Twisters

PhDs and Hillbillies—Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones unite to chase storms in Twisters

It’s been a slow year for movies in the Poss household, with Dune: Part Two and The Wild Robot being two of only three movies we’ve gotten really excited about. Over the weekend my wife and I finally got a chance to see the third, Twisters, after having to cancel plans to see it several times over the summer. We weren’t disappointed.

Twisters is old enough news now that I won’t recap the plot in any detail. Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a former meteorology PhD student who got several friends killed in an experiment. When Javi (Anthony Ramos), the only other survivor, approaches her about a new opportunity to learn more about tornadoes using new portable military radar, she agrees to a brief return to the field to look things over. With Javi and his corporately-sponsored team in Oklahoma, Kate meets Tyler Owens (Glenn Powell), a cocky amateur with a wildly popular YouTube channel. Then a monster storm arrives.

As a movie, Twisters is rock-solid old-fashioned entertainment, with good acting and a well-structured, suspenseful script that also makes room for much more realistic and nuanced characters than the original. Given the format in which we finally saw Twisters—projected on an inflatable outdoor screen with a portable sound system—I can’t fairly comment on a lot of the technical aspects of the movie. But despite the setting in which we saw it the movie looked and sounded great. I learned afterward that it was shot on 35mm film, which is a credit to the filmmakers. I hope to watch it again soon.

But while Twisters’ story and the technical aspects were good, they are not what made me want to write about it.

When the movie came out, our political schoolmarms were affronted that the movie did not lecture its audience on climate change. (The byline on that Salon piece sounded familiar, and, sure enough, that’s the same guy who wanted 1917 to sit the audience down for a talk on nationalism.) Again, to the filmmakers’ credit, the director explicitly stated in interviews that movies aren’t for “preaching”: “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”

Hear hear. And yet, while Twisters does not “put forward a message” in the sense of “preaching,” like all well-crafted stories it does have something to say. And like all well-crafted stories, it does so not through speeches but through its characters.

This begins when Kate, tagging along with Javi’s well-funded storm-chasers, first meets the crowdfunded livestreaming Tyler. The two sides are explicitly set in opposition as “the PhDs” on Kate and Javi’s side and “hillbillies” on Tyler’s. Javi’s company receives funding in exchange for data, and Tyler receives YouTube money and adulation from his viewers in exchange for risking his life to chase storms. It’s a familiar American dynamic in microcosm—elites vs populists.

But while Twisters introduces these two sides in opposition, it doesn’t hold them there. Both sides have hidden depths. Beneath their slick equipment and university backgrounds, Kate and Javi genuinely care about using their research to help people, and beneath his media-hungry machismo, Tyler has actual scientific knowledge and wants to help, too. Neither is blameless—one takes money from a shady real estate mogul, the nearest thing the movie has to a villain, and the other hawks t-shirts. Despite all this, they are more alike than different, and both want to help people.

This last point is important, because the key moment in bringing Kate and Tyler together, working toward a common goal, is a small town rodeo, an event that opens with the national anthem and is presented completely unironically. There is no wink or condescension toward the people at the rodeo, and, significantly, it is here that Tyler first opens up to Kate and the two begin working together. Twisters is the first movie I can remember in a long time that unequivocally presents small-town American life as good and worth preserving, and the suspense of the film’s final act comes not only from whether Kate’s experiment will finally succeed, but whether Kate and Tyler can save a town in the path of a once-in-a-generation tornado. Why? Because the people there are worth saving, period, regardless of their political affiliation or whom they vote for.

Twisters does not preach, no, but it presents a vision of an America where the elites and the people, the PhDs and the hillbillies, work better together. That demands a common goal, and on one side realizing that the people are more than data or raw material, and on the other realizing that the elites are people, too, and being willing to work alongside them toward a common goal.

This may not be a life-changing movie or high art, but Twisters is well-crafted and both entertains and uplifts. That’s rare enough in this day and age, but Twisters also tells a story of what can united Americans, which is worth contemplating during an election year—or any year.

The virtues of Spider-Man 2

Spider-Man and Doc Ock (Tobey Maguire and Alfred Molina) battle atop a New York City el train in Spider-Man 2

Last week I spent a day at home with a sick kid, my eldest son. He’s seven, and enamored of Spider-Man, so I thought a sick day on the couch warranted finally showing him the ultimate in Spider-Man movies, as far as I’m concerned: Spider-Man 2, which is now twenty years old. My son loved it, and took in every minute with a wide-eyed openness to enjoyment that I long to rediscover for myself. What I did rediscover, though, was how good this movie is.

I’d always enjoyed it and remembered it fondly, but after letting more than a decade pass without watching any more than the subway train chase that leads into the final act, I was stunned.

First, on a technical level, it holds up. Some of the special effects are better than others, but if CGI has improved since then it hasn’t improved much. If anything, the CGI in Spider-Man 2, still being somewhat experimental in 2004, is better integrated. And having been shot on 35mm film by a great cinematographer, the movie looks wonderful—even on the old DVD my son and I watched, the warmth of the color palette in scenes with Aunt May or Mary Jane and the palpable coolness of nighttime scenes look wonderfully filmic. None of the recent Marvel movies, which all have the dull, lusterless clarity of digital cinematography, can compare.

I could praise other aspects as well: the acting (from all but James Franco, anyway), or the perfectly balanced tone, or the meticulously structured script, or the obvious fun Sam Raimi is having throughout with snap-zooms and histrionic open-mouthed screams from bystanders.

But what stuck out most to me was the richness of its themes. On top of everything else, this is a legitimately moving drama. The film opens with Peter Parker struggling to fulfil his obligations in every aspect of his life except his role as a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, and his frustration grows as he loses the respect of an admired teacher, loses his job, loses an old friend, and seems set to lose Mary Jane forever. He briefly gives up his crime-fighting and, though gaining superficial success in the rest of his life, he can neither win Mary Jane back nor escape the feeling that he is not following his calling.

Spider-Man 2 dares to suggest that vocation and duty are more important than following dreams, and that doing the right thing might mean abandoning a cherished hope.

This underlies two points of grace in the story. First, when trying to earn a living and succeed at school and provide for Aunt May and win Mary Jane back on his own strength he fails, but by embracing his duty as Spider-Man he finds fulfilment and love. As much as we might desire autonomy and individual success and wish to escape duty, it is duty that most powerfully connects us to other people and gives everything else in life meaning. To paraphrase CS Lewis, when Peter aims at happiness he doesn’t get it, but when he aims at duty he gets happiness thrown in.

Second—and this is only a half-formed observation—I was struck that the turning point in the film comes not during an action scene, but in a quiet dining room conversation in which Peter tells Aunt May the truth about the night Uncle Ben was killed. Peter does so despite the discomfort of facing his lies and the petty desire for revenge that contributed to Uncle Ben’s death, and despite the risk of losing Aunt May. She forgives Peter, but not because he deserved it. This feels awfully close to the sacrament of confession. Certainly Peter’s life is more characterized by grace afterward than it was before.

After watching Spider-Man 2 I went to the kitchen to make lunch for myself and my son and idly looked up the late Roger Ebert’s review. Four stars, introduced with this wonderful paragraph:

Now this is what a superhero movie should be. “Spider-Man 2” believes in its story in the same way serious comic readers believe, when the adventures on the page express their own dreams and wishes. It’s not camp and it’s not nostalgia, it’s not wall-to-wall special effects and it’s not pickled in angst. It’s simply and poignantly a realization that being Spider-Man is a burden that Peter Parker is not entirely willing to bear.

It’s striking that, this early in the superhero movie glut, a year before Batman Begins and four years before Iron Man, Ebert accurately described the overwhelming majority of superhero movies to come, whether the CGI vomit of the later MCU or the mordant navel-gazing of Zack Snyder, and exactly what it is that set Spider-Man 2 apart. Better artistry, certainly, but serious and sincerely explored themes of duty and love as well.

It seems trite to point out, but it’s impossible to imagine such a movie being made today.

Commander Shears, living like a human being

William Holden as Shears at the beginning of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

Last weekend I rewatched The Bridge on the River Kwai for the first time in several years, and introduced it to my older kids, too—a wonderful experience. As with Lawrence of Arabia, which we watched together earlier this year, they were immediately and totally involved in it even though they only understood some of what was going on.

As for me, I thrilled, as always, to the escalating conflict between Col Nicholson and Col Saito, the struggle to build the bridge, and the commando mission to destroy it. The final unavoidable intersection of all the major storylines, converging on the bridge itself, gives The Bridge on the River Kwai one of the most suspenseful and weighty endings I’ve ever seen. I first watched it in middle school and it still floors me. Like any good story it continues to unfold and reveal itself and, per Flannery O’Connor, the more I see in it the more it escapes me.

What I’ve seen more of in the film as I’ve gotten older is the conflict of worldviews at its heart. Each major character lives according to an ethic that butts up against one of the others’ with little room for negotiation or coexistence. Col Nicholson and Col Saito, both men of honor, discipline, and protocol, are more alike than they are different, though Nicholson stands more for an order born of law and Saito for order born of feudal force. Saito explicitly invokes bushido. Major Clipton, the surgeon, argues for compromise with both Nicholson and Saito along utilitarian, consequentialist lines, an ethic suited for triage but which doesn’t satisfactorily scale to civilizational war—something Clipton, the most self-conscious character in the film, seems to realize. Maj Warden, the adventurer, with his scientific background, thoughtlessness about the consequences of his mission, and his willingness to kill his own teammates in pursuit of an objective, seems firmly entrenched in an optimistic materialist pragmatism. This also proves inadequate, as the reactions of his Siamese bearers to his actions during the climax make clear.

But the character who really struck me this time around William Holden’s Shears. One of only two survivors of the original batch of prisoners who built the camp in the film, Shears is wounded while escaping, nursed back to health by locals, and miraculously reaches British territory, where upon recovering from his ordeal he is recruited by Warden to go back to the bridge and blow it up. During this return, in one of the film’s only moments of speechifying, Shears berates Warden:

You make me sick with your heroics! There's a stench of death about you. You carry it in your pack like the plague. Explosives and [cyanide]-pills—they go well together, don't they? And with you it's just one thing or the other: destroy a bridge or destroy yourself. This is just a game, this war! You and Colonel Nicholson, you're two of a kind, crazy with courage. For what? How to die like a gentleman, how to die by the rules—when the only important thing is how to live like a human being!

It’s a commonplace that The Bridge on the River Kwai is an antiwar film, and, if this is true—and I’m not convinced it is—where Clipton’s closing “Madness! Madness!” might serve as the film’s argument against war, Shears’s speech may serve as the film’s proposed alternative vision. If not honor, discipline, law, and civilization, then what? Living “like a human being,” a phrase that should resonate with our postmodern liberal humanist world.

“You and Colonel Nicholson, you’re two of a kind, crazy with courage. For what? How to die like a gentleman, how to die by the rules—when the only important thing is how to live like a human being!”

Very well—let’s take Shears at his word. What, to him, does it mean “to live like a human being?”

Shears is cowardly, deceitful, venal, obsequious to the Japanese and snide to his fellow prisoners, and willing to submit to any degradation and commit any underhanded act necessary to survive. He claims to be an officer but performs the manual labor required of him by his captors and, when questioned on this by Nicholson, cheerfully admits his contentment as “just a slave—a living slave.” We learn later that he stole a dead man’s rank in order to get preferential treatment.

And what does “living like a human being” look like when, having escaped the camp, Shears is finally free of the coercion of the enemy and the deprivations of the jungle? Stolen liquor and sex, apparently. And his relationship with one of his British nurses doesn’t stop him from starting something with one of the women on the commando mission, either.

Shears has become one of CS Lewis’s “men without chests.” Abandoning honor and law as antiquated absurdities or irrelevant superstitions and substituting something as nebulous as “humanity” leaves one with nothing but base animal appetites. And deprived of carnal gratification, one is left with only resentment and rage. Note that the greatest passion Shears exhibits in the entire film comes in the climax, when he urges one of the other commandos not to blow up the bridge ahead of schedule—Warden’s pragmatic solution—but to kill Nicholson. When the other commando fails, Shears’s last act is to try to kill Nicholson himself.

I think the filmmakers are sympathetic to Shears and, like the rest of the cast, Holden plays his character wonderfully, as a real man rather than the avatar of a philosophical system. But I also think the film stops well short of endorsing his vague, selfish humanism, especially since Nicholson and even Saito are presented with unironic sympathy. (I could, and probably should, write a post just on Saito.) They, and even the doubting Clipton, have a consistent vision of right action and the good life. Shears talks big about humanity but embraces dissipation. A familiar type.

The Bridge on the River Kwai is too great a work of art and too good a story to offer a pat solution to a problem like war, so don’t be deceived by Shears’s plausible, self-flattering, and self-justifying words.

YouTube plagiarism

I occasionally dip into the more earnest side of YouTube film criticism through video essays by channels like The Discarded Image, CinemaStix, Thomas Flight—recently recommended by Alan Jacobs here—and Like Stories of Old.

The latter posted an essay earlier this month called “This YouTuber Won’t Stop Plagiarizing,” with an enticing thumbnail of the Dude. After a week or so of YouTube’s algorithm pushing it to the top of my recommendations every day, I finally gave in and watched it.

It’s well put-together and presents damning evidence that a YouTuber calling himself Archer Green has been stealing everything from specific lines of narration to montages from other channels, and it approaches this vexing topic in the most charitable way possible. Certainly more charitably than I would.

While Like Stories of Old does a good job outlining the specific sins of the plagiarist and makes a strong case against such actions, there is one point that deserves more thought but was lost amidst the detail. To judge from the case made against him, Archer Green’s research for his videos consisted entirely of watching other YouTubers’ videos and taking notes on them. I don’t know how deeply Like Stories of Old or Thomas Flight dig when preparing a video, but I’m guessing it’s deeper than that.

Even if Archer Green hadn’t ended up stealing the words and ideas of other people, such a limited, circular, self-referential environment could only end up being intellectually inbred.

Indeed, this is certainly true of other parts of YouTube, where bad ideas or false information are endlessly recycled because, in pursuit of clicks, YouTubers copy and regurgitate sensationalistic material, which other YouTubers copy and regurgitate, which other YouTubers copy and regurgitate, and on and on. Witness this commercial pilot’s frustrated attempt to debunk aviation myths that have been repeated over and over by YouTubers and TikTokers. And that’s not his only video in this vein. Watch this, this, and this as well, and note how often the same misconceptions or outright lies come up.

This is not, of course, limited to YouTube. Check out this recent video—which I’ve already shown students—about a hoax Wikipedia article that was cited by a newspaper, whose citation then became supporting documentation for the fake Wikipedia page’s bibliography. The fake went undetected for over a decade.

If all governments naturally turn into monarchies over time, all online information environments turn into echo chambers or bubbles. Break out. Maybe start by reading a book on a topic rather than clicking the next video the algorithm feeds you.

On tunnels

Nada and Frank discover the alien tunnels under Los Angeles in They Live (1988)

Over the weekend I finally got a chance to watch They Live, John Carpenter’s 1988 action-comedy-thriller about a working man unmasking the alien domination of the world. It was a delight. Carpenter presented his vision of the concealment of the true nature of the world by a powerful malevolence exploiting the ignorant masses brilliantly, and made it funny, creepy, and exciting in equal measure. It was also deeply paranoid.

That’s the point, of course. Rowdy Roddy Piper’s famous bank heist—a heist in which he steals no money—and the film’s climactic TV station shooting spree wouldn’t be nearly so enjoyable had the film not made the aliens’ domination so palpably real in the first half. But two things in particular struck me about They Live’s paranoid view of the world.

First, its vision of manipulative elites and passive, cattle-like masses is broadly applicable. They Live provides a template for just about any critique of the way society is run. The obvious target, and the one Carpenter intended, is the consumerism and haves-and-have-nots dynamic of 1980s America. But one could apply it to just about any menace you care to pick. In fact, the image of a hidden, rich minority of foreigners using the media to control the masses for profit suggested itself strongly enough to certain groups that Carpenter himself spoke up against the misuse of his story.

For myself, the aliens of They Live reminded me of nothing so much as latter-day tech CEOs: manipulating people, selling garbage, flogging unrealistic standards of luxury and beauty, clouding minds with useless information and busywork, justifying their existence through convenience, and—just occasionally—suppressing people they don’t want talking too much.

Second, and even more striking to me, were the tunnels. Following our hero Nada’s epiphany and initial, impulsive shooting spree, he falls in with a more organized resistance which is almost immediately destroyed by the foot soldiers of the alien overlords. Nada and his only friend, Frank, manage to escape using one of the aliens’ own wristwatches, which allow them to disappear in emergencies. Nada and Frank find themselves in a maze of tunnels under Los Angeles, the secret infrastructure supporting the aliens’ domination.

The tunnels are an interesting feature of the plot because they pop up in so many other paranoid visions of the world. Pizzagate, QAnon, the Satanic panic—all feature tunnel systems as prominent parts of their narratives. Even the rescue of twelve soccer players from a cave in Thailand has been spun in conspiratorial directions.

And this isn’t limited to recent theories: the anti-Catholic paranoia of the 1830s included fraudulent stories like that of Maria Monk, who claimed that tunnels permitted priests access to nunneries at night and convenient burial places for the children born of these unions, who were strangled at birth. Like its more recent counterparts, this hoax prompted investigations. Like those more recent investigations, it found no evidence that the stories were true.

So I’ve wondered more than once: what is it with tunnels?

If I were a Jungian—and I’m not, for reasons I intend to unfold here at some point—I might suggest that tunnels have some subconscious archetypal power that forces them to recur in our fears and anxieties and, inevitably, our stories. A little closer to reality, I find it interesting that tunnels make common conspiratorial metaphors literal. The image of the underground, the underworld, the subterranean, the hidden is always ready to hand in conspiracist rhetoric.

More to the point, I think tunnels keep popping up in paranoid narratives for two practical reasons.

First, tunnel systems really exist, and they’re not hard to find. Major cities, theme parks, malls, factories, and public works often have elaborate underground infrastructure, and that’s not even taking account of things like mining and military use. Even my undergrad college campus had a legendary tunnel network that was the subject of much rumor in the early 2000s. (One wonders how the rumors have morphed since.) These often vast systems are real, but they’re there for maintenance or logistics.

Not that the mundane has stopped paranoid speculation in the past. Look at any “abandoned places” video on YouTube and you will see two sets of people in the comments: people who have worked in maintenance tunnels and know what they’re for and try to explain it, and people who think all underground spaces are used solely for human trafficking and won’t change their minds.

Second, and perhaps more important psychologically, if something happens out of sight it is not falsifiable in the way something is that happens out in the open, potentially under observation. Conspiracy theories need tunnels because tunnels allow the conspiracy to unfold both here and somewhere else at the same time. And a good paranoid vision needs that, not just for atmosphere but so that the theory can perpetuate, unproven and impossible to disprove. Just look at all these tunnels!

John Carpenter used those trappings brilliantly in They Live. But in real life, living like Nada and looking for their tunnels will only lead you further away from reality.

Gladiator II trailer reaction

Naval combat in the Colosseum in Gladiator II

On Tuesday, the first trailer for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II appeared on YouTube. I immediately watched it and opened up a draft post here on the blog. A few thoughts:

I’ve been skeptical of a sequel to Gladiator for as long as Scott and friends have been talking about it. Not only was Gladiator a great movie and a perfect standalone story, it was—like Star Wars or Pirates of the Caribbean—lightning in a bottle, a lucky product of the planned, the unforeseen, and the ability of imaginative craftsmen to adapt to unique circumstances. Recreating the magic of such a great movie for a sequel would not only be unnecessary, I thought, it would probably prove impossible. It hasn’t helped that some of the leaked proposals for a follow-up were insane. Add to this the aging Sir Ridley’s increasingly unconcealed indifference to history and Napoleon’s thudding arrival last year and I hope you’ll understand why I wasn’t excited to learn, in the middle of all that, that Gladiator II was finally shooting.

Well, now that a trailer has arrived I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised.

Gladiator II picks up the story of Lucius (Paul Mescal), the son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), Commodus’s sister and Maximus’s love interest in the original, about twenty years later. When we last see him in Gladiator he’s leaving the sand of the arena where Maximus and Commodus have just killed each other. Now he is, per the trailer and scraps of information online, living in North Africa. Apparently he is captured in an amphibious raid by a Roman army under Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) and sold into slavery as a gladiator, where he follows his hero Maximus’s example by taking the fight to Rome via the Colosseum.

Lucius’s owner and trainer is Macrinus (Denzel Washington), who appears to have a similarly intimidating semi-mentor role to that of Proximo in the original. Macrinus has designs on political power, which is currently wielded by brothers and co-emperors Geta and Caracalla (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger). Bloodsport ensues.

What most surprised me about this trailer is the extent to which it recaptures the feel of the original. Gladiator had a look you could smell. The sharp, sun-drenched palettes, the sand and grit, the backlit smoke, the lavish textiles, the metal that looks hot to the touch, and the towering classical architecture are all present in Gladiator II. The seamless fit of this with the original’s style, more than anything else, made me excited for this movie.

This is, of course, playing to Scott’s strong suit. None of it means that the story will adequately support the visuals. (See again Napoleon.) Scope is guaranteed, but depth?

Other observations:

• I’m honestly thrilled to see more of the Colosseum, including its famous mock naval battles—complete with dolphins? sharks?—and a beast fight. When you learn about the Colosseum in school this is the stuff you really wish you could see. And this sample looks great.

• Speaking of the beast fight, the segments with the rhino reveal the starkest visual difference between this and the original: obvious CGI. Gladiator had some but here, nearly a quarter century later, it’s more apparent. The rhino looks pretty great but Lucius’s little tumble doesn’t.

• I like the nods to Maximus’s arms and armor. A proper Roman touch, and a nice callback to Maximus and Lucius’s scene in the original.

• Marcus Acacius’s amphibious attack looks rather too much like the climactic fight in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Potential unintentional comedy.

• Plotwise, this really looks like a rehash of Maximus’s story from the original. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I hate to see a great movie followed up twenty-four years later with the standard same-but-different sequel plot.

• Hans Zimmer has not returned to compose the score, which is a bummer. I’m curious to see whether Harry Gregson-Williams, a fine composer, repurposes some of Zimmer’s themes or writes entirely new music.

• “The greatest temple Rome ever built: the Colosseum.” Great line. I’m reminded of an observation my undergrad Rome professor made: you can learn a lot about a civilization by looking at the buildings it spends the most time and effort on and that dominate its skyline. In the Middle Ages it was the castle and the cathedral. Today it’s the skyscraper. In Rome it was the arena.

Okay, history stuff:

• I expect no attempt at accuracy. Like the original, I plan to enjoy this as a good movie and nothing more—provided it’s a good movie.

• Geta and Caracalla were real emperors who ruled together following the death of their father, Septimius Severus (r. AD 193-211). Geta was assassinated, presumably at his older brother’s bidding, after less than a year of co-rule, so that places the events of this movie in AD 211. Caracalla ruled another six years, though, and has entered history as a byword for imperial cruelty and bloodthirstiness alongside Caligula and Nero. Presumably his fratricide will play some role in the film.

• Caracalla was eventually murdered while on campaign and succeeded by Macrinus, Denzel Washington’s character. The real Macrinus was Berber rather than black, a fact internet comment sections are already full of fulmination about, and reigned a little over a year. At least one production still of Washington sitting on what looks like a throne has been released. After being murdered in his turn, Macrinus was succeeded by Elegabalus, a notoriously perverted teenage tyrant who has been the subject of a recent move to spin him as a “transgender woman.” Gladiator II is probably already biting off more than it can chew, history-wise. Lord help us if the filmmakers go there.

• Geta and Caracalla get a stereotypical depraved Roman emperor look, with an uncanny resemblance to John Hurt’s Caligula in I, Claudius. They creeped my wife out when I showed her the trailer.

• Marcus Acacius has a rather presentist line about not wishing to “waste another generation of young men for their [Geta and Caracalla, presumably] vanity.” You’ll have to look hard to find someone outright defending Caracalla—who, in addition to his personal violence and cruelty, also debased the coinage and granted citizenship to nearly everyone in the Empire—but he didn’t campaign pointlessly. Scott’s modern posturing creeping in, as usual.

Verdict: cautiously optimistic.

So we’ll see. I don’t precisely have high hopes for Gladiator II but the trailer looks good and I’ll certainly be there when the film opens in November.

Hitchcock and the eggheads

Ethel Griffies in The Birds (1963) and Simon Oakland in Psycho (1960)

Speaking of experts, last week, during our Independence Day trip to the beach with my in-laws, I rewatched The Birds for the first time in several years. What most struck me the last time I watched it—how long it takes to get to the bird attacks—seemed less remarkable to me this time. Hitchcock, master craftsman, spends the first half of the film both lulling the audience and foreshadowing the terror to come, all through the whimsical romance he creates in a realistic-feeling world.

No, what struck me this time was Mrs Bundy (Ethel Griffies), the elderly ornithologist who strides into the film just before the first major attack looking for cigarettes. She knows her birds. She’s observed them for decades and knows what they do and do not do. She has facts and figures, including a strangely precise calculation of the number of birds currently living in North America. Presented with Melanie’s stories of bird attacks, Mrs Bundy pooh-poohs them. Confidently, firmly.

She reminded me of a character who appears at the end of Psycho, the film Hitchcock made immediately before The Birds. Following that film’s unbearably suspenseful climax and shocking twist, Hitchcock treats the viewer to a good five minutes of Dr Richman (Simon Oakland) talking, and talking, and talking. Dr Richman explains to the other characters—and, by extension, the audience—what they’ve just witnessed and how Norman Bates came to be what he is. He knows his Freudian psychobabble and is strangely precise in his diagnosis of Norman. He’s confident, firm. He also feels like he talks forever, a strange inclusion in what is otherwise a terrifically paced, highly visual film.

I’ve seen a few explanations for Dr Richman’s protracted, stentorian lecture:

1. It’s intended as a genuine scientific explanation of Norman and the events of the film based on the pop Freudianism of the day

2. It’s intended as a parody of Freudian psychology and the way it can explain away anything

3. It’s there for structural purposes, to give the audience a few minutes to come down from the suspense and terror of the climax before wrapping up with the film’s genuinely chilling final moments

4. It’s some combination of the above

I think #3 is indisputable as a formal consideration, and so incline toward #4. But which of #1 and #2 is it?

The huge amount of time Hitchcock gives to Dr Richman suggests #1. Hitchcock loved his jokes but constructed them economically. Also, screenwriter Joe Stefano has said in interviews that he was heavily committed to Freudian analysis at the time, so his contribution was probably intended sincerely.*

On the other hand, Dr Richman acts like a blowhard and his explanation is too pat, too easy, fitting the mystery of Norman Bates snugly within the die-cut confines of theory. His explanation—and based on a single police station interview!**—is incommensurate with what the audience has seen over the preceding hour and a half. His confidence smacks of cocksureness rather than insight. Tellingly, even after his lecture we are left uneasy by Norman in his final scene, during which we leave the safe confines of law and order and expertise and travel down the hall to Norman’s cell and whatever is contained there. One senses that the cops guarding the door have a clearer grasp on Norman than Dr Richman.

The Birds reinforced my gut feeling that the latter is the better understanding of Psycho. Here, the expert shows up nearer the middle of the film rather than at the end and—most unlike Dr Richman, whose explanation is seemingly allowed to stand—is thoroughly humiliated. We see Mrs Bundy twice: the first time as an imperious expert holding court, the second as a traumatized survivor of the thing she denied was possible minutes before. She can’t even bring herself to look at Melanie and Mitch.

Hitchcock learning lessons between films? Or simply a difference in source material and screenwriter? I don’t know, but I think Mrs Bundy’s role in The Birds is the better of the two, heightening rather than explaining away the film’s central mystery.

* I know a psychiatrist does appear in Robert Bloch’s original novel, but I haven’t read it and can’t comment on how this information is handled there.

** Mark Twain comes to mind: “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

A vain aspiration to self-sufficiency

“The mistake is to see No Country for old men as being about the bad guy.”

I’ve argued for years, including here on this blog, that despite its darkness and violence Cormac McCarthy’s work is not nihilistic. Good and evil have clear meaning in his novels, and the tiny flame of hope shines all the brighter for the omnipresence of evil—a burning tree in the desert, a horn full of glowing embers. This theme recurs especially often in his later novels.

In a review of an anthology titled Film and Faith: Modern Cinema and the Struggle to Believe posted today, Anthony Sacramone considers an essay on the Coen brothers’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men by Carson Holloway. The essay mounts a “successful effort to redeem No Country for Old Men from the charge of nihilism,” a view Sacramone himself had previously held:

I, too, had dismissed No Country as another affected, self-consciously “cinematic” Coen brothers’ dead end, but Holloway’s careful reading converted me. The mistake is to see No Country as being about the bad guy. Instead, it’s about a traditional Hollywood good guy, the local sheriff, Bell (Tommy Lee Jones): “a kind of traditionalist conservative, … a lifetime lawman, a proud member of a line of lawmen.” But when this old-fashioned guy is confronted with radical evil in the person of Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who possesses not “an inordinate attachment to some real good” but a sadistic need to show everyone who crosses his path the utter worthlessness of their existence, Bell is lost.

Why? The lawman is unable to contend with Chigurh’s perverse brand of lawbreaking because he fears God has abandoned him and that “he may somehow be drawn into this evil.” In the end, Bell “quits” the fight because a “low estimate of himself arises from a vain aspiration to self-sufficiency.” When you believe you’re in a fight against the odds all by yourself, that you’ve lost God as your backup, what else is there to do but turn tail and run?

A great insight, and one that I hadn’t considered before. Bell’s despair, an outgrowth of his self-sufficient isolation from God, is underlined in the film by small changes the Coen brothers made to the novel. For one, Bell’s father in the novel “was not a lawman,” though his grandfather was. The “line of lawmen” Holloway notes—three generations in the film version, with Bell and his grandfather serving as sheriffs in separate counties at the same time—is the Coens underscoring this aspect of Bell’s history. A subtle but important detail.

But having just reread No Country I thought immediately of the ambiguity of this exchange between Bell and his elderly Uncle Ellis. After a long bit of dialogue from Ellis:

Bell didnt answer.

I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didnt. I dont blame him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion of me that he does.

You dont know what he thinks.

Yes I do.

He looked at Bell.

Ellis continues the conversation at that point, but who exactly is saying what here? The paragraphing and lack of dialogue tags leave it unclear. I’ve puzzled over it since that last reading. But in the film, the Coens assign the despair of that first line not to Ellis, whom Bell worries has “turned infidel” in the book, but to Bell himself.

Not only Sheriff Bell—who we learn in the novel was the sole survivor of his unit during World War II and only lived because he ran away when holding out alone proved hopeless—but also Llewellyn Moss and Carson Wells aim at self-sufficiency and fail utterly. Their greed and pride tempt them into isolation, where Chigurh destroys them both. Bell at least survives to receive prophetic word that hope remains alive. God or grace is reaching for him.

June 13 will mark the one-year anniversary of McCarthy’s death. I paid tribute to him following his death here.

Operation TNT

Twenty-odd years ago, beginning in the mid-90s, TNT (Turner Network Television) would run nothing but war movies for Memorial Day weekend and the week following. The selections ran from classic dramas like From Here to Eternity and The Bridge on the River Kwai—which presumably made the cut because of its one American character—to the old-fashioned big-picture story-of-a-battle films like The Longest Day and Tora! Tora! Tora! to the John Wayne war subgenre with Sands of Iwo Jima and They Were Expendable to pure action entertainment like The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes.

For a movie-loving kid with an emerging interest in World War II “Operation TNT” was a godsend. Films I’d seen mentioned in World War II magazine or had recommended by the veterans at church would appear on the lineup. The challenge—in that age before on-demand streaming or even the DVR, when finding a rare movie meant literally finding it at a flea market or a store at a mall two hours away—was to be watching TNT when The Devil’s Brigade or The Bridge at Remagen finally aired.

You’ll notice that all of the movies I’ve mentioned so far are World War II movies. Operation TNT did air movies about other conflicts—I’m pretty sure I remember catching Sergeant York, and, in its later years, a heavily redubbed Platoon—but the preponderance of films dramatized the last “good war.” It was meant as a tribute, after all.

And Operation TNT did pay tribute. Veterans’ stories would be read and letters and reminiscences were solicited during commercial breaks. Here’s someone for whom this meant enough that they recorded it and, years later, uploaded it to YouTube. The theme throughout was earnest and patriotic but, above all, appreciative. It’s hard to imagine something like it airing now.

And, indeed, Operation TNT withered away over the years. When I first remember tuning in, often during trips to the beach, when my parents would have to order me to the pool and away from the movie lineup, the marathon lasted all week. Eventually I noticed it had shrunk to the long Memorial Day weekend. The last I remember Operation TNT, it was a single day of programming on the holiday itself. I don’t remember noticing it disappear.

So in the spirit of Operation TNT, let me propose a movie marathon for your next Memorial Day—or any day for which good movies about men worth remembering are suited.

A proposed Memorial Day movie marathon

The following eleven films cover about a century of American warfare. I’ve tried to pick some lesser known or—in my opinion—underappreciated or unfairly maligned films that still offer entertaining and edifying viewing, and have arranged them in the chronological order of the events they depict:

The Lost Battalion (2001)—A World War I film based on a real incident in which a battalion of New York draftees ended up trapped behind German lines and held out despite heavy losses. A relatively low-budget TV movie, but clearly made with reverence and respect for its subject and the men involved, especially the hundreds who were lost. The commander, Charles Whittlesey, was one of seven who earned the Medal of Honor during the battle but took his own life in 1921.

Midway (2019)—Outnumbered pilots in outclassed planes make a desperate stand and win. Exposition-heavy dialogue, some cheap special effects, and a handful of hammy performances don’t detract from this detailed, earnest, and suspenseful dramatization of the battle that took the United States off the defensive and turned the war against Japan. This film also makes the cost of the war abundantly clear right from the beginning, making this perhaps the most appropriate Memorial Day movie on this list. I wrote a full review here after the pleasant surprise of seeing it in theatres.

Merrill’s Marauders (1962)—One of the rare World War II films that even acknowledges the war in Burma, this film follows a special unit that spent months fighting the Japanese in punishing jungle and mountain environments. Directed by WWII veteran Sam Fuller with less melodrama and a greater degree of authenticity and grit than a lot of comparable movies from the same period.

Battleground (1949)—The first great Battle of the Bulge film, this depicts a small group of paratroopers from the 101st Airborne in the combat around Bastogne and pays special attention to the cold, dark, hunger, general discomfort, and danger of their situation, as well as the heavy losses taken even in a successful defense. Well-trodden ground now, but few other films have told this story with the unromanticized simplicity of Battleground.

Fury (2014)—A solid war drama with powerful religious themes unfairly dragged by internet experts. Fury vividly and authentically dramatizes the desperation of the tail-end of the war in Europe, when Hitler has clearly been beaten but ragtag, borderline amateur units of SS fight on, and suggests that the men who survived had a hard time talking about it not just because of what they saw but because of what they did.

The Great Raid (2005)—A strong dramatization of the successful liberation of a POW camp in the Philippines, with special attention given to Japanese brutality toward the prisoners, the role played by Filipino guerrillas in the American recapture of the islands, and the weight of the cost of every campaign as the war neared its end. Be sure to watch the director’s cut.

Pork Chop Hill (1959)—Probably the great Korean War film, a stripped down, unvarnished war drama in which both the heroism of the soldiers involved and the unbelievably high losses taken in capturing the holding the hill both receive attention. I wrote a full review of the film last year.

Go Tell the Spartans (1978)—An early Vietnam film and an unusual one in that it tells a story from the advisory stage of the war circa 1964, this movie stars Burt Lancaster as a superannuated, put-upon officer leading a small MAAG unit and a larger South Vietnamese force in an effort to secure a remote rural area against the Viet Cong. It doesn’t go well.

Hamburger Hill (1987)—A solid war drama based on the real Operation Apache Snow in 1969, in which paratroopers patrolling a remote area close to the Laotian border took heavy losses in a literal uphill battle against dug-in NVA troops. As in Battleground, the other 101st Airborne story on this list, the characters are fictional but the film captures the reality of their experiences well.

BAT*21 (1988)—A story from 1972, late in the Vietnam War, when US Air Force officer Iceal Hambleton was shot down behind enemy lines, the only survivor of his plane’s crew. He not only survived but was rescued thanks in part to the efforts of a scout plane pilot, who kept in touch with Hambleton by radio and helped guide him to safety and rescue. The film takes liberties partly for Hollywood reasons and partly because some crucial information about the incident was still classified at the time, but BAT*21 nevertheless offers a good look at an unusual story from the war and the risks and losses involved not only in combat, but in rescuing the lost.

The Outpost (2019)—The story of the defense of Combat Outpost Keating in Afghanistan in 2009. The only genuinely great film to come out of the War on Terror, I think, one that tells a true story well and without either softening the ugliness and horror or romanticizing the men and their actions involved. I wrote a longer review here in 2020.

Conclusion

That’s eleven films totaling just over twenty-one hours altogether, and even if y’all don’t watch all of these—much less one after the other for an entire day—I hope you’ll check out at least a couple of them and watch them not only for entertainment, but to remember. The best of them, as Operation TNT originally recognized, are designed for both.

Eisensteinian historical montage

Today Medievalists.net shared a good summary of a 2006 article by Donald Ostrowski in which he examines the actual historical evidence for the Battle of Lake Peipus and finds that the one fact everyone “knows” about the battle is almost certainly made up.

The Battle of Lake Peipus was fought in April 1242 between a Crusader coalition led by a suborder of the Teutonic Knights and a Russian force from Novgorod led by Prince Alexander Nevsky. After an initial cavalry assault by the Knights, Alexander drove them back, winning the battle and thwarting the attempt to conquer Novgorod and bring the Orthodox Christians there under the authority of the Latin or Catholic Church.

The “one fact everyone ‘knows’” that I mentioned above concerns the way Alexander was able to win and the fate of the Teutonic Knights. Look the Battle of Lake Peipus up and you’ll certainly find descriptions of the way the Knights, charging across and even fighting on the frozen lake, drowned in large numbers when the overstressed late spring ice broke up beneath them in the latter stages of the battle. Hence the battle’s better-known name: “The Battle on the Ice.”

But it turns out that most of the details related to the frozen lake date from much later than the battle itself, with—in a process that will be familiar to anyone who has had to work with medieval chronicles—more and more detailed and elaborate accounts being recorded later, often much later. And the breaking up of the ice specifically originates not in any historical source but in a movie: Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 propaganda epic Alexander Nevsky.

Eisenstein was a Russian filmmaker who worked for decades making historical dramas for the Stalinist Soviet state. He was also a film theorist, experimenting with intellectual montage techniques to convey story and meaning and—most importantly for a propagandist—evoke emotional reactions. He had a good eye for an exciting sequence, and Alexander Nevsky’s battle on a frozen lake and the wicked Germans’ plunge into the icy depths is among his best. But not his most famous.

That Eisenstein invented this vision of the battle is isn’t exactly news, at least to anyone who has studied this region and period. Note that Ostrowski’s Russian History article dates from 2006. William Urban, in The Teutonic Knights: A Military History, first published in 2003, is also circumspect about anything ice-related, and quotes part of the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle which describes the dead and dying lying “on the grass” after the battle. No frozen sinking corpses here.

But there’s another dimension of the gradual elaboration and fabrication of the story. Urban:

The battle has become undeservedly famous, having been endowed—for twentieth-century political considerations—with much more significance than it merited in itself, through Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, and the stirring music of Sergei Prokofiev. Indeed, although this movie is a reasonably accurate portrayal of some aspects of the battle, especially the costumes and tactics, and gives us an impressive sense of the drama of medieval combat, other aspects are pure propaganda. Certainly the ancestors of today’s Estonians and Latvians were not dwarfs, as the movie suggests, nor were they serfs. Master Andreas was in Riga, and thus could not have been taken prisoner by Alexander himself and ransomed for soap. The Russian forces were mainly professionals, not pre-Lenin Communist peasants and workers facing the equivalent of German armoured columns; the Germans were not proto-Nazis, blonde giants who burned babies alive. In short, many scenes in Alexander Nevsky tell us much more about the Soviet Union just before Hitler’s invasion than about medieval history.

Alexander Nevsky is a great movie, though, and, as Urban notes, Prokofiev’s score is fantastic. I have it on CD. Here’s a sample from the scene in question.

But this isn’t the only historical myth created by Eisenstein and spread with the imprimatur of the Comintern. By far his most famous film, the silent propaganda classic Battleship Potemkin, which depicts a 1905 mutiny of Russian sailors in the Ukrainian port of Odessa as a proto-Soviet uprising crushed by the cold-blooded Tsarists, features as its climactic sequence a massacre of newly liberated and class-conscious proles on a long elegant staircase. “The Odessa Steps” is one of the most famous scenes in cinema history, a continuous series of stunning, unforgettable images, and has been imitated and alluded to many, many times.

But the massacre never happened. Per Roger Ebert, in a “Great Movies” essay on Battleship Potemkin:

That there was, in fact, no czarist massacre on the Odessa Steps scarcely diminishes the power of the scene. The czar's troops shot innocent civilians elsewhere in Odessa, and Eisenstein, in concentrating those killings and finding the perfect setting for them, was doing his job as a director. It is ironic that he did it so well that today, the bloodshed on the Odessa Steps is often referred to as if it really happened.

Both of these myths—the breakup of the ice under the Teutonic Knights and the massacre on the Odessa Steps—illustrate the unique power and danger of historical cinema. These are inventions by a director following the rule of cool which, as Ebert notes, is a director’s job. But as Urban suggests above there is plenty of shady ideology working alongside those artistic considerations. More importantly, these made up stories are now the entire story for many people. As Chesterton put it in a line I’ve shared here before, “A false film might be refuted in a hundred books, without much affecting the million dupes who had never read the books but only seen the film.”

Medievalists.net’s summary post caught my eye not only because I love the subject and period as well as Eisenstein, but because matters of historical truth in filmmaking are always on my mind. After all, think about the Battle on the Ice sequence in Alexander Nevsky and how influential it was, then watch—or perhaps rewatch—this scene from last year’s Napoleon.

Falsehood, if introduced through film, can have a very long life.

Dr Strangelove versus technocracy

Peter Sellers as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake in Dr Strangelove

Last week I showed my US History II students one of my favorite movies: Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. While the usual points of discussion of Dr Strangelove are the Cold War policies and theories that inspired it—the arms race, brinkmanship, deterrence, paranoia, and most especially mutual assured destruction—for years now I’ve noted a more subtle strain of critique running through the film: the false promise of technology and technocratic leadership.

Having gone rogue and radioed his wing of nuclear-armed B-52s “the go code” without authorization from the President or the Pentagon, Gen Jack D Ripper can wait in satisfaction for his men to breach the peace and commit the US to all-out war because he is the only person in the world who can communicate with the bomber crews. This is thanks to the CRM-114 “discriminator” on the radio, which blocks out any transmission missing a three-letter code prefix. While the bomb is the most obvious technological threat in the film, it is communications technologies, technologies meant to connect and to facilitate greater understanding, that most stymie the characters in their efforts to recall Ripper’s bombers.

Kubrick plays with some rich irony here. Radio communication with the bombers is blocked thanks to the CRM-114, but Ripper also barricades himself inside his headquarters, won’t answer the phone, and impounds even the privately owned radios on his base. During the US Army’s frantic attempt to shoot their way in, capture Ripper, and put him on the phone with the President, the phone lines are cut.

All but one: a Bell pay phone, through which Group Captain Mandrake—perhaps the only sane character in the film, and who spends most of the movie frightened out of his mind in Ripper’s office—attempts to call the Pentagon only to be blocked by an unhelpful operator.

Technology surrounds every character, insulating them from each other and limiting not only the options available to them but even the options they can imagine. Not for nothing is Mandrake introduced in the midst of a massive bank of IBM computers (see the imagine above), staring at a continuous feed of printed data. The President and the Joint Chiefs in the War Room depend entirely on “the big board,” an electronic map of Russia marked with the bombers’ targets and flight paths, for information about what’s happening outside. The film’s climax begins when they learn that some the information presented on the board is incorrect. And Dr Strangelove both enters and exits the film talking about computers—first to explain how the Soviet doomsday machine works, and at the end to describe a potential method of selecting suitable survivors to go into hiding. The latter comes after the doomsday machine has already been triggered and everyone on earth has mere minutes to live.

The saddest aspect of the film is the way the technological trap US leadership has walked into rubbishes the virtues of the men in their charge. Rippers’s men and the US Army troops sent to capture him shoot it out with each other and even die, both in the belief that they’re the good guys.

But the point is made clearest with B-52 pilot Maj Kong. Though played by comedic actor Slim Pickens, Kong is the film’s straight man. (Supposedly Kubrick never told Pickens that the movie was a comedy and Pickens treated the role as a serious thriller lead.) He is visibly bothered to receive the go code and treats his mission in deadly earnest. As far as he knows, flying in a vast sky of ignorance thanks—again—to the communication blackout, the US is under attack and he and his men may be the country’s only defense. He unironically invokes patriotism and pluralism to buck up his crew and navigates his plane with immense ingenuity and courage. In any other story Kong and his men would be the heroes. But their flight is ironic comedy gold because of the situation created for them by leaders that trusted too much in technology to do their judgment for them.

The ideology and amoral strategizing of the Cold War creates the scenario depicted in the film, but it is technology that keeps it moving toward destruction regardless of the characters’ increasingly panicked attempts to prevent it. Dr Strangelove’s most famous attribute—alien hand syndrome, which allows his right hand to operate independently, not to mention embarrassingly—works as a neat visual metaphor for the entire situation: an amoral genius who cannot control his own body. The machines are in charge.

Perhaps the most telling line in the film comes from Gen Buck Turgidson, when he is first briefing the President on the situation: “I admit the human element seems to have failed us here.” Pesky humans.

If not an intentional critique, Dr Strangelove at least gives pride of place to technology as one of the causes of the accidental nuclear war that obliterates the world at the end. Given the realistic short-sightedness, love of technology for its own sake, and self-serving foolishness of most of the characters, it presents a good argument against depending technology to make our decisions for us.

But then again, Dr Strangelove came out sixty years ago. The bombers are probably already past their fail-safe points.

Wildcat trailer reaction

Maya Hawke as Flannery O’Connor in Wildcat

As I noted in my 2023 movie year-in-review, Wildcat is one of the films I’ve been looking forward to this year. Though it was completed and premiered at a film festival last year I hadn’t heard any news about its distribution or release until yesterday, when a great trailer appeared on YouTube.

Wildcat takes place over a short stretch of the early 1950s, when young writer Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke) moves back home to Milledgeville, Georgia and is diagnosed with lupus, the same disease that had killed her father when she was sixteen. While struggling with her illness and its severe effects she tries to sell her first novel, a searing Southern gothic religious fable called Wise Blood. Like her short stories, it’s deeply Catholic and Southern and poignant in the sense of sharp, cutting. It’s a hard sell.

It’s unclear from the trailer precisely how much of O’Connor’s life Wildcat covers, but there are scenes suggesting her time among the literary elite in the northeast in the late 1940s, after she had graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and when she was laboring over Wise Blood. The trailer suggests a strong contrast between the world O’Connor leaves behind and the clay-banked roads and nosy church ladies back home in Georgia—a contrast O’Connor was certainly aware of and wrote about.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing in the trailer are the scenes from several of her short stories—”Parker’s Back,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Revelation,” and especially “Good Country People”—in which O’Connor and her mother Regina (Laura Linney) play major characters like the cynical Hulga or the self-righteous Mrs Turpin. Catching even short glimpses of scenes I’ve imagined many times—a crowded doctor’s office waiting room, a Bible salesman running across a field carrying a prosthetic leg—got me excited in a way I haven’t felt for a movie in a while. Apparently these are intricately intertwined with the events of O’Connor’s real life. I’m curious to see how this works, especially since it’s so easy for a film about a writer to slip into the biographical fallacy (or what CS Lewis called The Personal Heresy): the idea that everything a writer writes is based on his or her actual experiences.

But I’m most pleased to see that Wildcat takes O’Connor’s Christianity seriously. Apparently Ethan Hawke, who directed and co-wrote the film, was inspired to make it when he read the Prayer Journal that O’Connor kept as a writing student in Iowa. O’Connor, in addition to being a brilliant writer, was prickly, hard-edged, had a chip on her shoulder as an outsider in the postwar literary world, and was fervently orthodox and devout. Her faith suffuses her work not only coincidentally but by design. Wildcat’s trailer manages to evoke all of this. Here’s hoping that the full film delivers.

A few other notes:

• The Southern accents sound pretty good. O’Connor was originally from Savannah and, though recordings of her remind me a lot of my paternal grandmother, an Athens native, O’Connor’s speech has some peculiarities that must be down to her roots, Savannah having some distinctive dialect features even by Southern standards. Listen to her read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” sometime.

• I’m interested to see how the film explores what some people perceive as O’Connor’s cruelty (“Sometimes I feel like you’re trying to stick pins in your readers,” her editor says in the trailer). The question of just how unpleasant a writer can or should make the reader feel in order to make a point has concerned me for a long time.

• Maya Hawke looks a lot more like O’Connor than I would have guessed was possible based on what I’ve seen of her in “Stranger Things” and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Kudos to her and the film’s hair and makeup folks.

• I like the cinematography a lot. It’s clearly digital but has some creative composition choices and lens work—e.g. the way the focus and bokeh fall off at the edges off the frame, which reminds me of The Batman. A distinctive look will probably help support O’Connor’s story and give it the otherworldly feel it will probably need.

• Wildcat was apparently shot mostly in Kentucky rather than Georgia. From what I can see in the trailer it looks like a good stand-in, though it’s funny to me that, with so many movies shooting in Georgia as a substitute for more expensive locales, such a Georgia-centric story wound up being shot elsewhere.

It’s striking, having watched the trailer several times now, how present O’Connor’s crutches are. The final “coming soon” shot of O’Connor at the family mailbox, which has been one of the only images available for a while, has them plainly visible but I never noticed them. And there they are behind her as she types up a manuscript or struggles even to walk around the house. Some early film festival reviews I’ve read suggest that Wildcat is not just a story about a writer publishing a novel but a meditation on suffering, the threat of death, and God’s grace. I’m here for it.

Wildcat is currently scheduled for a big-city release on May 3 with wider availability to follow, though I haven’t been able to find any details about that yet. Hopefully we can look forward to a time in the late spring or early summer when we can catch Flannery O’Connor in theatres.