He is obsessed. He is guilty about the obsession. It is the source of the crime that defines his decades, that rotates them; guilt is the permanent address. Memory is the climate he finds himself in, and time behaves badly around him, running backward and looping back and folding itself into neat boxes that he builds and then becomes imprisoned within. Women orbit him, glowing, distantly, exerting tidal forces on the parts of his conscience that only emerge at night. Over three hours, he will speak a few words about his feelings, and each is an exercise in exposition about himself.

You know him. You have bought tickets to his grief, ever since the Clinton administration, in varying ratios of scale and scope.

Can you name him?

If you said Leonard Shelby, you would be right. If you said Cobb, you would be right, too. Bruce Wayne, yes, the sad magicians are all in there, right down to Oppenheimer, and congratulations on the recency bias. The portrait is fair for all of them, it stretches to the proportions of nearly three decades of movie making in a single man, and I mean this as a compliment: no other filmmaker in Hollywood has invested three decades and a large part of his budget in building the same beautiful sad lighthouse, over and over, refining his obsession, his own unhappy features, buying him oceans so that he may be lonely in them. Other directors have themes. Nolan has a tenant. I mean this as a compliment! I have paid to see him do it every single time.

He'd be the first one to tell you so himself. Promoting The Odyssey, he told the New York Times this film is "the ur-text. It's in everything I've done before." He said something similar to he LA Times, noting, "I've been telling this story in all my films for years."

He cast Matt Damon in the role, in part, because Damon is also Jason Bourne. He even told a journalist this. I get it. Damon has been playing him in a franchise where he spends his time trying to figure out who he really is, and he plays that hollowed-out wanting really well. If your Odysseus is a soldier who lost himself in a war, you call Damon and you call it a day (he was very good by the way).

Nolan opened one of the oldest poems in the Western canon and found the man he'd been filming since Memento already inside it, waiting. I booked opening night in a dusty Odeon, the only place I’d managed to grab a pair of tickets. Seated.

samantha morton supremacy

So let me start with the things I liked. The score is so good in the film. Göransson did something I did not think was possible in a studio movie at this budget, which is that he made the music sound like it came from the world onscreen. How cool! You know the feeling of watching a period film and the strings swell and you’re suddenly aware you’re watching a movie, because no one in ancient Greece had access to a hundred-piece Romantic orchestra and your brain clocks the anachronism even if you don’t consciously register it? Göransson eliminated that entirely. He built the score out of bronze gongs and struck metal and a reconstructed ancient pipe called an aulos, and then layered James Blake’s voice over the top of it, and the result is something that sounds wet and old and percussive, like someone dug it out of the ground. During the Cyclops sequence the low frequencies went through my ribs. I have heard this poem chopped into anecdotes between courses since I was small enough to sit on a phone book at the table, and I have never once heard the Odyssey sound like this. It sounded like the inside of a cave. It sounded like the inside of a ship. Good job, Ludwig.

Troy burned (that statue head chop shot 😮‍💨) and the heat was in the room. Samantha Morton’s Circe grabbed soldiers by the face and moulded their features into pig snouts with her bare hands like a potter working clay, and I HAD to turn away. We hit real good turbulence with this one. These were the most impressive minutes of the film and they were islands themselves.

Stranded inside three hours of ocean with no current connecting them.

Polyphemus showed up and Polyphemus was gone. The Sirens showed up and Nolan let us hear them sing and having Damon tell us about it was nice, and then the Sirens were gone before the decision to make them so could pay off (not nice). Scylla. Charybdis. The Laestrygonians. Many reviewers and people online already mentioned that the first act’s editing almost feels like a long trailer, and this was also my sensation while watching the film. The experience was similar to having seen some highlight reels from a bigger film that exists somewhere else. A film where you can feel like you have spent enough time on one of these islands to know what the air smells like.

Nolan’s film was shot in seven countries, but it doesn’t add up to a geography. I couldn’t draw you the coastline of a single island. I couldn’t describe you what the light looked like at Circe’s house in the morning. I couldn’t even tell you that I have the slightest idea about the feel of life in that world, the human touch that makes you think that people live there eat and sweat and get bored and have sex and fight over the shopping. The rooms are there to get through, and so are the islands.

The room around me was having a different night. A man a few seats over made small unconscious sounds after the action sequences. I heard involuntary noises of people’s bodies confirming that they got what they paid for. When Odysseus strung the great bow near the end, Göransson scored it with a note plucked on an actual lyre and the audience broke into a huge *gasp*. They gasped at the beggar disguise. They gasped at the massacre of the suitors. I gasped too.

Which is why I am writing what follows.

the format conundrum

Aristotle told us ages ago that the "essential" of the Odyssey is laughably short. You have a man who has been away for a long time, his home is being eaten alive by squatters and in the end, and then he comes back and kills them. Everything else is episodes. What Aristotle means by that may not be immediately clear. Homer’s episodes are episodes in a particular sense of the word. They are didactic. The genius of Homer was to recognize that episodes are the heart of the story. Odysseus goes into the Cyclops cave because he can't stop himself. His curiosity physically overrides everything else. It costs six men and a decade-long curse from a god who holds grudges. He stays with Circe a full year, a FULL year, and his crew have to come beg him to leave. Homer is unforgiving in making us guess whether it was the longing for Ithaca or Circe’s comfy-cozy cottage that kept him there. He is tied to the mast not to hear the Siren song riddled by the poison, but to experience, to suffer, to live.

This is a man who will always choose to have the experience and metabolise the consequences later. He refuses to choose. He’s gluttonous. (This is also what makes him both a spectacular hero and an absolute nightmare of a husband.)

Each episode unmasks or teaches him something, making him wiser and better. In The Odyssey, the encounters begin to build and the edit pulls the rug. We lose the transformation. We gain trailer spectacle. Sure, Nolan can do compelling trailer spectacle. But the only way you can tell the story the way Nolan wants it told (= from start to finish) is not by filming it for the biggest screen ever. It’s by committing to a two-part film or even a trilogy. There’s a reason the Dune franchise, often called Odyssey in space, has immersed us in its world over time.

Other directors have found ways to tackle this. Franco Rossi filmed the Odyssey in 1968 as an eight-part TV series, which has widely gone down as the most faithful adaptation of the poem for the screen. The reason for this is probably the simplest: an episodic poem turns into an episodic film. The Coens did O Brother, Where Art Thou? having claimed they'd never read Homer at all (this is maybe true), felt no obligation to illustrate the poem and transplanted its skeleton into Depression-era Mississippi with bluegrass and George Clooney's hair. The result has more of the Odyssey's trickster energy in it than other adaptations that have tried harder. Two years ago, Uberto Pasolini drew attention to his film adaptation of the Odyssey. He discarded the monsters, the nymphs and the gods, in other words, the first half of the poem, and committed to the homecoming as a chamber piece on a fraction of Nolan's budget. In The Return, we focused on a marriage under twenty years of pressure. The film is small, occasionally slow, but I believed in that marriage. I believed Binoche had been sleeping in that bed alone for two decades from the way she held her shoulders, from the flatness in her voice when she told Fiennes she wasn't sure she wanted him back, from the grit I could feel under their sandals whenever the camera followed them outside.

is our family trio ok?

In Nolan’s The Odyssey, I know for a fact that the light falling across Penelope’s weaving takes centre stage. Nolan loves that shot, the one where the camera is on one angle of the loom while Anne Hathaway is on another and the glow of the sun fractures through the threads, painting fractured shadows on the wall. I sat there taking the glorious composition while thinking about how Penelope's whole deal is that she has been secretly unravelling this weave for three years to keep the suitors at bay, promising she'll pick a new husband when the shroud is finished only to unravel it at night and hide the progress. This is a con so good it held for three years until a maid finally ratted her out. And the film cares more about what the thread does to the light than about what the woman behind it is doing to an entire palace full of armed men who think she's an idiot. Hathaway, our lord and savior, gets one real monologue, a speech about holding Ithaca together alone and uncredited while her son tries to take over. As Maxwell Rabb wrote about in Harper's Bazaar, it came across: "like nothing, we quickly move on."

I felt that.

Odysseus speaks to his own wife, in a form of a beggar, and this scene should be electrifying. Electrifying in the sense of Homer’s wording, since the man is lying to Penelope, feigning loyalty to her husband and perhaps knowing that she sees through him, but knowing also that he is putting on a performance for an audience of people who want him dead. Damon's Odysseus sounds like a man who has been to one therapy session and got the language down without doing the work. "It's not always an easy thing, a homecoming. What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way? What if he saw things?" Daniel Mendelsohn, Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books, pointed out that this is not what Homer sounds like at all, but that it soundsvery much like every other Nolan protagonist. He is not wrong. You could paste those lines into Interstellar without changing a word and nobody would notice. This is fine. We're fine.

Tom Holland plays Telemachus in a register so accidentally twenty-first-century that it teleported me out of the Bronze Age and into the queue at my local Pret in Chiswick. I don't blame Holland for this. I don't think anyone could have played those lines and kept their sandals on ancient ground, and I say this as a very Greek person who frankly wanted to cry about it, because Telemachus's own arc in Homer (his trip to Pylos and Sparta looking for his father), is a coming-of-age nostos in its own right. A boy who becomes a man by going looking for someone, failing to find him, and coming home changed by the search alone. Holland's Telemachus is looking for his dad (yes I said DAD, sue me!) as if looking for someone who went out for milk and never came back. On a human level, sure, this is passable acting. On a Homeric level it is a puddle in a car park where an ocean should be.

the side men of the odyssey deserved better

I know you want to talk about the women. I want to talk about the women. We will get there, you and I, at length, and I will not be kind about it. But first I want to take a detour through another group that got the same treatment in this film: the side men.

Homer's Menelaus is a crier. He is wealthy, over-generous in a way that borders on embarrassing. He refills your glass before you've finished drinking, sends you home loaded with gifts you never asked for, and weeps openly about people you've never met while you sit there pushing food around your plate. Homer catalogues the palace with loving specificity: bronze, gold, amber, silver, ivory. When Telemachus walks in and can't stop gawping at it all, Menelaus gently changes the subject. Your friend's rich dad catching you staring at the car and pretending he didn't notice. He feeds the boy, tells war stories, cries about Odysseus for so long it gets uncomfortable. Every gesture here is governed by xenia, the sacred hospitality law that Zeus enforces personally. The scene exists for a reason you don't clock until much later: Homer is showing you what it looks like when someone treats a guest as though the guest might be a god wearing a borrowed body. He is building a standard, and the standard matters because by the time you watch the suitors helping themselves to another cup of wine they didn't pay for, you feel their offence as something close to heresy.

In the context of the film, Menelaus boasts about the Trojan Horse from the inside to a teen who has come to him in search of his father. Bernthal is doing a committed, wild performance of a post-war thug in a domestic spiral, and I'd 100% watch that character in a different film, but in this film it doesn’t work. He is trying to convince us that generosity reigns supreme in the home, outside of which there is nothing but other homes with their own brand of generosity. The standard is removed, and therefore, the subsequent gifts of the suitors are no longer perceived as betrayal but rather as an intrusion into a personal home. I get it, these are rude guests in the man’s house, and rude guests deserve an eviction, maybe a lawsuit. Certainly not a room full of arrows.

Homer's suitors know the gods are watching and they have decided the gods have better things to do. That is what makes them terrifying. These are men who received the memo, read the memo, and decided the memo was addressed to someone less important. You have sat across from this confidence on Zoom. You have reported to it. You have dated it, if you were unlucky, or been raised by it, if you were unluckier. It is the arrogance of a person who has gotten away with everything for so long that getting-away-with-it has hardened into an identity and a worldview.

Pattinson’s Antinous is nothing to fear about. He has a good time, of course, feral and slapstick, channeling whatever Pattinson has in him to pick up signals from an exclusively brighter movie than only he can see. I rated that. But he is also a cartoon, entirely legible from his first scene, with no sense that he knows any of this will cost him. He kicks old Argos and drags him to a manure pile, John Wick style. The dog has been kicked, the audience is furious, the target is acquired. You want him dead in thirty seconds because A DOG IS HURT FOR FUCK'S SAKE. Homer takes twenty-four books to get us to the point where we want the suitors dead, and what that says about vengeance is that it’s not quite the same thing as anger. Anger is combustible, and burns swiftly. Homer builds something sturdier, and more enduring than that.

Patel’s Eurylochus sometimes furrows his brow and, as far as I know, is the only crewman who talks. The rest of Odysseus's men drift through the film as atmospheric extras you can't distinguish from the rigging. Do they have opinions about being turned into pigs? Did Nolan cut their tongues? Homer's Eurylochus refuses to walk into Circe's house when something smells wrong, and every man who goes in without him comes out a pig. His cowardice and his wisdom fire from the same nerve. He challenges Odysseus about decisions that get men killed, to his face, and the poem sides with him more than once. He is the one character allowed to say what the audience is thinking such as “maybe following this man into another cave is a bad idea?”. Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, who treated Vietnam veterans and later wrote Odysseus in America, reads the Odyssey as a study in command failure and treats Eurylochus's challenges as the poem's accountability mechanism. He is the voice that forces Odysseus to hear what his recklessness costs the people sailing behind him. Patel’s dissent vanishes mid-scene. The crewmen row behind him in silence, not even asking why.

the women (i can’t keep this short, i’m sorry)

Anyway! The women!

Homer’s women take vengeance on gods, turn men into pigs, tear up shroud cloths at a torch lit funeral feast for three years running so that they might gain time, sit in olive trees outwitting the wittiest of men and every important turn of the Odyssey is either planned or executed or greatly assisted by a woman. Several of the most important events are entirely designed by women; they are the very sinews.

Nolan's women wait. They advise. They suffer. They look beautiful and slightly dangerous. They deliver one monologue each, usually mid-film, usually interrupted, and then the camera moves on, because the camera has places to be.

Because of this, I’m not interested in running another lap of the Nolan/women discourse (even though you guys know I had expressed what I was hoping to see from Nolan’s Odyssey when it came to this issue in my piece here). What I am interested in is something Emily Wilson said about the film that has been stuck with me since I read it.

Wilson, who I also wrote about in my initial piece last year, has produced one of the most popular translations of the Odyssey in recent years. You probably know the opening line ("tell me about a complicated man”) a six-word grenade that detonated a decade of discourse about who gets to decide what the oldest surviving epic in Western literature sounds like in English. Nolan cited that line as inspiration. To my surprise, he never picked up the phone to consult her. Wilson found out secondhand that her translation had been credited, and before the film came out she said publicly, on the record, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with adapting Homer however you want.

Change whatever you want.

The poem is robust.

It can take it.

After she saw it, she found Penelope "so thinned out" it endangered "any possibility of believing in this marriage."

What Wilson identified in Penelope is running through all women in the film. Every woman in The Odyssey who holds power, divine power, intellectual power, sexual power, strategic power, has had the power source disconnected and the frame left standing. Calypso looks like Charlize Theron in a Castaway B-film. She occupies Calypso's island. She does not do what Calypso does, and what Calypso does in Homer, the thing that makes her crackle on the page, is scream at the gods. She screams at Hermes about the double standard on Olympus, about how male gods bed mortal women constantly, recreationally, and the cosmos shrugs, but the moment a goddess takes a mortal lover the full machinery of divine punishment descends on her, and she names names, she gives examples, and Homer lets the argument sit in the poem unanswered. Theron's Calypso is a mortal woman running a trauma clinic for tortured men. Mendelsohn called this "Yoda-like," which I think is generous to Yoda. Her biggest line is a question about whether remembering is therapeutically advisable (pardon?). Nolan took a goddess and turned her into a woman who manages a man's feelings.

And this connects to the amnesia device that structures the whole film. In Homer, Odysseus on Calypso's island weeps every single day for home. He sits on the headland staring at the sea with tears running down his face. The poem makes sure you understand the offer on the table: immortality, eternal youth, an eternity of sex with a goddess. He said no! He chose Penelope, the ordinary woman he had left behind over the cosmic, ageless alternative. Nolan's Odysseus cannot make that choice because he has been drugged into forgetting his wife exists. A man who does not remember Penelope cannot choose Penelope, and a story in which he cannot choose her is a different story. The different story is a less complicated one.

Morton's Circe I already told you is the best performance in the film but Morton's Circe is a woman running at half her Homeric capacity. Homer's Circe threatens, transforms, sleeps with Odysseus, hosts him for a year, then sits him down and tells him how to survive every single thing that is about to try to kill him. She teaches him about the Sirens. She explains Scylla and Charybdis and the Cattle of Helios. Her mentorship is the hinge the entire second half of the wanderings turns on. We didn’t see any of this.

And then there is Athena. Should we talk about the olive tree story? Homer's Athena sits under an olive tree on Ithaca with Odysseus and plots a massacre with him. She has just caught him lying to her face (he doesn't know she's Athena by the way, she's disguised as a shepherd so he invents a Cretan identity for himself on the spot) and when she drops the disguise she laughs at him. She laughs and sits down and says, essentially: we are the same, my boy. I am the goddess of cunning. You are the mortal of cunning. Let's partner up. My grandma used to describe this scene as two foxes meeting in a field, two animals who hunt the same way recognising each other and deciding to hunt together, and it is one of the great relationships in the poem! Jenny Strauss Clay, a classicist whose book The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey argues that the sentimental guardian-angel reading of this relationship is thin. Athena's warmth toward Odysseus coexists with genuine divine anger about Greek sacrileges at Troy, and the tension between the warmth and the withholding is what gives the bond its electricity. Zendaya's Athena tells Odysseus to look at the clouds and have faith. Amy Nicholson wrote in the Los Angeles Times that she "isn't that helpful, mostly staring at Odysseus in mute dismay." In Nolan’s Odyssey, there is no olive tree. There is no scheming. The foxes have been separated and one of them has been sedated.

I like my adaptations inventive, not accurate

I wonder whether some of you are composing a very reasonable counterpoint right now. Something about artistic licence or about how an essay of comparing a blockbuster to a three-thousand-year-old poem looks a lot like fidelity criticism. Or maybe something about historical accuracy is not the purpose of adaptations. And it’s about time we address this. I would be thinking the exact same thing in your position. So let me stay inside that thought with you for a second before I complicate it.

Imagine someone had told you, walking into the cinema, that this was an original screenplay. A story about a soldier who took ten years to find his way home, the wife who held the household together while she waited, and the son who grew up in the shadow of a father he barely remembers. Would the homecoming have moved you in its own merit? Would you have felt the man reconstituting himself as he walked back into his life, cell by cell, recognition by recognition, or would you have felt, as I did, a body arriving at coordinates? I keep asking myself this, and the answer keeps arriving in the same place. The argument I’m trying to make has nothing to do with whether the film is historically accurate or faithful to the original text. If anything, I love wildly inventive, subversive and exploratory movie adaptations (shoutout @ Tragedy of Macbeth). My argument has nothing to do with Homer and everything to do with what homecoming actually requires as a piece of storytelling: A meditation on what it takes to return back to the self, rather than sailing back to a physical location, fighting titans and monsters.

Homer constructs homecoming the way coral constructs a reef: organism by organism, accretion by accretion. Odysseus comes home disguised as a beggar, and the people who loved him have to find him inside the stranger, one by one, slowly. His dog finds him first. Argos is the poor dog who has longed for his friend on a dung heap, arthritic, forgotten, too weak to stand for anyone, and when Odysseus walks through the gate dressed in rags something in the old dog’s body remembers what his mind has probably long surrendered. He lifts his ears, wags his tail once, and dies, and Odysseus wipes one tear and keeps walking and swallows everything. All the grief lives in the performance of composure. Did you feel that pause in the film?

His old nurse, Eurycleia, finds him next. Accidentally, on her knees. She’s washing the stranger’s feet as she has washed a thousand strangers’ feet, and her fingers discover a scar on his thigh. A wound she'd known since he was barely more than a boy. Her fingers remember before her mind catches up, and his hand closes around her throat before she can cry out. Did you feel her awe?

And then Penelope, who has been governing this island and unravelling her own weaving, lays a trap so exquisite: their marriage bed is carved around a living olive tree, built by his own hands, rooted in the earth, immovable. She tells him, sweetly, to have it moved outside the bedroom, and ages of cunning and composure collapse in a single eruption of outrage. She has him. She outsmarts the smartest man in Greek literature with a question about INTERIOR DECORATING. (I love her. I love her so much.)

Aristotle's insight here as much as mine: the recognitions ARE the interiority. The poem does not give us the inner voices, the soliloquies and monologues, and the free indirect discourse. Nothing gives you direct access to what Odysseus is thinking or feeling, and yet by the end of these encounters you understand his interior transformation completely. Did you feel it happening while watching Odysseus come home? This turning of love into something else, that now takes on a corporeal, material form in the bodies and minds and hands of those who have loved him and thought they knew him? It has been cellared in their hearts, growing dark and potent, and these recognition scenes are meant to uncork it.

What pours out is the man. The dog knows his scent, the nurse knows his scar, the wife knows the secret architecture of their intimacy, and each recognition puts a piece of him back. Homecoming in Homer is something done to him by the people who remember him. It is seen throughout four books, with an almost sluggish pacing, and this is what it is all about. You can’t come home alone, you come home through the people that kept you whole while you were away.

Even if you take Homer out of it, a film about a long return journey would have to make the homecoming seem like a process, a drag even. It would have to make the people around the protagonist the agents of his return, and the door to his homeland had better not open quick enough for him to retain that sense of self that got him into this mess in the first place. I left the theatre feeling like I had missed that slow opening of the door. I walked out alongside audiences who felt completely nourished, and I understand that and I respect it. For people discovering the bow contest and Cyclops for the first time, the surprise and the delight are real, and I would be a smaller person and a worse critic if I tried to take either of those away. Spectacle is a gift.

All I was asking for was a different gift.

A character come back to himself under the weight of coming home, and I did not feel that happen. The room for it was there, but Nolan filled it with the wrong thing.

i’m not sure the usual nolan cocktail works guys

Nolan filled it with the substance he has always used: guilt. Leonard in Memento tattoos grief into his own skin to carry it past the reach of his dissolving memory. Cobb's dead wife in Inception colonises his dreamscape until she becomes the building material of his subconscious. Oppenheimer watches the world blister. In Nolan's best work, guilt and mission fuse into one volatile compound (Cobb's guilt IS the inception, Oppenheimer's guilt IS the bomb) and the collision between wound and purpose is what the films are about. It is a gorgeous engine, and I have loved watching him build it my whole life.

But Homer's engine runs on something else entirely: hubris, recklessness and the narcotic, ruinous thrill of being the cleverest person alive. Odysseus, safe aboard his ship after blinding the Cyclops, stands at the stern and SCREAMS his own name across the water. Is it brave? Absolutely. Is it suicidal? Also absolutely. Does it gift Poseidon a target to track him by for the next decade? Oh yes. And he does it anyway, because he cannot help himself. THAT, that magnificent and devastating vanity, is what homecoming requires him to shed, metabolise, and outgrow.

The thing that makes Odysseus extraordinary and the thing that makes him lost are the same thing, bound together, waging war upon itself. All the poem's heat comes from that. Guilt sits next to this struggle like a stranger sharing your armrest on a long-haul flight. Nolan's Odysseus feels remorse about his dead men and also wants to get home, and these two impulses coexist so placidly you almost wonder why anyone thought there was a story here. For the first time in Nolan's filmography (though I have thoughts on Oppenheimer, call me later lol), the engine idles.

Guilt was available to Nolan because it is available to all of us. We are swimming in it. It is how interiority works in Western culture right now. We know this man, the traumatised veteran working backwards through fractured memory. We have met him a hundred times and we LIKE him. Transformation is a harder ask. It requires a story in which someone becomes something actually new, and the growth demanded of the protagonist necessarily involves a moulting of self, leaving the old skin behind and asking the audience to believe that the creature beneath was worth the shedding. Odysseus needs to molt; he needs to shed the dazzling, ruinous skin of the man who shouted his name at the Cyclops and grow into something more porous, more able to be found by the people who loved him before the war. That moulting is why the Odyssey has endured for nearly 2,800 years, and it is the one thing that Nolan, for all his gifts and his devotion to the material, does not find a room for.

your bedtime story

When I was little, my mother told me the story about Procrustes who had an iron bed. He invited passers-by to relax on his bed, but stretched those who were too short and cut off those who were too tall to make them fit the bed exactly. The bed remained the same, yet the traveller had to adapt to it.

Nolan first experienced the Odyssey as a boy in London in a stage production, from which he took away a single image: the Trojan Horse tipping side-long into the sand. He would later compare it to the Statue of Liberty half-buried on the beach in Planet of the Apes. Both images do the same thing. They turn a civilisation’s pride into rubble and the rubble into something beautiful. He carried the image with him, and was hired to direct Troy in 2004 before the studio handed it back to Petersen. He kept the image, his own private iron bed.

He took it, laid it out and made a perfect fit of it. It is not that Nolan did this cynically. He loves the poem. He loves spectacle. He loves scale. He loves immersive sound. He loves beautiful shots of skin and muscle. He loves Odysseus the way Odysseus loves himself. He loves him like a boy. Nolan saw Odysseus as Procrustes’ traveller, stretching him on the iron bed of his machine of guilt and memory. The stretch is his, the ambition is his, and some of the images are truly beautiful. Some of them even work. But that is all the machine did. That, and interpret. It reduced the very thing that made Odysseus strange. The very thing that made him Greek. He shoehorned himself into Odysseus the way he always does with this travellers, and this time it did not work. I don’t mind this. Childhood loves are allowed to become adult misreadings.

The things in this film that cracked my heart open were Homer’s. The things that left me aching were Nolan’s. His door into Odysseia was a monument tipping into the sand of a stage when he was a boy. Mine was a word my grandmother said to describe my grandfather when he’d been away too long. Those two doors led to the same room in the end, but at this scale, his version becomes the poem for most people because this is what mass culture does. It overwrites. It becomes the default memory.

I guess this is what it means to love a story more than any one telling of it. To hold it so close for so long that seeing it reflected back in a distorted mirror feels like losing a piece of yourself. I don't know how to reconcile the joy this film gave so many people with the grief it gave me. I don't know how to hold my own childhood reverence alongside Nolan's and call it a draw. But I know that Odysseia will outlive us both. It will absorb this retelling and the next one and the one after that. It has been doing this since the 8th century BC. Odysseus always comes home in the end, even if he has to cut off pieces of himself to fit through the door.

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The thing is, r/Hot-Load7525, you’re not entirely wrong — great films can come from directors who don’t share the identity of their characters. But you’re using that obvious truth to argue something much stupider — that identity doesn’t matter at all, that Patty Jenkins was a “publicity stunt”. Ain't it funny how “anyone” almost always ends up being "no one," and a bunch of men get to sit back and act like it's someone else's fault? You think WB was like "Let's get a woman on this so we can say we did it"? Do you think the rest of Hollywood is all women-centric movies being directed by women? Nope! They are very much not!

I hate to tell you this but you've somehow convinced yourself that all the men you've been seeing in movies and TV shows is evidence of a meritocratic system, when really it's the complete opposite. You so badly want movies made for your demographic that you've been doing everything in your power to convince yourself that making something for you is the easiest, most simplest thing in the world. You've been so busy pretending that movies and TV shows are not made "for you," that you're forced to watch someone else's vision, that you're not even willing to ask yourself what exactly that must say about the kinds of movies and TV shows you're willing to make, let alone consume.

Wonder Woman is a film made for straight white men, and the legions of women who are eager to please them. Wonder Woman was always going to be the movie that told men like you, “Don’t worry, you’re still the best thing to happen to every single woman in the universe”. After all, Wonder Woman in Wonder Woman apparently only finds her calling when she meets a man. Wonder Woman is a gal pal movie, produced by rich men, for rich men. Wonder Woman might have been Patty Jenkins' film to direct, but at the end of the day, Patty wasn't the studio. All the studio saw was a female filmmaker with a proven track record of "doing it for the boys."

And that’s not even the most absurd part of this take, in my opinion. What I really want to explore is the idea that the question of who gets to make things, and what do we lose when we act as though it doesn’t matter?

There's a scene in Thelma and Louise that you may remember. The titular duo, played by Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, are on the run after Louise kills a man who attempts to rape Thelma. At one point they pick up a drifter — JD, who is played by Brad Pitt in one of his first breakout roles — and Thelma gives in to the heteronormative fantasy of a night with a beautiful young man. The film knows exactly what it's doing: it lingers on Pitt's body the way cinema usually lingers on women's, parking him in the role of the gorgeous, disposable object. He's a fantasy of southern charm, and our heroines, whom we've grown to love over the last hour and change, are smitten. And then the fantasy collects its bill. JD, it turns out, is a thief; while Thelma is busy being dazzled, he lifts Louise's entire life savings off the bedside table and vanishes by morning. The thing that looked like rescue, a sweet-talking man who liked them, was just another way to be robbed blind. In a few beats, the screenplay upends the whole fantasy: the women don't get punished for desiring him so much as for trusting that desire would be reciprocated honestly.

The movie spends considerable time developing the bond between the two women, showing us what is possible when women love and protect one another in the face of a patriarchal society. But, in a matter of moments, they are reminded that even after all they've been through, even after standing up against the male gaze and patriarchal control, they can't escape men's innate desire to possess and control them. Men like JD, no matter how sexy they are or how much we might want to believe in their rebellious charm, can often be idiots. It's a lesson women learn over and over again, and one that never seems to stick. Thelma and Louise is often described as the first feminist road movie. It isn't the first one, but it is the first one with a large enough budget behind it to inspire studio executives into thinking, what about that, but with Captain America?

I want to show you the power of empathy in art, r/Hot-Load7525. So how do I do that? I could start with the thesis that Thelma & Louise is one of the greatest films ever made, but that doesn't actually get anywhere. I could say that Ridley Scott is a straight white man and wonder whether Scott's work on Thelma & Louise would have been as empathetic and devoid of misogyny in the hands of a straight white man who wasn't Ridley Scott — that probably gets a little further. (Scott's great, but he's also a huge weirdo! And that makes him much more interesting than, say, Ron Howard, who I think of as the platonic ideal of a straight white man director.)

Eventually I'd want to get to the understanding that Scott didn't write Thelma & Louise, Callie Khouri won an Oscar for writing Thelma & Louise. Ridley Scott directed someone else's feminist vision, and that woman's name is Callie Khouri. You probably don’t even know that Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis made sure the way their characters were portrayed on set was exactly how they wanted it. Susan Sarandon was also critical in shaping the film — she pushed back on the script, insisting on changes to how the women were portrayed, right down to how Louise holds the gun in the scene that sets the whole story in motion. Understanding the female experience isn't exactly a universal human condition, no matter how hard people like you try to convince us otherwise. Ridley Scott himself has even said that executives dismissed it as "two bitches in a car."

This gets us to the idea that even when a movie is about relatability and shared experiences, it is not simply about relatability and shared experiences. I’d want to talk about how experiences are communal but empathy is individualized, and how even though movies are made by people, they can never reach their full potential until they’re in the hands of a person with the background needed to fully understand the material. So much of that is intuitive to me, but let's not focus on that too much. After all, what fun would it be to point out that the one example you grabbed out of thin air to back up your argument was completely, unequivocally wrong?

Unfortunately, you kept on going. You had to make it all about Black Panther. Ryan Coogler, you claim, wasn’t “necessary” to direct the film. But if that’s your argument, what is the opposite of Coogler? If not him, then who? Who is the alternative you propose? You clearly seem to suggest that it should not be a Black director since it’s not — let me say that again — necessary. You are not interested in the fact that he brought a specific cultural knowledge to Black Panther that shaped everything from the Afrofuturist design language to the portrayal of Wakanda as a post-colonial African nation.

It’s the whiteness of Ridley Scott you’re after.

Shang-Chi's story came from Destin Daniel Cretton and David Callaham, built out of lived Asian-American experience in a way no one else could have supplied. There are plenty of filmmakers who are skilled and talented, but those movies encompassed unique cultural perspectives that could not have been achieved by giving a script about Asian-American generational trauma and culture to a white guy. That's the reason why those two films were so effective and resonant. A talented filmmaker can work outside of those experiences, and Pride & Prejudice still exists, but doing so risks losing the heart of a story.

Identity is so deeply intertwined with the art we make and the stories we tell, and to pretend that it doesn't matter in directing is to be wilfully ignorant and blind to the experiences of others who don’t look and sound like you.

At the end of the day, it wasn’t that Ridley Scott was the exception to the rule of needing women for women’s films — it was that he had a talented woman in his crew. It can be difficult for a keyboard warrior like you to understand, but movies about underrepresented and misrepresented people often need those underrepresented and misrepresented people behind the camera. Not because they can’t trust white men, but because they can’t trust that white men will understand the significance of their stories, even when they appear to “get it” on the page. They need that trust to make a good movie, and it shows.

I can’t speak for all women but I’m a firm believer in the idea that our narratives, our stories are “our people’s” first line of defense. For their sake, I hope people like you do not take that personally. If you haven’t already, those narratives will be stripped from us, as will our people, if we allow it. The male film bro’s refusal to allow women into their hallowed halls of cinema is absolutely the hill you’ll die on, and that’s perfectly alright with me. We are not needed, fine, and you are certainly not welcome in my space. If Wonder Woman, the greatest female superhero of all time, can be made into a mediocre franchise then so be it.

Sadly, the real-world thing that’s making those movies happen is the industry’s complete and utter inability to be honest about the systemic sexism, racism, and xenophobia that the film industry is built upon. It’s all PR, and it’s all bullshit, and it’s all smoke and mirrors. When you have power and privilege, you have the ability to deny people the things they’re owed — and then lie about it.

To wrap this up, your post is clearly lacking, but I think what frustrates me the most is that this is exactly the kind of post that I see on the internet online more and more every day — the "just asking questions" pseudo-intellectual who uses film discourse to avoid engaging with nuance and instead hide behind the facade that they're "fighting the good fight." It's all self aggrandising nonsense and it doesn't belong in film discourse. But more than that, it's dangerous. When people like you continue to pretend that you don't understand the insidious power dynamics at play, you create a space for yourself where you can completely ignore those power dynamics. It's a waste of everybody's time and energy, and that's exactly why this type of discourse has to be shut down. Goodbye.

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Fate (μοῖρα) is “the allotted portion,” yes, but it’s also:

• what is due, fitting, or rightly ordered

• the share, line, or lot assigned to us

• the portion of life we keep meeting

When I first started writing this issue, I had a good laugh at the universe’s expense. Fate is a rude theme for anyone who likes to believe they are in control of their life, relationships, inbox, leep schedule even government. As I perused the evidence of fate’s work—the UK preparing its 6th prime minister in five years, the sheer elation of Jude Bellingham crashing onto the grass after the final whistle in the England vs Mexico game, a ridiculously important deadline I had convinced myself I would miss but miraculously I’m going to make—I realized that anyone’s sense of control is a joke, one I continue to tell for the sake of my own amusement.

If you’ve been following along, thank you for coming back. If this is your first issue…Welcome to fate, and thank you for joining the club ✨

film

tenet (christopher nolan)

What if, I wonder, Tenet is a modern moira story? Not moira like destiny, or fate with a lowercase f, but moira as the Greeks understood it: Moira, the path you’re already following when the gods stop to intervene. The slow moving train refusing to change tracks even as the characters on it attempt to disembark, to get to their destination sooner, to change the run of events.

In the case of Tenet, that’s a matter of life and death.

Neil walks toward the death he understands is his. He hasn’t “experienced” it in the simple human sense, because Tenet refuses us simple human senses, but the event has already happened inside the loop. From the Protagonist’s perspective, Neil’s sacrifice is already part of the world. At the same time, The Protagonist discovers that he is not recruited by fate — he becomes one of its authors. The organisation that saves him is something he creates. His moira is writing. He has to follow the line of it, to find ways to bend it, to create more space within it, to walk it forward, backward, and back into himself until authorship and obedience start looking like the same thing.

When I think of Christopher Nolan’s films more broadly, I think of the sort of rupture that makes the entire universe feel different. Something has happened that affects everyone, and you either have to reckon with it or continue on and risk being left behind. But in Tenet, a joyous embrace of the ridiculousness of its own concept, Nolan makes a film that, on an emotional level, mirrors the feeling of growing up under algorithmic fate more closely than any of his others. The Protagonist doesn’t have free will, but rather an intricate set of scripts and loops designed to create the illusion of choice. However much he might think otherwise, he is not a free agent operating outside the rules of time and physics, but a cog in a machine that has already planned far more than he understands. Even the Protagonist’s name — the Protagonist — is a script he has to follow, attached to him like fate. There are rules, and he has no choice but to follow them.

In Tenet, free will keeps running into a world that seems already arranged. The Protagonist thinks he’s improvising, but he isn’t. Some of the people guiding him are there because a future version of him helped build the path. Neil returns to help him because he has already done it; he has already been on the Stalsk-12 mission and died in the process. And of course the Protagonist will go on to found the organisation that saves him. So much of this has already been built around him by the Protagonist’s older future self, who orchestrates the counter-operation with incredible foresight, like a video game about time travel where all the cheat codes are written by a single person.

Much like a social media algorithm, Tenet’s built loops restrict the Protagonist’s actions and create the illusion of control. You believe you are choosing your own actions, but in reality they have already been decided for you. The future Protagonist is an architect with hindsight, and like all architects, he can only see the consequences of his designs once they’ve already been put in place.

Neil says in one of the final scenes, “What’s happened’s happened. Which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world. It’s not an excuse to do nothing”. It’s a faith that Tenet’s characters must put in the mechanics of their universe in order to get through the strange loops, but it’s also a philosophy that many people live by and attempt to use as justification for their actions.

What’s happened’s happened. Sometimes, for Neil, this feels like the only way to live.

novel

the secret history (donna tartt)

Everyone knows The Secret History is about murder, but the reason it’s still relevant is that it understands the humiliating glamour of wanting your life to become more serious, more ornate, more fatal. The fantasy is not just “what if I studied Greek with hot rich weirdos.” The fantasy is: what if my life had form? What if the ugliness I came from could be revised into ritual, language, beauty, danger? What if I could step into a story so powerful it would finally tell me who I am?

That’s the moira.

A boy from unglamorous Plano, California — Richard Papen is an easy subject for disdain. But his rapturous voice is one of the many reasons I’m still captivated by The Secret History nearly a decade after my first read. Tartt knows that to make a reader love a character — or at least never want to leave their side — is to show them something exquisite. This is a story about death and moral rot, but in Richard’s voice it reads as a love story. Richard learns the hard way that beauty will not save you, but Tartt has him (and us) on the hook at first, stringing us along with rich descriptions of the rare and precious delights of privileged life. Richard pursues these things desperately, hoping that they will make him beautiful, and perhaps change him into someone capable of being loved.

Out of jealousy and longing, the reader suspects that Richard is almost too willing to abandon his moral compass in service of grasping the beauty that threatens to slip through his fingers. His moral decay and aesthetic elevation are intertwined; Tartt doesn’t let Richard’s attraction to beauty sit innocently beside the evil; she makes the two feed each other. The more enchanted he becomes by these people, the easier it is for him to look away from what they are doing.

This is the dark side of beauty — seductive, and Richard and the reader learn the hard way, dangerous. But is Richard really the only one seduced? Every character in the novel, from the tragic Bunny to the feral Camilla, invites our sympathy. Isn’t it more truthful to say that we want to live in their beautiful world, even though we know it’s a trap — and that this, in essence, is the fantasy of being young and hot, even when you are not?

Moira, as I originally understood it, was a kind of story, and you chose your story, not the other way around. But perhaps this interpretation of fate is a little too hopeful. Richard chooses his story, and then it begins to choose him. This is the true darkness of the beauty that Richard pursues: not lightning from the gods, but self-sentencing by aesthetic. The beautiful dorm, the chosen friends, the Greek, the cashmere coats, the fantasy that proximity to clever people will transform you — and then the bill comes due.

This is the story of my twenties, by the way! Mesmerised by beauty, so desperate to be swept away by a dark and talented boy that I would sacrifice my dignity and safety for the privilege. When you are young, attractive things feel like magic — they promise to take you far away from your ordinary life, and sometimes they do. More often, they don’t. They leave you in the cold remnants of a familiar reality, holding someone else’s story.

I love this book so much.

film

the witch (robert eggers)

Fate is the story other people keep telling about you until the world rearranges itself to make them right.

Take Robert Eggers’ The Witch, a restrained little horror film about the birth of American evil. A story about Puritanical repression and misogyny, yes, but also about belief — belief in God, in Satan, in the evil that lurks around every corner, in the particular evil of the girl standing right there in your kitchen. It’s the family’s misplaced faith in the darkness of the world that leads to their downfall. They live as if the world is a test, and the woods answer in the form of a real witch in the woods. That is part of the terror in Thomasin’s story, sure. The greater tragedy is that her family has no imaginative category for her except sin, temptation, disobedience, and blame — and I think most women who grew up in a household with an opinion about us know exactly what that claustrophobia feels like.

And so regardless of how the story is told, it’s Thomasin1 who survives the onslaught. She is the most capable person in this family by a distance, the one keeping things together while her father fails to make the farm yield and her mother folds inward with grief. And yet, through the eyes of that same family — most violently her mother’s — the only future available to Thomasin is the witch. I’ve written before about the primal fear of female adolescence at play in the film, but though Eggers leans into it, it isn’t the only reading available to him, or to us. I believe in the witch because I believe in people. There is nothing they will not do when they have decided your fate.

Katherine is relentless in her condemnation of her daughter. William is more sympathetic, mostly meaning he is more useless — seeing more than Katherine does and still not saving Thomasin, as men in possession of a conscience and no spine have always done. Flora’s udder gives blood instead of milk. The crops fail. Caleb comes back from the woods changed and delirious and then doesn’t come back at all. Each new disaster narrows the circle, and Thomasin is standing in the middle of it, getting smaller.

I chose The Witch for this issue because it understands fate as a family system long before it becomes a supernatural event. Thomasin is not born free and then cursed. She is born into a household that needs a vessel for dread, hunger, failed faith, sexual panic, maternal grief, paternal weakness, and sibling weirdness. Congratulations, babe, you’re the eldest daughter. You’ve just met moira.

But Thomasin’s moira does not just wait for her — it runs to her.

When Samuel disappears and the family says a wolf took him, Thomasin becomes the place their grief and suspicion go. Katherine says God has cursed this family, because of course even the accusation has to pass through theology before it lands on the girl standing in the room. God may be the subject of the sentence, but Thomasin becomes the object of the family’s fear. Katherine has been waiting her whole life to point the finger at the woman who stole her son, and the fact that the woman is her daughter is not a complication — it’s practically a relief. The world, once it decides what you are, has a way of making sure your own family doesn’t get in the way.

They were chosen.

They deserve her.

On the Sabbath, when Thomasin joins the witches’ circle and laughs high above the trees, she does not feel free, exactly — freedom isn’t quite the word for what happens when every other door has been locked from the outside. She is not made a witch by her family but turned into one by them, slowly, over years of accumulated accusation. “Wouldst thou like to taste butter? A pretty dress? Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” Black Phillip asks. She says yes. The bar for temptation is butter. A dress. The Devil is offering her the things her own home made impossible.

That is the sick joke of accusation becoming destiny: the fascistic control of a Puritan family and the hedonistic excesses of a witches’ sabbath are both prisons. When a girl is treated as dangerous for long enough, danger is the only door left open.

book/tv show

the handmaid’s tale (margaret atwood)

I know you’re already smirking because the book literally contains Moira and you’re like, wow Sophie, so clever, so original. Well done, you made the joke before I could. Now, let me take it away from you just a little bit: as funny as that little coincidence is, The Handmaid’s Tale’s actual moira problem is much more grim, much more practical, and much more terrifying. Gilead doesn’t need mythic Fates when it has names, uniforms, rooms, routes, rituals, wives, commanders, aunts, and enough language to make captivity sound like purpose.

I remember when the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale first premiered in April of 2017, launching a whole new wave of Atwood’s novel into the zeitgeist. The show was eventually put on my list of media to avoid for many reasons, but in the early days, I remember speaking to a colleague about it. “Is it good?” I asked her, assuming she would be able to read my face and body language like a book. I was not ready to give it a shot, but neither did I want to sound like I was dismissing a major work of fiction. “It’s horrible,” she said, deadpan. “It’s so horrible.”

And in case my face hadn’t already anticipated this, she continued: “And I mean that in the best way. You should watch it.”

In Gilead, Offred’s survival runs on her instinct to live. The cost of that survival is that compliance can look like consent from the outside. Although she did not choose to become a Handmaid, she has been stripped of choice so thoroughly that now every choice available to her has been engineered by someone else. Technically, she can choose where to look, what to remember, how much of herself to keep hidden, how to walk through a room without giving Gilead the satisfaction of seeing all of her fear. Small things, but critically important when the alternative is total surrender. From the outside, Offred appears to have accepted her new life. She wears the red cloak and participates in the Ceremony. She holds hands and prays and is pushed toward Nick by Serena Joy before that relationship becomes one of the few places where her own desire and Gilead’s apparatus become horribly tangled. The eyes of Gilead see consent in her compliance.

But Atwood’s novel argues that survival never looks like rebellion from the inside. Within Offred’s mind, her choices are acts of defiance against Gilead. Even if they are not real acts of rebellion — and even if they are part of the Gilead system designed to give her a false sense of autonomy — they matter to her. She clings to them like a baby holding their favorite toy before bed; it doesn’t matter that it isn’t real attachment, just that it makes her feel safe enough to sleep.

The best passages in The Handmaid’s Tale are often the most grotesque, and they all illustrate what the female body as assignment — and as fate — looks like. Gilead doesn’t just oppress women; it converts women into roles and then pretends that the role is natural, ancient, holy, inevitable. The horror is that the regime has a whole vocabulary for why her captivity is her purpose. You can’t escape Gilead, because you were made for Gilead, and Offred’s Handmaid name — literally “of Fred” — is designed to sound like identity while functioning as ownership.

These descriptions in The Handmaid’s Tale have a life of their own. They’ve been adapted into memes and muted images, and they travel under the easy banner of “feminism” and lodge themselves in your brain. But Offred’s body is both fascist imagery and the body of a woman who deserves to be free. You can’t escape Gilead, because you were made for Gilead. You can’t escape moira, because moira is what has been assigned to you. Given enough time, Gilead wants the handmaid to wear her name like any other.

film

a woman under the influence (john cassavetes)

If you haven’t seen A Woman Under the Influence, Gena Rowlands plays Mabel and Peter Falk plays Nick, her husband and a construction foreman. Mabel whirls through scenes like a hurricane with a high-pitched cackle that will shred your nerves and make you laugh at once. She talks too loud and too fast, misinterprets jokes, intrudes on the conversations of Nick’s crew when they come back to the house after a shift — tries to fit herself into their world as best she can but can’t quite read the room. At home, she serves spaghetti to Nick’s crew for breakfast. She loves hard and she wants every person around her to be happy. When Nick leaves for work, she chases him out of the house and begs him not to go. She wears high heels around the house and puts on lipstick after he leaves anyway, because even though he will be gone for hours she still wants him to know that his wife is beautiful. Everything about Mabel is “too much.”

This “too much”ness is unsustainable — unsustainable for Nick, who must play the dutiful husband in public while coming home each night to a woman whose energy makes him feel small and unsure; unsustainable for their three children, who cannot always rely on their mother keeping it together; unsustainable most of all for Mabel, who pushes against the boundaries set by everyone around her but doesn’t quite have enough strength or support behind her to break them completely, so instead just rubs herself raw against them every day until they settle into a rhythm of violence.

When we first meet Mabel we might think she is eccentric or free-spirited, but we very quickly come to discover that there isn’t much freedom left in it anymore. She tries too hard at everything because everything has become an act meant to soothe those around her into believing that she is not actually breaking as badly as they all insist. She is inherently trapped.

But Mabel’s trap is not only cruelty. Sometimes the trap is everyone agreeing too quickly on the story of you. Mabel’s fate is sealed, in part, by everyone around her expecting her to give her heart to her family, and not to herself. When Mabel is sent away for psychiatric treatment, she returns quieter, changed, empty. Nick wants Mabel to be okay, but Mabel at her most okay is the woman who cleans the house on time, doesn’t go out and become impossible to explain, and never gets into an argument with her husband. What Nick, and everyone else in Mabel’s life, wants from her isn’t very different from what the family wants: to be small, to be quiet, to go through life without making too much noise.

Early in the film, Mabel says, “Tell me what you want me to — how you want me to be. I can be that. I can be anything.” The film makes it clear that normal means a woman who accepts her fate, believes she belongs to her husband and children, and resists nothing. It means a woman who will agree with the story everyone else has already decided on.

Fate, in this context, is the life other people keep allotting to you: wife, mother, hostess, patient, problem, beloved disaster. Fate is being watched too closely by the people who love you. Fate is sleeping in a bed that makes you anxious every night because your family doesn’t want the healthy version of you exactly and anyway it would ruin your husband’s story if anyone did actually think his wife was nuts.

But Mabel’s story reminds me that fate can also be a cage, a space where you can’t make any noise and where your body is not even yours. “Just be yourself” is a nice thing to say. What if everyone else has already agreed on who you are?

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Naturally, we’re counting them down with our second issue of Nolan Club: hubris.

The etymology of the word hubris (ὕβρις) traces back to the Ancient Greeks, and it’s thought to describe an offense against the gods, a kind of extreme arrogance, but it also means something more like “wanting it all”. And isn’t that what Christopher is up to? Wanting it all, even if it’ll be the end of him.

Enjoy!

film

the prestige (christopher nolan)

I think about control a lot, probably too much. The belief that if you just plan carefully enough, account for every variable, commit totally enough, you can override the basic randomness of being alive. I do this with work—if I just schedule it right, outline it perfectly, I won’t hit a wall. I do this with relationships—if I just communicate clearly enough, nobody gets hurt. And I do this with grief, which is where it gets dangerous. After someone leaves your life, you replay every decision that led to it, convinced that if you’d just done something different, chosen better, been smarter, you could have controlled the outcome. The Prestige is about what happens when that belief becomes total. When you decide you can engineer your way out of randomness, and you commit to that delusion so completely that by the time you realize you were wrong, there’s nothing left to go back to.

The hubris is thinking suffering transforms if you choose it. That pain you inflict on yourself intentionally is somehow different from pain that just happens to you. Angier builds a machine that kills him every night because his wife drowned randomly, accidentally, and he can’t live with the meaninglessness of that. So he makes his deaths meaningful—chosen, repeatable, part of the greatest trick ever performed. He thinks he’s taking control of his tragedy by authoring new ones, but really he’s just killing himself over and over because he can’t accept that sometimes terrible things happen and there’s no reason and no villain and no way to make it make sense. Borden does the same thing by erasing himself. His identity becomes the trick, and he thinks that’s a choice he’s making, a sacrifice he’s controlling, but really he’s just disappearing and calling it discipline.

What both of them share is the conviction that they can partition themselves cleanly. Be the performer onstage and the person at home, and the two won’t bleed into each other. Borden thinks he can live as half a person and his wife won’t notice the days when the other brother is playing husband. Angier thinks he can drown himself nightly and the version that survives will still be him, unchanged, whole. They’re both wrong. You can’t spend your humanity in controlled increments and expect the rest to stay intact. The performance bleeds into the life until there’s no life left, just the performance, and by then you’ve forgotten you ever had a choice about it.

I’ve made smaller versions of this mistake. Decided I could work eighteen-hour days and my relationships would be fine because I’d decided they would be. Decided I could ignore my body’s signals because I had a deadline and the deadline mattered more. And then I’m shocked when my body gives out. My hubris is in thinking I get to decide the cost, or that I can sacrifice exactly this much and no more.

I cannot.

You cannot.

Borden's wife hangs herself. By the end, Angier doesn't know which version of himself survived. The suffering takes more than they agreed to give, and they’re both so committed to the belief that they’re in control of the experiment that they don’t notice they’ve become the variable being tested.

The Prestige keeps asking what you’re willing to sacrifice for greatness, which is the wrong question. The right question is: why do you think you get to decide? Why do you think your suffering is a controlled burn instead of just a fire? Borden dies believing that the trick was worth it. Angier dies believing it too. But the trick is just a trick. The audience goes home and forgets. The only people who remember what it cost are the ones who paid, and by then it’s too late to ask for a refund.

tv show

the rehearsal (nathan fielder)

From the very first episode of The Rehearsal, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, a kind of manically performed absurdism that I thought only existed in the pages of Nabokov, or in the works of Harmony Korine. The show follows Nathan as he helps his subjects rehearse for big life conversations, using trained actors and elaborate sets to recreate their real lives in minute detail. He builds replica venues, casts actors as their loved ones, rehearses the rehearsal, and even builds an entire simulated parenthood setup with a woman who wants to practice motherhood and rotating child actors. And the show keeps expanding, and he keeps believing that one more controlled variable will finally make this safe. But the project soon spirals out of Nathan’s control, and it becomes apparent that he’s not just everyman, he’s also the villain.

Anyone talking about The Rehearsal as a show about anxiety, or cringe comedy, or Nathan Fielder’s specific relationship with social reality misses the real magic. The show is about showing off. About cracking a joke so elaborate and intricate that it becomes self-obsessed. About inviting your friends over to show them the coolest trick you’ve learned on the guitar, even if it’s just a couple of loops and some pedals that make it sound like a whole orchestra. About becoming so enamored of your own show-off abilities that they completely consume you, and then you lose the room. Nathan Fielder becomes his own enemy, loses sight of himself within his own show-off spectacle, and then becomes an even better show-off for it. For him, the more elaborate the rehearsal, the closer he could get to being God in somebody else’s life. The mistake other people made was trusting him to pull it off.

Hubris, in all senses of the word, becomes him. Hubris blinds you from the humility that must be held in the presence of something that cannot be rehearsed.
In a time where being like God is more easily achievable than ever, thanks to our increasingly elaborate technologies, it is imperative that we learn this lesson as a society.

film

showgirls (paul verhoeven)

I must have watched Showgirls for the first time when I was sixteen, and I remember thinking two things: that Elizabeth Berkley seemed like she was having some kind of medical emergency in every scene, and that I couldn’t tell if the movie was supposed to be funny. I’ve watched it maybe five times since then, and I still can’t answer that second question. Which is, I think, worth discussing.

Nomi Malone arrives in Las Vegas with a suitcase and a switchblade, and she leaves the same way. In between, she claws her way from lap dancing at the Cheetah to headlining Goddess at the Stardust, and the film never once suggests this is a tragedy. She gets exactly what she wants. She fucks the right people, makes the right moves, pushes Cristal Connors down the stairs when Cristal becomes inconvenient. The math works. That’s what makes Showgirls so unsettling to watch—not that Nomi fails, but that she succeeds completely, and success looks exactly as hollow as failure would have.

Elizabeth Berkley’s performance operates at a frequency that most actors would recognize as career suicide. Every line reading sounds like she’s being electrocuted. When she screams "I'm a dancer!" at her boss, she means it with her entire body. Gina Gershon is playing camp—she knows exactly what movie she’s in. But Berkley is doing method work, finding emotional truth in lines like “Maybe YOU are a whore, Cristal, but I'm not”. She’s trying so hard to prove she’s a Serious Actress that the performance becomes its own spectacle, completely unmoored from the film around it.

There’s a moment about halfway through where Nomi explains her philosophy to her roommate Molly: she’s going to be a star, and she says it like it’s already happened. She’s done the calculation. Desire plus ruthlessness equals inevitability. And here’s the thing—she’s right. The formula works as she predicted. She gets the billboard, the standing ovations, everything she wanted. The hubris isn’t in believing the math would work as usual. The hubris is in believing that winning would feel like winning.

Verhoeven told her to "exaggerate everything, every move”, and Berkley, fresh off playing Jessie Spano on Saturday morning television, thought she was being given the opportunity of a lifetime. She gave everything. Too much, probably. So much that the performance became unforgettable for all the wrong reasons. But watching it now, there’s something almost moving about how hard she’s trying. She’s performing for an audience that doesn’t exist—one that will recognize her brilliance, validate her commitment, understand what she’s attempting. Both Nomi and Berkley are convinced someone out there is watching who will finally see them for who they really are.

The film became a cult classic decades later, which doesn’t vindicate Verhoeven so much as complicate the question of what we’re even talking about when we talk about hubris in art. Was he right all along? Or did we just find new ways to appreciate his output? Probably both. Showgirls is about a woman who believes she deserves stardom enough to destroy anyone in her path, made by a director who believed his artistic vision could elevate material about lap dancing and revenge into something profound, starring an actress who believed her commitment could transform a ridiculous script into a showcase for her range.

Nomi hitchhikes out of Vegas in the final scene, heading toward Los Angeles with the same manic energy she had when she arrived. She’s learned nothing. She’s still convinced the next city will finally give her what she’s looking for. Verhoeven frames it as triumphant. And you could argue that’s just what hubris looks like when it’s playing itself completely straight. When you’re so convinced of your own vision that failure and success become impossible to distinguish from each other, because either way, you’re still right there in the center of your own story, still believing.

text

oedipus rex (sophocles)

The thing about hubris that Sophocles understood is that it feels like competence. Oedipus doesn’t think he’s arrogant when he decides to outsmart the oracle. He thinks he’s being responsible. The prophecy says he’ll kill his father and marry his mother, so he leaves Corinth to protect his parents. That’s a rational choice made by someone who takes prophecies seriously and acts accordingly. Sure! However, he also thinks that if you just stay alert and make smart decisions you can negotiate your way around the worst outcomes. Oedipus treats fate like a problem to solve instead of a condition to live with.

Sophocles wrote this in Athens during the city’s most unbearable period, when they’d just invented democracy and philosophy and were deeply pleased with themselves about it. The Athenians had beaten the Persians through tactical superiority. They’d built the Parthenon. They’d created a system of government based on rational discourse and collective decision-making. They thought they’d figured out how to be human better than anyone else in history, and they were probably right, but they were also setting themselves up for the kind of fall that only happens when you’re standing on top of the world convinced you’ve earned permanent residency there. Sophocles gave them Oedipus—smart, rational, committed to truth, everything they valued—and then let them watch him investigate his way into discovering he’d been living inside his worst nightmare for decades and just hadn’t noticed.

The hubris at the center of Oedipus Rex is the belief that awareness is protection. That if you can see the danger, name it, understand its contours, you can control how it touches you. Oedipus knows about the prophecy. He’s hyper-aware of it. He’s organized his entire life around avoiding it. And the avoidance is what makes it happen, because fate doesn’t care about your contingency planning. You can’t risk-assess your way out of being human. You can’t strategy-memo your way around grief or loss or the basic fact that you don’t actually know yourself as well as you think you do. Oedipus was so certain he knew who his parents were, where he came from, what he was capable of, that when Tiresias told him the truth he couldn’t even hear it. The information was right there. He dismissed it as conspiracy because it contradicted what he already knew about himself. (Also: what he knew about himself was wrong, and by the time he figured that out his whole life had already happened.)

The reason Oedipus Rex still resonates with us today is because we’re all doing smaller versions of this constantly. We think self-awareness is a shield. We think if we can just identify our flaws, understand our patterns, see our blind spots, we can correct for them. We go to therapy and learn our attachment styles and read books about cognitive biases, and we think this knowledge will protect us from repeating our mistakes. But knowing you have a pattern doesn’t mean you stop enacting it. Understanding why you do something doesn’t mean you stop doing it. Oedipus knew the prophecy backwards and forwards. He studied it, planned around it, stayed vigilant. And he still killed his father at a crossroads and married his mother and ruled Thebes for years before anyone figured it out. The knowledge didn’t save him. It just meant he got to understand, in excruciating detail, exactly how he failed to save himself.

feature story

who is the bad art friend? (robert kolker)

At some point in your life, you become the protagonist of your own story. It’s a rite of passage, an assumption of selfhood, the dawning realization that you are the main character. But what happens when you become the protagonist of someone else’s story — a story you didn’t choose to be a part of, one that, by all accounts, isn’t about you at all? You might get angry. You might laugh. You might think it’s a bit strange but ultimately do nothing. You might call your lawyer.

Who is the bad art friend? is mandatory reading if you live on the internet — but in case you haven’t read it, here’s the basic rundown: Dawn Dorland is the woman who, having donated a kidney to a stranger, made sure everyone knew about it — both in her private life and in her writing group, where soliciting praise was a favourite pastime. Sonya Larson is the woman who, after having received all the praise anyone could possibly want for her writing, decided that she could incorporate the language of Dorland’s donor letter into her fiction… and that it was fine because it was fiction. What started as a minor dispute (Larson's story ran in American Short Fiction; Dorland only read it in 2018 when it went online, two years after she'd first heard Larson was writing about a kidney donation) quickly escalated into lawsuits.

There’s much more to the story, but what fascinated me most was the way Kolker pinpoints the exact moment where moral action becomes turned into status, then into entitlement to recognition, and then into entitlement to narrative ownership. Kolker is careful to recognize the very human flaws of both parties (he resists the urge to cast Dawn as a cartoonish villain, I think, because she’s a real person and not, say, a Nolan character), but he also holds space for the way this trade-off has become a kind of cultural currency.

At the same time, I am repulsed by Dorland’s cringeworthy passive-aggressive posts, and I’m willing to bet many people would refuse to witness them. What I am deeply unsettled by is the assumption that doing something good earns you something back. The hubris we’re witnessing here is acting on the premise that being good is not good enough. You must be maybe good, but most importantly you must be recognized for being good, or at least have someone witness your forced goodness. Otherwise, it is not enough for the world to see, and it is not enough for the world to give witness — or credit — to the act itself.

I do want to end on another strain of hubris though: the certainty that we understand art better than the people who actually made the art or lived the thing. I was struck by how everyone in this story is dead sure their reading is the right one. Sonya is sure she knows what’s fair to take. The Chunky Monkeys are sure they know exactly how ridiculous Dawn is. Dawn is sure she knows what her gift was supposed to mean to everyone. And the reader is sure they know who’s right. That’s the part that should make you squirm, because we do it constantly. We think we know better than the artist, better than our friend, better than the stranger on the internet. Do we?

Hubris.

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I write to you from Greece, where the weather is something like 31°C and balmy, as opposed to the apocalyptic heatwave currently ravaging the UK. I’m still on a much needed holiday here (which is why you didn’t hear from me last week), enjoying some downtime as I find my way through exciting life transitions. Fret not though, as TFS returns to regular programming next week with more Nolan Club curations!

In the meantime, I’m sharing another archive special for my precious paid readers. You know Ted from our previous collab efforts, and as always, this piece is clear and convincing. In it, Ted argues against the one-film-at-a-time thinking that has plagued the film and media industries for too long, and advocates for sustainable creative careers instead. It’s a must-read.

Enjoy ✨

Please, please, please: stop thinking “one film at a time”

Perhaps I need a regular column to examine the missteps Cine-makers have been ill-advised to take over the years.

I have long felt there was a better way – or rather, several better ways.

And by better ways, I mean better ways to do this thing that we do. Here, on HopeFor Film, we make and love movies. We want – and hopefully have – careers making movies. Or once had them before the bottom dropped out.

We want this to be sustainable, for everyone. And I know we can make it be so in the not so distant future, but to do so we are going to have examine the errors so we don’t get fooled again. For instance, let’s leave alone the fact that SC-Indie film never prioritized the sustainability part, or why perhaps that never happened. One day we are going to have to talk about that part.

Today, let’s examine just what we need to do to prioritize sustainability.

It takes more than hope to make a movie well (although Double Hope helps). And it takes more than hope to build a career making movies. However, both of these goals are so exhausting, it is easy to fall into a thinking pattern that puts the first into opposition with the latter. We want to make the one at hand so well, we often ignore how it all needs to be in service to our career – or rather, to our overall sustainability.

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Welcome you to the first issue of ✨ Nolan Club ✨

In a shocking twist, I managed to convince you to let me write about the themes of Odyssey over the next few weeks leading up to the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Each issue is centered around a theme through the lens of films, songs, podcasts, essays and so much more. I’m soooo grateful to all my patrons who submitted their own picks to help co-curate them with me.

The first issue, homecoming / nostos, is about as foundational as it gets. One of the enduring questions across all of Nolan’s films is whether you can ever really go back — whether you can return home in any meaningful way, whether time can be undone, or whether lost love can be rekindled. It’s a fitting threshold to step through first, as well as something of a personal touchstone for me.

Hope you enjoy this issue as much as I enjoyed writing it.

film

E.T. the extra-terrestrial (steven spielberg, 1982)

My first memory of seeing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial was during one of my family’s summer camping trips. The campgrounds we would stay at would sometimes screen movies at night, and though the details are hazy, I remember my parents setting up our large tent while I sat at the picnic table on my small camping chair, watching a curious extraterrestrial learn about Earth and enjoy Reese's Pieces with a small boy. I was enamored, and to this day, the movie holds a special place in my heart.

Watching it now as an adult, it’s clear to me that the magic of E.T.—and the reason it lands as a homecoming film—comes from how it stages return as desire and rupture at the same time. Elliot and E.T. creating a telepathic connection that allows them to communicate without words. E.T.’s gentle touch as he heals Elliot’s cut finger. E.T. watching TV at home, getting drunk on beer, and syncing Elliott into that chaos from miles away. E.T. hiding among Elliott’s stuffed animals and trying to move through the house without being seen. E.T. pointing at the moon as he reminds Elliot of his home. Elliot giggling as E.T. touches his face and breathes heavily in awe of the human experience. The glimmer of wonder in his eyes as he learns about Earth for the first time. E.T. imitating the sounds of the children’s movie, mimicking them to learn how to speak.

E.T. wants to go home. Elliott wants him to stay. The whole movie lives inside that contradiction. But where that framework focuses primarily on the parallels between the two heroes, I’m equally interested in the darker side of Odysseus’ adventures in the underworld. In The Odyssey, Odysseus longingly communes with the souls of the dead. As he sacrifices animals to the gods, he watches their spirits drink the blood and remembers the lives they led on Earth. It’s a moment of clarity, breaking of the cycle of numbness that allows Odysseus to move on from his past and finally return home.

In a similar way, E.T. provides Elliot with the opportunity to commune with his own lost childhood. E.T. arrives on Earth as a kind of specter or ghost, a reminder of Elliot’s younger years before the pain of divorce and the loneliness of adolescence set in. He helps Elliot remember the sweetness of life, the importance of love and compassion, and most importantly, how to feel again. E.T. helps Elliot commune with the boy he once was, the boy he thought he’d lost forever. And like Odysseus, Elliot is haunted by the knowledge that he must one day leave behind the memories of his past.

So often, I think about the way Elliott cradles E.T. in his arms as he dies. He struggles to hold him up, to keep him from drifting away, and eventually gives into the weight of his body, gently cradling the dying alien in his lap. He rocks him back and forth as they share a final embrace, whispers tenderly into E.T.’s ear, “I love you.” E.T. reaches for Elliott’s face and touches his glowing finger to his forehead. “I’ll be right here,” he says. All this time, E.T. has been taking care of Elliott, keeping him safe, and now it’s Elliott’s turn to return the favor, to hold him close and guide him through the unknown, to love him as he goes.

film

interstellar (christopher nolan, 2014)

When suggested Interstellar as a nostos choice, my immediate instinct was protest: isn’t this a film about leaving home? But once I started thinking about it, I realized how perfect it really is. To me, interstellar feels like a film about another world, about a beautiful but alien cosmos. To many of you, it’s more personal than that.

When Cooper returns from the water planet, the sound of the ship's engines still roaring in the background, he races to his daughter Murphy's video messages. They've just lost one of their team members to a tidal wave. They've subjected themselves to the gravity of a planet that slows down time at a near infinite rate. Their beloved team member Doyle is gone forever, swept away by the wave at the entrance of the ship, just seconds too slow to get inside. Twenty-three years have passed on Earth. But Cooper wants to hear from Murphy, because she's still out there. She's in pain. She needs him.

He watches through the ship's screens as twenty-three years of messages scroll past — his son, his grandson, his father's death. Then Murphy: "Hey Dad. You son of a bitch. Never made one of these when you were still responding because I was so mad at you for leaving. And when you went quiet, it seemed like I should live with that decision, and I have. But today's my birthday. And it's a special one, because you once told me that by the time you came back we might be the same age. And today I'm the same age you were when you left." She has become him.

Cooper balances the guilt of surviving the planet’s deadly tidal wave and the loss of that team member with the knowledge that he has to leave for the next planet, where time will move at a much faster rate. But what will happen to her if he doesn’t make her feel seen, understood, appreciated? The answer is that she will continue to be hurt and angry, and he can’t bear to let that happen. So he does the thing love does. He makes it about him.

Humans, as the nature of this film proclaims, are inherently selfish beings. We constantly make it about us, even when we’re not supposed to. That’s the nature of love. But this also serves as one of the film’s central paradoxes: The only way to save humanity is to abandon it. Love and survival are inherently contradictory forces; they’re the only things that will keep a human being going, but they’ll also destroy our species in the end.

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is a film about love, and no other emotion has such a capacity for selfishness as love. It drives Cooper to choose his moment with Murphy over the lives of the rest of the crew. It drives Murphy to take over NASA and the fate of humanity, insisting on solving the equation Professor Brand confessed on his deathbed had always been a lie, that Plan A was impossible, that he'd never believed they could save everyone. It drives her to refuse the solution to the gravitational problem when her estranged father’s love is at stake. It drives Cooper to return to her, even at the cost of his own life. And this is why I think, out of all of Nolan’s movies, in addition to being the most emotional, Interstellar is also the most Homeric.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are adventure stories in the most classical sense: the hero is thrust into a journey beyond the comforts of home and family, where he must battle gods, monsters, and other men. But at their cores, they’re love stories about obsession and longing: Achilles and Patroclus' bonds of friendship and love are so powerful that they defy the will of the gods, and Odysseus’ endless journey home to Ithaca to be with Penelope is so legendary that it gives the ancient archetype of the “Homeric man” its name. Homer’s men are obsessed. They rage. They aren’t afraid to love too much, even if it means destroying themselves and the world around them, which as Interstellar reminds us, is what love often does.

Odysseus doesn’t even have the decency to die when he’s given the chance to go home: he keeps going on his stupid journey. And what is Cooper’s journey but an Odyssean refusal to go home?

podcast episode

the queen of dying (radiolab, 2021)

I was in the middle of a long, drawn-out break-up when I first heard Radiolab’s The Queen of Dying. Rachael Cusick’s voice eased in through my headphones, cradling a world of tenderness and grief.

Rachael, a writer and radio producer, grew up with a mother who died of cancer when she was six. “And then they just weren’t supposed to talk about the empty chair at the dinner table anymore,” she explains. Rachael says she spent her whole childhood “fighting off these feelings and failing, and fighting and failing,” thinking there must be something wrong with her. When she eventually discovered the five stages of grief, they felt like the first time anyone had underlined the word grief as a thing to go through. But then the stages didn’t work. They became, as she puts it, “supermodel tight jean versions of quote-unquote ‘normal’ grieving that I couldn’t fit into.” And she thought, who the hell sold me this?

So she goes looking. And what she finds is Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss psychiatrist who in the 1960s basically invented the modern language of dying. Kübler-Ross spent her early career as a country doctor in Switzerland before becoming a psychiatrist at the University of Chicago. In this enormous hospital full of dying patients, she couldn’t find a single one — the staff hid them in the furthest corners of the ward because no one wanted to be reminded they existed. Kübler-Ross walked the halls every day until she found an old man who stretched out his arms and said “please sit down now.” She promised she’d be back the next day with her students. When she arrived the next day, he was in an oxygen tent and could barely breathe. He looked at her with “that same kind of pitiful look” and said, “thank you for trying anyway.” He died half an hour later. She had never actually listened to him.

That became her life’s work. She started seminars where dying patients would sit behind a glass and talk about dying, with hundreds of doctors and students watching. Her book On Death and Dying came out in 1969 and made her a sensation. People wept in the aisles at her talks.

Kübler-Ross’s story gets significantly stranger after this point so I won’t give anything else away. But the reason I thought of this episode for this issue is that it tells us a story which doesn’t fully resolve. In Homer’s Odyssey, nostos is fraught with danger and not always achievable. In “The Queen of Dying,” we have this same sense of a doctor, a researcher, and a woman who believes that she can return things to their original state or fix them, only to have her own nostos become complicated and twisted.

Rachael captures this so beautifully in her reporting on Dr. Kübler-Ross. It’s an incredible tribute to Kübler-Ross’s work while also providing thoughtful and nuanced critique of her life and legacy. It’s an incredible episode. You’re going to love it.

film

inception (christopher nolan, 2010)

Christopher Nolan’s Inception begins with a disorienting dream sequence that climaxes with an emotional gut-punch and concludes with a lingering question: Is Dom Cobb finally home? While the titular inception (planting an idea into a target’s subconscious) is important to the plot, it is Cobb’s inability to go home — and what it takes to finally get there — that is the emotional spine of the film. And this is what makes it the number one #1 nostos Nolan film in my book.

In the case of Cobb, our homes are buried beneath the pain of grief and the guilt of letting go. They are hidden in time; they are the spaces we carry with us. But they are also the projections of our unconscious, the spaces we are forced to confront when we can no longer hide from ourselves. To return home means to risk losing everything, to risk being lost. At the edge of the dream, Cobb explains: "Our dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up we realize things were strange."

To wake is to return, to leave the dream state and what we desire, and return to the real world, the place of violence and betrayal and remorse. To wake is to confront. It is to be expelled from a limbo that is far more comforting than the waking world could ever be. I’ve long been fascinated by this idea that home can inherently be a place of danger, that to go home is to risk being hurt. And Inception is a film that surprisingly, and perhaps paradoxically, understands this idea too.

Home is both a fantasy and a kind of purgatory in Inception. Cobb and Mal built their ideal life together in the dream state and now they can’t escape it. "We can still be together, right here," Mal tells him in limbo. "In the world we built together." In the dream state, she is alive. In the dream state, she is real. In the dream state, they are still together. But to be together is to be trapped, and to be trapped is an illusion, however comforting it may be. It is paradise built on the memory of a life that never existed. It’s a fear and a fantasy that Cobb can’t let go of. It is the thing that threatens to consume him whole. He carries it in the totem he uses to ground himself; the spinning top is the only thing he needs to know if he's in the dream or the real world — and the top beginning to wobble, for the first time, is the final image that breaks him and brings him back to life.

And in the end, he finally makes it home. The top wobbles; the illusion breaks. Mal is gone. He is finally free. But freedom is no fantasy. It feels real. And it keeps him alive. Reality isn’t a place that heals you, it’s a place that hurts you. It’s a place where you carry the weight of guilt and continue to long for what you can never have. There is no going back. There is only moving forward, to the promise of a future you can’t envision. In the final moments of Inception, Cobb returns home to his children after years of running away from a life that he never wanted. You can see the joy on his face as he spins the top and walks away from it, but notice when he does find his way back home, he doesn't wait for the top to stop. He walks away from it toward them, toward the place he's always been running to, the place that has always kept him alive: his nostos.

essay

wow, no thank you (samantha irby, 2020)

I love Samantha Irby. I love the way she writes about her body, about her marriage, about friendship, about pop culture, about being a midwesterner. I love the way she writes about not knowing how to be a grown-up, how to fix a house, how to raise kids, how to write a book. I love the feeling of her work — funny and alive and still emotionally meaningful, like you’re sitting on the couch talking with your funniest friend, or looking at their group chat texts. I love that she is hilarious, but also that she uses her humor to write about the sad and difficult and confusing things: grief, chronic illness, the anxiety of adulthood. I love her writing about living in a fish-out-of-water situation so much that I wanted to write about one of her books for this issue.

I narrowed it down to Wow, No Thank You, an essay collection that’s basically all about homecoming (albeit in a chaotic, unexpected way). Central to the book, homecoming is a hazy new beginning that requires new forms of competence. She creates a home in Kalamazoo, Michigan with her wife, living with stepchildren for the first time. This is a dramatic shift — Irby is a Chicago comedian and writer who has written for Shrill, Work in Progress, and And Just Like That..., but most of the essays in the collection are rooted in her domestic life. Leaving Chicago feels like moving out of the city where she discovered who she was, and into a place that doesn’t have as much of a script for who she can be. Irby’s essays are funny, self-deprecating, and full of physical and mental health vulnerability, with a deep investment in flawed and imperfect community.

Most importantly, Wow, No Thank You is about the I-can’t-believe-it-ness of new beginnings. In a style full of Irby’s signature jokes, she describes panic-comedy at home: “my house is repeatedly saying, ‘What the fuck is that smell? It’s me; I’m the smell. I’m the idiot who left the food in the food processor to rot for three days because I thought it would be ‘simple’ with a capital S to make hummus and I forgot about it because the meatball daughters were arguing about some dumb shit… all day.” The new house requires “competence” as systems begin failing that she never had to manage in an apartment, but she understands that this form of adulthood isn’t about being correct or right: “I am not a homeowner with a to-do list that is a reasonable length and a house that is in good working order; I am a homeowner with a simple solution that requires extreme competence on my part.” Much like Odysseus overwhelmed by the flotsam of his ship in The Odyssey’s first lines, Irby needs to quickly become competent. The journey back home requires competency at rapid speed.

film

the wizard of oz (victor fleming, 1939)

There is a theory in psychoanalysis — from Donald Winnicott, if you want to be formal about it — about the difference between the home you grew up in and the home you’ve constructed inside yourself from the raw material of having grown up in it. The internal home. The one you carry. The argument being that healthy development requires you to leave the first one and inhabit the second, to internalise enough of it that the physical structure becomes optional — that you can be away, at sea, in a war, in Oz, and still have the thing that home actually provides, which is not shelter but continuity of self. The knowledge of who you are when nobody is watching.

Dorothy has this, which is why clicking her heels in the last five minutes works immediately. There is no warm-up, second attempt, or moment of doubt where the shoes sputter and she looks around and thinks, well, this is awkward. She just does it, and she’s home. The readiness to go home is the same readiness as knowing who you are without the yellow road and the companions and the green city to organise yourself against — and Glinda, who is essentially a transitional object in a tiara, withholds the exit until Dorothy has done enough miles to locate that knowledge in herself rather than in the destination. Dorothy’s entire journey, retrospectively, was an optional scenic detour around a solution that was already on her feet. And that’s what homecoming often is: the suspicion that the way back was always available or that some significant portion of what we call “trying to get home” is actually just learning to believe that we can.

This is, I suppose, the difference between nostos as logistics and nostos as readiness — and The Wizard of Oz is the only film I can think of that stages the gap between them so completely and then has the nerve to make it feel like a happy ending. Oz is in Technicolor. Kansas, when Dorothy wakes up, is sepia. She left a grey world, spent ninety minutes in a saturated one, and returned to the grey world and called it everything she’d ever wanted.

And that’s the cruellest thing about homecoming: It promises reunion and delivers archaeology. You don’t go back to your life. You go back to the site of your life, and you sift through what’s still there, and you try to reconstruct from the evidence something that matches the version you’ve been carrying around in your head, which has, in your absence, calcified into myth. The home you left was a place. The home you’re returning to is an argument you’ve been having with yourself for years, and the place has the audacity to just be a place, unchanged, indifferent, smelling the same.

song

owe you everything (puppet, 2022)

When I put out a call for my paid patrons to co-curate Nolan Club with me, suggested the song Owe You Everything.

She wrote in her message: “The song is dedicated to an artist named Pierce Fulton, whose work Puppet (real name Brendan Baldwin) looked up to when he was starting out in the EDM scene, and even got the chance to collaborate with Pierce before he died by suicide in 2021. If you read/listen to the lyrics, Brendan is telling Pierce about the role he played in helping Brendan become completely himself and succeed the way he has as an artist, to the point where he's finally found love for the whole journey that led him here, including the parts he never cherished before.”

I hadn’t heard this song before, but Charlotte hears it as a record of homecoming:

“A hero returning home after a long and dangerous journey. Listening to Owe You Everything, I can't help but wonder if the danger needn't be limited to mortal peril. Maybe it can also take the form of all that seeks to swallow our human potential, make us doubt ourselves, or whatever else made Brendan hate what he made half of the time/prevented him from becoming the truest version of himself. But once you get there — once your light becomes too bright for any shadows to obscure it — you can stand in those spaces you once feared and feel nothing but gratitude, because there's no home (within yourself or otherwise) without the coming. And sometimes, the X factor is a Pierce or an Athena that always knew you could do it.”

The first notes of the song feel like the sound of the walls of a place you love swelling in on you — a tight hug that compresses the isolation of a hotel room into the warmth of a childhood bedroom. In writing about nostos, I was particularly interested in the original mythological context surrounding the word; Homer defined nostos as a return home, but often a return home where everything has changed. In Owe You Everything, Brendan captures the spirit of this re-imagining: looking back at a past self with the wisdom of the person you’ve become, while still feeling the weight of all the ways you’ve always carried yourself.

He is signalling to us that it’s okay to hold the memory of someone’s influence as a source of joy and discovery, even as that person has died. But he is also capturing the strange intimacy of influence: how it exists both inside you and outside, as the voice that shapes your choices and the hand that tugs at the strings of your becoming. In the song, influence becomes another word for someone else’s notes, someone else’s choices, someone else’s sounds. How do you exist without the glimmers of others’ light? And, at the same time, how do you find your own light among all of that reflection? Brendan Baldwin is asking these questions, searching for the answers within the sound of his friend’s essence.

The song moves through ambition, impostor-feeling, creative shame, and appreciation. It lands on self-recognition and a hard-won relationship to origin/home. It returns, like nostos always does, to being unfinished.

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There are, however, specific moments that I can recall vividly that give me flashbacks to learning things. I remember the first time someone corrected my spelling at a sleepover and I was too embarrassed to ever let anyone see a note I wrote again. I remember pausing for a full minute on a question in 8th grade algebra, feeling like I was on the verge of some monumental breakthrough, before realizing that X being equal to X wasn’t very helpful at all. And I remember a rainy day in the summer before high school when my dad wanted to watch The Passion of the Christ and I wanted to watch a movie I’d already seen.

I remember throwing an absolute wobbler about it. Full-on teenage dramatics, complete with door slamming and accusatory journal entries. Looking back, I can see that my poor dad was just trying to broaden my cinematic horizons, to introduce me to something outside my comfort zone of early 2000s rom-coms and Disney Channel Original Movies. But at the time, it felt like a betrayal of the highest order. How could he not understand that rewatching A Cinderella Story for the fifteenth time was a matter of life and death?

What I couldn’t articulate then — what I’m still trying to articulate now, if I’m being honest — is that rewatching a beloved movie isn’t just a way to kill time or wallow in nostalgia (although it can 100% be those things too). It’s a way of learning a film’s secret language, of training your eye to catch the little grace notes and visual echoes that you might have missed the first time around.

Of course, there’s also something to be said for the jolt of adrenaline that comes with discovering a film that cracks your brain open like a walnut and rearranges the pieces into something unrecognizable. The films on this list did that for me. They took the building blocks of cinema that I thought I knew — the hero’s journey, the meet-cute, the third-act twist — and spun them into shapes I’d never seen before.

So consider this my cinematic Rosetta Stone — a decoder ring for the films that taught me how to watch and how to see film. Some of them are masterpieces, others glorious oddities, but all of them live on MUBI, and I put together a list on the platform so you can find them in one place. And you can get 30 days free at mubi.com/finalscene ✨

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babette’s feast (1987)

I've never been able to articulate exactly what Babette's Feast does to me1; maybe it's the way I can never retain enough Danish to understand it without subtitles, so I've always experienced the film as the world's most beautiful bedtime story. Maybe it's that sounds like rain falling on leaves, like water boiling, like bread tearing, like birds singing and the ocean crashing, are more important than score.

Babette’s Feast is about the purpose of creating art that you know will go unseen and the purpose of creating art that makes no sense to the people who are forced to experience it. It’s about going through it for the sake of going through it, without any of the other extraneous reasons that were somehow conjoined into that experience so that we could justify going through it. It’s about just going through it. It’s about being made to go through it and having absolutely no other reason for it to exist. And what’s so upsetting about that is that at the end of the day, when all is said and done, that’s really all of it, anyway.

With quiet films like this, you have to let yourself just sort of be in the moment, and be with the characters that are onscreen as they move through their lives. You can’t be waiting for the next thing to happen, you can’t be waiting for the next line. You have to just sort of let go of that impulse, and forget about Babette’s backstory and whether or not she’s going to leave, and just…be there. With her. And with the other characters, too. Just…be there. That sort of meditative way of watching Babette’s Feast has really affected the way I watch other films. It’s made me a more patient viewer. And, most importantly of all, it’s taught me that films don’t always have to have a point. Sometimes, it’s enough that they just exist.

three colours: the whole ass trilogy! (1993-1994)

Watching the Three Colours trilogy2 through the lens of ‘how to watch films’ is actually a really interesting proposition, because these films already embody a certain idea of how to watch films. With them being Krzysztof Kieślowski’s final solo directorial feature films, they also serve as a brilliant love letter to the medium. They’re deeply immersive, complex, and honestly a bit bewildering; like all great films, they hold so much within them and require everything from you just as you’re asked to give everything to the world they create.

This is a movie series that made me view colour through a more metaphorical lens. It’s not just about how a movie looks, it’s about how a movie feels. Colour can absolutely be representative of emotions, ideas, and thematic meat without physically existing in the same way as any other tangible element of a film. While they’re not the most extreme examples, I always found that the three colours—blue, white, and red—representing the three French revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity in the trilogy was an effective way to illustrate this meaning both behind and alongside the colour. It’s an interesting question to pose when it comes to this idea of what colour is doing in cinema—and if that’s the case, does each film ultimately end up being as much about the colour itself as it is about what colour is doing in cinema?

But I’ve also been thinking about it in terms of a larger framework — how should we think about the experiences of different characters and events across different films? Do they inherently feel like longer versions of a one-off film? Is there something fundamentally different about them? Can you even divide a trilogy like this into its constituent parts and think about them as separate, let alone think about the experience of watching them as separate? I don’t know if I’m getting at the right question, the question feels amorphous — but one of these days, I will figure out a way to answer it, even if that answer is “by watching the Three Colours trilogy.”

being john malkovich (1999)

The first time I watched Being John Malkovich, I was still young enough in my movie-watching life to be surprised by a film’s concepts. That’s not to say I don’t see unique ideas in movies anymore, but the first time I saw a film like Mulholland Drive or Brazil might’ve felt like an entirely different world of storytelling. Being John Malkovich came a bit later than those, but even still, it was an introduction to something for me, a sort of surrealism that I didn’t realize was missing from my own understanding of what films could be3.

Kaufman shows you cinema is a place where you can make things happen that would be completely unacceptable in our real lives, but totally captivating in a way that feels real even though it isn’t. That’s a lesson I’ve internalized into my own writing a lot. Sometimes that means tackling things with very serious implications, like I’m doing in TFS. Sometimes it means making a character do something logistically impossible, but narratively appropriate, like John Malkovich, or in movies like The Lobster or The Truman Show, where the stakes are so heightened and the emotion so real that it almost doesn’t matter if things make sense. What matters is that it feels true.

Being John Malkovich is already such a unique experience because we’re not just watching someone do something weird, we’re watching someone else watch someone do something weird. You know what this reminds me of? The way movies sometimes feel like a cheat code for life because you suddenly feel like you’re living through someone else’s experience. You’re in their head, feeling what they’re feeling, or at least as close to that as you can get. You’re blissfully unaware of the consequences for that person because you feel like you’re in control of their actions. I guess that’s what the movie teaches us — that sometimes we want to be like John Malkovich. And sometimes we don’t.

mean streets (1973)

I think Mean Streets is one of the great first films for a director — even though Scorsese had worked on other films and documentaries, I consider it a debut in the sense that it’s the first time his distinct style was so fully realized. The camera in that movie does so much to establish the milieu, the mood, the difference between Charlie and Johnny Boy, and the sensibility of the “working class” Catholicism that Charlie is always going on about. It’s a movie about “the streets,” so the camera takes on this nature of being out on the street itself: it weaves and bobs like someone walking through a crowded space, sometimes getting caught up in the chaos of life, sometimes pausing to look at the small moments or catch a side-eyed glance. It’s a camera that, at times, can feel almost voyeuristic, peeking through doorways or hanging back to observe Charlie and Teresa in the kitchen without their knowledge.

On a completely unrelated note: I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for what I call the “pity pause,” the beat at the end of a film that asks its audience to sit with the knowledge that the protagonist isn’t going to be okay, and neither are we. Mean Streets has one of the best pity pauses in cinema, and the question it leaves me with is simple: what are you going to do about it? What a film teaches you says more about you than the film itself, and what I’ve learned from Martin Scorsese’s first film is that nothing is stopping you from trying to be better, and nothing is stopping you from failing.

festen (1998)

I think that, above all, Festen taught me that you should always read the synopsis before you press play. I was pretty unprepared for that one. This movie, for those who don't know, is about a man who, at his father's 60th birthday party, stands up to reveal that his father abused him and his twin sister as children. Wonderful! Happy birthday! The opening credits are a carnival ride, shaky camera and unsteady hands. It’s not disorienting, it’s familiar. We all know this feeling, we’ve all been here before. We’ve all been at a party maybe not quite like this, but dressed up like idiots and suiting ourselves so no one else has to be uncomfortable. The opening of the film is a perfect setting of the scene for this Danish family drama and you are thrown into it so abruptly, so inorganically, that it feels like getting off a ride at Disneyland and wandering around the works yard.

I love how raw and unflinching this movie is, and I love how by the end of it you feel exhausted in a way that only a really good scream-cry can accomplish. I also love how tense it is; the buildup and anticipation of when the father is going to finally get what’s coming to him. It’s a really good movie! But only if you know what you’re getting into. Actually, it sounds like it’s about time I watched it again.

malcolm X (1992)

I’ve said before that Malcolm X is the most important film to ever exist, and I stand by it. That opening shot is a perfect encapsulation of everything Spike Lee starts with in that movie: the film begins with a refusal to pull punches, a willingness to be confrontational and discomforting, a commitment to using the full breadth of cinema to tell your story. Not that it was the first, but Malcolm X was certainly one of the first mainstream films to show you that cinema could be used as a weapon. It’s an opening that doesn’t so much set the tone as it does establish the precedent. If you can start there, what can’t you do?

I’ve always found that great films find a way to cater to your specific proclivities and fascinations, and Malcolm X is one of the best examples of that. It has spectacular performances, brilliant cinematography, plenty of iconic lines, and it’s a film about a man who lived an extraordinarily interesting life; you could argue those are the ingredients to any great film, and that’s true, but what really makes Malcolm X tick is its sheer operatic nature. Every scene is about 50% bigger than it needs to be. Spike Lee clearly believes that if a scene works and is good and fun to watch then you should just let it go on for as long as it wants to. This could easily be obnoxious in the hands of a less-skilled director, but Spike Lee manages to make it utterly intoxicating. There are slow-motion montages of Malcolm X giving speeches that go on for much longer than you’d expect, and they’re just so rad to watch! It’s astounding how every scene feels like it’s about to end and then just doesn’t.

You could argue that it’s protracted to the point of drawn out, but I just can’t, not when Spike Lee’s voice is so electrifying to experience. It’s a voice that insists on being heard, and that, in doing so, forces its listeners to confront their own prejudices, understandings, and lack of knowledge head-on.

belle de jour (1967)

You know how sometimes you’ll be talking to a friend and they’ll casually drop some wild detail from their past, like “Oh yeah, I spent a summer training as a professional contortionist in Prague,” and you’re just sitting there like “I’m sorry, what now?”. That’s kind of how I felt the first time I watched Belle de Jour. On the surface, it’s this chic little slice of French cinema, all dainty teacups and silk dressing gowns. But then BAM — suddenly Catherine Deneuve is getting pelted with mud in a forest by some dude with a whip, and you’re like “Excuse me, did I miss a memo? When did we take a hard left turn into Fetish Town?”

But the thing is, once you adjust to Buñuel’s wild rhythm, you start to realize he’s doing something really clever with all these jarring tonal shifts. He’s using them to keep you perpetually off-balance, to make you feel as disoriented and unmoored as Deneuve’s character. Every time he yanks the rug out with a surreal dream sequence or a kinky client, it’s an invitation to share in her sense of dislocation, her feeling of being adrift in her own life. It’s a trip, but it’s a trip with a purpose. By the end, I felt like I’d been given a crash course in how to use the unique tools of cinema — the cuts, the juxtapositions, the slippery sense of reality. Buñuel tells Séverine’s story by making you live it, drawing you deeper into her unraveling psyche.

the graduate (1967)

There are two types of boredom in The Graduate that interest me: the one that Ben Braddock feels in his post-college life, and the one that the audience feels in the pauses between his movements through that life. Nichols isn’t so much playing with the audience’s boredom as he is with their willingness to sit in those moments of inactivity, longer than is comfortable, because they know that a response to those moments is building within the character. The response is the catharsis — I need to get out of this pool, I need to go to Mrs. Robinson, I need to drive to Santa Barbara — and when it arrives, even if it’s been building for an extended period of time, it’s ultimately what the film’s been preparing us for. The result feels earned, rather than static.

This is a film where I learned that yes, of course, movies are about telling stories. But they are also about manipulating emotions, and they are about eliciting specific reactions at specific times. They are about running through the aisles of a church to a Simon & Garfunkel song, and they are about doing it for long enough that you can really allow yourself to think about how complicated and terrifying it is to run through the aisles of a church. They are about the pause on Dustin Hoffman’s face right before he says the damn thing. They are about Mrs. Robinson and her slow zoom. This is a film where you spend twenty minutes staring at Anne Bancroft’s face. This is a film where a man goes to college. This is a film where you spend a full minute staring at Katherine Ross’s sad face while music plays. It is a movie so off the wall that Hoffman originally didn’t want to do it.

And it works because Mike Nichols somehow figured out how to make a movie that contained, like, fifteen million of those specific moments. The close-ups are so tight, they almost start to feel claustrophobic; it’s Ben’s world, and we’re just living in it.

written on the wind (1956)

The first time I watched Written on the Wind, I remember being inexplicably fixated on the wallpaper. It was this lurid floral pattern that made me feel like I was inside a perfume ad from the 1950s, and not in a good way. I kept getting distracted by it, wondering who on earth would choose to decorate a room like that. It wasn’t until Dorothy Malone came swanning down the staircase in a yellow dress that was somehow even more aggressive than the wallpaper that something started to nag at me. The colors in this film weren’t just loud — they were screaming.

I found myself paying more attention to the palette than the plot. The sickly green of Lauren Bacall’s sitting room. The angry red of Robert Stack’s party blazer. The washed-out gray of Rock Hudson’s suit, like all the life had been drained out of him. It was like each character was wearing their subconscious on their sleeve, and Sirk was using color to whisper their secrets before they ever opened their mouths. I started wondering if maybe the wallpaper wasn’t an accident — if maybe it was a choice, as deliberate as a line of dialogue. I’m still not sure I have a definitive answer, but I know that I’ve never looked at set design the same way since. Now when I watch a film, I find myself scanning the margins, looking for the stories the colors are telling when the characters aren’t speaking. Maybe it’s all in my head, but I like to think Sirk let me in on a secret that day; that in the hands of a master, even the wallpaper is a supporting player.

the watermelon woman (1996)

The Watermelon Woman is a film that flips the script and, with that, challenges your perceptions of documentary filmmaking. Cheryl is making a quasi-documentary about a Black actress who never got her due. Throughout the film, she interviews her family, her friends, the men who were in her life, and herself. It’s a movie full of talking heads, community organizing, and anachronistic “found footage.” The film is at once a documentary and not a documentary; it’s a series of half-truths and whole lies. Cheryl lies to herself and about herself, but she also hones in on what is true about herself: she is a documentary filmmaker and this is her film. It’s like watching someone daydream, completely in their own head.

The film helped distill to me how “realness” is a highly malleable concept in cinema, and that documented history isn’t inherently more important than undocumented history. Like, who’s to say that the real history of the United States is more important than the imagined history of the Watermelon Woman?

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But I couldn’t let the festival pass without any coverage, so I did something a little scary and a little fun: I announced that I was looking for a writer to be the official Cannes 2026 correspondent for TFS. Thank you all for submitting your pitches!

I’m thrilled to have secured who got the job done AND captured the wild and wonderful spirit of everyone’s favorite overrated French film festival.

This piece is such a great fit for TFS, and I’m so grateful to Dan for making the time to write it. I’m also endlessly grateful to the paid readers who made this initiative possible. When I started building the community behind TFS, one of my goals was to create a space where readers and writers could support each other to do more of the work they loved. So if you want to see more initiatives like this, please consider upgrading to help me pay for them 💖

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Now, to Dan’s expert coverage of the festival’s 79th edition. Enjoy!

“The White Lotus people are here somewhere,” I kept thinking during the week I was at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. For its fourth season, which is set at the festival, the hit HBO series has set up shop in, among other locations, the Croisette’s historic Hôtel Martinez. I didn’t see any sign of the production while I was in town, but one friend did spot an errant steadicam, and glimpses of shooting have started trickling out. Film festivals are often great attractors for the kinds of people Mike White could have written—monied, image-conscious, and conflicted over the gulf between their professed and practiced values. The beauty of the French Riviera (*No amount of burnout can make the way the sea bands from aquamarine to wine-dark any less breathtaking) and the festival’s reputation make Cannes an ideal White Lotus setting. Time will tell if that actually helps the show find new and interesting ways to explore the themes it’s already been wearing thin after just three seasons.

The most useful structuring idea for my first year attending Cannes came from, of all things, Ron Howard’s aggravatingly cliched biographical documentary of Richard Avedon. Cannes’ nonfiction curation has historically been lacking, to a degree that seriously belies the festival’s general prestige. There might as well be a template for this kind of movie: Open with the least imaginative song you can think of (Spoon’s “I Turn My Camera On,” in this case), put on a slideshow of archival footage and photographs, and have a few talking heads shepherd us along. And yet Richard Avedon’s genius is still powerful enough to grab your attention. In one interview, he said, “I don’t think there will be photographers in the future,” predicting (before social media, mind you) the way the internet would cause image-sharing to metastasize. There are no more photographers because everyone is a photographer.

Cannes tries to defy this. It is the last major festival whose prime movers put in place certain guardrails to maintain it as a capital-I Institution. This is why it did not have a digital edition during the COVID-19 lockdowns, why it still refuses to cooperate with Netflix over the platform’s apathy toward theatrical distribution. No other festival’s opening press conference is given so much discursive weight, with participants expected to opine profoundly on The State of Cinema. (*It’s unfortunate, then, that the most memorable part of this year’s opening press conference was Demi Moore, in a beautiful stroke of Actor Brain, signaling her open-mindedness about AI on the basis that “against-ness breeds against-ness.”) Sections of the various venues are rigorously checkpointed to ensure talent, press, and civilians are in their proper places. (*No matter how many times I saw police officers with machine guns, it never stopped being unnerving.) The red carpet leading up the stairs to the Grand Palais has separate entries for different players—photographers enter at one point to fill the bullpens on either side of the aisle, celebrities get dropped off from cars, ticketholders enter from their own queues. It’s an elaborate, rigorous choreography for the stylish images you’ll see in your news feed moments later. Selfies are forbidden on the red carpet, and photography is restricted in other places; I watched a journalist get scolded for attempting to take a picture of the handsome view from the press lounge balcony.

These strictures are easy to mock and, naturally, hard to enforce. Elijah Wood blithely defied the red carpet selfie prohibition on opening night. More pointedly, just outside the official bounds of the festival’s premises, countless people thronging against the metal barriers that turn the Croisette into a labyrinth are gleefully snapping their own pics. (*The festival is also more than capable of puncturing its own mystique, like with kitschy mermaid photocalls.) The proximity not just to celebrity but to the idea of the festival itself is intoxicating for so many. This is in no small part where the 20th-century conception of fame and its glamour were refined. While the parameters around celebrity have changed significantly since Avedon’s day, the clout of Cannes lingers. The festival’s boundaries are almost more important as part of a performance that affirms this perception than they are at serving any practical utility.

The line between media-informed perception and reality is blurred into a pink opaque in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the latest feature from Jane Schoenbrun. Billed as a horror picture, it in truth seldom tries to be scary, despite having slasher films as its focus. Its investigation into the ways media shapes our sense of self is familiar territory for the director of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. But where those films were concerned with how art and the internet affect identity and gender, this one specifically explores desire and eroticism through the Persona-esque tension between Hannah Einbinder’s repressed filmmaker and Gillian Anderson’s sultry, reclusive retired actor. What if the Slasher and the Final Girl are performing a kink? What if the lurid, bloodthirsty gaze of the camera could not just dehumanize and dissociate, but sometimes help you recognize what you want? It’s a heady, talky film that I’ve found more intellectually rigorous the more I’ve thought about it, though the omnipresent scare quotes around the action can be a bit of an obstacle. It’s also gorgeous in its deliberate artificiality, featuring painted backgrounds and sumptuous color work.

The gulf between the real and the imaginary is much starker in Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales. Isabelle Huppert plays a housebound writer who spies on her neighbors and imagines plots for her novels based on what she sees. Due to shenanigans, the sound FX artists across the street get their hands on her manuscript, and reading the sordid love triangle Huppert prescribed them causes them to spiral. This is a drastically reimagined (and punishingly elongated) spin on Kieślowski’s Dekalog: Six / A Short Film About Love, and the first installment in a planned series of adaptations of the Polish auteur’s seminal Ten-Commandments-themed anthology. The project is not off to an auspicious start. Farhadi’s talent is in pitting people against each other in seemingly straightforward situations that grow more complex as he unveils information that dramatically recontextualizes their circumstances. This is instead a spin on the concept of fiction’s capacity to affect people, except the people in question are wincingly stupid.

There is a compelling kernel to Parallel Tales, though, about the self-consciousness that comes with being watched. Amid the paparazzi cameras and cellphones, cinephiles at Cannes are engaging in their own performances. This is a chance to playact at a classical ideal of beauty and chicness. I’m not above this, by the way. In anticipation of my first Cannes, I went to the top-tier menswear boutique Rothmans and purchased two pairs of chino shorts and a dressy T-shirt. Just like everyone else, I wanted to look good in photos. My hubris was punished with constant wind and surprisingly chilly temperatures, which kept me in jeans and a light jacket for most of my week there. Every film festival has its panhandlers outside theaters hoping for spare tickets, but only here are they doing so dressed in formalwear. They hold handmade signs begging in multiple languages for entry to their desired screenings. Or some of them simply want to be in on the action, regardless of the title. I saw one woman with a placard reading N’importe quel film fera l’affaire—“Any movie will do.”

The protagonists of Paper Tiger, brothers played by Miles Teller and Adam Driver, are themselves striving. It’s 1986, and they see an opportunity to cash in on the redevelopment of Brooklyn’s toxic Gowanus Canal with Teller’s engineering know-how and Driver’s cop connections. Unfortunately, they’re movie characters, and chasing the American Dream never works out for those folks—especially if you get in bed with the Russian Mafia. James Gray renders the resulting calamities with characteristic technical precision. The film’s recreation of ’80s NYC is immaculate, and multiple sequences stand out (gunfighters stalking through tall grass in the climax is a real treat), but like a lot of Gray’s work, it worked less for me in practice than it does on paper. He starts with deliberate, magisterial archetypes (this one has an epigraph from Aeschylus), but doesn’t completely hone them into real people.

In contrast, Fatherland sands down real people until they feel like generic Euro arthouse movie characters. Nobel-winning writer Thomas Mann and his family were subject to frequent tumult and so, so many lavender marriages amid Germany’s calamitous 20th century. Paweł Pawlikowski, with his typical formal austerity, elides much of this fascinating history as he puts Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) on a postwar road trip across both West and East Germany. I have been continually frustrated by the painstaking legibility of Pawlikowski’s work; the Themes are aggressive, crowding out the humanity of his characters and leaving almost no room for the viewer’s own interpretation. What’s left is a pat exploration of lingering fascism and basic Cold War both-sidesist ambivalence.

One facet of Fatherland that resonates is its emphasis on artists whose work has been dramatically eclipsed by both global events and personal tragedy, who feel adrift amongst the pomp different organizations have thrown on for them. Cannes is all pomp, to an overwhelming degree. More than anything else, I was unprepared for how omnipresent the red carpet is. It’s not just leading into the Grand Palais; it’s everywhere, guiding you where to go like hospital floor markings. Female volunteers wear shirtwaist dresses that match the carpet’s blood-orange color. The red carpet is even the main feature of Cannes’ pre-film introductory animation, adorning a glass staircase that rises out of the sea to the stars to the tune of Saint-Saëns’ “Aquarium.” It verges on a specifically French varietal of camp, which means it can still pass as cool for so many people.

The vagaries of hipness are a major theme of Club Kid, in which a veteran New York scenester learns that the one heterosexual encounter of his life a decade prior has produced a child, forcing him to grow up overnight. Jordan Firstman, who wrote, directed, and plays the lead, is one of the more White Lotus-esque figures at this year’s Cannes (*This could be taken either as a pejorative or a compliment, but I assure you it is just an assessment without judgment.), known for adopting a playfully abrasive persona in much of his work, and sometimes in life. The film’s sweatily lived-in depiction of the New York club scene is one of its strongest suits, and the way the protagonist tries vainly to fit his newfound son into it makes for some novel friction—turns out the little guy can DJ!

Community, art, and how one can shape the other is also core to All of a Sudden, the best film I saw at the festival. Ryusuke Hamaguchi is a rare filmmaker who asks for your patience and truly rewards it; this picture runs more than three hours, and I’d have gladly sat with it for longer. Set mainly in a nursing home, many of its characters require close attention and care. Virginie Efira’s character wants to set new standards for such care in place, which chafes against the more mercenary demands of the market. She clarifies her philosophy for the audience through her budding friendship with Tao Okamoto’s terminally ill theatremaker, who becomes the home’s artist in residence and comes up with physical and mental exercises for the residents inspired by theatrical practice. The two freely switch between French and Japanese in conversation; this is a film with bone-deep conviction in humans’ ability to transcend all potential obstacles and connect. From a grammar of simple, careful framing and editing, Hamaguchi again builds a full dialectic of manifold musings about what we owe to each other and how we can fulfill those demands.

After several years of high-profile bidding wars for Competition titles during Cannes, that activity was notably lacking at this year’s iteration. Neon presumably didn’t feel like it had to buy everything in hopes of securing the eventual Palme d’Or winner, since they came in with All of a Sudden, Paper Tiger, Fjord, and more. Club Kid woke things up a bit, with distributors fighting until (who else) A24 acquired it for seven figures. The general mutedness speaks to the greater shrug that’s greeted this year’s festival. There were stirrings about it being a flop year from the time the lineup was announced, and getting to see the movies hasn’t yielded many surprises. No amount of glitz can compensate if the artistic core of your institution isn’t sound.

There have been mutterings about Cannes’ lack of risk-taking in its mainline programming for a while now, how its love of specific auteurs and celebrity generally makes for predictable picks. How much can these returns diminish? All festivals have many industry attendees who will be going to more meetings than films, but it might in fact be possible for the industry element to overwhelm the whole intended purpose of a festival. That happened to Sundance, which has pulled up stakes for Boulder. Cannes won’t be moving anywhere, of course, but who knows where it may go.

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Dan Schindel is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. He is a former associate editor at Hyperallergic, and his work has appeared in Film Comment, Reverse Shot, Documentary Magazine, and more. He has a Substack called It's Been Said.

In addition, like a lot of you I am sure, my relationship to online movie communities has changed pretty drastically since starting to write about them. I've learned some things about myself, and discovered some things about others — one of the earliest sour memories that come to mind was seeing Black critics getting harassed on Twitter for critiquing Green Book (Note: It has 8.2 on IMDB).

I've also been in the aggregator movie review cesspool for long enough to know that my taste can be very different from theirs, and even a little too genre-adjacent for theirs, so I mostly use those ratings as a general guideline rather than something I take too personally. But when I love a movie and I see it getting a low score, I can't help but feel a little antagonistic. Like how dare you! I’ve seen plenty of movies that are critically acclaimed with high Letterboxd scores that I thought were total snoozers, and I’ve seen plenty of movies with low scores that deeply, deeply resonated with me on a personal level.

And my heart truly goes out to the beautiful talented souls whose first feature is met with a bunch of 1-star reviews simply for being different or weird. It's tough. I find myself asking, whose opinion do I trust? And should I be trusting anyone's?

This is all a long-winded way of introducing what asked for this month’s TFS Hotline, which I was very keen to jump on below.

From :

Transcript: What do you think of online movie review scores? Are there communities to disregard, trust or use with a grain of salt?

Sophie’s take:

Dear Jos,

Everything that follows is my own opinion, so I want to be clear that this is totally subjective — I know so many people who feel differently, and that's okay! I also want to preface this with the fact that I do still find value in aggregate scores, at least to some extent. All that being said, let's get into it: Maybe I'm a hater but I'm kind of anti-Rotten Tomatoes?

Read more

Hear ye, hear ye. That Final Scene co-substacking era officially starts today!!!

In case you missed it, a few days ago I announced that TFS will run NOLAN CLUB throughout June and I’m enlisting my paid subscribers to be my exclusive co-curators.

We also have an official fan-voted poster. Treat this as an official signal of how seriously I’m taking the club (very seriously, obviously.)

So Nolan clubbies, your task awaits

Read more

It will take her decades to give that question voice. To put a name to the suspicion that the very ideal of womanhood she’s been taught to revere might be the thing that undermines women most. But as Marina Warner, feminist theologian and mythographer extraordinaire, she will spend a lifetime unraveling the threads of that sacred illusion.

In Alone of All Her Sex, her groundbreaking and much condemned study on Catholicism, Warner will peel back the layers of legend and doctrine that have shaped the Virgin Mary into the impossible paragon we know. She’ll show how the flesh-and-blood woman of the Gospels — who speaks a grand total of four times in the entire Bible1 — was gradually buried under layer upon layer of legend and doctrine and artistic reimagination until what remained was a shimmering chimera: the Eternal Feminine, the Queen of Heaven, the Madonna on her pedestal.

Warner will argue, with fierce and unflinching clarity, that this Mary, the impossible Mary, is a trap. A set of contradictions no woman can embody, a standard no mortal can meet. Be a virgin, but bear children. Be humble, but reign as queen. Be entirely without sin, but suffer more than anyone who ever lived, and do it all with a face that suggests you've just finished a particularly restorative yoga class.

And the implications, Warner will insist, stretch far beyond the church walls. The Marian ideal had seeped into everything — into the mandate to be pure and selfless, into the exhortation to swallow your anger and call it grace, into every advertisement that promises you'll be closer to the divine if you just buy this particular serum, this particular supplement, this particular collagen that ships in packaging so minimal and delicate it could double as a reliquary. You can see the ghost of the Blessed Virgin in the “clean girl” aesthetic. In “trad wife” ideology. In every thirty-two-year-old on your feed who has somehow mastered her marinara and her cold plunge and her career in brand consulting and three children under five and yet still looks, at all times, like she has recently been lightly dusted with something heavenly.

She is Mary's daughter.

This is the truth Warner wants to shout from the rooftops: that the myth of the perfect woman, the impossible woman, is a toxin we’ve been imbibing for centuries.

Which brings us to the juiciest bit of the story. In 1976, Warner will end her book with a prophecy: the cult of Mary, she argued, was bound to fade as women became more emancipated and secular modernity advanced. But myths, as it turns out, are the great adapters. You can banish them from the church and they'll reappear at Sephora. As Warner will ruefully acknowledge in 2013 in a new preface of the book, her original prediction was wrong:

My closing assertion, that the cult of Mary would become, like the worship of Hera or Aphrodite or Artemis, a myth which no longer inspires belief, reads today as a hope at best, and a major historical error at worst.

She admitted, with scholarly grace, that she had underestimated her. The Virgin Mary did not fade. She simply changed clothes. And went on tour.

A house outside Dallas had a Virgin Mary on the mantel, plaster painted blue and white, her hands folded in permanent prayer. A seven-year-old David Lowery passed her every day on his way to the kitchen. He watched breakfast, watched homework, watched his father grade theology papers at the dining table while his mother set out dinner. Sundays meant mass at the cathedral downtown, the smell of incense and old wood, the Host on his tongue like a thin wafer of nothing that his father said was the literal body of Christ. You swallowed it. You walked home. Nobody thought it was strange.

His father taught moral theology at the University of Dallas and brought the work home with him. Aquinas at dinner. Augustine over coffee. Long debates about double effect and just war theory and whether contraception violated natural law, arguments that could stretch through dessert and into the evening while David sat there not following all of it but absorbing the vocabulary, the rhythm, perhaps the assumption that these questions mattered more than anything on television or the radio.

The rule about music came down when he was maybe ten or eleven.

My parents wouldn't let me listen to modern music when I was growing up, so I missed out on Michael Jackson and Madonna.

He didn’t push back because pushing back wasn’t something you did in a house where your father’s job was teaching people what God wanted. So when 1989 came and Madonna released Like a Prayer and the whole world caught fire—when the video premiered on MTV with burning crosses and stigmata bleeding on her hands and a Black saint stepping down from his niche to kiss her while a gospel choir sang and the set burned behind them—David was twelve years old in Texas doing algebra homework and he never saw it.

He heard about it later, of course. He heard that Pepsi had given her five million dollars for a commercial that premiered at the Grammys, aired once on The Cosby Show, and was yanked off the air as Christian groups called for a boycott of Pepsi and all its subsidiaries. And then, a year later, when she took the Blond Ambition tour to Italy, he heard that Pope John Paul II — the most Marian pope of the modern era — had called the show "one of the most satanic shows in the history of humanity”.

But he didn’t see the video. What his parents were protecting him from, exactly, he wouldn’t understand until years later when he finally watched it on a friend’s computer and realized it wasn’t sacrilege. It was someone who exuded bread becoming flesh, wine becoming blood — exactly the way his father had taught him to understand it. Madonna knew what happened at mass. She'd swallowed the same Host that dissolved on Lowery's tongue like paper, weightless, there and gone in seconds. And she put it on MTV.

He left the church eventually and started calling himself an atheist, though he qualified it—an atheist who believes in ghosts. He now makes films about bodies that refuse to stay put. In A Ghost Story a man dies and comes back wearing a bedsheet, unable to leave the house where his wife is mourning him. The Green Knight follows a medieval knight whose visions might be divine or might be fever—the film never tells you which.

His latest, Mother Mary, explores the complex relationship between a fictional pop star and her estranged costume designer. Lowery may have missed Madonna in 1989 but she got in anyway. The thing you're not allowed to hear is always the thing that furnishes your imagination most lavishly.

The Colorado Desert thrummed with anticipation in April. Sabrina Carpenter, the 26-year-old pop sensation, was midway through her Coachella set, the crowd pulsing to the beat of her 2024 hit “Juno,” when she paused. “I have a very, very special guest,” she teased.

The name that left her mouth next sent a ripple of shocked delight through the crowd: Madonna.

And there she was, the 67-year-old queen of pop provocation, rising from beneath the stage as if summoned by some divine force. She emerged in a purple corset over a lacy camisole, long gloves, thigh-high stockings, and tall boots—the exact ensemble, she told the crowd, that she had worn at Coachella twenty years earlier when she first performed Confessions on a Dance Floor in America. "The same boots, the same corset, the jacket I had on earlier, the same Gucci jacket," she said. "It's like a full circle moment."

Pop cultural memory, quite literally, made flesh — and crucially, made by her, on her, for her. The saint had become her own reliquary.

"Strike a pose," she commanded, and the audience obeyed.

She'd learned the ritual early. Little Madonna Ciccone in her Catholic school jumper, kneeling dutifully at mass, a child's mind already flickering between the Virgin Mary and Marilyn Monroe, the martyr and the bombshell. Forty years on, writhing on arena stages in a blaze of religious and erotic symbolism, she had never lost her knack for the so called transubstantiation. When the Vatican condemned Blond Ambition in 1990, she held a press conference at Rome's Ciampino airport and refused to back down. Her show, she said, was "a theatrical presentation of my music, and like theatre, it asks questions, provokes thought, and takes you on an emotional journey." She invited the clergy to come and judge for themselves. They did not RSVP.

But there was something else happening during that set too. As the gospel choir materialized for the obligatory Like a Prayer, the crowd energy felt and looked oddly muted. Phones stayed aloft, yes, but bodies stayed strangely still, writes Wren Graves.

No doubt everyone wanted to film an amazing concert — probably the kind where the crowd went wild and clapped along. Except everyone was above the actual labor of putting on a show, even when Madonna and her gospel choir joined their hands in the direction of the audience.

It was as if forty thousand people were experiencing, in real time, the particular confusion of encountering a living relic — do you sing along, or is that disrespectful? Do you dance, or do you document? Do you worship, or do you just try to get a shaky video for your story and figure out the caption when you're back at the glamping tent? Do you dream her, or does she dream us?

And then, in a blink, she was gone, leaving Carpenter alone again under the lights, blinking as if waking from a lucid dream. “It’s like… what do you do after that?” Carpenter quipped to the crowd.

“I need a drink.”

In Marina Warner's telling, the Virgin Mary is at once queen and concubine, untouchable mother and eroticized maiden, an icon whose very contradictions serve to elevate her above the messy realm of womanhood. In Mother Mary, David Lowery transposes this impossible woman into a 21st century key, dressing her in haute couture and sending her out on stage to be worshipped and consumed anew.

I'm sitting in the dark, watching Anne Hathaway's Mother Mary rise from the depths of the stage, a wire-crowned martyr in sequins and lace. From the moment she struts on screen — haloed and beatified, draped in something between a couture gown and an artifact — I can feel that Lowery has something bigger in mind than a pop star character study.

Her trademark is the circular headpiece floating behind her neck like a saint in a fresco. She’s a kind of pop demigod channeling our fantasies of saintliness and sin. The crowd's adulation has this Eucharistic quality to it, this fervor of communion, as if they are consuming her body and her blood and her image and her story with every beat, and I can't look away.

Idols, though, are built to shatter — ask any Catholic kid who has ever watched a nativity figurine slip from their hands on Christmas Eve and felt, for one horrible second, that they'd broken God. Lowery doesn't show us the crisis itself, which I think is a beautiful choice; he lets the aftermath do the talking, and it saturates every frame. Mary flees to the rural workshop of Sam (a stunning Michaela Coel), the reclusive designer who created her early looks and was later excised from her mythology. What unfolds between them is part reunion, part exorcism — a night-long reckoning with the origins of Mary's persona and the costs of Sam's erasure.

These scenes are where Warner's scholarship climbs quietly into the film and sits down and starts unpacking. Watching Mary and Sam circle each other through the ruins of their collaboration — the costumes, the concepts, the shared vision that made Mary's icon possible in the first place — you keep finding yourself back at Warner's description of the Virgin as a "collage of female perfections" assembled by unseen hands. Sam is those hands. She is the artisan behind the image, the seamstress behind the saint, and like every woman who has ever done the invisible labor of making another woman look effortless, she has been thanked for her service by being written out of the story entirely.

These questions come to a head in the film's most audacious sequence, a one-of-a-kind anti-musical number in which Sam demands that Mary perform her latest choreography in silence, stripped of all sonic and spectatorial artifice. Hathaway's body becomes a pure vessel of pop ritual, a site of ecstatic self-abnegation. It's extraordinary to watch, and it's also a very precise little essay about how we consume our pop goddesses — we love them as image, as gesture, as surface, we peel away the human underneath layer by layer until what's left is the smooth, luminous icon and nothing else.

A face on a billboard selling something it doesn't believe in.

A woman the whole world recognizes on stage and nobody knows.

As the night deepens, Sam pours herself into what will be her final creation for Mary — a gown that Lowery has described, in interviews, as the symbiotic fusion of artwork and artist. "The dress is the song," he’s said, in the sense that the garment and the body and the music and the myth have become so thoroughly entangled that trying to separate them would be like trying to unfold a paper crane back into a flat sheet.

I now find myself circling the question the film keeps circling. Is Sam creating Mary, or is she consuming her? Is she Pygmalion or Galatea? Is she worshipping her or weaponizing her?

Lowery, ever the sly subversionist, keeps blurring the lines the two, which I think is the only realistic thing you can do when your subject is an archetype that has survived two thousand years by being flexible enough to absorb every juxtaposition. What does it mean to be an object of worship and a target of destruction, a vessel for the culture's fantasies and a scapegoat for its fears? How do you find your way back to yourself when your very self has been fragmented into a thousand shimmering pieces, each one reflecting a different impossible ideal?

Nowhere is that tension more apparent than in the film’s bravura final sequence. In a moment of ecstatic self-annihilation, Mary takes the stage for her comeback, risen, glittering, and for a moment the illusion is total. She is the phoenix, she is the goddess, she is everything we ever wanted her to be. And then she strips it all off — the halo, the costume, the scaffolding of her image — to the visible distress of the team whose job is to keep her wrapped. She sings her new song to a crowd that is applauding, when you really think about it, the shape of its own longing.

The woman herself has dissolved. She is nowhere and everywhere, absorbed into her own iconicity. The impossible woman is always, already, an absence. She is a projection we generate together, a hallucination dressed in couture, and we are all of us inside it.

My mother had my first sister when she was twenty-two, in a small flat in Kypseli with a balcony that looked onto other balconies, laundry hanging between buildings like flags nobody had agreed on the meaning of. She was young enough that her own mother kept showing up unannounced to check the baby wasn't being held at the wrong angle. My second sister arrived two years later. By then my mother had learned to time the visits, to have the flat already spotless before her mother walked in so there'd be less surface area for criticism. Then the marriage ended and she was alone with two girls under five in a city that had very specific, very vocal opinions about women raising children without husbands.

She met my father a few years later. Married him. Had me, then my brother. Worked through all of it — admin jobs where you answer someone else's phone and keep someone else's diary and make someone else look competent while your own life runs on Nescafé and the silent arithmetic you do at the supermarket to see whether you can afford the good olive oil this week or whether it's the own-brand one again (the one that tastes like it was pressed reluctantly). I have one memory of her sitting down during the day and it's only because my grandmother physically lowered her into a chair after she came home from minor surgery and immediately tried to start folding laundry. She was still holding a pillowcase. She looked confused by the sitting, as if her body had been interrupted mid-sentence.

What I remember most is her standing in front of the mirror in the hallway, pulling at her stomach. She’d do it in the morning before work, at night before bed, any time she passed it. I was maybe seven, standing there watching her, thinking: what is she looking for?

She’d apologize to guests for the state of the house when the house was spotless. She’d serve dinner and apologize it wasn’t fancier. She’d come home after a full day, cook, clean, help with homework, fold laundry, get us bathed and into bed, and then sit on the edge of her own bed and tell my dad she felt like she wasn’t doing enough. Enough of what, I couldn’t tell you. We were fine. The house was fine. We ate. We had clean clothes. We felt loved. But the gap between what she was doing and what she thought she was supposed to be doing was where she lived.

And here’s the thing I didn’t understand until I started pulling at this entire story: the gap is the design.

My mum was doing what women have been doing for thousands of years — measuring herself against a standard that was never meant to be met, because a standard you can meet is a standard that can't sell you anything anymore.

The Virgin Mary couldn't be the Virgin Mary; she was an idea that men assembled over centuries and credited to a girl who barely speaks in the source material. Madonna is not Madonna alone — Patrick Leonard co-wrote the songs, Stuart Price produced the albums, Jean Paul Gaultier made the cone bra, a hundred collaborators built the spectacle and then stepped out of the spotlight while she absorbed it. In Lowery's film, the dress goes onstage and Mary removes the halo and Sam, who sewed every sequin of that dress, stays behind in the workshop, invisible.

And the women you watch living it — the ones who seem to have “figured it out” — they're not doing it alone. They have nannies and cleaners and meal prep deliveries and personal assistants and someone who presses the linen and someone who holds the ring light at the right angle so the kitchen looks twice its actual size. They all have a Sam. And the Sam, always, stays out of the frame. That is the gap.

If you're still reading this hoping I'm about to tell you how to fix it, I can't, and I think anyone who says they can is probably trying to sell you a very tastefully packaged something. But if we were sitting together right now, and I'd poured us both a glass of red, I'd want to ask you some questions.

What if the gap is the correct response to an impossible demand? What if you let your wrinkles accumulate like evidence? What if you let your stomach carry the soft record of having held children inside it, or of simply having lived for however many years in a body that eats and rests and takes up exactly the space it needs? What if your mother wasn't failing, and you're not failing, and the seven-year-old watching you from the hallway isn't learning that she's doomed to fall short — she's learning that falling short is what women do, and if nobody interrupts that lesson, she'll hand it down like a heirloom?

Now I’m the one standing in front of the mirror making that sound my mother used to make, somewhere between a sigh and an apology, and when there’s a kid watching, they’ll be learning something from it too. I know, somewhere in the part of me that isn’t afraid of the mirror, that I can choose what happens next.

So can you.

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It is filled with the deranged ramblings of a mind poisoned by film discourse. Specifically, the swirling vortex of takes, reflections, and galaxy brain theories surrounding the upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey by the king of the cerebral blockbuster: Christopher Nolan.

Just think of the sheer magnitude of takes this thing is going to release. We’re talking a convergence of every online niche and subculture imaginable: The Classics scholars. The Nolan stans. The Zendaya hive. The meninists. The contrarians. The film school grads. The SparkNotes skimmers. The Joseph Campbell disciples. The MCU fans still salty about Scorsese's comments. The theater kids who did The Odyssey in high school. The philosophy majors eager to deconstruct its themes. The history buffs ready to fact-check its portrayal of ancient Greece. The 4chan edgelords. The TikTok cosplayers. The Letterboxd cinephiles. The Wikipedia warriors. The Reddit theorists. The Tumblr artists. The YouTube reactors. The Greeks!!!!

Even if your engagement with Greek epics begins and ends with Disney's Hercules, there will be no escape. This movie is going to saturate the cultural conversation for months on end. It will be inescapable.

And for me, unfortunately, it’s personal. As a Greek person, Homer’s epics are my birthright. As a film person, Nolan’s spectacles are my occupational hazard. This July, those two wires cross, and I’m already smelling smoke.

So I did what any self-respecting, chronically online writer would: I started documenting every moment of this journey like a 19th-century sailor chronicling a voyage at sea. What follows are the highlights (lowlights?) of that diary. So hop aboard, dear reader, and join me on this odyssey through the choppy waters of cultural anticipation. I can't promise these dispatches will be profound, or even coherent.

But first, a newsletter announcement:

✨That Final scene is hosting NOLAN CLUB this June ✨

Over the course of June, That Final Scene will be dedicating its FREE programming on the four key themes from The Odyssey:

• nostos (homecoming)

• hubris (excess)

• moira (fate)

• theion (divine)

Nolan Club is not a straight Nolan retrospective. While these themes run throughout Nolan’s work and I’m sure we’ll talk about it loads, they also run throughout everything else.

So this is where you, my lovely paid subscribers, come in:

I’m enlisting you to co-curate Nolan Club.

I want you to look into culture and find the thing that sits next to these themes. I want you to share your favorite poems, songs, films, essays, images, albums, passages, TED talks, photographs that produce the same feeling.

More details on how to send submissions will follow (You may want to join my Chat if you haven’t already).

I can’t wait to see you all in Nolan Club (and yes, we have a poster) 😏

December 23, 2024

I am half asleep, in bed next to my partner, the sound of rain hitting glass — our glass ceiling — gently tossing and turning as I flick through my phone, desperately searching for something to engage my mind so it might finally shut the fuck up and let my body fall into sleep. I am searching for news. I am searching for gossip. Anything. The screen dims. My eyes close. I am searching for nothing and everything, and with the energy of a sleep-deprived bat swinging blindly through the night air, I open Threads.

There it is. There SHE is. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey adaptation announced. The biggest fucking news my eyes have ever seen.

And with news so big attached to a brain so big, anything so small as brain rot is a part and parcel inevitability. Responsible social calendar where I respond to texts within 48 hours? Boring. A good night’s sleep? A waste. Stretching, showering, going to the gym, eating lunch, drinking water, a good night’s sleep? Boring.

All that is to say, that I am his greatest admirer and his worst enemy, and simply the greatest student he ever had.

December 24, 2024

Woke up this morning and it’s still true. Christopher Nolan is adapting The Odyssey. My father read me The Odyssey wrong.

He read it from memory, every night when I asked. He couldn’t hold the book in his hand, he struggled to see the small print when challenged to read the words on a page, but the story was in his head in its entirety, and he could recite it for hours if asked. It is one of the only things that could quiet me as a child, one of the only things that can get me to sit still beside him on the couch, his arm slung around my skinny frame, his deep voice droning in my ear like a lullaby.

But he got it wrong. The gods were wrong, doing the wrong things, Athena doing what Poseidon was supposed to do. Circe was more malevolent, because he thought it made a better story. He thought she should be more evil, more cruel. I didn’t know the difference at seven. He made it up, and I believed it, and it was the story that was in the house, so who could tell me that it was wrong?

I remember that he read the curses wrong in an imaginary Greek-like accent. I think about the history of accents in Greek adaptations, of which there is a long and storied history. Troy (2004) used British accents — Brad Pitt as Achilles with an American accent widely considered a misfire. 300 (2006) didn’t bother with any particular accent, leaned into the stylisation. Gladiator (Roman, not Greek but same discourse) went British. The convention has been: Ancient world = British accents, as if Posh English is somehow closer to Ancient Greek than American English. Both are equally absurd. Neither is Greek. No Hollywood film has ever used actual Greek accents for ancient Greeks. The debate is always between two equally wrong options, with the actual culture nowhere in the room.

Will Nolan’s Odyssey follow the same path?

My father read me The Odyssey wrong. He got it wrong, but he got it right.

February 18, 2025

Matt Damon is officially Odysseus. He might be a little too likable for the role, but I’m willing to overlook that. Just have him lean into the arrogance and entitlement, and I think we’ll be good.

The cast keeps growing: Tom Holland as Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Zendaya as Athena, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o. And more names I can’t even process right now because my brain has turned into a sieve that only catches Nolan-related information and lets everything else fall through.

A Nolan Odyssey is not something one might choose, but it is an odyssey regardless.

April 29, 2025

Trying to figure out what I actually want from this thing. What I’m looking for in Nolan’s Odyssey is a more generous spectacle, one with space, water, a sky. Perhaps more than anything, I’m looking for an odyssey that isn’t afraid to be a voyage across its own glassy distance.

But what I also need — and what I want to talk about now — is a large and active connivance. I have no hope that the production design on Nolan’s Odyssey will accurately capture the ancient Greek world, much less that it will be any good, but I need — as I have needed with so many other Odyssey adaptations before — to believe I’m in Ithaca when I’m in Ithaca.

My standards aren’t too high or too low; they’re just high enough. I don’t expect hyperrealism, but I need a Nolan Odyssey that is so cunning, so selfish, so clever, that it’s willing, at times, to let me believe presumption can matter.

May 5, 2025

Started reading Homer again. First time since university when I had to write 4,000 words about narrative structure and homecoming. Forgot how Athena just meddles constantly, showing up every twelve lines disguised as someone’s dead uncle, generally establishing the world’s first parasocial relationship from Mount Olympus.

Nolan’s going to lose his mind over this. Culture is not ready.

July 29, 2025

Like many people, I spent 2023 in Oppenheimer hell. So in this sense, I’m simply thrilled the scourge of Oppenheimer can take a break. If you never recovered from that scourge yourself, I would understand why you aren’t thrilled. I read War and Peace. I’m not judging. If you are a Nolan hater, I can picture you giving me that look. I am not here for you, and nor is any movie, Hollis.

If you can’t figure out how to make Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey work for you, I can help. I’ll have a whole little resource library right here on this newsletter, we’ll find something. I’m serious: if you see any headline that makes you panic, I would like for you to send it to me. It’s going to be okay.

August 11, 2025

In 2026, I will be unable to go anywhere online without the following people ruining my day:

Ever since Interstellar was released, the Interstellar criers have been those who will defend this very specific Christopher Nolan film to death. When they meet someone new, they hand them a copy of Interstellar’s screenplay, saying, “You just have to read this.” They will tell you about the time there was a black hole and a robot named TARS and Michael Caine was there and Matthew McConaughey was crying and the soundtrack was playing and everyone was crying and now Sophie is crying and do you want to know the bookshelf quote or not?

Interstellar criers will hit their peak in 2026. Why? The Odyssey is a huge book and has multiple adaptations to its name. For those reasons, there is more narrative space for Nolan to intersperse various daughter-raising monologues throughout the movie’s 3 hour runtime. When they’re strapped in an IMAX seat for five hours, their long-dormant crying will finally commence. They will be weeping as the credits roll—not because of the movie, but because they finally have material to back up the incessant Interstellar comparisons they’ve been hurling our way for ten years. They will crash their car, recover, then immediately ask if Matt Damon wears a tunic. If he does, it will be all over for us.

I wish them nothing but the best in 2026, when it’s finally time to end.

The Tenet contrarians are a different beast. Have you met anyone who swears they “get” Nolan’s popular films, but does not like them? Or been bothered by any existential contrarian who responds to your mention of Tenet by saying they “watched it four times and it’s bad.” What does it mean to hate a movie you were entertained by, and spend twenty minutes texting someone about that movie? You haiku about Tenet. You complain about Tenet. You hold Tenet to a grudge.

They’re going to be insufferable about The Odyssey’s temporal dimensions.

Then you have the Nolanians or however they call themselves. These are the ones who give Nolan such a bad rep even though it’s not his fault everyone treats him like he’s personally curing cancer with IMAX cameras.

Remember the end of Taken when Liam Neeson finally discovers who has taken his daughter and he’s just some unassuming guy in a suit? That’s a Nolanian. He’s the kind that will log into Letterboxd purely to comment “false” on your review, or “actually, I think you missed the point of the film…”, or “it’s not his fault you’re dumb” and “I bet you didn’t even watch it in IMAX....”.

They have a very specific set of skills, and they will deploy them in time to ruin your whole day. They will find you. They will kill you. And then they will go to your house to watch Dunkirk on repeat, because it’s your fault for giving them no choice.

These people will defend truly whatever Nolan does, and yes, this includes the The Dark Knight trilogy that goes too hard — indisputably.

I actually don’t blame them for wanting to defend someone they love. In fact, I find Nolan to be a great filmmaker and a genuine advocate for cinema. But the truth is they have no critical vocabulary beyond “epic” or “it rips”. Trying to hop in and defend him by being vitriolic and insulting to others is creating this nexus of obnoxious Nolan discourse that ironically ruining the very thing Nolanians claim to love — Chris himself!

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September 14, 2025

The people who will say “it’s going to be too long” before seeing a single frame are doing my head in. How about you stay at home and watch TikTok?

Man, you said that about Dunkirk even though it isn’t long. You said that about Memento, even though it doesn’t have any scenes longer than three minutes. You texted the words “it’s too long” to your partner, who is a classics scholar, this morning, to tell him why you were going to make a picnic on the couch and watch the trailer for the new Dune even though he was still watching F1. You’re already saying to yourself that if the film is more than 2 hours and 35 minutes you’re not going. You’re not a serious person.

October 12, 2025

I think the difference between Odysseus’s lies and, say, Pinocchio’s is that, unlike Homer’s hero, the wooden boy’s untruths conjure perilous mischief into being. Odysseus’s falsehoods are the work of a poet and are intended to amuse. The prophet of pleasure, he only wants himself to be amused. He lies for the same reason that he is often described as singing, for the same reason that he shrinks his enemies to the size of a calf, for the same reason that he lodges inside the chest of the great tree like a lover.

So what do we do when the poet and the butcher are the same person?

Just as Oppenheimer’s bomb, Odysseus’s cunning is a weapon. I can’t hate Nolan for being who he is. After all, he isn’t the butcher; he’s the poet.

November 29, 2025

I think about the skeptics compiling evidence. I see you and I am you.

Specifically, compiling the evidence that Nolan can’t write women. Now that women like Circe and Calypso are about to appear in his film, good luck babe! We all know he’s been married to a woman for longer than most of us have been alive, so we’re wondering why that doesn’t seem to matter? Why we can’t seem to get at least one woman who feels as natural as Nolan’s very successful collaborator and wife, Emma (who, yes, he has four kids with)? You are, perhaps, so skeptical that you rewatched Tenet the other day to see what he did with Elizabeth Debicki in that film, just to prepare yourself for the worst.

January 5, 2026

I’m just waiting for some enterprising TikToker to dig deep into the archives of her Catholic high school education and emerge with the very first “actually Penelope is the true hero of the Odyssey” take. It will get 20 million views. It will have the wrong meter. It will use a Taylor Swift song. Taylor’s version. And I will know it’s coming.

Penelope’s interiority isn’t the TikTok crowd’s prerogative, but it will be their apostle. Penelope will send them letters in the form of tarot cards. I’m telling you TikTokers will be losing their minds over Penelope. Anne Hathaway will have a field day.

February 20, 2026

Everyone will have to answer for their actions at the end of July. We’ll have to sit down and reckon with all of our reasons for wanting to see this. We’ll have to argue with the ones we love and, yes, the ones we don’t.

March 3, 2026

You’re going to see the movie anyway. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. You’re going because the only people you’ve been able to talk about anything else with since the new year began are your coworkers, who don’t read. You’re going because you’re already doomed to read every single review, whether you want to or not.

But, importantly, all of us get to see it. And all of us will be able to weigh in. I can already feel the way the discourse will dance like a marionette pulled by ten different strings. I can smell the snapping, and I’m not alone. We need to be prepared for that moment when it comes. We need to have the courage to admit we’re all waiting for it in our own way.

March 12, 2026

I’m not going to pretend that Nolan’s The Odyssey is going to be the worst thing that ever happens to me. It’ll be a lot of things before it ever reaches that point, but it’s probably going to feel worse than it is. It’ll make me laugh, but maybe not for the reasons I wanted. I’ll feel a sense of wonder that becomes disgust. Everyone will leave the theater feeling something everyone feels when they see a movie. The only difference will be that the female characters all die, or don’t and we’re asked to look at the male ones before we decide to leave.

March 19, 2026

It’s in no one’s interest to pretend you’re not going to have an opinion in a few months. You’ll be at the premiere with the rest of us. You’ll be asking yourself why you got up so early. You’ll be counting down the hours until the movie starts. You’ll know it all over again when the lights go down and the logo appears. You’ll clap in the places where everyone claps, and you’ll clap because he’s Nolan and that’s what you’re supposed to do.

You will have an opinion, and that’s fine. You’ll have to work through that opinion, and that’s also fine. But the more we talk about it, the more we’ll realize we aren’t all that different. And the more we can make our peace with how very little we have in common.

April 12, 2026

The best thing I can do before the chaos begins, before everyone collapses into their positions, before the discourse becomes unbearable, is take a breath. I don’t love all of Nolan’s movies. I didn’t love Dunkirk. I don’t love TDKR. I might not love the The Odyssey. But I also can’t stop the world from loving these stories if it sees something in them.

I am going to do something embarrassing when this film comes out, and so will you.

April 19, 2026

Fast forward to a few months from now: you’ll have stepped out of your house, you’ll read the reviews, you’ll hear the voice in your head saying “nonsense.” It’s July 2026, we’re all going to see Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. The mind is calm. The cinema is fine.

I guarantee that when you least expect it, true peace will come upon you.

May 4, 2026

Well, I’m alive again. What is it about a new Nolan trailer that makes me feel like I’m coming back to life, limbs tingling with anticipation? If I could bottle that feeling, I would trade the rest of my life to keep it in my veins forever.

I woke up late and rushed through my coffee so I could watch the new The Odyssey trailer in bed before I started my day. I was already excited and I definitely should have paused to collect myself first.

You know how I feel about Robert Pattinson. He is my main man, my #1. The movie could have been called “Odysseus and the Very Handsome Man” and I would have seen it like, ten times already. But in the spirit of true impartiality, I’m going to do my best not to let his presence cloud my judgment. Here goes nothing.

The moment I hit play, all Nolan memes flash before my eyes.

I’m most likely paraphrasing here but I think it was Matt Zoller Seitz who said that war is a kind of male sex in Nolan’s films, and I’ve always loved that. Odysseus here is a man who has the full weight of ten years of war on his shoulders, and still the only thing that matters to him is the woman waiting for him at the end of it. And yet, for all of that violence and bloodshed, “we won no war.” The Greeks may have technically won the Trojan War, but it ends up not mattering for the sake of his return. Like, my god. Do we think he reads Sappho?

I hope he does.

Right, I distracted myself. What about the Robert Pattinson of it all? Never once did I think, he is going to be a huge problem for Odysseus. The way he’s smirking at the camera, the way he’s wearing that skirt like he’s absolutely going to eat it, the way he’s so annoyingly cool that at least twenty people are going to die so he doesn’t get to be that way in peace. I want blood and more than blood. I want their heads on spikes. I want Odysseus, the bloodied monster, to drag them through the dirt to meet their fates.

Nolan puts me in the very unique position of siding with a violent cheater/murderer who has not been home in twenty years.

“Let’s go!” is such a funny line to put in Odysseus’s mouth (and such a specific type of Nolan action-movie line) that I thought no one would actually say it with a straight face. But there’s Matt Damon, shouting “let’s go!” readying his men for battle as if he’s winding them up for a trip to the football game. This is probably more damning than anything else he’s done in this trailer. Surely Odysseus didn’t fuck Calypso on that island just to return to Ithaca and have his son call him “dad” with an American accent!

The international spectacle, the massive CGI whirlpool, the armored figures…all of it looks cool, and I would watch that movie without a second thought. The Ithacan scenes, however, feel like they belong in any prestige TV show — Game of Thrones, perhaps. But f I wanted to watch Game of Thrones I’d watch Game of Thrones? puzzled emoji

It gives me pause when I think of all the Western classics that have been brought to screen. How many films based on Greek myths I’ve watched in English despite the stories taking place thousands of years before the language existed. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel off.

Odysseus doesn’t need to sound like he’s in Billions to appeal to me.

May 5, 2026

I know everyone is sharing similar feelings but I have to give my little rant anyway because it’s my diary and God is dead.

I like modern dialogue in theory, but it hinges on an understanding of language within its time period, a correct approximation of modern vernacular. But “let’s go” is not boyish vernacular; it’s a catchphrase that says more about 21st century American culture than it does about Greek culture. This is the problem with modern dialogue. It can’t help but reflect modern culture (and yes, I get that’s the point, who wouldn’t want to inject their culture into ancient Greece but why must it be this one?).

My ideal version of this, because I’m a realist and I’m not expecting Matt Damon to learn ancient Greek, would have been an adaptation in early modern English. Preserve the original text, similar to Sheakespearean adaptations like what Joel Coen did with The Tragedy of Macbeth. This is where Christopher Nolan’s limitation lies: Not so much in writing the screenplay but his insistence that he must write his screenplays all alone.

It sounds dumb, but he literally didn’t need to be this unserious. When you have a text that’s inherently serious, the unseriousness of this type of dialogue becomes an insult. When it’s this sterile, it’s feels uncaring.

May 5, 2026

Some more thoughts today because the discourse has shifted on British vs American accents. I hate this debate when it comes to Greek adaptations.

As I’m writing this, I’ve fully converted to 1st Gen Film Kid. Capital G, Capital F. I’m so interested in the way cultures get remapped by the strangeness of global cinema. It’s very strange to see the film boy era of my teenage years — my father’s myth — at the hands of the most successful man in Hollywood. To see empathy, the empathy I learned from reading Odysseus’ return home to Ithaca, turn into something singularly filmic.

I feel like empathy has become a stand-in for culture in the 1st Gen Film Kid era. I am not alone in thinking that there is something queer at the heart of this myth. Not the queerness of Odysseus’ potential love for Achilleus, or the queerness of Odysseus and Penelope’s relationship, but the queerness of its refusal to be tamed by heterosexual convention. The poem keeps placing marriage at the centre of everything and then making marriage behave like a riddle, a disguise, a delay tactic, a private joke about a bed no one else is supposed to understand. Odysseus is a husband, sure, but he spends most of the story as Nobody, or a beggar, or a man crying on someone else’s island. Penelope is a wife, yes, but her fidelity is active and weird and tactical, all loom-work and suspicion and buying herself one more day. Their reunion is romantic because it is so specific. She doesn’t melt into him. She tests him.

I don’t care about the accents. Accents are arbitrary. What I care about is the erasure of the culture from the text, the assumption that something meant to be Greek can never truly be Greek. I care about representation, about pride. I care about a myth that already belongs to so many being taken and possibly made into another Troy.

It’s not that I have a problem with homogenisation, or that I think it’s making the world infinitely worse. I don’t think it’s making the world better, either. It is a capitalistic inevitability. But I reject the idea that sharing a culture with someone inherently gives them ownership of it.

I blink at my desktop, the way I usually do when I’m angry enough to want to write but don’t know where to start. I wonder what it would be like to tell my dad about the film when it comes out. It’s hard to picture. When I close my eyes, I see his face, the way he’d smile and shake his head, but I don’t know if I’d tell him.

But what do I know? Hope it was just a weird trailer.

May 6, 2026

Dear Diary,

Sometimes I close my eyes and try to picture my father. It’s not easy, since I have only seen a portrait that hangs in the great hall, but I imagine his voice is deep like the ocean waves that crash against our shores. I imagine his arms are warm like the summer sun that penetrates the winter chill of Ithaca. I imagine he is strong, brave, clever, and has defeated monsters a thousand times over, even if I am not really sure what monsters look like. I imagine he can hear me when I ask him why he has not come home after so many years. Has he forgotten about me? About my mother Penelope? About Ithaca? Does he even want to come home?

And then I open my eyes, and the house is still filled with the sounds of men drinking and laughing as they take my father’s place at our table. They are so loud, I feel like they are even in my mind, mocking me. I can’t allow them to make me weak, even if the thought of confronting them fills me with fear. They say my father is dead. They say he will never return. So many voices shouting the same thing must mean it is true. My own mother has bent to their will; she is no longer the woman I used to know. Perhaps this means he has forgotten about me, and the boy he left behind. And yet…

And yet, dear diary, I cannot help but be convinced otherwise. I will not allow myself to be beaten without a fight. I will not allow these men to feast on my people’s food and bed my mother as if they are kings when my father is still out there, somewhere. I will believe in my father with everything I have, even if he has no reason to come back for me at all.

I was told today by one of the suitors that Odysseus is “just a daddy you didn’t even know.” I do not know if I have ever heard a more disgusting sentence in my entire life. I do not care how much time or distance separates us, he is my father, and he is still alive. I refuse to believe that he will sit idly by as these fools ruin his name and take what is rightfully his. I refuse to believe that he will not come home for me, or for Ithaca, or for the sake of a little vengeance. He is coming. I know it. The gods know it. And the suitors will know it soon enough as well.

Yours,

Telemachus

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You guys know how deeply concerned I am about consolidation in our industry — and it’s not just because Larry Ellison’s name sounds like a character in a bad romcom. I worked inside the film marketing machine for years, and watched as indie films were squeezed to the edges of a distribution model that was designed to serve the few. I left my post behind because I cared too much about what was happening to culture.

By Paramount-Warner merging, it is clear they don’t want you to know about the small, weird, beautiful movies that are still being made. They want to monopolize your attention, and that means giving you less choice.

And truthfully, I built That Final Scene as a direct response to this.

Since I’m on holiday this week (eating tzatziki by the pound and lying on my back), I’m leaving you in the capable hands of , who has been speaking to this issue far more eloquently that I can. I read all of Ted’s posts, but the two below on media consolidation, the specific merger & our alternatives felt particularly urgent to share with you.

In an industry where so many people just want to be the loudest or the snarkiest or the first to break a story, Ted is driven by a belief that we can and must make things better, that art is essential, that community is essential, and that individual, non-dependent stories are worth fighting for. I hope you enjoy reading these pieces from him as much as I did.

Now onto Ted’s wisdom…

Have you been hurt by media consolidation? I have.

I have been working in the film business for over forty years. I worked my way up from complete zero (I knew no one) and being a production assistant to producing over seventy feature films, all of which I was very “hands on” on. I have built and run several production companies, a postproduction facility, as well as running a film society and its festival, a start-up streamer, and launching Amazon Studios movie program where I oversaw about sixty-five additional films to the ones I have produced. My films have received 44 Oscar nominations with 11 wins. I only state this so it is clear that no one is immune from current state of affairs.

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THANK YOU FOR GROWING THAT FINAL SCENE TO 5000+ SUBSCRIBERS!!

5000+ of you want to read my words about hegemonic masculinity in Greek mythology and the romance of anti-capitalism and Tumblr boy Bill Skarsgård?? Should I be grateful or offended? I’m leaning toward grateful.

I still get butterflies thinking about it, and if you’re reading this, you’re one of those butterflies. I know everyone says this when they hit a milestone, but it really is hard to put into words what it feels like to have thousands of people choose to spend their valuable time reading my silly little newsletter each week.

But then I got to thinking about what feels special about That Final Scene — what keeps our community engaging and what keeps me writing — and it’s that TFS is a place for radical gentleness in an incredibly abrasive world. Gentleness, in my view, is about accepting and embracing the inherent messiness of life, about refusing to participate in a culture that commodifies our attention and asks us to sacrifice our humanity for the sake of consumption. Gentleness is my guiding principle, and radical gentleness is the only thing that can sustain me through the chaos of being alive.

That’s why, as a thank you for this milestone and because I want to do the exact opposite of what major subscription services are doing:

I’m lowering the price of my paid subscription1 to $5/month (which is the minimum monthly rate on Substack) or $40/year (which is 37% cheaper than monthly) 🥳

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I’ve been thinking about the price drop for a while and I want to explain it — or rather, the headspace that led to it.

I’m 33 now, living in the UK for years, and it’s the first time I’m really feeling the crunch of a global economic moment. I hear about recession fears on the news every morning when I make coffee for myself and my partner. Inflation is something I’m feeling in my own pocket. Wars everywhere are unpredictable and terrifying. And in the middle of all that, I’m thinking about my readers and what I owe them.

I want TFS to be a place where you can take a break from all that, where you can laugh and think and feel. I want to make sure that when you come here, you’re met with the warmth, humor, and radical gentleness we all deserve. I want to keep the newsletter low stakes and fun.

Most of all, I want you to be okay. If you’re participating in this society, you’re likely not that anonymous. You’re likely not that powerful. And in the face of everything, we need to be thoughtful about the way we carve up our little corners of the internet. I want that corner, that little garden if you will, to be accessible.

I love you all so much. Please enjoy my favorite cat who’s always on the verge of getting mushy.

But the good news (and dubious literary devices) continue!

You know the sound of a canon being fired? Well, I’m not sure how to convey that through text so I’m just gonna say it: this is the sound of the canon being fired.

✨ THAT FINAL SCENE IS LOOKING FOR ITS FIRST EVER CANNES FILM FESTIVAL CORRESPONDENT ✨

I’ve long wanted to be able to invest in indie writers more meaningfully, and while I’d love to be able to hire a full-time team, here’s what I can modestly offer right now: I want you to represent TFS at the festival. After all, the whole point was always to get to a place where we could do cool shit like this.

Now to the important bits…

okay but is this a paid gig?

Yes! Very important. I would never ask anyone to work for free, which is something I feel quite strongly about. Good writing deserves to be honored, so that’s what I’m doing.

Worth noting that the generous support of my paid subscribers over the last few months has made this possible, and I want to take that support and invest it back into what you read on TFS. So this gig IS funded by the community, for the community, and I’m really proud of that!

do I need my festival pass already?

Unfortunately, also yes, I can’t sort that for you given the festival’s only a few weeks away and that I’ve only just been able to unlock the economics here. This has to be someone who is already going to be there, with their pass sorted (or if you’re a movie star who can work your magic to help someone else out, that works too).

so, who and what are you looking for?

Someone who is funny and smart, who has a real point of view, and who writes like…well, a bit differently. Originality and weirdness are key here — me and my readers will want to be surprised! I want someone who is going to find new ways to talk about these films that no one else would think to. I’m also open to see what people do with a more experimental nature of the piece, the chance to play with form, whether that’s a festival reflection or something else entirely. Ideally, I want someone who thinks outside the box and puts their whole heart into everything, and I know exactly who that is (hint: it could be you!).

Btw: You don’t have to be an established critic by any means.

and what will i be doing?

You’ll be writing one guest piece for That Final Scene at around 2000 words in the newsletter’s spirit. Yes, you’ll be able to plug your own work!

when’s the deadline?

Please send me your pitches by May 3rd.

how do i apply?

Email sophie@thatfinalscene.com with a note about yourself, some samples of your work and the Cannes films you’re most excited to catch.

If someone comes to mind the second you read this, send it to them 💌

And if that person is you — please get in touch.

Now sit down and let me tell you why The Wire has rewired so many people’s brains…

REALITY CHECK

From :

The Wire changed how I see the world. Most prestige TV trains you to follow characters. Their choices, their growth, their flaws. The Wire trains you to follow the system. How institutions shape the people inside them. How outcomes get produced by structures no single person controls.

Once you start seeing it that way, the world stops looking like a collection of dramas. It starts looking like a machine with interlocking parts, all running on the same logic. The corners, the precinct, city hall, the schools. Different settings. Same operating system.

My take:

Michael, thank you for sending this in. It’s a bit of an odd question given the subject matter, but do you remember when you first saw The Wire? I was already a teenager, but it felt like a show that existed before my time and, in some ways, a show that could only exist before my time.

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You see a lot of these. Notes is the unmoderated side of Substack where everyone pitches themselves sideways hoping you’ll notice them. But this note employed the word "cinephiles" with zero sarcasm which — if you know anything about the current state of film discourse online — is either very brave or very novel. I was curious which.

’s Substack is called . I clicked through. The first essay I opened was "The Predator's Gaze: Spectatorship in 'Nope.'" The second was "Aftersun and What We Never See”. I tilted my head with glee.

Teenagers building a film education in 2026 have access to more cinema than any generation before — platforms like MUBI curate hand-picked selections daily, Letterboxd has pre-teens logging and rating everything from Tarkovsky to the Super Mario movie, TikTok serves up film recommendations based on whatever they added in their TT Shop cart — and yet most of what gets produced is still "I don’t like to gatekeep which is why I will tell you what happened and whether I thought it was good". Finding someone who cares about spectatorship and framing, felt rare enough to finish reading.

As I went through the writing, I started to intuitively build the author in my head: probably mid-thirties, probably been thinking about film for years (probably should quit smoking so their voice doesn’t sound like Philip Marlowe), maybe recently found Substack as an outlet but most likely publishes elsewhere too — maybe as an adjunct or faculty member at a college you’ve never heard of, maybe programming at some mid-tier art house theater. In any case, familiar taste.

I went to Ben’s About page.

Ben, contrary to my assumptions, had just turned 17. As he came to tell me later, he'd just gotten a subscription to the Criterion Channel for his birthday, which he described as "one of his final steps in becoming a cinephile."

I don’t know why that baffled me. In theory, I should know that teenagers can write well and I’d be an idiot to find that strange. But writing like this, we are told, has a lineage you can usually trace: a professor, a parent with good shelves, the right film class at the right moment. I wanted to know where his had come from. I wanted to crack this mystery! Who taught him? Did anyone?

I reached out to ask.

What I learned was not what I expected, and changed my preconceived notions entirely.

"I grabbed a notebook"

I asked Ben to walk me through it. Where did the whole thing start?

“I can’t say that there has been a single moment where it flipped; it’s been a slowly building journey into film over many years. I guess it started during middle school during peak COVID years. Having nothing better to do, I binged the entire MCU, and made music videos with my older sister. That was the jumping off point of actually enjoying watching movies and seeking it out, becoming an interest of mine.

My brain loves organization and making lists, so in the fall of 2022 I grabbed a notebook and started to write down every movie I watched, my favorite movies, and my ratings of all of them. A few months later, you cannot imagine my surprise when I found out there was an app that would do it all for me. Letterboxd changed a lot for me, as I discovered that there was such a community around serious film appreciation, and I was opened up to a whole new world of movies beyond what I had ever imagined.”

Part of what makes me so interested in people’s journeys into film is understanding how something that seems so natural to me now was once so confusing. Even today there are people who love movies and don’t read criticism or think about film theory or care about filmmakers’ other work or whatever minutiae would qualify you as “cinephilic” in a traditional sense — hell, i know lots of people who actively avoid these things as though they suck away from the purity of the moviegoing experience (which, obviously, does not apply either way if you’re reading this!) but…here’s where I got stuck.

Millions of kids binged the MCU during lockdown. A decent chunk of them ended up on Letterboxd. Binging-franchises-during-COVID is a generational canon event at this point. What I couldn't figure out from this answer was where it all forked. Something turned Ben from a person who watches movies into a person who writes about how they work in long-form, and that's a completely different animal.

I asked him to trace that part. Where did he learn to analyze a film?

who is teaching teenagers to love cinema?

“One thing that I think had a big impact on my switch from watching to analyzing was that I would often watch a movie, and then for days after I would watch various reactions to that same movie on YouTube, primarily from channels such as Dylan is In Trouble, Reel Rejects, Badd Medicine and Natalie Gold. I would always be so interested in the section of the video after they finished the movie, where they would talk about different elements of the movie and analyze it. From there I went to podcasts such as Bill Simmons’ The Rewatchables, to reading Letterboxd reviews, to reading formal film essays.

I started to think of writing them myself during a project in my 10th grade English class, where we had to present to the class. I wrote an essay about how Hollywood is dying, and it was the most fun I’d ever had with a school project. I thought, ‘maybe I could do this on my own.”

When you’re raised on Youtube (if anyone from Vidcon sees this: I’m 33 years old), you think it is normal for channels like Reel Rejects — which has 1.45 million subscribers and 29K+ Patreon supporters paying monthly for extra content — to exist. You think it is normal for Natalie Gold, who built her channel during lockdown watching Star Wars for the first time at age 30, say in her bio that she is “just a girl who gets way too invested” get half a million subscribers and be followed through entire film canons by thousands of people. You think it is normal because you don’t know any different.

These are mid-size media companies producing hours of film discourse every week. And while I personally find that many of them are most compelling when half-watched while doing something else, technically, they are criticism. Informal, digressive, sometimes wildly uneven, but structurally it is a person with a more trained eye walking a less experienced viewer through what a film is doing and why.

Traditionally, for every Pauline Kael, there has been a Roger Ebert. Kael had The New Yorker and Ebert had every newspaper in America covering his death a decade earlier than they usually would’ve because he said nice things about The Help one time. Both were recognized while they were happening, celebrated even, because the establishment could look at them and see its own supply chain. The pipeline producing Ben runs through reaction channels, and nobody inside it — not the creators, not the viewers, not a single major publication I could find — has thought to call it what it is. A blogger at The Signal Watch came closest: “I do find it weird that the phenomenon is so little discussed online or in articles.”

Part of it might be some internalized snobbery: trying to be associated with an “elite,” Rolling Stone-y form of criticism. Some of it might just be not wanting to get in over their heads. Another reason may be that critics are worried to talk about this to not step on anyone’s toes1.

Still, I understand why Ben said he learned film analysis from these channels; they perform an incredibly accurate simulation of the modern teenage mind and social media brain. And yet, we still have a seventeen-year-old who had assembled a complete critical education from freely available internet material, guided by institutions that had no idea they were institutions.

So if the thing that taught him to analyze film was an institution he couldn’t see, what else in his answers might be one too? I continued digging.

the old guards as ghost canon

Ford v Ferrari initially grabbed Ben because — Oscar nominee. The subreddit he spends hours on — r/oscarrace. The YouTubers he follows beyond the reaction channels — The Oscar Expert, Jonathan Fujii, both awards-focused. What he does every winter — watches as many of the year's releases as humanly possible because it's awards season. All the red strings lead to the same thumbtack.

Every thread in Ben’s film taste leads back to the same ghost institutions like the Academy Awards. We all have a ghost institution like this. Yours might be Letterboxd’s top 250 or the Criterion closet or whatever Film Twitter was arguing about when it was still around.

The point is to be uncurated is to be self-directed. But can you be self-directed if you’re just recreating someone else’s curation? Young cinephiles think they’re post-institution, and in some ways they are: there are no adults curating for them, no teachers assigning or guiding or correcting them. However, there was a canyon there before he arrived. It was so big and boring that it looked like nature, like the Grand Canyon, and now it is so small and filled with all of their pixels that they2 have decided it is a river.

The annoying part is that the ghost institution doesn’t just organize what Ben watches — it organizes what he feels guilty about missing. When I asked about how he decides what to watch, he told me “there are always so many movies I want to watch at once that I can’t land on just one”. This makes him feel “shame” that he still hasn’t seen Pulp Fiction and Schindler’s List.

The guilt Ben carries is a guilt I know well. My own spills out for every film I still haven’t seen that surely could have taught me something, could have opened up a new world for me, had I only been more diligent in the homework my curiosity assigned.

That obligation, from my understanding, didn’t come from anywhere specifically. Nobody assigned Ben Tarantino. Nobody assigned me Richard Linklater. The guilt lives in this invisible curriculum of Films You Must Have Seen that not a singular force has compiled but everybody seems to be silently grading you on. It wasn’t us who decided what we should feel guilty about but we still do because the old monoculture canon is still, from beyond the grave, generating homework.

So what happens when you hand in yours and no one around you cares as much as you?

the cost of "blank stares"

“What you have to understand is that I speak a completely different language to people my age than I do to any adult. There is a whole world of slang, references and a general mentality that is so specific to Gen Z that older people can’t really understand. It’s almost like I’m switching dialects depending on who I’m talking to — same thoughts, different vocabulary.”

Sociolinguists have a term for this that you’ve probably heard of — code-switching — and they usually apply it to people navigating between cultures or social classes, not to a teenager navigating between the cinematography of Charlotte Wells and a conversation about the Minecraft movie.

Regardless, the mechanics are identical: you learn which parts of yourself are legible in which room, and you put the rest away, and after a while it stops feeling like a sacrifice and starts feeling like breathing. Ben just does it between second and third period.

“For the most part, whenever I have told people that my favorite movie is All The Presidents Men, I get nothing but blank stares.” So he reaches for what the room can hold — “the childhood staples like Mary Poppins or Cars, or the new movies like Sinners and Oppenheimer”. He also finds himself “simplifying my film knowledge and taste a lot when I’m talking to people my age, trying to make it more accessible.”

The broader landscape is no easier.

“Walking through the halls of my high school, one person you see will tell you to go watch Fight Club, and the very next person might tell you it is terrible. Some people’s favorite movies are Ratatouille, some are Mean Girls, some are Mad Max: Fury Road.”

There is no common ground to simplify into. This is individual taste at its most supreme, floating free, and Ben is navigating through it with whatever currency the next conversation will accept. His close friends know about his Substack. They like his posts though he thinks “that it is more of a gesture of faith and goodwill as friends than any real interest in the topic."

On the other hand, his school reads him through a frame that misses the point entirely:

"I've always been perceived as the 'overachieving' kid from the outside. Having a blog where I write essays just seems like another academic thing I'm doing. It's only on the inside that the true inspiration and passion is found."

The people closest to him see effort where he feels love. And that gap doesn't close, because there's no shared vocabulary that would let it.

In previous generations, Ben told me, "movie taste was much more uniform and consensus-based. Everyone had to love The Godfather, or Pulp Fiction." Less than a quarter of millennials have watched a film from the 1940s or 1950s start to finish, and by Gen Z the consensus has dissolved almost entirely.

Film studies lecturer Joseph Clark framed the shift as overdue:

It’s not a secret that alternate Gen Z canons are being made on TikTok right now." But the scale of what's being produced3 means no alternate canon can hold for long either. The old consensus was replaced by a thousand micro-consensuses, each moving too fast to become common ground.

Ben sees how this plays out at ground level:

"A person around my age will find a movie they want to see because of a TikTok they saw, or because of a recommendation they heard at school. There is no single streamlined way of choosing movies to watch anymore."

And the cost of that randomness falls on the films that can't market themselves into a feed:

"So many great movies become lost to new generations because they aren't available on major streaming platforms where Gen Z watches everything, while lower-quality streaming releases can still get millions of viewers simply because they're easy to access."

Which is why I have immense sympathy for young people who want to enter this space. I built TFS because the conversations I wanted to have about film didn't fit in any room I could find, but I had a generation of shared references to navigate by. My local mall multiplex used to be where teenagers went on Saturdays. Tickets costed five euros. An entire category of mid-budget films — the thrillers, the comedies, the dramas that weren’t quite prestige but weren’t quite disposable — existed to get them through the door, and once they were there, proximity did the rest. I could wander into The Departed without intending anything and come out different. That’s all gone.

watching a film on half a screen is not apathy

If you are seventeen and love film in 2026, right now you have access to more movies than you could watch in a lifetime even if you never slept, and your homework is due tomorrow. Ben told me he watches movies on half his laptop screen while doing homework on the other half. In fact, he was watching Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret while answering my questions. Films he’s anticipating get his full attention; the rest share the screen. “I have never found any personal struggle in taking in both the movie and the work that I am doing.”

We’ve been asking “do young people care about film/cinema?” as if caring has one shape. That shape was a product of how movies used to reach people: one screen, one showtime, one chance. Caring looked like reverence because the economics demanded it. When a specific film required a specific trip to a specific building at a specific time, you gave it your full attention because the experience was finite and you knew it.

The people who built their taste in a world that did the organising for you, are now judging young people who had to organise it themselves for doing it differently. That’s the part that doesn’t sit well with me.

Ben’s economics are inverted. The film is always available. There are hundreds he wants to see and the list grows every week and his schedule is a teenager’s schedule, shared with obligations and a social life and sleep. Under those conditions, triage is the only way to maintain a film life at all4.

In which case, the question worth asking isn’t whether cinema culture is dying. It’s what cinema culture looks like alive, in the hands of the people actually building it.

cinephiles and it’s completely different and it’s also cinephiles

“I think that film has fallen out of the mainstream a little bit in my generation. No one goes and sees movies in theaters unless it’s an Avengers or Avatar movie, not like they used to. When my parents were my age, young people would go out and see every mid-budget thriller that was made, but now they can’t fill seats in the theater.

However, I do think that within the community of film lovers there is an extra passion there, differing from previous generations. My feeling is that this is due to the overall lack of interest within our generation, which means that if you want to get into it, you truly have to love it. I think that on the surface it seems like the ‘cinephile community’ is dying in my generation, but I think that the reality is that it is more alive than ever.”

The mechanism, he says, is connection.

“Those who do care about it are able to connect with each other so much more than before, because of social media and the internet. Online communities are created where movie lovers can engage with and support each other, something that previous generations could never find, simply because they never had access to it.”

I believe him when he says this. The evidence supports it—Letterboxd has 17M+ users, Gen Z moviegoing rates are climbing, reaction channels pull billions of views. The narrative of cinema’s death persists because the people mourning the old world mistake illegibility for absence.

And I believe him because Ben himself is the proof. But he’s also standing on data he hasn’t looked at. Letterboxd’s seventeen million users represent seven-tenths of one percent of his generation globally. Gen Z may be going to the movies more but over 56% them find social media content “more relevant than traditional TV shows and movies. His own friends—people who support him—treat his Substack writing as a gesture of goodwill. The passionate community exists because it’s self-selected for genuine dedication, and self-selection by definition means the community can only grow by converting people who already care enough to climb up without an on-ramp.

Ben saw Network—a 1976 film about the dehumanizing spectacle of media commodifying human attention—and his response was to join Substack to write about it. The film warned him about the exact system he joined. He did it anyway because there’s nowhere else to go. The internet is the disease that creates the problem and the cure that solves it and the trap that ensures you can never leave.

on cinephilia in the age of no one curating for you

I started this investigation looking for a story about loss. A teenager who loved film in a generation that perhaps didn’t as much, building something alone because the infrastructure disappeared.

I had the causality backwards.

The real mystery is: how does a teenager in 2026 fall in love with film? The answer is the same way they always have—through obsession, through one discovery leading to the next, through the need to understand why a thing made them feel something. What changed is every piece of infrastructure surrounding that impulse. The notebook is now an app with user reviews. The video store clerk is now a creator with a Patreon. The Friday night movie shares the screen with calculus homework. But the kid trying to understand why something got under his skin—that kid is exactly the same.

If you’re running a studio, I want you to know that your discovery infrastructure is mapped to the wrong generation. You’re spending money on Entertainment Tonight segments and Variety covers and premiere red carpets, and people like Ben found Ford v Ferrari because someone on r/oscarrace mentioned it had good sound design. He watches trailers when they appear in his feed, which means the algorithm decided whether he sees your film, and the algorithm cares about engagement metrics you don’t control. The seventeen-year-olds who will become your core audience in five years are being formed right now by creators you’ve never heard of. Reel Rejects has 29K+ Patreon subscribers paying monthly to watch them discuss whether Project Hail Mary works as an adaptation. These are media institutions teaching your future audience how to watch, and you’re not in the room.

If you’re a young cinephile and you care about something the people around you don’t care about—and I mean any art form that lost its mainstream foothold—I can see how Ben’s daily negotiation is your daily negotiation. You love Minecraft but you can’t tell your friends that because they think it’s for babies, so you’ve resigned yourself to spending your free time crafting and farming blocks alone. You’ve gotten really into French New Wave films, but every time they ask you what you’re watching you just say “nothing” or “something stupid” because you don’t want to deal with the eye-rolls from kids who only watch Marvel movies. You love Taylor Swift, but when your friends put on Midnights at the party, you just pretend to be annoyed by it like your in-crowd. You love all of these things so intensely, but when it comes time to share it with the people around you — the people who hopefully understand you best in this moment of your life — you have to play-act someone who doesn’t care. I see how this fragments you, and I see how much it costs.

And here’s where I struggle with this story because I owe you all that: I don't know if Ben represents the typical young cinephile or if he's exceptional. On the axis of "teenager who cares about film"—he's representative. Millions are on this path. On the axis of "teenager writing essays about Charlotte Wells on Substack"—almost certainly exceptional. But the path, evidently, exists.

I also don’t know what happens when Ben’s passion meets the economic reality of professional criticism. He’s seventeen. He’s writing because he can’t stop writing, building something because the impulse won’t quit. The landscape waiting for him is brutal—publications cutting staff, freelance rates unchanged since the aughts, Substack barely viable for most. He has years before that matters. You’re carrying the question now. What does the industry offer him when he’s ready? What world are we building for the people who care this much?

When I asked Ben what he’d tell a thirteen-year-old starting their film journey, he said: “Just feel the movie. Immerse yourself in it and forget that anything else exists.”

He said this while watching a film on half his screen.

This is the most sincere account I've heard in a while of what it actually means to love something inside a world that was never built to hold that particular kind of love. You hold the ideal in one hand—the thing you want it to be, the thing you know it could be—and you hold the reality in the other hand—the thing it actually is, the constraints you're actually working inside—and you figure out how to carry both without dropping either one.

You may think this answer is naive. Take yourself back to when you were seventeen then. Had you learned that most people need more than permission—they need roadmaps, they need scaffolding? Had you realized something the rest of us forgot, which is that the roadmap doesn’t actually help because the roadmap is always someone else’s path?

The new ways of being a cinephile are not failures. They’re adaptations that let the love exist at all. And yeah, something’s lost in that adaptation—I’m not going to pretend otherwise—but something’s also preserved that wouldn’t survive any other way.

Ben's going to be fine. The kids always are. And somewhere right now there's another thirteen-year-old grabbing a notebook for the first time, and that kid's going to be fine too, even if fine looks different than it used to. The caring makes it real. The rest is just conditions.

This story took my brain hostage for 3 months, alongside my full-time job and I’m making it free for everyone. Commenting on Original Investigations is for paid members, so if you want to tell me how wrong I am or correct my grammar — do it below, I can take it 🙂‍↕️

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Finally, a big thank you to for taking the time to speak to me for this story! Make sure you go check out his work over at .

I’m glad to be honoring my roots, because Sophie’s Law states that the best part of any movie is always the final scene. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, I’m giving you a big ol’ spoiler warning to exit stage left. Or if you like reading spoilers, hey, I’m not going to stop you. Enjoy!

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At the end of The Drama, Emma and Charlie end up in their special diner. Charlie arrives first. He is bloodied from the reception, where the whole edifice of the previous ten days finally gave way in spectacular fashion. He orders a cheeseburger and a Diet Coke. Emma walks in still wearing her dress. She orders at the counter. She then sits down across from him. And instead of continuing the conversation — the one that started at a regrettable food and wine tasting — she introduces herself.

Hi, I'm Emma. He plays along.

Hi, I'm Charlie.

They hold hands. The film ends.

It is, on its face, a lovely ending. Earlier in the week, Emma had tried this same game with Charlie when he was spiralling — meet me fresh, she said, pretend we're strangers, pretend you're just finding out who I am. He couldn't do it then. The walls were closing in. The fact that he can do it now, despite everything that happened, is Kristoffer Borgli's argument about love: that it can choose, at the last possible moment, to begin again. We're being seduced by the velocity of the gesture — look how fast they can move past this! One can simply delete one's philosophically incoherent traumas and emerge as a pristine version of oneself just by updating the nomenclature, like changing your Netflix password after a breakup.

But as I watched them play-act at being strangers, I couldn't help but feel that something in the room had already curdled. There is a fundamental difference between forgiving a person’s plans and forgetting what you’ve conjured up: the terrifying geometry of their face while they were making them. Borgli wants us to believe in the reset, but the invisible architecture of that booth has already reorganized itself permanently around what Emma disclosed.

Which leads to the one thing the film’s graceful ending made me question: what exactly are we being asked to forget so that this romance can stay upright?

This question leads us directly into the path of Erving Goffman. In his 1963 book, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Goffman dissects the way we move through the world when we carry a trait that society deems deeply damning. For Goffman, social life is a constant effort to maintain a working consensus—a shared agreement between people that everyone is exactly who they appear to be. You're a bookstore clerk, I'm a customer, we both pretend these identities are stable and complete and nobody mentions the fact that I’m three months behind rent or that you once shoplifted a Cadbury Creme Egg because you were having a bad day.

Stigma is what happens when the mask slips and reveals something we have decided is deeply damning — what Goffman called a spoiled identity. It's the gap between who you're pretending to be and who you actually are, except the "actually" part is usually just the thing that confirms every prejudice the room was already holding about you anyway. He split the world into two camps:

First, there are the discredited—the people whose flaws are visible the moment they cross the threshold. They are the known entities, carry-ons of deviance whose physical presence dictates the terms of the room before a single word is even spoken. Judgment is the tax they pay for existing.

Then, there are the discreditable. These are the people with secrets tucked into their pockets, surviving through the quiet, obsessive, and ultimately exhausting art of passing. This is a high-stakes, 24/7 management of undisclosed information where you are keeping the room ignorant of a truth you haven't authorized. The moment Emma speaks in that food and wine tasting, the transition is final. She moves from one camp to the other. The consensus dissolves. The literary editor Charlie loved is replaced by a record of treacherous, evil intent.

To make this even more complex, Goffman differentiates between the types of stains we carry.

Abominations of the body — disabilities, disfigurements, the ways flesh can fail to cooperate with social expectations.

Blemishes of individual character — the addiction, the breakdown, the criminal record, the plan involving a rifle and a school bus.

These are things you can sometimes hide if you're “disciplined” enough and “lucky” enough if people aren’t looking.

But then he introduces tribal stigma: race, religion, national origin, and the things transmitted through bloodlines that mark you before you've even done anything wrong. Most people are managing one or the other, but Emma is caught in a complex collision across all of them. She is a hard of hearing mixed race Black woman managing an identity that is specifically, dangerously “discreditable”. Her body is already being read by a room that has its own prehistoric ideas about tribal stigma, and she is trying to layer a managed identity over a secret that, if revealed, would confirm every structural prejudice the world already holds against her.

I know the shape of this mechanism even if my version was embarrassingly low-stakes by comparison. When I moved to London at 24 I was dragging a decade of clinical depression behind me like a wet overcoat I couldn’t take off no matter how many times I tried to leave it in the Uber. I hated who I was — Sofia, the Greek girl who couldn’t get out of bed most days, who’d spent years lying on a bedroom floor in Athens staring at the ceiling or watching back-to-back movies and wondering if this was just what life was going to be forever, a series of days strung together by the thin thread of not quite wanting to die but also not particularly wanting to be awake — and so I did what anyone would do when confronted with an identity they find intolerable: I deleted her. I was born Sofia. I got off the plane at Heathrow as Sophie. I decided I wanted a new name, a new country, and in extension, a new self.

It worked for a while. “Sophie” was a cohesive unit of vague London-adjacent sophistication — someone who went to gallery openings and knew how to pronounce “Shoreditch” without sounding like a tourist and had a good story about the time she saw Jack O’Connell at a pub. Nobody asked where Sofia went because nobody knew she’d existed. I was passing. I’d successfully managed the discrediting information of my past and built a new consensus in its place, and for a few years the whole performance held up beautifully. I was the girl who’d always been Sophie, who’d always been fun, who’d always known how to show up to drinks without spending 45 minutes in the bathroom first trying to remember how to make her face do the thing that signals “I am having a good time and you should continue talking to me.”

The problem with Goffman's working consensus is that it's always a temporary truce held together by everyone agreeing not to ask too many follow-up questions. Years later, when I finally felt secure enough, I started telling people the truth. Oh yeah, I used to be Sofia, I changed it when I moved here, a bit of a rebrand, you know how it is hahaha. My family still calls me that. I thought my current standing would act as a shield. It did not. I’ve watched it happen in real-time—the way some people who have known me for years suddenly look at me with a new, narrowed focus. Their eyes recalculated my value. The room darkened because I’d introduced a version of myself that they weren't prepared to manage.

Even at this scale, where the secret is much lighter, the social space contracts. It proves that the "reset" is often a myth. The room doesn't forgive the disclosure. Once the identity is spoiled, it simply builds a new, smaller box for you to live in.

So when Borgli frames that diner ending as a romantic grace note, as two people choosing to meet each other fresh and leave the past behind, I'm sitting there thinking: who exactly is doing the work of forgetting here? Because it's sure as hell not Charlie.

Thomas Nagel wrote an essay in 1979 called "Moral Luck" that I should note everyone should be forced to read before they're allowed to judge anyone for anything. Nagel's whole argument is that the self we take credit for — the good person, the moral actor, the one who makes the right choices — is mostly just a pile of accidents we didn't authorize. He called this constitutive luck: the raw materials you're assembled from before you've even had a chance to fuck it up yourself. Where you're born. Who your parents are. What language you speak. Whether the house you grow up in has books or guns or both. Whether you're wired for serotonin production or whether your brain decided early on that happiness is a bourgeois affectation and you should probably just get used to being miserable.

Emma Harwood at 15 was built from materials she never requested. A Louisiana zip code with approximately zero mental health resources and a political culture that treats school shootings as an inevitable feature of American life. A white Southern school where being Black and angry meant you were already being watched, already being categorized, already being written off as a problem waiting to happen. And a rifle sitting in the house like a toaster. Borgli documents all of this with what I can only describe as anthropological glee — the internet radicalization, the YouTube videos, the whole prefabricated script for teenage rage that American gun culture hands to teenagers everywhere.

Charlie, sitting in that diner holding her hand, loves the Boston version of Emma — the woman who had the constitutive luck to escape Louisiana, to get into a good school, to reinvent herself as someone who reads theory and has a job she enjoys and is kind and empathetic. He struggles to see that this version of Emma is built from the exact same pile of materials as the girl who walked into that school with a rifle. The only difference is geography, time and timing. She got out. She got lucky. Holding her past against her is just a way of judging the factory while demanding the finished product meet luxury specifications.

This selective morality gets even more complicated when the room starts doing the math on resultant luck. Nagel’s point is that we judge people by the outcomes they can’t control—like two drunk drivers who both make the same mistake, but only one is a "monster" because they happened to hit a pedestrian instead of a curb. In the world of the film, Rachel actually locked a disabled neighbor in an RV. It was a finished, bounded act of cruelty. It's awful. Everyone agrees it's awful. But it's also done. The wound has scar tissue. Emma, however, is the near-miss. She stopped herself. And because her tragedy never actually happened, it remains "open" in the minds of everyone in that room. The "what if" is an infinite threat that a completed crime can’t match.

Zendaya’s casting makes this open wound bleed. The film explicitly mocks the idea of her as a threat, noting that someone like her—a lithe, modelesque Black woman—doesn't fit the profile. School shootings are overwhelmingly committed by young white men, and the whole infrastructure of American radicalization is built around their grievances. She's the wrong shape for the fear. Except the room hears the logic and ignores it. They collapse Emma’s blemish of character and her tribal stigma into a single, terminal category. As Goffman predicted, the second her identity is activated as a stigma, it reorganizes every other piece of data the room has on her. Her restraint is no longer a triumph of character. It is a close call that could still go off.

The real rot, though, is the asymmetry of the "passing" going on in their relationship. Charlie is a man built on his own charming, low-stakes deceptions, like the time he lied about reading the book Emma was reading. By Goffman’s rules, he’s just as discreditable as she is—he is managing a secret to maintain a standing he hasn't earned. But for a white man, concealment is a meet-cute, a harmless anecdote for the wedding toast. For a Black woman, it’s a threat to the social order. One person’s "passing" is a love story. The other’s is a crime. Charlie sits in judgment of a constitutive luck he never had to navigate, totally oblivious to the fact that his own innocence is just another accident of the materials he was given.

But here's where the high-minded structural empathy I've been building collapses under the weight of what's actually on screen. Because at some point you have to confront the tapes. Emma's recorded manifestos are not theoretical exercises. They're not vague teenage angst. They're a blueprint for mass murder recorded by a fifteen-year-old girl who'd already moved past the planning stage and into logistics. It is impossible to simply defend her through the lens of a bad upbringing when you’re watching footage of her hauling a rifle. The only reason she didn't leave a pile of bodies behind was because a different killer happened to get there first. Her ultimate restraint was a fluke of timing.

You can explain the assembly line that built the monster, but the monster still showed up to do the work. You can call Rachel cruel, vindictive, unable to let the past go, poorly written (if we’re being honest) but she's also reacting to a very real fact: Emma Harwood did plan the school shooting. Rachel’s cousin, sitting in a wheelchair, is the permanent, physical record of what Emma is capable of. Once you admit that Rachel has every reason to be afraid, you are forced to admit that Emma’s intent could be a permanent, dangerous part of who she is.

This all also suggests that the damage done to a teenager by 15 is so totalizing that the distinction between "wanting to kill" and "actually killing" starts to vanish. The conversation moves away from the possibility of a "reset" and toward a kind of social disposal. Everyone watching—Charlie, Rachel, and ourselves—is forced to decide if Emma is a person who can actually grow, or if she’s just a finished product of a broken kiln, written off before she ever had a real chance to fail.

Borgli wants to pivot to a reset, but the film’s own logic has already locked the doors. To believe in this new beginning, the room must perform a double-erasure: it has to un-know the blemish of the rifle and un-activate the tribal stigma that the confession set on fire. Goffman’s math says this is impossible. Once the identity is spoiled, the stains are permanent. And Emma’s tribal stigma was never a secret to be managed. It was the baseline the room used to calculate her threat the moment she spoke.

The room doesn't forget and the vibes changed and they both know it, but people do this constantly anyway. At the supermarket, at work drinks, on the tube, in their beds late at night deciding whether to stay or go. Someone walks into your life carrying something the room has already decided about — infidelity, bankruptcy, prison time, a mental collapse that leaves forwarding addresses — and you fall anyway. The mechanics still apply and stigma corrodes exactly as mapped, but the alternative is walking away from the person who makes your chest feel like something's trying to break out.

Think about the last time someone told you about choosing their person when the entire world said run. Your best friend who went back to the boyfriend who cheated with her sister and somehow made it work for three more years. Your colleague who married the woman with three restraining orders from three different states. The guy at the bar who kept showing you photos of his girlfriend — the one his family won't meet because she stole his mother's jewelry during Christmas dinner two years running — and he knows she did it and stays because he's decided that loving her beats his mother's sapphires. You remember thinking they were TOXIC and you remember the exact texture of your own judgment.

And maybe it did end in catastrophe, maybe your friend's wedding imploded exactly like you predicted. But they chose it with open eyes anyway. The room had decided and they looked at all that data and said yeah, I see it, and I’m still choosing this because the alternative is so much worse.

Charlie, in the final scene of the film, knows Emma in this diner is built from the same constitutive luck as the girl who walked into that school planning murder. And he reaches across the table anyway.

Love is the choice to write your own line when the room's script ends. Full knowledge that the stigma persists, full understanding that the mechanics say no and Goffman was right and Nagel was right, choosing anyway because what else is love except deciding that the person in front of you matters more than your own social legibility. In its context, people are the fools who decide that living in the gap between what-they-know and what-they-can-bear beats walking away with clean hands. Borgli is showing us what happens when you choose someone after the disclosure. Sometimes you choose the delusion together because the truth is unbearable and at least you're not bearing it alone.

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The audio mix was bad. They cut off the KPop Demon Hunters songwriters mid-speech. They made RDJ and Chris Evans cringe. Conan O'Brien — who I love, let me be clear, I have loved this man since the string dance — opened by telling the audience he was "the last human host" of the Academy Awards before doing a bit where he spoke in Gen Z slang over Subway Surfers footage. "Hostmaxxing the Oscars and lowkenuinely trying to rizz up the younger demographic by going brain-rot mode" is what the man said, out loud, on network television, in front of Jessie Buckley and God. Clavicular reacted live and declared network TV "a genuine fucking joke," which would be a career-ending own if Clavicular's entire livelihood didn't depend on reacting to network TV from his gaming chair. The ouroboros of it all.

The audience dropped 9% from last year’s post-pandemic high, the lowest since 2022 and the ceremony ran so long it nearly set a record for duration — a thing the Academy has been swearing for years it would fix. The 18-49 demo dropped 14%. Social impressions surged 42% to over 181 million, which means the Academy has frankly become a clip farm.

The Oscars are still culturally alive in the way a beheaded chicken with a great brand is physically alive — still running, still being stopped on the street, ultimately unclear about the direction.

Disney will keep it going like this for the next couple of years. ABC holds the broadcast through the 100th Oscars in 2028 — a centenary that will be commemorated, I assume, by a montage set to an Adele song and the vague institutional scent of a retirement party — and then YouTube takes over from 2029 to 2033, exclusive global rights, free to 2.7+ billion users worldwide.

The promise, as always, is access. Scale. Innovation. Closed captioning in multiple languages, year-round programming, the Governors Awards, the Nominees Luncheon, all of it on one channel. On streaming, the show will no longer be subject to FCC guidelines or broadcast TV formats. YouTube gives them carte blanche.

For the first time in a century, the Academy would have full production control without a network's notes.

And look, I am thrilled. For all I care, burn the run of show. Burn the walk-on music. Burn the bit where exhausted actors on the last leg of their press tours have to read scripted banter off a teleprompter. BURN IT ALL.

But liberation from constraint has never automatically meant liberation into vision, and that’s the part I would like us to start talking about. Every platform transition in the history of awards shows has resulted in the same ceremony1 with a different logo in the corner. YouTube COULD be the place where the Oscars finally become something new. Even so, it needs a rethinking so total it upends the format from what it currently is: a relic stuck in time and privilege, actively making the industry look impossible, distant and most importantly, uncool.

So why not give these two some inspo?

the new oscars season!

Let me be clear about where I stand: If I were queen of the Oscars, all campaigning would be outlawed2.

You know the part of a movie where the characters are in a really bad place and they’ve lost everything and everything is going wrong and they’re really in a “dark night of the soul” situation? And you the viewer are like, I’m sure the characters are doing a lot of growing and changing in this period, but to me it just looks like they’re wandering around in the desert and haven’t had a glass of water in two weeks and they look terrible?

And then eventually they’re dirty and disheveled and they’ve got a huge beard and they’ve lost a ton of weight and they look completely broken down and they come out the other side and you’re like, okay cool, that’s the part where you went through. You went through that. But I didn’t — I didn’t really go through it with you. That’s the Oscar campaigning season every year. The actors look hot, but the entire voting cycle is a relentless, thankless, spirit-crushing grind for everyone involved.

YouTube, while it’s full of horrible stuff, has an audience that actually doesn’t mind being talked to like it has a brain. YouTube, in the right hands, can actually be a place for something interesting to happen.

It’s time to finally have an awards event where everyone gets together to talk about what goes into shooting a movie.

I get that it’s always been somewhat difficult to explain to non-film buffs what a cinematographer is responsible for in any given scene. Sure, it seems fairly obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense that the person behind the camera has a lot to do with how the scene looks, and that (obviously) the stuff in the background (or not) was lit and staged by someone else. But until you’ve seen the exact same scene lit, shot, and staged in different ways, it’s difficult to understand how crucial that work is to the scene’s overall tone.

So, in the month3 before the ceremony, I would have the Oscars channel on YouTube run events that actually show people what the technical categories are (and make it fun while doing so).

house tours with DPs

I want us to commission interior tour videos that Architectural Digest has hopefully agreed to produce for every Best Picture nominee. House tours are totally a cinematographer thing, right? I want the nominees to show us their style and framing or give a rundown of their favorite movies and how they inspired their work. We could do a pair DP showdown with Roger Deakins and Emmanuel Lubezki on the nature of sunlight, or a dramatic lighting challenge. Or the same room, made claustrophobic by one DP and infinite by another and warm by a third. Sontag wrote about the frame as argument, and this would be a great time to let general audiences see the argument happening in front of them, which, in my humble opinion, would change the way people watch films for the rest of their lives.

masterchef but with production designers

Do a production design challenge where the Academy gives all nominated production designers the same brief from a specific movie scene. They get four hours and a warehouse full of materials and cameras rolling the whole time, and you’d just watch them work. The idea of this is intoxicating to me. The actors from the nominated films perform the same scene in all spaces, and you’d be able to see how the room changes everything. The booth two feet to the left changes where the actor’s eye goes. The colour of the wall changes the weight of the same line of dialogue. It wouldn’t count toward the Oscar, but it would do something the ceremony has never managed in ninety-eight years of handing out the production design award: show people what production design actually is.

month-long marathons with makeup & hairstyling experts

Beauty & Fashion is one of YouTube’s most lucrative categories, and the one that earns the most views and clicks by a long shot. The platform has never had a more obvious opportunity to cross one of its most successful categories with the Academy Awards. After all, wouldn’t you rather watch a 10-minute makeup tutorial about how to do Victor Frankenstein-esque makeup than listen to some exhausted poor soul at the press junket about how she just loved the character so much?

So grab your makeup and hairstyling kits for a month of tutorials on the nominated actors’ looks, warm up those vocal cords for celebrity look-alike challenges, and get your bingo cards ready for actual award show games while you’re at it. Make the craft show up in a way that isn’t relegated to a red carpet interview. Show Oscar voters and the audience that makeup artistry is about more than just what you see on the surface. Yes, it’s an integral component of worldbuilding, of developing an actor’s performance, as critical to a character’s journey as the script or the direction or the score. But more importantly, it’s a highly-skilled craft that takes years of training.

a live fashion show with costumes from the films

A costume design runway where the nominated costumes would be on the actors who wore them. Seeing the costumes move — seeing the textures shift in the light, hearing the sound of the hem brushing against the floor, the rustle of the sleeve as the arm bends, seeing the patterns shift as the body breathes — you suddenly realize the extent of the craft that went into the garment. It goes beyond just the fabric and the design: the rhythm of the movement, the way the garment responds to the body, all of it is part of the costume designer’s work. Think ANTM without the toxicity, hunny!

explosions, really

SOUND DESIGN, PEOPLE. I could build a cathedral to sound design in my heart and never step outside again. In fact, if I had to spend a week in a room with anything or anyone, it would be just, like, a few hundred random sound designers, just hanging out. Sound designers are the people I’m most in awe of.

Unfortunately, they’re also the Oscar category everyone goes to the bathroom for. Not because they don’t care — because they have no idea what it actually is.

For my Oscars sound design event, I would have the nominees rig a theater with proper sound, like I’m not fucking around. Dolby Atmos sound, the whole shebang. I’m rolling in that sweet YouTube ad revenue.

I’d play the same three-minute scene from whichever movie everybody liked in a year four times: sound design only, dialogue only, score only, then everything together. The first time through, it would be an innocuous joke, a few lines of blather that maybe get a chuckle out of you if you’re in the right mood. The second time you hear it, just the dialogue…well, that’s what you’d expect in a movie, right? It’s technically funny, sure—if you’re in the right mood. The third time you hear the score only, well, obviously that’s funny too. Ever heard the song “Baba O’Riley” before the lyrics kicked in? It’s a banger. But it’s not until the fourth time, when everything comes together, that you start to understand what’s actually going on. It’s so repetitive, yet it’s the repetition that makes you finally realize something about film you’ve never understood before.

(You could see how I could do this all day for every craft-related category).

the new oscars weekend!

The weekend of the ceremony, I want every film nominated for Best Picture to drop on the YouTube homepage. Free, globally, subtitled in 40+ languages, available for 48 hours. This is the part where studios would need to be physically restrained from storming the building, but listen to me: If you want 2.7B+ people to care who wins Best Picture on Sunday night, let them watch the films on Friday night. Or Saturday. Hell, Sunday morning even.

And while we’re at it, let’s make them available with optional DVD commentary-style tracks4. Gen Z deserve to know how good we had it. What if Barry Jenkins, Jane Campion, and Greta Gerwig all got in a studio together and made something fun with their commentaries? This doesn’t even have to be limited to film workers. I want to hear a YouTube turtleneck essayist’s withering musings on The Secret Agent. I mean, what better way to spend a Saturday evening than listening to Cole Escola and argue about how they fell asleep watching Hamnet? I want to see it all.

the new main event!

The way we know it, the main Oscars event is a levee holding back a rushing river, a singularity, a black hole where everyone else is sucking matter into their intense gravitational pull.

YouTube already has the solution, and the solution is what YouTube does by default: multiple simultaneous streams. You pick your Oscars experience.

You have a choice now. You have options.

the craft feed

Let’s just say that in my perfect world5, the Oscars on YouTube would have the Craft Feed designed specifically for me (and anybody else who can appreciate watching someone explain a ProTools session the way a sports commentator calls a tight game). Ayo Edebiri would be hosting it (obviously) with a panel of sound mixing, VFX, cinematography, and editing experts. When a craft-related Oscar winner is announced, you go to this Feed to actually get to hear about how that win happened. They’ll explain the nuts and bolts of the work as they show us the work itself.

This one is for the crafts in every sense.

the backstage feed

The backstage feed covers the red carpet, but it doesn’t really cover it so much as it eats it. I’m talking about Aubrey Plaza and Pedro Pascal locked in a room6 sitting down with popcorn live-reacting to red carpet looks. I’m talking about Jenna Ortega fumbling with a handkerchief as she approaches Nicolas Cage, tapping him on the shoulder to get his attention because he’s mid-anecdote to Tarantino and totally tuning him out.

I’m talking about the ubiquitous publicists who usually run the red carpet but are now lying face down on the ground because somebody recently unbuttoned their blazer and they are about to burst. I’m talking about Sofia Boutella searching for her voice because it went missing a few hours ago and all she’s got right now is the urge to say something really, really funny about revenge, but she’s just so thirsty. I’m talking about a team of twenty carpet wranglers trying to find an off-camera rest area for Alexander Skarsgard, who is wearing a Dior tuxedo and flip flops and who, if they don’t hurry, is about to run right through the backstage feed camera at the wrong moment.

It’s chaos. It’s sticky. It’s a wonder that anybody makes it out without getting hit by a striking actor or a strike of their own. It’s a red carpet, of course, but it’s also the green room of the entire event. The backstage camera will follow you wherever, which means nobody is truly backstage. That zip-up hoodie you’re trying to stow in your pocket, that’s getting a close-up. That Cobb salad you’re picking at, we see you.

the taste feed

From all the discourse around taste in the past few months, I’ve come around to the idea that is this: taste is a learned discussion. Taste isn’t just about what you like. It’s about what you know, it’s about what you talk about, it’s about your experiences and the experiences of those around you. What you like and what your personal taste is stems from where you spend your time and who you spend it with. So, if taste is contextual, watching a feed like the Taste Feed could or would be educational. But it could also be a good time.

I envision the Taste Feed as a director’s commentary-esque feed of 4-5 folks known for their supreme taste riffing over the ceremony in a way that’s reminiscent of watching movies with your most well-connected friends who will tell you all the weird AND informed insights. On a base level, I would like to see a mix of cultural tastemakers such as the one and only Bowen Yang, a genuinely shocked and slightly frightened Josh Safdie, a totally unfazed , and whoever is behind the r/Oscarrace subreddit.

This Taste Feed does three things I haven’t seen elsewhere:

1) It breaks down the Oscar ceremony into something more tangible and real, because even people who love movies (like the ones in this feed) can find the Oscars arbitrary and weird.

2) It makes space for the words “I don’t know but let me show you how I think about this” in a real, tangible way, which creates a space where anyone can develop their own taste through trial and error.

3) It makes room for liking things for the sake of liking things, which is why we watch movies in the first place. It encourages people to pick up a Coen movie as a way to understand Hail Caesar because they’re curious, and curious people tend to have great taste.

the main feed (the live ceremony lives here)

There are stories that are meant to be told in a short form, and a night like the Oscars, where everyone is basically starved for filmmaking, is the perfect way to showcase that. What if the Oscars opened with a short film7 every year?

I think about what it would mean for a filmmaker who has never had that platform before. Or at least for an established filmmaker8 who has never been nominated. The opportunity to showcase your work in front of billions of people is unheard of. It would also set the scene in a way that the red carpet and the opening monologue (which, I actually think it’s time we admit, are completely dead) don’t because it would get us into an emotional space that the usual Oscars opening doesn’t touch.

(I get that we still need a host. But we need someone who can actually do something. Imo Anne Hathaway needs to be given another chance!)

The rest of the main feed/ceremony runs in three segments.

The first segment opens with a mix of emerging YouTube filmmakers and legendary Oscar-winning practitioners presenting the technical categories on the main stage. Someone like Patrick Willems9 does editing with a sixty-second visual breakdown. Jenny Nicholson does costume design. Mikey from the FilmJoy team could do screenplay. These people have enormous audiences that will watch the show probably just for them which is great news for the technical categories because we need to make people fall in love with the craft of filmmaking10 all over again!

To wrap up this segment, I’d do a live demo. I want it to be something that’s either visually stunning or purely spectacular in its technicality (it must have also been used in one of the nominated films). The trick is that it has to be cool enough that the audience at home wants to tune in to see it, and easy enough to understand that they can grasp the basics in sixty seconds. It’s got to wow them: Oh, right! Fuck yeah cinema!

The second segment is where the night breathes and gets strange. We’d have categories such as Supporting Actor/Actress, International Film, Animated Feature, and woven between them: the live ceremony moments. Specifically, I would have a handful of nominated performances — perhaps audience-voted — get re-staged live on the Oscar stage.

Picture Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano doing the bowling alley scene from There Will Be Blood. This is acting, darling. This is the only truly Oscar-worthy action. (If Daniel Day-Lewis does not want to walk that stage, we need Paul Dano up there screaming “MY MILKSHAKE BRINGS ALL THE BOYS TO THE YARD” with reckless abandon while Daniel Day-Lewis stands there baffled.)

Or Cate Blanchett performing the iconic monologue from Tár with a live orchestra. The room is electric. She wears her signature short hair slicked back into a clean bun at the nape of her neck, ruby red lipstick stark against alabaster skin. She’s dressed in what appears to be a vintage tuxedo, with off-white lace sleeves falling delicately past shoulders bare and slight. She does wonders.

Cue the In Memoriam segment here. There are some real pitfalls with it at the moment. The most obvious is that people get left out, which is always going to happen just because of time and space constraints. But it can be particularly sensitive when someone very recent passes or if there’s a very shocking or surprising death. So what would I do differently? I’d want to make sure it was a fully collaborative project so that everyone felt represented and included while also being sensitive to any potential situations that could arise. I’d also like to know what they actually cared about? What they thought their best work was? I guess what I’m saying is I want a longer interview instead of a film industry obituary.

Now the last segment you’d have to save it for the top dogs: Best Director, Original and Adapted Screenplay, Leading actor and actress categories, and Best Picture. But before we move to announcements, we get the musical number. Yes, all we get is ONE and we all agree we hate when people sing during award shows (and the end of this performance should not be too long). Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling come out and do a number, strutting around backstage on their way to the stage (they’re there to present Best Picture, obviously).

The ceremony at this stage needs to make the audience feel like it’s been a long night, but not in a bad way—it’s pleasantly exhausting. It needs to be the bacon bagel sandwich after the morning rave. It needs to be paced like the last thirty minutes of No Country for Old Men: unhurried and inevitable.

Throughout the entire night, here’s what I’d blast across all feeds: Exclusive trailers11 every thirty minutes or so. The first one is totally unannounced and as soon as it drops, it becomes apparent it wasn’t unplanned — the screen cuts to black and the sound shifts in such a seamless way that everyone understands this was always part of the program. It doesn’t have a huge budget but it’s a film from somewhere in the world, and now you get excited for it because the trailer is the BOMB12.

(Plus, watching Kieran Culkin react to a thing he didn’t expect is always more interesting than watching someone react to a thing he expected.)

bonus: people’s category!

The Academy comes up with 10-15 additional categories13. One of them is chosen by us, the normies, and we change it every year. “Best stunt performance” could be the most interesting award to hand out in a year when a lot of stuff had great stunts, or maybe there weren’t that many interesting stunts and there were a lot of good monologues, so we vote on “Best Monologue” instead.

It very much is about putting that power back into that community’s hands and letting people vote on what they want to vote on.

i’ll wrap this up

Bob Hope called television a child bride at the 1953 ceremony, back when the Oscars’ relationship with the medium was new and uncomfortable and nobody could say how long it would last. Bauman wrote about liquid modernity — institutions that can no longer hold their shape because the conditions that created them have evaporated.

I’ve written multiple times about how, despite my best efforts, I can never escape the fascination I hold for the Oscars — a shiny object in a town built on shiny objects. Plenty of people are content to scoff at them from afar, though I’ll admit, it’s harder to ignore the bigger picture when you know people in the industry that would do anything, and I mean anything, for this stupid shiny object.

I know many people feel so detached from them that, at this point, for them to feel something, it would require a cataclysmic event. The ceremony has to be, on some level, awe-inspiring. If it’s going to be worth it at all — if all the endless boring awards shows and all the endless boring campaigns and all of miserable coverage is going to be worth sitting through — it has to be spectacle. It has to make you feel something. It needs to remind you of what an awards show can do when everyone involved believes in something: winning, losing, the power of movies. Everyone needs to want something so badly that night. And believe they might get it, too.

I’m not sure the Academy will use their newfound creative control to do anything interesting. The most ambitious stuff I laid out in this piece doesn’t sound all that radical to me. But I’m an optimist at heart. I have to be. I want to see more individual creators brought into this space, more major projects intersecting with smaller ones, and a platform that celebrates filmmaking instead of hindering it. I want to see Tom Cruise’s first Oscar livestreamed on YouTube in all its glory! The Academy has an incredible opportunity to rethink how any of this gets done, and I hope they take it.

But ultimately, this is YouTube’s game to lose. Kim Larson, global MD and head of creators at YouTube, said they are planning to give the Oscars “a little bit of a zhuzh-up”. A zhuzh-up can mean a lot of things. It can mean a full-on Wicked: Part Two situation, or it can mean just a little sprinkle here and there. I’m hoping for the latter.

YouTube can consider me their best consultant and talk to me anytime they want. We all really need to step up to the plate for this. All of our stupid little dreams are at stake here…and if we’re not careful, we might end up living theirs.

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Which is why I’m delighted to say that the film is now streaming on MUBI — a place to discover great, ambitious cinema, from emerging auteurs to iconic directors. They distributed our darlings Aftersun and Souvenir Part II and have recently put out Die My Love, It Was Just An Accident, The Mastermind and Sentimental Value (Trier gang rise up!!).

You can get 30 days of free streaming at mubi.com/finalscene 🔗

This is also why I was equally thrilled when the TFS Reader Hotline1 landed a voice note about the film. , a super thoughtful supporter of the newsletter, sent it to me a few weeks ago. He wanted to talk about a specific scene in Sentimental Value — and not one of the obvious ones.

Edited transcript:

“The scene that really triggered me was when Rachel Kemp goes to Gustav Borg’s house and withdraws from the film. She says she doesn’t want to disappoint him. He answers that she doesn’t. They hug and she cries. That scene really hit me hard — even harder than the typical scenes that make people cry in this movie — because of that feeling of realizing: this isn’t your story to tell. That even though it resonates with you, you’re not the vessel for this art to be made. It’s someone else’s story. You’re merely a witness to it. An important witness, but a witness all the same.”

Hernando, I swear I grinned when your voice note started. I love movies and I love talking about movies, but I also love when I hear someone else nail a feeling I’ve been fumbling for words on. Sentimental Value is a film I adore but I also don’t think about often because when I do, I get weirdly…sad.

Witnessing sounds soft as a word—kind, even—but it drags you into everything. It means watching, yes, but also carrying, feeling, knowing. Folding yourself into another’s story without folding them into yours. It’s holding space without elbowing in, telling without owning. And god, the power packed into that. But you have to watch yourself. Witness too hard and it slides into possession, the story no longer theirs but yours to flaunt or fix. Then comes the dull throb of adjacency—a slow, persistent pain that says, I care too much, and that very caring marks me as the outsider, the one who shouldn’t have to bear the weight. This half-step, this delicate overreach, that’s Rachel’s entire orbit in Sentimental Value.

There’s also so many questions around the ethics of proximity — too close and you’re just a gossip with a press pass, too far and you’re a clueless bystander playing at empathy. Access journalism thrives on this confusion. Like every acting teacher screams at you in week one: you nail a role by inhabiting it, then ditch the ego long enough to let the character breathe outside your control.

But what happens when you’re only meant to witness? I’ve started to feel a strange combination of comfort and despair in the movies that seem to be circling the same question — what does it mean to be someone who spends all their time witnessing, understanding, lovingly attaching themselves to stories that aren’t theirs?

Nobody’s named this feeling yet, and I’d like to try. I want to think through its privilege and its danger alongside Rachel Kemp’s Sentimental Value — the story of a woman whose power is the ability to see.

Shall we do it together?

a surrogate is not the same thing as a muse, gustav

Much of the critical conversation around Sentimental Value has fixated on the family drama—the sisters, the absent father, the ancestral wounds tangled with Norwegian resistance lore and a grandmother’s suicide—and sure, that reading is correct. But it’s also incomplete. The film’s true engine is Rachel Kemp, the American actress who barely belongs to this lineage yet dismantles it from the inside out. Elle Fanning embodies her with such urgency you’re yanked closer to the screen—only to lose yourself so utterly that leaning back feels like forgetting you ever moved at all.

We meet Rachel at the Deauville Film Festival, where a retrospective of Gustav Borg's early work is screening. She has come from the universe of blockbuster YA franchises — famous, yes, but carrying the bone-deep exhaustion of someone who has been successful at the wrong things. Rachel watches one of Gustav's old films and something in it reaches her. She invites him to dinner with her entourage. He offers her the role his own daughter refused. And Netflix, sniffing the scent of headline-grabbing chemistry, agrees to finance the whole thing. From the first frame, this looks like a meeting of artistic kindred spirits. It is already an arrangement built on asymmetric need: Rachel wants artistic legitimacy. Gustav wants a surrogate. The transaction is invisible to both of them, which is what makes it so effective.

Then the preparation begins, and this is where Trier starts tightening the screws. Gustav isn’t just coaching Rachel—he’s remaking her, sculpting Nora’s body language, her pauses, her inflections, like a puppeteer abusing strings that only look delicate. Some critics flagged this as a Bergman-esque touch, though I didn’t see many directly making the connection to Persona: One woman forced to dissolve into another under a patriarch’s cold eye.

It’s the sadism of a Bergman character, paternal and possessive, ready to consume the daughter to feed the art. The hair-dyeing is an inkblot of violence, bleeding under Rachel’s skin before the psychological guillotine falls. He then gets the script translated from Norwegian to English for Rachel—a concession that both he and Rachel know is wrong. She can’t speak Norwegian. It’s the same language of manipulation that gets fathers in trouble with their daughters.

The rehearsal scene is where the film's central dramatic irony becomes visible. Rachel performs a monologue from Gustav's script — a passage about crisis, loneliness, and a desperate prayer for home:

Gustav, clinging to his role as patriarch, suddenly taps into something real in her — which is just terrifying, because she’s really good. She’s a great actress, and that’s part of what makes her imaginative approximation so dangerous.

Rachel’s frozen walls start to crack. The story she’s been stuck in, the father’s secret ache—it all bubbles up just beneath the surface. Even the English sounds off; she hears it. She smells Gustav’s distractions, knows Nora’s shadow haunts every line, and that the entire project is his petition for his daughter’s forgiveness. Rachel is conscientious, conflicted, and a little like Gustav: ego-driven, but not without warmth and grace.

Rachel walks up to Gustav’s home. The foliage is expansive and lush, there’s a white picket fence, and the green of the trees provide a perfect backdrop for Rachel’s white dress. This is a woman who is a pure romantic at heart, but she’s also very American—in all of the ways that you might expect, but also in her frankness. She’s bracingly direct. She cuts through all the wry Nordic reserve in a way that feels ungrateful, but that is, of course, American. (I say this as a non-American of a skeptical and pessimistic disposition who goes to Nordstrom Rack every time she’s in New York).

Rachel tells Gustav she is withdrawing. She says she just doesn't want to let him down. She says it doesn't feel right.

"You asked me to dye my hair the same colour as your daughter. And, I mean, you don't want this film to be in English, do you?"

Rachel represents everything Nora resents. She is the Americanized blonde, the daughter who is willing to bend to her father’s will, the daughter who is willing to play the role that has been forced upon her. Nora is estranged in more ways than one: she has cut her father out of her life, which is what a good daughter would do, but she’s also cut him out of her work and her art. She’s an artist who refuses to be a daughter—in her work and in her life. Rachel is a daughter who is willing to be an artist, and that’s why she was chosen. But this, too, has its limits.

Gustav's response is the closest the film comes to grace: "Please, don’t look back at this as a failure. You’re a great actress, I meant it."

This exchange is deceptively understated, but the scene’s power comes from the mutual generosity between them. According to Elle Fanning, Rachel is the “catalyst” of the film—unburdened by decades of resentment, she sees Gustav and his family dynamics with a clarity that they cannot reach themselves. And when she walks away, it’s a dare: forcing Gustav to reckon with the truth he’s been dodging—wanting his daughter’s participation is, in fact, wanting her forgiveness.

Rachel occupies a specific position—an unwilling voyeuse to something she cannot enter. But is she the only one of her kind?

the taxonomy of women who carry stories that aren't theirs

In what is perhaps the most satisfying twist of Sentimental Value, she isn’t. She’s a type. And it wasn’t until I read Holocaust scholar and psychiatrist Dani Laub’s insightful work on the subject of witnessing that I realised just how many films had quietly placed their Rachel Kemp in Laub’s impossible position of the witness.

In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, Laub delineates three distinct levels of witnessing:

• Being a witness to oneself within the experience

• Being a witness to the testimonies of others

• Being a witness to the process of witnessing itself

His core insight is simple: Witnessing is never neutral. Proximity to another’s suffering creates its own form of wound. You don’t have to live the experience to be marked by it. To be adjacent to it is to be in a position that is not only moral and psychological, but one that is impossible.

Rachel is a witness to Gustav’s grief and pain, but she is also a witness to herself as an actor, as a woman, as a lover, as a friend. She looks through the camera lens, watches footage of herself and Gustav, and sees herself witness herself. She can’t escape it, and maybe that’s why she’s drawn it so forcefully. But the cost is heavy. Carrying the weight of someone else’s grief is a heavy burden, and when you’ve created a character who, like Rachel, is as empathetic and attuned to sadness as she is, it becomes even heavier. She has to find a way to express that burden through her body, as well as the sadness she’s creating every time she steps on stage.

I've started to notice Rachel everywhere, now that I'm looking. I went back through everything I'd watched in the last few years and found her sitting in the corner of film after film, slightly outside the main action.

Aftersun has adult Sophie going back through the MiniDV footage of that holiday in Turkey, 1999. She has Calum on tape asking her to tell her mum she misses her. She has him on a sun lounger. She has the particular way he holds a towel. Wells cuts between this footage and strobe-lit rave sequences where adult Sophie stands motionless in a crowd while her father moves somewhere in the dark just out of reach — and the film's whole argument is in that gap, which is Laub's second level: the testimony arrives after the fact, when it is completely, cosmically useless. She was eleven. She was standing right there. She just had the camera.

Past Lives goes somewhere even more airless. Celine Song has said that sitting at that bar in New York — Nora between Hae Sung and Arthur, translating between them — she realised she wasn't translating between two men but between two selves: the girl who left Seoul at twelve and the woman who stayed in New York and built a life in a language her childhood doesn't speak. Arthur tells Nora "you dream in a language I can't understand," which is shattering in the way that only accurate statements are. She's been her own witness for two decades — carrying that earlier version, that abandoned life — and still couldn't fully bury her. When she cries at the end, walking back from Hae Sung's taxi, Song is specific: it isn't grief for Hae Sung. It's grief for the twelve-year-old girl she never got to say goodbye to. Laub's first level, the most interior one — being a witness to yourself, inside the experience, in real time — and she was doing it for twenty-four years without a word for it.

Joanna Hogg's answer, in The Souvenir Part II, is to make witnessing into a graduation film — which is the logical conclusion of Laub's third level (witnessing the act of witnessing itself, turning the position into art). Julie casts an actor who doesn't look like Anthony and a producer friend who has never acted and then tries to direct her crew through grief she cannot translate into instruction, because the grief was built on a version of Anthony she had been substantially inventing since the day she met him. Her classmate Pete tells her she hasn't reconciled who Anthony was with who she loved. He is correct. It doesn't help. The graduation film she premieres looks nothing like the one she planned — brighter, stranger, Anthony resurrected and finally cooperative, Julie carrying a camera like a gun — and whether that counts as processing the wound or simply redecorating it is a question Hogg, characteristically, leaves entirely open.

withdrawal as an act of grace

I dust off the pile of notes I’ve made on involuntary witness research and all the ways that witnessing can be significant without being transformative. I can’t find words for being a witness by necessity, bound to the event by your own existence but compelled to do nothing.

You understand what is happening in a house you do not own and have no say in the maintenance of, and your understanding is not required and is not wanted. You are close enough to be marked and to be affected but too far away to act. You are not permitted to act. You are not a bystander because bystanders have power, since they can choose to act or choose not to act. You are weightless, the witness at the back of the courtroom being marked and informed and invited and enlisted for no reason at all. But you still have that power, and that power is yours to keep.

Rachel has this and this is where Sentimental Value shows its radical streak. Because, of all the witness films I’ve discussed, it’s the only one to directly show the act of withdrawing. Aftersun ends in the ambiguity of retrospective grief. The Souvenir transforms the act of witnessing into art. Past Lives holds its characters on a never-ending hinge. Trier’s film shows a character choosing to step back, and frames that choice as the most generous thing she could do.

the ethics of celebrating a woman for knowing her place

However, here’s where we’re confronted with a new problem. If Elle Fanning herself describes Rachel as a catalyst, then we should acknowledge what a catalyst really does — it initiates chemical reactions but remain unchanged themselves. Catalysts exist to produce a reaction and then be ended, consumed. They are sacrifice. Sacrifice is the force of nature that drives the story into motion, but sacrifice is not the subject of this story. Rachel the catalyst, like all the others in this essay, is a victim of her own invisibility. Sacrifice is mouth-watering, and she exists for the appetites of others — but exactly how mouth-watering is determined by their appetites. I cannot help but be reminded of the rapacious Polyphemus from the classic Greek myth, where Odysseus’s men are consumed one by one until only the cunning Odysseus remains, clever enough to blind the creature and escape.

Sacrifice speaks only when it has been dined upon.

So if the significant witness only seems to matter in their absence — then what are we exactly celebrating here? Is this ethics? Or a beautifully crafted story about being expendable? It’s our job to be careful with such stories and their byproducts. As the protagonists of Aftersun, The Souvenir Part II, and Past Lives demonstrate, every story told must translate into a story lived. Each emotion felt has consequence. No presence can be truly insignificant. What are we saying when we shove Rachel Kemp into a category defined by absence and void? What are we saying when we glorify her wisdom and her courage? Do we not risk romanticising the absence itself?

These dangers are real and I know it. To romanticise absence is to align with an othering logic that valorises female pain, that frames lack as an invitation for reverence. To make martyrdom a female privilege is to assert, yet again, that suffering is the price women must pay for wisdom, for duty, for insight into the dark machinations of the world. And the absence of a name is not a reason to celebrate Rachel’s position. It’s a reason to look at it closely and understand it without adornment or glamour.

So what do I do with Rachel Kemp, resting that way in my hands, suspended between the need to protect her and the need to honor her withdrawal? I spoon her up in beautiful prose, large and unfurling, her body stretching out my sentences before reaching the edge of this essay. She deserves beautiful, I write. She’s a star, after all, the brightest light in a dark film, carving space for herself when no one else will. I refuse to make that beautiful, but equally, I refuse to look away. If I push her from the centre to the periphery, then I risk obscuring the brilliance of the wound she carries. That is also violence, and I want no part in it.

Rachel is an aspiring artist who aches to be taken seriously, to be not just part of the machine but the reason the machine moves — we know her. We have been her. And yet, maybe more than any other character I’ve written about, she has felt like a kind of avatar for me. As a cultural critic, this job is witnessing by design. You crawl inside other people’s stories as completely as you can, you understand them better than anyone else who saw the same movie, better than the people who made it, and then you write it down and step away, letting the work go on without you. The understanding is real. The authority is retrospective, and is sometimes at odds with the visceral experience.

Because this is the thing about witnessing and then walking away when you realize a story isn’t yours: It happens all the time. You’ve been the friend who watched a relationship implode in excruciating slow motion — you saw the whole thing coming, you knew every line of the argument they were going to have, and you said nothing because it wasn’t your relationship and your clarity was not useful, it was just yours to carry. You’ve been in love with someone whose heart was already somewhere else and you understood it before they did, which is a particular kind of awful. You’ve sat at a party reading the entire subtext of the room — who hates who, what’s not being said, which couple is six weeks from ending — and you’re not even in the actual conversation. You’re always just outside the thing.

In these situations, most of us choose to either overstay or disappear altogether. In our desperation for meaning or closure, we try to assert our own significance in a narrative that has moved on without us, like an orphaned child still reaching for their mother’s hand. Or we shrink away entirely and hope to be forgotten.

The more interesting move— the thing I want to close with, and the one Rachel makes—is one of rare ethical intelligence. It’s the thing that requires the most bravery, and least self-indulgence. It’s the thing that is most often considered rude or callous. Rachel matters not despite her replaceability, but because of it, and because she knows it.

She comes to Gustav’s door in person, says it to his face, and leaves. Not because it’s easy or graceful—Rachel is crying when she says this to Gustav— but because the alternative is a worse type of dishonesty. It’s what he tells her, before she walks out for the last time: “Most actors would do the role even if it felt wrong. Or just leave, and let the agents sort it out. But you came here. You’re a good person.”

Sentimental Value is now streaming on MUBI, and you can get 30 days free at mubi.com/finalscene 🫶🏻

This week’s submissions come from long-time reader, first time “caller” . This man has been through it, folks. From the depths of Terrence Malick-induced despair to the heights of Ted Lasso-inspired ugly crying, he's run the gamut of movie-related emotions. And lucky for us, he's decided to bare his soul on the Hotline for the world to see.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “But Sophie, aren’t you supposed to be providing some kind of insightful commentary on Matthew’s journey? Some grand philosophical musing on the nature of art and the human experience?”

And to that I say: bold of you to assume I have any insights to offer. I’m just here to make Tarantino jokes and project my own issues onto unsuspecting readers.

However, my curiosity is indeed unmatched. I’m always curious to hear people’s unfiltered thoughts on films and tv shows, but most often, I feel that something’s missing — something about the way we talk about why we like something, why they have a special place in our heart, and what that implies about us. I think we sometimes forget to discuss the effect that movies have on us, the changes they inspire, the things we process because of them, and the meaning we find through them.

This month’s submissions, coupled with my response, are all about that effect. And if reading about Matthew's breakdowns or my own rambling attempts at profundity makes you feel even a tiny bit less alone in your own struggles? Well, that's all any of us can really ask for.

So here’s to the movies that move us, the stories that shape us, and the Hotline confessions that remind us of the strange, sweet relief of feeling fully seen by another human being.

May we all be so lucky.

From :

PLOT ARMOR

Knight of Cups’ existentialism pulls me out of my depressive spirals and helps me push my personal reset button.

SPICY TALK

I don’t understand all the fuss over PTA’s films. I’ve tried and I’m sure they’re technically brilliant if I understood that side of movies, but they definitely don’t move me.

REALITY CHECK

Arrival the movie (& many of Ted Chiang’s stories) give me perspective on life and my place within it.

Runner Up: War for the Planet of the Apes - When Woody’s “The Colonel” states he had to “sacrifice his only son so that humanity could be saved” made me see some of my previous religious beliefs in a new and strange light.

TRIGGERED

Ted Lasso Season 3 Episode 11 “Mom City”. I’ve had a difficult relationship with my mother and was not prepared for the ugly sobbing that overcame me as Ted cursed his mother out.

Sophie’s take:

Oh Matthew, you prince among men. There's so much to unpack here, so let's dive right in, shall we?

Read more

You laughed as Erika Jayne, formerly untouchable, undid her iconic ponytail and smeared her mascara down her cheeks for the world to see. You felt the air leave the room as Aviva Drescher, cornered by “shrews” at a white-tablecloth dinner, unbuckled her own prosthetic leg with the detached precision of a war medic.You recoiled when Diana Jenkins turned that cold, billionaire-sanctioned gaze on Garcelle, her lip-licking intensifying into a predatory tic while she essentially told a room full of women that they were beneath her tax bracket and her empathy. You cringed as Dorinda Medley stabbed herself in the hand with a dinner fork while trying to make a point that didn't exist, her eyes glazed over with a terrifying, gin-soaked vacancy.

You laughed. You clapped. You cheered. You grabbed your friend and shouted, “You will not believe what she did next!”. You texted your sister, “I hated her at the beginning of the season but now I just feel sorry for her.” You need a place to put all that rage and resentment, and because she’s invited you into her home and filtered life, she is the one to receive it.

You weren’t her only hater of course — the production team was right there with you, amplifying her worst moments and unearthing everything they could possibly find to paint her as manipulative, backstabbing, and even evil. You should probably be ashamed. You should feel bad for laughing. But somehow it all felt kinda right. She is the reason for the season. And you have all the help you need in making her worlds collide. You are a fan. You are a Bravoholic.

As a Below Deck fan, I've often contemplated the mechanics behind the careful engineering of a reality TV villain. And if you're like me, you probably have too. You've watched enough seasons to see the production hand. You know what frankenbiting is: producers line up a few soundbites that happened at separate times during filming, attach some ominous music, and voilà — you’ve got a full-on villain. If you want to line up that chaos for a perfect edit, you better make sure your soundbites come from the top of the season. Allow an evil laugh, a “she’s an idiot,” and some kind of “better you than me” to be the first soundbites the audience hears, and you’re in business. It doesn’t matter what happens in between.

Viewers love to hate, and everyone needs a villain.

I spent last winter watching Below Deck Season 3 for the very first time, which has the perfect combination of a shady crew, a ridiculously easy-going primary, and the luscious blonde deckhand Rocky Dakota. You probably know what edit is coming, if you know what I’m talking about at all. But if not, let me catch you up: Over the course of the season, we see a Rocky who goes from charming, kooky girl to sneaky, emo drunk to full-on Voldemort. The whole season the producers are clearly building the foundation for a flip, and they do it so well.

There is, of course, an obvious distinction between a well-loved yachtie gone bad (Hannah) and one who has been evil from the start (Adrienne). The former invites unchecked chaos because, at the end of the day, we like them, while the latter are made evil by established forces, like money, whiteness, and access. But it's the one you loved who stays with you. Watching the popular stew behave horribly transports us back to the high school lunchroom, when the Cool Girl says the wrong thing at the wrong time, cementing your spot on the shit list.

The Cool Girl arrives, and you already remember what she feels like. You remember what it feels like to be on her good side, but more importantly, you remember the power you have when you're on the outside. You remember that she knows exactly how to poke at your most sensitive parts, that she will only ever share her power with an inner circle that is always too small. You remember the rush of adrenaline when you say the right thing at the right time, the pit of shame when you say the wrong thing, and you know that she'll make sure everyone else remembers too. You remember, and you want to hate her all over again. This is what production gets for free when they cast a Rocky: the ease of it, the understanding that the audience has already done the work.

I remember watching the episodes, spellbound by the pacing of it all. How do they do it? I wondered. The way the edit foreshadowed and lingered just long enough to create anticipation in the viewer, only to cut away and leave you disappointed, Rocky’s face remaining frozen in a mask of confusion and distress. Did I try to stop it? Was I angry at production? Or was I watching the thing close around me and finding it interesting?

You're pre-loaded with all of that and more, but pre-loaded isn't quite right. It implies passivity — nothing is getting in your way, you'll just sit there and be annoyed for eleven months until production has the chance to activate all that potential again. You don't just remember and wait — you remember and tell everyone who will listen.

You grab your friend and ask if she saw that TikTok. You find it in yourself to explain for the third time why Amy Dunne's Cool Girl monologue is offensive, why Euphoria's Maddy is a school shooter if we're being serious, why Brooklyn 99's Amy Santiago makes police brutality funny. You text your best friend that you're sick of the Cool Girl on The Fall. You explain to your partner that the Cool Girl from That Show is not the same as the Cool Girl from This Show. You go to bed sick of explaining Cool Girls to everyone but sick of them, too. You still load your Venmo card and hit send. I hate her, you write. I hate her so much.

To put it lightly, I was obsessed with Rocky at first. She was loud and a little deranged, and I loved her. She represented an era of California surf, post-Girls women (indeed she could have easily been a character written by ). Her entire crew hated her, but she was cool to me.

But then, the moment comes.

It is the moment — maybe they don’t call it a moment on Below Deck, given the genre’s insistence on the explicit absence of time passing — where I cross over. Where I go from defending Rocky to participating in her downfall. Where I know what is happening when it happens. The moment Rocky tells Emile about what happened in the laundryyyyyyy rooooooooom1 — and she tells him like it’s a fun story, lowering her voice only for dramatic effect and not because she actually thinks this is a secret — I completely lose it. I rewind it. I hate how much she loves telling it, how she leans in, how she gestures, how she is extremely pleased with herself. I hate that she told Emile, who has been looking at her since the first day of the season like she is a snack he isn’t sure he’s allowed to have. I loathe the way she isn’t thinking about Eddie’s girlfriend back home, or what Eddie is going to say when this gets back to him, or what it means that she told the crew. Rocky is not thinking about any of that. Rocky is thinking about how good the sex felt in that tiny room and she wants everyone to know.

Then, of course, it takes a turn. Eddie finds out. The denial is immediate — bosun voice, verdict delivered to the whole crew: didn’t happen, she’s making it up, he doesn’t know what she’s talking about (she has to be imagining it, guys). At this point I know exactly what I’m watching. The crew hears his version. They believe him. Rocky is in her room. She has locked the door. She will not come out. The crew picks a side. She’s crying. It’s humiliating. It’s ruthless. She told the truth. He told a lie. She’s the one in the locked cabin. All of this gets played against her for the rest of the season. The laundry room story is real, but the story the edit tells about it is not.

I crawl into bed next to my sleeping boyfriend who has vowed never to speak of this again, pick up my phone, and log onto the group chat. “Rocky is off her rails. I can’t stand her.” I think of the Cool Girl, the one who reminds you of Rocky, and how easy she is to hate. I think of hating that girl when she was me, and how much more fun it is to scorn her than to defend her. I think of all the times I made someone else responsible for my unlovability and it felt so good. So I do it. I post the text. I participate in the group chat ritual of hating the loser girl. I feel like a high school girl, keeping a list of awful things that people have done to me in the hopes that one day I will get to do the awful thing back. This will show you.

I was fully on board the villain edit train, even while fully aware of how trains operate. The knowing didn’t help. I still went with it. I’m not entirely sorry. There was something delicious about it, even if it was manufactured — and it was manufactured. Rocky's post-show willingness to relitigate it hasn't exactly helped her case with me, but more than that, watching Kate at the 100th episode reunion deliver "you're not the best yachtie, but you're so entertaining and so talented" with that smile — that solidified my stance. Rocky went full culinary school grievance in response and I'm sorry, I didn't want the culinary school grievance. I didn't want to be lectured. Give me the drama, please. Give me the fights over the mic. Give me Kate's face when she says it. I'm sorry, Rocky. I really do love you. You've got nice hair and I love your tattoos. You're not really a bitch. You're an incredible TV personality, but you're not a bitch. If anyone's a bitch, it's Kate.

I've racked my brain wondering, why was I so quick to buy into what she was selling at first? And why did I hate her for it afterwards? Even when I laughed at her jokes and celebrated her wins alongside her, I still knew in my gut she wasn't to be trifled with. She was dangerous. But wait—that's why I liked her initially! Although I didn't want to root against her, obviously, I loved that she was a woman who would do anything to win. A woman who could wear a mermaid costume and just chill with Captain Lee and stay there. Running scared was the only way to live when someone like Rocky Dakota was around.

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She left me with no choice. I could deny it all day long, but I was rooting for her exclusively because I wanted to be her. I wanted to believe I could do to men what she was doing to Eddie; that I could turn their whole world upside down, if only they would recognize my brilliance. In the end, I wasn't mad Rocky Dakota was playing a dirty heel. I was mad because she pulled the wool over my eyes. Now I had to pay the price for it.

So they find me, empty, willing. This is the catch-22 of the villain edit: while I have spent years refusing to watch the girl or boy next door get away with anything, putting my anger toward those who “deserve” it, I’m still a woman. I still have access to the sanctioned outrage that lives in this shape. Women are forced to carry a coiled anger we can’t discharge or else risk being punished for it. It’s not rage, exactly; it’s more specific and insidious than that. It’s accreted frustration at the Cool Girls who seem to be getting away with something, taking up space in ways you were trained not to. It’s the accumulation of all the moments you’ve been made to feel too much, so you’ve learned to shrink and twist into a shape that makes you invisible.

That anger bubbles up without a sanctioned outlet, and the villain edit is the drainage system. You’re not crazy or transgressive for wanting to scream at them. The appetite for woman-on-woman cruelty, one that feeds and sustains misogyny, existed long before girls like Rocky were even a name on a casting sheet. The show has pre-approved the object of your fury, and now it’s leaving the drain open. It’s not yours, but you’re welcome to it. All you need to do is squeeze into the shape they’ve made for you. The show has been running long enough, and the supply is seasonal and renewable. When you’re done with this one, they’ll have another.

This is your chance to finally let it out. Let it go. Unspool it all over the living room as you laugh-mad-cry. You’ll feel better, at least for a little while.

After all, villainy as a currency on reality TV is not the effect of the edit. It’s the effect of demand. And you are hungry. So hungry. But so am I.

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Want to be featured on That Final Scene and win a 3-month membership?

I’m always on the hunt for your confessions as part of my Reader Hotline.

You share your most revealing, weird, or controversial takes on films and TV.

I respond and my readers chime in. Think of it as therapy, but I’m not licensed and your thoughts might end up on the internet.

Here’s what I’m looking for:

• Plot armor: The show or film that got you through a difficult time.

• Spicy take: Your most controversial film opinion that you’ll defend with your life.

• Reality check: The film or show that completely rewired your worldview.

• Triggered: When something on screen or in the theater hit you unexpectedly hard.

Send your confessions to sophie@thatfinalscene.com or record your voice message on the link below. Everyone who submits gets a 3-month free membership extension, whether I use your story or not. See you in the confessional.

Record your voice message