Chuck JordanModify

2026-06-04 16:59:39

I wasn’t wearing my watch during Episode 8 of Widow’s Bay, “Your Baggage,” which is probably for the best. My heart rate was elevated for the entire first half of the episode, and it might have gone past giving me warnings and made the executive decision to call 911 on my behalf.

I would be curious to see the resulting graph, though. It felt similar to episode 4, where I got so wound up with tension and dread that it seemed I couldn’t possibly handle anymore, and then it delivered the most absolutely perfect punchline. At the time, I said that nothing in horror hits me as hard as social anxiety. As it turns out, though, a good old-fashioned Boogeyman home invasion can work just as well.

The thing that stood out to me throughout this episode was that it wasn’t putting a clever twist on a Halloween story, or deconstructing it, or parodying it. It was just doing it, and doing it exceptionally well. Building tension from before the episode even started, really, since the “previously on” clips were perfectly chosen.

But it came right out of the gate hitting hard on the idea of “the evil is vanquished, everything’s good,” and it didn’t seem at all intended to fool the audience, but to stretch out the tension of our knowing more than the characters do. We know that it’s not all good, since there are three episodes left in the season. And also, because every time any story shows us scenes like this, it always means that something terrible is about to happen.

So we get the reveal of the mask that’s been stolen from the museum. And the door of the creepy house, which has been blown apart from the inside. And Patricia alone in the house at night, with a running story thread of a Boogeyman that still hasn’t been resolved. And the sound of a car alarm outside. And the sight of a bloody handprint on the hood of the Pattiwagon as she turns off the alarm. And a front door that she doesn’t notice is now standing wide open, even though we’d just seen her close it behind her.

But what follows is a sequence that follows the standard and familiar slasher movie setup, and it stays tense as hell all the way through, but without the potential victim wandering blithely through the house unaware, or making bad decisions in a panic. She’s just as aware of how horror movies work as any of us in the audience. And not in a Scream-style self-referential way, but simply a reasonably smart adult in 2026. So she quietly makes her way down to a potential weapon, and gets out of the house as quickly as possible.

So as the jump scares and the chase scenes start, she reacts not just with blind terror, but more a sense of “I knew that was going to happen!” It gave me the same feeling that the best moments in Widow’s Bay have delivered over and over again: that I was perfectly in sync with the people making this show. I wasn’t tense or scared or laughing because the show was telling me I should be, but because I actually felt it.

It all keeps building, as you realize she’s not going to be able to get help from anyone else. When she finally ends up at the home of the awful Kris and her awful friends, it feels like the show is twisting the metaphorical knife: the one potentially safe haven isn’t safe at all. They’re going to kick Patricia out and back into danger, or they’ll all learn their lesson far too late, as the Boogeyman bursts in and goes on a killing spree.

But instead, it breaks the tension with the single most satisfying moment in the entire series so far. Chief Mean Girl Kris gets tasered right in the middle of her asinine “bye-bye”s, and she falls with a thud that I have now rewound and rewatched 100 times as of this writing. And in the middle of being pursed by an unstoppable knife-wielding murderer, Patricia shrugs and says what everybody’s been thinking. “She’s the worst. She’s the fucking worst.”

Not only does it break the tension with an intensely enjoyable comedy moment, but it’s such a great character moment as well. She doesn’t have any more to prove to a bunch of assholes, and for the first time in decades, she doesn’t need anybody to take her story seriously from back then, because it’s happening now. She’s more or less transforming from the person who always wants to be confidently in charge of the situation, to the person who actually can be.

As soon as she regains consciousness and sees The Boogeyman on the ground, she’s demanding the EMT driver give her his keys, because “I’ve got to run him over.” At the gas station, she takes the stance of someone making a final stand, aggressively brandishing a gas nozzle, only to see a weak trickle come out. She runs into the brightly-lit station, where the clerk and the sheriff are both standing, and instead of screaming and asking for help, she decisively says, “I need twenty on three.”

The Patricia that we’ve been watching all season would come up with an elaborate plan like this to save the day, only to have it all comically fall apart at the last minute, and she’d shrug and give a resigned, “Well of course, what did I expect?” But here, it works spectacularly. It’s only foiled by the characters who typically would’ve been called in to help. But again, Patricia comes in with a shotgun blast that saves the sheriff’s life. And another blast that takes down the killer.

And then she slowly walks up to the killer’s body and cocks the gun, ready to deliver another blast the second he so much as twitches, as Enya starts playing.

And then we see her in the ambulance, having held the gun on the killer for the entire ride to the hospital.

And then in the coroner’s lab, as they’re examining the body.

And then in the morgue, as they’re putting the body into the crematorium.

And then she politely confirms that there’s no way out of the crematorium, and answers “Okay, thank you so much.”

And then as they open the doors of the crematorium, when she holds the gun trained on the remains, before finally saying, “Okay,” and standing down.

You’d think I would’ve gotten the joke and stopped laughing out loud at some point earlier in that sequence, but I cackled at every last one.

The last 15 minutes of this episode are like Widow’s Bay giving us one gift after another, with scene after scene that made me say “Oh hell yeah!” And as Patricia leaves the morgue, she smiles at Wyck in a way that suggests that the worst night of her life is over, she’s done with the past several decades of being haunted by it, and not only is it over, but that she’s the one who ended it.

I realized that a whole rat’s nest of unresolved story threads had either been tied up, or been shown not to matter. Yes, a teenage Patricia had lied about getting menacing phone calls, because that’s the kind of thing a teenager might do in a traumatic situation, but she didn’t lie about a killer getting into her house. (Clearly, because he came directly to her place to finish the job). And it’s so bizarre for her former classmates to still be upset about that, so many years later, that it’s clear they’re the ones who haven’t been able to get over it, and they’re not worth any concern. Instead of the satisfaction of proving herself right to them, it’s so much more a satisfying victory for Patricia to realize that she doesn’t care what they think.¹

I was initially confused as to why we’d been denied the scene where they rip off the Boogeyman’s mask, but I almost immediately realized that that scene would never have worked. We wouldn’t recognize whoever it was. And any reveal after the fact — like it’s Mr Wilson, the creepy gym teacher who disappeared under mysterious circumstances! — doesn’t matter to the story. He’s just a faceless evil who was presumably created by the island, and has now re-awakened. We’ve already gotten everything we need from this character: Patricia being a bad ass and in one night, taking out all of the monsters that have terrorized her for years.

Meanwhile, Evan confronts Tom about the photos he found of his mother, proving she hadn’t died in childbirth. It’s been set up to be a moment of peak dramatic tension, and just about any other series would’ve wrenched a few For Your Consideration scenes out of it for Emmy season. But here, it’s just Evan reading the letters from his mother, which we can infer he’d already read.

Maybe he’d started it with the intention of being accusatory, and making Tom feel bad. But it’s also clear from the letters that she was mentally unwell, and he’d probably already come to that realization. He just needed to hear an explanation of what exactly happened. So the scene we got was a scene of two characters finally connecting with each other, instead of angry histrionics.

And it quietly tied up a lot of other mystery-box-style questions that had been lingering, without drawing attention to them. How much did Tom know? What was he hiding? Has he been lying this whole time, just to attract tourism to the island? We now know that he was a grieving husband who went through two years of a nightmare, and he’s been telling his son a simpler version of what happened, so that he could be left with happier memories. And we know that there was a rational medical explanation for all of it, which didn’t require any earnest belief in the supernatural.

Way back in episode 1, he told the travel writer that of course his son has been off the island, even though we later learn that wasn’t true. My take is that he hadn’t consciously thought about it; he might not even have considered it until that moment. The fact was that he’d had a traumatic experience trying to leave the island with his wife. Even if he believed the legends were pure superstition, and there was a rational explanation for what happened, why risk it? An over-protective father fits with the series a lot better than a years-long conspiracy.

And when a series can deliver something that actually makes Halloween scary², it doesn’t need to gin up drama or tension with moments that don’t feel true to the characters. Just like you can generate laugh-out-loud moments that aren’t just making fun of the characters, but drawing out what’s funny about them.

The other great thing about a series that mimics but never quite behaves like a mystery-box series: I have no idea what’s going to happen over the next two episodes. The lingering questions have mostly been resolved or shown not to matter that much. All we’ve got left is Sarah Westcott’s boat full of Warren children, a child lost at sea, and a storm that’s coming in to Widow’s Bay.

2026-06-04 08:57:34

A question I was wondering after Backrooms last night, but which didn’t fit into my other post, was why the movie included the subplot with Mark Duplass as a whiskery employee for a mysterious company.

This isn’t a deep dive on the movie, and it’s definitely not a complaint about Duplass. I tend to be pro-him, for his evangelism of indie filmmaking, and his support/promotion of Vidiots.

But it’s pretty hard to make the case that his character, and in fact his entire subplot, needs to be in this movie.

As I understand it, the company appears in the later shorts, so it’s a reference for fans. And the whole idea of a secretive corporate entity conspiring with the government to cover up a huge existential threat does fit perfectly with the 90s vibe of the movie.

The nice detail in Backrooms is that the movie takes time to establish that this is just a normal guy working for a company that used to be very normal. Having him as the face of the shadow organization helps it feel less like a fifty-plus-year-old cliche. It also puts the focus back on the Backrooms itself as the source of all the scares and existential dread, instead of having to split focus with a conspiracy. And reminds you that there aren’t black ops teams who know exactly what they’re doing; nobody understands what this thing is.

And of course, the purely commercial angle is that it’s another recognizable actor to add to a pretty fantastic cast. You can really tell that people devoted enough resources and talent to this project to try and do it justice, instead of treating it like I Don’t Know, It’s Slender Man Or Some Shit That Seems To Be Popular On Reddit.

But just in terms of the story, there’s nothing that the subplot does that couldn’t have been handled otherwise. They don’t ever become a real obstacle or threat, and really only exist to come in at the end and explain things. It could’ve worked well to make them a more significant part of the story, or just hints at a larger story, but as it is, it’s just a middle ground that’s not enough of either.

After all, just hinting at their existence can be pretty effective, as the shorts demonstrate. Security cameras, and lights and tripods with cables, appearing in the otherwise sterile environment. Footage of unidentified workers in clean suits, cryptically labeled as “archives” of unknown origin. Suggestions that people have been here before and attempted to figure out the rules of a space that seems to have none.

But I realized that there’s something specific to this movie, and this specific adaptation of the source material, that made the inclusion of Duplass and his subplot necessary. While the dinner scene was going on¹, and the conversation was using so much of the language of therapy sessions, I started wondering whether the movie was going in the direction of saying that everything was happening inside Clark’s mind. Had the movie switched to a subjective viewpoint, after the ambiguous end of the POV segment? Was the movie no longer using the Backrooms as a metaphor for the characters’ psychological obsessions, and declaring that that’s what they were all along?

So by that measure, the movie needs to get brought back into the real world, to clarify that it’s a real place that exists in the movie’s universe, and not just some abstraction of the characters’ inner minds. And that just reinforced my bias against the approach this movie took with its adaptation.

I’m still a little frustrated that the movie not only felt the need to offer explanations, but that it felt obligated to make the Backrooms mean something. Or at least represent something. To its credit, it refuses to explain everything, and it makes a point of ending on a note of “we don’t understand it.” But it still feels as if they created a problem for themselves that they then had to solve, and at each step of that process, they got a little bit farther away from what makes the source material feel resonant and original.

2026-06-03 14:46:20

Here’s a tip for everyone: if you ever find yourself at the threshold of an inter-dimensional portal, where it seems like solid matter can pass through other solid matter, don’t stick your hand in there. No matter how tentatively. You don’t know what’s going to happen to it. Especially if you’re in a furniture store! Just stick a lamp or a coat rack in there or something.

I’m not just mentioning that for yuks, either. I’ve only ever seen one of Kane Parsons’s original Backrooms shorts, so I’m definitely not an expert. But there was so much that he did in that zero-budget short as a teenager that simply works better than a lot of the stuff in the feature film. Part of that is just having the main character fall through the world into the creepy Backrooms with no explanation or warning.

The feature’s instigating event is a little bit like that, as the protagonist (Chiwetel Ejiofor as a furniture store owner named Clark) stumbles into the Backrooms accidentally. But every single time afterwards, we see a person test the wall with their hand first, before committing to sticking an entire arm, then pulling it back in amazement.

On its own, it wouldn’t even be that remarkable, much less offensive. But in the context of a young filmmaker’s weird and original creation that became culturally resonant enough to make it into the mainstream, it feels like a disappointing step backwards. It’s such a conventional way to show the moment.

A similar choice is that there’s no music in the short film; it’s all diegetic audio, mostly the hum of fluorescent lights and buzz of the video camera. The feature has some kind of experimental electronic music playing throughout Clark’s initial exploration of the space, and to me it felt jarringly like someone trying to be creepy instead of just being creepy.

I could never quite shake the feeling that this could’ve been a breakthrough. The mainstream was finally giving resources to a new voice, instead of just repeatedly iterating on the same stuff that millennials and GenXers like. And instead, it just went back to The Old Ways. “That may fly on YouTube, kid, but here’s how The Grown-Ups make movies.”

And I do admit that I was a little biased, once I found out that A24 was doing the project, instead of somebody like Neon. I’ve been over-critical of A24, even though they deserve my infinite good will for making Everything Everywhere All At Once happen. And they’ve committed to treating the horror genre as something that can be successful without playing to the lowest common denominator. But that part has backfired, somewhat, to the point where it feels like everything either has to take the Blumhouse approach, where it’s all about turning fun horror movies into infinitely repeatable franchises; or to go the A24 route and make every horror movie a meditation on grief and psychological trauma.

Backrooms goes far enough into the latter that it almost feels like a self-parody of A24 horror. The inexplicably creepy infinitely expanding and self-reproducing liminal space becomes an all-but-literal metaphor for the failure to overcome past trauma. An idea that we’re reminded of, over and over again, via voice-overs and monologues.

I think a huge part of why the concept and the visual design resonates so much with people is that it suggests unsettling ideas, without really lingering on their explanations. It’s a nightmare, and nightmares always lose their impact when you analyze them or explain them. And significantly, it’s a modern nightmare, updating the imagery to where the 1990s are the time-long-ago, instead of drawing from whatever well people my age get their nightmares from.

So, probably unsurprisingly, the parts of Backrooms that I think are the most effective are the ones that work similar to how the shorts do. There’s a fairly lengthy sequence all done from the POV of a 1990s video camera, and I think it’s scary as hell. Not just for using the familiar found footage format, but for taking full advantage of the premise. It’s a confounding space that makes no sense and seems to stretch on infinitely, so you’re constantly being confronted with these bizarre copies of mundane things that seem like they shouldn’t be there, and you almost instantly feel completely lost.

And the camera has the very slow auto-exposure of a video camera from the period, so there’s always this unsettling feeling that you’re probably looking directly at something horrific, but you keep having to wait a few seconds to be able to make out what it is, exactly.

The second most effective sequence, just as unsurprisingly, has one of our main characters trying to escape the Backrooms as chaos is erupting around them. And again, it’s just a case of using the space and the characters to maximum effect: pursued through Alice in Wonderland-style nonsensical spaces, by a creature that is both unsettlingly eerie and immediately horrific. Desperately trying to make use of all of the elements that simply should not exist, instead of staring at them in wonder.

I liked those two sequences so much that it made me like the movie overall, even though I spent most of the rest of it focused on what it could have been. Maybe being more sparing with the music wouldn’t have actually worked in practice; I’ve only seen David Lynch projects really play with the idea of oppressive room tone and fluorescent hum, so maybe it would’ve felt derivative here. Maybe if they’d done more with the space itself, instead of building lore to suggest what it represents to the main characters, it would’ve resulted in complaints that the story and main characters felt shallow. Maybe seeing unsettling glimpses of some of the characters that inhabit the Backrooms, instead of an entire scene focused on them, would’ve left audiences confused.

As it was, I felt like it was showing a place that was supposed to be “every place there ever was,” and more often settled for showing us scenes that felt disappointingly conventional. There’s one brief shot, with a missing persons flyer on a telephone pole, that then has dozens of increasingly off-kilter duplicates, leaving you with the lingering reminder that the most horrifying aspect wasn’t a monster actively trying to kill you, but a place that dispassionately feeds off of your horror and makes copies of it. It was a perfect reminder of how this movie and this premise could result in some fantastic and genuinely novel imagery. There just wasn’t enough of it.

Finally, over the end credits there’s a track called “The Word Becomes Flesh” from the latest album by Boards of Canada. Its vocals are a woman and a computer voice describing the development of an embryo, but a lot of it sounds split into staccato phonemes, which suggest words, but are difficult to make out as more than just the components of words set to a rhythm — words trying only somewhat successfully to form themselves. It’s a fantastic counterpart to the visuals of Backrooms.

It not only made me eager to check out the band, but left me with positive vibes about the whole movie. So maybe that’s my second useful tip: if you’ve made a movie that might have audiences focusing on the parts that were disappointing instead of all the things that worked really well, just put a great piece of music over the end credits, and send everybody home in a good mood.

2026-06-03 03:29:37

It’s election day in California, the time when primaries dump that first, refreshing splash of cold water on our hopes for sweeping change in the mid-terms.

Especially with the Cheesecake Factory Menu quality of the candidates for governor, it’s hard not to get a strong vibe of “Pick Me”.

I’d never heard of RiRi, I don’t know anything about her, and I don’t even know what language this song is in. From context clues I’m guessing it’s from somewhere in south Asia? In any case, the song is silly and basically inoffensive and even a little catchy, even if it instantly evaporates the second it’s over.

It’s the least offensive out of everything that came up when I did a search in Apple Music, which makes it an even more perfect symbol for this election.

We’re in a situation where the candidate for governor with the most progressive platform is a billionaire who made a fortune as a hedge fund manager. Something he’s addressed in the non-stop ads we’ve been subjected to; he’s poured an obscene amount of money into the election, overspending his closest opponents by several orders of magnitude.

So maybe we’ve got to accept that Nada Surf was overly optimistic, and you can’t get “The One You Want.” You have to settle for the one who’s not enough of a sex pest that he was forced to drop out of the race, and the one who’s not running as an establishment Democrat even after the last presidential race clearly showed that people don’t want that, and we want to believe in actual, tangible progress again.

2026-06-01 08:52:00

The latest installment of Todd Martens’s newsletter for The Los Angeles Times is about Disney promoting some of the stuff it’s planning for the upcoming July 4th holiday, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States of America. It raises an interesting question: “Are you somehow not aware of what the USA is like in 2026, Disney?”

It’s the kind of idea that you don’t normally hear discussed by theme park enthusiasts, who are going to focus on the thing itself, without touching on what the thing means in a larger context. As someone who considers himself a theme park enthusiast, I totally get the appeal. It’s the same appeal as the parks themselves: it’s a bubble. It’s so much easier and definitely cheaper to watch videos of people going to parks than actually going yourself. And it’s just as reassuring to feel that you’re watching something that almost certainly won’t have the real world creeping in.

People try to defend theme park fandom by claiming it’s not mere escapism. I think people just underestimate the real value of escapism.

I even think there’s value in all the petty but heated arguments that arise from people having strong and even arrogant opinions about the parks. It feels more mentally healthy to get upset about things that either have simple, achievable solutions, or ultimately don’t matter, or both. Healthier at least than the overwhelming sense of dread that we’re surrounded by an infinite number of problems that are insurmountable.

A big part of Disney’s celebration is a new video for the Soarin’ attraction, flying across the United States instead of just California or a few sites around the world. Since I’m unlikely to see it in person, I watched a video of it via one of the aforementioned YouTube theme park enthusiasts. I think it’s so generic as to be completely apolitical, and the most offensive thing to me is its over-reliance on CG imagery. In everything after the original Soarin’ over California, Disney has more and more lost the plot and spirit of it, adding elements or entire scenes that were completely computer-generated, and even losing that sense of constant forward motion and imaginative transitions.

Anyway, even the footage of Washington DC is aimed away from anything even slightly politically charged, flying over the Mall towards the Washington Monument.¹ There’s a shot of Mount Rushmore, which is either a beloved national landmark or an enormous piece of propaganda carved by a racist into stolen and sacred land, based on how you want to look at it. The film starts with a rocket launch from Cape Kennedy, which doesn’t have quite the same patriotic impact it did back when Epcot opened, now that we can’t see it without thinking of slashed budgets and increasing corporate influence over the space program.

Ultimately, it doesn’t actually say anything. Of course, they’re not going to be soarin’ over ICE concentration camps, or the huge No Kings protests across the country, because that’s not the point of a theme park and it’s never been Disney’s thing anyway. Walt Disney was famously patriotic and conservative. It was only in my early teens, years after his death, that you’d see anything in the park try to update the Disney Version of American History. Even then, the closest you’d get to a more inclusive and critical take was in the American Adventure at Epcot, which still lightly skips over the problematic parts — the Civil War was sad because it divided (white) families, and the only thing we need to be concerned about with the whole Civil Rights movement is the stirring, inspirational “I Have a Dream” speech.

But again, that’s just not Disney’s thing. At least in the theme parks; in the movies and especially the documentaries, I’d want to see a more realistic take that at least addresses the issues. But expecting a theme park attraction to give an unflinching, or even well-rounded, version of American history would be as misguided as expecting an accurate history of piracy in the Caribbean. It would’ve been nice to see more images of culturally significant landmarks, like the Crazy Horse monument. But the existing video flies over the Statue of Liberty, and it’s still unlikely to make any of the most anti-immigration people in the audience suddenly see the light.

And a detail that I think is easy to miss: a theme park is such a bad venue for anything other than the most shallow take on edutainment, that even with the best intentions, it can backfire. Those of us who saw the early days of Disney’s Animal Kingdom will probably remember just how hard it went on its messages against poaching and for conservation. But even as someone who is 1000% on board with those messages, the handling of them in the park felt didactic and preachy. It was the opposite version of “read the room, Disney.”

The most effective message was the most subtle one that most directly impacted your experience as a guest: it was the first theme park to eliminate straws and cup lids. A direct way to remind everyone, via slight inconvenience, about how small things compounded across millions of people can have a huge environmental impact.

So I appreciate that one of the mascots of Disney’s celebration of the 250th is Sam the Eagle. He’s also been the icon of the American Adventure pavilion at Epcot ever since they redid the restaurant. I have no idea how much, if any, thought Disney put into the choice of the character beyond “we bought The Muppets,” but it’s a perfect choice. There’s always been a counter-culture streak to The Muppets, and Sam was devised as a parody of jingoism and chauvinistic patriotism. It’s one of the core threads of Disney parks nostalgia by this point: “A salute to all nations, but mostly America” from Muppet-Vision 3D.

Especially as somebody who saw the country go nuts over the Bicentennial in 1976, and then grew up during the Reagan era, I love having Sam as a symbol. It says “I can get swept up in the patriotic ideal of the United States, but I’m nothing like those guys.”

For most of my life, we had the worst people in the country wrapping themselves in the American flag and claiming exclusive ownership of it. Corrupting it to mean that being patriotic meant believing in the same stuff that they did. And conversely, being pro-labor, pro-immigration, pro-globalization, and socialist democracy in the broad sense, were deeply un-American. That racism wasn’t a shameful, indelible stain on the founding of our country, but was just an unpleasant topic to be ignored because that’s all in the past now and when you think about it, was it ever really that bad? A lot of people of my generation were happy to let them keep their flags and anthems and July 4th celebrations, because if being a patriotic American meant being like that, then we didn’t want any part of it.

So a huge part of why the Harris/Walz campaign was so invigorating at the start was because it felt like they were taking back so much of the imagery that we’d ceded to the right, decades ago. Getting back to the ideals that all of these symbols are supposed to stand for, instead of the corrupted versions.

It’s something I’ve been ambivalent about most of my life, because I do believe that there’s actual value in patriotism. I was only five and six years old during the Bicentennial, but I still vividly remember the energy of it. It was formative. A real sense of community and identity that even I could recognize, the sense that everyone I saw had at least something in common with me, and that spread outside of my town across hundreds of millions of other people. And it can’t be stressed enough that the mid-1970s were not a bright, optimistic period in American history. People had to put a lot of effort into remaining optimistic about the ideals of the country in the face of the reality.

As I got older, it felt increasingly hypocritical, at best, to even think about celebrating the United States. What is there to celebrate, when there’s never been any point in our history and even pre-history when the country wasn’t engaged in something deplorable? We were taught about the centuries-long history of anti-black racism from a fairly early age — even if it was often sugar-coated, diminished, or even spun into bullshit questions of “states rights” — but as we got older, we’d learn more about imperialism, isolationism, the excesses of capitalism, all of the various reasons that people have good reason to scoff at the idea of waving an American flag around.

But the idea that I keep coming back to is that we’ve ceded ownership of something great to the people who least deserve it. It’s especially easy to see now, as the corruption has been laid cartoonishly bare, and the worst people in America have abandoned the pretense of actually believing in anything the country is supposed to stand for. We have an exquisitely on-the-nose image in the form of 21st century ghoul Erica Kirk², glaring on podcasts while wearing a black cap with the word “FREEDOM” imperceptibly stitched across the front in black thread. We want to let these assholes control the definition of what America is?

That doesn’t feel progressive, or realistic, or even cynical, but just defeatist. Abandoning something essential just because it’s being exploited by the people who believe in it the least. Like deciding to give up GPS because flat-earthers use it.

I keep going back to the phrase “In order to form a more perfect union” from the US Constitution, both because I had it drilled into me in the form of a song, but also because it leads our founding document with an acknowledgement that things are perpetually in progress. You could just take it as nothing more than its immediate context — the Articles of Confederation didn’t work, so here’s attempt number two. Or you could take it as I do: an assertion from the onset that this country will never stop being an attempt to live up to an ideal.

That may even be part of why the new Soarin’ video feels bland and empty: it treats America as a place instead of an idea. Here’s where the Grand Canyon is, and also we have lighthouses and Hawai’i. We can be proponents of globalism, open borders, and free trade, and reject chauvinism or the idea of American superiority, and still believe that the US is more than just an arbitrary place.

It’s not an easy idea to capture adequately, without giving all the wrong connotations. Maybe it does require focusing more on people, and struggles, and protests, to really get it. Over the last year, we’ve seen that all of the attempts by the government to furiously rewrite the past, to obliterate all of the most shameful parts of our history, have also tried to obliterate the greatest achievements of the most marginalized people.

Maybe being a true American patriot means not being ashamed of the worst of our history, or in furious denial of it while insisting on American exceptionalism, but embracing the worst. Believing that people can eloquently express noble ideals even while doing reprehensible things. Acknowledging and doing more to celebrate the people who’ve been subjected to the worst offenses of the country, but still fought to bring the country closer to living up to its ideals.

Any time I think about giving up on the idea of America, I think of it as a slap in the face of all the people during the Civil Rights movement, who had real reason to hate the country, but still fought through the worst in order to make it better.

Maybe the only truly exceptional thing about the United States is that it’s not built on ethnicity and not built on geography, even though that’s what the people most likely to wrap themselves in the flag will tell you. It’s not even built on prosperity, even though people insist that the only thing that differentiates the US from any other democracy is privilege. I think it’s the struggle, and the work to live up to that ideal, and the invitation to anyone who wants to come and join in the work.

So my suggestion for a revised version of the Soarin‘ film: a group of people of every ethnicity, standing together in a golden plain or a mall parking lot, whichever’s easier, as a display of red, white, and blue fireworks over them spells out “America: At Least We’re Trying.”

2026-05-31 04:26:47

I’m fully prepared to acknowledge that you have to be in the right frame of mind to watch Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso, or Deep Red. I can absolutely recognize what other people see in it. I can imagine that it might’ve lived up to my high expectations if I’d watched it at a different time. I went in fully prepared to enjoy a lurid suspense thriller with all of the elements I love in Suspiria: bold colors, striking visuals, surreal and dream-like story, and absolutely phenomenal music.

And at the start, Deep Red seems like it’s going to deliver. It opens in a grand theater, and the camera moves through the lobby, past a few bored Italian men who’ve stepped out for a minute, and through huge deep red curtains to reveal a packed house watching three people alone at a table on a stage. A man with the most perfect mid-70s prog rock hair is explaining how it’s established science that many species use telepathy to communicate: butterflies, termites, and zebras. But it rarely exists in humans beyond childhood, with few rare exceptions. Like our guest, Mrs. Helga Ullman of Lithuania.

After a short demonstration of her telepathic talents, Mrs. Ullman is overcome by the thoughts of someone in the audience. The horrific, perverted thoughts of a murderer! After the panel concludes, she confides in her host that she saw enough to know the name of the murderer, just loudly enough for anyone still lurking in the theater to hear.

It’s all pretty great stuff. Melodramatic and weird, with an earnest suggestion of the paranormal, immediately dropping you into a world where everything is surreal and all the colors are turned up to maximum saturation.

I especially appreciated the details that went into a brief interlude, where we have the POV of the murderer inside the theater’s washroom. It’s all white tiled but dirty — not suggesting squalor so much as the idea that everything in Rome is impossibly ancient.¹ The killer looks into a rusted mirror which completely obscures their face; there’s only enough to suggest that you’re seeing things through their eyes. And a man asking them whether they need help is standing just outside the toilets, with nothing on the white walls besides the men’s/women’s icons on a sign, reminding you that we don’t yet even know the killer’s gender. They could be anyone!

It felt like everything working together in concert. But the rest of the movie never really lives up to that. It’s a lot of moments of brilliant imagery, or striking set design, or surreal intrigue, or a gruesome murder, or an imaginative composition or camera movement, that made me wish it were working in conjunction with everything else instead of just standing out as style for its own sake.

The bulk of the story centers on David Hemmings as Marcus, an English engineer living in Rome, who witnesses the (ending of the) murder of his neighbor while coming home one night. When a tenacious young female reporter photographs him with the police at the crime scene, she publishes his photo in the paper as the only eyewitness. This marks him as a target for the killer, so he sets off on his own to piece together the clues and solve the murder.

I said “on his own” even though the reporter (played by Daria Nicolodi, who became Argento’s partner and screenwriting collaborator after this movie) is also on the case, because I watched an edited version of Deep Red on Kanopy. As I understand it, the full version has at least 20 minutes more footage, largely building up the relationship between Hemmings’s and Nicolodi’s characters. I consider it a merciful cut, since I don’t miss the romance subplot a single bit.

The actors have zero chemistry, and the remaining suggestions of their budding romance feel awkward and out of place. I normally wouldn’t have said “young female reporter,” if not for the fact that there’s an overlong scene with clumsily-written “banter” between her and Marcus establishing her as a modern, independent woman, and him as an ostensibly charming male chauvinist. It ends with them arm wrestling.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve watched a string of movies that more or less demand that I watch them in the proper context and appreciate them for their strengths, and turn off the part of my brain that dismisses anything that doesn’t conform to my own tastes in scriptwriting or storytelling. So it’s possible that my brain had finally had enough, and it simply stopped tolerating anything that wasn’t a conventional movie.

As the best example: in what might be Deep Red‘s most well-known scene², someone is alone at home when they suspect that actually, they’re not alone at home, and after a lengthy build-up of suspense, they’re surprised by the sudden appearance of an extremely creepy mechanical puppet.

All of the components are there, and they’re pretty fantastic. Everything is shot and composed perfectly for maximum effect. The idea itself is great, as it works as a jump scare, but also lingers as unsettling since it’s so weird and creepy. It should have worked perfectly on me, and been the scene that won me over. But instead, I just kept thinking, “that makes absolutely no sense.” There’s just no plausible in-story explanation of how it was set up to happen, and thematically, it doesn’t even tie in with the killer’s usual schtick. It could’ve been a great scene in a different movie, but here, it just felt so out of place that I was taken out of it before the scene had even ended.

And Deep Red is full of moments like that. Scenes where it seems like everything is coming together and becoming something truly great, but it never quite coalesces.

There’s a sequence where Marcus is at home alone playing his piano when he suspects that someone is in the house with him. We get lots of close-up shots of the inner workings of the piano, his fingers on the keys, and suddenly, bits of plaster dust falling onto the piano from the ceiling. As the tension builds, and the telltale recording of creepy children’s music starts playing, we get an extreme close-up of his temple in profile, as we see a bead of sweat form. Again, they’re all terrific components of a well-crafted scene of suspense, but the mood always breaks before I can be fully pulled in.

And there’s a lot of Marcus exploring an abandoned and almost certainly haunted palazzo in the dark, as some fantastic prog rock plays on the soundtrack but never quite syncs with what’s actually happening on screen. This was Argento’s first collaboration with the band Goblin, and the music does a lot of heavy lifting throughout. None of it reaches the heights of Suspiria, probably because it feels as if they were still in the process of figuring out exactly how to combine the seemingly out-of-place music with the surreal visuals.

Even the more mundane scenes have these flashes of brilliance. There’s a small³ plaza outside of the apartment building, which we only ever see at night. On one side is a jazz club where Marcus’s friend Carlo seems to work, and it immediately evokes the painting Nighthawks — huge windows, with a few contemporary Romans standing inside, all but static. Against another wall, there’s an impossibly huge classical marble statue of a man lying on his side. During a conversation between Marcus and Carlo, the camera gradually pulls out to a wide shot, where the two are standing on either side of the frame, dominated by the statue positioned in the center.

In an even more straightforward walk-and-talk scene, Marcus and Carlo are going through a colonnade leading to that plaza, and they pass by several modern Romans standing silently and motionless looking through shop windows and the like. So much of the movie reminds you that Rome and its surroundings are ancient and huge, the scale of its architecture and its history dwarfing any contemporary people living there. It is constantly giving the impression that everyone there is surrounded by countless ghosts.

And a couple of the kills at the end of the movie have those flashes of surreal imagination and excess, and they’re really well done and perfectly in the spirit of what I’d expected from Deep Red. Especially one involving a garbage truck.

For me, the end result was that Deep Red feels like a collection of components for a genre-defining classic, but they weren’t assembled well enough to keep me from being thrown out of the movie, right as I was getting into it. Like with many Italian movies, none of the audio was recorded on set, and all of it was added afterwards. That always results in an uncanny disconnect, where even if an actor is speaking English — like most of the actors in Deep Red — the voice never quite matches perfectly with the image. I felt that disconnect throughout the movie, not just with the dialogue, but with everything.