Some early viewers have been offended by the movie’s “cool, jokey complacency”. The jokes come mostly “at the expense of the myriad political victims of America’s relentless interventionist politics”. Certainly, for those used to the paranoid thrillers from the Seventies like The Parallax View (1974) or The Domino Principle (1977),  which sought to lay bare America’s secret history, McDonagh’s flip, caustic tone seems a deliberate affront. In place of Deep Throat’s gravelly sotto voce in an underground garage, we have a spook laughing about messing up other people’s countries while on a mini-break.

McDonagh, in having Chris spill secrets from his bar stool, deliberately upends the conventions of the great conspiracy thrillers of the Seventies, which depended on the scarcity of disclosure. Their climaxes usually came with a congressional inquiry or a newspaper scoop: Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975) ends with Robert Redford’s CIA bookworm on the pavement outside the New York Times, having handed over the story. All the President’s Men (1974) ends with a fusillade of teletyping. To adapt the old Watergate maxim, crimes require a cover-up to register as crimes — and a heroic press to unmask them.

Fifty years on, the secrets are out. Or rather, the secrets are content. Conspiracy theories are the raw material of some of the most popular podcasts and YouTube channels in the world, and they are regularly spouted from the presidential podium. Meanwhile the actual record has never been more available: WikiLeaks cables, Edward Snowden’s slides, and tens of thousands of pages of JFK files declassified by presidential order. There is, if anything, too much of it. Revelation no longer registers, in the same way that Trump’s malfeasance barely registers, because he is so open about it. Asked in January why he was allowing so much conflict of interest, he said plainly: “because I found out that nobody cared.” Why bother with the cover-up?

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The flourishing of American paranoia in the Seventies took its cue from Richard Hofstadter’s seminal essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, first published in November 1964. For Hofstadter, this political approach was used by everyone from John Robison to Joe McCarthy, waving his lists around frantically in hearings. It was pedantic, mock-scholarly, piling up documents and footnotes, then leaping from real facts to a fantastic conclusion: usually the unmasking of the hidden enemy set on destroying American civilization. For all the implausibility of, say, Hollywood being a hotbed of Soviet sleeper agents, the paranoid worldview ends up more coherent than reality, because it leaves no room for accident or ambiguity. Everything can, ultimately, be explained. The paranoiac is therefore a dramatist who has forgotten they are making it up.

If the style of Seventies paranoia cinema owes a lot to Hofstadter, it is Dick Cheney we must thank for much of the content. At a lunch with editors of the New York Times on 16 January 1975, President Ford was pressed on why anyone should trust the commission he had appointed 12 days earlier to investigate the CIA. The agency’s own internal record of its past operations — the so-called “Family Jewels” — held material, Ford said, that would “blacken the reputation of every President back to Harry Truman”.

“Like what?” asked one of the editors.

“Like assassination.”

When Ford’s commission duly reported that June, the assassinations weren’t in it. Cheney, the president’s 34-year-old deputy assistant, had gone through the draft with a pen, paying particular attention to the 86-page chapter on plots against foreign leaders. He inserted recommendations the commission had never voted on, deleted ones it had, and, where the commission had found CIA activities unlawful, recast them as merely exceeding statutory authority or as “improper”.

Cheney’s pen marked a bad day for American democracy but a great one for the country’s thriller writers. The reality of the CIA’s plots, even in the redacted form that appeared in the report of the Senate’s Church Committee that November, was a catalog of bungled kidnaps and assassination attempts, subcontracted to Mafia hoods, Cuban exiles and Corsican gunmen, and, cigars poisoned with botulinum.

It was enough, in the words of the report, to “strain the imagination” — and the gap between the redacted public record and the reality fed thriller writers and Hollywood screenwriters with the myth of CIA invincibility for 50 years, in everything from Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite (1975) to Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), which gave the CIA a starring role in Dallas, right up to the Bourne films, which have the CIA tracking a man across Europe in real time from a bank of screens in Langley.

When the agency’s darkest skeletons were finally declassified in June 2007, director Paul Greengrass printed out all 693 pages and gave them to the cast of The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) — in retrospect, maybe the last gasp of the paranoid style in American filmmaking. The movie’s Operation ‘Blackbriar’ was directly based on the illegal surveillance operations of CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton which over two decades had secretly opened more than 200,000 letters passing between the United States and the Soviet Union as well as indexing some 300,000 Americans for being in the anti-war movement.

Today, believers don’t need official documents. Online, they can find thousands of fellow fantasists to back up their ideas and algorithms to amplify their most outlandish theories. The Covid pandemic proved a ferocious accelerant. Uncertainty about whether everyone else would follow the rules fed a more generalized distrust not of the “enemy above”, as Jesse Walker puts it in The United States of Paranoia (2013), but the “Enemy Within”: paranoia directed not at shadowy government agents, but at neighbors behind their picket fences and lawn sprinklers. As a Twilight Zone episode once had it, the monsters are on Maple street.

The circle of distrust narrows, but it never quite reaches the mirror. What the paranoiac fears most is not persecution but irrelevance. Better to be the object of a thousand plots than to discover that no one is thinking about you at all. That is Chris’s predicament in Wild Horse Nine. Malkovich plays him as an Angleton gone to seed, monologuing into a Dictaphone for a memoir to be published after his death, and blabbing state secrets to strangers to watch them react. He isn’t a whistleblower; he’s a man testing whether disclosure still has any voltage, and finding that it doesn’t.

This is the condition Hofstadter didn’t foresee: not that the paranoid style would turn apocalyptic, but that its apocalypses would become so commonplace as to be banal. The hero’s discovery is everyone else’s Tuesday. What’s left, when revelation is worthless, is loose-lipped farce. In HBO’s White House Plumbers (2023), the Watergate burglars, as played by Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux, are bunglers straight out of Veep: they can barely get through a door. Chaos or conspiracy? How about both?

I waited six days. But still the theater was packed (my wife and I had to sit in the front row, and she clutched my hand in the Polyphemus scenes where poor Bill Irwin was doing his technological best to scare us — chewing live Greek soldiers, et cetera). The audience seemed ready for a large Wow! But there was an odd silence, as if some subversive word had got around. It can be fascinating to watch an audience watching a film: and it’s unmistakable sometimes, the way respect can turn to regret.

Anyway, our full house sat through it, as dogged and drained of passion as Matt Damon’s weary, soured college professor Odysseus. But, like Matt, we weren’t with it — and if you’re going to cherish large audiences at the movies you have to hope for a kind of communion. It’s like the crowd on a roller coaster, learning how every looming Up precedes a wipe-out Down. Great movies teach us their rhythm so that we may ride along on the thrill and the dread.

Consider the opening of Jaws. That film does not compromise with our attention: we are given no freedom. From the outset, there is the pulsing music (a rite of summer) and the relentless forward motion of some underwater hunter presence. The credits come up on top of this shot — as if to say, for a moment, don’t worry, this is the usual thing, the way movie stories begin. Be calm, like the ocean late on a summer evening.

We see a group of kids hanging out on the beach. We hear their vague chatter. We appreciate that a boy is looking at a girl, in the same old way. She gets up; he follows her. He calls out to “Chrissy”. The camera pans, left to right, just as it did in showing us the beach and the group. In silhouette the youngsters are stripping off as they run to the water. We know where they think they are going. The knowledge builds like arousal. That sea is so wet in the moonlight. We are taken over by the force of desire. So when Chrissy, in deep water, is startled by some mouth tugging at her, we are ravished, too. It is as if the god of cinema is sweeping us away. Before the story can start, we have been consumed by the divinity of the force. It is with us.

What on earth, or at sea, am I doing, apparently assigned to The Odyssey but talking about Jaws? I am trying to explain the gods — no, not the scenario in which big-G God struggles to keep his place. I mean the Greek gods, the cruel arbiters of fate that lurk beneath the surface of the Homeric story, and who have nothing to do with the strained moral aftermath of our God-nostalgic culture. Forget that trite scheme of apprehension — we are most gripped by music, a forward tracking shot and the certainty that our participation has been hijacked by the force. There is a god of cinema, and we like to feel it is a shark coming after us. 

If you’re making a movie from Homer, that is the required state of helpless belief, like terror. In which case the face of Odysseus has to have a nobility that is growing older before our eyes; an erotic attention — because this film must be about watching and desiring; and a fatal, flawed power in him that is cunning but tragic. And that is not quite Matt Damon.

You can say you are showing the 10 years after the fall of Troy when Odysseus does not go home; you can string together a series of fanciful adventures, with or without special effects; you can make a pretense of saying, well, please understand that Odysseus is upset by that war he won, as if in grief or some convenient PTSD. You can ask Damon to put on armor, a helmet, a beard and guilt; you can give him tin lines when every time he opens his mouth he should utter music and existential anguish. “Oh gee,” says Matt, “I can’t do that. I’m only Matt Damon.”

Not that being Matt Damon is unworthy. He has been an ingenious, valuable supporting actor — that’s how Nolan used him as General Groves in Oppenheimer. That’s how, for 10 minutes or so, he was so electric in Courage Under Fire (1996) as Ilario, a liar who is coming apart. And there are many other pictures that place Damon highly as a professional. But it is in his straightforward modesty that he will not be able to hide from us or himself that he doesn’t know what he is doing trying to be Odysseus. Matt is smart. He got into Harvard even if he didn’t finish there. But he cannot lose sight of how Penelope is more central or more now instead of tempests at sea and horrors in the caves.

Penelope is the wife of Odysseus. When he went off to Troy (and that was 10 years before the 10 years in which he pretends to be coming home), he left her with their son, Telemachus, as queen of Ithaca. And in what amounts to 20 years, Penelope has grown older, more rueful and intense in her longing for her husband. She is besieged by suitors who tell her Odysseus must be dead so won’t she marry them instead. Whereupon, the cunning wife — truly, they are suited — says she cannot take a new husband while she is weaving a shroud for her lost father-in-law. Thus she weaves, only to undo her tapestry at night while the suitors are asleep.

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That is a beguiling narrative device (so close to the Scheherazade method) and it is a marvel, or proof of his thinness of imagination, that Nolan hardly attempts to show it. It is as if he fears tapestry will bore us — so let him play at the travails and adventure, frantic scenes of battle, and the infinite landscape of journeying. Did the director decide that his audience would lose interest without lavish swordplay, terrifying monsters et cetera? Did that distract him from the remembering face of a woman growing older yet more confirmed in her feelings of love (because love flowers best when it is not realized)?

The pity of this failure is that Anne Hathaway seems capable of being a mature Penelope. The actress is 43 now, and brave enough not to magic that away in so big a picture it could determine the rest of her career. Hathaway looks her age. She has consented to what can be a fatal candor in an era of so many new lies with screen skin. This is all the more admirable in that the same screen offers Lupita Nyong’o in only a few shots as a plausible version of “the most beautiful woman in the world”. And then there is Charlize Theron as Calypso.

Theron is 50 now, and she does not look it. No need to ask how that has been accomplished. Let’s just say that she is there or thereabouts in this incoherent narrative as a woman on the beach in a nice line of après-swim wear (off the shoulder and off the soul), wistful with longing for Odysseus. We get the point — that he and she have been exploring their inner lives for five years or so. (We guess the screen Penelope has been seeing them in her dreams, sewing and resewing the tapestry.)

To be blunt about it, in screen terms — or in what we actually feel struggling with the ramshackle narrative — Odysseus has not gone home because Calypso is such an obliging lay. Nolan does not need to show the engineering of their coupling. The best bodies in this film belong to the Trojan horse and the ship that Odysseus sails. Give that designer an Oscar — the only one the film deserves.

Am I being too facetious in treating a movie project where gods have withdrawn to leave room for the $250 million budget? That money is a god as fierce as anything in Homer. So the picture goes to so many tourist-ready locations — you can imagine cruise ships following the itinerary. It thrills to the Trojan horse (so Nolan films it in every way he can count). It exults in the ship, no matter that it is several centuries too modern. It still leaves room for inexplicable things — what is Zendaya doing in the film? Yet it cannot inhabit the mystery of a marriage where the spouses are most in love when far apart and worrying over reunion. Fix on that and the picture might not need the sprawl of its 172 minutes.

A few years ago, another film, The Return, understood the sad poetics in Homer and presented Ralph Fiennes as an Odysseus exhausted by nobility as well as his journey. Juliette Binoche was Penelope. That film was only 116 minutes long, but its passage of time was more palpable. The Return is instructive because it drops most of the gaudy adventures to stress how Penelope does not quite recognize Odysseus on his return. She has to learn him again, and that is poignant because Fiennes and Binoche have a history on screen: The English Patient and a Wuthering Heights.

I am not offering a conventional film review. But I’m prompted by the busy emptiness of this Odyssey, such that it is only worth writing about if one can suggest some remedy or alternative. Nolan is adorned now in reputation and budget, but he has a history of missing the point. On Dunkirk, he neglected how Germany let so many soldiers escape on the hard beaches, instead of driving them into the sea. On Oppenheimer, he had no time for the refugee mathematicians making the Bomb sweet, or the Washington that approved the venture, so “Oppy” became the fall guy. And so with The Odyssey, he overlooks how a modern film might make the story gripping.

Would it be compelling now to take the difficulty in believing in the Odyssey as your subject? Imagine a film unit roaming the world to film “adventures”, with pliant actresses on every beach. Then think of the director’s wife at home in Beverly Hills, wondering how her god is doing in IMAX, while studio suits come calling to take her to Palm Springs for the weekend. And Hathaway is halfway there already. But Odysseus needs a late middle-aged irony, and the hip asides of a droll director who sees how fatuous and tiring the Odyssey is. And maybe Penelope does succumb here or there — in the way Odysseus does what any guy is likely to do on the loose. Think of George Clooney as this distracted director. Do I see a comedy? I think I do. Something to jostle the stupor of this aimless epic. When I saw it — in that packed theater — as it ended a couple of people tried to applaud. Their clapping died a death as no one else joined in. The movie was greeted in silence — not the quiet of deep emotion, but a mix of fatigue and disbelief. We’ll see how long its glory lasts. 

I’m thinking of a movie about smart careerists who can’t understand why they’re making The Odyssey. Not when the locations they go to are ravaged by fire, flood and famine so that it’s all the director and the actress can do to swap a wisecrack in the morning. When the budget of the picture is such a Polyphemus it has become the film’s true subject. 

It might have its moments, as when Odysseus wonders if “home” will be there still, let alone his wife; or when Penelope is about to undo her tapestry once more, with fingertips raw from the needles, and recollecting how a god once warned her not to get into secretarial work or sewing. Whose is the face she keeps putting in the weave?

The Odyssey does not come from the same world as the other pinnacles of Greek culture we all know and love and tweet about. For one thing, it is much older: the events it recounts take place during the late Bronze Age, around 1200 years before the golden age of Attic culture that spawned Socrates and Plato. The poem itself was set down in writing only after centuries of oral transmission — but even the written document is older than not just Plato and Sophocles, but the Persian War, the Olympic Games, and even the Archaic poets like Sappho and Alcaeus. In fact, Homer barely ever uses words that mean “Greek” or “Hellenic” at all: The Iliad and Odyssey are really about a mess of tiny, disunited Mycenaean kingdoms whose subjects wear boar’s tusk helmets and fight with bronze weapons and write, on the rare occasions that they write at all, in a complicated ideographical script called Linear B that was only deciphered in the Fifties. 

No heroic figure better illustrates just how different these two worlds — the Homeric and the Attic — were than Odysseus. It is true that he was often admired by the Greeks of the Athenian Golden Age: the intelligence evinced by his ruses was impossible to ignore for such a self-consciously brainy civilization. But just as frequently, Odysseus was deplored for his lack of scruple, his amorality, his low cunning. Pindar suspected that “the fame of Odysseus is become greater than his toils, through the sweet lays that Homer sang”. Sophocles had his main character, Philoctetes, berate Odysseus for being a “shameless wretch! from whom nor truth nor justice, / Naught that becomes the generous mind, can flow”. Even Socrates, who was generally rather keen on intelligence as a virtue, stopped short of straightforwardly defending the man from Ithaca in the Lesser Hippias, preferring instead to show how his interlocutor is just as bad as Odysseus, because he is a deceiver, not of others, but of himself.  

What was it about Odysseus’s intelligence that proved so unsettling to these vast, rational, civilization-founding minds? In a series of essays and books published in the Sixties and Seventies, the French classicists Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne offer one interesting interpretation. In the Homeric epic, they point out, the words used to evoke Odysseus’s particular kind of intelligence are very different from the words that denote intelligence in later Greek. In Plato and Aristotle, for example, the usual abstractions of choice are nous, logos and episteme — all of which suggest the faculties and forms of knowledge concerned with grasping a stable, intelligible order. Homer, by contrast, tends to use the word metis, which denotes a more practical kind of intelligence. Something flexible, unrepresentable, as variegated as the flecks of light that glint off bronze armor: the uncanny knack some people have for getting things done. 

All through the Odyssey, Homer lingers over Odysseus’s feats of knowhow and craft every bit as lovingly as he does the feats of martial strength performed by Achilles, Hector, and Ajax in the Iliad. In Book 5, we watch him fell trees, bore joints and build with his own hands the raft that carries him from Calypso’s island; he steers himself across the open sea armed only with his knowledge of the stars. In Book 21, we see him string his great bow “like an expert singer skilled at lyre and song” in order to best the outrageous suitors who have colonized his house. In Book 23, we learn of his skills at carpentry, and the fact that he fashioned his marriage bed by carving it from the living trunk of an olive tree. Even the famous scar by which the servant Eurycleia eventually recognizes him is testament to his knowhow — specifically, in the distinctly non-Mycenaean art of hunting for boar. 

What distinguishes these skills from the kind of airy, abstract knowledge we find in, say, Plato? Vernant and Detienne list several divergences, but perhaps the most important is the peculiar relationship metis has with its own formal representation. For Plato and Socrates, a written or spoken representation of the truth is the truth; indeed, words like episteme actually imply some kind of representation of the world. Metis, by contrast, cannot be grasped abstractly; the moment you try to write it down, or codify it, you lose it. Odysseus may be best remembered as a creator of elaborate plans, but these plans are rarely laid out before him as a nice, clear set of steps; they are always provisional, prone to being revised whenever a cyclops bars the doors to the cave you are hiding in, or the sea-god who has taken against you tears apart your raft — when, in short, reality proves to be stranger and more variable than your own ordered representation of it. In Book 13, the goddess Athena explicitly admires this quality in her champion. When she meets him in disguise on the shores of Ithaca — and begins, for what it’s worth, one of the greatest, most under-appreciated flirtation scenes in all literature — she adores the fact that he begins to lie to her without yet knowing why he is lying. He has a blind conviction that pretense might yet prove useful in future improvisations: “Here among mortal men you’re far the best at tactics, spinning yarns, and I am famous among the gods for wisdom, cunning wiles [metis] too.” 

The choice of words is no accident. In ancient Greek theogony, “metis” had another important meaning. Specifically, it was the name given to Athena’s mother — the Oceanid nymph who marries Zeus in the primordial age of the Titans, before the Greek pantheon has settled into its familiar form. As Hesiod records it, after the wedding, the couple receive a prophecy. Metis will bear two children: a daughter, who will match her father in wisdom and strength; and a son, who will one day overthrow him. In response, Zeus swallows Metis whole — “put[s] her away inside his own belly … so that this goddess should think for him, for good and for evil”. The message is clear enough: power and strength are all very well; so too are patriarchal authority and abstract Apolline knowledge. But if you want to be King of the Gods, you gulp down metis, the most mysterious, unrepresentable form of intelligence of all. 

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It is striking, too, how many of Odysseus’s 20th-century admirers seem to single out something like metis as unusually appropriate to the modern age. Joyce, who reimagined Odysseus as an unassuming Jewish advertising agent named Leopold Bloom, always stressed that what he admired most in Homer’s protagonist was his completeness and wholeness, his ability to adapt to any task. He was, according to Joyce, “son to Laertes … father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy, and King of Ithaca” — all of which combine to render him the “most human” character in world literature. Over the course of Ulysses, Odysseus, in his wiliness, his adaptability, his endless capacity for reinventing himself, becomes a kind of antidote to modern alienation: by being identified with him, Bloom somehow transcends his boring bourgeois job and predictable bourgeois relationships, and becomes whole. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt went so far as to suggest the Homeric ethic as an anti-capitalist strategy: “In the world of Homer, Paris and Odysseus help in the building of their houses, Nausicaa herself washes the linen of her brothers, etc. All this belongs to the self-sufficiency of the Homeric hero, to his independence and the autonomic supremacy of his person.”

Nevertheless, there is something slightly unfamiliar about reading the accounts of Joyce and Arendt — or, for that matter, other modern Odysseus-fanciers like T.E. Lawrence and Derek Walcott — in the 21st century. The jury’s decision is in, and it has been decided that the Greek ideal means top-down planning, rational bureaucracy, vast sovereign efforts to make the world conform as neatly to abstract standards as possible. For Le Corbusier, Greek ideals justified razing half of Paris and replacing the curlicued old buildings with Parthenon-esque cuboids; for contemporary politicians, the grand old Greek word “democracy” is used to justify an increasingly inane and arbitrary form of abstract proceduralism. These days, the rational, modern institutions that claim to be the heirs to the Greek tradition — the halls of democratic government, the geometrical housing estates, the immaculate American universities with Greek letters on their porticoes — seem less capable than ever of producing a single individual as well-rounded, as universally capable, as polymetis, as Odysseus.

If there’s one hope I have for the wave of Odyssey-mania that is set to crest this week, it is that it might remind us that the intellectual legacy of Ancient Greece is far more mysterious than our culture likes to remember. The importance of un-representable knowledge is hard to discern in the philosophers of Golden-Age Athens — though even Plato, it must be said, put rationality in its place, giving over a good chunk of the Phaedrus is to the discussion of the revelatory power of the mania induced by poetry and sex and alcohol. But the further back you go, the clearer the mystery gets: the Pythagorean geometers guarded the secret of irrational numbers, and drowned Hippasus for revealing them to the world; the Orphic cults refused to disclose their secret wisdom to anyone who had not undergone elaborate purification rituals. But for my money, it was the earliest Greek writer of all who did it best. No-one since — in any language — has better captured the essential wildness of the human intellect, its storminess, its amplitude, that is matched only by the wine-dark sea. 

In part, The Odyssey is pertinent to Nolan because, unlike many writer-directors, he is devoted to classical storytelling devices, and the poem offers a paradigmatic — and literal — instance of what Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), called the “monomyth” or “hero’s journey”. This is a concept rooted in psychoanalysis and ethnography, and one keenly embraced by Hollywood screenwriters. Nolan has specialized in genre films, but his plots always double as a vehicle for ideas about personal conduct, with the individual challenged to prevail over forces both internal (guilt, fear, anxiety, confusion) and external (malice, violence, corruption) and, beyond these, the volatility of material reality and the hostility of the universe. As Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) tells Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in Batman Begins (2005), “it’s what you do that defines you”. Nolan’s concern with subjective experience in films like Memento (2000) and Inception (2010) has drawn comparisons to phenomenology, but there are echoes of epic poetry in his exploration, via his discursive dialogue, of revenge and justice, understanding and feeling. He has also displayed a taste for mythological allusion: the maze designer in Inception is named Ariadne.

Typically, though, the Nolan character is a man, associated with a familiar role — detective, pilot, soldier, spy — and drawn in abstract or elemental terms. His short Larceny (1996) and micro-budget debut Following (1998) concerned characters called “The Man” and “The Young Man”. In Interstellar (2014), the astronaut abandoned in space is named “Mann”. The British soldier in Dunkirk (2017) is known only as Tommy (i.e. a British soldier). In Tenet (2020), John David Washington plays “The Protagonist”. Bruce Wayne, in the final installment of the Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises (2012), explains: “the idea was to be a symbol.” The longtime Observer film critic Philip French, considering Bruce’s reclusive period of anguished withdrawal in the same film, likened his predicament to that of the injured archer Philoctetes, who Odysseus entices from exile to help defeat the Trojans — a figure mentioned in The Iliad and treated at length by the Greek tragedians, and explored in Edmund Wilson’s once-famous essay on trauma and action, “The Wound and the Bow”.

Nolan’s most recent film, Oppenheimer (2023), provides a concrete portrait of a historical figure and, in using his name as the title, forgoes the classical reference used in the source biography, American Prometheus. But there’s little doubt of the broader dimensions. Oppenheimer’s adversary, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), argues that the physicist stands by his conduct at Los Alamos “because it made him the most important man who ever lived”. Nolan’s own career has taken on fairly outsize dimensions. He is the last 20th-century Hollywood auteur, a heroic holdout who has defied the hegemony of digital (by shooting on film), streaming (his reason for leaving Warner Brothers), Covid (with the summer 2020 release of Tenet), and Barbie (bringing out Oppenheimer on the same day).

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His work isn’t shy of invoking a Great Man tradition or its trappings, whether in his use of paintings like Rothko and Bacon and Picasso and Goya; quotations from Dickens and Robert Frost; or borrowings from Kubrick, David Lean, Michael Mann, Akira Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, and, perhaps above all, the James Bond films, evident in the action and settings of Batman Begins, Inception and Tenet. When Nolan browsed the DVD library of the distributor Criterion, for an online video, his first three choices were Stephen Frears’s The Hit, a thriller about “the dynamics between desperate men”; 12 Angry Men; and Terrence Malick’s war film The Thin Red Line. (The Young Man in Following has pictures on his wall of Jack Nicholson doing his murderous grin in The Shining and the suited robbers in Reservoir Dogs.)

The emphasis in his work is on what it means to be a man — what men are, could be, should be. This strain is especially evident in the Batman films, with “decent men” on the one hand, and on the other, men who “just want to watch the world burn”. (The only time the word “women” is mentioned in the trilogy is in reference to Catwoman breaking out of “women’s correctional”.)

Odysseus, like Oppenheimer, diverges from Nolan’s past protagonists in one central way. For the most part, the Nolan character is a bachelor or widower. The wives or potential future wives kill themselves, die by accident or illness, or are murdered. Odysseus, of course, has a wife. But even though Penelope is waiting in Ithaca, and Mrs Oppenheimer was often by her husband’s side in Los Alamos and Washington (he tells her they “walked through fire together”), isolation nonetheless remains unavoidable.

One option is to hit the road — not in search of company, but of purpose. The Young Man’s peregrinations are fairly short — from his flat off Tottenham Court Road to Soho or Covent Garden, where he falls in with a conman and burglar. (The first flat they rob has a shelf full of travel literature and picaresque narratives: Chatwin, Raban, Don Quixote.) Bruce Wayne, an “unemployed twentysomething” of a different sort, heads further afield: to a monastery in the Himalayas, where he learns he is “truly lost” and shown “a path”. Angier (Hugh Jackman), the magician in the Victorian fantasy The Prestige (2006), makes the long pilgrimage to see Nikola Tesla in Colorado Springs, what he calls “a search for answers”. Cooper, in Interstellar, shoots off to the stars to find a new home for humanity. “We’re explorers, Rom,” he tells another crew member. “This is our boat.” Leonard, the memory-challenged former insurance investigator in Memento, drives around Los Angeles on the hunt for the man who killed his wife, or so he has tricked himself into believing. The Protagonist, for his part, is consigned to endless Bond-like globe-trotting. Resilience is key. Nolan has said that the final moments of Interstellar were “directly nourished” by the ending of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” (otherwise known as Odysseus): “strong in will /To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

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The battle over Paul Thomas Anderson

By Matt Feeney

The governing aim is the restoration of order. Leonard resists the idea that there was “no reason” for his wife’s death, “no conspiracy”, and so invents one. As he says in voiceover: “I have to believe that my actions still have meaning.” Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose job in Inception is “to navigate other people’s minds”, must purge his guilt for his wife’s death to stop her invading his dreams — plaguing him when he’s at work. The Protagonist has been assigned to undo the reversal of entropy. Nolan’s Batman wants to overhaul a city ruled by criminality and further threatened by the Joker, a self-described “agent of chaos”. Nolan’s work is a tribute to the power of rationality, a vision of cool-headedness that encompasses an Odyssey-like array of ingenious tricks and stratagems. As Bruce Wayne says, “theatricality and deception are powerful weapons”. From the Young Man, Leonard, and Wayne, to the dream “extractor” Cobb, the scientist Brand (Michael Caine) in Interstellar, who sends a Nasa team on a suicide mission; the French soldier who leaves Dunkirk in an English uniform; the Protagonist going undercover as an art buyer — Nolan’s characters lie or conceal sometimes out of self-interest, and sometimes for a higher purpose, occasionally both at once. Something similar could be said of his disjointed structures which, like his fondness for tilted camera angles, are designed both to bring pleasure and reveal underlying truth or connections. Nolan has been keen to present this tendency not as obscurantist or avant-garde but something like the opposite: “You go back to The Odyssey, it’s never been the case that you’re supposed to tell a story from beginning to end.”

But whatever the quirks of the telling, the trials of a solitary hero provides the spine. In Nolan’s Batman trilogy, the enemy is collective in nature: the League of Shadows; “organized crime”; the mob rule unleashed by the Joker (who also boasts that he brought “Gotham’s white knight” down to “our level”). The countervailing collective forces — civil society, “the structures”, “the rules” — are powerless, and so Batman must serve as a one-man exponent of liberal harmony. Though Bruce Wayne, orphan-turned-bachelor, doesn’t work alone, his abettors are fellow outliers; Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) is the rare uncorrupted Gotham cop, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) the only executive at Wayne Enterprises with integrity. When Gordon asks, “you’re just one man?” Batman replies, “now we’re two.”

But that’s the limit. There’s a striking convention in the Batman films whereby the central character, in both his civilian and masked-vigilante modes, is almost never shown talking to more than one person at a time. The trilogy alternates between vast action set-pieces and a series of tête-à-têtes involving Wayne and one of a dozen others. Again and again, scenes are constructed so that a potential third wheel withdraws, or else the interloper on a two-man exchange pops in for the briefest of interludes, to deliver an update or bulletin, or Batman scarpers more or less mid-sentence (“he does that,” Gordon reassures the other bystander). The parting shot offered by Michael Keaton’s Wayne in his first appearance in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) — “Will you two excuse me?” — is something that Nolan’s version is virtually unable to utter across a trio of lengthy films.

Notable in this context is that The Dark Knight Rises ends with a shot of the young police officer John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) on the verge of becoming “Robin” — and on unusual terms. It’s a role he will take up as a kind of successor, by inheriting the contents of the Batcave. In Nolan’s world, even the traditional sidekick must act alone. A partnership of that kind cannot exist even as an off-screen, post-credits possibility.

Camaraderie or a sense of community proves persistently elusive. The Young Man describes the experience of fixing on a person in a crowd: “all of a sudden that person isn’t part of the crowd anymore. They become an individual, just like that.” When Leonard tells someone, “It’s great that you’re helping like this”, she replies, “I’m helping you because you helped me”. The first thing we learn about the magicians in The Prestige is that Borden (Bale) is on trial for the murder of Angier. A flashback depicting on-stage collaboration soon gives way to their shared manager, Cutter (Caine), pitting them against each other with a test.

It might be said that Batman, orphan-turned-bachelor, is bound to be a lonely soul; Memento inhabits the Darwinian landscape of film noir; The Prestige adapts a novel — by Christopher Priest — about one-upmanship. But Nolan’s individualist leanings emerge in surprising contexts. There’s a moment near the beginning of Inception, notionally a film about teamwork, when Cobb advises his colleagues, “every man for himself”. The entire story then hinges on Cobb’s ability to return to his children in the United States — all of the corporate subterfuge, the dreams-within-dreams, exists as backdrop for a man to find what he calls “a way home”. Cobb’s first name is “Dom” (a play on “domicile”).

Oppenheimer does what he can to frame himself as a team player. Talking of the atomic bomb, he demurs, “it was hardly my invention”. But the film suggests that at the very least he was primus inter pares. (Nolan has compared his role to that of a film director.) The riposte “it was you on the cover of Time” could be extended: it is him on the film’s poster, it is his face in close-up intercut with a shot of the globe with which the film ends. We are left in little doubt that the Great Man is the one who matters, who stands apart and above — the known quantity, the household name. The film accords disproportionate attention to a tiny cameo for Albert Einstein. And when Strauss’s candidacy for secretary of commerce is rejected by the Senate, his aide, checking his notes, chooses to mention just one of the 48 Democrats who voted against him: “Kennedy, John F. Kennedy.” As Nolan put it, “an individual’s relatable.”

An apparent difference between the two films Nolan has made about the Second World War is that whereas Oppenheimer is candidly concerned with individual agency, Dunkirk portrays a mission involving hundreds of thousands. Nolan said he didn’t want “generals pushing things around maps, I didn’t want Churchill”. But the alternative emphasis — what he called the “collective experience of that historical event” — struggles to gain purchase. The film begins with a shot from behind of six soldiers walking down a residential street. Within 90 seconds, five of them are dead and we are left with Tommy. When he encounters French soldiers at the perimeter, he is immediately told “bon voyage”. Nolan divides the history of the evacuation into three narratives — Tommy’s journey, the tribulations of an airman running low on fuel (Tom Hardy), and the marginally more clubbable story of a civilian sailor who sets out from Weymouth to help the effort. And having resisted the Great Man route, the film ends with Tommy reading aloud Churchill’s “fight them on the beaches” speech.

The seemingly irresistible lure of the lone-struggle dynamic was evident in Nolan’s comments. He insisted that the film was “not about individual heroics” — but almost immediately afterwards, he identified the elements “whose universal significance we wanted to tap” as “the individual instinct for survival” and “the desperation to get home”. He added, “You get into kind of Homeric territory with this stuff” — and not because Dunkirk was a war movie.

The genius of the film, by the celebrated Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, is that it poses these questions without ever forcing simple, didactic answers.

Early on in the story, we know evangelical Christianity is going to be a theme. We hear a Norwegian rendition of “Amazing Grace” sung at a church gathering, and we learn the origin story of the film’s lead couple: the Norwegian Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) was on a humanitarian Christian mission in Romania when she met Mihai Gheorghiu (Sebastian Stan). They now have five kids together and, after years of living in Bucharest, have moved to Lisbet’s picturesque hometown in western Norway, where Mihai takes a job as a technician at the local school.

The couple’s Christian mores soon draw censure from many in the local community. The kids go to church every Sunday and study the Bible every day using a points-based system (you lose points if you misbehave or forget your daily portions). Unlike their peers, the Gheorghiu children aren’t allowed to use YouTube, dance, or own smartphones. Clashes erupt, both at the school and between Gheorghius and their next-door neighbors, the Halsbergs, with whom they have a complex relationship.

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Mats Halsberg (Markus Tønseth), who had initially made a point of warmly welcoming the family, is discomfited by their Christianity (he forbids Mihai from playing “Amazing Grace” on the piano at the local school where he works, even without the words). But his Swedish wife, Mia (Lisa Carlehed), whose outsider perspective perhaps renders her more understanding, gets along with Lisbet, who joins her in taking care of Mats’s wheelchair-bound father, Ake. The children get along, too. Elia Gheorghiu (Vanessa Ceban) forms a particularly close relationship with Noora Halsberg (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), a teenage rebel whose wild ways are in sharp contrast to Elia’s obedience to the Almighty and her parents.

We might expect an arthouse European film to indict the conservative Christian family at its center, mocking the members’ backwardness and showing their dark side. Mungiu himself has a venerable history of confronting religious obscurantism. His Palm-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) tackled the draconian anti-abortion laws in Romania. Beyond the Hills (2012) portrayed an Orthodox convent accusing two women in an intimate relationship of being possessed. R.M.N. (2022), too, paints a picture of a local church in Romania as a regressive institution.

But Fjord takes us on a wholly different path. When officials at the school notice bruises on Elia and her brother, they act swiftly and bring in Norway’s famously zealot Child Welfare Services. Within a day, all five children (even a still-nursing infant) are taken away from the family and placed in foster care. The film thus becomes a courtroom drama, as the Gheorghius throw all they have at a chance to get their children back.

Without surrendering to didacticism or painting a heroic picture of the family, the film gently takes the Gheorghius’ side, pointing out the gaping hypocrisies of the supposedly progressive Norwegian host society. The progressive townspeople, the film suggests, are animated by prejudice: against religious devotion, against the traditional mores of Romanian society.

We live in the age of self-righteous ideological silos, in which partisans of one side don’t bother to learn much about those of the other, often making do with cartoonish views of them. Social progressives and Leftists must be familiar with this phenomenon, having long critiqued the act of “othering” minorities. But liberals and Leftists can be equally prone to “othering” minorities they don’t approve of, as Fjord shows.

The film doesn’t sugarcoat the Gheorghius. Portrayed stoically and firmly by Stan, Mihai is not a particularly likable character, often appearing as dogmatic and mildly authoritarian. There is also no denying that the Gheorghius use corporal punishment as a routine part of parenthood, although the methods of discipline are never quite revealed. The specifics are lost in translation between three languages — English being the lingua franca between all sides — but it seems to be mild spanking, and certainly nothing harsh enough to leave bruises. Having seen how physical the games Noora plays with the kids are, we can assume those to be the cause for the bruises. Noora herself tells her parents as much.

With Mungiu’s typically masterful storytelling, the film shows us all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which the Norwegian progressives harbor prejudice toward these newcomers, because they are the “wrong” type of immigrants, the “wrong” type of minorities. The school is happy to hold formulaic and anodyne celebrations of the indigenous Sami People. But faced with a different minority, it reacts very differently. Any mention of the Bible at school is taken to be verboten “evangelizing,” which seems less like separation of church and state and more like the state enforcing certain ideas and barring others.

The prejudicial treatment also mars the courtroom proceedings. A teacher testifying about the bruises casually lets slip that it’s normal for children to have bruises at that age, since “they are children after all.” It is thus not the bruises-as-evidence, but a very pointed reading of them that impelled the school to act against the family. The prosecutor, meanwhile, uses old Romanian proverbs to portray Mihai as prone to violence. The prosecutor’s assuredness of being right in his viewpoint smacks of the sort of absolutism for which progressives usually reproach the religious Right. At several points during the proceedings, Mihai seems to be on trial for his religious beliefs, not whether he has smacked his children. The family’s mere taking part in church services — fraternizing with the wrong kind of locals —  is treated as suspicious in court. Only certain forms of “integration,” it seems, are approved for immigrants.

The film also tries to show how the supposed progressives are blind to shortcomings on their own side and virtues of the other. Banning YouTube might be draconian, but can anybody argue that unrestricted access to social media and smartphones has been great for kids? We see how the Halsbergs are clueless about parenting Noora (whose shenanigans include faking a suicide by gently cutting her wrist, jumping out of windows, and dangerously taking out boats at all hours of the night). Lisbet’s devoted caring for Ake achieves what the secular experts have failed to do: getting him to talk after long days of dementia-induced silence. Perhaps the Gheorghius have something to teach their new society.

Even so, the film can’t be read as a sign of Mungiu turning to the Right. Nor is this film an indictment of liberalism. In fact, if liberalism is to be defined as a philosophy of individual rights, due process, and tolerance of difference, Fjord stands as a vindication of liberal philosophy. It criticizes the illiberalism of the Norwegian system (Mungiu says the film opposes all forms of “fundamentalism” and “extremism”).

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At several points in the courtroom drama, we gasp at how little due process is observed. When the children are interviewed by the officials, there are no lawyers or psychologists present. The court that rules on the decision to take the kids has little institutional separation from the child-welfare agency. Even the lawyer acquired by the family seems too invested in the system to think it might have made a mistake. After one court session, she refuses to represent the Gheorghius. In this close-knit community, there seems to be an incestuous intimacy between various sources of authority, seriously undermining the principle of judicial independence.

The film’s real heroes, if you ask me, are some of the side characters. Mia, who holds a law degree but hasn’t practiced in ages, agrees to represent the family and works diligently on its behalf, despite grumbling by Mats. At a memorable moment in the trial, the prosecutor reminds her that she wouldn’t fare so well in a Christian conservative society. “If I were there, I’d defend minorities, too,” she says, showing a dedication to equality and individual rights that the uber-liberal prosecutor could learn from.

Then there is the budding friendship between Noora and Elia, which includes breaking all sorts of rules (Noora smuggles a phone to Elia, thus keeping in touch with her even when she is taken to a foster family). By painting a touching image of teenage amity between two girls from wildly different ideological backgrounds, Fjord arguably casts them as the real heroes. In treating each other as humans and friends first, they seem to rise above the ideological rifts that have ripped their community apart.

Mungiu’s film has now brought him his second Palm, making him one of the most decorated filmmakers alive. He is unquestionably the lodestar of Romanian New Wave, which in the past two decades has awed European and global cinema. The film inevitably will also be seen in an intra-European context. In the more than two decades since Romania joined the European Union, its people have encountered all manner of stereotypes. Here we see a Romanian auteur confidently critiquing Nordic political culture, by some lights the pinnacle of European civilization. His roots as a citizen of a formerly Stalinist country have endowed him with a healthy skepticism of state power. This year at Cannes, the fellow New Wave auteur Radu Jude did something similar with his Diary of a Chambermaid, offering acerbic satire in a story about a Romanian nanny working for a family of progressive French intellectuals in Bordeaux.

If these films can show us something, it is the value of a non-didactic cinema that doesn’t rush to confirm our priors, but pushes us to rethink them. It’s what art does best.

The same Winston Churchill, always longing for a fight, and in love with Dreadnoughts, was probably involved in the crazy decision to send two giant battleships, HMS Barham and HMS Ramillies, to the same estuary during the General Strike of 1926. Again, they never actually did anything. Merseysiders are, I would guess, quite proud at having been taken so seriously, though there is no evidence that the tactic made any difference. One has to wonder what would have happened if their ships’ companies had been ordered to open fire on Liverpool. I guess it would have gone badly for whoever gave the order. The famous Kronstadt sailors, who helped out in Lenin and Trotsky’s Petrograd putsch of 1917, may have been fooled by the Bolsheviks at the start. But they rebelled against them in 1921 when they found out what Lenin was really like. And it was to Trotsky’s lasting shame and disgrace that he massacred them that March.

Our own Royal Navy is famous for its mutinies, in HMS Bounty in 1789, at Spithead and the Nore in 1797, and most recently at Invergordon in 1931. It is a curious organization, its hammocks once filled by the cruel Press Gangs kidnapping innocent men and forcing them to sea and possible death, its discipline for many years enforced by the cruel cat o’ nine tails and the occasional shooting of an admiral to encourage the others. But it stood between us and the world, without trying to take over the state, and it was very beautiful, and many of us loved it. In London and the big seaport cities, bluejackets in their Edwardian uniforms were still a common sight in my childhood. They were reassuring, not overbearing. Since 1901, when horses failed at the task, Navy men have pulled the gun carriage on which Royal coffins (and Churchill’s) have rested at state funerals, an extraordinarily moving sight. These were our defenders, upon whom, as Charles II’s Articles of War first proclaimed, “under the Good Providence of God, the safety, honor and welfare of this realm do chiefly depend.”

In an era when soldiers were often despised, or even feared, sailors were not. Think of Kipling’s 1890 poem “Tommy”, intended to change the drunken delinquent reputation of Queen Victoria’s redcoats:

For it’s “Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot.

In George Orwell’s perfect novel Coming Up for Air, Edwardian civilians are appalled when a young man signs up for the Army: “‘Well now! Listed for a soldier! Just think of it! A fine young fellow like that!’ It just shocked them. Listening for a soldier, in their eyes, was the exact equivalent of a girl’s going on the streets.”

But sailors, possibly because they were at sea so much, were idealized as “hearts of oak” manning the wooden walls (and later the steel walls) of England. And the same was true for officers, credited above all with the great victory at Trafalgar in 1805, which secured national safety and prosperity for the rest of that century. They had a reputation for taciturnity and bluffness, which never does anyone any harm, and they often lived up to it. The fictional Jack Aubrey, in Patrick O’Brian’s witty and clever books about the Napoleonic wars, is a perfect rendering of this type. They tell terrible jokes. They don’t say much, just “Kiss me, Hardy” (Nelson as he died); “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today, Chatfield” (Beatty at Jutland, as British warships repeatedly blew up under German fire); and “Continue to engage the enemy” (Warburton-Lee at Narvik, dying on his bridge after smashing up Hitler’s destroyer fleet and so making a cross-Channel invasion impossible).

And so the word “Navy” had, for many years, a useful commercial magic if you were selling something a bit manly and bluff, such as Navy Cut tobacco and Navy Rum, or even Senior Service cigarettes. But it did not have the yelling, martinet character of the Army. I have never yet seen a naval officer’s uniform that fits properly, and when sailors are marched aboard their ships (does this still happen?), the drill is far from pernickety. Close contact with the Navy — both my parents were in it, and so were most of their friends, some of my schoolteachers and many of the parents of my schoolfellows — revealed a dry, faintly sarcastic view of the outside world which had never been to sea. Even my mother, an ocean-going snob who would die of shame if she heard me use the word “toilet”, had mastered the sarcasm of the fleet. More than once I jumped with surprise when I heard her icily remarking about some inadequate if feeble attempt at recompense. “Well, that’s damned nice of him”, she’d say, which, for a Fifties married middle-class woman in a respectable suburb, was going it a bit.

This reputation was kept alive just a little longer by two films. The first, The Cruel Sea, is one of the best movies ever made and shows, among other things, how the spirit of the Navy, stretching back through centuries, embraces and takes hold of ordinary men and turns them into something very nearly heroic. The other, In Which We Serve, features a speech by Celia Johnson, playing a naval wife, and explains the privations of this role. It can reliably reduce me to tears, and not just because of the way she says “sloop”, so upper-middle-class that nobody could get away with it nowadays. During one scene, at a 1939 Christmas dinner, she is wearing a small brooch, in a shape worn by my mother and known to her as the “Crown of Neptune”.

Few will ever notice this, but the little shiny badge betokened membership of a secret society. It was a sign to other such navy wives of a great unknown sisterhood, familiar with the grim features of married quarters and rented lodgings in glum seaports or remote colonial stations, the endless disruption of life by emergencies and distant postings, the miserable pay, and the infuriating tussle with their great permanent love rivals: their husbands’ ships. In Which We Serve also features the glorious Navy Prayer, one of the Church of England’s “Forms of Prayer to Be Used At Sea”, written when the Navy was recognized as an indispensable part of the nation. It is a plea for a safe return from danger, and opens with the words, “O Eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens, and rulest the raging of the sea, who hast compassed the waters with bounds until day and night come to an end…”

And this is one of the beauties of the Navy which once endeared it to so many. For it was beautiful. Great warships, which we no longer possess, are beautiful, as such engines of destruction should probably not be. The boxy, enclosed modern vessels of today’s piddling navies lack this magic, as do the two giant car parks we call aircraft carriers. But in the early Sixties, I couldn’t get from my home in the village of Alverstoke to Portsmouth without crossing the harbor by ferry, under the immense 15-inch guns of the last British battleship, HMS Vanguard. There is something uplifting and thrilling about great guns, and the swooping lines of the ship itself, 814 feet long, that expressed power as few other works of man can do. It made our hearts swell a bit, to know we possessed such an instrument. And many hearts, including my own, have shriveled, as that lovely fleet has melted away.

Of course, all this is also wrapped in England’s deep love of the sea. One sign of this can be found in Arthur Ransome’s books about children sailing in the Lake District. It is now impossible to imagine the hold these stories had on hundreds of thousands of English childhoods, lived far from the shore. Michael Frayn, who grew up in the Surrey suburbs, has confessed that he read them over and over again, and tried to write one of his own. Eventually, the children in the series escape from their lake and actually go to sea, in reality and in fantasy. Towards the end of Peter Duck, one of the strangest of these remarkable novels, the children sing their way up the Channel to the words of the sea shanty “Spanish Ladies”, a favorite of my naval father, marking the ancient landmarks known to homecoming Englishmen since the time of Grenville and Hawkins:

And the First land we made, it is called the Dodman,
Next Rame Head off Plymouth, Start, Portland and Wight;
And we sailed by Beachy, 
By Fairlight and Dungeness,
Until we brought to by the South Foreland Light. 

Those who still savor the “inshore waters” part of the Shipping Forecast, as I do, were probably brought up in a maritime Britain, where there was still a bit of salt in everything and the sea was a friend and fortification, not, as it seems now, a door left wide open. Modern Britain is now so turned away from the sea that it brings to mind a passage in C.S.Lewis’s Prince Caspian, one of the Narnia books. The new rulers of Narnia fear the sea and what might come over it, and have deliberately allowed thick woods to grow along the coast. Lewis, who also grew up in more naval days, though he lived far from the sea, understood, like any British person of his time, that the ocean is a source of power and inspiration and a great highway to the world and all that is in it. But only if you have a Navy.

In other words, the movie is perfectly timed for people who want to latch on to the revolutionary politics it portrays for their own reasons. Along with being an excellent movie, then, it’s a sort of Rorschach test, a psychic prompt at which agitated people can cast their political feelings. Some of these feelings have been pretty raw, directly connected to thoughts of real political power. For example, David Marcus of Fox News let on that the movie made him “angry” at leftists in a way that reminded him gratefully of the “cracking down” the Trump administration is doing against Antifa, and his anger at those Antifa radicals allowed him imagine how One Battle After Another would be “a fun movie for them to watch once they are all in jail”. I liked the movie a lot, but even I didn’t find it that evocative.

The film is a sort of love triangle: between revolutionary comrades Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), and the main antagonist Federal Immigration honcho Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) who gets hotter for Perfidia than even Bob is. But, since the film is (loosely) based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, it’s a Pynchonian love triangle — wild, improbable, so pervy it’s virtually supernatural. One Battle After Another is delirious fun, one of the most delightful movies I’ve seen in years. It touches daringly but not heedlessly on themes of political violence. Finally, though, and despite the shrill warnings of its conservatives detractors, and despite the dreamy swooning of its progressive admirers, it’s not politics. It’s just a movie, and thank God for that.

Anderson’s greatness has always consisted in his ability to make coherent art out of close and often lurid and somehow also epic psychological studies that are punctuated by juddering action and intimate violence. Thanks to these heavy counterpoints, an Anderson film can often leave you feeling kind of battered and wrung out when it’s done. One Battle After Another reverses this balance, in a way that makes it both more fun and less draining than, say, There Will Be Blood or Magnolia. That is, it has a setup of chaotic adventure on a large scale and settles only occasionally into close observation of the crazed G-Men and vain utopians who make up its cast. Indeed, despite its apparent political commitments, it’s one of Anderson’s least serious movies. The only Anderson film more larkish, finally, than One Battle After Another is Inherent Vice, which also draws from a Thomas Pynchon novel.

The Pynchon connection is key. Anderson’s Inherent Vice is closer to its Pynchonian sourcematerial than is One Battle After Another. But the new film is more Pynchonian in tone and spirit.  As the movie goes on, jumping 15 years when we meet lovely Willa (Chase Infiniti) as the adolescent daughter of fugitive Bob, its story grows more larkish, indeed slightly magical. Events transpire not according to some cold causal logic but from a sort of cosmic horniness familiar to Pynchon readers, the Fates really wanting in their loins for things to come together in a certain way, which makes the playing out of the assorted mortal destinies basically comic, basically funny. This places all the radical political action in an almost mocking light that makes both the progressive swooning and the conservative frothing about One Battle After Another seem like different forms of wish-projection.

This is not to say that the politics are insincere. Pynchon surely hates Nixon and Reagan and other buzz-killing Republican finks he sneers at in passing. But he’s too much of a postmodern jokester to make such dour hating a tonal feature of his fiction. Even the political bad guys get taken up into the machinery of Pynchonian play, and become funny. And Anderson surely hates the apparatus of immigration detention he portrays in One Battle After Another. But he’s too “inspired by” Thomas Pynchon not to show the avatars of this apparatus as clownish functionaries rather than slavering demons. The film’s enforcer supreme, made into an unforgettable grotesque by Sean Penn, has that great Pynchonian name, Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw, and he is consistently hilarious, literally never for a single instant a figure of seriousness. There’s an evil secret society in the film that seems to function as a shadow government, or some kind of white-supremacist Avengers, which conservatives are railing against as a slanderous outrage against the honor of America’s virtuous regime. Its name is the Christmas Adventurers Club. Its slogan or secret password is “All hail St. Nick”. How a pundit, even a Right-wing pundit, can mistake the planet where all this happens as our Earth rather than Near Pynchonia is a mystery. But then debilitating literalness is a job hazard, or perhaps a job requirement, of the Constantly Angry Commentator.

In other words, One Battle After Another is sincere about its politics, but it is not, as an aesthetic matter, serious about them. And this unseriousness is a good and saving feature of the film, because its politics really are pretty silly. The first time I saw it I thought to myself as the credits came up, “Wow. I have never loved a movie so much that had such dumb politics.” It’s the violent methods of the film’s revolutionaries that conservative critics and progressive admirers have found terrifying and inspiring, respectively, but more telling are the political ends that animate these radicals. The film seems to be about a bunch of Leftists planning revolutionary change for fascist America, but the revolution they’re trying to stage is on behalf of the utterly conventional moral quibbles and lifestyle priorities of bourgeois liberals. (I’m not saying these humdrum ends are dumb in themselves, necessarily. I’m saying that, if you’re pursuing these things that we most already have through the dramatic methods of armed revolution, the mismatch, the overkill, is very dumb indeed.)

The eye-catching opening sequence, and the extended action set-piece in which Bob joins up with his daughter’s relaxed and resourceful karate teacher (Benicio del Toro, being excellent), involve frightened migrants and the immigration forces trying to detain and deport them. As such, these scenes express the humane and totally understandable desire of liberals to distance themselves from the cruel realities of immigration enforcement. I struggle with this stuff myself, but maximizing the free movement of families across the US-Mexican border so that American businesses can have a larger supply of low-paid labor is not exactly a traditional goal of the radical Left or the working class. It is, rather, a policy fixation of educated progressives who, queasy about the human reality of immigration enforcement, also derive substantial lifestyle benefits from having all those migrants around to pick their vegetables and process their industrial meats and take care of their kids and make them tasty burritos.

Indeed the film says nothing about economic class. I’ve seen the movie twice now, and I have no memory of any character mentioning poor people. Affluent viewers anxious that a real-life French 75 would appropriate their things for communist redistribution can rest easy. The militants in One Battle After Another aren’t thinking about your property. The word “capitalism” is said once that I recall, but the person who says it is speaking vaguely, and he seems to be working in an anti-tech vein, inveighing against “surveillance capitalism”. In other words, he’s saying something any old centrist grumpy about the internet might say. Instead of poverty or class, the movie’s militants are militating for “freedom”, and this freedom seems much more “negative” and Lockean than “positive” and Marxist. When Colonel Lockjaw asks her what she and her movement are after, Perfidia, the film’s most outwardly radical character, snarls something about “free lives” and “free bodies” and “free borders”. When she brags about bombing a senator’s house, she says it’s because he supported “that anti-abortion bill”. With the possible exception of the internet stuff, then, and with the obvious exception of their chosen methods, the revolutionaries in One Battle After Another have no evident policy disagreements with the editorial team at Reason magazine.

Conservative critics might counter that this proves their point, that Paul Thomas Anderson really is encouraging progressives to take up revolutionary violence simply to pursue their current agenda of open borders and perpetual sexual liberation. That would be a fair point, if One Battle After Another actually encouraged anyone to take up revolutionary violence. The film portrays violent methods in a few scenes, and it presents them as part of a thrilling adventure in the moment, and it shows the supposed radicals committing and enjoying these militant acts to be nice people with good intentions, for the most part. But it also shows the whole enterprise to be kind of a mess, kind of a disaster. Even on the film’s terms the ends don’t justify the means, because the means, being haphazardly deployed by semi-competent people with their own particular agendas, don’t bring the world an inch closer to those ends.

The film is actually profound on this point, how projects of supposedly universal justice or general legitimacy require regular idiosyncratic people to carry them out, and so these general projects are readily hijacked by the specific quirks of these all-too-human humans. In embodying this dilemma, Perfidia represents the folly of revolution itself. She is the most charismatic member of French 75, but this owes in part to the very particular fire that burns inside her, which is one-part preternatural anger and about seven parts feral sexuality. In very Pynchonian fashion, then, her revolution is a matter of desire, of libido. Her specific chemical mix makes her an eager player of dangerous revolutionary games, but it also makes her unreliable as a revolutionary comrade and completely ludicrous, indeed terrifying, as a self-appointed agent of universal justice.

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More provocatively, for wary conservative viewers especially, the film applies this model to every urge to rule, within nominally elected governments and ostensibly revolutionary cadres alike. As Perfidia represents the mercurial and fairly stupid eros that revolutions end up taking their bearings from, Colonel Lockjaw embodies the priapic, libidinal essence of official violence. Revolutionaries pursue revolution in part because it’s fun and arousing, and some men sign up to be government enforcers, the tip of the sovereign spear, because they have a powerful desire to stab something. The thought of being the final thrust of the sovereign body is the sort of turn-on a man like Lockjaw can make a career out of. Lockjaw himself draws this link between official enforcement and erotic desire almost explicitly when, in a scene of deep comical strangeness, he refers to his erect penis as his “power”.

If Perfidia represents the arbitrary human desire that lurks in revolutionary plans for universal justice, DiCaprio’s Bob represents the steep human costs that the heady plunge into revolutionary action imposes on a life over the long run. Ben Shapiro really got himself going on this point during a recent podcast. A core “suggestion” of the film, Shapiro said, is that it’s “better…  to be a complete loser who wastes your life bombing things randomly in order to free illegal immigrants to run willy-nilly across the border than to be a productive citizen”. Shapiro gets the sequence wrong here, which is kind of important for what the film’s actual “suggestion” is regarding what kind of person it’s “better” to be. Bob doesn’t become a loser and then bomb things randomly so some Mexicans could get all willy-nilly. He bombs things and then he becomes a loser. He becomes and lives as a loser because he bombed things 15 years earlier.

In other words, thanks to his revolutionary hijinks, Bob’s been in hiding for those 15 years, living as a paranoid hermit with his frustrated daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). He’s a stoned and lonely bachelor who rarely washes his hair and is always wearing an old bathrobe. I imagine there are one or two viewers out there who will receive the “suggestion” that it’s better to live like Bob than to be a productive citizen, but they’re probably starting out as even bigger losers than Ben Shapiro accurately says Bob is. But it’s hard to imagine this is a lesson the film itself wishes to suggest, especially as the revolution, which sputters along without him, is achieving precisely nothing that would make Bob’s existential bargain seem a wise one.

That’s Bob’s existential bargain — and the deep sacrifice he’s imposed on poor Willa — are either probably or obviously not worth it, depending on how much of a loser you already are, is something Pynchon himself says in Vineland. After his long years of hiding out with his daughter Prairie (Vineland’s inspiration for Willa), the old legal jeopardy has once again found Zoyd (Vineland’s inspiration for Bob), which leaves Zoyd regretting the whole damn thing. “Damn fool Zoyd,” Pynchon writes. “Sent so gaga by those mythical days of high drama that he’d forgotten he and Prairie might actually have to go on living years beyond them.” Maybe I’m naive, gullibly inclined to interpret films I really enjoyed as bearing reasonable rather than idiotic ideas, but I thought that sound sentiment was the suggestion I was supposed to get from smelly Bob. But this aside by Pynchon also shows that progressive critics are getting carried away in their giddy claims that One Battle After Another is — to quote the New York Times’s Manohla Dargis — “dead serious”, at least about revolution. A cadre of young people “sent… gaga” by their “mythical days of high drama” does not sound even coma serious, let alone dead serious. To put it another way, if you’re identifying with these violent dilettantes, you’re not serious either.

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I want to point out for special recognition a fretful review of One Battle After Another in the conservative outlet The Blaze. According to the writer Peter Gietl, the film’s “celebration of vitriol and murder is clarifying” — that is, it reveals the lethal intent of Paul Thomas Anderson. “When the perpetually sweaty DiCaprio shouts ‘¡Viva la revolución!’ while detonating bombs, you’re meant to cheer. And if you’re not cheering, well, those bombs are meant for you.”

Couple things. First, the film’s take on murder is far from celebratory. The one murder it shows, black Perfidia killing a black security guard during a bank robbery, comes out of nowhere, from no operational logic or shared political motives, but merely from Perfidia’s uncontainable impulses, and so it appalls the other revolutionaries and ends up being their fall from grace, the end of their revolutionary innocence, the moment when all the fun comes apart and everyone is sent on the run, or to prison, or worse.

Second, Bob actually says “¡Viva la revolución!” twice, and neither time is the audience supposed to cheer. The first time he says it you’re supposed to chuckle, because it’s said as an afterthought, the blurting of a revolutionary cliché, and because it’s Bob, and Bob just isn’t a serious person. The second time he says it there’s more of a setup, more comic timing built behind it, and 15 years of hiding and getting high have made Bob even less serious than he was the first time he said it, and so you’re supposed to laugh. And that’s what the audience did both times I saw it — in Oakland, California, perhaps the most politically radical city in America. They didn’t cheer — it would have been dopey as hell if they did. They laughed, because it was funny, because it was Bob.

Finally, the melodramatic kicker in Gietl’s hysterical riff — “and if you’re not cheering, those bombs are meant for you” — is far more politically inflammatory than anything in One Battle After Another. Its interpretation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s motives is so flagrantly wrong, so totally unsupported by the text of his fun new film, that the reader would be justified in making a sort of Pynchonian turn as he seeks its actual meaning. This turn might take the reader into his memories of Pynchon’s masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow, whose hero has a cosmic erotic connection with the rockets of war. These memories might inspire our reader to wonder what kind of cosmic wanting lurks in that ostensible worry about Paul Thomas Anderson’s bombs, and, perhaps, what is the hidden connection in this wanting to the explosive power of the vengeful sovereign.

Emerald Fennell seems to have approached Wuthering Heights in a similarly improving spirit. I must say I haven’t read Emily Brontë’s novel myself — though I was assured that wouldn’t be a problem when it came to following the film, and may even confer an advantage when it came to enjoying it — but I’m guessing the stable-room bondage scene, depictions of public masturbation, and corpses with erections were all Fennell’s tasteful additions.

In fact, a little research suggests that whole epochs within the novel hit the cutting-room floor in the journey from bookstore to screen, with characters ruthlessly conflated or excised altogether, so as to accommodate all the steamy sex scenes that Brontë thoughtlessly forgot to arrange for her protagonists.

On the promotional circuit, Fennell has repeatedly emphasized the deep impression the novel made on her as a teenager, and her film contains touches overwrought enough to bear that out. As has been noticed, the film unfolds more like a fan-fictionalization of its source than an adaptation: the surrounding structural architecture of plot and character developed only to the degree that they can be taken for granted as a stable context for erotic wish-fulfillment. Even the title, which comes wrapped in coy little scare quotes — “Wuthering Heights” — seems an attempt early on to manage expectations. Though, of course, it’s not as if simply pleading guilty at pre-trial is a way of absolving yourself of a crime.

There is a peculiar cultural assumption that plumbing the detail of one’s sexual fantasies inevitably yields stark or revealing information about the self. To “explore” — like Sally Rooney and swathes of prestige TV — the dark allure of BDSM, and the supposedly psychologically complex interplay between affection and violence, is taken as a surefire way of advertising one’s artistic sophistication.

If Wuthering Heights achieves nothing else, it should be to put that particular misconception to bed, as it were. The inclusion of a BDSM scene seems a gratuitous, and slightly feeble, provocation. And if conceived as a quick-fix way of infusing Cathy and Heathcliff’s melodramatic love story with a sense of psychological depth — well, it fails.

Long stretches of the film consist of exactly the sort of breathless, derivative, fleeting encounters you might expect it to on the assumption that you were not watching Wuthering Heights, but something operating at a somewhat hazier degree of removal: an attempt to depict the erotic shadow cast by the book in the mind of a half-remembered adolescent reader.

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We watch while, as if on an endless reel, Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie chase each other pointlessly across windswept moors. There they grapple with each other. Kiss. Lick each other’s faces. Breathe meaningfully. Look searchingly into one another’s eyes. The weather being what it is, they are forever getting caught in the most torrential downpours, and neither of them ever thinks to bring an umbrella or to wear clothes that don’t quickly go transparent.

They cry and mewl and pout at each other, break for a costume change, and then do it all again, striking postures of indignance and hurt as they growl about their feelings and heave their respective bosoms. They stand stoically by Cathy’s father’s grave, the wind tearing camply at her black veil, then, practically within sight of the funeral party, reunite with animal intensity. Occasionally in fits of love-stricken anger Robbie will beat her girly fists on Elordi’s manly chest. When all other ways of communicating their profound bond have been exhausted, they stick their fingers in each other’s mouths.

Throughout, there is virtually no suggestion of the existence of a wider social world, the whole film instead an unrooted universe of total mutual self-absorption. The effect is a flattening realization of the montage of imaginative sexual fantasy. Sitting there, watching it, was like re-enacting the closing scene of Cinema Paradiso, except that instead of the touching variety of rescued black-and-white embraces, it’s just Elordi and Robbie sniffing and licking each other’s faces again and again.

Fennell’s attempt to not merely adapt a book for the screen, but somehow conjure up the imaginative impact it had on a teenage reader, faces considerable challenges. Polemicists of a cultural-declinist bent may be tempted to say this is because of the greater imaginative richness of the reading experience. But actually, some of the obstacles are to do with its comparative impoverishment.

There is something deceptively shallow about the contents of imaginative simulation: the kind of activity one gives might give way to in reading a novel or idly embellishing the romance of its protagonists. The internal spotlight of wandering imaginative attention makes fantasy feel rich from the inside, but it is a richness that relies on an illusion: a mistaken impression that one’s mind’s eye “sees” in more detail than it really does.

Many people are surprised to learn that vision itself relies on a similar cognitive trick: while the brain generates the illusion that the entire visual field is in focus, in reality the fovea, the central one or two degrees of the visual field, is tiny, equivalent in area to a thumbnail held out at arm’s length, the rest of the visual field implicitly filled in by a process akin to a simplifying inference.

Whether because of their inherent shallowness or otherwise, many of us come to realize it is a naive mistake to expect others to be as attached to our fantasies as we are. It is notoriously boring to hear others describe their dreams. In the same way, attempting to depict an object of fantasy can destroy its deceptive, impressionistic power. Most people are familiar with the dissatisfied feeling that a character played on screen is not at all how they imagined them — even if it is not always easy to put your finger on just how they depart from the under-specified but perfectly cast original.

Imaginative fantasy, then, has a propensity to crash-land when realized in the flesh. That propensity may only be greater when it comes to the kind of romantic escapism Fennell has tried to make flesh in Wuthering Heights. Writhing with Heathcliff on the moors, licking and gasping and striking a pose: from the inside of the teenage mind, these may grip one as the very heights of erotic profundity. Flattened onto the screen, they can seem like withering lows.

Of course, it’s not as if film, the standout expressive art form of the 20th century,  is too limited a medium to evoke romantic fantasy in a viewer. But to do such material justice probably requires something other than Fennell’s trademark style of campy overstatement, of which the lavish aesthetic and anachronistic latex costumes are only the most obvious manifestations of a general inability to exercise creative restraint.

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Some films can be almost novelistic in their tendency to invite an imaginative contribution from the viewer. Writing in 1972, the screenwriter Paul Schrader coined the term “transcendental style” for the peculiar effectiveness — the near-meditative quality — that was sometimes achieved in films of Ozu, Bresson and others, many only then being screened in LA for the first time. Schrader’s theory was that these filmmakers had learned to direct in such a way as to trigger introspection. The characteristic technique was to withhold — something akin to the intelligent use of empty time and space.

Into that space the engaged viewer is forced to contribute something of his own. Made to “add their own egg”. Of course, Fennell might argue she was trying to make a very different kind of film to those Schrader was watching; nevertheless, her Wuthering Heights stifles imaginative engagement in the very act of attempting to control it. Hers is a film in which all of the eggs are added on the viewer’s behalf — not least when Cathy is made to crack half a dozen of them into Heathcliff’s bed as an early provocation, and Elordi kneels there, plunging his fingers gormlessly into the gooey mess. (As ever no prizes are on offer for guessing subtext; there wouldn’t be enough to go round!).

The idea that information might be strategically withheld to creative effect is not a distinctively cinematic insight, of course. At the sentence level, Hemingway’s theory of prose seems to have been that there was imaginative danger in over-specificity — that it is in general an illusion that, as one modifier is piled on after another, resolution increases. Better to take advantage of an intelligent reader’s tendency to make an imaginative contribution of his own. Emerald Fennell, on the other hand, prefers to make films where all the adjectives are left in — italicized, underlined and in scare quotes too.

No doubt, in the contemporary attention economy, the natural tendency is to favor Fennell’s lurid approach over more hands-off alternatives. As Matt Damon and Ben Affleck recently recounted in a widely publicized interview, it is now de rigueur for Netflix to helpfully suggest that a film’s characters verbally reiterate the plot at least three of four times, and that large set-piece action scenes should be used to “grab” the viewer’s attention in the first few minutes.

Perhaps naturally suited to the cultural moment, Fennell has never shown any temptation to act on the maxim that less is sometimes more. “I will not stand for this grotesque performance a moment longer”, shouts Nelly at a bed-ridden Margot Robbie towards the end of the film, and it is difficult for the audience not to share the sentiment. The risk, in the end, in simply “grabbing” your viewer’s attention, and training it on the banal contents of an adolescent fantasy, is that you unwittingly reveal how shaky and under-developed those materials can be.

This is a book of fiction that performs the service for which fiction is uniquely suited — detailing the contours of consciousness — while performing a rather unusual bracketing in a context of higher truth. It comes amid a wider renaissance in horror cinema and literature, with some of the best work often described as “post-horror.” Beginning in the mid-2010s, artists have taken up the genre as a means for exploring the irrational and ineffable dimensions of human life — or to poseideas that, stated overtly, would be seen as tactless or impolitic. This, even as they break its conventions or, as in Lee’s case, blend them with other forms. 

A “prisoner’s cinema,” as we learn in the title story — its longest and best — is the series of hallucinations a person’s mind will produce after he is kept for a prolonged time in complete darkness. In this story, a child rapist waiting on death row engages in a series of verbal jousts with the demon who encouraged him in his crime, and who continues to mock him as he waits out his last days. The moral lines seem clear here, yet the unconventional structure of this long story confounds the reader’s expectations, offering no easy resolution, and a twist toward the end adds a sci-fi element to horror that was previously mostly psychological or ontological. The result is terrifying: the suggestion that the human mind is the most fearsome demon of all.

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As the line from G. K. Chesterton goes: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” The rational mind unbalanced, overheated, and off its tether is the true protagonist of these stories. Characters reason and use logic; they follow a flow of linked theses and fateful decision trees; they rationalize, or they victimize where they have been victimized. The result, far from making sense, is the most fetid tangle of human flesh this side of Hannibal Lecter’s pantry.  

In “Gods and Spiders,” a hypnotist returns a young man to the primal scene of his mother’s violent death at the hands of the Bosnian paramilitary. In “Lovecraft,” a philosophizing butcher allows a tenant who lives below him to tenderize some very suspicious meat as a form of stress relief. In “Lightning in a Cloudless Sky,” a disgruntled son of two newly dead parents bashes in the head of an intruding hoodlum. But the real brutality for this young man, Lee suggests, is internal: an animus between the protagonist and his brother that simply can’t be fixed. 

Lee’s compendium of gore is accomplished with subtlety and literary grace. “Never Find Us Here,” a story about a narcissistic young man who decides to volunteer for a day at the Salvation Army, keeps us on tenterhooks by sliding seamlessly between surrealism and psychology. And, as in the most crafty of short stories, an anticlimax serves as the perfect ending. Lee also has a knack for a good metaphor. He writes, for instance, of “the dark lips of ditches”: precisely the right word for the little mounds that might circumscribe a hole one has dug, turning it into a yawning black mouth. And the virtuoso vitriol that opens “Lightning in a Cloudless Sky,” — “They always have sallow skin, these whores, these meth-heads, wasted high-school beauties, soma-addled slack bodies, all with the same seeping sallow skin carrying Christ-knows-what proud strains of plague in their milky sebum . . .” — is mellifluous bile indeed.

But it is the moral stakes that set Lee’s writing apart. Literary fiction is a genre on the wane — like contemporary art and independent cinema. We suffer from a glut of writers and a dearth of readers, from a surfeit of publicity and a paucity of art. It is no coincidence that the successes over the past few decades have been the products of writers such as Michel Houellebecq, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Elena Ferrante, who are earnestly grappling with the morality of how one ought to live in a society that offers fewer answers by the day. 

In this sense, the contemporary writer of fiction is no different from the pundit on X (formerly Twitter), but whereas the online pundit is incentivized to provide extreme approbation or condemnation, the novelist may take a longer view. Today the craft of the novelist may not be as remunerative as the pundit’s — a few mega-writers excepted. But by making abstract problems concrete and by playing both sides, so to speak, the novelist offers wisdom no pundit can match.

One can, for example, argue all one likes about what it means for society that some men rob, rape, or kill. But Lee, an editor at the religious journal First Things, has done something much more difficult and important: he has, through imaginative exercises, made such actions concrete. He has told us their tastes and smells. Only a moralist would bother to tease out the thread of immorality with such care. Who else would bother with the mental anguish of such people? Lee thus does the reader the service of taking him somewhere he never wanted to go. Complacency, that most common 21st-century sin, is not an option once you’ve entered Lee’s fictional world.

None of it is easy to read, and Lee has written of an author’s struggle with his subject, in the form of dialogues with the demon “Paul” in three linked stories that make up the series “A Briefer Epic.” In these stories, the demon taunts the author, sophomorically questioning his sexuality, or suggesting that his preoccupation with the dark constitutes evil in itself. The back-and-forth is often amusing, but the scaffolding feels unnecessary, since many of the issues come through in the stories. Moreover, a writer allowing a clever demon to argue against his project may tempt a few too many readers to side with the devil and put down the book. 

But this is a quibble. In an age where art veers between empty entertainment and empty formalism, it is a pleasure to find a new voice deeply interested in how we ought to live. For Lee, that question manifests as a preoccupation with what in our world is most horrific. As in the ancient tragedies, Lee offers a chance to purge ourselves by following his characters down the long path to hell, before we return to the blessed freedom of our day-to-day lives. It is a bracing and, in the end, ennobling trip. I look forward to the next time Lee will lead me to a place I don’t want to go.

She has a heavy Eastern European accent, a marvelous embonpoint, and a resting bitch-face to die for. She has survived the infidelities of her philandering husband with statuesque dignity and proved unbiddable by his aides. Famously, Melania Trump does not stand by her man. Indeed, most of the time, she doesn’t stand within 1,000 feet of him, sequestering herself mysteriously in Trump Tower instead. And when out and about in the world, she likes to send oblique messages by means of her wardrobe choices: like that time she wore a pussy bow to the pussy-grabber-in-chief’s presidential debate, or when she went to Africa dressed in a pith helmet. In other words, she is camper than a row of tents.

As Sontag told us in her essay on the subject, the purest examples of camp “are unintentional; they are dead serious”. And there is no one more serious than the former Melanija Knavs. Even before all the Botox, her face was rigid with cultural inexpressivity. Despite — or perhaps because of — the humorlessness, her 2024 book Melania: A Memoir is possibly the funniest thing I’ve ever read. There, she describes her journey to the White House in phrased culled from the crib notes of a Miss World contestant, always talking about her own “dedication”, “elegance” and “poise”, and uttering sentences like “Confident in balancing many roles, I refused to confine myself to compartments and aspired to serve as a beacon of inspiration for other women”.

In fact, though, there wasn’t much feminine inspiration on offer during her husband’s first term, and her pet projects often unfortunately misfired. Her inaugural speech for the presidential campaign, written for her by an aide, turned out to be plagiarized from Michelle Obama. Once Trump was in office, her grammatically unorthodox brainchild, the “Be Best” campaign, was pilloried for its mentally scattered focus — “the well-being of children, online safety, and tackling opioid abuse” — and a lack of quantifiable results. There is also the fact that her husband, not much known for online safety himself, tends to suck up all the air in the room. Until now, the only place the First Lady seems to have received real adulation is in her Slovenian hometown. There, according to her unofficial biographer, sausages are sold with an “M” on them and a local shoemaker has made “a Melania-inspired bedroom slipper that is sparkly grey flannel with a white faux-fur pom-pom on top”.

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Presumably she hoped that the Amazon-backed film, tracing various aesthetic and philanthropic doings in the weeks leading up to Trump’s second inauguration, would usher in a new dawn of reputational fabulousness. It was released on Friday, and so far seems to be going about as well as the time she wore that jacket to the migrant child detention center. The timing is distinctly off, what with government agents executing protestors on the streets of Minnesota, and her husband featuring in newly released Epstein files. Indeed, for those who loathe Trump and all he stands for, the film presumably reads a bit like Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest: documenting the domestic idyll of a serenely well-situated hausfrau, while literal atrocities are being committed next door.

Still, as Sontag also wrote: “Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility.” In order to properly appreciate Melania, perhaps we should forget all that distracting guilt-by-association and try to imagine what it will look like as a cultural object decades hence. And I suggest that — much like the woman herself — it will look very homosexual-friendly indeed.

The film starts in the gorgeous Florida ocean, before the camera sweeps toward Mar-a-Lago and a pair of spike heels getting into a huge car. As it speeds along, Melania sitting stony-faced in the back, “Gimme Shelter” is playing and Mick Jagger is singing that war, rape, and murder are just “a shot away”. One hopes it’s just a heavy-handed reference to the Trump assassination attempt, but who really knows?

Before long we are in Washington, and Melania is stiffly walking into various rooms to talk to gay men about tableware and dresses. Wind is always unexpectedly ruffling her hair, even indoors. In the voiceover, the beauty-contestant phrasing is back: “every day I lead with nurturing and devotion”; “my creative vision is always clear”, and so forth.

With her team, she discusses a pre-inauguration candlelit dinner that she is micromanaging. The color scheme will be her signature white and gold, and each guest will be served a spray-painted gold egg filled with caviar. An example of the Goldfingered egg is produced for her, looking disgustingly inedible but gratifyingly expensive.

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Someone tells Melania that there will be only five hours to transition the White House between “first families”. The Bidens’ personal furniture will be taken out and the Trumps’ put in. Perhaps used to dealing with elderly presidents, a housekeeper puts a little too much emphasis on the fact that “floors are washed, furniture is steamed”.

Despite the potentially high-octane subject matter, the general ambiance of the film is calm verging on octogenarian. The director Bret Ratner was best known for the Rush Hour action trilogy before he got MeTooed, so this must have been a creative leap. At times the twinkling background piano music and murmured Slovenian consonants come close to inducing ASMR. Most of the drama, such as it is, concerns the tailoring of Melania’s inauguration outfits: will her jacket collar get raised just as she likes it? Can her hatband be sufficiently narrowed in time?

There are various stagey moments where one senses the sheer desperation of the makers for some emotional intensity from their subject — meeting an Israeli hostage, watching Californian wildfires on TV, closing St Patrick’s Cathedral down so Melania can theatrically light a candle for her dead mother. Occasionally there is a batsqueak flicker of feeling on display, but for viewers used to endless celebrity emoting it must surely be inaudible. Perched next to a Renoir, she talks to Donald on the phone just after he has won the presidency for the second time. “Did you watch it?” asks the President-elect. Melania impassively says she hasn’t — she has had “meetings all day”.

Conversations with her husband are generally stilted. The pair talk politely but distantly, as if they haven’t met for months — which may well be true. But equally, perhaps they always talked to each other like this. In her book, Melania recalls a “private moment” just after Donald has won his first election. “’Congratulations,’ I said. ‘What an achievement. All those other people . . . and you won. You’re the president of the United States of America.’ ‘And you’re the First Lady,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’”

Things are hardly better during a Zoom with Brigitte Macron, a fellow high-profile Euro-wife described in Melania’s memoir in improbably glowing terms, making it sound as though they are characters in Jules et Jim (“Brigitte and I shared a delightful camaraderie, marked by warmth and fun… Together, we embraced the unknown, turning every moment into an exciting adventure”). During this conversation, viewers discover that the #BeBest campaign will be back for a second term too. “Anxiety and mental health are growing all around the world”, Melania tells Brigitte. To deal with this, she wants to “foster relationships with like-minded leaders and form a coalition”. Brigitte helpfully feigns enthusiasm: “I am sure that things are going to move. I am sure of it because you are very strong”.

On one level, this film is harmless nonsense from an over-indulged but basically well-intentioned queen. On another, viewed with an awareness of the current affordability crisis in the States and mentally juxtaposing all that marble, gilt, and crystal, it seems that a second revolution might be needed. No one could say Melania hasn’t leaned into the pomp and circumstance listed in the job description, but I wonder whether the MAGA base will tolerate such high levels of conspicuous consumption. Her pal Brigitte should probably fill her in on what happened to Marie Antoinette.

So, Melania probably won’t be a populist sensation, nor, obviously, will it be a hit with the bourgeoisie. But mark my words: let time do its work and eventually this film will become the new Grey Gardens. Once Melania’s distracting OH is out of the picture, in a few years’ time we may finally be able to discern the woman properly; to sense the comic potential that was there all along; to see the woodenness for the trees. In fact, she is the epitome of Sontag’s vision of camp: style over substance; aesthetics above morality; all filler no killer; heroically focusing on the exact positioning of table settings, while the world around her burns.

Instead, as Hutchinson declares, it is precisely in mythmaking that nationalism draws its power, as disaffected intellectuals, and particularly artists, find themselves “generating at times of crises novel myths based on romantic acts of sacrifice by heroic elites that legitimize new national projects”.

Such was the director John Boorman’s explicit task with his 1981 epic Excalibur. It is “The Dark Ages”, the title sequence flashes portentously over Wagner, when “The Land Was Divided And Without A King”. As academics have noted, Boorman’s masterwork was released “shortly after Britain’s winter of discontent”, and “can be seen as a reaction to the economic and political crises of the 1970s, meditating on a Britain in decay, presided over by the female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher”. Yet if Excalibur is a critique of Thatcher’s Britain, it is not obviously one made from the political Left. The film’s driving fixation with will, heroic destiny, and the mystical unity of land and leader is strikingly transgressive to postwar liberalism. “I believe that the popular, lasting stories are really about great deep psychic events in human his­tory that have bitten themselves into the racial memory and which we remember in our unconscious,” Boorman would later write. “The retelling of these stories is like the rediscovery of them — it ‘catharizes’ and then gives solace.”

In Boorman’s intention to reattach Britain to its mythical roots, and so restore the nation’s mystic and psychic unity — the director is a convinced Jungian — Excalibur is overtly a work of cultural nationalism. Indeed, it is arguably the most deeply British, or at least consciously British film ever made: even more so for the fact that the names “Britain” or “England” are never once uttered. The ultimate, sacred source of yearning and duty is always “the Land”, tapping into and devoting itself to something far older than the modern British state, now palpably withering around us.

Excalibur’s immediate genesis was in Boorman’s failed attempt to adapt The Lord of the Rings, whose “great brew of Norse, Celtic and Arthurian myth”, the director declared, was “the Unterwelt of my own mind”. Yet unlike Tolkien, who viewed Ireland “as a country naturally evil”, haunted by a deep and ancient malignance emanating from its very bogs, trees and mountains, and only “held in check by the great devotion of the southern Irish to their religion”, Boorman found in the dramatic mountain landscape that had become his home a source of great and regenerative artistic power. “The valley in the Wicklow hills where my house sits is as close to Middle Earth as you can get in this depleted world,” Boorman would write, “The soft, feminine folds of the hills, the bleak bogs, the ancient oak woods, the black lakes, the urgent streams somehow corresponded to an inner landscape… It felt like a setting for the Arthurian legend.”

And, indeed, the Arthurian epic Boorman would create is dependent, for its visual appeal, on the Irish landscape surrounding his home: “with a few exceptions, all the scenes in Excalibur were shot within a couple of miles of my house.” In Ireland, the director had found an aesthetic hyper-Britain where the hills were steeper, the forests gloomy and primeval wildwood, and, most importantly, water was ever-present. Excalibur is surely the dampest film ever made on land: battles are fought in ice-cold moats, knights clash in front of plunging waterfalls and babbling streams or, drowning, find psychic truths in the weedy beds of lakes. His characters crawl and die in mud, their glittering armor sinking into the land itself. The woods themselves, wet with dew or shrouded in lake-mist, their moss and lichen-covered trunks and boulders lit a lurid green to heighten the raw, natural power emanating from them, are palpably rank with leaf-mold and mildew: it is the only film ever to capture the uncanny magic of our native Atlantic rainforests.

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Even the air, and light itself, is heavy with water, for “the Irish climate is heartbreaking to a filmmaker — unpredictable, constantly changing, but mostly raining”. It rained steadily for almost every day of the five-month production, Boorman said later, with the rare bursts of sunlight breaking through capturing a luminosity more intense for its doomed struggle against the Irish rain. Yet unlike Kubrick, Boorman would later praise the “wonderful light in Ireland, because it’s moist, because there’s so much moisture in the air even when it’s not raining that you get this refraction, this light, so you get a kind of softness”. That, he suggested, lent the film a hazy dreamlike radiance that “felt like a myth rather than reality.” In just this way, Boorman’s understanding of his native England was refracted through Ireland’s clarifying light.

Even still, only England could have made him. In Boorman’s personal mythology, both woods and water are central, fitting for the director of both the riparian horror of Deliverance and the pre-lapsarian fantasia of The Emerald Forest. Growing up in wartime London — his film memoir of the time, Hope and Glory, opens with the future director playing with a toy knight and wizard in the suburban rockery that served as mountain forest to the child’s imagination — Boorman was formed, he tells it, in a once-enchanted land that had only just lost its magic. As he writes in his autobiography, Suburban Boy, the “Tudor gables, leaded panes, bow windows” of suburbia — “eclectic fragments from pre-Industrial Revolution England” — masked the hard truth that “This was a new land and the England of old was gone for ever. Oh, what the English inflicted on the English: misery, deprivation and bondage on a scale quite equal to that visited upon their colonial vassals.”

Mocking the attachment of his father, George, to the Union Jack-and-Royal Family patriotism of the Westminster state, the young Boorman nevertheless remarks with wonder that, in his youth as a soldier in the Great War, like a warrior saint, the “young George, who lived to see a man walking on the moon, rode into battle against the Turks with a drawn sword on an Arab mare”. Though of London’s low church lower-middle class, Boorman’s parents would send him, for unromantic and practical reasons, to a cost-effective Catholic private school that was “my first contact with Irishness in all its glory and grim horror”, so seizing his imagination that “Ireland was to have an insidious influence on my life and work, drawing me and keeping me there for thirty years almost against my will”.

“During my Catholic schoolboy experience,” Boorman observes in his second memoir, Conclusions, “I used to study the holy water in those little enameled troughs that hung on the wall of the chapel. You dipped your finger in and crossed yourself. Here was a magical mystery: a priest could pray over ordinary water and invest it with spiritual power.” For Boorman, inverting Tolkien’s moral view of Ireland, “I felt Catholicism was only skin deep, that underneath it was a pagan place.” It could just as easily be said that Boorman’s English paganism had developed a markedly Irish Catholic flavor. Either way, the war would soon give Boorman his own watery baptism into the old ways.

Released from suburban boredom by the German bomb that destroyed his unloved house, the young director and his family moved to his grandfather’s wooden bungalow along the wooded stretch of the Thames at Shepperton. Skipping school, playing in and along the river, once he fell into the rushing waters of an open lock: “I opened my eyes to a turbulent green world… I exhaled and sucked water in again. No longer struggling, I felt a perfect ease as I breathed my beloved river. I was the river.” Rescued by his brother, “I resented the violent intrusion into my communion with water.” We see this scene recast in Excalibur, made mythic, in the drowning vision of Sir Percival, shedding his armor in the weeds, which permits him to find the secret of the Grail, that “You and the Land are one.”

Once, idly shooting a kingfisher with boyish callousness along the Thames’ wooded banks, Boorman “was consumed with shame and remorse. I had killed the spirit of the river, god’s messenger: the kingfisher. Something broke in me. I became the Fisher King whose wound would not heal until the grail was found and harmony restored,” a quest he would seek in filmmaking. For all Ireland’s influence, then, Excalibur is the product of his deeply English imagination: “my childhood in river and oak forest had been steeped in the legend.” Even so, like many others before and after him, from Edmund Spenser to Paul Kingsnorth, Boorman’s Irish exile crystallized his English romanticism into something harder, and sharper.

“When I came to this simple Georgian house in the Wicklow Hills of Ireland some thirty-four years ago, the ancient oaks I inherited cast their spell on me. They rooted me to the place,” Boorman writes. In his extraordinary film autobiography, I Dreamt I Woke Up, the director pens a dreamlike ode to the Church of Ireland rectory and 100 acres of forest he called home, set above the wooded, holy fjord of Glendalough. We see him planting trees, conversing with bog bodies and roguish peasants, setting up carved standing stones and swimming with a friendly priest in his own private stretch of the river Avonmore. The enclave, a wild and haunted place, was sacred to the Irish mystic and hermit Saint Kevin, revered for his attachment to nature, and long before him, at least in Boorman’s personal mythos, it had been a site of great power in native Irish belief. Even in Boorman’s own time, he writes, the local Church of Ireland vicar reverted to Druidism under Glendalough’s spell, now blessing births and weddings with oak fronds in the flowing waters. “The druids, the Dark Ages, the monks in the monastery up the way; the cruelty of man and nature,” all here came together in Glendalough’s primeval oak forest, for Boorman “the atavistic homeland, the repository of fairy tales and myth”.

Conveniently close to Dublin society, Boorman’s bohemian village of Annamoe was also once a favored spot for Anglo-Irish literary artistic converts to Irish cultural and political nationalism. The Gaelic Revivalist playwright J.M. Synge, whose brother was once Annamoe’s Protestant rector, “wrote in this room where I now write”, Boorman is pleased to relate. Iseult Gonne, Yeats’ muse, had lived there in “the smallest castle in all of Ireland, a castellated doll’s house”, with her husband, the writer Francis Stuart, who would spend the war making propaganda broadcasts on Nazi Germany’s Redaktion Irland radio service (while Iseult, from whom he was separated, would harbor a German spy in her faux-medieval folly). The Edwardian British imperialist and thriller-writer Erskine Childers was a scion of Glendalough’s landowning family, and following his conversion to Irish revolutionary nationalism, was hunted down by the forces of the Free State in his own family’s Big House: before being executed as the military commander of the anti-treaty IRA. What made these children of Ireland’s Protestant ruling caste, so dependent on British rule, in Glendalough nevertheless throw in their lot with a highly-mythicized and Irish nationalism? Whether quirks of personal temperament, the grand and impersonal logic of social forces, or simply of the spirit of place, the same strange magic also cast its spell on Boorman.

And so, in Excalibur, we see Boorman create in Ireland his highly aestheticized hyperreal Britain, in which he restores his rejected, blighted native land to the world of myth. The film, which asserts itself to be an adaptation of Mallory, in fact plays with the entire Arthurian corpus: Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” are in there, along with T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, Tolkien’s syncretic national dreamtime, and even Monty Python’s then-recent satirical effort. Boorman is not retelling the myth, but playing with the building blocks of myth itself. Setting the film at a moment when, as Merlin puts it, “The one God comes to drive out the many gods, the spirits of wood and stream go silent,” Boorman nevertheless spurns the Romano-British historicizing of Rosemary Sutcliff for a dream of the High Middle Ages. “We were taking it out of time, out of period, into the world of myth,” Boorman would later remember. “It’s a great mistake trying to make it real [because] the myth is much stronger than the reality.”

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As Hutchinson, undercutting the attempted debunking of nationalism’s demonstrable power by advocates of the modernist thesis like Hobsbawm and Gellner, observes, “many theorists have regarded nationalists as inventors of tradition and their claims to continuities with the past as either self-delusion or a form of deceit”. Yet this is simply a category error. Instead, we should see nationalism’s conscious appeal to myth as something akin to Boorman’s creative process, “a quest for an alternative world which is more satisfactory than the one we live in”, as the director states, “hopefully a bit better, braver, more beautiful than it was”. In the 21st century just as much as the 19th, a shimmering dream of the past stands as both a rebuke to the dysfunctions and humiliations of the present, and as a vision of the future to come. Rather than a retreat to past glories, real or imagined, as its detractors assume, nationalism’s appeal to myth is a modernizing, futurist mission, which recreates the present as an anomalous Dark Age to be overcome. Just as Hutchinson observes, against the dead hand of tradition, at moments of national crisis, historically  “national revivalists argued that it was a misunderstanding to conceive of tradition as a passive repetition of custom. Traditionalists must recognize that tradition had continually to be renewed.” We see just this process in Boorman, beating together the varied ancient and modern components of the Arthur myth, to forge something new in service of his own spiritual and opaquely political purpose of personal and national regeneration. Or as he pithily declared, “Realism is limited and boring — and fundamentally dishonest. It doesn’t tell the truth.”

And so, light gleams from his heroes’ burnished Gothic armor, beaten from polished aluminum for added brilliance, as if glowing from within. Boorman would later write that the 19th-century fantasia of Neuschwanstein, a classic product of German romantic nationalism, is far superior to any medieval relic. His is an extraordinarily Victorian dream of the Middle Ages, drawing from the same cultural wellsprings as the Gothic Revival, of Young England, whose romantic Tory peers would joust in armor to banish industrialism and its democratic excesses, as the pre-Raphaelites whose visual imagery Boorman would freely plunder, and indeed from the Wagnerian epics whose most bombastic sequences punctuate the film’s soundtrack.

Writing and filming his epic in an Irish setting that inspired the romantic nationalism of disaffected intellectuals, Boorman thus draws directly from the same Romantic aesthetics and impulses as England’s abortive and Germany’s ominous classical nationalism, essentially leaning on them for his film’s mythic power. He even openly reworked the aesthetics of fascism in his bricolage, as just another source of primal, irrational power, to some disquiet from critics. Knights kneel, as lightning strikes, before a blood-red solar cross; the inlaid marble knotwork patterning of the Round Table owes more, visually, to Wewelsburg, favored castle of the SS, than it does to Tintagel. Indeed, the film was particularly poorly received in West Germany, where its imagery of torchlit ceremonies, and of glittering knights riding forth under red pennants to battle for their sacred leader, all set to the most stirring excerpts of Wagner and Carl Orff, did not chime with the mood of the moment. What is the meaning of Percival’s Grail revelation that “you and the land are one”, after all, but nationalism’s great mystery of faith for which men sacrifice themselves? Boorman draws on the headiest strain of politics for his art, plundering nationalism for effect, as a dark and double-edged magic of fearsome power.

And like nationalism, when viewed from those outside its spell, the film is utterly ridiculous. It possesses, throughout, a definite end-of-pier quality. The performances are strange and stilted, Nicol Williamson’s Merlin is oddly camp and slapstick, and the whole thing is in the worst possible taste, a monument to excess as absurd as anything by Ken Russell. As a narrative, it barely hangs together; yet it is driven forward by imagery of strange and compelling power. Battles in bluebell woods, dead knights hanging from Mordred’s thorn tree, food for crows; the glittering, barely Christian wedding sequence, as if overseen by Glendalough’s renegade vicar; the apple orchards blossoming back into life as, restored by the Grail, Arthur leads his knights towards their final battle: and everywhere the presence of gushing, living water. We begin to believe, despite ourselves, that Boorman has indeed tapped into some Jungian essence, something that could only spring from the deep memory of these islands.

“When you’re in that state of grace where you’re wholly concentrated on making the film, you can draw on unconscious forces to help you,” Boorman writes, with absolute sincerity. “For a century now, we’ve been rushing headlong into the future; we’ve made a cult out of progress and we’ve forgotten our former selves, our former patterns of behavior, whose origins can be traced to the Middle Ages. We no longer have roots,” he mourned, and so, purely for our own survival, there is now “a pressing need to investigate the Matter of Britain”.

And it is only because of Boorman’s sincerity that any of it works. The vision of the just and rightly ordered state, of the Grail, and the restorative power to be found, if only searched for, in the land itself: he means all of it, with religious fervor, and it is enough to carry us along with him. A London mystic like Blake, he had found in Ireland not his Jerusalem but a dream of Camelot, sleeping dormant in the native woods and waters of these ancient, sacred isles. In Excalibur, more than any other modern adaptation, the great tradition has been worked on, made anew and handed on, glittering, to us. “I felt great satisfaction in having made it against all the odds,” Boorman writes, “It was a lifelong quest: I had found the Grail.” Like any national revivalist of the 19th century, or Anglofuturist of today, he perceived that the only way to cut our way out of the wreckage of modernity lay in reshaping the myths of a golden past to arm us for the great struggles ahead.

Walking through the Design Museum’s exhibition of Wes Anderson’s archive feels the same. It’s not just an extensive collection of movie ephemera. You’re entering Wesworld. Anderson’s style is unmistakable — the saturated pastel hues, the miniature dollhouse sets, the stories within stories — and there is a comforting, childlike, self-contained feel to it all. There are over 700 objects on display in what is essentially a museum of fictional things, including an ornate patisserie box (The Grand Budapest Hotel), a solar system blackboard (Asteroid City), and a pile of fictional fiction books (Moonrise Kingdom).

Some unexpectedly tug at the heartstrings — the bittersweet message “Bravo, Max! Love, Mom”, for instance, on a teenager’s typewriter case (Rushmore). The dedication to Gesamtkunstwerk or “total art” is impressive, and suggests Anderson’s heart is in an earlier age, when designers would create everything from architecture down to the cutlery.

You would think that this would all present as escapist fantasy — and indeed that is the charge that Anderson’s critics most often level at him. However, walking through the exhibition, I was struck by how much it reminded me of certain elite enclaves in London — though you can find them too in New York, Los Angeles, especially Paris, indeed, any wealthy Western city. These are the postcodes populated by young middle-class professionals and wealthy retirees. Places where the vote is Left-liberal-green, even if the actual lifestyles and backgrounds are closer to pink Tories. Places where you’ll see rainbow flags and Palestine Action stickers even if the population is overwhelmingly vanilla. There’s a cheese shop, a bagel place you must try and a French coffeehouse with macarons in the window. It’s Wesworld in 3D.

I know these enclaves well because I live in one. But I’ve never been able to suspend my disbelief, having lived for decades in less salubrious places. When I moved here, it always puzzled me how, leaving the area, literally turning a street corner, I could move from the lowest percentile of crime to the highest — from Wesworld to deprivation — and no one seemed to notice or care.  When crime did occur, it was dismissed as a kind of accepted urban tax; the omnipresent bike and phone thefts for example. If it was more grievous — a kid stabbed to death on the field where my child plays — it simply did not happen. It could not happen. After all, this is Wesworld.

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To understand the phenomenon, we must travel back to the Russia of Catherine the Great and another Wes Anderson-esque contrivance. The Empress wishes to conduct a tour of her dominion. Her courtiers have no intention of letting her see the deprivation and exploitation of peasant Russia so, the story goes, her favorite, Grigory Potemkin arranged for pretend villages to be built, lavish facades with actors playing the role of grateful serfs. The Potemkin village concealed the truth so that the imperial image could be sustained. It’s a strategy employed by many regimes since from Marie Antoinette’s fantasy rural idyll Hameau de la Reine to Hitler’s scale model of his future city Germania, which he was poring over as the Red Army approached his bunker.

It is the sound of the inside speaking to itself — denial and delusion masquerading as comfort and confidence. Angels dancing on a pin-head.

And the fantasy village survives into our time — and not only in the Potemkin postcodes of London. The camera might come to rest on the Wesworld of Davos where the World Economic Forum meets every year; a location Keir Starmer famously prefers to Westminster. For all the braying ignominy of the House of Commons, it still has some connection to the electorate. There are no such distractions in Davos. It is a paternalistic toytown, a delightful snowglobe that looks stage-managed by Wes Anderson himself with its funicular, its high railway viaduct, its baroque and art nouveau hotels and snowy peaks. Here, life is as it should be rather than as it is for the vast majority of mankind. Unaccountable billionaires and corporate monopolies can influence policy for the rest of us. A little war here, some privatization there. Here is where the fiction is written.

What all this amounts to is a curatorial approach to life, which requires, ironically, given the liberal obsession with the term, immense privilege to enjoy. It is a world in which evil cannot exist — unless it’s Hitler or Putin or Trump or whatever effigy is useful at any given time. In such a world, you can propose getting rid of police and sending in social workers (as the son of a social worker I have been privy to the burden they already carry and know this is a very very bad idea). Only someone who knows nothing of violence and crime could find this luxury belief viable. Meanwhile, struggles that do not fit the preferred narrative are magicked away — because, say, the idea of young white girls being raped, tortured and trafficked challenges the ruling administration’s fictional conception of the world. The mainstream politico-media class simply cannot countenance the existence of evil, and the struggle against it, because it would challenge the entire system from which they benefit.

This is a lot to lay at the door of a charming and gifted auteur. In a less corrupt and compromising era, Wes Anderson may not have been a Potemkin director. It’s an indecent world, after all, that cannot allow for picturebook flights of fancy — and it may just be chance that Anderson’s work illustrates the Potemkin condition more effectively than any documentary critique could. He also seems fairly at home in this world himself, at least to judge from his adverts for American Express, Prada, SoftBank and co. For though Anderson belongs to that rarefied category of filmmakers who create their own worlds, in Tarkovsky’s definition, there is a crucial difference with his peers. You find Cold War paranoia and fear in Hitchcock; there is moral and social decay in Kurosawa; Tarkovsky celebrated the radicalism of the spirit in the midst of materialist atheist Soviet Union. Though rarely directly political, these directors pulled aside society’s veils.

But Anderson is a different creature. He is an illusionist. Rather than pulling the curtain aside, he creates more veils, more tricks. It’s easy to imagine him as a theatrical genius in earlier times, designing mechanical devices or trompe-l’œil for regal masques — or Grand Guignol tableaux. His films often feel like plays but not necessarily human ones. Instead, he positions his characters as if they’re marionettes, figures to be maneuvered around diorama. They even speak that way. Anderson’s one-liners may be witty, but they are almost always the voice of the ventriloquist.

Again, this, for many, was part of the initial attraction of his films (especially for those raised on point-and-click video games). But a darker interpretation emerges if you consider these characters as, effectively, puppets, devoid of any will of their own. The charming artifice and comforting insularity make this apolitical director’s work hyper-political.

Anderson’s films do have humanity, with themes of loneliness, family, love, grief and responsibility — it is not entirely style over substance. But the form of his work, the comforting self-containment of it all, is a departure into solipsism. It’s insider art treated as outsider art. This is harmless in cinema — but disastrous in reality. It is this supposedly benevolent solipsism, sacrosanct to liberals on the Left, Right and center, that has marked the authoritarian turn in the Anglosphere.

It is always presented in the form of protection. This was evident in the relish and severity of the Covid crackdowns during Covid and when the wrong kind of riot or protest kicks off. It is there in the clampdown on free speech, in the push for ID cards, in the dismantling of trial by jury, in the creeping specter of militarism and the disturbing mantra that Europe must prepare for war and our sons and daughters must be ready to die. Policies that are anti-democratic and even tyrannical are pushed through with specious claims of the greater good.

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The conspiratorial might suggest that this is all Machiavellian and duplicitous, yet this would require untold levels of psychopathy. Instead, it appears as if the builders of our Potemkin age genuinely believe their own fiction. From the UK’s own Potemkin village, the Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently spoke of: “A Britain that is free from decline… confident about its future…” This would be in stark contrast to, say, Dame Anne Owers’s report on the dire state of the nation’s prisons, or the BMA council chair Tom Dolphin’s diagnosis of the NHS: “The whole nation knows that the health service is in deep crisis.”  There’s spin and then there’s hallucination.

Still, once you have been charmed by Wesworld it is very hard to be uncharmed by it. Working in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, I had to resist taking every photo in his style. I periodically see buildings (the Sphinx Observatory in the Alps, the Zoroastrian fire temple in Mumbai) where Wes Anderson is my first thought. Indeed, when The Grand Budapest Hotel came out, I was staying in Paris and went to see it in an archaic cinema, with an old man selling tickets in a booth who then shuffled off to double as the projectionist. It was enchanting, like watching a Wes Anderson movie within a Wes Anderson movie. The reverie lasted until I stepped out onto the street and received a bunch of expletives to the face from a passing group of little bastards not unlike my younger self.

To visit Wesworld is a pleasure then, provided you remember to leave. Only a monster could object to a shop window full of macarons — but life is not a fucking patisserie. It requires a degree of infantilism to believe that the Potemkin village you have constructed is real. Anderson is beloved for his coming-of-age tales but they also represent the dangers of arrested development – of yearning for a prelapsarian state that’s long been squandered. Our civilization no longer even pretends to produce the beautiful everyday Art Deco objects that Anderson fetishizes.

It’s arguable that Anderson’s greatest work comes when, instead of making kids’ films for adults and instead makes kids’ films for kids (see Fantastic Mr Fox). But among his adult films, he is at his best when he lets darkness in. Anderson’s well-publicized on-set difficulties with Gene Hackman were a necessary brush with truth and the friction made The Royal Tenenbaums a better film. Still, in my opinion, the closest Anderson has come to a masterpiece is The Grand Budapest Hotel — with its startling tonal shift from knockabout comedy to historical bleakness. This is the moment when Anderson deepens Wesworld by momentarily escaping it.

Ralph Fiennes’s hotel concierge is impeccably mannered, lovably roguish but ultimately honorable. Then fascist authoritarianism comes for the fictional nation of Zubrowka — and he finds himself suddenly living in a society that has no place for any of his charms. It is the moment that real palpable evil is allowed to enter Wes Anderson’s world and it’s his best and truest moment. It shows what Anderson is capable of when he dares to take a hammer to the Fabergé egg.

And perhaps we are on the brink of such a moment too, in a world that is increasingly ignoble — but why face reality, especially when it is not profitable or ideologically sound to do so? Why spoil a beautiful thing, even if there’s the sound of riots outside?

Only, a world that cannot admit to evil, and its own complicity in it, is a world that will endlessly permit it. In The French Dispatch, Lucinda Krementz (played by Frances McDormand) deems a student manifesto to be “a luminous abstraction.” This could be a harmless description of cinema. It could also be a damning verdict of our rulers, devoid of honor, contrition, humility or perspective. The aim is not to make society better but to maintain the luminous abstraction as long as possible.

Such a chap, recognizable by his round glasses and chin-length mane, sat to my left during a screening of Guillermo del Toro’s new flick Frankenstein. To cut a two-and-a-half-hour story short, I’ll race to the denouement: for all his apparent sophistication and despite being old enough to know better (he and his mortified wife were in their 60s) this guy was not content to sit through an even slightly hokey rehashing of Mary Shelley’s unkillable novel, but had to announce, loudly, “this is awful!” and periodically burst into bitter laughter every few minutes just to let us know that this film was beneath him. Apparently this famous tale of an immortal being fashioned from strangers’ body parts was simply too improbable. About half an hour before the Creature hobbled off into an uncertain dawn, this cantankerous Boomer hobbled into the strip-lit atrium having been told about four times to “shut up or leave!” — but not before turning to the civic-minded Millennial men behind me and showing them his stubby middle finger. Humiliatingly, he left his leather messenger bag on his seat when he stropped off, and returned shortly after to retrieve it. Having contributed a couple of neighborly shushes myself, I felt vindicated. Who says the young have no grasp of cinema etiquette?

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For me, this sordid sideshow animated Del Toro’s new production as much as the great coiled dynamos the scientist uses to fry a somehow still smokin’ hot Jacob Elordi. It was the perfect encapsulation of what the modern director is up against: peevish, cynical and stupid audiences who’ve as much patience and insight as a Cocomelon baby. As a filmmaker whose output lies somewhere between critically acclaimed (The Shape of Water) and cult favorite (Pan’s Labyrinth), Del Toro is a perfect target for film wankers everywhere. His budgets are enormous (Frankenstein cost $120 million courtesy of Netflix); he uses shocking gore and sentimental metaphor, things which impress normal people and therefore put Tarkovsky bores on high alert. He has also fallen victim to a recent Hollywood fever for sexy gothic remakes (think Nosferatu, Wuthering Heights): the A-list seem to spend all their billable hours in frilly shirts and breath-snatching bodices nowadays. Again, this makes snobs suspicious: it wouldn’t do to enjoy a trend — and anyway, do these primitives even know the visual references being attempted here? The scarlet veil of gauze which shrouds Victor’s mother is a symbol of sex and blood, you goons. And when the Creature examines a skull he’s actually doing a Hamlet. But you wouldn’t get that.

To be fair to the insufferable, there is lots to decry about contemporary cinema — but it is not the fault of directors. Filmmakers, like journalists, musicians and politicians, have reluctantly found themselves in the attention economy. As a way of luring viewers away from their phones, many seem to have opted for brighter and breathier versions of the key texts, refreshing the familiar so as not to “challenge” their way to bankruptcy. What results is a kind of creative cannibalism: more and more, the industry is raiding its own archives to lend projects “prestige”.

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By Poppy Sowerby

Del Toro himself described the process of reanimating Frankenstein as “marrying a widow”, which is also an excellent metaphor for the way audiences feel about these films. They are seductive and storied yet can seem gloomy and shop-worn; they are exhaustingly self-referential, borrowing from their black-and-white forbearers almost down to the frame. These films are hard to take on their own merit, and any slips — lame dialog, lapsing English accents — become evidence of disrespect. A period setting only heightens the perfectionism of audiences, who are always suspicious about the fidelity of costumes or scripts and are rightly perturbed by actors with a mouth full of distractingly modern veneers (Emily Blunt in Oppenheimer, you’ve been told). And the greatest crime of all — one which got a big chuckle out of Mr Criterion himself during my screening — is lousy, lazy writing of the kind which produces lines like “you are the monster!” (yes, really).

The story of Frankenstein is by now so familiar that it can only be looked at through tinted glass; dealt with head on, as Del Toro did, and the pilfery will elicit a guaranteed snort from the worst people in the room. The alternative, of course, is to do an Emerald Fennell and produce something so monstrously unfaithful to the text, as next year’s Wuthering Heights threatens to be, that you’ll horrify audiences in an entirely different way.

How to navigate this moviemaking minefield? Film buffs are ready to hate you, Zoomers can barely pay attention and fans of the novel lick their lips whenever you trip up on the source text. Audiences have never been so miserable, so quick to voice their disdain. The more Hollywood reheats the same old gristle, the more critical they are when it’s hard to digest. It all makes a day at the movies a terribly tense affair.

But I am here to offer a solution. Now, I am no buff of anything, and the most moviemaking I’ve done is filming my classmate dressed as Mother Mary getting covered in paint for an edgy school project, the evidence of which I’m sure is out there somewhere. But I do know one thing: it may be a hard time to be a director, but you can guarantee that at least half your audience will leave your film happy if you just cast Jacob Elordi.

I jest. But am I wrong? Fennell seems to have discovered that cheat code, casting him as her Heathcliff after his star turn in Saltburn. There’s a logic at work: as Frankenstein shows, most moviegoers will suffer through hours of twitching spinal cords, bleak shots of Georgian Edinburgh and exhausting fight sequences if you just show a bit of leg, even if that leg is gray-green and stitched together. It’s been a long time since it was acceptable to go to the movies simply for the purpose of being entertained, but what I wish I could tell Señor Cinema is that just enjoying a film is OK — it may even be the point.

Perhaps it’s not film which is depreciating, it is audiences: we are becoming hypercritical, joyless, cynical and distractible. But I am hopeful that, just as happened before my very eyes, vigilantes will send film buffs packing. If you must snort, do it in your own living room. And to those of us still clinging to the right to watch a slightly silly movie and be thrilled by an explosion, or something ghoulish or, yes, Jacob Elordi, remember the best weapon at your disposal as an Englishman: you can always, always tut.

A lavish Soviet-Italian co-production featuring a mostly British and American cast, Waterloo was a pronounced flop at the time, its box office failure putting paid to Kubrick’s chances of making his own Napoleon film.  Yet Waterloo has since won a devoted audience for its unreplicable scope, unlike anything else in English-language cinema. “You just couldn’t afford to get that many people together in Hollywood or anywhere else,” Bondarchuk boasted at the time. He was right: 15,000 Soviet infantry conscripts march across the screen and then die — the film ends with the entire cast of extras sprawled dead across the battlefield — in what is surely the only English-language work of socialist realism. Any small boy fighting battles on the living-room floor — or any adult wargamer — will recognize the joy and loving attention to detail with which Bondarchuk assembles and then destroys his vast armies.

The peacock brilliance of the era’s uniforms lend themselves to such reveries, yet the bloody business of war is not evaded. Ranks of cannon belch smoke and flame; sabers glitter in five separate, lovingly-filmed cavalry charges; entire hillsides flicker with campfire light on the eve of battle; and thousands of troops ford rivers and trudge through the mud: the dazzling scale is the film’s entire point. Ostensibly an anti-war movie, the effect is instead of a kind of boyish war pornography: for all the pointless deaths, in a film in which all deaths are inglorious, the film’s message is subverted by the sheer spectacle of it all.

Flitting between the perspectives of the great generals, whose unruffled exteriors mask inner doubt, voiced by interior monologues, and the sheer terror of the ordinary soldiers, the film has a marked Tolstoyan quality. The effect is entirely intentional: its genesis was in Bondarchuk’s earlier adaptation of War and Peace, a state-mandated prestige project explicitly calculated to cow the decadent West with its sheer scale and grandeur, the filmic equivalent of the contemporary space race.

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Born in the southern Ukrainian village of Bilozerka, Bondarchuk was conscripted into the Soviet Army in 1942, serving in the Caucasus front south of Stalingrad. At one point in Grozny, according to the Mosfilm studio, Bondarchuk sheltered from an artillery barrage “in a trench that could become his grave at any moment… It seemed as if the earth was burning and iron was melting. The eerie smell of charred human flesh permeated the air.” Pressing himself into the dirt, he locked eyes with a stray dog, its fur scorched by flame, which had approached his foxhole: “Sergei Fyodorovich remembered the dog’s gaze, filled with terror, for the rest of his life. Later, in a scene from War and Peace, he filmed the eyes of a wolf who also looked at people as monsters.” As Bondarchuk later remarked in his treatise on acting, “I belong to the generation that the war found in the prime of life, which took part in it and repaid with their lives for the joy of a peaceful life. The war still leaves a wound in the soul.”

Yet the war’s horror and suffering was also for the Soviet Union a kind of apotheosis: victory over the Nazi invader elevated the USSR into a great imperial state, the master of half of Europe and a great power as never before or since in Russia’s history. Having won the war, the Soviet Union now contested the contours of an uneasy peace in which open conflict was, for the most part, too terrible to contemplate. And so, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis broke, Bondarchuk was for the second time in his life conscripted for a great state-directed battle of prestige: for only his second directorial feature, he was chosen by the Soviet Ministry of Culture to direct War and Peace, a riposte to Hollywood’s recent adaptation of Tolstoy’s epic. As the historian Denise Youngblood observes, Bondarchuk’s War and Peace “was a tribute to the might and righteousness of the Russian people, which fit well with the Russocentrism of the USSR in the late Sixties under Brezhnev. A Russian victory was a Soviet victory.” Still the most expensive film ever made — around $700 million in today’s money — Bondarchuk’s seven-hour epic (watchable for free on Mosfilm’s YouTube account) succeeds more than anything through sheer scale.

War and Peace was planned like a military campaign, deploying thousands of Red Army troops to recreate the great battles of Austerlitz and Borodino. And like Russian military campaigns before and since, the production typified not only the wasteful planning failures but also the vast resources, as well as the sheer dogged determination, which only Mother Russia could bring to bear in executing the will of its leaders. A scale replica of Moscow was built and burned to the ground as a backdrop, against which his actors had only one chance to deliver their lines perfectly or wreck the entire production. Banned from using Western film stock, Bondarchuk struggled with the poor quality reels available to him, with mosquitoes embedded in the emulsion, often having to reshoot entire scenes with his cast of thousands when the film failed. His staff cowered before him, as he became an increasingly dictatorial presence on set. “The director has studied all the material for the film; he alone knows everything,” Bondarchuk wrote at the time. “He is tsar and god.”

Such was the stress of the film’s production, and the unreasonable schedule forced on him by the Kremlin, that Bondarchuk died twice making it. Resuscitated from both heart attacks, the second time after four minutes of clinical death in which his experience of blinding white light later inspired Prince Bolkonsky’s death scene, a near-broken Bondarchuk still delivered his epic on time. The effect was as dazzling as intended. Bondarchuk’s innovation of the “cannonball-eye view”, where the camera hurtles towards the ground and its doomed human targets, achieved everything the Kremlin had desired of him. “English filmmakers, seeing the footage shot with a “flying camera,” asked… in amazement: “How was this filmed?!”, Mosfilm’s website still boasts: “That’s how it was filmed — Russian ingenuity and military technology.” In 1969, the same year War and Peace won the first ever Soviet Oscar for best foreign-language film, Bondarchuk began filming Waterloo.

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For its own obscure reasons, the Soviet state had decreed that filming should take place in Uzhgorod, then on the Soviet Union’s far-western border, and today that of Ukraine. The region was a closed military zone, to the frustration of the Western publicity department struggling to bring journalists to the set. Only the year before, soldiers from the Transcarpathian Military District had crossed the border to crush the Prague Spring. The grizzled extras portraying Napoleon’s Old Guard had taken part in the campaign, a swift and forceful decapitation of a wavering client state Putin would later try, and fail, to replicate in Ukraine. Eleven of the 128th Guards Motor Rifle Division, one of the units drafted to make the film, had been killed in Czechoslovakia: today a Mountain Assault Division fighting for independent Ukraine against Russia, its modern successors suffer far higher casualties grappling with the Kremlin’s current wasteful prestige project.

The region’s sloping vineyards, in the foothills of the Carpathians, make a poor visual match for Belgium: instead of filming somewhere flatter, the Soviet Army Corps of Engineers leveled two hillsides in a vast geoengineering project simply, one assumes, because they could. Five thousand trees were planted to create a forest for Napoleon’s infantry to fight through, and six miles of irrigation pipes laid to recreate the muddy conditions of the battlefield. Amputee veterans of the Great Patriotic War were rounded up from surrounding villages to add a touch of body horror (later excised by the film’s Western editors). Horses requisitioned from nearby collective farms were injected with vodka to play dead: most then died as a result. An unknown number of horses were also killed in stunt scenes only filmed when the “sentimental English” cast were away from set, and since excised from broadcast. One trooper was trampled to death in the film’s great cavalry charge sequence, the Italian cameraman Daniele Nannuzzi would later reveal: “He goes down and the horses all ran over on his body. One Russian soldier in Russia — the life of one man was not so important at this time.”

Many of the film’s most distinctive sequences — the general soberly riding off a battlefield littered with corpses at the end, the aerial shots of Ney’s doomed cavalry sweeping and breaking against infantry squares — were directly lifted from Bondarchuk’s 35-minute long depiction of the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace. Yet the effect is even more dazzling. With Waterloo, Bondarchuk was granted the opportunity to reduce War and Peace to its most spectacular essence: stripping away the tortured love affairs, high-society gossip and philosophical discursions to present two hours of pure, lovingly filmed combat. Few films can ever have blurred the line more effectively between entertainment and generalship: the film’s senior military consultant, the Hero of the Soviet Union Lt Gen Alexander Luchinsky, had commanded the 28th Army in Operation Bagration, the largest and most successful Allied action of the entire war.

The result is overpowering: war has simply never been filmed like this, before or since. And if there is one thing that Waterloo brings to the screen that is beyond all comparison, it is the film’s depiction of cavalry. The scene depicting the charge of the Scots Greys — filmed, in part, in dreamlike slow motion, channeling Lady Butler’s “Scotland Forever!” — and the counter-charge of Napoleon’s Polish Lancers is rightly celebrated as one of the great spectacles of cinema. So expressive is the scene of the vanished chivalry of war, so alien to the grim, drone-haunted battlefields of today’s Ukraine, that it comes as a shock to realize that the Soviet Union had only stood down its last cavalry division 14 years before filming began. Indeed, contrary to popular modern narratives, the Soviet Army had massively expanded its cavalry forces during the Second World War, and utilized them profitably across a landscape which, today as then, horses can negotiate more easily than armored vehicles. In making War and Peace, Bondarchuk and his cavalry consultant, Lt Gen Nikolai Oslikovsky, who had successfully commanded the 3rd Guard Cavalry Corps across the Eastern Front all the way to the Elbe — it was Oslikovsky’s cavalry scouts who famously linked up with advancing American troops — proposed that the Red Army form a cavalry unit purely for film purposes. The proposal was accepted by the Kremlin: Oslikovsky, who had finished his soldiering career as the commandant of the Higher Red Banner Cavalry Officer School, requisitioned mounts and riders from the Transcaucasian and Turkestan Military Districts, where horse-drawn mountain artillery was still in use, and re-activated recently retired cavalry officers and NCOs to train a new generation of horsemen.

Just as did War and Peace, Waterloo spectacularly employed the 1,500 troopers of Bondarchuk’s new creation, the 11th Separate Cavalry Regiment now attached to Mosfilm Studios, supplemented by the Arabian horses and riders of the Moscow Militia. When we watch the cavalry charges in Waterloo, what we are witnessing is not merely thrilling filmmaking but an unbroken link in Russia’s cavalry history, stretching back long beyond the Soviet Union to the cossack units of Tsarist Russia, and beyond them to the furthest historical horizon of the Eurasian Steppe: these few glorious minutes are built on thousands of years of tradition. In making War and Peace, and then Waterloo, Bondarchuk saved this historical link to Russia’s military past: it is no accident, perhaps, that the 11th Separate Cavalry Regiment has since been repurposed as a prominent component of Putin’s Presidential Guard, responsible for the Kremlin’s defense as well as glittering ceremony.

After all this effort and expense, Waterloo’s box office failure came as a heavy blow to Bondarchuk, bitterly echoing Napoleon’s line in the film that “They will chain you like Prometheus to a rock where the memory of your own greatness will gnaw you.” The Soviet film journals long refused to review it. While War and Peace is now rapturously received among Western film enthusiasts, Waterloo’s reassessment as a masterpiece has been slower in coming: its reputation is greater amongst military history enthusiasts than cinephiles, yet it is, perhaps, the better film.

Freed from the constrictions of fidelity to a beloved classic, its pacing is tighter and its character portraits more expressionistic. Flitting between the interiority of self-doubt and the compulsion to impose a mark on the world, worn down by the tyranny of schedules and constraints of logistics, the line between great general and director is hard to parse. The Napoleon of Waterloo, physically broken but still imbued with greatness, is a more sympathetic one than of War and Peace, or indeed that of Christopher Plummer’s Wellington, who Le Monde’s critic remarked had been unfairly traduced by presenting him “in his most British aspect.” As Bondarchuk declared, “From the Russian point of view, even though Napoleon was our enemy at one point, he was also the representative of revolutionary principles. Wellington was the representative of reactionary principles.” So too, in time, was Bondarchuk, marginalized during Glasnost as a “Right-wing” figure.

Yet if Bondarchuk’s career provides an ambiguous portrait of a Soviet life, it is the great and terrible potential of Russia, so coldly wasteful and crushingly impressive, that shines through his work. As the film historian David Gillespie remarks, “Bondarchuk’s War and Peace contains some of the most thrilling and large scale battle scenes ever filmed, but it remains a paean to Russian military might and the strength of the Russian soul.” Much the same can be said of Waterloo, a film which contains not a single Russian character: the effect is, at times, disquieting. Only Russia could bring to bear such a dizzying quantity of resources and sheer willpower to a prestige project that makes no rational sense to Western eyes: contemporary parallels are not hard to reach for.

Bondarchuk’s birthplace of Bilozerka is today a frontline position ravaged by Russian artillery and FPV drones, an innovation of the Ukraine war whose terrifying, hawk-like perspective was uncannily prefigured by the director’s invention of the “cannon-ball eye” view; his son Fyodor, a Putin loyalist, is best known for his modern war epic 9th Company, and for his public advocacy of conquest against Ukraine. “Next to a battle lost, the saddest thing is a battle won,” remarks Wellington at the film’s conclusion: yet the film’s scale and grandeur subverts its own anti-war message, just as the human cost fails to dent Napoleon’s inhumane glory. As Ukraine’s countryside once again provides a stage for the Kremlin to overawe the West, and as the Russian army fighting there once again stands up cavalry forces, returning to the timeless tradition of the Steppe to counteract technology, Bondarchuk’s masterpiece has acquired a discomfiting new resonance.

The film shows Tim Key, the archetypically middle-class darling of the BBC, playing an everyman, Charles Heath, who is not quite depressed, but nonetheless downtrodden. Charles has won the lottery twice, lost his wife, and moved to a remote island in Wales. This is where the action takes place, between his house, an empty beach, and the phone booth outside the village shop. There’s not much in the way of plot, with the film’s appeal coming more from the soundtrack, the cardigans, and the rain, but after Charles has coaxed the two estranged members of his favorite band into traveling to the island and staying in his house, there is a will-they-won’t-they type romance as the band re-learn their old songs and rehash their old relationship in the run-up to a much-anticipated private gig.

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It has all the trappings of a sweet and wholesome tale about two individuals, clearly once deeply in love, at last given a chance to overcome the tragic twist of fate that has left them all so lonely. But the film is not wilful enough for that. Not one of the characters has it in them to make so decisive a move. Gone is the Britain of the Italian Job, where chutzpah and self-belief could turn a coach full of gold hanging off a cliff into a perfect, still very happy, ending. The lesson of Ballad, by contrast, is that when you find yourself facing one of life’s many hurdles you are better off not even trying, accepting that you never really had it in you. When the film does momentarily brighten, and the possibility of love dawns, and the pace of the music picks up, and the characters’ expressions finally lighten, the sense of potential, so elegantly created, is crudely banished. The woman tells the man that he is “in love with a past that is now gone” and that “it is time to grow up”.

A perfectly sensible sentiment, you might think. Grounded. Realistic. But is that really what we need in the pantheon of great British film? A story about a people who have had their time and are now content to listen to their favorite songs while ticking off the days? It is not so much a national panegyric as the assisted-dying vision of our country and its future.

Film and TV are too often seen as a medium for light-entertainment, a facilitator of relaxation. While movies and shows should, of course, be both pleasant to watch and entertaining, they are also the dominant repository of character study and story in the modern world, making what they depict and how they do so a matter of genuine importance. There is something to the idea that art paints a nation’s soul, and there is something to the Wildean notion that life imitates art. Stories give body to what are otherwise abstract and amorphous intuitions. They flesh out our perceptions of ourselves, give us touchstones by which to work out who we are or could become, and in doing so they inspire us. At their best, stories are our principal pipeline to the transcendent realm of what might be, and as such they are the surest reserve of aspiration and hope we have.

Henry VII tried tapping into this as far back as 1486 when naming his son, Arthur, after a unifying folk hero to legitimize the Tudor throne. The British government did the same when they sponsored Laurence Olivier’s film version of Henry V in 1944. Also in the Forties, the country’s wartime spirit was fed by Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and A Matter of Life and Death — patriotic as well as subtly progressive and profound. And then there is Richard Curtis, the director who most gave us our fin-de-siècle swagger, an End of History, Cool Britannia-themed glow-up to the legacy left by the Powell and Pressburger films mentioned above.

We love Hugh Grant rom-coms because they get something fundamental right. They present that unique and wonderful thing, English charm, which is difficult to pin down, but encapsulated in Britain’s Nineties and Noughties soft-power arsenal: Harry Potter, Paddington, Bridget Jones, Mr Bean. This charm — a combination of self-deprecation, understatement, irony and natural beauty — itself relies upon deep-seated security; and at risk of ruining it for those liable to let intellectual explanations corrupt otherwise innocent and natural feelings, this security derives from the fact that we once ruled the world. We could be self-mocking because, deep down, we knew we were superior; we could be madcap and eccentric because we were also very capable; and we could be indulgently scenic because the beautiful and well looked-after cityscapes and landscapes were there waiting to be filmed. Which isn’t to say that good art relies upon a good old Empire, only that we used to use what we had to produce things that went beyond the sum of their parts.

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Ballad doesn’t do that. Its island is an allegory for deep depression, with the sun rising and setting on a soggy little world where nothing really changes. It is a future that could very well be in store for us. A lot of our problems have come from complacency and excessive politeness; we haven’t been willing to tackle problems head-on, speak up about things we think are wrong, and do the painful and costly work required to get ourselves back on track. But why immortalize the worst aspects of ourselves in film? I’ve heard rumours that Stephen Daldry and Ridley Scott are in a race to create a new Battle of Britain, which could well do the trick. But we need not even go that far. Spitfires dancing over English fields while downing Germans helps, but it was never just the planes giving the film its appeal. It presents a solid and proud vision of who and what we are. Do that and you’ll have a film that will unite Boomers, Britpoppers, Zoomers, Deanos and Gen Alphas to come in a way that a tale like Ballad never could. The closest thing we’ve got is Guy Ritchie, whose genuine popularity has, of course, ensured that he’s never been given the credit he deserves.

His recent MobLand is the latest in a string of series that show him to be imagining on a national scale. It follows the story of Harry Da Souza (played by Tom Hardy), a lovable, cold, brutal fixer navigating a labyrinthine world that connects England’s aristocratic thugs, spoiled brat children and underclass lackeys with European smugglers, Mexican drug runners, American empire builders and corrupt representatives of global law and finance. It follows, of course, the old Ritchie formula — (1) meet an outsider hero with a debt and his motley crew, all of whom have regional accents and memorable names; (2) watch rapid-fire subplots unravel; (3) now see it all escalate stylishly to a Prodigy-heavy soundtrack before the drama peaks in a pub/warehouse/manor house shootout, and we close with an ironic epilogue that reveals the sly winner you can learn more about in the sequel. But at least the show is vital and composed of people still very much alive. For every snob slagging it off as more of the same, cheap TV propped up by the even cheaper thrill of violence, you can guarantee there are two more viewers watching with a quiet joy in their hearts. Damning and bloody as Ritchie’s England is, he is at least giving us a portrait of a country that is if not worthy then demanding of respect.

We could do with a bit of inspiration. We don’t need depressing tales about depressed people who think their better days are behind them when they’ve barely reached 40. It’s not comforting, it’s belittling. It’s not funny, it’s surrender. It’s time we reembraced our Michael Caine swagger and innate self-confidence and created something that could inspire a new wave of cocksure young men from the provinces to come to London and find fancy girlfriends in the way Notting Hill did; or that could revive our love for the land and taste for the quaint and quiet glory immortalized in The Detectorists; or that could inject some aspiration into our nobly establishment-wary youth, and trigger Italian Job-like missions that see them go off on North Sea oil-drilling excursions or try to claim some land in the Antarctic.

We might have lost control a bit in recent years, but why get off the coach and let the gold fall now?

As early as the first Die Hard movie (1988), Willis had perfected a way of delivering his lines with a little smirk of self-awareness that suggested he was just slightly cooler than the movie, an admission which somehow made the movies cooler. For his part, Cage had embraced a style of florid overacting, which was palatable and often fun precisely because of its obviousness and self-awareness, and when he found himself in the outlandish contraption of a Nineties action movie like The Rock or Face/Off, he really let loose, taking corny melodrama to the level of camp, taking cartoon villainy to the level of professional wrestling. The boldness of these meta-comic performances by these two actors, and the great success of those movies, created a sort of action movie culture — a larger tendency in the making of those formulaic spectacles that turned their native cynicism absurdity into an ironic style of its own.

The first Mission: Impossible appeared in the middle of all this, more or less. It was a nice blend of the dank European spy thriller and bright American action movie, but its director Brian DePalma endowed it with that slightly lurid DePalma tone, and its famous set-piece of a helicopter chained to a train inside the Chunnel was pretty over-the-top, basically meta-comic like those Cage and Willis movies. Still, by the standards of the decade, Mission: Impossible 1 was pretty understated. Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), on the other hand, was a full expression of the decade’s action-movie madness. John Woo, who’d directed Face/Off, — a movie to which the phrase “over the top” is uniquely inadequate — created heavily stylized action scenes that were both visually striking and a little ridiculous, and he staged the romantic interplay between Tom Cruise and Thandiwe Newton in the tones of extra-ripe melodrama familiar from his vaguely religious Hong Kong films. And, well, sometimes you couldn’t help laughing a little.

It’s easy to imagine Tom Cruise — who by this second Mission: Impossible had become a producer as well as the star of the franchise — looking back on the movie and telling his team, “Okay. Let’s not have any more of that extra-ripe melodrama stuff. Let’s not have any more half-intentional metacomedy. I am not Bruce Willis. I am not Nicholas Cage. I’m Tom Cruise. I don’t want people laughing at my movies and wondering if I’m in on the joke.” That is, the move from sodden and spiritual John Woo directing Mission: Impossible 2 to utilitarian J.J. Abrams directing Mission: Impossible 3 (2006) seems a pretty obvious and intentional course-correction. From then on, the campy excess, and the signs of directorial license and vision, disappeared. There was more excess than ever, of course, but it wasn’t campy. And there was plenty of license, but the person enjoying the license, the person whose vision informed these movies, was not some artsy-fartsy director, who might make the star come off campy or accidentally funny, but the star himself, the star of stars, Tom Cruise.

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From that point — though they grew ever more complex in both their set-pieces and their plots — the movies were no longer a little weird in their framing and tone, their look, their vision. The ambient postmodernism of the Nineties was gone. Amazingly, though, they stayed pretty good. They were thrilling and fun. They set a standard for consistency and reliability in a movie franchise that will be hard to beat. What I can say, movie-review-wise, about Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning is that it’s almost exactly as good, almost exactly as fun and exciting, as the last five or six Mission: Impossibles. It’s being reported that The Final Reckoning is the final Mission: Impossible. If that’s so, then the series is ending neither on a high note nor as a disappointment, but as the sound realization of well-founded expectations.

As successful and well-made as these movies have been, they’ve also been… I’m tempted to say they’ve been a little soulless, but that’s not quite right. It’s not that these movies don’t have a soul. They do have a soul, but it’s the soul of a Scientologist. Most of what I know about Scientology I know from things Tom Cruise was filmed saying about it, and what Scientology seems to have done for (or to) Tom Cruise is to make him believe that he can do pretty much anything. More specifically, the power or value-added of Scientology seems to be that this ability to do pretty much anything flows from the Scientologist’s, or at least Tom Cruise’s, belief in this ability. It’s the belief that counts, the believer’s will, the believing willer’s power to commit, the committed believer’s power to do… something, whatever. When Tom Cruise speaks about how Scientology empowers him, he sounds absolutely ready and able to take action, heroic action if necessary, but he’s somewhat befuddled, if not mentally paralyzed, on the matter of why he might act, what purpose his superhuman powers of action might serve. But it’s also clear that, should a worthwhile purpose fall into his lap, he totally believes he’d be able to do almost anything to realize it.

This latter stretch of Mission: Impossible movies is a testament to this belief, and to the unusual powers that possibly flow from it. And luckily for Cruise, the films themselves provide him with a self-renewing purpose to which he can direct his special powers. That purpose is to exceed, in scale of spectacle and physical daring of stunts and complicatedness of plot, in each new Mission: Impossible, whatever was done in the last Mission: Impossible. It’s necessary to interject here that Cruise not only stars in and produces these movies. He does his own stunts in these them, and it is central to the meaning of these movies that everyone knows this. These stunts rise to their highest greatness and their greatest importance in The Final Reckoning.

I’m not being totally fair to the later Mission: Impossibles when I say they have the soul of a Scientologist. They are dominated by this soul, but the light of other souls flickers pleasingly within them. They are wonderfully cast, with great villains extending back to Philip Seymour Hoffman in Mission: Impossible 3 and forward to the latest villain, played by Esai Morales. And when Vanessa Kirby arrived as the semi-villainous White Widow in Mission: Impossible: Fallout (2018), it felt like the movie and I were both being defibrillated. I’ve approached every subsequent MI with one initial thought: I hope the White Widow is in it.

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One funny thing about the White Widow is how, despite her sexual charge and ambiguous motives, she exemplifies a sort of children’s-movie logic in much of the franchise’s characterization. Many characters in the Mission: Impossible movies — to use the moral language of my daughters when they were little — start out mean but end up nice. Aside from the one main villain in each movie, Ethan Hunt’s antagonists always end up on his side, won over to a principle of universal niceness — which is anchored by the presence of a global threat — that his impossibly elaborate Mission is meant to serve. This is morally simple, if not simple-minded, but it works okay within the sentimental world of the franchise, which is otherwise dominated by movie machinery overcoming itself entirely for the sake of this overcoming, which is to say by the able and empty will of Tom Cruise.

This recourse to universal niceness as a global value made urgent by a global threat goes back at least to Nineties movies such as Armageddon (asteroid) and Independence Day (aliens). In the last two Mission: Impossibles, the global threat is a malevolent AI agent known as the Entity, which (who?) is rapidly taking over the world. The Entity is an even more unnerving action-movie conceit in The Final Reckoning than it was two years ago in Dead Reckoning, because it doesn’t feel so much like an action-movie conceit anymore. Maybe that’s why I wanted it to be a bigger presence in the new film. We see what it’s doing — casting a veil of confusion over people’s perceptions of the world, taking over the arsenals of every nuclear power — but we don’t get to hear the electronic thrum of its voice nearly enough. We don’t get to have the super-intelligent AI blow our minds by explaining itself.

Of course, this is because it’s a Mission: Impossible movie, a Tom Cruise production, in which the wildest, spookiest, most interesting thing to emerge in the history of the world has to take a back seat to, well, stunts. As the Mission: Impossible franchise has gone on, the daredevil stunts, and the public knowledge that Cruise is doing them, have grown in importance. The last two movies — despite the likable and beautiful cast of side-characters, and despite the logistical complexity of their individual capers and their larger plot — emit a somewhat reductive sense that they’re built for the sake of their stunts, that the film is a vehicle for Tom Cruise to show the world the insane things he has the iron will and thus the barely human ability to do.

But there’s a niggling aesthetic problem with Cruise’s superhuman self-belief. When you’re watching the Mission: Impossible stunt sequences, you inevitably start thinking about the stunt, not as a thrilling physical trial of a character in a movie story you’ve suspended your disbelief to enter as if it’s real life, but as a stunt. Instead of just worrying that the villain might get the better of our hero Ethan Hunt as the two of them wrestle with physics and luck and each other, you can’t help drifting into spell-breaking reflections, especially as the sequence extends into its ninth or tenth minute. “Wow,” you start thinking, “it’s really Tom Cruise doing that stunt. I wonder if he was scared. How does he hang on so long? How old is he now? Sixty-something? Jeez, that’s impressive for his age. For any age, really. I wonder what his wife thinks about all this. Who’s his wife now? Wait. He’s not married anymore, is he? I think I read something about that pretty Spanish actress.”

The Mission: Impossibles, then, go overboard in a way that would have forced various ironic concessions from other action-movie franchises, or in other action-movie eras. Were James Bond to motorcycle from a cliff and then parachute to the ground, he’d have to accent his landing with a cheeky adjustment of his bowtie or something, to cue the audience to chuckle at this self-aware gesture and not at the silliness and improbability of the thing itself. But the Mission: Impossibles see no need for cheeky gesturing because there’s no artifice to acknowledge. As it was the real Tom Cruise treating that rocky cliff as a motorcycle ramp, it is Tom Cruise himself pendulating gracefully under that parachute, easing down to the riverbank for that elegant landing. You might rather applaud than laugh, like someone in the stands at the Olympics.

The impressive self-creation and self-mythologizing of Tom Cruise have woven his roles as actor, producer, stuntman, and celebrity into a single entity, so to speak, one consuming presence so looming and powerful it turns the usual actor-movie relationship inside out. When you drift into those distracted reflections as he does his unlikely stunts, it starts to feel less like Tom Cruise is an actor in the latest Mission: Impossible than that the latest Mission: Impossible is a prop in the epic saga of Tom Cruise, an elaborate demonstration that he can do anything, that he’s big enough to contain anything. Tom Cruise isn’t in Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning. Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning is in Tom Cruise. But this means that the films and their star were always in a strange competition with each other. The movies needed to exceed their predecessors in action-movie magnitude, and Cruise needed to loom larger than the movies, to envelop their expanding artifice in his Tom Cruise reality. As the movies got bigger, Cruise and his stunts had to grow in scale and daring too.

There’s a signal in the latest entry, though, that this existential arms-race between movie star and movie franchise had to end — Cruise’s hair. The first thing you notice when Ethan Hunt appears on screen is that he seems to have missed a couple of haircuts. His hair is weirdly long. It’s over his ears. Another character even makes a joke about it. “I like the longer hair,” Hayley Atwell’s Grace says when she and we first see him. That is, the movie resorts to a cheeky gesture of self-awareness, a bit of action-movie irony, to adjust for Cruise’s conspicuous do. But why is it an issue? Why does he have distracting hair when it has no importance to the story, and when it doesn’t look very good? The first thing I thought of, which my wife echoed, is that he has longer hair to make himself look younger than he is.

The long hair is an aging man’s ruse, a bit of artifice that can’t be denied. So it has to be acknowledged, via an ironic mention at the beginning of the aging man’s new movie. This is a queasy moment. It reminds us that there’s at least one aspect of reality that the muscular will of Tom Cruise hasn’t mastered after all. It hasn’t mastered time.

And so the Mission: Impossible franchise is ending not because it’s said all it needs to say. It’s been saying the same thing for 20 years, which never really needed to be said in the first place. There’s no reason it couldn’t keep repeating itself. The franchise is ending because its star can’t sustain his mastery over it. Tom Cruise can’t keep being bigger than his massive movies — despite the Scientology pep talks he gives himself — because time and age are making him smaller. He surely can’t keep doing those elaborate stunts. The most he can do, perhaps, is to grow his hair so it’s over his ears, and then join everyone else in laughing at it.

Emergency, which lately appeared in Indian cinemas, portrays the 21 months from June 1975 that Gandhi suspended the constitution and ruled the country by decree. Citing rising political violence, and long-standing tensions with Pakistan, the Premier’s actions have been deeply controversial ever since. But if you know anything about Kangana Ranaut, you shouldn’t expect subtlety alongside your popcorn. For beyond producing, directing and starring in Emergency, the 38 year old is also a member of parliament for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

As a Hindu nationalist outfit, the BJP has always loathed Gandhi’s secular brand of politics. That’s clear enough from those billboards: Ranaut’s Indira practically snarls, a narcissistic demagogue as flames smolder ominously behind. Not that she’s alone. For decades, after all, politicians here have understood the immense power of the big screen, especially when so many Indians remain illiterate. Yet if Indira Gandhi’s own Indian National Congress exploited movies in the past, the BJP is doing something new, borrowing its links to the stars to dehumanize its foes — not just long-dead Gandhis, but many millions of Muslim citizens too, a strategy that could yet turn deadly.

Since independence, Indian politicians have reveled in the silver screen. The cinema of the Fifties and Sixties, the heyday of Congress rule, reflected Jawaharlal Nehru’s founding vision of socialist nation building. One classic example here is Ab Dilli Dur Nahi (“Now Delhi is Not Far Away”). Released in 1957, it follows a young boy who visits the capital to secure justice for his falsely imprisoned father, pleading his case to none other than Nehru himself. Other movies from this period invoke similar progressive pieties, lionizing ethnic minorities and assailing greedy landlords.

At the same time, Congress was happy to ban any movies it didn’t like. In 1975, for instance, it temporarily repressed Aandhi because it apparently drew on Gandhi’s relationship with her estranged husband. It’s a strategy that continued for as long as Congress was in power. In 2014, to give one example, it banned Kaum De Heere (“Gems of the Community”) because it allegedly glorified Gandhi’s killers. Gunned down by her own Sikh bodyguards, in 1984, they claimed revenge for an attack by Indian troops on the Golden Temple, the most sacred shrine in Sikhism. Politically, if not ethically, such sensitivity makes sense. Indian politicians have for long understood that cinema can sway voters in their favor. Boasting a vibrant film industry even before independence from Britain, in 2023 the sector pulled in $1.3 billion, with the industry pumping out some 1,500 films a year.

Yet if Congress pulled the plug on films for political gain, and on releases they felt could spark communal strife, its BJP successors have embraced film far more aggressively. Over their decade dominating the country’s politics, indeed, what can only be described as Hindu nationalist propaganda has flooded Indian cinemas. It’s worth returning to Emergency here, with Ranaut using her film to effectively paraphrase Modi that Gandhi’s rule by decree “was a dark chapter” in the country’s history. Considering Gandhi used the Emergency to suppress a range of Hindu nationalist organizations, that antipathy makes sense.

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In truth, though, BJP-aligned films usually have a far bigger target in mind than the Gandhis: Muslims. It’s a history that runs deep. The BJP’s parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), exists largely to undermine the Muslim presence in India, ever since its formation as a quasi-fascist organization back in 1925. Vinayak Savarkar, the group’s founder, carefully curated the idea of Indian freedom from the British Empire, even as he hoped to be free of Muslims too, envisaging a state where Hindus reigned supreme. Even today, leaders from both the BJP and RSS label Muslims as “terrorists” and “termites” — and just a few weeks ago, a BJP official in the southern state of Kerala told Muslims to “go to Pakistan” if they weren’t happy in India.

Certainly, these ideas are reflected in BJP-backed movies. A case in point is The Sabarmati Report. Released in November 2024, and produced tax-free after support by BJP officials, it covers an infamous 2002 pogrom in the northwestern state of Gujarat. The violence apparently started after an argument between Hindu pilgrims, returning from a shrine on the Sabarmati Express, and Muslim vendors at Godhra station. Even 22 years on, the details of what happened next remain murky. But what’s certain is that a fire started in one of the train’s carriages, killing 59, before vengeful Hindu mobs massacred over 1,000 random Muslims, raping and torturing as they went.

Watch the film, though, and you’ll get a rather different impression of what happened, with The Sabarmati Report bluntly blaming Muslims for the death of the pilgrims while ignoring the butchery that followed. Tellingly, Modi was chief minister of Gujarat during the slaughter — and was quick to praise the film, which earned almost 300 million Indian rupees. “It is good that this truth is coming out in a way that is accessible to everyone,” he wrote on X. “A fake narrative can only last so long — facts eventually prevail.” Statements like these unsurprisingly make India’s 170 million Muslims queasy, especially when Modi had the film screened at an auditorium in Parliament House, an event also featuring both the information and broadcasting minister and the defense minister.

And if victims and their families have little to cheer from The Sabarmati Report, films that cover the massacre more evenly have also been repressed. In January 2023, for instance, the BJP invoked emergency laws to block a BBC documentary examining Modi’s role during the riots. A month later, India’s Income Tax Department raided the BBC’s offices in Delhi and Mumbai, ultimately forcing the corporation to restructure its activities in the country. Feature films covering the pogrom have also faced legal challenges. That includes Kai Po Che, a 2013 movie that petitioners claimed unfairly blamed Hindus for the violence.

Nor, of course, is this simply a matter of a single film, or a single act of communal slaughter from many years ago. Rather, Modi and the BJP have developed close links with Bollywood to promote their jingoistic brand of Hinduism. As Kangana Ranaut hints, that begins with the stars themselves, with several backing the party in their public statements. And if it’s hard to know where ideology ends and professional expediency starts — Vicky Kaushal is just one of the actors to get big after playing a Hindu hero, with the rugged 36-year-old netting a National Film Award for his troubles — there are other links here too. That’s clear enough financially: several pro-BJP movies have received the same tax-free treatment as The Sabarmati Report. It helps, too, that Maharashtra, the home of Bollywood, is now under Hindu nationalist rule, with several stars recently attending the swearing-in ceremony of the state’s BJP president.

And if all this again speaks to the enduring power of cinema as a political tool in India, hardly surprising when 25% of people still can’t read and write, you equally get the sense that many films are best understood as telling one single story: Muslims are a danger to Indian life. One good example The Kashmir Files, which implausibly depicts the 1990 exodus of Kashmiri Hindus as a genocide systematically arranged Kashmiri Muslims, even though many actually fought to protect their Hindu neighbors. Article 370 covers similar themes, while The Kerala Story feels even more crass. Depicting Muslims as brutes intent on smuggling vulnerable Hindu girls into ISIS slavery, the film’s marketing initially suggested 32,000 women had suffered such a fate — until complaints forced the filmmakers to clarify that the blockbuster only compiled the “true stories of three young girls”.

Like with The Sabarmati Report, meanwhile, these movies have explicitly received the Modi mark of approval. And if that’s another reason for ambitious directors to stay on side — a good word from him can see box office takes soar — filmmakers have delved deeper into history to make their politics clear. One good example is the 2020 film Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior. Released during Modi’s second term, and set in the 17th century, it paints the subcontinent’s Muslim Mughal rulers as barbaric, bloodthirsty monsters, whose ultimate goal is the economic and political subjugation of Hindus.

Nor, of course, is cinema the only place that the BJP is flexing its anti-Muslim muscles. From its muzzling of journalists, to its lavish funding of friendly broadcasters, it’s little wonder Reporters Without Borders ranks India 159th for press freedom worldwide. The media, for its part, is happy to oblige its paymasters: in 2020 several Indian news channels blamed Muslims for Covid. Though they never questioned how the BJP’s faulty vaccine provision resulted in mounting deaths, they did promote conspiracy theories claiming Muslims were intentionally spreading the disease.

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Not, of course, that this matters simply for India’s spiraling international reputation. On the contrary, Modi’s usurpation of his country’s media is having a real-world impact on the safety of Muslims. In 2023 alone, India Hate Lab, a Washington DC-based group that documents hate speech against India’s religious minorities, recorded 668 hate speech examples targeting Muslims. Even more striking, there’s suggestive evidence that calumny against Muslims in the cinema can have a practical impact on the streets. Admittedly, the line between media and violence is hard to trace explicitly, but it’s surely telling that 59 cases of communal violence were reported in India last year, a significant rise on the 32 from 2023. Other links are even more explicit. After the release of The Kashmir Files, anti-Muslim videos soon went viral on WhatsApp, with one exhorting Hindus to shoot the “traitors” in their midst. Muslims themselves are clearly worried too, with one opposition politician comparing The Kashmir Files to Nazi propaganda.

Together with other ominous signs — an amendment to India’s citizenship act, coupled with a national register of citizens, may leave millions of Indian Muslims liable to detention and deportation — and the future looks bleak. That’s especially when you examine upcoming releases in Indian cinemas. One example is Chhava. Scheduled for release next month, it features a Hindu hero (once again) decimating evil Muslim kings. If only by comparison, Emergency almost feels balanced.

Yet as even a brief confrontation with the classics of silent cinema will show, certain ideas and “moves” which we now take for granted (e.g. insert shots, cross-cutting, alternation between close-up and wide) were already present then, developing out of a real necessity and a growing sense of the adaptivity of the audience. That is, as silent cinema grew into its great flourishing of the 1910s and Twenties, it was fast becoming a medium unparalleled in its ability to shape the expectations and attentions of its viewers. And among the giant innovators of the era, there remain a small handful of names whose enormous reputations have stayed essentially intact a century later: D.W. Griffith, F.W. Murnau, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton — and Fritz Lang, whose landmark fantasy epic Die Nibelungen marks its centenary this year. The film (and its director) has ultimately had an inescapable influence on everything that came after — not only in cinema, but in the whole of European and American popular culture.

Born to a converted-Catholic Jewish mother and a Moravian father in Austria, in 1890, Lang’s life conformed remarkably to the trajectory of the early 20th century. The stories of his early career have been told and retold over the years: there was his youthful sojourn to Paris to study painting, his enlistment in the Austrian army during the First World War, then a move to Berlin at the dawn of the Weimar Republic. Next came his first great period as a director, at the behemoth German UFA studios (then the largest outside of Hollywood), a series of masterpieces spanning the 15 years between his initial films in 1919, and the classic sound pictures M (1931) and The Testament of Doctor Mabuse (1933).

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The Nazis would ban The Testament for being plainly critical of the party, which led Joseph Goebbels himself to reach out to Lang in conciliation, offering him a place in the newly consolidated studios under the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Lang never took the offer, eventually fleeing Germany via Paris for Hollywood, where he would remain a successful director for two decades. In the midst of this, he managed to either perfect or outright pioneer entire genres, including film noir (in his earlier Mabuse film of 1922), utopian science fiction (Metropolis, 1927), espionage films (Spies, 1928), serial killer movies (M), and of course, epic fantasy in 1924’s Die Nibelungen.

What makes Die Nibelungen so powerful all these years later? For modern viewers, the first and most obvious thing is surely its sheer scale. Filmed over nine months on gigantic exteriors and in cavernous indoor studios, Lang had almost completely free reign to shoot as much and as long as he liked, against mattes, projections, and sets the size of which few films have managed since. The later French auteur theories of the Cahiers du Cinéma posited any director as primary author of a given film, and Lang was often cited as one of the perfect exemplars of the paradigm. Yet reports from the sets of his great UFA films suggest he might better be referred to as a general: at the head of a small army of technicians and designers, he had more or less total authority over the building, filming, and post-production processes.

The entire project was pitched at a mythic scale. The two halves of the film, Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge, total close to five hours long — epic by any era’s standards. Woven by Lang’s then-wife Thea von Harbou out of the traditional myth, Richard Wagner’s opera and a 19th-century theatrical version of the story, the two films tell the tale of the great Nordic/Germanic hero and symbol of Teutonic pride, Siegfried. The first recounts his battle against a dragon, his feats on behalf of the Burgundian King Gunther, his marriage to Kriemhild, and his final betrayal. In the second half, the despairing widow Kriemhild uses a strategic marriage to Atilla the Hun to destroy the Burgundians entirely.

Much has been made of the film’s relationship with German Expressionism, which was as defining to the art and culture of the time as Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Beginning with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), the German cinema dealt intimately with the emerging theories of art the Expressionists were espousing. The great film historian Lotte Eisner lays this out best in her influential book The Haunted Screen (1952), defining the goals of Expressionism as a pure abstraction almost at war with nature. The Expressionists sought — often in those weighty, untranslatable terms of German philosophy — to apocalyptically repudiate everything that had come before, whether it be Impressionism, Naturalism, or Romanticism. In Eisner’s words, what they were ultimately expressing was “that the world has become so ‘permeable’ that, at any one moment, Mind, Spirit, Vision & Ghosts seem to gush forth, exterior facts are continuously being transformed into interior elements & psychic events are exteriorized”. This, Eisner argued, was the same atmosphere evoked in the classic films of the German cinema.

But while Lang’s film delighted in the permeable, it was doing something else as well. Certainly, there was deeply abstract expression in the broad, slow gestures of the actors; in the mist and rocks where Siegfried wanders; in the general eschewal of realism or psychology in favour of pure, solemn archetypes. But instead of the usual warped planes or jagged lines of more normatively Expressionist movies (if such an oxymoron can be said to exist), Lang filled his frames with enormous, heavy symmetries, with rows of impeccably costumed soldiers, and vast diagonals and arches of buildings. In this, he took inspiration from the mythical paintings of German Romantics such as Arnold Böcklin and Caspar David Friedrich.

The influence of Die Nibelungen is still palpable wherever cinema engages in high fantasy. Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, even Denis Villeneuve’s recent Dune movies would be largely impossible without Lang’s accomplishment. Yet Lang’s film is still somehow more genuinely mythic than those films. This may be partially because of its silence, partially because its old-fashioned effects have aged enough to pass from the merely hokey into an elegant unreality. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings may be the lone fantasy to have surpassed its scope — yet Jackson’s sense of coverage and place are far more cluttered than Lang’s distant, detached spaces. Villeneuve’s Dune borrows amply from Lang’s shots of people dwarfed by enormous architecture, yet is still bound to naturalistic acting and contemporary demand for psychological ambiguity.

In fact, it may be this last factor which makes Die Nibelungen more authentically mythic, and more alien to our current sensibilities. Contemporary audiences are more or less trained to search for psychology and realism in their plots, in films and TV shows — they need reasons, causes, effects, and complex motivations for their heroes and antiheroes alike.

Die Nibelungen offers no such cushioning. Instead it offers a world without psychology, a world bound by outsized feelings and tragic destinies (though this is not to say the characters lack emotion or motivation). Perhaps the only contemporary filmmaker capable of summoning up such a world is the young American Robert Eggers, who in his three films The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman has — to varying degrees of success — tried to escape modernity and enter the wilds of older, stranger times. It’s surely no accident that his next film is a remake of Murnau’s Nosferatu, another masterpiece of Twenties German cinema.

But contemporaneity aside, Die Nibelungen is still worth deep attention and study precisely because it stands in such sharp relief to our muddled modernity. Particularly in the first Siegfried section, Lang achieves a clarity of image and architecture that is electric. As Siegfried emerges from the mist, perfectly framed between giant rocks and 100-foot trees, the viewer is confronted with a totalising image which wipes aside history, wipes aside nature, and — like the music of Wagner, its nearest analogue — realises something eternal and wholly symbolic.

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If this is beginning to sound even vaguely fascistic, well, the reference to Wagner is clear. Goebbels had, after all, offered that special position to Lang because Die Nibelungen had been such a source of pride for Germany. It was a perennial favourite of Hitler’s, and an immense influence on the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. It told the story of a favourite hero, central to the concept of Aryan heroism and purity, and of course included many grotesque trollish creatures and barbarous Huns—classic figures for racist caricature, of Jews in particular. Like Wagner, Lang’s work was brimming with big Teutonic ideals such as Weltanschauung and Gesamtkunstwerk — a very consciously Romantic questing after essentially totalitarian experiences. It is hard to watch Die Nibelungen and not see the ways in which it could be used to further such a cause.

Yet the reality of Lang’s later films and his rejection of the Nazi party (knowing full well that even his mother’s conversion would not save him from being legally considered an ethnic Jew) redeem him. It’s hard to imagine watching the vision of slave-class revolt in Metropolis and declaring it fascist. Yet as with Wagner, there is still something haunting left in Lang’s epics. A sense, perhaps, that lofty and mythic ideals can very quickly dovetail into destructive projects, always seeming to embark on a mission to “cleanse” impurities in the name of ostensibly building a better society.

Ultimately, Die Nibelungen survives its era in a way that many other films cannot. Its power derives from an extraordinary vision of a great artist, handling a myth which is far older, grander, and stranger than any modern doctrine. To view it now, from the standpoint of this tremulous technocratic century, is to clear one’s mind of psychological dross, to stand in a mist of time out of mind, among those ghostly abstractions of mind and spirit. It is to get a glimpse into one of the greatest secrets of the cinema — that myth is far from gone, that myth is only sleeping, waiting for a mind to take and hold onto, from a light, projected like an eye, on a screen.

None of these films takes genocide as their primary subject per se. Nor indeed have they been recognised as “genocide” films in the classic mould of Schindler’s List and The Killing Fields. In fact, their chief source of dramatic tension, and sense of artistic danger, comes from the decision to throw their dramatic weight behind the perpetrators and facilitators of mass murder rather than, as is more traditional, its victims and their champions. This has elicited some nervous gulps from critics. “Although its moral ambition is to honor the tribulations of an Indigenous people, it keeps getting pulled back into the orbit — emotional, social, and eventually legal— of white men,” wrote The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane of Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. “If [Oppenheimer] is three hours, I would like to add some more minutes about what happened to the Japanese people,” said director Spike Lee of Nolan’s film, while critic Manohla Darghis said The Zone of Interest “is fascinated with its villains, far more than it is with their victims, whose suffering here is largely reduced to room tone”.

Yet the convergence of all three films at the Oscars seems proof of something more than just the dictum “Hollywood loves a bad guy”. Historically, the subject has brought out both the best and the worst in Hollywood. From Lawrence of Arabia to Schindler’s List, with such lesser examples as Hotel Rwanda and The Promise, the genre is a bastion of “white saviourism”, in which an outsider comes to sympathise with the victimised group and enacts the audience’s own powers of empathy, which are rewarded as solution enough. We weep with Schindler because he did not do enough, but that is enough for us. “American movies, English books —remember how they all end?” asks Gamini, a citizen of Sri Lanka, in Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost. “The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it… That’s enough reality for the West… Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.”

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If sanctimony is the genre’s besetting sin, complacency is its most likely outcome. If the backlash over Green Book’s Oscar win in 2018 marked the white-saviour trope for the scrap-heap, Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon administers last rites. After making the film, Scorsese and DiCaprio did indeed “hit the circuit” to reveal the changes wrought unto David Grann’s book, which focused largely on the efforts of one of the newly formed FBI’s most upstanding agents, Tom White, to solve the murders of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, originally to be played by Leonardo DiCaprio. “After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys,” said Scorsese. Instead, together with DiCaprio and screenwriter Eric Roth, he took the story away from the FBI agent, and let the focus fall on the marriage of Ernest Burkhart, one of the co-conspirators, and the Osage woman, Molly Kyle, whose property rights Burkhart and his uncle were trying to steal.

The violence is entirely devoid of the giddy glamour that marked Scorsese’s earlier work, such as Goodfellas. The murders are filmed with Weegee flatness, mostly in long-shot, the bodies slumping to the ground like the proverbial sack of potatoes. But perhaps most remarkable of all is the ending. After the convictions of Ernest, Hale and their co-conspirators, we cut to a Fifties-style radio revue, in which a troupe of voice actors and foley artists update the listeners back home on what happened next, including Scorsese himself, who steps up to the microphone to read Molly’s sad obituary, which omitted all mention of the Osage murders. As Scorsese told one interviewer. “Yes, I am part of the system. Yes, I am European American. And yes, I am culpable.” In other words: if audience empathy is not enough, then maybe transparency on the part of the filmmaker will do — alongside a weary acknowledgement of the limited efficacy of filmed entertainment.

A similar ambivalence marks Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. The film is written in the first-person, a device generally used by unreliable narrators gently veering toward crack-up. And the film plays, in its first half, as a high-end biopic, in which we witness the rise of a great man or woman who advances the cause of human progress in some way. But at the climax, Oppenheimer’s victory falls away from him, and the film executes a very Nolan-like pivot into a Kafkaesque court-room drama, in which all of Oppenheimer’s nuanced expressions of moral ambivalence about nuclear weaponry serve only to damn him. The movie sets a trap for its audience, just as Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), the story’s shadowy Quilty figure, sets a trap for Oppenheimer — engaging our sympathies so that we urge on Oppenheimer in the race against the Nazis, before pulling the rug out from under us. At the film’s central point, Oppenheimer’s triumph literally turns to nuclear ash in his hands: as he gives a jingoistic speech to his fellow physicists, the sound drops away, and in eerie silence, he imagines his audience ravaged by nuclear fire. Blink and you’ll miss it but there in the credits, listed as a “burn victim”, is Nolan’s own 18-year-old daughter, Flora, who happened to be visiting the set. “The point is that if you create the ultimate destructive power, it will also destroy those who are near and dear to you,” Nolan said. “This was my way of expressing that in what, to me, were the strongest possible terms.”

The use of sound to summon unimaginable horrors off-screen is the central device, too, of The Zone of Interest. Set in the shadow of Auschwitz, where the camp’s commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) and their children go about their daily lives, the film is a sustained exercise in moral disquiet void of catharsis. What we see is the Hösses going about their daily lives — the children wishing father “auf Wiedersehen” as he departs for work, Hedwig receiving guests for tea, tending to the garden, swimming in the pool — as, over the garden wall, we hear the screams of prisoners, gunshots, and the infernal rumble of the crematoria, an “ambient genocide”, in the filmmaker’s words. Like Oppenheimer, the film uses the disjunction between sound and image to convey the intense dissociation practiced by the Hösses to divorce the mundanity of their lives from the horror that surrounds them. But where they experience that dissociation as numbing, we experience it as nightmarish.

Only at the end, as Höss exits a conference in which the fate of the Hungarian Jews is decided, and finds himself convulsively retching in the stairwell, do his actions seem to catch up with him, or in any way correspond to the horror we feel. Glazer has said the scene was inspired by a similar scene at the end of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, in which the Indonesian butcher Anwar Congo, after merrily re-enacting his methods of murder for the cameras, is bent double with dry heaves upon trying to answer the question of why he killed his victims. No matter how dissociated from his own guilt he is, his body cannot lie. All three films — The Zone of Interest, Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon — are to varying degrees studies of dissociative guilt: men who have no idea how guilty they are, who find out only after the fact that they are damned. In Gitta Sereny’s biography of Albert Speer, the Dutch Protestant theologian W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft is quoted saying of the Holocaust that “people could find no place in their consciousness for such an unimaginable horror and that they did not have the imagination, together with the courage, to face it. It is possible to live in a twilight between knowing and not knowing.”

That twilight between knowing and unknowing is where all three films live, eat, sleep and breathe. You might be tempted to say that all three films deal with “white guilt”, and yet their audience ambit feels wider than that. It’s probably safe to say that, among the citizens of the industrialised West — certainly those with the freedom and inclination to watch Oscar nominees about mass murder — the great majority of us are more likely to find ourselves bystanders to genocidal or genocidal-adjacent policies than we are to find ourselves the victim of them. “It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of the victims,” writes Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. “It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.”

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That is the unnerving thrust of all three films, but Glazer’s in particular. By the end of The Zone of Interest, the Höss’s garden wall is more than just a wall. It symbolises the bureaucratic structures that allowed the Nazis to see themselves as merely “getting on with the job”; or the gas chambers themselves, which Himmler intended to shield German soldiers from the damaging psychological effects of point-blank executions; or the “compartmentalisation” that allowed Oppenheimer to divorce the “technical success” of Trinity from its ghastly human effects. Is it any wonder Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest feel more like horror movies than war movies? The absence of victims from both films is not some act of artistic negligence or authorial oversight, but a deliberate absence that haunts both dramas, ionically charging what we do see: technocrats haunted by their own eerie success, numbed by a sense of mission, dogged by miasmic guilt.

Every development in warfare since the Trinity Test — the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, ICBMs, proxy wars, drone technology, cyber-weaponry — has served to further shield civilian populations from the killing done in their name and the sacrifices that make countries so reluctant to enter into wars in the first place. “You cannot surrender to a Reaper,” points out Durham University professor John Williams. “Ambient genocide” comes very close to describing if not the modern state of war, then the state to which it secretly aspires. Most citizens of the US have little idea they are currently pursuing anywhere between five and 15 wars or shadow wars, depending on your definition. All of these killing zones are off-camera; all its kills are “clean”. If the government you have empowered with your vote enacts a policy which kills a group to which you bear no ill will, and of which you may not even have even heard, what exactly is the extent of your moral culpability?

Perhaps that is the wrong question — not “How guilty should you feel?” but “What does guilt, at that distance, even feel like?” Nothing like the war guilt of old, perhaps, but something far more fleeting, diffuse, pixellated. Something like the feeling you get from this year’s Oscar nominees.

Things are different now. Every TV show has a gay character of one kind or another. The days of scouring the Hollyoaks omnibus for the John Paul storyline are long gone. The world is brimming with “LGBTQ+ content”. So it is odd that the range of film and TV about gay men doesn’t feel much broader than it was when I was young. Higher volume does not seem to have led to greater variety. Instead, we find a careful curation of how gay men are presented on screen, even when such presentation flies in the face of reality. An example of this curation occurred last year. Netflix’s Dahmer caused a minor online fracas when it premiered. The issue was not only that yet another 10-part series about yet another brutal serial killer is a tasteless way for a streaming service to win eyeballs. No, the problem was that Netflix had categorised its gory new show as “LGBTQ”.

Dahmer is a long way from Will & Grace, but you can see why some hapless Netflix worker slapped the LGBTQ tag on the show. Jeffrey Dahmer haunted gay clubs and preyed on gay men. His particular sickness was bound up with young male bodies. And it can’t be denied that Dahmer highlights the risks inherent in the anonymous hook-up culture that many gay men will dabble in at some point. Such risks are perhaps even greater in today’s world of lengthening digital shadows, as illustrated by murders of gay men in Sligo and London, where the killers found their victims not in bars, but on Grindr. Dahmer makes for grim viewing, but it is of gay interest — if only as a reminder that evil doesn’t wear a sandwich board.

I don’t have a strong view on whether or not Netflix was right to classify Dahmer as “LGBTQ”. If anything, the fact that the debate happened at all struck me as faintly comic. The effort to police the content of one sub-category on one streaming service feels misplaced — if the image of gay men is so easily tarnished, then there are bigger problems to deal with. Today, Dahmer is categorised under “US TV Programmes”. Jeffrey Dahmer might not have been the right kind of gay man, but you can’t deny that he was American.

So what is the right kind of gay man? What sort of show does qualify for inclusion in the LGBTQ category? One popular offering on Netflix is Heartstopper, a series that focuses on a burgeoning romance between two teenage boys. If John Lewis made a LGBTQ television show, the result would look a lot like Heartstopper. Fluffy jumpers. Snow angels. Awkward smiles. It’s all very sweet. Characters endure some implausibly vanilla bullying, but spend most of their time exchanging emojis and shy little kisses.

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I am not the first to observe that Heartstopper is an oddly chaste affair given that the central protagonists are teenage boys, hardly a demographic famed for sexual restraint. But Heartstopper isn’t made for teenage boys. It’s not even for gay teenage boys, although I’m sure that many of them watch and enjoy it. This show unfolds in the rigidly ordered territory of the tweenage girl, a dreamscape in which young men are desirable precisely because they are unattainable, meaning that there is no risk of being desired in return. Nothing wrong with that, but it does mean you have to look elsewhere for contemporary TV or film that is interested in gay men for their own sake.

This is surprisingly difficult at the moment. Young Royals is a Netflix drama based on one of Hollywood’s ropier elevator pitches: what if the heir to the Swedish throne was gay? Over on Amazon we find Red, White & Royal Blue, a film which asks the question: what if the heir to the British throne was gay? These are fun, silly productions, and are beloved by thousands. But again, they use male homosexuality to advance plot. They feature gay men, but they are not about them.

Naturally, there have been more serious attempts to capture gay male experiences in recent years. Moonlight and Call Me By Your Name have both entered the glitter canon; the former celebrated for its story of memory and survival, the latter for its tinted, self-absorbed charm. They are beautiful films, but neither made me laugh, and a gay film without humour isn’t very gay at all. To my mind, one of the better recent gay films is The Happy Prince, in which an extravagantly fat-suited Rupert Everett portrays Oscar Wilde’s last days in Parisian exile. Everett’s Wilde rolls down the boulevards, guzzles champagne, falls off tables and leaks brown bile. The film succeeds because it is bleak and because it is funny.

Bleak and funny. These are the qualities that I want from a film about gay men. Humour is especially important. If there’s one common thread to the films and TV in the Netflix LGBTQ category, it is an absence of laughter. Until recently, I had come to believe that this humourlessness was total. Gay men on screen would be forever trapped on a continuum with Call Me By Your Name at one end and Heartstopper at the other, doomed to be either a melancholy, piano-playing twink or an improbably earnest YA character. So when Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun premiered last summer, I was delighted. The film is a crime thriller and a wince-inducing critique of contemporary gay culture. Above all, it is extremely funny. Here was the cackling in the dark I had been craving.

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The film stars Silva and Jordan Firstman, both playing exaggerated versions of themselves. Sebastián is a gay man of the Von Aschenbach school. An artist — a filmmaker, in this case — who thinks about death a lot. He lazes around his Mexico City apartment and researches suicide methods while his maid does the dishes. Every so often he opens the fridge. There isn’t any food in there, just two bottles of amyl nitrate. Sebastián takes a deep huff and goes back to bed. Later, he’ll enjoy some plump lines of ketamine for dessert.

Sebastián goes to a gay beach for a change of scene. Naked men grunt and gargle in the dunes. Sebastián sits on the sand reading E. M. Cioran (this film is, first and foremost, a comedy). Tadzio never makes an appearance. Instead he meets Jordan, an American tourist and professional Instagram influencer. Things go downhill from there. It is difficult to describe what makes Jordan so irritating. There is an immediate presumption of total intimacy with Sebastián that is alarming, almost psychotic. There is the ceaseless chatter, countless words advancing like the Golden Horde across the steppe. There is the lack of content, let alone meaning, to anything that he says. Even his smile is annoying.

Silva does annoying very well. Rotting in the Sun is as much about irritation as anything else. The film opens on a public square in which rival buskers create a nightmarish mashup of “Jingle Bells” and “Zombie” by The Cranberries. A random woman accuses Sebastián of abusing his coprophage dog. His apartment complex is a chaotic building site. Work is a series of voice notes and juddering Zoom calls. Even his gay beach holiday is a source of vexation. Press about the film focused on the large number of male genitals on display, but there is nothing titillating about any of them. They are obtrusive and ridiculous. Far from evidence of liberation, all of those cocks feel like an imposition to Sebastián. It all begs the question of what he is doing there in the first place. This is a hell of his own devising.

Jordan is a social barnacle, and Sebastián is his chosen rock. “I love you,” he says, five minutes into their acquaintance. He wants Sebastián to work on a film with him — a film about him. When Sebastián finally lashes out, Jordan responds: “You can’t hurt me, because I’m happy.” He is almost convincing. Rotting in the Sun is a bleak, hilarious satire. Like all true satire, the film is resolutely focused on the world as it actually is. There are no snow angels, no golden Italian summers. Part of the film’s strength comes from its focus on men in their thirties. Illusions have departed. For Sebastián, this means a retreat into comfortable angst. Jordan is the true realist. Instagram for money, drugs and sex for fun.

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As Silva has been at pains to point out in interviews, this is not a portrayal of all gay men. Still, these are types — stunted wallower, fragile clown — that are instantly recognisable to many of us. To see them lampooned is a pleasure. But this is more than a piss-take. Both characters are vindicated by the end of the film. A Cioran-esque twist confirms Sebastián’s bleak worldview, while Jordan’s forcefulness becomes an endearing strength. These men are ridiculous, but that doesn’t make them wrong. Not entirely, anyway.

I enjoyed Rotting in the Sun for its comedy and its honesty. The two go together, I think. If the kind of gay men we see on screen are for the most part bland and humourless, it is because most filmmakers aren’t especially interested in gay lives as they are actually lived. Of course, there will always be a place for shows like Heartstopper and Young Royals. Cosy Teen Nonsense has been a recognisable genre since the days of Dawson’s Creek, and there is no reason why there shouldn’t be the occasional gay iteration.

But there needs to be room for honesty, too. At times I wonder if we have exchanged the predictability of Canal+ gay films for the predictability of a safe teen romance, eternally retold. I want more than that. I want annoying gay men in my gay films, and I want to be invited to laugh at them. And if there’s a bicycle ride followed by a beautifully lit sex scene in there too, well, I won’t complain.

One such casual — my cousin — has an approach to the MCU that embodies this form of “detached involvement”. He buys tickets to each new release, not for the cinematic journey but for the shared cultural moment. He engages with the films peripherally, often multitasking on his phone, sometimes snoozing or even leaving to eat a meal in his car. He only goes so he can watch the post-credit bonus scenes so he can talk about them at the water cooler. To him, the rest of the film is a palatable time-waster.

Yet relying on this was never going to be enough — and finally the Marvel Universe is starting to unravel. Its latest instalment, The Marvels, which reportedly cost $250 million, looks set to be a flop, joining the ranks of its other failures this year, Ant Man and The Wasp. Meanwhile, one its new stars, Jonathan Majors, whose portrayal of the time-bending villain Kang the Conqueror was intended to revitalise its brand, now faces domestic violence charges.

Marvel’s imperilled big-budget approach to superhero cinema is a far cry from my comic-crazed youth, spent in the rolling hills of rural Pennsylvania and the tidewater of North Carolina. Back then, collecting comics was more than a hobby; it was a rite of passage. I remember the visceral thrill of the hunt, driving from town to town, seeking the next instalment of narratives plotted by unsung creators such as Mark Gruenwald and Jim Starlin. These stories — particularly Starlin’s multi-part, multi-crossover Infinity Gauntlet saga — wielded a raw energy that their cynical deployment in subsequent movie adaptations could scarcely capture. In the pages of Starlin’s decades-spanning magnum opus, characters were not just avatars of power but embodiments of philosophy and human frailty. Thanos, with his nihilistic love affair with Death, was a villain of Shakespearean complexity, his every move in pursuit of power a stroke in a grand, dark saga of narrative ambition.

Crucially, these quests weren’t crafted for universal accessibility on the big screen; they were a haven for us nerds, a testament to our dedication to trivia, continuity, backstory, and our little imagined community. And as soon as they were repackaged into a blockbuster formula, they alienated those of us for whom every detail was a breadcrumb on the trail to the heart of a vast and intricate universe — our universe.

My pilgrimages to San Diego’s Comic-Con from 1998 to 2004 charted a similar journey from niche to mainstream. With each visit, the infiltration of Hollywood became more pronounced. The Comic-Con I first stepped into was a labyrinth of cardboard boxes overflowing with dog-eared comics, a place where the most valued currency was knowledge of back issues rather than the sheen of new video games or action figures. The comic vendors, custodians of this lore, guided us to hidden gems and long-sought-after back issues. Artists and writers, the unheralded architects of worlds and weavers of dreams, sat slump-shouldered at cluttered tables, ready to discuss the art of storytelling with anyone who held a passion for the craft.

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As the years progressed, however, the tide began to go out. One could watch, almost in time-lapse, as the old guard of vendors began to vanish, their places taken by the glimmering displays of upcoming blockbusters and the latest video-game tie-ins. Promotional materials, once modest handouts, grew into towering banners and ostentatious set pieces. Discussions of Jack Kirby’s artistry and the nuances of his Fourth World saga were edged out by panels dominated by sound bite-spewing celebrities and sneak peeks of next summer’s tentpoles.

By 2003, the transformation was nearly complete. The convention floor, once a haven for the comic faithful, became a temple of multimedia franchising meant to captivate not just fans, but a global audience. And yet, the Comic-Con of that era still retained vestiges of its roots — the sight of cult icons such as a then-controversial Kevin Smith, who mingled with fans in a way that would seem alien amid today’s polished celebrity walkthroughs.

But this evolution wasn’t just about a changing industry; it was personal. It marked the end of an era when conventions were a crucible for forging individual identities within the collective of fan culture. Each of us, clutching our own satchel of back issues, could craft a unique persona built on the esoteric knowledge of story arcs, character histories and creator biographies. Two decades ago, you could count on your fingers the number of individuals who could navigate the complex mazes of various crossovers — but when you met them, it was like meeting a brother.

And then came the beginning of a new, albeit less intimate, chapter. Soon everyone would get to be a vague Captain America fan, clad in a shirt with his logo, without knowing any of the hundreds of unique tales that Mark Gruenwald had told about the character. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, considering that Starlin, one the Greats, did not attain vast wealth from his creation due to the nature of work-for-hire agreements.

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As for the future of comics, can Marvel reclaim its former glory? While Disney, with its billions invested, might be hoping for a resurgence, it’s hard to see what it might look like. Despite Marvel’s continued efforts to extract fresh concepts from its comic division, the process seems strained. Currently, its loss-leading print division is going through yet another of its frequent “reboots” — a laborious effort that feels more like a tired publicity stunt than a thrilling narrative reset. Timeless, a new series designed to lay the groundwork for Marvel’s forthcoming tales, is set in a dystopian future that features a showdown between “Power Man” and “Immortal Moon Knight”. Such a trite narrative, for all its attempt at grandeur, smacks of desperation — a flamboyant plea for fans to hold on just a little longer in the hope that we’ll have something else for you, another place to park your money.

But perhaps it also speaks to the only way forward for Marvel: to see its decline not as a cause for mourning, but an opportunity for a reinvigoration of creativity. After all, comics still possess the potential for remarkable storytelling — provided the creators’ vision is given centre stage. Consider Amazon’s admirably faithful adaptation of Invincible, the blood-and-guts superhero story that catapulted its creator Robert Kirkman into the limelight. Or take Adi Shankar’s The Guardians of Justice, an overlooked Netflix jewel that makes Watchmen seem practically pedestrian. It was a spectacle of creative freedom, one that somehow attracted an extraordinarily diverse cast without pandering to the patronising, focus-grouped tropes of the big studios.

And outside of Marvel’s studios, the brilliance within the superhero genre also still sparkles. Japan is leading the way here — in the extraordinarily inventive manga of My Hero Academia and One-Punch Man, both flourishing under the stewardship of their Japanese creative teams rather than corporate interests.

Yet perhaps the greatest solace can be found closer to home. More than anything, the twilight of Marvel reminds me of the death throes of another genre: the Western. And how did that end? In Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and David Milch’s Deadwood — masterpieces of genuine passion rather than commercial viability.

If America has produced only the occasional James McNeill Whistler or Charles Ives who might make a plausible case for inclusion in the Western high-art canon, it has produced no shortage of geniuses whose works have delighted hundreds of millions if not billions of people around the world. America’s greatest composer, George Gershwin, wrote jazz, just as America’s greatest artists, from Jackson Pollack through Andy Warhol, were undeniably pop. The list goes on, from Hollywood writers, directors and stars; to Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson and the other founding geniuses of American jazz and blues; to Walt Disney, who gave us Mickey Mouse; to Chuck Jones, creator of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck; to Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground and dozens of other songwriters and performers who shaped rock and roll. What makes art American is the exuberant marriage of high and low, often at a large profit.

This summer is no exception, with transcendent work from the country’s two greatest pop talents. What has defined the director Christopher Nolan’s genius to date from Memento to Inception to Batman Returns to Tenet has been his endlessly inventive manipulation of the inner workings of the feature film form to tell stories in ways that reshuffle your brain — a talent founded on an acute awareness of the way the medium uses time. It should be mandatory viewing in all undergraduate philosophy seminars. With Oppenheimer, Nolan has transcended both the normative frame of Hollywood cartoon blockbusters and his own puzzle-palace constructions to make a big film on a world-shaping subject, centred around one of the 20th century’s most important and enigmatic characters. The result is a once-in-a-decade film that marks Nolan as perhaps the most dazzlingly brilliant directorial talent that Hollywood has produced since Orson Wells.

American pop music audiences have also been enjoying a generational talent this summer in Taylor Swift, who is perhaps both the single most gifted and also the most routinely downplayed and ignored pop music icon that America has produced over the past three decades. The mature version of Swift is a brilliant songwriter-storyteller who can hold large football stadiums containing 50,000 or more people spellbound while standing alone on stage for large portions of her three-and-half hour-long shows, which she performs without any breaks.

Only a few individual stars in the history of pop music have been able to mesmerise stadium-sized audiences by standing on a stage alone: David Bowie and Michael Jackson both come immediately to mind. But where Bowie and Michael Jackson were both great dancers, Swift is not — which makes her stage presence all the more remarkable. Her charisma comes from her singular focus on songwriting as a vehicle for mastering her own feelings and communicating them to her audience, which has proven fanatically and deservedly loyal.

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The multifarious reasons why Swift has not received her due from America’s pop culture taste-makers over the past decade, despite her near-unimaginable level of global fame in the end all boil down to one thing: Swift is a single white woman in a pop medium at an identity-obsessed, politically-divided moment when her particular identity is deeply unfashionable. The fact that she seems as utterly devoted to her craft as Christopher Nolan makes her even less sympathetic to critics who would prefer that her talent wasn’t so outsized, or that her songwriting wasn’t rooted in the storytelling tradition and strong female characters of country music, or that her skin was a different colour, or that she was a gay man or lesbian instead of a straight woman who develops needy crushes on men, or that she was an outspoken proponent of sex in marriage instead of wreaking vengeance on her long list of ex-boyfriends, or whatever else. Good luck to them.

But beneath the triumphs of Nolan and Swift, American pop culture hasn’t been looking particularly healthy this summer. A case in point is the writer’s strike that has paralysed Hollywood for months, and was recently joined by the guilds representing directors and actors. The strike, which shows no signs of being resolved any time before autumn, is a fearful response to the impact of new technologies on the industry, which are in part a response to the cratering of the film and TV business over the past four years. In turn, Hollywood’s problems are only the latest in a series of culture industry cataclysms that have overtaken American journalism, book publishing and the music business, and which make both Nolan and Swift seem more like the freakish end-products of bygone eras (Nolan released his first feature film in 1998; Swift’s eponymous first album came out in 2006) than harbingers of future glory.

While the implosion of each of America’s culture industries may look different up close, it is not hard to see the common factors at work. These range from the consolidation of once-thriving industries and the monopolisation of distribution channels to the stamping-out of competition, the ongoing detachment of monopolistic conglomerates from their audiences and the pursuit of lowest-common-denominator blockbusters to pay for the resulting losses. As America’s culture industries have decayed into anti-competitive, risk-averse monopolists, they have imposed layers upon layers of mind-numbing and increasingly politicised bureaucracy on their productions that make real creativity all but impossible. Looming above all these developments is the threat of push-button culture-production driven by AI, whereby studio executives can fulfil their dystopian dreams of licensing the likenesses of dead actors and actresses and feeding them into software owned by tech conglomerates. This would dispense with the need to negotiate for the services of pesky writers, directors and actors, along with Hollywood’s century-old hodge-podge of unionised guilds.

That’s what the strikers are fighting against. And from a distance, it is easy to wish them good luck. As a consumer, though, it is easier to wish that a giant fault-line might open up beneath Los Angeles and swallow the creators of endless hours of unpalatable dreck along with their bosses at Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, and other industry giants which, as their names indicate, are no longer entertainment companies but tech companies, pursuing the filmed entertainment business as a sideline to their insanely profitable monopolies.

Among the other things that Hollywood’s new industry leaders have in common is that they produce oodles of stuff that nobody seems to be watching. In the second quarter of last year alone, Netflix lost 1.3 million subscribers in the US and Canada, while earning a total of $4.3 billion on the year. Yet even that relatively modest net profit is deceptive, since Netflix amortises its content over a period of four to five years, while spending close to $20 billion each year on new productions. In reality, then, the company is burning cash in the hopes of a future profit while losing subscribers, a business model that is clearly headed for the rocks. When Hollywood writers and actors demand their “fair share of the profits”, they might think twice about what it is they are asking for.

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The dirty secret of the Hollywood strike, then, is that no one is making money. How did that happen? The short answer is that Americans have stopped going to the movies. In 2022, movie theatres sold more than 800 million tickets – nearly twice the number sold in 2021, but less than two-thirds the number sold in 2019, before Covid. In 2002, movie theatres sold nearly 1.6 billion tickets, or nearly twice the current number. These numbers are even more depressing when one considers that, prior to the dual release of Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s less exceptional woke doll movie, Barbie, this summer’s two biggest box office attractions were the latest Raiders of the Lost Ark movie starring a now 81-year-old, digitally-enhanced Harrison Ford, and the new Mission: Impossible, starring Tom Cruise, each the 7^th sequel in a series.

Similar declines can be seen throughout the American culture industries. Total album sales in the recording business 2001 were 762.8 million. In 2022, the recording industry sold 100 million albums, in all formats. Besides Swift, who as a 17-year industry veteran is a comparatively fresh face, the acts who make money touring overwhelmingly made their reputations many decades ago, when the industry was still healthy enough to create stars such as the Rolling Stones, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles. Revenue from periodical publishing, whether in print or online, declined from $40.2 billion in 2002 to $23.9 billion in 2022 –— a loss in raw dollars of almost 50%. Factoring in inflation, those numbers are again much worse.

Innovation-wise, the last great American pop culture decade was the Nineties — the last decade of the century that saw America’s rise to global pop culture pre-eminence. In television, the Nineties were book-ended by The Simpsons (1989), which kicked off a surge in witty, prime-time animation, and The Sopranos (1999), which ushered in quality scripted cable television. There was plenty of fare such as Dawson’s Creek (1998) available, too. In Hollywood, the Nineties was decade of indie studios such as Miramax, and birthed the world-class writers and directors Stephen Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino along with stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Matt Damon. Alternative rock birthed dozens of highly creative and financially successful new acts, from Nirvana to the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Alanis Morissette and Gwen Stefani, while rap music reached new creative and commercial heights with Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg and Jay Z. The last two American literary fiction writers who have attracted any real critical attention, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, made their debuts in 1987 and 1988, respectively.

So what accounts for America’s pop cultural collapse? The short answer is digital technology, which led directly or indirectly to monopolistic stagnation in every one of America’s culture industries in response to disruptions of prior business models.

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Hollywood’s main initial antagonists were the streaming services; these have since eaten old-fashioned movie studios and production companies whole by spending billions of dollars on content regardless of whether or not there was an audience. The race to become Hollywood’s Uber left smaller competitors without the ability to competitively distribute their products, with the resulting monopolistic structures imposing top-down uniformity on an industry that had formerly boasted about the audience being king.

In turn, the transition from the big screen to the small screen that streaming services and their users demanded made it near-impossible to create stars, who depended on big-screen magic and the industry’s promotional cycles. The strategy of overspending and then dumping new content into the marketplace made it hard for even the most original creators to stand out from the surrounding oceans of sludge. Cashing big checks from Hollywood’s would-be monopolists may have helped writers, directors and actors to pay for their swimming pools, but they also helped to kill the golden goose.

The extent to which these practices have alienated large parts of Hollywood’s traditional audiences may never be entirely clear, since the streaming services refuse to release even basic audience numbers for their shows. In part, that’s because companies such as Apple and Amazon are content to see entertainment as a loss leader. In Apple’s case, it’s an adjunct to the company’s marketplaces, which are linked in turn to its hardware; in Amazon’s case, entertainment is largely a way to draw some segments of consumers to the company’s immensely profitable marketplace, and keep them there. Freed from workaday competitive constraints, and with access to nearly unlimited piles of cash from their patrons’ primary, profit-oriented businesses, new Hollywood’s culture bureaucrats can give free rein to fashionable pre-occupations such as conducting Me-Too corporate witch hunts, ensuring equity in writer’s rooms, and injecting woke politics into shows that audiences refuse to watch.

Unlike Hollywood, the music industry has been largely unimpressed by the advent of woke-ism. Their business is rebellion, which took a weird turn when free file-sharing services such as Napster and Limewire started encouraging users to routinely violate artists’ copyrights. The result in the Nineties was music industry-wide campaigns in which aging rockers testified before Congress in the hopes of convincing or else forcing their fans to obey copyright law, and buy records. Brilliantly sensing an opportunity, Steve Jobs created the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone, essentially using sleek hardware to take control of the music business. Waving his hardware around like an old-time gangster, Jobs explained to the moguls that they were no longer in the music business: They were in the 99-cent singles business, with Apple getting the biggest cut.

After Jobs’s iPod, and its accompanying iTunes software, ate the music business, by essentially establishing a version of file-sharing that was now under Jobs’s control, the big music companies woke up and decided to go into the streaming business, taking pieces of Spotify and leaving the artists they had once nurtured on steaks and cocaine with a diet of pennies in return for their back catalogues. As record sales plummeted, the music industry stopped paying big advances or otherwise investing in the music they were putting out, and artists could no longer get paid for recording songs. As the star-making machinery broke down, scouts looking to sign the next big thing went to YouTube, and nurtured new talent on social media platforms such as TikTok. Needless to say, none of these platforms select for songwriting talent. Today’s Taylor Swift might find a home in Nashville, but would be an unlikely candidate to be nurtured by one of the major labels, which are no longer in the business of finding talent and making stars.

Book publishing saw successive waves of consolidation, which left four conglomerates competing to publish the same best-sellers while dumping mid-list authors — the vast talent pool from which authors suc as Wallace and Franzen had emerged. As the audience for literary fiction shrank, the products of the big four publishing houses became ever more formulaic. In turn, the publishers began to rely on sales to institutions that could turn their products into mandatory reading. This new linkage, once reserved for niche textbook publishers, meant that the publishing houses were more easily swayed by academic fads, and by the censorious doctrines of younger woke employees who had more recently graduated from high schools and universities.

The failure of American book publishers to produce interesting new work, and new literary stars, was also linked to the destruction of America’s once-thriving ecosystem of newspapers and magazines, which had formerly employed hundreds of book critics who served as independent gatekeepers and taste-makers, on behalf of their readers. Today, the number of full-time book critics employed by independent newspapers and magazines in America is perilously close to zero.

Aside from gazing longingly at the night sky in the hopes of spotting the occasional shooting star, like Oppenheimer or the next Taylor Swift album, it is hard to see how America’s culture industries imagine they will escape from their decades-long spiral of anti-competitive practices, creative sterility and dwindling audiences. In order to return the culture industries to health, what is needed is kind of broad anti-monopolistic legislation aimed at the tech industry that has often been promised but seldom actualised over the past two decades. While both Democrats and Republicans like to talk about punishing monopolists, such talk has so far proven to be a way of driving up the size of the checks they receive in order to further polarise the country while cementing Big Tech’s monopolies over pipelines and platforms that connect creators to their audiences.

If Hollywood’s striking writers and actors are serious about benefitting their audiences in addition to paying for their swimming pools, they might start by demanding an end to the stranglehold of monopolistic practices and same-think over the products they produce. Now that would be a show worth watching.

Thanks to its fans and their continuing ardor, in the 25 years since its release, The Big Lebowski has generated a vast cultural legacy, catchphrases taken from the dialogue and conveyed to us via coffee mugs and t-shirts. It’s inspired para-academic books and articles on the movie’s philosophy, at least one Lebowski-based religion, and at least two undying Reddit threads. All based on what? After an evening of bowling, lazy stoner and ex-hippie Jeff Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) — known universally as “the Dude” — is assaulted in his apartment by two goons. The goons demand that the Dude pay back some money his wife borrowed, or else. You’ve got the wrong Lebowski, the Dude protests. The Dude is a bachelor. In a fateful insult, one of the goons pisses on his living room rug.

Seeking compensation for his pissed-on rug, the Dude visits the other Jeffrey Lebowski, the “Big” Lebowski the goons were really looking for. This Lebowski is a wealthy paraplegic with a young and profligate trophy wife named Bunny (Tara Reid). From the Lebowski mansion the Dude takes a replacement rug — and thereby stumbles into a Humphrey Bogart movie (proximately The Big Sleep). There’s conflict in a rich family, a kidnapping subplot, a pair of seductive heiresses, cars following other cars, and the dogged hero getting punched and then drugged unconscious. The Dude is forced into the Philip Marlowe role, which he plays at his own ambling speed, wearing a bathrobe most of the time.

And, from the very start of my first viewing, I could see that the Coen brothers were doing something that was right up my alley, philosophically speaking. I’d spent enough time tethered to Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory to be — perhaps in the manner of Stockholm Syndrome — persuaded by it. Adorno speaks the language of Marx and Hegel in that book, but he’s basically updating Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic theory for “late capitalism”, and I was already a huge fan Kant’s aesthetics, and I was a young academic at the time. You can do the math.

And this was much more than a mere detective story, or much different. The Coens, as I said, were doing playful things with their storytelling that put me in mind of Adorno — taking the expectations of the detective plot and messing with them, letting the narrative momentum build up and then stopping it dead with whimsical digressions, antic speeches, absurd details lingered over for many seconds. Within the aesthetic form of the detective story they were carving out smaller, subordinate forms, immanent forms, a grad student might say.

But at some point I realised that — despite this philosophical thrill I speak of — I wasn’t enjoying The Big Lebowski very much. With some chagrin, I also realised that it was precisely the narrative moves I was so philosophically taken with that were setting my teeth on edge. Apparently I like narrative momentum in a detective plot, and, apparently, I find it deeply, almost viscerally unpleasant to have it messed with so systematically. But I had that philosophical respect for the film, and my friends who liked it were smart people with good taste in movies. At the same time, my own displeasure felt so idiosyncratic. It seemed a poor basis for any general claims about aesthetic merit. So when the The Big Lebowski came up in conversation, and people turned to me for my opinion, I was uncharacteristically humble: “You know… I didn’t really like it. I’m not sure why.”

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I’ve observed the thriving cult of The Big Lebowski in the same spirit. As a freelance culture writer I’ve had glaring incentive to enrage Lebowski fans with a contrary take, to send out a stereotypical “Slate pitch” on how this beloved film is totally overrated. (I wrote for Slate for many years. It would have been a literal Slate pitch.) I never did that. But my diffidence about this film I didn’t like has inspired some more general thoughts about the ironies of aesthetic judgment and cultural debate, which have been helpful. We all agree that de gustibus non disputandum est — because every gustibus comes from some secret consultation between a mind and a body — and then we go on disputing like it’s physical science we’re talking about, or universal morality. The Big Lebowski has forced me to dwell on these ironies, even as I’ve gone around calling other widely praised movies totally overrated.

As tolerant as I’ve been of the Cult of Lebowski, I do have one problem with it: The Dude is its Christ-like moral foundation, but the portrait it’s left us of him is almost perfectly wrong. In the Religion of Dudeism, the Dude is said to represent “the rebel shrug”. Dudeist observance begins from this simple nugget of wisdom: “Mellow out, man.” Writing and philosophising on the Dude generally treats him as a disciple of hippie stoicism and Buddhist mindfulness, of going with the flow, of taking it easy. We know he’s also hip to Wittgenstein because he won’t play the no-win language games of up-tight squares, who refuse to take things as easy as he does.

Now, the Dude says “Take it easy” several times, and it sounds a fitting sentiment, given that he’s wearing a bathrobe over Bermuda shorts, and that he’s speaking slowly, via the harmonic miracle of Jeff Bridges’s voice. But one thing The Dude rarely does is take it easy. Yes the Dude is a stoned, slow-talking hippie, but he’s also weirdly rigid and impatient, pessimistic and quick to despair. He doesn’t go with the flow. He makes the flow go with him. The plot’s begins with him fixating on an old rug. It may be defensible, as a matter of principle, seeking justice for this insult against his rug, but it is not stoical. Indeed it feels kind of wilful and arbitrary, like he was already looking for a fight, fishing around for a reason to start one.

Of the movie’s many catchphrases,“The Dude abides” has become its most defining, supposedly. But the Dude certainly does not abide having his rug pissed on. The Dude digs in his heels about the rug, and then he heads to the Big Lebowski’s house to get a new one. There, sitting across from this other Lebowski, a tomato-faced blowhard who listens only to himself, the Dude insists that the man not call him Jeff. He’s the Dude. Everyone calls him the Dude. The Dude does not abide being called Jeff. In this moment, a whole history opens up of our Jeff Lebowski telling clueless people through the years that, no, goddammit, he’s not called Jeff. Nobody calls him Jeff, or Jeffrey. He’s the fucking Dude. Can’t you get that through your fucking head!

Nor does the Dude abide the mellow California sounds of The Eagles. He gets himself physically ejected from of a taxi when, after clear warning from the driver, a large and irritable black man playing “Peaceful Easy Feeling” (seriously) from the cassette deck, he continues to complain about the music. “I hate the fuckin’ Eagles,” the Dude cannot keep himself from saying. In the principled stand he takes against the Eagles, he sounds less like an easygoing hippie than like a pretentious art-punk. One imagines a younger Dude in the apartment of a woman he doesn’t know, kicking a turntable because it’s playing “Desperado”.

To be clear, I’m not claiming my against-the-grain assessment of the Dude’s character is original. So much has been said about the Dude and his movie that, within the still-expanding Lebowskiverse, the main cosmic law must be Nietzsche’s “eternal return of the same”. This exact essay has already been written, indeed an infinite number of times. My point is more personal. It concerns the Dude and me.

Late in the film, after the kidnapping subplot has gone awry and the Dude’s car has been stolen and recovered, the Dude and his friends arrive at the home of the teenager they think stole the car and kept the ransom money that was left inside it. Parked on the street is a brand new red Corvette with the dealer invoice still stickered to a window. When he sees the Corvette the Dude moans, “Oh fuck me, man. That kid’s already spent all the money, man.” I got a strange familiar feeling watching this moment, the Dude making that wild, pessimistic inference and moaning it at his friends with total certainty. I’d have made the same leap in his situation, because, like the Dude, I’m a pessimist. I jump to dark conclusions all the time, with the same intensity of conviction, and a similar lack of justifying evidence, as the Dude possessed when he drove up on that Corvette.

Also, like the Dude, I’m dogmatic about music, or I was when I was younger. I spent my teens and twenties sneering at other people’s music tastes, and I imagine I ruined a few parties by complaining about the lame music. Like the Dude earning ejection from his taxi, I was almost fired from a job because I was always changing the station on the radio — “I hate this song!” — instead of working.

The Coen Brothers’s early films often owed some obvious debt to David Lynch, but The Big Lebowski is Lynchian in its very structure — a protagonist learning his fate has gotten tangled up with a sort of double, in this case a man with his exact name, and then realising this double-figure is an enemy who must be overcome. When the Dude grasps that his real beef is not with the rug-pisser but with his own Freudian double, the other Jeffrey Lebowski, he begins spinning in ecstasy. Likewise, were I to find myself in a David Lynch movie, confronted by some dream distortion of my hidden self, I’d assail this other self with all the lively purpose of a pigeon trying to kill his reflection.

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But the strongest, eeriest parallel between me and the Dude is that neither of us can abide his best friend Walter Sobchak, volcanically played by John Goodman. Were The Big Lebowski a film about how an anxious hippie played by the great Jeff Bridges self-medicates with weed and White Russians and bowling while solving a low-stakes Lynchian mystery, I think I’d have liked it very much. But instead it’s about how that guy is constantly bickering with his enormous friend who’s always yelling. Watch the Dude’s face every time Walter starts talking. It clenches in distaste and (correct) anticipation that Walter’s about to go on some pointless digression. The Dude is almost as mean to Walter as Walter is to their friend Donny (Steve Buscemi). Walter drives the Dude crazy.

Walter drives me crazy, too. Like the Dude, I want the kidnapping plot to go smoothly. We’re both stressed out when Walter screws it up. Like the Dude, I want everyone to keep the conversation on point. A rug has been pissed on. A young woman has been kidnapped. A car has been stolen. A briefcase filled with money is missing. We need to figure out what to do! The Dude is working hard to solve the mystery, and I’m urging him on as I watch, but Walter keeps interrupting the deliberations with his madcap ideas, his constant invocation of the Vietnam War, his armed threats, his yelling.

If I were to submit an article for inclusion in the next inevitable book on philosophy in The Big Lebowski, and the article’s title was “Aesthetic Freedom in Adorno and The Big Lebowski,” the editor, seeing the title, would surely start thinking of the Dude: “Yes… the Dude …aesthetic freedom…nice.” But it wasn’t the Dude who made me think those excited thoughts when I saw The Big Lebowski in 1998. It was Walter. Walter was negating narrative time in the detective plot with his prolonged and senseless yelling. Walter was carving out autonomous zones in the movie’s logic, where an alternative logic applied. And, once the thrill of philosophical recognition cleared away, my response to these moments of aesthetic freedom was the same as the Dude’s when Walter chides him about his “negative energy” at the bowling alley: “Fuck you, Walter.”

Sammy Fabelman lives in suburbia between two poles, real and metaphorical: his artist mother, who makes music, and his scientist father, who makes machines. Both parents are, in their own ways, thwarted and incomplete: his mother cannot have her art — she is a pianist, but gave it up to raise her children — and his father cannot have his family, because he is a workaholic. Sammy learns, as artists do, to create a world he can control.

He can change the world by filming it: change its emphasis; change his place in it. Sammy films, without realising it at first, his mother’s touch on his father’s best friend during a camping trip and learns that she is unfaithful. The insinuation — and this is the most self-aware thing in The Fabelmans — is that cinema is a poisonous medium: eat from the tree of knowledge and be cast out of paradise. But Sammy collapses to its incredible power to transform. The antisemitic bully of his schooldays in Arizona becomes a hero through Sammy’s lens, so much so that even the bully is humiliated by it. Sammy makes him small by making him big and sends him back to the world with his shame.

The shame, though, was Spielberg’s: in making The Fabelmans he is collapsing to the very power that he describes. Why can he not be honest about the scale of his ambivalence? According to his biographer, Joseph McBride, Spielberg was so ashamed of his Judaism he once pretended he did not know his own grandfather. “And suddenly,” Spielberg said, “my grandfather, with the yarmulke, comes out of our house, two houses down, and yells: ‘Shmuel! Shmuel! [Steven’s Hebrew name]. I’m not answering him. I’m pretending I don’t know him. I’m denying that name. My friend is saying, ‘He’s looking your way. Does he mean you?’ They point at me, and I’m saying ‘No, it’s not me’.”

Like all 20th-century American Jews, Spielberg grew up among stories of the Shoah — his parents talked about it constantly, inappropriately. I suspect this unimaginable loss was magnified by the loss of his family’s happiness, which shattered when his mother’s adultery was exposed: apparently by him. He was spoiled, though. “We never said no,” his mother Leah said in an interview. “Steve really did run us. He called the shots.” He describes her too: “We never grew up at home, because she never grew up.”

So, a shattered, gifted child: making himself big where he was once small. His sister Anne wrote the script for Big, in which a 12-year-old boy is given the body of an adult. He is fearful — what else could he be? Spielberg’s films are about anxiety. The truck (Duel) or the shark (Jaws) will kill you. Or the suburbs will: your own home. Suburban children are terrorised in Spielberg’s work. Their alien friend (though Spielberg is both Elliott and E.T.) is threatened; corpses rise from the ground (Poltergeist). He was very afraid as a child: “I used to be afraid of my hand shadow.”

Cinema is a solution to this, and this explains his monomania, and his skill. It is an act of survival. “I had no way to sublimate or channel those fears until I began telling stories to my younger sisters. This removed the fear from my soul and transferred it right into theirs.” Later he found a bigger audience. “One of the best ways to cope with it [fear] is to turn it around and put it out to others. I mean, if you are afraid of the dark, you put the audience in a dark theatre. I had a great fear of the ocean.” After Jaws, we all did. The great white shark was collateral damage.

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An obvious theme develops across his work: this man is preserved in childhood. He “can always trace a movie idea back to my childhood”. The mother is tortured; the father is lost. There are few politics in Spielberg’s films, and there is no sex. The sex scene in Indiana Jones is a man having sex with his mother. “Where,” she asks him during foreplay, “doesn’t it hurt?” Sometimes the child finds the absent father. In the final Indiana Jones film, I thought the grail was his father. Indiana says to Henry: “We never talked…”

And like a child, Spielberg is covetous, often unkind. He bought one of the Rosebud sleds in Citizen Kane, but he wouldn’t help Orson Welles, its creator, get work. Julia Phillips, his producer on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, called him “a writer fucker”. He can be amazingly obtuse, because he has lived his life in Hollywood and because he is always transmitting. He was so confident he would be nominated for the best director Academy Award for Jaws, he invited a news crew to film him watching the nominations. Only four came, including editing: no best director. According to Phillips, he had the editor, who won the Academy Award, kicked off his next film.

He had a public adolescence in 1993, with Schindler’s List: his acknowledgement of his Judaism. “The experience of making Schindler’s List made me reconcile with all of the reasons… I hid from my Jewishness,” he said in a 2017 documentary. “And it made me so proud to be a Jew.” Even so, it is a film about Jews non-Jews can live with, because it is about non-Jews: Oskar Schindler and the commandant Amon Göth.

It was Schindler he identified with, of course, as David Thomson noted: the morally complex showman, the maker of enamel, then souls. “The closest Schindler’s List comes to art may be in aiding Steven Spielberg to back into the upheld coat of his own mysterious, brilliant, actorly nature.” Again, it came from his childhood. He told The Jerusalem Post that the antisemitic school bully “never became my real friend. I was able to stop some of the hatred by, in a way, doing what Schindler did. Which was to charm him and make him a conspirator… Schindler consorted with the enemy, and he got what he wanted.”

He had wanted to film in Auschwitz but was forbidden. I had thought — how could he even ask? — but then I read about him: he is Steven Spielberg. He felt he could. His fake concentration camp outside Krakow is still there. I have seen it. I think he did Jews a real disservice with Schindler’s List, though unconsciously: his Nazis are glamourised while his Jews are a mute and terrorised mass.

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Remember the last scene: the imposition of a redemptive ending, which felt more horrifying than anything that went before? How could he make such a film and then miss the point of it? A film-maker friend saw a rough cut of Schindler’s List: he reported no music, no child in a red coat, and no redemptive ending. He thought it was a masterpiece. But that is Spielberg. He cannot stop editorialising because he does not trust the audience, only himself. “I am the audience,” he said.

The usual complaint about Spielberg is that, a gifted child making cinema for less gifted children, he has turned cinema from the sophisticated art form of the Seventies into an anaesthetic. Pauline Kael said the problem isn’t Spielberg but his acolytes: “It’s not so much what Spielberg has done, but what he has encouraged. Everyone else has imitated his fantasies, and the result is an infantilisation of the culture.”

His response to this is typically hurt: “I think some people would like me to make a movie that explores the dark side and provides no easy answer to make the audience feel better when they return to their cars. If those critics want more pain in my films, they can give me $2 million — that’s all it would take to make a film about pain — and I’ll make that movie.” I like to think that the only thing standing between him and greatness is his self-deception — his insistence on his own affability — but the awful thing is I know he could make it. And I wish he would.

I wonder how much he understands himself: The Fabelmans, despite its beauty, suggests not at all. His wife, the actress Kate Capshaw, who starred in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, once asked him what happened to her career. “He said, ‘You weren’t supposed to have a career. You were supposed to be with me.’” It’s what happened to his mother precisely: it was the source of her anguish. He says so in The Fablemans. But I am not surprised that he forgets this. His films don’t deal with the characters’ relationships with one another. They deal with Spielberg’s relationship with himself. His work looks ever backwards to the glittering, and limiting, landscape of the child.

A few years ago, in a conversation which presages this new book, Bret Easton Ellis invited him on to The Bret Easton Ellis Show to discuss political correctness, creative mid-life crises, and how they both fell in love with film…

Bret Easton Ellis: Quentin, it seems every week, there’s some kind of negative shit being written about you. What are your feelings about these controversies? How do you process them? And how seriously do you take them?

Quentin Tarantino: Well, it’s hard to take any of them seriously. But it’s actually ended up being kind of sobering. In a weird way, whenever I felt myself getting riled up, I came to realise that I was taking part in the riling up myself.

I never really thought of interviews as being these artistically significant things, but there used to be an artistic significance to the beginning and the end of the interview, and the beginning and the end of the published article. Well, now when they come out, they’re simply like a whale for other journalistic sharks to grab their little chunk of meat and make their big headline.

Now you’ve got 480 articles about me throwing shade on the director of Selma, from everywhere from The Guardian, to The New York Times to Variety and Hollywood Reporter, all the way to the Times of India. And so you look at all that, and just think: “Oh my God, well, I’m never going to do interviews again. This is such a drag.”

Bret: As someone who has been giving interviews for 30 years, I feel there’s something different in the air between the interviews I gave in 1995, compared to the interviews that I give today, where they are automatically dissected in social media, and things are pulled from them, that are taken out of context, like in my New York Times interview with you.

It’s part of an ideology now, and having an ideology is more important than aesthetics. Everyone really wants you to be PC, and if you don’t really toe the groupthink party line, then you are open to attack. It makes you think: why do I do this?

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One of the things that was really interesting that didn’t make it into our interview was my reaction to your love of Don Siegel’s 1973 crime drama Charley Varrick, with Walter Matthau. I rewatched it after our conversation, and I was amazed by it: it seemed to inform everything that you’ve done, and it seemed like a huge influence on the Tarantino aesthetic. And yet in the published piece, it seems that I take you to task for thinking this, and they removed my parenthetical about “or perhaps he’s right, it is magnificent”.

So let’s start with Charley Varrick, and why this movie matters to you as much as it does: what does that movie do for you that speaks to you and continues to speak to you?

Quentin: Yeah, well, it’s interesting, because I didn’t see Charley Varrick at the theatres when it came out. I think I saw it in 1973 in Tennessee. And I think one of the reasons I saw it was because Joe Don Baker was in it, because he was the star of Walking Tall, which was a huge movie in Tennessee at that time. I think it was more or less that type of aesthetic. And I think that’s what I probably responded to, even though I don’t know if I was sophisticated enough to call it by name.

Bret: Sometimes I think that passion comes from being exposed to amazing movies when we’re young. And maybe the reason film culture will wane for a generation is because of what they’re being raised on now, compared to what we were being raised on.

Quentin: Hopefully they’re being raised on me and less crap.

Bret: This is true, I would say you are one of the few. But 1975 and 1976 are very different years cinematically for a 12-year-old than today.

Quentin: Imagine learning about cinema from 1969 through 1974. At the age of eight in 1970, I went to the Tiffany Theatre on the Sunset Strip, where old Hollywood gave way and rock ‘n’ roll and the hippies took over. And at eight I saw a double feature of Joe and Where’s Poppa?.

Bret: I remember going to a double feature of Where’s Poppa? at the Sherman Theatre in Sherman Oaks, LA, which turned into a pretty good revival theatre. And I had the same exact thing. I remember being ten, leaving my house, walking by myself to Ventura Boulevard to go into the La Reina Theatre, when school was out in December 1974, buying a ticket to The Phantom of the Paradise and going into the theatre by myself. And I sat there and it spoke to me and I loved it. And I became obsessed with the movie and I became obsessed with De Palma and I wanted to watch everything that followed. It’s very hard for me now to understand a ten-year-old doing that. The options aren’t the same. The ten-year-old now is seeing Frozen.

Quentin: Or Age of Ultron or something like that.

Bret: Or Age of Ultron, and I sometimes think that there actually is a Gen X sensibility different from Millennial sensibility, that there is this thing that we shared.

Quentin: Very much so. Even the whole aspect about the fact that when I was in my 20s, before the Gen X talk started, when we were just busy living it and not writing articles about it, we were always stuck with people who were older than us who lived through the Sixties. And they were always telling us how junky our culture was in the Seventies compared to the Sixties — and usually what they were using as bully-whack to whip us with was how rock music had changed from their time. The Beatles doing their thing or Dylan…

Bret: … And becoming disco or The Eagles or whatever.

Quentin: Yeah, the pop sounds of The Partridge Family, which I still appreciate to this day. I actually think David Cassidy is one of the most underrated vocalists in rock history. But the point being, though, was that our music was junky and theirs was right-on. However, what they didn’t realise was that, okay, well, maybe you’re right when it comes to the music, but you’re not right when it comes to movies at all — you’re dead wrong.

And for that matter, you’re dead wrong when it comes to television, too. There was an aspect that we as children, literally children of the Seventies, invested in TV in a way that the generation before us didn’t. And we held on to TV in a big way.

But the thing is, though, we were invested in TV, and we were also invested in our movies. Even in elementary school we talked about the movies we saw. We talked ad nauseam about things like, not only The Bad News Bears, but even the crappy exploitation rip-off Here Come the Tigers. I remember when some kids saw that and came back the next day talking about it. And going to a pretty much all-black school, the weekend after Mandingo opened, like five students were talking about it or Black Belt Jones or whatever.

Bret: Well, also there was a kind of permissiveness in the Seventies that led us down these paths to movies. My parents weren’t going to take me to Chinatown at ten, but my dad took me to Theater of Blood and a couple of R-rated horror movies with my friends. We were nine; we loved it. They didn’t trigger anything, we weren’t cowering behind the sofa — we snuck The Exorcist on the Z channel that was here in LA. And I just keep thinking of the groovy Seventies, the permissiveness of it, seeing The Omen ten times in the summer of ‘76 because friends’ brothers and sisters took us in. And maybe this permissiveness of the Seventies, when I look at your group of filmmakers, perhaps aided in creating this movie consciousness that is definitely shared with Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson.

And I was thinking, in 2012, someone published your list of your Top 12 movies — which of course I know change at times…

Quentin: Almost always invariably, I pick ten new ones, every six years.

Bret: I just chose a random ten for my Criterion Top Ten. And I know that next week, it would have been a different ten. But it’s Apocalypse Now for you, The Bad News Bears, Carrie, Dazed and Confused, The Great Escape, His Girl Friday, Jaws, Pretty Maids all in a Row — a very strange and interesting choice…

Quentin: I kind of love that movie!

Bret: I do too!

Quentin: I show it quite a bit.

Bret: And then Rolling Thunder, Sorcerer, Taxi Driver, The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly — eight of these movies from the Seventies.

The other big two revelations for me were that you really were not a big Hitchcock fan, and that a lot of Hitchcock left you cold, especially the Fifties movies. And you also look at the Fifties as a very dubious decade for American film, almost up there with the Eighties. And that Vertigo doesn’t really turn you on.

Quentin: Vertigo, not at all. I really don’t get Vertigo. And I don’t really believe anybody who says they love it to that degree.

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Bret: Looking over your career, just to be clear, was there a period where you were unhappy? A period, a year or so, where you are like: this is it, I was probably most unhappy during this period.

Quentin: Yeah, when I was 18-22.

Bret: Really, those four years?

Quentin: Yeah. I’m sure I was hideous to women, I felt it. And I was really by myself in the world. I’d quit school a little too early, so I didn’t have any friends. I was really at odds in the world. I had kind of stopped going to my acting classes that brought me some joy at that time. My best friend at that time was a guy in even more, worse doldrums than me. And we literally were very pathetic, and we just kind of kept each other company in our own pathetic-ness.

Oddly enough though, that was actually a really good time for movies. So I just spent all the time going to movies by myself or dragging the sad-sack with me to go see films.

Things changed when I started working at Video Archives. That was basically like I joined college, not because we learned so much about stuff. It was more just that, if you don’t have your college experience, you usually find yourself working at a place where you get your college experience. And maybe you don’t learn as much as you would learn in college, but you have the whole social aspect of it. All of a sudden I had some friends, and I was working in a video store. It’s not really what I wanted to do, but it was connected enough to what I wanted to do that it actually gave me joy.

And my personality really flourished at this video store. I became like the little Andrew Sarris of the video archives and it was my Village Voice. And people came in and I started becoming a bit of a professor. They couldn’t even choose a movie unless I put it in their hands and gave them some little spiel about it.

People would come up with something like Pauline at the Beach, which has a very sexy box. And they would ask: “So how is this? What is this?” And I would explain to them what an Éric Rohmer movie was. So I’m kind of describing it, and I’m saying: “Well, they’re very interesting little stories. Not much happens; they’re usually just a tale of a group of people, some men and some women, and how they negotiate their little peccadilloes together.”

And somebody would say, “Is it a comedy?” “Well, no, it’s not a comedy. But if you watch it enough, give yourself over to it enough, it becomes slightly amusing. If you give yourself over to it enough, when it’s over, you’ll either know, okay, I like this, this was actually kind of an interesting experience. And if you don’t like it, well, then by the time you get to the end, now you know you don’t.”

Well, with a little setup like that, that was all they needed to actually watch the movie with the proper glasses, the proper response to things. And again, you have to remember again, how differently from now, as opposed to a Netflix cue, if I talked them into taking a movie out, they weren’t going to just watch it for ten minutes and turn it off. They actually wanted to watch it. They were invested in this.

Bret: It’s investment.

Quentin: They were invested in actually watching it for a while. If they really didn’t like it after 45 minutes or a half hour, they’d turn it on and off, and they come back pissed. But in the case of Éric Rohmer, with that kind of preamble, all the Éric Rohmer movies ended up renting like 90 times because if you saw Pauline at the Beach, and you liked it, you came back and you saw Claire’s Knee. And if you really liked Claire’s Knee, then you saw Full Moon in Paris.

And I was able to do that. Not only that, but that time at Video Archives, in a weird way, almost became a primer to some degree of what it would later be like to become famous. Because in Manhattan Beach, where the store was, we were famous. The guys at Video Archives were famous. We were the Video Guys. I’d walk down the street and people would drive by: “Hey, Quentin, hey, hey, hey, hey.” Everyone knew me: I was the Video Guy. The Man’s Theatre, that was right by us. We’d walk into the theatre, and then here we hear: “Those are the guys from Video Archives. Those guys from Video Archives.”

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Bret: It’s a different time… So have you had a midlife crisis? You’re about my age. I know I definitely had one about five years ago. You’ve escaped that, you did not fall into the mid-40s depression, or “where am I going”?

Quentin: My 40s were pretty good!

Bret: I guess my 40s weren’t so good — that’s why I had it! But you’ve also said that you are going to retire at 60 or after you complete your tenth film. You want to get to your tenth film. You think there are a few impediments. You think that there’s the idea that film is not going to be available to you, and you really don’t want to shoot on anything else. So if that happens, then maybe you’re going to be writing that novel, or whatever you’re going to be doing before that. So is that really the one impediment, the idea that there is no film?

Quentin: I think, especially if I’m talking about only doing two more, I think I’ll get past that. I think we’re okay. We’ll see what happens…

Bret: You’re right, because there is enough film: there’s a three or four or five-year stack.

Quentin: Look, things can change four years from now. But more or less, I don’t think that would be the thing that would stop me. It’s interesting because there is an aspect about the idea of saying you only have two movies left that I actually think is almost doubling and tripling down on my artistic vitality. I think that’s an interesting way to look at it, because I think most directors when they talk, especially if they get around my age, they all think they have more time than they really, truly do. I’m going strong after 20 years but going strong after 30 years… that’s a different story. And I’ve been very lucky.

But part of it all is just that nothing is more important than this. This is what this is; this is the time. And it’s not about wives, and it’s not about kids, and it’s not about anything. It’s about this.

Now, I don’t know if I can keep that up for a 40-year stretch, and I don’t even know if I would want to. But the thing about it, though, is I do think most directors think they have more time. And they talk about this book that they would like to do, and then this movie, and this genre movie, and this one and that one, and either they don’t live long enough, or their circumstances commercially change.

But if you’re actually thinking “you only have two movies left”, and asking what are those movies going to be and what is it that you want to say — well, then you’re not just going to be derailed by a bestseller that comes out, or a project with a big actor you want to work with, or any of the things that can possibly come up. Right now, in my brain, from stories that I have come up with in my head, I could do four or even four and a half movies. Now if I only do two, which of those four and a half will I end up doing, committing the next six years of my life to do?

That’s interesting, to see which of those two end up being the ones that I put my mark on. Which will be the ones that I end on, meaning they define me? Maybe I change and do 1. Who knows? Maybe I don’t. If the tenth one is bad, maybe I will. The idea is to kind of go out, you know, with a good one.

This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation from The Bret Easton Ellis Show.

Filmmakers had made massive bombs before Heaven’s Gate and they have made massive bombs since. Three or four were released last year, including Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story and Guillermo Del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, which is by far the best film Del Toro has created. Both of these films are nominated for Best Picture Oscars this year and have probably lost far more money for their studios than Heaven’s Gate. How is it that Cimino became so famous and was able to create two towering works of art in the space of three years? And then become a pariah?

*** 

Cimino lived for 77 years, having had so much plastic surgery by the end of his life that it was rumoured he transgendered. In the end, he looked like the cliché of a middle-aged lesbian. When he was barely 40, at the height of his career, he was briefly the world’s most famous youngish director, after winning the Oscar for directing The Deer Hunter, a new Hollywood masterpiece that spoke powerfully to Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation about the cost of war. It was a huge, serious R-rated movie for adults that was also a big popular hit, a work of movie art that resonated with filmgoers everywhere. (Well, that was 1979 for you.) But the following year, when his follow-up Heaven’s Gate bombed, Cimino instantly became the most disgraced director in Hollywood history and his career was mostly over. What happened? A big part of it had to do with the perils of obsession and perhaps not being as talented as your only great film implies.

Cimino was born in 1939, a third-generation Italian American who grew up on Long Island. His father was a music publisher, and his mother was a costume designer, and Michael was considered a prodigy from a very early age at the private schools he attended. But Cimino resented what was expected of him and he began to rebel in high school. He started hanging out with juvenile delinquents and getting into fights and coming home drunk. His parents couldn’t believe this was happening to their well-behaved little boy and they couldn’t stand his new friends. But these new friends lived with a passion and an intensity that Cimino, as a rich kid, just never found among his peers. They were the outsiders and the individuals that Cimino would be attracted to for the rest of his life; men with their own code — all of his seven movies are about criminals, soldiers, policeman, mob bosses, murderers.

Cimino found it strange that his father, not so much his mother, disapproved of his delinquency because his father was, according to Cimino, the life of the party. He travelled a lot, he was an intense womanizer, he loved martinis and chain-smoked and died young.

Cimino graduated high school in 1956 and then enrolled in Michigan State in East Lansing, where he majored in graphic arts and was a member of the weightlifting club. He was a popular student and in the 1959 yearbook he was described as someone who “loved blondes, Thelonious Monk, and drinking, preferably vodka”. After studying at Yale, Cimino moved to New York City and worked in advertising on Madison Avenue, where he directed commercials for everything from Kodak to United Airlines to Pepsi to cigarettes. The added incentive, Cimino said, was to meet beautiful girls.

Clients were soon clamouring to work with Cimino, but he had one drawback: because of how meticulous his work was he almost always went overtime, and yet most thought the results were worth it, even if Cimino went overschedule and over budget. Through advertising he met a woman named Joann Carelli, who was an agent for commercial directors, and they began what would become a 30 year on-off relationship and she would be the only credited producer on the ill-fated Heaven’s Gate. She is also the only woman Cimino has been quasi-romantically linked with; he never married, he never had children.

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As the Seventies began, Cimino decided to move to Los Angeles, where he began his career as a screenwriter. It was Carelli who encouraged this, even though Cimino had never written a script before. But by 1978 he had written about a dozen and was making a decent living. Cimino would have rather directed, but he didn’t have any money to option properties or buy books or pay someone to write a script and the only chance he had to direct something was if he owned the screenplay that a movie star wanted to make. And that’s exactly what happened with a screenplay Cimino wrote called Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which was shown to Clint Eastwood who bought it for his production company.

Eastwood had planned on making the movie himself but allowed Cimino a chance to direct it, his first feature, after being impressed with his rewrites on the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force. Cimino had been hired in to revise a second version of the script, and the film turned out to be a massive hit — the sixth-highest grossing movie of 1973, a much bigger hit than the original Dirty Harry. Cimino has said that if it weren’t for Clint Eastwood, he would never have had a career in film, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was the 17^th highest grossing film of that year and Jeff Bridges was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Cimino was 35.

Because of the success of the movie Cimino was deluged with offers, but he didn’t like any of them and decided that he would only get involved with a project that he wanted to do. This was the Seventies. This was the era of the filmmaker as auteur. This was the decade of freedom and studios were willing to take big risks.

So Cimino kept rejecting offer after offer until he decided to pitch a big ambitious Vietnam movie to a few EMI executives who had approached him in November 1976 about another script called The Man Who Came To Play, whose central conceit was about people going to Las Vegas to play Russian roulette. But the script needed to be heavily rewritten and revised: EMI loved the premise but it wasn’t a movie yet.

Cimino had read the script and told EMI he was confident that he could elevate the script into an actual movie, but it was unclear who these people in Vegas playing Russian roulette were, why they were there, and what had happened to them. Cimino was intrigued and decided to hire Deric Washburn, who had worked with him on a previous script, on the revision. Washburn went ahead and wrote a first draft and when Cimino read it he thought it was so bad that Washburn must be mentally deranged. Cimino and Washburn supposedly had a confrontation at the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood where Washburn said he couldn’t take the pressure of working on the script with Cimino’s attitude and gave up. So Cimino fired him and threw everything out and wrote the first draft completely alone. The Deer Hunter was born.

Now, Washburn has said that this is all a lie. He claimed that the two of them spent three days together at the Sunset Marquis and hammered out the new plot and agreed that Washburn would do the bulk of the writing. Washburn claimed he had been given a time limit of a month — the clock was ticking — and he had spent the entire time writing and rewriting the script. When he was finished, according to Washburn, Cimino and Carelli took him to a cheap restaurant somewhere on the Sunset Strip where Carelli told Washburn: “Well, it’s fuck-off time.” And Washburn was fired.

Washburn saw this as a classic Hollywood situation: you get a dummy to write the goddamn thing, then tell the dummy to go fuck himself, then put your own name on the dummy’s script, and make sure the dummy never comes back. Washburn admits he was so tired that he didn’t really care if he was fired. He’d been working 20-hour days for a month and was completely burnt out. He left LA the next day, got on a plane and flew back to Manhattan.

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EMI was surprised by the new The Deer Hunter script and how it turned one man into three — and how these men now worked in a steel town in Pennsylvania and were all drafted into Vietnam. In the original script it is Mike, played by Robert De Niro, who stays in Vietnam and Christopher Walken’s Nick who comes back to the steel town and returns to Linda (Meryl Streep). It is Mike who meets his tragic fate at the Russian roulette table and not Nick. Cimino revised all this, but the Writer’s Guild of America in their arbitration process awarded Washburn sole screenplay by credit and the original authors of the script The Man Who Came To Play were given story credit along with Michael Cimino. Cimino was pissed. But he had a movie to make.

The Deer Hunter started shooting in June of 1977, and it took six months to complete at double its original budget. The cast, along with De Niro and Walken, was made up of John Savage, John Cazale and Cazale’s girlfriend at the time, Meryl Streep, who De Niro recommended to Cimino after seeing her in a play. Streep didn’t really respond to the role of Linda — she saw her as a vague, stick girlfriend — but Cazale was dying of lung cancer and she took the role so she could be near him on set.

There was an arduous year of post-production — the film editor Peter Zinner, who won an Oscar for his work, was handed about 110 miles of printed film to edit. This was a monumental task in 1978. How did so much film get shot, one wonders. How did the already large budget double? The answer is Cimino had become obsessed. He was now a film artist who wanted to create a masterpiece, something that could be compared to The Godfather and The Godfather Part II — movies that are looked at as the pinnacle achievements of the New Hollywood.

The wedding sequence that opens The Deer Hunter was supposed to be about 20 minutes long but in the finished film it’s over 50 minutes and it’s grand and ominous. Visconti would be proud. Cimino’s instincts were so right: to give us this much time to spend with these characters until the horror of Vietnam interrupts everything and destroys their lives. The moviemaking in the wedding sequence and then in Vietnam is monumental. An artist has painted this movie and seems to know exactly what he’s doing with every brush stroke, every camera pan, every edit.

The first cut of The Deer Hunter was three and a half hours. EMI and Cimino were pleased with it but executives at Universal, the studio which had bought the film before production and were releasing it in the United States, were not so enthusiastic. According to an exec at EMI, the Universal contingent were shocked and thought the use of God Bless America in the final scene was anti-American. They really did not like it and they really didn’t like it any more when it was cut down by 30 minutes to just over three hours. Michael Deeley, the EMI executive who had overseen the film’s production, said that he realised too late that Universal was the wrong home for The Deer Hunter.

The head of Universal at that time was Thom Mount, who has described the post-production process on The Deer Hunter as a continuing nightmare from the moment Cimino finished it to the day it was released. Cimino was wedded to every single frame he shot. He was an artist obsessed with his own creation.

When The Deer Hunter was released in December 1978, it was given just a one-week run in two theaters in North America: one in New York and one in Los Angeles. The one in Los Angeles was The National in Westwood, which, along with the Village, was the grandest of all the theaters in LA. It was always a thrill, no matter what was playing, to go see a movie at The National: even if we had no interest in a particular movie and it was playing at The National, we’d still go.

My movie-mad friend and I — we were 14 — bought advanced tickets for the Saturday matinee. Four of us went with his parents, who had to take us because The Deer Hunter was R-rated. We sat in the last row and the movie began, no trailers, in 70mm. It remains one of the most powerful and overwhelming experiences I’ve ever had. The Russian roulette sequence was so suspenseful, so violent — no one had ever seen anything like this — that I was terrified, wiped-out.

Of course the literal-minded press complained that there weren’t any recorded cases of Russian roulette in the Vietnam War, but Cimino said The Deer Hunter was a personal and an autobiographical film. This is the kind of film an artist makes. The Deer Hunter for Cimino was not political, polemical or supposed to be historically accurate. This is what an artist says. And Cimino sometimes teasingly defended these scenes by saying he had news clippings from Singapore stating that Russian roulette was used during the war though  never showed these clippings to anyone. Cimino was a prankster and liked to make fun of the press and toy with them. This is what an artist does. I’ve done it before. Often you can’t help yourself. You think: they need to be tricked. They need to learn a lesson and get fucked with a bit. You think: why do we even have to talk to them?

In some factions — and this is so tiresome — The Deer Hunter was called a racist movie because of its depictions of the Vietnamese soldiers who torture the Americans. The whole film was apparently a racist rewriting of that tragic war. But Christopher Walken has said that while making the movie no one ever mentioned Vietnam — it was simply a war film and Russian roulette was its metaphor. Michael Deeley, that EMI exec, also said that The Deer Hunter wasn’t really about Vietnam but about how individuals respond to pressure in an unworthy war and how they face the horrible choices presented to them.

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The Deer Hunter is a parable and many Vietnam veterans who responded favourably to the film thought the Russian roulette sequences were a valid allegory. Maybe not the liberal entertainment press who, despite admiring the film, kept pushing the racist angle. But this is what an artist is often up against: a wilful misreading of your intentions in order to satisfy someone’s own ideological outlook. This is so boring and it was happening in 1978 just as it happens now. Some things don’t change.

That the movie was originally released in just two theatres in December — in order to qualify for Oscar nominations — was the brainchild of a flamboyantly gay Grease producer called Allan Carr. He had become a fan of the movie at early screenings and devised a PR campaign that would ensure the movie would be talked about and then rereleased nationwide at the end of February, when we saw it again at The Village Theater and where it played even more powerfully.

My friends and I were in awe of this movie. And most critics were too, with many of them writing that The Deer Hunter was the best American epic since The Godfather. Roger Ebert called it one of the most emotionally shattering films ever made and David Thomson has called it one of the great American films of all time. It was nominated for nine Oscars and won five: Picture, Director, supporting actor for Walken, editing and sound. De Niro, Streep and John Savage were also nominated for their performances — as was Vilmos Zsigmond’s extraordinary cinematography.

And this sweep at the Oscars happened despite a pushback campaign against the film once the nominations were announced. It was spearheaded by Warren Beatty, a famously liberal Hollywood insider, whose comedy Heaven Can Wait was also up for nine Oscars and was competing with The Deer Hunter in many of the same categories. Jane Fonda, the star of Coming Home, another Vietnam War film that was The Deer Hunter’s main competition at the Oscars that year, also criticised the film for its racism in public, even though she had never seen it. There were demonstrators outside the auditorium where the awards were given out. Robert De Niro was so anxious over the controversy that he decided not to go and stayed in New York, but then Jon Voight was the heavy favourite to win for Coming Home that night, which he did. A week after that Oscar ceremony, Cimino, newly minted as New Hollywood’s latest boy wonder, flew to Montana to begin shooting his follow-up to The Deer Hunter — a movie called Heaven’s Gate.

***

Heaven’s Gate was a script Cimino had written in 1971 called The Johnson County War, a western set in 1892 about cattle barons versus immigrants that didn’t get any traction because no stars wanted to sign on. It was shelved, but in the days leading up to the 1979 Academy Awards, when it seemed certain Cimino would triumph and The Deer Hunter would win him both a Best Picture and a Best Directing Oscar, United Artists was convinced to resurrect what was now called Heaven’s Gate, starring Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, Jeff Bridges and John Hurt.

United Artists approved a budget of $11.6 million and offered Cimino complete artistic freedom. The studio was coming off a heady run: it had won the Best Picture Oscar three years in a row, with One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky and Annie Hall, and it was considered the go-to studio in a town for filmmakers who didn’t want to be constrained by the politics and bureaucracy and interference of some of the other bigger studios. This was the headiest time in Cimino’s career: he was offered the most freedom as an artist, and he took full advantage of it. He was going to paint the screen with not only the most amazing western ever made but one of the grandest achievements of the New Hollywood. It would be the ultimate auteur movie, aiming not only for a stunning work of visual art but also a violent and popular movie that would connect with a mass audience.

Cimino was drunk on the possibilities and when a filmmaker becomes this obsessed with a movie, the first thing to go out the window is judgment. There was only one thing that United Artists asked of Cimino, and that was to have his film ready to premiere in December — to make sure it was eligible for a truckload of Oscar nominations and also have it play during the lucrative Christmas season.

But by the sixth day of filming, Heaven’s Gate was already five days behind schedule. Cimino had become an artist whose fanatical attention to detail led to an entire street being built to his precise specifications, and then being torn down because it just didn’t look right. The artist’s mania was settling in. An entire tree that Cimino approved of was cut down and moved in pieces and rebuilt in a courtyard in Oxford, England, where the opening Harvard graduation scene takes place. An entire irrigation system was built under the land where the climactic battlefield scene would unfold so that it would remain vividly green.

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But why not? This was the era where Francis Ford Coppola shot a million feet of footage for Apocalypse Now. Kubrick had shot almost as much footage for The Shining. Spielberg had lavishly overspent on 1941. Even Martin Scorsese had spent $20 million on Raging Bull. What was United Artists supposed to do except trust the artist they hired to make the movie they agreed upon?

But Heaven’s Gate was soon haemorrhaging money, and by the time Cimino was finished with principal photography he had shot more than 220 hours of footage. The movie was costing around $200,000 a day to produce at one point. But Cimino was in the grip of something: he wanted to make his perfect movie and soon he was demanding up to 50 takes of individual scenes. Cimino had become the kind of director who delayed filming for the day until a cloud that he liked rolled into frame. Actors and musicians who had been brought to Montana where most of the movie was shot would wait around and end up stranded, endlessly waiting to be called to shoot their scenes that never materialised. John Hurt, who plays Kristofferson’s best friend, temporarily left the set to shoot David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and claimed no one noticed that he’d been gone.

Heaven’s Gate didn’t finish shooting until March 1980, and ended up costing $44 million dollars, four times the agreed budget. Cimino then locked himself away with his editor — William Reynolds, who had edited The Godfather and The Sound of Music — and worked obsessively on putting the movie together for its new release date: Thanksgiving weekend, 1980 — a year after the original release date.

After I watched it for a third time during lockdown, I think Michael Cimino had convinced himself that he’d created a masterpiece, and that all the expense and hard work and time spent had been worth it. And though there are dozens of images in Heaven’s Gate that are as stunning as any ever shot and there is undeniable genius in it, the movie does not work.

In late June 1980, Cimino previewed a rough cut for the execs at United Artists that ran to 5 hours and 25 minutes, with Cimino promising to cut about fifteen minutes. UA flatly refused to release the film at that length and conspired to fire Cimino. Cimino finally relented and said that he could re-edit the film to about 3 hours and 40 minutes, but no less. In the end, he cut it down to 3 hours and 39 minutes.The premiere took place on November 19 at a theater on the Upper East Side in New York, packed with celebrities including the stars of the movie. During the intermission, Cimino noticed no one was talking excitedly to him or drinking the complimentary champagne. He went up to his publicist and asked why everyone was so glum and subdued and the publicist reportedly told him: “Because they hate the movie, Michael.”

The critical reception the following day was an avalanche of negativity. The New York Times called it “something quite rare in movies these days: an unqualified disaster”. Instead of reviewing Heaven’s Gate as a flawed ambitious epic — with some of the most gorgeous cinematography ever seen in an American movie — it was reviewed mostly as a business story, with everyone blinded by the cost rather than what was in the movie itself. When he realised what was happening — that his movie was being cancelled! — Cimino complained that it wasn’t finished yet and that he had been pressured to cut the movie for a Thanksgiving release. After a one-week run in New York, Cimino and UA pulled the movie.

Cimino recut it down to 2 hours and 29 minutes and it was released in late April 1981. It might have been shorter, but it was far worse than the original version — which, despite being a mess, has a feeling and coherency that is lacking in the truncated version. Roger Ebert proclaimed it was still one of the most scandalous cinematic wastes he had ever seen in a consensus reappraisal. The film closed in two weeks having only grossed $3.5 million.

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In the years since, there has been a major reassessment of Heaven’s Gate and what Cimino was trying to do. This began in the mid-Eighties, with European critics such as Robin Woods calling Heaven’s Gate one of the supreme achievements in Hollywood cinema. David Thomson called Heaven’s Gate “a wounded monster” that demands re-exploration. Martin Scorsese has said that it has many overlooked virtues. And it must be said that it does have a few overlooked virtues and that it does play better today that it did 40 years ago — its grandeur has become more powerful as the notions of movies are dying. But the damage to its reputation and to Cimino had already been completed in the early Eighties. The New Hollywood that thrived in the Seventies, where directors were often given free reign, had a stake driven into its heart. The New Hollywood was officially over. A decade of high-concept movies followed, negotiated by agents and lawyers as well as a return to studio control.

Heaven’s Gate damaged Cimino’s career considerably, but he still worked throughout the Eighties. It wasn’t until 1996, after a series of flops, that Cimino made his final film, Sunchaser, starring Woody Harrelson, with a budget of $31 million and only grossing $21,000. This was when Cimino supposedly snapped: reports of him arriving to set late, seemingly under the influence of drugs. The editor on Sunchaser said that Cimino emanated an eerie, freaky vibe and that he had his face covered during the editing process with a handkerchief. Over the years, I always wondered what happened to Cimino. He very rarely opened up or gave interviews after Heaven’s Gate. And yet colleagues and financiers and executives and producers continued to talk about him: vain, self-indulgent, egotistical and megalomaniacal. How can one make a movie like The Deer Hunter and then nothing else that remotely rivals it? The rest of Cimino’s movies are mostly bad; in fact, all of them are bad to one degree or another. How did Cimino get so lucky that one time out?

He seemed to be an incredibly intelligent man: his tastes were wide-ranging and he had real moviemaking fever. But something went wrong. Something got fucked up. And I think part of it was that he was working in the wrong business and believed that the sheer force of his talent was going to keep the lights on — that no matter what, his talent was going to let him thrive in the jungles of Hollywood. In the end he became a recluse of sorts, hiding in his Beverly Hills mansion on Coldwater, looking, on the few occasions he was spotted, as if he were transitioning into a woman. He died in 2016 but no one knows how or from what — the cause of death was never revealed.

He once said: “When I’m kidding, I’m serious, and when I’m serious, I’m kidding. I am not who I am and I am who I am not.” To me, this sounds like an artist.

Listen to The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast here.

These quotes all relate to Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, but similar things have been said about The Batman, the new movie directed by Matt Reeves and starring Robert Pattinson.

“Maybe every ten years Batman has to go through an evolution to keep up with the times,” his co-creator Bob Kane said. But The Batman’s glum rearrangement of old ideas made me wonder if the character is that flexible after all. His arch-enemy, the Joker, is far more fluid, his origins and motives obscure, while the basic facts of Batman are ironclad. Young Bruce Wayne sees his parents gunned down and vows revenge on all criminals. He uses his physical prowess, detective skills and immense wealth to fight crime in the guise of a bat while pretending to be a vapid playboy. Most of his enemies are maniacs.

Something about this outline lends Batman a gritty prestige that other superheroes lack. The Academy’s snubbing of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight in 2009 was so contentious that it led to an expansion of the Best Picture shortlist. Both Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix have won Best Actor for playing the Joker. There is no compulsion to take Superman, Thor or Iron Man seriously — we know they’re not real — but Batman and his enemies have no superpowers and they scrap it out in a gothic nightmare version of New York City, so they have a perceived gravitas that transcends the comic-book genre.

In a recent interview, Pattinson said: “It’s kind of such an insane thing to do: The only way I can live is to dress up as a bat.” Well yes, it would certainly be bizarre if he were real, but he’s not, so I don’t see how his choices are any stranger than, say, Spider-Man’s. This peculiar obsession with pretending that his world is ours hits a wall with The Batman.

Bob Kane lived to see a lot of Batman movies, dying in 1998 at the age of 83. Kane negotiated sole credit for “the Bat-man” but it was his less hard-headed collaborator, Bill Finger, who wrote most of the early stories and made some crucial design decisions: the pointy cowl, the scalloped cape, grey tights instead of red. Batman was a masterpiece of synthesis, jamming together popular tropes from silent movies, radio serials and pulp fiction.

He got his swashbuckling from Zorro, his socialite alter ego from the Shadow, his murdered father from the Phantom, his freakish rogues’ gallery from Dick Tracy and his detective skills from Sherlock Holmes. The result was the saturnine Rolling Stones to Superman’s sunny Beatles. “Superman’s brand of essentially optimistic problem solving found its cynical counterpoint in Batman’s obsessive, impossible quest to punch crime into extinction, one bastard at a time,” says comic-book writer Grant Morrison in Supergods.

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During his first year, Batman was a lone vigilante with a gangster-movie disposition. “Much as I hate to take human life, I’m afraid THIS TIME, it’s necessary!” he roared as he machine-gunned two thugs to death. With some newspaper columnists already railing against comic-book violence, editor Whitney Ellsworth soon introduced the first rule of Batman: no guns, no killing. Kane and Finger further softened the character by introducing young Robin, partly to appeal to younger readers and partly to give Batman a Watson-like sidekick to talk to. The “winged figure of vengeance” became a paternal pseudo-cop.

Almost everything we now associate with Batman had been introduced by 1943: Robin, Alfred, Catwoman, the Joker, the Penguin, the Scarecrow, Two-Face, the Batmobile, the Batcave, the Bat-signal, and so on. His origin story (parents, gun, bat) was laid out in just a dozen panels: a classic trauma story decades before that became a cliché. Finger took the name Gotham from a jewellery store in the telephone directory.

The biggest influence on Batman’s post-war evolution outside of DC was a psychiatrist named Frederic Wertham, whose 1954 polemic Seduction of the Innocent brought to a head the moral panic about comic books and juvenile delinquency. Using sketchy anecdotal evidence, Wertham claimed that “the Batman type of story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies… In these stories there are practically no decent, attractive, successful women… The atmosphere is homosexual and anti-feminine.”

Wertham’s crusade brought the industry to its knees, and the remaining publishers were forced to adopt a stringent Comics Code or die. With anything sinister, sexy or subversive now verboten, Batman writers had to resort to far-out Space Age plots involving aliens, time travel, Bat-Hound and Bat-Mite. Batman himself would routinely be transformed into something ridiculous such as a grey-bearded Rip Van Batman or, most regrettably, Bat-Baby. Batwoman and Bat-Girl were introduced to shore up the hero’s heterosexuality.

DC eventually tried to restore some edge but the goofy spirit of the novelty years fed into the 1966-68 TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward. Batman was a camp pop art romp (Andy Warhol turned up to the launch party) that I can never quite forgive for licensing sub-editors to use “Kapow!” in the headline of any story about comic books. Apart from turning the Riddler (reimagined in The Batman as John Doe from Se7en with a Gab account) from a subs-bench Joker into a canonical foe, its primary legacy was giving future writers something to repudiate.

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After the Batmania bubble popped, DC gave the comic book a hard reboot, aimed at older readers. Writer Denny O’Neil dispatched Robin to college, made Gotham City a gothic hellhole and repositioned the villains as lethal chaos agents rather than crooks with wacky gimmicks. Neal Adams’s cinematic artwork redefined Batman as a brooding spectre who perched on gargoyles, wrapped in an improbably vast cape. “If the script called for a daytime scene, I would simply change it in the artwork to a night-time scene,” Adams said.

Years later, as editor of all the Batman titles, O’Neil drew up the “Bat-Bible” for writers. “The basic story is that he is an obsessed loner,” he explained. “Not crazy, not psychotic… Batman knows who he is and knows what drives him and he chooses not to fight it. He permits his obsession to be the meaning of his life.” Gotham City should feel like New York, specifically “Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at 3 am, November 28 in a cold year”. One challenge to Batman’s pretensions to realism today is that Gotham has never really outgrown the dirty, dangerous New York of Abe Beame and Travis Bickle. “Batman works best in a society that’s gone to hell,” says Frank Miller in the anthology Many More Lives of the Batman. “That’s the only way he’s ever worked.”

Miller arrived in New York from rural Vermont in 1977. Being mugged at knifepoint (twice) gave him a personal incentive to depict vigilantes beating the crap out of criminals in alleyways, and that talent earned him the job of reviving Batman yet again in 1986. In Batman: Year One, a young Bruce Wayne swings into action in a city that’s corrupt to its core. In The Dark Knight Returns, a bitter fifty-something Batman comes out of retirement to become a militarised “god of vengeance” at the helm of a vigilante army. “Is Batman a Fascist?” asked the Village Voice. Miller’s implied answer was: Probably, so what?

Miller was still slamming the Sixties TV show (“For me, Batman was never funny”) but he was kicking a corpse. Two more landmark graphic novels — The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland, and Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean — cemented Batman as an ultraviolent nocturnal avenger, tormented from within and without. The fans loved it. As Glen Weldon puts it in The Caped Crusade: “Sure, Batman may have been created for children, but Frank Miller and Alan Moore had brought him into the real world, a place of bloody violence and stark sexuality, and now, finally, everybody would see him for the badass the fans had always known him to be.”

Tim Burton brought the gist of this new kitsch-killing Batman to a mainstream audience with his 1989 movie. I’m not sure that Joel Schumacher’s contributions to the franchise, Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, amount to a pendulum swing. He aspired to make “a living comic book”, but the bright, boisterous comics of his childhood memories bore no resemblance to the prevailing Nineties mood of bone-breaking, gun-toting, kick-ass nihilism. A funnier, freakier Batman might have worked but it certainly didn’t in Schumacher’s hands.

After that, Christopher Nolan’s beloved Dark Knight trilogy wasn’t so much a revolution as a restoration, returning Batman to the stygian Gotham of Miller and O’Neil. It is, as Zack Snyder already proved with Batman vs Superman, as hard to follow Nolan as it was easy to improve on Schumacher. The Lego Batman Movie’s brilliant parody of the grim-and-gritty approach now reads as a pre-emptive strike on The Batman: “I don’t talk about feelings, Alfred. I don’t have any, I’ve never seen one. I’m a night-stalking, crime-fighting vigilante, and a heavy metal rapping machine. I don’t feel anything emotionally, except for rage. 24/7, 365, at a million per cent.”

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Reeves’s movie feels like a doleful remix of The Dark Knight, incorporating the rain-sodden urban hell of Se7en and the husky, noir voiceover of Rorschach from Watchmen. Pattinson’s Batman says things like, “They think I’m hiding in the shadows — I am the shadows” and, “The city’s angry, scared — like me.” His Bruce Wayne, glum, reclusive and clearly a Nine Inch Nails fan, is no playboy. Nor is he much of a detective, having somehow failed to notice that Gotham’s crooked officials routinely hang out at the nightclub run by the mobsters they’re taking money from.

For all the promotional talk of making this Batman an emo “weirdo”, inspired by Kurt Cobain, the only difference is a matter of degree: he is more withdrawn, more unhappy, more obsessed. Given that his formative psychic wound is the same as it was in 1940, it seems futile to ask again why he is like this. The movie’s politics, such as they are, are as incoherent as Nolan’s in The Dark Knight Rises. Once again, we have an aggrieved underclass whose legitimate gripes with Gotham’s self-serving elite are undermined by all the serial killing and terrorism. So what’s new? What speaks to our particular 2020s anxieties?

There are routes to making Batman interesting again. One would be an off-its-rocker horror movie with an 18 certificate. Another would have a discernible sense of humour and warmth, probably involving Robin. You could even tap into the wild fantasies of DC’s Elseworlds series: Victorian Batman, sci-fi Batman, Twenties Batman, whatever you like this side of Bat-Baby. Just shake the kaleidoscope.

For the 2005 reprint of Batman: Year One, David Mazzuchelli produced a short comic strip about the history of the character and his own role in it. “With Year One, we sought to craft a credible Batman, grounded in a world we recognise,” he wrote. “But, did we go too far? Once a depiction veers toward realism, each new detail releases a torrent of questions that exposes the absurdity at the heart of the genre. The more ‘realistic’ superheroes become, the less believable they are.” Grant Morrison, the writer of Arkham Asylum, recently made a similar point: “Using kids’ adventure heroes to make hackneyed observations about typical human behaviour that does not in fact apply to made up comic book characters strikes me as — I don’t know — whimsical? Dilettantish? A squandering of energy and creativity?”

That memo has yet to reach Hollywood, where poor, sad Bruce remains stuck in a cul-de-sac of scowling trauma and urban decay. If we must have more Batman (and we surely must), then next time let’s make him unreal.

Someone recently described to me, vividly, the anhedonia of severe depression: of finding himself in sublime mountains, in champagne-service clubs, with gorgeous women who loved him, feeling nothing. And I guess somewhere on the depressed-neurotic axis there’s an overlap between “I don’t enjoy things anymore” and just wishing you were the type of person who likes Marvel movies and Ed Sheeran and doesn’t feel a bored yet self-satisfied despair as you attempt to chat with the median individual on a dating app.

There’s something bovine about cinema, which is also what is spectacular about both popular art and art in public: the confirmation that the individual spirit is also the shared spirit, that what is vulnerable and personal and redeemable about us, is in all of us. Art makes us feel realer and deeper, and to share that with others makes us feel less alone. But for the same reason, bad art can also seem like an insult to the human race itself: that’s all we are?

To play on David Foster Wallace: Licorice Pizza is a supposedly good movie I will never see again. Los Angeles, especially, is plastered with ads for the film; so is my demographically overcoded web browser. I am supposed to like the new Paul Thomas Anderson film, having seen quite a few of them already; yeah, I’ve listed “film” on the interests line of my résumé. And, seriously, how many art films are there today besides low-budget films intended for an audience of 100 individuals residing mostly in Bushwick, Israeli-Austrian dramas about the Holocaust, and slow cinema about outsider farmhands from low-GDP EU member states?

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Nonetheless, I was left asking myself: what were all those moviegoers so excited about? Why are critics so impressed? How was this moving?

Much as the film’s alleged anti-Asian racism is more shockingly unfunny than it is shocking, the romance in Licorice Pizza is neither revolting nor remarkable. Anderson can make touching films about characters struggling toward misguided intimacy. But Licorice Pizza isn’t even a cloying teen romance: Gary and Alana neither consummate their mutual attraction nor even mourn it, and instead simply bounce around for over two hours: cute, charming, and completely inconsequential.

The moment Gary asks out Alana, she cheerfully declines with, “That’s illegal!”, but it’s not like he tries that hard, anyway. At their first dinner, they tell each other they’re not going to forget each other, but they seem pretty happy to goof around with his more prepubescent-looking friends in zany, period-piece pursuits (waterbeds, pinballs, slightly unsavoury politics). There’s little narrative momentum, little impediment, and little sense of “the stakes”. The leads are affable, and Haim is astonishing; but these characters are as thin as the candy on an M&M.

Previous Anderson fare arguably went a little overboard on the downbeats: all that really degrading stuff at the end of Boogie Nights, all those dying men in Magnolia, all the violence in Punch Drunk Love. But at least that mattered. Here, the downbeats are basically that two people who’ve agreed not to date get a little bit jealous when the other one flirts with someone else. The tensest scene involves Alana driving an out-of-gas truck in reverse down the Hollywood Hills. To no one’s surprise, it works.

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But the scene after that, I think, holds the key to the movie. They’ve gotten the truck down the hill and collected some jerrycans from the gas station. The sun is rising, painting the quiet road in almost psychedelic purples and oranges. The younger boys are ecstatic silhouettes on the horizon, laughing and leaping and pretending to hump each other with the gas tanks. Meanwhile, Alana is crouched on the sidewalk, near trash and glass, head hunched over her knees — something good has happened, something fun is going on, but she can’t enjoy it.

I don’t know why Anderson made a film that was clearly going to be accused of paedophilia — he told Variety that while walking by his local middle school, he saw a teenager flirting with a girl taking school pictures, and instantly thought the premise was “ripe for humour”. And anyway, he says: “It’s not romantic in any consummation of things. That would be inappropriate.”

Regardless of whatever PTA was thinking, we live in the era of the “Mommy Girlfriend”. Infinitely affirming and infinitely caring, the Mommy GF is the ideal mate for a generation of men that commonly self-identifies as autistic or anxious, and who have no idea how (or whether) to be masculine or mature. With the Mommy GF, you can stay a kid. As an iconic 2013 4chan post went: “that face when you’ll never have a cute slightly older Mommy GF who cleans up after your loveable-fuckup-self, helps you do your taxes, brown-bags a lunch for you to take to work, wakes you up on time, and cuddles you to sleep.”

That’s not exactly the deal here; I doubt the phrase “Mommy GF” was thrown around Licorice Pizza brainstorms, and Gary, anyway, seems like a perfectly confident and competent young man. But for better or worse, the Mommy GF has graduated into end-of-year lists — and maybe even real life. A number of millennial girls in my circle have started dating Zoomer boys, and I’ve been wondering about these relationships.

They’re all around 30. They’re all, more or less, ambitious. It’s tried-and-true for the clout-chasing young woman, to date an older man. But why date a younger one? As Mariah Kreutter has pointed out, it’s hard to see why Alana’s “borderline incoherent character” has any interest whatsoever in dating a 15-year-old. What, after all, does the Mommy GF want?

Maybe this: to enjoy things, one last time. Very young people, especially boys, enjoy things with an unbridled, carefree insouciance that evaporates the second one becomes concerned with becoming an “adult”. And perhaps on the fringes of show business and in the afterglow of the Sixties — or in the youth-obsessed inertia of millennial life, screwed by 2008, scared of settling, mired in therapy-brained exploration of the unconstrained yet unfulfilled self — one can soak in that sweet, warm limbo for just a little longer.

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But sooner or later, it has to end. As a young woman told me recently, for the educated millennial woman, it’s a bit odd to marry in your twenties; but once you hit 30, you’re suddenly “an unmarried 30-year-old woman”. Essentially, you’ve got one year. The clock starts ticking, and all time becomes time lost. Every joy contains its future loss. And for the archetypical millennial woman — with no savings, no house, and no children – ageing reaps no accomplishment and no satisfying narrative. It’s purely something that makes you look worse in photos.

If you date the younger guy, you can zip around the Valley plotting hare-brained schemes, or at least understand TikTok. But you’ll still feel old, even older than you are. Just 25, Alana is, as Gary calls her, the “old woman”. It’s unclear what her main worry is — material success, glory, being single — but she’s going to be worried for the rest of her life. And Gary doesn’t care about any of that, not really. He’s just having a good time. And seeing that good time — a band of boys, playing as the sun comes up — she wants to cry. Tellingly, from the next scene, she commits herself (rather unconvincingly) to “politics”.

But this breezy, sugar-dust cloud of a film doesn’t dwell in despair. At the end of it, Alana and Gary just run toward each other, with a condescending intercut of identical earlier sequences (they really could be walking, but I suppose running looks nice in trailers). They kiss. Music plays. Did you notice that this was shot on 35mm and the colours were very warm? Did you see that the characters had cool clothes, which included many prints? Yay! You’ve seen an art film. Nice.

Perhaps that’s what the Mommy GF wants: to be able to just enjoy a film like this. Maybe I’m just growing out of it.

I wonder what Lumet would make of studios greenlighting entire movies to “state the reasons”. Largely thanks to Emma Stone’s spiky charm, the 101 Dalmatians prequel Cruella made $233m on its release in May. If Hollywood can rehabilitate a puppy-skinner who is basically called Cruel Devil, then all bets are off. Following prequels to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ratched) and The Sopranos (The Many Saints of Newark), get ready for the origin stories of Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story and Gru from Despicable Me. The ubiquitous Timothée Chalamet is currently shooting the Roald Dahl prequel Wonka. Now that Netflix has acquired the Roald Dahl Story Company, the only obstacle to a Young BFG movie is that he would sound too much like a rapper.

Blame, in part, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which bucked William Goldman’s “Nobody knows anything” maxim by building a series of interconnected movies into Hollywood’s dream scenario: a safe bet. Constructing a universe around beloved IP is the business model of our times, besides which inventing characters and worlds from scratch looks like a terrible bother. But the MCU has six decades of comic-book mythology to work with and, because it had a plan from day one, relentless forward momentum. Most IP-juicing requires starting with well-known movies and working sideways or, increasingly, backwards.

For the Star Wars empire, whose first three prequels notoriously depleted global supplies of exposition, that means Solo and Rogue One, both set prior to the Star Wars movies that people fell in love with. For The Wizard of Oz, the blockbuster musical Wicked asks how those witches ended up so mean. Meanwhile in the world of superheroes, Joker reaped 11 Oscar nominations by presenting Gotham City’s murderous chaos agent as the product of bullying, insufficient mental health care, urban decay and toxic showbiz. Not so judgemental now, Batman.

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Some of these are successful entertainments but, nonetheless, ones that nobody asked for. I doubt that any child has ever watched the Wicked Witch of the West and thought, “Huh, what’s her story?” Most of these stories were originally written before the rise of pop psychology, when it was OK for a character to be wicked or bizarre without inviting an investigation into nature, nurture and the long-term consequences of trauma.

It’s not that there are no successful attempts to mine a character’s past for information that might decode their behaviour. Citizen Kane’s Rosebud or Vito Corleone’s salad days in The Godfather Part II are gold-plated arguments for the value of an artful backstory. But screenwriters are obsessed with providing damp-squib answers to questions that nobody was asking. I enjoy reading interviews with the people behind prequels as they try to justify the exercise without admitting that the only important question these movies are answering is “How can we squeeze more money out of this IP?” Ever wondered how Han Solo got his name? Me neither. Turns out he was alone a lot. Cool.

Television has its own version of rubber-ducky syndrome, now that flashbacks are de rigueur and grief has replaced alcoholism as a short cut to depth of character. Baptiste was already the most depressing cop show on TV — Camus of the Yard — before they killed off Baptiste’s daughter and his hallucinations of a stuffed toy elephant turned tragedy into accidental comedy. Another recent BBC procedural, Vigil, was grippingly assured in the present-day scenes but drifted off course in the flashbacks. It was as if writer Tom Edge didn’t trust us to believe that a woman would feel uncomfortable investigating a murder on a submarine (pretty stressful!) unless she had previously experienced her own watery calamity. Watching these shows back-to-back with Mare of Easttown, I began to wonder if a shocking bereavement was a requirement of the job. It feels a little crass to milk grief so frequently, and unnecessary, too.

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How much do we need to know about a TV detective to be invested in a whodunnit? Columbo had an indelibly eccentric personality (mostly improvised by Peter Falk) but no stated first name and no private life except for a wife we never saw (unless you happen to have watched the flop 1979 spin-off Mrs Columbo). Columbo was what he did, and that was enough.

What Lumet and Chayefsky were really getting at with their rubber-ducky quip was the pretence that explaining everything is akin to psychological veracity. We are all shaped by our experiences, good and bad, but rarely in a clear or simple way. Psychotherapists don’t identify one essential turning point in a client’s life (“Hmm, Dalmatians, you say?”) and then close the case. Sometimes, one can know every factor and still encounter a terrifying, unilluminable void at the heart of a personality. In real life, not everybody who does appalling things is misunderstood.

There is, of course, a humane liberal impulse to understand how circumstances can corrupt an individual; how the abused can become the abuser. It is the job of psychologists and the criminal justice system to get beyond the idea that certain people are irredeemably sinful, and the task of historians to fathom how seemingly ordinary people could become complicit in atrocities. Authors such as Gitta Sereny (who wrote about the Nazis Albert Speer and Franz Stangl and the 10-year-old child-killer Mary Bell) and Gordon Burn (who chronicled the serial killers Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West) dedicated their lives to interrogating the problem of human evil.

Disney and Warner Brothers, needless to say, are not engaged in that painful work but in the trivialising of trauma to give profit-seeking entertainment a veneer of psychological curiosity. It is both morally dubious and narratively absurd. In storytelling, villainy often has a theatrical boo-hiss quality that requires no elucidation.

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Why is Cruella a canicidal fashionista? Because otherwise Dodie Smith’s story would have been just a bunch of dogs running about. Why is the Joker a cackling killer? Because the joylessly uptight Batman needed an antithesis. In Frank Miller’s 1986 graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, a pompous psychologist appears on a talk show with the Joker to argue that he is not so much evil as horribly mistreated. The Joker promptly kills him, and everybody else in the room, with glee.

It’s true that Miller was a law-and-order conservative who enjoyed poking fun at bleeding-heart liberals but, like Christopher Nolan, he also knew that the Joker is compelling because he is beyond understanding. Ridley Scott squandered a great deal of time and money on making two prequels to his own Alien, even though the unknowable menace of the creature was what made the 1979 movie such a taut shocker. More often than not, additional information makes antagonists less intriguing.

As one of the showrunners of Lost, Damon Lindelof was as responsible as anybody for the backstory epidemic, creating a time-hopping narrative tangle that concluded with a crushing disappointment. He was then a co-conspirator on the Alien prequel Prometheus. On his next show, The Leftovers, he learned his lesson and leaned into his characters’ reactions to the mysterious disappearance of 2% of humanity rather than the reasons for the event. Trauma was the cake rather than the icing, and therefore taken seriously. In becoming so comfortable with complexity and ambiguity, Lindelof made one of the finest shows of the decade. The theme tune of the second series summed up the ethos of the whole show and the reason behind its success. It was a song by country singer Iris DeMent: Let the Mystery Be.

Today, these darts could easily be thrown at Wes Anderson, whose new anthology film, The French Dispatch, revolves around a New Yorker-style magazine published by the French bureau of a wealthy Kansas newspaper between 1925 (also the New Yorker’s birth date) and 1975. Framed as articles in the magazine’s final issue, the stories draw on characters and episodes from the New Yorker’s history, many of which are named in the credits. Owen Wilson’s Herbsaint Sazerac covers “hobos, pimps and junkies” much like the legendary reporter Joseph Mitchell, while Jeffrey Wright’s melancholy, hilarious food writer Roebuck Wright is James Baldwin with a dollop of AJ Liebling.

The ecstatic testimonials quoted by Yagoda could also apply to Anderson. One staff writer calls his first contract “my pass to an enchanted kingdom”. The narrator of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying says: “It was not that I merely read the New Yorker, I lived it in a private way. I had created for myself a New Yorker world.”

Anderson’s ability to create his own enchanted, self-contained world is well-established. Twenty-five years after he debuted with Bottle Rocket, film-goers know what they make of him and he has no apparent interest in changing their minds. It’s not true that he never changes. The Fantastic Mr Fox was a triumphant venture into stop-motion animation, while The Grand Budapest Hotel deepened his obsession with fastidious eccentrics who create beautiful sanctuaries from the ugliness of the world by pitting one of them, Ralph Fiennes’s Monsieur Gustave, against the extreme ugliness of totalitarianism. His appetite for new storytelling techniques is underrated, as are his emotional rug-pulls, which are all the more effective because his characters are so reluctant to broadcast their feelings.

Still, he does what he does. Critics have exhausted the metaphors of snowglobes and dollhouses to describe his meticulously curated out-of-time worlds. Arguments about style versus substance (as if they were two distinct qualities in cinema) are old and tired. Fans know how his characters will talk, dress and move. There is even an art book called Accidentally Wes Anderson, featuring travel photographs that conform to the director’s love of symmetry and colour. Anderson effectively operates on a subscription model rather than hustling for passing trade.

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The only surprising thing about The French Dispatch is that it took him so long. A New Yorker reader since his teens, he owns a collection of bound volumes going back to the Forties; the magazine’s sensibility is as foundational to Anderson as grindhouse movies are to Quentin Tarantino. The Royal Tenenbaums in particular is infatuated with the aesthetic of the mid-century Upper West Side intelligentsia, striking a tone somewhere between a New Yorker cartoon and the short stories that J.D. Salinger published in the magazine.

But what exactly is that sensibility? It’s not the confident diversity of David Remnick’s 21^st-century New Yorker, where ageless cartoons featuring wry exchanges in offices and desert islands can decorate longform explorations of hip hop and Instagram while the website does roaring traffic. No, Anderson’s New Yorker is the one that has inspired films, plays and dozens of histories and memoirs: the mythologised golden age of editors Harold Ross (1925-51) and William Shawn (1952-87). Its hallmarks were urbane sophistication, dry wit, scrupulous attention to detail, and a certain squeamishness about abstract ideas, sexuality and intense emotion. (A sign in the office of the French Dispatch reads: “No Crying.”) All of this gave it immense cultural cachet. In the post-war years, it was reluctantly acknowledged that many subscribers were using the magazine for the purposes of home decoration rather than reading material.

Closing in on its centenary, the New Yorker is by some distance the most celebrated and fetishised magazine in the world, and with good reason. Between 1962 and 1965 alone, it spawned Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Its pages have given us Salinger’s Glass family, James Thurber’s Walter Mitty, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, John Cheever’s The Swimmer, Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain and The Addams Family.

Like Monsieur Gustave, Steve Zissou or Mr Fox, French Dispatch editor Arthur Howitzer Jr (Bill Murray) is a version of Anderson the director, but in New Yorker terms he is three parts Ross to one part Shawn: two very different men united by their heart-and-soul devotion to the magazine. Ross, a journalist and war veteran of enormous energy and charisma, co-founded the New Yorker with his wife Jane Grant, funded by his wealthy poker buddy Raoul Fleischmann. A member of the fabled Algonquin Round Table, he made the magazine a vehicle for the qualities in journalism that he admired (wit, clarity, accuracy, charm) and a rebuke to those that he loathed (sentimentality, pretension, “bunk”). “We don’t cover the news; we parallel the news,” he explained.

Ross hired women reluctantly and black people not at all, but he cherished those he did employ. “Don’t fuck the contributors,” he would tell new editors, using a word he would never tolerate in print. “Moreover, we don’t hire the people you do fuck.”

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Crammed into ramshackle offices on West 45^th Street, cantankerous, hard-drinking talents such as James Thurber, EB White and Wolcott Gibbs produced a magazine that was as pristine as its creation was chaotic. By its 25^th birthday, however, the operation was so professional that fiction editor Gus Lobrano said with some regret that the party at the Ritz-Carlton “seems generally to be regarded as a success, despite the fact that nobody got insulted, nobody fell down stairs, and there were no fist fights”.

The war had forced gravitas upon the New Yorker, a development epitomised by the decision to give over an entire issue in 1946 to John Hersey’s 31,000-word report from Hiroshima, and which left its founder ambivalent. “I started to get out a light magazine that wouldn’t concern itself with the weighty problems of the universe, and now look at me,” he told a friend shortly before his death during lung surgery in 1951.

The veteran staffer who persuaded Ross to run Hiroshima was more attuned to the post-war mood. William Shawn was a shy, self-effacing man who nonetheless amassed imperial control over the magazine’s output. He was a brilliant talent-spotter and an endlessly curious and patient listener who made his writers feel not just appreciated but profoundly understood. This could make him indulgent to a fault. Joseph Mitchell took five years to deliver his classic 1964 profile Joe Gould’s Secret, then never published another word in the magazine, despite continuing to come into the office to write (and draw his $20,000 salary) for the remaining 32 years of his life. One minor French Dispatch character represents the chronically unproductive older writers who used to joke about which of them would die most in debt to the New Yorker.

Both Ross and Shawn combined a relaxed approach to commissioning (it was considered ungentlemanly to specify deadlines or fees) with a maddeningly rigorous, comma-crazed editing process. EB White joked that the magazine’s style guide was longer than Gone with the Wind, and Thurber complained that Ross’s zero tolerance for ambiguity meant that he seemed to be editing for the benefit of “a little boy or an old lady whose faculties were dimming”. Shawn was no less exacting. Theatre critic Kenneth Tynan compared the arrival of marked-up proofs to an “artillery bombardment” while the fabled film critic Pauline Kael grumbled that she “spent more time and effort restoring what I’d written than writing it”.

However annoying this may have been for writers, New Yorker readers could feel confident that every sentence had been considered and every fact verified. To this day, you may not feel like reading 10,000 words on the controversy tearing apart America’s oldest heron sanctuary but you know that they’re the best damn 10,000 words on the controversy tearing apart America’s oldest heron sanctuary that you could ever hope to read.

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The dark origins of the Sopranos

By Dorian Lynskey

What fascinates me about the New Yorker is its remarkable consistency of taste and purpose. Of its five editors to date, only Robert Gottlieb (fired after five years) and Tina Brown (quit after six) have stayed for less than two decades. Some contributors have had even longer tenures: Mollie Panter-Downes wrote ‘Letter from London’ from 1939 to 1984. While most magazines are susceptible to desperate personnel changes and flailing redesigns when the circulation dips, the New Yorker disdains sudden moves. Shawn didn’t even accede to publishing a table of contents until 1969. When Brown introduced photography, subheads and proper bylines in 1992, some traditionalists reacted as if she had added Page Three girls, but she still didn’t dare meddle with the illustrated covers or the headline typeface designed by Rea Irvin in 1925.

When Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications, bought the magazine in 1985, Shawn wrote an open letter to readers, reassuring them that its values would not change: “At an age when television screens are too often bright with nothing, we value substance. Amid chaos of images, we value coherence. We believe in the printed word. And we believe in clarity. And we believe in immaculate syntax. And we believe in the beauty of the English language… And if any single principle transcends all the others and informs all the others, it is to try and tell the truth.”

The New Yorker’s purism and gentility under Ross and Shawn closed it off from some thrilling developments in American prose. Shawn despised the flash and swing of New Journalism (“a debased form of journalism and a mistake”) and sent rejection letters to spiky young fiction writers as important as Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor and Kurt Vonnegut. Snooty and short-sighted? Probably, but such omissions are the price of taste: every aesthetic needs boundaries.

Which brings me back to Wes Anderson and the pleasure of seeing a director doing exactly, and exclusively, what he wants. When talented young directors routinely go straight from indie movies to the inevitable compromises of the franchise machine, Anderson’s complete lack of interest in mainstream audiences feels like a rare privilege indeed. You can love or hate his artistic choices but even in his weakest films, they are always deliberate. As Howitzer tells his writers: “Just try to sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” And Anderson’s long relationships with key collaborators, from Owen Wilson to composer Alexandre Desplat, echo Shawn’s passionate loyalty to his writers. His movies about families and quasi-families have nurtured one in real life.

The French Dispatch opens and closes with a dual obituary for both editor and magazine. This elegiac tone is typical of Anderson (whose films are usually about the end of something) and of writing about the New Yorker. The final words of Yagoda’s book are “rapidly receding past”, while the title of Renata Adler’s elegantly brutal 1999 memoir is Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker.

Anderson also shares with Ross and Shawn a mission to bring together diverse talents to create something beautiful, and an incorruptible integrity that is uncommon because it is hard to maintain. He is so entirely himself that his films have the same proud energy as the standard reply that one of Ross’s more hardline staffers would send to complaining readers: “If you don’t like us, read something else.”