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Not long after moving to New Orleans, I walked by a woman pushing a stroller that contained a possum wearing a birthday hat. I did what any reasonable person would do and texted basically everyone I knew about this remarkable event. A few years later, I entered a crowded bar looking for a seat and realized that the only stool not occupied by a human patron was acting as a perch for a large tropical bird. This time, I merely said “Excuse me” (to the bird) as I shuffled past in search of a spot in the back.

You see a lot of strange things in this city, and eventually most of them are no longer worth texting your friends about. At a certain point, you can stop really noticing. Unless you’re the New Orleans writer Nancy Lemann, for whom “the whole point of everything” is “to notice things more.” Lemann, who is seventy, and whose books have been largely out of print for the past two decades, is enjoying some notice this spring, as two of her early works, “Lives of the Saints” (1985) and “The Ritz of the Bayou” (1987), are being reissued, and a semi-fictional novel, “The Oyster Diaries,” is being published for the first time. The first of these—a cult favorite among writers, particularly youngish women writers—put Lemann on the map as a singular stylist, capable of crystalline insights into the miscreants and oddballs of the American South and great bursts of unrestrained sentiment. Sort of like if Charles Portis listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell.

“Lives of the Saints” is narrated by Louise Brown, who has recently returned to her native New Orleans after four years of college in the Northeast, as she catalogues the various symptoms of decay among members of her Southern aristocratic class. It opens at the wedding of Henry Laines and Mary Grace Stewart, where, we are told, everyone has breakdowns, “including the bride and groom. Especially the bride and groom.” Lest you miss the tenor of the evening, Louise continues, “Everyone was too drunk. Everyone was unglued.” This is all in the first three paragraphs, and the breakdowns—a capacious category that, for Lemann, seems to encompass everything from rages to amiable fugues—do not let up. They befall men and women, children and the elderly; later, an entire family is afflicted in a single afternoon. One begins to think that the condition is hereditary—that, instead of a Habsburg jaw, the wealthy white denizens of New Orleans high society are saddled with emotional problems. Louise describes Mrs. Stewart, the mother of the bride, as a woman who “could spend an entire afternoon talking about what hat she wore when she was fifteen,” and Mrs. Stewart’s mother-in-law, rather fortuitously, as a woman for whom “there was no subject dearer to [her] heart than the subject of what hat she wore when she was fifteen.” Two pages later, the elder woman is telling Louise about a “little red hat” she wore in the summer of 1912.

Amid the sweltering heat and almost menacingly lush greenery, Louise compiles an exquisite taxonomy of local types. Mary Grace, who “had the spark of divine fire, which you find in a face not quite pretty enough,” is described as “the type of girl you see being dragged screaming from a convertible sports car outside of the bar at the Lafayette Hotel at three in the morning by her father and brothers.” An adorably irritating young child is introduced as “the type of person who would run into the house on weekday mornings and slide under the dining room table and make racing-car noises while everyone was trying to eat breakfast.” Louise, you could say, is the type of girl who likes to imagine a category of person with a sole inhabitant.

Familiarity breeds peevishness, and Louise is able to so precisely classify the “hysterics,” “catastrophes,” and “lunatics” of her milieu because they are too close for her own comfort. She is an observer and a product of a certain pathological excess: too much heat and too much booze, too much money and too much free time, all among people who live too much in the past and know too much about one another. The novel is like a sweaty, Southern “Brideshead Revisited,” being both about the dying world of a once triumphant class whose rule was never justified, and about how terrible it is to fall in love with a Catholic.

Here, the Catholic is Claude Collier, who has many sterling qualities, despite his fondness for hanging out with “wino lunatics, dissipated businessmen, crooked politicians, demented young lawyers, debutantes, alcoholics, and sleazy men.” Louise has known him since childhood, and his father, Mr. Collier, an eccentric lawyer, has acted as a sort of surrogate parent to her. In Claude—a wayward young man whom everyone nonetheless finds promising—Louise sees a vessel for her remaining idealism. He can hardly enter a scene without her near-ecstatic mention of his virtues: in the glow of Louise’s admiration, his profligacy becomes generosity, his indifference to the chaos around him a calm simplicity, his aversion to literature a sign of a more soul-deep wisdom. “It was the air about him, gentle and uncorrupt, some steady, noble thing,” she observes. He was “simply better than most people in his heart, and you could look up to him.”

Louise loves Claude in the way that you love someone when you are in your early twenties and have a job proofreading an eight-hundred-page book titled “Texas Business Law”: with blazing, idiotic conviction. But Lemann, to her credit, does not play this for laughs. You believe Louise when she declares, “My heart was not trained to love anyone but him. I could only love one person. This was my innate principle.” Those who have gone about their lives without falling for such a dissipated trap of a person may wonder how she could be so naïve. But the inevitability of doom does not lessen its impact. Like the unseemly family wealth that funds all those gin-soaked garden parties, or the nameless Black maids on their periphery, some truths are willfully ignored in the haze of romantic self-conception.

“One deception can be traded for another, greatness and betrayal lie beside each other closely intertwined,” Lemann writes early on in her next book, “The Ritz of the Bayou,” suggesting that she has learned a few things. The book, a work of nonfiction that began as an assignment for Vanity Fair, is ostensibly about the governor of Louisiana being charged with bribery and corruption, but it serves primarily as a way to turn Lemann’s eye for disgrace and disrepair to a broader set of social circumstances. She is less interested in outlining the facts of the case—Governor Edwin Edwards and seven associates, including his brother and nephew, were indicted for fraud and bribery related to an alleged scheme that involved selling state hospital permits—than in painting the various scenes and characters in and around it. “There is so much human frailty floating around that it is a dramatic thing to see,” Lemann writes. “I had never seen so much of it, all at once, and it was a sort of breathtaking spectacle.”

The book is told through a whirlwind series of vignettes, some no longer than a few sentences: one minute Lemann is making an arch observation about the Louisiana Board of Ethics, the next she is in raptures about trees. Always, her eye is drawn away from the spectacle of the trial and toward the people who make spectacles of themselves. This includes the notoriously charming Governor Edwards, often accompanied by his “long-suffering wife” and “bombshell daughter,” the Governor’s nephew (“fraud defendant by day, cocktail bar pianist by night”), a stereotypically Southern lawyer named Pappy Triche, and the “jazz-crazed assistant prosecutor,” who appears everywhere but inside the courtroom. Also in the mix are the Governor’s many female admirers who show up to watch the trial, and a gaggle of fellow-reporters, one of whom eventually becomes Lemann’s lover. Despite the seriousness of the charges, she reports, “a lot of people in the courtroom were psychotically jolly.”

But Lemann herself is a bit confounded, at least when she arrives. The outcome of the trial seems foreseeable early on. “The Prosecutor was not winning when he moralized about the Governor, who is known for gambling, womanizing, and risqué bon mots, for people hold few things as dear as those,” she notes dryly. Prospective jurors have a litany of poor excuses: illness, the possibility that a nephew knows the Governor, constipation. Everything is taking too long: “The Prosecutor had sixty-five witnesses. We were on number three at the time. Reporters sometimes grew depressed.” Lemann finds an unexpected bright spot in an attorney named Camille Gravel, who, she has heard, managed to tame the wildness of his youth and is now the most dignified and elegant man in the whole city—a rare home-town boy who made good.

The real action happens outside of the courtroom—at the Cairo Club, or the bar at the Lafayette Hotel, or F&M Patio Bar—where the heat and the music and the drinks have a way of bringing Lemann back to herself. “You may be filled with longing and unease, but one thing you know—when you are there, your ticker’s back in business,” she writes. Though the events of “The Ritz of the Bayou” play out in the course of almost a year, reading the book feels like spending one long night out with a brilliant stranger you’ve met at a bar, one who can tell you the kinds of stories you would hopelessly mangle if you attempted to repeat them.

Not everyone thought that this was a good thing. The critic James Wolcott, in his introduction to the book, recounts being in the office of Tina Brown, who was the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair at the time, when she first received Lemann’s draft, and how Brown was “dissatisfied—borderline exasperated—with the copy.” Lemann had not included any facts or details about the trial. She forgot to mention what the charges even were. In fairness to Brown, this is true. Instead of legal analysis, Lemann writes extensively in the book about a man she meets on the train who insists on calling her his “little shrimp remoulade.” There is a whole section devoted to a secret committee for an even more secret Mardi Gras social club, the purpose of which was to draw up psychological profiles of prospective members based on drawings they did of a horse. In return for her weird, digressive, and highly mannered manuscript, Lemann received a kill fee. The implication is that she got distracted and failed to notice the most important things. But this is precisely wrong. It is only because Lemann turns her gaze to the things that really matter to her—how people act, and what they believe in spite of the facts facing them—that the book feels like a small miracle. And she gets away with it in the same way Governor Edwards did: with an abundance of style.

New Orleans looks a little different forty years later, and so does Lemann. Her new book, “The Oyster Diaries,” finds a Lemann-esque woman named Delery Anhalt, originally from New Orleans, now living in a tony D.C. neighborhood, having traded her wastrel youth for a respectable late middle age. (Parts of the book initially appeared as first-person pieces in Harper’s Magazine and The Paris Review.) As the novel opens, Delery becomes, in her typical fashion, “riddled with disgrace on a minute-by-minute basis.” At first, her despair is a little hard to fathom. She has two woke daughters who find her politics retrograde, in-laws who annoy her, and a husband whom she loves, though in her description of that love you begin to suspect where we’ll find trouble: “The ordinary things he left in his wake, like his allergy-ridden Kleenex strewn among the bedsheets, had emanated that strange radiance to me, as if they were the relics of saints.”

We learn that Delery’s saintly husband is capable of profound betrayal, the kind that makes you “mentally nauseous to think of.” She couldn’t see what was right in front of her. So she heads home to New Orleans, where she revels in memories of a youthful fling she once had with a man in whom she observed “a loping generosity and angelic self-effacement that dispelled my doubts in man.” His name, as it happens, is Claude Collier. This Claude Collier is twenty-eight, a year older than the one we first meet in “Lives of the Saints.” This Claude Collier woos Delery and eventually marries the “long-suffering” Louise, who leaves him years later. This Claude Collier takes a job at his father’s law firm after Mr. Collier dies of a heart attack, opting to stay in New Orleans rather than abruptly disappearing as he does at the end of “Lives of the Saints.”

It’s probably for the best that Mr. Collier is killed off here, since many of his most memorable qualities—a love of the law, a Yankee transplant wife, a habit of eating oysters every day at noon at the Pearl—have been given to another character, Delery’s father, August Anhalt. These enduring quirks have their origin in Lemann’s life: in “The Ritz of the Bayou,” she writes about her father, an eccentric lawyer who appears as “the courtroom philosopher,” and who keeps a log with the date and grade (B+, C) of the oysters he eats every day at the Pearl.

“This story does not start at the same old party,” Lemann writes in the final section of “The Oyster Diaries.” “I would have to be the same old girl for that.” And yet the story does start again. Claude Collier is once again generous and noble. Lemann, like the talkative older ladies of her youth, clutches the motifs of her past like talismans. Her tendency to repeat herself, the compulsion that gives her work such a musical quality and that has so confounded reviewers (“Why does she so persistently and jarringly use repetitions?” a critic wrote in the L.A. Times in 1987), is both her greatest tool and her greatest theme. Perhaps, she suggests, repetition could be seen less as a compulsion than as a mark of inimitable style. A pair of women at a wedding can once more discuss the hats they wore at fifteen. A lawyer can eat oysters every day at noon at the Pearl, and can show up in three different books doing exactly that. Like a warm summer night or a third cocktail, Lemann lulls and envelops you. Like a breakdown, she lets you get carried away. ♦

Our go-to tale of resistance to technology is the story of the Luddites: In England in the early nineteenth century, skilled weavers and craftsmen found their livelihoods threatened by automated machinery, so they began to attack textile factories, destroying the machinery with hammers. Less familiar are the revolutionaries who used large clubs to smash thousands of hanging lanterns on the streets of Paris in 1830, in rebellion against gas lights as a form of state surveillance; or the Committee for the Liquidation or Subversion of Computers, a.k.a. CLODO, a gang that set fire to magnetic data cards and computer programs in the Toulouse offices of Philips Informatique in 1980. Members of the latter group identified themselves as information-technology workers and described their attack as “an intelligent act of sabotage,” opposing the “dangers of IT and telematics.” (The French, with their strong culture of protest, seem particularly adept at fighting the encroachments of technology.) CLODO continued to express their dissent by bombing the regional computer archives of Haute-Garonne, decrying a “society where we connect like trains in a rail yard, desperately hoping to reduce chance.” They saw digital recordkeeping as a kind of existential imprisonment, locking humanity in a cage of data. As invention rolls on, so do ingenious acts of destruction, attempts to halt so-called technological progress in the name of the organic and the soulful.

These rebels, among others, are the stars of “Techno-Negative” (University of Minnesota Press), a provocative and enjoyable new book by Thomas Dekeyser, a professor of human geography at the University of Southampton. In it, Dekeyser assembles a history and taxonomy of the refusal of technologies, even ones that humans had come to depend on in their daily lives. The techno-negative attitude involves “longing for the dismantling of what sustains you,” he writes. Yearning to light some tech on fire is a relatable feeling these days, as generative artificial intelligence promises to supplant nearly every form of non-physical labor, social media wreaks havoc on the mental health of young people, and massive data centers loom as environmental blights. Dekeyser’s assembled stories may not offer a how-to manual, but they do provide inspiration for thinking against today’s dominant technologies. The book proceeds through three themed sections charting, respectively, state policies that regulate technology (“Sovereignty”); individual efforts to sabotage new technologies (“Revolt”); and attempts to escape from society’s technologized condition (“Withdrawal”). Dekeyser ultimately calls for “techno-abolitionism,” a process of deconstructing the aura of inevitability around new technologies. This is a somewhat abstruse goal, aiming not to stop technological change but to remake its character. At the book’s conclusion Dekeyser offers a tidy manifesto that may urge us on: “There is insufficient hatred for this technological world.” I could get a tattoo of that line, or at least use it as my iPhone background.

In antiquity, technology was literally demonized, so there was no stigma in positioning oneself against it. For all the ancient Greeks’ knowledge, they created curiously little in the way of lasting machines. This may be explained by the negative connotation of technē, their word for the practice of skilled crafts and engineering. Technē “had brought something dark, possibly sinister, into the world, something that must, for as long as possible, be kept at bay,” Dekeyser writes of the prevailing attitude. Out of a kind of “pathological narcissism,” he adds, the Greeks may have feared that machines would displace humanity, which they considered the height of beauty; anyway, they had enough human slaves who needed to be kept occupied and oppressed that they didn’t really need robots. The medieval Catholic Church associated technology with the devilish temptation of pride; one twelfth-century historian accused Pope Sylvester II of using magic that he’d learned in Islamic Spain to call forth a demon and have it build an omniscient talking statue head that helped him to become Pope. (Sylvester had evil statuary; we have ChatGPT.) “Sinfulness is the hidden condition of technology,” Dekeyser writes, summarizing the Church’s posture. Amen!

With the birth of early modernity, which is to say, the advent of industrial capitalism, ideological skepticism toward technology gave way to technology becoming a tool of the state. As soon as tech proved that it could reproduce capital more efficiently than a human worker, it was given more protections than the worker, attaining an exalted status. (According to a seventeenth-century law in Vienna, you could get a hand cut off for messing with street lanterns.) The history of struggle against technology is also the history of struggle over what makes the human different from the machine. The labor movement undertook two fights, resisting workers being displaced by machines but also resisting workers being treated as machines, subhuman fodder fuelling technological progress. Techno-negativity represents the desire to opt out of technology and its (perhaps illusory) narrative of improvement, as Osei Bonsu, the early-nineteenth-century African king of Ashanti, did when he declined a gift of mechanical devices such as a lathe, a watch, and a music box from the British. Colonial technology came for his kingdom, regardless, and the forces of modernity ended up demonizing those who didn’t embrace technology as backward and uncivilized. The protagonists of “Techno-Negative” may find contemporary adherents among those who seek out older, slower, less efficient forms of technology—after all, bricking our smartphones is its own kind of rebellion.

Dekeyser is a crisp and forceful writer, though nonacademic readers may find themselves sometimes lost in the verbiage of theory. (The lantern smashers, he writes, “open up the strategic-affective possibilities of a politics of the unknown.”) Still, there’s more solace to be found in the history traced by “Techno-Negative” than in many more mainstream literary critiques of technology. Our hatred of social media or of artificial intelligence is not some novel phenomenon, Dekeyser reminds us; it’s a feeling that has existed in some form across millennia. Resistance seems less futile when it is part of a shared tradition, though “Techno-Negative” is more focussed on tracing a lineage than on judging the efficacy of anti-technology movements past. Many of the stories in the book are tragic Icarus narratives, featuring acts of rebellion that succeed in one brief ecstatic burst, and then resoundingly fail. We know from history that the Luddites were not successful; indeed, over time their name became (undeservedly!) a shorthand for technological dummies. CLODO’s fires did not stop digital recordkeeping; its members could scarcely have imagined a modern world in which, say, user-generated location data from Pokémon Go is being used to train automated delivery robots. But the ancient Greeks may have had a point with their suppression of ​​technē after all. ♦

There’s no making sense of “The Drama” without discussing its supposedly big twist, which was just about unavoidable online even before the movie opened. Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) meet cute in a coffee shop in Boston. Zip ahead two years: they’re engaged and about to marry when, in the course of a wine-soaked evening with two friends, Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim), everyone discloses the worst thing they’ve ever done. Only Emma’s confession makes an impression: fifteen years ago, at the age of fifteen, she planned a mass shooting at her high school and nearly went through with it—but instead abandoned the plan and quickly became an anti-gun-violence activist. Rachel, whose cousin is in a wheelchair because of a school shooter, is outraged. Charlie is both horrified that his intended life partner could harbor such monstrous inclinations and terrified that she might get violent with him. He appears reluctant to marry Emma but doesn’t dare back out. Instead, he goes through the motions of preparing for the wedding as his panicky behavior becomes increasingly reckless. Of course, the wedding turns into a powder keg of secrets, and the orderly proceedings blow up in the protagonists’ faces and leave a trail of emotional and physical pain.

Two factors have launched “The Drama” to a level of commercial success and critical praise far surpassing the artistry that its writer and director, Kristoffer Borgli, brings to it. The first is the star power of its lead actors, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, whose presence exemplifies stardom: they’re more interesting to watch than anything the script gives them to say or do. The second is the extensive armchair sociology that the film has inspired. On its cinematic merits alone, the film would never have generated the profusion of think pieces, explainers, debates, and interviews that have both probed and promoted it in recent weeks. It has succeeded in projecting itself outside the screen and into culture at large not by conjuring a persuasive romantic relationship or amply imagined characters but by posing a series of hypothetical moral challenges akin to trolley problems, all of a similar (and woefully unexamined) abstraction. As a result, “The Drama” plays like an extended internet trolling that exists solely to stimulate discourse. This achievement, dubious though it may be, depends upon a cleverly crafted story that builds drama with an astonishing, risible lack of inwardness, by fabricating an illusion of subjectivity. Through flashbacks and leaps ahead in time, fragmentation and fantasy scenes, the film simulates complexity while endowing its characters with mere crumbs of knowledge and experience. Viewers follow this meagre trail methodically, greedily, with heads down, driven by compulsive curiosity. The script is less of a narrative than an addictive algorithm.

Where the recent “Wuthering Heights” attracted attention for its apparent resuscitation of the romance genre, “The Drama” shows why romance hardly exists in current movies except as sidebars and subplots. Love has always been complicated—that’s why John Cassavetes’s movies are enduring landmarks of unpopular art, and why the Hays Code collapsed—but relationships were once, by consensus, straightforwardly observable on film. Today, relationships are no more intrinsically complicated than they ever were, but their verbal and visual basis in texting and social media makes them trickier to depict onscreen. To represent them substantially in the movies requires an original and creative approach to form—starting with script construction and continuing through the way that these varieties of in-person and virtual communications are filmed and displayed onscreen. Thus love, a common experience, enters the category of the extraordinary, demanding higher levels of artistry from filmmakers. With “The Drama,” Borgli does the opposite of rising to the occasion, engineering the movie to avoid dealing with his characters’ teeming and tangled inner lives. He reduces enormous swaths of experience, both personal and public, past and present, face to face and digitally mediated, to inhuman abstractions.

Emma was twenty-eight when she and Charlie met. In the two years between then and the run-up to their wedding, did Charlie never do an online search to find out who he was getting involved with? And, even if not, did this couple never talk about who they were in high school, what people from back then would remember them for? Did Charlie never meet Emma’s family or visit her home town? Have their two years together been a hermetically sealed black box of present-tense activity? Even in the present tense, the characters express no political opinions, taste in movies and music, hobbies—or backstories that shape such inclinations. “The Drama” depicts a couple who have supposedly been together for two years, yet they seem to know each other about as well as a pair of strangers thrown together a few days ago.

This calculated void is built into the movie’s elaborate editing, a striking ruse that’s built to yield puzzle-like solutions. After the coffee-shop meet-cute, the movie cuts two years ahead, to Charlie’s fancy duplex apartment, where he and Mike are working on Charlie’s wedding speech, referring to the early days of his romance with Emma and showing them in flashback. In other words, the entirety of the two-year relationship is boiled down to the few sweet and catchy reminiscences that Charlie offers (along with a joke about his inappropriate wish to talk about their sex life, which he avoids doing, though not before a quick montage of the couple in a variety of positions emphasizes his satisfaction). The apocalyptic gathering at which the two couples confess their worst deeds is fuelled by another cheap dichotomy: en route, Emma and Charlie think that they spot their wedding d.j., Pauline (Sydney Lemmon), smoking heroin on a street corner. Charlie is sure, Emma is less so—and Charlie unhesitatingly wants to fire Pauline, whereas Emma is both less judgmental and less fretful, arguing that what they saw or didn’t see has little bearing on the d.j.’s fitness to work at their wedding. Mike and Rachel take Charlie’s side; when Emma poses a glass-houses challenge (haven’t you ever done anything bad?), the parlor game of confessions is unleashed.

While watching “The Drama,” I found myself pushing hard against the narrow bounds of its characters and imagining a movie that faces complex relationships and experiences unflinchingly. The very setup suggests a screenwriter whose sense of psychology is defined with arid literalism by his own just-so, cut-to-fit contrivances. There are hints tossed out to suggest his characters’ inner recesses. For instance, Rachel, the maid of honor, isn’t a longtime friend of Emma’s; she got to know Emma only in the past two years, through Charlie—and, in her snarky speech at the wedding, Rachel wonders, vengefully, whether Emma has any “real friends.” Moreover, Emma tells Rachel and a colleague named Alice (Hannah Gross) that Charlie is her first love, and explains her late blooming in romance by noting that she used to be “ugly.” Just enough of Emma’s high-school experiences are seen in flashback to suggest other troubles—such as her experience as a Black student in a predominantly white school in Louisiana. She speaks of being socially outcast, and we see snippets of her enduring physical aggression and insults from other kids—conspicuously, not from Black kids, but the subject of her racial identity never comes up explicitly. The flashbacks to Emma’s adolescence, which Borgli films with some curiosity, are far more engaging than the film’s depictions of the chatty Boston bourgeoisie, which exude self-satisfied certainty. His failure to delve deeper into these flashback scenes and situations is as striking as their undeveloped implications.

Charlie’s subjectivity is played as a sick joke: once he learns of Emma’s grim unrealized plan, he can’t stop imagining Emma—both the thirty-year-old woman he’s about to marry and the fifteen-year-old girl (played by Jordyn Curet), whom he’s seen in an old photo—bearing a rifle. He pictures himself romancing both Emmas, at both ages, while they’re armed. Pattinson manages to convey Charlie’s unease without relying on any such crude touches, but the movie abounds in them. In his job, as a museum curator, Charlie receives a book of art photos of women with guns. The wedding photographer (Zoë Winters) insistently talks of “shooting” the couple and their families, which—quickly following flashbacks to the armed teen Emma—plays like a crude double entendre. While the couple is at a florist’s, Charlie hears a gaggle of people running in the street and assumes that they’re fleeing danger. At the wedding itself, a d.j.’s cable bursts with a gunshot-like sound. Such moments hint at comedy, but Borgli plays them humorlessly, as authentic stresses and additional wedges driving the couple apart. The people around them are no help: Rachel and Mike react with shock at Emma’s revelation, and when Charlie consults his colleague Misha (Hailey Benton Gates), she tosses off the word “psychopath” and says that she would call the police.

To the extent that there’s comedy here, it’s as irony: the world at large begins to reflect Charlie’s quandary back to him in incidental details that would otherwise go unnoticed. Those reflections of his private concerns are what “The Drama” offers in lieu of any actual public realm, any politics, any discussion of ideas or ideals. The protagonists are ultimately constructed like robots, accreting no more experiences or traits or memories than they’re programmed to have. The charismatic presence of both the leading and supporting actors doesn’t so much fill out the personalities as substitute for them. For all of its intricacy, the film’s editing conceals a void of disrespect for its characters, for experience, history, emotion, and the cinematic image itself. In its febrile moralism and its facile op-ed-ification, it pontificates about how we live now, but it has no life at all. ♦

An A.I. video recently released by supporters of the Iranian government begins with a robed Shiite Muslim warrior approaching the White House on a stormy night, clutching an ornate split-bladed sword. In the next scene, the weapon slides across President Donald Trump’s cheek. Generated images depict present-day Iranian soldiers defending oil facilities under attack and capturing a U.S. aircraft carrier. Another group pays respects to the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading religious figure for millions of Shiites around the world, before launching what appears to be a suicide mission against enemies in Humvees. Then other soldiers attack oil tankers from speedboats as ballistic missiles launch out of a gold-domed mosque, and explosives-laden drones target Dubai. “You can’t kill people who are ready to die for their cause,” the narrator says in English, addressing the U.S. “The Shia are prepared to be martyrs in the cause of their faith. It is the Islamic Republic of Iran that they are defending—not just their land, not just their culture, not just their history, but their faith.”

As the Trump Administration prepares for a possible ground invasion of Iran, the Iranian regime and its loyalists are waging a propaganda war, using motifs of religion, self-sacrifice, and glory, through dozens of videos like this one that are circulating on social media. Many troll Trump and are designed to motivate Shiite Muslims in Iran and around the world. Others are in English and attempt to influence global public opinion, including in the United States, where the war is increasingly unpopular among most Americans. While these A.I. memes are built for dissemination on the modern internet, the reliance on religious iconography and references to martyrdom originate from a different era: the last time Iran was invaded by a foreign power. In the nineteen-eighties, the country fought a brutal eight-year war against Iraq, whose government was backed by the U.S., the Soviet Union, and much of the Arab world. The lessons learned from that conflict still guide the regime and its powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps more than four decades later. The Iran-Iraq War “is a vast reservoir of resilience memory from which to draw on,” Hussein Banai, an Iran expert and professor of international studies at Indiana University Bloomington, told me. Iran saw “that it could stand up to the United States, but also to other countries that are backed by American power. The narrative of that war is really what’s driven a sense of purpose, especially for the Revolutionary Guard.”

On Sunday, Trump vowed to strike Iran’s power plants and bridges if by Tuesday night the regime doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz. A defiant Iran replied that it would not open the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas flows, unless the U.S. pays for war damages. And it warned that it would retaliate “much more crushingly and extensively.” The morning before the deadline, Trump posted on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” adding that “we will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.” Meanwhile, thousands of U.S. ground forces, including U.S. Special Operations Forces, seaborne marines and élite Army paratroopers, with experience in seizing strategic terrain during rapid-response combat missions, have arrived in the Middle East. Over the weekend, the risks of operating on the ground were laid bare when Iran shot down a U.S. F-15E fighter jet, and the two airmen in the plane ejected over the southwestern part of Iran. Later, a second, low-flying U.S. warplane, an A-10 Warthog that was part of a mission to rescue the F-15E pilot, was hit multiple times, but its pilot managed to fly out of Iran and eject safely over Kuwaiti airspace before it crashed. A U.S. HH-60W Jolly Green II combat helicopter also came under heavy fire; its crew sustained minor injuries but were able to leave Iranian airspace without mishap. While the pilot of the F-15E was rescued shortly after ejecting, the second airman, an Air Force weapons officer, fled into a mountainous region, where he climbed mountain ridges several thousand feet high, despite being injured, and successfully evaded Iranian forces for more than a day. He hid in a rock crevice and activated an emergency beacon to signal his location, setting off a sprawling mission deep inside Iran which involved commandos from SEAL Team Six, hundreds of other military personnel, and a hundred and fifty-five aircraft, including sixty-four fighters, forty-eight refuelling tankers, thirteen rescue aircraft, and four bombers. After the weapons officer was located, two U.S. transport planes that had landed at a remote forward operating base inside Iran to extract the team and the airman experienced mechanical problems, and three other planes had to be dispatched to extract them hours later. Before leaving, the team blew up the immobilized aircraft to prevent sophisticated technology from falling into Iranian hands. At a White House press conference on Monday, Trump acknowledged that the operation was “a risky decision, because we could have ended up with a hundred dead, as opposed to one or two. It’s a hard decision to make, but in the United States military we leave no American behind.”

While no U.S. service members died in the rescue, the chaos of operating inside Iran’s border is just a preview of what a full-scale ground invasion, or even limited incursions, would look like—and the Iran-Iraq War can offer a blueprint. U.S. troops could quickly find themselves fighting a guerrilla conflict against Iranian forces who deploy tactics and strategies developed during Iraq’s invasion and further honed in succeeding regional and internal conflicts. That war’s extreme death toll and the lingering memories of being occupied by a foreign force have established a mind-set that could galvanize more Iranians to support a war against an invading American force, including those who were opposed to the regime before the U.S.-Israel attack. “Those affiliated with the state know that the one thing that united everybody in post-revolutionary moments was the Iraqi invasion of Iran,” Amir Moosavi, a professor at Rutgers University-Newark who specializes in the cultural history of the Middle East, told me. The regime, Moosavi said, uses “this language of resistance to cultivate a culture of remembrance about that conflict,” which was “the first act of resistance that Iran had against the U.S. and its regional allies. It’s an evolving language that is now being used and updated for the current conflict.”

In the propaganda video, the narrator mentions the core Shiite religious figures Imam Hussein and Ali, the first Shiite Imam, as well as the Battle of Karbala, a seventh-century uprising by Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, against a tyrant named Yazid. During the confrontation, Hussein and his followers were massacred, but the imam’s quest for justice became a defining value of Shiite identity, fostering a sense of revolutionary duty to fight oppressors at any cost. Even the split-bladed sword the A.I. warrior carries outside of the White House, known as the sword of Zulfiqar, has religious connotations: it belonged to Imam Ali and symbolizes resistance and martyrdom. Trump, the narrator claims, “has no clue” about the Battle of Karbala or Shiite philosophies or their imprint on the current war. “The Islamic Republic is invincible at this moment,” he declares as the video ends with an apocalyptic scene of missiles raining chaos down on central Tel Aviv.

On September 23, 1980, one day after launching strikes on Iraqi ground forces crossed into Khuzestan, a strategic western province that contained Iran’s largest oil field and a considerable number of Iranian Arabs, a minority in the country. The previous year, the Islamic Revolution had deposed Iran’s Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and installed the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and an ultraconservative Shiite theocracy. From the very start of the attack by the U.S. and Israel in February, there were striking parallels to Iraq’s invasion. Before Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s dictator, declared war on Iran, he feared that the fledgling theocracy next door would export its hard-line ideology and marshal Iraq’s Shiite majority to topple his Sunni-dominated Baathist regime. Like Trump, he viewed crushing Iran as a great service to the region—in his case, by shielding the Sunni Arab world from Shiite expansionism. Iraq took advantage of the Iranian military’s disarray in the aftermath of the revolution. It launched air strikes on Iranian airbases, fired hundreds of Scud missiles at Iranian cities, including Tehran, and targeted Iran’s oil-and-energy infrastructure, in moves reminiscent of today’s extensive U.S.-Israeli campaign to degrade the regime’s military capabilities and resilience. The U.S., the Soviet Union, and France would eventually provide intelligence and advanced weaponry to Iraq. Iran’s Air Force and military fought back, but isolated by the world and under U.S. and international sanctions, they had to scramble for spare parts for its warplanes and military equipment. Like Trump, Saddam Hussein expected a quick, decisive victory. He believed that by imposing large numbers of casualties on Iran, including chemical attacks on civilians, he could break the regime’s morale and force it to agree to his demands. He urged Iranians to rise against the government. Instead, they remained loyal to the Ayatollah. Saddam, like Trump, underestimated Iran’s fierce response and its determination to survive at any cost.

Lacking conventional military resources to fight Saddam’s army, Iran turned to asymmetric warfare, fighting back through low-cost methods. Its strategy was clear: to endure and survive, it needed to prolong the war and gradually wear down Iraq and its allies. This meant conducting guerrilla attacks and cobbling together missiles and warplanes to shell Iraqi cities. And when Iraq bombed Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil-export hub, the regime retaliated, bombing Iraqi oil facilities and later using improvised mines and missiles to target ships carrying Iraqi crude in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran also spied on Iraqi positions with rudimentary precursors to drones, an early use of one of the regime’s most effective weapons in its attempt to blockade the strait. The rhetoric used by the regime was telling: Fighting the invaders was not just a matter of national defense, but a pre-ordained religious mandate." Iranians called the war the “sacred defense,” or the “imposed war,” and the conflict was framed as a modern-day Battle of Karbala. The religious branding of the war motivated hundreds of thousands of Iranians to join the Basij, or “mobilization” in Farsi, a volunteer militia that is now one of the most powerful paramilitary forces in the country, and made martyrdom an honor.

By December, 1980, these tactics had stalled Iraq’s advance. And by June, 1982, Iran had pushed Iraqi forces back across the border. But the war lasted six more years, much of it in a military stalemate. In 1988, with Iran facing battlefield setbacks, a lack of military resources, and economic ruin, Khomeini was forced to sign a U.N.-brokered ceasefire. As many as six hundred thousand Iranians had died in the conflict. He famously described the decision as “more deadly than drinking from a poisoned chalice.” But the regime survived, and Iran avoided losing any of its territory. It declared a moral and religious victory. This past Sunday, Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, based in Washington, D.C., wrote in a post on X that, at that time, “Iran faced existential economic pressure and was offered a concrete diplomatic exit that did not require it to abandon its revolutionary identity. Trump has offered the pressure without a clear exit.”

The relative success of the war elevated the Revolutionary Guard from a small, street-level militia, initially created to protect Khomeini and the other clerics at the forefront of the Islamic Revolution, into the symbolic defenders of the theocracy. “The Iran-Iraq War was what the Great Patriotic War was for the Soviet Union and for Russia,” Michael Connell, an analyst who specializes in the Iranian military at C.N.A., a D.C.-based nonprofit research organization, told me, referring to the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazi Germany. “It was a coming of age, really, for the I.R.G.C., and for the regular military in Iran, because so many of the leaders that have shaped those organizations for the past few decades got their start during the war.”

These leaders spent the next four decades preparing for another major invasion, specifically one by the United States. The regime had never portrayed the war with Iraq as a bilateral fight but, rather, as a proxy war led by the U.S. and its Arab allies. I.R.G.C. commanders became Iran’s most powerful generals—many are still leading the war today—and the Iranian military focussed on improving its asymmetric war capabilities and building its own defense industry. That included ballistic missiles, in addition to low-cost mines and drones. To project power and deterrence, the regime also launched a nuclear program and influenced regional wars with a network of proxy forces in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza. As Iransaw it, “The only existential threat to the Iranians was the U.S., and secondarily Israel,” Connell said. They spent decades studying “how the U.S. operates, looking for vulnerabilities, looking for ways that they could invest resources into things that would deliver more bang for the buck.”

Today, the soldiers killed in the Iran-Iraq War are still memorialized in town and city squares across the country. Every September, the regime celebrates “Sacred Defense Week” to commemorate the start of the war and honor the dead with military parades. In schools, the war is taught in such a way as to instill the values of resistance and martyrdom in children, as well as a distrust of America and the West.

The U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has said that the U.S. can achieve its objectives in Iran without using ground troops But Trump has sent mixed signals and has publicly said he likes to keep opponents guessing about his intentions. In either case, the Iranian regime seems to be prepared, militarily and in its messaging. In a social-media post in late March, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, wrote, “How can the US, which can’t even protect its own soldiers at its bases in the region and instead leaves them stashed away in hotels and parks, protect them on our soil?” For decades, the I.R.G.C. and other forces have regularly conducted military exercises and drills to prepare for a ground invasion. Today, Iran has roughly six hundred and ten thousand active-duty soldiers, including a hundred and ninety thousand I.R.G.C. members, and it can draw upon approximately another million Basij fighters. There are reports that the I.R.G.C. is sending reinforcements to Kharg Island, through which ninety per cent of Iran’s oil exports flow, and bolstering its defenses, including planting sea mines to slow down an amphibious landing. Other U.S. targets could potentially include territory in or near the Strait of Hormuz, with the aim of ending Iran’s closure of economically vital shipping lanes, and also sites where Iran has stockpiled its enriched uranium.

In 2003, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, American combat troops slipped over remote borders without stiff resistance and struck the military’s nerve center in Baghdad, debilitating Saddam’s command-and-control systems. In Iran, a similar scenario is unlikely. The regime has set up a decentralized “mosaic” defense system with I.R.G.C. and regular Army command posts spread out across the country, replete with their own intelligence capabilities and supplies of missiles, drones, and other advanced weaponry. Lower-level commanders have the authority to conduct certain types of operations without approval from central command, if contact with Tehran is disrupted or lost–an operational guideline stemming from Iran's observations of how the US attacked Iraq. Multiple Iranian units, including the Basij, could be used to swarm U.S. troops. “Let’s say you were invading the South, it’s not kids from Tehran or some other place that are manning bases,” Afshon Ostovar, the author of “Wars of Ambition: The United States, Iran, and the Struggle for the Middle East” told me. “It’s all kids from the local neighborhoods. They know the terrain, they know the valleys, they know the caves, they know the roads. That gives them a certain advantage. And Iran has also learned, not just from the Iran-Iraq War, but from the Iraq War during the U.S. occupation, some of the vulnerabilities of U.S. ground forces.”

American ground units could face battlefield scenarios similar to those they faced in Iraq. Qasem Soleimani, the former head of the Quds Force, a wing of the I.R.G.C., who was assassinated by the U.S. in 2020, was the primary architect of the offensives used by Iran-backed Shiite militias to kill hundreds of American troops during the Iraq War. This included planting powerful bombs known as Explosively Formed Penetrators that can rip through U.S. armored vehicles on roads. “Iran has these in abundance. Iran knows how to place them on roadsides. Iran knows how to activate them remotely,” Ostovar told me. The Iranians can also deploy small kamikaze drones called F.P.V.s on surveillance missions or to crash into U.S. troops. The F.P.V.s are controlled by incredibly long fibre-optic cables, preventing attempts to jam their frequencies with radio signals. “Those aren’t super helpful when attacking things very far away, but within a twenty-mile, or fifteen-mile, kind of zone, they could be used pretty effectively,” Ostovar said. “We haven’t seen Iran use them, to my knowledge, at least in this conflict, but they could be saving for a later fight.” The I.R.G.C. also has fleets of fast-attack boats, some of them armed with mines and missiles, and others that can be laden with explosives and used to stage suicide attacks against naval vessels. The regime knows that it doesn’t need to outgun U.S. ground forces to achieve its strategic objectives. It only needs to be successful in occasionally killing American troops to make the war even more unpopular back home, a vulnerability for Trump ahead of the midterm elections. Referring back to the Iran-Iraq War, Connell, the Iranian military expert, said, “If you’re looking at Iranian military writings in the subsequent decades, there’s always that emphasis on, we can take hits.” He explained the Iranian perspective: “We’re willing to die. You are not. You’re going to take a few hits, and then you’re going to say it’s too risky.’” Last week, Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee, warned that “the soldiers of Iran have long been waiting for this historic confrontation with the U.S. military forces,” adding that “the battle on the ground will be more terrifying for you than anywhere else.”

Taking extreme risks, though, could prove disastrous for the regime and its forces, especially the I.R.G.C. During the Iran-Iraq War, Khomeini and the I.R.G.C. overplayed their hand and rejected all attempts to end the conflict, even after pushing Iraqi forces from Iranian soil in 1982. Driven by revolutionary zeal, they vowed to keep fighting until Saddam was ousted from power. As the war dragged on, Iran’s military and economy were decimated. To preserve its power and ideology, the I.R.G.C. sent tens of thousands of Iranians to their death in so-called human-wave operations to overwhelm Iraq’s front lines. Last week, the regime launched a similar nationwide recruiting drive called “Janfada,” or “sacrificing life,” seeking volunteers to defend the country against American ground forces, including children as young as twelve, who will operate checkpoints and serve as spies. This time around, though, heavy casualties risk triggering internal mass unrest in a nation where a sizable portion of the population is anti-regime, regardless of their religious embrace of martyrdom. And after the Iran-Iraq War, the I.R.G.C. prioritized the buildup of its asymmetric war capabilities so much that Iran’s conventional army, known as the Artesh, was neglected ; its infrastructure has atrophied. Iran’s air-defense systems remain weak, allowing U.S. and Israeli warplanes to dominate Iran’s skies in the current conflict. (Of course, the regime still poses a threat to U.S. and Israel aircraft, as last weekend’s incident reveals.) “At least rhetorically, in terms of propaganda, they’ve been preparing for this for decades,” Ostovar told me, referring to a U.S. invasion. “But there’s also an element of hubris that drives the I.R.G.C., and it’s unclear to me how much that hubris may have undermined their military planning.”

To mobilize Iranians in support of an extended war against the U.S. and Israel, the regime has triggered the memories of Iraq’s invasion that it has nurtured for the past four decades. Over the past month, officials have referred to this war by again using the terms “sacred defense” or as the “imposed war.” Pro-regime Shiites inside and outside Iran have branded Trump as a modern-day “Yazid,” and references to the Battle of Karbala have flooded social media in Iran. Moosavi, the professor of Iranian cultural history, pointed me to an A.I.-generated animation made by an Iranian rapper which has gone viral in the country. It starts with Trump tossing dice at a roulette table, and ends with him crying over American-flag-draped coffins. The lyrics go:

Sacred Defense, we protecting the soil
While you sacrifice soldiers to pay for your spoil
You thought you ran the globe sitting on your throne
Now we turning every base into a bed of stone. ♦

It’s weird out there—you’re aging, the world is changing, and the economic landscape is shifting beneath your feet. The things you once cared about suddenly seem so stupid. The things you now care about objectively are. People are dying. Babies are crying. Everyone around you has a crazed look in their eyes. And, each time you meet up with an old friend, or a new acquaintance, or a person you’ve known sort of well for some amount of time, one thing is abundantly clear: they’re going back to school to become a therapist.

When the first friend mentions this, it comes as a delightful surprise. She’s been working at a fancy shoe store that’s really a fancy drug front for far too long. But, when the second, third, and fourth competent buddy with a bachelor’s degree divulges the same update, you may start to wonder—how does this make me feel?

It’s important to note that this phenomenon is beyond your control. We were all fed false promises in our youth about what we could achieve if we set our minds to it, or what we could be if we wanted it enough. Surely, every generation faces this devastating crossroads of actual adulthood. We can’t all be experimental d.j.s forever. Your own therapist had to have decided to become a therapist at some point, right?

But, does having a lot of about-to-be therapists in your life mean that you should become a therapist, too? Does having zero therapists-to-be around you mean that you’re an unexamined brute with no hope for self-actualization? Let’s find out.

• If eight of your friends are slated to become therapists this year, I’m suspicious of your definition of “friend.” I wonder if those same “friends” consider you their “friend.” You may want to discuss the concept of friendship with your very own therapist (who, may I remind you, is also not your friend).
• If seven of your friends are about to become therapists, you have an M.F.A. in acting from a prestigious institution and a handful of legitimate IMDb credits. All seven of these friends are other actors you’ve worked with over the years, or, more likely, participated in an unpaid staged reading alongside.
• If six of your friends are becoming therapists, you’ve thought about becoming a therapist yourself. Many people have told you what a good listener you are. Little do they know, you’re just a freak for gossip.
• If five of your friends are currently completing their M.S.W., you identify as someone who is very good at therapy. You love therapy! You roll your eyes at people you know who are not in therapy when talking about them behind their backs. Your primary goal in your own sessions is to be the best at therapy ever. All you want is to be your therapist’s favorite. Which you are. You know you are.
• If four of your friends are in therapy school, you’re a big feelings baddie. You likely feel an immense amount of nostalgia for nearly everything from your past. You live for reunions, just so you can resuscitate shallowly buried negative emotions. You’re a glutton for punishment, because that punishment leads to more feelings.
• If three of your friends are about to be therapists, that seems kind of unremarkable.
• If two of your friends are getting into that therapy life, you are the child of therapists and have done everything in your power to avoid people who might become therapists. You have almost succeeded, but not quite. Do you want to talk about what might be triggering your sense of failure?
• If one of your friends is studying to be a therapist, it’s your wife and she’s thinking of leaving you.
• If none of your friends are becoming therapists, it’s time to look inward. Perhaps consider . . . therapy? ♦