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) 🥳

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

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

It was 2016. I had a package to send.

The man ahead of me let the door go when he was still two feet past it. In Athens this is a small act of violence. You hold the door from six feet, sometimes more; you make eye contact; you perform the sincere mime of I see you, I am a person, we are doing this together. I reached for it with the confidence of someone who has never in her life been left holding nothing. The door swung shut in my face. I stood on the pavement with my arm outstretched, package in hand, looking, I can only imagine, absolutely deranged.

You already know this, even if you've never stood outside a Hackney post office at 11am on a Tuesday in November with a padded envelope addressed to a landlord called Sveta. A woman in a grey coat stepped around me, caught the door with her shoulder, went in. The city had always been hers and her body knew it. I followed her inside, joined the queue, and tried to arrange my face into something that communicated I meant to do that.

Next please, said the man behind the counter. I stepped forward and put my package down and told him where it was going, and he said something I didn't catch. I think he dropped the end of the sentence and swallowed it in a way I hadn't yet learned to anticipate — and I said sorry? He looked up at me with a slight mid-transaction recalibration, and repeated it slowly in the voice1 that English speakers deploy for children and tourists.

I felt my face do something I hadn’t asked it to. A smoothing over. A performance of unbothered, executed automatically by a face that was, in fact, very bothered.

I sent the package. I walked back out onto Mare Street, which smelled of wet concrete and bus exhaust and something sweet and softly rotting from the market stalls2. The grey coat woman was gone. The man who’d let the door go was long gone. And I stood on the pavement in my wrong coat — wrong weight for London cold, which is damp and insinuating rather than the dry declarative cold of Athens, cold that finds the gaps between fabric and skin and installs itself there like a houseguest who has decided the spare room is actually theirs.

I was also in my wrong shoes, which I didn’t know were wrong yet but would discover later in the year, and I thought:

Right. So this is a place I don’t know how to be.

London runs on a grammar that nobody explains because everyone who knows it learned it too long ago to remember it needed learning. I became a student of it the way you become a student of anything being lived inside: from small, humiliating corrections administered by a city too busy to notice it was teaching.

The door distance (there is a correct one; it is not metaphorical; getting it wrong produces a flinch so micro-calibrated that by the time you've registered it, the other person has already decided you're Brazilian).

The queue-face. Rueful, contained, communicating this is absurd and I am above complaining via the coordinated depression of exactly three facial muscles I had to locate on my own face. Fine meaning something other than fine. Not bad meaning rather good. Interesting meaning your idea is a catastrophe and I have decided, specifically, not to tell you this.

I learned to iron the enthusiasm out of my sentences before releasing them into company. This is what I think of now as enthusiasm-laundering, aka the practice of running a feeling through several ironic cycles before presenting it as a considered position. In Athens you announce what you find exciting and people respond in kind or challenge you directly and either way the table gets louder. Everyone is leaning forward simultaneously like a room full of plants turning toward the same window. The warmth is expressed through volume and interruption. You get intimate talking over each other because you physically cannot wait for the other person to stop.

In London, raw enthusiasm lands as a social alarm. People clock it, shift slightly, produce a polite oh, lovely containing a faint but unmistakable note of clinical concern, as though you've disclosed something that requires gentle management rather than a response. Enthusiasm-laundering takes the better part of a year to learn. You know it's worked when the pre-deflated opinion arrives before you've decided to deliver it. The Greek in me still rattles the cage — the look a dog gives a door it could have sworn was open a minute ago — and the Greek in me is also, I now suspect, why I used to say things before I'd finished thinking them.

On the bus home one evening the month after, a woman in the seat ahead was smiling at nothing. She looked at the dark outside the window, visibly inside some private thought that London hadn't interrupted. I noticed she'd just left mentally, gone somewhere else while her body managed the commute. Three stops I watched her, with the focused, slightly desperate ambition of the newly arrived: that. Whatever that is. That's where I'm trying to get.

We're now ten years later. The edges between the years have gone soft in the way that years do when you stop counting them individually and start measuring in lease renewals and dentist switches — I know the doors. I know the platform geometry of every Piccadilly line station well enough to position myself at the exact spot where the doors will open, which is the closest thing to sorcery available to a person in Zone 3. I say lovely as punctuation without hearing myself say it, which is, I would argue, a very successful integration on my end.

I have a GP who calls me "my dear" in a way that is either affectionate or geriatric, I still can't tell. I have a corner shop where the man knows my order and once, unprompted, told me his daughter got into medical school, and I said Oh that's wonderful in a voice so English that I startled myself. I have a Home Office reference number I could tattoo on my forearm, and a filing cabinet's worth of documents proving I am who I say I am to a government that, up untl now, never seemed fully persuaded.

I tried explaining this once to a British friend, in the sixth year, over a pint.

“Isn’t that just called settling in?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Exactly. That’s what I’m describing.”

He shook his head and changed the subject. I sensed a mild, total indifference of someone for whom the question had never been interesting because it had never, for a single day in his life, been a question. His belonging predated his memory of acquiring it. He’d always just been in London the way fish are in water — unaware of the medium, completely dependent on it, completely without access to what it actually is. I have come to think of this as a kind of poverty, though it would be obnoxious3 to say so to his face.

Last week, an email arrived from His Majesty's Government. His Majesty's Government, in my experience, communicates with the warmth and frequency of an estranged father who only makes contact when money is involved, so I opened it with hesitation. BUT NO. YOU GUYS NO!

It was an invitation to drum roll British citizenship ceremony.

GUYS I MADE IT.

In a week, I will officially become British.

And since I got that email, I haven’t stopped thinking about a very specific film.

Certified Copy is Abbas Kiarostami’s 2010 film and it contains the most accurate portrait of immigration I have ever seen, which is funny, because it has nothing to do with immigration. It is set in Tuscany and stars Juliette Binoche in a silk dress looking like she was put on this earth specifically to make the rest of us feel underlit.

William Shimell plays James Miller, a British author and art historian promoting a book whose thesis is that copies of artworks hold the same value as their originals. Think of it as the plastic Venus de Milo your aunt bought for eight euros near the Louvre, wedged between a dying succulent and a Penguin Classic she picked up at Stansted in 2009. Shimell is an opera baritone in his other life so a Tuscan lecture hall containing thirty-five attendees and one spectacularly bored ten-year-old is unlikely to faze him. The boy belongs to Binoche. You can see him trying to get his mother’s attention convinced that she is about to follow an intellectual into a car and ruin his afternoon.

She does.

They drive into the hills arguing about art. The dream! Two people who fancy each other and have decided to channel it through disagreement (if you’ve dated in London you’ll recognise this as the entire foundation of British courtship). They stop at a café where the owner mistakes them for a married couple, and Binoche lets it stand, and Miller takes a phone call and when he comes back they are married. Fifteen years.

Kiarostami refuses to cut. He refuses to show you the edit, the seam, the moment of transition — one frame they’re strangers performing closeness and the next they’re spouses performing distance and there is nothing between. I felt this. You cannot point to the morning you woke up and the performance had become the person — the bins, the Tesco, the pronunciation of Marylebone that no longer sounds like you’re having a minor stroke. At some point the rehearsal settles into fact. The transition can’t be filmed because it can’t be found, so Kiarostami did the maddest thing. He skipped it altogether.

Binoche excuses herself from dinner and goes to the bathroom and Kiarostami turns the camera into the mirror — she faces us, applying lipstick, trying earrings, taking them off, trying a different pair. She goes back to the table.

"Look at your wife, who's made herself pretty for you," she tells him.

He ignores the earrings and complains about the wine. I wanted to climb into the screen and shake him by the collar, but then again I have been that woman.

I am that woman.

I have made myself pretty for London. I have made myself pretty for London for ten years. And the reward for getting it right is that nobody can tell you got it right, because getting it right means becoming invisible, and becoming invisible means the effort disappears, and the effort disappearing is realizing that the highest compliment this city will ever pay you is to forget that you weren't always here.

Reupholstering your entire personality involves a certain grief. You can’t become a new person without the old one going quiet, and another thing nobody tells you is that the old one goes quiet the way a child in another room goes quiet. She’s not fine but she’s also stopped asking for attention.

Eventually, you lose your phone voice.

Your mother calls and the first word out of your mouth is English — hello? — and she pauses. Just a fraction. She then answers in your language and you switch to that language and the conversation carries on and neither of you mentions the fraction because mentioning it would make it true. You dream in English for the first time and wake up feeling obscurely guilty, as if your subconscious has been conducting private negotiations with the host country behind your back and forgot to cc you on the minutes.

Someone in the pub asks where are you from? and your mouth opens and the answer takes a second longer than it used to because the answer is now complicated in a way that requires either one word or fifteen minutes. There is no version in between, and by the time you've run this calculation they've said oooooh, I love Santorini! and the moment has closed.

Miller would call this a successful reproduction. I would call it something else but I don't have the word for it because it doesn't exist in Greek or English. Perhaps there are just versions, and the version of me who lands at Athens airport and reverts to Greek volume and Greek hand gestures and orders a coffee in Greek is the same woman who says sorry when someone steps on her foot on the Central line and means it.

Kiarostami tells us both are the original, both are the performance, and you know what? Yes. That. The loneliest thing I know now is that selfhood is constructed daily from whatever materials the city will give you, assembled and reassembled until it coheres, until it holds, and is, therefore, more or less, you.

The film ends on Miller, alone, staring into a bathroom mirror. Church bells at eight, a train at nine. Kiarostami holds the shot and the credits roll and he never tells you whether Miller stays or goes. He died in 2016 and I am fairly confident he timed it specifically so he'd never have to answer questions about this ending at another Q&A.

My mother has asked what I'm wearing to the ceremony four times already. My father said "kopela mou" on the phone and then went quiet for a long time and then cleared his throat and said something about the weather in Athens, which is what Greek fathers do instead of crying and also what they do instead of saying I can hear that you are different now and I love you anyway.

(brief pause as I’m crying typing this….3,2,1, okay we’re back)

I’m going to sit underneath a portrait of Charles looking mildly startled and pledge allegiance and become, on paper, what I’ve been in practice for years. Ten years ago a woman held a door open for me at a post office and I walked through it wrong and she looked at me like I’d arrived from the moon. In a week I’ll walk through another door, this time into a municipal room, and I’ll know exactly how far to hold it for the person behind me.

I should probably figure out what to wear.

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Want to be featured on That Final Scene and get a free 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 the free membership, whether I use your story or not. See you in the confessional.

Record your voice message

I wrote my ass off on Substack last year. Thanks to you, I ended the year with almost 5,000 subscribers, regular spots on the global leaderboards for film & tv, and a body full of reminders that being vulnerable on paper is revolution, not just a pipe dream for aspiring writers.

I’m getting a lot of emails and messages from people who want to give a newsletter and/or culture criticism a go on here so I thought why not brain dump what I’ve learned in a full issue?

So here it goes ✨

42 substack thoughts and prayers

1. The blessing and curse of Substack is that it’s just you. Every week, the lights go out at That Final Scene HQ and it’s just me sitting in my big, dark, empty office room writing a newsletter by myself. No one to share the workload, no one to bounce ideas off of, no one to talk about Jeff Goldblum with. But also…no one to share the workload, no one to bounce ideas off of, no one to talk about Jeff Goldblum with.

2. Your voice matters so much more than your format does. People will often choose voice over visuals, voice over consistency, voice over hot takes or controversy if it’s UNIQUE. If there’s something they’d rather be reading or watching instead they will go do that (trust me — we’ve seen how fast AI parodies came and went). However if they resonate with your specific perspective filtered through whatever character you decide plays out through these pixels (in my case Selena Gomez from Only Murders In The Building) they will keep coming back.

3. Finding your voice takes practice — and sometimes a lot of swearing! For me personally, writing about culture came as naturally as breathing; learning how to do so with humor & heart took time. In those early months whenever someone told me my voice reminded them of theirs or another writer they loved, it felt like code for “you don’t have your own voice yet.” However after having read through my archives recently with fresh eyes it became clear: every single time I gave myself permission to swear or make fun of someone or something people paid attention…and boy did that feel good.

4. Be kind to other writers! It goes such a long way to rallying support for your work.

5. Your weirdness is your winning streak. The internet is filled with homogeneity. It is digitally optimized for boring people. In a sea of beige, my newsletter welcomes kooky perspectives. Write like you’re only allowed to make three more pieces before disappearing forever…because you might be! Give your readers permission to be just as weird.

6. Your audience wants you to take yourself seriously: The more I experimented with coverage of awards season, press tours and other serious industry news, the more my readers embraced it and wanted even more (they also want me to keep making Tarantino jokes).

7. Write like no one is reading because they usually aren’t. I’m joking (kinda), but seriously: when you’re just starting out on Substack, no one is seeing your work except your existing friends and family. Take advantage of that. Write the pieces that excite you and help you hone your voice as a writer without worrying too much about what others will think.

8. I pray for thine protection over my open rate. I thank you for every 40-something, 50-something, and dare I say it, 60-something open rate that has graced my account.
   I plead forgiveness for the subject line typo, for the hastily sent email late on a Tuesday night, for the "this is not for everyone" reader I invited into my fold to unsubscribe. Deliver me from the "this is not for everyone" reader, oh Open Rate, and preserve me always in the graciousness of thine embrace. Amen.

   

9. Write the post that only you can write. It sounds cheesy but this is really important! There are certain things that happen in the film/tv world where every single substack/letter/bulletin writer is going to be covering it e.g. One Battle After Another. Instead of trying to write something better than everyone else (impossible), focus on making sure your unique voice shines through — think of it as an opportunity to speak to your community. Here’s what I wrote on the film instead.

10. Not everyone will want to give you money for your work, especially if you write words that are not conventionally “educational” or don’t include “resources”. Most of the best sellers in my vertical provide (incredible) advice, tips, news, guides and how-tos. This is something I can’t do because I’m not a traditional expert. But there is also power in unique perspectives and your work will resonate with people without intersectional frameworks around it.

    This is a banal plug, but if you need tips and how-tos, you obviously should not pay for That Final Scene. If you are a cultured person who likes being able to tell people you know who Agnès Varda is, pls consider a paid subscription 💸

11. Consistency builds credibility but don’t underestimate pushing yourself a little outside of your comfort zone!

12. Newsletters aren’t what you think they are. Nobody actually wants to subscribe to a “community” of “people like them,” but they will subscribe if they think you’re funny or interesting.

13. I say this all the time: Your newsletter is not a business unless you want it to be. As a Substack creator, sadly, you are a content creator, and as a Substack editor, you are a content editor. Build your newsletter the way you would build a content business, not the way you would build a tech startup or an app.

14. Don’t feel like you need to keep pace with the world’s attempts to move away from what people want on this platform: letters of any alphabet.

15. Don’t quit your day job, because you’re not going to get rich from Substack, but also don’t be afraid to think of your newsletter as something other than a passion project. But I will stop saying this as soon as Substack fixes their search function.

16. Musings are mid, analysis is superior for conversion. Long-form think pieces and articles are where the magic happens (for me). You’ll learn pretty quickly what works best for your writing — check your stats regularly!

17. People engage with vulnerability the deepest. The most successful pieces from this past year were the ones where I really opened up — which was scary and hard — whether it was talking about my family situation during the 2008 financial crisis through the lens of Margin Call, working through my grief over losing my grandpa from dementia with films about dementia, or sharing my personal struggles with ADHD through the lens of Letterboxd logging.

18. Writing film criticism on Substack is one of the only places (besides maybe Letterboxd) where using the phrase “middlebrow” isn’t considered an instant death sentence.

19. Film criticism might not always pay the bills, but it makes them up with abundance in other ways. Long live Filmstack!

20. Building a newsletter is all about building relationships — both between you and your readers, but also among your readers themselves. That Final Scene is now home to a wonderfully smart and funny group of people who regularly join the TFS Chat to talk about the latest films/tv shows or react to industry news (are y’all in our Oscars thread?). It feels like more than just a newsletter (though we do love talking about movies) because it’s genuinely a community of people who care about each other.

21. Oh Substack Gods, who are most likely and , I come to you with my exceedingly small problems in hand. I pray of you to protect my subscriber count from the prying eyes of my cyberstalkers, my exes, my old bosses who hated me and are probably still in prison for insider trading. Trust me, I see them. Remind me regularly that I am small, that I am mighty, and that even if my writing goes unread I will forever have an incredibly dedicated 4,740 people who show up for me every week. And when I inevitably away from my keyboard and succumb to the pressures of the Stacks, forgive me for my failures and my absences. Amen.

    

22. Writing consistently doesn’t mean ignoring the rest of your life — in fact, it means including it more! It can be easy when trying to build an audience to feel like you need to only write about your “niche,” but don’t be afraid to include your day-to-day, big life events, or what kind of takeout you had yesterday. I want to know.

23. Film criticism isn’t dead, but it is changing rapidly…so we’d better evolve with it (aka, have you subscribed to yet?).

24. Put just as much thought into your subject lines as you do into your main body text. Subject lines are everything — that’s what encourages people to open your email over the hundreds of others in their inbox. Pay attention to what works (or doesn’t) for you when you receive newsletters from other writers on Substack.

25. Invest in yourself! I turned on paid subscriptions on That Final Scene almost right away and dozens of you signed up almost immediately! It means the world to me that so many of you believe in what I do here enough to support it with your hard earned cash (thank you thank you thank you). Investing in yourself can feel scary at first. But trust me: if you believe in what you’re creating, others will too.

26. Don’t be afraid to speak your truth on the platform — even if it’s unpopular! If there’s anything I learned from going viral for my Jeremy Strong x Kieran Culkin piece it’s that people appreciate honesty even when they don’t agree with you.

27. You don’t have to niche down…unless you want to: One of my hesitations about Substack was that I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as only a film writer or only a pop culture writer, but I quickly realized that this platform works best when you embrace your own eclecticism (and so many of my favorite Substack writers do this).

28. If your newsletter is about pop culture, it should not be in the “culture” category. Put that shit in “humor” or whatever else feels more real to you. You can still be smart and give incisive cultural commentary — but if it’s funny, lean into it. That’s what people want.

29. Writing for women specifically is profitable, especially if you don’t hate women (it’s amazing how rare that is). The minute I stopped caring about attracting a specific audience and started thinking, “what would my mom and aunt find interesting?” paid subscriptions went up.

30. Trust your instincts. When I started, people told me to write film reviews — after all, that’s the format that everyone has always known. But here’s the thing: while I love writing about film at least as much as anyone else does, there are other things I’m passionate about too (like how the internet fries up our brain daily????). So don’t be afraid to mix genres every once in awhile; after all, it’s YOUR newsletter.

31. As someone who’s started getting offers from brands and publications that want to partner with me on their newsletters/websites (and sponsors that want me to talk about their products), not all money is good money.

32. Bring your readers to your lore! Most newsletters encourage you to send in questions or thoughts but leave it at that; very rarely do those voices get published within the newsletter itself. I wanted TFS to be different by including reader questions/thoughts as often as I could so it feels more like a conversation where everyone has a voice and more opportunities for people who may not have one otherwise. TFS Hotline is now a monthly segment.

33. Find your stickiness factor. For some people it’s an advice column or pop culture analysis piece; for others it’s humor or snarkiness. For me? It’s usually rabbit holes and “what ifs” — whether that’s taking a bizarre internet trend too far or imagining Hollywood movies in ways they’ve never been imagined before.

34. The best thing you can do for your writing is read other people’s writing. (And pay them!) One of my biggest goals this year was to read as much as possible from other Substack writers, whether it was newsletters I subscribed to regularly or ones that popped up on my discovery feed. Not only did it give me new material to promote every week, it also made me realize how much room there is for unique voices on the platform.

35. Substack “gurus” are bad at giving advice. This is true about pretty much every aspect of life, but it’s especially true in writing spaces. My readers love me, and those who don’t, don’t deserve me. Like, sorry that I can read the subtext of American Pie II without a PhD.

36. At the heart of all the “tips and tricks and tactics” is the idea that you have to be relentlessly marketing your job. It’s exhausting, it doesn’t scale, and most importantly, it’s not what I want most people to know about me or what I do. Don’t do that. When I’m asking people to subscribe to my Substack, I’m not just asking them to support me, I’m also asking them to go along with my vision for how I want to contribute to the conversation, and that’s a big ask.

37. Don’t be afraid to ask for help…especially if you’re a woman. I know it’s hard when you’re stubbornly independent like me, but one thing I learned in my early days is that women are often told they have to do everything alone and try to prove how capable they are as a result. Finding other women on Substack was imperative for me — I see you all and appreciate you. Also let me know if I can help 🫶🏻

38. Oh Email Gods, who are diverse across all digital platforms but converge in your devoted hate of me when I'm most vulnerable, I beg of you to have mercy on my open rates. I fear you, more than I fear the trolls, more than I fear unsubscribes in bulk, more than I fear the dreaded spam folder. I pray that you do not laugh too hard at this troglodytic request that surely isn't worthy of your time. But alas, as I have learned over endless Mondays: you are the most powerful force of all. Amen.

    

39. Sticking to your principles pays off and will make sure you don’t burn out. I never considered making That Final Scene an exclusively paid-only newsletter, because I genuinely believe that film & tv criticism should be accessible for everyone across socio-economic lines — especially considering how many people use it as an escape from their daily lives (including myself). In turn, I’ve made much less money than I could have but sticking strongly to what inspired me to start TFS means that integrity has not been an issue.

40. It’s only perfect if it’s working for you. It took me a while to realize this but sometimes I’d put a ton of work into perfecting something and then have it flop entirely. Meanwhile there were pieces I thought would be mediocre but ended up resonating with readers much more than anything else. That taught me that at the end of the day the best issue is the one your people respond to — not the one that looks best in your main.

41. If you write a newsletter on Substack that has even a modicum of success, you will inevitably feel pressure to add a (video) podcast. That said, you are not Serial or Smartless or Maintenance Phase or A Bit Fruity. You are not The Daily. You are not Joe Rogan, whose podcast is barely a podcast. This is your gentle “you are under no obligation” nudge — said with love, and said with experience. Only start a podcast if you can protect your mental space.

42. Hit ‘send’ already! As someone who previously struggled with insecurity around being too “online”, getting over that fear and hitting send helped me form such a tight bond with my audience. Start asking yourself: are you really curating this space for other people or are you curating it for yourself?

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Dear God, Josh Hartnett, Substack Papa,

thank you for the readers who open every email (including this one)

the loyalists who never once considered hitting unsubscribe,

and the ones who know that I’m talking about them

and are stroking their chins with delight.

Bless the readers who like that I’m kind of wacky and messy and neurodivergent,

who send me DMs asking how I’m doing because

they can tell from the tone of my writing that I’m a little off.

Mercy for the ones who love Hartnett’s eyebrows as much as me,

and those who trust and understand the power of my long-ass essays.

Finally, thank you to the readers who would not want to be friends with me IRL,

but think I would be a hilarious and interesting choice for their email bestie.

I know you don’t pick favorites and I try not to either,

but I picture these readers when I pray for The Ones,

the ones who always, without fail, show up for me.

Amen

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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

Thanks for sharing your voice with TFS this week.

Full disclosure: I debated the merits of running this one for a while. It’s not always wise to inject yourself into your newsletter, but Steven’s words were so incisive that as much as they made me uncomfortable, I felt they deserved a response. I’m conscious that Schindler’s List is an all-time favorite film for many — and I take that to heart as you can see in my response below.

SPICY TAKE

From :

My controversial opinion is that Spielberg’s celebrated Schindler’s List is an instance of Holocaust denial, and I provide an intricate argument to justify this view (it appears alongside a review of Gibson's Passion of Christ where I argue that the Three Stooges put Mel on the road to Damascus).

Through the Looking Glass

Suffering Servants

The Passion of the Christ…

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a year ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Steven Aoun

From Sophie:

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You have been hearing a lot from me lately, but I can’t help it. I’m absolutely enamored with the FilmStack Inspiration Challenge series, started by the icon that is and now coordinated by the great & . Hearing people I admire share something that inspires them each day has been the antidote to my cynicism. The prompt is simple: what inspires you? It doesn’t have to be about film. It doesn’t have to be about anything. It just has to be true.

I signed up to contribute a piece for Valentine’s Day, and the permission structure of the holiday—this one day where we’re allowed to be earnest about desire—made me think about how we used to talk about longing versus how we talk about it now. We’ve gotten so good at undercutting everything before anyone else can do it for us. The piece of inspiration I’m highlighting in this issue was big in an era when you could still talk about heartbreak like a natural disaster and people would just let you mean it.

Too much setup, that’s the problem. I never remember to undercut my own enthusiasm! But anyway, here’s Andrea Gibson’s “Photograph,” which I haven’t thought about in a decade. Happy Valentine’s Day.

My friend showed me Andrea Gibson’s “Photograph” on her laptop in her room in 2013 and I told her I had to pee. I went to the bathroom in the basement that nobody used because the door didn’t lock properly and you had to hold it shut with your foot, and I watched the poem again on my phone with my face so close to the screen I could see the pixels. Gibson standing under stage lights in some community center somewhere, their voice doing this thing on “I’ve been missing you like crazy” where it sounded like they were about to cry but hadn’t yet. I watched it four times. Went back upstairs. My friend asked if I was okay and I said yeah totally and we talked about something else.

Tumblr in the early 2010s was a whole ecosystem built for art like this. You’d reblog Andrea Gibson between the Abramović crying photos and those pictures of people kissing in the rain and pretend you were building an aesthetic when really you were building a permission structure. A way to feel gigantic things without anyone calling you dramatic. Spoken word poetry was perfect for this because the form gave you cover—you weren’t being ridiculous about a breakup, you were engaging with Art. It made “I miss you<3” into something you could say out loud. It was embarrassing and beautiful and the exact opposite of how anyone talks about love now, where you have to minimize every feeling before someone else does it for you.

I went a decade without thinking about this poem. Tuesday morning I was walking down Chiswick High Road thinking about whether we had almond milk, whether I needed eggs, the quality of the winter light coming in low and golden under the cloud cover like a film from the seventies. I step into Waitrose, I buy the things, and as I step out, the security guy tells me: “Wish you well, love”. A bit much, I thought, but I nodded politely. In the spur of the moment, my brain delivered “Photograph” back to me complete. Not the first line floating up as memory—the entire text, every metaphor in sequence, Gibson’s exact inflection on “moons love the planets they circle around,” the pause before “But I wish you well” all three minutes of it performed inside my skull while I stared at the Valentine’s roses in their plastic sleeves and the lilies that smell like funeral homes and small churches.

I must have made a weird face because he asked if I was alright.

I said yes and walked home and put my keys in the ceramic dish by the door (Anthropologie, three years ago, too expensive, bought it anyway) and sat at my desk and opened my laptop to check one line—just one line, the bit about the snow falling in the glow of a street light—to see if I’d remembered it correctly.

Google autofilled “Andrea Gibson death” before I finished typing.

They died in July. Ovarian cancer. Their wife Meg wrote that Andrea had been running a newsletter called here on Substack documenting beauty while dying. That they wanted the work to continue after they were gone because the work was never about them—it was about giving other people permission.

You’ll never hear anything like Andrea’s voice. You will feel seen and understood, as I think many people do when they discover their favorite artists for the first time. You will learn how to grieve a love that never fully belonged to you, a love that had strayed too far away to ever come home. How crazy that the very first time I heard the line, “I wish you well / I wish you my very very best,” I knew that it wouldn’t be the last time I’d need to hear it. I wish I could have told Andrea that. Or at least that I would need them to stick around for a decade longer so they could tell me, over and over. Sometimes I still need to hear it, a reminder to accept, a prayer to the inevitable.

Today, “Photograph” is all about absence. It’s a poem about missing someone, a poem about love, moving into memory. It’s a poem about longing, about death, about everything that makes its way into the cracks of the mundane.

It is about the specific torture of wanting good things for someone who's not in your life anymore. Hoping they quit smoking even though you'll never know if they did. Wishing their lungs are open even though you can't hear them breathing. Maintaining this tenderness for someone who's become hypothetical.

It's about how being changed by love—any love—matters more than whether that love lasts. "I'm still time zones away from who I was the day before we met." That line used to feel like loss. Now it feels like lived-in proof.

But today, it mostly feels like a eulogy to Andrea’s own life. It makes sense to me that one of Andrea’s last conscious acts was to write, “I fucking loved my life.” Andrea spent their final days surrounded by exes, people they’d loved and stopped loving and loved differently after. I love this image, of finally, fully accepting that there is no single way to love and be loved. It reminds me of something I thought about a lot while I was in my last serious relationship — that the people we love always find their way out into the world, that the only thing we can control is how they move through our hearts.

I'm sharing this poem on Valentine's Day because I think it means something about the love we keep and the love that keeps us, about what we think we've successfully defended ourselves against and what's still in there waiting maintained in perfect condition ready to wreck us when we're just trying to buy almond milk.

I want to invite us to listen to Andrea. I want to encourage you to listen and to be held by their words, the way I was all day back on my Tumblr days. To hear them at that big, aching moment when the world was almost completely over for them. To hear them at the moment when all that mattered was the love they had for their life.

What doesn’t suck about being alive?

I also want to remind you that love is a wild, bizarre, strange, and beautiful thing. That whatever kind of love you hold, or have held, or will hold is worthy of all the space you give it. I want to remind you that love does not follow the rules or listen to the laws put in place by those who do not truly understand it. I want to remind you that you are so very loved. I want to remind you to love your life. Today, tomorrow, and all the days after that. I want to remind you that there’s always room for more joy. I want to remind you that all you have to do is listen.

So listen, listener. Listen.

Listen to Andrea Gibson’s “Photograph”.

Listen. Listen. Listen.

Photograph

I wish I was a photograph
tucked into the corners of your wallet
I wish I was a photograph
you carried like a future in your back pocket
I wish I was that face you show to strangers
when they ask you where you come from
I wish I was that someone that you come from
every time you get there
And when you get there
I wish I was that someone who got phone calls
And postcards saying
Wish you were here

I wish you were here
Autumn is the hardest season
The leaves are all falling
And they’re falling like they’re falling in love with the ground
And the trees are naked and lonely
I keep trying to tell them
New leaves will come around in the spring
But you can’t tell trees those things
They’re like me they just stand there
And don’t listen

I wish you were here
I’ve been missing you like crazy
I’ve been hazy eyed
Staring at the bottom of my glass again
Thinking of that time when it was so full
It was like we were tapping the moon for moonshine
Or sticking straws into the center of the sun
And sipping like icarus would forever kiss
The bullets from our guns
I never meant to fire you know
I know you never meant to fire lover

I know we never meant to hurt each other
Now the sky clicks from black to blue
And dusk looks like a bruise
I’ve been wrapping one night stands
Around my body like wedding bands
But none of them fit in the morning
They just slip off my fingers and slip out the door
And all that lingers is the scent of you
I once swore if I threw that scent into a wishing well
All the wishes in the world would come true

Do you remember
Do you remember the night I told you
I’ve never seen anything more perfect than
Than snow falling in the glow of a street light
Electricity bowing to nature
Mind bowing to heartbeat
This is gonna hurt bowing to I love you
I still love you like moons love the planets they circle around
Like children love recess bells
I still hear the sound of you
And think of playgrounds
Where outcasts who stutter
Beneath braces and bruises and acne
Finally learning that their rich handsome bullies
Are never gonna grow up to be happy
I think of happy when I think of you

So wherever you are I hope you’re happy
I really do
I hope the stars are kissing your cheeks tonight
I hope you finally found a way to quit smoking
I hope your lungs are open and breathing this life
I hope there’s a kite in your hand
That’s flying all the way up to orion
And you still got a thousand yards of string to let out
I hope you’re smiling
Like God is pulling at the corners of your mouth

‘Cause I might be naked and lonely
Shaking branches for bones
But I’m still time zones away
From who I was the day before we met
You were the first mile
Where my heart broke a sweat
And I wish you were here
I wish you’d never left
But mostly I wish you well
I wish you my very very best

If this piece resonated with you, I write weekly about film, culture, and the places they meet in my newsletter, That Final Scene. You can subscribe for free, or if you’re able, paid subscriptions help support my work and allow me to keep bringing you the things you love! Thank you for reading and for grieving and remembering with me.

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She had custom signet rings made for both of them. Skeletons in poster pose wrapped around each other. Gold, naturally. Emily Brontë’s novel quote “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” engraved inside. You know, for privacy. She gave him one as a wrap gift. He filled her hotel room with roses on Valentine’s Day. My favorite detail: he left a note in character as Heathcliff (did he use a marker or crayon to make the Hallmark card?). In my mind’s eye I see it written in red ink. She was so flattered because he was “a little bit Heathcliff himself.”

Like all women, she felt “unmoored”and “co-dependent” when her man wasn’t around set. Like a kid without their blanket, if you can believe it. She saw Heathcliff as the ultimate bad boy. Before you ask: yes, she said “he’s mine” even though he most definitely isn’t.

I get that forcing something as innate as sexual desire doesn’t work (unless you’re Jake Gyllenhaal in which case I shall have thoughts). Desire is involuntary, metabolic, the thing that happens despite your better judgment, sometimes even despite your consent. Obviously you can’t workshop chemistry into existence through sheer repetitive effort and some well-placed Vogue Australia quotes. But this, I think, is my larger point: Temu desire versus Real McCoy desire.

We are fluent in the aesthetics of desire (online, in press) and have lost the actual thing somewhere along the way. Or we prefer the simulation—cleaner, controllable, Instagram-ratioed, coordinated with the PR department, sexual speculation all but outsourced to Warner Bros' studio executives. Take that much care to build something fanfiction-like into existence and you get a photo-op like: staged handsy moments at kooky pubs, paparazzi romps through Mayfair that require three takes to get the lighting right. It's palatable as romance because we've all seen this performance a thousand times. But real desire makes you look dumb and stupid. It makes you jump on Oprah's sofa. Real thirst is feral and unpredictable.

In some ways, this is Wuthering Heights’ attempt to bottle the magical psychosis of Heated Rivalry and I need someone to sit them down and explain why that show is radical and they are not. Canadian Shane has been piss-missiled by his heated rivalry with Russian Ilya in the show. They hate-fuck their way through increasingly dire consequences until one wonders if hate-fucking can lead to love? (Answer: yes).

In Heated Rivalry sex is literally at the center because Shane and Ilya communicate through their bodies when words fail—they speak many languages but English isn’t one of them! The sex IS the plot—how they learn what they want, what honesty costs. Jacob Tierney understood the assignment; problem being there was never an assignment. Just like Connie Sumner tells to her friend in the film Unfaithful: “[desire] is like your body’s taking over...and your mind’s just...going away”. Tierney treated intimacy as narrative infrastructure built on physical vocabulary. The intimacy coordinator Chala Hunter talked about choreographing vulnerability and sex as a language unto itself within these scripts. It’s not decoration or punctuation either—it’s syntax!

The Wuthering Heights press tour thinks you can capture that energy by just performing intimacy loud enough and often enough and with enough custom jewelry, until people forget you’re both going home to completely different people. But desire does not exist like that — so much so that even if you announce your own every single week with such forced devotion it ceases its form altogether. It stops being want and becomes laborous production which produces nothing except fatigue for everyone involved.

There also isn’t any genuine mischievousness in talking about your obsession with someone so much, or any curiosity regarding “what if” Robbie was fucking Elordi?! No one thinks that. Paradoxically, mischievousness becomes forced at planned intervals so mischief itself becomes saturated—there's too much manufactured transgression happening everywhere online that adding more just makes it all blur together when there's no reality anchoring any of it.

You know what’s the one remotely intriguing subversion this press tour could have attempted? Margot and Jacob publicly loathing each other, trading barbs and “I hated every second filming with him” leaked soundbites, all smiles and venom on the press circuit. Snide comments about how filming sex scenes were “a challenge” because, obviously, the chemistry was more volcanic than romantic candlelight. Snarky anecdotes about how their chemistry was less ‘birds of paradise’ and more ‘cats in a sack.’ Then audiences walk into theaters February 13th and watch them sexually destroy each other on screen and there’s real friction—a gap between what we thought we knew and what the film reveals1.

(This clown show surely tracks with Emerald Fennell’s entire filmography so far, which is far more invested in aesthetics and superficial spectacle than actually going deep into the themes it supposedly explores. She traffics in surfaces so slick and shock so loud you almost forget there’s no real intellectual plumbing beneath. She wants credit for transgression without doing the work of it.

Anyway, I digress!)

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Once upon a time, press tours were a polite hors d’oeuvre before the main course: actors flexed their craft muscles, tossed off witty anecdotes, and flirted with chemistry like a teasing appetizer. The performance served the film. This press tour performs a simulacrum of the film itself—the obsession, the passion, the intensity—which makes the film redundant. Why watch two hours of Catherine and Heathcliff destroying each other when you’ve already consumed that narrative through two months of press? Now the performance IS the thing, which isn’t whetting my appetite anymore—it’s eating the film’s lunch and sending me the bill.

We know studios believe this strategy works. Take Anyone But You, the Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell rom-com that put press-pairing (and having a fake affair with your hot co-star) on the syllabus. Month’s worth of press with the subtext “are they or aren’t they?”— the tension was the story. The film rode that ambiguity all the way to $220M ($25M budget) worldwide; one of 2023’s most profitable movies relative to its budget.

I cannot be the only one who thought Powell and Sweeney were sleeping together, and neither could Powell’s ex girlfriend of three years. Gigi Paris, went public about the affair rumors destroying their relationship. Apparently, she flew to Australia during filming to break up with him in person, "bawling" on the plane because she understood what was happening. He assured her that the flirtation was just part of the job, and she could either play along or walk. Lucky for us, she chose the latter; it’s never too late to make sure that Glen Powell respects you as a woman and also put on one last good show for his movie. "I just wanted respect," she said. "Don't make a fool out of someone you've been with for over three years, talking about forever with."

The rub is that Powell actually gave Sweeney "all the credit" for the whole rumor mill. "I don't have the mental capacity to pull anything like this off, but she's very smart," he said. Translation: destroying a three-year relationship to sell a romantic comedy was a smart career decision. Sweeney later admitted that the affair-baiting was deliberate strategy.

But that strategy—poisoning your own well for publicity—would never fly with Margot Robbie and Tom Ackerley. Robbie is married to him, and Ackerley is credited as an executive producer on Wuthering Heights (did you know?) through their joint company, LuckyChap Entertainment. The matching rings are a business expense, my love! So you get all the aesthetic signifiers with none of the (disastrous but genuine) ambiguity that made the Anyone But You version work. You also get no chance of Gigi Paris crying on a plane because your chemistry is too combustible to fake. The affair-baiting is pre-approved by the person who would theoretically be threatened by it.

The most outrageous thing about modern celebrity culture is how legible it all is. When Robbie pricks her finger into Elordi’s palm, there’s blood from Barbie 2 riding on that risk. When Elordi does it back, he will also have something to lose (you). Once you’re worth something at all, you have to behave. And so they perform for us: “I’m with someone,” but I’ll also wear someone else on my hands, clutch their arm, smile wide.

I’m not criticizing this arrangement, of course. Though it’s deeply unsatisfying, it is also mostly harmless. But if there’s a lesson here, it’s not just that a real relationship gives us something to talk about. It’s that we increasingly prefer floundering around in an intentionally vague, sometimes cruel (for Gigi Paris at least), media-mogul-cult-archetype performance of desire, rather than engage with and enjoy the havoc of what’s undeniable.

And if we prefer the performance, perhaps it’s because we feel more in control—of the desire, of the passion, of the relationship itself. The real thing is mercurial and ferocious and far from aspirational, which is why we can only enjoy it on screen but crave it for ourselves. In a world where even love has become a commodity, it seems like we’d rather be the audience than the lover. And what Hollywood has realized is that this is exactly what drives us as consumers: not an actual desire for desire, but an insatiable hunger for managed intimacy.

Which is why, if Billy Bob and Angelina2 poured gasoline over their bodies and set themselves on fire in front of paparazzi today, they wouldn’t be held up as icons of sex. They’d be locked away in an LA mansion like a forgotten polycule with no Living Arrangements clause—perhaps the ultimate punishment for reckless lovers: to live without even a performance of desire.

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**Marty Supreme spoiler in the next two paragraphs**

There's a scene midway through where Rachel—Marty's childhood friend, sometime lover, the woman pregnant with what is almost certainly his child—gets shot during a botched attempt to steal money from a dead gangster's pocket, and Marty rushes her to the hospital where she's bleeding from a gunshot wound while simultaneously going into premature labor. Despite her yelling at him to stay with her while she’s in the hallway he walks out of the hospital to catch his flight to Tokyo for a ping pong exhibition match.

The film doesn’t soften this choice with a lingering shot on him looking conflicted, it just gives you a man refusing to let anything get in the way of his paddle, of performing a cold, calculating operation of what matters more and what needs to be sacrificed. When he eventually comes back after the match having hitched a ride home with the American soldiers who watched him play, he tells Rachel he loves her for the first time in the entire movie, then goes to see the baby through the nursery glass and breaks down completely, then sobs in a way that suggests something in him has finally cracked open.

**Spoiler ends here**

I went home and did what I always do when a movie stays with me: I went looking for the discourse. The discourse was, to put it mildly, an absolute disaster. Some saw it as a savage parody of American narcissism in its truest form; others found themselves aching for Marty, swallowed by the dream machine which was rendering him into a perfect object of aspirational fantasy.

My take was somewhere inbetween: the fact that he comes back doesn’t negate the fact that he left, nor does it undo the math he did in that hospital corridor when he decided his shot at being Supreme was worth more than being there while the mother of his child might bleed out from wounds incurred helping him steal money for his athletic career.

As I watched my next-seat-neighbor wash the movie out of his eyes with a Gatorade Zero, Chazelle’s Whiplash and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood immediately sprung into mind. It was at this moment that I realized, yes, I was thinking about Marty, but I was also seeing Andrew Neiman in Whiplash with his hands shredded and bleeding onto a snare drum. I was also seeing Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood collapsed in an oversized bowling alley yelling that he was finished into the space of his accumulated wealth.

Why did these three men—a mid-century ping-pong player, a contemporary jazz student, a turn-of-the-century oil baron—suddenly feel like kindred spirits?

This proposition might seem ridiculous at first. Their eras are too different. Their genres are too divergent. But the more I tried to compartmentalize them, the more they blurred into one horrifying composite: they perform the same surgical procedure.

So what if, and I'm genuinely asking here, the ping-pong paddle, the drumsticks, and the oil derrick are actually the same scalpel?

a grand unified theory on the american supreme

In physics there's a concept called the Grand Unified Theory—the idea that what appear to be three separate fundamental forces are actually one underlying force manifesting at different energy levels. Raise the energy high enough and the distinctions collapse, revealing a single mechanism operating across different scales.

When I looked at these three films I had the eureka moment that Marty, Andrew, and Daniel are one American sickness running at escalating intensities:

• trivial pursuit (table tennis)

• artistic pursuit (jazz)

• industrial capitalism (oil extraction)

The stakes change. The surgery does not.

But first, allow me to give you the working understanding of this underlying force. I am going to dub it purification which is, in fact, a straightforward operation:

The contemporary American Supreme as articulated in our most venerated auteur cinema is not a process of radical self-fulfilment but rather one of radical self-amputation, one that requires the protagonist to understand heritage, communal duties, and collective identity as biohazard contaminations that must be excised in order to realize what these films consider “Supreme” individuality.

The once-purified being is not granted freedom or transcendence, but what sociologists term Total Social Death—a self so isolated it contains nobody else, so liberated it has nothing left to lose, so magnificent it stands entirely alone.

To prove this is actually a unified theory and not just me having a normal one about ping-pong (I promise I’m fine), I need to show three things:

First: The mechanism must be identical. In order for it to count as the same mechanism, I need to show that the same surgical procedure is being performed on the same specific categories of human connection, in the same order leading to the same endpoint.

Second: The mechanism must be systemically necessary, not just representative of individual pathological choices.

Third: The mechanism is indifferent to stakes — that the same price is charged whether your pursuit is trivial (a ping pong trophy), aesthetic (jazz perfection), or industrial (an oil empire). Gravity charges the same acceleration whether you drop a feather or a boulder.

If we can meet these three conditions—and I'm going to walk you through why I think we can—then our most celebrated narratives on greatness aren’t unique different results but iterative experiments actively purifying American selves into Supreme individuals.

The rest of this investigation is for paying subscribers. These Original Investigations are brand new to TFS—I made the first one free so you could see what they are, but moving forward they're a paid perk.

Think of them as: I notice something weird, I investigate the hell out of it, you get to watch me figure it out in real time. If you're curious where this goes (and trust me, it goes places), subscribe below.

Oh, going annual is 20% cheaper. See you on the other side 🫶🏻

A) the mechanism must be identical

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What you’re about to read is very personal. In writing honestly about my own insecurities, it sometimes can feel a bit of a sacrifice. So, if you read this and you think it’s you I’m talking about…I’m sorry! The reason I’m saying this all openly is because I want to normalize the idea of writing your intrusive thoughts on paper (or on screen) until it feels like catharsis or purge or both.

I love all of my cinephile friends who have Letterboxd and use it regularly and post funny things on there. This is me being as real as I can be about my complicated feelings.

Oh, and by the way: I am moving weekly newsletter posts back to Thursdays. I tried Tuesdays for a bit but my little brain treats them like the second Monday of the week. This rhythm feels good again! Hope that’s okay 🙂

It is January 2026 and I am—as per the ancient laws of my people—scrolling through Instagram when I should be writing. I have a coffee getting cold and a soul getting colder, but I am transfixed by The Perfectly Consistent Content Creator. I’ve followed him for years. You know someone like him. He posts consistently. January after January. February after February. March after March. April after April. May after May. June after June. July after July. August after August. September after September. October after October. November after November. December after December. Back to January. A rhythmic, relentless heartbeat of output.

The thing is, I’ve personally taken huge, dramatic internet breaks in the past. Naively, I thought if I stopped watching, the world might pause in sympathy. But no. I log back on and there he is: same high-key lighting, same terrifyingly consistent upload schedule, better than ever before.

Before coming back from my break on Substack, I hadn’t posted on my newsletter in weeks. Months? Let’s not look at the timestamp, it’s rude. I was doing so well. I ran a Perfectly Consistent Newsletter until I suddenly freaked out about the sheer weight of being perceived and decided to quit. Now, trying to restart feels infinitely worse than the initial quitting. To restart is to admit you are just trying to jump back onto a moving treadmill while holding a hot soup.

So this year, as I’m infamously a glutton for punishment, I’ve turned to self-reflection to get to the bottom of my relentless self-sabotage.

Naturally, I flee to Letterboxd because Instagram is making me feel too many "icky" things. I love when I accidentally discover a Perfectly Consistent Letterboxd User who takes this “logging every film you watch” thing to the extreme. They don’t have streaks of just a few days—they have streaks in the hundreds and log every single film they watch. Watching a foreign horror film as background noise while doing your taxes? You better believe it’s getting logged. Hating Dune Part Two so much that you turned it off after 25 minutes? It still gets logged. Didn’t realize it was a David Michôd movie (or that he directed anything ever) until it got to the end credits? Up on that log with all the rest of the films!

These users strike fear into my heart, and not just because they’re clearly capable of committing to something long term whilst I struggle to even hit the gym on a semi-regular basis. It’s more their obsessive nature, their almost psychopathic dedication to logging, that leaves me unsettled. What type of sicko behavior is this, I ask?

In my head, the idea of opening an app to document the fact that I watched a film feels like being asked to write a book report for homework I’ve already finished and handed in. I do it once or twice and then I fall off the wagon.

(Like a drug addict whose drug of choice is breaking patterns.)

james clear lied to me and now I own four unused planners

Last year, I bought a Moleskine. The nice one. The “I’m a serious writer with serious thoughts” one. I seriously believed that if I owned the correct stationery, I would undergo a biological transformation into a person who “journals.” I used three pages. The rest are an empty, ivory-colored taunt. Occasionally, I open it just to confirm that I am still, fundamentally, bad at being a person who uses notebooks. I also snatched myself one in Cannes, and well, we all know how that ended.

When the analog dream died, I built a Notion database. I spent an entire day making it perfect. Color-coded tags! A ten-point rating system for how films made me feel—literally grading my own emotions like I was a proctor for the SATs. I almost cried when I finished because it looked so organized. I thought, “This is it. This is the scaffolding for my new, disciplined life.”

(Narrator: It was not).

I added The Substance, noticed I’d spelled Coralie Fargeat wrong, realized I didn’t know how to fix the “primary property” without breaking the whole damn thing, and closed the tab forever. It’s still there in my bookmarks, unattended next to my British citizenship application (which is still PENDING btw).

I even read Atomic Habits. Twice. I took notes like I was cramming for a medical board exam. Two-minute rule? Check. Habit stacking1? Check. Reward system? Sure, I aggressively prevented myself from listening to my favorite podcasts UNLESS I moved my ass to the gym. I believed in James Clear like he was the Messiah. It lasted maybe six weeks before I was back to my natural rhythm of completely obliterating my entire routine because a new Frostpunk game came out. The If Books Could Kill episode didn’t help either.

One skip is all it took. My rusty carcass didn’t see the inside of that building for four months.

I can write 4000 words on a film but I can't click 'add to diary’

The thing that rots my brain is that I DO do the work. I published over 30 pieces of That Final Scene last year. Thirty! That’s an objective win! We grew the subscribers, honey! We topped the leaderboards! If I were my own life coach, I’d be thrilled, but I am sitting here in a puddle of my own neurosis because I can’t tell anyone how long I can keep this for. There is only “The Great Unknown” followed by “The Great Fuck You Maybe Always Never” in my book.

To the outside world, I must look like a dilettante who only works when the moon is in the right phase of the zodiac. I’ll do absolutely nothing for three weeks—just staring at the wall, wondering if I should become a person who goes through all Fellini’s films chronologically—and then, the lightning hits. I’ll vomit out four essays in five days, fuelled with passion and a mortifying sense of purpose, only to vanish into the ether for another month.

I have a Perfectly Consistent Friend who is the final boss of showing up. She goes to the gym five times a week. She will move actual, high-stakes meetings—including our regular catch ups (*clears throat*)—if they dare to conflict with “Leg Day.” I asked her once, with a genuine curiosity: how do you never miss?

“It helps my anxiety,” she said, as if that explained everything. “Having the routine. Knowing exactly where I’ll be at 7:00 AM.”

I nodded, because that’s what humans do in conversation, but internally I was puzzled. The thing is, I don’t have anxiety. I deal with the other thing. The heavy, velvet-curtain thing. The D word. Which is a completely different flavor of hell and an essay for another time. But it’s fascinating, really—her anxiety forces her into a rigid schedule to keep the floor from falling out, while my D makes me want to do absolutely nothing for eternity. Her brain craves the repetition. It gets a little hit of dopamine every time she ticks a box. My brain sees a box and immediately wants to set it on fire and move to Slovenia.

the research (or why i’m biologically incapable of being a ceo)

I started reading about dopamine because I am desperate for a scientific excuse for why I am like this. It turns out, I was born a high dopamine seeking individual in a world designed for low novelty existence. Low novelty seeking people are like slow-cookers: they prefer consistency, repeat what works for them over and over again, enjoy regimented patterns, are reliable and expectable. Indeed, all boring shit that I have never been capable of on-purpose displaying in my life. I can only wake up my brain by making something new happen or doing something never done-before-exciting-getting caught dimensionally cryptic behavior.

Neither is technically “better,” which is a lie the books tell you so you don’t feel like a total failure. The upside is knowing that there are benefits to being a genetic lottery winner in this sense; had our brains evolved a few generations sooner I would have made an excellent berry scout or mad cow alert tiger spotter. Instead, nature bestowed upon me an adapter brain. I am “explorative” by nature, creative by design, an unapologetic visionary who cannot remember basic life tasks such as putting the dishwasher on unless it’s added to her calendar on Google Drive which belongs to her 9-5 job using a work email address as if she is having an affair with herself.

It should be obvious where this high-arousal wiring leads us in today’s modern world: We don't live in a berry-scouting economy anymore. We live in a "Letterboxd Friday" economy where consistency is currency and respectability requires avoidance of risk-taking at all cost. When you are a Perfectly Consistent User on Letterboxd, your Friday is a dazzling spectacle of pinks and purples that doesn’t really need to say much because you have developed an extensive vocabulary that allows you to explain your entire film-watching personality in lowercase and internet-speak. Your 7/10 review commentary makes sense. You remember the names of the directors of both movies you watched last week. You create ‘boring women doing murder’ lists. You’re good. You’re safe. You know what comes next.

I could never live my life in such predictable patterns. I see myself as a different species entirely—a flamboyant, flighty bird watching a tractor plow a field. I’m fascinated, but I’m also pretty sure the tractor is going to outlive me.

what i don’t say (contempt as a clasped purse)

If I am a flighty bird and they are a tractor, then I have decided—for the sake of my own crumbling ego—that being a tractor is actually a profound moral failing. This is the part I’m not proud of, the part I’d never admit to the Perfectly Consistent People of the world: I’m jealous. I’m contemptuous. And sometimes this jealousy is a flat, unwashed spitefulness that I carry around like a designer bag I can’t afford. I’m back on Letterboxd, staring at those streak freaks with the Patron badges and my first instinct isn’t to admire the stamina. It’s to develop a very specific, very localized contempt for their entire lineage.

Maybe what unnerves me is this: They ooze discipline, and while I’m capable of discipline when coaxed by intense desire, streak upkeep simply does not turn me on. My bi-annual chickenwing streak makes me uncomfortable. The Perfectly Consistent People have more discipline than me so I look down on them. I’m projecting my own fears about what it means to devote oneself entirely toward silly pursuits, however satisfying, onto the most benign strain of Letterboxd behavior there is.

In fact, I get so petty I start telling myself that my refusal to log a film unless I’ve had a tectonic spiritual shift is actually a mark of my superior cinematic pedigree. It’s my intellectual version of "you can’t fire me, I quit!". Like sure, I’ll watch Marty Supreme and my brain will start firing off these sublime, high-velocity critiques about Timothée Chalamet’s frantic, rodent-like performance being the only thing standing between us and total cultural collapse. I’m writing the review in my head! It’s Pulitzer-tier! I am basically Pauline Kael if she had better hair and a Reddit addiction! And then, I bail.

It’s not that I’m above the consistency. It’s that I’m terrified of the consistency because the consistency is a mirror.

The mirror is like seeing yourself in the airport bathroom after a long flight.

The mirror reveals a gap between who I tell myself I am and who I actually am.

The mirror is terrifying because it asks questions I don’t want to answer.

If the Perfectly Consistent People can be consistent AND interesting, what does that say about me? What if I’m not creative and spontaneous? What if I’m not special after all? What if I’m just undisciplined?

The mirror also tells me that consistency is proof of caring.

The Perfectly Consistent People care enough to show up. They care enough to sit in front of that digital blank page until words come out, even if they’re ugly or boring or unengaging, because those words are part of a larger project that means something to them, and so they deserve to be shared with the world.

They’re doing something mundane that I cannot manage, something that allows for all their deliciousnesses to flourish within it: time spent consistently writing reviews, editing Reels, running on treadmills.

So what does that say about what I care about? What does that say about whether or not I care about myself?

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I am sorry I am a piece of shit (I’m now marvelling at your hardware)

The shame of that mirror follows me right into another morning scroll of 2026. I’m hovering over my Perfectly Consistent Friend’s Instagram handle—yes, the one whose life is a series of metronomic gym attendance—and it’s an orgy of effortless efficiency. It’s January 15th, the exact date when the rest of us are beginning to smell the rot of our own resolutions, but she is just...continuing.

6:14 AM, a grainy mirror selfie in a room that smells like industrial rubber and silent, unyielding discipline. There’s no "You’ve got this, babes!" or any other cringe motivational quotes. She’s cut and lean and wearing a tiny sports bra that was definitely from Alo. Her skin is that obnoxiously healthy shade of hydrated. She looks at the camera with the flat, bureaucratic gaze of a person who does what she says she’s going to do. She looks entirely accounted for. I’m paralyzed by the idea of even texting her a "How’s your week? Let’s catch up soon?" because I know exactly how her week is: it’s on track.

I feel this compulsive urge to rewire my brain into believing that rather than jealousy or contempt for consistency I should feel nothing but wonder.

And surprisingly…it works. How does her brain not rebel? How does she not wake up and decide that the concept of a “schedule” is a personal insult designed by the patriarchy to keep her from staring at the ceiling for three hours?

My wonder turns into fascination.

Because it’s all so natural to her, she is robbed of the one thing I have in abundance: awe. She’ll never wake up and marvel at her own consistency, because you don’t marvel at your own heart beating. To her, that early morning workout isn’t a victory over the self—it’s just Tuesday, who cares? It is natural and expected when everything inside you works as it should. She’s a masterpiece that thinks she’s a shopping list.

She also doesn’t get the electric, hair-raising hit of awe that I get on the rare days I get to have a spectacular workout, jolted into action by surprise that maybe today will be the day my brain permits me this favor. Just this once please thank you if there is a god above let this be one of those days where I can. Oh please do not hold anything against me! Just let me go to the gym and spend hours obsessing over whether or not to wear a pink sports bra or a blue one. Imagine thinking about nothing other than those two options until finally coming to the conclusion that if you are not wearing pink what even is life?

I am the only one who gets to find her extraordinary because I am the only one who knows the actual, physical cost of the hardware.

the way forward

So my new strategy for this year is to trade the rusty carcass for a magnifying glass. When I look at a Perfectly Consistent Letterboxd User’s profile now, I am training my brain—with the stamina of a 19th century coal miner—to pivot from "bitch how" to "How does this marvellous human nervous system physically execute that?", like observing biological mechanism in a lab rather than anything that could ever apply to self.

But because the universe is a prankster with a very sick sense of humor, choosing awe over jealousy is itself a practice that requires the one thing I don't have: consistency. And as we’ve established over three thousand words of domestic failure, I don't have any! Most days, the reframing works, some days it does not and on those days I think anyone who logs their Letterboxd films immediately after watching anything is a psychopath.

So where does this leave me in the wreckage of January 2026? I am currently restarting this newsletter after months of silence while the world kept turning. I can explain intellectually why brains are wired differently. I understand that some people have brain chemistry suited for routine and consistency, and that others have brain chemistry suited for novelty-seeking chaos. I can parrot these facts:

• Neurodivergent people often swing between hyper-fixation and paralysis

• Our timelines feel non-linear

• We find interest where others do not

• Chaos means we will never get bored of our own life, but it also means we constantly drop the ball on things that are important to us

But understanding something intellectually does not make you feel better about it emotionally. The gap between the two is so big it should be called the Chasm of Incessant Existential Suffering. It’s uncomfortable but it’s how it’s supposed to feel.

I know I will likely spend the rest of my life in a state of high-intensity oscillation. I will have the bursts, I will have the silences, and I will have the Saturday mornings where I look at the Perfectly Consistent People with a mixture of profound fascination and a tiny, lingering desire to set their output on fire.

Perhaps the goal isn’t to become the Swiss clock. I happen to be the bird that occasionally crashes into the clock but manages to sing a really beautiful, unhinged song before it flies away. You can hold both things at once: the fact that they are built for the marathon, and the fact that you are built for the sprint and the subsequent siesta. Neither of us is winning; we’re just playing different games on the same glitchy hardware.

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one very final important thing

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The film's already shattered China's opening weekend record for the franchise—$57.6 million, if you're counting, which apparently we're not because it happened in Mandarin. Biggest debut of the year in France, Germany, Spain, Korea. A 90% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, an A CinemaScore, the fifth-biggest IMAX opening in history. But sure, let’s talk about the cultural void.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been investigating into the matter because I wanted to know if this paradox actually held up when you looked at it closely, or if there was something I was missing due to my buying into the premise. And I found things! Genuinely surprising things that made me think I'd figured it out.

By the time the weekend rolled around, I had seventeen pages of notes in a Google Doc I'd optimistically titled "Avatar Cultural Impact: The Investigation” —basically walk you through each piece of evidence methodically, build the case like a prosecutor, land on "see? Avatar DOES have cultural impact, you just weren't looking in the right places.". I was so ready to prove everyone wrong and to write the piece that would make people stop having this same stupid conversation every three years. I’m telling you I was SO ready!

And then I sat down to write it, I got stuck on this nagging thought that wouldn't go away: what if I’d spent all this time building an incredibly thorough answer to what might be completely the wrong question?

A note before we begin:

This is a one-time free investigative essay open to everyone. I’m planning on doing more rabbit hole essays like this (if you want to call them that) in the future, but they require even more work and resources than the regular stuff I do, which is already a lot! This one ended up being 5000+ words, blimey. So if you like this kind of thing and want to see it continue, please consider upgrading your subscription to include full access next time around (and support independent film criticism in the process).

If you regularly question things that others take for granted or notice small details that make you say “huh,” these types of investigations might be for you. No filmic or cultural question is too weird or small — I firmly believe that small questions can lead to big answers. I would love to release these types of essays maybe quarterly…but we’ll see! As someone who has only recently begun to train themselves on this type of research, I acknowledge I’m not an expert so your feedback will be immensely valuable to me. Alright…onto the investigation✨

how the avatar paradox goes (what i’ve read)

First things first, I want to say that the consensus position deserves far more than a dismissive hand-wave. When people say that Avatar isn't culturally impactful, I don’t think they are being contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian — they're pointing to real absences and patterns that differentiate this franchise from others that made far less money. By taking their argument seriously (and accepting that it's okay to disagree with them), we can get a sense of what exactly it is that they're measuring.

the quotability “problem”

Quotability is perhaps the most important factor in cultural spread. The Avatar franchise has produced next to no dialogue that ever left the confines of Pandora’s atmosphere. “I see you” never made it past the ears of a non-chatbot filmgoer. It didn’t even reach the level of “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker,” or, I don’t know, “Talk to the hand.” Even something as basic as “May the Force be with you,” which was not especially innovative on release in terms of film dialogue, remains iconic due in part to simple mechanics — it’s kept alive by its use as a sort of pop culture punctuation mark. (Were you really working on that McDonald’s Big Mac crossover Episode I special edition without using it?).

The lack of quotable dialogue does more than shut down water cooler discussion. It seems to hamper the very mechanisms through which culture circulates. When a piece of dialogue is memorable enough, audiences can reference a film without having to break into an exposition monologue about what happens in it (or even feeling pressured to show more than half an hour of footage before any marketing will allow). These lines become cultural fuzzy dice — touchstones whose continued existence isn’t contingent on specific viewership. Limited quotability only serves to siphon fewer things to discuss into conversation.

the character “problem”

The film's character naming only makes the memorability problem worse for us Westerners. It's not just the strangeness of the Na'vi names that make them hard to remember — Jake Sully is way dorkier than that. I mean, his name sounds like he could be an overzealous fan of The Office. Neytiri doesn't help: what b-movie alien sexipede is she from? (The rest don't even rate: Mo'at? Tsu'tey? Sounds like another planet's version of Simon and Garfunkel.) Try as we might, no one's going to remember these names like Luke Skywalker or Ellen Ripley or Katniss Everdeen, right?

Part of the “problem” is also Byung-Chul Han's linguistic barbarism. Paul Frommer constructed the Na'vi language using ejective consonants—sounds produced with a sharp burst of air that don’t exist in English. The language was built for alien authenticity, to sound genuinely non-human, but that same authenticity creates a barrier to casual recall. The names resist the mouths of anglophone audiences, and you can’t reference Tsu’tey at a dinner party if you’re not sure how to pronounce it.

The way I see it, when you can't remember a character name it often just means they weren't memorable, but these characters actually aren't there. In fact, supposedly, they're not functioning as cultural references outside the film because they have no significance to anyone outside their plot function.

the derivativeness “problem”

You’ll often hear that the story itself is a mix of Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, Ferngully, The Last Samurai—that "white guy goes native" structure that we've all seen before. This obviousness has a very specific effect on cultural conversation. I don't say that to imply Avatar is themeless or unintelligent. It has clear messages about postcolonialism and anti-racism (perhaps too clear) that are worth critiquing. But because the arc of the story is so recognizable from the first few minutes — you know Jake will betray his people, fall in love with Neytiri, lead the Na'vi people into battle, and become one of them — its legibility affects how we talk about it. You'd never call everything in a Marvel movie "obvious," because they're so stuffed full of twists and turns and setups that you can never be sure where they're going with any given plot thread (though if you've seen one Deadpool movie you've basically seen them all). A predictable narrative means that instead of asking "what's going to happen next?" (which no one does for this movie) or "what just happened?" (which also isn't really relevant), we focus more on asking "what does it mean?". Narrative legibility results in a conversation dominated by thematic discussion rather than puzzle-solving.

Another thing that affects how we talk about a film is spectacle. You can describe cool action scenes and impressive explosions in a James Bond film, but those things barely generate conversation — if anything, they serve to emphasize how little there is to say. But again, just like with the narrative legibility, we reach a point where those descriptions start sounding like platitudes: yes, yes, it looks great. Spectacle in and of itself doesn't create conversation, this camp will tell you. It simply exists as part of the "experience."

the fan culture “problem”

Franchises live on remix culture. Fans steal content, write fanfics, turn Pedro Pascal into memes that manage to express every human emotion. This keeps stories alive between releases.

James Cameron protects his franchise like it's the Mona Lisa except the Mona Lisa is also classified military technology. Industry commentators have dubbed the Avatar approach "the lawyer stick”, meaning the franchise would rather let its story go untold than collaborate with fans on it. Star Wars dumps assets online and pretends not to notice when you make little fan films. Marvel actively encourages you to draw their characters as whatever your heart needs to process your emotions—cats, bread, small melancholic creatures. Avatar never releases anything.

The legal stuff is one barrier but the technical problems might be even more prohibitive. The film's assets are crafted using cutting-edge CGI that strives for perfect photorealism. Beautiful, genuinely. However they resist translation into the lo-fi formats meme culture requires to survive. You cannot easily edit the Na'vi characters even if you wanted to (not without looking like a blue naked mole rat who missed her mark anyway). The technology resists looking cheap even when you want it to look cheap, which creates this fascinating problem where the visual language of the film is fundamentally incompatible with the visual language of how people communicate online.

And then there's the biological design, which I have such sympathy for anyone who's attempted.

Fan engagement hinges on emulation—cosplay, fan art, DIY costumes at conventions. These are ritualistic displays of devotion that create community, signal belonging. The Na'vi present a sincere conundrum here and I'm not being facetious. They aren't humans painted blue. Third eyelids. Elongated limbs. Tails. Which means that when someone cosplays Na'vi—and people try, God bless them—they're fighting against physics and biology in ways that are heroic. Full-body paint that takes hours. Elaborate latex prosthetics. Friends who dedicate entire afternoons to helping you transform into a ten-foot-tall blue alien, which is honestly beautiful if you think about it.

You pour all that labor and love into it and instead of looking like Eric Lutz playing an alien warrior, you come across as a flesh-eating spirit in a gone-wrong horror flick Dorian Gray would be proud to own.

Finally, there's also Pandora itself, which presents its own obstacle course for fan participation. You cannot separate the seduction from its bioluminescent dreamscape—those phosphorescent jungles, that fiber-optic flora, those landscapes pulsing with alien light. None of it translates to DIY recreation. You can build a lightsaber in your garage. Sew a Hogwarts robe. Construct an Iron Man helmet from foam and prayer and acrylic paint. But no one is cultivating convincing bioluminescent rainforests in their basement. The films' glowing fabrications exist exclusively on screen. They refuse to be in our world.

the merchandise “problem”

In 2009, Mattel thought they would finally crack the movie tie-in market wide open with what they believed was genius-level innovation. They embedded augmented reality into the Avatar action figures—each toy came with an i-TAG that you'd scan with your webcam to unlock "interactive content," which sounded exactly like the sort of promise that would later seduce every tech bro in Silicon Valley into pivoting to the metaverse. The animated model would spring to life on your screen as if they were really there with you, which was a noble ambition and a spectacular disaster.

This had less to do with concept than execution, because late 2000s hardware simply could not handle what Mattel was asking it to do. Webcams couldn't track properly. Instead of your Na'vi warrior gracefully gliding across your desk in a display of alien majesty, latency and jitter caused these cursed digital figures to stutter around like malfunctioning animatronics at a bankrupt Chuck E. Cheese. They didn't respond to you. What was meant to feel like wonderment instead felt like watching something die in real time on your computer screen. Within a year, Avatar merchandise started vanishing from shelves, not because it sold out but because retailers were quietly moving it to clearance aisles where toys go to die.

And then there's the paradox: The film's entire moral architecture rests on rejecting earth-killing mass consumerism, on valuing connection to nature over accumulation of stuff. Pandora's ecosystem operates on spiritual interconnection—those glowing trees aren't decoration, they're the nervous system of an entire planet. The Na'vi plug their hair-tentacle things directly into animals and trees because belonging matters more than owning. So when you try to mass-produce millions of plastic action figures based on characters who represent anti-consumerist values, you've created this bizarre ouroboros of hypocrisy that even the most devoted fan can feel in their bones.

the content drought problem

From 2009 to 2022, aside from the occasional theme park ride, Avatar went dark. Marvel Cinematic Universe released twenty six films in the time since. Star Wars five films and animated series and books and comics (someone fact check me?). And while all of that sounds tedious I do mean it, because those franchises made sure to remain “culturally relevant” by never going silent. Avatar very purposely did the opposite thing. James Cameron spent thirteen years working on his sequels and then he just didn't release anything else in the meantime.

A generation of people grew up watching other movies and shows. And then when Avatar came back in 2022 it was presented to an audience that had been conditioned to expect new content all the time. By that standard something like Avatar clearly had no cultural cachet whatsoever. And yet…and yet…Way of Water still made two billion dollars.

So all in all, this is what "no cultural impact" means when people say it, I think. They're not actually claiming that no one ever saw the movie—the box office numbers make that sound silly, and they're not stupid. They're claiming that the movie doesn't keep working when it's not playing. It doesn't generate quotes, characters, products, theories, communities. It doesn't circulate (I’ve often heard people call it an "absolute movie"). It just exists, monolithic and silent, until the next sequel materializes and jolts everyone into remembering it happened.

And by the metrics we've inherited from critical tradition—the ones tracking whether stories colonize imagination, infiltrate conversation, generate that ambient presence even dormant, Avatar does indeed flunk spectacularly.

the counter-arguments (i did my best)

Here's what they don’t tell you about spending weeks building someone else's argument: you start to believe it. By the time I finished laying out the consensus case, I half-wanted to abandon my investigation entirely. The "no cultural impact" position isn't stupid—it's rigorous, coherent, and supported by every metric I know how to check. So either I was about to waste my time hunting for evidence that didn't exist, or I was about to find something the consensus had missed. Neither option felt comfortable.

So let’s lay out some of the counter-arguments.

The consensus claims Avatar vanishes between releases, that it doesn’t sustain engagement, that people forget it existed until the next sequel reminds them. But Avatar holds the record for the fastest-selling home entertainment release in US history—6.7 million units sold in four days. On Facebook (boomer of me I know BUT it’s still technically the biggest social platform in the world), it remains the most engaged-with film on the platform, with 42 million likes. The combined box office of the first two films, $5.26 billion, outgrosses the entire Twilight franchise and the entire Shrek series put together.

So where was all that engagement going? If 43 million people liked the film on Facebook, why weren’t they generating memes? If 6.7 million households bought the DVD in four days, why weren’t they quoting it? The numbers tell me the engagement was/is real. What I couldn’t yet see was where it was manifesting—because it clearly wasn’t manifesting in the places where “discourse” lives. The answer, I discovered, was that it was manifesting, first and foremost, in political action.

the political and social activism footprint

In 2010, five Palestinian activists in the village of Bil'in painted themselves blue, donned Na'vi ears and tails, wrapped themselves in traditional Keffiyeh and Hijab scarves, and marched toward Israeli soldiers at the separation barrier. They'd been protesting for years with minimal international coverage, unable to break through the noise. The Avatar imagery changed that. Camcorder footage of them being assaulted with tear gas was cut together with clips from the film, their message spliced into the narrative: "This is our land!" The video spread globally. News outlets that had ignored Bil'in for years suddenly had a visual too striking to pass over. The activists had found what one researcher called a "pressure point" in the global imagination—a piece of cultural vocabulary legible enough to make the world pay attention.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government was drawing its own conclusions. After exactly 14 days in theaters, Avatar got yanked from 1,600 screens across the country. Why? Because it turns out watching blue aliens resist forced displacement was hitting a little too close to home for citizens watching their own neighborhoods get demolished for development projects. And the thing is, governments don't censor movies they consider culturally inert. You don't ban something that has no impact. The suppression was itself an admission—the film was resonating hard enough to feel like a threat to state stability.

But it gets weirder (or maybe just more interesting, depending on how you feel about Hollywood directors actually showing up). Leaders from Cherokee, Maori, and Xingu nations used the film to spotlight land rights struggles. James Cameron didn't just post support from his yacht—he physically joined the Amazonian Xingu tribe's legal fight to halt a massive dam project in Brazil. The line between Pandora's fictional resistance and actual indigenous advocacy got real blurry real fast. Then there's the Avatar Home Tree Initiative, which planted one million trees across 15 countries including Haiti, Brazil, and Japan. In Zhangjiajie, China (the national park that inspired those floating mountains), they renamed one of their rock pillars "Avatar Hallelujah Mountain" and restructured their entire economy around the connection. Tourism now accounts for 60% of the city's GDP and has lifted 40% of the local impoverished population above the national poverty line.

So when the consensus argument claims Avatar has been “vanished”—that it's just passive entertainment consumed and forgotten—I have to ask: vanished by whom, exactly? Because it was being used for political resistance in the West Bank. For indigenous land rights in the Amazon. For economic transformation in rural China. The film became a tool, a shared vocabulary, and a resource for people pursuing goals that had absolutely nothing to do with Hollywood's bottom line. You can call that a lot of things, but a “vanished” blockbuster isn't one of them.

I know the obvious objection and I can already hear the counterargument: Activists repurpose imagery all the time—someone's always slapping Guy Fawkes masks on protest posters or holding up three-fingered salutes borrowed from YA dystopias. That doesn't make the source material culturally significant on its own.

Okay, I’ll play. What I found next was harder to dismiss because it wasn't happening to activists with agendas.

It was happening to ordinary viewers with no political stake at all.

the psychological footprint

In the months after Avatar's release, thousands of viewers started reporting something they called "Post-Avatar Depression Syndrome"—a profound despair triggered by the fact that Pandora looked better than their actual lives. On forums like tree-of-souls.net (yes, that existed), users wrote that their human existence felt like a "meaningless hollow illusion." Some reported suicidal ideation, expressing hope they might be "rebirthed" into a world like Pandora. Others went full lifestyle conversion: veganism, rejecting "wasteful greed," spending more time in nature, longing for the Na'vi way of communal living without money or—and this is key—40-hour work weeks. (So really, did they want to be Na'vi or did they want Danish social policy with glowing trees?).

@kickin.it.with.kyleeit’s real #fyp #foryou #avatar #avatarthewayofwater #postavatardepression #postavatardepressionsyndrome #jamescameron #jakesully #neytiri

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A forgettable blockbuster doesn't trigger existential crisis. Fast & Furious movies don't send people into despair spirals because they can't drift cars through Rio de Janeiro. PADS was evidence of psychological impact so deep it destabilized viewers' relationship to reality itself—people were genuinely depressed that they couldn't live on a CGI moon. And the phenomenon revealed something crucial about why Avatar's engagement remained invisible to the discourse. PADS sufferers didn't make memes. They didn't write fan fiction or debate lore on Reddit. They went back to the theater—five, six, SEVEN times—to re-enter the world that had made ordinary life feel insufficient. The engagement was real, but it was a closed loop: repeated consumption that boosted box office numbers while leaving almost no external cultural residue. Psychological devastation is hard to measure when it’s happening inside nervous systems and not on social media feeds.

But while I was digging through all this—the forums, the repeat viewings, the existential despair—I kept running into something more obvious. This is the argument you’ve all heard of: Avatar had physically restructured cinema itself.

the scientific and industrial footprint

Over 80% of ticket sales for the original Avatar came from 3D and IMAX formats. I was 17 when it came out, and to say that the 3D thing felt huge would be an understatement. I remember begging my parents to take me to see it in IMAX 3D on our family vacation in Crete. Things were tight at the time so going to the movies still felt like a special treat, and seeing something on that massive of a screen and wearing those gigantic glasses almost felt like walking into a fairytale.

Pandora was special and magical because of this movie event sensation none of us had actually gotten before, that if you lived through it, imprinted on you like imprinting on a baby creature. I remember being put out by how “real” the screen felt — as if it was talking directly to me in one long inside joke that only our small-town high school understood. I remember going all-out at Hot Topic store because they were releasing a ton merch for the movie (Aang cosplay wig; check!). I felt genuine awe that my 3D glasses had very authentic-looking Na’vi sitting on them and buying into Pandora’s promise Avatar was going to be an entirely immersive theme park experience for fans, thanks partly through its ingenious use of infrastructure.

And now, 3D babies by its chief architect James Cameron aside , Avatar’s groundbreaking motion capture technology has been repurposed in service of new kinds of magic since such as: tracking motor symptoms in movement disorder patients. Technology that made Jake Sully walk again is now assisting doctors in observing Parkinson’s patients’ gait. Fab stuff!

The film has also entered scientific record. A new pterosaur genus identified in China was named Ikrandraco avatar because the creature’s crest resembles that of the flying dragon. In 2019, the moth species Arctesthes avatar was named specifically to raise awareness about an Australian coal mine threatening its delicate ecosystem. Love it or hate it, Avatar imagery is now embedded in taxonomic literature and may as well soon appear in biology textbooks read by thousands of kids desperate to impress their teachers with characters from Pandora they wish were real.

Well, well, well. Hasn’t Avatar had a tremendous cultural impact on our world?

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realizing my faulty premise

This should have been the conclusion of my personal investigation, or whatever you want to call it but even with this evidence, my conclusion was still deeply unsatisfying. Sure, I had data on political appropriation, psychological rupture, industry transformation, technological and scientific innovations— all distinct categories, none of them circulating in the conversations where Avatar's legacy was being adjudicated. Why not?

At first I assumed the problem was visibility. Maybe people just hadn’t encountered my material. My job was to surface it, that felt like a simple enough solution. But as I sat with my notes trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong, I started to see something else. The evidence I had gathered wasn’t random — every piece of evidence shared a quality. It was legible. Legible to whom? To me, obviously. To the outlets I read. To the critical frameworks I had internalized (frameworks that, importantly, mostly don’t come from or exist in conversation with the Global South).

My investigation started because I was focused on proving Avatar has cultural impact only to translate this evidence into terms that would make sense to the audience I was imagining—which is to say, the Brads from Bushwick who can’t name three Na’vi besides Neytiri despite the fact that there are entire Weibo forums cataloguing every background character’s clan genealogy.

Bil’in protestors mattered because they were photographed by international wire services. They mattered because they were written up in anglophone publications and went viral on social media platforms centered around english speakers rather than anywhere else (that isn’t meant as blow off — those are massive platforms but there are other very large platforms where things could go viral where they did not). My PADS case studies mattered because they happened on forums at least someone like me can read (and then write an essay about white people letting James Cameron do whatever he wants with their brains!!!). The Zhangjiajie rebranding was accessible because it got the kind of coverage in Western travel press aerosol aspired to emulate (and managed to secure).

So here I am, so deep in my scarcity mentality that even when given the chance to redefine “cultural” to include non-English voices and perspectives, I still played by the rules of a game that wasn’t built for me. The question I was trying to answer—”does Avatar have cultural impact?”—isn’t actually the question. It obviously does no matter what people tell you.

The real question is why we insist we cannot see it.

What counts as "cultural impact" in how we talk about art? Is it whether something trends on Zuckerberg’s social platforms? Is it whether white millennials who went to Sarah Lawrence make memes about it? Is it whether you can buy the merch at Target next to the Funko Pops and those weird reversible sequin pillows? What happens when your entire framework for measuring it is built around one very specific type of conversation—the type that happens almost exclusively in English, on platforms you choose to prioritize, generating the discourse you recognize and consider legitimate?

Over 70% of Avatar's box office has historically come from outside the United States. When The Way of Water opened in 2022, audience interest surveys showed 11% of Americans planned to see it in theaters. In India, the figure was 48%. In the UAE, 45%. In Mexico, 36%. The same film, producing radically different levels of enthusiasm depending on where you asked the question.

The "Avatar has no cultural impact" argument requires you to ignore that these films dominate globally—in ways that are non-discursive, non-participatory, and not heavily indexed to anglophone internet culture. It requires you to forget about millions of people who see the films four times in IMAX and can tell you the difference between a thanator and a viperwolf and certifiably care about the spiritual cosmology of Pandora's bioluminescent ecosystem—in markets we routinely dismiss as "just showing up for spectacle."

I get it. Spectacle is only real if Timothée Chalamet’s wearing Givenchy suits while namedroping André Bazin or if it’s Nolanian (and I say this as a unironically big-Christopher-Nolan fan). But I’m sorry, when was the last time you cried about a bioluminescent forest or went home to make fan art of zero gravity water? Yes, H₂O is super cool guys but what millions of people remember—what they know all the details about and what they care about in terms of star lore and in-universe cosmology—is literally being dismissed by American film critics as $5 spectacles for dumbasses.

This is the same film discourse that treats international box office as this weird asterisk—"well it made money in China"—as if that's less real than making money in Akron, Ohio. Everyone rolled their eyes at how far-reaching and penetrative Avatar was into Manila but don’t worry—it never came to Manchester. The Avatar "paradox" is just us discovering that Western cultural hegemony in film criticism doesn't extend to defining what people care about globally, and instead of examining that, we've come to treat it as evidence that something's wrong with the franchise.

Nothing's wrong with Avatar1. Something's wrong with us.

So long as we continue to measure ocean depth with a ruler designed for IKEA furniture, we will continue being shocked when the numbers don't make sense. So long as we're more interested in whether Chris Pratt's oversized head successfully attached to blue-spined Mario than in why a film that restructured global cinema gets called culturally irrelevant, that fucking ruler is the problem.

Avatar’s lack of cultural footprint in Western film discourse isn’t a paradox.

It’s data.

And the data tells us exactly where our attention lives: in an echo chamber that mistakes its own conversations for the entire world, where cultural impact is measured by whether something can be turned into a Halloween costume you can buy at Party City. You know, next to the inflatable dinosaur suits.

A special shoutout to this guy

a very important final thing

Realistically, you’ve made it this far because you either love me or have way too much stamina for scrolling. Either way, I respect that about you.

Anyway, here’s the situation. I know you’re not here because an algorithm served this to you between ads for meal kits. You’re here because you’ve decided, week after week, that this specific voice saying these specific things is worth your time. That matters, and frankly, it’s the only reason I keep doing this alongside a job that pays my bills.

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I’ve always believed watching a movie can change your mood. I watch You Hurt My Feelings and I’m angrier than Julia Louis-Dreyfus (my brother says I’m always angry, which is not true). Or, conversely, I watch Hoosiers and I’m like, wow, basketball is incredible! The same goes for how movies can change your perspective on the day or week you just had. Now think about what happens when you watch TWO movies back to back: we’re feeling feelings on steroids.

But back to bu$ine$$ with this edition’s TFS Hotline: We have a reader submission about this concept coming right up, so get excited! I know I am.

• Upgraded subscribers: You’ll get my full response to Madeleine below, plus comment access to answer this month's question: What’s the worst double bill you’ve ever sat through?

• Free subscribers: You get the submission, I get to keep my lights on, everyone wins. Upgrade if you want my response and the group therapy session in the comments.

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As always, send your confessions to sophie@thatfinalscene.com or record your voice message for a chance to be featured in next month’s edition. People who send a submission get a free 3-month membership to TFS.

Here are the categories of the Hotline:

• 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 brain.

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

TRIGGERED

From Madeleine:

Dear Sophie,

I’ve come across your writing recently and I really enjoy it. I too think August is one of the cruellest months...Thanks for introducing me to the David Foster Wallace speech!

When I was 17, I didn’t have that very specific curatorial instinct I have since honed, so my movie nights with my (indulgent, super film fan) dad were loosely held together double bills. One Friday night, I said we were going to do single title films set in California: Vertigo, followed by Clueless. (Now I know that this is a) totally the wrong order and b) still a valid double bill but it would need to be called Compelling California Blondes or Let’s Drive Around Real Carefully or Edith Head vs Mona May.)

At this point in my life I had seen Clueless probably 20 times and Vertigo 0. I knew it was one my dad’s favourites and he had warned me that I was going to see Jimmy Stewart in a very different light than I was used to and I might not even like the movie. He told me it was slow and cruel, and he was not wrong. I watched Kim Novak in her multiple guises; I watched James Stewart scrambling for control amongst his desire and grief; I felt Bernard Hermann’s score winding around me. And then the movie was over and my dad turned to me: what did I think? I can’t remember my answer now but it was something along the lines of: Wow that was a lot, I need a minute. So we paused before we put on Clueless.

Then we started Clueless and Cher, sporting some of cinema’s greatest hair, was driving around in glorious California sunshine like I’d seen many many times before and suddenly I could not cope. I needed my dad to turn it off, it was like we were watching Vertigo again. Thinking about it now I realise how sort of ridiculous it sounds that I was experiencing the film’s title for real, that I had been so taken aback by Hitchcock’s tricks that I had lost my (not equal to my dad maybe in terms of years but certainly up there in terms of enthusiasm and a broad education) super film fan footing.

My dad said he would think about something really different we could watch and went into the kitchen to make tea. I followed him in there and burst into tears. I’ve cried in movies before but I’ve never had a movie take over my body in quite that way. That’s what it felt like; I couldn’t control it and I couldn’t even understand why I was feeling such an intense way.

My dad says you can only watch Vertigo every five years and I agree. I’ve since seen it in the cinema, I wrote about it as part of my finals at university, and I can talk about it without breaking down. But that first experience is wired into me in a way I still don’t understand and which has not happened with any film since.

All best,

Madeleine

From Sophie:

Read more

A few hours after I posted Part 1, I got a text from a friend asking if I’d deliberately picked films that had people treating each other like glass. I hadn’t noticed this until she said it, but she was right—even when characters were falling apart or getting divorced, they moved through scenes like they were afraid of shattering whatever fragile thing was holding them together.

When I started drafting the 2023-2025 list, I realized none of the films I wanted to include had that quality anymore. I watched the Hollywood strikes happen in summer 2023, scrolling through Instagram stories of writers holding signs outside studio gates while streamers were simultaneously deleting shows from their platforms for tax breaks (throwback to Westworld vanishing overnight). I remember friends working in the industry telling me that their projects that had been greenlit were gone for “restructuring”. Then the actors joined and everything stopped for months.

At the time, my naive brain was telling me it was all temporary, surely production would resume and things would stabilize. On the contrary, we witnessed Max rebrand from HBO Max because apparently three letters was too much prestige to maintain. Netflix announced they were going “all in” on AI content production. Clearly, the industry would rather invent technology to replace you than pay you what you’re worth.

The films I picked for Part 2 came out during or after that collapse, and they carry that exhaustion with them—not despair exactly, but a total absence of pretense that things were going to get better.

So let’s get to them.

2023

tár (Todd Field)

Todd Field put Cate Blanchett in a men’s suit and let her conduct an orchestra like she was performing open-heart surgery, and somehow that became the least interesting thing about Tár. I’m talking about a film where a woman has clawed her way to the top of classical music—a field that treats women like decorative plants—and now she’s the one doing the destroying. She grooms her students. She tanks careers over perceived slights. She records herself sleeping to catch evidence of her own nightmares. Field shoots all of this with zero commentary, like he’s David Attenborough observing a apex predator. You’re simply watching someone unravel because the machinery of power always, always eats its operators.

The 2020s gave us a thousand conversations about accountability and none of them prepared us for a film that shows what happens when the reckoning arrives not as justice but as irrelevance. Power protects itself until protection becomes expensive, then it finds a new host. Blanchett plays this with her entire body, all angles and contained violence, and by the end she’s conducting in Manila for gamers who don’t know her name. The film doesn’t ask you to feel bad for her. It asks you to recognize that the machinery doesn’t care who’s operating it.

anatomy of a fall (Justine Triet)

I spent the entire runtime of Anatomy of a Fall white-knuckling my armrest because Justine Triet refuses to let me off the hook, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can give a filmmaker these days. We’re living through the great flattening—cultural moments instantly processed into good guy/bad guy choices, ambiguities steamrolled into certainty by people who’ve decided that holding two contradicting thoughts is a moral failing. Then here comes Triet with Sandra Hüller’s writer on trial for maybe-murdering her husband, and the film sits you in a room with a marriage so knotted and frayed that truth becomes beside the point. I love this film viciously because it uses memory as slippery, self-serving, and revised in real-time depending on who’s asking the questions.

The courtroom is a theater where everyone performs their version of events, and Triet films it with such forensic attention that you start noticing how testimony is just storytelling with higher stakes. Every time I thought I’d landed on a verdict, the film would unspool another conversation, another recording, another moment that scrambled my certainty back to static. Hüller’s face does tremendous work here—she’s not playing innocent or guilty, she’s playing someone exhausted by the demand to be legible, to fit neatly into the story the prosecution needs. 2023 was the year we probably lost all our ability to sit with uncertainty, yet Anatomy of a Fall managed to build a cathedral to ambiguity. It trusts you to live inside discomfort, to recognize that people contain multitudes and marriages are ecosystems we can never fully parse from the outside. Watch this if you miss cinema that respects your intelligence, that doesn’t hand you answers because life doesn’t work that way.

past lives (Celine Song)

I left Athens for London ten years ago and the trade-off seemed straightforward: shed the accent, learn to small-talk about the weather, stop gesticulating like I’m conducting an orchestra, become the kind of woman who may one day get cast in British productions instead of playing “ethnic friend” forever. Past Lives obliterated me because Celine Song filmed the exact texture of that bargain—not the romantic version where you stay connected to your roots while thriving abroad, but the one where you amputate your past self and spend precious time pretending the phantom limb doesn’t ache.

Greta Lee sits in New York bars speaking Korean to her childhood love while her American husband waits nearby, and I recognized that special hell of being fluent in a language you’ve deliberately let corrode. My family speaks to me in this careful, translated Greek, and I do the same terrible math Lee’s character is doing: how much did I lose? Can you measure it? Would I trade it back if I could? Song shows us that assimilation isn’t code-switching between two intact identities. It’s amputation. You cut off the version of yourself that can’t survive in the new country and then keep insisting you don’t miss it. The film sits you down and makes you witness someone realize they can’t undo the choice even if they wanted to. Lee’s character chose America, which meant choosing English over Korean, a white husband over her first love, a career that required erasing the girl from Seoul who would have made different choices entirely.

I’m including this film in this list because we’re drowning in immigrant narratives about finding yourself, honoring your culture, staying connected. But Song’s film is about winning by the rules America set and discovering the prize is loneliness in three languages.

saint omer (Alice Diop)

Alice Diop shoots courtrooms the way Chantal Akerman shot kitchens. Static camera, durational time, zero relief. Saint Omer is two hours of watching a trial where the verdict matters less than watching two women realize they’re trapped in the same impossible performance. There’s a novelist in the gallery, Senegalese, pregnant, supposedly researching a book. There’s a woman on trial, also Senegalese, accused of something unforgivable. Diop keeps cutting between them until you can’t tell who’s really being examined. Both learned French perfectly. Both absorbed the right cultural codes.

The difference between them is just circumstance and luck, and the film won’t let you look away from that. Diop came from documentary and she brings that rigor. Testimony unfolds in real time, lawyers repeat themselves, the bureaucratic apparatus grinds on. The woman on trial quotes Wittgenstein and references Duras and the prosecutor loses his mind trying to make her fit into any recognizable story about bad mothers. She won’t cooperate. The novelist sits there taking notes and you can see her entire sense of self collapsing behind her eyes. This is an essential film about how much we demand mothers explain themselves in language that was never designed to hold them in the first place, and how France built an entire legal system around that impossibility.

do not expect too much from the end of the world (Radu Jude)

Okay so there’s this sixteen-hour driving sequence where Angela recruits workplace injury victims for corporate safety videos—think if Errol Morris directed HR training—and between shoots she films these deeply unhinged Andrew Tate TikToks. Like, prosthetic bald head, incel manifestos, genuinely disturbing shit. And I get it. When you’re three energy drinks deep into a gig that pays maybe enough for rent, ironic misogyny starts looking like the only honest performance left. Jude splices this with footage from an ‘81 Romanian road movie where a taxi driver has thoughts, takes breaks, exists as something other than extractable content. The juxtaposition is vicious. That driver had interiority. Angela has metrics. She’s atomized herself across dashcams and TikTok and corporate Zoom calls until there’s no self left to surveil—just fragments that algorithms can parse and platforms can monetize.

This is the 2020s distilled: your degradation is your brand now, your exhaustion is your selling point, and the only rebellion available is performing your compliance with enough irony that maybe it counts as art. Sadly, it doesn’t. The title is diagnosis. Lower your expectations to match your conditions. Angela already has, and she’s filming the whole thing because at least documentation feels like labor she controls. It isn’t, obviously. But let her have this.

2024

sing sing (Greg Kwedar)

The essential cinema of this specific cultural moment (a period I’ve unofficially titled ‘the Great vapidity’) must possess two qualities: irreverence and absolute specificity. Which brings us, with a perfectly arched eyebrow, to Sing Sing. It’s the film that shattered the glass case of polite, procedural prison dramas, replacing them with a glorious, documentary-adjacent din. You see, this film, built on the authentic, lived-in tremors of its incarcerated cast, is a slap in the face to the tyranny of the well-made script. Its energy is less ‘story arc’ and more ‘shrapnel.’ Its presence on my personal required viewing list is a sneering declaration that the greatest acting of the decade isn’t happening in the soundstages of Burbank, but in the volatile chemistry between men who have nothing left to lose but their own self-respect. It’s a film that asks “What do you do when your life is reduced to four walls?” The answer, delightfully, is that you stage a ludicrous play, and in doing so, you save yourself.

challengers (Luca Guadagnino)

Challengers got released at a time when we needed to remember that movies could be horny without apologizing for it, that competition is foreplay, and that sweat can be a protagonist. Zendaya plays Tashi Duncan like a conductor orchestrating a decade-long mindfuck between two men who are either in love with her or each other (correct answer: both), and the film never once pretends this is complicated. It’s simple. They all want to devour each other. The camera knows it. The score—Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross turning tennis grunts into industrial music—knows it. Josh O’Connor eating a churro like he’s trying to make it come knows it. And somehow, that’s less horny than the actual tennis scenes, which Guadagnino shoots like they’re the final ten minutes of a porno where everyone’s about to collapse from exhaustion and satisfaction.

If 2024 cinema needed anything, it needed permission to be unserious about serious things. Challengers walked in, drenched in body fluids and sexual tension, and reminded us that movies can be smart and stupid, gorgeous and grotesque, high art and high camp all at once. It’s less a sports movie than a thesis on why we can’t separate competition from fucking, why winning means nothing if no one’s watching, and why we’ll destroy ourselves for the chance to be seen by someone who sees us completely.

Anyway, I haven’t stopped thinking about its lack of Oscar nominations since it came out and I’m pretty sure that means something. #JusticeForChallengers

nickel boys (RaMell Ross)

I watched RaMell Ross put me inside Elwood’s body for 140 minutes and my brain kept trying to escape into the usual critical distance—like maybe I could think about Bazin or formal innovation or how this compares to other POV experiments—but the fist kept coming at my face, the ground kept rushing up at me, and there’s no retreating into film theory when your nervous system registers that you’re the one being beaten. Ross didn’t make a film about witnessing Black suffering from a comfortable seat. He made something that smashes the comfortable seat entirely.

You cannot look at these boys the way we’ve been trained to look at historical atrocity because you’re not looking at them—you’re looking through their eyes, seeing the white faces of their abusers from the exact angle of their terror, and every formal choice in the film is designed to make that distance we usually maintain while consuming Black trauma completely impossible. Essential feels like too small a word for this film. Nickel Boys is what American cinema looks like when it stops letting us be safely distant witnesses to its own history.

monster (Hirokazu Kore-eda)

The school counselor who pulled me aside in seventh grade to ask if everything was “okay at home” had seen me drawing during math class and decided this indicated trauma. I was doodling because math was boring and I’d finished the worksheet in ten minutes, but she’d already constructed an entire narrative about my home life based on the fact that I’d drawn a girl with no mouth.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster operates in that exact gap between what adults observe and what’s actually happening, except instead of one misread moment, he stacks three competing narratives on top of each other until you realize certainty itself is the problem. A mother finds bruises. A teacher gets accused. Two boys hide something neither adult could parse even if they knew to look. Kore-eda never tells you which perspective is correct because that’s not how perspective works—everyone’s telling their version of the truth and everyone’s manufacturing their version of the lie, and the violence happens in the space between. This film has a special place in my heart for that reason. You finish it still not knowing who to believe, which is unbearable if you’re someone who needs people to be legible, or needs behavior to be data you can decode.

the beast (Bertrand Bonello)

There’s a scene in The Beast where Léa Seydoux sits in a 2044 therapy chair getting her emotional DNA scrubbed so she can qualify for work, and I thought about the last time I checked my email at 11 PM because leaving it until morning felt like a competitive disadvantage. Bonello’s film takes place in three timelines—1910, 2014, 2044—where Seydoux keeps meeting the same man and something terrible keeps happening, except the timelines bleed together until you’re not sure which century you’re drowning in. The future looks like an investor pitch deck: clean, pastel, everyone pharmaceutically balanced into placidity because apparently we’ve decided feelings are inefficient and need to be removed. Then Bonello cuts to 1910 Paris and Seydoux is in a mansion waiting for an earthquake that’s definitely coming, and the dread sits on your chest like a weight you can’t shift.

The structure mimics vertigo—you’re never stable, never sure where you are, and that disorientation is the point. Bonello isn’t interested in explaining how we got to 2044 or offering escape routes. He just films what happens when optimization culture reaches its natural conclusion: people volunteering to lobotomize themselves so they can compete. The 2014 section takes place in Los Angeles and I’m not describing it except to say Bonello gets that incel violence and AI futures are the same problem wearing different masks—both are about punishing people for having needs. Seydoux’s face across three centuries tracks the same exhaustion: the exhaustion of wanting things in a world that’s decided wanting is a vulnerability to be eliminated. I adored this film for refusing to pretend we’re headed somewhere we’re not already living. We’re just calling it different names.

bonus: civil war (Alex Garland)

I watched Civil War a few weeks before the election and the woman next to me was on her phone during the scene where journalists get executed in a parking lot. Check your Instagram girlies, the end times can wait. That’s the thing nobody wants to admit about Garland’s film—it’s not showing us some dystopian future, it’s showing us what we’re already doing. We scroll past atrocities between “get your 30-day manifestation challenge pack for $899” carousels. We’ve watched so much violence on our feeds that actual bodies wouldn’t even make us flinch anymore, we’d just wonder if it’s trending or if it’s AI or whatever.

Jesse Plemons in those red sunglasses asking “what kind of American are you?” should be the most overblown moment in the film except it’s the only thing anyone quotes now, which means we all know that’s the question coming. Not if, when. Garland shot this like he was making a documentary about next year and everyone got mad because he wouldn’t tell them which side wears the white hats. There are no white hats. There’s just Kirsten Dunst chasing the shot because what else is there to do when your country’s a crime scene and you’re holding a camera?

The 2020s needed a film that treats American collapse like weather—just something happening around you while you’re trying to get gas. And that, my friends, that’s more terrifying than any lecture about democracy.

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2025

bugonia (Yiorgos Lanthimos)

Bugonia is the film that, in my very humble opinion, encapsulates what it really feels like to be alive in the 2020s, which is to say: constantly oscillating between existential dread and the urge to laugh hysterically at the sheer absurdity of everything. While Emma Stone was busy discovering her clitoris in Victorian England in Poor Things, Bugonia was busy dissecting how we’ve become unwitting participants in systems so byzantine and ridiculous that they’d make Kafka weep with recognition. Lanthimos doesn’t just make politics look absurd—he suggests that our real life politics have become so detached from human logic that his clinical framing now reads as documentary realism. I mean, what kind of art are you supposed to create in 2025 when the White House’s own social media is now using SZA’s ‘Cuffing SZN’ SNL song with the caption: ‘WE HEARD IT’S CUFFING SZN. Bad news for criminal illegal aliens. Great news for America.’ to brag about its ICE efforts?

The film serves as a fitting mirror held up to a decade where we’ve watched democracy slowly collapsing in ex-social-media-platforms-now-neonazi-hangout-spots, billionaires shooting cars into space while people die from rationing insulin, and politicians debating whether books should exist while the planet rapidly rises up in temperature. It’s the first film in a while that’s made me snap out of this ridiculous reality for a brief second and unfortunately, that’s the cathartic recognition we may desperately deserve right now.

the sound of falling (Mascha Schilinski)

My mom flinches when cabinet doors close too hard. I didn’t notice it was weird until I was twenty-five and realized I do it too. Her mother did it. I do it. None of us have ever been hit by a cabinet door.

Mascha Schilinski filmed three generations of German women, grandmother to mother to daughter, mapping how a single act of wartime sexual violence ripples forward through decades, showing up in the granddaughter’s panic attacks and the mother’s inability to be touched and the grandmother’s seventy years of silence about 1945. At the same time, the film shows us women folding laundry and making tea and staring out windows and suffering in small ways and in big ways. We see them in these long static shots where nobody moves wrong, and I’m watching like “oh fuck that’s how I move through rooms too”, like I’m trying not to get noticed, and then the grandmother speaks and the daughter cries and nothing gets fixed but something unlocks when you finally see the outline of what you’ve been carrying and understand you didn’t fucking put it there.

Your grandmother did. Because someone put it in her first.

sentimental value (Joachim Trier)

Joachim Trier shot Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgård in an Oslo house and delivered a great film that shows what it looks like when someone tries to turn family pain into art while the family is still alive to watch. Skarsgård plays a washed-up director who wants to cast his estranged daughter as his dead mother—the woman who killed herself when he was a kid—and Reinsve has to decide if letting her father use her to process his trauma is an act of love or just letting herself get exploited again. I watched her demand her married lover fuck her or slap her before going onstage and laughed because that’s what happens when you’ve spent so long mimicking emotions you can’t access them anymore. Me and the rest of the theater are sobbing two hours later because the film understands that some people only know how to love through making art about why they can’t love, which doesn’t make the love less real but it doesn’t make it less painful either.

This is a film that will speak to a lot of Substack culture writers right now—writing essays about their childhoods, posting vulnerable content, turning grief into newsletter subscriptions—asking themselves if making the private public is healing or just another way to avoid actually dealing with it. Trier shot it in a house that’s held three generations of the same unspoken rage and filmed it so you can feel the weight in the walls.

sinners (Ryan Coogler)

Hollywood pretended to care about Black lives for eighteen months after George Floyd’s murder, then immediately returned to casting Black actors as the wisecracking best friend—which makes Ryan Coogler’s Sinners box office success feel like some studio exec finally remembered that yes, Black culture exists beyond trauma for white consumption. Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers opening a nightclub in 1930s Jim Crow South and when the vampires arrive they’re less metaphor than reality check: monsters have always been here, white supremacy wore fangs long before Bram Stoker, but Black people kept building nightclubs and playing blues anyway. Coogler films the juke joint scenes like they’re the actual point, not historical backdrop or educational content for white audiences—this is Black Southern Gothic as celebration, horror and joy occupying the same frame. The twins want to build something beautiful and the film treats that ambition like it’s normal, like of course you’d try to create joy in a place trying to kill you, because that’s what Black communities have always done.

What stings about watching this in 2025 is remembering how the discourse died the second it required real change, and here’s a film that just exists at the center of its community without asking permission or explaining itself to anyone.

sorry, baby (Eva Victor)

One thing you may have deduced from this list is that yes, I cry in theaters a LOT because I don’t let myself do it anywhere else—lights go down, who gives a beep—so you won’t be shocked when I tell you Sorry Baby turned me into a blubbering mess, but so did everyone around me during that final scene so I can’t be accused of mawkish sentimentality when the entire room was sobbing into their scarves. You’re probably wondering why I’m putting another trauma film on a 2020s essential list—do we really need more trauma porn from this decade—except Sorry Baby isn’t about trauma at all.

Agnes teaches comp at the college where her professor sexually assaulted her because moving costs money and tenure track jobs are rare. She makes dark jokes about killing herself with office supplies and orders the same sandwich every day because bigger decisions feel impossible. Victor treats this not as pathology but as Tuesday.

The 2020s gave us works on sexual assault such as Promising Young Woman (not very good) and I May Destroy You (very good) but Victor sidesteps both approaches. Agnes doesn’t get revenge nor does she get revelation. Three years later she’s still teaching at the same college, still living in the same house, still measuring progress in days she doesn’t want to die. She exists in the years after when everyone expects you to be fine and you’re just trying to remember how to order coffee without dissociating. Victor gets that sometimes healing looks like staying alive until tomorrow. And to top it all off, she wrote, directed, and starred in the film without making it feel like a vanity project.

That’s an essential film in my book.

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I’m in Greece for the holidays eating every variation of panettone known to man, which means you’re probably somewhere equally food-comatose reading this today wondering what day it even is. Perfect timing, then, to re-share an early piece I’m still fond of—it’s about Babel, Crash, and why we love pretending everything connects in neat little bows.

Enjoy!

[Original date of release: December 26, 2024]

The first time I watched Michael Haneke's Code Unknown (just last week), my mind kept drifting to Fredrick Jameson's post-modernist idea that we're all attempting to map our place in systems too vast to comprehend. Haneke's film, composed of roughly fifty scenes shot in unbroken long takes, seemed determined to expose the futility of such mapping.

The film opens with a deaf student failing to convey an emotion through sign language, and this image of thwarted communication ripples through everything that follows. An African immigrant witnesses this casual cruelty and confronts him. A local shop owner misinterprets the escalating tension. The police arrive with their own prejudices. Each person in this sequence sees a completely different reality playing out, and Haneke captures it all in one masterful shot that somehow never calls attention to its own virtuosity.

I came to Code Unknown through Brock Eldon, one of this newsletter’s founding members (who, like all founding members, get to request one film/tv essay from me each year). When he suggested the film, I thought it might illuminate something about cinema's relationship with connection. What I found instead was a film that seemed to take perverse pleasure in denying every satisfying intersection that mainstream movies had trained me to expect – a fitting choice for a newsletter obsessed with endings, given how stubbornly this film refuses to provide one.

The contrast hit hardest in the film's Metro sequence, where actress Anne (Juliette Binoche) endures escalating harassment from a teenager while other passengers perform that studied ritual of urban unseeing. The moment captures volumes about city life without straining for significance - no swelling music to telegraph emotion, no convenient revelation about shared humanity. Even when an elderly man finally intervenes, first carefully removing his glasses in anticipation of violence, the scene refuses the easy catharsis that a Hollywood version would demand.

The film moves this way throughout, through fragments where attempted connection leads to deeper isolation, where meaning constantly slips through our fingers like sand. A Romanian woman begs on the street until police demand her papers, leading to deportation. We next see her back home, but the journey between those moments stays deliberately opaque. Anne acts in a film-within-the-film called "The Collector," but we only glimpse fragments of this performance.

The realization started creeping in around the third abrupt cut to black - those moments where Haneke ends scenes a beat or two before conventional resolution. While other “network narrative” feature films of the early 2000s were engineering elaborate coincidences to suggest that everything was secretly connected, Code Unknown kept insisting on the spaces between, the stories we don't get to see, the connections that fail to materialize. Through its very structure, the film illuminated something crucial about how Hollywood had been processing our collective anxiety about globalization.

All those carefully constructed intersections in films like Babel and Crash suddenly felt like elaborate defense mechanisms - ways of making vast systemic issues feel manageable by reducing them to personal epiphanies and cosmic coincidence. Code Unknown stripped away those comforting pretenses. Its fragments remained stubbornly fragmented, its characters proximate but perpetually out of sync, its narratives deliberately incomplete. The effect was oddly liberating, like finally admitting a truth we'd been working very hard to avoid.

Which made me wonder: what exactly were all those other network narratives trying so desperately to resolve?

that time BMWs solved globalization

In the early 2000s, Hollywood discovered a peculiar magic trick: if you crashed enough cars into each other, eventually they'd reveal the hidden connections binding humanity together. The trick worked best with high-end vehicles - a Mercedes in Mexico City colliding with a BMW in Morocco, the impact rippling through time zones until some vital truth about globalization emerged from the wreckage. Directors like Alejandro González Iñárritu and Paul Haggis perfected this cinematic calculus, engineering elaborate pile-ups that turned random accidents into cosmic significance.

Their films promised a seductive equation: enough carefully choreographed coincidence plus sufficient cross-cultural collision equals enlightenment. The math wasn't exactly subtle - Crash literalized it right in the title - but audiences devoured these intricately constructed networks of meaning. We wanted so badly to believe that somewhere in all our messy global entanglements, a hidden pattern waited to be discovered.

The formula proliferated through the decade like a viral trend, spawning ambitious experiments in global storytelling even as it exposed Hollywood's limits. Iñárritu's 21 Grams used a fatal car accident to weave together a mathematician, a grieving widow, and a born-again ex-con, their lives intersecting with the precise choreography of an existential ballet - a formal innovation that made visible what traditional linear narratives couldn't touch. Hotel Rwanda transformed the 1994 genocide into a node connecting Rwandan, Belgian, American, Canadian and UN bureaucracies, while Beyond Borders stretched its network across African refugee camps and conflict zones in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, each film straining against commercial cinema's boundaries to map previously unfilmable systems. Lord of War tracked arms dealing through a web spanning from Brooklyn basements to African warlords, each transaction another strand in capitalism's favorite spider web.

The genre kept expanding its reach, more fascinating in its noble failures than its occasional successes - these films crashed against the limits of narrative like waves against a seawall, revealing the shape of what they couldn't quite capture. By mid-decade, every global crisis arrived pre-packaged with its own set of intersecting storylines and manufactured moments of cross-cultural enlightenment, the industry's ambitious impulse to map the unmappable calcifying into formula. You couldn't throw a rock at the multiplex without hitting some character about to discover their secret connection to the military-industrial complex, but those connections revealed as much through their artificiality as their insights.

This desire for connection emerged alongside academic theories about "the butterfly effect" and "six degrees of separation," reflecting a growing awareness of hidden patterns in complex systems. But the films themselves operated on three distinct levels of networks - their fractured narrative structures, their themes of global interconnection, and their very production models. Amores Perros marked the first time private investment exceeded public support in Mexican cinema, while Babel, also by Alejandro González Iñárritu, required five different production companies spanning multiple continents just to exist. These films weren't just about global networks - they were products of the very systems they attempted to map.

When Traffic tried to untangle the complexities of the international drug trade through interconnected storylines, it relied on what scholars termed "magical neoliberalism" - using coincidence and chance to make visible systems that seemed to defy representation. The films became increasingly ambitious in scope: Syriana spanned four continents and 220 locations in its attempt to map oil politics, while Babel wove together stories from Morocco, Japan, Mexico and the United States through the trajectory of a single bullet.

The secret ingredient in this global gumbo was what film theorists called "risk and randomness to map a fantastic network of interrelations." Characters needed to literally crash into each other because genuine connection felt increasingly impossible - every collision promised the possibility of revelation. A Mexican nanny takes her wealthy employers' children across the border: epiphany about immigration. A police officer pulls over a Black film director and his wife: epiphany about racism. A corrupt oil executive confronts the human cost of corporate politics: epiphany about capitalism.

The formula grew so reliable it practically became its own genre, with each new entry promising bigger connections and more impressive star-studded collisions. Brad Pitt discovering shared humanity in Morocco. Sandra Bullock learning tolerance in Los Angeles. Matt Damon unraveling conspiracy in the Persian Gulf. The coincidences grew more elaborate as the systems they attempted to represent became increasingly complex.

Yet even at their peak, these films contained the seeds of their own undoing. The more ambitious they became in scope, the more their attempts at connection began to feel artificial. Traffic could map the drug trade's complexity but still had to resolve through personal moral choices. Syriana's sprawling critique of oil politics ultimately retreated into individual character arcs. Babel tried to suggest connection through parallel editing and cosmic coincidence, but its very production model - designed to appeal simultaneously to multiple national audiences while maintaining Hollywood production values - ended up reinforcing the power dynamics it hoped to challenge.

By the late 2000s, the genre's central tension had become impossible to ignore: these films wanted to show systemic issues but felt compelled to make them personal; they aimed to reveal real connection but relied on increasingly contrived coincidence. The beautiful lie began to unravel. The question was no longer whether everything was connected, but whether connection itself might be part of the problem.

a system built to blame its victims

The beauty of blaming everything on a butterfly in Brazil is that no one has to face the jaguar in their own backyard. Network films of the early 2000s mastered this sleight of hand, turning systemic guilt into a kind of shell game where responsibility constantly shifted but never quite landed. In Crash, wealthy housewife Jean Cabot's (Sandra Bullock) journey from paranoid racism to manufactured enlightenment through her Hispanic housekeeper Maria exemplifies this pattern perfectly. The film suggests structural racism can be solved through individual moral awakening, transforming centuries of systemic violence into a neat character arc about one white woman learning to hug her maid. Her eventual epiphany after falling down stairs – literally brought low by her own prejudice – reveals the genre's favorite magic trick. Transforming structural problems into individual moral dramas.

Syriana perfected this diffusion of responsibility through what scholars call 'neoliberal heroes' - fragmenting its narrative between Bob Barnes (George Clooney), the compromised CIA operative; Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon), the energy analyst whose personal tragedy entangles him in oil politics; and Prince Nasir, the reformist royal dreaming of democratic capitalism. Each character embodies a different facet of systemic corruption while remaining just sympathetic enough to deflect real criticism. The film's sprawling critique of oil politics required clear villains, yet even its most corrupt characters came equipped with humanizing backstories and reasonable motivations. When Barnes ends up tortured in a basement or Woodman watches Nasir's assassination, their individual suffering becomes a convenient substitute for addressing the systems that produced it.

This approach to localized guilt offered the comfort of specific antagonists while acknowledging systemic complexity. But the resolution followed a familiar pattern - characters either fled from the system's most intensive nodes (like Jeffrey Wright's lawyer escaping to the United States) or made ultimately futile attempts at reform (Barnes trying to warn Nasir about his impending assassination). The weight of guilt proved too heavy for any individual to bear, too dispersed to effectively challenge.

But the most insidious displacement of guilt emerged through what Tania Modleski calls "the hysterical text" - network films' unconscious tendency to make women bear the psychological burden of systemic failure. Crash's treatment of Christine (Thandiwe Newton) epitomizes this pattern. After being sexually assaulted by a racist police officer, she's later forced to accept help from her abuser when he pulls her from a burning car. The film frames her wordless gesture of forgiveness as a moment of grace, transforming systemic police violence against Black women into a personal journey of healing that demands nothing from the perpetrator. Her body becomes both the site of violence and the vehicle for redemption, reproducing ancient patterns of forcing women to absorb and absolve society's sins. In Traffic, Caroline's mother Barbara becomes the repository for guilt over her daughter's addiction. While Robert actively tries to address both personal and systemic issues, Barbara faces condemnation for her passivity and past drug use. The film tells us her liberal permissiveness enabled Caroline's downfall, reproducing ancient patterns of blaming mothers for society's ills.

Babel takes this gender displacement to baroque extremes through its treatment of Susan (Cate Blanchett). Her initial preoccupation with surface concerns - refusing local water, using hand sanitizer, maintaining her appearance - marks her as frivolously concerned with aesthetics while her husband Richard grapples with "real" issues. The underlining takeaway is that feminine superficiality must be violently purged through injury and humiliation before genuine cross-cultural understanding becomes possible. Even The Constant Gardener, which positions activist Tessa as its moral center, undermines her credibility by having male characters repeatedly question her sexual fidelity, as though uncovering pharmaceutical industry crimes somehow connects to personal virtue.

Richard: “Jesus Christ! Why can’t we just relax? Why are you

so stressed?”

Susan: “You’re the reason I’m stressed; you’re the reason I

can’t relax.”

Richard: “You could if you tried.”

Susan: “You don’t think I tried?”

Richard: “You’re never going to forgive me, are you?

Dialogue from Babel (2006)

This gendered displacement of guilt operated alongside broader cultural anxieties about masculine impotence in the face of global systems. Network films emerged as traditionally male spheres of influence - government, industry, military - seemed increasingly unable to affect meaningful change in an interconnected world. The genre's repeated focus on failed fathers, compromised executives, and impotent authority figures reflected deep uncertainty about agency in networked systems.

Yet rather than examining how patriarchal power structures might themselves perpetuate systemic problems, these films displaced responsibility onto women who supposedly enabled moral decay through their own weakness or vanity. The pattern reveals how even presumably progressive critiques of globalization often reinforced existing power dynamics in their attempt to resolve systemic anxiety.

two films nuking the formula

While mainstream cinema spent the 2000s engineering increasingly elaborate collisions between characters, two films from 1999 had already mapped the outer limits of what network narratives could achieve. In one corner stood Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson's sprawling opus about intersecting lives in the San Fernando Valley. The film took the DNA of what would become network cinema's favorite tricks - parallel editing, cosmic coincidence, simultaneous crisis - and pushed them past the breaking point into genuine surrealism.

Its damaged ensemble of dying TV producers, coked-out former quiz kids, and imploding self-help gurus orbited each other with the gravity of Greek tragedy filtered through late-night infomercials. The film's three-hour runtime luxuriated in the kind of connections that later movies would reduce to quick-cut montages, letting its web of relationships unspool at a pace that made synchronicity feel earned rather than imposed. When divine intervention finally arrived in a rain of frogs (yes, actual frogs falling from the actual sky), it landed with the weight of genuine revelation rather than narrative convenience. Anderson understood something that later network films would work very hard to obscure - if you want to suggest everything is connected, you need to embrace the fundamental absurdity of that proposition.

And there is the account of the hanging of three men, and a scuba diver, and a suicide. There are stories of coincidence and chance, of intersections and strange things told, and which is which and who only knows? And we generally say, "Well, if that was in a movie, I wouldn't believe it." Someone's so-and-so met someone else's so-and-so and so on. And it is in the humble opinion of this narrator that strange things happen all the time. And so it goes, and so it goes. And the book says, "We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us."

Quote from the Narrator in Magnolia (1999)

Michael Haneke walked the opposite path through this same creative wilderness. Rather than amplifying coincidence into cosmic significance, Code Unknown stripped away every comforting pretense of meaningful connection. Its characters passed each other on Paris streets without discovering hidden links. Its scenes cut to black precisely when other films would manufacture moments of recognition. Even its most dramatic confrontations - like the metro sequence where Binoche faces escalating harassment - refused the satisfaction of clear moral resolution or character growth. The film's structure mirrored the experience of living in an interconnected world where genuine understanding remains elusive despite constant proximity. Fragments stayed fragmentary. Stories remained incomplete. The very title mocked our desire to crack some hidden code that would make everything make sense.

These divergent approaches - Anderson's maximalist embrace of artifice and Haneke's minimalist refusal of false connection - illuminated the limitations of how other network narratives tried to process systemic anxiety. Magnolia's rain of frogs worked better than Babel's magic bullet precisely because it admitted its own unreality.

Code Unknown's unresolved tensions felt more honest than Crash's manufactured epiphanies because they acknowledged how connection often fails despite our best efforts. One film pushed coincidence past the breaking point into genuine supernatural intervention, while the other stripped away every narrative comfort to expose the gaps between people that no amount of careful plotting could bridge. Together they charted alternate paths through the creative territory that mainstream network films tried so desperately to claim - one through radical embrace of artifice, the other through radical refusal of false resolution.

Between these two poles of maximalism and minimalism, the mainstream network narrative struggled to find stable ground. Film scholars, those dutiful taxonomists of cinematic trends, had neatly divided these films into two categories: "contingency narratives" (where random car crashes revealed our shared humanity) and "world-systems films" (where Matt Damon got very serious about institutional corruption). But both branches withered on the same dying tree.

The contingency crowd kept engineering ever more elaborate collisions, like a desperate party host convinced that if they could just get the right combination of guests to bump into each other by the cheese plate, world peace might break out. Meanwhile, the world-systems directors found themselves trapped in the same corporate labyrinth they were trying to expose - their ambitious maps of military-industrial complexity kept getting refolded into tidy personal journeys toward enlightenment.

A film could span continents tracking the tentacles of global capitalism, but eventually some disillusioned white guy in expensive leisurewear had to stare meaningfully into the middle distance and deliver a monologue about how everything was connected. The genre died doing exactly what it criticized - reducing vast systems to personal revelation, like a Victorian explorer convinced he could comprehend the entire British Empire by having one really good eureka! moment about tea.

everything's a psyop when you're terminally online

The cosmic rain of frogs in Magnolia landed in 1999. Twenty-five years later, we're scanning the skies for something darker - CERN's particle accelerator firing up during a total solar eclipse, NASA launching satellites named after Egyptian snake gods, red heifers being sacrificed in Jerusalem. The evolution from finding meaning in coincidence to suspecting conspiracy in connection marks a fundamental shift in how we process our entangled world. Those early network narratives offered a liberal humanist fantasy - that our global collisions might yield enlightenment rather than paranoia. Now even the path of the eclipse gets mapped as a connect-the-dots through American trauma, linking presidential assassination sites to chemical spills to government massacres. The pleasant fiction of meaningful connection has curdled into universal suspicion.

This transformation runs deeper than just increasing cynicism. When United Healthcare's CEO was gunned down in Manhattan earlier this month, social media didn't just speculate about motives - it constructed an entire alternative narrative around shell casings allegedly inscribed with insurance industry jargon. The "three Ds" of claims denial (delay, deny, defend) transformed into ballistic evidence, manufacturing meaning from corporate bureaucracy with the same determination that network films once used to extract epiphanies from car crashes.

But where Babel strained to suggest that a single bullet could reveal our shared humanity, contemporary pattern-recognition seeks to expose systems of control. Luigi Mangione’s surprisingly photogenic face sparked not just memes but elaborate theories about staged events and crisis actors. We've traded Crash's forced redemption for what cultural critics now call "Psyop Realism" - an aesthetic movement built around heightened awareness of propaganda and subversion in everyday life.

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3 years ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Sibi Ramesh

The structure of the internet itself encourages this conspiratorial mindset. As anthropologist Kathleen Stewart noted, the Web's architecture of endless hyperlinks naturally feeds the three cardinal rules of conspiracy thinking:

nothing happens by accident,

nothing is as it seems,

and everything is connected.

But this affinity has evolved beyond just making conspiracy theories easier to produce and consume. Social media's algorithmic architecture creates filter bubbles that feel like personally curated investigations rather than manufactured echo chambers. This paranoid pattern-recognition now pervades culture at every level. When Virginia Sole-Smith suggests parents need not restrict their children's food choices, the internet erupts in predictable fury - over 1,700 Washington Post commenters decrying her as anti-science, as if letting children learn to trust their own appetites amounts to societal collapse.

Each revelation reinforces what cultural theorist Mark Fisher termed "the weird and the eerie" - the creeping sensation that seemingly natural phenomena are actually orchestrated by hidden forces. A 2023 YouGov poll found 41% of Americans believe a single group secretly controls world events. The percentage rises among both the very wealthy and very poor, suggesting that economic precarity at either extreme breeds suspicion rather than solidarity.

The bitter irony is that this evolution simply inverts rather than escapes network narratives' original sin. Where films like Syriana used coincidence to make systemic issues feel personally manageable, contemporary conspiracy thinking deploys the same techniques to identify convenient villains. Both approaches avoid confronting the genuine horror of systems that operate without central control or clear antagonists. As political scientist Michael Barkun notes, conspiracy theories began shifting in the 1960s from imagining tight-knit groups of plotters to vast impersonal systems. Yet we still anthropomorphize these networks, reimagining institutional forces as intentional agents because the alternative - that no one is truly in control - feels even more terrifying.

This might explain why Code Unknown's refusal of false connection resonates more strongly now than when it was released. Its fragments and ellipses mirror our contemporary relationship with truth - always partial, constantly slipping away, resistant to both conspiracy and comfort. We're all amateur semioticians now, searching for meaning in every cultural artifact while simultaneously suspecting that meaning itself might be a psyop. The fascinating horror of our moment isn't that everything is connected, but that we can't stop trying to connect everything, even as we trust connection less and less.

meaning-making as mass delusion

Something shifted in us between Magnolia's divine intervention and this month's conspiracy-laden breaking story. The fantasy of meaningful connection - that comforting lie of early 2000s cinema - has given way to endless pattern recognition without purpose. I keep thinking about those shell casings at the United Healthcare shooting, inscribed with corporate jargon like some twisted art installation. We don't need Hollywood manufacturing coincidences anymore. We're too busy constructing our own labyrinths of meaning, each new cultural moment another dot to connect in an increasingly desperate search for order.

@kellieintheknowwe’re living thru a movie #luigimangione #uhc #unitedhealthcare #suspect

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Those early network films, for all their forced coincidences and manufactured revelations, at least betrayed a kind of desperate optimism. They emerged when "bearing witness" still felt like a revolutionary act, when the spectacle of suffering might somehow yield transformation rather than content. Traffic's Robert Wakefield could retreat into private rehabilitation, The Constant Gardener's Justin could die exposing pharmaceutical corruption, Hotel Rwanda's Paul could save his refugees - each protagonist discovered their impotence and promptly transformed it into the kind of personal journey that wins awards. Their failures were perfectly calibrated for more empathy and less systemic change, converting global catastrophe into individual character development with the precision of a corporate retreat. Now our failures are algorithmic, our revelations pre-formatted for maximum engagement, our very awareness of disconnection repackaged as proof of our entanglement in systems we can analyze endlessly but never escape.

The machinery of contemporary capitalism has evolved beyond those clumsy early attempts at displacement, perfecting a form of alienation that makes disconnection feel like empowerment. Women still shoulder the psychic burden of systemic failure, but now through an infinitely more sophisticated mechanism - every woman artist an industry plant, every cultural contribution evidence of manipulation, every success story proof of shadowy backing. The same patriarchal anxieties that once required elaborate narrative gymnastics now reproduce automatically, turning even resistance into content. The weight of unresolved guilt presses down harder than ever, but we've lost the ability to feel its pressure without suspecting manipulation.

Our networks have perfected what those early films could only gesture at - the transformation of systemic violence into personal narrative. But where Traffic strained to make the war on drugs intimate through a judge's daughter's addiction, our current systems excel at making intimacy itself feel systemic. Each attempt at genuine connection arrives preemptively corrupted, suspected of being engineered even as we engage with it.

We've traded magical neoliberalism for magical thinking of a darker sort, replacing forced epiphanies about shared humanity with equally forced cynicism about shared complicity. The rain of frogs at least announced itself as divine intervention. Our current networks operate through a more insidious magic - one that transforms even our suspicion into proof of its power.

I find myself returning to that moment when everything changed, when we stopped expecting connection to save us and started suspecting it might be the thing we needed saving from. The systems we built to bring us together now excel at keeping us apart, not through elaborate conspiracies but through mechanisms so ordinary they've become invisible. We map eclipse paths through tragedy because facing our actual condition - genuine disconnection within systems designed to simulate its opposite - requires admitting that no hidden code will make sense of what we've built.

The weight of this realization changes everything it touches. Even the sky above us becomes another text to decode, another pattern to map. Generation by generation, we've perfected a spectacular form of loneliness - one that mistakes endless analysis for genuine understanding, forever searching for meaning in the very mechanisms designed to keep us searching. The true brilliance of modern capitalism isn't that it built systems to keep us apart - it's that it convinced us finding the right pattern might somehow bring us together.

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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 the free membership, whether I use your story or not. See you in the confessional.

Record your voice message

By winter I was back in Greece, staying with my parents for the first time since I was eighteen, rewatching The Sopranos on a loop because Tony’s therapy sessions felt more productive than my own mental spiral. My mother kept asking why I was watching “that violent show” and I kept explaining it was about family and she’d say “but we have family right here” and I’d retreat back to my laptop.

2021: A time in my life in London where I got really into watching films alone at the Barbican. Not because I’m particularly noble or intellectual, but because none of my friends wanted to see a three-hour Apichatpong Weerasethakul film on a Wednesday night and I was done pretending I didn’t.

2022 was the year I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once and genuinely couldn’t tell if it was brilliant or if we’d all were in desperate need of mental stimulation. A woman next to me was sobbing during the hot dog fingers scene and I thought: yes, we’re all coping normally.

2023: Oppenheimer in 70mm IMAX. The Trinity test detonated and a man behind me audibly gasped, then immediately checked his phone. The blue light from his screen illuminated the entire row.

2024 brought Challengers and the revelation that Luca Guadagnino understood threesomes better than most people in actual threesomes. I watched it twice in one week.

And now it’s the end of 2025. We’re staring down 2026 and it’s dawned on me about how we measure time now—not in years but in lockdowns, elections, strikes, and never-ending feeds that have convinced us we are more divided than we actually are.

Most best-of-the-decade lists won’t drop until December 2030, which is five years away and also feels deranged to conceptualize. Who’s to say we’ll make it that far? Who’s to say cinema will? Theatrical windows keep shrinking, streamers keep purging libraries for tax write-offs, and there’s a faint possibility AI will have replaced half the industry by then. The other half will be Tom Cruise doing his own stunts at age 73.

So here’s my pitch: Why wait? Why not take stock now, at the halfway point, while we (I?) can still remember how these films felt when they landed?

For the record, “essential” doesn’t mean important to everyone. And that’s okay, we can all still be friends! For me, it means:

• I can’t imagine these five years without them

• I remember where I was when I watched them

• They’re tied to specific moments in my life that I can’t separate from the films themselves

• I’m still thinking about them

So here’s Part I covering 2020-2022.

Part 2 will drop in the new year (for dramatic effect).

Note: If the release years look wrong to you, that’s because I live in the UK where films arrive six months late and we call it charming. Take it up with the distribution companies, not me.

2020

the father (Florian Zeller)

Most people would call The Father a fiiiiiine film. Competent. Anthony Hopkins doing Anthony Hopkins things, collect your BAFTA on the way out, see you never. I won’t argue with that read. The play-to-screen translation is workmanlike, the supporting cast doesn’t get much to do, and the whole thing was destined to appear on your dad’s “pretty good actually” list before sliding into permanent cultural irrelevance. But I can’t write about this one like a critic because my grandad spent his final three years asking for his brother, dead since 1990s, while failing to recognize the woman he’d been married to for fifty years. I sat across from him while he accused us of moving his chair, switching out the coffee cups, rearranging a kitchen that hadn’t changed since the colonels fell. I knew what dementia looked like from the outside. Zeller gave me the inside. That flat shifting between scenes isn’t a non-linear gimmick—it’s the detailed texture of a mind that can no longer trust space and time. Olivia Colman is his daughter until she isn’t because faces have stopped being reliable information. The disorienting edits are documentary realism if you’ve been on the other side of those eyes. I spent a long time wondering what my grandad was experiencing while I held his hand and lied that everything was normal.

I don’t wonder anymore.

portrait of a lady on fire (Céline Sciamma)

Portrait of a Lady on Fire landed in early 2020 like a dare with Céline Sciamma handing us a film constructed entirely from looking, from the accumulated weight of two women paying such ferocious attention to each other that the attention itself becomes the sex scene. She expected us to recognize it as erotic when most cinema still can’t conceptualize feminine desire without punishing it by the third act.

The film circulated like samizdat through group chats that April. “Have you seen it yet” was functioning as vibe check and litmus test simultaneously, with the timing not being incidental—we were all sitting alone in our flats, untouched and invisible, and Sciamma came out with a film arguing that visibility IS intimacy. Marianne paints Héloïse, Héloïse clocks Marianne clocking her, and within that loop of gazes you finally get a coherent theory of feminine want: female desire rendered not as spectacle or tragedy but as attention. Without a male mediator, without a camera that treats these women’s bodies as territory to be conquered or decoded, you get the radical proposition that two women falling in love might simply look like two people becoming visible to each other.

2020 was a period in time when presence became impossible, and I think that’s why it lodged itself so permanently in the cultural memory of everyone who encountered it during those months.

the long goodbye (Aneil Karia)

Riz Ahmed has been getting pulled out of airport lines since before he was famous—Schedule 7 detentions, humiliations of being asked “what kind of Muslim are you” by a border agent who’d watched Four Lions on the flight over—and the Oscar-winning The Long Goodbye, co-created with director Aneil Karia, metabolizes decades of that ambient surveillance into twelve minutes and forty-one seconds.

Karia opens on a multigenerational British-Pakistani household preparing for a wedding: handheld, available light, aunties commanding the stove, cousins mid-argument about dupattas, a father adjusting his son’s tie with the quiet pride of a man who will absolutely cry later and deny it. The domestic texture is so specific it borders on banal, which is the point. Then the frame stays the same but everything inside it shifts, mid-morning, and Karia keeps the camera shaky and intimate as the state enters the home with the bureaucratic calm of someone reading a gas meter.

This is the Britain of Prevent referrals on Muslim schoolchildren, of stop-and-search quotas in Tower Hamlets, of BBC journalists asking British Muslim actors to condemn attacks they learned about the same moment everyone else did—and Karia shoots the horror in the same handheld grammar as the wedding prep because they have always shared the same afternoon. The final three minutes are Ahmed alone, delivering spoken word directly to camera, and Karia holds on his face long enough that it stops feeling like a music video and starts feeling like testimony delivered to a court that will never convene.

It’s less than the length of your commute and it will restructure how you think about every prestige immigration drama that came before it.

his house (Remi Weekes)

Netflix usually churns out the type of film that you would, at your most generous, call mid so when something like His House appears, it feels like finding treasure in a landfill. Remi Weekes’ debut is a ghost story where the haunting is just what happens when you survive something unforgivable and then get told to be grateful for a moldy council flat in South London. Sope Dirisu and Wunmi Mosaku play Sudanese refugees who escape to England only to discover the UK asylum system operates like a slow-motion horror film: patronizing social workers, fluorescent waiting rooms, the constant performance of being a “good immigrant” while gangs circle and neighbors glare. The house they’re assigned is falling apart and possibly possessed, but Weekes shoots it so you can’t tell where the supernatural ends and the systemic cruelty begins. A night witch crawls from the walls. A child they couldn’t save on the boat over keeps appearing, waterlogged and accusing.

I love this film because it truly scared me while also making me furious, which almost never happens. Most films (regardless of their genre) about refugees treat the trauma as backstory, something to overcome through white saviors or found family or whatever. Weekes doesn’t give you that comfort. The house is haunted because Bol and Rial brought their dead with them, and no amount of assimilation will make those ghosts leave.

parasite (Bong Joon Ho)

Leaving Parasite off a 2020s list would get me excommunicated from Letterboxd and film criticism circles within the hour—this is the decade’s Bicycle Thieves, the film your professor’s professor will assign in 2055. So yes, obviously, it’s here. But over the last few years the discourse has flattened it into the precursor of the “eat the rich” genre renaissance when Bong’s actual achievement is nastier. He makes wanting money feel like a disease.

Saltburn shot the manor like an Architectural Digest spread and let Barry Keoghan’s feral little performance double as property lust; you walked out half-coveting the estate. Glass Onion staged its billionaire takedown on a Greek island so pristine the critique played like a Thomson holiday advert. Triangle of Sadness gave you forty minutes of yacht before the vomiting started. Bong gives you none of it. The Parks’ home is beautiful yet he films it like a crime scene photo—flat, evidentiary, cold. The camera lives in the Kims’ semi-basement, in the sewage gurgling up through their toilet, in the smell that saturates their clothes and hair and marks them the moment they walk into a room where wealth has settled. The Kims don’t want destruction. They want absorption. They want to be the family who winces at the man on the subway. That wanting—not the flood, not the knife—is what Bong dissects, and he offers no out.

2021

sound of metal (Darius Marder)

I watched Sound of Metal in my tiny Wandsworth bedroom during lockdown, lying on the floor with headphones on like I was 16 again. The final scene where Ruben sits in silence and you hear absolutely nothing—I paused it because I thought my laptop had broken. When I realized the silence was intentional, I sat still, frozen alongside him. Not because it was sad but because I couldn’t remember the last time a film trusted me enough to just sit in nothing.

My flatmate knocked on the door to ask if I wanted dinner and I couldn’t hear her knocking. I was that inside it. A film that can trick you into experiencing its subject’s reality instead of just watching it deserves to be called essential, even if that sounds like film school BS.

minari (Lee Isaac Chung)

Steven Yeun spends Minari with his jaw clenched so tight I wanted to reach through the screen and tell him to relax, except I know that face. It’s the one you make when you’ve bet everything on a decision everyone thinks is stupid. His character Jacob moves the family to Arkansas to grow Korean vegetables and his wife hates it, his kids are confused, and you spend the whole movie waiting for the film to pick a side: is he a dreamer or is he selfish? Chung never answers. The grandmother shows up and she’s not some wise vessel of immigrant knowledge, she’s just old and bored and loves professional wrestling. When she has a stroke and wanders outside at night trying to burn garbage and accidentally torches the barn Jacob built, the movie doesn’t frame it as tragedy or irony or metaphor. It’s just: this happened, now what.

The minari keeps growing by the creek because that’s what minari does—it’s a weed, it doesn’t care about your narrative arc. We’re all supposed to have one coherent story about our lives, some through-line that makes sense of why we moved or stayed or gave up or kept going. Minari suggests maybe that’s not true. Maybe your dream fails and your family adapts and a plant grows and none of it adds up to wisdom, it just adds up to: you lived, things happened, some stuff died and some stuff survived. The end.

the nest (Sean Durkin)

Sean Durkin makes movies about the misery that comes with wanting more than you have, which is maybe why I’m the only person I know who will defend The Nest with my life. Jude Law plays Rory, a finance guy who drags his American family to a crumbling English manor in the 1980s because he’s convinced he’s about to be rich, and the whole thing plays like watching someone’s marriage dissolve in real time through escalating dinner parties and bad architecture. Carrie Coon spends half the movie riding a horse alone because it’s the only place she doesn’t have to look at her husband’s face. Law does this thing where he’s always performing confidence even when he’s clearly drowning, and Durkin shoots it all with this cold, empty aesthetic—huge rooms, bad lighting, the kind of house that swallows you. Some people hated this movie. They said it was slow, nothing happens, why should we care about rich people’s problems.

But Durkin gets that it’s not about the money, it’s about the fact that Rory would rather die than admit he made a mistake. The dinner party where everything falls apart isn’t dramatic, it’s just uncomfortable and pathetic and real. By the end, the family’s still together but you can see the fissures, the tiny ways they’ve all decided to tolerate each other’s lies. Durkin’s films live in that space—the almost-breaking point that never quite breaks. I’m obsessed with his worlds.

another round (Thomas Vinterberg)

Another Round ends with Mads Mikkelsen erupting into dance on the Copenhagen docks and I sat flabbergasted on my seat because I'd forgotten bodies could do that—move with zero apology, take up space like it's owed to them. Many filmmakers would be tempted to turn this into inspirational soufflé, but no, this is Mikkelsen deploying his actual ballet training to spin and leap and cartwheel with such ferocity it borders on aggression. Vinterberg holds the shot, lets it run, no cutting away to spare us the rawness of watching a middle-aged man lose himself completely in front of his students. The film doesn't tell you if Martin's transcendent or spiraling or both. He just moves, uncontained, and the movie ends mid-jump. He's airborne, suspended, never lands. I watched this after months of shrinking my masked self in public spaces, walking into Tesco with my shoulders hunched like I was apologizing for existing, and Mikkelsen's dance felt obscene in its lack of self-consciousness. He's not performing for anyone. He's not even aware of being watched.

The film captures what it looks like when someone briefly escapes the stone cold version of themselves and becomes animal again. Another Round belongs in my list because it visualizes the central crisis of 2020-2025: we survived the pandemic, but survival petrified us, and now we've forgotten how to be reckless enough to feel anything.

petite maman (Céline Sciamma)

Grief doesn’t arrive with violins and tears in Céline Sciamma’s hands—it shows up in the way a child folds a crepe or builds a fort in the woods behind her dead grandmother’s house. Petite Maman runs 72 minutes and I’ve watched it several times when it came out because it excavates more about mother-daughter relationships than every therapy session I’ve paid for combined. Nelly meets a girl in the forest who turns out to be her own mother at age eight, and they build a life-sized house out of branches and bedsheets while time collapses like origami. The film operates on fairy tale logic except the witch is grief and the spell is understanding your mother existed before you ruined her body and derailed her ambitions, and I cannot think about that without my throat closing.

Josephine and Gabrielle Sanz play both generations with this feral sweetness that makes me ache for every version of my mother I’ll never meet: the girl who wanted to be a dancer, the teenager who fell in love badly, the woman who became a parent before she became herself. Sciamma made something that rewires how I see the woman who made me without needing to spell anything out, and I keep returning to it like a bruise I can’t stop pressing.

bonus: c’mon c’mon (Mike Mills)

I’m not close with my uncle and never have been, which makes it strange that C’mon C’mon hit me like a freight train. Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, a radio journalist who agrees to watch his nine-year-old nephew Jesse for a few weeks while his sister handles her ex-husband’s spiral, and the whole film is just Phoenix fumbling through bedtime routines and fielding impossible questions like “what does the future look like” from a kid who can smell bullshit from three blocks away. They road trip across America (New Orleans, Detroit, New York) and Mike Mills shoots it in black and white that makes everything look both timeless and heartbreaking, lingering on several beautiful moments: Jesse methodically eating cereal, Johnny bombing a bedtime story, the two of them navigating each other without instructions.

The film came out in 2021 when half my friends were getting married and the other half were having crises about whether they wanted to get married in the first place, and I fell squarely in the crisis camp. Watching Johnny try to care for this kid while clearly having no clue what he’s doing made me realize something I’d been avoiding, which is that family has nothing to do with knowing what you’re doing. It’s about showing up anyway. It’s about answering the hard questions even when you don’t have answers. Mills directed a film so gentle it almost feels slight until you realize it’s dismantled you completely.

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2022

the worst person in the world (Joachim Trier)

I was 29 when I watched Julie leave her boyfriend mid-dinner party—just walks out while he’s mid-sentence about his graphic novels—and recognized the woman I’d been conditioned to believe didn’t deserve screen time: selfish, directionless, incapable of gratitude for the Good Man she’s supposedly ruining. This was my last year single, spent fielding questions about when I’d finally settle down with someone who had his life together, as if my own uncertainty was a disease requiring a cure named commitment. Julie ricochets between medical school and photography and maybe writing while dating Aksel, whose entire existence is already authored—published work, intellectual soirées, future as finished product—and she can’t articulate why it makes her want to implode her own life. Renate Reinsve plays her like Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence except nobody’s trying to institutionalize her, just quietly suggesting she’s ungrateful, difficult, the worst person in the world for not wanting what she’s supposed to want.

Trier’s film, ultimately, is about a woman at 29 who hurts people and changes her mind and leaves good situations because they feel wrong, and rather than punishing her with consequences or character growth, he just follows her. Watching her claim that space made my own flailing feel less like pathology and more like the non-linear, legitimate work of becoming.

parallel mothers (Pedro Almodóvar)

Pedro Almodóvar wrote a story about two women who give birth on the same day and somehow smuggled an entire reckoning with Spain’s fascist past into a maternity ward melodrama, which is the kind of tonal high-wire act only he could pull off without it collapsing into pretension. Parallel Mothers opens with Penélope Cruz asking a forensic anthropologist to excavate her great-grandfather’s mass grave and ends with her nursing a baby that isn’t genetically hers, and between those points Almodóvar weaves together motherhood and memory and national amnesia with such ferocious elegance I wanted to applaud the sheer audacity of it. He shoots Madrid like a jewel box—all vermillion walls and azure tiles and women in clothes so saturated with color they could stop traffic—while the film’s skeleton is pure thriller: swapped babies, DNA tests, secrets metastasizing in living rooms. Cruz plays Janis with this molten intensity, a photographer who carries her family’s unburied dead alongside her own maternal guilt, and watching her navigate both feels like witnessing someone balance on a knife’s edge in stilettos.

Almodóvar has always known that personal catastrophe and political tragedy aren’t separate registers but the same frequency played at different volumes, and Parallel Mothers synthesizes his entire career—the lush aesthetics, the furious politics, the melodrama that never once winks at itself—into something that feels both quintessentially his and completely urgent for this decade. This is how you make a film that’s gorgeous and gutting and politically uncompromising all at once, and I cannot think of another director alive who could engineer it this beautifully.

flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen)

Amin spent twenty years in Denmark pretending he arrived there legally, and Jonas Poher Rasmussen made Flee so Amin could finally tell the truth about fleeing Afghanistan as a kid, about the traffickers in Moscow and the shipping container and all the years of lying to everyone he loved about where he came from. Except Amin can’t show his face without putting his family in danger, so Rasmussen animated the whole thing. Rotoscoped interviews, hand-drawn memories, the visual style shifting every time Amin’s pulling up a different part of his past.

The film lets Amin be genuinely difficult about his own trauma, which almost never happens in refugee narratives. He’s stressed about his boyfriend wanting to buy a house together, not because of his undocumented status but because commitment terrifies him in ways he can’t articulate. He’s kept massive secrets from people who think they know him. He’s not performing gratitude or resilience, he’s just trying to figure out how to stop running when running is the only thing that’s kept him alive since he was twelve. Europe spent 2021 building higher fences and electing people who campaign on cruelty toward refugees, so watching this film (which won every documentary award that year) felt, and feels, essential in ways it most definitely deserved. Animation does something here that I’m not sure live footage could manage: Details blur. Timelines collapse. Certain images stay frozen while everything around them disappears. Rasmussen’s documentary looks nothing like what we think documentaries should look like, and it works better because of it.

hit the road (Panah Panahi)

I picked Hit The Road for this list because Panahi figured out how to make a film about state violence without showing any violence at all. My grandma used to force us to stop every forty minutes on those Greek summer drives—six people crammed in a Peugeot that smelled like cigarettes and overripe peaches, everyone at each other’s throats. Road movies are supposed to be about freedom, right? Open highway, wind in your hair, all that Thelma & Louise bullshit. Well, Panahi flips it. His family is trapped even though they’re moving, the car becomes a cell, and the kid bouncing off the walls isn’t cute—he’s short-circuiting because he’s six and doesn’t understand why his brother keeps staring out the window like he’s already dead. There’s a wedding they crash. Four minutes of borrowed happiness. Then back to driving toward an ending everybody knows is coming. The beauty of the film is that Panahi never explains what’s happening. He just films a family saying goodbye in the only way authoritarianism allows: quietly, in a car, pretending it’s temporary. That’s 2022 in 93 minutes.

aftersun (Charlotte Wells)

Aftersun is the film I wish didn’t exist because then I wouldn’t have to explain to people why I started therapy again at 29. To this date I still don’t know how Charlotte Wells directed something so vicious feel so tender. Calum takes his daughter to Turkey and the entire movie is him trying to be a good father while something inside him is already gone—you can see it in how carefully he speaks, how he flinches when Sophie hugs him too suddenly, like affection is something he’s borrowing and needs to return intact. His daughter Sophie watches him the way I used to watch my own father during silences that stretched too long, that child’s panic of knowing something’s wrong but being told you’re imagining it. I grew up in a house where I learned to read atmospheric pressure, where silence meant something bad was coming and I just had to figure out what I’d done wrong.

Wells shoots this vacation like evidence being compiled—here’s your dad struggling with his back brace, here’s the moment he tells you about being young, here’s when you realize he’s saying goodbye without using the word. The film ended and I sat through the credits sobbing because I finally had language for a feeling I’d been carrying since childhood: sometimes people leave not because you failed them, but because their sadness is so much more encompassing than your love.

bonus: argentina 1985 (Santiago Mitre)

I caught Argentina 1985 at the London Film Festival purely because I had a couple of hours to kill before my next screening, and Santiago Mitre’s courtroom procedural about prosecuting the military junta became the film I couldn’t stop recommending to strangers on the festival circuit afterward. Look, I know “based on true events” triggers our collective eye-roll reflex—we’ve been trained to expect treacly manipulation and Oscar-baiting speeches—BUT Mitre films bureaucracy like a thriller. Ricardo Darín’s prosecutor Julio Strassera isn’t some crusading hero; he’s a middle-aged man who chain-smokes through his terror, who knows the entire apparatus of power wants him to fail, and who builds his case the way you’d defuse a bomb. Watching this in a dark cinema in 2022 while the UK government was collapsing weekly and accountability felt like a fairy tale, was how the film treats justice not as inevitable but as constructed. Painstakingly. Witness by witness. The courtroom turns into an engine of memory, and Mitre films testimony with such restraint that when the camera finally holds on a survivor’s face, the accumulated weight nearly splits you open.

I watched it again when it dropped on Prime because I needed to confirm I hadn’t hallucinated its delivery. I can confirm I hadn’t! It’s a spectacular film about how democracies repair themselves when they’re brave enough to look backward, and I’m begging you to watch it before we forget that’s even possible.

✨ You can find Part 2 HERE ✨

Now what are your essential films from the 2020s so far?

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You may have noticed I’ve quietly posted a couple of things recently without making this whole “I’M BACK” announcement because I wasn’t sure how to do that without it feeling weird.

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Goddammit okay, time to write about this guy. I was supposed to be writing a piece on Pluribus but here we are. Sunday afternoon, lying around in my pyjamas, laptop balanced on my chest, cursor blinking at an open Substack draft that contained exactly eleven words. Reddit was calling to me, that familiar black hole of procrastination camouflaged as research, and I was deep in someone’s biohacker routine when I saw it. Quentin Tarantino trending. Which already felt ominous because when has a 62-year-old white man trending ever been good news? I clicked.

Quentin Tarantino had called Paul Dano “the limpest dick in the world” on Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast. Listen. I do enjoy some Tarantino films. Django’s soundtrack is on my weekly rotation, Pulp Fiction is superb, the Kill Bill films are good fun, sure—but the man himself has always made me want to mute my TV whenever he appears on screen. The manic energy, the constant interrupting, the way he explains film history to journalists like they’re particularly slow children.

I know this isn’t S-tier cultural criticism but when I heard what he said, my first thought was: He’s such a whiny baby.

The full quote was worse—”weakest fucking actor in SAG,” “weak sauce,” apparently watching Paul Dano act makes Tarantino want to “take a fucking nap.” Which is rich because Paul Dano made drinking milkshakes in There Will Be Blood feel like watching someone commit murder with dairy products. Sweet, anxious Paul Dano who looks like he sends thank-you cards to his grocery store cashier.

This attack on Dano didn’t land well with audiences nor the industry. The comments sections were brutal—fans defending Dano with a golden-retriever level of protective energy. Within hours, Daniel Day-Lewis had come out of semi-retirement to defend his There Will Be Blood co-star. Matt Reeves posted Instagram stories calling Dano “incredible.” Ben Stiller, Reese Witherspoon, half of Hollywood suddenly became Paul Dano’s personal protection squad. I hadn’t seen anything like it since Jeremy Strong and the infamous The New Yorker hit piece. Then Colleen Foy, who apparently was at the There Will Be Blood screening Tarantino attended, posted that he “vibed” with Dano’s performance at the time.

So either he was lying then or he’s lying now. Both options make him look pathetic. Tarantino has finally picked on someone so universally beloved, so genuinely talented, that people are snapping out of whatever spell his hot takes usually cast. Plus, the whole thing felt less like fair criticism and more like watching someone have a very public breakdown.

All of which raise some obvious questions: what compulsion drives someone to announce their hatred of Paul Dano like it’s breaking news? Why did this need to be public at all? And more importantly, why does Tarantino always need an audience for his contrarian takes? Is there something genuinely tragic about being a 62-year-old edgelord?

attempting to define edgelordism

Before we get into the why, it’s worth defining the inner workings of an edgelord.

The genealogy of the term emerges from the most terminally online spaces. It’s January 2013, and massively multiplayer online games are hitting their stride. Guild Wars 2 has been out for a few months, and players are deep into the endgame grind, showing off their badass weapons and rare armor sets. Certain players have developed an extremely predictable aesthetic. Think black and red color schemes, the darkest possible armor, tragic backstories, and usernames that sound like they were generated by a 14-year-old’s idea of what “intimidating” looks like. These players enacted what we might call ‘aesthetic recuperation’, wearing it like a costume to signal how mysterious and dangerous they supposedly are.

On January 28, 2013, a Guild Wars 2 player spots one of them and posts about it on the r/Guildwars2 subreddit: “some kind of edgelord with twilight [a legendary sword] and full of [Citadel of Flame armor] and black and red, which is good for a laugh.” The emphasis is on the aesthetic rather than the character archetype we would now call an “edgelord” but regardless, it stuck. On February 19th, 2015, Urban Dictionary user Petrus4 submitted an entry for “edgelord.”

The term would eventually escape gaming forums altogether.

By 2015, Sarah Nyberg wrote the popular essay “I’m Sarah Nyberg, and I Was A Teenage Edgelord” during peak #Gamergate, launching the term beyond gaming into general internet vernacular. People finally had a word for cubicle fascists mainstreaming chan-board Nazi jokes and mid-tier podcasters mistaking R-word deployment for epistemological courage. Progress.

“Edgelord” smashes together “edge” and “lord”—edge meaning you’re pushing boundaries, lord being this sarcastic honorific borrowed from internet gems like “shitlord” and “douchelord” and “jukelord”. Oxford added it in its vocabulary just last year, making it among the freshest entries in formal English.

Edgelords may have elevated contrarianism as libidinal economy in recent years, but psychologists have been studying them under various names for a long time. Their public provocative behavior strongly correlates with what you would know as the “Dark Tetrad”—a delightful combination of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. Sounds like a psychiatric diagnosis designed by someone with a very twisted sense of humor!

So what are the key characteristics of a fully-formed edgelord? Consider this your field guide to spotting them in the wild:

• They depend on audiences: Private opinions are for peasants. Edgelords need an audience for their intellectual superiority, preferably one that will react with shock and awe.

• They escalate when previous controversies start getting reactions: What starts as mild contrarianism (”I don’t like Marvel movies”) eventually becomes nuclear takes (”Paul Dano has the limpest dick in the world”) as they require bigger shocks to maintain their transgressive currency.

• They like to perform rationality: Edgelords are not truth seekers. They are performing the appearance of being logical while actually just showing off their supposed superior taste.

• They frame cruelty as intellectual honesty: They enjoy being horrible to specific individuals but if you challenge them they’ll say it’s fearless cultural criticism or artistic integrity.

• They have a need for uniqueness: Aka a compulsive drive to resist majority opinion, even when the majority is objectively correct, just to maintain their sense of being special.

Things get juicy in a 2014 study titled “Trolls Just Want to Have Fun”, in which researchers found that internet trolls—our modern edgelords—derive genuine pleasure from causing distress to others, rating images of human suffering as “relatively pleasing” compared to normal people who, you know, have functioning empathy. Unlike what one would assume, they have high self-esteem combined with sadistic tendencies, meaning they’re not broken losers seeking validation, they’re functional sociopaths who get off on causing psychic damage. In other words, they think they have a superpower, except the power is being an asshole and believing they’re saving civilization.

Edgelord behavior typically peaks in adolescence and fades once people discover that cruelty doesn’t seriously make you interesting. But Tarantino represents a different species. This is someone whose edgelord tendencies have progressively escalated. You could argue there are different reasons for this:

1) Early in his career, he could get away with shock-value provocations because transgression itself felt revolutionary in the ‘90s.

2) Industry power has insulated Tarantino from consequences in ways that would be impossible for other filmmakers. A white male director without two Oscars and a Palme d’Or couldn’t casually destroy actors’ reputations without career repercussions.

3) Cultural amnesia protects Tarantino from pattern recognition. His unopposed provocation teaches him that cruelty carries no professional costs, only social rewards.

So if you think this dynamic developed overnight, please allow me to enter the thirty-year old exhibits that help shade light to the case.

tarantino’s (non-exhaustive) edgelord timeline

1992

Target: David Lynch
Quote: “After I saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me at Cannes, David Lynch has disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different. And you know, I loved him. I loved him.”
Edgelord Rating: 6/10

1997

Target: Spike Lee
Lee’s Quote: “Quentin is infatuated with that word. What does he want to be made—an honorary black man?” (referring to 38 uses of N-word in Jackie Brown)
Tarantino’s Response: “As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. And to say that I can’t do that because I’m white... that is racist.”
Later Tarantino Quote: “He attacked me to keep his ‘Jesse Jackson of cinema’ status... I wasn’t looking for his approval, and so he was taking me on to keep his status.”
Edgelord Rating: 10/10

2000s

Target: David Fincher
Quote: “David Fincher is not in the same category as me because I’m a writer-director.”
Edgelord Rating: 4/10

2003

Target: Stanley Kubrick
Quote: “I always thought Kubrick was a hypocrite. Because his party line was, ‘I’m not making a movie about violence, I’m making a movie against violence.’ And it’s just, like, ‘Get the fuck off. I know and you know your dick was hard the entire time you were shooting those first twenty minutes.’“
Edgelord Rating: 7/10

2003

Target: 13-year-old rape victim Samantha Geimer
Quote: Called Geimer a “party girl” and dismissed rape accusations against Roman Polanski
Edgelord Rating: 10/10

2012

Target: Alfred Hitchcock
Quote: “People discover North by Northwest at 22 and think it’s wonderful when actually it’s a very mediocre movie... [Hitchcock films] have the stink of the 50s which is similar to the stink of the 80s.”
Edgelord Rating: 6/10

2015

Target: Ava DuVernay
Quote: “She did a really good job on Selma but Selma deserved an Emmy.” (He then followed up to say he actually never saw Selma but c’est la vie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
Edgelord Rating: 5/10

2015

Target: Wes Craven
Quote: “I actually didn’t care for Wes Craven’s direction of [Scream]. I thought he was the iron chain attached to its ankle that kept it earthbound and stopped it from going to the moon.”
Edgelord Rating: 5/10

2015

Target: Blake Lively and The Town casting
Quote: “When you see David O. Russell cast those sisters [in The Fighter], and you see Ben Affleck cast Blake Lively, you can’t compare the two movies. One just shows how phony the other is.”
Edgelord Rating: 6/10

2021

Target: His own mother (Connie Zastoupil)
Quote: “OK, lady, when I become a successful writer, you will never see penny one from my success. There will be no house for you. There’s no vacation for you, no Elvis Cadillac for mommy. You get nothing. Because you said that.” (This was revealed on “The Moment” podcast that he’s kept a childhood vow when he was ~13 to never give his mother money after she dismissed his “little writing career”.)
Edgelord Rating: 8/10

2022

Target: Robert Altman
Quote: “Brewster McCloud is the cinematic equivalent of “a bird shitting on your head”.
Edgelord Rating: 4/10

2023

Target: George Clooney
Quote: “When was the last time that he had a hit in this millennium?”
Clooney’s response: “Since the millennium? That’s kind of my whole fucking career. So now I’m like, all right, dude, fuck off.”
Edgelord Rating: 5/10

2023

Target: Martin Scorsese
Quote: “While Spielberg “still has it” with West Side Story, “I don’t think Scorsese has made a film this exciting” this century.”
Edgelord Rating: 4/10

2025

Target: Paul Dano
Quotes:

• “He is weak sauce, man. He is the weak sister.”

• “The weakest fucking actor in SAG”

• “The limpest dick in the world”

• “He’s just such a weak, weak, uninteresting guy”

Edgelord Rating: 10/10

2025

Target: Owen Wilson
Quote: “Oddly enough, I really can’t stand Owen Wilson. I mean, I can’t stand him.”
Edgelord Rating: 7/10

2025

Target: Matthew Lillard
Quote: “I don’t care for Matthew Lillard”
Edgelord Rating: 6/10

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Now here’s where you may be reading these takes and thinking “lol I also think Matthew Lillard is mid” and for the record, you have every right to that opinion. We have a democracy after all, and you can hold that opinion, no matter how incorrect it may be. Freedom of speech and all that jazz! But let me give you some reasons you might want to keep that shit to yourself.

This sounds obvious but apparently it needs saying: Your personal attacks get to people. “It hurts your feelings. It fucking sucks.”, Lillard said in response to Tarantino’s remarks. “And you wouldn’t say that to Tom Cruise. You wouldn’t say that to somebody who’s a top-line actor in Hollywood.”

Lillard isn’t wrong—modern edgelords love to roleplay as practitioners of what the ancient Greeks called parrhesia, fearless speech. They frame themselves as courageous truthtellers who are willing to speak the “dangerous” truths that polite society is too scared to utter. But true parrhesia requires speaking truth to power, usually at great personal risk. Tarantino is doing the exact opposite.

Second, in literally any other professional context, this behavior would get you called into a meeting with your boss the next morning. Imagine if you worked at McKinsey and decided to announce at the company retreat that Jennifer from accounting was “the weakest fucking consultant in the firm” because you didn’t like her presentation style. You’d be updating your LinkedIn by lunch. But edgelords like Tarantino operate in a biosphere of unchecked privilege where consequences are for poor people. You, my darling, do not.

Third—and this is the part that may worry aspiring edgelords—people don’t want to hang out with you. Mean-spirited contrarians are exhausting company because everyone knows you’re workshopping your next takedown. If you’re the person at the dinner party explaining why actuallyyyyyyy everyone’s favorite movie is overrated whilst claiming you’re “just being real”, you stop getting invited to dinner parties. (Also, you’re probably wrong about the movie but I digress.)

Finally, edgelords never operate in good faith. Even if we accept the premise that Tarantino just wants to help actors and directors to “get better” through public demolition (again: see edgelord definition), why doesn’t he take that private? Why not call Paul Dano directly and offer some constructive feedback? What does airing his negative thoughts in public actually accomplish beyond feeding his own ego? The answer is simple.

Genuine artistic criticism doesn’t require witnesses—it requires conversation, nuance, and the possibility of being wrong. Spectacularized destruction serves purely as narcissistic supply to the destroyer, suturing whatever primal wound necessitates this compulsive cycle of witnessed cruelty.

what a tragedy!

So I started wondering: if Tarantino understands rejection this intimately, where did that education come from? My theory is that edgelords usually target the exact space where they experienced their own deepest humiliation. Tarantino’s industry-wide bitterness—his compulsion to systematically diminish everyone from actors to legendary directors—starts to make a lot more sense when you consider that Hollywood rejected him long before it embraced him. Quentin Tarantino desperately wanted to be an actor, failed spectacularly at it, and I suspect he’s been making the entire film industry pay for that rejection ever since.

It’s time to back up for some context here, because understanding Tarantino’s behavior requires knowing what he originally wanted to be. His first, and perhaps truest, love was the spotlight. As a teenager, he performed with the Torrance Community Theater. Around 1981, he studied acting seriously with James Best at the James Best Theatre Company (yes, that James Best from The Dukes of Hazzard, which somehow makes this whole story even more tragic). His first professional TV appearance was playing an Elvis impersonator in The Golden Girls—he used those residuals ($3,000 eventually) to fund Reservoir Dogs preproduction, which feels like the universe’s way of saying “maybe try something else, buddy.”

The pivotal shift came accidentally during acting class when he memorized movie scenes, wrote them from memory, and filled gaps with original material. His instructor noticed: “Quentin, you rewrote Paddy Chayefsky.” More significantly, Tarantino realized: “I just knew more about cinema than the other people in the class. I cared about cinema, and they cared about themselves.”

But even with this obvious talent for writing and directing, he admits: “My parents said, ‘Oh, he’s going to be a director someday.’ I wanted to be an actor.”

Uma Thurman also noted this in a 2003 Vanity Fair profile:

“You must never forget with Quentin that he wanted to be an actor. If somebody asked him to act in something while he was prepping Kill Bill, he would’ve dropped everything to go and act.”

But then came 1998 and his Broadway debut in Wait Until Dark opposite Marisa Tomei, which turned into the sort of professional humiliation that scars someone for life. The New York Times eviscerated him:

“Mr. Tarantino seems menacing to nothing except possibly the script... he registers at best as merely petulant, like a suburban teenager who has been denied the use of his father’s Lexus for the night.”

The Daily News went for the jugular:

“As a movie director Tarantino may be the new Alfred Hitchcock, but as a stage actor he is the new Ed Wood. He has the vocal modulation of a railway station announcer, the expressive power of a fence post and the charisma of a week-old head of lettuce.” (Week-old lettuce! Limpest dick energy!).

Tarantino was completely shattered by the response:

“I tried not to take it personally, but it was personal. It was not about the play—it was about me...It started getting to me. It’s fucked up when people make fun of you.”

The irony here (🤡) is so thick you could cut it with a knife. He’s been giving us a flawless blueprint for edgelord behavior while simultaneously crying about how much it hurts when people do exactly that to you.

A Vanity Fair source reported that Tarantino was “traumatised by that resounding slam... He went into a tailspin. It scared him. He’s a very wounded guy in that way.” The show closed after 97 performances, and here, my friends, we witness a quintessential Greek tragedy unfold in real time.

Like Oedipus fleeing his fate only to run straight into it, Tarantino became the exact thing that destroyed his dreams—the cruel critic who makes it personal, who targets the individual instead of the work. Tarantino’s hubris is the most pathetic form of self-preservation. He avoids ever feeling vulnerable again by making sure everyone around him feels exactly that vulnerable all the time. But edgelords are doomed to repeat their trauma forever, trapped in their own hamartia: the inability to heal from the original wound means they’re condemned to keep reopening it in others, never realizing that their “victory” is actually their eternal punishment.

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