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This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Murder; Bereavement; Racism; Sexism; Descriptions of gore.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, The Secret Agent is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

During Carnival Week in 1977, widowed academic Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura) arrives in Recife, where his young son Fernando (Enzo Nunes) now lives with Armando’s father and mother-in-law, Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) and Lenira Nascimento (Aline Marta Maia). He does so under the protection of a dissident network opposed to Brazil’s ruling military dictatorship, having been dismissed from his post as a technology professor and subsequently unfairly persecuted. Armando and his late wife and fellow academic Fátima Nascimento (Alice Carvalho) had made an enemy of Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), an executive at state power giant Electrobras, who closed down their department.

Armando stays at a refuge operated by the elderly Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), which is also home to Angolan couple Thereza Vitória (Isabél Zuaa) and Antonio (Licínio Januário), as well as divorced dentist Claudia (Hermila Guedes), with whom Armando becomes romantically involved. Under the assumed name ‘Marcelo Alves’, he is placed in a position at the state’s National Institute for Identification (INI) office, where he encounters corrupt local police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes), and his son Sergio (Igor de Araújo) and adoptive son Arlindo (Italo Martins). Euclides takes a liking to Armando, who does not welcome the attention.

Back in São Paulo, Ghirotti hires former Army lieutenant Augusto Botha (Roney Villela) and his stepson Bobbi (Gabriel Leone) to assassinate Armando. Upon arriving in Recife, the two men hire a local gunman, Vilmar (Kaiony Venâncio), to help them track down and kill their target. Armando learns from Elsa (Maria Fernanda Cândido), his contact in the dissident movement, that his life is at risk, leaving him perilously awaiting the imminent documentation that will help him and Fernando escape from Brazil – providing he can escape from the hitmen tasked with his murder.

Dictatorship, power, and inequality

The Brazilian dictatorship in The Secret Agent is ubiquitous, but hardly omniscient. It is a vast edifice, with concentrations of corporate power showcased by the INI – where the authority to record who has lived and died lies – and Electrobras. Yet the state’s gaze is essentially vacant, symbolised by Armando’s paradoxical penetration of the INI under a false identity. Rather, it is an infrastructure containing vast lawlessness, in which Armando’s life is threatened not by the regime, but by an officeholder’s grudge. Ghilotti had earlier mockingly branded him a communist, a judgement based less on Armando’s political ideals than on his appearance, the executive taking the academic’s long hair and beard as signifying a refusal to meekly accept his own authority. By contrast, the corrupt police chief Euclides, described with meaningful ambiguity by Armando’s contact at the INI, Anísio (Buda Lira) as ‘an imperfect man’, is a source of unwitting benignity and even assistance to the film’s fugitive protagonist.

Within this system, behind the façade of professionalism and officiality, the real order of things is composed of crude transactionalism and dynastic patronage. The Brazil of The Secret Agent is one in which individuals routinely court or are at least open to bribery for the misuse of their position or knowledge, or even more actively willing to do harm on behalf of others for the right price. It is one where fathers routinely recruit their sons into positions of influence, but also frequently potential personal and legal risk, as with Ghirotti and his son and right-hand man Salvatore (Gregorio Graziosi), or Euclides and Sergio and Arlindo, or hitmen Augusto and Bobbi Borba. It is a system that works through covert action and absence of oversight. Armando, with his close and protective relationships with both his father-in-law and son, and his place in a network of dissidents, mirrors and inverts this dominant framework.

This is symbiotic with Brazil’s deep, multifaceted, intersecting inequalities, brought into sharp relief by the proximity between those on either sides of this divide. How the worth of a person’s work and life are calculated, whether their existence and disappearance are duly recognised by the state, depends on class, geography, race, and gender. The wealth and power imbalance between its south and north is epitomised by Ghirotti travelling from Sao Paolo to disparage and terminate the work done by Armando and his department in Recife. The executive boasts of his Genovese heritage while throwing his weight around, a manifestation of neo-colonial power that recalls one Christopher Columbus. The Borbas put a higher price on Armando’s head due to his being white, but are only willing to pay Vilmar, a dark-skinned labourer, a fraction of this when they outsource the deed to him. Women’s work is also routinely devalued , as when we see Ghirotti, in flashback, deliberately belittle Fátima.

Carnival, film, and the politics of genre

The Secret Agent’s opening title describes its events as taking place during ‘A time of great mischief’. This is in part an assertion of historical periodisation, referring to the years of military dictatorship over the country, but equally draws our attention to the fact the film takes place during Carnival. In Brazil, Carnival operates both on the premise of separateness from the everyday, and yet also draws upon and partly constitutes it. It ritually dramatizes the reality of social relations, and yet refuses a sharp distinction between representation and represented. It holds the promise of inclusion and equality for the marginalised, and yet functions both through the operation of pre-existing hierarchies, as well as inversion of and resistance to them.1

Carnival is therefore an apt metaphor for Brazil during the military dictatorship. It was born out of an apparent state of exception in 1964, but then persisted for two decades. It functioned both through authoritarian legalism and wholly outside the law. It exercised widespread violence and oppression, but was neither monolithic nor fully capable of containing resistance to it, and by the late 1970s entering its twilight years.2 In the film itself, this dynamic is best captured in the figure of Euclides, who has two sons – one white, one Black – and whom we first encounter covered in confetti as he attends to a case straight from carnival, and who cheerfully predicts to Armando a rising death toll during the festivities, which his police are clearly contributing to.

The film also demonstrates its sense of the carnivalesque through the way it presents us with both a representation of 1970s Brazil through the prism of the period thriller, with its implication of historical accuracy, and equally draws our attention to its own artifice, through experimentation with genre conventions for purposes of political and psychological symbolism. Its paranoid atmosphere echoes the Hollywood political thrillers of the 1970s, which themselves articulated a sense of intelligence and security service overreach, partly in response to revelations about US involvement in overthrowing democratic governments across Latin America. Yet its very name overdraws this connection, calling attention to this title’s bland genericism and simultaneously its unrepresentativeness of Armando as protagonist.

The film also evokes the conventions of horror: Alexandre runs a local cinema currently screening Jaws, whose famous poster is a source of macabre fascination for young Fernando; simultaneously, in another subplot, Euclides’ sons aim to retrieve and dispose of a severed human leg that has turned up in the stomach of a dissected shark. This deliberately schlocky gore is thus a counterpart to the mischief of Brazil under dictatorial rule, and of carnival. The nightmarish abjection of the non- and no longer human communicates a patent wildness of society, and the capacity of the dead, of past violence and injustice, to haunt it in the present.

Technology, modernity, memory, and justice

Contra to the circularity of carnival time and the return of the repressed and the abject is the pursuit of modernity and the contestation of its meaning. The Brazilian dictatorship was in itself partly rooted in a modernisation project at odds with the pre-existing notion of Brazilian racial democracy, instead deeming the county’s racial heterogeneity and uneven economic geography as justifying an authoritarian, top-down, centre-out, programme of transformation, to remake the north-eastern periphery in line with the values and prerogatives of its European-descended southern elites.3 Yet the modernisation pursued by the dictatorship was hardly wholly distinct from the developmentalism of its left-leaning, democratic predecessor, or of explicitly socialist varieties pursued in other countries.4 After all, both Electrobras and the INI were founded prior to the 1964 coup. Moreover, countercultural elements in the country had their own understandings of what it was to be modern that challenged the underdevelopment paradigm.5

1970s Recife in The Secret Agent has many trappings of being too late, left behind. A slain corpse lays outside a petrol station at the start, waiting days for police attention. Alexandre’s cinema screen Jaws two years after its initial release. Ghirotti saw it as a backwater, and accordingly sought to impose limited horizons upon Armando’s university department, rejecting the viability of ambitious work he deemed more appropriately undertaken elsewhere. Yet he is challenged and affronted by Armando’s alternative, antiestablishmentarian modernity. Armando, who possesses his own transnational networks, academic and dissident; who drives back into Recife in his bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle; who uses the recently installed ‘orelhão’ public telephone booths to communicate with his confidants, while evading the attentions of his persecutors; whose own account of that persecution is captured for posterity by Elsa and her assistant through a tape recorder.

The memory work undertaken through technologies like the tape recorder or the birth or death certificate in The Secret Agent constitute claims on justice across time. As the political philosopher W. James Booth has argued:

We attribute to political communities an identity understood as a cross-generational enduringness of some broadly normative aspects of their existence: for example, a shared perception of justice, a constitution to express it, and its correlated institutional arrangements. That persistence makes a community the bearer of its past and the steward of its future, and gives it an enduring relationship to the absent denizens of both domains.6

Who gets to remember, who gets to be remembered, who tells their story, who is silenced – these are questions not only of justice, but also modernity, because the periodisation of the political community, the naming of the past and its crimes and their perpetrators and victims as such, is integral in order to ensure a different order of things in the present and into the future, with its foundational myths, with the absented as it sentinels. And yet The Secret Agent was made against the backdrop of the fallout from the attempted coup after Brazil’s 2022 Presidential Election, and its genre games evoke alternative temporalities, in which ‘the time of great mischief’ defies a clear beginning and end.

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This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Alcoholism; Murder; Mental illness.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

In 1981, Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) has just finished touring with his group, The E Street Band. His latest album The River has topped the American charts, and its lead single ‘Hungry Heart’ given him his first Billboard Top 10 hit. Struggling to acclimatise to this newfound fame and to readjust to life off the stage, he retreats to a house near where he grew up in New Jersey, rented on his behalf by staunchly supportive manager and producer Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong). There he starts work on demos of new songs using a four-track recorder supplied by his dutiful guitar technician Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser). He also jams in his spare time with the house band at local music venue The Stone Pony. It is after one such performance that he meets Faye Romano (Odessa Young), the sister of a former classmate, and a waitress and single mother. They begin dating, and Bruce grows closer with both Faye and her young daughter, Haley.

Bruce’s new songs are distinctly darker and more insular in theme than his previous output. They channel his memories of his childhood, shown in black-and-white flashbacks, of his loving relationship with his mother Adele (Gaby Hoffmann) and his much more difficult one with his alcoholic father Douglas (Stephen Graham). Bruce is insistent on maintaining the lo-fi sound captured in his rudimentary home studio, feeling that fuller arrangements would not do justice the authenticity of this deeply personal nascent new album. He titles it Nebraska after the home state and place of trial and execution of the late 1950s teenage serial killer Charles Starkweather, whose story is recounted on the album’s title track.

This poses a challenge to Jon Landau, who not only has to balance the commercial expectations of Bruce’s record label Columbia with the musician’s uncompromising stance, but who also recognises in these new songs signs of his friend’s worsening mental health, manifesting in his increasingly tempestuous behaviour within and beyond the studio. Bruce’s intense work ethic and growing erraticism threaten to jeopardise his relationship with Faye as well. She, Jon, and others find themselves somewhat helplessly looking on as Bruce – seemingly on the cusp of both superstardom and romantic contentment – spirals inexorably towards a breakdown.

Biopic, reissue, and canon

Deliver Me from Nowhere is based upon music writer Warren Zanes’ book of the same name, published in 2023, as well as on parts of Springsteen’s own 2016 autobiography, Born to Run. Book and film are both titled after a lyric featured on two separate tracks on Nebraska, ‘State Trooper’ and ‘Open All Night’. The film was made with Springsteen’s own full involvement, and its release coincided with that of a box set, Nebraska ‘82: Expanded Edition. The set consists of four discs (or records):

1. Principally outtakes of acoustic songs written for the album but that did not make the final cut, including a demo of an early version of ‘Born in the U.S.A.’.

2. The fabled ‘Electric Nebraska’: a collection of recordings Springsteen made at the time, mostly of songs that would end up in solo, acoustic form on Nebraska (as well as again, Born in the U.S.A.), and whose existence had long been rumoured.

3. A full live performance of Nebraska, played by Springsteen without an audience over forty years after the album’s original release.

4. The original Nebraska album.

In many ways the role of Deliver Me from Nowhere is analogous to that of Nebraska ‘82. It broadens Nebraska from an album into a period piece by way of more expansive contextualisation. It conveys the extent of Springsteen’s almost compulsive creativity and productivity as he rapidly composes a vast repertoire of new songs, more than ultimately ended up on Nebraska itself (at one point in the film Bruce ponders the possibility it might be a double album). It showcases (but also explains) the discarded possibility of Nebraska having been another E Street Band album and Springsteen’s turning away from that possibility. And it locates the album firmly in its creator’s contemporary lifeworld, albeit with the conventions of the biopic meaning that thickened past still functions as part of our wider understanding of his personal and career arc.

The film’s premise is essentially that Springsteen in 1981 is on the verge of being a superstar, but that in order to get there he has to first take a highly risky, left-field turn that could potentially jeopardise his career (except Jon Landau’s role in the film is such that this never really carries much threat), in order to confront and conquer his own personal demons. And that superstardom looms in the form of his huge follow-up album, Born in the U.S.A.. Deliver Me from Nowhere is almost pregnant with that coming moment, particularly in the subplot of how he comes to write its title track and then performs an ecstatic version of it with the band for his mightily impressed manager, but nonetheless feels he must return to working on and putting out Nebraska. It is therefore a film about the making of Nebraska, but also about what it took for Springsteen to get to where he could record its career-defining successor.

Springsteen’s America

Deliver Me from Nowhere immerses the viewer in the world of Nebraska by way of peppering with its creator’s cultural and social touchstones. This includes the classic rock’n’roll he jams along to at the Stone Pony, but also the literature of Flannery O’Connor, and films such as the 1973 Terence Malik-directed crime drama Badlands – also based upon Starkweather’s murder spree – and the 1955 film noir The Night of the Hunter, which a young Bruce is shown watching in flashback with his father. These cultural reference points locate Springsteen within a pantheon of great American storytellers.

Yet this storytelling is also how Springsteen captures and relates something real. Back in small-town New Jersey, he is trapped by both his past and his fame. He revisits familiar haunts, sometimes trying to recapture some lost enchantment, sometimes to re-confront old ghosts. The fairgrounds, seafronts, diners, and car rides that comprise his public or semi-public milieu in the film are the regular milieu of his albums up until that point – but when the car salesman recognises him as a famous rock star, and ‘Hungry Heart’ plays on the radio as he drives back from the lot, can he still also be the authentic voice of the places that raised him?

Instead, he retreats into his home studio and writes songs deliberately narrated in the first-person, but written from the perspectives of killers, petty criminals, and other desperate men. These songs, he tells his manager, are the only thing that seem real to him right now, as he struggles to reconnect with both himself and the places he once knew. Yet even more than the lyrics, this realness is sonic, stripping away all other musical accompaniment and studio trickery to leave mainly just his solo vocal and acoustic guitar. It is a pure essence that also requires the stripping away of Bruce Springsteen as star persona: no photo of him on the cover; no accompanying tour; Nebraska must speak for itself.1

The personal is apolitical?

This opposition between commercial success on the one hand and authenticity and artistry on the other is integral to Deliver Me from Nowhere. Also central to its premise is that artistry and authenticity are themselves the product of psychological turmoil, and in turn function as a form of self-therapy, in order to get to the point of mental wellness, at which point commercial success can be reconciled. Bruce must suffer to make great music, to make Nebraska; he has to make Nebraska to get to the breaking point where he can seek the help he needs; and he has to go through all that to make Born in the U.S.A.. That is the logic inherent in the film’s chronological framing.

Along with his alienation by his growing fame, Bruce’s worsening mental health owes to his unprocessed trauma over his childhood relationship with his father, who we learn could unpredictably swing from being caring and devoted to cruel and intimidating. The prospect of domestic contentment with Faye and Haley comes with the promise of re-rooting him in the environment he has become estranged from. Yet his immersion in musical perfectionism and the dysfunctional model of family life he has inherited from his own childhood inhibits him from providing the commitment and emotional security Faye needs.

What all this entails, however – and this goes hand-in-hand with commencing the film at the very end of the The River tour – is partitioning Springsteen’s artistry and biography from the socioeconomic and political. Thematically, musically, and emotionally much of The River anticipated what Springsteen did more uncompromisingly and compactly on Nebraska. ‘The River’ and ‘Independence Day’ told stories of marital strife and father-son conflict respectively in the broader context of processes of deindustrialisation and economic decline that exacerbate and dwarf the internal struggles and interpersonal discord Springsteen relayed on them. Many of the songs on Nebraska likewise overtly laid out the economic factors underlying damaged relationships and bad choices, continuing his exploration of the social and material constraints accompanying blue-collar work and community life, and of his protagonists’ often illicit and ultimately doomed efforts to surpass those diminished horizons.

Yet one gets little sense watching Deliver Me from Nowhere of how those factors might have shaped Springsteen’s relationship with his father or their respective struggles with their mental health. Of how his sense of embarrassment by his rising fame and dissociation from the place he grew up related to the bifurcation between his fortunes and those of his former neighbours. Of why an album featuring a line like ‘Down here it’s just winners and losers/And don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line’, as he sang on ‘Atlantic City’, was not just timelessly American, but of That Time in America: Reagan’s first term as President. It is jarring that a film about someone who explicitly located people’s desperation, including semi-autobiographically his own, in the wider historical arcs that swept their lives along does not do the same for him.

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This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Violence (in trailer); Sexual abuse; Narcotics; Domestic violence; Queerphobia.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Honey Don’t! is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

In Bakersfield, California, the death of barmaid Mia Novotny in an apparent car accident brings Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley), a private investigator who was about to take her on as a client, to the scene of the crash. Honey believes the death may have had something to do with Mia’s membership of the Four-Way Temple, an Evangelical local church run by the charismatic, womanising preacher Drew Devlin (Chris Evans). Reverend Drew abuses his position to sleep with his female congregants, while the Temple also functions as a front for his drug-dealing business, supplied by a French narcotics ring through their intermediary, Chère (Lera Abova), which he runs with the help of his dim-witted henchman Shuggie (Josh Pafchek).

Honey runs her detective agency with the help of her secretary Spider (Gabby Beans) and maintains friendly relations with the local police through her connections with homicide detective Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day), whose romantic attentions Honey, a lesbian, amusedly rebuffs. Instead, she begins dating MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), who works at the station’s information desk, and with whom she shares an immediate sexual chemistry. Honey’s private life is also marked by a close relationship with her sister Heidi (Kristen O’Connolly), whose eldest daughter, teenager Corinne (Talia Ryder) has an abusive boyfriend, Mickie (Alexander Carstoiu).

The Four-Way Temple attracts further adverse attention when one of Drew’s congregants and dealers, Hector (Jacnier), accidentally kills a customer who propositions him – not least as the dead man’s suspicious boyfriend, Mr Siegfried (Billy Eichner), is another of Honey’s clients. Yet Honey’s investigations into the church’s activities become all the more personal when Corinne herself mysteriously disappears.

World-building in Bakersfield

Honey Don’t! is the second instalment in Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s planned ‘lesbian B-movie trilogy’ of films centring lesbian characters within blackly comic takes on particular genres. It follows on from last year’s Drive-Away Dolls, in which Qualley also starred: a late 1990s-set road trip movie about two lesbian friends who, while driving from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, unwittingly become involved in a murder-theft intended to preserve a Republican senator’s reputation. As I noted in my piece on that film, Drive-Away Dolls depicts a world on the cusp of changes not yet quite arrived: the permeation of everyday life by the internet and mobile phones; and the wholesale polarisation of American politics. In this context, lesbianism is almost subcultural, a set of social as well as sexual practices that trade on specialist knowledge (which Qualley’s character, Jamie, prides herself on possessing) not set up directly against the mainstream, but nonetheless distinct from it.

To a large degree, the fact that Honey Don’t! is set in the present day makes for little difference in these regards. Aside from one or two moments, the film does not specifically connect the small-p politics of its story with the big-P Politics of the MAGA movement and its antagonists. There are relatively few technological or social details that clearly situate the film in the 2020s rather than the 1990s, and those that are present often deliberately riff on the anachronistic nature of some of its characters.

Yet Honey Don’t is very specifically located geographically. In 2008, Bakersfield voted by around three-to-one in favour of Proposition 8, eliminating the right of same-sex couples to marry in California. Last year, Kern County (of which it is the administrative seat) voted more narrowly 57-43% against Proposition 3, which amended the state’s constitution to remove a stipulation that marriage was between a man and a woman, as well as 59% for Donald Trump in the Presidential Election. Bakersfield’s ethnic composition has shifted substantially over the past three decades, from 21% Hispanic or Latino in 1990 to 53% in 2020; its non-Hispanic white population share declined from 66% to 29% over the same period.

Bakersfield in Honey Don’t! captures these political and demographic dynamics, and the implicit inequalities and respectability claims that accompany them, as well as the city’s low density, road-centric layout. Mia Novotny’s mother Kia (Kinna McInroe) pointedly tells Honey that her family are homeowners and do not ride the bus to get around Bakersfield. Corinne, who works in a diner, equally notably does commute by bus (when not being picked up by her abusive boyfriend, who lives in a trailer). We are also shown the ways in which class, ethnicity, masculinity, respectability and queerphobia all intersect, from Hector’s fatal humiliation at being offered sex by another man, to Honey bonding with MG over the latter’s experiences of being physically assaulted by her ‘war hero’ father.

The lesbian as private detective

As a genre exercise, Honey Don’t! both uses lesbianism as a means of subverting the private detective as a type, and the world of the private detective as a means for portraying lesbianism. Honey is an unsentimental pursuant of sexual pleasure: the first time we encounter her, she concludes a tryst by abandoning her lover in order to investigate Mia’s death; later she finds a kindred spirit in MG, with whom she shares a distaste for clingy partners. She is hard drinking and proud of the fact. She has an eye and memory for detail, and a working method that is old-fashioned but precise. Her relationship with Spider sends up the characteristic portrayal of the secretary as office wife, in that she is often little requiring of the heavily gendered support labour the latter figure typically provides.

Honey therefore both epitomises some of the masculinist qualities of the private detective and pokes fun at some of the shortcomings inherent in this chauvinism. Being a private detective and a lesbian does not locate her beyond the milieu of her class and gender, but it does provide her with independence from it. This is evident in her relationship with Heidi, whose multiple children Honey dotes upon, but whose willingness to keep having more she gently chastises her for. Honey, by contrast, never seems concerned with remuneration for her work, but her profession (and distance from heteronormativity) means she can financially support her sister, drive around Bakersfield in a convertible, and always dress impeccably. She exists in a world marked by men’s violence, but whereas this is routinely executed incompetently and impotently, she is capable of using force with skill and ingenuity when it is required.

Private detection, like lesbianism – as in Drive-Away Dolls – is subcultural. Honey works with the police in a transactional but unconfrontational manner, possessing her own line of work that neither infringes upon nor is infringed upon by theirs, but is also not entirely transparent to them; mirrored by Marty’s haplessly asking her out, despite her repeated rejoinder that ‘I like girls’. Private detection and lesbianism require knowledge that others lack and an ability to notice what others miss, whether the fetish-wear concealed with a vestal robe, or the verbal exchanges and clothing choices that mark someone’s sexuality and sexual availability. In a city of faux-respectability and facades, Honey is comparatively worldly, familiar with ethnically, socially, and sexually diverse sites and characters.

Evangelicalism, masculinity, and exploitation

Honey Don’t! captures the role of religion in Bakersfield through its depiction of the Four-Way Temple and its leader. Again, for context: Christian organisations of different denominational compositions have played a significant role in California’s anti-LGBTQ+ politics, with Evangelical churches particularly vocal in opposition to Proposition 3 last year. The growth in Bakersfield’s Latino population has been accompanied by Catholicism’s ascent as far-and-away its dominant religion, with the share of the metro area’s inhabitants who are Catholic hovering at or above the one-in-four mark since 2000. However, the share who are Evangelical Protestant – split between an array of denominations and non-denominational churches – has nonetheless remained steady at around the one-eighth mark during the same period. The Temple’s multiracial congregation, including the hispanophone Hector, represents Evangelical Christianity’s insurgent, adaptive appeal.

If Honey’s, MG’s, and Hector’s family histories are coded as Catholic in the retrograde gender politics they have grown up navigating, the Reverend Drew embodies a very different type of Christian masculinity. Handsome and immaculately coiffured, with his sculpted facial hair and smart-but-casual outfits, outside of his pulpit he exercises a relaxed but self-satisfied charm. Inside of it, flanked by large photographs of himself – signalling a vanity that veers towards encouraging worship of himself rather than God – he preaches sermons that are ludicrously vacuous in their oxymorons but insistent upon their devotion and commitment to God, the Church, and himself.

Reverend Drew charismatically blurs the line between theology and profanity, using grandiloquent spiritual metaphors to describe his grooming, propositioning, and sexual activity with his younger female congregants. He employs similar language in discussing the church’s narcotics acquisition and distribution with the male church members employed in that dimension of its activities. The Four-Way Temple is a parasitical and corrosive presence in Bakersfield, preying upon especially young, working-class women and men in search of purpose and community, in a manner encapsulated by its bus-side adverts. As a private investigator, a lesbian, and a disbeliever, Honey is immune to the Reverend’s transparent charms, but also alert to his church’s allure for her co-citizens. And in this way, through the perspective of its protagonist, Honey Don’t!’s queering of the detective genre provides its means for exploring the politico-religious dynamics of contemporary America.

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This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Paedophilia; Religious cults; Mental illness; Racism; Violence; Murder.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Eddington is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

Eddington takes us back to 2020 and the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic, as seen from the fictionalised New Mexico town from which the film takes its name. Eddington’s conservatively inclined sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is disconcerted by the raft of new public health measures being imposed by the town’s liberal mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), at the behest of the state’s governor, which Joe sees as infringing civil liberties and dividing the community. Their rivalry is exacerbated by an alleged dalliance between Ted and Joe’s younger wife, Louise (Emma Stone) – the daughter of Joe’s deceased predecessor as sheriff – when the latter was a teenager. Joe dotes on Louise, who is recovering from a serious mental illness. However, their relationship is strained by the unwelcome presence of Louise’s mother Dawn (Deidre O’Connell), a rabid conspiracy theorist who sees Joe as an unworthy successor to her late husband, and who has moved in with the couple against Joe’s wishes.

With Ted seeking re-election as mayor, Joe spontaneously decides to run against him on an anti-lockdown platform, with the help of his deputies, Guy Tooley (Luke Grimes) and young African-American Michael Cooke (Micheal Ward). Joe’s decision antagonises Louise, who fears the media attention will detrimentally affect her recovery. She accompanies her mother to meet the charismatic cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), who alleges to have been the victim of a shady network of child traffickers, and under whose sway Louise increasingly falls.

A further dimension is added to the town’s political divisions by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement to Eddington. Teenage social justice activist Sarah Allen (Amélie Hoeferle), who had briefly dated Michael, is heavily involved in the protests, prompting Ted’s cynical son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) and Eric’s naïve best friend Brian (Cameron Mann), both of whom are vying for her affections, to get involved as well. Joe is bewildered by the protests. Yet as his own health worsens, his relationship with Louise becomes more strained, the mayoral race even more bitter, and civil unrest in the town worsens, he becomes caught up in an escalating spiral of allegation, conspiracy, and violence.

Ideology, COVID, and the Internet

Eddington is, to a large degree, an in-depth study of the workings of ideology and the causes of political polarisation, particularly within the context of two exacerbating factors. The first is the pandemic. Setting a film in the Spring of 2020 – a period of time that most people can agree has deeply and negatively impacted Western societies, but rarely want to revisit, least of all in the prism of popular culture – is a rather striking choice. It takes us back into an era of isolation and confinement, whereby new and unfamiliar rules around masking and social distancing now govern interactions and are (sometimes wilfully) inconsistently implemented in ways that rachet up the tensions in individual encounters.

It also sets the stage for the confrontation between Joe and Ted. In Joe’s view, COVID is something occurring outside of his community, and yet the state governor has chosen to impose arduous public health regulations on New Mexico, and Ted to impose them upon Eddington itself. Moreover, while Ted’s remit is to set these rules, Joe as Sheriff is charged with implementing them, thus creating two competing centres of local power around their respective offices, particular when Joe sets his sights on Ted’s.

The second factor is the internet, in the guise of smart phones, social networks, podcasts, and online videos. Eddington presents an increasingly fragmented media environment in which people can readily access a wide range of information of dubious veracity, providing seemingly instant answers that they lack the critical faculties to meaningfully evaluate and interpret. The literally maddening nature of this mostly clearly manifests in shots of characters scrolling through their social media feeds, faced with contrasting radical political messaging and misleadingly skewed content.

These destructive contexts underpin Eddington’s sharp but sour view of ideology, as something lightly worn and frequently engaged in for personal or professional gain. Characters are depicted as laughably insincere (when not naively earnest) in the worldviews they espouse. They tell stories about themselves and others that often touch upon genuine sources of suffering or legitimate causes of grievance, and yet are exploitatively framed for political gain. Their positions deviate rapidly based upon whom they encounter, whom they want to impress, which alliances and allegiances they are pursuing. And this combination of opportunism and fanaticism ultimately leads characters to engage in shocking acts of violence.

Representing the right

At its strongest, Eddington offers a darkly funny but also sensitive and insightful picture of the rapidly disintegrating firewall between centre right and far right. Joe’s politics at the outset are those of a mildly libertarian conservative. He is not in denial about the existence of the pandemic, but merely appears sceptical about the necessity and efficacy of what seem to him heavy-handedly but also inconsistently implemented public health measures, which he denounces as divisive (and also resents having to follow). Regarding race, he also appears initially to be a colour-blind moderate, one who can recognise the tragedy in George Floyd’s death, though not the necessity of protests over it, and willing to promote Michael in recognition of his abilities as an officer. Fundamentally, he cannot grasp how and why what seem to him real but distant problems are relevant to, and should shape the politics of, his own small town.

Yet Joe also finds himself occupying a similar political, and indeed often physical, space with more extreme versions of right-wing politics, paradoxically out of perhaps his most sympathetic quality: his clear affection for the deeply vulnerable Louise, whose mental fragility and hidden trauma renders her more susceptible to conspiratorial worldviews. Joe takes a quietist position towards his mother-in-law’s flooding of his home with the sonic, visual, and material accoutrements of anti-medical, anti-state paranoia. By contrast, recognising the sexual challenge that Vernon poses, he makes little attempt to hide his derision for the cult leader’s story of widespread trafficking and abuse of children, rejecting an account of how the world works that is palpably false, even as it resonates – for very real reasons – with his wife.

The blackly comic tragedy of the piece is, however, that Joe’s insecurities and resentments, his striving to demonstrate his adequacy in comparison with both his late father-in-law – a shrine to whom now dominates his own home – and with Ted, compel him to tear down those walls between reality and unreality. His respectable homespun conservativism itself comes to seem insincere as he readily abandons it when there is more personal and political capital to be gained through espousing the more provocative tropes of the terminally online far right; by making lurid allegations against his opponents and concealing his own misdemeanours in ways that play upon those same hatreds. As his descent accelerates, it becomes clear that Joe has been infected, both metaphorically and literally, and the deeper he gets into the maelstrom, the more patent it is that he is fundamentally out of his depth.

Representing the left

Eddington is also pretty scathing in its portrayal of the political left, in its different manifestations. One of these is the sort of small-town elite liberal politics embodied by Ted. The incumbent mayor demonstrates considerable ease engaging in wholly gestural identity politics, whether speaking out on racism as a light-skinned Latino, or on the importance of community as a single father (belied by his strained relationship with his son). Yet the real motors of his mayoralty are his his close ties to the tech sector that underpin Eddington’s clean energy-centred economic progress, and his political alignment with the state governor, including on public health, both of which smooth his career advancement.

This contrasts with the movement-based, intellectually and emotionally invested social justice campaigning epitomised by Sarah. And yet her own awareness of her positionality as an affluent young white woman demonstrates another limitation of this type of politics, as she and others wrestle convolutedly with articulating arguments about racial oppression from a place of privilege under the same system. Eric, who seemingly has no real truck with this cause, is nonetheless happy to use the way he is coded in her worldview to his sexual advantage, as well as to deploy the privileges and associations inherited from his father to his interest (and the denigration of others, including Joe). Yet perhaps the hollowest embodiment of all is Brian, a willing blank slate who rapidly absorbs and regurgitates antiracist rhetoric without really comprehending or especially deeply believing in it, out of the same combination of low esteem, jealousy, and resentment that fuels Joe’s rightward turn.

This is not to say that Eddington does not take racism, or social injustice more broadly, seriously in itself. It captures the genuine racial inequalities at play in the town, particularly in its policing, from Michael’s paradoxical position as a Black policeman handling a mostly white BLM protest, to the pretty shallow limits to the inclusiveness and meritocracy of the Sheriff’s office, to the contempt demonstrated in particular towards the indigenous Pueblo officer Butterfly Jimenez (William Belleau) whose policing skills and professionalism far outstrip those of his white counterparts. The perennial presence of the raving, alcoholic vagrant Lodge (Clifton Collins Jr), meanwhile, serves as an on-the-nose commentary on the claims of others to care about suffering and inequality.

Channelling the madness

However, the film’s portrayal of what really drives the left do not carry the same force of its mapping out of the webs of ideology and interests on the right. This is partly due to a political imbalance in its plotting and characterisation: there is simply no full equivalent to Joe (and Phoenix’s performance in the role) as an object of the film’s study, even if a decreasingly sympathetic one; he has a complexity – undergirded by screen time – that his ostensible near-equivalent in importance, Ted, simply does not – let alone the town’s teenage activists. As such, they lack the humanity that underpins Joe’s political trajectory. Yet it is also in part a product of the reality of the situation the film riffs on: the sheer asymmetry of the radicalisation of the right compared to the left, the immateriality of many of its concerns, and crucially, its much greater propensity for violence.

What Eddington captures extraordinarily well, however, is the senselessness and incomprehensibility of contemporary American politics – a dimension whose prescience only grew more apparent following the murder of the right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk a week or so after I watched the film. It is a portrait of how individual idiosyncrasy and obsession, and physical and mental suffering, perpetuate both persistent harm and visceral instances of violence, in ways that political ideology, as an apparently coherent and abstract map of beliefs and cues to action, obfuscates as much as it explains.

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This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Superman is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

In this latest cinematic version of Superman, its titular superhero (David Corneswet) is one of a number of ‘metahumans’ operating on Earth. He covers his own exploits in the guise of alter ego Clark Kent, reporter for Metropolis’s The Daily Planet, where he works with colleagues including girlfriend Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo), and editor Perry White (Wendell Pierce). Hailing from the now destroyed planet of Krypton, he has a secret headquarters in the Antarctic, the ‘Fortress of Solitude’, also inhabited by a team of robot helpers, and the unruly superpowered dog, Krypto. On display there is a damaged holographic recording of his late parents Jor-El (Bradley Cooper) and Lara Lor-Van (Angela Sarafyan), apparently instructing him of his duty to serve and protect the people of Earth. His ageing adoptive parents Jonathan (Pruitt Taylor Vince) and Martha Kent (Neva Howell) dote on him from their home in Smallville, Kansas, where Clark grew up.

Superman protects Metropolis in collaboration with ‘The Justice Gang’, comprised of the pompous Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), deadpan Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi), and acerbic Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced). Yet his engagements further afield, particularly intervening to prevent the state of Boravia from invading its poorer neighbour, Jarhanpur, have proven seemingly more divisive, causing concern in the US government. Boravia’s hawkish President Vasil Ghurkos (Zlatko Burić) is in league with American tech billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). With the aid of his own metahuman allies, including the technologically enhanced ‘The Engineer’ (María Gabriela de Faría) and the mysterious ‘Hammer of Boravia’, Luthor plots to exploit the Boravia-Jarhanpur conflict, and Superman’s own ambiguous status as Earth’s alien guardian, to ruin Superman’s reputation and put a permanent end to his escapades.

Superman, narrative, and comic book universes

Putting a distinctive spin on the Superman story is no easy feat. This is a character who made his comic book debut in 1938, who has been a transmedial phenomenon for most of his existence, and whose almost messianic backstory is incredibly widely known. Just as the original comic set the mould for other (never quite so high-powered) superheroes, so the 1978 film version, in which Christopher Reeve played Clark/Superman, and its three sequels established a template for subsequent comic book blockbusters.1 Later highly successful television serials Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993–1997) and Smallville (2001–2011) further fleshed out the character’s romantic adult life and adolescent backstory respectively in ways particularly suited to the medium.

We have since seen a paradigm shift, whereby relatively self-contained short film series – such as the 2002–2007 Spider-Man trilogy, or the 2005–2012 Batman one –gave way to Marvel’s and DC’s extended cinematic universes, comprising inter-referential films and television serials connecting each franchise’s stable of heroes. An overlapping logic slightly in tension with this is that of the reboot, whereby reviving and recasting a particular character for a new series of films about them usually involves discontinuing prior timelines, and commencing with the telling of a new version of the hero’s (or villain’s) origin story.

Both tendencies were at play when Warner Brothers commenced the DC extended cinematic universe with 2013’s Man of Steel, starring Henry Cavill as Superman. Like 1978’s Superman, it began with the story of Superman coming to Earth as an orphan, growing up with is adoptive parents, and becoming a superhero. This was followed by films such as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and Justice League (2017), connecting Superman with other D.C. heroes. Yet the franchise proved decreasingly commercially and critically successful. Now DC Studios, a reorganised production company within the recently merged Warner Bros. Discovery conglomerate, co-headed by writer-director James Gunn and producer Peter Safran, is rebooting the DC cinematic universe with a greater focus on storytelling and overall cohesion. Gunn’s own Superman is its first fresh feature film entry.

Yet in a refreshing, almost startling move, the new Superman does not follow the reboot convention of beginning by retelling the hero’s origin story at length. Instead a quick succession of intertitles provide a rapidly advancing history of metahumans, Superman’s arrival and time on Earth, his involvement in the Boravia-Jarhanpur conflict, and his recent beating at the hands of the Hammer of Boravia – before our bloodied hero plunges into the Antarctic ice as swiftly as we have been plunged into this version of his world. No drawn out exegesis, no flashbacks: Gunn trusts that the audience know this character well enough, and what we do not know, what is novel this time around, we can pick up easily enough along the way. There is a symbolic, lightly self-aware familiarity to it all, not least when Lois subjects Clark-as-Superman to a bruisingly confrontational interview, a wholesale inversion of the extremely softball one in the 1978 film.

States, superheroes, corporations, and geopolitics

The Boravia-Jarhanpur dispute pits two fictional nation states against each other. Boravia first appeared in the second-ever issue of the Superman comic back in 1939, as a central European country wracked by civil conflict (a routine trope of interwar popular culture). Jarhanpur, an apparently Asiatic dictatorship, debuted in the Justice League of America comic in 2002. Juxtaposing them geographically in the new Superman film, Boravia explicitly Europeanised, militarised, and with strong ties to the US, Jarhanpur orientalised and seemingly defenceless, has unsurprisingly been widely interpreted as a commentary on the Israel-Palestine conflict, despite Gunn’s denial. President Ghurkov’s two-dimensional villainy speaks to a broader might-makes-right tendency in contemporary regional politics, but Superman’s minimalist approach to narrative originism provides little scope for exploring warfare’s ideological and societal underpinnings, beyond the whims of powerful individuals.

Superman’s role in the conflict is far more interesting. His naïve defence of his actions when grilled by Lois echoes elements of 1990s US foreign policy thinking, that unilateral action by powerful actors in other (distant) states’ affairs with the noble intention of stopping bloodshed ought to enjoy universal approval. Lois’s adversarial line of questioning comes from a sort of liberal realist position, emphasising the complexity of international relations, the importance of following rules and procedures, and above all the question of deference to American political authority. As a metahuman, Superman troubles American sovereignty: he inhabits and protects the country, but does he represent it, and is he entitled to act independently of it?

There is a parallel with Luthor, whose combination of wealth and technological achievement likewise places him in a position of autonomy in national and international affairs. The character’s resemblance to real tech billionaires wielding outsized ideological and material influence in the US and beyond is patent. What is especially striking in Superman’s portrayal of corporate power and the workings of the military-industrial complex is its driving logic is not capital itself, so much as the egos, conceits, and insecurities of those who possess it. His collaboration with the Boravian government and, more uneasily, that of the US, nods to a paradoxical relationship between tech-optimists aspiring to transcend the limitations of the nation state and nationalists seeking to extend its hegemony.2 This is epitomised in Luthor’s creation of a pocket universe beyond the territorial bounds of the state, but also serving as a space for wielding untrammelled power in its interest.

Superman and the two Americas

Superman also inevitably reflects upon the polarisation of America into two versions of itself: liberal versus conservative; coastal big cities versus small-town or rural heartlands; diversity versus homogeneity. The hero himself in many ways embodies the former version. He is an arrival from another world entirely, with powers that make him visibly not like others. His capacity for rapid flight enables him to involve himself in affairs beyond US borders. Superman’s own personal origin myth – as apparently related posthumously by his Kryptonian parents – is that of the ‘good immigrant’. He is based in an urban environment inhabited by other immigrants with whom he interacts positively (such as food vendor Malik Ali (Dinesh Thyagarajan)). His alter ego works within that epitome of urban modernity, newspaper journalism, with its emphasis on speed (of news gathering and reporting, but also of dialogue).

These qualities render Superman, and this version of America, problematic to the conservative mind, with its proclivity to scepticism and fear rather than trust and hope. They motivate Luthor’s loathing and the US government’s suspicion of him. The presence of metahumans in Metropolis coincides with the persistent threat of its destruction, which evokes not only a negative association of diversity with danger, but also a post-9/11 isolationist concern with the risk of blowback from US adventurism.

However, the film also counters these sentiments by incrementally rooting Superman through his adoptive parents. The Kents stands for a traditional America of simple values and homespun wisdom. At first their habits and affairs are played for laughs through their incongruity with Superman’s world, encapsulated by a comical hurried telephone conversation with Clark while he is at work. However, as the plot advances, it becomes clear that their ideals are what truly underpin Superman’s mission, and the version of America he stands for.

Superman is simultaneously troubled by the sources of the polarisation its protagonist provokes and negates: a fragmented public sphere in which disinformation and abuse are easily spread, upon which opinion fickly and swiftly turns. It overtly blames this on social media, but also on television, or more specifically unscrupulous talk show hosts, portraying both as easily exploited by the likes of Luthor. Yet the film simultaneously retains hope in a liberal yet nostalgic notion of the media, of broadsheet newspaper journalism manifested in the Daily Planet. It promises that ethical motivations and a commitment to truth-telling retain the capacity to deploy new technologies, and change essentially benign American minds, for the better.

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This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Death and bereavement.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Moana 2 is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

Moana 2 follows some years after the original film, in which its eponymous protagonist, a young girl from the Polynesian island village of Motunui, was selected by the ocean to restore the heart of Te Fiti, stolen from the goddess by the shapeshifting demigod Maui. This led to a gradually expanding ecological disaster, eventually blighting her island’s food supply, prompting Moana to defy her village chief father (with her dying grandmother’s encouragement) and sail out to sea to find Maui. Through a series of adventures together (along with her stowaway pet rooster Heihei), overcoming unspeaking pirate coconuts the Kakamora, giant crab Tamatoa, and lava monster Te Kā, Moana eventually earned her sceptical companion’s admiration and friendship, and returned Te Fiti’s heart, bringing serenity and balance back to the maritime ecosphere, before returning home a hero.

In the sequel, the now older adolescent Moana (voiced by Auliʻi Cravalho) still lives on Motunui with father Tui (Temuera Morrison), mother Sina (Nicole Scherzinger), and now little sister Simea (Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda), but regularly voyages to other nearby islands. On one trip, she finds a pot fragment, pointing to the existence of other peoples. Upon returning, she receives a vision of her ancestor Tautai Vasa (Gerald Ramsey), explaining that the storm god, Kalo (Tofiga Fepulea'i) once sank the island of legendary island of Motufetu, which had linked the peoples of other different islands, out of his hatred for mortals, and that if it is not raised once more, the people of Montunui and other islands will die.

Moana therefore sets out to sea again, this time with a crew comprised of the young historian Moni (Hualālai Chung), engineer Lori (Rose Matafeo), and the bad-tempered elderly farmer Kele (David Fane), as well as Heihei and Moana’s pet pig, Pua. They hope to once again secure Maui’s help, only to instead encounter Moana’s old foes, the Kakamora. Unbeknownst to them, Maui (Dwayne Johnson) has his own reasons to seek out Nalo, but must also negotiate his own potential obstacle, in the form of Nalo’s mischievous henchwoman, Matangi (Awhimai Fraser).

Sequels and referentiality

Moana 2 fits within a broader recent tendency by Disney towards self-referentiality as it approached and passed its centenary. This has included live actions remakes such as Beauty and the Beast (2017), Aladdin (2019), and The Lion King (2019), as well as broader re-envisioning of studio lore in films as diverse as Saving Mr Banks (2013) and Wish (2023). Beyond Pixar, it had been less inclined to build consistently cinematic franchises, making lower budget sequels to recent and older animated films from the 1990s onwards, but predominantly releasing them direct-to-video, as well as spin-off TV series. Frozen II (2019) bucked this trend, a major commercial and critical box office hit, but then Frozen (2013) had been a success several orders greater than other recent animated Disney films.

Having initially been slated as a TV series before being belatedly converted into a film for cinematic release, Moana 2 falls somewhere between those poles. It presents a world that is largely the one built in its predecessor with little supplementation, save that it is decidedly post- the events of that film, with the tension between Moana and her father resolved, the people of Motunui’s reluctance to leave the island overcome.

Opportunities are regularly taken to reiterate plot points from the first film; this is hardly unusual – think, for example, of Olaf the snowman’s recapitulation of the plot of Frozen in Frozen II – but Moana 2 also pretty much re-treads the same water as its predecessor, beat by beat: Moana’s vision alerting her to a crisis and its solution; the encounter with the Kakamura; the swapping in of Nalo for Te Kā, and Matangi for Tamatoa; a reversal of Moana’s inspirational speech to Maui. The songs too consciously nod at counterparts from Moana, such as ‘Beyond’ aping ‘How Far I’ll Go’, or ‘Can I Get a Chee Hoo?’ doing likewise with ‘You’re Welcome’.

Gods, ancestors, and cosmology

The world presented in Moana was one without clear demarcations between the temporal and spiritual, between history and religion. The people of Motunui were the victims of a creeping ecological disaster that was divine (rather than human) in origin, but that they could redress if they would seize the opportunity to do so. Moana, anointed for this role as a small child, could rescue and recruit a demigod in order to rectify his original sin and reattain cosmological balance. The passage of time between that earlier point of divine origin and a human present was apparently vast. Yet it was unsettled by Moana’s grandmother, Tala (Rachel House), as interpreter of the past and prophesier of the future, before the full restoration of the unity of past and present through Moana’s actions. Human time in Moana is measured in ancestors, whose manifestation to their descendants after death is a further marker of continuity.

In Moana 2, the events of the first film are now folded into that time of divine activity and historical legend. Moni has succeeded Tala as the community’s historian, incorporating Moana’s adventures with Maui into those stories, illustrated, as they were in the first film, with monochrome stencilled fabric prints. This is a society distinctly post-redemption, in re-communication with that which is more than human: gods and demigods, monsters, and ancestral spirits. It is also one in which a new original wrongdoing, again that was divine rather than human in its perpetration, this time born of malice rather than hubris, necessitating another extraordinary act by the film’s eponymous hero to resolve the crisis and sustain her people. This time, at her father’s urging, her mission is a more collective endeavour, and yet Moana remains somewhere between the human and the transcendental: a future chief, a wayfinder, a heroic representative of Montunui, but also an historical-religious figure, rewriting the cosmological record.

There is an intrinsic connection between Moana 2’s evocation of a world in which the legendary and the everyday map onto each other, and the film’s aforementioned referentiallity, its consciousness of being part of a cinematic franchise and canon. The story is being inscribed both into a fictionalised Pasifika and Disney lore as it proceeds, and the parallels are often explicitly drawn. Moni’s adulation for Maui, for example, straddles a reverence for a figure of religious-historical significance and a fan’s almost cloying excitement about a celebrity in the world as is. Likewise, Moana functions both as a legendary, almost (if embarrassedly) messianic figure, and as an object of fandom both within Montinui and beyond the realm of the film itself.

An ocean world and its peoples

The vision of impending ecological disaster in the Pacific world, caused by external actors, is a potently symbolic one given the catastrophic environmental impacts of Western colonialism and militarism and climate change caused by far more industrialised nations. The fate of Motufetu, whose submersion has resulted in the unnatural dispersal and dissipation of Pasifika societies, echoes the contemporary threat of rising sea levels and likely depopulation faced by island states such as Tuvalu. Yet as a knowing joke by Maui about smartphones implies, the events depicted in Moana 2 occur millennia before our current moment. This is a premodern world, and crucially pre-encounter with European peoples.

Setting Moana and Moana 2 instead in the period of the original Austronesian settlement of the Pacific islands, aside from offering representation to the history of Pasifika peoples, also means that voyaging and exploration can be presented as exciting but without the implications of domination and exploitation in the European ‘Age of Discovery’.1 Another metaphor of colonisation present in the first film was the notion that in accepting a sedentary lifestyle on their island, offering – as per the lyrics of the song ‘Where You Are’ – all that was necessary for flourishing and contentment, the people of Montinui had ‘forgotten who we are’, as Tala lamented.

Moana’s, and subsequently her fellow islanders’, re-embrace of maritime travel comprised a re-finding of those authentic ways – a logic that persists in Moana 2: ocean-faring and human contact are tantamount to survival itself, a remembering of lost connections spurred by the spirits of their ancestors themselves. Moni’s succession from Tala as the village historian, Loto’s restless engineering spirit, and the elder Kele’s horticultural expertise (adapted for a life on the waves) all reinforce a unity between honouring tradition and pursuing progress.

This bears relation to what Holger Droessler has termed – with regard to Samoa – an ‘Oceanian Globality’, a response to the imperial powers’ vision and enactment of globalisation, whereby Samoans took their own opportunities to travel and work and forge connections with other colonised peoples. It was rooted in the notion that the expansive ocean did not separate them from, but rather connected them to, a wider world.2 There is an element of this conception to the voice casting of Moana 2, like that of its predecessor, which draws upon actors of indigenous Hawai’ian, Samoan, and Māori descent, the expression of a common Polynesian identity through working on an American-made film. It is also integral to the film’s promise of reunion of different peoples of the Pacific by means of ocean travel, in spite of malicious external efforts to keep them apart.

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This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Death and bereavement.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Conclave is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

Conclave begins with the death of the Pope, with it falling to his close associate, the Englishman Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), as Dean of the College of Cardinals to convene a papal conclave to elect his successor. The early favourites are Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), a reluctant American candidate close to Lawrence and the deceased Pope, and like them from the liberal wing of the Church; the ambitious and insincere Canadian Joseph Tremblay (John Lithgow); the socially conservative Nigerian Joshua Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati); and the gregarious but deeply reactionary Italian Goffredo Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto).

The cardinals are sequestered in the Vatican, residing in the Domus Sanctae Marthae, with voting taking place in the Sistine Chapel; head nun Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini) taciturnly and watchfully oversees the conclave’s catering and hospitality. Cardinal Lawrence, wrestling with his own crisis of faith and grief at the former Pope’s death, finds proceedings immediately further complicated by unexpected developments. Archbishop Janusz Woźniak (Jacek Koman), Prefect of the Papal Household, alleges that the Pope confided in him that he had demanded Tremblay’s resignation at a meeting shortly before he died. There is also the surprise arrival of Vincent Benitez (Carlos Diehz), a Mexican cardinal hitherto unknown to the other cardinals, whom the last Pope had secretly made Archbishop of Kabul.

Lawrence and his fellow liberals line up behind Bellini, seeking to prevent Tedesco from attaining the papacy and reversing the progressive reforms of the past half-century. Yet with the successful candidate requiring the backing of at least two thirds of the other cardinals, and the conclave visibly marked by sharp personal and political cleavages, it will take several rounds of voting for the new Pope to be elected. Moreover, Lawrence learns of a series of scandals that threaten to derail proceedings, and irreparably damage the Catholic Church’s already fragile reputation.

Ideological schisms

The division at the heart of Conclave is one that we might well recognise as a version of the polarisation around social issues visible in most contemporary Western societies. The liberal-reactionary divide is epitomised by an early exchange between Lawrence and Tedesco at dinner. Lawrence speaks warmly of the conclave as a microcosm of the Church, with representation from across the world but united in their faith and membership. Tedesco amusedly dismisses Lawrence’s optimistic reading of the room, cynically remarking on the cliquish way in which the cardinals converse and dine primarily with their own compatriots.

This is essentially an ideological rather than a theological schism. It is a contest over how the affairs of the Catholic Church on Earth ought to be governed, and the positions that the Church ought to take, relative to wider societal trends: the role of women; attitudes to sexuality; the relationship between tradition and modernity; the value or not, of diversity. It is not principally a disagreement about the nature of God, or Christ, or the Trinity, or humanity’s relation to them. When Tedesco rages against the emphasis that the liberal wing places on interfaith relations, it is essentially a cipher for his hostility to immigration and the tolerance of cultural difference, rather than a point about the incompatibility of Catholicism with other faiths.

Lawrence does, however, provide something for a religious foundation for his politics. In the extremely forthright speech with which he open the conclave, he tells the other cardinals: ‘There is one sin I have come to fear above all others. Certainty. If there was only certainty, and no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.’ Coming amid his own internal spiritual struggles, conveyed through uncertain upward glances at Michelangelo’s frescoes on the roof of the Sistine Chapel during voting, as he wrestles with the import of the occasion and his own role in it, his address makes a virtue of not knowing and acceptance of that, of the gap between spiritual and temporal realms as justification for the exercise of openness and pluralism in the latter.1

Vatican politics

Conclave also makes clear, however, that righteousness of view alone is insufficient without political will and nous to win arguments, persuade people, and manipulate the levers of power in one’s grasps. The dynamics of the Vatican as institution are that to occupy the Papacy is to be able to wield immense authority over the Church’s direction of travel, yet it also renders the dominance of one faction contingent, ultimately limited by the mortality of the office’s holder. Within the moment and rituals of succession, all is at play, and Tedesco’s crudely realist reading of the conclave holds far truer for most of the film than Lawrence’s idealistic interpretation.

There are clear parallels, and the resemblance is explicitly remarked upon at one point, between the politics of the conclave and the intra and inter-party politics of majoritarian electoral systems, especially that of the US. Elites whose worldviews have little in common vie for leadership of an institution to which they do hold a shared allegiance, and that offers the most viable vehicle for their respective aspirations. The very act of sequestration signifies an ultimately futile attempt to insulate the system from external influence.

In the interim, Lawrence and his fellow liberals must make a series of compromises. There is the compromise of seeking power, tainting one’s aspirations to do good and potentially sacrificing their inclinations towards selflessness and humility through personal ambition and risk of corruption. There is the compromise of deciding which candidate the liberal faction must align behind (potentially jettisoning those same personal ambitions). There is the compromise of deciding which progressive policies that candidate can afford to advocate. There is also the prospect of having to line up behind another unity candidate, whose politics they do not share, in order to stop Tedesco. All of this is rendered harder to navigate by the seeming inscrutability of collective will as manifested in the voting process, its unpredictability, its upward and downward shifts in momentum.

Yet, while the white male liberal cardinals discuss how best and how far to steer the Church in a way that promotes equality between genders, sexualities, and races, the power shifts occurring in Conclave occur in a manner beyond their anticipation and guidance. Lawrence readily welcomes the increased representation from the Global South at the conclave, but they constitute a voting bloc that he and his allies are ill-equipped to understand and marshal the support of. Women are not at all represented among this electorate, meanwhile, but as Sister Agnes states, ‘Although we sisters are supposed to be invisible, God nevertheless has given us eyes and ears.’ The nuns possess access and agency to conceal and reveal secrets, with momentous implications for various candidates’ prospects.

Scandal, conspiracy, and investigation

This capacity is especially significant because Conclave portrays scandal and the fear of it is the most potent political force within the Vatican, exposing as it does the contradictions in the Church’s and religion’s ambiguous positions between being private and public institutions. The damning implication of hypocrisy is so potent because the Church requires officeholders, from the pettiest to the grandest, regardless of ideological inclination, to subscribe to moral standards that dissolve boundaries between the professional and the personal. It creates and exacerbates the inequalities of power and attached temptations that make the vices which contravene those standards possible, that aggregate and amplify individual breaches of covenant with God, that transform them from sins into social problem.

It is also an irony of the way the politics of the Church works, that they require subterfuge, collusion, and coercion to acquire and exercise power, and yet magnify the suspicions about and possible ramifications of this conduct. Secret malfeasance contains the seeds of its own exposure. Conspiracy makes accomplices but also witnesses. Its very workings are also its body of evidence. Those who seek to disguise it render its discovery possible; those who seek to expose it make their own conspiracy in doing so.

All of this serves to further emphasise and elaborate the paradoxes in Lawrence’s own position. His instincts are to unify and tolerate, and yet he presides over proceedings in which unity is scant and intolerance rife. His position as Cardinal-Dean commands his impartiality, and yet provides him with means to buttress the liberal direction of the Church, in which he is also invested. He strives to uphold the sequestration of the cardinals, and yet is routinely presented with information that begs divulgence to them. His preference for uncertainty in the face of mystery, as a moral basis from which to decide his conduct, is tested by the partial evidence of wrongdoing that demands his further, barely willing investigation and judgement of the men he considers his brothers, peers, and equals.

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This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Alcoholism; Racism; HIV/AIDS; Misogyny; Antisemitism.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, The Apprentice is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

The Apprentice begins in 1973, with a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), possessing ambitious ideas for revamping the New York built environment at the point of the city’s apparent physical, economic, and social nadir, but lacking the assurance and reputation necessary to persuade others to back his endeavours. He struggles to escape the shadow and disdain of his real estate magnate father, Fred (Martin Donovan), whose domineering manner is also helping drive Donald’s elder brother, airline pilot Fred Jr. (Charlie Carrick), into deepening alcoholism. With the Trumps facing a federal government investigation for discriminating against African-American tenants, Donald’s luck changes when he falls into the circle of notorious, right-wing lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), whom he convinces to help his family fight the case.

Cohn, a barely closeted gay man, takes a shine to Donald and accepts him as his protégé, introducing him to underhand and illicit methods for undermining his opponents, and teaching him to effuse the necessary bravado to persuade both financial backers and local politicians to support his spectacular real estate projects. Donald also channels some of this newly found self-confidence into pursuing Czechoslovakian model Ivana Zelníčková (Maria Bakalova), whom he subsequently marries.

As the 1980s commences, Donald’s star continues to rise, his reputation cemented by the completion of his Trump Tower skyscraper in Manhattan, and his behaviour, towards Ivana, his family, and even Cohn, becomes increasingly obnoxious. His former mentor warns him against hubris over his risky investments in developments in Atlantic City and elsewhere. Yet with the AIDS crisis besetting New York’s gay community, Cohn’s own private life and health become an object of greater public scrutiny, and the power dynamic between Donald and himself begins to shift inexorably.

Truth, law, and real estate

Early in their acquaintance, Cohn explains to Donald Trump his three rules for success. ‘The first rule is attack, attack, attack. Rule two, admit nothing, deny everything…Rule three: no matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat.’ Truth for Cohn is subjective, a narrative to control. Law can be bent to one’s will, if one’s will is strong enough, if one is willing to sully their own character with relish rather than shame, break the rules they ostensibly operate within and uphold. He inverts John Adams’ maxim, describing America as a nation of men, not laws, identifying the foibles and weaknesses of one’s potential opponents as the pressure points necessary to ensure favourable outcomes.

Law and property are closely connected, straddling the gap between private wealth and the public interest. Fred Trump Sr.’s line of business means his exercise of personal racial prejudice is a matter of government concern. Donald Trump’s plan to attract finance for the derelict Commodore Hotel requires him to secure a tax break for the project from City Hall, to the outrage of citizens who want the cash-strapped city to use its finances for welfarist purposes. In both cases, Cohn intervenes by blackmailing key decision-makers. The collective interest, the public space of the court or tribunal, can be overridden through private, interpersonal interaction. The legal realists of the 1920s and 1930s assailed the classicist jurisprudence rooted in allegedly objective doctrinairism as effectively aligning the judiciary with the interests of capital.1 Cohn gleefully deploys this insight to ensure those same interests are upheld.

Donald Trump demonstrates the applicability of Cohn’s mantra to the world of real estate more broadly. The regeneration of New York, at the point in the city’s history where both its material reality and popular image are marked by degradation, exacerbated by its slide into bankruptcy, is dependent upon his telling a story about its present and future, and persuading others to quite literally buy into it.2 It is about his cultivating an image of himself as a rare talent who can make that story come true, someone who has the vision and ability to be entrusted with the money of others. To reinforce this point, we are repeatedly shown Trump through the medium of period-style television footage. Obscuring the reality of his own gilded upbringing, he attributes his capacity for dealmaking to another form of inheritance, genetics, while secretly worrying about the ravages of middle age on his physical appearance.

Relationships and contracts

The Apprentice is a film about the nature of relationships, and this is integral to its politics, and the nascent politics of Donald Trump. In a key scene, Cohn takes him to a tailor to fit him for an expensive suit. When Trump protests he cannot afford it, Cohn returns the cheque he had given him for taking the family’s case. ‘You pay me back with your friendship,’ he explains. ‘Okay, quid pro quo. You’ll be a friend to me, I’ll be a friend to you.’

This transactional approach, this viewing of your relationship with other people in terms of what they can do for you, is something that ultimately infuses every aspect of Trump’s behaviour, including towards Cohn. As the power balance shifts between them, Trump increasingly marginalises the man he once fought so anxiously to associate himself with. His response to Cohn’s declining health is a combination of unease and pity; his continued gestures of friendship towards Cohn serve primarily to show onlookers how far their fortunes have diverged. By contrast, Cohn’s relationships are the source of his vulnerability, epitomised by his efforts to care for his sick assistant and lover, Russell Eldridge (Ben Sullivan), and his disappointed expectation that Donald now reciprocate and be a friend to him.

Trump takes a zero-sum understanding of this transactionalism in part because of his family background. His loyalty to his parents and siblings is partial and begrudging, not least because of the weakness and dependency it implies. That weakness is epitomised in his eyes by his brother’s alcoholism, to which he responds with both consternation and disgust. Donald also resents being perceived only as Fred Sr.’s son; he yearns to impress his father, but also to eclipse him. And as his father’s mental faculties decline, so he ultimately seeks to take advantage by leveraging the family’s wealth to his own benefit.

This view of relationships underpins Donald Trump’s misogyny too. He sees women as objects of sexual gratification but also as status symbols, to be obtained accordingly. He uses Cohn’s name to get Ivana and her model friends into an exclusive private members’ club, and subsequently seeks to woo her with talk shows of how there are two categories of men, ‘killers’ and ‘losers’, with him falling into the former category. Cohn intervenes by drawing up a miserly prenuptial agreement, much to Ivana’s disgust. However, Ivana herself is also skilled at utilising her looks, and Donald’s desire for her, to pursue her own career aspirations as an interior designer. She not only refuses to take her suitor’s posturing seriously, but perceives and sympathises with the insecurity and vulnerability behind it. Yet this only serves to provoke Donald’s resentment, and motivates his worst behaviour towards Ivana.

Lineages of the American right

In its depiction of Cohn’s relationship with Donald Trump, The Apprentice captures something of the through-history of the American conservative movement, from the height of the Cold War to the present-day dalliance with fascism. Cohn made his name as a young lawyer in the 1950s through his highly public involvement in the legal persecution of alleged communists. At one point in the film, defending his methods to a mildly shocked Donald, he refers back to his involvement in the 1951 prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, culminating in their execution for espionage despite serious doubts over the latter’s guilt. Dismissing the public unease that condemning the mother of young children to death had provoked, he angrily denounces the Rosenbergs’ treachery, using an antisemitic slur in doing so, despite being Jewish himself.

This is of a part with the way Cohn specialises in using evidence of officials’ involvement in same-sex relations to blackmail them – another echo of Red Scare politics – when he is himself gay, and indeed gleaning this information by his participation in the same circles. Alongside this shameless hypocrisy, in keeping with his flexible approach to the truth, he makes occasional displays of outrage, and pronouncements of principle, of his belief in liberty, democracy, and above all America. Sliding between performance and sincerity, we get a glimpse of the psychic needs that such beliefs, rooted in the defence of an imputed status quo, might hold for someone who would otherwise be marginalised by that same order on grounds of their ethnicity and sexuality. This is thrown into sharp relief by Cohn’s physical decline at the point when the staunchly conservative Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan is in the White House (and culpable of doing little to alleviate the AIDS pandemic).

The 1980s, The Apprentice makes clear, is Trump’s era, and we see in his education from Cohn, in his career in real estate, in his personal and professional relationships, the birth of Trump’s own politics. His vision of reviving and regenerating New York – the city’s ‘decline’ strongly associated in the public mind with its increasing racial diversity, and juxtaposed with the Trump family’s discriminatory letting practices – is a dry run of his explicitly racist national revivalist programme. He jokes in The Apprentice about running for president himself as an extension of or deviation from his current career trajectory – nation and presidency as a new potential outgrowth of his personal brand. He assesses political actors – from New York mayor Ed Koch (Ian D. Clark) to the Soviets – crudely in terms of whether he can cut deals with them, of whether they are weak or strong. His learned insistence on always claiming victory, even as his creditors circle, is a harbinger of his impending future bankruptcies in the 1990s and 2000s, and of his denial of the 2020 Presidential Election result.

Earlier in The Apprentice, we see Cohn introduce Donald Trump to Roger Stone (Mark Rendall), the Republican campaigner who would in 2019 be sentenced – and subsequently pardoned by Trump – for his links to and efforts to conceal Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential Election. Later in the film, Stone visits Trump in his office to persuade him to support Reagan’s electoral campaign. Trump fumbles and looks smirkingly at a badge Stone has presented him with, carrying the campaign slogan ‘Let’s Make America Great Again’. It is an overt nod to the connection between Reagan’s politics and those Trump would come to embody some thirty years later, except that whereas the Reagan campaign slogan is an optimistic invitation, a promise of partnership in reversing decline, the Trump version – shorn of the ‘Let’s’ – is more of an anguished demand for such a reversal, the externalisation of agency to bring about, or rather turn back, change in the personage of the individual demagogue.

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This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Bereavement.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Twisters is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

A distant follow-up to 1996 disaster movie Twister, Twisters centres on aspiring Oklahoman meteorologist and storm chaser Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar Jones). She is researching into the possibility of halting tornados in their tracks by propelling a super-absorbent polymer into them to alter the atmospheric conditions they thrive upon, but abandons these ambitions after an experiment goes badly wrong. Five years later, Kate is working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in New York when Javi (Anthony Ramos), a former member of her storm-chasing team, makes contact with her. Javi persuades a reluctant Kate to temporarily return to Oklahoma to help him in his new venture, ‘Storm Par’, deploying triangles of high-tech scanners around tornadoes in order to get a three-dimensional picture of their internal dynamics.

Javi’s faith in Kate’s instincts is not shared by his highly credentialed team of experts, least of all by Javi’s business partner Scott (David Corenswet). She also encounters, and is initially contemptuous of, a rival team of storm chasers comprising the so-called ‘Tornado Wrangler’ Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), videographer Boone (Brandon Perea), drone operator Lily (Sasha Lane), scientist Dexter (Tunde Adebimpe), and mechanic Dani (Katy O’Brian) – and accompanied on this occasion by British journalist Ben (Harry Hadden-Paton).

Tyler’s team seem wholly unserious in their objectives, competing with Storm Par to find a major tornado, only so they can film themselves driving into and launching fireworks into it. However, in the aftermath of one such destructive storm, Kate comes to realise the far more altruistic motives of Tyler’s team, as well as the far less scrupulous ones of Storm Par’s business backers. This shifts the dynamic between Kate and Tyler, as well as between her and Javi, and also compels Kate to face her past.

Twister and Twisters

Save for the tornadoes, there are no characters from the original Twister in Twisters, despite earlier reports indicating the film would centre on the daughter of the original’s protagonist couple, Jo (Helen Hunt) and Bill Harding (Bill Paxton). Both Hunt and collaborator Daveed Diggs have stated that their initial proposal to make a version of the film with an all-Black and Brown team of storm-chasers was nefariously blocked – although an element of this vision survives in the final film, as discussed further below.

Twisters does, however, feature plenty of nods to its predecessor. There is the Oklahoma setting. There is a reference to the ‘Dorothy’ technology that Twister centred on. There is the prelude of a traumatic experience by one of the film’s protagonists, which explains her motivations, just as with Jo’s childhood loss of her father to a tornado at the outset of the original. There is the love triangle between Kate, Tyler, and Javi, just as there was between Jo, Bill, and Melissa (Jami Gertz) in Twister. There is the pitting of a highly ramshackle outfit against a far more professionalised one – only in Twisters we are initially introduced to the latter rather than the former. There is a parallel between Jo’s Aunt Meg (Lois Smith) and Kate’s mother, Cathy (Maura Tiernan), as a key matriarchal figure. There is even a cameo by James Paxton, son of the late Bill Paxton, as a motel guest with skewed priorities.

A sequel for the climate crisis?

So what does it mean to make a follow-up to (or reboot of) Twister in 2024? The original film was made in a decade of heightened environmental consciousness, of awareness of global warming, but also a post-Cold War optimism in humanity’s capacity to tackle it through cooperation and scientific advancement. A pre-teen viewer like myself had already grown up on a staple of cartoons like Captain Planet, which told us we could protect the environment by recycling used items and not leaving lights on when we left a room.

While that was a deeply relevant context in which to make a film about tornadoes, Twister was unconcerned with the idea of them as a product of environmental change. Rather, they were characterised as an exciting but frightening recurring feature of life in the Central US, and Dorothy – based on the TOTO technology developed in the 1980s – was a scientific tool of progress: a capsule containing small weather sensors that, deployed in a tornado, could provide a much clearer picture of how they functioned as a weather phenomenon, facilitating the development of a more effective early-warning system that could save lives.

Thirty years on, general optimism about anything, let alone the climate crisis, is thin on the ground. Yet Twisters is no more concerned with the – admittedly still only partly understood – relationship between climate change and tornadoes than Twister was. The film’s director Lee Isaac Chung insisted he did not include any references to climate change in the film because he does not feel films should be ‘message-oriented’. There is a plain-speaking homily by Cathy that hints at the general effects of environmental change on everyday life, as well as a nod to the dangers of climate denialism when one character foolhardily dismisses a tornado warning as a false alarm. However, the description of the series of tornadoes in the film as ‘once in a generation’ also echoes Twister’s conceptualisation as recurring, with occasional infamously destructive outliers.

There is also an evident continuity between the technological solutions offered in Twister and Twisters, and the logic underpinning them. Storm Par’s objective is to provide an even better picture of the internal workings of a tornado than Dorothy was able to, ostensibly to further diminish their impact. Kate’s vision goes further still: to not just anticipate, but neutralise bad weather as it occurs. This is explicitly linked to an actually existing form of weather modification, cloud seeding. In this regard, it taps into a broader stream of wishful thinking on environmental problems: that with individual bravery and invention, the right technologies, and the right intentions, we can overcome them without having to alter broader patterns of human and economic life.

Science, business, and populism

Nonetheless, alongside this techno-optimism, there is also an anti-corporate, egalitarian populism at Twisters’ heart, which also recalls its predecessor, though it takes a while to show its hand, concealed within an apparent technocratically liberal facade. Javi – played by an actor of mixed racial heritage – seemingly epitomises the latter quality. Since his earlier storm chasing days, he has had a stint in the military, a signifier of multicultural meritocracy, where he had encountered and obtained the technology necessary for scanning tornados. His Storm Par team, with their uniform dress and vehicles, their PhDs from elite universities, backed with finance from major businesses who also have an interest in addressing the problems caused by tornadoes, seem to epitomise a marriage between the scientific, military, and corporate worlds, unified in pursuit of a common good. Yet it becomes clear that there are contradictions in this alliance that Javi has to navigate, as there is as much money for businesses to make in the advent of tornadoes as there is in their mitigation.

Compared to the seriousness of Storm Par’s mission, the tongue-in-cheek self-aggrandisement and clownish thrill-seeking of Tyler’s team seem at face value to signal badly warped priorities, bearers of a mission whose success is measured not in data accumulated nor lives saved, but in YouTube hits and merch sold. Yet we also learn that there is a humanitarian ethos to their brand of commercialism, that this multiracial group may not possess the impressive qualifications of Storm Par’s personnel, but they do have a diverse range of skills beyond their exuberance and buffoonery, reminiscent as it is of Jo’s unassuming band of storm chasers in Twister. In this regard they are a much better stand-in than Storm Par for the melting pot, egalitarian, well-intentioned nation. This blend of performative flair, authenticity, and applied intelligence is especially encapsulated by Tyler himself, an Arkansan rodeo rider turned science grad.

Kate straddles these two worlds and she is the vehicle through which we learn more about them both, and through those encounters we also learn more about her. There are clearly strong parallels between Bill in Twister and Kate here: a natural storm chaser hiding away from who they really are, away from the field where they are really in their natural habitat. At first it seems that it is Javi, a figure from her past, haunted by the same tragedy as she is, who will reawaken her true sense of self, win her over to his mission, and draw her back to where she really belongs. Yet the stark contrast between her instinctive, folksy methods and the high-tech professionalism of Storm Par rather shines light on the tensions in who Javi is and what he is trying to achieve.

Rather, it is through Kate’s encounter with Tyler, half-amused by her apparent city girl uptightness, half-intrigued by her aptitude for tracking tornadoes and by her surprising wiliness, that she really becomes her original self again. It is through meeting him that she not only returns to the field, but also reconnects with Oklahoma as a place, returning home to her mother’s farm, to the barn where she once engaged in much more improvisational, original, radical scientific research. She and Tyler also share an understanding of tornadoes as both a cause of harm to the ordinary people of small-town America, with whom they have a natural affinity, and as a sublime, almost living component of the prairies of the central US. It is in this way that Twisters brings together its different ideological strands: its admiration for scientific ingenuity, its scepticism of big business, its affinity for the rural environment, and its advocacy of a vaguely progressive type of heartland populism.

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This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Alcohol; Narcotics.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, The Bikeriders is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

The Bikeriders is based on photojournalist Danny Lyon’s 1968 book of the same name, documenting his time with the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club. It was made by writer-director Jeff Nichols with Lyon’s cooperation, and the script draws extensively on the original audio recordings of his interviews with the club’s members.

In Chicago in 1965, Kathy Bauer (Jodie Comer) meets, swiftly falls in love with, and marries rebellious biker Benny Cross (Austin Butler). Benny is a member of the Vandals Motorcycle Club, led by its charismatic founder Johnny Davis (Tom Hardy). As the Vandals develop a fierce local reputation for hard drinking and roughhousing, their exploits are documented by Lyon (Mike Faist), who also interviews Kathy and various members of the gang, including Johnny’s deputy Brucie (Damon Herriman), mechanic Cal (Boyd Holbrook), good-humoured Cockroach (Emory Cohen), and bad-tempered Zipco (Michael Shannon).

Benny’s reckless disregard for danger and his own personal safety increasingly concerns Kathy, putting her at loggerheads with Johnny, who sees Benny as his natural heir as the Vandals’ leader. Meanwhile, the club grows with its notoriety, adding new chapters in other cities. Amid an influx of new members, Johnny struggles to maintain his authority, and the atmosphere within the Vandals takes a much darker turn as the 1970s approach.

Bad civil society

As I watched The Bikeriders, one three-word phrase recurringly flashed through my mind: ‘bad civil society’.1 This was the title of a 2001 article by politics scholars Simone Chambers and Jeffrey Kopstein that pushed back against the then dominant notion of civil society as an unalloyed good, at a point in time when American democracy and societal cohesion was seen as threatened by allegedly declining levels of social capital.2 Chambers and Kopstein countered that some forms of civil society could, while distributing valuable public goods to their members, simultaneously inculcate them with hateful ideologies and reward toxic behaviours.

The Vandals turn what might otherwise be a deeply individualistic pastime, motorcycling, into an inherently collective one. Members pay in their subs and in return partake in drinking and socialising together, in a shared identity connoted by their donning of the club’s regalia. They gain not only a heightened sense of status from their membership, but also a degree of protection and impunity in a violent and heavily (but unevenly) policed society. Johnny compares it to a family; Brucie’s wife Gail (Phuong Kubacki) more mockingly refers to the other Vandals as ‘your boyfriends’ when alerting Benny to a potential standoff between them and another set of bikers. Both descriptors capture the club’s self-contained, semi-closed off structure and the closeness of the masculine bonds within it.

Violence is integral to the Vandals as an institution. It is exercised internally, especially by Johnny, as a means of maintaining internal hierarchy and order in what is ostensibly an egalitarian organisation. It is also exercised externally as the club both provokes and avenges violence against its members. However, spectacular violence and rebellion serves to inspire incomers and copycats, and this organic expansion dilutes the members’ intimate knowledge and trust of each other, as well as Johnny’s capacity to use violence as a disciplinary tool and set the terms of its deployment. The violence of the Vandals becomes more vicious, more unpredictable, more regularly inflicted upon each other.

Historical rebellion and reaction

The Bikeriders tells the story of a period of rapid social and cultural change, between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, through the prism of a group who seem to embody it, but as the film progresses it becomes clear that they are being left behind by. There is a strong sense of 1950s nostalgia about the Vandals. Johnny, we learn, was inspired to set up the gang by watching the 1953 Marlon Brando film The Wild One on television, while Austin Butler – whose star status was built on playing Elvis Presley in 2022’s Elvis – strongly echoes the spirit of that decade’s juvenile delinquency films. All of this is further evoked by a soundtrack slightly out of temporal sync with the period it covers, with its mixture of rhythm and blues, beat groups, garage rock, and a couple of tracks by the Shangri-Las.

The Vandals’ stylised, undirected rebellion, their position as white, working-class men routinely shown at leisure, is at significant remove from the political struggles of the period. The ubiquity of Black music and singers on the film’s soundtrack conversely draws attention to the racial homogeneity of the gang, at a time of intense civil rights struggle, including in Chicago.3 Zipco, who takes intense pride in his own manual labour, labels his brother a ‘pinko’ for going to university. Of Latvian descent, he rails against students tearing up their draft cards when he himself wanted to go and fight in Vietnam, but was turned down by the Army. There is added irony in all of this being documented by college-educated Danny Lyon, who in real life had previously been involved with the civil rights movement, and increasingly became disillusioned with the political and racial views of the Chicago Outlaws.

The scale of transformation in American society during the late 1960s and early 1970s highlights the relative conformism of the original Vandals – perhaps best captured by Cockroach’s stated aspiration to become a motorcycle police officer. Their own predilection for alcohol puts them at odds with newer members who prefer cannabis, and even heroin. Their own capacity for lawbreaking and violence is greatly surpassed by that of newer members, many who have themselves served in Vietnam, or in the case of the aspiring member known only as ‘The Kid’ (Toby Wallace), comes from an impoverished background. Road violations, brawling, arson, and the physical settling of vendettas make way for drug dealing, larceny, and assassinations – a transition from associational culture to organised crime.

Generation and gender

The Bikeriders is also very much a film about intergenerational relationships and the lifecycle. If the Vandals – whose members range from young to middle-aged men – have anything to rebel against, it is against maturing, against the idea that their growing older means having to adopt wider norms around propriety, against the prospect that they might no longer be young enough for this lifestyle. Moreover, for all its homosociality, the Club also proves excessively compatible with settling down and embracing domesticity, with wives and girlfriends – especially Kathy – routinely present even at its ostensibly most masculinist social occasions.

Yet as time passes, the Vandals provide an exemplar for younger men who aspire both to imitate and join and to succeed and surpass them. It is this process, as well as the hazards of motorcycling and gang membership, that accelerates the original members’ sense of ageing, of being left behind, of losing control. Social occasions are no longer safe for attendance by wives and girlfriends, and membership is no longer congruent with the responsibilities of being husbands and fathers.

All of this is most epitomised by the triangle of relationships at the heart of the film, between Kathy, Benny, and Johnny. The real Kathy Bauer was in her mid twenties with children of her own when she met the still teenage Benny, and in the film she relates to him partly as patient, long-suffering wife, and partly as indulgent mother figure, tasked with caring for him during the aftermaths of his frequent encounters with violence, and rarer moments of emotional vulnerability. As she tells Danny, ‘I thought I could change him, y’know…not to be different but to be – I don’t know, like he’s wild!’ As his most frequent interviewee, she is an ideal interlocutor, exceeding Danny’s proximity to the Vandals over time, but her gender also placing her outside that world in a manner analogous to his social class and education. As such, she functions both as admonishing critic and affectionate chronicler of the club and its evolution.

Johnny’s relationship with Benny, meanwhile, veers between friendship, father figure and son, and something more homoerotically charged. Admiring of Benny’s loyalty to and ability to command respect from his fellow Vandals, and fearing of the changes afoot in the club and his own inability to manage them, Johnny sees in Benny a kindred spirit and potential heir. Kathy, for all her patience and intimacy with the Vandals, increasingly sees Johnny as a rival for Benny’s affections and commitment, and the club as a rival to their marriage as the dominant institution in Benny’s life. Benny, enigmatic and elusive, a character almost entirely of Kathy’s retrospective narration, is the perennial teenage boy, inclined to flee rather than face up to the different versions of growing up that both Kathy and Johnny require of him.

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This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Domestic violence; Drug use.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Love Lies Bleeding is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

In 1989, introverted Lou Langston (Kristen Stewart) is managing a gym in a town in the American Southwest, where she encounters and quickly becomes smitten with Jackie Cleaver (Katy O’Brian), a bisexual bodybuilder from Oklahoma who has drifted out that way. Jackie is in training for a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas, and Lou helps her with her preparations by procuring steroids for her. The two move in together as romance blooms between them.

Jackie has taken up a job waitressing at a nearby gun range owned by Lou’s menacing criminal father Lou Langston Sr (Ed Harris), from whom Lou has long been estranged, and whom the FBI are investigating. The range is managed by J.J. (Dave Franco), who is married to, and violently abusive towards, Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone), deterring the protective Lou from moving away. However, when Jackie – whose temperament is increasingly affected by her steroid use – seeks revenge on J.J. on Lou’s behalf, she initiates a spiral of violence that imperils the two lovers and their relationship.

Queering the erotic thriller

As remarked in a recent discussion with about Love Lies Bleeding and Drive-Away Dolls, both films aim to reinvigorate older genre models by integrating them with a newer type of ‘lesbian plot’ – in Love Lies Bleeding’s case, the erotic thriller. This type of film, which had its commercial heyday in the late 1980s and early 1990s, drew upon the older conventions of film noir – not least in its entanglement of fall guy with femme fatale – but also updated them by integrating other elements, including from standard thrillers and softcore pornography. At its core is the close relationship between sexual desire and violence, the former routinely culminating in the latter.1

Love Lies Bleeding draws upon many of these elements, not least in its highly charged lesbian sex scenes, as well as its often shocking moments of brutality, but also in its setting in the period so associated with the erotic thriller. Yet before discussing those dimensions in more detail, I want to address the way in which the lesbian plot is not simply a novel twist on the erotic thriller, but actively transforms it. By having two female protagonists, it replaces the fall guy-femme fatale opposition with a dynamic in which each character displays aspects of both types.

Jackie on the surface is the character who is closer to the fall guy, a position partly suggested by her status as an out-of-towner and as an athlete.2 She routinely demonstrates an insouciance bordering on naïveté, a tendency to rely on her natural physical traits rather than thinking situations through. This is in marked contrast to the more calculating Lou, who shows far greater worldliness as Jackie’s supplier, trainer, and lover. Yet it is, however, Lou with whom the audience are invited to identify more, whose desiring gaze at Jackie we are originally invited to share, whose personal situation we become much more acquainted with. It is Jackie whose unpredictability keeps Lou forever slightly off-balance, compelling her to use her nous reactively.

Masculinity, femininity, and violence

In one regard, Love Lies Bleeding is centrally concerned with patriarchy and the ways in which the family unit enables men’s violence. It is obvious from our introduction to Beth and J.J. and their two children that J.J. is physically abusive towards his wife, and tension bubbles beneath a thin veneer of domesticity. Beth’s tolerance of this is encouraged by Lou Sr, whose approach to his son-in-law’s conduct towards his daughter is discretion and dissuasion from going too far. Lou Sr runs a family business in which he and J.J. maintain the gun range’s façade of legitimate fun that conceals a gun-running operation.

This is the world that Lou and Jackie as queer women inhabit, negotiate, and resist. When we are introduced to Jackie it is during a transient sexual encounter with J.J. that is patently transactional: a route to a job on the gun range. For Lou, managing the gym is a means of maintaining some independence and distance from her father even as her geographic mobility is curtailed by her desire to protect her sister. They are explicitly contrasted as a pair with Beth and J.J. during a double date at a restaurant. This heteronormative ritual is subverted by the inclusion of a same-sex couple, while the coupling of couples as a mutual performance of domestic contentment is undermined by J.J.’s simmering anger with Beth.

Existing in this world requires that Lou and Jackie also resort to violence. This arises initially from the need to protect themselves, each other, and Beth, from the threat men pose to them. Nor do they always demonstrate unmitigated agency in that violence, with Lou Sr in particular seeking to manipulate their proclivity for it to his own ends. Yet their violence also arises from the interpersonal dynamic of their own relationship, and is a product of their own emotions and calculations – their jealousies, their desires for vengeance, their instincts for self-preservation. And it is directed not only at men but also increasingly at other women, even each other.

Bodybuilding culture and the 1980s

Setting Love Lies Bleeding at the end of the 1980s and close to the Mexican border locates it at the geographic and chronological extremes of Ronald Reagan’s America. It also exists at a cultural extreme too, in the world of bodybuilding. Hulking figures lift weights, contorted faces expressing both the strain of bodily exertion and a narcissistic thrill at their own physical capabilities. The walls of the gym are littered with aspirational motivational quotes like ‘Pain is just weakness leaving the body’. All this is reminiscent the intersection of bodybuilding and cinema in the action thrillers of the 1980s, the films of right-wing coded stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.3 Yet all of this jars with the shabbiness of the gym itself – suggesting a tawdry reality beyond the spectacular transformation of the body.

Love Lies Bleeding, however, queers this world through the presence of Jackie, with her eroticised yet muscular physique, sexualised in a manner that challenges dominant ideas of femininity, desirable to and desiring of both men and women. She captures the contradictions in the New Right political project, between neoliberalism and neoconservatism. As a homeless, bisexual, biracial woman, raised in a foster family, she is at the intersection of different groups the Republicans framed as immoral and sought to discipline. Yet she also embodies a capacity for human self-transformation. She believes she can transcend her circumstances by participating in a heavily commercialised subculture holding opportunities for women who offer their bodies for display, in a manner at odds with dominant notions of female domesticity.

The supply and consumption of performance-enhancing drugs also captures the instability in the New Right project. The pursuit of success fuels a lucrative illicit trade that runs counter to ideas of fair competition and period moral panics about drug usage. Sequences of shots showing Jackie’s figure seemingly mutating with each steroid injection, moreover, form part of a surrealist tendency that becomes more pronounced as the film proceeds. This too is part of the queerness of Love Lies Bleeding: its introduction of horror and fantasy elements into the erotic thriller. Jackie’s physical and psychological transformation is central to this, at the hinge between sexuality and violence, but also between the sublime and the grotesque.

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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Domestic violence.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Drive-Away Dolls is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

It’s 1999 in Philadelphia. Jamie (Margaret Qualley) is dumped by her girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein) for her infidelities. Now homeless, Jamie convinces her best friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), to take her with her on a trip south to Tallahassee where Marian’s aunt lives. At Jamie’s behest, they opt to use a driveaway service, which means taking another client’s car one-way to a shared destination. Though they are supposed to be on a strict schedule, Jamie is intent on frequenting lesbian bars and parties along the way; Marian, who is also gay but far more prudish, would rather simply read.

However, it turns out that the car was intended for another driver, and the mix-up puts ‘The Chief’ (Colman Domingo) and his henchmen Arliss (Joey Slotnick) and Flint (C. J. Wilson) onto Jamie’s and Marian’s tails. The two friends continue driving southwards, not realising Arliss and Flint are looking for them, but begin to get a sense of what they have stumbled onto when they find a mysterious suitcase in their car’s trunk.

The road trip structure

The road trip and its connotations are integral to Drive-Away Dolls’ structure. It simultaneously liberates and confines its two protagonists. Jamie has literally nowhere to go; for her, the journey and its possibilities are their own destination. Marian wants to absent herself from her own dead-end situation, consisting of a dull office job and non-existent romantic life, but her prosaic ambition is merely a respectable existence elsewhere, engaging in wholesome pastimes like birding. Their contrasting visions of freedom and the good life must coinhabit the same small spaces of the car, bars, diners, and motel rooms, along a single trajectory.

This (literal) vehicle allows not only for the exploration of the dynamics between two very different characters – a relationship that is mirrored in their pursuers, the autodidactically, aspiringly urbane Arliss and the old-school, instinctively violent Flint. It also allows for the juxtaposition of different versions of America. It contrasts the metropolis Jamie and Marian are absconding from and the small towns they visit along the way. There is the further contrast between Philadelphia and Tallahassee, whose politics are embodied by its Republican senator Gary Channel (Matt Damon). This points to another paradox between Jamie, a loquacious emigree from the South, and Marian, who aspires to its gentility.

The late 1990s period-setting is also significant here. Firstly, in an era prior to the ubiquity of mobile phones and the internet, the world of Drive-Away Dolls is less integrally connected, certain forms of knowledge are far less readily available, and Jamie and Marian can be more readily lost to the rest of the world, not least the hapless Arliss and Flint. Secondly, it is an era of political and cultural flux, with a sharper (but closing) divide between gay and mainstream culture on the one hand, and less visible political polarisation on the other, in which the social conservatism of someone like Channel retains a pre-MAGA respectability.

Lesbian subculture1

Drive-Away Dolls shows a world in which sexuality and sociability are inseparable. Lesbianism is subcultural but not clandestine, and one can readily find opportunities to encounter other lesbians to hang out and hook up with, providing one has the necessary subcultural capital. This is the insider knowledge which the worldly Jamie readily possesses, as when a trip to a pizzeria leads to a party with a women’s soccer team. It is this knowledge, as much as the technology of the motorcar or the shady capitalism of the driveaway service, that turns their journey into a liberatory one. Arliss also assumes himself to possess the necessary social skills to navigate this world, but his reading of context and information supplied comes up short, hamstringing his and Flint’s pursuit of Jamie and Marian.

By contrast with Jamie, Marian has not been sexually active since the breakup of her relationship with an aide to Ralph Nader. This is a seemingly throwaway reference, but a pertinent one: Nader came to prominence as a vehicular safety campaigner, and in the 1990s was a politically independent, morally ascetic politician – that once derided a concern with gay rights issues as ‘gonadal politics’ – whose third party candidature contributed to George W. Bush’s narrow, crucial victory over Al Gore in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. There are parallels with Marian’s character, seemingly keen to minimise hazards and sexual activity along the road to Tallahassee. As time passes, however, the two friends’ qualities shape each other, as Marian comes to appreciate the value of sexual pleasure, and Jamie of fuller emotional attachment.

Another recurring sexual motif of Drive-Away Dolls is the dildo. This is played to a large degree for comic effect, a carnivalesque oversized, overly garish, overly ubiquitous phallic symbol whose appearance routinely challenges restrained sexual mores. Yet its subversion goes further than that. It functions in the first instance as a material signifier of women’s right to autonomy in their sexual pleasure. Secondly, it inverts the power structures that objectify and fetishize women’s bodies, turning the penis instead into something readily removable, reproducible, and commodified.

Respectability and violence

Lesbian subculture is presented in this way as radically indifferent to and cheerily rubbing up alongside seeming respectability. Marian is regularly shown reading Henry James’s 1878 novel The Europeans, whose encounter between traditionalist New Englanders and their free-spirited (and queer-coded) European visitors is analogous to her relationship with Jamie.2 There is perhaps an added significance here in that Marian is of South Asian heritage: just as for the New Englanders, attachment to the Old World’s rules are more important for their distance from it, so too the pursuit of respectability is given heightened impetus by being racially marginalised. Notably, The Chief – who also inhabits a space between Black respectability and conservatism, and criminality and queerness – is also shown reading the same book at one point.

In keeping with the films that director and co-writer Ethan Coen made with his brother Joel, comically excessive violence recurs throughout Drive-Away Dolls. As so often in that oeuvre, it is the product of people either foolhardily or unwittingly getting into situations beyond their ken, of characters failing to communicate with or understand the motivations and intentions of others. Yet violence in this film is not simply accidental and then inevitable, but an inherent and necessary component of the pursuit of respectability. It drives the Chief, Arliss, and Flint to try and hunt down Jamie and Marian. It causes the police at one point to arrest Marian for suspected vagrancy. It compels Sukie, herself a police officer, to strike Jamie for being unfaithful.

Hypocrisy is a principal target of Drive-Away Dolls. It lampoons political conservatism that licenses brutality and lawbreaking. It makes light of gay characters embracing aspects of heteronormativity in their personal and professional lives, although its treatment of this subject is nuanced. Yet the film does not take aim at hypocrisy solely as a failure to remain true to one’s ideals. Rather, albeit with tongue firmly in cheek, it highlights the self-defeating, harmful consequences of maintaining a façade of propriety. In the quarter-century since 1999, taking up this option has brought uneven gains to LGBTQ+ people, but equally legitimated equally uneven attacks on their rights. Drive-Away Dolls looks back and offers an alternative look forward, to a future of liberation, unashamed pursuit of pleasure, and care.

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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warnings: Anti-Black racism; Murder; Antisemitism; Caste discrimination.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Origin is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

Origin is a biographical film about the author Isabel Wilkerson, and her writing of the 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The film commences in 2014, with the murder of Black teenager Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost), before introducing us to the film’s protagonist (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), an African American journalist turned non-fiction writer, as well as her white husband Brett Hamilton (Jon Bernthal), her ageing mother Ruby (Emily Yancy), and her cousin and best friend Marion (Niecy Nash). During a speaking engagement, Isabel runs into her friend and former editor Amari Selvan (Blair Underwood), who tries to convince her to write an article for him on the Trayvon Martin killing. She is reluctant, citing her mother’s failing health, but also increasingly intrigued by the case, which she does not think adheres to conventional understandings about race in America.

Instead, Isabel seeks to formulate a more systematic and universal interpretation of the bases for prejudice, inequality, and violence, based on a notion of caste. She begins researching a book that will place anti-Black racism in the United States in dialogue with the treatment of Jews in Germany prior to and during the Holocaust, and with the discrimination faced by Dalits as part of the Indian caste system. In the process, however, she faces considerable pushback from people sceptical of the intellectual underpinnings of her project, as well as heartache in her personal life.

Multiple places, multiple histories

For most of its running time, Origin is structured around Isabel Wilkerson’s research process. It unfolds through her travel around the United States, and to Germany and India; through her interviewing those affected by discrimination about their lives and experiences; through her encounters with sites of atrocity and memorials to their victims, and with the archival records they left; and through her dialogue with multiple interlocutors, some sceptical, some enthusiastic.

Isabel is therefore the intellectual and emotional core of the film. It is, moreover, anchored in the America of the 2010s, of the wild contrasts of the Obama and Trump presidencies, of both the Black professional advancement she epitomises and the ongoing reality of racial inequalities and lethal violence that characterised the murder of Trayvon Martin. Yet it is also a polyphonic story, in which hers is the narrator’s voice, the most often heard, but far from the only one. It is a film of multiple narratives, temporalities, and places, albeit that interlock upon her vision. Thus, through her interviews, reading, and archival trips, Isabel re-animates through flashback scenes the lives of those who bravely, both futilely and successfully, confronted prejudice amid the tumult of the twentieth century.

There are August Landmesser (Finn Wittrock) and his Jewish partner Irma Eckler (Victoria Pedretti), whose union fell afoul of Nazi race laws. There are the married African American anthropologists, Allison (Isha Blaaker) and Elizabeth Davis (Jasmine Cephas Jones), who return to the US from Berlin upon the Nazis’ rise to power, and subsequently collaborate with two white colleagues, Burleigh (Matthew Zuk) and Mary Gardner (Hannah Pniewski) on a ground-breaking ethnographic study of racism in the American South. There is the Dalit academic and politician B. R. Ambedkar (Gaurav J. Pathania), shown during this student days in New York. There is the African American artist and educator Al Bright (Lennox Sims), who as a young boy in 1950s Youngstown, Ohio, is prohibited from swimming in the same pool as his white baseball teammates.

Explaining caste

In her early encounter with Amari, Isabel draws a distinction between the work she once did as a writer of newspaper articles and that she now does as a writer of books: her vocation is answering rather than simply posing questions. She sees Trayvon Martin’s death at the hands of George Zimmerman, who is himself Hispanic, in apparent defence of a street of white homeowners, and the broad range and variations in the forms of discrimination faced by African Americans, as revealing hitherto unaddressed levels of complexity. Hers is a quest for a totality, a framework of understanding that breaks from the narrow purview of the present place and time, to settle not just for basic factfinding or speculation, but seek deeper answers.

To do so, Isabel engages firstly in dialogue with analysis of the much older system of Indian caste discrimination, traceable back to antiquity. Why, she ponders, have upper-caste Indians subjugated Dalits, and Germans Jews, people of the same skin colour as they are, along lines that resemble the treatment of people of African descent by those of European descent, ostensibly on the grounds of racial difference?

In the process of answering this question, she is also compelled to confront distinctions between those systems too. Whereas African Americans were relegated to a subservient socioeconomic status on grounds of their being Black, Nazis reviled Jews for their apparent privilege. Whereas Europeans enslaved Africans for purposes of economic exploitation, Nazis sought to exterminate Jews entirely. Swastikas are banned in Germany but the Confederate flag remains ubiquitous in the US. And yet, she realises, Jim Crow provided the inspiration for Nazi race laws.

Nonetheless, as the film progresses, Isabel is able to discern the ubiquitous ‘pillars’ of caste, including ideas of superiority, purity, inheritance, and practices such as banning mixed relationships, dehumanisation, and violence. She eventually develops the metaphor of the house as a way of explaining this system: a concrete and apparently timeless edifice, whose flaws the inhabitants absolve themselves of guilt for and yet that they also have to continue to live with.

Overcoming caste

Despite the ubiquity of caste, Origin offers us an optimistic, even upbeat message as to how it might be overcome. This paradoxically arises in part from the film’s most harrowing moments, the juxtaposition of scenes depicting atrocities such as slave transportation, concentration camps, and lynching. In explaining how we reach those nadirs, the film demonstrates not only the hatred that underpins broader structures of oppression, but also the volume of work that must go into maintaining them. It highlights the absurdity of going to the effort of inflicting suffering, and denormalises trying to proceed with one’s everyday activities in its presence.

Given the scale of dehumanisation, the logical corollary is that simple humanity is the antidote. We are shown at one point a discussion between Isabel, Brett, and Ruby about Trayvon Martin’s killing in which Ruby attributes the event in part to the victim’s naivety as to how to behave in white neighbourhoods as a Black person. Subsequent recollections and depictions of children experiencing and negotiating discrimination, however, bear out that there is nothing natural or innate about caste. To defer to, brutalise, or separate oneself from someone on the basis of an imputed difference is not a natural instinct, but a learned, harmful behaviour.

Attaining enlightenment about the nature of caste is both empowering and uplifting, for it fosters mutual recognition and solidarity between members of oppressed groups, epitomised by Isabel’s warm, instant friendship with Dalit scholar Suraj Yengde (who plays himself in the film). Moreover, the very natural act of forming friendships or romantic relationships that cross caste lines serve inevitably to challenge and undermine the foundations of these systems – epitomised by Isabel’s own marriage to Brett. The personal is political in Origin, and agency lies in recognising and acting upon that together.

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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warnings: Death; Narcotics; Anti-Blackness.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Bob Marley: One Love is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

Bob Marley: One Love commences in 1976, with Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) getting ready to play ‘Smile Jamaica’, a concert organised in opposition to the country’s worsening politically-related gang violence, with his band The Wailers. Yet in advance of the concert, gunmen attack the compound where he and the band are staying, injuring both him and his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch), who is one of The Wailers’ backing singers, the I Threes.

Bob Marley subsequently decamps with The Wailers to London where, with the support of Chris Blackwell (James Norton), whose Island Records label they are signed to, they begin work on writing and recording their Exodus album that will launch Marley to genuinely global stardom. Yet his rising fame and the glamourous lifestyle that accompanies it takes its toll on Bob’s relationship with Rita. At the same time, a foot injury sustained while playing football reveals the parlous state of his health, while in his absence, political violence continues to escalate back in Jamaica.

Capturing Marley’s zenith

Made with the cooperation of Marley’s estate – Rita Marley and her and Bob’s children Ziggy and Cedella are listed as executive producers – Bob Marley: One Love is a broadly conventional biopic. It uses the approach of focusing on a particularly momentous period in Marley’s life, into which a number of key themes and developments can be condensed and explored. These include his place in 1970s Jamaican politics; his engagement with and embrace by a European audience; his writing of many of his best-known songs, featured heavily and mostly diegetically on the soundtrack; and his illness, prefiguring his early death.

This is fleshed out through flashbacks to Bob’s childhood and adolescence that give us a greater understanding of his character and motivations in the mid-1970s present. We are shown fragments of his being raised alone by his mother, Cedella Malcolm (Nadine Marshall), after they are abandoned by his white soldier father; his burgeoning romance with Rita; his embrace of Rastafarianism; and the beginnings of his music career.

The biopic’s truthiness is further emphasised through interspersal with real-life footage of Marley, including his instigating an awkward handshake between Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, leaders of the violently opposed People’s National Party and Jamaica Labour Party respectively, at the 1978 One Love Peace Concert. Written pre and post-scripts further serve to ensconce the film’s events in the broader narrative of Marley’s life.

Marley as messiah figure

The film tells Marley’s story in a manner that casts him nakedly as a quasi-messianic figure. Integrating artistic with spiritual purity, he explains that ‘You can’t separate the music and the message’, as he tries to make an album that is sonically and lyrically transcendent. While Marley is primarily concerned with prophesising, the music industry is determined to aggrandise him as above his band’s music and audience, something that is anathema to him. ‘I ain’t no superstar,’ he laughingly insists. He has temptations routinely put in his way by the musician’s lifestyle, which he must overcome. He is also seemingly preordained to suffer, from the initial attempt on his life to his foreshadowed death, and in doing so without reproach or desire for vengeance, serves to redeem his assailants, Jamaica, and the world for their sins.

Other characters likewise fulfil roles with clear biblical analogues. Rita is a similarly self-sacrificial figure, who at different times serves to remind Bob of the need to retain his purity; to care for him and encourage him to care for himself; and to ultimately augment his lionisation: ‘Sometimes the messenger has to become the message’, she tells him. Bandmates Tyrone Downie (Toison Cole), Aston Barrett (played by his son Aston Barrett Jr.), and Carlton Barrett (Hector Lewis), meanwhile, function almost as apostles. Affectionately calling Marley ‘Skipper’, they are forever awaiting his guidance in the studio, accompanying him in his leisure activities, and re-encapsulating his points in conversations. Manager Don Taylor (Anthony Welsh) seems equally integral a part of their entourage, but by contrast is ultimately cast more in the role of Judas.

All of this is reinforced through persistent verbal and visual presence of the accoutrements of Rastafarianism: dreadlocks; references to Jah, Haile Selassie, and I-and-I; groundings and nyabinghi drumming; cannabis smoking; and Marley’s recurring visions. As discussed below, it comes with a rather vague presentation of the substance of the faith itself, beyond emphasising Marley’s spirituality. The trip to Europe does offers though an opportunity to place it in dialogue with Western Christianity, through discussions of the Book of Exodus and its significance to the Wailers’ record (in response to condescending dismissal by a white record executive).

Obscuring Marley’s politics

Beyond this, however, Bob Marley: One Love offers only a very partial and sanitised version of Marley’s politics, and his place in the global politics of the 1970s. ‘You see reggae music come fi unify the people’, he explains, and the film very much presents his message as being about unity and peace, and the disavowal of violence. Again, this is articulated in a manner comprehensible to a white, Western audience. We see Marley and the Wailers attend a Clash concert, and parallels being drawn between urban disorder in Kingston and London – tropes familiar to anyone well versed in the history and mythology of British punk rock.1

Where race is addressed, however, it is done so in a fragmentary manner. There is the matter of Marley’s abandonment by his father, and flashes of racial tension and discrimination when they are in London, but racism is generally presented as a bad thing that results from the sort of individual prejudice Marley rises above. He and his bandmates experience some pushback from record executives over their more idealistic ambitions, especially a putative tour of Africa, but in Chris Blackwell he has a cautious but loyal white ally who helps them overcome any such opposition.

Ignoring structures of racial oppression renders what the film tells us about Marley and his politics and significance partly devoid of meaning. There is some discussion between him and others of him being biracial, but no real reflection on the broader issue of colourism in Jamaican society that lends his skin tone particularly salience, and which makes the included footage of the real-life Marley with Manley and Seaga – two extremely light-skinned men dominating the politics of a majority Black country – rather incongruous. Nor is the violence Marley opposes connected with the legacy of colonialism and pervasive anti-Blackness. We get hints of Rastafarianism’s rejection of white supremacy, and avowal of Black togetherness, but little of its sophisticated reworking of Biblical scripture in pursuit of Black liberation in Jamaica and globally.2

These omissions are set into sharpest relief when we hear the music of Bob Marley itself on the film’s soundtrack. Particular emotional weight is placed (anachronistically) on him singing ‘Redemption Song’, the opening lyrics of which are:

Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit

Bob Marley: One Love often plays almost as a religious parable, but is deeply forgetful of this original sin.

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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warnings: Child death; Bereavement.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, The Iron Claw is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

The Iron Claw is a fictionalised retelling of the story of the Von Erich family, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Kevin Von Erich (Zac Efron) is a young up-and-coming wrestler, living in Texas with his demanding father Fritz (Holt McCallany), a retired wrestler turned owner of the World Class Championship Wrestling franchise; devout Christian mother Doris (Maura Tierney); and younger brothers David (Harris Dickinson), another aspiring wrestler; and budding musician Mike (Stanley Simons). The family is said to be cursed, Fritz having previously been denied his shot at the Worlds Heavyweight Championship, and his and Doris’s eldest son, Jack, having died tragically as a child.

Desperate for his sons to get an opportunity to win the title he did not, Fritz pairs Kevin and David together as a tag-team wrestling outfit. They are subsequently joined by another of their brothers, Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), who has returned to the family home after his dream of competing in the Olympics is dashed by the US boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games. The trio are a growing sensation and Fritz is hopeful that one of them might get a title shot. Away from the ring, Kevin catches the eye of young veterinarian Pam (Lily James), and the two begin dating. Yet just as professional success as well as personal contentment seem on the horizon, Fritz’s ruthless ambition and competitive streak hold tragic ramifications for his sons.

Wrestling and the long 1980s

The period between the late 1970s and early 1990s was one of rapid transformation for both wrestling and America, and the former offers an apt metaphor for the latter. This was when the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush embraced deregulation and encouraged America’s imbrication in rapidly expanding global capital flows.1 Likewise, in The Iron Claw, the Von Erich saga unfolds against the backdrop of wrestling’s shift from a highly localised, fragmentedly organised cultural form, watched mostly live in arenas by loyal home fans, to an increasingly national and then transnational phenomenon, broadcast on cable channels like ESPN. Texas, which began in 1980 an as-yet unbroken run of favouring Republican candidates in presidential elections, is an appropriate location to view these developments from.

As Kevin recalls it, his father had always said that ‘If we were the toughest, the strongest, nothing could ever hurt us’. This is, in many ways, a mantra for Reaganomics: that in a tough, unforgiving world, it is resilience and self-reliance that wins through. Kevin initially internalises this view. When Pam queries whether wrestling is is not, after all, fixed, he defends it and his aspirations within it. It is, he counters, like other professions, whereby the leading performers reach its pinnacle. Its blending of sport with entertainment does not mean that it deviates from the meritocratic ideal of competition upon which sport is typically based.

Yet The Iron Claw also exposes the lie in this. We certainly see the skill involved in its combination of brute physicality and improvised choreography, in its requirement that wrestlers are both athletes and thespians. Yet we are also shown the apparent arbitrariness by which careers stall and hopes are frustrated. We realise the lack of transparency in the decision-making around wrestling, as to who gets the title shot, who gets to win major matches. As misfortune in the ring intersperses with tragedy beyond it, talk of a curse offers a tantalisingly persuasive explanation for why promised good times elude the Von Erichs.

Patriarchy and toxic masculinity

Fritz epitomises the combination of masculinity and commerce at the heart of wrestling. He foists his own ambitions upon his children and then plays his own part, through the decisions he makes on their behalf, in shattering them. Feeling himself to have been cheated out of the belt he was entitled to, he is determined to ensure it ends up in the hands of one of his sons, but family to him is a means of vicariously grasping the object he desires, not something he values for its own sake. As such, he seeks to foster a perpetually fluid hierarchy of his sons, anathema as that is to them. Yet again, the seeming meritocracy of this contest to be the number one wrestler in the household, and in the world, is a mirage; for it is he, as their manager, who negotiates the abstracted, mystified forces of the market, and in part decides the fate ostensibly in their hands.

He is enabled in this regard by his wife, Doris. ‘Mom tried to protect us with God; Dad tried to protect us with wrestling,’ Kevin explains in a voiceover. The two function in tandem in the Von Erich household, because of the particular quietism of Doris’s faith. In fastidiously entrusting to God the protection of her sons from the hardships of the world, she recuses herself from protecting them from their father, refusing to intercede on their behalf even when begged by Kevin to do so. We might read this as signifying the role of evangelical Christianity in morally buttressing neoliberalism and patriarchy in contemporary America.

Toxic masculinity takes its toll on the Von Erich brothers through wrestling itself. It does so in the requirement that they experience often severe pain and carry on through it, ignoring or medicating themselves through the signs of wear and tear on the body. This physical harm is matched psychologically, through the mental strains of having one’s hopes raised and dashed, the hedonism of a life consistently on the road, and the trauma of watching these things hurt your loved ones as well. Wrestling’s sport-entertainment narratives, its dramatisation of violence and veneration of endurance, are superimposed upon their real lives.

Fraternity and redemptive masculinity

Patriarchy, as depicted in The Iron Claw, is toxic to men because of its top-down nature and its fomenting of relentless competition. Brotherhood, by contrast, offers a version of masculinity in which bonds are horizontal and reciprocal, in which protection comes not through strength or piety, but through caring for one another. Fraternity transforms the nature of male physicality, with bodily play and contact as gestures of love and affection. It even partly redeems wrestling itself, through the sense of togetherness the brothers share when they accompany each other into the ring.

Whereas Doris serves as passive accomplice to Fritz’s patriarchalism, Pam actively encourages Kevin to embrace this different model of masculinity. It is her initiative that propels their relationship forward, and she also makes it clear that she will not put aside her vocational ambitions for domestic ones. This makes for a notable contrast with Doris, a talented painter who has neglected this pastime to focus on homemaking.

The journey Kevin goes through, supported by Pam, is one of breaking harmful cycles. He rejects the example set by Fritz as a model for fatherhood, developing instead a relationship with his young sons much more akin to that which he has with his brothers, allowing them to see his own vulnerabilities. He also comes to see through the so-called Von Erich curse, moving from a paranoid fear of some malignant force of nature preying on his family, to the outcome of harmful actions in systemic patterns of behaviour. In fully reckoning with the agency his father in particular has exercised, Kevin manages to purposefully restore his own.

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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warnings: Antisemitism; The Holocaust.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, The Zone of Interest is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

Loosely adapted by writer-director Jonathan Glazer from Martin Amis’s book of the same name, The Zone of Interest is set in 1943 and focuses on the family of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), commandant of the Auschwitz extermination camp in occupied Poland. He lives in a luxurious home right next to the camp with wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five children, waited on by local servants. Höss takes his elder children on regular outdoor activities, while Hedwig looks after their youngest child and tends lovingly to her garden. At the same time, the commandant works hard maintaining the unseen brutal efficiency of the death camp next door, looming ever large in the background, the brutalisation of its inmates distinctly audible.

The Höss family barely seem to register this, however, and Hedwig shares in the spoils expropriated from the inmates. Her mother Linna (Imogen Kogge) arrives to stay with them, and seems impressed by the life her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren enjoy there. Yet unbeknownst to Hedwig, her husband is facing a dilemma. Unwillingly promoted to the position of deputy inspector of all concentration camps, Höss must relocate west to Oranienburg, jeopardising the luxurious country lifestyle his wife so cherishes.

Settler colonialism and rural idyll

The Zone of Interest captures not just the banality of evil, but the familiarity of that which drives it. What ostensibly motivates Rudolf and Hedwig Höss, more the anything, is the pursuit of a certain version of the good life. He relishes the opportunities for outdoor activities such as swimming and fishing, in the company of his children, to whom he is visibly dedicated. She luxuriates in particular in her perfectly curated, vast garden.

All of this is possible through a logic of dispossession and exploitation. The Höss family are colonial settlers, making their home and lives on conquered Polish land, their household maintained through locally sourced labour, paid for by Rudolf’s ascent through the Nazi exterminatory machine. Hedwig explicitly references Nazi ideology in conversation with Rudolf and others, as bargaining and justifying rhetoric: talking about the life they have built in terms of ‘lebensraum’ and ‘the East’; urging her husband to appeal up the chain of command, even to Hitler himself, in order to maintain it; evoking the idea of separate spheres in demanding that she and the children remain in Auschwitz even after her husband has gone to Oranienburg. This is a language in which common dreams can be articulated.

We also get a sense of the status insecurities that partly drive her: this is a standard of living she has become accustomed to, not one she inherited. Her relationship to her servants is one of indifference: they work silently around her as she gossips with friends and her mother, sometimes talking condescendingly about them. Yet Hedwig also turns viciously upon individual servants at points where her position is threatened, and the privileges she enjoys are challenged or questioned. She imagines disregard or insubordination on their part, as an opportunity to reassert her superiority.

Absence, presence, and the Holocaust

In The Zone of Interest, the Holocaust is both ubiquitous and elusive. The name ‘Auschwitz’, with its unbearable connotations, is all the more unsettling for being talked about as residential address, even a desirable one. The camp looms physically over the Höss family garden, its ominousness heightened by occasional shots of trains passing or flumes of smoke billowing into the night sky. We see ashes scattered and blood washed from boots. We hear snatches of muffled dialogue and orders being barked from behind the fence, intermingling with a soundtrack dominated by dissonant, rumbling, voluminous noise.

The Holocaust’s victims are not seen; instead we view their appropriated possessions being almost nonchalantly distributed and consumed: gentility accrued through state-sanctioned looting. Again, this is in keeping with the politics of envy and resentment that partly fuels Hedwig, the intersection of material want with racial hatred. Yet that hatred is only perceivable as callousness, as the Jews and their fate are only absentmindedly and amusedly referenced in everyday conversation. We also encounter the Holocaust in its most bureaucratic and professionalised forms: acquisitions of furnaces; institutional restructuring; staff meetings; abstracted numbers and quotas; mass murder as logistical challenge.

A mood of unease and dread thus lingers throughout the film, as we encounter the Holocaust only in fragments, and struggle to mentally assemble its totality. Traces of its violence are everywhere. Rudolf both criss-crosses and broodingly polices the boundary between these spaces, arcadian bliss and death camp. His wife and children seem almost oblivious to the horror of the juxtaposition. Only Linna, as partial outsider to this world, is unable to ignore it.

Screening war memory

There have been a number of films made of late, across different countries, engaging with the Second World War and its legacy: Oppenheimer in the US; One Life in Britain; Godzilla Minus One and The Boy and the Heron in Japan. These films have wrestled with questions of where the conflict’s worst horrors fit within particular national histories, often seeking some form of exoneration or redemption.

The Zone of Interest, by contrast, is unflinching in its depiction of German culpability for the Holocaust. It is though a British-Polish production, co-funded by the Polish Film Institute. It is set mainly in Poland, but Poles are present only as downtrodden servants, or in one case – based on a real-life figure – covertly providing comfort and sanctuary to Jews. These elements are in keeping with a dominant Polish national narrative about its war experience; accounts of Polish culpability in the persecution of their Jewish compatriots are decidedly not. I remark upon this not as a criticism of the film. Rather, I note its existence within a broader structure of mainstream Holocaust representation, which restricts the drawing of analogies and frequently involves outsourcing guilt for historical and contemporary antisemitism.

The Zone of Interest resists those tendencies in other ways. The most viscerally disturbing moments and elements of the film centre on the particular paraphernalia of industrialised genocide. Yet these sit upon a far more recognisable phenomenon: building a better way of life for oneself through dispossessing and displacing others, by assembling and maintaining an intrinsically fragile hierarchy. It is a set of relations we can recognise in other, similar circumstances, including the British Empire and the American West.

More frighteningly still, what drives Rudolf and Hedwig Höss – the desire for more living space, a higher standard of living, a healthier place to raise their children, career advancement – are continuing staples of middle-class aspiration. The audience is implicated in wanting what they want from our own lives, even as we react with disgust as to how they get it.

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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warnings: Racism; Suicide; Dementia.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, American Fiction is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

American Fiction centres on middle-aged author and literature professor Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) and his intertwined, troubled professional and personal lives. Monk faces disrespect from his academic colleagues, and resents being pigeonholed as an African American author – while his novels are not perceived as Black enough for his long-suffering agent Arthur (John Ortiz) to successfully sell to publishers. A trip to his hometown of Boston for a literary festival further raises his ire, as he confronts the success there of Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), a younger Black female writer whose much feted book We’s Lives in Da Ghetto he sees as pandering to stereotypes about Black life.

Visiting Boston also means re-confronting his difficult relationship with his family. Monk’s mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams) has begun to show signs of dementia following his father’s suicide. His divorced, hard-working medical doctor sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) bears the toll of dealing with Agnes’s declining health, aided mainly by the family’s longstanding, dedicated housekeeper Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor). Monk also gets on particularly uneasily with his hedonistic plastic surgeon brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), who has begun to live a far more liberated life after recently coming out as gay. He does, however, also find budding romance with Coraline (Erika Alexander), a lawyer who lives near the family’s beach house.

While in Boston, Monk writes a parodic memoir, My Pafology, under the false identity of ex-convict ‘Stagg R. Leigh’, which he sends to Arthur. Intending to send up the Black ‘trauma porn’ he sees white publishing executives fawning over, he is horrified when Arthur is instead inundated with large rival offers for the book, and later its film rights. Monk is thus presented with a conundrum as to whether to go along with the lucrative farce, which will also cover the cost of the increasing care his mother needs.

Genre and authorship

American Fiction depicts scathingly the white liberalism underpinning the interlocked publishing and higher education industries. This worldview fetishizes Blackness, or a particular version of it completely counterposed to white middle-class experiences and dominant values. It construes Blackness in terms of poverty, violence, familial breakup, and rejection of Standard American English, and thrills vicariously in these qualities. This liberalism also prides itself, or at least seeks to stave off its own embarrassment, by giving space to diverse voices – but only on its own terms, it the categories it permits, without ever really ceding its power to gatekeep.

Monk simultaneously is not Black enough, in white liberals’ interpretation of what it is to be Black, and only gets to express himself in the literary world in a role specified as that of the Black author and critic. American Fiction renders explicit the racialised ways in which genre and canon, and the lowbrow/highbrow distinction, are made. The challenge for Monk and other Black authors is how far to compromise with that system, to accept the logic of publishing executive decisions and market forces in order to obtain the space to express themselves artistically and authentically.

Life imitates art. ‘People want to love you, Monk’, Cliff tells his brother. ‘You should let them love all of you.’ Monk’s guardedness, dissatisfaction, sometimes self-sabotage are in part behaviours learned through past trauma – repetitions of the conduct of his late father, to whom his siblings and mother repeatedly compare him. Yet the structures he works within require him to compartmentalise himself, to become in part Stagg R. Leigh while concealing that component of his life from nearly everyone else. The literary categories policed by academia and publishing also define the genres of person those sectors, and society more broadly, require him to be.

Depicting Black experience

By contrast, American Fiction is concerned with capturing some of the complexities and divergences in Black experience, depicting lives in which being Black is both integral and yet not wholly defining. Monk is from an upper middle-class background, and the socioeconomic challenge he and his family face is of maintaining that standard of living in the face of the particular strains and travails that are part of the lifecycle both generally and in ways particular to Black professionals: career disappointments; stress; marital breakup; ill health; death and bereavement. Monk resents being expected to articulate and embody a Black experience beyond that, and is contemptuous of peers who try to do so.

The film does not make light of Monk’s difficulties, but compels him to recognise his privileges as a middle-class straight man, which other Black characters do not enjoy. The emotional labour of maintaining relationships with and the wellbeing of loved ones falls disproportionately on women. Agnes had to accept her husband’s infidelities. Lisa has to worry about her mother’s health when her brothers have left town. Coraline has to deal with Monk’s temperamentality and secrecy. Lorraine, as a Black working-class woman, paradoxically is virtual family member and employee, tasked with the physical labour of maintaining the Ellison household. Monk resents what he sees as Cliff’s flightiness and unreliability, but as the film progresses, we also realise the strains he bore in remaining closeted for so long.

Ultimately, for all the trauma and friction that the family unit contains, it also redeems and recuperates its members. The aforementioned inequalities that fuelled its unresolved resentments do not dissipate, but the various main characters nonetheless positively affirm their relationality to each other. They do so within an ideal of family as something built upon shared experience but also open, welcoming, actively chosen, rather than closed, rigid, and biologically determined. Monk in particular, as he embraces his place within that entity, so he comes more to terms with himself, and his place in a broader social structure that so frustrates him.

Two films in one?

American Fiction both satirises white liberal racism masquerading as allyship in cultural industries and dramatises Black family life in all its complexity. These two components are ideologically of a part with each other: it is the nature of those cultural industries that impedes depicting Black experiences in a nuanced manner, as this film strives to do. Yet tonally, they jar slightly, revealing a contradiction that I think is productive to think through.

The film captures with unerring accuracy the discomforting white spaces that Monk has to negotiate, the microaggressions he endures, the strenuous self-censorship he struggles to exercise. Doing so, however, requires the white liberals he encounters to be unfailingly two-dimensional, with their emotional responses to him – and to Black authors more generally – ranging from embarrassed enthusiasm through blasé indifference to unconcealed contempt. There is little exploration of shared experiences of oppression across colour lines, on grounds of class, gender, or sexuality, which might motivate vocal expressions of solidarity against racism, rather than just guilt. They lack the interiority the film grants to Monk and his intimates.

That is no failing on writer-director Cord Jefferson’s part. Meaningfully centring Black experiences and lives requires marginalising the same white feelings that most Hollywood films seeking to address racism inevitably end up prioritising. American Fiction focuses on how white people act – rather than what they intend – and what this means for Black people, or rather one Black person in particular. Yet it also speaks to the dilemma Monk himself vocalises, the flattening work that fiction does, often in the name of seemingly worthy aspirations. To make powerful political points through art requires a degree of stereotyping, enabling one figure to stand in for a wider group or institution. This is in tension with the realism of the character study, which instead prioritises emotional depth and psychological complexity.

American Fiction dabbles in both these versions of realism. In doing so, it reminds us that who gets to stand for no one but themselves, and who has to function as stand-in for a much broader collective, is itself an inherently political question, which most films answer very differently to this one.

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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Suicide; Misogyny; Child abuse; Ableism.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Poor Things is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

Based on the late Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things begins with the suicide of an unknown pregnant woman in Victorian-era London. The corpse is found by surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), who replaces the brain of the deceased woman with that of her baby, before reanimating her. He subsequently acts as surrogate father to his creation, Bella (Emma Stone), who has the mind of an infant and must learn how to walk and talk within her unfamiliar new body. Dr Baxter recruits one of his students, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), to help him in rearing Bella and charting her progress.

Max comes to care deeply for Bella, and Dr Baxter has the two betrothed. However, Bella is becoming increasingly restless in her desire to explore both the world and her own sexuality. She absconds to Lisbon with the raffish, lusty lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Thus begins a journey which will also see her explore philosophical questions on a Mediterranean cruise with fellow passengers Martha von Kurtzroc (Hanna Schygulla) and Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael), and eventually leads to her working in a Parisian brothel for Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter).

Patriarchy and matrimony

Bella calls Godwin Baxter ‘God’, and this epitomises his role as her creator and as the setter of the parameters of her permitted cosmos. Poor Things thus captures the theological roots of patriarchy, and Dr Baxter’s relationship with Bella stands in for the patriarchy more generally: caring but also controlling, instrumentalising, sexually interested. He recruits Max to serve as his assistant in this work, and later literally signs her over to him to sustain this arrangement, illustrating the way patriarchy is reproduced through marriage.

It is at this point that Duncan Wedderburn intervenes and seemingly offers to consummate Bella’s yearning for sexual liberation – something Baxter surprisingly consents to. Yet Duncan’s rejection of the conventions of monogamy is incredibly partial, and he increasingly seeks to monopolise Bella’s time and attention, resenting both the broadening of her intellectual horizons and her own freedom to choose sexual partners. Ironically Max, who wishes to marry Bella and yet repeatedly accepts her autonomy to the point of her abrogating their arranged marriage, offers a more truly liberatory version of masculinity.

Bella’s sojourn with Duncan leads her, much to Duncan’s dismay, to the brothel. I would assert here that Poor Things is not principally concerned with sex work and sex workers as and of themselves.1 Rather, they function as a device to highlight the social and economic position of women more generally. Bella realises that a more explicitly contractual exchange of sex for money is a more efficient use of her time and effort than the emotional labour required to massage a single man’s ego in exchange for the gift of financial security. It also illustrates men’s own contractional approach to sexual relations: utilising their economic power to ensure their unnegotiated, unimpeded gratification; to buy their way out of the need for consent.

Progress and experimentation

Poor Things also strongly counters a High Victorian liberal notion of inevitable progress, centred on scientific advancement, which is again deeply patriarchally rooted. Dr Baxter is externally scarred and internally damaged by his father’s own seemingly pointless and cruel experimentation upon him, and Bella is likewise a product of his own dubiously justified attitude to experimentation on the human body. This serves as a metaphor for the broader colonial mindset that treats the other as a blank canvas for implementing one’s own projects upon, the implications of which manifest during Bella’s journeys overseas.

Bella learns by imitating her father’s actions and internalises the quest for advancement that he and Max undertake through her, trying to make herself better by expanding her vocabulary, mastering social cues, seeing and learning more of the world. In the process, she hopes to make the world better with her. She is also driven by curiosity and a desire to experiment, particularly sexually, that comes into frequent conflict with those same parameters of improvement being imposed upon her.

Over the course of her travels, both Harry Astley and Madame Swiney seek in different ways to disabuse Bella of her faith in being able to improve humankind and its lot. It can be implicitly read that they do so from their own positions of marginality: Harry as an African American; Madame Swiney as a racially ambiguous, physically unconventional, older woman engaged in illicit economic activity.2 Nonetheless, they also do so out of their own self-interested motives.

Bella learns from them, but continues her own intellectual trajectory and growth. She becomes increasingly concerned with moral questions as she strives to develop a systematic understanding of the world, ultimately embracing socialism through her relationship with a Black sex worker, Toinette (Suzy Bemba).3 Yet as she follows her adoptive father’s pathway into medicine, the outcomes of her experimentation and own ideas of progress remain ambiguous.

Unreality and hybridity

Poor Things is heavily stylised. It use of unorthodox camera angles, both black-and-white and expressive colour palettes, stage-like sets against obviously painted backgrounds, absurd technologies, theatrical acting styles, and frequent comical depictions of sex and violence, all give the film a strong aura of unreality. It nonetheless simultaneously evokes through them historically rooted categories of time, place, social class, and race. The combination furnishes the film with a universalist approach that nonetheless explicitly engages with a recognisable modernity, as Ewan Gibbs and Calum Barnes have highlighted elsewhere.

Moreover, Poor Things’ aesthetic centres on a cyborgisation of what it is to be alive, with the fusion of living creatures both with technology, and through technology with each other. This disrupts essentialist notions of identity: what it is to be yourself, to be a woman, to be a human. Its depiction of bodily hybridisation and modification also functions to at least partially challenge ableist and ageist ideas of what a body should look like, how it should move, whether or not it should be sexually active – even if this is somewhat undercut by the presence of conventionally attractive actors like Emma Stone, Ramy Youssef, and Jerrod Carmichael among the film’s cast.

This, however, does bring us back to one potential point of criticism of the film. The deliberately stylised depictions of sex work, physical ailment, and mental illness are mobilised to make visible and destabilise harmful norms governing gender relations, beauty standards, and the public sphere. Yet at the same time, doing so risks treating those discarded and disciplined by these norms, such as sex workers and disabled people, as caricatures, canaries in the coalmine, tools for the liberation of all. It does not take so seriously the actual existence of those groups in the world as is, nor the specificities and validity of their experiences.

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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Death; Child loss; Bereavement.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Ferrari is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

Michael Mann’s Ferrari is set in 1957 and stars a greyed-up Adam Driver as the then middle-aged Enzo Ferrari, founder of the Italian sports car manufacturer that bears his name. He continues to run the business with his estranged wife Laura (Penelope Cruz), their marriage destroyed by their grief at the recent death of their adult son Dino from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and by Enzo’s infidelities. He leads a double life, spending much of his time with his long-term mistress Linda Lardi (Shailene Woodley) and their son Piero (Giuseppe Festinese).

With the company losing money fast, Enzo is urged to bring in outside investment and increase production. To this end, he desperately needs a stellar performance from his team of drivers in the prestigious cross-country Mille Miglia race. They include the veteran Piero Tuffi (Patrick Dempsey), Englishman Peter Collins (Jack O’Connell), and Spanish new recruit Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone), who attracts as much media attention for his romance with actress Linda Christian (Sarah Gadon) as for his driving. Enzo also needs Laura to give him control over her stake in the business, but their relationship is tested further as she discovers more about his affair with Linda.

More than a manufacturer

One of the central themes of Ferrari, I think, is the weighing down of people, events, and entities with more significances than they can comfortably bear. Ferrari, as an institution, is emblematic of this. A former racing driver himself, Enzo is concerned above all with producing cars that can win races. Yet the hard reality he faces is that the company’s business model – even as a high-end manufacturer – is dependent on making more cars and finding enough buyers for them, and this requires some external funding, challenging Enzo’s control over the enterprise. The relationship between sporting and commercial success can be synergistic, as winning races sells cars, but this inevitably changes the meaning of what racing is for.

Ferrari is also a significant employer within Modena, and its synonymity with the city raises Enzo to the status of celebrity there. Italy’s passion for motor racing turns car manufacturers from brands into objects of fan loyalty and of patriotic pride. This is illustrated by Gianni Agnelli (Tommaso Basili), head of Fiat, seeking to dissuade Enzo over the phone from doing business with Ford, as an American company, over him. The encounter locates the film’s subject matter within the political economy of post-war Italy: reliant on American investment in the wake of the Second World War and in the context of the Cold War, but also with strongly national industrial cultures such as car-making that shaped work, welfare, and consumption.1

Finally, the company – whose shares are jointly all held by Enzo and Laura – also signifies their marriage. They are together as both spouses and business partners. Enzo cannot easily extricate himself from either arrangement and yet circumstances compel him to do both. As a result, their relationship becomes increasingly nakedly contractional, and even their continued gestures of care for each other have a visible economic value. The tragedy of their son Dino’s death not only dooms their marriage, but also jeopardises the wellbeing of Ferrari by denying Enzo the heir that will keep the business in the family.

A deadly business

Ferrari also centres on another unbearable paradox: the lethality of motor racing. ‘It’s our deadly passion,’ Enzo tells his team of drivers. ‘Our terrible joy.’ It is not only simultaneously a sport and a business; the addition of a third element, leading-edge technology, raises the stakes further. ‘You have perhaps a crisis of identity: am I a sportsman…or a competitor?’, Enzo explains. This is a tension at the heart of all sports, between aesthetics and ethics on the one hand and results on the other. Yet the choice Enzo places in front of his drivers carries added weight, for it means making split-second decisions that could cost them and their opponents their lives.

Motor racing thus brings death incongruously into spaces of work, spaces of pleasure. Those spaces simultaneously render death shocking and senseless, amid the mundanity of everyday routines. Meaning is applied again in part through money: the compensation of the bereaved, a vacancy for jobseeker. It is also applied in part through controlling the narrative of events, something Enzo wrestles with the Italian press – sometimes cajoling, sometimes bargaining – in order to do.

Failing to compartmentalise

As an engineer, and as a man, Enzo Ferrari is driven to pursue control things in this way, to apply order. ‘I have to have all the cards in my hand,’ he explains to Laura. The engine design he pores over at one point with Piero, lovingly explaining how it works, functions as a metaphor for his broader worldview. He is constantly seeking to properly compartmentalise the different aspects of his world. To keep the sporting and commercial aspects of Ferrari separate, so that the latter does not override the former. To convince each of his drivers that they will be the one to win the Mille Miglia. To separate the tragedy of accidents from the glory of victories.

‘Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same moment in time’, he tells his drivers, speaking of the zero-sum game of intimidating a rival driver into letting you pass, rather than risk crashing. Yet the true metaphor for life is not Enzo’s motor, but the collision. Sport, money, love, sex, death, all vying to imbue the same spaces, the same events, with different meanings. These are rival forces battering into each other beyond the control of any one individual, who can but try to convince the world and themselves otherwise, until the delusion becomes manifest. Enzo’s greatest and grandest folly of all is his infidelity, his double life, his parallel paternities, whose coexistence prove beyond his powers to maintain.

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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warnings: Bereavement; Self-harm; Pregnancy and complications.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, The Boy and the Heron is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron is a fantastically unnerving and deeply symbolic film. It commences in Tokyo with a young boy, Mahito Maki (Soma Santoki), who is awoken one night during the Second World War to find that the hospital his mother is in has been set aflame. A year after her death, he moves with his industrialist father Shoichi (Takuya Kimura) to the countryside to live with his father’s new wife, Mahito’s mother’s younger sister Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura), who is pregnant with Shoichi’s new child.

They live on Natsuko’s family estate with her gregarious, elderly maids. There Mahito becomes intrigued with a closed-up old tower built by Natsuko’s great-uncle, but which Natsuko and the maids warn him to steer clear of. Mahito gets into conflict with other boys at his new school, and returning home deliberately wounds his head with a rock. The injury requires treatment from a local doctor, and he is ordered to stay in bed and rest. Yet Mahito finds himself being taunted by a talking heron (Masaki Suda), who claims he can take him to find his mother.

Natsuko herself becomes unwell from the strains of the pregnancy, and one day disappears into the nearby forest. Mahito heads into the forest with one of the maids, Kiriko (Ko Shibasaki), reluctantly in tow, and enters the tower, where he encounters the heron, as well as his great-great uncle (Shōhei Hino). There, he is plunged into a strange world wholly out of place and time, in which he encounters souls yet to be born, man-eating parakeets, and the mysterious Lady Himi (Aimyon).

War and fascism

Mizaki was born in Tokyo during the Second World War, and so The Boy and the Heron’s point of departure is clearly at least semi-autobiographical. Yet his choice of time and place of setting also seems politically portentous, and one cannot help but seek metaphors for the war and for fascism in this parable. The tower itself is both familial heirloom and alien imposition; mystical and chaotic and yet with the great-uncle as its remote orchestrator; apparently timeless and yet arrived in living memory. In this regard, it might be read as standing in for the Japanese emperor system, which by blending industrial modernisation with legitimation through history and sublimity, created the space in which Japanese fascism could emerge.1

In this analogy, it is surely the parakeets who most embody fascism: small creatures grown to an abnormal scale, violent and ravenous and always teeming in huge crowds, with a cult of personality around their own King (Jun Kunimura). They mirror the society beyond the tower, with its own mass mobilisation of flesh and machinery for destruction, its motivation by greed and resentment, its capacity to inflict violence upon others but also – as with Mahito’s head wound – upon itself. Birds, and other animals, can be understood on one level, as illustrative of humankind’s dehumanisation.

Yet we might also see the monstrosities of the world within the tower as symbolic of contemporary ecological disaster, of humanmade climate change, habitat destruction, and species endangerment. The violence of the birds, their unnatural feasting habits, is the outcome of their expulsion into worlds where food is scarce; a set of circumstances that puts the not-yet-born into harm’s way. We could consider the parallels in the relationship between the resurgence of the far right today and environmental catastrophe, which they readily accelerate, while at the same time reacting violently to the displaced.

Class and reproduction

A connected theme that recurs throughout The Bird and the Heron is that of social hierarchy, and the ways it is reproduced. Shoichi’s wealth (like that of Miyazaki’s own father) comes from producing military aircraft, Natsuko’s is inherited, and through this they and Mahito can escape the destruction being inflicted upon Tokyo. They are waited upon and treated with deference, and Shoichi is showily materialistic. Yet these legacies of privilege are cursed. The machinery Shoichi makes his money through building is the kind that also killed his wife. Shoichi’s ostentation when he takes Mahito to school sparks resentment from other pupils. Mahito’s matrilineal heritage includes the tower.

The family’s elderly servants, by contrast, are comically short of and pleased by even the most basic pleasures like canned goods and tobacco, and Mahito learns to use his position to extract favours through bartering with them. However, their lowly position paradoxically places them in a position of great importance. They are at the heart of an economy of care, dutifully watching over Mahito during his convalescence, and continuing to protect him after he has entered the tower. Their protective role is augmented by their age and length of service, which makes them privy to knowledge about Natsuko’s family and the tower and their histories.

The economy of care is integral to the (literal) reproduction of the social order, for as well as Mahito, the maids also carefully guard Natsuko as she suffers with complications from her pregnancy, performing their own necessary labour to ensure the survival of the generation that will inherit the assets and social position of their employers. The fetishizing and guarding of Natsuko’s pregnancy takes on horrific dimensions within the tower itself, perhaps demonstrative of the centrality of natalist obsessions to fascism.

Fate and time

The tower’s promise is that of a dimension outside of temporality. It is seemingly beyond the finitude of the lifecycle, for the dead and the unborn both reside there. It is a nexus between different times, and offers the possibility that past tragedies might be avoided, that past mistakes might not be repeated, that one can step beyond this world and from there make it anew.

However, what I took as the key message about time in The Boy and the Heron is its circularity. Humankind responds to tragedy by seeking to replicate that which it has lost, and thus both misrecognises and perpetuates the past in the present. Shoichi’s wife dies, and so he marries and has another child by her younger sister. For Mahito, reviving his mother seems to become conflated with saving Natsuko.

Moreover, before he has stepped into the tower, Mahito is already too marked by the violence of the world to not recreate it. The lesson he is subsequently presented with is that maturity and perhaps even contentment are reconciliation with one’s fate. Yet we might also ask ourselves whether, with this fatalism, also comes the inevitable circularity of violence too.

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