“Another great year for movies”

I’ve written this before, but it bears repeating: It is a very silly trope for film critics to remind us, every December, of just how great the movies are doing; how it was another great year at the movies; how reports of cinema’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

The trope is born of insecurity: Cinema isn’t well, so its health must be reasserted in a manner that cannot be gainsaid, by sheer authority. “People say” movies are in decline, but I, the critic, say otherwise. And since I’ve seen them all and am about to list a bunch I claim are great, therefore, thou shalt trust me.

Part of the silliness here lies in the odd commitment to any given year being a measure of the health of any art form, underwritten by the notion that year to year an art form (such as film) will show itself to be consistently “good.” Even if there were no decline in film—nothing to worry about, nothing to see here—surely there are good years and bad years, high stretches and low, waxing and waning. There can be no truly excellent years or periods of cinematic creativity if there are not also lower quality years to match. Otherwise it would be meaningless to call some years great. If 1999 was a high point, 2025 might be a low point. Does anyone really want to defend the view that movies have been a single straight line of high quality going back decades? A plateau of eminence? Does any art form display such a thing, whether over decades or centuries?

Nor, finally, can the sheer quantity of films released each year tell us anything about their quality. Given Netflix et al, the overwhelming amount of slop and soulless prefab “content” is staring us all in the face, each and every day. Perhaps the more movies we make, the worse they get. Who knows?

Here’s what I do know: While there could have been some great films released this year, that’s a falsifiable claim. The proof of the pudding’s in the viewing. I can’t know the previous twelve months produced good movies just by arriving at December. I’ve got to actually see them—and to be willing, hard as it may be, to admit the possibility that “this year’s movies just weren’t that great.” An unwilling critic in this regard isn’t worth reading.

DiCaprio

Since Titanic came out in 1997, when Leonardo DiCaprio gained the clout to make whatever he wanted, with whomever he wanted, he has chosen to work with the following directors:

• Martin Scorsese (six times)

• Quentin Tarantino (twice)

• Paul Thomas Anderson

• Steven Spielberg

• Christopher Nolan

• Woody Allen

• Ridley Scott

• Alejandro González Iñárritu

• Clint Eastwood

• Sam Mendes

• Danny Boyle

• Baz Luhrmann

That’s not counting James Cameron (who directed Titanic) or Sam Raimi (The Quick and the Dead, 1995). All together that’s more than a dozen of the greatest, most influential directors of the last fifty years. Leaving aside de Palma and Coppola, who are past their active years, the only other major names that come to mind that DiCaprio hasn’t worked with are Soderbergh, Malick, Mann, the Coen brothers, Spike Lee, Fincher, del Toro, Linklater, Bigelow, Cuarón, and Paul Schrader. It would have been something to see him work with David Lynch before he passed. Is there anyone else?

This point was brought home to me by the Scorsese documentary on Apple TV+. I had no idea how important DiCaprio was to rescuing and preserving Scorsese’s career after the ’90s. I had assumed it was the other way around. The man has taste, and he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is. Just imagine all the paychecks he turned down to work with these guys instead. For DiCaprio, apparently, there’s no “one for them, one for me” dynamic. He only makes the movies he wants to make, and if people want to see them, so be it.

Scorsese

I was impressed with Mr. Scorsese, the new five-part documentary (or “film portrait”) about Martin Scorsese on Apple TV+, directed by Rebecca Miller. I’ve never been a true devotee of Scorsese, but I’ve always appreciated his work and usually defended him from detractors. Over the years I’ve seen most of his films and all the major ones. (I’ve not seen, e.g., Boxcar Bertha or Cape Fear. I keep trying to get Kundun on DVD via ILL, but no luck so far.) Even those who don’t prefer his work can admit his status as a great American artist with a recognizable moral, political, religious, and stylistic perspective.

That’s a boilerplate paragraph, but I say it to say this: Something in the documentary nagged at me. Miller allowed herself a moderate degree of criticism, but less of Scorsese’s art than of his life. Regarding Scorsese’s actual critics, the lesson we learn from the entire film and from Scorsese himself is that, at the end of the day, they are haters or skeptics or simply confused; they fail to grasp the significance and rationale, in particular, of the gratuitous violence and sex in his films.

There is, regrettably, not a trace of aesthetic self-criticism in Scorsese the man, no Augustinian retractationes. He never says, “I went too far,” or, “You know, they had a point about this one.” Every decision about graphic content is justified because … well, why?

Because, so far as I can tell, “that’s what the world is like” or “that’s what American society is like.” Okay. But that doesn’t tell me whether rubbing our faces in it—while appearing to glorify it in the process—is morally or aesthetically warranted. Such a comment is the beginning of a conversation, not its end.

You don’t have to be a “trash in, trash out” puritanical simpleton (that’s me, to be clear) to draw moral and aesthetic distinctions between, for example, the depictions of sex and violence in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, on one hand, and those in Casino and Wolf of Wall Street on the other. For me, Goodfellas resides somewhere in the middle. I marvel at the achievement while unable, in my heart, to keep myself from applying Truffaut’s rule about war films to mafia films, with Goodfellas even more than The Godfather the Platonic exemplification of the rule’s almost universal truth.

I just wish that someone would put this question to Scorsese himself, and that he would take it more seriously than he does here.

My latest: del Toro’s Frankenstein, in CT

This past Tuesday Christianity Today published my review of Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. The title is “In Netflix’s ‘Frankenstein,’ Monster Is More Compelling Than Maker,” with the following subheading: “The Guillermo del Toro adaptation brings unique perspective—but fails to match the depth of its source material.” That’s a fair representation of the review, which is critical of the film but appreciative of some of its virtues, not least Jacob Elordi’s performance and some of del Toro’s marvelous compositions. The last lines of the review sums up my theological take, too.

I must say I love the opportunity to moonlight as a film critic for CT. The original review I submitted was basically a cinematic recap of del Toro’s entire filmography, some of which remains in the final version. Turns out I got multiple degrees in theology and a job as a tenured professor just so I could finally fulfill my heart’s desire as a teenage cinephiliac: to get paid to write about the movies. What a life.

Toward a definition of Dad TV

Last December Joshua Rivera wrote a piece for Slate called “Why ‘Dad TV’ Shows Are So Popular—and Why It’s Time to Stop Calling Them That.” The tone is all over the place and the result is a mess. The author is both outraged and unmoved by the plethora of Dad TV shows and the ensuing discourse about them. Sure, they’re bad; but they’re also watchable; but they do have bad politics; but then, they go down easy.

Rivera asks at one point: “here’s my problem with calling it ‘Dad TV’: What does that even mean?” He half-heartedly gives some possible answers, but they’re so enraging he moves on. It’s impossible to define! Not for him tongue-in-cheek taxonomies like this one by Hillary Busis in Vanity Fair. At the same time, he writes, “I have no issue with these shows or the people who watch them. Frankly, who cares!” Ah, yes, the culture critic writing with passion about the thing he cares nothing about. Paging Dr. Freddie.

In any case, Rivera’s question got me thinking. Dad TV is a thing—we know it when we see it—and it is, somewhat to my surprise, a pretty relaxed topic. Most critics appear to have stopped worrying and embraced Dad TV. At least, they no longer scold viewers for their simple (“conservative”) pleasures. Maybe it’s the poptimist period in TV criticism. Whatever it is, Dad TV isn’t embarrassed about itself and critics refer to it with a kind of gentle affection, as though they’re writing about their own dads’ actual viewing habits.

So what is Dad TV? Sure, it’s a mood, a vibe, a set of recurring epochs, subjects, and themes. There’s a clear family resemblance among the shows in question, even if not a set of necessary and sufficient conditions to meet. Let’s say that, in the world of Dad TV, there are certain premises that either never go questioned or, when questioned, are always upheld. Here, in no particular order, is an incomplete list of these givens; if they emerge as the invisible motor of a show you’ve watching, then you’re probably watching Dad TV:

• Men are protagonists of history and society: they are necessary agents who solve problems. It is desirable for men to fulfill these roles.

• The world is full of problems, some of which are perennial, others intractable.

• The world contains ineradicable evil, which manifests in evil men.

• Evil men cannot be thwarted except by good men willing and able to do what is necessary.

• Evil as such is never fully or finally defeated.

• That said, enemies are defeated, not conciliated or forgiven.

• Physical strength, a firm will, and decisive action are virtues when used to protect the innocent and the weak.

• Actions is preferable to words; words are liable to be impotent, ineffective, or a means of excusing or explaining away evil.

• Forces of law and order, however imperfect, are necessary.

• When just, law and order are to be praised, held in honor, and participated in.

• When unjust, law and order call for emergency exceptions that restore them to their proper just place and purpose.

• Men are the primary, if not the unique, instruments of law and order.

• Punishment is necessary and just. The fundamental question is the balance to be struck between (societal) justice and (personal) vengeance, granting that retributive punishment must play a role in both, not just the latter.

• Suffering is acceptable, necessary, and even good when it benefits others; it is not good in itself, except as purgation or self-improvement.

• The behaviors and virtues worthy of pursuit and exemplification are not: empathy, politesse, social decorum, interpersonal subtlety, moral gray, both-sides-ism, intuition, asking permission.

• Instead, the behaviors and virtues worthy of pursuit and exemplification are: honor, duty, courage, loyalty, sacrifice, truth-telling, brotherhood, stoicism, hierarchy, rationality, skilled excellence, hard work, and getting the job done regardless of the risk, pain, or obstacles.

• Although (at a meta level) the viewer is a sedentary consumer, the show in question does not glorify but ridicules the easy consumerist pleasures of passive, sedentary, inactive men. It holds all of bourgeois society in contempt.

• What then is good? The family is good.

• Protection, provision, and procreation are good.

• Religion, at least in the sense of religio or piety, is in general good.

• Tradition, if just and time-honored, is good.

• Friendship with other men is good.

• Men who are live on the outside of these goods—who, for example, have neither wife nor children or who lack faith or friends—nevertheless are called to serve and protect them, sometimes to seek them in their absence.

• It is pleasing, to men and women alike, to tell, read, and watch stories that confirm any and all of the above.

• In fact, it is wholesome to enjoy such stories and what they celebrate; to do so is, in a way, a ballast to society.

• Human society is, among other things, one continuous if often failed attempt to bind fathers to sons and sons to fathers and, in turn, to their own (eventual) children. When successful, everyone benefits; when unsuccessful, everyone suffers.

• Hence, failed versus faithful fatherhood is at the heart of all Dad TV. Every man at the center of such stories is a son who either has a good father or, lacking one, is looking for a surrogate.

• Likewise, every man in such stories is an actual or would-be father to others, and the crux of the drama is the test of his fatherhood, if only metaphorical.

• Likewise, and therefore, every man in such stories is on a journey bound for home in whatever form; if not—if a rōnin or a wanderer—his business is entirely helping others finding theirs, usually by removing obstacles in their path.

• In a word, Dad TV is nothing more than a set of variations on The Odyssey. Which suggests that Christopher Nolan, currently adapting Homer’s epic into a film, is the chief auteur of Dad Content for our time.

Sith > Jedi

Through five of eight episodes, The Acolyte is a middling failure—and a failure because it is middling. Of everything Star Wars needed, the very last was one more showdown between the Jedi and a mysterious Sith shrouded in darkness, a long drawn-out unveiling and encounter shot without beauty or grandeur or style or grandness of scope. What a bore.

Oh well. Three more thoughts before we finish the series then immediately forget it ever existed.

First: In the lead-up to the show, the buzz was that it would be a story told from the Sith’s perspective, that is, from the vantage point of powerless partisans of the Dark Side at the tail end of a millennium-long unchallenged reign by the Jedi. That’s an interesting idea! Why wasn’t this exact story told in that way? Never in the hallways of Jedi power; never looking at the Sith or his acolyte through Jedi eyes; always, instead, looking at the Jedi aslant, from an angle, burning with furious resentment. In this way the aha-reveal wouldn’t be a Sith under a mask, but the epiphany of actual Jedi in all their boring beige glory—come to steal children, enforce galactic edicts, and kill with impunity. Why did no one think this the better route?

Second: If Disney wants to make quality Star Wars (on either the big or the small screen), they have to commit to top-tier casting. Cast a show the way HBO does. Don’t cast tweens and newbies. Don’t cast on the cheap. Get the best of the best. The only way this works is if the actors on screen have gravitas. Most of the actors on this show, like Kenobi and Boba Fett before it, look like third billing in a spin-off DC comics movie. Follow Andor’s lead and make every actor who has even a single line of dialogue someone who could win an Emmy—someone who could steal the show. (Make them human, too, by the way.) As it is, we get stilted dialogue performed by teens and twentysomethings who look like it’s their big break following a string of guest appearances on the CW. And it’s Disney, I remind you, that’s footing the bill. They’ve got the cash.

Third: Does this show prove once and for all that, canonically, the Dark Side is more powerful than the Light? Ignore Episode IX, since it never happened. Across eight movies, nearly every time a Jedi fights a Sith head-to-head (or a Force-wielding opponent in touch with the Dark Side, since neither Snoke nor Kylo Ren are Sith), the Jedi loses. Darth Maul defeats Qui-Gon Jinn and, at least in terms of lightsaber combat, Obi-Wan too. Dooku defeats Anakin and Obi-Wan both before fighting Yoda to a draw. Palpatine beats Yoda. Anakin may lose to Obi-Wan, but he “wins” in Episode IV and wins again in Episode V against Luke. Luke bests Anakin only by tapping into his anger (i.e., the Dark Side); Palpatine then defeats Luke; and Anakin in turn destroys Palpatine. In other words, this particular Sith loses not to a Jedi but to a fellow Sith—his own apprentice.

It turns out that, with the exception of Obi-Wan in his prime against an Anakin lacking any training in the Sith arts—having turned to the Dark Side mere hours earlier—the Jedi are no match for the Sith. The Sith are simply too powerful. The Dark Side appears to be the stronger side of the Force, and by a wide margin, whatever its moral content. (Note further that the Jedi themselves teach, as doctrine, that the Force as such is amoral; what it seeks, and what the universe wants, is balance, not for the extinction of the Dark by the Light.)

To its credit, The Acolyte confirms and extends this canonical pattern. In doing so, it raises questions it will surely avoid, such as why the viewer should root for the Jedi; why the Light is preferable to the Dark Side; why, post-Rey, anyone should have confidence that the Dark will not return and prevail; and how, pre-Palpatine, the Sith and the Dark Side alike were dormant, or even nonexistent, for a thousand years.

Star Wars has written its canon into a corner. Leslye Headland isn’t going to write it out. That falls to someone else. I have my doubts such a person exists. And even if they did, I wouldn’t hold my breath that Disney would hire or empower them to tell the only story that needs telling.

Update (5 minutes later): I realize, upon pressing “publish,” that this post is, unwittingly but unsurprisingly, one long apologia for Rian Johnson and The Last Jedi. IYKYK.

But seriously: I forgot to mention that Rey and Ren fight to a draw; that Rey is powerless before Snoke; and that only Ren can defeat Snoke. Which only furthers the point. Not to mention that Snoke converts Ren from the Light to the Dark and that Ren rebels against Luke—a Jedi Master!—thereby casting him away into exile and self-incurred defeat, even if also (at the end, through Rey) toward a sort of self-immolating victory. Had Kathleen Kennedy permitted Rian Johnson or some equally brilliant screenwriter to follow the lines he’d drawn where they were pointing (that is, in the climactic ninth film), all this would have already been resolved, since the question at the heart of the above post is the question at the heart of Episode VIII. Asked but, on principle, unanswered by Kennedy, Abrams, et al. Oh well. Maybe that was their signal that it never would be. So it goes.

23 thoughts on The Phantom Menace

Twenty-five years ago I saw Episode I with a childhood best friend in the theater that sits at the entrance to Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida; last night I saw the re-release with my sons at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas. I’ve got thoughts.

1. No matter its potential, no matter the what-might-have-beens, no matter the revisionist reviews or retconning or retrievals, three things were always going to keep TPM from being a great Star Wars film: (a) an eight-year-old Anakin; (b) unnecessary narrative nostalgia; and (c) cutesy cartoon schmaltz. We now have forty years’ worth of evidence that these decisions were not departures from the vision of George Lucas, but part and parcel of it. To change course, he would have had to listen to outside voices suggesting that Anakin be eighteen, not eight; that Anakin not be the original builder of C-3PO; that Jar Jar and Watto and Sebulba and “sleemo” and “doo-doo” and ha-ha neighborhood Tatooine slave children taunting “Ani” are neither funny nor endearing, including to actual children. But Lucas doesn’t believe in listening to others, here in his galaxy above all. So there’s no sliding doors moment where Episode I is truly excellent; it was always going to be hamstrung from the start.

2. A partial addition to this list is Lucas’s obsession with “cutting edge” CGI, which everyone but him knows ceases to be cutting edge the moment the car drives off the lot. On re-watch, though, had the film lacked the above three items of dead weight without cutting the gratuitous CGI, it could have held up. So long as the animated characters weren’t cartoonish or racist(!)—a big “if”—then TPM would have been like Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park or Fellowship of the Ring. The “dated” graphics aren’t dated at all: they’re remarkable testaments to digital artistry. Rather than what they became, which is testaments to Lucas’s softness for silliness.

3. A friend told me years ago that a professor of his ruined The Godfather for him by pointing out Diane Keaton’s acting in it. Allow me to suggest that Natalie Portman is the Kay Adams of The Phantom Menace—indeed, of all three prequel trilogy episodes. She’s not exactly spectacular or awful, the way Hayden Christensen is on screen and going for it and not quite succeeding but still, you know, doing a thing. It’s a void, an absence, a null. She’s a non-presence in every single scene. I’m happy to blame Lucas for this instead of Portman, both for his direction and for his writing of the character. (Portman is, after all, a very accomplished actor outside of Star Wars, which was one reason to be excited about her casting!) Nevertheless one-half of the Skywalker twins’ parentage is a zero in our introduction to her. A lost opportunity.

4. The only time Portman is half-alive is when she “plays” her own double on Tatooine and repeatedly butts heads with Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jinn. But then, the entire handmaiden/queen ruse and its “reveal” is goofy to begin with. I wonder how it played with adults at the time. I vaguely recall being surprised in 1999, yet minus any payoff. The only narrative logic is that it allows Lucas to put Portman in town with Neeson when they meet and befriend Anakin and his mother Shmi. Otherwise it’s a dead end.

5. Given the furor it caused at the time, I have to admit that, on re-watch these many years later, with so many shows and film and canon filled out, I don’t mind the Midi-chlorians one bit. It’s actually rather elegantly done, I must say. Begone, haters! Hier stehe ich und kann nicht anders.

6. There are other clunky bits, not least just about everything related to the Gungans as well as the deep-sea adventure through the planet’s core, plus some of the Trade Federation politics- and alien-speak (again, those accents are shameful). That said … like all the other revisionists, I can’t hate this movie, and there’s a lot to appreciate, even love. Let me count the ways.

7. Neeson’s Qui-Gon is not only a home run: well conceived, well written, and well executed. He may be one of Lucas’s greatest creations. He commands every scene. He’s always in his own skin, comfortable where others are not. His simultaneous uncertainty, confusion, confidence, and resolve are palpable. The hints at his past and his running conflict with the Council are expertly deployed in their ambiguity. He has chemistry with everyone: with Portman, with Ewan McGregor, with Jake Lloyd, with Pernilla August. Neeson somehow single-handedly elevates this movie from forgettable to memorable, at least when he’s on screen (which is a lot). All this is not even to mention the moral gray that Lucas leans into with Qui-Gon. I lost count how many times Neeson lies to someone’s face without a trace of regret. He gambles without promise of gain and doesn’t even stop to inform the queen. What a character! What a performance!

8. Did I mention that Qui-Gon was dead right about the Jedi and the Republic? About its sclerosis, decay, and internal rot? About its detachment from the common good? About its aristocratic self-regard and blindness to the evil in its midst? Neither Yoda nor Mace Windu could see Palpatine standing right in front of them. Palpatine made sure his apprentice killed the only one who might recognize him before it was too late.

9. (This point and the next two relate also, by the way, to The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson understood that Luke had to come to terms, on screen, with the “intra-Jedi” debate between Palpatine, Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and Yoda. In a sense, Luke—through Ren—had to mature beyond Yoda and Obi-Wan’s vacillating optimism and despair in favor of something less childish, less binary, less yin and yang, without succumbing to the Dark Side. That maturity goes unspoken in the film, but its name is Qui-Gon. Had Episode IX been made by someone as shrewd as Johnson, Rey’s journey and continuation of the Jedi would have made explicit this callback all the way to Episode I: “a new start” for “a new Jedi,” open to the wisdom and worldly good sense of a Qui-Gon Jinn.)

10. Qui-Gon wasn’t just right about the Jedi; he was also right about Anakin, assuming he was indeed the Chosen One (a contestable proposition, I admit). Even if he was wrong about the prophecy, or rather ensured the truth of the prophecy by tragically ensuring Anakin’s training, he was right to see promise and potential in Anakin and the Council was wrong to treat a third-grade child—to his face—like his sadness and fear, after leaving his home and mother behind, were such a psychological obstacle to his learning the Force that they would rather him suffer humiliating rejection before the highest sages of the land. Hm, I’m sure that would have bode well for the virginally conceived Jesus of Midi-chlorian Force powers. They sealed their fate, and confirmed Qui-Gon’s worst fears about them, in that very room, by that very decision. It’s a miracle that Anakin ever repents at all, given his experiences.

11. Think again about those experiences. He’s conceived without a father’s involvement. He’s a slave from early childhood. He leaves his mother before his tenth birthday. He joins an order that not only keeps him from ever visiting his still-enslaved mother for a full decade but also refuses to use their power, influence, and wealth—not to mention their lightsabers—to liberate her from a slavery that the Republic itself outlaws! Oh, and the Jedi also require lifelong abstinence, forbidding marriage and children. Later, Anakin will return on his own to Tatooine to find his formerly enslaved mother kidnapped, tortured, and raped by Tusken Raiders. He will murder all of them for this. Later still, Anakin’s secret wife, secretly pregnant, will die, in part as a result of his lashing out at her with the Force. Then he will be led to believe that his unborn child died with her. Then he will learn that his son lived, but this knowledge was kept from him both by his current master (Palpatine) and by his old master (Obi-Wan)—all surrogate fathers who failed him. Then he will learn that his son has a twin sister, likewise kept from him. Then he will fight and nearly kill his son. Then he will kill his current master, having “killed” (or defeated) his old master, and ask his son for forgiveness before dying of his wounds. (Note: All three of Anakin’s surrogate fathers died as a result of apprenticing him.) Then he will look on from Force-ghost-world as his grandson turns to the Dark Side and murders his own father and nearly his own mother, even as Luke turns away from the force in despair and self-chosen exile. Then, finally, his grandson will join forces with (former Nabooian Senator) Palpatine’s granddaughter to destroy Palpatine himself—whom Anakin, somehow, failed actually to kill in his one and only good deed in life. Having killed Palpatine once and for all, Anakin’s grandson gives his life to save Palpatine’s granddaughter’s. And so the Skywalker blood line is complete: from Shmi to Anakin (and Padmé) to Luke and Leia (and Han) to Ben. Seven Skywalkers, all special, most Force sensitive, some Jedi, all dead and gone, and for what?

12. No, J. J. Abrams, Rey is not a Skywalker, even if she wants to claim the name. And yes, it occurs to me that one of Freddie deBoer’s best essays is a longer and much funnier version of the previous point. Go read him and weep/laugh.

13. Since I’m mentioning writers on these themes, see also Matt Zoller Seitz and Ross Douthat. And Freddie again, who is correct about The Last Jedi.

14. What else does Lucas get right? The politics, the decadence, the transition from planetary democracy to galactic democracy to galactic republic to galactic emergency to galactic empire. He also understands that the wider cinematic and narrative frame of Star Wars is not itself, his own prior creation, but the larger mythic and movie worlds of both Western and Eastern culture. Granting the moments of eye-rolling nostalgia and point-and-laugh coincidences, Star Wars has not (yet) become solipsistic at this time.

15. The music is flawless. Thank you, John Williams.

16. Lucas also nails multiple scenes and images, to the point that some of them remain iconic. The greatest of these is every single frame of the Darth Maul fight. I dissent from the view that Maul should have lived to fight another day; it was wise to kill him off. What makes the duel with Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon so compelling—somehow I’d never realized this—is that none of them ever speaks a word. In just about every climactic fight sequence in any action movie, the leads are in constant conversation: cajoling, insulting, persuading, begging. Not here. There’s nothing to talk about. It’s pure visual poetry. Few things filmed since then can match it.

17. Maul is a singular visual creation. You can’t help but stare. As for other characters, Obi-Wan is well written by Lucas and well acted by McGregor, as are Palpatine by Ian McDiarmid and Shmi Skywalker by Pernilla August. I was surprised how affecting August’s portrayal of Shmi is. The only pathos in the movie, with the possible exception of Obi-Wan’s grief over Qui-Gon, belongs to Shmi. She is worn down by the world, yet oddly hopeful, given her experience with Anakin’s miraculous conception and her love for him. She wants him to leave, even as she registers a moment’s hurt quickly covered over by a mother’s affection when she sees his forgetfulness, then remembrance, then acceptance at her remaining behind (as, the movie won’t let us forget, a slave).

August and Neeson share multiple moments together: knowing glances, light touches of arms and shoulders. Squint and you might see romantic tension. On this viewing I saw instead a kind of shared religious sensibility. They both relate to the Force the way Mary and Joseph relate to God. Like Joseph, Qui-Gon is a surrogate and adoptive father (also like Joseph, Qui-Gon dies before Anakin becomes an adult; unlike Jesus, Anakin has major daddy issues for the rest of his life, as do his son and grandson, Luke and Ben—apparently the only way for sons in Star Wars to exorcise their paternal demons is by slaying their father or dying themselves, or perhaps through handing on the line from multiples generations of failed father figures to an adopted daughter figure: this is the only reading of Rey I will allow). Note well that Shmi isn’t passive before Qui-Gon; rather, her fiat mihi is, like Mary’s, an active consent in response to a higher benign power. In this way Shmi and Qui-Gon alike are responsive to a kind of cosmic momentum sweeping them along. They see it, acquiesce to it, float along with it, even at great cost; in fact, at the cost of both of their lives.

18. I remain struck by the fact that when Lucas sat down to write Darth Vader’s backstory he made the child Anakin Skywalker a slave on a backwater planet. I must have seen The Phantom Menace at least a dozen times since 1999, but I had never registered the brief conversation at the Skywalker dinner table in which Anakin explains that all slaves on Tatooine have a chip implanted beneath their skin that (a) can’t be detected or removed by the slave himself and (b) marks them as a slave for life, lest they attempt to escape. This, in what is otherwise, in Lucas’s hands, a children’s fable! Anakin can’t run away, much less hop aboard starship, because his brutal slaveowners will track him down through the cybernetic chip implanted in his body!

Is this a kind of dark foreboding of Anakin’s eventual bodily disintegration and reintegration via robotic machinery? “More machine than man”? A man enslaved by his own passions, by his unchosen transhuman body, metal and circuitry rather than flesh and blood? A man overmastered by a Force he supposed he could manipulate to save the wife he eventually killed? All of which turned on his receiving freedom from slavery without his mother—a motherless origin at this, the source of the most famous “orphan’s tale” in American pop culture? Recall that, in the next film, Padmé comforts Anakin following his slaughter of men, women, and children among the Tusken Raiders, after they took and abused his mother (once she had herself been freed and married by a good man!). I lay all this out to show what was going on in Lucas’s mind as he sketched out the origins of Darth Vader. As seemingly light and occasionally cartoonish as Episode I can be, it has moments of such darkness it makes you gasp.

19. This is a movie about overconfidence. More than once different characters say, “You assume too much.” Or, “I promise you…” followed by an outlandish vow they can’t be sure they can keep or whose implications they can’t foresee. Even my beloved Qui-Gon comes under judgment here. No one knows anything—the only exception is the Sith, who see all. No one else has sight. Everyone is blind while presuming the indefinite persistence of the status quo. And it’s all about to come crashing down around their ears. This is the tragedy of the beginning of the story of Darth Vader. This is “the phantom menace” haunting the galaxy, haunting the Jedi, haunting the Republic, haunting Anakin and his many would-be fathers.

20. So no, I don’t mind the name, either. It’s both accurate and appropriately apt to the Saturday morning genre B-movie serials that influenced the original film.

21. Three final thoughts, each a missed opportunity. The first concerns slavery. Why not make that issue more prominent in the next two episodes? Why not make Anakin an abolitionist? Why not insinuate the issue into the Senate’s bureaucratic machinations and Padmé’s own frustrations? Why not send Anakin back to Tatooine to liberate the slaves—only to have his hand slapped by Coruscant, even to have the slaves returned to their masters by the august Republican Senate? And why not have Palpatine rise to the occasion, offering the power of emancipation to Anakin and Padmé in return for emergency wartime powers? After all, doesn’t he need the military might of the Republic to stamp down the Hutts and other slave-mongering forces? How did this not write itself?

22. Why not let Anakin lose the pod race? The race is well shot, but there’s no urgency or angst because we know he’ll win. What if he didn’t? What if a loss then put Qui-Gon in the position of stealing Anakin away, refusing to honor his bet with Watto and the Hutts? Qui-Gon would do it. And it would make him a hero in Anakin’s eyes, even as it made Anakin resentful and ashamed for having lost and furious at the now-villainous Council and Senate, which would politely instruct Qui-Gon to return Anakin to Tatooine. This plot line, too, writes itself.

23. Oh, Jar Jar. By which I mean: Darth Jar Jar. Do I buy the theory? I want to. And man, there really are odd aspects of TPM if Lucas truly had nothing up his sleeve with this character. His banishment, the fear he inspires in fellow Gungans, the suggestion that he will be punished or even killed once Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan depart, his occasional physical prowess and grace, his crucial role at key moments to catalyze the plot (such as hinting in Padmé’s ear that she should return to Naboo—moments after Palpatine whispers diabolical suggestions in her ear in the Senate—not to mention his fateful vote to make Palpatine Emperor in Episode III). Remember, too, that Palpatine is a Senator from Naboo, so it’s absolutely plausible that he and Jar Jar have had prior contact. He just “happens” to run into the Jedi and incur a life debt. Oh, and how does Darth Maul track Padmé’s ship to Tatooine if they never sent a transmission off world, but only received one? One option: Jar Jar himself found a way to send a transmission, alerting the Sith to their whereabouts.

The notion of doubles (“Always two there are”)—co-equal/rival pairs or even a kind of surreptitious self-doubling—is pronounced in TPM: Republic and Trade Federation, Senate and Council, Amidala and Padmé, Palpatine and Sidious, Sidious and Maul, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan and Anakin. Why not Jar Jar and Darth Jar Jar?

As others have detailed, this would also explain Maul’s death and Count Dooku’s random appearance in his place; it was meant to be Count Jar Jar all along. Had the JJB character not been such a fantastic fiasco and embarrassment from day one, he might have been the Gollum of Star Wars: the first true and truly momentous CGI character, and a secret villain to boot. Was he? Was that the plan?

Maybe. Who knows. On this re-watch, aside from some of the narrative holes, it didn’t seem particularly likely. And it sure seems like we would have heard some leak from Lucasfilm in the last three decades spoiling the secret.

Chalk it up as one more might-have-been in this remarkable might-have-been of a movie.

Civil War

I don’t yet know what I think about Civil War, Alex Garland’s latest. I’ve not read a word from others, though I have a vague sense that there are already battle lines drawn, strong readings offered, etc. I have nothing to say about that.

I do know that Garland is smart and makes smart films. I’m hesitant to trust either my or others’ knee-jerk reaction to a film that’s clearly got things on its mind, a film that is surely not what many of us supposed it would be based on trailers and ads.

I also care not one whit what Garland himself thinks about the film. He may have thought he was making a movie about X, intending to say Y, when in fact he made a movie about A, which happens to say B and C.

Like I said, I don’t have a strong take yet. I do have one possible interpretation, which may turn out to be a strong misreading. Here goes.

Civil War is not about American politics, American polarization, impending American secession, or even Trump. It’s not a post–January 6 fever dream/allegory/parable. It’s not a liberal fable or a conservative one.

Instead, Civil War is a film about the press—about the soul of the press, or rather, about what happens when the press loses its soul. In that sense it is about Trump, but not Trump per se. It’s about what happens to the press (what happened to the press) under someone like Trump; what the reaction to Trump does (did) to journalism; how the heart of a free polity turns to rot when it begins to mirror the heartless nihilism it purports to “cover.” Words become images; images become form without content; violence becomes a “story”; an assassination becomes a “scoop.”

It doesn’t matter what Nick Offerman’s president says seconds before he’s executed. It matters that he say something and that someone was there—first—to get “the quote.” The newsroom lifers and war-time photographers documenting propaganda, unable to listen to one more canned speech spouting lies on the radio, themselves become agents of propaganda. They become what they oppose, a photo negative of what they’re so desperate to capture for their audience. (What audience? Who’s watching? There’s no evidence anybody is reading, listening, or watching anymore. Outside of the soldiers and the press, everybody else appears to be pretending the war isn’t happening at all.)

The urban warfare Garland so expertly displays in the film—better than almost anything I’ve ever seen attempting to embed the viewer on the streets and in the cramped rooms of military units breaching fortified gates and buildings, made all the more surreal by its being set in downtown Washington, D.C.—is therefore not about itself, not about the images it seems to be showing, but is instead a Trojan horse for us to observe the “PRESS” who are along for the ride. And what happens between the three leads in the closing moments tells us all we need to know. One gets his quote. One gets her shot. And one loses her shot, as she does her life, having slowly awakened across the arc of the film to the intolerable inhumanity required of (or generated by) her profession. Another propagandist, though, rises to take her place. There’s always someone else waiting in the wings, ready to snap the picture that will make her name.

There, in the Oval Office, staring through a camera lens, a star is born.

“Real” movies

There are movies and there are movies. There have always been hacks for hire, but these days it’s less hack directors than hack IP that you’ve got to be on the lookout for. Hack IP is prefab by definition. Not so much too many cooks in the kitchen as no cooks at all: pull off the plastic, nuke it, and you’ve got yourself a movie. The next step, namely eliminating directors altogether in favor of A.I.-generated “content,” is only logical.

Sometimes, though, you’re in the mood for a crowd-pleaser. So the other day, when I had a couple nights to myself, I watched the second and third Equalizer films. The trilogy stars Denzel Washington and all three entries were written by Richard Wenk and directed by Antoine Fuqua. I vaguely remembered the first one, and thought it would be a pleasant, if undemanding, way to pass the time. I thought, in other words, that this was a bit of hack IP, brought to life by a hack writer and a hack director.

To my shame! There are movies and there are movies: some are fake, prefab, assembled by committee, produced by a factory, mindless, visionless, voiceless, toneless; and some are not. The Equalizer 2 & 3 are not classics; they didn’t deserve an Oscar. But they’re not fake. They’re not prefab. They’re “real” movies. And I wasn’t expecting that. Fuqua, Wenk, and Denzel surprised me.

The action in both films is well-executed. It’s what happens in between, though, that upended my expectations. Long stretches of “down time” with seemingly stock characters who, all of a sudden, are shown to have an inner life. What appears to be a minor detour is actually a bona fide B plot pulling the A plot into itself.

Wenk and Fuqua care about characters who, in any other Hollywood blockbuster, would be throwaways and caricatures. Ashton Sanders, fresh off his Moonlight turn, plays a teenage boy in the second film drawn into drugs and violence. Through Denzel’s eyes, Wenk and Fuqua train the audience—many of whom might not identify with Sanders’s character; might dismiss him as a problem; might think they already know his fate—to see him as Denzel’s character does: a sweet young boy, full of promise, caught between worlds. I sort of wanted the action movie to stop entirely and just become about this kid’s future.

Anyway. As I say, these films aren’t all-time greats. But “real” movies, however flawed, are always preferable to fake movies, however technically expertly wrought. And these two made me want to take a second look at Fuqua’s filmography especially. I’ve always dismissed him as merely competent, a professional who can work well with stars for big-budget manly movies. That was a mistake on my part. At a minimum, it turns out that professionalism—not to mention perspective and patience—go a long way in a landscape dominated by hack IP.

Marvel on a budget

Why do Marvel’s productions look so bad? Why does Secret Invasion look like it was shot by numbers in about three weeks on an Atlanta backlot the size of a basketball court? Why are scenes so often in cars or indoors? Why are so many actors unknowns or newbies? Why does everyone seem sedated except Olivia Colman?

Likewise, why was Ant-Man 3 so aggressively ugly? Why were the graphics so poor? Is the studio on a budget? Is Disney siphoning money from Marvel to other IP? Is Disney’s current cost-cutting already evident in Marvel’s post-Endgame entries? Is Marvel’s aesthetic on purpose? Are the directors and cinematographers happy with the way the shows and movies look, or is the aesthetic imposed on them from on high?

Either way, where is all the money going? Consider the latest season of Jack Ryan on Amazon. Shot on multiple locations, regularly featuring wide-angled shots of gorgeous outdoor vistas, it looks and feels like a slick action movie with a visual language and a modicum of style. It’s never hazy or gooey the way Marvel (and, for that matters, Netflix) productions are. You can see everything. It’s high definition. Care has been put into the image. And into the acting and writing. Even if it’s just popcorn entertainment, there’s forethought and planning in evidence. Bezos is getting his money’s worth.

You can’t say the same for Marvel. It’s embarrassing. It’s beginning to feel like late 90s primetime television: same production quality, same writing exhaustion, same pseudo serialization. This, from a multibillion-dollar movie studio that conquered the globe over the last fifteen years. Does anyone know why? What’s going on?

I’ve stuck with the movies just for fun. And Guardians 3 was good. But last year I couldn’t bring myself to finish Moon Knight, much less try She-Hulk or Ms. Marvel. I don’t know anyone who did. I sampled Secret Invasion because (a) it’s summer and (b) Samuel L. Now I’m hooked just to see how the car wreck comes to an end.

After this, it’s Loki (potentially solid) followed by a run of shows and movies that are humdrum, eyerolling, or parody: The Marvels, Echo, Agatha, Captain America 4, Ironheart, Daredevil (again), and Thunderbolts. (Deadpool 3 doesn’t count; it’s inherited, won’t follow house style, won’t mess around with MCU canon, and will wrap up the trilogy.) Future Avengers movies keep getting delayed, contain no narrative momentum, and feature no names or actors normie audiences care about. Plus the one interesting thing about the multiverse, Jonathan Majors’ performance as Kang, is unlikely to continue; I assume Majors will be replaced by another actor by year’s end.

When Kevin Feige hired Ryan Coogler and Taika Waititi and James Gunn, it seemed as though Marvel’s productions would have style and panache, built on relative directorial freedom. Sometimes that came through. But in the last few years it’s become clear those were exceptions to the rule. The rule, it appears, is half-rendered sludge on a budget that will always prefer an Atlanta green screen to an actual physical location. At the very moment Tom Cruise is defying death in practical stunts on the big screen. It’s bizarre.

If there’s an explanation, I’m all ears.

Prestige scholarship

No, not that kind of prestige. I mean the kind you find in Christopher Nolan’s movie of the same name, based on the (quite good, quite different) novel by Christopher Priest. Wherein—and here I’m spoiling it—a magician so committed to entertaining audiences and to defeating his competitor uses a kind of real magic, or outlandish science, to make a copy of himself each night, drowning the old man and watching from afar. Why does he do it? Why go to such lengths? Because, little does he know, the trick performed by his competitor, in which he seems to be in two places at once, is a con: he’s not one man but two; identical twins. That’s why he, the competitor, appears to be so superhumanly productive, so supernaturally capable of bilocation. He does exist in two places at the same time. Because he’s not one person. He’s two.

That’s the way I feel about people I think of as super-scholars. There are many of these on offer, but I’ll use Timothy Burke as an example for now. The man writes a daily Substack, almost always with a word count in the thousands. He reports continuously on the books he’s reading, the New Yorker articles he’s reading, the peer-reviewed journal articles he’s reading, the comic books he’s reading, the genre fantasy he’s reading, the novels he’s reading, the Substacks he’s reading—and more. In addition, he reports the dishes he’s cooking, the video games he’s playing, the photos he’s editing, the book manuscripts he’s drafting, the syllabi he’s re-writing, the institutional meetings he’s attending. Oh, and he has a spouse and children. Oh, and he teaches classes; something he’s apparently well regarded for.

Reading him isn’t masochistic for me so much as uncanny. He belongs to this (in my eyes fictitious but clearly all too real) tribe of academics and journalists who appear never to sleep, only to consume and produce, consume and produce, without end or exhaustion. Do they speed read? Are they lying? Do they refuse to close their eyes except for six carefully timed and executed 20-minute naps every 24 hours? Are they brains in vats operating their bodies from afar? Do they have assistants and researchers doing the actual work that comes into my inbox every single day of the week?

No, I don’t think so. They’re really doing all of it. It’s them. No tricks.

Well, except the one. Like Alfred Bordon in The Prestige, there’s more than one of them. Sometimes twins, sometimes triplets; occasionally more. Nothing magical. No futuristic science involved. They just don’t want us in on the secret. Which I get. I wouldn’t either. The result is marvelous, even unbelievable.

It’s prestige scholarship. It’s the only explanation. Good for them.

The Gray Man

Why is The Gray Man so bad? Chris Evans is in top form, while Ryan Gosling and Ana de Armas are always game. It could be the script; but then, dumb action scripts have the potential to be elevated by competent direction into quality entertainment, and occasionally even excellent art.

The culprit has to be the Russo brothers. Yet they are the same directors of this scene, which contains more clarity, line of sight, and visual creativity in three minutes than anything in the full running time of TGM. Don’t they know they now live in a world ruled by action auteurs like Christopher McQuarrie, Chad Stahelski, and Gareth Evans? Are there more than three straight seconds of coherent, sustained editing in TGM before a careening drone shot or confusing cut renders the action visual gibberish? Why all the CGI smoke, gas, and fire? Why the constant haze, a sort of vague fog constantly filtering the audience’s sight? Is it cinematographer Stephen Windon’s fault? Someone else’s? Who is spending all that Netflix cash? On what, exactly, other than an outlandish and unnecessary travel budget? Why are the visuals and action of Extraction, another Netflix film produced by the Russos but directed by first-timer Sam Hargrave, superior to TGM’s? Why, why, why?

Does anyone know the answer? I certainly don’t.

NOPE, BCS, TOM, MCU

Some pop culture odds and ends…

Nope. I’ve got little to add to the Discourse here, just a few scattered thoughts. (I saw the film with friends and processed it with them; I’ve not done any online reading besides skimming—and being disappointed with—this article.) First, Daniel Kaluuya remains Jordan Peele’s not-so-secret super-weapon. What an actor. Second, it’s nothing but good for the movies that Jordan Peele productions have become events unto themselves. That’s a happy world to live in, even when Peele doesn’t quite hit the mark, as here. Third, the problem with Nope is the opposite of what ailed Us. Where Us worked at the visceral level of story and characters, it failed at the symbolic or metaphorical level. In Nope, by contrast, the allegory is what’s potent and compelling, whereas the literal narrative has gaps and questions. At times it feels like the plot does X or Y because that’s what the Meaning requires, rather than the significance arising organically from the story. When the allegory calls for the same signifier to mean two or more contrary things at once, the plot becomes unmoored. Having said that, fourth, a couple minor interpretive ventures. What’s up with that shoe? What came to my mind was the monolith in 2001, whose presence always signals a powerful evolutionary or technological shift in a group or species’ agency—and whose first appearance involves apes, tools, violence, and a jump to spaceships (re the last, the dad in the sitcom appears to be space-related in interests or profession). I wonder if, on a re-watch of Nope, mention or flashback or appearance of the shoe would similarly signal not only Gordy’s turn but also key turns in the narrative and/or Jean Jacket’s behavior. I’ll also add, mostly tongue in cheek, that when wondering aloud about the title of the film, what came to mind was Knope, as in Leslie. If Get Out (still his most successful film) was Peele’s rejoinder to the fantasies of well-meaning Obama-era white-liberal post-racism—though it understandably took on new force when someone other than Hillary was elected—perhaps Nope is a rebuttal of the same phenomenon, only applied to Hollywood instead of Washington, D.C. It’s Peele’s Nope to Poehler’s Knope.

Better Call Saul. I’ve been on the BCS bandwagon from the beginning. I’ve written about it briefly before, but mostly I’m just here to stand in awe. Like MBD, I anticipate these final episodes like each is Game 7 of the NBA Finals. Be sure to be reading what Alan Jacobs writes about it. Even DBH is in on the glories of Saul:

I became genuinely addicted, however, to Breaking Bad, which was so much better written than any of the television of my youth—and better written than just about every studio film made since the 1970’s—that it astonished me. It was the perfect balance of Dostoyevsky and Ed McBain, with just a hint of Lawrence Sanders here and Charles Portis there. I did not even mind the somewhat fantastic conclusion of the series. When, however, its sequel (or “prequel”) Better Call Saul came out, I was hesitant to watch it, fearing it would prove to be an inferior product that would only diminish my memory of the original program. But I watched. Now, in its final season, having just returned from its mid-season break, the show is dwindling down to its end over half a dozen episodes; and I am prepared to say not only that it is the better of the two programs, but that it may be the finest wholly original program ever to grace American television (or television anywhere). Like its predecessor, it is a grim portrayal of the gradual destruction of a soul, though now perhaps with somewhat greater subtlety and nuance, and with a richer range of characters. Comparisons aside, though, the quality of the writing has proved consistently astounding, and never more so than in these concluding chapters. Anyone who has followed the story—and I will give nothing away—will know that the final episode before that mid-season break was at once shocking and brilliant. It arrived in its closing minutes at a denouement (ominously announced by the slight flickering of a candle’s flame) that made perfect sense of the entire narrative of the series up to that point, and of the current season in particular, but that was (for me, at least) wholly unexpected until the moment just before it occurred. The construction of the story was so ingenious, and its moral and emotional power so unexpectedly intense, that I was left amazed. I do not know what it tells us about the current state of our culture that good writers have more or less been banished from the movie industry and have had to take their wares instead to television; but I am glad the medium as it now exists can make room for them. I also do not know what to make of the reality that there are television programs so much more competently written than most novels today. But, whatever the case, I can at least assure my three correspondents that, yes, I do watch television, even sometimes when something other than baseball is on; and that, moreover, in the case of Better Call Saul I feel positively elevated by having done so, because the program is a genuine work of finely wrought art.

I’ll add that, though Alan Sepinwall is usually reliable, his most recent recap of the show is strange, and it worries me he might know something about the final three episodes and be unintentionally telegraphing it to readers. He’s done this in the past, where he interprets an episode’s implications in ways no normal viewer would, because screeners or confidential information tugs his mind in an unpredictable direction. All that to say, he suggests over and over both (a) that this is probably our last glimpse of Gene’s future story and (b) that it provides a “happy ending” to Jimmy/Saul/Gene’s story.

A happy ending? What could that possibly mean? Deceiving and abusing an elderly woman and her loser son with a meaningless heist that could get the latter sent to jail, thereby reminding Jimmy of “the good old days” when—wait for it—theft, fraud, drugs, and murder were part of his daily life … this is a “happy ending”? Huh? The story is explicitly and intrinsically a fall narrative, a decline into moral squander and misery. The eminently wise and trustworthy writers and showrunners of BCS may or may not have more Gene in store for us. But even if we don’t return to him, his ending is as far from happy as one could possibly imagine.

The Old Man. Shows like The Old Man are more or less factory-produced for my tastes: The Honourable Woman, The Night Manager, The Americans, Fauda, even season five of Homeland—self-contained, stylish cocktails of spycraft, action, and character, realistic enough to be taken seriously, unrealistic enough to be fun. Le Carré lite, in other words. I was disappointed by the finale of TOM, however, because I thought it was a seven-episode miniseries, not the first of two seasons. I also didn’t realize Jeff Bridges’ battles with lymphoma and Covid brought production to a halt multiple times. Imagine being 70 years old, cancer in remission, Covid finally beaten, and the next day you’re hanging out a window at 70mph playing grandpa-Bourne, shooting back at the bad guys chasing you (and grandpa-driver John Lithgow). Not a bad capstone to a remarkable career.

Marvel. By my count, between May 2008 and November 2025, if Disney has its way, there will have been at least thirty-nine official “Marvel Cinematic Universe” movies. By the time the fifth and sixth Avengers films come out (six months apart) in 2025, my bet is that there will have been even more than what’s currently announced, which means the number will likely cross the threshold of forty movies in a little over seventeen years. And that’s not counting any Marvel characters produced by Sony outside of the MCU. Nor is it counting the Marvel TV shows, which in the same time span should amount to at least twenty-six in toto, which on average run two to three seasons each. So again, in less than two decades, we’re talking one hundred movie hours and hundreds of TV hours.

Now look at quality. From 2019 to the present there have been nine MCU movies. Two have been very bad (Captain Marvel and Eternals), three have been middling (Black Widow, Shang-Chi, and Thor 4), and four have been solid (Avengers 4, Spider-Man 2 & 3, and Doctor Strange 2). People love the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, but they’re actually pretty forgettable; and although the final Avengers entry provided a cathartic conclusion to the previous two dozen films’ worth of story lines, it was bloated and even sort of boring in the middle act.

All that to say, that’s three and a half years of the world-bestriding Marvel Universe, the most successful film franchise of our (all?) time … and it’s a pretty mixed record, when you step back and look at it. Add in the deluge of Disney+ series and their even spottier quality, plus a narratively unclear and mostly uncompelling “multiversal” saga connecting these films to the coming ones in the next few years, and it makes sense that people are writing about Marvel’s “problem” or “crisis.”

Nevertheless, I think that sort of language overstated. Between one pole, which suggests the MCU will keep on breaking records forever, and the other pole, which suggests the MCU is about to crash, I think the correct position lies somewhere in the middle. When characters and properties that people love are featured in a Marvel movie, people will keep buying tickets; see Black Panther 2, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Blade, etc. When people don’t care, or the movies are bad, people will start to drift away. Instead of seeing 2019 as a peak followed by a steep cliff, we should see it as the highest peak, followed by only very slowly diminishing returns, with many subsequent slightly smaller peaks, with a cliff awaiting only after 2025. At that point, unless they nail revivals of Fantastic Four and X-Men, which somehow spark another wave, a new generation, a seventh “phase,” and thus a third decade of MCU fandom and culture-wide mania, I think that’s when it all, finally, comes to an end—where “end” doesn’t mean “no more popular comic book movies” but “everyone and their mom ceases to reflexively see most MCU movies in the theater.”

Then again, the almighty Kevin Feige has been doubted before. He knew something no one else did fifteen years ago. Maybe he knows something we don’t today. But count me skeptical.

Malick and Scorsese on confession and martyrdom

The two people to read on Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019) are Jon Baskin (in NYRB) and Alan Jacobs (in The Point as well as his blog). One thing I assume others have noted but that struck me in my viewing is the likeness to and contrast with Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016).

Both directors are 1970s auteurs. Both are Americans born during World War II. Both are Roman Catholic in one sense or another. Both have made multiple films featuring explicitly Christian themes. In fact, within the next year or two, both will have directed films about Jesus of Nazareth himself.

Moreover, both A Hidden Life and Silence are rooted in historical events, though the latter is an adaptation of a novel fictionalizing something that happened centuries prior, while the former is an imaginative evocation of a real man’s life and martyrdom, based on his personal correspondence. As it happens, the execution of Franz Jägerstätter occurred less than four months before Malick’s birth.

Finally, both films are about faith under conditions of persecution, the meaning (or meaninglessness) of suffering, the command of Christ under duress, and martyrdom. Scorsese and Malick come to very different conclusions, however.

To be sure, neither film imposes a particular interpretation on the viewer. Personally, I read Silence against what are Scorsese’s evident intentions: namely, to vindicate Rodrigues’s ultimate decision to step on the fumie, i.e., to repudiate and blaspheme the image and name of Christ. He does so, under impossible pressure, not only from Japanese authorities, who are torturing Japanese Christians before his very eyes, but also from Ferreira, a fellow priest who preceded Rodrigues’s time in Japan. Ferreira wants Rodrigues to see that nothing is gained by not giving in. He is the voice of “reason” absolving Rodrigues in advance of his betrayal. At last Rodrigues does the deed. In a long epilogue, we see him going about his life aiding the Japanese in keeping Christianity out of the country. But when he dies and is given a customary burial, his wife slips a crucifix into his hands—on which Scorsese zooms in the final image of the film.

Again, Scorsese is clear: he wants us to approve of Rodrigues, who saved the lives of believers under his care, relieving their suffering, while keeping the faith quietly, privately, silently. Here Scorsese is wrong both in his theological instincts and in his artistic instincts—he need not try to stack the deck so obviously—yet the film remains patient of other readings, including readings wholly contrary to Scorsese’s own intentions.

Now consider A Hidden Life. Over and over, Franz is asked a variety of the same question: “What are you wanting to accomplish? Your death will do nothing. It will make no difference. No one will even know of it. The only result will be the suffering and shame brought upon your widow, your orphaned daughters, your mother, and your village.” Franz’s calculus, however, is not consequentialist. It’s a matter of principle. He cannot do what he believes to be wrong, even if it will make no difference whatsoever. (And it’s worth noting that basically no one knew his story for decades after his death.)

In a pivotal scene late in the film, Franz’s wife Fani visits him in prison. As they face each other across a table, his lawyer gives him one last chance: if he signs a piece of paper, the execution will be stayed, and he will be permitted to work in a hospital—he won’t even have to fight as a soldier. The only price is the oath of loyalty to Hitler.

With the paper before him, Franz’s parish priest joins Fani at the table and makes the following appeal (this is a quote, not a paraphrase):

God doesn’t care what you say, only what’s in your heart. Say the oaths and think what you like.

This is precisely Ferreira’s advice to Rodrigues. And here it is likewise a Catholic priest meaning well. It doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter if you repudiate Christ; it doesn’t matter if you deny his lordship and pledge yourself instead to Der Führer. What matters is your heart. Think, feel, believe what you like—quietly, privately, silently—so long as you step on the image; so long as you swear the oath.

Franz refuses. And he never sees his wife again. Soon thereafter he is taken to the guillotine. He is killed “for no reason,” “senselessly,” by his own stubborn refusal to do the “sensible” thing, for the sake of others—his own beloved family. The Nazis kill him in a windowless room away from witnesses or crowds. He dies alone. For what?

The film as a whole is the answer. The rationale underlying it, though, highlights the contrast with Scorsese. Who you are is not separate from what you say and do. “You” are not “within.” “You” are your words and actions—full stop. The distinction between the inner self and external behavior is not a division, much less a chasm separating the real from the ephemeral. As Christ promises: “Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven.”

Confession manifests the self. There is no you except the you who acts in the world. The life and death of Franz Jägerstätter—beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007—reveals this truth, and Malick understands it. Based on the evidence of Silence, Scorsese does not.

Sometimes it’s simple

There is always much hand-wringing in Hollywood and among the writers who cover it when a film that “should have” been a hit is a flop, or at least underperforms. I find this phenomenon baffling. It seems to me that we should only wonder aloud why people didn’t go see a movie if all the following conditions are met:

1. The movie is well-advertised, far in advance, with excellent marketing and especially trailers and commercials that not only make the movie look good but also communicate clearly what it’s about and why it would be worth seeing in the theater.

2. The movie is in fact good—where “good” means at least “entertaining” but preferably also “successful at what it is trying to do.”

3. There was reason to suppose, prior to going into production, that this sort of movie released at this particular moment would be appealing to ordinary movie-goers and thus well-received upon release.

If a film fails to meet any of these conditions, not to mention all of them, then we do not need to ask why it was not popular. (NB: A film not meeting these conditions might still be popular, but that’s a separate matter.) Consider Lightyear. Not one single moviegoer across the past two decades has wondered when Pixar would make the movie inside the movie Toy Story from which the action figure Buzz Lightyear was ostensibly taken as merchandise. This fact alone didn’t doom the movie, though it didn’t help. Blasé marketing and poor execution did the dooming. That’s it. End of story. Question asked and answered.

Most people don’t see a movie on opening night. They go see said movie if and only if they ask friends who did go on opening weekend whether the movie was good. If the answer is no, they won’t go see it. Again, end of story. This isn’t rocket science!

Now take a harder case: The Last Duel. Here we’ve got A-list stars in a period drama directed by Ridley Scott. I watched it for the first time at home last week. The critics were right: it was great—much different than expected—and I wish I had seen it in the theater. Why didn’t I?

Simple: The trailers oversold the generic parts of the story and undersold the original parts. All the stakeholders piqued my interest, but I just couldn’t gear up for another Ridley Scott B+ medieval epic. Once I started reading good reviews a week or two after its release, I considered going—except that, after digging around, I learned that this is a 2 1/2 hour film featuring an extended rape scene portrayed not once but twice. At that point I knew my wife and I would not be paying a babysitter to go see it, even if I thought it probable we would “like” it. Such a movie is worth making (and I’m glad they did), but it’s a hard sell to ordinary moviegoers; see criterion #3 above.

Making popular movies is hard. My claim here doesn’t belie that. My claim, instead, is that it’s not hard to understand when bad movies, or poorly marketed movies, or movies that have neither reason to exist nor prior built-in appeal, do poorly. We don’t have to pretend not to know.

The issue with Kenobi

It’s not that it’s especially good or especially bad. It’s not that it’s revisiting a time period we’ve seen before. It’s not that it involves old characters and a fair bit of retconning.

It’s not that we’re back on Tatooine (for an episode). It’s not that we see kid Luke or kid Leia. It’s not that Hayden Christiansen is behind the mask (or in flashbacks). It’s not that the stakes are lower than usual. It’s not even that it’s serialized TV rather than a movie—though that’s close.

It’s that it feels like TV. It isn’t cinematic: in scope, in style, in ambition, in storytelling. Both its visual grammar (on the screen) and its literal grammar (on the page) are fit for the age of binging and streaming, not for a once-in-a-lifetime must-see cultural event.

There are no stunning landscapes. There is no moving music or even a memorable theme. The action is indistinguishable from other generic CGI-fests today, only somehow smaller. Even with the deep Disney pockets and the Star Wars brand, the show feels like it was made on the cheap: on soundstages, before green screens, with small crews, smaller casts (regular and extra), yet without the modest grandeur of The Mandalorian manufactured by StageCraft.

Compare with Top Gun Maverick, which for all its “legacy sequel” status is so big, so impressive, so jaw-on-the-floor awesome that it’s already the biggest hit in Tom Cruise’s 40-year career. It bends your will into submission by virtue of nothing so much as its self-confidence as pure spectacle.

By contrast, there is neither spectacle nor patience in Obi-Wan Kenobi, no pregnant pauses or non-filler geography. The editing is ho-hum. Viewers find themselves in the land of close-ups, the default setting of television cinematography. No one is winning any awards for this show.

That’s it. That’s the problem. Ewan McGregor is doing yeoman’s work, as ever. Kid Leia is cute. I didn’t mind the Anakin flashback. Nor do I mind looking to the animated series as a template here. But that template is for character, canon, and nuances of character. The visual, aural, and storytelling template is 1977—full stop.

Whether or not the finale lands the plane without eye-rolling, nostalgia bombs, or massive canon-revision—that is, even if the last episode doesn’t ruin anything in the OT and actually turns out to add a thing or two—it will still not have been worth the effort. Kennedy, Favreau, Filoni, et al have to start thinking bigger. They have to start unleashing their writers and directors while resisting, at all costs, the siren song of a Star Wars analogue to the Marvel in-house style, which is no style at all.

The worst eventuality here is not to make something bad, a la Episode II. The far greater sin is to make something boring, even forgettable. And I expect to have forgotten this series by year’s end.

Pseudo-Scorsese

It’s come to my attention that there are discrepancies in the filmography of American director Martin Scorsese. To be precise, certain films attributed to him evidently qualify as pseudirectoria (pseudokinemagraphia? pseudeikonzon?)—that is, instances of unnamed others claiming his name as director of a cinematic artifact, although the evidence suggests otherwise.

Consider three films, released across more than two decades’ time: The Age of Innocence (1993), Kundun (1997), and Silence (2016). Their subject matter, respectively: a historical romantic drama set in the 1870s among the upper class; the life of the Dalai Lama, set in Tibet in the middle of the twentieth century; and the plight of Catholic converts and their missionary priests in seventeenth century Japan.

Are we really supposed to believe that the director responsible for these films is the same man behind the camera—during the same time span!—for Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)? Not to mention Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and Raging Bull (1980)? It beggars belief.

The visual grammar; the composition and editing; the characters, time periods, settings, and cultures; the dialogue; the feel—it’s all off. Someone else has been posing as Martin Scorsese in plain sight. Any honest comparison between the two groups of films will render the same result; any protest to the contrary is clearly a matter of special pleading.

The upshot: We have a Pseudo-Scorsese on our hands. The time has come to weigh the evidence and thence to sort the “official” or “received” Scorsese oeuvre into those films that are “authentic” or “undisputed” and those that are “inauthentic” or “disputed.” Historical and artistic integrity demands no less.

Personal tech update

It’s been an unplanned, unofficial Tech Week here at the blog. I’ve been meaning to write a mini-update on my tech use—continuing previous reflections like these—so now seems as good a time as any.

–I deactivated my Twitter account on Ash Wednesday, and I couldn’t be happier about the decision. It was a long time coming, but every time I came close to pulling the trigger I froze. There was always a reason to stay. Even Lent provided an escape hatch: my second book was being published right after Easter! How could I possibly hawk my wares—sorry, “promote my work in the public sphere”—if I wasn’t on Twitter? More to the point, does a writer even exist if he doesn’t have a Twitter profile? Well, it turns out he does, and is much the healthier for it. I got out pre–Elon Musk, too, which means I’ve been spared so much nonsense on the proverbial feed. For now, in any case, I’m keeping the account by reactivating then immediately deactivating it every 30 days; that may just be a sort of digital security blanket, though. Life without Twitter is good for the soul. Kempis and Bonhoeffer are right. Drop it like the bad habit that it is. Know freedom.

–I deleted my Facebook account two or three years ago, and I’ve never looked back. Good riddance.

–I’ve never had Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, or any of the other nasty social media timesucks folks devote themselves to.

–For the last 3-4 years I’ve been part of a Slack for some like-minded/like-hearted Christian writers, and while the experience has been uniformly positive, I realized that it was colonizing my mind and thus my attention during the day, whether at work or at home. So, first, I set up two-factor authentication with my wife’s phone, which means I need her to give me access if I’m signed out; and, second, I began limiting my sign-ins to two or three Saturdays per month. After a few months the itch to be on and participate constantly in conversations has mostly dribbled away. Now I might jump on to answer someone’s question, but only for a few minutes, and not to “stay on” or keep up with all the conversations. I know folks for whom this isn’t an issue, but I’ve learned about myself, especially online, that it’s all or nothing. As with Twitter, I had to turn off the spout, or I would just keep on drinking until it made me sick.

–I don’t play video games, unless it’s a Mario Kart grand prix with my kiddos.

–I only occasionally use YouTube; nine times out of ten it’s to watch a movie trailer. I cannot relate to people, whether friends and students, who spend hours and hours on YouTube. I can barely watch a Zoom conversation for five minutes before needing to do something else with my time.

–I subscribe to Spotify, because it’s quality bang for your buck. I’d love to divest from it—as my friend Chris Krycho constantly abjures me to do—but I’m not sure how, should I want to have affordable, legal access to music (for myself as well as my family).

–I subscribe to Audible (along with Libby), because I gave up podcasts for audiobooks last September, a decision about which I remain ecstatic, and Audible is reasonably priced and well-stocked and convenient. If only it didn’t feed the Beast!

–I happily use Instapaper, which is the greatest app ever created. Hat tip to Alan Jacobs, from whom I learned about it in, I believe, his book Reading for Pleasure in an Age of Distraction. I’ve even paid to use the advanced version, and will do so again in the future if the company needs money to survive.

–I’ve dumbed down my iPhone as much as is in my power to do. I’ve turned off location services, the screen is in grayscale, and I’m unable to access my email (nor do I have my password memorized, so I can’t get to my inbox even if I’m tempted). I can call or text via Messages or WhatsApp. I have Audible, Spotify, and Instapaper downloaded. I use Marco Polo for friends and family who live far away. And that’s it. I aim to keep my daily phone usage to 45 minutes or so, but this year it’s been closer to 55-75 minutes on average.

–I use a MacBook Pro for work, writing, and other purposes; I don’t have an iPad or tablet of any kind. My laptop needs are minimal. I use the frumpy, clunky Office standbys: Word, Excel, PowerPoint. I’ve occasionally sampled or listened to pitches regarding the glories of alternatives to Word for writing, but honestly, for my needs, my habits, and my convenience, Word is adequate. As for internet browsing, I use Firefox and have only a few plug-ins: Feedly for an RSS reader, Instapaper, and Freedom (the second greatest app ever)—though I’ve found that I use Freedom less and less. Only when (a) I’m writing for 2-4 or more hours straight and (b) I’m finding myself distracted by the internet (but don’t need access to it); I pay to use it but may end up quitting if I find eventually that I’ve developed the ability to write without distraction for sustained periods of time.

–I’ve had a Gmail account since 2007; I daydream about deleting my Google account and signing up for some super-encrypted unsurveiled actually-private email service (again, Krycho has the recs), but so far I can’t find it within me to start from scratch and leave Gmail. We’ll see.

–I have the same dream about Amazon, which I use almost every day, order all my books from, have a Prime account with, and generally resent with secret pleasure (or enjoy with secret resentment). Divesting from Amazon seems more realistic than doing so from either Apple or Google, but then, how does anyone with a modest budget who needs oodles of books (or whatever) for their daily work purchase said books (or whatever) from any source but Amazon? That’s not a nut I’ve managed to crack just yet.

–I don’t have an Alexa or an Echo or an Apple Watch or, so far as I know, any species of the horrid genus “the internet of things.”

–In terms of TV and streaming services, currently my wife and I pay for subscriptions with … no platforms, unless I’m mistaken. At least, we are the sole proprietors of none. On our Roku we have available Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Disney+, Apple+, HBO Max, and YouTubeTV. But one of these is free with our cellular service (Hulu), two of them are someone else’s account (Apple+ and YouTubeTV), and another is a byproduct of free shipping (Prime). We pay a nominal fee as part of extended family/friend groups for Netflix and HBO, and honestly we could stop tomorrow and we’d barely notice. We paid a tiny fee up front for three years of Disney+, and if we could have only one streaming service going forward, that’s what we’d keep: it has the best combination of kids, family, classic, and grown-up selections, and you can always borrow a friend’s password or pay one month’s cost to watch a favorite/new series/season before canceling once it’s over. As for time spent, across a semester I probably average 3-7 hours of TV per week. I’ve stopped watching sports altogether, and I limit shows to either (a) hands-down excellence (Better Call Saul, Atlanta, Mare of Easttown), (b) family entertainment (basically, Marvel and Star Wars), or (c) undemanding spouse-friendly fare (Superstore, Brooklyn 99, Top Chef). With less time during the school year, I actually end up watching more TV, because I’m usually wiped by the daily grind; whereas during the summer, with much more leisure time, I end up reading or doing other more meaningful things. I will watch the NBA playoffs once grades are submitted, but then, that’s nice to put on in the background, and the kids enjoy having it on, too.

–Per Andy C.’s tech-wise advice, we turn screens off on Sundays as a general rule. We keep an eye on screen time for the kids Monday through Thursday, and don’t worry about it as much on Friday and Saturday, especially since outdoor and family and friend activities should be happening on those days anyway.

–Oddly enough, I made it a goal in January of this year to watch more movies in 2022. Not only am I persuaded that, my comparison to television, film is the superior art form, and that the so-called golden age of peak TV is mostly a misnomer, I regret having lost the time—what with bustling kids and being gainfully employed—to keep up with quality movies. What time I do have to watch stuff I usually give to TV, being the less demanding medium: it’s bite size, it always resolves (or ends on a cliffhanger), and it doesn’t require committing to 2-3 hours up front. I’ve mostly not been successful this year, but I’m hoping the summer can kickstart my hopes in that area.

–If I’m honest, I find that I’ve mostly found a tolerable equilibrium with big-picture technology decisions, at least on an individual level. If you told me that, in two years, I no longer used Amazon, watched even less TV, and traded in my iPhone for a flip phone, I’d be elated. Otherwise, my goals are modest. Mainly it has to do with time allocation and distraction at work. If I begin my day with a devotional and 2-4 hours of sustained reading all prior to opening my laptop to check email, then it’s a good day. If the laptop is opened and unread mail awaits in the inbox, it’s usually a waste of a day. The screen sucks me in and the “deep work” I’d hoped to accomplish goes down the drain. That may not be how it goes for others, but that’s how it is with me.

–The only other tech-related facet of my life I’m pondering is purchasing a Kobo Elipsa (again, on the recommendation of Krycho and some other tech-wise readerly types). I’m not an especially good reader of PDFs; usually I print them out and physically annotate them. But it would be nice to have a reliable workflow with digital files, digital annotations, and searchable digital organization thereof. It would also help with e-reading—I own a 10-year old Kindle but basically never use it—not only PDFs for work but writings in the public domain, ePub versions of new books I don’t need a physical copy of (or perhaps can only get a digital version of, for example, via the library), and Instapaper-saved articles from online sources. I’ve never wanted a normal tablet for this purpose because I know I’d just be duped into browsing the web or checking Twitter or my inbox. But if Kobo is an ideal balance between a Kindle and an iPad, designed for the sole purpose for which I need it, then I may end up investing in it here in the next year or two.

Masterly Spielberg

I’ve written before of my love for Steven Spielberg (whose critical fortunes, having waxed and waned over the decades, seem to have settled into a sort of consensus: whatever your personal feelings for this or that movie of his from the past 10-15 years, it’s undeniable that the man knows where to put the camera), and Tim Markatos, whose writing on film you should read and whose newsletter you should subscribe to, captures perfectly what makes Spielberg so great in his explanation for placing West Side Story at #5 on his list of the best 25 films of 2021:

This movie is so well blocked that it simply embarrasses nearly every other movie released this year (including some of the highbrow fare on this very list). Mise en scène alone doesn’t make a movie (“But what if it does?” whispers the little devil-horned Janusz Kamiński that suddenly appeared on my shoulder), but it matters more for a musical. The Spielberg–Kushner rendition of West Side Story lets the Robert Wise version alone and leans harder into political awareness (a key distinction, I would say, from political correctness) not merely by writing it into the script but also by building it into every material aspect of the production. Sometimes it gets a bit hokey, Ansel Elgort brings all his personal baggage to the screen in a way that will either alienate you or not, but none of that matters because I will watch “America” approximately 300 times once it’s inevitably uploaded to YouTube and be floored by Spielberg’s total mastery of this medium every single time.

I will, too. “Total mastery” is right. In those areas of which he is master, the man is without peer.

Bezos ad astra (TLC, 4)

In his latest newsletter—is it the best going? It’s up there—L. M. Sacasas writes about what he calls “earth alienation.” He uses Arendt and McLuhan’s distinct reflections on the significance of Sputnik as a frame for considering Jeff Bezos’s recent comments about space exploration and colonization. Here’s where he quotes and unpacks Bezos:

During his portion of the proceedings . . . Bezos articulated a vision for the creation of space colonies that would eventually be home to millions of people, many of who would be born in space and would visit earth, Bezos explained, “the way you would visit Yellowstone National Park.”

That’s a striking line, of course. It crystalizes the earth-alienation Arendt was describing in Prologue of The Human Condition. It is, in fact, a double alienation. It is not only that these imagined future humans will no longer count the earth their home, it is also that they will perceive it, if at all, as a tourist trap, a place with which we have no natural relation and know only as the setting for yet another artificial consumer experience. And, put that way, I hope the seemingly outlandish nature of Bezos’s claims will not veil the more disturbing reality, which is that we don’t need to be born in space to experience the earth in precisely this mode.

To be sure, Bezos makes a number of statements about how special and unique the earth is and about how we must preserve it at all costs. Indeed, this is central to Bezos’s pitch. In his view, humanity must colonize space, in part, so that resource extraction, heavy industry, and a sizable percentage of future humans can be moved off the planet. It is sustainability turned on its head: a plan to sustain the present trajectories of production and consumption.

Sacasas comments:

Arendt believed, however, that the modern the desire to escape the earth, understood as a prison of humanity, was strikingly novel in human history. “Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age,” Arendt wondered, “which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?”

We’ll return to that Arendt quote. After meditating on the set of issues it raises, Sacasas concludes:

What alternative do we have to this stance toward the world that is characterized by a relation of mastery and whose inevitable consequence is a generalized degree of alienation, anxiety, and apprehension?

We have a hint of it in Arendt’s warning against a “future man,” who is “possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.”  We hear it, too, in Wendell Berry’s poetic reminder that “We live the given life, not the planned.” It is, I would say, a capacity to receive the world as gift, as something given with an integrity of its own that we do best to honor. It is, in other words, to refuse a relation of “regardless power, ” in Albert Borgmann’s apt phrase, and to entertain the possibility of inhabiting a relation of gratitude and wonder.

Go read the whole thing. I can’t do it justice in a few quotes, not to mention the way in which every one of Sacasas’s newsletters is part of a larger, coherent whole. It brought something to mind, though, a recent film that seems to me a perfect example of the phenomenon he is describing, precisely in existential and aesthetic terms. Whether or not it is an illustration or a critique of that phenomenon is an open question.

The film is Ad Astra, which somehow was released only two years ago. (Every pre-pandemic cultural artifact feels much older than it is.) Written and directed by the great James Gray, Ad Astra (“to the stars”) tells of an astronaut, played by Brad Pitt, who goes on a mission to find his father near the planet Neptune, who may or may not have finally discovered extraterrestrial life. Pitt plays his character, Roy, with a perfectly controlled flat affect: his stoic courage is actually the surface of a dying, or dead, inner life. He lacks what he most desires, namely presence: to himself, his ex-wife, his estranged father. Haunted by his mental monologue, Roy’s voyage to the stars to find his father and/or life beyond the human is at once a metaphorical and literal, allegorical and spiritual journey into the heart of darkness.

When the film came out I didn’t write about it in a formal venue, but I did tweet about it. So let me take the opportunity to unfold one of my “Twitter loci communes.” First read Alissa Wilkinson’s excellent review for Vox, then Nick Olson’s lovely thread. (Also a bit from the indispensable Tim Markotos: “Penal Substitutionary Atonement: The Movie flirts with Freud and Nietzsche before finally settling on Beauty will save the world.” LOL.) Now here’s what I said:

Grateful to @alissamarie for this beautiful review of Ad Astra. Couldn't agree more. I'll have to keep pondering whether there's something potentially transcendent there, or if it's as deeply immanent-humanist as Gray's oeuvre suggests.

She's also right that this is the sort of a-theological spiritual art that religious people should celebrate, contemplate, and (quite possibly) read against itself. I mean, what a beautiful film.

It's also something of an anti-Interstellar. What finally doomed that film was its navel-gazing: when we look at the stars, we see ourselves blinking back. Here, Gray's vision is subtly different: the stars are “empty,” but beautiful in their sheer existence for all that.

And that very beauty and wonder of the ostensible nothingness—that the cosmos exists at all rather than nothing—generates not only awe at the mystery of life but love for those closest to us. That's what Nolan sought to accomplish, I think, but failed where Gray succeeds.

The next day I read Nick’s thread and riffed on this tweet of his in particular:

The TOL [Tree of Life] parallels come easily. One way of putting it is that this is TOL without Mother. Maybe in spite of itself, it winds up being a film that’s in search of Mother in lieu of distant Father. AD ASTRA’s “we’re all we’ve got” is also that TOL cut from the universe to the infant.

Here’s what I wrote:

This is good too. If you can accept the father/mother // nature/grace symbology of Tree of Life then apply them to Ad Astra, what you have in the latter is nature without grace, because a creation without a creator.

Then you can read it one of two ways: 1. The father's despair is a proper response to the realization that the universe is bereft of Logos (much less a Logos incarnate), and the son in effect embraces a false consciousness in the face of a potential nihilism.

2. The son's affective embrace of an "empty" cosmos is the proper response because "Man" has been searching for meaning (or ratio) apart from "Woman" (here, a figure for concrete love, rather than abstract wanderlust).

Again, you've got to accept that gendered symbology on the front end, but if you do, and you import it from Malick (and other sources!), then Gray is doing a lot here with his choice of characters. (Also makes me think of what role Ruth Negga serves in the story . . .)

Having said all that, though what I most want is to read the film in the vein of #2, inflected theologically, I have to admit that if I'm going to read the film against itself, #1 is the more penetrating as well as the more provocative route.

The next day I expanded on this line of thought, using an interview of Gray on one of The Ringer’s podcasts, The Big Picture:

In that James Gray podcast interview, he says he wanted it to star someone like Brad Pitt, who brings with him a “myth” or “mythology” that he, Gray, could then deconstruct in the film—referring to Ad Astra as “a deconstruction of masculinity.” Pairs well with the thread below.

Not only is Brad Pitt a global icon of “manhood” or “masculinity.” In Tree of Life he literally plays “Father/masculine” (=nature), as opposed to “Mother/feminine” (=grace) (Jessica Chastain). Gray then makes him a Son who spurns Woman while searching for the absent Father.

And in the process (again, literally) cutting the umbilical cord (in the heavens!) connecting him to the Father, thence to return to Mother Earth—now no Fall but a reditus of the aboriginal pilgrim-exitus—to reunite masculine (nature) with feminine (grace) via the bond of love.

I also had the following “aha” moment:

Somehow it only just occurred to me that Ad Astra opens with ha-adam, the royal Man (Brad Pitt)—husband of Eve (Liv Tyler), whose name (Roy) means "king" (le roi)—literally falling from heaven to earth.

Now I realize Brad Pitt's character's name, Roy, has not only royal connotations (Leroy, le roi, the king) but also a biblical-theological connection (el-roi, Hagar's naming of the Lord as God-who-sees). Roy wants truly to be seen by his father/God—a hope left unfulfilled.

Now recall that Arendt quote from above:

Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?

It seems to me that Ad Astra is, from start to finish, one long cinematic meditation on this question. And whereas my initial reading of the film leaned immanent-cum-nihilistic, I feel prompted to revise that reading in a more hopeful, if still humanist, direction.

Sacasas writes of “Arendt’s warning against a ‘future man,’ who is ‘possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.’” In this respect Pitt’s Roy might be construed as that “future man” who goes beyond himself by his own means but, ultimately, reaches the end of his tether—again, this happens quite literally in the film—before returning to earth to accept the limits of finite human life for what it is: a gift. As given, it is not subject to the manipulations or technologies of man, but as what it is it is good in itself, howsoever concrete, delimited, and therefore subject to loss. The gift is a mystery from without and can only be accepted with gratitude or spurned with ingratitude. Though Gray insists on an immanent frame—indeed, we are given to understand that going beyond that frame is itself a rejection of the gift of finite existence—the film’s closing scene is less a period than a question mark. Roy accepts the gift in love, and as love. But if a gift, then a Giver? If love, then a Lover?

The question is apt for Bezos and his ilk. To escape the immanent as immanent is a rejection of transcendence, not its embrace; the technological sublime is a substitute for the beatific vision, not a means of reaching it. Accept earth as the gift that it is, and you will gain heaven with it. Renounce earth for the stars, and you will lose it all.