Admittedly, when it ended (I’m still not looking it up because I write all of these posts by hand and then have my low-level functionary/Greg type them verbatim) I was sufficiently whelmed. Somewhere in the midst of season 3, I felt that there’s a great sameness to Succession. Its identity and vision was so rigorous that it never wavered from its original goal.

To put it succinctly…8/10.

But, to be fair, there was always a part of me that felt I had maybe robbed myself of one of TV’s great shows, considering how the general consensus was that it was a masterpiece. Maybe I never gave it a chance. Maybe COVID robbed me of my attention span enough that prestige TV couldn’t bring me back. Maybe prestige TV is a paleolithic concept and we’re in something new.

So I rewatched it and to put it succinctly…10/10. Here’s a handful of things that struck me harder this time around.

**Obviously this post will contain spoilers to Succession. But come on, it ended like…a specific number of years ago so keep up.**

No one receives gifts normally

Now, this may be an equal condemnation of the gift givers too, considering they are typically not normal either. But it’s a striking detail that seems so obvious: what do you give people who want for nothing? Or at least, want for no physical object. Reminds me of JCO dunking on our Normalest Guy:

Tom gives Shiv a scorpion encased in glass and she immediately reads into it. Naomi gifts Kendall a watch and he also interrogates her on its meaning, because he already has a watch he likes that speaks directly to his character.

What’s so tragic about the latter is that it immediately follows Rava letting Kendall know that his kids (nearly absentee throughout the entire show) have left him a gift and someone has misplaced it. It’s an incredible moment by Jeremy Strong. Kendall is right in the midst of his asshole era (his 40th birthday party is a monument to it) but that bravado and shittiness immediately drops when Rava reminds him that he has kids and they care about him.

The essential tragedy of Kendall is that he’s a buffoon who could almost just choose to be a decent person. Is he really decent inside? Or is that also a facade? He’s constantly seduced by buffoonery but his gestures of love and caring (two words that have never been associated with Succession) are so powerful because you get a glimpse into the person who could care about the right things if he wanted to.

Lukas Mattsson isn’t an idiot

A great deal of Alexander Skarsgård’s power rests in the fact that he’s physically imposing. It worked in Big Little Lies, it worked in The Northman, and it works here. Paired with vulnerability or even a level of pathetic-ness (like Infinity Pool, where he gets mogged by Mia Goth the whole time) his characters immediately adopt a certain degree of dimension.

He’s seen as a bit of a frat douche (they call them fråts in Sweden) but immediately clocks that the Roys are trying to fuck their deal on the mountains in Norway. He gets under Shiv’s skin and eats her from the inside, ultimately leading to her own downfall (and the final nail in the coffin of the show), all the while lecturing her on democracy.

He’s a shark that bides his time while everything implodes around him. He wrecks Shiv, calls the brothers a “tribute act”, and then appoints the guy who will “suck the biggest dick in the room” (the words of that guy’s wife btw) as the successor, the pain sponge.

Another in the great tapestry of characters that I didn’t appreciate at the time. Speaking of which…

Cousin Greg may be the most realistic character to plebs like us

There’s a scene in the final season where Tom makes Greg sit down in front of an impersonal mega screen of Zoom calls to fire a bunch of anonymous ATN workers.

Greg is a perfect image of someone we’ve all encountered in the corporate world: someone with no discernible skill, talent, or, frankly, personality who somehow has tripped and flopped their way upwards and now sits on the other side of your “restructuring” meeting. He’s the business world’s version of a limpet.

Greg is incredible. And I didn’t appreciate at the time that his true intangible is knowing when to listen and what to understand is important and to whom. Tom may suck the biggest dick in the room but Greg will literally stab anyone in the back to retain his upward momentum.

We love him, Braun is an absolute king. But more importantly, he feels so real in the role.

Ewan feels all too familiar

I have two grandfather/actors in cinema. Men who appeared early on in my movie loving life and seem like such kind paternal figures, they comfort me a great deal. The first is Anthony Hopkins1 and the second is James Cromwell.

Cromwell was so superb in Six Feet Under, a show I love, that I really wondered if he would ever top that performance. I think many would argue that he did as Uncle Ewan. His eulogy for Logan is unbelievable. The fact that he calls Kendall “histrionic and meretricious” is…well, prescient.

And yet, he feels familiar. He rails against the evils wrought by his brother yet continually benefits from it. He doesn’t donate the money he has now to Greenpeace, he disinherits Greg to do so after his death (I meeeaaann….fuck Greenpeace, really).

But it’s in Ewan’s power to actually affect change and yet he sits on the sidelines. He sits on the sidelines not seemingly taking very much joy from…anything. To be fair, we usually only see him in New York, which he hates, interacting with Logan’s side of the family, who he hates.

It’s become somewhat prescient today, at least in the political arena, where the dipshits who run America seem able to run amok and cause chaos while their checks and balances do…what exactly?

Season 4 has two seasons worth of story stuffed into one but…

…I’m so glad they didn’t draw it out. We’ve seen the pain that can cause.

There’s still so much one could explore, especially in the fourth season. What’s Jeryd Mencken’s deal? What would Tom “pain sponge” Wamsgans look like running ATN? Will the fake India data ever come back to bite Mattsson?

Even within the season, they could have drawn out the more political aspects of ATN’s conservative agenda setting. What does America look like in the wake of that election? Also, how deep can the principle characters go when they necessarily surround themselves with worse and worse people just to get their way?

Even many of the tertiary characters could take up more time. Frank, Karl, Karolina, Stewy, even Jess.

Then again, it would be predictable to end a season on Logan’s death. It was genuinely shocking to see him die at an arbitrary point in the season. And worrisome, to be honest. What is Succession without the big evil beast?

Fortunately for us, it delivered so consistently afterwards2. Each episode has so much happening, it’s an incredible orchestra.

Season 1 is just as strong as any other season, it’s just lacking identity

I remember being up on Succession early. It was a show that had little fanfare but I recall enjoying it. It was unique, fresh, but no one quite knew what to do with it. The original air date (June 3, 2018) was smack in the middle of everyone wondering what the fuck was taking Game of Thrones so long to deliver its final season.

And it’s the antithesis of the GoT era of prestige TV, even though House of the Dragon is more akin to Succession than you’d think, considering it’s just a bunch of people standing around in rooms (or on a bridge) chatting but…you know…boring.

It’s interesting to think back because really what was Succession’s promise? What was it trying to do? There wasn’t a whole lot of inkling that it would be the most important TV show over the next few years that wasn’t Emily in Paris.

One of the issues is that, in my opinion, the second episode (Shit Show at the Fuck Factory) is hands down the worst of the series by a wide margin. I recall listening to a podcast long ago where two TV writers talked about their jobs and one of them expressed often that most TV shows start with a strong pilot but almost always have no idea what they are in the second episode. So I forgive it.

But by the end, the show delivers possibly one of its best episodes of the entire run (Nobody Is Ever Missing). The last fifteen or so minutes, starting with Greg’s veiled blackmail to Kendall, through the car crash and Kendall wandering back to the castle through a literal swamp, is absolutely outstanding work. You start to see why Mark Mylod crossed over from prestige to prestige, from directing GoT to Succession.

So in rewatch, it takes a while to gain footing but it grabs you when it does and you start to see what the show would become, which was…

Succession was the apex form of modern TV

Here’s my ultimate explanation of Succession: it’s a show with many incredible scenes, but few singularly great episodes. I’m not saying there’s none, there’s just a handful.

And that’s not bad necessarily, it’s just an evolved version of modern TV. The golden era of yore had a certain style, where the seasons built to great episodes that anchored them, so much so that many can even recall these episodes by name like they’re little movies. The Sopranos was the king of this3, with Pine Barrens, Amour Fou, The Test Dream, or Funhouse4. But Mad Men had it (The Suitcase) and so did Breaking Bad5 (Ozymandias, The Fly6).

Succession, on the other hand, felt very even, very same-y. I couldn’t quite tell you where season 2 peaked. And the betrayal at the end of season 3 doesn’t become clear until there’s about ten minutes left in the final episode. Season 4 is where the truly standout episodes largely lived, but again, to my earlier point, they had so much to get through that the episodes just felt so full.

It was a great time. I didn’t appreciate it then but I do now, all the more because I binged it. It actually has the opposite effect of a lot of modern TV, where the binging just reveals that not a lot actually happens (omg they’ve been talking about forging the One Ring for like 7 hours or wow does Carmy ever go anywhere besides the chef’s table?). But Armstrong creates scenes where maybe nothing happens fast but at least it’s a night of good TV.

Below is a rerun of an essay I wrote on one of my favourite novels. Please enjoy responsibly.

I’m once again AFK this week, dealing with my problems through the opposite of putting dogs down: eating and indulging myself in a foreign country.

So another Old thing I gone done and did. If you missed last week, I embarassed myself obsessing over a Netflix program (lol). This week, one of our great novels.

Things I gone done and read

Disgrace (1999)

JM Coetzee

Let’s get some things out of the way so you can read this in the proper context: I think this is one of the best books ever written. And yes, I think I probably stumbled across it by pure chance when googling most disturbing books ever written.

And much can be said about the disturbing content of the book: set in post-Apartheid South Africa, David Lurie, a communications professor (our protagonist no less, the man in whose head we are stuck), has an affair with a much younger woman that crosses the line from dalliance to harassment to straight up sexual assault. When he’s dismissed from his position for refusing to apologize for his actions, he moves to the Cape with his daughter, Lucy. Lucy lives on a farm and boards dogs. There, while taking a respite in the pastoral, they are attacked, robbed, Lucy is raped, and David is set on fire.

Where does one go from here? Well, Lucy, as can be expected, has a particularly hard time dealing with the aftermath. David, whose relationship with his daughter is strained at best, has a hard time dealing with her retreat. And to kill time he volunteers in a veterinary clinic.

Yes, it’s a novel that hearkens back to a time when men dealt with their cancellation the right way: by putting dogs to sleep.

Disgrace opened up the world of Coetzee for me. My own personal experience of Coetzee is that he is in an echelon separate from many writers that are more mainstream, such as McCarthy or Murakami1. When I peeled back the layers of the contemporary “greats”, here was this author, adorned in all sorts of acclaim for novels that are wholly unique to anything I’d read before. Like McCarthy (pre-Oprah), he’s apparently a famously private person and did not appear to collect either of his Booker Prizes.

I don’t want to sound as if I’m introducing you to Coetzee, I’m only highlighting my own ignorance. When reading backwards from Disgrace, I was playing catch up to a great author who was somewhat before my time.

His talent for writing thoroughly pathetic and sad souls is a thing to behold. While engendering pity, his characters are also written with immense pain. There’s some hidden reserve of incalculable talent that allows such spare prose to communicate such deep, soulful suffering. That’s the secret sauce, I suppose.

Disgrace is no different. I think, when casting about the internet for people’s opinions (huge mistake), it’s somewhat in vogue to admire works that portray complex, flawed, awful characters while still distancing oneself from their complex and flawed characteristics so that one can cast themselves in their own morally superior light.

While I agree that it’s pointless to write and/or read a book in which a protagonist has no serious flaws (though it still happens), to view them as if detached from any sort of empathy is absurd and moralistic.

David Lurie is a nearly impossible man to empathize with. His actions are disturbing and unethical. Coetzee makes no qualms about showing that Lurie takes advantage of Melanie Isaacs through his own selfish amorality and blames it on his own primal masculine urges. And ultimately he is an awful man subjected to a horrible fate.

But I don’t think it’s unfair to understand Lurie. His obstinate shittiness, his midlife crisis. He warps it to himself to justify his actions but to excise oneself from trying to understand him is to close oneself off from understanding the complexities of the story.

Lurie is experiencing a midlife crisis. I mean, he says it in the first line of the book: he’s solved the problem of sex. Solved through visiting a sex worker named Soraya. When Soraya abandons him, he seduces Isaacs, his student. His waning power is his own skill at seduction that is quickly wilting as he ages. He obsesses over Melanie’s youth, noticing intensely and uncomfortably how young she is.

It’s easy to read the novel through a modern lens. While it predates #metoo by many years, it’s stunning in how familiar it seems today. The accusation, the media frenzy, and ultimately Lurie’s actions and response. When Lurie’s affair comes crashing down on him and he becomes a pariah at the college, he reacts in a way I think many contrarians (and assholes) wished their favourite rapists and creeps would have reacted: a bald-faced rejection of their own cancellation. But there are no “closed doors” in Disgrace, you ride with Lurie the whole time. He harasses and then assaults Melanie, full stop.

And you’re never afforded a peek inside Melanie’s mind.

This is what can be so hard about grappling with the book. You have to live with this guy and he sucks.

And yet, the scene where he goes before the inquiry is truly electric. He has remorse, he admits what he did, but has absolutely no desire to change. Or rather, he has no desire to change through the mechanisms of the inquiry. He’s so stubborn, so twisted in his principled stance to remain a jerk, it’s almost admirable. His admittance isn’t enough, in his view they need him to beg for forgiveness and he won’t do it. Because, and he’s probably right about this, it will never be enough.

And the scenes that follow are doubly ironic. He resigns in disgrace and instead of being further punished (at first) he is gifted this pastoral beauty where he can go away and write his silly little opera about Byron. It’s like he’s been rewarded for his stubbornness. Congratulations David, you don’t have to protagonate! As in this scene with Lucy when she suggests he volunteer at Bev Shaw’s veterinary clinic:

‘I’m dubious, Lucy. It sounds suspiciously like community service. It sounds like someone trying to make reparation for past misdeeds.’

‘As to your motives, David, I can assure you, the animals at the clinic won’t query them. They won’t ask and they won’t care.’

‘All right, I’ll do it. But only as long as I don’t have to become a better person. I am not prepared to be reformed. I want to go on being myself. I’ll do it on that basis.’

Right? It’s incredible. A damaged man in a damaged world trying desperately to hold onto his own power that will slip away anyway.

Of course, none of this lasts. A man doesn’t assault a woman, refuse to reform, and then get to live out his life on a farm. In fact, it gets a lot worse.

The attack is the central act of the novel. So horrid, so cruel, even to a man like David, it’s enough to begin dissolving the armor he has spent so much of his life constructing. One of the great accomplishments of Coetzee’s prose in Disgrace is that David’s narration always has a touch of disdain about it. Everything is judged, usually quite harshly and the reader can never quite tell what the world is outside of David’s head. Is it his pretentiousness or is it honesty?

When Bill Shaw retrieves David from the hospital, his armor begins to crack. A man who David has thought very little of and basically called his wife, Bev, ugly (despite later cuckolding Bill), when asked why he has done him this favor simply says “You’d do the same.” Oof. Would David do the same? For anyone?

From the attack onward, the novel is concerned with further stripping David of his power.

He has a sense that, inside him, a vital organ has been bruised, abused — perhaps even his heart. For the first time he has a taste of what it will be like to be an old man, tired to the bone, without hopes, without desires, indifferent to the future.

Lucy won’t speak to him about her assault, knowing all too well her father, who believes himself to be unknowable, above it all, will only make things worse. Petrus, Lucy’s ambitious neighbor who wants her land, enlists David to help lay pipes in the ground and David sees he’s nothing more than an assistant, an unacceptable twist of irony that his massive ego cannot handle. Nor can he handle later, when it’s clear that Petrus orchestrated the attack in a scheme to get Lucy to capitulate and give up her land, her independence.

David can’t handle the subjugation.

It’s important here to give a bit of an aside: I don’t have anything but a surface level knowledge of Apartheid or South Africa post-Apartheid.

With Disgrace, in my opinion, being so concerned with power, the loss of it, and subjugation, it’s nigh on impossible to not connect the themes of the book to Apartheid.

However, I’m just ill-equipped to do it. There’s fertile ground there, covered by those much more knowledgeable than me.

For example, I’ve read that it’s implied2 that Melanie Isaacs is black. David takes advantage of her. Soraya, who I believe is directly implied to be Cape Malay, plays out a sort of fake subjugation with David, her being a sex worker and all. When she takes away that facade, it basically ruins David’s life. Well, it sets him on a path to ruin his own life.

I’m echoing this succinct quote from Derek Attridge here:

I need to take on board the fact that because of the intense focalization, combined with Lurie’s self-centeredness, we are excluded entirely from Melanie’s feelings; that Lurie’s dedication to music and animals doesn’t compensate for his inadequate treatment of people; that whatever reconciliation is achieved at the end of the novel, Lurie remains a deeply flawed character, unable to accept the power shift produced by the advent of democracy.

I don’t feel able to comment on this chain of abuse, but there is a lot going on even in these first 30 or so pages.

There’s a line which I’m loathe to include because it’s so chilling to me, but I will, if only to highlight my own lack of ability to unpack the complex history of race relations in South Africa:

Halfway home, Lucy, to his surprise, speaks. ‘It was so personal,’ she says. ‘It was done with such personal hatred. That was what stunned me more than anything. The rest was…expected. But why did they hate me so? I had never set eyes on them.’

He waits for more, but there is no more, for the moment. ‘It was history speaking through them,’ he offers at last. ‘A history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It may have seemed personal, but it wasn’t. It came down from the ancestors.’

Up until this point, there is a deliberate avoidance by both David and Lucy to call the attack a rape, echoing David’s equivocation earlier in the novel when he assaults Melanie.

But the bit about history and ancestors? It’s simply too much for me to tackle. I only highlight it to reinforce my feelings for the novel: there is so much between the pages of this short book and it’s one of the best ever written, hands down.

Ultimately, David is unable to save his own daughter. “Save”, as if he had the power or emotional capacity to do so. He returns to Cape Town as if trying to find his lost power, a place where can assert himself. A place where he toiled away as an asshole in some sort of obscurity.

Then, in the strangest and most complex of resolutions, he has dinner in George with Melanie’s family. After seeking some sort of resolution on the affair, he endures an awkward evening with them. Melanie’s absence, felt. Afterwards, he earnestly begins work on his Byron opera where, in all of the ironic twists, finds himself shifting the perspective away from Byron and to Teresa.

When he goes to watch Melanie’s play, it’s difficult as a reader to believe what’s happening: David’s introspection, his growth, is almost admirable, almost forgettable are his misdeeds. He seems to have actually changed, despite his firm opposition to doing so.

And then, another downfall. His revelations about the self a false victory.

He returns to Lucy, now certainly pregnant through the assault, clearly orchestrated by Petrus and partially carried out by his relative Pollux, who may be developmentally disabled.

When David catches Pollux spying on Lucy, their confrontation is as disconcerting as any passage in the book. The way he sics the bulldog on the young man, Pollux’s own mental impairment, the embarrassment of Lucy’s nudity.

And finally, a confrontation with Lucy:

‘David, I can’t run my life according to whether or not you like what I do. Not any more. You behave as if everything I do is part of the story of your life. You are the main character, I am a minor character who doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through. Well, contrary to what you think, people are not divided into major and minor. I am not minor. I have a life of my own, just as important to me as yours is to you, and in my life I am the one who makes the decisions.’

And after the attack on Pollux, the casting out by Lucy as a man who has any power over her life, David reasserts his desire to remain unchanged.

He goes to live in a refuse dump, playing a banjo, playing his opera in fact. And befriending and caring for a three-legged dog.

But when it comes to confronting the fact that he might care for something more than himself, after much delay, he brings the dog to the clinic to be put down. He’s giving up on the possibility that he could care for something more than himself, at the close of the novel:

Bearing him in his arms like a lamb, he re-enters the surgery. ‘I thought you would save him for another week,’ says Bev Shaw. ‘Are you giving him up?’

‘Yes, I am giving him up.’

When I read other, more experienced readers, authors, or critics’ thoughts on Disgrace, I feel like this tiny circle inside a forever expanding globe of thought. In fact, this roundtable summed up everything I wish I could say about the novel so you could also read that:

Tears. Fury. Avoidance. Each anecdote reveals Disgrace as a work whose signal feat is to destroy critical distance.

A book merely 200 odd pages long provokes this multilayered response that continues to resonate.

And while people try to draw out meaning using trite comparisons to current popular culture and social affairs (or by simply comparing a bad man to Donald Trump, presumably for dopes like me to click links), those works wash away into an ocean of forgotten things while books like Disgrace circle back and endure.

Further reading

These are pieces I drew from and/or directly quoted and are worth exploring:

• In Retrospect: “Disgrace,” Coetzee’s Masterpiece

• J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” @ 25: A Roundtable

• After the Fall

• What ‘Disgrace’ was telling us before we were ready to listen

I rewatched 1917 the other day. I consider 1917 to actually be a near-perfect movie. Yeah, yeah Parasite is great and Director Bong is a master blah blah blah and Sam Mendes made both American Beauty and Empire of Light (oof!). But you can keep your Korean satire, 1917 is fantastic.

The movie got me thinking about depictions of men in films. There’s at least ten or so, I think. I’d have to count to be sure. Nah, I’m playing. Men are, if anything, overrepresented in the world of cinema and now I literally sound like I just woke up from a coma and I need to tell people I just found out about a conversation that’s been going on for years.

Regardless, I started thinking about men in movies, but more specifically about “maleness”. What are movies that say something about being a man? Not movies that men typically like or that feature men heavily, but that are thematically focused on men.

I should also preface this by assuring you I don’t mean it in like…a Men’s Rights, I’m-angry-because-my-wife-who-I-treated-like-a-second-class-citizen-divorced-me, “being married to a woman is gay”1, “masculine energy2” sort of way because those people are grifters and are generally too miserable to enjoy…literally anything. I also don’t mean it in the thinkpiece-y “uhh men are you okay?” sort of way. I can’t solve these problems! Ffs I just want to talk about movies!

So I made this list. And it kept expanding so I divided it into groupings of similar themes. I don’t think this list is definitive nor exhaustive. For example, I didn’t include either Top Gun films because they’re overfuckingrated.

One theme I found that unifies them (with a couple exceptions) is that they are largely non-aspirational. In fact, and maybe this somewhat shades the “are men okay?” conversation, a lot of films about maleness are cautionary tales. Even some that have streaks of aspiration, streaks of interesting lessons, are ultimately not complete endorsements of that particular brand of masculinity.

And lastly, I don’t consider these themes uniquely and solely masculine. I’m all for inclusivity. I just think these themes end up speaking to and commenting on some sort of “maleness” really well.

Alright, whatever, I’ll stfu, here’s the “list”:

Films about giving in to your most base instincts

Examples: Taxi Driver, Falling Down, Jarhead

Probably the most “cautionary tale” category. Don’t go to war and/or don’t become a maniac. These are quite literally the films that stoke the conversation whether men are okay or not. There are derivatives of course, other films that are more explicitly about violent men giving in to their most horrific desires. Nitram, American History X, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and so on.

I think though, those movies are more about the “external”: what affects these characters and makes them do these things? The three films I’ve listed feel more like internalized brutality made material. Sort of like The Shining, the ghosts are just visual representations of Jack’s violent drinking problem.

Taxi Driver and Falling Down are somewhat in conversation with each other. Jarhead strikes me because it’s about taking men of all different types and putting them in a place where their worst impulses can be acted upon but they have to choose restraint3. There’s a reason that a big turning point in the movie is when Jamie Foxx tells Jake Gyllenhaal explicitly I love this job.

Sykes is built to resist or feed off of the negatives externalities and make something out of them. Swoff is not. Kuwait is to Swoff what New York is to Travis Bickle or LA is to William Foster. The environment that brings out a man’s worst impulses.

Films about being unable to escape who you are

Examples: The Hurt Locker, (500) Days of Summer, Gone Girl, The Spectacular Now, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Man on Fire

Admittedly, it’s weird to see three quasi-rom-coms sandwiched between two harrowing, violent, tense movies about incredibly fucked up dudes.

The Hurt Locker, along with 1917, really implanted this dumb idea in my mind. There’s something so poignant about watching Renner in his domestic life, with his son and ex-wife and admitting that there’s really nothing that lives up to war. It’s right there in the epigraph: war is a drug.

Renner, and Jarhead’s Sykes, are of the same ilk and their counterparts just cannot keep up with them. But Geraghty (also in Jarhead!), quite rightly, calls out Renner’s maniacal adrenaline junkie habits. And I think that is the most male thing about the movie, for better or worse. Not that only men can be adrenaline junkies, but the classic idea of a man avoiding domesticity because he’s obsessed with work…I mean they made a whole show about it called Mad Men. But in the case of The Hurt Locker, Renner’s work is maybe getting exploded, not making fellow copywriters weep over their memories of Coca Cola.

So why the fuck is this movie even in conversation with (500) Days or The Spectacular Now? I think all of the movies in this category are about men struggling with their innate identity. Whether it’s their poisonous romanticism or the alcoholism and isolation they’ve inherited from their father or their desire to almost explode, the story is about them identifying it and either protagonating in a different direction or accepting it as who they are. Renner accepts it, Sutter changes4, and Tom almost learns his lesson and then meets Autumn, the equivalent scene of Renner walking down another street to possible death and dismemberment while we learn he’s just re-upped for another year in the shit.

As for the other three examples, well…Man on Fire is about an innately violent man who needs to remain violent against his wishes, but use that viciousness for the good of another. Gone Girl is essentially about a man who wants to retreat into his own loser-ish, philandering, midlife crisis self who’s then forced to improve in the most extreme way by a very normal woman5. And Me and Earl…well, firstly I would just like to shout it out as a good movie and book. But it’s also about a teenager who coasts off of not getting close enough to anyone for fear of rejection (shades of Good Will Hunting honestly) who’s then forced to get close to someone and open up. And when he opens up, it kills her lol.

Films about reinvention of the self

Examples: Fight Club, Sideways, Into the Wild

These movies are like if the men in the above category got a sequel. A part of the journey to change has already been thrust upon them. They know they want to change they just don’t know how.

But I also think they get at a very human urge: I can cure these lame or bad parts of myself if given the chance. I can truly live by rejecting consumerism or going on holiday or completely forgoing the trappings of society.

I think Miles in Sideways thinks he’s doing this. He’s a better man outside of the confines of his regular life, where he’s a failure. In wine country, he’s knowledgeable and generally liked. But it’s actually a case of wherever you go, there you are.

In Into the Wild (bear with me, this is one of my favourite movies), McCandless basically has the ultimate lesson blared in his face with a megaphone the whole time: “Happiness is only real when shared” (which he wrote in the margins of his copy of Doctor Zhivago). He bums around the country touching people’s lives, quite literally bringing them joy to the point they want to adopt him, and yet he still rejects them, to his own peril. His reinvention fails right as he learns why.

Weirdly, this category is also heavily dominated by cautionary tales. Ultimately, they have a sort of you-have-to-cure-your-soul kind of vibe to them. But each of the characters brush with (face shot off, friends all move on without you) or succumb to catastrophe (dies alone in a bus) just as they take a small piece of what they learned with them. They can’t wholly change their external circumstances and also expect their inner selves to follow suit.

Films about competing male archetypes

Examples: Heat, The Departed, Call Me By Your Name, Collateral, 1917, Seven

Above I talked briefly but likely too much about 1917 and why it got me thinking about this dumb idea. These movies, about archetypes, essentially take two men who can’t escape who they are and make them discover some way out of that by being in conflict with another person. In these examples, contrasted with Gone Girl, for example, it’s another man.

Typically, at least with these examples (except maybe Heat and Call Me By Your Name6) it’s the cynic vs the Boy Scout. In 1917, Blake is the boy scout who wants to save his brother, while Scho, a veteran of the Somme and medal recipient, can’t help but be overwhelmed by the horrors of the war. Like The Departed, it’s the overthinker vs the singularly driven. Scho/Costigan are weighed down by circumstance, while Blake/Sullivan block it all out because they have something to pursue.

It’s always interesting to me who ends up punished in these movies. Blake’s inherent good nature leads to his death as he tries to save a downed German pilot. Costigan gets shot in the face while arresting Sullivan in The Departed. And Seven’s Mills…well…what is in the box? Even Elio is left pensive by the fire at the end of Call Me By Your Name.

After Blake’s death, Scho, despite his cynicism, has to take on the mantle of the boy scout and he has to choose to do it selflessly7. The archetypes have to learn from each other to grow. In Collateral, Max literally impersonates Vincent, regurgitating some of his lines back to Felix. Costigan takes the guise of a criminal, Sullivan the cop. Good versions of these stories start to blur the lines between the characters or else why put them together in the first place?

In 2024, with my lack of job and endless stretches of time I could easily fill by playing the Assassin’s Creed series from start to finish2, I decided I would read more seriously. In the previous decade, I would probably finish around 20-25 books a year. In 2024 I read 56. In 2025 I read 76.

There’s an interesting phenomenon that happens when you start to take a particular art form seriously: everything that’s probably just good seems exquisite and everything that’s exquisite seems life-altering. And when things are bad, it’s somewhat insulting. How could anyone write a bad book? Novels are good, high-quality entertainment. TV, movies, internet ephemera, they’re all slop of differing levels of magnitude.

I started this newsletter because I felt like I was consuming a lot. Even though I fancied myself a “creator” (fucking gag me) of sorts, I’ve never wanted to sacrifice creating things for consuming them. But, frankly, consumption is, in some ways, its own reward. And honestly, if you want to write at all, you have to read.

The newsletter, in its original form, was multiple recommendations. I found myself pulling from many sources. The hard part was coming up with things to say about them. Over time, it’s evolved to be a little more “inspired”. That is, if a work, new, old, liked, hated, prods me in the right ways, I should write about it. And I should delve deeper into it. If I can.

And that’s still the hard part. Because now that I’m reading a metric ton of books (I think I’ll finish closer to 60 this year because I’m commuting less) a lot of them just seem kind of pedestrian. Even by authors I truly admire and love.

Take Minor Black Figures. I’ve written previously about my admiration for Brandon Taylor and lo and behold I stopped by the library and there, neatly on the shelf, were his two books I hadn’t yet read: Filthy Animals and Minor Black Figures. Why not finish the quadrilogy?

Maybe it was the wrong time to read them based on the whole tone of this post and all but I felt myself sort of drifting through both books. Filthy Animals, like The Late Americans, is a multi-faceted book of short connected vignettes set at a Midwestern university. Filthy Animals is like the prototype of Late Americans. Very good, but a little less satiating than The Late Americans vision of itself.

Filthy Animals contains a throughline in Lionel, a character we revisit multiple times through his own perspective or through that of Charles and Sophie, a couple with whom he seems to be on the cusp of a complex relationship.

In Minor Black Figures, Wyeth is a little more open than Lionel (who makes an appearance actually) but is still characteristically closed off. Lacking. In need of some sort of shake up in his life as a gay Black painter whose work seems somewhat stalled. Wyeth’s own salvation comes through a chance meeting with a former Jesuit named Keating, a project to track down the artwork of a Black artist (one of the more obviously titular minor Black figures), and his deep disdain for a contemporary art collective called MangoWave (lol).

Taylor has a talent for creating characters who build their own armor to the world and still have the depth to carry a story. Almost all of their journeys involve some sort of realization that they need to loosen the fuck up. That’s flippant but true. They’re all twisted up within themselves. Protagonists need to be lacking something crucial or else why tell a story. And they must change. The lesson Wyeth learns is to not be so controlling over everything external to him: relationships, ideas about his work, etc. Or at least that’s how I saw it.

But sometimes, reading these journeys of self discovery in the wrong headspace can be a little wearing. Instead of “these characters are fragile and complex but their protagonation is vital” I start to feel more like “god, these characters are incapable of feeling anything resembling joy”. Their anhedonia, while justified, feels like a cutting reflection of the online world, where we all spend too much of our time listening to the most comfortable middle class losers act like they’re Tsarist peasants who can post.

Of course, if Taylor’s characters were happy or fulfilled there would be no need to tell their stories. But sometimes you read things in the wrong headspace. When I read Real Life and The Late Americans, there was something so intense about how spiky those characters are. Wallace doesn’t just have armor, he has a fortress built around him meant to repel others with violent force. In these latter two books, however, I didn’t feel quite as enthralled with the characters because mostly they just seemed mildly sad.

To be fair, there was a point in Minor Black Figures where I felt bathed in the admiration of his writerly talents. About midway through the book, I quite literally wondered how I could feel so rapt about this guy drifting through New York, smoking cigarettes, suffering from painter’s block, and merely thinking about the work of a forgotten artist. That awe sort of wore off as I neared the end. But again, that’s on me.

Taylor feels illustrative to me personally. When I started this largely pointless endeavor (the newsletter, not reading), I felt revelation in his work. Obviously, I was late to it but I tore through Real Life and Late Americans with such ferocity. Their similarities, rather than portending something, were instead further justifications to seek out his writing. Like Sally Rooney, his books are thematically consistent3. There is a throughline to his grand project.

But what once seemed revelatory now seems like it just meets my expectations. And again, I want to stress: this is all on me. When I pithily consider ranking his work and Minor Black Figures is at the bottom, we’re still talking about a difference between an 8/10 and a 10/10 spread across his four books. That’s a pretty incredible rate. Some would say it’s Rooney-esque.

Here I am complaining that one of the world’s great writers didn’t elicit a momentous emotional response from me while comparing his work to that of another of the world’s great writers. Who the fuck am I exactly? Probably someone who is suffering from something that makes critics so often insufferable: when you’re voraciously devouring the good, bad, and ugly of a medium and feel you have to come up with something to say, you come across as a pissy whining loser who can’t enjoy things and then you post about it online.

It’s complicated, what to ask from a book. As a consumer, you pick the thing up, often for free, take X amount of time to read it (for me it’s usually about a week), and expect it to shatter you emotionally. Or at least I do. I long for works that wreck me. And rather than excoriate something because it didn’t reach my lofty, absurd expectations, I’d rather wrestle with it publicly in this forum.

It’s a joyful feeling to be right in the midst of something and already have an inkling of how I’m interpreting it as it unfolds. It’s like you see the theme start to gain more definition and you can see exactly how you’re going to interpret that theme. I felt that way when I saw Marty Supreme or read Atavists. In some ways, maybe that makes those works predictable or maybe I jumped the gun on them. Sure, that’s possible. But it’s such a nice feeling when a work is, in turn, working you, almost against your will. Such is art, I suppose.

I don’t want to stray too far into personal essay territory because, frankly, that’s boring and no one cares. But I do think a lot about this issue I’ve imposed on myself. I pick up a book and hope I can take something more from it than just digestion of the words on the page. Each book is a hope that that will happen. Maybe it will be The Incendiaries (it wasn’t). Maybe The Mark and the Void, since I’ve somewhat started to believe that The Bee Sting was a work of genius.

But when you finish a book and shrug and move on to the next one, the lack of reflection sort of kills me. I’ve said before that a book being “bad” is actually not the worst thing it can be, the worst thing is actually if a book is middling and boring.

Ultimately, this is me excusing the declining quality of my own work and blaming it on others, some of whom are quite literally geniuses. But I genuinely find it fascinating to be a consumer, trying to really draw out feeling from the art you consume and, while acknowledging that it is good, it just doesn’t work for you personally. It’s sort of…meta-criticism, I suppose.

Rest assured that, when I write long, time-wasting essays on a single work, it’s because they have truly affected me. And when I mention things in passing, it doesn’t mean I disliked it, I just ran out of thoughts on it. And when I go on a prolific run of having no thoughts, I stray into further, equally pointless, side quests.

This isn’t me announcing my retirement or even hinting at it (sorry!) but more just overexplaining why this newsletter has no cohesive theme or subject. I’ll continue to hope to focus on books because they are still, hands down, the most rewarding art form, in my opinion. But every once in a while you’ll be stuck with some mildly elevating complaining.

Oh and read Brandon Taylor. Despite everything I’ve said, I still want to make it clear: he is a great writer and I would recommend all of his books.

Kidding, of course, but I just lack that somewhat bookfluencer-tinged I-just-can’t-stop-buying-books-looooool impulse. Except for cookbooks.

I think, and this might give you a glance into my quickly deteriorating mind, I sort of trick myself into believing that they have some sort of utility. And they do! But also, as I’ll get into later on, a lot just don’t but they’re are nice to look at and flip through.

Anyone who has stuck around here for a bit knows that food and eating is my other, other hobby1. I guess, simply, I’m a foodie, but I decry the label because it connotes a subset of Instagram influencers whose work I find, frankly, embarrassing2.

But more than just eating, I do also love to cook. And honestly, I’m not that good of a cook, I just like recipes. I like the order, I like the product, I like the result. Leave me to my own devices in the kitchen and I can fall back on a few dishes but nothing that will blow your dick off. Leave me to flip through some cookbooks and I can actually make something alright.

There are basically three types of cookbooks in descending order of utility:

1. Ones where you start to flip through every page and have to get post-it notes to mark the myriad recipes you want to make3.

2. Ones that, while beautiful, only offer a few recipes that seem accessible or unique.

3. Glorified coffee table books that look amazing on a shelf but are largely bereft of any utility whatsoever.

And this is where I should really divulge something I found out early on as I grew my collection: all I really ask for in a cookbook is that it provides at least one decent recipe I can return to or teaches at least one technique that you can replicate in other dishes.

That, to some, may seem like an incredibly low bar but you’d be surprised to learn that probably 70% of the cookbooks I own don’t even clear that.

And so, settling for the aesthetic value of a book is not the worst thing in the world. The first book that kicked off my collection was, admittedly, The Kinfolk Table, both a book and a brand primarily concerned with aesthetics. Together we can lament that particular era of consumerist propaganda all we want but that doesn’t change the fact that when I flip through that book (which is really quite lovely) I feel a great sense of calm. And you’d be shocked to know, some of the recipes are quite good.

But anyways, so as not to waste your time, here’s ten cookbooks I’d recommend for different reasons, five that you can use and five that you can flip through and that look pretty on your shelf4.

5 useful cookbooks

All of the books below I have used multiple times or returned to one recipe in them as the apex version of that recipe. My copies of these books are stained and often sticky, which is a good sign.

Shelf Love by Yotam Ottolenghi

Ottolenghi is, hands down, the best cookbook writer alive. If you broke it down into some type of formula of recipes that work x instances cooked/money spent on book he would come out far ahead of any other name in my collection.

Admittedly, his prolific output helps, his team basically drops cookbooks like albums. I own five all on my own5. I could write an entire post dedicated to them and maybe I will (a threat). He’s also on Substack, writing away:

Ottolenghi

Super-soft courgettes and smoky aubergines with olives

So often, I am tempted to end the day in front of the television. I actually love having my dinner while watching the news, or starting a new series (I am on episode 2 of DTF St. Louis - and it’s promising; David Harbour shaking a big belly to hip hop while doing sign language is a masterpiece). But I also try to resist the temptation and not end up on the couch too often…

Read more

a month ago · 192 likes · 4 comments · Yotam Ottolenghi

I could choose any of his books and they’d still likely be the ones I return to the most. Shelf Love end-to-end probably has the best recipes and also has a killer hummus technique. Honestly, if he hadn’t already called a book Simple, that’s probably what this book would be called, as all the recipes are meant to be pretty accessible.

Japaneasy by Tim Anderson

Japanese cultural ephemera doesn’t do a whole lot for me, even though I’m a white guy nearing middle age and therefore it’s my right to be a huge fucking dweeb about Japan.

But Japanese food really fascinates me and Japaneasy is a great intro to it, aided by the fact that Tim Anderson is a similarly soft white man who is obsessed enough with Japan for my needs. The book is quite accessible, that’s the whole point, and its schtick seems somewhat inauthentic (if you care about that sort of thing) but ultimately the recipes speak for themselves. The oyakodon recipe in particular is quite good.

Again, Anderson also provides enough recipes for the building blocks of the dishes (sweet soy, dashi, etc) that you could learn quite a bit from them alone.

Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan

This cookbook is essentially a giant that stands astride all other cookbooks like the archdemon of pasta. Hazan is the Julia Child of Italian cuisine without the dunking ability and half-good movie.

One drawback of the book is that the recipes appear somewhat quaint today, as there has been so much obsession over how to make the best cacio e pepe or aglio e olio (or just watch this), but the good news is that Italian cuisine doesn’t…really…evolve…lol. Everyone kind of wants the same ol’ shit. And this book has it.

Also, the page dedicated to pairing sauces with certain pasta shapes was an interesting revelation to an inquiring mind.

Tacos: Recipes and Provocations: A Cookbook by Alex Stupak and Jordana Rothman

Probably the second most used cookbook I own. Invaluable to learn basic techniques of tortilla making and salsas. Like the authors say, one could use the starting point of the book to make all manner of salsas with your own unique combinations.

So while the book stays on the shelf a lot these days, it probably taught me more technique than any other.

Tartine All Day by Elizabeth Prueitt

First off, a warning: this book asks a lot of the reader. Prueitt is the co-owner of Tartine, along with her husband6 Chad Robertson (of general bread fame). Ironically, as she gets into in the book, Prueitt can’t eat wheat.

So guess what? This book is gluten free. You’d be surprised to find there are a lot of normally gluten heavy recipes. It asks a lot because of the sheer amount of replacement ingredients you need to source (oat flour! tapioca starch!) to make even the simplest recipes.

However! The recipes are absurdly good. It’s probably annoying to Prueitt to hear but the whole I didn’t even realize it was gluten free really rings true. The only drawback is that typically simple recipes become slightly more complex.

5 pieces of art masquerading as cookbooks

Please don’t take my opinion as gospel. Obviously, some of these books are incredibly influential and have their place. Personally, I haven’t gotten a lot out of them due to either my deficiencies of talent or my lack of interest. That said, I love owning each of them anyways.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck

This is probably as controversial as I’ll get. The book is essentially the Beatles of cookbooks but honestly…it’s fine.

Firstly, the recipes are decidedly of its time. That’s okay, I’m forgiving of Hazan for the same sins. Secondly, I despise the layout, which again I forgive Prueitt for lifting for her book above.

I just never got much mileage out of this book, even for basic techniques. Sometimes I flip through it to get a sense of the building blocks of certain cuisines, but it really operates as more of an interesting historical document than a tool. As the titular Julie in Julie & Julia says, there’s a whole chapter on aspics which feels like you’re entering a wholly different era of nauseating cuisine.

Mexico: The Cookbook by Margarita Carrillo Arronte

Phaidon, the publisher of this book and another down the list, is confounding to me. I hesitate to pick up their books largely due to my experience with Mexico: The Cookbook.

A beautiful, striking tome, incredibly constructed and unfortunately next to useless unless you’re looking for inspiration. Most of the recipes I’ve tried from the book are either incorrect (the proportions and measurements make little sense) or poorly written. My suspicion is twofold: the recipes were recorded orally and then assigned estimated measurements, and also they were never tested. That said, I don’t doubt their authenticity and I think they can be a useful guideline for a certain dish.

Which is fine because I think Phaidon as a brand is more interested in the coffee table side of cookbooks rather than the usefulness.

La Cucina: The Regional Cooking of Italy by The Italian Academy of Cuisine

This doorstop was an absurd purchase that I don’t regret at all. It is a fascinating, inexhaustible look at Italian cuisine. And having been published in 2009, it’s a relic of a time before Instagram-friendly images or covers came to dominate cooking.

The book is meant to be used. Actually, I would guess it’s more meant to be referenced, like a dictionary. That said, it’s impossibly constructed, like a labyrinth of the country it’s meant to be explaining.

On Vegetables by Jeremy Fox

A deceptively advanced cookbook that relies on both technique and your ability to source very fresh, very high quality ingredients. I have no qualms about that, some people live in California and can do that.

I’ve cooked a few things out of the book (the zucchini bread and ratatouille dish is quite nice) and its larder section really shines. But I always find myself sufficiently daunted when I look through it, despite being awed by its construction and beauty.

The Noma Guide to Fermentation by David Zilber and René Redzepi

Another book that asks a lot of a home chef. Again, that’s fine. Beyond the first section of ferments, it starts to get fairly advanced. A more ambitious person would find that exciting. Personally, I’m happy with the lacto-ferment section. I just don’t think I’m ever going to make vinegar.

I’m an admirer of Redzepi (and his dog, as seen here) despite his recent debacle. And I’ll probably buy their new book and visit Noma Projects if I go back to Copenhagen.

As far as this book goes, when I have more time after flaming out with this newsletter, maybe I will set up a temperature controlled area for koji or whatever but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Which means you’re stuck with me and my bullshit.

1 itty-bitty in-betweener

Bar Tartine by Cortney Burns and Nicolaus Balla

I picked this up on a whim after flipping through it and gravely overestimating my own skill and commitment. Again part of the Tartine family, Bar Tartine is, generously, about 50% dedicated to parts of dishes and/or preparations. One could stock their pantry with everything described in the book. Of course, you could ask yourself “do I really need to make my own onion powder?” and the answer may be no.

That said, it’s a book that invokes that strange compulsion within me known as “ambition” because some day I will buy a dehydrator and get to work.

But in the midst of feeling confronted by the novel, I realized I had been working on (and was planning to work on) posts that involved incredibly confrontational works. So why not write an omnibus thought piece about them? Then will you like me?

“90% voice, 10% plot“ would be my quippy review of Banal Nightmare were I to stoop to the level of Letterboxd/Goodreads japes and goofs. But I won’t and never will, that’s all theoretical. But just so you know, that would be the joke I’d make.

And it’s true, Halle Butler’s acerbic novel lacks in “things happening”. Normally, this would be a point against it. You wouldn’t believe the amount of fiction I read where nothing actually happens which I suppose is how life feels when we spend all day posting puns and wordplay-based humour on X the Everything App for Everything. But it actually works for Butler’s novel.

Banal Nightmare follows Moddie back to her unnamed Midwest town (coincidentally called X) after she breaks up with her boyfriend. There, she reconnects with old friends and makes some new ones and happens to sort of piss them all off because she’s, frankly, a lot. I thought this review encapsulated it better than I could:

She has been tempted back by cheap rent, old friends, and the prospect of becoming a better, more thoughtful version of herself. Instead she finds a group of artistically stifled, angry, and disappointed men and women in their thirties who claim they like to socialize together. They are all unhappy and unfulfilled and put one another through huge amounts of psychic torture in the name of nothing at all.

There’s something so quintessentially Millennial about this premise. There’s a way to write this book quite credulously. A sensitive, artistic woman, dumped by a sensitive, artistic man, goes on a healing journey to her hometown, where she revisits past traumas but then works through them with the help of her multicultural cast of friends who are all there to lift her up and get her some rebound sex or something. Or like, she rediscovers her latent passion for art.

That would suck. That’s a Hallmark film with a thin sheen of self-help but also couched in some sort of empowerment narrative. Thank god it doesn’t actually exist and Butler wrote Banal Nightmare instead.

I think the book also asks of the audience a critical question: what if you were one of these people? Or maybe, more pointedly, which one of these people are you right now? Moddie, the self-indulgent constant main character who monologues at people and calls them fascist? Pam, the timid, petty, chaste woman on the brink of an extramarital affair? David, her object of affection, the loser artist who is entirely defined by his GenX level of narcissism and self loathing? Or Kimberly, the egotistical, somewhat maniacal foil to Moddie?

You’d think that all of these freaks wouldn’t just go to each other’s parties and sort of glower, but that’s literally most of the book. And I actually liked it. It’s one of those works where, in performing scientific research via one-star Goodreads reviews, a lot of the criticisms are also the exact reasons I liked the book. I like how mean they are. I like how annoying they are. I like that the book asks me which of these assholes I am.

I grew up in a small town, nothing like Moddie’s, but all small towns are sort of the same, which is why these return narratives often work. Lots of people got out and then come back for a visit or to live. And that gap can inexorably change your relation to that place and the people.

One aspect of the novel that I felt wasn’t quite there was the context for Moddie’s return. I didn’t get a sense of how much she had kept in touch with Pam and Nina, for example, because clearly their relationships had changed quite a lot. Nina and her mysterious boyfriend. Pam and her growing distaste for Moddie, especially since her schlubby partner Craig seems to really enjoy her company.

When you check out from your hometown headspace, it can sometimes be tempting to wonder what people think about you. Oh you! So far away in some cultured city. How you’ve changed! But the truth is, they don’t think about you at all and you’ve probably become some self-centered loser like Moddie.

In the midst of the novel, I thought a lot about why these narratives work for me specifically and not others. Why do I enjoy being implicated, called out, told actually I’m the asshole?

Because they don’t work for everyone. I think that good protagonists, or good characters overall, don’t have to be likeable but they have to be understandable. You have to be able to comprehend why a character does anything and it can’t just be for the convenience of the plot. And sometimes when I see people complain about unlikable protagonists, I often think it’s because those characters exhibit shitty behaviour that can hit too close to home.

When I got to the infamous scene in The Drama **I won’t spoil the contents of this scene but will talk briefly about later events of this film so if you don’t want to know then skip ahead or stop reading or whatever** where they all confess to the worst thing they’ve done (don’t worry, this is in the trailer) I found myself squirming at Alana Haim’s reaction, her fury, her offense. I hated it. But when she gets up and gives her maid of honour1 speech later I realized that her performance is actually too good.

If we haven’t quite been that person before, we’ve all experienced them: self-righteous, quick to take offense, and, frankly, self-centered, considering Alana’s own confession only minutes before. And all too glad to give a mortifying speech at a wedding.

Haim’s character would actually be right at home in Banal Nightmare, a novel where bad thoughts and feelings are akin to bad actions. I read a note on this dumb platform (Substack) that I would link to if I could find it again where someone said that the central conflict of The Drama illustrates a very modern development, where we often conflate bad things happening with things that feel bad to think about.

I think that’s spot on and apologies to the writer of that note if they’re reading this. And again, the movie puts us in this spot that asks what we would do if someone close confessed something similar? Would we go all Haim on them? Would we introspect and admit we don’t quite have the moral high ground we might think?

The brilliance of Haim’s character is that we might well overreact in the moment and we might not want to admit that we did so when pressed. Or maybe we could be right to overreact.

The Drama worked for me2 because it plays largely in this theoretical headspace. Sort of a “thought crime” gray area.

When I wrote recently about The Zone of Interest and Blonde, I found myself deliberately implicated by those works. Implication, the involvement of the audience, the confrontation with evil and despair, is largely thematic in both works. For different reasons, obviously, but at a much more serious level than Banal Nightmare or The Drama. It doesn’t make these works more important or more enjoyable, of course. Blonde is certainly the most challenging to cheerlead of the four. Zone…yeah, I think we can all admit it’s probably one of the most important works of the 21st century.

Blonde defies my own ideas of a good but unlikable protagonist. Norma is harder to understand though you can empathize with her. She’s not unlikable but she’s hard to watch. And yet the movie constantly asks you why you’re so morbidly interested in her. In a way, the movie makes the viewer the protagonist, challenging the viewer to evolve their view of the myth of Marilyn as we watch one unfortunate scene after another.

I know that’s a pretty pretentious reading of a work that lots of people consider valueless trash but whatever, I’m happy with it.

The Zone of Interest, on the other hand, forces you into empathy for perhaps one of the most despicable pairs of people to ever live. It does a Clockwork Orange on your feelings. You’re closer to them than you might think.

That’s a sick feeling. That could make some wonder why they should be subjected to such implication in the name of art. Well, that’s a much larger question that I can’t answer. But it works on me, if not others.

So why this desire to be punished by works of art? Even the ones that make me feel disgusted by myself?

I guess it provides some catharsis. At the level of The Drama, it makes me grateful to not have to be confronted by an Alana Haim. With Banal Nightmare, it relieves me to think that I’m not the only incredible loser who takes themselves too seriously, even though these are fictional characters. Their authenticity provides solace. I could be worse, even if I suck. Again, put brilliantly in the review above:

Millennial fiction has tended to involve a generous outpouring of sympathy for its characters, and a condemnation of that eternal bogeyman, late capitalism. Late capitalism is why your apartment isn’t appropriately furnished, and there are some deep but unmentionable fractures in your friendships, and you aren’t getting any design commissions even though your ideas are actually excellent. Butler considers the housing market, the growing threats of neoliberalism and climate change, and instead asks: What if you’re just a boring jerk?

But push further down, into that real morass of feel-bad work like Zone or Blonde…that’s the real *chef’s kiss*. The Drama and Banal Nightmare were both excellent. They’ve lingered with me long enough to unpack them in this dumb newsletter and they might indeed linger further.

But scenes from Zone would just pop into my head since I first saw it. And those awful vibes would accompany them. Works that force you to have a personal stake in them leave this echoing imprint. If a work isn’t really asking anything of you, even the slightest amount, is it even worth considering?

In 2022, Netflix released Andrew Dominik’s hotly anticipated Blonde. The talk before it dropped was basically this:

• Pulitzer Prize finalist source material.

• Ana de Armas good.

• 14-minute standing ovation at Venice.

What we got instead was:

• Ana de Armas good.

• A brutal 3 hour marathon.

• NC-17 rating.

• A director reacting very coolly to the reception of the film.

Basically, a lot of critics savaged the movie and the audience decided that Dominik’s fate should be that he get blasted directly into the sun. But de Armas was good. From what I’ve gleaned from keeping up with it at the time, the general criticisms were thus:

• Bad script.

• Inaccurate biopic.

• The film’s stance on abortion is shockingly conservative.

• The film is sexist.

• The film is exploitative.

And I think…all of those are somewhat true. I also think, and I thought this in the heat of the film’s release, that, while Blonde may have a metric ton of baggage to contend with, it will be reclaimed in subsequent years due to its technical proficiency.

So I guess I’m the very brave first person here to reclaim it.

What I found really fascinating when rewatching it (besides being maybe the only person on the planet who has seen it twice) was its sheer technical bravado. Dominik, as was noted all over the place, is an accomplished writer/director. People will probably talk at you about The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. How it’s underrated, how it’s unfairly forgotten, etc. It has its fans.

I’m one of them for much the same reason I enjoy Blonde. Jesse James is a stunning work to look at and is pretty limp to really consider. It’s a fine movie. It drags.

In Dominik’s oeuvre, I find myself thinking more about Killing Them Softly. Not only does it have a wonderfully pointed ending, it’s also one of James Gandolfini’s final film roles and he’s fantastic. Brad Pitt sort of floats through this world of criminal kooks just being Brad Pitt, while everyone who has a bit part (Jenkins, Scoot, half the cast of The Sopranos) carries him on their shoulders. It’s the kind of film that doesn’t get made much anymore: mid-budget, auteur driven, etc. And it’s safe to say that without Brad Pitt’s involvement, the film would flounder.

In fact, it’s safe to say we probably only have Brad Pitt to thank (or curse, depending on your vibe) for any of Dominik’s films, including Blonde. As Dominik said himself:

Brad is the reason I work […] I make a film, they put me in director jail, and then Brad comes down to the parole board and says, ‘Look, he's learned his lesson. He's going to make something a bit more user friendly this time’. They let me out of jail, I make another film, and they put me back in […]

Director jail. An interesting concept to debate about. Who is in? Who’s been sentenced really or who has imposed it upon themselves?

I find the example (in the link above) of Damien Chazelle particularly interesting. Like Dominik he’s an absurdly talented filmmaker but he’s made (up until his “conviction”) almost universally liked films (Whiplash, La La Land, First Man). Then Babylon flops and it becomes a little less likely they’re going to shell out for him anytime soon.

Babylon is an interesting point of comparison. When I rewatched Blonde, my main question was: is there another film that has been crafted so skillfully and yet is so widely disliked1? Babylon immediately came to mind. I happen to love it and there are many vocal supporters of the movie (unlike Blonde) but the main difference between Chazelle and Dominik is that Dominik seems to have been indicted purely on the audience’s distaste for this one movie2.

Is that fair? Maybe. After all, audiences are the reason one makes art, I suppose. Somewhere between creative fulfillment and profit there has to be some consideration for the audience. And the audience, ultimately, can acquit you or break you out of director jail.

But I think, in revisiting Blonde, it was interesting to consider that the Audience is a large thematic part of the film. In reliving the controversy, I found this quote that I think can cut different ways depending on your perspective:

Following the comments, viewers also criticised Dominik for seeming to make a film based on what he wants, rather than what the audience might want.

Right. And what exactly is wrong with that? He is, after all, the “auteur” here.

But I get it. There is a tension between making art completely inconsiderate of an audience and making the most pandering, joyless piece of shit imaginable. It’s particularly prevalent in the biopic space, where so often the goal seems to be to make 2 hour long movies blowing the principal character and sort of brushing anything remotely critical under the rug. (We had King Richard, we’re about to get Michael)3. Honestly, when was the last time you watched a biopic that was genuinely interesting?

Now, Dominik’s seeming disdain for the audience didn’t engender much support. As he said before the film dropped:

“It’s a demanding movie,” he said. “If the audience doesn’t like it, that’s the fucking audience’s problem. It’s not running for public office.”

Hmm. Were I to coach Dominik, I would maybe suggest he say something closer to “Listen, it’s a demanding movie but it would be great if audiences respond to it.”

I think Adam Nayman wrote it best, nailing the tension between the audience and the creator:

When a movie is truly shattering or devastating, there’s a residual sense of gratitude for what you’ve been through: the necessity of being shaken. Blonde is the kind of movie that brutalizes you for three hours, feigns a sigh, and says, “You’re welcome.” Well, thanks for nothing.

Frankly, I kind of agree with both sides. Dominik isn’t my friend and he’s not telling me “hey if you don’t like my upcoming movie, fuck you specifically”. He’s probably venting some very valid frustrations that audiences are sometimes pretty fucking dumb. And he’s made a challenging film that isn’t easy (to some impossible) to love.

And if this all sounds like Dominik venting that sort of frustration post hoc, I actually think it’s right there in the text. You wouldn’t think that Blonde would be the film that someone would basically throw every film technique in the book at, short of 3D, but the cinematography morphs relentlessly. There are many scenes that use SnorriCam to show emotional distress (like…more so than normal. Ana de Armas is literally on the brink of tears the entire film) and it’s a jarring technique.

But what does it do? It makes the audience look right down the pipe, straight at the face of whoever is on screen. There’s literally a point where Norma looks right back at us and says What business is it of yours? My life?

Dominik talked a lot about Marilyn as an American myth and about deconstructing that myth. When pushed on why he focused on basically everything shitty about her life, he was pretty clear that he’s not interested in the other stuff. Not her legacy and not the myth. It feels like that myth represents the dichotomy between the auteur and the audience: reinforcement of the myth is what the audience wants, while Dominik wants to tear it down. de Armas got it:

“I feel like the movie also makes the audience feel like participants. We contributed at the time, and we still contribute, in the exploitation of actors, people in the public eye. We, the audience, do this,” she said. “And I feel like it’s possible that some people have felt like [someone] pointed a finger at [them].”

But still! That doesn’t mean you have to like this movie. In fact, even if you “like” it, no one really likes it.

The childhood scenes drag on, as do the scenes between her ethically non-monogamous throupling with Cass and Ed, sequences that are likely untrue. Weirdly, I think the movie actually picks up in the second and third hours, something almost no one has said ever. When people raised objections to the false nature of the biopic of it all, I always had to remind myself: this movie is based on, and shears pretty close to, a work of fiction.

Yes, there is an aspect to the film concerning where fact and fiction begin, end, or coalesce. But that makes it interesting. And honestly, is it any more true or false than A Beautiful Mind?

Ultimately, that question is unimportant. I think the argument about the truth of the movie was conveniently trotted out to criticize the film when Dominik was, again, very clear about his intentions4:

Do you think there’s ever a risk that the audience takes Blonde as gospel about Monroe, even though it’s clearly based on a novel? And does it matter?

I don’t think that matters. Why would it matter?

Obviously, he was wrong. It did matter to some. To me, it doesn’t matter. Maybe he should have had a disclaimer at the start of the film. Would that quell the outrage? Nah, probably not.

The question remains though: If you’re not interested in reality, is there value in having an extended sequence where she is literally dragged to JFK’s hotel room and made to give him a blow job? The scene is pretty gross. Cruel even. And then…we pull back from the frame and see the whole thing projected on a movie screen. The symbolism is clear, if gratuitous.

It’s cheap and easy to say that objectification is part of the point, even if that’s true. But I think Dominik was drawn to the gulf between Monroe’s legend as an American symbol and the concurrent misery of her life:

“But the visual idea of the movie is to reference the collective memory. It’s a weird déjà vu, but the meaning of the images is different. So, the image of her and Arthur Miller at the window is a romantic image, but in the film, it’s kind of ugly. She’s trapped in our memory of her and trying to break out of it. It’s a movie about the unconscious. And we only know as much as she does because she’s essentially living an unexamined life.”

When pushed on the actual good things Monroe did with her life, Dominik dismisses it:

“That stuff is not really what the film is about. It’s about a person who is going to be killing themself. So it’s trying to examine the reasons why they did that. It’s not looking at her lasting legacy.“

I think that’s callous, to be honest. And a little perverse. But it’s also fine. It’s fine for a creator to be honest about their intentions of the work and then also receive some blowback over it.

There’s an interesting pop cultural phenomenon where a creator’s exposure, be they a YouTuber or director or actor, starts a rumbling of discontent toward their work that at some specific point explodes in a public furor, even when that creator has been basically making the same things they were making when the audience fell in love with them.

I think that’s happening to Sam Levinson right now with Euphoria’s long awaited third season. Euphoria’s first season was genuinely great, Levinson seemed like a new TV auteur, then he makes The Idol (LOL!) and sort of gets this stank on him. Like, yeah, it’s a vapid, largely pointless show that seems to have forgotten to film an episode (?).

I suffered through The Idol for the sake of the culture but also because I do like unpacking when talented people make interestingly bad things. Shrugging at something is a lot worse than being like wow what an exceptional collection of garbage.

Dominik never reached the popular heights of having a prestige HBO show but Blonde does fit in a similar Levinson-esque slimy, filthy, provocateur lane. And the equal and opposite reaction to those works when they go wrong is somewhat a hope I suppose but also a bit of a misfire.

I guess I sound like a defender of the film and maybe I am in some respects. But really, if you hate, please hate it. However, I am in strong defense of people’s ability to make bad shit and say dumb things about them rather than being pop culturally excommunicated.

In Blonde, Norma constantly refers to herself as a vessel. Part of what makes de Armas’s performance so strong is that you can see her struggle to find her way out of the maze between Norma and Marilyn. When Dominik painstakingly recreates magazine covers or calendar pinups or film scenes, we are with Marilyn. When Norma and Arthur Miller lounge in their home, we’re with Norma. But as the film goes on, they blend and combine.

And she’s a vessel to the audience as well. Some want Marilyn, some want Norma, some want both. And hey, we got both, in a beautifully made, questionably motivated package. For better or (more likely) worse.

First, see it in the cinema. Ideal. Thoughtful. Uncomfortable. The audience will be silent because the movie is deeply unhappy.

Second, and it feels insane to say this, but watch it at home on your phone with headphones in. Why? Because it’s one of the few movies where the importance of the sound almost completely supersedes any other aspect.

I’m sure Jonathan Glazer, who I’m also sure is a huge fan of my work, would want to strangle me for even suggesting that the second most ideal way to watch his movie is on your little doom device. But it’s a hypothesis I’ve tested a few times and it’s really true.

I grabbed Martin Amis’s 2014 novel on a whim, from a library shelf as I am wont to do. I’m always fascinated to compare the source material to an adaptation. Here’s the gist:

The novel is a multi-perspective story about an SS officer, Angelus Thomsen, and his growing obsession with and love for Hannah Doll, the wife of the commandant of Auschwitz, Paul Doll. We are also treated to Paul’s perspective as he struggles to run the camp and handle his wife’s growing distaste for him. Finally, we also see aspects of the camp through the eyes of a sonderkommando, Szmul.

Keen eyed readers will already have spotted something a little puzzling: besides the setting, this novel sounds almost nothing like the film.

Glazer’s film tells the story (“story” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here) of Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller). Höss was the true-to-life commandant of Auschwitz for two terms over the course of World War II. Amis’s Doll was inspired by Höss, while Glazer took from his real life. The film shows the idyllic life of the couple and their children while they live quite literally beside the camp, sharing a wall that separates their paradise garden from total hell.

While the novel was praised in multiple places for being a return to form for Amis1, the film has since been floated as the best film of the 2020s and possibly one of the best films of the 21st century.

Your mileage may vary on that sentiment. It’s not an easy film to love, even if you are moved by it. And in a year (2023) of sticky, strong movies that are wholly more likeable, it was easy for it to be overshadowed by crowdpleasing affairs (Barbie, The Holdovers) or major works by new and old masters (Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon).

The power in the adaptation, to me, is twofold:

1. While Glazer has openly said that his film is quite far afield from the novel, I ultimately think they are driving at the same theme via different techniques.

2. On technique, Glazer’s ability to use a wholly cinematic technique (sound) to exemplify the theme is what makes it such a masterful adaptation.

And what is the theme?

An easy description would be to simply label it a film about “the banality of evil”, a now famous (and controversial) term Hannah Arendt used to describe Adolf Eichmann. I think one can see that banality in Höss and Doll. As Arendt said about Eichmann:

[…] he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts.

And yet, this view, as an observer to this casual horror, is a surface level take on the works. Because the works want to make you feel complicit, which Glazer has alluded to many times by evoking the work of Gillian Rose. He says:

“[Rose] imagined a film that could make us feel ‘unsafe’, by showing how we’re emotionally and politically closer to the perpetrator culture than we’d like to think,” Glazer said. “It articulated something for me in a way that I hadn’t been able to for myself.”

The banality of their lives, their actions, and, most importantly, their desires and wants and needs makes me feel like the story pushes beyond merely presenting them as cogs in the machine of pure horror.

In fact, Doll spends so much of his time insisting that he is completely normal. He leads a normal life, he wants normal things. Is he convincing us or himself? His insistence makes us doubt. Later in the novel, he’s chastised for not playing along when they offload the trains at the ramp. They’d offload victims and send them directly to the showers, while leading them to believe that it was, in fact, a shower. But Doll’s facade weakens. And why wouldn’t it? He knows where they’re going, he says this himself, so why would he pretend?

I believe Doll and Höss are not banal. I believe they know.

The novel pushes the absurdity of the characters preoccupations to the point of provocation. It’s almost appalling the way they are all overly concerned with primal urges. Sex and cuckoldry. The work in the camp is sort of humdrum, the victims only tools for the Buna Werke.

Glazer pulls this back in the film. Firstly, by eliminating the chief stickman of the novel, Angelus Thomsen, entirely, and focusing on Doll, now Höss2. And if Doll spends so much time telling us he’s normal, Höss doesn’t even bother. And yet his existence is drenched in his own moral decay. His Eden, while visually stunning, cannot spare him from the camp.

Because of the sound. I return to it again and again because it is exceptional (Tarn Willers and Johnnie Burn won an Oscar for it). I’d argue the sound is the film. There’s layers and depths to it unlike any other movie, hence the headphones recommendation. The train in the distance, the occasional pop of gunfire, a crescendo of screams and cries that dies away. And at all times the great undulating industrial roar of the crematorium. No more notable than constant city traffic outside your window.

Not that the other aspects aren’t special. Friedel and Hüller had previously decided independently that they would not portray Nazis and yet something about this film convinced them, adding another accolade to Hüller’s already G.O.A.Ted year playing an incredibly distasteful character (she had also starred in Anatomy of a Fall). The acting is top notch, the performances largely “found” as well as written. The camerawork deliberately echoes Big Brother. The set famously just rolled ten cameras through the house to catch moments.

The film opens with an extended sequence of nothingness, only the title. You hear the sound of a train, a certain symbol present in nearly all works concerning the Holocaust. Or is it the score? Mica Levi’s music is spare and stark and it either flows in or punches all at once, such as in the scenes of the Polish girl leaving apples for the workers.

And yet we don’t open on the scene you’d expect. To watch the film is to have a perpetual pit in your stomach. When will the horrors emerge? But instead, we find this pasty Nazi family enjoying a picnic, a day on the river. And the film proceeds as such, as Giles Harvey puts it:

At moments — or rather, for extended stretches — these vignettes sail close to the wind of sheer tedium, but there is method in the drabness. Rather than taking you out of yourself, as most movies do, “The Zone of Interest” provokes a disquieting self-awareness. As the minutes ticked by and little of note occurred, I found myself asking the unwholesome question: When are we going to see behind the wall?

This perverse desire, if it can be called that, is exactly the point. Now the viewer is complicit in a way. Harvey continues:

Audaciously, the German-language film invites us to regard its central couple not as calculating monsters, the way we’re used to seeing Nazis depicted onscreen, but as ordinary people acting on recognizable motives. For the most part, the Hösses want the things we want: comfort, security, the occasional treat.

This is where the novel and film converge. They must be grounded in feelings we can all recognize. The best villains of fiction operate on a level we can at least understand. What’s so brutally effective about these works is that we can understand these small wants and desires in the backdrop of an event so catastrophic and evil that it beguiles comprehension to even those who study it closely.

When Höss tells Hedwig he’s being transferred she is not happy. She’s embraced the Nazi version of a back-to-the-land movement, a response to overwhelming technological advancement that’s literally next door. Advancements made for the sheer purpose of killing people faster3. And here, again, we see the parallels. Have we all not sometimes wished for a simpler existence, away from our little handheld doom boxes? Not only that, but Hedwig is basically doing the tradwife thing before there was Instagram to swan around to, a social media movement that’s been associated with conservatives and the far-right.

One of the biggest differences between the novel and film is the characterization of Hedwig/Hannah. In fact, I would go so far as to say Glazer completely dispenses with Hannah Doll altogether. She simply does not exist in the movie. Hannah is outwardly disgusted by Doll. She finds him ugly and psychotic and she finds herself gravitating towards Thomsen. Doll, for his part grows more pathetic and perverse, spying on his wife through a two-way mirror in their bathroom.

Hedwig, on the other hand, is a great Nazi. She’s embraced lebensraum because she gets to have this big house and a stolen fur coat and Jewish house slaves.

At one point, Hedwig invites her mother to visit. She parades her about the garden, pointing to all the nice work she’s put in. Her mother immediately locks onto the wall, pointing it out. Hedwig waves it away, saying she wanted to grow vines over it. Her mother responds by pondering whether her old boss is beyond the wall, a prisoner. Her casualness is, frankly, chilling. And Hedwig still doesn’t want to talk about the wall or what’s on the other side of it. Here’s the scene:

Hedwig’s forced ignorance is brutal. And how does the sequence end? With the encroachment of sound. As they sit down, we see Hedwig’s mother briefly, instinctively, put her hands to her ears at the sounds of a far off gunshot and the barking of dogs before we cut to gaze at the flowers in bloom as the sounds of suffering intensify, fading to red alongside a man’s screams.

Amis’s novel explores the casualness of this world, especially in the first half. The theme drags somewhat in the middle and then shifts towards the end. As the novel is more concerned with the greater World War, there is a noted turn to the melancholic for many of the characters as it’s become clear that the Battle of Stalingrad was no picnic4. This might actually go poorly for them.

Glazer’s film puts this box over the Hösses, or in fact a wall. When I watch the movie I see a metaphor, a parallel to life. The horrors and pain of the world are now so available to us, plain to see, plain to seek out if you so choose. And you can erect your walls to it but it seeps in. It’s sort of how I think of people who elect odious leaders who do terrible things. Because “lower taxes” or whatever is on this side of the wall. All the other terrible shit is on the other side. And the wall is high and sturdy. It can hold that other stuff back for a while.

Rudolph Höss is, unfortunately, meant to be us to an extent. And he’s slowly being poisoned by his own misdeeds, as we see in the final scenes. When he’s alone, at last, he retches and spits in this empty hallway. Is he alone though? Or are we there with him? After all, he looks directly at the camera, at the viewer.

When I left Tar after seeing it in the cinemas, I concluded (and still believe) that it was the first film of the 2020s that would be a consensus top 10 film by the end of the decade. I think The Zone of Interest may be the second. Again, your mileage may vary and if it does, you can at least feel in watching the movie that it is capital-I Important.

The way it invokes complicity is wholly unique. Because of the near tedium of the narrative, you’re forced to not just contend with the technical skill but also what the film implants in you. It’s not surprising that the film immediately had people drawing parallels to the genocide in Gaza as a current talking point. Glazer even mentioned it in his Oscar speech.

I’m not knowledgeable enough about the issue to comment my own take on it. It’s not for me to say. But I understand it.

But the complicity feels real, even if you can’t point to a specific event. I was struck by a theme in Amis’s novel that’s deliberately excised in the film. All of the characters are somewhat “perverted”. In the film, ignorance and conditioning is paramount. In the novel, everyone wants to be involved in everyone else’s business all the time, like poor pathetic Doll, spying on his wife.

I think it also reflects on us. We have the horrors of modernity forced down our throats through technology and though many of us want to retreat to a cabin and hide, it eventually infects us. And we want to peek over the wall. For just a second.

So here’s an older post. In the wake of the Oscars, I’m sure many people are visiting or revisiting Sentimental Value, one of 2025’s best films. And if you aren’t you should!

I will have a new post next week and it will more ambitious, highly controversial, and absolutely full of clickbait worthy takes that can finally launch my online persona into the stratosphere.

Thanks, bye.

Among all the stylistic grandeur of The Worst Person in the World, there’s this key sequence I always think about.

Long since they broke up, Julie and Aksel reunite after she learns he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The whole film sort of stops for a sequence that shows Aksel’s decline. Nothing else exists in this stretch, it’s just the two of them. And I think of this scene all the time.

After talking about rewatching Lynch and The Godfather Part II and Dog Day Afternoon, Aksel monologues a bit (apologies for the length):

Sometimes I listen to music I haven’t heard before. But it’s old as well. Music I didn’t know about but from when I grew up. It felt as though I’d already given up.

I grew up in an age without internet and mobile phones […] I sound like an old fart but I think about it a lot. The world that I knew has disappeared.

For me, it was all about going to stores. Record stores. I’d take the tram to Voices record store in Grünerløkka. Leaf through used comics at Pretty Price. I can close my eyes and see aisles at Video Nova in Majorstua.

I grew up in a time when culture was passed along through objects. They were interesting because we could live among them. We could pick them up. Hold them in our hands. Compare them […] That’s all I have. I spent my life doing that. Collecting all that stuff, comics, books. And I just continued even when it stopped giving me the powerful emotions I felt in my early twenties. I continued anyway.

And now it’s all I have left. Knowledge and memories of stupid, futile things nobody cares about.

[…]

In recent years, I reached a point in life when suddenly it just happened. When I began to worship what had been. And now I have nothing else. I have no future. I can only look back. It’s not even nostalgia. It’s fear of death. It has nothing to do with art.

Joachim Trier, as he demonstrates in Worst Person and at points in Sentimental Value, has an uncanny talent at digging down into this deep, millennial-coded angst. When Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) attends his grandson’s birthday, having been largely absent, he gifts the child a stack of DVDs, which include The Piano Teacher and my all-time don’t-ever-watch-this-for-the-sake-of-your-mental-health movie, Irreversible1.

When Gustav’s daughter Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) rescues her son from the fate of maybe watching these movies by saying they don’t have a DVD player, the other daughter, Nora (Renate Reinsve), scoffs:

Thank god.

To me, there’s something so of a generation in both of those scenes. It’s so specific. Cultural capital, who had it, who didn’t, who’d seen this movie or listened to this album or saw this band when they played in bars not arenas, was such an annoyingly 2010s twenty-something relic. The transition period between the largely physical culture of Gen X to the more ephemeral, experiential hipsterdom of Millennials.

But both Aksel and Gustav can only really communicate with these relics. Culture one can touch, as Aksel says.

It’s the crux of Sentimental Value, the inability to communicate in any meaningful way. Or in the way that’s actually needed.

We learn that Gustav’s motives in gifting DVDs to his grandson are a little more muddled than we once thought. He wants the child to perform in a new film he’s written. Alongside Nora, his actress daughter, with whom he has a fraught relationship. And Agnes is stuck in the midst of it, having acted as a child previously in one of Gustav’s films from the early aughts.

In fact, the conversation when Gustav tells Agnes he wants to cast her son in the film (and later her blunt rejection of it) is probably the only time anyone communicates effectively to another person.

The whole film is built around never saying anything plainly. As a young girl, Nora eavesdrops on people through an upstairs fireplace. That’s how she learns her father has returned for his ex-wife’s funeral. Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) cannot get a foothold on the character she’s been cast to play because Gustav can’t explain it. But Rachel knows it’s not meant for her. And Agnes needs to keep prodding Nora to text her, answer her calls, keep in touch, for reasons that become clear later.

Yet when Agnes picks up Gustav’s screenplay, she reads it in one sitting, realizing that the role he offered Nora has been imbued with some eerie sixth sense about exactly what’s gone on in her life.

Gustav can only communicate through his work.

Everyone in Sentimental Value is unfulfilled.

Longing. Longing is a given characteristic in Trier’s movies. Lack of fulfillment and the lengths one goes to become fulfilled and the ultimate frustration of it not working out totally as planned basically defines Worst Person and Sentimental Value2. Even Oslo, August 31st.

And it pours out of them. The film starts with Nora’s intense stage fright, despite the fact that she’s possibly an absurdly talented actress, underachieving in Oslo’s theatre scene. There’s this scene where Nora rehearses onstage. She enters and begins to cry and crumple to bits at the foot of an empty bed. We cut back to reveal everyone watching her. And there’s this woman in the corner of the screen giving these sideways glances to everyone else as if to say you seeing this shit?

Is Nora too talented? Or are the tears just a bit too real?

And the film actually sort of runs out of steam with Nora, as Gustav and Rachel begin to occupy the story, fitting seeing as Rachel has become a surrogate for Nora. She takes her place in the movie and Gustav, try as he might, can’t explain what the role really entails.

Rachel thinks, and is led to believe, it’s about Gustav’s mother, her suicide in the house. Gustav continually insists it isn’t but otherwise doing nothing to dissuade Rachel of her hunch, even claiming the Ikea stool he’s using as a prop is the same one she kicked out from under herself. It’s a darkly funny joke that feels like Trier could not resist.

Rachel ultimately can’t grasp the character. She thought it would be her ticket into more serious fare. There are hints her most recent big budget film has somewhat flopped. Rachel is a perfect contrast for Nora, perhaps an overachiever in the same field. Famous but longs to be taken seriously.

It’s a small stroke of genius casting Fanning, who is excellent in this role. She’s a natural talent who has worked since she was a child, was long overshadowed by her equally talented sister, ran the gamut between commercialism and art (her other big movie this year was Predator: Badlands where she plays a…backpack?), and has ultimately proven to be a deep and considered performer.

Trier seems to always wrench these absurdly good performances out of everyone he casts and Fanning is no exception. In his New Yorker profile, they comment on his obsession with the psychology of people:

It helps, as Helle [Trier’s wife] told me, that Trier is “endlessly fascinated” by other people’s psychology—“penetrating the top layer of big emotions and trying to understand why people are like they are. That is a constant conversation, at home and with our friends.”

To me, this is what I get a ticket for. Trier makes this angsty, soft-psychological drama. The emotions are rarely big but they’re deep and vast.

And the films are rife with this kind of yearning.

I’ll be honest, Aksel’s death sequence in Worst Person fucked me up for weeks after I saw it3. The raw pain, the plainness of the explanation, the way he divulges these memories not of family or of friends but of things. All in relation to art he’s experienced. How that becomes memory itself.

And, ultimately, the pain of seeing that world go away and get replaced by a new one where you and your ideas are not actually that useful or interesting, as if they ever were.

To me, something characteristic of the millennial age was the use of insincerity as a value. But the bristles, as characterized by Trier’s work, have softened into something often melancholic but also acceptable.

Sentimental Value is more workmanlike in the way it plays on you. It’s spare in comparison to Worst Person, but not diluted. More reduced (in the cooking sense). It knows its job is to give you the powerful emotions and it does.

Razorblade Tears (2022), SA Cosby

Last year I read Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed. I loved it. Now, I tend to judge the popularity of books by two strictly scientific metrics: my innate sense of vibes and how long a book takes to get from my local library. Pretty sure I’d been waiting close to a year for Razorblade Tears.

Was it worth it? Well…yes, the book is good. Year-long-wait good? Meh. To criticize by way of comparison, I kept thinking that while All the Sinners Bleed is overall a better written, more gripping, and stylistically more complete book, Razorblade Tears has a far more interesting premise. Better hook, slightly worse execution.

Razorblade Tears tells the story of Ike and Buddy Lee, two men thrown together after their sons are both murdered. Their sons, a mixed race gay couple. Themselves a mixed race duo seeking revenge.

It sells itself honestly. And I think I rode the high of the premise for a while through the book before its flaws came to bear.

Cosby does something I actually enjoy: **SPOILERS SORT OF** both ultimate perpetrators in All the Sinners Bleed and Razorblade Tears are characters that are a few places removed from the main action. Their motives are convoluted and less clean. In a lot of crime novels, the “twist” often ends up being wow it’s been this eerie person who has been hanging around the whole time1! Cosby doesn’t really do that. And I like that. It’s sort of like, you know, real crime in a way.

On the other hand, we don’t get a lot of time to spend with the bad guy in order to more fully understand them, which is why crime writers often place that person nearby so you can be so blown away that they were right under your nose the whole time. At the same time, I think one of the biggest weaknesses of Razorblade Tears is our lack of time spent with the victims, the sons. Obviously, their murder is an unjust tragedy but at one point Ike and Buddy Lee are pretty blasé about putting a guy through a wood chipper and I started to feel like that was an…intense overreaction. I needed more of the sons, more to justify how dark the story gets.

But really, I think these small flaws are forgivable. As far as the writing goes, the book is an exemplar in constant conflict. Each character has competing wants and needs, new ones are crisply introduced with fully realized conflicts with whomever they’re sharing a scene. It’s a great way to fuel the engine of a story, by constantly pouring in new opposition, new obstacles to create tension.

The core conflict of the book, in my mind, is about whether people can truly change. Cosby doesn’t shy away from relevant, grounded, and frustrating character flaws. Ike struggles with his son’s sexuality. His son, as far as we know, struggled with the twin pressures of being black and gay. And in the South. The story, on an emotional level, sets both Ike and Buddy Lee on the precipice of this new understanding with their sons: they’re both ever closer to accepting them, their identities, their lives. And then that gets torn away. The new Ike, the new Buddy Lee have to access their inner past selves to get revenge (like Ike’s past criminal identity, Riot Randolph).

And the whole time the book confronts the reader with whether this is really the right move, morally permissible. I don’t think the book ever oversells its thirst for blood. Each killing, each move, I found myself questioning the lengths these two men would go.

It’s a confrontational novel and, ultimately, I think that’s what makes it good.

Stag Dance (2025), Torrey Peters

About halfway through Stag Dance, I wrote down a note that basically said that each story is about identity but that’s kind of a facile reading and a simple way of assigning theme because Torrey Peters is trans. I wanted to dig deeper, to unearth more than that interpretation.

Then I read the acknowledgements and found that I was sort of right. As Peters writes:

I wrote the pieces in this book over a course of ten years. They were the stories I wrote to puzzle out, through genre, the inconvenient aspects of my never-ending transition — otherwise known as ongoing trans life […]

Well…I can’t put it more succinctly than that.

What I can put succinctly is that Stag Dance is a fantastic read and Torrey Peters is an immensely skilled writer.

Stag Dance is a short story collection with one novella (the titular Stag Dance) in the middle. Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones tells the story of patient zero in a pandemic that prevents humans from producing sex hormones. The Chaser is set in a Colorado boarding school, where a young man has a fling with his roommate. Stag Dance is about a group of lumberjacks working an illegal plot. The Masker is about a woman attending a convention in Las Vegas that’s marauded by a guest who wears a full body silicone woman suit.

Let’s get it out of the way first: I liked Stag Dance the least. It was good, for sure, but the other three stories were just such good examples of the form that I would have taken 2-3 more over the novella. It’s hard to believe Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones was originally self-published because it’s sort of a perfect short story in form and narrative. The story supposes a very silly thing: basically a pandemic of transness. But Peters tells it so well, you buy in.

The Chaser felt very classical to me, less subversive than the other works (though, be forewarned, there is a scene of violence involving an animal that I found hard to read). Still, quite good, brutally heartbreaking.

The Masker had a very Lynchian quality to it. It also set up some very confrontational ideas that, honestly, I’m not at all qualified to talk about. Good thing Peters was interviewed about it:

In the story The Masker, there’s a sissy who’s into online sissy culture and she goes to Vegas, where two people want to take her under their wings. One is a trans woman, who’s probably very into respectability politics and the “correct” way to be a woman. And the other person is totally on the fetishist level; he wears a full-body silicone woman suit. And that person, I think, makes a very compelling case for doing it his way, which is basically, like, he’s a doctor and he gets to go dress up and have great, wild, fetishistic sex, then go back to being a doctor and being respected. His way of doing things is kind of appealing — keep everything and have great sex. Who wouldn’t want it? And meanwhile, this idea that you have to transition and you have to tell everybody that you’re doing this thing — it didn’t look that appealing in the story. And I think there is this open question of what the sissy will choose: The fetishist could be the future, could be the past. The life of a trans woman could be the future, could be the past. And that moment of indeterminacy in time is something that really interested me.

It’s hard to decide if The Masker or Infect Your Friends is the strongest story in the collection. Ending the collection with The Masker felt provocative certainly.

Now…Stag Dance. For some reason, this one didn’t totally work for me. Peters’ ability to wend through new vocabularies and the ambition of the story were certainly impressive. But it didn’t fully land for me. It was more just an admirable story that wasn’t my lane and unfortunately ground my reading pace down. But whatever.

I think the strength of the other works is so obvious that I would rank this book among the best I’ve read so far this year.

What is subjective badness? Is there such a thing as objective badness? The latter is definitely something I think about a lot.

But also I’m just tired of writing about books for a minute.

A note: I left out a lot of bad stuff here and mainly explored major hits of the era. Legitimately poorly made or novelty songs aren’t really that fun to trash. The list is more like…the worst hits of the 2010s.

10 - Same Love, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

Let’s start somewhat controversially. This is actually the only song on this list that I would categorize as sort of “good”. And I have absolutely no doubt about Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s bona fides when it comes to their support of the LGBTQ+ community. And musically, it’s a pleasant ride, the chorus in particular.

But the song itself I find immensely frustrating for a few reasons. Hip-hop, generally, thrives in subversion, when there’s something sort of dangerous about it. Same Love to me sounds like an artist positing that their position is subversive, dangerous, and/or revolutionary when actually it isn’t. These dudes are from fucking Seattle.

There’s something deeply cynical and impersonal to it. While Thrift Shop is inane and stupid and ironic, Same Love feels like a song written to teach eight-year-olds about the LGBTQ+ community. And his brief gestures towards homophobia in hip-hop are admirable but you’d be better off just listening to DMX’s Where the Hood At? to illustrate those problems.

And, frankly, I agree: homophobia, transphobia, etc sucks. But that inarticulate sentiment is exactly how this song sounds.

9 - That’s My Bitch, Jay-Z, Kanye West

There’s no real bottom to my disdain for this song. My general take on Watch the Throne is that it’s an album with some of the most inventive and interesting production paired with some of the shittiest songs of both Jay and West’s careers, That’s My Bitch possibly being the nadir.

In retrospect, the album is a fascinating study of two artists whose pop-cultural capital was headed in opposite directions, we just didn’t know it yet. It was obvious that West had either peaked or was in the midst of a continued rise to the top (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy came out a year before Watch the Throne). Jay-Z, on the other hand, felt, to me, like when the Oakland A’s sign David Justice in Moneyball.

When Magna Carta…Holy Grail1 came out in 2013 I think it was pretty clear Jay-Z was washed (4:44’s2 acclaim was a psy op, fight me about it, that album sucks) and the success and/or quality of The Blueprint 3 a few years previous wasn’t necessarily a fluke but had a ton of firepower propping it up. Jay-Z’s ability to latch onto more interesting or more relevant stars (West, Justin Timberlake, his wife lol) is a skill in itself but it can still result in That’s My Bitch so it’s not a surefire route to continued success.

8 - Lighters, Bad Meets Evil feat. Bruno Mars

When I say hip-hop thrives in subversion, I am almost always thinking of Eminem. No artist has illustrated the transition from subversive to culturally tolerable more than him. That should be apparent from the mere inclusion of Bruno Mars on this song at all, the most corporately acceptable pop artist of the 2010s.

I’ve been thinking about Eminem a bit because I was on a kick listening to Superman a lot. Superman, if you don’t know, is probably one of the most misogynistic songs ever recorded? And yet Eminem, at the time, was operating on such a lyrically and vocally high level that the song remains one of the best on The Eminem Show.

The subversion of Eminem was that his raw talent was constantly in concert or conflict with his intense feeling of everything, fueling it so much that he still decided to record and release songs like Superman, Kim, or ‘97 Bonnie & Clyde3.

Lighters just sounds so paint-by-numbers. Lyrically empty and produced to sound like Eminem is rapping from inside a cardboard box. Although it was apparent long before this song, it’s disappointing to hear Eminem fill album after album with literally nothing to say anymore except “I’m a really good rapper”.

7 - Look What You Made Me Do, Taylor Swift

This is a particularly brutal song. I like Swift generally but as I don’t identify as a Swiftie I can safely say that, apart from Delicate, reputation pretty much sucks. Someone could probably write me a dissertation on why it’s good or important to her career or whatever but I still find this song, as a lead single, intolerable.

And reputation as a whole has gone through its own critical reevaluation (when there’s a whole section on Wikipedia for it, you know it’s serious) but I still can’t quite get there. Luckily, I think Taylor’s career can recover from this slight.

6 - FourFiveSeconds, Rihanna, Kanye West, Paul McCartney

Whoever of the three performers came up with the idea for this song should be dragged in front of Congress4. I don’t give a fuck about The Beatles so that’s probably why I’ve never quite been able to tell what McCartney contributed to this song besides his name and I assume the half-ass guitar strumming in the background or perhaps the strange grunts and groans that permeate the verses (but I actually think that’s RiRi).

Rihanna was and remains a fantastic singer and Kanye West is…Kanye West. Had he not released The Life of Pablo the following year, I think FourFiveSeconds would portend the closing of the “talented and relevant” portion of his career. Turns out Pablo, though I think it’s a great album, was the dead cat bounce for Ye.

5 - Young, Wild & Free, Snoop Dogg & Wiz Khalifa feat. Bruno Mars

Not to sound all Gen-X but Snoop Dogg has always managed to surprise us with the how deeply he can sell out. I don’t begrudge aging stars trying to record catchy songs that stoned 17 year olds can sing at a house party. But when it’s done so lazily…I mean, yeah I guess I do begrudge it from the dude who made Doggystyle.

It’s telling, though not necessarily indicative of quality, that songwriter Philip Lawrence called this song an “afterthought”. The creative process is a nebulous thing. But there’s still sometimes a world of difference between “this song is going to be a hit, baby!” and “this song is good”.

4 - Stupid Hoe, Nicki Minaj

I can’t think of an artist who coasted so successfully off of one verse for such a long time even though it was clear she was fairly untalented. And yes, it’s easy to clown on her now because she’s been doing super cool things and making big purchases but let’s be honest: no one was firing up Pink Friday on vinyl to kick back to (let alone Roman Reloaded, lest we forget).

Stupid Hoe, besides being sonically one of the most unlistenable songs ever recorded, is essentially a novelty record making fun of highly relevant recording artist Lil Kim. So yeah, it’s hard to put on my critic hat and say this sucks but it actually does and was sort of dropped as a quasi-single and therefore was meant to be indicative of what listeners could expect from an album.

3 - Party Rock Anthem, LMFAO

From the seminal album Sorry For Party Rocking. It was a hard choice between two afflictions courtesy of LMFAO: this song or Sexy and I Know It. I hate to have had to listen to both songs a few times to decide, but Sexy and I Know It at least had some utility as “shitty song to introduce annoying characters in comedy films” whereas Party Rock Anthem is straight up annoying.

There’s a certain genre of music that encapsulates literally all of LMFAO but also plenty of other forgettable pop or rock or rap tracks that is…music for people who don’t like music but need to have music on in some contexts.

I was never totally clear on whether LMFAO sucked on purpose and it was all a big joke (ahaha you got me!) or if they were making…something from the heart? The joke, I suppose, would have been “let’s make at least one song we can license forever and live off the proceeds”. Which is certainly cynical but like get your bag king.

The latter is actually much more horrifying: that this is an inspired, heartfelt expression of Redfoo and Sky Blu’s (that’s their names, really) souls. I don’t really believe that but I think the NME did a better job than me of articulating their entire ethos:

It’s that it’s all ever-so-slightly tongue-in-cheek, with an Epic Movie ability to make their parody far more revolting than the genre it’s parodying. LMFAO understood the pain they would be inflicting on the world and did it anyway.

2 - I Gotta Feeling, Black Eyed Peas

This song is a bit of a cheat (it was released in 2009) but I’m including it because a) it had a grip on the early 2010s for a long time b) in my life specifically, it seemed to be everywhere and c) it is, legitimately, one of the worst songs ever written.

I can’t prove it but I genuinely think the vapidity of this song drove Fergie out of the quickly floundering Black Eyed Peas (she did one more album that turned out to be her last with the group). The BEPs, while not a barnstorming act of significance, were capable of so much more than this. It’s frustrating, not just in music, to be exposed to art that feels like the creator seems motivated to make something specifically for idiots (see all of LMFAO for example).

Then again, will.i.am gave this heartfelt explanation in an interview:

It’s dedicated to all the party people out there in the world that want to go out and party. […] It was a conscious decision to make this type of record5. Times are really hard for a lot of people and you want to give them escape and you want to make them feel good about life, especially at these low points.

Reading this, I feel like it’s something I can turn to when times are tough. Mazel tov!

1 - We Are Young, fun. feat. Janelle Monae

I cannot stress enough how fucking bad this song is. And it always was. You know how I know? It won a Grammy.

Among its many intolerable qualities, such as the worst chorus besides I Gotta Feeling, is also that it starts off as one song and then fun. (fun with a dot) decides to transition to a completely different song partway through, presumably because Janelle Monae called them back. Janelle Monae! Where is she on the song? Oh right, background vocals, exactly where you want her.

fun. was always an enigma to me. Nate Ruess formed the band with Andrew Dost and the world’s foremost mega producer (now, not then) Jack Antonoff. What stumps me is that Ruess was in The Format, who were making music not crazily dissimilar to fun. so why the need for a whole new thing? I get that The Format broke up6 but like…just get Jack and Andrew to join and continue making slightly ineffective indie rock?

This is all very Old Man Yells at Cloud but I truly despise this song to a deep degree. It’s not thoughtful, it’s not even danceable, it’s just cozy enough for radio stations to sort of claim they play indie rock but ultimately it’s an inane piece of shit.

Honorable mentions:

All About That Bass, Meghan Trainor

Trainor seems so widely disliked and disdained that there’s almost no point in examining her work further.

Happy, Pharrell Williams

From Lapdance to Despicable Me 2. What a ride!

Hotline Bling, Drake

It was hard to decide which Drake song to include. In the late 2010s he was so chart dominant that I wasn’t even sure which songs I knew and which I didn’t. That’s because nearly all of his songs in this late era (post Views) sound exactly the same. And he makes 20-25 song albums of them!

Tik Tok, Kesha

Kesha is a sympathetic artist these days because of her widely publicized lawsuit against Dr. Luke. Now I’m not totally sure which medical practices Kesha was unhappy with but you can read more about it if you wish. Regardless, Tik Tok, which launched her career, is a rough listen. I wouldn’t say I hate it but it is undoubtedly obnoxious. It sounds a bit like proto-mainstream-dance-pop, like we were still learning to blend electronica and early aughts pop. Oh, and Auto-Tune7.

What do I mean? A friend, reader, and raconteur asked me to read this book and tell them what to think about it, a plea I have made a few times to other readers when I’ve encountered a particularly confounding piece of literature.

What does that mean for you? Well, if you want your own piece of bespoke criticism, let me know and I’ll read the book and tell you what to think. Unless the book sucks, in which case I will either a) not read it or b) tell you it sucks, in confidence, gratis.

So…Atavists.

There are a lot of books that fall into a category I sort of outlined above: I know they’re about something and the author is saying something but I just don’t know what that thing is or it’s gone over my head.

A few years ago, I read Millet’s A Children’s Bible and felt wholly indifferent to it. Millet is an excellent writer and the book seemed to be exactly my kind of thing: an allegory about the climate crisis, about how people sort of suck, acid prose, short and to the point. All things I like!

At first glance the collection seems very…plain. There are no stories that break the mold, nothing fantastical, they are about a group of characters with sometimes strong, sometimes tenuous connections who flit in and out of each other’s lives. Slice-of-life would be the diplomatic way of saying it.

That’s the surface. Millet’s characters feel grounded and real, lacking any caricature or bigness that typifies those that inhabit short stories. And each time we switch perspectives and dig into another’s psyche, they’re revealed to be so much more than what another character made them out to be.

Nick and Liza stand out to me. Shockingly, the most white-bread brother and sister duo sort of provide the spine of the book, Nick especially. Is it because I, too, am white bread that draws me to him? Or because he is also a bad writer? Who can say? But Nick develops in this interesting line and I would consider him to probably appear or be mentioned in more stories than any other character.

Not only does he have his own story, seemingly everyone has an opinion on the fact that he currently or formerly LARPed with his girlfriend Chaya. His “journey” is somewhat silly, from LARPing Stanford dropout to steady guy in therapy with a nice girlfriend. Is that so bad?

But his progression sort of typifies the concerns of the book because, and here’s my bigass thesis, Atavists, to me, is about feeling small in a big world. It’s about people who drift through their lives and while their lives aren’t meaningless, they are often adjacent to tragedy or “reality”1. Trapped in a suburb of Los Angeles. Middle-class life as a slow moving cataclysm that you can watch on your phone.

This feeling gets implanted right away in the first story, Tourist. With a lot of the stories, there is no telling whether Millet is going to go for plot or vibe. Some of the stories don’t follow a traditional this-happens-because-of-this structure leading up to a big moment. It’s one of my main, but minor, criticisms, but I’ll get to that later.

The story, and book, start with a perfect, all-encapsulating line:

She was courting her own disgust, these days. The way she’d picked at her knee scabs as a kid — knowing it would end in blood but doing it anyway. Revulsion was a stimulant.

Trudy, the main character of Tourist, captures that feeling of watching life, or “life”, happen on your phone. That sinking feeling that what’s happening on this dumbass device (including reading my newsletter) is somehow rotting your brain and making your eyes bleed.

Because it’s often so dumb. Yet, it’s rife with drama and pathos. One could lose their lives getting lost in other people’s lives. All to keep up. And Trudy feels that. Don’t we all, just a bit?

She’d vowed, in her youth, never to let herself get old.

In years, of course, she’d age. In skin and bones, movement and muscles. But what she’d believed and insisted, long ago, was that she wouldn’t allow herself to calcify. Wouldn’t become, as her own parents had, irrelevance in human form. Enacting automatic functions they’d performed for decades, bound by routine. And never diverge from it.

[…]

But then, here she was. Living in a minor corner of the real. In a forgotten country.

Living in a minor corner of the real. Oof.

It’s what I found so captivating about the book. It’s about capturing that background malaise and examining what it’s like to live in it.

Because, frankly and I believe deliberately, all of these characters sort of have quite nice lives. Even the misguided pick-up artist in Pastoralist…I mean, he feels absolutely no remorse for…anything? And the ultimate sad irony is that he marries into a rich family. Yes, they’re criminals with connections to Russians falling out of windows, but Letty in Insurrectionist2 still feels like the universe has conspired to have everything work out for the worst person she knows. Which, if we’re honest, is a fate worse than death.

Which is again why I return to Nick. He’s first found as a side character in Dramatist, where his sister, out of some inexplicable sisterly urge towards chaos3, tries to get her hands on his screenplay that he claims to have written. And she does it with the sole intention of exposing him as an embarrassingly shitty writer4.

And yet when she does find his work, she is actually so embarrassed on his behalf that she starts to feel bad she even took part in the endeavor at all. It’s actually pretty heartbreaking.

We find later that Nick has moved on. He’s still a Stanford…not quite dropout, but someone who never lived up to his potential. He tends bar at a gay establishment (“More of a gastropub” as Mia says), where he’s a witness to all sorts of other small dramas, ones that take place outside of the bubble of his LA neighbourhood.

He becomes the thematic focal point of both Optimist and Therapist. Optimist, which closes the book, is one of the more poignant stories in retrospect. Not only is it a kind, subtle nod towards empty nesters, it closes the book with a passage I found incredibly moving.

Buzz, Nick’s father, deals with his empty nest syndrome and physical ailments by doing what middle-aged men do best: talking it through with loved ones and/or a therapist and grappling with their feelings in healthy ways. Just kidding! He takes up endless, all consuming hobbies, the main one being building a tiny house for Afghan refugees who never seem to quite arrive. Yet there is a heartbreaking point where he finds himself standing in Nick’s empty bedroom. Buzz had been gently prodding him to move out for years and when he finally does, it’s not quite what it seems. Empty nesters are so often shown to be the mothers. It feels like a stereotype, possibly mildly sexist. It was touching to see the brief glimpse in a father. But, of course, it’s quickly subsumed by whatever obsession the man is given space to pursue.

In Therapist, Nick is the patient to the titular character. By this point he embodies malaise. It’s the background radiation of his young life. His concerns are indeed, quite mid-twenties coded but no less true:

A dream gets implanted in you, he’d told her in an early session. A dream of the heroic individual, tall and powerful as a god. The monomyth! A dream of infinite selfishness. But instead of liberating you, it binds you to the wheel.

The great wheel moves the plow. And the plow tills the field.

“And far away,“ he said, “always ahead of you but never reached, there’s a shimmering mirage. That they call happiness.”

This is hilariously undercut later when the therapist herself speaks with her mentor about how to approach Nick’s therapy, basically saying he has no past trauma, no real problems so what’s he so bummed out about? How do you help someone with such existential angst?

This is why I consider Nick the spine of the book. He gives voice and dimension to the background noise, though it’s Helen who explicitly voices the themes in the final pages (which I mentioned above):

“I feel that way in general,“ Helen said. “Like we’re all waiting for something that never comes. A sign, maybe. Written across the sky by a thousand jet planes. In synchronicity. And once we see it, well, then we may do something. Meanwhile the smaller signs are all around. So many of them that together they are a giant sign. And we go on as if we don’t see it.”

Life, in a lot of sad ways, is just a slow-motion catastrophe leading us to ruin. Sucks, don’t it?

Ultimately, for some, Atavists may be a better book to think about than read. Millet writes weighty themes in effortless passages and each story leaves a mark or an itch.

My main criticism, in a mechanical sense, is that the stories all feel 75% complete. They never really close off neatly. In other words:

As I mentioned above, most of what’s here is great, and so fans of great writing should definitely read this book. However, it’s not without its flaws. Perhaps the biggest is the lack of a point. The writing is always sharp, but not always with a reason or direction. There is a critique I often hear from students about literary fiction — that “nothing happens” — and there are a few instances of that here.

Read this book! It’s pointless! I disagree actually. But it would be stupid for me to say “the non-point is actually the point”. That’s just a thoughtless rebuttal. The book is wonderfully written. But what you take from it is the point. Will it itch you? Will it linger in your head?

The stories feel very 2025 for better or worse. The world, even since the book’s publication, has moved so fast and far or at least feels that way. If it’s left in the past, then it’s a stunning portrait of the time. And maybe in ten years we’ll feel like it’s still prescient or just prescient for the moment. And that’s okay too.

It’s such a great scene that you and millions of others can watch it here:

They literally have to fit a square peg into a round hole. I love this scene. Hell, I love this movie.

I also believe that this scene is what goes through Andy Weir’s head whenever he strays from the mission of his writing. Weir seems determined to write variations of this scene that interlock into a long chain of “plot” that eventually creates a novel.

In preparation for the upcoming film, I wanted to read Project Hail Mary because I really enjoy watching the process of adaptation. What did they keep? Why? What’s different? How did they imagine this scene? Why can’t I just sit and enjoy blockbuster cinema without intellectualizing it like a loser? These are all burning questions to me.

I read The Martian years ago and remember it fondly. The Ridley Scott adaptation is, frankly, an underappreciated work of art. I’ll say this: Project Hail Mary is a “bad” book. And yet, I still really enjoyed it too.

Upon opening the first pages, I had that immediate sinking feeling that I was not only going to hate hanging out with Ryland (fucking Ryland?) Grace, but that through professional obligation I would have to suffer his company through a doorstopper of a novel.

And it’s for a simple reason: Basically any time someone in Project Hail Mary isn’t saying “this science thing is happening for this science reason so I should do this science solution and here’s why” they are saying something quippy, trite, and/or unfunny. The relationships, the interpersonal interactions, are nearly bereft of character, nuance, or intrigue. They are building blocks to a story that, shockingly, managed to have an emotional payoff that it didn’t really earn.

To psychoanalyze Weir a bit **OH SHIT SPOILERS FOR THE BOOK AND FILM INCOMING** Grace, who is undoubtedly a bit of a surrogate, really doesn’t relate to humans well. He has no backstory, no relationships (despite eventually being played by one of the hottest men alive in the adaptation, you’re telling me ain’t no one in the science community wants a grope of the Gos?), he is literally defined by a few things: teacher, smart, one-time academic upstart1.

Yet he’s completely engaged when he meets Rocky, an alien. When approaching their interaction as a problem to be solved, Grace is completely hooked. Fair, it’s also his only means of saving his own life but whatever. It’s either a brilliant stroke of character building or a very cheap way of building out the plot points that lead us through the book. I can’t decide!

Because Grace has, seemingly, no family or friends or loved ones on Earth (though he has a teacherly do-it-for-the-kids attitude), the stakes feel tenuous. Granted, the emotional payoff involves Rocky more than the group of Science Plot Device characters in the flashbacks. And honestly, the idea of Weir writing a close human-to-human relationship makes me queasy to think about. Instead, he omits what would be undoubtedly weak to play to his own strengths.

On the flashbacks, my lord do they start to strain credulity. Grace awakens from a science-induced coma aboard the Hail Mary with no real memory of how he got there. That’s an intriguing way to pitch a story, I suppose (you can just picture his publisher JOing over Bourne Identity for science or something2), but in practice it becomes unwieldy. The flashbacks are too convenient and ultimately, it doesn’t really matter that he can’t remember what happened. The “hidden” plot element that’s revealed is, frankly, neither interesting nor surprising. The novel would work just as well if Weir relied on straight flashbacks without the amnesia.

And eventually, even the science/competence porn outstays its welcome, especially after Grace and Rocky part ways. It’s forgivable, because the final Science Problem leads to the emotional conclusion of the book. I can forgive it, but it does feel a bit like one turn of the screw too many.

But…I liked this book. It made me think of the place that “bad” works of entertainment have in my life.

Willa Paskin, who hosts a podcast and writes things (neither of which I listen to or read), said something really interesting in this episode of Panic World3:

They’re talking about the entertainment value of specific types of internet ephemera and the evolution of it to today. I suppose the end goal of which is what we would now call “slop”. Paskin says, basically, that these pieces of entertainment garner audiences because the people in charge make the grave mistake of thinking people want to watch (or read or listen to, etc) good things.

As much as I’d like to believe I have elevated taste, because I’m a millennial and that was practically currency for a time, one need only to look at my year-end book lists to see that I partake in, perhaps even waste my precious time reading, books I categorically do not like.

But honestly, that doesn’t really trouble me. A book can be bad and entertaining and worth reading. A book can be technically proficient and boring and lame. In fact, the worst thing a book can be, in my opinion, is forgettable. If I see a dumpster fire on the street I might stop and watch. But if I just see a normal dumpster, I probably won’t unless there’s like, a freegan eating out of it or something.

A few years ago, back when I started my journey of reading more than normal (meaning when I was unemployed) I read a book called Black Buck. I genuinely think this is the most entertaining bad book in contemporary fiction. The characters are absurd, the plot is contrived, the satire is thin, and the sheer confidence with which the author (read the acknowledgements section) carries it all off…well, it’s actually something to behold.

And I had to finish it. I just had to. And I get it, who the fuck am I? Just a critic, sure. Nowhere near, nor ever will I ever get near, the success of the author. But is it so crazy to recommend a book of such…interesting accomplishment? Who knows!

The point is, we don’t all have to read bad books, but we inevitably will, even when your best intentions are to avoid the pain of suffering through shoddy work (like literally anyone who has read this far down this post or anything I’ve ever written before).

Some works reach these specific heights where their defining badness is actually what makes them interesting and thought-provoking (for example, I still ponder specifically what bothered me so much about Colored Television). Finishing a book and forgetting about it may be protective to your psyche but does actually suck more.

Project Hail Mary is probably going to make a good movie. Sure, Gosling has sort of abdicated his responsibility as Hollywood’s weirdest heartthrob4 and pivoted to just doing kind of the same thing. But the book clearly has all of the makings of an interesting adaptation.

And again, like Black Buck, I find myself recommending it, despite large aspects of it truly sucking. Enjoy!

1. At worst, she’s one of the world’s most talented writers who has written one genius-level novel (Normal People).

2. At best, she’s just a flat-out genius.

I’ve never felt like reading one of her books, though I don’t love all of them, is a waste of time. And yet, I know people in real life (Really! I promise they exist!) who despise Normal People, which, as noted above, I think is a work of genius. Additionally, I’ve heard criticism claiming that Conversations with Friends is her finest work, which to me is plainly untrue.

Who’s right? That’s what I’m here to answer today, once and for all, so we no longer have to have a discourse about Rooney next time she writes a book. Or rather, I don’t have to stand on the sidelines of a discourse and kind of judge people for their bad opinions.

As a casual viewer of literary vibes, I’m always a little surprised when people seem to get stung and affronted every time Rooney has the audacity to do her job and write a book. Perhaps it was the incessant rollout of Intermezzo, a big deal for a novel of all things. The level of publicity isn’t quite at Wicked levels, but I could understand those plugged into the literary world growing weary of the intense level of focus in one direction. Here! Book!

I also think there’s a tendency for some readers to backlash against something popular immediately. And then, if so inclined, write a post or newsletter articulating their contrarian opinion because, honestly, liking things isn’t really the approved lingua franca of the internet. Being a hater is more entertaining, better for your personal brand, more inclined towards engagement, etc. Cool.

But I like Rooney. A lot. However, every time I pick up one of her critically acclaimed novels, it engenders a lot of personal debate in me.

Because they’re all fucking the same:

Some character is stifled in their life, generally, until they form an unlikely or surprising relationship that lets them have endlessly serious conversations about life (and the ethics of living). And that relationship typically conflicts in some way with people close to them, usually minor or supporting characters.1

But it’s a formula that works. And within the same structures, Rooney still unearths such powerful stories. Genius is so often reserved for works of profound thematic, visual, or timely art. But it’s astounding what she weaves out of the simplest raw materials. Take a handful of people, two in Normal People, four in Conversations (two major, two minor), two in Beautiful World (and their forgettable male counterparts, I guess), and four in Intermezzo. Set them in this millennial morass of modern living, where their differences stand out among their many similarities, (usually) make them fuck, and see what happens.

In this interview, it’s striking how simply she describes inspiration:

I would be telling a lie if I said I had any of that on my mind when I started writing about these guys! The idea for this book came to me when I imagined a simultaneous exhibition game, which is where an accomplished chess player, maybe a grandmaster, plays a lot of different players all at once. I had this idea for a game like that happening in a small-town arts centre in the west of Ireland, and that a woman who worked there would be watching this young man [Ivan] play this chess, and I found that idea captivating. So I wrote that scene, and then I started wondering about the rest of the characters’ lives, where they were coming from and how they’d reached the point where they met each other, and I wrote quite a bit about them, and then kind of got stuck. Then, I had this moment of realisation that Ivan had an older brother, and immediately it was like, “Now I know that I have to write a novel.” Peter kind of completed the picture for me, and from that point, I knew that I would have to write about brothers.

She literally just conjures a key scene from Intermezzo. And from that builds this sprawling, overdone narrative that is intensely focused on how people treat each other. The simplicity belies the raw talent, the machine in her head that spins into action.

Maybe I find myself so drawn to her because she writes about the great inbetweenness of millennialism. All of her characters, while being set against each other in her tapestry, are always in transitional moments. The death or aging of a parent (Intermezzo, Conversations), the beginnings of adulthood (Normal People, Conversations), the growth or regressions of talents or careers (Beautiful World, Intermezzo).

In the aforementioned interview, she talks about the novel as an art form emerging at the advent of industrial capitalism2. She works in these concentric thematic rings of the world’s changes: she writes as part of a transitioning world, recorded in a form birthed from change, about characters witnessing and struggling with those exact same changes.

And her willingness to engage with the transitional world is equally admirable. In her earlier works, I was always impressed by her ability to write men. I understand that this has absurd, borderline sexist connotations, like wow how could a woman understand the vast depth of the opposite sex?!?! I assure you, I don’t mean it that way. Rooney just has a natural intuition towards writing interesting male characters who, yes, have fathomless depths of emotion but also usually want to dominate their sexual counterpart in bed.

This is all just a function of Rooney’s ability to inhabit her characters beyond the visual level. They feel luxuriously fleshed out in comparison to other works. In Intermezzo, the “wow-lady-so-good-at-writing-men” sheen faded a bit because it’s expected in her work. Now, she writes about all sorts of permutations of psychology, to explore the true perspectives of a character, rather than them all being vague mouthpieces for the author herself.

Take Ivan. At points, he regurgitates some intellectual but ultimately college-level thoughts about wealth disparities under capitalism. Is he a mouthpiece? For someone as intelligent as Rooney, it seems pretty doubtful. But it’s equally doubtful she’s trying to teach the plebs who read her work something about the world, man. Because of that, Ivan feels rounded. Expressed. He wrestles with some darker ideas but it feels real for an autistic intellectual who just left college. Rooney avoids the didactic and presents a tangible, tactile world.

In fact, I can attribute a quote that basically sums it up:

What makes Rooney so electrically compelling is the way she sticks with a scene and draws it out, often just the delicate dance of talk between two people in a room (although not just talking, given the characters tumble into bed pretty much every 50 pages). Indeed, the greatest drama here comes from conversations taking place under the pressure of life-changing events in the novel’s prehistory. Not only the obviously big ones, like Sylvia’s accident, but also things like Ivan, still in his teens, silently walking away in fearful confusion when his brother, 10 years his elder, needed a shoulder to cry on. The reader always feels different layers of grief at play – buried pain exhumed by fresh hurt – in a way that rings stingingly true to life.

The oft-cited Brandon Taylor wrote a really interesting piece on Rooney. It’s much better than mine. He’s a better writer and, therefore, person than me. But me being literally the second person ever to write an essay about Sally Rooney, I felt the need to acknowledge that I stand on the shoulders of giants.

He espouses essentially the same view as I do about her: great, great writer but not without problems. But those problems? How much do they really matter?

Her writing of sex often comes up in interviews, in conversation, in criticism. Her books are full of sex scenes, both titillating and pedestrian, sexy and decidedly unsexy. Personally, I find her sex scenes sort of unremarkable and boring. In Intermezzo, they feel drawn out and so granular I found myself skimming to the afterglow3.

In fact, that is my main criticism of Intermezzo. While many of her other books feel positively fleeting in comparison, their language plain and work(wo)manlike, Intermezzo is bogged down by many small details that leech each moment. While I didn’t love this style, I found it to be evocative of the tedium of living, especially with grief, confusion, and transition.

Taylor pinpoints, with much more eloquence, almost exactly how I feel:

Sometimes people with graduate degrees in creative writing are accused of writing technically proficient but boring prose, or stories that function well but attain nothing lifelike. People without graduate degrees in creative writing are often held up as some sort of shaggy band of true inheritors of the literary tradition. Brilliant experimentalists. Risk-takers and politically engaged. There are writers—Sally Rooney perhaps chief among them—about whom it is said with a gleeful delirium, “They don’t have an MFA!” In response, I’ve started to think, after having read a handful of novels by people like this, “Yeah, you can tell.” This struck me as especially true in Rooney’s case as I reread all of her novels alongside Intermezzo. Conversations with Friends, Normal People, and Beautiful World, Where Are You all demonstrate a writer of virtuosic gifts but minor technical proficiency.

MFAish books pervade The Culture. I’ve read plenty. I don’t tend to criticize them along those lines because a) I don’t have an MFA and b) it feels like a sweeping thing to characterize certain styles of writing until you read a few that are actually good. I think what Taylor is getting at is that her “lack” of technical proficiency doesn’t truly matter. Her “weakness” is instead a strength.

Because, I believe, the governing drive of joy in reading should be movement of emotion, not worship at the altar of writing that lacks mistakes or follows the structure and expectations of some ideal. Whether you call it a lack of MFAness or just a wholly unique, virtuosic gift, as Taylor puts it, Rooney is delightfully unbound by any sort of rule or expectation.

If, in some alternate universe, someone pitched me the idea of reading almost any of her books without knowing it’s her, I’d probably think they sound incredibly dull. Like…what happens? So what? But append Rooney’s name to any pitch of the sort and I’m totally game. She’s just that good.

Ultimately, Intermezzo (and frankly Beautiful World) didn’t do a lot to move me. I liked them both. Maybe I need to reread them. Maybe I’m coasting in the afterglow of how absurdly good I thought Normal People was. And so the debate rages on in my head. It’s a good one to have. When she writes an immediately forgettable book, then maybe that will sway me in one direction or other.

As you can probably tell, I fall a little more into the former camp I outlined above. But it’s only for lack of distance. Am I watching and indulging in a genius at work or simply (lol) an incredibly talented writer? Is history being made? I think that her books give you so much space to sink into that they’ll be seen as great and enduring works.

1. Coasting on the highs of inspiration and writing something you really feel.

2. Complaining (usually online) about literally every other aspect of the craft, like typing and being coherent.

Normally, my MO is to never give in and to deliver shoddy, slapped-together work all in service of The Content. But due to an abundance of tired this week, I couldn’t finish the book I’m reading in time to be inspired by it and then type that all up.

So I’m going to redirect readers to some of the work from the past year or so that I’m most proud of. For new readers, welcome. For old readers, for God’s sake get out while you still can.

Thank you. Sorry. Go see Crime 101.

You could start with my most recent, fullsome novel/TV series obsession…

…or catch up on all the things I care about concerning the Oscars, including the size of Ann Lee’s forehead…

…go deep on an Oscar nominated film that’s likely to win zero awards…

…catch up on my thoughts on a 27 year old book about putting down dogs…

…or finally, remember back when Netflix wasn’t complete shit.

Thank you. Bye.

I read The Narrow Road to the Deep North. And now I wrote about it.

There’s this thing I used to think to myself a lot, back when I worked at a job I hated for a company that sucked: this isn’t really life.

I’d think that a lot. I occasionally think about it now, even though I’m in much happier circumstances. It’s not that I thought that this low point of my professional career1 was some sort of unreality. It was more that I thought I spent a lot of time doing those things that don’t really feel like the substance of being alive.

There are a lot of things we do that are just parts of living. We have to do them and they are tedious and forgettable and feel perfunctory but must be done even though they just simply aren’t conducive to feeling like your life has meaning. I’m talking about things like scrolling endlessly on your phone, calling your bank, deciding where to eat at an airport, doing your taxes, shopping for insurance, having a conversation with someone from Ontario, debating things that actually have a concrete answer, and so on and so forth.

Things that aren’t always terrible but you won’t really remember them later.

I thought of this quite a lot when I neared the end of The Narrow Road to the Deep North. If you’re reading this then you know I was mildly obsessed with the miniseries adaptation a few weeks ago. It was my duty, therefore, to read the critically acclaimed novel it was based on.

To recap, Narrow Road is about Dorrigo Evans, a young (and old) doctor in World War II who is taken as a POW to work on the Burma Death Railway. The novel is largely framed as the fragmented but crucial memories of Evans as he grows older and further from the critical events of his past: the harrowing experiences at the camp but also the chance encounter with the love of his life, Amy Mulvaney, who is married to his uncle.

In reading the book, I was pleased to find that not only was it incredibly good, the show and novel subvert each other in interesting ways. It seems clear that Justin Kurzel and Shaun Grant found certain aspects of the book more interesting than others and focused their attention there for various reasons (likely budgetary, among others). The show, with few exceptions, rests firmly in Dorrigo’s POV, which is a pretty good choice when your lead is smokeshow Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein’s monster himself.

In the novel, you not only get various POVs, but you see a lot more interiority of those characters, their motivations and, importantly, their fates are a lot clearer. While the mystery, specifically of Amy, is pitched perfectly in the show, her fate is equally gut-wrenching and tragic when you understand it fully.

On Amy, I found her guarded and closed off on the show. Not a criticism, I praised the chemistry between Dorrigo and Amy as a high point of the show. Odessa Young is excellent. In the novel, shortly after meeting Amy, you get a picture of her character so clear it’s almost shocking:

She was full of yearning. To leave, to be someone else, somewhere else, to start moving and never stop. And yet the more the innermost part of her screamed to move, the more she recognized that she was frozen to one place, one life. And Amy Mulvaney wanted a thousand lives, and not one of them did she want to be like the one she had.

We learn that Dorrigo isn’t her first fling either. Her dimensions, her wants are most explicit. And even her final scene, dying, mind in a pretzel from seeing Dorrigo alive and old, is so much more brutal than the opaque final images of the series, which are incredible. Despite the differences, the themes are just as powerful. Dorrigo and Amy are the ultimate missed connection. Dorrigo reflects that his feeling for her seemed a power beyond love.

But their love is still doomed, because we know who Dorrigo is when we meet him as an older man: a serial adulterer with a wife and family he doesn’t care much for. As Ella says, a part of him never really left the camp. He’s stuck there and he’s also stuck with the other great, enduring memory of his life, Amy.

And yet their fates broke them apart and their lives became these pedestrian, dissatisfying slogs that end in fairly unremarkable ways, cancer, a car accident. They were deep in the substance of life and nothing has been like it since.

The novel is overly concerned with fate. Fate and memory. A sense of doom that hangs over everything. It’s the driving question of the show too: if Dorrigo is alive now, what happened in the intervening years to all of these people? What happened to Darky Gardiner? To Jimmy Bigelow? To Amy?

They live in memory, where Dorrigo lives because he’s stuck. Ironic, because when he’s in the camp, burning the bodies of the dead, he’s pretty firm about his feelings on memories:

Nothing endures […] Not empires, not memories. We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this?

Yet, every character who wrestles with the aftershocks of such brutality is haunted by their own memory until they literally can’t remember anymore.

Major Nakamura, the methamphetamine-addicted Japanese railway engineer ultimately concludes (when he’s older and infirm and his mind is failing him) that he acted in good faith to the Emperor. That he had been just. Despite the torture and death and disregard for the humanity of his POWs.

Jimmy Bigelow, on the other hand, slowly lets the bad aspects of the camp melt away and over time he only recalls the camaraderie. The positive aspects are inflated in his mind.

Even in the depths of hell, when hundreds of men witness the beating of Darky Gardiner, all they have is memory to retreat into, to try and not bear witness to his murder.

For Dorrigo though, everything, as evidenced by these passages, remains crystal clear. Because, as he thinks when he finally returns to Australia, these were the times he felt alive. After the camp, after the war, he remains away from home to try and retain that sense of life. It’s a brutal feeling, one he’s ashamed of, but in the camp he was drenched in living. At home, as he gets further from it, he feels less so:

He was compelled to travel frequently; long periods of tedium and waiting, interspersed by unnecessary meetings with people similarly suffering the vertigo of achievement. During sleepless nights in hermetically enclosed rooms that had the persistent, unpleasant underscent of chemicals, he wondered why fewer and fewer people interested him.

These things just don’t feel like living, do they?

It’s a harsh idea. That life in the camps, life in the brief moments with the greatest love you’ve ever known are inevitably linked because they are the times you felt most alive.

I think it’s what separates The Narrow Road as a war novel from others. There’s layers of complexity to the evil. There’s layers of complexity to the good. Dorrigo acts unequivocally good in the camp. Even when he’s tasked with sending one hundred men to their certain death, they all form an orderly queue to shake his hand. A handful survive. Most of them die.

Even The Goanna, the Korean guard charged with Darky’s murder, is given a small shred of dimension late in the novel. Yes, that shred reveals that he’s a nearly unrepentant sociopath, but he also struggles with the fact that only he is punished for the murder. No one above him gets tarnished, the shit rolls downhill. Even for a psycho like him, there’s great injustice in his death. And the passages leading up to his hanging are the most harrowing of all. What does one think when they know they have mere hours left alive?

Dorrigo spends a great deal of time wondering why anyone would think him a good man. Later in life, he teeters on the edge: philandering, boozing, and generally thinking everyone is a bore and a loser. The only thing that gives him that slice of redemption is his surety that he himself is the worst of all of them.

Yet, the novel ends on a more explosive note than the ending of the miniseries2. The Dorrigo of the present has a less focused plot than in the show. The novel captures his drifting, dreamlike automatic life, while in the show he’s tasked with something that his character must do (give a speech at an art show for Rabbit Hendricks’ work).

But in the ending, Dorrigo still acts the part of a good man. Still confounded as to why anyone would think that.

The great tragedy being that, with a part of him forever trapped in the camp, he’s missed and neglected the substance of life all around him. He relives it in bits, here and there. But then he crashes his car and takes three days to die. And lying in bed his thoughts are right where they always are:

[…] he was stunned to realise that his life was only just beginning, and in a faraway teak jungle that had long since been cleared, in a country called Siam that no longer existed, a man who no longer lived had finally fallen asleep.

But because I am a loyal servant to The Content I have to write something or else how can I truly measure my own self worth as a person?

Things I gone done and read

Colored Television. Danzy Senna.

I generally dislike books or movies where a large portion of the tension is generated by the main character refusing to engage in pretty normal behaviour, like answering a text or returning a phone call.

Colored Television is about Jane, a novelist who delivers her magnum opus only to have it completely rejected. She then finagles her way into a handful of general meetings with TV producers in hopes of adapting her idea for a dramedy about a mulatto family, an idea she lifted from her close friend Brett, in whose incredible mansion she is living with her family while he’s away in Australia. Jesus, all of these moving parts are exhausting. Anyway, she starts working with an absolute caricature of a TV producer and things spiral from there.

Perhaps it’s because I consider myself to be “reliable”, the sexiest and most titillating of traits a person can have, but after a bit of time spent with Jane living in her fantasy world where things might work out for her, I grew tired of her blasé attitude towards the truth and, frankly, reality.

Jane sucks. I know that’s a simplistic way of dismissing her character and I’m sure that was part of the author’s intention. But Jane’s continual delusions about how the world works start to stretch credulity so much that I started to wonder what exactly was at stake in this story. It’s one of those situations where if she had told the truth from the start, things would have likely gone well for her. But instead she lies and the motivation for the lie isn’t ironclad enough for me to feel much empathy for her when the house of cards she built begins to collapse.

So instead she just sucks and by the end I’m just like yeah dipshit you deserve it.

The Stalker. Paula Bomer.

Hey! I already wrote about this! Besides being a shameless opportunity at self promotion, The Stalker is genuinely the one book I’ve read since December that I’ve been like this is fucking great.

Unfortunately, it’s sort of hard to be moved emotionally by a book like this (like I say in the review, it’s largely about smoking crack and having a boner) but it at least hooked me real good.

Everybody Knows. Jordan Harper.

I read this right after Colored Television. I felt like I was on a big Los Angeles kick and both of those books are heavily LA-centric. You could almost say something groundbreaking like “LA itself is almost a character in the novel” which would be a very original vein of criticism. And your readers would applaud you and recommend you to friends and sort of daydream about what it would be like to be around you all the time, what with all of your witticisms and incisive ideas about books.

Everybody Knows meets the moment in this sort of post #MeToo, Epstein files, police-involved-shooting kind of way. It’s an excellent, modern neo-noir and well worth reading.

To criticize myself, I actually often complain about the focus on explicit depictions of characters’ backstories in TV, movies, or books. I’d rather have them implied than laid out in a flashback where we always learn some variation of the same reason why a character carries trauma. But I felt a little bit like that was missing from Everybody Knows. Mae and Chris, the main characters, were well drawn, but I ended up feeling like I didn’t know them that well in the end.

Regardless, this is an excellent book.

Among Friends. Hal Ebbott.

I was excited for this book, I’d heard really good things, and then I read it and was like…hm.

That’s it. That’s the exact sound I made when I read the last page.

Among Friends is about two couples and their daughters (one each, both sixteen). The friend unit is largely bonded by the deep friendship between Amos and Emerson. They have the type of friendship that’s almost deeper than family. There’s a lot of love but also so much history layered within that it also results in a lot of resentment and petty annoyance at each other’s typical behaviour. When they spend a weekend together for Emerson’s birthday, one of them does something and it’s bad.

So…it’s difficult to talk about this book without completely spoiling this central event, though eagle-eyed readers will guess the nature of it from my summary but also within a few pages of the book itself.

Among Friends is thoughtful, almost to a detrimental degree. The characters spend so much time navel gazing that their inaction starts to drag down the tension of the story. Which is partially the point I suppose. We’re stuck in the heads of these four overthinkers as they try to think through a confounding problem. And it’s grounded because what would one truly do when faced with such a situation?

Ebbott is an exquisite writer and I’d read another book by him but I was satisfactorily whelmed by Among Friends.

Things I gone done and saw

The Testament of Ann Lee

Directed by Mona Fastvold. Written by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet.

Of the four auteurist films I’ve started the year with, Ann Lee is by far the one I enjoyed the most.

A musical about sex-negative Shaker founder Ann Lee (y’all rushing out to the cinema yet?) starring Amanda Seyfried, Ann Lee tells the story about the foundations of Shakerism (Shakerdom?), her journey to America, and ultimately the end of her life.

I was pretty clear about how I felt about Seyfried’s performance last week and I will reiterate it here: she’s phenomenal in this movie. Aside from pretty much liking everything about the film, I also appreciated the frankness with which they portrayed Ann Lee’s life and beliefs. It felt very non-judgmental. Not preachy. Just of interest.

And it is. I really couldn’t believe how much I enjoyed the movie based on everything I’d heard about it. It’s technically impressive and incredibly moving, with absolutely no guile or cynicism, unlike…

Send Help

Directed by Sam Raimi. Written by Mark Swift and Damian Shannon.

I quite enjoyed this very stupid film.

Sam Raimi’s return, two insane and good-time performances by Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien. It’s completely bizarre and inessential and a total joy.

No Other Choice

Directed by Park chan-wook. Written by Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, and Lee Ja-hye.

As an aspiring cinema elite, it’s incumbent on me to like and enjoy the films of Park Chan-wook, despite knowing almost nothing about him nor having literally ever finished a film by him except Oldboy. Call it a blind spot.

I did like No Other Choice. I felt like it could have and should have ended four or five times before it actually did. The payoff worked but I felt a little bit like…I get it. Let’s move along.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Directed by Nia DaCosta. Written by Alex Garland.

I wrote briefly about how I ultimately came to be indifferent to 28 Years Later after around a year removed. I feel similarly about The Bone Temple but I liked it more. Turns out there’s a lot you can do when you don’t film on fifty iPhones tied to a stick.

I’m being flippant, I love Danny Boyle and I think he’s truly an innovator. I’m also one of the five or so people who defends Nia DaCosta’s remake of Candyman. DaCosta is an exciting filmmaker and she shows it in The Bone Temple.

For me, the experiment of the “28iverse” is sort of tiresome. After catching up with the original 28 Days Later and seeing how it looked like old porridge, I wondered how much of this as a universe is worth pursuing. I like them all, don’t get me wrong, and I’ll go watch the rumoured third film.

But like I said as the genesis for this whole post: shrug.

When I was a youth, wide eyed at the promise of the world, the Oscars provided a great baseline for quality. We can quibble with their picks and make the same joke about Crash over and over again but for someone trying to understand good or important movies, the Oscars at least give you an idea of what the establishment of Hollywood chooses to laud.

So with that, I’m going to engage in a little soft punditry and then literally forget about the awards because they’re not taking place until March lol. Oh and if I bolded something, that’s who I think will win (will, not should).

Best Picture

• Bugonia

• F1

• Frankenstein

• Hamnet

• Marty Supreme

• One Battle After Another

• The Secret Agent

• Sentimental Value

• Sinners

• Train Dreams

Honestly, what are we doing with Frankenstein here? This is a movie I came out of thinking was on par with Kenneth Branagh’s disastrous 1994 adaptation. If it had featured a scene of Oscar Isaac slapping around in amniotic fluid, it would have an edge. But like…come on.

I get that del Toro is very well-respected and deserves to be. For example, Scorsese vamped hard for Nightmare Alley, a film I thought was decidedly okay. And between us two luminaries, who are you going to trust, really?

I’m taking One Battle here. Really, it comes down to a toss-up between it and Sinners. While I have a softer spot for Marty and Bugonia, I don’t think they’re genuinely competing. And Hamnet, well I’m glad I can forget about Hamnet in a few short months.

Best Director

• Chloé Zhao, Hamnet

• Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme

• Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another

• Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value

• Ryan Coogler, Sinners

Again, while this is an incredibly strong category, it’s Coogler or PTA. PTA has never won an Academy Award and both directors are past due for recognition. That said, PTA gets the edge because I think One Battle will steamroll many categories.

Actor in a Leading Role

• Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme

• Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another

• Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon

• Michael B. Jordan, Sinners

• Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent

Moura has been cleaning up a lot of awards even in the face of Timmy’s campaigning. I personally want Chalamet to win, I think Marty is ultimately a better film that’s carried by his central performance even more so than The Secret Agent. But this is an absurdly strong race and I’d be happy with any of them.

Actress in a Leading Role

• Jessie Buckley, Hamnet

• Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

• Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue

• Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value

• Emma Stone, Bugonia

It’s tempting for me to wtf at Hudson’s nomination here but I will be honest because I haven’t seen Song Sung Blue. Actually, I will pivot into a direction that pains me: I don’t know if I’m super happy with Reinsve and Stone, despite loving both of those movies. If Reinsve can’t even get nominated for Worst Person in a decidedly weaker year (y’all remember The Eyes of Tammy Faye? Me neither!) then I can’t really vouch for this performance.

Not because either of those performances don’t deserve it, they absolutely do. However, I think there were two significant snubs: Amanda Seyfried and Jennifer Lawrence. For Seyfried, I just think that The Housemaid was…lol just kidding, I saw The Testament of Ann Lee last night and it was, frankly, a great movie with an incredible performance at its center. And there’s no reason for the real Ann Lee’s forehead to go this hard:

Lawrence led my favourite movie of the year, Die My Love, and she didn’t even get a look. Which is a shame because I was hoping she was moving into an era of being recognized for doing good work in good movies instead of pieces of limp garbage by David O. Russell.

Actor in a Supporting Role

• Benicio Del Toro, One Battle After Another

• Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein

• Delroy Lindo, Sinners

• Sean Penn, One Battle After Another

• Stellan Skarsgård, Sentimental Value

I think One Battle is over-represented here by one performance. I don’t care much which one because I’d like Stellan to win.

Actress in a Supporting Role

• Elle Fanning, Sentimental Value

• Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value

• Amy Madigan, Weapons

• Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners

• Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another

I struggled with this category because the only performance I truly loved in it was Lilleaas, despite being an avowed Fanning fan. On the other hand, I think Taylor will win and I don’t have any idea who I’d slot in place of anyone else.

Adapted Screenplay

• Bugonia

• Frankenstein

• Hamnet

• One Battle After Another

• Train Dreams

I mean…sure. Normally, I judge this by how well I think something has been adapted (like I know anything at all) but that’s not usually how the vote goes and also I’ve only actually read Hamnet and I thought that book was aggressively okay.

Original Screenplay

• Blue Moon

• It Was Just an Accident

• Marty Supreme

• Sentimental Value

• Sinners

So Sinners. For my predictions, I could very easily see each choice I’ve made be flipped to Sinners. It could sweep. I’d be happy with that. It’s a phenomenal film that was super successful if you’re not a pocket watching loser:

But here is the only place it’s not directly competing with One Battle and unfortunately could be the only place it’s recognized.

Achievement in Casting

• Hamnet

• Marty Supreme

• One Battle After Another

• The Secret Agent

• Sinners

I normally wouldn’t cogitate too strongly on this category but I specifically pointed out how insanely good the casting of Marty Supreme was and I should stick by my guns, it’s called integrity, look it up.

Original Score

• Bugonia

• Frankenstein

• Hamnet

• One Battle After Another

• Sinners

I listen to a lot of scores and I would say that for four of these nominations, the score was not very notable at all and in Hamnet the big “score” moment is for a song already used in multiple successful films.

Marty’s absence is nearly criminal, as is the omission of The Testament of Ann Lee. I genuinely think Daniel Blumberg is a genius.

Cinematography

• Frankenstein

• Marty Supreme

• One Battle After Another

• Sinners

• Train Dreams

Only here to further trash Frankenstein. F1 should have been nominated.

Film Editing

• F1

• Marty Supreme

• One Battle After Another

• Sentimental Value

• Sinners

Again, a technical award I wouldn’t consider that much unless I felt very strongly for two of these films: F1 and Marty. That said, I often don’t understand how decisions are made for a lot of technical awards so I’ll go with my gut.

International Feature Film

• The Secret Agent

• It Was Just an Accident

• Sentimental Value

• Sirat

• The Voice of Hind Rajab

I haven’t seen two of these (Sirat, Hind Rajab)! Which is more than I can say for most years. Sirat isn’t out in Canada yet (I think?). The exclusion of No Other Choice is a little suspect. This is a strong category which I base completely on the fact that I saw and enjoyed three of these films. I’d be happy with any win.

Production Design

• Frankenstein

• Hamnet

• Marty Supreme

• One Battle After Another

• Sinners

Again, a technical category I wouldn’t care for if the legendary Jack Fisk wasn’t stunting so hard for Marty here.

Some keen-eyed readers may have noticed that I left off some key categories: Animated Feature, Sound, Original Song, etc. But it’s for a good reason, I promise!

It’s because I don’t give a fuck about them lol.

Those. Are. Facts.

And it’s why I found myself conflicted about joyfully ripping through Paula Bomer’s The Stalker, a novel about a cokehead with a perpetual boner.

Robert “Doughty” Savile takes us on a ride from his sociopathic beginnings as a teenager to his cathartic downfall as a fake real estate mogul but full-time leech, drug addict, and abuser in New York City. Literally, the story, its tone and tenor, can be summed up with this quote:

He was amazing. Everything was his. He loved crack. He loved his dick. He loved New York City.

I loved this book. It made me uncomfortable and pretty sad but its unabashed narration was also downright hilarious. I didn’t feel at any point Bomer had to check in to ensure we knew Doughty sucked. A lot.

He’s kind of a cross between Tom Ripley and Patrick Bateman. It’s sort of trite to draw comparisons from two of literature’s preeminent psychos but it’s also hard not to do so1. But while Ripley can play act as a real human and Bateman is so insane it becomes a mockery, there was also something so creepily grounded about Doughty.

In fact, I can draw two lesser known comparisons. In Six Feet Under (just finished a rewatch, still slaps) there’s an episode (That’s My Dog, season 4) where David SPOILER FUCKING ALERT picks up a young hitchhiker while he’s driving a body from the morgue. At first, the man appears normal, well-adjusted, perhaps even, in David’s wildest fantasy, a gay man with whom he can have a casual fling.

Instead, he beats David, robs him, throws the corpse out on the highway, douses David in gasoline, and makes him suck a gun muzzle before driving away. David survives but he’s never the same. For the final season and a half, it’s essentially the turning point that defines David’s character. The episode is shocking, even by Six Feet Under standards2. And like Doughty, there’s an extended obsession with procuring and freebasing crack!

That’s the guy I most thought of when reading The Stalker. Completely self-assured that he’s right and whenever anyone tells him he’s wrong…well, that’s not possible. Doughty is so sure that he’s the best thing that ever happened to everyone he’s met, especially the women.

The second person I thought of was Alex from Emma Cline’s excellent novel The Guest. Alex is a con woman, there’s no doubt. But when it comes to quality, she’s certainly a better person than Doughty. It’s a little more vague, we’re never really in Alex’s head.

On the other hand, Alex will do seemingly anything to merely spend her summer on Long Island, sure that the rich dude who dumped her is just playing around.

There’s a lot in The Stalker that made me uncomfortable. But a lot of it is the stuff of stories, the assaults, the crack smoking (have I mentioned yet how much he loves crack?3), all of that is expected in stories about awful pieces of shit.

Maybe it’s my inherent Canadian guilelessness but the parts I found so poignant were the ways Doughty would step so carefully over the line of social order. It’s one thing to order a drink at a bar, drink it, and then duck out on the bill. Something Alex of The Guest might do. Or she might talk her way out of paying.

When Doughty goes to the bar to meet Beata (a high school classmate he already abused once) he’s downright offended when she asks him to pay. What does one do in that situation, really? You can’t exactly get in a physical altercation to solve every problem (although someone definitely does physically altercate Doughty at one point, satisfyingly so) especially if you’re a beleaguered young woman just trying to pay your way through nursing school.

I hate comparisons like this because they’re hack and overdone and I should be ejected into the sun for even writing about it but it’s sort of how the Trump presidency operates (or should I say operated because currently they’re doing Gestapo stuff in Minnesota) by crossing over established norms and taunting everyone else into doing something about it. Like when they’re not breaking the law and shit. And when they see that they can push that far, they try to push a little further.

That’s, I suppose, a macrocosmic reading one could take away from The Stalker and perhaps Bomer intends that. As Doughty says:

[…] winning was not negotiable; he would win, he wouldn’t stop a conversation until he won it.

Doughty, for most of the story, finds ways to come out on top in the most infuriating fashion. And like a certain president, it helps that he lacks all shame and embarrassment. Losses get painted as wins, wins get painted as owning the dems or whatever the fuck.

I don’t want to stray too far into the political reading of the book or its specific comparisons to “the moment” because, like I said, it’s hack and easy and utterly boring and if you’re reading this you’re probably trying to escape from some dimension of reality into the joys of literary criticism. Feel my warm embrace!

The final aspect of the novel that I found rendered skillfully by Bomer was that, while it was frustrating to watch Doughty live his life without consequence, the rigorous way Bomer stuck to his POV pays off so well. We’re mostly stuck in this guy’s head. It’s a terrible place to be. It’s casually hateful and dismissive, usually of women and poor people4, but also of his “friends”. But Bomer always lays in hints that people find him genuinely unsettling to be around.

Doughty inherits money from his father when he passes. The estate lawyer tries to explain to him that the house is owned by the bank and all he will be getting is the meager sum in his father’s chequing account. Doughty essentially hears none of this. All he cares about is getting money. With this money, Doughty moves to New York, and nothing comes of the $250,000 he thinks he will inherit.

Later, when he tries to come into possession of Sophia’s apartment for various reasons that to explain would be to spoil, the lawyer he talks to is clearly disconcerted by Doughty. Probably because he’s seeking advice on how to squat his way into ownership of a SoHo loft, among other reasons.

Bomer never strays into the didactic, never has to paint it so black and white that this guy fucking sucks. We’re locked into his POV and it all seems like another day at the office for Doughty, which makes it all the more chilling because it’s full of crime and casual abuse and disdain for all things human.

My favourite part, besides the fact that Billy Bob Thornton’s Tommy is the GM of an oil company and seems to still do every job, is that his ex-wife left her billionaire husband due to the raw sexual energy of this man:

Besides that, I saw the Marty, the Avatar, the Dead Man, and I read the Booker winner. As of the writing of this sentence, the world spins loose on its axis as we face the reality that Netflix’s The Electric State may be an Academy Award nominated film.

I was originally going to write something really navel-gazy to kick off the year and then I started watching The Narrow Road to the Deep North and that was better. So enjoy!

First, I want to preface this with two things:

• I haven’t read the book but I fully intend to, meaning it’s on order from my local library, which means I will read it somewhere in the next six weeks to five years.

• While I have nothing but admiration for this series, it does contain one of the most brutal scenes of torture I’ve watched in a while, so if that’s not your bag, here’s a happy video of people’s marriage proposals.

There’s this thing that controversial standup comedian and (lest we forget) critically acclaimed television actor, writer, and creator Ricky Gervais said about The Office that I think about a lot.

Since the characters are confined to this one space (recall that unlike the American remake, in the British version, they only leave the titular office briefly to throw Tim’s shoes over the pub), intimacy and romance is limited. In such a charged environment, a touch can be like a kiss and a kiss can be like sex. The allure of what’s not allowed becomes incredibly powerful.

I think it’s what makes that version of The Office so memorable (that and it being 12 episodes long) and why the American remake needed to heavily expand its story, because once Jim and Pam get together, who really gives a fuck? Besides most of the television viewing audience but you get my drift. When Dawn returns to the party at the end and kisses Tim, the catharsis is so intense it caps the entire show1.

The limitation is essential to creating intimacy between these two characters. The forbidden, the unknown, the secret crush. Contrast this with, say, Heated Rivalry, where the forbidden is certainly a big part of the show, but Shane and Ilya bang within about 15 minutes of the first episode, kind of dispensing with that as a driving tension for the show2.

So then, how do you build chemistry? And tension? How do you make those touches so agonizing they threaten to burn you?

Jacob Elordi has made it clear that he has no hesitation getting down in the freak sauce and splashing around a bit. While he’s not always the main freak (Saltburn, Deep Water LOL), he has no qualms about being the sideshow freak (Euphoria). And while he’s currently winning awards for being in 2025’s most okay film (Frankenstein), his lesser lauded work in The Narrow Road to the Deep North is nothing short of remarkable.

Smoldering is a word often invoked when describing Elordi. Likely due to his inherent and obvious hotness, coupled with a hint of danger, and exemplified in the oft-wordlessness of his performances. The dude is not one for lengthy monologues or easy quips. Perfect then, because director Justin Kurzel isn’t exactly making Marvel movies.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North tells the story of Dorrigo, an Australian medic in World War II who is kidnapped by the Japanese to work on the Burma Death Railway. An older Dorrigo (Ciarán Hinds) has his memory stirred when he’s tasked with giving a speech at an exhibit that displays the artwork of one of his fellow POWs who died on the railway. We see the time he spent before the war with his “aunt” (his uncle’s new, young wife, played by Odessa Young), his harrowing experiences in the POW camp, and his life as an older man and respected surgeon.

There’s something about a director making a work of romance whose previous work was decidedly anti-romantic3. You’d think Kurzel would be well-versed in the scenes in the POW camp.

And he is. They’re bleak and shadowed, full of mud and grime. The contrast of shocking greenery with this hell on earth. Yet the scenes in memory of Amy are some of the most comprehensively beautiful work in the show4.

When Amy shows Dorrigo her favourite poem, a fragment by Sappho that simply reads you burn me, it’s clear that something (to say what exactly here would be gauche and imprudent) is going to go down between them. It’s only a short time later that Amy cuts her thigh on a wire fence as they return from the beach and Dorrigo, a medical student, kneels to examine the wound and finds himself touching the blood with his lips. Like I said, freak sauce.

But I want to state, in no uncertain terms: this is one of the most heart-rending, romantic scenes in the series. Young and Elordi have built such absurd, tense chemistry that this act, rather than the sex they have an episode later, is the real release of all that tension. To state their love for one another is superfluous at this point in the story. Everything about this scene, the filmmaking, Amy’s reaction to the act, the score5, it’s a scene burned into memory.

Elordi has been nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance (congratulations, I think?) and may well have won by the time this posts (I’m not coming back to change it lol) but Odessa Young, snubbed, deserves…well, if there was a more meaningful award than a Golden Globe, then she deserves that. The way she communicates her ache with a look and a glance. She’s a real face6, there’s no other word for it. Elordi is ultimately more staid but perfect.

I’m kind of a sucker for the aching, longing love story that’s doomed essentially as soon as it begins. To its credit, the show never engages in false tension. You never think Dorrigo will die because you know he lives7. The question then becomes, what happens to Amy? And what happens to his fellow soldiers?

Her fate comes with little fanfare, making it all the more painful. To expound on the details would be to engage in deep spoilers, so I won't. Suffice to say that it’s the low point (emotionally) of the series and its complete lack of intensity stands in stark contrast to how their affair began: with this unnameable, animalistic desire.

Truthfully, the heartbreak, the ache, and ultimately Amy and Dorrigo’s romantic tension comes from the fact that it’s immediately a lost cause. Keith (Simon West), Amy’s husband and Dorrigo’s uncle, isn’t an awful man, in fact he’s sort of low-key obsessed with his wife. Ella (Olivia DeJonge) is a bit of a pill but quite honestly she does more for this guy who feels pretty mixed about her than anyone else. And, no spoilers, she gets her moment, her say in what she goes through.

When Dorrigo finally gives the speech he’s been tasked with, it’s a maudlin affair. He doesn’t mince words or pretend bygones are bygones. The Japanese government gave him an official apology and yet his memory cannot be shaken.

He says that we leave parts of ourselves in the memories and places of our lives. Parts of him are still in the jungle. And visually, we understand that parts of him are on the beach with Amy.

The final few moments of the series fall into the category, for me, of “Filmmaking that Transcends Definition”. A montage I felt was so sublime, so fitting and perfect, that the work seems to reach beyond the bounds of criticism. When a work flows, when each beat is perfect, when it delivers you imagery and sentiment you didn’t even know you wanted until it’s right there on screen, that’s what the ending does.

It makes it impossible to describe but a hell of a thing to experience. Quite simply, it burns you.