When you hop aboard a bicycle and learn how to ride, there is this moment of truth as you try to maintain your balance and build momentum. It doesn’t feel possible that picking up speed will make staying balanced easier, yet that is precisely what happens as you pedal with more confidence and purpose.

Bicycle Thieves is a film that immerses you in that wobbly state between forward momentum and crashing out. Its protagonist, Antonio Ricci, never takes full flight, nor does he succumb to total disaster. He is, as the film takes pains to illustrate, one of many wobbling nervously and precariously ahead.

Ricci’s movements about Rome—or more accurately within and among masses of other Romans—are the crux of the film. Lamberto Maggiorani, the actor who plays Ricci, has movie star looks, but was in real life untrained and a factory worker. Perhaps because of this authenticity, he exudes pathos, whether as a seemingly triumphant provider for his family or as a desperate man trying to claw back what has so quickly and unfairly eluded him. It is the backdrop of Rome—the real, unvarnished, staggering post-war Rome that Italian Neorealism made central to its movement—though, that gives the story real heft.

Without an unending supply of other would-be Antonio Riccis bustling around the actual Antonio Ricci that has our attention on this day—without understanding that he is one of many—this would not land in the same way.

In that sense, Bicycle Thieves is a film that trains your eyes downward. It does so figuratively, in the context of class—we are meant to consider what those living on the edge like Antonio must navigate—but also literally. After Antonio’s wife pawns their bedding so he can get his bicycle back and take a job putting up posters around the city, we are, because of the title of the film, waiting for it to be plucked away from his grasp. There it is, almost never fully in frame, bleeding off the bottom edge, the frustration of seeing part of it eclipsed only by the panic when it disappears fully. Is this the moment that will send Antonio spiralling? Or is it the next? Or the one after that?

Even after his bicycle is stolen, you still find yourself gazing downward. In the bottom quadrants are piles of bike parts in the Piazza Vittorio and kneeling, hungry congregants at Mass, and mozzarella sandwiches. There are hands ready to handle you roughly and feet kicking up dust and cars and buses that might mow you down carelessly if not properly heeded.

The bottom half of the screen is where, for us foreign viewers, the subtitles are. But it is also where the real meaning is—where Antonio’s growing desperation slams headlong in to the grinding, unceasing, callous rhythms of a city that has hustled and bustled since before the birth of Christ. If the Second World War could barely knock this city off its path—you’ll find this war-torn version of Rome fairly familiar if you’ve ever been—then what kind of cataclysm actually would?

Director Vittorio De Sica doesn’t really pose that question or, even if he does, expect an answer. Instead, he seems to be asking us to see the precarity and possibility of Antonio’s situation, and appreciate that it is one of a nearly infinite number that could be playing out at that moment.

Ultimately, Bicycle Thieves is like a ride through the city in which it is set—one famous for having seven hills. There are ups and downs. Antonio beams alongside his reclaimed bike, buffed and shined by his son, a perfect match for the starched hat and uniform he will wear to his new job. Not long after, he is back in his floppy fedora, wet as a stray dog in one scene and manhandled by a mob in another, as he searches in vain for his lost transportation.

One other way this film is like a ride through Rome. is in its use of actual and metaphorical crossroads. This is, after all, the city to which all roads are supposed to lead. Crossing traffic is a near-constant—a companion to and obstacle in the way of Antonio’s search. On a less literal level, his journey shows us a universe of possible outcomes depending on which path he takes. He can be the working man or the thief—the man who, when gainfully employed, can buy his son Bruno a sandwich and sneak him some wine at a restaurant, and, when not, introduce him, shamefully, to a life of petty crime.

Antonio Ricci is a man on the edge, but he is also a man moving more quickly than he can think. He doesn’t just rush through intersections. He also rushes through Mass, a meeting with an apparent holy woman and prophet, and an underground Communist Party meeting.

Given his predicament and your persuasions, you might wonder why he doesn’t find more time for prayer or for organizing with other would-be workers. Perhaps that is the most powerful point De Sica has to make. For someone like Antonio, there is no time for catechism or class consciousness. Perhaps there should be, but, you know, he has a family to feed first.

Returning guests and Lynch devotees Ben Elsener and Andrew Stewart are back one last time. Together, we recap the season’s earliest episodes, discuss why Twin Peaks is a fitting capstone on our comprehensive examination of Lynch, and attempt to place its original ABC run in historical context, including how audience and network pressure forced major story reveals and contributed to the show’s decline in the second season, but also how it set the tone for the era of prestige television that would arrive over the next decade or two.

We contrast the TV series’ tonal agility and its beloved ensemble (especially Special Agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan) with Fire Walk with Me’s far darker, narrower, but still urgent focus on Laura Palmer, leaving room for plenty of praise for Sheryl Lee while also noting the film’s polarized reception.

Join us to hear everything from our take on the mythology of the Red Room to our proposed definitions of “Lynchian,” as we reflect on Lynch’s singular influence on modern cinema and television.

Show Notes

00:00 Introduction
01:49 Why End on Twin Peaks
17:14 How ABC Let It Happen
25:04 Tarantino Take and Laura Focus
30:30 Fire Walk With Me Reactions
36:52 The Limits of the Prequel Film
41:21 Red Room Meaning
51:21 Picking Favorite Scenes / Lightning Round
58:05 Defining “Lynchian”
01:02:16 Discussing Lynch’s Legacy
01:09:24 Season Wrap and Farewell

For a tradition that is so ostensibly backward-looking—whether celebrating films from the prior year or steeping itself more deeply in more than a century of moviemaking—Oscar night is actually most useful as a barometer for what the industry is working through in that exact moment.

For most of this century, that has manifested as ever-accelerating neuroticism—about declining ratings and the collapse of the monoculture, about representation and the ugly power dynamics that have always permeated the industry, and, now, about the shrinking landscape of places you can go to get a film financed or even see one if you don’t want to sit on your couch.

The New York Times used the word angst as part of its recap of the ceremony. One film writer I’ve long followed characterized the proceedings as having a “funereal undercurrent.” These aren’t misrepresentations of the state of affairs, what with the ongoing fallout from streaming remaking consumption habits and yet another corporate merger sure to put many people out of work.

But it is, in my view, a touch too negative in its summation of Hollywood’s mood—missing a strain of pugilism that felt new to the Dolby Theater this year.

Host Conan O’Brien is there mostly to keep things silly and light. Yet, there he was Sunday night lampooning the streaming-born practice of recapping plot points for people absorbed in their second screen vis a vis Casablanca. Before that, he went hard in the paint on Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos for the part his company has played in both imperiling the moviegoing experience and in our deepening loneliness crisis.

There is a real edge to Conan’s mockery. Sarandos seemed to take it in stride, but if he turns out to be a thick-skinned tech CEO, he’ll be the first of which I can think.

None of this is to say that Hollywood’s existential crisis is imagined or even overblown. It’s quite real, and it has the potential to do a great deal of ongoing damage. The industry, though, didn’t seem quite as unsure of itself or as resigned to its fate as it has been in years past.

Perhaps it’s a death rattle, but on a night when a 39-year-old from Oakland took home a bunch of awards for a film that was as commercially successful as it was critically acclaimed in a month when one of the major studios announced it would lengthen its theatrical windows, I’ll choose cautious optimism, if only for a moment.

The 98th Academy Awards are in just a handful of hours, and like always we’ve got a whole host of thoughts and golden hot takes to help get you ready for the year’s biggest night in film.

Start with our list of the best films of 2025, which include a bunch of the films nominated this year:

Then go deeper than a paragraph or two with our discussion and pick for the very best film of the year. Spoiler alert: we’re right in line with what the predicition markets have.

And since the two favorites were both distributed by a studio that may not even exist by the time next year’s Oscars roll around, you could also read our article or listen to our podcast episode about all the drama with Warner Brothers.

Finally, I’ll be posting the hottest of takes as Notes as the ceremony unfolds, but in the meantime, here’s my ranking of the Best Picture nominees, Nos. 1-10. If I finish The Secret Agent before the ceremony I’ll be sure to update the order.

Ranking the Best Picture Nominees

1. Marty Supreme

2. One Battle After Another

3. Sentimental Value

4. Sinners

5. Bugonia

6. Hamnet

7. Train Dreams

8. F1

9. Frankenstein

(Still working on finishing The Secret Agent as you read this post.)

Enjoy the show, everyone. If nothing else, we’ve at least got Conan again.

Join us as we discuss the horrors of late capitalism and how this acquisition might hasten the slow decline of the theatrical experience.

Just like any other modern artform, cinema has always been concerned with what money and power does to the soul. One of the most beloved films ever made is pre-occupied with this concern. You don’t have to go back to the 1940s for this sort of meditation, though. Parasite, just named the best film of the 21st century by The New York Times, is about this very thing as well, even if—in being about it—it’s far more blisteringly furious than It’s a Wonderful Life.

It’s been more than a half decade since the release of Parasite, and I think it’s fair to say that the forces fueling the fury of that film have only grown. Filmmakers, in turn, have had more than ever to say about this subject over the past year. I would expect that to continue for the foreseeable future—both because it takes years to produce a film and because there is zero indication that our “culture of elite impunity” is changing.

Once upon a time (aka 2005), comedian George Carlin quipped that “it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it,” to sum up where we the people stand in relation to elites. His incisive pessimism seems to be getting proven right, but, that aside, I find it interesting that, over the course of the last 20 years, this kind of sentiment has leaped from a single countercultural comedian to—this past year—a number of celebrated films. The film industry, after all, has always had a close relationship with power, and defaults to having a vested interest in reinforcing it. That it can’t seem to ignore the pernicious nature of it now, as it is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, tells a tale about how bad things have gotten and shows the real limits of filmmakers to push back. In some ways, all film can do is illuminate, and illuminate it has.

I’m not sure I found any scene from the last year more haunting than the final one in After the Hunt, which brings Carlin’s quip to life. In it, Julia Roberts’ Alma and Ayo Edibiri’s Maggie sit across from the table at a diner years after both were embroiled in a #MeToo-adjacent sex scandal at Yale on opposite sides.

Where once they were lobbing accusations at each other, now they are downright collegial. Neither has paid any real long-term price for their actions despite both carrying real guilt. Indeed, both seem to have benefited materially.

They’re in the club. We ain’t.

The strange bedfellows found in the Epstein files—the Chomskys alongside Bannons—give this scene, and Luca Guadagnino’s film by extension, a remarkable prescience. A scandal only really matters if there are consequences for those involved. Otherwise, it’s merely a spectacle—an empty-calories kind of entertainment.

Other films from 2025 were far more absurdist in their handling of the so-called Epstein class. Bugonia turns Emma Stone’s would-be tech CEO in to a literal alien. Director Yorgos Lanthimos at once takes the doomerism lurking deep within the ostensible missions of Blue Origin and SpaceX seriously, and also has his version of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk lie and manipulate to escape culpability. Gee, I wonder where he got the idea.

Presumptive Best Picture winner One Battle After Another, meanwhile, uses a shadowy white supremacist organization called the Christmas Adventurers Club as a driver of the film’s overall paranoia. When even a would-be agent of the Club, Sean Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, is disposable to those in power, we are, it would seem, all in grave danger.

If director Paul Thomas Anderson captures the paralyzing anxiety of living through such times, then whatever comes next cinematically might do well to diagnose what we can all do to change things. Sure, Benicio del Toro’s Sensei offers a scant bit of a hint, but One Battle After Another ends with its protagonist having barely scraped by, not with him delivering some kind of righteous accountability. Perfidia Beverly Hills’ letter to her daughter admits failure, and in the same breath hopes that “maybe” it will be different for the all-grown-up Baby Charlene. It’s a Wonderful Life, by contrast, uses community and virtue to deliver a decisive blow against the scheming of Mr. Potter.

In this context, it might be 28 Years Later, of all the films released last year, that offers the clearest warning about the status quo persisting. That film isn’t so much about a collective problem facing us as it is about our failure to respond appropriately. In it, a community mistakes self-imposed isolation—avoidance, in other words—for a solution to the threat. All that really does is make you more vulnerable when it eventually comes knocking on your door.

Thankfully, we’ve got more than a decade worth of experience doing this and we basked in a bunch of great movies all the live long year.

Find out which topped our list and along the way enjoy a deep, serpentine discussion about the cinema that stood out and left an impression.

Timeline

00:00 Introduction and New Year Greetings
01:23 Reflecting on the Year in Movies
09:54 Favorite Beverages and Listener Shoutouts
13:39 Diving into the Best Movies of the Year
14:01 Unexpected Movie Highlights
28:24 Breaking Down Cynicism in French New Wave Cinema
29:32 Exploring Unconventional Films and Performances
30:10 Debating the Merits of After the Hunt and Bugonia
37:45 The Polarizing Life of Chuck and Its Unique Appeal
40:49 Celebrating Genuine and Earnest Storytelling
42:29 Top Four Films of the Year: An Overview
59:42 Leo’s Versatility and Performance in One Battle After Another
01:01:59 The Propulsive Nature of One Battle After Another
01:03:50 Sean Penn’s Unbelievable Performance
01:05:17 Benicio Del Toro vs. Sean Penn: Best Supporting Actor Debate
01:10:34 Ryan Coogler’s Sinners: A Box Office Hit
01:18:12 Michael B. Jordan’s Dual Role and Performance
01:27:55 The Joy of Cinema and Final Thoughts

New domain, who dis?

Yes, if you clicked through the email, you have probably noticed that In Reel Deep has a new resting place. Steve and I got tired of paying for two domains, but we haven’t lost our zeal for cinema or listmaking.

So, here we are, with another top 10 list—our 12th together if we’ve got the count right. It was a pretty amazing year for the watchers, even if the bean-counters tell us things are increasingly bleak for the industry as a whole. Here are 16 films we loved from the year that was.

The Top Four

Black Bag

Andrew Johnson: One thing that happens a few times a year right now if you’re a middle-aged cinephile, is that you watch a movie and are reminded they barely make anything explicitly and exclusively for adults anymore. Black Bag was one of those reminders. It might even be the rarest variety, for surely we get 10 or 20 adult comedies for every erotic thriller. Fewer still are the erotic thrillers that are actually good, as Black Bag is. Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett are the biggest reasons for this, but it’s not just the sexual tension between them that accounts for it all. It’s the perfectly manicured and tight-fitting suits and cocktail dresses, the hot and cold tones of their home and the office, respectively, and terseness with which they are able to express fierceness without a voice ever being raised. The sexy vibe is the thing—one that leaves you thinking of a lot of other similar movies with a spy veneer that forgot those vibes and, in so doing, suffered.

Steve Cimino: Andrew mentioned Fassbender and Blanchett, and it’s delightful watching Fassy be a devoted Wife Guy. But Black Bag is really a six-hander; you’ve got Tom Burke, who is quietly having quite a moment with this and Furiosa. You’ve got Marisa Abela, who is fantastic on HBO’s Industry and a huge amount of fun here as well. And you’ve got the always reliable Naomie Harris and the unhealthily handsome Regé-Jean Page. When Pierce Brosnan is the weak link, you’re doing something right. Thank god Steven Soderbergh un-retired and—as Andrew said—continues to make high-end movies for grownups.

Marty Supreme

AJ: Timothee Chalamet’s Marty Mauser is a manic inversion of the Walter White types that have dominated television and movies for two decades. His deep flaws are immediately apparent. He happily admits that he is out for himself, and will cut just about any corner or screw over just about anyone to make his name. But by the end of Marty Supreme he is overcome by the wreckage left in his wake. In other words, director Josh Safdie made one that celebrates the try-hards. Marty Mauser is an asshole, but he isn’t cynical or ironically detached, or working through some private shame about who he is. He is, to put it another way, genuine even as he lies and fucks his way around Manhattan, London, and, finally, Japan. To put it another way still, he is a breath of fresh air. It’s quite something to make a statement about authenticity through a character that is defined as much by his dishonesty as by the way he plays ping pong.

SC: I think Uncut Gems is a masterpiece, and Marty Supreme is not quite Uncut Gems. It’s Josh Safdie grafting his anxiety-inducing, shithead-centric style onto a sports film, albeit with a scene where concentration camp occupants lick honey off of one of their own. Chalamet throws himself into the titular role with his usual vigor and doesn’t shy away from the annoying side of being a self-centered force of nature. It’s also clear that Josh got custody of the Safdie weirdos in the divorce; you can have The Rock and Emily Blunt, Benny, we’ll take George “The Iceman” Gervin and (sigh) Kevin O’Leary. Shave 20 minutes and this rises to the five-star level.

One Battle After Another

AJ: I’m going to sidestep the roiling debate about where this film might fit in the 21st-century canon—overhyped, underhyped, masterpiece, whatever—and instead focus on what I think will always land about this film even when this particular political moment passes. For me, that is the paranoia and exhaustion of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson—a guy who has walked away from his notions of changing the world to instead devote himself to raising a decent human. In most ways, I am nothing like Bob Ferguson, but I do understand how precious a child you have raised in to a semi-competent human is—how much you want for them and what you’d be willing to do to secure and protect their chance at a chance. We’ve all been through a lot, us parents, but we all have a lot more get through, and director Paul Thomas Anderson gets that perfectly here.

SC: And I will not sidestep anything; this is a modern classic, a truly propulsive motion picture that speaks to the moment and entertains at the same time. The way Jonny Greenwood’s score undercuts the intensity just enough, the incredible performances by almost everyone but especially James Raterman as Greg Bovino Jr., and of course the grand finale drive through the mountains that made everyone realize there were new ways to shoot a car chase. Paul Thomas Anderson has long been a director for film boys (and girls!) whose movies often broke into the zeitgeist long after their release (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, even Phantom Thread). But now is his time and place, and he’ll deserve all the little gold men he racks up on March 15.

Sinners

AJ: At this point, we have to show up whenever Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan are together again. Sinners gives us twice the Jordan in that sense, with him cast as twin brothers, and perhaps that multiplying effect is the best way to interpret and absorb this film, which is at once about vampires and the blues and the long legacy of race relations in the Jim Crow South that extend to the here and now. Sinners is well in keeping with Coogler’s quite accessible sensibilities. It is, after all, another genre flick, following on from Creed and Black Panther. At the same time, this is the most ambitious of the bunch. It swings bigger thematically than anything he has done since Fruitvale Station, while managing to be just as fun as his more mainstream fare.

SC: Just an incredible theater watch. All the music, the extended history-spanning dance sequence, Jack O’Connell and his vampire friends doing an Irish jig in between hunting their victims. Andrew and I love Creed and think Michael B. should’ve been nominated years ago, but it’s fitting that he and Coogler break through in the same year. And let’s hear it for Delroy Lindo, another actor we love who deserved a nomination (if not a win) for Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. Now he finally has one, in somewhat of a surprise, for a true phenomenon that is unapologetically Black but truly spoke to everyone. Nobody does that quite like Coogler, capturing his own experience and his research into Black history and translating it into scintillating moviemaking. He won’t win Best Director, but he’s undoubtedly one of our best.

The Best of the Rest

28 Years Later

AJ: In 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle terrified us well before a speedy zombie flashed on screen by presenting a plausible vision of what complete societal collapse might look like, and how quickly it could come about. There is Cillian Murphy caught on the surveillance cameras still in central London, the wide shots displaying both the deafening silence of a suddenly empty city and the pace at which it happened, what with the crashed cars and the piles of barely rotting trash that remain. Civilization always hangs by a thread. 28 Years Later arrives as a sort-of mirror image of this. It switches a grainy, dawn-of-digital feel for something more pastoral, idyllic, natural, and creepily tradwife. This vibe is undercut by the story that unfolds, and the plot is a key juxtaposition because as safe as things might look, reality inevitably overwhelms. Lindisfarne—connected to the mainland of the United Kingdom only by a footbridge that can be crossed only at low tide—looks like the ideal place to shut out the world and ride out a long storm. But this delusion is a grave error. There is nowhere that is safe forever from an existential threat. Avoiding it is ultimately impossible and makes you more vulnerable in the process. Yet again, this is a frightening vision of the future—one that tells us that our problems don’t end with a Black Swan event. They are just beginning. Sounds familiar.

After the Hunt

AJ: For most of its runtime, After the Hunt is carried, clumsily, by its sterling cast—Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Ayo Edebiri, and an elderly stateswoman-like Julia Roberts. It is a melodrama, but a high-gloss one set against the backdrop of the racial and gender politics of the late 2010s, which is all to say it holds your attention. Its final scene takes it to another level. Roberts and Edibiri are five years’ removed from the melodrama that turned them in to adversaries at Yale. They meet up for a drink, and it quickly becomes clear that both have benefitted materially from what seemed at the time to be certain personal and professional ruin. They exchange genuine pleasantries—a jarring development given what has occurred between them—and in so doing reveal a deep, dark, disturbing cynicism. Clumsy as it all is, Luca Guadagnino is making a statement here about the (ongoing) damage done by elites. Really, it is an indictment, and a damning one at that.

Blue Moon

SC: This felt like “the little movie that could” when I saw it and now it has two Oscar nominations, for screenplay and Ethan Hawke’s incredible performance. I have never seen Oklahoma! and have very little knowledge of musical theater, but I love Hawke and I like Richard Linklater and—even though I’ve seen very few actual plays—I love movies that are framed like them. Hawke’s Lorenz Hart is one of the most endearing sad sacks you’ve ever met; you can feel the desperation in all his witty rejoinders, in the way he hopelessly stares at Margaret Qualley’s Elizabeth as she’s going on about her love life, which he claims to want to be a part of despite clearly being a semi-closeted gay man. All this, plus Bobby Cannvale hangin’ behind the bar serving drinks and bantering with Hart in between soul-crushing conversations; cue the Al Pacino “what a picture” meme.

Bugonia

AJ: One way to explain why so many of the worst of the worst people in this country—and by that I mean tech CEOs—are so obsessed with jumping in rockets and leaving the planet is that they might be literal aliens. They certainly lack humanity. Anyway, director Yorgos Lanthimos makes that notion quite literal in Bugonia, although he doesn’t really reveal it until the very end. I found that revelation to be a bit of a pulled punch, but in the end it didn’t really take away from the sociopathic desperation of Emma Stone or the pathetic, galaxy-brain rantings of a grief-stricken Jesse Plemons. The performances of these two make this one the year’s best, no matter what you think of that ending.

Highest 2 Lowest

AJ: No need to overcomplicate the analysis here: Spike Lee collaborating with Denzel Washington is still must-see viewing. This time around, Spike and Denzel offer us a meditation on the complications that come with success in a creative field—the ever-present temptation to compromise what brought you to this point, to trade what made you for security and comfort. There are times in Highest 2 Lowest when this is made a bit too explicit by the mechanics of the story and the way the characters talk about the predicament in which they find themselves. Ride it out. Enjoy the opportunity to see Denzel carry another quintessentially New York Spike Lee vehicle. Who knows how many times we’ll get this opportunity again.

It Was Just An Accident

SC: It’s a shame that this didn’t sneak into the Best Picture top 10; when it comes to filmmaking the word “brave” gets thrown around too often, but It Was Just An Accident is the genuine article. Writer-director Jafar Pahani has previously been imprisoned for speaking out against the Iranian government, and this is a searing statement about a cowardly, torture-happy regime and the cost of standing up to tyranny. That said, it’s neither hopeless nor overly grim; it’s got team-up energy, as a group of survivors with differing personalities discuss what to do after capturing what seems to be their former oppressor. Panahi has plenty to say but he’s telling a story, not preaching, and his work is all the better for it.

The Life of Chuck

SC: According to Letterboxd, this is one of the year’s most polarizing movies, which is another way to say that my brother and I liked it and everyone else hated it. I see their point; after the bravura opening act, which I would argue is near-perfect in creating both anticipation and dread, the rest is inevitably a letdown. It doesn’t help that Tom Hiddleston, the titular Chuck and front-facing in all the marketing, is around for only 15 minutes (but what a 15!) and the rest hinges on how much you like hearing Mark Hamill say “Chucko.” But I still love it; from Chiwetel Ejiofor and Matthew Lillard to Mia Sara and Karen Gillan, everyone maximizes their limited screen time and brings an admittedly shaky overarching idea to life. Mike Flanagan’s films are much less beloved than his Netflix miniserieses, possibly because he wears his heart on his sleeve, but I think we could use a little more of that these days.

Nouvelle Vague

AJ: Much like Marty Supreme, Nouvelle Vague centers itself on a protagonist from several decades ago who is unconventional and driven and fucking real—oozing modernity and, in the process, crying out to us here in our post-modern world. The similarities kind of end there. The great film critic and Breathless director Jean-Luc Godard is not presented as a rapscallion, like Marty Mauser. Instead he has unconventional—almost unbelievable—methods that manage to work. Director Richard Linklater constructs a vision and version of Godard that seems designed to build up your cynicism initially, what with the sunglasses that never come off and the hyperbolic protestations about the meaning of art and cinema, and then chips away at it through the shoot of Breathless. You end up disarmed by the apparent pretension of French New Wave—unable to discount its authenticity, even if it’s not your particular bag.

The Secret Agent

SC: The movie most worthy of this classic Simpsons meme. I went into Secret Agent not knowing much beyond “Wagner Moura is very handsome with a beard” and “I loved Kleber Mendonça Filho’s last film, Bacarau.” I also enjoyed his in-between documentary, Pictures of Ghosts, which Secret Agent is fully in conversation with. It’s about political unrest in 1970s Brazil, with Moura as a professor who unwittingly becomes associated with the resistance and marked for death. If that sounds straightforward, I promise you the movie is not; at one point, a severed leg (found in a shark’s mouth) starts attacking gay men out cruising at night, which is then covered prominently in the local papers. Is it a metaphor for all the puffed-up stories planted to cover up deeper corruption? Probably, but we certainly see a first-person leg attack. Filho loves being strange and messy, weaving a complicated web and understanding that his films don’t have to make perfect sense to mean something.

Train Dreams

SC: Train Dreams has a lot of mumbling in the woods. Joel Edgerton is murmuring, William H. Macy (now with brand-new beard!) is murmuring, the trees are swaying in the wind. It’s a dreamy, Malick-ian journey through the life of Edgerton’s Robert Grainier as he loves and loses and tries to find purpose in the forests of Idaho. And it’s one of the rare examples of a Netflix acquisition that I think helped the movie; I saw it in theaters and I wish others could’ve done the same, but I think it got eyeballs and recognition via the streaming service that it wouldn’t have found as yet another high-quality indie dropped quietly into 800 theaters. So hooray, Netflix; you have a use beyond letting me catch up on Den of Thieves 2: Pantera.

Warfare

AJ: For most of its runtime, Warfare is a cinema verite-style snapshot of one of America’s many foreign misadventures. Told essentially in real time as a stranded platoon awaits backup in insurgent-ridden territory in Iraq, it is largely swimming in the familiar waters tread by everything from Black Hawk Down to Lone Survivor to the likes of The Hurt Locker and American Sniper. It is a harrowing and tension-filled experience, although not exactly a new one, at least until the haunting final shot. The dust has quite literally settled. It is quiet—more noticeably so after the preceding 90ish minutes of anguish and blood and rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire. Things seem almost improbably normal. But the power lines are askew. There are still streaks of blood in the sand. Everyone seems to be trying to move along despite the fact that everything is just a bit off.

Weapons

SC: It’s odd, it’s clunky, it bounces between being on-the-nose and esoteric. But it also has some of the most off-putting moments I’ve ever seen, including Benedict Wong’s Marcus headbutting his lover to death. I had a deep, disgusted reaction to that scene that wouldn’t go away, which I imagine is what writer-director Zach Cregger was looking for. He wants the audience to know in a few short moments that Amy Madigan’s Gladys is unstoppable once her unexplained magic has you in its grasp. You’ll hurt yourself, you’ll hurt the people you love; there’s no coming back. A lot of the “answers” in Weapons don’t really make sense, at least once you remove them from the context of the movie, but Cregger keeps it moving at such a brisk, entertaining pace that it didn’t bother me in the least. I laughed, I cringed, I had a wild, unpredictable time at the movies.

In this episode we explore how Lynch's unique style is applied to the place most famous for film as a medium, and how Hollywood is a perfect place to explore his recurring themes of identity and reality.

Our conversation touches on Lynch's use of non-linear storytelling at the tail end of his filmmaking career and how that intersects with how he is coming to grips with the modern technology that arrives around the turn of the 21st century.

Here, we go deeper than ever on Lynch's cinematic world-building as a natural segue in to an exploration of his work on television, which we’ll cover in greater detail in our fourth and final episode of the season.

Show Notes

00:00 Introduction
02:43 The LA Trilogy: An Introduction
03:26 Lost Highway
28:55 Mulholland Drive
41:03 Lynch's Hollywood Influences
47:15 Dreams and Delusions in Lynch's Films
58:32 Inland Empire as a Lynchian Enigma
01:04:45 Transcendental Meditation and Lynch's Philosophy
01:16:48 Teasing Twin Peaks

Netflix does not want you to see movies in a theater. Despite its origin story, it does not particularly believe in movies or film or “the cinema.” It believes in “content” and “engagement,” just like every other company in Silicon Valley. It is, in other words, a technology company, not an entertainment company, which is to say that its aims and incentives are even more perverse than that of the average Fortune 500 firm.

This feels worth making a point of in the wake of last month’s news that Netflix is attempting to complete the purchase of Warner Brothers—the most Hollywood of all the Hollywood studios—for $82.7 billion.

To be clear, it feels that way because the party line coming out of Netflix right now is that it won’t really mess with the WB operation, that, in fact, it might be Netflix coming around to the idea of theatrical distribution, just as it came around to the idea of cracking down on password sharing and incorporating advertising after saying it wouldn’t do those things for years. And this is a party line that is a huge part of the framing of the media coverage of this potential deal. Just take it from The New York Times …

In fairness to The Times, the analysis in the article I’ve screenshotted above ought to give its readers reasons for healthy skepticism:

In 2022, Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive of Netflix, said, “We make our movies for our members, and we really want them to watch them on Netflix.”

In May of this year, he called theatrical distribution “an outmoded idea.”

And in October, Mr. Sarandos said on an earnings call that the company’s goal was to “give our members exclusive first-run movies on Netflix.”

Oh, well — never mind.

But the headline here, along with the context that is being emphasized throughout the article, is a choice in and of itself—one that places Netflix on the continuum of an emergently powerful entertainment company as opposed to what it is, an emergently powerful Silicon Valley outfit.

What if the primary context for this proposed merger was not that of a Hollywood upstart that has reversed course a few times but instead more akin to Facebook’s anti-competitive acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp? What if enshittification is the lens through which all of this is viewed?

Well, we’d rightly assume that Netflix’s executives are lying through their teeth—that they are telling us, consumers, regulators, everyone, what we want to hear so that they can lock us in to a platform that increases costs in lockstep with a degradation of quality.

So, let me just say what The New York Times can’t (or won’t): Netflix is either lying to us or, if not, letting consumers believe what they want to believe. They have made no—none, zero—firm commitments to do things any differently than today. If a press release saying that “it expects to maintain … current operations and build on its strengths, including theatrical releases for films,” counts as such, then you need to hear more lawyers discussing word choices.

We should take Ted Sarandos at his word, not the tortured, interrogated pablum of his legal department and public relations firm. He believes theaters are “outmoded.”

There is a possibility that the government bails us out. Paramount has lodged a competing, hostile takeover bid, and all three studios are bracing for lengthy fight before any potential deal is done.

Larry Ellison’s son, David, runs that studio, and the Ellisons are close with the Trump administration. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, is involved in the Paramount bid. Indeed, this is why many in the industry didn’t really see a successful Netflix bid coming.

Even if you set aside the Paramount bid and all the tangled relationships between Washington D.C. and Hollywood, there’s a very good antitrust case to be made, given that this would fold the biggest and third-biggest streaming service in to one.

You have to assume our laws still have teeth, of course, and then you have to make a successful argument about the nature of both companies, but the risk to the deal is substantial enough that there are smart people who think this takeover bid is more about “freezing” a competitor than it is about taking market share, and that it is a strategic misstep by Netflix.

It would be lovely for that to be the case, but we’re so far through the looking glass here that I have zero expectations that something so obviously illegal would be treated as such by the Department of Justice.

And, really, that legal intrigue is beside the point if you love the cinema. Hoping Paramount, with an assist from Daddy Trump, prevails is a poverty mindset, as this piece by The American Prospect outlines.

The oligarchs and Trump hangers-on coming together to try to bully their way into giving Warner Bros. to Paramount instead of Netflix have different designs but will fundamentally lead to the same outcome: ruining Hollywood. A merged Paramount and Warner Bros., with Jared Kushner and a bunch of Middle East sovereign wealth funds behind the scenes of the financing, simply wipes out one major Hollywood studio entirely, just like the sale of Fox assets to Disney. We can expect the same drastic impact on theaters that the Netflix acquisition will have. Paramount+ is the number five streamer, and while not immediately presenting as drastic a consolidation as the Netflix bid, it still reduces options for consumers for streaming and for producers for bids for their services. There’s nothing much better here, and then you add in the MAGA attempt to control information flow through corrupting news media.

By the way, both deals lead to the creation of more debt. The Paramount proposal is predicated on a $54 billion bank loan, and the Netflix bank loan is $59 billion. For decades, failed mergers have created a wall of debt for Warner Bros., and a new wall of debt is being built through yet another merger.

FOR SOME REASON, THE PERVASIVE REACTION to this bidding war between Netflix and Paramount has been to choose sides, based mainly on your political persuasion. A Netflix deal, liberals believe, at least doesn’t put CNN and CBS under the thumb of Trump allies. To conservatives, that’s the promise of a Paramount deal. And in the Trump era of politicization of antitrust, we hear about secret meetings between the president and Netflix or Paramount executives, and gauge our preferences accordingly.

Yet this blinkered way of thinking about the economy, this idea that we simply must tolerate more Hollywood consolidation, and the best we can hope for is something that aligns in some way with our political beliefs, is completely wrong. Functionally it’s wrong, because state attorneys general can choose to use the Clayton Act to challenge either of these mergers, and they would have good precedent to block this attempt at monopolization. What the Trump administration wants is immaterial to the opportunity state AGs have to scrutinize either a Netflix or Warner Bros. deal.

But more than that, it presumes that Warner Bros., a historic American company that is doing about as well as it ever has, simply must sell itself. This “there is no alternative” mindset, sold by Wall Street for 40 years, has warped our thinking. Especially if the cable channels are split off, Warner Bros. can be a profitable company, with no need to indulge its executives’ dreams of a quick payout.

We can do better than “the best possible consolidation under the circumstances,” if we can just imagine for a second an outcome where the M&A people lose for once.

Truth be told, unless you’re under the age of 12, it shouldn’t take any imagination to conjure up the world we want.

We simply have to remind ourselves what happens when tech companies “disrupt” anything, whether it be taxicabs, vacation rentals, food delivery, news, or interpersonal relationships. In the end, we the consumers pay more for an inferior facsimile of what we had before while the workers starve.

Or, we can remind ourselves of what it is like to walk in to a movie theater that is busy and well taken care of on opening night—what it’s like to be alone together in a darkened room as our senses are thrilled visually and aurally.

It is not so far of a journey—just to the other side of COVID for most of us—to remember a good, all-encompassing trip to the theater. Hell, go to the right theater now, get a ticket for Avatar: Fire and Ash or Marty Supreme, and you can remember what it was like today.

I suppose the question becomes what are we fighting for, and how do we fight for it. In my view, the answer, in the context of Netflix’s moves specifically, is the theatergoing experience as we know it. There are many other things under threat, not the least of which is the creative class that is responsible for one of America’s greatest artistic and cultural contributions to the world. But it is Netflix alone that represents an extinction-level threat to movie theaters. Just listen to their executives.

Be self-interested for a second. Think about what it’s like to see a great movie in a crowded theater with friends and strangers alike. Think about Paul Rudd’s experience below, of seeing Avengers: Infinity War at the premiere of the film and anticipating the reaction to that film’s big moment.

Then think about Ted Sarandos calling something like that “outmoded.”

There’s a fight to be had in the courts here, but most of us will be interested spectators as that plays out. We can hope that it works out in our favor and we can place a call or two to our elected representatives, but that’s about it.

But there’s also one to be had in the streets—the one where your local movie theater is. And there, we can all do a bit more, can’t we?

We can make a point of putting our butts in movie seats for all different kinds of films. As a bonus, we can shut off our phones and leave the close captioning off, since staring at your phone in a theater is still frowned upon, and the sound systems at your cineplex don’t have to compete with your dishwasher. It all might amount to swimming upstream, but the Barnes & Nobles of the world prove that downward trend lines don’t have to amount to fate.

A few weeks from now, my wife and I will watch When Harry Met Sally … as we have on every New Year’s Eve since we decided being out with the crowds no longer had any appeal to us.

We put our kids to bed and make French 75s, a totally incongruous cocktail choice for a middle-aged couple cuddled up on their couch and bedecked in athleisure. We time the start of the proceedings so that Billy Crystal is done telling Meg Ryan that he wants “the rest of his life to start as soon as possible” a few minutes before the real ball drops in Times Square.

It is a modest tradition, I suppose. Nevertheless, it has become one of my most cherished ones. When Harry Met Sally …, of course, has a natural tie-in to the holiday. But, mostly, its appeal is its warmth and unflinching optimism on the subject of love. It gets us to end every year laughing deeply together because the jokes are very funny, but also because they are told in service of real wisdom: friendship as the bedrock of lasting romance, patience as the ultimate virtue, flaws and imperfections being things not to get over so much as they are avenues for deeper understanding and admiration.

Why bother with movies at all? Because of films like this, which do nothing less than make you feel less lonely for a little while.

I am, of course, writing this because Rob Reiner, the director of When Harry Met Sally … and a passel of other films that are held in similarly high regard was murdered in his home along with his wife Michele over the weekend.

This is a shocking and senseless tragedy—one I am finding especially difficult to process, not just because of the nature of it, or because I love so many of his films, but also because Michele specifically is the reason that When Harry Met Sally … ended up ending the way it did.

Social media is flooded with clips of Reiner’s films and also many, many interviews. You don’t have to look far or hard to hear him explain that he changed the ending of When Harry Met Sally … after falling for Michele during the shooting of the film.

It is too plain to think of this as art imitating life. This is a real-life romance changing the course of cinematic history. Is When Harry Met Sally … even on the list of great romantic comedies without that ending—without Michele? What even is the archetype of romantic comedy without this film, just as it is? It would be something foreign, alien, totally different. It’s a good thing fate intervened.

This isn’t something I knew until this week. Sadly, now that I do, it makes what happened to Rob and Michele that much more heartbreaking.

One of the other clips I’ve watched a few times is of Reiner explaining that he learned it was possible to fuse elements of comedy, drama, horror, and so on in one piece, and that the pursuit of that is what animated him professionally.

This, I think, explains the broad appeal of his individual films as well as the remarkable range he displayed over the course of his career.

“That’s capturing the human experience,” Reiner says in the clip above, explaining what he aimed to accomplish with is work. “Because it’s tragic and it’s dramatic and it’s funny too. And if you can figure out a way to blend those things, then, to me, that is the most satisfying theater.”

Well, he did what he set out to do.

Even in his funniest films, there is darkness. Think, for example, of the arc of Buttercup, who becomes earnestly suicidal when she learns Westley is still alive and believes she’ll be forced to marry Prince Humperdinck. Or, sticking with The Princess Bride, consider the backstory and prime motivation of Inigo Montoya. It is funny how he explains his quest to avenge his father, but there is a real sadness in Mandy Patinkin’s eyes when he is delivering the explanation.

It is, of course, there in When Harry Met Sally … too.

“When I buy a new book, I always read the last page first,” Billy Crystal’s Harry tells Meg Ryan’s Sally. “That way in case I die before I finish, I know how it ends. That, my friend, is a dark side.”

This is right after they first meet, on their road trip from Chicago to New York. Harry is playing the part of worldly man lecturing naive young woman, and it seems in the moment that he must be telling a tall tale to make a point.

It is only much, much later—after Harry and Sally get together and then can’t seem to make it work—that we learn he was being entirely serious. Lonely in his apartment and lamenting the mistakes he’s made, we see him do the thing he claimed he did all those years prior, flipping to the last page of a book before turning all the way back to the beginning.

Harry really does have a dark side. We all do, don’t we? It’s confirmed in this one, small moment, and with that confirmation comes a new clarity about the stakes for these two characters in whom we have invested so much. Harry is staring at a dark prospect—an abyss of loneliness if he can’t figure things out with someone who is so obviously right for him.

It still plays for laughs, but When Harry Met Sally … is great because of its unique blend of the human experience. The laughs are just the veneer.

In a way, Harry’s compulsion for reading the last page first serves as a metaphor for his inability to focus on the things that really matter, yet are staring him right in the face. The ending isn’t really what makes a book good or bad. It’s just where it stops. The whole point of reading isn’t to finish, but to begin and then to keep going.

So it is with romantic partnership. And, so, it must sadly be said, it ought to be with Rob Reiner. His last page isn’t what matters. It's all the ones before it.

In the very first sequence of Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s iconic Little Tramp slithers and oozes his way through the cogs in an enormous, non-descript factory machine. It is as if the matter of which this man is composed has changed state. He is, for a moment, a liquid or a gas coursing through and around massive gears, all bendy—utterly and totally malleable.

This is the first pointed visual metaphor in a film where they come thick and fast. As those visuals accumulate, they gain power and the film gathers momentum thematically. It’s a nice thing that the film picks up this kind of steam, but, the truth is, it’s purely a bonus. Modern Times is a work of genius before its deeper meaning even begins to cross your mind.

That genius can not be separated in any real way from the genius of Chaplin himself, which itself is a kind of genius that doesn’t even feel like it fits properly in the world of film. To watch Charlie Chaplin at the peak of his powers is not so much worthy of comparison to other great actors and is far more worthy of comparison to the most transcendent of athletes.

Right now, tennis player Carlos Alcaraz is my favorite athlete to watch. He is, I would argue, transcendent. And he is not because he is brilliant at what he does, but because he seems to routinely do things on the court that bend the laws of time and space to his will, whether with a ball, a racquet, or his legs. To watch Carlos Alcaraz is to anticipate magic, to witness its inevitable arrival, and to guzzle down amazement as your brain tries to process what your eyes have just seen.

So it is with Charlie Chaplin.

Much later in the film, there is this scene in a department store where he roller skates with a blindfold on. Unbeknownst to his character, there is a multi-story drop perilously close to his path. Chaplin glides in and out of range of the drop. Even watching at home, alone, you can practically hear a crowd of moviegoers gasping with concern and then squealing with delight as he figure-eights his way in to danger and then out again.

In both scenes, there are optical illusions. In the skating scene, Chaplin is passing by a matte painting, not an actual hole in the ground. In the machinery scene, as in all others in the film, the silent speed (18 frames per second) is being projected at the sound speed (24 frames per second), quite literally speeding the action up, and making everything feel even more slapdash. These effects heighten the overall experience as opposed to accounting for the entirety of the sensation. You could give Carlos Alcaraz a wooden racquet, and he would still be a marvelous tennis player. Here, we have Chaplin colliding headlong with the era of “talkies,” and he too is just as marvelous as ever.

Indeed, with Modern Times, Chaplin is using an outgoing approach to film to skewer a cresting, crashing wave of modernity. It is fitting, isn’t it, that The Little Tramp, in his final appearance, is deployed in this particular way after more than two decades as an iconic cinematic figure.

And what does he have to tell us? Well, mostly that we should watch out for a ruling class that will do pretty much anything to dominate the rest of us. Plot-wise, Modern Times is the story of a man who wants to be anything but a cog in a machine—who wants to be left well enough alone—but truly struggles to find any peace despite his best efforts.

The boss at The Little Tramp’s factory surveils him via television monitors while doing a jigsaw puzzle, even when The Tramp is taking a piss. When he gets fired, he is almost immediately and wrongly imprisoned after he’s swept up in a Communist street protest. In jail, he finds the conditions preferable to those in his factory but, after a good deed, isn’t allowed to stay and winds his way back to the factory. There, things become somehow even more dehumanizing, culminating in the adoption of a force-feeding machine that mitigates the need for breaks on the line by literally shoving food down workers’ throats.

In other words, Modern Times predicted the modern times that have extended from the moment it was shot to the moment we are in presently. I share all of the anxieties laid bare by Chaplin in this film. I may not work on a factory floor, but, moment after moment, I feel hounded by surveillance or like a cog in some vast apparatus that I don’t fully understand.

Chaplin’s film offers hope, but not blind optimism. The ending of Modern Times suggests that it is our bonds with other people that will steel us against these kind of relentless incursions on our humanity. Given the looping nature of the story, Chaplin does not seem to be suggesting that this alone will guarantee success. Instead, he seems to be saying that sticking together is all we really have as a means of combat, and that it is all that is really worth pursuing.

Here is a list of films Disney released this year in theaters (including Marvel Studios and Pixar, but excluding 20th Century Studios):

Captain America: Brave New World, Snow White, Thunderbolts*, Lilo & Stitch, Elio, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Freakier Friday, Tron: Ares, Zootopia 2

And, just for fun, here is a look at what’s coming from the Mouse in the year ahead:

Hoppers, The Mandalorian and Grogu, Toy Story 5, Moana, Hexed, Avengers: Doomsday

If you’re not depressed by that list, then I’m not entirely sure what you’re doing here. But, just to draw a line under it, that’s a total of 15 feature-length releases this year and next, only three of which are not some kind of remake, sequel or franchise extension. Elio—the only one of those three that anyone has seen—was a nice film, but it hardly stirred optimism of another Disney renaissance on the horizon.

The question I have is whether I, or anyone else, should hold a candle aflame at all. It seems I am not alone in wondering.

After Walt [Disney] died, his company became just one more Hollywood studio. For a few decades, it flourished as an entertainment conglomerate, but eventually the people running the Walt Disney Company lost the desire to try new things. They just rehashed formulas.

That business today puts all its energy on extending these tired brands. But it’s wise to remember what extended means in the finance world—it indicates that you’re out on a limb, and have lost any margin for error.

Walt Disney would be horrified. But what would he do if (through some Tinkerbell or cryogenic magic) he were made C.E.O. today?

I think we can answer that question.

• Walt would ditch the plans for sequels and prequels and spin-offs, and focus on fresh new concepts.

• He would hire people full of imagination and creativity—because he always did that.

• But he would be just as willing to adapt some story from an outsider or in the public domain—if that was more exciting or interesting. He didn’t need to own it, because he had confidence that he could do it better than anybody else.

• Even better, he would incorporate the latest technologies in his vision, and enter into partnerships with the most forward-looking companies in the world to realize his dreams.

• Above all, he would do this in a holistic, people-oriented way.

There are a few details I would quibble with here. First, I think the author, the great Ted Gioia, is underselling the spirit and the heights of the Jeffrey Katzenberg years. Second, I think if you’re going to celebrate Walt’s unparalleled vision for the future—and you definitely should—you have to pay tribute to his brother Roy who rehashed a whole lot of formulas in his day to enable WED Enterprises, the corporate vehicle for Walt’s next thing, whatever it ended up being from year to year.

Those really are quibbles, though. Ted is absolutely correct that the creator of Disney would be appalled by its current state.

I watched The Fantastic Four: First Steps this week. It’s probably the best of the 2025 releases. The production design is truly wonderful and the performances of each of the Four have some real soul. But, put in the context of Walt Disney’s legacy, it is astonishingly far from what the man stood for and what he built. There are many, many worse films out there. But this is still nothing more than a slick, clever repackaging of scores of films just like it. Like cotton candy, it is meant to taste sweet and then dissolve all in a moment.

The thing that I find so hard to understand is just why Disney, the corporation, is so milquetoast. What is to prevent it from resurrecting something like WED Enterprises and pursuing a radical vision for the future in parallel to what it is already doing. (I know, I know, it’s maximizing shareholder value, stupid.)

Or, as Ted puts it:

Some of you know that I’ve speculated about a merger between Apple and Disney. In many ways, that would represent a return to Walt Disney’s original E.P.C.O.T. vision. But there would be one big difference—both Apple and the Disney Corporation are fallen angels, who have lost their mojo.

But if you brought them together and returned to that initial vision of a healing, people-oriented partnership between high tech and entertainment, miracles might happen.

Alas, there’s no Walt Disney to oversee it. But maybe somebody else—not named Tim Cook or Bob Iger—could rise to the challenge. After all, the need is enormous.

Even more to the point, this abandoned vision of healing, human tech married to creativity is much better than any of the other available options for these companies. Best of all, we really don’t need magic—so Tinkerbell can put away her magic wand. We only need leadership and courage.

Maybe we can’t bring back Walt Disney. But he left behind a pretty good playbook, and an inspiring vision. Now’s the time for someone else to start again where he left off.

Look, there are a lot companies—especially almost all of them in Silicon Valley—that display outright contempt for their customers. To put it more bluntly, many firms hate human beings and view their relationship with them as purely extractive.

Disney isn’t one of them—not yet—and it needn’t ever be. Its birthright gives it license to be exactly the opposite—to engage in something far more ambitious than that of a middling quarterback trying to run out the clock.

The conversation kicks off with Eraserhead, Lynch’s surreal student project that delves into fears of parenthood and intimacy in the strangest possible manner. From there, we transition to Blue Velvet, one of Lynch’s master works, which deals with the themes of evil and how it is intertwined with Americana. Lastly, we discuss The Straight Story, a heartwarming departure from Blue Velvet, featuring Richard Farnsworth.

The final film, and really all three of them, epitomize Lynch’s thematic range and interest in simple human kindness as a counterbalance to his interest in the darker side of human nature.

Throughout, the episode, we continue to touch on Lynch’s unique creative processes, the way he is fueled by transcendental meditation, and the broader implications of his work, particularly just what the term “Lynchian” means.

Show Notes

00:00 Introduction

01:41 Introducing the Films: Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and The Straight Story

03:52 Discussing the Range of David Lynch’s Work

14:47 Diving into Eraserhead

26:28 Transition to Blue Velvet

33:42 Dennis Hopper’s Iconic Performance

36:16 Exploring Evil and Good in Blue Velvet

44:03 The Straight Story: A Journey of Kindness and Redemption

01:00:25 David Lynch’s Critique of Hollywood from within

Note: In the middle of the episode, we discuss David Foster Wallace’s impression of David Lynch vis a vis an essay he wrote after visiting him on set. You can find the full essay right here.

“Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you”

— Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another practically compels you to see it more than once. I haven’t, and yet know I will need to in order to appreciate all of its facets. This is not because it is inscrutable, but rather because its characters provide so many different angles of explorations. Its clear what this film is about—what buries it in your psyche are the various vantage points from which you can take it all in.

It’s no wonder that I spent most of my first viewing thinking about the action from the perspective of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson. He is, after all, the middle-aged white guy who isn’t a brownshirt. He has a daughter, too.

Unlike so many other characters played by DiCaprio over the years, Bob Ferguson is defined by a paranoid ennui. DiCaprio has looked this disheveled before—we do have The Revenant, after all—but it’s hard to think of a role where he’s seemed so insecure and lacked so much confidence in his ability to do just about anything well. It’s an interesting progression in DiCaprio’s on-screen persona (there’s probably a whole separate essay to be written on the subject), but it’s also quite a comment on where we are generally.

Here is Jack Dawson and Romeo, or even the imperious Jordan Belfort and Calvin Candie if you look at the other side of the coin, crippled to the point of near-inaction by depression and anxiety.

What drives it? What turned “Ghetto” Pat (aka “Rocketman”) in to Bob friggin’ Ferguson? Well, I’d argue it is the combination of disappointment in the kind of change a radical revolutionary movement can effect, watching the forward march of dark reactionary forces in response, and, most important of all, the deep vulnerability that comes with having a child to care for and protect.

I can’t claim “Ghetto” Pat’s radical bona fides—my life has not been remotely that bold or courageous or interesting—but there are many days when I share in his anxiety about just what the hell is going on and where all of it is headed. I spend a not-insignificant amount of my time feeling trapped between the notion that I should be doing more to bring about the world I want my kids to live in and worrying about what that might mean for my main job right now: keeping them safe and healthy.

For me, the anxiety is low-stakes and largely theoretical. For Bob Ferguson, it’s quite real. Steven J. Lockjaw is still out there, rising up the ranks and garnering commendations from the most powerful military force in human history.

I’ve had this running joke with family and friends that fatigue is, ironically, the thing that is most animating about my politics in this extended moment. The punchline is that I want to found a political movement or party simply called I’m Tired.

The irony, of course, is that I’ve been too tired to do anything about it yet, and I still am. Terrorist attacks, financial crises, the rise of authoritarians, a global pandemic, and getting up in the middle of every night to soothe infants, and toddlers, and kids do take their toll. I feel it myself, and I saw it all over Bob Ferguson’s face—I felt it every time he sparked something up to calm his nerves.

The “artificial intelligence” in Google’s search results (speaking of sources of anxiety) tells me that two of the reasons for a permanently altered state are “trauma” and “neuroplasticity and experience.”

As an elder Millennial, I have plenty of both, and so does Bob Ferguson. I have no earthly idea if that makes the two of us any different from previous generations upon their arrival at middle age. What I do know is that, hapless and exposed as I feel, I’m trying to choose a path like Bob’s—that is to say putting one foot in front of the other so that my children can have an opportunity to do the same.

I’ve seen plenty of movies like Rashomon—enough of them, in fact, that its status as a template-setting film didn’t leave much room for a surprise upon my first viewing.

You, too, know Rashomon even if you haven’t seen it exactly. A horrible crime is committed, and there is guilt to be assigned. A series of eyewitnesses recount the events in pursuit of the truth (or, more accurately, blame), and as each person tells their version of the story, the picture gets more and more murky.

Some of my very favorite films use the Rashomon template to great effect. The diptych or triptych or kaleidoscopic tack to storytelling often makes the story itself richer. It reminds you of our precarious relationship with any so-called fact. It also allows you to imagine how many different versions of any story there might be—a subliminal entryway of sorts in to the act of criticism itself.

What makes this kind of film oft-successful is its constraints. The plot is, by its nature, less propulsive and, so, less stuffed with MacGuffins and any other devices meant to deliver you to a conclusion. There is more time to luxuriate in the characters and the themes because you are spending less time keeping up.

Rashomon, besides being the originator of this type of film, is perhaps the most extreme example of working within such deliberately narrow confines. Its minuscule budget limited director Akira Kurosawa and the rest of his crew to just three sets—the gate where the story is told and retold, the forest where the action actually takes place, and the police courtyard where the accused and the eyewitnesses are interrogated. That, in turn, gives the film a laser focus—a maximal return on its spartan trappings. And so the bandit Tajomaru, played by Kurosawa’s frequent muse Toshiro Mifune, slices his way through thick brush and bamboo and includes us in the inquiry that will follow.

“The more I hear,” says one of the commoners who is at the gate hearing this story told and retold, “the more confused I get.”

This sentiment is the classic textual reading of the Rashomon effect. Truth, if not exactly subjective, is always filtered by our experiences, motivations, and cultural beliefs. Certainly, this is true of the confused actions of Masago, the samurai’s wife. We wouldn’t expect her to behave that way if the same sequence of events occurred in the West in the 21st century—the norms of today being so radically different from feudal Japan.

Those filters obscure the truth by their very nature, and so many of the successive works to Rashomon fixate on this distortion. Anatomy of a Fall and The Last Duel are two of my favorite films of the last half-decade. Both crib extensively from Rashomon (in the best possible way), and both marvel at the deep frustration of realizing what we can’t really know.

Where Rashomon is different is in its focus on what the very concept of truth—and our pursuit of it—says about us. Kurosawa’s script is quite explicit in this regard. Our version of events—our truth—is an inherently selfish act.

“If you’re not selfish, you can’t survive,” says the commoner toward the end of the film. ‘

In the shabby, soaked ruins at the gate—and indeed in a devastated post-World War II Japan—survival can often seem like the only thing worth achieving.

After all, as the priest says at the beginning of the film: “A human life is truly as frail and fleeting as the morning dew.”

If we’re to learn anything from Rashomon, it is not the dorm-room wisdom that the truth is unknowable. It is, instead, that “telling our truth”—one that is exclusively indexed on the kind of self-justification that will merely help us live with ourselves instead of transcend that state—is a road to hell. Just look, after all, at the crazed, animalistic eyes of Mifune’s bandit, and consider what that kind of truth does to your humanity.

Naturally, it is the character of the priest who is there to remind us of our species’ higher calling—or at least its higher potential.

“I believe in men,” he says. “I don’t want this place to be hell.”

So must we all, lest our planet turn in to a hell of our own making.

Upon learning of the death of Robert Redford earlier this week, I thought of two of his performances straightaway: his role as “Our Man” in J.C. Chandor’s 2013 disaster film All Is Lost and his far more indelible turn as Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men.

Why those two? Well, they meant the most to me personally. I went to the very same journalism school as Carl Bernstein—the other half of the reporting partnership highlighted in the All the President’s Men—and that particular story, as portrayed in the book and the movie, remains the Platonic ideal of the profession I chose and subsequently left.1

All the President’s Men is as obvious as All Is Lost is not. The latter film is obscure—at least in the context of Redford’s career—but its simple setup, as-narrow-as-it-gets focus, and sparing dialogue left a different kind of mark. It showed me just how minimalist a film could be, while still being absolutely riveting. There is a vast ocean, a storm, a sailboat, and, eventually, a tanker ship. Mostly, though, there is Redford, keeping you glued to the proceedings even as he grunts and mutters his way through each scene, hardly uttering a word aloud.

I’ll leave it to others to more fully evaluate Redford’s on-screen persona. His always-twinkling eyes and ability to emit steel and stoicism without feeling too cold or distant are the qualities that, to me, always seemed to make him a fit for whatever it was he was doing.

But that, of course, was only part of his legacy. I could go on and on about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting or all manner of other parts from his acting filmography—those two, in particular, were huge touchstones in my house, both as reference points for my parents and as introductions to the vast world of film that, well, preceded my birth. If I did go on and on about that, I’d be skipping his body of work as a director and his founding of the Sundance Institute, the non-profit that puts on the Sundance Film Festival every year. I’d even be skipping the fact that, to some younger people, he’s almost exclusively a meme—like one of the most famous ones.

Indeed, it’s hard to think of any person who has done more to shape movies in such a multi-faceted way, especially following the collapse of the studio system in the 1950s and 1960s.

Redford, of course, bridged that gap most visibly on screen. Butch and The Sting demonstrated what a hit was or would be as Hollywood got more fragmented and, frankly, grown up. But he also helped make it OK for actors to get behind the camera with his success as a director. And, perhaps most important of all, he championed independent film and independent artists through Sundance.

Most of the best films made every year now hail from outside of the mainstream Hollywood machine. The film world is better for it—far more varietal and interesting—and Redford, more than any other single individual, is responsible for those kinds of films getting a real platform.

Why are we starting with those three—even though they’re not in chronological order? Well, Andy has his reasons, and they’re mostly about easing our way in to the most accessible of his works.

The discussion begins with The Elephant Man, possibly the most conventional of his films. It continues with the disastrous 1984 version of Dune, a film plagued by production issues and, perhaps, a creative force who realizes throughout those challenges that conventional Hollywood isn’t for him.

Finally, we dissect Wild at Heart, drawing parallels to other directors like Quentin Tarantino and digging in to Lynch's obvious love for/obsession with The Wizard of Oz. Oh, and we get a chance to celebrate Nicolas Cage, a foxy Laura Dern, and an early entry in to the catalogue of films where a Willem DeFoe performance steals the show.

As we start to delve into Lynch's work, we begin to discuss what the often-overused adjective “Lynchian” actually means—from the grotesque and uncomfortable to the fugue-like states that start (and keep) showing up in his work.

Show Notes

00:00 Re-introduction to the Crash Course Podcast

01:37 Meet the Lynch Lovers, Andy Stewart and Ben Elsener

04:25 The Elephant Man as Soft Landing in to the work of Lynch

19:22 Dune: Lynch's Disastrous Sci-fi Epic

34:26 The Unique Dynamic between Lynch and Frequent Collaborators

35:21 Comparing David Lynch to Orson Welles

40:32 Wild at Heart: A Deep Dive

48:51 Lynch's Wizard of Oz Obsession

58:17 Lynch vs. Tarantino: A Beginning Comparative Analysis

01:03:23 Looking Ahead to Next Episode

Production Note: We ran in to some unsurprising—but still very annoying—technical challenges with our recording, so if you notice rare moments of audio dropping out, that is why. We’ll do some extra testing before next episode to ensure that you get a more pleasant listen. Thanks for your patience!

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre feels at once like the kind of thing that might have been first performed at the Ancient Theater in Delphi and also the kind of thing that might have prompted Hollywood to draw up a blacklist in the first place.

It is a morality play—a strident indictment of the vacuousness and violence of greed—but it is also a statement about the depravity built in to certain flavors of capitalism.

Before the gold starts to tear them apart, Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart), Howard (Walter Huston), and Curtin (Tim Holt) sit around their campfire and discuss the plans they have for their score. Dobbs and Curtin—an unlikely pair from the start, brought together by shared desperation—are perfectly juxtaposed. Curtin talks about buying a peach farm, speaking in romantic terms about the hard work it takes to nurture something that will eventually bear fruit.

“Must be grand watching your own trees put on leaves, come into blossom and bear. Watching the fruit get big and ripe on the boughs, ready for pickin’,” he says.

Dobbs meanwhile can only think in terms of consumption. There will be a visit to the baths, clothing, fine dining, and maybe women. One thing you can do with wealth is buy yourself the time and space to live the kind of life you want. Another thing you can do is accumulate.

Yes, this sequence foreshadows which of the characters is most likely to teeter. But it also presents alternate visions of the world as it could be along with a clear value judgment about which vision is worth pursuing. We can go skin deep, or we can sink our hands deep in to the soil. Both strains of philosophy have found favor in America.

Ultimately, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre asks us to consider how much is enough, and it does double duty in that regard—weighing that question for individuals and the collective alike.

It is far more direct where individuals are concerned. The degradation of Dobbs leaves little doubt about where it stands on what greed does to the soul of a single man. Bogart embodies unbridled desperation, and, paradoxically, becomes more and more outwardly and visibly desperate the less precarious his situation becomes. He starts out sleeping on park benches and in flop houses. Yet, he looks and sounds far more crazed once he has all of the gold to himself.

The disheveled appearance and muttering to himself only really peak once Howard and Curtin are no longer obstacles. As if to leave us with no doubt, some of the final images director John Huston flashes of Dobbs are his face dissolving in to the flames of a campfire hours after he thinks he has killed Curtin and then his prostrate, terrified reflection in the water when the bandidos catch up to him. Some good his paranoia and greed has done him.

Though the film is less explicit in its societal indictment of greed, it still has a clear perspective from start to finish. Consider the derision and contempt that Dobbs is treated with by a fellow American when he is panhandling in Tampico at the start of the film. Or how about the bandidos who rob from and murder Dobbs in the end, offering a simple justification for their viciousness. “We need money, too,” they tell him. Or how about the contradictory warnings of Howard before he and Dobbs and Curtin head for the hills hoping to strike it rich.

“I know what gold does to men’s souls,” he tells them with foreboding.

And yet off he, Howard, goes, with very little hesitation. There is a conclusion to Howard’s sentiment that is implied. I know what gold does to men’s souls, but off I must go anyway because there doesn’t seem to be any other way I know of to survive. There is an ugliness to it all. The more naked our pursuit of money, the more barbaric we become—even if the pursuit is successful. Perhaps that is why Bogart’s sunken-eyed mug is such a perfect visage for this story. It is certainly why his character bristles at being accused of being greedy even though he obviously is.

“I just don’t like being called a hog,” he says. “That’s all.”

Sure, my snout is deep in the slop at the bottom of this trough, but don’t you dare tell me I’m covering myself in filth.

There’s a predictable banality to Dobbs, isn’t there? From the moment he demands to keep a hold of his own share of the gold, you know exactly how his story will end. There are flashes of humanity in there, such as when he agrees to break down the sluice with Howard in an act of deference to the mountain that has made them rich. But, mostly, there is a dull emptiness to him—one that can only come to a conclusion when there is nothing left of him at all.

It is his companions that are there to remind us that there is more to life than getting rich. What a contrast it is to bounce from Dobbs’ demise to the execution of the bandidos that killed him to the hysterical laughter of Howard and Curtin when they realize the bandidos never even knew about the gold Dobbs was carrying and, so, scattered it to the literal wind.

Why laugh in the face of a lost fortune? Why not, when those fantasies they shared around the campfire with Dobbs seem within their grasp even with all of their treasure lost.

“You know, the worst ain’t so bad when it finally happens,” says Curtin, once the laughter has died down.

What he really means is that what might seem like the “worst” outcome is actually just a profound failure of the imagination. When we can see beyond what a fortune will do for us personally and in the short term, we can see a great deal more of what the world has to offer.

I am thrilled to share some exciting news with you—something new is launching at Film 101. Brace yourself for a new adventure: a podcast series!

Now, I know what you might be thinking. The world has an overabundance of podcasts. Who needs one more? Or perhaps you prefer the eloquence of the written word, specifically mine. Fear not. What’s coming next won’t replace the stuff that made you a subscriber in the first place.

But it does feel like time for something new that aligns perfectly with the essence of this endeavor. So, with a mix of excitement and anticipation, allow me to introduce "Crash Course," a podcast series.

This concept came to life because, despite having watched more films and a larger variety than nearly everyone I know, I still have significant gaps in my cinematic knowledge. Fortunately, I have a circle of brilliant, witty friends ready to help me bridge these gaps. So here we are.

In each short yet intense season, we will delve into topics I've yet to explore in-depth—for instance, a specific genre, an era, a style, or even directors and actors. Each season will feature a guide or two, akin to cinematic Sherpas, leading me to new heights.

What cinematic—ahem—peak will we scale first? David Lynch.

Why Lynch, you ask? The passing of this legendary filmmaker earlier this year was a pivotal moment that spurred the inception of this podcast. As I looked back on his body of work at the time of his passing in January, I realized how little of his oeuvre I had actually experienced. My understanding of Lynch stemmed largely from his reputation, but that is about to change.

Embarking on a journey through Lynch’s mind-bending work is no casual endeavor. Lynch, after all, once said to the Los Angeles Times: “I don't know why people expect art to make sense when they accept that life doesn't make sense." So here I am, ready to take on his reputation as an inscrutable artist with serious commitment.

Luckily, I have Lynch aficionados in my life who have graciously agreed to guide me on this labyrinthine exploration—a path befitting his idiosyncratic legacy.

So stay tuned. Our first episode will debut in your podcast feeds soon, and I cannot wait to share this journey with you.