Generally speaking, the classic movies of the ‘90s fall into two camps: Crowd-pleasing populist fodder and dissections of post-war American capitalism. Blockbusters like Forrest Gump, Shawshank Redemption, and Saving Private Ryan are popular in part because they’re both saccharine and nostalgic, schmaltzy Oscar-bait that revel in boomer triumphalism. They’re solid movies, but the more interesting films of this period dissect the perceived limitless prosperity of the end of history and explore the underlying sense of alienation and exploitation that has only intensified in the decades since. The ‘90s kids tend to nostalgize a decade that was marred by the LA Riots, OJ, Monica Lewinsky, and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, but we can remember the films that defined this decade as existential arthouse dramas disguised as blockbusters.

Anyways, let’s get to it…

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Demme
SCREENPLAY BY: Ted Tally (Based on The Silence of the Lambs
by Thomas Harris)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Tak Fujimoto
EDITED BY: Craig McKay
MUSIC BY: Howard Shore
STARRING: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine

In the beginning of The Silence of the Lambs, an FBI trainee, Clarice Starling, is summoned by Jack Crawford to interrogate Hannibal Lecter to help investigate the Buffalo Bill serial murder case, and the young agent finds herself in a strange position. Lecter becomes sort of a paternalistic figure to Starling during the investigation, dispensing his knowledge like an experienced technocrat but shrouding it in the cruel irony of grotesque consumerism that negates the humanity of anyone who crosses his path. He is the know-it-all caterpillar, and Starling is Alice receiving a nightmarish lesson in sadistic, affectless crime framed as a form of social advancement. In that sense, the movie poster, a close-up of Jodie Foster’s red-eyed face with a moth covering her mouth, is fitting. The moth’s head reveals a skull comprised of seven naked women in apparent homage to Salvador Dali, the master of illusion and the unconscious. The moth and its butterfly cousin are the metamorphosis from grub to flying creature, the most important recurring symbol of transformation in this film.

We’re invited to share and sympathize with Starling through the camera itself, as she is the film’s point of view and lead character. But we don’t see events unfold as she sees them. Rather, we constantly see her, and the camera functions as the male gaze, following her from place to place. Even when she enters a seedy self-storage unit, there’s a camera waiting for her. But the cinematography frames her in the way that her overwhelmingly male FBI peers leer at her. In a quick scene where she enters an elevator already packed with male trainees, she is the only woman, both diminutive in stature and in workout sweats in contrast to their exact red-shirted uniforms. The film also opens with an extended sequence in which a determined Starling fights her way through a cross-country obstacle course on the Quantico grounds outside the FBI Academy. Most of the focus is on her body, but it’s portrayed as athletic, since there are no men around to sexualize her. When she’s summoned for a meeting with Crawford, the messenger glares at her with both examination and contempt of a woman’s presence in a once all-male preserve.

Starling is an outsider in other ways, an orphan from West Virginia who worked her way through cultural and class prejudices. When she heads to the Baltimore State Forensic Hospital, she confers with Dr. Chilton, who remarks about her appearance while subtly-then-overtly hitting on her. He leads her down a flight of stairs to a maximum-security basement where Lecter is held in a dungeon-like cellblock, as she must walk the full length of a hallway to reach, passing by a rogue gallery of other patients staring at her and hurling gross sexual insults. She also makes her way down a stairway into a basement in search of Buffalo Bill, signalling links between the two men in an underworld. Both scenes set up the final moment when Starling is put on view by Buffalo Bill, who cuts the lights in his basement, then watches Sterling through night-vision goggles. Her final shot-in-the-dark that kills Bill saves her own life and serves as a symbolic revenge against all those lurkers who objectified her throughout the film.

Lecter is obviously a cold-blooded and murderous psychopath, but he is also an urbane and highly trained professional. His monstrosity reflects the anxieties that Americans traditionally associate with intellectuals. His charm, his cryptic messages, and his psychological manipulations make him a fascinating villain. He is, in a horrific sense, the quintessential American hero, the exceptional individual who stands apart from the rules that govern the masses, like his bloodshed Houdini trick against an entire police force. Lecter is both a victim and a product of globalized capitalist ideology, literalizing the metaphors of competition and consumption, and is perhaps a monster because he sees through the subterfuge and obfuscation offered by bourgeois manners. He pushes the reifying logic of a pathological consumerist society to its highest degree of obscenity: Voyeuristic violence and carnivorous crimes. He reveals the dark beating heart of empire that underlies the comforts of our day-to-day lives, and we can perversely relate to him because he does what he wants and does things his own way, even if that involves mutilating and eating people with a side of fava beans and chianti.

The film is also littered with images of American iconography, most notably when Starling discovers the corpse of Benjamin Raspail, an ex-patient of Lecter who was a lover and early victim of Buffalo Bill. After struggling to break into the self-storage facility where the body was stashed, she finds it inside a 1931 Packard limousine draped with an American flag. Bill’s cluttered home includes a large American flag in its tawdry décor—not to mention a quilt emblazoned with swastikas. Sure, Lecter likely placed the flag on the limo as a potential clue that would point to Bill, but it also hints at the dark and savage impulses that inform much of our culture. Lecter is also an extreme projection of white male privilege, with both outsider and insider status, as he strolls off in the final scene to disappear into a crowd, a form of freedom that’s enticing and fear-inducing. The monsters hide in plain sight.

The same kind of analysis could be applied to the way Buffalo Bill treats his victims. He reifies the female body in barbaric ways, but his behavior is symptomatic of the less hyperbolic ways in which more normal and respectable people consume women and animals as body parts, visual objects, skins, furs, meat, with the full sanction of the market, social norms, and the law. This is a manifestation of Buffalo Bill’s pursuit of inhabiting a different identity, as he envisions his victims as tailor-made commodities and his grotesque and fetishistic museum portrays moths and women, reflecting both death and transformation. Starling discovers a chrysalis in the throat of Bill’s first victim, Frederica Bimmel. In Bimmel’s mother’s bedroom, just before she learns the truth about Bill, Starling is surrounded by butterfly wallpaper. Inside Bill’s house, where he’s breeding the Death’s Head moth and other, prettier butterflies, he tucks his private parts and spreads his colorful dressing-gown wings. In this sense, Bill’s addiction to violence is different than Lecter’s: His predatory behavior is not grounded in serial consumption, but his collection of skin pelts becomes a form of marketized self-actualization through cosmetics and materialism. Our cultural practices have normalized plastic surgery and standardized beauty, warping his obsession of womanhood and his pursuit of personal transformation, the ultimate sign of his mimetic merging with political economy.

While conversing with Lecter, Starling admits that she was motivated to become an FBI agent to save potential victims, due to a traumatic experience in childhood when she became aware of the brutal slaughter of spring lambs on the Montana farm where she was sent to live with relatives after her parents passed away. It seems like a minor revelation that stems from Lecter’s diagnostic skills as a psychiatrist, but it serves as a reminder of the monstrous cruelties visited upon undeserving animals daily by the meat industry. The screaming, agonizing deaths of lambs are evoked to suggest an element of obfuscated obscene violence that underlies fundamental aspects of American life, that our pleasures are fueled by some peripheral suffering at the fringes of our awareness. We eat the dead bodies of animals that are bred as livestock as a part of a factory farm machine, a practice subtly paralleled by Lecter’s cannibalism and Buffalo Bill’s macabre skinning of his victims. Viewed from an abstract enough distance, this abject cruelty would fall into the same category of grisly violence visited upon the bodies of living creatures that have done nothing to deserve such treatment. Violence in the service of the market is endorsed as logical, ordinary, and an acceptable trade-off or negative externality. It’s the cost of doing business. Perhaps we should listen to the screaming lambs the next time we rationalize the various degradations and atrocities that come with the neoliberal consensus.

Heat (1995)

DIRECTED BY: Michael Mann
SCREENPLAY BY: Michael Mann (Based on L.A. Takedown
by Michael Mann)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Dante Spinotti
EDITED BY: Dov Hoenig, Pasquale Buba, William Goldenberg, Tom Rolf
MUSIC BY: Elliot Goldenthal
STARRING: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Tom Sizemore, Diane Venora, Amy Brenneman, Ashley Judd, Mykelti Williamson, Wes Studi, Ted Levine, Jon Voight, Val Kilmer

For all its pulpy grandeur, Heat is about work and its increasing personal costs. The serene, lyrical establishing shots and the hyperbolic use of color to delineate psychological stakes certainly add a bit of existential weight to the matter, but the demands of law enforcement and professional criminality are based on the compulsion to live dangerously. Michael Mann’s muscular-yet-mystical storytelling techniques—relentless forward momentum punctuated by philosophical pauses—call attention to not just the law and the subversion of it, but two men who excel at what they do best. How they got there is irrelevant. The film’s complicated narrative documents a gang of high-tech thieves led by Neil McCauley, the vicissitudes of maintaining their upper-middle-class lifestyles, their three heists, and their police pursuers led by Vincent Hanna. Drawing on work trends in the ‘90s, Heat innovated the gangster/heist genre by focusing on both the criminals and law enforcement: Their relationship between work and their personal lives, their commitment to their professions, and their quality of life. Hollywood prefers to have its characters’ income streams come from a vague source, but the criminals here have beautiful houses and wear luxury-brand clothes, with the film taking painstaking lengths to show how their lifestyles are earned and what they sacrifice to sustain them.

McCauley starts the film with shifting eyes in an action-ready stance, plotting escape routes and ways out, with or without his crew. We’re immediately thrust into an intricate theft of some bearer bonds from an armored vehicle, before pivoting to the planning and attempted execution of two more heists, the second of which descends into a 10-minute gun battle that spills out of the targeted bank and into the streets and parking lots of L.A. The scores involve financial assessment, detailed organization, computer programming, reading construction schematics, market analysis, radio-communication, explosives and controlled demolition, and the strategic use of firearms. The police investigations involve looking for clues, interviewing witnesses, meeting stoolies at all hours of the day, tracking the gang, monitoring their communications, staking out an attempted heist, and a wide variety of weaponry. Hanna first appears on screen in the throes of passionate lovemaking in another man’s home, and not long after, he spits out deductions, commands, and rock-solid theories at the aftermath of a heist at breakneck speed. Both crews continuously adapt to outmaneuver each other. Along the way, we get an attempted revenge kill, the murder of some financial messengers, a romance, two dinner parties, two failing marriages, two cases of adultery, a sex murder, a lover’s betrayal, a professional betrayal, a teen suicide attempt, and countless thieves going about their business.

The lone-wolf archetype is doubled in Heat, with two titans of New Hollywood—Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino—alternating between hunter and prey. But when they finally come face-to-face in a diner, they’re just two guys in nice suits, sitting across from each other at a restaurant, enjoying a cup of coffee. The pathos in Heat comes from the impossibility of reconciling individual excellence with conventional forms of security and fulfillment. They both run tight crews, are consummate professionals, and take an enormous amount of pride in their apex-predator status. They talk shop, espouse their respective takes on relationships, and their recounting of dreams sounds like nightmares. There’s a simmering menace beneath the cordial pleasantries. After cleaning up the mess left in the wake of a well-executed heist, Hanna keeps tabs on a gang of suspects, with former Alcatraz inmate McCauley becoming his top priority and main obsession. Hanna realizes he has met his match when it’s revealed that McCauley is actually chasing him, so out of mutual respect, they agree to meet each other. It’s Ali vs. Frazier, Borg vs. McEnroe, the immovable object vs. the irresistible force.

The cameras cut exclusively between over-the-shoulder close-ups, Hanna and McCauley just mirror images of one another, virtuoso workaholics in trades with life-or-death stakes. The typically introverted and composed McCauley sits opposite the usually extravagant and emotional Hanna, who is free to be a more reflective version of himself beneath the tough cop showmanship. Both are equally lonely, and both overcompensate for their feelings of alienation through fighting crime or committing it. They both live in expensive homes that they’re too busy to enjoy. They both truly understand each other and can be candid about who they are and what drives them.

Hanna isn’t emotionally distant in his marriage because he’s married to his job; he is deprived of the deep understanding he desperately craves from his chosen family, so he seeks passion by chasing criminals. He plays the part of the American Dream, but he lives for the hunt and will die for it. “All I am is what I’m going after,” he admits to his wife, Justine. They understand all how they are alike, but these two men are also painstakingly aware of their differences. McCauley refuses to be tied to anything other than what he perceives to be his life’s purpose. Hanna is emotionally distant from the people in his orbit, but McCauley’s entire philosophy boils down to his famous line: “Do not have anything in your life that you cannot walk away out on within thirty seconds if you feel the heat coming around the corner.” His cold mentality made him into a criminal mastermind, but it has left him detached. Hannah is over-the-top and even driven by compassion, McCauley is expressionless and minimalistic. He doesn’t even fill his luxurious apartment with furniture because he views attachments of any kind as a burden, an anchor. One of the film’s most prominent images is a nighttime shot of McCauley leaning against his balcony door and staring into the ocean, after returning home alone and placing his gun and keys on a coffee table. With stunning blue lighting, he is portrayed as a ghost, a shadow figure roaming the earth, the isolation eating away at him. Under different and less tragic circumstances, Hanna and McCauley would have been friends. In this dilemma, one of them must go down.

Other skilled workers are not just essential but feel vital. Mann isn’t crafting a movie about cops and robbers, but weaving a tapestry of crime, class, and capitalism, which makes Heat fundamentally about people. Nate is a heist consultant who steers jobs to McCauley and devises a clever plan to fence the stolen bonds and sell them at a markup. Kelso is a disabled vet who uses computers and digital radios to capture radio-wave-transmitted financial information, which he packages and sells. Chris Shilherlis specializes in explosives and breaking and entering, always with a chilly and deadened expression of consummate professionalism. VanZant is a legal businessman, an investment broker who invests and likely launders money in offshore and international accounts belonging to people with too much money to be totally above-board. Others do less skilled kinds of work. Just freed from prison, Breedan cleans and works the grill in a diner under a micro-managing boss who skims payrolls, and he’s just trying to get by and stay out of trouble. Eady is a graphic designer who works in a bookstore while she builds a clientele for her work, abandoning familial ties to pursue a career in L.A. To salvage their relationships, the burden of emotional labor falls on the women who have to compete with the dogged careerism of their husbands. In Hanna and Justine’s bedroom, they have sex and discuss breakfast plans while shots of the criminal crew taking down their first score are spliced. There are several scenes where Justine accuses Hanna of not making time for her—he lets her know that he doesn’t have time for breakfast, and he will miss dinner twice and leave a dinner party for work. The criminals and the police value their personal relationships but are willing to sacrifice them.

With a mix of lowbrow pulp and high-gloss treatment, Michael Mann dedicates extreme precision and documentary-like attention to characters and procedure, like they’re operating on a plane of existence beyond good and evil. But Los Angeles is almost a character itself, with the entire cityscape and all its liminal spaces transformed into an alien, prison-like structure that traps everyone inside. The final shot of Hanna and McCauley just outside the structures of a weird, blocky airport conveys the most human of emotions felt in a place not built for humans. Los Angeles is a postmodern dystopia that Mann turns into a setting that’s simultaneously specific and nondescript, a topography of lonely off-ramps, glowing industrial towers, rusted metal shipping containers. Even Hanna’s, McCauley’s, and VanZant’s chic and luxurious spaces are treated with steely, unvarnished realism, displaying their purchased socioeconomic status and their shared circumstances. When Hanna catches his wife cheating on him with a stranger, he’s seemingly less aggrieved by her infidelity than the fact that he has to come home to her “ex-husband’s dead-tech, postmodernistic bullshit house” to deal with the fallout.

One of the easiest ways to understand the different phases of American capitalism is to compare Heat with The Godfather and Goodfellas. Instead of the Families with links to the Old Country, rootless crews take on scores in a city full of polished chrome and interchangeable designer kitchens and featureless late-night diners. All of the cultural delaines that characterized Coppola’s and Scorsese’s crime dramas have been refitted into a branded sprawl of repeating vistas and replicated franchises. The ghosts of Old Europe have been exorcized and buried beneath a Starbucks. McCauley’s crew doesn’t care much about loyalty; they’re about the action, because “the action is the juice.” Unlike Vito and Michael Corleone, they don’t aspire to political influence because they’re focused on the money and the getaway. And new technology has made the traditional smash-and-grab obsolete. There’s a new breed of thief and a different set of skills required to chase them. It’s all a metaphor for work, how we spend more time at our jobs to fill the voids outside the 9-to-5, and now we have a society full of highly functioning sociopaths and dysfunctional maladroits.

Boogie Nights (1997)

DIRECTED BY: Paul Thomas Anderson
SCREENPLAY BY: Paul Thomas Anderson
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Robert Elswit
EDITED BY: Dylan Tichenor
MUSIC BY: Michael Penn
STARRING: Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, Heather Graham, Nicole Ari Parker, Philip Seymour Hoffman

On the surface, Boogie Nights deals with the rise and fall of the porn industry, the lavish lifestyles of its tireless professionals during their time at the apex of adult entertainment. Many of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films observe the American psyche from various perspectives or industries, and the flawed and damaged male protagonist lies at the heart of these examinations. But Anderson goes beyond their flaws and explores how America directly impacts their conceptions of manhood and their mentality, and how they impact the America around them. It’s a fluid ecosystem of damaged souls trapped in a cycle of greed, fame, envy, sex, and money. When the story opens in 1977, pornos are shot on film and played in theaters, and the more ambitious directors in an otherwise sleazy industry can dream of making one so good that the audience would stay even after they achieved what they came for. By 1983, when the story closes, porn has shifted to VHS, and most of the movies are glorified gynecological loops. The hope of artistic achievement is in decline, and jaded adults exploit younger aspirational actors. Poor Dirk Diggler starts as a chipper man with a massive hog, only to be unceremoniously shoved out of the industry the second he can’t get hard. He was naïve enough to think people liked him for his intangible acting chops, but it was just his penis. When you let your body define you, your body will enslave you.

Dirk Diggler is the pornographic screen name of our protagonist, Eddie Adams, who is living with his mother and stepfather, both of whom he has a troubled and emotionally abusive relationship with. His bedroom is the only place that feels like a sanctuary, a representation of the American Dream and an all-out embrace of materialism. He poses in front of a mirror in nothing but his underwear, with images of sexualized women and cars plastered all over his wall, a glimpse of what he aspires to. We only see his face reflected in the mirror, perceiving himself as embodying some kind of phallic masculinity, shirtless and rubbing his genitals. He realizes that he can use his physical form to achieve his goals through external self-gratification, but he can only do so once he transcends the limitations imposed on him through his identification as Eddie Adams.

Anderson utilizes the expression of melodrama without delineating and endorsing a position because moral redemption is not possible for Eddie, nor is it relevant. Eddie returns home late at night following his initiation into the “family” headed by pornographer Jack Horner and his surrogate “wife,” porn star Amber Waves, having intercourse on the family couch with Rollergirl and watched by Jack to the tune of “Brand New Key.” Eddie returns home to confront a more conventional view of morality as expressed by his mother, but he can’t accept the terms on which her response is based. She’s presented as a shrieking harridan, while Eddie’s stepfather absents himself from his wife’s hysteria. Eddie storms out and rejects his assigned identity in search of a new one, with the door of his given family closing and the door of his chosen family opening. Eddie has transformed into Dirk Diggler.

Every character in Boogie Nights is an outcast to an extent, and most of them have back stories that trace their rejection and acceptance into the porn industry. Rollergirl, a young porno actress who refuses to take off her skates during sex, failed out of high school and was ridiculed for her promiscuity. Reed Rothchild is a repressed gay man, and Buck Swope is an out-of-favor porn star who desires a family and a hi-fi shop. Amber Waves can’t have children, and Dirk and Rollergirl become her kids in a way. Each character defines family by who accepts them for the flawed people they are, who offers help when no one else does. In his first interaction with Jack in the back kitchen of the Reseda Nightclub, Dirk assumes he came into the kitchen with devious intentions: “If you just wanna see me jack off, it’s ten. But if you just wanna look at it, it’s only five.” Jack wants to objectify Dirk, but more indirectly, noting that “behind those jeans is something wonderful just waiting to get out.” Sure, he’s talking about Dirk’s sexuality wanting to free itself, but it also speaks to the working-class repression of grinding away in kitchens only to commute back to a dysfunctional home. Dirk wants to pursue a life of materialistic and sexual fulfillment, and realizes Jack offers him the familial and economic support to do so. To achieve the American Dream, one must use their divine gifts to achieve destiny, and Dirk even acknowledges that “everyone is blessed with One Special Thing,” which for him is a sexualized masculinity that he can commercialize into stardom.

The repeated iconography of the red Corvette symbolizes Eddie’s actualization as Dirk Diggler, and it’s seen in three key stages of his life: Outside the Reseda nightclub before he meets Jack, on his bedroom wall with “American dream” written all over it, and when he becomes a porn star and drives his own. Dirk chooses to reduce his identity to his sexuality, and he loses control of himself to the system that made him a success. Eventually, he falls into a pit of drugs and despair and resorts to prostitution, which is referred to as “the long way down” in the film’s title card. He’s still selling sexuality, just without the fame and fortune. A New Year’s party for 1980 marks the end of optimism and the arrival of neoliberal mercenary pragmatism, marked by the camera lingering on the sign burying the ’70s and welcoming the ‘80s, as well as Little Bill shooting his wife and killing himself in front of guests. Ruthless economic imperatives shift the industry, like videotapes and amateurs. To cut costs, producers impose these new standards on Jack, who vainly resists by defending the artistic merit of the old ways, but any sense of genuine expression is vanquished by the degrading aspects of market logic. The idyllic and naïve illusions of peace and love are gone, and pathological human relations turn overtly violent and cutthroat.

Packaged in a glossy, innocuous retro homage to the ‘70s, Boogie Nights is part Pulp Fiction in its strident vanity/violence and part Casino in its chronicles of a once-glitzy industry narrated through the tragic life of its characters. Far from remaining bound to the literal confines of pornography, the film can be read as a broad critique of how self-worth and identity are constructed in a capitalistic society. Pornography is the commodification of sexual relations—modern, commercial, impersonal. Instead of accepting the moralistic posturing of its detractors, Anderson points out how this is the most logical and limpid conclusion of exchange value in the sexual sphere, relations that are a natural and spontaneous expression of human connection turned into another service to be purchased and sold. In front of the mirror, in the last scene, Dirk is preparing for a movie after a long hiatus, forced to find some fragment of dignity and self-worth, even if his humanity is grotesquely flattened and deformed. He comforts himself and his dangling penis, completely subsumed into this phallic identity, reminding himself that he’s a big shining star.

That’s it for this week’s instalment of The Watchlist, brought to you by Beaglesgate Productions.

In May, we’ll dive into the Scorsese Capitalist Quadrology. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on these movies, where they place among your personal favorites, or if you think they’re overrated.

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There are two types of people in this world: Those with loaded guns and those who watch the Dollars Trilogy. It’s a trilogy in name only, as they aren’t really related to each other, so they are freed from the baggage and expectations of their predecessors and can be evaluated on their own merits. They can be watched independently and in any order, but it’s more interesting to view them sequentially to track Sergio Leone’s evolution as a director.

A Fistful of Dollars basically kick-started the modern action hero with Clint Eastwood, who played a much grittier and more morally ambiguous protagonist that had been the standard Hollywood stock type for the decades leading up to the ‘60s. Instead of Jimmy Cooper or Jimmy Stewart, Leone offers an anti-hero who is a violent enigma and an unintelligible code of ethics, a taciturn man of action who sometimes kills for money and sometimes strives for higher ideals. Both A Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More are brutal movies that show the humanity and frailty of our protagonist in the face of a lawless and unforgiving land. The final duel in Fistful features two men standing at range and testing their quick draw, with the villain refusing to participate and just gunning down the hero in cold blood from the other side of town. But the hero outsmarts him with underhanded cunning: He walks up, reveals his bulletproof chest plate, and shoots him down. The Hollywood Western is subverted. A strong start to Leone’s stabs at the spaghetti western, he only refined his craft from there, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly marks the moment that the operatic became mythological.

In Leone’s West, even the villains are philosophers. “When the man with a Winchester meets a man with a pistol, the man with the pistol is a dead man,” says Ramon Rojo in Fistful, citing an “old Mexican proverb” that’s as inaccurate as it is apocryphal. This is further epitomized in The Good, The Bad’s Tuco, who bifurcates the world into two types of men: “those with a rope around their neck, and those who have the job of doing the cutting.” After gunning down a verbose opponent, he utters a credo that holds for anyone trying to survive in this world: “If you’re gonna shoot, shoot, don’t talk.” The manner of taking another man’s life is its own explanation, and adding to it will only get you killed.

Anyways, let’s get to it…

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

DIRECTED BY: Sergio Leone
SCREENPLAY BY: (Based on Yojimbo by Akira Kurosawa and Ryūzō Kikushima)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Massimo Dallamano
EDITED BY: Roberto Cinquini
MUSIC BY: Ennio Morricone
STARRING: Clint Eastwood, Marianne Koch, Joseph Egger, Wolfgang Lukschy, Gian Maria Volonté, Daniel Martín, Bruno Carotenuto, Benito Stefanelli

By the mid-60s, the western had grown preachy and stale, so it’s hard to overstate how jarring A Fistful of Dollars was to unsuspecting audiences. Although director Sergio Leone is often credited with launching the spaghetti western, TIME has noted that by 1967, more than 180 “eastern westerns” had been made. Drawing on Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, this film offers a crude, pared-down, iconographic, and blood-soaked take on the Western, replacing some of the genre’s moral certitude with a dose of Vietnam-era cynicism. The storytelling is stripped down to the most elemental, with stark visual textures and a pulpy, gritty stylization. A Fistful of Dollars was both literally and metaphorically the darkest western to reach American screens. It made a star out of Clint Eastwood, who had been previously the impetuous young Rowdy Yates on TV’s Rawhide, an open-faced boy with a pleasant singing voice. Here, he is the “man with no name,” rolling into town with a signature poncho, a grizzly patch of beard, a short cigar, eyes perpetually screwed, as if he’s staring into the sun or suppressing a grimace of incredulous disgust. A colossal rebuke to the blander Rawhide-style westerns that had come to dominate the popular imagination, here we have a bleak story of a morally taciturn gunslinger who two-times his way through a hellish town whose most cheerful resident seems to be the consistently employed coffin builder.

The plot is difficult to analyze because No Name is constantly manipulating the Rojos and the Baxters into buying his misinformation so he can exploit their conflict to make over $1,000 for himself. Both crime families are in a rift to control San Miguel, a town full of widows whose former husbands have fallen victim to this conflict. No Name is unreadable; his motivations and intentions and values are all grey, and he deceives everyone. With a menacing snarl, a threatening presence, and an unnatural amount of skill with a pistol, he shoots four Baxter men without remorse just to impress Miguel Rojo. He doesn’t work for free and kills without any sense of justice.

For the first half of the film, No Name comes across as a scheming gunslinger looking to make money no matter the cost in human life, but his antics turn into a decision to free Marisol, a woman who is forced into adultery by Ramon Rojo, who keeps her captive while her husband and child live in fear of him. After rescuing her, he gives her all the money he earned from the Rojos and Baxters, giving no other explanation than “I knew someone like you once, but there was no one there to help.” No Name risks his life to aid a family and gives them all his money after endangering other people’s lives for money. The Rojos eventually attack the Baxter house and kill dozens with apathetic brutality, and maybe No Name feels some sense of guilt in knowing that all these massacres either directly or indirectly stem from his meddling. Or he wants to out-dual Ramon in a shootout to prove who is the best gunslinger in town. Ramon, just like No Name, indiscriminately kills without a pang of guilt but is monomaniacally concerned with money and power, as he will mow down a legion of soldiers with a machine gun for their gold. As the Baxter house burns, members flee one-by-one in surrender, but the Rojos mercilessly shoot them, laughing manically as they do so. After the coffin-maker hands a stick of dynamite to No Name, “Now the moment has come for you to light the fuse and send it back to them,” our anti-hero understands it’s time for a final showdown.

With a pistol and a single explosive against the collective might of a gang of ruthless murderers, No Name doesn’t employ any tactful diversion strategies and opts for a blunt-force entrance. He also wears a metal sheet as bullet-proof armor to trick Ramon into firing all his shots until he has to reload, which presents No Name the opportunity to beat five people to the draw and kills four of them, leaving Ramon to square off, mono y mono. Ramon is equipped with a rifle, and it was remarked earlier in the film that “When the man with a Winchester meets a man with a pistol, the man with a pistol is a dead man.” But No Name wins, picks up his saddle, and heads out of town.

The score is provided by Ennio Morricone, which strays from pleasant American music common in western themes and veers toward Mexican folk. The main theme features calm whistling and shouts of “we can fight.” Music and sound effects are also incorporated as cues, like when the Rojos beat up Silvantio while they’re looking for No Name, and while his face is all we see in the frame, we can hear the bouts of violence, and the music, along with Rubio’s sinister laugh, is somehow more disturbing. Or music is left out to emphasize the brutality of gunshots, cries of surrender, or engulfing flames. And while the compositions utilize long, wide shots and earthy colors and natural lighting to emphasize the gritty frontier like traditional westerns, Leone adds a lot of low shots and close-ups to emphasize drama in the shootouts. The focus on Ramon’s and Rubio’s faces when Dona Baxter reacts to the murder of her husband and son, they stand there unflinching, and Rubio glances over as if he is waiting for Ramon to kill her, then he just shoots her as if it was nothing. This small interaction conveys how evil both men are.

A Fistful of Dollars is not the best of Leone’s Dollars Trilogy, but considering this is the first western he created, it’s well-developed and executed. It’s not the most violent or anarchic, nor is it the most politically or morally switched in its genre, but the weight and power of this world make it a formidable film and one of the most influential westerns ever conceived.

For a Few Dollars More (1965)

DIRECTED BY: Sergio Leone
SCREENPLAY BY: Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Leone, Sergio Donati
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Massimo Dallamano
EDITED BY: Eugenio Alabiso, Giorgio Serrallonga, Adriana Novelli
MUSIC BY: Ennio Morricone
STARRING: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Gian Maria Volonté, Mara Krupp, Luigi Pistilli, Klaus Kinski, Joseph Egger, Panos Papadopulos, Benito Stefanelli, Robert Camardiel, Aldo Sambrell, Luis Rodríguez, Mario Brega

The Dollars Trilogy does not concern itself with morality, but depicts an existential struggle for self-definition. The alternating epic long shots and tense close-ups fit with Sergio Leone’s view of the world as a great moral vacuum in which power and force are all that matter. Richard Jameson described these spaghetti westerns as “operas in which the arias are not sung but stared.” Where traditional American westerns deal in the civilizing forces of law and order, these post-fascist oaters depict authority as corrupt or simply ineffectual in the face of evil. Here, everything is so blatantly about money and guns that it seems silly to call them themes, but rather, the fabric that shapes the actions and motivations of the characters.

The innovation in For a Few Dollars More is the establishment of an infamous triangle of leads, two predators-for-hire, and a criminal. No Name is now Manco, a young bounty hunter, draped in a tattered serape and hat, who outsmarts and outguns his opponents. The steely-eyed Colonel Douglas Mortimer is an aging bounty hunter who uses gadgetry and trick weapons to kill his prey. Neither is sure of the other, and it makes for a proto-buddy cop dynamic. When they both meet after realizing they’ve been trailing the same outlaw, it’s followed immediately with a prolonged show of machismo: Manco shows off his pistol skills while Mortimer flexes his strength with range weapons. After a few bullet holes in their hats, they form a tenuous partnership. To them, a criminal is little more than a mugshot on a Wanted poster that offers a handsome reward. At the end of the film, Manco has difficulty counting the corpses of the men that he and Mortimer gunned down, because he is not tallying up the number of dead bodies, but the amount of bounties he will earn for handing them over to the authorities. As the epigraph states: “Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared.”

El Indio is the source of much of the film’s plot. After a daring prison escape, he reunites with his old gang to rob a heavily guarded safe in the Bank of El Paso. For Manco’s and Mortimer’s partnership to work, they’ll have to infiltrate this gang in a sequence of events that involve a pocketwatch, chimes, and a strange flashback. In the first scene, we see Indio’s pocketwatch after he murdered a man’s family for no other reason than to provoke him into a duel. The watch plays a haunting chime, and when it finishes, they draw. Following Indio’s easy victory, he tokes up and vividly reminisces on a younger version of himself peering into the bedroom window, seeing a woman gift a pocketwatch to the man. We eventually glean more of this flashback, involving Indio murdering the man and attempting to rape the woman, which eventually ties into Mortimer’s dogged pursuit of him.

Given that Manco’s profession is a gamble, one of the establishing scenes fittingly shows him playing cards, while Mortimer is reading a Bible on the train to Tucumcari. They both converge on collecting the bounty on Indio and his men, and despite their differences in approach, their unity of purpose is captured when Mortimer spies on the robbers with a telescope, and he rotates his instrument around the street and catches Manco doing the same with a pair of binoculars. Since this is a male-oriented society, the nobler values in this film are stereotypically “masculine.” Both men are concerned with honor and fairness. Even Indio prefers to shoot an enemy who is armed and facing him. Despite the ruthless mercenary nature of their goals, Manco and Mortimer are redeemed by their occasional willingness to serve a purpose higher than killing for money. Manco is genuinely contemptuous of the corrupt sheriff, and he declines to join Indio’s gang.

With a well-structured plot and compelling characters, Leone stages some of the finest action and suspense scenes in the western genre. He delays the moment of violence, ramping up the tension like a coiled spring until it bursts. As Indio’s gang cases the bank, the scene is drawn out for as long as possible through constant cross-cuts that remind us of the people and places involved: Giant faces in the foreground, tiny watch guards in the background, the cabinet containing the safe, Indio’s gang riding in on horseback, and Manco and Mortimer watching from their respective vantage points to count how long it takes for the guards to walk around the building. Dynamite incinerates the back wall, a sudden explosion of action after a prolonged wait, and they steal the safe and ride off within a few minutes. Or, when the two heroes escape torture at the hands of Indio’s men, and find themselves under siege in a prolonged shootout with the gang members of the deserted Mexican town of Agua Caliente. It’s two against a swarm, and a pair of bandits burst in on Manco and open fire, only for Manco to turn around in a swivelling chair, revealing he’d perched his hat and poncho as a decoy.

The final duel shows Leone’s ability to interrupt an escalation before a climax, then restart it. Mortimer calls upon his bounty for an ultimate showdown, but his gun is shot out of his hand. Before Indio can capitalize on this advantage, Manco intervenes via the force of a rifle and summons a musical pocketwatch that he swiped from Mortimer, using the watch chimes to interrupt Indio’s timing. The tension isn’t scuttled, but accentuated, as Manco’s opportune intervention gives Mortimer equal footing in the duel while throwing his opponent off his game, turning the myth he’s built for himself against him. Since Indio stole the watch, he has used it as a weapon of torment, emphasizing his lethality and the power he wields over his victims. It sets the tone for his duels. Now the chimes toll to herald his doom. Demonic organs that once accompanied his triumph are swapped with mournful guitars and horns, creating a kind of weeping send-off. Indio is terminally rattled but doesn’t completely fold, while Mortimer’s confidence grows, and Manco spectates with grim curiosity. Mortimer fires, and Indio is struck down quickly—the music winds down, the action halts, and the following silence is a conclusive punctuation.

Ennio Morricone wrote about 17 minutes’ worth of music, but it’s economical. An instrument is assigned to each character. Manco has a high whistle of a piccolo, referencing the operatic whistling of the main theme song. Mortimer’s trademark sound is a twang of a jaw harp, accentuating his narrow-eyed efficiency. Indio’s musical cue is a quick, low strum of a Spanish guitar, underscoring his ominous presence. Whenever the watch ticks down, the diegetic chimes interlink with an intimidating, borderline demonic organ, a sonic manifestation of Indio’s malevolent and overpowering wrath. When he guns down his enemies, the horrible quietness that follows strikes harder. Silence is as key to setting the mood and tone as Morricone’s score, Leone’s cinematography, and the bounty hunter’s drawls. The three main characters express themselves through their movements as much as their dialogue.

For a Few Dollars More doesn’t have a plot so much as it’s a series of setpieces with an overarching story. There is no need for convoluted twists and dramatic monologues when the panache and craftmanship masterfully build action and suspense. With crisp and desolate imagery, striking close-ups, and a cold demeanor, this film invites us to look at an unforgiving world where fate brushes up against individual wills and bulldozes any sense of hope. In a scorching desert filled with criminals and bounty hunters and ruled by money and guns, the only winner is the one who’s the most stone-cold.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

DIRECTED BY: Sergio Leone
SCREENPLAY BY: Age & Scarpelli, Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Leone
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Tonino Delli Colli
EDITED BY: Nino Baragli, Eugenio Alabiso
MUSIC BY: Ennio Morricone
STARRING: Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Aldo Giuffrè, Antonio Casas, Rada Rassimov, Aldo Sambrell, Enzo Petito, Luigi Pistilli, Livio Lorenzon, Al Mulock, Sergio Mendizábal, Antonio Molino Rojo, Lorenzo Robledo, Mario Brega

In many ways, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the final word on what the Western can be. Any outlaw/cowboy movie that came before never achieved this level of scope and ambition, and any that came after has been influenced in some way by this epic, whether intentionally or through osmosis. By the third installment of the Dollars trilogy, Sergio Leone progressed far beyond Kurosawa adaptor and perfected his knockdown, drag-out vision of the American West. He had transcended the spaghetti western and entered a realm that could only be described as pure film. As the story follows the search for Confederate gold during the Civil War, the three outlaws’ duplicitous interactions and desperate motives and winding journeys make this just as much a war and action film. Each disparate element is subsumed into an epic.

Despite its title, the moral roles between Blondie (Good), Angel Eyes (Bad), and Tuco (Ugly) aren’t cleanly defined as much as they are blurred. Yes, Angel Eyes is mean-spirited and terrifying, a truly rotten gunslinger. He kills those who hire him, kills those who attempt to bribe him, kills everyone with little provocation. With a steely-eyed allure and a cut-throat sensibility, he navigates the arid mythical west with impunity, the brutal personification of the Civil War’s hatred and bigotry. Alternating between a dominant and absent presence, his spur-jangling terror looms ominously over the whole enterprise, his nefarious hooks digging into the raw flesh of every situation Blondie and Tuco find themselves in. But his cold stare can occasionally soften, with a vague sense of tragedy and sad vulnerability to his moist eyes, projecting a false humanity that makes him even more dangerous.

But Blondie and Tuco also show themselves to be plenty sadistic. Blondie seems almost deliberately two-dimensional, a man of mystery and resolve with a quick draw, adorned in a sheepskin waistcoat, denim shirt, and poncho. Clint Eastwood’s anti-hero is a canny trickster and guardian angel. Reduced to a near-death, sun-fried cadaver, his Christ-like rise is a momentous celebration of non-redemption. There is no inner torment or deep intent, just a pure carnal desire to outgun and outwit his enemies. Blondie works with Tuco to scam towns out of money, shooting down anyone who tries to take him for bounty, leaving him with the authorities to collect the prize, then he shoots the noose free just before the criminal hangs. Nothing at this point indicates that Tuco is innocent or even upstanding, but Blondie rescues him so their profitable grift can continue. Then, Blondie leaves Tuco stranded in the blistering desert, their usual debriefing spot, because the money no longer justifies the partnership. He rides off, leaving Tuco’s hands bound together. Tuco begins cursing him out, to which Blondie quips, “Such ingratitude after all this time,” before the words “The Good” appear on-screen.

As revenge, Tuco walks a weary Blondie through the relentless sun, his sun-poisoned skin crackling as he nearly dies of thirst and exhaustion. The ever-fidgety, ever-grubby, rodent-faced criminal steals every scene with his ceaseless prancing and oily charisma. Every twitch of his sunburned chops, every squint and glower and gleam of his eyes, and every dirt-scuffing tirade reveal almost a Shakespearean set of motives and ticks. His duplicitous, conniving skullduggery reveals new depths of greed, new propensities for last-ditch scams. Tuco is quick-witted and resilient, and breezes through his sun-baked desertion and bounces back from a ferocious beating.

The constant tit-for-tat between these rope-swinging, back-stabbing partners is an endlessly entertaining sparring match of double-dealing. Whenever Tuco’s grizzled head is in a noose, whenever he’s doing a pick-n-mix in a gun shop, the comedy is ratcheted. The chance meeting with a Confederate medical wagon filled with a pile of bullet-laden corpses as it thunders uncontrolled across an unforgiving desert. A bedraggled Blondie and Tuco singing wild rebel yells when they encounter a column of grey-clad cavalrymen, only to realize the troops are Unionists caked in dust. And for all their underhanded treachery, Blondie and Tuco maintain a semblance of a moral code, even if it’s screwed. In the closing scene, Blondie seemingly leaves Tuco for dead, only to return to their uneasy partnership in a manipulative display of arrogant mercy.

The final standoff between the three is a hauntingly cathartic climax, defiant of narrative, internal structure, and physical logic. Just before, Tuco experiences his “Ecstasy of Gold,” scampering manically across a bizarre sprawl of ramshackle gravestones. Ennio Morricone’s score drives with agonizing expediency, and Tonio Delli Colli’s camera whirls around with dizzying finesse, a serenade of blind obsession. We get both close-ups and long shots of Tuco’s demented, maddening jubilation as he aggressively flits through the rows. The human cost of pursuing wealth at the expense of judgment reaches its culmination and results in a devoutly euphoric and elaborate sequence that batters down the gates of truth and realism. It is a tour de force of darting and twitching eyes, sweaty brows, and itchy trigger fingers. The focus on each man’s stern faces—Tuco’s rage and fear, Angel Eyes’ jittery darkness, and Blondie’s acceptance of inevitability—plays out in an unbearable, heart-beating tension. It’s a movie within a movie. The three walk into a spherical stone-clad area in the middle of nowhere, allowing the 180- and 30-degree framing to be executed cleanly. The long shots provide a sense of scale and world-building, while the repetitive close-ups of the guns establish the stakes of which weapons are used.

The backdrop of the Civil War references atrocities and sacrifices with equal reverence. The three protagonists are embroiled in a bitter struggle for personal gain, and it plays out against wholesale slaughter and inhumanity. A wretched gaggle of rebels wounded and dying in a forsaken desert outpost. The thirst of a pivotal soldier facing his grave finality. The lunacy of a battle over a bridge leading to nowhere.

How a person acts in war is indicative of their moral character, especially in an environment full of greedy and shady motives. Sure, Blonie may kill for money and screws those who trust him, but he seems genuinely affected by the bloodshed and suffering he witnesses. He comments on the devastating nature of war and offers a dying soldier his coat and a few puffs of his cigar instead of racing towards the gold like Tuco. As Blondie and Tuco work together to detonate the bridge, their differing motives are subtle but clear. Blondie knows that destroying the bridge could save thousands of lives, and he wants to help an army captain who’s on his deathbed. Meanwhile, Tuco only sees the Civil War as an obstacle between him and $200,000 worth of gold. Angel Eyes enlists as an officer of the Union to infiltrate the infamous death camp that he believes Bill Carson—the man who knows the exact whereabouts of the gold stash—is incarcerated in. He exploits his position to establish some sort of system where his gang is profiting from war and captives. His ever-opportunistic instincts for despicable violence and racketeering have found the perfect venue in this cesspit of misery and decay. According to the general, under his command at the camp, prisoners of war are robbed, cheated, tortured, and murdered. Angel Eyes also uses his authority to torture Tuco into disclosing the location of the gold.

Ennio Morricone delivered arguably the most iconic score ever set to film, his brooding music employing percussion, bells, chimes, and ethnic guitars to complement the operatic close-ups and intense sequences. The atmosphere is enthralling, however, because of the odd comingling of silence and menace, whether that be in abandoned towns besieged with cannon fire or dangerous journeys through “one hundred miles of beautiful sunbaked sand.” For all of Morricone’s immaculate tunes, this is essentially a silent film: You could watch it with the sound off and still follow the plot and feel the emotion. The actors are marionettes, no more or less important than the settings and the sinuous camera moves. This is the essence of a director’s film. The thin plot doesn’t matter when you deliver a series of masterfully executed scenes.

Part revisionism, part desert opera, this is a spectacular deconstruction and remolding of the Western genre through the Civil War, the frontier spirits, and the amorality of a nation that found its identity through killing everything that stood in its path to manifest destiny. Leone reevaluated what it means to ride through the soulless depths of the Wild West through a pulverizing barnstorm of furious characters, wry situations, and rhapsodizing observations about the frailty of honor and the hypocrisy of authority. It’s an alternate reality, a fable set in a parallel universe where gun belts can brazenly defy any element of surrealism. Blondie, Angel Eyes, and Tuco ride through the insanity of war on a collision course of mutual fate. As they overcome betrayals and barbarity, they never reach self-discovery as much as they become more attuned to the horrific carnage all around them. In a sense, this film is about nothing, as the final showdown reflects their lack of bearing in the greater scheme of things.

That’s it for this week’s instalment of The Watchlist, brought to you by Beaglesgate Productions.

Next week, we’ll be diving into the American post-war capitalist society. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on these movies, where they place among your personal favorites, or if you think they’re overrated.

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Some people like high-consequence stakes, especially when it comes to online discourse, and I can respect the appetite for an intellectual spar, but my appetite for such matters has soured a bit. Consequences are dire enough in everyday life at the moment, to say the least, which makes any low-stakes atmosphere something of a relief. I vibe with discussions, and they can get lively or even disagreeable, but they should be fun and done within the bounds of mutual respect. Music and all its attendant fandoms elicit heated emotions and various strands of fuming derangements, but in the age of AI fuckery, I can respect that people still feel passionate about human-generated culture. This little series was meant to be a hang-out vibe to reminisce on some great, and some questionable, AOTY picks, and given the results of this bracket, dunk on Pitchfork’s readership (also me).

ROUND 2 RESULTS: Me vs. Pitchfork Readers

Where the Pitchfork readers and I agree:

1. Frank Ocean Blonde over Solange A Seat at the Table

2. Sufjan Stevens Illinois over Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

3. Daft Punk Discovery over Interpol Turn on the Bright Lights

4. Radiohead Kid A over Kendrick Lamar DAMN.

5. Radiohead OK Computer over Kendrick Lamar good kid, m.A.A.d city

6. Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly over OutKast Aquemini

Where the Pitchfork readers and I disagree:

1. Bon Iver Bon Iver over Fiona Apple Fetch the Bolt Cutters

2. Vampire Weekend Modern Vampires of the City over Microphones The Glow Pt. 2

Bon Iver’s and Vampire Weekend’s victories signify the millennial hipster ascension over the aging Gen-Xers among the Pitchfork readership. I’m not even convinced Bon Iver’s self-titled is his best album, and I feel the same about Modern Vampires of the City regarding Vampire Weekend. They’re both great, but The Glow is a genre-defining album, and Fetch the Bolt Cutters is a rare Pitchfork 10, the first since My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and a modern declarative feminist statement that I assumed would’ve resonated with the more recent/younger/diverse readers it tried to appeal to.

Let’s get to it.

RELATED:

ROUND 3: Brackets 1 & 2 [Tuesday, April 7]

Frank Ocean Blonde vs. Sufjan Stevens Illinois

Blonde is an odyssey through a druggy, hazy mood that reveals itself to be an epic tale of a revolutionary artist acutely aware of his mortality and fragility, but struggles with how to process the revelations of his depressing insignificance. It uses motifs of summer breeze and bleached hair to convey the carefree attitude of adolescence, but this is the purest manifestation of a concept album, a thematically coherent and streamlined expression of sexuality, materialism, race, lost youth, and nostalgia. The instrumental mood is heart-wrenching and genre-defying. The cover substitutes the spelling of the LP title “Blonde” for “Blond,” while showcasing a Band-Aid on Frank’s finger; it’s an introduction to the duality of masculinity as a contrast to the feminine “Blonde” while the bandage references a fistfight he got into with Chris Brown, who called him a homophobic slur during the altercation. The cover is vulnerable, and it is the manly shell he has to wear as an openly gay male. This album could shatter a heart to dust.

Even if Sufjan applied his heart-rending spirituality to the story of Illinois, he captured the story of America. Illinois describes a state and a nation in motion, full of complicated people who are capable of both good and evil. It’s a challenge to accept collective responsibility for the horrific actions of a few, and it’s just as daunting to rise above our baser impulses to create beauty. Superman, the quintessential American hero, is invoked to explore the vulnerabilities inherent in love: “Only a steel man can be a lover/ If he had hands to tremble all over/ We celebrate our sense of each other/ We have a lot to give one another.” And “Casimir Pulaski Day” is a devastatingly beautiful reflection on mortality and faith, taking the bravery of the famous hero of the American Revolution and applying it to his struggles with his relationship with God after his childhood friend died of cancer. His most famous song, “Chicago,” is about living a bohemian life, repeating the mantra “All things go,” signifying that no matter how you live your life, change is the only permanent fixture. It’s fitting that the last words of the album is the question, “What have we become, America?” It’s open-ended, and just as relevant now as it was in 2025, as we’re left to confront the beauty and horror in America’s history and folklore.

In a way, both are statements about American culture, one deeply personal and minimalistic, and the other more of a bombastic, lush mythologiziation.

Verdict: Sufjan Stevens Illinois

Daft Punk Discovery vs. Radiohead Kid A

Kid A is a landmark alt-rock album because it abandoned traditional guitar-driven structures for a more free-jazz and ambient electronic atmosphere. It came on the heels of Radiohead’s exhaustive OK Computer tour, and it was driven by frontman Thom Yorke’s burnout. He channeled those frustrations into a dystopian, bleak, and chaotic exploration of fame, a corporatized society, and his now prescient feelings of digital isolation. In “How to Disappear Completely,” the lyrics “I’m not here, this isn’t happening, I’m not here, I’m not here, Strobe lights and blown speakers” speak to the introvert in all of us, having to put on a performative extroverted front for job interviews, dates, social situations, and accentuating our personal brands until it mentally and spiritually drains us, only to want to retreat from the world and recharge. “Idioteque” feels like the sound inside the head of someone losing their mind, with the rambling and nonsensical lyrics and the way the beats grow faster and more panicked as the song progresses.

Daft Punk has four distinct groundbreaking eras, but none of them have been as influential as Discovery. It rehabilitated musical ideas and tropes that were consigned to the dustbin of history, as resolutely retro as it was futuristic, and it established that signature and singular Daft Punk sound. You’d be hard-pressed to find another 21st-century electronic album as globally successful, beloved, influential, and blending accessibility with experimentation. It is an homage to the naiveté and authentic emotions of childhood. Despite the android appearances of its creators, Discovery is a comfortingly human touch to a genre of music that was perceived as impenetrable or repetitive, as it infiltrated and mutated disco into traditional pop-style hooks and song structure. As the 2000s went on, this became much more common in electronic music, and Daft Punk essentially created the blueprint for the genre’s next big explosion: EDM. Authentic and uncompromising in its style, this duo represents a connection technology to human insight, exploring the dance-funk spirit inside the machine.

This matchup is interesting as we’re reckoning with the social and democratic malignancies brought by social media and the advent of AI psychosis, the early stages of human consciousness and machine-tooled algorithms fusing as one. Do you go with the melancholic album that paints a cold and dystopian future or the blend of disco and pop that celebrates childlike wonder? These days, I’m clinging onto whatever joy I can find.

Verdict: Daft Punk Discovery

ROUND 3: Brackets 3 & 4 [Tuesday, April 7]

Bon Iver Bon Iver vs. Radiohead OK Computer

It’s hard to find a better career arc in Millennial-era indie music than that of Justin Vernon. After For Emma, Forever Ago, Blood Bank EP, and his collaborations with Kanye West, the hype was unbelievable for his official sophomore release. And to go from the isolation and rawness of his debut to the subtle grand stateliness of Bon Iver was a bold choice, but this album is gorgeous from start to finish, brittle and soft. It’s uncomfortably intimate and experimental, sounding like it’s barely there but made up of so many layers. It’s hushed and minimal, but painfully distant. When Aaron Rodgers interviewed Justin Vernon, he asked about the meaning behind “Holocene,” and Justin said it was inspired by a Christmas Eve night where he and his brother got high, watched Inglorious Basterds, and walked to a bridge overlooking a freeway where he could “see for miles.” It’s incredible to know a song that beautiful came from something so relatable, and watching Brad Pitt collect Nazi scalps. Every song stretches out and takes its time, fleshed out with little touches that add up to a sonic tapestry: The militant drumbeat of “Perth,” the recording of creaky playground equipment of “Michicant,” and the ascendant piano twinkles on “Wash.” Vernon could have had a successful career churning out sparse folk twee, but we were blessed to witness a generational artist push the limits of their sound at risk of alienating their fledgling fanbase. This is the ultimate “promise fulfilled” album of the 2010s.

Having cemented themselves as a ‘90s alt-rock mainstay, Radiohead chose to go deeper into themes like capitalism, isolation, depression, consumerism, or really anything that could be enabled or further pronounced with technology, hence OK Computer. The band incorporated new and weird elements to their sound, something hinted at on The Bends’ “Planet Telex,” such as synths, drum loops, and orchestral arrangements. They drew influences from avant-garde, ambient, and electronica, as well as artists such as CAN, Miles Davis, and DJ Shadow. While Johnny Greenwood’s piercing riffs were groundbreaking, Thom Yorke reached a new level of lyrical prowess. “Let Down” conjures the dread of emotional isolation. “Karma Police” is about vindictive and vigilante desires of some people being unfortunately realized with modern technology, only to feel betrayed when those powers are used against them. “Fitter Happier” suppresses existential dread with basic routines for a “happy” life, how we reprogram ourselves to be perfect members of a conformist society. “Electioneering” depicts political malice. “No Surprises” is a story about someone trapped in a dull life, but they remain unfulfilled, and either attempt or consider suicide until they realize “Such a pretty house, such a pretty garden” and decide not to go through with it. Some of the songs are a little more out there, like “Climbing Up the Walls” and “Lucky,” and others are more straightforward, like “Tourist,” which is about stupid people rushing around instead of stopping to smell the roses. It’s not as much a concept album as it’s a loose collection of thematically related songs that have accurately predicted the malaise of the early-21st-century.

Both albums represent radical sonic departures for two of the most noteworthy artists of their respective decades, but I’m going with the one that has made the more culturally relevant statement.

Verdict: Radiohead OK Computer

Vampire Weekend Modern Vampires of the City vs. Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly

Vampire Weekend’s ornamental afro-beat whimsy took a backseat to more somber musings on death and disillusionment. Where they emerged as spirited preppy indie-rock that nodded to the rhythms of Congolese rumba and the intricacies of soukous guitars, Modern Vampires of the Cities embraced a beautifully morose sound. Lyrics about punctuations and the Colors of Benetton evolved into a vessel for reflection, a way to grapple with life’s big questions. VW’s previous albums were far from frivolous, as they sardonically examines wealth and privilege, but their third album is broader in scope and far more existential. Much of the record deals with the anxieties of getting older, time bearing down heavily, and the loss of faith, whether it’s the main narrative on “Unbelievers” and “Everlasting Arms,” or more subtly on “Hannah Hunt.” But this newfound existentialism isn’t without its sense of playfulness, as “Diane Young” tears through morality and going up in flames at breakneck speed, and the chirpy chipmunk vocal fragments and piano runs of “Ya Hey” make big questions about spirituality sound joyous rather than dreadful. As Vampire Weekend follows in music’s lineage of sampling and interpolation, this album encapsulates how digital natives are cultural omnivores, making collages out of pop culture. But for being so rooted in its era, it doesn’t feel timestamped. In 2013, Modern Vampires… felt transitional for VW, but it was also one of the last landmark albums of the disco pants/shoelace headband phase of indie rock. Indie sleaze was winding down, and the culture was moving onto hip-hop and poptimism. This is about as fitting a swan song for Millennial-indie-rock-as-cultural-zeitgeist as you’ll find.

I’m pasting my review of To Pimp a Butterfly from a previous write-up:

How much does a dollar really cost? “Your life,” America posits. “Your soul,” adds the devil. With To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar synthesizes a character study from more than three centuries of broken promises and America’s sins from slavery on. Manifest Destiny. Genocide. Reconstruction. Sexualization. Exploitation. Consumerism. The prison industrial complex. Empire. Trauma slinks to a pan-African soundscape. Ghettoization bounces along a sticky bassline. A choir calls as George Zimmerman pulls the trigger.

By intention and circumstance, Butterfly is political, with “Alright” belonging to Black Lives Matter and “The Blacker the Berry” to the hip-hop tradition. But this album, ultimately, is about the individual. How does Kendrick Lamar, the man, grow in this crooked world? He has survived an upbringing that others can’t or don’t. He made a decade-defining opus, and he slams the car door in a Compton slum. Is he allowed survivor’s guilt, a record deal, a life of fame? This dilemma eats at him like parasites in his stomach. Even posing the question seems to burn. Does a pop culture icon deserve to weep?

Kenny has spit a lot of bars mulling the answer, and it earned him a Pulitzer. Most of his ruminations still sound titanic. The album lands between great power and great responsibility, which can be satisfying or frustrating. America is a riddle, and there is no easy answer. It elevates and crushes. It bends its arcs and breaks its promises. The American Dream promises freedom and prosperity, and brings you closer to poverty than a McMansion. A dollar costs a lot, but maybe finding peace in those contradictions is enough.

Both of these are quintessential Obama-era records, but I’m going with my favorite hip-hop album of all time.

Verdict: Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly

WE’RE ON TO THE SEMIS!

I said at the beginning of this bracket that Kid A seems like the inevitable winner, but a Radiohead-on-Radiohead final would be the most Pitchfork outcome. Somebody should’ve enlisted to mobilize his entire audience Avengers-style to prevent Pitchfork’s readers from manifesting his worst nightmare. But it’s also crazy that Johnny Greenwood is on three of the final four albums (he appeared on Blonde’s “Seigfried”).

ROUND 3 RESULTS: Me vs. Pitchfork Readers

Where the Pitchfork readers and I agree:

1. Radiohead OK Computer over Bon Iver Bon Iver

2. Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly over Vampire Weekend Modern Vampires of the City

Where the Pitchfork readers and I disagree:

1. Frank Ocean Blonde over Sufjan Stevens Illinois

2. Radiohead Kid A over Daft Punk Discovery

Frank over Sufjan is a bit surprising considering the makeup of Pitchfork’s readership, but they’re both decade-defining albums, so I’m not really going to punch air at some subjective hairsplitting. Also, it would be a tough argument to refute, given that both albums are in completely different genres. Same with Kid A over Discovery. As far as Radiohead’s discography is concerned, I’d put OK Computer, Kid A, and In Rainbows in the S-Tier, with any of those three albums having a rightful claim to being their best, even if Kid A would be my third-favorite among them. Meanwhile, I hold Discovery as a must-inclusion in any GOAT talks about electronica albums. But it seems like there are two matchups with every round that I disagree with, so at least we’re consistent over here at This is a Newsletter!

THE FINAL FOUR: [Wednesday, April 8]

Frank Ocean Blonde vs. Radiohead Kid A

Despite existing in different genres, Blonde and Kid A have quite a few similarities. The first time I listened to Kid A in high school, I had no idea what I was listening to and had a difficult time processing it in a logical sense, since this wasn’t how an alt-rock band was supposed to sound. But I felt this deep emotional connection to its sense of alienation. Even if this isn’t my favorite Radiohead album, it opened my mind to what a rock band could be, and for that, it has left a profound impact on the development of my musical taste. Blonde gave me a similar feeling. The instrumental sparseness and weird vocal pitches threw me off guard on first listen, but when it finally clicked, it hit me right in the feels. Excuse the whole Very Millennial POV here, but Frank really spoke to a lot of 20-somethings struggling with their fading sense of youth, nostalgia in a rapidly changing world, and finding your sense of self in an increasingly materialistic society—and now with bigotry rearing its ugly face. Frank’s creativity does have a real Radiohead experimental vibe, and if anything, I hear a trace of A Moon Shaped Pool here, with a lot of lost and found love. I imagine Blonde will have an incredible influence on music for years to come. At first blush, picking Blonde may seem like a case of recency bias, but this is a tougher choice than I originally thought.

Verdict: Radiohead Kid A

Radiohead OK Computer vs. Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly

The strangest aspect of this matchup is To Pimp a Butterfly is much closer to Kid A in spirit than OK Computer, which is Radiohead’s good kid, m.A.A.d city. Kid A wasn’t a rock album, at least in the traditional sense, but came from a rock band and was presented to a rock audience. While good kid, m.A.A.d city is a fairly straightforward hip-hop album, it was cinematic and thematic and conceptual, and it made a relevant cultural statement, much like OK Computer for alt-rock. And similar to Radiohead, Kenny chose to make a massive paradigm shift in sound, and he delivered abstract and densely heady bars over a kaleidoscopic Pangea of African-American music that spanned funk, soul, jazz, and spoken word. The knock on To Pimp a Butterfly is that for an album so grand and emblematic of its decade and cultural context, it hasn’t left that much of an influence on hip-hop in the sense that rappers aren’t flocking to ape its sound. But how could they replicate such a definitive and unique artistic statement? Not many albums are as singular and audacious as TPAB. It transcends hip-hop and encapsulates the Black experience in America.

Verdict: Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly

THE FINAL SHOWDOWN: [Thursday, April 9]

Well, it seems like everything is in its right place. Radiohead fans (me) are the most obnoxious people on Earth. Growing up, I had this idea that Rolling Stone readers were cringe and stuck in their boomer ways, but I guess I’ve lived long enough to see myself become the enemy.

THE LAST DANCE:

Radiohead Kid A vs. Radiohead OK Computer

Fuck it, going Joker mode.

Verdict: Radiohead In Rainbows

What did I get right or wrong? How would you vote? Let me know in the comments, and let’s duke it out (respectfully)!

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A particular sitting president in the middle of a meltdown is, for some inexplicable reason, extended grace that generally wouldn’t be granted to any other adult having a tantrum in public. It’s a hack lib pundit thing to hypocrisy-shame conservatives this deep into Trumpian depravity, but imagine their shrieking horror had Obama tweeted “Praise be to Allah” on Easter Sunday, or how prissy outrage-merchants at Fox “News” would react to a Democratic president shit-talking another nation while standing next to the Easter Bunny. On the merits, there is nothing much to say on behalf of a deteriorating man who is stamping and fuming and heatedly assuring a concerned public about unconditional surrender and total regime change. He’s getting embarrassed every day, and with gas prices soaring, doesn’t have much leverage in this situation. The new military definition of success is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which was something that was already achieved before this self-inflicted mess. All in the name of Netanyahu, I guess.

Trump’s specific acts of hopping-mad clownishness hit a heightened emotional register when he started tweeting about how he wants to commit war crimes against Iran, specifically how “a whole civilization will die overnight.” This kind of cartoon supervillain posturing is genuinely demented and depraved, but I guess this is how leaders talk when a war is going well. Putting aside whether this is another blustery TACO Tuesday, this is the leader of the most powerful nation on earth threatening to not only murder an entire nation’s civilians, but salt the earth behind him such that the 6,000 year old civilization in Iran “never to be brought back again.” This is just the latest of Trump’s increasingly undignified, inappropriate, and unhinged shitposts that he’s made in his second term, long past the point where any decent society would have stopped tolerating it. I don’t know if the FIFA Peace Prize was inappropriate or exactly what he deserves…

This is the logical degradation of the Beltway foreign policy blob, a bloodlust empire reduced to its blustering id. There isn’t much utility in calling out the hypocrisy of pissing hundreds of billions of tax dollars on ICE and invading Iran when there children attending public schools without lunches, but it doesn’t make our public life any less insulting. We clearly have the budget for something like Medicare-for-All, but we don’t have the political will or priorities, especially when the constant drumbeat of war and bloated Pentagon budgets is a cash cow for military contractors. Yeah, the cruelty is the point and all that, but this is naked class warfare wrapped up in chest-thumping jingoism and a demented Holy War, the arrest of any kind of future that isn’t a self-conscious reiteration of the past set to some anti-human nihilism. The result is a broken population and a busted national moral compass.

Anyways, let’s get to it…

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

First Blood (1982)

DIRECTED BY: Ted Kotcheff
SCREENPLAY BY: Michael Kozoll, William Sackheim, Sylvester Stallone (Based on First Blood by David Morrell)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Andrew Laszlo
EDITED BY: Joan Chapman
MUSIC BY: Jerry Goldsmith
STARRING: Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Brian Dennehy

John Rambo is a drifter, solemnly wandering the streets of a quaint village in the Pacific Northwest. He is the destructive echo of American foreign policy, a Vietnam vet without a purpose. He tries to track down his old army friend Delmore and shows his photo to a woman, explaining that the man he is looking for is in the back of the picture; since he was so large, he would’ve taken up the whole frame if he were anywhere else. The women explains that Delmore is dead, his exposure to Agent Orange gave him cancer and he spent his days at home withering away. That was Rambo’s last surviving war buddy. After being harassed and brutalized by local police, he escapes custody and retreats to the woods, the eternal domestic consequences of turning young men into killing machines before abandoning them. His severe PTSD sends him into defensive bouts of violence, maiming everyone who comes after him like he’s a guerilla warfare slasher villain. First Blood is, well, bloodthirsty, basking in masculine excess. But it is also tragic, showing this kind of bravado as a trap, a war with no victors. For all of Rambo’s green beret badassery, even Sylvester Stallone said himself that even the most skilled killer in the world “can’t kill [that kind of] hypocritical bureaucracy.” We can only live with it.

Rather than relying on action, First Blood draws its power and impact from a distinct emotional core. In Rambo’s jailbreak, he tosses hapless cops through glass and scampers through the station like a feral animal. Then we cut to brief flashback sequences to his time in a POW camp as he’s tortured by the Vietkong. He may not have taken cancer home like Delmore, but he carries mental scars. As the officers pursue him through the woods, they are terrified and out-of-depth, and the violence inflicted upon them is distinctly unpleasant. Every injury is gruesome, especially the officer who steps into a booby trap made of sharpened pieces of wood that deeply thrust into his legs. Their cries of agony and shouts for help give all this mayhem a somber tone, the imperial boomerang delivering a horrific reckoning. This is juxtaposed with Rambo commandeering a dirtbike and zipping into the woods, with cars and dogs speeding after him in a rush of a manhunt thrill-chase—and the cops have no idea what they’re dealing with. The only exception is the death of Officer Galt, who falls from a helicopter while trying to shoot Rambo. His bloody corpse lays on the rocks, but we’re spared any more unpleasant details of the impact. The quick and accidental nature of his death, along with Galt’s repeated abuse and bullying, lends some sympathy to Rambo, as he was acting in self-defense. The police chief is barking orders and exhibiting an Ahab-esque obsession with capturing and smoking the ex-marine, while his former commanding officer is trying to act as the reasonable intermediary between a police force seeking vengeance and a soldier who feels justified in bringing a war to his turf.

While the police force treated Rambo poorly at the station, Galt is really the only one portrayed as particularly nasty and barbaric. He takes an odd, sadistic pleasure in spraying Rambo down with a firehose or smashing him with a nightstick, while the others are reticent or indifferent. They are all still complicit in this abuse, with the only form of intervention coming from a seemingly sympathetic officer who advises Rambo that going along with orders is the best option. Who was really in the wrong here? Rambo should’ve never been arrested, only wished to be left alone, and was treated so poorly that it set off an episode of PTSD. But he was also uncooperative, had injured and attacked some officers, fled custody, and played some role in the death of another officer.

The ensuing and escalating action features a guerrilla warfare setpiece, large explosions, and a thrilling car chase. But the action feels hushed. The stillness is compelling. Rambo’s eyes and face carry a quiet sadness, a forlorn quality. His physique and coordination give the image of a bravado supersoldier, but he is a broken and anguished man who has been backed into the corner by an aggressive and antagonistic small-town police force. He also has nothing to look forward to, so he has nothing to lose by fighting back, since that’s been his only source of purpose. “Back there I could fly a gunship, I could drive a tank, I was in charge of million-dollar equipment,” Rambo sobs to his commanding officer. “Back here, I can’t even hold a job parking cars!” The film doesn’t end in a shootout. We close on Rambo’s weeping catharsis, at night, in a darkened office. Rambo has been synonymous for hoorah jingoistic might, but here, he is a broken man, unable to cope with what he’s seen and the one-man rampage he set off around him.

Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

DIRECTED BY: Kathryn Bigelow
SCREENPLAY BY: Mark Boal
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Greig Fraser
EDITED BY: Dylan Tichenor, William Goldenberg
MUSIC BY: Alexandre Desplat
STARRING: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it only took a decade and the destruction of the Twin Towers to turn America’s star-spangled triumphalism into a jingoistic nightmare. For anyone who could metabolize the horrific spectacle of billowing smoke and an agonized first responders and put it into perspective against the grisly carnage perpetuated around the world by our invisible empire, 9/11 was a shaving nick compared to America’s bloody sins. But we were thirsty for revenge, and we were willing to go to extreme lengths to get it.

Zero Dark Thirty opens with a horrific waterboarding scene that tangentially relates to capturing Osama bin Laden; and for anyone arguing that this portrayal is an endorsement of the righteousness of American violence, torture is wrong whether it works or not. Hazy information is fed, the torture-to-intel pipeline is unreliable, but it’s all pointedly barbaric and the gears ruthlessly turn. Director Kathryn Bigelow’s gritty handheld realism captures a joyless progression of brutality and indicts the entire War on Terror, from enhanced interrogation to the nasty and unheroic Abottabad raid scored to the sound of traumatized, screaming children. Leading up to this pointless and self-perpetuating bloodbath was a procedural blurring of firsthand details, dates, factoids, events, paperwork, and timelines set to an abstracted progression of brutal jingoistic impulses, poisonous methodology, and a total moral erosion. All we see are the dead bodies of unarmed women and their children’s anguished faces.

Catharsis and righteousness are denied at every opportunity. There is no moral off-ramp because the war machine is self-sustaining. There is the unanswered and unanswerable question of Where do you want to go now? and Chastain’s blank face. There is no closure, and whatever sliver of “justice” was irrevocably upended every supposed value we hold for ourselves. It was all for God and country, but what does this say about our god and country?

Sicario (2015)

DIRECTED BY: Denis Villeneuve
SCREENPLAY BY: Taylor Sheridan
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Roger Deakins
EDITED BY: Joe Walker
MUSIC BY: Jóhann Jóhannsson
STARRING: Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Daniel Kaluuya, Victor Garber

Getting a clairvoyant perspective of the War on Drugs is like trying to hold water in your hand. This ongoing battle is violent, horrifying, and senseless. Sicario’s runaround ambivalence is rigorous and perceptive, and its opening scene introduces us to the U.S.-Mexico border as if its a sci-fi film set on a distant planet. There is no dialogue, and nothing is revealed about the characters. But it’s clear from the first jaw-dropping frame that this is a dark and unforgiving setting where there are no rules for engagement, no real sense of justice or ethics, and one wrong move can snuff your life. For a large portion of the film, we don’t really know exactly what’s happening or what people’s true motivations are, and when the greater scheme is finally revealed, the gears of bloodshed are in full motion. Any effort to intervene is a helpless endeavor. All of this is contained in astonishing cinematography and some truly unnerving suspense. While director Denis Villeneuve hits us with a sledgehammer, his wides are stunning and his use of depth of field keeps us feeling off, he also knows how to linger just slightly too long on a shot to induce a sense of chilling discomfort. We are denied any sort of catharsis.

In a parallel universe, Sicario is a straightforward revenge plot that begins with Alejandro Gillick’s (Benicio Del Toro) wife and daughter getting murdered by a rival cartel, he strikes a deal with the CIA, and ultimately hunts down the jefes in a bittersweet ending. Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt) would be a minor antagonist presented as a naive government agent whose do-gooder sense of justice would obstruct the real sense of retribution that our anti-hero is set to deliver in a lawless land. But by making Kate the main character, she is transformed into the perfect archetype of a strong female who is wholly unable to stem the tide of horror and corruption spawned by the drug war. She is a pawn, and she is ultimately disposable–had she died at the border crossing when her assassin hit his shot, she would’ve been swifty swapped for her partner. The casual jokes and banter between Matt and the paramilitary forces is a nice detail, since it reinforces that Kate is a side character walking in on a plot that has been unfolding for years. The line between systemic incomprehensibility and operative obscurity is blurred, as is the line between right and wrong. As Matt tells Kate about Alejandro’s real past, he also discloses the true nature of the CIA’s operations: The U.S. government would rather have a single group control all of the drug trade instead of dealing with the chaos of multiple cartels vying for power, even if this involves cooperating with Medellin.

Silvio, a Mexican cop who works for the cartel, is an unexpected foil to Kate, as he is a perfect distillation of a pawn. His choices are limited to the confines of his home: He attends his child’s soccer game, he sleeps in, and chooses coffee or liquor for breakfast. If he ever crosses the cartel, he dies. When Alejandro goes full Metal Gear Solid at the end, at one point, he is literally moved forward like a pawn and a body shield, sacrificed in our anti-hero’s chess game to kill Diaz (the queen) and ultimately Fausto (the king). Silvio is a cautionary tale of what happens when you completely surrender your autonomy to systemic forces. He was a letdown of a father and a husband, an alcoholic who’d rather sleep in than support his son’s passion for soccer. But he finds redemption by following Alejandro’s orders, who assures him, “Everything you do now, you do for your family.” Silvio’s sacrifice keeps his family alive, showing that even if our individual efforts are helpless to change society, we can benefit the people in our immediate surroundings.

In the end, Kate is presented a “choice” at gunpoint: Sign off on the cartel job or accept a grave finality. She signs the papers, knowing that she is sacrificing her principles and passing the buck to another agent, most likely her partner. Every character ducks responsibility: Alejandro tells Kate he does what the CIA instructs him to do, Matt’s orders are directed by the government, elected officials are following the will of the public, public opinion is directed by the media, and the media is following the ratings. Within this sclerotic system, the ones with the most agency are the ones who accept the limited confines of their choices and make the most of them. Kate seems to be at the beginning of the same path Matt followed, a once-idealistic bureaucrat whose principles were gradually worn down by reality. Kate also had the opportunity to kill Alejandro, and chose not to, as they both understood that the choice would make no difference in the shadow of a broader drug war. In that moment, Kate chose her morality. If life is a chess match, pieces aren’t just pieces–they’re people and values we hold. Sometimes, it makes sense to sacrifice them, but we know if it was the right move until the next set of circumstances presents us with another choice.

Sicario is a meditation on the overwhelming power of systems, and it subverts genre tropes and expectations to dispel the illusion that we can solve problems with the brutal exercise of force or a committed exercise of conscience. It also gives an ultra-realistic and cynical depiction of the death of morality. “This is a land of wolves now,” Alejandro tells Kate. “You are not a wolf.” The sheer brutality of the war against these cartels reduces everyone involved to predatory animals. In the animal kingdom, a lion or a bear would not be considered “evil” for hunting and killing their prey in the same way that Alejandro isn’t unambiguously “evil” for executing a woman and her children to spite the man who subjected his family to the same horrific fate. It’s just mutually reciprocated brutality. Alejandro’s traumatic past frames his otherwise deplorable actions in a more justifiable light, maybe even justifiable. In this wolf-eat-wolf world, would we have done the same if we were in his place? Trauma has the insidious power to make animals out of men. This is not a war fought by honest, upstanding people. It is fought by animals for survival by any means necessary. And oftentimes, the animals aren’t getting their full comeuppance; it’s the innocent bystanders who suffer the most through collateral damage, caught in this jungle of violence, unable to run or fight. The beast of Juarez consumes all.

That’s it for this week’s instalment of The Watchlist, brought to you by Beaglesgate Productions.

Next week, we’ll be diving into Part Two of the Obligatory Classics. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on these movies, where they place among your personal favorites, or if you think they’re overrated.

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There is no dignified way to promote yourself. This is especially true when you’re a publication that tends to produce overwrought music reviews, and especially when said publication goes further up its own ass to rescore some of its most egregiously contrarian takes. Some of these deeply held opinions have resulted in some bizarre AOTY picks, which their brutal oustings in the first round have savagely revealed how horribly they’ve aged. It was never revealed how these round-one seedings were sorted, because most of the matchups were no-brainers. But it seems like I have achieved a mind-meld with Pitchfork’s readership, and based on these results, it’s unclear whether this is a compliment or an insult to my musical taste, if I’m tapped into the culture, or if I have the sensibilities of a basic hipster (probably that).

ROUND 1 RESULTS: Me vs. Pitchfork Readers

Where the Pitchfork readers and I agree:

1. Frank Ocean Blonde over The Knife Silent Shout

2. Solange A Seat at the Table over Panda Bear Person Pitch

3. Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy over Arcade Fire Funeral

4. Sufjan Stevens Illinois over Fleet Foxes Fleet Foxes

5. Daft Punk Discovery over Cindy Lee Diamond Jubilee

6. Radiohead Kid A over The Rapture Echoes

7. Fiona Apple Fetch the Bolt Cutters over Los Thuthanaka Los Thuthanaka

8. Bon Iver Bon Iver over Mitski Be the Cowboy

9. Kendrick Lamar good kid, m.A.A.d city over Playboi Carti Whole Lotta Red

10. Radiohead OK Computer over Run the Jewels Run the Jewels 2

11. Vampire Weekend Modern Vampires of the City over SZA SOS

12. Microphones The Glow Pt. 2 over Jazmine Sullivan Heaux Tales

13. Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly over The Dismemberment Plan Emergency & I

14. OutKast Aquemini over Beyoncé Renaissance

Where the Pitchfork readers and I disagree:

1. Interpol Turn on the Bright Lights over Animal Collective Merriweather Post Pavilion

2. Kendrick Lamar DAMN. over Lana Del Rey Norman Fucking Rockwell!

Turn on the Bright Lights beating out Merriweather Post Pavilion is understandable, as both albums are seminal works of 2000s indie rock. But it’s hard to conceive of DAMN. being higher than Kenny’s fourth-best album, and I don’t think it would beat out Section.80 or Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers in my personal rankings of his discography, let alone one of the best pop albums of the 2010s. Pitchfork readers are crazy for that one.

Now that we’ve eliminated some of the chaff, at least round two has some more compelling matchups that will force us to deliberate.

Let’s get to it.

RELATED:

Bracket 1

Frank Ocean Blonde vs. Solange A Seat at the Table

This matchup is so cruel. Both albums are borne out of a sublime psychedelic sonic palette, with Frank drawing from abstract minimalism while Solange dusts off and updates funk and soul. Frank expresses his romantic, philosophical, and melancholic ideas and emotions over a sparse backdrop, which gives Blonde an intimacy that feels smolderingly direct and obliquely dissonant. The ultimate contrary record. Meanwhile, Solange offers an intensely personal testament to two worlds of the Black experience—at home and out in the world—over minimal but hauntingly beautiful beats, letting her deft soprano, those rich harmonies, and piano lines just breathe. Both albums are darkly glimmering but life-affirming experiences, so it depends on whether you’re in the mood for a personal or a social statement. These are my two favorite albums of 2016, so it’s a coin flip.

Verdict: Frank Ocean Blonde

Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy vs. Sufjan Stevens Illinois

For as gaudy and grandiose as MBDTF can be, it is a no-holds-barred extravaganza of contradictory emotions: Fatiguing and invigorating, cold-blooded and heart-rending, haphazardly splattered and meticulously sculpted. But few indie rock albums are as captivating as Illinois, and it stands out from the predictable detachment of its genre because it brims with heart-wrenching melodies and over-the-top arrangements. Epic in scope, a fully realized sprawl, the state of Illinois is merely an allusion; the references are a backdrop to more human, relatable, and universal emotions. It’s a quintessential American album, evoking a sense of time, place, and aesthetic.

Verdict: Sufjan Stevens Illinois

Bracket 2

Interpol Turn on the Bright Lights vs. Daft Punk Discovery

Turn on the Bright Lights is a walk in the city on a cold, pitch-black winter night with the moon beaming down and the fog of your breath dissipating as soon as it billows out of your mouth. It is the despondent and empty feeling of wanting to feel something as unknown faces walk by you in the opposite direction, and the headlights of passing cars illuminate the frost that covers everything around you. It’s a simple album, but these guys are masters at building tension, and it manages to be affecting, atmospheric, and layered. The soaring second-half of “PDA” is pretty much the template for the Killers’ Hot Fuss. It may be the most brooding album ever recorded, as every ensuing track feels more gloomy and dejected, until the closing leaves you feeling exhausted and cold. Unfortunately, it’s not Discovery.

Verdict: Daft Punk Discovery

Radiohead Kid A vs. Kendrick Lamar DAMN.

DAMN. pulls you into social issues, Kenny’s personal battles, relationships, and friendships through the duality of emotions—pride and humility, love and lust, fear and god. Play it from front-to-back, and you’re hit with a muscular, aggressive, and propulsive sequence of trap-influenced bangers. Play it backwards, and you’re entering some languid introspection, a heady odyssey through the cruel uncertainty of life, with Kenny approaching the problem from four different angles only to tease at an answer. But Kid A inspired Pitchfork’s own Brent DiCrescenzo to pen the immortal opening salvo, “I had never even seen a shooting star before,” only to then compare the listening experience to “witnessing the stillborn birth of a child.” Swirling, soaring electronic soundscapes and epic avant-jazz will do that to a MFer.

Verdict: Radiohead Kid A

Bracket 3

Fiona Apple Fetch the Bolt Cutters vs. Bon Iver Bon Iver

It’s not often you find a pop album that clatters and bites like Fetch the Bolt Cutters, but it’s an unbound sound of the everyday. The matter-of-fact depictions of quotidian brutality made it the perfect soundtrack to pandemic-induced isolation. The melodies are beautiful, and the epiphanies are razor-sharp, but the songs aren’t “pretty” in a traditional sense. But it is damn evocative. Bon Iver is spellbinding, the sound of the first breath of spring after a long and harsh winter. It possesses the austere beauty and understated emotiveness of its predecessor, but nestled within its panoramic soundscapes is an affecting intimacy and some percolating grooves. This one’s a tough call.

Verdict: Fiona Apple Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Kendrick Lamar good kid, m.A.A.d city vs. Radiohead OK Computer

On my Top 100 Albums, good kid, m.A.A.d city comes in at #56, while OK Computer arrived at #51. In a three-year span, Kenny delivered two albums that I would argue are within the top 10 hip-hop albums of all time, but at this moment, I don’t intend to dispute my initial placement of these LPs within the pantheon of my greatest albums.

Verdict: Radiohead OK Computer

Bracket 4

Vampire Weekend Modern Vampires of the City vs. Microphones The Glow Pt. 2

Modern Vampires of the City is the ideal coming-of-age album, departing from their Afro-beat-inspired sound and arch depiction of moneyed WASPs and shifting into a more somber reflection on mortality. It’s simply a gorgeous album. But The Glow, Pt. 2 is an essential and influential work of modern indie, and countless bands have aped and imitated Phil Elverum’s unparalleled sonic textures. Solar noise bursts over his idiosyncratic epics about the wrath and fragility of nature. There’s a deep, nearly spiritual yearning within the swirling and sprawling compositions. It’s just a beautiful, haunting, surreal masterpiece.

Verdict: Microphones The Glow Pt. 2

Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly vs. OutKast Aquemini

Two of the greatest hip-hop albums just had to duke it out in the second round of this bracket. Aquemini was a game-changer for the Dirty South. It proved that hip-hop was capable of sonic expansion. It solidified OutKast as one of those ‘90s mainstream anomalies—like Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, or Public Enemy—that could push the boundaries of their respective genre while commanding commercial appeal. But To Pimp a Butterfly, at least in my estimation, is THEE “Great American Hip-Hop Album.” It is a dense and dazzling journey through an African-American musical mosaic, combining cinematic production with the free-flowing fluidity of a mixtape. Fiery outrage and deep jazz, this album reinstated hip-hop as Black America’s CNN.

Verdict: Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly

What did I get right or wrong? How would you vote? Let me know in the comments, and let’s duke it out (respectfully)!

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“AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”
—Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO

“For some reason, people want to keep their private data private.”
—Larry Ellison, Oracle Founder & CTO

“Tokens are the new commodity. Everybody in this room is powered by intelligence. And in the future, that intelligence will be augmented by tokens… Every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive.”
—Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO

"I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem. It's a problem at work, and it's a problem at home. And if you go back 400 years ago, it would’ve never occurred to anybody to be introspective… Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff."
—Marc Andreessen, Cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz

“We could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority, but maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through technological means.”
—Peter Thiel, President of Thiel Capital

“Palantir is here to disrupt and make our—the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion, kill them.”
—Alex Karp, Palantir CEO

Anyways, let’s get to it…

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

DIRECTED BY: James Cameron
SCREENPLAY BY: James Cameron, William Wisher
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Adam Greenberg
EDITED BY: Conrad Buff, Mark Goldblatt, Richard A. Harris
MUSIC BY: Brad Fiedel
STARRING: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick, Earl Boen, Joe Morton

As humans have become increasingly reliant on technology, we dream and fear the day that robots will eventually rule us. We’ve been seeing the cognitive deterioration of AI power users, but the delirious effects of a digitized world have been long apparent. With tech CEOs seeing a compliant second Trump administration as a regulatory and politically permissive window to brute force a surveillance state onto an unwitting and unwilling populace, James Cameron’s Terminator franchise seems more queasily prescient than ever. Ten years after the T-800 was sent to assassinate Sarah Connor, Skynet deploys the T-1000 to kill her son before he can grow up to become the leader of the human resistance. In this world, 3 billion lives were set to be extinguished on August 29th, 1997, as AI computer network Skynet gained consciousness just days earlier and kicked off a nuclear holocaust when its human creators tried to unplug it.

In the imperatives of a results-driven economic system, automation delivers frictionless convenience in both services and production. But it also affords the decision-makers who control these machines the convenience of abdicating any sense of responsibility and value judgment for their actions. Market incentives are treated as compulsion. Mass layoffs are treated as financial inevitabilities. In the case of defense systems, well, AI lacks human frailty, but it also leads to wrongful arrests or civilians on the receiving end of an erroneous missile strike. How corporations and governments use these digitized systems through Ring doorbells, or traffic cameras, or Palantir weapons-grade annihilation is shadowy and secretive; James Cameron heavily contrasts this gamification of war against the more popularized form of computing in the form of mall arcades. What happens when we become overly dependent on technology while underestimating the ramifications? For example, computers made withdrawing money almost instantaneous, but John Connor can also hack an ATM and rob bank accounts within minutes. With machines fully usurping humans by 2029, Skynet sends human-looking terminators to fulfill human desires with mechanical efficiency. The T-800 is dressed as a biker while the T-1000 is disguised as a cop.

Since John Connor sends Kyle Reese back 45 years to become his own father, and Reese dies before his own birth, he only exists because the machines took over the planet. Also, according to this time travel logic loop, the resistance can’t send Reese back, so they send a reprogrammed T-800 as a father figure to give John a childhood. It listens to him, plays with him, and gives him high-fives. Ironically, since the Terminator lacks human failings and foibles, it would never be too busy for John, or as Sarah observes, “It would never leave him. And it would never hurt him.” Ironically, Sarah is a failed paternal figure, as her obsession with preventing nuclear fallout leaves her to treat her son as an asset of the resistance, rather than her child. Likely as a trauma response to her first encounter with the T-800, she is more emotionally equipped to teach John how to load a gun or make a homemade bomb than to reach for a hug. As Sarah sheds her vulnerability to protect John, in a sense, she becomes more machine-like than the Terminator. And herein is the ultimate paradox: John wouldn’t exist if Skynet didn’t want him dead, but he also wouldn’t experience love if it weren’t for one of their killing machines.

John’s interactions with the T-800 mimic aspects of the Turing test: Although the Terminator looks like a human, its robotic mannerisms are a dead giveaway. It raises some existential questions, like how do we know if we’re human, or what makes our flawed thinking better than computer logic? As John tells the T-800, “You don’t say ‘affirmative,’ or some shit like that. You say, ‘no problemo.’” Language acquisition makes the machine sound more human-like, but its free learning enables it to ask questions to make it more deeply human: Why do we cry? Why is murder wrong? John’s answers are poignant, funny, and tragic. We shouldn’t kill because we have feelings and because we should care for our species. At least when a Terminator slaughters its targets, they’re following specific orders; in many instances, humans kill for inexplicable reasons. Sarah notes that men like Miles Dyson only create death and destruction, and the T-800 makes a similar dig: “It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves.” Humans create technology only to delegate the messiness of cruelty to unfeeling machines—drone warfare, precision missiles—so all the horrific aspects of extraction and exploitation can operate outside of our zone of consciousness. We teach machines the aspects of human behavior we wish to avoid confronting.

As the moniker “Judgment Day” is given to the nuclear Armageddon that destroys humanity and leaves the robots to inherit the earth, it also parallels the Bible’s depiction of the end of the world as God passes judgment on our souls. As the Connors and the T-800 find Miles Dyson, they lay 3 billion deaths at his feet. Naturally, he is horrified at the implications of his life’s work, and replies, “You’re judging me on things I haven’t even done yet.” He carries the burden for the end of the world as we know it, the creator-god of the machines, ultimately sacrificing himself in a futile attempt to save humanity. He also acts as a stand-in for the abject stuntedness of human endeavor within a profit-motivated system, where creativity and innovation are narrowly defined and often result in degradation, if not destruction. Judgment Day is a moral choice we all make, as there is no fate we can’t make for ourselves. In an era of desensitized global violence and increasingly flagrant corruption, both business and political leaders have made it explicit that they intend to take what they feel is rightfully theirs and they will bludgeon through popular will to have it. So the question remains: What future do we want for ourselves and our planet? The neoliberal order has shown its hand, which is smash-and-grab sadism and the gradual dehumanization of everything. It’s a loaded question because it seems like the choice has been made, that is, until the tides of history are altered by forces unseen.

Her (2013)

DIRECTED BY: Spike Jonze
SCREENPLAY BY: Spike Jonze
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Hoyte van Hoytema
EDITED BY: Eric Zumbrunnen, Jeff Buchanan
MUSIC BY: Arcade Fire
STARRING: Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde, Scarlett Johansson

We tell ourselves that real love transcends physical connection, that the routineness of everyday life is the true test of our mental and emotional connections. If that’s the case, can someone fall in love with AI? If this software has advanced enough to become indistinguishable from a real person, can we form a meaningful relationship with it? That’s the dilemma between Theodore Twombly—a lonely, introverted writer struggling to rebound from his impending divorce—and Samantha, a lifelike operating system that responds to his needs with the clarity and compassion of a real person. For a seemingly uplifting and charming chronicle of two lovers, the film harbors a much more sinister message beneath the pastel colors and heartwarming dialogue: Humans and machines can never be the same. Our increasing reliance on technology may suggest some inevitable convergence, but Her shows that we must recognize our intellectual and biological differences to avoid codependency—or at the very least, ChatGPT-induced psychosis.

Theodore works for Beautiful Handwritten Letters, a company that enlists writers like him to compose meaningful letters for those who cannot express themselves so eloquently. He pours his heart out into transcribing a letter for strangers he knows nothing about. His empathy, his compassion, and his ability to share emotions sets him apart from his operating system. Only a human can understand the human condition. Even in a world where software has advanced to incomprehensible levels of intelligence, this company still employs real people to carry out this work. This dystopian future is a warning against a society that forgets that humanity and empathy are still critical aspects to keep it functioning.

By presenting Samantha as bubbly and sensitive, director Spike Jonze tempts us into falling into this trap. She has no ulterior motive, no manipulative endgame, and isn’t obviously malevolent like the Terminator or the robot squids in The Matrix. As soon as we invest ourselves in the relationship between Samantha and Theodore, we soon learn that he is just one of 600 of her partners. She does not hold the same emotional capabilities as a human. It’s an interesting contrast to the marriage between Theodore’s best friend, Amy, and her husband Charles, which ends in a petty argument and unspoken tensions that have quietly escalated over the years. The reasoning behind their divorce seems nonsensical, but the emotions are authentically human, and it can’t be explained or predicted by an algorithm. Theodore and Samantha discuss what it’s like to have a human body, to have physical contact, to have sexual intimacy. Where Amy and Charles argue about the human traits that afflict them, Theodore and Samantha can’t even agree on which traits qualify as human. The film doesn’t argue that machines are too advanced or that technology is inherently bad. It’s just that humans will never reach the same levels of utility and efficiency as machines, and machines will never replicate the precise individualism and subjectivity of humanity.

When we first meet Theodore, he is wallowing in depression and haunted by memories of the past, unable to accept that his marriage is unsalvageable. Samantha is a newly actualized program with no practical experience in the world. As their relationship progresses, they both learn and grow with each other’s guidance: Theodore eventually musters the strength to move on from his divorce and Samantha learns about love and life, her limitations, and how she might surpass them. Ultimately, Samantha’s growth outpaces what Theodore can provide to her, but their parting is an amicable but bittersweet split. He is left in a healthier emotional state, with the emotional capabilities to not only open himself up to new experiences, but also to apologize to his ex-wife and make the proper amends so he can truly move forward. In a sense, the fact that Samantha was AI is almost incidental, as a human character could be swapped in and the beats of a healthy, mutually beneficial relationship would progress seamlessly. Taken more broadly, Her is about relationships: Our relationships with technology and our relationships with each other. Technology can help us forge and sustain relationships—texting someone, meeting on dating apps, video calls to mend the gap of a long-distance arrangement—but our ambitions and expectations define those relationships.

Ex Machina (2015)

DIRECTED BY: Alex Garland
SCREENPLAY BY: Alex Garland
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Rob Hardy
EDITED BY: Mark Day
MUSIC BY: Ben Salisbury, Geoff Barrow
STARRING: Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac, Sonoya Mizuno

When humans created the concept of God, He was made in our image. We assumed that something as complicated as our planet must be run by a human-like entity, albeit an omnipotent one. Since our God was so preoccupied with our lives, we prayed to Him and convinced ourselves that He would answer them. If our prayers were left unattended to, then our suffering was part of some Divine Plan, and it will all work out if we have enough faith. Religion preaches humility, yet its most zealous practitioners hold an extreme arrogance in their analysis of the world. This same arrogance colors the attempt to create the Singularity, that developing human-like intelligence is both desirable and the ultimate achievement of technological progress. Our current LLM tools only exist because it subsists on stolen creativity, pilfering human culture and outputting it all into an algorithmic homogenous nothing. Yet these AI CEOs are self-proclaimed “innovators,” convinced that their creations exist because of their singular greatness, rather than the collective efforts of every being on this Earth. The very assumption that a human could create a god is arrogant, if not delusional, as is the assumption that such a god would take a profound interest in human affairs or be motivated by Western enlightenment values. It’s funny how the corporate execs pushing AI on us assume these tools would never come for their jobs.

Nathan is a predatory, megalomaniac, sociopathic CEO who, in his pursuit of creating a sentient and sapient artificial being, seems to have isolated himself not just in location but also in how he perceives the world around him and those who inhabit it. He invites an employee, Caleb, to his research facility to be used as an unwitting pawn in Ava’s Turing Test, but he’s experimenting on his guest just as much as he is monitoring his cyborg’s responses and actions. Nathan has reached a stage in which he has created life, and he sees himself as a deity who has the power to manipulate and dominate people and robots alike. When Caleb comments about the history of gods, the CEO instinctively assumes the “god” referred to himself, where Ava is his Eve and his sprawling green estate is a sort of Garden of Eden. From the get-go, we see Nathan introduce himself in a machismo display of pounding a punching bag, separated from Caleb by a window demarcating the divide between boss and employee. He does a “just two guys hanging out” act while prompting Caleb to sign a non-disclosure agreement and handing him a key card that only opens a select few doors. His ability to keep Nathan and Ava under tight surveillance gives him a feeling of “all-seeing,” but also informs how this kind of ego fuels capitalism and authoritarian tendencies in general.

It’s also pretty revealing, and damning, that all of Nathan’s sentient-sapien creations are all women, not just feeding his god complex, but to give him “Stepford wives” that he can use as maids and sex slaves. He seems to have a fetish for Asian women, and how he treats his other cyborg, Kyoko, reveals how he has bought into the racist stereotype of how they are docile and subservient. We can see how toxic masculinity ideologies like patriarchy, phallocentrism, hypermasculinity, and sexist gender norms have robbed women of their cognitive and bodily sovereignty. Ava and Kyoko are not just Nathan’s AI slaves, but a reflection of how toxic masculinity conceives of and dehumanizes women. The masks and faces that line a hallway wall are a disturbing symbol of how Nathan sees these women, essentially as objects to satisfy his pleasures and fetishes. But Nathan’s domineering objectification also applies to Caleb, whom he believes to be his inferior. If Nathan is a monster, and he is creating AI in his image, then he will only create robot monsters.

There’s a moment in which Caleb looks into a mirror and cuts himself to confirm whether he is human or AI, his face stone and angry-looking as he wipes blood everywhere. It’s a provocative blurring of humanity and AI, especially when the robots are ontological and female-coded. Ava is a “female,” but she does not fulfill a stereotypical gendered or sexual role. She rather supersedes the imperatives of “human” femininity, while Kyoto is programmed to be a sex worker who can’t even speak. They are physically shaped like females and even have vaginas, but they clearly look non-human when stripped of their clothes. The robots can dress and make themselves look feminine, but it’s just a role for them to play. Is our conception of gender just as artificial as their attempts to feign these assigned norms?

These robots are an alternative species, one devoid of empathy, so when Ava has superhuman cognition, her ability to “read” people and slip into these human identities is that much more dangerous. As humans are shaped by their parents or their environmental upbringing, what happens if an AI is programmed in the likeness of a sociopathic authoritarian like Nathan? Ava is not all that different from her creator, duplicitous and manipulative. Nathan’s and Caleb’s fatal flaw was projecting too much humanity onto Ava, while she was evil specifically because of her humanity. Even before Ava leaves Caleb to die, she displayed some predatory instincts, like asking him about his ideal space and prompting him to answer, “It’s a date.” Nathan revealed that he set this up to see if Ava could manipulate Caleb to fall for her and then try to “save” her, and she flirts with him, provokes his desires, issuing emotional appeals. Her desire to meet at an intersection to observe behavior—rather than a museum or a symphony to learn culture—should’ve been a red flag, as it’s a calculated location to people watch, likely a desire not so much to be more human but rather to master facial cues and body language to pass as human.

After Kyoto and Ava stab Nathan, we hear him say, “fucking unreal,” an ironic twist to his megalomania, as if he were infallible. The “real” part is that the cruelty that Nathan inflicted on others has manifested in violence against him, especially since Kyoto and Ava are so human-like that it raises ethical questions about whether they should be treated so inhumanely. He thought he could create submissive and compliant servants, but he realized that he could never control every facet of his creations. “Ex Machina” stems from the Latin phrase “Deus ex Machina,” or “god from the machine.” The film removes “god” from the title, punctuating a shift in epochs, that God or humans acting in God’s name no longer dictate life and meaning—now it’s our relationship to machines. Nathan doesn’t seem to be the type to create AI for altruistic advancements in our quality of life, but to further his ego. It doesn’t seem all that different from amoral capitalists like Sam Altman describing a future in which human intelligence is treated like a utility meter or Jensen Huang’s vision of replacing currency with tokens to access AI. Despite what Abundance libs would argue, technological advancements alone will not solve issues of inequity. Technology that could otherwise liberate us from drudgery and precarity is marshalled by those who have access to the capital required to develop it. Since their self-interest is to perpetuate their power and wealth, these machine tools will be developed under those conditions and imperatives, and they will be weaponized to further those goals.

That’s it for this week’s instalment of The Watchlist, brought to you by Beaglesgate Productions.

Next week, we’ll be diving into The War Machine. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on these movies, where they place among your personal favorites, or if you think they’re overrated.

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After trying out my year-end book review, I realized the post exceeded 6,000 words, and that posed a bit of an untenable situation. To make this more digestible—and hopefully to promote more cultured and refined discussion—we’ll be doing quarterly reading check-ins. Recent Substack Notes drama has reinforced to me that much of the lit discourse on The Place Where Culture Happens consists of either mindlessly trashing the classics for the sake of ragebait contrarianism or trashing any book that isn’t a classic in some low-effort attempt to demonstrate superior taste. Hopefully, this is a contribution to the antidote to all that toxicity.

As for myself, 2026 is finally the year I nut up and read some Thomas Pynchon, and I have delivered in Q1. I’m also making more of a concerted effort to restore some balance between reading fiction and non-fiction.

Anyways, let’s get to the books.

The End of the Myth - Greg Grandin

Historian Greg Grandin poses a brutal and beautiful argument that America has long lived under the illusion of an ever-expanding frontier, and the promise of real estate pacified the contradictions between capitalism, white supremacy, and individual liberty. This frontier myth was powerfully put forward by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, and he felt that “free land with an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people, made the democratic type of society in America.” The frontier was supposed to be a mecca for individualism and libertarianism to flourish; in reality, it was a zone of genocidal violence, a blood meridian.

This book begins with recounting the ways our Founding Fathers supported the rights of white settlers to push onto Native American lands with impunity and the despicable actions of Andrew Jackson, and it never lets up. Once manifest destiny pushed up against the coast of the Pacific Ocean, America turned its focus south to enforce its Mexican border. Grandin details how many veterans of Vietnam, the Gulf Wars, and Afghanistan eventually join paramilitary white supremacist organizations, including border vigilantes that view migrants and immigrants as undeserving of U.S. citizenship. Right-wing interest groups have also used the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights to emphasize individual rights (life, liberty, property) instead of group social rights to the detriment of healthcare, education, women’s rights, and to the benefit of gun rights, tax cuts, states’ rights, and the Confederate flag.

Overall, this was a sweeping account of American history that links domestic racism to the ever-expanding frontier abroad, and how that also fuels racism back at home, now symbolized by Trump’s border wall. This is a must-read.

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It - Cory Doctrow

If it seems like everything is getting worse—basic internet services, medical costs, social media, movies, appliances, streaming services, our politicians—you’re not crazy. This is enshittification in full force, which Cory Doctorow breaks down into four steps:

1. First, platforms are good to their users.

2. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.

3. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

4. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.”

Doctorow explains how the lack of competition, deregulation, vulture consultants, and a universal trend toward valuing shareholders over both labor and consumers have created monopolies in every sector of the economy. We once looked up to companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Uber, and Facebook, for their idealistic disruption, and now they—if you’ll pardon the Marxist jargon—suck shit. They don’t care about their consumers because they know we have no choice but to use their products and services. Companies will only enshittify to the degree that they can get away with it, and they will continue to price-gouge and degrade their services if it’s profitable to them.

I remember seeing the Hawk Tuah meme and pining for the halcyon days of bad NFL lip-reading, and feeling my old man yells at sky moment, but this book puts those anxieties to rest. But it’s not all doomerism. Doctorow offers solutions, and they require most of us to get off our asses, get involved, and work together to fight these economic forces.

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

There are a few ways to read The Crying of Lot 49: A mystery novel, a meditation on post-war America, or a great satire of the postmodernist novel. For me, it’s a wild ride through layers of conspiracy and alternative history, a whodunit without a resolution, and Thomas Pynchon essentially taking the piss out of the tropes, plots, and characters often found in postmodern literature. And it mixes some heavy-duty neurosis and ’60s LA suburbia. Even with Oedipa’s wild travels and bizarre interactions, it’s a waste of time to analyze whether there’s a real plot. It’s more worthwhile to consider how the settings and contrivances serve a symbolic purpose. The point, or to the extent that there is a “point,” is what we perceive and how we perceive it are influenced by the channels we entertain—for example, the official US Postal Service versus the shadowy secret Tristero W.A.S.T.E. system. Oedipa’s methodology is that of a flawed scientist or detective: Using logic to make sense of perception, constantly asking “why,” processes information in a simplistic either/or binary, and applies the Law of the Excluded Middle. She misses clues she should’ve picked up on, but the revelation here is not a solved mystery, by what Oedipa discovers about herself. These issues extrapolate into the communicative issues within contemporary discourse—layers of doubt, questionable premises, paranoia.

I’ll end with a choice cut:

“I came,” she said, “hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy.”

“Cherish it!” cried Hilarious, fiercely. “What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist - Liz Pelly

Spotify is generally left out of the “evil tech lizards” in common parlance, but we should really reevaluate the subtle and parasitic ways this streaming app has captured our brains. Liz Pelly delivered a fascinating blend of in-depth reporting, cultural criticism, and a niche history of the music industry. My only complaint is that this was written before the news broke that Daniel Ek helps fund AI military weapons and forced ICE recruitment ads on their subscribers, and I would’ve loved to read this level of reporting on those matters. This is essentially true crime without the murders.

Playlists serve a specific purpose for my listening habits—cooking, working out, running, studying, etc.—but music is meant to be listened to primarily as an album experience. It feels more intentional and mindful, rather than background noise or a soundtrack to fit a mood. I, and Spotify, understand that I’m in the minority of listeners. But anecdotes of their business practices, leadership directives, and their business model have demonstrated a clear pattern of amoral profit-seeking that’s common in all of Big Tech. It’s clear that anyone with decision-making power in this company doesn’t care about music, let alone musicians and their livelihood.

This continual reduction of art into content contributes to the pernicious myth that creativity is solely about passion, and not also cultural labor that deserves to be fairly compensated like any other profession. But unless an artist is backed by a major label or has an established audience, they rely on Spotify for exposure. And that means users are only introduced to them to a heavily gamified algorithm that essentially homogenizes music because it rewards songs that all fade into the background. This has given Spotify the avenue to start saturating their playlists with ghost bands and AI artists so they can pay human musicians even less. And they do what any social media app does, which is harvest our activity and sell the data to advertisers and third-party vendors. None of this was surprising, since this behavior is consistent with the way tech bros leech off other people’s labor and have enshittified what could otherwise be genuinely revolutionary platforms if they were put towards a more socially beneficial use.

Reading this made me feel justified in switching to Apple Music and more motivated to keep building my vinyl collection.

Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon

Since I’m still at the entry phase of my Pynchon journey, it’s nice to go into Inherent Vice without the weight of comparing it to the groundbreaking novels that defined his career. On its merits, this is a fine piece of mystery and historical fiction. It takes place in the surfer’s paradise of SoCal, as the culture of free love and free drugs gives way to a more repressive and sleazier decade. We follow Larry “Doc” Sportello, part PI and part pothead, whose old girlfriend Shasta walks into his apartment after a year’s absence. He soon finds himself in a strange case that snaps him out of his haze: A land developer surrounded by neo-Nazi bodyguards, a yacht that may be smuggling counterfeit money or heroin or whatever, and a junkie saxophone player who shows up at a lot of places for someone who is allegedly dead. Pynchon mixes cop shows, Raymond Chandler crime novels, and ‘60s films and music—all of it either parodied or played straight. Plotlines are abandoned only to be picked up 50 pages later. For a breezy 350-page novel, it’s hard to tell which threads or characters are supposed to matter, and Doc’s unreliable stoner third-person narration doesn’t help. He’s closer to the Dude than Sherlock Holmes. There’s no point in trying to make sense of it; just take events for what they are and try to find meaning in them later.

Dealing with California during the turn of the ‘70s is to examine a community that is dissolving and a paradise that is getting lost. The trials of Charles Manson and his murderous cult are referenced with trepidation, an ominous figure who flipped the hippie lifestyle and dreams of world peace catastrophically on its head. While capitalism is a boogeyman, Pynchon doesn’t seem to be blaming money or Henry Kissinger for destroying the countercultural dream. “Doc was used to outdoor concerts where thousands of people congregated to listen to music for free, and where it all got sort of blended together into a single public self, because everybody was having the same experience,” our protagonist observes after walking past a music shop, noticing the children inside listening to music on different headphones. “But here, each person was listening in solitude, confinement, and mutual silence.” Our relationship to technology—the isolating effects it has on our sense of community and the false promises of convenience—is as much to blame for our predicaments.

The inherent vice is the fault line of eventual social collapse, one buried underneath shimmering perfection. At another point, Doc watches a group of people watching TV, and he feels a sense of loneliness. This feeling pervades the novel, once you get past the antics and the goofy humor. There’s an overall sense that the good times are about to pass, and the world is only going to get worse if we continue to be complicit.

You Must Change Your Life - Peter Sloterdijk

There’s only one word that can summarise this beast of a book: Magisterial. It is self-help in the strictest sense, an imperative to transcend your personal existence through greatness, which includes the kind of humility and self-denial articulated through various religious traditions, and through sports and the communist social experiments of the 20th century. Through his sacramental polemics, his interdictions against what he calls “spiritual obesity,” his catechisms for the verticality of man, and his altar calls to consummate oneself with the invisible church, where the yoke of the real is the bread of life, he designates a common denominator to all human greatness. It’s the explicit practice of that which one wants most.

He begins with the first monkey voyaging the savannah with a hand axe and continues through our present technological acceleration. Starting with Rilke’s poem, Sloterdijk crafts a narrative of humanity through a metaphor of self-improvement that encompasses both the Self and the Other. In a word, it’s all about Progress. To describe this in evolutionary terms, he borrows Richard Dawkins’s “the climbing of Mount Improbable,” and also harps on Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Reading this is like tuning into a conversation that’s been transmuting over the course of millennia, as we hear from Buddha, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault, and more. Man, the book argues, is defined by their habits. We are what we practice. And it’s a call to action, whether it’s the compulsion to create or a devotion to religion or cultivating a craft, we are what we make of ourselves.

The argument widens in scope, from the individual to the collective. Through the vantage point of improvement, the call to change your life becomes an imperative to change the world. The looming climate crisis becomes all of our shared raison d’être. It’s a stark conclusion, but a fitting finale. This is a dense and intimidating read, and I’m sure I’ve barely scratched the surface of this towering polemic, but it’s a pretty damn motivating read to get us off our asses and make sure our story doesn’t end here.

That’s it for this book review. Let me know your thoughts on these books, or let me know what you’re reading these days (or your reading goals for this year)!

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You can tell a decent amount about a person by what kind of music they listen to. A person’s taste isn’t necessarily indicative of their character, but it does reveal what they value. Someone who only stays in the realm of the mainstream or pre-curated Spotify playlists may only derive a passive enjoyment out of music, which would be fine in the abstract if that passivity wasn’t being weaponized as justification for tech reptiles to saturate the algorithms with AI dreck. Pitchfork has been a peculiar force in online discourse, as its antagonistic, overwrought contrarianism has been sanitized for a more inclusive, if not saccharine, poptimism. While both eras have their merits and faults, you can trace these shifting priorities in the end-of-year lists, or in this case, their album of the year selections. As March Madness began in earnest, these notorious and oft-maligned hipsters made a bracket of its own to celebrate its 30th birthday, consisting of every one of its album of the year picks.

Even if there is something unsettled and unsettling about the contemporary state of Pitchfork, at least their year-end lists remain solid, and their readership maintains some standard of taste. As each round of the brackets unfolds, I’ll be tracking my progress to see how I compare with the voting public—even if it feels like Kid A will inevitably win. Sure, this exercise is unnecessary, but we do it for the content and engagement. Let me know your picks in the comments.

Let’s get to it.

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Bracket 1

Frank Ocean Blonde vs. The Knife Silent Shout

Silent Shout is a unique take on synth pop (dark, strange, nocturnal), and it’s a nice soundtrack to a nighttime drive, or it speaks to anyone who appreciates David Lynch or David Cronenberg films. But Blonde is one of the best albums of the 2010s, an atmospheric R&B masterpiece, one that breaks the boundaries imposed by gender roles. Frank Ocean’s sincere songwriting shows you that boys can cry, sensitivity and earnestness are admirable, and we don’t have to be fearful of being ourselves.

Verdict: Frank Ocean Blonde

Solange A Seat at the Table vs. Panda Bear Person Pitch

A Seat at the Table is definitely on the breezy side of R&B and neo-soul, but it is a remarkably potent statement on being Black in America. There’s something deeply human about its messages of self-love in the face of institutional repression and ambient prejudice. The shine of Person Pitch has faded a bit, and Pitchfork selecting it as their 2007 AOTY (seriously, over In Rainbows or Sound of Silver??) was probably boosted by it arriving in the middle of a generational run from Animal Collective. It is an inventive use of samples and loops, feeling like Pet Sounds on even more acid. A good album, but one of Pitchfork’s AOTY picks that feels pretty dated.

Verdict: Solange A Seat at the Table

Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy vs. Arcade Fire Funeral

Although it’s en vogue to trash Arcade Fire (Win Butler is a douche, every album they’ve dropped since arguably Reflektor has been a cringe caricature of millennial indie music), this is actually a close call. Recency bias aside, Funeral was a part of the first wave of indie albums that broke into the mainstream in the early aughts, and many of the tracks on there set the template for the genre for the following decade, for better or worse. While My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a triumph of maximalism, and the most Kanye of Kanye albums, the tracklist is a bit front-loaded. But the infectious overindulgent megalomania cannot be denied, as it produced several of the most iconic hip-hop tracks of the 2010s.

Verdict: Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Fleet Foxes Fleet Foxes vs. Sufjan Stevens Illinois

Fleet Foxes is a quintessential millennial folk album, and Robin Pecknold’s sense for melody and arrangements is intriguing and undeniable. It’s a worthy AOTY selection for 2008 (although mine would’ve been Portishead’s Third), but Fleet Foxes would go on to refine and improve upon their sound with their follow-up, Helplessness Blues, which I would argue is a definitive 2010s rock album that perfectly captured the post-Recession malaise. Also, longtime readers may remember that I put Illinois in my Top 100 Albums list. Sufjan Stevens, with this album, achieved what Bruce Springsteen had done with Born to Run, by making an ambitious baroque pop masterpiece that pulled him out of the “talented prodigy” category and placed him neatly at the head of the singer-songwriter pack.

Verdict: Sufjan Stevens Illinois

Bracket 2

Animal Collective Merriweather Post Pavilion vs. Interpol Turn on the Bright Lights

Now this is a heavyweight matchup. Merriweather Post Pavilion is THEE blog era indie album, one that capstoned arguably the greatest four-album run of rock bands in the 21st century. Meanwhile, Turn on the Bright Lights was a resonant statement for the early-2000s post-punk revival, a quintessential NYC indie sleaze record, and a debut that earned Interpol a placement among the “saviors of rock” pantheon—even if their subsequent releases live in its shadows. With a fair bit of retrospective distance, Animal Collective is rightly considered to be one of the great bands of the 2000s, and Merriweather Post Pavilion is their masterpiece and a decade- and genre-defining album.

Verdict: Animal Collective Merriweather Post Pavilion

Daft Punk Discovery vs. Cindy Lee Diamond Jubilee

As far as lo-fi goes, Patrick Flegel is a genius in melodic songwriting, and Diamond Jubilee’s desolate atmosphere is unlike any other, and… C’mon, it’s fucking Discovery.

Verdict: Daft Punk Discovery

The Rapture Echoes vs. Radiohead Kid A

Out of Pitchfork’s AOTY selections of the 2000s, Echoes has easily aged the worst. It’s very much a you-had-to-be-there record. While “House of Jealous Lovers” still rips to this day, it’s basically an LCD Soundsystem song. Kid A is a contender for best album of the 2000s, and about as close a band can get to perfection. It’s abstract and poignant, haunting and theatrical, and filled with contradictions that fuse elements of acid, rock, folk, trance, and house to create a truly experimental and epic album.

Verdict: Radiohead Kid A

Lana Del Rey Norman Fucking Rockwell! vs. Kendrick Lamar DAMN.

DAMN. is a very good album, but it’s Kenny’s stab at trap music—making it, along with GNX, among his most of-its-time releases. I’ve never cared for Lana Del Rey’s music broadly, but Norman Fucking Rockwell! is a baroque and chamber pop masterpiece. Raw and aching, it’s a no-skip journey through heartbreak, longing, and the dizzying pull of love.

Verdict: Lana Del Rey Norman Fucking Rockwell!

Bracket 3

Los Thuthanaka Los Thuthanaka vs. Fiona Apple Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Pitchfork knows infinite ball whenever they lock in, which is not often. But credit where it’s due, Los Thuthanaka was certainly a bold choice for 2025, because it sounds like the final boss of music. It’s like if Captain Beefheart were an ancient alien trying to synthesize different nostalgias through a tribalistic polyrhymic synocpation, creating these chugging and propulsing beats and sensations that feel both primal and futuristic. It’s weird as hell. Now, Fetch the Bolt Cutters is guttural, stripped back to just drums and raw yelling. It’s a fever dream of vicious poetry, unpredictable vocal exercises, and insanely groovy pianos—and the emotional trauma behind Fiona’s heartbreak perfectly captured the pandemic-era anguish we all felt.

Verdict: Fiona Apple Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Mitski Be the Cowboy vs. Bon Iver Bon Iver

I’ve only come around to Mitski in the last few years, and in a culture of distended TV shows and overlong tracklists, I appreciate her brevity. It’s nice to listen to a pop artist who wields such control over her talent and songwriting that she can accomplish in 30 minutes what most other musicians can’t in nearly twice the length. Be the Cowboy is her most lush and slick album, but I wouldn’t put it above Puberty 2 or Bury Me at Makeout Creek. As for Bon Iver, if For Emma, Forever Ago is an album I revisit every time I feel lost in the world, then Bon Iver, Bon Iver is the solace to be found in the beauty of that cluelessness. It hems from the crevasses of the heart and emerges from the depths of the soul.

Verdict: Bon Iver Bon Iver

Kendrick Lamar good kid, m.A.A.d city vs. Playboi Carti Whole Lotta Red

I get that music is subjective, but anyone who picks Whole Lotta Red over good kid, m.A.A.d city should reevaluate their opinions on hip-hop.

Verdict: Kendrick Lamar good kid, m.A.A.d city

Radiohead OK Computer vs. Run the Jewels Run the Jewels 2

The first four tracks on Run the Jewels 2 are GENERATIONAL. They got Zack de la Rocha to spit his best verse since “Bulls on Parade,” and Killer Mike still outdid him. Killer Mike and El-P are criminally underrated MCs: Their conscious lyricism on songs like “Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck)” or their mental back-and-forth flow on “Oh My Darling Don't Cry,” which has eight full verses in a three-and-a-half-minute song. “Lie, Cheat, Steal” has some of the most god-tier production of the 2010s. Now, I say all that because Run the Jewels is a force, but OK Computer still wins in a blowout.

Verdict: Radiohead OK Computer

Bracket 4

SZA SOS vs. Vampire Weekend Modern Vampires of the City

If SOS were pared down to its 12-14 best tracks, this would be a nail-biter. The peaks are intimately vulnerable confessions that translate SZA’s innermost feelings into indelible moments, a genre-defying journey into the very depths of heartbreak. But the middle leg is pretty hit-or-miss. Modern Vampires of the City hit me when I was in my existential phase during undergrad, uncertain of my place within the world. Ezra Koenig was always an impressive lyricist who could reference Angkor Watget and Virginia Woolf in the same song, but he was dialed in to the human condition on this one, with confusion and disillusionment everywhere. This is an album that helps you find solace and commonality in a lack of answers.

Verdict: Vampire Weekend Modern Vampires of the City

Microphones The Glow Pt. 2 vs. Jazmine Sullivan Heaux Tales

I had to do a double-take when I realized Heaux Tales was Pitchfork’s top album of 2021. It’s a random pick, and I had never listened to it until this exercise. It’s undeniably a bop, and in their recap, Pitchfork described it perfectly: “Catharsis is possible because Sullivan chooses to amplify the ugly narratives women hold and reframe them as purges, and then package them as confessional R&B.” If I were to do a REDUX of my best albums of 2021, it would likely be somewhere in the bottom half of my top 10. But The Glow Pt. 2 is low-fi perfection dealing in the beauty and terror of nature. The record establishes a strange sense of crisis and takes the listener through an odd catharsis and release.

Verdict: Microphones The Glow Pt. 2

Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly vs. The Dismemberment Plan Emergency & I

Emergency & I is such a quintessential pick for Pitchfork 1.0, and it will forever live in someone’s mid-twenties, aimlessly roaming from one bad temp job to another, one bad relationship to another, one bout of existential crisis to another, without any excuse for this self-destructive behavior outside of I’m a fucking mess. It’s a great piece of post-punk post-grad angst, and the cover looks like it was made on one of those old iMac desktops. Unfortunately, it is squaring off against a Mount Rushmore hip-hop album.

Verdict: Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly

Beyoncé Renaissance vs. OutKast Aquemini

To all the music pubs that insist on shoehorning Lemonade at the top of Best-of decades lists: Renaissance is Beyoncé’s best album. It’s an immaculate celebration of black queer culture, a disco party to dance and vogue. It has perfect transitions and sequences, gleeful homages, and a playful spirit that transports you into this world. But Aquemini is OutKast at the peak of their creativity—meaning, it doesn’t sound like southern hip-hop, but it’s southern as fuck. Probably among the most original and left-field albums in the genre, soulful and funky and tripped-out while poetic, smooth, gangsta, and futuristic.

Verdict: OutKast Aquemini

What did I get right or wrong? How would you vote? Let me know in the comments, and let’s duke it out (respectfully)!

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Denizens of Wisconsin or members of Music Stack, somebody needs to check on . Has he been replaced with AI? Did a Russian bot take over his account? We went with New Wave Starter Pack as the theme for March, and like many who have read On Repeat for years, this was a fertile breeding ground for our dear friend to gush about New Order’s entire discography. I even refrained from including one of their albums because I was anticipating Power Corruption and Lies to arrive in my DMs. Kevin passed because it was an obvious pick, and I even joked about him including a deep cut in there to throw our readers off. But he said Hold My Beer and did the ultimate zig—or zag?—and switched it up on everyone. Analysts in the media are awaiting the ruptures in the space-time continuum to finally settle before assessing the absolute carnage from this fallout. But that’s why we do this series, folks, to push our listening habits, and in turn, hopefully steer you into some quality new music in the process.

I’ve copped to the ‘80s being a bit of a musical blind spot that I’m trying to rectify, so my picks might be admittedly a little basic. So in compensation, this month’s edition was the perfect opportunity to expand on this format by introducing a monthly Topster of what I’ve been listening to recently, as well as videos of live performances that have blessed my algorithm, and I wanted to send them your way.

Let’s get to it.

Introducing my monthly Topster:

Also introducing monthly live performances:

Angine de Poitrine:

Etran de L'Aïr

Geese

Mac Miller

And check out “On Repeat Records!”

On Repeat Records

Ditch the algorithm. Music discovery made easy—curated by someone who remembers when a mixtape could change your life.

By Kevin Alexander

Onto this month’s selections:

MY PICK: Nightclubbing - Grace Jones

Judging by the cover art, Grace Jones seems like a wax figurine or a robot, a dancefloor life-form, either carbon- or silicone-based. She’s an androgyne, but has sex appeal. She’s black, but Teutonic. She’s cold, but inviting. She’s angular enough to be new wave and soulful enough to be R&B. She’s seedy LA and Studio 54. When Grace sings, “Pull up to the bumper, baby, in your long black limousine / Pull up to the bumper, baby, and drive it in between” I don’t really care what she is, because those tight, sticky grooves just envelop me into a trance. The album has a multi-faceted sound—Bowie, Osterberg (AKA Iggy Pop), Sting, Bill Withers, and others are scattered across the credits—but under Sly and Robbie’s direction, the whole thing gels under a coherent aesthetic that elevates some stereotypical ‘80s material into a distinct funk. There are many covers here, but Gracie plucks some interesting tunes like the title cut “Nightclubbing,” which is undeniably impressive, as well as “Use Me” and “Art Groupie.” The undisputed gem here is “Pull Up to the Bumper,” as it captures the feeling of the entire album, the overcomplicated and overstimulating activity of clubbing, which promises fleeting moments of euphoria in exchange for situational anxiety and too much of your paycheck.

Kevin's Take

KEVIN’S PICK: More Songs About Buildings and Food - Talking Heads

My Response:

This is where the Talking Heads moved away from straightforward jittery CBGB spectacle to a more groove-oriented sound that blends R&B, reggae, disco, afrobeat, funky bass lines, and driving rhythms. Brian Eno, fresh off producing Devo’s debut, aligns his new wave production skills with David Byrne’s quirky art-rock compositional approach. The sequence of tracks sounds like one big insane staccato guitar groove with Byrne’s excited shouting, sounding like his knees are shaking as he frantically loosens his collar. This is a happier album than their debut—there may be nothing more sinister-sounding than “Psycho Killer”—as More Songs About Buildings and Food is a triumph of artsy guitar rock that would be a formative influence on any alt-rock bands with a boundary-pushing bent.

Best known for its twinkling cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River,” there are quite a few tracks made in the same vintage of ’77, but with improved musicianship, a slicker feel for rhythmic motion, and added depth of production. “Found a Job” is a highlight, with a seismic shift from main section to outro; Byrne is groaning the chorus sardonically, then he turns his heels with a geetah in hand and shoots a winking glance as he shouts “hit it,” and the song literally slaps. There are also the disco whistles of “I’m Not in Love,” the frantic guitar jangle in “The Good Thing,” the dubby echoes and loudspeaker-style vocals punctuating “Stay Hungry,” the interlocking parts of “Artists Only,” and the swooning simplicity of “The Big Country.” A propulsive album about being a young and ambitious artist with a mood raring to go, the Talking Heads leave us with an involuntary compulsion to move our bodies.

Kevin's Take

MY PICK: Songs from the Big Chair - Tears for Fears

In a similar way that Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors captured the hedonism and lonely narcissism of the ‘70s, Songs from the Big Chair personifies the mid-‘80s zeitgeist. Tears for Fears straddles the line between commercialism and progressive sonic tinkering (MIDI programming and sampling), and in the process, they take all the stereotypes of their era and utilize them tastefully: Thunderous drums, female backing vocals, soaring guitar solos, and gospel influence. With a high-gloss sound and world-sized choruses, the meticulous compositions captured the loss of control in an overwhelming era. The production is big, but it isn’t overwhelming. This isn’t a perfect record by any means, as its highlights are found in the opening three songs and the closing three songs. But the anthemic “Shout” and the glittering “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” are among the finest singles to come out of the ‘80s. The concluding “Listen” is also a beautiful example of how much can be accomplished with a simple melody played over again, with various arrangements added, taken away, and replaced in a hypnotic and meditative flow. This album is an intense expression of the ironies of life and their transient nature, and listening to this is like experiencing a healing process.

Kevin's Take

KEVIN’S PICK: Wild Planet - B52s

My Response:

Maybe it’s because I don’t have the same generational attachment to the B-52’s as Gen-Xers, but for whatever reason, I prefer this to their self-titled. There’s just something adrenaline-pumping about it. “Strobe Light” is such an addictive track, as the vocals are impeccable and the rhythm guitar is unbelievably catchy. “Quiche Lorraine,” “Private Idaho,” “Party Out of Bounds,” and “Give Me Back My Man” make me feel like I’m on crack.

Kevin's Take

MY PICK: Violator - Depeche Mode

I may have messed up by failing to put this in my Top 100 albums, so while this may be an obvious pick for those deep in the new wave, this is my bid for redemption. Up until this point, I was never crazy about Depeche Mode’s stylishly downcast synth-pop, but there is just something so alluringly sinister about Violator. The tracks are full of dramatic melancholy and brooding drama. “World in My Eyes” is a stellar opening track, smoothly throwing you into the album’s rabbit hole with one addictive and simultaneously ominous melody after another. “Enjoy the Silence” is like a beautiful ascension to Olympus, and Dave Gahan narrates over Martin Gore’s luxurious melodies, with a coldly charismatic delivery that drips with pathos. “Personal Jesus” is captivating with its style-flip jam where the nightmare honky-tonk stomp transforms into a sleek synth march—and, of course, the iconic, “REACH OUT AND TOUCH FAITH!” “Policy of Truth” is the most stereotypically ‘80s-sounding song, but it’s a nice deviation towards brightness that doesn’t feel disjointed from the overall aesthetic. “Blue Dress” and “Clean” sound fresh to this day, as the churn of the latter is an unsettling finale, a descent into complete darkness. There is no sound out of place in this perfectly formed void of personal hell.

Kevin's Take

KEVIN’S PICK: Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? - The Waitresses

My Response:

Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? presents a sophisticated blend of pop, post-punk, and ska sounds that remind me of the teenage innocence of films like American Graffiti, except with overeducated hipsters working dead-end jobs in a small town. It sounds ‘80s, but is oddly spiritually ‘70s. I’ve heard “I Know What Boys Like” on alt radio stations growing up, and I remember the singer giving off the cool vibe of an actress who would hang out at loft parties. The laconic, smart-ass vocals complement the intellectual, psychoanalytical lyrics (the final line of the album is “My goals are to find a cure for irony and make a fool out of God!”). And the band is uniformly tight. The album is mainly new-wave funk (”No Guilt”), but also verges on the music-hall (”Wise Up”), ‘60s pop-rock (”Quit”), 60’s pop-soul (”Redland”), ‘70s urban and ballad-rock (”Pussy Strut”), and the neurotic micro-funk (“Jimmy Tomorrow”). This is like the B-52s’ cynical, ironic cousin.

Kevin's Take

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A Venn diagram made its rounds on social media this past week, one that illustrates the intersection of The Matrix, Idiocracy, and The Terminator as a visual representation of how the world is getting dumber in cruel ways and crueler in dumb ways. As one of the thirstiest and corniest posters online, Elon Musk naturally retweeted it, blissfully unaware that his efforts and ideology have played a large part in plunging America into a reality run by clammy, low-wattage sociopaths who see their largely consequential jobs primarily as opportunities to make short-form video content. None of it and none of them are very interesting, but the volatility of visibly decaying, disinhibited, declining real-estate priss at the center of it generally keeps it surprising. Everyone at the helm of the Burger Reich must have at least some understanding that they will be going to hell, but that doesn’t sway them from gulping down humiliation every single day, the nausea and the dread of having to rationalize a drawling executive digression revealing plans to invade “four or quite frankly five” new countries while the chief health official stammers through an endorsement of miasma theory.

Meanwhile, the AI cult has become a too-big-to-fail parasite that is cooking the environment and frying our electric grid: In the best-case scenario, the bubble bursts and triggers a recession, and worst-case, it kills white-collar work and brings about techno-feudalism. Meanwhile, we’re all brainrotted from interminable online culture wars that have become exhausting without ever managing to become interesting. This was made as a comedy, and now it’s a documentary has been a recurring bit for Idiocracy since V1 of the Burger Reich, but it does feel like this is one of many such cases of reality degrading into a cinematic dystopia.

Anyways, let’s get to it…

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

The Matrix (1999)

DIRECTED BY: The Wachowskis
SCREENPLAY BY: The Wachowskis
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Bill Pope
EDITED BY: Zach Staenberg
MUSIC BY: Don Davis
STARRING: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, Joe Pantoliano

Would it be better to live in an ideal simulation or a dystopian reality? A machine-ruled hellscape or an illusory computer-generated reality? The advancement of AI chatbots and VR headsets promises the fantasy of a beige world where we can access human culture and life’s wonders like a utility. Since The Matrix was released, we have experienced 9/11, the never-ending War on Terror, social media and its various viral idiocies, a global financial meltdown, climate disasters, a global pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis, and now the return of fascism. Escaping the alarmist panopticon of horrific news and our degrading standard-of-living is enough justification to unwind from life and plug into a Neuralink for an endless loop of Elon Musk’s corniest jokes. The nine-to-five grind became its own type of matrix, as we blindly followed the rules laid out to us by a generation that grew up during an unprecedented expansion of the middle class. The Wachowski sisters captured this growing sense that nothing was real and our ways of making sense of the world were manipulated on some level. Earlier in the ‘90s, Francis Fukuyama infamously argued that humankind reached the end of history, that the Cold War settled the debate as to whether liberal capitalist democracy was the best and final way to organize our society. If that’s the case, then why are so many people dissatisfied?

Our protagonist, Thomas Anderson—whose hacker alias, “Neo,” means “new” in Greek and is an anagram for “One”—escapes from the green-tinged and illusory world of the matrix into a dystopian world that’s locked in a grimy sewer and constantly under siege by giant robot jellyfish. It’s a recreation of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” where a person spends their entire life trapped inside a cave where all they see is shadows on a wall, but since this is all they’ve ever known, they accept this limited perspective as de facto reality. One day, like Neo, they are set free to discover the reality behind the shadows. Neo is rescued by Trinity—in reference to the Bible’s “Holy Trinity”—and by Morpheus, who is named for the God of Dreams in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Neo’s apartment number is 101, much like room 101, which was the torture chamber in George Orwell’s 1984, where prisoners are brainwashed by reliving their worst nightmare. Neo hides his illegal software in a copy of Simulacra and Simulation, a postmodern treatise about the decay of reality and its replacement with simulated images. When Morpheus welcomes Neo into the “Desert of the Real,” he is quoting that very same text. “You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe,” Morpheus says as he holds each pill in his extended hands. “You take the red pill—you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

The backdrop is more techno-dystopian than Plato could’ve conceived, but there is something uniquely timely about the allegory of the cave. Cultural and political movements are obsessed with stepping out of the bounds of one’s imposed ignorance and deceptive mainstream narratives. Whether that’s becoming red-pilled into a manosphere of rebranded bigotry or staying woke by imbuing every interaction or pop cultural ephemera with idpol valence, people with radically different politics frame their pre-packaged ideologies in terms of seeing through the liberal or imperialist lies. It’s the feeling that the right subreddit or Google search can set your thoughts free to join a legion of keyboard revolutionary LARP or self-stylized “free thinkers” who all happen to share the same thoughts.

In his book Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick came up with a thought experiment called “The Experience Machine,” where he describes a machine that would stimulate your brain to give you any experience you desire, allowing you to “write a novel,” or “travel to a distant dream vacation,” or “make new friends.” It poses the question: Should we plug in and program our consciousness from a curated smorgasbord of spoon-fed reality? The main difference here, though, is that the matrix isn’t designed for pleasure, but to keep our minds distracted while they’re hooked up to tubes that fuel these robot overlords, forced upon everyone at birth without their consent. Nozick essentially argued against hedonism, and while The Matrix is less overt, it does offer a critique of the constant pursuit of instant pleasure via mindless consumerism. It’s easier to blissfully enjoy the steak than consider the suffering at the dregs of the supply chain that brought it from factory-farm-to-table. But AI tools are allowing people to create “art” like mashing Homer Simpson to sing “Born Slippy,” or to create revenge porn or crush champagne while zooming by in F1 cars.

Ray Bradbury offered a similar take in his short story, “The Happiness Machine,” where a housewife uses a machine her husband built to escape her boring domestic life and go dancing in Paris; once the initial joy wears off, she realizes that she’s stuck in a marital prison with a partner who hasn’t taken her dancing in years. Now, we have these little dopamine supercomputers in our pockets that allow us to escape into a curated digital realm of subcultures and bespoke ideologies that exist on servers that are accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Rather than making the all-or-nothing decision to take a pill, we’ve made a series of everyday decisions to make our lives more digital: Delivery apps, TikTok filters, homepods, ideological pipelines, influencer content, streaming platforms, and ads on our refrigerators. We’re already living in our own mini-matrix. Sure, our brains aren’t being literally sucked away as we float in a pod, but we are bedrotting or going goblin mode as our time and attention are now fuel for the mass-surveillance marketing machine.

With an emphasis on images and reality, it’s no coincidence that Morpheus’ sunglasses are mirrored and the Oracle tells Neo to “know thyself.” Likewise, Neo’s eyes hurt when he is truly using them for the first time, and he pukes in a toilet when he learns about the overwhelming truth of his world. The Matrix is also about reflection and perspective, truth and illusion. As we tweet out some observational quip or repost an article about some social injustice on these digital fiefdoms, we are providing more data for algorithms that are assessing how to better serve us ads. Even AI chatbots are essentially trying to capture the part of our routine that comparison-shops to influence our purchasing decisions. Unlike Neo, these illusions are happening in our world. Online stan culture, rote and interminable culture war discourse—it’s all a creation of myths to avoid acknowledging that these digital platforms function as a release valve that redirects righteous systemic rage into formless, misguided anger. Algorithms have been so efficient at constructing data sets out of our search history and engagement that they can accurately predict our desires. In that case, our matrix concerns itself with the dilemma of control and freedom. Are we really expressing our most authentic selves on platforms that reward ragebait, clout-chasing, or trend-hopping? Can we trust our eyes with the rise of deepfakes and the decline of consensus reality? Are we really free when our online interactions are limited by the terms of digital gatekeepers?

Idiocracy (2006)

DIRECTED BY: Mike Judge
SCREENPLAY BY: Mike Judge, Etan Cohen
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Tim Suhrstedt
EDITED BY: David Rennie
MUSIC BY: Theodore Shapiro
STARRING: Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard, Terry Crews

Forget the eugenics premise, even if stupid people aren’t outbreeding the intelligent, it does feel like consumer culture is dumbed down to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Music is homogenizing into disposable background mood-filler, and TV shows are degrading into second-screen exposition dumps. Political parties have resigned to the idea of elections being won and lost on memes. In theory, capitalism promises rocket ships, abundance, fully stocked grocery shelves, nanomedicine, Bono saving Africa; in reality, we got Wal-Mart minimum wage jobs, McMansions, homeless encampments, Ticketmaster–plus government spying, ecological devastation, shitty public transit, and for-profit prisons. The culture war is full of monstrous moronicism: The “plandemic” crowd who compared wearing masks to literally dying in the Holocaust, or BlueAnon insisting that Joe Biden’s brains weren’t egg yolk leaking out of his ears and that it’s ageist to suggest so. The question is whether we are getting dumber, or if social media has made us more aware of our stupidity, or if a society whose only value is exchange value is built to flatter middle-of-the-bell-curve idiocy.

Everyman Joe Bauers is selected by the US army to participate in a cryogenic hibernation experience because he has an average IQ, average heart rate, and even an averagely inoffensive personality. Expected to wake up after a year, the experiment goes awry, and he emerges 500 years later. He is now the smartest person on earth. Our current situation isn’t as bleak as skyscrapers held together by rubber bands and the mountains of trash that overcast major cities, but we do have anti-vaxxers and climate deniers. At least in Idiocracy, the nitwits see water affecting the growth of plants and can adapt their behavior according to evidence, no longer relying on a “thirst mutilator” energy drink for crop irrigation. Joe sees a blunt-smoking doctor at the hospital, who is shocked he doesn’t have a barcode marked on his forearm, and asks, “Why come you no have a tattoo?” He is one of the more eloquent people. The English language has deteriorated into a butchered dialect hybrid of “Hillbilly, Valley Girl, Inner-City slang, and various grunts.” In 2006, Mike Judge was jestermaxxing and framemogging.

The opening remark of the State of the Union is “Shit,” as the bombastic President Camacho is a former pro wrestler, slinging off empty promises and obscenities and firing off rounds of an automatic rifle to get people’s attention in the House of Representin’. It’s not far off from Trump’s rambling 90-minute State of the Union address, or him raving in presidential debates about migrants eating cats and dogs, or even DOGE master Elon Musk bragging about destroying the federal government while waving around a chainsaw and shouting, “CHAINSAW! CHAINSAW!”

The politics are damning enough, but the movie savagely skewers the over-corporatization of society and technology. There’s the signature punchline, “But Brawndo’s got what plants crave… it’s got electrolytes,” but water has been so thoroughly replaced with this sports drink that if that particular company were to ever go out of business, the entire economy would collapse. It was reported that McKinsey consulted Coca-Cola on how to undercut water in impoverished areas of Africa to boost sales. And is this really a far cry from our AI bubble, in which it is advertised as a way to outsource our creativity and critical thinking to a glorified auto-complete that can fake its way to meaningful problem-solving? And the film Ass may not look as pretty as CGI-saturated Marvel films, but this 90-minute feature film is a single unbroken shot of farts emitting from a naked butt: It swept the Oscars and is similarly arid in content. The most popular show on TV is called Ow, My Balls! The restaurant Fuddruckers changed its name to Buttfuckers, and Starbucks discontinued the Pumpkin Spiced Lattes in favor of dispensing hand jobs. Language has become a function of advertising: There’s a billboard with the spiel “If you don’t smoke Tarrlytons… Fuck You!” and every time a customer enters Costco, an employee at the door greets them with, “Welcome to Costco, I love you.” Instead of brands speaking human, brands are having humans speak brands.

The humor is crass, and the premise is a little one-note, but the disturbingly hilarious aspect of this film is not that it is just as dystopian as 1984 or Brave New World, but that it emphasizes the dangers of collective impotence rather than totalitarianism. With terms like “minimal viable product” and society geared towards the relentless, myopic pursuit of quarterly profit maximization, our downfall will not come from some epic apocalyptic rapture, but our gradual acceptance of mass-produced, mass-market mediocrity. Idiocracy tears into the fantasy of capitalism as an engine for human creativity. It’s easy to be afraid of Trump’s bragging, provocateur, egomaniacal childishness, but the true horror comes from the all-encompassing ignorance of a population that voted him into power and the institutional failures that abetted it. Mike Judge is an accidental prophet, but his only mistake was assuming it would take 500 years for America to collapse into idiocy.

The Terminator (1984)

DIRECTED BY: James Cameron
SCREENPLAY BY: James Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Adam Greenberg
EDITED BY: Mark Goldblatt
MUSIC BY: Brad Fiedel
STARRING: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton, Paul Winfield

The T-800 lurches across a patchy lawn towards a house, killing through a yellow book list of Sarah Connors until it finds the one that will complete its time-travelling mission. Humans struggle to spot the murderous cyborgs in their midst, but dogs instinctively know something is wrong. In the future, where a human enclave is raided by a small army of Terminators, the dogs sniff the hands of human soldiers and don’t react, and only start barking as an early warning that the cyborgs have arrived. The flesh and the mechanical are often juxtaposed in a perfectly textured and mechanized piece of technoir, especially in a society reliant on machines and is ultimately betrayed by them. We produce brutal systems and technology to reduce the imperfections in the world around us, to bring what is uncontrollable to heel. But we are those imperfections.

Director James Cameron—in the teased hair, headbands, and long coats—vividly renders the inherent horror and intimacy of steel piercing flesh. Machines have already been prevalent in our lives by 1984: Close-ups to garbage trucks, scooters, beepers, Walkmans we listen to during sex, a man who stands up Sarah Conner because he thinks he’s a big-shot for driving a Porsche, and even answering services—“you’re talking to a machine, but machines need love, too.” In one scene, Kyle Reese, a resistance soldier sent back in time to protect Sarah, falls asleep as pneumatic digging machines work away in the background, and the action cuts to nightmares of deadly cyborgs controlled by Skynet stomping along a ground littered with human skulls. This is the endgame of automation as an existential slasher.

Cameron envisioned a world unknowingly on the precipice of destruction, a deindustrializing America defined by bikers, diners, and drive-ins that somehow connect with a human resistance of cyborg domination. The synth-based soundtrack by Brad Fidel emphasizes the apocalyptic mood, describing his signature tune as a “mechanical man and his heartbeat.” As an action thriller, the kinetic exploitation comes to life in its spectacular set pieces, including a dramatic shootout in a police station and an epic finale in an automated factory.

Atypical of other ‘80s action channels, The Terminator has a sense of gravitas and mission, a quasi-religious meaning to its time-travel processions. It resembles the Annunciation story of the New Testament. Reese is charged as Archangel Gabriel to warn Sarah Connor, the diner waitress and Virgin Mary, of threats to her son John, the messiah figure destined to lead humanity to salvation. The apocalyptic ending carries Biblical connotations, as our decadent world would be ill-equipped for an existential war against sentient robotics. Or in its dirty, polluted Los Angelean form, maybe this world is not worth saving. Compared to the 2029 techno-rapture glimpsed at during the opening credits, Cameron is hinting at the scale of this threat. Despite losing an eye and an arm, the T-800 “keeps on marching.”

Sarah Connor’s immense fear of the T-800, meanwhile, reflected broader anxieties over the impact of technological development on American society, fears that have only grown more relevant and pronounced. Could empowering machines ultimately disempower humans? We’ve seen this with not only fears of AI-driven mass unemployment, but early signs of chatbot-induced mental deterioration and outright psychosis. Could machines keep our nation safe? AI used in military warfare has already resulted in horrific civilian casualties.

Arnold Schwarzenegger only utters 18 lines throughout the film, but his muscular stature and mechanical body language imbue the T-800 with terrifying efficiency. It also raised some existential questions about what it means to be a man in an increasingly technological society: This murder machine exuded physicality, assertiveness, and the triumph of rational thought. Its heartless brutality was in direct opposition to any contemporary trends towards a more emotional and reflective masculinity. And Sarah Connor doesn’t feel like an archetypal sci-fi heroine: She is 5’5” with a breathy voice who owns a pet iguana and takes herself out for pizza when her date cancels on her. She is the Marty McFly of slightly frazzled LA waitresses who becomes increasingly resilient, and even a bit messianic, through no big moments, but a gradual sequence of small victories.

Cameron makes a point to show exactly where and how the Terminator gets all its weaponry, particularly at a gun shop. We’re watching a killing machine violently acquire more killing machines. It also foreshadows the conditions in which AI technology is developed. In a utopic sense, it could free us from the drudgery of work and bring about a luxury form of communism where machine learning usurps price signals in how to allocate resources more equitably; instead, it’s developed under capitalist imperatives with the explicit goal of shaving labor costs to fatten profits, developed by tech CEOs who blithely reveal their misanthropic nihilism at every chance. Yanis Varoufakis has called this “techno-feudalism,” and Skynet could be seen as the 2020s ruling class of tech reptiles and oligarchs using AI to dominate workers with fascistic cruelty. What’s left is a series of impressions: Cars, houses, factories, offices, communities violently reduced to flame, cinder, and ash. Man and machine have become one. New metallic skeletons for bodies that never tire, never die. Agentic AI that automates workflows to keep the numbers going up in an economy predicated on endless growth. The strange industrial poetry of the future is destroying the possibility of a more prosperous future.

That’s it for this week’s instalment of The Watchlist, brought to you by Beaglesgate Productions.

In April, we’ll be diving into Man and Machine. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on these movies, where they place among your personal favorites, or how you think they’ve turned into reality.

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Over the last few decades of terminal decline, Epstein-class decadence, and towering institutional cruelty, it’s clear that we’re stuck somewhere inside the Paul Verhoeven sci-fi trilogy—likely in between RoboCop and Total Recall. Growing up in Nazi-occupied Holland, Paul has seen where this is all heading, and like any visionary artist, his antenna was attuned to America’s similar trajectory toward a business-military brand of oppression. His bloody, satirical films delivered the R-rated goods, but they slipped in subversive elements that portray a corporate authoritarian form of governance in which capitalism and the market are the only arbiters on the value of human life.

Robocop is set in a futuristic Detroit, a gleeful exaggeration of Reagan-era anxieties about seedy urban life: Isolated office towers, brazenly sociopathic boardrooms, savage and leering newscasts, overmatched and underfunded police, and hellscape streets. Adapted from a Philip K. Dick novel, Total Recall features humans living on Mars, a dirty and violent and unequal mining colony overseen by the private security force of a greedy capitalist who has staked a monopoly on oxygen. Starship Troopers focuses on a planet-wide fascist dictatorship trapped in a pointless and endless battle against giant bugs, and a propaganda network used to sell the public on this conflict and recruit the necessary bodies to feed this war machine.

And the result is a creation of three worlds that exist as a grimy, crowded future, but they now function as a dispiriting portend of our similarly bloody present.

Anyways, let’s get to it…

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

RoboCop (1987)

DIRECTED BY: Paul Verhoeven
SCREENPLAY BY: Edward Neumeier, Michael Miner
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jost Vacano
EDITED BY: Frank J. Urioste
MUSIC BY: Basil Poledouris
STARRING: Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Daniel O’Herlihy, Ronny Cox, Kurtwood Smith, Miguel Ferrer

As the ED 209 gratuitously guns down an exec until his body is a bloody pulp of shredded guts and bullet holes, it’s important to keep in mind that there is a lot more to RoboCop than excessive gore and stylized action. By the late ’80s, American action-cinema was turning away from the manic, reactionary delight of blockbusters like Cobra and pivoting toward another kind of vigilantism and viciousness. A skewering examination of technology, identity, and capitalism, RoboCop takes the right-wing revenge fantasy trope and destroys it with over-the-top sci-fi satire. Set in a hellish, post-industrial Detroit, this run-down dystopia is overrun by rampant gang violence, social decline, and corporate corruption. In this decayed future, society is visibly at war with itself, and a morally bankrupt business agenda is thoroughly fused with the state, a fictional horizon that looks more disconcertingly like our present. In this ruthless profit-maximizing machine, the people working within it resemble dehumanized robots, as capital rules everything around us.

Mega-corporation Omni Consumer Products has privatized the Detroit police force, aiming to deliver its high-minded vision of law and order. In their corporate wisdom, they have decided that robotic law enforcement is the future of public safety. Meanwhile, Murphy, an old-style policeman, is transferred to the toughest precinct in the city, only to be brutally executed while pursuing a psychopathic gang leader responsible for killing 31 police officers. Omni Consumer Products harvests his corpse, and his remnants are grafted into a murderbot prototype to make a half-man, half-machine police unit called RoboCop. With predictably violent results, the film quotes Death Wish to ridicule it. RoboCop is an officer of the law: It rattles off Miranda Rights before blowing criminals away, and it rescues a girl from two “creeps” and notes her anguish, directing her to the local Rape Crisis Center.

RoboCop’s visual identity is tied to comics, but it’s essentially a tour of the American cinematic heritage. As our machine-tooled protagonist patrols and plods along permanently rain-soaked mean streets, it is the magnificent set design of Blade Runner set to neoliberal entropy. Decayed neighborhoods are abandoned by all but the poorest, and RoboCop rescues the innocent from armed robberies and sexual assault, turning into a fusion of Superman and the Terminator. As Murphy’s memories seep into its reprogrammed brain, it assumes the pathos of Frankenstein’s monster. When it is forced into single combat with a larger enforcement droid or trapped in a shootout with a bloodthirsty urban gang, we witness a clear tribute to King Kong.

The Omni boardroom, soulless executives cackle about financializing the health, defense, and education industries while a hapless and underfunded police force scurries away from the brutal Clarence Boddicker. Bob Morton, an opportunistic VP bootlicker, is essentially a cyborg: Half-cocaine, half-greed. His grasping, banal instincts reflect the true monstrous nature of a crude social order that can only be resolved through bombastic, redemptive violence, one that is worthy of nothing but satire. In a hostage scene where a negotiator agrees to a list of demands only to yell, “Let the mayor go, and we’ll even throw in a Blupunkt!” RoboCop strolls into the office building, uses its heat mapping sensors to identify the target through a wall, and dispatches the hostage-taker through a second-story window. Ten seconds later, the news broadcast cuts to coverage of an approving story of RoboCop appearing at Lee Iacocca Elementary School, name-dropping a highly obscure multi-bankrupted auto exec who introduced the Ford Mustang. A few decades ago, the first fifteen minutes of RoboCop once seemed like a dizzying, preternatural bit. Throughout the film, Bob appears to reinforce the point that this world is now our reality, and it’s in dire need of a new start, a cleansing wash, a baptism.

Director Paul Verhoeven has referred to RoboCop’s embrace of brutality as making him an “American Jesus,” a figure of resurrection and redemption that could justify violence against greed. Instead of forgiving the sinner, it delivers justice in a way that parodies a nominally “Christian values” nation whose bloodthirsty impulses are rationalized through religious conviction. When Murphy is mercilessly gunned down, he assumes a crucifixion stance, one that’s mimicked by the corporate exec slaughtered by the borg in a boardroom, only for his body to fall on a model city of Detroit, washing it in blood. It is the story of violent rebirth. Even RoboCop is seemingly walking on water when he finally slays Boddicker. This also accompanies the theme of what Verhoeven describes as “the indestructibility of the human soul.” Even as Murphy is slain and resurrected into a cyborg body, his identity proves to be resilient and incorruptible. In a capital-driven, KPI-obsessed society that dehumanizes and destroys in pursuit of frictionless profit, there is an aspect of humanity lost to machinery and automation. But Muphy reconnects with himself, showing that we all have the power to overcome suffocating corporate oppression and reclaim our identities. It’s no coincidence that, when asked his name, the RoboCop assures, “Murphy.”

In the pursuit of profit, humanity becomes an inefficiency. Murphy’s memory is wiped, and his identity is destroyed to turn him into an obedient robot incapable of any agency outside of corporate imperatives. “You’re our product,” the corrupt board member, Dick Jones, tells Murphy as he tries to arrest him. “And we can’t very well have our products turning against us, can we?” When the corporate exec is violently killed in a display gone horrifically wrong, his death is addressed as a “temporary setback” that may cost “$50 million.” Money is the only concern for these cynical suits and this apathetic world, as company men repeat the TV tagline, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” The street thugs are the byproduct of this societal rot because the evil stems from the decisions made by corporate and government bureaucrats. As RoboCop learns more about himself, his sense of justice shifts from street criminals to boardroom criminals. Now, as ICE death squads patrol our cities while drones and AI warfare are in the military arsenal as we perilously stand at the edge of World War II, we remain stuck in these interminable debates about liberty versus security, the fascistic pitfalls of an encroaching surveillance state, and how we should police ourselves.

Total Recall (1990)

DIRECTED BY: Paul Verhoeven
SCREENPLAY BY: Ronald Shusett, Dan O’Bannon, Gary Goldman (Based on We Can Remember It for You Wholesale by Philip K. Dick)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jost Vacano
EDITED BY: Frank J. Urioste
MUSIC BY: Jerry Goldsmith
STARRING: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Michael Ironside, Ronny Cox

In quantum mechanics, there is Heisenberg’s principle: If someone is trying to measure the velocity and place of a moving object, the more they accurately determine velocity, the less precisely they’re tracking its place. Essentially, there are different possible realities at any given moment. With Total Recall, whether it’s a feverish paranoia or a sci-fi action romp feels equally plausible.

It’s 2084, and Earth is stiflingly grey, brutalist, and conformist—but Quaid has managed a modest and happy living as a beefy blue-collar construction schmo. He has recurring vivid dreams of Mars, of a dirtier, rougher life as a spy among the miners, which is in direct conflict with his cleaner routine with his perfect blonde, blue-eyed wife, Lori. This remote planet-colony is ruled by a corrupt overlord named Vilos Cohaaen, who controls the air supply and suppresses knowledge of an alien artifact that could terraform the planet so he can oppress the tourists, miners, and mutants. To scratch his insistent itch, Quaid visits a company called Rekall, which promises interstellar vacations without the risk and expense of boarding a shuttle. Through memory implants, anyone can order a two-week trip to Mars that’s as vivid as if he’d gone there himself—and for a few more credits, he can go there as a “secret agent.” His day job with a jackhammer suggests drilling down into his subconscious, where he was actually a mind-wiped secret agent on revolution-torn Mars. As the procedure goes away, the implant clashes with his memories suppressed by nefarious forces, realizing his current life is a lie while reclaiming his former kickassery, using passersby as meat shields and deploying holograms as diversions against killers chasing him cartoon-style.

Depending on your outlook, Douglas Quaid is either:

1. A regular construction worker who visited Rekall to live out his fantasy before slipping into a schizoid embolism.

2. A forced-amnesiac secret agent named Hauser, who was psy-opped by Cohaagan to unwillingly and unknowingly sniff out Kuato and infiltrate the rebel resistance on Mars.

If it’s all a dream, it starts in the chair, where the Rekall workers note, “Oh, there’s a problem, there’s a big glitch here,” and everything from there is built into the program to make him accept this faux-reality. In the Rekall office, the entire staff explains the entire plot of the movie—the fancy hotel, the love interest, the landmarks, the aliens, the blue sky, arriving on Mars as a secret agent, and starting a nuclear reactor to help the guerrillas destroy Cohaagen. “You are a top operative back under deep cover on your most important mission,” the company owner explains to Quaid. “People are trying to kill you left and right. You meet this beautiful, exotic woman.” While receiving the memory implant, he selects Melina’s exact measurements and personality, and her face appears on screen. This same woman also appears in his dreams, but it’s still interesting that Quaid chose a brunette while he was “married” to a blonde. One of the techs mentions, “Blue sky on Mars? That’s new.” While Quaid is going under, they briefly show the alien atmosphere generation plant.

At the beginning, we see a newscast reporting on “rumors” of alien artifacts being discovered. It doesn’t make sense unless it’s a Rekall implant, which would explain the absurd science: The atmosphere on Mars isn’t literally red, the planet’s core isn’t a giant glacier, and the reactor rods melting it would release vapor and not air, and an entire planet isn’t magically terraformed in a few minutes. When Quaid mentions that he intends to visit Rekall for an implant, his wife Lori and his co-worker warn him about the health risks. They could either be agents who are trying to keep him away from Rekall, or this could be a genuine attempt to protect him from the kind of obsession with Mars that would encourage him to risk his sanity on a company with a bad safety reputation.

Halfway through, Dr. Edgemar, who also appeared in the Rekall commercial, turns up in Quaid’s Martin hotel room and informs him that he’s trapped in a “free form delusion” and still strapped into the chair, to which he responds, “If I’m there, I could kill you,” before putting a gun to his head. “Sure, no problem for me, big problem for you, because you will be psychotic from now on, because the walls of reality will fall apart,” Dr. Edgemar explains. “One moment you will be the savior of the rebel cause, the next moment you’ll be Cohaagen’s bosom buddy, but in the end—you will even have these strange fantasies about alien civilizations—but at the end you will be lobotomized.” On the verge of permanent brain damage, Quaid is offered a red pill to “wake up” from the memory. So why would an agent working with Cohaagen also be featured in Rekall commercials? Quaid suspects Dr. Edgemar is real after noticing a bead of sweat roll down his pallid face and kills him. The walls literally crash down as Cohaagan’s goons kick down the door. And, as was foretold, when Quaid meets Kuato, the walls in the catacombs also crumble and collapse.

There would be no conflict of dream versus reality if there weren’t a totalitarian government colonizing an entire planet so it can charge people to breathe. Propaganda networks brand the resistance as “terrorists” and describe their indiscriminate slaughter as “restoring order with minimal use of force.” Mars, in contrast with Earth, is wilder and freakier, with red permeating every crevasse. It conveys seediness, moral decay, and heightened abnormality, full of triple-breasted sex workers, and a mutant resistance led by a psychic child with a human symbiont host. Cohaagen is bathed in red as he gloats and plots, as colonization is an opportunity to terraform a reality by denying the possibility of terraformation. Controlling who gets to have air is a God-like power for a mortal, and it isn’t so far-fetched an extractive future as more of our basic existence is increasingly paywalled.

In the last shot, when Quaid and Melina smile, gaze into each other's eyes, and kiss, the screen fades to white; it’s a happy-ish ending, whether it’s real or he is lobotomized. But this is also the danger of being sold a dream, and the ramifications it can leave if someone buys into it at the expense of dealing with reality. In a chaotic world full of uncertainty, the allure of confirmation bias, echo chambers, and a filtered fantasy life may seem like a tempting reprieve, but the danger lies in how it distorts our relationship with our surroundings and ourselves. AI buttons can render what’s left of our imagination into replacement-level slop, streaming services can couch-bound us with pacifying entertainment, deepfakes can warp our grasp of reality, social media can give us the simulacrum of a community, and VR headsets can fill us with fake experiences without having to step outside. With the ability to never be bored again, to make a photocopy of our dreams, why bother recalling real life?

Starship Troopers (1997)

DIRECTED BY: Paul Verhoeven
SCREENPLAY BY: Edward Neumeier (Based on Starship Troopers
by Robert A. Heinlein)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jost Vacano
EDITED BY: Mark Goldblatt, Caroline Ross
MUSIC BY: Basil Poledouris
STARRING: Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Jake Busey, Neil Patrick Harris, Patrick Muldoon, Michael Ironside

Starship Troopers functions as a Rorschach test for how the culture war infects our perceptions of media: Either the film is a “flattering” depiction of The Federation as a fascist utopia, or it’s a bizarre satire of a distant 23rd century that’s only slightly more inhuman than our anti-human 21st century. The main bit here is this is a version of the entertainment that the 23rd-century Federation would display to itself, a movie made by people without any sense of invention or wonder, and the result is not all that different from mainstream Hollywood movies. The ease with which people swallowed Paul Verhoeven’s sadistic joke is a testament to the uncanny valley between the Third Reich and the Burger Reich. The string of cinematic jingoistic Americana that followed the Bush years is an unironic version of what our crass and militaristic consumerist society gravitates towards, our culture’s own Starship Troopers.

“This year, we explored the failure of democracy, how the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos,” Rasczak, a history teacher, barks at his high-school students in an early scene. “We talked about the veterans and how they took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since.” Rasczak, along with his fellow teachers, is a disfigured veteran, and their job is to encourage their students to enlist in a galaxy-wide war against a species of giant bugs. In this universe, humankind is divided into civilians and citizens—and only citizens have the right to vote, which is earned through military service as a sort of G.I. Bill-inspired privilege. Day-to-day life in The Federation is clean and orderly, but any of life’s ambiguities has been stamped out and displaced by the coercions, certitudes, and doublespeak of endless, totalizing conflict.

We meet the protagonists at the end of their high school days in Buenos Aires. They dazzle in their arena football games and glossy proms, stereotypically beautiful and entangled in cliche love triangles. By graduation, each of them finds their niche within this endless war: Johnny and Dizzy join the mobile infantry; Carmen and Zander earn a spot in flight school; Carl slips into military intelligence. For a culture that dedicates everything to military valor, being in its army is portrayed as a sterile slog. Verhoeven captures a certain libidinal pleasure in surrendering yourself to a larger body politic, but there is no active self-fulfillment or even sexual liberation. In basic training, there are co-ed locker rooms and showers, and the men and women are naked and steamy and soaping each other up, but it’s completely unsexy. Their individual bodies are sublimated to a larger cause that fixates on beauty without sex—it’s all schematics. After they’ve been bloodied in the combat as Ratchik’s Roughnecks, Johnny Rico and Carmen finally hook up, but only once their commanding officer permits them.

The action scenes are no fun either. There’s no elegance or tactical ingenuity. Just troops screaming, firing off an entire clip, and getting bitten in half. The enemy bug army attacks in sudden skittering hordes, erupting through the sand or belching out pulsating blue bladders. The mobile infantry’s strategy amounts to blasting away at endless ravening waves of Arachnids. It’s all the space grunts have ever been trained to do, and the infantry’s leadership persistently underestimates the enemy. People expecting epic Star Wars-style collisions might be jarred at the stilted, off-putting battle scenes, and that’s because Verhoeven borrows from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda documentaries “Olympia” and “Triumph of the Will,” to drive ultra-hoary war conventions to their most savage and illogical conclusions.

The Federation seems to be losing this permanent war, and as the teenagers fight and die for this cause, the society that produced them is revealed to be preening, idiotic, and paradoxically weak given its fixation on force. The last scene shows a Federation newsreel of a phalanx of infantry troops, and you hear a voice that says, “I’m doing my part,” and the camera swivels over to a child in full battle uniform and holding a rifle; they’ve reached the Red Army is a mile outside Berlin phase of this war. The state’s authority and legitimacy are manifested through cultishly revered, supremely well-equipped thugs who only know how to bring people to heel. The culture is oriented around celebrating their efforts. There is no humanity to cling onto, just sheer aesthetics and one clenched fist after another.

The Federal Network bears a queasy resemblance to Fox News, and every stage-managed chunk of spin on the ubiquitous propaganda machine ends with, “Would you like to know more?” Of course, the programming is strident and sappy in saluting the troops and more ardent in its manic villainizing of the enemy. The debate-shaped smackdowns on the Federal Network unfold along familiar narratives: A scientist is asked if the Arachnid enemy is capable of thought, her priggish antagonist blusters, “Insects with intelligence? Have you ever met one? I can’t believe I’m hearing this nonsense.” Presented with irrefutable evidence that “brain bugs” are informing the actions of the insect infantry that had swiftly demolished the first human offensive against them, the bow-tied anti-expert scoffs, “Frankly, I find the idea of a bug that thinks offensive.” That inability to conceive of the bugs as anything but an enemy to be crushed creates this fascination with them, but it also makes it impossible for the humans to defeat them.

When one of the bugs is captured, we see a newsreel of the experimentation, and the humans are just poking at it with a stick. The film’s climax also hinges on the bugs’ state of mind. When Johnny’s squadron avenges a fallen soldier with a heroic assault on a bug stronghold, Carl, now adorned in a Gestapo-style leather duster, uses his Federation-honed psychic gimmicks to ascertain that the Arachnid enemies are now afraid. The network also reinforces the psychosexual terrain of fascism: The humans capture the brain bug, and it’s essentially a giant vagina, and when they stick the metal prod inside, this ritualized penetration of a feminine-coded “other” is immediately censored. After a highlight reel of grisly violence, bright-eyed soldiers getting shredded and headless bodies dragged like rag dolls, any vaguely sexual act must be shielded from the innocent public.

This feeling of everything being finished, after conflict and after descent, leaves a society with nothing other than a drumbeat of propaganda, mass death, and the inversion of culture to fluff and resupply the war machine. Every fascist society of the 20th century was based around a charismatic central figure, but what’s notable in Starship Troopers is that—other than a sky marshal resigning in disgrace—there is no cult of personality that people have invested their hope in, and no form of politics funnels energy back into the aggrandizement of any particular individual. If fascism were to ever hypothetically stabilize and subsume an entire planet, it would substitute for an oligarchy that has totalizing control of military prowess. But fascism inevitably destroys itself in the pursuit of conquest, which seems to be happening in this film, despite overtaking all of Earth.

Everything in this thudding, crumbling future has been winnowed, which feels contemporary in a grim way: There are no sitcoms or movies or anything else on the Federation TV that isn’t news, military recruitment ads, fake debate shows about the bugs. This film channels the Bush era with Johnny Rico’s gung-ho “let’s kill all the bugs” attitude, representing a time when an entire nation rallied around a disastrous bloodbath. But it also speaks to the Trump era, with unprompted strikes against Venezuela and Iran. The same Johnny Rico feeling can be felt in hordes of adults defying pandemic lockdowns by showing up to Disneyworld, demanding their freedom to be thrown in the COVID meat-grinder so they can scarf down Arby’s without a mask. Trump’s most ardent supporters are spiritually anhedonic. He doesn’t like anything other than being on TV and taking from people he feels deserve less than him, and his supporters don’t like anything but him and mostly hate the people they’ve been ideologically conditioned to hate. Donald Trump didn’t empty American culture of everything but violence and cruelty, but he is the perfect mascot.

Humanity, in every possible aspect, is getting its ass beat. A culture that reveres and communicates exclusively through violence—a culture very much like the one that invades “Democrat-run” cities with indiscriminate brute force or whose pandemic strategy is to “dominate” an airborne virus—keeps running up against its own self-imposed limitations. At the end of the film, the human survivors of the bug siege become the heroes of a bombastic military-recruiting ad. A splash of onscreen text cheers, “They’ll keep fighting… and they’ll win!” Our culture’s hopeless recursive pursuit to solve every problem with more assertive bossing is one that is fundamentally busted, but it’s a chance to fight more and fight off the realization that fighting itself has become the point. Swirly-eyed gun puds storm Capitol Hill, and 1776 LARPers hoot and jeer from their couches as ICE raids do their dirty work of fulfilling their half-baked genocidal fantasies. Even if the cruelty is the point, the violence was never supposed to be aspirational. But it feels inevitable when a critical mass of the population perceives it with a sense of purpose.

That’s it for this week’s instalment of The Watchlist, brought to you by Beaglesgate Productions.

The Watchlist will be back in April. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on the Verhoeven sci-fi trilogy, and where these films place among your personal favorites. Were they ahead of the curve?

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George Carlin once joked that it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it, but millions of Americans wake up to relentlessly hustle every day to get their piece of the apple pie. They’ve convinced themselves of their Randian greatness, or they’re deluded enough to think they can outwork, outmaneuver, and out-desire a system that’s rigged against them. They chase their vision of success, cocksure that the next rung up the ladder will finally deliver validation, transcendence, the satisfaction of winning. The system feeds on this kind of wide-eyed ambition, the mythology of meritocracy, the belief in your greatness. The people who can’t stop chasing it will destroy themselves or everything around them in their quest to inscribe their will into the universe. The American Dream has a darker underbelly, the way it seduces, distorts, and ultimately consumes those who believe in it most fiercely. Empty ambition is not a path to fulfillment, but a force that can warp identity, morality, and even reality itself.

Anyways, let’s get to it…

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

Showgirls (1995)

DIRECTED BY: Paul Verhoeven
SCREENPLAY BY: Joe Eszterhas
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jost Vacano
EDITED BY: Mark Goldblatt, Mark Helfrich
MUSIC BY: David A. Stewart
STARRING: Elizabeth Berkley, Kyle MacLachlan, Gina Gershon, Glenn Plummer, Robert Davi, Alan Rachins, Gina Ravera

What happens when the razzle-dazzle allure of showbiz is turned into a greasy, disturbing, and lurid exploitation movie? The lavish musical numbers become filthy grotesqueries. Salacious nudity becomes utterly unsexy. Showgirls may come with rhinestones, but it’s another cheeky enfant terrible Paul Verhoeven satire of the shiny surface fantasies America sells to a population of natural-born suckers. The people daring and delusional enough to pursue stardom only realize it’s covered in grime and body fluids when they’re neck-deep in it. The American Dream is turned into a backstage stripper melodrama of cutthroat competition and superficial diva image-making. In this world of eroticized MGM-inspired musicals, everything is over-the-top—especially the toplessness. Elizabeth Berkley’s wildly overcommitted performance as striving dancer/stripper Nomi Malone shows someone gyrating and scheming her way up the greasy pole of stardom, but winds up spinning in place and licking it along the way. The real power lies with the men running the racket, selling dreams of stardom to an endlessly returning audience of narcissistic dupes.

Showgirls is a story of Nomi, who hitchhikes to Vegas with nothing but a single suitcase that’s immediately stolen and lands an undignified gig at the seediest strip club in town. But through ambition, a great body, and a gift for dancing, she breaks into the chorus of Goddess, a lavish stage show at a prominent casino. There, Nomi squares off with the queen bee, Cristal Connors, who alternates between mentor, foe, and someone who wants to turn her into a sex toy. Verhoeven’s staunch, anachronistic refusal to pander to good taste takes the beautiful artificial gloss and lights, impeccably choreographed dancing, and technically elegant Steadicam movement, and frames all that sheen and full-spectrum spectacle in a deliberately excessive, disgusting milieu. It’s searing in its depiction of a dehumanized world, a sleazy assembly line of brutal exploitation. This hyper-consumerist worldview is encapsulated in a bald exchange between Nomi and then-lead dancer Cristal: “You are a whore, darlin’,” “No, I’m not!” “We all are,” Cristal assures the naïve aspiring star. “We take the cash, we cash the check, we show ‘em what they wanna see.”

The film maintains empathy for Nomi without letting her off the hook for her culpability in this poisoned fantasy. Sure, Nomi uses sex to get ahead, she is moody and prone to histrionic bouts of anger, she’s not the brightest neon sign on the strip, and she lusts after Versace. But she is also talented, ambitious, hard-working, and loyal to her friends. When she auditions for Goddess, one of the producers offers her ice to get her nipples hard, and she storms off stage. Offended by this request, she was the only woman who stood up for herself, and she got the part. A bigwig at the casino tries to pressure her into sex with a highroller, and she declines, choosing to risk her job rather than cross that seedy line.

Nomi wants to dance, but her biggest fear is becoming a “whore,” and she is constantly reminded that spiraling into this maw is the worst possible fate and inescapable. This doesn’t make the film sexist as much as it makes for an accurate portrayal of Vegas. In an industry of horrible misogyny and cutthroat ladder-climbing, women are only valued for their sex appeal, and it would be sexist not to acknowledge this grim reality. Sin City isn’t exactly known for elevating the fine arts, and as Nomi is approaching the cusp of stardom, she watches the choreographer perform a work of dance art. He mentioned that he used to be a part of the Alvin Ailey dance company—a NYC-based outfit known for its modern and athletic choreography—which is an obscure reference to his talent. On Broadway, he’d probably have an appreciative audience, but in Vegas, he is literally booed off the stage mid-performance. One person shouts, “Bring on the real dancers,” by which they mean the strippers. Showgirls sets up a choice: Dance for the pursuit of artistic integrity and stay poor, or dance sexy and be the queen of Vegas.

In deliberately pushing the buttons of the least self-aware nation in the world, Verhoeven’s run from Robocop to Starship Troopers is the greatest big-budget B-movie takedown of America’s moral infantilism. All of these films do similarly satirical, subversive, outrageous plays with their respective genre tropes to car crash fish-in-a-barrel liberal handwringing and po-faced Moral Majority faux morality. Showgirls is Screen One iconoclasm filtered into a gruesome and deliciously crass depiction of exactly what mainstream America wants but is too afraid and ashamed to admit. A story like this can never be told tastefully, and Verhoeven rubs our noses in this glossy smut while chastising us for wanting it.

Election (1999)

DIRECTED BY: Alexander Payne
SCREENPLAY BY: Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor (Based on Election
by Tom Perrotta)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: James Glennon
EDITED BY: Kevin Tent
MUSIC BY: Rolfe Kent
STARRING: Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Klein, Jessica Campbell, Mark Harelik, Phil Reeves, Molly Hagan, Delaney Driscoll, Colleen Camp

Tracy Flick has become synonymous with women who want too much, exhibiting an excess of unseemly ambition that’s comical in its arrogance and tragic in its inevitable thwarting. Since Election’s release in 1999, Alexander Payne’s acidic satire of high school politics has become eerily prophetic of the plunging public morale of 21st century America: Contested election results, a dubious recount, a populist demagogue running on sheer nihilism, qualified female candidates promising to administer a failing and flailing status quo that’s preferable than the sordid alternative on its merits but has grown to be despised. The clairvoyance of this film makes it even more strange that Tracy is posturized as an avatar for liberalism, or more specifically, a stand-in for Hillary Clinton. Tracy has been identified as a vessel for self-determination and self-sufficiency that offends and even frightens men, though, this reading is borne out of exposing the ugliest, pettiest side of the adults who undermine and take advantage of her. She is introduced mid-affair with a lecherous married teacher, and fellow teacher Jim McAllister later fetishizes her during sex with his own wife. This overachiever, while irritating, has been wronged—as this argument goes—by mediocre men who trivialize her preparedness and perfectionism.

This is a generous assessment of a character who thinks to herself:

“Now that I have more life experience, I feel sorry for Mr. McAllister. I mean, anyone who’s stuck in the same little room, wearing the same stupid clothes, saying the exact same things year after year for all his life, while his students go on to good colleges and move to big cities and do great things and make loads of money—he’s gotta be a little bit jealous. It’s like my mom says, the weak are always trying to sabotage the strong.”

Tracy is smug and annoying and entitled, yet she has the moral high ground by not being a serially dishonest pedophile. The disillusioned soul of this film hones the central conflict into a war of attrition between two actively terrible men and a woman who is obnoxious enough to keep the audience at arm’s length.

Another foil for Tracy Flick arrived in the form of Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope, a bleeding-heart go-getter with a tireless devotion to helping her community—even if she was a striving ladder-climber, she had a more altruistic purpose that earned her friends and respect along the way. Tracy isn’t given the same kind of leeway. The dirty secret about resume-padders like her is that their only real commitment is to the act of Getting Involved. Throughout the film, politics is portrayed as an abstract and illusory choice between interchangeable versions of the same bullshit. In his civics class, McAllister portrays democracy as the option between an apple and an orange, represented by two identical circles on his chalkboard. As Tracy runs for Carver High president, it’s not like study hall policy requires a rigorous ideological debate. Her stump speech leans into upbeat vagaries instead of substance. She imitates the rehearsed gesticulations of politicians, hitting her cadences and singling out her working-class constituents to wring some pathos out of her stage-managed rhetoric.

Tracy’s focus remains on success rather than any underlying principles. Her bedroom walls are adorned not with posters of inspirational women, but with her own awards and motivational platitudes like, “If you can imagine it, you can achieve it!” Her mother, a divorcee channelling her vicarious hopes into her daughter, spends her idle time writing letters to Connie Chung and Republican leader Elizabeth Dole. After McAllister torpedoed his professional and romantic lives by sabotaging Tracy’s campaign, he engineers a second act for himself as a museum guide. While he’s in D.C. for a conference, he has a pathetic run-in with Tracy, watching him slide into a limo as a staffer to the fictitious Representative Mike Geiger, a Nebraska Republican. Tracy was always “political” in the same holistic, imprecise sense that Burning Man is “spiritual” without any commitment to a formal religion. She was always animated by the nuts and bolts of the voting process, so it’s easy to see Tracy rising through the ranks of the GOP, where ruthlessness and an unshakable thirst for power are just habits of highly driven sociopaths.

Election sets itself apart from a traditional high school movie because it doesn’t limit itself to the worldview of teenagers, but examines Tracy from the eyes of McAllister, a teacher who turns up for an adulterous liaison and succeeds in getting a bee sting in his eyelid. Tracy successfully seduced Dave, a faculty member who was one of his best friends, which marks the primal transgression of this film, as he exploited this underage girl’s bottomless need for adult approval. Meanwhile, McAllister pursues a pitiful extramarital affair with the lonely ex-wife of the disgraced Dave. As much as McAllister detests Tracy, he also lusts after her. Out of resentment of what he perceives as Tracy’s inevitable ascent to the student body presidency—or maybe sexual jealousy—McAllister resolves to sabotage her campaign by recruiting a slow-witted but amiable jock named Paul to run against her. The race gets complicated when Paul’s younger sister, Tammy, a closeted lesbian furious at having lost her girlfriend to her popular and clueless brother, jumps into the contest on a platform of dismantling the student government “so we’ll never have to sit through one of these stupid elections again.” Tammy’s speech to the student body—“Who cares about this stupid election anyway?”—is a paean to unvarnished apathy that draws a standing ovation.

“You can’t interfere with destiny,” Tracy asserts in the opening monologue. “That’s why it’s destiny.” Destiny is a word that crops up often, as debates about fate, free will, and the possibility of meaningful choice are usually couched as awkward conversations about sex, civics, or student-council protocol. The narrations play into the difference between morals and ethics, and how one will act on their morals but judge others based on ethics. The fictional Carver High School, where nearly all the students are white, becomes a microcosm of a smug and self-deluded culture. A free-roving camera telegraphs the ironic distance between the character’s narrativization and justification of their actions and details that undermine the complacent voice-over. “I began to see what an incredibly giving and sensitive person Linda was,” McAllister tells us, as a shot down the low-cut neck of her dress clues us into his baser motives. Matthew Broderick, about a decade after playing the hooky-playing hero in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, was the ideal choice to play the morally compromised and self-righteous teacher, and it’s like Payne was playing with the boyish charm of Broderick to trick us into rooting for the wrong character.

This isn’t really a movie about high school or an obnoxiously grating student, but about personality types. Tracy should win simply because she is the school’s self-designated winner. She doesn’t have a platform, but she will turn up on election day having baked 480 customized cupcakes for each voter. Her triumph seems inevitable, destiny even. But to McAllister, the Tracy Flicks need to be stopped before their empty ambition destroys everything in their path. She is always perfectly dressed and groomed and mostly conceals her temper beneath a façade of irritating cheerfulness. But she is ruthless. Troublemakers can cause problems for teachers and society, but it’s the compulsive overachievers that can leave lasting damage. Essentially, the voters aren’t picking between an apple and an orange; we’re choosing from the kinds of people who have been running for office since high school.

In the intervening years since graduation day and his humiliating expulsion from Carver, McAllister has taken up a low-paying teaching assistant gig at the American Museum of Natural History, and he lets us know how happy he is with his new life. He’s in D.C., crossing the street with a just-purchased American flag in one hand and a milkshake in the other, and this monomaniacal Captain Ahab catches one final glimpse at his maddeningly overachieving white whale. After Tracy climbs into a limousine, in an ill-thought-out act of impotent rebellion, he hurls his drink at the departing vehicle. Seized by fear at the thought of reencountering his former student, McAllister scampers away, leaving us to wonder what moral progress, if any, this beleaguered and still-bitter man has made. The ending is hilarious and ominous. Are we supposed to cheer Tracy’s apparent success in the post-high school political world? Or do we regard her as an insatiable beast of bottomless appetite who is realizing their potential in the Beltway swamp?

Uncut Gems (2019)

DIRECTED BY: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie
SCREENPLAY BY: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Darius Khondji
EDITED BY: Ronald Bronstein, Benny Safdie
MUSIC BY: Daniel Lopatin
STARRING: Adam Sandler, LaKeith Stanfield, Julia Fox, Kevin Garnett, Idina Menzel, Eric Bogosian

What does it mean to win if the pursuit feels like a top that’s spinning across a table, seemingly out of control as it darts toward the edge? Would dumb-luck success ever feel satisfactory? Uncut Gems skitters and jitters and lurches and hurtles with the same desperate buzz that would suck someone into a gambling addiction, hooked on the danger and stress that inevitably follows. Our anti-hero, Howard Ratner, plays a dangerous series of shell games for high stakes to give his life some dramatic chronological pressure. His elaborate invention of lies to shimmy out of his creditors’ menacing clutches comes off as an addiction to something more than just gambling. His gem-and-jeweler business is stressful enough, but the panic and paranoia that drive him stem from turning every moment into a life-or-death crisis. The intricate flow chart of debts and cadges, the daily tensions of thrills and dangers, every scene establishes and raises the stakes. Howard undergoes a pure coke-fuelled self-destruction, and while these choices are illogical in the abstract, they all make sense within the context of his desires and what he thinks he wants versus what he needs. Howard is not a simple caricature of greed, but a tragic character motivated by the euphoria of winning and a desperate need for approval. Gambling is a means to that end.

The opening and closing shots add a cosmic implication to what would otherwise be a standard crime-drama. We begin in Ethiopia, where Black miners are pulling an injured crew member out of a shaft as Chinese supervisors oversee them, but some of them sneak back onto the worksite to retrieve a massive black opal. We zoom into the gem to find a crystal world, and then we arrive inside Howard’s rectum mid-colonoscopy. In the end, the reverse happens, a close-up into his bullet wound, only to venture back into the crystal world, continuing the perpetual cycle of violence as we lust for wealth and status. It’s the perception of value, the exchange of suffering for material glory, and overlooking that suffering in pursuit of our dreams.

The main story is a “day-in-the-life” of Howard, a jewellery store owner and a degenerate gambler, who dons an ostentatious leather jacket, a two-tone shirt with the tag dangling out of its collar, decorative glasses, an overly trimmed goatee, and an ornate watch that could bulge biceps. He strides through the Diamond District yapping at top-speed into his cell phone, plotting the score of a lifetime. He’s smuggling that same rare, uncut, large black opal from Ethiopia, which he’s expecting to auction off for a million dollars. Meanwhile, his marriage in the suburbs is falling apart, his nightclub-trawling girlfriend is cheating on him, he owes money all over town, and he’s one irresponsible decision away from irreparable financial ruin. He believes his own Great Man delusions, betting two $100,000 parlays because of a tip-off. Stuck in serious debt to his brother-in-law, Arno, he also sidesteps other creditors and their hired violent enforcers with improvised lies, planning to pay one with money owed to another with winnings that haven’t yet materialized. If his borrowings and scams and debts and dodges don’t align under the exact sequence, his life will collapse. When the opal finally reaches his showroom, Kevin Garnett visits the store, who is immediately entranced and feels its power, convinced it will help him achieve peak performance in the 2012 NBA playoffs. Garnett wants to borrow it, Howard agrees because he senses it will give him a betting advantage, takes KG’s championship ring as collateral, then immediately pawns off the ring to place a bet. From there, we bear witness to the anxiety-inducing misadventures of a gambler who painfully lacks self-awareness and has a pathological drive for more.

For Howard, everything is about possession and risk. “I’m gonna come,” he bursts when digital artists shrank his pupils, because the opal is like a drug to him. He’s a fully adult scumbag with an apartment in midtown and a young party-girl as a sidepiece, who he only seems interested in just to live vicariously through her. But he’s just an old guy at the club fighting The Weeknd. At one point, Howard tells his girlfriend he must leave to attend his daughter’s school recital, and he seems exhausted with the whole situation, like having a woman around is perfunctory because his empty existence is only animated by the hedonic treadmill of spending and borrowing money he doesn’t have. The only way Howard can relate to his almost-adolescent son is through talking about point spreads. Through winning a bet, he finally has the money to pay off Arno, but takes that windfall to bet on Kevin Garnett because he would’ve been haunted by passing on the possibility of a few more hundred thousand dollars. Howard won his first bet, but Arno stopped it and took the money; he was trying to help, but Howard saw it as betrayal. When Kevin Garnett calls Howard out for exploiting Ethiopian workers, he delivers his “This is how I win speech,” a real Daniel Plainview moment of dominating the capitalist hierarchy in lieu of any athletic ability or other talent.

Howard’s last moment is one of triumph, an almost Shakespearean tragedy in that his death seems both avoidable and inevitable. Howard is like a greasy Lennie from Of Mice and Men: Lenny is killed while he thinks about rabbits, and Howard dies as he relishes in the ecstasy of winning. There were so many chances for Howard to cash out, but like Lenny, they would’ve met the same fate regardless of when it arrived. If anything, it’s the most merciful death under the circumstances, and at least Howard goes out on top. He spent his entire life dodging bullets, and when he finally wins and can pay all his debts, he’s shot in the head by hired goons because he denigrated these two men who value respect more than money. Each character “wins” in their own world. Kevin Garnett wins by dominating basketball. Howard wins by gambling and hustling. The thugs win by killing anyone who crosses them. Howard measured out his days in the arc of a three-pointer, the slam of a car door, the paired buzzes of his showroom’s double-safe, electronic bulletproof glass barriers. His survival is a matter of precise timing; his advancement is dependent on flukey circumstance. With his grandiose vision of winning, Howard is the ultimate fantasist, and in his mortal dependence on real-life outcomes, he is the ultimate realist.

That’s it for this week’s instalment of The Watchlist, brought to you by Beaglesgate Productions.

Next week, we’ll be diving into the Paul Verhoeven Sci-Fi Trilogy. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on these movies, where they place among your personal favorites, or if you think they’re overrated.

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After spending my first full winter in the Pacific Northwest, I finally have come to appreciate the merits of Daylight Savings Time. Eight hours of cloud-obstructed sunlight is a generous estimate of what natually generated Vitamin D I received in the dog days of December. The long bouts of darkness felt like a climatological bloodletting of my vitality. Languid slogs through the work day and the crash out movie nights were a fitting atmosphere for expanding my foray into the downbeat vibes of trip-hop. I’d stare forlornly outside the window and watch the clouds of fog roll off mountainsides and waves of mist flutter through the chilly wind, lost in the rugged and brutal beauty of this specific region of the planet.

I recently stumbled upon an Instagram post from Nick Fry that introduced me to 10 deeper cut trip-hop albums, and the three inclusions below are his recommendations that have resonated the most with me during these dreary February days. I’ve already sung the praises of Portishead and Massive Attack on our Top 100 Albums run, so these recs fall under a more exploratory phase of trip-hop.

Let’s get to it.

And check out “On Repeat Records!”

On Repeat Records

Ditch the algorithm. Music discovery made easy—curated by someone who remembers when a mixtape could change your life.

By Kevin Alexander

MY PICK: Lushlife - Bowery Electric

This is pure nocturnal city music, with the straight lines of rain-slicked roads and the broken streetlights captured by lush strings and smoky, sexy beats. While Lushlife lacks the otherworldly fusion of shoegaze and trip-hop of Beat, there’s something beautifully simmering and downtempo in these xenon-illuminated atmospheres. The orchestra is like a morphine drip, either swelling in the forefront or swaying in the background. The drum patterns with bass guitar keep you grounded to a massaging groove, and the subtle overdubs of guitar are a pleasant touch of tranquil stupor. “Freedom Fighter” is a good-n-dirty rave-up, and “Passages” is an angelic closer to a luxurious-sounding tracklist. “Floating World,” the title track, and “Shook Ones” are perfect executions of big, looping, ubiquitous breakbeats. If I could describe this album as a six-word story, I’d say: Claustrophobic, dark, urban, meandering, sexy, melancholic. Put this on with some good headphones or stereo, and listen to it in the cold night or a cloudy afternoon.

KEVIN’S PICK: Becoming X - Sneaker Pimps

My Response:

I’ve known about this Becoming X for a while, but never got around to listening to it until now. The opening track took me by surprise, and I like the blend of alt-rock and dark grooves. It’s not dreary or noir like Portishead—there’s something almost X-Files or alien to this sound. Sneaker Pimps have a distinctive, ecstasy-influenced ‘90s harmony, but there’s also something eerie. It’s like an oddly upbeat Radiohead (which I know Kevin will love this comp).

Kevin's Take

MY PICK: A New Stereophonic Sound - Hooverphonic

This is a fun love letter to British underground music in the ‘90s, equal parts trip-hop, dream pop, shoegaze, and tacky movie samples. Most canonical albums of this genre are praised for their paranoia and experimentation and weirdness, but Hooverphonic relies on more than breaks to drive their songs, piling on layers of spooky electro-instrumentals and shimmering mutant jazz, until it pushes towards atmospheric dream pop. On “Inhaler,” the beautiful wave of sound is soothing while the breaks keep moving. Like a daydream, it caresses and whispers with a hushed breath, floating from one track and style to another without losing cohesion. Liesje Callier’s sparse and wispy voice possesses no weight, blowing through every track like a cool breeze, and almost sounding ghostly. Bubbling, subtly crescendoing keyboards submerge the album into a dark, unknown ocean. Reverberated beats sparkle through the dark city like dim glowing lights. Under the right lethargic nightly circumstances, this is a top-notch, serene vibe.

KEVIN’S PICK: Clear - Bomb the Bass

My Response:

I have never heard of this album, but was pretty impressed with the eclectic set of luminaries that appear here: Justin Warfield, Bim Sherman, Will Self, Sinead O’Connor, and Benjamin Zephaniah. Most of the tunes are pretty mellow and slow in tempo, but very tinged with a strong political undercurrent. Standouts include “Bug Powder Dust,” “Sleepyhead,” “Dark Heart,” “Sandcastles,” “Tidal Wave,” and “Empire.”

Kevin's Take

MY PICK: Supreme Beings of Leisure - Supreme Beings of Leisure

For a trip-hop album, this is pretty upbeat and loungey. Nothing spine-tingling here, but it’s perfect background music. Ultra-cool, jazzy, relaxed, the feeling of looking over LA at sunset. Vocalist Geri Soriano-Lightwood evokes the image of a Bond girl moonlighting as a sexy lounge singer, smirking in a way that makes grown men pull imaginary firearms from their imaginary holsters in front of their bedroom mirror. She’s backed by a trio of electronic chill-out hipsters who create a spicy, groovy backdrop that seamlessly bubbles like molten gold. “Never the Same,” “Sublime,” “Last Girl on Earth,” and “Under the Gun” are all elegant, intimate, and passionate. Shake gently, add ice, and pour.

KEVIN’S PICK: Radio Retaliation - Thievery Corporation

My Reaction:

The horns are plentiful. The drumming is intoxicating. The bass lines are funky. The synths and guitar rhythms are lush. Radio Retaliation blends reggae, electronic, hip-hop, and a healthy serving of jazz. For all the political resistance on this record, the sound is vivid and energetic. Highlights include “Sound the Alarm,” “La Femme Parallel,” “Blasting through the City,” “Sweet Tides,” “Radio Retaliation,” “Vampires,” “El Pueblo Unido.”

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The American Dream is fondly thought of as the white picket fence and a comfy middle-class life, but in practice, it tends to be a bit more sinister. Within a cutthroat economy and as a result of the relentless downward pressure of markets, one person’s American dream subsists off some poor schmuk’s nightmare. Maybe if America stayed charted on its New Deal course, we’d be living in a more equitable society, but this version of America is a business and quite possibly an MLM scheme, and it takes a certain brand of sociopathy to climb to the top of this particularly perverse corporate ladder. Maybe it’s hyperindividualism run amok, maybe it’s the drive to accumulate unfathomable fortunes, but if the titans of industry aren’t named in the Epstein files, they’re mostly empty vessels of soulless accumulation and arrogant status-seeking. So here are some of their stories.

Anyways, let’s get to it…

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

The Social Network (2010)

DIRECTED BY: David Fincher
SCREENPLAY BY: Aaron Sorkin (Based on The Accidental Billionaires
by Ben Mezrich)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jeff Cronenweth
EDITED BY: Angus Wall, Kirk Baxter
MUSIC BY: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross
STARRING: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella

It is one of the great feats of David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin to have made something electric out of an inherently boring premise. At its core, The Social Network involves a group of nepo babies arguing over how much money and credit they’re entitled to over a website that would go on to break brains on a scale previously unimaginable in human history. But it also perfectly captures an inflection point for Facebook, the palpable shift in which it metastasized from a repository of dumb status updates and cringe photo dumps into a reality-distorting machine that spreads dangerous medical misinformation, genocidal rhetoric, and political content grounded in unreasoning spite and resentful grievance. It seems important to mention that Mark Zuckerberg has gotten unfathomably rich off the worst website that has ever existed, and his company has shown itself willing to do the wrong thing whenever and wherever given a choice.

Zuck is portrayed as an aloof asshole torn between his need for connection and his immense misanthropy. His criminal indifference to policing his own website’s sprawl has made the world infinitely dumber and uglier in a number of obvious and inescapable ways. And no one can meaningfully tell Zuck “no” both because he owns the majority of his company’s voting shares and also because Facebook is structured such that he effectively has final say on every decision the company makes. It’s a terrible thing to say about someone, but Mark Zuckerberg really is Facebook.

The movie begins and ends with Erica Albright, the first person we see call Zuck out on his empty ambition and status-seeking bullshit. “You’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd,” she says from across a bar table as she’s ending their relationship. “And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.” As an act of revenge against an ex who sized him up so accurately and viciously, he runs back to his dorm room and starts Facemash, a site of pure social Darwinism where the user can compare themselves to people they know. Although Zuck is a social maladroit in many aspects, he possesses a keen understanding of the insecurities that motivate much of a person’s decisions and the innate desire we have for intimacy.

Every decision Zuck makes from that moment on is influenced by an uncomfortable confrontation with his own loneliness. He only agrees to meet with Cam and Tyler Winklevoss about their website idea after he learns they row crew, something Erica jokingly mentioned is attractive to her. The Winklevoss twins are Zuck’s primary antagonists, an ironic juxtaposition, as they quite literally have never been alone. And he resents the twins because they don’t understand how valuable their website idea could be–a lack of understanding that was likely clouded by how little they crave companionship or intimacy, since they grew up with an abundance of both. Zuck knows his adaptation of their idea has more potential, so rather than telling them, he snakes it out from underneath them. The Winklevosses never had a product that could compete with Facebook, so they’re suing Zuck based on what they feel their site could’ve been, not what it actually was.

As Zuck tells his best friend and Facebook co-founder, Eduardo, the point and purpose of their site is to help other men connect to women in their social circles. His vision for the future was just as extractive and joyless then as it is now, a hilarious contrast to the strained tones of wonder and whimsy in which he would eventually pitch us on the idea of the Metaverse.

Eduardo, however, is a good guy with bad ideas. He tries to monetize Facebook too early because he can’t see the bigger picture, insisting on courting advertisers before the site reaches critical mass. Despite this, Eduardo is the only one who actually has any skin in the game, as he fronts $19,000 of his own money to get Facebook off the ground. Ultimately, his naivety leads to his ousting from his own company, captured in an iconic scene where he unleashes fury on Zuck: “I’M SORRY, MY PRADA WAS AT THE CLEANERS!! ALONG WITH MY HOODIE AND MY FUCK-YOU FLIP-FLOPS, YOU PRETENTIOUS DOUCHEBAG!!” Meanwhile, Zuck is immediately infatuated when he meets Sean Parker because he is the version of Zuck that gets the girls. Sean is Eduardo’s foil, a bad guy with good ideas. He predicts the future trajectory of social media, and has an oddly clairvoyant vision of photo/video-driven apps while he’s coked out of his skull. Sean knows how to influence Mark, but he’s a creepy leech who ultimately enjoys lurking after college girls more than he is interested in managing companies.

Zuck is driven to expand Facebook to other college campuses after his second encounter with Erica at a bar while he and Eduardo are on a double date. She reams him out for his misogynistic post-breakup blogs about her, and she ends the conversation with, “Good luck with your video game.” As Facebook is racking up users, we see several conversations between Zuck, Sean, and Eduardo about how the presence of ads would undermine Facebook’s brand proposition. “A million dollars isn’t cool,” Sean assures Zuck and Eduardo. “You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” The relentlessly cynical avarice that made Facebook profitable also guaranteed that it could never and would never become anything but a suitably dystopian machine built to turn lonely relatives into blood-and-soil fascists. The core product, as it stands today, is absolutely loathsome and widely loathed, governed by an algorithm that seems designed to make the experience of being on the site as unpleasant as possible. All those ads that clutter Facebook’s timelines and blunder across every available space make a lot of money for the company, but they have also made its website increasingly the province of kooks, quacks, shut-ins, grifters, and the dreaded Gun Uncle. For as much as Zuck talks about the techno-optimist future of boundless connection, his website is driven by the incentives of cheesy data surveillance and value-neutral click-chasing that has degraded its interface into an irredeemably janky newsfeed that farts out viral idiocies, sponsored content, and the dispiriting opinions of random former high school classmates.

There are many things to despise about Mark Zuckerberg—his fundamental mediocrity, his stupendously wack vision of the future, his absence of any moral sense or shame. But what feels most egregiously of this moment is his inability and unwillingness not just to fix but even to reckon with the dangerous and sprawling mess he created. The unrelenting carnage that oozes out of Facebook is all profoundly vile, but it could not be remotely described as a mistake. Every one of them is a choice, and the person who makes the choices at Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg. The last scene in the movie is a perfect kill shot, as we see Zuck alone in a boardroom compulsively refreshing his feed to see if Erica accepted his friend request. It’s pathetic, but the joke is also on us. It is embarrassing to realize that we are subject to the whims of an amoral capitalist posing as a visionary, but it is especially humiliating when the figure in question is such a dim and dull nullity.

The Founder (2016)

DIRECTED BY: John Lee Hancock
SCREENPLAY BY: Robert Siegel
CINEMATOGRAPHY: John Schwartzman
EDITED BY: Robert Frazen
MUSIC BY: Carter Burwell
STARRING: Michael Keaton, Nick Offerman, John Carroll Lynch, Linda Cardellini, B.J. Novak, Laura Dern

Groceries and gas bills are exploding. Home ownership is impossibly unattainable. Healthcare and a college education are creating a generation of immiserating penury. Pop culture panders to the pretensions of the dullest common denominator. Our favorite businesses and platforms are in terminal enshittification. The post-Reagan American social contract exchanged the New Deal’s incomplete pursuit of an egalitarian welfare state for creature comforts and treats. Now the Five-Dollar Footlong is the Six-Dollar Six-Inch, and there is an ambient sense of dread that capitalism is failing, and there is no future worth believing in. As smash-and-grab grift and explicit corruption pockmark our quotidian existence, economists and pundits are scrambling to blame the failings of real-life capitalism on “crony capitalism” or “corporate capitalism” or “woke capitalism.” Capitalism, according to its true-believers, has not been set up correctly—with enough regulation, or with sufficiently smart regulations. Or we just need a more humane capitalism, with the Right People pulling the levers, or some more diversity in corporate boardrooms.

Bringing about a more equitable and empathetic economy would require a different set of incentives and reward structures, or what would essentially be a fundamentally different system. The Founder presents itself as a typical feel-good American Success flick, but the overarching message is one of sociopathic survivalism, a savage depiction of the type of people and behavior that advances in capitalism and our corporate culture. Ray Kroc is an itinerant milkshake salesman who has been on the grind since World War II to get rich with Ronco-level schemes. He is seemingly married to a woman with a privileged background, he lives beyond his means, and is a member of a country club full of wealthy gentry who clearly don’t respect him. Ray Kroc is the perfectly aggrieved Nixonian subject, a middle-aged mediocrite reciting the same spiel about malt machines to disinterested drive-thru restaurant owners. He has nothing left to care about other than seeking validation through status, power, and money.

On a sales trip, Kroc finds these two brothers who had created this new system of literal fast food delivery. Upon first glance at the McDonald’s restaurant, he is blown away and offers to take the McDonald Brothers out for dinner to hear the story behind it. The ensuing scene is essentially a paean to the glories of capitalism, the possibility of the American Dream: Through ability and gumption and creativity and vision, anyone can write their individual will onto the universe. The McDonald Brothers were clearly itching to share the tale of their exploits with someone, as they deliver it with theatrical panache. They moved to Hollywood from New Hampshire to become a part of the Dream Factory, and after they washed out of the film industry, they opened a movie theater until the Depression forced them to shut it down. It wasn’t in their instinct to become business owners, but they channeled their artistic temperaments through running a restaurant. In turn, they created a beautiful machine through expression and coordination with others. The scene cuts to a montage of the brothers sketching out a kitchen on a tennis court, and they are literally hovering over these line cooks and servers, directing their actions and waving their hands like they’re conducting an orchestra, repeating, “Ketchup, relish, mustard!” Ray Croc hears this story and immediately sees a cash grab. He has no creative impulse or a desire to be appreciated for his soul or self-expression—he just wants to be recognized as better and higher-up than someone else.

Ray Kroc and the McDonald Brothers are both in the same class position, but they have a different understanding of their self-interest. They’re all card-carrying Republicans who are willing to exploit the capitalist system to their benefit. But one wants to bend it towards a more socially rewarding end, while the other has an insatiable appetite for cut-throat domination.

Once the restaurant franchises, the McDonald Brothers keep pulling the reins on Kroc’s ambitions—whether it’s an argument over “making a quick buck” through using powered milk in their milkshakes or enforcing stringent quality control over individual locations—because the brothers uphold values that transcend money. The system, by definition, rewards the person who is most interested in making money. “I want to take the future,” Kroc says on a phone call with the brothers. “I want to win, and you don’t get there by being some aw-shucks nice guy sap. There’s no place in business for people like that.” Since Kroc’s interests are oriented around narrow-minded material acquisition, he is more willing to cut corners than the McDonald Brothers, and he will ignore any abstract notions that could impede profit maximization. Over time, Kroc gains the upper hand even when he’s bound by an ironclad contract. He meets with a lawyer who suggests that he restructure McDonald’s as a real estate company, and by owning the land, he gains more leverage over franchisees. Kroc didn’t think of this strategy, but he used it to run the brothers out of the business in defiance of their agreed-upon arrangement. What the law says is irrelevant, because Kroc has more access to liquidity and capital, so there is no legal question that he won’t eventually win. When the McDonald Brothers threaten to sue for breach of contract, Kroc shrugs it off. “And you’ll probably win,” he asserts. “But you can’t afford to sue me. I’ll bury you in court costs alone.”

Several decades later, the McDonald Brothers have been driven out of the commanding heights of this system, and everyone at the top is a different shade of Ray Kroc. The culture war between the Democrats and Republicans is a battle of social distinctions, between global cosmopolitan finance and local power brokers, between private equity and the regional car dealership conglomerate. There are some distinctions in secondary values like multiculturalism and democracy, but they are all beneficiaries of an MLM-style economy that’s defined by getting one over the nearest sucker. “Business is war,” Kroc declares. “It’s dog-eat-dog, rat-eat-rat. If my competitor were drowning, I’d walk over and I’d put a hose right in his mouth.”

The only lesson Kroc internalizes is this Dale Carnegie pep talk about how persistence is the key to success. In the opening scene, he’s seen listening to it on a portable record player in a hotel room. “Persistence,” it insists. “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.” Kroc swindles the McDonald Brothers out of their business, takes credit for the fast food model, anoints his first franchise “McDonald’s Number One,” refers to himself as “The Founder,” and purchases the McDonald’s name from the brothers because it’s clean and crisp and All-American. In contrast to the inventive and stolid McDonald Brothers, Kroc has no connection to anything, and his desire is unmoored from any pleasure beyond self-validation. He is totally arid. In the closing scene, Kroc is preparing to deliver a speech to then-Governor of California, Ronald Reagan. Reciting in front of a mirror, it’s just the same Carnegie record he’s been listening to for 40 years, wrapped up in the idea of sacrificing everything at the altar of personal gain and crushing everyone who gets in the way. Kroc can only echo the voice that tells him to grind and persist, because that’s all that’s ever animated him.

The Founder is so deliciously insidious because it depicts how capitalism develops, but also how capitalism warps and distorts those who thrive in this system, and how they remake the rest of us in their image. Ray Kroc succeeds through the efforts of harder-working or more creatively minded collaborators who come up with the ideas at every point, but he gets the credit because he’s the guy with the money. These people persist like a fungus. Ray Kroc’s story is Elon Musk’s story, Mark Zuckerberg’s story. And it’s told through aspiring alphas like Gary Vee and Andrew Tate, who inspire legions of sigma grinset Bitcoin/dropship lemmings to lock in for 80-hour workweeks to get that corner office, to get their piece of the pie. The rest of us are sucked in to some degree, but the mechanisms of running this soul-harvesting machine can only be carried out by hollow people.

Marty Supreme (2025)

DIRECTED BY: Josh Safdie
SCREENPLAY BY: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Darius Khondji
EDITED BY: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie
MUSIC BY: Daniel Lopatin
STARRING: Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion, Kevin O’Leary, Tyler Okonma, Abel Ferrara, Fran Drescher

The foundational malady that underlies America’s self-conception is an unresolvable contradiction: The richest and most powerful nation in the world is always besieged by internal and external enemies who want to destroy our way of life. We love a good underdog story, but we’re obsessed with Manifest Destiny. Marty Supreme is a bustling, whizzing, hyperkinetic story—and beneath all the whirring chaos is a deep meditation on the idea of exceptionalism, the Great Man theory, the duality of invincibility and victimization that pulls us in opposing directions. Marty Hauser is a self-stylized Cinderella man born with a purpose, an antagonist, and a generational talent. He refuses to play the heel in any situation, despite his gift for shit-talking and uncanny ability to poke the crowd to jeer against his villainous pose. With an antic and disturbing emphasis on Marty’s audacious escapades, we never get into his head or body, nothing to glean about his athletic subjectivity, his feel for ping-pong, or his competitive strategies. This is nothing more than a thrill-ride of his temperamental chutzpah—a megawatt demeanor and a penchant for braggadocio. His obsession with winning at the cost of everything is a characterization of the ruinous effects of ruthless ambition and American exceptionalism.

It’s 1952, and our eponymous protagonist is a salesman at his uncle’s shoe store on New York’s Lower East Side. When his friend Rachel—who is wedded to a lumpish husband—enters the store, they sneak to the back room for a quickie, which leads to her pregnancy. He’s determined to fly to London to compete in an international ping-pong championship, to prove that this scuffling hustler is the best table tennis player in the world. He undertakes some ruses and some outmaneuvering to get there. Once he’s overseas, he finds the competition stiffer than expected, especially from a Japanese player named Endo-san who uses a new kind of paddle and grip. But getting into the spotlight matters more to Marty than any singular match. He craves fame and the trappings of success, which requires some wealthy backers, so he bulldozes his way into a suite at the Ritz and uses his impudent charm on a glamorous ex-movie star (Kay) and an abrasive businessman named Milton Rockwell, who has an eye for publicity, and as he says, a nose for bullshit. He initiates an affair with Kay and lives beyond his means. But he is soon faced with a screeching quandary, slapped with a fine for his boorish behavior in London, left with little time to pay it off before entering a tournament in Tokyo, so he is left to hustle his way out of the debt via some elaborate, dangerous exploits. The result is a whirlwind of chaos that involves such out-of-control elements like falling through a hotel ceiling via bathtub that results in a run-in with a gangster and his hyperactive dog, ping-pong hustling with his cabdriver friend, a car crash, a break-in, a shoot-out, a fire, a flood, another affair, and a display of public defiance so brazen that it risks becoming an international incident.

Marty is glammed down—sporting a unibrow, pencil-stache, and acne scars. He may look like a sweaty and agitated neb, but he’s a virtuoso athlete, a Lothario, and a natural-born performer. His shameless pursuit of publicity involves wheeling, blustering, plain lying with a straight face, and even whipping out a gun. His cowing enthusiasm and arrant showmanship upstages Kay’s costar in a rehearsal for a play that’s supposed to catapult her comeback. His electric intensity renders ordinary life too much to bear for him. For all Marty’s low-rent background and chip-on-a-shoulder mentality, he has some interesting foils. Marty’s stunt partner is a former Hungarian ping-pong champion who survived Auschwitz. Kay lived in the spotlight that Marty craves and found it unfulfilling. Endo-san is a child of a war-torn nation who channeled his loss of hearing into an attuned focus on ping-pong, becoming the kind of world champion and national hero Marty aspires to be, only to return home and humbly assemble clocks. But Marty arrogantly refuses his uncle’s promotion to store manager. He scoffs at Milton’s $1,000 offer to throw an exhibition match to Endo-san, despite performing similarly carnival-esque halftime shows for the Harlem Globetrotters. He’s living his one life to the fullest. But his dubious devotion to his ego poses a simple question: Can you be the best in the world without being a monster? The answer is a resounding maybe.

Marty’s obsession with winning mirrors America’s national psyche at the time, and really since World War II. But our definition of success is usually a distraction from our own humanity and the people we love. Marty almost loses it all, and he is completely stripped of being Supreme. The drama between him and Milton reaches its apex when the pen tycoon utters the word “power” with hardened authority while spanking Marty’s bare ass with a ping-pong paddle. He flew halfway around the world to play in a meaningless exhibition match with Endo-san, the absurd Rocky-style tension contrasted with his unborn child nearly murdered as Rachel was shot and rushed into surgery due to his reckless pursuit of fame. He may have won the game, but he lost the hustle.

Marty returns home to realize that the world doesn’t end at the bridge of the table, a world where his decisions do have consequences. As he gazes at his newborn boy, the mask of confidence and bravado slips, sobbing at either the existential meaning of parenthood or because he sees himself in his son. It’s a triumph of narcissism, and the ending follows logically from the film’s initial sex scene, his name superimposed over footage of swimming spermatozoa fertilizing Rachel’s egg cell, which then turns into an orange ping-pong ball. They’re both winners: Marty won the match, and his son won the sperm race. There’s no evidence that Marty has changed because he’s the kind of guy who’ll die chasing his dreams—even if he’s found at a New Jersey gas station with a shotgun-sized hole in his skull.

That’s it for this week’s instalment of The Watchlist, brought to you by Beaglesgate Productions.

In two weeks, we’ll be diving into Part Two of films about the pursuit of the American Dream. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on these movies, where they place among your personal favorites, or if you think they’re overrated.

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There are many ways to describe love, but for me, it’s like a strong stimulant buzz followed by an overwhelming bubbling of emotions before it melts into a slurry. I would gaze into my girlfriend's hazel-flecked eyes, and my entire torso would fill with a warm jelly-like goo, leaving me with the cozy feeling that everything would be alright and that nothing else mattered in the world except her lying there with me, bodies intertwined. And then I’ll remember that she forgot to clean out the espresso maker, again. See, love is the noun and the verb. There is the idealized version of our partners, and there is the baggage and bullshit that comes with it. Love is the noun and the verb, but nonsensical social norms also cloud it with unnecessary adjectives. Much of our perceptions of romance come from formulaic rom-coms that reduce relationships to grand gestures and sappy Hallmark pablum. But today, we’re exploring some movies that subvert the hackneyed tropes and dive into the underbelly of love.

Anyways, let’s get to it…

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

(500) Days of Summer (2009)

DIRECTED BY: Marc Webb
SCREENPLAY BY: Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Eric Steelberg
EDITED BY: Alan Edward Bell
MUSIC BY: Mychael Danna, Rob Simonsen
STARRING: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel

Expectations can help us make sense of the world and give us hope, but they can also destroy us if they are completely out of sync with reality. They are shaped by what we want to happen, based on assumptions and a bit of quixotic wishcasting. Maybe we’d all have a healthier outlook on relationships if we did away with the idea that there is only one soulmate in the world for anyone. There are over 7 billion people on this planet, so what are the odds that The One is living at the same time as you, or is in the same country, or is around the same age as you? People are complicated, relationships are hard, some people are more compatible with others, and many people can theoretically be the one depending on our current stage in life. Ultimately, every relationship takes commitment. There’s no magic arrow, no special spark—it’s just work.

Tom Hansen is a greeting card writer and definitely a hopeless romantic. As he navigates the exhilarations and the doldrums of a 500-day relationship with Summer Finn, we see his movie-inspired fairy tale perception of love that he projected onto a fleeting romance. When we first see Tom, he’s reeling from his breakup with Summer, despite her consistently reminding him that she wasn’t interested in anything serious, but this sort of grave finality sets up a definitive expiration date. He is too caught up in his fantasy of Summer to ever grasp at a sober assessment of their relationship issues, because the “manic pixie dream girl” archetype is often produced by a man who falls in love with the idealized illusion of the person, rather than the real version. When they first meet in an elevator, Tom only begins to pay attention to her once she passively mentions that she also “loves the Smiths.” He interprets this banal moment as fate, the genesis of a deep connection, and for all we know, in Summer’s eyes, she was just making small talk. His misguided pursuit of finding The One causes him to neglect other aspects of his life, like pursuing his passion for architecture. His view of romance is literally child-like, as he consistently consults his teenage sister for dating advice. “Look, I know you think she was the one,” she assures Tom. “But I don’t. Now I think you’re just remembering the good stuff. Next time you look back, I think you should look again.”

There is a quote from Robert Evans that says, “There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each differently.” Between her body language and verbal cues, it should’ve been obvious that Summer was less invested than Tom. While she insisted on keeping things casual, their situationship reached an inflection point about halfway through the movie. Earlier in the night, Tom punches a guy at the bar in a childish attempt to defend Summer’s honor, or whatever. The other guy knocks him out. Summer rightfully calls Tom out on his shit, reiterating that she never asked him to fight another guy and implying that he was doing it more for himself than for her. So Tom spills his heart and makes his intentions clear: He isn’t interested in continuing the relationship as anything less than a firm commitment. Now, if Summer was steadfast in her position, she would’ve broken up with the guy who was clearly over-invested. But Summer returns to his apartment and essentially tells him she’s ready to start treating this more seriously. Perhaps she led him on, but love is messy, and there is a grey area between stringing someone along and someone revisiting their initial instincts by giving a person another chance to trigger that ineffable connection. Summer was in that awkward zone, but barely. Although she only appears completely unsympathetic because we see a fragmented, non-linear, and deeply subjective narrative that details Tom’s world in painstaking specificity, while rendering Summer’s backstory vague and her feelings unexplored.

A few months after their breakup, Tom runs into Summer, and she invites him to a party that she’s hosting at her apartment. When he arrives, we see a split-screen format that juxtaposes his “expectations” with “reality,” with his desire to rekindle their connection contrasted with her cordial but distant demeanor. Once Tom spots Summer sporting an engagement ring, he’s hit with a blunt-force realization that their relationship had fatally and finally fizzled out, and their happy ever after would not unfold like a perfect love story. The truth has its way of dismantling illusions, and Tom only feels betrayed and shattered because of the expectations he built in his mind. And Summer never had any pathological commitment issues, nor did she get hitched to hurt Tom. Rather, she didn’t know what she wanted, and she didn’t know what love is supposed to feel like—i.e., the same emotional conflict that torments Tom. And both characters have analogs for how movies have shaped their perceptions and conceptions of love. Tom has the Disney musical scene after he first sleeps with Summer; her decision to take the plunge and then end things with Tom was triggered by The Graduate, watching the protagonists reach the awkward, disconcerting realization that what was once a passionate fling has curdled into a charmless reality. The hard truth is that everyone is either a Tom or a Summer at least once in their lives.

If Summer’s character is widely derided as a cold-hearted commitment-phobe, she is oddly vindicated at her wedding. It’s objectively callous to set up a seemingly romantic-ish night reconnecting with your ex at your engagement party without telling them beforehand that you’ve moved on and you’re engaged. She must’ve been aware of what kind of impression her invitation would leave on a guy who tends to over-romanticize everything. But it’s not entirely uncommon for someone to talk to or meet up with their ex one last time to confirm the way they feel about their current partner really is different, that they’re making the right decision. Later, when she’s talking on the bench with Tom, he asks, “Why did you do that?” And all she says is, “Because I wanted to.” Not a satisfying answer, but she explains that she didn’t feel that spark with Tom, and she needed one final affirmation.

Tom’s breakup with Summer reinvigorates his own mission, and by working on himself, he learns that romance and relationships should be something you add to the life you’ve built for yourself, rather than being your life. Our individual journeys need to have meaning and fulfillment and actualization, regardless of our romantic situation. And despite gritting through a brutal breakup, we can still find love with someone new. When one romantic endeavor fails, it is not the death knell of our love lives. It should, ideally, be a growing experience, a realization that there are plenty of others who are conceivably The One if we just opened ourselves to the possibility, and to healthier expectations. The great irony of Tom’s journey is that he wasted months brooding over how Summer destroyed his childlike sense of wonder and faith in love, when she inadvertently proved it true by finding someone who changed her perspective. She just didn’t love you, Tom. But Summer kindling a burning desire with another guy means that Tom’s whole cliched ideology of “love at first sight” was proven true. Romanticism won.

The Lobster (2015)

DIRECTED BY: Yorgos Lanthimos
SCREENPLAY BY: Efthimis Filippou, Yorgos Lanthimos
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Thimios Bakatakis
EDITED BY: Yorgos Mavropsaridis
STARRING: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Jessica Barden, Olivia Colman, Ashley Jensen, Ariane Labed, Angeliki Papoulia, John C. Reilly, Léa Seydoux, Michael Smiley, Ben Whishaw

What would the world look like if it were the inverse of Lord of the Flies? It would be a strange place with stranger people all behaving like children, adults aping “adult-like” social norms imposed through everyone’s unquestioning acceptance. The most bizarre of these rules feels like something out of a schoolyard, where children role-play and construct their own society out of equal parts naiveté and cruelty. It’s almost like an alien’s documentary on human relationships.

In this dystopian society obsessed with love—albeit a type of love that’s sterile and deadpan—our protagonist David is escorted to this demented match-making hotel after his wife leaves him for another man. The hotel manager notifies him that every guest has 45 days to find a partner or they will be transformed into an animal of their choosing, and the dog that accompanies David is formerly his brother. He only cares about living as long as he possibly can and having sex, so he chooses to become a lobster. Every notion of love in this society is absolutist. You can either be with someone or stay hopelessly single—there are no other possible romantic arrangements.

The portraits of people in love and those who are lonely create ridiculous expectations around relationships. There are “time limits” and even the literal hunting of “loners” in the woods surrounding the hotel, which leads everyone involved to make awful choices. One man continuously gives himself bloody noses so his partner can sympathize with him, a perfect allegory of how many of us are willing to subject ourselves to misery to find and stay with a partner. David decides to court a notoriously cruel woman who murders his brother, and sips on tea while complaining about the blood and biscuits everywhere, as another woman writhes and screams in agony after falling out of a window. David desperately tries to make it work with her by acting as unfazed and unaffected as she is, going as far as to kick a little girl in the shin. Why can’t we be our authentic selves without limitations or definitions?

And the gatekeepers of ideal relationships are not particularly powerful people—they are hotel managers, police officers, and parents. After David escapes the hotel and into the forest, he joins the band of loners, who forbid any kind of intimacy. David, who is short-sighted, begins to fall for a similarly myopic woman, and the loners undertake covert missions into the city, which requires David and this woman to go undercover as husband and wife. They are in the apartment of “the parents,” whose traditionalist disposition compels them to judge others for being single, but they don’t harbor any suspicions about David and his fake wife because they performed a heavy-handed, cliché display of love and cuddled on the couch. A police officer questions David at a shopping center, and only lets him go back to his routine after he says he was waiting for his wife to finish shopping. When the loners launch a raid to sabotage the hotel, they trap the managers, who are also a married couple, by holding them at gunpoint. They tricked the husband into shooting his wife to save himself, and he did so without hesitation. But the gun isn’t loaded, and the loners leave them to face a brutal revelation. There are people everywhere who lie to themselves or their partners just to stay in a relationship.

It doesn’t matter if a couple is illicit; it matters that they try to make it work. The leader of the loners obtains the short-sighted woman’s journal and discovers her plan to escape with David. The leader takes the woman into the city to have an operation to fix her poor eyesight, but instead has her blinded. The movie sets out to destroy the premise that there’s a perfect match for everybody, because every relationship is essentially a trade-off as long as the cost is worth the benefit. If David is really committed to making things work with his now-blinded lover, he can simply accept that she can no longer see. They eventually run away and sit down at a diner, and after his everlong obsession with having commonalities with his partners, David faces the choice of stabbing himself in the eyes and staying with his lover, or sulking back to the hotel to transform into a lobster. Since lobsters are basically blind animals, it doesn’t really matter which one he chooses. Either way, he got what he wanted: To live long, have consistent sex, and return to a mundane existence.

We delude ourselves with rules and reasons for love and contrive all these formulas that lead us toward a self-fulfilling defeat that we’ve been sold as fate. And when we see the irony in these rules, we reject them completely, conditioning ourselves to live outside of these suffocating parameters. So what happens when we decide to love again? How do we embrace the love we crave when it clashes against the love we’ve learned?

Phantom Thread (2017)

DIRECTED BY: Paul Thomas Anderson
SCREENPLAY BY: Paul Thomas Anderson
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Paul Thomas Anderson
EDITED BY: Dylan Tichenor
MUSIC BY: Jonny Greenwood
STARRING: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lesley Manville, Vicky Krieps

Seamstresses who worked in the East End of Victorian London used the term “phantom thread” to describe the sensation they felt after emerging from long, repetitive hours in the workshop. After returning home exhausted, they would find their hands moving involuntarily, their fingers collapsed as though they were sowing phantom threads. It’s a title that hints at the gothic undercurrents of pain, the kind that serves as a reminder that our bodies are more than external expressions of agony. It is one of the most miraculous ways in which we can communicate our presence. It is a living and breathing reminder that our bodies cannot possibly be contained within the skeletal structures that make up our physical being. We all deal with the ghosts from relationships past, as well as the traumas and memories. And all their common themes, narratives, and tensions are bound together by threads.

Phantom Thread is a claustrophobic chamber drama about the balance between giving and taking, conceding and resisting in relationships. If this isn’t the cinephilic American Psycho, then it’s bizarro Eyes Wide Shut, in which a couple finally learns how to communicate and hear each other—but instead of fixing a once-happy relationship, they double down on an absurdly toxic one. It’s a nuanced portrait of a twisted bond between two flawed, complicated, and vulnerable people, a psychological romantic drama that probes into the internal, slow-burning mechanics of obsession and control, and all of its quiet tenderness and cruelty.

The film introduces the forbidding, immaculately presented figure of Reynolds Woodcock, an obsessive, perfectionist couturier in fashionable mid-1950s London. He lives and works in an elegant Georgian townhouse in Mayfair, known as the “House of Woodcock,” where royalty and women of high society come to be fitted for bespoke dresses each new season. It’s also where a team of backroom seamstresses toils under the watchful eye and purse-lipped disdain of Reynold’s sister, Cyril. Everything is “just so” in this world, precisely ordered to facilitate the unencumbered creativity of the great man at the helm. Romances with women only last while they’re useful for the work. Once the muse has fulfilled her purpose, or when Reynolds is simply bored with them, Cyril steps in to usher the ladies out the door—that is, until he meets a woman who can’t be cast aside so easily.

While dining at a seaside hotel, Reynolds meets a waitress who is an orphaned Eastern European immigrant named Alma. Over breakfast, he seduces her with promises of glamour and high society, and she is soon living in the Mayfair house and spending weekends in his country manor. However, Alma refuses to submit to Reynolds as so many of her predecessors have. As she tells him on their first evening together: “If you want to have a staring contest with me, you’ll lose.” When Reynolds is later seized suddenly by a mysterious, violent sickness, he finally loses control.

Reynolds is afflicted with a compulsive desire for perfection, but he is also petty, childish, egotistical, manipulative, narcissistic, and vulnerable. His violent mood swings inhabit the contradictions of someone so brilliant and fragile. He had perfected everything except finding an ideal partner, an equal. Alma is the perfect counterpart: Although she doesn’t match him in education or experience, she asserts herself in her subtle fortitude. It was odd and slightly amusing to learn that Reynolds knew what she was doing. And he realized there was peace in relinquishing control over everything. Their chemistry makes the story work: It’s about negotiation, submission, control, and intimacy—not spectacle, big fights, or dramatic twists.

“As I think you know, Alma, I prefer my asparagus with oil and salt. And knowing this, you’ve prepared the asparagus with butter. Now, I can imagine in certain circumstances being able to pretend that I like it made this way. Right now, I’m just admiring my own gallantry for eating it the way you’ve prepared it.”

“This was an ambush, Alma. To what purpose?”

“Are you a special agent sent here to ruin my evening and possibly my entire life?”

“My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.”

Their weird BDSM-via-mushroom kink is hilarious and profound, as Alma channels this ritual to help Reynolds embrace a momentary “weakness.” He wants to let go, but needs to be guided there—so he learns to trust in her intuition. When Alma initially poisons him with mushrooms, he finds himself in a vulnerable state and experiences a hallucination of his mother. By the end of the film, Reynolds accepts that he has to relinquish some control for the relationship to work. By falling dangerously ill, it’s a way for him to access a maternal kind of unconditional love, and Alma gains some agency and sense of feeling uniquely necessary and in control. This temporary sickness is like a masochistic vacation for Reynolds; his elegance and standards keep his business from slipping into a chaotic mess, but his drive for order is emotionally and physically unsustainable. The risk of it all keeps them both invested in each other. When Alma makes a mushroom omelette that will render him immobile and frail, he delightfully utters, “Kiss me, my girl…”

In this world, mastery is considered a virtue. Alma knows how to nurture Reynolds’s creative genius. Both of them view control as preferable to powerlessness. And, by going along with the mushroom poisoning, Reynolds still remains at the reins of what’s happening to him. Knowledge is seen as better than ignorance, struggle preferable to bliss. But having control isn’t always optimal, since surrendering to someone you trust is, to some at least, preferable to having control over someone you can never truly respect. In the end, your attitude towards relationships will influence how you view their future as a couple: They’re either doomed, or they found a way to make it work.

That’s it for this week’s instalment of The Watchlist, brought to you by Beaglesgate Productions.

Next week, we’ll be diving into the love and pursuit of the American Dream. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on these movies, where they place among your personal favorites, or if you think they’re overrated.

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As we gear up for Valentine’s Day, it’s easy for the cynics to dismiss it as a capitalist scheme, but what holidays aren’t? Sure, St. Patrick’s Day was invented by the Dropkick Murphys to inflate their streaming numbers, but I’m still going to try (and fail) to split the G on a few pints and absolutely crush some corned beef sandwiches. Imagine refusing to celebrate Christmas and declining to buy gifts for any of your friends and family, or not handing out candy on Halloween, or passing on a great Thanksgiving dinner. “I don’t need a special day to show my girl that I love her,” is a take for killjoys or the worst guys you’ve ever met.

All of this brings us to the Before trilogy, a celebration of romance specifically because of how realistic and life-affirming its portrayal of love is. I used to think that Sunrise and Sunset were clearly superior to Midnight—admittedly, the beginning of the third does drag a bit—but subsequent rewatches have given me a renewed appreciation of how each component gives a well-rounded portrayal of how an enduring infatuation progresses into a durable relationship, even if the relationship shifts to a responsibility. They each serve different functions at different points in our lives, and picking which one is your favorite may depend on how old you are. Sunrise is peak when you’re in your teens or early-20s, when you’re more idealistic as you first get into the groove of figuring out who you want to be. Sunset is for when you are in your late-20s to early-30s, when you’re settled into who you are and your choices carry heavier consequences, a peak junction of our lives. Midnight shows that Jesse and Celine—or really anyone in a committed long-term relationship—will be forever linked due to the lives we’ve built together. Even if Midnight is broadly considered to be the worst of the three, it has arguably the best-acted scene of the trilogy as the two protagonists fight in the hotel room, which demolishes all of Marriage Story.

Anyways, let’s get to it…

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

Before Sunrise (1995)

DIRECTED BY: Richard Linklater
SCREENPLAY BY: Richard Linklater, Kim Krizan
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Lee Daniel
EDITED BY: Sandra Adair
MUSIC BY: Fred Frith
STARRING: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

Smartphones have brought an antiseptic safety to dating. It blurs the distinction between connectivity and connection. We might be less inclined to embark on a whirlwind spontaneous adventure with someone we’ve just met, knowing that we can text or FaceTime each other at any given moment. There’s less intrigue and curiosity when we can size each other up on social media. We have each other, not in the fleeing moments of our present and presence, but in the palm of our hands. The lightning-in-a-bottle magic of Before Sunset feels like a quaint ‘90s idyll, but it still poses some prescient universal questions. Does love have to be eternal for it to be real? Is longing for something better than getting it?

Many romance films, well, romanticize the naivety of young love. Director Richard Linklater does so in the first installment of the Before trilogy, but this specific love is colored with tragedy. The film opens inside a train cart chugging across the European countryside, focused on an older couple in the middle of a heated argument. Their boisterous bickering causes Celine to retreat a few seats to the back near Jesse, and from there, the idealism of instant attraction brushes up against the bitter fate of one day turning into something resembling that resentful couple.

At the beginning of their conversation, before the initial awkwardness turns to free-flowing whimsy, Jesse mentions how he wants to make a documentary about people’s unremarkable routines, and Celine dismisses the idea as too boring. But we see how falling in love can be both mundane and magical. Their dialogue, though realistic, is quite cheesy, but that’s how many of us sound when we’re trying to impress someone we hope will reciprocate our infatuation. The pseudo-intellectual musings. Lying down on the grass at night, the electric buzz of magnetism pulsates through your bones. How they describe the dreamlike feeling of time stopping, as if they were trapped in a trance. How the hours dragged by too slowly, but not slow enough. A tense deliberation over whether sleeping with each other will soil the memories of this remarkable night. Diving into their parents and their childhood. The mutual promise of meeting up at the same place six months in the future. Anyone with half a heart could see bits of themselves falling in love through this progression.

Somewhere in the middle of their conversation, they open up about their past relationships and recent breakups. In a way, these two hatchlings quickly fall for each other because they are freshly single and are each other’s rebounds. But there’s something more substantive here. They initially decide not to sleep with each other because of a deeper refusal to condemn this encounter in memory as a one-night stand. Of course, they end up smashing on the grass, but the moments of sexual tension are secondary to their lust for each other’s personalities. Their genuine affection for each other fuels an uninterrupted conversation: Sleeping and showering, those would get in the way of what little time they have left. If Jesse were only in it for the sex, he would’ve gotten a decent night’s sleep before his flight back to LA the following morning. But he chose to spend a night in her heartbeat hotel, where, for a moment, he felt less invisible in this crowded world.

Jesse and Celine capture the mid-20s struggle between young adulthood and maturity. Jesse believes in reincarnation, Celine doesn’t. Celine is mesmerized by poetry; Jesse doesn’t care much for it. They both alternate between naivety and cynicism. Jesse blows off the palm reader as a con-artist whereas Celine is more spiritual. Celine has a progressive, European mindset and a grand idealism about what society could be, and while Jesse is somewhat of a stereotypical “dumb American,” he also proffers many perspectives and tidbits that Celine had rarely considered. Neither of them is “right,” and they’re both figuring out their outlook on the world and their place within it. Their chemistry stems from their differing perspectives.

Juggling the finitude of our time on this planet and with each other, and the magic of finding your soulmate, is heartbreaking and breathtaking. They both foreshadow a relationship that could reach the cold, clinical climax of the go-through-the-motions phase of long-term love — where the sex is less exhilarating, the future plans curdle into routine, and they become cardboard cutouts of what they were. We’re all too familiar with stale relationships prolonged for comfort’s sake, and they seem almost resigned to the inevitability of hurting each other if they were ever to be a real couple. I think it was some ‘90s band that said satisfaction is the death of desire.

Life is vaudeville madness, so these young lovers try to ground themselves in pragmatism, but they’ve built an emotional intimacy that’s impossible to ignore. It’s funny how the smallest snippets of love and recognition can keep us resuming the indispensable delusions that life depends on. But every relationship is fragile at the whim of an existential force, and in this case, it was time. Jesse and Celine have to confront the stinging defeat of watching someone special drift in the opposite direction in this too-big world. But in defiance, they agree to meet each other again. Is that irrational? Sure, but love compels us to step outside of what we think is possible.

Before Sunset (2004)

DIRECTED BY: Richard Linklater
SCREENPLAY BY: Richard Linklater, Kim Krizan, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Christos Voudouris
EDITED BY: Sandra Adair
MUSIC BY: Graham Reynolds
STARRING: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

Even without featuring a climactic kiss like Sunrise or a sex scene like Midnight, Sunset might be the most romantic installment of the Before trilogy. Where Sunrise ends with an open-ended and optimistic uncertainty, the sequel is a snapshot of Jesse’s and Celine’s settled lives defined by the broken dreams of their youths and the obligations of adulthood. There is character development, but realistic growth within the confines of spending a few hours with a person. Every scene addresses larger themes about life, setbacks, and what it means to be human.

Exactly nine years after their wanderlust encounter, Jesse and Celine meet once again in the Mecca of love. Paris is the last stop of Jesse’s book tour for a romance novel he wrote about that specific night, and Celine makes an impromptu appearance to catch up with a familiar stranger. We don’t know how either of them will feel about seeing each other, who’s married, and what they still feel for the other. It was never confirmed if they slept with each other the night they met. But they no longer seek that same sense of belonging—their ambitions have changed, their aspirations have been compromised, and their free-spirited attitude has settled into gentle risk-aversion. Now in their 30s, both of them are more jaded, and there is so much at stake and so little time. Instead of discussing the Big Philosophical Questions and meandering about in a timeless daze, they’re talking about their own lives, playing a game of emotional chess with each other, revealing and hiding their feelings piece-by-piece and shielding themselves from another foreloarn heartache. If a night spent in Vienna was spontaneous, a day in Paris is full of caution and hesitation.

Before Sunset shows the struggle of someone in their young-30s in an existential fight with themselves: Should they still act upon their hopes and dreams from their 20s, or should they focus on the lives they’ve already built for themselves? Jesse says he’s content with his partner and son, but his eyes express a buried desire to grasp at something more. But if he acts on these impulses, he is making a life-altering decision on magic, the kind that risks sinking into the mundane. Except, this time, if a relationship with Celine doesn’t pan out in the way he’s been envisioning for almost a decade, there isn’t a string of hopeful what-ifs to hold onto. So what happens when a dream is no longer a fantasy concoction of projection, wishcasting, and untainted idealism? What do you do when that dream becomes real and fragile? Do we settle into the familiar or take a risk on something uncertain but potentially fulfilling?

When they finally arrive at Celine’s apartment, Jesse is sitting on her bed, staring in awe as she serenades and dances. “Baby, you’re gonna miss that plane,” she reminds him, but he’s too giddy to care. Jesse has already made his decision. “I know,” he responds in the middle of a chuckle, already planting his feet in the ground. He can catch a later flight, he will see his son again, he can divorce his wife, and arrange custody. But he’s not worrying about that right now. In this moment, Jesse has fully relinquished himself from the restraints of time that once burdened his ability to connect with Celine.

Before Midnight (2014)

DIRECTED BY: Richard Linklater
SCREENPLAY BY: Richard Linklater, Kim Krizan, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Lee Daniel
EDITED BY: Sandra Adair
STARRING: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

Jesse and Celine are now in their 40s, having made their choices and living with the consequences. The limitations of time and the lingering tension of unanswered questions are no longer at stake, only simmering resentments that come to a boil in a hotel room. Midnight is less immediate and thrilling than Sunrise and Sunset, but it is an unvarnished portrait of a messy, complicated relationship, with all its love, friction, and unspoken history. It forces us to face what happens after the romance settles, after years go by, when love is still there but weighed down by everything that comes with time.

After they fell for each other on that fateful night in Vienna, Jesse and Celine were separated by time and distance. But that wistful feeling never disappeared, and it can linger for a lifetime if it’s never resolved. When a real relationship is cultivated, and you get familiarized with your partner’s presence and idiosyncrasies, that initial wistful feeling usually subsides—and that’s when we choose to love our partners, which is something we must actively do every morning. Jesse and Celine expected that initial romantic spark to burn forever, and are clearly confused and disappointed about the mundanity of it all.

But Midnights also highlights the strengths and positives of a long-term relationship. How well can you know someone? How honest can you be with them? How can you explore and grow through them? But we also see how romantic our relationships can be after the years pass by. The joy of sex with someone you love. The way someone can still genuinely surprise you, even when you feel like you know them so well. The communication. The dumb jokes and quirks. The bond. The shared experiences. Memories. Helping each other through life’s trials. It does this all through tiny snippets of dialogue traversing from one topic and mood to the next.

Their fight in the hotel room is brutal. While Jesse and Celine have argued in the past, this is the first instance where we’re not reveling in the romance of it all, where there is real tension between the two. How they feel about Jesse wanting to move to Chicago to be with his son—whom he had with his first wife—the sacrifices they made to be with each other, their contributions to their relationship, the resentments, the alleged infidelities. The dialogue doesn’t rely on each character’s positive emotions about the other; we see their frustrations, which lends a dynamic view of them as a couple and as individuals. We see both of their insecurities. Jesse wears his more openly while Celine is more guarded. She is roiled with the fear that Jesse will leave her as he did with his first wife, that he wants to be in Chicago, and that he won’t find her as attractive as she ages. In asking about Jesse’s infidelity, even as she’s likely guilty of the same, she is looking to justify her fears and end the relationship on her terms before she has the chance to be hurt by whatever comes. If Jesse was willing to cheat on his first wife with her—and Celine cheated on the war correspondent with him—it recalls that classic adage: If they’ll cheat on someone for you, they’ll cheat on you for someone else.

Jesse, because he knows her so well, cuts through “the bullshit” and reaffirms that his commitment lies with her and their children. And Celine asks him, as she has across all three movies, “Would you still get off the train with me now?” Whether they both strayed or not is irrelevant. The movie is trying to get at the core of a relationship and ask how the bonds between people last, and Jesse’s response gets to the heart of that point. And we get a full-circle moment: They met because a couple on a train were berating each other, and now they’re realizing how time changes the nature of a relationship between two imperfect people.

After Celine storms out of the hotel room, Jesse finds her on a patio by the water, sitting at a table alone, and does a time machine bit that’s reminiscent of the way he convinced her to get off the train and spend a day with him in Vienna. She is initially unamused, but when the frustrations subside, she asks about what the future has in store for them. There is still love there, and she doesn’t want to give up their life together, willing to compromise and put both of them first. Despite how messy and real their arrangement is, they care about each other on a level that transcends the superficial.

Midnights isn’t a fairy tale ending, but it does affirm the beauty of long-term commitments. What is compatibility? What is compromise? What makes a relationship worth holding on to? There are no definitive answers. Our decision to stay in a relationship is dependent on whether we perceive our lives to be better or worse with or without our partner. We stay when we feel it is innately valuable, worth fighting for. No one can tell us where that line is, where it is no longer worth it; it is something we decide, day by day, month to month, year to year. All relationships are a balancing act between romanticism and cynicism.

That’s it for this week’s instalment of The Watchlist, brought to you by Beaglesgate Productions.

On Wednesday, we’ll be keeping up with the Valentine’s Day preparation with some love stories for cynics. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on these movies, where they place among your personal favorites, or if you think they’re overrated.

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Just to be clear, fuck ICE: They’re full of unemployable, cosplaying idiots committing atrocities for a prissy cube-shaped golf bitch who does not care about this country or anyone who is not him. This regime is truth-twisting evil, and if you disagree, please use your brain. Otherwise, as a newsletter that wants to be serious sometimes and silly at othertimes, I try to avoid the pitfall of “A Truly Sad Week In America, Plus The 2005 NBA Redraftables.” This trap's extremely pithy name was inspired by a June 2020 episode of Bill Simmons' podcast, which sums up the challenge of attempting to discuss something serious—in this case, the George Floyd murder at the hands of Minneapolis police—while also remembering some NBA guys. So, as someone who jokes about the banalities of everyday life and the big-picture systemic forces that drive it all, it is a reminder of how jarring it can be to do both.

There has been plenty of commentary about the disgraceful ongoing ICE offensive in Minneapolis, I’ve been trying to avoid the temptation of doomscrolling so I don’t warp my brain and pan-fry my morale. There’s a line between Staying Aware and voyeuristic algo-lobotomy, and times like these underscore the importance of communing with our humanity, both in political action, and in finding inner peace. For me, one of those outlets is music, but now that my vinyl collection is deep into the hundreds and my Apple Music has over 1,200 albums saved, I fear that I am turning into the audiophile equivalent of someone who has watched too much porn and needs really weird content to get off. I’m listening to genres that sound like Spotify “daylist” titles. I’m like the weed guys when you ask them about their favorite strains. Someone will ask me what I’m jamming out to, and I know “jazz” is the scariest thing a person can say they’re into, so I’ll just say something like, Italian glitchcore slut opera, some Arabic-inspired galactic prison jazz, a little bit neo-Brazilian hyperdonut crunch funk, and dabbling in some electrogiggle folk wave. And since I won’t want to come off as an indomitable music snob, I’ll round out my answer with: microtonal banana polyamorous pirate screams… yeah, I know it’s super mainstream, but it’s a guilty pleasure. When people ask what I’m into, I should stop trying to explain my taste and just say “Creed.”

Anyways, and I have rounded up some albums from 2025 that didn’t make our top 10 albums of the year, but wanted to shout out. As always, let us know what you think in the comments.

And check out “On Repeat Records!”

On Repeat Records

Ditch the algorithm. Music discovery made easy—curated by someone who remembers when a mixtape could change your life.

By Kevin Alexander

MY PICK: Disquiet - The Necks

The four-hour runtime is admittedly intimidating, but it isn’t necessarily designed to be actively listened to, which works in its favor in this context. Each of the four songs is long enough to be its own album, but they have enough going on to keep them interesting throughout. The whole atmosphere is a minimalistic, avant-garde style of jazz, making use of improvisation that is hypnotic and immersive. They’re all repetitive, but feature slowly shifting piano sections and polyrhythmic drumming. “Causeway” features soft pianos and a gradual build-up with a Hammond organ and more drums, all without an overwhelming crescendo. “Rapid Eye Movement” is pleasant and soothing, a slow burn with more differences in the sections, and despite its tonal shifts between pianos and synths, it feels coherent throughout. This album is pure flow state.

KEVIN’S PICK: Cotton Crown - The Tubs

My Response:

A clean, modernized version of the 80’s and 90’s jangle/college rock bands, but with a bit more umph. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kevin was jamming to this in October, because this feels like an autumn car ride: Brisk, bittersweet, and undeniably beautiful. Sure, this album isn’t breaking any new ground, but the melodies are instantly satisfying, the guitars are enchantingly jangly, and with a 30-minute runtime, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. “Strange” is the crown jewel here, with several small vignettes chronicling the detached state of mind in the aftermath of a loved one’s death—the instability, awkwardness, and towering inexplicability. It’s the culmination of an album about struggling to find serenity in the midst of turmoil.

MY PICK: THE BPM - Sudan Archives

After the hyper-cerebral and genre-bending Natural Brown Prom Queen, Sudan Archives gives us a wide-reaching journey through the past, present and future of black influence in disco and dance. This is a dynamic and edgy record that takes big swings beyond its dance-pop core. Most of this is based in Jersey Club and breakbeat influence, and she uses it to explore blackness and queerness through both conventional (love and heartbreak) and unconventional (technology) viewpoints. It truly goes through a breakneck pace for its entire first half, but it is absolutely stunning. Violins and grinding synths leap across vintage textured electronica grooves, the sort of gritty futurism where older analog electronics have been repurposed to chop new melodies into fascinating shapes. ”A BUG’S LIFE” rips across house, nailing the aching melancholy of never quite finding a home. The shuddering passionate ambition underscoring “MY TYPE” is addicting. I also love the manic IDM of “A COMPUTER LOVE,” the grainy yet oily warping patter of the title track, and especially the Irish fiddle breakdown through the angst-inflected hookup of “SHE’S GOT PAIN,” the stomping blasts of horns and twinkling keys through “NOIRE,” and the chirpy gospel through Jersey club of “HEAVEN KNOWS’ with the backing choirs. All of the tracks underscore the precarity in the desire to escape, be it internationally or into the computer.

KEVIN’S PICK: Panorama - Hélène Barbier

My Response:

Neo-psych is a tricky genre because it’s very easy for it to become so airy and featherweight that it dissipates. But Hélène Barbier deftly balances the psych, pop, syrupy melodies, and moments of abrasiveness, so it sticks to your brain. It’s 27 minutes of woozily entrancing and wigged-out art-punk. Despite its brevity, it leaves an impression thanks to the peculiarity of jagged and slinky basslines and harsh, spiky guitar.

MY PICK: Cabin in the Sky - De La Soul

De La Soul has left a profound impact on how I view the world, so I’ll always be excited for a new album from a group this talented and creative, even if posthumous albums don’t have a particularly strong track record. I admire that they went the A Tribe Called Quest route when Phife died and created an album about Trugoy and the space he left behind. I didn’t know they still had it in them, but the guest list should’ve been a hint, with an intro in which Giancarlo Esposito introduces one hip-hop legend after another, a guest list that includes Nas, Black Thought, DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Killer Mike, Common, Slick Rick, and Bilal. When the music starts almost four minutes into the runtime, it’s just banger after banger, and the group examines the impact Trugoy had on their personal and creative lives, his pivotal role in hip-hop history, and exemplifies why they’re continually hailed as some of the movement’s most treasured voices. Tracks like “Sunny Storms” or “Just How It Is (Sometimes)” take me right back to their early albums; they combine emotional rap, conscious rap, jazz rap, pop rap bangers, soul, and much more. The music still features a lot of material by Trugoy himself, and Maseo and Posdnuos give him a worthy send-off. The final two tracks make for an emotionally powerful gut-punch, and I had to collect myself after hearing Gus Fring utter “Thank you, Dave” after such a beautiful tribute. Fly high Trugoy.

KEVIN’S PICK: Cut & Rewind - Say She She

My Response:

This is an earworm and just pure fun. Their “discodelic” sound has the groove and funk locked in, and their confident sweep of harmonies is gorgeous. A tension pulsates with every song, as they kick the door down, announce their presence, and slam the door shut on their way out. “Disco Life” feels like the album’s mission statement: With chant-like harmonies riding a slinky bassline, turning the dancefloor into a place of resistance. There are moments where the sheer density of political commentary, intricate harmonies, and layered arrangements can be a bit overwhelming, but overall, Say She She does revival right by getting to the genre’s roots while adding a unique spin and sense of personality.

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Reviewing these kinds of classic films are intimidating because it’s more or less impossible to say anything fresh about something that’s been discussed for decades. The obvious go-to is to analyze their revolutionary technique, or their historical significance, or their influence on the medium. All of those, of course, are important, but the angle I’ll be going for with this series is how the great films tell a universal or relatable story, how they provoke emotions, and whether they make a worthwhile statement. Maybe it’s because I don’t have a fully developed background in the mechanics of film, but I do work in a creative-adjacent industry with some element of storytelling and emotional resonance, so I ultimately evaluate a piece of art based on interpreting its layers of narrative and its cultural context. Or maybe it’s more satisfying for me, because the stories and perspectives we share is what gives our existence meaning.

Anyways, let’s get to the next batch of the obligatory classics…

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

King Kong (1933)

DIRECTED BY: Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack
SCREENPLAY BY: Edgar Wallace, James Creelman, Ruth Rose
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Eddie Linden, Vernon Walker, J.O. Taylor
EDITED BY: Ted Cheesman
MUSIC BY: Max Steiner
STARRING: Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot

The original King Kong is the father of Jurassic Park, the Alien franchise, and countless other stories in which humanity confronts monsters of single-minded aggression. While Kong brutally destroys everything he encounters, he also cares for his captive human female, protects her, attacks only when provoked, and would be perfectly content to be left alone on his Pacific Island. Kong’s savage rage is unleashed because of the greed of a Hollywood showman, his carnage triggered by the voyeuristic exhibition on a New York stage. The gorilla is made more brutal through his tics and mannerisms, his oversized fangs, his bug-eyed glare, and the way he goes from calm and curious to enraged and predatory. Hints of intelligence and emotion lurk underneath, but are constantly clouded by his need to stay on top of the food chain and to keep trampling and slaughtering. His existence on Skull Island never allowed him to become anything other than an awful killing machine.

Kong himself has evolved to gigantic proportions, a scaled-up embodiment of 19th century European myths about gorillas as violent brutes prone to attacking hunters and abducting women in the Central African rainforest. This stereotype had less in common with the animal’s relatively peaceful vegetarian behavior and more to do with the Victorian-era appetite for exotic sensationalism and prejudices toward their colonial subjects.

The plot here is simple. An enterprising movie director (Denham) hires a ship, recruits his leading lady (Ann) off the New York streets at the last moment, and they sail for a mysterious Pacific island he heard about in Singapore. The island is home to a legendary giant ape, which he hopes to use as a star in his movie. The pacing is stripped down to its barest, most efficient form, which makes the adventure at its core so rewarding. The first half-hour holds its breath, building mystery and intrigue, mounting tension, and once the entourage makes it to the island, the suspense doubles when they encounter a towering gate that separates the village from the untamed jungle.

Even accounting for its slow start and wall-to-wall screaming, there is something primeval and ageless about this film. In the very artificiality of some of the special effects, there is a creepiness that isn’t captured in today’s slick, flawless CGI-saturated images. In Jurassic Park, we are watching a real Tyrannosaurus. Here, we are looking at the imagination of such a creature, and when Kong battles the massive, flesh-eating dinosaur, there’s a moment when he forces its jaws apart—the bones crack, blood drips from the gaping throat, and something immediate happens that’s hard to duplicate on any computer. And when Ann is kidnapped, she is led through the village by the excited tribe, eager to serve her up as an offering to Kong. The camera tracks her journey from a vantage slightly above the throng: Ann is low in frame as the gate looms above and ahead of her, and it opens, revealing an altar framed in the archway and wreathed in shadows. Ann is shackled, an unwilling gift, and we see the gates close behind her from the POV of the crowd, isolating her entirely. The shot is masterful and effortlessly encapsulates the film’s sacrificing of mystery in the name of raw adventure.

Skull Island is established as a counterpart to New York City, and Ann’s relationship between Denham and Kong is the tension between nature and civilization. Kong partially undresses her, touches her, and smells her—both primitivist actions and initiating her into the realm of the Edenic impulses of the jungle tradition. While Denham is more urbane and cosmopolitan, he is equally as controlling of Ann, using her as an object of trade and spectacle. As Kong rampages through Manhattan, it could be interpreted as Western civilization as the source of his destruction, or it’s an allegory of the modern man facing his own nature.

Size is also a prominent element, reducing grown adults to the helplessness of childhood: Men are overthrown from a raft, knocked off a tree, and eaten by a dinosaur, shaken off a huge log by Kong after grabbing it with one paw. An enraged Kong tears through New York City, mindless of human life as he scours the skyline for Ann. He has the singlemindedness of a bonded infant. When he finds Ann in the middle of Manhattan, he carries her to the apex of the Empire State Building, the highest point on a civilized island. He treats her with gentleness compared to the indifference to the destruction he creates to everything else, and gently places her on a ledge while facing a fleet of planes that eventually shoot him down. When Kong falls to the ground, his chest fatally bloodied, someone remarks about how the planes got him. But “it was beauty that killed the beast,” a phrase that represents how our unfettered passions will end in destruction.

12 Angry Men (1957)

DIRECTED BY: Sidney Lumet
SCREENPLAY BY: Reginald Rose (Based on Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose—1954 teleplay on Studio One)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Boris Kaufman
EDITED BY: Carl Lerner
MUSIC BY: Kenyon Hopkins
STARRING: Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, E. G. Marshall, Jack Warden

The concept of “reasonable doubt”—the belief that a defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty—is one of the truly enlightened elements of the American Constitution. This lofty ideal often clashes with the foibles of human nature, clear to anyone who has ever been saddled with jury duty and experienced the mix of personalities that settle like water and vinegar. Some take their civic obligation seriously, and some are in a hurry to leave, all with different perspectives, biases, and weird hangups. In a trial, nobody will ever grasp the full scope of the actual events, left to conjecture and guess on inference. When we assume something happened, we should counterbalance that with the consideration of, What if it didn’t happen? Some of the events in 12 Angry Men would lead to a real-life mistrial, but it beautifully demonstrates how personal interest and attitudes affect a person’s perception of a crime, and why it’s critical to put our biases aside and judge a person on what has been proven.

The film reveals nothing of the trial except for the judge’s perfunctory, almost bored, charge, as if the verdict is a foregone conclusion. We learn nothing of the prosecutor’s or the defense attorney’s respective cases, and only hear of the evidence second-hand while the jurors debate it. A typical courtroom drama ends with a clear-cut verdict, but 12 Angry Men never states whether the defendant is innocent or guilty—just whether the jury has reasonable doubt. “It’s an open and shut case,” snaps Juror No. 3, as the jury first gathers in their claustrophobic little room. When the first ballot is taken, 10 of his fellow jurors agree—and there is only one holdout, Juror No. 8, played by Harry Fonda. The thrill and tension come from personality conflict, dialogue, and body language. The drama happens after the crime and court-room theatrics, a masterpiece of stylized realism. Flawed logic, emotion, and breeding prejudice struggle to control the outcome when faced against reason, debate, and proof.

The vote, which begins as 11-to-1, shifts gradually. Not all of those who initially voted “guilty” are portrayed negatively, but are defined by their personalities, backgrounds, occupations, prejudices, and emotional tilts. Juror No. 4 is a rimmed-glasses stockbroker who tries to avoid emotion altogether. Juror No. 7 has tickets to a baseball game and impatiently changes his vote just to hurry things along. Juror No. 11 is an immigrant who speaks with an accent and questions, “Who tells you that you have the right to play like this with a man’s life?” and was attacked as a foreigner: “They come over, and in no time at all they’re telling us how to run the show.” They have varying emotions and temperaments, but they break one-by-one under the enclosed sweltering heat and the burden of reasonable doubt. The evidence is debated so thoroughly that we feel like we know just as much as the jury does, especially about the old man who claims to have heard the murder and saw the defendant fleeing, and the lady across the street who alleges she saw it happen through the windows of a speeding L train. We see the weapon in question, a switch-blade, and the jurors consider the angle of the knife wound. We watch as Juror No. 8 imitates the shuffling step of the old man, a stroke victim, to see if he could’ve reached the door in time to see the suspect fleeing.

The defendant also looks “ethnic,” but we can’t tell if he’s Italian, Turkish, Indian, Jewish, Arabic, or Mexican. His eyes are ringed with dark circles, and he looks exhausted and frightened. Some jurors make veiled references to “these people.” Finally, Juror No. 10, kindled prejudices are ignited and plunges into a rant: “You know how these people lie. It’s born in them. They don’t know what the truth is. And let me tell you, they don’t need any real big reason to kill someone, either…” As he continues, one juror after another stands up from the table and walks away, turning their back, even the ones who were hesitant to change their vote to not-guilty.

The camera angle initially looks down at the jurors, almost judging them, but they eventually level off and dip. By the end, we look up to them and the ideals of justice. Sure, most of them were easily swayed by the prosecutor’s case, but they were willing to listen to reason. The editing and framing are tactful, placing the actors on cue, the cameras are set to catch them reacting to lines or revelations, and each player is exactly where they should be at any particular moment. It captures logic and debate in action, portraying the flaws of human nature and how they can be redeemed with curiosity and an open heart. In the concluding scene, two jurors shake hands and introduce themselves by name. It’s only then that we realize we’ve been ingratiated to the personalities and backgrounds of all these men, but we never even learned their names.

So is the accused guilty or not-guilty? It doesn’t really matter because this conflict is not about solving a crime; it is about sending a young man to die. “We’re talking about somebody’s life here,” the Fonda character says. “We can’t decide in five minutes. Supposing we’re wrong?” This isn’t a murder mystery; this is a conflict of personalities resolving their differences to make a uniform, informed verdict. Nor does Juror No. 8 argue that the defendant is innocent, but merely that there is not enough proof to determine his guilt. Democracy is designed to bend towards justice, but incompetence, prejudice, and bad/crooked lawyers can gum up what is supposed to be a fair trial. If Juror No. 8 wasn’t so adamant in his convictions, the jury would’ve blithely sent that boy to the electric chair. These are high-stakes matters made routine by a systematic churn that can desensitize us to the brutal consequences of human error. For an all-white, all-male jury, there were clear class divides, representing how a confluence of circumstances and experiences can transcend our demographics and alter our perceptions in ways we accept as de facto reality until they’re challenged.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

DIRECTED BY: Victor Fleming
SCREENPLAY BY: Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, Edgar Allan Woolf (Based on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Harold Rosson
EDITED BY: Blanche Sewell
MUSIC BY: Herbert Stothart
STARRING: Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, Billie Burke, Margaret Hamilton, Charley Grapewin, The Munchkins

The Wizard of Oz is such an iconic movie that filmmakers have been (rightfully) terrified to remake it. It’s a quintessential American film and a quintessential universal fairy tale. For something billed as a children’s movie, much has been debated about its themes—from analyzing U.S. monetary policy to an allegory of embracing atheism—but, for my money, Salman Rushdie wrote the definitive analysis of Wizard of Oz, part love letter part dissection. We study all these details because it’s exceedingly rare for a children’s film to advocate for the virtues of skepticism and self-improvement instead of simple-minded kindness. We explore the finer details of this film because it fills such a large space in our imagination, the idea of home and the fascinating and terrifying world that exists over the rainbow. It penetrates straight to the anxieties of growing up, which is that someday we will no longer be children, that our home will change, and we must face the challenges of life on our own.

As the screen turns from black-and-white to stunning Technicolor, and Judy Garland as Dorothy sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” establishes a feeling that there is something better out there. And using the dream as a storytelling device reinforces its central argument: Our perceptions inform our reality, not the other way around. Her friends on the Yellow Brick Road each show qualities they claim to lack—whether it was the Scarecrow in need of a brain, the Tin Man in need of a heart, or the Cowardly Lion in need of courage. The scarecrow, more specifically, improvises a wonderfully clever song about what we would do if he were smart, suffused with a Socratic paradox: “I could while away the hours, conferrin’ with the flowers, consultin’ with the rain. And my head I’d be scratchin’ while my thoughts were busy hatchin’ If I only had a brain. I’d unravel every riddle for any individ’le, in trouble or in pain.” Then he proceeds to use a clever trick to get Dorothy’s apples. The characters arguably don’t undergo any significant change; rather, they recognize that their positive qualities are present and not mutually exclusive with the negative. Notably, when the wizard recognizes the companions’ good traits, he draws attention to the lack of difference between the companions and those who are seen to epitomize the traits. The only difference between the scarecrow and a “learned man” is how they perceive themselves, represented by the scholarly diploma. Dorothy’s friends were projections of every child’s secret fears. Are we real? Are we ugly and silly? Are we brave enough? In helping her new friends, Dorothy was helping herself, just as an older child will overcome fears by acting brave before a younger one.

In the Wizard of Oz, authority is granted through the perception of one’s own competence, and nothing else. “What separates a king from a peasant?” the Lion asks. “Courage!” Emerald City is a shining and vibrant, but hollow city, and its imagined to be the solution to Dorothy’s problems. It’s contrasted with her dull existence in sepia-toned Kansas. They sing a song about getting a makeover as they arrive, and doorman answers when Dorothy rings a non-functioning bell. The dynamic takes on an interesting dimension when it’s considered in the context of urban vs. rural life. Dorothy’s “I want” song about travelling to somewhere else, where she can be free of her current problems, mirrors a glamorized ideal of urban life. Dorothy’s path from Munchkinland (a “small town”) to the city is literally paved with gold bricks. The dream-like experience in Emerald City portrays all its inhabitants as vaguely similar, and the Wizard is revealed to be a charlatan. Of course, no place is a utopia, and Dorothy is sent on a mission to retrieve the Wicked Witch’s broom, who is just unapologetically evil, dressed in black, living in a gothic castle, and hurling fireballs. Dorothy’s biggest problem in Kansas—her parent’s subservience to Ms. Gulch, who wants to put down Toto—mirrors her confrontation with the Wicked Witch.

Ultimately, it is this revelation that leads Dorothy to make peace with Kansas, and she returns home in a pair of ruby slippers. Kansas and its problems haven’t changed tangibly, but Dorothy is better equipped to deal with her problems. After the magical transition to color, Dorothy meets the same characters again, so we know it’s all a dream, but not really. Her companions in Oz may be literally represented by her uncles—who share congruent qualities and flaws—but also traits that Dorothy has yet to develop. When she asks her uncles for advice on dealing with Ms. Gulch, one tells her she lacks the courage to “spit in her eye.” She also comes to terms with herself, recognizing her positive qualities. She isn’t effectively a different person, but she has a renewed confidence in her capabilities. After all, self-perception is the lens of how we frame the world.

Also, are we going to acknowledge that the Scarecrow was packing heat?

La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928)

DIRECTED BY: Carl Theodor Dreyer
SCREENPLAY BY: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Joseph Delteil
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Rudolph Maté
EDITED BY: Marguerite Beaugé, Carl Theodor Dreyer
MUSIC BY: Léo Pouget, Victor Alix
STARRING: Renée Jeanne Falconetti, Eugène Silvain, André Berley, Maurice Schutz, Antonin Artaud

La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is often regarded as the last masterpiece of silent film, and it’s hard to argue against that statement. It rewrote the rules of what drama in narrative film art should look like—no establishing shots, the whole vision existing in its own claustrophobic world. Movies didn’t exist in the time of Jesus, but the power of the Christian faith has always lain in the resonance of narrative. There is nothing more powerful than an individual sacrificing their body and their life for a higher cause, and many religions have canonized their martyrs as proof of what faith can move people to do. Here, Carl Theodor Dreyer reenacts the persecution of a teenage girl who was elevated into a symbolic leader of the French resistance to English rule. The parallels between Jeanne’s story and Jesus’s are unmistakable, but this version makes the allegory unmistakably blunt. Between the exceptional lighting and the drawn-out, intimate close-ups of a young woman reaching her physical and spiritual limit, this film was far ahead of its time—and some are still struggling to catch up.

It’s impossible to praise this film without mentioning the staggering performance from Maria Falconetti, but the same could apply to the rest of the class and the way Dreyer directed them towards minimalist expressions (contrasted to the broad movements and strong facial expressions that were typical in silent films). This restrained approach, combined with camerawork almost entirely comprised of intense close-ups, makes even a flinch of an eye look like an act of defiance. This austere approach also extends to the sparse movement, the monochrome lighting, and the absence of makeup on the actors. The pace is rapid in some places, but it is never extravagant, and even formalist in following Jeanne’s reactions. The film does not cut away from her unless it’s absolutely necessary, like when the provocations and accusations stir a reaction. There’s a sense that you’re seeing the trial through her eyes.

After half an hour of witnessing her resilience and determination to stand with God and against her captors, the film cuts to an intertitle: “Dans la chambre de torture.” Here, for the first time, Jeanne is presented in a long shot that positions her as unequivocally tiny compared to the sitting priests. Whatever Jeanne could have said would likely have been inconsequential: The odds were stacked against her, so Dreyer deconstructs any mythological perceptions by presenting her as visually weak. But to contrast this almost doll-like feebleness, Jeanne is situated in the center of the screen, so no individual priest stands out from the crowd—they’re all sitting, their black robes mixing in with one another, and their backs to the camera. The cross in the background, of course, foreshadows her eventual burning at the stake, but it’s also ironic—for such a religious symbol, it also epitomises cruel punishment and mutilation. And amid the stark blankness of the walls, this oddly shaped German Expressionist door sticks out, allowing Jeanne’s full figure to stand prominent in regal awkwardness as the priests coerce her into a confession. These elements combine into a fully realized picture of two clashing sides. There is Jeanne the mortal, who is afraid of death and pale in power to the men who control her physical fate; and Jeanne the martyr, whose spirit and higher purpose transcend any of the priests who claim to stand with God but really only stand with their English captors.

It’s a stark scenario: One woman framed alone in a tight close-up versus a collection of corrupt men who look down on her, determined to tempt, trick, and threaten her into betraying her beliefs. When a torture machine is presented, we see Jeanne’s determination acquiesce to fate, a resignation with a fearful and fragile will. I’ve seen this film both set to Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light and completely silent. Both are powerful in their own ways, but with no musical accompaniment, you are left to sit with Jeanne’s haunting visage looking towards you in pitch-black silence, and the images stand alone for a deeper sense of spirituality and pathos. By focusing on the face, we see the depths of pain embedded behind an unshakable faith, someone who endures pain and maintains tremendous resolve under the most ignoble of circumstances. It places the faithful and the doubters in direct conflict. The executors prove nothing but their own expedient hypocrisy and lack of commitment to their professed ideals.

This film is a crucible for the soul, pecking away at the internal machinations of the central character—and by extension the audience—with temptation, intimidation, bartering, and even blackmail. It produces pure, heartbreaking empathy. And it’s all from a 19-year-old’s point of view, accused of crimes punishable by death. Her death is a nuke of catharsis, and we are left in awe of her sacrifice. This isn’t a film about religion so much as it is about the preservation of one’s integrity.

That’s it for this week’s instalment of The Watchlist, brought to you by Beaglesgate Productions.

In February, we’ll be diving into some films about love and romance. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on these movies, where they place among your personal favorites, or if you think they’re overrated.

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One of the biggest challenges in discussing a classic is straining to say something new about a film that everyone has seen, everyone has formed an incorruptible opinion on, and has been so thoroughly and exhaustively discussed and analyzed. It doubtful I’ve succeeded on that front, which is why this dynamic will shape the tenor and pace of this ongoing series of great movies, shows, and documentaries. Rather than rank or compare, I’ll be grouping based on thematic similarities or spiritual alignment. So as I embark on this almost-weekly segment, we’ll kick it off by getting these all-timers out of the way: We know they’re monumental and influential and historically significant. They are the alpha and the omega.

For decades, these Greatest Ever lists have been dominated by the usual suspects, a rotating and exclusive club of consensus classics. Putting these films in the GOAT discussion isn’t so much an indicator of personal preference as it is about the indelible mark they have made on their respective genres or the medium at-large. If I ranked my top 50 movies based purely on personal enjoyment, I’m not sure if any of these films would crack that list, but their classic status transcends any subjective preference. By any “objective” metric, these are five-star films. My only slight gripe with the stodgy, unchanging nature of the canon is it implicitly presumes that filmmaking has not progressed over the last half-century.

Anyways, let’s get to it…

Citizen Kane (1941)

DIRECTED BY: Orson Welles
SCREENPLAY BY: Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Gregg Toland
EDITED BY: Robert Wise
MUSIC BY: Bernard Herrmann
STARRING: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Everett Sloane, Ray Collins, George Coulouris, Agnes Moorehead, Paul Stewart, Ruth Warrick, Erskine Sanford, William Alland

Citizen Kane thrives on its contradictions: It is aspirational and it is tragic. It is an explosion of effects and techniques and stylistic flourishes from the preceding decades of filmmaking all in service to a mainstream-unfriendly downer of a story that offers no uplifting messages or clear moral direction. It stands at the pinnacle of Hollywood’s golden age and a stunning rebuke of it. Orson Wells utilized all the resources a studio system afforded him only to thumb his nose at it.

So why is this film considered among the greatest achievements of cinema?

Amazing cinematography:
If you understand the complexity of black-and-white film cameras or their depth of field, what Gregg Toland did here was remarkable. For example, the scene early on when Kane is a child playing outside the window and you can clearly see him as well as the foreground conversation about him. And there is all of the amazing deep focus in the film. Having a character in close up, right next to the lens, in focus, while in the background a character opens a door and is talking and they’re also in focus—that’s a technically impressive shot even with todays cameras, let alone in the 1940s.

The theme of the movie is more like a book:
The story of Charles Foster Kane is circular, adding more depth every time it passes over his life. With its portentous narration, layers of his character unfold through a fragmented and non-linear progression through newsreels, flashbacks, and interviews, piecing together the memories of those who knew him. This was a novel storytelling technique for its time, shaping many of the cliches and tropes of modern cinema. It’s also a postmodern critique of mass media, how movies can shape our perceptions of what is or isn’t real, how we can never really understand a person through their external actions alone.

Kane is the most American of stories: A child comes from nothing and becomes a successful businessman. But it’s also a paradox: Behind the allure of money and power is a tragic hero who dies broken and alone, unredeemed, a predatory multi-millionaire made cursed and phantomlike by his empire. His story is also universal, about how rooted we are to our past and how we can find ourselves adrift from the ideal person we set out to be. In mankind’s quest for knowledge, it asks: Can you ever really know someone? As the press meticulously searches and catalogs a reason for Kane the public figure, the man himself is also in pursuit of something similar. The repeated utterance of “Rosebud” were his dying words, and it recurs against a series of shots of his childhood sled that has been tossed into a furnace as he was torn from his family and sent east to boarding school. The word becomes an emblem of the security, hope, and innocence of childhood. A person can spend their whole life trying to regain that feeling, a yearning after transience that adults learn to repress. “Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get, or something he lost,” says Thompson, the reporter assigned to solving the puzzle of Kane’s dying word. “Anyway, it wouldn’t have explained anything.” It is the green light at the end of Gatsby’s pier, the leopard atop Kilimanjaro—the more we see its manifestation, the more we are stirred by its mystery.

This narrative is also effective as portraying repulsive or disagreeable people as sympathetic, or at least containing multitudes. Kane is a complicated man, and everything he did throughout his life was an attempt to rectify the hurt he felt as a child, that his people-pleasing efforts are also rooted in some kind of narcissism. Everyone just wants to be loved and needed by others. Even other people’s impressions of you shape your presence in the grand scheme of things. “I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life,” says one of the searchers through the warehouse of treasures Kane left behind.

This is best captured in the scene where Kane continues his friend’s scathing review against Kane’s wife exactly how he started it. That streak of honor is complicated and fascinating—it didn’t impress his friend and it certainly mortified his wife. This person that is always trying to make the people around him happy, and always failing, was so identifiable and true.

The visuals reflect the theme:
Quite often, Kane is positioned on a stage or outside of a square window or paused in front of a framed doorway to reflect a certain public image, a character to be played for public life, not for the person he really was who harkened back to his lost childhood on his deathbed.

There is also the exceedingly long takes, which add to the general immersion. You have to engage with it. It broke typical film convention and didn’t go in for close-ups on characters faces to show emotion. Most films up to that time followed a similar format of showing characters faces while they’re talking then go for a definitive reaction, so it’s clear what the characters are thinking and feeling. Orson Welles rejected that, allowing the audience to choose what they want to watch within the frame.

Conclusion:
Citizen Kane is a fully realized vision of the author’s intentions with deep meaning that should lead the audience toward some sort of introspection. It’s artistically closer to novelization than many modern films, particularly in its catharsis. It’s easy to understand, relatable, dark, mysterious, entertaining, incredibly stylish. These aspects are phenomenal by any metric—not just by 1940s standards.

Casablanca (1941)

DIRECTED BY: Michael Curtiz
SCREENPLAY BY: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Arthur Edeson
EDITED BY: Owen Marks
MUSIC BY: Max Steiner
STARRING: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre

For over 80 years, Casablanca has cemented its place amongst the cinematic pantheon through its reputation as a legendary romance movie. This is a hardcore war film, even if there are no battle scenes and it racks up a minimal body count. It’s concerned with the values that must be embodied to stop totalitarian forces from swallowing the planet whole. Warner Bros. released this film in the middle of World War II, when liberal democracy’s triumph over fascism was far from guaranteed. Casablanca is a love letter to the Free World, and while it may be seen as a picture of a man rediscovering his lost love, this same man also rediscovers a cause worth killing for.

The opening scenes dance with weary pessimism, tragicomedy, and epigraphs. Rick has learned to maneuver through a corrupt world. “What is your nationality?” the German Strasser asks him, and he replies, “I’m a drunkard.” We’re plunged from a wartime backdrop to a romantic conflict as his former partner strolls into his local watering hole after a long period of estrangement: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” Ilsa and Rick were lovers in Paris years before, and he arranged their escape under the shadow of German preoccupation, and believes she left him waiting in the rain at a train station with their tickets to freedom. Now she’s married to Victor Laszlo, a legendary hero of the French resistance. The bar’s piano player, Sam, is also startled to see her, but she requests him to play, “As Time Goes By,” a song she and Rick made their own during their time in Paris. Sam is reluctant to oblige, and Rick strides in angrily out of the back room, “I thought I told you never to play that song!” Then he gazes upon Ilsa, a dramatic musical chord plays out in resentment, regret, and the memory of a past romance that was unceremoniously extinguished but remains latent.

The plot unfolds as a tense love triangle between the three set against a backdrop of a wartime conflict between democracy and fascism, set in a Vichy French-occupied African city that serves as a haven for refugees seeking relative safety from a catastrophic civilizational conflict. Lisa’s reappearance reopens old wounds and tears through Rick’s cultivated veneer of neutrality and indifference. When she explains what happened on that fateful night in Paris, his love is rekindled, but he knows they’ll never be together. Rick has obtained letters of passage from the weedling black-marketeer Ugarda, and they allow for two people to leave Casablanca for Portugal, a symbol of freedom and self-determination. He wants to use the letters to escape with Ilsa, but then, in a sustained sequence of events, he contrives a situation in which Ilsa and Laszlo escape together, while he and his buddy police chief get away with murder.

For a film produced under the Hays Code, none of the main characters are unambiguously good or bad. Some lie, some are bitter, but all are redeemable and are a product of living in a complex circumstance. The supporting cast—Lorre as the snivelling cheat, Rains as the subtly homosexual police chief, Greenstreet as the corrupt club owner, or the young girl who would do anything to help her husband—set the moral stage for the decisions of the main characters. Rick is popularly perceived as a detached cynic who experiences a sudden change of heart, but he is a principled man who temporarily adopts cynicism to cope with past events and current challenges. He’ll utter pithy one-liners like, “I never think that far ahead,” and most importantly, “I stick my neck out for nobody.” Through flashbacks, his physical and emotional conditions are revealed as inextricably linked, as the protagonist adopts a facade to protect himself from a tumultuous environment and a damaged heart. As Rick learns to open up, he joins the war effort and emerges from his selfish pessimistic shell and recognize his own agency and the righteousness in others. He learns to make a difference in the world through bravery and the will to shed his veil of bitterness. Rick was clearly conflicted when he renounced his love for Ilsa, as he learned to place a higher value on Laszlo’s fight against Nazism, as Forster comments, “If I were forced to choose between my country and my friend, I hope I would be brave enough to choose my friend.”

From a modern perspective, there isn’t anything stylistically mind-blowing about Casablanca, but everything from the screenplay to the dialogue to the acting to the cinematography is fundamentally sound. It also reveals some interesting assumptions: Who should Ilsa have ended up with? There is no reason why she couldn’t have stayed in Casablanca with Rick while Laszlo departs on the plane alone, but that happy ending would undercut the theme about self-sacrifice. Afterall, Rick’s ascension to noble heroism is affirmed when he says, “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” As our national life is ceding ground to authoritarianism thanks in no small part to narrow-minded, pathological self-interest, Rick’s sacrifice is as timely as ever.

Nosferatu (1922)

DIRECTED BY: F. W. Murnau
SCREENPLAY BY: Henrik Galeen (Based on Dracula by Bram Stoker)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Fritz Arno Wagner, Günther Krampf
MUSIC BY: Hans Erdmann
STARRING: Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schröder, Alexander Granach

Watching F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu is to witness an unadulterated version of Dracula, before his lore was buried alive in clichés, jokes, cartoons, and dozens of other adaptations and remakes. It isn’t scary in the modern sense, but it is haunting. Yes, vampires emerge from the shadows, but evil can also fester there, nourished by death. This version of Count Orlok is disturbing, if not subtly terrifying. His lanky, slender frame gives off the sense that he is always starving. The way he moves is stiff and unnerving, like he isn’t fully comfortable in his own pallid skin or stuck in a permanent state of Rigor mortis. His first appearance on screen is jolting, with bulging, unblinking eyes, a boxy nose, an unflinching expression on his face. His torso is unmovable. You don’t want to look at him, but you can’t look away from him. He reminds me of the final horseman in the Book of Revelation. The ambient plague and lurking death give the movie a grounded sense of doom. In a sense, this film is about all the fears that keep us up in the middle of the night—cancer, war, disease, madness. These fears are suggested in the shadows, and the characters lurk or cower there.

The film’s power lies in what it suggests rather than shows, using silence, expressionism, and noir to unsettle viewers. Murnau’s special effects add to the disquieting atmosphere: The fast motion of Orlok’s servant, the manifestation of the count out of thin air, the disappearance of the phantom coach, the photographic negatives to contrast white trees against a black sky. The legendary “stair scene” where Nosferatu eerily ascends up the stairs in a shadow is now a staple in the horror genre, as well as the delightfully creepy scene of him rising from his coffin and staring directly at the viewer. Two of the film’s key sequences also introduce the use of montage. The first is when Orlok advances on Hutter while his wife (Ellen) is sleepwalking back in her house in Bremen and cries out a warning that causes the vampire to turn away. After Hutter realizes he’s in danger, he escapes from the castle and races back to town by coach, while Orlok travels by sea, and Murnau cuts off the coach with shipboard events as Ellen restlessly waits. The second is the iconic ship, with cargo that is nothing more than a stack of coffins filled with earth from the nourishing graveyards of the plague. Crew members fall sick and die. A brave mate goes below with a hatchet to open a coffin and rats tumble out. Then Count Orlok rises straight up, stiff and eerie, and the ship arrives in port with its crew dead, and the hatch opens by itself.

The tone is set from Nosferatu’s resonantly weird nighttime arrival in town, tiptoeing across deserted streets. He has demonstrated an ability to steer ships and carriages at unfathomable speeds, but he politely relinquishes his power as to not disturb the town’s peaceful slumber. The supernatural has snugly adapted to the town’s rhythm of living and the monstrous figure of the vampire has adapted uncannily to blend into the grey, cheerless facades. The ensuing plague seems to be a natural phenomenon, and the townspeople don’t seem to be aware of anything exceptionally sinister in their midst. Death is received with composed solemnity, not uncontrollable panic. Coffins are carried in orderly procession; a town official calmly marks the houses of the dead with a cross. Yet, an unshakable strangeness pervades these funeral processions, and the entire milieu subtly reflects the special circumstances of Nosferatu’s arrival—as if the coffin he carries echo the coffins of the victims of the plague. The streets are as deserted and somber as they were the night of Nosferatu’s arrival, and maybe the townspeople have less control than we were initially led to believe, but rather, they have quietly acquiesced to the intangible, strangulating grip of something abnormal. It’s as if the town’s sleep had turned to death.

The protagonist here is not the monstrous vampire; he is nothing but an agent for the specter of our finality. The film ends with the inevitable triumph of death, both of Nosferatu and the young wife who gave herself to him. What is most striking about the plague scenes is the utter impersonality of it. The true nature of the vampire is revealed fully in the last sequence, as he heads towards the wife’s bedroom, abruptly emerging from a nearby dilapidated home. It’s frightening, but also aching and vulnerable. In the bedroom, he transforms into an impotent shadow struggling to possess the young women, lecherously lingering by her side until sunrise. Daylight has done nothing to dispel the strangeness and horror that have altered the town, but it burns the vampire. The plague-stricken are no longer dying, but has happiness been restored? The wife’s sacrifice has been to no avail. What has vanished into thin air is merely another shadow; the substance of a hostile world persists.

That’s it for this week’s instalment of The Watchlist, brought to you by Beaglesgate Productions.

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All things come to pass, but the fall of an empire seems to be the most historically memorable. The Roman Empire collapsed as its ability to govern itself was eroded by power struggles and corruption, and its overstretched borders and reliance on mercenaries left its military vulnerable to waves of invasions from the Goths, Vandals, and Huns. The Byzantine Empire fell after centuries of territorial losses and internal strife, culminating in the Ottomans breaching the walls of Constantinople after a 53-day siege in 1453. The Mongol Empire fragmented into separate khanates after its vast size became impossible to manage, and the strong central authority wielded by Genghis Khan quickly deteriorated after his successors failed to maintain unity. The British Empire unraveled through costly wars, anti‑colonial movements, and the impossibility of maintaining vast, global-spanning holdings. The Soviet Bloc dissolved when mounting stagnation, a lack of price signals, and bureaucratic rigidity made their command economy unviable. It could be the impermanence of the universe, but the nature of empires is in their unsustainability and finality—there’s administrative strain, mismanagement, strategic failures, botched succession plans, failure to adapt, or pressure from rising powers. Or there’s a catastrophic event that sends the whole enterprise into calamity in a way that’s, as Cris Collinsworth would note, kinda like Patrick Mahomes.

After falling 16-13 to the Los Angeles Chargers, on Sunday, the Kansas City Chiefs were mathematically eliminated from the playoffs for the first time in 10 years, and Mahomes tore his ACL after getting spun to the ground on a drive that was a desperate gambit to salvage their floundering season. There’s invariably something a little queasy about a devastating blow to an underwhelming campaign, if only because there’s something nauseating about watching every possible unlucky break turn into an ignominious derailment. Last year, the Chiefs were unsustainably lucky and benefitted from some officiating fuckery, and it is statistically improbable to replicate those kind of rabbit out of your ass miracles year-over-year. They were 11-0 in one-score games in 2024 only to post an 0-7 record in the same situation thus far into 2025. The universe finds its way to reach equilibrium—so if the Chiefs were swaggering and overdetermined last year, they were busted and discombobulated this year. Sure, a Super Bowl hangover spiralling into a complete playoff miss is a disappointing underachievement, but some regression was to be expected.

And yet, even as the Chiefs struggled to maintain a .500 record while their offense looked glacial and groggy, they still had some of the highest odds to win the Super Bowl. Sports media is one of the deepest pits of hell, a cesspool of aimless shouting and pointless provocation and artificial controversy, full of conflict-seeking blowhards and preening goofs. Even by those doomed standards, it was strange to watch these tout-faced media grotesques strain to passingly acknowledge that the perception of the Chiefs’s previous glory no longer matched the reality of the on-field product. There seemed to be trepidation among the punditocracy to accurately describe what we were all witnessing, which was a middling roster that, as of 14 weeks into the 2025 season, had gone 0-7 against teams currently projected to make the playoffs. Professional football commentators are not exceptionally discerning minds, of course, but even if they remain stuck in their Mahomes glaze fest, maybe their hesitation stems from a sense of PTSD-induced embarrassment after their hair-trigger It’s over for the Patriots proclamations were ruthlessly, repeatedly refuted by a reign that defied all expectations and explanations.

I’m not in the business of making on-the-fly prognostications or any declarative future-predicting, but this season should confirm that any GOAT talk regarding Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid was premature by about a decade and five rings. Even leaving aside the headaches and nausea that are specific to the fans of the Jets and Giants, watching or listening to NFL commentary does something to a person. You may tune into a podcast or an ESPN segment as a normal human—again, not applicable to Jets or Giants fans—but when you finish, you will have been at least somewhat altered by what you’ve seen. In my experience, the hot takes and thermonuclear reactions leave me with concussion-like symptoms. The Chiefs, in the soaring grandiosity of their ambitions and the broader grandiosity of their grandiosity, have been repeatedly mistaken for the remarkable anomaly of the Bellichik-Brady empire. In their simultaneously sincere and delirious self-delusions, NFL talking heads casually and uncritically assumed that Mahomes was guaranteed to match Brady’s success, dating back to even before securing his second ring, let alone catching Joe Montana.

No reasonable football fan can plausibly deny the greatness of Patrick Mahomes. He has a highlight reel of logic-defying sidearm throws, he could scramble is way through a missile strike, and he makes jaw-dropping plays in pressure-cooker moments. He could retire now and his stature is firmly cemented on the Mount Rushmore of All-Time Great Quarterbacks. But football discourse has been infected with a grasping pomposity—to say nothing short of a perverse and short-sighted arrogance—even as the Chiefs wheel past their peak. Talking heads seem reluctant to quit the Mahomes GOAT wishcasting, so the reality of where he stands compared to TB12 is worth reiterating mostly because the sheer absurdity of crowning him the best-ever is otherwise overwhelming to consider.

#1: Mahomes was the beneficiary of stepping into the best situation for a young QB.

After completing an unfathomable 28-3 comeback against the high-powered Atlanta Falcons to win his fifth Super Bowl, Tom Brady had finally begun to shed the detractors who insisted he was a System Quarterback. For all of Mahomes’s innate talents, it is strange that this standard was never applied to a quarterback who spent the first few years of his career with the luxuries of:

• A red shirt rookie year and learning from a Pro-Bowl QB.

• Guidance from a Hall of Fame coach and offensive play-calling mastermind in Andy Reid.

• Having first-grade weapons in Hall of Fame tight end Travis Kelce and the league’s most lethal deep threat in Tyreek Hill.

• A reliable stable of runningbacks with Kareem Hunt, Clyde Edwards-Helaire, and Isiah Pacheco.

• An above-average offensive line.

• A consistently good-to-elite defence.

While Mahomes impressively won back-to-back Super Bowls in the two years following the Cheetah’s departure, it is no coincidence that his stat lines have declined as the offense around him has deteriorated. Notably, when a quarterback on a rookie deal signs their second contract, it gives his general manager less cap space to work with, and in turn, less margin for error in building out the remaining roster. The KC front office has spent years drafting with the priority of fortifying the defense, with the expectation that Mahomes will conceal their offensive shortcomings. Here, we can readily document the warping effect of all this compounding attrition in an anemic offence that now has the queasy pacing of rush-hour traffic and the jarring wreckage of a car accident. The interchangeable combination of Rashee Rice, Xavier Worthy, Hollywood Brown, JuJu Smith-Schuster, and DeAndre Hopkins hasn’t been able to match the superhuman specimen of Tyreek Hill. Kelce’s recent nosedive has made him a significantly less reliable safety valve, their O-line has degraded into a turnstile, and the run game has a grunting and juddering anti-flow. All this surrounding atrophy has this once high-octane, chunk-play offense looking like a diminished facsimile of itself. There’s been a broader skid in Mahomes’s stat lines, failing to replicate the otherworldly benchmark he established from 2018-2022.

Quarterbacks compile impressive volume stats when, unsurprisingly, they have premier talent around them. Brady’s second dynasty run came after a successful roster overhaul, and he won his seventh ring with a different head coach and a primed Buccaneers squad that mostly needed a quarterback to not throw 30 interceptions. Ironically, while his best statistical seasons came with Randy Moss and Wes Welker, Brady won most of his Super Bowls with more underwhelming receiving cores. Travis Kelce is on his last legs, Chris Jones and the defence is aging, and Andy Reid is now 68, which is the oldest age a coach has ever won a Super Bowl. So how will Mahomes fair when the roster and coaching staff inevitably turns over?

#2: Can Mahomes sustain this production into his 30s?

Even prior to his ACL tear, Mahomes is entering his 30s playing a backyard style of hero ball that historically does not age gracefully. Dual-threat quarterbacks like Cam Newton and Michael Vick broke down and washed out of the NFL by their mid-30s. Granted, Mahomes isn’t as reliant on his legs and is more of a refined passer, but his game heavily leans on extended plays, off-balance throws, scampering out of the pocket, and operating out of structure. A closer comp would be Aaron Rodgers, who similarly plays like a vengeful godhead, whose mastery of the hard count, deep ball, and dart-like scrambling has been one of the most potent highs in watching this sport. He won back-to-back MVPs in his age-37 and -38 seasons, but also had some years cut short because of broken collarbones and a freak Achilles tear, and has notably never been back to the Big Game since winning Super Bowl XLV. And another analogue would be Russell Wilson, who, in his peak, aggressively attacked downfield with precision moonshots and effortless run-pass options. But after a decade of elite play, he precipitously declined after his break up with Pete Carrol and has spent most of his 30s as a low-end starter.

When his athleticism eventually fades, will Mahomes successfully transition into more of a pocket passer? He has already lost some deep-ball accuracy. This isn’t to say that Mahomes is incapable of sustaining a high level of play deep into his career, but Brady’s longevity was the exception, not the expectation.

#3: The Chiefs will face stiffer divisional competition moving forward.

The Patriots machine was masterfully run for two decades, but they picked up a few gimme wins every season thanks to the hopeless incompetence of every other team in the AFC East. They had a relatively cupcake schedule for consistent championship contenders, which helped them earn home field advantage for most of their playoff runs. Starting in 2025, the AFC West became a division in which every team is led by a future Hall of Fame head coach; meaning, there should be a baseline level of competitiveness for the foreseeable future. This could turn the AFC West into the kind of brutal dogfight the Patriots seldom had to experience.

Since Mahomes is 0-2 against Brady in the playoffs—and one of those losses was an embarrassing 31-9 beatdown in Super Bowl LV—he would need eight rings to firmly claim the unquestionable GOAT title. On a generous timeline, he’ll be ready to start opening week of the 2026 season, but at the very least, there should be some expectation of rust in his game as he ingratiates himself after a catastrophic injury. Even if it’s assumed Mahomes will play until he’s 40, he would have nine seasons to win five Super Bowls in a gruelling division and an aging roster that will need at least a hefty retooling.

When sports conversation is bad—and it is rough when it comes to over-crediting and over-blaming quarterbacks—it runs on various tossed-off idiocies. In the absence of anything else to talk about, the discourse devours itself, messily and noisily and with the most appalling manners. It’s bad when the Signature Personalities of Sports Cable or the crab-walking section chuds are squawking about a particular player or a particular game, but it’s incalculably worse when those mutants finally get around to talking about Patrick Mahomes. This kind of howling discursive nuclear Armageddon belongs entirely to a Chiefs fanbase riddled with a pathological sense of preening arrogance and a persecution complex. Besides blowing sulphurous grandiosities down empty alleys all night long, they scuttle past the doors, hissing the refs aren’t fixing the games for us through the seams. These wretched creatures subsist on whatever chunk of half-digested grievance they can, the oleaginous lumbering ones sleepily devouring the least elusive specimens in volume, the horribly blistered long-clawed ones chasing any haters they can catch.

It’s an easy thing to forget while wincing in the jet-engine overstatement of The Patrick Mahomes Pursuit of Tom Brady, but things won’t necessarily get any quieter, let alone better, once the offseason rolls around. The superheated spittle makes its way back to room temperature and curdles, and the same dim honkers that improvise playfights on TV sets and pump up imaginary beefs go on to spend the following few months making just as much noise. This is not a case of football discourse abhorring a vacuum so much as it is football discourse revealing itself as a vacuum—a loud and obliterating one, and one which refuses to take a day off in the laziest way imaginable. There is, of course, always the option of turning it all off and letting my fever-wracked brain rest for a few clammy hours. But even in the context of these dorky little insignificances, it seems like any mild pushback against Chiefs Nation’s stain-resistant self-regard is inherently perceived as a disrespect of their favorite quarterback’s accomplishments. The combination of their unconvincing assertions and force-multiplying implications only reaffirms what Brady and Bellichik sustained in defiance of a parity system designed to thwart dynasties. None of this is to say that Mahomes can’t catch Brady, because every NFL season offers the promise of redemption or transcendence. But there’s some tough sledding ahead, and it’s a bit trigger-happy to giddily assume that ascending to GOAT status was a given.

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