The devastating calamity that was the AIDS epidemic, which disproportionately ravaged gay and bisexual men and other marginalized communities throughout the 1980s, was compounded by the official indifference of much of the political establishment and the often inflammatory media sensationalism surrounding the disease. The resulting stigmatization reflected an ingrained cultural bias that can be traced back through centuries of Western culture, through religious doctrine, historical laws and traditional views rooted in prescribed gender roles and reproduction. Unfortunately, the national narrative in the 1980s was often less about compassion and providing support to affected communities than about assigning moral blame and creating an "other" so that mainstream society could imagine its own health and bodily integrity were not at risk, which, of course, they were.
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It is a complicated, multi-pronged dynamic that Canadian director John Greyson masterfully interweaves in his musical Zero Patience (Strand, 1993), which addresses the anxieties and frustrations of the gay community toward the skewed cultural, economic and political response to HIV/AIDS and its misinformed, unempathetic and even opportunistic representation. The choice of the musical form is particularly subversive, as its exuberance and theatricality stand in deliberate contrast to what is ultimately a very sad tale. The tragedy was also far from over at the time of the film's release, with the devastation continuing throughout the 1990s even as the emergence of effective combination antiretroviral therapy around 1996 transformed what had largely been regarded as an inexorably fatal disease into an increasingly manageable chronic condition.

Greyson anticipates this transformation through an ingenious invocation of Scheherazade from the famed Arabic collection One Thousand and One Nights. In the story, a king betrayed by his wife comes to regard all women as inherently untrustworthy, marrying a new woman each day only to execute her the following morning. When he marries Scheherazade, however, she tells him a story that she deliberately leaves unfinished at dawn. Desperate to hear its conclusion, the king postpones her execution, a strategy she repeats for a thousand and one nights until he ultimately abandons his murderous ritual and accepts her as his queen.

The metaphor is particularly resonant in the context of HIV/AIDS because Scheherazade survives not by eliminating the threat hanging over her, but by repeatedly postponing its consequences. Her victory is measured in increments of time: another night, another story, another tomorrow. In much the same way, modern antiretroviral therapy does not eradicate HIV from the body but suppresses viral replication, preventing the progression of the disease and allowing people living with HIV to lead long and healthy lives. Scheherazade consequently becomes an unexpectedly powerful metaphor for the medical future that Zero Patience stood on the threshold of witnessing.

Greyson also resurrects the historical figure of Sir Richard Francis Burton [John Robinson] to personify both the judgmental gaze of institutional authority and the role that supposedly objective scholarship can play in perpetuating harmful narratives about sexuality. Burton was a nineteenth-century British explorer, writer and scholar whose extensive travels were accompanied by a fascination with the sexual practices of other cultures. Among his more notorious ideas was the now-discredited "Sotadic Zone," a geographic band in which he claimed male homosexuality was especially prevalent. By mapping homosexuality onto particular regions and cultures, Burton gave a veneer of scholarly legitimacy to the comforting notion that supposedly undesirable sexual behavior belonged primarily to foreign peoples and places rather than Victorian Britain itself.

Burton was also an accomplished linguist who became instrumental in introducing Western audiences to works of Eastern literature and sexuality, most famously through his translations of The Kama Sutra and One Thousand and One Nights. Greyson exploits these contradictions by imagining that Burton has discovered the Fountain of Youth and survived into the late twentieth century, where he is preparing a "Hall of Contagion" exhibition for a natural history museum with HIV/AIDS as its star attraction. Burton's desire to collect, classify and exhibit the disease transforms human suffering into an intellectual curiosity and public spectacle, reproducing the same process of othering that characterized his nineteenth-century theories. Greyson's target is therefore larger than Burton himself: the institutional impulse to observe marginalized people from a safe distance, reduce them to categories and case studies, and then claim authority over their experiences.

Lastly, there is Zero [Normand Fauteux], the embodiment of the mythical "Patient Zero" who, according to a now-debunked popular narrative, introduced HIV/AIDS to North America. Research has since demonstrated that HIV was circulating in the United States by around 1970, long before the cases associated with the supposed Patient Zero. Yet the persistence of the myth reveals another dynamic central to Greyson's film: society's desire to reduce complicated systemic catastrophes to individual villains. A single identifiable culprit provides a cleaner and more digestible narrative than the messy epidemiological reality of a virus spreading invisibly through interconnected populations over many years.

Zero is consequently Greyson's most direct attempt to correct a historical injustice. His real-life counterpart, Canadian flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas, was notoriously vilified as "Patient Zero," with his homosexuality and sexual activity transformed into evidence of personal culpability for an epidemic that had begun long before he became infected. In reality, Dugas cooperated extensively with researchers, providing information about his sexual contacts that helped investigators reconstruct networks among early AIDS cases and better understand the disease's patterns of transmission. Rather than the malicious vector popular culture transformed him into, Dugas was a cooperative participant in the epidemiological research used to understand an emerging public health catastrophe.

Thus, Scheherazade, Burton and Zero serve as historical and symbolic benchmarks through which Greyson traces the complicated social history of the epidemic itself. Scheherazade represents survival through the perpetual postponement of death, Burton the institutional impulse to classify and other human sexuality, and Zero the individual scapegoat created to make an enormously complicated public health catastrophe comprehensible. Each also embodies a different relationship to narrative: Scheherazade prolongs her life by telling a story, Burton exercises authority by telling stories about others, and Zero reclaims a story that others have falsely told about him. By packaging these ideas within an irreverent musical filled with upbeat numbers, humor and theatrical excess, Zero Patience attempts to dismantle the misinformation and taboos surrounding HIV/AIDS while replacing fear and moral judgment with transparency, scientific understanding and empathy.

The same message reached an enormous mainstream audience only two years before the film's release, when legendary Los Angeles Lakers basketball player Magic Johnson announced in 1991 that he had tested positive for HIV and became one of the world's most visible advocates for HIV/AIDS awareness. As a heterosexual superstar athlete who had acquired HIV through sexual contact with women, Johnson profoundly disrupted the comforting fiction that the virus belonged exclusively to gay men and other marginalized populations. His advocacy helped advance public understanding of HIV as a virus rather than a moral judgment, while forcing mainstream America to confront precisely what Greyson's film insists upon: disease recognizes neither the social categories nor the moral boundaries that human beings construct around it.

Fairly or unfairly, jazz often gets pegged as being an overly intellectualized, sterile, snobby, dispassionate affair akin to the same elite circles that attend society events, operas and classical concerts. It’s ironic, since in Ken Burns’s authoritative multipart series on jazz for PBS, it is explained that one possible derivation of the term itself is a euphemism for sex. One need only remember that the genre started in the back rooms of brothels in the Storyville section of New Orleans, where young trumpeters like a prepubescent Louis Armstrong would get tipped extra for playing the right note during another’s lovemaking. In essence, jazz is not an elitist music; it’s a visceral and even carnal one.
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That pretext comes to mind when experiencing Spike Lee’s jazz-centric film Mo’ Better Blues (Universal, 1990), which utilizes the musical form as meta-commentary on a self-centered trumpeter in Bleek Gilliam [Denzel Washington] as he navigates a life complicated by relationships of the personal, business and romantic variety, all of which develop and tug at his attention while questioning his loyalty, integrity and independence.

At the center of his problems are two women, Indigo Downes [Joie Lee] and Clarke Bentancourt [Cynda Williams], each demanding a degree of emotional commitment he is unwilling to provide. His interactions with them are glib, fleeting and completely one-sided, taking on an improvisational quality as he tries to maintain both relationships without accepting the obligations that genuine intimacy imposes.

Likewise, his business dealings with childhood friend, degenerate gambler and business manager Giant [Spike Lee] are defined by contradiction, as Bleek both relies on and incessantly defends him despite his poor results and obvious liabilities. It’s a quasi-antagonistic relationship that mirrors Bleek’s similarly contentious dynamic with rival musician and accompanying saxophonist Shadow Henderson [Wesley Snipes], with whom he fights over musical direction while still depending on his creative input and musical talent.

Bleek wants the benefits of interdependence without surrendering any autonomy. He demands it emotionally from Indigo and Clarke, professionally from Giant and creatively from Shadow, even as he prizes his own independence almost pathologically. Yet everything meaningful in his life depends upon collaboration, which is where Lee’s use of jazz as metaphor becomes especially potent. Jazz itself negotiates the tension between individual expression and collective responsibility, allowing a musician to improvise and assert a distinct voice while remaining responsive to the ensemble around him. Bleek understands that relationship instinctively when he has a trumpet in his hands; his tragedy is that he struggles to extend the same principle to the people in his life.

That changes when a pair of bookies’ enforcers come after Giant in the alley outside the nightclub where Bleek is playing. Instinctively, he comes to the defense of his friend and is brutally assaulted himself, tellingly beaten across the face with his own trumpet and rendered unable to play professionally again. This lone act of chivalry effectively costs Bleek the identity around which he has constructed his entire life, but it also gives him the opportunity to develop into a better, more compassionate and reliable version of himself. Unable to return to his old ensemble, he ultimately assembles another through marriage and family with Indigo, while his former musical family similarly reconstitutes itself around Shadow, now leading the band with Clarke by his side. In losing the instrument through which he had always expressed his individuality, Bleek finally learns how to become part of an ensemble and ultimately passes that lesson on to his son, allowing both the music and the communal responsibility it demands to endure into another generation.

The transformational power that comes with adopting a new persona is a trope nearly as old as storytelling itself, encompassing literary, theatrical, cinematic and oral traditions as varied as Homer’s The Odyssey, the shape-shifting exploits of Zeus and Odin in Greek and Norse mythology, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925), Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (Hyperion, 1912), Batman and even Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013). Across these vastly different narratives, the assumption of another identity offers characters the possibility of transcending the limitations of their ordinary selves, whether in pursuit of survival, desire, social advancement, power or liberation. But there is a dark underbelly to this metamorphosis, given the innate instability of assuming an essentially inauthentic identity or worldview. One is, after all, constructing a false lived experience, likely drawing upon stereotypes, received images and incomplete cultural information in the process.

Such a dynamic is what makes Moustapha Alassane’s Return of an Adventurer (Argos, 1966) such a compelling juxtaposition of cultures. A young man returns to his small Nigerien village after an extended stay in the United States, bringing cowboy outfits for his friends. Almost immediately, the clothes seem to liberate them from the communal responsibilities of village life, and they set about becoming a pack of bandits, stealing sheep, horses and cattle from their elders in pursuit of a new lifestyle centered around being cowboys. Armed with guns, their greed and ambition recognize no communal boundaries as they take on all comers, including one another’s parents, bullying their neighbors and seizing property before inevitably turning on each other. Jockeying for position within the group, some members are killed in duels over competitive honor and saving face, values that never existed among them before and seem particularly absurd in a barren Nigerien landscape where cooperation is a necessity for survival. Ultimately, the village council convinces one member that his father has died, prompting him to turn against the gang’s leader and permanently breaking up their counterfeit Wild West.

It is fascinating that the cowboy persona adopted by these young adults becomes one of violence, aggression and domination rather than the freedom, liberty and escape from pastoral responsibility that the cowboy has so often represented within the United States. Given the colonial imposition of Western culture upon the region, perhaps it should not be surprising that its mythology is instead associated with cruelty, subjugation and the wanton appropriation of limited resources. That colonial overlay upon their behavior is particularly inspired because it demonstrates how inherently damaging and destabilizing such an individualistic ethos becomes within a community organized around collective survival rather than material accumulation. The young men do not produce anything through their transformation. They merely take, hoard and fight over resources that already belong to their community, making their performance of the West an extraordinarily hollow and pathetic exercise in accumulation.

Therein lies the film’s most barbed indictment. The cowboy outfits do not merely allow these young men to pretend to be Americans; they provide them with an entire imported vocabulary of power. Property becomes something to seize, guns become a means of establishing authority, violence becomes a method of resolving disputes and individual status supersedes communal obligation. Their imitation may be exaggerated and constructed from distorted fragments of Western culture that have reached them, but that is precisely what makes it so damning. Alassane turns the colonial gaze back upon the West, stripping its mythology of its romantic veneer and reducing it to the qualities most visible from the outside: acquisitiveness, violence, domination and an insatiable hunger for resources. That the young men adopt these values almost instantaneously upon putting on their cowboy costumes makes Return of an Adventurer a particularly brutal satire of the supposedly liberating culture they are attempting to emulate.

Embedded in the desire for superhuman abilities is often a deeper primal longing that is less obvious. The desire for flight, for instance, can reflect a longing for freedom and to be untethered from responsibility, while the desire for X-ray vision may be informed by the fantasy of penetrating concealment, of knowing what is secret and determining who is worthy of trust. Invisibility is an intriguing ability since, at its core, it is as much about power and control through voyeurism as it is about the desire to escape scrutiny and consequence.
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In James Whale's classic horror film The Invisible Man (Universal, 1933), based on the H. G. Wells novel, both tendencies are at play as scientist Jack Griffin [Claude Rains] develops a chemical formula that renders him visually invisible. And at first, it isn't hard to discern why such an ability might produce an intoxicating sense of power, given his complete domination over those around him and the local authorities seeking his capture.

With Griffin, you have an ambitious young scientist who is hungry to make a name for himself, not necessarily out of ego or a need for personal glory, but to financially sustain a life that he can reasonably share with his beloved Flora Cranley [Gloria Stuart], daughter of his respected mentor, Dr. Cranley [Henry Travers]. Yet his decision to secretly experiment upon himself already suggests a certain recklessness, isolation and ambition that precede his eventual transformation. It is only after experimenting with the chemical monocaine that mania sets in, accompanied by wild bouts of grandiosity that gradually transform his personality into that of a power-hungry tyrant.

This distinction is important. Invisibility itself does not necessarily make Griffin insane. The film specifically establishes monocaine as having dangerous psychological effects. The drug creates the mania, while invisibility gives that mania extraordinary power. One supplies the pathology while the other removes the ordinary social constraints that might otherwise contain it. Rather than manufacturing an entirely new personality, the chemical can therefore be understood as amplifying tendencies already present in Griffin while simultaneously giving him an unprecedented ability to act upon them. He can increasingly operate without being seen, identified or easily punished, transforming his scientific breakthrough into an almost perfect mechanism for escaping accountability.

As with any scientific discovery or novel technology that expands our ability to manipulate nature, such advancements create capabilities without necessarily supplying the ethical framework governing their use. The advancement itself may be morally neutral, but its consequences depend enormously upon the intentions and psychological disposition of whoever possesses it. Griffin discovers how to make himself invisible before adequately considering what someone with that ability should or should not be permitted to do.

Thus, invisibility here is not merely a means of escaping accountability but a ready vehicle for the weaponization of one-sided surveillance, leaving everyone around Griffin with a compromised sense of privacy and safety, if not an entirely justified sense of paranoia and terror. He can observe without being observed, enter private spaces without detection and exercise power over people who cannot even determine whether he is physically present. The imbalance is nearly absolute.

In the pantheon of classic Universal Monsters, the Invisible Man therefore holds a unique place because his ability is not based primarily around explicit physical domination but instead an understood loss of agency for everyone in his immediate community. Griffin is, in essence, a one-man surveillance state with delusions of grandeur and a quick willingness to murder if cornered. This is terrifying on an entirely different plane of psychological torture than being overpowered by any number of vampires, underwater creatures, nocturnal beasts, reanimated bodies concocted from spare human parts or ancient Egyptian mummies.

Those monsters are frightening in part because their physical presence can be detected. Griffin reverses that relationship. His absence becomes the threat. An apparently empty room can contain the monster, and the inability to determine whether he is present means that his power extends beyond those moments when he is actually watching. The possibility that he might be watching is enough to alter everyone else's behavior, operating on a principle not entirely unlike that of the panopticon, in which the possibility of constant observation becomes a mechanism of control even when the observer's actual presence cannot be confirmed.

Whale ingeniously translates that psychological condition into cinematic form. Doors open by themselves, objects move without explanation, footprints materialize and a disembodied voice emerges from apparently empty rooms. The film's celebrated special effects are therefore more than technical showmanship. They gradually teach the audience to distrust empty space itself. We begin scanning portions of the frame where seemingly nothing is happening for evidence of a man who, by definition, cannot be seen. In doing so, the viewer is conditioned into something resembling the same paranoia experienced by Griffin's victims.

In The Invisible Man, one can therefore see something resembling distinctly modern anxieties surrounding government surveillance and other forms of institutional observation that are largely invisible to the people being observed. The parallel is obviously imperfect, but the underlying anxiety is remarkably similar: one party possesses the ability to observe another without being observed in return. There is no reciprocal power in play and often no immediate means of knowing when surveillance is occurring, leaving the individual vulnerable to an authority whose presence, intentions and ultimate purpose may remain unknown.

The anxiety extends well beyond government surveillance. Digital tracking, smartphones, facial recognition, online platforms and enormous systems of personal data collection increasingly create circumstances in which individuals cannot always know who is observing them, what those observers know about them or what will ultimately be done with that information. Observation combined with invisibility, unknowable intention and an inability to meaningfully retaliate creates a profound imbalance of power.

Griffin therefore presents an enduring modern anxiety in remarkably vivid terms. Unlike most Universal Monsters, he doesn't terrify because he enters your field of vision. His very invisibility forces you to wonder whether he was there all along.

The most frightening thing about an invisible man may not be that you cannot see him. It is that he can see you, and you have no way of knowing when he is watching.

In what was no doubt intended as an epic adventure film set in India, complete with the scale and spectacle of set pieces, elaborate action sequences and exotic locations, the George Stevens-directed Gunga Din (RKO Radio, 1939) unfortunately does not hold up to modern scrutiny because of its dependence on colonialist misinformation and a self-serving cultural misrepresentation of the subcontinent and its inhabitants.
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This is exemplified, despite introductory title card assertions to the contrary, in the film's depiction of the Thuggee phenomenon. During the British occupation and exploitation of India in the 19th century, colonial authorities encountered itinerant gangs engaged in robbery and, in some cases, murder. From this emerged an increasingly elaborate colonial mythology surrounding the so-called Thugs as a vast, coordinated, bloodthirsty death cult centered on the Hindu deity Kali and engaged in the ritual strangulation of its victims. From the British perspective, the existence of such an organized and fanatical opposition provided a more satisfying colonial narrative than admitting the limits of imperial control over a vast subcontinent in which they were enormously outnumbered. The mythology persisted within British representations of India, and Hollywood extended it even further in this film, loosely inspired by the work of British expatriate writer Rudyard Kipling.

Gunga Din [Sam Jaffe] is an Indian camp worker whose specific job is that of a water carrier. He is stationed with the British Indian Army in northwestern India when the regiment learns that the telegraph wires connecting one of its remote outposts have been cut. Three sergeants, Cutter [Cary Grant], MacChesney [Victor McLaglen] and Ballantine [Douglas Fairbanks Jr.], are dispatched to investigate, eventually discovering what the film depicts as a coordinated Thuggee uprising against British rule.

What is interesting is how little these three sergeants understand about the cultural context in which they have been placed. Cutter is almost exclusively interested in exploiting the region for personal enrichment and is susceptible to fantastic tales of hidden temples filled with gold. Ballantine is practical about his participation in the army but eagerly anticipates the end of his enlistment, after which he intends to marry and begin a new life in the tea business. MacChesney, meanwhile, is a lifer whose entire existence revolves around his service to the Queen and the camaraderie he finds in the army. Interestingly, all three are ultimately focused on what their service can provide for them, whether wealth, economic opportunity or a sense of belonging. This stands in marked contrast to the selfless devotion of Gunga Din, who receives comparatively little from the institution to which he is nevertheless completely devoted.

This gets at the revealing central contradiction of the film itself. Gunga Din, the lionized Indian character, has to demonstrate extraordinary loyalty and self-sacrifice toward the colonial institution simply to achieve the status the British characters possess automatically. Oddly, his great aspiration is not liberation from British rule but acceptance into its military apparatus. British colonial rule profoundly shaped India's political and economic trajectory while subjecting its population to an imperial system in which Indians remained subordinate. Against that history, the decision to name the film after an Indian character whose ultimate aspiration is complete acceptance by the occupying power is problematic at best and farcically absurd at worst. His heroism is ultimately validated not through resistance to subordination but through his willingness to sacrifice himself in service of the very institution responsible for it.

The treatment of Kali compounds the problem. A major Hindu deity is transformed into the spiritual center of a murderous cult without any meaningful acknowledgment of her actual religious significance, allowing a sensationalized colonial representation of Hinduism to function as unquestioned fact within the film. The result is not merely an unflattering depiction of individual Indian antagonists but a broader degradation of Hindu culture that allows British imperial authority to appear comparatively rational, civilized and legitimate. Structurally, the film's conception of Indian heroism itself is colonial, although the theoretical vocabulary commonly used to analyze such representations would not fully emerge until later. Anticolonial thinkers such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon would examine the psychological and cultural consequences of colonial domination in the following decades, while later postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha would develop frameworks for understanding how imperial power operates through representation, language and cultural assumptions as well as direct political control.

One need not be familiar with these postcolonial concerns, however, to understand that the West has historically had an active interest in constructing an imagined India that makes Western domination appear natural or necessary. It is an insidiously productive tactic of domination in which foreign and seemingly exotic cultures are defined according to the interests and assumptions of those representing them rather than those being represented. Gunga Din is a historical example of this tradition, one whose influence can still be recognized in later cinematic descendants such as John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King (Allied Artists, 1975) and, most notoriously, Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Paramount, 1984).

Anyone who has been alive through the eleven years since 1980s real estate gossip-column mainstay and reality-television star Donald Trump descended that gaudy golden escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president of the United States is more than aware of his unusual appearance, curious use of language, shameless self-promotion and torturous relationship with the truth. It is hardly hyperbole to argue that American culture over the past decade has, in many respects, taken on elements of that image: a coarsening of public discourse and the normalization of a purely transactional worldview in which wealth and power become primary measures of value.
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More than anything else, the fearless Ali Abbasi-directed The Apprentice (Briarcliff, 2024) functions as a cinematic examination of that worldview and of the conditions and figures that shaped it. It is not surprising, especially when one considers the account offered by his niece and clinical psychologist Mary L. Trump in Too Much and Never Enough (Simon & Schuster, 2020), that much of his psychological architecture is presented as originating with his father, Fred Trump [Martin Donovan]. The film largely concurs. His father's unrelenting cruelty and binary vision of the world, divided between winners and losers, molds Donald [Sebastian Stan], steering him toward real estate as both profession and identity.

There is also little doubt that Donald was affected by the way his father treated his older brother, Fred Trump Jr. [Charlie Carrick], whose desire to become a commercial airline pilot was met with disdain. Fred Jr. ultimately struggled with alcoholism and died young, while the pressure placed upon him to abandon aviation and enter the family business is well documented. The film suggests that standing up to his father represented a significant psychological hurdle for Donald, one he only managed to overcome with the help of an outside force.

That force, and the true crux of the film, is his relationship with arch-conservative lawyer Roy Cohn [Jeremy Strong]. Cohn's maximalist tactics, unrelenting pressure campaigns and morally fluid, if not outright reprehensible, methods had long made him an ideal fixer for powerful figures, going back to his role in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and his subsequent work as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the anti-Communist investigations of the 1950s. By the 1970s and 1980s, the period in which much of the film is set, his client list spanned organized crime figures such as Tony Salerno as well as business, political and cultural elites.

Trump enters this elevated world as a client and evolves into something closer to a mentee. Cohn helps him navigate the legal and political obstacles surrounding his emergence as a Manhattan developer, beginning with the federal housing-discrimination case against the Trump family business and extending into his increasingly ambitious development projects. More importantly, he imparts a simple, brutal operating code: always attack, never concede, treat truth as malleable and always claim victory.

The film suggests that this code, rooted in shamelessness, domination and a disregard for conventional ethics, was Cohn's most lasting influence. His reputation for intimidation and legal aggression is well documented, and the film's inclusion of figures like Roger Stone [Mark Rendall] reinforces the idea of a shared ecosystem built on these principles. What Cohn provides is not just strategy, but a philosophy: that power is self-justifying and that perception can override reality.

It is this worldview that enables Trump, within the film's telling, to displace his father as the dominant force in the family, even before Fred Trump's decline into Alzheimer's disease. The film's broader argument is that this ethos, far from being anomalous, was cultivated, refined and ultimately projected onto a national stage. Whether one accepts that conclusion or not, the film positions this transactional logic as central to understanding both the man and the cultural moment that followed.

Youssef Chahine’s Cairo Station (Gabriel Talhami Films, 1958) is a revelation to many Western cinema-goers unfamiliar with Arab cinema, a sophisticated, noir-inflected narrative concerned with the harsh realities of urban life for those eking out a precarious existence in one of Egypt’s great metropolitan hubs. Within the societal microcosm of Cairo’s central railway station, various factions seek power and territory, competing for control over the commerce generated by the daily influx of travelers, from porters and clerks to newspaper vendors and soft-drink sellers. Some unlicensed vendors undercut established businesses on-site, while others seek to unionize labor as a means of ensuring a living wage for the many instead of guaranteed income for the few. It is a dynamic, ever-evolving system, much like Egypt itself, a nation negotiating its future after the final remnants of British military occupation had departed only two years earlier in 1956.
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Also on clear display are the aspirations of life in this new, modern, liberated era, namely a newfound economic, social and sexual independence from what came before. With liberation comes opportunity, but just as prevalent is the dark underbelly of those individualistic, largely material ambitions: economic exploitation, sexual frustration and social isolation, especially for those who find themselves without a cohort of like-minded collaborators or on the losing end of what increasingly resembles a rigged, zero-sum system. There is an almost cruel irony for many in witnessing the fruits of these ambitions up close in a public arena like a metropolitan train station, while finding their own prospects of attaining them frustratingly distant and perhaps altogether unattainable.

The isolated experience of the socially marginalized and pathetic figure of Qinawi [Youssef Chahine] is instrumental in drawing out many of the fears and anxieties surrounding this new modern way of life. Emotionally unstable and possessed by fantasies wildly out of proportion to his circumstances, he becomes particularly fixated on Hanuma [Hind Rostom], a cold-drink vendor at odds with the station establishment and the fiancée of Abu Siri [Farid Shawqi], a burly porter bent on securing their future as he attempts to unionize his profession. For a Western viewer, the film’s remarkably open expressions of lust and acknowledgment of Arab sexuality may come as something of a surprise, challenging assumptions about how sexuality has historically been represented in Arab cinema. Chahine presents Cairo as a vibrant, cosmopolitan metropolis in which flirtation, desire and the human body are very much part of public life, even as Qinawi’s inability to participate meaningfully in that world transforms desire into resentment, obsession and ultimately violence.

It is Qinawi’s descent into aggrieved violence against women that reveals the most disturbing manifestation of this alienation. His very real disadvantages of poverty, marginalization and social isolation become entangled with a heightened sense of entitlement to have his personal and sexual ambitions satisfied. Unable to reconcile the promises of the modern world surrounding him with his own exclusion from them, Qinawi increasingly directs his resentment toward the women he desires, as though their rejection represents not an exercise of their own autonomy but another injustice perpetrated against him.

What is remarkable is how Chahine places Qinawi’s violence alongside the violence Abu Siri directs toward Hanuma, revealing two different manifestations of masculine frustration within the same rapidly changing social environment. Abu Siri’s anger is rooted largely in economics and traditional gender expectations. Hanuma dances, flirts and turns herself into a public spectacle in order to earn money, ostensibly to help finance their wedding, yet Abu Siri interprets this behavior as a humiliation not only of her but of himself. As the man in the relationship, he believes their financial security should be his responsibility, and Hanuma’s ability to generate money through the public performance of her sexuality calls into question the value he believes he is supposed to provide as a prospective husband. Qinawi’s violence represents the dark side of aspirations left unresolved, while Abu Siri’s represents an attempt to reassert familiar gender roles that allow him to feel empowered within an increasingly chaotic atmosphere of economic and social volatility. In both cases, female autonomy becomes the terrain upon which male anxieties about status, economic security and modernity are violently expressed.

Ultimately, Qinawi’s intended victims survive and a degree of social order is restored, but what remains unresolved is how such male aggression will manifest itself in a rapidly transforming society. Newfound economic possibility is one thing; inherited assumptions about sex, gender and social hierarchy remain very much in the mix. Chahine offers no easy reconciliation between these forces. Instead, Cairo Station captures a society at a moment when new possibilities for economic and personal autonomy coexist uneasily with older expectations about masculinity, sexuality and power. To what extent one would ultimately transform the other remained unknowable in 1958, leaving the station not merely as a portrait of contemporary Egypt but as a crossroads between the society it had inherited and the one it was still struggling to become.

In Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin Féminin (Columbia, 1966), the self-absorbed Paul [Jean-Pierre Léaud] is constantly referencing French intellectuals and authors such as Georges Perec, André Malraux, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Guy de Maupassant in an effort to demonstrate his intellectual sophistication to the singer Madeleine Zimmer [Chantal Goya] and her friends. It is an act of performative intellectualism rather than genuine refinement and exemplifies the extent of his isolation and alienation from society. Consequently, his arrogance and inability to empathize with others or think beyond his own needs ultimately render his death a non-event for all involved.
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Compare that with the figure of Andy [James Duval] in Gregg Araki's transgressive New Queer Cinema update of Masculin Féminin and first installment in his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, Totally Fucked Up (Strand Releasing, 1993), whose suicide has a resounding emotional impact on his small cadre of friends. Much beloved and supported by this group of fellow gay teenagers, Andy distinguishes himself through his thoughtfulness, steadfast loyalty and biting self-effacing humor, making his absence profoundly felt by those he leaves behind. Being an openly queer teenager in Los Angeles during this period is an invitation for harassment, if not violent physical abuse, with society turning its back on one's core humanity, making this small cohort of peers and friends particularly close-knit and intimate. Even with the requisite infighting and interpersonal tensions, it is understood by all that they only have each other, making Andy's departure, especially as one who serves a stabilizing role for the others, particularly devastating. Andy habitually minimizes his own importance and is deeply mourned, whereas Paul repeatedly attempts to prove his importance and ultimately isn't mourned at all.

Much as the quoting of French intellectuals is meant to showcase Paul's failed attempt to communicate a sense of academic curiosity and sophistication, Araki similarly utilizes alternative, dream pop, shoegaze and industrial rock bands of the era, including Coil, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry and Cocteau Twins, throughout the soundtrack, dialogue and even the intertitles themselves to establish a shared cultural vocabulary between Andy and his close friends. The difference is that Paul's references are largely performative, intended to distinguish himself from those around him, while the musical references in Totally Fucked Up constitute a common cultural language that binds its characters together. In a society in which these teenagers are routinely made to feel like outsiders, music becomes one of the means through which they recognize one another and construct a community of their own.

Stylistically, Araki's use of VHS-recorded, direct-to-camera confessionals similarly provides the characters with a private outlet for thoughts and vulnerabilities they struggle to communicate elsewhere. The device strikingly presages the confessional format that would become ubiquitous, and eventually much maligned, with the rise of reality television, but here it serves a far more intimate purpose. Rather than manufacturing confession as entertainment, Araki uses the camera as a confidant, allowing his characters to articulate fears, desires and insecurities that might otherwise remain invisible even to those closest to them.

That such a community ultimately fails to save Andy from a broken heart from which he cannot recover, even though he spends much of the film instilling that very resilience in others, is particularly tragic. It speaks to the often invisible suffering experienced by queer young people unable to bear the cumulative cultural weight of social hostility, institutional indifference and pervasive homophobia during this deeply conflicted period in American history.

What makes Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two (Warner Bros., 2024) so compelling is its refusal to treat liberation as an uncomplicated moral good simply because the people pursuing it have been oppressed. The Fremen are unquestionably victims of colonial exploitation, yet the means through which they become capable of defeating their oppressors are increasingly troubling. Their victory depends upon religious mythology, charismatic authority, political manipulation and ultimately violence on an enormous scale. At the center of this contradiction is Paul Atreides [Timothée Chalamet], who gradually comes to understand that defeating the existing order may require him to compromise the very principles that initially distinguish him from it.

Paul's decision to adopt the Lisan al Gaib identity despite knowing its origins represents a conscious sacrifice of fidelity to truth in pursuit of political necessity. He understands that the prophecy is artificial, yet recognizes it as the most viable mechanism for uniting the Fremen into a force powerful enough to defeat their oppressors. More importantly, he understands where such a path leads. Throughout much of the film, he resists embracing the role because he foresees the catastrophic holy war that will follow. His eventual acceptance of the prophecy is therefore not merely an act of political calculation, but a tragic surrender to the path he believes offers the greatest chance of securing victory despite the devastating consequences likely to follow.

Likewise, his willingness to set aside personal happiness with Chani [Zendaya] in favor of a strategic marriage reflects a recognition that effective political leadership and personal virtue are not always compatible. His father, Duke Leto [Oscar Isaac], faced a similar conflict but never fully surrendered his personal life to political necessity. Although Leto never married Jessica, preserving the possibility of a politically advantageous marriage, he nevertheless remained devoted to her. Paul ultimately goes further, sacrificing his relationship with Chani by agreeing to marry Princess Irulan in order to consolidate his claim to the throne. Indeed, the Emperor himself offers a darker version of this argument when explaining why he moved against House Atreides: brutality, however regrettable, may sometimes be necessary to preserve political order.

Paul appears to have reached a similarly unsettling conclusion. Whether that realization elevates him as a leader or diminishes him as a human being is left for the audience to decide. The dilemma is particularly compelling because this path represents the narrow sliver of possibility through which the Fremen emerge victorious. The unsettling implication is that defeating an oppressive system may require adopting many of the same tools that made that system possible in the first place.

Such moral complexity is why this series feels like a singular cinematic achievement. What begins as a story about colonial exploitation gradually reveals itself as a cautionary tale about charisma, faith and the seductive appeal of leaders who promise salvation. By the conclusion of Dune: Part Two, Paul has achieved everything he set out to accomplish. He has avenged his father, defeated his enemies and seized control of the Imperium. Yet the film leaves the audience with an uncomfortable question: If attaining power requires the manipulation of truth, culture and belief, how different is the victor from the forces he set out to overthrow?
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In many respects, that question is the true destination of Paul's journey. The film begins with a young man seeking justice for the destruction of his family and ends with a leader willing to harness myth, religion and political calculation to reshape an entire civilization. Whether he has liberated the Fremen or merely become the latest architect of their destiny remains unclear. What is certain is that the cost of his ascension will be paid far beyond the deserts of Arrakis.

I know that when I first watched the Adam Sandler vehicle Billy Madison (Universal, 1995) as a teenager, the overt social incongruity of a grown man starting school over from elementary school and working his way through high school felt like a fruitful comedic conceit, particularly given that Sandler’s Saturday Night Live-derived persona was already that of a man-child. With his over-the-top half-witticisms, copious grunting and over-reliance on physical humor, the nepo baby that is Billy Madison proved an ideal vehicle for Sandler’s first major starring role and established the template for much of what was to follow.
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But a lot has changed in the past thirty years, and it is difficult to take on the premise of this film without thinking of the steady procession of privileged children afforded second chances they never deserved, from James Dolan, Andrew Cuomo, Jaden Smith, Paris Hilton and James Murdoch to your pick of Trump offspring, never mind the equally disturbing, if not hereditary, revolving door of elite executives playing musical chairs in corporate boardrooms everywhere. The problem is not that these people get second chances. It is that, at that level of economic and structural power, they seemingly obtain an inexhaustible series of undeserved chances.

With no education, no work history, no marketable skills and pronounced behavioral problems bordering on the pathological in his late twenties, Madison would be absolutely screwed if his father were not the head of a hotel chain. It is presumably a privately held company, given that the shareholders of a publicly traded corporation would be unlikely to stand for the shenanigans of redoing one’s entire education, never mind settling a succession dispute through an academic decathlon.

What is interesting is that the film nevertheless presents Madison as the protagonist, a hapless fool with no discipline who is making strides to prove himself to his father and pursuing an absurd love interest in one of his teachers, Veronica Vaughn [Bridgette Wilson], while positioning company stooge Eric Gordon [Bradley Whitford] as the antagonist. It is a dynamic that makes absolutely no sense under scrutiny, since Gordon gained his position through discipline and hard work, pursuing both an education and an ever-growing portfolio of responsibilities within the company. Compare that with Madison’s lone qualification of being his father’s son and the whole conceit collapses.

The fact that Gordon is pegged as elitist, opportunistic and ambitious, whereas Madison is amiable, good-hearted and loyal, seems to speak to an underlying assumption about the film’s perceived audience. The soft bigotry of low expectations pervades an aesthetic of comedy based on populist fantasies of being granted positions for which one is expressly unqualified in terms of temperament, experience or expertise. Thus Sandler, in Billy Madison as well as much of his subsequent catalogue, repeatedly appears in fish-out-of-water stories in which the object of ridicule is not the undisciplined, the indolent or the unimaginative, but instead those possessing competence, intelligence and the ability to function successfully within established institutions.

Thirty years on, after two consecutive failed George W. Bush terms and now a second disastrous Donald Trump term, the concept of failing upward feels like a feature of American life at the highest economic and political strata of our culture. It reflects a two-tiered system that is no longer perceived as an outlier, but as the manifestation of an entrenched hierarchy in which accountability itself is unequally distributed through a different constellation of rules, consequences and expectations. I watch Billy Madison now and am reminded of a contrived populist posture that demands extraordinarily low standards of its decidedly privileged protagonist, who is treated as an underdog despite the obvious fact that he is afforded advantages no true underdog possesses.

It seems absurd in retrospect, but maybe it shouldn’t. If anything, it may be prophetic.

I can recall coming to New Jersey for the first time to meet relatives after my family’s first year living abroad in West Africa. We had left Southern California, the only home I had ever really known, early in the school year, and going from the backyard of Disneyland to Lagos was quite the culture shock. It proved to be one of the great perspective transformations of my life, and I was only twelve.
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Meeting those relatives, I could tell that the experience was unnerving for some of them, since my younger brother and I had seen and experienced things that none of these adults, raised in relative comfort and stability, had ever even considered. Death was not some remote or random occurrence. People in my extended orbit through school would die by suicide, infectious disease, automobile and plane crashes, and even political assassination, to say nothing of the people one passively encountered on the street who had suffered from political and ethnic violence, opportunistic crime or running afoul of the military dictatorship then governing Nigeria. Then there were the visible effects of less immediately fatal conditions among the local population, including severe malnutrition, leprosy and untreated physical disabilities.

In the years since, I’ve run into former classmates in Tel Aviv, Montreal and Brooklyn, only to discover that a similar home dynamic was shared by many of us. There was something akin to survivor’s guilt at play, coupled with a profound gratitude that we had made it through. It created a deep connection that remained despite our different nationalities, professions and life trajectories. In a sense, we had all lost some measure of our innocence and naïveté about the nature of reality in the developing world, with all its struggle and suffering, before we had even reached our teens.

That experience was what immediately came to mind while watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s debut feature, Ivan’s Childhood (Mosfilm, 1962), about a preteen on the Eastern Front during World War II whose experiences as an adept reconnaissance agent, able to slip through enemy lines because of his diminutive frame, have profoundly marked him emotionally, psychologically and psychically. The circumstances are obviously incomparable in their severity, but I recognized something in Ivan that had remained familiar to me since childhood. There is a peculiar estrangement that occurs when a child has been exposed to realities that childhood is ordinarily supposed to keep at a distance. The adults around Ivan may possess greater authority, experience and physical strength, but he has acquired a terrible knowledge of the world that cannot simply be taken away from him. Like the children I knew growing up, he has crossed an experiential threshold from which there is no uncomplicated return.

Ivan has lost the innocence associated with childhood without ceasing to be a child. It is the central contradiction of the film. Never truly settled away from the front, his mind races when awake as well as when he dreams, where he escapes into visions of his mother and an idyllic pastoral life representing childhood, maternal security, nature and a prewar world that are inevitably overtaken by the violence and trauma of the front. Even on a purely symbolic level, in his often surrealistic dreams, the experience of war has permanently shifted his perspective. His identity has become inseparable from it, which is why he threatens to run away and join the partisans when told that he needs to return to civilian life and attend military school for his own welfare and intellectual development. The adults around him recognize the damage already done to his psyche and no longer wish to be complicit in its further unraveling. Ivan himself, however, no longer understands removal from the war as salvation. His sense of purpose and self-identity have become wholly consumed and defined by it. In his mind, there is no Ivan apart from the conflict itself.

It is a tragic set of circumstances because it is precisely Ivan’s diminutive stature as a young child that gives him such utility and effectiveness as a reconnaissance agent, but that usefulness comes at a terrible cost. The very qualities of childhood that make him valuable to the war are simultaneously being destroyed by it. That which sustains him is also the root of what is consuming him, much like an ouroboros eating its own tail. It is a devastating circular logic that leaves him unable to conceive of an alternative existence. His life is the war itself. There is no reality beyond it. Only in his dreams can he temporarily break that negative feedback loop and find respite, allowing the remnants of a childhood suppressed by his waking identity to reassert themselves before his conscious mind once again subsumes the unconscious.

Generally, war films have an understood reliance on aspects of spectacle, whether grand military maneuvers, technological capabilities or the visceral immediacy of combat. Where Ivan’s Childhood separates itself is in its attention to the far more insidious and arguably humanistic dimensions of war, particularly the moral and spiritual degradation of the individual through prolonged exposure to it. The film deals specifically with the damaged psyche of a child, but in essence this extreme example speaks to anyone, civilian or combatant, affected by extended exposure to wartime conditions.

I have personally seen variations of Ivan in young men I met in Kosovo while conducting interviews during my time as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Balkans, or in the sons and daughters of Kachin separatist leaders I taught in Myanmar, whose families were actively engaged in a decades-long civil war. The psychological entrenchment that can come with prolonged exposure to such realities is not a physical deformity or visible wound that can be easily observed. It is far more nuanced, far more difficult to identify and potentially far more insidious in its long-term effects. That is the gift Tarkovsky provides in Ivan’s Childhood. He makes the invisible damage visible through the gulf between Ivan’s waking and dreaming selves, a dilemma that thankfully few of us have ever had to experience firsthand.

Much like motorcycling, surfing and recreational aviation, modifying cars was a hobby that expanded dramatically among returning GIs after World War II, specifically in Southern California, where hot rodding was popularized on the dry lake beds of the Mojave Desert. It soon became a staple of youth culture, as young enthusiasts souped up outdated models like Ford Model Ts and Model As and raced them illegally on public streets throughout the 1940s and 1950s. As the popularity and dangers of street racing increased, dedicated drag strips provided enthusiasts with controlled places to compete, while the formation of the National Hot Rod Association in 1951 helped transform amateur drag racing into an organized and sanctioned sport.

What began as a garage preoccupation developed into an entire subculture known as Kustom Kulture, which flourished in the 1960s and incorporated everything from fashion and hairstyles to illustration and graphic art, all centered around customized cars and motorcycles. It also permeated the airwaves at a time when the emerging baby boomer teenager was becoming both a highly sought-after consumer demographic and an increasingly powerful arbiter of popular culture, with the likes of the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, and Ronny & the Daytonas popularizing escapist visions of Southern California centered around hot rods, drag racing, surfing and teenage freedom.

It is within this cultural milieu that Kenneth Anger’s short experimental film Kustom Kar Kommandos (Puck, 1965) emerged, originally intended to be feature length but shortened considerably after the Ford Foundation grant funding its production was exhausted. In Anger’s hands, what was conventionally understood as a heteronormative pursuit of speed, performance and mechanical prowess is transformed into a homoerotic fetish object, with a young, virile man [Sandy Trent] in tight jeans meticulously wiping down and admiring his customized car’s engine and furnishings as he might a lover’s body. And just to drive the point home, the sequence is set to the Paris Sisters’ “Dream Lover,” a wholesome pop song recontextualized here with a defiantly queer connotation.

This kind of curated reinterpretation of cultural imagery is commonplace today in the visual language of music videos, advertising and especially memes in the internet age, but such was hardly the case in the 1960s. It is part of what makes Kustom Kar Kommandos and other Anger shorts like Scorpio Rising (1963) so influential. Anger appropriates familiar music, imagery and cultural iconography, strips them of their conventional associations and recombines them to create entirely new meanings. Subsequent surreal and experimental filmmakers would adopt similar tactics, perhaps most famously David Lynch in Blue Velvet (1986), where the reassuring artifacts of postwar American popular culture are likewise repurposed into something strange, erotic and frequently sinister.

It has been well documented, and is fair to say, that the Coen brothers have a longstanding preoccupation with the film noir genre and its many iterations, specifically its machinery, which they tend to distort and manipulate for their own purposes in increasingly idiosyncratic ways. Arguably, this was never more the case than in their black comedy crime thriller Fargo (Gramercy, 1996), which finds an inside extortion plot degenerate into a grisly bloodbath in the serene, frost-white confines of a Minnesota winter, with its mild-mannered, folksy, close-knit population marking one of the most unlikely juxtapositions in cinematic history.

Noir films often portray victimized men whose hubris, ambition or desire is overwhelmed and eviscerated by environmental elements of society over which they have no control, including women, money, criminal institutions, social class and chance. Often, this moral and physical degradation is depicted in a night-time urban environment that feels indifferent, hostile and dehumanizing to the suffering of an isolated individual. What makes Fargo so delightfully insidious is how it unexpectedly exceeds the degradation and fatalism of most noir films while unfolding across vast, white, snow-covered landscapes and within a close-knit, outwardly congenial community that knowingly plays against the genre’s iconography.

Jerry Lundegaard [William H. Macy] is a financially desperate used-car salesman who works at his father-in-law’s dealership and initiates a kidnapping scheme involving his wife, Jean [Kristin Rudrüd], through a connection provided by his mechanic, Shep Proudfoot [Steve Reevis]. It is never formally stated why Jerry so desperately needs the money. Presented as a simple man caught in an occupation that does not play to his personality strengths, namely being a good liar, Jerry becomes implicated in a convoluted conspiracy that grows bigger as the body count rises and more money is demanded by the professional criminals Carl Showalter [Steve Buscemi] and Gaear Grimsrud [Peter Stormare]. In Jerry’s conception, the whole scheme is a means of siphoning money from his stern father-in-law, Wade Gustafson [Harve Presnell], who routinely condescends to and patronizes him. This dynamic is evident when Jerry brings Wade a legitimate business opportunity for which he seeks financing, only for Wade to appropriate the investment and offer Jerry a nominal finder’s fee.

Failing in the ruthless world of business, Jerry likewise fails in his interactions with the criminal underworld, which quickly devolve into a chaos he had hoped to control but whose potential variables he never appreciated. The result is a series of acts of wanton violence and the involvement of local police chief Marge Gunderson [Frances McDormand], who quickly synthesizes the clues into a coherent narrative. These two characters serve as the central axis of the film, with Jerry creating greater complexity through incompetence and deception while Marge calmly reduces it through observation and reason. He views his life in suburban Minnesota as limiting, whereas Marge is ripe with hope, literally in the final trimester of her pregnancy and enjoying a loving relationship with her devoted husband, Norm [John Carroll Lynch], who paints birds for postage stamp competitions and makes breakfast for her at ungodly hours of the morning. Where Jerry experiences an objectively comfortable life as imprisonment, Marge finds genuine fulfillment in an outwardly ordinary one.

Jerry’s trajectory is therefore entropic, with everything he touches gradually disintegrating, while Marge carries new life and restores order to the destruction he has set in motion. Jerry’s relationship with Carl and Gaear is understood on a distinctly binary and transactional basis: this amount of money for that outcome. This contrasts with Marge, whose professional and personal life is organized around longstanding relationships of a mundane and nonfinancial variety. Often in noir films, the victim is destroyed by unforeseen complications and corrupt environmental forces beyond his control. Jerry’s downfall is different in that he manufactures it himself through dissatisfaction, dishonesty and an absurd, unfounded belief in his ability to control other people.

Much like David Lynch’s destabilizing use of setting in Blue Velvet (De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1986), Fargo manipulates the audience into a false sense of security through the comforting, white-blanketed snow that dominates the landscape, never anticipating the brutality that will erupt within it. The false “based on a true story” title card serves a similar purpose, another red herring that does not merely mislead us intellectually but lowers our defenses before the film violates the assumptions it helped establish. The implication is that this kind of moral collapse can happen literally anywhere because the impulses from which it emerges are so banal and unexceptional. This point lands hard when Marge speaks to Gaear in the police car, utterly bewildered by all the carnage just “for a little bit of money.” The motive is trivial; the consequences aren’t.

To be alive is to carry wounds, and how we interface and connect with the world is, in part, a reflection of how we individually reconcile and come to terms with them. Loss, pain and, for many, trauma are inescapable parts of being human, but their manifestations are different for everyone: the death of a loved one, a divorce or separation in the family, physical harm or abuse, betrayal, violence, humiliation or the accumulation of smaller disappointments over a lifetime. Part of what makes trauma so insidious is precisely this individual nature, the way it exploits each of us differently. Shared events can produce radically different outcomes. How and why they do so remains something of a mystery.
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Watching the recent Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear documentary about the celebrated multifaceted drummer, entrepreneur and music producer, it struck me that the through-line of its narrative is grief in the wake of successive waves of trauma throughout a lifetime. Interestingly, this was not really the organizing principle of his memoir, Can I Say, which was much more triumphant in tone and focused on Barker's unlikely rise to cultural prominence through dedication to his craft, a boundless curiosity about music, cars and tattoos, and more than a little sheer luck. In that book, the harrowing plane crash that nearly killed him was positioned as another obstacle to overcome. In the documentary, it becomes a defining traumatic event with intergenerational implications for Barker and his family, as his fear of flying was subsequently inherited by his children, much as he had inherited the same fear from his late mother.

It can be strangely difficult to see musicians as human, their lives appearing so charmed from the outside. Yet one never really knows what drives someone to achieve what they do or where that drive is rooted. For Barker, the drums became both a sanctuary from life's problems and an enduring connection to his mother, who encouraged him to pursue music and recognized the instrument as particularly conducive to his personality as a child. His parents' separation, followed by his mother's death from an autoimmune disorder when he was young, undoubtedly marked him, but it also deepened his dedication to the instrument, transforming his music into something like a living legacy and testimonial to her influence.

Going through his own divorce and enduring the breakups and reunions of Blink-182 over the years repeated, in different forms, the pattern of separation and loss that had characterized parts of his childhood. Yet the sense I get from Barker is that these experiences ultimately strengthened his determination to be there for his friends and family, to remain compassionate and available during their own moments of need, perhaps most publicly during bandmate Mark Hoppus's battle with cancer. Finding love again through community and shared values becomes another manifestation of the regenerative possibilities of remaining alive, curious, open-minded and openhearted despite everything that might encourage a person to withdraw.

Perhaps the greatest testament to that quality is the extraordinary number and range of people who participate in the film. His Blink-182 bandmates Tom DeLonge, Mark Hoppus and Matt Skiba appear alongside Transplants bandmates Tim Armstrong and Skinhead Rob Aston, while drumming peers including Questlove, Lars Ulrich, Sheila E., Taylor Hawkins, Tommy Lee and Stewart Copeland testify to his stature as a musician. Punk comrades Toby Morse and John Feldmann sit alongside hip-hop collaborators Killer Mike, Lil Wayne, the Game and Trippie Redd and a younger generation of pop-punk artists Barker has worked with, including Machine Gun Kelly, Yungblud and Ryan Key. Taken together, they represent more than the breadth of Barker's career. They constitute the community he has built around himself over a lifetime.

It is a pretty remarkable legacy, but as much as the film looks backward, one gets the sense that Barker's energy, commitment and unbridled joy in music will keep him producing records and touring well into the future. The birth of his youngest son may be the most optimistic gesture toward that future imaginable: the creation of new life after a story so thoroughly shaped by loss. In the process, love and family have helped Barker confront the fear of flying that connected three generations of his family. His eventual return to the air therefore represents something larger than overcoming a phobia. His mother feared flying; Barker inherited that fear before experiencing the nightmare that seemingly confirmed it; his own children then absorbed the fear from him. By flying again, Barker has at least begun to interrupt that cycle, refusing to allow an inherited fear compounded by unimaginable trauma to determine what comes next. In a film fundamentally concerned with how one continues living after loss, there may be no more appropriate conclusion.

Life has a way of gradually revealing itself, iteratively unfolding with new characters, circumstances and experiences as time goes by. Often in film, there is a convention of narrative compression, in which time is understood to be subjective and actions are cut together irrespective of the spatial and temporal spans between them.
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What makes the work of independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, as evidenced in his third feature Down by Law (Island, 1986), so compelling is his willingness to extend scenes and showcase the time between spoken and physical actions, as one experiences them in real life. The payoff of such deliberate use of pauses, silence, waiting and apparent inactivity is a level of intimacy rarely provided in cinema history. One is literally watching three grown strangers, each in jail as a victim of circumstance, hubris, poor judgment, miscalculation or just plain bad luck, become sufficiently acquainted to begrudgingly trust one another with their lives as they successfully mount an escape. But unlike virtually every other prison film, Down by Law is uninterested in the mechanics of the plan, instead more drawn to how the experience affects the relationship between the three prisoners.

Zack [Tom Waits] is a down-on-his-luck, out-of-work radio disc jockey who is paid handsomely by a local heavy to move a Jaguar sedan from one end of New Orleans to the other, only for the cops to pull him over and find a corpse in the trunk in an obvious setup. Likewise, Jack [John Lurie] is a local pimp who is caught in a police sting operation when a rival tells him where to find a young woman ready to be turned out on the street as a gift and peace offering. Last is Roberto [Roberto Benigni], who is imprisoned after killing a man with a billiard ball in an act of self-defense following a card game gone terribly wrong.

Thrown into the same cell arbitrarily, Jack and Zack slowly feel each other out, sensing a kindred spirit only after much time and a gradual erosion of their own self-absorption. No sophisticated meet-cute, no dramatic revelation, just the slow familiarity that comes with extended exposure. Roberto’s inclusion disrupts this building rapport, but ultimately his idiosyncrasies related to misconstruing language and culture serve as a kind of social glue, creating unique shared experiences and understood in-jokes that progressively cohere the duo into a trio.

By bearing witness to this slow burn, we as an audience have likewise been drawn under the same spell and thus instinctively understand why individual outbursts of frustration and conflict from three inherently selfish individuals do not result in the cohort dissipating. Jarmusch makes us spend enough time with them that the durability of the relationship no longer needs conventional narrative justification. When they do depart, it is after their shared goal of liberation has been reasonably fulfilled, with each wishing the others well as they return to the uncertain void from whence they emerged. Such is the nature of life.

Contrary to most depictions throughout cinema history, crime is in fact a team sport, with unnecessary braggadocio, flashy purchases, trophy relationships and conspicuous consumption rendering amateurs susceptible to being sussed out through their own unhelpful exposure. Real professionals are patient, understated, calm, detail-oriented and deliberate, reading the room for the mistakes of others and the opportunities that arise through social interaction. As much as they may be calculating, amoral or even psychopathic in disposition, successful criminals cannot afford to be equivocal or careless in purpose.

Which is why Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake (Sony Pictures Classics, 2004) is such a refreshing crime film. The unnamed protagonist [Daniel Craig] is perfectly happy being a useful cog in someone else’s criminal machinery. He has his small role and is paid handsomely for it, so much so that he is already planning an early retirement. But his competence and reliability turn out to be liabilities. He is ultimately a clever sod who can be discarded or sacrificed at will by those above him, knowingly or otherwise.

For sheer survival, this reserved, meticulous operator is thus forced to act increasingly on his own as a series of overlapping schemes rapidly unravels around a shipment of stolen ecstasy pills from Amsterdam, prompting the Serbian underworld to seek recompense and revenge. He had nothing to do with the theft but must now negotiate its consequences largely in isolation, with the interests and loyalties of his supposed peers increasingly unclear. His professionalism and ability to work collaboratively are paradoxically what make him useful enough to exploit.
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The title becomes an intriguing metaphor for this predicament, as he discovers that competence within his assigned layer does not grant him any control over the layers above it. The criminal organization functions precisely because responsibility and danger can be pushed downward, insulating those at the top while leaving capable subordinates to absorb the consequences of decisions they did not make. Thus, the group ethos made famous in countless Scorsese and Coppola films is instead supplanted by a top-down bureaucratic structure designed to insulate the decision-making echelon from risk, much like any modern corporation.

An intriguing dynamic often permeates films that showcase hierarchical institutions traveling and functioning well beyond the natural bounds of their native societies, particularly spectacle narratives involving military conquest, space exploration, deep-sea exploration and even colonization. In these stories, the resulting self-contained community becomes a microcosm of its home society, reproducing its hierarchies, institutions and social tensions even at the furthest reaches of the known world.
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Such is the case with the Peter Weir-directed Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (20th Century Fox, 2003), an adventure film that is as much about the nuanced characteristics of strong leadership and the institutions that sustain it as it is about the spectacle of early 19th-century naval warfare. Somewhere in the New World, along the coast of Brazil, HMS Surprise is ambushed by the French privateer Acheron, barely escaping when a favorable fog provides a much-needed escape route. From then on, a chase unfolds around the tip of South America and up the other side to the Galápagos and beyond, as the captain of the Surprise, Jack Aubrey [Russell Crowe], seeks both to retaliate in kind and to find purpose in the mission of safeguarding England from its enemies during the ongoing Napoleonic Wars.

Aboard the Surprise is the skilled surgeon Stephen Maturin [Paul Bettany], who often questions Aubrey’s decisions and functions as a conscience on matters of just leadership and institutional responsibility. He is also a naturalist who values collaboration, peer review and evidence-based inquiry, which sometimes places him in opposition to the military’s adherence to centralized decision-making and unquestioned discipline within its hierarchy. Maturin also serves as a counterweight to the rampant magical thinking that can infect a ship, especially during periods of extreme hardship and deprivation, when misfortune demands a Jonah figure to be identified and sacrificed according to custom.

Thus, Master and Commander is at its core a morality play about the proper role of leadership within highly hierarchical institutions, which themselves serve as microcosms of the nation-states they represent. This conception is not merely imposed upon the film, as Aubrey makes it explicit when he passionately declares that “this ship is England” before launching a surprise attack on the Acheron while the crew is disguised as stranded whalers. When an ineffective officer is openly defied and humiliated by a subordinate, Aubrey sees to it that the transgressor receives the lash regardless of his status as a capable and valued sailor. The punishment is less an expression of Aubrey’s personal anger than an acknowledgment that authority aboard the ship cannot function selectively. His responsibility as captain is not merely to command but to preserve an institutional order whose legitimacy depends upon its rules being enforced even when doing so is uncomfortable, unpopular or seemingly contrary to the immediate interests of the crew. Aubrey is thus not simply a strong leader because he exercises command effectively; he understands that his own authority is itself subordinate to the institution he leads.

It is a fine line, however, because such conviction can easily descend into the obsessive archetype embodied by literary figures like Captain Bligh and Captain Ahab, pursuing a superior adversary beyond the letter of one’s orders out of pride, hubris or a desire for glory rather than duty. This tension becomes most pronounced when Aubrey pursues the Acheron into the notoriously dangerous waters around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. He admits privately to Maturin that his orders did not authorize him to pursue the ship beyond Brazil, meaning that he is no longer acting in strict compliance with the institution whose authority he otherwise so carefully upholds. Yet Aubrey believes that destroying the formidable French privateer represents a unique opportunity to serve the larger war effort. The distinction between principled initiative and personal obsession consequently becomes difficult to locate: Aubrey must exercise the independent judgment expected of a leader precisely when doing so requires him to exceed the institutional mandate that legitimizes his command.

This responsibility is compounded by the very real consequences of such a decision, which are ultimately measured in the lives of the crew. During a violent storm, a sailor working aloft is thrown overboard along with a section of the ship’s rigging, which begins dragging the Surprise down with it. Aubrey orders the ropes cut, effectively sacrificing the sailor to save the rest of the crew. It is an agonizing but necessary decision in the immediate circumstances, yet those circumstances would never have materialized had Aubrey remained off the coast of Brazil as instructed. The episode therefore complicates any easy distinction between good and bad leadership. Aubrey makes the correct decision once the crisis is upon him, but he also bears responsibility for having placed his men in the crisis to begin with.

And therein lies the central paradox of leadership. An institution needs obedience to function, but it also entrusts its leaders with discretion precisely because orders written thousands of miles away cannot anticipate every circumstance they will encounter. Half a world away from England, Aubrey effectively becomes the King’s representative in absentia, entrusted with interpreting the interests of the institution when direct oversight is impossible. With that autonomy comes the moral weight of his decisions. He can make the correct tactical choice and still bear responsibility for creating the conditions that made such a choice necessary. It is a dilemma that gets at a fundamental problem of government itself: how much discretionary authority can an institution delegate to an individual while still expecting that individual to remain subordinate to it?

Such is the real legacy of a film that negotiates these thorny questions with remarkable nuance while simultaneously delivering a swashbuckling epic of genuine spectacle, the likes of which are rarely experienced at this scale in modern cinema.

It is not an enviable position to be a beast of burden in a traditional agrarian setting, yet in director Ibrahim Shaddad’s A Camel (1981), a rural villager in Sudan is seen driving his blindfolded camel in circles to propel, in Sisyphean fashion, a rudimentary grinding wheel inside a dark sesame mill. It is a dreary existence, only further intensified by a sound design that squeaks and squeals with a creaking scream so brutal that one cannot always pinpoint whether it emanates from the camel or the mechanism itself. That blurring of animal suffering with the punishing sounds of the primitive device seems very much the point. Devoid of any value beyond its capacity for labor, the camel exists in the eyes of its human brethren simply to push that grinding wheel forward, ceaselessly and without end.

Yet Sudan at this point is hardly a preindustrial society, as Shaddad makes clear through interspersed cuts to enormous mechanized excavators dredging through the countryside as part of some major infrastructure project. An aqueduct? An irrigation system? Such is never specified, but Shaddad presents this mechanized activity in an almost ethereal silence compared with the hellscape soundtrack of the sesame mill. It is almost as if the grand pursuits of modernization can take place openly in the light of day, while the suffering that continues to sustain everyday economic life remains out of sight and out of mind, an obscured necessity of the modern economy.

Camels are not ordinarily regarded as possessing much individuality, which perhaps explains why Shaddad so curiously intercuts portraits of them dressed in human garb, complete with wigs, glasses and other accessories. This blurring of the camel and human condition is later brought to fruition when the man in charge of the mill is suddenly shown wearing the animal’s full harness, almost like a bondage apparatus, and pushing the grinding mechanism forward in the camel’s place. Significantly, this occurs just as he is preparing to blindfold the animal, transforming an act of domination into an unexpected identification between master and beast. It is a deeply poetic way of suggesting that the ordinary people subjugating these beasts of burden are themselves entrapped and rendered powerless within an economic system that demands such brutality while relegating the suffering it produces to the status of an unfortunate but necessary externality.

Before even discussing the narrative, the first thing to know about Makoto Shinkai’s anime drama The Garden of Words (CoMix Wave, 2013) is that it is arguably one of the most visually arresting and immersive animated films I have ever seen, with impossibly minute details defining both the urban and park settings of Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood, particularly the pastoral Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, whose history dates back to the Edo period.

Many of these exterior establishing shots also employ subtle shifts in perspective, or parallax effects, between foreground and background elements, further immersing the viewer in the setting. The effect is so seamless that the imagery takes on a poetic lyricism all its own. Even before the two main characters are properly introduced, the viewer is mesmerized by the rhythms of changing weather patterns in the park where they meet on rainy days.

The story centers on 15-year-old aspiring shoemaker Takao Akizuki and Yukari Yukino, a 27-year-old literature teacher at his school who has withdrawn from teaching after becoming the target of false rumors spread by students. Both seek solace beneath a pavilion in Shinjuku Gyoen on rainy mornings, where the expectations governing their lives temporarily recede. In each other they recognize someone similarly caught in a state of flux, unsure of how to move forward.

There are romantic overtones to this odd pairing, particularly as Takao's feelings become more explicit, but their deeper connection comes from this shared sense of being stuck. Despite the considerable difference in their ages and circumstances, both have reached moments when the prescribed paths before them no longer seem capable of carrying them forward. The garden consequently becomes more than a beautiful refuge from Tokyo, offering temporary sanctuary where neither is required to know exactly what comes next. Shinkai’s extraordinarily lush presentation of the park, particularly in the rain, therefore serves more than an aesthetic purpose. It creates the conditions under which this alternative world can exist, as Takao and Yukari’s relationship is itself organized around their mutual withdrawal from ordinary life whenever it rains.

Within the highly competitive environment of modern Japan and its considerable cultural pressures to produce and conform, The Garden of Words is refreshing in its willingness to create a liminal space between such external demands and the individual. Removed temporarily from their prescribed social roles, Takao and Yukari are afforded the freedom to reflect upon what they actually want and to find support in someone facing similar uncertainty. Neither ultimately abandons society so much as learns to negotiate a place within it on different terms.

Embedded in the American Dream is an aspiration for self-sufficiency, upward economic mobility and social advancement. For immigrants from countries where those types of ambitions are unattainable or fixed by circumstances of birth, the promise of the opportunity to unlock such potential outcomes stateside is quite the seductive proposition. Unstated in the American Dream, however, is the reality that elite capitalist success often comes with a considerable body count, as climbing that greasy economic pole requires competitors to be defeated, displaced or discarded along the way.

When I look at a film like Brian De Palma’s epic crime film Scarface (Universal Pictures, 1983), beyond the drug use, womanizing and gaudy nouveau riche materialism is the story of a Cuban immigrant with limitless ambition who never considers the human cost of realizing such ambitions through the cocaine trade. His family, his associates, his wife and ultimately Tony Montana [Al Pacino] himself all suffer as a consequence.

In this underworld, everything can be bought and laundered through the illicit drug trade. Legitimate institutions like banks and law enforcement are all too willing to enable criminal enterprise at the right price. The same goes for women, as evidenced by Elvira Hancock [Michelle Pfeiffer], whom Tony effectively takes from his former boss, Frank Lopez [Robert Loggia], after having him killed. But these rules also work against him. Loyalties are bought and sold to the highest bidder, associates and allies become enemies, corrupt cops switch allegiances, and business relationships endure only for as long as they remain financially advantageous. Loyalty in this environment is dead.

And when Tony turns and sees his second-in-command, Manny Ribera [Steven Bauer], together with his younger sister, Gina Montana [Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio], he cannot handle no longer being the exclusive focus of their loyalty. Both have supported him unconditionally despite his cocaine-fueled paranoia and embarrassing public outbursts, yet in his warped perspective, all he can see is betrayal. The irony is that Manny and Gina have just married, making all three of them literally family, something Tony does not discover until after he shoots Manny. In attempting to punish an imagined act of disloyalty, Tony destroys perhaps the most profound expression of loyalty available to him.

Tony has become so conditioned to a world in which loyalty is transactional and betrayal inevitable that he can no longer recognize genuine loyalty when it is directly in front of him. And that profound sense of moral isolation and social alienation can become a condition of unqualified success in any industry where attaining power makes one increasingly vulnerable to exploitation, betrayal and displacement by others seeking the same position. In Scarface, the volatility of the drug trade serves as good a metaphor as any for legitimate professions and markets that are likewise susceptible to ruthless competition, transactional relationships and the moral compromises demanded by unchecked ambition.

It is an aspect of the American Dream rarely discussed. We are endlessly told how to pursue it, but considerably less about what happens once we actually succeed. Tony’s tragedy is that he cannot survive being there. It raises the question of how much of ourselves must be sacrificed in obtaining it, and how we survive once we have.

I remember during my student teaching days having a department administrator come in for an unscheduled classroom observation, which could prove a nerve-wracking experience for a new educator. At the time, my students were deep in thought during an in-class timed formal assessment for which they had been allowed to bring prepared research and sources. The administrator walked into a silent classroom, save for the sounds of pencils scribbling, erasers scraping, breathing and seats being readjusted. I recall her coming up to me, smiling, and quietly stating, “There is a lot of action going on in here,” before quietly exiting the classroom. I had made the mistake of thinking she wanted a performance, but seeing the students engaged and on task was all the evidence she needed of my competence before moving on with her day.

That same sense of charged stillness, of teeming activity contained within silence, is on full display in the masterfully paced and minimalist execution of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (Gaumont, 1956), a prison film about French Resistance fighter Fontaine [François Leterrier] undertaking the tedious and exhaustively meticulous process of planning an escape from Nazi confinement. Unlike preceding prison films like Jules Dassin’s ensemble-based Brute Force (Universal, 1947) and Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (Paramount, 1953), A Man Escaped is not a collaborative team enterprise or grand spectacle, but something conceived and executed essentially in isolation.

Others certainly assist by passing along information, particularly the reconnaissance that can only come from the mistakes and experiences of those who have tried before. In this case, a fellow inmate named Orsini (Jacques Ertaud) discovers the existence of a second wall that must be traversed, crucial information he passes on to Fontaine before being executed. For Fontaine, every attempt carries the inherent risk that some unforeseen complication will undermine his chances, with life and death hanging in the balance.

In presenting this vision, Bresson is masterful in his use of silence and tight shots that linger, creating a ruminative, self-aware atmosphere in which the audience is left to consider all the possible negative outcomes at any given point in the narrative. This is especially true when the danger of Fontaine being exposed seems to be rapidly approaching, sometimes materializing and other times simply passing him by. The viewing experience is one of sustained tension and suspense, probably not dissimilar from the experience of an escapee whose every movement could determine whether he lives or dies.

Much of the film is remarkably quiet, filled with the sounds of distant footsteps and muffled conversations between guards, broken primarily by Fontaine’s voice-over narration, which gives us access to thoughts otherwise concealed by his isolation. With fellow prisoners being tortured, there is also the possibility of being exposed by another inmate, a danger that becomes especially pronounced when Fontaine gains a cellmate in the young François Jost [Charles Le Clainche], whom he initially suspects may be a plant and therefore evidence that his plan has already been discovered. Within this atmosphere of unrelenting paranoia and uncertainty, A Man Escaped becomes a film about the interior dimensions of action: observation, calculation, patience and restraint, all the invisible activity that narratives built around greater visual spectacle often overlook to their own detriment.

I'm fully aware that the impetus for the globetrotting Indiana Jones [Harrison Ford] character was, at its core, a nostalgic look back at the action serials and pulp adventure heroes of the 1930s, with their intrepid narratives of exotic locales, ancient mysteries and fearless protagonists. These stories reflected the bravado of a young American century, celebrating individualism, self-reliance and the assumption that even the most dangerous and unfamiliar corners of the world could be conquered through courage and ingenuity.

Reviving that archetype in the 1980s was particularly resonant. After the political disillusionment, economic stagnation and cultural malaise of the 1970s, followed by recession and severe unemployment in the early years of the new decade, American audiences were ripe for stories that offered encouragement and a rejuvenation of national spirit. Indiana Jones provided precisely that kind of escapism: a hero drawn from an idealized American past who confronted an uncertain world with confidence, resourcefulness and sheer force of will.

Nor was this nostalgic impulse unique to Indiana Jones. Films as different as The Right Stuff (Warner Bros., 1983), the Back to the Future trilogy (Universal, 1985–1990), Stand by Me (Columbia, 1986) and The Natural (TriStar, 1984) all look backward toward idealized versions of America, recovering qualities that the present seemed to have lost: optimism, innocence, heroism and faith in the individual

But nostalgia is by its very nature selective, and the past that Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (Paramount, 1981) resurrects also carries some of the colonial assumptions of the pulp adventures it celebrates. Foreign countries become exotic playgrounds for Western adventurers, Indigenous people exist largely at the periphery of their own histories, and cultural objects become prizes to be discovered, possessed and transported elsewhere.

This is apparent from the opening sequence, in which Jones enters an ancient temple in what the film identifies only as “South America” to remove a golden Indigenous idol. The setting is Peru, yet its particular national or cultural identity matters so little that an entire continent is deemed sufficient identification. More importantly, the film never seriously questions Jones' right to take the object. His belief that such artifacts “belong in a museum” distinguishes him from men like René Belloq [Paul Freeman], who seek them for money and power, but it also reflects the paternalistic assumption that Western institutions are the natural custodians of other cultures' material heritage. Given the contemporary repatriation of objects acquired through looting, illegal trafficking and colonial extraction, that assumption has become particularly difficult to ignore. Peru ultimately functions less as a society with its own history and cultural claims than as a place for Indiana Jones to have an adventure, with little consideration given to the relationship its people might have to the very objects he seeks.

The same dynamic extends to the film's central conflict. Jones and the Nazis compete for the Ark of the Covenant across Nepal and Egypt, while the people who actually inhabit these countries are largely relegated to the background. The presence of the Third Reich makes the moral division easy: obviously we want Jones to prevail. Yet their unambiguous evil also obscures a more interesting question: Why does preventing the Nazis from possessing the Ark necessarily mean that the Americans are entitled to possess it? The film never seriously considers a third possibility: that neither power has any particular right to it.

There is also a strange irony in Hitler's desire for the Ark. A regime built around virulent antisemitism is seeking one of the foundational sacred objects of the ancient Israelites. Raiders explains this in practical terms: Hitler believes its supernatural power can make his armies invincible. He need not respect the religious tradition that produced it; he need only believe its sacred power can be converted into a weapon. The Nazis are, in effect, attempting to appropriate the spiritual power of the very people they intend to destroy.

Yet Raiders itself offers a clever final complication. After Jones saves the Ark from the Nazis, the United States government takes possession of it, denies him access and promises that “top men” are studying it. Instead, it is sealed inside a crate and disappears into an endless government warehouse. The Americans are certainly not morally equivalent to the Nazis, but the ending quietly undermines the assumption that American possession necessarily represents the proper destination for the object.

This is ultimately what complicates my enjoyment of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It is escapist entertainment rather than serious history, and extraordinarily effective entertainment at that. But when escapism depends upon resurrecting an idealized version of the past, what that nostalgia leaves out matters. Raiders revives the excitement, confidence and romanticism of the old adventure serial, but it also inherits some of the cultural hierarchies and blind spots that made that romantic vision possible in the first place.

Honor is a curious thing. It is perhaps most enduring when rooted in love, not love in its romantic sense but as a broader commitment to the well-being of others. If love provides the emotional impulse to care for people, communities or ideals, honor is the discipline of giving that care moral form. It compels people to act according to a code of conduct rather than immediate self-interest, reflecting the belief that one's obligations to others matter. Honor therefore requires sacrifice. It demands fidelity to principles even when such commitments carry personal costs, because no community can endure if every individual places private advantage above the common good.
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Reality, of course, often rewards the opposite. Most people navigate life according to their own interests, which frequently conflict with the honorable aspiration of promoting long-term well-being or elevating the human condition through values such as equity, compassion, inclusion, empowerment and sustainability. Every generation likes to imagine that it has discovered a new moral crisis, complete with its own cultural flashpoints and political vocabulary, yet the tension between principle and self-interest is as old as civilization itself. Dishonor has never required a modern name.

I would argue that John Cromwell's film noir Dead Reckoning (Columbia, 1947) functions as a case study in acting honorably within a world that rewards the exact opposite. Captain "Rip" Murdock [Humphrey Bogart] is a decorated paratrooper who returns stateside alongside his friend, Sergeant Johnny Drake (William Prince), following their service in France during World War II. Both men are summoned to Washington, D.C., to receive medals for extraordinary valor, but before they arrive, Drake disappears from their train without explanation.

Murdock follows his trail to the Southern coastal town of Gulf City, where he learns that Drake was wanted for murder and has since died in a fiery car crash, his body burned beyond recognition. His investigation gradually exposes a world of municipal corruption, organized crime, blackmail and competing hidden agendas. From the moment he begins pulling on the thread, almost every person he encounters emerges as a potential accomplice in his friend's death. Murdock is therefore forced to navigate an environment in which appearances are unreliable and virtually everyone possesses some ulterior motive.

What distinguishes Dead Reckoning from many of its film noir contemporaries is not its visual style so much as its dependence on language. Many noirs establish their fatalism through shadow-drenched compositions, expressionistic lighting and memorable set pieces that allow the environment itself to communicate moral decay. Cromwell's film is far more restrained. The dialogue performs much of the narrative heavy lifting, to the point that the film sometimes feels less like a conventional motion picture than a stage play adapted for the screen. Characters explain, deflect, rationalize and lie far more often than they act.

The result is a plot that can occasionally feel needlessly convoluted, even contrived, with pacing that periodically stalls under the weight of its own exposition. Yet that quality may be entirely appropriate. In a world composed of smoke, mirrors and self-serving narratives, words become the primary currency. Every conversation is a negotiation, every explanation a potential deception and every declaration of virtue an invitation to skepticism.

The film's central question is not merely who killed Johnny Drake, but whether anyone in this world still possesses a genuine sense of honor. Murdock's persistence stems not simply from curiosity or a desire for revenge, but from his refusal to abandon a fallen comrade. Where others view relationships as transactional, Murdock treats them as moral obligations. His honor is not an abstract ideal but an act of love expressed through duty, even in a world that has long since stopped believing in either.

There is an air of dominion embedded within the institution of marriage. You don’t need to look back at social customs like dowries, arranged marriages and coverture to understand the ingrained subservience of women in the whole enterprise. You can just look at the naming rights alone. It’s right there. If it weren’t for the religious sanction or tax breaks afforded married couples, domestic partnerships would undoubtedly be much more common.
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The much-ballyhooed sanctity of marriage has arguably been in question since divorce was invented, but in recent decades the variety and visibility of differing forms of relationships have expanded as young people have adopted increasingly open and progressive attitudes on such matters, courageously unencumbered by tradition or, again, tax breaks. In the modern era, perhaps this shift began with the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, but by the 1990s the concept of a polyamorous relationship was becoming less taboo.

Gregg Araki has long been interested in themes and subjects that challenge normative culture, from heteronormativity and fixed sexual identity to sexual respectability politics, the mythology of suburbia as wholesome, conventional masculinity and the moralization of sex. Underlying these concerns is a broader skepticism toward social arrangements presented as natural, proper or inevitable, particularly those governing how people are expected to love, desire and relate to one another. In Splendor (Samuel Goldwyn, 1999), Araki extends that skepticism to romantic exclusivity itself, thoughtfully examining a polyamorous relationship through the prism of the traditional lighthearted screwball romantic comedy.

The film follows Los Angeles transplant and aspiring actress Veronica [Kathleen Robertson] as she negotiates relationships with the inquisitive and considerate music critic Abel [Johnathon Schaech] and the animalistic and muscular Zed [Matt Keeslar]. Each seemingly represents a different aspect of what Veronica desires in an ideal partner, together offering something both invigoratingly libidinous and spontaneous while also intellectually engaging, curious and emotionally attentive to her needs. Fraught with consternation over whom to ultimately choose, she gradually comes to the realization that she is not socially obligated to choose at all. It is this transformative abandonment of social norms that Araki is interested in investigating, particularly the willingness of two heterosexual men to consent to such an arrangement, forsaking their own claims to romantic exclusivity and possession that have historically defined conventional relationships.

But even that arrangement eventually becomes routine, and familiarity apparently does breed contempt. A third man enters the picture in Ernest [Eric Mabius], who possesses an attribute neither Abel nor Zed can offer: economic and institutional power. What he represents is not animal magnetism or intellectual compatibility, but stability, security and the promise of a conventional future, something foundational upon which Veronica can ostensibly build a life. His arrival therefore complicates Araki’s experiment. Having rejected romantic exclusivity in favor of a relationship structured around desire and emotional fulfillment, Veronica is confronted with the material incentives that have always helped sustain the institution of marriage in the first place. That she eventually chooses the uncertainty of love with Abel and Zed over the comfort and security of a wealthy partner in Ernest, on their wedding day no less, doesn’t hide the fact that the latter was tempting, even for someone as progressively open-minded as Veronica.

It leaves one thinking that the reason such arrangements don’t happen more often has less to do with love or desire than with the boring, practical, non-amorous considerations of everyday life, such as housing, health insurance, inheritance and, yes, tax benefits.

There is something curious about a particular strain of American social culture in that many people find it surprisingly difficult to tell someone "no" in a face-to-face encounter, especially when the other person approaches them politely, confidently and with seemingly good intentions. Rejecting such a person can feel socially awkward, as though one has violated an unspoken expectation of civility. Perhaps it is a product of the country's Protestant heritage, or perhaps it is simply an outgrowth of American cultural norms that place a premium on agreeableness, helpfulness and positive self-presentation.

Social psychologists might describe much of this behavior as a consequence of the unwritten norms that make civil society possible: reciprocity, cooperation and a general presumption of good faith. We generally assume that people present themselves honestly, that civility should be met with civility and that apparent authority should be treated as legitimate until there is reason to believe otherwise. When someone presents themselves as credible, friendly or legitimate, we feel a subtle pressure to respond in kind. To refuse without an obvious justification can create a form of cognitive dissonance, as though our actions have fallen out of step with our self-image as decent, accommodating people. Saying "no" therefore feels less like a simple social decision than a small moral failure.

Confidence artists understand this vulnerability intimately. Their greatest asset is seldom an elaborate scheme so much as an instinctive understanding of how reluctant most people are to violate the expected rules of social engagement. People naturally hesitate to create an awkward scene, challenge an apparently reasonable stranger or accuse someone of deception without evidence. Instead, they accept the social script that has been presented to them, assuming that if someone is acting as though they belong, they probably do. By the time that hesitation gives way to suspicion, the con artist has already moved on.

Michael Ritchie's Fletch (Universal, 1985) is built upon this very premise, pushing it to absurd comedic extremes. Undercover reporter Irwin "Fletch" Fletcher [Chevy Chase] shamelessly assumes a dazzling array of false identities, ridiculous costumes and fabricated backstories to piece together the convoluted mystery of a beachfront narcotics operation and its connections to prominent aviation executive Alan Stanwyck [Tim Matheson] and Police Chief Jerry Karlin [Joe Don Baker]. Fletch is essentially a confidence man, albeit a benevolent one. His greatest strength is not his investigative ability but his complete absence of social embarrassment. He never hesitates, never second-guesses himself and never gives his mark an opportunity to question the role he has assumed. Instead, he confidently presents each fabrication as though it were the most natural thing in the world, knowing that most people will follow his lead rather than risk the discomfort of interrupting the social performance.
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They reciprocate the reality he has invented.

It is an especially intriguing dynamic because Chevy Chase's comedic persona had long been built upon that very quality. Whether on Saturday Night Live or behind the "Weekend Update" desk, a role he originated, Chase cultivated a smug, self-assured intellect who delivered rapid-fire asides with an air of effortless superiority. His jokes often landed a half-step ahead of his audience, inviting them to realize they had been outsmarted only after the fact. That comedic instinct overlaps almost perfectly with the psychology of a successful confidence artist. Both depend upon unwavering confidence, rapid improvisation and an instinctive understanding of the invisible rules that govern everyday social life. Both succeed by encouraging other people to accept a fiction without pausing long enough to question it. The difference is that Fletch deploys those talents in the service of justice rather than personal enrichment, making him less a criminal than a modern trickster hero who turns the invisible rules of civil society into his greatest weapon. His most effective disguise is never a fake mustache, an outlandish alias or one of his ridiculous costumes. It is his unshakeable confidence that other people will choose politeness over skepticism, cooperation over confrontation and social harmony over the embarrassment of calling a bluff.