blanchett.

I had mixed feelings hearing this. On one hand, I love his work and can see what he sees in Berlin’s writing. In shorthand: women’s stories, with community and financial struggles. I see it, I definitely see how he could make an excellent movie from that source. I could even see how the movie might come out of the short story “Strays” instead of maybe one of the Mexican, Chilean, or possibly LA-based stories.

On the other hand, there’s no way Almodovar’s movie would be anything like mine. It becomes a sort of, “Could we both do it?” Even if we used the same stories, the results would just be so different I don’t think they’d even really compete with each other. I feel maybe people would enjoy comparing them, but the only people who would be like, “You can’t have both movies” would, unfortunately, be the people who finance such things, and of course they’d go with Almodovar before they went with me, on a sheer marketability basis.

Also, Cate Blanchett is perfect for the role. Spectacular casting. I would kill to work with her on this movie.

Well, it turns out Almodovar dropped out of the development, and that it’s Cate Blanchett’s production company Dirty Films that holds the option on the book.

So this is to put out there, publicly: if anyone knows Cate Blanchett or anyone at her production company, and would be able to put me in contact with them, I would love to pitch this script!

As for the script itself, I do know what work it has left to do. I need to develop a little bit more of the ‘Satellite Stray’ community that I created and how they build out the barracks from recovery center to self-owned commune. I have to pull out Belinda, a character completely of my own invention and not from the Manual for Cleaning Women stories, by the roots and redevelop her completely, but I have some clarity on how to do that. And there’s a structural / pacing pass. I have room for more story development: the script is roughly 20 pages short. But it’s a script I can certainly finish.

So that’s my answer to Charlotte Simmons’ challenge: what work do I want to adapt? I want to grab a crew of New Mexican filmmakers and invite Cate Blanchett to shoot Satellite Strays near the VLA in New Mexico, based off the writing of Lucia Berlin. That’s my dream adaptation.

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Soaring Twenties

Movie Recommendations: 3 Wordless Features

On Monday I talked about the superiority of recommendations that come from actual human beings who have expertise and taste and biases and obsessions and all of those other wonderful facets, flaws and foibles that machines will never be able to add to their cold calculations…

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a year ago · 17 likes · Dane Benko

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The difficulty in this challenge was narrowing down my approach. There are deep emotions of many types and hundreds of movies to serve them. Sometimes you allow for emotional reception of a film beyond its craft-level qualities for purposes of sentimentality, nostalgia, or escapism.

What I settled on is looking at movies that expressed something emotionally that I didn’t know I was looking for or felt. This effect is called the spark of recognition: a moment when you see something in art that makes you realize someone else has been there. Often the spark is extremely gratifying; sometimes it’s humbling; a few times it can flash light on a part of you that you’re not so happy to share, and you can feel called out.

Here’s some examples of movies that sparked recognition in me:

Bridge to Terabithia (2007) — dir. Gábor Csupó

I can’t for the life of me remember why I decided to see this movie, but going in blind was probably a significant part of why if affected me so. I watched a screening one afternoon between work or classes at “the dollar theatre”1 in Albuquerque, NM, one of what was once known as “second run theatres”2 that showcase late-run movies for discount prices.

My decision there may have literally devolved to I was in the neighborhood, and I had the time.

Anyway, Bridge to Terabithia hit me twice. The first half of the movie involves tween friends Leslie and Jess as they run around the woods behind their houses imagining up a rich kingdom of fantasy creatures and evil forces. The imagination sequences start with pinecones, shadows, and wisps of wind until Jess’ suspension of disbelief ignites and various woodland elements start to form into fantastic figures that engage in the story Leslie and Jess tell each other — a story in which they, of course, are the leads and the heroes.

There’s a long list of family movies that feature ThE pOwEr Of ImAgInAtIoN, but something about Bridge to Terabithia just nailed what it’s like to be a kid and in the zone with play.

Like there’s running around in the woods with your friends playing, but then there’s snapping out of a fantasy you and your friends have been collaboratively hallucinating for several hours and realizing with a dazed and somewhat head-achy stomach slam to earth that you didn’t even realize it’s become nighttime, and you can hear your parents yelling for you with the beginning edge of anger and panic in their voice. This state of childhood play, to my knowledge, is not so often or as well represented in cinema, but Gábor Csupó achieved it…

To a point. Admittedly after a while the fantasies become too CG and the verisimilitude is gone. However, just as my attention to the film was about to drop, I got hit with the second spark of recognition.

Leslie dies. What the fuck? For someone who knew the book title but never read it, this moment completely blindsided me.

Then an entirely different story begins, one about how children manage and handle grief.

And again, this is not a new topic for a family film to cover, but the way Bridge to Terabithia handled it was just so painfully true.

I’m no stranger to grief. About when I turned 11, a lot of people started dying in my life: family members, friends, classmates, pets. My grandfather died, my aunt and uncle died in short order to each other, my best friend’s father committed suicide and set up my mother to find him. My dad died. My cat died a few months after that. I got very used to funerals.

One of the things that Bridge to Terabithia shows is how adults can sometimes be completely condescending to children in grief, though they may not be. Children are often expected to understand grief on the adult level, or feel they should be able to reassure or pacify the child in grief; or really, their cardinal sin tends to be the belief that the kid’s grief is their business.

Jess’ struggle to figure out how to understand his loss in the face of parents and teachers just not in his zone, the people who’ve never achieved Terabithia, hit me like a brick in the gut.

So kudos, Csupó. You got me twice.

A note that I immediately followed up the movie with reading the book, and though I normally tend to prefer the story in the format I saw first, the book really is better.

Vortex (2021) — dir. Gaspar Noé

To continue with the grief beat, let’s talk about the surprise gut-punch that was Vortex.

Vortex was an early Mubi Go experience. For those who don’t know, the streaming company Mubi has an add-on feature that curates independent movies with weekly tickets. Soon after I signed on, Vortex was the movie of the week, and I went in thinking the following:

It’s a Gaspar Noé movie. Some drug addicts are gonna go to a club, something isn’t going to go terribly wrong, and then we’ll enter a two-hour psychedelic experience with very pretty flashing color lighting.

I was prepared… only, it turns out, to be greeted with a sobering audio-visual in memorium for Noé’s parents, dead by heart disease and cognitive decline, which just so happened to match the deaths of my aunt and uncle exactly3.

Oof. Vortex was rough. By the end I was a tearful mess and shocked that Noé, of all people, had spoken to me. I rode home from the movie in silent contemplation and then had a long, long talk with my wife.

It’s interesting to note that both Bridge to Terabithia and Vortex reflected back to me my experiences with grief whereas, counterintuitively, the recent movie Familiar Touch by Sarah Friedland didn’t so much. Part of this is because Familiar Touch is more about expressing the experience of cognitive decline from the character’s perspective than our outside experiences dealing with them, but I think surprise is a big element of it. Grief really takes you out when it’s not expected.

Punch-Drunk Love (2002) — dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

There’s a catharsis theory of violence in cinemas, where the idea is that by viewing violence through a storytelling medium with a resolution, the movie releases the pent up violence the viewer is holding inside of them and they can move on.

I think catharsis theory is bullshit, at least broadly speaking; but on the other hand, no moment in a movie ever made me feel like I was releasing more stress in a nice long hiss of emptying chest tension than when Adam Sandler beats some bullies to shit with a tire iron in Punch-Drunk Love. It’s glorious. It sends frisson down your spine. It is definitionally cathartic.

Now, I can’t say Barry Egan ignites the spark of recognition in me entirely as a character. There’s a lot of him in people PTA must know and Adam Sandler must know that I don’t really recognize in the people I’ve known. But nevertheless there’s a lot of ticks and moments and mannerisms Barry Egan has that I can relate to completely.

Take his sisters talking over him all the time, speaking for him and forcing him to comport to their view. This is not an experience I’ve had; for that matter, I only have one sister and she’s too much older than me to have tried to run my life. However, it’s the noise of those scenes, the way Barry shuts down when the verbal information overwhelms his perceptions and his inability to get a word in edgewise, that is uncannily familiar and true to myself.

Too many people are taught fight or flight without the third common reaction to danger: freeze. Barry, like me, is a person who freezes. Punch-Drunk Love is almost literally a story of a person who freezes first teaching himself how to flee, then teaching himself how to fight. For a person who freezes, it’s an extraordinary odyssey to behold.

Similarly, when Barry gets accosted by men in a truck, he starts shouting “Ow! Ow! Ow!” before they’ve even touched him… in fact, before they’re even within reaching distance. I’ve done that. When I was a kid I’d get mercilessly harangued for reacting, “Ouch!” when someone would pretend to punch me without even making contact. My overreaction drove me as crazy as it made cause for them to tease me: it felt like a betrayal of my own sensitivities. It made me more hurtable. I don’t do this anymore, but I still remember the burning frustration with myself when it happened.

In Punch-Drunk Love there’s something real about masculinity and violence that isn’t quite touched upon in the same way as any other movie I can think of. The nice reading of it is that Barry begins to fight back when he has something worth fighting for — Emily Watson’s Lena. But a more threatening read of that scene is what happens if you push an overcranked brain past the threshold of self-protection and into a heightened clarity and focus.

It’s scary to talk about here, because I feel like I’m writing words that could be used to character assassinate me, but there have been times where I’ve felt my brain twang like a broken rubber band, the noise and confusion just disappear, and a heightened sense of clarity and specificity in my surroundings. Never once in those situations did I get into a violent altercation. However every single time in those situations, the people I was with later told me it’s because everyone was too scared to fuck with me. As such, I keep very mindful about never getting in those situations, because I believe the fear that people’ve expressed to me. That zone is terrifying.

I don’t want to pretend that this sort of zone would turn out as well as it did for Barry. Punch-Drunk Love is low-key a superhero movie. One guy against four, he’d probably have gotten his ass kicked. But the point is the mindset is familiar. The ease and calmness with which he moves through space at that moment is relatable. The simplicity of his sudden burst of violence is what sparks recognition.

Upstream Color (2013) — dir. Shane Carruth

I’ve written about Upstream Color in another FilmStack Challenge regarding its sound design. This time I’m including it because of its subject matter, and what makes it striking regarding the concept of the spark of recognition is that the recognition was sparked in my fourth viewing.

From when I saw Upstream Color in theatres in 2013 through my first couple years in New York City, I loved it because of its scrappy independent low-budget filmmaking style and heady, cerebral storytelling. This is the type of movies I want to make, and Carruth’s ability to make it happen on a $50k budget is very appealing.

I would say I understood the story intellectually, and that it disturbed me emotionally, but I didn’t understand the story emotionally until after I had recovered from an abusive relationship.

When I was getting out of that relationship, I was having coffee with a friend who said, “You need to be careful for the next few weeks. You’re going to feel better than you ever had in your life. Then you might get yourself right back into a similar situation. And you’ll surprise yourself with what you remember and what you forgot about this relationship for the rest of your life.”

So clearly my friend had been there, and homefry was not fucking lying. Friends, family, general people around me during that less than year I was in that relationship sometimes tell me things that I told them that I don’t remember at all. There’s a weird pull behind knowing things that happened and being completely blanked by them. And Upstream Color matches that journey completely.

The story follows Jeff and Kris, two victims of a scammer that uses mind-controlling worms to puppeteer his victims into committing identity theft against themselves, who are drawn to each other and are compelled in ways they can’t explain to match each other’s emotions, movements, and, ultimately, search for the truth of what happened.

Before, I read the movie as a parable about how it feels to be scammed, since scammers have an ability to get in your head and act counter to your sense of self. Scam victims regularly report feeling out-of-person from the experience. So, too, do escapees of cults. So report citizens after the end of fascist regimes. At the heart of this immemory is the trauma of abuse. We could basically define each of these activities as the application of abuse in different sectors: scams = application of abuse in financial dealings, cults = application of abuse in community cohesion, fascism = application of abuse in political stage. But it took actual abuse to recognize Upstream Color in a way that intellectual reading didn’t spark.

In fact, after my fourth view of the movie, I had to seriously consider whether I could watch it again. I also then looked up more information on Carruth to figure out how he came to tell such a story and discovered he exhibits abusive behavior. Some of his behavior comes out as obsessiveness, which happens also to be the energy that’s enabled him to complete weedy movies as Primer and Upstream Color with such a punishing budget and workflow.

I’m not going to lie, after a year or two of considering whether I should personally “cancel” Carruth and not watch his movies anymore, I couldn’t help it… I watched Upstream Color again. And I can’t let it go, it’s too important to me, for reminding me of what someone can be capable of (making a great movie for $50k by taking on almost every technical and creative aspect of the production), reminding me of what someone can be capable of (being an obsessive abuser who leaves his ex-girlfriends in fear of their lives), reminding me of what people can be capable of (various methods of mind control and ego destruction employed to gain power over individuals’ lives) and finally, reminding me what people can be capable of (recovering and owning their own agency, finding their way upstream of the abuse and defeating the bad actors at their source).

I choose to see Upstream Color as the abuser’s guide to recognizing abuse. Pay attention. It’s all there. You can see it on screen. But it’s not just in the characters and dialog, its an expression of the fragmentary nature of memory and emotion when you’re trying to reclaim your sense of self. It’s actually mythic, rewiring your brain to make you question how you ended up on that particular train, talking to that particular person, after you’ve forgotten why you’ve lost everything, metaphorically speaking.

I Saw the TV Glow (2024) — dir. Jane Schoenbrun

Here I am also repeating myself, but I’m going to beat this drum again: I knew Owen and Maddy personally, and I have never seen them presented so truthfully and in-depth in any other movie as I’ve seen here in Schoenbrun’s contemporary classic.

Owen was a friend I made in typing class, freshman year of high school, who was obsessed with Tenchi Muyo. They were also a trans kid I knew, though I didn’t understand the nomenclature at the time, who had the same conversation with me that happens on the bleachers, except swap “TV” with fashion design:

“Do you like girls?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you like boys?”

“I think that I like… clothes. And beautiful objects.”

And Maddy, I knew a ton of Maddies. Girls and tomboys and ACEs who would obsess over every detail of every episode of some super nerdy YA show and just occasionally casually answer your request to go out to see a movie or something with, “Nah, if I get back late again my dad will beat the shit out of me. Don’t tell him we’re talking, okay?”

I also worked in that exact movie theatre and exact “Family Fun Center” that Owen suffers through.

When I was in high school, I was goth, and most of my friends were either grunge or punk, and being in those subcultures, you’re always adjacent to the kids being slowly choked out by suburban domesticity, whether it be from direct physical and emotional abuse to simply broad suppression of their self-representation and presentation. Lots of these kids turned out later to be on the autism spectrum, or have mental health disorders, or simply weren’t allowed to be gay or trans and had to escape home to become themselves.

To me I Saw the TV Glow was a PSA to what happens to the kids who decide to suck it up and stay where they are, and its brilliance lies not in acting like leaving what they know is “somewhere over the rainbow” but actually as existentially threatening as staying. In the movie, Owen has a choice between burying himself alive, with all the suffering Maddy describes in an intense and heightened (and brilliant) monologue, or remaining and slowly suffocating asthmatically from self-suppression.

Would you rather be buried alive or choke to death? Not an easy round of the “would you rather” game, particularly if it’s existentially real. But as the movie sez, “There’s still time,” and a light inside.

I’ve never, ever gotten such high school parity from the elder classics, not even The Breakfast Club.4 I Saw the TV Glow even tickles me the way Fred Durst, he of early Aughts aestheticized pop youth resistance, plays the perfect father of terrifying condescension, drawling slowly in Middle American Masculinity, “Isn’t that show for girls?”

Exquisite work, no notes. And specific. I’ve had enough conversations with enough people since this came out to see that this movie simply does not land for everyone; to be frank, if I didn’t know Owen and Maddy so well, if I didn’t spend almost the entire movie thinking, “Shit man, how did Jane get into my friends’ teenage bedrooms?” I would have a very boring response to this movie about its messy narrative structure and whether or not it counts as a horror movie. But that spark of recognition transcended all technical considerations and all I saw was a message from an elder gloom cookie to the new generation of alt, lost, scared, disturbed, and queer kids that there is a path out that looks dark and is difficult but is worth it.

It’s actually pretty funny because one time I saw a meme that said, “If you liked I Saw the TV Glow, congratulations, you’re trans” and it almost made me defensive in the “I’m not trans but I liked the movie!” way. In the end, in the spirit of the meme, as an actress once told me, “We’re all a little queer.” For me, I have no gender dysphoria, but I’ve always related to “But the world just doesn’t fit quite right, like it’s made and shaped for a different body and mind” feeling that, in the 90s and 2000s, expressed itself as sub- and counter-cultures until the Internet flattened and weirded everything. Now that I’m really comfortable with myself and my life, I know I’m not invited to the cool kids’ clubs where the really edgy music and art is getting made. But I can at least recognize it when it rises past the underground and manages to make it on cinema screens.

Well, and, so, this post feels a lot darker than I initially intended. I swear I don’t only recognize sad and disturbing things, grief, violence, existential trauma, etc. I also have flashes of recognition in Buster Keaton’s flat-affected attempts to woo the pretty girl next door, The Dude from The Big Lebowski is pretty much my dad in attitude and appearance, and Tim from Jurassic Park was LiTeRaLlY mE and we were the same age when it came out.

But part of what makes art powerful is that the spark of recognition can help address or redress things we don’t have the words for or aren’t aware of ourselves, and these are movies that hit in a way where I didn’t know I needed the understanding until I saw them, and then felt so familiar it was shocking I hadn’t come across it before. What begins as, “Someone else has been here?” becomes, “Of course, why didn’t I ever think of that?”5

So that’s what I really seek in movies: the spark of recognition. The moment when the filmmaker and I seem to be feeling the same things, in the same ways.

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The Greek Myth Revival

I took the train round-trip to visit my family up in Montreal a couple weeks ago, and my original selection for the ride was Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway.

I wanted to follow up with Gnomon, his sci fi noir that almost gave me a stroke. I am not being hyperbolic here: reading Gnomon felt like downloading anti-surveillance programming straight to the brain, a text-based neural inoculation disguised as a gumshoe novel — Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, except encrypted.

The encryption method was myth. I will be getting to what I mean by that in a minute.

Titanium Noir ended up not hitting the mythic levels of Gnomon, though like Gnomon, it had many direct references to Greek myths. It was also shorter and easier to read than I expected, meaning I finished the whole book on the way to Montreal.

Needing to read something on the way back down, I went to small shop in Montreal and picked up The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. This time I explicitly had Greek myth in mind. It’s a beautifully written book that retells The Iliad from the perspective of a relatively minor character from the original story, Patroclus, Achilles’ confidant, sidekick, and, in this retelling, lover. One of The Song of Achilles’ best qualities is fully embracing the epicness and poetics of its source material, with full awe given to the gods, their magic, and their various motivations and personal vendettas. These gods are not merely metaphor but also really exist and are active in their own layer of society, one of the elements of Greek myth that most inspired me when I read them as a kid.

I want to say, then, that Miller’s book is great “because it represents the story as the Ancient Greeks actually saw things,” but what gives me pause is that I’ve heard that line before. That argument was the basis for so many fan defenses of the fascist, racist, and homophobic 2006 film 300, where the Spartans are white Europeans rather than olive-toned Mediterraneans, fighting against “Persians” that are either big gay effeminate black giants or subhuman, monstrous orcs, to save the “boy fuckers” of Athens (300’s framework for Washington, DC or at least governing bodies like it) from themselves and their peacenik Senators preaching weak girly things like diplomacy, who are revealed to be traitors of the nation corrupted by foreign coin and rapists to boot (but the woman agreed to it, so it’s her fault, too).

Someday I’ll tell you how I actually feel about 300.

Perhaps the 300 fans are right and that’s how the Spartans were actually racist, homophobic fascists and thus “saw” the Persians that way. Takes a leap of suspended disbelief regarding things like big fat saw-armed mutants, but at any rate, arguing “How the Ancient Greeks actually saw things” is absurd, in the sense that none of us know any Ancient Greek people to ask for their perspective.

What we do instead is read the texts through the filters of our cultural references: Greek Myth™ isn’t just the stories we have preserved, but all the ways we’ve told ourselves those stories over time, much the same way as history isn’t so much documentation of what happened but the narratives we’ve applied to the events to give them meaning to our time.1 There are absolutely people who have the same complaints about the historical muddiness of The Song of Achilles that I have about 300. There are very likely some people who fit in the overlap section of a Venn diagram of “People who believe 3002 is a historically accurate representation of something that actually happened in fact” and “People who think The Song of Achilles is a perverse re-writing of history for political reasons,” but I’m not going to expend any search engine effort checking to see if that’s the case.

Rather, this issue lead me to think about the generalized trans-media Greek Myth revival we’ve been seeing over the last decade broadly, and the upcoming version of The Odyssey that Christopher Nolan is creating (and its likeliness to be read in political contexts regardless of its actual content). It seems significant that media companies and artists alike are in a big hurry to tell these stories all over again, whether they adhere to the texts and historical understandings closely or not. Nolan, being an artist whose primary medium is scale, might be releasing the Olympus-sized climactic finale of this trend, or represent merely a large peak of the distribution curve from which another decade or two of smaller efforts will continue to crank away, retelling history in new contemporary terms.

Either way, the race is on to tell you how you should think about Greek Myth, and within that race raises the questions of whose concern it really is. However, Greek Myths function so well because they are interpretable across media, historical context, and regimes, making each one a game of interpreting both the original details of the story and why it’s been rewritten.

Thus, Gnomon-like, I have a cognitive inoculation for you, one that comes disguised in a French docuseries from 1989.

The Owl’s Legacy

Chris Marker, that time-traveller who gives you the answers to the questions you’ve not yet conceived, already responded to underlying cultural debate running the 2020s Great Greek Myth Revival.

The Owl’s Legacy is a 13-part docuseries on the global influence of Ancient Greek culture. As a Marker production it’s surprising because it’s superficially straightforward and is, to the best of my knowledge, the only talking head documentary he’s made. This approach makes it feel more accessible and less, well, Marker-y than his other work, something that disappointed me when I saw it at a retrospective screening at the Metrograph a couple-three years ago.3

As best as I can tell, this series is currently only available on Amazon Prime rental in the US, an irony that reminds me of comment I once heard about how prisons endeavor to keep revolutionary literature out of inmates’ hands and yet allow them free access to revolutionary works of Shakespeare: if only Bezos knew what content his servers were hosting. For that reason I’d recommend watching it as soon as you get a chance, because we don’t know whether it’ll be available at any point in the future.

Anyway, The Owl’s Legacy is about “the global influence of Ancient Greek culture”, as I said above, but also as I said above, this is just its surface, and Marker always enjoys plying the world of images to reveal the machinery underneath. The fact of Ancient Greek culture influencing modern culture is known and not worthy of a 5 1/2 hour long documentary, much less something that strikes me as interesting to Marker.

But what Marker is interested in is the flip-side of the signifier. How does Ancient Greek culture affect modern culture? By how we choose to seek in Ancient Greek culture antecedents to define our culture. In doing we’re entering an epistemological loop: it affects our culture because we see our antecedents in it; we see our antecedents in it because it affects us. It’s the act of searching that gives us something to find, and thus what Ancient Greece is to us today is whatever we need it to be to justify who we think we are today.

If the above paragraph feels too loopy for you, welcome to the Markerverse. But let me simplify it: in episode 4, “Democracy-or the City of Dreams,” Marker details how many of the same symbols and images that inspired democratic nations also gave causes and justification for fascism. In episode 6, “Mathematics-or The Empire Counts Back,” he delves into how the Greek’s struggle over the conception of zero to bring to question the philosophical conception that, since parallel lines and geometric shapes are “universal and ahistorical,” that they also resist narratives of “purity of form.” In each of our conceptions of what Ancient Greece stands for is an obverse side that may undermine the conclusions we want from it.

Some of the episodes hint at their argument in the titles themselves:

• S1 E1 - Symposium-or Accepted Ideas

• S1 E5 - Amnesia-or History on the March

• S1 E11 - Misogyny-or the Snares of Desire

• S1 E10 - Mythology-or Lies like Truth

Meanwhile, Marker, a fan of owls proper, adds one Marker-y aspect by constantly framing images of owls variously in the set decor and backgrounds of the talking heads. In many cases the owls loom over the speakers, like history haunting the historian. And we have to remember some rules when Markers does something like this: he genuinely loves owls; he genuinely loves images; images are not owls; images are not real. We also have to remember that Chris Marker’s name is not Chris Marker and that he identifies himself through a series of avatars, one of which is an owl.

Thus Marker is also pointing out that the narrative you’re seeing is not “How Ancient Greece affects world culture” but also how the talking heads chose to interpret the question; and then, on another level, it’s not just how the talking heads chose to interpret the question, but what parts of their conversation Marker chose to record and edit.

The owl’s legacy is not historical, but rather hauntological. Luckily the series doesn’t end on episode 12 (“Tragedy-or the Illusion of Death”) but episode 13 (“Philosophy-or the Triumph of the Owl”).

The Battlefield of the Past in the Culture War of the Present

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Ol’ George Orwell in his cognitive inoculation disguised as the book 1984.

There’s a book I bought the second I read a description of it, which I then realized I don’t really want to read. The book is called The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz, and I don’t want to read it because we’re currently living it.

The concept is that time-travelers duke it out over competing timelines to change history to make the world the way they want it to be. In this sense the book is just a literalization of the competitive narrative regime the West entered in the mid-2010s.

To understand what I mean by “competitive narrative regime”, you may want to read the Epsilon Theory blog by Ben Hunt and Rusty Quinn, though they have long since paywalled much of their work and it would take you several months to get through it all. The gist is that throughout history, cultures go through periods of collaborative regimes and periods of competitive regimes. Collaborative and competitive in this sense refer to Game Theory definitions of each. By their reckoning, the US has been forced into a competitive regime, full of competitive games, from a previous period of collaborative regime that ran on collaborative games.

In a collaborative regime, history is history. We agree that this thing happened and caused that, and thus we find ourselves today the way we are. There are always people who challenge the mainstream history and provide alternative histories in order to sustain their subculture or subjugated cultures; but the mainstream dominant culture remains cohesive and people like Fukuyama show up to announce “The End of History.”4

In competitive regimes, history is a battlefield, fought with weapons of mass media. There’s no longer a unipolar dominant narrative of Who We Are and Where We Came From, but rather an urgent need to dictate Where We’re Going. The battle is existential: one narrative cannot be settled into hegemony without subjugating the others. Either 300 is historically accurate, The Song of Achilles is historically accurate, or neither are, but there’s no regime in which both are equally truthful. That is what is being decided.

This is the rigging underneath the oft-stated “collapse of shared realities,”5 which is another way of talking about our “crisis of trust” and so forth. In a collaborative regime, we trust authority, institutions, history, society, each other, even if we disagree on facts and policy. In a competitive regime, the game is on entirely based on who lays claim to the facts for the next few generations, regardless of whether you trust them.

Very important caveat here: it’s easy to imagine a collaborative regime as one filled with large groups of like-minded people operating in drone fashion, whereas competitive regimes as wastelands of individualistic survivalists living off the lay of the land with sharp wits and a good knife. In fact it’s actually the reverse: a collaborative regime enables individuals to strive for their own goals independently because they trust the basic infrastructure of the world around them to support them, whereas a competitive regime requires you figure out which people you can trust in order to build up resources you all can mutually rely on.

Think of it like this: a football game can be competitive because both teams trust the rules are enforced by a coach and a league and that bad behavior will be caught by a displeased and unsupportive audience, whereas fair play will be supported and cheered on, even if the team loses. Sports is collaborative regime-based competition.

But when all the referees are corrupt and the audience willing to flee over the slightest slight and the league keeps changing the rules arbitrarily, the games stop working and eventually the players must either quit (extinction) or go play a different game or for a competing league. For either alternative (game or league) to work, they must first collaborate on setting the rules and then collaborate on getting the resources (equipment, fields, etc) to play the games, then they must compete with the other sports or leagues to earn the attention of the audience.

This is known as “the rule of law.” A regime is competitive or collaborative based on its observance of the rule of law.

This raises the question of why some players, coaches, or other stakeholders ever seek to undermine the rule of law? The answer is, more-or-less, because they cannot win the game unless they change the rules.

Now, how does it come to pass that a league would let stakeholders start changing the rules? Or, why does a society begin to undermine the rule of law? Basically, there are always players that want to cheat, but they don’t gain enough collective power to start changing the rules unless the rules are already weakened by the league itself, for various reasons. An easy example is perhaps the league owners are corrupt, and just let whatever team wins that pays them the most money. However, sometimes the rules can be weakened by not-so-directly nefarious causes, such as reducing the time a player can hold onto a ball in order to make the game more exciting for television.

This latter example is actually really important for the next section.

How Myth Works

There’s a problem inherent to the operands of history: it keeps going. As such there can never really be narratives that are truly ‘settled.’ What can happen, and does throughout, I believe, most of human history, is that some stories are just too good to ignore, and settle into culture because they give the community the referents and sense of safety necessary to endeavor ever forth in the human condition.

Myths, then, can arguably be defined as narratives strong enough to settle cultures on.

That sounds pretty pat, until we remember the legacy of the owl: as for sports, so for narratives themselves. The impact of Ancient Greece on US culture and democracy is a self-actualizing loop, until it isn’t. Then we either rewrite them or reject them in favor of new myths. It’s both true that cultures rely on myths to maintain a consistent identity, and yet the myths themselves are malleable to how the culture decides to interpret them.

At three different points I’ve called a piece of media a “neural inoculation.” Those three works are Gnomon, 1984, and The Owl’s Legacy. They are not the only inoculations, but they are a good starting point to define myths, because myths are neural inoculations, and narratives strong enough to inoculate you against mind control can appropriately be called mythic.

Not all narratives are mythic. In fact very few are. You can’t even rely on the same author to always deliver mythic quality work: Titanium Noir, though very entertaining and exquisitely written, is not mythic. Gnomon is mythic because it restructures your brain to reject neural surveillance systems currently sought after by tech industrialists and authoritarian governments alike. 1984 is mythic because it restructures your brain to be aware of the politics of language in ANY regime, whereas Animal Farm is just an extended metaphor for communism specifically.

Everything Chris Marker ever made is mythic though, don’t play me.

But what it does is not quite the same thing as how, so I’m merely describing mythic storytelling without giving you the tools to do it. And in that sense, looking at the original myths is required.

My personal history with the Greek Myths helps me understand the difference between mythic and quotidian storytelling.

I loved the Greek Myths as a kid because I loved fantasy stories. Greek Myths were entertaining in the same way that Lord of the Rings, DragonLance, and the Magic: The Gathering books were entertaining: there were humans, gods, legendary beasts, magical rules, and they were all mixed together and had their own motivations, powers, and abilities. All of this was fun and cool.

The difference is that, as a middle schooler, I couldn’t wrap my mind around how the Ancient Greeks actually believed these stories. Sphinxes and minotaurs are cool fucking creatures, but obviously nobody actually saw one. How could they actually believe these things?

Yet on the other hand, my teachers explained to me, these characters gave explanatory power to phenomena outside humans’ grasp at the time. Where the heck did spiders come from? Well, this one weaver girl named Aradne offended Athena by challenging her to a weaving contest. Why are the stars aligned like that? Well, this one hunter Orion had such incredible feats, the Gods chose to bring him to Olympus.

Why is life so god-damned challenging? Well because the gods damned us with challenges. They’re petty, vengeful folk with vicious pride and absolutely choose sides in conflicts and warfare. You really better respect them and burn offerings in their honor or they will fuck you up.

In short, myths are metaphors… that can kill you. Athena, she of the owl, represents wisdom. She also will absolutely split your skull open if you offend her. The wisdom she offers is as powerful as her ability to leave your brains on the steps of the agora. She’s a concept, but she’s real.

Myths are metaphors you actually believe. In order to make mythic-quality stories, you have to believe in the sorts of stories that can actually come to life and kill you.

Myths Versus Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories have metaphors. People really believe them. Does that make conspiracy theory myth?

There’s another work I’ve been reading lately that’s been making me think about the battle of narratives in the culture war, an ongoing comic book series called The Department of Truth written by James Tynion IV and drawn by Martin Simmonds.

This concept is very similar to The Future of Another Timeline in the sense that it’s about an ongoing war over the nature of reality through battles of stories. In this series, every conspiracy theory is as ‘real’ as the number of people who believe it and how strongly they believe in it. As such, in order to keep reality confined and manageable, the US government has a “Department of Truth” tasked with ending conspiracy theories — through counter-programming, investigation, and yes, even murder.

Antagonizing the Department of Truth is “Black Hat”, a person or group intent on freeing the bounds of reality to competing belief systems. Their argument is as compelling as it is terrifying: why shouldn’t reality be democratized? Besides, doesn’t the existence of the Department of Truth itself indicate a conspiracy to suppress people’s independent truths? Without getting too into the weeds of the plot here, in relatively quick order it’s hard to read The Department of Truth without being intensely suspicious of who, or what, any character actually really is or says they’re for.

Tynion is deeply knowledgable about conspiracy theories, and his research is impeccable, both in detailing the contours of the conspiracies but also their historical genesis and development, as well as the whys and wherefores they take hold on certain characters. And he’s compassionate about it, too. One of the most touching episodes concerns a father whose obsessive search for Sasquatch is driven by his fierce desire to reconnect with his son — who rejected him because of his obsession with Sasquatch. This self-defeating, downward spiral logic underlines a lot of the complexities we have when dealing with the concept of conspiracy theories and people’s inabilities to let them go.

Nevertheless, I believe Tynion knows what a friend once told me: conspiracy theory is about grief. If Tynion doesn’t have that idea in mind in those words, he certainly represents it in how he writes this series. Conspiracy theories are mythic on the surface but lack agency underneath: they are fragile, and prone to collapse. The pulpa can come to kill you, but you are not in equal grounding to fight back.

I would say conspiracy theories flood in to replace when the mainstream myths fail to protect a person or community. Once one narrative dies, others compete for viability, “these are times of monsters” style. A conspiracy theory ceases to be a conspiracy theory when it becomes true, wherein true = accepted generally by mainstream society as rule of law. Very few do; the rest we call history.

This is why charlatans, fraudsters, and cult leaders thrive in marginalia of conspiracy theory: because at root, they’re pretty good storytellers. This is also why don’t make good leaders in mainstream society: because they’re good storytellers, but not good enough. They tell stories that some people can believe some of the time, but struggle to find stories that everyone can believe all of the time.

On that note:

Why We’re in a Culture War; or, Why the MCU is Not Mythic

The spoils of culture war go to the best storytellers. This is the definition of history: the spoils of culture war.

Let’s go back to the sports analogy: there are always players that want to cheat. Similarly there is always underground cultures, alternative cultures, subcultures, and subjugated cultures preserving, curating, protecting, and developing its own mythology with its own niche of participants. When the league fails to maintain its rules, the cheaters take over — when mainstream culture fails to tell coherent stories that protect its citizens and gives them cause and direction, the “alternative facts” rise.

Why does the league fail to maintain its rules? Corruption, perhaps. The stories started to serve only the interests of the few rather than the whole. Or perhaps for less malevolent reasons, such as forcing the game to speed up to make it fit for television rather than fit for athletics, skill, or tactics:

the stories started to be prioritized based on their marketability rather than their cultural value.

I’m lucky to have found The Department of Truth. I’ve only recently getting into comic books at all. I never got into comic books before, because the majority of mainstream comic books are run by a duopoly of superhero IP, Marvel and DC, and I never found the characters as interesting as people would tell me they are. In fact with comic book characters, often people’s explanation of what attracts them to their favorite heroes strikes me as far more interesting than any of the actions they take on the page.

Nevertheless, much of my life has seen the gradual invasion of comic book-based superhero references into ever more media and popular culture, culminating in the MCU. And during this roll-out, academics were quick to point out those stories’ structural similarity to myths: you had gods that interacted with humans, rules of might and magic, morality plays backed by action and tactics, “pantheons” of interconnected and interrelated stories and characters, often choosing sides in significant, world-altering ways.

The structure is there. The issue is that save a few really good individual runs, I don’t get the impression that Marvel or DC as companies “believe” in their characters in quite the same way as some of their best writers. And even their best writers, I doubt, really believe these characters exist in the sense of walking among us, with the potential to get involved, intervene, and do something fatally consequential to our organic selves.

But they do believe, with cause, that the characters are money-printing machines.

Is Spider-Man Peter Parker, Ben Reilly, or Miles Morales? Is he white, black, or black and white? Regardless of which “universe” we roll with, no writer of any single Spider-Man movie thinks he’s gonna show up and punch them in the nose. Which would not preclude Spider-Man becoming a mythic figure if they at least believed in some moral force that, should they behave like one of his villains, would both figuratively and literally punch them in the nose. I don’t get that belief out of these stories.

This doesn’t mean they’re not good stories and they’re not entertaining, they just aren’t quite mythic. Yet. They could be, provided they are driven by belief in something more powerful than their profitability. This I do not think will happen. I love the Spider-verse movies, but would not call them a neural inoculation against threatening cognitive or moral antagonists of any kind.

However, when you see some MCU movies that seem to gain a life of their own beyond the exercise in corporate synergy, you tend to see there’s something about them that resonates on deeper cultural levels than their mere commercial viability. Spider-verse is a fairly good example because it recognizes the Metaverse as a conflict of competing timelines rather than the excuse to ignore inconvenient and costly things like continuity between productions. Black Panther spoke to black Americans by worldbuilding around their cultural symbols and designs rather than white American ones. These things matter.

I use the MCU as a metonym for not just the arts and entertainment world today, but the entire mass media and our communication technology generally. Progressively since the 1980s, the stakeholders in charge of communication technology, whether for art, entertainment, journalism, editorializing, documentary, history, or whatever, has made series after series of decisions to focus on what stories are easier to sell than what stories have more cultural power, and the result is that the storytelling got so weak that eventually it stopped protecting people from the mere liars and cheats. And so the liars and cheats have taken over.

This is not just a top-down gatekeeper shareholder fault, it’s also a bottom-up technology user-base fault. “Legacy media” as the current narrative names it both faces competition from new media (as the current narrative has long since moved on from naming it) while doing an horribly lame duck job defending their turf with any cultural production worth noting. Above, I linked Ted Gioia’s article “Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in 12 Months”. He also writes positive articles about how Substack is challenging the Legacy Media and points the way to a better future. Gioia’s alarms about modern culture AND his celebrations of Substack are the same coin. You don’t get Substack’s ascent without a competitive narrative regime.6

Would Substack exist without a competitive narrative regime? Or is Substack really causing the competitive narrative regime? Neither and both. They are the image of the owl. They co-produce each other.

One last thing before I bring you the inspiration part of this inspiration post:

You Don’t Have a Choice

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” ~~Philip K. Dick

There’s real things and then there’s reality and then there’s what we decide to agree reality is. Denying the rock exists won’t prevent it from stubbing your toe, but denying a narrative exists could cause people to stone you. Things get messy in the metaphysical layers.

The thing about cultural regimes is that they impact your lives whether you care to acknowledge them or not. If you were a writer, artist, filmmaker, musician, storyteller of any type in 1997, your platforms, industries, markets, and audiences would be operating under a collaborative structure that would assume for you the peacefulness to make independent, self-representing artwork that others could elect to sponsor and support. Today, the platforms, industries, markets, and audiences are operating under a competitive structure where resource allocation is existential and you must team up with trustworthy collaborators to commit to artwork of cultural production.

One small example of where this matters is on the discourse surrounding the concept of whether or not “artwork should be political.” Substack is lousy polluted with this debate. There are the yesses, there are the nos, there are the “everything is political” takes.

None of them matter: that’s collaborative narrative environment discussion. Politics is a society’s debate on how to move forward. When the society is run by people who are competing over how to tell history and define who we are, political art can only be reactive instead of productive, always letting the people with access to the most resources set the topics of conversation. Political art can be productive in collaborative environments when resources are allocated. It’s no mistake that under a competitive narrative environment, the US federal government is defunding public media while businesses are trying to automate their creative capital. When you know your stories are in competition to create reality itself, you try to cull your competitors from the field.

Either way, you’re working in an environment where the audience will be reading your work as political whether you intend them to or not. You don’t get to choose whether your art is political: they will deem it. Since there’s no escape, you might as well mean it.

Remember: in a collaborative narrative environment, people set up debates. In a competitive ones, they prevent the other person from talking. Where they can’t directly suppress resources to alternative voices, they will divert attention. Here’s at least one primer to get orientated in your new narrative map.

This is the world you live in whether you want to acknowledge it or not. The only way to survive is to find the people you trust and build each other’s resources together, and insist on telling only the stories you believe in so strongly you know they can kill you.

Thus: Rules for Mythic Storytelling

The spoils of history go to the mythmaker.

99.9% of you will never achieve a truly mythic narrative. I myself worry I may never be able to.

However with all the references I dumped above, with all of the ways I’ve come to be thinking about this, what I bring to offer here today, fat and fed off the the most nutritious fields of recent literary, cinematic, and graphic stories, is guidelines for telling competitive stories:

1. Metaphors that you believe in

This has two parts, the metaphor, and the belief.

In a collaborative narrative environment, it’s enough to tell personal stories as a matter of self-representation. Since culturally the mainstream is on the same page, the story rests on the foundation of that mutual trust and this new iteration is part of the shared public discourse realizing the world around it. When it’s something like underrepresented voices, these stories help introduce and invite them into the mainstream, albeit with effort.

In a competitive narrative environment, the story must survive on its own. It thus must be stronger, broader, and more realized: it’s not enough to do it out of self-recognition but human recognition. People across cultures, backgrounds, and their own idiosyncratic tastes must perceive the reality of the story without understanding its references. To avoid weakening the story with lowest common denominator tropes, you instead extend its power by lifting the stakes to our shared human condition. Metaphor is your tool for that.

It’s not enough to use metaphor as figurative language or a writing technique. This is where David Lynch and his Catching the Big Fish technique is helpful. There’s the story you want to tell, but there’s also something deeper that makes you need to tell it. That need is going to have some weird juju around it you’ve never seen in stories before, that you normally look to craft standards to get passed. You have to do the opposite now: take the weird juju stuff and make it the center of the work.

This takes a lot of time, effort, and risk. There is no easy way that is not also a weaker way.

The second half is the belief in it. Storytellers are taught in terms of morals and themes, the old Campbellian journey as justification for itself, cross the thresholds and save the cat. However in this paradigm, a pretty good indication that you’re going in the wrong direction is if a character can state the thesis in a line of dialog or your story is pointing toward a specific issue.

Again, you need to be looking deeper than that: not just the thesis, but the structure of your moral universe that gives you your thesis; not just the issue you’re stressing out over, but why it and issues like it continue to disturb you and never seem to be completely defeated. Themes in storytelling are downstream of the story’s moral universe, and your moral universe is only as strong as your morality.

How much do you believe in yourself?

2. The more reality-backed, the better

Two genres are the most mythic-enabled: biography and science fiction.

The thing about many of the Greek myths and the belief in them is that many of the characters were real. Stories of their exploits became famous, then legendary, then mythic, through process of cultural telephone.

Sometimes you see this genesis in modern day: when I was a kid, Edison was a genius inventor and Tesla was this weird subcultural figure admired mostly by hipsters and cranks. These days Edison largely seems to represent the corporate IP thief the public is increasingly dismayed by, whereas Tesla was a free-thinking visionary that leant us key technologies and the richest man in the world’s public corporation’s name.

Madeline Miller made a whole thing of Patrocles’ and Achilles’ relationship out of the documentation she had while Frank Miller made a whole thing about 300 Spartans holding the pass at Thermopylae from his favorite childhood movie. These things develop out of texts in the record that can be reclaimed, particularly if you seize the spark of recognition within them on how they represent your true moral universe.

In other words, mythic storytelling answers “why are we the way we are today” oftentimes by pointing out something in the past and saying, “Same as it ever was.”

Science fiction achieves the same aims through speculation based on the realities of today. Rather than past-oriented to describe the now, it describes what the storyteller sees now to illustrate the moral arc of the future. “If we start here, we end up there.” This process works the more accurate the effects reflect how we see things now.

3. Employ Dramatic Irony

One of the main reasons I believe Greek Myths particularly have such sticking power, is because they made me burn in rage with how unfair they seemed sometimes.

Oedipus: his father abandons him as a child because Laius hears the prophecy that Oedipus will kill him; Oedipus kills Laius because he doesn’t know that Laius is his father. Orpheus can’t trust that Eurydice is there because he can’t hear her; she disappears because he checks to confirm. This stuff really twisted my noggin as a kid.

Robert McKee discusses dramatic irony as a more satisfying resolution than a happy or a sad ending: the protagonist gets what they want, but loses what they need; or the protagonist loses what they want, and ends up better and happier. On a lower level I believe a key thing to avoid in storytelling, particularly storytelling that deals in metaphors and myth-making, is a protagonist winning against the forces of evil entirely backed on the righteousness of his moral code. The moral code drives his beliefs but his decisions still have to bring about the consequences.

It’s two parts of the coin: why is this always happening? And how do we resolve it. Obviously you can’t resolve it completely, then it’s not “always” happening. But we can’t give up, because that way lies extinction. Thus we fight to survive, and in so doing continue the conflict that’s always happening.

4. High-level presentation

This is one of my personal weaknesses, to a point where the work I need to do to overcome it is going to brutal, but overcome it I must: for a narrative to become mythic quality, it must be immediately and visibly well-presented.

This means you can’t just write a great book, it has to have great printing and design. You can’t just compose a beautiful song, you have to record it with exquisite clarity performed by exceptional talents. You can’t just four-wall a movie, you have to develop a whole danged distribution strategy complete with packaging, design, and marketing. Artists, at this moment in time, are not only on the usual hook to make good art and run their own business, but to outdo the galleries, museums, competitions, and shows at their own game.

This is very difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, but unfortunately necessary. The stakes drive ever higher the more mythic your storytelling is.

It’s not enough to just “work on the things you love and the money will follow.” That may have been true before the Internet but after the advent of Facebook, it’s a complete lie. These days, work on the things you love and everyone else will steal it to train their chatbot; or follow the money, and be employed in the industry of slop production.

High-level presentation cannot happen if you don’t have high-level work, so step 4 necessarily follows steps 1-3. The next step is a little more muddy:

5. Determine the people and groups you can trust

The problem underlying step 4 is a resource one: Mainstream society is currently obliged to prohibit you access to the resources you need to tell the stories of the future. I can’t state this any more clearly, it’s not an accident that the US government is cutting arts funding while the corporate world is laying off creative professionals. They know that if better stories are told than the ones they’re telling, their narratives will collapse, because they are weak stories built on the basis of fraud and lies. Normally these things could collapse on their own account, but they have incredible resource pull to keep it going for an indeterminate length of time.

It is not worth waiting for the inevitable reversion to mean. Plus, even if you do, you have no guarantee that the new stories and new regimes that sprout will be gods or monsters. The only way to tilt these to your favor is to build your own resources and make your stories live as long as possible.

The individual seeking self-representation in an industry is already lost. That’s collaborative world thinking. The competitive world survivalists aren’t trying to save the world, they’re building the next one. That means finding, building, and creating resources from scratch.

Which means community building, which means being very clear who you go to when you need help with what resource need, and being very clear and willing to put in your own help to the people who need it. And they will need it, and if you don’t show up for them they will drop you.

This section, too, is difficult. Because the world, particularly the entertainment and media world, is full of people willing to take advantage of people who are willing to help. So you have to be on your toes. If you’re helping other people and they’re not paying in kind, you have to find more people. If other people are helping you out, you have to deliver for them and you have to find a way to come back around to them.

Community management is its own full-time job, and in a competitive narrative regime is not one that you can outsource to institutions. Just like step 2 has you taking the work of publisher, platforms, and distributors upon yourself, step 3 has you taking the networking events, fundraising, investing, equity, and dividend distribution upon yourself.

This is not fair, but it’s the world we live in.

The lucky thing is that you can do step 5 while working on steps 1-4. As long as you keep telling your story, you’ll find people interested in telling it too. And since this is not a solipsistic world, when you hear stories you feel need to be told, it’s your responsibility to offer help.

The other good news is that resource acquisition is not a zero-sum game. The larger efforts of people who crave power and control are always toward the lie that resources are zero-sum, but they are rarely so, and never creative resources. The more collaborators you get the more will join you. The more money you get, the more you can work on the artwork itself or its presentation, which attracts more people to it and so on.

This is a good point to mention I am open for collaborations.

6. Make your work exist

Every now and then there’s an idea I have that I want to stamp on a mallet to run around smacking people in the forehead with, such that the statement gets scarred right where they can see it in the mirror every morning, and my current one is

If your work does not exist physically, it does not exist.

Sorry, but your YouTube Insta-blog thing does not exist as a work of art unless it’s in a format you can hand to someone at a cafe and they can take home to watch themselves without expensive, bespoke, or novel equipment.

You must print your books. You must make Blu-Rays and archival quality DCPs of your films. You must etch your music on vinyl or electronic tape. You must paint on canvas and frame your photographs. You must do these things or you do not have a copy of them.

This argument is two-fold:

One, learn the concept of an artist’s archive and what archival quality really means. This is how you manage and control and actually own your work. It’s very medium dependent, and for new digital arts like webpages and such is an open development (to which there is, actually, some promise in the concept of NFTs if not the current practice). This is also how you account for what you’ve actually done. It’s the real “proof-of-work” that no NFT engineer can ever match.

But the second is a platform warning. The Internet used to be a distributed network of independently operated servers. That ended when everything was centralized under cloud computing and is now being scaled up with data-centers. Whatever you have online is owned by people like Sundar Pichai (Google), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), or Elon Musk (X). They can do whatever they want with it. They steal it for AI training, the can delete it whenever they choose for any reason even vaguely related to their user agreements, they can alter it without your permission and they can hold it against you in court.

And … you never know which one of their narratives we call a “company” will just… collapse, leaving your url as nothing more than a 404 error and all the work you’ve uploaded it vanished to some silicon wafer well beyond any individual’s ability to find, less retrieve. This warning goes double for the people exporting their full writing archives to Substack, a not-yet-profitable endeavor backed by not-verifiably-dependable venture capital that can change on a dime.

In sum, you have to build the factory, the distribution, the retailers, the product, and its museum quality preservation storage yourself. There’s no way you’re going to do that for a reactive thinkpiece about Cracker Barrel’s new logo. You might do that, but people would think it’s bizarre, for a short film or a collection of short stories. To bring people on this adventure, your work must ascend higher.

It must be mythic quality.

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Read previous FilmStack inspirations:

Talk Cinema, Save Cinema

FILMSTACK INSPIRATION CHALLENGE // DAY #8

Good morning, Substack. It’s Monday, and I know you’ve got a lot on your plate, so I’ll keep this quick. Mondays get a bad rap, but honestly, I’ve always thought Tuesday was the real shitty day. Monday still carries a spark of fresh energy, it’s a new week, you got big plans for crushing everything today. But we all know that feeling of renewal is fleet…

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8 months ago · 15 likes · 8 comments · Amanda Sweikow

Tips, Tricks, & Tea with Ruth

FILMSTACK INSPIRATION CHALLENGE:

Note: I’ve been following along with Ted Hope’s #FilmStack Challenge about sharing creative inspirations. This post is adapted from a previously written post from my Substack, Tips, Tricks & Tea with Ruth…

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8 months ago · 10 likes · Ruth Setton

CUT TO: Writing a Movie

FILMSTACK INSPIRATION CHALLENGE // DAY #6

Hello! Welcome…

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8 months ago · 14 likes · 7 comments · Lauren Greenwood

Read more of my shenanigans:

Tip me thru Venmo!:

So, for this challenge, I would like you to share a conversation, an article, a podcast, an interview, or any experience that gave you a redefined insight - and therefore a renewed appreciation of a film.

This could be as fundamental as completely changing your mind about a film you didn’t like on first watch (as I alluded to in the title), or it could be a subtler moment: reading, watching, or discussing something that allowed you to access a different way of thinking about a film, or even about cinema as a whole. It might even be a fleeting spark of perception that made you absolutely have to see a film you were previously indifferent about.

Contrawise

When was the last time someone changed your mind about a film? - FilmStack Challenge #5

Welcome friends…

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9 months ago · 20 likes · 3 comments · Dario Llinares

Sadly, though I have had my opinions shift on various films over time, I had a hard time thinking of precise people-changing-minds moments, particularly my self-imposed listicle set-of-5 moments.

But what Dario’s challenge did make me think about is how my relationship to horror film has changed over time, usually incited by someone close to me. In reading this story you’ll begin to see why horror movies are important to me.

“I Can’t Handle Horror”

It’s important to start with the fact that my family did not watch horror movies. My mother refused, having many personal stories of horror sticking with her and causing nightmares for weeks. My sister seemed to inherit that sensitivity: when a friend of hers showed her a horror movie during a sleepover, my sister had to go home, kept waking up screaming, and that was that. I have no idea what my Dad’s opinion on horror was, but he simply didn’t watch any the same way he’d watch action or sci fi movies after we went to sleep.

So there were no horror movies around the house, and we never rented them, and any time horror film was spoken about, it was as something not welcome.1 The horror section of the video rental store was a blind spot, a simple waste of space my family and I passed that I wasn’t even curious about.

Staring Down Anxiety — My First Horror Phase

I am going to give the credit to my friend Troy.

During my late elementary school and middle school years, Troy was my best friend. I’d have sleepovers at his house, where he had cable television, and he was already a fan of a variety of horror material.

At Troy’s house I watched the easy things like Are You Afraid of the Dark? , the sillier Stephen King adaptations like Christine and Cujo, and no end of late night trash off of The SciFi Network2. I even once caught a glimpse of Killer Klowns from Outer Space before Troy hissed and quickly changed the channel — Troy was afraid of clowns.

One of those nights, Troy was flipping channels and landed on Aliens.

I don’t remember how much of it we watched. The movie was advanced enough that I definitely remember the sensors blaring as the xenomorphs approach, and then the dawning realization of the crew that they are inside the vents.

What I do remember is being absolutely rigid frozen not okay upsettingly terrified, and Mom’s voice dancing around my head about how she “can’t handle horror,” and thinking to myself then and there that I am obviously the type who cannot either, and should not watch horror movies. My stomach hurt, sitting through it was torture, my brain seared me with panic that I couldn’t resolve…

but then…

I kept watching.

After seeing Aliens, I had to see Alien. After seeing Alien, I had to see Pumpkinhead.3 After Pumpkinhead I don’t know what happened. Village of the Damned with Christopher Reeve had me jabbering about “creepy children” to my friends for a week. Then I watched a Friday the 13th marathon with my cousin. Then I got into slashers.

Boy, slashers. That was my game, when I was 12. First the Scream movies, then the I Know What You Did Last Summer duology, then the Urban Legend franchise.

I don’t know why I grokked to slashers, but for me they were the ones that were truly scary. Things that could actually happen. Soulless and unconscionable human beings who maliciously wanted to, and cruelly delighted in, killing you. Monsters and ghosts and aliens were okay, I guess, but they weren’t real. Those fucking hulks in masks, stalking panicked teenagers, however….

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It was the slashers that taught me a few things about myself. They taught me to handle fear and anxiety. I’d be watching these movies, that same horrible gut-tensed “rigid frozen not okay upsettingly terrified” feeling washing over my body, but slowly and surely my brain started overriding my body. “You know this is fake,” it’d say. “Breathe, relax. The bad scene is coming now but it’ll happen whether you tense up or not. You’ll get through it.”

I started learning the horror format. “This is the jump scare that is going to be a cat, rat, or boyfriend sneaking up to tease the girl.” “This is going to be the first kill.” “This person probably didn’t actually die.” And the final scare, the part I actually hated and resented about the slashers I was watching, “Yes they all lived happily ever after, now the last shot is going to show the monster bursting back into frame.” Boom, there it was. I always felt it was unfair for the filmmakers to refuse us closure.

But I kept watching, and watching, and watching…

until they weren’t scary anymore.

“Horror’s Stupid.”

Somewhere around the Millennium, watching horror movies became a competition. “No, that one’s not scary.” “You say it’s good, but is it scary?” “I only like the horror movie if the movie is scary.” “There are no more scary horror movies.”

I adapted. Hardcore. By the time They came out in 2002, I was done. Not only did They fail to scare me, I thought it profoundly stupid that characters that were suffering constant night terrors and fear of the dark always lived in this dingy, under-lit apartments. If you’re afraid of the dark, don’t put curtains over your windows!

And that was that. I was over horror. I went to high school. I became goth. I eventually discovered art cinema. And people would recommend me horror movies, and I’d be like, “Nah, I don’t like horror movies unless they scare me, and horror movies aren’t scary.”4

“I’m Prefer Being Disturbed”

A pivotal moment in my life came from a fateful triple feature. I had found a website5 called Ambidextrous Pics, where two “Handsome Dudes” named Matt and Scott wrote reviews of their favorite directors’ filmographies in a hierarchy built around the Greek myths: The Titans, the Olympians, the Demi-Gods, etc.

From their writing I discovered a lot of movies that sounded really, really interesting. I wrote a list. I took that list to my neighborhood local rental store, Mountain Video, run by a woman named Sarah, who had known me from the time I was so small that I refused to rent anything but The Land before Time. I gave the list to Sarah and said, “Hey, these might be really strange or obscure, but do you have any of these?”

Sarah lit up. “I’ve been waiting to recommend you some of this stuff.”

She then went and grabbed Lost Highway and Fight Club from the list6 and then said, “and I’m adding this one too, seems along the line of what you’re looking for,” which was Requiem for a Dream.

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I drove home and watched all three, back to back. I have a whole story about the cadence of this event, the mistakes I made in assuming the next movie would give me relief from the last; and how I finished the lot of them, stumbled downstairs to my mother cooking dinner, proclaimed, “I’m going to be a filmmaker,” and watched her nod and say, “Yeaaahhhh, you’ll probably be a good one.” She didn’t like the sound of those movies at all.

Regardless, that feeling had returned. “Rigid frozen not okay upsettingly terrified disturbed.” “Disturbing movies” became the thing.

This wasn’t horror, but it was horror-adjacent. I quickly learned “psychological thriller” as an easy password to close-enough stuff; but then again, a lot of these movies were, uh, not so psychologically accurate, more like dreamlike, ephemeral. I sunk my teeth into Lynch and Fincher and Aronofsky, sure, and Kubrick and early Nolan and less long-lived movies like One Hour Photo.

Suddenly “horror movies” were even stupider. “Slashers” were just serial killers without any character, empty-faced puzzle pieces for quick kills but no insight or poetry. Ghosts and monsters and aliens weren’t only not even real, they didn’t even look good on camera. But cinema could recreate nightmares like Brazil, or Eraserhead, or Irreversible, or Oldboy.

Demonlover is the peak “I prefer being disturbed”-era Dane flick. I went to see it because my friend Andy was a huge fan of Sonic Youth, and they composed the score. I was only one among about four people at The Guild, the one-screen indie cinema in Albuquerque, NM.

Demonlover fucked me up. The sheer, passionless, flat-affected evil of all the characters, the way the movie implemented the viewer in the blame for all that was going on, the various allusions to global capital flows that damned all of us for the suffering that we saw on screen. Like Village of the Damned, I babbled my friends’ ears off about this movie for weeks. Unlike Village of the Damned, I actually lost sleep over it.

And that, I decided, was the type of movie I wanted to create. I wanted to fuck people up. I wanted people to come away from my movies with “Rigid frozen not okay upsettingly disturbed.” I wanted to make my audience never forgot the way I made them feel.

Cult Horror as Punk Cinema — My Second Horror Phase

A couple of threads came together to change my mind on horror once again. The first was the Millennial zombie trend from about 28 Days Later… through Shaun of the Dead to about World War Z. The other side was Tartan’s Asia Extreme label. Finally, there was my friend Sahra.

Sahra is a supreme horror fan. I don’t have quite the words for the different subtypes of horror fans, but I’d have to let her explain her own relationship to horror. For the intents and purposes of this essay, we connected over Troma, J-Horror, David Cronenberg7 and Re-Animator.

Seeing Re-Animator for the first time was a moment. Sahra excitedly put it on, telling me about how often she watched it and how much she loved it and how much I’ll love it. THAT scene happened, you know, with the head. I turn to give her my best “What the fuck?” side-eye. Her face is drained of color. “I’ve never gotten to this part sober,” she admits.

Anyway, Sahra introduced me to the concept of horror as a playground. A place where it’s okay to be cheap, creative, whimsical, rule-breaking, and purposefully do the things that may seem inappropriate or incorrect. We gorged on cult cinema and so-bad-its-good tales of soaring ambition mismatched with ability.

Similarly, around that time I lived with my friend Andy and we started a “Half-Halloween” event where we watched horror franchises all the way through in April. We started the annual event with the Halloween franchise, and I learned from a special features interview with Moustapha Akkad that “horror is a sense of humor.”

Thus, horror was no longer scary… but it also wasn’t stupid. Horror is a sense of humor. Horror lets you undermine the norms of social propriety.

Horror is punk.

This was my “running around with the woods with drunk friends and a camcorder” period. My D-grade, bad taste era, where Ed Wood, John Waters, and Herschell Gordon Lewis taught the camera work and Lloyd Kaufman and Roger Corman taught the production style.

The era that roughly ended a couple years after college, when Sahra and I sat down to watch a J-Horror movie8, and when she invited her at-the-time boyfriend to watch it with us, he asked, “Does it have rape in it?” “Yeah,” we sheepishly said. “I don’t want to watch it then,” and he went to their bedroom.

We looked at each other and Sahra said, “It’s probably indicates something bad about our viewing habits that he could assume that and be correct. Maybe we watch too much of this stuff.”

And I’ve floated away from the exploitation galaxy ever since.9

“You’re a Horror Guy.”

I entered the film work world. I crewed some features. I made some shorts, narrative and experimental. I worked in Dubai for a couple years, moved to New York City after, got my feet on the ground, worked some more. I made new friends of various interests, had media production jobs of various sub-industries, slowly became more of an editor than a generalist. And I didn’t think of horror much.

For this period of time, horror was mostly about a potential opportunity. Horror was a market, a place where you could cut your teeth and do things cheap and if it didn’t work out, “Haha, it’s a b-movie, we meant it to be like this.” I loved many horror movies, but I didn’t necessarily seek “horror” movies.

My ideas were still inspired mostly by the movies you would call “horror-adjacent.” I got into experimental cinema in college, and my tastes in world cinema expanded too many directions to be dedicated to genre. If anything, I didn’t feel like I had any ideas that would please Horror People enough.10

However, horror seemed to keep coming to me.

In particular, one day I was attending a workshop, and one of the feedbacks I received was, “I mean Dane, after all, you’re a horror guy.”

Am I?

That was interesting.

And so I just started telling people I was a horror guy.

And they never disagreed.

I don’t remember who said that quote, but they definitely framed my mind around how I relate to horror by relating my mind to horror.

“This Movie is So Pretty!” — My Third Horror Phase

Yet there remained the question of what I got out of horror. I like to say I want movies to be experiences, and horror delivers on that promise. But there are many types and sub-genres, sub-industries, and sub-cultures of horror, and over time you learn you can’t just keep up with all of them.

What I vaguely learned over time is that I loved heady cerebral anything and I loved gross icky gooey anything. So Cronenberg showed me the way. Now I wasn’t looking for scary or disturbing but rather “rigid frozen not okay upsettingly visceral.” Visceral was the North Star.

But there was still something, beyond the cults, beyond the format, beyond the jump scares, that I couldn’t put my finger on until I watched Killer Klowns from Outer Space with my then girlfriend now-wife, and the way she described it. She said, “This movie is so pretty!”

Pretty? Big chunky rubber clowns? Who calls them “pretty?”

Well, my wife did, and she’s 100% right. They are pretty. Just look at them:

Look at the colors! Look at the shapes! Look at the textures! Look at the design!

It took me way too long to get around to it, but my wife taught me about horror as an aesthetic. As production design. An opportunity to realize the fantasy without relying on $300million production budgets.

The irony is that I started out liking slashers and not liking monsters and ghosts and aliens. Now I like monsters and ghosts and aliens, and slashers could sure use some more rubber and appendages.

Horror, Anthologized

The irony of the debate about horror, not horror, what is horror, what is horror-adjacent, how well horror does at the box office, how horror is trending (or perhaps that trend is ending), is that when you’ve watched enough horror movies, art movies, dark animations, cerebral science fictions, uncomfortable experimental works, depressing and disturbing and off-putting thematic movies, graphic violence and bullet balletic action movies, that over time you learn that horror storytelling is just… storytelling.

There’s no such thing as “horror” that doesn’t really follow the beats and processes of drama, comedy, adventure, magical realism, whatever.

The Toy Story series is for children, and yet infamously has some of the most horrific imagery ever set on screen:

But horror enables you to go wild and push all of those story types to their extremes. If the story arc is going to send the character into the dark night of the soul, horror blackens the night and damns the soul.11

That’s why the bulk of short film productions I’ve made in the subsequent years have been horror, from my uncanny ambient narratives to my glitchy experimental works to traditional narratives like In the Bowels of the Building and my upcoming short film Shroomery, currently in post-production.

To sum up:

horror helps you face your anxiety (when I was a kid).

Horror let’s you test your limits (when I was a teenager).

Horror gives you freedom and opportunity (when I was a young adult).

Horror gives you something to identify with (when I started my career).

Horror gives you permission (now).

There’s always been a third rail of darkness operating in my psyche, a preference for the morbid, the minor key, the Gothic, and the challenging. The horror genre danced around this relationship in various ways over the years. It will continue to do so, and my relationship to it will continue to change.

In the meantime, I have monsters to build and cerebral shadows to get tangled in.

Previous FilmStack Challenges:

To watch some of my own movies:

Monday and Tuesday were my days for shooting and editing the video I was putting together for this STSC Symposium. The video’s working title is Heat Wave. I am making a movie about a heat wave.

I was making it during a heat wave.

I think it’s gonna turn out to be a pretty rad video. Look at this still I grabbed from it:

This image is overexposed, and I couldn’t be happier with how it looks. I had a decision to make between purposefully over-exposing the shots in-camera, or pushing the whites in post. I decided to do the risk of the in-camera effects, and the shots came out exactly how I wanted.

In fact, many shots are “underexposed” relative to what I was trying to do, because I was worried about overdoing it and pulled back. Those pulled-back shots I tested by pushing the whites and pulling the blacks, and with a bit of color correction they can match the other shots.

I’m proud of the intuition I held while shooting this short. I’m going for something aesthetically ugly, so the ‘mistakes’ have to look right — they have to be the correct mistakes. In the past I would have needed a couple of camera tests, but for this I snapped on the 24mm lens, threw a frost filter over it, put the picture profile to ‘Clear’ (this adds contrast and clarity at the expense of roll-off and saturation, but I don’t want the saturation and the frost fixes the roll-off), and trooped around LIC grabbing angles I liked without having any good way to view it in the brightness and heat. Still I got the shots.

So the first layer of imagery works. There’s a second layer I need to build that is going to look something like a vignette, but animated. It is supposed to represent cataracts.

And there’s the story. Heat Wave is about a former surfer who had an accident that nearly blinded him, after which he started to have paranoid attacks that microscopic imps that live in light beams are attacking his vision, and that there is a conspiracy by the wealthy and powerful to feed the imps by baking the streets with light from the glass towers they build.

Obviously, you’re not viewing that very video right now because something went wrong.

As of writing, I can’t get the Premiere timeline to playback (and no, please don’t send me suggestions to fix it. Clear cache, restart computer, update Premiere, toggle GPU encoding, copy the project assets into a new project file, yadda yadda. I tend to be the guy people come to with these issues). I think it has to do with the audio VO file being corrupted, and I’ll just recompress it. I’ll figure it out in another editing session or two, but I won’t have the video done in time for the Symposium, so you get this update instead.

However, it’s not sufficient for me to merely send an apologia for unfinished work and grin and say, “See? Metanarrative! Still delivered a, uh, Summer theme. Uh, like as ‘Summer Break.’ Haha. My laptop and me took a break!” I had to think about what to give the Symposium instead, and I considered a few things like reworking the video’s narration into a short story (not medium appropriate), writing a poem? (don’t like idea of pretending a poem is a one-off quick fix solution for missing projects), writing a poem about an overheated computer?? (meta, haha), or writing a new short story, which my brain, as overheated as my computer, stolidly refused as an option (I can’t argue with my brain. It always knows what I’m thinking, and can’t see the flaws in its own thinking).

Instead, in the spirit of the topic of Summer and grabbing onto the meta-haha of Summer break, there is something, haha, about my creative workload right now, haha, that feels broken.

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This edition talks a bit more about travel and covers, but also cancel culture and where to find Pynchon adjacent lit.

To catch up on previous Pynchon dailies, start here:

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Day 50 of new Pynchon novel, the “Baedeker world” I mentioned yesterday was described in V.

... there remains a grand joke on all visitors to Baedeker's world: the permanent residents are actually humans in disguise.

~~Thomas Pynchon, V., p.78

Today we could switch "Baedeker's world" as "Instagrammers' travel posts."

That said, I inherited a lot of that “travel like the locals” guff from my sister and mother, the tourist’s paranoia of getting caught in the embarrassing position of looking at a map, and as I’m getting older I’m starting to reject the other side as well. The “humans in disguise” are quite often living in their beautiful, historic, often seaside locations spending their days doing things like going to the office or cleaning their house. You don’t want to spend a day in Paris with a Parisian, they’ll take you grocery shopping; and they don't live in Montmartre, they live in Cergy.

Baedeker world is fine, it’s not the worst place to be. At heart I feel most tourists come to a place with genuine curiosity about different cultures with different stories. They just can’t help bringing some of themselves with them and leaving it behind, so the problem of over-tourism is the flattening of culture: “Starbucks on every corner” &c against a minstrelized backdrop of “authentic experience.”

But listen, let’s have some appreciation for the much frowned-upon minstrel show: it’s court theatre. You’re there to hear a story, why do you complain that the performers don’t actually dress like their characters after they clock off at night?

I thought about this a lot while in Boston relearning my embedded American mythos next to my wife, who did not know who Paul Revere was or heard of the Battle of Bunker Hill, nor even the phrase “…until you see the whites of their eyes!”; and I had been thinking about it when we were in Costa Rica earlier this year, travelling exclusively with tour guided companies who nevertheless pointed out the endless rows of palm oil trees and discussed the political and economic conflicts behind them and drew attention to the apparently largely Nicaraguan worker base that risk their lives sawing the fruits down. It’s like watching news or movies or reading a book set in the time and place or whatever: no shit tourism’s “not real,” but it’s a narrative, there are some facts and many interpretations, it’s on you to do your own critical thinking.

Anyway I’m under the impression that despite Pynchon’s jokes, he collected Baedeker guide books and used them as research materials to help describe the places he wrote about but didn’t visit himself. Apparently there’s a subculture dedicated to collecting Baedeker, which I guess had arguably deeper dives than anything you'd find these days from the likes of Lonely Planet, Fodors, or Rick Steves.

Day 51 of new Pynchon novel, sometimes I think not enough is made about his time in the Navy.

I’m under the impression he wasn't in long, and didn't do much, but if there is one major effect being a sailor had in him, it’s his general sailor humor.

In fact my second read of Gravity’s Rainbow, the one I didn't finish because I gave it to a friend, I realized one way his voice could be described as listening to a drunken old sailor at the end of a bar wind off on some of his favorite yarns he may have told so many times they’d begin to get pushed a little past the point of exaggeration. “Yeah yeah yeah, that time you were on leave in London. What’s that? A giant adenoid? You’ve gone daft, old man.”

Pynchon the Sailor Man is most apparent in V., which is like a college graduate written novel about being let out of college and feeling directionless, but in this case the Navy. It has an interesting spiritual connection to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s long short story May Day, if you’ve ever read it.

Day 52 of new Pynchon novel, how has he never been cancelled?

We’re talking from either end of the censorial spectrum. Graphic sex, language, antireligious themes, anticapitalist themes to offend the American right. Abused women, ribald racial tension sequences, filthy sailor lewdness to offend the American left. A personal history of sleeping with his friends’ wives. He could’ve gotten himself fingered for moral outrage at some point.

I guess it’s just a mix of obscurity and density. To censor a thing, someone needs to read it and get offended (only one; the movement to censor a thing rarely involves the advocates actually reading it, they just need to hear from someone who found the offensive text, whether a passage or more). Good luck, I guess, with that, when the book is famously difficult to parse.

Interestingly enough I once read an article by a progressive woman who said Pynchon is a model for how a white, male writer can contend with colonialist history. She pointed to V.’s descriptions of the Herrero genocide to show how white writers can be honest about such events from their perspective, and not try to appropriate the story by trying to write from the Herrero perspective and thus indulging in heroic victim narratives.

All of the last paragraph if I recall / understood correctly, because I did read it only once, almost a decade ago, and have no hope of finding it now. One warning about your think pieces: they disappear quickly. Whereas print books have a tendency to stick around.

Day 53 of new Pynchon novel, talking about cancellation, I think there’s a variety of ways literature gets away with stuff that would be a bit much in movies, and in Pynchon’s case the movie could particularly come across as being pornographic, but also there’s situations like:

the Paola Maijstral / Ruby situation in V.

If someone else adapted V. and didn’t feature the Paola Maijstral / Ruby subplot, I’d be disappointed in their cowardice. But on the other hand, if I adapted it, I’d have a really hard time doing it myself.

See, the thing is, Paola Maijstral, a Maltese woman in love with Benny Profane, puts on blackface to become a hooker in Harlem named Ruby.

It’s not just the blackface but a white woman connecting prostitution to a black body that’s likely to drive audiences hot piping mad.

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But it’s all in accordance to V.’s general theme about identity and (largely female) desire. The book similarly goes off plastic surgeon Dr. Schoenmaker’s quipy musings about how Jewish women getting nosejobs are an intergenerational guarantee of demand for his line of work, Rachel riding a gearshift, and V herself as object of desire literally objectified into a cyborg loss of her own humanity.

But I think actually finding the actors willing to deal with blackface prostitution and producers willing to greenlight it would be very, very difficult these days, regardless of heady thinky “desire and identity” justifications.

Day 54 of new Pynchon novel, if you really want moar, you can always read William Gaddis and Richard Fariña (sadly only his one book).

Somehow I found The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen in connection with Pynchon. Looking it up again it may have just been a reddit thread, “What else do you read if you like…”. I don't recall there being an actual connection between the world.

But The Journal of Albion Moonlight is highly recommended. Dour, dark, graphic, and disturbing. Sheer nightmare id. It starts with a dead angel being raped and gets worse from there. Read if you’re willing to lose sleep for a few days.

There are some other midcentury postmodernists Pynchon gets grouped with of varying qualities. Personally I don’t care much for William Gass, and I respect but did not really hit with Donald Barthelme. I think I need a revisit, I found his work through McSweeneys.

Then there are the inheritors, so to speak, the David Foster Wallaces and Neal Stephensons and Mark Z Danielewskis. I enjoy all of them but I feel the closest in headiness rather than pomp is David Mitchell, actually. I’d say each David Mitchell book is like one section of Pynchon’s four section books. Compress four David Mitchell books into one and add more jokes, and you got yourself a new Pynchon book.

Day 55 of new Pynchon novel, look at this, Pablo Andreu launched his new (second) publication Queryous with a write-up about the Pynchon dailies!:

Queryous

The Rankification of Art

We rate everything…

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a year ago · 2 likes · Pablo Andreu

When Shadow Ticket drops, I won’t be swayed by ratings or where the book ranks within the author’s oeuvre. Instead, I’ll pay attention to people like Dane, who don’t take shortcuts and don’t hide behind tidy numbers, and who aren’t afraid to show great, big, unabashed enthusiasm. Too many cool-kid critics out there.

Ultimately, I’ll have to decide what Pynchon’s writing means to me, but however I feel, I won’t be assigning a number. I’d much rather talk to Dane.

Which all feels great except now it probably guarantees that Shadow Ticket will suck. Nothing better than selling people on unabashed enthusiasm to raise the chances of the work disappointing.

But less ironically, I wholeheartedly endorse Pablo’s message about the rankification of art (“rank,” after all, means the food has gone bad). I stopped writing reviews and assigning ratings about fifteen or more years ago, when I found myself stretching for ways to say witty or unique things about movies or books I really didn’t have anything good or bad to say about.

On my Substack proper, I have Movie Recommendations, which happen only as often as I finish a movie and absolutely loved it and want everyone to watch it. Actually I post them less often than that — they happen everytime I'm really excited by a movie AND have the time to write out a few paragraphs telling people about it.

I also avoid saying negative things about movies I dislike online for three reasons: 1) I work in the industry and don’t want to make enemies; 2) almost all movies I watch are independent, foreign, or original concept studio films, which have enough trouble existing I’d rather not criticize them even if the effort didn’t pay off; 3) hate posting about a thing tends to devolve into showcases of wit, which then influence people to participate in the thing. The truly worst thing you can do to a work of art is ignore it.

Day 56 of new Pynchon novel, David Lynch's estate auction has been going around Notes, and I couldn't help but notice The Crying of Lot 49 in one of its lots of books.

It looks like the same edition I have. That’s neat.

You know, I normally don’t respond much to celebrity deaths. So many people close to me in my own life have died that it doesn’t feel like a stranger affects me as much. But David Bowie’s death back in 2016 affected me very much, which surprised me. Thinking it through, I realized that it was because I assumed I’d continue to get good music from him for another decade or so. His death left a hole because I sincerely expected more art in the world that would never be fulfilled.

Lynch’s death was similar, except I was more prepared for it. There had been too many retrospectives, too much made about his biography / memoir Room to Dream. I realized about a year before he died that people were expecting it.

On the other hand, I did hope for one more from him. Purportedly he was working on a movie called Unrecorded Night that would have been nice to receive. There was always his musical or short film or experimental video drops. And US society has done him dirty by rarely if ever showcasing his art.

I like to joke that when Pynchon dies, I’ll have to take off a week in grief. But to be perfectly honest, Shadow Ticket comes as a nice surprise, like a bonus book, and I wasn’t expecting more from him. Dude is old. I’ve been expecting news of his death for like a decade now.

I’m not into posthumous releases unless I’m under the impression the thing was actually finished. I’m sure Jennifer Lynch, for instance, could set about finishing Unrecorded Night, or Melanie Jackson could help finalize whatever Ruggles may be tinkering with. But I don’t like it. I prefer the artist concent to the release of their work such that it conforms to their vision of it.

Would I read a posthumously published Pynchon novel? I’m not yet sure. I guess it depends on knowing how complete it was, and whether he signed off on it. I feel like he’s one author I could learn something or enjoy seeing his sketches and discards.

That said, the Morgan Library in Manhattan has his letters to his first agent and the Huntington Library has his archives, which should be released upon his death, do maybe there’ll be some “Letters of Thomas Pynchon” books or something that will come out.

That is, of course, assuming they're actually interesting. I’m sure they offer a few good jokes.

Day 57 of new Pynchon novel, I saw this really cute cover of The Hobbit, and it reminded me of how my neighbor Gary used to collect Lord of the Rings things. He had movie merch, recreations of the various swords and Sting, the type of stuff like collectible McDonalds cups and whathaveyou. He also had, and this confused me at the time, nearly an entire bookshelf full of various editions of Lord of the Rings (and The Silmarillian, and a children’s book / poem about Tom Bombadil, &c.)

Now, clearly Pynchon's work doesn’t come with a lot of gack. But I could see collecting the various editions. I almost felt like starting a collection when I discovered the cool V. covers from like two weeks back. I do have two editions of Gravity’s Rainbow, and one of them, the Bantam paperback edition, is full of typos. So it would be interesting to compare across the editions for changes and errors, as well (I also wrote marginalia in the Bantam copy; I also have two copies of House of Leaves and one is kept clean while the other I write over).

You can tell Pynchon’s books are considered collectible, particularly first editions. I went to a rare book fair a few years ago and practically half the sellers had either a first edition V. or first edition Gravity’s Rainbow. In fact it begs the question if those books are really worth hundreds of dollars if they’re so common; I saw only one copy of Rage there (written by Stephen King as Richard Bachman, a book he famously let go out of print) and it was also a few hundred bucks.

I don't really understand the rare book world, though.

Now one interesting thing I once saw, a friend of my mother’s learned I was into Pynchon and showed me these military distributed prints of his short stories that he had. They’re formatted in a way to be easy to carry so that the soldiers have something to read when on tour. Those would be cool to have around.

Regardless, even if I had the money and the space, I don't think I’d follow through with creating a Pynchon collection. Actually as far as ephemeral texts go, I’m into Chicago and New York World Fair stuff. I’d splurge on more of that if I had the capacity.

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During this block I talked a lot about Chris Marker, postmodern politics, and travel.

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Day 42 of new Pynchon novel, so talking about discarded branches of history, I feel a lot of my attraction to Pynchon’s work comes from the same place as my attraction to Chris Marker’s work. Both have subversive, surreal, and cerebral sensibilities.

And both are disenchanted leftists, though of different sorts. For one thing, Pynchon’s ironic detachment seemed to come early; Marker worked in utopic media before discovering its failures for himself. The other is that Marker’s leftism started from a more Marxist center, whereas Pynchon’s was more preterite: Bakunin, who was forced out of the mainstream debate by Marx himself along with the typical roster of powers-that-be.

Here is a good place to discuss the concept of postmodernism in the sense of art that concerns itself with the postmodern condition, versus say art that attempts to ‘be’ postmodern or create a postmodern dialectic (guys I physically gagged typing that word):

The postmodern condition was the result of the failures of modernism to cohere to, let’s say, Hegelian linear history sort of results. An oversimplified way of thinking of modernism is that it builds the concept of a thing as being inherently founded in an essential form: “the story of history is the progression of revolutions, leading ultimately to the ownership of capital by labor” say, or Freudian “consciousness is made out of the ego, superego, and id,” or painters increasingly concerning themselves with essential forms, colors, and compositions. All very Platonic, all very idealistic.

All very fragile against the complexities of pretty much every level of human cognition and social cohesion.

At its most reactionary, postmodernism throws in the towel: if history isn’t the linear progression of revolutions, then there is no history! If there’s no basic form that explains yourself entirely, then there’s no inherent meaning in any visual forms! If there’s no basis to signs decisively chaining them to their appropriate signifiers, then language is arbitrary! (And implied or directly stated in a lot of this is that it’s the capitalists’ fault by purposefully reducing sign and signifier to exclusively what can be commercialized and sold.)

But that type of postmodernism is mostly academic, and mostly dull. Postmodernism shouldn’t be so easily dismissed, because in where an artist or thinker contends with the limits of sign and signifier to directly correlate, enjoys tinkering with the limits of language and communication and our collective cognitive dissonances, understands the cybernetic relationship between our media and our cognition, and has seen the seeds of failure of any modernist track within its own manifesto, above all has a wit about them regarding the world of appearances and what weirdo shit lies beneath the veneer, then you have an artist who confronts you with your own biases and values with a wry smile and a dire warning that you’re bound to be, at best, disappointed.

So, like, I’m no Marxist or anarchist. However, watching the right wing develop a MAGA post-modernism to match the academic leftist post-modernism while liberal democrats peer into the end of the End of History with a sort of horrified bemusement completely lacking the language to express what monsters, exactly, here be the times of, it’s worth looking at these disappointed leftists once again and grokking their cope. There’s some useful mental and moral reckoning behind the philosophical self-flagellation there, should you choose to accept it.

And above all, they bring great puns. Boy, do the best postmodernists know how to turn a symbol on its head.

Day 43 of new Pynchon novel, when I started rereading his books methodically I found a very useful resource for annotations, pynchonwiki.com . It’s run by the same guy who runs thomaspynchon.com and was launched after the release of Against the Day.

My midlife reread process is the second read through, I look everything I don’t know up and read the book very carefully. That’s how I found this site, and after awhile I just opened up it's book page while starting a second or sometimes third read of whichever Pynchon novel I was on.

I’m curious how quickly it will update for Shadow Ticket, or if it will at all. Or if it will continue after the owner, Tim Ware, passes, and who would inherit it. To think about, this has been around already for 20 years. A piece of Internet ephemera, I fear doomed one day to the Wayback Machine, which itself is highly glitchy and I think doomed long term.

Imagine asking ChatGPT for explanations of Pynchon’s references… sheesh. How could you tell when it’s hallucinating?

I also read Harry Potter in Spanish with a translation app open, so of late I’ve actually become pretty comfortable with “second screen” reading in a way I don’t think people should quickly dismiss. I actually wonder what people did with Pynchon books beforehand, either encyclopedias on the standby or just winging it, I suppose. Which is valid.

I know that there was a book of annotations published for Gravity’s Rainbow I intended to buy back in the day. Admittedly, PynchonWiki sort of ended that desire.

Holy shit… while writing this out this morning, I found it. I found the Warhol banana Gravity’s Rainbow cover. It was for Steven C. Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion.

Day 44 of new Pynchon novel, I’ve spent a lot of time talking up ways of thinking of adaptation, favorite works, why I like his work, how he inspires me and other writers, &c., but admittedly, I’m not interested in making Pynchonesque (Pynchonian? Pynchonic?) work. I’m not particularly interested in telling his stories, or telling my stories in his style.

Part of it is just the sheer uniqueness. You can’t write the things that Pynchon does without having his specific interests (and personality).

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I feel like a lot of people become interested in the things Pynchon is interested in through Pynchon’s work, and then feel like making something about those interests, but that’s not the same thing as generating new work from their own interests. Again, that’s what makes Against the Day so special for me, it actually was about some of my previously-existing interests: the 1893 Chicago World Exposition, the folk history of anarchist dynamiting in Colorado, Nikolai Tesla (who everyone was interested in back in 2006), eldritch horror, steampunk airships, and speculative digressions into hollow Earths.

But and also however anyway, I do pick up things from writers like any other sort of mimetic creature, but I’m also not particularly interested in mimicking his style. There’s a lot to learn from his craft but not a lot that’s imitable.

I will say that Pynchon cited as a comparison in a book blurb is typically a fairly good indication that the book will either be a systems novel or richly, perhaps even Baroquely, detailed. And, hopefully, funny. I can’t say that any book described as “like Pynchon and…” or “like if Pynchon ….” ever really struck me as Pynchonesque, but the worst they’ve been is interesting.

However, I honestly can’t say I can think of any other author who writes remotely like him. He just stands alone. I think writers want to stand alone like that, but that’s not something you can plan.

I’m a huge believer in craft and learning and improving, but talent can’t be manufactured. Thus trying to be like any other talent is going to destroy your own.

Day 45 of new Pynchon novel, how close to release does a cover typically drop?

Was really hoping to geek out on the cover of Shadow Ticket by now, though if I wanted to go crazy I suppose I could try to really do some paranoid media deep read of the synopsis or something. “Prohibition Era…? Pynchon's contending with our national drunkenness and the War on Drugs….”1

Day 46 of new Pynchon novel, I was lamenting to my wife one day that he could die pretty much any day now, and she responded

“Pynchon isn’t real, it’s just a pen name a bunch of books agents and editors use to publish the sort of books they want to see in the world.”

Reader, I love her.

Day 47 of new Pynchon novel, I'm in Boston currently so can live the Kit Traverse life for a bit (especially tomorrow taking some ferries) but no, I will not be trying to recreate Slothrop’s toilet scene.

Day 48 of new Pynchon novel, I am heading to Salem, which brings back a scene I’ve mentioned a few times in these Notes, when Slothrop dances with the Bavarian witch Geli Tripping (name a reference to Gilbert & Sullivan, “gaily tripping, lightly skipping, flock the maidens to the shipping” as well as inferring psychedelics) on the top of a mountain, their shadows cast by the sunset extending their reach over the German forest. It was one of the first read-through moments where Pynchon's writing switched mode from mechanics to beauty.

Later I figured out the magic vs modernity theme of Pynchon, where the old magics were carved out of the earth with the whittle of industrialization. Ironic then that Geli is the lover of Tchitcherine, a Soviet soldier that precedes Darth Vader in cyborg status of becoming “more machine than man.” In this scene they dance upon a rift literally called “The Broken,” referring both to the immediate post-war aftermath and to what we’ve done with the world.

Anyway, if I recall correctly there is some references to Salem in both Gravity’s Rainbow and Msson & Dixon, but for such a Pynchonian event the trials themselves are perhaps too mainstream. However I feel s lot of kinship between Pynchon and Nathaniel Hawthorne re: contending with that particular wound of history, though Hawthorne had a forebearer involved so took it more personally.

By the way, Hawthorne was one of my favorite authors in high school.

Day 49 of new Pynchon novel, a Facebook post I wrote in September, 2020:

In Coréens, Chris Marker observes that there are different ways of travelling: 'the Barnabooth way, the Genghis Khan way, and the Plume way.' In other words, those of the gentleman travellers, the conquerer and the one who humbly accepts the random upheavals of the journey. Marker writes that his own preferred method is to submit, Plume-like, to the haphazard events that befall him: 'to accept in their disorder the rhythms, waves, shocks, all the buffers of memory, its meteors and dragnets.' This approach is reflected in the aleatory character of Marker's travelogues, which flit spontaneously from one fact or observation to another, without attempting an ordinary narrative account of the place being visited. The intensely personal quality of Marker's response to other countries brings out the subjective, imaginative dimensions of travel, captured in the Romantic poets Gérard de Nerval's famous maxim that the purpose to travel is 'to verify one's dreams.'

--Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, p.43-44.

At nearly the same time Thomas Pynchon writes about the fourth way, now world dominant, known as Baedeker-land: the commercial and consumer class world of tourists and expats that has increasingly become a lifestyle magazine industry. These differ from the Barnabooths because the Barnabooths became what The Economist dubbed "Davos Man," the globe trotting transnationals that effectively founded a borderless meta-nation of their own, for which geography is roughly beside the point. They differ from Ghengis Khan because they swapped resource extraction with wage service industry. It's not enough to call them post-modern Khans because real Khans still exist.

Most Baedeker-land travelers think they're Plume travelers, but their strange gravitational attraction to beaches and scheduled, blocked out festivals betrays them.

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For this month's challenge, I've been thinking a lot about sound in film.

For this challenge, you can choose to share either your favorite needle drops, composers, themes, monologues, usage of voice-over narration, or directors who use soundtracks to further their storytelling. Expand upon how these key moments of sound usage helped to shape a scene or contributed to the emotions you had while watching it.

I’m artificially keeping this list to 5 selections, because the previous challenges were 5 and because I need a place to stop with these sorts of lists or else I’ll never finish writing.

As it turns out I’ve been looking critically at sound design a lot over the last year. Earlier on in my film career I didn’t want anything to do with the sound department — it wasn’t that I didn’t think it was important, I learned the elder knowledge that sound is (more than) 50% of the movie. It’s because I didn’t feel capable of expanding into it with so many other technical investments in mind. I thought it would be better to focus on the stuff I had good command over, and hire or collaborate with sound people to really do the rest.

However, I now regret that decision and have been working on projects to learn more, as well as studying the theory more, as well as been listening more to movies to try to parse the sound design decisions and how they affect the story, tone, and how we perceive the imagery on-screen. I’ve been experimenting with sound design in my own movies and am currently developing a project to print two short stories to vinyl with voice actors and sound design.

As I’ve developed as a filmmaker, I’ve discovered that the ideas, the scenes, and moments that I imagine in my mind are accompanied with sounds… and the problem is that it’s really difficult to communicate what those sounds are, much less create them as waveforms from scratch. I’m hoping technical sound design and some amount of music theory knowledge should help, but in the meantime I’m learning how to create foley and work with canned sounds to make a full experience out of the flickering images that pass our eyes.

Here’s 5 movies that important to study if you want to learn about sound design:

Blackmail (1929) — dir. Alfred Hitchcock, sound editor Harry Miller (uncredited)

I could have started with The Jazz Singer (1927) as the first synchronized soundtrack1 movie, but Hitchcock’s first synchronized sound movie is really important because he locked in very early on how sound can affect perception. The Jazz Singer invented talkies but Blackmail invented sound design.

It’s all about the birds. 34 years before Hitchcock released The Birds, he already showed his fear of them. In the sound version of Blackmail,2 several sequences raise tension not with a bombastic score but with the levels amping up over birdsong.

In one particularly memorable scene, Alice is alone in a room, fretting over getting caught killing the man who attempted to rape her, and the soundtrack is overloaded with sharp, screeching birds. The emptiness of the room contrasts with the fullness of the birdsong, making Alice feel both completely alone… and surveilled.

Birds as harbingers of doom continued throughout Hitchcock’s filmography, from the stuffed birds in Norman Bates’ office through the titular and numinous entities of Birds, which itself adapted the chirps and clucks and other rustling sounds to create almost abstract, ambient soundscapes of eeriness so famous that the Simpson’s referenced it in “The Longest Daycare.” But Blackmail was an early movie where Hitchcock’s ornithophobia had not yet been established, and there was nothing about birds specifically stated in the plot of the story, so the mental connection Hitchcock was running between ambient birdsong and terror was entirely poetic. For a first sound film, it shows an incredible leap of faith in the audience’s ability to interpret a sound device and how to manipulate their perception.

In a dinner sequence, subjective sound design is used with Hitchcock’s smirking dark humor. As Alice enters the shop she works at, she overhears a female customer discussing the murder. Every time the woman says the word “knife”, the word gets louder and louder as the woman’s other dialog fades away, until all Alice hears is a brittle, demanding, “Knife! Knife! KNIFE!!”

Early sound films in general are useful to watch for their stripped down, no-nonsense sound design: a ripping canvas is a ripping canvas, a car horn is a car horn, a song a song. Sound ruined cinema for a good portion of the 30s, constricting camera and actor movements and struggling with coherence and clarity, as well as it’s own sync. It’s amazing that before those issues became cliche, Hitchcock was on top of it and asking how not only to make sound work, but make it expand cinema.

Blackmail, by the way, is public domain, and you can watch it here.

The Conversation (1974) — dir. Francis Ford Coppola, sound design Walter Murch (uncredited)

We skip ahead. Way way ahead. We have a lot of territory to cover in just 5 brief selections. But let’s just say that after the ‘30s, sound design iterated in quality and complexity until The Conversation arrived and introduced what we consider to be modern sound design.

The Conversation is a story that investigates the concept of recordings. It’s a haunted movie, in both the moral and the hauntological sense. The main character, Harry Caul, runs a surveillance business and lives a controlled, solitary life. In sound design we talk about finding “the isolated audio of…” a subject, and Harry is all about isolating things to find their meaning… isolating the audio from a busy Union Square to find what a young couple are talking about, isolating himself from the world to keep control of his own life, and isolating the moral consequences of his business from himself.

But as that isolation breaks down and the consequences start to come to light, and as his business partner Stan gets pushier about getting him out of his house, Harry becomes fixated on the danger he may have created for the young couple and finds himself delving even deeper into the audio recordings he made to find a way to save them.

It’s a paranoid thriller, a favorite genre of the 1970s, that stands out for the way we watch Harry pull apart soundwave after soundwave looking for meaning, and instead burying himself further into noise. Many of the editing techniques and mixing Murch used were quickly adapted by other sound designers, and sound design has chased The Conversation ever since.

Blue Velvet (1986) — dir. David Lynch, sound design by Alan Splet

I started thinking about sound design in a different way when I read Room to Dream last year and revisited Lynch’s movies in tandem. What I discovered from that career review was how significant Alan Splet was to Lynch’s overall quality of work, to the degree that I question if Lynch’s work would have been as successful without him.

Splet was introduced to Lynch early on through the AFI program that Lynch used to produce Eraserhead. Splet was an at-the-time experimental sound designer and vibed well with Lynch’s experimental flourishes, and the two of them worked side-by-side in creating the chaotic industrial soundscape of the Eraserhead world while Splet taught Lynch a lot of techniques on how to get natural wind tunnel, electrical snaps and drones, and reverb effects. Their collaboration carried over to Lynch’s next two films, at which point Splet split with Lynch during Blue Velvet: it affected him too much. “I can’t stand Frank,” Lynch claims Splet said, “I won’t spend any more time with him.” After this point Lynch became his own sound designer, carrying through to Twin Peaks: the Return.

Obviously I could say Eraserhead is the movie to watch, but because it’s so graphically nightmarish to match its sonic nightmarishness, it’s easy to get mixed up on where you’re responding to the sound and where you’re responding to the image. The Elephant Man also has this issue via its somewhat gaspunk, retro black-and-white grainy cinematography.

Blue Velvet is the one to study for sound design, because, meaningfully, if you split the sound design from the image, I think you’ll find the movie functions very differently.

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I discovered as I watched along Lynch’s filmography that some of his scenes aren’t actually as weird as you remember. Sometimes they can be outright goofy, or play like soap operas or worse, except that the sound design elevates them — camp becomes absurdist wink, soap operatic wailing becomes disturbing mental breakdowns, even something like a wall or a little gadget feels distressing because of a grinding subwoofer drone laid underneath.

You see that in Blue Velvet when Jeffrey collapses on top of Dorothy over a raging hiss, or a police radio chirps underneath the coat of an immobile standing corpse, or the ambient roomtone clears out when Frank first appears. Whether adding or reducing sound, Lynch and Splet are dramatically altering the feelscape of Blue Velvet from the campy boy caper it’s sometimes written as to a full blown thriller to hold up the strength of Dennis Hopper’s deranged performance.

Without the sound design, Blue Velvet would be an infamous flop. I would also suggest that you can actually tell which scenes Splet wasn’t around to work on, the same way you can tell when Mulholland Dr. switched from a television pilot to a feature film. It’s just a half-stop tonal difference, whenever the movie gets goofier or the sound design more obvious.

It’s also when Lynch started collaborating with Angelo Badalamenti to score what he needed to create his audio experiences. According to Room to Dream, an early request he made of Badalamenti was to provide ‘kindling’, synth tracks to lay under scenes to create certain moods, which basically was Lynch re-inventing music beds in his own quirky nomenclature. “Like starting a fire with,” he explained.

Upstream Color (2013) — dir., composing, and sound design by Shane Carruth

Every now and then you get a director like John Carpenter who is also a musician and scores his own movies, but Carruth is an absolute nutjob who manages to make the flex also an intricate and irreplaceable part of the narrative.

Upstream Color is a $50k movie that Carruth almost killed himself making, as he was trying to edit and shoot in tandem to the point where he was sometimes only getting an hour or two of sleep per day. He eventually accepted indie director / editor David Lowery’s offer to help out on the edit, but the point is that this is the type of movie where all parts were handled not only aesthetically but technically by the filmmaker, and that includes not only the sound design, but how the sound was a feature of the writing.

The story follows a couple, Kris and Jeff, both of whom are recovering from identity theft that was executed via mind-control worms, who have found each other and seem to have other strange parallels to each other in mood and movement. As they rebuild their lives and try to resolve their shared trauma, they eventually began to investigate upstream of the mindcrime, eventually leading them to a pig farmer with some strangely familiar swine.

Integral to that investigation is the pig farmer’s hobby as a field recordist / ambient musician. You not only get to see the farmer explore nearby woods and streams, finding interesting sounds and recording them, you get to see him process them bit by bit into notes and tones and eventually mix them into music. Kris and Jeff find that music, and through immersing themselves in it are able to transcend space and time to see the pig farmer himself, as well as deconstruct its various field recordings into separate landmarks that help them trace his movements.

That music, of course, is the score of the movie. So the sounds of the movie become the diegetic thread of clues of the plot which also underscore the emotional tone and cognitive space of the characters.

There’s a lot of other ways in which music and sound design within the movie bring characters together or initiate movement of them, but to describe all of them would require a detailed scene-by-scene breakdown. At any rate Upstream Color is sort of like a reverse The Conversation, where the surveilled couple investigate the waveforms in order to hunt down the spy.

Piaffe (2022) — dir. Ann Oren, sound design by Robert Hefter & Jonas Vicent

The word “foley” comes from sound effects artist Jack Foley, and by any rights one of his works should be here. But which one? This movie, Piaffe, is topically about foley artistry, and in this case combines it with the ASMR trend of social media video for a wholly different experience. It’s the evocation of Foley’s spirit to a new level of sound design.

Piaffe is about an introvert named Eva who takes over her sibling Zara’s job as a foley artist for a commercial featuring horses, after Zara is institutionalized. As Eva works through the foley of the horse bit by (actual reins-in-mouth teeth-clacking) bit, she starts to feel herself embodying the horse, to the point where she grows a tail and starts an affair with man who helps her indulge in horseplay kink.

The sound design doesn’t end in Eva’s on-screen foley-making but is an integral part of the surreal kink sequences. Let’s just say the sound of Eva urinating on the ground in one erotic sequence is very crisp and clear. The foley of this movie itself pushes the eroticism, much as ASMR creates its own form of frisson. In quite a few scenes you’re not really looking at much, but the sound makes you want to coyly cover your eyes.

Piaffe is a movie I felt the need to talk a lot about when I saw it, but didn’t really know what to say or who to talk to. Now sound design has given me my chance: you should see it, it’s an amazing piece of art. But much like the other four works here, that artistry is dependent on the sound design in a significant way where I’m not sure the movie would have succeeded, story, performance, and over reception-wise, if it wasn’t for how the sound supported imagery that wouldn’t necessarily land without it.

Originally this list would include Memoria (2021), which involves Tilda Swinton waking up to a strange sound and then pursuing it across Colombia to figure out where it originated, including an excellent sequence where she sits down with a sound designer to try to recreate it; but because Apichatpong Weerasethakul is so insistent that the movie looks and sounds the way he intends it, he does not allow it to play anywhere but in cinemas. It’s not accessible enough to offer for study.

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I did not put a lot of thought into the above ballot, just sticking to movies I know I’ve advocated for and will advocate for a long time, but I did have one regret two days later when I realized I forgot Tree of Life. I’m not gonna submit a new ballot, but I’d swap that one with The Master.

Anyway, “Best Movie” of the 21st century (soOoOooO FarRrrRrr) didn’t feel very enticing of a project to endeavor for. As I made my selections, I realized they are personal favorites that I enjoy watching a lot regardless of any faults or criticism and regardless of their influence or context within “the 21st Century”. I don’t really need them to be on a best list. They’ll always be my favorites in my own way.

That got me thinking. If we’re discussing “The 21st Century”, we’re not discussing “The Best.” We’re discussing what has affected the medium of film itself that has made it into the medium that it is in the 21st Century, as opposed to what the medium of filmmaking was in the 20th Century. Every one of the films on my list could have been made in the 20th Century technically, if not necessarily thematically or with the same narrative concerns and social context.

No, filmmaking has changed in the 21st century and in profound ways, and so here is a much different list. This is a list of movies I don’t necessarily advocate for seeing regardless of whether I like them. Some I love, some I like, some I merely respect, and one I haven’t even seen. But they have changed the face of filmmaking in a way that affects what audiences expect and frame what we think about when we think about what a movie is.

28 Days Later (2002) - Digital Cinema

I am nearing middle age, but the only two times I ever felt a distinct “generational” difference between me and people who were born after the year 2000 was once when I told some Zoomer colleagues of mine about what it was like dropping people off at the airport and actually walking them to the gate, and when I one day found myself telling some perplexed younger filmmakers how adamantly against “videotape” Hollywood used to be.

Before 28 Days Later came out, there were feature length movies that were shot on HD tape (HDV, “high definition video”). They were largely indie releases or cult experiences like The Blair Witch Project, or sometimes documentaries that would eke out a theatrical screening, but in general HDV was scorned as a “direct-to-video” tool, only useful for dirt cheap lesser quality products at Blockbuster. Not only did cinematographers, directors, producers, and studio heads all commonly announce, “Videocameras will never offer a high enough quality to present the real cinematic experience in a movie theatre!” but I even witnessed scrappy zero-budget penny pincher Lloyd Kaufman solemnly tell a group of film students during a Q&A that Troma only shoots on film because “video” is too low quality.

I was a burgeoning filmmaker back then, making my first forays into networking. Even little indie production companies in Albuquerque, NM sweated about how they could ever scrap together a budget for actual film because the miniDV cams they owned were strictly for industrial work.

Then 28 Days Later burst through the back curtain and announced to the world that these newfangled “camcorders” could make a product that could project on a big screen, and audiences wouldn't reject it screaming, “This isn’t a movie, it’s a video!”

Film use has cratered ever since.

HDV fed a 720i image onto an about 40min reel of magnetic tape, but it was quickly replaced by 1080p cams that wrote about 20min of footage to thick, heavy, and expensive solid state harddrives, which iterated higher in resolution and storage space and smaller in form factor until these days we’re swimming in prosumer 6K cameras that record over two hours of footage to 516gb SD cards that cost a tenth of what 516gb spinning disk harddrives cost about ten years ago.

Now film is a premium product for a specific theatrical experience, IMAX and 75mm and so forth. Everything else is digital cinema. “Video” is what someone posts on the Internet, instead of an actual reel of electronic tape that transmitted to “televisions.”

Now, if 28 Days Later didn’t come along, some other movie would have. But since 28 Days Later was the one that sold Hollywood on the premise of HDV, it also set the standards of the look for a good decade to come. The Aughts were full of overcranked, overcovered, undersaturated images essentially until the Canon 5D’s color science taught indie filmmakers that blacks could be deep and colors could be saturated, and later flat and raw files became technically accessible and color grading had a comeback.

I would even argue that a lot of digital’s ‘desaturated’ quality is less technical and more just reflex, even to the point of affecting the looks of things like the ostensibly colorful Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) / Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002-2007) trilogy — Multi-Episode Contracts

These selections are a little into the weeds, but essentially these two early Aughts trilogies expanded Hollywood’s idea of how they could contract movies. Both Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man had unusual production agreements for the time.

Peter Jackson pitched New Line, and New Line took a huge risk, on producing all three Lord of the Rings episodes at the same time in order to cut down on production costs. I can’t speak to Peter Jackson’s mindset, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was fretting about being able to finish the series considering previous attempts never pulled through. It would have been awful to have to stop after The Fellowship of the Ring, even in some cases with it being profitable. New Line, on the other side, would have to have dealt with a huge loss if not only The Fellowship of the Ring flopped, but the flop cost three whole movies.

Spiderman was somewhat the reverse. The studio wanted to lock Sam Raimi, Tobey Maguire, and Kirsten Dunst into a three-picture deal in advance, seeing the burgeoning success of superhero movies and the concept of ‘trilogies’ in general, from Back to the Future through The Matrix (both of which had first movie successes and then received two sequel contracts). The risk was all on the creative’s side to be able to deliver all three movies, which turned out to make Spider-Man 3 a messy and combative work environment.

The reason both matter is that they were wildly successful. Audiences ate them up and proved that the studios could contain costs and plan in advance on multiple film roll-outs, reduce the rounds of negotiations with directors and actors trying to raise rates between sequels, and it helped marketing when the audiences knew to anticipate new episodes.

Pretty much immediately, Christopher Nolan was signed by Warner Bros to produce a Batman trilogy and Kevin Feige approached Disney with an idea of how they could help Marvel studios… (see The Avengers, below).

Avatar (2009) — Virtualized Cinema and the DCP

Almost exactly ten years after The Matrix, James Cameron said, “you know, plugging in to virtual networks is actually cool and eco friendly and spiritual” and the world said, “Yes absolutely here’s literally billions of dollars thank you”.

Avatar is currently the top-grossing movie of all time, earning $2.9billion worldwide, so we could argue it’s ‘influential’ because it’s cinema’s current largest financial success, and if we wanted to be populist about it we could argue that it’s influential because billions of people have seen it and liked it and so therefore it has ‘influenced’ so many imaginations.

Sure. I also for the life of me can’t remember a single line of dialog or really much of what happened. Backlash was pretty harsh against the actual qualities of the story, which I won’t beat up on, but which I wouldn’t say necessarily influenced how stories are told in movies in the 21st Century.

No, Avatar changed the workflow of digital cinema entirely and ushered in new production and distribution modes. Most of its billion-dollar budget was actually research and development of new camera hardware and software that would enable things like camera movement-matching on virtual green screens, pre-rendered 3D real-time compositing, polarized stereoscopic 3D, and digital projection.

After Avatar’s success came a flood of “3D movies” which sometimes had the premium sell of having been shot on “Avatar’s camera technology” (I remember this being actual trailer copy for a Resident Evil film) or was just simply processed to be 3D from a 2D image in post-production. This 3D period did not last much longer than Hollywood’s previous few attempts at making 3D a thing. It’s still around, but the premium theatrical experience has sought “immersion” in a variety of different ways.

But what Avatar did irrevocably was force movie theatres worldwide to tear out their film projection platters and replace them with digital projectors. DCP standards set in 2005 started rolling out and taking over most of how workflow is considered from camera card to projectable file.

Meanwhile, Avatar set off debates about whether it was really a ‘live action movie’ if so much of it was CG designed characters running around CG worlds, basically expanding the mo-cap character animation of Lord of the Rings to entire sequences and worlds. A year later, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland comes out and Disney starts its series of “live action” animated updates of their hand-drawn animated classics. The line between live action and animated feature was blurred and never really redefined since.

This was also when Hollywood learned that shooting on virtual locations is so much less of a hassle than shooting in real locations, where you have to deal with, like, locals, customs, and location managing. Without Avatar we don’t have The Mandalorian, which managed to stay in production through the COVID pandemic because it was shot entirely on virtual sets.

Hollywood tasted virtual reality and loved it. And the concept expanded beyond the interests of techny nerds like James Cameron but to Hollywood’s relationship with the tech industry itself (See Her, below).

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The Avengers (2012) — Cinematic Universes

At one point in the Aughts, a man named Kevin Feige went to Disney and made a pitch: Marvel Studios was struggling, but superhero movies were taking off. If Disney could provide the capital for some high-production value films, it could buy Marvel Studios and have access to nearly a century’s worth of already written characters and stories with a built-in fan-base.

Disney and Marvel were not to sure, so Feige asked to produce Iron Man (2008), in the hopes that he could prove the strategy off of a character that wasn’t as set in Hollywood film lore as a character like Spider-Man, Batman, or Superman. Other than those three characters, superheroes in Hollywood weren’t considered broadly successful and usually only stuck around if they had a cult following.

Iron Man was a huge success, and Disney and Marvel extended the deal to produce the rest of the Avengers team’s character movies, resulting in Disney purchasing Marvel Studios by the end of 2009.

Movie by movie, Feige built the steps to 2012’s The Avengers, a masterstroke of corporate synergy and IP management that gave superhero nerds everything they ever wanted and caused them and Disney alike to chase that high ever since. The Avengers rolled out “the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”

It’s success was quickly followed by Hollywood’s attempt to build additional cinematic universes. Warner Bros looked at what they had with Nolan’s Batman trilogy and went looking for people to produce a “DCU.” Series such as Transformers and Mission: Impossible dropped the numbers from their sequel titles. Post-credit roll scenes proliferated. Actors started getting cast as a character for many movies, not as a specific character for specific movies.

Disney itself followed up The Avengers by purchasing Lucasfilm from George Lucas in 2012, under the assumption that the Star Wars phenomenon was the same as the MCU phenomenon. Spoiler alert: they are not the same phenomenon. Now, as audiences are experiencing superhero fatigue and so many “cinematic universes” ended up becoming messy and burdensome to manage across so many directors and aging actors, there lies an open question of whether the structure will fall apart.

However, Disney’s expansion into Disney+ has given ‘cinematic’ universes new life in extended and limited television series alike, and the overall movies are still profitable, while the merchandising and other IP benefits continue churning money.

I don’t think this will necessarily end, but I think “cinematic” theatrically-released episodic work is going to learn a lot from televised home streaming episodic work in terms of having showrunner-style producers who manage the universes’ continuity and adapt them to audiences tastes while keeping dependencies on specific above-the-line talent to a minimum.

This is one reason why Hollywood is drooling over AI generated imagery. If they can have Wolverine without depending on Hugh Jackman, Iron Man without Robert Downey Jr., and not have to sort out the differences between managing someone like Sam Raimi and someone like James Gunn, they’ll truly encapsulate “IP value” in its most Platonic form.

Her (2013) — The Merger of Hollywood and Silicon Valley

Certainly I could make the case that Avatar was the merger between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, with its embrace of digital technology and virtualized filmmaking. It even adopted Silicon Valley’s techno-critical aspects about “extractive” versus “data” industries. It’s all good to plug in to wear digital blue-face and commune with the global network, as long as you’re not ruining Nature™. Code should eat the world, but shame on you for oil production.

But Her was the point when the medium of film started selling the world Silicon Valley’s foundational stories. It’s important that it wasn’t even a studio film but rather a studio indie. Her aestheticized where Silicon Valley was going using Silicon Valley’s own logic, rational, and point of view. Her was when Hollywood became the official propaganda arm of Silicon Valley.

Director Spike Jonze, I suspect, would disagree. He shares with Dave Eggars that, “But behind the irony it’s all very human, right? That’s the double-irony, ironically” nonsense Gen X cursed us with, leaving us with an ‘open ending’ where the nature of Theodor and Samantha’s relationship is offered to audience to discuss and determine; but no, functionally this movie was a Kurzweillian fever dream set up to make us accept the premise even if we disagreed with the conclusion. The overall implied acceptance not “of our relationship to devices” but how would we maintain intimate relationships with our technology manufactured consent to Silicon Valley to go about engineering UX with these relationships in mind. Hence ChatGPT.

This is very different than 20th Century sci fi about our potential for relationships with android robots. For one thing, the devices are already here; for another thing, the relationship is framed as natural and grows organically, instead of being designed.

This movie is probably the least watched and will be the least likely one to ‘stand the test of time’ of all of them on this list; and, because my argument is about its content rather than its technical influences, it’s a bit more difficult to lay objective claims about its influence on culture. However, it was the big breakout movie hit in which Silicon Valley was no longer ‘the tech industry’ but rather our American social hegemony. It was no longer “what we’re inventing” but “who we are,” “where we’re going” but “where we’ve arrived.”

It doesn’t matter if Theodor was left staring at the sky, wondering if Samantha was ever there. We’ve been trying to find a way out of her/Her’s world ever since.

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Ex Machina (2014) — “An A24 Film”

I do not remember when I first heard someone say, “Hey, have you seen the new A24 film?” but the rapid adoption of that phrase was stunning. “A24” went from being an easily missable quick chromatic-split before a couple-few indie films to being a logo custom-embedded into trailers of its movies to make clear we knew: this is an A24 movie.

I hardly had time to wrap my mind around it before there was an “A24 look,” A24 merch store, A24 fans, and turgid backlash articles from grumpy cranks about movies being A24ified.

The only comparable brand loyalty I’ve seen to A24 as an umbrella is “Disney kids,” but that feels different. When I first discovered Kubrick, I discovered that most of his movies were released by Warner Bros, and I thought that was a really interesting studio / director relationship, but it never inspired me to become a Warner Brothers loyalist. A24 fandom is akin to someone saying, “I’ll watch any movie that is released by Warner Bros because Warner Bros released Kubrick films” rather than “I like the overall experience of princesses and rides and music and enchantments” that Disney addicts jones for. “Disney” is experiential, it’s a brand promise for escape into a land of childlike wonder; A24 makes no specific promise. There’s really nothing that brings together, say, The Materialists, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.

And I don’t think a film distributor has ever had brand recognition quite like this before. Miramax certainly forged the path of “studio indies,” starting off as a low-budget indie distributor before merging with Disney, getting into production, and winning Academy Awards. So in a lot of ways A24 follows that same path (minus the Disney acquisition).

But here’s a core distinction: if I ask you who founded Miramax, you’ll think, “Ugh, the Weinstein brothers.” Yeah, so, who founded A24?

The answer is Daniel Katz, David Fenkel, and John Hodges, by the way. But I know that most readers of this don’t know that, and that you don’t really know anything about those three men. You certainly didn’t cringe at their names. You don’t really have much of an opinion about them. You, like me, will likely forget all three names after being finished with this article.

Miramax changed the indie world by making indie producers like Weinstein competitive with big studio executives. Much of its story is fundamentally based on the Weinstein brothers’ personalities and, Harvey especially, their ambitions to be recognized power brokers of movie talent. A24 isn’t known for the personalities of the founders, but as an abstract brand whose logo is a stamp of quality.

But yeah, I have no idea what A24 movie first hit critical mass where enough people said, “A24 did it again.” But the first movie I noticed it was Ex Machina.

This movie gives this list a satisfying symmetry because it started with Alex Garland (see 28 Days Later, above) while looping around Silicon Valley hegemony. One could claim, and the movie tried to make clear, that Ex Machina is the anti-Her, coming just one year later and definitively taking the stance of the anti-humanity of virtualized relationships.

However, just like Her, in order to accept Garland’s criticisms of tech culture, we have to accept the premises of what they’re doing: that the intimacy will be there, and will change us. Ex Machina is less anti-Her than Her for goths. Just as goths never unwound the consumerism of their glam rock counterparts, Ex Machina solidified, rather than subverted, Silicon Valley hegemony.

After the success of Ex Machina, Alex Garland became an A24 house talent, one of their most profitable filmmakers, currently the filmmaker that has pulled their largest budget (with Civil War), and much of what is referred to when people are saying things like “the A24 look” or “A24 aesthetic” derives in part from that film.

A24 brand value may not expand into Disney level, but it’s unlikely to go away for a while and nevertheless has inspired similar endeavors from the likes of Neon and Mubi. Even if A24 one day dies, a fan-supported film distribution brand is now possible and therefore likely to be a path pursued by distributors well into the future.

Before I continue, I have to take a little bit of a diversion. A movie that does not quite fit the ‘influential’ list but should be looked at from the frame of reference of the Her / Ex Machina dynamic is M3gan (2022).

Here is the reason why: all three movies are about our relationship to devices (as opposed to “technology” writ large. Modern consumer implements hooked up to computers). All three of them treat the relationship we have with them as matter-of-fact.

But M3gan just accepts the world it lives in instead of tries to question it in a way that re-enforces it. It’s more matter-of-fact: yeah we’re gonna have childcaring devices, and some of them might go crazy and try to kill us. Haha, oops. In a weird way that makes M3gan more subversive than what either Her or Ex Machina attempt. It doesn’t say “We should consider the implications” but rather “I mean, you already know about this.”

M3gan in fact is following the trajectory of Terminator, where the initial villain in the first movie becomes the body guard in the second movie, and thus in the same way the initial anxiety about weapons tech becomes a debate about its alignment. Terminator is a perfect late 20th Century movie, where liberal artists like James Cameron eventually became the machine they criticized. M3gan is Terminator for Zoomers.

But M3gan isn’t influencing how we tell these stories, it exists because of the influence of movies like Avatar, Her, The Avengers, and Ex Machina.

I also bring M3gan up because where Her was distributed by Warner Bros and Ex Machina was distributed by A24, M3gan was distributed by Blumhouse. And that’s the three modes of mainstream commercial cinema we’re currently living under: studio, studio indie, and genre indie; or: corporate, premium, and populist media. This becomes important for the next section.

Moonlight (2016) / Get Out (2017) / Black Panther (2018) — Black Cinema Competes

In December of 2019 when people were making the “top films of the 2010s” lists, I posted the following the Facebook:

Best movies of the decade go to American black cinema in general.

Get Out, Moonlight, and Sorry to Bother You as luminous examples on the big screen. I really enjoyed Dear White People and BlacKkKlansman despite various criticisms of them.

I may have saw better movies or movies that I liked more, but honestly I currently remember and hope to continue remembering this decade for when cinematographers started saying, "Naw bro, this is how you light black faces."

[As well as] An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, a movie that still excites me years later. If there's any movie I listed you missed, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is the one I most urge you to see.

The movies I listed were top of mind in 2019, but the movies I list for this section have distinct reasons to be highlighted.

Firstly, they’re not just all directed by black men, but are about black men dealing with black cultural concerns. Before these movies, most black-helmed movies were either comedies about a black man in a dress, directed by Spike Lee, or considered experimental films. There were successful black filmmakers such as John Singleton, but their successes were confined by studio disinterest from breaking out into being the phenomena they probably deserved.

Secondly, these were all visibly successful movies, in other words, phenomenal:

Moonlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture, signifying critical and institutional competitiveness of black-led filmmaking.

Get Out was an instant genre cult classic, grabbing worldwide fans of the genre across demographics regardless of the movie’s base in American black anxiety. It also attracted a lot of critical and new audience acceptance of horror film as a highbrow genre.

Black Panther was a popular, well-respected, and very profitable episode of the MCU and has helped make Ryan Coogler’s actual profitability as a talent for the studios competitive with none other than Steven Spielberg.

Lo and behold: Moonlight was distributed by A24, Get Out by Blumhouse, and Black Panther by Disney. The trifecta of mainstream cinema corporate, premium, and populist media all topped by black-helmed and black-leading talent.

Sinners this year landed this statement in a single movie, what these three movies told any film market observer without denial running through their veins: “black” movies are as good, as profitable, and as audience-friendly as “white” movies. Which they could always have had been, had Hollywood chosen to support more black filmmakers and stories, and given them the same sort of production and marketing support they give white filmmakers.

The denialists in charge of greenlighting and marketing are holding the line on international audiences due to endemic racism. “We’re not racist, it’s just that the Chinese are.” But that wall is crumbling, and good riddance to it.

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A little house-cleaning before I go:

These movies are the most influential in how they’ve affected cinema in the 21st century, which does not mean they were the first to do whatever they did that changed things. Indie features were made on HDV before 28 Days Later. Multi-movie contracts were written with filmmakers, particularly directors before Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) preceded Avatar in green-screen dominated virtual world digital filmmaking. Serialization was well known before The Avengers. “People might someday want to bone robots” is not a new 21st century concern. Black cinema has existed as long as cinema has.

What makes these movies influential is that they hit a critical mass of acclaim, profitability, audience appeal, pop culture referentiality, and general knowledge and awareness of them. It isn’t that it’s the first time this thing happened, but that it’s the tipping point when that thing became a modality of 21st century filmmaking.

This also sets up these movies to be criticized for being overrated, which, maybe. It doesn’t change their influence, unfortunately. I’m not necessarily recommending them though on par I believe they’re “good” movies.

Some of the above movies inspired me. 28 Days Later was a profound cinematic experience that had me raving (or raging?) for years after and was a regularly-watched DVD that I studied and watched all the special features and director’s commentary for. Lord of the Rings lived up to my most wild fantasy nerd dreams and made it seem like movies could respect magic again. Moonlight I was really excited to see win the Academy Award, which I didn’t feel was possible. Get Out was one of my favorite times spent in a movie theatre and ended up calling me out with my intentions to “see a black movie” as a white person; Jordan Peele got me good and I can do nothing but give him the credit for doing it masterfully.

Most I enjoyed but didn’t personally inspire me, like Avatar, Her, Spider-Man and Ex Machina. And I haven’t even seen Black Panther, so this list was not written entirely with personal appeal in mind.

These are, as I see it, the movies that shaped how cinema is perceived as art and run as a business in the 21st century. More will come, and the industry is always changing, but movies subsequently either live in or are trying desperately to crawl out of these movies’ shadows.

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I’ve been inundated with work, so this post was delayed a week, but unlike the news you don’t need it to constantly update to follow along. This week I delved into Pynchon’s philosophies, and philosophy is evergreen.

To catch up, start here:

Day 37 of new Pynchon novel, yesterday I referenced “Pynchon’s essay on Luddites” and I already wanted to share it with you, but today I reread it just to refresh myself, and guys… it's like inhaling a concentrated dose of pure, uncut Substack memes.

IS IT O.K. TO BE A LUDDITE?

Everything people here are on about is included, from the jokes about “serious literary people” to the weird right-leaning nostalgia of the Age of Miracles counterbalanced by the weird left-leaning nostalgia for the Age of Reason; Substack fiction writers’ disproportionate interest in Gothic literature; the labor and creative class anxiety over AI and the rebellion act of “denying the machine” rule of technology and politics.

If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long.

There’s also a very interesting quote about

Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead. Beyond this seems to be a growing consensus that knowledge really is power, that there is a pretty straightforward conversion between money and information, and that somehow, if the logistics can be worked out, miracles may yet be possible.

I select that quote because I already discussed Pynchon's chilling “It’s like the 60s all over again. These kids really believe information should be free.” In the 80s, Pynchon foresaw the fascist implications in “information is money.” (In there he shares with Don DeLillo, particularly Cosmopolis, the ways in which financialization’s abstraction of material wealth erected new frontiers in class warfare). On the 2010s, he foresaw the same fascist implications in “Information should be free.” The issue being, of course, the use of information as a tool of power.

Y’all gotta read this shit. He published it in 1984, a symbolic literary year, when he had also published Vineland.

Day 38 of new Pynchon novel, I wouldn't want to speak for everybody about why they love his work, but even people that don’t much like his books seem to acknowledge in their criticisms the quality of his writing. There’s something he does on the word sentence paragraph level that tickles the mind.

A colleague from the Soaring Twenties Social Club Discord called it “the musicality of his language.” And indeed Pynchon addresses his writing's debt to jazz and rock in the introduction to Slow Learner, as well as forwards one of the most useful pieces of writing advice I’ve ever read:

“In a symphony performed in C sharp, you can replace a note with a cannon blast all you want, but it better be a C sharp cannon blast or else it’ll sound awful.”

There are sentences he composes where the full stops land like cannon blasts. Boom. Frisson.

However, lovely prose is not enough. I enjoy heady sorts of things. Pynchon, like Sebald in one direction and Borges and Calvino in another, pulls off the sort of writerly shit other writers dream of. He packs his books with his entire world, and somehow it fits.

This skill is why the synopses and reviews of his work drop details like laundry tumbling out of a broken drier door. It's impossible to sum up the experience of getting from here to there, be sitting in the fear of German air raids in London and then deal with kaiju and tentacles before dancing with Bavarian witches during an epic sunset, while in between having your brain just overloaded with various references, puns, and Apocrypha.

Writers wish they could pull half the shit Pynchon does, and get away with it without editors murdering them, critics mauling them, or worse: audiences laughing at them.

Richard Linklater’s work to some degree revolves around the theme of struggling to do all of it, fit entire lives, feelings, shared experiences, memories and perceptions into single moments of stories. His movies yearn to compress all human experience into a pre-credit roll striking final image. I believe a great attraction of Linklater’s work, to artists, writers, and filmmakers in particular, is sharing that yearning.

Pynchon causes the same envy but in the completely opposite direction. His books are uncompressed versions of all a brain packs into itself, even the weird idiosyncratic associations individuals perhaps not so arbitrarily develop over time, particularly in mass mediated culture. Puns, paranoia, and pop culture are all the same cognitive operands. His talent is keeping all of his ideas in the same key and beat.

Let this stand as my pitch for his work for those who have not yet read it.

Day 39 of new Pynchon novel, some more musical analogy of his work.

One of the best praises I’ve heard of his work is his ability to change registers. I don't remember where I heard it, but I think about it whenever Pynchon takes us through some fantastic collage of whimsical stuff then dumps us right in the feels. There are scenes that make you sad, scenes that are forlorn… scenes that disturb. And by the time you're in them, you felt you were there with it the whole time, the same way you feel when you’re in the silly or amazed or awed scenes. There are no real rug pulls between the book dancing with you and you finding yourself on the floor.

The other term that works is dynamic range. Luckily this term works for the idea of compression as well as music. Pynchon can go soft and he can go hard. He can go low and he can go high. He can ramp up and down smoothly, one could even say analog.

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For all the banana cream pie fights against limerick singing Americans in hot air balloons, Gravity’s Rainbow has this other nearly perfect novel embedded in it about Roger Mexico and his lover Jessica, their forlorn knowledge that their relationship will not last, Jessica’s doomerist nihilism from being subjected to German air raids contrasted to Roger Mexico’s cope in seeking certainty in the pattern making of stochastic averages in statistics, balancing the appreciation of randomness and form, and his bemusement of what she even sees in him.

These scenes alone would make a fairly critically acclaimed war romance novel like The English Patient.

This is also why one of the Pynchon criticisms I do not accept is that “he’s too cold and distant from his characters.” People pull that criticism on Kubrick too, and often any cerebral works told in the third person mostly objective (Pynchon is actually third person limited). It also probably means they never read any of his books published after Gravity’s Rainbow because those ones are much more interested in characters’ inner lives, particularly Vineland and Mason & Dixon, which I would argue are his most sentimental words.

Another Gravity’s Rainbow example in changing registers, Gravity’s Rainbow chosen because it’s arguably his most mechanical novel, is the relationship between half brothers Enzian and Tchitcherine, as they hunt each other across half of Europe in an attempt to have the last say of the significance of their father’s influence in the early century Herrero genocide. It’s a high stakes war espionage thriller that could have also been a great book on its own terms.

Pynchon can switch modes whenever he wants to, his key skill set is doing it without disrupting the reader and also keeping the book a cohesive whole. Everything belongs. It makes you wonder what, possibly, didn’t.

Day 40 of new Pynchon novel, when I first learned the word “preterition” from Gravity’s Rainbow, I learned the rhetorical device before I understood the Calvinist context.

In rhetoric, preterition is an ironic device where a person brings attention to something by claiming not to bring attention. One common structure is anything to follow “not to mention…”: you clearly just mentioned it!

“I won’t bring up my opponent’s drinking problems, we’re just here to discuss whether liquor licenses being expanded would affect the character of our community.”

It’s surprising preterition the word for that device is less known because once you learn it, you see it quickly and you see it everywhere. It’s a very easy device to catch because it makes you aware of the thing by claiming not to. It wouldn’t work if you didn’t become aware of the thing.

If you want a real example, on Friday while I was working on other things, a colleague who committed from New Jersey was following Gov. Phil Murphy’s comments on the NJ Transit strike. Even half-listening / overhearing, I caught at least three different points where Gov. Murphy would say something like, “We wouldn’t be in this situation if [the strikers / the federal government / the previous administration / the Dept of Transportation / whatever] didn’t [do thing]. But, we are not here to point fingers or cast blame…” Smooth, ya preterite.

You can see it here if you want homework.

“Preterite” the term doesn’t really work to describe a user of the rhetorical device called preterition, but it sounds like a curse, so purposefully misusing it could arguably also be called preterition.

Anyway, knowing preterition as the rhetorical device made my first read of Gravity’s Rainbow more confusing. I kept looking for examples of how Slothrop is “a preterite.’ Figuring that I didn’t understand the novel deeply enough, I figured it had something to do with the people of the White Visitation bringing Slothrop an agency over history he shouldn’t have by insisting on his relevance that Roger Mexico, for one, points out is pure pareidolia.

And I wondered if Pynchon’s use of conspiracy theory subplots was also a form of preterition: “I’m not saying it happened this way. I’m just saying it’s interesting to think if it happened this way.” This feeling becomes acute in Bleeding Edge.

It is, however, a misreading, which I’ll get into more clearly tomorrow.

Day 41 of new Pynchon novel, I finally grokked “preterition” the Calvinist concept when I asked members of the Soaring Twenties Social Club, some of whom have more religious and theologic backgrounds than me, before my 3rd (.5) read of Gravity’s Rainbow.

In the end I don’t know why I had a hard time with it before, since it seems relatively straightforward: there are the elect of best religious principles chosen for salvation and then there are the preterite, the left behind.

First of all there’s the verb tense (which anyway in English we call the “simple” past tense to make it more, well, simple). But secondly, back whenever I’d look, usually the religious sense of the word was always on pages that wanted to explain it holistically. Lots of reading about debates of predestination and stuff in a vocabulary I don’t know well.

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Anyway, once preterition is grokked, Gravity’s Rainbow quickly follows. And the theme sustains Pynchon’s writing overall. He really opened up a window to his own work with his self-written synopses to Against the Day, “It may not be the world, but with a minor adjustment or two it’s the way the world could be.”

That is to say from a larger perspective, the reason Pynchon and I vibe so well is because I fucking love thinking about retrofuturism, the beliefs and imagination we held for the future in the past, and Pynchon’s work is basically applied retrofuturism: showing pivot points in history where we may have broken away to some imagined, perhaps even glorious, future, but rather were held to our current course mostly from the magic-destroying industrialism and fecklessness of greed.

(For example, there’s this really fun chapter of Mason & Dixon that posits what would have happened had they continued surveying their line well past their project’s historical end and even past the land geography of the United States’ future Western territories as well, building into the ocean and eventually separating themselves from terrestrial concerns entirely… And if, say, history followed them, then what?)

This is actually why my rhetorical device reading of “preterition” was a misread. Applied to Bleeding Edge, it makes the novel a Loose Change Theory book. Applied with the Calvinist preterition, it’s important to note that 9/11 doesn’t appear in the book. It happens, but it’s not observed… “off-screen,” in cinema lingo. What Bleeding Edge actually describes is a sudden transition of awareness from a burgeoning surveillance tech state to when it gets turned on. If it wasn’t 9/11, it’d’ve been something else. It was 9/11, but in the Pynchonian reckoning getting overly concerned with the alternative possibilities of any given historical moment misses processes and systems of the periods in between.

And that’s why he’s always setting his stories in weird in-between times. Gravity’s Rainbow is often considered a WWII novel, but it begins when WWII ends. New world old world time of monsters stuff, except the monsters are agents of magic and salvation left behind by the decisions we make.

That’s it for this week. We have a couple more roundups coming, but as of time of writing, I ran out of Pynchon dailies a few days ago. There should be a couple-three more round-ups and then we’ll see if there’s much more I think to talk about before Shadow Ticket actually releases.

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Essentially here I went all in on cover art. As of time of writing (May 19th) there is no book cover released for Shadow Ticket.

Catch up with my previous Pynchon dailies here.

Day 33 of new Pynchon novel,

Zachary Dillon yesterday commented on his interpretation of the Mason & Dixon first edition cover, which I found to be a very good interpretation, and I had already planned to mention my favorite covers, so there you go.

Against the Day 1st edition: like Mason & Dixon, this cover is minimalist while looking both distinct and holding references to the text. The title is written in three different fonts, two of them in progressive drop shadow, as if viewed through a piece of Icelandic spar, an optical effect mentioned often in the book and referencing branches of possible realities. A little international stamp on the lower left is broken, as if a secret missive that has been opened before delivered to you, and if I recall correctly the language on it is fake but it looks like famous diplomatic stamps of the 19th century.

I also have a personal fondness for it because it was the first time one of his books was newly published in the time that I knew about him, and I didn’t know it was coming so did a double-take and had to look closer. Was this really happening? The book still feels like a private hallucination of mine, it’s just wayyy too aligned with my interests.

Bleeding Edge 1st edition cover: at first I didn’t like it. Looks like a cheap airport bookstore technothriller. But then someone pointed out that it The dark volumes on the left and right not only look like a server farm but also the Twin Towers. Oh. And I’m a sucker for holographic foil.

Gravity’s Rainbow, Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition: no smart reason for liking this one, I love glitch art, textural / stain / decay stuff, this one has sort of a look like an ink-smeared vintage printout of a bomb target landscape, it’s just pretty and cool.

The Penguin Vintage editions: including Vineland here as an example but basically they’re all like this, same font and different drawings but each with a distinct leading color, these are the most playful and kaleidoscopic of his covers that give a visual business to match his prose. They covers are a little like comic books and I think his books would make great comic books, even more than I think they'd make good movies.

Against the Day Penguin trade paperback edition: A lot of Pynchon covers seem to refer to early modernist art movements to mixed success, but this one really gets me aesthetically because I love mazes, cubism, art deco, futurism, and there’s a bit of implied retrofuturism. The disappearing airship is an extremely smart visual and referential touch, the only thing I don't like about it is with the pilot facing down a seemingly art deco city makes it Gravity’s Rainbow coded.

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Personally, I had to tackle this as a sort of 4, possibly 5-dimensional chess game. There are several different approaches to the same challenge that I’m trying to fit together in one single, highly limited selection of films. Aspects I had in mind while creating this list:

• The list should feature films of increasing mental challenge from easiest to enjoy to most difficult to interpret.

• The list should be roughly chronological along the timeline of the advancement of cinema.

• Similarly the films on the list should open gateways to entire movements in cinema, and provide context of how movies have been approached over time.

• The list should include as many different possible “modes” of filmmaking (not just genre but structure, type, effect, production process, intended audience, whatever) as I can possibly fit into just five selections.

• The list should include as many different film industries as possible, which is another way of saying each film should be from a different country.

• The list should sell people on the concept and promise of cinema as an artform that can be appreciated in its own respect. Ideally, it should help people fall in love with movies.

• And obviously it’s gonna be some of my favorite movies that I really eagerly want you to see.

I think I did a pretty good job at binding these various considerations together.

Sherlock Jr. (1924, US), dir. Buster Keaton

American cinema; Hollywood cinema; movies as entertainment; vaudeville and stage; silent film; special effects; cinema as dreams; populist cinema; the movie business; studio productions

I could have easily filled this challenge with silent films alone, because filmmakers had already developed and achieved everything cinema is capable of doing before they added synchronized sound to the mix.1

Outside of some technological updates on how to do visual and special effects and a few structuralist experimental cinema, the artform is all here in Sherlock, Jr. All of it. Everything you can think of, from Christopher Nolan’s quick cross-cutting to Tom Cruise dangling from an airplane to telling a good ol’ fashioned yarn to making meta-commentary on good ol’ fashioned yarns, were all preceded by Buster Keaton in this one 45 minute long exaltation of the joy, dreams, promise, and magic of the moving image.

If you want to fall in love with cinema, Sherlock Jr. is the ideal movie to start with. It’s fun. It’s amazing. It’s not only technically impressive, you don’t have to know anything about how the effects were achieved to see how impressive they are. They speak for themselves.

You’ll laugh, you’ll fall in love, you’ll release a gasp of relief when that train misses him, you’ll cringe when he lands on his neck and be amazed he stood up and walked it off — despite having just broken it. There’s action, there’s comedy, there’s romance. There’s not a single second of this movie that isn’t dazzling.

It also establishes a thematic I see running throughout film history: where literature tells of the knight saving the princess, movies tell of the princess waking the knight up. This is, I assure you, why you love Star Wars and The Matrix. It all starts with Sherlock Jr, itself a reverse Sleeping Beauty.

Sherlock Jr. is the apotheosis of Hollywood cinema: a pure fusion of entertainment and art, craft and storytelling, performance and effects, technical and emotional devices. When we imagine people sitting in a movie theatre, wide-eyed, open-jawed, popcorn left forgotten on their laps, bathed in the silver light reflected from screen, we’re imagining the world that Buster Keaton encapsulated right here.

Also like much of the history of Hollywood cinema, it couldn’t exist without the sacrifice of the artist for the commercial interests of the producers. Keaton, a self-abusive alcoholic, never really made a lot of money during his career, as his producer Joseph M. Schenck wrote his contract with MGM without his input. This enabled Keaton to take ever bigger risks with the movies themselves, with only the reward of satisfaction. Eventually the damages he took from doing his own stunts combined with his alcoholism got him fired and divorced, and he spent the rest of his career as a comic performer.

I can’t think of a better pairing of movie and behind-the-scenes to describe the challenges artists face bringing you the entertainment that flickers across the screen. Sherlock Jr. is a synecdoche of cinema itself AND Hollywood as well.

Herein I will add the only gatekeeping statement I will have in this entire essay: Sherlock Jr. is pure, undiluted cinematic joy, so if you didn’t like it or at least respect it, I’m at a loss at how to sell you on the art of cinema.

It’s possible that you may like some movies based on their subject or their entertainment value but aren’t really into film as an artform unto itself. This is okay — some people can like paintings but not care about painting, have favorite music but not really be interested in learning about it, or enjoy reading but don’t really dive into the depth and breadth of literature.

If, on the other hand, you’re still with me and was moved by Sherlock Jr, I’m certain you’ll stick with me to the end. This gatekeeping doesn’t carry forward; you don’t even have to like the following movies. But if you give them a chance, I can guarantee you’ll at least find something in them interesting and moving.2

Last chance to cancel my course. Ready to move on? Welcome, then:

Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse : (1933, Germany) dir. Fritz Lang

German cinema; Expressionist cinema; film noir; horror cinema; cinema as nightmare; social issues and public anxiety; movies contending with history; cinema as an illusion; tricksters and frauds; propaganda; book adaptation; serialization; iconic cinema

There remains a joke on all visitors to cinemaworld: they spend half their time in a dark room, staring at an black screen.

Thus I was told by my film professor Nina Fonoroff. “Motion pictures” are created out of an illusion called the persistence of vision: flash enough pictures at a person fast enough, and their brain puts them together as one continuous, moving image. This does mean that in between the static images is no light at all. ~50% of a movie’s runtime, no light is shown from a projector.

For an artform made of light, cinema is uniquely adept at showing the darkness. This quality is no better informed than by looking at German Expressionism, the forebearer of films noir and horror.

If a movie is an illusion, cinema itself is hypnotism. In fact the concept of hypnotism and mind control runs as a third rail underneath the surface of images we see, provoking all sorts of periodic outrage and distress. People know how important the moving image is, which is why we pick our statespeople based on how they perform on television more than how well they can write their plans for leadership.

Now, there’s quite a lot of Expressionist films to choose from, particularly again from the silent era, but I chose this sound-era sequel because, again, I’m trying to cover a lot of territory here. Dr. Mabuse had already appeared before in the 1922 Lang film, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler. That first movie features Dr. Mabuse more like The Penguin, a mob boss and gambler who runs a counterfeiting operation in the Berlin underground. “Der Spieler” in this case can mean both “The Gambler” but also “The Puppeteer,” and as a character stood to represent the fraudulence and immorality of Weimer-era Germany.

In 1933, however, Lang returned Dr. Mabuse to screen, and now his figure has become more monstrous and paranormal. No longer just a hypnotizer, Dr. Mabuse literally haunts the investigators and characters, seemingly controlling people from a distant cell while also capable of appearing in rooms as a phantasm. The realist bottom had dropped out as German culture seems to be seduced and driven mad by a dark spectre.

Huh, 1933 Germany? I wonder what Mr. Lang could possibly have had in mind.3

Lang would return again to Dr. Mabuse in 1960 with Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse (trans: “The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse”), which turned out to be his final film; and Dr. Mabuse showed up again in about 13 other feature films, a television series, and other media. Originated as a series by author Norbert Jacques, Dr. Mabuse is an early film icon, or perhaps cinematic universe unto himself, shapeshifting and adjusting to match the social anxieties of the day.

He is, in a sense, always with us, always with his fingers in the underground or eyes behind the wall or presence beyond history’s grave, ready to rise again and drive the worst impulses of man towards crime, violence, and self-destruction, perhaps temporarily able to be held in cell or coffin, but whose influence is something more of a mind-controlling mechanism, a leader not only able to defraud people of their material valuables, but also their values.

Sound familiar? We get quite a lot of that these days. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is that he is among us. Beware.

Cinema doesn’t solely operate to entertain and to incite our dreams; it can also be a nightmare reflecting our social issues and civil concerns. A medium is neither a window nor a mirror, but some amalgamation of both, which represents more purely the better it twists the world of appearances to uncover what’s underneath.

Welcome to the dark side of film. The part of the projector that casts only shadow.

Stalker (1979, Soviet Russia), dir. Andrei Tarkovksy

Russian cinema; poetic cinema; philosophical cinema; film theory; surrealism; science fiction; contemplative cinema; movies as temporal artform; slow cinema; color vs. black & white as a choice; cinema as virtual reality; labyrinths; elemental cinema

It’s time to exercise your patience.

There’s an image of cinephiles like me, stodgy intellectual types that shush the person chewing popcorn and watch these long, slow, boring movies where people walk around aimlessly speaking cryptic dialog about philosophical notions. Well, this here is that movie: it’s so soporific, in fact, that even the characters all stop to take a nap midway through.

Joking aside, though, Stalker is mesmerizing, in a different sense than the dark magick of Dr. Mabuse.

Stalker is painting, music, and poetry. Tarkovsky was the son of a poet and a man of deeply-held faith, making the best movies he could under the surveillance of Soviet Russia, which he eventually had to leave. He survived their censorship, like many Soviet artists, via science fiction; and less you believe that this movie is just random and arbitrary for the purpose of sounding smart, he had to reshoot the entire thing when the first version of it burnt down in a factory fire. You don’t make a movie twice just to show off.

There’s a term that went out of fashion about a decade ago, “contemporary contemplative cinema” (CCC), which to a large degree exists because of the path filmmakers like Tarkovsky forged. In his case, he literally wrote the book about it. Tarkovsky approached film as a very purposeful, very necessary means of addressing everything he thought and believed about the world around him.

And, though that might not sell you on its surface, his movies are such a beguiling, surreal experience. In Stalker, characters navigate a maze without walls, relying solely on faith in the guide they suspect to be an idiot-savant, to find a room in The Zone that they’re not sure exists, and don’t know how it will help them.

This magical realist and very alien “Zone” is felt, not seen, as the movie switches from black and white to color and is placed in a blasted out former battleground where tanks and ammunition lay rotting in unmanaged grass. It’s an inverse The Wizard of Oz, where dour black and white reality is not replaced by glorious technicolor adventure, but by the shock of infrastructure rotten by rust, water, and mold.

So much for “go touch grass”: the grass here is dangerous. And you don’t know why! Is it a Chernobyl-like atomic radioactive fallout that caused the Zone? Some Soviet military experiment? Aliens? God himself?

Movies tell stories, but the best of them create the sort of stories where each individual viewer thinks they saw their own movie. Stalker, despite always having the same images in the same order and the same lines of dialog for everyone who watches it, and being interpretable both with a critical mind and acknowledgment to Tarkovsky’s own intentions and writings, is nevertheless a personally affective experience that gives you exactly what you bring into it: just, in fact, like the Zone.

Cinema is cerebral and brings you into the mind of its creators. None were better than Tarkovsky at fixing you in his own world, a world with rules you understand but are not, in fact, written down, much less ever dictated by the characters. The anti-Netflix cinema, where a character won’t even announce what they’re doing, you’ll never quite be able to pin down how you understand it just by watching it.4

It’s also important to bring up Tarkovsky as sort of a denier, an antithesis of the Soviet Montage line of film theory — which, by all means, I encourage you look into as part of your cultural exercise. Soviet Montage started as technical theory and lead eventually to propaganda films. Tarkovsky holds great animus against both the merely technical (the image must have its underlying philosophy) and propaganda (being himself a victim of it).

Here it is necessary to express that you can learn from artists without always agreeing with them: there’s important film theory to learn from the likes of Dziga Vertov and crew. There’s important film history to learn from Sculpting in Time. The point is that the possibilities are there, to craft worlds in your unique form of filmmaking, to expand cinema beyond the borders of quotidian narrative entertainment. Vertov-like, you can “make a brand new human” with your “mechanical eye,” or Tarkovsky-like, you can “sculpt time” to navigate “the Zone” of faith. Another way of saying this is you can make poetry of film by cutting fast or cutting slow.

The key significance of experiencing Stalker at this juncture, however, is to learn the rewards of patience. If you like Stalker, oh how many further riches the history of cinema provides you.

Tetsuo: the Iron Man (1989, Japan) dir. Shinya Tsukamoto

Japanese cinema; punk cinema; underground cinema; animation; music video; technophobia; cult cinema; subversive cinema; experimental cinema; the cinema of resistance

Alright.

I’m enjoying imagining a person reading this essay, a genuinely curious person who has always wanted to “get into film” but hadn’t really known where to start, and by reading up to here has been on board, even watching along. That person perhaps really enjoyed Sherlock Jr, sort of enjoyed Dr. Mabuse but found it “kind of old,” they watched through Stalker and are like, “Yeah man, I see what you’re saying, but that was rough for me to get through,” and are starting to worry, “So are these movies just going to get longer and slower as we go along? Is the point that cinema becomes more difficult the more work it requires the audience to do?”

Well, welcome to your reprieve. Go ahead and splash some of this water over your face, let’s cool down a bit.

Psych! That water was full of arsenic and used condoms!

Welcome to the full-frontal 40 minute visual assault entitled Tetsuo: the Iron Man. You will go in feeling like a curious human being. You will come out with your brain shredded by junk metal.

Tetsuo: the Iron Man is fast. Tetsuo: the Iron Man is LOUD. Tetsuo: the Iron Man is unlike any other movie you’ve ever seen, unless you’ve already seen Tetsuo: the Iron Man.

The story, as much as it has one, involves a man waking up one morning to find he has a wire growing out of his cheek. From there his body progressively starts to turn into a pile of junk metal, which would be freaky enough, except that he’s pursued by a screeching, obsessed, and vengeful man made of rust through a broken and industrially poisoned Tokyo.

This all unfolds over pounding industrial music, jagged frame-by-frame stop-motion and timelapse photography, anime-style camera movements, and almost constant screaming from the actors. Welcome to Japan, which cinema arguably developed out of two modes of storytelling: Noh, the contemplative, structural, and minimalist filmmaking that tells the story of entire generations of family in a stirring of green tea; and in this case Kabuki, a form entailing exaggerated masks and wild dances.

But also welcome to underground cinema. The cinema of punks, anarchists, revolutionaries, and people not satisfied with the world they’re sold. Shinya Tsukomoto was driven to make Tetsuo: The Iron Man out of his fears and concerns about industrial pollution. The inciting incident, a car crash, came out of his own experience, which left him with a life-long hatred of cars. Using whatever money he could scrape together, his collective of artists and dancers, and a lot of lo-fi ingenuity, he cast a 40 minute performance that became a cult classic that still drives peoples to movie theatres just to say they’ve experienced it.

And emotional experience is the muscle you’re working here. This movie will make you feel many contrasting things at once. You’ll be disturbed, but you’ll like it. You’ll be horrified, but also laughing. You’ll want to vomit, and it’ll be exciting and glorious.

Many filmmakers have to contend with a moral quandary: film is wasteful, polluting, and expensive. It’s difficult to be a filmmaker and believe in things like solving climate change, providing for your collaborators and colleagues, and navigating the commercial requirements to come out the other side with something that can have impact. Some punks, like Tsukomoto, skip the history and the theory and run on pure id. If Dziga Vertov wanted film to make the new mechanical man, Tsukomoto unveiled that new man to be a person broken by machinery and leaking motor oil everywhere.

Cinema is poetic, thoughtful, and painterly. It can also be dirty, profane, and glitchy. You can write books theorizing how the motion picture expands new possibilities for meaning-seeking, or you can scream “FUCK YOUR RULES” and give your terrified hero a fatal industrial drill in place of his penis. Both are valid.

Welcome, my friends, to the cult. The film reel was developed by chemists and spun by illusionists: here the alchemists take over and summon demons.

Catch your breath. All of the above has been different ways of teaching you how moving images have meaning.

Now it’s time to question them.

Sans Soleil (1983 / Beyond Time, France / Beyond Geography) “dir.” “Chris Marker”

French cinema, New Wave cinema, documentary, video, postmodern cinema, travelogue, non-narrative, experimental film, post-ideological, essay film, metanarrative, movies as time travel

Hi, hello, welcome. Before you lies the Markerverse, a compelling if confusing place, multifaceted, and with many trick floors, some of which may even contain cerebral booby traps to trip your brain up. Watch your step, you’re in a maze of carnival mirrors made of journalistic, documentary, and travel footage. The world of appearances, it turns out, betrays you regardless of survival at both extremes.

Above I put “directed by” and “Chris Marker” in flying quotations because he didn’t direct this movie so much as assemble it, and Chris Marker is just one of his many pseudonyms, a character the artist plays moreso than a registered and identified citizen of France. He has had many forms (before his quotidian real-world death) and many appearances. In fact one of the great regrets of my life is that a former professor almost pulled off interviewing him in Second Life, but it didn’t work out. I was invited; I still want to be there.

Anyway, again this selection is trying to do a lot of work: not only to represent a higher (potentially highest) challenge of cinematic fitness, but to represent much of film history and modes of filmmaking not yet covered. In this case it’s worth bringing up the French New Wave explicitly to describe the ways Marker deviated from it, the same way Tarkovsky helps me introduce Soviet Montage by being the antithesis of it. And by the way, Marker and Tarkovsky were friends.

Marker was a multidisciplinary artist who was working in French filmmaking before the New Wave took hold but got carried along, to some degree, by that wave. His early work with superb structural stylist Alain Resnais sent him off on a documentary track where, by various names and guises, and in collaboration with various collectives but particularly SLON, Marker tried to create a new mode of moviemaking: without “auteurs”, contrary to the Right Bank New Wavers like Godard et al, with a focus on revolution and social impact.

It didn’t work out. Marker the multidisciplinary moved on and over the course of his life assembled a personal library of footage he made various film essays of, the most famous of which is Sans Soleil.

Sans Soleil itself is a movie that questions what its own images mean. After all vigor and activism of his more ideological youth, Marker looks back over his footage… his travels… his memories… and realizes his dominant concern is “the world of appearances.” He investigates himself and in so doing, investigates the underlying fragility of images themselves.

Now, this is no sophomore philosophy. This stuff has consequences. Sure, he travels around San Francisco chasing the ghost of Vertigo. Certainly, he questions how much he can really know of the people he’s filming when at a Japanese ritual. He looks at televisions, paintings, museums, zoos, stuffed animals, and faces with the same inquisitiveness. But he also acknowledges capturing footage of Luis Cabral decorating the selfsame Major who, a year later, would seize power in Guinea-Bissau. Behind all the images are their subversion: history’s frustrating tendency to refuse to comport to what even the most well-meaning advocates intend.

Sans Soleil is, in a word, layered. Chris Marker is a pseudonym but the story isn’t even told by him. It’s read by a woman’s voice, who is reading letters by a figure named Sandor Krasna, a world- and possibly time-traveller. The text of Sans Soleil say one thing while the footage says another. Underneath lies a sound design, sometimes synced and often not, rarely clear and often funneled as if echoing from the past, that brings its own additional signifiers. The three elements, voice, picture, and sound, weave together in an elaborate choreography that can take you down down infinite passages of history and memory.

This is non-narrative cinema. There is no beginning, middle, or end; it loops upon itself, Ouroboros. There’s no conflict in the sense of a driving of characters. There’s no climax whatsoever. There’s only the challenge of mapping it all out like the gnome in the magic maze of DragonLance, which shifts its shape underneath him as persists in measuring every angle, counting off every step.

I once decided to write a 12 page essay on Sans Soleil for a college assignment. I got to page 36 just trying to describe how its editing works, which was really just meant to be the introductory paragraph, before I called it a day and called it a structuralist essay.

I have also watched this movie more times than I can count.

I still don’t “get it.” Or rather, I don’t think it’s that hard to comprehend. I think just watching it, you’ll get it. Every line spoken, every shot and edit, are in and of themselves comprehensible and any given moment.

It’s grokking the thing that seems impossible. It’s a bin of signifiers that tips out to spill when you bend down to pick up another one. A Faberge egg that itself is a Matryoshka doll, all projected through a kaleidoscope. Every winding thought, contemplation, idea, musing, or poetic meditation Marker takes you through leads one from another quite sensibly, until at any given point you wake up and wonder how the living hell you got here from there. Weren’t we just looking at emus in the Ile de France? Why is everyone patting the Hachiko statue at Shibuya Crossing?

And underlying it the question too few cinephiles, and dangerously enough filmmakers, fail to ask themselves: what are we doing with the images we create? What responsibility do we have toward their consequences? And can there really be a Zone — yes that Zone again, that you visited two movies before — where images can be processed until they are nothing but themselves?

I brought you here to fall in love with film. Now you have to deal with the fallout.

I will tell you this. If you followed me on this journey to this point, even striding defiantly pass the gate I erected despite plausibly not enjoying Sherlock Jr and yet still deciding to face what lied beyond, I will say that I have changed your mind.

Not, possibly, towards loving or appreciating cinema.

But your brain has been fundamentally altered watching these movies. They got into your neural cells and rewired them. There are certain things you’re going to see in movies you never saw before. Hell, there are certain things in the real world you’ll see you never saw before. And you’ll never be unable to unsee them.

Congratulations! You’ve been given the curse of the cinephile.

Look. There’s only so much I can do with five movies. I could have done this same activity focusing exclusively on silent era alone; animations; American independent cinema; and what really hurts me inside is the short shrift given to experimental cinema. This list is very Westernized: even the two Easternmost countries are particularly Western from the frame of reference of the East; but even within the West, I didn’t even get into British social and Italian neo-realism! And I’m very mad at myself for not including a single film directed by a woman, but that’s one of film history’s particular sins, underrepresenting half the human population for its entire history.

I thought about having each segment end with a list of alternatives or continuations of that stage. But I’m so happy with how much territory I was able to cover with so few titles, I’m gonna own it as is. This is your list. If you want some like/as to branch off of, feel free to send me an e-mail.

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For a while I went off on a “how to adapt Pynchon” tangent.

Here are my previous daily posts:

Day 25 of new Pynchon novel coming out, a little more about Vineland.

Much is made about the 17 year gap between Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland (not counting Slow Learner), and I’ve already quoted David Foster Wallace’s “smoked pot and watched television” implied disappointment with the quality of the book after such a wait, but I do think the big reason Vineland “clicked'“ with me w/r/t Pynchon’s use of language is because he became a more mature writer, in two magisteria.

Most importantly, in the transition between his early work and his mid-career work ( Vineland through Against the Day in my measure), he became a family man. All of his later books are more personal about his characters. Now, I’ve always disagreed with the criticism that Pynchon's characters are “cold” or “distant” — that’s just readers struggling with the density. But their relationships are given a more primary, intimate significance.

A pretty good way of saying it is that V. launched his career and Vineland relaunched it. Both center on a missing woman.

But V. Is something of a semiotic mystery novel: V herself has been everywhere, seems to have something to do with everything. Perhaps is not one woman. Perhaps is not even a woman anymore. Perhaps has never been a woman at all. Her absence tears a hole in history.

Frenesi, however, is one woman, a definite singular character with personality, a past, and relationships to the characters. Her absence tears a hole in the hearts of a bunch of people in Vineland, California.

Seems “smaller,” no? This development seems to have disappointed some readers, as the DFW quote indicates (however DFW also turned against David Lynch after Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me so DFW has real “first album was better” issues). But becoming a family man seems to have opened up more heart in Pynchon's novels, and slightly adjusted the endings. The characters still disappear in a fog of confusion… but now one with silver lining?

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At this point am I just writing a memoir?

You can read my previous dailies on Pynchon starting here:

Day 20 of new Pynchon novel coming out, a quick note that my experiences discussing Gravity’s Rainbow has led me to determine that everyone has their own Gravity’s Rainbow, by which I mean we all agree on the umbrella, global synopsis, but discussing the book usually leads to very personalized takes and memories of scenes.

As such sometimes it’s a little difficult to discuss it with people simply because each person is talking about something different. Normally the discussion coalesces around the quality of the writing itself. However I’ve learned to also just listen to people’s descriptions of GR as if it’s a book I’ve never read.

The book is dense enough I don’t think a regular human brain can overall absorb it in its completeness — if that’s even possible of any book. At least from the first read, people tend to glom onto very specific scenes that others have mentally glazed over.

Borges' has this quote I love about “A man would be lucky to read 1000 books in his entire life, and even then would be lucky to read one book in all its fullness” (paraphrased from memory). He was referring to his obsession with A Thousand and One Nights.

As mentioned previously, Gravity’s Rainbow is picaresque enough to be read as a series of short stories, too. Browsable. Like Borges’ “one book in its fullness,” I suppose Gravity’s Rainbow could be my A Thousand and One Nights or how Finnegans Wake reads to some people. An eternal volume that opens up to different pages every time.

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At this point I started getting some daily interaction with my Shadow Ticket anticipation posts so more and more of my writing turned to responding conversations I was having about them.

Day 14 of new Pynchon novel coming out, a couple days ago I mentioned readers who treat Pynchon’s books as some sort of encrypted guidebooks to finding The Truth. This cohort, moreso than Pynchon’s writing or himself, is detailed in an actual documentary that came out in 2002 called Thomas Pynchon: A Journey Into the Mind of P.

Listen, this documentary is worth a look, it’s very interesting, but you’re not gonna learn a heck of a lot about Pynchon himself from it. It mostly follows some of his fans as they trace his movements through California and Mexico and history and try to track him down in New York. It even gets creepy, with one dude camping out with a camera trying to grab some video of him.

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