From even my earliest age, my parents raised me to be a voracious omnivore of movies. Every kid’s parents try to rear them on their own personal interests to some extent or another, and mine were no different.

My mother, whose rare fond memories of her own mother involved going to back-to-back double features to escape the New York summer heat (let me clarify: TWO double features), and who was essentially raised on television as a latchkey kid, had a laundry list of movies and shows I absolutely MUST see. Mind you, not as a matter of preference, but as a moral imperative. This meant watching a new movie or few episodes of television every night; Columbo, Funny Girl, Harold and Maude, several Alfred Hitchock movies, all of Mel Brooks’ oeuvre, with a special fondness on my mother’s part for The Producers. (“Spring-time, for Hit-ler, and Ger-many! Win-ter, for Pol-and, and France…” was a common singsongy refrain in the house.) Whenever I was sick, we’d watch some fluffy ‘80s/’90s classic or cult classic. The Princess Bride, The Breakfast Club, Grosse Pointe Blank, Better off Dead. And when I, an idiot child with idiot child tastes, enjoyed Steve Martin’s Cheaper by the Dozen in theaters, mom felt the need to feed me every film Steve Martin’s catalogue up to that point, not just to show me her favorites, (Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Leap of Faith, LA Story, Roxeanne,) but to hammer in the Obvious and Objective decline in his career since Father of the Bride parts 1 and 2.

If nothing else, I now know this scene exists

It was like getting a free education in the lexicon of the wrong decades, plus growing up with no cable or live TV. So, while I had to catch up with episodes of Spongebob years after the fact to have common ground with my friends in elementary school, I distinctly recall only some short years later trying to convince them all to watch Twin Peaks. And you can imagine how insufferable I was when everyone I met in college had (to my view) such a superficial and far-too-recent love of the same show. Not watching it in middle school like me, I understand, I’m not a snob, but not seeing it in high school? What’s wrong with you?

My father, on the other hand, was not nearly as well-versed, but fiercely idiosyncratic in his media taste, and unapologetically so. This is a man who walked out of Toy Story 3 for being too saccharine, (he had a venomous distaste for Randy Newman, as a composer himself with a special chip on his shoulder for what he viewed as undue recognition,) Inception for being “too loud,” but whose favorite film was Cliffhanger, starring Sylvester Stallone. It’d be easy to write off his taste as “dad movie,” but it was weirder than that. He had a blue collar puritanical streak that clashed with my mother’s sensibilities frequently, who cursed like a sailor. For example, he was worried that The Devil’s Advocate was giving me the wrong impression of sexuality and viewing women as objects, and that I didn’t see it as the pulpy fun it clearly was. Or, my mother would frequently quote Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, “Gentlemen, let’s not start sucking each other’s dicks quite yet,” which, if he overhead, would shake his head, “That’s disgusting.” If his harshest critique was parental concern, though, his highest praise during a movie was a delighted laugh at how stupid something on screen was.

So, when I came of age to start watching R-rated movies, I don’t know who was more excited, me or them. Our family’s overlapping viewing interests found a natural common ground in the action film. Mom wanted to show me The Matrix, and had a vested interest in me appreciating Van Damme more than Schwarzenegger. (Hate to disappoint, but I prefer neither—it’s Stallone.) My dad, however, managed to slip in recommendations of movies, regardless of how mediocre they were, starring Catherine Zeta Jones. (Remember the thoroughly average thriller Entrapment pairing off Zeta Jones and a way-too-old for her Sean Connery? Because I do.) To this, my mother would only say, with an admirable restraint in her voice, “He likes Zeta.”

One of our earliest go-to schlocky movie rentals, however, was The Fast and the Furious. It was an action movie, so I was in, it was dumb and doofily masculine as hell, so my dad was in, and mom would watch literally anything, so she was in. (This is a woman who, even when she hates a movie, can’t stop watching it after it begins because she needs to know how it ends.) And somehow, over the course of countless rentals, it went from “something to watch,” to “guilty pleasure,” to “bedrock of our family.” It inspired a binging of every other Vin Diesel movie and Paul Walker movie (not the greenest of pastures,) but we kept coming back. There was just something lovable about it, even though none of us were in a position to articulate why yet. We also kept rewatching that and only that because, and I cannot emphasize this enough, even for die-hard fans like ourselves, the landscape of the Fast and Furious series was far grimmer in 2008. We loved the first movie for two people: Paul Walker. Vin Diesel. Nothing else mattered. We had little interest in watching the so-awfully-named-it-comes-back-to-good 2 Fast 2 Furious, since it didn’t have Diesel, let alone Tokyo Drift, which, from a distance, appeared like a direct-to-DVD spinoff with none of the original cast. (I know, I know, I’m sorry, Han, I’m sorry, I’m going to make it up to you by singing your praises for the rest of my life!)

When Fast and Furious (2009) came out, though, we were all-in. It looked slick as hell, directed by the only true auteur of the franchise, Justin Lin, and brought some truly ludicrous action setpieces that made as all cackle with glee, and with the cast we had grown to love over the last couple of years. I remember all of us just guffawing at the end when Dom ran over Phoenix with his car, only to say, “Pussy.” And that sequel lead-in at the end is an all-timer as far as I’m concerned—I’ve had multiple accidental double features of Fast and Furious and Fast Five with friends because of that ending. And we stuck to our favorites, 1 and 4, for a long time. Until something truly awful and outside this little bubble of my family’s goofy taste came up.

Sometime in middle school, 7th grade, I think it was, my mother and father sat me down in the kitchen, stone-faced, telling me they needed to say something. No stranger to overhearing them argue, my brain went to the worst thing it could think of—divorce? I asked them, my voice thick. No, no, it wasn’t that, they explained.

My father had cancer.

Neck cancer, specifically. They had known for a while now. Well, I asked, why did they take this long to tell me? They wanted to be sure. Also, when they did know for sure, it was Christmas, and they didn’t want to ruin the holidays for me. In that moment, though I would never say it out loud, I wrote my father off as dead. It wasn’t a possibility, but a fact—he was going to die, and I was losing him, and I needed to accept that sooner than later. And while the Christmas sentiment  was nice of them, I can’t help but feel the next few Christmases—when he visibly, and more upsettingly, audibly struggled with his illness—more than made up for lost time. One Christmas, I could hear him hacking and violently coughing late into the night, attempting to expel the mucus filling up his throat, unable to sleep for the constant effort. Another, we attempted to watch Miracle on 34th Street, but kept pausing to adjust the IV drip into Michael’s arm. That part was fine, and had long been a normal nuisance to us; in fact, greater concern to us was the effect on the film’s pace. The part that wasn’t so fine was seeing Michael drift in and out of himself that night as the painkillers took their toll. It was one of the few times I was truly scared. The rest of the time, well—upon first hearing the news, I was in shock, and by the time I wasn’t in shock I had become numb to it. Nothing feels especially traumatic when it’s a regular part of your reality, and this was no different.

Eventually, the pain and discomfort was too much for him to keep working. All the time I had become so accustomed to him spending in his recording studio composing music for hours on end was now spent in the living room watching something, anything, to pass the time. Often, I would join him. We trawled for films together on lazy afternoons or evenings, usually when mom was out working. (Where before we could just assume she was the man of the house with dad’s salary as a musician, it was now a fact. She was keeping the house together.) This was in the earlier days of Netflix’s transition to streaming, back when you had a choice between getting something in the mail or what they called “Instant Watch,” the Blue/Red buttons split down the middle of every movie on their site. This Instant Watch library of, let’s be fair, mostly trash, some gems in the rough, was our treasure trove of mid-afternoon viewings for the rest of my father’s life. It was in this manner we discovered many films for the first time—some of them great, like Heat. Others of them… well, others of them were 2 Fast 2 Furious.

I don’t mean to disrespect or trivialize the memory of my father by saying this, but I think he would agree: it literally took cancer to get us to give 2 Fast 2 Furious and Tokyo Drift a shot. And gosh I’m glad it did. I mean, I’m always going to associate 2, especially, with those last days, but it’s a genuinely fine movie that suffered from fan disappointment around the lack of Vin Diesel. But for a lazy Sunday with my dad where we came in with our expectations already in the dirt? It was great. Today, I appreciate the genuine chemistry between Tyrese Gibson and Paul Walker, the manic energy Gibson brings to the movie, as well as the outright gay-as-fuck text of the film. Plus, the finale, with its hordes of brightly colored cars, is the closest this series has gotten to feeling like playing with matchbox cars or a Hot Wheels set.

(Also, as an aside, let me tell ya what an experience it was seeing Tokyo Drift after Fast and Furious, and just assuming blindly that since Han was in 4, he had to live through 3. This made an already devastating scene hit even harder as it completely blindsided us.)

A year or two later, Fast Five was the first Fast and Furious film I saw in theaters, and the last movie my father got to watch in a theater, ever. Looking back, it’s clear there could have been no better final movie for all of us to see together one last time, the creative high point of our favorite popcorn franchise. Again, my father’s taste was very particular – just months before, he had walked out of Inception. (Which is actually one of my favorite Nolan movies!) But he stuck around for Dom and Brian. It was the perfect ending to our film snob family’s unlikely descent into fandom for this stupid, wonderful series.

A few months later, dad was dead.

Since then, I have watched every Fast and Furious movie opening weekend, on the biggest, dumbest format of screen I can find, demarcating the passage of my life as I do so. 6 came out when I was a still a moody high schooler. I got to watch 7 with my roommate during my first year of college across the country in New York. Opening weekend of 8, I was studying abroad at Oxford, and caught an IMAX screening with my friends (and same roommate!) in London, the weekend of my birthday. My long-distance partner at the time, who well knew about my Fast and Furious obsession by now, caught a viewing back in the States so we could talk about it. I watched Hobbs and Shaw while visiting my friend in Connecticut, nursing my wounds from a rough breakup. 9 came out ages later, when what felt like a lifetime had passed—I was out of college, had moved back from New York and was now a level designer for a video game studio in the first few months of my transition. And now, Fast X has come out literally a few days after a huge, life-changing surgery in my life, the same week.

It hasn’t been an even, smooth-sailing relationship with the series. I rewatch the later films less and less, it’s clear the series has never quite recovered from Paul Walker’s death or the departure of Justin Lin after his legendary hot streak from Tokyo Drift to Furious 6. (Even bringing Lin back for 9 didn’t do it!) But no matter how jaded I convince myself I am, with each new film announced, I find myself irrationally, giddily excited. In an era where I am more cynical, wary, and adult than ever, there is some eternal wellspring of childlike glee within me for any new Fast and Furious movie. And every time that joy bubbles up in me sitting down for another improbable sequel of this family pet franchise, a twang of sadness, comes, too. For I think of my father, and think of how happy he would be to see this series still going. His delighted laugh if he saw a muscle car fight a submarine, or a car drive out of an airplane. And maybe, if I let myself think about it, how proud he would be of me for who I’ve become and the life I’ve made for myself.

I have no clue how Fast X is. Recovering from surgery meant I had to break the streak and not go to the theater, and it could very well be trash. But I’m excited to watch it, and I’ll be just as stupid excited as any chance to sit down and watch a new one comes. I’m wary of the behavior of fandom, of deep, personal, and emotional allegiances to corporate properties like Marvel or Star Wars. Does that make me a hypocrite? Maybe. But I can’t help but feel there’s a difference. That as massive and calculated as new entries to the series are now, this has come forth from nothing but the sheer enthusiasm of its fans and its unlikely heart and success. This wasn’t a safe bet. This wasn’t meant to be a hit. It just was.

All because of sincere dorks like my mother, my father, and I.

Let no one say that Christopher Nolan is devoid of ambition.

A man who loses his memory every few minutes, his story told in reverse. A professional thief who not only breaks into his target's dreams, but creates those dreams for them to inhabit as well. An astronaut who saves the Earth by communicating with his daughter through space and time in a black hole. These are all interesting ideas in theory that could easily fall flat, or even be catastrophic trainwrecks, with the wrong execution. Now, mileage may vary with these fillms -- Interstellar/Dunkirk especially -- but for my money, Nolan has hit the mark perfectly almost every time. (With the glaring exception being The Dark Knight Rises, a film that he may not have even wanted to make.) There's a same-ness in his oeuvre, for sure, but they've all functioned on a purely dramatic level, while playing with mind-bending ideas most $250 million films wouldn't even attempt.

And Tenet, set in a world of international spies travelling backward through time, has all the same surface aspects of a successful Nolan outing. The premise is esoteric, but simple enough for audiences to "get" in a broad stroke: the future is waging war on our present, backwards through time. GOT IT. The cinematography and production design are slick, the music and atmosphere fit this "Twilight World" perfectly, the lead cast members give great performances, and the action scenes are suitably large in scope and ambition.

But despite all that, Tenet might be Nolan's weakest movie since The Dark Knight Rises. More than that, its problems are not the kind of nitpicky plot holes that entire YouTube channels have made a career from criticizing Nolan on, but fundamental dramatic missteps.

Now, that's a really harsh thing to say, so let me back up a bit and explain where this take comes from.

On Dead Wives

Critics have rightfully pointed out that Christopher Nolan goes back to the same problematic trope rather often -- the dead wife that gives our main (male) lead motivation and pathos. The death of Guy Pearce's wife in Memento set his quest for revenge in motion, which was manipulated by another party for their benefit; the death of Hugh Jackman's wife in The Prestige set his quest for revenge against Christian Bale; the death of Leonardo DiCaprio's wife in Inception set his quest to return home in mo -- okay, you get it. This is obviously not a great look for Nolan in 2020, and more than a little macabre for his wife, Emma Thomas, but these backstories serve a crucial function in the screenplay. They give the main characters a clear motivation the audience can follow, and they're executed pretty effectively. I'd argue Inception is one of the best uses of this trope, because not only does it give Cobb an initial motivation, but his obsession over his dead wife continues to complicate the story and create interesting new obstacles to overcome throughout. (Think of the "oh shit" moment when Mal shows up in the snow base to shoot Cillian Murphy in the back, and Cobb can't take the shot -- or that wonderfully creepy scene when Ariadne sees Cobb's dreams.) Of course, motivations don't need to be dead wives (god no), they just often show up like that in Nolan's work. It can be something as simple as "we need to get the hell off this beach" in Dunkirk.

So with that established, let's ask ourselves: "What is The Protagonist's motivation in Tenet?"

Seriously.

We know that he is a spy of some sort, likely working for the CIA or an equivalent. From the first real exposition in the story with his handler, we know that he is dedicated to "the mission." That he'll do whatever it takes to follow whatever orders he was given (a "tenet" if you will). Given that he has a barebones name like "The Protagonist", we can tell that his backstory/motivation is intentionally sparse, either for mystery or to let us focus on the plot as quickly as possible. Later on, we can infer that he wants to protect Kat from her abusive husband Sator, and there is supposed to be conflicting motivations between accomplishing "the mission" to stop Sator destroy time itself, and protecting Kat. Now, like I said earlier, a simple motivation can work -- but this is as thin as it gets. Even John Wick, which everyone lauded for its economy of storytelling and motivation (they killed my dog, I must kill them), took the time to establish why this dog was so important. We saw John grieve for his wife's loss (SO MANY DEAD WIVES), saw how the dog was one last gift to him from her, saw this bring some joy back in his life, however small -- and then the gangsters kill the dog, so when John is heartbroken and furious, we feel some of that too.

To that end, there is no "why" in Tenet for our main character but the plot itself -- save the world. Maybe more charitably, we can say the motivation for him is the same as the audience's, uncovering the mystery of what "tenet" means, as his handler tasks him. This kind of impersonal distance can work -- a lot of great thrillers are intentionally sparse on the character details -- but this puts a lot of importance on the plot, how intrigued we are in the mystery. Because The Protagonist has no stake in this for a long time, other than, "it's his job."

And the plot of Tenet is not particularly compelling.

Nolan’s Usually Good at Exposition, but…

In one scene, The Protagonist's handler tells him that there's a shadowy underbelly to the world he wants investigated, and all they know is the word "tenet." Cryptically, he says, "Use that word, but be careful where -- it may open some doors you want to, and others you don't" or something to that effect. Cue the very next scene, where the very first person he says "tenet" to in a labcoat reveals almost everything upfront. I'm not kidding. The scene goes:

"Tenet."

"So we've been seeing guns and bullets come backward through time, find out where they're coming from."

This starts a trend the movie never recovers from, where everyone The Protagonist comes into contact with already know more than him, and simply tell him what's happening as flatly as possible. This is a shadowy world of time travel that no one knows anything about! Except everyone you've ever met actually knows about it, and know more than you about it, to the point that there are dozens, if not hundreds of soldiers who are in on the time travel. This is getting dangerously close to just saying "durr, that's a plot hole", but it's more than that. It robs the main character, and therefore us as the audience, of the joy of discovery, something crucial in an action movie that's trying to play up the mysterious sci-fi angle as much as this one. Imagine The Matrix if there wasn't that 30 minute build-up to the "twist," if Neo asked Trinity at that night club, "What is the Matrix?" and she just said, "You live inside a simulation, your actual body is in a pod being harvested by machines. Bye!" That is almost every bit of exposition in Tenet. Even characters like Neil (Robert Pattinson) who aren't supposed to know anything, are revealed in a "twist" to actually have known everything about time travel since the beginning.

This is so strange, because Nolan is usually great at exposition. To go back to Inception, you have entire scenes that are just Arthur or Cobb explaining to Ariadne how the rules of the world work, but they're still compelling because there's drama there. Notice how in the exposition with Arthur and Ariadne, she's also teasing out the details of Cobb's inability to build dreams any more, learning more about Mal. Having these character dynamics help pure info-dump scenes, but that's pretty darn tough when your main character's entire reason for existing is "gotta do the thing."

The one potential upside of such cut-and-dry info dumps is that the audience (if their eyes don't glaze over) can follow the story clearly, but in Tenet, we don't even get that benefit, as the audio mix garbles the dialogue so thoroughly you just can't understand it without subtitles. Between that, and the overly convoluted plot of the middle of the film, ("We need to put pressure on this art dealer who's the wife of the bad man because she made a bad deal or lost this art piece that's worth millions of dollars for the bad man, so pose as an art guy yourself to put yourself in their circle, except now you're posing as an arms dealer for the bad man to work with and this involves the opera house from the beginning of the film somehow and AAAAAAAAAAA") it's really difficult to follow. Thus, a good chunk of Tenet is characters with no reason to care about each other, mumbling at each other in an inaudible audio mix about a plot I didn't understand but in the broadest strokes.

And that can be fiiiiiine, I don't need to get every little machination of the plot if at the end of the day, the big emotional moments and turns in the climactic action scenes are still understandable. So, are they? As the movie says, "Don't try to understand it, just feel it." Is there enough here to get out of my own way, and just "feel it?"

(Laughs nervously) Um.... no. Not really.

The Ending of Tenet FINALLY EXPLAINED!!!1

There's this misconception that Nolan movies, because they dabble in mysteriousness and big ideas, are somehow giant puzzles to solve even after you've finished watching them. Just today, while writing this and listening to S.T.A.Y. from Interstellar, I saw in the YouTube recommendations a video titled, "The Ending of Interstellar Finally Explained"... posted nine months ago. Now, you might not agree with some of the turns the end of Interstellar took (communicating through space and time in the middle of a black hole really did break some of the more left-brain viewers), but is the ending really that much of a mystery? Humans from the future gave Matthew McConaughey the equation to solve interstellar travel. He then gave this equation to his daughter, Murph, back on Earth. This saved humanity, and because we're dealing with, essentially, Space Magic at this point, he was teleported back to our solar system. He has a heartfelt goodbye with his daughter, and goes out to find a stranded Anne Hathaway. The End.

Inception had a similar reaction -- "woah, was Cobb really dreaming at the end or not? let's post hour-long videos trying to figure out the right answer, as if that's the important part of the movie!" I want to linger on this, because this ties into my issues with Tenet.

Let's clear this up right here and now -- Nolan movies are not meant to leave you scratching your head after watching them.

The core emotional beats are incredibly evident. Yes, there's a little bit of mystery at the beginning of these movies, but by the end, they have explained enough and established enough of the character motivations/relationships to land gut-punching emotional moments without even a word of dialogue. Think of the rows of Hugh Jackman's own cloned corpses at the end of The Prestige. Or think of Cillian Murphy finally having the reconciliation he's sought his entire life with his father near the end of Inception, holding a paper windmill from the one photo he put by his dying father's bedside. I tear up thinking about it now, that rush of catharsis with a distant family member, that is still a lie because this has all been constructed by Cobb for his own ends. Or, back to Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey has been slowly and surely drifting away from his daughter, the core relationship of the entire film. At the end, there is space mumbo jumbo about the "fourth dimension" and communicating through love, and messages from future humanity, but it all resonates and works anyway in that moment because he's finally reuniting with his daughter when he plucks those strings in the black hole. Murph, who thinks her father abandoned her for space travel, finally hears from him again, and realizes he's still out there and still loves her. All while also being the moment where humanity is saved -- it's cathartic stuff. Some people found it saccharine maybe, but no one missed what was being said there. To put it like Tenet might, you didn't have to understand it to "feel it." As crazy and convoluted as Nolan's machinations got, there was always a core emotional, dramatic thread to the story to keep the audience grounded.

This is what Tenet lacks entirely. I've already brought up my issues with the lack of character motivation, how the main character is the passenger in his own story thanks to the style of exposition, but the real killer here is what I haven't brought up yet, and that's basic comprehension of the big action scenes and climactic turns. For how Tenet has been marketed, this is the reason to see the movie -- watch the master of the big screen create the most elaborate, mind-bending action scenes you've ever seen!

In some ways, it delivers on this promise.

The craft and spectacle in the action scenes are very impressive. I can't imagine how much time and effort went into logic-ing out the choreography of that first hallway fight with the Protagonist's future self -- and it pays off. I don't understand much of what's happening moment to moment in that fight, but because it's a one on one fight, it's very easy to let it wash over you and just admire the spectacle of this guy being suplexed off the ground, or sliding forwards while writhing like he's being dragged backwards. Similarly, the truck heist in the middle of the film is fantastic, as the stakes are clear and the time travel doesn't get in the way of understanding them -- there's a case to steal from this truck, we are stealing this case, and now mysterious cars from the future are driving backwards on the highway to steal the case from us. Aspects of the time travel are clever as well, like the super clear visual language of going backwards by entering a vault, seeing both your past and future self walking along different sides of some partition glass. The first scene the Protagonist goes through one of these vaults is one of the more visually impressive shots in Nolan's career. Again, these all work because you might not understand the nitty gritty of the mechanics, but you understand what's happening in the overall story.

However, the longer Tenet runs, the more that moment-to-moment understanding slips away, as more and more complications are being thrown at the time travel rules. For instance, as the Protagonist first starts to go back in time to steal the case from Sator on the highway, it is an absolute nightmare to follow. You get the gist -- Sator has the case, Protagonist wants to get it back. But the scene now involves not just 2 parties: someone going forward through time, and someone going back through time. This now involves 3: 2 people going back through time, and 1 person going forward through time, which is really tough to parse in terms of visual storytelling, the bread and butter of action films. These things live or die by how much you understand in an action scene in a split-second, and by those standards, this scene fails. The Protagonist tries to intercept the case, but this somehow gives Sator the case. Even though he already had it. That is all I parsed from the scene, because it's very difficult to tell what's supposed to be a dramatic turn for the worse when you've already seen it happen earlier in the movie.

This continues with the climactic battle scene, which involves two entire armies fighting each other backward and forward through time at the same time in an abandoned quarry with some ruined buildings, easily the least impressive scene in the film. On the good guys' side, one platoon is going forward through time, and the other is going backward, attempting to defuse a bomb that's going to destroy all of time. But the bad guys also have one squad going forward and one squad going backward, and it becomes an indecipherable cluster, even after a five minute exposition dump explaining what the plan is. In here, it's harder to let it all wash over you, because the mechanics are no longer just details you can ignore, but crucial to understanding what's happening in the story. To the best of my understanding, the bomb gets buried after a tripwire explodes the entrance to the mine it's in, but Robert Pattinson goes from going backwards in time, to going forwards in time, only to go back again (I'm serious, he starts going in one squad or the other, but then uses one of those reversal vaults and AAAAAAAAAAA). It gets bad enough that the climactic showdown, involving the Protagonist trying to defuse the bomb, but being blocked by one of Sator's henchmen and a locked gate, is also tough to follow. This is important. This is your "yipee-ki-yay" Die Hard momentwhere, when all seems lost, the character's ingenuity turns the tables and saves the day. The problem? I don't know how he did so. He just stared at the lock and it got shot by Robert Pattinson or...

You know what. I'm boring even myself with this blow-by-blow. Let me just say I understood none of it other than the most basic "yay, he defused the bomb" or "oh no the bomb gonna explode." Yes, there are literally two fronts of time-warfare occurring at once here, but it boils down to lots of gunfire and explosions happening in reverse around the characters, so... it's a lot of effort for something that ends up imparting the exact same feeling as say, Black Hawk Down.

The bigger issue is that this admittedly clever premise starts to make the movie less interesting from a character or dramatic perspective. The big twists, like the fact that the second half of the movie is dedicated to going backward through the first half, means that there's very little tension because we've already seen it go fine before. Remember that hallway fight I praised? Well, you get to see it again, and the outcome goes the same. A fight scene where you know what happens is inherently less exciting, and that's a good chunk of Tenet. The characters don't get out unscathed either. We learn next to nothing about either Neil or the Protagonist, but, we learn that they become really good buddies in the future, so that's a lot of character development you can just hand-wave away. And this isn't a nit-picky thing, either -- Robert Pattinson was the best part of the movie, and the movie's clever ideas deprive us of seeing more interesting interactions with him. We never see his relationship with the Protagonist develop, never earn any camaraderie, so that when we learn he's marching off to his death in his last scene, it's an "awww", but not nearly as affecting as some similar moments in earlier Nolan movies.

The Protagonist gets even more scammed by this setup than Pattinson -- because, as it turns out, literally the entire Tenet program was founded by him... in the future. So the mysterious people he has been taking orders from are... himself. In his words, when he's talking to the Indian arms dealer -- "I thought I was taking orders from you. I was actually taking orders from myself, to you." Which, I see what they're going for, in a Matrix-y sense -- he's the One and doesn't even realize it. Heck, you could make an argument that his super slight character motivation and background is intentional for this twist -- his character arc is one of self-realization of agency, from taking orders to being the master of his own destiny. And that's pretty clever! The problem is that while this is satisfying in hindsight, it doesn't make the present moments in the film any more engaging. We just spent 2 and a half hours watching the main character be shuffled around from taskmaster to taskmaster, only to learn the ultimate taskmaster was HIMSELF! But that doesn't change the fact we watched him be an errand boy with no interior or motivation of his own throughout.

(As an example, imagine a twist in Grand Theft Auto, where all these characters give the protagonist meaningless errands to do, but at the end it turns out that the main character told those characters to tell him to do that. It works about as well as that. Which is to say, it doesn't.)

To continue the Matrix example a bit further -- even in that film, that hinges entirely on Neo being an ingenue who has to accept this power that has been bestowed upon him, there is a clear scene of self-realization. When he jumps off the helicopter to save Trinity, we all understand before even a line of dialogue occurs, that he is absolutely the One. Now imagine The Matrix where Neo does nothing, Trinity saves the day, but Morpheus calls at the end and says, "hey Neo, by the way, you're the One!" Tenet is a lot like that.

On that note, one last thing...

On Living Wives (Or The Women in the Nolanverse Who Get Short Shrift)

This is going to be a much smaller side note, but I thought it was worth pointing out -- Tenet is kind of unusually weird about women, even for a Nolan movie. Pretty much the entire emotional core of the story is attempting to revolve around Kat and her abusive husband Sator. In many ways, she has more character depth than the Protagonist. She has a motivation -- to protect her son. She has an obstacle -- her piece of shit husband might kill her if she sticks around, and he'll only let her go if she gives him her son as well. And she has an arc -- she goes from helpless to murdering the guy.

Now. Despite that, there are a lot of problems here. First, I don't think I need to point out how thin a character is who is entirely defined by her abusive relationship. Second, the movie goes for several cheap shots with her character. To establish what a bad dude Sator is, we get not one but two scenes of him verbally or physically abusing her, which doesn't make me hate the guy, it just makes me uncomfortable they put this on-screen. Third, her sole motivation being her child's wellbeing goes to pretty absurd lengths in the dialogue. One character says, "If this happens, the entire world will end!" to which she replies, "And my son will die!" No shit, really? Fourth, her largest contribution to the story -- killing Sator -- is marred by how the screenplay unintentionally paints her as reckless for doing this. Some pretty clear stakes are established near the end saying, "hey, make sure to only kill Sator if you get the signal, otherwise his dead man's switch to the bomb might go off and the world will end" (not to mention your son will die!) So, with that established, she doesn't get the signal, and she ends up killing him prematurely anyway. Sigh.

Elizabeth Debicki does well with the role, but man did she deserve more.

Also the triumphant scene of the film where the Protagonist realizes he's the ultimate badass is him shooting the Indian arms-dealer lady in the back of the head WHAT THE FUCK? That was like, one of three women in the movie you just killed, buddy!

Alright, Let's Wrap This Up

If you've made it all the way down here, thank you for your patience and time! I really appreciate it, and hopefully you enjoyed it. Sorry for the constant Matrix references, it just kinda cropped up given the similarity in genre.

A trailer for Fast and Furious 9 was released. Han’s back. That’s nice.

The Senate ruled 49-51 against calling any additional witnesses with crucial information in regard to the misconduct (to use a polite term) of Donald J. Trump. That’s not so nice.

And the final episodes of Bojack Horseman aired.

I still don’t know how to feel about it.

I have refrained from writing about Bojack Horseman for a lot of reasons. Everyone under the sun writes about it, as its cornucopia of obscure pop-culture references, scathing wit, and unflinching, brutal honesty about what can be so fundamentally broken about Us, in every sense of that word, makes it a perfect articulation of the disillusionment of the millennial generation. What could I add, other than another voice to the chorus? Also, as deeply as it has resonated with me, I never had an angle, that urge that simply had to exist. In reality, though, there was only one thing keeping me from writing about this show.

Fear. Fear that whatever I had to say about it, it already said itself. And better. One of the greatest compliments you can give a piece of art.

Now, with its conclusion, I still feel afraid to accidentally tread on its toes. But I do have perspective. And if ever there was a time we could definitively ask what Bojack Horseman is about, it’s now.

So what is Bojack Horseman about? And, warning here, I usually try to contextualize whatever I’m writing about in case you haven’t seen it yet, but that’s not the case here. If you haven’t seen Bojack, see Bojack. It’s worth it.

Is it the story of another broken, hurt man who hurts others in all too familiar ways? A Don Draper? A Walter White? The haunted prestige TV everyman? A guy whose behavior is so bad, it makes the rest of us look good by comparison (yet who we still relate with because we have the same feelings of regret, of shame, of depression and the feeling you just aren’t enough)? Or something altogether different?

So Bad, but So Good

The phrase I find myself continually returning to in how we talk about Bojack is, “It’s so awful and hard to watch, but it’s so good.” What do we mean when we say that? I heard this phrase so often around my college campus, which, as an odd, reclusive East-coast private liberal arts school, was no stranger to Bojack’s unique brand of hyper-clarity, yet total inability to fix his own behavior and how he hurt others. That exact descriptor could fit several people I’ve known.

With this phrase thrown around so much in describing the show, to people who most deeply related to the show, it almost became a truism, a shorthand. An excuse in multiple ways – that while there was emotional pain that show depicted, and indeed, could inflict, (don’t you know, watching traumatizing shows is a form of self-harm, how could you do that to yourself? Or so the thinking would go,) it had an Important message, and was clearly articulated and Meaningful, so the pain was worth it in a soul-searching kind of way, if you’re into that kind of thing. The phrase was also an excuse in that, we framed the conversation so people who didn’t want to see it were totally justified, the same way I might be justified not wanting to see the umpteenth Important War Movie. It might be Important, but it’s painful.

It’s so bad, but so good. The phrase says, “there’s so much good here past the pain. But if you can’t see past it, I get it.”

And I can’t stand it.

It implicitly divvies up and separates the deep pain, trauma, and heartbreak the show depicts, and the genuine emotional catharsis that can come from resolutions, (which are only so meaningful because of this strife,) when in truth, they are part of the same journey. And this isn’t just a college-grad-blog-with-a-too-expensive-education kinda thinking – these are the very basics of compelling drama, of compelling storytelling, and yes, meaningful interpretations of life.

And this particular journey, Bojack’s journey, has been with me through some of the most wondrous and heartbreaking years of my life. From bingeing the whole first season in one AudioVisual office shift because, well, I had the time, and I was curious (HA, what a horrible idea that was), to making a life halfway across the world, to the crestfallen realization, with Diane Nguyen and Mr. Peanutbutter, that I could no longer be with the love of my life. (“I’m just so tired of squinting.”) In a way, refusing to watch Bojack Horseman because it’s difficult is tantamount to turning your back on life as a whole. You can’t have the good without the bad.

I get it, that’s an extreme, almost sanctimonious thing to say. Not everyone is a sad movie nerd who lives vicariously through the shows and movies they watch. People learn these lessons about life through actually living it sometimes. I won’t hold it against anyone who has had their full share of woes without taking on those of an imaginary horse.

But it means something. Going back to that real life argument, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is a show that most deeply resonates with people who’ve lived lives where their biggest enemies are themselves. It’s not a substitute for experience. It’s a mirror for those with experience. Unflattering. No dressing room tricks of the light. But maybe, just maybe, upon reflection, we see the way forward.

Yes, on a horrible day, I would love to just watch the Fast 9 trailer again. John Cena is such a good fit for this series, Justin Lin gives the whole thing a wonderfully serious directorial style that rams right into Susan Sontag’s definition of camp and I really need to write that book, and – for Christ’s sake, a car swings like Spider-Man off a rope! I want nothing more than to stick my head into Fast and Furious land and pretend terrifying, latter-era Roman-republic (not exaggerating) political developments aren’t occurring. But unlike the phrase “so bad and so good” promises, I can’t just divide the bad and the good.  

And that’s where Bojack comes in. As the whole. Not as escape, but as a beautiful story that reminds us we can be better.

Bojack Isn’t Better Though

I wish there was a different way to write that last sentence, because it sounds so preachy. You know those people who keep arguing for video games and art’s relevance in purely utilitarian terms? You know the one. “Art serves to pass cultural and moral values down through society over time, it’s society reflecting on itself,” blah blah blah. Like all trees-for-the-forest-over-definitions, it’s not exactly wrong, but it does miss the feel of the thing, doesn’t it? Well, let me walk it back from that shitty territory.

When Bojack Horseman first began, it really felt like a slightly more acerbic version of a classic redemption tale. The story of one horse, man, thing, becoming a better person. Sure, Bojack kept digging himself in deeper holes, did shittier and shittier things, but at the end of every early season, he saw a way out. We saw a way out. But at the end of season 5, the light at the end of the tunnel began to fade. Suddenly, we saw there was no way for Bojack to ever completely redeem himself – at least, not in the absolute way we’ve come to expect from our stories.

Because, in between the show’s beginning and end, Harvey Weinstein happened.

That sounds hyperbolic, or like a too-topical reaching-too-far grab in an academic journal or third-rate online blog (wait a second), but it’s the truth. Allow me to mansplain for a second, not because I truly think anyone out there doesn’t know, but for the context and flow of the essay – the avalanche of allegations in Hollywood and other industries fundamentally altered our understanding of capital F capital M Flawed Men. Right? It sounds so obvious I feel stupid writing it, but it’s still worth acknowledging. Suddenly, our sexy Don Drapers and other antiheroes of the TV world stopped looking like fascinatingly complex portraits of pathos and more like -- sexual offenders at best, rapists at worst. Because they are. (In case my politics were unclear up to this point.)

Where does this fundamental shift in realization leave Bojack Horseman? The man who gave a 10 year old girl vodka, who almost slept with his lifelong crush’s underage (well, not in the state of New Mexico, blurgh) daughter, who made a move on his friend’s fiancé, who slept with that same 10 year old at 30 who he had come to see as his daughter?

It leaves him as a piece of shit. (As he happily tells himself.)

You can see the switch flip in season 5. The sickening realization in the writer’s room that if Bojack is totally redeemed by the end, as he’s on course to in season 4, that real people in the real world will use it to justify their own behavior. (See the success of Philbert and Diane’s rants on the world of prestige TV.) That a post Weinstein Bojack needs to face the music. So we get Gina, a real chance at a loving relationship, which ends with him threatening and strangling her. To make an understatement – it’s not fun watching this. It is certainly, by some perverse objective standard, worse TV than the electric season 4 (which may still be the best season in the show overall), but it works. It’s the necessary fall, the only honest outcome for Bojack’s behavior up to now.

By the end of season 6, we have seen Bojack achieve the redemption we always hoped for him, only to “lose it” (I say in quotes only because he hadn’t truly faced the weight of his actions) in the end, and almost lose everything, including his own life. The people in his life we always took for granted, Todd, Princess Carolyn, and most importantly, Diane, won’t even talk to him. Hollyhock cuts off all contact with him, leaving him with the horrible Vance Waggoner, who we see come scarily close to “Red Pill”-ing Bojack multiple times, talking about “PC Culture” this, “the Patriarchy is bullshit” that. By the end of the fourth to last episode, I was just hoping Bojack wouldn’t turn into a Jontron type.

By the end of the penultimate episode, I just hoped Bojack wouldn’t die.

In the final episode, that primal wish, that last gasp “I don’t care how bad his life is, I just want Bojack to live,” is granted, but no free passes are given. Bojack is sent to jail for breaking and entering; he leads a life, but a small, melancholy one. The whole thing has a beautiful “now what?” feel, and a fond farewell to the people that made Bojack’s life, and indeed, the show, worthwhile.

Beside Every Great Woman is an Okay Guy

It is in these final scenes that we come to realize, as much as this could have been a show about the Struggles of the Flawed Man, it has so much more with such an empathetic, open heart for its entire cast of characters, and such strong, remarkable women who Bojack has formed his life around, who are the real stars of the show (they certainly lead more fulfilling lives by the end).

The final scene with Diane and Bojack on the roof, recalling their first roof talk in season 1, doesn’t recontextualize the show so much as restate its core – the loving, strained, and sometimes outright broken relationship between the two. In Diane’s relationship with Bojack, we reach the show’s core questions. “How do we best treat those we love in our life who continue to hurt themselves and others?” “What boundary do we draw between ourselves and others?” And, to Bojack, who has asked this question of Diane since season 1 and always been disappointed: “Am I a good person?”

That last question haunts us all. After Bojack has done so much wrong, hurt so many so deeply, and after we have perhaps seen our worst tendencies in his behavior – it’s the question the show practically forces us to ask.

Bojack tells Diane he came up just to talk to her, because he likes talking to her. Diane, seeing both how he can think that, but also through to his deeper anxiety, starts talking about the last phone call he made to her before he almost killed himself. How he was drunk (meaning he lied about being sober), how he said he was going to “go for a swim,” that if she didn’t pick up respond he’d know she didn’t care and “go for a swim”. That in those 7 hours between the news that he wasn’t dead and Diane receiving that voicemail, she thought Bojack had killed himself because of her. Because she felt safe enough not to constantly worry about him. That it was her fault. And after learning he was still alive, that he had that horrible power over her.

From the previous episode, we know Bojack’s motivations for calling Diane didn’t come from an inherently abusive place – he called because he wanted to hear her voice. But in how that desire manifested, it’s clear – Bojack made Diane responsible for his wellbeing, his life, in that moment. This betrayal hits harder than all of his previous failings. Not just because it’s so horrible for Diane, who has finally found some sort of peace, but because it encapsulates the troubling dynamic of their entire relationship. As Diane says,

“I wish I could have been the person you thought I was. The person who would save you.”

“That was never your job.”

“Then why did you always make me feel like it was?”

Remember how Bojack and Diane’s relationship first started. He wanted her, possessively, romantically. And us, not knowing any better, likely rooted for him as he’s framed very sympathetically. When that failed, he made her his life coach. For better or worse, it became Diane’s job to give Bojack, not what he wanted, but what he needed. A stable friendship that wouldn’t put up with his bullshit. Sometimes, too often, perhaps, she let Bojack invade her boundaries, but in the end, became a rock in his life. Not the kind that anchors your entire being, but one that gives you the opportunity to stand up on your own. A crucial difference this show understands completely. These are perhaps the most important relationships we have in life, those that set boundaries with us and help us grow past our possessive instincts.

Even in these final moments, this boundary is being defended. The conversation lightens, and Diane refers to Guy as her “then-boyfriend,” as if they have broken up. For the smallest moment, even now knowing how important Diane and Bojack’s friendship as strictly a friendship is, the question is raised: are Bojack and Diane complete enough people on their own to be with each other now? But then I noticed she wasn’t showing her left hand. And sure enough, she soon reveals her left hand, wearing a wedding ring. Bojack starts to feel sorry for himself, jokingly asking if this is the last time they’ll ever speak.

Diane clearly thinks it is. And we have no reason to think otherwise.

As she gets up to leave, Bojack tells her that he has a “kinda” funny story to tell. And she stays. Soon, words run out, and they simply sit together, sometimes almost looking at each other and moving closer in a shot that’s very reminiscent of Before Sunrise. (Where Ehtan Hawke and Julie Delpy keep missing looks at each other while listening to a record.) While the context is very different, both shots communicate a similar feeling…

“Now what?”

Where Before Sunrise anticipates a romantic union, the final shot of Bojack sees the rest of life coming on. Whether we are ready or not.

The View from Halfway Down

In Bojack’s near-death hallucinations, Secretariat and his father have fused into one being. It makes some sense, as Secretariat was Bojack’s male role model in the vacuum of his biological father, the drunken failed novelist. As dead friends of Bojack gather and start to put on a show, Secretariat scoffs at the process of making peace, saying that his happiest moments in life were on the bridge he took his own life. Staring to the water below, taking in the air. But as the final doorway approaches, a poem he has written says otherwise. He describes “the view from halfway down,” the terror in the knowledge that he is definitely dying, the vain wish to not have jumped.

“If only I had known the view from halfway down.”

Watching the end, seeing Diane and Bojack simply sit there, with an uncertain future, but for the first time a chance to truly move on from their respective traumas, I felt the two characters sitting on a tipping point, about to plunge into the future, or back into the past. Are we at a similar tipping point? Or are we, by 2 votes, already experiencing “the view from halfway down?” Are we absolutely fucked?

Even writing this now, I feel a strange déjà vu, as if I’ve seen this scene in my life years and years earlier. My past self seems to pass judgment on the present– “you’re still thinking about these ideas? These people?” When you spend so long on a certain thought, a certain feeling, or a certain idea – in my case, the complexities of human relationship – you are always at a tipping point of a great new idea; in a much more real way, however, you are just continuing to fall down the same rabbit hole you decided to jump down years ago.

You can still see the moment. You had a crush, and rather than dismiss it as frivolous, you thought to follow that feeling as far as it would go. Not out of possessiveness, but out of belief that such feelings are mundane miracles. That even the smallest love was a form of grace that could always teach you more, that all the ugliness in the world you saw could be avoided if you didn’t try to hold on. What was so obvious then, so quickly decided then, has led you, simultaneously, to the joy that you were right, and the shame that you may have thought of this to curb your possessive tendencies in the first place. A worldview that showed me so many wondrous things but that I’m now trying to grow beyond.

If only I had known the view from halfway down.

Unlike Secretariat, however, I say this not with regret, but with exhaustion, and more than a little awe. And my, admittedly very biased, take on the message of Bojack Horseman is, in the end, a similar exhaustion and awe. A show that has a fierce, compassionate empathy for those who find themselves haflway down, and the belief that we, like its characters, can wake up from the nightmare.

As Bojack and Diane sit beneath the stars, Bojack grumbles, “Life’s a bitch and then you die.”

Diane responds, “Sometimes. Sometimes life’s a bitch, and then you keep living.”

Socrates (Again)

In Plato’s Symposium, various stodgy Greek men argue through dialogue the nature of love itself over dinner (as one does after one glass of wine too many). Socrates, Aristophanes, Alcibiades, and other “Es” get together to make “speeches in praise of love” but really just spat and try to come up with the hottest, long-winded-est takes of the evening about just what love really is. For those of you not born in the 300s BC, this was the idle Greek philosopher’s idea of a scathing Twitter thread.

The conversation eventually drifts away from love to some weird Platonic idea of greater Beauty and Truth that sounds an awful lot like religious sublimation—Socrates equates love to some philosophical step ladder in which at the end you have attained totally non-sexual divine enlightenment because of course he does. Yet, before Socrates performs that mic drop on the evening, Aristophanes has a (non-coincidentally) more oft-remembered speech that is far closer to our modern conception of love. He claims that there used to be a union of the sexes—nigh-divine intersexual humans with two heads, four hands, feet, etc. There were man-men, woman-women, and man-women. Eventually, though, the gods split them right down the middle as to have twice the sacrifices—man and woman. These halved souls forever seek each other to die in each other’s arms. In short—our soulmates are literally our missing half.

Leaving aside the queasy-making implications for queer sexuality this argument makes in a 21st century context (because men can clearly only ever romantically love women, right, thanks Aristophanes,)[1] it is easy to see how this portrayal of love affects us to this day, for better and worse. It’s beautiful and comforting to think there is someone that fits you that perfectly, that makes you that content, who is literally your divine-ordained other half, but it’s also scary to imagine never being enough for yourself—only ever being half a vessel. Forever incomplete.

There’s a cute line in Jerry Maguire that is the perfect modern articulation of this thought—we all remember it. Tom Cruise has come over to Renée Zellweger’s place to win her back, he’s making all the usually gossipy divorced ladies in the house go “aww” at his sweet, romantic gesture, and from across the room, he says, “You complete me.” It’s an incredible line, to be sure.

It also happens to be the one of the most insidious ideas we have ever had as a culture.

Scott Pilgrim Take 1

When I first saw Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, I absolutely adored it. I hadn’t actually dated any human being at this point, like any self-respecting antisocial misanthropic middle/high school mankin,[2] but I fell in and fell in hard with the ethos and romantic message of the film, especially the anti-hero characterization of the titular Scott Pilgrim. For those who are unaware, the film follows Scott Pilgrim through a magic video-game-tinged reality where he fights the seven evil exes of his new girlfriend Ramona Flowers, while also coming to grips with being kind of a shitty person and how he can change that. I loved the nonstop game references and whipsmart visual gags, for sure, but what pushed it over the edge for me was the fact that the film actively acknowledged what a flawed person Scott was. Here was a rom-com where the protagonist was absolutely in the wrong in many ways, who had to better himself before blindly leaping after the girl. Yes, 23-year-old Ari knows there are many films that do this better (and we’ll even talk about one of them!) but 14-year-old Ari’s mind was blown, okay?

That being said, even 14-year-old me knew that what the film was trying to say, and what was actually being said were in almost outright warfare with each other, that there was something kind of weird about a guy fighting seven video-game bosses to get the girl as a reward at the end with next to no earned relationship between the two. The final message, that Scott and Ramona are both flawed people but overcome these flaws to bravely grow together and not run away, resonated with me, even as I saw that these people really had nothing in common and kinda sucked together. It was the thought that counted, right?

Well, no, because at the same time I was coming to this conclusion, other ardent fans of the movie were insisting that Ramona was simply the wrong girl. Clearly, Scott should have kept dating the 17-year old Catholic school girl Knives Chau, right? Yeah, he’s 23, and yeah, she’s a high schooler, and yeah, it’s a fucking felony, but she likes video games just like he does! She’s a gamer girl! We’re all teenagers in 2010 and think the concept of an Actual Woman who likes games is a near-divine concept! Eat your heart out, godly intersexual beings of Aristophanes’ speech—the Gamer Girl is the real divine providence here! If you think I’m joking, here is a Real Internet Review of this movie from 2010:

Just to recontextualize, some quotes:

“A lot of you have already argued, that, hey, that’s the way the graphic novels are, the beginning of them is [sic] boring, stupid, and uninteresting, but you know what, this is a movie, I don’t care if it’s the way it’s supposed to be!”

“…Knives—who, by the way, I don’t know if anybody’s with me on this, but I’d rather be with Knives than Ramona. That’s just me… he lusts after Ramona. And then you ask yourself, why? Ramona is uninteresting, she’s not even really that hot… but then you realize that was the point of the movie. You go into movies expecting a certain thing, that would be like putting a tragic end into [this movie]… Sure it might be more profound and you’re saying a message…but it’s not a message that we want to hear… They will desire a different ending… Ultimately he has to make a decision between Knives and Ramona. He goes with what you think he’ll go and it just doesn’t seem right, especially when one of them is his true soulmate.”

Wow. Now, I admit I felt a little bad calling this guy out so baldly, and I might be cherry picking a bit because I’m sure not every fan (#notallfan) had this, honestly juvenile and entitled reading of the film, but this was absolutely the general tenor of the conversation around the movie. “Finally, a good video-game movie that all self-respecting nerds need to see! Kickass action! Boring talky bits with boring messages we don’t want to hear boo!” So, sorry, not sorry Angry Joe. But, as awful and misplaced as his argument is, he is reacting to a genuine emotional disconnect in the film. A lot of us did. It’s just one he did not articulate, one that he couldn’t. One, that, honestly, I couldn’t either. Not at 14.

Like Scott, we—and by we, I mean socially anxious, entitled, white “nice guy” gamer boys who put women on a pedestal and blamed anything but ourselves for our distance—had a lot of growing up to do. And like Scott, we kinda got away with not, despite lip service to the contrary. But we were about to lash out in embarrassingly public fashion, in an event that would change our perception of “gamer culture” forever, and maybe, just maybe, lay the groundwork to someday elect a racist orange as President of the United States.

And Scott Pilgrim is partly to blame.

Gamer Gate

In 2014, Zoe Quinn, an independent game developer who had the gall to be a woman in the field, broke up with a man named Eron Gjoni. This man proceeded to post a lengthy diatribe on Wordpress named “The Zoe Post” in which he essentially did the thing all frustrated, dumped men do, which is spit vitriol to whoever will listen. He accused her of infidelity, among other things, and was quickly banned from most reputable sources (Penny Arcade, Something Awful, among others), but his Wordpress post was shared onto 4chan’s forums. In case you haven’t had the displeasure—4chan is reddit but as an infinitely deeper cesspit full of involuntary celibates, Neo Nazis, and more! It’s a fun place. This more sympathetic audience created the name of their movement, all in the interest of defaming this one woman—“GamerGate.” This group of balanced individuals proceeded to begin a harassment campaign against Zoe Quinn and anyone who spoke out against them, claiming they were acting in the interest of “Ethics in video game journalism”, since Quinn slept with a journalist and that was clearly the only reason she got positive press on her game, right? (Coughcough we think all women are sluts and want to hide it behind lofty language about the ETHICS OF VIDEO GAME JOUR— sorry can’t finish that with a straight face.) This debacle continued for almost 2 years, as the very same people throwing misogynistic insults and death threats at women in the game development scene also created new accounts posing as feminists and progressives also against Zoe Quinn. Families were harassed, addresses leaked, death threats sent by the thousands, and guess who supported and fanned this free-thinking fire? None other than Milo Yiannopoulos, alt-right firebrand; or, if we’re not using euphemistic normalizing Newspeak—racist, sexist, bigot who got promoted to the head of Breitbart’s tech division for his actions during GamerGate! Yeah! GamerGate’s weaponization of the trolls of the internet was the groundwork for greater disinformation campaigns during the 2016 Presidential Election, and we all know how that went!  

Okay, deep breaths.

For an actually in-depth and far more terrifying look at these trends, please take the time to read this fantastic article by Dale Beran on 4chan’s connections with the rise of Trump, and this timeline on the events of GamerGate. It’s overwhelming, it’s exhausting, it’s depressing… but it’s important to understand.

Now, just a few paragraphs earlier, I said Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was partly to blame for this mess. That’s a little harsh. I don’t blame Edgar Wright,[3] the director of the film for electing Donald Trump. That would be ridiculous. What I do lay at Scott Pilgrim’s feet, however, is the continuation of normalizing women-as-rewards specifically for a gaming-oriented-audience.[4] Because 14-year-old-me was right in one respect—the film empathizes with and articulates Scott’s (and therefore gamer men’s) struggles and worldview with incredible precision. The same cannot be said, however, of the women of Scott Pilgrim, including Ramona.

Especially Ramona. And this discrepancy damn near sinks the whole film.

Scott Pilgrim Take Two

Originally coined by A.O. Scott to describe Kirsten Dunst’s character in Elizabethtown, and her total lack of interior character with the sole purpose to make Orlando Bloom’s life more quirky and interesting, the term “manic pixie dream girl” has since caught on like wildfire and been used to death (or are women in film simply underwritten? [the answer is yes]), but there is no better way to describe Ramona Flowers’ character in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

Throughout the film, she and Scott have no chemistry, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s (great) performance leads us to believe that she has no interest in him whatsoever. Every step forward as a couple between them feels less like enthusiastic consent between equals, and more like begrudging admissions extracted through coercion. Take, for example, the scene where Ramona delivers Scott’s package, and Scott uncomfortably keeps her there and refuses to sign for his package until she agrees to go on a date with him. Even the cinematography suggests something deeply uncomfortable is occurring here, as Scott is pushed up close into the frame and against the door, while Ramona is instinctively further back in the frame as if wanting to back away. He is imposing, she is diminished and passive. The final line of the scene, “If I say yes, will you sign for your damn package?” certainly doesn’t scream romance.

This is not an unusual feature for romantic comedies—plenty of films feature reluctant heroines being pushed by headstrong men who can’t take no for an answer (that’s a whole other essay). His Girl Friday gets great mileage out of this dynamic, making it the engine of the film’s dramatic structure. Bringing Up Baby even pokes fun and inverts this dynamic, with Katharine Hepburn badgering a poor Cary Grant until he falls in love with her, and we can’t help but ask if it is truly a newfound zest for life or Stockholm Syndrome. The key difference, though, and why Scott Pilgrim fails with this attempted dynamic, is that His Girl Friday knows this courtship is problematic. Cary Grant plays Rosalind Russell’s ex, and a slimy ex on top of that! As he schemes and manipulates and draws her deeper into bad old habits, we have fun seeing him go to work, and so does she. But we are also made deeply aware that this is unhealthy. In that paradox, there is a tension that drives the entire movie forward. Scott Pilgrim has no such nuance. We do not see Ramona have fun with Scott, we just see him moon over her as she inexplicably keeps dating him. Without that mischievous His Girl Friday energy, we are not co-conspirators to a thrilling affair—we are witnesses to a yowling cat being dragged by its tail as it sinks its claws into the ground in vain. It’s not fun. It’s just kind of awkward and uncomfortable.

Perhaps worse is Ramona’s eventual admission that Scott is “the nicest guy she’s ever dated,” despite him being characterized as an absolute bastard by everyone else in the film. Even Scott himself admits, “That’s kind of sad.” In defter hands, this would be the launching point for greater introspection, but the film doesn’t develop this further, instead treating it as the catch-all for why Ramona is with Scott, inadvertently validating every “nice guy” bullshit argument men have ever had.

Ramona’s only potential moment of agency is in breaking up with Scott for how he has treated her thus far—a time when she can put her foot down and say she deserves better, or has her own life to get to. A My Fair Lady moment, if you will. But while she does break up with Scott, she does so to go back to her ex Gideon who she’s never really gotten over (not great), and it is later revealed that she was actually being mind controlled by Gideon at the time, so this was never her decision to begin with. At least Audrey Hepburn chose to take Rex Harrison back.

After the climactic fight with Gideon, the biggest, baddest, evil ex of them all, where much ado is made about Scott earning the “Power of Love”—no wait, now the “Power of Self Respect”, we see him draw a flaming colored sword from his chest on both occasions—Scott asks if he and Ramona can get back together, and she says yes, despite him not having grown as a character at all. He still cheated on Ramona and Knives—he may have admitted it, but he never meaningfully made it up to them. The change is symbolized and signaled, but… it never actually occurs.

Perhaps no moment is more indicative of Scott’s stasis than his confrontation with Nega Scott. After Gideon is defeated, the soundtrack goes quiet and we hear Gideon say, “You can defeat me, but can you defeat… yourself?” And from the ether appears a black-and-white Scott with red eyes, a symbol of his own demons and all the ways he hurts himself and those around him. It’s classic shadow self stuff, but it’s a great opportunity for Scott to visually (for film is a visual medium, after all) confront his worst self and demonstrate change to the audience. In Hero’s Journey terms, this is the Return Home, where we’ve been told the character has grown, but we need one last test, one last crucible to see it for ourselves and really believe it. Given that 95% of the movie has built up how flawed Scott is, we especially need this scene. Ramona and Knives offer help, but Scott refuses, saying he has to confront this alone. The anticipation builds, Scott and Nega Scott are framed opposing each other in profile on the screen, a video-game announcer bellows, “Solo Round!”, and…

We cut to Scott and Nega Scott walking out the front door, chit chatting about brunch and waffles, with a lunch date set for next week. “What happened?” Knives asks. “Oh, nothing, we just shot the shit. He’s actually a really nice guy!” Scott replies.

…

…..

I cannot overstate my disappointment with this conclusion. An earlier draft of this had me saying, “You motherfucker!” but that felt a bit dramatic. Let me explain slightly more calmly. This is a cheat. This is a moment that is tonally appropriate and cute in the moment, yet one that undermines the entire dramatic foundation of the movie. We have spent the entire film shitting on Scott. Literally every other character in the movie has taken him to task for being an insensitive, selfish, cheating bastard. Kim, his ex-girlfriend and drummer in the band constantly calls Scott “scum” and it never gets old. Julie, his acquaintance/enemy frequently cusses him out and calls him a “wannabe ladykiller jerky-jerk.” His roommate Wallace says to Knives, “You’re too good for him. Run.” His sister Stacy… you get the idea. We have so much great dialogue and so many hints from the supporting cast suggesting that Scott is going to get his comeuppance… but he never does. All of these consistent, albeit shallow characters are relegated to little more than lampshading[5] for Scott’s bullshit, giving us the impression of a world with consequences and change when none really exists. “We get it,” the cast of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World says. “Scott sucks.” This self-awareness buys faith with the audience for much of the film, but by the end—when Ramona still chooses to be with Scott, when all of his friends rally behind him to defeat Gideon, when Knives still likes him despite cheating on her—it’s rendered entirely ineffectual.

And so, for this visually beautiful, hysterical, frenetically paced, perfectly directed, edited, and performed navel-gazing weaponization of gamerdom and the angst of self-absorbed men, there really is no more perfect ending than Scott confronting his darkest self, and saying “Okay! Nothing wrong here! I’m awesome!”

Video games are awesome, Scott Pilgrim says. You’re awesome for liking them, Scott Pilgrim says. There is nothing wrong with you. And women? They’ll come to you. Eventually. Why? Well, we don’t really know.

High Fidelity

While Scott Pilgrim has quite a few problems, High Fidelity takes a very similar premise and crafts one of the greatest romantic comedies of all time from it. Starring a latter-day, comically jaded John Cusack, the film follows Rob Gordon as his girlfriend Laura has just broken up with him and is leaving the apartment. In an immature power play, he yells after her that she is not even in his “top 5 worst breakups of all-time” list, and may only barely sneak into the top 10. “If you really wanted to screw me up, you should have gotten to me earlier!” he yells from his window.

From there, he goes down memory lane, remembering and eventually contacting his 5 biggest exes, arguing with his coworkers at his record store and navigating his awkward new standing with Laura along the way. It’s a premise that could easily become aimless, but the stellar script and Cusack’s fourth-wall breaking keep the exposition-heavy first act light. As he recounts his most memorable (or traumatic) romantic experiences, we get the sense he is not an amazing guy. He broke up with his high school girlfriend Penny because she wouldn’t let him touch her breasts while making out, or have sex with him. He reacts to every misfortune and dumping in his life as a personal slight, marking himself “doomed to be rejected.” At the end of the first act, our opinion of Rob is solidified as he lists, finally, just what he did to make Laura leave. He cheated on her while she was pregnant, borrowed money from her and never returned it, and even mentioned that he was looking for other people while dating her. It is here that we also learn, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Laura is the true number 5 ex on his all-time list. Perhaps sensing the audience turning against him, he narrates, “Did I do and say all those things?” “Yes,” a conversation between Laura and a mutual friend interjects. “No!” the mutual friend proclaims in shock. “Yes.” Rob confirms, looking the camera dead in the eye, Cusack’s natural charm taking a sharper, more caustic edge in the moment. “I am a fucking asshole.”

I needn’t mention that this is a greater level of self-awareness than Scott Pilgrim mustered, but it goes further from there, putting Rob on a truly deserved redemption arc. He messes up, he has flaws, and he even gets worse from Act 1 onward for a bit, but he learns from his mistakes and gets on the path to becoming, maybe, just maybe, a good enough man for Laura. It helps that High Fidelity has one of the most dryly funny scripts I’ve seen, poking fun at Rob’s tendencies. In one scene, after being dumped by his college girlfriend Charlie, he yells, “Charlie, you fucking bitch! Let’s work it out!” In just two sentences, the movie perfectly cuts into the paradox and intense emotions of breaking up, and it displays this insight again and again. By the end of the movie, with Laura back in his life, and everything seemingly perfect, Rob almost cheats on Laura again on a whim—and realizes that he is his own greatest obstacle. At the end of the film, Rob states, “I’m making a mix tape for Laura. Full of songs she’d like. For the first time, I can see how that’s done.” At the end of his journey, he escapes his own rabbit hole of memories, his self-centeredness, and sees Laura as her own human being, in direct contrast to Scott and Ramona.  

Of course, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is not an original story—it is a film adaptation of a graphic novel. In doing due diligence, I had to read the source material, which is not only different, but addresses many of my concerns…

But that only raised more concerns.

To hint at the problem:

I may think Rob is worthy of redemption, but that is far from the only valid reading.

Philadelphia, 2017

On a sweltering June day, Diane and I sat down next to each other by a window seat in the train to the northern suburbs, uncomfortably fidgeting. In five days, we had still not become fully settled in each other’s presence. It was understandable. We had only just kissed for the first time five days ago since my plane from England landed, and this was the first time I had occupied this much space with someone for such a prolonged period. I sat stiff by her side.

I felt it was nerves and inexperience. She felt I was distant and didn’t want to be with her. I would learn that part later.

“So, what did you think of the movie?” I asked. 

“It was fine,” she shrugged.

“I think High Fidelity is an interesting counterpoint to Say Anything. Like, Say Anything is so idealistic, it’s almost unrealistic. But in High Fidelity, John Cusack is such a flawed guy, and we get to see him grow up.”

“I guess. I’ve just known too many guys like that.” she replied.

Tumbling Memories

Unlike the film, the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels have an eerie, dreamlike quality as present events and crucial flashbacks blend into one other without warning. Even in the comic’s most straightforward moments, time rarely moves reliably—the turn of a page can take the reader forward one second or one hour, with no obvious cues as to when we have jumped to. Scott and Ramona’s own sordid love histories are drawn in far more detail, as Scott in particular dreams his flashbacks, only to have Ramona intrude in the present day, begging him to wake up.  

Between this and the darker color palette of the comics—seriously, look at some full color screenshots, and note how much grimmer the ambience is compared to the film’s cheery hues—there is a strange feeling of dread that accompanies each page. Knives is now a tragic figure, with the comic taking time to notice her alone on rooftops, with her ex Scott nowhere in sight (something rarely afforded the character in the film). The story is much franker about the angst of 20-something existence, as the characters are all trapped in a sort of perpetual ennui about finances and their futures.

Ramona herself is more characterized and fully drawn in as a person. With no runtime constraining the story, we see more of Scott and Ramona just being together—you know, having fun, actually seeming like they like each other.  Ramona is still a manic pixie dream girl, but we see what the original intention for their characters are—smitten, but deeply hesitant, wounded, and uneasy from past experience. Not all of Ramona’s characterizations are flattering—unlike the film, we get a genuine impression that she’s pushing Scott away and has a teetering relationship with substances.

The middle section of the series, especially, is permeated with a sense of growing dread as Scott and Ramona’s distance and sniping grows more and more pronounced between bouts of confronting evil exes. Ramona, having cheated on all her previous partners, suspects Scott of the same with others. She is disturbed by Scott’s relationship with Envy Adams—who takes a much more blatantly antagonistic role in the story of the comic—seeing it as a sign that perhaps Scott might not be as sweet as he seems. Who we choose to be with says something about us, after all. The end of the second act turns the screws especially tight, as an ex sleeps over at Ramona’s place, and she misinterprets how Scott slept at an old friend’s house. All hell is about to break loose, when Scott finally tells Ramona that he loves her. Shocked, she says she loves him too, and they embrace. In that moment, we understand the uneasy pact they have made (as well as why they are together):

These two are each other’s only hopes of being understood. They have agreed to accept in each other what no one else will. With all the good and ill that promises. 

England, 2017

Earlier in the year. I curled up sideways into my blanket, my laptop propped up on my nightstand. On the screen, Diane lay on her side, softly, sleepily smiling.

“Is there anything you want to say? Anything you might be saving for Philadelphia?” she asked.

“I really want to say it.”

“I think I know what you’re talking about.” 

I laughed. “Yeah, gee, I wonder what it could be?”

Diane went silent.

“I love you.”

I paused for a moment, the words clear in my head, but heavy on my tongue. I meant them—that’s why they carried enormous weight.

“I love you too.”

The Glow

Ramona’s character, in the film and to a lesser extent the comic books, is defined by a vague sense of guilt that forces her to always run away from her problems. “I’ve dabbled in being a bitch,” she says, alongside “My last job is a long story filled with sighs.” Like Scott (as evidenced by the erratic, constantly flashing back structure of the comic), she is seemingly forever trapped in the past. She keeps her feelings close to her chest—and by close to her chest, I mean they are very obvious but she often refuses to communicate them.  

A huge difference from the film is Ramona’s tendency to glow whenever memories from her past are triggered. Any time she starts to glow, you know the current proceedings are going sideways and quickly. By the end, we learn that this glow is associated with her self-hatred—a power that simultaneously lets her become incredibly powerful at points in the story while also hurting herself, and indeed, being entirely fueled by self-loathing, you can’t imagine that’s healthy.  

While there is a mind control storyline in the comics, it’s subtler than the film. We learn Gideon has implanted himself in people’s minds, influencing people’s decisions rather than outright controlling them. It does put the comic in a bit of an interesting bind, as it has to draw the lines between: Scott’s power, Ramona’s glow power, Gideon’s mind control power, what effects what and how this mythology all really works together. In the ending battle, I was enthralled (especially since Ramona got to kick Gideon’s ass herself), but also very lost as to the particulars of the supernatural abilities, and sort of just letting it all wash over me. This is a shame, because up to this point, all of the powers and moments had very specific metaphors for the real world, and the comics lost an important moment to make a clearer statement in the confusion. That being said, I won’t complain too much. Ramona, rather than going to Gideon when leaving Scott, goes to her parent’s place to be by herself—of her own free will! There’s even a great “gotcha” moment where Scott goes, “But I thought you had her!” and Gideon says the same.

Also telling is how much better handled Nega Scott is in the comics. Nega Scott appears as a physical manifestation of all the terrible things Scott wants to forget. As he fights himself, struggling to repress his memories, Kim urges him to remember, otherwise he won’t be able to change. Eventually, he calms down, and simply stares at Nega Scott. Nega Scott disappears.

In addition to being a more satisfying moment of acceptance and change for Scott, this also parallels with Ramona’s need to stop hating herself and running away. Hey, our romantic leads have something explicitly in common. Go figure, any attempt at characterization at all can help a relationship in a story feel organic! 

But with that realization, something else comes to mind: in the film we could criticize Ramona of being a manic pixie dream girl who only existed to continue making Scott’s life better no matter how much he messed up. But in the Scott Pilgrim comics, despite being fleshed out and a much more compelling character overall, Ramona ultimately serves a utilitarian purpose in regards to Scott…

She is the avatar of his emotions.

Put more plainly, in the story, Ramona represents Scott’s struggle to accept himself. We can tell this, because in the last pages of the book, they are describing the exact same struggle and bond over this. They both describe how hard it is to change, and how they can perhaps change together. And maybe, just maybe, Ramona taught Scott how to cha—oh god dammit we’re back to the manic pixie dream girl thing again, aren’t we!? Just executed more effectively!

It’s not just Ramona, either—female characters around Scott tend to just highlight a particular aspect of his personality or a character flaw. Envy is Scott’s shittier tendencies given form, literally saying the same questionable things Scott has (but a few pages later) so we know that Scott became an asshole because of Envy. Well, isn’t that great. Blame the lady. Characters even say at one point, “Scott was different before Envy.” Yes, breakups and bad relationships can be formative for the worse, and if there’s any environment to explore that idea, it’s this series, which is honestly all bad relationships and the fallout of breakups. (There were next to no battles. I was very much okay with this, as disappointed as say, Angry Joe might be.) But doing such a simple 1:1 with Envy and Scott feels… cheap.

Of course, it’s not just Scott Pilgrim that treats women as a catalyst to express the inner emotions of men. It’s most masculine art. Ever.

The Nightingale

John Keats was one of the most feminine-obsessed poets of Second Generation Romanticism while also being deathly afraid or in awe of women. Keats was a rather sensual poet, not just in the sense of sexuality but in how focused on human sensation he was—touch, smell, taste. And in almost all of his poetry these senses are overwhelmed by a higher being, whether it be Psyche, or the Nightingale, or La Belle Dame Sans Merci—and these forces are overwhelmingly feminine.

In his famous “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats writes, not praise of the bird and its sweet sound, but a deeply anguished fall inward. Though he is addressing a creature of the stars and sky, one who is often a symbol of the Muse and upward transcendence, from the very beginning, he sinks deeper and deeper into depression.[6] “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, / Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:” Note that, in the first few lines of the stanza, our titular Nightingale, the subject of this Ode, has not even been mentioned yet. Instead, the focus is on Keats, and implicitly, the Nightingale’s effect on him.

England, 2017

“Sometimes I wonder why you’re with me.”

“Because I like being with you. I wouldn’t be with you otherwise.” 

“I can’t believe that. You’re too good.”

The Nightingale

In later lines, we see Keats’ drowsy, sinking affect take on a more urgent tone as he attempts to join the Nightingale in starry light… “Away! away! for I will fly to thee, / Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, / But on the viewless wings of Poesy, / Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: / Already with thee! tender is the night, / And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, / Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;”  

…only to stumble further into darkness.  

“But here there is no light,”

“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, 

         Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs…” 

Philadelphia, 2017

Our last night together, waiting for a train in the dark. One of the few comfortable silences of the week.

“Your mother is going to hate me.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to hurt you. This is going to get so much worse before it gets better.” 

“What if I’m okay with that?” 

“You won’t be.”

The Glow

As Scott fights the Katayanagi twins, Ramona’s 5th and 6th evil exes, they shout at him that Ramona cheated on them, that her fear of Scott cheating on her is projection, that she’s likely packing her bags to run away again as they speak. As Scott reels from this information, Kim, who has been kidnapped by the twins and is currently trapped in a cage, performs the most selfless, noble act in the entire story. She opens her phone and yells to Scott, “Ramona just sent me a text. She can’t wait for you to come home. She believes in you.”

The comic panel shifts to Kim’s perspective. We see her phone. There is no text.

The Nightingale

It is near the end of the poem we realize that Keats is sinking, not just into depression, but himself, imprisoned by his emotions, specifically, “Forlorn.”

“Forlorn! the very word is like a bell 

         To toll me back from thee to my sole self! 

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well 

         As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.”

Despite his mind and heart’s greatest efforts, he recedes into his own ennui, cursing “fancy” (imagination) as a “deceiving elf,” who cannot cheat him away from himself. He cannot reach the Nightingale, yet he is also the one who has elevated the Nightingale to such a mythological, longing and yearning status to begin with.

The poetic and emotional resonance of the nightingale as a symbol originates with Philomela. The Greek myth of Philomela describes her as a princess of Athens, brutally raped by King Tereus of Thrace. Afterward, he cuts out her tongue to prevent her from telling anyone what befell her. She weaves a tapestry, tells a visual story in order to get the truth out. Once Procne (Philomela’s sister) sees this tapestry, she murders Tereus’ son and feeds his son to him. In a revenge-filled rage, Tereus chases the sisters with an axe. In desperation, once Tereus has nearly caught them, Philomela prays to the gods to be turned into birds as to escape his wrath.

Philomela is turned into a nightingale. Procne into a swallow.

In nature, female nightingales are mute. Only the males may sing.

The Glow

Scott rushes back to Ramona’s place, only to see her already on her bed, dressed to leave with a bag packed. He says he doesn’t care what the Katayanagis have said, that people can change and she’s not a bad person.

Ramona insists otherwise, thanks Scott, and glows brighter than she ever has before.

When the light disappears, Ramona has vanished. 

New York, 2019

Reading Scott Pilgrim is a bit like diving into your own personal romantic miasma.

Scott’s behavior, much like Rob’s in High Fidelity, forces us to examine our own, putting an unflattering mirror to the masculine condition. The dream-like, uneasy structure of the graphic novel reflects, not just Scott’s scattershot and unreliable memory of his actions, but the feeling any of us have diving a little too far in the deep end of our own worst memories.

Putting the book down for a moment, I had to just stand there and reel before walking downstairs to finish my laundry. As I stood bent over the stairway railing, I felt myself falling and falling, “Lethe-wards,” as Keats would put it, into memories from years past I swore I had digested and appreciated ages ago. I could see myself as a speck, drifting into a vast, tumultuous, black ocean of feeling, all summoned by one panel: an image of Ramona, lying awake in bed next to Scott, feeling—as the reader does—that dreadful distance, the one you love drifting further and further apart inch by inch. Remembering myself lying awake like that, being so close yet so distant to someone.

There’s another especially heartbreaking scene in the comic, where we see Scott losing his virginity to Kim in the back of a car. Kim, who we know Scott will soon dump unceremoniously as he moves away. Kim, who Scott won’t even remember most of the time afterward. Kim, who years and multiple heartbreaks later, will still have Scott’s back and try to save his relationship with another woman. As they curl underneath a blanket, she says, “Listen to this song. It’s a really good song.”

…directly referencing the sex scene from Say Anything, one of my favorite romantic comedies of all time, but in a much more painful context. One of Diane Court, the so-perfect-she’s-almost-boring woman having sex, not with Lloyd Dobbler, the best movie man ever (I’m just saying), but to Scott Pilgrim. An asshole. A guy.[7]

Diane often liked to say that we were like Lloyd and Diane in Say Anything. She said I was her Diane Court, this person she admired so much going off to England for a year. I remember upon first hearing that, thinking it was so sweet. And it was, obviously. But I also didn’t like being on a pedestal. I came to resent her for that.

But as time passes, I’ve come to think that she didn’t like being put on a pedestal either. And that I definitely put her there.

Seeing that throwaway reference in Scott Pilgrim just launched a flood of thoughts and angry feelings toward the comic. “How dare it subvert and take one of the sweetest romcoms in cinema away from me? This is so messed up to be referencing Say Anything in this context!”

But Say Anything, just like Aristophanes’ myth in the Symposium, may just be reaping what it sowed.

We’re Nearly Done, I Swear

Say Anything, among other things, was Cameron Crowe’s first directorial effort. More observant readers may have already noticed that this isn’t the first Cameron Crowe I’ve name-dropped and built my arguments on throughout this essay, too—he was the director and writer for Jerry Maguire and the less-fortunate Elizabethtown.

In Crowe’s filmography, there’s a very simple, singular, powerful ethos tying it all together, one that veers into saccharine naïveté at his worst and soars into endearing optimism at his best: he believes in the Platonic idea of soulmates. For example, he wrote Say Anything as a tribute to the first love of his life: “In many ways… Say Anything is a tribute to the first girl I really fell in love with… And yes, I used to drive by her house late at night, listening to music, feeling like a sap and somehow heroic at the same time. She was already with someone new, but I was going to wave the flag of our great love, even if I was the only one at the ceremony.” This idea of yearning is expressed in its simplest, most raw and powerful form with Jerry Maguire’s “You complete me.” It’s a line I have always loved while hating what it implicated, a sentiment that works so beautifully within the framework of the film but advances Neo-Platonism to unsuspecting moviegoers with that poisonous thought: “You are not whole. You are not complete. This hole can only be filled by another person.”

What sadder and more perfect culmination of this thought process is there than Elizabethtown,[8] a saccharine affair in which neither romantic lead is a complete character on their own, neither Orlando Bloom nor Kirsten “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” Dunst, but instead must form an amorphous, bland, romantic blob as one? And how perfect is it that the guy who most effectively argues for traditional “soulmates” in his movies is also the one who creates the most damning caricature of the concept?[9]

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the film, cribs from Crowe’s worst work, while the comic intentionally subverts and challenges some of his best. It’s a weird connection to make, but it works. We can trace a line from Plato and Philomela, to Neo-Platonism and Romantic-era poetry, to Cameron Crowe, to every version of Scott Pilgrim, to Gamer-Gate, to our own (probably shitty) romantic experiences in life with a single idea:

Our idea of love itself, and therefore how it is represented in art, is inherently broken and robs women of agency.

The female nightingale is mute. Only the male sings.

Scott Pilgrim, as a comic, is so much better than the film, and I am grateful to have read it and for all the thoughts it provoked. I had a genuinely profound emotional impact from it that cannot and should not be undersold. It’s a great book. But that doesn’t avoid the ugly truth:

Scott Pilgrim only works as an exploration of Scott’s interior being. As romance, it’s paper-thin, but as an exploration of the angst of a deeply flawed 20-something dude, it works like gangbusters and captures those emotions perfectly. Ode to a Nightingale isn’t about a Nightingale, so much as it’s about Keats’ failed attempts to escape himself. Me writing about Diane, while it served many other purposes, also primarily conveyed what I —a white 20-something guy—felt in reaction to a lady. And at times, these all seem like generally smaller flaws in the grand scheme of things. Some would certainly say that these examples aren’t outright misogyny, at least. Scott Pilgrim isn’t “grabbing them by the pussy.” It’s harmless, let the gamer guys have their escapist fun! Let the guys write about their feelings however they want!

But see—these slights are only innocuous as long as people don’t try to escape them or remedy them. Sexism in games is no big deal, until someone has the gall to bring it up—then they’ll face a shitstorm of death threats and doxes and tweets and angry men saying “keep politics out of my games!” The role of women in the video game industry has been elevated enough that certainly we can stop talking about it, right until someone actually talks about it—in which case we get Gamer-Gate. The ingrained masculine perspective in art is fine and certainly slowly changing—until a few other perspectives are introduced and “oh my god aren’t there enough chick flicks already?”

But this is just how things are, right? How can you help what you feel toward the people you love, how can we re-examine centuries of romantic theory?

Just One More Reference

There’s a great scene in Don Quixote in which a man in a local town has literally died of a broken heart over a woman named Marcela. According to the townsfolk that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza speak to, Marcela is a cruel villainess, who has led the man on only to spurn his affections, and she should accept responsibility for his death.

Upon actually seeing Marcela, though, the pair see someone quite different. Marcela, about to depart into the mountains, lambasts the townspeople for their treatment of her. She says she informed the man over and over she did not love him, did not want to be with him. Her wishes should be respected as well, she says, as she wants nothing more than to live alone in the mountains as a shepherd.  It was his doggedness, she claims, his insistence to suffer over her, for fear of not being complete on his own, that he died.

Conclusion

Contrary to what Plato once wrote in the Symposium, we are our own complete people. To delude ourselves into thinking otherwise is to lay down responsibility for our own happiness, an act of suffering. To enforce others into believing otherwise is outright cruelty.

Like Kim telling Scott he has a text from Ramona, Neo-Platonism and the idea that our soulmates are literally our other halves is a lie, albeit a moving one. But as sweet as it can be, it can lead to real toxicity, bile, and yes, suffering.

Unlike what Aristophanes told us, we can be our wild, four-armed, Greek, intersexual god-things. And once we realize that, maybe we can realize the most important lesson of all…

… 

That Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is kind of a mediocre movie and we can do a lot better.

[1] In more detail: Aristophanes says that the halves of woman-women form “female attachments and friendships” (no homo) and that man-men have “pure and manly affection”, but, kind of adorably, “cannot tell what they want of one another” (NO HOMO REALLY). All you halves of man-women out there are SUPER SLUTS in Aristophanes’ eyes, though!

[2] Lord Byron’s favorite insult of John Keats’ perpetual boyhood in both temperament and station in life.

[3] Although I don’t think it’s a coincidence that next to none of Edgar Wright’s work has had any notable female romantic leads, aside from Liz in Shaun of the Dead.

[4] The film really is an expensive production of “Your princess is in another castle!”

[5] Inserting referential lines of dialogue that acknowledge how bad or strange a part of a story is, in an attempt to earn audience trust. See here, Linda Hamilton acknowledging the plot of The Terminator is absolutely bonkers if you spend one moment thinking about the time travel at the end of the film.

[6] Certain Deconstructionist critics like Paul de Man would like to say this is a failing on his part – that he attempts the visionary and falls into the melancholy. I believe the two are linked, and always have been.

[7] “The world is full of guys, Lloyd! Be a man.”

[8] Yes, Cameron Crowe later made Aloha, which is worse. We don’t talk about Aloha.

[9] Also worthy of note: Cameron Crowe’s most interesting film is also the most critical of putting others on a pedestal: Vanilla Sky. In it, Tom Cruise gets into a horrible accident, pumps up Penelope Cruz as the love of his life, but ends up being horribly (rightfully) rejected and sad for using her to prop himself up, and ends up escaping into a VR simulation of life (I am not kidding!) in which everything worked out how he wanted it to, but his own guilt turns the dream into a nightmare, much like the graphic novel version of Scott Pilgrim.

Tl;dr Vanilla Sky is really good and weirdly relevant to this exact paper and you should see it.

Socrates. Huh?

Thrice Removed From Reality

In The Republic of Plato, Socrates makes the argument that art is an imitation “thrice removed from reality.” (Book X) The truest reality to Socrates is that of nature, landscapes, animals, and life itself, the gods being the most powerful crafters for this act of creation (an odd idea, but then again, The Republic is an odd book.) After this comes carpenters, artisans among humankind who are merely imitating nature, but bring forth something physical and useful to the real world. And then, there are poets, imitators of imitations, who arouse feeling but do not add anything tangible or substantial to our existence on Earth, and therefore should be shunned in his utopian State. “…he can paint any other artist, although he knows nothing of their arts; and this with sufficient skill to deceive children or simple people.” Driving the point home further in a far more candid and vicious moment, Socrates interrogates Homer, “If you are only twice and not thrice removed from the truth—not an imitator or an image-maker, please inform us what good you have ever done to mankind?... Once more, the imitator has no knowledge of reality, but only of appearance.”

Now, perhaps obviously as a guy what writes essays about art for fun, I have some grievances with this statement. While Socrates (or more accurately, Plato’s Socrates) is correct in how a painter can say, paint a blacksmith yet not know the first thing about sharpening swords other than the appearance of it, artists are still rather good at getting to emotional rather than literal truths. Even he implicitly acknowledges this as he launches a later assault on the poet’s ability to move audiences to emotion, discussing “…the power which poetry has of injuriously exciting the feelings. When we hear some passage in which a hero laments his sufferings at tedious length, you know that we sympathize with him and praise the poet; and yet in our own sorrows such an exhibition of feeling is regarded as effeminate and unmanly.” But, say we make the not-so-large leap that if a writer or poet creates a work that does align with our own feelings, our inner compass, or even change it for the better… then this is no problem at all. Thus, it’s tempting to say “why listen to Socrates at all?”

But we can’t. Despite these qualms, Socrates’ argument on art cannot be dismissed lightly. Believe me, I’ve tried. The truth is, some of the most valuable conversations about art come from understanding that it will be always true and deeply untrue at the same time. Movies can both ground us in ourselves and serve as an escape to different lives and experiences—often at the same time. That is one of art’s greatest powers, for better and worse (depending on the content). As long as that Feeling, that Tone of the film is correct, we will gladly accept these transformative journeys, no matter how far away they take us. And while not everyone experiences movies the same way, for most of us this has to do in large part with the Aesthetic of a film, and not so much what’s actually happening in the film. On top of this, we will easily let our own associated feelings with an aesthetic dictate our experience, rather than what that aesthetic truly represents, what darker connotations it may have.

Which brings us to a topic that I’ve been chomping at the bit to write about for some time now—the recent explosion that is the ‘80s throwback renaissance.

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop Never Stop the ‘80s

What is it about the ‘80s? Is it that a lot of filmmakers, music artists, and writers who were children then are now big enough names to contribute to the industry with what they know best? That audience members who grew up then are now old enough to be nostalgic, and this is all some kind of feedback loop? Is it that it’s an easy-to-replicate (if hard to truly master) aesthetic that stands out immediately, can be easily recognized, and adds marketability? Does this speak to some darker truth about some kind of nexus in our current culture, how our desire for escapism and rampant consumerism line up perfectly with our past selves from nearly 40 (40!) years ago? Or maybe it just looks and sounds cool?

This isn’t even a recent trend, either. If you think about it, we never, ever got over the ‘80s. Not even for a second. The ‘90s had a plethora of shows that looked and sounded exactly like the ‘80s—the ‘00s was already dipping its toe into nostalgia fare with films like Music and Lyrics, starring Hugh Grant as a washed-up ‘80s pop star, and the ‘10s… well, you get it. We’re there! And since The Guest, Passion Pit, Hotline Miami, Drive, and Stranger Things it’s been fucking non-stop.

So what fascinates us so much? It’s a weird choice for a decade to go gaga over. The ‘80s was a dark time in American history—the hope of the ‘60s had fizzled out to nothing, turned to the bleak soul-searching (and partial aimless disco hedonism) of the ‘70s, and hardened into a nihilistic, yet utterly cynical mindset of the entire culture. This was the decade of the AIDs crisis, of looming Armageddon at the hands of Soviet ICBMs, of economic deregulation… and yes, of Cindy Lauper and Tears for Fears and Molly Ringwald. It’s a weird split, right? Yet it’s one that is at best cursorily mentioned, if that, but never given deeper thought than that. And even as a failed business mogul from the ‘80s runs loose in the White House, a literal nightmare projection of the ideals of that era made real, we still don’t think about it. We don’t want to.

Just so we don’t dissolve into vagaries here, I’m going to discuss this split in the terms most familiar to me—I like to call this split of ‘80s identity the “Say Anything/Heathers Split,” both some of my favorite films of all time, for very different reasons. Say Anything, on the one hand, is the most wholesome romantic comedy I’ve ever seen, with the greatest male role model ever in John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobbler. It has a certain generational angst, an anxiety over what lies in store for all of our lives’ futures, but ends on the side of hope and selflessness. Then there’s Heathers, which out “Mean Girls” Mean Girls, cackling gleefully as teenagers viciously insult, stab, shoot, and poison each other, wearing a piranha grin like its titular Heather Chandler. It dresses up in a familiar bubblegum red and blue aesthetic, but reveals an aching nihilism, a cold void where its heart should be. One leaves Heathers feeling drained, and the only way to truly enjoy it is to be as cruel as its characters. So clearly, these films came out far apart from each other, right? This is some decade-long fall from grace?

Nope. Both came out in 1989. As a culture, we were feeling both these ways at the exact same time. Honestly, you look at the films and music of the ‘80s, and there’s no word for it other than “excess.” An excess of contradictory feelings, in overflowing, almost sickening quantities—of sincerity, of violence, of candy sweetness—all of it as loud and colorful as possible to hide a deeper vulnerability, fears too great to acknowledge, let alone confront. As another example, consider the defining sound of ‘80s synth pop—synthesizers. Now, synthesizers had been around since the ‘60s in some form or another, but they hadn’t caught on, for a kind of obvious reason—they sound cold. They’re scientifically, theoretically perfect sine and square (and many other) wave sounds that sound very odd, especially for the sound of the ‘60s. But they somehow found their way into the sugary sweet love anthems of the ‘80s. And as much as I love the sound, personally, they still sound incongruous. It’s artificial, cold, and in the right contexts sounds driving without ever necessarily getting anywhere. It again comes down to a split personality, which comes out in different ways only in the execution—we’ve got both Cindy Lauper and Annie Lenox here, remember.

It is in that split that I think we can start to figure out just why the hell we love the ‘80s so damn much. In the difference between the face it puts on and what it’s truly feeling inside, we subconsciously relate to it, to its yearning for forward movement or meaning, to its plight in stasis. It doesn’t hurt at all that it’s an easy aesthetic to enjoy, visually and musically, with a surface-level feel-good attitude that has a low barrier to entry—after all, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Yet in either relating to the self-contained angst of the ‘80s, or more accurately, commiserating with it for too long, we end up exactly where we started: the art that Gets you, lets you know you’re not alone, becomes yet another voice in your head—companionship becomes solipsism. And I’m afraid that in continuing to just pump out ‘80s “feeling” movies, ‘80s “feeling” music, we’re subconsciously setting ourselves up to become more solipsistic than ever. It sounds so stupid and inconsequential, but I think there’s a great deal of cultural baggage left unexamined, and the more we continue to “unexamine” it, the more we enjoy stuff that makes us feel like what we maybe remember instead of confront what we’re actually communicating with our lionization of the time, the closer we get to some kind of meltdown of identity.

And in the middle of this fracas, right in the middle of my messy feelings on the ‘80s, on the value and hindrances of aesthetic, and on art in general, lies Bumblebee.

Yes, the Transformers movie.

The Aesthetic Choices of Bumblebee

At first, I wouldn’t have guessed that Transformers was going to hop onto the ‘80s train. In hindsight, of course, it makes perfect sense. Transformers come from the ‘80s, Paramount needed a new era to make a spinoff/prequel/possibility of ignoring the Michael Bay Transformers film, and again, people frickin’ love their ‘80s — have you seen the Ready Player One box office returns?

What is far more surprising is just how damn awesome the actual movie is. I loved it, almost the whole way through. Despite the core action of the film not interesting me at all—you know, what was before the main attraction to the series—I found something I would have never expected before; Bumblebee is, at its heart, a sweet coming of age story about opening yourself up to the world, about the bittersweet feeling of growing up, paired with the exhilaration of the limitless possibilities of early adulthood. In short, upon watching it, I felt it was made just for me—it felt like Say Anything did the first time I watched it, warm and moving and all-too-relatable (the Northern California setting did not help my feelings of nostalgia, having grown up there myself), and Hailee Steinfeld delivers an absolutely knockout performance once again as an aimless teenager, this time an 18-year old car nut named Charlie. (Also, if you haven’t, please please please check out The Edge of Seventeen.)

Having been blown away by it, I recommended it to everyone I could. Eventually, a friend of mine was willing to take up my offer of seeing it as I went to see it with him again. Enthralled that I got to have this emotional journey again, I settled into my seat before the movie started.

And then the movie wasn’t quite as good as I remembered.

It was still great, mind you. Just not quite as transcendent as I thought at first blush.

The majority of this can be blamed on what I implied earlier—that the movie’s main plot of Decepticons and Autobots fighting is a hell of a lot less interesting than the human characters and their relationship to Bumblebee, to the point that I actively wonder how much better the movie could be if we focused entirely on this E.T.-like story and not, y’know… Transformers. Put more nicely, the necessities of the Transformers brand put the brakes on an otherwise simple and resonant story. The real curiosity, however, was how this managed to slip past me the first time—and then the answer slapped me in the face.

On that first viewing, my primal, emotional reaction to the aesthetic and bildungsroman themes of the film outweighed the concerns of what was actually happening—where Socrates would make a difference between appearance and reality, with Bumblebee, the appearance became the reality, or, as I’ve been referring to them, the aesthetic became the content. And that’s why this is such a perfect, fascinating movie to talk about in relation to aesthetic theory and my thoughts on the ‘80s.

It is unsurprising that in this Hailee-Steinfeld-‘80s-bildungsroman-centric reading of Bumblebee, the first, most Transformers-centric 15 minutes of the film are absolutely the least interesting. On the plus side, this is the most comprehensible, entertaining action the series has ever had. On the down side, that’s not a high bar and still pretty much amounts to a lot of pretty clanging that, while I don’t mind, I also don’t really care about. Story-wise, the most important bits are Bumblebee’s traumatic injuries at the hands of a Decepticon removing his robot vocal chords, his memory loss, and the introduction of one John Cena as Gruff McMilitaryMan.

From his first moments on screen, the film establishes Cena’s character clearly as a self-aware, humorous, if still antagonistic military officer. Yet the couple of minutes of banter between him and his comrades before Bumblebee’s fall demonstrates a recurring move within the movie—have character traits that play against type while story-wise, be exactly that type. Cena certainly has charisma, and his scenes are all funny and appreciated in an otherwise rote role… but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a rote role. He’s an antagonist, someone to hunt down Bumblebee and Charlie, no matter the great character work they do to lampshade his trope-y part in the story. 

The movie picks up significant steam with the introduction of Hailee Steinfeld as Charlie, however, immediately, almost jarringly shifting to the trappings of a high school coming-of-age film; Charlie is a disaffected teen dealing with the recent loss of her father, distant and disconnected from the all-too-cheery rest of her family, who often tell her, “why not just smile more?” and other wonderfully awful advice. She mostly stays inside her own world, listening to her Smiths-filled Walkman as she goes from an unsatisfying family life, to an unsatisfying work life, to her unsatisfying social life… you get it. The film cleverly reflects this “jukebox for one” theme as her scenes frequently have a smattering of ‘80s songs playing in the background, reflecting an individual curation and breadth similar to the soundtrack of a Cameron Crowe film. (Did I mention Say Anything yet?)

And as we see Charlie’s contained yet angsty internal world so clearly articulated, and the way her life’s soundtrack plays such a prominent role in this—for example, “Runaway” by Bon Jovi plays as she stares at the popular kids hopping into fancy BMWs and cars, belting, “…girls talk about their social lives / They’re made of lipstick, plastic and paint … All your life all you asked / When is your Daddy gonna talk to you / But we’re living in another world / Tryin’ to get your message through”—that I couldn’t help but think of how the “soundtrack of your life” idea only became possible in the ‘80s with the invention of the Walkman in 1979. Before, there were boomboxes, jukeboxes, and record players, sure, but these are all communal listening experiences. A boombox, though personal, broadcasts to the people around you; a record player is meant to be sat around and listened to together (the image of Beatniks passing cloves while listening to Miles Davis springs forth almost involuntarily), but portable headphones are for the Individual and the Individual alone, creating our own worlds… indeed, our own Life Soundtrack, as Cameron Crowe portrays implicitly in his films. Consider how even moments of intimacy with headphones, such as The Office when Jim and Pam share their earbuds, show less a communal experience, and more letting each other into their isolated internal worlds. For some, portable music is a convenience, but for disaffected teenagers such as Charlie, it is a lifeline, a personal air bubble that without which one would be miserable. Of course, as I have said before (and as I will continue to hammer at as many times as I have to in this essay), this lifeline can also easily become a lonely dead end, a solipsistic echo chamber of one. And at its best, Bumblebee uses its soundtrack to confront this idea head-on. For instance, I doubt it’s a coincidence that Charlie uses music to isolate herself, and Bumblebee uses it to communicate with others—though both uses fall under her vague statement, “Music can show how you feel.”

Really, isolation versus togetherness, the anxieties and comforts of both and the fraught relationship between them, are the engine of most of our romantic comedies, and despite Bumblebee not being quite a rom-com, it has the same dramatic questions. The emotional core of the story is not, “Will Bumblebee defeat the Decepticons?”—like I’ve said, that part’s kind of a drag—the core of the story is “Will Charlie reconnect with the world?”

In this context, Bumblebee reappears, as Charlie is a bit of a car nut who finds him abandoned and damaged as an ugly yellow VW Beetle. Being a teen who needs a car, she repairs it and takes it back to her house—only to have him transform into a god-damn ROBOT and understandably freak her out. Notice how even from the start of Charlie and Bumblebee’s arc, there’s a bit of a subversion here—the car is most often portrayed as a symbol and enabler of individual agency and freedom, and the story has certainly treated it dramatically as such so far. A car is Charlie’s ticket out of her family. Yet upon getting a car, we learn it’s actually a sentient robot, a friend—another potential community and relationship, the exact opposite of what Charlie wants (but what she needs, to use some Character 101 terminology).  

As the two bond, Charlie soon puts a radio/cassette player in Bumblebee, and we get to the flipside of the whole ‘80s aesthetic thing. Remember when I said that Bumblebee at its best uses its soundtrack very purposefully, not for the mere sound and appearance of the ‘80s, but to communicate very basic ideas about the character and the era she inhabits? Well, as Charlie and Bumblebee goof around, we get a solid few minutes of the opposite end of this, which is a game I like to call “You Know This Song, Right?” First, she gives him a cassette of “The Safety Dance.” Then another Smiths song. Then, in a nadir, “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley. Because, you know, Rick Astley? Like, Rick Rolling? Bumblebee just got Rick Roll’d! You know this! It’s funny! He spat it out immediately because he didn’t like getting Rick Roll’d! Many laughs are had by all.

Okay, so kind of unwarranted and venomous sarcasm aside, what I’m trying to say is that there’s a big difference in using your setting, music, and aesthetic to communicate something about the character (and in turn, parts of ourselves) and just using your soundtrack for cheap recognition laughs. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it just feels a little low brow for what’s been an otherwise very intelligent movie thus far. Look, I’m—I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed. It’s what separates this from say, Ready Player One, or Stranger Things season two, or most run of the mill ‘80s-regurgitations. And while it’s a blip in the movie, alongside an overuse of Judd Nelson’s famous fist pump from the end of The Breakfast Club, it reveals something a little uncomfortable for me, someone who really unapologetically likes Bumblebee, loves the ‘80s, and yet remains very exhausted by the whole nostalgia hubbub—even in Bumblebee’s smarter, more informed aesthetic choices, there’s a gut pleasure to it that has nothing to do with thematics. My pop-culture-addled reptile brain just gets a little hit of dopamine every time it hears synth-pop, or sees a clip of The Breakfast Club, or… or yes, sees a film with the same tone as my formative favorite Say Anything set where I grew up, amid Redwood trees and foggy beaches. Socrates would be rather disappointed, for in this respect, he is absolutely right—regardless of the reality of Bumblebee, its appearance gives me great pleasure. Thankfully, the reality of it is mostly great, if well-trod, but the realization still makes my stomach squirm a little. And everything I’ve been talking about—how the appearance can outweigh the reality, how Bumblebee’s aesthetic and thematic power uplifts an otherwise tried-and-true story, how nostalgia is its own force that, if called upon properly, will just emotionally melt the audience—it all comes to a head in just one scene.

A cute neighbor-boy named Memo comes into Charlie’s garage at the wrong moment and sees Bumblebee in not-car form, and from there the two start to bond as well. They go driving… in, with, can’t tell which word to use there—they drive Bumblebee around, and Charlie shows off how she can take her hands off the wheel and still stay on the road as Bumblebee drives for them. Her hands free, she pops off the sunroof, takes Memo’s shirt, blindfolds herself with it, and stands up with her arms stretched out, hair whipping in the wind. As Memo gets up as well, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” starts to play, a sunset on the horizon, seemingly endless rolling hills around them on the curving road as the camera pulls back into the air… it’s a beautiful shot, and a moment that tugged at nostalgic strings even I didn’t know I had. Nostaliga for young adulthood, feeling what those characters must be feeling—it’s a great moment of character empathy, which is only the most important goal in movies, to make us feel as the protagonist must.

And yet.

It’s a really bad use of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Or a perfect one? Let me explain.  

We’ve all heard it before, even if we don’t realize it. “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears is one of those songs that’s impossible to hear without going, “Oh yeah, THAT’S the ‘80s.” I personally first heard it in the ending credits of Real Genius, which just, in general, must be one of the most ‘80s films of its time. But it’s been used far more than that. It even appears in games like World in Conflict from time to time. And the purpose of employing it is singular, past even the meaning of the lyrics—it’s to communicate that whatever you are watching takes place in the ‘80s. And if it doesn’t, then it shares the same nostalgia and idealism for that time as you do, like say, In a World, an indie film with Lake Bell that ends on the exact same song.

And that cultural meaning, that broad shorthand and tugging of the nostalgic heartstrings has become so powerful that it’s easy to ignore what the song’s actually about. What is Tears for Fears actually saying? Like many songs, when you do start listening to the lyrics, it kind of sounds like nonsense at first. But let’s just type out the lyrics in plain English here.

Welcome to your life
There's no turning back
Even while we sleep 
We will find you acting on your best behavior
Turn your back on mother nature
Everybody wants to rule the world

It's my own desire
It's my own remorse
Help me to decide
Help me make the most Of freedom and of pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world 

There's a room where the light won't find you
Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down
When they do, I'll be right behind you
So glad we've almost made it
So sad they had to fade it
Everybody wants to rule the world

I can't stand this indecision
Married with a lack of vision
Everybody wants to rule the world 

Say that you'll never, never, never, need it
One headline, why believe it?
Everybody wants to rule the world

All for freedom and for pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world

Wow. Out in the open like that, it’s kind of haunting, right? Paired with the bittersweet, distant synths and main guitar melody, this still sounds like a celebration, but a celebration of something about to disappear for good… “Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down / When they do, I’ll be right behind you / So glad we’ve almost made it / So sad they had to fade it.” I’m someone who, for fun, has tried coming up with every possible interpretation of these lyrics in his free time (really), so I mean it when I say there’s a lot of other ways to go with this too. There’s a simultaneous claustrophobic and expansive feeling here, as the singer is trapped by his “own desire” and “own remorse,” doing everything for “freedom and for pleasure” yet pleading with the audience at the same time, “Say that you’ll never, never, never, need it”—but what is “it?”

The contemporary listener wants to immediately jump to “capitalism”, which is valid, but it could also relate to that titular line that for some reason no one actually pays attention to—“Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” In short, it’s talking about our desires to “rule the world,” not literally, but individually, internally, controlling everything in our lives and being the master of our own destinies. But, despite our efforts, “Nothing lasts forever,” and “there’s no turning back.” In moments of loss, be they personal failures or relationships, all we can do is celebrate what was, move forward, and accept that while “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”—no one does. It’s a sweet-sounding song speaking of great loss and personal anguish, a perfect product of a decade that valued putting on a cheery face in the space of unspeakable tragedy—bubbly at first glance, but deeply melancholy just underneath the surface.

So, what the fuck is it doing in this scene in Bumblebee, other than to say “this is the ‘80s?” It works, I’ve already said as much, but why? Memo and Charlie have just met, certainly not about to have a bittersweet farewell. Bumblebee and Charlie aren’t departing either. It just doesn’t fit, and it comes really close to being as pointless a reference as “The Safety Dance” from earlier, just with more dramatic heft thrown behind it. It is a joyful scene with a song of loss playing in the background when no characters have experienced any loss. And while Real Genius’ end credits had no loss either, it had the benefit of actually coming out at the same time as the song did, reaching for a pop hit of the week while accidentally communicating for an entire generation, “this song is for happy moments, guys!”  

But therein lies our answer.

In 1801, William Wordsworth wrote a Preface for his second edition of Lyrical Ballads, a collection of short poems written in collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In it, he declared his intent for his poetry, saying he was writing in opposition to excessive German poems of sentiment and near-Gothic levels of gore/tragedy meant to get as many feelings as possible. He then made the very famous statement that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Other Romantic poets made similar sweeping self-appraising statements of their work—Keats said the poet had to be a “chameleon” in his letters, Byron bragged he could write hundreds of cantos of Don Juan right before his death interrupted this lofty claim, and Coleridge wrote several essays examining not just poetry, but nature and science as well. And for over a hundred years, English professors and scholars took their word for it and simply analyzed the Romantics and their work as they wished to be examined, the Preface and other primary sources taken at total face value with no critical eye to their intentions. It wasn’t until the ‘50s and ‘60s and the start of Deconstructionist theory in literature that someone thought to ask, “Wait, Wordsworth says he doesn’t like excessive German poetry—but doesn’t he literally write excessive poetry meant to provoke feelings himself?” For the longest time, the Romantics made their own narrative, and this led scholars into a dilemma where all they could talk about was this narrative.

We’re currently in a similar quagmire with the ‘80s, because the first decade to lie about the ‘80s was, unsurprisingly… the ‘80s. And from Real Genius onward, we have blindly accepted that “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is a happy song, and that cultural misconception lets it work on the surface level for this scene. We see happy people, hear a happy ‘80s song, and it functions as we expect it to. But underneath the surface level of this joy, we see the rolling hills symbolizing endless possibility, the children on screen who remind us so much of our younger selves or who we wanted to be or wanted our childhood to be like, we see an era that never existed but for now, just now, we can pretend it did… and the whole melancholy nostalgia clicks into place in our subconscious as a flood of feelings comes out.

“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” doesn’t work in Bumblebee because it speaks to the characters—it works because it speaks to us. It is not their loss, but our loss of innocence, an innocence crystallized into the ‘80s era of music and filmmaking, that brings out so many feelings of joy and sadness at the same time, our adolescence more painfully absent for having been present for this short moment. There’s a reason nostalgia means both “homecoming” and “ache” in Greek.

It’s tempting to simply continue to revisit it. To dive deeper down the ‘80s hole, consume it faster than it can go away, drown ourselves in it. And there are plenty of movies and companies that promise this. The slogan for Mary Poppins Returns is literally “Magic Returns,” as if to say, “for over 50 years since Mary Poppins, your life has been meaningless and empty, but don’t worry, it’s back! For two hours you can feel like a child again!” It is this impulse that has led us to never truly let the ‘80s go, after all. But that cannot be sustained. And to disappear into our old loves and memories is to disappear into ourselves, removed from the rest of the world, when the answer is to take the feelings of our childhoods—the feeling of freedom, of hope, of romance and opportunity for change—and bring them to our lives here and now. The alternative is to be a slave to something sweet, yet ultimately unreal.

In Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton writes that it was only at the turn of the 18th century that aesthetic theory took on its current spiritual, ephemeral quality—the now all-too-common idea that some beauty resides only in the mind, that art turns to the immaterial. There were intellectual reasons for this move—putting everything into the mind reconciles certain artistic difficulties—but pragmatic reasons as well; in short, aesthetic theory became very interested in the immaterial at the same time underclass workers in the Industrial Revolution were very much concerned with the material. It was intentionally placating—culture and aesthetic beauty could be anyone’s, even if they couldn’t afford to feed their god-damn-family.

A similar trap lies in our current cultural state and the surge of ‘80s nostalgia. Just as Charlie overcomes her trauma and lets Bumblebee go at the end of the film, it is time for us to let go of the ‘80s. For good. Because, for all its rote character beats, its rare stumbling around intentions with aesthetic choices, Bumblebee ultimately makes incredibly intelligent use of its time period, and gives us a message we do not see from the films of that time…  

If you love something, let it go.

https://ari-runanin-telle.itch.io/euretta

The first was a solo project in my usual wheelhouse — a text adventure written quite a bit like a screenplay called Euretta. In it, a Stranger wanders the wild northwestern forests of California as a type of underworld as he searches to bring his wife back from the dead.

As with all tragedies, not everything is as it first appears.

I’m also accepting $2 donations for these projects, should one be so inclined. $1 goes to me, and the other dollar goes to the incredibly talented Max Lescohier, a videogame composer and musician who makes some great cinematic, atmospheric stuff, and kindly contributed about 4 minutes worth of music to Euretta.

Hopefully you’ll hear about the next project soon. Cheers!

https://ari-runanin-telle.itch.io/euretta

The third season of Twin Peaks.

Spoilers. Obviously.

For those of you who aren’t v-neck-sweater-wearing film snobs or old/nostalgic to know this, Twin Peaks… you know, after spending five minutes or so trying to finish that sentence, I still honestly don’t know how! It’s that kind of experience. There are the technical details: it started as a network television show on ABC in 1990, a sort of classic “whodunit” crime soap opera set in the titular small Northwestern town where everyone and their mother has some deep dark secret or scandal as FBI detective Dale Cooper investigates the murder of Laura Palmer, yet supernatural elements are soon revealed to be at play. It was directed by David Lynch, who has also directed the eccentric, brilliant films Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and Lost Highway, whose directorial style is barely even hinted at by the word “idiosyncratic.” Yet to simply describe its parts and call it a day—crime, drama, soap opera, supernatural, horror, surrealist—is to mistake the forest for the trees. As with any profound work of art, the best ways to get at the whole of Twin Peaks are in describing the odd details and moments.

I still remember the sense of fear creeping up in my chest as the scraggly demon Bob walked closer and closer to the camera in Donna’s brightly lit living room, feeling there was nothing she—or I—could do to halt his advance, unable to move or hide. I laugh yet feel reassured every time Dale Cooper, played by the inimitable Kyle McLachlan, shows up on screen saying such simple yet charming lines as, “Damn fine cup of coffee.” I am still moved at how deeply this show believes in a universal decency, as if cherry pie, coffee, FBI agents, love, and Tibetan meditation practices are all cut from the same cloth, come from the same source. And, above all else, before the airing of Twin Peaks: The Return, I was haunted by Cooper’s brave, terrifying, and ultimately doomed journey through the heart of darkness itself at the end of Season 2, forever wandering the labyrinthine halls of The Black Lodge as Bob possessed his body.

With such a dour ending as this, it is unsurprising that so many fans of the show felt cheated, that they deserved a third season and some closure. I distinctly remember my mother, an otherwise uber-fan of the show, acidly remarking that this was clearly Lynch’s petty response to the show being cancelled, that he was simply being a jerk for the sake of being a jerk. Yet, as always with Lynch, the joke is on us if we come into his work with any expectations—especially such nostalgic and indulgent expectations as we hold coming into The Return. Even the name promises some sort of impossible time travel, the allure of bringing back the show we loved intact and whole and familiar and comforting. But, the uneasy truth is, that feeling at the end of Season 2 is not some aberration.

That haunted feeling of loss is the emotional core of the entire show.

And with that, we’re going to talk for realsies about The Return. All the spoilers ahead. 

Just as there were fewer more formative experiences for me than seeing the original Twin Peaks for the first time, there were fewer odder or more memorable experiences than watching The Return as it aired—always totally unprepared for whatever came next, pushing through an at times colossal feeling of disappointment and loss to satiate my curiosity, my burning desire to see Dale come back, dammit. And I’m going to make no bones about it, I fucking hated this thing the first time I saw it. The first three episodes had me on tenterhooks as I hung onto every detail waiting with more and more anticipation for what would come next, loving the slow pace…

And then it just kind of kept doing that. For a long time. And despite some incredible moments, and even standout episodes (episode 8 may be the best of the entire series), I was finding myself fed up with Dougie, adorable as he was, the slow pace, admirable as it was. Because while there were some lovely cinematic and thematic motives to all of these choices, at the time it really felt like Lynch had just completely lost his editor, especially when the grand mystery started feeling less than grand… and at parts incredibly predictable. It felt like it was manipulatively trading on the good faith of the several avid fans of the show, promising morsels of fan service in exchange for a slog of a main plot.

But then that finale happened, and the entire picture came into focus. The resulting thoughts and feelings kept me up at night.

Because The Return was never about fan service. It’s about something much less satisfying, much more haunting and ultimately, compelling than that. It’s about trauma, loss, and the never-ending search for Home itself.

Consider the machinations of the entire show. It is titled The Return, implying a comfortable return to what we love, yet none of the characters “Return”, really… they have all been ravaged by time, and those who return whole do not remain so. From the first episode, the main-main conflict is simple—Dale Cooper has to take his body back from Bob and return to the world whole. And for 16 episodes, we see a painstaking journey to this point, mostly from the perspective of Dougie Jones, an amicable, yet somewhat melancholy splinter of Cooper’s personality, an echo of how mute the usually chatty and chipper agent was at the end of Season 2 in the Black Lodge. Cooper is a symbol of ordinary yet profound decency, and we love him for it—but mercilessly, the show takes that away from us, destabilizing us. And it is from this point The Return starts, and never looks back.

Audrey appears for only three episodes, only to be in a terrifying, unknowable situation where we can only say that something is wrong. Oh, and that she was raped by Bad Coop for sure. Diane, a never-seen but until now untouchable symbol of friendship and goodness with Coop, has also been raped, and ultimately turned into a shade of herself by her trauma. The patrons of the Bang Bang Bar all have their own issues, to put it lightly (remember that woman being thrown into the ground among the crowd by bikers, unseen, uncared for, screaming?) Sarah Palmer has become a creature of pure malice and wounds, destructive toward everyone and herself. The main demons of the series are also born of trauma—the trauma of the creation of the atomic bomb. From this, they slowly take hold throughout the dark crevices of our collective world and thoughts, lingering just beneath the surface.  

And in this world of seemingly unending pain and trauma, we finally get catharsis—the return of Cooper in episode 16. And he makes everything better, immediately, just as we have been promised as an audience. He takes charge, he drives to Twin Peaks, he fights Bob and defeats him. He then goes a step further, finding the real Diane and saying goodbye to all of his deepest friends in this journey before stepping into the Other World for some unknown purpose. And then we learn he’s gone back in time to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me—he’s catching Laura before she goes to Leo and Jacque’s cabin. He takes her hand, Pete doesn’t find her body in the morning by the water, and… I’ll admit it freely here, I started crying. After all this horror, all this pain and fear… the audience receives catharsis upon catharsis. We are potentially undoing the events of the entire series, and we never wanted it because we never thought it was possible—but seeing it now, seeing the possibility so close, we want it more than anything. I wept because I wanted to save Laura from that fate with her father with all my heart, I wanted Coop to get her out… 

And then Sarah Palmer smashes her photo. Laura lets out an ear-piercing shriek and disappears. Cooper is left alone in the dark woods, scanning the trees. The dread is back, the horror is back. It was not going to let us go that easily. Julee Cruise sings a final song of farewell, about how we don’t want to let go.

Finally, in the season finale, with all these possibilities in the air and still craving above all else that catharsis, Cooper and Diane go to yet another alternate universe, one where they can see their doppelgangers milling about, where Cooper is a cold, uncaring yet just as willful man. They have the creepiest, most distant sex you could imagine, and Diane leaves Cooper. And in less than an episode, so leaves one of the most-yearned for relationships in the show, ruined forever. In this strange alternate land, Not-Cooper finds Not-Laure in Odessa, Texas, and gets her to come with him to Twin Peaks to end all of this once and for all. He takes her there, they approach her house, dread in the air… but it is only a random couple there. They have nothing, no lead to go on, no catharsis. They stand in the middle of the street, dumbfounded and panicking and lost. Then, finally, something clicks—we hear someone, likely one of Laura’s parents, scream “LAURA!” from the house, and all the sickening trauma comes back to her in an instant—the sexual abuse from her father, all the pain and fear. Her eyes widen and she screams, and the lights of the entire world go out. And this is all we are left with. A journey to make things better, a desire to fix all that has hurt us, gone too far and horribly awry and sucking Laura right back into the world that hurt her so much.

It is at this point I recall the incredibly Western motif of the entire show, especially this season. As a genre, the Western has very searching, lost motifs. The silent, strong male protagonist searching for his love or gruffly righting every wrong, forever wandering the desert on our screens never finds resolution. Clint Eastwood will simply wander into another situation in the Spaghetti Western. And even the real-world frontier West on which the genre of frontier fiction is founded has these qualities. America aimlessly pushed outward out of a sense of “Manifest Destiny”, displacing citizens into unsafe territories as they felt dissatisfied, and searched, at great peril, these new borders for their Home.

And indeed, Twin Peaks is very much a psychedelic Western, except the frontiers are not the physical natural landscapes of the desert and the western territories, but our very understanding of ourselves and the universe. It brushes up against the boundaries of aliens, demons, angels, alternate realities, the hidden emotional currents of electricity and atomic bombs. This is the frontier that Dale Cooper, the new John Wayne, explores.

But this search is never satisfied. We never find Home again, as Home has been disrupted from the very first episode of the show with Laura Palmer’s murder. Remember the infinity symbol shown to Cooper by Jeffries in the season finales—trauma begets searching which, as the ending shows, begets more trauma. And our selves splinter more and more with each collision, into Dougies and Bobs, Mikes, new Dianes and atomic men and Richard Hornes. As Cooper searches for a way to save Laura, we too stay too long in the show out of a desire to save Cooper from the fate he begins the season in.  

What The Return (which I hope you now realize is a cruel, cruel title) emphasizes so hauntingly is how we can never return home. Yet if there is a failing of the show, it’s how it doesn’t build anything outside of this anguished thesis—it is a self-fulfilling dead-end prophecy, similar to the more solipsistic tenets of Romanticism. Because my first question after hearing “You can never go home,” is—“What now?”

And the show does not say. And that’s a little disappointing, given how humanist and sentimental Lynch clearly is. It’s a nihilistic statement not befitting his genuine faith in humanity. Still, what it does say, it says brilliantly.

Contrast this to the modern action film, which, yes, has attractive stars who will hopefully attract box office success, but cannot bank on that alone (see the underperformance of Skyscraper, which ended Dwayne Johnson’s streak of profitable if-not-great blockbusters). More is required to lure the audience into the carnival tent now—special effects, brand recognition—and the sad truth is, a potential Schwarzenegger of today has to share the screen with all of that clutter. They cannot be the soul of the film anymore in most mainstream action fare; they aren’t even a distant second. For all of my qualms with the John Wick or Taken sequels, at least both franchises started with the invaluable trait of building films around Keanu Reeves’ or Liam Neeson’s on-screen personas, which has become the exception rather than the rule.

Looking back at our favorite older action films, then, it shouldn’t be surprising that we divide ourselves into camps based not on individual movies, but stars (or series) and their entire filmographies. There are the obvious ones: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, every James Bond; smaller niches (or honestly, lower calibers)—Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, Dolph Lundgren. And I, always one for a little bit of an under-dog, have always been most attracted to the soul of Sylvester Stallone’s work.

STALLONE THE PUPPY

While he’s received a little renaissance of sorts with the release of Creed and soon Creed II, Stallone has always seemed a little like the sloppy seconds of the ‘80s. There’s The Terminator and then Rambo, True Lies and then Demolition Man, Eraser and, well… Assassins, Stallone’s filmography always playing second fiddle in popularity. This sounds horribly harsh, but this second-hand feeling points to a crucial truth in Stallone’s emotional core as an actor… (and yes, I just said that)…

The fear of being overlooked.

It started with Rocky, Stallone’s undeniable magnum opus and defining moment, even if you’re someone who doesn’t particularly like it. (Me—I’m a person who doesn’t like it. Me.) He plays Rocky Balboa, a low-level debt collector and hoodlum in the streets of Philadelphia, hoping, in the words of a certain Brando, “To be a contender,” spiritually and literally. No one takes him seriously, either as a man or a boxer, but he is given a chance as the champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) challenges him as an easy publicity stunt, giving the little guy a chance. As Balboa trains, (or more accurately, aimlessly wanders around the streets bouncing his tiny ball, waiting for the story to arrive) he comes across a meek tofu named Adrian (Talia Shire). Together they share slice of life moments together like awkwardly roller-skating, awkwardly meeting Adrian’s brother, awkwardly standing around and enjoying the simple pleasure of breathing the same air as another person, Shire pushing her lines out like an out-of-breath flute player, Stallone occasionally rumbling like a drooping tuba, belying his actual acting ability (again, yes, I just said that). Then there’s an exciting montage! And then more wandering. And then an, admittedly, incredible final fight where Rocky stuns Creed and the world alike as he proves his manhood and his fighting ability by almost defeating the champ.

In both Rocky I/II and the first Rambo, Stallone is a perpetual under-dog, hiding some inner determination and strength underneath a hangdog appearance, seeking the world’s approval. Remember the cruelty and disregard shown him as a recent veteran in First Blood, the humiliating ad scene from Rocky II. Stallone’s ’70s and ‘80s stardom comes, not from being the buffest, coolest macho action man, but because we truly believe that he can be overlooked—and that he can succeed despite our expectations. This is shown even in his silliest, bottom-of-the-barrel-est filmography, like Over the Top, as he plays a blue-collar trucker trying to bond with his son through arm-wrestling while a moustache-twirling rich Robert Loggia attempts to snatch custody away from him. This emotional core recurs again and again in Stallone’s work.

But how does Stallone’s oeuvre have such consistent qualities, if not consistent quality? The answer is shockingly simple and rare for an actor, even today—because he writes most of it. That’s right, this man:

THIS man:

Is actually a man of letters. And a pretty prolific one at that!

Stallone has been at least co-writing the majority of his work for ages now, even trying his hand at directing to mild success, too. Rocky was his original screenplay, his passion project—studios attempted to buy the script from him for up to $150,000 (in ‘70s money), with the simple condition that he not be in it, especially not as the leading man. Now, this guy was broke—broke-broke. He had to sell his dog to pay for food and rent. But he held out that he wanted to star in it, and eventually reached a deal where he was payed a measly few thousand dollars, but got his face solidified in the American pop-culture consciousness forever, and was able to buy his dog back for several thousand dollars. So, when Stallone says in Rocky…

“The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It is a very mean and nasty place and it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't how hard you hit; it's about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward.”

…he means it. Knows it. Has lived it. And as such, as goofy and downright awful as some of his projects are, he genuinely believes in what he is creating, the messages he is leaving. Regardless of what I think of the film itself, I have nothing but respect for him and the creation of Rocky. Because of this irreplaceable quality, no matter how hammy his performances or lines can sometimes be, we believe him. And as Pauline Kael once said, the most important part of acting is not diction, or method, or disappearing into a character, but, “When he speaks, I believe him.” And I always believe Sylvester Stallone. He will always, totally, almost achingly, bring all of his sincerity, marshal all of his artistic talent to every film I see him in, regardless of the result.

Which brings us to Cliffhanger.  

CLIFFHANGER

From a distance, this film has “also-ran-Die Hard” written all over it. It comes in the early ‘90s, a prime era of Die Hard ripoffs that can be summed up as “Die Hard on a…” Air Force One: Die Hard but on Air Force One with the President as John McClane. Executive Decision: Die Hard on a plane. Speed: Die Hard on a bus. The Rock: Die Hard in a prison. Cliffhanger has a similarly simplistic log line—Die Hard on a mountain—and is directed by none other than Renny Harlin, the director of Die Hard 2, even starring an Alan Rickman-Hans Gruber wannabe in John Lithgow and Peter Qualen. But that’s about where the obnoxious Die Hard similarities end and Cliffhanger, the quaint, earnest action movie in its own right, begins.

The first thing that strikes people who I kidnap and force to wa—I mean invite over and encourage to see Cliffhanger at their leisure—is the stunning cinematography and production. This is a gorgeous movie, filmed in the Italian Alps with panning shots and huge wide frames that make Stallone look almost miniscule. Of course, he looks less so up close, what with his rippling pectorals, almost more an extension of the mountain than its antagonist. And the soundtrack kicks all kinds of ass too, with a wonderful orchestral score by Trevor Jones, that, along with the mountains, convey a real sense of ambition and scope, even if the actual plot aims are fairly limited.  

Adding to that first great impression is a tense-as-hell scene with Stallone as Gabe Walker literally hanging over a precipice in Colorado (yes, that’s actually him, I checked) and climbing to conduct a rescue operation, ending in a genuinely unexpected tragedy as his friend Hal (Michael Rooker)’s girlfriend falls to her death. Of course, we now have capital-P Pathos in the story, and the closest we get to explicit character development in the film—Gabe has retired from mountain rescue operations because he blames himself for the death of Hal’s love.  

Cue one of the most lovingly convoluted action movie set ups of all time: a National Treasury plane is hijacked in midair above the Rockies by a gang of terrorists led by John Lithgow as Peter Qualen, hoping to steal $100 million. Unfortunately, the plot goes awry, and the money (and plane) crashes to the earth. In an attempt to both save themselves and the money scattered around the mountain range, Qualen makes a fake distress call to be “rescued.” Gabe and Hal, hoping to squash the emotional beef, come to rescue him, only to be taken hostage and forced to find the money for him. And then, Die Hard-esque shenanigans ensue.  

Plot-wise, Cliffhanger is all incredibly straightforward, but it is easily the best Sylvester Stallone film, and an exemplification of his strengths as a persona. Schwarzenegger, despite his own rags to riches story, has always come across on-screen as permanently glitzy, the rock star bodybuilder who took Hollywood by storm. Even in films such as Total Recall, where you have to see him as a construction worker —it just never fits. But Stallone is the simple mountain climber, trucker, veteran—his body and presence convey a blue collar, down-to-earth energy onscreen while he does his best with the dialogue, and as long as the film around him is on the same page, it works. And Cliffhanger is definitely on the same page. Even the one-liners fall into the “earnestly trying a little too hard to be cool” category. (As Stallone burns some cash for warmth—“Costs a fortune to heat this place!”) 

This is a goofy, sincere summer blockbuster that is exactly what it appears to be—a solid action movie with an incredible location and stunts, anchored by a stalwart working horse of the action genre—Stallone. It wants to impress the audience, wow the audience, and it believes in its own aims. There is not a lick of cynicism in the whole production. For that, I will always love it, and Sylvester Stallone as an actor. They might not be Great…

…but they are sincerely doing their best.

There are few movie tastes of mine that raise quite as many eyebrows as my love for Mission: Impossible. It’s not quite as out there as, say, Real Steel or Fast and Furious—people generally like these films, after all—but love? They’re transparent Tom Cruise vehicles, the kind of competent yet workmanlike products that can be safely labeled as “popcorn flicks” and promptly forgotten. And while this is not inaccurate—this is the definition of an assembly-line franchise—it also confines our experience, and therefore critique, of the films.

The name, “popcorn flick,” and even to a degree, “Mission: Impossible” itself encourages a passive viewing experience, a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get contract: the viewer agrees to only look for certain elements and ignore everything else, and the movie agrees to check those boxes. It is a blockbuster compromise—the film accepts a level of derision from the audience, and the audience accepts to like the movie a certain amount for indulging them. This phenomenon is best encapsulated in the phrase, “It was stupid, but it was fun.”

And there is certainly stupid fun here—Tom Cruise doing stunts, elaborate double and triple crosses, a bombastic score, at SOME POINT in every film a literal ticking clock and multiple spinning plates. The audience is trained to find these elements and focus on them alone—it’s part of the contract, and these elements are so overwhelming and gregarious that it’s an easy one to unwittingly accept. But it is in the “everything else” that the Mission Impossible series has mutated and grown—the tertiary details are what give each film in the series its unique soul.

We’re going to talk about “everything else.”

THE BEGINNING

Now, as this is a decades-long series, we’re going to keep this short, focusing on what elements are carried over from film to film and the unique challenge in identity of each film without devolving into a full-on series synopsis. It should also be noted that, in this brief section, my criticism is borrowing heavily from Stephen Mulhall’s On Film, which includes a critical examination of the first four Mission: Impossible films as philosophy and the differences between its several directors. Cool? Cool.

Originally, Mission: Impossible was a Cold War espionage show created in the 1960s, following the Impossible Mission Force as they combated, not real-name threats of the era like the USSR, but stand-ins such as the “European People’s Republic” and the “Eastern European Republic.” These doppelgangers served a specific purpose: to give viewers the shorthand to quickly understand the threat without actually being that reference, and therefore having to engage with the real-world politics involved. The viewer immediately goes, “oh, it’s like the USSR.” Other cousins of real-world threats include South American dictators, Apartheid asshats, and, oh, Nazis. Because why not.

All of these fictional or safe villains create a comfortable degree of separation for the audience, a reality adjacent to ours that can have stakes (“the world could end!”) without any of the consequences (“our world could end!”). In less words—there’s an easily understandable but safe backdrop to justify our spy shenanigans, that implicitly comforts us about our own world, the safety rubbing off on us just a bit. This alter-reality continues in the feature films, as do the spy shenanigans. And in a way, Mission: Impossible as a film franchise has wrestled with these TV roots for its entire lifespan.

Take the first film, for example. Mission: Impossible, released in 1996, has the most transparent attempts at reconciliation (between pulpy TV roots and action film) of the entire franchise. Ethan Hunt (Cruise), leading an IMF team with Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), has a mission to retrieve a sensitive list of agent’s identities in Eastern Europe go horribly wrong, and everyone but Hunt dies. Soon after, Hunt, as the sole survivor, is accused of being a mole and a traitor, and is forced to go rogue and find who the real mole is in order to prove his own innocence. Of course, this eventually involves breaking into Langley and fighting a guy on top of a speeding train—why wouldn’t it? However, it turns out that Jim Phelps is alive, having faked his own death, and is the real mole. You can guess where it goes from there. (Spoilers: Tom Cruise isn’t the one who dies.)

Our only returning character, Jim Phelps doubles as our Psycho­­-style fake-out main character to be replaced by Ethan Hunt, and an older audience’s touchstone for the series. The fact that he, and Hunt’s entire IMF team, are killed so quickly signals an obvious passing of the torch for the series. However, it is significant that this is not a graceful retirement, but almost a roadside execution. Phelps, the symbol of the old-guard, the tradition, is not just killed, but essentially resurrected to become the villain. As opposed to another long-running spy franchise, James Bond, and particularly, Skyfall, tradition is the enemy, not to be eulogized but vilified.

Being betrayed by an ally becomes a staple of the series, and it shows the synthesis of genres starting to take hold in the nascent franchise. It is no longer purely espionage, with fun gadgets and elaborate schemes, but has interpersonal schemes as well—the realm of noir, a clear visual influence as well in the opening dark alleys of Prague. We have gone from goofy espionage to spy/noir/action, a mix of tones and genres that’s held together by tightly wound dramatic motivations. The goofy espionage occurs when Hunt is in his element, the noir occurs when he doesn’t know who to trust, and the action kicks in when every plan has gone to hell and he’s madly holding onto any chance he has (a recurring moment in the series).

The movie’s true thematic concern is dead simple, however—itself. Screens, on televisions, glasses, computers, and cameras litter the entire film, from the opening scene to the ending. We open on a room being surveilled, and end with Hunt revealing Phelps’ betrayal with hidden glasses. It is watching itself, surveilling itself, much like Dickinson’s “soul unto itself.” She writes, “The Soul unto itself / Is an imperial friend - / Or the most agonizing Spy - / An enemy – could send - / Secure against its own - / No treason it can fear - / Itself – its Sovereign – of itself / The soul should stand in Awe –“ Mission: Impossible is not only similarly self-examining, but in its self-combating plot (IMF fighting the IMF), it simultaneously fights itself while standing in awe of itself.

This multiplicity extends to the chameleon-like direction of Brian de Palma. It is simultaneously brutal and absurd, whimsical and dark. Relevantly, of De Palma, David Thomson once scathingly said in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film:

“There is a self-conscious cunning in De Palma’s work, ready to control everything except his own cruelty and indifference. He is the epitome of mindless style and excitement swamping taste or character. Of course, he was a brilliant kid. But his usefulness in an historical survey is to point out the dangers of movies falling into the hands of such narrow-minded movie mania, such cold-blooded prettification. I daresay there are no “ugly” shots in De Palma’s films—if you feel able to measure “beauty” merely in terms of graceful or hypnotic movement, vivid angles, lyrical color, and hysterical situation. But that is the set of criteria that makes Leni Riefenstahl a “great” director, rather than the victim of conflicting inspiration and decadence. De Palma’s eye is cut off from conscience or compassion. He has contempt for his characters and his audience alike, and I suspect that he despises even his own immaculate skill. Our cultural weakness admits and rewards technique and impact bereft of moral sense. If the thing works, it has validity—the means justify the lack of an end. De Palma is a cynic, and not a feeble one; there are depths of misanthropy there.”

Now, that’s quite a tirade, but underneath the several layers of invectives and general Thomsonian pretension, there’s a crucial idea here. “If the thing works, it has validity… [a] lack of an end.” There is an assumption of skill with no meaning, “mindless style and excitement” swamping the rest of his work—in other words, the expectations of the modern blockbuster, and therefore, Mission: Impossible. We see a conflict of narrowness in this paragraph—of De Palma’s narrow skillset and Thomson’s narrow, moral gut reaction, which, while powerful, is very singular, overwhelming his critique.

It is this supposedly “style over substance” Brian de Palma who brought Mission: Impossible to the modern film era, on a hell of a complicated first step. By having such a synthesis of tones, De Palma provided a broad palette for the series going forward—it could get as goofy or as dark as it needed, and the foundation would still remain. And its total dearth of meaning outside of itself meant the series could go anywhere. This is all well and good, but there was an unfortunate toxic side effect of this approach. Remember when I said earlier that M: I was much like Dickinson’s soul standing in awe of itself? Well, this early, self-aggrandizing approach for the series only works with a heavy, heavy caveat: every entry has to stand in awe of itself.

And that becomes a real problem for the next two films.

THE DARK YEARS

M: I 2 and M: I 3 are two separate but equally flawed answers to the first film’s question. (“Where can the series go from here?”) Mission Impossible establishes Ethan Hunt as the new-guard, the ur-action protagonist, but 2 and 3, in the slick hands of John Woo and JJ Abrams, respectively, simply double down on Tom Cruise’s perceived “cool” factor and inadvertently make Ethan Hunt one of the most boring protagonists in the history of film. (See here, “the rule of cool” cliché.)

For example, the opening moments of Mission Impossible 2 “modernize” the series in the most dated way possible. This being an early ‘00s film, our main character has to have a sick haircut and some interest in extreme sports, so we have to open on Tom Cruise with an unruly mane of hair and rock climbing. Upon reaching the top of the rock formation, a helicopter shows up to, and I’m not kidding here, shoot an unarmed rocket at Ethan’s feet—inside the rocket is a pair of sunglasses which relay his mission once he puts them on. The whole thing, especially with the sick rock cover of the Mission Impossible theme that plays, is just embarrassing. Self-destruct tapes and phone calls are kind of old-fashioned, sure, but is Tom Cruise throwing a pair of exploding sunglasses (inadvertently referencing Resident Evil 4, a campy B-story if ever there were one) any better? No. No it’s not.

Discover & share this Mission GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

The rest of the film is surprisingly pedestrian in comparison. I love John Woo as much as the next guy, but in a PG-13 Tom Cruise vehicle, his action cinematography feels oddly muted and restrained. Of course, Woo restrained, even by Mission Impossible standards, is absolutely bonkers, but, for lack of a better phrase—the “bonkers” to “leaden interpersonal drama” ratio is absolutely crippling. For every slow-motion, dual-pistol-shooting and leaping with explosions and doves action scene, there’s four more scenes of Tom Cruise and Thandie Newton’s “romance,” where toxic masculinity runs rampant as he pretty much blackmails her into going undercover to seduce her ex, manipulating her with their own past relationship.

See, underneath its adorably early ‘00s “cool” veneer, Mission Impossible 2 is just a bad remake of Notorious by Alfred Hitchcock. Except, where that was a Swiss watch of tension focusing entirely on the stakes between characters, exploring ideas of perverted maternal impulses and love, Mission Impossible 2 can’t wait to get all these stupid people talking scenes out of the way so Tom Cruise can just shoot and jump more.

For those who haven’t seen it, Notorious is a classic thriller about Cary Grant sending Ingrid Bergman into the arms of her Nazi ex against her will as an undercover agent. Unfortunately, the ex’s mom catches on and starts poisoning Bergman’s drinks so that she’ll slowly die over time and no one will suspect a thing. The plot of Mission Impossible 2 is exactly the same except instead of any clever plot developments or slow poisonings, Thandie Newton just gets poisoned with a super virus as an act of self-sacrifice and Tom Cruise has to jump and shoot things to get the antidote in 24 hours while pretentious orchestral music plays.

See, Notorious had plenty of problematic elements, but that could be forgiven by the era and the fact that the noir genre sort of engaged with this—mistrust and problematic relationships are sort of the name of the game. But by taking that plot wholecloth, changing very little, and putting it in a power fantasy starring Tom Cruise that young men are going to look up to, Mission Impossible 2 gets into very icky territory. And while the first film had the tiniest decency to at least be honest about how disposable its love interest was, literally shooting her at the end, Mission Impossible 2 has the gall to pretend Hunt and… what’s her name again?... have some great love as the last shot is them happily kissing at a picnic in Sydney. Really? REALLY? After this prick manipulates her and throws her in harm’s way? No number of motorbike beach fights in slow-motion can salvage this shit.

And the disposable women syndrome has just started!

Enter Mission: Impossible 3, which asks you to promptly forget that whole “happily ever after with Thandie Newton” thing (though you probably already did) and accept that Ethan Hunt is now marrying a woman named Julia. Julia, played by Michelle Monaghan, while not as aggressively mistreated as Thandie Newton’s character, makes up for this with sheer blandness. See, Julia isn’t a spy, but a civilian, so Ms. Monaghan gets the novel opportunity to play a woman in the dark, a woman on the sidelines cheering for her man, and a damsel in distress all in one.

It doesn’t even waste a second in putting Julia in distress—the film literally opens with the couple tied down to chairs, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the bad guy pointing a gun at her as Ethan begs him not to shoot. As she sobs, he pulls the trigger! And we immediately cut to a fun montage with the classic Mission Impossible music of all the spy hijinks we’ll get up to in this romp!

…what the fuck?

And weirdly, there’s not much more to say about this one. That scene kind of says it all. More than ever in this film, Mission Impossible is less a clever, fun spy flick and more a boilerplate action film, with a gritty, grounded camera style and tone with lots and lots of shooting, helicopters, drones, men with guns, stuff blowing up, but very little intrigue or dramatic interest. Most notable in this entry is Phillip Seymour Hoffman—who plays a sociopathic, casually cruel villain incredibly well, but in entirely the wrong franchise—and the first appearance of Simon Pegg, who will be one of the only regulars in the series, along with Ving Rhames, from here on out.

At the end of the series of explosions and all-too-predictable “WAIT THE BAD GUY WAAAAAANTED TO BE CAUGHT” moments, all we’re left with is the continually weird relationships with women in this series. Not only does Ethan have his “I’m Not a Shitty Plot Device” wife, but early in the film there’s also a young, blonde and busty IMF agent he trains and has to rescue. There are some flashbacks, and they never say anything explicitly, but there’s some real weird vibes in there…? That ride that all-too-common line between paternal protector/mentor and sexual tension? And it’s just icky? And I already used that word but that’s really best description for these two films?

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Icky. It’s just icky. And it’s what you get when you sincerely uphold an actor like Tom Cruise as some icon of masculinity to aspire to, what happens when you tell these kind of pulpy spy stories with no self-awareness or winks to the audience whatsoever. There is very little humor in these first three movies, but the first earns it with a well-constructed, if convoluted story with some noir flare. This self-seriousness in 2 and 3 give the audience no humanity to latch onto, no truth to connect to—all we are left with is a display of competence and a bad taste in our mouths.

Luckily, things got better. A whole hell of a lot better.

 MISSION IMPOSSIBLE AS SCREWBALL COMEDY

A lot of critics, such as Manohla Dargis, have rightly commented on Tom Cruise’s stunt work in these films as being one of the most genuine aspects of his acting, and therefore, the Mission Impossible series as a whole. And this series staple has always been there, but what the first few films lacked was a connection to the human performing all these elaborate, death-defying acts. The audience gasps, and Tom Cruise just goes, “no biggie!” (At least in 2 and 3—the first has some great “oh shit” face moments.) I’ve already talked a bit about the safe alternate reality the films live in, but one of the problems was how the films were in awe of themselves, how seriously they treated all of this as the audience giggled.

So, to explain how these movies pivoted for the better, I’m going to say something really obvious that I’ve somehow not touched on yet.

These movies, at their best, are hysterical.

Right?

It sounds really, really obvious. Like I shouldn’t even have to say it. This is a series with exploding bubble gum, motorcycle bike fights, exploding sunglasses, almost Bond villain-style deaths with overcomplicated diseases and “explode in head” implants. What doesn’t explode? What gadget isn’t absurd?

It’s all so apparent and obvious, but I’m afraid this is one of those truths of the Mission Impossible series that kind of flies under the radar. You know, one of those “so obvious” answers that no one bothers to say it out loud, and inadvertently buries the truth a little bit—so let’s just say it.

Mission Impossible is a comedy.

It’s a crackpot, exciting blend of Loony Tunes-style cartoon violence and screwball gags of mistaken identities and elaborate comedic situations. It may have action, but it’s at its best when we don’t take any of it seriously. The helicopter chasing a train in a tunnel scene from the end of 1 wouldn’t be out of place in a Road Runner cartoon, and the constant face masks and mistaken identities recall classic screwballs like Bringing Up Baby.

And it is this simple realization, this simple acknowledgement, that informs every Mission Impossible from Ghost Protocol onward, makes the series exhilarating and entertaining once more, all while changing literally nothing else.

Take Ghost Protocol. Of the entire series, it might be the most disposable entry—few of the characters make it to any future film, the plot is a transparently McGuffin-fueled romp, and the feminine presence is still, uh… an issue. I mean, there’s a cat fight for God’s sake, and the token female agent checks all the “Poorly Written Female Character” boxes: her main motivation is her dead boyfriend, she kinda sorta falls for Ethan in a way that is never followed up on, her most important actions in the film are fighting another lady and seducing a guy, she unnecessarily strips at one point, and she disappears from the series entirely after this film. Ugh.

But it still works. Because the film is just so god-damn funny and breathlessly paced.

Credit is owed to the stunt work, which is still incredible. This movie features Cruise climbing the god-damn tallest tower in Dubai with nothing but his hands! But the best parts of Ghost Protocol are the tiny human touches throughout the entire film, both during these elaborate schemes and in between. And by human touches, I mean the team’s own incredulity at what they have to do.

When Benji (Simon Pegg) suggests that Ethan has to climb on the tower from the outside, he suggests two or three other options, trying to weasel out, each one getting shot down. “Vents?” “Protected—not enough time.” “Elevator shaft?” “Lasers—not enough time.” He very gingerly steps outside as he starts climbing, and Simon Pegg winces as Ethan makes the first jump. It sounds insignificant, but these human reactions sell the entire film. It grounds the spectacular, the impossible if you will, in an emotionally resonant reality.

Another fun trope that starts in this entry was the idea of none of the gadgets working properly. Those elaborate face masks keep messing up, and Ethan Hunt’s magic magnetic gloves stop working halfway up the tower (at which point he shoots them a dirty look as he yanks them off and starts free climbing). It all comes together in the right kind of dumb fun, as Tom Cruise is no longer this superhuman machismo bore, but an overconfident dork in over his head.

I mean, Christ, guys, the last scene is Ethan shouting “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” as he dramatically pounds his fist on the abort button of a nuclear launch, only for it to not work. For the first time in Mission Impossible, the film is in on the joke of Tom Cruise’s entire persona, changing the entire tone, and truly, soul of the movies, while the audience is blithely unaware because, well, the contract is still being fulfilled. We still have our convoluted world-hopping plot, our stunts, and our gadgets, so we think Mission Impossible is still the same. But it has fundamentally changed, and pretty obviously so once you consider Ghost Protocol was directed by Brad Bird, who has already made fun of super-macho masculine supermen in The Incredibles.

Rogue Nation takes this cue and just runs with it. The show starts with a showstopper, as Ethan climbs onto a literal JET as it takes off and hangs onto the side. Again, we start to see Ethan’s can-do masculine archetype start to veer into ridiculous proportions, and for the better. We see his wolfish handsome features distorted into grotesquerie and comedic angles in the wind, once he gets inside he tries to stealthily push a crate out the plane only to be caught mid-grunting, quite ungracefully, by a guard. The cinematography commits to this comedic tone, with a wide angle and all the characters insignificantly small in the frame.

We are also finally graced with a decent female character for the first time in Ilsa Faust, played by Rebecca Ferguson. (And it only took 20 years!) She is one of the few restrained presences in the series, exuding competence and craftiness while looking after her own interests (instead of always supporting Cruise the whole damn time). It’s not all perfect—the camera leers at her frequently as she wears a (to be fair, killer) dress, bikini, nothing but her pants, you get the picture, but she’s at least a start. And while there’s a romantic air/subplot kind of deal going on between Ilsa and Ethan, they do not end up fucking, which is a plus.

There’s an utterly forgettable nasally villain played by Sean Harris in Rogue Nation, who unfortunately comes back to Fallout, but the real star of the show is the continuing pivot of the series. Ghost Protocol helped sell an incredulous Ethan Hunt, but Rogue Nation goes a step further and makes Ethan Hunt a critical reflection of Tom Cruise’s entire persona. Here, he is not just incredulous, but completely willing, and in fact, eager to throw himself in harm’s way as his aging body protests, and other characters call him out on it.

For example, mid-way through the film, after Hunt has drowned himself from holding his breath too long underwater switching out ID cards in a water-cooled server, he is abruptly revived with a defibrillator. But then, the important McGuffin flash drive is stolen from him and he immediately gets into a sports car to make chase as he’s still groggy and wide-eyed from being, you know, dead. Simon Pegg looks over as Cruise groggily keeps his eyes open, clutching the steering wheel and starting the engine with the look of a mad-man, and asks, “are you sure you can do this?” And Cruise blithely drives on, all “I GOT THIS” when he so clearly does not got this.  It’s perfect.

And suddenly, I am reminded of how emblematic of the male movie hero Tom Cruise is in these films. Think about Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Reeves in John Wick, or Kiefer Sutherland in 24. Their defining attribute is not cleverness—to be clever would be effeminate and weak—but raw prowess and determination. There’s a hysterical scene in 24 when a man Jack Bauer needs to interrogate on the other side of a panic room door/wall is locked inside. So, for a moment, you think he’s going to talk him out or find a Macgyver-esque solution to the problem. But no, he just takes a fucking shotgun or sledgehammer and wails against the wall until it breaks down. It’s raw determination. He wants it more than the other guy and he’s going to get what he wants, damn it!  John Wick doesn’t need a clever solution, he just shoots the other guys better, and this prowess lets him do things and take approaches no other character in the Wick films can, making him an almost superhero-like figure. And similarly, Ethan Hunt is the guy who can just climb a skyscraper, leap onto a plane or helicopter, run for miles, whatever. It is his core character trait throughout the entire series, as his actual emotional and character state is sort of waffled on between directors (genuine if charming rookie in 1, disgusting lady’s man in 2, grizzled vet in 3, so on). And sure, he can be clever, but when push comes to shove it is his physical state that saves him.

And this is what Rogue Nation, and subsequently, Fallout, so brilliantly play on. It slyly comments on Cruise’s aging state (the man is now in his late 50s) by portraying how desperately he will cling to whatever chance there is at succeeding a mission (and therefore, how desperately he will cling to his youth). He is the “I can do it” masculine attitude taken to the nth degree. And that’s why Rogue Nation is shot more as a comedy than an action film. It’s not like this is flying under Tom Cruise’s nose, either—he’s a huge producer on these films, and has the final say on many elements. I am reminded of Katharine Hepburn and how she was the one to suggest Cary Grant throw her to the ground at the beginning of The Philadelphia Story—she knew audiences didn’t like her and would like to see her smacked around a bit. Similarly, Cruise knows what modern audiences think of him, and he’s starting to have fun with it—and that makes me very, very happy.

FALLOUT

Which finally brings us to Fallout, an odd duck in the series. In the “contract” sense, it is another competent Mission Impossible film, and I enjoyed it a hell of a lot, but there’s weird unresolved series issues at the periphery.

First, the good: I think they continue Cruise’s self-deprecating streak brilliantly. He gets beaten up severely in stunts in some cartoonish ways, and the wonderful comedic camera work is still in full effect. There’s a shot where the Henry Cavill is sitting in a helicopter blithely unaware and calm as Cruise climbs the rope underneath another helicopter in the background that nearly had me rolling on the floor with laughter. If Ghost Protocol was incredulous Hunt, and Rogue Nation was Hunt as self-harming with his determination, then Fallout shows how even his colleagues and people in his ridiculous world find him to be an absurd entity. Angela Basset calls the IMF “Halloween,” his (now-standard) crew of Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames always look away as he’s doing ridiculous stunts—the running gag of Hunt’s very existence plays like gangbusters. In the words of a frustrated villain, “Why won’t you just die?”

Ilsa Faust continues to be in it, and is much less objectified by the camera this time around. The stunts are incredible, Henry Cavill is a wonderful addition who has a lot of fun with his straight-man role against Tom Cruise, and the whole film moves very smoothly and confidently as you’d expect the sixth entry in the series to. Unfortunately, however, Rebecca Ferguson is not the only returning actress.

That’s riiiiiiiiiight! Michelle Monaghan is back as Ethan Hunt’s boring ex-wife! And not only that, she has a cringe-worthy speech about how she can sleep well at night knowing he’s out there saving the world (barf). In general, this film is one-step-forward-two-steps-back with women. On the one hand, Ilsa continues to be great—if a bit blankly staring concernedly at Ethan this time around—and on the other, there’s a whole train of women interested in Ethan this time around (because one woman is never enough, AIMIRITE?) There’s Ilsa, who is more explicitly an interest, there’s an arms dealer who’s the daughter of the arms dealer from the first film named the White Widow who is just immediately turned on by Tom Cruise and finds him incredibly sexy and thrusts herself at him repeatedly, and then there’s his ex-wife thrown in the mix for good measure. Ugh. We even have a weird passing of the torch with love interests as his ex-wife speaks to him on a hospital bed and then Ilsa shows up immediately after, after whispering something into her ear. HERE’S THE NEW AND IMPROVED LADY SHE’S A SPY LIKE YOU AND I’M JUST GONNA GO BE A DOCTOR AND BE A GOOD WOMAN CHEERING FOR MY MAN FROM THE SIDELINES SURE HOPE I’M NOT ABDUCTED AGAIN ALRIGHT I’M GOING TO GO SLEEP SOUNDLY KNOWING YOU KEEP ME SAFE LIKE A STALKER BAAAAAAAAAI!

(Takes a deep breath.)

It’s at this point I have a (probably inaccurate, but still funny) image of Tom Cruise in a writer’s meeting:

Tom Cruise: Alright, and what if in this scene, she draped her arms onto my chest seductively and said, “Oooh, Ethan, you’re so sexy… what? No, you don’t look old at all, you still look like you’re 30. You don’t look like a grape that’s been left out in the sun for a little too long at all!”

(Tom Cruise turns to the producer.)

Tom Cruise (whispers): We’ll have a larger de-aging budget this time, right?

Besides easy potshots at Cruise’s age and persona, my other issues with Fallout are mostly tonal. Despite the often comedic tone and spyjinks, the entire movie has a really drab color palette and some dark-ass subject material. We open on a dream sequence ala Terminator 2 of Ethan and his wife disappearing into nuclear ash as the bad guy from Rogue Nation recounts all the ways Ethan failed her, and there are not one but two fakeouts of real rough shit happening and then going “Just kidding!” It feels like the filmmakers are trying to play with the expectations of a Mission Impossible film in the most shocking ways, while actually doing nothing. The first time, I was on board and thought it was really clever. The second time, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth that I hadn’t had since Mission Impossible 3.

There are also certain scenes that go on a little too long, but really, this is all just nitpicking. Mission: Impossible Fallout, overall, is the latest in a smart new trajectory for the series. I just hope Cruise’s ego doesn’t get in the way, and that this series is gracefully retired before we get to the Roger Moore Bond-era of Mission Impossible: Catheter.

IN SUMMATION

Hopefully I’ve demonstrated, that, like Bond films, Mission Impossible films are rather defined by what most people consider to be the most throwaway elements of the movies—the women and the stuff around the staples of the series, what, quote unquote, “Needs to be in a _____ movie.” The Mission Impossible series is one of the most fascinating mainstream takes on masculine action movie heroes in recent memory. They might be “popcorn flicks” that we don’t have to think too hard about, but it is exactly that which we don’t think about too much that shapes our thinking and our public culture.

A quick step back for context. For those of us that weren’t nerds in the ‘00s onward, “Machinima” is any sort of movie, music video, or show produced with recorded footage from gameplay in a video game. So instead of people standing around being filmed in live action, it’s a bunch of characters in video games standing around being filmed from someone’s PC or game console. This term, also, is not to be confused with the company named “Machinima,” who do publish machinima from many content creators, but are also soul-sucking exploitative vampires.

The rise of movies made in games can mostly be attributed to the increasing ease of capturing game footage and growing online video communities such as YouTube throughout the 2000s. Games becoming more and more mainstream didn’t hurt, either. After Red vs. Blue and Rooster Teeth, one of the most influential and successful Halo machinimas was Arby ‘n the Chief in 2008.

Besides the weird culture around it, what actually is Arby ‘n the Chief as a story? The premise, once you get over the meta-ness of it, is dead simple. The main characters are Master Chief and the Arbiter, action figures of characters from the first-person shooter, Halo 3. They live together as an Odd Couple­-style of roommates in their owner’s apartment. They’re both voiced by Microsoft text-to-speech programs—Master Chief is voiced by Microsoft Sam and Arbiter by Microsoft Mike. Chief is a nearly illiterate, sexist, immature character with the temperament of a toddler and a sailor’s mouth, and Arbiter is a more even-headed, articulate surrogate for the show’s creator, Jon Graham. Together, they bicker and play video games. That’s it. Between the simple premise, the crude handheld live action footage of action figures moving around talking (totally not with a hand off-screen), and the rudimentary voice acting of Microsofts Sam and Mike, there’s a charming gaucheness to the entire production.

Now, for reasons that are only known to my ass of a subconscious and God himself, I got into the mood to rewatch the entire original three seasons, as I still giggled hysterically remembering certain scenes. I was not surprised to see parts of it hold up very well. Other parts—well…

Arby ‘n the Chief, more than ever, strikes me as an artifact of its time—late ‘00s Xbox Live culture—and as created by a man who is smarter than he is capable of articulating at the time as he experiences growing pains both as a director and as an early adult in his 20s. And those growing pains—that fuzzy grey area between childhood and adulthood, and all the insecurity and uncertainty that comes with that—those are what give the show its surprisingly resonant emotional core and its funniest, most endearing moments, what led to its widespread success.

Sure, there are several scenes and plots dealing with “gamer culture” or the nuisances of playing games online (screaming internet trolls, lag, etc.), but at its heart, Arby ‘n the Chief is a college roommate comedy, where much of the conflict comes from Master Chief trying to appear more mature and adult than he really is as Arbiter either helps or hinders him (it really depends on the mood he’s in). The illiterate Master Chief of Arby might be an iconic early internet meme because of saying such perfectly awful phrases as “my roflcopter goes SOI SOI SOI” in that ridiculous Microsoft Sam voice, but he’s also a tender embodiment of the internet at its worst, not because it’s just that stupid or malicious, but because it’s just that immature. Chief makes homophobic dick jokes about the Arbiter nearly nonstop, but also always constantly seeks out his approval. He’ll wear a condom like a hat after having mistakenly called it a “sex balloon.” Is it any wonder that Chief resonated so much with the primarily younger audience of Arby ‘n the Chief, the middle schoolers and high schoolers who wanted so desperately to fit in and grow up? Who unknowingly empathized with Chief’s plight while simultaneously treating him like a scapegoat of stupidity, someone who is certainly more clueless about sex than they are? (As clueless as some kids are, they’ll never use a condom as a hat or dunk an entire bottle of deodorant on their pits… right?)

This youthful anxiety, the lines between child and adult being blurred, permeates the entire show and leads to most of, if not all the most memorable and funny scenes: Master Chief pretending to be drunk like a freshman at his first house party, drinking from a water bottle crudely labeled “BeR” with a sharpie, going, “Oh maaaaaan I’m so wasted”; a kid playing Grand Theft Auto IV online with an offensive-as-fuck fake “black from the streets” voice only to be dragged screaming from his Xbox by his father; Chief rolling up Lucky Charms cereal in a paper towel and attempting to smoke it like a joint and going “I’m so high”; two adults getting married in an online game of Halo 3 as “Here Comes the Bride” plays over a tinny headset (after the “priest” pesters his roommate to start playing the stereo, of course); the list goes on.

We can see a similar anxiety in the creator himself, Jon Graham. When Arby ‘n the Chief was first created, Graham’s online name was “Digital Ph33r,” something he himself constantly lambasted both within the show and in commentary tracks. In commentary, he points out he chose that Xbox Live name when he first started playing at a much younger age and keeps it around for name recognition only; in the show, Master Chief himself mocks Graham—“Look at me, I’m DIGITAL PH33R, I have 3s in my name!” There’s even a plot in one of the “movies” where Chief is brought to LA to make a movie thanks to his machinima (the producer thinks it’s ironic), and then unceremoniously booted because it turns out he’s crap. Tell me there’s not a little insecurity there about being an aspiring filmmaker working in video games. By later seasons, however, he altered his persona to “Jon CJG,” a much more professional sounding handle. The later seasons also traded in heavier topics as well, trying to discuss internet tolerance and the controversy surrounding Resident Evil 5’s portrayal of the African continent.

But then, anyone who disagrees with the Arbiter (Graham’s obvious writer surrogate) is immediately called “a fucking douchebag.” And therein lies the rub with Arby ‘n the Chief.

See, part of that anxiety of high school—fitting in and trying not to be eaten alive as an impostor by your peers—is viciously tearing apart others so you’re not next. It’s not just fearing for yourself, it’s ripping everyone else a new one. And we see this effect in full force in Arby ‘n the Chief. Many of the show’s subplots trade in making fun of the most idiotic and toxic members of the Xbox Live community. That’s fine—considering this was made in 2008/2009, that toxicity, dumbasses and 10 year olds screaming “faggot” and “retard” through their mics at all times, is reflective of Xbox Live at the time. But I take issue with these low-hanging pieces of comedic fruit being mauled, not just because they ought to be mauled, but to make Jon Graham seem clever. I hope, and assume that’s not the case—hearing him speak outside the show, he’s clearly very passionate about making online communities a safer, kinder place. In the work itself, however, it’s very easy to assume otherwise. Many episodes follow this format—Chief or some online troll do something stupid and hateful, and Arbiter either talks some sense into them or burns them in an eloquent, well-articulated rant. Master Chief’s character is a tender and empathetic representation of the internet dumbass within us all; the Arbiter is the high-handed aloof judgmental guy within us all. It’s easy to seem smart or clever when the people you’re talking about are as stupid as Xbox Live. And yes! Xbox Live can be that stupid! But that doesn’t make the revolving door of idiotic adversaries in Arby ‘n the Chief any less annoying. Graham is right, but he is not clever.

It’s no coincidence that the episodes that fall the flattest are these “serious” episodes—it’s not because Graham is wrong, or because we’re all immature assholes who just want Chief swearing. It’s because Graham’s direction and writing feel so much more energetic, emotional, and alive while writing immaturity than platitudes. Certain plotlines and certainly, Master Chief, come from the heart—Graham’s arguments, however, feel far more detached and intellectual. When Chief is being an idiot, Graham is making fun of internet culture, but also embracing how he is a part of it. When the Arbiter speechifies, however, he clearly considers himself above it. Another example of this is the later characters of Todd and Travis. Travis is the idiot, Todd is the Jon Surrogate 2.0. Travis is stupid in the most blunt, obnoxious, unclever ways—he sucks at games, he swears, he wants to shoot up strip clubs while playing Grand Theft Auto IV. Todd, on the other hand, is even less alive—he’s reasonable. Therefore, in the universe of Arby ‘n the Chief, he’s boring. He is given nothing to do but be a foil to Chief. Even Graham himself admits that he hates the characters of Todd and Travis. As he well should—they’re Arby and Chief again, except without the actual conflict and character moments. They are pure didactic id.

Think for a moment on the characters that are looked at with the most disdain by Arby ‘n the Chief. They’re all either blithering idiots or posers or shameful in some way. There’s Craig, who claims to be MLG, but isn’t really, and camps the most powerful weapons while jacking off. He is shamed for not being as good at the game at he claims to be, and for making the pose in the first place. In this faux-high-school environment, full of people with impostor syndrome, those most harshly punished are the actual impostors. There’s “Assassin Ninja 4827”, a 39 year-old man who is way too invested in his Halo 3 armor sets, and is mockingly called “Ass Ninja” by the Arbiter nonstop. This one is interesting. He’s an object of derision because he’s supposed to be an adult by now—not caring about this stupid video game. Graham, as a guy in his 20s clearly struggling with this same sort of thing, tears this character a new one because he’s just as critical of himself, and sort of displaces onto the character, as if to say, “You’re way older than me, YOU of all people should have your shit together and be an adult by now.” Graham even pokes fun at his own fan base, in a fun way, but one that also reveals his own insecurities about just what kind of entertainment he’s making. In a very meta episode, a lobby of Halo 3 players get stuck together when a match glitches, only to bicker about which Halo machinima creator is the best, including—you guessed it—Jon CJG. Yet the characters who advocate for him are clearly 10 year old children who slobber and froth over every little personal detail of Graham’s life, and cackle at Chief saying “my roflcopter goes SOI SOI SOI.” Heck, another character chides them, saying, “enjoy your stupid dick jokes,” to which they simply scream, “We will!”

That assessment is not too far off, at times. Arby ‘n the Chief is funny, but it is incredibly crude and blunt, to the point that South Park looks like an Aaron Sorkin script.  Most of this crudeness comes from, surprise, Master Chief, as he spouts “faggot,” “retard,” “gay,” “fuck,” “bitch,” and all sorts of mom and gay jokes left and right.  A more modern episode from season 8 has him saying “cuck.” While this is a conscious decision, and another example of a time capsule, it’s still hard not to cringe a little bit at points. Graham is smart, but not quite on top of his social-political awareness enough to earn a character who talks like this—especially in the context of 2018. The language, in general, is just super blunt and foul like a middle schooler. Even Arbiter, the smart one, the sort of role model, frequently resorts to just calling people “douchebags” and “assholes.” There’s a random gay alien rapist—why? And this is what I meant earlier when I said Jon Graham seemed like he’s too smart for how well he can articulate his stance. Like teens, his characters have a nuanced sense of the world, but they can’t express them properly. He has moments of eloquence through the Arbiter, and he comes off far better outside the show, but the best way he can articulate his issue is to have a character annoy him in some way and then call that character a douchebag. Or Ass Ninja. When he’s feeling a tad cleverer.

If it sounds like I’m stretching this theme of anxiety about adulthood too far, consider that almost directly after halting Arby ‘n the Chief for a spell, (Machinima was working him into the ground,) Graham went on to create a shorter-lived series called One Life Remaining, a dramedy about a recent high school graduate trying to figure out life after school. I remember enjoying it at the time, but the question has to be asked… why Halo 3? The simple answer is, yes, the channel was all Machinima and Graham was used to working in Halo 3 and could probably work on a larger scale within a game than in the real world. But what about a post-high-school dramedy about low-key adult conflicts really demands the use of Halo 3 instead of just filming in real life?  Halo fans aren’t happy, Arby ‘n the Chief fans don’t have enough cock jokes, and the rest of us are wondering why this is in such a limiting medium. You often see Graham pushing the limits of both the medium and what his audience will accept, and in this case he pushes it too far.  

Still, that a fucking Halo 3 machinima can inspire this much thought is an achievement in itself. Also, it is, for the most part, funny as hell—I will always remember Chief wearing a tie that envelops his entire head saying, “I haz 2 l00k liek @ bisnismann.” But it works best as an embodiment and an embracing of the more immature, insecure parts of ourselves, and whenever it tries to look at our youth from a distance while still occupying it, the show becomes a maddening post-modern nightmare in a thematic sense and hollows out some of its power. It is a show about Halo action figures playing Halo and living in the same house as the guy making films as them—but it works so much better as just two oddball roommates. And one desperately wants to grow up, like we all have. He never will. But we do. Not when we try to close the gap between our young and adult selves—but when we learn to celebrate and embrace that gap.

Somehow, I’ve avoided talking about Call of Duty so far. Part of that is a conscious decision on my part, because it’s hard to wear a Serious Art Commentator hat while talking about the video game equivalent of Bad Boys II at length. Or perhaps Call of Duty has simply been that unremarkable for the past few years to even its largest fans—especially its largest fans, a group I would consider myself a more and more begrudging member of.

Yes, you heard me correctly; I really love this series. I think it’s been host to some of the best first person shooters of all time. That’s why the past stretch of entries has bummed me the fuck out. To quickly recap, on this generation of consoles, we’ve had Call of Duty: Ghosts, one of the most casually jingoistic entries in the series (and that’s saying something) that manages to look worse than its predecessor and bork multiplayer completely while having the most laughable campaign in a while. We’ve had Advanced Warfare, which had a decent campaign and incredible improvements to movement in multiplayer—that were promptly dumped in Black Ops III for a far floatier set of wall-runs and slow jumps. And then Infinite Warfare decided to stick with those inferior mechanics. Sigh.

It was there that I checked out, after having played every entry in the series since Modern Warfare 2. The cause of Call of Duty’s decline, for whatever reason, attracts as many armchair theorists as the fall of the Roman Republic, so I haven’t been too eager to leap into the fray with my own theories. The common complaint is that not enough changes from year to year. “These games are all the same! With linear bombastic single player stories and braindead twitchy multiplayer!” Or something like that. Personally, as a tween or teen growing up with these games, I honestly thought too much changed from entry to entry in multiplayer. In case you haven’t noticed it, guys, these games have changed their multiplayer progression systems almost every single time. And without fail, almost every time it has changed for the worse.

Gone are the simple days of Modern Warfare, one attachment for your gun and three perks. No, now we have a menagerie of bullshit no one really needs for their ShootyMans™ game, with layers and layers of nested menus for cosmetic items and killstreaks and perks and playercards and weapons and attachments and AAAAAAAAH. Yet underneath all these topheavy systems and menus lies the same core action: point, shoot. Die. In short, we’ve become accustomed to doing more work to get to the same simple gameplay, what actually brought us to the series in the first place. When you die, you can’t simply accept it as a misplay on your part and move on—you have to wonder if it’s because you don’t have as powerful a loadout as the guy who shot you.

My playtimes tell the story better than my bitching. I logged 189 hours in Modern Warfare 2. 25 in Black Ops. 55 in Modern Warfare 3. 25 in Black Ops 2. 10 in Ghosts. 20 in Advanced Warfare. 15 in Black Ops 3. And next to none in Infinite Warfare. I didn’t even purchase Infinite Warfare until just recently, and it was only for the campaign, and it was on sale. Oh, how the fandom has fallen. But I did finally play it, and it actually inspired some pretty interesting thoughts.

While the multiplayer is worse than ever in Infinite Warfare, the campaign hasn’t been this ambitious since Black Ops II and its branching inter-generational storyline. It pushes the Call of Duty formula well past its limits, but in fascinating ways. That being said, the plot isn’t one of them. In the far-flung future, you play as Nick Reyes, an everyman with a gun in the FUTURE SPACE NAVY. The settlers of future Mars have turned into real future dicks and want to destroy future Earth. They try to do that. You try to stop them and command an entire future ship and her future crew while you do so. The future end.

No really. That’s the plot. Aside from a really odd inclusion of future Kit Harington as the actor playing the main future Mars future bad guy (future), there are no attempts to give this conflict any depth or nuances. In fact, screw depth, how about basic motivation? The SDF (future Mars bad men) are never given any motivation for attacking Earth. They’re sort of this militaristic culture, (probably from how rugged life was colonizing Mars, but hey, that’s just me speculating, THEY NEVER SAY WHY) and all the quotes that come up when you die are super flat examples of just HOW BAD THESE FUTURE BAD MEN ARE. They say “Mars Aeternum,” as if they’re Roman empire groupies or as if they have to conquer to survive, apparently they say freedom or liberty is weakness, they say a paraphrasing of “History is written by the victor,” they require 15 years of military service, they don’t let women serve in the military—THESE ARE REALLY BAD FUTURE BAD GUYS YOU GUYS. Just read these quotes (partway down the screen) and tell me what you think.

The vague villains feel like an odd callback to Call of Duty: Ghosts, Infinity Ward’s last entry in the series. Remember the Federation? That super plausible coalition of impoverished South American countries that hijacked the US’ super missiles and brought the country to its knees? Yeah, me neither. Probably because I was still too busy laughing over the line, “I’m better than a Ghost now!” (Man, 2013 was a fucking rough year.) Still, if the villains and the plot have nothing to do, at least the characters are decently well drawn.

You have an XO, Lieutenant Salter, who is convincingly tough without being a laughable “bad girl” stereotype, and is (thank god) not a love interest, although I’d be surprised if Call of Duty ever tried something like that. Eth3n is a robot petty officer who sounds like an affable farmboy, and has some of the best understated humor in the series. I could keep on with this boring laundry list, but suffice it to say, the game manages to handle an ensemble cast deftly with only a few minutes, if that, of screentime. That’s some impressive, economic character work. Heck, even Whitey McWhiteFutureSoldierMan Nick Reyes is alright, a naïve ingénue who becomes far less so by the end of the game. He’s just a normal guy doing his best to an impossible job. In fact, in general, the cast doesn’t feel superhuman, which is a nice change of pace after, oh, almost 10 years of MEGA BADASSES—Soap and Price, Mason and Woods, Russian Lady and British guy in Advanced Warfare, the Ghosts. ENOUGH! We get it! You’re super cool dudes who shoot guys and don’t afraid of anything.

Also welcome are side missions. Yeah. There are side missions in a Call of Duty. Not only that, they’re pretty great ones. There are multiple stealth missions, with legitimately tense infiltrations of enemy ships, with ACTUAL stealth mechanics! Lines of sight, alert meters! They’ve even started ripping off Batman games, and for the better, as you silently take out enemies in a room while a bad guy threatens hostages. You steal enemy ship prototypes, assassinate leaders, sneak around asteroids above Pluto—it’s a wonderful balance of quantity and quality. There are only about 8 or 9 side missions, but they each feel pretty substantial, with their own custom built assets and mechanics. Like a lot of the campaign, they have decent pacing too, smoothly moving from dogfighting in space jets to zero G combat, to interior infiltration and back.

Buuuuuut then you’re brought back down to Earth. Because it’s a Call of Duty game. And, despite all the cool stuff around the edges, at the end of the day, most of the time, missions will boil down to shooting a few men in a tight corridor with hit scan weapons. You’ll take a lot of damage as you have trouble, not shooting enemies, but seeing where they are shooting from in the first place in chaotic, dense, constantly exploding environments. You’ll be asked to focus fire on giant mechs (cool!) as several other soldiers shoot at you while you cower in the same small bit of cover hoping not to die (not so cool). Those visually stunning zero G battles, while amazing in concept, will ask you to fight several enemies with hit scan weapons where you have very little cover and can get shot from very large distances. What should be a change of pace or a twist on the formula accidentally bares just how shallow the core action is; the game—stripped of the spectacle, left with only a few bits of cover, open space, and enemies—is a bore.

See, I’ve been talking about the side missions. And while the side missions are varied, well-paced, and engaging, the main campaign is… not. The very first action in the game is hitting space to jump and following directional prompts on the HUD as you fly through Europa’s atmosphere. A red arrow pointing left shows up on the right, leaving you wondering, “So I need to steer… which way?” And then you die. Because of course it was left, dummy. When paired with the classic “Follow your ally” prompt a mere seconds later, the opening minutes of Infinite Warfare send a clear message—stick to the script, or die. Watch your squadmate do a dramatic jetpack knife kill of the guy in front of you. Yeah, we know you could have easily just shot him in the same time. We don’t care.

If that side mission I was lauding earlier—the Batman Arkham Asylum ripoff—were a main mission, we wouldn’t have been able to choose how to clear the room. We, as the measly player, would no longer be trusted to understand how to shoot a room full of enemies quietly, and would instead be given someone to follow who tells us who to shoot when, or maybe when the game is feeling generous, an obtuse “V TO SILENTLY KILL” prompt. And this mentality drags the moment to moment shooting—you know, the core game—down significantly. Don’t worry, though, sometimes the on-foot shooting is livened up with large robotic enemies that take MORE BULLETS! Oh wait that actually doesn’t fix any problems, FU—

My fatigue with the moment to moment shooting became so severe, any chance I got to actually wallrun, I took it, regardless of whether or not it was a good idea in my present situation. What’s that, you say? With all the space jets, zero G grappling, hacking, and other mechanics, you forgot you could double jump or wallrun? It’s funny that you should mention that, because so did the game.

The campaign, on the whole, is a missed opportunity. There’s competent, fun dogfighting mechanics in here, but they’re applied to the most basic “shoot guys” missions. There’s a Mercenaries style deck of 52, a Most Wanted list of targets for you to kill, but they just show up during your missions with no fanfare. You get their picture and biography after you kill them. You know, when that information is the most useful! (Facepalm) Oh, and if you’ve been preventing yourself from looking at the whole board of targets because it has a weird tendency to bug out and force you to restart the game, say, 50% of the time, and you want to read the biographies when you’re done killing all the targets, TOUGH SHIT, because for story reasons you can’t see the board after you’ve killed all the targets. (I could be missing it, but the fact that it can be missed is issue enough.) It’s kind of neat on a story mission when you blow up a ship, and “WOW, that was a guy, this feels slightly more interconnected!” but that’s really the most you ever get out of the system. And that really describes all of Infinite Warfare quite well. Despite the name, everything around the edges of the combat has grown more expansive and engaging than ever, but the core game—the “warfare” in Infinite Warfare, the Call of Duty—feels more finite and claustrophobic than ever. So, even with all the amazing stuff at the edges—the character work, the side missions, the dogfighting, the setting, certain moments—it all lands with a bit of a thud.

Rather than put myself through Black Ops III’s mechanics in multiplayer again with Infinite Warfare, I actually became curious and booted up Modern Warfare 2 for the first time in a while. Well, let’s be real, I check in about once a year, but I gave the multiplayer an honest college try for the first time in a while, instead of just vacantly amusing myself for a match. You know what? I actually kinda couldn’t stand it. The people who are good at Call of Duty are now insane in Modern Warfare 2. And it’s no fun at all. You have to check every corner of your vision and surroundings at all times, while also peering into the distant distant horizon (of say, Highrise or Wasteland) lest you be immediately sniped. There is no rhyme or reason to where enemies will be, thanks to the constantly shifting spawns. You have to be twitchy and on guard at every second. If you somehow do all of this, you will be killed by a stray grenade or someone’s airstrike. Plus, there was someone named “Goindrypulloutwet” so it was pretty much a bottom of the barrel experience all around.

So what the hell happened in these 8 years and change since Modern Warfare 2’s release? Do I just suck? Probably, but I also do okay in Counter-Strike or Titanfall. So what gives? Well, while the Call of Duty mainstream crowd moved from new release to new release—see here, me—the guys into Modern Warfare 2 stuck with Modern Warfare 2. For years. And the meta changed. Perhaps not the meta—I mean, idiots still run around with akimbo Model 1887s—but map awareness and knowledge. Everyone knows every map in and out. They know the routes and likely enemy placements like the back of their hands, and they’re probably much better shots than the average player. They dropshot, jump around, attack from sneaky angles—it’s kind of impressive to see Call of Duty at such a peak, honestly. From a distance. In person, it’s miserable. See, unlike a Counter-Strike, unlike a Quake, unlike a Titanfall, the better people are at the game—the more advanced the meta is—the less fun it is. Counter-Strike is demanding, but you can be a good player by communicating with your teammates even if you suck at shooting. It’s as much about thinking and ambushing as it is about pure twitchiness. Titanfall gives your enemies insane mobility, double jumps and slides and wall runs and bunnyhops, making them harder to shoot, but you get those same tools yourself to escape. In Modern Warfare 2, you see the other guy first, you shoot first, or you die. And there is no way to predict where someone may be, besides general map hot spot knowledge. It’s a clusterfuck.

Better question then—how was I ever competent at this hyper-twitchy mess? Well, besides the classic age and reflexes thing (21 means I’m, essentially, an old man), I think it has a lot to do with the crowd playing at the time. I realized something sad while playing Modern Warfare 2, something that other people noticed way earlier than I did—the only way to have fun in Call of Duty multiplayer is to feel like you’re getting one over on the other chumps playing. It’s not “our team made that sick play!” like Counter-Strike, it’s “I shot that guy before he shot me” or “I got that killstreak and called in a missile.” And such fun only exists as long as there are players below your skill level. Now, for a game as popular as Call of Duty, that’s no problem, at least at release. But Modern Warfare 2 in its current state reveals that it is disposable entertainment, meant to be quickly devoured by the masses until next year’s installment. Because without the masses, the game falls apart. It is the multiplayer equivalent of a pyramid scheme. And hey, if your old Modern Warfare 2 is bumming you out, why not play this year’s installment for a mere 60 dollars, where the less skilled players still exist?

In short, a game on Highrise with no dumbasses running in the open is a game that’s no fun at all. And middle school me is very sad to hear that. Adult me just shrugs.

And this is all such a shame, because I feel like a lot of these problems were solved in Advanced Warfare, only to be discarded out of hand. The boost jump and strafing turned every firefight in multiplayer into a mini dogfight, where tactical positioning and heck, even the option to retreat mattered. As opposed to the duck-shooting gallery we see in Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops III onward. This is only talking about multiplayer! Don’t get me started on the dormant potential in these singleplayer campaigns. (You know I’m just getting started, right?)

Like it or not, these are some of the last big budget singleplayer games out there. Think about how crazy that is for a second. The games you usually only play for the multiplayer have these lavish, expensive as hell handcrafted stories, just for the additional “value” or making cool looking trailers to show to sports audiences. And if they tried just a bit more, not in design, not in visuals, not in setting or concept, but in the fucking story, these could bite-sized blockbusters. They’re four to six hours, an ideal length for a story in a game, and they have the budget and the talent to make something special happen. And every other year, they get so close to greatness, but just miss the mark. Infinite Warfare is simply the latest almost-hit.

On the other hand, we’ve been clamoring for a different setting or a better story in Call of Duty for years, and it hasn’t really helped. Think about it—in 2009 or 10, we were begging for a future Call of Duty. Then future Call of Duty happened. It flopped. And now people are treating Call of Duty: WW2 like some brilliant breath of fresh air. Maybe it’s a trap to think the problem is in the story or the setting. Asking for Call of Duty to have a different setting is like asking for a different wallpaper for your prison cell. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but it would be naive to think it’ll help you get out. And a Call of Duty in space is still Call of Duty.

Of course you do. In my last post, I spent a long paragraph bemoaning the current fan culture and how it squeals with glee at every morsel of Star Wars with an almost cult-like reverence and obedience, but for all my whining, you have to admit—the word for these movies sure gets out. The question is not if any of us have seen The Last Jedi, but when, and what do we think about it?

For myself, between undertaking a cross-country plane trip and waiting for friends to do the same, I ended up until the end of the weekend to watch it, by which point the entire internet had exploded in “IT’S THE GREATEST THING EVER” and “IT’S THE WORST THING EVER.” (What else is new?) What piqued my interest, however, was one recurring theme—“they do weird or unexpected things with Star Wars.” So which is it? Honestly—all of the above.

I’ll be upfront here—I’ve spent a good few minutes just staring into space wondering where the hell to start with this thing, despite having very clear opinions on it, and ones that are none too rosy at that. There’s just a whole clusterfuck to untangle here in terms of criticism—do I start with the difference between concept and execution, how The Last Jedi has some really great ideas (albeit lifted directly from Knights of the Old Republic 2) yet bungles them in practice? Or why half of us are yelling that it’s a mess and the other half says it’s plotted, set up, and paced perfectly? How some critics claim it liberates Star Wars to do new things while the rest say they can feel the tight, metallic, grip of Disney’s influence like a claustrophobic vise? They’re all worthwhile, but also all related.

Let’s begin by describing The Last Jedi in concept. By this I mean, describing an idealized, paraphrased summary of the story and themes—how the film might appear to the writer in their head before actually writing a single word down. This is (to borrow an overused term) “the dark second act.” Despite the victories won by Rey, Finn, and Poe in The Force Awakens, the First Order has the Republic/Rebellion on the run. The last of the Rebellion is being pursued by the First Order’s fleet, unable to escape, mere hours of fuel away from being destroyed completely. In the face of insurmountable odds, our characters all have to learn the importance of accepting and learning from failure. This is a story about rejecting the dogmatic belief in good and evil, the Light and Dark sides of the force, Jedi and Sith—leaving the past behind and starting something new. How the future of the Force is not in a Skywalker, but just—someone. And therefore, anyone.

Sounds pretty fucking awesome, right? Except these are the only the ideas and themes behind The Last Jedi, its aspirations, its potential. And this sizeable potential? It’s completely unrealized. Because these great ideas are only spoken of in dialogue, given lip service to. The actual story and character arcs do not reflect these ideas one bit. Here are the four main subplots driving the film. Feel free to skip this list if you just want to hear what I think it all amounts to:

1)    Rey starts as a perfect, gifted novice Jedi. She wants to learn from Luke, or at least enlist his help for the Rebellion. Luke, embittered by Kylo Ren’s turn to the dark side, has cut himself off from the Force and believes that the Jedi and Sith should stop existing altogether. (Sound familiar?) After several minutes of being awkwardly followed around, he decides she’s pretty cool, though, so he starts training her. In their first lesson, he is disturbed by how immediately she turns her attention to the dark side, and says he won’t train her anymore. Then Luke sees Rey swing a sword in a pretty cool way and completely changes his mind again. After a very long time, Rey finally asks how Kylo Ren turned to the dark side, and Luke lies, only for Ren to say that Luke tried to kill him, and Luke then admits that he thought about killing Ren for a moment, only for him to take it the wrong way and freak out. (Notice how Luke is let off the hook a bit here when it would have been far more interesting if he actually was capable of being that ruthless?) Rey decides to try to turn Kylo back to the light side. Kylo reveals that her parents, long teased at, are not special at all and there is nothing to be learned there. Rey decides that Kylo is being a dick and leaves to save her friends. Meanwhile, a ghost Yoda tells Luke that he had nothing to teach Rey because she already knew everything she needed to know. So, after a whole lot of screentime-burning scenes, Rey ends as a perfect, gifted novice Jedi, who only needed to learn that she didn’t need to learn anything. What?

2)    Kylo Ren starts as an incompetent crybaby. I don’t say that as an insult, mind you. His character was one of the most interesting parts of this and The Force Awakens; he’s meant to suck, you guys! Anyway, his evil-master-guy-thing-Palpatine-stand-in Snoke chews him out for sucking so much. In a space battle, he almost kills his mother Leia, but lets off the trigger only to have his allies blow her up anyway. He and Rey develop a connection through the force (sound familiar) and he tells her how Luke tried to kill him. When Rey comes to try to save him, he takes her to Snoke, who orders him to kill her. Instead, Kylo kills Snoke, and asks Rey to join him, claiming he’s leaving behind Jedi and Sith while sounding a whole lot like a Sith. Literally, these contradictory lines are right next to each other: “Leave behind the Jedi and the Sith! Join me and we could rule the galaxy together!” (Facepalm.) Then he tries to kill the Rebellion and fails. And tries to kill Luke and fails. After an entire movie, Kylo Ren ends as an incompetent crybaby who is now in charge.

3)    Poe starts as a hothead who takes too many risks. In the opening scene, he overcommits to an attack on the lead First Order ship, leading to its destruction, but also to most of his allies dying. Leia demotes him for this, claiming he doesn’t have what it takes to be a leader. Leia is then jettisoned out into space by the Kylo Ren’s allies attacking the bridge. She returns herself to the ship with never-before-used Force powers and is absolutely fine for the rest of the film. Meanwhile, Poe conflicts with his new superior officer, who I forget the name of, so let’s call her Officer Purple Hair. Officer Purple Hair refuses to tell him her plan for saving the fleet from certain doom, so he starts a mutiny. The mutiny fails. It turns out she had a plan. Yay? Later, Poe has now somehow learned his lesson. The Rebellion begins on the run and outgunned and ends on the run and outgunned. This is one of the most coherent character arcs in the entire film. Oh dear.

4)    Last, and least, Finn and a new character named Rose leave the fleet to try to find a hacker who will help them save their friends. They don’t find the hacker they were looking for, but they find a hacker, which they hope is good enough. They return, only to absolutely fail and have their new hacker friend betray them and put the Rebellion in even greater danger. Thankfully, they still escape (oh, and Finn super quickly kills Captain Phasma in an anti-climactic battle. Yay) and join their friends on the surface. Finn attempts to sacrifice himself to save his friends, but Rose stops him, saying that they “need to stop fighting what we hate and start saving what we love.” Oh, by the way, she loves him now. After a little fan-girl glee at first meeting him and no other development or hint at affection whatsoever. Finn and Rose have no arc, and their actions feel pointless, as they only ever negatively affect the story.

Sounds a whole lot messier, right? This is a film where entire subplots, entire character arcs begin and end in almost exactly the same place. And that’s fine, as long as the characters have learned something along the way—but Rey hasn’t. Kylo threatened to, but hasn’t. Finn hasn’t. Leia has learned to use the force, but no one reacted to it and she never used it again, so it feels like she hasn’t changed at all. The structure of the film moves in circles, making dramatic moments or changes and then going back on them and expecting you to praise it for being so clever. Leia is dead—now she’s not. Luke won’t train Rey—now he will—now he won’t—now he will—now he won’t—oh wait, he had nothing to teach her in the first place. Kylo will change—no he won’t. Snoke is important—no he’s not. We’re ditching the concepts of good and evil—but at the end we have a clear good and a clear evil. I have enjoyed Rian Johnson’s work in the past, but his writing and directing here is so busy subverting expectations that very little actually changes. I think the clearest example is Kylo Ren—the whole movie builds up to him changing, but then he doesn’t. And because this isn’t expected, some can call this “clever.” But it’s not—for it to be clever, the intention or groundwork would have to have been clearly communicated and built up in the first place. This whole film is the equivalent of saying, “I’m going to do something new and interesting—NO I’M NOT! GOTCHA!”

And because of this constant “GOTCHA” approach, or just a lack of character development in general, a lot of moments that sound awesome on paper, and should play like gangbusters, don’t. Rey realizing that Luke’s teachings are limited and that she has to strike out on her own? That should be a great moment. But because she and Luke have already gone back and forth so many times in their training with no real reason, instead of a big, important, character moment, her departure simply feels like that switch flipping again.

The concept of the Rebel fleet being hunted, constantly shot at by the First Order, and being on the verge of running out of fuel and dying is a really great one! As a lot of people have already said, it’s reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica’s second episode, “33,” where the fleet is under attack every 33 minutes without end. However, BSG took great pains to show us how this constant siege took its toll on the crew. Fighter pilots have to fight against fatigue, using drugs and stims to stay awake, crew members have unshaven, haggard faces. You can see the 33-minute mark on every clock marked with tape or a marker. It all culminates with them realizing the enemy is only tracking one ship in their fleet, and them making the hard decision to destroy it—killing the 1,000-something people aboard—to save the rest of the fleet. The Last Jedi, on the other hand, uses this rich setting only as a ticking clock for the other subplots, and the only conflict to come from it is the dry tension between Poe and Officer Purple Hair. The severity of the situation is also undermined by how easily Rey, Finn, and Rose enter and exit the fleet at will.

Also, the overabundance of plots and moving pieces make even The Last Jedi’s 2 hour and 30-minute runtime feel claustrophobic. Characters are almost exclusively defined by their profession or their role in the story. They have no inner life, no hobbies, no life outside of their role in this tiny story. We are now two films deep in new Star Wars, and we still have no idea what normal, regular life looks like outside of this narrow conflict. These characters feel like they are merely tools for the story—that might be because they are.

Honestly, at this point, even I’m tired of talking about Star Wars, so I’m going to leave it here, despite having lots of other nitpicks. I’ve read lots of positive responses to The Last Jedi after me (and all of my friends and family) feeling quite differently. And they’re articulate, and smart, and make a lot sense, especially the one by Film Crit Hulk. However, they all talk about how great the themes are, the ideas, or the craft and control displayed by Rian Johnson. And it’s true—there are some great ideas in The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson is a talented director. But in two and a half hours, I was rarely excited, I was rarely invested, I didn’t care about the proceedings. My reaction through most of it was lukewarm disinterest, despite coming into it with moderately positive hopes. One of my friends even went so far as to call it one of the worst movies he had ever seen (not that I agree).

When it appeared that Leia had died, my first reaction was “huh.” And when she came back, my reaction was also, “huh.”

“Huh.”

I can think of no word more damning for a movie with such transparently great aspirations.

In the seemingly endless waking nightmare that is our existence with the Star Wars and Marvel “Cinematic Universes,” we have been treated to a lot, a lot of talking about Star Wars, but it’s not exactly a critical discourse. It’s more akin to a nonstop ejaculation from—what I can only assume Disney’s horde of marketing people would condescendingly refer to as—the “enthusiast” demographic. You know, those people who make a living screaming in reaction to the latest Star Wars or super hero trailers? Or the YouTube channels where people sit around on a mildly professional looking set decorated with geek paraphernalia and take turns saying how excited they are over every little drop of meaningless information put out about the latest film?

…may have gone a little overboard there. But that has been the tone of the discourse for some time now. There is more Star Wars than ever before, engaged with by more people than ever before, and to less meaningful effect than ever before. What I mean is, more people than ever can say they’re a “Star Wars fan,” but when they say that, they might not even like the original films—they like the mainstream, edges-rounded-off, safe, popcorn-flick blockbusters that they have become.

I am aware that I am dangerously close to becoming one of those “Star Wars is deeper than you think” guys here, which is just as bad as fawning over whatever fan service Disney dusts off and throws in a trailer, but this all bears saying. At the time of its creation, Star Wars was new, unlike anything most people had seen while incorporating Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, his ideas of the Hero’s Journey into a simple, yet emotional and compelling story. This is going to sound pretentious as fuck, but fuck it—Star Wars is not overly simplistic; it is archetypal. It is simple, but not braindead. With the ideas of the Light Side, the Dark Side, the Rebellion and Empire, the Force—big shocker here, I know, but Star Wars is building off our basic ideas of good and evil. It’s not complex, it’s not subtle, but by doing so gets to portray its age-old conflicts more clearly and with more emotional force.

Put in a nutshell, “The Emperor” is not a nuanced, Machiavellian schemer. He works best as Evil Incarnate, a representation of a darkness within Luke he must turn away from or overcome. And with that freedom to be as awful as (in)humanly possible, he gets to do incredibly cinematic, powerful fucked up stuff like electrocuting and torturing Luke in front of his father. In its way, Star Wars is profound.

So, with its seemingly interminable reign in the pop culture milieu, it is easy to see how Star Wars’ absolutism and archetypal conflicts have devolved, over decades, into mindless “good guys versus bad guys” stories. With such a limited palette, how many stories are there to tell, really?

Enter Knights of the Old Republic, a Star Wars video game that seems to understand its source material better than its creator (George Lucas) or current caretakers (Disney). Developed by Bioware in the studio’s golden age, KOTOR takes place a thousand years or so before the events of A New Hope, when the conflict was not between an Empire and Rebellion, but the Republic and the Sith. Now, the story itself is your basic Star Wars coming-into-power-and-fighting-the-big-bad adventure. You have the option to play as a Dark Side character, but the game’s interpretation of that is you playing as someone who kicks the puppies of orphans as they’re crying outside their burning orphanage for fun. In classic black-and-white Star Wars fashion, if you want to be someone remotely reasonable or human, you have to play as a Light Side character who is ridiculously generous and charitable at their own expense. That being said, the setup and backstory are nuanced in a way that would be greater capitalized on in Knights of the Old Republic 2.

EXPOSITION START!

Before the game even starts, in a relatively peaceful time for the Republic, an unruly ancient clan of warriors called the Mandalorians started raiding Outer Rim worlds just outside of the Republic’s territory. Think “Klingons” or any of the myriad of honor-bound, warrior types in science fiction and you’ll be on the right track for the Mandalorians. The Republic, in its hesitancy, decided not to attack until the Mandalorians took actual Republic territory—and eventually, the Mandalorians attacked the Republic itself, on several different worlds at once. Overstretched and, honestly, outmatched in prowess and general strategy, the Republic’s military took loss after loss. In desperation, they turned to the Jedi for assistance. But the Jedi—being the Jedi, and rather self-conscious about only doing the right thing—waited on their decision to join the war. See, they were still recovering after their own mishaps with a rogue Jedi-turned-Sith named Exar Kun. (Funny how that happens a lot, isn’t it?) So, as they waited and deliberated and deliberated, more and more worlds were falling, millions were dying in the Outer Rim to the Mandalorians.

One Jedi, however, advocated joining immediately. And not just any Jedi, but the Jedi’s greatest student, the closest thing they had to a celebrity, Revan. Without going into too much detail, let’s just imagine, for the sake of illustration, that this is Luke Skywalker. He’s a hero. A guy like him arguing that the war should be fought resulted in many, many Jedi joining him. And right off the bat, the war started turning around under Revan’s command. He, apparently, was not just a hero, but a great general. And at a final battle at Malachor V (more on that later,) Revan defeated the Mandalorians once and for all. But then his forces went missing for a few months, only to reappear under a Sith banner and turn on the Republic. In a Caesar-like fashion, Revan was marching on the capital with troops he had converted to his cause. Imagine US troops sailing back from Japan in World War 2 to attack Hawaii and San Francisco. It was like that.

Desperate, out of options, facing the end of the Republic (again,) the Jedi take Revan alive with a small SEAL-Team-Six-type squad, and wipe his memories.

EXPOSITION END (SORTA)

Here is where KOTOR starts its story. You play as an amnesiac Revan, turned against his former allies without his knowledge. This premise eventually devolves into black-and-white good-and-evil, but at least at the beginning, there are shades of grey. Was Revan so wrong for joining the war? Why did he turn back on the Republic? And was it at all ethical for the Jedi to, essentially, brainwash Revan and turn him into their own weapon against the Sith army he helped create? The game never really answers these questions, nor is it very interested in them. It is, however, interested in giving you plenty of opportunities to be the most comically evil or charitable individual. The former is particularly amusing, as your face gets all evil and Palpatine-y with wrinkles and yellow eyes and yet, somehow, your companions still manage to be surprised every time you do something ridiculously evil, all “That was a really cruel thing you just did!” (Because I look so trustworthy and have been so nice up to now! Facepalm.)

But the questions that KOTOR refuses to scrutinize too deeply, Knights of the Old Republic 2 focuses on entirely, with an almost nihilistically sharp attention paid to the grey areas of Star Wars. At the end of KOTOR, Revan renounces his old ways and saves the Republic—yay! But KOTOR 2 starts a few years later, and Revan has gone missing, the Jedi are being hunted, the Republic is crumbling, and no one seems to give a shit—guess that “yay” was premature? You play as one of the Jedi who immediately joined Revan in the Mandalorian Wars, one who has now been exiled for her actions.

You wake up, alone, defenseless, trapped on a remote mining outpost, hunted by bounty hunters and Sith alike. One of the first people you talk to, Atton (a Han-Solo type who actually only poses as that to hide that he used to be a Jedi Hunter), makes one point resoundingly clear: he and the rest of the galaxy give zero shits that you’re a “Jedi” and not a “Sith”—to them, you’re all the same, lightsaber, Force-wielding maniacs who force (sorry, had to) the galaxy into countless wars all in the name of “balance.” And it only gets darker from there.

Your other companion, Kreia, is someone who refuses to identify as either Jedi or Sith. She finds such absolutes tedious—the Jedi are too rigid, and the Sith are too mindlessly destructive. Kreia, along the journey, happily manipulates everyone around her and encourages you to do the same (although, as she bitterly admits at one point, she’s too unlikeable to be totally successful—she is forever doomed to be the voice of reason no one listens to.) And it is Kreia that serves as the mouthpiece for the greatest themes, ambiguities, questions within KOTOR 2.

When asked about Revan, Kreia raises several interesting points about his “fall.” Did he ever fall, or was he always like this? Was he simply acting pragmatically in a way that the Jedi could not understand? In his assault on the Republic, he left key military production facilities and worlds standing, as if he was planning in the long term to keep the Republic standing. Kreia also reveals that she was Revan’s mentor, that she taught him to leave the Jedi to pursue a path that was less encumbered by dogma, without becoming a destructive monster. She also points out, that in many respects, people do not become their best selves until they are tested by conflict. So, charitable acts that take this hardship away from them—or, say, rushing to the defense of the Republic—rob them of these tests. And the Republic has never truly been tested, because the Jedi always rushes to its defense. Perhaps it deserves to fall?

As an exiled Jedi who knew that the Mandalorians had to be fought immediately, you are an ideal next pupil for Kreia. Throughout the game, your character is referred to, several times, as a “wound in the Force,” as you are still distanced from the Force due to the traumatic events of Malachor V (a clearer metaphor for trauma, I cannot find). See, Malachor V was not any regular battle, it was a deliberately cruel feint on Revan’s part where he lured the Mandalorians out with his own, least loyal forces. And with all of his (and your) enemies all together, the exile gave the order to fire a superweapon that destroyed the entire planet. Obviously, ordering the death of so many left a bit of a scar on the main character.

That this connection to the Force can be wounded, battered like this, frightens the Jedi and makes them regard you as an abomination. Where there should be a connection to the Force, your character only has an emptiness—she is one of the few people who has chosen to turn away from the Force and succeeded, and not only that, still lived. So the question is raised—is your character deafened to the Force, somehow hollow or dead inside, or is she more alive and free for being able to distance herself from it? The Jedi Council thinks the former, while Kreia thinks the latter.

To question Star Wars’ archetypal ideas of the Light Side and Dark Side is to question our basic ideas of good and evil, and to wonder what the Force really means is to question, on a spiritual or philosophical level, our connection to the universe. And KOTOR 2 does this all the time.

Take the villains, for example. They are not classic Star Wars villains, bent on power or domination. In fact, they are portrayed as the victims of their own perverted connection to the Force, as they are both also victims of Malachor V. Darth Sion, whose body has millions of bone fractures and is about to fall apart at any moment, holds his shattered form together with only the Force and his pain. Darth Nihilus has been so wounded that he can only live by consuming the Force around him, literally living off the destruction of others for his own benefit. He is constantly hungry for more because he is incapable of supporting himself—only taking from others. (Do I need to bring up that this is an obvious trauma metaphor again? I am reminded of lifeguard training, how someone who is drowning will involuntarily drag you down if you give them the chance.) I won’t beat around the bush here; these are the coolest, creepiest Star Wars villains I’ve ever seen. Nihilus cannot even speak, reduced to otherworldly shrieks from underneath a mask.

KOTOR 2, by acknowledging, not just that the Force can be wounded, but that it maybe should be—to hide from such trauma would be too similar to the reclusive, self-contained, disconnected Jedi—advocates for a much more mature worldview than its source material. In KOTOR 2, where there should be Star Wars dogma, there are only questions, and where that belief in a greater power should be, there is only its wounded remains or emptiness.

Adding to this feeling of emptiness is the game’s general lack of content. It is a large, ambitious game, running about 30 to 40 hours, but it was developed in only 14 months. Therefore, there are huge areas that have only a few quest lines or missions. Yet this empty feeling actually adds to the game. It presents an empty, uncaring, cold universe where yes, a lot is happening, but you can’t actually do that much in it or change everything in it like you might expect to.

But it is not entirely nihilistic, for two reasons—the ending, and a scene in the middle of the game. In a vision in an ancient tomb, you see your allies turn on Kreia, saying that she has been manipulating you this whole time. Now, you can do the good guy thing and defend her, or agree with your allies. However, there is a third option—to simply say, “if you have a problem with her, you fight her.” At which point everyone turns to you and says, one at a time, “Apathy is death.” And then they all attack you. So clearly, KOTOR 2 acknowledges the dangers of its own nihilism, and tells you, as directly as possible, that despite operating in shades of grey, apathy or neutrality is not an option. Just because things are complicated doesn’t mean you get to do nothing or try to stay in the middle.

Finally, at the end of the game, Kreia betrays you and knowingly gives information to the Sith that will let them loose on Telos, the last planet of the Jedi, and the last hope for the Republic to rebuild. She then returns to Malachor V, where she hopes to somehow recreate the horrific events there and make an even greater wound in the Force, maybe even destroy it outright. Because Kreia, it is revealed, hates the Force. She hates that both the Jedi and the Sith have to rely on it, hates its constant influence on everything and how it manipulates everyone in the name of balance. In Revan, she says, she saw the Force at its most alive, and in you, she sees the death of the Force. And for that she admires you, even loves you.

There are several ironies here. Kreia hates absolutism, but attempting to destroy the Force is an even more extreme, absolute act than either the Jedi or the Sith are capable of. Also, a greater wound in the Force would likely not destroy it outright, but simply create more monsters like Sion or Nihilus. Finally, by taking these actions, Kreia accidentally brings about balance yet again. Because what Kreia wants—a life without the Force—is impossible. When something is consciously nowhere, the lack of it is everywhere

KOTOR 2 becomes, almost by accident, the most profound, hopeful story in Star Wars. A story of absolute loss, of being absolutely broken by the world at its worst, but coming back from it slowly, painfully. Where the Force, usually unassailable, can be damaged or wounded, but how that actually makes us stronger. It’s like that truism in screenwriting—“a hero’s accomplishments are only as good as the difficulty of their struggle.” It is easy for Star Wars to be hopeful when you know everything is going to work out, when the Force will always bring balance. But ironically, by showing the Force at its very worst, KOTOR 2 shows how it will never leave. If it can come back from this, what can’t it come back from?

I actually started KOTOR 2 with the intention of being a cutthroat, pragmatic Revan-type character. After becoming sick of the cookie-cutter morality of the original KOTOR, I was consciously trying to be the least straight-up “good” or “bad” character. I wanted my character to stick by her actions, to question the Jedi, but not be a cartoon villain. Here’s the thing, though—the game actually succeeded in changing my mind for the more positive. Throughout, characters hammer you again and again on your actions in the Mandalorian Wars—was it worth it, knowing it led to Revan turning, that kind of thing. And at first, I stuck by it profusely. “Yes, I saved lives, fuck you”— answers to that effect. But around the halfway mark, I actually reconsidered. My character would go with Revan all over again, if she had the choice, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t acknowledge how she regretted the consequences. She was no stuffy Jedi, but she tried to change and be her best self.  

I am reminded of Blake’s ideas of “higher innocence” here. Reacting to Milton and Paradise Lost, Blake wrote that both Heaven and Hell, good and evil are necessary, for “without contrarieties there is no progression.” Meaning—in a very Kreia-like, way, I hope you notice—that conflict and tensions are necessary to grow. Unlike the Bible, Blake does not lament the Fall as regrettable, but acknowledges that knowledge, experience, and exposure to evil is necessary to come back to an even Higher Innocence. This is when our innocence is bolstered by knowledge. We do not have to wallow in our bad experiences—they are an opportunity to grow.

That is what Knights of the Old Republic 2 does for Star Wars. It brings an otherwise archetypical and naïve series into experience and maturity. But by deconstructing it or discarding its weaker elements, KOTOR 2 actually shines an even brighter light on the profound aspects of Star Wars. After being defeated, Kreia asks only one more thing of you—that whatever you do next, it be entirely your choice. So, the game’s last message is imparted. The world is complicated, but there is still right and wrong, and all we can do is our best, listen to our own wisdom. From emptiness comes unlimited potential.

…see why I’m annoyed by the new Star Wars now?

Well, it has an amazing story. Mmm, not an amazing “story” per se, as in some masterfully crafted narrative structure and rumination on the human condition. The plot itself is rather mundane—your gang, the Third Street Saints, take on a large crime syndicate in a new city, and hijinks ensue. Simple, right? And yet the deliriously absurd tone and characters take the story in unpredictable and exciting directions—there’s a mission in cyberspace with riffs on classic text adventures like Zork or Atari games like Combat, a wrestling mission, a zombie outbreak, a film called Gangsters in Space, a cameo from Burt Reynolds—this game goes places.

Of course, that alone doesn’t really get across what makes The Third so compelling. With a description like that, and observations such as the ridiculous character progression that makes you invincible, or the selection of absurd weapons such as giant purple dildo bats, the game sounds more like a toybox than a properly curated experience. Yet, for all of its “throw fun stuff at the wall and see what sticks” bravado, The Third does have an oddball consistency, a quirky sixth sense that runs throughout. The cliché would be that “it is greater than the sum of its parts.” Yet even this does not work, because that assumes that the compelling nature of this game is somehow within its myriad gameplay systems and story beats, as in “Wow, I didn’t realize these things would go together so well, yet they do.” But what makes Saints Row: The Third so hard to explain is that its greatest elements come from outside the game—specifically, our engagement with its tone and characters. And this engagement is imperfect—some side missions fall flat, certain gameplay systems are a chore. In a weird way, that adds to it though—not to get too pretentious all at once, but life is similarly a series of imperfect engagements with sublime or transcendent concepts. That the experience is incomplete does not make it any less profound.

Did I just call Saints Row: The Third “transcendent” and “profound?” Yep. Its writing is consistently self-aware and endearing in a way that makes us invest more emotion and attachment into the proceedings than is actually there (in a rather similar way to the with magic of the characterization in Fast and Furious). With this coy, indirect method of engagement with an audience, I start to think of Lucretius, and his theory that all movement, all energy exists because particles are constantly swerving. They fall, but they do not do so in a direct, static line. Similarly, Blake believed that all progress in the universe came, not from constant good or evil, but with the conflict of opposites. “Without contrarieties, there can be no progression,” or something to that effect. And Saints Row is nothing if not constantly swerving. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but it is always lively.

Another game that puts me down a similar philosophical track is Trackmania 2. Here is another game that should not be special. It is a simple, time trial racing game in which you drive cars through strange courses at high speed, with loops, wall rides, big jumps and boost pads. It plays very well, with snappy, responsive controls, but the default courses are boring, all of the UI is a nightmare, and there is next to no support for the game. Except the game has a ridiculously dedicated following that supports the multiplayer constantly with new, exciting tracks, custom car models and skins, custom servers with horrible (or amazing?) music, usually of the techno or dubstep variety, and a small but persistent group plays it to this day. Adding to the surreal feeling of the gameplay, cars all appear on the track at once but do not collide with each other, as they are all simply racing for the fastest time. Servers usually have 50 players at once, but they can go up to 200. Now, Trackmania 2, in isolation, can be rather depressing and desolate. But Trackmania 2 with 49 other players on the track at once, blaring custom horns with custom car models (why does that car look like Sonic the Hedgehog?) while a dubstep remix of Cher is playing for… some reason… is incredibly entertaining.

Both Saints Row: The Third and Trackmania 2 swerve the unremarkable into the remarkable, and turn the mundane into something special. There is a devious kind of optimism in both games, where they give us, the audience, not what we expect or want but something else entirely. In this day and age—when it seems like we’re surrounded with nothing but shit—perhaps the only option we have is to remember that we can turn lead into gold. A Grant Theft Auto clone can be the funniest comedy in video games possibly ever, a niche French racing game can be the embodiment of the Wild West of the Internet. Games can do anything, and so can we.

If ever in a seemingly inescapable position, if we feel powerless and like we have no control—

All we have to do is remember Lucretius. And swerve.

…and then I was very much off board.

Because all of a sudden, I saw this seeming passion project in a new light. This may be Tim Miller’s genuine desire to salvage the Titanic that is the Terminator franchise, (like that mixed James Cameron metaphor anyone?), but that desire and enthusiasm has been subordinated to a far more cynical enterprise—yet another gargantuan, monolithic franchise or cinematic universe. My worst fears were confirmed when the interviewer asked, “Is this the Star Wars model?” and Cameron replied, “Yes, this a passing of the baton to a new generation.” (Paraphrasing, of course.)

Now, my issue here is less a vague anti-capitalist or mainstream studio filmmaking screed, and more a specific point of taking some of the most talented young studio filmmakers of our time and all putting them to work on massive properties like assembly line workers. Because the interviewer was right to bring up the “Star Wars” model. Has anyone else been paying attention to the churn-and-burn attitude Disney has been treating creatives with lately? Garth Edwards’ Rogue One had massive reshoots when Disney hired Tony Gilroy (who wrote Bourne, directed Michael Clayton) in a total last minute, mercenary move. Disney fired Colin Trevorrow from Star Wars Episode IX before it even started production because of less than stellar reviews for his latest film. They also manhandled Phil Lord and Christopher Miller of 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie fame while they directed the new Han Solo film, until eventually chucking them out for Ron Howard. Rian Johnson has managed to direct Episode VIII without incident, though I’m starting to wonder if that’s more due to him keeping a low profile than any benevolence on Disney’s part.

Besides the cited inciting incidents—falling behind production schedule for Lord and Miller, clashing egos for Trevorrow, and last minute plot changes for Edwards—it’s hard to look at this mess and not see a studio grinding the creative impulses of these directors to dust. Just take a look at the caliber of director they’re hiring—Disney isn’t getting established big names, they’re hiring talented up-and-comers who aren’t veteran enough to argue with their creative direction being thrown into the gears of the big machine. And Star Wars isn’t alone! Warner Brothers and Fox and Marvel (essentially Disney still) have been doing the same with superhero movies for ages now. Joss Whedon was the architect of the Marvel Cinematic Universe before getting, pardon my French, royally fucked on Age of Ultron and then booted. Edgar Wright was unceremoniously kicked off Antman. Fox hired Josh Trank from Chronicle (remember that weird little film) for that new Fantastic Four, then butchered it in reshoots and edits for being too niche.

The sad thing is, there is a genuine lure to all of this. If someone approached me with the opportunity to work with STAR WARS, then yeah, I’d put up with a lot of shit. These amazing, talented young directors are simultaneously being given a great opportunity while sort of wasting it by not pursuing their own original projects, but adapted or existing properties. At some point in the Tim Miller and James Cameron interview, Miller said that he honestly prefers to work with adapted material, with books or films that already exist and he loves. And I get where he’s coming from, as someone working on an adaptation at this very moment. But I had this, perhaps overdramatic, lachrymose moment as I foresaw some dystopian future where directors no longer create their own material, but throw themselves into existing, safe bubbles of brands. Where all their creativity goes into making the same thing but different. I was reminded, again, of Jean Baudrillard’s ideas of post-modern society, and how it is no longer based on reality but models of reality. Well, this interview went one step further and showed me a society where we don’t even base ourselves on any models of reality, but only specific models of reality. And it scared the shit out of me. Because as much as I love working with existing great books or great movies, if that’s all we ever do, who will be left to make those great movies in the first place?

Jurassic Park is now a cinematic universe. Star Wars is now a cinematic universe. Fast and Furious is about to become a cinematic universe. Sony attempted to make Ghostbusters a cinematic universe. Let’s not even talk about Universal and the Dark Universe of their classic monster films turned into action schlock.

And now Terminator is about to become a cinematic universe. Congratulations, world. You finally made me root for Skynet to kill us all.

So, at the risk of being an insufferable list maker, I have to divide my thought process here into three sections. I will first discuss the appeal and strengths of the original Death Note manga/anime, which should also serve as a decent introduction to just what the hell this weird story is. Then, I will go over (shortly, I hope) how this new Death Note is nothing like the anime, and how it therefore should not be judged by its adherence to the source material, but by how well it succeeds in its own aims.

Death Note Circa 2007

The original Death Note follows Light Yagami, a gifted, charming high school student in Japan who comes across a suspicious notebook—the Death Note. Inside, it claims that anyone’s name who is written within the notebook will die of a heart attack 40 seconds later, unless another cause is specified. Out of morbid curiosity and disbelief, Light writes a criminal’s name down only to discover it works. His first reaction is not horror, but to experiment further. At the end of Light’s first night with the Death Note, the notebook’s original owner—a Shinigami (Japanese god of death) named Ryuk confronts Light, only to find out he has already written dozens of names in the notebook. Light is not shocked by Ryuk’s appearance, and gladly admits he expected a supernatural presence like this. He even tells Ryuk of his plans to use the Death Note to kill all the criminals of the world and create a utopian society. And in case anyone in the audience were waiting for the show to make a definitive moral judgement on either side of the matter, Light asks if he’s about to be taken to Hell. Ryuk merely laughs and says only that “any human has used the Death Note will go to neither Heaven nor Hell.”

Tl;dr, in the span of less than 24 hours from picking up the Death Note, Light Yagami goes from a normal high school student to a serial killer with a messiah complex, using the notebook to kill all the criminals of the world.

This can be seen as one of the fundamental problems of the original story. There is no gradual turn, no slow slide into evil. As soon as he knows the Death Note works, Light begins killing left and right, labelling himself the God of the New World. And while I would agree that for some stories, a slower collapse makes sense, I believe Death Note intentionally contracts this arc for the better. In pragmatic terms, most of the audience could see a turn like that coming from a mile away, and they would only be annoyed to see the inevitable prolonged and teased for several episodes (I’m looking at you, most Marvel Netflix shows). As Joss Whedon would say, “Play your cards early. It forces you to come up with new cards.” And boy does Death Note come up with new cards. Soon, a super detective named L starts chasing Light, solving a seemingly unsolvable crime with increasingly clever tricks and deductions, and Light constantly pushing the limitations and learning new uses for the Death Note in response. New characters, situations, and dramatic ironies are thrown in at breakneck speed, all while staying logically and dramatically consistent.

More important than that pragmatic concern, however, Light’s immediate shift serves a crucial thematic purpose. It pushes us away from the easy out of separating ourselves from Light’s actions, implying that we would all be capable of this kind of wanton cruelty given this particular tool and unaccountability. Light is a serial killer, but one who can justify every single one of his actions (up to a point). The more rational, calm, and charming Light appears while carrying out these heinous crimes, the more effective and unsettling a villain/anti-hero he is. (Noticing a not-so-subtle critique of the new Death Note there? Good.) As L says at one point in the show, for someone to murder without even changing the expression on their face, their psyche must reach a God-like level. Put in less dramatic terms, the show explores how our egos can distance us from our vulnerable, yet deeply necessary and human selves. What Light does is inhuman, because our egos are inhuman. Constructions meant to flatter ourselves, scare ourselves, whatever it takes to not face the parts of ourselves we don’t like. And, especially several episodes in with a bizarre moral version of Sunken Cost Fallacy, you can bet Light’s ego works overtime. Light’s non-arc is not a lapse in writing or a pragmatic necessity, but a deliberate thematic decision that informs his character for the rest of the show.

This character, in my opinion, is the core of the show. There are nice-sounding yet deeply juvenile ruminations on the nature of justice, manipulation, family, and all that, but Death Note only works as more than a simple game of cat and mouse because of Light’s Teflon morality and its implications for ourselves. The rest is just icing on the cake—high end production values, a soundtrack that is sometimes great (when it’s not being overbearingly dramatic with wailing guitars or choral sections), a somber atmosphere, and a story that, if nothing else, really goes for it and shows the full scope of the ramifications for Light’s actions. It’s a show that compels with, essentially, descriptions and deductions between two characters for 22 minutes at a time. That’s impressive as hell.

Anyone who knows me personally will also know I adore characters and premises like this in most shows. It’s what drives stories like Mad Men, In Treatment, The Wolf of Wall Street, Breaking Bad, Rick and Morty, and Magic Mike. It’s not enough to preach to the audience that something is bad. Show something to them with a completely straight face—sexism, self-loathing, greed, a neurotic need for control, anything—and allow them to decide for themselves. This gets a message across beautifully, but more importantly, it allows us to be more empathetic. Distancing flawed characters, slapping them on the wrists in a film only gets you so far. It’s one thing to say that Don Draper is a reclusive asshole who hides behind his aura of hyper-confident masculinity. It’s another to see him hold it together perfectly yet still be miserable. Not only does this speak volumes, it helps us see these flaws not just in them, but ourselves. And when we empathize with these flawed characters, we empathize and perhaps forgive the imperfections in ourselves as well.

Speaking of imperfections, let’s get back to that new Death Note!

OMG It’s Not the Same as the Old One

Let’s get this out of the way. Yes, the new Death Note is absolutely nothing like the anime. For starters, Light is no longer a charming, popular genius (showing how even the most normal, well-adjusted person could be capable of this) but a loner malcontent who gets beat up by the bullies at school and is perpetually angry/whiny. (Mistake number one, equating Light to a Chronicle or school-shooting type loner character. This goes back to that “easy out” I was talking about—now we can just say he was a freak and move on rather than more deeply examine ourselves.) If he’s smart, we only know through lip service and some shots of him doing other people’s homework for money. Instead of coming to use the Death Note himself naturally, due to human nature or his own ends, he is goaded into it by Ryuk (who, admittedly, is played very well by Willem Dafoe) in a very tired snake/demon/devil allegory. While I always wondered about the apple analogy in the original show, now it is the often trod-upon snake/apple thing. Yes, let’s put all the blame on a demon rather than facing the uncomfortable truth that human nature is capable of this. Yawn. Instead of slowly coming into knowledge of the Death Note’s abilities, Light is handed all of the rules upfront by Ryuk in a cursory exposition dump. In order to try to explain Light’s behavior, the movie gives him the quick and dirty motivation of “a criminal killed his mom and got off on a technicality.” Misa, who was supposed to be a wildcard of sorts to shake up the existing stalemate between Light and L as well as an element of innocence to show just how far Light had gone, is now named “Mia” and serves as another person to goad Light on. It takes Light 30 minutes to start killing in proper, but Mia takes only about 5 to be on board. (Though this serves a purpose which we’ll get to later.) Light quickly loses all agency and rather finds himself caught between Ryuk and Mia’s plans.

Besides airing some of my frustrations, that long wall of text should show just how different this new film is. And rather than spend the rest of our collective time wailing about the tiny differences, let us acknowledge this simple truth: the new Death Note is attempting something different than the old Death Note. Clearly. The question is not how similar it is, but if it succeeds by itself.

It doesn’t.

Death Note Circa 2017

Death Note (from now on that will only be referring to the new film) draws from several odd sources that seemingly fit into the existing story without having to change much. The most glaring one to me, as a sad lil’ ‘80s obsessed person, was Heathers. In case you aren’t familiar, Heathers plays like a standard Mean Girls high school film (in fact it came out before Mean Girls, just saying), except Winona Ryder’s love interest (Christian Slater) is a psychopath who encourages her to kill the lead mean girl, pass it off as suicide, and start killing all the mean kids at school. I’m not going to pretend Heathers is perfect, but it’s a damn interesting film that has easily one of the most vicious senses of humor I’ve seen, capturing the mentality of the uncaring teenager perfectly. And you can see Death Note visibly struggling to do the same thing.

Rather than a well-defined yet perverted sense of justice, Death Note attributes Light’s actions to Ryuk goading him and his desire to impress Mia. You can see Mia very much as a Winona Ryder-ala-Heathers type, drawn into a world where murder is allowed, and her teen angst/dissatisfaction with the world can be writ large in blood. As Winona Ryder said in Heathers, “My teen bullshit has a bodycount.” Except Death Note is neither funny nor clever enough to make the same point nearly as concisely. Indeed, if there is a point to Light or Mia’s actions, it has to be heavily inferred, because their vague, stated motivations sure as hell don’t help. Mia says she loves Light and that before she met him (it’s heavily implied she more just loves his killing power and the Death Note) she was just a cheerleader. Again, I see what they’re going for here. Killing criminals gives Mia a twisted sense of purpose that poses as the answer to her teenage apathy and malaise. It’s just that they never state it so outright, or really do anything with this. Light, on the other hand, is a fucking mess. He slowly dips his toe into using the Death Note, alternating between whining to Ryuk and killing the guy who killed his mom in a fit of rage, only to then brag about it to Mia later. After they make out he apparently considers himself a god now. (Talk about using others for an inflated sense of self-worth, Jesus.) To make matters more annoying, he then goes back to pretending to be the victim ten or fifteen minutes later when Mia and Ryuk push him to kill the investigators following him.

By tying together Light’s desire for Mia with the desire to use the Death Note, Death Note firmly places itself in Heathers territory, where Ryder and Slater’s chemistry encourages her to keep killing classmates. But, as the comparison to the original Death Note is unfavorable, so is the comparison to Heathers. It lacks the humor of its ‘80s doppelganger, the bubbly visual style as a counterpoint. In one crucial way, however, Death Note almost outdoes Heathers, and almost makes me like it.

The moral problem that Heathers ran into was trying to justify Winona Ryder’s descent into murder. She got into it, but rather than own up to her actions, the movie had her go against Christian Slater as a way of wiping her slate clean. “See!” it said, “she’s no longer on board with killing people. That makes the last few murders less heinous, right?” I would have much preferred to have Winona Ryder go deeper into that hole than Slater, even, not letting her off the hook nor the audience for indulging in the film thus far. And for a hot moment, Death Note does just that. Mia goes further than Light, even writing his name in the Death Note and blackmailing him into giving her the notebook. Upon learning he’s been double crossed at the school’s winter homecoming dance, Light stalks over to Mia. As the pleasant ‘80s music plays, she lays out her plan and how she killed the investigators for him. Then she says, “Now go get me my fucking book.” It’s easily one of the highlights of their “relationship,” which was previously defined by his basic lust for her and her lame sense of purpose from him (go figure, a female character whose only purpose is a male character hmmmmmm). There’s a catch, though. Because she’s not the main character the same way Ryder is as Veronica in Heathers. What’s actually happened is insidious, and a little gross.

Light has been let off the hook.

Sure, there are lines paying lip service to the contrary. The dad finding out that he’s Kira. Light saying that he just wanted to kill the bad guys and he thought that would help but he knows it’s more complicated now. But for all dramatic intents and purposes—what actually happens, not just what has been said—Light is in the clear. He started as an anti-hero (more likely villain), but his ladyfriend’s escalating actions make him look tame in comparison, they make him appear to be the victim. Due to an elaborate series of events/double crosses shown in flashback (yayyyy) Light survives while Mia ends up dying. So, dramatically speaking, the movie is saying, “Yeah Light was a bad guy but not as bad as that girl and he learned his lesson and he’s clever so he gets to live? Also fuck that bitch?” It’s really confusing and kind of icky. Yes, let’s villainize women and men’s desire for them even more. I understand that she was that way from the start, and the movie is not in any way trying to say that all women are like this, but dramatically speaking, Light wouldn’t have become a serial killer if it weren’t for Mia. Which is lame, and not an uncommon trope.

Say what you will for the ending of the original, but at least Light was made to frickin’ answer for what he did and then some. Here, all we’re left with is a shrug. Light’s dad finds out that his son is Kira, they look at each other awkwardly on the hospital bed, and Ryuk says something to the effect of “Gee, humans sure are interesting!” Which is a great way of saying you have no idea what you’re saying.

This indecision is probably what led to the film’s aesthetic choices. “Well there’s murder and what’s a popular supernatural murder film series, oh Final Destination, so let’s have needlessly gruesome and elaborate deaths that conflict with the detached nature of the killing.” “Well, we’re kinda going for a teen angst high school vibe more than a cat and mouse vibe like the original, so let’s have lots of synths like those ‘80s movies?” Ugh. Don’t get me wrong, I love the soundtrack in this film, and may have even jumped up and down in my seat when I heard my boy MAKEUP AND VANITY SET start playing during a chase scene, but it just communicates how misguided some of the decisions are in this film. If you’re going to make it cool, calm and collected like the original, do that with say, a Michael Mann treatment. Think Heat. Stylish, yet very, very calm. And if you’re going to make it more of a teen flick with blaring synths, then great, make it brash, make it emotional, make it human. But oh wait, for that we need to care about the characters and their relationships, and we’re given very little to do that with.

This is really good but also what is it doing in Death Note

Like Light between Ryuk and Mia, Death Note is torn in too many different directions and has no agency of its own. It has no message it wants to impart, no themes it wants to explore. It just wants to get through its version of the story as quickly as possible while drawing surface-level-pleasant cinematic and aesthetic allusions out of its ass to pass the time. (A cynical part of me wonders if some of these aesthetic choices were not made from Netflix’s own vast data, which probably shows that ‘80s aesthetics and shows set in Seattle do very well coughcough Stranger Things cough The Killing cough.) It’s telling that the most meaningful messages I get from Death Note I get from what it’s referencing, not the film itself. The original and its commentary on the ego and humanity. Heathers and teenage discontent turned violent. Maybe on the next Netflix adaptation go around, we could stop wasting time and just put a little post-it-note on the front that says “INSERT STUFF YOU LIKE HERE.”

There’s this cute little moment in The Office. It’s pretty simple; Michael has just moved back into his office as manager and Erin lists all the random comfort items he has—a humidifier, a dehumidifier, a foot fan (?), most importantly, a Casio keyboard. Erin turns on the keyboard and a dinky little tune comes out. Before they start wiggling to the music, Michael says, “It’s good to be home.” It’s silly; it’s small. It’s also one of the most adorable things I’ve ever seen.

People tend to remember it for being deeply uncomfortable, but the driving force of The Office is truly in the innocence in this scene. It's what separates it from the more biting, unpleasant UK original. Most of this is visible in Michael, whose greatest virtues and flaws both come from his childlike demeanor. He is ignorant, inconsiderate, sensitive, selfish, yet he usually has good intentions, and, perhaps most endearingly, is incapable of deceit or tact, no matter how hard he may try. To be as blunt as possible: innocence is the key. Innocence here meaning, not just the dictionary definition, but also warmth, idealism without being naïve.

And I can’t stop thinking about it.

One afternoon, I found myself rewatching that scene with Michael and Erin over and over. It brought me a sense of warmth, of unconditional joy that has, frankly, been missing for a bit. Like any drug, though, the effect was temporary, any sense of resolution or comfort I got from it fleeting. All I was left with was the question. “Why do I care so much about such a small moment? Why does something so happy leave me so sad?” Sorry to get all emo on you, but the depressed reaction is important. It could show that there may be something present in The Office that isn’t found in many places, or it could show that I, personally, am in a bizarre place. We’re going to talk about both.

One fond memory I have from high school was going over a silly short story in English class. The story itself was weird, and honestly, kind of stupid. It was about a teacher, or a class, and the more the class progressed or the teacher taught, the more the teacher physically degraded or grew these abnormalities, eventually looking like a monster or surrealist painting yet not acknowledging it. The only possible explanation I could come up with was the story being a commentary on knowledge’s relationship with innocence. How, the more you know, the more you grow up from childhood, the less innocent you are. It’s a huge idea for humanity, and sexuality in particular. Adam and Eve, anyone? But here’s the key, the big caveat. This representation of innocence, is, in a way, naïve. It implies that once you grow up, once childhood is over and you have knowledge or Sin, there is no going back, no return to innocence, that innocence only comes from ignorance, that this is a fall from grace.

If I have a complaint with The Office, it is how it ties its innocence to childhood so tightly. Michael Scott is a manchild. Jim is a better manchild. It implies that some sort of regression is necessary, which helps no one. Slightly better examples, and uncoincidentally my favorite movies, Holiday and Say Anything, don’t fall into this trap. The latter actually makes a point of flying in the face of this logic, as Lloyd Dobbler is an idealist just when most people turn to cynicism—high school. In Holiday, we see our main characters Johnny Case and Linda Seton eschew their stuffy high class surroundings. They do acrobatics, watch puppet shows, ride around on little bikes—it’s not a coincidence that most of the film takes place in a playroom.

But all of this is at a remove, in a way. There’s a scene in Holiday that seems to acknowledge a distance between childhood joy and reality. Linda turns on a little music box just before she and Johnny start dancing in the playroom. The dance is graceful, yet their conversation about thwarted expectations is wry, sad. All the while the music in the background sounds frail, small, distant. And movies, at times, can be like that sad little music box. Beautiful, yet ineffectual as reality plays out in front of them.

I realize I am contradicting myself here, and in confusing matters. I say that innocence and warmth and idealism are not necessarily tied to childhood, go to all the trouble of giving examples, and then show how one of those examples actually shows the opposite at times. It only appears so confusing because A) I’m a bad writer in a bad mood and B) there’s a missing ingredient in there. Us. People. How we perceive things. Movies can say whatever the hell they like, if we don’t understand them, if we don’t meet them halfway, then they’re never going to make an impact. It’s part of why I started this blog, why I care so much about movies and how we talk about them. How we consider the world, and therefore everyone and everything in it, in my opinion, reflects greatly on how we consider ourselves. Movies can make a difference. They are emotional, powerful objects of substance. So why do the moments and movies that used to lift my spirits make me feel kind of like shit right now?

Some astute readers will already know the answer from my foreshadowed train of thought or my general demeanor. The problem is me. There’s a great essay that has been quoted to death called “The Death of the Author” that talks about how a piece of art is received is more important than the author’s intentions. Who cares if Far Cry 3 was intended as a satire of shallow game stories when such satire amounted to and was received as—well—a shallow game story? Just as innocence after childhood is an effort, movies are an effort too. It’s just that the best ones don’t feel like it. But if the audience isn’t willing to meet the film halfway, then it amounts to nothing.

The difference between Holiday as a life-changing movie and Holiday as that sad little music box is as simple as how the audience receives it. In this solipsistic case, moi. Which is a shame, because it represents everything I try to stand for. This is the power of film—simply feeling separated from a movie has the potential to make me feel separated from myself.

Unsurprisingly, I have also been thinking about Christopher Nolan in this sense, lately. How beautiful Dunkirk is for no longer trying to outsmart grief or pain. How it’s not an elaborate construction, but a simple representation. Somehow, by not trying to be as clever, Dunkirk becomes far less nihilistic than some of Nolan’s other work. There is forced catharsis in most of his other films, regardless of how he himself felt (remember the forced happy ending of The Dark Knight Rises despite his misgivings with the project and grief over Heath Ledger’s death?) By not forcing that, it works so much better on an emotional level. So allow me to take a cue from our friend Chrissy N and dismiss cleverness and catharsis for a second. The point of this piece will come across far better that way.

Innocence, warmth, idealism—striving for those virtues is probably one of the most important things we can have or hold onto as human beings, second only to love. Movies can show us this, and indeed my favorite movies do. Movies are powerful enough to not only show us this, but have us define these ideas by them. However, if we ever feel disconnected from these movies, these movies we set such store by, define ideas and ourselves by—like me and Holiday right now—it’s indicative of large changes. It’s pretty cool that movies can be that sort of barometer. I’m okay, I guess, but I’ve also just unintentionally proven in the essay format in public just how shaken up I am. Which is fun.

The end?

Oh, what I would do for such reassuring feelings right now.

Dunkirk, from a distance, looks like an oddity in Christopher Nolan’s oeuvre. Its premise, the historical evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940 in the first years of World War 2, seems ill-suited for Nolan’s fascination with puzzles or interlocking storylines. Yet Dunkirk transcends its genre, avoiding cliché, empty bombast, and rah-rah jingoism; it is a perfect fit for Nolan­—just in a rather subversive way.

The most important feature of a Nolan film is his twisting and turning storyline that can be followed through rationally. Yes, there are detours and setbacks, but on the whole, he has a rather idealistic faith in the power of the rational, the power of good. Remember that line from Inception? “I think positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time. We all yearn for reconciliation, for catharsis.” In many ways, Cobb is a stand-in for Nolan in that film, and this quote is no different. Of course, what we yearn for and what truly exists are two different things, which Nolan coyly acknowledges with his characters and his obsession with showmanship and deceit/world or character building (see: The Prestige, Inception, The Dark Knight). The only way for Nolan to give us reconciliation or catharsis is to put on a good show, because reality sure as hell isn’t going to give it to us on its own.

This knowledge, the separation between filmmaking and reality, is part of what makes Dunkirk such a resounding success. It is not a dry A to B to C chronological retelling of heroic events—it twists and turns the temporality of the story, following men waiting for an evacuation a week beforehand, boats on the way to evacuate them a day beforehand, and a plane dogfight in the air over the course of an hour during the evacuation. Then it mixes all of these together at once, weaving a tapestry of tension. The constant setting and sense of dread helps it all fit, rather than feel cobbled together. It’s not just a fancy construction for its own sake, either—it conveys a sense of endlessness, of constant struggle and conflict while still pacing and not exhausting the audience. Nolan is no longer making fancy playthings perfectly suited for his interests at a remove—he has now moved into chopping up and remixing events from reality. It is far more audacious and impactful for it.

It is rather minimalist in its storytelling. There is not much dialogue, characters rarely have names. There is not a macro plot, really, just a seemingly impossible goal with several micro actions taken along the way. The focus, therefore, is not a message or cause, but simply the human experience of survival. (That sounds really pretentious, but there’s no other way to describe Dunkirk’s hour and 50 minutes of nonstop bad shit happening. I was reminded of Gravity, and a cynical part of me thought that certain scenes were cut as one nonstop trailer.) If there is a message, it is in the film’s simultaneously bleak and determined ending.

SPOILERS GO TO NEXT PARAGRAPH. Tom Hardy, after having destroyed the last German bomber attacking the evacuees, runs out of fuel. He has no choice but to glide his stalled plane deep into enemy territory to land, but as his now useless plane flies overhead, the soldiers cheer him on. He has made the very best of an unwinnable, awful situation, but is still going to suffer for it. But for now, the plane is still in the air, and isn’t that still a pretty sight, even if it’s a futile one? SPOILER END.

The lack of an overtly happy conclusion is both a necessity of the subject material—World War 2 was not ended in 1940, after all—and a reflection of our time. As Manohla Dargis said for the New York Times, “[At the end] we are reminded the fight against fascism continues.” Not to make this overly political, but I think we can all agree times are more uncertain than most in recent memory. World War 2 ended over half a century ago, so why are we still revisiting it? Why does the struggle feel more present than ever? I would call Dunkirk a deconstruction of the war film, except it’s not even that—it’s too busy being its own thing off to the side to bother wasting its time deconstructing a genre that, frankly, is already falling apart on its own.

Which brings me to my main point. The nonlinear story resonates so much partly because we don’t know how else to process the magnitude of our time. A linear, chronological, three act classic story for a film no longer feels like a genuine reflection of our experience. It is a construction; actually, it always was, but now it is a construction that feels more “other” than ever. The best it can be is an aspiration. When up is down and the world seems alien and hostile, entertainment—in this case, films—have two choices. They can be escapism, or they can speak to that unreality. Films, as an unreality of their own—moving images, imperfect snapshots of the world edited together and projected across a room from us to be marveled at—are uniquely suited to do just that. Certainty and innocence may feel dead, but Dunkirk lets us know that we are not alone in that feeling. “Whatever may happen,” it says to me, “we’ll survive to make a movie about it a hundred years later.”

First, a quick recap on the story and events of the game for those who don’t know. Ethan’s wife, Mia, after having disappeared for three years, sends him a message to come to a run-down Louisiana shack of a property. He shows up and finds her rather promptly, but she rapidly vacillates between sanity and attempting to murder him against her will. Then, Ethan is captured by the Baker family, who own the property and keep talking about “her gift.” I wonder if this has anything to do with the creepy little girl we keep seeing? It’s a plot point so obvious that the sarcasm in my voice should register in words alone. As to what “her gift” is, even the game hand-waves it in late game exposition; “the effects vary from individual to individual, yet they are all imbued with super strength.” I’m paraphrasing, but only a little. It’s the science-y equivalent of “eh, we dunno, but they’re all super tough for the player to defeat!”

But not too tough, in real terms. I played on Normal, after being convinced by the game’s emphatic warning against Madhouse difficulty the first time around, and left it barely bruised at all. I had a disgusting amount of ammo for all my weapons, 8 or so health items, and the materials to make 7 more should I have ever required it. I didn’t. I’m not bragging about my prowess at these games—if anything, I’m mediocre, therefore I’m sure most players had a similar experience. There is a drastic downward difficulty curve near the end as players can run by most monsters, and even if they can’t, they’ve been drowned in ammo at the end of the second act of the game.

Anyway. After dealing with each of the Baker family (and condemning the only sane one to death, at least in my playthrough) Ethan rides off into the sunset with Mia, only to be stopped by the aforementioned creepy little girl. So, the last act of the game has you trudging through (or running past) crowds of black goo cannon fodder monsters as you try to find this Alma-stand-in and defeat her. Between the embarrassment of resources and the increased enemy count in tiny corridors (as opposed to the more, open, backtrack-y level design of the first two thirds of the game), the design takes a real turn. Not for the worse, necessarily, it’s just trying something different and more tightly guided than the rest of the game. I just happen to like it less. A lot less. (Although there was something indulgently satisfying about being able to blow through enemy after enemy with my surplus of shotgun ammo at the end.)

Ethan defeats the evil little girl (who turns out to be an evil old lady, gasp!) with the help of Chris Redfield and his Umbrella homies (who are clearly covering up their own mess, by the way—all the random documents lying around imply Umbrella as the creator of this bioweapon). There’s a nice little hallucination where Ethan talks to the Baker patriarch, Jack, in a not-insane-mood and he apologizes for how he’s behaved and explains what happened with Eveline (the little girl). The sun rises as Ethan gets on the Umbrella helicopter and—gasp!—his wife Mia is there and fine! Sentimental music plays as the helicopter flies into the pretty horizon and Ethan says the following:

“They say that when one door closes, another opens. Well, a door closed tonight. And what a long night it was - but not just for me. Mia and I weren't the only victims here. So were the Bakers. It was that... thing, Eveline, who made them that way. But now Eveline's dead. And these guys are here to clean up the mess. I had just come to terms with losing Mia. But now she's back and wants to start over - put all of this behind us. Maybe this is where the next door opens.”

What? Pardon my French, but this is—to borrow a term from Scholarly Circles—the most saccharine shit. Like, really? “They say that when one door closes, another opens?” “We weren’t the only victims here?” I understand I got the supposed Good Ending, but this doesn’t fit with the tone of the rest of the game at all. In fact, the ending sticks out so sorely that it almost seems intentionally incongruous. (Although it supports my theory that Ethan is the most boring white guy.)

Given that this is all Umbrella’s doing, and Ethan is now stuck in a helicopter with them with his wife, maybe the super chipper ending is intentionally ironic. He says that “here to clean up the mess,” but as a witness he is part of that mess. Maybe he’s about to bite the dust? Perhaps that isn’t Chris Redfield at all? There’s a fan theory, given his appearance with the helmet, that he’s HUNK, a soldier created by Umbrella (though I only know him as that dope Mercenaries character from RE4). That would make sense. If this is all ironic, then I am completely on board and can’t wait to see Ethan in Umbrella’s custody next time around. Otherwise, I give zero fucks.

Then again, Resident Evil as a franchise has certainly been through its own “long night” with 5’s lukewarm reception and the downright catastrophe that was 6. The ending can be seen as the creators’ statement—“let’s put all this other nonsense behind us and start again.” And the game itself supports this, as a fresh start or reboot with the first-person perspective and a renewed focus on survival horror over action. Yet if this is a fresh start with limitless possibilities, why are we returning to the well on all these ideas from Resident Evil 1 and just mixing in whatever’s been hot in horror lately—first person hiding from invincible enemies, found footage, Saw style traps? In modern mainstream art, be it movies or games, the “reset button” is clearly impotent. It’s no longer a chance to do something new, but one to do more of the same from years ago and get away with it. There is no “reset” in anything in life, so why do we keep attempting it in our franchises? Resident Evil has fallen into the same trap.

This all sounds incredibly critical, but these are big picture concerns. Resident Evil 7, on its own, is an incredibly engaging modern survival horror game with—in retrospect—near impeccable pacing and constant forward motion, despite certain nitpicks (all of which I’ve already gone over.) Even more than that, I’m deeply impressed and heartened by the return of big budget horror games—products such as this or Alien: Isolation that clearly took many millions of dollars to satisfy a seemingly niche audience. It’s awesome to see, and the game mostly succeeds in its goals. It returns to what people liked about the original Resident Evil games while making it fresh (for now).

I only worry about the future. Reboots often get it right the first time around but then don’t know what to do with their new canvas—remember Mortal Kombat or that new Star Trek? At the end of Resident Evil 7, our characters are looking at a bright sunrise... 

...yet the horizon feels uncertain.

(For those who somehow don’t know: Resident Evil is a series of horror or action games [or B movies]. You fight enemies, but the point is not necessarily to defeat them, but to survive. Far more important than combat is efficient health, ammo, and inventory management, as well as exploring the environment thoroughly.)

I have a weird relationship with the Resident Evil series. I started with Resident Evil 4 on the Wii in middle school, at a time when I was definitely unprepared for the ceaseless tension and difficulty in the gameplay. Yet, despite leaving every play session as an emotionally exhausted husk, despite having to pause the game and organize the inventory every few seconds to give myself time to breathe, there was something perversely compelling about the experience. It quickly became a game my friends and I would play and watch each other struggle with, getting through large chunks and then putting it down for a few months or so when it became too intense (that invisible bug section—fuck, man). Actually, scratch that, it was a game *I* played while my friends watched and refused to play themselves. Most of them have still never finished or even touched the thing. Bastards. Therefore, between Resident Evil 4 and games like Bioshock, I found myself becoming accustomed to games with tense atmospheres. More than that, I started to love it. There was something about just a touch of fear or discomfort that made the game worlds feel so immediate, so tangible. (We’ll touch on this point later.) Years later, I’ve played every version of the game I can get my hands on with the hardest difficulty, and even do weird little challenge runs for myself for fun (first weapons only, carry a fish through the whole game, etc.) I learn something new about it every time I play, even now. It’s a brilliant damn game, and my favorite Resident Evil by far.

Now why did I go on so long about my first experience with a game pretty much everyone and their mother has played? Well, it’s not narcissism—not a lot, anyway. I only gave this background so that the next statement is a little less shocking: I find Resident Evil 4 calming.

The Resident Evil series isn’t exactly what most would consider a “calming” experience. Over the years it has gone from terrifying, to tense, to silly, to becoming a straight up tire fire, (I’m looking at you 6,) but it has always been considered a horror or action series. Yet, even before I became intimately familiar with it, 4 had and still has a grounding effect for me. Yes, you always have to be alert, but despite the challenges, any enemy or situation can be overcome. And that knowledge, oddly, makes any game of this ilk calming. See that screaming monstrosity over there? It can be put down with one well aimed rifle shot. What about the seemingly invincible Right Hand boss fight, where you can only slow this monster down or run away from it as you wait for an elevator to arrive? Well, you can actually kill it with one rocket after you’ve frozen it with an ice canister. Nothing is insurmountable. Anything is possible.

That’s actually a rather profound lesson for life. Of course, this is by design, but it’s one of my favorite parts of video games in general, and it feels especially prominent in RE4.

Which brings us to Resident Evil 7. I’m trying this out way past its time in the zeitgeist, but hey, what else can you do when you’re stuck in England away from your computer for the year? Coming into it, I only knew a few things: it is a return to more traditional survival horror roots, with less focus on combat than 4, 5, and 6; 7 now also has a first-person camera and some enemies you have to hide from, in a move that could either be a natural innovation for the series or a cynical move for that sweet Amnesia money. I can’t tell yet, two hours in.

You play as Ethan, a man with a nondescript white guy voice (ala Jason Brody in Far Cry 3) searching for his wife Mia on a dilapidated Bayou property in the middle of nowhere. Quickly, things go awry as you find a tape showing that others have come here and been killed. Not only that, but Mia, after being rescued, is having schizophrenic fits of TRYING TO MURDER YOU WITH A KNIFE OR CHAINSAW. After disturbingly, apparently murdering his wife—twice—Ethan is captured by the crazy redneck family that owns this place, and Mia somehow comes back to life again. Plus, your antagonists are just as prone to the whole revival thing. Clearly, you’re in a shitty situation.

After some early sequences of hiding around, ill-equipped, the game settles into the familiar rhythm of Resident Evil—exploring, scrounging for ammo and health, managing your inventory, and backtracking to previous environments once you have the proper equipment or key. The inventory is smaller than 4, which I appreciate from a “hardcore” difficulty perspective, I suppose, though I miss the granular Tetris-style control over it. I only have a pistol and shotgun as opposed to the early arsenal of 4 (pistol, shotgun, TMP, rifle). I also appreciate the crafting system, whose shared resources for the recipes of health and ammo forces the player to choose one or the other at any given moment. The proud part of me kept wanting to craft ammo, as clearly, I was good enough not to get hit, right? I ended up crafting health 90% of the time.

Once all these systems kicked in, however, a nagging feeling at the back of my brain came to the forefront: I was not scared. I was engaged; I was having a great time—but I was as calm as in any session of RE4. After a life or death struggle with the patriarch of the Baker family, I found myself immediately thinking, not “phew,” but “I could have only used the knife there at the right time and saved so much pistol ammo.” Old habits die hard, I suppose, but I also feel like a little bit of a sociopath for engaging with the game in this manner. Did my young experience with RE4 scar me that much, leaving me numb to any future horror game? Probably not. Any horror game by Friction Games will still scare the bejeezus out of me. Then it dawned on me—it’s all about the core gameplay loop.

The core gameplay of Resident Evil is its greatest strength and also why I end up so damn Zen any time I play it. Every system feeds into every other system—use too much ammo, and you might run out later, but use too little, and you might get hurt in combat more, forcing you to use more health items. Do you want to explore this dangerous area for a potential weapon upgrade earlier in the game, at the potential expense of health or ammo? It all constantly engages the player and makes them think in gameplay relevant terms while still having an emotional immediacy, if that makes sense. The horror trappings aid this. It’s not just, “should I heal right now,” it’s “OH GOD THAT MAN JUST HIT ME WITH A PAINTROLLER WITH SPIKES AND I’M ABOUT TO DIE I NEED TO HEAL AND THEN RUN.” But because of my experience with 4, I just see the system. I find this style of game more engaging than other hoarding or survival games, so the horror aesthetic must be getting me emotionally, just not in the way any normal person would expect.

Remember when I said we’d talk more about the immediacy of horror games? Yeah, that’s now. The best, most surefire way to immerse a player in a game is to get them to think as the character would or create a mental model of the game world in their own head to predict possible outcomes. Resident Evil has both in spades. The horror genre, the instinctual fight or flight response wired in all of our DNA, gets us to immediately think like the character of the game if we’re powerless and forced to hide from a frightening foe. We don’t need to be coerced or pushed into doing what the game wants—we’ll run from the crazy lady with a chainsaw on our own initiative, thankyouverymuch. And the constant struggle to maintain ammo and health forces the player to create a mental model in their head for possible outcomes as they choose to use resources or not, while also still being in the context of the world and situation of survival. This, with the lack of pausing, keeps us squarely in the game world. This is why survival horror games are so immediate and tangible to me, or anyone, honestly.

The gameplay is well-executed, just not in the terms of crisp response time we expect from most shooters. The slow speed at which you can fire your weapon while keeping a steady aim isn’t necessarily great for immediate player enjoyment, but it does put them in a methodical, tense mindset where they feel underpowered in the face of their threat. Therefore, it works. It’s the same reason that not being able to move while aiming, or the zoomed in view without peripheral vision worked so well for Resident Evil 4. It increased tension.

So why am I so calm through all this? Well, like I said earlier—the designers created this to all be achievable. The situation presented is dire, but I, as the player, know I am more than equal to the challenge presented. It’s not that I’m numb to the fright or the fight/flight reaction; no, I definitely have that. It’s that even with all of that at the same time, I can still succeed—and that makes these sorts of games a calming, even pleasant experience for me. It just wouldn’t be as fun without the stakes or the frightening scenarios—like any good story, a game in this vein is only as cathartic as its lowest moment is bleak. You can flail at me or shout “Boo!” as much as you like, Resident Evil 7. I’m still having a good time, for reasons that—for me, at least—are deeply profound. It's why even in some of my *absolute worst* times, I have gone back to Resident Evil 4 for comfort.

Back to 7. I’m still not sure how I feel about the more Amensia-y elements of the game, the hiding from invincible foes, I mean. It’s scary, sure, but not in the Resident Evil way. The Resident Evil way is, “Wait, you expect me to beat that? How?” Whereas with this hidey-hidey crap, I know exactly what is expected. To hide in that one corner and then slip through the enemy’s patrol route. Yawn. It also doesn’t mesh very cleanly with the combat-based survival horror elements. I see the designers jumping through story hoops and doing all kinds of gymnastics to justify the premise. “They come back to life, so you can shoot them for a temporary reprieve, but they’ll be back!” “Oh at this part it’s gone,” “OH WAIT NOW IT’S BACK!” And then these encounters are put smack dab right next to environments with total cannon fodder black goo bullet sponge monsters. It gets even messier considering that you will eventually fight these “un-kill-able” foes in boss fights where you do vanquish them, case in point today, Jack. There’s some real hand of the writer shit going on here, and I don’t like it.

Speaking of hand of the writer, modern cinematic sensibilities and railroading of the player’s progress doesn’t fit with the exploratory nature of the game. Part of the contract you sign with the player when you make an interconnected, large environment like this to explore is that everything they need to progress is right there—they only need to find the right tool. Take Myst, for example. Yes, it’s incredibly (some would say needlessly) complicated, but everything you need is there. Here, though, there were a couple of parts where I got stuck searching for a tool—in this case a knife—only to realize I needed to walk over to a window where a cutscene of a cop giving me a knife ensued. Thanks, buddy? There are too many moments without clear forward momentum until the Hand of the Writer graciously swoops in and gives us exactly the tool we need. Another example: near the beginning you are trapped in a hallway and forced to backtrack so that a SCARY MOMENT may happen and an enemy throws you through the wall. Lame. Now I’m not saying cinematic stuff can’t happen. Used properly, it’s quite effective. I’m just saying don’t rob the player of a sense of agency at the same time, even if it’s all smoke and mirrors. Have your SCARY MOMENT just before the player is going forward in the next step of their quest, not as they’re forced to aimlessly meander back for your scripting. This comes back to the mental model point—if the player constantly feels like they are making forward progress, then they’re immersed and in the world of the game. The moment they have to figure out scripting like this it takes them out. They are no longer Ethan, trying to escape the Baker family and rescue his wife Mia. They’re Joe Gamer, trying to figure out how to get to the next section of the game they’re playing.

These qualms aside, I have enjoyed my time with Resident Evil 7 thus far. It might have a couple of ill-thought-out design moments, but it’s one of the most engaging horror games in a while, and definitely the best Resident Evil since 4. And again—weirdly pleasant and calming for me. The whole time.

See you tomorrow. (And remember, you can find my streams at 6 PM PST here.)