Catholic Jedi, Protestant Wizards

A recent visit to Orlando brought home to me how different the respective aesthetic visions of Star Wars and Harry Potter are. A thesis came to me: Jedi are Catholic and Wizards are Protestant.

By which I mean: The narrative, themes, and overall look and feel of George Lucas’s fantasy galaxy are Catholic in nature, while those of J. K. Rowling’s are Protestant. I tossed off the idea on my micro blog, but let me unfold it a bit more here.

Although Star Wars is superficially science fiction, it’s presented from the start as a fairy tale set in the distant past, featuring an orphan, a princess, and an evil empire. Everything centers around the decadence and fall of a long-regnant republic and the rise, in its place, of an empire led by a tyrant. In other words, we’re in Gibbon territory; we’re somewhere in the early medieval period. Moreover, the films are saturated with nostalgia for a lost time of peace and justice when a small religious order was allied to the republican senate. This order selected children from a young age for training and membership, required of them lifelong celibacy, and taught them an intimate relationship with an all-powerful numinous reality that binds all life together. They also gave them swords and called them knights. For a millennium they governed without serious rival, though we should assume they put down untold rebellions(!) in countless corners of the galaxy.

In a sense Lucas is merging the old Roman Republic with the Holy Roman Empire of the middle ages. A thousand years of throne and altar united in service to the common good, led by an elite of religious warriors and celibate servants who minister from a temple down the proverbial street from the senate. Jedi are Roman Catholic.

Whereas Rowling’s wizards and witches belong to the modern or even the postmodern world. Their identity and power are a secret. They, too, form a minority of elites among the wider population of muggles, but they do not rule arm in arm with parliament (even if the prime minister apparently knows about them). In brief, they choose to live anonymously in a disenchanted age, though their very existence is a living contradiction of it. Yet their invisibility cannot, by definition, rise to the level of being a sign of contradiction—except to us readers, who (like them) like disenchanted lives yet (unlike them) continue to disbelieve in magic.

It’s true that the aesthetics of Harry Potter is “high church,” but only in the way that empty cathedrals in Europe are “high church.” Oxford and Cambridge and the aura of boarding schools may feel enchanted, or perhaps enchanting, to American readers, but that says more about us than about them. Does anyone at Hogwarts pray the daily office? Is there a chapel for morning prayer? Does anyone across all seven books pray at all? (I don’t recall mention of eucharistic celebration, but I cede the question to the scholastics of fandom.)

The difference with Tolkien on this point is important: Middle-earth’s religion is everywhere and nowhere because it is another world than ours, and that was his goal—he didn’t want an ecclesiastical hierarchy as a simple mirror image of Europe. Yet Rowling’s world is ostensibly ours plus magic, while religion is nowhere to be seen. This isn’t belied by her personal faith, the theological themes of the story, or the occasional references to Scripture; these rather prove the point. She is telling a Protestant story. Her wizards are secular. No doubt some of them believe in God. But whereas magic is just there, a living and undoubted phenomenon for any student or teacher at Hogwarts, God and religion are options, presenting one among many choices, including unbelief.

Harry Potter thus lives in the wake of the Protestant revolution. He is an autonomous individual adrift in a chaotic, disenchanted, disestablished time. He must choose for himself. The robes and castles are vestiges of a world gone by, never to return. To the extent that they continue to function religiously, they bind together a literally enchanted sub-world—a magical enclave safe, for a time, from the secular world. But after seven years, he has to return to that world and live as though magic doesn’t exist. In a sense, he must live a false identity, and therefore inauthentically. (Paging existentialism.)

By contrast, the Jedi in their heyday and even in their triumphant return to glory are definitionally public figures: they live differently, they dress differently, they speak differently—they hold themselves aloof from the masses. They may occasionally produce failed recruits as well as ronin, but a Jedi in disguise is a Jedi ashamed of himself. He lives as a recluse, in exile, because of some great defeat; his proper nature is to brandish lightsaber and wield authority as if he were born for it. Which, according to the Jedi, he was.

Such, at any rate, is my half-baked theory about why Jedi are medieval Catholics and Wizards are secular Protestants. I’ll now open up the floor for questions.

The Acolyte: mea culpa & apologia

I take it all back.

In my view, the final two episodes of The Acolyte’s first season redeemed the whole thing. It didn’t become perfect, but it did become something: an actual story, told with perspective and, by the end, with style.

From what I can tell, this is not the consensus. And I don’t deny that flaws remain. But what felt missing that felt so frustrating through five episodes made itself apparent by episodes seven and eight. Let me start with the flaws before I defend the show and issue my mea culpa.

First, Amandla Stenberg is not, at least on this show, a particularly good actress. Her range is minimal; she played both twins almost indistinguishably; and her inability fully to sell her descent to the Dark Side is an understandable hurdle for viewers disappointed with the finale.

Second, the whole idea of twin sisters played by the same actress was goofy from word go and never paid off. Alas.

Third, it’s true that we were not in need of a replay of The Last Jedi’s basic beats: revisionist Jedi deconstruction mediated by Rashomon-like competing memories of an ambiguous tragic accident whose misunderstandings turn a hero into a villain.

Fourth, I still don’t understand why the twins had to be separated at the end, nor exactly why Mae’s memory of Osha has to be erased entirely—yet with the hope that they would one day be reunited. Huh?

Fifth and finally, I grasp the seven-year long frustration with Disney seemingly trying to undermine the Jedi at every turn in the Star Wars extended canon. Once the coolest, most mysterious characters around, they’re now lying bureaucrats who can’t be trusted, and who certainly are no match for the Sith.

Let me begin in reverse.

To begin, don’t blame Disney or Rian Johnson. Blame George Lucas. He’s the one who not only told of a thousand-year Jedi reign brought down by the Dark Side and the Empire—raising the question, “Why and how did they lose?”—but also offered his own answer in the prequel trilogy. That answer was: sectarian insularity, political sclerosis, spiritual blindness, and institutional decadence. If you don’t like Jedi as weak and foolish celibate wizard cops more eager to save their own hide than to protect the weak, then blame Lucas, not the last decade of Star Wars canon. It’s his fault.

Besides, he was right. He was always telling a fall-of-Rome descent from a republic to an empire, and if it was all happening beneath the noses of the Jedi, and if a rival rose quickly enough and powerful enough to wipe them out in a flash, then doubtless they were at fault to some extent. And The Phantom Menace clinched the deal: Qui-Gon Jinn is the fly in the ointment whose death at the hands of Darth Maul simultaneously ensures (a) the defeat of the Jedi, since they will no longer have a critical voice in their midst to possibly heed, and (b) the return of the Jedi, since his dying wish was for Anakin to be trained, and Anakin proved himself the Chosen One prophesied to bring balance to the Force by destroying Palpatine. (Reminder: Episode IX never happened.)

Granted all this, it was an inspired choice by Leslye Headland to make the final image of the series the iconic head of Yoda, framed from behind. If Yoda’s life is more or less coextensive with the rule of the Jedi, then he’s got to take some blame as well. There’s no retconning of evil here. There’s the hint—and it’s only a hint for now—that Yoda may not be a blameless saint in the centuries-long march to Order 66. He may even have covered up a scandal or too in his time the way a shrewd political operator might. And why not? Surely a millennium of peace and justice is worth a few secrets between Jedi Masters.

I repeat: While Yoda presided on the Jedi Council for centuries, Darth Plagueis and his apprentices flourished, culminating in Darth Sidious, Darth Maul, and Darth Tyranus. The defections from the Jedi were accumulating one after another in the decades leading to Anakin’s training—this is canon already by Episode II, since that film reveals that Yoda trained Tyranus (i.e., Count Dooku) before he in turn trained Qui-Gon, left the Order, and joined Sidious—which raises the question: How long had such defections been occurring, and why wasn’t the alarm being sounded more widely? The fact that the Stranger turns out to have been a former Padawan of Vernestra’s, a fact known to Yoda, is neither revisionism nor deconstruction: it’s a logical deduction. It’s putting a name where a blank used to be.

True, The Acolyte is now part of a story meant to fill in the gaps between Plagueis, whom we learn about in Episode III, and the “vergence in the Force” mentioned in Episode I, namely Anakin’s miraculous birth without a human father. I suppose that makes it one more prequel connected to the Skywalker Saga. But in this case is that so bad? It makes narrative sense that Plagueis had false starts and mixed results in his attempts to create and sustain life with midi-chlorians alone. Osha and Mae appear to have been part of the run-up to Anakin. Given Palpatine and Dooku’s respective ages in the prequels, this show is only a few decades out from their births and thus only a couple more from their turning to the Dark Side. The question now is who ends up killing Plagueis: the Stranger, Osha, or Palpatine. If not Palpatine, then we might actually see it happen on screen. (It could be Osha who takes on Palpatine as an acolyte, not Plagueis—now there’s some double-barrelled retconning.)

Turning back to the show itself, let me note a few more virtues and reconsiderations, given my boredom and annoyance just a few weeks back.

First, I reiterate my affection for Lee Jung-jae as Sol. What I wasn’t prepared for was coming to appreciate Rebecca Henderson’s performance. Vernestra seemed both boring and bored in early episodes. I now see that she was meant to embody the cynical self-interest of the decadent Jedi, running in notable parallel with the nameless imperial bureaucrats scrambling for patronage, status, and safety in Andor. She’s not meant to be cool or likable. She’s the very reason the Jedi fall, and the Republic with them. I should have been more patient.

Second, I thought the finale was expertly made. I’ll even go so far as to say that the lightsaber duel between Sol and the Stranger struck me as the most creative, distinctive, unique Jedi action choreography put on film since the fight between Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon, and Maul in The Phantom Menace. That’s 25 years, y’all! (The only rival is the throne room scene in Episode VIII, but that isn’t a lightsaber duel; it’s two Force- and lightsaber-wielding fighters facing off against Snoke’s Praetorian Guard.) Too often lightsaber duels are little more than glorified sword fights. But these are wizards! Who can do magic! Who can float and fly and manipulate objects through space, including their own bodies! Where’s the creativity? We saw it on display in this episode, with more than one nod to Hong Kong action cinema. Kudos to Hanelle M. Culpepper, the director.

Kudos also to the composer, Michael Abels. The music and cinematography were finally atmospheric; they made you feel something, rather than serving as so much visual and aural wallpaper for “made-for-TV Star Wars.” Lee sells the hell out of his anguish, inner turmoil, and (even in the end) refusal to accept responsibility and insistence on his own innocence, his own righteousness. No one can doubt his good intentions, but he did in fact invade a secluded town, woo a child away from it, kill her mother, lie about it, and maintain a decade-long cover-up.

It’s for this reason, third, that I buy Osha’s turn, even if her acting doesn’t sell it the way Lee’s does. The one man she looked up to for so long not only kept the truth from her the whole time; he himself killed her mother. That shattering moment shatters her whole world. How could it not? Everything else he told her must be a lie. The Jedi rejected her, after all. The Stranger hasn’t lied once. Sol becomes collateral damage, even as his death at her hands is a point of no return. She’s committed. She’ll be trained. She’ll become an Acolyte to the Sith.

Now, do I take back what I wrote previously about the way they should have told this story? No. This was always the right story to tell, but it took them too long to get there, and they should never have told it from the vantage of the Jedi Temple and its inner workings. It should have been from Mae and Osha’s viewpoint from the start. Nor were all eight episodes of the season equally successful. Two, four, and six (if I recall) were duds. One, three, and five range from solid to good. And seven and eight were excellent. Perhaps, if there’s a second season, they can build on this momentum and keep the quality high. It doesn’t hurt that we can begin the season from Osha and Plagueis’ perspective, rather than starting all over again.

Having said all that, the fundamental question posed by my last post was this: Does The Acolyte once and for all confirm, in conjunction with other established Star Wars canon, that the Dark Side is definitively stronger than the Light? So that it remains an utter mystery how the Jedi remained in power for so long? Yes, it does. The question remains. This show won’t answer it. But perhaps another one—or a film, like James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi—will. My hope is now nonzero.

Mea culpa.

Sith > Jedi

Through five of eight episodes, The Acolyte is a middling failure—and a failure because it is middling. Of everything Star Wars needed, the very last was one more showdown between the Jedi and a mysterious Sith shrouded in darkness, a long drawn-out unveiling and encounter shot without beauty or grandeur or style or grandness of scope. What a bore.

Oh well. Three more thoughts before we finish the series then immediately forget it ever existed.

First: In the lead-up to the show, the buzz was that it would be a story told from the Sith’s perspective, that is, from the vantage point of powerless partisans of the Dark Side at the tail end of a millennium-long unchallenged reign by the Jedi. That’s an interesting idea! Why wasn’t this exact story told in that way? Never in the hallways of Jedi power; never looking at the Sith or his acolyte through Jedi eyes; always, instead, looking at the Jedi aslant, from an angle, burning with furious resentment. In this way the aha-reveal wouldn’t be a Sith under a mask, but the epiphany of actual Jedi in all their boring beige glory—come to steal children, enforce galactic edicts, and kill with impunity. Why did no one think this the better route?

Second: If Disney wants to make quality Star Wars (on either the big or the small screen), they have to commit to top-tier casting. Cast a show the way HBO does. Don’t cast tweens and newbies. Don’t cast on the cheap. Get the best of the best. The only way this works is if the actors on screen have gravitas. Most of the actors on this show, like Kenobi and Boba Fett before it, look like third billing in a spin-off DC comics movie. Follow Andor’s lead and make every actor who has even a single line of dialogue someone who could win an Emmy—someone who could steal the show. (Make them human, too, by the way.) As it is, we get stilted dialogue performed by teens and twentysomethings who look like it’s their big break following a string of guest appearances on the CW. And it’s Disney, I remind you, that’s footing the bill. They’ve got the cash.

Third: Does this show prove once and for all that, canonically, the Dark Side is more powerful than the Light? Ignore Episode IX, since it never happened. Across eight movies, nearly every time a Jedi fights a Sith head-to-head (or a Force-wielding opponent in touch with the Dark Side, since neither Snoke nor Kylo Ren are Sith), the Jedi loses. Darth Maul defeats Qui-Gon Jinn and, at least in terms of lightsaber combat, Obi-Wan too. Dooku defeats Anakin and Obi-Wan both before fighting Yoda to a draw. Palpatine beats Yoda. Anakin may lose to Obi-Wan, but he “wins” in Episode IV and wins again in Episode V against Luke. Luke bests Anakin only by tapping into his anger (i.e., the Dark Side); Palpatine then defeats Luke; and Anakin in turn destroys Palpatine. In other words, this particular Sith loses not to a Jedi but to a fellow Sith—his own apprentice.

It turns out that, with the exception of Obi-Wan in his prime against an Anakin lacking any training in the Sith arts—having turned to the Dark Side mere hours earlier—the Jedi are no match for the Sith. The Sith are simply too powerful. The Dark Side appears to be the stronger side of the Force, and by a wide margin, whatever its moral content. (Note further that the Jedi themselves teach, as doctrine, that the Force as such is amoral; what it seeks, and what the universe wants, is balance, not for the extinction of the Dark by the Light.)

To its credit, The Acolyte confirms and extends this canonical pattern. In doing so, it raises questions it will surely avoid, such as why the viewer should root for the Jedi; why the Light is preferable to the Dark Side; why, post-Rey, anyone should have confidence that the Dark will not return and prevail; and how, pre-Palpatine, the Sith and the Dark Side alike were dormant, or even nonexistent, for a thousand years.

Star Wars has written its canon into a corner. Leslye Headland isn’t going to write it out. That falls to someone else. I have my doubts such a person exists. And even if they did, I wouldn’t hold my breath that Disney would hire or empower them to tell the only story that needs telling.

Update (5 minutes later): I realize, upon pressing “publish,” that this post is, unwittingly but unsurprisingly, one long apologia for Rian Johnson and The Last Jedi. IYKYK.

But seriously: I forgot to mention that Rey and Ren fight to a draw; that Rey is powerless before Snoke; and that only Ren can defeat Snoke. Which only furthers the point. Not to mention that Snoke converts Ren from the Light to the Dark and that Ren rebels against Luke—a Jedi Master!—thereby casting him away into exile and self-incurred defeat, even if also (at the end, through Rey) toward a sort of self-immolating victory. Had Kathleen Kennedy permitted Rian Johnson or some equally brilliant screenwriter to follow the lines he’d drawn where they were pointing (that is, in the climactic ninth film), all this would have already been resolved, since the question at the heart of the above post is the question at the heart of Episode VIII. Asked but, on principle, unanswered by Kennedy, Abrams, et al. Oh well. Maybe that was their signal that it never would be. So it goes.

The Acolyte

1. Lee Jung-jae as Sol is A+. A precursor to Liam Neeson’ Qui-Gon Jinn. Check.

2. Charlie Barnett as Yord, aka “but what if a Jedi Knight were a tool?,” is a great call. Even from the commercials you could see the stilted self-regard, which out of context presented as CW-quality acting, but in context is a nice in-universe joke. The Jedi are the worst! And Yord is the worst of the worst.

3. I’m fine with the twins plot, not least given the Sith’s Rule of Two and the Light and Dark sides of the Force. Already in the first episode we’re hearing about this, plus the episode titles make the subtext text. Will Amandla Stenberg’s characters be anything more than a literal outworking of this metaphor on screen? TBD.

4. I’m curious as to the show’s depiction of the Jedi’s inner workings. Are they sclerotic and bureaucratic? Or democratic and therefore unhurried (if possibly too slow to meet the urgency of the moment)? If the latter, then they are more like the Ents, and thus to be admired. If the former, then we’re back with Qui-Gon and d-e-c-a-d-e-n-c-e. But if the former because the latter, well, then you’re just making Palpatine’s argument for him.

5. I do not mind at all (unlike Alan Sepinwall) that the decadence, sclerosis, and institutional blindness on evidence in the prequels is already evident here, a century before the Empire. These things takes time. Moreover, Qui-Gon will be born some fifty years after the events of this show, and there will be living memory of whatever transpires in the rest of the series when he’s being trained as a child in Coruscant. I am eager to see whether Leslye Headland et al can make thematic or narrative hay of these matters beyond “Palpatine-versus-the-Jedi avant la lettre.”

6. See further Timothy Burke on the difficulty of nailing down the Sith’s concrete motivations in Star Wars lore.

7. There are intriguing hints. “Our political enemies” says one Jedi to another. Who are they? What do they want? What is their brief? But these questions raise a whole new set of questions, as does The Acolyte as a whole…

8. Boil them all down this: How is it possible that the Jedi kept the Republic from war for a thousand years? Remember, Star Wars is not a Star Trek: this isn’t meant to be utopian. Life isn’t perfect. Greed and lust and wrath and gluttony and pride and all the other sins prevail; the Republic is not the Federation. This isn’t communism minus Lenin and Stalin. It’s just ordinary civilizational life projected onto the stars. How, I repeat, was there absolutely zero war—no conflict beyond the local, the petty, the private—for a full millennium? Across how many solar systems in an entire galaxy? Even contained on a single planet? None, zero, zilch? Are we committed, canonically, to this necessarily and strictly being true? For real?

9. Now think about the Jedi. They are a tiny religious minority of celibate wizards who forsake emotional attachment, are taken from their families while very young to be trained by a secret order on the galactic capital planet, wield magic spells at a whim, brandish laser swords, and carry an imperial (sorry, republican-senatorial) remit to investigate, subdue, arrest, and (if necessary) kill any and all suspected of breaking the law or making trouble. In effect, Jedi are medieval monks, knights, and sheriffs, all in one. They leave family behind, they neither marry nor have sex nor have children or households, yet they possess occult powers that intimidate and discipline a galactic population of trillions. How, I ask once again, did such a tiny, terrifying, and unrepresentative group preserve, much less enforce, peace and justice in the galaxy? As Obi-Wan remarks at one point in the prequels, the Jedi are not soldiers. Who wouldn’t feel burning resentment at these magical universe policeman? “The Jedi live in a dream,” the acolyte’s master says. I’m inclined to agree.

10. I failed to mention that, in this galaxy, there is no God, only the Force. No one worships the Force, not exactly. The Force has servants and students (a la Chirrut Îmwe), but the Force itself is neither good nor evil, only the balance of the two. Why should any ordinary people “believe in” the Force, or respect or admire or even care about it? And by extension, the Jedi?

11. I suppose a postmodern debunking of Obi-Wan’s “more civilized age” as just so much nostalgic hokum could be interesting. But I’d prefer a deeper answer on this score. Even during the Jedi’s (and by extension, the Republic’s) high tide of peace, politics was never extinguished. What was going on? How did they preserve it? By what maneuverings? With what shenanigans? Who, after all, initiated the Jedi doctrines about detachment, much less celibacy? Are they necessary? Or are they part of the problem? And thus part of what led to Sidious, Maul, Anakin, Snoke, Ren? Could Rey’s new Jedi order correct for these past mistakes, as Rian Johnson’s film implied? If Disney makes good on a new series of films focusing on her efforts—as well as a biblical epic, directed by James Mangold, depicting the Jedi’s origins in the distant past—could these form a kind of narrative thread, even an inclusio, centering less on Luke and Leia’s family drama and more on the High Republic’s failures, the Jedi’s decadence, and Palpatine and Qui-Gon’s shared critique of the status quo? In order too forestall repeating history, which would doom the galaxy (and moviegoers) to an endless cycle of Sith/Dark-versus-Jedi/Light?

12. Fat chance. But in theory, it could work.

23 thoughts on The Phantom Menace

Twenty-five years ago I saw Episode I with a childhood best friend in the theater that sits at the entrance to Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida; last night I saw the re-release with my sons at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas. I’ve got thoughts.

1. No matter its potential, no matter the what-might-have-beens, no matter the revisionist reviews or retconning or retrievals, three things were always going to keep TPM from being a great Star Wars film: (a) an eight-year-old Anakin; (b) unnecessary narrative nostalgia; and (c) cutesy cartoon schmaltz. We now have forty years’ worth of evidence that these decisions were not departures from the vision of George Lucas, but part and parcel of it. To change course, he would have had to listen to outside voices suggesting that Anakin be eighteen, not eight; that Anakin not be the original builder of C-3PO; that Jar Jar and Watto and Sebulba and “sleemo” and “doo-doo” and ha-ha neighborhood Tatooine slave children taunting “Ani” are neither funny nor endearing, including to actual children. But Lucas doesn’t believe in listening to others, here in his galaxy above all. So there’s no sliding doors moment where Episode I is truly excellent; it was always going to be hamstrung from the start.

2. A partial addition to this list is Lucas’s obsession with “cutting edge” CGI, which everyone but him knows ceases to be cutting edge the moment the car drives off the lot. On re-watch, though, had the film lacked the above three items of dead weight without cutting the gratuitous CGI, it could have held up. So long as the animated characters weren’t cartoonish or racist(!)—a big “if”—then TPM would have been like Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park or Fellowship of the Ring. The “dated” graphics aren’t dated at all: they’re remarkable testaments to digital artistry. Rather than what they became, which is testaments to Lucas’s softness for silliness.

3. A friend told me years ago that a professor of his ruined The Godfather for him by pointing out Diane Keaton’s acting in it. Allow me to suggest that Natalie Portman is the Kay Adams of The Phantom Menace—indeed, of all three prequel trilogy episodes. She’s not exactly spectacular or awful, the way Hayden Christensen is on screen and going for it and not quite succeeding but still, you know, doing a thing. It’s a void, an absence, a null. She’s a non-presence in every single scene. I’m happy to blame Lucas for this instead of Portman, both for his direction and for his writing of the character. (Portman is, after all, a very accomplished actor outside of Star Wars, which was one reason to be excited about her casting!) Nevertheless one-half of the Skywalker twins’ parentage is a zero in our introduction to her. A lost opportunity.

4. The only time Portman is half-alive is when she “plays” her own double on Tatooine and repeatedly butts heads with Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jinn. But then, the entire handmaiden/queen ruse and its “reveal” is goofy to begin with. I wonder how it played with adults at the time. I vaguely recall being surprised in 1999, yet minus any payoff. The only narrative logic is that it allows Lucas to put Portman in town with Neeson when they meet and befriend Anakin and his mother Shmi. Otherwise it’s a dead end.

5. Given the furor it caused at the time, I have to admit that, on re-watch these many years later, with so many shows and film and canon filled out, I don’t mind the Midi-chlorians one bit. It’s actually rather elegantly done, I must say. Begone, haters! Hier stehe ich und kann nicht anders.

6. There are other clunky bits, not least just about everything related to the Gungans as well as the deep-sea adventure through the planet’s core, plus some of the Trade Federation politics- and alien-speak (again, those accents are shameful). That said … like all the other revisionists, I can’t hate this movie, and there’s a lot to appreciate, even love. Let me count the ways.

7. Neeson’s Qui-Gon is not only a home run: well conceived, well written, and well executed. He may be one of Lucas’s greatest creations. He commands every scene. He’s always in his own skin, comfortable where others are not. His simultaneous uncertainty, confusion, confidence, and resolve are palpable. The hints at his past and his running conflict with the Council are expertly deployed in their ambiguity. He has chemistry with everyone: with Portman, with Ewan McGregor, with Jake Lloyd, with Pernilla August. Neeson somehow single-handedly elevates this movie from forgettable to memorable, at least when he’s on screen (which is a lot). All this is not even to mention the moral gray that Lucas leans into with Qui-Gon. I lost count how many times Neeson lies to someone’s face without a trace of regret. He gambles without promise of gain and doesn’t even stop to inform the queen. What a character! What a performance!

8. Did I mention that Qui-Gon was dead right about the Jedi and the Republic? About its sclerosis, decay, and internal rot? About its detachment from the common good? About its aristocratic self-regard and blindness to the evil in its midst? Neither Yoda nor Mace Windu could see Palpatine standing right in front of them. Palpatine made sure his apprentice killed the only one who might recognize him before it was too late.

9. (This point and the next two relate also, by the way, to The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson understood that Luke had to come to terms, on screen, with the “intra-Jedi” debate between Palpatine, Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and Yoda. In a sense, Luke—through Ren—had to mature beyond Yoda and Obi-Wan’s vacillating optimism and despair in favor of something less childish, less binary, less yin and yang, without succumbing to the Dark Side. That maturity goes unspoken in the film, but its name is Qui-Gon. Had Episode IX been made by someone as shrewd as Johnson, Rey’s journey and continuation of the Jedi would have made explicit this callback all the way to Episode I: “a new start” for “a new Jedi,” open to the wisdom and worldly good sense of a Qui-Gon Jinn.)

10. Qui-Gon wasn’t just right about the Jedi; he was also right about Anakin, assuming he was indeed the Chosen One (a contestable proposition, I admit). Even if he was wrong about the prophecy, or rather ensured the truth of the prophecy by tragically ensuring Anakin’s training, he was right to see promise and potential in Anakin and the Council was wrong to treat a third-grade child—to his face—like his sadness and fear, after leaving his home and mother behind, were such a psychological obstacle to his learning the Force that they would rather him suffer humiliating rejection before the highest sages of the land. Hm, I’m sure that would have bode well for the virginally conceived Jesus of Midi-chlorian Force powers. They sealed their fate, and confirmed Qui-Gon’s worst fears about them, in that very room, by that very decision. It’s a miracle that Anakin ever repents at all, given his experiences.

11. Think again about those experiences. He’s conceived without a father’s involvement. He’s a slave from early childhood. He leaves his mother before his tenth birthday. He joins an order that not only keeps him from ever visiting his still-enslaved mother for a full decade but also refuses to use their power, influence, and wealth—not to mention their lightsabers—to liberate her from a slavery that the Republic itself outlaws! Oh, and the Jedi also require lifelong abstinence, forbidding marriage and children. Later, Anakin will return on his own to Tatooine to find his formerly enslaved mother kidnapped, tortured, and raped by Tusken Raiders. He will murder all of them for this. Later still, Anakin’s secret wife, secretly pregnant, will die, in part as a result of his lashing out at her with the Force. Then he will be led to believe that his unborn child died with her. Then he will learn that his son lived, but this knowledge was kept from him both by his current master (Palpatine) and by his old master (Obi-Wan)—all surrogate fathers who failed him. Then he will learn that his son has a twin sister, likewise kept from him. Then he will fight and nearly kill his son. Then he will kill his current master, having “killed” (or defeated) his old master, and ask his son for forgiveness before dying of his wounds. (Note: All three of Anakin’s surrogate fathers died as a result of apprenticing him.) Then he will look on from Force-ghost-world as his grandson turns to the Dark Side and murders his own father and nearly his own mother, even as Luke turns away from the force in despair and self-chosen exile. Then, finally, his grandson will join forces with (former Nabooian Senator) Palpatine’s granddaughter to destroy Palpatine himself—whom Anakin, somehow, failed actually to kill in his one and only good deed in life. Having killed Palpatine once and for all, Anakin’s grandson gives his life to save Palpatine’s granddaughter’s. And so the Skywalker blood line is complete: from Shmi to Anakin (and Padmé) to Luke and Leia (and Han) to Ben. Seven Skywalkers, all special, most Force sensitive, some Jedi, all dead and gone, and for what?

12. No, J. J. Abrams, Rey is not a Skywalker, even if she wants to claim the name. And yes, it occurs to me that one of Freddie deBoer’s best essays is a longer and much funnier version of the previous point. Go read him and weep/laugh.

13. Since I’m mentioning writers on these themes, see also Matt Zoller Seitz and Ross Douthat. And Freddie again, who is correct about The Last Jedi.

14. What else does Lucas get right? The politics, the decadence, the transition from planetary democracy to galactic democracy to galactic republic to galactic emergency to galactic empire. He also understands that the wider cinematic and narrative frame of Star Wars is not itself, his own prior creation, but the larger mythic and movie worlds of both Western and Eastern culture. Granting the moments of eye-rolling nostalgia and point-and-laugh coincidences, Star Wars has not (yet) become solipsistic at this time.

15. The music is flawless. Thank you, John Williams.

16. Lucas also nails multiple scenes and images, to the point that some of them remain iconic. The greatest of these is every single frame of the Darth Maul fight. I dissent from the view that Maul should have lived to fight another day; it was wise to kill him off. What makes the duel with Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon so compelling—somehow I’d never realized this—is that none of them ever speaks a word. In just about every climactic fight sequence in any action movie, the leads are in constant conversation: cajoling, insulting, persuading, begging. Not here. There’s nothing to talk about. It’s pure visual poetry. Few things filmed since then can match it.

17. Maul is a singular visual creation. You can’t help but stare. As for other characters, Obi-Wan is well written by Lucas and well acted by McGregor, as are Palpatine by Ian McDiarmid and Shmi Skywalker by Pernilla August. I was surprised how affecting August’s portrayal of Shmi is. The only pathos in the movie, with the possible exception of Obi-Wan’s grief over Qui-Gon, belongs to Shmi. She is worn down by the world, yet oddly hopeful, given her experience with Anakin’s miraculous conception and her love for him. She wants him to leave, even as she registers a moment’s hurt quickly covered over by a mother’s affection when she sees his forgetfulness, then remembrance, then acceptance at her remaining behind (as, the movie won’t let us forget, a slave).

August and Neeson share multiple moments together: knowing glances, light touches of arms and shoulders. Squint and you might see romantic tension. On this viewing I saw instead a kind of shared religious sensibility. They both relate to the Force the way Mary and Joseph relate to God. Like Joseph, Qui-Gon is a surrogate and adoptive father (also like Joseph, Qui-Gon dies before Anakin becomes an adult; unlike Jesus, Anakin has major daddy issues for the rest of his life, as do his son and grandson, Luke and Ben—apparently the only way for sons in Star Wars to exorcise their paternal demons is by slaying their father or dying themselves, or perhaps through handing on the line from multiples generations of failed father figures to an adopted daughter figure: this is the only reading of Rey I will allow). Note well that Shmi isn’t passive before Qui-Gon; rather, her fiat mihi is, like Mary’s, an active consent in response to a higher benign power. In this way Shmi and Qui-Gon alike are responsive to a kind of cosmic momentum sweeping them along. They see it, acquiesce to it, float along with it, even at great cost; in fact, at the cost of both of their lives.

18. I remain struck by the fact that when Lucas sat down to write Darth Vader’s backstory he made the child Anakin Skywalker a slave on a backwater planet. I must have seen The Phantom Menace at least a dozen times since 1999, but I had never registered the brief conversation at the Skywalker dinner table in which Anakin explains that all slaves on Tatooine have a chip implanted beneath their skin that (a) can’t be detected or removed by the slave himself and (b) marks them as a slave for life, lest they attempt to escape. This, in what is otherwise, in Lucas’s hands, a children’s fable! Anakin can’t run away, much less hop aboard starship, because his brutal slaveowners will track him down through the cybernetic chip implanted in his body!

Is this a kind of dark foreboding of Anakin’s eventual bodily disintegration and reintegration via robotic machinery? “More machine than man”? A man enslaved by his own passions, by his unchosen transhuman body, metal and circuitry rather than flesh and blood? A man overmastered by a Force he supposed he could manipulate to save the wife he eventually killed? All of which turned on his receiving freedom from slavery without his mother—a motherless origin at this, the source of the most famous “orphan’s tale” in American pop culture? Recall that, in the next film, Padmé comforts Anakin following his slaughter of men, women, and children among the Tusken Raiders, after they took and abused his mother (once she had herself been freed and married by a good man!). I lay all this out to show what was going on in Lucas’s mind as he sketched out the origins of Darth Vader. As seemingly light and occasionally cartoonish as Episode I can be, it has moments of such darkness it makes you gasp.

19. This is a movie about overconfidence. More than once different characters say, “You assume too much.” Or, “I promise you…” followed by an outlandish vow they can’t be sure they can keep or whose implications they can’t foresee. Even my beloved Qui-Gon comes under judgment here. No one knows anything—the only exception is the Sith, who see all. No one else has sight. Everyone is blind while presuming the indefinite persistence of the status quo. And it’s all about to come crashing down around their ears. This is the tragedy of the beginning of the story of Darth Vader. This is “the phantom menace” haunting the galaxy, haunting the Jedi, haunting the Republic, haunting Anakin and his many would-be fathers.

20. So no, I don’t mind the name, either. It’s both accurate and appropriately apt to the Saturday morning genre B-movie serials that influenced the original film.

21. Three final thoughts, each a missed opportunity. The first concerns slavery. Why not make that issue more prominent in the next two episodes? Why not make Anakin an abolitionist? Why not insinuate the issue into the Senate’s bureaucratic machinations and Padmé’s own frustrations? Why not send Anakin back to Tatooine to liberate the slaves—only to have his hand slapped by Coruscant, even to have the slaves returned to their masters by the august Republican Senate? And why not have Palpatine rise to the occasion, offering the power of emancipation to Anakin and Padmé in return for emergency wartime powers? After all, doesn’t he need the military might of the Republic to stamp down the Hutts and other slave-mongering forces? How did this not write itself?

22. Why not let Anakin lose the pod race? The race is well shot, but there’s no urgency or angst because we know he’ll win. What if he didn’t? What if a loss then put Qui-Gon in the position of stealing Anakin away, refusing to honor his bet with Watto and the Hutts? Qui-Gon would do it. And it would make him a hero in Anakin’s eyes, even as it made Anakin resentful and ashamed for having lost and furious at the now-villainous Council and Senate, which would politely instruct Qui-Gon to return Anakin to Tatooine. This plot line, too, writes itself.

23. Oh, Jar Jar. By which I mean: Darth Jar Jar. Do I buy the theory? I want to. And man, there really are odd aspects of TPM if Lucas truly had nothing up his sleeve with this character. His banishment, the fear he inspires in fellow Gungans, the suggestion that he will be punished or even killed once Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan depart, his occasional physical prowess and grace, his crucial role at key moments to catalyze the plot (such as hinting in Padmé’s ear that she should return to Naboo—moments after Palpatine whispers diabolical suggestions in her ear in the Senate—not to mention his fateful vote to make Palpatine Emperor in Episode III). Remember, too, that Palpatine is a Senator from Naboo, so it’s absolutely plausible that he and Jar Jar have had prior contact. He just “happens” to run into the Jedi and incur a life debt. Oh, and how does Darth Maul track Padmé’s ship to Tatooine if they never sent a transmission off world, but only received one? One option: Jar Jar himself found a way to send a transmission, alerting the Sith to their whereabouts.

The notion of doubles (“Always two there are”)—co-equal/rival pairs or even a kind of surreptitious self-doubling—is pronounced in TPM: Republic and Trade Federation, Senate and Council, Amidala and Padmé, Palpatine and Sidious, Sidious and Maul, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan and Anakin. Why not Jar Jar and Darth Jar Jar?

As others have detailed, this would also explain Maul’s death and Count Dooku’s random appearance in his place; it was meant to be Count Jar Jar all along. Had the JJB character not been such a fantastic fiasco and embarrassment from day one, he might have been the Gollum of Star Wars: the first true and truly momentous CGI character, and a secret villain to boot. Was he? Was that the plan?

Maybe. Who knows. On this re-watch, aside from some of the narrative holes, it didn’t seem particularly likely. And it sure seems like we would have heard some leak from Lucasfilm in the last three decades spoiling the secret.

Chalk it up as one more might-have-been in this remarkable might-have-been of a movie.

Civil War

I don’t yet know what I think about Civil War, Alex Garland’s latest. I’ve not read a word from others, though I have a vague sense that there are already battle lines drawn, strong readings offered, etc. I have nothing to say about that.

I do know that Garland is smart and makes smart films. I’m hesitant to trust either my or others’ knee-jerk reaction to a film that’s clearly got things on its mind, a film that is surely not what many of us supposed it would be based on trailers and ads.

I also care not one whit what Garland himself thinks about the film. He may have thought he was making a movie about X, intending to say Y, when in fact he made a movie about A, which happens to say B and C.

Like I said, I don’t have a strong take yet. I do have one possible interpretation, which may turn out to be a strong misreading. Here goes.

Civil War is not about American politics, American polarization, impending American secession, or even Trump. It’s not a post–January 6 fever dream/allegory/parable. It’s not a liberal fable or a conservative one.

Instead, Civil War is a film about the press—about the soul of the press, or rather, about what happens when the press loses its soul. In that sense it is about Trump, but not Trump per se. It’s about what happens to the press (what happened to the press) under someone like Trump; what the reaction to Trump does (did) to journalism; how the heart of a free polity turns to rot when it begins to mirror the heartless nihilism it purports to “cover.” Words become images; images become form without content; violence becomes a “story”; an assassination becomes a “scoop.”

It doesn’t matter what Nick Offerman’s president says seconds before he’s executed. It matters that he say something and that someone was there—first—to get “the quote.” The newsroom lifers and war-time photographers documenting propaganda, unable to listen to one more canned speech spouting lies on the radio, themselves become agents of propaganda. They become what they oppose, a photo negative of what they’re so desperate to capture for their audience. (What audience? Who’s watching? There’s no evidence anybody is reading, listening, or watching anymore. Outside of the soldiers and the press, everybody else appears to be pretending the war isn’t happening at all.)

The urban warfare Garland so expertly displays in the film—better than almost anything I’ve ever seen attempting to embed the viewer on the streets and in the cramped rooms of military units breaching fortified gates and buildings, made all the more surreal by its being set in downtown Washington, D.C.—is therefore not about itself, not about the images it seems to be showing, but is instead a Trojan horse for us to observe the “PRESS” who are along for the ride. And what happens between the three leads in the closing moments tells us all we need to know. One gets his quote. One gets her shot. And one loses her shot, as she does her life, having slowly awakened across the arc of the film to the intolerable inhumanity required of (or generated by) her profession. Another propagandist, though, rises to take her place. There’s always someone else waiting in the wings, ready to snap the picture that will make her name.

There, in the Oval Office, staring through a camera lens, a star is born.

Klosterman, Rowling, and the NFL

Recently I had the chance to sit around a campfire with a bunch of boys aged 6-12. For almost an hour they talked about one thing: Harry Potter. Both the books and the movies. Who had read which books, who had seen which films, who preferred the one to the other, ranking the volumes from one to seven (or eight), and so on. The kids who’d read and seen them all were clearly top dog—they held court over the younglings (though not all the older kids had read them all, apparently a demerit). Naturally, an overeager fourth grader spoiled Dumbledore’s fate for a first grader.

None of these boys were alive when any of the books or the films were first released. The first book came out 26 years ago. The final film came out 12 years ago. They aren’t just second but third wave Harry Potter fans. And they talked about it like it was the most relevant, the most vital, the most up-to-date pop culture matter in the world.

Eavesdropping on their conversation brought to mind a short essay by Chuck Klosterman, published in 2012 on Grantland (RIP). It’s called “The Two Lines That Never Cross.” It’s about the popularity of football in America. For years folks like Malcolm Gladwell were sounding the alarm on concussions, head injuries, and the long-term consequences for adult men’s brains of playing football in their teens and twenties. Readerly parents and good liberals stopped enrolling their boys in Pop Warner. The imminent death of American football seemed inevitable. Like boxing before it, football would go the way of the dodo.

It wasn’t to be. Eleven years ago, Klosterman saw why:

To me, this is what’s so fascinating about the contemporary state of football: It’s dominated by two hugely meaningful, totally irrefutable paradigms that refuse to acknowledge the existence of the other. Imagine two vertical, parallel lines accelerating skyward — that’s what football is like now. On the one hand, there is no way that a cognizant world can continue adoring a game where the end result is dementia and death; on the other hand, there is no way you can feasibly eliminate a sport that generates so much revenue (for so many people) and is so deeply beloved by everyday citizens who will never have to absorb the punishment. Is it possible that — in the future — the only teenagers playing football will be working-class kids with limited economic resources? Maybe. But that’s not exactly a recipe for diminishing athletic returns. Is it possible that — in 10 years — researchers will prove that playing just one season of pro football has the same impact on life expectancy as smoking two packs of cigarettes every day for a decade? Perhaps. But we’ll probably learn about that study during the Super Bowl pregame show, communally watched by a worldwide audience of 180 million people. Will the government have to get involved? I suppose that’s possible — but what U.S. president is going to come out against football? Only one who thinks Florida and Texas aren’t essential to his reelection.

If football’s ever-rising popularity was directly tied to its ever-increasing violence, something might collapse upon itself: Either the controversy would fade over time, or it would become a terminal anchor on its expansion. But that’s not how it’s unfolding. These two worlds will never collide. They’ll just continue to intensify, each in its own vacuum. This column can run today, or it can run in 2022. The future is the present is the future.

So far as I can tell, Klosterman was and remains right. There’s not one trend line, but two. They’re not intersecting; they’re parallel. They’re pointed straight up, forever, and they’ll never cross. Not ever.

Now think back to Harry Potter, or rather to that global phenomenon’s author. If J. K. Rowling’s name is in the headlines today, it’s not out of love or celebration. It’s a cause for controversy: something she said, something she wrote, something she did that, once again, has sullied her name and reputation and outraged her (once, no longer) fans. Search “Rowling AND cancel” and you’ll find a million think pieces about her actual/potential/impending/deserved/unearned/fake/outrageous/latest “cancellation.”

And yet. Consider those boys around the campfire. They know Rowling by name; she’s their favorite author, right up there with Rick Riordan, Jeff Kinney, Tui Sutherland, and Dav Pilkey. They know nothing about her social and political views. They know nothing about activists burning her books—whether fundamentalists in the 1990s or progressives in the 2020s. They know nothing about what they’re supposed to think. All they know is that they adore the world and the story and the characters she created, and they want to live in it and relive it constantly in conversation with their friends and in their spare time. They’d meet news of her controversies with a blank stare.

In a word: Imagine two vertical, parallel lines accelerating skyward. One’s made of distressed former fans who’ve repudiated Rowling and all her works. The other’s made of these boys and their peers, a whole generation of children raised on and devouring Rowling and all her works. The lines never meet. They just keep shooting upward, forever.

I think she’s going to be fine.

Ahsoka

Start with the good:

• Charting a path to another galaxy.

• Bridging the gap from Episode VI and Mandalorian to the rise of the First Order in Episode VII.

• Bringing the animated characters of Rebels into real life.

• Dreams and memories and holograms of Anakin—a natural move, since he was Ahsoka’s master, and by this point in the timeline he’s been redeemed and died, without ever resolving his relationship to Ahsoka.

• Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Hera: of all the actors on the show, she’s got the most life in her eyes.

• Ray Stevenson as Baylan Skoll. Not only is the late Stevenson a commanding presence; his secret long game, whatever it is, is the only narratively compelling and unprefabricated part of the show.

• Genevieve O'Reilly as Mon Mothma, given her spectacular turn on the equally spectacular Andor—but only if she plays more than a minor role; that is, if Filoni et al have plans to continue and eventually finish that character’s arc, on this or another show, given that we don’t know her final fate.

• The general action choreography, including the space fights and (some of) the lightsaber duels. Kudos on the old school Samurai-esque solo-move kill by Ahsoka in her duel with Marrok.

Now for the middling:

• Rosario Dawson! Perfect for the role, and yet somehow she’s not quite clicked with the character. She clearly made the decision to play Ahsoka as contemplative, unemotional, patient to a fault. No spunk or flavor at all. Sometimes she, and thus the show, feels like it’s stuck in molasses. This was an unwise decision, to say the least.

• Not bringing back Zeb! Why? The hassle of a CGI character? The entire gang’s back together. Shouldn’t all of them constantly be asking one another why this old friend isn’t tagging along?

• Huyang and Chopper. Low-key or downer screen presence the both of them. Someone has got to bring some life and verge to the show, no?

• Ivanna Sakhno as Shin Hati. She’s aiming for the boiling-over-with-rage-and-desire-for-power Sith thing, but it only sometimes works. Just as often she just looks like she’s posing, and so trying too hard with nothing evident for the viewer to care about in the character’s nature or motivations.

• Lars Mikkelsen as Thrawn. I’m withholding judgment on this one until the finale airs. I read the original Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn thirty years ago, so it’s a pleasure to watch a live-action Thrawn on a bona fide Star Wars show with my sons in the year 2023. Neither Mikkelsen’s acting nor Thrawn’s depiction so far is a disappointment. But it hasn’t blown me away yet either. The show needs to make good on this guy as a—the—Big Bad of this stretch of time in the canon, a villain on a par with Vader and Palpatine and Kylo Ren and Maul. Stick the landing, people!

And the bad:

• Natasha Liu Bordizzo as Sabine Wren is a dud. Close behind is Eman Esfandi as Ezra Bridger. Not only did these characters need to pop, their chemistry—with each other, with Ahsoka, with anyone and everyone—needed to function as the beating heart of the show. Unfortunately the opposite is the case.

• The eye-rolling hero’s welcome for C-3PO. My word. Not only does the fan service need to stop. The excuses for why neither child of Anakin Skywalker can’t find it within themselves to come join the action are getting old. Kennedy, Favreau, and Filoni made a tactical error when Solo scared them off from re-casting the Original Trilogy characters. So now we’re stuck with either bad CGI recreations of a young Mark Hamill or a stage-left fanfare appearance of Leia’s droid envoy—instead of just recasting the parts and letting these fictional characters show up and do stuff, as they unquestionably would have in such a story. Oh well.

• The sequel-to-a-show-most-viewers-haven’t-watched problem. This was the one nut needing cracking, and Filoni wasn’t up to the task. There were creative ways around this. Why not do something unexpected and actually film key scenes from Rebels in live action, with the newly cast actors? Either for flashbacks or even for a kind of mini-movie that might serve as a prologue or prelude to the show itself? How cool! Fun for the fans of Rebels, fun (and necessary) spadework for new viewers. A win win. Instead we’re deluged by exposition and vague references to the past, a past we’re made to know is Heavy and Sad because we saw melancholy faces reflecting silently about mostly unidentified things that happened on a children’s animated show that premiered almost a decade ago!

• The story itself. The real story begins to ramp up in the second half of the series, which makes the first four episodes pure build-up. This was a mistake. It’s clear to any viewer watching this show that it’s just a launching-pad, or segue, into a larger story—the real one, the “star war” against the fledgling New Republic as led by Thrawn and his imperial remnant—a story whose conclusion we’re going to have to wait years to see. Even if it culminates in a fantastic theatrical film by Filoni (I’ll be there, I always am), this series will have proved to be nothing more than a stepping stone, when it could have been an interesting stand-alone story, far more than a bridge. Perhaps the finale this Tuesday will prove me wrong, but I have my doubts.

Marvel on a budget

Why do Marvel’s productions look so bad? Why does Secret Invasion look like it was shot by numbers in about three weeks on an Atlanta backlot the size of a basketball court? Why are scenes so often in cars or indoors? Why are so many actors unknowns or newbies? Why does everyone seem sedated except Olivia Colman?

Likewise, why was Ant-Man 3 so aggressively ugly? Why were the graphics so poor? Is the studio on a budget? Is Disney siphoning money from Marvel to other IP? Is Disney’s current cost-cutting already evident in Marvel’s post-Endgame entries? Is Marvel’s aesthetic on purpose? Are the directors and cinematographers happy with the way the shows and movies look, or is the aesthetic imposed on them from on high?

Either way, where is all the money going? Consider the latest season of Jack Ryan on Amazon. Shot on multiple locations, regularly featuring wide-angled shots of gorgeous outdoor vistas, it looks and feels like a slick action movie with a visual language and a modicum of style. It’s never hazy or gooey the way Marvel (and, for that matters, Netflix) productions are. You can see everything. It’s high definition. Care has been put into the image. And into the acting and writing. Even if it’s just popcorn entertainment, there’s forethought and planning in evidence. Bezos is getting his money’s worth.

You can’t say the same for Marvel. It’s embarrassing. It’s beginning to feel like late 90s primetime television: same production quality, same writing exhaustion, same pseudo serialization. This, from a multibillion-dollar movie studio that conquered the globe over the last fifteen years. Does anyone know why? What’s going on?

I’ve stuck with the movies just for fun. And Guardians 3 was good. But last year I couldn’t bring myself to finish Moon Knight, much less try She-Hulk or Ms. Marvel. I don’t know anyone who did. I sampled Secret Invasion because (a) it’s summer and (b) Samuel L. Now I’m hooked just to see how the car wreck comes to an end.

After this, it’s Loki (potentially solid) followed by a run of shows and movies that are humdrum, eyerolling, or parody: The Marvels, Echo, Agatha, Captain America 4, Ironheart, Daredevil (again), and Thunderbolts. (Deadpool 3 doesn’t count; it’s inherited, won’t follow house style, won’t mess around with MCU canon, and will wrap up the trilogy.) Future Avengers movies keep getting delayed, contain no narrative momentum, and feature no names or actors normie audiences care about. Plus the one interesting thing about the multiverse, Jonathan Majors’ performance as Kang, is unlikely to continue; I assume Majors will be replaced by another actor by year’s end.

When Kevin Feige hired Ryan Coogler and Taika Waititi and James Gunn, it seemed as though Marvel’s productions would have style and panache, built on relative directorial freedom. Sometimes that came through. But in the last few years it’s become clear those were exceptions to the rule. The rule, it appears, is half-rendered sludge on a budget that will always prefer an Atlanta green screen to an actual physical location. At the very moment Tom Cruise is defying death in practical stunts on the big screen. It’s bizarre.

If there’s an explanation, I’m all ears.

Ranking drama series finales

The Ringer ran a fun piece this month, since revised, ranking the forty best series finales by TV shows of any kind—bar miniseries—since the turn of the century. Some of the choices were head-scratchers, though. Parks and Rec? Lost?? New Girl??? The Good Place???? They also included both comedies (Friends, 30 Rock) and reality/other (Nathan For You, The Hills). But the move to limit the options to the post-Sopranos prestige/peak TV era was smart. And they ranked a couple episodes usually overlooked in these debates (though they missed one big one). Overall it’s a solid list.

Here’s mine, following the conclusion to Succession Sunday night. Like many, I’ve soured on the TV hype over the last few years. Partly just because I want to spend my time doing things other than keeping up with the latest shows. But mostly because Peak TV was excellent at creating B-level series with A+ production and unreliable at creating A+ series of any kind—especially ones that made it to the end, rather than starting with a bang and ending with a whimper.

With the end of Better Call Saul last year and Succession this spring, I expect to limit my TV viewing going forward to occasional/pure-fun shows: basically, blockbusters or popcorn fare that involve cooking, spies, or galaxies far, far away. And any series that gets a lot of attention out of the gate, I’ll wait till the start of season 4 (I’m looking at you, Last of Us and House of the Dragon). If everyone still swears by it at that point, I’ll give it a look.

Having said that, the following is a list of shows I don’t regret watching, because each of them stuck the landing. Though first some criteria followed by honorable mentions.

First, I’m only ranking dramas.

Second, I’m only considering finales aired after the year 2000.

Third, I’m considering the finale in the context of the final season. No “good” finale of an otherwise dispensable or poor final season qualifies.

Fourth, while I’m not prioritizing unhappy endings, I am giving the nudge to conclusions that avoid the sitcom trap of giving everyone an (unrealistically) happy ending, because these are people we (and the writers room) love, and we can’t allow ourselves to imagine them unhappy once we say goodbye.

Fifth, I’m also (and therefore) giving the edge to finales that simultaneously (a) work as episodes of television, (b) conclude the overall story of the season/series, and (c) do not in any way swerve from the story the show was always telling, but are clearly an organic and fitting and thus (in the Aristotelian sense) necessary way of completing the story.

Full disclosure: I’ve seen whole seasons of Girls, Atlanta, Half & Catch Fire, and Deadwood, but not finished any of them. I’ve not seen more than a scene or an episode of Six Feet Under, Dexter, Sex & the City, Barry, and Ozark. I’ve always heard wonderful things about the SFU finale, as well as Deadwood’s. Perhaps one day I’ll make it to the latter; I doubt I’ll ever get around to the former.

Honorable mention: Battlestar Galactica (a wild ride, but a bit too hand-wavy even for this Christian Luddite), Mr. Robot (somehow successful, if dragged out there in the final episodes), The West Wing (good for CJ! But all around too much, even for this show), Parenthood (melodrama is as melodrama does), The Expanse (an action-packed blast, but too premature—given how much more story there was to tell), Boardwalk Empire (so good! Almost cracked my top 10), Breaking Bad (excellent, obviously, but still too happy and action-hero-ish for Walt), Mad Men (one or two seasons too late, and too enamored of its two leads to see them as the sad, artless, tragic souls they always were), Hannibal (off the deep end … and also in need of that Clarice sequel!)

Dishonorable mention: Lost + Game of Thrones (no comment necessary)

Now to the top ten … (Minor spoilers ahead, though I’ve tried to be vague.)

*

10. Friday Night Lights. Unlike all that follow, this one partakes of the happy tradition of TV dramas and sitcoms giving everyone the happy ending the audience wants them to have. But because that was always the nature of this show, as a high-production soap opera about high school Texas football and the perfect marriage at its heart, this was never going to be the wrong call. Our heroes ride off into the sunset—the bright lights of Philly, that is.

9. Rectify. Somehow not on The Ringer’s list! The best TV drama of the 2010s. It ended in just the way it ran from the beginning: beautiful, ethereal, contemplative, ambiguous, honest, hopeful. This is the only show I recommend to anyone without reservation. A lovely and humane work of art.

8. Justified. Like Star Trek movies, the best Justified seasons come in evens: two, four, six, followed by five, one, three. The finale hits all the beats, while providing surprising catharsis between the star-crossed hero and villain. I’m not a re-watcher of TV shows, but I look forward to going back through this one with my kids once they’re old enough.

7. The Leftovers. Had the finale of season two been all she wrote, it would have been higher on the list. As it stands, the third season is good but unnecessary. I’ve long wanted to write something about the finale, which has something to say about religion. It’s the wrong thing, but it’s something all the same. You can’t help but cry in those final moments. And it doesn’t spoil a thing in the previous seasons. It even brings a measure of closure to both leads’ stories, along with a question mark the viewer can’t answer for himself. We just have to trust Nora’s word, too. (Or not.)

6. The Wire. Dinged for the final season going a bit haywire. But still a magnificent final two episodes. A sort of sitcom finale, except without making everyone’s ending happy. Feels epic the way the whole show was epic: a story about a city and the lives and institutions that make it endure, for all its dysfunction. And that last Irish wake…

5. The Americans. They were holding out on that U2 song. When it hits, you know why they were so patient. In a sense, this finale was “happier” than expected. But not all happy. And no corners were cut getting there. And when you realize what the leads have lost, you realize it’s not happy at all. But that final confrontation! A whole series building to one single moment in a parking garage. Marvelous performances. When The Americans was on, it was the best show around.

4. The Shield. A pitch-perfect finale with so much plot, so many storylines built into it! So brutal, so devastating. And that final scene. Haunting. An underrated show.

3. Succession. Shows four through one on this list all have perfect finales, in my view. It’s only been twenty-four hours, but Succession belongs. They stuck the landing. They knew the story they were telling. They knew the characters they were crafting. They knew how it had to happen. And they twisted the plot in just the right—and sometimes unexpected—ways, to get there. (Tom!) I wonder how this show would play for someone watching it all for the first time, binged in a week or two? Viewers have been agonizing for what feels like ages to see how it all would come to an end. And people interpreting the finale as a set-up for more seasons or even a movie have utterly misunderstood both the show and the finale. It’s done, folks! They, and we with them, were stuck in interminable infernal circles for forty episodes—and they’re still stuck. They’ve just swapped spots in hell’s musical chairs. It’s never getting better. That’s the point.

2. Better Call Saul. I’ve written about the BCS finale at length. Whether I’m right or Alan Jacobs is right (or his amended take is right), the finale couldn’t have been better. Not only were they completing Jimmy McGill’s arc, they were also bringing the entire Breaking Bad universe to a close—not to mention the excellent-but-still-slightly-missed-opportunity of the BB finale. It’s true, Jimmy-Saul gets to shine. But not because the writers couldn’t bear to see him unhappy. Because he couldn’t help himself. And whether or not he’s happy where he landed, it’s not a happy place to finish one’s days.

1. The Sopranos. This one’s been written about to death. I’ve got nothing to add. It’s still on the throne. No dispute from me. Long live the king.

Slow Horses

In adapting the novels, here’s what the show gets right:

1. Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Not only a perfect match between actor and character, a so-obvious-it’s-inspired choice given Oldman’s previous role as Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

2. The rest of the casting in season 1. Jack Lowden’s River is a would-be cross between Bond and Bourne, except he’s a bit of a doofus, self-regarding, a screw-up, and still in the service owing mainly to nepotism. The rest fit their roles perfectly, whether Kristin Scott Thomas, Christopher Chung, Saskia Reeves, Freddie Fox, or Dustin Demri-Burns. Give the casting director a raise.

3. The general atmosphere and vibe: the former within the world of the story, the latter put off by the same. Slough House is dark, dank, and cranky; Lamb is genuinely embittered and misanthropic; redeeming qualities are few and far between; you really believe this is an island for MI5’s misfit toys. The vibe thus produced is simultaneously cool (spies!) and bitterly funny (losers!), placing the audience always on the ironic edge between cheering on the slow horses and laughing at their incompetence. And it’s hard to believe when actual danger and daring-do come along and rope these has-beens and second-rates into the game.

Here’s what the show gets wrong:

1. The final episode of season 1. In the book, not only do we get to live inside Ahmed’s head as a character in his own right. For all the slow horses do to find him, much less to save him, Ahmed rescues himself. All the Lamb/River action is at Regent’s Park. The others try to track Ahmed from a deli or coffee shop. But the kidnapping and attempted execution are botched due to a combination of foolishness (Lady Di), in-fighting (the two remaining kidnappers), and shrewdness (Ahmed). The slow horses are nowhere to be seen! That is, in the book. In the show, Lamb and River and Min and Louisa speed down the highway to find Ahmed and, eventually, save him—more or less on camera! Give me a break. It’s absurd TV high jinx that lights the subtext of the show on fire. All of a sudden we’ve got real spies doing real Bond–Bourne–Jack Ryan stuff, rather than the back-ups to the back-ups accidentally stumbling upon observing some spy stuff … on their laptop screen.

2. The second season is a mess from start to finish. Marcus and Shirley are both duds—whether as written or as acted, it’s unclear. The plot of the book is so complicated that the writers attempted both to simplify it and to make it more closely connected to Lamb and the slow horses, but the result is a story impossible to follow by anyone unfamiliar with the novel and finally nonsensical on its face. I still can’t believe that the finale opts to leave both the “evil pilot mom” and the “cicadas” plot threads utterly dangling, unaddressed. Including the bald man in the action, making Roddy an action hero with his laptop, putting Lamb and Popov in the same room, flying River to the OB’s house to save the day … once again, the finale is absurd, on its own terms, while also being a denial of the whole point, ethos, and thematic heart of the show.

3. I’m also unsure about the wisdom of beginning to reveal, as soon as the season 1 finale, secrets about Lamb, the OB, Partner, and their interlocked past that might be best reserved for later. That is, the shock of some of their secrets needs time to become shocking. If we learn them more or less up front, then they’re just part of who the characters are, rather than revelations that complicate what we thought we know.

4. The second season also ups the “feel good” schmaltz a couple notches compared to the first season. It feels the need, in other words, to give the good guys a heart, rather than to keep them the losers they are. Lamb in particular basically just becomes a grand master spy, running his joes, rather than a cynical drunk who can’t spare a single second’s thought for another person’s feelings—especially if that person is someone he cares about. I hope, in the next season, they have the wisdom to drop the warmth and return to the cold the way it should be.

The Gray Man

Why is The Gray Man so bad? Chris Evans is in top form, while Ryan Gosling and Ana de Armas are always game. It could be the script; but then, dumb action scripts have the potential to be elevated by competent direction into quality entertainment, and occasionally even excellent art.

The culprit has to be the Russo brothers. Yet they are the same directors of this scene, which contains more clarity, line of sight, and visual creativity in three minutes than anything in the full running time of TGM. Don’t they know they now live in a world ruled by action auteurs like Christopher McQuarrie, Chad Stahelski, and Gareth Evans? Are there more than three straight seconds of coherent, sustained editing in TGM before a careening drone shot or confusing cut renders the action visual gibberish? Why all the CGI smoke, gas, and fire? Why the constant haze, a sort of vague fog constantly filtering the audience’s sight? Is it cinematographer Stephen Windon’s fault? Someone else’s? Who is spending all that Netflix cash? On what, exactly, other than an outlandish and unnecessary travel budget? Why are the visuals and action of Extraction, another Netflix film produced by the Russos but directed by first-timer Sam Hargrave, superior to TGM’s? Why, why, why?

Does anyone know the answer? I certainly don’t.

NOPE, BCS, TOM, MCU

Some pop culture odds and ends…

Nope. I’ve got little to add to the Discourse here, just a few scattered thoughts. (I saw the film with friends and processed it with them; I’ve not done any online reading besides skimming—and being disappointed with—this article.) First, Daniel Kaluuya remains Jordan Peele’s not-so-secret super-weapon. What an actor. Second, it’s nothing but good for the movies that Jordan Peele productions have become events unto themselves. That’s a happy world to live in, even when Peele doesn’t quite hit the mark, as here. Third, the problem with Nope is the opposite of what ailed Us. Where Us worked at the visceral level of story and characters, it failed at the symbolic or metaphorical level. In Nope, by contrast, the allegory is what’s potent and compelling, whereas the literal narrative has gaps and questions. At times it feels like the plot does X or Y because that’s what the Meaning requires, rather than the significance arising organically from the story. When the allegory calls for the same signifier to mean two or more contrary things at once, the plot becomes unmoored. Having said that, fourth, a couple minor interpretive ventures. What’s up with that shoe? What came to my mind was the monolith in 2001, whose presence always signals a powerful evolutionary or technological shift in a group or species’ agency—and whose first appearance involves apes, tools, violence, and a jump to spaceships (re the last, the dad in the sitcom appears to be space-related in interests or profession). I wonder if, on a re-watch of Nope, mention or flashback or appearance of the shoe would similarly signal not only Gordy’s turn but also key turns in the narrative and/or Jean Jacket’s behavior. I’ll also add, mostly tongue in cheek, that when wondering aloud about the title of the film, what came to mind was Knope, as in Leslie. If Get Out (still his most successful film) was Peele’s rejoinder to the fantasies of well-meaning Obama-era white-liberal post-racism—though it understandably took on new force when someone other than Hillary was elected—perhaps Nope is a rebuttal of the same phenomenon, only applied to Hollywood instead of Washington, D.C. It’s Peele’s Nope to Poehler’s Knope.

Better Call Saul. I’ve been on the BCS bandwagon from the beginning. I’ve written about it briefly before, but mostly I’m just here to stand in awe. Like MBD, I anticipate these final episodes like each is Game 7 of the NBA Finals. Be sure to be reading what Alan Jacobs writes about it. Even DBH is in on the glories of Saul:

I became genuinely addicted, however, to Breaking Bad, which was so much better written than any of the television of my youth—and better written than just about every studio film made since the 1970’s—that it astonished me. It was the perfect balance of Dostoyevsky and Ed McBain, with just a hint of Lawrence Sanders here and Charles Portis there. I did not even mind the somewhat fantastic conclusion of the series. When, however, its sequel (or “prequel”) Better Call Saul came out, I was hesitant to watch it, fearing it would prove to be an inferior product that would only diminish my memory of the original program. But I watched. Now, in its final season, having just returned from its mid-season break, the show is dwindling down to its end over half a dozen episodes; and I am prepared to say not only that it is the better of the two programs, but that it may be the finest wholly original program ever to grace American television (or television anywhere). Like its predecessor, it is a grim portrayal of the gradual destruction of a soul, though now perhaps with somewhat greater subtlety and nuance, and with a richer range of characters. Comparisons aside, though, the quality of the writing has proved consistently astounding, and never more so than in these concluding chapters. Anyone who has followed the story—and I will give nothing away—will know that the final episode before that mid-season break was at once shocking and brilliant. It arrived in its closing minutes at a denouement (ominously announced by the slight flickering of a candle’s flame) that made perfect sense of the entire narrative of the series up to that point, and of the current season in particular, but that was (for me, at least) wholly unexpected until the moment just before it occurred. The construction of the story was so ingenious, and its moral and emotional power so unexpectedly intense, that I was left amazed. I do not know what it tells us about the current state of our culture that good writers have more or less been banished from the movie industry and have had to take their wares instead to television; but I am glad the medium as it now exists can make room for them. I also do not know what to make of the reality that there are television programs so much more competently written than most novels today. But, whatever the case, I can at least assure my three correspondents that, yes, I do watch television, even sometimes when something other than baseball is on; and that, moreover, in the case of Better Call Saul I feel positively elevated by having done so, because the program is a genuine work of finely wrought art.

I’ll add that, though Alan Sepinwall is usually reliable, his most recent recap of the show is strange, and it worries me he might know something about the final three episodes and be unintentionally telegraphing it to readers. He’s done this in the past, where he interprets an episode’s implications in ways no normal viewer would, because screeners or confidential information tugs his mind in an unpredictable direction. All that to say, he suggests over and over both (a) that this is probably our last glimpse of Gene’s future story and (b) that it provides a “happy ending” to Jimmy/Saul/Gene’s story.

A happy ending? What could that possibly mean? Deceiving and abusing an elderly woman and her loser son with a meaningless heist that could get the latter sent to jail, thereby reminding Jimmy of “the good old days” when—wait for it—theft, fraud, drugs, and murder were part of his daily life … this is a “happy ending”? Huh? The story is explicitly and intrinsically a fall narrative, a decline into moral squander and misery. The eminently wise and trustworthy writers and showrunners of BCS may or may not have more Gene in store for us. But even if we don’t return to him, his ending is as far from happy as one could possibly imagine.

The Old Man. Shows like The Old Man are more or less factory-produced for my tastes: The Honourable Woman, The Night Manager, The Americans, Fauda, even season five of Homeland—self-contained, stylish cocktails of spycraft, action, and character, realistic enough to be taken seriously, unrealistic enough to be fun. Le Carré lite, in other words. I was disappointed by the finale of TOM, however, because I thought it was a seven-episode miniseries, not the first of two seasons. I also didn’t realize Jeff Bridges’ battles with lymphoma and Covid brought production to a halt multiple times. Imagine being 70 years old, cancer in remission, Covid finally beaten, and the next day you’re hanging out a window at 70mph playing grandpa-Bourne, shooting back at the bad guys chasing you (and grandpa-driver John Lithgow). Not a bad capstone to a remarkable career.

Marvel. By my count, between May 2008 and November 2025, if Disney has its way, there will have been at least thirty-nine official “Marvel Cinematic Universe” movies. By the time the fifth and sixth Avengers films come out (six months apart) in 2025, my bet is that there will have been even more than what’s currently announced, which means the number will likely cross the threshold of forty movies in a little over seventeen years. And that’s not counting any Marvel characters produced by Sony outside of the MCU. Nor is it counting the Marvel TV shows, which in the same time span should amount to at least twenty-six in toto, which on average run two to three seasons each. So again, in less than two decades, we’re talking one hundred movie hours and hundreds of TV hours.

Now look at quality. From 2019 to the present there have been nine MCU movies. Two have been very bad (Captain Marvel and Eternals), three have been middling (Black Widow, Shang-Chi, and Thor 4), and four have been solid (Avengers 4, Spider-Man 2 & 3, and Doctor Strange 2). People love the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, but they’re actually pretty forgettable; and although the final Avengers entry provided a cathartic conclusion to the previous two dozen films’ worth of story lines, it was bloated and even sort of boring in the middle act.

All that to say, that’s three and a half years of the world-bestriding Marvel Universe, the most successful film franchise of our (all?) time … and it’s a pretty mixed record, when you step back and look at it. Add in the deluge of Disney+ series and their even spottier quality, plus a narratively unclear and mostly uncompelling “multiversal” saga connecting these films to the coming ones in the next few years, and it makes sense that people are writing about Marvel’s “problem” or “crisis.”

Nevertheless, I think that sort of language overstated. Between one pole, which suggests the MCU will keep on breaking records forever, and the other pole, which suggests the MCU is about to crash, I think the correct position lies somewhere in the middle. When characters and properties that people love are featured in a Marvel movie, people will keep buying tickets; see Black Panther 2, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Blade, etc. When people don’t care, or the movies are bad, people will start to drift away. Instead of seeing 2019 as a peak followed by a steep cliff, we should see it as the highest peak, followed by only very slowly diminishing returns, with many subsequent slightly smaller peaks, with a cliff awaiting only after 2025. At that point, unless they nail revivals of Fantastic Four and X-Men, which somehow spark another wave, a new generation, a seventh “phase,” and thus a third decade of MCU fandom and culture-wide mania, I think that’s when it all, finally, comes to an end—where “end” doesn’t mean “no more popular comic book movies” but “everyone and their mom ceases to reflexively see most MCU movies in the theater.”

Then again, the almighty Kevin Feige has been doubted before. He knew something no one else did fifteen years ago. Maybe he knows something we don’t today. But count me skeptical.

Sometimes it’s simple

There is always much hand-wringing in Hollywood and among the writers who cover it when a film that “should have” been a hit is a flop, or at least underperforms. I find this phenomenon baffling. It seems to me that we should only wonder aloud why people didn’t go see a movie if all the following conditions are met:

1. The movie is well-advertised, far in advance, with excellent marketing and especially trailers and commercials that not only make the movie look good but also communicate clearly what it’s about and why it would be worth seeing in the theater.

2. The movie is in fact good—where “good” means at least “entertaining” but preferably also “successful at what it is trying to do.”

3. There was reason to suppose, prior to going into production, that this sort of movie released at this particular moment would be appealing to ordinary movie-goers and thus well-received upon release.

If a film fails to meet any of these conditions, not to mention all of them, then we do not need to ask why it was not popular. (NB: A film not meeting these conditions might still be popular, but that’s a separate matter.) Consider Lightyear. Not one single moviegoer across the past two decades has wondered when Pixar would make the movie inside the movie Toy Story from which the action figure Buzz Lightyear was ostensibly taken as merchandise. This fact alone didn’t doom the movie, though it didn’t help. Blasé marketing and poor execution did the dooming. That’s it. End of story. Question asked and answered.

Most people don’t see a movie on opening night. They go see said movie if and only if they ask friends who did go on opening weekend whether the movie was good. If the answer is no, they won’t go see it. Again, end of story. This isn’t rocket science!

Now take a harder case: The Last Duel. Here we’ve got A-list stars in a period drama directed by Ridley Scott. I watched it for the first time at home last week. The critics were right: it was great—much different than expected—and I wish I had seen it in the theater. Why didn’t I?

Simple: The trailers oversold the generic parts of the story and undersold the original parts. All the stakeholders piqued my interest, but I just couldn’t gear up for another Ridley Scott B+ medieval epic. Once I started reading good reviews a week or two after its release, I considered going—except that, after digging around, I learned that this is a 2 1/2 hour film featuring an extended rape scene portrayed not once but twice. At that point I knew my wife and I would not be paying a babysitter to go see it, even if I thought it probable we would “like” it. Such a movie is worth making (and I’m glad they did), but it’s a hard sell to ordinary moviegoers; see criterion #3 above.

Making popular movies is hard. My claim here doesn’t belie that. My claim, instead, is that it’s not hard to understand when bad movies, or poorly marketed movies, or movies that have neither reason to exist nor prior built-in appeal, do poorly. We don’t have to pretend not to know.

The issue with Kenobi

It’s not that it’s especially good or especially bad. It’s not that it’s revisiting a time period we’ve seen before. It’s not that it involves old characters and a fair bit of retconning.

It’s not that we’re back on Tatooine (for an episode). It’s not that we see kid Luke or kid Leia. It’s not that Hayden Christiansen is behind the mask (or in flashbacks). It’s not that the stakes are lower than usual. It’s not even that it’s serialized TV rather than a movie—though that’s close.

It’s that it feels like TV. It isn’t cinematic: in scope, in style, in ambition, in storytelling. Both its visual grammar (on the screen) and its literal grammar (on the page) are fit for the age of binging and streaming, not for a once-in-a-lifetime must-see cultural event.

There are no stunning landscapes. There is no moving music or even a memorable theme. The action is indistinguishable from other generic CGI-fests today, only somehow smaller. Even with the deep Disney pockets and the Star Wars brand, the show feels like it was made on the cheap: on soundstages, before green screens, with small crews, smaller casts (regular and extra), yet without the modest grandeur of The Mandalorian manufactured by StageCraft.

Compare with Top Gun Maverick, which for all its “legacy sequel” status is so big, so impressive, so jaw-on-the-floor awesome that it’s already the biggest hit in Tom Cruise’s 40-year career. It bends your will into submission by virtue of nothing so much as its self-confidence as pure spectacle.

By contrast, there is neither spectacle nor patience in Obi-Wan Kenobi, no pregnant pauses or non-filler geography. The editing is ho-hum. Viewers find themselves in the land of close-ups, the default setting of television cinematography. No one is winning any awards for this show.

That’s it. That’s the problem. Ewan McGregor is doing yeoman’s work, as ever. Kid Leia is cute. I didn’t mind the Anakin flashback. Nor do I mind looking to the animated series as a template here. But that template is for character, canon, and nuances of character. The visual, aural, and storytelling template is 1977—full stop.

Whether or not the finale lands the plane without eye-rolling, nostalgia bombs, or massive canon-revision—that is, even if the last episode doesn’t ruin anything in the OT and actually turns out to add a thing or two—it will still not have been worth the effort. Kennedy, Favreau, Filoni, et al have to start thinking bigger. They have to start unleashing their writers and directors while resisting, at all costs, the siren song of a Star Wars analogue to the Marvel in-house style, which is no style at all.

The worst eventuality here is not to make something bad, a la Episode II. The far greater sin is to make something boring, even forgettable. And I expect to have forgotten this series by year’s end.

Kim, breaking bad

You heard it here first. To be specific, on March 3, 2020, here’s what I wrote:

A brief comment on Better Call Saul, prompted by Alan Jacobs' post this morning:

I think the show rightly understands that Kim is, or has become, the covert protagonist of the show, and by the end, we (with the writers) will similarly come to understand that the story the show has been telling has always been about her fall. No escape, no extraction, no pull-back before the cliff: she, like Jimmy, like Mike, like Nacho, like Walter, like Jesse, like Skyler, lacks the will ultimately and decisively to will the good. They're all fallen; and in a way, they were all fallen even before the time came to choose.

In this way the so-called expanded Breaking Bad universe has made itself (unwittingly?) into a dramatic parable of original sin. Not that there is no good; not that characters do not want to do good. But they're all trapped in quicksand, and the more they struggle, the deeper they sink.

This was only three episodes into season 5; the closing moments of the eventual season finale—in which Kim not only initiated an unnecessary, risky revenge-scheme (now being played out in season 6) but also wryly double-barreled Jimmy just the way he had done in the closing moments of season 4 (“It’s all good, man!”)—signaled that the writers have known this was the destination, and the overriding theme of the show, for some time.

The present two-part final season is stretching out that slow burn to the breaking point, in peerless, masterly form as usual. In Gilligan and Gould we trust.

Masterly Spielberg

I’ve written before of my love for Steven Spielberg (whose critical fortunes, having waxed and waned over the decades, seem to have settled into a sort of consensus: whatever your personal feelings for this or that movie of his from the past 10-15 years, it’s undeniable that the man knows where to put the camera), and Tim Markatos, whose writing on film you should read and whose newsletter you should subscribe to, captures perfectly what makes Spielberg so great in his explanation for placing West Side Story at #5 on his list of the best 25 films of 2021:

This movie is so well blocked that it simply embarrasses nearly every other movie released this year (including some of the highbrow fare on this very list). Mise en scène alone doesn’t make a movie (“But what if it does?” whispers the little devil-horned Janusz Kamiński that suddenly appeared on my shoulder), but it matters more for a musical. The Spielberg–Kushner rendition of West Side Story lets the Robert Wise version alone and leans harder into political awareness (a key distinction, I would say, from political correctness) not merely by writing it into the script but also by building it into every material aspect of the production. Sometimes it gets a bit hokey, Ansel Elgort brings all his personal baggage to the screen in a way that will either alienate you or not, but none of that matters because I will watch “America” approximately 300 times once it’s inevitably uploaded to YouTube and be floored by Spielberg’s total mastery of this medium every single time.

I will, too. “Total mastery” is right. In those areas of which he is master, the man is without peer.

Bezos ad astra (TLC, 4)

In his latest newsletter—is it the best going? It’s up there—L. M. Sacasas writes about what he calls “earth alienation.” He uses Arendt and McLuhan’s distinct reflections on the significance of Sputnik as a frame for considering Jeff Bezos’s recent comments about space exploration and colonization. Here’s where he quotes and unpacks Bezos:

During his portion of the proceedings . . . Bezos articulated a vision for the creation of space colonies that would eventually be home to millions of people, many of who would be born in space and would visit earth, Bezos explained, “the way you would visit Yellowstone National Park.”

That’s a striking line, of course. It crystalizes the earth-alienation Arendt was describing in Prologue of The Human Condition. It is, in fact, a double alienation. It is not only that these imagined future humans will no longer count the earth their home, it is also that they will perceive it, if at all, as a tourist trap, a place with which we have no natural relation and know only as the setting for yet another artificial consumer experience. And, put that way, I hope the seemingly outlandish nature of Bezos’s claims will not veil the more disturbing reality, which is that we don’t need to be born in space to experience the earth in precisely this mode.

To be sure, Bezos makes a number of statements about how special and unique the earth is and about how we must preserve it at all costs. Indeed, this is central to Bezos’s pitch. In his view, humanity must colonize space, in part, so that resource extraction, heavy industry, and a sizable percentage of future humans can be moved off the planet. It is sustainability turned on its head: a plan to sustain the present trajectories of production and consumption.

Sacasas comments:

Arendt believed, however, that the modern the desire to escape the earth, understood as a prison of humanity, was strikingly novel in human history. “Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age,” Arendt wondered, “which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?”

We’ll return to that Arendt quote. After meditating on the set of issues it raises, Sacasas concludes:

What alternative do we have to this stance toward the world that is characterized by a relation of mastery and whose inevitable consequence is a generalized degree of alienation, anxiety, and apprehension?

We have a hint of it in Arendt’s warning against a “future man,” who is “possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.”  We hear it, too, in Wendell Berry’s poetic reminder that “We live the given life, not the planned.” It is, I would say, a capacity to receive the world as gift, as something given with an integrity of its own that we do best to honor. It is, in other words, to refuse a relation of “regardless power, ” in Albert Borgmann’s apt phrase, and to entertain the possibility of inhabiting a relation of gratitude and wonder.

Go read the whole thing. I can’t do it justice in a few quotes, not to mention the way in which every one of Sacasas’s newsletters is part of a larger, coherent whole. It brought something to mind, though, a recent film that seems to me a perfect example of the phenomenon he is describing, precisely in existential and aesthetic terms. Whether or not it is an illustration or a critique of that phenomenon is an open question.

The film is Ad Astra, which somehow was released only two years ago. (Every pre-pandemic cultural artifact feels much older than it is.) Written and directed by the great James Gray, Ad Astra (“to the stars”) tells of an astronaut, played by Brad Pitt, who goes on a mission to find his father near the planet Neptune, who may or may not have finally discovered extraterrestrial life. Pitt plays his character, Roy, with a perfectly controlled flat affect: his stoic courage is actually the surface of a dying, or dead, inner life. He lacks what he most desires, namely presence: to himself, his ex-wife, his estranged father. Haunted by his mental monologue, Roy’s voyage to the stars to find his father and/or life beyond the human is at once a metaphorical and literal, allegorical and spiritual journey into the heart of darkness.

When the film came out I didn’t write about it in a formal venue, but I did tweet about it. So let me take the opportunity to unfold one of my “Twitter loci communes.” First read Alissa Wilkinson’s excellent review for Vox, then Nick Olson’s lovely thread. (Also a bit from the indispensable Tim Markotos: “Penal Substitutionary Atonement: The Movie flirts with Freud and Nietzsche before finally settling on Beauty will save the world.” LOL.) Now here’s what I said:

Grateful to @alissamarie for this beautiful review of Ad Astra. Couldn't agree more. I'll have to keep pondering whether there's something potentially transcendent there, or if it's as deeply immanent-humanist as Gray's oeuvre suggests.

She's also right that this is the sort of a-theological spiritual art that religious people should celebrate, contemplate, and (quite possibly) read against itself. I mean, what a beautiful film.

It's also something of an anti-Interstellar. What finally doomed that film was its navel-gazing: when we look at the stars, we see ourselves blinking back. Here, Gray's vision is subtly different: the stars are “empty,” but beautiful in their sheer existence for all that.

And that very beauty and wonder of the ostensible nothingness—that the cosmos exists at all rather than nothing—generates not only awe at the mystery of life but love for those closest to us. That's what Nolan sought to accomplish, I think, but failed where Gray succeeds.

The next day I read Nick’s thread and riffed on this tweet of his in particular:

The TOL [Tree of Life] parallels come easily. One way of putting it is that this is TOL without Mother. Maybe in spite of itself, it winds up being a film that’s in search of Mother in lieu of distant Father. AD ASTRA’s “we’re all we’ve got” is also that TOL cut from the universe to the infant.

Here’s what I wrote:

This is good too. If you can accept the father/mother // nature/grace symbology of Tree of Life then apply them to Ad Astra, what you have in the latter is nature without grace, because a creation without a creator.

Then you can read it one of two ways: 1. The father's despair is a proper response to the realization that the universe is bereft of Logos (much less a Logos incarnate), and the son in effect embraces a false consciousness in the face of a potential nihilism.

2. The son's affective embrace of an "empty" cosmos is the proper response because "Man" has been searching for meaning (or ratio) apart from "Woman" (here, a figure for concrete love, rather than abstract wanderlust).

Again, you've got to accept that gendered symbology on the front end, but if you do, and you import it from Malick (and other sources!), then Gray is doing a lot here with his choice of characters. (Also makes me think of what role Ruth Negga serves in the story . . .)

Having said all that, though what I most want is to read the film in the vein of #2, inflected theologically, I have to admit that if I'm going to read the film against itself, #1 is the more penetrating as well as the more provocative route.

The next day I expanded on this line of thought, using an interview of Gray on one of The Ringer’s podcasts, The Big Picture:

In that James Gray podcast interview, he says he wanted it to star someone like Brad Pitt, who brings with him a “myth” or “mythology” that he, Gray, could then deconstruct in the film—referring to Ad Astra as “a deconstruction of masculinity.” Pairs well with the thread below.

Not only is Brad Pitt a global icon of “manhood” or “masculinity.” In Tree of Life he literally plays “Father/masculine” (=nature), as opposed to “Mother/feminine” (=grace) (Jessica Chastain). Gray then makes him a Son who spurns Woman while searching for the absent Father.

And in the process (again, literally) cutting the umbilical cord (in the heavens!) connecting him to the Father, thence to return to Mother Earth—now no Fall but a reditus of the aboriginal pilgrim-exitus—to reunite masculine (nature) with feminine (grace) via the bond of love.

I also had the following “aha” moment:

Somehow it only just occurred to me that Ad Astra opens with ha-adam, the royal Man (Brad Pitt)—husband of Eve (Liv Tyler), whose name (Roy) means "king" (le roi)—literally falling from heaven to earth.

Now I realize Brad Pitt's character's name, Roy, has not only royal connotations (Leroy, le roi, the king) but also a biblical-theological connection (el-roi, Hagar's naming of the Lord as God-who-sees). Roy wants truly to be seen by his father/God—a hope left unfulfilled.

Now recall that Arendt quote from above:

Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?

It seems to me that Ad Astra is, from start to finish, one long cinematic meditation on this question. And whereas my initial reading of the film leaned immanent-cum-nihilistic, I feel prompted to revise that reading in a more hopeful, if still humanist, direction.

Sacasas writes of “Arendt’s warning against a ‘future man,’ who is ‘possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.’” In this respect Pitt’s Roy might be construed as that “future man” who goes beyond himself by his own means but, ultimately, reaches the end of his tether—again, this happens quite literally in the film—before returning to earth to accept the limits of finite human life for what it is: a gift. As given, it is not subject to the manipulations or technologies of man, but as what it is it is good in itself, howsoever concrete, delimited, and therefore subject to loss. The gift is a mystery from without and can only be accepted with gratitude or spurned with ingratitude. Though Gray insists on an immanent frame—indeed, we are given to understand that going beyond that frame is itself a rejection of the gift of finite existence—the film’s closing scene is less a period than a question mark. Roy accepts the gift in love, and as love. But if a gift, then a Giver? If love, then a Lover?

The question is apt for Bezos and his ilk. To escape the immanent as immanent is a rejection of transcendence, not its embrace; the technological sublime is a substitute for the beatific vision, not a means of reaching it. Accept earth as the gift that it is, and you will gain heaven with it. Renounce earth for the stars, and you will lose it all.

Artists for friends

Should the artists you love love you back? I confess that this question never occurred to me when I was growing up or , as an adult, when I developed a taste for whatever art I happen to take pleasure in. As this question, or rather assertive expectation, hovers like a gibbering ghoul over all our aesthetic and pop-cultural conversations these days, and has done so in increasing emotional intensity with each passing year (or at least it seems so to me), I have found myself asking why it would never occur to me—apart from what I take to be later, more informed and reflective conviction.

I suppose much of the reason comes down to this: Growing up as a Christian in the U.S. means that if you like anything outside the sub-cultural bubble of kitsch and in-house “Christian” entertainment, you are forced to reckon pretty quickly with the fact that not only are the artists whose work you enjoy neither religious nor Christian; they are often actively hostile to the sort of Christian you are. More to the point, their words or images or themes make your faith and/or your community (i.e., your family) an object of critique, ridicule, or dismissal. Which means that, pretty quickly, you either accept this state of affairs and go on enjoying their work, or reject it in toto and return to the warm confines of the bubble. I opted for the former.

I think of Tool and Rage Against the Machine, two bands I adored in high school. I saw them live. I owned all their albums, including the Napster-sourced live and hard-to-find stuff. I learned their songs on guitar and bass. I was willy-nilly radicalized politically. (RATM was my first real introduction to leftist thought. They were the reason I was skeptical, as a self-involved suburban high schooler, of the Iraq war.) And guess what? I knew they hated my guts. They hated where I lived, where I went to church, my house, my friends, my parents, my beliefs—all of it. They told me so, in no uncertain terms. And what did I do? I kept on listening. Not only did I not let their contempt for much of what made me me determine whether or not I could enjoy their art. It actually proved a significant moment, or development, in my intellectual and theological formation. It snatched me out of the bubble and put me face to face with the voices of people who’d been harmed by religion, or who found it repulsive, or who thought it an emotional and political sedative, or who saw through the lies of hucksters and frauds. That was (and remains) an important education. For much of what they had to say was true; and even when it wasn’t, it was worth listening to.

I think also of Christopher Hitchens, whose writing I found myself falling in love with in my twenties. Not his politics—though the fact that I feel compelled to say that is itself an indictment of those readers who loved Hitch right up to the point when he crossed an invisible line, whereupon his writing somehow proved no longer good—but his prose. I still marvel at the man’s ability to write interesting sentences, combined with or underwritten by masterly knowledge of Anglophone literature and global politics and history. Seeing his nearly-posthumous bullet-stopper Arguably show up in the mail was Christmas come early: every essay a feast.

As you well know, Hitchens, too, hated my guts. He thought religion poisoned everything, specifically my religion: Israel and Jesus and Paul and Rome and all that. To which I thought: So be it. Who cares? I returned his hate with affection. I thought he was wrong, naturally, and that he ought to turn down the volume every once in a while. But if his hatred was earned—if he truly believed that what I believe is toxic to human flourishing—then he ought to have said so, and with all the passion he could muster. It would never occur to me to be angry at him, certainly not for saying what he judged to be true in the most compelling manner possible. I would, and still do, keep on reading and loving him back.

To be clear, I don’t mean to universalize my own experience. I would never prescribe reading or viewing or listening to artistic content filled with genuine hatred for oneself or one’s community. Nor would I suggest that one ought to do so on principle.

But the general point stands. Artists aren’t our friends. Good art is not art that affirms me or who I am; good art is not art that is made by people who affirm me or who I am. The art stands on its own. It is good or bad in itself, on its own terms. And if you, or I, find joy in it, see the truth in it, delight in its beauty or wit or pleasure, then each of us is free to ignore whatever wise or foolish beliefs its creators hold. The joke’s on them if they would withhold their work for only the “right” sort of people. But if we withhold it from ourselves, for no other reason than an arbitrary (and, given the implications, ultimately indefensible and self-defeating) sense that artists ought both to like us and to say so, then the joke’s on us.

Quit podcasts

“Quit Netflix.”

Matt Anderson has made that phrase something of a personal slogan. Among the many controversial things he’s written—he’s a controversialist, after all—it may be the most controversial. We like our shows in the age of Peak TV. And what he wants to do is take them away.

Okay, not exactly. But he thinks you—all of us—would be better off if we canceled our Netflix subscriptions. For the obvious reasons: Netflix is a candy bar, a sedative, a numbing device by which we pass the time by doing nothing especially worthwhile at all. It turns out that’s true not only of Netflix but of the so-called Golden Age of TV as a whole. It’s not that there are no good TV shows. It’s that, in almost every circumstance, there are dozens of better things you could be doing with your time. (You might be inclined to resist this claim, but in your heart you know it’s inarguable.) Add to that the fact that watching Prestige TV has become, in the last dozen years, a vaguely moralized social obligation for a certain subset of upper-middle class white-collar professionals, and perhaps Matt is right that Christians not only may but should quit Netflix.

Point taken. Now allow me to swap out a different activity for your quitting consideration.

Podcasts.

Podcasts, as you well know, are the new Prestige TV. They’re ubiquitous. Not only does everyone have a favorite podcast. Everyone has a podcast, i.e., hosts one of their own. Or is starting one. Or is planning to. Or has an idea for one. They just need to get the equipment and line up some guests . . .

I live and work right next to a college campus. If you see someone walking on campus and that person is under 40 and alone, almost certainly she has air pods in her ears, and chances are those air pods are playing a podcast. (Maybe music. Maybe.) What is the podcast? Who knows? There are literally millions today, on every topic under the sun. “Have you listened to [X] podcast?” is the new “Have you seen the latest episode of [X]?” Just last month our pediatrician asked me, in the middle of a check-up for one of our kids, given my job, whether I was listening to the Mars Hill podcast. Alas, I had to say no.

Now, this post is two-thirds troll, one-third sincere. I’ve been listening to podcasts for nearly 15 years. My first was Bill Simmons’ old pod for ESPN, whose first episode dropped while I was living in an apartment in Tomsk, Russia, early in the summer of 2007. I’ve been listening to Simmons off and on ever since. My podroll has increased as I’ve aged, and some of my typical listens are among the usual suspects: Ezra Klein, The Argument, Zach Lowe, The Watch, The Rewatchables, Know Your Enemy, LR&C, Tyler Cowen, Mere Fidelity, The Editors, a few others here and there. Washing the dishes or cleaning the house, it’s a pleasure to listen to these folks talk about sports and entertainment and news and politics and theology. It’s background noise, their voices become like those of friends, and occasionally you even learn things.

So unlike the scourge of Prestige TV—which is little more than a Trojan horse for reinforcing the single greatest collective habitual addiction besetting our society for nearly a century—podcasts aren’t All Bad, nor are their benefits mainly a function of rationalization and self-justification. I’m not worried about them in the same way.

Having said that. Let me suggest a few reasons why you ought to be a little more skeptical of them. So as to decrease your podcasting, and maybe even to quit it.

First, podcasts are filler. They’re aural wallpaper. They’re something to have on in the background while you do something else, something that requires your actual focus and attention. If that’s true, can they really be that substantial? Aren’t they, as often as not, little more than snack food for the ears?

Second, if you really want to listen to something (say, on a road trip or a long walk or while working out), why not listen to an audiobook? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the book will be worth your time—a four-course meal—in a way the Cheetos-posing-as-Michelin-starred-podcast will not. You could buy audiobooks or sign up for Audible, as a way to patronize authors, or you could use Overdrive or Libby. You have more or less every great work of literature and prose in the English language available to listen to for free; sometimes the work was composed with the express purpose of hearing it read aloud, rather than reading words on a page. Why not give it a try?

Third, those first two points suppose it’s not a problem, us walking around incessantly filling our ears with the voices of others, thus blocking out the noises—and silences—of the real world. Isn’t it a problem, though, this anxious need to fill even the smallest of snatches of time with meaningful noise, lest we be oppressed by the stillness and quietness (or, if you’re in a big city, the parading loudness) of life? Or perhaps we feel anxious to Do Something Productive with our time: If our attention can manage it, surely we Ought To Be Learning/Listening/Thinking? Nonsense. If to cook is to pray, so is every other daily “mindless” habitual activity that doesn’t demand the totality of our attention. Such activity may, in fact, permit our attention to be at ease, or to meditate on other matters, or to examine our days, or to wander as it pleases. Or, as the case may be, to choke on emotions we’d rather not address, indeed would rather numb and sedate and repress through unremitting distraction. Perhaps podcasts are a kind of noise pollution but on an individual level, self-chosen rather than imposed from without. We just have to refuse the urge to put the pods in and press play.

Fourth, podcasts almost invariably trade on the new, the latest, the exclusive-breaking-this-just-in-ness of our forgetful presentist age. In this they’re analogous to Twitter: an infinite scroll, not for the eyes, but for the ears. Doubtless some people listen to podcasts while scrolling Twitter. (The horror!) The podcasts play on, world without end, one blending into another, until you forget where one begins and one ends. Of all the podcasts you’ve ever listened to—and I’ve surely listened to thousands—how many discrete episodes can you point to, from memory, and say, “That one, right there, was significant, a meaningful and substantive and life-giving episode”? I’m not saying you couldn’t pick out a few. I’m suggesting the batting average will be very low. Again, like remembering individual tweets. That’s why podcasts are so disposable. The moment they lose their immediate relevance, they are cast aside into the dustbin of history. It’s what makes writers who become podcasters so sad. Books and essays and columns stand the test of time. Pods do not. Bill Simmons, whom I referenced earlier, stopped writing five or six years ago. He likes to say his fingers stopped working. The truth is, a combination of market inefficiency plus the convenience of podcasting meant taking the time to draft and revise and draft and revise, under an editor’s watchful eye, was less convenient and more time-demanding than hopping onto a podcast seconds after a game ended—plus advertisers are willing to pay for that in a way they don’t for individual columns. So a writer who came onto the scene and made a name for himself because of his writing simply ceased to practice his craft. That’s something to lament. Beyond that individual case, though, it’s a parable for our time. And Simmons is someone with an audience in the millions. Yet his thousands upon thousands of podcasts from the last decade will never be listened to a second time, now or in the future. They might as well be lit on fire ten days after going online. The same goes for politics podcasts. They’re talk radio, only rarefied and highbrow. But they have the same shelf life. And they partake of the selfsame contemporary obsession with The New that all people of good will, but certainly Christians (and Jews and Muslims), should repudiate in all its forms. Go read Rolf Dobelli’s Stop Reading the News and you’ll realize just how unimportant—in general and to your own daily life—“keeping up with the news” is. That goes for politics and sports and entertainment (but I repeat myself) as much as for anything else. Stop reading the news translates to stop listening to the news, which I will gloss here as stop listening to podcasts devoted to The New.

Fifth, podcasts have increasingly become niche and personalized, as so much in our digital economy has. You, the individual consumer-listener, pay the individual content-maker/podcaster, perhaps become a Patreon supporter, and thereby receive Exclusive Access and Personal Benefits and other just-for-you paid-for goods and services. Am I the only one who finds all of this ever so slightly weird, even gross? I don’t begrudge anyone hustling to do their thing or to find an audience, precisely outside of the decaying and desiccated institutions that act as gatekeepers today. But there’s something icky about it nonetheless. In the same way that news-watchers can exist in entirely different moral and epistemic universes—one presided over and mediated by Fox News, the other by MSNBC—so podcast-listeners curate their own little private aural worlds with nary a glance at or interruption from another. It doesn’t help that this ecosystem (or ecosphere?) overlaps substantially with the gig-cum-influencer economy, where fame and fortune are always one viral moment away, for anyone and everyone. We’re all always already potentially (in)famous and affluent, if only the digital stars will align. We try to nudge those stars by flooding the market with our content, a sort of astrology or spell-conjuring with ones and zeroes, or in this case, “Thanks for following; while you’re here, check out my SoundCloud.”

In any case, those are at least some of the reasons for increasing your skepticism quotient in this matter. More than a slightly more skeptical eye, though, consider whether you ought to go all the way. For there’s a solution lying close to hand.

Quit podcasts.