When the clearly distressed and tormented pop star Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) shows up unannounced at fashion designer Sam Anselm’s (Michaela Coel) studio mansion, it’s obvious this won’t be a routine fitting and design.

We quickly gather that Mother’s desire for Sam to make her a new dress has an almost metaphysical significance to both of them. And as they begin the process of taking measurements, and comparing fabrics, they also start to unspool their complicated history as collaborators and friends, as well as the haunting dark-night-of-the-soul that Mother’s gone through since they last worked together.

David Lowery’s Mother Mary, excited me from the outset. An ethereal gothic pop-horror about something haunted that lies underneath the veneration of celebrity and the way artistic collaboration can both wound and heal? Sign me up. I’ve enjoyed much of Lowery’s work, most notably Ghost Story and The Green Knight, so a strange sort of blend of those two infused with the essence of Phantom Thread and Persona is exactly the kind of thing I should immediately fall in love with.

Unfortunately something about this never really clicked. What it ended up doing best was providing an example of how it takes more than a collection of compelling concepts to make an actually compelling film.

There are many flashes of set and costume design, editing, and performance that I found beautiful and engaging. An early piece of dance choreography, performed by Mother with no soundtrack but Sam’s reverent-yet-judgemental gaze, and the sound of her own limbs pounding and scuffling against the wooden floor of the old church (barn? castle?), is an inspired moment that showcases the way an artistic impulse can start to appear like a kind of possession. In other parts of the film, Mother’s performances on stage, and the moments leading up to and following those performances, employs staging, symbolism, and lighting that evoke a fusion of elements from medieval, baroque, and romantic religious art—making the way our culture treats celebrity as a kind of religious icon explicit. In other more horror-inflected portions of the film, the imagery approaches a kind of abstraction akin to what we’ve seen in the more daring portions of Under the Skin or Get Out.

All of that is beautiful and at times horrifying, yet I never found my bearings within the story. I could never figure out how relate to these characters, or what, exactly, all of it was trying to say. I’m often fine with movies that don’t check those boxes (like is the case with more than one David Lynch film—and not every movie needs to “say” something) but this moves forward in strange fits and starts that kept me from ever getting completely swept up in just the vibe alone and left me feeling like I was missing something.

The dialogue was the biggest discomfort. The performance of it was fine, with the cast working overtime to give it all dramatic weight, achieving impressive results at times, but they’re weighed down by overladen, poetic language that doesn’t quite amount to much. I’m paraphrasing here, but exchanges like:

“I’m stubborn you know.”

“Yes you are.”

“I mean I don’t change easily.”

—just left me a baffled. One character says and then re-states the same thing, and the other just agrees? It’s the kind of thing I’d give a note on if I saw it on the page. Many such cases. Mother and Sam mostly seem to be talking at each other and we learn very little about who these women are or what’s going on with them besides what they explicitly tell us. I’m fine with a chamber piece (Persona is a favorite), but there’s ways of showing and revealing things about the characters through the dialogue that don’t involve them just telling us their personality traits. I’m also perfectly fine with floral dialogue, where the words are mostly there for the lush texture of their own sound when the occasion warrants it, but this didn’t feel like that. It felt like it a hand trying to scratch an itch on my back that it never found.

In the end the movies is much more effective when the dialogue falls away and it shifts into an entirely different register, where it’s carried by the boldness of the aesthetic, and lets the images do the talking.

Still, it felt worth the time investment, and I don’t mean to come across as harsh. I’d happily try this again another time to see if it strikes me differently. I think I’m left picking-nits because wanted to like this much more than I did, even more so thanks to the particularly powerful turn from Hathaway, how bold of a swing the evocative visuals are, and the way it explores the cost of venerating celebrities—so I’m left feeling around for why this didn’t work for me.

At its core it taps into a powerful idea, that if we treat someone as an enchanted being, it inevitably opens up a door for them to be haunted, something I believe is at least metaphorically true. But while the basic structure of this theme is sketched out, we never get to see it explored with enough detail to learn anything about that double edged sword, what it says about us as humans, or how we might wield it.

Books Mentioned in Part 2:

Every Man for Himself and God Against All — Werner Herzog

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man — Marshall McLuhan

Film and Video Editing Theory: How Editing Creates Meaning — Michael Fri…

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While transporting a man they’ve kidnapped, Vahid’s van breaks down. When they resort to pushing the van through the busy streets of Tehran the scene is shot in an usual way: with the camera hidden on a nearby rooftop.

In another scene Shiva gets out of the car to go speak with someone. As she crosses the street and begins arguing with someone—the camera stays in the van.

These are just two of the many signs throughout the film that it was shot in secret to avoid the detection of the Iranian government.

Much of It Was Just An Accident, the latest film from Iranian director Jafar Panahi which won the Palme d’Or last year a Cannes, and was nominated for 2 oscars this year, takes place in more remote locations. Areas where the filmmaker could stage lookouts to alert the crew if the police come by so they could hide the cameras. When shooting in more populated areas, the camera almost always stays concealed inside a car.

This approach is not a mere stylistic quirk or paranoia, but something that evolved in Panahi’s work out of necessity. By the time Panahi was making this movie, he had already sentence to prison time for filmmaking twice. As he was abroad this past year (leaving Iran for the first time since his travel ban was lifted) to promote the film, he received a third prison sentence, waiting for him upon his return to Iran. At the time I’m writing this, he’s returned to Iran, but have yet to receive news about his legal status there.

It’s surprising how little effect the undercover approach has on the overall film. If you weren’t paying close attention, you might not even notice. Yet the effortlessness with which Panahi now wields this clandestine style certainly didn’t arrive overnight.

For many directors a 6 year prison sentence and a 20 year ban from filmmaking for the alleged crime of “propaganda against the regime” might have been enough to push them to change careers or flee the country. But after the ban, Panahi, who had already been a director for 15 years at that point. . . just kept making movies.

At first he tentatively tested the waters. This is Not a film was shot within the confines of Panahi’s apartment and was smuggled out of the country to the Cannes Film Festival (though not in a cake as the legend somehow came to be).

By Taxi—his 3rd made illegally—he had become bold enough to shoot in the semi-public setting of a car.

Taxi is a meta-fiction about himself as a taxi driver, making a movie while he pretends to be a taxi driver. The story is told through Panahi’s interactions with the different passengers he drives throughout the city. It’s cleverly constructed, and has a strong documentarian and anthropological impulse.

One scene from the film address explicitly the strict content guidelines placed on any film that screens legally in Iran, including a call to avoid violence, men and women interacting, and particularly relevant to Panahi’s work, something the censorship ministry calls “sordid realism.”

By the time Panahi shot No Bears in 2022, he had become bold enough to shoot outdoors in rural areas, skipping from one small village to another anytime the police came looking. This time telling a fictionalized version of how he goes about making his films in secret. It was after this film, that he would land in prison for the second time.

Vahid has kidnapped a man with a false leg. He suspects this captive is someone who tortured him in prison. But as the man protests Vahid starts to doubt. He wants revenge—but he does not want to harm an innocent man, so he starts tracking down other prisoners who were tormented by the same captor in order to verify his identity.

This is the setup for the rest of the film, which is full of suspense, a surprising amount of humor, and which ultimately poses the central question: how do you respond to people who have oppressed you, when, if ever, is violence or revenge justified?

This ethical question that runs through the heart of the film is not some hypothetical thought experiment for Panahi or the other Iranian’s on screen. Panahi based the movie on his experience in prison, and the stories that he heard there. It is not just the film’s real world political relevance that make it compelling however, it is the perspective that Panahi takes on these issues that I find most interesting. His perspective not just on politics and violence, but on Iran itself, and more importantly, on human beings.

A young girl walks the streets of Tehran alone. She is trying to make her way home after her mother did not show up to pick her up from school. The Mirror, Panahi’s second film, would be the last movie he would make without any legal trouble.

Many hallmarks of what will come to define Panahi’s work are already present. Most notably the way he sees humanity and the world around him and his ability to capture that vision on film. It is an incredible movie, one I want more people to watch.

On the surface The Mirror is about this young girl and her journey home, we watch the film play out at her eye level. When she interacts with adults we rarely see their faces:

The camera does not observe her as an outsider from inside the world of the adults, it is placed within her world. The city around us takes on the kind of overwhelming force that a young child on her own would experience. Yet even this perspective unfolds with a great deal of nuance, we’re not merely given the most obvious story about the frightening reality of the city waiting to confront the child, we are shown her courage, independence, and even competence in navigating this space.

But there’s another side to the story that lends it even more depth, and that is the texture of the world that surrounds her. In the periphery of her journey we see the world of Tehran with a kind of documentary realism. Panahi positions his gaze so that we’re often overhearing (what feel like very real) conversations between adults, and through this we glimpse what appears as a very nuanced portrait of a place. Through Panahi’s eyes, as he gives us the perspective of a child, we clearly see the humanity of the city. The people in the film aren’t a homogenous mass, but individuals with different perspectives and ways of existing within the constraints their society has placed on them.

And what I find impressive about Panahi’s work is that he offers this kind of nuance to every character he portrays.

It’s hard to fully realize how bold the opening of It Was Just An Accident is the first time around. You simply meet a man driving his daughter and pregnant wife home late at nigh, they accidentally hit a dog, after they have some car trouble they stop to get help, this is where Vahid hears the sound of the leg.

Based on the context available to a first time viewer, Vahid will likely seem like the villain of the film. The man he kidnaps doesn’t seem particularly threatening or evil – it’s only later we hear about how horrible of a person he might be.

I want to punctuate this: the movie Panahi makes fresh out of one of Iran’s most notorious prisons, opens by humanizing the captor.

Later—as the characters slowly become more convinced that they do actually have their tormentor tied up, after the stark reality of how horribly they were treated as prisoners comes out, and they debate what kind of punishment he deserves—it’s at the very moment when revenge starts to seem most justified that Panahi chooses to remind us again that this man has a daughter and a pregnant wife who may be harmed by his death.

I don’t read this as a shallow attempt to subvert our expectations or to build suspense. Panahi is simply asking us to do the thing his oppressor refuses to do, to see the humanity in everyone, to ask if they really deserve violence. They know that if they harm this guy, they’ll risk harming his innocent daughter. The question: even if we’re attempting to right wrongs that were done to us: is whether it is justifiable to knowingly allow the innocent to be harmed?

To treat the child as collateral damage.

I was in the middle of editing the video version of this essay when The United States and Israel began bombing Iran. One of the bombs that fell killed Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader who presided over the recent massacre of tens of thousands of protestors. Another bomb, which investigations seem to indicate was launched by the US, fell on an girls school, killing more than 100 civilians, many of them children.

It is impossible to disconnect the meaning and significance of It Was Just An Accident from the political context of the protests, massacre, and continuing war. I’m not a political analyst, or expert on foreign policy, so I don’t want to spend to much time here trying to relay that context to you. But there are times when looking at the discussions of the war online and reading through comments on social media posts feels a lot like watching the arguments that play out in the back of Vahid’s van.

The question of justice and non-violence is already an incredibly difficult and fraught subject, and in It Was Just an Accident, Panahi tackles these subjects in what I think is an incredibly daring way, by doing what he’s always done: showing things in their uncomfortable complexity, without reducing reality to the binary of political propaganda. He’s trying to see the humanity of each person in the conflict.

This of course, is an easy way to upset people, because while trying to see the humanity in each of these perspectives he cannot force the viewer into siding with a particular view. For those who believe their view is the truth that must be fought for, that can feel like a betrayal of everything they believe in.

And in conflicts like this it is impossible to ignore the role of propaganda. Political violence is often driven by and supported by narratives that portray the other side purely as a threatening enemy, and their own side purely as a force fighting for good. I have seen expressed, under every possible perspective on this conflict, (including about this film itself) the accusation of the media in question being propaganda for one side or another.

As I was grappling with how this film fits into the current context, it had me wondering, is it even possible to make art that touches on these subjects that isn’t propaganda?

How does an artist or a film director navigate these waters? Can you engage with the nuance and complexity of differing views on these subjects, without resorting to a watered-down both-sidesism that uses neutrality as an escape?

It might surprise you to learn that Jafar Panahi does not think of himself as a “political filmmaker” telling Hollywood Reporter he calls himself a “social director.” I don’t think this is the kind of meek attempt to claim neutrality we’ve seen recently from some artists who naively hope their work can be “apolitical” when any perspective ultimately has political implications. Instead this has to do with the perspective through which Panahi approaches the political in his work, which I believe is core of how he avoids creating propaganda:

“In my definition, a political filmmaker is somebody who belongs to a party and who defends a specific ideology, and so they make a film that defends their ideology, in which the good people are the people who observe and respect this ideology, and the bad people are those who are against them.”

If Panahi condemns anything wholesale in his work it is not a specific kind of person, but rather the ways of thinking that motivate the individuals’ harmful views and actions. This is part of the tension that is held in Vahid and Shiva’s skepticism of their own desire for violent revenge. The idea that is ultimately at the heart of a commitment to non-violence.

They know they suffered injustice, and they have an understandable desire to seek justice by taking revenge on the man they believe was their captor, but they also know it was their captor’s system of thinking—the political narratives he bought into which turned them into pawns in a religious and political struggle—that allowed him to strip them of their humanity, and to perpetrate violence against them.

They want to be sure they do not fall prey to their own version of this violent, dehumanizing logic.

One of the common ways propaganda works is by crafting narratives that simplify complexity into reductive binaries—portraying one side as so irredeemably evil that violent force is the only option, and portraying the other side as justified in whatever actions they take, because they are inherently on the side of good. The logic of propaganda is dehumanizing, flattening the real people involved, civilians and children included, into nameless extras, NPCs, in the background of an oversimplified story about nations and geopolitics.

Panahi’s work defies this by working around those narratives. Not because those narratives are irrelevant (they have significant real-world repercussions) but in order to offer us an opportunity to see the people in the conflict as people—as human beings just like ourselves.

Through these characters, he even wonders if we should offer this humanizing lens to our worst enemies. He doesn’t suggest hey should not be held accountable for their wrongs, but how can we ever expect our enemies to see our humanity, if we refuse to recognize theirs?

This is the question Vahid and Shiva are left struggling with. And I won’t spoil the ending because I want you to watch this movie if you haven’t, but I think it’s important to note that Panahi doesn’t ask these questions lightly. He does not consider non-violence naively. He also humanizes the perspective of those who have experienced such much injustice, that non-violence feels impossible.

A non-violent path hopes we can find freedom by defying the logic of force. It hopes that humanizing tools like compassion, understanding, and the revelation of truth can undermine the dehumanizing logic of violent oppression. If there is any hope in this path, compassionate art is one of it’s most powerful tools available. Authoritarian regimes implicitly understand this, which is why they try so hard to censor art. Which is why they see a camera as a threat.

Panahi doesn’t just use It Was Just an Accident to ask these difficult ethical questions. The movie is itself a question waiting to be answered. Panahi has offered it as his own form of non-violent dissent, and as he returns to Iran with a third prison sentence awaiting him, he awaits an answer to his own question about what the consequences of this kind of dissent will be.

Someone was just in my DMs asking what three things I’d tell a creator who wants to be in my position.

I’ve been making a full time living from my video essays for 7 years now, and I get why people would want this. I love this job. Being a “content creator” provides a lot of freedom, has paid better than any other job I’ve worked (although that’s not saying much), and can be very rewarding and fun—even if sometimes it feels like I’m bound to the whims of a fickle algorithm, and required to work in an online media ecosystem that can feel downright toxic at times. Every job has downsides.

It was a fun question to try to answer so I thought I’d share here as well.

One more caveat since I’m skeptical of advice: This is not a recipe for success, or a comprehensive guide: just a reflection on some of the things that feel like they lead me to where I am now. It might be helpful if you’re looking to do what I do or something similar, or it could be outdated and too specific to me, so try to use your discernment about whether or not this might be useful for you, and please ignore it if not.

1.

Have a vision for who you are as a creative and what your work is besides being a generic “creator” or “youtuber” or “influencer” or “fill-in-the-blank.”

Are you a critic, a filmmaker, an entertainer, a comedian, an educator, a documentarian, a journalist? Whatever it is, I’d encourage you to focus on that as your identity and guide for your work and on “content creation” as just a means of achieving that. Yes creating youtube videos is what I do, but I’ve never thought of myself as being a YouTuber, and I think it’s healthier if I don’t. Maybe this sounds pretentious, but I think it’s good not to shape your personal identity around corporately owned platforms and I believe it’s a helpful guide for creating genuinely meaningful, engaging content. Most of the “content creators” whose work I love and respect the most seem to operate this way to some extent, even if it’s unconsciously.

A benefit of this approach is having an understanding of why your work is meaningful to you beyond the views/recognition/money. That meaning will be your fuel through the early parts when the views/recognition/money aren’t there, and help you avoid being distracted by views/recognition/money you’re lucky enough to get them. You’ll need this identity as a helpful defense against being corrupted by the algorithm and audience capture into just doing the thing that gets you the most attention.

2.

Iterate and experiment.

There are no formulas. There are no rules. Nobody knows what will work.

I got started by trying my hand at making things that were similar to successful work that other people were doing (I saw video essays from Every Frame A Painting and thought… I could make one of those), and then gradually developed my own voice, but what worked three years ago in content creation may not work now, and nobody can tell you what will work 6 months from now.

Try things, see if it resonates with an audience, and be willing to adapt and change based on what’s working. You’ll have to do this while trying to maintain your own voice, vision and purpose, and that’s genuinely difficult, but that’s the challenge you have to take on to do this kind of work.

3.

Figure out a reasonable and consistent rhythm for publishing your work and stick to it.

To get good at this you have to practice the entire process of creating a work from begging to end. You can’t let perfectionism get in the way of actually posting. I think you only really get better at coming up with ideas, crafting the piece, and marketing it to your audience through repetition and trial and error. If you get stuck forever fiddling in the “crafting the piece” stage—trying to make something so perfect that it goes insanely viral and launches your career, you won’t be getting the practice you need.

But don’t forget number 2: You can’t just keep posting into the void if nobody is watching expecting that to magically change. The difference between slow but steady audience growth, and having no audience or growth at all is huge. If it’s not working, you have to be willing to try something else. Before my current YouTube channel caught on, I had spent the previous 8 years experimenting with blogs, podcasts, and other youtube channels that never went anywhere. If it wasn’t working, I tried something new. With each new venture my skills were improving, but I also think I just finally found the combination of platform and format that fit with my interest and skills in the right way to create something compelling enough that people actually found value in it.

Hopefully that’s a little helpful to someone out there. If you’re a person creation content online, what would you tell other people who want to get to where you are now?

Related video: “Regarding the Pain of Others” [Nebula]

Books Mentioned in Part 1:

Amusing Ourselves to Death — Neil Postman (1985)

The Medium Is the Message: An Inventory of Effects — Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore

Directing…

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About once a month I pick a showtime for a specific movie in theaters, shoot out a group text to a bunch of friends announcing what we’ll be watching and when, and welcome them to join and bring their friends. There’s an optional hangout at a nearby bar afterwards.

I call this “Cinema Club.” It’s fun. You should start one.

Why You Should Start A Cinema Club

1. It’s just fun to go to the movies with a group of people. I love a loner matinee as much as any critic (it would be tough to do this job if you didn’t), but there’s something equally great about rounding up a group of friends for a movie and hanging out afterwards.

2. It’s a great way to make friends/build a social circle. It’s an easy thing to invite people to. Building up a friend group can be hard, throwing events, parties, or organizing one-on-one hangouts can take a lot of effort or be high-commitment for a new acquaintance. But asking someone you just met if they like movies, and saying “hey a bunch of us go to a movie once a month, come join us if you want” is a lot more low-key and low commitment than asking someone to come to a party, or a dinner, or even to have coffee one-one-one.

3. Movies are a great conversation starter. It’s like the ultimate ice-breaker. Take a group of strangers and ask them to socialize and it’s hard to know where to start. Have them all go on a ~2 hour narrative journey together and immediately they all have a shared experience that they can talk about, even if it’s what they didn’t like about it. Artful movies also have a way of creating an opportunity to talk about life. Online film discourse is mostly annoying and toxic, but talking about movies in real life with friends is in my experience mostly pleasant and fun.

4. It promotes cinema. Since I started my film club a couple people have mentioned that coming to cinema club was the first or only time they had gone to a movie in theaters in months. I think cinema is cool and I want theaters to survive so I’m happy to be responsible for getting someone out to see a movie in theaters they might otherwise have waited to watch at home (or not watched at all). There’s a lot of people who enjoy going to the movies, but don’t enjoy going alone, so you might be providing an opportunity to do something they like anyway.

A Few Tips for Starting Your Own Cinema Club

1. Know your audience. As the self-proclaimed cinema club instigator, it’s your job to try to pick movies that will interest the group, or to select a variety to appeal to the range of interests within the group. This will vary widely depending on your own interests and the interest level of the people you’re inviting/hanging out with but your cinema club could focus mostly on blockbusters, horror-fare, art house, or whatever, there’s no wrong way to do it, just be mindful that what you pick will shape the tone, and who will continue to come.

2. Pre-plan a post-movie hang. We usually go to a nearby bar. You can try to organize a formalized discussion of the film afterwards, but I usually keep it casual. Discussion of the film will happen organically, some people are just interested in hanging out, that’s totally fine. Put these details in the invite you send out so everyone knows where to go when the movie gets out.

3. Support an independent theater if you can. If you’re going to send a couple hundred dollars of business somewhere you might as well boost an indie theater if you have one. I also like not having assigned seating for this kind of thing because it feels more casual if people can just walk up and by a ticket and go in, but it wouldn’t be too hard to coordinate pre-buying assigned seats if people want to sit together.1

4. Experiment and make it your own. I’m hoping to try out different things, maybe eventually organize a private screening of something for the group. You could have a more formal discussion afterwards, you could promote yours online. There’s not really a right or wrong way here if people are getting enjoyment out of it, but don’t feel like it has to be a big, formally organized thing. The minimalist version: where you just text a few friends a showtime, hang out with whoever comes, and call it a cinema club is completely valid.

So far it’s been a blast. About 8-12 people have shown up each time. At the last one, we even picked up a new member after someone who was in our screening of Sentimental Value overheard our post-movie circle discussing the film and wanted to join our chat. She ended up coming to the next one as well! I encourage the people I invite to bring their friends and then offer to add them to the group invite for next time.

Some movies go over well and incite a lot of discussion, some are more polarizing, some don’t warrant as much conversation, but whatever the case it’s always a good time, and a nice excuse to get out and socialize a bit. You could start with as few as two friends who are into film and grow from there.

One of my stated goals for 2026 (and likely beyond) is to invest more time and effort into things that exist in the world and not just on a screen. Cinema Club has been a fun way to do this locally, so I though another way I could fulfill this goal is by trying to convince you to start your own Cinema Club as well. If you start one, or already do something similar, send me an email.2 If there are enough of us maybe I’ll organize a Cinema Club leaders group where we can swap tips and picks for upcoming films.

One night in the mid 1970s a 20 year old James Cameron is sitting around a campfire with his wife and another couple, peaking on LSD, when bullets start to explode from within the fire.

It turns out to build the fire Cameron’s wife had used a bunch of trash from the back of the car, and one of the bags contained a box of 22-caliber shells that Jim had bought for a failed rabbit-hunting expedition.1

In the hallucinogenic daze of the trip it takes Cameron a few moments to figure out what is happening. “...I heard kind of a “Pew!” And in one of those sort of insightful, just instantaneous flashes, I knew what had happened... So I had to put the fire out.”

As the acid is hitting him “like a locomotive” he crawls in the moonlight down to the Colorado river with a bucket to get some water to put out the fire. “The ground is kind of undulating like, I seem to recall an image of it being like a bunch of snakes. Kind of snakes in mud, except it was solid ground.”

He makes it back with the bucket of water, crawling like a commando to avoid the bullets that are spraying out of the fire. Not thinking through the consequences of throwing a bucket of colder water onto a roaring bonfire from two feet away on acid, he describes the ensuing steam explosion as happening in “jump cuts” which “knocked him backward” due to the perceptual intensity. He falls back into the river, and lays there tripping while watching a “big, you know, volcano of steam” coming out of the fire, thankful that the crisis was averted.

It would be easy for me to imagine that, right there, laying in the river, looking up at a volcano of steam rising into the moonlit sky, with the adrenaline of a fire shooting bullets at him and his wife mixing with the acid in his blood, young impressionable, pre-frontal-cortex not yet formed Jim Cameron saw images that struck him so profoundly that they manifested almost 50 years later in Avatar: Fire and Ash. But that is the kind of wild speculation a “serious film critic” should probably avoid.

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So here’s a casual overview of some of the most interesting, beautiful, strange, and noteworthy things I encountered this year (though not necessarily things made or published in 2025). In no particular order.

[Experimental Short Film] Wasteland No. 3: Moons, Sons by Jodie Mack

Beautiful contemplation of plant material and decay. I was lucky enough see this screened live. You can view the 5 minutes silent film on Jodie’s website. Combines cinema with the art of flower arrangement.

[TV Program] Big Media in America (1959)

Found doing research for my video on how cinema has changed, I was enthralled by this TV program from 1959 titled “Big Media in America.” It’s a panel discussion between 5 students that examines questions like: “Has the big media in America been cheapened by its manipulation to the lowest common denominator? Is the media limited to the sensational and the exploited?”

We should have more of this these days! There should be roundtable discussions among Gen-Z academics about media theory (if there are and I just don’t know about them please point me in that direction).

[Book] Meditations for Mortals

I had one of the busiest years of my life in 2025 and one side effect was that I did less reading than I typically do, but I started the year off with Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals and it laid a solid foundation for the year. Burkeman’s work, starting with 4000 Weeks, has been incredibly helpful to me in deprogramming from hustle/grind/optimization/self-help culture I fell into at a young age (I was first exposed to Gary V at 14).

I don’t remember very many specifics from the book, but I took away from it the permission to accept imperfection rather than strive for optimization, and in applying this (maybe coincidentally) had one of the most productive years of my life.

The best concept from the book that I do think about regularly though is to shift from thinking about your “watchlist” or “to-read list” as a to-do list to thinking about it as a “river of high-quality material that you can dip into whenever you like.” It’s a small change in mentality that’ accepts the impossibility of actually watching it all and it makes collecting media recommendations feel like less of a chore.

If you haven’t read it, it’s a fantastic way to start your new year.

[Podcast] Ólafur Arnalds is a guest on Derrick Gee’s podcast “Solid Air”

Host Derrick Gee invites guests over to his house to play him music on Solid Air, a radio show for the internet era. This episode in particular is beautiful, features some amazing music and great stories. I was not expecting it to make me cry multiple times.

[Article] Are modern movies using flatter lighting than in the past?

While there’s much talk and theorizing about what is different about the look of movies now (we can all feel it, but what really is the cause?) Film researcher Stephen Follows crunches a bunch of data to try to answer the question, and discovers that… it’s complicated. Great if you love nerdy data about film.

[Photo] Random flat-lay of printed photos I found on a chess board at the park.

[Video] Rare 17-minute interview with Thelma Schoonmaker (1993)

I was delighted to come across this fantastic conversation Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese’s longtime editor and one of the greatest editors of all time. She rarely does interviews and often downplays her work, so it’s nice to hear some insight into her process.

[Article] If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You’re Not Paying Attention

L. M. Sacasas on how to enchant your world by improving the quality of your attention.

[Painting] A Rose (1907)

One of my favorite paintings I’ve come across this year is this one by Thomas Anshutz. The detail work and color in the dress is incredible. Her expression is what makes it though. It feels like a reaction shot from a scene in a Jane Austen adaptation. I want to know the story.

[Video] Drinking In Rural China for Beginners

Mike Okay’s travelogues are one of my favorite recent YouTube discoveries. Mike’s ability to connect with seemingly anyone even when he doesn’t speak a work of their language is impressive. He shows us the beauty, hospitality and humanity of many rural cultures that rarely get featured in western media, and handles the difficult balance of being honest about the conditions of the places he visits, while being respectful toward the people he encounters and avoiding an exploitative frame. “Drinking in Rural China for Beginners” was how I found his channel, and is not a bad place to start.

[Book] A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

When flooding from Hurricane Helene devastated a large part of Western North Carolina where I live, I was struck by the incredible process of community bonding and mutual aid that took place in the storm’s wake. This book is about that phenomenon, which often takes place after disasters, and which is generally under-reported by the media. It’s this book that helped me understand the narrative I had discovered while making my documentary Out of a Flood.

[Practice] Ikebana

[Article] The Zen TV Experiment

Notes from Bernard McGrane on TV and how to approach it meditatively to learn different things about the medium.

In one exercise he asked students to look at a blank TV for 30 minutes:

One expression of this anger that comes up repeatedly is "I wasted 30 minutes of my time." Is it possible that this is a very valuable waste of time? Is it possible that "wasting time" is a very valuable thing to do in studying society?

[Video] Richard Kind - The Adam Friedland Show

While the bit occasionally wears thin, The Adam Friedland Show is one of the best swings at a genuine YouTube talk show that isn’t food-based. Friedland shines when he’s chatting with actors that don’t get as much of the spotlight as they deserve like in this episode with guest Richard Kind or this one with William H. Macy.

[Article] People are “writing for the AIs” now

Some people are now writing explicitly with the idea that the writing will become part of the training material for future AI models. Scott Alexander gives a breakdown of some of the how and why. I do not endorse this behavior, but I note these examples of how quickly we’ve entered a very strange reality with a kind of anthropological curiosity.

[Podcast ] AI discusses “ AI discusses “AI discusses document that just says “Poopoo Peepee” “ “

Is what it says it is, recursive surrealism generated using Notebook LM’s feature that lets you generate an “AI podcast” that discusses any video or document. Good reminder that LLMs are first a foremost, skilled bullshit generators.

[Video] Straight Line

Mash together an episode of High Maintenance and I Think You Should Leave and you’ve got: whatever this is. Part of the Internet New Wave.

[Video] Silent Hiking The Himalayas for 16 days

Part meditation, part travel documentary. Incredible cinematography. Is this also part of the Internet New Wave, albeit a very different genre?

[Photography] Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs

Research for my video on the cinematography of Sinners lead me to the FSA photography archive on the Library of Congress website. I hadn’t seen this collection previously, and love browsing through high-quality historical archives.

[Book] Reclaiming Art in The Age of Artifice by J.F. Martel

Helped me make sense of the role art has played for humanity throughout are existence, and how we stay in touch with that in the face of advertising, propaganda, and now AI generated media. Was very influential on the video I made this year about “AI art.”

Donna Tart’s introduction for the new edition of the book is also worth your time:

“Art with a capital A—is all too often viewed as an antiquated construction ensconced behind velvet ropes, not very relevant except as a standing resource to be boiled down to blunt cultural agendas, picked apart by theory, aped by predictive formulas, pillaged and parodied for commercials and computer software, if not ignored altogether in the glitz of technological stimulus…

“But Martel’s definition of Art with a capital A extends beyond the gilded category of fine arts. He casts it as an uncanny force bursting into the world in earliest prehistory, less a theoretical construct or byproduct of culture than a slant of light streaming into our world from elsewhere. Like dream, it gives us access to parts of the psyche and even of society that we might not otherwise be able to see; like prophecy, it has potential to burn through all the managed and multilayered cultural fictions that surround us and to awaken us from our pervasive sense of unreality. And as our world degenerates around us into pixels, Martel maintains that one of our oldest and most human ways of knowing might also be our best hope of negotiating the present moment without being destroyed by it.”

Read the introduction here.

[Short Film] Morning Routine

Great cinematography, cheeky script. One of those cinematic gems you find on YouTube from time to time. The YouTube algorithm tends not to reward this kind of work, but I’m always happy to find it. Directed by Nur Niaz.

[Propaganda] The Political Art of Jon McNaughton

Some artists eschew subtext for… just saying the quiet part out loud. Completely sacrilegious, but also it would be almost impossible to tell just from the image alone if this was satire or not. (Spoiler alert: it is not). Obviously I don’t endorse the content but there’s something strangely fascinating about this work that helps you understand the psyche of American Christian Nationalism.

Propaganda is often just as revealing and informative as Art if you know what you’re looking at.

[Book] The Magic Hours: the films and hidden life of Terrence Malick

I thoroughly enjoyed the new biography of Terrence Malick from John Bleasdale. Sly bit of self-promotion: my review of the book was published this year in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Since I wrote the review John and I have connected and I’ve also made a few appearances on his podcast.

[Video] Tristan Spohn invites acting students at different levels of experience to recreate a scene from La La Land.

Really helps illustrate the nitty gritty of what makes performances great. The devil is in the details. Fun to see this kind of direct comparison.

[Place] Big Bald, NC

Sometimes one of the most beautiful places you’ve seen in your life is only an hour from where you live and all you have to do is walk up a small mountain to see it.

[Video] Your Journey into Analog Glitch Art

Beautiful video showcasing the world of analog glitch art. This is the kind of retro-nostalgia I’ll endorse.

[Speech] Tilda Swinton’s speech at Berlinale 2025

“The inhumane is being perpetrated on our watch. I’m here to name it without hesitation or doubt in my mind. And to lend my unwavering solidarity to all those who recognize the unacceptable complacency of our greed addicted governments who make nice with planet wreckers and war criminals wherever they come from.

I’m also here to name my absolute personal faith in culture in resistance. An enlightened cinema can inspire a civilized world, can lend us the pause, the breath, the reflection that might embolden us to take the best part of ourselves. That capacity for enchantment and openness, for wit and intrigue, that admiration for human flexibility and resource. Our capacity to survive things, for thrill and sensation that we find in the witness that cinema represents and build on it out in the open and under the sky.”

I recommend you watch it in full.

[Art] John Atkinson Grimshaw: Painting Moonlight

I’ve been truly enthralled by how painter John Atkinson Grimshaw features moonlight in his paintings.

[Podcast] David Perell’s Interview with Richard Powers

David Perell’s podcast, How I Write, has been a new favorite this year. In depth conversations with a variety of prominent authors, about the practice and craft of writing. Richard Powers is the author of The Overstory, one of my favorite books, so this episode in particular was a treat.

[Place] Balzi Rossi, Italy

Exit the train in Menton, walk to the eastern end of town, cross the border into Italy, go past the small hotel and Michelin star restaurant and down the gravel path a few hundred meters, just before the expensive Resort Bagni there is a small public beach. Bring a picnic, spend the afternoon.

[Article] Olivia Rafferty’s guide to quitting Spotify

Their treatment of artists aside, I’ve also become frustrated by the fact that the UI designers of Spotify increasingly don’t seem to want me to actually listen to music. This guide was helpful and I’ve made the switch to Qobuz, which is a solid service but desperately needs a better name.

[Video] Brigands vs Knight (Real Unchoreographed Duel)

I enjoyed this short film that attempts to simulate medieval era combat as realistically as possible. I can’t vouch for the video’s actual authenticity, but it’s interesting to see a counterpoint to how these types of fights usually play out in movies and TV shows.

[Article] The Oscar Should Go to Bob Ferguson’s 1991 Nissan Sentra SE-R

“--only for another sound to emerge in the clamor: The high-pitched, shitty-exhaust-kit buzz of Bob Ferguson’s four-cylinder. My favorite image in the movie comes around here: A wide shot with the Charger out of focus in the foreground to the right, the Mustang in the middle distance (and middle of the frame) behind it--and there, in the background, suddenly pulling in from the left: A exhilarating little two-door Nissan Sentra. The cavalry has arrived. Sort of.”

One of my favorite pieces of film writing from this year, all about how the little details matter, and a great reminder that A Car is Never Just a Car.

[Photo] The color produced by this maple tree found in a park.

[Paper] Perspective Distortion from Interpersonal Distance Is an Implicit Visual Cue for Social Judgments of Faces

Perspective distortion in photography created by the distance from the subject influences how “trustworthy” the person appears to us. Every little decision a filmmaker makes is significant.

[Article] The Fordham Experiment

(see also) The Fordham Experiment details how subtle changes in how a film is presented effects audience perception. Every part of a medium shapes our perception. The medium is the message.

[Book] Selected Essays by John Berger

[Video] Parody of Actor’s on Actor’s by Ryan Micho and Grace Reiter

I love Variety’s Actor’s on Actor’s series when the pairing is good, but this video by comedy duo Ryan Micho and Grace Reiter deftly nails so many of the awkward cliches that exist in celebrity posturing.

[Video] Interior Motives: A Room Investigation Game Show

Host Ben Mora, and two guest contestants look at submitted photos of viewers bedrooms and try to guess their age, location, gender and sexuality. A voyeuristic comedy show that’s like geoguessr for people’s private lives. It’s interesting to explore the ephemera our identities leave behind, and sometimes how you can’t judge a person by the room they sleep in.

[File Under: “I knew it!”] Wet Bias

From Wikipedia: “Wet bias is the phenomenon whereby some weather forecasters report an overestimated and exaggerated probability of precipitation to increase the usefulness and actionability of their forecast.”

[Art] Approaching Thunder Storm (1859)

This dramatic landscape by Martin Johnson Heade has such an incredible mood. I love the little dog.

[Article] Vince Gilligan Warns Against Glamorizing Villains

The creator of Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul (and now Pluribus) reflects on the unintended aspirational nature of anti-heroes and calls for more “good guy” protagonists. Does Gilligan really regret Breaking Bad to some extent? Carol, the main character of Pluribus is not a straightforward hero, but certainly less problematic than any of Gilligan’s leads in the past. Also Pluribus is a great show and worth a watch.

[Photo] This cat in the streets of Ventimiglia, Italy

That’s a wrap for 2025. Happy New Year.

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The thing that is “Supreme” in Marty Supreme is confidence. Marty Supreme Confidence.

Confidence is alluring in part because it is inherently dramatic. Two guys squaring off in a table tennis tournament is a contest. Two guys squaring off while one of them says “I’m the best of all time. You’re going down. I can’t lose.” is a drama.

It’s dramatic because there is suspense implicit in the confidence. It is Hitchcock’s ticking bomb under the ping pong table. With confidence the stakes are no longer just who can paddle a tiny white ball with the most speed and accuracy, they are the nature of the universe itself. Can we mere mortals, through the power of belief alone, bring a future that has not yet happened into existence? Can the titular Mr. Supreme (played by Timothée Chalamet) through his conviction in his own greatness bring about the destiny he already know is his birthright?

“Believe in yourself.” “Fake it till you make it.” The Law of Attraction. Manifest your desires. “Confidence is king.”

Our society is replete with the superstition of confidence. Those who seem to wield it effortlessly proclaim it’s power is right there for the taking. We are correct to have our doubts. To believe you can simply speak or think a reality into existence is to believe in magic. And yet—despite the prevailing skepticism—we find it hard to untangle ourselves from these ideas. The confident among us do often seem to have an almost uncanny knack for success. Maybe there is something to this power.

Some of the power of confidence lies in the suspense. The performance of confidence draws us into the drama. Those who root for the confidant man might do so out of curiosity as much as anything else. The success of the confident presenting a felt proof in his manifesting power, and if that power is found to be real, then we are given hope that it may also work for us, that all we need to pry ourselves from the floorboards of mediocrity and into the lofty rafters of greatness is the belief that the rafters are where we belong. But even the skeptics and the haters are enthralled by the drama: for if the confident one crashes in what we call a blaze of glory all the sweeter their defeat. Watching a loss is one thing, but to watch your opponent lose when they knew they would win is to watch their world fall apart. Their reality destroyed and your own affirmed.

Suspense alone is not power. The power lies in the way the drama of suspense attracts and holds attention. Attention (as we’ve been so frequently reminded in this attention economy) is a limited commodity which, once gathered can be transmuted into power. Power which can then be wielded by the confident to help achieve their goals.

This is, partly, the basis of confidence’s sleight of hand: If you believe fully enough in your own success, others will pay attention and with that attention you may actually be better equipped to facilitate that success. The other, more tangible dimension to the power of confidence lies in the nature of choice and self-fulfilling prophecy.

A large part of what you achieve in life is defined by what you choose to attempt. (You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.) But like most people, your choice of what to attempt is largely defined by what you believe is possible to accomplish. If you know it is impossible to make the 50ft leap across the spike-filled pit, you will never try, and rightly so. You cannot suddenly make the impossible possible simply by believing you can do something that you cannot.

However. Many of us unwittingly believe that which is possible is not. These beliefs limit what we attempt and what we do not attempt to accomplish is certain to remain unaccomplished.

So the confidant man unlocks a kind of power by expanding his vision of what is possible beyond the common bounds. He is more willing to attempt the seemingly impossible, and in doing so is more likely to accomplish the seemingly impossible. When this effect is realized, it further reinforces the confidence, and the belief in confidence itself as power, and the confidant man might begin to believe that the power of his confidence is limitless and that he himself is limitless.

From the outside, when overconfidence pays off, it can seem as if the laws of material reality have been defied. It is by appearing to facilitate acts that appeared impossible that confidence takes on its almost mystical quality. To fully harness this power the confidence man must not only convince other’ his destiny is pre-ordained but also himself. He must become lost in the performance, him must himself fully believe so that all doubt is overcome, forcing him like a funnel towards the choices that could result in his success, indeed making the success more likely, though not, as he must believe, inevitable.

This double gambit, which first attracts attention, then seems to make the impossible possible is quite effective as a means of seduction. This is the power that the con man leverages against a mark. Either hiding his own ability while stoking your confidence until you make a miscalculation that benefits him, or by earning your confidence in him through the performance of his own, which he may then exploit.

It is why campaigning politicians always refer to themselves as “the next president of the United States” rather than the more accurate “prospective next president of the United States.” Because they know that by projecting the view that their victory is an inevitable, they might influence the voter’s perception of what is possible. That because most people are more likely to bet on a person they believe has a shot at winning and because beliefs are not rooted in cold hard science and reason (as many of us would prefer) but are instead malleable and susceptible to influence—if you can influence beliefs you can influence outcomes. That is where the power of confidence lies, made greater by the force of the conviction behind it.

But the whole thing is fragile, for no matter how strong the conviction of the confident, the self help guru, the salesman or politician, they are still bound by the same physical laws of the universe, they are still susceptible to the same forces of happenstance. Even though confidence helps a candidate win, for every candidate that wins many more will lose.

Yet there is just enough real power in confidence that sometimes the confidence itself is all you really need to convince someone to believe in you enough to provide the next wrung on your ladder to heaven. Marty Supreme knows if he can just get that next wrung, he’ll climb right to the top. Never mind he doesn’t yet know where all the other wrungs will come from—he believes his confidence will materialize those as well.

In the face of enough confidence many think maybe they know something I don’t. And it’s easy to almost hope that they do. Because wouldn’t it be nice if we could know the future? Wouldn’t that be a comfort to our anxieties? Perhaps if I am in close enough proximity to the confidence it will rub off and I too will gain prescience of my own destiny, discovering the comforting certainty that I will win.

It is with glee that Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a fading actress trying to restart her career on broadway, runs to hear the New York Times review of her play. “You’re acting circles around that guy.” Marty had told her confidently in rehearsals. The confidence is infectious.

When the gambit pays off, for a moment the confidence appears to be manifesting the outcome, our confidence man grabbing wrung after wrung in the ladder to his success out of what appears to be thin air. Each successive success makes the sleight of hand all the more compelling. Maybe confidence is all you need. Hustle. Optimize. Manifest. Ignore the haters. Ignore the critics. Ignore the damage your single-minded focus has done to yourself and everyone around you.

We should not forget the bomb of reality ticking underneath the table tennis. And if you’ve seen these stories before, or been on this plant long enough (and payed attention to what’s happening around you) you probably see where this is going. Things are not so simple, and however compelling, the high-wire act often comes to a spectacular end. That in-and-of-itself is sometimes the show.

This year at the Golden Globes Chalamet broke with Hollwood’s tradition of affected humility to declare out-loud his desire to be ranked in the pantheon of acting greats. It is hard not to see a through line between the Marty’s confidence, Chalamet’s own display of confidence, and the brashness of the meta-character behind film’s brilliant marketing campaign. A campaign which gave us a “leaked” meeting where Chalamet overconfidently pitched absurd concepts and where the punchline was “yeah sure, that’ll never happen.” —Only for many of the ideas to materialized as viral marketing stunts leading up to the film’s release. A marketing campaign perfectly timed to double as an Oscar campaign, a film released on Christmas day well positioned to generate Oscar buzz, all lead by a confident guy who clearly has his sights set on his first academy award.

I myself am fairly confident that Chalamet will one day earn the statue he desires, and he may even rank among the greats. But I doubt this performance is the one to cement that position.

Director Josh Safdie does a wonderful job of guiding us frantically through Marty Supreme’s calamitous wake. And while the film’s examination of confidence is less overtly spiritual than Uncut Gem’s, Daniel Lopatin’s soaring, etherial choral/synth score still evokes a mystical dimension. The wonderful casting mixes non-actors with familiar faces to lend us a world with depth and texture, and Darius Khondji’s cinematography is well tuned to the controlled chaos. Throughout all of this, Chalamet is strong as a leading man, effortlessly embodying youthful cocksure intensity needed for the role: but he wants to be ranked against the likes of Day-Lewis, Pacino or Viola Davis, and I say in all love, that he just is not yet there. I don’t see nuanced physicality, sensitivity, or presence—I see mostly a young man frantically trying to win. It is what the role calls for but what is underneath this Supreme Confidence? What formed Marty Supreme? Who is he besides his drive?

When I encounter the increasing number of AI generated images, videos that are flooding the internet, I don’t know about you, but I get a very strange feeling. I have a kind of gut reaction that something is wrong with these images.

There is part of me that is skeptical of this gut reaction—am I falling into a trap that so many generations have fallen into before? Am I, as proponents of AI might suggest, just reflexively rejecting the next logical step in technological advancement because it represent an uncomfortable change? Am I merely repeating the pattern started by Plato when he critiqued the development of writing, arguing that it would cause humans to cease remembering?

Or does this gut feeling that something is “wrong” about “art” generated by AI, speak to something deeper and true? Does it reveal something about what art is for us as humans? And that whatever Art is, trying to generate it using AI violates that thing in some way?

AI in Hollywood

Tilly Norwood is an AI “actress” created by Particle6—a UK based company that bills themselves as “Europe’s leading up-and-coming AI production Studio”

Tilly caused an immediate, strong backlash from many in Hollywood, actors frustrated at the idea of being replaced in an already competitive industry, with some seeing the Artifice of Tilly as unsettling in a deeper way. Emily Blunt, reacted to Tilly by saying “Please stop. Please stop taking away our human connection.”

Even if the technology is not yet developed enough for Tilly to show up in the next season of House of Dragon, it’s clear that some in Hollywood are not opposed to the creeping advance of AI, some talent agencies have reportedly been circling Tilly, Ridley Scott has said he’s “trying to embrace AI” and Blumhouse’s Jason Blum argued in a reaction to Tilly Norwood, that AI is here to stay whether we like it or not. That Hollywood shouldn’t stick it’s head in the sand but should instead embrace AI, “as long as it can be done ethically and legally” he made sure to clarify. Ashton Kutcher called AI “an amazing tool that we should learn to work with.”

This is the most common refrain in support of AI—that it is just another tool. That rejecting AI would be like rejecting digital cameras, or computer animation. And it’s this argument that the creators of Tilly use in their response to the backlash:

“I see AI not as a replacement for people–but as a tool.” “She is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work - a piece of art.”

But is Tilly art? Could Tilly be used to create art? Is AI just a new paintbrush we can use to put the strokes the canvas? Or is it something else?

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

In Cave of Forgotten Dreams director Werner Herzog takes us into the Chauvet Cave in France, to see the oldest paintings ever discovered.

J. F. Martel writing about the film in his book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice says: “In the images this prehistoric people have bequeathed to us, we get a glimpse of something like a shared humanity, but we also gaze into a stranger part of ourselves, something reaching to the depths.”

Seeing works of art made some 30,000 years ago, there is a striking sense of familiarity. There is something in the very activity of creating art that feels instantly recognizable as human. An impulse which remains with in us despite such a vast passing of time and how much society has changed across that span.

But we also encounter in this cave, something else—what Martel calls a stranger part of ourselves.

What we find looking at this art is the mystery of who the the people painting these images were, and why they painted them? It’s as if we discovered signs of alien life, only to realize the aliens are us, that our own existence is just as mysterious and startling as anything else in the cosmos.

Even if we cannot know what these cave paintings mean, there is a profound and moving mystery in the question of their meaning itself.

These images don’t just represent the existence of something or someone, but a self-awareness of that existence. The existence of the art is existence itself expressing itself for others to see.

What we don’t often think about, is that despite how much art has changed, despite all the technological advancement and scientific knowledge we’ve acquired since these cave painters did their work, we are still caught in this mystery today.

Art is still mysterious, and true works of art still expresses the mystery of life itself.

According to Martel art, “demands that we feel and think the mystery of our passage through this body, on this earth, in this universe…” and “...bears witness to the bafflement that the mere fact of existence elicits in our brains.”

What is the impulse that connects the intricate carvings in Angkor Wat, the Chauvet cave paintings, and the Sistine Chapel, with the mournful beauty of Debussy’s Arabesque No.1, or the hauntingly poetic images crafted by Andrei Tarkovsky in The Mirror?

I see in all of them an attempt to express something the artist experienced, but struggled to quantify. An attempt to express a mysterious part of life that cannot be put into words. A desire to leave not just a mark on the world, but our mark, a mark that says something about who we are and our experience of life.

Art is what allows us to communicate about these mysteries. To share between two humans the unquantifiable aspects of our existence.

Cave of Forgotten Slop

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT recently released Sora2, an AI model that allows you to easily generate AI videos that sometimes look startlingly real along with a platform that allows you to view an infinite stream of these artificially generated videos.

Scrolling through Sora induces a kind of dizzying uncanny feeling. There is of course something familiar about this: it looks, at moments, like I might be watching a TikTok, or instagram reel. But there is also something alien and strange about it. At times it evokes a chuckle, more at the nihilistic absurdity of the thing itself than any given video or joke created by the platform. Yet the overwhelming feeling I get, looking at Sora, other platforms that feature streams of AI generated images, Tilly Norwood, or reading a poem generated by an LLM, is a strange sense of emptiness.

There is, to me, a perceptible vacancy to the entire thing, while the occasional AI image might initially grab my eye, I am not drawn in by the curiosity I feel when a human work of art grabs my eye. I do not want more, I am left simply asking why does this exist? What is it for?

Art/Artifice

You can ask an image model like Midjourney to generate a cave painting in the style of the Chauvet cave and you’ll get something like this:

Setting aside the fact that this obviously wasn’t skillfully crafted onto the contours of rock 30,000 years ago, it would be easy to critique this image by pointing out which details it gets wrong, tallying up all the ways in which the images do not measure up to the original in terms of quality and style. But I think doing so would miss the point, because this image, even is it got the details right, would still be missing something that the original paintings have.

But what exactly is missing? And if this generated image isn’t art than what is it? What do we call it?

To answer these questions I’m going to draw on the distinction made by J. F. Martel between "Art, and what he calls “artifice.”

In our lives–even long before the advent of AI–we have been surrounded by and inundated with designs, photographs, paintings, illustrations, graphics, symbols, videos, animations, and other creative works.

Within this huge landscape we find the stuff we typically call art, but we also find the same skills and techniques that are used to create art, used to create a lot of stuff that is… something else.

Most of us would probably agree that Van Gogh’s Starry Night is a work of art, but probably would not think of a Stop Sign, or an event flyer as art in the same sense.

Martel calls this other category: artifice.

It’s important to note that Artifice itself is not bad. There is obviously artistic craft and skill involved in the design and creation of artifice. Intent, creativity, composition and color theory are employed to create an effective road sign or event flyer.

So this distinction is not about diminishing the talent that is often needed to create good artifice or the necessity of artifice in our society.

Instead the distinction between Art and Artifice lies in the purpose they serve both for the artist as a means of expression, and to the viewer as a means of relating to that expression.

Martel says: “Artifice foregoes the revelatory power that is art’s prerogative in order to impart information, be it a message, an opinion, a judgment, a physiological stimulus, or a command.”

When I look at a work like Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” there is no obvious message or statement to be found: instead I find a strange sense of mystery, a weird juxtaposition of liminality, loneliness, and beauty that is hard to describe but which feel familiar to me.

I get the same sense from Hopper’s “Morning Sun.” Is this loneliness? Despair? Is the warmth of the sun about to awaken her from this melancholy? Or is it somehow the cause, the warmth of it’s touch making her long for something else? Is the emptiness on her face, reflected in the sparseness of the composition, connected to the industrial landscape that clouds her view? Is Hopper suggesting that these emotions are the result of the modernist environment that was reaching maturity in the 1950s? I don’t know, but he captures here a feeling I recognize. And in recognizing that feeling, I feel connected not just to the painting but beyond that to the human expressing it through the painting.

Now compare “Morning Sun” to these images created by Karl Largerfeld for a 2010 campaign for the fashion brand Fendi.

There is certainly a necessary level of artistic skill needed to craft and style these images. But unlike Hopper’s original work, there is no mystery at their core. We do not need to wonder what the images are trying to expressed, what the model is feeling, or what emotion the photographer was trying to convey.

We know the purpose of the image is to showcase the clothes, to get us to associate these clothes with the prestige of Hopper’s art. The images are trying to get us to buy something.

While I like these images, and think Largerfeld is obviously a talented photographer–Martel would argue, and I’d agree that they are not art but works of artifice.

Artifice isn’t made for the purpose of exploring some deep mysterious feeling. Artifice might use or evoke feelings but it’s ultimate purpose is to convey information, or to get the viewer to do something, whether that’s drinking a Pepsi, or yielding to oncoming traffic.

And doing this can be important. You do not want a stop sign to express the profound mysteries of the universe: you want it to clearly and effectively convince the viewer to take an action.

Authentic art, by contrast, takes us out of the realm of the utilitarian altogether. According to Martel it “astonishes and is born of astonishment….”

“Astonishment is the litmus test of art, the sign by which we know we have been magicked out of practical and utilitarian enterprises to confront the bottomless dream of life in sensible form”

In this view art is made and exists simply and as an expression of and way to encounter the mystery of life.

And the astonishment that defines art can come in the form of a grand expression of religious wonder, or a more subdued examination of subtle emotion. Or it can come in something as small as attention to the way light plays across curtains blowing in the wind, the simple beauty of how objects and color dance together in a room, or even a self aware study of the way large expanses of tone and the texture of brush strokes can evoke a certain emotional states.

Martel argues that this astonishment comes not from transcending the uncanny strangeness and mystery of our very everyday existence, but by awakening us to it.

Astonishment is not necessarily a conscious end goal that the artist sets out to symbolize within the work–it is the driving motivation, something that comes through the process of creating the art itself, revealed both consciously and unconsciously in the thousands of decisions made by the artist in the act of crafting the work.

Each culture or individual has their own taste in what they value and a stylistic language they use for expressing this astonishment. What astonishes one person or culture may confuse or bore another. But what all art has in common is this attempt at expressing our own astonishment at some aspect of existence itself.

And while not every work of art will awaken this astonishment in every viewer, when art is serving it’s true purpose, astonishment is there.

AI Cannot Be Astonished.

I do not really know if the painters in Chauvet were expressing a sense of wonder, fear, desire, worship, or celebration in their depictions of the animals that would have been their source of life. Perhaps what lead them to create these images was the way all these complex feelings about the subject coexisted within them. We can only speculate.

What I do know is that there was something astonishing in these painters experience that drove them to take time away from all the activities in their lives that served an explicit survival function, to engage in the act of expression.

Whether or not we get our interpretation of these images right, much of the value we get out of looking at these works comes from trying to connect with what they were expressing.

So what happens when we have an AI create cave paintings, or any other kind of image that looks like art? It might be visually similar, just like an advertisement might bear a resemblance to a work of art, but as an image object I would argue the AI generated image does not carry the expression of life that true works of art do.

AI, unlike the cave painters and other artists cannot “express” astonishment at some aspect of life through art, because it is not itself experiencing that life, it is not feeling the astonishment to then translate into the artistic process.

Anything it makes can only be an imitation of how a human expressed a part of life. An imitation made with no understanding of what it is imitating, or why.

You can ask an AI to generate an image of what loneliness and alienation looked like in the 1950s. And you might even resonate with AI’s depiction of those feelings in some way. But these images are not an actual artifact that reflects the real human emotions that someone felt in 1950–while Hopper’s painting are.

And I think the extent to which we might connect with the emotion of an AI image is simply the extent to which we connect with its ability to imitate of how human artists have already translated those experiences into art.

It can generate infinite variations of these imitations, in every conceivable style, but it cannot add to the corpus of art something new born out of a direct contact with existence. It does not have it’s own experience of loneliness to express.

What draws me to a Hopper painting is not the content of the images themselves, but what is behind them. A painting is not just wallpaper meant to decorate a room. I do not look at his work just to see a city street or a woman sitting in a bed.

What draws me to Hopper is his perspective on these scenes, the way he captures certain feelings through how he constructs and paints the everyday. He saw the world in a certain and expresses that perspective through his work, his work of art connects me with another human’s experience, while the artifice only connects me with the arbitrary elements of style that Hopper used to communicate his experience.

I believe much of what draws us to art is the artist’s perspective, literally getting to see how their way of seeing the world is encoded into their work.

AI fundamentally, does not have its own perspective on the world. There is no way of seeing to encode. At least in its current iteration it can only produce imitation of existing perspectives. That might work for the creation of artifice, but leaves out one of the most significant reasons we are drawn to art.

Data and Consensus.

The heart of this issue is not just found by evaluating the end results, it’s also found in looking at how the works are made.

The artifice of AI generated images or text is baked into the very way it is created. Beyond conveying information and commands, Martel argues that artifice works in service of creating consensus:

“Consensus is the statistical world of useful knowledge, generalization, habit, custom, and ideology. Works of artifice reinforce Consensus by representing reality as though everything had already been mapped out.”

The Machine Learning Algorithms that generate text and images, literally work by using statistical and mathematical analysis to try to create predictive data. An AI generated work is not created using the artistic process: it is created by visualizing consensus found in data and information.

AI uses this consensus to reverse engineer an image in order to meet the desire or expectation we give it through the prompt. The AI image is a visual expression of the very consensus that Martel argues is antithetical to art.

While we might use it to generate something new—in the sense that it might be a particular arrangement of pixels or words that has never existed before—it seems to me AI cannot be a means by which true astonishment and mystery are captured and transmitted because true astonishment and mystery are not pieces of data or information: they are something strange, felt and experienced.

In this sense, true art is the part of life that cannot be turned into data or information, that’s the whole reason why we encode these things into poems, paintings or songs, in the first place instead of just describing them using logic and reason.

But why care?

Why should we care so much about this distinction between Art and Artifice? Because if we lose sight of the distinction we risk becoming victim of two unfortunate misunderstandings:

First, we might treat works of art as artifice and lose out on allowing ourselves to experience the astonishment and connection that authentic art has to offer.

Or we believe that works of artifice is are works of art, and leave ourselves vulnerable and exposed to the ways Artifice is trying to influence our thinking and behavior.

Our society currently is in the grips of both misunderstandings, beyond the ways we’re manipulated by advertising, we fall prey to all manner of propaganda.

And we simultaneously devalue the power of art by frequently asserting that everything is artifice, that there is no room for something greater that can truly move us profoundly.

Martel argues that in our modern world we are often closed off to allowing the forces of art to profoundly effect us as a defense mechanism against the manipulative power of Artifice. That the very guardedness that we use to protect our mental health in such an artifice saturated world, has turned into an apathy toward art.

We put on ironic detachment, and see being unaffected by authentic expression as cool while we view those who can be moved as weak. Sentimental and romantic becoming insults.

The jadedness has affected the artists themselves, who often only engage with anything sincere through a layer of detachment, not wanting to be seen as cliche.

The cost of all of this is high: cynical artifice posing as art, concerned only with its own commercial viability, and numbed-out audiences unable to connect with the artists and works that manage to get past the cynicism and exist as works of authentic art.

Not Just Another Tool.

I’ve focused here mostly on images generated entirely by AI. But what if AI is just one small tool used in the process of making a larger work of art?

I don’t think any small piece of artifice within the larger work necessarily corrupts the entire thing. I do not think just because a small amount of AI was used on part of Adrien Brody’s performance in The Brutalist that the entire film has no artistic merit and needs to be called Artifice. There is obviously a big gap between that and Tilly Norwood becoming a reality. And all art that exists within a capitalist marketplace necessarily has to negotiate a relationship with the forces of artifice to be produced and seen. I am not proposing a strict binary.

And perhaps–as Jason Blum suggests—if we can iron out the ethical and legal issues—AI might find a place as another tool in our toolbox, like CGI or digital cameras. But I think we should be very hesitant to adopt it without serious consideration about what it does to the artistic process.

Because what makes art a work of art is not just the end result but the process we use to get there. True expression in art emerges from every tiny choice made in the process of bringing that art into reality as a representation of our experience and perspective.

The artistic process is something both conscious and unconscious that reveals itself through each brushstroke, through accidents and how we respond to them, through collaborative decisions made by humans, through the way the environment we make the art within subtly influences each choice in that process. Each decision or accident we make in the process of creating art is an opportunity for meaning, perspective, and experience to sneak into the work, even when we’re not consciously planning for that to happen.

Any aspect of the process that you use AI for necessarily removes you from the process. But you and your perspective is the very source of what makes something art. The “prompt” is not a tool you express yourself through but a way of describing an outcome you want to achieve and having something else try to achieve that for you. If the essence of a work of art is often found in the very process of attempting to get to an outcome, AI disconnects us from that process.

In the documentary series Mr. Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio shares a story from the making of The Aviator, in one scene after many takes both he and Scorsese new that something wasn’t working. And eventually Scorsese told him it wasn’t working, but did not tell him what to do to make it work, because Scorsese knew it would be more valuable, and more authentic if DiCaprio found what worked on his own.

Scorsese did this because as an artist he knows that the process matters, and that even when working with a human, giving them an explicit outcome to work towards can sometimes be antithetical to the artistic process.

So if we want the machine to make our art for us, it strikes me that we may not understand the purpose of the art we’re making. That the true value of art is not in the perfect outcome that we imagine AI will help us achieve, but the process we take to get there. And when we use AI we risk undermining the very process that allows deeper meaning to emerge through our work.

A typewriter might have made writing words more efficient, but it did not write the words for you.

If you want to make true art rather than artifice, you must engage in the artistic process not to have a perfect, finished work that makes your experience comprehensible, but to have a work that brings the audience along on your attempt to express incomprehensible.

This is why looking more closely at a work of art reveals deeper meaning, while looking closer at a work of Artifice often reveals it to be less meaningful than it originally seemed.

Yet I Am Astonished.

But I must admit: while I have not yet encountered an individual AI image that feels like a true work of art, I sometimes do feel a kind of dreadful astonishment at what these images represent.

If we peer into this endless hall of mirrors constructed to reflecting everything we’ve ever created back at us and ask why? What do we see?

When I look at the whole of AI generated images this way I see a work that astonishes me with it’s absurdity, surrealism, emptiness and glut. An attempt to create a work that encompasses everything humanity has created while simultaneously trying to remove as much of ourselves from the creative process as we possibly can.

I see humanity trying to abandon its own involvement in the act of creation, leaving itself with only its desires, its prompts waiting to be filled with increasing accuracy, precision, and speed.

And I wonder if maybe this attempt reveals a hidden desire for self-negation.

That perhaps our desire to remove ourselves from the creative process itself is born out of a belief that we are fundamentally flawed, and that we must overcome those flaws by creating a machine that transcends our imperfect abilities.

One that can infinitely meet our needs with the touch of a button, without ourselves or another human being needing to be involved. That can put an end to the unbearable mystery of it all.

But what if we have it backwards?

What if our involvement in the process, as flawed as it may be, is the very thing we desire and are trying to satisfy with this endless cascade of novelty, information and increasing productivity?

What if what we are seeking a machine that can perfectly fill our prompts, when what we truly desire is for ourselves to be prompted by our own artistic vision: to care enough about something, an experience or perspective on the world that we want to do the creative labor ourselves, to falter through the decisions, finding the expression of the beauty in each brush stroke.

What if what we want is an artistic project where no shortcut is fulfilling because the project is not a means to an end, but fulfilling as a process in and of itself, a part of life, which is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be astonished by?

Imagine that perhaps 30,000 years ago the cave painters finished their work, put down their torches and charcoal, gathered around a fire together afterwards and one of them said “wouldn’t it be great if we could create something that would do the painting for us so we did not have to do it ourselves?”

In the interview where Jason Blum said the industry needs to embrace AI, he said “The consumer does not care if what they’re looking at is AI.” And at first I thought: he’s wrong. Some people, like myself, do care about whether or not what they’re seeing is AI. But looking closer I think he’s right. A consumer does not care about whether or not what they’re seeing is AI—a consumer is just looking for whatever might be available to fill the craving they have in that moment. Whatever might draw them in, appease, and amuse them will do the job. And there is money to be made giving consumers what they want.

But are we here just to consume? Or do we want something else?

Appeasing consumers is not the purpose of a work of art. If you are creating to appease, or experiencing something for the sake of being appeased you are within in the realm of artifice.

Art is made not for consumption but for the sake of expression, connecting with yourself, others, or existence itself through that expression.

While there is a place in this world for the creation and consumption of artifice, if we lose sight of the role that art can play in our lives, both as artists and as audiences, we lose sight of a valuable part of being human.

We cannot escape our desire for the connection provided by authentic art by getting better, faster, and more efficient at making artifice.

I've loved this movie for years. As a teenager I had always heard people hype up The Godfather. I'd heard there was this gangster movie and it was one of the greatest movies of all time. Well, reader, I'll risk my film bro card by saying that when I eventually watched The Godfather as a budding teenage cinephile, I didn't really get the hype. I was like, why is this wedding scene sooooo long? etc etc. Not long after that, I saw Goodfellas for the first time. I was enthralled from beginning to end. Now this, I thought, this is a gangster picture.

I've since come around on The Godfather of course, learning to appreciate its more sober meditation on family, and spiritual corruption –but the point is I've always loved Goodfellas. And in my mind it will always be the gangster film. It has all the usual gangster stuff, robberies, shocking violence, waxing eloquent about the sauce— but there is just something else about this one.. it sings. It's almost musical. To this day I think my favorite film editing of all time, all thanks to this genius:

Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese's long-time editor is one of the best film editors in cinema, and Goodfellas is one of her greatest achievements. If you want to understand how to use rhythm in editing... study this film. Every cut, every freeze frame, every line of dialogue, needle drop, crash-dolly, J-cut, L-cut, punch, and gunshot hits at exactly the right moment. The whole thing kicks off with a bang and just... never stops going. The weave of background dialogue, camera movement, music, voiceover never misses a beat. It's such incredible story craft.

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In these monthly videos, I review everything I've been watching and give updates on upcoming projects. The reviews are short and spoiler-free, so you don't need to worry about plot details. We have a lot to c…

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This essay was adapted from my video essay “Why The Movies Will Never Feel The Same Again” available on YouTube and Nebula without ads. I’m providing a written version because it will reach a different audience and is easier to reference or cite, but the video version contains a fair amount of archival footage and references that help support my narrative, so you may prefer to watch if you’re so inclined. As always I couldn’t do work like this without the support of my patrons and Newsletter subscribers:

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I. The Exorcist Sparks Moral Panic

In 1973 David Sheehan went out to capture the audiences reactions to a movie that was becoming wildly popular. Reporting for KNXT-TV he said: "The manager of the National Theatre in Westwood says that there indeed are at least a dozen people who faint or become ill during every showing."

A hit that took Hollywood by surprise, The Exorcist quickly set box office records, becoming one of the first “Blockbusters” of the New Hollywood era. It also cause people to freak out.

There were reports of people screaming and running out of the theater, becoming ill and vomiting, being carried out of the theaters on stretchers. It incited a genuine moral panic with some religious groups believing the movie was causing demonic possessions.

None of this seemed to hurt its popularity (it probably helped it). Scalpers reportedly would sell tickets sometimes for hundreds of dollars. The movie ran in the theaters for two years. And its cultural impact has been lasting. A lot of people credit The Exorcist for playing a big role in starting up the satanic panic, something that was still going on 20 years later when I was born in the 90s.

But if you released this movie now, in 2025, what would happen?

It would probably do well at the box office, horror movies are still a good bet, and The Exorcist is a well constructed scary horror movie. But I don't think it's hard to argue that it wouldn't have anywhere near the same cultural impact. And this isn't just because culture has become less religious. Jaws, which was released just a few years later, inspired a similar kind of cultural panic. One that also had such a profound effect that to this day, some scientists call our collective irrational fixation on shark attacks (relative to other more dangerous things) “the Jaws effect.”

The reality is in the 2020s, Movies just don't have the same kind of cultural impact that they used to. Sure, people still might flock to the theater for a Minecraft movie or Barbenheimer, but they're being drawn in by massive marketing budgets and stories that draw from existing intellectual property. I could be wrong, but while Barbenheimer might have trended on Twitter and TikTok for a week, it doesn't seem like either movie will inspire a shift in mindset on Barbies or nuclear bombs that will echo through the culture for decades. At least not anywhere near the scale we saw with something like The Exorcist or Jaws.

A very common explanation for this is that movies just aren't as good. And sure, The Exorcist and Jaws are incredibly well-crafted films. Friedkin and Spielberg were basically at the top of their game technically. They knew how to wield all the forces of cinema that were available to them at that time for maximum effect. I will admit that in some ways, the major day-to-day fair at the box office is below the quality level of The Exorcist or Jaws, but there are still incredible major movies being made today and I don't think the shift in average quality is enough to really, truly explain the dramatic shift in cultural impact that has happened over the last 50 years. And ultimately even if you somehow could release The Exorcist for the first time today, it just wouldn't have the same impact. That means something else has changed. We've changed, the culture has changed, how we respond to the movies has changed. And I'm not saying going to the movies isn't fun anymore or has no value now. There are plenty of movies that provide cool, entertaining, even awe-inspiring experiences at the cinema. But on average, for me (and I gather for many others), it just doesn’t feel the same as it used to.

This essay is my attempt to explain this shift, and to do so we’ll have to dig into a media theory that I think is vital for truly understanding—not just the movies—but the shifting media landscape that we’re living through and some of the changes that are happening in our culture right now.

II. “Phonevision”

Chicago, January 6, 1951. The Zenith Radio Company begins testing an exciting new technology. If you’re one of 300 test households, for $1, you can order a movie directly to your home television set simply by sending a phone signal.

Seeing this, movie theaters and studios already feeling pressure from antitrust regulations and the rapid explosion of home television feared phone vision posed an existential threat. What will happen to the industry, they wondered, if movies can skip the theater and go straight to people's televisions at home? The industry pushed back, even lobbying the government to try to ban early pay-per-view movies. And while the technology didn't take off at the time, their fears were not unfounded. TV would not spell ultimate death for cinema, but by the 1950s, theater attendance was already in decline from its peak in the 30s and 40s.

It's hard to overstate just how big a deal movies were in the first half of the century. Theaters were a foundational American institution. In 1940, some reports indicate that over 60% of Americans were attending the cinema weekly, 20% more than were attending religious services each week.1 The cinema was a community gathering place. Small local neighborhood screens would show one movie at a time. The newsreels that ran before films were often the only opportunity citizens had to get a glimpse of the second world war as it unfolded abroad. This was the era of the Hollywood studio system with each of the big studios cranking out over a hundred movies each year.

But by the 50s, cinema attendance was in free fall. The Hollywood clergy and theater owners were panicking. Could cinema compete with the ease and convenience of the entertainment now available in the comfort of people's homes? Some in the industry attempted to ease their worries by recalling how Hollywood had already overcome significant threats. One exhibitor told Box Office Magazine it was "new and improved methods of presentation that had turned the tide in cinema's costly, discouraging, and prolonged fight against radio entertainment."2

TV shook the industry. And with antitrust regulations that made it so the studios couldn't own their own theaters anymore and other post-war cultural changes like suburbanization happening at the same time, by the 1970s, the number of theatrical admissions had fallen over 70%.

But the movies wouldn't go quietly. To try to win back audiences, theaters and the studios made the movies bigger and more exciting, implementing widescreen cinemascope, 3D, and better sound. Movies like Jaws, The Exorcist, and Star Wars found people lining up around the block. These new, bigger, bolder, blockbusters gave cinema attendance new life, and by the 80s, movie-going had stabilized, and with rising ticket prices, box office income was hitting all-time highs.

But even though this new world of multiplexes and blockbusters still had significant cultural influence, the movies and Hollywood had changed forever. They would never again represent the same thing to society that they had in their golden era.

In January 2007, just six days after Steve Jobs announced a technology that would shape the coming decades, a company that mailed DVDs to subscribers announced Watch Now, a service that would allow consumers to instantly watch a movie on their computer. These two technologies together would set in motion a transformation in how we consume media over the next decade, eventually sending the film and TV industry into the state of crisis it currently faces.

III. Hollywood In Crisis... Again

"‘Cinema. Is it a language about to get lost an art about to die?’ … It's obvious that it's on the way out."

-Paul Morrissey in Wim Wenders 1982 Documentary Room 666

Since cinema was born, basically every generation has been grappling with what it perceives to be the death of the medium. Almost every technological innovation has been perceived as a threat by cinema. Some of these like Television have proven to be credible—but others, like color filmmaking or home video, have proven to be false alarms, with theatrical attendance actually going up during those periods.

But in 2025, I think cinema truly does face the most credible set of challenges it has seen since the 1950s.

Like they did with TV, studios initially resisted streaming before eventually scrambling to join in. As streaming services like Netflix have grown into full-scale studios, and studios launched their own streaming platforms, it began a transformation in the economics of filmmaking that we're still in the midst of now. And when a global pandemic cratered the box office to all-time lows, the shift to streaming felt like a lifeline for the studios.

Theatrical windows have shortened, already down from the two years we saw with The Exorcist in the 70s to an average of 90 days in the 2010s—now we're down to just a few weeks, or in some cases, no exclusivity at all.

Consumers already burdened by lingering pandemic fears and economic pressure, combined with rising ticket prices, increasingly opt to wait for a streaming release.

There are reports claiming that Hollywood studio backlots, once the site of production for a global cultural force, have been sitting dormant. And in 2023, industry unions engaged in historic strikes to fight for fair compensation in the midst of these changes.

And yes, the movies themselves have been changing. I’ve documented their shift in philosophy towards metamodernism, but genre and subject matter has also changed significantly. As bigger budget narrative TV entered a golden era during the dawn of streaming, the stories that made up many of the mid-budget rom-coms, adult comedies, and dramas have moved to television.

This is how in 1980 you have a movie like Caddyshack for $6 million, in 1996 you have Happy Gilmore for $10 million, and then in 2025 you don't see any mid-budget sports comedies released in theaters. Instead you get a show like Stick from a computer and smartphone company, who likely spent much more than was spent on either of those movies on the show. A show written and produced by Jason Keller, who's worked almost entirely in film before this, and starring Owen Wilson, whose career also used to be entirely in film before it transitioned to television in just the last five years. And Happy Gilmore 2 comes out, but it goes straight to Netflix and skips the theaters entirely.

And that's just one small example of the many ways the lines between TV and film have blurred. The types of content you're traditionally used to seeing in a movie theater, and the types of content we call "TV" that exclusively streams at home in multiple parts, now often look very similar, are made by the same people using the same equipment, feature the same celebrities, and have similar budgets.

Over the last 20 years, while this transition has been happening, for most Americans the habit of going to the theater fell out of style. The American audiences stopped going to the movies and then deciding what to watch there. Instead, they began going to the movies to see a specific film. This change meant they needed to be convinced to attend the theater by a film's marketing. And facing more difficult challenges in drawing people to the theaters, the studio execs found that movies driven by recognizable intellectual property had built-in audiences that were much easier to market to. This is how remakes, reboots, sequels came to dominate the box office in the 2000s. By 2024, not a single one of the top 15 box office hits was an original film.

This paid off in the short run. Like the turn towards blockbuster filmmaking in the 1970s, the shift towards large IP driven franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the resuscitation of Star Wars has driven record-breaking box office receipts. Referring to these hits as "tentpole films," distributors, studios, even critics began to see IP driven megahits as the only thing holding up the industry, further pushing out smaller mid-budget offerings.

But this approach, which has worked relatively well in the 2010s, is starting to see diminishing returns in the 2020s. With almost no development of new original worlds, stories, ideas, IP, major blockbuster films have become a kind of cultural ouroboros. Cinema no longer creates the narratives that define the culture, instead it relies almost exclusively on its own past cultural influence or existing worlds, characters, and stories from other forms of media for its success.

All this while massive tech giants throw billions into developing technologies which threaten to undercut an entire workforce of craftspeople in the industry. Many fear AI tech will be too enticing for studios to pass up, even if it's not what audiences want.

Like in the 50s and 60s, cinema is now poised at a decisive moment. And just like cinema and its cultural influence changed significantly from the 40s to 70s, the movie industry that survives this current shift and its cultural influence will likely look radically different on the other side.

Those within the industry, and those paying attention to this, are already aware of pretty much everything I'm talking about here. There's been plenty of commentary going on about what's happening and how cinema might be able to weather this storm.

But this crisis is not the main focus of this essay. Its the backdrop. You might even say the crisis is a symptom of what I’ll be talking about. We're going to look at something underneath all of this industry crisis that has already quietly transformed what the movies mean to our culture. A shift not in the movies themselves and how they're made, but in the very way we perceive them. A change that has already happened, which may be irrevocable, but one which I think we need to understand if we want cinema to survive its current crisis and maintain cultural relevancy.

IV. What is Media Ecology?

To understand the force I'm talking about, we're going to have to go back to the mid-century. A time which, like today, was experiencing a rapidly evolving media landscape: Cinema, radio, television, the telegraph, color print, photography, and magazines had all sprung into existence in a generation. While these media feel commonplace to us today, for someone living through that time, it was an incredible shift in the culture.

For some, this time represented an overwhelming but exciting new world. One that was defined not by writing or the printed word, but instead by prolific auditory and visual media. Culture rushed to adopt these new forms of media, but it was also grappling with the influence and power that they had.

In a discussion round table called “Big Media in America” broadcast in 1959 on National Education Television, one student expresses her concern about newspapers, "For example, the advertising, the funny page, the sports, the crossword puzzles. I mean, so many people don't even read the newspaper for the news. They read it only for these things."

Another student adds: "And these new little quickie magazines that you pick up that are a few inches high. And then the radio, you have the five minute news spots. And that what you only get is the most sensational aspects of what's going on in the world."

There were concerns about Cinema: In 1928, the League of Nations Child Welfare Committee released a report saying some delegates expressed fears that “cinema performances happening in the dark with promiscuity of sexes and languorous music should excite the child by appealing to his lowest instincts and least noble passions.” And that “bad habits may result.” This was a problem that could easily be remedied, the committee said, if the technology was developed that would allow cinema to be shown in broad daylight. But there were also more serious concerns about the potential for cinema to be used as a propaganda tool by authoritarian governments.

And Television of course did not escape suspicion. There was much hand wringing about the amount of violence shown in the Westerns and crime dramas that were incredibly popular. But there was also concern about the way television was changing people's habits. A New York Times article from 1949 titled, "What is Television Doing to Us?" reports that, "Whether the art of one person talking to another is to be killed by television is the subject of much energetic debate.” What would this do to society? “Nearly half of the television owners acknowledge that their choice of an evening to go out is influenced by what programs are on," reported Jack Gould. "Political groups and social clubs are feeling the rivalry of television."

In the burgeoning modernism of the 20th century, whether it was cinema or television, media itself was becoming the infrastructure of ritual and community for American culture. Increasingly, people were gathering for and around pieces of media rather than civic or religious institutions.

Hoping to understand the implications of all this, new figures arose. These new cultural commentators and critics sought to study and understand the messages that these media conveyed and the influence they had on society. In Toronto, Canada, one of the people trying to understand this media landscape was a professor named Marshall McLuhan.

McLuhan's work was sprawling, controversial, and shrouded in riddles and poetic language. But his core idea—that the mediums themselves were the messages—would spark a school of thought that would provide a new way of seeing how media influences culture.

"The medium is not something neutral. It does something to people. It takes hold of them, it wraps them up, it massages them, it bumps them around." -McLuhan

This school of thought developed by McLuhan and expanded by his followers would come to be known as media ecology. For the media ecologists, an individual medium represented not just a way of conveying individual ideas that we could then judge or interpret. It was a landscape that surrounded us. One which could literally alter our behavior and even the way we think.

"When you put a new medium into a play in a given population, all their sensory life shifts a bit." -McLuhan

To understand this, think about how your real life physical environment shapes your behavior. If you live in an arid, mountainous landscape, this will cause you to have a very different lifestyle life than you would if you lived in an urban landscape. In these landscape you have some influence over your own behavior, but much of it is ultimately shaped and constrained by the environment itself. You can’t, in the mountains, go down to the corner bodega at 2 am because you ran out of oat milk. Your entire existence has to be structured in a much more intentional way even when it comes to the most basic habits like acquiring food.

And these landscapes don't just affect our habits and lifestyle but also how we perceive the world. Think about how your physical environment might shape the kinds of sensory information you're attuned to as a person. Someone used to living in a city might easily tune out the sound of an ambulance, while someone living in a rural environment where they're more exposed to the elements might notice specific shifts in air temperature and wind direction that signal an approaching storm.

In the same way, the media landscape around you, which is made up of the different individual mediums that you interact with, shapes and influences your behavior. One of McLuhan's key ideas was that each medium extended one of our senses. While this extension of our senses outward makes us more attuned to certain kinds of information in the environment, he theorized that it also numbs us to other kinds of sensory information.

McLuhan and others theorized that the fundamental technology was language itself. In the same way, your understanding of language and the words in your language can shape how you think about ideas, the other kinds of media that you use to communicate and express yourself also shape the way you behave, see the world, and think.

To understand how subtle and nuanced the changes can be that affect our perception of the media we're experiencing, let's talk about the Fordham Experiment. In the Fordham Experiment, they took the same video content and showed it to audiences in two different ways. For some audiences, the videos were projected onto a screen. This means the light is bouncing off a wall and into the audiences eyes. For another audience, the videos were played on a screen. This means illuminated pixels were shining directly into the audience's eyes. Each audience would then write about what they watched. What the experiment discovered was that even when they were viewing the exact same content, there was a dramatic difference in what each audience would write about depending on how they had viewed that piece of content.

So for example, for those that watched the content projected onto the screen, only about 6% mentioned “losing a sense of time.” For the group that watched the content from an illuminated screen (like most of our screens are today) the mentions of losing a sense of time rose to 60%. And this happened with a lot of factors, like whether or not the audience would comment on a specific scene or the cinematic technique. So a relatively subtle change in how the content is presented can lead to a fairly significant change in how the content is perceived: changing what elements of the media we're more likely to notice or focus on.

That's one small shift in form. Think about what happens when there's a larger shift in mediums, where many factors of how a piece of information is conveyed change at once. And when a society suddenly switched to consuming most of their media through a new medium in a short span of time.

V. Amusing Ourselves To Death

"In the 1860s, he would have been unthinkable because he can't talk. But you put him on television and he's dynamite." -Neil Postman

For a media ecologist like Neil Postman, his primary critique of TV was not the individual programs, but instead the landscape that TV presented. In an interview with CSPAN he explains some of his concern with TV News, "The voiceover says more shooting in Beirut today. We see some film of a street perhaps in Beirut, a body on the floor. We hear shots. This image is powerful. So people know of Beirut. They know there's shooting in Beirut. Do they know who's shooting at whom or why or what is the historical context for this?"

Another of his main concerns was the way television was structured around advertising, "The function of television in America is to gather an audience, which can be sold to advertisers.” Which he theorized significantly diminished its ability to present the serious discussion of anything. "American television knows that the best way to gather an audience is to provide something that is amusing."

TV, according to Postman and McLuhan, converted everything, even disasters and wars, into entertainment. One of the strongest realizations I’ve ever had about the reality of this came have come from watching television coverage of United States Elections. Postman explicitly critiques the TV format of political debates, but the way TV warps our perception of politics extends well beyond that. If you watch an election night coverage on any major channel, and pay close attention to the tone, language, visual, and editing they use to convey the information, the format of presentation is extremely similar to the coverage of sports. The whole event is made to look and feel as much like a boxing match as possible where the two sides are duking it out as we look at an instant replay, blow-by-blow account of what just happened in a swing state when the polls just closed.

I don’t find it hard to argue that this intense, entertainmentification, and dramatization of an incredibly important, nuanced, and complex event for our nation, is not particularly helpful in generating an informed public.

When it comes to the role of advertising, film editing theory, like the Kuleshov Effect—which shows that our perception of the meaning of a shot can change depending on what the filmmaker cuts to next—can help us understand Postman’s critique. How is our perception of the meaning of a serious topic affected when it's juxtaposed against and interrupted by an advertisement for dish soap?

Through a traditional lens, we might examine television media by looking at the violence in a specific Western, or a news report that spread misinformation. But through a media ecology lens, we can see that the bigger impact that television had on our culture probably had more to do with the way information was presented by the medium.

When we adopt a new media landscape, it also changes our social and physical habits. With the arrival of TV, the social gatherings in public that the Cinema provided gave way to more time spent in intimate family gatherings around the TV in the home. Some parents were concerned about their children spending less time outside because of TV, while others saw this as a good thing since it was keeping them off the streets.

But perhaps the most important idea from the media ecology perspective for what I want to illustrate for you here in regards to Cinema, is that a medium and what it represents and means to a culture cannot be understood in isolation. Because what a medium means to us, the message it conveys, comes not just from its inherent properties, but from how it relates to the other mediums around it. And when we begin to understand this, we'll see clearly how no matter where the film industry goes from here, cinema has already undergone a significant transformation into something new.

VI. The Message of Cinema

To understand how the meaning of cinema has evolved, we must first look at what it represented in the past. If we return to time when The Exorcist was released, even though cinema had already fallen from its peak in the 30s, it was still one of the most significant cultural forces.

This was a world where, if you wanted to know what was happening or be entertained, you could turn on the TV, or turn on the radio, if you're fortunate enough to have one. But using these devices, you would only be able to see or hear whatever happens to be broadcast on the few available channels at that moment. If you're not interested in what's being shown or said at that time, you have no control beyond simply turning it off or changing the channel. And these technologies were still largely built around communal spaces. Families would gather in the living room to watch TV, or the radio might be on in the kitchen. Your media consumption was often linked to the consumption of those around you.

To access more information, you'd need to physically retrieve a newspaper or a magazine. The information there would be dense and low fidelity. Illustrations and photographs, written reports of things happening in the world delayed by a day or sometimes weeks or months. For musical entertainment, you could buy or listen to records, turn on the radio, or go to a live performance—again engaging with media experiences that were both curated by others and communal.

And then, in the midst of all this, you decide to go see a movie. The movies in this environment share a lot of features with the other media at that time. You still have limited control over what you consume, and you can only go see a movie at the specific showtime. But the movies also stood apart as an entirely unique media experience.

In this landscape, the movie was arguably the pinnacle of sensory entertainment. It was the biggest cultural spectacle media could provide. Its images were the biggest and the most vibrant available. Unlike books, newspapers, or magazines, and even the low fidelity of early TV where you had to focus your attention and participate in consuming the media, when watching a movie, you could sit back in the dark and essentially allow the film to wash over you. The movies guided you through the story with an almost hypnotic, trance-like quality. You were absorbed. They might sweep you away to another world, transport you to another time, and all of this alongside a crowd of people. It's not hard to see how the movies were one of the most captivating and alluring media experiences at that time.

When cinema arrived, it didn't just bring new kinds of art and stories. It introduced culture to a new kind of experience.

It was partly a commodification of the theatrical experience, but it was also a ritualistic, social, and almost religious consumption of media. Unlike a play, audiences from all around the country or even the world could be united around having seen the exact same piece of media. But it also introduced a new type of sensory experience. These were large, exciting images that commanded the audience's attention. A movie star could be lit, captured, and projected in a larger-than-life way that would have been impossible in any prior form.

Taking into account the media ecology view, we must ask how did these movies change our perception of ourselves as humans? Unlike the print-dominant forms, cinema was a medium where images, language, and music worked together to create feelings. You could analyze movies, but unlike text, they didn't really require analytical thinking to be understood. All of this together meant that they were a uniquely powerful cultural force. This distinct and uniquely evocative experience that cinema represented within the culture explains why movies like Jaws or The Exorcist could have so much impact and influence. But what changed? Well…

VII. welcome to the hypermodern

"But when I was a boy, we didn't have a telegraph, didn't have a telephone, of course, no electric lights, no any of these other things which have come out to bother us." -An 87 year old farmer in 1929.

"I remember when we didn't have television and I was forced to be creative all the time and to make up all of my own games and to play at acting all myself and nothing was ever presented to me so that I could simply sit and absorb it." -Student in 1959

You wake up and immediately open your phone. Whether you choose Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, or Facebook, you're hit with a torrent of shifting information, algorithmically tuned to be the most interesting, attention-grabbing content possible. One flashy image or video after another. You can see videos of the most exciting or horrifying events happening around the world delivered straight into the palm of your hand before you even get out of bed. If you set down your phone and turn to your computer or TV, you have access to almost every kind of recorded media from any time period or part of the globe available for you to choose from at any time. You can watch an independently produced YouTube channel. You can watch the news in HD showing you violent or catastrophic events. You can watch children's programs. You can watch videos constructed entirely by artificial intelligence. Almost anything you can imagine lies at your fingertips completely at your control to pause, rewind, play again, or share.

A lot of attention is given to how social media is shortening our attention spans, but I think the story is much more complicated. A full analysis of smartphones, internet streaming, and social media from a media ecology perspective could be its own book, so I'm just going to hit some of the highlights here:

From a media ecology perspective, people have become acclimated to an environment of rapidly shifting context. We expect an increasing variety of content to be constantly accessible and easily switchable. Increasingly, very little media consumption is communal or tied to a specific time anymore. You might watch a movie or some TV with friends or family, but what you watch is now usually disconnected from what most other people around you are watching. Even if you and a friend are watching the same show, the chances that you both watched the same episode the night before is low. By allowing us to watch whatever we want at any time, streaming has reshaped collective viewing. For internet content, personalization algorithms only push this further.

While the mediums that McLuhan and Postman were examining were relatively simple, with the introduction of the computer, we enter an era of what I would describe as hyper-mediums. These are mediums that themselves contain layers of smaller mediums. So if you're reading this essay right now on your phone, the content that I'm sending you is filtered through the medium of written text. There are certain biases and effects that are inherent to text itself, but then that's also being filtered through the medium of Substack, your email app, or the browser, how the text is presented to you, the comments and other meta design elements that surround the text. Your perception of what you’re reading will likely be impacted by how positive or negative the comments are or how many likes the post has. And then beyond that, this text is additionally being mediated by the form factor of the smartphone itself. The fact that you can carry it around with you. You might be reading this in bed or on the toilet or on the subway. Each of these contexts would in some way inform the experience.

For McLuhan, the mediums of the past become the content of the current mediums. And we're seeing that happen right now: So if the video of cinema and television and the words and photos of print are the content of our social media feeds, what is the new medium we're consuming and what is the message of that medium? Well, the medium is the feed itself, the algorithm itself, and our consumption of that. Tech writer Alberto Romero posited that when we're scrolling through short form video, it's not the content itself that delivers a dopamine hit, but the moment we scroll, the millisecond where we're anticipating what might come next—whether it's something scary, funny, interesting, or boring. It's the hit of anticipation that we're consuming.

Here, Neil Postman's concerns about the influence of advertising on a medium, rather than disappearing in the transition from TV to social media, only become more amplified. Like television, the goal of the feed and the algorithm is to gather an audience and sustain that audience's attention so that it can show it more advertising. The result of this is that it will show you not what's best for you or the most important information, but whatever is the most attention-grabbing.

For mediums of the past, like cinema, a book, or record, by the time you consumed the content, you had already paid for it. Those making the media were incentivized to make the experience a good one so that it spread word of mouth and more people bought it and so that you might be more likely to buy something from them in the future. But there was little specific incentive to hold your attention for as long as possible.3 That all changed with television with the move to an advertising model in which more time spent watching by the viewer translated directly into more money for those creating the content and distributing it.

In an online world defined by incentives to grab and hold your attention subtlety, nuance, and quietude do exist, but they're fairly niche products delivered to a minority of viewers. The vast majority of what filters to the top of these algorithmically curated platforms is the loud stuff that will grab and hold your attention. And this affects everything from Netflix and Instagram to the what you're reading right now4.

A significant aspect of the smartphone is the way it fuses the medium of the remote control with the media itself. The medium of the smartphone is a platform that we use to bring stuff to us (both in the digital world and in the physical world: doordash, “Find My”, Uber, dating apps) or to control what we're seeing or the world around us (Google Maps, camera apps). There's nothing on our smartphone that we're truly subjected to and don't really have control over. Even the sensation of grasping it in your hand is the ultimate sense of control over the media you're consuming. I'm not saying being able to control our media is bad, and this might seem like a minor difference, but I think it has a significant psychological impact on how we perceive the media as we consume it.

The act of craning our necks downward for hours every day literally reshapes our bodies and our experience of the world. We doomscroll, we talk about misinformation, internet bubbles, and write think pieces about the attention economy, some people are quitting their phones entirely or doing dopamine detoxes, but this is already the water we swim in. If McLuhan and the media ecologists are right, the shift to spending hours a day consuming media through a new medium, our phone, changes not just how we perceive the media on our phone, but the entire world around us.

We have stepped into a new media environment, and now we must understand and respond to how it's reshaped our habits, society, and perception. The big takeaway is that in contrast to a lot of the media of the past, the current media landscape emphasizes control, portability, individualization, total participation in a global landscape of media, and perception mediated by desires through an algorithm.

Now within this new landscape: think about the experience that going to the movies represents. In the 1970s when you went to a movie, you were stepping out of a world of relatively low fidelity visual media into an intense multi-hour visual spectacle. In 2025, when you go see a movie, you're probably taking a break from the most overwhelming sensory spectacle humanity has ever created.

When you go to the movies, now you're committing to a single piece of media for multiple hours, which you must watch at a predetermined time with a group of people. A piece of media you have no control over. The images on the screen move at a much slower pace than what you're used to seeing on your phone, and if you aren't interested in it, you can't immediately change it to something else. Even big, exciting action films can feel deliberate and calculated in a world where you can watch actual countries shoot missiles at each other, the most insane stunts you’ve ever seen, or real-world car accidents back to back in the instagram reels feed.

So cinema, the medium that used to feel like the height of spectacle, which could send culture into a panic, now often feels like a relatively slow, linear, and focused journey through a single narrative. In this landscape, it's the phones and the content on the phones that are inciting the kind of moral panic and cultural change that The Exorcist did.

The printing press, electricity, the telegraph, and television weren't just tools of communication, they allowed society to adopt new shapes, new ways of living and interacting with one another. The rapid adoption of smartphones, social media, algorithmically tuned recommendation feeds, and now AI is currently reshaping the landscape of our society, the same way it was reshaped in the early 20th century by the mediums that arrived then. And cinema's place within this new landscape is different than it was 50 years ago, just like it was different in the 70s than it was in the 1940s. Now, collectively on average, compared to all the other media we consume, it represents something else, a different kind of experience.

VIII. “Bad Habits May Result”

My goal with all of this is not to construct a narrative that phones are bad and movies are good. For McLuhan, the media ecology approach wasn't about trying to make moral assessments about which mediums were better than others.

"I seek to perceive, not to conceive what's in front of me. And perception is exploration." -McLuhan

Instead, he was more interested in contemplating the media environment we're actually living in. I do think there are some notable downsides to the hyper-modern media landscape we all live in now,5 and I think we should do everything we can to document, understand, and then overcome whatever negative effects these new mediums might have. But especially for those old enough to have one foot in the media environment of the past, it can be easy to fall into a kind of understandable nostalgia where we hold up the mediums of the past as somehow more morally pure than the mediums that are most popular today.

This has happened with things like the novel, which was initially treated as populist distraction, while today there's almost a moral panic about the fact that fewer people read literature. And we're seeing this happen with movies: When the big blockbusters of the 70s like The Exorcist and Jaws came out, a lot of filmmakers and critics wrote them off as populist escapism, but now they're treated as something closer to a form of art. So it would be easy to romanticize film somehow as a more pure or unblemished form of media, but that's not what I'm trying to do here.

The Movies have downsides. Producing one has been much less accessible to the average person than other forms of media, and so channels of distribution have traditionally been controlled by corporate interests. Right now, for example, No Other Land, an Oscar-winning documentary about Palestine, is not available for viewing in the United States six months after winning, because nobody's been willing to distribute it here. A repeat of what happened in 1974 with the documentary Hearts and Minds a film critical of the Vietnam war.

And while cinema's power as a transporting, emotional, and almost hypnotizing storytelling medium is what makes it so enticing, it's also what makes it a powerful tool for intentionally and sometimes unintentionally perpetrating harmful ideas, stereotypes, and ideologies through propaganda. Cinematic propaganda wasn't just an issue in Nazi Germany, it continues to be produced in subtle and sometimes insidious ways that audiences often don't even realize.

Another limiting factor for cinema is how it has been transformed from an affordable cultural commodity into what is almost a luxury experience. Back in the 40s, when over 60% of Americans were attending the cinema, a movie ticket was only 25 cents, which would be about $4 today. These days, for many Americans, a trip to the movies can be cost prohibitive, pushing it further towards being an activity reserved for special occasions and the middle and upper classes.

So as much as I have deep concerns about the new hyper-modern technologies like phones, social media, shortform video, etc., this is not about vilifying or blaming those things in order to say cinema is somehow inherently perfect or a great medium by contrast.

But neither is my goal to proclaim that “cinema is dead, this time it's real, and now I've found the true culprit!” When Wim Wenders made Room 666 in the 80s, a documentary asking the question "Is cinema about to be a dead language?" many of the filmmakers he interviewed seemed to think it would be. I think the opposite is true.

The language of cinema is far from dead. Instead, it's been absorbed by the mainstream culture as the primary language of communication. A lot of the media we now consume on our TVs and phones uses cinematic language. These mediums are essentially a form of post-cinema that adopt the visual grammar of filmmaking. In this world dominated by visual cinematic grammar instead of literary grammar, valuing and studying the cinematic roots of all this is only becoming more important.

So I'm saying the movies have changed, and on average probably won't quite feel the same. But that doesn't mean I think they've ceased to be relevant, that they won't continue in some way to provide interesting, meaningful, culturally relevant experiences and play a role in the media landscape for a long time to come. But if we want that to happen, if we want moviegoing to continue to be an accessible medium for people, we need to give up false hope that cinema will magically return to what it was in a previous time and stop trying to force it to compete with the new media landscape by being something that it isn't. Instead, the way forward for cinema is to understand exactly what it has to offer to us that social media, phones, and television cannot.

IX. An Unofficial Guide to Saving Cinema

So let's talk about how cinema can survive. It's very possible in the future we'll go down a path where a movie is just a different type of content that plays on our TV or phone like everything else. In this future, theater screenings will be treated as rare events or simply a marketing ploy. We're already headed in this direction to some extent. But I don't want this to happen, and I think it can be avoided. So let's look at how:

First, like it did in the 20th century, cinema can once again become bigger. This is already happening, the increasing prevalence and promotion of IMAX represents this century's version of CinemaScope or VistaVision—and it works to some extent. Better sound along with bigger, more immersive visuals can still provide some of the grandest sensory experiences available in media today. Some filmmakers like Michael Bay even seem to be competing with the intensity and rapid-fire pacing provided by internet video.

But while I love the trend towards impressive large-format filmmaking with great sound design—and seeing some of the scenes from this year’s Sinners on a big screen is one of the most stunning media experiences I've had this year—I think trying to consistently out-compete internet media in terms of creating the largest sensory spectacle is ultimately a losing battle. Your phone might be tiny in comparison, but it provides pure uncut dopaminergic entertainment and novel images in a way that even the biggest cinematic images these days will struggle to keep up with. I'm not saying internet video is better, or that these bigger, more cinematic movies aren’t good. I just don't think cinema will win only on the basis of trying to be the entertainment spectacle of culture when we're carrying around one of the most intense media spectacles ever created in our pockets every day.

Instead, where cinema can win is where it continues to provide something that your phone cannot. And this lies in its ability to use that sensory experience to immerse you in an emotional narrative. The biggest advantage that cinema has going for it is time and focus. Cinema is one of the only forms of storytelling remaining that asks you to sit and give your full attention to a complete story for an unbroken two to three hour chunk of time. Sure, you might binge watch a TV show or doom scroll for three hours, but those aren't contained narrative experiences consumed in a single sitting. Short form video shifts your attention every few seconds and TV breaks for episodes and ads and happens exclusively at home in a distraction-laden environment. You can listen to a podcast or audiobook for three hours, but again, that three hours won't be an entire narrative, and you likely won't be giving it your undivided attention.

With a movie, you're locked into a single, overwhelming experience for hours, with no breaks or division points. And while obviously people are going to whip out their phones, even at the theater, the key is that the intention of the form is for you to be mentally immersed in a complete story without distractions. And even if not everyone consumes it this way, this changes what it is.

A lot of TV is specifically made to be on in the background. Netflix intentionally produces what it calls second screen content with the expectation that audiences are going to watch it while they're on their phones. So this means that even if you sat down and completely immersed yourself in one of these Netflix shows that is made to be on in the background, you aren't going to get the same experience as if you immersed yourself in something that was made to be immersed in. Even if you aren't on your phone while you're watching a show made to be on in the background, you're still watching something that has been made for the level of attention of someone who is.

Cinema, meanwhile, is made for the theatrical experience6 where an audience is going to give it their undivided attention. When people hear filmmakers say "this is made for the big screen," or advocating for the theatrical experience I think it's sometimes perceived as elitist or nostalgic posturing, but having the theatrical experience as the end goal for filmmakers as they create the movie really shapes the kinds of movies that filmmakers will make and how they make them. When a movie is made for an environment where you're supposed to give it your full attention, the effects of that will impact the viewing experience even if you end up watching that movie at home.

Cinema's unique demands on our attention and time in this media landscape means that movies are asking a lot more of an audience in terms of time and attention commitment relative to other media today, but this is exactly what makes them a particularly powerful form of media in the landscape. Given this commitment, filmmakers have a unique opportunity to sweep up and transport audiences in an emotional, evocative experience that other kinds of media might not be able to. Movies that really want to succeed today need to understand the bargain they're striking with audiences, and at least attempt to deliver something worthwhile in return for what they're asking.

But within this space, movies also now have an opportunity to be something much more inherently meditative and contemplative. I don't mean that all movies need to be slow, art-house fare, (although I think that's great and more people should give it a shot) I mean even a basic drama can create space to think about a single subject, character, idea, world, or feeling for hours in a way that audiences probably aren't doing with other media they're consuming. I think the movies that will stay relevant will be the ones that use this time in a way that rewards the audience for doing so, instead of just providing cheap entertainment escapes. It's not that cheap entertainment escapes are bad, or that movies should never try to do that, but those are now freely available in your pocket whenever you want, and paying $20 to go sit in a room for a cheap entertainment escape won't feel as worthwhile when you can get one for free at home.

We also need to recognize and lean into the communal value of movie theaters and the movies themselves. These days I often hear people complain about the theatrical experience. People are on their phones or there's distractions, but there can really be a magic to watching a film with a group of people, and the movies need to try to retain that. Even when everyone is quiet, you can feel something, the experience changes when you're with people. And in the same way movies being made for theaters impacts the demands they place on our attention, movies being made for theaters also means they're made to be watched with a group of people.

I love watching movies alone, but most of my best movie memories involve a theatrical or group experience. Even at home, “the movie night” creates a unique social opportunity for a group to experience a complete narrative together in a way that pretty much no other media currently provides. Sure, you can watch TV together, but it's hard to do that with a group of people who are all living different lives. You have to coordinate together to watch the same show and all be on the same episode at the same time. Consuming a movie with a group provides a unique opportunity to all experience a single narrative together and then discuss it afterwards. In our increasingly socially fragmented and individualistic society, where our media consumption is more and more specialized and presented on tiny screens just for us to see, there's a value in getting to experience something more communal.

And movie theaters, with their progression towards premium experiences and larger multiplexes, have kind of been leaning away from the value of the communal experience rather than into it. Theaters are often trying to compete with streaming by trying to make the theater as comfortable as your living room. But while I love a heated lounger as much as anyone, I think this might not be the most productive approach in the long run. Many of the best theatrical experiences I've had come from smaller, less comfortable indie theaters in my town where even obscure movies would sell out and there was a sense of community surrounding each screening. Theaters can lean into this more by making memberships more affordable and accessible and by providing lounge and gathering areas outside the screens instead of literally designing the spaces to minimize human contact and interaction, shuttling you like cattle in and out of the screen.

I'm not insinuating these are the only things that make the movies valuable these days, or that this is an easy or surefire way to save cinema, but I think if the movies want to continue to carve out a valuable, vibrant, successful place in the media landscape of today, they need to capitalize on what makes them unique instead of trying to morph into what everything else is in order to compete with that. Or by doing what they’ve mostly been doing—sticking its head in the sand and pretending the problem will go away while theatrical attendance continues to shrink.

This narrative I've been crafting focuses mainly on Hollywood, American movie-going, and the blockbusters that draw the largest crowd. And while similar dynamics are playing out around the world, each country has its own unique set of cultural, economic, and political dynamics that affect how well the theatrical experience thrives. And the world of indie and international film, along with many independent boutique theaters, are already leaning into much of what I'm describing here and how they make movies and present them. If the Hollywood studios want to stay relevant, they will have to catch on, otherwise they're fated to continue down the path they're already on: towards simply becoming content production engines for their own streaming platforms, which will compete with all the other content on the internet.

The movies should be interesting, thoughtful, and worth your time. They should continue to be immersive, visual, sonic, sensory experiences. They should continue to be communal experiences, an event that we go to or consume with a group at home, rather than just another piece of content to be consumed the same way we consume anything else. Not because of some kind of elitism where cinema is superior, but because it offers us a unique media and cultural experience that other forms of media do not.

Cinema will never again have the kind of cultural dominance it had in the 40s, and it's unlikely it will even return to the influence it had in the 70s. To imagine it would would be wishful nostalgia, but as the industry faces the biggest shakeup it's seen in 80 years, I believe it can continue to be a valuable and relevant cultural experience for a long time to come, as long as we value it for what is actually unique about its ability to transport us together.

I get some version of the question Isiah shot into my DMs fairly regularly so I want to finally take the time to write out an answer because:

I. I want to clear up some misconceptions.

II. I do genuinely think it’s possible to learn to enjoy/appreciate something more and have some ideas for how to do that.

While in academia Film Appreciation is often shorthand for Film Studies (and learning film history and theory can certainly help you appreciate movies more) but I’m writing here very literally about how to appreciate film:

Literally how do you get the most out of the experience of watching movies?

And while this is a guide to appreciating film, you might find my thoughts here apply appreciate art more generally.

I. How Not To Appreciate Cinema (Misconceptions)

Don’t put a bunch of pressure on yourself to like something

Probably not what someone whose livelihood depends on people enjoying a thing should say, but I don’t think anyone shouldn’t feel obligated to try to enjoy something that’s a totally optional part of life1.

Go sit in the grass, ride a bike, cook some food, go on a hike with friends, read a book.

If movies just aren’t doing it for you, maybe your brain trying to tell you it wants to do something else. It’s okay to listen to that.

When you encounter an art forms, activities, and subject matter you don’t enjoy I think it’s interesting to try to be curious about why, and to try to give it a fair shake. Maybe you’re missing something and maybe some more time, more context, or a different perspective would help you get out of the work what other people seem to get out of it. But sometimes, even after you try, something just isn’t your bag. Don’t sweat it.

A lot of internet content explicitly or implicitly demands: “You. Should. Pay. Attention. To. This!” This has much more to do with how algorithms work, and what gets people to watch things than it does the actual value of paying attention to any given thing. If you don’t find something interesting it’s a perfectly sane and normal response to just not engage and shift your attention elsewhere. Diverse taste is beautiful. I can hardly pay attention to math for more than about 23 seconds, and the world desperately needs people who are interested in that.

I’m not really saying all things are created equal. I’d argue you’re better off watching a 3 hour movie than 3 hours of TikTok. You’re probably better off spending 20 hours reading a book than you are 20 hours watching Love Island. But if you’re deciding between watching another Bergman film, going to a museum to look at a Monet exhibit, or learning how to make Pesto—just follow your heart!

It’s easy for me to come up with reasons why I think cinema in particular is cool and worth putting time into appreciating, but it’s not like I reviewed the evidence and then rationally decided film was the objectively best place to focus my attention. I just write and talk about movies because I was drawn to them when I was young, got really hooked on filmmaking and film, and it just ended up being my career.

My point here is that if you’re putting pressure on yourself to like something, please, just take the pressure off. For one thing you don’t need that in your life, and for another that pressure might actually be interfering with your ability to appreciate the thing.

I think cinema is great. If people are going to watch movies I want them to watch great ones that will enrich their life, and for them to have a deep understanding and deeper appreciation of what they watch. But if they don’t want to watch movies they should go right ahead and not do it!

Don’t conflate appreciation with enjoyment.

Isiah’s question continues: “You’ll watch anything and appreciate at least one aspect of the media through filmmaking, writing, characters etc. I want to get to this level but I don’t know how can you please help.”

Okay this is kind of true. I think Jafar Panahi gets it right in Taxi.

I can almost always find something to appreciate about anything I watch even if it’s bad, but I think its worth clarifying just because I can appreciate anything does not mean I like or enjoy anything.

I think both appreciation and enjoyment can be cultivated (by creating the conditions that give yourself the best chance of both enjoying and appreciating a work), and I’ll talk about both here somewhat interchangeably. But for me appreciation is a little more intellectual and philosophical. You can have an unpleasant experience and appreciate it, but enjoyment is a little more instinctual, emotional, more of a “gut feeling.”

I want to clarify this distinction because if you conflate the two you might think your lack of enjoyment of certain films means you aren’t appreciating them, but the opposite can be true. Thinking you have to enjoy everything will actually hold you back from fully appreciating a lot of great art.

A lot of art-films might be trying to actively create an unpleasant experience in some way, often to get you to challenge your assumptions or beliefs, or to bring you into a confrontation with difficult subject matter.

What kind of experience you want is a matter of taste. If you don’t want be existentially shaken and just want a little escapism or a more traditionally satisfying narrative, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. There’s value in diversifying what you watch, trying new stuff, and not genres, styles, or eras of film off entirely, but I think its fine to follow your taste and focus mostly on watching the kind of films that appeal to you. But just remember that film (and art) has more to offer than just enjoyable experiences, and true appreciation requires recognizing that.

Appreciating something doesn’t mean making it your whole personality.

Sometimes I’m tired of watching movies.

You can have a deep appreciation for an art form and still not want to live and breathe that thing 100% of the time.

I’m far from the world’s biggest cinephile. It’s not even close. A lot of other critics, filmmakers, and even just normal movie fans clock much bigger watch numbers than me. There are large, conspicuous gaps in film history that I still need to catch up on.

There are periods where I just get burnt out on watching movies and mostly read The New Yorker or watch Below Deck or stare at the way the sunlight reflects off of a photo and onto the wall in my house at a certain time of day:

I go on this tangent because I want to counterbalance the way I think social media tends to present people as one dimensional where they seem totally focused on and obsessed with whatever their niche is. Yes I love film and spend a lot of time consuming it, thinking about it, and writing about it, but it’s only one part of my life.

It’s easy to think an online personality that creates content about a specific topic has made that thing their entire personality in real life (because it might be their entire personality online)—and then assume that if you want to do what they do (appreciate film/cook well) you also need to make the thing your entire personality.

This can make someone who wants to “get into” something, whether that’s film, cooking, or skateboarding, feel like they need to go all in. This is made worse by gatekeeping attitudes that exist in some communities. But I think you can casually be into a hobby and have a deep and sincere appreciation for that hobby. In fact…

Doing other things will help you better appreciate the thing.

This is true of any kind of creative work or interest, but having a life and interests outside of the thing you’re trying to appreciate is necessary to deepen your appreciation. Understanding history, science, philosophy, traveling, working, being in nature or doing things in community with other humans—these experiences deepen and expand our appreciation of art and cinema.

Art is about life! You have to live a life alongside your consumption of art for those things to really come alive. You can’t just hole up in your house and watch movies until your eyes bleed and expect them to touch you deeply because if you do that you’ll eventually lose touch with what they’re talking about.

You know what Werner Herzog recommends for filmmakers? Reading. He reportedly only watches a few movies a year.

There’s a tendency to valorize the Scorsese-style cinephile with a knowledge of cinema deeper than the Mariana Trench, but that’s really not a requirement to understand, appreciate, or work in film.

Yeah you should absolutely study and watch film and try to appreciate it especially if you want to work in it or a related field but even if you’re really into something, are studying it, or are pursuing it as a career—it’s normal to go through periods where you might not be as jazzed about it, or just to want to spread your focus across various interests and subjects.

It’s normal to love some parts of something but not others. You might love some kinds of movies but discover that certain genres, or periods, or styles just aren’t your thing.

Again. That’s fine.

I know I’m a few thousand words into an essay about film appreciation and have only really mostly said “don’t worry about it too much” but I emphasize all this because I think part learning to appreciate something is maintaining a good relationship with that thing. If you’re coming at film appreciation from a sense of obligation, misunderstand, or expecting to feel a certain way about it based on how you perceive other people feel about it via social media, you’re setting yourself for a disappointing experience. The first step to appreciating film more is removing the obstacles to that appreciation.

II. Some practical ideas for deepening your film appreciation

So how do you get the most out of a film?

I want to be clear: I’m not giving you a set of requirements. This isn’t the way I think you have to watch movies. I don’t follow all of these all the time. Just think of this as some ideas for how you can give yourself the best chance of getting the most out of a film experience.

Set the mood.
Not every movie is going to blow you away, but if you can give the movie the ideal conditions for that to happen, I think you’ll have a better chance of understanding and appreciating the film for what it is. Even if you ultimately dislike a film, or it disappoints you, you’ll know you gave it every opportunity to succeed, and you’ll have a more nuanced understanding of why you didn’t like it.

The most obvious and basic of these is to just give the movie your undivided attention. Cinema is literally made to be an uninterrupted experience. At the theater, the audience doesn’t get to control how, or when its displayed, and there are (hopefully!) no distractions.

Go see a movie in the theater if you can. If you’re watching at home, try to make an occasion out of it. Actually settle in.

And yeah, you have to put your phone away. I’m sure this is super basic to some of you and may too obvious to even write, but it’s 2025 and phones are everywhere so apparently it’s worth saying.

I’m not being elitist and saying you can’t watch a movie on a phone, or ever be distracted or anything. We’re all human, it’s just a movie, its not that big of a deal. But you’re reading this because you’re trying to appreciated film more and step one is to just make sure you’re actually paying full attention to the film.

Try to meet the film where it’s at.
I think one of the first steps to really appreciating a movie (or any art) is trying to understand what it is, and appreciating it for that instead of just immediately comparing the actual film to whatever you were hoping it would be.

It’s totally fine to realize the movie you watched isn’t what you actually wanted, maybe the film’s marketing mislead you, and you wanted a John Wick style revenge thriller but instead you got a meditative, film about food and buddhism. But if we judge movies by whether or not they were what we wanted, instead of trying to understand and experience what it is we’ll miss out on what the film has to offer.

There’s a lot of ways this mismatch can happen. Sometimes the movie just isn’t the genre you wanted, sometimes a movie doesn’t follow narrative structure or genre convention in the way you thought it would, sometimes it doesn’t make the thematic or philosophical point you wanted it to. But whatever the case I think “the film is failing at what it’s trying to do” and “the movie failed at what I wanted it to do” is a worthwhile distinction to make.

It’s not that what you want a movie to be isn’t valid. I’m not saying you can’t say, “I wish this movies would have been…” That’s a normal part of critiquing a film, but it’s good to be able to understand the role your expectations and desires for what the film would be plays in your perception of it.

I’ve noticed for myself there are many movies that I didn’t “get” on a first watch because I was too caught up in what I thought the movie would be, that by the end I was disappointed, but on a repeat viewing with the knowledge of exactly where the movie was going, I suddenly found myself enjoying it much more because I could appreciate it for what it was. So I guess I’m also making the case for giving movies a second chance!

Sometimes you can’t control your expectations, but it’s worth at least initially trying to let go of them as much as possible. Which pretty closely relates to our next point…

Try to suspend judgement during the experience of the film.
Sometimes when I’m watching a movie, I can already feel my mind trying to “formulate an opinion” on what I’m watching while I’m still watching it. I hate when this happens because its disruptive to the actual viewing experiencing. Are you watching the movie to experience it, or to have an opinion on it? If we’re trying to craft your letterboxd review in your head during the third act climax, we’re not really enraptured by the film’s narrative are we?

This isn’t just about distractibility though. Even if you’re not crafting your take, or thinking about what you’ll have for dinner, if you’re actively thinking “do I like this?” or “is this good?” during a film its not very conducive to actually getting immersed in the story and giving the film a genuine shot as taking you on the journey its trying to take you on. Don’t worry. You’ll have plenty of time after you’ve seen the film to figure out how you felt about it. For now, just let it carry you away.

Cinematic meditations.
One little trick I’ve found, if you keep getting “distracted” while watching something, is to treat the viewing experience a little bit like a meditation. If you’ve ever done any kind of guided meditation you’ll know what I’m talking about. Just notice that your attention has wandered from the film, and gentle bring your attention back to the breath screen. If you’re having trouble getting immersed in the narrative, I find actively imagining I’m in the room with the characters and asking myself “how would I feel if I were them?” helps get me emotionally engaged. Once you’re caught up in the emotion, it’s much easier to be immersed in the film.

Try to let yourself be caught up in the film.
I keep mentioning this notion of “being carried away” or “caught up in” or we might say “immersed” in a film. Sometimes we say the film really “grabbed me.” This is a kind of flow state, where you forget you’re even watching a movie and are just transported into a narrative experience is usually the best way experience a film.

This won’t always happen and that’s fine. It’s not required that you’re immersed in the viewing experience to appreciate a film, and some movies aren’t really meant to be enjoyed in this way, instead encourage a kind of intellectual engagement. Some movies even deliberately try to take you out of the story! But regardless, it’s good to have an understanding of how this immersion works, and the impact it has on your viewing experience and how you perceive a film.

When you’re “taken out” of a story, or when you can’t get immersed to begin with, sometimes that’s because of a failure on the part of the movie itself. Anything from bad filmmaking or bad writing to a continuity error, or just a subject matter that doesn’t interest you can break your immersion.

But sometimes this isn’t the fault of the film at all. Maybe you’re just really hungry and keep thinking about dinner, or just anxious about something in your life, or are sleepy, or whatever. This distinction is valuable to be aware of, and it’s good to notice if it’s happening, because you want to know if the movie was bad, or if you just weren’t in the headspace for it in that moment. At the very least this can help you decide if its worth giving the movie another shot later.

Try to give yourself some time to absorb the film afterwards.
I’ve seen it happen, the phones whip out to log and rate the movie on letterboxd before the credits have even finished rolling. Sometimes you walk out of the theater and someone has a really strong, confident opinion about what they just watched. “That was a masterpiece!” — “Clearly a metaphor for the trauma of middle age.” These initial reactions, and strong first impressions can be helpful when we’re trying to understand a film, and it’s worthwhile to make note of them at times. I’m not really trying to criticize anyone for having these reactions, but sometimes I think we lose the value of “sitting with something.”

Your first impression might not be your best impression.

Let the film wash over you. Take it in. Ask yourself how you felt about the movie. And especially, especially try to avoid the question “was it good?”

I don’t know when or how the good/bad binary became the metric we tend to fixate on.2 I really struggled with this at Cannes, where circles of critics often wanted to passing judgement on the quality of a film mere minutes after it ended. In these tender moments after a film I’m much less interested in the question “did you like it?” and more interested in “what did you think it was about?” or “what did it make you feel?” or “what was the most beautiful moment?” or “which scene in particular made you angry?”

To really appreciate a film or a work of art we have to give ourselves space to actually absorb it, process it, and think about it. After we’ve given ourselves that time, that’s often when our most thoughtful critiques, or interpretations will arise.

There are plenty of movies that I walk out of not knowing how I feel. The Sound of Falling which premiered at Cannes this year was a great example. I had no idea what to make of it as soon as the credits rolled, but three days later, I was convinced it was an incredible film. Film appreciation means understanding what a film is, and a movie is not just what happens during the running time of the film, it’s also the way that experience ferments inside you. Eat the meal. Let yourself digest it.

We’re just scratching the surface

I think I’ll draw the line there for now. Film appreciation can also involve:

• Understand a film within the context of film history

• Examining a film through different critical lenses

• Studying specific aspects of the filmmaking

• Listening to commentary, interviews, or reading other people’s analysis of a film

But I think all of that is down stream from simply letting yourself be immersed in the film, and giving yourself time and space to really think about how it made you feel, and why you think it made you feel that way. I’m confident the more you do this the more you’ll grow a deeper appreciation for film over time.

I guess I took a lot of words to give the very simple advice “watch the movie and think about it.” But I do really think it’s that simple—but simple doesn’t mean easy. We often get in our heads about these things, and make them more complicated than we need to be, getting back to the basics can help us appreciate art more fully.

If I had any additional advice I’d give here it would be to write about a movie. Writing down your thoughts really forces you to think through what you watched and even if you don’t ever plan on writing reviews or publishing anything about a film (even if you’re not a writer), writing about film will level up your appreciation significantly.

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If the first week of Cannes was defined by heavy examinations of power struggles, suffering and oppression, the second week certainly provided some lighter fare, which (as much as I love films that face difficult struggles head on) was a welcomed break.

The Chronology of Water

Un Certain Regard / dir Kristen Stewart / US

I kicked off my second week with the debut film from an actor-turned-director Kirsten Stewart. Based on a memoir of the same name by Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water’s fractured, visually poetic style follows the lead (played powerfully by Imogen Poots) as she tries to move through and beyond her traumatic childhood. I can’t disagree with some of the critics calling this “over-directed” but I’m impressed that Stewart isn’t playing it safe here. This has all the hallmarks of a strong debut; a clear vision, strong voice, and unique style. Refinement can come later, and I have confidence that if Stewart continues to direct, it will.

This is one of the more provocative, edgy films I saw at the fest, leading to a small but steady trickle of walkouts in my screening, but I quite enjoyed it. While a lot of movies I saw at Cannes had me hooked at the start and then felt like they faltered in the 3rd act, this movie did the opposite. I was unsure at first, but by the end it had won me over and it had one of my favorite endings of the festival—one which really resonated with me emotionally.

I think it might lean a tad too avant-garde to be a true awards contender and it certainly won’t be for everyone but I think it will have a intense set of fanbase among those who love it for what it is.

Nouvelle Vague

In Competition / dir Richard Linklater / US & France

Richard Linklater was one of the directors I encountered when I was young who introduced me to just how much freedom was available within the cinematic form if you were just willing to playfully explore. Why not just break all the rules? It’s an energy he borrows from the French New Wave directors of the 50s, and so to me it felt totally fitting that he choose to tell the story of the making of Godard’s Breathless, the most well known and influential film from the French New Wave era.

Watching this at Cannes in an audience of about 1000 film critics was such a uniquely specific experience—the movie literally opens with scenes of critics at Cannes. You could almost see this whole movies as pandering to the audience, but Godard looms so large as a figure for filmmakers and critics alike that making a film about him that will make those people happy is a daunting challenge. I think a lot of people will want this to be way more than it is, which is basically a fun Linklater hang-out film about making a movie set in the 50s.

I had a blast watching this, and was really taken by the excellent casting and full commitment to making the film look and feel like it was shot in the 50s. Everything, down to the title cards commits to the period.

Linklater said in the press conference that he wanted to it feel like the filmvane the characters had no knowledge of how influential what they were doing would be—because that’s how it would have been in reality. You see that often in period films about significant moments, the narrative “voice” of the film almost has an anachronistic prescience about what is coming. This is sometimes what we want and works great, but its fun to see someone deliberately play around with the opposite, and I think its very successful here. For a movie about the making of one of the most influential films ever made, it’s refreshingly devoid of a sense of self-importance. Sure Godard (the character in the film at least) is arrogant, but you can also see how out-on-a-limb he was. He didn’t know it would work, nobody did.

I think its funny to watch some critics act like this movie is disrespect to Godard because it’s not more profound or formally radical. On the way out of the screening I heard one critic say “he’s rolling in his grave.” And I doubt he is but if so… maybe let him roll, it’s good exercise. Why should we be so precious about a figure who was so radically un-precious about the form? And sure, for many of the critics at Cannes with decades of cinephilia under their belts it might not reveal anything profound about Godard, but this will undoubtedly ignite an interest in a bunch of young people who have never encountered the New Wave at all, and I think it’s a worthy entry point.

This is easily Linklater’s best movie since Boyhood and is a joy to watch. I doubt it’ll have a big audience outside of cinephiles, but I can see this having a long life as a cult classic.

Die My Love

In Competition / dir Lynne Ramsey / United States

What can I say about Lynne Ramsey’s primal growl of a film, Die My Love? I’m sure you’ll hear that “it’s about postpartum depression” something that the movie does touch on, but I think its reductive to say that’s what the film is about. The films stars Jennifer Lawrence as an isolated mother and writer struggling to cope when she moves into the country with her husband (Robert Pattison) and son, but as with much of Ramsey’s work it feels like there’s an almost ferocious energy brewing beneath the surface. The way it comes forth is sometimes sudden, sometimes surreal, and the lines between dream, fantasy, and reality blur.

The performances, particularly Lawrence’s (as well as Sissey Spacek’s as the doing-her-best mother-in-law) are fantastic. This is definitely the best work we’ve seen from Lawrence in a while. The sound design is absolutely wild. Overall, for how somber the subject matter is, the energy of the film is very punk. It’s dark but not dower. I can almost here the old-timey trailer voice saying “from the twisted mind of Lynne Ramsey.”

It really feels to me like it’s about the need to express something, a certain kind of energy, but being stuck in a landscape where that expression would get you ostracized, and where no one around you really relates or can understand that need. Here that certainly relates to postpartum, and to patriarchal oppression, but it’s also tapped into something very “animal” to borrow a word Ramsey herself used in the press conference, and which is illustrated almost literally in the film.

This one had a solid number of haters at the festival, and I definitely wasn’t among them, but I definitely didn’t find it to be a perfect watch and I was loosing my bearing a little by the third act. Still it’s one I’ll happily give a second chance, and the star power might propel this beyond where a film this challenging might normally go. While this is more mild in many ways, the success of something as wild as The Substance last year has me thinking that audience are ready for stranger fare.

Urchin

Un Certain Regard / dir Harris Dickinson / United Kingdom

Another directorial debut from an established actor, this time Harris Dickinson, who I first became aware of a few years at Cannes when I saw The Triangle of Sadness. I really enjoyed this story about a young man trying to clean up his act and get off the streets.

It feels very Safdie Brothers-inspired, but not derivative, and Dickinson obviously knows how to direct actors and manage the camera. I’ll be excited to catch this again and see what he does next.

The Phoenician Scheme

In Competition / dir Wes Anderson / United States

Wes Anderson’s latest, The Phoenician Scheme is an undeniably beautiful and delightfully funny continuation of his streak of storybook narratives. There’s been a doubling down on his style since Grand Budapest, and at this point it feels like we’re almost watching the kind of movie that a character from a Wes Anderson film would have made. This leaning deeper into the style certainly has its detractors, but at a time when so much stuff genuinely looks the same I’m happy to see work from someone who has such a completely original visual voice.

The standout feature of this film is that it is Anderson’s most character-centered film since The Grand Budapest Hotel and is lead strongly by Benecio Del Toro with newcomer Mia Threapleton, and Anderson-first-timer Micheal Cera in excellent support roles. I had a blast, but it’s quite dense and I was in a festival haze, so I’ll definitely need to see it again to see how it ranks in the filmography.

My Father’s Shadow

Un Certain Regard / dir Akinola Davies Jr. / Nigeria

One of the things I love most about international film is when filmmaker gets to introduce you to their country through their eyes. This is done with so much warmth and care by Akinola Davies Jr. whose debut My Father’s Shadow became the first Nigerian film to premiere in competition at Cannes.

The movie is set with an election crisis as a backdrop, but the core narrative surrounds two brothers getting the rare opportunity to spend the day with their father visiting Lagos. It’s a beautiful, touching film, with wonderful attention to craft and performances. It gives us a lovingly detailed glimpse of Lagos and Nigeria, but is grounded within universal themes of grief and coming of age. This is just a really solid knock out of the park that I’ll happily recommend to everyone and if MUBI plays their cards right I think this could garner some awards traction at the end of the year.

The Love That Remains

Cannes Premiere / Hlynur Pálmason / Iceland

Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland was one of my favorite movies of 2023. With The Love That Remains, the Icelandic filmmaker returns with a quiet, pastoral, drama about family, art, nature, and love.

There are three children, a dog, some chickens, a mother who makes her art, and a father who works on a fishing boat. Not much happens, we follow their quiet life as the parents work through a separation, but these beautifully languid moments are punctuated by brief hits of surreal and endearing drama.

Ultimately a meditation family, nature, time, and change, it felt soothing to my soul, and like a reminder of all the parts of life that we let pass us by all too easily. Some of my favorite editing of the festival, and I film I look forward to watching again when I need a break from the breakneck pace of modern life and a reminder of the beauty I do not want to take for granted.

Splitsville

Cannes Premiere / Micheal Covino / United States

The most entertaining screening of the festival for me was the premiere of Michael Covino's new film Splitsville. The audience, which included Jason Mamoa, Ari Aster and Sean Baker, really loved this incredibly well crafted, romantic comedy about two couples in a sort of love-triangle. I’m not exaggerating when I say the laughter was uproarious. At the end of the Premiere after the applause died down Covino said “We need to keep making cinematic comedies for Cannes.” I agree—with the addendum that they shouldn’t just be made for Cannes.

“Cinematic comedy” is a great way to describe Splitsville because it’s a movie that uses the entire toolbox of filmmaking for comedic effect. It’s not just presenting funny dialogue and performances, there are jokes made with editing, camera moves, and—best of all—stunt choreography.

This movie has one of the greatest comedic fight scenes I’ve ever seen in a film. To even think of anything that competes I’d have to look back to Jackie Chan’s Police Story, or something from the silent era. I thought really funny slapstick comedy might be a thing of the past but it’s alive and well here. That’s not to say that’s all this movies delivers; it also has an incredibly sharp wit and a grounded dramatic core that gives it a lot of heart.

I can’t guarantee if you go see this in a theater that the crowd will be dying of laugher as much as when I saw it, since the Cannes audiences are some of the most expressive I’ve ever experienced. But I’m going to rush to watch it again in a theater when it comes out, just on the off-chance that they are, because this was such a fun reminder of just how good it feels to laugh together with a crowd.

Alpha

In Competition / dir Julia Ducournau / France

I had high hopes for Julia Ducournau’s new film after Titane sent me almost crawling out of my skin and the theater with it’s ecstatically visceral horror. Unfortunately, I really struggled to connect with Alpha in a meaningful way, at least within the screening itself.

There certainly is some very compelling sequences, and it deploys body horror with an effective restraint, but my appreciation of what this film is doing felt almost entirely intellectual. The conversations I had about it afterwards with other critics were compelling, but I wish I had gotten more of that from the experience of watching it.

Set in a vaguely in what feels like an apocalyptic future/past—the movie explores the AIDS epidemic, drug addiction, family trauma, as it follows Alpha, a 13 year old girl who is suspected of having an infection that slowly turns people to stone. We learn about the disease through her mother, whose work as a doctor brings her into close contact with its sufferers, and her uncle who is living with the disease. However it’s fractured-multiple-timeline narrative felt discordant and I was left confused in the moments I felt like I should have been enraptured.

Fuori

In Competition / dir Mario Martone / Italy

Fuori follows Sapienza, a middle aged writer who is in and out of prison, tracking her relationships with women she meets there. It took me about 40 minutes of runtime to really even get a handle on what this movie was, which I guess is mostly a kind of hang-out drama? There’s a lot of sitting at a cafe, getting an espresso, drinking a whiskey, and then leaving? I generally am on-board for just being thrown into the deep end by a film but I felt this one might have benefited from some slightly more traditional setup or character development.

I didn’t dislike watching this, but it constantly felt like there was something right beneath the surface that I was supposed to be accessing, but couldn’t? Perhaps the late night screenings were catching up to me but as with Alpha I found this film’s non-linear storytelling needlessly confusing with no real payoff once they align.

A mid-credit sequence provides a bit of insight, but I found myself wishing I’d had that context earlier, which maybe most Italian’s or Europeans do and this was just a victim of my cultural ignorance in this instance.

It Was Just an Accident

In competition / Jafar Panahi / Iran

For years Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has had to work secretly and illegally after being imprisoned and banned from filmmaking for defying government censorship. His films during this period of clandestine filmmaking have mostly been inventive, pseudo-documentaries that make incisive political commentary while somehow maintaining a sort of playful exploration.

I very recently fell in love with his work (The Mirror is very underrated!), and found It Was Just An Accident to be one of his most compelling recent films. Without the usual explicitly meta layer, (there’s still the meta layer of the whole narrative being a sort of commentary on the political situation that Panahi is himself dealing with, but Panahi doesn’t appear as a character this time) it’s a more straightforward narrative, but that makes way for a political statement that feels bolder, more provocative, and a tad angrier than before.

It Was Just An Accident is about a man who recognizes and then kidnaps a member of the Iranian regime’s secret police that tortured him and ruined his life years ago. And it becomes an almost a dark comedy of errors as the kidnapping proceeds. It’s dryly funny, and yet thoughtfully explores its central moral dilemma before delivering a powerful ending that was one of the sharpest of the festival.

Making art this politically relevant that still has such an open-hearted curiosity and genuine embrace of difficult ambiguities is a rare feat, and while my personal picks for the Palme were Sirat and Sentimental Value, Panahi’s win of the Palme feels much deserved.

The History of Sound

In competition / dir Oliver Hermanus / United States/United Kingdom

Likely to be billed as a period queer romance (which it certainly is to some extent), what most captured me here were the musical elements. I loved the exploration of early folk music, which is treated with as much love a respect by the film as by the characters. Paul Mescal and Josh O’Conner work well together, although Mescal’s more restrained performance leaves him feeling almost underused to me.

One of the more conventional, genre films I caught at the festival, its not hard to see this nabbing a few Oscar nominations come awards season.

Resurrection

In Competition / dir Bi Gan / China

Cinema as Metamodern mythology or fairytale. A swirling synthesis of film history. Bi Gan’s Resurrection takes us through a series of dreams, dreamt by a monster whose insides plays reels of film. It opens with an expressionistic silent film, evocative of early German works, and proceeds to shape shift for each new dream, becoming a film noir, melodrama, and culminating in an impressive single-take sequence that traverses streetlight and rain-drenched alleyways on New Years Eve 1999.

Easily the most stylistically bold film of the fest, as a work of film craft its astounding. I found the plot and the ultimate meaning of the dreams both individually and collectively almost completely indecipherable. I don’t know how much of that to credit to cultural barriers and lack of sleep, and how much was intentional but I suspect a significant amount of the bewildering storytelling was intentional dream logic.

Despite not being able to make heads or tails of what was going on in terms of story, I was caught up in the sheer beauty of the film, and it made me feel something, even if that something was just the power that bold imagery and cinema can hold on its own. Cinema speaks, even without words, sometimes our desire to understand makes us overlook that power—Resurrection continually thwarts your interpretative capacity but still captures your imagination. It’s like the magic trick that you know is fake, but still can’t help being taken in by.

Surprisingly the movie which presented itself most explicitly as a dream was the one that left me most awake to the world around me as it ended, and reminding me that I was alive, sitting there in the theater and the finite, fleeting nature of it all. It’s one I hope people will give a chance, your eyes will thank you even if your mind is left in mystery.

Sentimental Value

In Competition / dir Joachim Trier / Norway

How do you make a film about something the characters refuse to talk about?

In relationships, pain that goes unacknowledged can form an object which obscures our vision of one another making it difficult to communicate and see each other for who we really are. But how do you convey that in film? How do you make a movie about something the characters themselves do not understand?

This is what Sentimental Value, the latest movie from Joachim Trier who you probably know for Worst Person In The World explores with an incredible subtlety and nuance. The film uses beautifully deft cinematography and metamodern narrative to bring you into the experience of this family as they try to connect and confront their shared pain. Art (specifically filmmaking) is at the center of how they connect.

Stellan Skarsgård is magnetic as an aging director who is trying to make a film about his mother, starring his daughter— but this is not a film about filmmaking, that exists only as a backdrop for a tightly constructed character drama that really wants us to try to understand these characters, and how they manage, or fail to connect with each other.

While it doesn’t have some of the punchy-youthful energy that Worst Person in the World did, that largely feels by design. This is a more mature, understated work and Trier’s direction is confident and precise without ever feeling constrained. By the end I was absolutely glued to the screen, just aching for these characters to find what they are looking for.

Definitely one of my favorites from the fest and the one I felt to watch a second time before the festival’s end. It’s one I’m pretty confident will find a place on my best-of list at the end of the year.

Barry Lyndon

Cannes Classic / dir Stanley Kubrick / United Kingdom

How could I pass up the opportunity not just to see Barry Lyndon with a Cannes audience but also to see a Kubrick film on the big screen for the first time? Its always good to watch one Classic in a festival setting as a kind of control group, and by the end of the festival it felt great to watch something that I could just let wash over me. There was no need to formulate an opinion—I knew exactly what I’d be getting, which is a masterpiece.

One of my favorite of Kubrick’s, the staging of this film plays really well on a big screen and I’m glad I took the time to watch it. This viewing it really struck me how much of a debt Wes Anderson owes to some techniques and ideas that are particular to this film.

The Mastermind

In Competition / dir Kelly Reichardt / United States

Reichardt gives the anti-drama genre deconstruction treatment to the Heist film. Understated might be an understatement when describing her work and this film in particular, which means you have to look closely to see what’s really going on. It’s not going to bowl you over. But there is something there. I think understanding what she’s doing really involves seeing how closely tied certain images of masculinity are tied to certain narrative tropes and genre convention, and how the deconstructing those things goes hand and hand.

It’s a warmly constructed period film, set solidly in the 1970s of Joan Didion and Vietnam War student protests, with a self assured performances all around. I find her films a kind of comfort food, there won’t be drama that raises my blood pressure. There will be substance, but it won’t be harsh. I found this a lovely way to cap off the festival, and one I’ll look forward to revisiting when it comes out.

That covers everything I managed to catch this year at the festival. I’m sure some of these films I’ll be revisiting and talking about more in depth once they get wide release. And I look forward to eventually catching up on all the stuff I missed that I really wanted to see, like The Secret Agent and Renoir. I also heard great things about The President’s Cake, and Yes. But it’s impossible to get tickets for everything, schedule it all, and while there were some people who logged many more films than me, I genuinely began to hit my limit, and pushing past the point where I can even absorb and appreciate everything I’m watching feels pointless.

I had a wonderful time seeing so many great films, but also loved getting to meet and connect with so many fantastic people. It’s easy sometimes to be cynical about the state of cinema when you mostly perceive it through the online discourse. But meeting and speaking in person with so many who are still passionate about the form was energizing, and left me hopeful that there’s a bright future for film as an art, even if the industry shrinks or is reshaped.

In the press conference for Nouvelle Vague, someone asked Richard Linklater about the state of indie film, and he said he was hopeful, shouting out all the young people he saw gathering at independent theaters, and even giving kudos to what he called the “Letterboxd generation” (who I think often unfairly get a bad rap). And I felt a similar energy throughout the festival, there are a lot of young people in attendance, and some relatively young directors bringing films to the fest. But there’s a lot of passion, excitement and hope for cinema across the board.

Cinema stays alive if we keep it alive. If we go to see movies, and make them, and talk about them. If create independent theaters, and new production and distribution companies, and form national film boards to help fund projects, and greenlight risky projects. It takes an entire industry of people, who are passionate about keeping it alive, for it to continue to exist. For all the glitz and glam of Cannes that you see from afar that can make it seem very over-the-top (much of it is) Cannes is also a place where the passion for film as an art is palpable, and we need that passion to keep film going.

“Excuse me,” she said approaching our circle of critics cautiously. “Are you from the States?” (It was apparently the New Yorker tote that gave it away).

She wanted to know what someone from the US thought of what we had just watched—the premiere of Ari Aster’s Eddington. The maximalist-panic-attack-reflection of COVID era insanity, which feels like a kind of deranged Americana, is riddled with the tiny details that make American life feel like an absurdist dark-comedy at times. I had wondered during the screening how the mostly European audience was perceiving the film, and now we were being asked as Americans for our perspective. The general consensus: It felt unfortunately real.

That’s not to say Eddington, which premiered last night at the Cannes Film Festival and which comes out in the US in July, isn’t over the top or surreal in ways. But I did find myself facing the uncomfortable reality that as absurd as movie the movies is, it’s not that unrealistic—at least not by the standards of the last 5 years in America. And that seems to be Ari Aster’s objective here (if he has one)—to hold a mirror up to American Absurdism and makes us all look at ourselves.

The circle of critics I was standing in was somewhat split, many (myself among them) found a cathartic entertainment in this funhouse mirror but a few felt it lacked substance beyond that. It’s certainly a film that will be no less polarizing as it reaches wider audiences, but how could a depiction of American life in 2020 not be? Isn’t that part of the absurdity? That any depiction of our own recent reality polarizes us?

Eddington was my seventh screening, capping off my fourth night at Cannes. Below you’ll find my full review along with my recap of everything else I watched in the first week here of the Cannes Film Festival.

Power struggles, whether they’re against patriarchy or the state or within a society have been the pervasive theme within all the films I’ve seen at Cannes so far. When the movies have deviated from this theme it’s to instead face and confront death. All this to say it’s been a frolic.

Perhaps these themes reflect the interests of the selection committee at Cannes, but I suspect just as much it reflects the current preoccupations of the artists making the films. Socially and globally we’re at a place of renewed destabilization. While things have never been perfect (far from it) some of the assumed promises of modernism, neoliberalism, and inevitable progress towards greater freedom are being forced into question. Much of the art cinema I see these days (not just at Cannes) feels like it’s grappling with these big questions, and trying to understand our place within this shifting landscape.

2000 Meters to Andriivka

Special Screening / dir Mstyslav Chernov / Ukraine

I got into the fest and picked up my badge just in time to slip into a special screening of Mstyslav Chernov’s new documentary, 2000 Meters to Andriivka. His previous film, 20 Days in Mariupol (which won Best Documentary that year at the Oscars) is a harrowing and insightful documentary that covers the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The last time I was at Cannes in 2022, the invasion had just begun, so to return years later, and begin the fest with Chernov’s second film about the conflict, drives home just how protracted this war has been.

His new film tracks a specific operation within Ukraine’s difficult 2023 counter-offensive, and it gives us a glimpse of modern warfare in a way no piece of media I’ve seen has before. It operate effectively on several levels:

It’s a harrowing depictions of the hellish intensity of combat. Evocative of Alex Garland’s recent Warfare—but instead as a documentary. As the film opens we’re immediately immersed within subjectively shot combat footage. It’s the most intense capturing of real world combat I’ve ever seen and it is not for the faint of heart. There are several of these horrific combat sequences, stitched together from first person helmet cams worn by the soldiers, and they document a few battles in the protracted struggle to claim one 2000 meter strip of forest leading to the village of Andriivka. These sequences are broken up by Mystslav’s own journey following a group of soldiers through the region towards the end of the operation.

What elevates 2000 Meters beyond just a visceral depiction of the reality of combat is the way Chernov position this operation as just one event within a conflict that has happening for thousands of years. 2000 Meters is not just a look at the fight to claim Andriivka, it’s a look at the nature of why men go to war and die over pieces of land.

Some of the film’s most moving and provocative sequences are actually when the viewer and the soldiers have a break from the combat. Hiding in fox holes while shells and gunfire explode around them, they connect with the filmmaker as humans, smoking, chatting about school, their families, or what they’re going to do when they’re get home from the front (if they do).

Throughout, Chernov reflects on his own role in all this. Asking us to consider the role the camera plays in these conflicts. In his personal introduction to the film at Cannes he described the documentary as his way of carrying the flag for the soldiers from the film who lost their lives. Its a kind of raising of a banner that ultimately might be more symbolic than strategically meaningful in the grand scheme of the struggle.

This documentary gives us a first hand account of a small piece of the latest military conflict in Europe since World War II, and beyond being politically relevant for understanding the nature of the ongoing invasion, I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it will likely find a place as one of the most significant war documentaries ever made. It should be recognized not just for its documentation of these events, but for what it has to reveal about the nature of war itself, and it’s excellence of craft as a documentary.

If you think you can handle seeing real violence, it comes highly recommended.

The Sound of Falling

In Competition / dir Mascha Schilinski / Germany

We get impressions of life—the haunting moments where you awaken to your loneliness, the disconnect between yourself and reality, the places where there is a rift which one feels must be reconciled. There is curiosity about this, but also horror. These moments awaken in youth but are held in those with age. Around these moments lingers the specter of death, but they exist adjacent to an enveloping warmth.

Sound of Falling, the second film from director Mascha Schilinski (only the first of her work that I’ve seen) is a multigenerational coming-of-age existential horror film, sewn through with sorrow and foreboding that lingers at the fringes before finally becoming a reality in the third act. You’ve heard of the male gaze. This is the death gaze. I’m writing about it with this broken and disconnected language because that is how it presents itself, in fragments, initially disjointed; the characters, places and timelines seem at first connected only by a sort of haunted resonance. They come into clearer focus by the end, but as a first time viewer the connections still felt tenuous by as the credits rolled, perhaps more spiritual than chronological and causal.

It’s a beautiful film, conjuring images that feel as enchanted as often as they are disconcerting. Its structure and use of these imagery evokes Tarkovsky, while the atmospheric sound design is reminiscent of Lynch. As a technical piece of filmmaking this is was my favorite film so far, with each department working in concert to delivery a unique but aesthetically cohesive whole.

Within this frame, oppression, sexual violence and awakening, objectification, unhappiness, depression, and ultimately, death and the realities that might draw someone towards it as an escape from those other things, are explored through the interiority of the young girls and women at the center of the film.

Perhaps too challenging and avant-garde to make a large splash post-Cannes in the US, but The Sound of Falling’s haunting beauty will certainly linger for those who take the time to seek it out. Seems a like contender for the cinematography award.

Two Prosecutors

In competition / dir. Sergejs Lozņica / Germany

A dry and darkly funny journey through the hellish, corrupt, bureaucracy of Stalinist Russia’s prison and legal system. This movie really wants you to feel the pain of waiting and moving through those systems and uses a kind of dry suspense to propel what is essentially 5 scenes stretched over its two hours. If you’re at all familiar with the nature of Russian jokes, you’ll know what you’re getting yourself into. But if you’re familiar with the political reality there you may not find anything particularly new revealed, just a new and formally inventive way of expressing that reality.

I enjoyed it thoroughly for what it is, and was particularly taken by the performances, production design, and cinematography, but doubt this will be a major player in the Cannes awards this year and don’t expect it to make a huge splash once it makes its way to full distribution globally.

A Pale View of Hills

Un Certain Regard / Dir. Kei Ishikawa / Japan

Much warmer and more sentimental that most of what I’m used to from Japanese cinema. This split narrative explores immigration and post-war Japan grappling with the wake of the bombing of Nagasaki through a daughter’s discovery of her mother’s story.

While beautiful, I unfortunately I saw the third act twist coming from the end of the first act, which sapped most of the second act of its dramatic suspense and created some pacing issues.

Dossier 137

In Competition / dir Dominik Moll / France

Dossier 137 follows Stéphanie (Léa Drucker), a police internal investigator as she handles a case of police brutality against a protester in Paris. Structurally a pretty by-the-books investigative drama, with the single twist on the concept being that the investigative aim is inverted onto the police. Portrayed with deft a naturalism, theres little here to find fault with in terms of form. It’s tightly scripted, well shot, and the performances all deliver on what they need for each moment.

Where it fell short for me was just in the nature of its story, which would maybe be a profound revelation for anyone who isn’t at all familiar with the sorry state of police accountability procedures, but my knowledge of the flaws in the American policing system (and the fact that similar flaw exist in many others) made almost every beat and revelation here feel inevitable and obvious to me. I didn’t find that it engage with the personal conflict for the central character enough to carry the film beyond its political message.

Sirat

In Competition / Dir Óliver Laxe / Spain

If you wanted to be cute you might call Óliver Laxe’s EDM infused desert road movie Max Rave: Fury Road. That comparison provides a few clues about what to expect, but only gets you so far.

A father wanders through a desert rave searching for his daughter, having no luck they band together with some experienced ravers for a cross-desert journey to find her. There’s little plot to speak of here, or what plot I could speak of would spoil too much. But we don’t need to because for me this was certainly a movie I felt more than I understood. And it gripped me with a feeling no other film here has so far.

The epigraph which defines “Sirat” as “the bridge between heaven and hell” which is “narrower than a hair and sharper than a sword” might feel disconnected initially from the slow, lingering shots of trucks driving through the dusty swirl of the desert set to pulsating bass lines but where the journey takes them will eventually bring them into a confrontation with that “sirat.”

I was engaged and invested in these characters despite their minimal development, and the aesthetic use of EDM music is unlike anything I’ve seen in a film, leaning into the trance-like, spiritually evocative character that rave culture values it for. These are people who go into the desert, take drugs and dance to the vibrating pulse of a drum for hours in search of an ecstatic loss of self. What happens if that loss begins to become real?

There are some very bold choices here, which will definitely lose a lot of viewers, but this film momentarily crushed a piece of my heart, transported me to somewhere that felt otherworldly, felt like something totally new, consistently made unexpected and surprising choices, and then pulled me back to earth with it’s final shot in a way that grounded it all within a much larger context.

This final note (which I won’t spoil) is perhaps bringing us into a confrontation with just how many exist on this desert journey, not by choice—not in search of the ecstatic loss of self found in drug-infused-desert raves and loud music, or in search of the daughters who wandering that landscape—but in search of mere survival in the midst of war and the harsh realities presented by their environment.

Eddington

In competition / dir. Ari Aster / United States

Strangely, the closest touchstone I can think of for articulating what this movie is artistically, is Kendrick Lamar’s track “We Cry Together” from Mr. Morale (an album that also grapples with a lot of COVID era themes). The song opens with the line “This is what the world sounds like.” The same line could easily be an epigraph for Eddington.

Ari Aster made a profound leap in tone and style from Midsommar to Beau is Afraid. With Eddington, Beau is Afraid’s everything-and-more trip into lunacy is applied to a small western town that is the stage for what feels like every piece of insanity, hypocrisy, and extremism we encountered during COVID in 2020 America.

Here’s what the movie does really well: It captures the feeling of being inundated and pummeled by social media during that time with visceral clarity. And I mean this literally: one of the stand-out features of the film for me was how realistic its depictions of the digital world are. Various feeds, from Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are portrayed realistically and accurately. Showing us the conflicting absurdities that slide through our feeds within a few seconds giving us a kind of mental whiplash that can leave us unable to really get a footing or find our bearings. In Eddington it’s as if those feeds have come to life.

What Aster is also great at portraying is how, underneath everyone’s hypocrisy or extremism, there’s some very real or human reality that’s motivating them. They all feel like they’re the exception for some reason, and their reason might be real, but their attempts to fight and defend themselves become self defeating.

Anyway people are going to hate this movie. Not everyone of course. But definitely many folks. It’ll be too much, it won’t be enough, they won’t like what it’s saying, or they’ll feel like it’s not saying anything at all. As I write this, the morning after the screening, my feelings are mixed. I was riveted the entire time, and found it mostly entertaining. Darius Khondji’s cinematography looked great, the performances are hilarious (with Austin Butler mildly stealing the show again). But…

I see what Aster is doing with these films, I appreciate that someone is committing so hard to the bit and to just going all in. His last two movies don’t resolve into a sharpened point, they explode into a disorienting fever-dream. It’s interesting, but also kind of a mess. Threads, plot lines and ideas drop, morph and disappear into the chaos. Maybe this is supposed to resemble how reality feels, but it also kinda resembles how messy writing feels.

Midway through, as I was feeling the familiarity of the 2020 world he’s captured, I found myself wondering: How does this resolve? Where does it go? I was curious to see how Aster was going to try to engage with a way out of this mess, because to me, in many ways it feels like we’re still stuck there. Does this film have something to offer us by taking us back into this reality, but showing us more of what surrounds us already? Can it open our eyes to the reality the poster depicts? That of a frenzied heard of buffalo running headlong off a cliff to their death?

If you’re a fan of Aster’s work so far this is certainly one you won’t want to miss. Watch it so that: you too can participate in the discourse™. You’re likely to find it funny, but you’re probably just as likely to be confused, annoyed, or offended. Maybe all of those things. But hey, this is America. C’est la vie.

Many of my most anticipated movies remain, including Die My Love, and Richard Linklater’s New Wave, both of which I should be catching tonight. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for part 2! If you enjoy my work you can support it by becoming a subscriber:

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The festival is a behemoth. Attending is like being shot through a grinder of the most beautiful world cinema. It’s a whirlwind of impossible scheduling, espresso, scrambling back to your lodging to get into formal attire for a screening, and frantically trying to find time to eat so that your-blood-sugar-doesn’t-crash-and-you-loose-the-ability-to-read-subtitles-in-the-middle-of-a-3-hour-art-house-film-about-colonialism2. This is (apparently) my idea of a good time. I’m excited about the opportunity to see some amazing films at the largest annual gathering in celebration of global cinema.

It feels like the year of film really starts at Cannes. Often the big players at the fest will go on to make a splash at the Oscars, as Palme d’Or winner Anora did last year, The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall did the year before, Parasite did in 2019 (just to name a few recent examples). But it’s not just a chance to get a jump on the hits, it is also a chance to catch some amazing films that might totally be overlooked by American audiences. The goal of my coverage is to loop you in on what you should really keep an eye out for in the coming year.

To kick things off, here’s a quick breakdown of what I’m most looking forward to seeing.

Most Anticipated:

Eddington dir. Ari Aster
While I didn’t love Beau is Afraid as much as Midsommar and Hereditary, Ari Aster has always delivered a film that is provocative, unsettling, and distinct. Eddington, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, and Austin Butler is about a standoff between a small town mayor and sheriff in May 2020. There’s a trailer out, and it looks bonkers. I’m particularly interested to see how Aster’s horror lens engages with contemporary events. Will this have the visceral punch of Hereditary and Midsommar? Trend more towards the bold yet wavering sprawl of Beau is Afraid? Or will it be something entirely new from the director? I’ll report back.

The Mastermind dir. Kelly Reichardt
In my opinion Kelly Reichardt is one of the most overlooked American directors in recent time. Her beautiful First Cow got lost the the folds of COVID era film releases. I was lucky enough to see the gently funny and profound Showing Up premiere the last time I was at Cannes. She crafts beautifully understated but psychologically insightful character dramas, and she a rare Director/Editor! The Mastermind, which stars Josh O’Conner (who’s been doing some of my favorite work recently) and Alana Haim (who was fantastic in Licorice Pizza), is about an art heist, which on the surface feels like a bit of a departure from her typical work. I’m excited to see how she treats the material, and also for the possibility that a more commercially oriented story might finally garner her some of the recognition she’s due.

Die My Love dir Lynne Ramsay
Scottish Director Lynne Ramsay is another woman whose work deserves more credit than it receives. We Need To Talk About Kevin is shocking and bold and You Were Never Really Here continues her peripheral, unique take on masculinity and violence. Very little is know about the plot of Die My Love (the description in the Cannes program just says “Amour Folie Folie Amour”) but Ramsay’s unique gaze combined with a promising cast (Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Lakeith Stanfield, & Sissy Spacek) makes this one feel like it’s likely to be one of the most interesting films at the fest.

A Simple Accident dir Jafar Panahi
We also know very little about Jafar Panahi’s latest film, but his work continues to be incisive, defiant, and somehow even playful in the face of having to do his work illegally in his home country of Iran. Panahi has been imprisoned for his work, banned from making film, and even banned from leaving the country. His pseudo documentaries weave together fiction and reality, blending meta commentary on his situation with beautiful cultural portraits of Iran (aka “sorrid realism”). I admire the unwavering commitment to work that is daring and politically relevant even in the face of suppression and I’m excited to see what this film has to offer.

The Phoenician Scheme dir Wes Anderson
Of course, if you know my work at all you know I’ll be queuing up for Wes Anderson’s latest pastel pastiche. This time for a reportedly very talky (can it get more dialogue heavy than the recent French Dispatch?) film centering on a character played by Benicio del Toro. Anderson reportedly pitched it to del Toro by saying “I'm thinking of you for the lead. But there's going to be a lot of talking.”

I know many people are beginning to tire of what they consider Anderson’s “shtick” but I personally find him to be continuing to develop and unfold his form into increasingly surreal and unique territory, and he’s certainly one of the most stylistically singular directors working today, and I’m glad he continues to make movies exactly the way he feels like making them.

Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) dir Richard Linklater
Richard Linklater was one of the directors I encountered as a budding cinephile who introduced me to just how much freedom that was available within the cinematic form if you were willing to playfully explore. Why not re-invent the form? It’s an energy he borrowed from the French New Wave directors and so it’s fitting that he choose to tell the story of the making of Godard’s Breathless, perhaps the most well known film from the French New Wave era.

I don’t know what to expect here, bringing a film like this to Cannes borders on pandering to the audience (I say that lovingly). But in the midst of a lot of films that look like they deal with heavier material or more serious drama, knowing Linklater’s sensibility this looks like it might be a shorter, fun reprieve in the midst of the more serious fare.

Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi) dir Joachim Trier
The Worst Person in the World, Joachim Trier’s last film, was one of my favorites of 2022. He’s one of the filmmakers who really seems to have his thumb on the pulse of millennial ennui. And it from the look of things Sentimental Value will find him continuing to explore that territory. The Worst Person In The World had that metamodern affect of being both playfully tongue-in-cheek and truly sincere at the same time (which I like—although I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea) and I wonder if that tone will carry through here as well. I’ll keep you posted.

Everything Else:

There’s many more I could name: Julia Ducournau, who made one of the most transcendently viscerally horrifying movies I’ve ever seen with Palme d’Or winner Titane, is back this year with a film called Alpha that I’m actually feeling kinda nervous to sit through.

Oliver Hermanus’ History of Sound looks like it could be incredible. Actors Kristen Stewart, Scarlett Johansson, and Harris Dickinson are all premiering their directorial debuts, which I’m always curious to see. And I’m always excited to be introduced to work from talent I’m not yet familiar with.

Part of the fun of a film festival is getting to see a curated set of films that don’t yet have any sort of cultural response attached to them. There’s a feeling that you’re “discovering” the film. Many of the movies don’t even have trailers yet, so you get to walk in blind, free of any expectations. There’s no cultural consensus yet and so you have a sense that any movie could be anything from one of the best movies of the decade, to just your average fare for the year, and all you have to go on is your own experience of the film.

I’m planning a video/newsletter that will be released directly after the festival recapping the fest and highlighting the movies I think you’ll want to look out for in the coming year—but if all goes well I’ll also be posting some updates along the way, probably a mix of paid and public. I’m hesitant to make any promises though because this is my first time covering the fest while I attend and I’m unsure of what I’ll realistically have the energy for.

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Just minutes into 20 Days in Mariupol, a harrowing documentary about the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a man fleeing his home in the aftermath of Russian bombing looks at the filmmaker and calls him a “prostitute.” It’s a powerful accusation, asserting that the act of filming this suffering is somehow commodifying something that shouldn’t be commodified.

A few scenes later a soldier asks the filmmaker not to film. Mstyslav Chernov, who’s been a war correspondent and videographer for 20 years responds simply: “Understand, this is a historical war. To not document is… impossible.”

Moments later, as a medical team struggles to revive a child struck by Russian bombs, a doctor looks into the camera and demands that he film what’s happening, “Show this Putin bastard the eyes of this child, and all these doctors who are crying.”

Later in the film Chernov reflects on his years documenting war in the region. And with the horrors of war continuing and even increasing in spite of his efforts to shine a light on this violence, he questions whether this work—which he puts his life on the line to create—really has much impact.

20 Days in Mariupol would go on to be widely viewed and acclaimed, winning Best Documentary at that year’s Academy Awards, achieving the best case scenario for this kind of work. And yet, years later the war continues, Chernov is gearing up to debut his second film about the invasion. If we’re measuring the impact of his work in strictly utilitarian terms, it makes sense that he might be questioning whether what he’s doing is really accomplishing anything.

Chernov’s work cannot be reduced to an artistic endeavor. It is journalistic reporting, and historical documentation. But it contains a struggle and contradiction that many artists face, one which is unfortunately becoming increasingly urgent to answer.

Even if your country isn’t under literal siege, it is in times like these that many artists find themselves questioning the value and validity of their work. Beyond artists themselves, critics and audiences might struggle with how to judge the quality or value of artistic works when it feels like there is a need for this work to be meaningful and impactful.

As someone who half-chose, half-fell-into a career as an artist and critic, but who wants my work to be meaningful1, I’ve been increasingly haunted by this question. How relevant is making art and talking about art in a time of crisis? Should I ditch this to focus my work on something else that might theoretically matter much more?

Some folks don’t seem bothered by this question. Maybe for them the way their art beautifies the world is enough of a reason. Some see their art mostly as a means to gain influence. Influence they then hope to leverage for good. For some the question is irrelevant—art is just what they do. I’m not here to call out anyone who is satisfied by these reasons, but they have never quite satisfied me. None of them sufficiently explain the visceral power that art seems to have. I have an intuition that art could be more, mean more, but for a long time I struggled to understand exactly how.

Art critic John Berger called the question of art’s ability to do social good a “situation of extreme crisis.” In his essay Revolutionary Undoing he writes, “There is not a significant artist in the world who is not asking himself whether his art is justified - not on account of the quality of his talent, but on account of the relevance of art to the demands of the time in which he is living.”2

Like Berger I wanted to know if art really could be a revolutionary force. If I could answer that question it would have a significant influence on how I spend my time as an artist. And as a critic, it would also influence the way I critique and evaluate art.

Berger’s answer to this question is the most satisfying I’ve encountered so far, and I want to share it with you.

Art in Crisis

Reading John Berger I get the sense of someone who was able to see a work of art in its totality. He was in love with the beauty of artistry and its possibilities, yet he pulled no punches in critiquing a work’s social and political relevance. Importantly he wasn’t just doing the all-too-common surface work of critiquing the messages a work of art carried, but also the context that created and sustained them. He threaded all these things together with a deep understanding of the craft involved in making the art he wrote about and an appreciation for the raw sensual beauty of experiencing art directly.

If you’re not familiar with Berger’s work, I highly recommend checking out his influential television series Ways of Seeing (1972). If you only know him from Ways of Seeing, don’t stop there—his other works of criticism are just as worthwhile. Today I’m drawing from two of his essays, Revolutionary Undoing and The Ideal Critic and the Fighting Critic, both of which can be found in the collection Landscapes.

For Berger the political and social crisis artists found themselves in during the 20th century was alarming, but nothing new. Berger was a dedicated leftist, and even if you don’t identify as a leftist I want you to consider for a moment the conundrum that any artist critical of capitalism has found themselves in since its rise as the dominant system in 1848:

“Since 1848 every artist unready to be a mere paid entertainer has tried to resist the bourgeoisisation of his finished work, the transformation of the spiritual value of his work into property value. This regardless of his political opinions as such.” (Landscapes p. 46)

Berger lays out how since capitalism reframed art as a commodity to be produced and sold, artists of all political leanings have struggled against this commoditization. Even if you’re not explicitly an anti-capitalist politically, there’s a good chance you still have an intuitive resistance to the commodification of art. Anxiety about “selling out” is such a common concern for artists it’s almost a cliché.

For many artists the commodification of their art feels like a necessary evil. A force that is required for their survival in this system but one that also constantly threatens to undercut the very nature and value of the art itself. Consequently artists frequently try to resist this in their work. Entire movements of art across many mediums have arisen out of the desire to thwart commercialization or to create countercultures, only to find those movements adopted as yet another commodity or absorbed into the dominant culture.

The question we’re asking in this essay isn’t just about the “integrity” of art under capitalism however. Berger establishes art’s struggle against commodification because this issue begs a larger question. Not about art’s ability to fight capitalism per se, but about art’s ability to resist the status-quo at all. In short, can art really act as a revolutionary force? What ability does art really have to challenge the status-quo, to fight oppression, control, fascism, hate, racism, or authoritarianism more broadly?

Against Demanding Propaganda

One response I see to this is to essentially say, “Yes. Art can be revolutionary. I’ll just use my art to promote my political or social message.” It can be very tempting especially for those with strong ideological beliefs to slip into evaluating the worth and quality of art almost exclusively on the basis of whether or not it advances their preferred political message. Berger believed that works of art could serve a social good, and wanted them too, but he also warned that we “must beware of believing that they can always do so directly. You are not simply demanding propaganda.”3

To measure art only by its ability to convey a message is to “demand propaganda.” It’s a pretty common perspective, especially in many online spaces today, but I think it should be avoided because it is an incredibly limiting and frankly, almost pedantic lens through which to view art. It reduces the work of art from something complicated, nuanced, and personal, into a binary based entirely on interpretation. It changes art from something that we like because it challenges us, frees us, or invokes emotion, into something that we like because we agree with it, or dislike because we disagree with it.4 It is this way of looking at art and media that’s largely responsible for the increasing inability of some audiences and even critics to distinguish between depiction and endorsement.

While I think understanding and judging the “message” of a work of art for both artists and critics can be an important piece of the puzzle, I’m pretty allergic to any view that reductively turns that into the only or most important way we evaluate art. My upbringing within Evangelical Christianity exposed me to an entire culture that saw art almost exclusively as a means to an end, where that end was spreading a message. And it’s a culture that in my experience, fosters mostly low quality, propagandistic art, often completely stripped of mystery, ambiguity, or inquiry. I often see a similar attitude reflected in many corners of the progressive sphere, its just the message that is different.

When artists confine their view of “quality art” to art that explicitly expresses their message well, it breeds blunt and self-righteous art. It breeds art that mostly appeals to those who already agree with that message, and rarely inspires genuine confrontation or transformation in an audience. And when critics and audiences evaluate art based on its explicit political or social message, it’s a perspective that best serves viral tweets, not the thoughtful, nuanced criticism that deepens our understanding of the works, the world, and ourselves.

“I do not assess the works according to how graphically they present, for example, the plight of our old-age pensioners… Nor am I suggesting that the artist, when actually working, can or should be primarily concerned with the justice of a social cause.” Landscapes. p. 95

But what then are we left with? How does art have revolutionary potential if not through direct political messaging?

Art’s Truly Revolutionary Capacity

To understand how art can be revolutionary without simply being propaganda, we need to understand what a work of art conveys at its most fundamental level. We tend to think about a work of art, whether it’s a poem, painting or film, in terms of the content. We talk about what happened, the subject matter, and we focus on what those things mean to us. All of this is relevant, and an important part of art’s function, but it is far from art’s most powerful capability.

Beyond content art also conveys something more complicated, something that’s not so easily distilled into the language of interpretation. According to Berger, “What we carry away with us—on the most profound level—is the memory of the artist’s way of looking at the world.” And it’s in that way of looking that art’s truly revolutionary power is found.

This, Berger contends, is how an artist like Goya could paint a massacre in such a way that asserts that massacres should not happen. When we look at The Third of May we don’t see a massacre, we see the way Goya saw a massacre.

From this view, art, and it’s revolutionary capacity, isn’t simply about conveying ideas or statements politically, it’s about conveying perspectives. Berger was particularly interested in art that offered the viewer a perspective that would enable them to better understand and fight for their rights.

Fascism is a political system, and you can attack that political system directly with varying degrees of success. (It is very hard to do this without making an audience with the perspective that leads to fascism raise their defenses.) But fascism is also a political system that is borne out of a way of seeing the world—out of a specific perspective. This perspective is rooted in fear and a desire to tyrannically and violently control others in an attempt to silence those fears. So a different approach to anti-fascist art, the one I believe Berger advocates, is to judge the revolutionary value of art not by how it challenges the political systems and outcomes directly, but through how it convey perspectives that challenge the views that fuel those systems and outcomes.

We must be sensitive to the poetry of this. The transmission of perspective isn’t something that the artist intentionally inserts into their work, it is encoded as a part of the process. It is inherent to the creation of art. Creating art in this way, requires a quiet confidence in the long term value of what you’re doing detached from utilitarian outcomes. This kind of art doesn’t convince people or “win” arguments, it plants seeds that shape ideas, opinions and perspectives, slowly and organically over time. It tends to humanity’s garden.

Revolutionary art brings us into contact with revolutionary ways of seeing the world. Ways of seeing that challenge the status quo. This perspective encourages us to see the influence of art not in immediate utilitarian terms, not in terms of messages, or content, but in terms of how it shapes, and expands the human attitude and perspective across centuries.

You might still assert: these perspectives are not effective enough. Why has this expansion of perspective not brought about the significant change we hope for? Why don’t the documentaries that lay bare war crimes summon peace, and prevent future violence?

One thing to consider is that even if these works feel inadequate, it does not mean that they aren’t having an impact. Perfectionism is the enemy of the good. We should consider that the existence of revolutionary art could be one of the bulwarks standing between us and even greater and more expansive suffering and tyranny than we have now.

But we should also be wary of demanding too much from art. I agree with Berger that art can be revolutionary. And I agree that this revolutionary power is strongest, not through a propagandistic mechanism, but through arts ability to expand our perspective. It is understandable that we want art to shape and change the world for the better. But we cannot expect art to do the work for us. Making art, talking about, and consuming art that contains expansive perspectives that challenge the evils of our time has a value, but that value lies mostly in how that art shapes how we interact with the world itself.

Some of us are compelled to dedicate our lives to art. And that has its place and its value. But there’s also a tendency to hide behind art and media as a way of escaping a need to interact with the visceral world. Art can grow, expand, and increase our empathetic capacity, our compassion, our understanding of the value of human life, but it is still up to us to act from that understanding.

Like Berger I think art that uses the perspective it conveys in ways that are productive for humanity, in ways that increase love, compassion, and understanding, is good. But I’m also slightly wary of reducing art’s value even to its ability to do this. Perhaps art’s full value lies beyond even this ability to shape our perspectives, in something more immediate, intimate, and less understandable.

Art is not just our attempt to decorate, represent, or shape our world, it is a very expression of our existence and our consciousness, with all its messy contradictions. It is our prayers and cries to each other and what lies beyond us. Art gives voice to our hopes and our ideals, but also our nightmares. Must we demand it be more than that to justify its worth?

As Chernov says in 20 Days in Mariupol, “To not document would be impossible.” The film is also a cry for acknowledgement, a demand that we see the victims of this injustice. There is a deep humanity in making the attempt, regardless of the outcome. Not to do so, would be to resign to the inevitability of violence.

Art may or may not change the world for the better, but it is part of our world, and part of us—how we respond to that world. Art is not a rational practice, but a necessary one. I think we lose out when we try to describe or justify its worth in strictly rational terms.

I'm a big Miyazaki fan. Each of his films is a work of art, hand crafted over years. This is …

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Recently I shared some of my thoughts on imagination with Dominique Sisley for a piece on David Lynch, imagination, and attention on Dazed. It’s a thoughtful essay that I recommend checking out, but answering her questions sparked something for me and I wanted to take some time to explore the subject further.

Sisley’s thesis is that the imaginative quality that made Lynch’s work so striking seems to be disappearing. “Could a young, oddball director release a debut as fucked up as Eraserhead now? Would it get enough traction, even if they could?” Sisley asks in the essay’s opening.

It’s a good question. Artistically I think a David Lynch could absolutely still exist. I think they do, they just don't look like Lynch because what made Lynch himself was his own commitment to his unique voice and aesthetic taste. There are filmmakers out there operating in that way now. But part of what was special about Lynch was the way he brought an avant-garde sensibility into the world of mainstream filmmaking. Could that still exist today? The mainstream that Lynch brought an avant-garde sensibility to in the 80s doesn't really even exist now in the same way it did then. It's hard to know what might be possible for filmmakers starting now when the medium is in such a point of flux. There are plenty of weird, unique films still getting funded, made, and making money. Kinds of Kindness made $16 million worldwide off of a $15 million dollar budget. Not a smash hit by any means, but striking for such a bizarre, esoteric work. Twin Peaks: The Return, still remains one of the most avant-garde pieces of television ever produced, but imaginative and strange shows like Severance and The Curse, are still getting made and finding a home.

Existing as an artist who makes imaginative work is certainly possible, it's just a question of what the culture chooses to pay attention to. Realistically I don’t know if the kinds of films as strange as David Lynch made will ever compete with the blockbuster tentpoles, I think it’s very possible that ship has sailed. But I also don’t really feel the need for the weird art I like to be the cultural mainstream, as long as the interesting weird work has room to exist.

I certainly take the point however, that much of the mainstream landscape seems devoid of imagination these days, and perhaps it is the exceptions that prove the rule. But what is the value of imaginative media, and why do we need it?

Why We Need Imaginative Media

An artist has many tools at their disposal, and imagination is one of them. Imagination is what takes art beyond being mere remix of the world or other works and into completely new territory. Deeply imaginative work is the work that takes us so far into new territory that it's almost unrecognizable. Imaginative work is what helps us discover new possibilities and futures. It is what helps us see the world and ourselves in new ways. Imagination pushes forward science, society, and art into new territory. It’s the impulse that envisions something other than what we already are.

It's also rare. It's rare because it requires the artist to do the actual work of imagining, something few set aside the time it takes to do these days. Imaginative work also takes a real commitment to the product of your own imagination. When you're in deeply imaginative territory with a work, you can't look to others for confirmation that you're on the right path, because you're blazing a new one. Nobody can tell you if you're headed in the right direction, you just have to do it and see. It’s what we see reflected in the work of actors like Willem Dafoe and directors like David Lynch. It's risky work and not a lot of people have the courage to put themselves out there like that, especially in mediums that takes a massive amount of collaboration and a lot of money like film and television.

Lack of Imagination in Mainstream Cinema

Mainstream blockbuster cinema lost a lot of its imagination when it became all about Intellectual Property. Things get made primarily on the basis of how they fit into a marketing scheme: how they fit into a "cinematic universe," relate to the previous film in the series, or the material the film is remaking. All of that literally a lack of imagination. It’s selling people on seeing more of what they've already seen. They do it because it works: people go to the remake, sequel, or next film because they remember how they felt watching the original and want more of that. Eventually though, this plays itself out. Remaking the old misses the point of why all the original works were appealing in the first place, which was the imaginative originality of those works.

Star Wars was once an imaginative story—something new. But it’s sapped of its imagination when we've revisiting that world countless times, not because there’s more story to be told, but simply because there’s more money to be made. I think even if we’re drawn towards sequels and remakes, fundamentally we go to the cinema to see and feel new images. So much of mainstream cinema has become a retreading of tired ground.

Lack of Imagination in TV

I think a lot of the lack of imagination and originality in TV has come from a devaluing of screenwriting. So much stuff now, especially in streaming TV and Blockbuster filmmaking has the trappings of high production value but absolutely horrible writing. I don’t blame the writers. Good writing takes a lot of time and investment. You can't force it with a formula. A writer or a group of writers have to sit around and wait for good ideas to strike, and then they have to refine. That all takes time, and time is money. If that isn't there it's the fault of the executives. From Variety:

“It’s wild to me that the first 10 weeks of breaking a show are the most important,” “Abbott Elementary” and “Harley Quinn” executive producer Justin Halpern (also a WGA board member) recently told Variety. “And to think that those are the weeks we get paid minimum, and maybe we don’t even get to go on with the show.”

I don't know exactly why execs aren't valuing the writing, but I can guess it's probably short-sightedness in pursuit of the bottom line. Hollywood is in crisis. Streaming has created heavy competition. COVID really hurt theatrical box office. There's been a lot of corporate take-over in the last 20 years. Appeasing shareholders is a fast track to destroying creativity.

Trying to stay competitive with streaming, executives are trying to make larger profits and screenwriting is one way they can cut corners and (temporarily) hide that they cut corners. When an audience looks at a trailer they see the flashy costumes, set design, actors they love, crisp cinematography, or an IP they recognize, but you can't really judge the writing until you've already seen the film or show and by then your money is already spent. It's a swindle that works in the short term, but in the long run they're undermining the value of the whole medium when they do this. The audience ends up losing trust that they're going to get a good story.

Some of it is also the fault of critics and fandoms. We've collectively become so enamored with a kind of nostalgia for media that is attached to what we already know that we'll forgive pretty mediocre screenwriting and the “money people” start getting the message that people just don't care. But I think audiences do care in the long run about the quality of screenwriting even if they don't consciously realize it. A lot of viewers aren't sensitive enough to the specifics of the medium to identify where it's going wrong and might mis-identify why they didn’t like something but they definitely feel it when the quality declines.

Lack of Imagination in Culture

Finally this lack of imagination in Film and TV stems from a more endemic lack of imagination across our culture. We don't create the economic and social conditions that allow imagination to thrive. Imaginative media takes risk. Corporatization is allergic to risk. I think it’s a mistake to blame consumers, because in traditional media so much of what's produced and how it's distributed is owned by a few corporate entities, and in new media the algorithms decide what is shown. It's why we need critics and curators. People crave imagination, but imaginative, risky media is not what succeeds commercially or algorithmically. The imaginative stuff is out there if you look but most people don't have the time and space to go looking outside the mainstream channels for the art that will resonate with them and take them to new places because they have busy lives. People don't want their media consumption to feel like a chore, so they go for what's right at their fingertips and it's boardrooms and algorithms that decide what that will be.

There another thing that limits imagination though, and that is the hypermodern environment most of us live in. It’s an environment that is sapped of the conditions that are needed to cultivate imagination. Part of why David Lynch was so imaginative is because he had an extremely dedicated meditation practice that he used to come up with his ideas. He consistently meditated for 40 minutes a day. You don't need to meditate to imagine, but if you want to make imaginative work you do need space in your life somewhere for your mind to wander imaginatively. I think it's so easy these days with our phones and AirPods with us everywhere to leave ourselves no moments of silence. Its so easy to fill all the spaces we would use for the actual work of imagining. It's a cultural tragedy but I think it's much simpler to get back than we realize, we just need to stop buying into the attention economy's demands, put down our phones, turn off the podcast or audiobook, and give our minds some space to actually wander. The solution is simple, but not easy.

Some people have a more active imagination than others but having space to imagine used to just be a natural extension of daily life. No that long ago you could not have filled your life with nonstop media consumption even if you had wanted to. We're the first few generations that actually have the option of giving up the space that would have been used for imagining in the past. We didn't really know what we were giving up. We're also the first few generations to feel the effects of actually giving that up. Right now we have to decide if we like the results of imagination enough to make the time for it in our own lives. We can talk about the cultural shift that's happening away from our towards valuing imagination, but it's also a choice you can make for yourself right now.