I used to think I was a control freak because I prefer knowing what happens before I watch a movie. Give me a book, and I will behave beautifully for the first hundred pages — then, suddenly, I’ll turn into a literary criminal and flick to the end. This doesn’t always happen; the writer has to be good enough to make me panic. Yet if I care deeply whether Harry Potter survives, or whether Catherine ends up with Heathcliff, I need the literary equivalent of someone taking my hand and saying, “Brace yourself, chapter thirty-two is going to be a bit of a donut”.
It turns out this may not be control freakery. How wonderful to think that I have been waiting years for science to rebrand my worst qualities as skills. Apparently, people who like spoilers are just trying to regulate their emotional response. We are not monsters, but only putting on a cardigan before the storm.
Those who hate spoilers also want control, but theirs is driven by a desire to preserve suspense. They want to receive information in the sequence designed by the storyteller. My own spoiler-seeking is also a form of control, although it works differently. I want the major facts early, so I can relax into the texture of the story rather than sit there like a meerkat scanning the horizon for emotional catastrophe.
So we are all control freaks, just wearing different cardigans.
Spoiler alerts began as a civilized courtesy. If someone on a bus was halfway through a book, it was not considered the done thing to lean across and announce the ending like a deranged town crier. There were rules. Perhaps not that many. But there were some.
Now the spoiler alert has become a moral siren. One can’t discuss a film, television show, podcast, documentary, memoir, cake reveal, or episode of Bluey without issuing a warning so elaborate that it requires its own stationery. People now approach plot discussion like bomb disposal experts. One innocent mention of a character’s demise, and the online village square bursts into flames. On “The Good Ship Murder” Facebook page, for instance, someone posts, “Can’t believe they killed Pierce”, and within seconds the spoiler militia descends.
Admins should delete this spoiler.
People might not have seen it yet.
Can’t believe you’ve posted a spoiler…You can almost hear the sirens. Somewhere, a moderator is reaching for a lukewarm tea and wondering how a cozy murder show has turned into the fall of Saigon.
Nicole James, “Tell Me Who Dies So I Can Relax”, The Freeman, 2026-05-07.
August 9, 2026
QotD: Spoilers — threat or menace?
July 30, 2026
Equilibrium: 198451 with Gun-Fu Fighting
Feral Historian
Published 27 Mar 2026Equilibrium (2002) is a curious mix of early-aughts action movie and mid-20th Century dystopia. While it does feel a bit overwrought and derivative at times, it ends up being more than the sum of its parts.
00:00 Intro
03:17 Gun Kata
04:44 198451
06:45 Endings
07:07 Anti-Human Systems
(more…)
July 27, 2026
Timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs
The tag in my chosen headline means roughly “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”, which anyone who has read anything about the Trojan War can understand. A huge problem for modern translators of works like The Iliad and The Odyssey is that there’s a double layer of cultural change built in before you start: the Mycenaean Greek culture of the Bronze Age — the setting of the Trojan War — is significantly different from the Greek culture of the classic era — when the oral tales were first written down (and attributed to Homer).
Classic Greek culture is often misunderstood by modern audiences through the most prominent survivals of that time: especially Greek philosophy, as the philosophers we think of as most representative of Athenian and the wider Greek culture were actually a fairly small and relatively powerless subculture at odds with the mainstream of their times.
All that said, going from a translation to an on-screen interpretation requires a lot of picking and choosing of elements to highlight and others to leave unrepresented or actively suppressed. In the most recent film of Odysseus and his extended return journey from Troy to Ithaca, director Christopher Nolan chose to portray Odysseus as a modern man in ways that may suit today’s audiences, but don’t accurately portray the Homeric interpretation or the times in which it is set:
Some viewers have described Nolan’s version of Odysseus as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But moral injury is the more accurate term. It overlaps with PTSD, but it’s not the same thing. Moral injury occurs when a person commits, witnesses, or fails to prevent an act that violates his moral convictions. In war, moral injury can arise when a person does something that violates his own ideals, loyalties, or sense of right and wrong. The result is lasting guilt. A combat veteran comes to see himself as corrupt, unworthy, or beyond forgiveness.
In the film, Odysseus describes his guilt over the violence he witnessed during the sack of Troy. He is conscience-stricken about his Trojan Horse gambit. Odysseus took an object that appeared to be a gift of peace and used it as a weapon of deception. His stratagem allowed the Greeks to enter Troy, destroy the city, and slaughter its people.
But the Trojan Horse is Odysseus’s crowning achievement. Homer’s Odysseus is a wily trickster, and a trickster would not be tormented by the fact that his trick succeeded.
During his journey, he repeatedly deceives his own men for what he believes is the greater good, and these acts clearly trouble him. The war itself is remembered as grim and pointless. Men are drafted rather than rushing eagerly toward glory.
This is not Homer’s moral universe. In the poem, the Greeks rape, rob, enslave, and pillage without displaying anything like modern guilt. We can tolerate this when reading an ancient text. It is harder to tolerate when those acts are placed directly before us on a movie screen.
This may explain Nolan’s decision. Had he shown the violence of the original story without softening it, would the audience still have been able to sympathize with Odysseus?
Consider what happens to the enslaved women accused of consorting with the suitors after Odysseus returns home. Odysseus orders them to be killed, and Telemachus hangs them. Homer does not present the scene as morally complicated. Their punishment is part of restoring order.
Modern films sometimes allow their heroes to inhabit moral worlds very different from our own. Robert Eggers’s 2022 film The Northman asks us to sympathize with Viking characters who obey codes that most moviegoers today would find reprehensible. But The Northman was a mid-budget film. Nolan made a summer blockbuster that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. A blockbuster can’t afford to depict a hero from whom audiences recoil. Eggers could let his Viking be a Viking. Nolan needs his Greek warrior to be one of us.
Yet such individuals lived in societies that existed before Christian morality reshaped the Western understanding of guilt, mercy, and the value of every human life. The moral injury that afflicts Nolan’s Odysseus belongs more naturally to the AD world than the BC one.
In the film, Odysseus grieves for the men he lost and appears to blame himself for their deaths. But Homer presents that suffering as the result of pride, fate, divine anger, and human foolishness. The original story does not depict Odysseus as a man tormented by the fear that he has violated his own moral code.
The difference is clear in the episode of the lotus-eaters. In Nolan’s film, Odysseus eats the lotus because he seeks mental relief, a kind of ancient Greek version of using psychedelics to treat combat trauma. In the poem, Odysseus does the opposite. He refuses to eat the lotus and orders his men away from it.
July 21, 2026
Making out like a bandit – Christopher Nolan’s sweet deal for The Odyssey
Hollywood accounting is always a murky pool to wade into … unlike accounting in the real world, it’s very, very difficult for outsiders to understand how the money is spent and where the profits go. Christopher Nolan’s new film seems to have broken new ground in Hollywood accounting, very much to Nolan’s benefit:
So Nolan is getting 15% off direct revenue, (not profits, gross, and his wife another 5%) from the Odyssey, basically risk free, AFTER his 20 million up front.
That’s a better cut than a lot of mob bosses take off drug dealers (which tend to vary between 5 and 30% depending on how much violence they can command).
And probably core stars (Damon and Hathaway mostly) are getting some smaller percent of the same deal.
This is unheard of. Basically a violation of fiduciary duties to the investors.
Studio execs paid all these people to make this movie this way against their own investors’ interests.
So if another 10-30% of gross is divided across Damon, Hathaway, Holland, Pattinson, and Theron … You know the real stars (Zendaya, Nyong’o, and Page don’t draw crowds and aren’t getting that) …
Then you might have to effectively cut all revenue first by 50% for theaters, then by another 40-50% for the star power.
It other words … The Odyssey would need to make 800 million – 1 billion before it could even hypothetically start to turn a profit for investors.
All the Woke casting etc. Is actually a cover for basically outright money laundering and embezzlement by the entertainment class. And because its “sticking it to the Chuds” business news and institutions are covering for the fact a bunch of studios just defrauded Universal Studios’ parent Comcast, to possibly the tune of hundreds of millions.
Comcast is a publicly traded company. That’s 401Ks and pension funds.
And all the woke stuff is in there so that no studio execs, corporate leaders, media, or corporate watchdogs will call them out for basically transferring hundreds of millions of retiree dollars into their own pockets.
All the discussion of “Will the Odyssey make its money back” is missing the point that there is almost NO WAY for the Odyssey to actually produce a reasonable return to investors … BY DESIGN.
It is a pure, basically fraudulent, wealth transfer from American middle-class investors to Hollywood insiders irrespective of whatever money the film does or does not make … intentionally.
And all the woke window dressing is chaff, or a bonus to prevent any institutions from having the nerve to call them out lest they get called, racist, sexist, and transphobic.
July 14, 2026
Orson Welles – the great failures
On his Substack, Ted Gioia looks at the up-and-down-and-up-and-down career of Orson Welles and selects, from a long list, his ten greatest failures:
Orson Welles in 1937.
Photograph by Carl Van Vechten via Wikimedia Commons.
It takes a lifetime of misses to create those hits (if they come at all). And those misses tell the real story of our passion, our resilience, our willingness to push our talent to the limit.
These speculations have led me to return to the work of filmmaker Orson Welles (1915-1985) — who I see as an inspiring role model for indie creators of the digital age. Welles is like many of us today. He lost institutional support from Hollywood studios while still in his twenties. And despite his reputation as the most innovative filmmaker of his generation — for many years his debut movie Citizen Kane won polls as the best film of all time — was forced into a precarious life as a perennial freelancer.
He spent most of his career working on projects that failed. And not because they weren’t good (see the list below) — but for other reasons. Some blame Welles’s prickly personality. Others will fault close-minded Hollywood execs. Or maybe Welles was just cursed with bad luck — problems did seem to follow him wherever he went.
You might say that even his hits were misses. His biggest early success came via a 1938 radio rendition of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which convinced many listeners that extraterrestrials were actually invading America. Welles got plenty of publicity but was threatened with $12 million in lawsuits in the aftermath. He was lucky to escape without criminal charges.
His greatest triumph, Citizen Kane, was also anything but a conventional hit. The major theater chains refused to book it — fearing punishment from newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the thinly-disguised model for Kane. So even at the peak of his career, Welles had a target on his back.
It got worse from there. He couldn’t finish the editing of his second film The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) — because FDR prodded him into going to Brazil as a cultural ambassador during World War II. So Welles was out-of-touch as the studio butchered his remarkable film, and even added a saccharine new ending. It’s testimony to Welles’s greatness that The Magnificent Ambersons is still ranked among the best movies of the era despite the meddling.
After Brazil, everything fell apart for Welles. Hollywood never forgot him, but also never forgave him. He got occasional gigs (although more often as an actor). But this brilliant filmmaker never enjoyed job security or long-term institutional support. He was the permanent indie gadfly — always pitching projects and sometimes actually starting them. But rarely finishing them.
At his death in 1985, Welles left behind at least 19 unfinished projects. Add to that the many others he abandoned in earlier years. And then there are so many Welles concepts that hardly got started at all — but were promising ideas that deserved better. Finally, Welles suffers the added indignity of achieving some commercial successes (on radio or the stage) that are now lost to us — so even these must be counted among his misses, at least from the perspective of posterity.
Below I’ve listed Welles’s ten greatest failures. But I could have easily expanded it to twenty or thirty.
I do this as testimony to Welles’s greatness. From a mercenary perspective, these might be failures, but from an aesthetic standpoint they testify to a creative force that operated at the highest level of intensity for a full lifetime.
July 8, 2026
Initial reactions to The Odyssey trailer
As always, I’m not closely following whatever movies Hollywood chooses to extrude, but I do see the occasional high and low lights from the reactions of others. The latest attempt to portray Homer on screen isn’t finding it easy to get potential viewers excited:
The public reaction to the Odyssey trailer is a strong indication that Nolan’s reputation won’t be enough to prevent this turd from leaving a smoking crater in the studio’s budget.
People are sick of blackwashing. They’re sick of girlboss reimagining. They’re sick of every movie turning into a sermon.
Does this mean that a Tipping Point will be reached, that Hollyweird will finally sit up and pay attention to the dashboard full of red warning lights and sirens screaming for its attention?
Lol. Lmao.
The cultural revolution means that everyone in a position to do something has been replaced with religious fanatics who don’t care about nonsense like “money”.
Just like every other institution they suborned.
They are crashing the plane with no survivors, and as it goes down in flames they will take the opportunity for a final smug lecture about how the failure of the audience to appreciate them demonstrates that the audience are nothing but white supremacists.
I’ve seen speculation that the current crop of “big” movies were all in early production just at the peak of a few trends that have since receded in popular culture — girlbosses and general wokeness — and it might just be a matter of timing … or it could be that Hollywood’s movers and shakers are still determined to press on with the undiluted progressive message even if it means losing hundreds of millions of dollars with every new release.
On the topic of The Odyssey, Ted Gioia talks about his own discovery of Homer as a youngster and says “youngsters were Homer’s target audience — you can feel that at every turn in his story”:
The first work of classical literature that thrilled me to the depths of my soul was the Odyssey. It made such a big impact that, decades later, I insisted on reading it aloud to my own children, hoping they would feel that same magic.
I was little more than a child back when I discovered Homer — 12 or 13 years old, I’d guess. Back then I knew more about comic books than serious literature. But I was outgrowing Spiderman and Superman, and decided to take a chance on Odysseus.
I approached this book with fear and trembling — worried it might be too difficult. But I soon discovered that Homer was the Stan Lee of antiquity. He told adventure stories not much different from the ones peddled by Marvel or DC.
I’d somehow gotten my hands on a tattered used paperback copy of the Odyssey, in a 1937 prose translation by W.H.D. Rouse — published by Mentor Classics (cover price when new = 60 cents). This is not a respected translation — they will never assign Rouse’s version of Homer at any Ivy League college. [NR: I think this is the way I first encountered The Odyssey … possibly this version in Grade 5 as it was a prose translation.]
That’s because the legit translators try to convey this epic as poetry. Rouse made no attempt at that. He just turned Homer into everyday language, just like it was a pulp fiction story for the mass market.
That was the right choice, he believed, because (as he wrote in his introduction): “The Odyssey is the best story ever written … It has been a favorite for three thousand years”. Other translations of this book are, he claimed, “filled with affectations and attempts at a poetic language Homer himself is free from. Homer speaks naturally and we must do the same.”
You can see the difference by comparing Rouse’s rendering of the opening lines with the esteemed Chapman translation from Shakespeare’s era.
Is this the best version of Homer? I won’t go that far — years later I became very fond of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation. But I will insist that Rouse is the superior version for a youngster. And, in many ways, youngsters were Homer’s target audience — you can feel that at every turn in his story.
So this is the first thing about the Odyssey you won’t learn at Harvard — namely that this tale was not intended for Harvard elites. It’s a story for everybody. So it’s an obvious choice for a big-budget Hollywood movie. There was no pretension or elitism in Homer’s approach. In today’s parlance, you would say that he was appealing to a mass audience.
Director Christopher Nolan — whose screen version of the Odyssey makes its debut in London today — relied on the more recent Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In her version, our hero is described, like Shaft, as a complicated man who won’t cop out (when there’s danger all about). Okay, she doesn’t use those exact words, but comes close …
Emily Wilson’s translation of the opening lines of the Odyssey
I like this rendering, and can almost hear that Isaac Hayes synth vamp in the background. Wilson is just as straightforward as Rouse — living up to her aspiration to “tell the old story for modern times”.
June 16, 2026
QotD: Nitpicking the field fortifications in Gladiator (2000)
What we are shown is pretty clearly a prepared defense on a hillside, with a series of raised terraces, with a mix of abatis (sharpened wood obstacles, often crudely cut wood stakes set in an X pattern) and mantlets, with gaps in those defenses to allow units to move and a whole bunch of catapults positioned up on the hill. The terraces make for a layered, multi-stage fighting position at each level. On the one hand, the Romans were hardly averse to field fortifications and one wonders again if this set was a product of someone with an active imagination looking at the Column of Trajan [Wiki], which features a lot of scenes of Roman soldiers cutting trees and building bridges, roads and forts.
The problem isn’t that there are field fortifications, it is everything else about them: the style of field fortification, their position, layout and use. As we’ve noted before, Roman armies on campaign built fortified marching camps nightly, so we would expect Maximus’ army to have such a camp, but as we’ve discussed even more so, one of the classic, famous features of Roman armies is that they build the same layout of camp wherever they go, the famous Roman “playing card” forts, generally built on flat, open ground (rather than hillsides). That defense would not look like this, instead consisting of a ditch (the fossa) behind which would have been a earthwork rampart (the agger) topped with a wooden palisade (the vallum); thus rather than successive layers, you’d have a single clear fighting position (the vallum) on a mount with the ditch directly in front of it. And that would be a continuous line, with just four gates (at the center of each side), rather than this kind of checkerboard pattern of fortifications, because of course the purpose of this defense was to prohibit entry. Moreover, the line of field fortifications we see are not part of, nor connected to, a marching camp: it is simply a line of fortifications on the side of the hill with nothing on the flanks, rather than the distinctive “playing card shape”. We don’t see the camp sitting behind it either.
But the really immediate problem is that Maximus’ army has formed up within his troops strung through the field fortifications, with legionary soldiers mostly in front of them (but some are behind them) and the archers in between the stakes and mantlets. This may seem like a sensible way to form up a defense, but it is not the Roman way. Maximus is very intentionally “offering battle”, – inviting his opponent into an open field engagement. The way a Roman army did this was invariably forming up on the flat, open, unfortified ground in front of the camp, toward the enemy, signalling that they would fight in the open, outside of their walls (as Maximus does indeed intend to do).
So what we ought to see is Maximus’ army formed up outside in the open field, with the camp likely visible some distance behind them. That camp would be protected by very different fortifications: you’d be able to make out its “playing-card” shape, with watch-towers on the corners and the raised vallum running the exterior and the relatively neat grid of tents in the interior.
Finally, before we get to the battle plan, I want to note one more oddity here, which is the battlefield itself. The battlefield is a muddy field, which it looks to have been recently clear-cut, otherwise surrounded by dense forest. Of course part of the reason is that this is Bourne Wood, a coniferous tree plantation (and frequent filming location) in Surrey, England (which is why the trees are all the same species, so neatly spaced out) rather than the edge of an old-growth forest somewhere in southern Germany.
But the thing is, the Marcomanni, Quadi and other Germanic-language speaking peoples were an agrarian society, same as the Romans: their villages were surrounded by farm and pastureland. Of course a lot of the forest – old-growth forest, rather than tree-farms as here – remained, but if a Roman army wanted a flat, open space to offer battle in, they needn’t have cleared it themselves (and indeed probably couldn’t, at least not in the time frame they’d have to prepare for a pitched battle), but could simply march to the nearest village with its patches of farmland. Getting a Roman army to fight in dense, old-growth forest, after all, famously required clever ambushes, as a Teutoberg Forest (modern Kalkriese) in 9 AD. And if the enemy didn’t want to fight in the open, Roman armies were perfectly happy to burn villages and pillage crops as the standard way of attempting to force an enemy to accept an offer to battle or else vacate the area.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nitpicking Gladiator’s Iconic Opening Battle, Part I”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-06-06.
June 15, 2026
Elysium: Greed and the Crab Trap
Feral Historian
Published 23 Jan 2026Elysium is one of those films I like more for the world it presents than the story it tells. It’s a tale of two worlds, a wealthy break-away civilization in orbit and a slowly dying civilization on Earth. On the surface it’s simplistic, preachy even, but underneath it posits some important questions both by what it tries to do and what it doesn’t even attempt to address.
00:00 Intro
01:18 Healing Magic and Healthcare Access
03:22 Overpopulation and Automation
04:18 Technology in Layers
07:50 Easy Answers to Hard Problems🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
🔹 Ko-Fi | ko-fi.com/feralhistorian
🔹 and Merch! | feral-shop.fourthwall.com
Ninti’s Gate – the prologue to Stellar Drift, coming later this year.
🔹 amazon.com/dp/B0CYXH9BWD
June 4, 2026
“It’s called Starship Troopers, not The Big War with the Bugs“
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen explains why filmgoers still identify with the humans in Verhoeven’s unfaithful-to-the-story film of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers:
Here’s a hint:
It’s called Starship Troopers. Not The Big War with the Bugs.
There’s a reason for that. Heinlein was one of the 20th century’s greatest authors, if not THE greatest, and he was also the 20th century’s greatest philosopher and it’s not even close.
So he didn’t name things by accident.
Starship Troopers isn’t about the war. It isn’t even about war. And it’s certainly not about the fucking bugs.
All that shit is just stage dressing for the story is really about. That’s why the book doesn’t end with defeating the enemy. It ends with Rico meeting his father again, facing future fights together.
Starship Troopers is about the military life, the relationship between armies and the civilizations they serve, and what it means to be a soldier and a man.
Eurotrash communists failed to get the point, not merely because they have the “media literacy” of a sack of wet hammers, but also because they don’t understand soldiering, civilization, or manhood.
So, yes, Verhoeven tried to make fun of Heinlein and failed miserably because Heinlein was a better storyteller, a better man, and a better human being by a margin so great that the Earth can barely encompass it.
But even though his failed satire makes humanity clearly the good guys, the war clearly righteous, and soldiers clearly cool and heroic, it still doesn’t recapture the actual meaning of Starship Troopers.
Because the real themes were so invisible, so incomprehensible, to Verhoeven that he couldn’t even see them to disagree with.
So enjoy the film for what it turned out to be … a fun, campy, morally unambiguous story of heroes squashing disgusting bugs. Suitable for popcorn consumption.
Then, read more Heinlein.
Update, 6 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
May 28, 2026
The Day The Earth Stood Still: a Post-WWII War of the Worlds
Feral Historian
Published Jan 9, 2026The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) is in some ways the most successful translation of the alien invasion story from 19th Century colonial assumptions to those of the post-WWII world. They no longer come to take our land and plunder our resources, but to keep us from threatening their “Rules Based Order” and turn us into a low-fidelity copy of themselves.
00:00 Intro
02:46 Nukes and Norms
06:48 Ultimatum
09:00 Farewell to the Master
11:08 Hello Remake
(more…)
May 25, 2026
QotD: Modern movie casting
For a long time now, Hollywood has been taking great care to make the good characters black and the bad ones white. For a short while, the bad guys could be Arab terrorists, but now bad guys are white again. If they need to be foreign baddies, then they are neo-Nazis from eastern Europe or Russian gangsters. Of course, the smartest characters are black or female. If we’re lucky, the brainiac is a black lesbian. Every computer hacker is now non-white or female.
On occasion the blackwashing gets ridiculous. Some figure from white history is played by a black actor. A black guy in a show about medieval Europe could be amusing, but that’s not how it is done. Instead, we get black cowboys saving a white town or a black playing King Lear. It will not be long before we have historical dramas in which well-known figures from white history are played by black actors as black people. Imagine Ben Franklin played by Morgan Freeman.
The Z Man, “Blackwashing”, The Z Blog, 2020-10-02.
May 24, 2026
Hollywood took the wrong lessons from Joss Whedon’s work
I was a huge fan of the TV show Firefly, which I think was Joss Whedon’s best work — perhaps more so because it was cancelled before any of his typical tics and quirks took the show in overtly progressive directions. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a comment on yesterday’s post about writers needing empathy to fully portray the characters they create:
Koko (literal gorilla) @Mark68002312
I think Joss Whedon did great at writing characters in the Joss Whedon universe. At least through Firefly.
I don’t understand how people — even people who don’t write for a living — think the character and the context/universe they live in are independent
Joss Whedon wrote the characters in Firefly the way he did because they were:
1. Rebels and iconoclasts, thus irreverent.
2. Broken people, thus inclined to hide deep pain behind shallow humor.
3. Familiar with each other already, thus more likely to banter.The style worked in Firefly because it created a sense of character and setting, which it was appropriate to.
Joss was no master of individualizing character voice, but he at least managed to get the group dynamics right.
However, Hollywood, sack of narcissistic overfunded retards that they are, managed to learn the wrong lesson from the show’s resonance with audiences.
“Oh, the people want light, quippy dialogue with a joke to interrupt every tense moment with a laugh. They are not interested in drama, pathos, gravitas, or emotional weight”, they concluded, and proceeded to pack every damn film with snark for the next twenty years, like Pacific islanders making landing strips and control towers out bamboo, enacting rituals to bring the “cargo” back.
The lesson they should have learned is that audience want, will always want, dialogue that illustrates and enhances character and setting.
Banter is a good tool, sometimes, but it is one good tool in a toolbox of many, and an author must select the right one to do character voice correctly.
“He will run. A vampire can run throughout the night, untiring. Verdammnis, is there no metal in this room larger than the buckles on braces? Were we women, at least we would have corset stays …”
“Here.” Asher sat suddenly on the lid of the coffin and pulled off one of his shoes with his good hand. He tossed it to the startled vampire, who plucked it out of the air without seeming to move. “Is your strength of ten men up to ripping apart the sole leather? Because there should be a three-inch shank of tempered steel supporting the instep. It’s how men’s shoes are made.”
“Thus I am served,” Ysidro muttered through his teeth, as his long white fingers ripped apart the leather with terrifying ease, “for scorning the arts of mechanics.”
Don Simon Ysidro doesn’t say “Well excuuuuuse me for not knowing all about shoes”, because Don Simon Ysidro is a three hundred year old Spanish nobleman turned vampire, not a homosexual Las Vegas nightclub DJ.
And when he remarks upon his own deficiency in knowledge, he says “mechanics”, not “tradesmen”, or “blue-collar workers”, because to a nobleman of the renaissance, a “rude mechanical” is not an impolite robot, he is an uncultured man who works at physical labor or crafts, rather than social or intellectual pursuits.
May 21, 2026
QotD: “Theory” in film interpretation
[Camille Paglia] What has been called “theory” since the arrival of deconstruction in elite U.S. universities in the 1970s is in my view one of the most pointless and pretentious movements in modern cultural history. The catastrophic results should be obvious by now: the humanities are in ruin and have lost public respect and even internal support in academe, where budget reduction has come to the fore. I would refer those seeking greater specifics to my long attack on poststructuralism, Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, published by Arion in 1991. Seven years ago, I did a follow-up assessment of current “theory” when the Chronicle of Higher Education asked me to review three new academic books by women about the bondage and domination trend. My unhappy response was “Scholars in Bondage”, which laments the damage done to promising young professors by a tyrannical academic establishment still chained to the bleached-out corpse of “theory”.
My approach to art is grounded in the sensory. Art is not philosophy. Art by definition refracts meaning through some medium of the material world. Hence my interpretation of art is grounded in the five senses. Perhaps the only theorist who fully grasped this issue was Gaston Bachelard in his 1957 book, The Poetics of Space, animated by a phenomenology that partly aligns with my own practice. It is no coincidence that I have spent most of my teaching career at art schools, where the body remains front and center in most art forms. Digital genres are certainly spreading and flourishing, but dance, music, and theater remain grounded in physicality — which is partly why art schools are finding it so difficult to adapt to the harsh, distancing realities of the virus crisis.
May 17, 2026
QotD: Battlefield morale and cohesion in movies/games versus real history
Actual armies have far more than two states of morale and behaved in far more dynamic, unpredictable and interesting ways!
The first problem with this “binary model” of morale is that it assumes just a single factor (“leadership” or “morale”) but in practice we ought to be thinking about at least two different ingredients here: morale and cohesion.
Morale is the commitment the combatants have to their leadership and their cause. To simplify a bit, we might say that soldiers with good morale believe three things: that their cause is a worthy one, that they are on the road to success and that their leaders have a good (enough) plan to achieve final victory. Poor morale can result from a breakdown in any of those three elements: troops might for instance believe both in their goal and its eventual possibility but not in their leaders to produce it (this seems to have been the case, for instance, in the French Mutiny of 1917). On the other hand, regardless of the charisma of leaders, few people come to a war intending to die in it; if the cause appears impossible, morale will sink regardless. And armies that do not believe in the cause at all are extremely difficult to motivate by other means.
On the other hand cohesion is the force that holds a specific unit together through the power of the bonds holding the individual combatants to each other and/or to their (generally junior or non-commissioned) officers. There are a lot of ways to build that cohesion: people are generally unwilling to abandon neighbors, close friends and relatives, for one. They are also reluctant to expose themselves to shame at home for having done so; shame is one of the few things people fear as much, if not more than, death. For armies that can’t rely on that sort of organic cohesion, it can be built by reconstructing the soldier’s unit as his primary social group. Drill can do this: it creates an experience of shared suffering and achievement which bonds the soldiers together creating strong “artificial” cohesion.
These two ingredients have different roots, but they also function differently. The formulation that has always stuck with me is one from James McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1998): morale (McPherson discusses it under the heading of “the Cause”) will get men into uniform, it will sustain them on large marches and cold nights and it will get them to the battle, but it will not get them through the battle. Instead, cohesion (the “comrades” of the title) gets men through the terror of actual combat, when fear has driven “the cause” far from mind. But of course cohesion isn’t enough on its own either, since it provides no reason to advance or attack or really to do anything at all except stick together.
Adding further complication to this, morale and cohesion are not, as they often exist in games, inherent properties of a unit, but rather emergent properties of the interactions of a whole bunch of individuals. In a strategy game, units exist primarily as extension of the player’s will; in film units typically exist as extensions of their commander’s or the main character’s will (note how common it is that right as the hero begins winning his duel with the villain, so too his army begins winning the battle). But of course actual armies are composed of lots of humans, each with their own individual will and agency.
Those humans are continually making calculations about risks, goals and survival. It’s not hard here to see why, by the by, morale won’t carry troops through high risk conditions: if your only goal is to survive to experience the end-state of the war, then it is always in your interest to let someone else do the dying; it doesn’t serve your end to stay in a high risk position. By contrast, if you are held there by the fear of shame if your close comrades see you run, that still applies. Thus these calculations get progressively more “primal” as the sense of danger rises (fear makes a mess of those higher brain functions), but they do not stop.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIC: Morale and Cohesion”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-07-01.
April 26, 2026
South Korea’s switch from an exporting heavyweight to a cultural juggernaut
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte looks at the importance of a South Korean government report to changing the structure of the South Korean economy and making the country far more visible culturally on the world stage:
South Korea, in the latter half of the twentieth century, was building its economy almost entirely by exporting manufactured goods, everything from home electronics to ships to automobiles. That changed, as the story goes, when the country’s Presidential Advisory Board on Science and Technology released a report on digital technology in May 1994. It noted that a single Hollywood film, Jurassic Park, with its computer-generated dinosaurs, generated the same amount of foreign sales as 1.5 million Hyundai cars. The darling of Korean industry, Hyundai was exporting 640,000 cars a year in 1994. So one film was worth more than two years of heavy industrial production requiring enormous plant, equipment, capital investment.
The report stunned Koreans — “literally sent shock waves across the country”, writes Doobo Shim, a Seoul-based professor of media and communication. At the time, culture and entertainment were viewed as ephemeral and unlikely to contribute to Korea’s core mission of “improving the material conditions of the people”. The country decided it needed to change its game in order to thrive in the twenty-first century economy.
It wasn’t a straight line from the Presidential Advisory Report to Parasite, Squid Game, BTS, Blackpink, and Han Kang’s Nobel prize, but it’s straighter than you might think. Seoul is now a top-five world cultural center, and arguably top two if we’re talking pop culture and anything that appeals to under-thirties. How it happened tells us a great deal about Canada’s relative failure to develop home-grown cultural and entertainment industries.
The Presidential Advisory Board report alone did not alter Korea’s strategy. The country was starting from way behind. First came democratic reforms and media deregulation. That birthed new commercial TV channels and a variety of independent publications. Now with an independent (from government) domestic media sector, Korea tried to protect it by limiting the amount of foreign cultural product in its market. That didn’t work. In 1993, 90 of the top 100 video rentals in the country were from Hollywood; only five were domestic. Sound familiar, Canada?
Protection wasn’t going to work, anyway. Another factor at play was the Uruguay Round, an international accord negotiated between 1986-1994 that decisively liberalized the global economy, forcing all 123 signatory countries to open their markets for a vast range of goods and services, including communications services and entertainment product. It was clear to Korea that efforts to protect heritage and culture by shutting out the world had no future. It needed to upgrade its efforts in the cultural sphere if it wanted to avoid being swamped by content from multinational companies, and not just American ones. Satellite television services out of Japan and Hong Kong were already making inroads in Korea.
Another thing: Korea had noticed that Japan, its nearest rival in the home electronics sector, was making investments in content. Sony had bought Columbia pictures and CBS records. It was the nineties, the age of synergy, or vertical integration. Companies making devices — video players, portable music players — also wanted to own what played on them. Korean firms such as Samsung and Daewoo, makers of TVs and VCRs, felt a need to be vertically integrated, too.
So the Presidential Advisory Report landed on fertile ground. Korean businesses felt an imperative to pay attention to content. The Korean government felt itself under siege from foreign cultural and entertainment product. “Gone are the days”, said one expert interviewed in the newspaper Dong-A Ilbo, “when the government could appeal to the people to watch only Korean programs out of patriotism”.
All that notwithstanding, the report mostly resonated because it presented culture as an opportunity. It asked Koreans to recognize the potential of arts and entertainment to improve the material conditions of the people. Instead of resisting the emerging global marketplace, the power of multinational corporations and platforms, and the free movement of talent, it needed to master this new system, compete commercially, and take Korean culture to the world.
