The topic of the nearly five-thousand word essay, beneath the work I close read, is the question of timeliness and timelessness. I have certainly not been timely in reading Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection (2024) even after reading “The Feminist” back in 2019. But the novel came back to mind because of Cape Fear (2026), in a quick scene of Natalie Bowden (Lily Collias) reading the book. Then, it took my wife reading it for me to finally crack it open. Now, re-opening three Jean-Paul Sartre books later, here we are.

Timeliness and Timelessness in Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection

What does it mean for a work to be timeless? Frank Kermode writes in The Classic (1975) that timeless work “possesses intrinsic qualities that endure, but possesses also an openness to accommodation which keeps them alive under endlessly varying dispositions” (44). There is also available a much less interpretive view one might take of the timeless. A work that is timeless may lack the markers to situate it in time, it may use fantasy or science fiction generic tropes in an attempt excise it from any recognizable era of human existence.

One might consider, too, whether a work being ‘timely’ would preclude it from being ‘timeless.’ Timeliness could be defined as of the moment, carrying in it the considerations, anxieties, and antagonisms of the contemporary. I want to argue, though, that Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection (2024) is a work that has qualities of timeliness and timelessness. While it certainly does not fit my latter definition of timelessness — Rejection is firmly entrenched in the language, culture, and events of contemporary culture — the text’s broader philosophical concerns will endure; mostly.

Rejection, according to its publisher, is an “electrifying novel-in-stories.” I will regularly refer to it as a novel (mostly because, ironically, that’s shorter than “short story collection”), though there is value in focused investigation of the form I’ll defer to another essay. Really, it is a short story collection packaged up as a novel. Tulathimutte describes the work for The London Magazine: “Rejection doesn’t really progress in terms of plot. The individual stories mostly create an illusion of plot by having things happen to a character and their personality develop in response – though the events themselves are pretty disconnected.” Each short story chronicles a different rejection and a point-of-view character’s perception of it. Characters might appear across different stories, but there is only one vaguely continuous thread between two stories. More than anything, Rejection’s plot is downright evasive. Tulathimutte regularly introduces inflection points or unresolved incidents that he never returns to.

The most widely read of the included short stories is “The Feminist” by virtue of its publication in N+1 (I read it there). Craig is the story’s retroactively named protagonist, suffering the slings and arrows of romantic rejection because of, from his vantage point, his narrow shoulders and stout allyship. He’s a remarkable character: passive, reactive. Tulathimutte recounts Craig’s litany of non-confrontational post-rejection postmortem emails: “he writes a third email clarifying that she’s by no means obliged to reply, though if she wants to, he’d love hearing her thoughts” (4). But there are some nagging qualities to Craig’s expression of feminist. Opening his dating profile, he describes himself as “Abortion’s #1 fan” and continues:

I can usually be found haunting the bookstores and bakeshops of our fair burgh, when I’m not dismantling the imperialist male supremacist hetero patriarchy. But I’d also be fine saying “To hell with it!” and staying at home for an Agnes Varda marathon sesh followed by discussion . . . and perhaps a wee snogfest? 😉 [sic] I always do my own cooking (thanks Mom!) so I’ll make a killer brunch for you! Trans women are women, duh. All races, ethnicities, and body types—but NOT all ages—very welcome! (10-11)

This self-description is like a nauseating gut punch for any well-adjusted person, as Tulathimutte well knows. It’s one of many examples in Rejection that could be categorized as “cringe comedy,” along with its social commentary. Still, if a good man is hard to find, finding a Craig in 2026 with the ascendency of the manosphere and the interpellation of the sexually frustrated incel into the familiar lexicon of movie villainy (see: Obsession [2026]) might be impossible. It seems to me that one couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a Craig in 2015, but they have been entirely replaced by new models: “performative males” and self-disfiguring looksmaxxers.

Does this immediately retrograde quality mean anything for the story? There is a stark juxtaposition between “The Feminist” and all of the stories that follow. The concession to timeliness and the accident of masculine dating behavior have rendered Craig, and “The Feminist,” a relic from a bygone era of heterosociality. The rest of the films deal with techno-optimism, LLMs, the profoundly familiar ‘micro-aggressions’ that cut across all manner of identitarian lines (”I’ve always believed that microaggressions warrant microapologies” [199]), and ideological formations that surge against the tides of compulsory identitarianism (but are at least as old, in the form they’re represented in the novel, as the work of Alyson Escalante, Lupus Dragonowl, Flower Bomb, or even Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey).

The amber within which Craig is trapped and seeks violent relief from, only reveals just how easily one can trace each cultural trend in masculine social embodiment from one to the next. Tulathimutte anticipates the transness of looksmaxxing in Craig’s attempts at self-modification:

He hits the gym, where he targets his deltoids with set after set of shrugs and lateral raises, and afterward takes zinc sulfate, lysine, and arginine … horny goat weed and pumpkin-seed extract for libido, cabergoline to lessen the refractory period by lowering prolactin. He gets a prescription for Depo-Testosterone and Deca-Durabolin to manage hypogonadism and improve pelvic muscle tone. Then somatotropin. Then trenbolone. (20-21)

Unlike looksmaxxers, most of his attempts at ‘self-improvement’ (using the term very generously) are invisible and meant to assuage anxieties he has about his imagined sexual performance. The idea that some other bizarre practice or some physical prosthesis or medical supplement will complete one’s masculinity is unmistakably shared across Craig and the idea of looksmaxxing.

If indeed there are aspects of “The Feminist” that are more timely than timeless, it has much to do with the story’s publication history. The story was published, unchanged from its novel version, in 2019. Tulathimutte began writing the story in 2011. It’s a relic, a brilliant and informative one. And why the story will endure is precisely because, though the specific codes change, the behaviors stay the same. Craig, like Obsession’s Bear (Michael Johnston), masks a repressed contempt for women under deference, agreeableness, and uniform adherence to behaviors which may or may not endear him to any given woman.

Other stories in the collection represent a more current view of social life. What runs through these works, at their core, is not just cultural critique or pastiche but a treatment of existentialism. Rejection has much in common with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) (something Tulathimutte discusses in his London Magazine interview), Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Naipaul’s “One out of Man” (1971). Has Tulathimutte thrown his lot in with a passé philosophical and aesthetic movement, or does this interconnection make it all the more vital.

In Gregory B. Sadler’s introductory lecture in the “Glimpses Into Existence” (2014) series, he posits about existentialism:

I don’t think that it is really irrelevant. And I’m going to tell you why, but I’m going to tell you a little bit of my background in it. So the story and my reasons for thinking that kind of tie in together. I’ve been studying philosophy since I was in high school. Started doing it before I realized that I was actually engaging in philosophy. I started reading people like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky back then before I knew that they were supposed to be existentialists. And like a lot of younger people who get into, particularly Nietzsche and Sartre and Camus, I was attracted to the ideas of sort of sticking it to the system and, you know, you’re not going to categorize me. you know, revolts, all those sorts of things that we associate with adolescence. And as I, you know, ended up going into philosophy and studying it and going to graduate school, I started to think, yeah, that’s the reason why people are, that’s why you can always teach an existentialism class, because you’re always going to have 18, 19, 20 year olds who want to say, I’m an individual. And maybe that’s all there is to existentialism.

The resistance against a conformist tidal wave, simple and adolescent as it may sound, is no small act to which one might dedicate philosophical study. Sadler, in the series, does just that. Tracing the history of existentialism, its definition is somewhat less rigid than other kinds of philosophical movements or retroactively constructed schools of thought. And it has fiction, short story, poetry, the novel, built in from its very inception. Thus, we can understand existentialism as simultaneously a set of aesthetic and philosophical concerns expressed across literary fiction, film, poetry, as well as non-fiction theoretical writing.

What are these critical themes and concerns? Turning to Sadler again:

Kierkegaard is also very critical of what he called the leveling tendencies of the press. You know, the modern press, the appeal to the mass. And this is a theme that you’re going to see in all of these existentialist authors. This notion that the individual is not only sort of threatened by getting lost in the mass, It’s amorphous, anonymous, they, but has to make efforts to extricate themselves from that. Kierkegaard actually said the crowd is untruth. That was one of his catchphrases.

He goes on:

[T]he individual for [Nietzsche] is somebody who extricates himself from the existing culture and expresses their forcefulness, their dominance, and is what he calls the superman, the person who frees himself of all conventional morality.

Whatever might be prescriptive about existentialism, it is not a system of self-help or a path to mental wellbeing in the socially recognizable sense.1 Dedication to individuation, to extricating oneself from the mass, is not all it’s cracked up to be. Craig’s renewed, though deeply distorted, sense of self does not make him happy:

This can’t happen again: all this not-happening. The nothing that is made of words, the reading and processing and discussing and journaling and posting with which he’d attempted to understand the hundreds of women’s voices he’d then gone on to uplift and amplify, only to hear that those voices were mocking him, all the listening—wasted effort constituting a wasted life. Words by themselves have no substance, he realizes, they are only ever meant to underscore acts. Being correct has been its own reward and no reward at all. Now with whatever miserable span of life remains to him he must commit himself to action[.] (30)

The same sort of resolve gives way to a grim resignation, instead of a suicidal, annihilative impulse, for Santosh in Naipaul’s “One out of Many”:

Then I looked in the mirror and decided to be free. All that my freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and have a body, and that I must feed this body and clothe this body for a certain number of years. Then it will be over. (50)

Perhaps one might throw a dart at the full text of Notes from the Underground wheatpasted to a wall to find some similar sentiment:

I, for example, quite naturally want to live so as to satisfy my whole capacity for living, and not so as to satisfy just my reasoning capacity alone, which is some twentieth part of my whole capacity for living. What does reason know? Reason knows only what it has managed to learn (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is no consolation, but why not say it anyway?), while human nature acts as an entire whole, with everything that is in it, consciously and unconsciously, and though it lies, still it lives. (Richard Pevear trans. 47)

Where freedom intervenes in these examples is relative to what existentialism takes as an imminent social feature: alienation. Rather than the Marxist definition, one can follow from Sartre’s treatment of the idea:

By alienation, we mean a certain type of relations that man has with himself, with others, and with the world, where he posits the ontological priority of the Other. The Other is not some specific person but a category or, if you will, a dimension, an element. There is no object or privileged subject that has to be considered as Other, but anything can be Other and the Other can be anything. It is just one way of being. In a conception of the world based exclusively on the Other, the subject derives all his projects and everything about his existence from what he is not and from what does not exist as he does. He interprets each object in the universe not as it is but as being profoundly other than it is (the tree and the pebble are also bears), the Other being the substance and the same being the accident and the appearance. Finally, he makes the Other a way of existing in otherness, that is, in the very heart of every upsurge of being he sees a way of not being itself, of escaping itself, of signifying something other than itself, which is in no way the mode of existing of the For-itself but, if you will, its projection in the objective and reified element of the Other. (Notebooks for an Ethics 382)

For Sartre, intersubjectivity as such, other subjects or objects that might occupy the structural position of Other, necessitates alienation. It is not just separation, but subordination at the level of (supposed) ontological category which renders the antagonistic relation between self and Other as determinative of the self. In Being and Nothingness (1943) Sartre writes:

It is at this point that I can react against these interdictions by declaring that race, for example, is purely and simply a collective fiction, that only individuals exist. Thus here I suddenly encounter the total alienation of my person: I am something which I have not chosen to be. (671-672)

He theorizes the individual more extensively in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960):

But we are not concerned, at this point, with interrogating consciousness about itself: the object it must give itself is precisely the life, the objective being, of the investigator, in the world of Others, in so far as this being totalises itself from birth and will continue to totalise itself until death. On this basis, the individual disappears from historical categories: alienation, the practico-inert, series, groups, classes, the components of History, labour, individual and communal praxis - the individual has lived, and he still lives, all of these in interiority. (51)

The very sense of being perceived makes this state of affairs most obvious: “I grasp the Other’s look at the very center of my act as the solidification and alienation of my own possibilities” (Being and Nothingness 352), a notion Fanon would elaborate in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) attempting to suture this notion of “the look” with the Lacanian gaze.

Bee, the protagonist of “Main Character,” seems to be the most evident and sympathetic proxy for Tulathimutte. Though the novel is polyphonic, like the work of Dostoevsky, and thus difficult to attribute the views of a character to the author, one can’t deny the positioning of Bee as a relative success compared to their counterparts. Bee conceives of themself as particularly smart (197), attends an Ivy League university, does reasonably well compensated white collar work (202), and enriches themself from AI video scams despite having “no use” for money (214). All of this means nothing relative to their sense of absolute exception relative to others, even if that sense is in part driven by some of their conventional ‘specialness.’

Early in the chapter, Bee recounts an anecdote of selling their gender:

Sometime in third grade, I saw the Simpsons episode where Bart sells his soul to Milhouse, who later offers it back for $50, the lost soul appreciating with remorse. Something must have clicked for me, seeing that with a few words on a scrap of paper you could commoditize any abstraction. I mean I didn’t think in those terms, I just thought Why not? Who says I can’t sell something I never asked for? So after asking around and getting that Um, okay look I would become very familiar with henceforth, I found a buyer in Sean Pennell … I offered to sell him my gender, implying it would allow him to do whatever girls did, even enter girls’ bathrooms, and he went for it. I wrote my name on a folded sheet of ruled notebook filler, and he gave me $22 in a wad of ones and change, which by the conversion rate of childhood made me a millionaire. In this way, before I learned gender was fluid, I’d learned it was liquid. (174)

This sale prefigures both the economizing of online desire and antagonism Bee accomplishes at the end of the story as well as Bee’s own objection to categorization. Can one not simply defer identity? Plenty of theorists (the aforementioned anarchists as well as Ignatiev and Garvey) leave open that possibility or advocate a confrontational stance toward categorization. Bee embodies this imperative. Bee responds to the questions about their identity in their progressive, high-minded Stanford dorm: “I said I thought it was strange to respect how people identify, but not the refusal to identify” (186). They continue with an emphatic rejection of the conventional calculus of what might make identity valuable:

what if I don’t care about limiting my reach, it’s not worth other people representing me—it’s nonsense to lump together, for instance, a Vietnamese refugee, a Korean adoptee, an engineer from Delhi on an H-1B, and an undocumented Cambodian garment worker. Like I don’t care if both our parents made us learn piano, or we both take off our shoes in the house and know what Haw flakes are, I don’t think those facts are in any way definitive about me and they’re certainly not what I’d lead with. (189)

Bee is painstaking clear: “I don’t want to be racialized … which is why I don’t go in for the taxonomies that racism creates” (192). But this kind of anti-identity (Bee later discusses the idea of ‘identity terrorism’ [211]), living with it, is not amenable to the ideological version of prescriptive progressive politics. This antagonism is precisely what existentialism diagnoses in its formulation of alienation. Bee is something because of the subordination to the Other which brings them into existence as something other than a them, a truly particular them devoid of the non-determinative qualities that aggregate them into such-and-such a group, and all it takes is a look.

Like The Underground Man, or The Invisible Man, or Santosh, Bee does not end up satisfied or enriched because of their rejection. The aspiration to not be categorized can only be accomplished by explicit deception, first schematized by a Rachel Dolezal-like figure, a ‘race grifter,’ Bee’s roommate Zamira (really Bethany, a white woman). That schema is transposed onto the assumption of many identities by Bee, ‘ragebaiting’ and creating the impression of semi-legitimate grievances by misrepresenting themselves as multiple distinct individuals on social media. None of this works to relieve Bee of their “diseased inner life” (231), a sickness that afflicts all the characters across this novel but may also be “the most humanizing thing about” (215) each of them. Bee says in their final accounting:

Understand this is no confession. I never got the point of online apologies, this notion that you’re accountable to strangers who aren’t affected and maybe wouldn’t have even known of your offense, had you not apologized. I guess we feel responsible to the image of ourselves we’ve installed in other people’s heads. But real accountability requires a community. Online you can meet people, hang out, hook up, meet your soulmate, but it’s not a community. In a real community bonds are hard to dissolve and antagonisms must be sustained, there’s continuity, and unavoidable neighbors. The internet is millions of solitudes blinking in and out of existence, each dreaming the others, where “consensus reality” is less an agreed-upon reality than a reality made of agreement. With identity it’s the same—this idea that a checkbox on a form is a service tunnel to a stranger’s soul. People will always fall for it.
It’s a mistake to believe social media is all about hearts and thumbs, flames and eggplants. If everyone were only trying to be liked then it’d be kinder, and way more boring. But discourse is loneliness disguised as war. What people there really want is to be perceived on their own terms, which is so, so funny. Because if the grand promise of the internet was to be whoever you want, in reality it will make of you whatever it wants, and beneath every mask is another mask mistaken for a face. (231-232)

The final move by Tulathimutte, by way of Bee, is to contend even the confession is a half-truth, one out of many (2³⁰) variations of this story generated by a language model trained on the concrete facts:

I cannot be represented in any way I haven’t already represented myself (though my larger point of course is that everyone alive is a misrepresentation). In my apotheosis from human to spam, I’ve ensured that the facts—which do exist—are spread over billions of iterations and perfectly unverifiable. This is what’s been keeping me busy as I look for the next place to be no one. (233)

There is no victory or escape here, as the anonymous commentariat says regarding Bee’s story, presented as an online post:

we can appreciate the classical irony of Bee’s retreat to the internet to escape the prison of identity, only to institute another one. Or how the account of someone who wanted to end the practice of identifying with others might move someone to identify with them. (Or as them.) (242)

Bee’s state of individuation, such that it exists, leaves them as impoverished, vulnerable, precarious, and uncertain as the frustrating interpellation into identitarian categories might have. The founding texts of existentialism, too, have always built into themselves this cautionary fatalism. One must reject the crowd, but not to alleviate their suffering. They will only exacerbate it.

Tulathimutte writes a remarkable novel in Rejection, one that revitalizes the tradition of existential novels and short stories more than its ostensible post-modern formalism. Rejection includes forum posts, letters, emails, group texts, meta-fictional flourishes (Tulathimutte is a bit character in his own work), and frequent allusions. Even with a character named Kant, references to Marcuse and Deleuze, Tulathimutte omits the most obvious rosetta stone for making sense of his text. This is a convention of modernism or realism rather than post-modernism. Withhold. Let the reader figure it out. Let the reader invent the meaning. Such a withholding mirrors the structure of Rejection’s static plot with the climactic moments excised or deferred.

Critical reactions, and even Tulathimutte’s own self-description, suggest that the foibles of the characters are what open up the ability for the audience to distance themselves from these characters. When Craig falls into a right wing rabbit hole, when Alison melts down at a wedding or berates her fair-weather friends, when Kant discloses a repulsive, cartoonish sexual fantasy, or when Bee farms engagement with bot accounts and online social justice false flags,2 these are the moments when we reject the characters; when we look at them and go “they might have seemed like me, but now I know I could never be as messed up as they are.” Leah Abrams makes this case in her Interview Magazine discussion with Tulathimutte, “you take these pitiful characters and you don’t let them remain objects of sympathy.” Tulathimutte tacitly endorses this reading in the London Magazine interview:

When you see somebody trip and fall, it’s like, ‘ha ha ha, I’m better than that’. And that makes me think of cringe. It’s this kind of meeting ground between these almost opposed forces where you have to be empathetic enough to put yourself in that position, but also, have the distance of laughing at another person’s misfortune. And the tension between the two is unstable. I think that it actually accounts for a lot of the response I’ve seen to the book already, which is that people almost disavow it at the same time that they praise it. Jia Tolentino’s review said something like, ‘I didn’t know I could have such a good time reading about a bunch of huge fucking losers.’ There’s this sort of recoil or distancing from the subject matter because there’s something in us that makes us want to not fully associate ourselves or relate, even if we do relate on some level.

He even builds this reading into the text itself, in the somewhat poor concluding chapter “Re: Rejection,” a faux-rejection letter of the book from an imaginary, anonymous publisher criticizing Kant, the protagonist of “The Ballad of Sexual Repression”:

This resemblance might trick some readers into believing you’re putting more of your personal experience into him—Wow, maybe the author had a rough time too, and maybe this is his way of processing it, poor guy! But in our reading, this special treatment is a bit of “leverage” to help get away with the ending, which, with its flagrant and prolix obscenity, feels like a punch line at the reader’s expense, punishing us for being fool enough to care about the character, not to mention running a heavy risk of playing on stigmatizing tropes of homosexuality as deviant or degenerate. (251-252)

I don’t think these critics are getting the book right, nor are Tulathimutte’s imagined publishers. Even if this is what Tulathimutte might intend, the book chafes against this assertion. The more reliable ‘speaker’ that captures the essence of the novel is Bee, not these anonymous publishers. They put it best, “only to later be taken down for hideous indiscretions that were ultimately the most humanizing thing about you” (215). For Rejection, it’s true. I felt compassion for these characters most deeply in their moments of disgusting, destructive self-exposure. I don’t think it’s just me. The novel presents their low moments with remarkable clarity and following strictly from the moments which do resemble human life, which make painful sense of the sometimes heinous actions of the characters. Even, to some degree, the pathetic protagonist of “Our Dope Future,” who seems prima facie to be the most shallow, archetypal character of Tulathimutte’s novel. But that chapter is also the funniest. Like Kant (the character), this would-be entrepreneur is sympathetic because of how profoundly naive he is about what would bring him happiness. As complete and detailed as each of these characters’ fantasies might be, their fulfillment would never relieve them of the pain that drove them to fantasize in the first place. Thus, desire’s perpetual metonymy.

Rejection is a remarkable archive of the bizarre social structures, conventions, and ideas that have produced various “disease inner [lives]” which make obvious the timeliness of existential ideas. As the internet lingo, cultural references, and caricatures fade from collective memory, the ideas of alienation, uncertainty of the Other, and the evasiveness of happiness are what will endure. As constrained to the contemporary is it might seem, my guess is Rejection is timeless.

Weekly Reading List

Yeah, they got me watching Big3 highlights of the Boston Ball Hogs. Spoilers: Boston might still be a basketball champion this year.

I learned a lot from this video.

https://readonlymemo.com/linda-cube-again-explained-fan-translation-interview/ — There are still horizons of enthusiast knowledge I have yet to reach. One of those is the game Linda Cube (1995), which I learned about this weekend.

Event Calendar: Mini-Marathons

Added the upcoming GDQ showcase at Gamescom to the event calendar. I’ll be watching something, at least.

Also, you can see where The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026) is playing near you: https://samuraiandtheprisoner.film/buy-tickets. It’s good. I’ll probably write about it next week.

Until next time.

This weekend, I dressed like an NBA prospect on draft night.

What was the occasion? My great friends Jack and Emily got married. Huge congratulations to them. Sometimes good things happen.

Incision Scars and Unexpected Encounters in Tubi Original Match

There is a well-established repository of under-the-radar horror films for in the know enthusiasts. No, I’m not talking about Shudder or Screambox. The place that houses the most obscure, most shocking non-theatrical horror films is none other than Tubi.

This isn’t the first coverage of Tubi in Paradox. Back in 2022, I interviewed The Final Rose director Tim Cruz and wrote about his Tubi Original film.

The Final Rose remains, as far as I can tell, among the best original films ever licensed under the Tubi Original banner. But there are plenty more where this came from, ranging from horrendous to reasonably good.

This past weekend, I watched Danishka Esterhazy’s Match (2025), a film unique enough to deserve some high-minded theorizing. Match has all the hallmarks of ‘microfilmmaking.’ Being housed on Tubi, it is ignominiously punctuated with commercials. My friend Ronnie suggested one early scene was “filmed like a pharmaceutical ad,” an astute observation. The idea of “trash cinema,” the kind of salacious exploitation film that is most likely to screen at midnight in repertory theaters across the world, is a well-established pop and academic film critical term. Match is something else entirely. It’s film crawling out of the junkyard.

The premise of Match is not particularly novel. Humberly González plays Paola, a dating app power user looking to swipe right on love. Instead, she ends up the victim of a predator; misrepresenting himself online to attract women to his large, disgusting home. Match has sustained a number of comparisons to Zach Cregger’s Barbarian (2022); a remarkably facile assessment of similarity. The two films have virtually nothing in common, although there seems to be the same kind of liberal-progressive social justice ideology permeating both to some degree. Just as Justin Long’s AJ uncomfortably embodies the essence of rape culture, Paola suffers through endless mispronounced names, racist remarks from potential suitors, and various indignities based on her race and ethnicity. Other characters are mocked for their weight and appearance, something which the film clearly positions as immoral.

But Match can hardly be called a moral film. In fact, the film is so full of obscene and horrifying incidents, I wouldn’t even summarize a vast majority of the plot in writing anywhere. It’s not a film for the faint of heart. I encountered it with no such preparation or knowledge of what Match would contain. The fact of the matter is, you can just navigate to this film on Tubi and click play without any warnings or additional steps given the film’s content. It is a repulsive, disgusting work of cinema so extreme that the point of interest of the film cannot be the individual instances it contains, but the broader filmic container that houses circumstances committed to narrative film only rarely.

Remarkable as the film is, Danishka Esterhazy, the director, becomes my first point of analysis to understand how this film might’ve come to be. The only other film of her’s I’ve seen is Slumber Party Massacre (2021), a serviceable and moralistic revenge fable of women menaced by a stalker. Match abandons the pretext of progressivism for repellent shock value, whereas Slumber Party Massacre maintains its ethical positioning to its conclusion. The difference, then, cannot be Esterhazy’s helming of both and instead could involve the distinct screenwriters. For Slumber Party Massacre, Suzanne Keilly handles sole writing duties. Keilly is best known for Warrior Nun (2020) and Ash vs. Evil Dead (2015). Match is written by Jon and Al Kaplan, two equally inexperienced film writers better known as composers for the Terrifier series. The film makes clear something is wrong with these guys.

Keilly’s contributions to Slumber Party Massacre ultimately make the end result something actually resembling a normal movie. The Kaplans are not able to do the same when it comes to Match, for better or for worse. It is ugly, meanspirited, and punitive to its characters likely in the way either the Kaplans or Esterhazy intended. The obscenity it presents comes at the cost of any subtlety whatsoever. To put this another way, and to avoid narrating things that I’m sure are painfully obvious to anyone who has seen the film, what Match represents in its text are usually ideas relegated to a film’s subtext and not depicted on screen.

While Production Code-era film does not have a monopoly on sublimation, substitution, and metaphor, there are any manner of clever evasions of the strict regulations in the four-ish decades Hollywood was subject to the Hays Code.

Contrasting a Product Code-era film like Gilda (1946) with the delimited signification of Match helps elucidate Jacques Lacan’s oft-quoted aphorism, ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’ (Seminar III 11). Arguing for his claim in more detail, he writes in “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire”:

the unconscious is governed, correspond exactly to the functions this school of linguistics believes determine the most radical axes of the effects of language, namely metaphor and metonymy—in other words, the effects of the substitution and combination of signifiers in the synchronic and diachronic dimensions, respectively, in which they appear in discourse. (Écrits 676-677)

The crucial point is that the unconscious, following Freud, utilizes these mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy in its rendering of signifiers. He draws out metonymy’s meaning and function in more detail in “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious”:

It is among the figures of style, or tropes—from which the verb “to find” [trouver] comes to us—that this name is, in fact, found. This name is metonymy.

I shall refer only to the example of it given there: “thirty sails.” For the worry I felt, over the fact that the word “ship” [bateau] that was hiding therein seemed to split its presence there in two by having been able to borrow its fig urative sense from the very rehashing of this example, veiled [voilait] not so much those illustrious sails [voiles] as the definition they were supposed to illustrate.

The part taken for the whole—I said to myself, if the thing is supposed to be based on reality [réel]—leaves us with hardly any idea what we are to conclude about the size of the fleet these thirty sails are nevertheless supposed to gauge: for a ship to have but one sail is very rare indeed.

This shows that the connection between ship and sail is nowhere other than in the signifier, and that metonymy is based on the word-to-word nature of this connection.

I shall designate as metonymy the first aspect of the actual field the signifier constitutes, so that meaning may assume a place there. (Écrits 421)

He goes on, contrasting metaphor and metonymy:

But to return to metonymy now, what does man find in it, if it must be more than the power to skirt the obstacles of social censure? Doesn't this form, which gives oppressed truth its field, manifest a certain servitude that is inherent in its presentation? (Écrits 423)

In short, an underrated quotation from Lacan that has not yet reached the status of aphorism, “the letter kills while the spirit gives life” (Écrits 423).

Match’s flaw is the deadening effect of the letter. Because it represents things explicitly, shocking though it might be, it fails to access the horizons of imagination and symbolic meaning that “skirt the obstacles of social censure” that occurs when using substitution or subtext. Match has full frontal nudity while Gilda has only Mundson’s cane. It is absolutely indisputable which is richer and more expressive.

As much as Match’s explicitness marks it as unique, it condemns it to the shlock pile not simply because it is obscene, but because the attempt to present the unmediated image results in an image beneath consideration. Cinema of the junkyard may often shock and have particular points of intrigue. But to the extent these works adopt the blunt hammer of the obvious, they will fail to transcend the disfigurement that indelibly marks them — the cutting for the insertion of the advertisement.

Weekly Reading List

Good music. In Boston September 16th.

Big dog link up.

This movie looks spectacular.

Event Calendar: Secret Events

I smuggled an event in the above section. Did you catch that? The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026) has opened at select megaplexes nationwide, including my local AMC. I’ll be seeing it tomorrow.

Until next time.

Eventually my two issue series on The Odyssey (2026) had to come to an end. Now, as is the newsletter’s beat (big budget films) I must turn my attention to the next big thing: Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026).

Kidding. I wrote about Seijun Suzuki this week. You think he could break box office records with the right promotion?

Other brief news items:

I would like to know if anyone’s local library system has a copy of this brief book on Suzuki, Branded to Thrill (1995) by Simon Field and Tony Rayns.

Discotek Media has a lot of Kamen Rider right now, including the recent announcement of Kamen Rider Super 1 (1980).

A church in Tallahassee has this sign up.

McDonald’s Japan is selling a ramune flavored shake by way of the Morinaga ramune candy.

The missing Rai Rai Rai (2023) chapters got backfilled on Viz. Not the Viz manga I chose to put in the weekly reading list, but it’s good.

Devotees of Style: Seijun Suzuki, Suda51, and Atsushi Kaneko

What is it that makes Killer7 (2005) so distinctive? It goes far beyond the normal aesthetic and design flourishes of Goichi Suda, otherwise known as Suda51. The plot of the game involves a group of eight assassins all residing within the body of the elderly Harman Smith (Dwight Schultz). With “Multifoliate Personae Phenomenon,” he can physically transform into one of seven different personalities — each a fellow assassin whom Harman himself killed.1 It also involves monstrous Heaven Smile terrorist organization, global conspiracy, and geopolitical conflict between the United States and Japan.

The plot is absurd and surreal, matched by the visuals and supporting cast with idiosyncratic names and behaviors. Killer7 is a bizarre amalgamation of David Lynch, Kinji Fukasaku, and Alan J. Pakula. But there are very few works that capture what this unquestionably unique sensibility becomes when executed by Suda51.

A more all-encompassing influence of Killer7 and Suda’s subsequent work No More Heroes (2007), is director Seijun Suzuki. Branded to Kill (1967), especially, seems to the film to which Suda51 is most indebted. If Killer7 is the apotheosis of the Suda51 style, the counterpart for Suzuki is Branded to Kill.

There are obvious similarities between the two, including the surreal visuals, the juxtaposition between absurdist comedy and profoundly dark elements, and the overall plot.

Similarities between the rhythm of the plot and even patterns of character speech are more subtle. Suda51 seems to borrow the repetitive phrasing for his supporting cast from corresponding characters in Branded to Kill, like Gihei Kasuga’s (Hiroshi Minami) lamentations of formerly being a pro assassin.

Killer7 and Branded to Kill share the dubious honor of critical and commercial disappointment. Nikkatsu studio head Kyūsaku Hori fired Suzuki in 1968, following the release of Branded, seemingly with great personal animus. Hori repeatedly called Suzuki’s films “incomprehensible” and suggested “Suzuki should open a noodle shop or something instead” (Miyao 194). Daisuke Miyao claims in “Dark Visions of Japanese Film Noir” (2007) that Branded to Kill is, in part, “a social critique of rapid urbanization”; “Tokyo’s dirty, vulgar, and filthy things became hidden beneath an apparently clean surface” (197). The film moors protagonist Goro Hanada (Joe Shishido) in a disorienting world of uncertainty and repression. Whatever Hanada himself exposes by, for instance, his libidinal obsession with cooking rice, is incompatible with the world of the film that seeks to sand away these rough edges.

The disordered position Hanada occupies, and the fact that Branded itself is dismissed as “incomprehensible,” put them on the side of the negative surplus that anatomized by Lee Edelman in No Future (2004):

The drive — more exactly, the death drive — holds a privileged place in this book. As the constancy of a pressure both alien and internal to the logic of the Symbolic, as the inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within, the death drive names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability. (9)

He goes on:

The drive holds the place of what meaning misses in much the same way that the signifier preserves at the heart of the signifying order the empty and arbitrary letter, the meaningless substrate of signification that meaning intends to conceal. (10)

If Branded and Killer7 are dismissed as incomprehensible works, it is precisely because they attempt to excavate that intractable something which is concealed by the organization of meaning. Their disparagement or dismissal is a structural necessity in the logic of the Symbolic order which excludes by its very function (102). Edelman writes, contra Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim (2000):

Butler’s reading thus buries Antigone once more — or buries in her the sinthomosexual who refuses intelligibility’s mandate and the correlative economy that regulates what is “legitimate and recognizable.” Just as the law in North by Northwest is compelled to get rid of Leonard, so Butler’s reading expels the Antigone who turns no face to the future but takes heart to the meaning of her name, “construed as ‘anti-generational’” (22). (105)

Extending this analogy further, one can look to the Japanese idiom: deru kui wa utareru or “the nail that sticks out gets hammered hammered.”

Manga artist Atsushi Kaneko uses his own variation on the phrase in Deathco (2014), “the overgrown plant is cut down.”

This manga by Kaneko is another definitively similar work following Killer7 and Branded to Kill. Despite the aesthetic and plot similarities, Kaneko gives no credit to Suda51. In a Q&A session hosted by Frederico Anzalone, an audience member asked Kaneko about a possible chain of influence to which Kaneko replied, “Sorry, I don’t play video games. I don’t know him at all.” By contrast, Kaneko venerates Suzuki’s role in influencing Deathco, “I was really inspired by Suzuki’s Branded to Kill, it’s a really weird movie that I liked a lot, and it inspired me for this manga.”

When all is said and done, the style for which Suda51 is celebrated has its roots in Suzuki’s work. Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter, among Suzuki’s other “incomprehensible” films, mark him as exceptional among his peers. So much so that Suzuki sued Nikkatsu Studio in the wake of his 1968 firing, supported with widespread protests including luminary filmmakers and university film societies. Suzuki’s work is still standing and his peculiar worldview inhabits radical art across mediums.

Weekly Reading List

https://www.viz.com/golgo-13 — It is time for you to go on the internet and read Golgo 13 (1968).

Has there ever been a musicological account of the “Snow Halation” phenomenon?

Event Calendar: Kiyoshi Kurosawa is Back

Added some local screenings for The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026) as well as a few other exciting nationwide engagements.

Until next time.

It’s pretty rare that I write about the same movie two weeks in a row. The cultural gravity The Odyssey (2026) exerts is impossible to escape. And it’s not so much the film itself that interests me as much as the critical response and how critics treat adapted works. That is a perennial focus for the newsletter that is crystalizing in the remarkable reaction to Nolan’s latest.

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Now back to your regularly scheduled cultural criticism.

André Bazin, Stuart Hall, and Christopher Nolan

If there is a summary logic of the way Paradox Newsletter looks at adaptation, it is simply that an artist has no obligation to the work they are adapting whatsoever.

Among the examples that make this principle obvious and indisputable are André Malraux’s Espoir (1945), Yukio Mishima’s Patriotism (1966), Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987), or Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988). These are, of course, examples where the author of the original text serves as director for the film adaptation. Thus, none would begrudge the venerated original author amending or altering their work. André Bazin writes extensively about Malraux’s film as an exemplary of adaptation in “André Malraux, Espoir, or Style in Cinema” (1945):

Despite its fidelity to the book for which not even the adapters of Henry Bordeaux’s novels could be criticized, Espoir remains, but for a few reservations, as deeply original as the book … For [Malraux], this is not an adaptation but two creations, engaging him equally. (André Bazin on Adaptation 62-63)

One can imagine such praise lavished on any adapting author, whether they share authorship of the source text and the adapting text. Why shouldn’t any director be given the same agency? The reverence for accurate adaptations emerges coincident with their frequency in cinema, according to Bazin. In “Cinema and Novel” (1954), he addresses the question of ‘fidelity’ to the adapted text:

With Aurenche and Bost, who adapted this and so many novels for cinema, a new concern emerges: respect for the original as a criterion of a film’s value. (84)

Bazin goes on:

This ambition has fairly often elicited skeptical remarks from literary critics as well as from many film critics. The former, always considering cinema with more or less unmasked condescension, claim, and with some degree of truth, that in the best cases the finesse of language, its intellectual and poetic subtleties, are untranslatable to the screen. The more benevolent critics deign to acknowledge that cinema may have considerable powers but that these are of another order: in any event, literary energy could at best be very partially converted to images, and only when at its most banal. They therefore agree with those film critics, partisans of “pure cinema,” who worry about the perils to the screen posed by the temptations of the novel almost as much as those posed by the theater. Borrowing from literature is for them ultimately just a stopgap in the absence of good screenplays. (85)

Ultimately, though, he remains suspicious of the notion of fidelity not because he reveres the unique powers of the novel, but because there is a different axis of cinematic evaluation: quality. Bazin writes:

fidelity does not, in itself, ensure cinematic quality, and we gladly lauded Aurenche and Bost precisely for their ability to take great liberties with their transposition so long as these liberties did not appear to degrade the original too much.

It is clear, then, following from Bazin, that if one is evaluating an adapted work, one may evaluate the axes of “fidelity” and “cinematic quality” separately. A great film’s greatness is fundamentally unrelated to the strictness with which it adapts the source text. Even Bazin’s qualifying statement of liberties which “did not appear to degrade the original too much” proposes a minimum standard of relation to the source material even as exceeding that minimum does not make the film any better. In some cases, it might make it worse.

The same year as “Cinema and the Novel,” François Truffaut would also take up the work of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost in “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema.” Unlike Bazin, though, Truffaut looks at the work of Aurenche and Bost with disdain if only because the duo, in Truffaut’s view, “look down on the cinema because they undervalue it” (The French New Wave 46). Far from embracing Aurenche and Bost’s “celebrated process of equivalence” (43), Truffaut’s picked bone is the question of the unfilmable. He believes the idea of the unfilmable scene is a disparagement of cinema and rejects it outright, “I am by no means convinced that a novel can contain unfilmable scenes, and even less so that scenes decreed to be unfilmable are unfilmable by any director” (43). In other words, the right director for the right adaptation renders all of the source material “filmable.”

Truffaut’s ultimate argument is not in favor of painstakingly accurate adaptation, but against the titular cinematic tendency of supposed ‘psychological realism.’ Aurenche and Bost’s screenwriting, and their “water[ed] down” adaptations (47), embody this tendency. Their ‘equivalence’ (substitution of a new film scene in place of an ‘unfilmable’ segment of the source text), “always tends to encourage betrayal or timidity” (47). Truffaut’s final damning charge is of formulaic repetition that divests from the auteur their particularity (56-57).

How can Truffaut possibly critique divergences from the source text on the one hand but on the other hope that auteurs embrace a more particular kind of filmmaking and avoid repetitive formulas with the alibi of realism (one of Truffaut’s subheadings: “Psychological realism, neither real nor psychological [50])? Like the “partisans of pure cinema” that Bazin describes, Truffaut is not prescriptive about how one adapts, “[b]orrowing from literature is … ultimately just a stopgap in the absence of good screenplays” (Bazin on Adaptation 85). Though Truffaut’s point is well taken, adherence to a derivative formula is not a good reason to make changes to source material from which one adapts, the more salient point is Bazin’s regarding cinematic quality. Evaluating an adaptation based on its fidelity is a different normative exercise than qualitative evaluation or even hermeneutic analysis.

I am hardly systematic in my qualitative evaluation of films, although I try to be systematic in my hermeneutic analysis. But my critical framework borrows from both Bazin and Truffaut. I consider a film’s cinematic quality and adaptational fidelity separately. Generally, though, the poorer I find a film, the more divergences from the source material seem egregious, unjustifiable, and offensive. There is little worse a film can be than boring, uncreative, and thoughtlessly (or thoughtfully — in service to market demands) derivative. In that sense, I am following the logic of Truffaut’s critique.

Stuart Hall creates the formulation of “conventionalization” that helps elaborate the nuances of Truffaut’s condemnation of the tendency toward the misnamed “psychological realism.” Hall takes as his subject TV westerns, which he describes as having a “clear-cut, good/bad Manichean moral universe … [a] clear social and moral designation of villain and hero … [and a] clearly-registered climax in the violent shoot-out, chase, personal show-down, street or bar-room duel” (Writings on Media 251-252). He goes on:

a set of extremely tightly-coded rules exist whereby stories of a certain recognizable type, content and structure can be easily encoded within the Western form. What is more, these “rules of encoding” were so diffused, so symmetrically shared as between producer and audience, that the “message” was likely to be decoded in a manner highly symmetrical to that in which it had been encoded. This reciprocity of codes is, indeed, precisely what is entailed in the notion of stylization or “conventionalization,” and the presence of such reciprocal codes is, of course, what defines or makes possible the existence of a genre. (252)

While Hall is discussing the ‘original’ (non-adapted) artistic output within certain genre-forms, one can easily see that the propagation of such codes when adapting a work present a risk of “conventionalization” that would make Truffaut shudder. Simply put, the prevalence of genre-forms can shape what seems to be possible when adapting a work from one medium to another. An “unfilmable” scene from a novel may seem unfilmable only when thinking within the horizon of established cinematic genres. Truffaut suggests a truly inventive, unconstrained director could bring any source material to the screen with appropriate reverence for the source material.

All of this is in service of a better understanding of an as-yet unmentioned work: The Odyssey (2026) and its relation to its Homeric source material. I discussed the incomparable Daniel Mendelsohn’s critiques last week. Over the past week, I read Richard Brody’s review for The New Yorker and Emily Wilson’s exhaustive excoriation of Nolan’s film for the London Review of Books. Both Brody and Wilson make some reasonable points. Brody extends my criticism of the film’s ending to the broader characterization of Odysseus:

Psychologizing Odysseus like this lends “The Odyssey” a readily digestible modernity—ancient Greeks, they’re just like us!—but does so at the expense of the richness of detail and societal complexity that makes reading Homer such a vital and immediate experience.

Brody follows Truffaut, here, as I do. From Brody’s perspective, some of the vital richness is lost becaause of Nolan’s ultimate structural analogy between ancient Greek culture and contemporary culture. I am less convinced, though, that there is not some of the arresting, alien quality to the obsessive fascination with “Zeus’s law.” Likewise, I would argue such a preoccupation by the film reflects some degree of accuracy in reproducing Homer’s Odyssey’s (8th Century BC) themes.

One of Brody’s silliest points, though, is his opening gambit that one of Nolan’s greatest failings is the “pervasive absence” of the gods. Wilson agrees, mocking the film as small because of its failure to include “real gods” along with a few extended riffs on missing “notable sequences” with little argument regarding their significance. There is a whole paragraph in Wilson’s review dedicated to the absence of Odysseus’s deception of the cyclops. Is this truly the best these critics can do? Complain about excluded details like a gasping Marvel movie fan overly excited by easter eggs and cameos? It’s no accident that both the Marvel Cinematic Universe commentator Eric Voss and many of the supposedly urbane maligners of Nolan’s Odyssey lament the absence of Achilles.

Some of these critics signal their intellectual superiority by claiming they do not watch or care for film. Only the epic cultural event of Nolan adapting Homer could motivate them to leave their fire-lit cave and watch their first ever movie. Their unfamiliarity, disinterest, and disdain for the medium is obvious when complaining about some of the most routine exigencies of cross-medium adaptation. That: or here we encounter the omnipresent specter of bait. If you translated the Odyssey, if you’re a scholar of ancient Greece, this is probably the most attention you’ll ever get. But this deluge of condemnation is embarrassing.

What is uniform among these critics, even the venerable Richard Brody, is their insistence that the film is worse for its departures from Homer. But the critics are far from having done enough to substantiate why their version of fastidious adaptation is preferable to the choices Nolan makes in service of accuracy. Nolan’s accuracy, however, is certainty more “faithful to the spirit” rather than “faithful to the letter” (Truffaut 41). The most substantive divergence is his attempt to make his Odyssey a contemporary moral fable.

I hate to be defending Nolan’s The Odyssey. I would take Tenet (2020) or The Dark Knight (2008) or Memento (2000) or even maybe Insomnia (2002) over The Odyssey any day of the week. But what the wave of high-minded Nolan criticism reveals more than anything is the failure of most of its critics to address the question of adaptation as such. For them, The Odyssey is an artistic failure because it omits and transforms elements of Homer’s original epic. For the slings and arrows of these critics to pierce the storied corpus of Nolan, they must bring more than a laundry list of omissions.

Weekly Reading List

This week, I’m trying something a little different. My reading list includes the various material I read for this newsletter issue, including stuff I didn’t cite. A few earlier issues of the newsletter are included.

Bazin, André. André Bazin on Adaptation: Cinema’s Literary Imagination. Edited by Dudley Andrew, Translated by Deborah N. Glassman and Nataša Ďurovičová, University of California Press, 2022.

———. Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews From the Forties and Fifties. Edited by Bert Cardullo, Taylor and Francis, 2014.

———. What Is Cinema? Vol. I. Translated by Hugh Gray, University of California Press, 2004.

———. What Is Cinema? Vol. II. Translated by Hugh Gray, University of California Press, 2004.

Brody, Richard. “‘The Odyssey’ Movie Review.” The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/07/27/the-odyssey-christopher-nolan-movie-review. Accessed 27 July 2026.

Graham, Peter, and Ginette Vincendeau, editors. The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks. Second edition, British Film Institute, 2022. K10plus ISBN, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781839022333.

Hall, Stuart. Writings on Media: History of the Present. Edited by Charlotte Brunsdon, Duke University Press, 2021. Stuart Hall: Selected Writings.

Rivera, Miguel. “Issue #194: Dune? Don’t.” Email Newsletter. Paradox Newsletter, 26 Oct. 2021, https://www.paradoxnewsletter.com/p/issue-194-dune-dont.

———. “Issue #316: American Contradiction.” Email Newsletter. Paradox Newsletter, 27 Feb. 2024, https://www.paradoxnewsletter.com/p/issue-316-american-contradiction.

———. “Issue #396: Can We Get Much Higher? Spike Lee and Denzel Washington Say ‘Yes.’” Email Newsletter. Paradox Newsletter, 9 Sept. 2025, https://www.paradoxnewsletter.com/p/issue-396-can-we-get-much-higher.

Wilson, Emily. “An Uncomplicated Man.” Review of The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan. London Review of Books, vol. 48, no. 14, 27 July 2026. www.lrb.co.uk, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n14/emily-wilson/an-uncomplicated-man.

Event Calendar: Sci-Fi Summer

The Brattle has added a ton of amazing 1950s sci-fi programming through the end of the summer. If I could, I’d see every one of these screenings.

Until next time.

Here are some questions that have been plaguing me lately:

• Just how much relatively unknown new jack swing is out there?

• Why do all the X-Men hate Xavier in Jed Mackay’s 2024 run (mentioned two issues ago)?

• What grip does the ‘refresher’ drink branding have on the U.S. beverage purchasing populous?

• When will the probiotic soda trend end?

• How did The Varukers get so underrated?

Re: question one, there is both the thrill of discovering new music that is seemingly endless within this genre and the anxiety that something truly great will go undiscovered.

Re: question five, I’m willing to bet even if you are a Varukers fan you are not listening to this song on the regular

Kinda sounds like Warzone, interpolates lyrics from old songs. The song was “Nothings Changed” on the titular 1994 EP, then inexplicably “Nothing Changed” when re-released on No Masters No Slaves (2007). This also happens a lot with them. This song is “Protest and Survive” some places, “Protest To Survive” others:

Still one of the best ever.

Authorial Intent, Adaptational Fidelity, and Anachronistic Sentiment in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

What is the key to appreciating Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026)? It certainly is not the aspect ratio or projection medium, despite all of the debate about 70mm IMAX screenings. I will remind the Paradox readers that all the reverence to an assumed artistic intent on the part of Nolan, that he believes all viewers should watch the film in 70mm IMAX, is only six years removed from Nolan’s explicit artistic intent reduced to a punch line. Promoting Tenet (2020), Nolan attested to CineEurope:

I think of all the films that I’ve made, this is perhaps the one that is most designed for the audience experience, the big screen experience. This is a film whose image and sound really needs to be enjoyed in your theaters on the big screen and we’re very very excited for you to see what it is we’ve done. We’ve made big films in the past, but this is a film whose global reach and level of action is beyond anything we’ve ever attempted before.

Tenet indeed released in theaters, despite vociferous criticism that Nolan and Warner Bros. insistence on theatrical exclusivity endangered moviegoers, risking exposure to COVID-19.

Rather than adjudicate the morality of Tenet’s release, I point only to widespread audience appetite to watch Tenet via streaming video:

Nolan’s stock as a professional director has never been lower than post-Tenet. Certainly we remember these gags:

And yet, somehow, the simple fact of Nolan having used IMAX cameras and 70mm IMAX film for The Odyssey means it must be seen in this exclusive projection format.

The panic and consternation have given way to satirical comparison posts and engagement bait that supposedly illustrate the gulf between IMAX 70mm projections and other formats.

To any who are worked up into a lather by this overstated and misrepresented difference: get a grip. I like going to the movie theater more than most, but any movie worth watching is worth watching almost anywhere.1

The Translators’ Consensus

Putting aside projection formats, I can turn to interpreting The Odyssey. Before sharing my interpretation, one might appreciate consulting the oracles. Hillel Italie quotes Odyssey (8th Century BC) translator Emily Wilson in her hit piece for Associated Press:

Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said she didn’t want to come across as a “snobby,” nitpicking expert at odds with any deviation from the original text. But she questioned a range of omissions and other choices, from the absence on screen of the Gods Zeus and Poseidon (Athena is played by Zendaya ) to the “incoherent” messaging that condemns both war and physical cowardice. She found Penelope’s role so thinned out that it endangered “any possibility of believing in this marriage.” Wilson also that thought parts of the movie, notably the scenes with Odysseus’ dog, Argos, “catered towards modern sentimentality.”

Daniel Mendelsohn, my favorite Odyssey translator, also gives an unfavorable review of Nolan’s interpretation for The New York Review of Books. He writes:

it is in the end a mixed bag: at once a vehicle for the director’s virtues and, as with The Return, a case study of the weaknesses inherent in attempting to modernize a work many of whose values remain, for all its timelessness, stubbornly archaic.

Ever the clever one, a writer in the tradition of the cunning Odysseus, Mendelsohn uses a critique of the Odyssey by Aristotle as a through-line:

the storyline of the Odyssey is not long. A man has been away from his homeland for many years, and Poseidon is always on the watch for him, and he is all alone. Meanwhile, the situation at home is such that his wealth is being consumed by the Suitors, who are plotting against his son. But after a storm-tossed journey he returns, and after revealing himself and attacking them is saved and destroys his enemies. That is the essential; everything else is episodes.

Curiously, though, Mendelsohn does not return to the Aristotelian critique at the end of his piece. It’s through-line rather than framing device. The reason for this is Mendelsohn’s disagreement with Aristotle, for him the episodes are the point of the Odyssey even as the plot boils down to such a simple summary. Mendelsohn appreciates Nolan’s treatment of these episodes, even if he quibbles regarding which episodes are included.

Southern (Greek) Hospitality

Some of the criticisms of Wilson and Mendelsohn are justified and savvy. Wilson points out Penelope’s minor presence in Nolan’s film. Mendelsohn rightly observes that The Odyssey fits into Nolan’s oeuvre as one among many, calling Matt Damon’s Odysseus “tormented” and “guilt ridden,” “a sibling of Memento’s anguished amnesiac, of Batman, of Oppenheimer, men agonized by pasts they wrestle with in different ways.” But most of their critiques are more confusing than condemning. What, exactly, is particularly “incoherent” about Nolan’s Odyssey, as Wilson posits? To what degree has Nolan “imposed on Odysseus’s adventures values utterly foreign to Homer”?

If The Odyssey had been poorly received, like Tenet, I imagine Nolan’s repeated evocations of “Zeus’s law” would be the meme du jour to mock the film. It does the concept no favors that it first hits the audience’s ears awkwardly, courtesy of a truly awful performance from Tom Holland as Telemachus. Nonetheless, Zeus’s law is hardly an invention of Nolan’s or a presentist hijacking of Homer’s original. Mendelsohn himself writes in his introduction to the Odyssey:

Because its hero is a wanderer who often finds himself at the mercy of those he encounters, the Odyssey shows a deep and ongoing interest in hospitality: the treatment of strangers, foreigners, and wanderers, the proper relationship between hosts and guests. Such relations, a matter of urgent importance in the society that produced the Iliad and the Odyssey, were subject to a set of protocols known as xenia … Such protocols mandated, among other things, that households—whether kings or slaves—offer food and shelter to any stranger who appeared on their doorstep
…
The elaborate courtesies of xenia forbid hosts even from asking the names of their guests until a proper welcome had been provided. Guests would, in time, be sent off with a gift and were expected to reciprocate when the opportunity presented itself—a reminder that xenia always assumed an eventual reciprocation. In the real world, such reciprocity was a matter of practicality: in an age when travel was a perilous affair, travelers had to be able to rely on some kind of system that at least temporarily guaranteed their safety. Small wonder, then, that proper adherence to the protocols of xenia was considered a religious obligation and came under the jurisdiction of no less a deity than Zeus himself[.] (17)

The critical importance of hospitality or xenia is neither a controversial nor novel view of Homer’s Odyssey. But the one-hundred-and-eight suitors, with Antinous (Robert Pattinson in a performance apiece with Holland’s; horrendous) leading them, behave like the masses of Mother! (2017) with the malice of the sadistic home invaders of Funny Games (1997). The Odyssey, Homer’s Odyssey, shows incontrovertibility that the obligations of social norms can be exploited. It is Nolan’s invention, evolution, transformation, or perhaps refocusing of the story that illustrates the continuity between the Trojan Horse trick and such violations. This is not the imposition of a foreign value, but rather the reading of a critical theme in light of modern anxieties.

Adaptations: Faithful and Unfaithful

Nolan takes many interpretive liberties with the plot of The Odyssey, but his core thematic focus on community and responsibility is not among them. Where he diverges from Homer is in the extreme character of the act of utilizing the Trojan Horse and the fanciful contemporary-progressive gesture at the film’s conclusion that analogies the fallen society of Greece, by his transgression of norms, with our own collapsing society.

Indeed, Nolan laments that we have not sufficiently learned our lesson from Homer, and this retrospection is the only thing that could reasonably called an “utterly foreign” value by Mendelsohn. For all the focus on the dour, self-reflective Odysseus, Matt Damon embodies the larger-than-life quality of the hero as a hero. Menelaus’s (Jon Bernthal) exhortation of Odysseus, “what prison could hold a man like that,” is devoid of irony. Odysseus’s self-critique only makes him more admirable, as is the case with Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer. The valorization of Odysseus is a similarity in the film to the original.

The Odyssey is faithful to the original in most ways that matter. It is not a deconstruction of the myth of Odysseus, revealing a flawed man behind a legend (as I anticipated it would be). Though The Odyssey has a non-chronological plot housed in multiple framing devices, this is another area of fidelity to the original. Even Mendelsohn concedes this: “Nolan’s own ‘song’ effectively replicates the imbricated textures of the original.”

“Back into your disguises”

Where Nolan diverges from Homer, he leaves some cunning substitution or revision in its place. In the original epic, Odysseus returns home under a supernatural glamour supplied by Athena that ultimately gives way to the restoration of Odysseus’s youth. Telemachus rejects Odysseus. In his introduction, Mendelsohn writes:

when the father is presented to the son, the youth simply refuses to believe that this stranger is the parent he has dreamed of for so long. What, precisely, is left when the disguises come off? (31)

Telemachus and Odysseus’s reunion in Nolan’s film has none of this acrimony, the son recognizing the father through his non-supernatural disguise. There is a different order of hidden identity with which Nolan’s film is concerned, dramatized in the encounter with Circe (Samantha Morton) who accuses Odysseus and his soldiers of self-deception. The disjunction between what kind of subjectivity the soldier embodies and what peacetime, or polite Greek society, demands is more the realm of Coriolanus (1605) than Homer’s Odyssey, but this adjustment suits the epic. It is only Odysseus himself, ever the übermensch, who recognizes the destructive, barbarous quality of his soldiers. Whether this is their essential character or traits inculcated by ongoing war and desperate battle, the film leans to the latter, this behavior is the proximate cause of the political unrest and upheaval that leads to the collapse of Greek society.

“What you most can’t have is what you already had and lost”

Another change from the original epic is Odysseus’s relationship to Calypso (Charlize Theron). Rather than remembering his own life marrying Calypso, compelled in part by her magic, he lives as her paramour only under the contrivance of amnesia — more valorization of our cinematic hero. Mendelsohn points to Calypso’s observation of Odysseus in book five:

She found him by the shore, sitting there; nor did his tears
Ever dry, since the sweetness of life was trickling away
As he grieved for his homecoming. For the nymph had ceased to please him.
Night after night he lay down in the hollow caves beside her,
Compelled by the goddess to do so, he unwilling, she all too willing,
While during the day he would sit on the rocks by the edge of the sea
Weeping and moaning and tearing his heart to shreds in despair,
The tears pouring down as he stared at the restless wastes of the sea. (146)

The question of Odysseus’s willingness and the conditions under which he lives with Calypso are more or less captured by the amnesia revision. But what is lost, in part, is Odysseus’s anguish in this moment which returns elsewhere; his encounter with the sirens. Homer’s account of the siren’s is brief:

So they spoke as they poured fourth their lovely voice. My heart
Was eager to listen to them and, motioning with my brows,
I ordered my comrades to free me. But they fell to and kept on rowing. (259)

Nolan, instead, takes the opportunity to recapture the anguish from Homer’s original and engage with the Lacanian notion of the objet a. Odysseus describes the siren’s song to his crew, Damon’s face in close-up:

It was all the things you wanted it to be, then, all the things you wished for. It was the delicious itch you go to scratch, that lies under the skin you can’t reach, so the itch becomes something unbearable. It told you what you want most is what you most can’t have. And what you most can’t have is what you already had and lost. It was the song of all the promises I failed to keep. And it told me I don’t really want to go home.

Here again, there’s a quilting and re-contextualizing of various thematic strains. Nolan’s Odysseus, no less heroic than Homer’s, is a more tragic figure precisely because of his yearning for a lost object. Embodied by his seemingly blissful monarchal life and the love of Penelope (Anne Hathaway), it is one of the film’s thematic ‘twists’ that the real loss, for him, is the evisceration of the social contract and upending of the norms to which the film repeatedly appeals.

The supposedly alien places Odysseus visits are threatening, supposedly, because their inhabitants don’t observe Zeus’s law. They may not even know it. But it is Odysseus himself who is the handmaiden of knowing transgression through the Trojan horse. This is the true intervention of Nolan’s Odyssey, reading Odysseus’s trickery as every bit the distortion of xenia as the suitors themselves. And only exile can balance the scales.

“We lived in a world of palaces, trade, and language, blind to its beauty”

The tragic character of Odysseus in Nolan’s version is only a slight divergence from the epic it adapts. This seems to be Nolan’s reading of Homer, an interpretive jump not without textual precedent. But such precedent is unnecessary when adapting a work. For most, I think Nolan’s fidelity to the original will be surprising.

Speaking to the movie’s faults, some to which I alluded, they are largely in the craft of the film rather than its concept. Some of the performances, like Holland’s and Pattinson’s, are quite bad. They exert no gravity in their roles and hide behind the costuming and script like so much nothing. By contrast, Damon, Hathaway, Leguizamo (as Eumaeus), Page (as Sinon), and even Bernthal are excellent. One would think there is enough room on a 70mm IMAX screen for decent performances for the younger core of the film, but acting against Damon and Hathaway in particular is too tall a task for Holland and Pattinson in this case.

That IMAX 70mm screen and all the fanaticism it has engendered, the round-the-clock screenings, the concert ticket trading, is the perfect structural analogy to the thrust of The Odyssey that would make even Christopher Nolan shudder. This screen is an objet a par excellence, and to view a film on it will not create a uniquely transcendent viewing experience that other projection formats wouldn’t offer. Likewise, the lost object for which Odysseus yearns never existed. The society he believed he destroyed, the norms he believed he upended, are farcical and easy to exploit, regardless of whether the horse crosses the gates of Troy. Odysseus gives himself too much credit. It’s all going down anyway.

Weekly Reading List

https://www.lacanianpress.com/products/lacan-versus-foucault — Aurélie Pfauwadel is a woman on a mission in Lacan Versus Foucault (2022, appearing in English translation for the first time this year). She writes:

“Lacanism” began with the symbolic norms of the Other: the aim was to grasp how the subject finds itself instituted and noramlised by this symbolic order, and how desire is caused by what escapes this normalisation. Subsequently, the problem became more complex: in the perspective of the Borrmean knots as models of subjectivity emerging from the last teaching of Lacan, how can we grasp what functions as a norm for the speaking being, outside of the paternal norm? As we said earlier, what comes to play the role of a norm for a subject (on the side of the One) is what quilts, borders, or limits meaning and jouissance (xxii)

Pfauwadel’s rigorous reading of Lacan’s teaching cutting across the historical context of the emergence of “this society of normalisation, a society produced by the alliance between modern science and capitalism” (xvii) is certainly urgent. The fragmented, competing norms of contemporary life are precisely suited to Lacanian theoretical analysis. And, according to Pfauwadel, such prismatic, multifacted norms produce subjects suited for Lacanian clinical analysis.

Event Calendar: The Boston French Film Festival Begins

What it says on the tin: MFA will be hosting the Boston French Film Festival beginning this weekend. Screenings are starting to sell out, so get in where you fit.

Until next time.

The Summer Games Done Quick charity video game speedrunning marathon is over. I watched a lot of it. I wrote about it this week. In fact, it’s a very video game heavy edition this week. Any competition calls to mind for me the question of what it means to compete.

Social Goods and Social Ills in Charity Speedrunning Marathons

I am a competitive person. Whether by accident or by virtue of other personality traits and attitudes I value, I am not often surrounded with people who can appreciate that competitiveness. My experience with Slay the Spire 2 (2026) is a great recent example. Reviewing my own runs, analyzing my card choices, tracking various factors that contribute to my (50%, including A10) win rate. If I can play as well as I possibly can, I’m satisfied. But I want to raise that ceiling.

It’s the same with anything. I care about the newsletter being written well, my work output being thoughtful. If another game commands my attention like STS2 has, I think about the design principles and how understanding them can help me play better.

People around me tend not to care about this stuff, or they at least say they don’t. But society at large places a premium on being good at things, even if that thing is trivial. Chris Sacca, a venture capitalist, used to tell a story about Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick. According to Sacca, Kalanick described himself as “actually tied for second in the global rankings in Wii Tennis.” What did Sacca take from this?

I don’t what the day was when Travis decided he wanted to become one of the best Wii Tennis players in the world while founding what’s gone on to become the biggest transportation company in history, etcetera etectera, but it was in that moment that I saw his true obsession with obtaining a goal. Once he sets something out as a goal for himself, he’ll absolutely accomplish it–at probably any cost.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the fact that this story is somewhere between a good-natured misunderstanding and complete bullshit. I don’t know if Sacca or Kalanick is the liar here, but there are no “global rankings in Wii Tennis.” That doesn’t change the underlying ideology here, however. Being good at a meaningless activity like Wii Tennis or Slay the Spire 2 is interesting or laudable to people because it demonstrates the capacity to be good at things, especially those things that might be seen as more productive or monetarily enriching. At minimum, accomplishment in even a single arena implies certain desirable social traits.

Jack Black interrogates the idea of the traits one infers from another’s performance in “Revisiting the sport ethic,” (2025) with a focus on (following the title) sports. Black writes:

Valorising dedication, sacrifice, and the prioritization of athletic achievement, above all other considerations, the sport ethic describes a widely accepted expectation that athletes will internalize and enact a set of required values in the pursuit of sporting excellence. This includes striving for distinction, accepting risk and pain, subordinating personal interests for the sake of performance, and refusing to quit in the face of adversity. While adhering to these values is celebrated as a marker of discipline and excellence, the sport ethic simultaneously functions as a disciplinary regime, with Hughes and Coakley (1991, 309–310) outlining a number of interrelated values and expectations that shape how athletic identity is governed. This includes 1) a sacrificial commitment to sport, 2) a relentless pursuit of distinction, 3) the normalization of pain and risk, and 4) a refusal to acknowledge limitation.

Taken together, these principles constitute a powerful ideological framework that legitimates not only particular forms of behaviour but also a broader cultural mythology about what it means to be an athlete (Coakley 2015, 2017). (1-2)

These traits are conferred onto the, in this case, athlete regardless of their path to achievement. Just being an accomplished basketball player, for instance, means that generally people will conclude you persevere through adversity, have a drive for recognition, and take action toward your goal at the expense of your personal comfort.

The brunt of Black’s argument, however, is that these supposedly laudable characteristics are valorized only through their enmeshment in an ideological frame. Black gives some real examples that show how these traits are certainly part of the psychic reality of many athletes, but also how they lead to deleterious outcomes:

A powerful illustration of overconformity to the sport ethic, and its harmful consequences, can be seen in the case of former NFL linebacker, Junior Seau, whose career and tragic death are emblematic of overconforming to the dominant norms of elite sport. Seau played for two decades in the NFL, often competing through serious injuries and embodying the hypermasculine ideals of toughness, stoicism, and bodily sacrifice (Acee 2016). These behaviours aligned closely with a valorisation of enduring pain, ignoring vulnerability, and privileging the team or game above personal well-being (Hughes and Coakley 1991). Following his suicide in 2012, Seau’s brain was found to exhibit signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative condition linked to repeated head trauma, particularly prevalent among American football players (Fainaru-Wada and Fainaru 2013). Seau’s case exemplifies how the internalisation of sport’s core values, such as the expectation to ‘play through pain’ and never show weakness, contributed to longterm psychological and neurological harm.
…
a contrasting, but equally telling, example can be found in the case of Mary Cain, a former teenage track star who trained under Alberto Salazar at the Nike Oregon Project. Cain was encouraged to lose an extreme amount of weight to optimise performance, a decision framed within the sport’s logic of discipline, sacrifice, and self-denial (Li 2021). (2-3)

Generally, then, while society may be (generally) correct about the characteristics it assigns to individuals who demonstrate proficiency in a given arena, the meaning of those characteristics, what it means to be such a person, is what I want to call into question. Black provides the conventional qualitative evaluation of traits like these, “Discipline, teamwork, perseverance, and fair play, while largely positive values, are subsequently associated with a moral incentive in which children, marginalised youth, and citizens, in need of integration or social cohesion, can be reformed and uplifted.” (3). However, he also argues that these socially enriching or morally upright and admirable traits do not, in fact, enrich one socially or adjudicate one’s moral orientation:

Athletes, spectators, and institutions do not invest in sport because it is useful, in any narrow sense; rather, they are drawn to its apparent inutility, such as, its detachment from necessity and the forms of sacrifice that it demands. In the case of the latter, the sport ethic constructs a framework in which athletes give up rest, health, social relationships, or even long-term physical integrity in pursuit of goals that, while dressed in the language of professionalism or sporting legacy, are often excessive and unnecessary. (9)

If sports’ very appeal is in its “apparently inuitility,” as Black claims, the critics of my endeavoring to aspire to the good of Slay the Spire 2 are more right than they know. Such an aspiration comes at the expense of the good as such, and the good of anything else.

Such an understanding hardly ameliorates my interest or compels me to change my behavior. This is the function of desire that Black explicates in the context of sports and that many Lacanian interlocutors have theorized more broadly. Being generous, I would argue that the aspiration to be good at pointless, non-productive activity is anti-social, but also perhaps indicative of some of the supposedly positive characteristics when transposed into the realm of productivity or economic enrichment. The argument that economic enrichment is anti-social is an argument for another piece. The next step in this argument is one that relates to yet another enterprise of interest: speedrunning. Just as I have written that it is a solitary activity around which one must organize an artifice of community, it is structurally identical to any other aspiration toward exceptional proficiency. It’s an anti-social act that can spawn a social tie.

One need look no further than the GDQ speedrunning marathons I write about twice a year. Each solitary sojourner on their quest for faster PBs finds camaraderie among other Sisyphean video gamers. Whether they play the same game or different ones, somehow these people have found each other, created cross-game coalitions, and decided to broadcast their undertaking to the world. It’s all right in front of us. And these are my favorite examples from the past week:

Devil May Cry 5: Special Edition (2019) has all the ingredients for a great, watchable speedrun. Decomsic plays superlatively, Maxylobes gives the color commentary while Bobbeigh fills the role of play-by-play announcer. Bryonato is a special addition to GDQ commentary in addition to the normal color commentary/play-by-play dyad, he is a clueless audience proxy.

I’ve played this game from beginning to end, which I find typically does enhance my enjoyment of a run. But even if you haven’t played, I think it’ll still look cool.

I didn’t realize when staying up late for this run that it is the first Suda51 game to ever appear on a GDQ main stage. This fact gave things a little bit of a historic quality. There’s extra excitement for the “community representatives” when they finally get that main stage GDQ recognition. Sonic9jct, the commentator, also recommended El Topo (1970) to the crowd. This was GDQ after dark.

The high difficulty ‘kaizo’ Super Mario World (1990) hacks are always one of my favorite parts of GDQ. This year’s marathon had a multiplayer theme, another overture to my thesis related to the social possibility of the anti-social. Two teams had to progress cooperatively through the challenging levels.

There’s a little bit of an issue with GDQ calling this a speedrun. It should have been called a pinball showcase. Am I even supposed to italicize the name of pinball machines? Do they represent stand-alone ‘games’ as such? For now, I denigrate them by leaving the name in ‘normal’ text: Total Nuclear Annihilation is a 2017 pinball machine and the first ever demonstration of pinball on the GDQ stage. Nomenclature be damned, it was pretty cool.

Competitive Elden Ring (2022) runs are more my speed, but the GDQ team really upped their production quality with this one.

There is not a single four-player co-op A10 Any% run uploaded to speedrun.com. While the category exists on the leaderboards, it is empty. Runs are a little less entertaining to me when they are outside of the context of a competitive speedrun.com leaderboard in a contested run category.

If I were going to tackle four-player co-op A10 Any%, a Necrobinder No Escape build feels like a reasonable method. It certainly works out, more or less, for our runners here. Four Ironclads spamming Dominate might be faster, though.

This is the one. Adef brings in a ringer with Balatro (2024) streamer Roffle on commentary. There are some liberties taken with the legitimacy of the category, as with Slay the Spire 2, but this is a tense, exciting run with a lot hanging in the balance despite the minor advantages Adef gains by using a set seed.

So much cooperative hand-holding at this GDQ, it’s good to see some old fashioned bloodlust with Meme and Huff facing off in yet another installment of a long-running rivalry.

Unlike kaizo Mario games, the levels CarlSagan42 (what a name) and Juzcook make their way through are designed to frustrate, deceive, and kill them at every turn. Pretty funny.

Tool-assisted speedruns, or TASes, are a genre unto themselves at GDQ. The cooperative quality of this run involves a large number of people asynchronously — really asynchronously, like over a decade and a half — collaborating to figure out the fastest way to complete a level at the maximum speed a game can process inputs. The TAS always demonstrates feats that are humanly impossible and can only be achieved by perfect, deterministic commands to a game with a frequency beyond the capability of even the seasoned speedrunner.

The movements and gameplay here is unnatural and bizarre even by speedrun standards. It’s marvelous.

This run of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991) is in the All Dungeons (Restricted) category. It is so full of game breaking glitches, you would think whatever restrictions the Restricted designation entails must be minor. However, unrestricted Any% categories for LTTP involve a technique called arbitrary code execution to warp you to the credits screen in like a minute. This category makes for something a lot more watchable.

This year’s SGDQ culminated in a bonus game of Super Dram World 3 (2025), another kaizo Mario run. Revolug’s virtuosity is unquestionable.

SGDQ wrapped up with seven days of games played, several world records set, and 2.4 million dollars made for Médecins Sans Frontières. And no disrespect to GDQ’s outstanding charitable achievement. But, like the sport ethic, charity is the alibi to legitimize a pursuit that many people would dismiss as a waste of time; even if, at the same time, those same people believe this level of achievement means that one could succeed in other supposedly productive endeavors. Making money for charity is great. But these speedrunners run because they can and they must. None of them need the cause of charity to motivate them to their expeditious and repetitive completion of a video game.

What one strives to achieve may be pointless, or require artifice and sublimation to be given meaning, but even without such pretense, all that matters is its fun.

Weekly Reading List

Watch if you want to learn how Slay the Spire 2 was made.

Watch if you want to learn how to be good at Slay the Spire 2.

Event Calendar: There’s Enough Stuff On Here Already

No updates this week. Book your transit to the Hitchcock at Brattle in mid-August.

Until next time.

OverClocked ReMix, ocremix.org, is one of the longest-running institutions of the nerd’s internet. Founded in 1999, I have a distinct recollection of downloading from it via a dial-up internet connection. Maybe I got thirteen songs or so in a week if I was lucky.

OC ReMix doesn’t come up very often for me anymore. I rarely listen to music from it. But one thing brings it back to the fore twice a year, Games Done Quick.

I’ve written in the past about how GDQ marathons (SGDQ is underway now) take average gaming hobbyists and turn them into some of the gaming world’s biggest celebrities for two weeks out of the year. But it also spotlights, in a much more subdued way, the hard work of these fan remixers from the earliest period of the internet’s existence. Yes, OC ReMix is still going strong.

But I am sure it is never hitting more ears than when the GDQ team is running the tunes in their breaks between speedruns.

Desire, Identity, and Repetition in The Whole Town’s Talking

After watching John Ford’s The Whole Town’s Talking (1935), I’ve been thinking a lot about comedy. I am more likely to laugh at a movie from the 1990s or the 2000s than one from the 2020s or the 1930s. These worlds, despite their remoteness in time from each other, are alien to me in ways the twenty or so years of my adolescence and young adulthood are not. I’m not sure this is a universal feeling, but I imagine it’s not totally idiosyncratic. Humor in the realm of play is associated with childhood. Alenka Zupančič also recognizes the association between humor and childhood through a third term: repetition. In The Odd One In (2008), she writes:

In other words, comedy as genre is not simply about failure, about the hero’s ludicrous but stubborn, “mechanical” attempts to accomplish something which he is absolutely not up to. Instead, it functions in the background of something that has always-already succeeded, and draws its power from there. This remark is important not only because it points to an important fact that I hinted at in the beginning of this section—a possibility of repetition that is constitutive for the comic genre as such—but also because it indicates a way of redeeming what is otherwise rather problematic in the Deleuzian account of comic and tragic repetition. (158)

Though she glosses Deleuze here, the theoretical interest of repetition is Freudo-Lacanian. She quotes Lacan, “Whatever, in repetition, is varied, modulated, merely alienates us from its meaning … this sliding away conceals what is the true secret of the ludic, namely, the most radical diversity constituted by repetition itself” (Zupančič 171/The Four Fundamental Concepts 61). She then goes on:

What exactly is at stake in this difference between repetition through variety and textual repetition? The briefest answer would be: the difference between the fact that we can tell something in hundred different ways, and the fact that we cannot, absolutely not (not even by literally repeating it) tell something in only one way. (171)

And following from the explanation of Freud’s fort-da game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920):

If we simplify things and relate them to the example above, we could say: the child demands repetition because its failure nevertheless realizes something, and this something is precisely what he wanted to see, appearing in the form in which he wanted, or was able, to see it. In other words: the failure of repetition itself fails at some point, or, something disturbs the pure failure of repetition: something fleeting, elusive, something perceptible at one moment and gone the next. (172)

We know, evidently, that repetition and escalation is an absolutely indispensable aspect of comedy. In The Whole Town’s Talking, which stars Edward G. Robinson as both the mild mannered Arthur Ferguson Jones and wild criminal Mannion, repeatedly has Jones mistaken for Mannion, swapped with him, or otherwise confronting the inexplicable congruence of their appearance. Despite what I think is a reduced likelihood that I would laugh aloud at a comedy from this period, The Whole Town’s Talking had me in stitches.

Zupančič casts repetition as a failure, but one that periodically does what it sets out to do with the paradoxical quality of “the failure of repetition itself fail[ing]” (172). That moment of the “fleeing, elusive” is extended in The Whole Town’s Talking, with Jones and Mannion exact repetitions of each other in terms of appearance with their attitudes diametrically opposed. Indeed, the movie plays with the idea of Jones’s own duality. After his introduction into the film, his uncharacteristic late arrival at work puts him in yet another paradoxical position. Seaver (Etienne Girardot) says to Jones:

This morning, J.G. instructed me to raise your salary. But he also gave me instructions to fire the next employee who came in late. And you’re both people, Jones. Now, what am I going to do? I can’t raise your salary and then fire you. [emphasis added]

Symbolically, it is Jones’s unconscious that leads him to oversleep (the film attributes it to an alarm clock) just as it is his unconscious that makes him appear to Wilhelmina Clark (Jean Arthur) as the rabbit who “has something.” That something is the unconscious desire with which Jones moves through life and cannot escape. It is concretized in the form of Mannion, who, in the tradition of cinematic doubles, (which include Max Cady [Bardem, De Niro, Mitchum, take your pick]) is in some ways the self that Jones represses. Jones is an efficient worker, but Mannion is an unparalleled criminal with a seemingly endless capacity for stick-ups and murders.

The gag of Jones and Mannion’s shared countenance is an interesting symbolic and visual device. Mannion is, at times, who Jones sees in the mirror: a misrecognition that is close enough to an extension of Lacan’s mirror stage.

One of the film’s more impressive comedic beats involves Jones looking at himself in the large mirror of a restaurant emulating the facial characteristics the newspaper attributes to Mannion. Another man eating dinner (Donald Meek) has his own series of misrecognitions, first believing Jones is menacing him and then identifying Jones as Mannion. Of course, the gag here is that he identify Mannion correctly. Yes, the man he sees is Jones, but Jones’s visage is identical to Mannion’s and he is attempting follow Mannion’s description to the letter. Later in the film, the prison warden (J. Farrell MacDonald) from which Mannion escaped says, Jones “looks more like Mannion than Mannion does.”

The absurdist conceit of the film is a letter, written by the district attorney, that identifies Jones as himself rather than Mannion to protect him from being wrongly hassled by the police. Never mind that the letter is not enough to guarantee Jones’s identity. This becomes painfully clear as Mannion immediately moves into Jones’s house and demands the letter, which the film calls a “passport.”

Mannion demands, “we’re gonna go 50-50 on this pass. You’re gonna use it in the daytime and me at night.” The assurance of the letter that Mannion is Jones overrides the circumstantial evidence of his repeated proximity to the bank robberies he goes on to commit.

As Jones navigates his subordination to Mannion, desire running amok, the film makes homoerotic jokes about a relationship between Jones and Mannion. Jones’s boss, J.G. Carpenter (Paul Harvey), calls Mannion Jones’s boyfriend. Less than two minutes later, Jones is in an apron serving Mannion coffee, embodying the modern plight of the woman who comes home from work only to assume domestic responsibilities.

The homoerotic subtext of The Whole Town’s Talking is about as subtle as that of Gilda (1946), but it’s just as substantive. For Jones and Mannion to be in a relationship isn’t just homoerotic, it’s autoerotic. They look exactly the same.

Jones also makes clear his dissatisfaction with this arrangement, pliant though he is in the face of Mannion’s demands. Jones earlier describes Mannion as a “false alarm,” “a criminal is as brave as his gun. You take his gun away and he’s a coward, just like anybody else.” Jones, even with a gun in his hand, doesn’t have the supposed bravery he believes it confers on Mannion.

With this dynamic, the film reveals that both Mannion and Jones are more than their gun or their gray suit. But their excessive subjectivities and orientation to one another is what causes them to repeat over and over again. Mannion is the disruptive desire that shakes Jones from his stupor.

The letter, supposedly, protects Jones, but it is also the letter that exposes his subordination to Mannion. Jones writes a daily column on Mannion using information and descriptions Mannion gives to him. Jones not only knows things about various criminal exploits only Mannion could know, he uses “juicy underworld lingo” that exposes him as having a source. His relationship to Mannion doesn’t just change his attitude, it also enriches him as the author of these popular newspaper pieces.

To call The Whole Town’s Talking ‘a funny movie’ is to sell it short. It is hilarious, yes. But the treatment of psychoanalytic doubles, the corresponding mistaken identity, and the confrontation between desire’s trajectory and society’s demand is unparalleled. From the man who directed The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Stagecoach (1939), and The Quiet Man (1952), The Whole Town’s Talking stands among them.

Weekly Reading List

I have been reading Jed Mackay’s ongoing run of X-Men that started back in 2024. It’s a classic X-Men story with all of the complicated detritus from the last two decades of X-Men stories involving mutant brain clones or whatever else they were doing. It’s a very approachable entry point for ongoing X-Men comics. And Juggernaut looks really cool in it.

SGDQ is underway and now, conveniently, on Youtube.

They are making an anime based on my favorite video game of all time.

Judge’s Tower

Great songs are immortal. They will also show up where you least expect them.

Event Calendar: Hitchcock’s Birthday at The Brattle

On Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday weekend, The Brattle Theater will celebrate showing three of his classic films on 35mm. Or, two of his classic films and another one, depending on who you ask. Need an impromptu film discussion after these heaters.

Until next time.

The newsletter never goes on vacation. But I have been actually on vacation. This kind of re-arrangement of my time can sometimes produce interesting results for Paradox. There is nothing topical here, although I have been reading Lacan’s The Logic of Fantasy (2023) on the beach.

The culmination of all of this is some writing on the new Cape Fear (2026). I started the piece of writing right after watching the first episode and planned on restricting it to a close reading of only that episode. But, I’m on vacation, and my mom wanted to keep watching it. As a result, the essay touches on all five of the episodes that have aired so far. I made an effort to avoid major ‘spoilers.’

I made the connection between Cape Fear and Shadow of a Doubt (1943), not very subtle I’ll admit, before I saw the show actually excerpt Shadow of a Doubt within it. Sometimes the criticism is built into the text.

Cape Fears: From Uncle Charlie to Max Cady

There is a small, but notable, sub-genre of horror film that focuses on the anxiety and self-sacrifice that exist at the most extreme manifestation of polite sociality. These include Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy (2016), Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017), and Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil (2022). These films are largely focused on a domestic situation running out of control, but follow from the same sort of themes and structures that exist in classics like Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). These films, taken together, intersect across the symbolic universe of unwanted house guests, desperate behavioral interpretations, and gaslighting. Again and again figures in these films will insist a situation is normal, when it is clear to the aggrieved party, and likely the audience, that what is unfolding is far from normal.

Shadow of a Doubt, by way of the various contemporary examples, would leads us to Cape Fear (2026). The series, starring Javier Bardem and Amy Adams with showrunner Nick Antosca, is the third version of Cape Fear after J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 film and Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake. The Max Cadys of the works (Robert Mitchum in 1962, Robert De Niro in 1991, and now Bardem) each loosely follow the same kind of menacing blueprint of Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten). Likewise, a similarity among all of these works is the need for a plot structure that can accommodate the reassurances from one party to the unsettled other: “this is all fine.” In most cases, particularly in Cape Fear, the behavior some characters find acceptable is well beyond the realm of a reasonable person. 2026’s iteration is even more extreme in this respect.

The plot of Cape Fear always involves a sinister criminal named Max Cady menacing an attorney with the last name Bowden after his release from prison. In the original novel, The Executioners (1957), and the 1962 film, the attorney in question has always been an antagonist to Cady: these two versions Sam Bowden interrupting Cady’s attack and testifying against him. Scorsese’s version adds a wrinkle: this Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) is Cady’s defense attorney and withheld evidence that might have aided in Cady’s defense. The version that is my primary subject today, the 2026 streaming series, follows the loose plot outline of Scorsese’s version with some significant changes. Sam Bowden is now Amy Adams’ Anna Bowden. Another divergence is Max Cady’s sentence: each of the prior versions involve Cady being released after serving his full sentence. The 2026 series has Cady sentenced to life in prison, but through some unclear machinations in the first episode is ultimately released, supposedly wrongfully accused. This ties Anna and Cady together even further: Anna has become a senior attorney for the Innocence Project-like Savannah Justice League Project and advocates for the release of incarcerated people who have been wrongfully accused.

As with any Cape Fear adaptation, Cady has every reason to hate Anna. Whether she withheld evidence as is the case in Scorsese’s version, she goes on to marry the prosecuting attorney in Cady’s case, Tom Bowden (Patrick Wilson). She also, clearly, believes him to be guilty. The SJLP director, Noa Toussaint (CCH Pounder) is intent on using Cady’s notoriety to benefit her non-profit. Her attitude is one among many examples of what strains the verisimilitude of “Fingers & Toes,” the series’ first episode. Despite seemingly knowing how stressful Cady’s release might be, she regularly encourages Anna to work with him to garner donations.

This is all necessary for the plot to unfold. The world cannot be hospitable to the perceptions of Anna and the Bowden family. Everything they feel as a slight or a threat has to be under-counted and undervalued by those close to them. The Bowden family must become isolated under the menace of Max Cady and the audience should see the world they do, equally frustrated by a money-grubbing charity executive who would put her friend and colleague in danger.

Such plot contrivances and psychological unreasonableness cuts across the various Cape Fears. In the 1991 version, Cady is able to orchestrate a caper that implicates Sam Bowden in retaliatory physical assault and attempts to re-litigate his criminal trial on a storm-shaken boat. Theoretical treatment of the films largely focus on the symbolic level of the absurd situations that unfold. Slavoj Žižek writes in Tarrying with the Negative (1993):

In the original version, the ex-convict (Robert Mitchum) is a figure of Evil who simply invades from outside the idyllic all-American family and derails its daily routine; whereas in Scorcese’s remake, the ex-convict (Robert de Niro) materializes, gives body, to traumas and antagonistic tensions that already glow in the very heart of the family: the wife’s sexual dissatisfaction, the daughter’s awakened femininity and sense of independence. In short, Scorcese’s version incorporates an interpretation homologous to the reading of Hitchcock’s Birds that conceives of the ferocious birds’ attacks as the materialization of the maternal superego, of the disturbance that already dwells in family life. Although such a reading may appear “deeper” than the allegedly “superficial” reduction of the force of Evil to an external threat, what gets lost with such a reading is precisely the remainder of an Outside that cannot be reduced to a secondary effect of inherent intersubjective tensions, since its exclusion is constitutive of the subject: such a remainder or object always adds itself to the intersubjective network, as a kind of “fellow traveler” of every intersubjective community.

In this sense, then, De Niro’s Max Cady and Mitchum’s Max Cady are two sides of the same coin in a way Scorsese’s film seems not to recognize in Žižek’s reading. The excess of Cady is radically exterior to the Bowden family, even as their own disorder, dissatisfaction, and desire “produces” Max Cady in a symbolic sense. The truest Max Cady would be one who is the synthesis of the remainder of what Žižek calls “an Outside,” that seizes the subject through the gaps in their own ideological frame — gaps in their own reality.

Enter Javier Bardem. This 2026 reinterpretation of Cady is by no means the goldilocks perfection Žižek alludes to; a Cady without the (somewhat) naive beliefs of each film. 2026’s Cape Fear does, however, introduce all manner of ambiguity to Cady. De Niro’s Max Cady is an unrepentant and unquestionably guilty sex criminal. Bardem’s Cady, by contrast, does not just legally maneuver his way to innocence. The show embraces the idea, to some small degree, that he might actually be innocent.

Of course, he is not. But Bardem’s Cady is at times compassionate, supportive, seemingly altruistically invested in the lives of the Bowdens for no other reason than his facade of being a stand-up guy wrongfully accused of a crime. In 1991, Cady’s ‘true face,’ the face of evil, is always exposed to Sam Bowden. It is only to the eyes of the law that he appears safe, domesticated, and a man exculpated from guilt only through the repayment of a debt to society via incarceration. The Cady of 2026 is janus-faced always. This masking to the Bowdens, particularly Anna and Tom, enriches the reading of Cady as the embodiment of their unconscious.

Bardem as Cady is, at times, ghostly. In the most recent episode, “Faith,” he sets up Tom to appear to be the aggressor in a bar fight, speaks with his voice, and tries to speak Tom’s thoughts back to him in a distorted form.

In the previous episode, “Pierced,” he does what Anna cannot and extracts a witness statement from a man who previously refused to give it.

These are very typical ways of representing Cady as the desirous, libidinal unconscious in the tradition of cinematic doppelgängers. But when Cady takes Tom’s statement, “do the right thing,” and turns it into “stand up for yourself,” it demonstrates Cady’s own agency in his effort to undo the life of the Bowdens and render it utterly chaotic and disordered. This is what ties 2026’s Cape Fear all the more to Shadow of a Doubt, Bardem’s Cady is Uncle Charlie in the sense of his manifesting something impossible for Charlie Newton (Teresa Wright), “Young Charlie,” to articulate but is analogous to her existential ennui. Likewise, he matches also the degree to which Uncle Charlie takes the dissatisfaction Young Charlie feels and distorts it with that “remainder of an Outside” that any domestic family unit would be utterly incapable of assimilating.

In Lacan’s newly translated fourteenth seminar, The Logic of Fantasy (2023), he looks at two critical elements related to this Cape Fear remake: reality and intersubjective relation. He writes:

How thereafter are we to define reality? Well, as what I earlier called that which is ready-to-bear the fantasy … We shall then see that human reality as a whole, is nothing but the montage, an assemblage, of the symbolic and the imaginary. Desire, which lies at the centre of this apparatus, this frame, which we call reality, is equally, as I have been spelling out from the beginning, what covers over what is properly speaking the real. (10-11)

The constant confusion for the non-indoctrinated is disjunction between the so-called Lacanian Real, held out from the Symbolic and Imaginary, and reality, subjective experience, which is only constituted by the Symbolic and the Imaginary. Reality knows nothing, and wants to know nothing, about the Real. But it is the Real that emerges, surging through the desire that covers it over, in the moments of Cape Fear that make no logical sense — contradict reality.

In “Faith,” one such moment comes when Anna confronts Nevaeh (Malia Pyles), a seemingly threatening paramour of her son Zack (Joe Anders), outside of a movie theater. What posters is the theater advertising? The Lawyer’s Secret (1931), The Crime of the Century (1933), Guilty as Hell (1932), and Dangerous Waters (1936). Is this theater in Savannah, Georgia in 2026 running repertory programming of pre-Code thrillers and crime film?

Not for nothing, the Bowden couple have a lawyers’ secret about Cady, Anna feels guilty as hell, and the two of them may have carried out the crime of the century by implicating him. If the series follows the plot of the previous versions, the Bowdens will be in the dangerous waters of Cape Fear by the end. This is yet another example of the absurdity of Cape Fear that emphasizes the symbolic meaning and structure of the series as it relates to the transgressive desirousness which might cover over the Real and the places where the Symbolic order fails to cohere.

“Pierced” also makes the association between Cady and Uncle Charlie, Cape Fear and Shadow of a Doubt by showing a clip of Shadow of a Doubt in the episode. Tom and Zack visit an art show where Tom runs into the grim face of Uncle Charlie.

The episode excerpts this bit of monologue from Shadow of a Doubt:

You wake up every morning of your life and you know perfectly well that there’s nothing in the world to trouble you. You go through your ordinary little day, and at night you sleep your untroubled ordinary little sleep, filled with peaceful stupid dreams. And I brought you nightmares.

In the next episode, Cady says to Tom:

I can tell what you’re afraid of. It’s … entropy. Chaos. Disorder. Collapse … you’re fucking terrified of it. It’s obvious. But you of all people, you need to lose control sometime. Because that life you’re leading, something inside you is dying.

This pastiche of Uncle Charlie is an example of a rare moment of honesty from Cady. Honestly to the extent that it is Cady’s genuine belief about the restricted, anodyne, inert Tom.

Cady serves as the distorted mirror for both Anna and Tom. His difference from the De Niro iteration extends to the crime he (allegedly) committed, killing his wife and unborn son. He constantly pines for a family, with allusions toward a dysfunctional childhood. Cady also secretly proselytizes a bizarre religion he invented himself. He’s covered in tattoos that reference his as-yet unexplained cosmology. In The Logic of Fantasy, Lacan writes:

Urverdrängung, or primary repression, is this — that which a signifier represents for another signifier. It doesn’t bite into anything. It constitutes absolutely nothing. It makes do with an absolute absence of Dasein. (13)

This follows from Lacan’s description of the objet a, that which “in an alienated form … forever continues to leave its stamp upon any enunciation concerning Dasein” (12). Objet a, then, is a “punch mark,” a small hole that marks an absence in the subject’s Being. Max Cady makes hay where he sees these subjective pockmarks borne through the surface. Cady is not doing any favors to the Bowdens, but he does threaten to shake them loose from their concretized modes of being. The primary repression to which Lacan necessarily requires, he argues, accepting the barred subject as “something coming from one locus where it is supposedly inscribed and shifting to another locus where it will be inscribed afresh” (13). That which is repressed being brought to the surface by Cady’s bottom trawling will necessarily require such a shifting, the re-inscription of the Bowdens existence as signifiers to some other kind of existence. This transformation is occurring for them, by the fifth episode of the show, already.

As for Cady, he has been transformed by his imprisonment, as evident by the inscrutable religious symbols tattooed on him. His barred subjective status is demonstrated by the signifiers inscribed aflesh.

Weekly Reading List

I am excited for this movie.

Event Calendar: Speedrunning

SGDQ begins Sunday. I will be watching.

Until next time.

Naoki Urasawa is a frequent topic in this newsletter. My weekly series on Pluto (2023) from the end of that year is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written.

This week, though, it’s all about Billy Bat (2008). You can find an official English translation wherever you buy your paper or electronic books. And I implore you to buy it. “Peak fiction” is an inaccurate superlative at times. But not in this case.

When it comes to getting your music recommendations from Paradox Newsletter, one door closes and another opens. Paradox Newsletter Radio is back.

The playlist is updated and all new. I hadn’t changed it since the end of March. Here’s the archive. There are some sub-themes and groupings among the songs here. You, hopefully, notice an extended tribute to the late, great Tay Keith. He passed away a few days ago, too soon, at age 29. Tay Keith has a distinctive production style characterized by driving, syncopated hi-hat rhythms that he has bent, stretched, and refined. Some of his most famous and best productions include “Look Alive” and “Sicko Mode.” I put less appreciated examples of his beats on the playlist.

Keep an eye on it for periodic updates.

“Take this manuscript and run for your life”: Conspiracy and Negativity in Billy Bat

The official English publication of Naoki Urasawa’s Billy Bat (2008) has been a long time coming. Finally available from Kana Manga, Billy Bat stars Kevin Yamagata as a pastiche of Walt Disney. Kevin is an up-and-coming Japanese-American comic book artist who is working to complete a popular series, the titular Billy Bat. As he struggles to find a satisfying ending for the series, someone suggests the character is adapted from a Japanese manga while Kevin claims the character is original.

He goes to Japan to try to discover the original artist, quickly realizing a very similar character pre-dates Billy Bat in the manga series Batboy’s Big Adventure by Zofu Karama. Plagiarism, permission from Karama, and international copyright law are the least of Kevin’s worries, however, as the plot quickly spins out of control and comes to involve mysterious international organizations and ancient texts.

Urasawa is exceptionally acclaimed as a manga artist, but he tends to work in two distinctive modes. His work like Master Keaton (1988), Monster (1994), and Pluto (2003) is more episodic, taking some influence from classic non-serial comics as well as American investigative procedurals. 20th Century Boys, by contrast, involves a vast, conspiratorial plot with each subsequent plot development inextricably connected to what happened previously. Those connections, however, are sometimes oblique and opaque, befitting the disorienting quality of being embroiled in such a conspiracy. Billy Bat is in the tradition of 20th Century Boys, highly serialized and presenting the reader with events that may not make sense in the moment, but mean differently as the saga continues to unfold.

Billy Bat also uses the tropes self-reflexive, metafictional, postmodernism. The manga’s first chapter is entirely within the world of Kevin’s Billy Bat comic, complete with the beige pages of 1940s comic print — although the verisimilitude does not go so far as to orient the fictional American comic so one reads it left-to-right. As with most manga, it reads right-to-left.

Kevin’s Billy Bat character has his own curiosities. He’s a bat, but refuses to fly.

Urasawa writes Kevin’s manga with all the exaggerated noir-detective troping one could imagine. Billy Bat goes on about “hating anchovies and the cops” and dichotomy between:

The folks who’ve got all the luck and the ones who don’t. The folks swimmin’ in cash and the ones who ain’t. The folks who win big and the ones who always lose.

The comic-within-a-manga even includes a pastiche of Chinatown (1974) with a brief appearance by a mogul in the style of John Huston’s Noah Cross.

This story of Billy Bat’s comic is only a small footnote in the manga’s first volume. As the reader exits the comic’s narrative and enters its framing device, Kevin illustrating it, Urasawa shows how the world of the comic-within-a-manga and the manga itself overlap. Both worlds are paranoid, both Kevin’s editor and his landlord sharing the anxiety object of ‘Soviet Spies.’ This paranoid structure gives way to the real conspiracy that motivates the plot, the conspiracy of the bat.

When Kevin eventually meets Zofu Karama, he seeks permission to continue Billy Bat. Karama, on the other hand, suggests copying is an inherent dimension of visual art and illustration:

And yet, Karama’s theory of art involves a prime mover:

So, who did the first person to ever draw copy in order to draw like this? Believe it or not, that drawing was etched on the wall of a cave. And wouldn’t you know that the drawing on that wall was that very same bat.

Billy Bat, or Batboy, this mysterious cartoon bat, is the supposed origin of all illustration.

These are just the breadcrumbs that will come to make sense as Urasawa’s plot unfolds. Alongside this primal bat, the seemingly interchangeable Billy Bat and Batboy that can claim to be the ancestors of the first ever cave drawing, Kevin’s own identity is mistaken repeatedly. He returns to Japan as a civilian, but is pressured to wear military uniform regardless.

Following the coextensive analysis of Gilda (Rita Hayworth) and Jessica Rabbit (Kathleen Turner), how one is ‘drawn’ has a prophetic quality.

Kevin aspires to what he believes a comic book artist should be, someone who “inspire[s] children to be brave” and “teach[es] them right from wrong.” Instead, Kevin himself cannot follow the supposed right path as he seemingly murders his friend after being blackmailed. And who was it Kevin copied to learn to murder? A bat, drawn evil.

This incoherent absurdity which the manga repeats evinces the moral universe it is trying to repeat. Billy Bat and Batboy are both black and white. There is no “black bat” or “white bat,” and the ostensibly different bats, each, respectively, an angel or devil on Kevin’s shoulder, have no quality by which they could be differentiated.

Whether the bat is black or white is a question of negativity. But which space is empty and which is substantial is not something Billy Bat resolves in its opening volumes.

Both Kevin Yamagata and Billy Bat have their identities mistaken and occupy the symbolic position of ‘the wrong man,’ but one need not be the right person for a conspiracy to continue its machinations. Something just has to fill the space.

Weekly Reading List

Wow?

Wow

Wow!

https://mangadex.org/title/c727d921-4294-455b-9bcc-2f0c7d29cd9a/rokudenashi-blues — One of the most popular Shounen Jump manga has finally been completely translated into English by fan translators.

Event Calendar: Film Festivals Galore

I’m making up for the dearth of updates last week. This one is huge. A free outdoor screening at Malcolm X Park. The features of the Roxbury International Film Festival. Most of the lineup of the Boston French Film Festival. That last one is showing Le crime du 3e étage (2026) on Friday July 24th. I’ll be there.

Until next time.

I had an idea for a podcast. Please, hold your groans. The premise would be, of course, film discussion with a guest. There would be some kind of scale that would dictate how we would discuss the film, chosen by the guest. On the high end, maximally unapproachable and complicated critical-theoretical film discussion. On the low end, the most rudimentary critique possible in the most democratic terms. As I thought about this, I started to wonder about different films as the subject. How difficult would it be to discuss certain movies under these constraints? Rush Hour 2 (2001) would be a little less amenable to a highly intellectual discussion, though it would be doable for me. Vertigo (1958) would be pretty tough to strip down to the pure, instinctive, non-academic pleasures of cinema, I think. But maybe that challenge is just for me. I maintain that there are movies that would be genuinely challenging to talk about in a non-intellectual way. Whether that is a limitation of myself as a critic or the films themselves, that’s for you to judge.

As I finished watching Gilda (1946) at Noir City Boston this year, I thought it was one of those films that might be hard to discuss without a robust intellectual apparatus. The more I consider about the film, the more I realize I was wrong in that initial estimation. Clearly this movie leaves an impression, no matter who you are.

Regardless, it is remarkable to me that this film has not been taken up with more fervor by Lacanians. Maybe it’s just too easy. The illustration of some of Lacan’s theoretical formulations are too clear, too schematic in Gilda. But I don’t think so. It is certainly a film I will write more about, hopefully in a peer-reviewed context.

Among the films I saw at Noir City Boston, it was by far my favorite. There were some other great ones, though. Anatomy of a Murder (1959) is almost too good. Unbelievable James Stewart plays piano with Duke Ellington in that flick. All Night Long (1962) and A Man Called Adam (1966) are both only debatably noir, but I liked both. The ‘62 British production re-stages Othello (1603) with the guy from The Prisoner (1967) as the Iago character. A Man Called Adam has taken some unfair slings and arrows. It would probably make a good double bill with Mo’ Better Blues (1990).

The theme this year was music; and each film had some explicit or implicit involvement of music, usually jazz. But much of what was on offer was closer to conventional melodrama than what I expect from film noir. Not complaining. Just an observation.

Let’s wrap up Music League coverage. We had one category of “upbeat or otherwise energized songs with depressing lyrics”:

Spotify

Apple Music

Youtube Music

And our final category was another run of cancelled artists:

Spotify

Apple Music

Putting my cards on the table, I lost some of my joie de Music League by the end. And I still came in 3rd with some stiff competition.

Bobby, my movie trivia teammate, has become an absolute Music League ringer. Paolo has great taste and makes a great zine. Now, Music League is over. We’ll run it back:

“Understand what? Mean what?”: “La femme n’existe pas” and the Lacanian Phallus in Gilda

Gilda (1946) may be one of the most rich films for Lacanian reading ever. It offers a treasure trove of examples to demonstrate and anatomize Lacanian concepts. Take Lacan’s concept of the phallus, for instance, and its relation to sexed subjects. Elizabeth Grosz writes:

Instead of the Freudian commitment to a phylogenetic, pseudobiological explanation of the oedipal structure, Lacan will use social, unconscious, and linguistic explanations. While agreeing with Freud that the castration complex is the pivot of the child’s entry into culture, Lacan confirms Freud’s conflation of patriarchy with culture in general, yet he refuses to see women as castrated in any Real or anatomical sense. The mother is denigrated from her position as the all-powerful phallic mother, not because of the child’s perception of an anatomical lack. (70)

Grosz goes on, elaborating the idea of the phallus with more detail:

The mother carries the Law of the Father within her, in the very form of her unconscious desire (for the phallus). She invokes ‘his’ authority on loan whenever she threatens or punishes the child for wrong-doing. She requires the authority of he who is absent. Thus she does not lack in any anatomical sense. This is to attribute lack to the Real, which, as Lacan defines it, is the ‘lack of the lack’, a pure, unspeakable, pre-representational plenitude. Instead, she is positioned in relation to a signifier, the phallus, which places her in the position of being rather than having (the phallus, the object of the other’s desire) (71)

As I have described regularly through the life of the letter, the Lacanian phallus to which Grosz refers here is an empty signifier. Lacan writes in “The Signification of the Phallus,” “It … becomes the bar with which the demon’s hand strikes the signified, marking it as the bastard offspring of its signifying concatenation” (581). In other words, the phallus as signifier mangles the signified it would supposedly stand in for. This specific formulation is a bit different from the idea of an ‘empty signifier,’ but it is coextensive to the extent that whatever the phallus represents is illegible, meaningless, and disfigured. Grosz’s elaboration helps make sense of Lacan’s own view of the subject’s relation to the phallus. Lacan, again, writes:

But one can indicate the structures that govern the relations between the sexes by referring simply to the phallus’ function.
These relations revolve around a being and a having which, since they refer to a signifier, the phallus, have contradictory effects: they give the subject reality in this signifier, on the one hand, but render unreal the relations to be signified, on the other. (582)

Let us then turn to Gilda for further clarification. One symbol orients us and the characters to the phallus: Ballin Mundson’s (George Macready) “faithful and obedient friend,” his cane which hides within it a knife.

The cane-knife being a physical object should not deceive anyone. It is a phallic signifier, both in the logic of the film (which associates it with certain anatomical features) and in Lacanian logic. Ballin’s authority is derived from the cane-knife. He uses it to save Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) and his relation to it gives him authority over Johnny. In the obvious, though implied, gay relationship between the two men, the reductive relation between the two feminizes and queers Johnny while rendering the disaffected Ballin something of an asexual. His interest is in neither romance nor sex, but instead, power.1

In this way, we can see how the disorienting, disfiguring power of the phallus removes a subject from conventional sexual and romantic orientation. But the cane-knife falls out of the film to be replaced by the film’s titular figure, Rita Hayworth’s Gilda.

Gilda replaces the cane-knife as Ballin’s phallus. The film is very explicit here: during the new trio’s first dinner, Johnny expresses his confusion. Before Gilda’s arrival, Ballin and he toast to “the three of us,” as in Johnny, Ballin, and the cane-knife. After, Gilda replaces the cane-knife in that configuration.

About this, Grosz writes, “The phallus as singifier is that by which the subject is placed as being or having” (104). This follows from the Lacan quotation above, where he elaborates the relations to the phallus which “revolve around a being and a having” on page 582 of Bruce Fink’s Écrits (1966) translation.

Being the phallus, for Gilda, is coextensive with her status as barred woman, or woman who does not exist in Lacan’s logic. Melvyn Stokes writes in his book-length treatment of Gilda for the BFI Classics series:

We had both imagined a fantasy of Gilda’s behaviour, rather than the real thing. Yet in many ways, this was symptomatic of Gilda as a whole. It rested heavily on what people wanted to see and what despite or perhaps because of the Hays Code – they sometimes believed they had seen. Gilda herself was the perfect sexual symbol for the confused, immediately post-war world: she acted as a catalyst for seething emotions but was in the end loyal, a woman who was at different times dangerous and supportive, free-wheeling but ultimately safe. (8)

This follows the reading of Gilda implicitly endorsed by her satirization in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), where Jessica Rabbit is “not bad… just drawn that way.” Film critic and historian Eddie Muller attributes this quality to the producer, Virginia Van Upp, in his 2016 companion to the Criterion Collection release of Gilda:

Wholeheartedly, I believe that this movie is Virginia Van Upp’s take on Rita Hayworth’s career at this point. In that she sees Harry Cohn as Ballin Mundson … I think that drawing parallels between Gilda and Rita is dead-on accurate.

Prefacing his attribution to Van Upp, Muller describes Gilda as distinct from the femme fatale because she seeks not to bring Johnny to ruin but seems to have a genuine romantic affinity for him. Instead, it’s Ballin fitting into the structural position of “homme fatale,” according to Muller, “the last man that Gilda should meet.”

If Gilda is positioned as the phallus, just as she is a sympathetic and fully realized film character, we must examine her phallic qualities in the film. Lacan writes:

Paradoxically as this formulation may seem, I am saying that it is in order to be the phallus—that is, the signifier of the Other’s desire—that a woman rejects an essential part of femininity, namely, all its attributes, in the masquerade. (583)

One need only look to the literal masquerade of Gilda’s Carnival wherein she possesses her own phallic facsimile: a whip.

To the end of “reject[ing] an essential part of femininity,” the film turns on the idea, as Muller and Stokes have observed, that Gilda is ultimately a devoted, moral figure. Behind the artifice, she’s a “decent woman,” in the sense of ideological masculine chauvinism.

Both Johnny and Ballin misrecognize this fact, taking the artificial, imaginary projection of Gilda as the real one.

Of course, Gilda uses this misrecognition to her benefit, detriment, and eventually out of necessity when she is completely imprisoned through contrived machinations of Johnny that match the level of deception of Michael Douglas’s character in David Fincher’s The Game (1997).

Gilda the film and Gilda the character demonstrate beautifully how ‘being the phallus’ and ‘not existing’ under the Lacanian sex-gender schema coalesce. Every bit of Gilda’s presentation is the amalgamation of the fantasies of those who view her. This is borne through the text itself and the staging of it.

The “feminine image” is illusive precisely because of its illusory status. Gilda’s disposition changes, she deceives and has deception projected on her, and ultimately renders her speech meaningless in snappy dialogue with Johnny. The thing she seeks to unmask about herself in the “Put the Blame on Mame” number is exactly something that is untrue. Reading outside of the text, we see how the profoundly detailed, laborious, and expensive staging and costuming of Rita Hayward leads us also to conclude that the feminine image on screen has no referent but imagination. The Mame on which Gilda proposes everything be blamed is as non-existent as the Gilda of the film.

Weekly Reading List

From the Criterion bonus features.

Best music I heard in a flick at Noir City Boston. Sammy Davis Jr. goes unbelievably hard on “I Want To Be Wanted.”

Saverio Guerra might be my favorite Curb guest star.

Event Calendar: Adolescence of Utena and Not Much Else

It’s summer in Boston. The Harvard Film Archive is in hibernation. The Coolidge Corner Theater Union might be about to go on strike so I don’t want to add a bunch of screenings and then have to delete them. I added a few Brattle shows, but otherwise the headline is GKids bringing Adolescence of Utena (1999) to theaters across the US and Canada. Go see it.

Until next time.

What’s in a name? In Music League, one name reigns supreme: John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.

Spotify

Apple Music

Even as an adult, I find this song profoundly confusing. Is its premise really that there are two people, the speaker and the subject of the gaze, named John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt? In the somewhat ostentatious name and its repetition, we also have a precursor of what is becoming known as a ‘vocal stim.’

The Lil Uzi Vert and Nav song on the playlist was my contribution. I took it as an opportunity to share some beautiful music with the world more than angle for points. Earnestness is sometimes rewarded.

Catastrophes of Racial Signification in Backrooms

The target of the discourse machine will always be the tele-visual object ostensibly making a corporation a lot of money. Twitter still doesn’t quite have Heated Rivalry (2025) out of its system. There have been no shortage of things between its air date, I am sure, to command a lot of attention. Obsession (2026) has been a routine target of analysis, critique (non-moralizing), and criticism (moralistic). It is unlikely very many good ideas have come up around the film other than relating it to Vertigo (1958).

What’s the next target? You don’t need a map: it’s Backrooms (2026). I’m not going to degrade myself by talking about the financial returns of these films. For all I care, Obsession made six quadrillion dollars and Backrooms made a gazillion. And all on a shoe string budget! How impressive. What is more impressive to me is when popular taste overlaps with mine. This is the case with Obsession: the movie is very good. Backrooms is also okay. But how okay, good, or bad it might be in a qualitative sense, part of the discussion of Backrooms has attempted to litigate where it sits in a moral continuum. Here we are again. If the Backrooms of the film were as labyrinthine as those of the creepypasta, I might argue their un-mappable territory is a metaphor for the repeated arrival at the same sorts of critical inquiry.

Backrooms as an object of scrutiny on the topic of social consciousness and, as you’ll see, racial politics, may not make sense on its face. It is a feature film adapted from a series of youtube short films in turn adapted from a post on the 4chan image board. Somewhere along the line, there are a few video games, including the popular Escape the Backrooms (2022). This is thin, but emergent subject matter. Ideas and interpretations of ‘The Backrooms’ as such have popped up widely across the internet. But Kane Parsons is now the de facto custodian of the lore and canon, with his large body of work across the youtube videos and now the corporate sponsored feature.

As for the film, which represents the concretized ‘The Backrooms’ canon, it follows a failed architect, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) as the duo descend into the mysterious backrooms in parallel. The symbolism here should be obvious: the disciplines of architecture and talk therapy attend to the physical and mental components of the backrooms. Parsons pays his dues to the original backrooms image, taken in a furniture store, staging the entryway to his film’s backrooms through Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. Again, there’s symbolism riding the line between substantial and a bit too cute: any encounter with the backrooms seems to invite colonial aspirations.

One common refrain in criticism of Backrooms as an aesthetic object should sound familiar to horror fans: “nothing happens.” Despite the ostensible incongruity between the ‘weight’ of the source material and the seriousness of the feature film’s subject matter, not much has surprised me about its reception. This critique is no exception. One need look no further than Paranormal Activity (2007) for a critical antecedent to Parsons’ film. In Roger Ebert’s Paranormal Activity review he writes, “It illustrates one of my favorite points, that silence and waiting can be more entertaining than frantic fast-cutting and berserk f/x. For extended periods here, nothing at all is happening, and believe me, you won’t be bored.” Backrooms conveys its horror in the same way. Not much happens. It is unsettling. The disquieting space of the backrooms is brought to life in a way that will stick with you if you see your movies in one of the many megaplexes propping up otherwise abandoned malls.

Another criticism, far less common, indicts Backrooms for explicit or implicit racism. By casting Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, various parts of his character background and some of the imagery associated with the more horrifying elements of the film run up against anti-Blackness. That is, at least, my interpretation of the argument. I have not been particularly impressed or compelled by the close reading that has attempted to substantiate these claims, but these are fair and worthwhile avenues of exploration. However, any reading of Backrooms as anti-Black should not treat the film as an exception. It may or may not be part of a tapestry of how works signify in a society found on racism and with myriad observable outcomes resulting from systemic racism. This is true of any major U.S. motion picture.

Why should what Backrooms represents call for a moral condemnation of the film and its author? And, to the opposite point, why should a work with supposedly ‘low-brow’ subject matter be immune to rudimentary cultural criticism? Asking both of these questions is a re-litigation of asked-and-answered disputes of cultural studies. A work’s author is not on the hook for the social ills it represents. Sometimes those things will enter the film without any agency on the author’s part. To the second question, a work is worthy of study to the degree the critic can make a case for its substance by enacting the critique. My reading is the backrooms, big B, little b, italics, or otherwise, has many worthwhile angles of entry for serious analysis.

When it comes to Backrooms and racism, what is most interesting to me is the difference between Clark on the page and Clark as an embodied character played by Ejiofor. Clark’s race is never explicitly addressed in the film. There is virtually nothing, other than his embodiment, to make a determination about his racial identity. This, in itself, might be a point of contention. However, what it suggests to me is that this role could’ve gone to any man, of any race, and the incidental racial embodiment of the characters — both Clark and Mary — makes this reading possible.

Reading Backrooms and the racial-political problematics that emerge from it alongside the film Suture (1993) is productive in getting to the core of what I think is interesting here. In Desiring Whiteness (2002), Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks writes about Suture:

But the sense of bewilderment that this film generates turns on that point where the traditional narrative would demand an absolute suspension of our disbelief: the physical resemblance of the two brothers. In this film, however, it is not our disbelief that we are called to suspend, it is our credulity. We as spectators know what no one else in the film seems to know, recognize, realize, or care about, and this is that not only are the two men nothing alike (there is not the remotest resemblance, physical or otherwise, between them) but that Clay and Vincent are of different races. Vincent is white, and Clay is black. Like Magritte’s famous painting Ceci N’est pas une Pipe, this film asks us to consider the relation between signifies and visual images. (104)

She goes on to explicate the connection between the Lacanian notion of suture and the title of the film:

In other words, suture names the process by which the subject comes to find a place for itself in a signifying chain by inserting itself in what is perceived as a gap, a place-holder for it. The subject appears in the chain as a signifier, thus making a subjective meaning possible. (105)

To this end, it is not the case that Ejiofor is cast in a ‘white’ character playing the role of Clark. Clark, as a plot function written in a script, can only exist as a gap that is partially filled in the act of performance. Ejiofor’s performance brings Clark to life on the screen, regardless of what was consciously or unconsciously ‘intended’ by Parsons regarding the character’s race.

There is something to be said for the chaos generated when racial signifiers run amok. Backrooms is far from the most extreme example. Only a narrow set of close readers seem to be concerned with any racial-political subtext. Fewer still have made such considerations about films like The Purge (2013) and The Bye Bye Man (2017). Whatever Parsons culpability in representing stereotypes — racial or gendered — the fruit of what he inserts into the signifying chain is precisely the critical discourse we have in front of us. We need not deny it. Rather, we should think about it.

Weekly Reading List

Apparently Quentin Tarantino said something flattering about The Rip (2026) in Sight & Sound. Joe Carnahan’s remarkable thriller is one of the best things I’ve seen this year. I highly recommend it.

Event Calendar: Support Your Local Drive-In

No updates this week, but I’m near the Wellfleet Drive-In Theatre. Maybe I’ll go this week? If you have a drive-in theater near you this summer, pay them a visit.

Until next time.

I started re-reading The Prince of Tennis (1999). It’s so awesome. I forgot that Ryoma Echizen and Baki Hanma start out with the same genre-subverting character motivation.

Speaking of these uncredited, maybe unintentional, similarities among art objects: here’s the most recent Music League playlist.

Spotify

Apple Music

Youtube Music

Voting is over so I can share I submitted a Miki Matsubara song based on its similarity to Michael Jackson.

Classics all around. These two songs are well-known as a pair, so I was lucky to get the submission in.

“Anyone could become obsessed with the past with a background like that”: Objet a and the Non-Existent Woman in Obsession and Vertigo

“[I]n its function as object, objet a cause of desire … we must give a function that will explain its place in the satisfaction of the drive”

Generally, I don’t think any work of art demands the peaks of enthusiasm demonstrated by contemporary audiences. Yes, I would scoff even at Vertigo (1958) “fancams,” though that is among the works most deserving of such slavish dedication. It is not Vertigo, however, that is enjoying such acclaim, but Obsession (2026), Curry Barker’s debut feature film. Despite its film festival premiere nearly eight months ago, lightning has struck during the theatrical release period. The film has taken audiences by storm. Yes, it’s very good, about as good as a modern film can be. And it’s no accident such a great film has caused such fervor among movie goers. Obsession is Vertigo.

For the benefit of the reading audience who I will assume have seen both films, I’ll be brief. Hitchcock’s Vertigo follows the investigative efforts of John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart), a retired police detective, in service of Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to follow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) and prevent her suicide. Some time later, Scottie meets a woman named Judy Barton (also, Kim Novak) who he pursues based on her resemblance to Madeleine. In the background is Marjorie “Midge” Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), a friend and confidant to Scottie whose romantic intentions toward him are not reciprocated.

The plot of Obsession is less complex. A pathetic chump, Baron “Bear” Bailey (Michael Johnston), has romantic designs on his friend Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarrette) and relentlessly brainstorms a method to woo her. With the self-interested advice of his friend Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), Bear fails to convey his feelings and instead uses a strange object called a One Wish Willow to wish that Nikki “[love him] more than anyone in the … world.” In the tradition of the tale of King Midas, Bear gets what he wishes at the expense of Nikki’s sovereignty. All the while, Bear’s friend Sarah Harper (Megan Lawless) has romantic intentions toward him that are not reciprocated.

The most critical resonance between Vertigo and Obsession, aside from a brute mapping of their characters to a corresponding figure (Bear-Scottie, Cooper-Gavin, Sarah-Midge) is the rejection of the supernatural, specifically demonic, component of each film’s intrigue. In Looking Awry (1991), Žižek offers the turn-of-phrase describing the first half of Vertigo calling it, “the fascinating story of a woman possessed by demons from the past” (84). In an interview with CinemaBlend, Inde Navarette recounts Barker’s description of the power that compels Nikki to behave the way she does:

It’s not demonic, I wanna emphasize that. … Curry really nipped that in the bud at the beginning of the process. It was not demonic, it wasn’t a possession, it was a wish, and it was kind of like, for her … this draw to him. I have this veil that’s like over everything while the other Nikki is inside kind of peeping through that sheer material.

In this way, both Judy-Madeleine and Nikki-Nikki are incomplete in their division from themselves. Their duality is excessive and symbiotic. The woman Scottie believed to be Madeleine is in fact Judy pretending to be Madeleine, and in his attempt to re-create her he, at least, relegates her to the position of lure in Gavin’s plot. Žižek writes, “The elevation of an ordinary, earthly woman to the sublime object always entails mortal danger for the miserable creature charged with embodying the Thing, since ‘Woman does not exist.’” (68). This follows from Žižek’s render of Lacan on sublimation:

Hitchcock’s Vertigo, another tale of a woman who vanishes, a film whose hero is captivated by a sublime image, is made as if to illustrate the Lacanian thesis that sublimation, while having nothing to do with “desexualization,” has all the more to do with death: the power of fascination exerted by a sublime image always announces a lethal dimension. … His starting point is not the object of the allegedly direct, “brute’‘ satisfaction, but its reverse, the primordial void around which the drive circulates, the lack that assumes positive existence in the shapeless form of the Thing (the Freudian das Ding, the impossible-unattainable substance of enjoyment). The sublime object is precisely “an object elevated to the dignity of the Thing,” an ordinary, everyday object that undergoes a kind of transubstantiation and starts to function, in the symbolic economy of the subject, as an embodiment of the impossible Thing, i.e., as materialized Nothingness. (83)

Sublimation, and its ‘elevation’ of the object to ‘the dignity of the Thing’ is among the crucial overlapping themes between Vertigo and Obsession. Nikki’s humiliation is her transformation into the miserable, obsequious creature that is a manifestation of Bear’s own fantasy. Madeline is no different.

Relating this figuration to Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), Žižek writes:

It is difficult not to recognize in this phantomlike figure the apparition of Woman, of the woman who could fill out the lack in man, the ideal partner with whom the sexual relationship would finally be possible, in short, The Woman who, according to Lacanian theory, precisely does not exist. The nonexistence of this woman is rendered manifest to the hero by the absence of her inscription in the sociosymbolic network: the intersubjective community of the hero acts as if she does not exist, as if she were only his idée fixe. (80)

The Woman as such, ‘elevated to the dignity of the Thing,’ is featured in The Lady Vanishes, through her absence. One might allegorize this to a chalk outline in certain works of film noir. In Vertigo or Obsession, we see their excessive presence in their very creation by Scottie/Bear. These women, even as Scottie/Bear imagine them as Woman, that which will fill the lack, their ideal fails to live up to what the man imagines despite how exactly — in Obsession, exactly — they live up to the letter of what the man demands. In other words, the entire scheme of the monkey’s paw is revised to emphasize how it is men who don’t know what they want and don’t realize their lack cannot be filled.

If the story of King Midas and the monkey’s paw are the story of Lacan’s objet a,1 then one can look to Vertigo and Obsession to understand the relation between objet a and Woman who, in Lacanian logic, does not exist. It is critical to differentiate between this non-existent or barred Woman and the supposed ‘ideal woman’ precisely because this ideal is only supposed. When one obtains it to the exact specification of their fantasy, there is no satisfaction. Laurence Simmons writes of Vertigo and the MacGuffin that reveals Judy and Gavin’s deception:

Judy/Madeleine puts on the necklace inherited by Madeleine from Carlotta Valdes. For Scottie, the jewels belong to the real Madeleine not just the image of Madeleine (although they were present in the image of Carlotta Valdes) so they cannot belong to the real Judy. He now must ask himself how he got what he thought he wanted: the perfect image, agalma.

Obsession is more explicit. Nikki behaves with an absolute, animalistic devotion toward Bear. This devotion is ultimately threatening and demands from Bear equivalent… obsession. To some degree, this is where Vertigo and Obsession diverge. Nikki obtains a One Wish Willow herself and condemns Bear to a corresponding stupor of obsessive love. Their Bonnie and Clyde moment is short lived and transforms quickly to Romeo and Juliet. Bear consumes painkillers in an attempt to kill himself, and though he ultimately flinches and tries to vomit, his being overtaken by the power of the One Wish Willow leads to him, for one reason or another, not vomiting. So, he dies, and in turn releases Nikki from her obligation to the terms of his wish. Let us not make the mistake that this turn suggests the two might’ve been happy. They would only be equals in their mutual enslavement, and Bear’s death is a structural necessity for the plot’s logic. Thus, Obsession upholds the notion of Lacan’s non-relation as vehemently as Vertigo.

“Here I was born, and there I died.”

Viewing the films should make clear that both Obsession and Vertigo call into question the guarantors of one’s subjectivity regardless of gender. Although Bear/Scottie and Nikki/Judy are structurally analogous in the logic of each film, they each make opposite demands of their unwilling partners. For Scottie, identity is coextensive with the image. Bear not only wants Nikki to want him, but he wants her to want to want him. This final criterion is the one which Nikki can never meet, despite the only evidence of her resistance being her unending scream on the other side of a strange phone call or her unexpected plea to ‘kill me.’

Bear himself is as illusory as Madeleine Elster, a flaw with which the film makes clear at the outset. He practices a histrionic, overwrought confession of love to a waitress, supposedly his earnest, authentic feeling. What authentic feeling needs practice? Why would the audience believe that a contrived, juvenile expression of affection represents something real about Bear and his feelings? His faces only multiply as the film continues. There is the reserved, resigned Bear who refuses to admit his feelings to Nikki. There is the disaffected Bear who brushes off Sarah. Even this version of him rings false, as Bear tells no one about the death of his cat in any manner that suggests he is conveying his depth of feeling about it.

If Bear can be said to have any subjectivity at all, it is only that exposed through profound trauma and confrontation. He laments the accidental death of his cat. He, chillingly, refuses to assent to Nikki’s request to kill her, instead asking: “what’s so bad about being with me?” In a climactic moment with her, he repeats this is “all [he] ever wanted,” despite the evidence the facts of his subordination of Nikki do not match the contours of his fantasy.

What Bear and Scottie share, aside from nicknames, is the structural position of film villain. In Scottie’s case, the visual language is unambiguous. He stalks Judy and is ultimately the proximate cause of her death. Stewart’s performance is uniformly acclaimed for its chilling turn in the second act that makes his position clear. Bear’s villainy is equally unambiguous, though the way the film communicates it is unconventional. He is prompted, regularly, to kill himself to set Nikki free. Periodic bursts of ‘the other Nikki’ evince her suffering as a consequence of his wish. Even as Nikki terrorizes Bear as the ostensible supernatural threat, this is a threat of his own making. Her behavior toward him matches what he demands of her against her will.

“There’s someone within me and she says I must die”

Obsession unquestionably fits within the generic formalism of horror film. Much of the frenzied reaction to the film comes from how effective it is subjected to horror’s rubric. Nikki follows Bear, menaces him, entraps him, moves with an inexplicable, supernatural quality. The film’s gore is remarkably reserved for the first two-thirds. But the film never loses sight of the extent to which Nikki herself is the victim, out of control of her own body. Bear’s transformation of her afflicts her with what the film conveys as an illness. This, too, fits the archetype of Madeline and other ‘ideal women’:

The ideal love-object lives on the brink of death, her life itself is overshadowed by imminent death—she is marked by some hidden curse or suicidal madness, or she has some disease that befits the frail woman. (Žižek 85)

At the same time, both versions of Nikki have an inexhaustible vitality that Bear seeks to confine. Though her Wish Willowed version seems to control Bear, her control of him is a result of his ceding of control. His reluctance to speak, to exist, to be somebody, is what leads to the film’s sorry state of affairs.

The similarities between Vertigo and Obsession cannot be understated. There is certainly more to mine in the encounter between the texts. I, at least, will make the effort to continue it. Obsession is not itself without Alfred Hitchcock.

Weekly Reading List

Art is just out there for you to encounter.

https://www.arrowvideo.com/p/blu-ray/wandering-ginza-butterfly-collection-limited-edition-blu-ray/17699252/ — I did not get a chance to write about this movie for the letter, but you should watch it.

Event Calendar: More at the Brattle

I added listings for some screenings of one of my all-time favorite films, Malcolm X (1992) at the Brattle.

Until next time.

I love an issue that calls for me to bury the audience in footnotes. They snowball out of control. Once I start leaving footnotes, I start aspiring to the full-page Fanon footnotes about Lacan in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). My copious footnoting is not occasioned by Music League.

Spotify

Apple Music

Youtube Music

This past round was dedicated to songs under two minutes. The resulting playlist is necessarily, mercifully short. It is not exactly a fun listen. The first song is an exceptionally bizarre acapella about domestic violence. I submitted VaVa. Otherwise, there wasn’t much for me here outside of the stuff I listen to already — Playboi Carti, Dicks (shout out killfromtheheart.com), Stalag 13. Maybe you will find something more your speed.

“The power to soothe savage men”: The Spectral Women of Yoshiyuki Tomino and Earl Lovelace

Lalah Sune. Reccoa Londe. Quess Paraya. What can possibly explain the bizarre behavior, treatment, and positioning of women in the work of Gundam auteur Yoshiyuki Tomino? Reccoa is a particularly interesting example, a character in Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (1985) who works with the protagonist Kamille Bidan but betrays him for her love of the antagonist Paptimus Scirocco. This puts her opposite a former comrade, Emma Sheen, who stays committed to the AEUG cause. Reccoa and Emma kill each other toward the end of Zeta. During the final confrontation, Emma tells Reccoa, “You’re being too much of a woman.” Reccoa replies:

That’s right! I’m a woman! That’s why I’m here, and now I’m your enemy! That’s why I fight. Each person lives life differently. I don’t want interference with mine. … Men think of nothing but fighting and can only think of how to use women as tools. Or if anything else, how to humiliate a woman.

In an interview soon after Zeta concluded its TV run for the Mobile Suit Z Gundam Encyclopedia (1986), Tomino tries to explain the relationship between the two:

When it comes down to it, the two of them are talking about an identity that represents the idyllic image that men hold of women. To sum up why this is, Reccoa is a good example. She never makes the attempt to take a stand for herself even after how she was treated at Jaburo, and she maintains a state of denial by making excuses like “I’m looking for the man who will fulfill me”, and she ultimately ends up looking for a way to become dependent on a man. As a man, this is extremely gratifying to see. Emma is extremely similar to Reccoa, and I believe that the two characters are fundamentally the same in this sense.

Even with Tomino’s explanation, Reccoa’s character turn and later actions are hard to reconcile with how she’s depicted in the first half of the show. Nearly a decade later, Tomino would reflect back on the women in his work in conversation with Hideaki Anno, Yūichiro Oguro,1 Shinichirō Inoue,2 and Bii Ogawa for a Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack (1988) fan magazine Anno released in 1993. Inoue asks Tomino whether the trope of women betraying their allies comes from Tomino’s difficult professional relationship with Yoshikazu Yasuhiko3 and Mamoru Nagano.4 Tomino dances around the question, but Anno puts a finer point on it, “it’s generally women who are doing the betraying.”

Like Reccoa, Quess betrays her allies in Char’s Counterattack and defects to Neo-Zeon to become a mobile armor pilot. Tomino explains her character’s function:

I thought, “A character like that would be good for setting things in motion.” That’s her true value. The thing that decided it was, it got me thinking, well then, in that case it doesn’t necessarily have to be a girl like Quess, right?

Even if Quess is a plot device, the form she takes on and the actions she takes aren’t accidental — even if they might be ‘unintended’ as Tomino is conceptualizing the script and story sequence of Char’s Counterattack. Quess and her betrayal loom large over the latest Gundam work, Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe (2026). Shūkō Murase directs this second of a planned trilogy adapted from Yoshiyuki Tomino’s original novel, Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash (1989). Like Quess, Hathaway features a woman with shifting allegiances, Gigi Andalucia (Reina Ueda/Megan Shipman). And, like Lalah from the original Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), Gigi is a sex worker.

These echoes make Gigi a confusing and somewhat unsatisfying character. Tomino is an archetypal storyteller. He has character personalities, relationships, and plot structures that he reuses over and over. And, indeed, he has a view of women that endorses misogynistic tropes but explains them through the imposition of systemic misogyny:

I think the reason [women] leave like that is basically due to a self-preservation instinct. “There’s a part of a woman that can’t survive without someone else to depend on.” That’s actually just an epistemology instilled in them by men. And so they’ve gotten used to that[.]

This is obvious in the case of Reccoa, who names men as responsible for her ‘humiliation,’ which, in turn, drives her to betray. Tomino clearly learned something from film noir, too.

Gigi is a little different. In The Sorcery of Nymph Circe, Federation Captain Kenneth Sleg (Junichi Suwabe/Aaron Phillips) pursues her while she pursues terrorist figurehead Hathaway Noa (Kensho Ono/Caleb Yen), also known as Mafty. Gigi ingratiates herself with Kenneth, she works to keep Hathaway aware of the Federation’s designs on him. Gigi’s loyalties are earnestly divided. Though she supports the Mafty political program, she tells Hathaway in the first Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway (2021) film, “the way Mafty does things isn’t right.” In Nymph Circe, she interrupts Hathaway’s frenzied reminiscence of the events of Char’s Counterattack which casts young pilot Lane Aim (Soma Saito/Kieran Walton) as Amuro Ray (Tōru Furuya/Lucien Dodge).

Tomino treats Gigi like Quess, both of them functioning as plot devices. The film makes no attempt to cover this over. In Hathaway, Kenneth tells her, “It always seemed to me like you have the power to soothe savage men.” Because they are fulcrums for the plot, and regardless of their critical symbolic meaning, there is something unsatisfying about their psychological and dramatic substance as characters. There is less to them than Amuro, Char Aznable, or Hathaway. Gigi and Lalah are particularly of apiece because of their shared origin as sex workers. Sex work or sexual economy, in the literal sense of economic fungibility, is often connected with the kind of mystical, illusory quality of women characters.

Earl Lovelace, the author of Trinidadian Carnival fable The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979), confronts these same issues with his heroine Sylvia. Despite her age, seventeen, he describes her in a remarkably sexual fashion, which immediately raises alarm for contemporary readers.5 He also emphasizes this otherworldly quality that Gigi and Lalah seem to share:

She had watched, felt, the whole performance as if she wasn’t there, from a distance, was already engaged in the apprenticeship of being the whore, the virgin fucked but untouched. Already she had outgrown these boys that never sliced her virginity. She had grown away from them, and, even before them, the men watching her, so that now she could look at all of them with a kind of amusement, wonder, really, watching to see what they would try next. (25)

Given this description, readers should be unsurprised when Lovelace describes her entry into the aforementioned sexual economy:

instinctive knowing refined by seventeen years on this hill, that between this man, the rent collector, and her mother, a woman with seven children and no man either, she was the gift arranged even before she knew it, even without the encouragement or connivance of her mother. (25)

On the one hand, one can see how the denigration and precarity of a woman’s life in Cavalry Hill, the setting of The Dragon Can’t Dance, is ultimately because of masculinist hegemony and economic power. On the other, and not to scold Lovelace, but to read him, the potential romance between Sylvia and the age-inappropriate partner Aldrick suggests Lovelace is not fully equipped to deconstruct the tropes he deploys here. Sylvia and Aldrick fall into the archetype of heroine and hero, destined to be lovers, despite the way in which it naturalizes Sylvia’s treatment as a sexual object. Such treatment is always cause for objection, but it is particularly objectionable because she is a child. Though Tomino is unlikely to have ever read the English-language work of a novelist from Trinidad, he addresses this point explicitly in the context of the common visual gag of showing a young woman’s underwear in Japanese animation:

What I mean is, you see white pair of panties, and in that glimpse you see that the artist or director is only showing them furtively or knowingly. When it comes to [a character’s] fleshiness, if you’re putting that kind of thing out there without considering how it’s going to be seen, then I really wish you would stop. … If you’re intentionally doing that then you’re making a lolicon cartoon, which is bad for kids’ education and you should knock it off. … I want him to make that clear. Even if it’s just a painting on a cel. “I saw that girl’s panties.” “I could see them.” “I had to see them.” You need to be clear which it is. More than calling that character meaningless, I think it’s disrespectful. Carelessly showing their underwear. Am I wrong?

Tomino’s critique cuts across all works of fiction, navigating the ‘fleshiness’ (a term he tentatively defines and deploys in the course of the Anno interview) of a character set against the undeniable reality that they are representations rather than actual people. In his medium, animation cells.

Resulting from this view, Tomino may be the better critic of misogyny by representing it — again, a lesson likely learned from film noir. The most damning humiliation from Sylvia at the hands of her author comes at the novel’s conclusion Now in her late twenties, Sylvia is the ‘beneficiary’ of ‘advice’ from Aldrick that allows her to escape consignment to a loveless life of domestic servitude. Lovelace writes:

he could see that Sylvia in her way had arrived, that, at least, she could feel she had arrived; her own clean, polished room with almost every available modern convenience. She was too wise now for love. (199)

Sylvia has fully bought into her comfortable lifestyle. She asks Aldrick, “What you could give me?,” to which he replies, “Yourself” (201-202). All I can do is laugh.6 Lovelace narrates Aldrick’s thoughts:

he turned and waved again, this time with both hands, signalling [sic] faith in her and a joy in the moment, signalling [sic] as a dear friend, a lover, who is going on before to be joined later by her. In truth, he felt to rush back to her and hold her in his hands and lift her up and carry her away with him; but, he had come to Sylvia, not to claim her, but to help her claim herself (203)

The novel does not push back or question this notion of what Aldrick can offer whatsoever. She really does ‘claim herself’ because of Aldrick’s provocation and ends the novel abandoning her comfortable life for a comradeship with an aspiring revolutionary (218).

Looking at Lovelace and Tomino side by side, all I can think is that some misogynies are more interesting than others. The ill-treatment or poor writing of women in Lovelace leaves the men of his novels untouched. By contrast, Tomino’s leads are distorted and obsessed with the women they’ve lost. In Nymph Circe, the strongest evidence of this is Hathaway’s struggle to embody the ascetic guardian of Plato’s Republic7 (375) or Miyamoto Musashi’s Dokkōkō8 (1645). Hathaway constantly struggles against his supposed ‘carnal desires,’ “I’m supposed to have a high-minded mission to shock the world into setting itself right.” In service of that mission, he feels the need to transcend those aspects of his subjectivity that are not ‘high-minded.’

Tomino is not endorsing this idea among ‘warriors.’ His entire oeuvre is a condemnation of war, to the extent that it is possible in film. What Tomino is attesting to here is the relationship between men and women. In his interview with Anno, he says:

I think that the fact that men torment women as a part of everyday life shows that the power dynamics tied to our issues as an animal species can never be overcome, and even though the women can be forced to submit through brute strength, what we see is just a reaction on their part; it doesn’t fundamentally threaten their position of sovereignty.

Emphatically, he believes there is a relationship between men and women, an inherent relatedness even if the form of that relationship can transform, and that the failing of the ascetic masculine is its rejection of the inherent connectedness to women.

Or, if the relationship between men and women is not inherent, it is at least pleasant. But Tomino echoes the (slightly homophobic and, indeed, fight-fire-with-fire misogyny) critique leveled by The Boys (2019) of the manosphere, this time directed at Plato and Musashi. This asceticism or ‘high-mindedness’ has a queering effect and denies all that which might be pleasant or pleasurable about how men and women can relate.

Where Tomino and Lovelace seem to differ critically is on the question of lack. Aldrick’s wisdom is complete enough to impart something on Sylvia to snap her out of an ideological stupor. Hathaway has no answers, like his predecessor Amuro. And, like Amuro, Hathaway is incomplete. Despite occupying the structural position of Amuro in the narrative logic, Hathaway echoes the view of Char. While Amuro pleads with both Char and Hathaway to await the product of human wisdom, Char and Hathaway condemn him in the same way, “grant all these ignorant people your so-called wisdom, at this very moment!”

Tomino describes Amuro in these lacking terms in his conversation with Anno:

“If only you had been more of a hero, you could have ended things in a cooler way!” There’s a feeling of insufficiency, or at least that’s how I feel about it.

Char, on the other hand, covers over that insufficiency:

It’s not so much that he’s like me, but that we’re on equal footing, and I understand his feelings. So there are things I know very clearly, including that part that’s like, “Doesn’t it make you embarrassed to wear that mask forever?” … I don’t have that with Amuro, he was just raised very normally.

Hathaway is their amalgamation. But is his lack covered over enough with the name of Mafty in the same way as Char’s mask? Neither Amuro nor Char is ‘sufficient,’ but Char’s ‘coolness’ comes with the cover he chooses for his lack. Even as Reccoa shares the dubious claim to psychological realism of the undeveloped Sylvia, she has more in common with Tomino’s lead characters than Sylvia has with Lovelace’s. While both authors struggle with the representation of women, only one gives us a relation among genders as strange as the behavior of his underserved women characters.

Weekly Reading List

Two nice collections of semi-recent Kant scholarship from Paul Guyer are out this month. Find them at your local library.

And here’s some music:

Event Calendar: Backrooms (2026) this weekend

Not actually adding it to the event calendar, but the Backrooms feature film is out this week. I’m there on opening night. Otherwise, see Rififi (1955) in June and Vertigo (1958) in October.

Until next time.

There are a lot of songs about nukes. More than I thought. This week’s Music League theme: “songs with lyrics about nuclear apocalypse or anxiety about nuclear weapons.” I was critical of this theme, thinking it might be generically homogenous. It was only after the playlist came out that one of my generous volunteer administrators for this season of Music League reminded me: I’m the one who came up with it. I forgor.

Spotify

Apple Music

If you are a Music League spectator and are only going to listen to one playlist this go around, let it be this one. I would’ve happily taken the blame if the playlist sucked or was boring, but I’m even happier to take the credit knowing it is probably the best playlist we’ve ever had. The hits don’t stop: Sun Ra, Discharge, Kraftwerk, The Smiths, Prince, Bolt Thrower, Doom, and Watchtower.

There were also songs from bands and artists I’m not too familiar with, who I will now listen to a lot like Barry McGuire, Tom Lehrer, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, and Television Personalities. I have to give some special attention to a song that moved me particularly: “誰にも見えない匂いもない2012” by Rankin Taxi.

The title translates to “You Can’t See It, You Can’t Smell It,” an upbeat dance hall tune with lyrics like “radioactivity is horrible, radioactivity is cruel, radioactivity hurts.” This is the second version of the song by Rankin Taxi, opposing the use of nuclear power in Japan in a post-Fukushima climate: “if there’s an accident it’ll be a huge panic, one small mistake and everyone will die.” Taxi takes aim at corporate greed, the environmental costs of nuclear power, and the military-industrial complex in a radically incongruent musical mode.

Someone else submitted the Integrity cover of “Cease to Exist” which blew my mind. I like the lyrics of the Earth Crisis version, but the song is not good.

This is an incalculable improvement. Dwid even changes some of Karl’s lyrics, from “Mercy of madmen whose commands will cast us into World War Three. If the keys turn from the press of a switch all life as we know it will cease to exist” to “welcome to World War Three. Flip the switch, turn the key. Cease to exist.” Integrity strips down the lyrics at every opportunity to great effect.

I underestimated the scope of cautionary nuclear fables, and even more so just how fantastic the songs would be. What’s the common thread here? This is a subjectWorld War Three for the great songwriters of the past two generations.

This week I wrote about the three Kiyoshi Kurosawa films that have been screening around the country. This is the second time I’ll be writing about Chime (2024).

The 2024 essay is really good. Reading it felt like seeing it for the first time and I didn’t re-tread the same territory this week. If you don’t have it in your inbox, you’ll have to cop a paid subscription to read. I’m not just giving you a sales pitch saying that I’d be happy to have spent $5 to read it.

“I don’t know what possessed me”: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Troika of Chime, Serpent’s Path, and Eyes of the Spider

“Sensory knowing ceases, while spirit-urges proceed”

Without question, the most popular of Zhuangzi’s writings is the ‘butterfly passage.’ Lacan explores it in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973), Westworld (2016) evokes it in the fifth episode of the fourth season.

But I also like the fable of “Butcher Ding,” “The Dextrous Butcher,” or, as translated here, “Cook Ding”:

Cook Dīng was carving up an ox for Lord Wén-huì. Every touch of his hand, every move of his shoulders, every step of his feet, every bend of his knees—Swish! Thwack! The sounds rang out as he waved the knife with a swoosh, all perfectly in tune, as though performing the Mulberry Grove dance to the rhythm of the Jīng-Shǒu symphony.

Lord Wén-huì said, ‘Ah! Wonderful! How can skill reach this level?’

Cook Dīng put down his knife and replied, ‘What I care about is the Way. It’s beyond skill. When I first began carving oxen, what I saw was always the whole ox. After three years, I never saw the whole ox. Now I meet it with my spirit, rather than looking with my eyes. Sensory knowing ceases, while spirit-urges proceed. I go along with the natural patterns, strike in the main gaps, and guide the knife along the major seams, working according to the inherent structure. So I never hit the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.

A good cook changes knives annually—this is cutting. A poor cook changes knives monthly—this is hacking. Now this knife of mine I’ve used for nineteen years, carving thousands of oxen, and yet the blade is like it’s fresh from the grindstone. The joints have spaces in them, and the blade has no thickness. When what has no thickness enters what has space—whoo!—there’s surely more than enough room for the blade to wander about. This is why after nineteen years the blade is still like it’s fresh from the grindstone.

Still, whenever I come to an intricate place, I see it will be difficult and cautiously take care. I keep my eyes on it, work slowly, and move the knife delicately, until suddenly it has already come apart, like a clump of earth falling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife, looking all around, feeling completely satisfied and fulfilled, and then I wipe the knife off and put it away’.

Lord Wén-huì said, ‘Excellent! From hearing the words of Cook Dīng, I’ve learned how to nurture life’. (57-58, Fraser trans.)

Like all of Zhuangzi’s work, there’s a lot to read closely. The simple, presentist contradiction is between the realm of butchery and the idea of “nurturing life,” a contradiction that is smoothed over by the ideas of life’s circularity that romanticize human needs and wants in their subjection of the so-called ‘natural’ world. There’s also the realm in which Dīng works — one might “hack” or “cook,” but there’s not a name for what Dīng does. He cares about “the Way” as opposed to cultivating skill. “Spirit-urges” supersede “sensory knowing.” Then there’s the description of the knife’s relation to the joints, “the joints have spaces in them, and the blade has no thickness … there’s surely more than enough room for the blade to wander about.” Dīng reasons here from a first principle, that a knife moving through empty space should never dull. But it is only his precision, or rather, his adherence to “natural patterns” that allows him to insert his knife into a space which is otherwise invisible. The most conventional of his advice is, “whenever I come to an intricate place, I see it will be difficult and cautiously take care. I keep my eyes on it, work slowly … until suddenly it has already come apart.” His slowness is not a question of efficiency, or even time. Before he knows it, the job is done. My dad gave me this same advice, “when in a rush, slow down.” And Ding takes pride in his work, “feeling completely satisfied and fulfilled.”

Reading Zhuangzi’s parable against the grain, more in line with the contradiction between “to butcher” and “to nurture life,” is what Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Chime (2024) allows.

Rewatching Chime with Serpent’s Path (1998) and Eyes of the Spider (1998) this weekend, I couldn’t help but think of Takuji Matsuoka (Mutsuo Yoshioka) as a Butcher Ding-like figure. If some other agency, “spirit-urges,” inhabits Ding to the end of virtuosic ox carving, those same “spirit-urges” take the form of the chime that drives Matsuoka to kill others and Ichiro Tashiro (Seiichi Kohinata) to kill himself. Though Matsuoka tells detective Makoto Otsuki (Ikkei Watanabe):

People come here to calm their negative emotions. Looking at the ingredients, touching them, and savoring the taste calms you down. So we feel fine even with dangerous things lying around.

One can imagine Matsuoka sitting in an interrogation room much like the one where Kenichi Takabe (Kōji Yakusho) interrogates Kunio Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), looking at Otsuki as confused as he is in his first job interview, “I don’t know what possessed me to say that.”

Something radical, and radically against one’s own self-interest, repeats in Chime. There’s the chime itself, Matsuoka’s repeated reference to himself for which he is castigated, his wife’s disposal of cans, the stabbing and cutting of onions, chickens, and human bodies. Freud writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920):

It is clear that the greater part of what is re-experienced under the compulsion to repeat must cause the ego unpleasure, since it brings to light activities of repressed instinctual impulses … the compulsion to repeat also recalls from the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even to instinctual impulses which have since been repressed. (Norton Standard Edition 21)

In the simplest possible Freudian terms, these repetitions are a manifestation of something repressed. While Butcher Dīng may turn over his body to his “spirit-urges,” one cannot control what those urges motivate someone to do. Not all are so lucky. And Matsuoka kills with the wu wei of “effortless action” or “absence of self-initiated action” (Zhuangzhi: Ways of Wandering… 182). He is possessed by desire.

The repetitions that characterize desire in Chime generally entail some encounter between or among subjects. Elaborating Freudian Wiederholungszwang (’repetition compulsion,’ usually, in the Stardard Edition) as “repetition automatism” in “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’,” Lacan writes:

It is not only the subject, but the subjects, caught in their intersubjectivity, who line up—in other words, they are our ostriches, to whom we thus return here, and who, more docile than sheep, model their very being on the moment of the signifying chain that runs through them.

If what Freud discovered, and rediscovers even more abruptly, has a meaning, it is that the signifier’s displacement determines subjects’ acts, destiny, refusals, blindnesses, success, and fate, regardless of their innate gifts and instruction, and irregardless [sic] of their character or sex; and that everything pertaining to the psychological pregiven follows willy-nilly the signifier’s train, like weapons and baggage. (Écrits 21)

Following this logic, Lacan chooses “automatism” over “compulsion” because the unconscious intervention into human action has several requirements. First, a pre-precondition, the subject must be the subject of the signifier, enmeshed in a signifying network that requires multiple subjectivities. Second, the subject’s desire is not the agent of their action, but rather the Lacanian view suggests the subject’s representation initiates the automatism of repetition. The signifier is displaced by itself in the course of representation.1 This, too, is a repetition.

Kurosawa, in some sense or another, is not ignorant of this labyrinthine Lacanian formulation. Chime hinges on the assertion of Matsuoka’s “I” in an intersubjective setting. Matsuoka’s excesses, along with those of his wife Haruko (Tomoko Tabata) and his son Kenichi (Koki Ishige) chafe against their ego. This ego corresponds to an ideal imposed based on a ideology of domestic obligation. None of them, however, can fulfill the roles into which they are cast precisely because they are displaced in the course of their casting with the movement of the signifier.

“If it’s the wrong guy, they’re all involved anyway”

If representation-as-repetition is critical across Kurosawa’s oeuvre, the most evident meta-repetition is across Serpent’s Path/Hebi no Michi and Eyes of the Spider/Spider’s Eyes/Kumo no Hitomi.2 Both films star Shô Aikawa as a man named Nijima Naomi. Though Nijima’s biography is different between the films, he is an enigmatic killer partially involved in a revenge plot in both. Serpent’s Path is my favorite among the two, where Nijima initially appears to be the Faustian tempter to Teruyuki Kagawa’s Miyashita — sharing a character archetype with Mamiya from Cure or Sano (Daiken Okudaira) from Cloud (2024). As it turns out, however, it is Nijima who is seeking revenge rather than thrills and his ultimate target is Miyashita.

Both Miyashita and, it is revealed toward the end of the film, Nijima have daughters who have been tortured and killed by an unnamed criminal organization. This organization sells tapes of the abuse. Miyashita, a former salesman of these tapes, is looking for the specific killer. Nijima faults the organization as a whole, and directs Miyashita to expose more and more members. Thus, the relationship between Nijima and Miyashita is less Sano and Ryōsuke (Masaki Suda) and more Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and Leonard (Guy Pearce) in Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000).

Following the discussion of Hannah Arendt’s “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” (1964) two weeks ago, Nijima’s ostensible revenge quest follows the logic of her argument. She writes:

In every bureaucratic system the shifting of responsibilities is a matter of daily routine, and if one wishes to define bureaucracy in terms of political science, that is, as a form of government—the rule of offices, as contrasted to the rule of men, of one man, or of the few, or of the many—bureaucracy unhappily is the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of rulership. But in the courtroom, these definitions are of no avail. For to the answer: “Not I but the system did it in which I was a cog,” the court immediately raises the next question: “And why, if you please, did you become a cog or continue to be a cog under such circumstances?” (31)

Nijima, like Arendt, faults both the system and the so-called “cogs” in the system’s machinery — even as every supposed killer implicates someone else. He holds to account every person with even proximate participation in the act of torture or the self-enrichment resulting from that torture.

Serpent’s Path repeats, in part, out of necessity. It is a narrow film with only a few sets; including two of Kurosawa’s signature empty warehouses. Part of Nijima’s sinister quality comes from his activity in one of those sets, a classroom where he teaches gibberish.

There’s something cultish about Nijima’s seminars where he cautions students of all ages that an incorrect result in these nonsensical equations could lead to “space turn[ing] inside out and time go[ing] backwards.” Knowledge is power for Nijima, both in the sense of his bizarre writing on the chalkboard and the truth of who committed the actual murder of the children. That power is also dangerous, with the power to turn around time or cause the world to “fall apart.” Nijima knows what Miyashita is looking to uncover through the entire film, positioning himself to achieve his own goal of killing the entire organization. He forces Miyashita to reckon with knowledge’s destructive quality.

But Nijima’s true identity, or even his corporeal reality, is called into question. Miyashita may just as well be haunted by his own conscience within the circuitous dream logic of Serpent’s Path.

“Is there anything you’d sacrifice your life for?”

Eyes of the Spider is the more comedic of the two Nijima films, tying together the continuity of domestic anxieties from Cure to Chime and Cloud. This version of Nijima is not just a father, but a husband. The film is full of vignettes of a home life resembling Takabe’s or Matsuoka’s. Behind the facade, Nijima is a disaffected hitman working on behalf of a shady government organization with a group of yakuza aspirants including his high school friend Iwamatu (Dankan).

The film explores a number of Kurosawa preoccupations in addition to the ill-fit of domesticity for the ungovernable subject. Nijima kills effortlessly, inexplicably skilled as an assassin. There is a lingering, unexplored conspiracy behind the scenes of the film in which Nijima is caught. In the end, Nijima is a working stiff trying to pay his mortgage. This, too, forces subjectivity and desire into frames that cannot accommodate them.

This version of Nijima’s disaffection comes in the wake of an unsatisfying revenge that, rather than leaving Nijima unsatisfied, seems to render him too satisfied and unable to behave in accordance with demand or desire. Instead, he has become a cog, moving only when prompted through paths set out for him.

Again, Kurosawa shows a sinister side of a mastery that defies conscious thought. Nijima doesn’t need passion to kill. Instead, he kills because he can; and because there are worse ways to make a living.

Weekly Reading List

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/thomas-nagel/i-m-not-sorry — Thomas Nagel vs. T.M. Scanlon is a clash of philosophical titans. And Nagel empties the clip in his review of Scanlon’s Morality and Responsibility (2025). From my perspective, this is a fair and good faith critique of Scanlon’s work and some of its most ridiculous conciets. The subtext of Nagel’s analysis is a through line between Scanlon’s thinking and the moral universe of social media condemnation.

Michael Sugrue’s vintage lectures archived on youtube are absolute gold. I watched a few this week and am shocked to realize I’ve never posted them in the newsletter before.

Event Calendar: Gundam is in Theaters

Sparse updates this week — just added Mulholland Drive (2001) and Taxi Drive (1976) both at Brattle and both in 35mm this week. But really what you should do is watch Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway (2021) at your house and then go see The Sorcery of Nymph Circe (2026) so you know what the hell I am talking about when I write about it next week. There will be Plato.

Until next time.

Music League’s theme this week was a song you like by an artist you hate.

Spotify

Apple Music

I already discussed my difficulty making a selection here. Ultimately I chose a song by Drake that is 60% inside joke with a friend of mine. I don’t feel like I was exceptionally adhering to the prompt. “Hate” would be kind of a strong descriptor for my feelings about Drake, though I do think most of his music is pretty terrible. We had some pretty easy to hate representation: Maroon 5, Dave Matthews Band, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters. We also had shocking feelings of hatred by the edgiest of us: Bauhaus, Pixies, Pavement.

But the best choice, the one that I thought would have been more true for me than even my own submission was Post Malone. My friend Eric submitted “Congratulations.” I’m sure everyone has heard it. I would’ve gone a little further back.

What can I say, I am a sucker for melancholy rap songs about mortality. I don’t even know what kind of terrible music Post Malone is making now, but there’s a fall off study to be had looking at his career.

This week, Eiichi Kudo.

“When he fights with the aim to die, he lives. When he fights with the aim to live, he dies”: Critique and Chivalry in 13 Assassins

In a conversation with Gene Siskel from the November 11, 1973 edition of the Chicago Tribune, François Truffaut makes a critique that has reverberated through film criticism for decades:

For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don’t think I’ve really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war.

Truffaut makes no exception to this critique, even indicting Paths of Glory (1957) and Dr. Strangelove (1964) as proponents of war. The films to which Truffaut are far from the only example, I’ve written about this idea in relation to The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel (2013), Black Mirror (2011), and Severance (2022). In my first engagement with the idea for Paradox, back in 2019, I also discussed Mobile Suit Gundam (1979):

In the case of Gundam, Yoshiyuki Tomino as the series’s architect is faced with the impossible task of telling a story critical of war all the while having to sell models of the war machines to children. And the machines that Tomino should revile are instead almost objects of worship.

Indeed, much of the Gundam works are subordinate to the capital incentives that justify their existence — down to some of the most egregious examples of Mobile Suit Gundam Narrative (2018) largely structured to re-use toy molds.

The tension here, especially in the cases where the contrast is so apparent, can make a text more rich. Paths of Glory and Dr. Strangelove clearly works that critique war whether or not they inadvertently also endorse it. In contrast to Truffaut, I think there’s evidence to suggest they’re successful. To quote myself again:

Kubrick was certainly on to something here. The best way to make an antiwar film might be to have the majority of the film’s runtime dedicated to the tedious bureaucracy of the court martial and the insistent pleas of men consigned to death.

Unlike those two films, Gundam is a self-awarely Janus-faced beast. Bandai expects toy commercials while Yoshiyuki Tomino, Yasuhiro Imagawa, and even Toshikazu Yoshizawa are trying to make art. The samurai-focused jidaigeki encounters the same tension, as films present heroic characters and finely choreographed chanbara action while also critiquing the social hierarchy and ideological inconsistencies embodied by the samurai class. No movie more than Eiichi Kudo’s 13 Asssassins (1963) demonstrates this contradiction.

“We must figure out a way to correct the distortion of this injustice”

In their summary for the film’s re-release, Arrow Video writes:

By 1963 Eiichi Kudo was already a jidaigeki veteran. But for 13 Assassins, he decided to buck the emerging trend for colourful, family-friendly samurai films and renew with the radical traditions of the genre. The resulting film is a compelling and suspenseful samurai drama that remains impactful to this day.

Despite the gritty quality of Kudo’s film, it is far from the nihilistic, caustic condemnation of Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri (1962) from a year before. Neither Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), nor Masahiro Shinoda’s Assassination (1964), nor Kihachi Okamoto’s The Sword of Doom (1966) make available a reading that romanticizes the “samurai spirit” (samurai no kokorozashi) or “Way of the Warrior” (samurai no michi). 13 Assassins, though, explores both with a naive earnestness through its principal characters Shinzaemon Shimada (Chiezō Kataoka), Shinrokurō Shimada (Kōtarō Satomi), Kujūrō Hirayama (Kō Nishimura), and antagonist Hanbei Onigashira (Ryōhei Uchida).

All of this is to say, despite the violence and salacious material in 13 Assassins, it valorizes and ennobles the samurai as something more than a privileged social position rife with hypocrisy. There is certainly something ‘family friendly,’ or ideological, about that.

13 Assassins sets Shinzaemon and Hanbei against each other. What is critical about the film’s structure is neither man acts on their own behalf. Were it up to them, they wouldn’t be fighting at all. Shinzaemon works on behalf of Doi Ōkō Toshi (Tetsurō Tanba) to exact punishment on Hanbei’s lord, Naritsugu Matsudaira (Kantarō Suga). Naritsugu evades public censure as the half-brother of the Shogun and Hanbei reluctantly fulfills his obligation as his retainer despite Naritsugu’s apparent sadism.

Doi’s instructions to Shinzaemon are secret. He says, “To betray the word of the Shogun, and find fault with his political leadership, that’s something, as a senior advisor, I cannot do.” Instead, he sets Shinzaemon on his mission as a clandestine assassin with dubious legal authority. I write in my Letterboxd review of 13 Assassins:

Thus, the lawful and moral hierarchy that insulates Naritsugu calls for the intervention of Shinzaemon Shimada (Chiezo Kataoka). Shinzaemon is not a sole actor in a state of exception who violates the written law in service of a higher one. Instead, he is a disavowed government operative bestowed his authority by Doi Ōkō Toshi, in a quick but memorable performance from Tetsuro Tanba.

Shinzaemon acts with authority that Doi would ultimately deny. The missive that grants him that authority, Doi burns. This is a familiar pattern for viewers of 007, Mission: Impossible, or 24. But more than any of those works, 13 Assassins invites the question of how such an anonymized, denied authority within the scope of law differs from absolute criminality. How is Shinzaemon different from heroes like Hanshiro Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai) who ignore the authority of written law all together? Shinzaemon’s authority is explicitly unwritten. Or, more emphatically un-written, erased from the archive despite its official status.

Shinzaemon fits squarely into the trope of the “disavowed agent.”

Despite the cloak and dagger instructions from Doi, he must still censure Shinzaemon. Halfway through the film, Shinzaemon is dismissed as a law enforcement official:

By the ruling justice of the country, you have been relieved of your position. Should you fall at arrowpoint, your responsibility weighs tremendously. And the day of life and death shall be determined.

Though Shinzaemon’s status as a judicial functionary is unverifiable, it both sets him apart from the many noir-ish or cowboy-influenced samurai protagonists who have no such authority. Likewise, it places him in structural opposition to Hanbei. Even as Shinzaemon acts in accordance with his convictions in the way Hanbei does not, it is a duty imposed by someone else that causes Shinzaemon to act.

“It’s beyond anyone’s imagination what actually happens when two men fight, throwing their lives at each other”

The caper to assassinate Naritsugu requires co-conspirators, and Shinzaemon enlists twelve other samurai to make up the titular thirteen assassins. The film is unique in that it presents sword fighting as that which has been sublimated into a martial art rather than a tool for killing. Even Shinzaemon is inexperienced in warfare, and the collective working on his behalf acknowledge that for both the assassins’ squad and Naritsugu’s samurai, it will be their first experience in life-or-death combat.

Aside from the social hierarchy and ethical structure that is the subject of so much samurai cinema, Kudo demystifies samurai labor in a time of peace more than other films. Yes, 13 Assassins has ronin like Hirayama and Heizō Sawara (Michitarō Mizushima). The question of being or not being a samurai is inextricable from the status of employment. In this sense, Shinzaemon and Hanbei are yet again opposed to one another. Shinzaemon is gainfully employed, but far from wealthy as an ōmetsuke. Despite his relative economic precarity, Shinzaemon is also a hatamoto, from a distinguished samurai lineage that, in turn, dictated his own class and profession. Shinzaemon had no choice but to be a samurai.

By contrast, Hanbei is neither an ōmetsuke working on behalf of the Shogunate nor a hatamoto, with no impressive samurai in his family tree. However, he is much more wealthy than Shinzaemon as Naritsugu’s chief retainer. Naritsugu repeatedly alludes to the wealth of the clan by the number of rice bales (specifically koku of rice) in storage. Shinzaemon does not have generational wealth to fall back upon, only generational status. But Shinzaemon’s meager paycheck does allow him to support Hirayama, though Shinzaemon calls it only a “small contribution.”

Shinzaemon’s nephew, Shinrokurō, is yet one more rung removed from the celebrated samurai family of Shimada. Shinrokurō lives with a geisha and refers to himself as a gokudō and works to learn the shamisen, rejecting his implicit obligation of public service. However, after a demonstration of Shinzaemon’s prodigious shamisen skills despite also being an accomplished samurai, Shinrokurō joins Shinzaemon’s cause. Being a great shamisen player never satisfies Shinzaemon, no matter how proficient he becomes at the instrument. His virtuosity passes that dissatisfaction to Shinrokurō, less accomplished as both a musician and samurai.

“I’ve heard it said that a samurai would choose death to avoid becoming a laughing stock”

Much of the film revolves around the antagonism between one’s self-image and perception by others. Shinzaemon is seen as endlessly proficient, but Shinrokurō has a different read of him:

He gets deeply worried, thinking about what trouble he’s getting into. But, despite all his feelings, he just smiles and takes on the job. He takes on jobs that seem impossible, and achieves success. And that’s the really great thing about him.

Shinzaemon is externally self-assured and admired by even those who recognize his internal anxiety. Both Yukie Makino (Ryūnosuke Tsukigata) and Naritsugu concern themselves with the idea of being ‘laughing stocks’ in the English translation — though it’s worth noting their Japanese phrasing is different (guchi to o-warai kudasare and tenka no monowarai respectively). Even the different Japanese phrasing lends itself to reading this juxtaposition. Makino is unable to protect his son and daughter-in-law from Naritsugu, “as a living witness, I don’t feel free to die, so I must extend this life that I no longer care for.” Naritsugu’s obsession with how he is perceived by others (tenka, the world) is one of his many flaws.

Ultimately Shinzaemon’s self-image is different from the calm exterior he shows. He looks at himself as having lived too long, and will confront death through Doi’s censure or in the course of assassinating Naritsugu.

“I’m telling myself now how truthful I’ve been to the Way of the Warrior”

There is no question that the failings of the samurai class’s structure cannot dampen the heroic character of Shinzaemon, Shinrokurō, Hirayama, and Heizō. Though Heizō has little screen time, his role is critical. He re-emphasizes the economic relations of the samurai. As a ronin, he demands payment for joining the plot against Naritsugu:

My sympathy with your cause has nothing to do with money. But I’m a ronin with no kind of relationship with you. I don’t think you should expect me to work for no payment.

Heizō then describes his plans for the 200 ryo payment he requests:

120 ryo for loans and debts that have accumulated over the years, plus buying something nice for my relatives. Then, 30 ryo for a tomb for my wife who died from the hardships I put her though. And 20 ryo for my own preparations. With the remaining 30 ryo, I plan to experience the kind of luxuries I never had in life … pleasing those around me ultimately satisfies my desire.

In the film’s penultimate scene, Shinrokurō finds Haizō’s dead body, 30 ryo left in his pocket.

This unstated and unknown self-sacrifice encapsulates what is admirable about the samurai for Kudo.

Like Haizō, Shinzaemon is heroic for what he is willing to sacrifice. He exposes his doubt to Hirayama only through parable:

They say a man’s life is unpredictable, but not a warrior’s life. When he fights with the aim to die, he lives. When he fights with the aim to live, he dies. I’m telling myself now how truthful I’ve been to the Way of the Warrior.

Even as Shinzaemon is a paragon of the samurai (samurai no michi), he has fallen short only because he has not given his life. Not for nothing, this is a film whose action is initiated by harakiri: Zusho Mamiya, another chief Naritsugu retainer, kills himself in a plea to the government to censure Naritsugu and deprive him of his title. Hanbei takes a different path:

If Chief Retainer Lord Mamiya had to commit harakiri, I wish he’d done so in front of my lord. I feel we could’ve done something about it then. I’ve also thought of committing harakiri myself. But I kept seeing the face of the former Shogun, who asked me to protect his son Naritsugu, and the face of my foe Lord Shimada.

Hanbei is only a villain because he is trapped between the two obligations. But neither Hanbei nor Shinzaemon act without some sort of lawful authority, even if the record of that authority for Shinzaemon is erased and denied. Hanbei and Shinzaemon both die in the course of battle, Hanbei killing Shinzaemon without Shinzaemon raising his sword back. His dying words to Hanbei, “this is the right way. If I hadn’t killed your lord, I’d have lost my pride as a samurai. If you hadn’t killed me, you’d have lost your pride, too.” This is cut-and-dry heroic stuff. The critique the film levels, even in the face of these larger-than-life characters, looks at both the samurai’s rigidity and the permissiveness and favoritism of the Tokugawa Shogunate.

Shinzaemon tells his comrades after killing Naritsugu, “end this meaningless fight.” It is meaningless not just because Naritsugu has been killed, but because the confrontation itself occurs only because of the governments inability to object to the Shogun’s nepotism. Kudo seems to acknowledge that the samurai façade can produce perverse incentives. Hanbei ignores his ethical convictions in favor of personal enrichment and status. Shinzaemon cannot, nor does he even want to, pursue the life of an artist despite his prodigious shamisen skill.

Even understanding those shortcomings, 13 Assassins is a much more favorable, romantic view of the samurai than its contemporaries. The outlook is almost naive, with much of the characters plight coming from the machinations of daimyo like Doi and Naritsugu, the truly shiftless and corrupt compared to the committed, duty-bound samurai heroes.

Above all else, Shinzaemon is a hell of a cool character on screen. And this is a movie that’s full of them. For the scathing critique of samurai hypocrisy, look to Harakiri. 13 Assassins is a Shakespearean tale of those more heroic than flawed and inspiring than deconstructed. Nonetheless, Kudo’s work is at the peak of the genre.

Weekly Reading List

Music this week.

Also this.

Event Calendar: Gundam is Back in Theaters

Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe (2026) is gearing up for a full theatrical run starting on Thursday. There are at least seven days of showings nationwide, usually around 7pm at your local AMC. This is the second film of a planned trilogy, the first of which is available on Netflix. And, what do you know, I’ve written about it.

Until next time.

Losing well is not easy. Developing your response to losing, if you are a competitor, is vital. But there are wider applications here for those who lead a blissfully agreeable, non-confrontational life. Losing in a competitive sense has a very discrete meaning defined by whatever game context. But typically a loss entails some affect, disappointment, frustration, perhaps something unanticipated. So thinking about losing and how one deals with it implicitly involves dealing with disappointment, frustration, and the unexpected. Watching Luis Scott-Vargas lose playing Slay the Spire 2 (2026) this weekend, he made an offhand comment, “frustration is also a really important part in games. It can really keep you coming back.” Where frustration meets that impetus to to come back is key to how one loses.

In competition, the stakes of losing well are very high. Typically a single loss is not the end of your competitive journey. You can lose one game in a match. You can lose one match, but still be in contention for the broader win. You must avoid becoming ‘tilted.’ Whatever your emotional response to an unfavorable result in a game, you have to maintain composure and continue to play well to give yourself the best chance of further wins. A loss shouldn’t compound into further losses just because you’re disappointed or frustrated — though this happens all too often.

At the same time, the answer is not being disaffected in response to a loss. Feeling is good. Feeling something about a game or any kind of competition where you are in a position to win or lose means that it matters. It should matter. If it doesn’t, why bother doing it in the first place? Something that matters to you will, probably, mean you expend a greater effort and likely perform better because of your emotional investment. But that investment invites the risk of getting tilted, suddenly playing or performing worse because of an unexpected loss. This is where the challenge lies. There are no prescriptive, one-size-fits-all answers to this quandary either. I am always working to make sure a loss hits me in the right spot. Losing should provide motivation and learnings for improvement or greater understanding of my position without sending me off the deep end.

Things get all the more complex when the losses are not your responsibility, but you are nonetheless emotionally invested. Yes, we’re talking about sports and the Boston Celtics. The Celtics have been bounced, ignominiously, from the first round of the NBA playoffs. It’s a strange situation to be disappointed when the team’s prospects at the beginning of the year were so abysmal. Jayson Tatum was injured. Brad Stevens cleared the roster for the sake of lowing the team’s tax bill. But I was still optimistic.

My optimism does not win basketball games. Nor does the fan’s attitude, knowledge, disposition. However good or bad of a fan you might be, the team performs the same. And I cannot be the most gracious loser when I have no control over the outcome. When the outcome isn’t even my win or loss. The greatest regret I have is that I probably won’t watch any more basketball this season. At least that leaves me more time for movies.

Maybe I can’t quite be the good sport I want to be when it comes to professional sports is because the stakes are so low. But I can be a good sport when it comes to losing in Music League. I am getting crushed. You thought I forgot? Here are the new playlists for our third attempt at a covers round:

Spotify

Apple Music

With cover songs, they can be hit or missed based on whether or not you know the original, whether or not the original is good, whether or not the cover is good. A good cover usually shouldn’t be too similar or too different from the original, although there’s plenty of room for exceptions on either ends of the spectrum. I almost want to put my favorite song on this playlist behind a paywall because it is so salacious and shocking. I’ve never listened to the band Falling In Reverse before, but their cover of “Gangsta’s Paradise” moved me. It does not sound serious, which is a plus. As a gag, it’s okay. But beyond the joke, where the punchline is only incongruous juxtaposition, this version does expose something about just how good of a song “Gangsta’s Paradise” is. I’ve listened to the Coolio version a million times and stopped paying attention to it line by line a long time ago. I heard the verse:

Fool, death ain’t nothin’ but a heart beat away I’m livin’ life do or die, what can I say? I’m 23 now but will I live to see 24? The way things is going I don’t know

like I was hearing it for the first time.

Next week we are asked to submit a song we like by an artist we hate. I am innocent — category creation is delegated to others this season. I’m finding it pretty difficult to think of anything I can submit that fits the prompt. I don’t really “hate” artists who have songs I like. I see two options for myself: choose in the spirit of the prompt, picking a song by an artist whose songs I generally do not like. Or, I could choose to maximize my probability of winning and choose a great song by an artist who most people think is bad. But I probably think they’re great.

I think I’ll stick to the former. Nothing wrong with losing when you know it’s coming.

Crises of Faith in Daredevil: Born Again and The Boys

If you have followed this newsletter for a reasonable period of time, you know I like routinely writing about an ongoing television show. The closest I have gotten to this are an essay about Daredevil: Born Again (2025) about a month ago and one about The Boys (2019) two weeks ago.

I noted in my writing about The Boys that there are some big picture thematic similarities between it and Daredevil. Notably, both series deal with a Trump analogue and have necessarily responded to broader positioning as texts within the so-called culture war.

Spoilers for Daredevil and The Boys follow liberally

One of Daredevil’s most intrigue characters is Daniel Blake (Michael Gandolfini) who serves as the unsuspecting Trump voter. Blake is unsuspecting in the sense that he looks at Wilson “Kingpin” Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) with a reverence that, in turn, produces a genuine belief. Blake’s belief in Kingpin is, to some degree, based on a deception carried out by Kingpin himself. He misleads those who follow him, claiming the altruistic motives of a dedicated civil servant rather than his more evident motives of self-enrichment. To this extent, Blake is positioned to be an object of the audience’s sympathy. He has been duped through no fault of his own and has bought into lies presented with the precise function of eliciting his support.

Unlike the average political supporter, however, Blake becomes Kingpin’s Deputy Mayor and is exposed to the inner workings of the criminal enterprise. In the second season’s fifth episode, “The Grand Design,” Blake is explicitly read into the essence of Kingpin’s criminality: Buck Cashman (Arty Froushan) brings Blake to dispose of a murdered corpse.

This is the most acute cause of the struggle for Blake that Deborah Ann Woll identified in her conversation with Gandolfini in a discussion about the second episode, “Shoot the Moon”:

If you were to get sucked into a community, a group, a movement that suddenly down the line you’re realizing, oh wait, this isn’t what I thought it was? Or this is now starting to ask me to step beyond my moral boundaries, like what do you do in that situation? How do you either step out or do you dive in deeper?

In “The Hateful Darkness,” last week’s episode, Blake has to face the dissonance of what he believes about Fisk and what he is expected to do as a believer. Blake is coerced to turn over his romantic interest, BB Urich (Genneya Walton), to Cashman. If Urich falls into Cashman’s hands, she will presumably be killed because of her unfavorable coverage of the Kingpin regime. Urich also serves as Blake’s conscience, confronting him with the incongruity he already seems to struggle with at some level.

Blake, ever the sympathetic character, ultimately chooses to help Urich escape Cashman.

The episode illustrates the contrast between Blake and Cashman in their subsequent encounter. Cashman tortures Blake, but Blake purposefully deprives himself of the information that might save him — Urich’s location. Instead, he tells Buck:

What is followin’ his orders gonna do for you? How long till you’re on the floor with a gun pointed at your head?

Indeed, what Kingpin can do for Cashman has always been at issue between the two of them as distinct from Blake’s earnest belief. In “The Grand Design,” Cashman says to Blake in the course of convincing him to bury the corpse, “we work for a man who can change your life.” Material enrichment has never been Blake’s goal. He is motivated by faith.

Faith is the watchword in The Boys’ final season’s fifth episode, “One-Shots.” The episode is bookended with the story of Firecracker (Valorie Curry), a right-wing religious superhero supporting the fascist superman Homelander (Antony Starr). The season’s anxiety-inducing twist is Homelander’s claim of Godhood, working to create a religious apparatus around him as a deity that supplants American Christianity.

Firecracker, who previously believed Homelander shared her religious convictions, now faces two incompatible belief systems: Christianity and the Democratic Church of America.

The episode follows Firecracker through her anguish, painfully trying to supplant Jesus with Homelander. She accuses her religious mentor, Reverend Greg Dupree (W. Earl Brown) of pedophilia and disgraces him as reprisal for his disbelief in Homelander.

Firecracker also confides in Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), Homelander’s father. Soldier Boy crudely affirms her, “If there is a God, he sure as hell didn’t come out of my balls.” But Soldier Boy is Firecracker’s Judas, revealing her hesitance. Homelander accuses her of being ‘unfaithful’ just as she attempts to truly displace her former faith.

He says:

Are you thinking of Jesus when you’re praising me? … You’re supposed to worship me. Love me. And me alone. … I believed in you. Turns out you don’t believe in me. I need you to collect your things and leave.

Homelander’s rejection only stokes her desire to appear faithful. She sets herself apart from his other followers:

Everybody else here, they’re just scared of you. Or they want something from you, but I have always loved you for you.

What Firecracker doesn’t realize is her conflation of the romantic, human love she has for Homelander and the distinctly religious affection she has for Jesus. Homelander, however, does not allow the two to be conflated. She asks him, “We all need love, don’t we? Even God.” Homelander is astonished, in part because what she appeals to is his human foible of need. God is complete. She exposes precisely that he is not God. And he rejects her because, as she says, he needs love.

Both Daniel Blake and Firecracker meet grisly ends, Blake spared the indignity of being killed by the one in which he believes and Firecracker smote like so many nonbelievers. They both die because of a crisis of faith.

The religious character of Firecracker’s relationship to Homelander is obvious as a feature of the plot itself, but Blake’s attitude toward Kingpin is as overt as subtext could possibly be. During his death scene, he is crosscut with Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) in prayer to Saint Jude.

Both Daredevil and The Boys treat faith with some amount of suspicion. Blake and Firecracker lie to their God-analogues with different degrees of success. Blake tells Buck, despite being tortured, that he doesn’t know where Urich is. He tells the truth, but only because he has deliberately denied himself the knowing Buck presumes him to have. This echoes his relationship with the knowledge of his own wrongdoing. On the verge of turning Urich over to Buck, Blake tells her:

I went upstate with Buck, to the Catskills, and we buried a body. And I wish I didn’t know I did that. But I can’t have anyone else knowing I did that. [Emphasis added]

This is his apology for killing her, she must die to not know he did that. More interesting, though, is his formulation “I wish I didn’t know I did that.” Blake’s issue is not with the doing, but the knowing. Would that he could forget, he would be spared the moral weight of his action.

Firecracker is a different kind of believer. Her belief is earnest, though perhaps she may wish to forget her faith in Jesus. What she says to Homelander is true, but truer than she intends. Even as she avows her belief in him as a God, it is the unconscious impossibility of her belief in him that is revealed by her question “We all need love, don’t we?” For Lacan, these complexities are part and parcel of discourse. Communicating will never get across what it appears to represent. In “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (1966) he writes:

Even if it communicates nothing, discourse represents the existence of communication; even if it denies the obvious, it affirms that speech constitutes truth; even if it is destined to deceive, it relies on faith in testimony. (209)

Faith is what guarantees speech, and to lack faith means to lack the capacity to tell the truth — even if the guarantee that faith promises is destined to fall short.

Of course, there are more realpolitik interpretations of the plight of Firecracker and Blake, such as that of Hannah Arendt. Where Lacan takes us as far as their discourse, Arendt’s framework evaluates their ethical positioning. Once again, we see where the two characters diverge: Firecracker attempts to assimilate into the fold despite her nagging disbelief, whereas Blake willingly becomes an apostate, rejecting Fisk and Cashman. Even as Blake’s life is on the line, he behaves morally in Arendt’s formulation. In “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” (1964) she writes:

There was a widespread conviction that it is impossible to withstand temptation of any kind, that none of us could be trusted or even be expected to be trustworthy when the chips are down, that to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same, whereas in the words of Mary McCarthy, who first spotted this fallacy: “If somebody points a gun at you and says, ‘Kill your friend or I will kill you,’ he is tempting you, that is all.” And while a temptation where one’s life is at stake may be a legal excuse for a crime, it is certainly not a moral justification. (18)

Firecracker needs no such temptation to subordinate her own convictions to Homelander’s whims, whereas not even the most extreme temptation could bend Blake’s will once his faith is broken. Blake refuses to be a cog, contrasting the justifications Arendt describes post-WWII war criminals as using, “Here it is indeed true what all the defendants in the postwar trials said to excuse themselves: if I had not done it, somebody else could and would have” (29). Neither Firecracker’s attempt to impose upon herself the idea that Homelander’s will is inextricable with the moral law nor the implicit threat of Homelander’s profound power is enough to excuse her from culpability. Firecracker is the late-stage follower of a dictator:

I must here remind you that the personal or moral issue, as distinct from legal accountability, hardly arises with those who were convicted adherents of the regime: that they could not feel guilty but only defeated was almost a matter of course, unless they changed their minds and repented. And yet, even this simple issue has become confused because when the day of reckoning finally came it turned out that there had been no convicted adherents, at least not of the criminal program for which they stood trial. And the trouble is that, though this was a lie, it is not a simple or total lie. For what had started in the initial stages with politically neutral people who were not Nazis but cooperated with them, happened in the last stages with the party members and even with the elite formations of the SS: there were very few people even in the Third Reich who wholeheartedly agreed with the late crimes of the regime and a great number who were perfectly willing to commit themselves nevertheless. (Arendt 35)

In this sense, we see the opposite in Firecracker. She attests to her commitment in an attempt to believe it, rather than to obscure her doubt. Functionally, though, these processes are identical. An attestation to the leader of belief and commitment will obscure doubt, whether the subject wants to doubt or not.

Regardless of how Firecracker accepts or rejects her uncertainty about Homelander, she is “on the floor with a gun pointed at [her] head” suffering the fate that Blake predicts for Buck. Faith, or the attempt to enact faith, isn’t even enough for Homelander. When that faith is predicated on his human qualities, he must reject it.

Though both Firecracker and Blake suffer the same fate, their relationship to the sovereign they have dedicated themselves to is distinct. Whether one is a doubting servant or an unapologetic apostate, they are equally at risk for murder by a capricious king.

Weekly Reading List

Nothing here made it into the essay, but I enjoyed this interview with Curry about the fate of Firecracker.

You can become unkillable in Slay the Spire 2 (2026).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sangokushi_(manga) — Been digging into this manga classic. Seek and you shall find.

Event Calendar: Noir City Boston is Back

I had a ton of fun at last year’s Noir City: Boston festival and am looking forward to attending this year. The incomparable Foster Hirsch will be back introducing the films. They are showing The Yellow Canary (1963) and The Crimson Canary (1945). I haven’t seen anything they’re screening other than Sweet Smell of Success (1957), even some of the heavy hitters. If you live in the area, I strongly encourage you make your way to as many of the Noir City screenings as possible.

Until next time.

Let’s get this out of the way quick: Music League is back. You can join here: https://app.musicleague.com/l/87b7b82585ec42f5b7d8fdd267db5ee4/

And you better do it quick. I shared the link in the paid subscriber Discord early last week. This first round closes at the end of the week. I’ll be writing about the playlists the week after they release.

This week, I am planting some seeds for subsequent writing.

The Mystery and Mysticism of Xenogears

The first directorial effort from game designer Tetsuya Takahashi, Xenogears (1998), has cast a shadow over his career as imposing as the “monstrous” Weltall on the game’s cover. Co-created with his wife, Kaori Tanaka, Xenogears is a singularly mythologized video game. The Perfect Works (1998) companion book is available in various English translations, including UltimateGraphics’ attempt, and the partially translated “study guide.” Xenogears: A God Slaying Story (1998), a prequel novel, has just recently been fan translated. When I was in middle school, I had an enormous binder filled with the printed pages of the Xenogears: God and Mind Novelization (1999) by the semi-anonymous author Dark.

His website is now defunct and no longer houses the novelization’s files. However, I have them archived here:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qy9pl5wc17pnchoepa3f1/Xenogears-God-and-Mind-Vol-1.docx?rlkey=7bdhhvld804ns2395huchb490&st=e3r293g1&dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/38n2dvyjtc98mjih5ijgu/Xenogears-God-and-Mind-Vol-2.docx?rlkey=an2jxergyo6faggiom9u6f274&st=ldqkpqde&dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/shvan1nsat8oad637v7oo/Xenogears-God-and-Mind-Vol-3.docx?rlkey=6l4zy4gaw3qho04w2nsjsbqmr&st=6z88ooku&dl=0

Fascination around the game comes from its heady philosophical references, release during the heyday of Japanese RPGs, and unusual game design. Xenogears has a robust, well-animated combat system inputting commands that can combo together in the style of fighting games. This atypical approach to combat has rarely been emulated — though Sony’s Legend of Legaia (1998) would feature somewhat similar combat releasing about ten months after Xenogears.

Takahashi is unquestionably an auteur, as he has worked across three publishers and two development teams in an attempt to work through Xenogears’ themes. In 2002, he would begin the Xenosaga series for Namco. Xenoblade Chronicles, a still-ongoing series started in 2010, is his most recent attempt.

I’ve been thinking about Xenogears in part because of a great deep-dive podcast, *Retrograde Amnesia* (2019). The podcast has covered a wide range of classic games, but Xenogears was the first covered to the tune of fifty-five or so episodes. Even in those early episodes, hosts Eric Laymen and Chris Stone are attentive to the little things. They cut in dialogue and soundtrack bits. They uncover the source of mysterious vocalizations in the song “Knight of Fire,” which Yasunori Mitsuda somehow sampled from Christian Brando’s murder trial: “total sentence imposed is ten years.”

I am just beginning my long overdue listen of the Retrograde Amnesia season on Xenogears, but I’m planning on pairing it with a play through of the game’s Perfect Works Build. Laymen and Stone reflect often in their recording on the disparity between how they received the game as teenagers and how they encounter it as adults. For the most part, their adult reaction reveres the work of Takahashi. Having played the game relatively recently, I agree it is as fascinating as ever. I haven’t re-read Dark’s novelization recently, however, so I imagine looking it over again could lead to a dissonance between my enthusiasm for it as a young person and my view of it now. Still, like most things even tangentially related to this game, it deserves to be preserved.

Weekly Reading List

https://umiami.mediaspace.kaltura.com/category/Caribbean+Writers+Summer+Institute+Archival+Video+Collection/87964161 — The University of Miami maintains a singular video archive including several years of the Caribbean Writers Summer Institute. I highly recommend reviewing these remarkable discussions, interviews, and readings.

Payton Pritchard highlights.

I’m back on Yowamushi Pedal (2008) after a long haitus from reading. It will soon publish its 100th volume. What an achievement.

Event Calendar: When You Have the Chance To See a Hitchcock Film in Theaters, Do It

Lots of good stuff on the calendar this week. Along with a bunch of Hitchcock, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Serpent’s Path (1998), Spider’s Eyes (1998), and Cure (1997) are coming to the Brattle.

The underrated Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle (1987) will also screen at Coolidge in May.

Until next time.

Raffle is done, and we have a winner. Thanks to all who participated. I’m hoping to do more things like this in the future. I am aiming to continue developing the paid subscription this year. You can always get in early.

Subscribe now

Playoff basketball is underway. It’s a great time to be a basketball fan and a better time to be a Celtics fan.

This week, I’m tackling where prestige meets superheroes.

“Who says I want to change?”: Ending at the Beginning of Eric Kripke’s The Boys

This section includes spoilers for the season premiere of The Boys’ fifth season.

What is wrong with The Boys (2019)? According to Eric Kripke, it is the problem of all satire or political commentary. His show is too prescient. The year plus of production time before airing has rendered his send-up of Trumpian politics too similar to reality. In conversation with Collider this week:

[Collider:] I interviewed Jack [Quaid] ... and one of the things I asked Jack is, do you ever watch the news? And I’m going to ask you the same thing. Do you ever watch the news and just think, “Oh, shit, we just filmed something like this last year and now I’m seeing it happen in real life”?

KRIPKE: It happens all the time. And, you know, tomorrow’s episode is a perfect example. The talk about attacking the pope and presenting yourself as a God as we’re about to release an episode where Homelander thinks he’s God. I don’t know what to say about it. It’s upsetting. You know, I was sending a text, and someone last night who works on the show sent me the image. And my reply is about how I feel, which is like I just texted back: Sigh. Hard, sad, sigh. And I say that’s what I’ll say to you: hard, sad, sigh.

Similar to Dario Scardapane’s commentary on Daredevil: Born Again (2025), Kripke discusses using historical antecedents to structure The Boys’ plot and determine what he will satirize. However, unlike Scardapane, Kripke is earnest about his efforts to mock Trump. The rapid conflation of fantastical satire and what one might see on an evening newscast is problematic for all satire. It loses both its intensity and interest if it simply reproduces everyday life. The fact that the world moves “too fast” for satirists to sufficiently capture in the production timeline of television is a challenging obstacle, but not an insurmountable one.

I have never found The Boys to be particularly incisive when it comes to political satire, although it has its moments. In addition to the comedic dimension of the show, The Boys is often an edgy soap opera focused on internecine personal conflict among allied characters. Now in its fifth season, the fourth of eight episodes airing this week, The Boys remains more soap opera than satire. “Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite,” the fifth season premiere, bucked the prevailing trend with some fascinating television.

Of course, a showrunner with the aesthetic sensibilities of Hot Topic, Invader Zim (2001), and Deadpool comics can’t help but be too cute. When screenwriter Paul Grellong has The Worm (Ely Henry) deliver a meta-monologue on final seasons, I had to laugh. His complaints as an in-show writer of a Reacher spec script (the real show Reacher, like The Boys, is an Amazon Prime exclusive streaming series) are both astute and funny:

It [is] impossible to, like, tick every box and tie up every little storyline. I mean, just try making everybody happy. You can’t do it. Finales are the worst.

The Worm, and the show, are unmistakably right. Finales for long-running shows are difficult to execute. They are often misevaluated because if a show is sufficiently successful, a large portion of its fanbase simply does not want it to end. No ending could possibly be good enough.

The Boys, from my perspective, is headed to a reasonably satisfying conclusion even as the second and third episodes have dragged. Kripke knows where the real interest of the show is: the triangulation of William Butcher (Karl Urban), Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid), and Homelander (Antony Starr). Aside from self-reflective commentary, the trio are the focus of “Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite.”

Butcher’s world tour of recruiting displaced characters also brings him to his abusive father Sam (John Noble). It is in conversation with Sam that the show communicates Butcher’s arrested development, stuck because of his father’s abuse. Characters like Campbell, A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), Starlight (Erin Moriarty), and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) are dynamic. Butcher and Homelander, by contrast, cannot change. It is both because of their inextricable antagonism and their traumatic childhoods. After interrogating Homelander’s childhood in the previous season (particularly “Wisdom of the Ages”), Butcher and Sam’s last caress lays plainly that Butcher will end the show in the same place he begins it: “Who says I want to change?”

But Butcher has changed, though in a relatively superficial fashion: he has become a ‘Supe.’ After an injection of Compound V in an attempt to stave off a fatal tumor, Butcher showcases some gruesome superpowers in season four and five. It is this change that Homelander observes in their season premiere face off

Homelander laments being the man on top, now pairing his unimaginable physical strength with unilateral executive power over the United States. As any good Lacanian would predict, he is unsatisfied.

He attributes his dissatisfaction not to the perpetual metonymy of desire, but to a lack of “devotion.” The masses fear, rather than revere him.

This positions him awkwardly, relative to Butcher. Though Butcher does not revere him, he also does not fear him. And the devotion that Homelander identifies in him is a devotion to attempting to annihilate his arch nemesis. Cue Heath Ledger’s Joker, “you complete me.”

Hughie Campbell, then, presents another antagonism for Homelander. Campbell spends much of his screen time consoling other prisoners in the “freedom camps,” the avatar of earnest hope characteristic of more conventional superhero stories.

Campbell has neither the superpowers of Homelander nor the grit of Butcher. He is entirely without particularity, representing the everyman. For Homelander, this is unthinkable. Commenting on Campbell’s romance with Starlight and friendship with Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), Homelander asks, “why are they so hopelessly devoted to such staggering mediocrity? Why would Starlight and Butcher piss away their lives to try and rescue you?” Campbell replies, Quaid showing some remarkable acting chops here in a reflexive moment of thought before he delivers the line, “Because I’d do it for them.” This mutual benevolence, this sense that the rising tide lifts all boats, is the essence of the everyman that Kripke sets against Homelander’s, and Butcher’s, exceptionalism.

What Homelander struggles to confront in this episode is that his exceptionality may be entirely accidental. This is most evident in his confrontation with A-Train, a fight that concludes A-Train’s arc most spectacularly. Though Homelander kills A-Train, A-Train dies laughing. He tells Homelander (in a series best performance from Usher):

What was I so afraid of? You are fucking nothing. You’re just an empty fucking suit. Take away these powers and what are you? A pathetic, weak, sniveling fucking loser.

These words cut deep not because they happen to be true, but because Homelander is obsessed with what others think about him. And it is this obsession that will undo Homelander as the series progresses, maybe waylaid by Butcher who despises him, but most likely to be defeated by those who don’t think about him at all.

Weekly Reading List

I posted a Caleb Gannon Gaming video last week, but this is a little different. He regularly records straight forward play throughs of Slay the Spire 2 (2026) with thoughtful commentary that will help viewers make better decisions as players.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-18396-5 — Xintong Jia’s Gender and Postfeminism in Chinese Reality Dating Shows (2026) is available in open access. Niche subject matter, but fitting for the part of my audience that has read me scrutinizing The Bachelorette (2003) using Lacanian theory.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/27546330261443722 — Another open access academic work, this time a journal article, I’m willing to read just about any contemporary academic treatment of Romance of the Three Kingdoms (1522).

Event Calendar: Repertory Potpourri

This week I added a some Coolidge After Midnite programming, a few screenings of 2025’s Resurrection, and a screening of Vertigo (1958) that really snuck up on me. If you’re reading this on Monday, it’s tomorrow.

Until next time.

Mark Jones is a really, really good play-by-play commentator. I only watch basketball, so I only know his work commentating basketball. His career as an NBA commentator on the national stage came to an end on April 12th, with his final telecast being a historic game: the 113 to 108 win of the Boston Celtics over the Orlando Magic in Game 82 of the season. I’ll get back to why, other than Jones, the game was historic. There were plenty of tributes to Jones’s unique commentary style from his colleagues.

Jones used one of his signature phrases to describe a certain three-point shot by Celtic Baylor Scheierman, calling Scheierman “hotter than fish grease.”

Jones is the voice you hear in the second of the five commentary tracks here.

So, why was this a fitting game for Jones to go out? It was completely irrelevant for the Celtics’ playoff seeding. They had seven players on the injury report with ailments like “Left Foot Plantar Fasciitis” and “Right Toe Sprain.” The Celtics played eight different players with a cumulative salary of $11.5 million compared to the $173 million fielded by Orlando, according to Money on the Floor. This was the moment for some of the most underrated, under-appreciated, and inexperienced players on the Celtics roster. They delivered.

While the game had no impact on the Celtics’ standing, it did solidify the lower end of the Eastern Conference. The Magic had ample incentive to win. They just couldn’t. Celtics are too deep and Scheierman is sinking moon ball 3s. “28 on the meter, and it’s still running,” says Jones. My favorite Jones-ism:

This week we still have our raffle going. Consult the previous letter for details. Erin made a reel to advertise:

There has been some interest but you still have a pretty good shot at these tickets. Raffle entry is included as a perk for paid subscribers. Your support means everything.

The Drama, spoiler free

Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama (2026) has largely obscured its premise during its high-concept promotional campaign. I went into the film knowing only that it is about a wedding and some kind of acrimony leading up to the nuptials. Having seen it, it’s title does some interesting work. “The drama,” as a phrase, evokes the oft-repeated self-examination of drag queen Scarlet Envy on RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009): “Is it me? Am I the drama? I don’t think so… Maybe I am?” Being “the drama,” then, suggests something excessive, unnecessary, unsubstantial. “The drama” creates conflict where none need be. Borgli’s film is more serious in its subject matter, although it has tinge of class-based satire. And there is, perhaps, a case to be made that it is Alana Haim’s Rachel who is ‘the drama’ in the RuPaulian sense. But I don’t think The Drama is an example of ‘the drama,’ rather it is a drama, and a socially conscious one at that.

I’m going to take the hit to the clarity and precision of my writing and choose not to explicitly lay out the film’s core conceit. Instead, I’ll talk around it. The film deals with the issues I anticipated but not in the ways I expected. Borgli’s previous feature is 2023’s Dream Scenario, which is more similar to The Drama than it might first appear. Though The Drama is ostensibly a realistic film, without the explicit magical realism of Dream Scenario, the characters’ behaviors, with one exception, are not particularly realistic. Indeed, Borgli sets up a friend group that is almost cartoonish in their response to the situation that initiates the plot. Borgli sacrifices psychological realism for the purposes of dealing with the film’s ideas. He is very ambitious in his scope here, but largely successful. The Drama is a film about American society and interpersonal relationships, but also addresses the fabric of ethical evaluation.

Writing about The Drama under my self-imposed constraint is not easy, so this is as far as I’ll go for now. A more spoiler-rich analysis may be forthcoming. But before then, avoid the plot summaries and go see the movie.

The Best Sneakers in 2010s Sci-Fi Manga

Back in 2022, I got an anime recommendation: Summer Time Rendering. Even though I didn’t finish the series, it stood out to me as particularly interesting. I came back to the series opting to read the manga instead. I’m glad I did. As good as Summer Time Rendering’s anime is, the original manga from 2017 is even better.

First, the important stuff: sneakers. Yasuki Tanaka illustrates some of the most realistic sneakers I have ever seen. He is a real head, too. Although you have to be when you are drawing brand name sneakers with this level of detail.

The Nike Aqua Sock 360 is not a shoe for for the faint of heart. It makes sense, given the beach-side setting of Hitogashima, a fictional island based on Tomogashima, Wakayama. Tanaka also grew up in Wakayama. He also uses his great eye for shoes to draw the New Balance 574.

You just can’t get shoe drawings like this in a TV anime.

The plot of Summer Time Rendering has nothing to do with sneakers. Instead, it is about doppelgängers. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) is a strong influence. This is about as high-concept of a sci-fi thriller as one gets, particularly in the medium. It also has an evident antecedent in Future Diary (2006), but the plot is quite different despite being structured with a page-turning mystery. Summer Time Rendering also uses a time loop as part of its plot devices, but makes some smart narrative decisions to reduce repetition and avoid repeated, lengthy exposition.

Summer Time Rendering is a great, readable series for those who enjoy contemporary science fiction. The manga is available from Udon Entertainment.

Weekly Reading List

You should be watching this.

For those still slaying the spire as I am, this is a great tutorial video on deck building concepts.

Event Calendar: Fathom Events

Added a bunch of nationwide repertory screenings from Fathom, including Citizen Kane (1941) and The Maltese Falcon (1941) probably at your local megaplex. You gotta go.

Until next time.

Would You Like to See Straight Ahead in New York City?

Straight Ahead is playing the Brooklyn Monarch with Gorilla Biscuits, Youth of Today, Underdog, Outburst, Identity Shock, and Stigmatism on Sunday, April 26th. In a first of its kind subscriber incentive, I will be raffling two tickets to this sold out gig. For all the scene soldiers who missed their shot copping or curious hardcore neophytes, you can see Straight Ahead and not pay the cost of admission. It’s a good deal.

How do you throw your hat in the ring? Purchase a paid subscription to Paradox Newsletter.

Subscribe now

If you are a paid subscriber as of the afternoon 4/18, you’re in the raffle. I’ll run the raffle at 3pm on 4/18 using this website and stream on twitch.tv for posterity. No funny business here. Just subscribe for a chance to win the tickets. You can unsubscribe for May, entry into this raffle does not assume you will remain a paid subscriber outside of the month of April.

This might be obvious, but all you’re getting are the tickets. You have to get yourself to the gig.

Being a subscriber is also its own reward, because you get access to the archive. You get access to the newsletter Discord server. You get the warm and fuzzy feeling of supporting independent writing. There is also forthcoming paid sub-only stuff of a heretofore untouched medium for Paradox. You’ll be ahead of the game as everyone scrambles to join the ranks of the newsletter scene soldiers.

A generous reader who wants to remain anonymous donated these tickets, so thanks to them.

Contemporary Political Art in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

“Art is always political” is a common liberal-progressive truism. It has not emerged in a vacuum, but rather in opposition to a sentiment like this from Project Hail Mary (2021) author Andy Weir:

I dislike social commentary. Like… [sic] I really hate it. When I’m reading a book, I just want to be entertained, not preached at by the author. Plus, it ruins the wonder of the story if I know the author has a political or social axe to grind. I no longer speculate about all possible outcomes of the story because I know for a fact that the universe of that book will conspire to ensure that the author’s political agenda is validated. I hate that … I put no politics or social commentary into my stories at all. Anyone who thinks they see something like that is reading it in on their own. I have no point to make, and I’m not trying to affect the reader’s opinion on anything. My sole job is to entertain, and I stick to that.

Weir’s view is profoundly naive both to the function of artistic interpretation and the relation of art and politics. “Art is always political” because art is not made in a vacuum. It emerges from a political milieu, a social context, that imbues it with meaning that may be intended or unintended. The question of intention, what Weir does or doesn’t “put” in his stories, is likewise irrelevant to how one might receive it.

“Art is always political” as a response to Weir’s view, however, falls a bit short. There is a misalignment of meaning, too, in the two contrasting assertions. The political features of art emerge in spite of itself and distinct from the self-aware, avowed aesthetic undertaking of “political storytelling.” There are many authors like Weir who endeavor to entertain, but they can never fully inoculate their art against the political situation that is the condition for artistic production.

Unlike Weir, many authors have felt an acute responsibility of social consciousness within their art that goes far beyond the incidental political dimension “art is always political” asserts. The great Trinidadian writer Earl Lovelace writes in “The Arts, The Critics and a New Society” (1968):

The basic principles of artistic criticism are well known to critics. Basically, we ask: What is the artist trying to say? How well has he said it? And, is it worth saying?

However, today, in our condition, we need to look carefully at how we ask these questions. We need to note the context in which we ask them. In fact, we ought to ask: To whom is the artist speaking? Is he speaking to us at all? We need to consider whether the artist is representing us, whether he is speaking to us, and to what extent is he (if he makes the claim), mirroring our hopes, aspirations and attitudes realistically. Or whether he is representing an individual experience that is intimately his own, that does not keep pace with our thinking and our condition. In short, we need, today, to determine the artist’s relevance to us.

This question of relevance is of critical importance today because it is only when the artist and the arts are relevant that they fulfil [sic] their functions in the society. Most of the intellectuals and artists for a long time now have not really made any strenuous efforts to relate to the community in which they operate or of which they speak. (14, Donnell 23-24)

Though I have issues with Lovelace’s articulation of the “well known” principles of artistic criticism, what is critical here is what he suggests happens beyond “basic” critique. Lovelace looks at art’s relevance as fulfilling a social function, namely, “relat[ing] to the community in which they operate or of which they speak.” This idea is critical for Caribbean literature of the period, with Lovelace considering European expatriates from the Caribbean who are, at the time, its exemplars.

Sylvia Wynter follows Lovelace’s thinking with a more direct critique of Louis James’s The Island in Between (1968), writing in “We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture” (1968):

He sketches the history of the Caribbean from an Archimedean point outside the historical process. Yet it is a process in which he is as involved as is the West Indian. This pretended objectivity and detachment is the common stance of what I call, for convenience, the ‘acquiescent critic.’ In attempting to write from outside the process, in pretending detachment, the ‘acquiescent critic,’ accepts the status quo.

James, as an English teacher teaching in a West Indian university, passing judgement on West Indian writing, is mediated to his bones by the colonial experience, by the colonial myth in which he is involved (26-27, Donnell 25)

Wynter’s elaboration of Lovelace points back to the idea of the inherent political quality of art. Her issues with James is his detachment and attempt to present himself as disinterested in the milieu and authorial context he describes. He is, in Wynter’s view, unable to recognize the ideological framework that structures his very critique.

There is an ideological framework, too, that governs the possibility of Weir claiming his art is apolitical. That is the ideology of consumerism, escapism, and the idea that art is capable of providing a purely self-effacing enjoyment that carries with it none of the vicissitudes of the material world. Indeed, Weir seems to feel the responsibility of producing art as commodity with the purpose of inert entertainment as exigently as Lovelace feels the responsibility to represent. Unfortunately for Weir, one cannot escape the aesthetic reality of having represented something.

Stuart Hall develops the thinking of Lovelace and Wynter (and Roland Barthes) in his “Introduction to Media Studies at the Centre” (1980), referring to the educational program of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies:

[W]e broke with the passive and undifferentiated conceptions of the “audience” as it has largely appeared in traditional research—influenced, as these had been, by the surveying needs of broadcasting organizations and advertising agencies. We began to replace these too-simple notions with a more active conception of the “audience,” of “reading” and of the relation between how media messages were encoded, the “moment” of the encoded text and the variation of audience “decodings.” (Writings on Media 170)

Hall goes on:

[T]he question of the media and ideologies returned to the agenda a concern with the role which the media play in the circulation and securing of dominant ideological definitions and representations. This more classical set of concerns contrasted sharply with the “mass-culture” models which underpinned much early American research and the resounding absence in that whole body of work of the question of ideology. (Writings on Media 170)

All of this is to say that the meaning of a work of art is never determined at the moment of its creation, but rather at the moment of its reception. Additionally, both the political situation that produced the work and the political situation in which it is received alters the work’s meaning.

While there is certainly avowedly political art in contrast to the work that is ‘incidentally political,’ neither satirical nor ‘socially conscious,’ there is also work that is clearly offering precise social commentary despite an author’s protestations to the contrary. Take, for instance, this year’s new season of Daredevil: Born Again (2025). Showrunner Dario Scardapane has distanced himself from the idea of contemporary social commentary doing press for the season. The ongoing plot involves the Anti-Vigilante Task Force, reporting directly to Wilson “Kingpin” Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), operating in a manner similar to Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In a conversation with IGN, Scardapane appeals to the the production timeline and source material to defang the allegory:

This is picking up Charles Soule’s Mayor Fisk storyline that was written about 10 years ago, in 2016 … The first and second season is ‘rise of a tyrant.’ Whether that’s applying to now? I’m not in that space. I’m in ‘What if Wilson Fisk, criminal, rose to power as mayor?’ Yes, sometimes we’re feeling prescient, but all of this stuff was written long before these events.

Bracketing the AVTF-ICE parallel, there are other symbolic parallels in Born Again’s second season. The Born Again Official Podcast’s companion to “Shoot the Moon” has Deborah Ann Woll, who plays Karen Page, discussing the character motivations with Michael Gandolfini, who plays Daniel Blake. Woll says:

If you were to get sucked into a community, a group, a movement that suddenly down the line you’re realizing, oh wait, this isn’t what I thought it was? Or this is now starting to ask me to step beyond my moral boundaries, like what do you do in that situation? How do you either step out or do you dive in deeper?

One can recognize the obvious parallel with the Trump supporter in Woll’s analysis, even as Scardapane denies them. Crucially, though, Woll keeps her social critique abstract and hypothetical. This is a feature of a show produced by Disney. Scardapane and Woll are media trained and careful not to alienate fans. Paraphrasing Michael Jordan, republicans watch Daredevil too.

There are other, more urbane allusions Scardapane is comfortable owning. In an Entertainment Weekly interview, he talks about scenes that allude to “the Turkish invasion of Cyprus” and Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station (2013). But much as Scardapane attempts to point audiences away from the most obvious contemporary parallels, they are evident.

Born Again and the supposedly unintended similarities to Trump immigration and policing policy and accidental exploration of Trump supporter psychology are a case study in how art is political with or without intention. As Hall says, a work’s meaning is derived both from its “’moment’ of [encoding]” and “the variation of audience ‘decodings.’” Decoding Daredevil today means to recognize its condemnation of private, unaccountable police forces and unmoored political supporters. Likewise, this method of interpretation is why Weir’s assertion of being apolitical is worth less than nothing.

Weekly Reading List

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted — Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz come up big on the AI beat.

https://www.darkhorse.com/books/3016-662/oldboy-deluxe-edition-book-one-hc/ — The original Oldboy (1996) is out in deluxe edition. It’s a great time to read a stone cold classic.

I love Eric Collins.

Event Calendar: IFFBoston and Shadow of a Doubt

This week I added the tentative (but also fast approaching) dates of interest for the upcoming IFFBoston. Also added some of Coolidge’s Big Screen Classics, including a screening of Shadow of a Doubt (1943) where I will be seated.

Until next time.