What’s in a name? In Music League, one name reigns supreme: John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.

Spotify

Apple Music

Even as an adult, I find this song profoundly confusing. Is its premise really that there are two people, the speaker and the subject of the gaze, named John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt? In the somewhat ostentatious name and its repetition, we also have a precursor of what is becoming known as a ‘vocal stim.’

The Lil Uzi Vert and Nav song on the playlist was my contribution. I took it as an opportunity to share some beautiful music with the world more than angle for points. Earnestness is sometimes rewarded.

Catastrophes of Racial Signification in Backrooms

The target of the discourse machine will always be the tele-visual object ostensibly making a corporation a lot of money. Twitter still doesn’t quite have Heated Rivalry (2025) out of its system. There have been no shortage of things between its air date, I am sure, to command a lot of attention. Obsession (2026) has been a routine target of analysis, critique (non-moralizing), and criticism (moralistic). It is unlikely very many good ideas have come up around the film other than relating it to Vertigo (1958).

What’s the next target? You don’t need a map: it’s Backrooms (2026). I’m not going to degrade myself by talking about the financial returns of these films. For all I care, Obsession made six quadrillion dollars and Backrooms made a gazillion. And all on a shoe string budget! How impressive. What is more impressive to me is when popular taste overlaps with mine. This is the case with Obsession: the movie is very good. Backrooms is also okay. But how okay, good, or bad it might be in a qualitative sense, part of the discussion of Backrooms has attempted to litigate where it sits in a moral continuum. Here we are again. If the Backrooms of the film were as labyrinthine as those of the creepypasta, I might argue their un-mappable territory is a metaphor for the repeated arrival at the same sorts of critical inquiry.

Backrooms as an object of scrutiny on the topic of social consciousness and, as you’ll see, racial politics, may not make sense on its face. It is a feature film adapted from a series of youtube short films in turn adapted from a post on the 4chan image board. Somewhere along the line, there are a few video games, including the popular Escape the Backrooms (2022). This is thin, but emergent subject matter. Ideas and interpretations of ‘The Backrooms’ as such have popped up widely across the internet. But Kane Parsons is now the de facto custodian of the lore and canon, with his large body of work across the youtube videos and now the corporate sponsored feature.

As for the film, which represents the concretized ‘The Backrooms’ canon, it follows a failed architect, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) as the duo descend into the mysterious backrooms in parallel. The symbolism here should be obvious: the disciplines of architecture and talk therapy attend to the physical and mental components of the backrooms. Parsons pays his dues to the original backrooms image, taken in a furniture store, staging the entryway to his film’s backrooms through Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. Again, there’s symbolism riding the line between substantial and a bit too cute: any encounter with the backrooms seems to invite colonial aspirations.

One common refrain in criticism of Backrooms as an aesthetic object should sound familiar to horror fans: “nothing happens.” Despite the ostensible incongruity between the ‘weight’ of the source material and the seriousness of the feature film’s subject matter, not much has surprised me about its reception. This critique is no exception. One need look no further than Paranormal Activity (2007) for a critical antecedent to Parsons’ film. In Roger Ebert’s Paranormal Activity review he writes, “It illustrates one of my favorite points, that silence and waiting can be more entertaining than frantic fast-cutting and berserk f/x. For extended periods here, nothing at all is happening, and believe me, you won’t be bored.” Backrooms conveys its horror in the same way. Not much happens. It is unsettling. The disquieting space of the backrooms is brought to life in a way that will stick with you if you see your movies in one of the many megaplexes propping up otherwise abandoned malls.

Another criticism, far less common, indicts Backrooms for explicit or implicit racism. By casting Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, various parts of his character background and some of the imagery associated with the more horrifying elements of the film run up against anti-Blackness. That is, at least, my interpretation of the argument. I have not been particularly impressed or compelled by the close reading that has attempted to substantiate these claims, but these are fair and worthwhile avenues of exploration. However, any reading of Backrooms as anti-Black should not treat the film as an exception. It may or may not be part of a tapestry of how works signify in a society found on racism and with myriad observable outcomes resulting from systemic racism. This is true of any major U.S. motion picture.

Why should what Backrooms represents call for a moral condemnation of the film and its author? And, to the opposite point, why should a work with supposedly ‘low-brow’ subject matter be immune to rudimentary cultural criticism? Asking both of these questions is a re-litigation of asked-and-answered disputes of cultural studies. A work’s author is not on the hook for the social ills it represents. Sometimes those things will enter the film without any agency on the author’s part. To the second question, a work is worthy of study to the degree the critic can make a case for its substance by enacting the critique. My reading is the backrooms, big B, little b, italics, or otherwise, has many worthwhile angles of entry for serious analysis.

When it comes to Backrooms and racism, what is most interesting to me is the difference between Clark on the page and Clark as an embodied character played by Ejiofor. Clark’s race is never explicitly addressed in the film. There is virtually nothing, other than his embodiment, to make a determination about his racial identity. This, in itself, might be a point of contention. However, what it suggests to me is that this role could’ve gone to any man, of any race, and the incidental racial embodiment of the characters — both Clark and Mary — makes this reading possible.

Reading Backrooms and the racial-political problematics that emerge from it alongside the film Suture (1993) is productive in getting to the core of what I think is interesting here. In Desiring Whiteness (2002), Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks writes about Suture:

But the sense of bewilderment that this film generates turns on that point where the traditional narrative would demand an absolute suspension of our disbelief: the physical resemblance of the two brothers. In this film, however, it is not our disbelief that we are called to suspend, it is our credulity. We as spectators know what no one else in the film seems to know, recognize, realize, or care about, and this is that not only are the two men nothing alike (there is not the remotest resemblance, physical or otherwise, between them) but that Clay and Vincent are of different races. Vincent is white, and Clay is black. Like Magritte’s famous painting Ceci N’est pas une Pipe, this film asks us to consider the relation between signifies and visual images. (104)

She goes on to explicate the connection between the Lacanian notion of suture and the title of the film:

In other words, suture names the process by which the subject comes to find a place for itself in a signifying chain by inserting itself in what is perceived as a gap, a place-holder for it. The subject appears in the chain as a signifier, thus making a subjective meaning possible. (105)

To this end, it is not the case that Ejiofor is cast in a ‘white’ character playing the role of Clark. Clark, as a plot function written in a script, can only exist as a gap that is partially filled in the act of performance. Ejiofor’s performance brings Clark to life on the screen, regardless of what was consciously or unconsciously ‘intended’ by Parsons regarding the character’s race.

There is something to be said for the chaos generated when racial signifiers run amok. Backrooms is far from the most extreme example. Only a narrow set of close readers seem to be concerned with any racial-political subtext. Fewer still have made such considerations about films like The Purge (2013) and The Bye Bye Man (2017). Whatever Parsons culpability in representing stereotypes — racial or gendered — the fruit of what he inserts into the signifying chain is precisely the critical discourse we have in front of us. We need not deny it. Rather, we should think about it.

Weekly Reading List

Apparently Quentin Tarantino said something flattering about The Rip (2026) in Sight & Sound. Joe Carnahan’s remarkable thriller is one of the best things I’ve seen this year. I highly recommend it.

Event Calendar: Support Your Local Drive-In

No updates this week, but I’m near the Wellfleet Drive-In Theatre. Maybe I’ll go this week? If you have a drive-in theater near you this summer, pay them a visit.

Until next time.

I started re-reading The Prince of Tennis (1999). It’s so awesome. I forgot that Ryoma Echizen and Baki Hanma start out with the same genre-subverting character motivation.

Speaking of these uncredited, maybe unintentional, similarities among art objects: here’s the most recent Music League playlist.

Spotify

Apple Music

Youtube Music

Voting is over so I can share I submitted a Miki Matsubara song based on its similarity to Michael Jackson.

Classics all around. These two songs are well-known as a pair, so I was lucky to get the submission in.

“Anyone could become obsessed with the past with a background like that”: Objet a and the Non-Existent Woman in Obsession and Vertigo

“[I]n its function as object, objet a cause of desire … we must give a function that will explain its place in the satisfaction of the drive”

Generally, I don’t think any work of art demands the peaks of enthusiasm demonstrated by contemporary audiences. Yes, I would scoff even at Vertigo (1958) “fancams,” though that is among the works most deserving of such slavish dedication. It is not Vertigo, however, that is enjoying such acclaim, but Obsession (2026), Curry Barker’s debut feature film. Despite its film festival premiere nearly eight months ago, lightning has struck during the theatrical release period. The film has taken audiences by storm. Yes, it’s very good, about as good as a modern film can be. And it’s no accident such a great film has caused such fervor among movie goers. Obsession is Vertigo.

For the benefit of the reading audience who I will assume have seen both films, I’ll be brief. Hitchcock’s Vertigo follows the investigative efforts of John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart), a retired police detective, in service of Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to follow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) and prevent her suicide. Some time later, Scottie meets a woman named Judy Barton (also, Kim Novak) who he pursues based on her resemblance to Madeleine. In the background is Marjorie “Midge” Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), a friend and confidant to Scottie whose romantic intentions toward him are not reciprocated.

The plot of Obsession is less complex. A pathetic chump, Baron “Bear” Bailey (Michael Johnston), has romantic designs on his friend Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarrette) and relentlessly brainstorms a method to woo her. With the self-interested advice of his friend Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), Bear fails to convey his feelings and instead uses a strange object called a One Wish Willow to wish that Nikki “[love him] more than anyone in the … world.” In the tradition of the tale of King Midas, Bear gets what he wishes at the expense of Nikki’s sovereignty. All the while, Bear’s friend Sarah Harper (Megan Lawless) has romantic intentions toward him that are not reciprocated.

The most critical resonance between Vertigo and Obsession, aside from a brute mapping of their characters to a corresponding figure (Bear-Scottie, Cooper-Gavin, Sarah-Midge) is the rejection of the supernatural, specifically demonic, component of each film’s intrigue. In Looking Awry (1991), Žižek offers the turn-of-phrase describing the first half of Vertigo calling it, “the fascinating story of a woman possessed by demons from the past” (84). In an interview with CinemaBlend, Inde Navarette recounts Barker’s description of the power that compels Nikki to behave the way she does:

It’s not demonic, I wanna emphasize that. … Curry really nipped that in the bud at the beginning of the process. It was not demonic, it wasn’t a possession, it was a wish, and it was kind of like, for her … this draw to him. I have this veil that’s like over everything while the other Nikki is inside kind of peeping through that sheer material.

In this way, both Judy-Madeleine and Nikki-Nikki are incomplete in their division from themselves. Their duality is excessive and symbiotic. The woman Scottie believed to be Madeleine is in fact Judy pretending to be Madeleine, and in his attempt to re-create her he, at least, relegates her to the position of lure in Gavin’s plot. Žižek writes, “The elevation of an ordinary, earthly woman to the sublime object always entails mortal danger for the miserable creature charged with embodying the Thing, since ‘Woman does not exist.’” (68). This follows from Žižek’s render of Lacan on sublimation:

Hitchcock’s Vertigo, another tale of a woman who vanishes, a film whose hero is captivated by a sublime image, is made as if to illustrate the Lacanian thesis that sublimation, while having nothing to do with “desexualization,” has all the more to do with death: the power of fascination exerted by a sublime image always announces a lethal dimension. … His starting point is not the object of the allegedly direct, “brute’‘ satisfaction, but its reverse, the primordial void around which the drive circulates, the lack that assumes positive existence in the shapeless form of the Thing (the Freudian das Ding, the impossible-unattainable substance of enjoyment). The sublime object is precisely “an object elevated to the dignity of the Thing,” an ordinary, everyday object that undergoes a kind of transubstantiation and starts to function, in the symbolic economy of the subject, as an embodiment of the impossible Thing, i.e., as materialized Nothingness. (83)

Sublimation, and its ‘elevation’ of the object to ‘the dignity of the Thing’ is among the crucial overlapping themes between Vertigo and Obsession. Nikki’s humiliation is her transformation into the miserable, obsequious creature that is a manifestation of Bear’s own fantasy. Madeline is no different.

Relating this figuration to Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), Žižek writes:

It is difficult not to recognize in this phantomlike figure the apparition of Woman, of the woman who could fill out the lack in man, the ideal partner with whom the sexual relationship would finally be possible, in short, The Woman who, according to Lacanian theory, precisely does not exist. The nonexistence of this woman is rendered manifest to the hero by the absence of her inscription in the sociosymbolic network: the intersubjective community of the hero acts as if she does not exist, as if she were only his idée fixe. (80)

The Woman as such, ‘elevated to the dignity of the Thing,’ is featured in The Lady Vanishes, through her absence. One might allegorize this to a chalk outline in certain works of film noir. In Vertigo or Obsession, we see their excessive presence in their very creation by Scottie/Bear. These women, even as Scottie/Bear imagine them as Woman, that which will fill the lack, their ideal fails to live up to what the man imagines despite how exactly — in Obsession, exactly — they live up to the letter of what the man demands. In other words, the entire scheme of the monkey’s paw is revised to emphasize how it is men who don’t know what they want and don’t realize their lack cannot be filled.

If the story of King Midas and the monkey’s paw are the story of Lacan’s objet a,1 then one can look to Vertigo and Obsession to understand the relation between objet a and Woman who, in Lacanian logic, does not exist. It is critical to differentiate between this non-existent or barred Woman and the supposed ‘ideal woman’ precisely because this ideal is only supposed. When one obtains it to the exact specification of their fantasy, there is no satisfaction. Laurence Simmons writes of Vertigo and the MacGuffin that reveals Judy and Gavin’s deception:

Judy/Madeleine puts on the necklace inherited by Madeleine from Carlotta Valdes. For Scottie, the jewels belong to the real Madeleine not just the image of Madeleine (although they were present in the image of Carlotta Valdes) so they cannot belong to the real Judy. He now must ask himself how he got what he thought he wanted: the perfect image, agalma.

Obsession is more explicit. Nikki behaves with an absolute, animalistic devotion toward Bear. This devotion is ultimately threatening and demands from Bear equivalent… obsession. To some degree, this is where Vertigo and Obsession diverge. Nikki obtains a One Wish Willow herself and condemns Bear to a corresponding stupor of obsessive love. Their Bonnie and Clyde moment is short lived and transforms quickly to Romeo and Juliet. Bear consumes painkillers in an attempt to kill himself, and though he ultimately flinches and tries to vomit, his being overtaken by the power of the One Wish Willow leads to him, for one reason or another, not vomiting. So, he dies, and in turn releases Nikki from her obligation to the terms of his wish. Let us not make the mistake that this turn suggests the two might’ve been happy. They would only be equals in their mutual enslavement, and Bear’s death is a structural necessity for the plot’s logic. Thus, Obsession upholds the notion of Lacan’s non-relation as vehemently as Vertigo.

“Here I was born, and there I died.”

Viewing the films should make clear that both Obsession and Vertigo call into question the guarantors of one’s subjectivity regardless of gender. Although Bear/Scottie and Nikki/Judy are structurally analogous in the logic of each film, they each make opposite demands of their unwilling partners. For Scottie, identity is coextensive with the image. Bear not only wants Nikki to want him, but he wants her to want to want him. This final criterion is the one which Nikki can never meet, despite the only evidence of her resistance being her unending scream on the other side of a strange phone call or her unexpected plea to ‘kill me.’

Bear himself is as illusory as Madeleine Elster, a flaw with which the film makes clear at the outset. He practices a histrionic, overwrought confession of love to a waitress, supposedly his earnest, authentic feeling. What authentic feeling needs practice? Why would the audience believe that a contrived, juvenile expression of affection represents something real about Bear and his feelings? His faces only multiply as the film continues. There is the reserved, resigned Bear who refuses to admit his feelings to Nikki. There is the disaffected Bear who brushes off Sarah. Even this version of him rings false, as Bear tells no one about the death of his cat in any manner that suggests he is conveying his depth of feeling about it.

If Bear can be said to have any subjectivity at all, it is only that exposed through profound trauma and confrontation. He laments the accidental death of his cat. He, chillingly, refuses to assent to Nikki’s request to kill her, instead asking: “what’s so bad about being with me?” In a climactic moment with her, he repeats this is “all [he] ever wanted,” despite the evidence the facts of his subordination of Nikki do not match the contours of his fantasy.

What Bear and Scottie share, aside from nicknames, is the structural position of film villain. In Scottie’s case, the visual language is unambiguous. He stalks Judy and is ultimately the proximate cause of her death. Stewart’s performance is uniformly acclaimed for its chilling turn in the second act that makes his position clear. Bear’s villainy is equally unambiguous, though the way the film communicates it is unconventional. He is prompted, regularly, to kill himself to set Nikki free. Periodic bursts of ‘the other Nikki’ evince her suffering as a consequence of his wish. Even as Nikki terrorizes Bear as the ostensible supernatural threat, this is a threat of his own making. Her behavior toward him matches what he demands of her against her will.

“There’s someone within me and she says I must die”

Obsession unquestionably fits within the generic formalism of horror film. Much of the frenzied reaction to the film comes from how effective it is subjected to horror’s rubric. Nikki follows Bear, menaces him, entraps him, moves with an inexplicable, supernatural quality. The film’s gore is remarkably reserved for the first two-thirds. But the film never loses sight of the extent to which Nikki herself is the victim, out of control of her own body. Bear’s transformation of her afflicts her with what the film conveys as an illness. This, too, fits the archetype of Madeline and other ‘ideal women’:

The ideal love-object lives on the brink of death, her life itself is overshadowed by imminent death—she is marked by some hidden curse or suicidal madness, or she has some disease that befits the frail woman. (Žižek 85)

At the same time, both versions of Nikki have an inexhaustible vitality that Bear seeks to confine. Though her Wish Willowed version seems to control Bear, her control of him is a result of his ceding of control. His reluctance to speak, to exist, to be somebody, is what leads to the film’s sorry state of affairs.

The similarities between Vertigo and Obsession cannot be understated. There is certainly more to mine in the encounter between the texts. I, at least, will make the effort to continue it. Obsession is not itself without Alfred Hitchcock.

Weekly Reading List

Art is just out there for you to encounter.

https://www.arrowvideo.com/p/blu-ray/wandering-ginza-butterfly-collection-limited-edition-blu-ray/17699252/ — I did not get a chance to write about this movie for the letter, but you should watch it.

Event Calendar: More at the Brattle

I added listings for some screenings of one of my all-time favorite films, Malcolm X (1992) at the Brattle.

Until next time.

I love an issue that calls for me to bury the audience in footnotes. They snowball out of control. Once I start leaving footnotes, I start aspiring to the full-page Fanon footnotes about Lacan in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). My copious footnoting is not occasioned by Music League.

Spotify

Apple Music

Youtube Music

This past round was dedicated to songs under two minutes. The resulting playlist is necessarily, mercifully short. It is not exactly a fun listen. The first song is an exceptionally bizarre acapella about domestic violence. I submitted VaVa. Otherwise, there wasn’t much for me here outside of the stuff I listen to already — Playboi Carti, Dicks (shout out killfromtheheart.com), Stalag 13. Maybe you will find something more your speed.

“The power to soothe savage men”: The Spectral Women of Yoshiyuki Tomino and Earl Lovelace

Lalah Sune. Reccoa Londe. Quess Paraya. What can possibly explain the bizarre behavior, treatment, and positioning of women in the work of Gundam auteur Yoshiyuki Tomino? Reccoa is a particularly interesting example, a character in Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (1985) who works with the protagonist Kamille Bidan but betrays him for her love of the antagonist Paptimus Scirocco. This puts her opposite a former comrade, Emma Sheen, who stays committed to the AEUG cause. Reccoa and Emma kill each other toward the end of Zeta. During the final confrontation, Emma tells Reccoa, “You’re being too much of a woman.” Reccoa replies:

That’s right! I’m a woman! That’s why I’m here, and now I’m your enemy! That’s why I fight. Each person lives life differently. I don’t want interference with mine. … Men think of nothing but fighting and can only think of how to use women as tools. Or if anything else, how to humiliate a woman.

In an interview soon after Zeta concluded its TV run for the Mobile Suit Z Gundam Encyclopedia (1986), Tomino tries to explain the relationship between the two:

When it comes down to it, the two of them are talking about an identity that represents the idyllic image that men hold of women. To sum up why this is, Reccoa is a good example. She never makes the attempt to take a stand for herself even after how she was treated at Jaburo, and she maintains a state of denial by making excuses like “I’m looking for the man who will fulfill me”, and she ultimately ends up looking for a way to become dependent on a man. As a man, this is extremely gratifying to see. Emma is extremely similar to Reccoa, and I believe that the two characters are fundamentally the same in this sense.

Even with Tomino’s explanation, Reccoa’s character turn and later actions are hard to reconcile with how she’s depicted in the first half of the show. Nearly a decade later, Tomino would reflect back on the women in his work in conversation with Hideaki Anno, Yūichiro Oguro,1 Shinichirō Inoue,2 and Bii Ogawa for a Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack (1988) fan magazine Anno released in 1993. Inoue asks Tomino whether the trope of women betraying their allies comes from Tomino’s difficult professional relationship with Yoshikazu Yasuhiko3 and Mamoru Nagano.4 Tomino dances around the question, but Anno puts a finer point on it, “it’s generally women who are doing the betraying.”

Like Reccoa, Quess betrays her allies in Char’s Counterattack and defects to Neo-Zeon to become a mobile armor pilot. Tomino explains her character’s function:

I thought, “A character like that would be good for setting things in motion.” That’s her true value. The thing that decided it was, it got me thinking, well then, in that case it doesn’t necessarily have to be a girl like Quess, right?

Even if Quess is a plot device, the form she takes on and the actions she takes aren’t accidental — even if they might be ‘unintended’ as Tomino is conceptualizing the script and story sequence of Char’s Counterattack. Quess and her betrayal loom large over the latest Gundam work, Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe (2026). Shūkō Murase directs this second of a planned trilogy adapted from Yoshiyuki Tomino’s original novel, Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash (1989). Like Quess, Hathaway features a woman with shifting allegiances, Gigi Andalucia (Reina Ueda/Megan Shipman). And, like Lalah from the original Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), Gigi is a sex worker.

These echoes make Gigi a confusing and somewhat unsatisfying character. Tomino is an archetypal storyteller. He has character personalities, relationships, and plot structures that he reuses over and over. And, indeed, he has a view of women that endorses misogynistic tropes but explains them through the imposition of systemic misogyny:

I think the reason [women] leave like that is basically due to a self-preservation instinct. “There’s a part of a woman that can’t survive without someone else to depend on.” That’s actually just an epistemology instilled in them by men. And so they’ve gotten used to that[.]

This is obvious in the case of Reccoa, who names men as responsible for her ‘humiliation,’ which, in turn, drives her to betray. Tomino clearly learned something from film noir, too.

Gigi is a little different. In The Sorcery of Nymph Circe, Federation Captain Kenneth Sleg (Junichi Suwabe/Aaron Phillips) pursues her while she pursues terrorist figurehead Hathaway Noa (Kensho Ono/Caleb Yen), also known as Mafty. Gigi ingratiates herself with Kenneth, she works to keep Hathaway aware of the Federation’s designs on him. Gigi’s loyalties are earnestly divided. Though she supports the Mafty political program, she tells Hathaway in the first Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway (2021) film, “the way Mafty does things isn’t right.” In Nymph Circe, she interrupts Hathaway’s frenzied reminiscence of the events of Char’s Counterattack which casts young pilot Lane Aim (Soma Saito/Kieran Walton) as Amuro Ray (Tōru Furuya/Lucien Dodge).

Tomino treats Gigi like Quess, both of them functioning as plot devices. The film makes no attempt to cover this over. In Hathaway, Kenneth tells her, “It always seemed to me like you have the power to soothe savage men.” Because they are fulcrums for the plot, and regardless of their critical symbolic meaning, there is something unsatisfying about their psychological and dramatic substance as characters. There is less to them than Amuro, Char Aznable, or Hathaway. Gigi and Lalah are particularly of apiece because of their shared origin as sex workers. Sex work or sexual economy, in the literal sense of economic fungibility, is often connected with the kind of mystical, illusory quality of women characters.

Earl Lovelace, the author of Trinidadian Carnival fable The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979), confronts these same issues with his heroine Sylvia. Despite her age, seventeen, he describes her in a remarkably sexual fashion, which immediately raises alarm for contemporary readers.5 He also emphasizes this otherworldly quality that Gigi and Lalah seem to share:

She had watched, felt, the whole performance as if she wasn’t there, from a distance, was already engaged in the apprenticeship of being the whore, the virgin fucked but untouched. Already she had outgrown these boys that never sliced her virginity. She had grown away from them, and, even before them, the men watching her, so that now she could look at all of them with a kind of amusement, wonder, really, watching to see what they would try next. (25)

Given this description, readers should be unsurprised when Lovelace describes her entry into the aforementioned sexual economy:

instinctive knowing refined by seventeen years on this hill, that between this man, the rent collector, and her mother, a woman with seven children and no man either, she was the gift arranged even before she knew it, even without the encouragement or connivance of her mother. (25)

On the one hand, one can see how the denigration and precarity of a woman’s life in Cavalry Hill, the setting of The Dragon Can’t Dance, is ultimately because of masculinist hegemony and economic power. On the other, and not to scold Lovelace, but to read him, the potential romance between Sylvia and the age-inappropriate partner Aldrick suggests Lovelace is not fully equipped to deconstruct the tropes he deploys here. Sylvia and Aldrick fall into the archetype of heroine and hero, destined to be lovers, despite the way in which it naturalizes Sylvia’s treatment as a sexual object. Such treatment is always cause for objection, but it is particularly objectionable because she is a child. Though Tomino is unlikely to have ever read the English-language work of a novelist from Trinidad, he addresses this point explicitly in the context of the common visual gag of showing a young woman’s underwear in Japanese animation:

What I mean is, you see white pair of panties, and in that glimpse you see that the artist or director is only showing them furtively or knowingly. When it comes to [a character’s] fleshiness, if you’re putting that kind of thing out there without considering how it’s going to be seen, then I really wish you would stop. … If you’re intentionally doing that then you’re making a lolicon cartoon, which is bad for kids’ education and you should knock it off. … I want him to make that clear. Even if it’s just a painting on a cel. “I saw that girl’s panties.” “I could see them.” “I had to see them.” You need to be clear which it is. More than calling that character meaningless, I think it’s disrespectful. Carelessly showing their underwear. Am I wrong?

Tomino’s critique cuts across all works of fiction, navigating the ‘fleshiness’ (a term he tentatively defines and deploys in the course of the Anno interview) of a character set against the undeniable reality that they are representations rather than actual people. In his medium, animation cells.

Resulting from this view, Tomino may be the better critic of misogyny by representing it — again, a lesson likely learned from film noir. The most damning humiliation from Sylvia at the hands of her author comes at the novel’s conclusion Now in her late twenties, Sylvia is the ‘beneficiary’ of ‘advice’ from Aldrick that allows her to escape consignment to a loveless life of domestic servitude. Lovelace writes:

he could see that Sylvia in her way had arrived, that, at least, she could feel she had arrived; her own clean, polished room with almost every available modern convenience. She was too wise now for love. (199)

Sylvia has fully bought into her comfortable lifestyle. She asks Aldrick, “What you could give me?,” to which he replies, “Yourself” (201-202). All I can do is laugh.6 Lovelace narrates Aldrick’s thoughts:

he turned and waved again, this time with both hands, signalling [sic] faith in her and a joy in the moment, signalling [sic] as a dear friend, a lover, who is going on before to be joined later by her. In truth, he felt to rush back to her and hold her in his hands and lift her up and carry her away with him; but, he had come to Sylvia, not to claim her, but to help her claim herself (203)

The novel does not push back or question this notion of what Aldrick can offer whatsoever. She really does ‘claim herself’ because of Aldrick’s provocation and ends the novel abandoning her comfortable life for a comradeship with an aspiring revolutionary (218).

Looking at Lovelace and Tomino side by side, all I can think is that some misogynies are more interesting than others. The ill-treatment or poor writing of women in Lovelace leaves the men of his novels untouched. By contrast, Tomino’s leads are distorted and obsessed with the women they’ve lost. In Nymph Circe, the strongest evidence of this is Hathaway’s struggle to embody the ascetic guardian of Plato’s Republic7 (375) or Miyamoto Musashi’s Dokkōkō8 (1645). Hathaway constantly struggles against his supposed ‘carnal desires,’ “I’m supposed to have a high-minded mission to shock the world into setting itself right.” In service of that mission, he feels the need to transcend those aspects of his subjectivity that are not ‘high-minded.’

Tomino is not endorsing this idea among ‘warriors.’ His entire oeuvre is a condemnation of war, to the extent that it is possible in film. What Tomino is attesting to here is the relationship between men and women. In his interview with Anno, he says:

I think that the fact that men torment women as a part of everyday life shows that the power dynamics tied to our issues as an animal species can never be overcome, and even though the women can be forced to submit through brute strength, what we see is just a reaction on their part; it doesn’t fundamentally threaten their position of sovereignty.

Emphatically, he believes there is a relationship between men and women, an inherent relatedness even if the form of that relationship can transform, and that the failing of the ascetic masculine is its rejection of the inherent connectedness to women.

Or, if the relationship between men and women is not inherent, it is at least pleasant. But Tomino echoes the (slightly homophobic and, indeed, fight-fire-with-fire misogyny) critique leveled by The Boys (2019) of the manosphere, this time directed at Plato and Musashi. This asceticism or ‘high-mindedness’ has a queering effect and denies all that which might be pleasant or pleasurable about how men and women can relate.

Where Tomino and Lovelace seem to differ critically is on the question of lack. Aldrick’s wisdom is complete enough to impart something on Sylvia to snap her out of an ideological stupor. Hathaway has no answers, like his predecessor Amuro. And, like Amuro, Hathaway is incomplete. Despite occupying the structural position of Amuro in the narrative logic, Hathaway echoes the view of Char. While Amuro pleads with both Char and Hathaway to await the product of human wisdom, Char and Hathaway condemn him in the same way, “grant all these ignorant people your so-called wisdom, at this very moment!”

Tomino describes Amuro in these lacking terms in his conversation with Anno:

“If only you had been more of a hero, you could have ended things in a cooler way!” There’s a feeling of insufficiency, or at least that’s how I feel about it.

Char, on the other hand, covers over that insufficiency:

It’s not so much that he’s like me, but that we’re on equal footing, and I understand his feelings. So there are things I know very clearly, including that part that’s like, “Doesn’t it make you embarrassed to wear that mask forever?” … I don’t have that with Amuro, he was just raised very normally.

Hathaway is their amalgamation. But is his lack covered over enough with the name of Mafty in the same way as Char’s mask? Neither Amuro nor Char is ‘sufficient,’ but Char’s ‘coolness’ comes with the cover he chooses for his lack. Even as Reccoa shares the dubious claim to psychological realism of the undeveloped Sylvia, she has more in common with Tomino’s lead characters than Sylvia has with Lovelace’s. While both authors struggle with the representation of women, only one gives us a relation among genders as strange as the behavior of his underserved women characters.

Weekly Reading List

Two nice collections of semi-recent Kant scholarship from Paul Guyer are out this month. Find them at your local library.

And here’s some music:

Event Calendar: Backrooms (2026) this weekend

Not actually adding it to the event calendar, but the Backrooms feature film is out this week. I’m there on opening night. Otherwise, see Rififi (1955) in June and Vertigo (1958) in October.

Until next time.

There are a lot of songs about nukes. More than I thought. This week’s Music League theme: “songs with lyrics about nuclear apocalypse or anxiety about nuclear weapons.” I was critical of this theme, thinking it might be generically homogenous. It was only after the playlist came out that one of my generous volunteer administrators for this season of Music League reminded me: I’m the one who came up with it. I forgor.

Spotify

Apple Music

If you are a Music League spectator and are only going to listen to one playlist this go around, let it be this one. I would’ve happily taken the blame if the playlist sucked or was boring, but I’m even happier to take the credit knowing it is probably the best playlist we’ve ever had. The hits don’t stop: Sun Ra, Discharge, Kraftwerk, The Smiths, Prince, Bolt Thrower, Doom, and Watchtower.

There were also songs from bands and artists I’m not too familiar with, who I will now listen to a lot like Barry McGuire, Tom Lehrer, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, and Television Personalities. I have to give some special attention to a song that moved me particularly: “誰にも見えない匂いもない2012” by Rankin Taxi.

The title translates to “You Can’t See It, You Can’t Smell It,” an upbeat dance hall tune with lyrics like “radioactivity is horrible, radioactivity is cruel, radioactivity hurts.” This is the second version of the song by Rankin Taxi, opposing the use of nuclear power in Japan in a post-Fukushima climate: “if there’s an accident it’ll be a huge panic, one small mistake and everyone will die.” Taxi takes aim at corporate greed, the environmental costs of nuclear power, and the military-industrial complex in a radically incongruent musical mode.

Someone else submitted the Integrity cover of “Cease to Exist” which blew my mind. I like the lyrics of the Earth Crisis version, but the song is not good.

This is an incalculable improvement. Dwid even changes some of Karl’s lyrics, from “Mercy of madmen whose commands will cast us into World War Three. If the keys turn from the press of a switch all life as we know it will cease to exist” to “welcome to World War Three. Flip the switch, turn the key. Cease to exist.” Integrity strips down the lyrics at every opportunity to great effect.

I underestimated the scope of cautionary nuclear fables, and even more so just how fantastic the songs would be. What’s the common thread here? This is a subjectWorld War Three for the great songwriters of the past two generations.

This week I wrote about the three Kiyoshi Kurosawa films that have been screening around the country. This is the second time I’ll be writing about Chime (2024).

The 2024 essay is really good. Reading it felt like seeing it for the first time and I didn’t re-tread the same territory this week. If you don’t have it in your inbox, you’ll have to cop a paid subscription to read. I’m not just giving you a sales pitch saying that I’d be happy to have spent $5 to read it.

“I don’t know what possessed me”: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Troika of Chime, Serpent’s Path, and Eyes of the Spider

“Sensory knowing ceases, while spirit-urges proceed”

Without question, the most popular of Zhuangzi’s writings is the ‘butterfly passage.’ Lacan explores it in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973), Westworld (2016) evokes it in the fifth episode of the fourth season.

But I also like the fable of “Butcher Ding,” “The Dextrous Butcher,” or, as translated here, “Cook Ding”:

Cook Dīng was carving up an ox for Lord Wén-huì. Every touch of his hand, every move of his shoulders, every step of his feet, every bend of his knees—Swish! Thwack! The sounds rang out as he waved the knife with a swoosh, all perfectly in tune, as though performing the Mulberry Grove dance to the rhythm of the Jīng-Shǒu symphony.

Lord Wén-huì said, ‘Ah! Wonderful! How can skill reach this level?’

Cook Dīng put down his knife and replied, ‘What I care about is the Way. It’s beyond skill. When I first began carving oxen, what I saw was always the whole ox. After three years, I never saw the whole ox. Now I meet it with my spirit, rather than looking with my eyes. Sensory knowing ceases, while spirit-urges proceed. I go along with the natural patterns, strike in the main gaps, and guide the knife along the major seams, working according to the inherent structure. So I never hit the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.

A good cook changes knives annually—this is cutting. A poor cook changes knives monthly—this is hacking. Now this knife of mine I’ve used for nineteen years, carving thousands of oxen, and yet the blade is like it’s fresh from the grindstone. The joints have spaces in them, and the blade has no thickness. When what has no thickness enters what has space—whoo!—there’s surely more than enough room for the blade to wander about. This is why after nineteen years the blade is still like it’s fresh from the grindstone.

Still, whenever I come to an intricate place, I see it will be difficult and cautiously take care. I keep my eyes on it, work slowly, and move the knife delicately, until suddenly it has already come apart, like a clump of earth falling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife, looking all around, feeling completely satisfied and fulfilled, and then I wipe the knife off and put it away’.

Lord Wén-huì said, ‘Excellent! From hearing the words of Cook Dīng, I’ve learned how to nurture life’. (57-58, Fraser trans.)

Like all of Zhuangzi’s work, there’s a lot to read closely. The simple, presentist contradiction is between the realm of butchery and the idea of “nurturing life,” a contradiction that is smoothed over by the ideas of life’s circularity that romanticize human needs and wants in their subjection of the so-called ‘natural’ world. There’s also the realm in which Dīng works — one might “hack” or “cook,” but there’s not a name for what Dīng does. He cares about “the Way” as opposed to cultivating skill. “Spirit-urges” supersede “sensory knowing.” Then there’s the description of the knife’s relation to the joints, “the joints have spaces in them, and the blade has no thickness … there’s surely more than enough room for the blade to wander about.” Dīng reasons here from a first principle, that a knife moving through empty space should never dull. But it is only his precision, or rather, his adherence to “natural patterns” that allows him to insert his knife into a space which is otherwise invisible. The most conventional of his advice is, “whenever I come to an intricate place, I see it will be difficult and cautiously take care. I keep my eyes on it, work slowly … until suddenly it has already come apart.” His slowness is not a question of efficiency, or even time. Before he knows it, the job is done. My dad gave me this same advice, “when in a rush, slow down.” And Ding takes pride in his work, “feeling completely satisfied and fulfilled.”

Reading Zhuangzi’s parable against the grain, more in line with the contradiction between “to butcher” and “to nurture life,” is what Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Chime (2024) allows.

Rewatching Chime with Serpent’s Path (1998) and Eyes of the Spider (1998) this weekend, I couldn’t help but think of Takuji Matsuoka (Mutsuo Yoshioka) as a Butcher Ding-like figure. If some other agency, “spirit-urges,” inhabits Ding to the end of virtuosic ox carving, those same “spirit-urges” take the form of the chime that drives Matsuoka to kill others and Ichiro Tashiro (Seiichi Kohinata) to kill himself. Though Matsuoka tells detective Makoto Otsuki (Ikkei Watanabe):

People come here to calm their negative emotions. Looking at the ingredients, touching them, and savoring the taste calms you down. So we feel fine even with dangerous things lying around.

One can imagine Matsuoka sitting in an interrogation room much like the one where Kenichi Takabe (Kōji Yakusho) interrogates Kunio Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), looking at Otsuki as confused as he is in his first job interview, “I don’t know what possessed me to say that.”

Something radical, and radically against one’s own self-interest, repeats in Chime. There’s the chime itself, Matsuoka’s repeated reference to himself for which he is castigated, his wife’s disposal of cans, the stabbing and cutting of onions, chickens, and human bodies. Freud writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920):

It is clear that the greater part of what is re-experienced under the compulsion to repeat must cause the ego unpleasure, since it brings to light activities of repressed instinctual impulses … the compulsion to repeat also recalls from the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even to instinctual impulses which have since been repressed. (Norton Standard Edition 21)

In the simplest possible Freudian terms, these repetitions are a manifestation of something repressed. While Butcher Dīng may turn over his body to his “spirit-urges,” one cannot control what those urges motivate someone to do. Not all are so lucky. And Matsuoka kills with the wu wei of “effortless action” or “absence of self-initiated action” (Zhuangzhi: Ways of Wandering… 182). He is possessed by desire.

The repetitions that characterize desire in Chime generally entail some encounter between or among subjects. Elaborating Freudian Wiederholungszwang (’repetition compulsion,’ usually, in the Stardard Edition) as “repetition automatism” in “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’,” Lacan writes:

It is not only the subject, but the subjects, caught in their intersubjectivity, who line up—in other words, they are our ostriches, to whom we thus return here, and who, more docile than sheep, model their very being on the moment of the signifying chain that runs through them.

If what Freud discovered, and rediscovers even more abruptly, has a meaning, it is that the signifier’s displacement determines subjects’ acts, destiny, refusals, blindnesses, success, and fate, regardless of their innate gifts and instruction, and irregardless [sic] of their character or sex; and that everything pertaining to the psychological pregiven follows willy-nilly the signifier’s train, like weapons and baggage. (Écrits 21)

Following this logic, Lacan chooses “automatism” over “compulsion” because the unconscious intervention into human action has several requirements. First, a pre-precondition, the subject must be the subject of the signifier, enmeshed in a signifying network that requires multiple subjectivities. Second, the subject’s desire is not the agent of their action, but rather the Lacanian view suggests the subject’s representation initiates the automatism of repetition. The signifier is displaced by itself in the course of representation.1 This, too, is a repetition.

Kurosawa, in some sense or another, is not ignorant of this labyrinthine Lacanian formulation. Chime hinges on the assertion of Matsuoka’s “I” in an intersubjective setting. Matsuoka’s excesses, along with those of his wife Haruko (Tomoko Tabata) and his son Kenichi (Koki Ishige) chafe against their ego. This ego corresponds to an ideal imposed based on a ideology of domestic obligation. None of them, however, can fulfill the roles into which they are cast precisely because they are displaced in the course of their casting with the movement of the signifier.

“If it’s the wrong guy, they’re all involved anyway”

If representation-as-repetition is critical across Kurosawa’s oeuvre, the most evident meta-repetition is across Serpent’s Path/Hebi no Michi and Eyes of the Spider/Spider’s Eyes/Kumo no Hitomi.2 Both films star Shô Aikawa as a man named Nijima Naomi. Though Nijima’s biography is different between the films, he is an enigmatic killer partially involved in a revenge plot in both. Serpent’s Path is my favorite among the two, where Nijima initially appears to be the Faustian tempter to Teruyuki Kagawa’s Miyashita — sharing a character archetype with Mamiya from Cure or Sano (Daiken Okudaira) from Cloud (2024). As it turns out, however, it is Nijima who is seeking revenge rather than thrills and his ultimate target is Miyashita.

Both Miyashita and, it is revealed toward the end of the film, Nijima have daughters who have been tortured and killed by an unnamed criminal organization. This organization sells tapes of the abuse. Miyashita, a former salesman of these tapes, is looking for the specific killer. Nijima faults the organization as a whole, and directs Miyashita to expose more and more members. Thus, the relationship between Nijima and Miyashita is less Sano and Ryōsuke (Masaki Suda) and more Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and Leonard (Guy Pearce) in Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000).

Following the discussion of Hannah Arendt’s “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” (1964) two weeks ago, Nijima’s ostensible revenge quest follows the logic of her argument. She writes:

In every bureaucratic system the shifting of responsibilities is a matter of daily routine, and if one wishes to define bureaucracy in terms of political science, that is, as a form of government—the rule of offices, as contrasted to the rule of men, of one man, or of the few, or of the many—bureaucracy unhappily is the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of rulership. But in the courtroom, these definitions are of no avail. For to the answer: “Not I but the system did it in which I was a cog,” the court immediately raises the next question: “And why, if you please, did you become a cog or continue to be a cog under such circumstances?” (31)

Nijima, like Arendt, faults both the system and the so-called “cogs” in the system’s machinery — even as every supposed killer implicates someone else. He holds to account every person with even proximate participation in the act of torture or the self-enrichment resulting from that torture.

Serpent’s Path repeats, in part, out of necessity. It is a narrow film with only a few sets; including two of Kurosawa’s signature empty warehouses. Part of Nijima’s sinister quality comes from his activity in one of those sets, a classroom where he teaches gibberish.

There’s something cultish about Nijima’s seminars where he cautions students of all ages that an incorrect result in these nonsensical equations could lead to “space turn[ing] inside out and time go[ing] backwards.” Knowledge is power for Nijima, both in the sense of his bizarre writing on the chalkboard and the truth of who committed the actual murder of the children. That power is also dangerous, with the power to turn around time or cause the world to “fall apart.” Nijima knows what Miyashita is looking to uncover through the entire film, positioning himself to achieve his own goal of killing the entire organization. He forces Miyashita to reckon with knowledge’s destructive quality.

But Nijima’s true identity, or even his corporeal reality, is called into question. Miyashita may just as well be haunted by his own conscience within the circuitous dream logic of Serpent’s Path.

“Is there anything you’d sacrifice your life for?”

Eyes of the Spider is the more comedic of the two Nijima films, tying together the continuity of domestic anxieties from Cure to Chime and Cloud. This version of Nijima is not just a father, but a husband. The film is full of vignettes of a home life resembling Takabe’s or Matsuoka’s. Behind the facade, Nijima is a disaffected hitman working on behalf of a shady government organization with a group of yakuza aspirants including his high school friend Iwamatu (Dankan).

The film explores a number of Kurosawa preoccupations in addition to the ill-fit of domesticity for the ungovernable subject. Nijima kills effortlessly, inexplicably skilled as an assassin. There is a lingering, unexplored conspiracy behind the scenes of the film in which Nijima is caught. In the end, Nijima is a working stiff trying to pay his mortgage. This, too, forces subjectivity and desire into frames that cannot accommodate them.

This version of Nijima’s disaffection comes in the wake of an unsatisfying revenge that, rather than leaving Nijima unsatisfied, seems to render him too satisfied and unable to behave in accordance with demand or desire. Instead, he has become a cog, moving only when prompted through paths set out for him.

Again, Kurosawa shows a sinister side of a mastery that defies conscious thought. Nijima doesn’t need passion to kill. Instead, he kills because he can; and because there are worse ways to make a living.

Weekly Reading List

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/thomas-nagel/i-m-not-sorry — Thomas Nagel vs. T.M. Scanlon is a clash of philosophical titans. And Nagel empties the clip in his review of Scanlon’s Morality and Responsibility (2025). From my perspective, this is a fair and good faith critique of Scanlon’s work and some of its most ridiculous conciets. The subtext of Nagel’s analysis is a through line between Scanlon’s thinking and the moral universe of social media condemnation.

Michael Sugrue’s vintage lectures archived on youtube are absolute gold. I watched a few this week and am shocked to realize I’ve never posted them in the newsletter before.

Event Calendar: Gundam is in Theaters

Sparse updates this week — just added Mulholland Drive (2001) and Taxi Drive (1976) both at Brattle and both in 35mm this week. But really what you should do is watch Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway (2021) at your house and then go see The Sorcery of Nymph Circe (2026) so you know what the hell I am talking about when I write about it next week. There will be Plato.

Until next time.

Music League’s theme this week was a song you like by an artist you hate.

Spotify

Apple Music

I already discussed my difficulty making a selection here. Ultimately I chose a song by Drake that is 60% inside joke with a friend of mine. I don’t feel like I was exceptionally adhering to the prompt. “Hate” would be kind of a strong descriptor for my feelings about Drake, though I do think most of his music is pretty terrible. We had some pretty easy to hate representation: Maroon 5, Dave Matthews Band, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters. We also had shocking feelings of hatred by the edgiest of us: Bauhaus, Pixies, Pavement.

But the best choice, the one that I thought would have been more true for me than even my own submission was Post Malone. My friend Eric submitted “Congratulations.” I’m sure everyone has heard it. I would’ve gone a little further back.

What can I say, I am a sucker for melancholy rap songs about mortality. I don’t even know what kind of terrible music Post Malone is making now, but there’s a fall off study to be had looking at his career.

This week, Eiichi Kudo.

“When he fights with the aim to die, he lives. When he fights with the aim to live, he dies”: Critique and Chivalry in 13 Assassins

In a conversation with Gene Siskel from the November 11, 1973 edition of the Chicago Tribune, François Truffaut makes a critique that has reverberated through film criticism for decades:

For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don’t think I’ve really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war.

Truffaut makes no exception to this critique, even indicting Paths of Glory (1957) and Dr. Strangelove (1964) as proponents of war. The films to which Truffaut are far from the only example, I’ve written about this idea in relation to The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel (2013), Black Mirror (2011), and Severance (2022). In my first engagement with the idea for Paradox, back in 2019, I also discussed Mobile Suit Gundam (1979):

In the case of Gundam, Yoshiyuki Tomino as the series’s architect is faced with the impossible task of telling a story critical of war all the while having to sell models of the war machines to children. And the machines that Tomino should revile are instead almost objects of worship.

Indeed, much of the Gundam works are subordinate to the capital incentives that justify their existence — down to some of the most egregious examples of Mobile Suit Gundam Narrative (2018) largely structured to re-use toy molds.

The tension here, especially in the cases where the contrast is so apparent, can make a text more rich. Paths of Glory and Dr. Strangelove clearly works that critique war whether or not they inadvertently also endorse it. In contrast to Truffaut, I think there’s evidence to suggest they’re successful. To quote myself again:

Kubrick was certainly on to something here. The best way to make an antiwar film might be to have the majority of the film’s runtime dedicated to the tedious bureaucracy of the court martial and the insistent pleas of men consigned to death.

Unlike those two films, Gundam is a self-awarely Janus-faced beast. Bandai expects toy commercials while Yoshiyuki Tomino, Yasuhiro Imagawa, and even Toshikazu Yoshizawa are trying to make art. The samurai-focused jidaigeki encounters the same tension, as films present heroic characters and finely choreographed chanbara action while also critiquing the social hierarchy and ideological inconsistencies embodied by the samurai class. No movie more than Eiichi Kudo’s 13 Asssassins (1963) demonstrates this contradiction.

“We must figure out a way to correct the distortion of this injustice”

In their summary for the film’s re-release, Arrow Video writes:

By 1963 Eiichi Kudo was already a jidaigeki veteran. But for 13 Assassins, he decided to buck the emerging trend for colourful, family-friendly samurai films and renew with the radical traditions of the genre. The resulting film is a compelling and suspenseful samurai drama that remains impactful to this day.

Despite the gritty quality of Kudo’s film, it is far from the nihilistic, caustic condemnation of Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri (1962) from a year before. Neither Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), nor Masahiro Shinoda’s Assassination (1964), nor Kihachi Okamoto’s The Sword of Doom (1966) make available a reading that romanticizes the “samurai spirit” (samurai no kokorozashi) or “Way of the Warrior” (samurai no michi). 13 Assassins, though, explores both with a naive earnestness through its principal characters Shinzaemon Shimada (Chiezō Kataoka), Shinrokurō Shimada (Kōtarō Satomi), Kujūrō Hirayama (Kō Nishimura), and antagonist Hanbei Onigashira (Ryōhei Uchida).

All of this is to say, despite the violence and salacious material in 13 Assassins, it valorizes and ennobles the samurai as something more than a privileged social position rife with hypocrisy. There is certainly something ‘family friendly,’ or ideological, about that.

13 Assassins sets Shinzaemon and Hanbei against each other. What is critical about the film’s structure is neither man acts on their own behalf. Were it up to them, they wouldn’t be fighting at all. Shinzaemon works on behalf of Doi Ōkō Toshi (Tetsurō Tanba) to exact punishment on Hanbei’s lord, Naritsugu Matsudaira (Kantarō Suga). Naritsugu evades public censure as the half-brother of the Shogun and Hanbei reluctantly fulfills his obligation as his retainer despite Naritsugu’s apparent sadism.

Doi’s instructions to Shinzaemon are secret. He says, “To betray the word of the Shogun, and find fault with his political leadership, that’s something, as a senior advisor, I cannot do.” Instead, he sets Shinzaemon on his mission as a clandestine assassin with dubious legal authority. I write in my Letterboxd review of 13 Assassins:

Thus, the lawful and moral hierarchy that insulates Naritsugu calls for the intervention of Shinzaemon Shimada (Chiezo Kataoka). Shinzaemon is not a sole actor in a state of exception who violates the written law in service of a higher one. Instead, he is a disavowed government operative bestowed his authority by Doi Ōkō Toshi, in a quick but memorable performance from Tetsuro Tanba.

Shinzaemon acts with authority that Doi would ultimately deny. The missive that grants him that authority, Doi burns. This is a familiar pattern for viewers of 007, Mission: Impossible, or 24. But more than any of those works, 13 Assassins invites the question of how such an anonymized, denied authority within the scope of law differs from absolute criminality. How is Shinzaemon different from heroes like Hanshiro Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai) who ignore the authority of written law all together? Shinzaemon’s authority is explicitly unwritten. Or, more emphatically un-written, erased from the archive despite its official status.

Shinzaemon fits squarely into the trope of the “disavowed agent.”

Despite the cloak and dagger instructions from Doi, he must still censure Shinzaemon. Halfway through the film, Shinzaemon is dismissed as a law enforcement official:

By the ruling justice of the country, you have been relieved of your position. Should you fall at arrowpoint, your responsibility weighs tremendously. And the day of life and death shall be determined.

Though Shinzaemon’s status as a judicial functionary is unverifiable, it both sets him apart from the many noir-ish or cowboy-influenced samurai protagonists who have no such authority. Likewise, it places him in structural opposition to Hanbei. Even as Shinzaemon acts in accordance with his convictions in the way Hanbei does not, it is a duty imposed by someone else that causes Shinzaemon to act.

“It’s beyond anyone’s imagination what actually happens when two men fight, throwing their lives at each other”

The caper to assassinate Naritsugu requires co-conspirators, and Shinzaemon enlists twelve other samurai to make up the titular thirteen assassins. The film is unique in that it presents sword fighting as that which has been sublimated into a martial art rather than a tool for killing. Even Shinzaemon is inexperienced in warfare, and the collective working on his behalf acknowledge that for both the assassins’ squad and Naritsugu’s samurai, it will be their first experience in life-or-death combat.

Aside from the social hierarchy and ethical structure that is the subject of so much samurai cinema, Kudo demystifies samurai labor in a time of peace more than other films. Yes, 13 Assassins has ronin like Hirayama and Heizō Sawara (Michitarō Mizushima). The question of being or not being a samurai is inextricable from the status of employment. In this sense, Shinzaemon and Hanbei are yet again opposed to one another. Shinzaemon is gainfully employed, but far from wealthy as an ōmetsuke. Despite his relative economic precarity, Shinzaemon is also a hatamoto, from a distinguished samurai lineage that, in turn, dictated his own class and profession. Shinzaemon had no choice but to be a samurai.

By contrast, Hanbei is neither an ōmetsuke working on behalf of the Shogunate nor a hatamoto, with no impressive samurai in his family tree. However, he is much more wealthy than Shinzaemon as Naritsugu’s chief retainer. Naritsugu repeatedly alludes to the wealth of the clan by the number of rice bales (specifically koku of rice) in storage. Shinzaemon does not have generational wealth to fall back upon, only generational status. But Shinzaemon’s meager paycheck does allow him to support Hirayama, though Shinzaemon calls it only a “small contribution.”

Shinzaemon’s nephew, Shinrokurō, is yet one more rung removed from the celebrated samurai family of Shimada. Shinrokurō lives with a geisha and refers to himself as a gokudō and works to learn the shamisen, rejecting his implicit obligation of public service. However, after a demonstration of Shinzaemon’s prodigious shamisen skills despite also being an accomplished samurai, Shinrokurō joins Shinzaemon’s cause. Being a great shamisen player never satisfies Shinzaemon, no matter how proficient he becomes at the instrument. His virtuosity passes that dissatisfaction to Shinrokurō, less accomplished as both a musician and samurai.

“I’ve heard it said that a samurai would choose death to avoid becoming a laughing stock”

Much of the film revolves around the antagonism between one’s self-image and perception by others. Shinzaemon is seen as endlessly proficient, but Shinrokurō has a different read of him:

He gets deeply worried, thinking about what trouble he’s getting into. But, despite all his feelings, he just smiles and takes on the job. He takes on jobs that seem impossible, and achieves success. And that’s the really great thing about him.

Shinzaemon is externally self-assured and admired by even those who recognize his internal anxiety. Both Yukie Makino (Ryūnosuke Tsukigata) and Naritsugu concern themselves with the idea of being ‘laughing stocks’ in the English translation — though it’s worth noting their Japanese phrasing is different (guchi to o-warai kudasare and tenka no monowarai respectively). Even the different Japanese phrasing lends itself to reading this juxtaposition. Makino is unable to protect his son and daughter-in-law from Naritsugu, “as a living witness, I don’t feel free to die, so I must extend this life that I no longer care for.” Naritsugu’s obsession with how he is perceived by others (tenka, the world) is one of his many flaws.

Ultimately Shinzaemon’s self-image is different from the calm exterior he shows. He looks at himself as having lived too long, and will confront death through Doi’s censure or in the course of assassinating Naritsugu.

“I’m telling myself now how truthful I’ve been to the Way of the Warrior”

There is no question that the failings of the samurai class’s structure cannot dampen the heroic character of Shinzaemon, Shinrokurō, Hirayama, and Heizō. Though Heizō has little screen time, his role is critical. He re-emphasizes the economic relations of the samurai. As a ronin, he demands payment for joining the plot against Naritsugu:

My sympathy with your cause has nothing to do with money. But I’m a ronin with no kind of relationship with you. I don’t think you should expect me to work for no payment.

Heizō then describes his plans for the 200 ryo payment he requests:

120 ryo for loans and debts that have accumulated over the years, plus buying something nice for my relatives. Then, 30 ryo for a tomb for my wife who died from the hardships I put her though. And 20 ryo for my own preparations. With the remaining 30 ryo, I plan to experience the kind of luxuries I never had in life … pleasing those around me ultimately satisfies my desire.

In the film’s penultimate scene, Shinrokurō finds Haizō’s dead body, 30 ryo left in his pocket.

This unstated and unknown self-sacrifice encapsulates what is admirable about the samurai for Kudo.

Like Haizō, Shinzaemon is heroic for what he is willing to sacrifice. He exposes his doubt to Hirayama only through parable:

They say a man’s life is unpredictable, but not a warrior’s life. When he fights with the aim to die, he lives. When he fights with the aim to live, he dies. I’m telling myself now how truthful I’ve been to the Way of the Warrior.

Even as Shinzaemon is a paragon of the samurai (samurai no michi), he has fallen short only because he has not given his life. Not for nothing, this is a film whose action is initiated by harakiri: Zusho Mamiya, another chief Naritsugu retainer, kills himself in a plea to the government to censure Naritsugu and deprive him of his title. Hanbei takes a different path:

If Chief Retainer Lord Mamiya had to commit harakiri, I wish he’d done so in front of my lord. I feel we could’ve done something about it then. I’ve also thought of committing harakiri myself. But I kept seeing the face of the former Shogun, who asked me to protect his son Naritsugu, and the face of my foe Lord Shimada.

Hanbei is only a villain because he is trapped between the two obligations. But neither Hanbei nor Shinzaemon act without some sort of lawful authority, even if the record of that authority for Shinzaemon is erased and denied. Hanbei and Shinzaemon both die in the course of battle, Hanbei killing Shinzaemon without Shinzaemon raising his sword back. His dying words to Hanbei, “this is the right way. If I hadn’t killed your lord, I’d have lost my pride as a samurai. If you hadn’t killed me, you’d have lost your pride, too.” This is cut-and-dry heroic stuff. The critique the film levels, even in the face of these larger-than-life characters, looks at both the samurai’s rigidity and the permissiveness and favoritism of the Tokugawa Shogunate.

Shinzaemon tells his comrades after killing Naritsugu, “end this meaningless fight.” It is meaningless not just because Naritsugu has been killed, but because the confrontation itself occurs only because of the governments inability to object to the Shogun’s nepotism. Kudo seems to acknowledge that the samurai façade can produce perverse incentives. Hanbei ignores his ethical convictions in favor of personal enrichment and status. Shinzaemon cannot, nor does he even want to, pursue the life of an artist despite his prodigious shamisen skill.

Even understanding those shortcomings, 13 Assassins is a much more favorable, romantic view of the samurai than its contemporaries. The outlook is almost naive, with much of the characters plight coming from the machinations of daimyo like Doi and Naritsugu, the truly shiftless and corrupt compared to the committed, duty-bound samurai heroes.

Above all else, Shinzaemon is a hell of a cool character on screen. And this is a movie that’s full of them. For the scathing critique of samurai hypocrisy, look to Harakiri. 13 Assassins is a Shakespearean tale of those more heroic than flawed and inspiring than deconstructed. Nonetheless, Kudo’s work is at the peak of the genre.

Weekly Reading List

Music this week.

Also this.

Event Calendar: Gundam is Back in Theaters

Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe (2026) is gearing up for a full theatrical run starting on Thursday. There are at least seven days of showings nationwide, usually around 7pm at your local AMC. This is the second film of a planned trilogy, the first of which is available on Netflix. And, what do you know, I’ve written about it.

Until next time.

Losing well is not easy. Developing your response to losing, if you are a competitor, is vital. But there are wider applications here for those who lead a blissfully agreeable, non-confrontational life. Losing in a competitive sense has a very discrete meaning defined by whatever game context. But typically a loss entails some affect, disappointment, frustration, perhaps something unanticipated. So thinking about losing and how one deals with it implicitly involves dealing with disappointment, frustration, and the unexpected. Watching Luis Scott-Vargas lose playing Slay the Spire 2 (2026) this weekend, he made an offhand comment, “frustration is also a really important part in games. It can really keep you coming back.” Where frustration meets that impetus to to come back is key to how one loses.

In competition, the stakes of losing well are very high. Typically a single loss is not the end of your competitive journey. You can lose one game in a match. You can lose one match, but still be in contention for the broader win. You must avoid becoming ‘tilted.’ Whatever your emotional response to an unfavorable result in a game, you have to maintain composure and continue to play well to give yourself the best chance of further wins. A loss shouldn’t compound into further losses just because you’re disappointed or frustrated — though this happens all too often.

At the same time, the answer is not being disaffected in response to a loss. Feeling is good. Feeling something about a game or any kind of competition where you are in a position to win or lose means that it matters. It should matter. If it doesn’t, why bother doing it in the first place? Something that matters to you will, probably, mean you expend a greater effort and likely perform better because of your emotional investment. But that investment invites the risk of getting tilted, suddenly playing or performing worse because of an unexpected loss. This is where the challenge lies. There are no prescriptive, one-size-fits-all answers to this quandary either. I am always working to make sure a loss hits me in the right spot. Losing should provide motivation and learnings for improvement or greater understanding of my position without sending me off the deep end.

Things get all the more complex when the losses are not your responsibility, but you are nonetheless emotionally invested. Yes, we’re talking about sports and the Boston Celtics. The Celtics have been bounced, ignominiously, from the first round of the NBA playoffs. It’s a strange situation to be disappointed when the team’s prospects at the beginning of the year were so abysmal. Jayson Tatum was injured. Brad Stevens cleared the roster for the sake of lowing the team’s tax bill. But I was still optimistic.

My optimism does not win basketball games. Nor does the fan’s attitude, knowledge, disposition. However good or bad of a fan you might be, the team performs the same. And I cannot be the most gracious loser when I have no control over the outcome. When the outcome isn’t even my win or loss. The greatest regret I have is that I probably won’t watch any more basketball this season. At least that leaves me more time for movies.

Maybe I can’t quite be the good sport I want to be when it comes to professional sports is because the stakes are so low. But I can be a good sport when it comes to losing in Music League. I am getting crushed. You thought I forgot? Here are the new playlists for our third attempt at a covers round:

Spotify

Apple Music

With cover songs, they can be hit or missed based on whether or not you know the original, whether or not the original is good, whether or not the cover is good. A good cover usually shouldn’t be too similar or too different from the original, although there’s plenty of room for exceptions on either ends of the spectrum. I almost want to put my favorite song on this playlist behind a paywall because it is so salacious and shocking. I’ve never listened to the band Falling In Reverse before, but their cover of “Gangsta’s Paradise” moved me. It does not sound serious, which is a plus. As a gag, it’s okay. But beyond the joke, where the punchline is only incongruous juxtaposition, this version does expose something about just how good of a song “Gangsta’s Paradise” is. I’ve listened to the Coolio version a million times and stopped paying attention to it line by line a long time ago. I heard the verse:

Fool, death ain’t nothin’ but a heart beat away I’m livin’ life do or die, what can I say? I’m 23 now but will I live to see 24? The way things is going I don’t know

like I was hearing it for the first time.

Next week we are asked to submit a song we like by an artist we hate. I am innocent — category creation is delegated to others this season. I’m finding it pretty difficult to think of anything I can submit that fits the prompt. I don’t really “hate” artists who have songs I like. I see two options for myself: choose in the spirit of the prompt, picking a song by an artist whose songs I generally do not like. Or, I could choose to maximize my probability of winning and choose a great song by an artist who most people think is bad. But I probably think they’re great.

I think I’ll stick to the former. Nothing wrong with losing when you know it’s coming.

Crises of Faith in Daredevil: Born Again and The Boys

If you have followed this newsletter for a reasonable period of time, you know I like routinely writing about an ongoing television show. The closest I have gotten to this are an essay about Daredevil: Born Again (2025) about a month ago and one about The Boys (2019) two weeks ago.

I noted in my writing about The Boys that there are some big picture thematic similarities between it and Daredevil. Notably, both series deal with a Trump analogue and have necessarily responded to broader positioning as texts within the so-called culture war.

Spoilers for Daredevil and The Boys follow liberally

One of Daredevil’s most intrigue characters is Daniel Blake (Michael Gandolfini) who serves as the unsuspecting Trump voter. Blake is unsuspecting in the sense that he looks at Wilson “Kingpin” Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) with a reverence that, in turn, produces a genuine belief. Blake’s belief in Kingpin is, to some degree, based on a deception carried out by Kingpin himself. He misleads those who follow him, claiming the altruistic motives of a dedicated civil servant rather than his more evident motives of self-enrichment. To this extent, Blake is positioned to be an object of the audience’s sympathy. He has been duped through no fault of his own and has bought into lies presented with the precise function of eliciting his support.

Unlike the average political supporter, however, Blake becomes Kingpin’s Deputy Mayor and is exposed to the inner workings of the criminal enterprise. In the second season’s fifth episode, “The Grand Design,” Blake is explicitly read into the essence of Kingpin’s criminality: Buck Cashman (Arty Froushan) brings Blake to dispose of a murdered corpse.

This is the most acute cause of the struggle for Blake that Deborah Ann Woll identified in her conversation with Gandolfini in a discussion about the second episode, “Shoot the Moon”:

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?

In “The Hateful Darkness,” last week’s episode, Blake has to face the dissonance of what he believes about Fisk and what he is expected to do as a believer. Blake is coerced to turn over his romantic interest, BB Urich (Genneya Walton), to Cashman. If Urich falls into Cashman’s hands, she will presumably be killed because of her unfavorable coverage of the Kingpin regime. Urich also serves as Blake’s conscience, confronting him with the incongruity he already seems to struggle with at some level.

Blake, ever the sympathetic character, ultimately chooses to help Urich escape Cashman.

The episode illustrates the contrast between Blake and Cashman in their subsequent encounter. Cashman tortures Blake, but Blake purposefully deprives himself of the information that might save him — Urich’s location. Instead, he tells Buck:

What is followin’ his orders gonna do for you? How long till you’re on the floor with a gun pointed at your head?

Indeed, what Kingpin can do for Cashman has always been at issue between the two of them as distinct from Blake’s earnest belief. In “The Grand Design,” Cashman says to Blake in the course of convincing him to bury the corpse, “we work for a man who can change your life.” Material enrichment has never been Blake’s goal. He is motivated by faith.

Faith is the watchword in The Boys’ final season’s fifth episode, “One-Shots.” The episode is bookended with the story of Firecracker (Valorie Curry), a right-wing religious superhero supporting the fascist superman Homelander (Antony Starr). The season’s anxiety-inducing twist is Homelander’s claim of Godhood, working to create a religious apparatus around him as a deity that supplants American Christianity.

Firecracker, who previously believed Homelander shared her religious convictions, now faces two incompatible belief systems: Christianity and the Democratic Church of America.

The episode follows Firecracker through her anguish, painfully trying to supplant Jesus with Homelander. She accuses her religious mentor, Reverend Greg Dupree (W. Earl Brown) of pedophilia and disgraces him as reprisal for his disbelief in Homelander.

Firecracker also confides in Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), Homelander’s father. Soldier Boy crudely affirms her, “If there is a God, he sure as hell didn’t come out of my balls.” But Soldier Boy is Firecracker’s Judas, revealing her hesitance. Homelander accuses her of being ‘unfaithful’ just as she attempts to truly displace her former faith.

He says:

Are you thinking of Jesus when you’re praising me? … You’re supposed to worship me. Love me. And me alone. … I believed in you. Turns out you don’t believe in me. I need you to collect your things and leave.

Homelander’s rejection only stokes her desire to appear faithful. She sets herself apart from his other followers:

Everybody else here, they’re just scared of you. Or they want something from you, but I have always loved you for you.

What Firecracker doesn’t realize is her conflation of the romantic, human love she has for Homelander and the distinctly religious affection she has for Jesus. Homelander, however, does not allow the two to be conflated. She asks him, “We all need love, don’t we? Even God.” Homelander is astonished, in part because what she appeals to is his human foible of need. God is complete. She exposes precisely that he is not God. And he rejects her because, as she says, he needs love.

Both Daniel Blake and Firecracker meet grisly ends, Blake spared the indignity of being killed by the one in which he believes and Firecracker smote like so many nonbelievers. They both die because of a crisis of faith.

The religious character of Firecracker’s relationship to Homelander is obvious as a feature of the plot itself, but Blake’s attitude toward Kingpin is as overt as subtext could possibly be. During his death scene, he is crosscut with Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) in prayer to Saint Jude.

Both Daredevil and The Boys treat faith with some amount of suspicion. Blake and Firecracker lie to their God-analogues with different degrees of success. Blake tells Buck, despite being tortured, that he doesn’t know where Urich is. He tells the truth, but only because he has deliberately denied himself the knowing Buck presumes him to have. This echoes his relationship with the knowledge of his own wrongdoing. On the verge of turning Urich over to Buck, Blake tells her:

I went upstate with Buck, to the Catskills, and we buried a body. And I wish I didn’t know I did that. But I can’t have anyone else knowing I did that. [Emphasis added]

This is his apology for killing her, she must die to not know he did that. More interesting, though, is his formulation “I wish I didn’t know I did that.” Blake’s issue is not with the doing, but the knowing. Would that he could forget, he would be spared the moral weight of his action.

Firecracker is a different kind of believer. Her belief is earnest, though perhaps she may wish to forget her faith in Jesus. What she says to Homelander is true, but truer than she intends. Even as she avows her belief in him as a God, it is the unconscious impossibility of her belief in him that is revealed by her question “We all need love, don’t we?” For Lacan, these complexities are part and parcel of discourse. Communicating will never get across what it appears to represent. In “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (1966) he writes:

Even if it communicates nothing, discourse represents the existence of communication; even if it denies the obvious, it affirms that speech constitutes truth; even if it is destined to deceive, it relies on faith in testimony. (209)

Faith is what guarantees speech, and to lack faith means to lack the capacity to tell the truth — even if the guarantee that faith promises is destined to fall short.

Of course, there are more realpolitik interpretations of the plight of Firecracker and Blake, such as that of Hannah Arendt. Where Lacan takes us as far as their discourse, Arendt’s framework evaluates their ethical positioning. Once again, we see where the two characters diverge: Firecracker attempts to assimilate into the fold despite her nagging disbelief, whereas Blake willingly becomes an apostate, rejecting Fisk and Cashman. Even as Blake’s life is on the line, he behaves morally in Arendt’s formulation. In “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” (1964) she writes:

There was a widespread conviction that it is impossible to withstand temptation of any kind, that none of us could be trusted or even be expected to be trustworthy when the chips are down, that to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same, whereas in the words of Mary McCarthy, who first spotted this fallacy: “If somebody points a gun at you and says, ‘Kill your friend or I will kill you,’ he is tempting you, that is all.” And while a temptation where one’s life is at stake may be a legal excuse for a crime, it is certainly not a moral justification. (18)

Firecracker needs no such temptation to subordinate her own convictions to Homelander’s whims, whereas not even the most extreme temptation could bend Blake’s will once his faith is broken. Blake refuses to be a cog, contrasting the justifications Arendt describes post-WWII war criminals as using, “Here it is indeed true what all the defendants in the postwar trials said to excuse themselves: if I had not done it, somebody else could and would have” (29). Neither Firecracker’s attempt to impose upon herself the idea that Homelander’s will is inextricable with the moral law nor the implicit threat of Homelander’s profound power is enough to excuse her from culpability. Firecracker is the late-stage follower of a dictator:

I must here remind you that the personal or moral issue, as distinct from legal accountability, hardly arises with those who were convicted adherents of the regime: that they could not feel guilty but only defeated was almost a matter of course, unless they changed their minds and repented. And yet, even this simple issue has become confused because when the day of reckoning finally came it turned out that there had been no convicted adherents, at least not of the criminal program for which they stood trial. And the trouble is that, though this was a lie, it is not a simple or total lie. For what had started in the initial stages with politically neutral people who were not Nazis but cooperated with them, happened in the last stages with the party members and even with the elite formations of the SS: there were very few people even in the Third Reich who wholeheartedly agreed with the late crimes of the regime and a great number who were perfectly willing to commit themselves nevertheless. (Arendt 35)

In this sense, we see the opposite in Firecracker. She attests to her commitment in an attempt to believe it, rather than to obscure her doubt. Functionally, though, these processes are identical. An attestation to the leader of belief and commitment will obscure doubt, whether the subject wants to doubt or not.

Regardless of how Firecracker accepts or rejects her uncertainty about Homelander, she is “on the floor with a gun pointed at [her] head” suffering the fate that Blake predicts for Buck. Faith, or the attempt to enact faith, isn’t even enough for Homelander. When that faith is predicated on his human qualities, he must reject it.

Though both Firecracker and Blake suffer the same fate, their relationship to the sovereign they have dedicated themselves to is distinct. Whether one is a doubting servant or an unapologetic apostate, they are equally at risk for murder by a capricious king.

Weekly Reading List

Nothing here made it into the essay, but I enjoyed this interview with Curry about the fate of Firecracker.

You can become unkillable in Slay the Spire 2 (2026).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sangokushi_(manga) — Been digging into this manga classic. Seek and you shall find.

Event Calendar: Noir City Boston is Back

I had a ton of fun at last year’s Noir City: Boston festival and am looking forward to attending this year. The incomparable Foster Hirsch will be back introducing the films. They are showing The Yellow Canary (1963) and The Crimson Canary (1945). I haven’t seen anything they’re screening other than Sweet Smell of Success (1957), even some of the heavy hitters. If you live in the area, I strongly encourage you make your way to as many of the Noir City screenings as possible.

Until next time.

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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

4 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.

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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.