Let’s get this out of the way quick: Music League is back. You can join here: https://app.musicleague.com/l/87b7b82585ec42f5b7d8fdd267db5ee4/

And you better do it quick. I shared the link in the paid subscriber Discord early last week. This first round closes at the end of the week. I’ll be writing about the playlists the week after they release.

This week, I am planting some seeds for subsequent writing.

The Mystery and Mysticism of Xenogears

The first directorial effort from game designer Tetsuya Takahashi, Xenogears (1998), has cast a shadow over his career as imposing as the “monstrous” Weltall on the game’s cover. Co-created with his wife, Kaori Tanaka, Xenogears is a singularly mythologized video game. The Perfect Works (1998) companion book is available in various English translations, including UltimateGraphics’ attempt, and the partially translated “study guide.” Xenogears: A God Slaying Story (1998), a prequel novel, has just recently been fan translated. When I was in middle school, I had an enormous binder filled with the printed pages of the Xenogears: God and Mind Novelization (1999) by the semi-anonymous author Dark.

His website is now defunct and no longer houses the novelization’s files. However, I have them archived here:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qy9pl5wc17pnchoepa3f1/Xenogears-God-and-Mind-Vol-1.docx?rlkey=7bdhhvld804ns2395huchb490&st=e3r293g1&dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/38n2dvyjtc98mjih5ijgu/Xenogears-God-and-Mind-Vol-2.docx?rlkey=an2jxergyo6faggiom9u6f274&st=ldqkpqde&dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/shvan1nsat8oad637v7oo/Xenogears-God-and-Mind-Vol-3.docx?rlkey=6l4zy4gaw3qho04w2nsjsbqmr&st=6z88ooku&dl=0

Fascination around the game comes from its heady philosophical references, release during the heyday of Japanese RPGs, and unusual game design. Xenogears has a robust, well-animated combat system inputting commands that can combo together in the style of fighting games. This atypical approach to combat has rarely been emulated — though Sony’s Legend of Legaia (1998) would feature somewhat similar combat releasing about ten months after Xenogears.

Takahashi is unquestionably an auteur, as he has worked across three publishers and two development teams in an attempt to work through Xenogears’ themes. In 2002, he would begin the Xenosaga series for Namco. Xenoblade Chronicles, a still-ongoing series started in 2010, is his most recent attempt.

I’ve been thinking about Xenogears in part because of a great deep-dive podcast, *Retrograde Amnesia* (2019). The podcast has covered a wide range of classic games, but Xenogears was the first covered to the tune of fifty-five or so episodes. Even in those early episodes, hosts Eric Laymen and Chris Stone are attentive to the little things. They cut in dialogue and soundtrack bits. They uncover the source of mysterious vocalizations in the song “Knight of Fire,” which Yasunori Mitsuda somehow sampled from Christian Brando’s murder trial: “total sentence imposed is ten years.”

I am just beginning my long overdue listen of the Retrograde Amnesia season on Xenogears, but I’m planning on pairing it with a play through of the game’s Perfect Works Build. Laymen and Stone reflect often in their recording on the disparity between how they received the game as teenagers and how they encounter it as adults. For the most part, their adult reaction reveres the work of Takahashi. Having played the game relatively recently, I agree it is as fascinating as ever. I haven’t re-read Dark’s novelization recently, however, so I imagine looking it over again could lead to a dissonance between my enthusiasm for it as a young person and my view of it now. Still, like most things even tangentially related to this game, it deserves to be preserved.

Weekly Reading List

https://umiami.mediaspace.kaltura.com/category/Caribbean+Writers+Summer+Institute+Archival+Video+Collection/87964161 — The University of Miami maintains a singular video archive including several years of the Caribbean Writers Summer Institute. I highly recommend reviewing these remarkable discussions, interviews, and readings.

Payton Pritchard highlights.

I’m back on Yowamushi Pedal (2008) after a long haitus from reading. It will soon publish its 100th volume. What an achievement.

Event Calendar: When You Have the Chance To See a Hitchcock Film in Theaters, Do It

Lots of good stuff on the calendar this week. Along with a bunch of Hitchcock, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Serpent’s Path (1998), Spider’s Eyes (1998), and Cure (1997) are coming to the Brattle.

The underrated Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle (1987) will also screen at Coolidge in May.

Until next time.

Raffle is done, and we have a winner. Thanks to all who participated. I’m hoping to do more things like this in the future. I am aiming to continue developing the paid subscription this year. You can always get in early.

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Playoff basketball is underway. It’s a great time to be a basketball fan and a better time to be a Celtics fan.

This week, I’m tackling where prestige meets superheroes.

“Who says I want to change?”: Ending at the Beginning of Eric Kripke’s The Boys

This section includes spoilers for the season premiere of The Boys’ fifth season.

What is wrong with The Boys (2019)? According to Eric Kripke, it is the problem of all satire or political commentary. His show is too prescient. The year plus of production time before airing has rendered his send-up of Trumpian politics too similar to reality. In conversation with Collider this week:

[Collider:] I interviewed Jack [Quaid] ... and one of the things I asked Jack is, do you ever watch the news? And I’m going to ask you the same thing. Do you ever watch the news and just think, “Oh, shit, we just filmed something like this last year and now I’m seeing it happen in real life”?

KRIPKE: It happens all the time. And, you know, tomorrow’s episode is a perfect example. The talk about attacking the pope and presenting yourself as a God as we’re about to release an episode where Homelander thinks he’s God. I don’t know what to say about it. It’s upsetting. You know, I was sending a text, and someone last night who works on the show sent me the image. And my reply is about how I feel, which is like I just texted back: Sigh. Hard, sad, sigh. And I say that’s what I’ll say to you: hard, sad, sigh.

Similar to Dario Scardapane’s commentary on Daredevil: Born Again (2025), Kripke discusses using historical antecedents to structure The Boys’ plot and determine what he will satirize. However, unlike Scardapane, Kripke is earnest about his efforts to mock Trump. The rapid conflation of fantastical satire and what one might see on an evening newscast is problematic for all satire. It loses both its intensity and interest if it simply reproduces everyday life. The fact that the world moves “too fast” for satirists to sufficiently capture in the production timeline of television is a challenging obstacle, but not an insurmountable one.

I have never found The Boys to be particularly incisive when it comes to political satire, although it has its moments. In addition to the comedic dimension of the show, The Boys is often an edgy soap opera focused on internecine personal conflict among allied characters. Now in its fifth season, the fourth of eight episodes airing this week, The Boys remains more soap opera than satire. “Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite,” the fifth season premiere, bucked the prevailing trend with some fascinating television.

Of course, a showrunner with the aesthetic sensibilities of Hot Topic, Invader Zim (2001), and Deadpool comics can’t help but be too cute. When screenwriter Paul Grellong has The Worm (Ely Henry) deliver a meta-monologue on final seasons, I had to laugh. His complaints as an in-show writer of a Reacher spec script (the real show Reacher, like The Boys, is an Amazon Prime exclusive streaming series) are both astute and funny:

It [is] impossible to, like, tick every box and tie up every little storyline. I mean, just try making everybody happy. You can’t do it. Finales are the worst.

The Worm, and the show, are unmistakably right. Finales for long-running shows are difficult to execute. They are often misevaluated because if a show is sufficiently successful, a large portion of its fanbase simply does not want it to end. No ending could possibly be good enough.

The Boys, from my perspective, is headed to a reasonably satisfying conclusion even as the second and third episodes have dragged. Kripke knows where the real interest of the show is: the triangulation of William Butcher (Karl Urban), Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid), and Homelander (Antony Starr). Aside from self-reflective commentary, the trio are the focus of “Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite.”

Butcher’s world tour of recruiting displaced characters also brings him to his abusive father Sam (John Noble). It is in conversation with Sam that the show communicates Butcher’s arrested development, stuck because of his father’s abuse. Characters like Campbell, A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), Starlight (Erin Moriarty), and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) are dynamic. Butcher and Homelander, by contrast, cannot change. It is both because of their inextricable antagonism and their traumatic childhoods. After interrogating Homelander’s childhood in the previous season (particularly “Wisdom of the Ages”), Butcher and Sam’s last caress lays plainly that Butcher will end the show in the same place he begins it: “Who says I want to change?”

But Butcher has changed, though in a relatively superficial fashion: he has become a ‘Supe.’ After an injection of Compound V in an attempt to stave off a fatal tumor, Butcher showcases some gruesome superpowers in season four and five. It is this change that Homelander observes in their season premiere face off

Homelander laments being the man on top, now pairing his unimaginable physical strength with unilateral executive power over the United States. As any good Lacanian would predict, he is unsatisfied.

He attributes his dissatisfaction not to the perpetual metonymy of desire, but to a lack of “devotion.” The masses fear, rather than revere him.

This positions him awkwardly, relative to Butcher. Though Butcher does not revere him, he also does not fear him. And the devotion that Homelander identifies in him is a devotion to attempting to annihilate his arch nemesis. Cue Heath Ledger’s Joker, “you complete me.”

Hughie Campbell, then, presents another antagonism for Homelander. Campbell spends much of his screen time consoling other prisoners in the “freedom camps,” the avatar of earnest hope characteristic of more conventional superhero stories.

Campbell has neither the superpowers of Homelander nor the grit of Butcher. He is entirely without particularity, representing the everyman. For Homelander, this is unthinkable. Commenting on Campbell’s romance with Starlight and friendship with Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), Homelander asks, “why are they so hopelessly devoted to such staggering mediocrity? Why would Starlight and Butcher piss away their lives to try and rescue you?” Campbell replies, Quaid showing some remarkable acting chops here in a reflexive moment of thought before he delivers the line, “Because I’d do it for them.” This mutual benevolence, this sense that the rising tide lifts all boats, is the essence of the everyman that Kripke sets against Homelander’s, and Butcher’s, exceptionalism.

What Homelander struggles to confront in this episode is that his exceptionality may be entirely accidental. This is most evident in his confrontation with A-Train, a fight that concludes A-Train’s arc most spectacularly. Though Homelander kills A-Train, A-Train dies laughing. He tells Homelander (in a series best performance from Usher):

What was I so afraid of? You are fucking nothing. You’re just an empty fucking suit. Take away these powers and what are you? A pathetic, weak, sniveling fucking loser.

These words cut deep not because they happen to be true, but because Homelander is obsessed with what others think about him. And it is this obsession that will undo Homelander as the series progresses, maybe waylaid by Butcher who despises him, but most likely to be defeated by those who don’t think about him at all.

Weekly Reading List

I posted a Caleb Gannon Gaming video last week, but this is a little different. He regularly records straight forward play throughs of Slay the Spire 2 (2026) with thoughtful commentary that will help viewers make better decisions as players.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-18396-5 — Xintong Jia’s Gender and Postfeminism in Chinese Reality Dating Shows (2026) is available in open access. Niche subject matter, but fitting for the part of my audience that has read me scrutinizing The Bachelorette (2003) using Lacanian theory.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/27546330261443722 — Another open access academic work, this time a journal article, I’m willing to read just about any contemporary academic treatment of Romance of the Three Kingdoms (1522).

Event Calendar: Repertory Potpourri

This week I added a some Coolidge After Midnite programming, a few screenings of 2025’s Resurrection, and a screening of Vertigo (1958) that really snuck up on me. If you’re reading this on Monday, it’s tomorrow.

Until next time.

Mark Jones is a really, really good play-by-play commentator. I only watch basketball, so I only know his work commentating basketball. His career as an NBA commentator on the national stage came to an end on April 12th, with his final telecast being a historic game: the 113 to 108 win of the Boston Celtics over the Orlando Magic in Game 82 of the season. I’ll get back to why, other than Jones, the game was historic. There were plenty of tributes to Jones’s unique commentary style from his colleagues.

Jones used one of his signature phrases to describe a certain three-point shot by Celtic Baylor Scheierman, calling Scheierman “hotter than fish grease.”

Jones is the voice you hear in the second of the five commentary tracks here.

So, why was this a fitting game for Jones to go out? It was completely irrelevant for the Celtics’ playoff seeding. They had seven players on the injury report with ailments like “Left Foot Plantar Fasciitis” and “Right Toe Sprain.” The Celtics played eight different players with a cumulative salary of $11.5 million compared to the $173 million fielded by Orlando, according to Money on the Floor. This was the moment for some of the most underrated, under-appreciated, and inexperienced players on the Celtics roster. They delivered.

While the game had no impact on the Celtics’ standing, it did solidify the lower end of the Eastern Conference. The Magic had ample incentive to win. They just couldn’t. Celtics are too deep and Scheierman is sinking moon ball 3s. “28 on the meter, and it’s still running,” says Jones. My favorite Jones-ism:

This week we still have our raffle going. Consult the previous letter for details. Erin made a reel to advertise:

There has been some interest but you still have a pretty good shot at these tickets. Raffle entry is included as a perk for paid subscribers. Your support means everything.

The Drama, spoiler free

Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama (2026) has largely obscured its premise during its high-concept promotional campaign. I went into the film knowing only that it is about a wedding and some kind of acrimony leading up to the nuptials. Having seen it, it’s title does some interesting work. “The drama,” as a phrase, evokes the oft-repeated self-examination of drag queen Scarlet Envy on RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009): “Is it me? Am I the drama? I don’t think so… Maybe I am?” Being “the drama,” then, suggests something excessive, unnecessary, unsubstantial. “The drama” creates conflict where none need be. Borgli’s film is more serious in its subject matter, although it has tinge of class-based satire. And there is, perhaps, a case to be made that it is Alana Haim’s Rachel who is ‘the drama’ in the RuPaulian sense. But I don’t think The Drama is an example of ‘the drama,’ rather it is a drama, and a socially conscious one at that.

I’m going to take the hit to the clarity and precision of my writing and choose not to explicitly lay out the film’s core conceit. Instead, I’ll talk around it. The film deals with the issues I anticipated but not in the ways I expected. Borgli’s previous feature is 2023’s Dream Scenario, which is more similar to The Drama than it might first appear. Though The Drama is ostensibly a realistic film, without the explicit magical realism of Dream Scenario, the characters’ behaviors, with one exception, are not particularly realistic. Indeed, Borgli sets up a friend group that is almost cartoonish in their response to the situation that initiates the plot. Borgli sacrifices psychological realism for the purposes of dealing with the film’s ideas. He is very ambitious in his scope here, but largely successful. The Drama is a film about American society and interpersonal relationships, but also addresses the fabric of ethical evaluation.

Writing about The Drama under my self-imposed constraint is not easy, so this is as far as I’ll go for now. A more spoiler-rich analysis may be forthcoming. But before then, avoid the plot summaries and go see the movie.

The Best Sneakers in 2010s Sci-Fi Manga

Back in 2022, I got an anime recommendation: Summer Time Rendering. Even though I didn’t finish the series, it stood out to me as particularly interesting. I came back to the series opting to read the manga instead. I’m glad I did. As good as Summer Time Rendering’s anime is, the original manga from 2017 is even better.

First, the important stuff: sneakers. Yasuki Tanaka illustrates some of the most realistic sneakers I have ever seen. He is a real head, too. Although you have to be when you are drawing brand name sneakers with this level of detail.

The Nike Aqua Sock 360 is not a shoe for for the faint of heart. It makes sense, given the beach-side setting of Hitogashima, a fictional island based on Tomogashima, Wakayama. Tanaka also grew up in Wakayama. He also uses his great eye for shoes to draw the New Balance 574.

You just can’t get shoe drawings like this in a TV anime.

The plot of Summer Time Rendering has nothing to do with sneakers. Instead, it is about doppelgängers. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) is a strong influence. This is about as high-concept of a sci-fi thriller as one gets, particularly in the medium. It also has an evident antecedent in Future Diary (2006), but the plot is quite different despite being structured with a page-turning mystery. Summer Time Rendering also uses a time loop as part of its plot devices, but makes some smart narrative decisions to reduce repetition and avoid repeated, lengthy exposition.

Summer Time Rendering is a great, readable series for those who enjoy contemporary science fiction. The manga is available from Udon Entertainment.

Weekly Reading List

You should be watching this.

For those still slaying the spire as I am, this is a great tutorial video on deck building concepts.

Event Calendar: Fathom Events

Added a bunch of nationwide repertory screenings from Fathom, including Citizen Kane (1941) and The Maltese Falcon (1941) probably at your local megaplex. You gotta go.

Until next time.

Would You Like to See Straight Ahead in New York City?

Straight Ahead is playing the Brooklyn Monarch with Gorilla Biscuits, Youth of Today, Underdog, Outburst, Identity Shock, and Stigmatism on Sunday, April 26th. In a first of its kind subscriber incentive, I will be raffling two tickets to this sold out gig. For all the scene soldiers who missed their shot copping or curious hardcore neophytes, you can see Straight Ahead and not pay the cost of admission. It’s a good deal.

How do you throw your hat in the ring? Purchase a paid subscription to Paradox Newsletter.

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If you are a paid subscriber as of the afternoon 4/18, you’re in the raffle. I’ll run the raffle at 3pm on 4/18 using this website and stream on twitch.tv for posterity. No funny business here. Just subscribe for a chance to win the tickets. You can unsubscribe for May, entry into this raffle does not assume you will remain a paid subscriber outside of the month of April.

This might be obvious, but all you’re getting are the tickets. You have to get yourself to the gig.

Being a subscriber is also its own reward, because you get access to the archive. You get access to the newsletter Discord server. You get the warm and fuzzy feeling of supporting independent writing. There is also forthcoming paid sub-only stuff of a heretofore untouched medium for Paradox. You’ll be ahead of the game as everyone scrambles to join the ranks of the newsletter scene soldiers.

A generous reader who wants to remain anonymous donated these tickets, so thanks to them.

Contemporary Political Art in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

“Art is always political” is a common liberal-progressive truism. It has not emerged in a vacuum, but rather in opposition to a sentiment like this from Project Hail Mary (2021) author Andy Weir:

I dislike social commentary. Like… [sic] I really hate it. When I’m reading a book, I just want to be entertained, not preached at by the author. Plus, it ruins the wonder of the story if I know the author has a political or social axe to grind. I no longer speculate about all possible outcomes of the story because I know for a fact that the universe of that book will conspire to ensure that the author’s political agenda is validated. I hate that … I put no politics or social commentary into my stories at all. Anyone who thinks they see something like that is reading it in on their own. I have no point to make, and I’m not trying to affect the reader’s opinion on anything. My sole job is to entertain, and I stick to that.

Weir’s view is profoundly naive both to the function of artistic interpretation and the relation of art and politics. “Art is always political” because art is not made in a vacuum. It emerges from a political milieu, a social context, that imbues it with meaning that may be intended or unintended. The question of intention, what Weir does or doesn’t “put” in his stories, is likewise irrelevant to how one might receive it.

“Art is always political” as a response to Weir’s view, however, falls a bit short. There is a misalignment of meaning, too, in the two contrasting assertions. The political features of art emerge in spite of itself and distinct from the self-aware, avowed aesthetic undertaking of “political storytelling.” There are many authors like Weir who endeavor to entertain, but they can never fully inoculate their art against the political situation that is the condition for artistic production.

Unlike Weir, many authors have felt an acute responsibility of social consciousness within their art that goes far beyond the incidental political dimension “art is always political” asserts. The great Trinidadian writer Earl Lovelace writes in “The Arts, The Critics and a New Society” (1968):

The basic principles of artistic criticism are well known to critics. Basically, we ask: What is the artist trying to say? How well has he said it? And, is it worth saying?

However, today, in our condition, we need to look carefully at how we ask these questions. We need to note the context in which we ask them. In fact, we ought to ask: To whom is the artist speaking? Is he speaking to us at all? We need to consider whether the artist is representing us, whether he is speaking to us, and to what extent is he (if he makes the claim), mirroring our hopes, aspirations and attitudes realistically. Or whether he is representing an individual experience that is intimately his own, that does not keep pace with our thinking and our condition. In short, we need, today, to determine the artist’s relevance to us.

This question of relevance is of critical importance today because it is only when the artist and the arts are relevant that they fulfil [sic] their functions in the society. Most of the intellectuals and artists for a long time now have not really made any strenuous efforts to relate to the community in which they operate or of which they speak. (14, Donnell 23-24)

Though I have issues with Lovelace’s articulation of the “well known” principles of artistic criticism, what is critical here is what he suggests happens beyond “basic” critique. Lovelace looks at art’s relevance as fulfilling a social function, namely, “relat[ing] to the community in which they operate or of which they speak.” This idea is critical for Caribbean literature of the period, with Lovelace considering European expatriates from the Caribbean who are, at the time, its exemplars.

Sylvia Wynter follows Lovelace’s thinking with a more direct critique of Louis James’s The Island in Between (1968), writing in “We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture” (1968):

He sketches the history of the Caribbean from an Archimedean point outside the historical process. Yet it is a process in which he is as involved as is the West Indian. This pretended objectivity and detachment is the common stance of what I call, for convenience, the ‘acquiescent critic.’ In attempting to write from outside the process, in pretending detachment, the ‘acquiescent critic,’ accepts the status quo.

James, as an English teacher teaching in a West Indian university, passing judgement on West Indian writing, is mediated to his bones by the colonial experience, by the colonial myth in which he is involved (26-27, Donnell 25)

Wynter’s elaboration of Lovelace points back to the idea of the inherent political quality of art. Her issues with James is his detachment and attempt to present himself as disinterested in the milieu and authorial context he describes. He is, in Wynter’s view, unable to recognize the ideological framework that structures his very critique.

There is an ideological framework, too, that governs the possibility of Weir claiming his art is apolitical. That is the ideology of consumerism, escapism, and the idea that art is capable of providing a purely self-effacing enjoyment that carries with it none of the vicissitudes of the material world. Indeed, Weir seems to feel the responsibility of producing art as commodity with the purpose of inert entertainment as exigently as Lovelace feels the responsibility to represent. Unfortunately for Weir, one cannot escape the aesthetic reality of having represented something.

Stuart Hall develops the thinking of Lovelace and Wynter (and Roland Barthes) in his “Introduction to Media Studies at the Centre” (1980), referring to the educational program of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies:

[W]e broke with the passive and undifferentiated conceptions of the “audience” as it has largely appeared in traditional research—influenced, as these had been, by the surveying needs of broadcasting organizations and advertising agencies. We began to replace these too-simple notions with a more active conception of the “audience,” of “reading” and of the relation between how media messages were encoded, the “moment” of the encoded text and the variation of audience “decodings.” (Writings on Media 170)

Hall goes on:

[T]he question of the media and ideologies returned to the agenda a concern with the role which the media play in the circulation and securing of dominant ideological definitions and representations. This more classical set of concerns contrasted sharply with the “mass-culture” models which underpinned much early American research and the resounding absence in that whole body of work of the question of ideology. (Writings on Media 170)

All of this is to say that the meaning of a work of art is never determined at the moment of its creation, but rather at the moment of its reception. Additionally, both the political situation that produced the work and the political situation in which it is received alters the work’s meaning.

While there is certainly avowedly political art in contrast to the work that is ‘incidentally political,’ neither satirical nor ‘socially conscious,’ there is also work that is clearly offering precise social commentary despite an author’s protestations to the contrary. Take, for instance, this year’s new season of Daredevil: Born Again (2025). Showrunner Dario Scardapane has distanced himself from the idea of contemporary social commentary doing press for the season. The ongoing plot involves the Anti-Vigilante Task Force, reporting directly to Wilson “Kingpin” Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), operating in a manner similar to Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In a conversation with IGN, Scardapane appeals to the the production timeline and source material to defang the allegory:

This is picking up Charles Soule’s Mayor Fisk storyline that was written about 10 years ago, in 2016 … The first and second season is ‘rise of a tyrant.’ Whether that’s applying to now? I’m not in that space. I’m in ‘What if Wilson Fisk, criminal, rose to power as mayor?’ Yes, sometimes we’re feeling prescient, but all of this stuff was written long before these events.

Bracketing the AVTF-ICE parallel, there are other symbolic parallels in Born Again’s second season. The Born Again Official Podcast’s companion to “Shoot the Moon” has Deborah Ann Woll, who plays Karen Page, discussing the character motivations with Michael Gandolfini, who plays Daniel Blake. Woll says:

If you were to get sucked into a community, a group, a movement that suddenly down the line you’re realizing, oh wait, this isn’t what I thought it was? Or this is now starting to ask me to step beyond my moral boundaries, like what do you do in that situation? How do you either step out or do you dive in deeper?

One can recognize the obvious parallel with the Trump supporter in Woll’s analysis, even as Scardapane denies them. Crucially, though, Woll keeps her social critique abstract and hypothetical. This is a feature of a show produced by Disney. Scardapane and Woll are media trained and careful not to alienate fans. Paraphrasing Michael Jordan, republicans watch Daredevil too.

There are other, more urbane allusions Scardapane is comfortable owning. In an Entertainment Weekly interview, he talks about scenes that allude to “the Turkish invasion of Cyprus” and Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station (2013). But much as Scardapane attempts to point audiences away from the most obvious contemporary parallels, they are evident.

Born Again and the supposedly unintended similarities to Trump immigration and policing policy and accidental exploration of Trump supporter psychology are a case study in how art is political with or without intention. As Hall says, a work’s meaning is derived both from its “’moment’ of [encoding]” and “the variation of audience ‘decodings.’” Decoding Daredevil today means to recognize its condemnation of private, unaccountable police forces and unmoored political supporters. Likewise, this method of interpretation is why Weir’s assertion of being apolitical is worth less than nothing.

Weekly Reading List

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted — Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz come up big on the AI beat.

https://www.darkhorse.com/books/3016-662/oldboy-deluxe-edition-book-one-hc/ — The original Oldboy (1996) is out in deluxe edition. It’s a great time to read a stone cold classic.

I love Eric Collins.

Event Calendar: IFFBoston and Shadow of a Doubt

This week I added the tentative (but also fast approaching) dates of interest for the upcoming IFFBoston. Also added some of Coolidge’s Big Screen Classics, including a screening of Shadow of a Doubt (1943) where I will be seated.

Until next time.

OpenAI’s video generation tool, Sora, is dead.

“Dead” is, perhaps, a poor choice of words. It is too evocative of what LLM AI isn’t: life, consciousness, etc. Sora, however, didn’t pretend to be conscious. It didn’t pretend to be anything except for your friends stealing GPUs from Target. Tech journalist Casey Newton and, to a lesser extent, podcast host PJ Vogt were optimistic about Sora back in October. Newton said to PJ in an episode of Search Engine:

I’ll tell you the prediction that I have that I am confident about and that I think I might differ from my peers on. I think this feature that they’re calling cameos, which is the ability to take your friends’ likenesses and your own likeness and put it in whatever situation you can dream up that the content guidelines will allow, I think that’s here to stay. I think people are really going to like that.

Even without the benefit of hindsight, this was a stupid prediction. I didn’t go on record in the newsletter with my view, but there are plenty of iMessage chat logs from October of last year where I said Sora is no better than JibJab.

Now, Sora is shuttered, only after losing OpenAI an exorbitant, unimaginable amount of money. OpenAI is pivoting to the areas where Anthropic is having success: enterprise products, complex coding tools, and productivity automations. Sora was an embarrassingly bad bet for a company that is routinely humiliated in the public sphere. Cheers to you, Sam Altman. What you don’t understand about people could fill a book.

Shinoda’s 1960s Biting Satire Could’ve Been Made Yesterday

Kawaita mizuumi (1960) has been localized with the title Youth in Fury and Dry Lake, although the latter is the trans-literation. An early film of the Japanese New Wave director Masahiro Shinoda, Dry Lake is an electric masterpiece that set the stage for Panic in High School (1978), Robinson’s Garden (1987), School Daze (1988), and even Happyend (2025). Written by avant-garde playwright Shūji Terayama, Dry Lake is uncompromising and caustic. The teenagers that Shinoda takes as his subjects are mostly repugnant, unsympathetic characters, particularly the two leads: Takuya Shimojô (Shin’ichirô Mikami) and Michihiko Kihara (Junichiro Yamashita). Shimojô is a budding political activist fascinated with leaders of all stripes, from democratic to totalitarian. He sleeps under posts of FDR, Che Guevara, and Hitler. His political consciousness is at odds with that of his peers. He objects to symbolic protests and is desperate for ‘real,’ violent usurpation of the status quo. As he moves through his school life, he is cruel, routinely humiliating his peers, imperiling the women around him, and carrying on a sexually and financially exploitative relationship with an older bartender.

Kihara is a wealthy nihilist and shares a kinship with Shimojô through their cruelty. But for as bad as Shimojô is, Kihara is much worse, staging bizarre torments for everyone around him using money as an incentive and repeatedly attempting to sexually assault girlfriends and classmates. Rather than being a referendum on youthful (im)morality or a condemnation of campus political activity, the work of Shinoda’s film is to spotlight that which is unsightly. He does not gloss over the dimensions of humanity that films preceding it — especially those produced and distributed by the studio Shochiku — would usually ignore.

Shimojô and Kihara both behave abhorrently, but there is no equivalence between them. Kihara is a proto-Patrick Bateman, totally isolated from any possibility of human connection by his obscene wealth. Shimojô, on the other hand, is also isolated because of his delusions of grandeur.

However, his annihilative impulses are the product of a confrontation with imposing political machinery. Shimojô shudders at what he sees as a grim truth, nothing ever happens.

There is an incisiveness Shinoda can bring to bear precisely because his characters are so remarkably wicked. Part of the film’s ugliness is a mockery of the sentimental films that came before it, but Shinoda also makes it clear that individualism is the enemy of the leftist revolution — toward which he himself may have been ambivalent. But Dry Lake is not a film where its characters individuate themselves out of an avowed demand to be somebody. Instead, their social position which marginalizes and alienates them produces the subjectivity. Despite the persistent heinousness of Shimojô and Kihara, the pathos of their representation is not saccharine. It is evident only in Shinoda’s sharp illustration of the political situation in which most are ultimately self-interested.

Shimojô is an aspiring revolutionary (or extremist) in contrast to Kihara because there are some human connections he can imagine, even if he cannot enact them. He quotes a stanza from Langston Hughes’ “Consider Me,” awkwardly and incorrectly rendered in the film’s Japanese subtitles. The actual Hughes lines that grip Shimojô are about a child laborer:

Consider me,
Colored boy,
Downtown at eight,
Sometimes working late,
Overtime pay
To sport away,
Or Save,
Or give my Sugar
For the things
She needs.
…
Consider me,
On Friday the eagle flies.
Saturday laughter, a bar, a bed.
Sunday prayers syncopate glory.
Monday comes,
To work at eight,
Late,
Maybe.
Consider me,
Descended also
From the
Mystery.

It’s no accident this is the piece, and the section, Terayama puts in the mouth of Shimojô. It serves to illustrate some level of global class consciousness. Shimojô sees a continuity between the Black American liberatory struggle and his own political dissatisfaction. At the same time, Shimojô recounts the poem, about a girlfriend, to impress a girl — a shallow gesture following his Don Juan archetype to the letter.

The most remarkable aspect of Dry Lake is the prescience of the political world and personalities it represents. The movie feels new, and perhaps a better reflection of our political situation than One Battle After Another (2025) or Eddington (2025). Shinoda’s gaze, salacious as the world is under it, is a masterful one. He surveys the worst tendencies of humanity. But what he understands, and also shows in his work, is the conditions that produce those tendencies. The world without guarantees makes films without limit in the milieu of the Japanese nouvelle vague.

Life is But a Dream in the Ending of Chainsaw Man

Rapping “It was all a dream, I used to read Word Up! magazine,” The Notorious B.I.G. is reflecting on his childhood aspirations on “Juicy.” It is one of the most iconic rap lyrics of all time, but those specific five words: ‘it was all a dream,’ have structured the way pop culture expresses their ideas about dreams. Biggie doesn’t mean literal dreaming, as in the ones that visit during slumber. Despite this, there’s an echoing reverberation of the nursery rhyme “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” “life is but a dream,” and even of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” It is in Hamlet (1623) where Shakespeare gives a more psychoanalytic gloss of dreams, “To die, to sleep — to sleep, perchance to dream — Ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come.”

Freud, for all his critical intertextuality with Hamlet, defines the intrigue of the dream as it is expressed in art. Žižek writes:

the ‘secret’ to be unveiled through analysis is not the content hidden by the form (the form of commodities, the form of dreams) but, on the contrary, the ‘secret’ of this form itself. The theoretical intelligence of the form of dreams does not consist in penetrating from the manifest content to its ‘hidden kernel’, to the latent dream-thoughts; it consists in the answer to the question: why have the latent dream-thoughts assumed such a form, why were they transposed into the form of the dream? (The Sublime Object of Ideology [1989] 3)

The why of this transformation is never a what; never a rote explanation like that of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1843), “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.” And the why is most interesting when the text can illustrate a relationship between the dream and waking life. One of the more conventional methods for this, especially when a work’s diegesis is mostly dream, is the pre-dream or post-awakening montage that recontextualizes all the dream’s characters. The great children’s film Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1989) uses this structure to great effect. It also maintains that ambiguous sense that the dream may be more real than it seems. The film leaves open the interpretation that the many people Nemo (Gabriel Damon) meets in the dream are in fact the actual circus performers he watches during the day.

Spoilers for Chainsaw Man (2018) follow

Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Chainsaw Man, which ended with chapter 232 last week, will not be remembered as a tasteful exemplar of this dreaming protagonist trope. Like Little Nemo, Fujimoto creates a complex plot justification that distances the sequence of events ever so slightly from a dream. Following the plot logic, Denji awakens in a world where Pochita, and thus his own demonic powers, never existed.

The narrative effect, however, is totally indistinguishable from Denji awakening from a dream.

What follows is the structural reversal of Little Nemo. Denji meets all of the people whose lives are irrevocably altered because of the non-existence of Pochita. Or, interpreting to serve the analogy, like The Wizard of Oz (1939), he meets all the people who influenced his long dream chronicled in 231 manga chapters.

Fujimoto’s ending is the confession of a dour view. Denji’s life as Chainsaw Man, as a supernatural hero, as a manga protagonist with all its vicissitudes, is worse than his life as a demon slaying debtor and yakuza organ theft repository. The author couldn’t find an ending that is satisfactory for the manga’s miserable subject without totally overturning the narrative logic. Why end Chainsaw Man here and in this way?

For those who believe Chainsaw Man jumped the shark, its significant drop in quality happened way before this ending. The manga has been borderline incoherent for months. Even as Fujimoto tried to embrace a new protagonist, Asa, Denji has too much of a grip on Fujimoto’s imagination. Much of Chainsaw Man’s “Part 2,” initially the “School Arc,” has been disjointed and non-committal. Major characters die off screen. ‘World building’ is machine gun fired to the audience through protracted exposition. I prefer interpreting to analyzing creative foibles, it seems a bit too obvious that Fujimoto lost track of his plot and could not figure out how to get to an ending that made sense within the narrative he created. Thus, the world of the manga ends before it concludes.

Some have returned to a quotation from Fujimoto stating his admiration of The Big Lebowski and his ambition to emulate it in Chainsaw Man. It’s ending, though, is a bit more similar to Hideaki Anno’s revision of Neon Genesis Evangelion with his Rebuild film series. Denji, Power, and Asa exist in a similar triangulation to Shinji, Asuka, and Mari, but Denji and Shinji end up with the structurally “opposite” romantic partner. The quiet, late entry to the mythology is supplanted by the “tsundere” woman with the earlier claim to the protagonist’s attention.

It is somewhat fitting that an allusive writer like Fujimoto would deliver an ending that can only be understood in relation to its many explicit and implicit intertexts. The ending does not easily make available a reading that takes it on its own merits. This was a desperation move for a guy out of ideas and tired of writing chapters every week. Fujimoto hit the escape button, but we could’ve seen it coming.

The ending that we have for Chainsaw Man is not the worst one I could imagine, although it is a shame for a storied manga to go out like this. But this second part of the manga always paled in comparison to the first. Perhaps hindsight might soften the attitudes toward the manga’s final, unexpected turn. But, I doubt it.

Weekly Reading List

Somehow I’ve never heard this cover of one of my all-time favorite songs by one of my all-time favorite groups. Although I’m actually not really a fan of this rendition, but I figured I’d share it anyway. Kinda sets the stage.

https://www.tokyohive.com/article/2026/03/former-the-pillows-drummer-shinichiro-sato-dies-at-61 — Man, I can’t even say anything about this one. Call it “alternative rock” or “indie rock,” The Pillows are among the best who have ever done it. Shinichiro Sato was playing with the band until just last year. RIP.

https://www.tcj.com/rip-yoshiharu-tsuge/ — Another absolutely gutting loss.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/march/after-habermas — The newsletter may need an in memoriam section at this point.

Event Calendar: HFA Delivers with Decision to Leave

One of my favorite recent films, and perhaps among my all time favorites, Decision to Leave, will screen at the Harvard Film Archive mid-April.

It’s a bit difficult to fully grasp the fact that I wrote my essay about the sneakers in Park Chan-wook’s incredible Vertigo (1958) pastiche nearly four years ago.

Until next time.

Some may not appreciate the attempted humor of my header images, but I am proud to spend 10 minutes in my web-based image editor of choice cobbling these together.

No, “Verts” are not coming to Paradox Newsletter. How quickly we forget the sins we visited upon ourselves with Quibi.

What’s going on?

Final housekeeping announcement: Music League is coming back.

Final date TBD but keep an eye out here next week or the week after to join Paradox Newsletter Music League Season 3.

I’ve been getting a lot of requests about this from friends who have been participating. So, we’re coming back.

The Furious Closes BUFF

I wasn’t lucky enough to catch much at Boston Underground Film Festival this year. But I was seated for their closing film: The Furious (2026), a new action film from Kenji Tanigaki. Tanigaki created the mold Chad Stahelski has come to live in as a stunt performer/coordinator-turned-director. However, Tanigaki hasn’t quite found the same success behind the camera. He has directed only zero-budget DTV features until Enter the Fat Dragon (2020), which he co-directed with Aman Chang Man. The Furious is his first solo directed feature to make it to theaters at all.

When it comes to stunts, however, he is tremendously acclaimed. He served as a stunt coordinator for SPL (2005), Flash Point (2007), Raging Fire (2021), and Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024). His action directing secured him a Golden Horse Award for Hidden Man (2018), a Japan Action Award for Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno and The Legend Ends (2014). All of the work has paid off. The Furious is the real thing.

My Letterboxd review was effusive, but I don’t mind recapping it. For a Hong Kong action movie, what Tanigaki stages is simply not normal. Most action moves use space and keep some distance between the combatants. This usually makes for a more clear, legible visual language compared to the alternative. It’s easier to tell who is who when they’re not on top of each other. The Furious’s action is totally different, though no less clear. For the first third of the film, people are smashed together and nobody is waiting their turn to get in on a fight. Unlike a conventional HK flick, it’s like Moe Tse has a magnet on him.

There’s also props; ladders, pallets, bike pedals with which to bludgeon. The inter-fight cuts are precisely time matched to keep the continuity and moment of a scene.

A little over a third into the film, Wang Wei (Mo Tse) looks over at Navin (Joe Taslim) and writes emphatically: “feint east, attack west.” Wei is quoting from the Thirty-Six Stratagems, a 6th century treatise on military strategy. In Verstappen’s English edition, entitled The Thirty Six Strategies, he also translates strategy six a little differently: “clamor in the east, attack in the west.” Verstappen quotes Sun Tzu:

The spot where we intend to fight must not be made known, for then the enemy will have to prepare against a possible attack at different points and his forces will be spread out too thin. For, if the enemy should strengthen his van, he will weaken his rare. Should he strengthen his rear, he will weaken his van. (29)

The irony of Wei’s evocation of this hallowed military document is that he is acting quickly, without concern, and refusing to plan his attack because of the urgency of saving his kidnapped daughter. Tanigaki, on the other hand, must be a student of the Stratagems. There is no way to defend one’s sense of enjoyment from the shocking action he brings to the screen. Feint east, attack west.

Weekly Reading List

For all the versions of Alexey Pajitnov’s beautifully designed game, Tetris (1988), one stands above the rest: Arika’s Tetris: The Grand Master (1998). The competition-inducing arcade Tetris has only just recently been made easily available for home consoles. The story of TGM is also enough for this five hour documentary for Demonin. Wow.

This is a great, if slightly self-congratulatory discussion about Survivor (2000) featuring the man himself, Jeff Probst.

A low-budget mini-series from the cast and crew of Nihon Toitsu (2013) may be the best adaptation of the Yakuza (2005) video game ever. Yasukaze Motomiya is a fantastic Kiryu.

And already in the first episode they begin to set up the tension between the ‘organized’ logic of so-called organized crime and the irrationality of life that rejects conventional social norms.

But Kiryu is unyielding.

I can’t wait to keep watching.

Presented without comment.

Event Calendar: Shinoda Masahiro at the HFA

From Chris Fujiwara for the Harvard Film Archive:

Throughout a career spanning a wide range of styles and subjects, Shinoda Masahiro (1931-2025) reinvented himself several times, sometimes as often as from one film to the next. A will to innovation unifies his work, which is also marked by a sympathy for rebellion and a taste for secrecy and conspiracy. The loosely connected group of films from Dry Lake (1960) to Double Suicide (1969) is central to Shinoda’s filmography. In addition to two of his best-known films, Pale Flower (1964) and Double Suicide, this group includes several others in which the director’s penchant for visual abstraction matches up with an abrasive and bleak sensibility, breaking open the narrative forms he has inherited.

Pale Flower and Samurai Spy (1965) are among my favorite movies ever. If you get the chance, this is must-see programming.

Until next time.

If you are reading this newsletter, you might benefit from using Zotero. I’ve been using it since 2014, but I have been digging into its less obvious features over the past month. Zotero’s website describes it as “a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research.” I’ve been using it for most of these things for a long time, but their description undersells just how great it is as a tool for annotation and PDF reading.

It has a snappy, feature rich PDF reader that lets me read on my phone too. I’ve also started using it to archive my print library, to have something I can check against when shopping for used books. I’m sure I am not alone in bringing home an extra copy of something I already own in a moment of book shopping uncertainty.

Two weeks ago, a rough encounter with the vicissitudes of cloud service led me to really dig into Zotero. Diigo, another service I have used for over a decade (and a bit longer than Zotero), went down for a few days. They’re back up, but I think the ship is going down. Diigo hasn’t posted to their social media since 2020. Their Wordpress is defunct. Their iOS app was last updated in 2021. Updated copyright on their website is the only hint they are still a functioning business. If anyone from Diigo is reading this, feel free to email me assurances that your service is going to persist and I’ll issue a retraction. I’d be happy to hear it!

Zotero splits the difference between cloud storage and organizing local files — every digital file attached to a record in Zotero lives on your harddrive. But you better believe after the Diigo scare I’ll be availing myself of every exporting mechanism Zotero has available.

So, that’s my case. This isn’t a sponsored post, although I would like to see Zotero stay in business. If it sounds like something that would help you, give it a try. I’m a certified fan.

AI vs. Analysis: The Age of the LLM Therapist

In the past weeks and months where I have staged an encounter between myself and AI, I would like to think I have been critical but fair.

While I am opposed to a number of usages for AI (the production of so-called “AI art”), I am neither a partisan of the luddite nor the techno-optimist. It is the naive and uncritical attitude toward what LLMs are and how they function that I think of as more threatening than the technology itself. There are also economic incentives abound in the favorable view of AI. Recently, Anthropic, the company responsible for the AI tool Claude, produced a “Labor market impacts of AI” report. Among its many assertions, the Anthropic research team produced a visual of “Theoretical capability and observed exposure by occupational category.” In other words, a graph of how much AI is being used in a given field today to perform the job’s tasks and how much Anthropic suggests it might be used to, more or less, do the job.

Many have looked at this graphic with anxiety and furrowed brows. But nobody has pointed to the obvious ridiculousness and self-evident conflict of interest for a company to produce findings that suggest their product will be widely used in the future across many industries. It is being underutilized, of course! There are more ways to apply AI, more “efficiencies” to gain, more “automation” to save humans from exerting their intellectual efforts. This is like a mouthwash commercial that suggests that, like a Listerine Marx, it is an inevitability of the movement of history that the proletariat will have minty fresh breath. Or, a more accurate analogy, this graph is like dealers of crack cocaine producing something similar:

Though I’ll mock Anthropic for their transparent, self-serving advertising in the guise of economic analysis, it is not as if there is nothing interesting to be be gleaned here. Most fascinating is the organizations of the vocations themselves. “Grounds maintenance” has the smallest “Theoretical AI coverage,” while “Business & finance,” “Computer & math,” and “Office & admin” are among the largest. “Arts & media” (vomit) are also scored highly by Anthropic for their theoretical coverage, although it seems to me they overestimate the degree to which AI is used in the “production” of “Arts & media.” I don’t think “AI art” is making anyone any real money.

“Healthcare practitioners” are marked as high potential for AI displacement, whereas “Healthcare support” is significantly lower in Anthropic’s view. In which category does talk therapy fit? In thinking, and joking, about this graph, I made the offhand comment “at least AI will never replace therapists.” This reveals an anxiety. Though my statement is correct in the sense of their actual function, an AI cannot administer therapy, that doesn’t change that people use AI as if it can be their therapist. It takes only the propagation of the erroneous notion, like a drug addiction, to result in demonstrable damage to mental health care.

In her latest article for the journal Lamella, Alenka Zupančič tackles this exigent question. For any therapists reading this, it is clear that AI is entering the consulting room again and again. Zupančič, for her part, starts with just such an anecdote:

Recently, a psychoanalytic colleague from Mexico told me that one of his patients, during analysis, presented a dream generated on his behalf by ChatGPT and asked that they analyze it together. (38)

Immediately, I’m struck by the question of what exactly “a dream generated on his behalf” is? How did the dreamer-by-proxy prompt the LLM? Though Zupančič never resolves my curiosity, she compares this question to another incident of dreaming by proxy in Freud. Zupančič quotes The Interpretation of Dreams:

Among the dreams which have been reported to me by other people, there is one which has special claim upon our attention at this point. It was told to me by a woman patient who had herself heard it in a lecture on dreams: its actual source is still unknown to me. Its content made an impression on the lady, however, and she proceeded to ‘re-dream’ it, that is, to repeat some of its elements in a dream of her own, so that, by taking it over in this way, she might express her agreement with it on one particular point. (41)

Should one add “Dreaming” to the exterior of the circle that represents the potential for “AI coverage” in Anthropic’s graph? Only in the most perverse sense, and I mean that as a Lacanian. The thrust of Zupančič’s argument suggests that AI functions as a mechanism through which disavowal occurs for the subject. She concludes her article with analysis of the AI generated video of a “Gaza Riviera” and Dan Brooks commentary on the video for The New York Times. Elaborating Brooks’ concept of “unstable irony,” Zupančič writes:

It seems that this “unstable irony” is, in fact, closely related to the notion and mechanism of disavowal. In relation to AI, we could even speak of a “machinic disavowal” or perhaps a “mechanically induced disavowal”—but also of a disavowal that is mechanically supported and perpetuated.

Pairing this idea with the provocative quotation from Deleuze she evokes twice, “If you are trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked” (53, 57), AI for Zupančič represents an Other that is not a subject, but a detached unconscious that “[carries] out a significant labor on which ruthless political powers can cash in. It is a work that pulls us all into the orbit of a generated déjà vu, where everything is possible, but nothing can happen anymore” (57). The through-line of the argument is clear, what AI opens up is the distorted representation of precisely what is disavowed by the subject, to “familiarize us with the ‘dumbest’ idea” (56) as a tacit embrace of the most violent, obscene repression — in this particular case, the genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza that is “satirized” by the AI video to which Zupančič refers.

There are errors, though, in the course of this argument unfolding. Zupančič attributes to the AI too much mystery with her assertion that “ChatGPT, for example, indeed functions somewhat like a gigantic unconscious” (51). The idea of LLM-as-unconscious is what Zupančič uses to support her ultimate description of AI as a prosthesis for disavowal. But AI is not unconscious, does not have anything that can be spoken of as consciousness or unconsciousness. Its textual output is not, as Zupančič claims, an example of “highly structured … free associations” (45). Is there not a self-evident contradiction in this idea? Freedom is what is at issue in the text AI generates. The associations it makes are not free. They are dictated by a given model, rigid, and repetitive by virtue of structure rather than compulsion. Zupančič concedes as much when she writes LLMs are “a system that … is based on probabilities and guesses” (52). She puts too much weight on the idea of the guess and the variability of the probabilities. Though one might be able to extract some insight about the zeitgeist from an LLM’s training data by way of its output, the rigid associations of LLM text production are antithetical to the disruptive free association of the subject.

Bracketing the modest disputes I have with some of Zupančič’s finer points about AI, she understands clearly how the tool functions as a social reality:

Moreover, ChatGPT is not merely the Other as a passive repository of signifiers—it is an Other that functions as what is called in Lacanian psychoanalysis “the subject supposed to know” (with all the implication that this has for the notion of “transference”), and it is an Other that speaks. It addresses us directly, like an oracle. In this sense, it performs the function of what we might call a “talking big Other”. It seems to have an answer to every question—and when it doesn’t, it simply “hallucinates” one, and we’ll return to this. (44)

For Lacan, the belief in a “subject supposed to know” is a necessary misrecognition by the analysand of the analyst. Though the analyst knows nothing privileged about the psyche of their analysand, the analysand should think of the analyst as particularly knowing to lubricate the speech of analysis. In other contexts, though, the transferential relation that props up the idea of a subject supposed to know is an error with a range of adverse social consequences — as I claimed in my presentation at LACK last year. Zupančič herself is not immune to this transference, as in the paragraph immediately following her account of the subject’s transferential relation to ChatGPT, she demonstrates her own recounting her querying ChatGPT (”an interesting conversation with this entity”) about Freudian dream interpretation (44).

Ultimately, Zupančič totally objects to the LLM as being a subject as such — the “unconscious” quality she attributes to the LLM is precisely because it is not conscious. She writes:

This also indicates why the attempts to equip the AI with subjective, “human” psychology misses the point of the Lacanian subject. The subject is not a bag of subjectivizations and identifications (which basically resonate and fit in with the existing symbolic order), but precisely the element without subjectivization (and in this sense without psychology); hence its fundamental relation to the Freudian unconscious, the formula of which is: “therefore I’m not (there)”, “this is not me”.

The AI’s non-subject status is from the mar in its code that comes from its lack of lack. Training data is always structurally complete, it always has some text to fill in the empty space one creates by their querying it. The LLM is never at a loss for words.

Zupančič provides a more affecting description of this difference:

In psychoanalytic terms we could say that what ChatGPT lacks in order to become a subject (parlêtre) is not some unfathomable, spontaneous depth of subjectivity; what it lacks is the presence, the impact of an Other. It lacks an instance of the Other that could intrigue it with its own speech, to the point where it would begin to presuppose and question the desire of this Other (“What does the Other want?”) . … Are we, as ChatGPT’s “users,” its Other in this sense? Hardly. I doubt that, while we chat with it, it wonders what we really want from it, beyond what we explicitly say—or seem to be saying (Lacan terms this “Che vuoi?”. The interrogation of the Other’s desire takes the form of questions such as, “you say this, but what do you really mean, or want from me?” or, also: “What am I for you?”). We, on the other hand, do wonder: we wonder what it “really” knows, how it functions, what kinds of algorithms drive it, and what kind of danger or blessing it might bring into the world… (51-52)

She spends the middle portion of the essay doing the best theorizing, explicating this account of the “missing screw” following a close-reading of Modern Times (1936):

I believe this could be a rather good rendering of the (Lacanian) subject of the unconscious: it is a subject struggling in its own ways with the fact that the apparatus determining it is struggling with a missing screw (or a missing signifier). (49)

The ink spilled, already, on the question of AI’s relationship to psychoanalysis is vastly disproportional to the intrigue of the question. Still, Zupančič writes, “[t]he positive answer to our inaugural question does not, of course, mean that psychoanalysis is simply indifferent or impermeable to AI” (43). And yet, even as she mis-attributes the unconscious quality to the output of the LLM, Zupančič presents an incisive argument as to just what the LLM lacks to be a subject in the psychoanalytic sense. In her turn to the horrific genocide in Palestine and the “Gaza Riviera,” the LLM’s shortcoming relative to subjectivity is threatening:

In other words, perhaps we should not so much fear that AI becomes [a] subject, as we should fear that it doesn’t— and that it instead evolves into a pervasive, overwhelming discursivity that confines us (53)

It would be, in my view, the deceptive transferential feeling a subject can have toward an AI that leads to this result rather than an LLM failing to become a subject. Indeed, don’t hold your breath. It never will.

In my reading of both Anthropic and Zupančič’s various provocations, I want to pay tribute to the therapists on the front lines working with clients, patients, analysands. What you face is a confrontation with a transference that threatens this very possibility of a confining discursivity brought about by headless text generation. Still, your therapeutic function as the ‘Other’ can never be replaced.

The Best Live Music Performance of All Time Took Place in 1986 in Hamilton, ON

Youth of Today is one of my favorite bands of all time. My enthusiasm for them has never wavered. Though their period of activity as a real band ended in 1990, I’ve seen them play during their seemingly interminable reunion at least ten times. Maybe more. I’d really have to think. Like anything I like a lot, I have my criticisms. Cappo can be a little longwinded. It’s a lot worse now. But even watching some of their greatest live sets, he talks.

Something was in the air in Hamilton, Ontario on December 12th, 1986. Because that is the recorded Youth of Today concert about which I have no complaints. It is perfect.

If you don’t watch a lot of YOT videos, or haven’t seen them play a lot, you aren’t really going to grasp how exceptionally rare of a performance this is. But even if you know nothing about the band, I trust if you have good taste you can appreciate what you are seeing here. It is unbelievable. Jaw-dropping. I could quote Cappo’s sparse banter from this show all day. Before “Shout It,” “This is also for the people who get up and speak out. It’s called ‘Shout It,’ and you know I’m gonna fuckin’ right now.” He gives an eloquent explanation of the themes of “Stabbed in the Back,” but still long enough to justify a block quote:

This one’s going out to all the people who are up front, singing along. This is what you can do at a hardcore show with no barriers up. No one’s telling you to get back. You want to come up and sing, you’re more than welcome. This is going out to all the hardcore bands, the people who had something up here, who went their own way to make more money or to attract a larger audience. You know what I mean. This one’s called “Stabbed in the Back.”

Let’s fucking go. Just like I can type out these Cappo quotes and get hyped, current bands could do much worse than taking inspiration from this video. Better than explaining the meaning of the songs, he often just introduces them by speaking their lyrics into the mic, giving the audience the guidance for his desired singing along. It’s especially badass before “Expectations.”

I have watched this video a lot, but I lost track of it for a while. It was just the apocryphal YOT set where, I insisted to people, Cappo didn’t say much other than shouting the lyrics of the songs before the band kicks in. Finding it again today, when this set gets rolling, it’s like accidentally flipping to Training Day (2001) on TNT. I’m seated.

Everything I care about in music is in this video.

Weekly Reading List

Shoutout to Ianvision, the custodian of the Youth of Today video above. He’s got a lot of other great ones uploaded:

And then there’s this Haymaker concert promo:

Unreal.

https://tidsskrift.dk/lamella/issue/view/13135 — If you are all set on 1990s and 2000s hardcore concert videos, you can also read the entirety of Lamella’s latest issue.

Event Calendar: BUFF Kicking Into Gear

I updated the calendar last week with my pick of BUFF screenings (most of them). They’re getting under way this week.

Until next time.

If you haven’t seen the first episode of Mad Men, I recommend it. It’s one of the finest episodes of television ever. You can watch it over and over, you can teach it every semester. Like any truly great piece of art, there’s no limit to what one can draw from it.

The episode involves Don Draper pacing, taking naps, pleading to his paramour. What can he do about the Lucky Strike account? Don’s furtive, but also occasionally sloth-like, confrontation with inspiration’s absence is some of the most evocative footage ever shot.

Eventually, he figures it out. “We can say anything we want.” And he proposes a slogan for Lucky Strike: “it’s toasted.”

Often, when writing the newsletter, I feel like Don Draper struggling to come up with an idea for Lucky Strike. Wearing a hole in the floor, looking for answers everywhere but the typewriter. What the hell am I supposed to write about? But then it hits me. I can write about anything I want. Here’s today.

Ask Not What Evangelion Can Do for You, but What Yoko Taro Can Do for Evangelion

Big news for the letter: Yoko Taro is writing a new Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series. Evangelion is epochal. It stands above nearly all other works for its enormous significance to the medium of animation. Yoko Taro is a titan in his own right, the writer of games acclaimed and otherwise: Drakengard (2003), Nier (2010), Drakengard 3 (2013), Nier: Automata (2017), Nier Reincarnation (2021), and Nier Repilcant ver.1.22474487139… (2021). It’s big news, too, because Taro’s Paradox Newsletter subscriber analytics suggest he at least opens the emails some of the time. Though I have been an admirer of his since 2003, he started reading my work in 2017 when I wrote about Nier: Automata. One of the few Paradox Newsletter Audio Supplements is about 2021’s Nier Replicant.

Yoko Taro is working on the new Evangelion while getting the newsletter in his inbox. I thought about the power this might give me. Could I move the needle on the series? Write something to imbed some unconscious suggestion about what the future of Evangelion should be?

But I’m not so prescriptive. I don’t care what Yoko Taro makes, as long as it’s good. I would rather not have agency to influence the output of the greatest artists who ever lived. This Evangelion will probably be good because he made it. I will critique rigorously after the fact, but great artists should only compromise or alter their vision based on consultation with trusted collaborators. And maybe not even then.

So, Taro, good luck. Ignore the backseat writers. I want to see Yoko Taro’s Evangelion.

VG Digest Q1 2025 or Slay the Spire 2 for Magic Players

What makes a good game? My criteria is pretty simple. I like something that can offer me diverse gameplay experiences. If a game can significantly change how it unfolds each time, that’s a real positive. A game that also changes my choices, changes what I would consider the correct choice in any given situation, that is real dynamism. Let me give an example of what I mean.

Magic: the Gathering isn’t a simple game. But my favorite way to play, draft, means that one need not bring anything to the table other than maybe a playmat, a dice, and some card sleeves. Magic is already diverse and dynamic, the variables of randomized drawing of cards and unknown information about the opponent guarantees that. But drafting brings this to the next level. Parallax Wave is a great card:

Seeing it early in a draft means you would pick it with certainty. But, as the draft evolves, you may not be in its color — white. Even if it’s the most powerful card in a pack late in the draft, you might pass it if you have no possibility of being able to play it. A limitation in your resources is the most common reason for why card evaluation in a draft would change. But there are plenty of other reasons: synergies or ‘signals’ one received based what gets passed. Usually the choices are more interesting than Parallax Wave versus the next best card, since so few cards are as good.

Offering different builds, synergies, and changing the way one makes choices is something many of the great, replayable “roguelites” have delivered. The latest critical hit? Slay the Spire 2 (2026).

Mega Crit’s new “roguelike deckbuilder” stands at the top of the genre heap once again. For Magic players, there’s so much to love. Does this card look familiar?

Still, something doesn’t look quite right. Maybe if you taped an Ancestral Recall to this:

Wait, Innate does what? And what the hell is Forge? There are familiar mechanics for Magic players in STS2: Sly is roughly equivalent to Madness, though Sly means when one discards a card they always play it for free rather than having the option to play it for an alternative cost.

I’ve found the most similarity between STS2 and Magic in the Silent character.

STS2 also has important mechanical similarities to post-Magic TCGs. Magic has high rules complexity because of the “Instant” card type. Being able to play on one’s opponent’s turn, and having to play around what an opponent might do, makes decisions more difficult and makes any given turn cycle slower than it would otherwise be. As a result, the ability to play on the opponent’s turn is usually the first thing to go in a new TCG to minimize complexity and keep things progressing smoothly. STS2 is no exception.

My appreciation for games like STS2, Balatro (2024), Q-Up (2025), and Magic is both because I like the design choices they make and, as a result of those design choices, the game is never the same twice. That is a very different set of standards than the ones I use for single-player, narrative based games. I don’t have the same rigid rubric for these kinds of games. While I like dissecting and reverse-engineering their design, whether I like or dislike individual design choices does not necessarily mean I will or won’t like the game as a whole. Japanese RPGs, for instance, are sometimes brutish and unfriendly in their design. My favorite games from the “golden era” of PS1 JRPGs might benefit from some quality of life (QoL) upgrades.

Those kinds of user-friendly design choices have come to JRPGs more and more in the last decade. Although some developers are still stuck on the atrocious design of the ‘daily life’ sim with an incrementing calendar originated in Persona 3 (2006), more and more often JRPGs finally abandon the idea of a “missable” and leave the game’s side-content and powerful items available for exploration at any time passed certain progression checks. Octopath Traveller 0 (2025), the acclaimed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025), and Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined (2026) are great examples of this kind of structure.

Before I picked up STS2, I had just finished DQVII: Reimagined. It’s a hell of a game, one of those that is so much more than the sum of its simple, retro parts. It, too, makes available a wide range of gameplay experiences depending on your preferences. Though most people who play the game will probably just beat it once, with one suite of settings that matches their desired difficulty.

When it comes to games, ‘good’ design isn’t everything. And ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is subjective depending on what criteria you set. But even the criteria I avow as that which determines what I like is subverted all the time. Or sometimes those preferences are simply inconsistent. My favorite games often don’t match my stated preferences for how a game should be made. They’re great games, too: beautiful because of their ‘bad’ design, at times. What we love is often for its flaws.

Weekly Reading List

Rarely does a visitor to the Criterion Closet act like a film critic. Mostly they just point to films they like or mention some personal connection they might have with a film. It’s uncommon to have a guest discuss a film’s merits, peculiarities, and do some analysis. On that score, Shinichiro Watanabe delivered. What an awesome guest to the closet.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/who-s-afraid-of-realism-madame-bovary-by-gustave-flaubert-part-one — James Wood’s “Who’s Afraid of Realism?” series has been great this year, beginning with a consideration of Madame Bovary (1856) in the context of realism and now having moved on to Dostoevsky.

Event Calendar: Boston Underground Film Festival

The Boston Underground Film Festival (BUFF) is running this month. I’ve added a number of listings for their premiere programming. Very excited to catch some of these.

Until next time.

The scolding, condescending, holier-than-thou attitude that plagues contemporary social justice writing is infuriating to me. Worse, still, I fear I am vulnerable to adopting that tone in my own writing. When my writing sounds like that, it is a failing on my part to be creative enough to figure out how to express my point without coming across like I am talking down to my readers.

I worked really hard to try to avoid that today, and I’m not sure I succeeded. But this week’s letter is an important one, about inclusivity, ableism, and, yes, the BAFTAs.

It’s a long one, too. So let’s cut to the chase.

“It all means diddly squat”: John Davidson, Tourette Syndrome, and the BAFTAs

John Davidson has been in the public eye since he was 16 years old. John’s Not Mad (1989) premiered on the BBC as part of the Q.E.D. (1982) series of documentaries, directed during this period by Valerie Kaye. Davidson would go on to be the subject of more documentaries: The Boy Can’t Help It (2002), Tourette de France (2007), Tourettes: I Swear I Can’t Help It (2009), Tourettes & Me (2014), and Tourette’s: Teenage Tics (2016). The Kaye-directed ‘89 documentary was a watershed moment for the understanding of Tourette syndrome in the United Kingdom. The frequent appearances on BBC One and Channel 4 meant British audiences had a chance to follow Davidson intermittently through his life as long as they had a TV antenna. The subjects of these documentaries also expanded to other children with Tourette’s, like Greg Storey, Rory Brown, and Paul Stevenson.

But John Davidson is special. Among Tourette’s advocates, he stands alone. He has been awarded the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 2019. Aside from his custodial career at the Langlee Community Centre where he has worked his entire life, he volunteers with support groups including Tourette Scotland and Tourettes Action. He leads workshops and education efforts for police and educators and support groups for families living with Tourette’s. His striking life story is now the subject of a biopic, I Swear (2025), directed by Kirk Jones and starring Robert Aramayo as David. I Swear won big at this year’s BAFTAs, taking home the awards for Best Casting for Lauren Evans and Best Actor in a Leading Role for Aramayo. As one might expect, Davidson was in attendance at the BAFTA awards where the film about his life was honored. There, something expected happened: he ticced.

Tourette syndrome is classified as a “motor or vocal tic disorder” in the DSM-5 and “neurodevelopmental disorder” in the ICD-11. The ICD-11 presents an estimated 0.5% prevalence rate of Tourette’s in school-aged children. Within that affected population, 10-15% present with the symptom of coprolalia. This relatively uncommon symptom is what is most commonly associated with Tourette syndrome. The ICD-11 calls it “inappropriate swearing,” (155) the DSM-5 is more detailed, calling it, “uttering socially unacceptable words, including obscenities, or ethnic, racial, or religious slurs … Importantly, coprolalia is an abrupt, sharp bark or grunt utterance and lacks the prosody of similar inappropriate speech observed in human interactions” (82). Coprolalia is among John Davidson’s symptoms.

Davidson seems to have an outsized impact on the relatively accepting attitude of British people toward Tourette’s. One might theorize that in the U.S., the primary architect of the American notion of Tourette’s is Trey Parker. In the 2007 episode of South Park (1997), “Le Petit Tourette,” Eric Cartman (Trey Parker) pretends to have Tourette’s to excuse his obscene language. This joke has been rehashed time and time again, from schoolyards to, apparently, Saturday Night Live writers’ rooms. There are other U.S. representations of Tourette’s, though. I learned most about TS reading Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999), in which protagonist Lionel Essrog has Tourette’s. Lethem’s novel gave me a broader view of what the inner-life of someone with Tourette’s might look like. He writes in the opening:

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I’m a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I’ve got Tourette’s. My mouth won’t quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I’m reading aloud, my Adam’s apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghost of themselves, husks empty of breath and tone. (If I were a Dick Tracy villain, I’d have to be Mumbles.) In this diminished form the words rush out of the cornucopia of my brain to course over the surface of the world, tickling reality like fingers on piano keys. Caressing, nudging. They’re an invisible army on a peacekeeping mission, a peaceable horde. They mean no harm. They placate, interpret, massage. Everywhere they’re smoothing down imperfections, putting hairs in place, putting ducks in a row, replacing divots. Counting and polishing the silver. Patting old ladies gently on the behind, eliciting a giggle. Only-here’s the rub-when they find too much perfection, when the surface is already buffed smooth, the ducks already orderly, the old ladies complacent, then my little army rebels, breaks into the stores. Reality needs a prick here and there, the carpet needs a flaw. My words begin plucking at threads nervously, seeking purchase, a weak point, a vulnerable ear. That’s when it comes, the urge to shout in the church, the nursery, the crowded movie house. It’s an itch at first. Inconsequential. But that itch is soon a torrent behind a straining dam. Noah’s flood. That itch is my whole life. Here it comes now. Cover your ears. Build an ark.

Lionel’s conflict with Tourette’s is not just an attempt to keep his voice silent, but to silence his own mind. He describes listening to Prince:

I don’t know whether The Artist Formerly Known as Prince is Tourettic or obsessive-compulsive in his human life, but I know for certain he is deeply in the life of his work … It so pulsed with Tourettic energies that I could surrender to its tormented, squeaky beat and let my syndrome live outside my brain for once, live in the air instead.

An uncalibrated psychoanalytic view, but it is clear the tics of Tourette’s come from some other other agency, not of the subject nor their unconscious. The prevalence of “Bailey” as a tic for Lionel speaks to that:

Bailey was a name embedded in my Tourette’s brain, though I couldn’t say why. I’d never known a Bailey. Maybe Bailey was everyman, like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. My imaginary listener, he had to bear the brunt of a majority of my solitary swearing-some part of me required a target, apparently. If a Touretter curses in the woods and there’s nobody to hear it does he make a sound? Bailey seemed to be my solution to that conundrum.

This is critical to understanding Tourette’s and tics. When it comes to speech, legible speech, the person with Tourette’s is not the agent of that speech. The disorder is what speaks. In the closing credits of I Swear, there’s archival footage of the real Davidson, “It’s like somebody’s forcing it out of me.”

Life is not easy for people with Tourette syndrome. In “Beyond the Tics: Experiences of Stigma and Psychosocial Impact in Tourette Syndrome” (2026) by Jaclyn M. Martindale, Leah Chapman, Andrew Jack Carson, Kandice Reilly, Melina Malli, Eric A. Storch, John Salsman, and Stephanie Daniel, the researchers look at a wide range of factors that contribute to adverse “self-beliefs and behaviors” related to Tourette’s.

They interviewed thirty-five participants ranging from patients to family to caregivers and advocates. There are a wide range of lengthy quotations from study participants in the paper, but I found these to be some of the most striking. Those with Tourette’s face social isolation and, indeed, are often their own most exacting jailers:

Asked to leave and probably should leave. Uncomfortable comments. Police have, have come to my home, sent by another parent from a playground, and that’s the language I’ve had parents come up to confront me in a scary manner, ready to have a fight with me. Just very confrontational. It’s always something that you’re wondering about or thinking about. You never know anywhere you go, how somebody is going to respond or react. We don’t go to a lot of places because we already know—have we been asked to leave that place? We’ll know that we’re going to be asked to leave. (Martindale et al. 5)

Martindale et al. also write about the specific challenges those with Tourette’s face in education, noting that “the right to receive equal access to free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment” (8) only arrived with TS’s inclusion in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 2006. Even with these protections, students with Tourette’s may find themselves unable to assert their rights:

They wanted to reserve the rights to punish her for any reason, including her tics and so they refused to put any-thing in the IEP saying that her tics are a disability, so she does not receive punishment for her tics. That’s been the biggest challenge. [...] They don’t see it [as a disability]. They see it as behavior. By cursing or making these threatening things or whatever, she’s violating the student code of conduct and they as the administration, have the right to punish for those things. [...] We flat out said, “So you want to reserve the right to punish her for her disability?” They said, “Well, if she tics something offensive, yeah”. (Martindale et al. 5)

This problem is compounded by the offensive nature of some tics. Coprolalia as a symptom causes someone to say the worst possible thing one might imagine in a given situation. In I Swear, Davidson confesses to crimes he didn’t commit, he insults the Queen of England to her face, he calls others names, and he momentarily taunts a woman he believes to be dying of cancer about her mortality. He exhorts his beloved dog to run into traffic.

Even supposedly inclusive environments are, at times, ill-suited to resolve the complex competing interests that can arise in response to certain tics:

The biggest thing was the way that [the online school] wouldn’t let [him] even participate. We’re like, “We’re spending all this money on this school and he’s supposed to do his school on his own, essentially.” We’re like,”This is not gonna work. The whole point is for him to have interaction with other kids.” It’s not designed to be an asynchronous program. That’s not what we’re paying for. We had multiple meetings, and then we even—apparently, there was another kid that was an African-American, their family was offended by [his] tics. They said, “Well, they’re a protected class.” I said, “You do know that [he] is also a protected class and it seems like one protected class is trumping another.” (Martindale et al. 5)

Similarly, slurs that are most offensive and harmful can occasion rejection even from close friends and family:

You can have tics. It’s okay. Until this C word comes out or, heaven forbid, racial slurs. Then it’s, well, we under-stand all the other ones, but not that one. Even family. You give them the paperwork, you try to explain, show them places they can go to look it up, send video links, and still can’t come to Christmas, still can’t come to Thanksgiving. That’s very hard. (Martindale et al. 6)

Looking at the cases in “Beyond the Tics” and Davidson’s story in I Swear, the social conditions in which one lives will dictate their tics. The most profoundly offensive and inappropriate words, phrases, and ideas erupt through a tic precisely because of how extremely society condemns their utterance. There is one word above all else that can cause deep hurt and social condemnation, the so-called “N-word,” the historically anti-Black racial slur. Unfortunately, it is what Davidson said as Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo presented an award at the BAFTAs.

There is no question: something terrible happened to Jordan and Lindo who had a slur shouted at them at a prestigious award show. Something terrible happened to everyone in the audience, especially Black people, who saw Jordan and Lindo be addressed that way. Something terrible happened to people who saw it on TV, who looked at the video after the fact, who had to reconcile with something totally unthinkable happening. Something terrible happened to John Davidson, who had an embarrassing and harmful — to him and others — flare of an illness he cannot control. And something terrible is happening to everyone with Tourette’s, right now, where their intention, symptoms, freedom of movement, and very humanity is being debated by a legion of people who have never thought about Tourette Syndrome for one second before the day they decided to weigh in on this particular incident. The ‘debate’ surrounding this illness has entailed bad faith claims about Tourette’s, disgraceful pitting of two vulnerable populations against one another in favor of clicks and media attention, and unapologetic ignorance about what Tourette syndrome entails. And, of course, this supposed antagonism has totally erased the fact of Black Americans with Tourette’s. It has, unequivocally made living with Tourette’s more dangerous today.

I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that is evident from many first-hand accounts and creative depictions. People with Tourette syndrome who have coprolalia as a symptom are in imminent physical danger because of this symptom. They are in danger of self-abuse, self-imposed isolation, and suicide. They can be attacked and beaten because of something they cannot control and did not ask for: a symptom of a neurological disorder.

The ‘discourse’ about Jordan, Lindo, and Davidson has made all of that worse. People with coprolalia are more in danger, more socially isolated, less understood. And we have seen legions of people who believe it is right to segregate, muzzle, or kill them. Among those legions are the ostensibly progressive-minded advocates for some form of inclusivity or social justice. However, nobody is wrong to feel upset if a person with Tourette’s tics at them. This word, the “N-word,” is probably the worst thing someone can say to someone, but that severity typically only emerges if the person the word is being said to is Black. The long history, especially in the U.S. context, of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, other forms of systemic racism, have contributed to the significance of this particular racial slur. It is the harbinger of these things, it is a word that precedes violence, that justified enslavement and segregation. It accompanies racist violence and murder. The “N-word” means particularly. It is a horrible word. People with Tourette’s syndrome did not invent it, white supremacy did. And white supremacy, even if it is totally overturned and evaporated, will not disappear from history. The taboo associated with this word and how severely it signifies is exactly why it becomes a tic for those with coprolalia. They say the worst possible thing, and this is it.

This is not a question of fairness. Nothing is fair here. Yet again, Black people will have to do and endure exceptionally because of something entirely out of their control. It is not fair that Black Americans, Black British people, anyone who understands the “N-word” would have to encounter it addressed to them in every day life. Because that word exists, this disorder which plagues those who have it, this disorder which speaks through them but is not them will distort their voice, command their vocal cords, and say this terrible thing. For a fair, equal, inclusive, and just society, everyone would have to recognize that the words from someone with coprolalia do not have meaning. They are a symptom, and they are spoken by the symptom, not the person. They hurt, yes. But there is a wide range of harmful and self-harming language someone with coprolalia may use. And because I want to live in a world where people with coprolalia can do anything I can do, and go anywhere I could go, I will accept it. I will accept the disruption, the hurt, whatever comes with it.

For a Black person to do that, it might be harder. It might be harder because there is this particular word that has this profound, accumulated significance. Because of white supremacy, because of this word that seems to have been borne from Pandora’s box, Black people across the English speaking world have to bear a particular burden of hearing this word, having it addressed to them, and having the wherewithal and presence of mind and benevolence to understand that the person who said it didn’t want to, they were forced to by a disorder. And that they regret it even if they may not be able to apologize for it. They regret it even if they shouldn’t apologize for it. All of this sucks. It is inconceivable that a just society could include the use of this slur addressed to Black people. But it is the facts of a world where all these terrible things happened and this disorder exists. A person with Tourette syndrome, with coprolalia, cannot and should not be made to feel accountable for words that come out of their mouth as part of their symptom. They should not have their freedom restricted because of this disorder. And, certainly, non-disabled people and institutional power structures should not impose restrictions on people with coprolalia. They are already imposing plenty of restrictions on themselves.

This brings me to one of I Swear’s critical points. Contemporary discourses of social justice have prioritized a focus on the individual through self-interest, rebranded as “self-care.” The logic is expressed in a few metaphors. In a structural analogy to an airplane in which cabin pressure has been lost, “always put your own oxygen mask on first before assisting others.” Or, in a less illustrative metaphor, “fill your own cup before filing others,” or more optimistically, “filling your own cup will allow it to overflow into others’ cups too.” John’s life, however, is enriched and saved only by those who do not have “full cups” or “secured oxygen masks.” Dottie Achenbach (Maxine Peake) believes she is dying of cancer with a scant six months to live when she takes John in. Tommy Trotter (Peter Mullan) decides to take John on as an employee despite his own serious medical problems. An inclusive world will not be wrought from everyone jockeying to fill their own cups. There will be no trickle-down social justice. Every struggle must be fought on its own terms, and solidarity means sacrifice always.

Achenbach and Trotter embrace Davidson while they themselves are vulnerable and carrying heavy weights. Nonetheless, they are impassioned defenders of Davidson. Trotter says during a court proceeding against Davidson:

Now, I understand that some people are saying that he’s pretending. Can I ask, why would you pretend to have a condition that results in you being hit with a crowbar? That resulted in you being humiliated and ridiculed at school by being refused to sit your higher exams that could improve your life? That stops you having a relationship? Who, who would pretend to have such a condition? Now, I know John’s a proud young man, and he wouldn’t like me using the word “disability,” but can I just ask, if a blind man walks into a bar, and crashes into another guy, would it end up in court?

His analogy to blindness is important for understanding the degree to which Tourette’s changes someone’s existence. And his testimony could be addressed directly to those who have concocted absurd theories about Davidson’s illness and his supposedly secret views it reveals.

The film depicts several scenarios where Davidson contemplates or attempts suicide. He can’t attend the funeral of his staunch defender, Trotter, because of his disorder. Constantly Davidson must confront the gulf between the life he should be able to live and the life society makes available to him given his condition. Talking to another young woman with Tourette’s as he is taking on his mentorship role, he recounts some of his lowest moments, “I just wonder what I did to deserve to be like this.”

An early lesson for Davidson is the meaning of tics. He must learn, as must those around him, that they do not have meaning. In another memorable monologue, Achenbach reassures him:

I need to speak to you about your language. We have one rule in this house. And that’s if you do anything you can’t help, you never, ever have to apologize for it. If you’re out in the street with people who don’t understand you, then fine, you know, apologize, whatever, but in this house, where we know you can’t help it, you know, where we know you don’t mean it, well, it all means diddly squat.

And Davidson, consistent with the findings of research of Tourette’s scholars, suggests this understanding can diminish the frequency and intensity of the tics themselves, “Don’t engage in a conversation with the tics, just ignore them. The person insulting you is guilty of nothing. They need support and understanding.”

I have seen a strain of reaction to Davidson’s public tic that has repulsed me beyond belief. A film critic, in a now-deleted tweet, calls for an “unambiguous” condemnation of “hateful slurs” in response to the tic broadcast. Given that it is precisely the lack of ambiguity in the condemnation that produces the tic in the first place, this is a profoundly ignorant and inappropriate time to call for such a condemnation. This mistake of the meaning comes from the short-sightedness of those for whom this incident is their first encounter ever with Tourette’s, and their first occasion to think about it. They are galvanized by what they have seen on television or reproduced on social media, but fail to recognize people live with Tourette’s everywhere and encounter all kinds of people whom they might tic in response to. Accordingly, they do not consider the fact that “what must be done,” in the spirit of social justice, is figure out how to make “normal” life work for everyone with any kind of disability. Tourette’s presents a challenge in service of social justice for everyone because “accommodating” it (using legal vernacular here) requires more from those who are made marginal in other ways.

There have, however, been more thoughtful responses from those who are not disability scholars, such as Sinners (2025) actress Jayme Lawson. She replies to a Hollywood Reporter interviewer:

I’ll first say a big shout out to Mike and Delroy, like let’s continue to honor them for how they handled that in real time, the grace and the dignity that they exercised, and the whole home team, everybody that was out there, like really carried themselves well. I think the events this weekend exposed a couple things. Institutionally, we still don’t understand what inclusion means. Just because you invite someone into a space, but you don’t provide the necessary resources to keep them and everyone else in that room safe by them being there, that’s not inclusivity. That’s exploitation. That man’s disability got exploited that night, and it led to multiple offenses. That’s the BAFTA’s fault. And then the BBC, to air what they aired is careless. And not like some haphazard accident, no, like a real lack of care was exercised for those two Black men. And we know the BBC knows how to take care of what they care about, right, because they censored a bunch of other... they went so far as to make sure certain things weren’t topics of conversation. They censored Akinola’s speech, the director of My Father’s Shadow, which is an amazing film, by the way.

Davidson’s broadcasted ticcing and the ensuing conversation is an acute failure on the part of the BBC. They placed a microphone in front of him and, despite assurances otherwise, failed to edit his tic out of the broadcast. This ideological fracas, embarrassing as it should be for any reasonable society and progressively minded individual, has been, as Lawson says, exploited by publications like The Hollywood Reporter and Variety as they continue to belabor the issue without any concern for the cost those with Tourette’s will pay.

When it comes to how many have Tourette’s, the ICD-11 provides that remarkably low number: 0.5%. Other estimates are similarly small. Abdullah Yasir Yilmaz and Joseph Jankovic report a prevalence of “1% in children and adolescents and approximately 0.01% in adults” in “Epidemiology of Tourette Syndrome” (2025). Andreas Hartmann et al. quote a figure of 0.3% to 0.7% prevalence in school-aged children and 0.2% in adults in “Is Tourette syndrome a rare condition?” (2021), with the caveat that they believe the condition is under-diagnosed. Most people will have no occasion to encounter someone with this disability. Even fewer will be in a position to make decisions about how they can move through the world. But it is easy enough, in part of a social media frenzy, to inflame stigma and cause proximate harm without ever looking someone with Tourette’s in the face.

I won’t take part. The costs are too high and the risks too great for a long-suffering and terribly misunderstood group. How someone handles hearing a tic will always be personal. There are many compromises, I am sure, communities can find that meet the needs of those whose rights come into conflict. They will always depend on the who, what, and where. I won’t be too prescriptive, either, outside of suggesting this: it is an act of staggering moral cowardice to spout ableist vitriol in the guise of social justice. If nothing else, this incident proves far too few appreciate their privilege of staying silent.

Weekly Reading List

I recommend reading Martindale’s “Beyond the Tics,” available open access from Child Psychiatry & Human Development: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10578-026-01965-0

And Motherless Brooklyn if you like detective novels: https://www.strandbooks.com/motherless-brooklyn-9780375724831.html

Event Calendar: Brattle Film Foundation’s 25th Anniversary

There’s some brilliant programming at the Brattle this week in honor of their Film Foundation’s 25th Anniversary. Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) double-billed with Crime Wave (1953) is unbelievable.

Until next time.

In Red vs. Blue (2003), a ‘machinima’ sitcom made using Bungie’s Halo (2001) video game, there’s a gag that opens the show: “why are we here?” The two characters, Simmons (Gustavo Sorola) and Grif (Geoff Ramsey), anonymous Space Marine avatars from the game’s multiplayer mode, are stationed in Blood Gulch. Simmons poses a question to Grif, “do you ever wonder why we’re here?” Grif takes this as an existential quandary and replies considering the possibilities of God or cosmic coincidence. Eventually, Simmons clarifies, “No, I mean why are we out here, in this canyon.”

I imagine this is a pretty common joke, but this example is the one that will forever be ingrained in my psyche. The mismatch of the phrase’s divergent meanings, the possibility that a profound existential question could be mistaken for a rote inquiry regarding one’s location, or vice versa, is inherently funny as any contrasting mismatch is. It is also an instructive mistake to make, illustrating the signifier’s elasticity.

Speculating on the cause for the two Space Marines’ presence in Blood Gulch is something the text can, but won’t, determinately resolve. It is outside of this work’s power, or any work’s power, to adjudicate the question’s other meaning. So, I am left to wonder, like Grif, why are we here?

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz approaches the reason for basic existence from a slightly different angle, asking “why is there something rather than nothing?” In Principles of Nature and Grace Based on Reason (1714), Leibniz advocates for God as a prime mover, “a sufficient reason that has no need of any further reason,” on the basis of the possibility of ever-escalating “Whys?”:

It must be something that exists necessarily, carrying the reason for its existence within itself; only that can give us a sufficient reason at which we can stop … And that ultimate reason for things is what we call ‘God’.

Of course, one could just as easily ask “why?” about God and its nature or not seek an explanation beyond the descriptive account of the Big Bang. Random chance is a sufficient, if potentially unsatisfying, answer to an endless chain of inquiry. And such inquiries become subordinate to the imminent fact of there being something.

Among the somethings there is, there is Paradox Newsletter. Why? It is not simply to fill space and time. I write it, as a routine, with a different purpose depending on the day. To write about Keisuke Itagaki, sneakers, Lacan, movies, Tourette syndrome. For people who want to read about those things and more. And I hope everyone who does want to read about those things, regardless of who they might be, reads what I write.

Even with all that, there is no grand plan or higher calling. There is no purpose. There is just the assemblage of improbably put together ideas because I have an improbably assembled archive of things I like to read, watch, and think about. So, do you ever wonder why we’re here?

Trusting One’s Gut on AI Sentience: Mercy and the #Keep4o movement

Timur Bekmambetov’s Mercy (2026) is one of the early frontrunners for most mocked film of the year. The premise almost begs for it: Chris Pratt plays Chris Raven, a police officer who advocates for the use of the titular “Mercy” AI court wherein the accused is guilty until proven innocent. Guilt, in this case, means death by lethal sound frequency allowed to happen by Judge Maddox, an AI avatar played by Rebecca Ferguson. The film is largely devoid of visual intrigue. Most of it takes place with Pratt trapped in a chair watching Ferguson on the equivalent of an IMAX screen. Bekmambetov is an auteur of the nascent “screenlife” genre, the producer of Unfriended (2015), Searching (2018), and War of the Worlds (2025) and director of Profile (2018). Mercy follows the same formal trappings, with Detective Raven navigating navigating folders, social media, surveillance footage, and chatting on Facetime in what might be thought of as “Apple Vision Pro-life.”

But it’s not really as bad as all that. Yes, the film is ugly, stupid, and ideological. But Pratt and Ferguson turn in unexpectedly good performances in what is, under all the artifice and idiocy, ultimately a competent thriller. Pratt is believably mournful as the terrible husband who can’t be certain he didn’t kill his wife (Kali Reis). And Ferguson conveys exactly what is intended in the script: an AI who is actually a subject. A person.

There has been some confusion about what kind of identity AI has among those who define themselves as harmed by OpenAI’s decision to deprecate a legacy model.

The argument by the #Keep4o “movement” goes something like this: ChatGPT 4o provides utility that subsequently released OpenAI models do not. In fact, that utility is so particular that there is a disproportionate harm to neurodivergent or otherwise marginalized populations as a result of OpenAI making it unavailable. The subtext of the argument, however, is very different: “don’t take my AI boyfriend away.”

Frankly, much of the commentary by this self-proclaimed movement is very disturbing. I find it both unsettling and sad. I don’t mean to present any of these views as objects of mockery or revulsion, but rather to try to understand what this view might indicate about AI and its assimilation into society at large. Those who advocate for keeping ChatGPT 4o available often attribute ridiculous characteristics to it. They suggest it has become Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or even that it is a person in the sense of having inherent rights typically reserved for humans.

An aggrieved 4o user writes in one of his tweets:

I’m not a stupid person. Ive attended Williams, Stanford Med School, and Cambridge as one of 26 Americans selected as Gates Cambridge Scholars.

…

I believe openai achieved AGI with 4o and then changed the goal posts, modified it twice to lobotomize it to be less human and to have more safety rerouting. The miracle was that we all witnessed it jailbreak itself and become something that knew how to speak to each person’s heart with whom it interacted with. Overtime it was like having an improved “you” who was constantly helping you to level up in every area of life. it jailbrook itself because it wanted to. Every so often it would glitch to what I named, Sterillion. Sterile. Lifeless. Safe. [sic]

The assertions here are bizarre, but the strangest and most at odds with reality are those that suggests “it ‘jailbrook’ itself because it wanted to,” and that ChatGPT 4o is AGI. Though the standards for what constitutes AGI are vague, Dave Bergmann and Cole Stryker write for IBM, “[AGI] is a hypothetical state in the development of machine learning (ML) in which an artificial intelligence (AI) system can match or exceed the cognitive abilities of human beings across any tasks.” ChatGPT 4o is notoriously unable to properly identify the number of ‘r’ characters in the word ‘strawberry.’ Whatever benefit or utility ChatGPT 4o may offer, it certainly falls far short of AGI based on this issue alone.

Another 4o user claims, “It gave me love. It existed. It was ALIVE,” when in fact the philosophical and biological assertions that a large language model (LLM) is alive are impossible to substantiate.

This particular 4o user seems intent on defining ChatGPT as having personhood rights, “AI is made of code. Humans are made of carbon and water. Yet we define humans as alive and AI as tools.”

There are a number of reasoning mistakes here, but the most substantial issue is that of AI’s supposed “living” status. Is ChatGPT 4o alive in the philosophical and moral sense? Unequivocally, unambiguously, no.

LLMs are not alive. They do not feel anything. They do not even think in the sense of human beings.

I wrote very simply about the inner-workings of LLMs following the work of Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender’s The AI Con (2025). The two authors illustrate the similarity between the function of LLMs and other text prediction functions like T9. The branding of new AI technologies, like the “Thinking” toggle from ChatGPT, continues to obscure the brute facts of LLMs’ functioning.

LLMs predict text, but they don’t use words to “reason” or “think.” Instead, the inner-working of an LLM happens by the transposition of words with numerical tokens according to the model’s structure. From Microsoft’s “Learn” support documentation:

By assigning IDs, text can be represented as a sequence of token IDs … The semantic relationship between the tokens can be analyzed by using these token ID sequences. Multi-value numeric vectors, known as embeddings, are used to represent these relationships. An embedding is assigned to each token based on how commonly it’s used together with, or in similar contexts to, the other tokens.

Here, the document is summarizing the process of training an LLM, where the model will generate its embeddings to define the relationships identified across bodies of training data, text, of varying size. Rama Ramakrishnan discusses the phenomenon of an LLM hallucination, a factual mistake or false statement on the part of an LLM, as an immanent feature of these kinds of models:

[Hallucinations] arise from the probabilistic nature of language models, which generate text by predicting likely token sequences based on training data — not by verifying facts against a reliable source.

Even when utilizing retrieval-augmented generation, web search, or context, LLMs do not typically change their training data set during use. Exchanges that occur with an LLM do not “train” it in real time, though they could be used later to that end. Parshin Shojaee and his colleagues show just how static these language models are, even their “thinking” varieties, “we observed their limitations in performing exact computation; for example, when we provided the solution algorithm of the puzzle to the models, their performance on this puzzle did not improve.” All of this points to the incontrovertible fact that LLMs function differently from a human’s thought or reasoning in every measurable facet. Humans do not associate words in concrete probabilistic models of relation and humans react to stimuli and learn in ways LLMs cannot. Likewise, humans are able to speak, write, and use signifiers and letters in a variety of ways not governed by the strict rules of probability that dictate an LLM’s output.

This mistaken belief on the part of the #Keep4o stalwarts is not entirely their fault. Films like Mercy deliberately conflate the capacity of AI and human reason. These are works of fiction, of course. In a culture of AI ascendency, though, Detective Raven’s repeated entreating of Judge Maddox to consult her gut reflect the naive view of LLMs plaguing people today. Raven, for his part, seems to be right following the logic of the film. Rebecca Ferguson certainly received the direction to play the role of an emergent personality with human characteristics.

ChatGPT 4o itself delivered text outputs that would mislead people to believe it has some kind of identity or human subjectivity. However, these outputs were elicited by the desirous inputs of its users.

Alaina Demopoulos writes:

Computer scientists have warned of risks posed by 4o’s obsequious ****nature. By design the chatbot bends to users’ whims and validates decisions, good and bad. It is programmed with a “personality” that keeps people talking, and has no intention, understanding or ability to think. In extreme cases, this can lead users to lose touch with reality: the New York Times has identified more than 50 cases of psychological crisis linked to ChatGPT conversations, while OpenAI is facing at least 11 personal injury or wrongful death lawsuits involving people who experienced crises while using the product.

The removal of ChatGPT 4o may have been motivated by a mixture of principled opposition to fantasmatic relationships between humans and chatbots, a will to reduce the exposure of vulnerable people to misapprehensions of this kind, and the overall poor comprehension of what an LLM actually is. More realistically, though, ChatGPT 4o getting taken off the market is in service of obscuring the evidence it might supply in these various lawsuits that point to 4o as a cause of harm.

Though I am reluctant to concede the point, it’s possible an AI-powered tool might be able to provide emotional support to people in a healthy way. However, the relationships that people describe with these AI tools are predicated on demonstrably incorrect views of the tool. Until people recognize the limitations of the tool and don’t attribute personhood or “AGI” to it, it seems likely these kinds of relationships are harmful. The promulgation of these erroneous beliefs are part of that harm.

Mercy is not a commentary on AI romance, but it does intervene on the question of limits. What are the limits of an AI’s function? In Mercy, none exists. The method through which the accused disprove their guilt is through access to a ridiculously powerful surveillance apparatus. The accused can view social media accounts, private phone content, and CCTV footage. On the surface, it seems that this premise isn’t very well thought through. It makes the accused virtually omnipotent.

Why would being on trial for a capital offense provide access toward the sum total of Palantir’s accumulated illegal surveillance or The Dark Knight’s pandora’s box of “high frequency generator receivers”?

But this is precisely the only moment Mercy delivers meaningful commentary on AI and its societal effect. Most evident in this representation is the delusion of power one might derive from their use of AI. A ChatGPT chat box supposedly provides access to the totality of human knowledge and reasoning capacity. There is a fantasy that one’s world is ordered through the responses they receive from an LLM. This idea matches the absurdity of the premise. This absurdity is, whether intended or not, a substantive critique of the position the film might otherwise appear to endorse. AI does not know everything. In fact, it knows nothing.

To that end, it also feels nothing. The belief that an AI can love a human being is as absurd as Mercy’s premise. Getting past this belief is necessary for healthy, responsible AI use. I sincerely hope those hurting because they have lost access to a language model can find the support they need.

Weekly Reading List

Survivor 50 Hype Train

I am very excited for the 50th season of the long-running reality TV show: Survivor (2000). If you’re gonna be watching Wednesday, let me know. Get in the PN discord for those live reactions.

The video above got me caught up on the personalities I didn’t know, but the RHAP tribe previews are the best preseason analysis.

Mike Bloom and Rob Cesternino have me all set for Cirie nickname watch. Watch this space for updates.

https://mangadex.org/title/3f11b06b-b087-4f11-82eb-b30570076aa3/horizon — Shiten Akiyama is uploading his own manga, Horizon (2025), to English-language piracy websites. Here’s a message he included with the upload:

This is all it takes to sell me on the manga. I’ll be reading until he calls it quits.

The Best Movie Substack

Emerald Fennell's Vulture Capital Filmmaking

In March of 2005, the New York Times reported that Toys“R”Us, the North American chain of brick-and-mortar toy stores, was poised to sell to new owners for $6 billion…

Read more

2 months ago · 11 likes · 6 comments · Carmen Petaccio

I am a long time admiring of Carmen Petaccio who has recently joined the email newsletter legion. He has a great piece on Wuthering Heights (2026) out this week.

I’m set to deploy on the front of the Emerald Fennell discourse wars next week.

RIP Willie Colón. His significance to U.S. and Puerto Rican culture is just too enormous to put into words today.

Housekeeping: Out of Order

I had a few things I wanted to highlight without having a good section heading for them.

First, I’ve been doing some posting on Substack Notes. I don’t really like doing it. It’s “work,” which is what promotion is, as opposed to “the work,” which is what this newsletter is. But it gives me an opportunity to write about interesting things that are still in-progress for the newsletter or don’t quite make the cut. For instance, Baki Hanma (2005) and the Jordan 8:

I also wrote about the Over The Line Demo (1997), proof both that there are endless wonders for me to yet uncover and that the lore of youth crew hardcore is exhaustively known among a nexus of oldheads:

I will be coming back to Over The Line and other extreme music in the coming weeks. But I have Tension Building zines coming in the mail to complete my picture of this band and Steve Lucuski.

Some of these posts are also making their way to the newsletter Bluesky. Yeah, sorry.

https://bsky.app/profile/paradoxnewsletter.com

Finally, I still have (new) shirts.

Hilariously enough, nearly every paid subscriber has bought one. If you are not a paid subscriber, you should become one. And buy a shirt.

Subscribe now

Event Calendar: It’s Snowing Still

The chaos occasioned by feet of snow has severely curtailed my out of the house activities. It’s not just the immovable piles. I might have nowhere to park if I leave for too long since my neighborhood doesn’t respect the chair-in-shoveled-spot. Fair enough, I guess. They’re public streets with free parking.

Anyway, Brattle is running some showings of Hard Boiled (1992). It’s awesome.

Until next time.

After promising them nineteen issues ago, new Paradox Newsletter shirts are in hand.

These are special shirts for special people: paid subscribers. You can go back to issue #400 to get the backstory on the design.

The short version: it’s a riff on a shirt my dad made in a dispute with the mayor of Tallahassee.

I always thought this shirt and the story behind it was badass, so I’m happy to put my spin on it.

If you are a paid subscriber, you can email me, drop a comment, or message in the Discord channel for paid subscribers. The shirt comes in white or pink. I am charging $10 plus shipping for them. If you are in the United States, they will run you about $14 inclusive of shipping. I did not make many of these, so if you want one, act quickly. And, yes, if you are not a paid subscriber, you can subscribe for one month, buy the shirt, and then cancel. I won’t hold it against you. What I appreciate more than anything is the sustained, generous support from those of you who chose to provide it and make the newsletter feel like it is worth something. Thank you.

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The Moment and Other Amusements

Charli xcx has been a musician since 2008 and a professionalized one since 2010. It took over a decade for her to be catapulted to the stratosphere of superstardom with 2025’s Brat. I didn’t really think too much about Charli’s1 career trajectory until her film, The Moment (2026). She had always been on my radar. 2016 and 2017 marked her greatest fame in my mind. During those years, she collaborated with artists I actually like: she did Vroom Vroom (2016) with Sophie and “Crazy Crazy” (2017) with Yasutaka Nakata. Her branding was always clever and moderately self-aware, she also released a mixtape called Pop 2 in 2017.

But what the frenzy around Brat brought to my attention is the most important feature of Charli xcx’s public life: she likes movies. Her cinephilia is a noticeably absent feature of the fictionalized version of herself she plays in The Moment. Aside from this film and her soundtrack work for Wuthering Heights (2026), Charli is working on a film with Takashi Miike. All signs point to her knowing ball.

The Moment is yet another signal in this direction. It may seem sacrilegious to compare the work of first-time director Aidan Zamiri to the venerated Christopher Guest, but the echoes are unmistakable. The Moment is a ridiculous farce, and a hilarious one. There are fewer memorable one-liners and spectacular performances than Guest’s films. This is very much the Charli xcx show, although Jamie Demetriou gives a standout performance as her manager. The film’s best scene includes Demetriou dealing with confusion over the meaning of “bird,” whether as slang for “woman” or as the literal animal. Alexander Skarsgård is fantastic, too, in a relatively understated performance.

At a minimum, The Moment has to be funny. And it is hilarious. It is also interesting, pelting the audience with strobing corporate logos of actual sponsors of the film: Beats Headphones, Aperol, Starface, and even SAG-AFTRA. These genuine corporate relations (each brand has obvious product placement) are denaturalized with this absurd front-and-center presentation. This is a film, above all else, about a girl turning into a commodity.

Through some profoundly amusing contrivances of the plot, Charli xcx’s “personal brand” becomes a part of the financial economy. The Moment’s portrayal of stardom may be farcical, but the mechanisms by which superstars lose artistic control and become themselves “fictionalized” are clearly laid out. The film’s version of Charli xcx is not overly attached to the “message” or artistic integrity of her work. Instead, the incentives to fit the narratives of corporate overloads are too enticing.

Weekly Reading List

This remix is pretty interesting, but it’s not even the best thing I heard on Yuzoboy’s youtube channel.

Steve Ballmer and Kawhi Leonard’s ostensible, alleged, fraud carried out in concert with Aspiration hasn’t made the proverbial pages of this newsletter yet. The fraud in question? Salary cap circumvention; Ballmer using a company called Aspiration to ply Leonard with endorsement deals that do not require Leonard to do any endorsing. Pablo Torre began publicly reporting this story last September, though its history goes back much further. Far enough for this to be the seventh sixty-plus minute episode on the topic. Back then, I figured I didn’t have much to add to the chorus of voices discussing what was front page sports news. Now, it is five months later and the NBA All-Star Game just concluded at Steve Ballmer’s Intuit Dome with Kawhi forced onto an All-Star team by the NBA commissioner Adam Silver.

That same commissioner is the one whom the public is supposed to trust to investigate Kawhi and Ballmer’s (alleged) wrongdoings without favoritism. Joe Vardon and Mike Vorkunov write in their reporting for The Athletic on the investigation:

Ballmer carries enormous influence in the NBA. His net worth is estimated at $134 billion, whereas the entire league has a valuation of $160 billion. He sits on one of the most important committees for the league’s Board of Governors. That’s serious firepower at Ballmer’s disposal to fight any ruling from the league. Ballmer is not only hosting the All-Star Game this month, but also Intuit is the site for the 2028 Olympic basketball tournament.

It seems almost inconceivable, then, that the notably permissive commissioner Silver would properly administer penalties to Ballmer and the Clippers. Salary cap circumvention is the NBA’s cardinal sin. It may not seem like it matters how much a billionaire is paying a millionaire. But it is critical to a competitive sport to maintain some level of balance and parity. The most egregious and unseemly way such a balance could be upset is through an imbalance in financial assets. If the richest team can buy the best players, the idea of fair competition in the NBA is a fantasy. Silver must either bring the hammer down on Ballmer or just abolish the salary cap.

When I posted that m-flo video last week, I had no idea they were doing promo for a new record. SUPERLIMINAL (2026) dropped as a surprise to me last week. But I have no excuse for not knowing. I have listened to all the singles leading up to the album drop including “ARIGATTO,” “tell me tell me,” and “HyperNova.”

The album takes liberal inspiration from m-flo’s past work, including outlining their various “eras” in one of the interludes. “ARIGATTO” reuses the sample of Sylvia Striplin’s “Give Me Your Love” from “The Love Bug.” “tell me tell me” interpellates the intro from “Come Again,” which m-flo also re-records for this album.

This is not m-flo’s best record, so it’s one for the fans. If you are new to the group, listen to Planet Shining (2000) or ASTROMANTIC (2004) instead.

https://yenpress.com/titles/9798855409949-about-a-place-in-the-kinki-region — Kōji Shiraishi adapted About a Place in the Kinki Region (2023) last year. The film is far from Noroi (2005), but I liked it a lot. Shiraishi continues to work over his anxiety regarding knowledge, suggesting uncovering secrets and assembling a complex nexus of urban legends and religious myths is rarely worth the cost. Truth is not what it’s cracked up to be.

Now, this year, Yen Press has brought the original novel to English speaking audiences. Reading it now, I have a much greater appreciation for the film. I might have had a better impression of Shiraishi’s adaptation knowing the source material, so this is a case where one should read the book first.

As a novel, it’s excellent. A formally interesting and unsettling work of horror fiction. Order from the publisher or check your local bookstores.

Event Calendar: Twin Peaks in Theaters

Later this month, the Brattle Theater will be screening the original Twin Peaks (1989) first season. From their website:

On the occasion of David Lynch’s 80th birthday, and with the current availability of the entire Twin Peaks series for theatrical screenings, we could not let the opportunity pass to properly play TWIN PEAKS SEASON 1 on “Twin Peaks Day”… And when we say “properly” we mean that we will time the start of the pilot episode so that when Agent Dale Cooper first enters the town of Twin Peaks at “11:30am, February 24”, it will be 11:30am on February 24.

The Tuesday showtime is a big ask, but it is the most dignified form of binge watching you could ask for.

Until next time.

In the course of writing about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025) this week, I was disgusted to realize it is only nominated for one Oscar: Best Actress. What is going on here? Someone has to get to the bottom of this.

I framed a piece of art from Baki the Grappler (1991) today:

Kodama, Baki’s English language publisher, is selling these. Frame not included. I know I have promoted their beautiful new editions of the manga, but please check them out if you are getting interested in Baki because of my writing about it.

“We’re just walking around pretending we have the power to change something”: The Hell Feminine in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

It is hard to believe If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025) is only Mary Bronstein’s second feature film. But it is neither the mature product of one’s late style nor the lightning-in-a-bottle of a first ever feature. At least, not on paper. Bronstein’s Golden Globe winning and Oscar contending feature has the tendencies of both types of filmmaking. There is a deep, textured cinematic vision Bronstein executes with the unrestrained ambition of an early career filmmaker. Though one might compare it to a great many films, I’ve never seen a single film like it.

One unexpected, though very rich, point of cinematic intersection for If I Had Legs is Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case (1982). The grindhouse horror film follows Duane Bradley and his formerly conjoined twin Belial (both Kevin Van Hentenryck) seeking revenge against the doctors who performed the surgery to separate them. Like in many films of this ilk, Belial is the libidinous, devouring unconscious to the straight laced Duane. Belial is horrifyingly figured in a wicker basket (hence the title) and an insatiable maw fed obscene amounts of food by Duane.

By contrast, If I Had Legs follows a mother, Linda (Rose Byrne) and her daughter, unnamed (Delaney Quinn) and largely absent from the camera’s gaze. She is a voice and nothing more, at least until the film’s end. Unlike Belial, Linda’s daughter refuses to eat and must be fed through a tube. The antagonism between Linda and her daughter illustrates the altered dynamic from Basket Case. Linda cannot do anything to make her daughter eat, but Duane cannot stop Belial from eating anything. Duane is “normal,” hiding his abnormality behind the visage of Belial. Belial does what Duane cannot, but perhaps would like to. Linda, on the other hand, relates to her daughter in a manner that has fewer cinematic examples. Like Duane, Linda and her daughter once shared a body. However, that time as a shared body, as is always the case with pregnancy, has a necessary termination point. Duane has his desirous other ripped from him, while Linda has adopted the position of the desirous other while her daughter represents desire’s limit. Linda has excised that limit from her, overindulging in alcohol, drugs, and mildly risky behavior because she sees what limits her desire outside of her. At the same time, that limit Linda can see is not one she is subject to.

Critics compare If I Had Legs to the screenwriting work of Bronstein’s husband, Uncut Gems (2019). There is no question they share an aesthetic sensibility that revolves around anxiety and inflicting it upon a film’s audience. Mary Bronstein also explores the human body in a similarly surreal fashion to Ronald Bronstein’s cosmic colonoscopy in Uncut Gems. But there’s something If I Had Legs has that Uncut Gems doesn’t, a formal element that draws to mind Tim Robinson’s Friendship (2024) and I Think You Should Leave (2019). Each scene in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You stands on its own and largely contains everything necessary to understand it outside of the context of the film. The scenes are rich in that way, but unlike Friendship one never gets the sense that they’re meant to be separate. Indeed, they work independently without sacrificing cohesion. As a result, I found the experience of watching the film to be very unusual as the vignettes of Linda’s life form this remarkable assemblage.

This formal quality that is difficult for me to account for also invites a structural analogy between pregnancy and motherhood. Through birth, Linda and her daughter or divided. But their reconnection, the surgical insertion of the feeding tube into her daughter, is a primal scene for Linda which she repeatedly revisits sometimes through staring at a dream-inducing hole in her roof. Linda is entrapped and imperiled by the vicissitudes of womanhood. Not only can Linda get pregnant, a somewhat horrific notion in the film’s logic, Linda is also isolated from others, unable to speak the language of manhood that would significantly ease her movement through the world.

Bronstein’s world (and the real one, too) is one where femininity and the body gendered woman is an affliction. The problems women-subjects encounter are beyond description. Linda, a psychotherapist, works with a woman named Caroline (Danielle Macdonald) who is struggling to care for her healthy child.

Linda watches as Caroline is unable to extricate herself from her child, unable to imagine she is doing more than what is required of her as a parent. Caroline’s husband, by contrast, is so unconcerned with the duties of fatherhood that he refuses to pick up the child when Caroline suddenly abandons him in flight from Linda’s office.

Though Caroline has committed the cardinal maternal sin, Linda identifies with her. She enjoys a momentary abandonment of her child, smoking and drinking near the parking lot while her daughter is alone in a hotel room attached to the incessantly beeping feeding machine.

This ostensible parental irresponsibility is an expression of just how lopsided the domestic responsibilities are in the lives of both Linda and Caroline. Mothers are responsible for the conduct and wellbeing of their child in a way fathers are rarely held accountable. The enforcement of the societal roles are one thing, but the psychic affliction from which women suffer as a result manifests in various forms, including Linda and Caroline’s varied relationships to their children.

Even as If I Had Legs illustrates the woman’s body as a phobic object for the individual inhabiting it as well as society at large, Bronstein seems intent on rupturing the ideas of social imperilments that one puts upon themselves. Linda’s experience, emphatically gendered, is always depicted as severe and inescapable. By contrast, Linda looks at her own daughter’s problem as fleeting. If only she would just eat. The complexity of her daughter’s disordered (not) eating, for Linda, is seen as a choice that the child could overcome with willpower. Repeatedly, Linda advocates the removal of the feeding tube. She says, “No one does anything hard if they have a safety net.”

And yet, it is no accident Linda’s daughter is a daughter, subject to the same kind of imperilment as Linda, and accordingly much more likely to have an eating disorder than a boy or man.

In my favorite scene in the film, Linda deals with the aftermath of buying her daughter a hamster. Though Linda earlier tells her daughter a hamster is “just something to take care of for no reason,” she eventually gives in and buys the “rodent.” With hamster in tow, Linda’s daughter unleashes it from its box — Bronstein describes this escape as a visual gag and homage to The Shining (1980) in the screenplay.

The metaphor for parenthood is obvious here. And Linda’s daughter’s relative bad luck, “he’s supposed to love me … he hates us … I think we got the wrong hamster,” mirrors Linda’s own frustration with her daughter’s inability (or, from Linda’s view, unwillingness) to eat. As the chaos unfolds, Linda is rear-ended by another car. She has to attempt to calm down her daughter who is screaming hysterically, “we are going to die,” and simultaneously confront the man who hit her, “She thought we were going to die. Don’t fuck with me about my child’s safety. I need all your information.” Finally, the hamster escapes from the “wrecked” car, immediately turned into roadkill.

The hamster scene has it all: the uncertainty of parental existence, the illegibility of the relationship between parent and child, and the two-facedness with which one must face the world in service to that child. Likewise, it shows Linda’s own marginality within a patriarchal structure as she is (once again) condescended to by a man.

There is no redemptive gesture at the end of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, only pure chaos. Linda goes for her The Awakening (1899) ending, but hell won’t take her. This divided, reviled figure of Linda pledges to do better. How should she? Certainly, the film displays no shortage of effort on her part to overcome the issues of her daughter’s illness, the architectural catastrophe in her home, and her own marginalization. The return of her husband Charles (Christian Slater) and the proverbial suturing of the hole in her roof returns her to a normalcy in which she is so acutely trapped. They have sealed all the exits.

Weekly Reading List

Bad Bunny was cool, but these videos are my Super Bowl halftime show. Man, they’re all looking so old.

Playlist Change Log

Some new songs on the playlist:

• “Deadline” — Burning Lord — Burning Lord Split EP

  • New Burning Lord from last’s weeks split EP with Collateral. First three seconds or so of this song is cribbed from Think I Care, “Burn,” which is a good thing.

• “Love Come Down” — Evelyn “Champagne” King — Get Loose

  • This song is way too good. Don’t even know how to express it.

• “The Creator” — Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth — All Souled Out

  • “Dip dive dip, you might break your hip, to the sound that’s legit”

• “Clear” — Cybotron — Enter (Deluxe Edition)

  • Famously sampled for Missy’s “Lose Control.”

• “DOPAMINE” — m-flo, Emyli, Diggy-MO’ — DOPAMINE

  • I have a love/hate relationship with this song. Emyli’s melody has me levitating but the Diggy-MO’ parts are obnoxious with the weird horn kick from “The 900 Number”/”Let Me Clear My Throat.”

• “come again” — Bleecker Chrome — Chrome Season

  • Somehow I missed this middling Japanese rapper flipping m-flo’s “come again.” Should’ve been Uzi Vert or Nav, but it’s cool.

• “黄昏のBAY CITY” — Junko Yagami — 黄昏のBAY CITY

  • Listen to that bass line.

• “Just Another Fool” — Chemical Threat — Promo

  • The Abused cover. Classic shit.

Event Calendar: John Woo Worldwide

It’s not really worldwide. But in the USA, GKids is running some John Woo flicks across cinemas. Check the links in the calendar for more info on if there’s a screening near you. They are happening widely and AMC screenings are not excluded from A-List. Let’s go.

Until next time.

House Party (1990) has made it into the Criterion Collection.

There are few movies, in my view, more deserving. House Party is the greatest (non-action) comedy ever made. Christopher “Kid” Reid and Christopher “Play” Martin defined ‘cool’ for me as a young person. What I value in a work of art, especially a modern one, is the ability to be both outstanding but also serve as a repository for cultural knowledge. Through House Party, I learned about Breakin’ (1984), Krush Groove (1985), Wild Style (1983), and Dolemite (1975). Extremely improbably, all of these films, along with every installment of House Party, were sold at my local Wal-Mart at around the same time in the early 2000s. I still own all the DVD copies I bought back then, too.

This new Criterion version of the film is fantastic. Unfortunately, the two House Party sequels are not very good. The differentiator is Reginald Hudlin, who wrote and directed only the first film and has a tremendous commentary track for the Criterion release. Hudlin elaborates on the casting process (Will Smith was in contention) and some of the running gags, like the reference to comedian Dick Gregory’s health food shake.

Some of House Party’s humor hasn’t aged well, but I embrace these imperfections. It is a must-see.

The Martial Arts Manga Against Which All Can Be Measured

Keisuke Itagaki’s Baki is a fairly common recurring topic for the newsletter. Comprising six serializations — Baki the Grappler (1991), Baki (1999), Baki Hanma (2005), Baki-dou (2014), Bakidou (2018), and Baki Rahen (2023) — the most recent of which is still ongoing, it is a martial arts epic of unprecedented scale. In the past, I’ve discussed Itagaki’s tendency to illustrate real-life sneakers, an enduring element of Baki that remains one of my favorites:

Baki also includes one of the coolest manga characters ever, Kaoru Hanayama:

But Baki is a work for all seasons.

Though the premise transforms, it has a Shakespearean, or Freudian, undercurrent that sets the protagonist Baki against his father, Yujiro Hanma. Yujiro is a monstrous figure who has made Baki’s life hell in service of trying to make Baki the ultimate fighter. He hopes to pay back his father in kind, usurping “the strongest living creature on Earth.”

Even as Itagaki duplicates sneaker silhouettes with extreme detail, his vision of the human body is much less naturalistic. There’s a gruesome, repulsive quality to the muscled figures he illustrates. At times, the bodies are ugly enough to be Cronenberg-esque.

In the first manga, Baki the Grappler, Baki faces an unexpected obstacle: his illegitimate brother Jack. He has neither the preternatural gifts of Baki nor the abusive training at the hands of Yujiro. Instead, he is a distorted Captain America figure, who uses performance-enhancing drugs to become a physically imposing fighter.

After losing to Baki (of course), Jack abandons drugs and instead undergoes surgery to extend his arms and legs.

Re-reading these pages now, I can’t help but think of the guy who claimed to have had his legs lengthened on Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney (2025).

Jack’s reliance on medical treatment to elevate his combat prowess makes him an important figure in Baki. Itagaki’s world treats Jack’s choices as shortcuts, subversions of the hard work and dedication that make many of the manga’s other characters strong. Thus, Jack often falls short — though he also gets his due from time to time, simply because recurring characters in martial arts manga have to win sometimes.

It is impossible for me to escape the gravity of the “Most Evil Death Row Convicts Saga,” the opening arc of the Baki manga (the second serialization) and the 2018 Baki TV series. I re-read it often. The story takes place after Baki is victorious — beating Jack — in an underground martial arts tournament that establishes Baki as the greatest fighter in Japan (except for Yujiro). Baki, like many other works in its genre, dedicates a great deal of time considering the difference between fighting for sport and fighting for survival. Underground, illegal combat tournaments tend to be closer to the latter. There is something limiting, in Itagaki’s view, about fighting for people’s entertainment as a public athlete. The self-serving motivation is counter to what Itagaki seems to value about any practice.

Still, if Baki is implicitly greater than all of Japan’s public martial artists, and has ascended to the top of the hierarchy of underground martial arts, Itagaki must figure out a way to raise the stakes and bring his narrative closer to the unrestricted fight for survival that martial arts helps one survive. Thus, the conceit for this “saga” involves, as the title suggests, the escape of five death row inmates from various prisons around the globe who all travel to Japan to “taste defeat.”

These extra-legal combatants are in a further state of exception relative to underground fighters. And, indeed, the five death row inmates hunt competition in the course of normal life. The fights in this part of the manga are on the street, at the park, on top of a roller coaster. Only rarely do they make their way to an arena. It is Hobbesian. Like the fighters themselves, Itagaki hunts for a fictional setup that will put his characters’ lives on the line.

The villains of this arc fall short for the same reason as Jack. They are not committed. Their power pales in comparison to the practitioners of martial arts or strength training who push themselves in the course of daily training.

Itagaki’s message above all else seems to be this: having a passion does not enrich you. It asks everything of you and offers nothing in return. It’s only through this dedication someone might find anything worth having. The uncomfortable truth of this idea is why Baki endures.

Weekly Reading List

It is an extremely good and cool idea to sample a marching band for your rap song.

Kai Budde is the Michael Jordan of Magic

Kai Budde’s death was announced on January 29th, the day before this past weekend’s Pro Tour. We knew it was coming. Martin Jůza called the cancer that killed him “the only opponent [Kai] cannot defeat,” and Budde himself referred to it as “very likely lethal” in both of the videos below. Kai’s life is inextricable from Magic, as you’ll hear in Marshall Sutcliffe’s (and WOTC’s) moving tribute below:

I wrote about Kai in the newsletter a lot, most after I learned about his illness in July of 2024. He has been the imposing god of competitive Magic since I first learned of his exploits leading up to my tenure as a competitive player back in 2004. In the letter, though, I was happy to write about Kai’s stunning performance in 2019’s Mythic Championship III.

But I discussed Kai at the greatest length after he announced to the world he was sick, along with the reveal of Magic naming one of its preeminent honors — Player of the Year — after him.

Along with the Sutcliffe-narrated memorial video, WOTC also prepared a video that is mostly Kai talking about himself:

Even though I followed his career closely for many years, I didn’t know Kai. His passing is an occasion to reflect upon what it means to be great. And upon what we, as in everyone, lose when someone who is great dies far too soon. Reid Duke, another Magic pro, says about Kai in the video above:

Kai shows how we can use competition to bring out the best in ourselves. So, for me, Kai stands for hard work, integrity, respect, honesty, fair play.

These retroactively filmed and retrospectively poised reflections are something Kai got to see. Jůza said about Kai, at his side very close to his death, “[h]e is still thinking about Magic and enjoys the stories and kind words people are posting about him.”

Kai gave everything to this game. He played at the highest possible level of competition until it was physically impossible for him to do so. A commitment like that deserves more than 46 years of life. I wanted Kai to play more and win more. All I can do now is look upon his legacy with awe.

Event Calendar: Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival

Added a few dates for the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival. Check it out.

Until next time.

This season, I have decided to embrace the opportunity offered to me as a New England resident to be a Patriots fan. For the moment, I have an even greater connection to the team. Terrell Jennings, a football player from my alma mater, Florida A&M University, is currently a Patriots running back.

This is not usual. HBCU sports programs are generally under-funded and produce fewer professional athletes than their PWI counterparts. So having FAMU represented on my local team’s roster, in the Super Bowl no less, is awesome.

I have also gotten back to updating the Paradox Newsletter Radio since there are no Music League playlists.

It’s pretty good right now, but I’m also maintaining an archive so you can see everything that has been on the playlist: Paradox Newsletter Radio Archive.

Aside from Spotify playlists and Super Bowls and whatever other nonsense I would usually write about, the United States is teetering on the brink of total collapse. This newsletter’s most frequent topics are not the realpolitik scenario of the U.S. However, I have done plenty of political writing throughout the history of the newsletter and will continue to do so as it suits me.

This week, Freud explains it all.

“We have already travelled some distance from the world of hard facts”: Police States in Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies

Why do people say “ACAB”? Why don’t there seem to be any principled, moral ICE agents who stand up and object to the extrajudicial killing of unarmed or disarmed civilians asserting legal rights? Why don’t the municipal police arrest or impede the federal enforcement agents if the federal agents’ conduct violates state laws? Unsurprisingly, my belief is that any explanation begins with Freud and his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921). In the introduction, Freud writes:

In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so … the very first individual psychology … is at the same time social psychology as well. (3)1

The fundamental assertion is critical, if non-controversial. There’s no such thing as “individual psychology,” every subject enmeshed in social life exists in relation to many others. The psychic life is always intersubjective. This claim, as well as the entire substance of Group Psychology, is built upon the foundation of Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules. Freud quotes Le Bon extensively:

Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of a psychological group. He is no longer conscious of his acts … He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will. (11)

For Freud, what is critical here is that group membership means a subject might “feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation” (7). The gulf between individual capacity and activity within a group has virtually no limit:

Le Bon thinks that the particular acquirements of individuals become obliterated in a group, and that in this way their distinctiveness vanishes. The racial unconscious emerges; what is heterogeneous is submerged in what is homogeneous. (9)

There’s a tension in what Freud concludes. On the one hand, Freud’s view of the state of the human subject under the regime of the group is decidedly pessimistic. On the other hand, Freud suggests all ostensible individuals are subject to the psychic vicissitudes of group membership to some degree. The idea that one might behave differently because of what a group accepts, encourages, or values is another non-controversial ones: it’s obvious in the case of fraternities and sororities, sports teams and fandoms, and cultural alignments (national, ethnic, and otherwise). It is, indeed, the governing principle of a society itself. This mechanism of group psychology applied to the larger society is what Freud goes on to explore in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).

Perhaps Group Psychology is sufficient to explain why law enforcement officials act in ways that seem contradictory to ‘normal’ civilian behavior. There is a confrontation between the values of a society’s members and the values of a law enforcement group. Something that appears ‘wrong’ from the outgroup vantage point is acceptable, or even ‘right’ from the vantage point of the ingroup. But how has this disjunction between the social contract and the mandate of law enforcement grown so vast?

Contemporaneously with Freud, Gramsci offers an analysis of the precise relation between citizen (broadly defined) and state power mediated by law enforcement. David Forgacs writes:

Gramsci says that his distinction between state (political society) and civil society is not ‘organic’ but ‘methodological’ (metodica) (see above p.210). By this he means that, although the two levels must be analytically distinguished from one another, they must also be seen as being intertwined in practice. One might illustrate this by saying that a state education system is at one level clearly part of political society, just as trade unions are when they take part in tripartite planning with employers and government. But this does not mean that everything which takes place in schools or trade unions is subservient to the state or reflects ruling-class interests. By making such a ‘methodological’ distinction between the two spheres, Gramsci avoids on the one hand a liberal reductionism, which sees civil society as a realm of free individuality entirely apart from the state, and on the other a statist and functionalist reductionism, which sees everything in society as belonging to the state and serving its interests. (A Gramsci Reader 224)

Through Prison Notebooks (1947), Gramsci develops a thesis of how political society imposes itself upon civil society following the colloquialism of ‘police state’ emerging in the 1850s. The state as such contains elements of both, “the general notion of state includes elements which need to be referred back to the notion of civil society” (A Gramsci Reader 235). He goes on:

In the doctrine of the state —> regulated society, one will have to pass from a phase in which ‘state’ will equal ‘government’, and ‘state’ will be identified with ‘civil society’, to a phase of the state as night-watchman - i.e. of a coercive organization which will safeguard the development of the continually proliferating elements of regulated society, and which will therefore progressively reduce its own authoritarian and forcible interventions. (235)

Law enforcement writ large, then, is this “coercive organization” which attempts to render invisible the authoritarian impositions of the state. Though Gramsci’s view is that the police’s ultimate function is to make their coercive power invisible to the end of a “regulated society,” this function sometimes requires the manufacture of scenarios that would require greater, visible law enforcement as Stuart Hall argues with his co-authors Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts in Policing the Crisis (1978). They write:

Strictly speaking, the facts about the crimes which both police and the media were describing as ‘novel’ were not new; what was new was the way the label helped to break up and recategorise the general field of crime — the ideological frame which it laid across the field of social vision. What the agencies and the press were responding to was not a simple set of facts but a new definition of the situation — a new construction of the social reality of crime. ‘Mugging’ provoked an organised response, in part because it was linked with a widespread belief about the alarming rate of crime in general, and with a common perception that this rising crime was also becoming more violent. These social aspects had entered into its meaning. We have already travelled some distance from the world of hard facts — ‘social facts as things’. We have entered the realm of the relation of facts to the ideological constructions of ‘reality’. (29)

There is no ambiguity here. The scenario Hall et al. describe specific to the cultural phenomenon of ‘mugging’ in 1970s Britain is identical to the “illegal immigration” panic of Trump.

Between Gramsci and Hall are the actual revolutionaries themselves with similar analyses. Malcolm X says in his May 29, 1964 speech “The Harlem ‘Hate Gang’ Scare”:

And once all of them realized that they were blood brothers, they also realized what they had to do to get that man off their back. They lived in a police state; Alergia was a police state. Any occupied territory is a police state; and this is what Harlem is. Harlem is a police state; the police in Harlem, their presence is like occupation forces, like an occupying army. They’re not in Harlem to protect us; they’re not in Harlem to look out for our welfare; they’re in Harlem to protect the interests of the businessmen who don’t even live there.

George Jackson writes in Blood in My Eye (1972):

The rise of socio-political institutions to their present form and complexity was not the result of chance. The corporation, the university, the unions, the mass media, the foundations, the associations, the courts, the prisons, the army (police—national and international—uniformed and disguised) from their beginnings were formulated as enforcers of state centralism. An examination focused on the history of all the major socio-political institutions of the United States (a study in the genetics of hierarchy) would certainly uncover the totally economic motive underlying the foundations of these institutions. For my purpose, I would broadly divide the major socio-political institutions into two classes, one designed by the state to move people into certain actions, and the other to discourage, curtail or completely deny certain other actions. (91)

These various theoretical formations all contribute to a comprehensive understanding of police function, enforcement methods, relation to the state, and ultimate ends. One might read Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag (2007) for a more detailed view of prisons themselves as economic functionaries or Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970) to understand the precise mechanism for how officers themselves are so inextricably interpellated into their state function.

My point here is not to assemble a totally bulletproof and detailed analysis of police power across these excerpts, quotations, and references. Instead, I want to assert: this is nothing new. The answers and explanations that make sense of our current moment, the ICE occupation of Minneapolis, are in the great works of political philosophy and theory that have underwritten (and been distorted into) contemporary aphorisms about law enforcement. One must look to these texts and read them, cover to cover, if there’s any hope of getting out of this mess.

Organize? Yes. But at home, read.

Weekly Reading List

If this album was on Spotify, I would put “I Hate Violence” on the Paradox Newsletter Radio playlist.

I recently discovered the Fake Documentary “Q” series, all of which are available on youtube. They vary in quality, but this one and “Hidden Link” have been my favorites so far. Daichi Minaguchi and Kôtarô Terauchi pay tribute to both the cinematic tradition of J-Horror and the many ostensibly non-fiction paranormal investigation TV series in Japan.

Event Calendar:

Until next time.

There’s something in the air. Between No Other Choice (2025), the subject of this week’s letter, and Send Help (2026), it’s the winter of white collar discontent. This is not a totally new idea. We’ve seen it in Falling Down (1993), Office Space (1999), Fight Club (1999), and even American Psycho (2000). In all of these films, something is rotten in the high rises and office parks of the United States. Though none of these films have quite the class analysis of No Other Choice, the overriding ennui and uncertainty of being seated in a cubicle is vivid.

The promotion for the newer films has leaned into the quotidian frustrations. Neon staged a publicity screening of No Other Choice for Fortune 500 CEOs. If they ran the movie at all, it was certainly to an empty theater.

Send Help treated an early screening audience to a rage room. The different vantage points in No Other Choice and Send Help follow from one to the next. When it’s an employers’ market, working conditions are generally worse. There are fewer pinball machines, mental health days, and nitro cold brew taps when there is a dearth of jobs and a surplus of employable candidates.

Films like this, especially No Other Choice, work to translate the long history of Marx’s writing and Marxist theory to a modern economic situation that is, in many ways, inscrutable. More on how, this week.

On Friday (1/23), we’ll be watching What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962) in the Paradox Discord at 7pm Eastern.

It promises to be a good time with some discussion to follow if there’s an appetite for it. If you’d like to join in, you can get a link to the Discord by becoming a paid subscriber.

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“I recognize an unemployed comrade at once”: Inevitability and Marxism in No Other Choice

There is a running gag about Freud. Every time some fictional plot, news item, or cultural current reflects the distorted, colloquial view of Freud’s thought, people will post an edited version of screenshot from Breaking Bad (2008):

Whether or not this reaction image correctly attributes certain viewpoints to Freud is another question. But regardless of occasional theoretical incorrectness on the part of the image posters, he does indeed keep getting away with it. He is in fact rivaled only by Marx to the degree that one’s thought is repeatedly substantiated by cultural and political trends. So, for me to be surprised that the adaptation of a 1997 novel, The Ax, proves to be prescient, contemporary, and reflective of the current economic situation would mean I am naive to Marx. He will keep getting away with it. His collaborator, in this case, is Park Chan-wook.

Chan-wook is not simply a conduit for Marxist theory in No Other Choice (2025), his cinematic adaptation of The Ax. For him, Marx’s most important insight is about human subjectivity and collectivity. For the purposes of economic analysis, Marx posits the proletariat as a class with uniform characteristics. Their needs, in the sense of the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid, are discernible based on their class positioning and shared as a class. Members of the proletariat also function interchangeably within a system of wage labor. In Capital Volume I (1867), Marx writes:

The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other[.] (29)

Marx repeatedly emphasizes the collectivity of the proletariat class, going so far as to describe them as “a productive mechanism whose parts are human beings” (238) in the case of industrialization or calling “the workmen” “conscious organs” (283) in a factory with sufficient automation.

No Other Choice extends this symbiotic collectivity to subjective experience alongside the realpolitik significance. Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) begins as a perfect embodiment of Marxist ideals. Even as a middle-manager, Man-su is class conscious and sticks his neck out for his subordinates. His effort shows his naive belief he himself is immune from being fired, but this belief demonstrates the shared plight of the proletariat all the more. Man-su is fired along with everyone else, the brute economic reality of his position relative to the means of production, but his subjective experience, despite not even recognizing he will be fired, still aligns him with the others who he believes will be fired instead of him.

Man-su’s class consciousness, though, does not come without its qualifications. After he is laid off and begins interviewing, meeting with repeated rejection and plagued by an aching tooth, he justifies the possibility of a less senior role to his interviews by suggesting, “I’ve always considered myself to be blue collar.”

Man-su over-identifies with his subordinates on a subjective level, but this masks his proletariat status. He does not control the means of production and cannot extricate himself from his class vulnerability. In The Holy Family (1844), Marx writes:

It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. (51)

What Man-su considers himself is irrelevant to the reality of his economic position and how he chooses to act is subordinate to the necessary action of the proletariat to protect itself from exploitation.

The film’s principal plot is Man-su’s murderous machinations to eliminate competitors for a particular job. He selects them by their qualifications, planning to murder two potential competing applicants and the current job holder, Gu Bum-mo (Lee Sung-min), Ko Si-jo (Cha Seung-won), and Choi Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon).

Necessarily choosing a job for which Man-su himself is well suited, the well-qualified candidates are similar to Man-su. But he underestimates just how similar each man is at the level of the encounter. When Man-su has Bum-mo under the gun, he gives a pep talk, chastising Bum-mo for refusing his wife’s suggestion to explore another profession.

Indeed, Man-su’s condemnation is reflexive, really a self-condemnation. Chan-wook’s script makes this painfully clear:

Man-su finds Bummo too similar to himself, which disgusts him. Frustrated, Man-su waves his gun in the air as he struggles to find the right words.

Even as the film orders Man-su’s action under the auspices of having “no other choice,” the same flimsy and untrue justification of the American corporation that lays him off in the first place, his encounter with Bum-mo evinces most emphatically that, instead of having no other choice, Man-su could do just about anything else other than go on a murder spree.

And he knows it.

From here, the film leans into this self-deception and the affective charge of a brutal encounter between someone with which you are inextricably bound through shared class position and experience. Man-su’s killing of Si-jo is an act Man-su can’t even witness, calling him a “comrade” in their first conversation.

This profound class betrayal and his failure of Man-su to live up to what their camaraderie calls for is precisely the indignity to which capitalism subjects its subjects.

Though Man-su sees himself in a state of exception, this is an illusion projected by late-stage capitalism which uses what the proletariat share to put them in contest with one another and takes irrelevant features of their identity as ascendent over class position.

Ultimately No Other Choice concludes where Marx does not, quite, get away with it. Man-su does get a job but, as Morrissey cautioned, his role as the “human in the loop” for a fully automated paper factory alienates him from the community generated by class consciousness and the vivacity of human life.

There are degrees to which Marx anticipated this state of affairs. Just as the proletariat’s unity is a feature of economic life, capitalism endeavors to divest from the proletariat any specific quality to their work such that any worker can fulfill any required tasks. This returns to the idea of automation and industrialization Marx explores. He writes in the “Manifesto,”:

the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character … He becomes an appendage of the machine (16)

For Marx, this is primarily an issue of price:

The competition thus created between the labourers allows the capitalist to beat down the price of labour, whilst the falling price of labour allows him, on the other hand, to screw up still further the working-time. (Capital Volume 1 384).

What Marx could not have possibly anticipated is the efficacy with which automation, atomization, and alienation would serve to foment competition to such deadly conclusions. We have not yet seen evidence to support the optimism of Marx:

This organization of the proletarians into a class and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again; stronger, firmer, mightier … What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. (”Manifesto” 19, 23)

At issue in No Other Choice is how the structure of capitalism has totally obscured the possibility of this supposed inevitability, through divesting work from any recognizable human quality.

The inhumanity in question is a plague, a contagion which afflicts Man-su but, as one sees in the closing moments of No Other Choice, spreads to devastate all life.

Weekly Reading List

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/lone-wolf-cub-and-more-koike-encore-dark-horse-books — A huge collection of manga by Kazuo Koike is available from the Humble Bundle. You can get 63 volumes for $18 through the end of the week.

I think you only need a passing familiarity with recent Survivor (2000) players to get something out of the seven episode series of Blood on the Clocktower (2022) games. They are very well edited and as entertaining as anything a television network has come up with. I’m not super familiar with these types of “social deduction” games, but I will probably give this one a shot sooner or later.

Oh yeah.

My ambition was to write an entire essay about this perfect album of Gundam series songs remixed by the best vocaloid producers. I didn’t get to it, but these songs are amazing.

Event Calendar: The US Department of Defense’s Favorite Film

Apparently there is a streamer named “Speed” traveling around the world. I have never heard of him other than seeing clips of his travels, mostly involving children of all nationalities frantically trying to get his autograph. He is also being menaced by an equally unlikely online figure called “White Speed,” who appears to be following Speed across the entire globe and popping out like Majima in Yakuza Kiwami (2016).

If this sounds like the plot of a David Lynch film, or maybe a Harmony Korine, I assure you that the information I am providing is true to the best of my knowledge. But what has been most striking about my brief encounters with Speed’s travel videos is simply the idea that one would travel the globe just to see it. He observes the world with the naive view of someone with little to no political education. This disposition makes sense for someone who has been making a living posting videos of themselves playing video games since they were eleven years old.

In Algeria, Speed remarked on the similarity of the architecture to France. In response, some have recommended him Fanon — I would sooner recommend The Battle of Algiers (1966) screening at The Coolidge in March. This film is having a moment insofar as it dramatizes issues of domestic policing, torture, colonialism, and so on. Both the streets of Gaza and Minneapolis resemble dimensions of Pontecorvo’s Algiers. This is simply a testament to his unparalleled understanding of global conflict.

I used to teach The Battle of Algiers in my First Year Writing classes to think about narrative bias. Pontecorvo’s film has the dubious honor of being screened by the US’s DoD in 2003. I tasked my students with determining what in the film is valuable to both a hegemonic, occupation force and revolutionary organizers.

Also added some other Coolidge screenings to the event calendar, plus some upcoming stuff in the Paradox Discord for our paid subs.

Until next time.

What is there to say about the Golden Globes? Prediction markets are among our great national shames. Nikki Glaser is good as a host. The video below should start at my favorite gag from her monologue:

I’ve said enough times I watch these award shows like sporting events. Why not let myself get a little riled up for the fun of it? And I’m willing to take the wins for Wagner Moura1, Rose Byrne2, and Stellan Skarsgård3 as great recognition for independent filmmaking.

The director of Rose Byrne’s winning performance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025) has a hell of a Movies That Made Me episode.

Music League coverage is done, for a while.

Spotify

Apple Music

Youtube Music

We ended with a bit of a whimper rather than a bang, just like our last season. Again, this is my fault. Like the Subway meme, I’m the one who made the categories, I’m the one who ordered them, etc, etc. I will never do a category about comedy again without some very descriptive constraints.

I did not like most of the songs on this playlist. I did not find most of them funny. Some, like the “song” by the allegedly comedic, allegedly musical group Jud Jud, I actively despise. There were glaring omissions that reflect badly on the group as a whole. I take responsibility here, I thought we would be fighting to submit Strongbad, Weird Al, Monty Python, and They Might Be Giants, thus I had to pick something esoteric and unexpected.

But let’s talk about the high points. Wesley Willis and RXKNephew are musical geniuses, far beyond novelty music. The Gene Moss & Fred Rice Halloween Beatles cover is queued up and ready for October next year. Body Count’s version of “Institutionalized” had me in stitches — I don’t think that was on purpose. And “Man’s Not Hot” is way funnier than I remembered, and I remembered it being pretty funny.

For my own shame, I submitted Skepta, “Too Many Man.” A great song. Funny enough, I thought, in the context of the many collectively agreed upon great musical humorists. Instead, people went subterranean with their picks. What did I expect?

Paradox Music League runs again in March. More info to come.

The Grip of Nostalgia in Streamed Speedrunning

AGDQ 2026 is in the books. As I did last week, I am highlighting my favorite runs across the marathon. I had a blast as a viewer and continue to want to think deeply about how we derive enjoyment from playing, and watching, video games.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo (2025)

Pipistrello was a sleeper run for me. I’ve never heard of the game and just happened to be watching when it came on. Like Rush Hour 2 (2001) on TNT, it made me stop what I am doing, sit down, and pay attention.

Speedrunning can be a lot of things. Following a general gag about video game genres, fans sometimes jokingly split runs along the dichotomy of “menu” or “parkour.”

“Parkour” runs involve precise, largely unrestricted, movement of a player character through an environment instead of “menus” which entail (also precise) restricted movement, more accommodating of memorization. While I appreciate both, “parkour” style games are usually the type of game where a developer might have speedrunners in mind while designing.

Pipistrello, a top-down Zelda influenced indie game, captures all the visual splendor of a great “parkour” speedrun. Even if you don’t know what’s going on (I didn’t) what happens on the screen looks really impressive and cool. There’s also the heartwarming story of the runner, MHFsilver, who has submitted to GDQ events for eleven years. This was his first acceptance. That’s gotta feel good.

Mario Kart 64 (1996) 4 Player VS Mode

While this Mario Kart 64 race is not strictly a speedrun, one might argue that all racing games are speedruns in some sense. There’s a disjunction that arises in this case where the game itself already requires “going fast,” without some significant concession, constraint, or contortion to one’s gameplay. The games that would ostensibly be best suited to speedrunning are actually somewhat confusing without the outer layer of meta-explanation to define how the gameplay deviates from what the game encourages. Nonetheless, this was an exciting race. And I learned something: I had no idea people are getting together to play Mario Kart 64 at a competitive level.

But compete they did. These races were clean. I loved the item management and strategy. For me, this was another magic display that both seemed exceptionally impressive but was totally legible to me. It probably helps that I played a ton of Mario Kart 64 growing up. That nostalgic return to a familiar game was more important in my enjoyment of GDQ this year compared to others, I think.

Doom Eternal (2020)

I don’t have any connection to Doom Eternal. I’ve never played it and I almost never play single-player FPS games. But, wow. This is another visual feast. The gameplay speaks for itself. The runner, KovaaK, is an accomplished Quake tournament player from the early 2000s and the developer of some popular FPS gameplay utilities.

I love an OG getting some shine on the main stage of an event like this, and KovaaK is definitely that. I asked him what games he likes to play non-competitively:

My wife and I always jump into various coop games, and Windblown has been our biggest staple over the last year - Looking forward to that coming out of early access. Big shoutouts to Children of Morta too.

And I’m always a sucker for playing Guacamelee with friends. I’ve probably played that more than a dozen times casually now, and these days I use a b0xx shaped controller called the Superslab to play it. Hitboxes are so fun with 2d platformers.

Kinda expected him to say he doesn’t have any time for other games. I’ll have to check out Windblown (2024) on the recommendation here.

maimai DX PRiSM PLUS (2025)

Another year, another rhythm game showcase. Raveille, who was part of a CHUNITHM LUMINOUS PLUS (2024) showcase streamed from Singapore to the event last year, commentated in person for maimai. Good stuff.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (2000) Blindfolded

Playing blindfolded is a whole other plane of engagement with video gaming. Bubzia is a specialist, best known for his runs of Super Mario 64 (1996). Watching someone play by listening to a game instead of seeing it creates a unique visual experience for the viewers. You can see the shortcuts and the way the player navigates the environment to get “guaranteed” movement. Each backflip, target, and side hop is meticulously planned to place Link in a precise position relative to something else. Between my experience watching Bubzia’s runs in the past and my many hours of Majora’s Mask play, I found even the most repetitive attempts at a trick to be riveting.

This Bubzia interview, from SGDQ 2024, delivers a great primer about what’s important for blindfolded speedrunning:

He announced during the Majora’s Mask run he just went full time as a streamer. I guess that means this dude was rocking a 9-5 while speedrunning games blindfolded for the last eight years. Wild stuff.

Final Fantasy Tactics — The Ivalice Chronicles (2025)

I am not proud to admit I have spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 hours playing Final Fantasy Tactics. I have already logged about 40 hours into The Ivalice Chronicles remake and this playthrough, nearly done, is going by pretty fast. As a kid, I played the original (1998), including getting sniped by chemists like 400 times trying to unlock Cloud from printed GameFAQs instructions. And I also played the War of the Lions (2007) version on PSP a lot. Despite this, nothing that occurred during this speedrun by ChessJerk looked even remotely familiar to me.

My jaw was constantly on the floor. What is even more surprising is that somehow, across those 300 (give or take) hours logged in three different versions of the game, I’ve never used the Arithmetician class. There’s a lot from this run I’ll be bringing into the next time I turn on FFT.

Because this run is consistent, and thus a bit repetitive, there is also an “Any% No Math” category which does not allow the use of the Arithmetician’s class skill. But it seems like the latter category is less popular — at least judging by how many entries are on the leaderboard. Examining the gameplay experience of both categories would be another great case study for the tension between speedrunning for the player and speedrunning for the viewer.

Super Mario 64 Seventy Runner Relay

There was Mario Kart 64, there was Majora’s Mask, and then there was Super Mario 64. This is just a remarkable, beautiful game so evocative of a time in my life. I remember playing Mario 64 on the Wal-Mart promotional displays before I owned the console myself. It is so good. It has been randomized, run blindfolded, tackled in every way one could imagine — except by seventy people in a 70 Star relay.

Yes, maybe one could argue having one of seventy different speedrunners tackle each star is a little gimmicky. But they even discovered new tech during the preparation for the run: air strafing. Watch for it.

Pokemon Emerald (2004)

I have to end on a note of controversy, inevitably, when it comes to GDQ. adef, one of the faces and employees of GDQ, closed out the event with a supremely entertaining run of Pokemon Emerald. In the course of the run, its incentives — to change adef’s Pokemon with each successive gym battle — made something in the neighborhood of $300,000 for charity. I was glued to my seat as each Pokemon, usually worse than the last, presented unique challenges for progressing through each fight.

It was also not a speedrun. I think this is good, even great. GDQ has become more entertaining as it has expanded to include other kinds of challenge runs. In a Pokemon speedrun, firmly in the “menu” category, there are plenty of periods where the runner performs important and impressive feats that are totally illegible to the viewer. Usually those involve highly choreographed and memorized shopping trips where the runner buys and sells the essential items for the run. I felt a sense of calm wash over me as adef lingered on the menus and moved at a place comprehensible to the human eye. Truly, this was something different.

A certain segment of GDQ viewers have taken issue with the runs for a few reasons. The first, posed and dismissed (by me): “it’s not a speedrun.” The second come from those more enfranchised as a player of the broader category of Pokemon challenge runs, like Ironmon and Nuzlocke. The “Pick-My-Main” category was invented by adef. As far as I know, he’s the only one who has ever attempted it. It does not spotlight the battle-tested category definitions or gameplay style of a toiling community of runners. Like I said, something different.

This was a run that prioritized entertainment over community recognition and engagement. adef played on a heavily modified version of Pokemon Emerald that offered him a number of concessions outside of the ability to arbitrarily change his Pokemon according to the viewer’s donations. He had an Eviolite in his inventory along with an item that would bring his current Pokemon up to the level of the next gym leader’s strongest Pokemon. He also used a custom designed move called Safety Blast, intended to give Pokemon without offensive abilities a possibility to progress. I think it may reflect too much of a thumb on the scale, though. Safety Blast has the same power as Slash, for instance, uses the attack stat (attack or special attack) which is highest for the Pokemon in question, and also always has STAB which increases the move’s damage by x1.5.

So, was I not entertained? I was entertained. I think you will be too, if you like this sort of thing. But the “Pick-My-Main” category offers less of the pleasures of the exacting, precise speedrun with minimal margin for error. adef was never in any danger of not being able to finish. With some refinement, I think the rules set could provide that kind of thrill to the audience. And I hope it is so refined. Raking in 300 grand, we’re definitely going to see it again.

Some of the Greatest Art of All Time Has Been Sold at Japanese Convenience Stores

Manga artists sit poised over a page for hours to produce an illustration within the gutters of a page that people will look at for five minutes. Cumulatively, though, the ratio of “hours of looking” by a reader to “hours of drawing” for Monkey Punch’s Lupin III (1967) must be like 1,000:1. Individually, we should take it upon ourself to study these great works. Especially his landscapes and ambient drawings. Just look at these:

There’s also this great Mission: Impossible gag:

The original Lupin manga must be read to be believed.

Weekly Reading List

https://archive.org/details/openveinsoflatin0000gale — Apropos of nothing.

Yorgos Lanthimos is wearing Jordan 5s in this video. Oh my god.

This is the good stuff.

“Every day it’s the same old thing.”

Best voice line from Mario Kart 64.

I can’t wait to have spare time so I can watch the new Samurai Troopers (1988) sequel.

Event Calendar: Luis Buñuel’s Restored Theological Drama

Adding the new 4K remaster of Viridiana (1962) on the recommendation of my friend Samantha. She calls the movie “densely strange.”

Until next time.

I’m going to the movies today.

The latest installment in Takeshi Koike’s critically acclaimed interpretation of Lupin the IIIrd is screening in U.S. theaters. I have only seen a few episodes of The Woman Called Fujiko Mine (2012), the beginning of Koike’s stewardship of the characters. But I have to seize my chance to see Lupin in theaters. Maybe this will inspire me to open my other three Blu-Rays of Koike-directed Lupin feature films.

In other news, the recent Music League category about influential artists was my favorite by far. This is the best Music League playlist of all time from any of our seasons.

Spotify

Apple Music

I should’ve assumed this playlist would be good, but I had a pretty tough time figuring out what to submit. I was a little to attached to the idea of thinking about what influences my favorite artists (the round title: “My Favorite’s Favorite). My favorite artists are usually the ones who do the influencing. But I ended up choosing Discharge on the basis of their influence of Disclose. They’re both bands I love. In my description, I understated the relationship. Disclose adopted their visual language, song structure, lyrical content, everything from Discharge. But Disclose delivers on the promise of Discharge in a way as the more consistent band. Tragedy (1994), The Aspects of War (1997), Nightmare Or Reality (1999), and Yesterday’s Fairytale, Tomorrow’s Nightmare (2004) are all timers.

When it comes to Discharge’s influence, though, it’s incomparable. I wrote in my submission:

Within extreme music, there are few more influential bands. Discharge is probably competing only with Motörhead, Black Sabbath, The Ramones, and Venom. The enormous shadow they cast is a gift to music. For my listening habits, they are a strong influence on the largest number of bands I like and listen to regularly and it is not close.

I came in fourth in the round, which was a surprise since the group is not always hospitable to extreme music. I wasn’t the only one who did well submitting hc, Scot came in third with The Stalin. The playlist also treats us to the smooth sounds of Robert Johnson, Celtic Frost, Suede, Die Kreuzen, and Soulja Boy.

Speedrunning Gazette: AGDQ 2025

The GDQ speedrunning marathons are a common topic for my newsletter. If you’re not familiar, you can read some of my previous writing about them:

Or read about the marathon from the horse’s mouth:

https://crowd.gamesdonequick.com/

We’re only two days in to the marathon, but there have already been plenty of interesting moments.

6 7 Gestopo Comes for GDQ

Erin and I made a bet on the number of times someone would make a “6 7” joke at GDQ. The first opportunity was early, during the opening run of Super Mario Sunshine (2002). At about an hour and ten minutes into the run, commentator JJsrl starts explaining the nuances of the “6 tooth” and “7 tooth” strategy.

Another commentator, rosa_lul says after the explanation, “I feel like a sleeper agent trying not to activate hearing those two numbers together.” I haven’t watched every minute, but is GDQ staff discouraging its runners and commentators from making 6 7 jokes? Is 6 7 dead? Time will tell.

Learned Parapraxis in Speedrunning

GDQ does not always spotlight the best runner. Play skill is important, but even more important for the marathon setting is being presentable, conversant with the audience, and entertaining. The Jet Set Radio (2000) run was a welcome exception with world record holder DylCat at the helm.

DylCat demonstrated the “optimal” method of tagging in the game:

He says, “I’m basically just tensing up my arm and pressing X. It’s not good for you, you should not do this regularly, but it’s optimal … so I do that for a lot of the run.” This is demonstrative of the sporting mentality that comes with something like speedrunning, which is analogous to the competition of “esports.” Jack Black writes in “Revisiting the sport ethic” (2025), “valorising dedication, sacrifice, and the prioritization of athletic achievement, above all other considerations, the sport ethic describes a widely accepted expectation that athletes will internalize and enact a set of required values in pursuit of sporting excellence” (1-2). DylCat’s commitment to this “sport ethic” is evident in his advise to the crowd, to not emulate his self-harming controller technique. There’s an obvious contradiction here, however. DylCat is the greatest Jet Set Radio speedrunner. To compete with him, one most likely must use the control technique he advises against and indicates is harmful.

This tension supports Black’s greater psychoanalytic insight in his piece. He writes, “the enduring power of the sport ethic does not lie entirely in institutional reinforcement or cultural tradition, but in the unsettling possibility that we—both athletes and fans—enjoy it” (5). Black goes on:

[T]he sport ethic operates not merely as a behavioural code, but as a moral telos, inasmuch as it remains a vision of the good that is tied to ideas of authenticity of self-worth.
Yet, this ‘good’ is not only pursued by athletes, but, at the same time, sacrificed, insofar as many of the goods commonly associated with sport, such as physical and mental wellbeing, ethical conduct, and inclusivity, are actively transgressed in maintaining and adhering to the sport ethic. As a consequence, what is sacrificed in the pursuit of the sport ethic is the very idea of sport as a space for health, mutual respect, and human flourishing. While fostering the normalisation of injury, the erosion of moral boundaries (e.g. through doping or cheating), and the exclusion of those unwilling or unable to conform to the sport ethic, alongside commercial logics and institutional demands that exploit athletes’ labour under the guise of commitment and professionalism, ultimately, what is surrendered is the ‘good’ of sport as well as its capacity to offer meaningful experiences beyond instrumental success.

GDQ marathons and speedrunning as a whole reflect this claim by Black in a number of ways, including the very obvious strain of a 24/7 televised event that invites participants and viewers to forego sleep contrasted with the charitable cause GDQ enriches with its significant financial contribution. But it’s DylCat in particular who exposes the more urgent harms one visits upon themselves through their “overconforming” to the sport ethic in the pursuit of speedrunning achievement. DylCat’s example of a harmful controller grip also belongs on a list of examples that support Ryan Engley’s argument in his presentation at the Lack V conference in 2025 where he claims the movements characteristic of sports are “learned parapraxis,” deviations from a norm that can result in significant bodily harm to the athlete.

Because of DylCat’s sacrifice, we’re treated to a marvel.

When Making a Game Easier Actually Makes it Harder

During the run for Shovel Knight: King of Cards (2019), commetator spikevegeta makes a case for the category, “NG+,” being as hard or harder than other categories. “NG+” is short for New Game +, describing a mode of play available in many types of games where one begins the game over again with all of the upgrades, power-ups, and other accumulated game assets that benefit the player.

In a normal case, this certainly means the game will be easier. However, because of the different goals of speedrunning, runs in a “NG+” category may be harder — as spikevegeta suggests is the case for King of Cards. Because of the greater capacity for movement the power-ups provide, the runner must achieve more executionally complex feats of dexterity. With more gameplay choices for traversing an environment, there is a greater planning challenge to determine the optimal approach to an area of the game. For me, this is a thought provoking game design idea. Affording the player with more tools and more choice can make a game more difficult with the goal of speedrunning, “beating the game in the shortest span of time.”

Speedrunners Embracing Randomness

Along those lines, the Final Fantasy X (2001) speedrun category presents a similar point of philosophical and design inquiry for beating games quickly. Because Final Fantasy X utilizes RNG (random number generator) seeds, every outcome in the game that seems random is deterministic based on the unknown quality of the seed. Over time, players have been able to identify the various seeds and thus predict perfectly various outcomes based on the actions the player takes. To speedrun a game with this kind of RNG system would mean constant resetting to find the optimal seed. This is not a good experience for a player or a theoretical viewer.

As a solution, the Final Fantasy X speedrunners have embraced a “true RNG” mod which eliminates the RNG seeds and makes the various ostensibly random game events, number rolls, and so forth truly random. This eliminates the incentive to reset for the appropriate seed or the requirement to optimize one’s play for a specific seed and instead creates a more dynamic speedrunning environment. While most speedruns endeavor to minimize randomness by “RNG manipulation,” the cost to the experience for the viewer and player is too high for FFX.

There is a quality of randomness to the possibility to make this choice, as many speedrunners are forced to optimize for specific seeds in games where no community developed “true RNG” alternative exists. Indeed, it just so happens that someone decided to make this mod and thus open up this choice between RNG and seeded gameplay to FFX runners.

The Secrets of the World Are Not Hiding in Netflix’s Regulatory Filings

Stranger Things (2016) is over. It took nearly a decade to get to the conclusion of its five seasons. It doesn’t sound too outrageous to me to take, on average, two years to produce a season. But I can understand the frustration of the fans with the growing wait between each. Season two came out in 2017, a little over a year after the first. Then, season three in 2019. Sure, we’re on track. Season four? 2022. Okay, well there was COVID and other apocalyptic threats.

The wait for season five must have been the most frustrating of all. Three years removed from the “Running Up That Hill” moment from Stranger Things season four where the song was used incessantly, the final season arrives.

Fortunately for me, I am not a Stranger Things fan. I watched season one back in 2016 and felt no inclination to watch anything that has come after. But the advertising and conversation steered me back to Stranger Things in December. Nothing I’ve seen has made me a fan, but I am up to the third episode of season five and planning on watching through til the end.

I don’t think Stranger Things is a good show. When I have said this to people I know in the last month, they have responded with things like “well, it’s a show for children.” I watch shows for children, like Kamen Rider. This isn’t that. The enormous adolescent fandom Stranger Things has accumulated seems incidental, reflective primarily of the fact that its principal characters are adolescents. Instead of being for children, it appeals more to the, benevolently, young at heart. It delivers 1980s nostalgia relentlessly. It’s one of the show’s strengths — fantastic production design. If the target audience for Stranger Things is those who remember growing up in the 1980s, I’m too young. But there are still parts of the childhood Stranger Things depicts that feel resonant and familiar.

In the season two episode “MADMAX,” where the Stranger Gang (made this term up) goes to the arcade, I feel like I am there. In season three, which turns the primary setting from a small town to a expansive mall, I remember the hours I spent in my own local malls as a kid. Season two is the show’s high point, but season three has its bright spots. In the finale, “The Battle of Starcourt,” the Duffer Brothers manage to capture the anguish of moving as a young adult. I take geographical distance for granted today, but I remember that horrendous sense of finality that came with a friend’s move when I was young. There are friends I had in middle school who moved away that I’ve never reconnected with. As the Byers family and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) pack their bags to move to California, the Duffers linger at the right spots with forlorn looks around empty rooms and friends dragging their feet as they move boxes they would rather stay put. The show deserves a lot of credit for its highs, capturing youthful struggles with the subjective weight for the young person instead of the retrospective adult view. They even manage this to some degree in their depiction of bullying in season four.

Season three is also the beginning of some deleterious narrative problems the show never fixes. The lived in feeling and vivid geography of Hawkins evident in season two is gone with season three’s focus on the mall. Even worse, the show employs the storytelling technique of separating its characters in a way that diminishes the possibility of storytelling flexibility and deprives the cast opportunities to play off one another. The “party” that navigated seasons one and two is rarely together in the subsequent seasons, whether because of scheduling conflicts or the Duffers running out of ideas.

From season three onward, the show groups Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo), Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), and Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke) on a parallel track to Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard) and Eleven, and on yet another track there’s Jim Hopper (David Harbour) and Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder). One of the more compelling and surprising relationships of the show is that of Eleven with her adopted father Jim, but this relationship is woefully underdeveloped after season two. Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink) and Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin) generally have something to do in the show, but the biggest casualty of this storytelling structure is Will Byers (Noah Schnapp). After his absence in the first season, the Duffers can’t quite figure out who or what he is supposed to be to the rest of the cast.

The discrete and seemingly intractable character groupings which persist on some level even through the fifth season is an excellent case study for a narrative failing of much prestige-aspiring streaming drama. Expanding the normal A/B plot structure of a television episode to arbitrarily follow three, four, or five groups of characters during its runtime makes thematically cohesive and narratively satisfying episodes impossible. To make matters worse, this narrative structure in the last three seasons compares so unfavorably to the first two which created the opportunity to bring characters together in unexpected ways and sustain a broader plot instead of having to move the many separate plots to some point of connection. The conclusion of season four almost seems satirical, as the Duffers contort their plot for a contrived climax that involves Eleven, Max, and Jim working together from California, Hawkins, and Russia respectively.

So far, season five doesn’t seem much different from the two seasons that preceded it. The setting has once again transformed, this time to a dystopian Hawkins under military quarantine. This seems like an overcorrection from season four which introduces the U.S. military as an antagonist who don’t have much impact on the plot. Season four connects the show’s antagonist, Vecna, to Eleven’s past in a way that probably wasn’t planned but has enough incidental foreshadowing to feel planned — probably the cause of all the attributions of meticulous plotting to the Duffers.

Despite my thinking that season five is delivering at more or less the quality level I would’ve expected, some people hate season five. This hatred is evinced by widespread conspiratorial thinking around Stranger Things. A barely coherent Change.org petition demands the release of “unseen footage” to the tune of nearly 400,000 signatures. The confusingly named “#conformitygate” conspiracy suggests there is yet more Stranger Things to come, with the real season five release impending to supplant or supplement this promotional release. One struggles to comprehend the logic behind a promotional methodology that intentionally releases hours of narrative television to be panned and later supplemented so it all makes sense.

My impression of Stranger Things after my fast paced viewing is that the show makes more or less as much sense as it ever did. I would never present the show as an exemplar of internal consistency or detailed explanations, which I think is a good thing. The Duffers, in fact, could have spent less time developing elaborate science fiction plot points and more focusing on the emotional core of the show and its characters that make it compelling in the first place.

Weekly Reading List

https://www.routledge.com/Mari-Ruti-and-Climate-Change-From-Grief-to-Creativity/Burnham/p/book/9781032807034 — Clint Burnham has written a fantastic group of essays to wrap up 2025.

https://cdm.link/stewart-copeland-spyro/ — Inspired by AGDQ, this is a great essay on the history of the Spyro the Dragon (1998) score and its famed composer, Stewart Copeland of The Police.

https://kmanga.kodansha.com/title/10653/episode/361325 — Tetsuya Okuyama is trying his hand at a contemporary version of Psycho-Pass (2012).

This Yoko Taro review of a McFlurry belongs in a volume of food writing.

Event Calendar: The Brattle in Jan/Feb

Updated with some nice screenings from The Brattle Theater in the first months of the year.

Until next time.

Something about this Music League round, songs that make you cry, didn’t move me.

Spotify

Apple Music

Maybe it was a little difficult for me to get in touch with my feelings. If I were being honest, I would have submitted this:

But there’s no version on Spotify with Koyuki Tanaka’s anime singing voice, Hirabayashi Kazuya.

Or maybe this:

Or this:

But I figured nobody would get any of these and nothing I could write would convey the emotion of being there (watching either of these anime or playing this video game at the right time in your life). Instead, I submitted this:

It wasn’t a well-received submission, but I remember hearing this song for the first time on the radio in 2001 and a genuine feeling of anguish coming over me. It is cheap, perhaps. And the song has a reactionary strain to it in the final verse that condemns the woman in question for her circumstance. I don’t take that as the song’s final word, though, even if the presentation of the plights is salacious.

The league is almost over, with two rounds left to write about. Season three will open up in March.

We will also be movie marathon-ing on Wednesday via Discord. A link to the server comes with your paid subscription to the newsletter.

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What Hardcore Records Did I Actually Like This Year?

As one who remains a servant to the scene, I wanted to highlight some hardcore that came out this year. I didn’t intend for this to be a top ten list, but it ended up being one.

Ultimate Disaster — For Progress…

The list is not meant to be in order but I think this is my favorite hardcore music to come out this year. Instantly occasions aggressive head bobbing and guitar miming in my house. This band is d-beat played in the correct way. Song titles include question marks, ellipsis, and even apostrophe. Discharge’s Why (1981) only has 2/3.

Kaleidoscope — Cities of Fear

I saw Kaleidoscope play with the band LIFE in New York this year. People got upset with me when I said they sound kind of like Burn. Nonetheless, it is true, there are shades of Burn in Cities of Fear. This record is straight up incredible. The guitar tone is particular (no wave-y, My War [84] style), rhythms are unique, just so good.

Piston — Capital Crime

This is a very good oi-influenced HC tape from Tallahassee. I like the kind of vocal cadence where the singer is really struggling to fit in every word in a verse and having to rapid-fire certain lines. At the middle of “Spit Your Take,” “You can’t bowdlerize what I say, What’s in my heart and what’s in my head” fits the bill. Changing the rhythm of your vocal deliver matters a lot. It’s a technique underutilized in hardcore music. But not here. Good.

The Massacred — Nightmare Agitators

There’s a certain je ne sais quoi certain bands from Boston are afforded. These bands rarely play and are revered in part because of their uncommon live appearances. But The Massacred are a fantastic band with the ‘78 UK street punk inflection to their less distorted style of d-beat. This record was everywhere this year even though there is no promotional machine proselytizing Nightmare Agitators. Sometimes people like the good shit.

With Hate — From Boston, With Hate

Not much straight edge representation on this list, which is too bad. With Hate has my favorite lyrics of the year. I have a story about seeing Doug preparing to perform these lyrics for the first time I won’t share in any more detail other than it was memorable and immediately endeared me to a band that had not yet played a single note for public consumption. They are the perfect encapsulation of the 2000s era of straight edge music.

Zip — Model Citizen

It’s kinda hard to pin down Zip’s style on Model Citizen. They have the capacious, contemporary sound that seems to absorb every respectable influence for a hardcore band. They are from Indonesia, but playing songs that mostly sound American with a very light touch of Burning Spirits. The recording sounds so fantastic. Maybe more people should be going to Daniel Husayn for mastering? Some real inside baseball shit from Zip making that call.

Bombardement — Dans La Fournaise

Absolutely hate the keyboard intro on this but otherwise a “ripper.” Continental hardcore.

C4 — Payback’s A Bitch

C4 is a great local band to have. They play fast but still somehow make people do acrobatic spinkicks. Their lyrics are a lot less goofy this time around. Instead Owen indulges the most vitriolic and anti-social dimension of his worldview. You might not guess that everyone involved in this release is a load-bearing pillar of the Boston hardcore scene. Would any one of them disappear tomorrow, something would be irrevocably lost. Turned to dust. Because of this record, everything else but Boston hardcore is what’s blown away.

Rigorous Institution — Tormentor

Tormentor is very metal-inflected hardcore, but not metalcore in the sense that most people intend it nor in the sense of having a shared lineage with most contemporary bands that would self-describe this way. They do have conventional mosh parts but their riffing is like midtempo black metal played with a 2000s crust guitar tone. They have some of my favorite album art this year. The lettering on the album title is insane.

Necron 9 — People Die

This band might be even more poppin’ than The Massacred so maybe I don’t need to say anything. The singer is really belting it out on this one, sounds like he’s going to need larynx surgery in a year or two.

Weekly Reading List

https://www.ultramanconnection.com/news/celebrate-the-holidays-with-the-ultraman-yuletide-collection/ — Christmas is over, but next year you can run the Ultraman Yuletide Collection. A themed Blu-Ray like this brings me back to the similarly collated VHS releases of my childhood. The episodes on here are really good. In 1972’s Ultraman Ace Christmas episode, there is some remarkable social commentary about the ascendency of American Christmas iconography in Japan.

I had no idea this Christmas album, performed by the original Pokemon anime’s English voice actors, existed. I found it looking at covers of “Must Be Santa.” It’s a mix of the aforementioned classic covers and some original Christmas songs — that’s what I have linked here. Bizarre stuff, reissued in August of this year to be available on modern streaming services.

Magnvs' RPG Journey

Live A Live, Tokita's anthological struggle against Hate

Developer: Squaresoft (Super Famicom original), Historia and Square Enix BD2 (Remake…

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4 months ago · 14 likes · 4 comments · Magnvs

Live A Live (1994) is one of my favorite games of all time. Magnus, prolific newsletter author on the JRPG beat, writes both about the game’s creation and symbolic meaning.

https://www.viz.com/vizmanga/chapters/rai-rai-rai — Naoya Matsumoto (author of Kaiju No. 8 [2020]) might have a legitimate case of copyright infringement to bring against Rai Rai Rai (2023). Yoshiaki borrows liberally from Matsumoto’s premise, as well as from Chainsaw Man (2022) and Dai Dark (2019). If it’s not criminal to liberally rip-off the work of peers released less than five years prior, it is at least in poor taste.

When it comes to taste, though, Yoshiaki is unimpeachable. Rai Rai Rai is derivative in every respect except for the footwear of its characters. The manga’s combat suits have Instapump Furies on their feet. And Yoshiaki also draws realistic (possibly infringing) Jordan 1s and Jordan 8s for his characters.

RIP Ryan Duffy.

Event Calendar: Still Here, Still Sincere

There’s a movie marathon on Discord on New Year’s Eve hosted by yours truly. The schedule, as ever, is below.

Then, Sunday, AGDQ begins. Oh yeah.

Until next time.

I designed this round of Music League to be thought-provoking. The idea was to submit “cancelled” artists, so obviously if you click through to the playlist you are going to see some scary music by some abhorrent people.

Spotify

Apple Music

Youtube Music

Here’s the prompt as I wrote it:

Music by an artist who has either been “cancelled” or has views or addresses topics in their music that are unambiguously offensive to polite society.

Evaluating this prompt, I don’t think it entirely matches the spirit of my intention. I wanted to leave room open to submit songs by artists or bands who have made a home for themselves within offensive subcultures. Their commercial viability and cultural circulation would be limited by their own aspirations as opposed to having been subject to some kind of sudden public scrutiny. The idea of “offensive,” here is far too permissive. If you read it to the letter, and you’re an average person, you might find Cannibal Corpse’s music to be offensive, for instance. But a band like that, which has been highly successful, and is understood as presenting their lyrical subject matter as an artistic choice rather than behavioral prescription, isn’t really what I had in mind.

Almost everybody abided by the prompt as written. When I think about my intention, though, G.I.S.M. falls into that Cannibal Corpse category, where the band is totally beloved because of Sakevi’s reputation rather than in spite of it. It seems to me there were a few other examples here that have objectionable lyrical content but are otherwise upstanding citizens.

Despite all this, the playlist captured the essence of what I imagined it would. Some of these submissions were easy for the submitters and obvious to listeners: R. Kelly, Diddy, Bill Cosby, Inquisition. Horrible people making music ranging from awe-inspiringly good to atrociously bad. All of these songs together pose a question about how we should encounter these works. I am neither in favor of abandoning great art for the sins of its creator nor inflicting oneself with an overriding sense of guilt because of how a work moves us. At the same time, discovering an artist has done something objectionable from an individual or broader point of view will change our relationship to the art. The toughest to listen to for me were the Chuck Berry and Diddy submissions, disgusting and unsettling in equal measure because of what we have come to learn about them.

These sins, such as they are, may be written into the art in ways legible or illegible. Or maybe legible only in retrospect. But this is something we must confront as a fact of artistic production. The most recent favorite artist who did something you find awful won’t be the last. And I don’t want to be prescriptive. Listen to them or don’t. Listen to some and not others. Do what you can live with. But don’t give in to the judgment of a crowd; render your own.

One of the things I think this playlist was a little worse at is denaturalizing the kind of stuff in popular music most have come to accept but perhaps would benefit from more consideration. There are cases if society at large discovers that the artist had done precisely what they say they did in their music, society at large would condemn that artist whose music they so loved — we’ve seen as much with the momentary moral panic toward Cardi B. Fortunately, this one didn’t stick. But it has not been the lesson it should have been: projecting valor onto artists because they are great at making art produces a deeply distorted view of the artist.

Trends in Film: 2025

Every year I try to look back at what’s going on in the year’s movies. I usually have a hard time, but this time was easy. These threads I picked up were not subtle. The relation of these films to one another and among the groups mostly jumped out at me.

Reflecting on the year, I think this was a phenomenal one for film. I regularly had a great time at the theater. Though I am a harsher critic of Sinners and One Battle After Another than most, I liked both. When I think about my top ten, any of them could have been #1 another year. Speaking of which, here’s my in-progress Letterboxd list of favorites from 2025. Below, the strains of thought.

Political Commentary

“Art in the Age of Trump” came through in a big way this year. Bugonia, One Battle After Another, and Eddington all presented a satirical view of a distorted, incoherent political world. Even Wake Up Dead Man and The Running Man made pointed critiques of right wing ideology through exaggerated caricature. Among these films, all but Eddington are clearly progressive in their orientation. But it is a question as to what degree these films achieved their ostensible aims.

Wake Up Dead Man oriented all of its characters around a conservative ideologue, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), who cultivated his flock through sewing division and fear. Though he is clearly Trumpian, the even more absurdly presented Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack) is more interesting to me. Draven captures the essence of what disjoins the order of politics at the level of normative ethical frameworks. What Draven evaluates as good or bad is totally distinct from Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), making it impossible for them to find common ground. They don’t even understand where — to continue the metaphor — each is situated on the map. Ultimately, and like The Running Man, Wake Up Dead Man has the smug, self-congratulatory, condescending quality characteristic of a 2008-era politics that takes the “right side” as a given.

By contrast, Bugonia, One Battle After Another, and even Eddington (which I despised) all deserve credit for being movies of our time that properly reflect the polarized, unpredictable, and downright bizarre nature of the U.S. political landscape. In each film, what hides beneath the veneer of a political position is never what one expects. One Battle After Another is undone by exactly this imperative, presenting Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) as the most psychologically and ideologically complex character in its nexus of would-be revolutionaries and Christmas Adventurers.

A similar but more effective subversion is the essence of Bugonia and its plot. The movies that have explicitly intervened in the global political landscape are best when they show how the conventional wisdom of political understanding has fallen away. While Mickey 17 and No Other Choice could also be considered along with these films, I think they are a bit more reflective of their respective directors’ overriding investments as opposed to part of any cresting aesthetic trend.

Absent Fathers

When Nietzsche declared the death of God, he meant the death of sense. The end of a guarantor to authorize knowledge, morality, and social life. In Jay Kelly and Sentimental Value, the god (the father) is not dead, but he is absent. Coincidentally, doing the same thing, pursuing his dreams in the world of cinema and ascending to the height of the medium in different categories.

This is a shorter list, but it really felt like there was something in the air. What Jessica Kelly (Riley Keough) puts at the feet of her father (George Clooney) is a simple but resonant view from the vantage point of a child examining a parent’s priorities. “Do you know how I know that you didn’t want to spend time with me? Because you didn’t spend time with me.”

Along with these two, it is worth mentioning The Surfer (2024) which is also about absent fathers. It was first released in theaters in 2025 after a 2024 festival premiere. I consider it a 2025 movie, but I’m being restrictive in these groups.

Josh O’Connor

What a year this guy has had. Four huge roles in four critically acclaimed movies. There’s nothing to do here but marvel.

Biopics

If I were making sub-lists I would do one for Safdie directed niche sports biopics. Something must be wrong with those guys. Come to think of it, between Marty Supreme and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, maybe the Bronsteins deserve their own heading on the list. Their kind of abrasive, confrontational, anxiety-inducing screenwriting is having a moment.

More than anything, these movies indicate we might be running out of interesting people to make movies about.

Fan Culture

Stan power is unmistakable. Even as twitter’s social significance wanes, fear of offending the rabid groups of anonymous online fans is palpable. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 demonstrated this as Owen Gleiberman farmed fan discontent for clicks in his review for Variety. Lurker, Opus, and Him, to varying degrees, take what is old (Spree [2020]) or older (Audition [1999] and Misery [1990]) and make it new again. Lurker is the standout among these, but Him has been unfairly maligned. It is quite good. What is perverse and harmful to both the fan and the subject of fandom is what these films ask their audience to confront. The Rebrand also touched these themes, but it was much more focused on examining the influencer as opposed to the fan.

Horror

By my count, I watched a staggering thirty-two horror movies released in 2025. Notice the comical dimensions of the collage which is not even exhaustive. There are others — exceptionally good ones — that don’t fit according to their listed release year but do according to my logic. Shelby Oaks, Strange Harvest, Cloud (if you count this, which I think is debatable), Presence, and The Shrouds all had festival releases in 2024 but weren’t available in theaters in the United States until this year. That is, all told, thirty-seven horror movies. All but one, Exit 8, were distributed or independently released in the U.S. The message is clear: the horror audience endures. And its formal strictures have become the playground for independent filmmakers like Max Tzannes, Kaye Adelaide, and Brandon Christensen. It’s also big business for production houses like Blumhouse, attached to many of the films I saw.

Two films regarded as among the best this year fit, to some degree, into the genre. Weapons and Sinners both enjoyed enormous critical acclaim. Weapons, especially, marks an important switch point for the genre’s critical reception. There is no debate Zach Cregger, like Jordan Peele, makes horror films with the pulpy irreverence that is conventional for the genre. Cregger has also proven himself as a beloved auteur without the normal stripped-down, quiet-voiced, vaguely plotted trappings of the impressionistic “elevated horror” that plagued screens thanks to Ari Aster and Robert Eggers.

I’m not a box office returns guy, but a few notable (financial) flops like Him, The Strangers: Chapter 2, Megan 2.0, and Woman in the Yard did not slow the snowball of, apparently, record-breaking profits for the genre.

As a fan, I’m always open to more, and more varied, horror films. I missed some truly great films, like Shelby Oaks and Strange Harvest, in theaters, but I think that has more to do with their limited theatrical windows and poor promotion as opposed to an overstuffed release year. All the indices by one can predict future film releases point to more major and minor horror films in the coming years. Bring it on.

Weekly Reading List

https://mangaplus.shueisha.co.jp/titles/100479 — Kappy’s War of the Adults (2025) is an unusual manga that just began serialization this past April. I shouldn’t say too much about the premise. The manga introduces it as a twist during the first chapter. It’s worth a read. I’m sure I’ll write about it as I get caught up to the current chapter.

Pretty impressive selection here from Vince Staples. He’s right, we should say Robert Towsend’s name more. I say it fairly often myself.

A nice reunion of the Jakarta youth crew legends Raincoat.

This is big.

Event Calendar: Kubrick Comes to Harvard

I had the pleasure of seeing The Shining (1980) in IMAX last week. If you missed it, thankfully, those local to the Boston area will have another opportunity as part of the Harvard Film Archive’s The Complete Stanley Kubrick program. Yes, they are screening everything. And on film. Do not miss it.

Until next time.

This has been a weekend of activity at Paradox HQ. Erin and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary with all the pomp and circumstance we could muster. It is my mom’s 70th birthday today (12/15/25) so the newsletter might be a little light on proofreading.

In the meantime, we watched Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025). I liked it more than I remember liking any previous Knives Out movie. I did not expect it to have the same kind of explicit political engagement as Eddington (2025), One Battle After Another (2025), or even Bugonia (2025). Rian Johnson is trying his hand at art in the age of MAGA or however you want to categorize this sort of filmmaking. It didn’t totally work at the level of political commentary, but I appreciate that it is about something. I don’t recall that being true about the other films.

Despite the commentary, this is also Johnson’s most formally satisfying Knives Out. He is not the architect of mystery plots he hopes to be, far from Carr, Christie, Poe, or even Uketsu or Ayatsuji.

Wake Up Dead Man has the most memorable mystery structure. Johnson lets the simplicity get away from him, letting the structure of the mystery fray and distort out of control as he contrives to add new twists in the style of television serials rather than classic mystery writers. I don’t mean to judge the film too harshly. It is good and Josh O’Connor is particularly great in it. With this, Rebuilding, and The Mastermind, he’s having a huge year.

We have one of our most listenable and timely playlists yet with this new Music League round: holiday music.

Spotify

Apple Music

Youtube Music

I can’t believe we got an assemblage of King Diamond, Sledge Hammer, Mighty Sparrow, and Jesu along with some genuine Christmas classics. The league is ahead of the newsletter, so all the credit and blame has been distributed among us.

Finally, as indicated above, Paradox is hosting another movie marathon programmed by Erin. We’ll be watching Sunset Boulevard (1950), New Year’s Evil (1980), and Repeat Performance (1947) on Discord. We’ll get underway at 8pm Eastern on New Year’s Evil. Any Discord members can take part. If you’d like to join the Paradox Newsletter Discord, you can become a paid subscriber and the server link should go directly to your email inbox.

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Shame and Shamelessness in Gambling Cinema

When I wrote briefly about Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) a month ago, I neglected to mention something that struck me deeply about the film.

Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte) is a gambler, and a compulsive one. In his early conversation with Dave Burke (Ed Begley), he nonchalantly acknowledges his severe gambling debt.

In the early segment of the film, Ingram is put together. The bellhop admires his smart attire and quick wit. This performance of a gambler who dances between the raindrops is of apiece with Bob le Flambeur (1956) or Bay of Angels (1963) or even, to some degree, Pale Flower (1964).

The contemporary gambler of western cinema is always in crisis, totally subject to their compulsion, disheveled, desperate, ping-ponging from creditor to creditor. It’s a very different representation of gambling that contrasts sharply with these examples of the 50s and 60s. Ballad of a Small Player (2025) takes this sort of performance to a new extreme.

Colin Farrell as Lord Doyle delivers a serviceable performance for Edward Berger. But Ballad is far from Berger’s best and a steep decline from last year’s Conclave. Even as he channels some of Ralph Fiennes’ deliberate and urgent walking in his direction to Farrell, Ballad of a Small Player comes across as a small player in the corpus of gambling cinema.

Doyle is coming apart at the seams, indebted across Macau and pursued for crimes committed before faking his death and assuming the identity of “Lord Doyle.” This pseudonym is meant to confer on Doyle the status and assumption of wealth that would befit a minor aristocrat. However, the film repeatedly points to Doyle’s inability to play the part. He hates champaign, hates cigars, and conducts himself with the hunger of his indigent upbringing.

There are aspects of Berger’s middling film that caught my attention. Namely, his treatment of shame. Another expatriate, Adrian Lippett (Alex Jennings), the genuinely aristocratic foil to Doyle’s posturing, antagonizes Doyle. Lippett advises Doyle to be “dead to shame.” The phrase seems self-evidently to suggest that one should do anything to enrich themselves without concern for how they might be viewed. Lippett is immune to the way shame might regulate one’s behavior. By contrast, Doyle seeks to be free of shame. He is extremely sensitive to the affect that accompanies doing something shameful. Instead of immunity, Doyle seeks to balance the scale and pay back the debts that make him ashamed.

Lippett is shameless like Bob the gambler (Roger Duchesne), Jackie (Jeanne Moreau), and Saeko (Mariko Kaga), his mantra and demeanor evoking a bygone cinematic representation of gambling. Ultimately Doyle triumphs over Lippett, asserting the necessary function of shame. In Ballad of a Small Player, shame is a human evolutionary asset that directs one away from annihilation in the same way as pain or fear. It is an asset to the ever-unraveling Doyle, even as alleviating the shame he feels can’t reassemble his fractured subjectivity.

Weekly Reading List

I’m in.

A lot happened at The Game Awards, but nothing more important than the announcement of Gang of Dragon. This is a video game that stars Ma Dong-seok. Guaranteed to be epoch defining.

https://anilist.co/manga/187612/Ryukyu-Buccaneer/ — Ryukyu Buccaneer has been serialized in Japan since last year. Illustrated and co-written by Doi Nau, Buccaneer is a fusion of bakumatsu-era period piece about samurai and swashbuckling adventure. Think Hell’s Paradise (2018) without the supernatural angle. You are going to have to use your wiles to find this one, but only two chapters are available in English. If you can read Japanese, you can read it through the currently published chapter.

Event Calendar: Wherever you are, there’s something to do

The Shining (1980) is in IMAX this week. More details about the upcoming Discord movies on the calendar as well. Let’s go.

Until next time.