Logical Meme

In this essay, I argue that the movie Weapons (2025) is a latent critique of radical transgender ideology, particularly its barbaric application to children and its associated violence (e.g., Trantifa, trans-related school shootings, etc.). Whether this critique is the subtle intention of the film’s writer/director Zach Cregger or is an unconscious byproduct of his art, Weapons channels our society’s collective anxiety over the trans issue.

NOTE: This essay contains spoilers.

Suburban Horror

Much has been written about the horror film genre being a coded and subversive critique of straight, White, “patriarchal” suburban America. This writing has come almost entirely from the cultural Left and is quite often of the Marxist or Freudian variety, or a fusion of both. (Postmodernist film analysis is among the most execrable writing one will find). Among this crowd, Robin Wood’s 1979 essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” is quite influential.^[1] Drawing on Freudian and Marxist ideas, Wood argues that American horror films dramatize the tensions and “repressions” underlying bourgeois capitalist society. He proposes that horror narratives revolve around the return of the “repressed Other” — figures or forces symbolizing what the dominant society “excludes” or suppresses (e.g., sexuality, female autonomy, racial differences, youth rebellion). In this reading, the monster or threat embodies these repressed elements, while the central conflicts in the plot reflect society’s attempts to contain or destroy these repressed elements. Wood interprets the horror genre as a cultural barometer: when purported social contradictions intensify, horror films become more subversive, revealing anxieties about the fragility of the family, authority, and the suburban ideal at the center of American life. In a widely-quoted line from Wood’s essay, he writes: “At this stage it is necessary to offer a simple and obvious basic formula for the horror film: normality is threatened by the monster.”

In what can be called suburban horror or suburban gothic, some films attempt to subvert the American suburban life ideal in particular or, more generally, middle-class life itself. Relevant motifs include the fear of the neighbor/stranger next door; isolated or emotionally distant characters; the uncanny in familiar domestic spaces; anxieties about reproduction and parenthood; and the aforementioned consequences of “sexual repression” beneath middle-class conformity. And so we have Leftist exegeses on such films as Psycho (1960), Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Exorcist (1973), It’s Alive (1974), Carrie (1976), Eraserhead (1977), Halloween (1978), The Brood (1979), Poltergeist (1982), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), The Babadook (2014), and Hereditary (2018).

But sometimes the interpretive tables can be turned. Wood and his ilk are correct that films can act as a cultural barometer, an intuiting of the zeitgeist. With respect to many of the culture war issues of our time, the Left currently has institutional hegemony (e.g., schools, government, media, etc.) despite lack of majority support from the public, and right now there is widespread public anxiety over the issue of minors sexually transitioning, particularly in how schools, the medical establishment, and the courts can collectively strip decisions over such matters away from parents.^[2]

The zeitgeist itself is the conscious self-image of an age — its collective attitudes and dominant symbols — plus the unconscious compensation for what that age represses. Carl Jung theorizes that each of our individual psyches contains an unconscious reservoir of motives, desires, fears, beliefs, and other characteristics that we have suppressed from our conscious mind. He furthermore believes that insofar as certain elements of one person’s unconsciousness are shared by others — that is, as part of a collective psyche — we then have the second-order dynamic of the collective unconsciousness, which Jung demarcates through his schema of archetypes. In the same way that an individual has a Shadow, an entire culture can likewise possess a collective Shadow. The path to psychological health, according to Jung, is the individuation process, and the first step of that process involves encountering one’s Shadow and attempting to integrate its components into the ego. This cycle of individuation then repeats itself continuously as a person matures through adulthood.

It is in this context that the symbolism found in works of art can be studied, interpreted, and appreciated. Works of art that — however indirectly or subconsciously — touch upon the individuation dynamic will resonate. Whether it is through movies, music, literature, or other artforms, Jung’s unconscious Shadow archetype expresses itself as the antithesis of whichever personality type is the dominant, actualized, conscious zeitgeist of the day. “Whatever the unconscious may be,” Jung writes, “it is a natural phenomenon producing symbols that prove to be meaningful” (Jung, 1964). Of the very nature of a symbol, he writes: “By this I do not mean an allegory that points to something all too familiar, but an expression that stands for something not clearly known and yet profoundly alive” (Jung, 1933). Elements of the Shadow are encountered in creativity and can act as a sublimated expression of this encounter. Oftentimes, the artist is not consciously aware that his work is accomplishing this. Great art that engages with this dynamic is able to resonate with a wide swathe of society, tapping into those elements of the collective unconscious most in need of resolution, broaching unresolved tensions of the conscious and unconscious minds, and ultimately providing a step towards psychic integration. With respect to a society’s well-being, Jung believes that the more primordial elements or visions an artist gives expression to can have a salutary effect upon the psychically unbalanced situations the society is experiencing.

Aunt Gladys

Writer/director Zach Cregger’s surprise hit film Weapons centers on the mass disappearance of 17 third-grade children from the same classroom in a small Pennsylvania town. All vanished at precisely 2:17 a.m. on the same night, in a synchronized exodus from their respective homes. Only one child from the classroom, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), remains behind.

Rather than moving events in a straight line, Cregger divides the film into character-driven chapters. The narrative unfolds by jumping back and forth in time through these chapters, rotating the perspectives of several key characters.^[3] Weapons contains several themes revolving around the trauma of inexplicable loss, forms of addiction, and scapegoating, but a closer symbolic reading reveals a latent critique of radical transgender ideology, its application to children, and its associated violence.

At the heart of this interpretation lies Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), the film’s ruthless antagonist. Gladys is a malevolent witch with ulterior motives who, presenting as Alex’s old and long-absent aunt, inserts herself into Alex’s home life after the disappearances. (Alex has never met her before).

She appears to be suffering from an incurable illness (or else is unnaturally old), and the film’s supernatural premise suggests that she uses witchcraft to restore her health and prolong her life. By obtaining a victim’s hair or another personal belonging, she can place them in a trance-like, near-catatonic state and bend them to her will. She then exploits these victims, especially the children, as a source of vitality, effectively feeding on their life force to rejuvenate herself. In addition, by stripping individuals of their agency, she turns them (whether children or adults) into obedient zombie-like “weapons” who attack on command.

Gladys is heavily queer-coded in appearance and demeanor: garish outfits with all the colors of a rainbow flag, camp theatricality, drag-queen aesthetics, and an exaggerated, almost performative femininity. Interestingly, she only talks with this performative cadence when in public. Privately, when she is back at Alex’s house, with her wig off, her voice is lower, measured, and more natural. Gladys’ overall presence and effect can be seen as an example of the uncanny, one of the horror genre’s most unsettling devices in both literature and film. The concept is most famously associated with Freud’s influential 1919 essay “The Uncanny” (one of Freud’s better moments), where he analyzes the psychological roots of the feeling, believing it can be traced to repressed fears and the blurring of boundaries between animate and inanimate, familiar and strange. The uncanny operates less through the alien or monstrous, and more through the distortion of the familiar: the home that no longer feels safe, the doll that almost looks alive, a smile that goes a little too wide. What makes it effective as a horror device, and what the better elevated horror filmmakers understand, is that it doesn’t ask the audience to fear something foreign, but asks them to fear something they already know and love, albeit something that is now slightly wrong. In other words, the horror isn’t located in the thing itself but in the gap between what it should be and what it has become, and that gap — that ‘wrongness’ — is often harder to make sense of than a straightforward monster. With the uncanny, the familiar world is thrown into disarray rather than being intruded upon from the outside. An aspect of the closely related unreliable narrator device often comes into play as well: one never really knows if the noise a character hears, or something he thinks he sees in a flash, is really there or whether it is part of his overexcited or paranoid imagination. The uncanny in Gladys’ unsettling appearance mirrors the uncanny in our own real-world encounters with many transgender individuals, where we are supposed to ‘perceive’ the biological male who decided he wants to be a woman… as an actual woman.

Given Gladys’ unambiguous malevolence (which includes murder), it is rather odd (or perhaps not) that her character has become something of a camp LGBTQ+ icon. In a NYT piece by Esther Zuckerman titled “Aunt Gladys From ‘Weapons’ Doesn’t Scare These Drag Artists,” several drag queen performers who have adopted the Gladys persona in their acts are interviewed:

Perla said that drag queens were drawn to Gladys because she is something of a drag queen herself. When she’s at home, Gladys is makeup-less, casting spells in a nightgown. “But when she’s interacting with people throughout the film and she’s fully done up in this caricature of herself, there is such a difference between her private persona vs. her public persona, and I think that resonates with a lot of drag artists,” Perla said.

From this same piece, another drag performer expresses kinship with Gladys:

Capulet explains that, despite Gladys’ evil actions, she resonates for queer viewers beyond just her fabulous looks. “She’s an outsider trying to fit in with this weird society, and society kind of accepts her but not really and that’s gay people,” she said.

Another volunteers the well-worn ‘girl power’ trope:

[DeJa Skye] added that drag queens were drawn to Gladys because “we love a strong female.” She continued, “For me, it was just the fact she was not afraid to wear the cosmetics, she was not afraid to be camp, to be outlandish, to be out there and just to be, well, I guess not herself, quote-unquote, but what she wanted to present to the world.”

Still another hopes that Gladys lives forever in the drag queen world:

In Gouda Judy’s act, she imagines that Gladys survives the gruesome end of “Weapons.”

“I like to live in a delusional world where I get to see her one more time onscreen,” Gouda Judy said. “So I’m letting her survive through me and I’m sure a bunch of other drag artists are the same where she will live forever now as a drag icon.”

Amy Madigan, whose performance as Gladys has received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, concurs:

“I love that the gay community has so taken to Gladys, and they realize she’s somebody that is an outsider, that’s tormented, that doesn’t fit in. And also her look. People just said, ‘Yeah!’ It’s just a surprise to me that the community, and I think people in the drag community too, kind of really related to [her]” (Chichizola, 2025).

In Weapons, Gladys is deceitful and manipulative and exerts a supernatural control over both children and adults. It’s important to note the striking visuals of the children running away from their suburban homes (i.e., the nuclear family) in the middle of the night (while their parents are asleep) and together racing to Gladys (i.e., trans ideology). With their minds controlled, the possessed children run in a synchronized, trance-like state — arms outstretched in a pointed, ritualistic form – as seen on the film’s promotional poster.

This running-in-unison serves as a metaphor for the associated brainwashing – the mind virus — that comes with woke indoctrination of children on the topic of transgenderism. Regarding these missing children, Gladys has effectively usurped parental authority, isolated the children from their families, and then proceeds to use them to pursue her agenda. Collectively, these sequences of the children running elicits a parallel with how transgender ideology and its proponents effectively lure or “steal” children away from their traditional family units.

Elsewhere in the film, a secondary character named James, who is a young homeless drug addict (and who will ultimately come under Gladys’ spell), steals a child’s backpack from an unlocked car and heads to the local pawn shop to unload its contents, all of which are in trans pink and blue.

At one point in the film, after she puts Alex’s mother and father into a catatonic state, Gladys sits at the head of the family’s dinner table, with the catatonic parents seated on each side of her, waiting for Alex to enter the room. The symbolism here is that Gladys (representing trans dogma) is in control, and not Alex’s parents. We can also perhaps see this dinner table scene symbolizing the mother/father divide on the issue of transitioning a child, the sociological phenomenon of fathers being more resistant to the idea than mothers.

Gladys then says to Alex: “Now, when I tell you that you are not to speak about me or your parents to anyone… you understand what can happen if you break your promise. I can make your parents hurt themselves. I can make them hurt each other. I can make them eat each other if I want to.” One can’t help but see a corollary here with teachers and school administrators hiding a student’s gender dysphoria from their parents, of indirectly encouraging the child to keep their transitioning a secret from their parents. (Many blue states have actually passed laws not requiring teachers or school officials to inform parents if a student identifies as a different gender at school).

Gladys has the missing children spellbound and holed-up in the basement of Alex’s suburban house, standing in unison as if in an alternative classroom, and she has placed newspapers over all of the house’s windows, furthering the theme of hiding the trans agenda from parents. Gladys has turned the children into her personal ‘weapons’ against those who threaten her plans. Should the need arise, she has the possessed children under her control to carry out whatever malevolent deeds she needs done. This motif of an adult figure indoctrinating, grooming, and coercing a group of impressionable youth into militant action against imagined enemies, in many ways echoes the ideological conformity mechanisms of transgender activists and the spate of violence in the past several years committed by transgender activist shooters, or in the case of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a trans-adjacent shooter. This violence is very much the result of framing rational dissent against the transitioning of minors – against the “gender affirming care” that involves puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones — as being fascist ‘existential violence’ worthy of violent pushback.

AWFLs & Homosexuals

Of the affected third-grade classroom, the single holdout, Alex, becomes the pivot point: the child who resists or is spared the full ‘infection’, and who facilitates the truth surfacing. This echoes conservative critiques arguing that ‘gender-affirming care’, very much a social contagion phenomenon, pressures youth into irreversible steps (with unknown long-term effects on the still-developing brain) and also sidelines those with detransition narratives or who otherwise oppose the Trans-mania driven largely by AWFLs.

On this last point, a telling scene involves Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), a blue collar, conservative-coded, alpha male whose son is among the 17 missing children. Increasingly upset with the police department’s lack of progress in the missing children’s case, Archer takes it upon himself to research the overall case. He marks the locations of the homes from which the children have gone missing onto a map and, where he can, proceeds to review Ring camera footage from nearby houses for the night the children went missing. From this footage, he is able to see the direction the individual children run in, and using a triangulation method he posits the general area where the children’s rendezvous point might be converging at. At one of the homes of a missing child, however, Archer meets unexpected resistance from the child’s mother. She refused to allow Archer to review the family’s Ring footage. Not giving up, Archer waits in his car just down the street until the woman’s husband pulls into the driveway. Archer then approaches him and instantly agrees to let Archer review the Ring footage. As Archer is reviewing the footage with the husband, we see the wife lingering in the doorway, with arms crossed and a look of disapproval. Might this be alluding to how White mothers seem to be the most fanatical proponents of gender-transitioning their children, and White fathers the biggest detractors?^[4]

The scapegoating of teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) further layers this allegory. Justine is the dedicated teacher of the missing children (and Alex). She is young, White, unmarried, and lives alone. Although her heterosexual promiscuity is depicted in the film, at first glance she could easily pass as lesbian or, at a minimum, feminist or the stereotypical AWFL public school teacher. As one lesbian reviewer of the film notes:

She isn’t, as far as the text shows us, queer, but it sure is easy to map her experiences and position in the film onto what it’s like to be a queer or trans teacher today. As part of their multi-level attacks on public education, the religious right has demonized LGBTQ+ teachers (Upadhyaya, 2025).

Justine is blamed by the community for the disappearances — in the way that, in our current cultural climate, teachers would be logical suspects in how and why someone’s child “decides” to become trans — and at one point in the film we see Archer use red paint to emblazon her car with the word “Witch”. Despite no evidence that she knows something about the children’s disappearances, she is placed on leave by the school’s principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong). Now completely ostracized, Justine’s alcoholism spirals, accompanied by other self-destructive behavior.^[5]

Marcus is conspicuously depicted as homosexual, yet this seems to serve no ostensible purpose. (For instance, we see him and his effeminate husband Terry in the grocery store interacting as they pick out cereals and such). At Justine’s urging, Marcus visits Alex’s family home to inquire about young Alex. Gladys meets him at the door and successfully deflects him, but Marcus grows suspicious. Gladys picks up on this and decides he must die. She eventually visits the home of Marcus and Terry, invites herself in, and activates a spell on Marcus. In the following grotesque sequence, Marcus (under Gladys’ control) kills Terry, knocking him down to the kitchen floor, and then smashing Terry’s head repeatedly with his own forehead while spewing an ungodly stream of black bile onto Terry. Gladys then sends Marcus to kill Justine, who has been investigating Alex’s home life.

Insofar as we accept the notion that Gladys represents radical transgender ideology, her taking control of Marcus turns him into a symbolic agent of trans ideology itself. Gladys’ instructing Marcus to murder his husband Terry represents the escalating animosity that the thoroughly intolerant, radical trans community has towards ‘traditional’ homosexuals and feminists who believe in the biological gender binary, which is an issue dividing the LGBTQ coalition.^[6] The black bile that Marcus spews onto Terry is akin to the relentless stream of screeched moral indignation and demands from the trans community that is taking place within this coalition’s political environment. Furthermore, with Gladys also suspicious that Justine (representing feminism) is getting close to the truth, she instructs Marcus to find and kill her. In other words, radical trans activism, its institutional ascent (especially in schools), and its intolerance for dissent has led some gays, lesbians, and feminists to turn on each other. These dynamics are articulated by Andrew Sullivan in his NYT opinion piece from 2025 titled “How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and Lost Its Way”. Sullivan is an influential culture critic and gay rights advocate whose politics could best be described as center-right-with-libertarian-leanings. Of the radical transgender agenda, he writes:

[It] was no longer primarily about gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights, because almost all had already been won. It was instead about a new and radical gender revolution. Focused on ending what activists saw as the oppression of the sex binary, which some critical gender and queer theorists associated with white supremacy, they aimed to dissolve natural distinctions between men and women in society, to replace biological sex with gender identity in the law and culture and to redefine homosexuality, in the process, not as a neutral fact of the human condition but as a liberating ideological queerness — which is then meant to subvert and queer language, culture and society in myriad ways.

The words ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ all but disappeared. L.G.B.T. became L.G.B.T.Q., then L.G.B.T.Q.+, and more letters and characters kept being added: L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ or 2S.L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ (to include intersex, asexual people and two-spirit Indigenous people). The plus sign referred to a seemingly infinite number of new niche identities and, by some counts, more than 70 new genders. The point was that this is all one revolutionary, intersectional community of gender-diverse people and intertwined with other left causes, from Black Lives Matter to Queers for Palestine…

But this new ideology, I believed, was different. Like many gays and lesbians — and a majority of everybody else — I simply didn’t buy it…

[A]bolishing the sex binary for the entire society? That’s a whole other thing entirely. And madness, I believe. What if I redefined what it is to be heterosexual and imposed it on straight people? Or changed what it means to be a man or a woman, for that matter? Then it ceases to be accommodation of a minority and becomes a society-wide revolution — an overreach that would soon lead to a potent and sane backlash, against not just trans people but gay men and lesbians as well” (Sullivan, 2025).

Sullivan notes how the ‘live and let live’ liberal equality goals of the gay rights movement suddenly began to clash with LGBTQ groups who, per their stated revolutionary goals, rapidly permeated the relevant institutions, including schools:

They demanded that the entire society change in a fundamental way so that the sex binary no longer counted. Elementary school children were taught that being a boy or a girl might not have anything to do with their bodies and that their parents had merely guessed whether they were a boy or a girl when they were born. In fact, sex was no longer to be recognized at birth — it was now merely assigned, penciled in…

Sullivan argues that in the gay rights movement, “there had always been an unspoken golden rule: Leave children out of it.” (To what extent this is true is certainly debatable). But for trans activists, targeting children has been a critical front in their culture war:

So what did the gender revolutionaries go and do? They focused almost entirely on children and minors. Partly because the adult issues had been resolved or close to it and partly because true cultural revolutions start with the young, it meant overhauling the education not only of children with gender dysphoria but of every other kid as well.

In a nightmare dream sequence that Justine has, she enters her classroom and sees all of her students sitting at their desks with their heads down. Alex, the one student who didn’t disappear, raises his head and gives a sinister smile with his face covered in creepy clown-like makeup, conjuring Gladys’ own garish appearance. This could be seen to symbolize the fear that certainly some teachers must have that a young boy in their classroom decides he is a girl.

Anxiety Over Trans Violence

Within another nightmare dream sequence that Archer has about his missing son, a giant AR-15 is seen floating in the sky over his house, with “2:17” (the time the children all simultaneously disappeared) illuminating from it. Cregger has stated that he intentionally left the moment ambiguous and doesn’t give a definitive meaning for it:

It’s a very important moment for me in this movie, and to be frank with you, I think what I love about it so much is that I don’t understand it. I have a few different ideas of what it might be there for, but I don’t have the right answer. I like the idea that everyone is probably going to have their own kind of interaction or their own relationship with that scene, whether they don’t give a shit about it and it’s boring, or whether they think it’s some sort of political statement, or whether they think it’s just cool. I don’t really care. It’s not up to me. I just like that it’s there (Earl, 2025).

That being said, when combined with the very title of the film and the premise involving young schoolchildren, one cannot help but read the image as representing parental fear of school violence.

Sanity Prevails

Bioleninism (“Biological Leninism”) is a useful shorthand formulation for the Dissident Right’s view on how society operates.^[7] It provides an encapsulating framework that centers upon, and synthesizes, various core perspectives within the Dissident Right: HBD realism; Steve Sailer’s “Coalition of the Fringes” notion; Moldbug/Yarvin-style historical revisionism (rejection of the progressive account of history) and accounts of hierarchy; memetics; and the critical role that status anxiety plays in radically remaking the centers of power in Western society. Because post-industrial affluence in the West has met the material needs of even the poorest and most low-status groups, class consciousness has failed to materialize as a Leftist rallying point. In its place is status, a prime motivator of human activity.^[8] In brief, Bioleninism is the ideologically driven elevation of low-status groups into positions of power in the ruling class. However, unlike Lenin’s unified and formal Communist party of the Soviet Union, today’s Bioleninism is distributed and informal. There is no single unifying political party, but rather Gramsci’s “Long March through the Institutions” in the form of HR departments, NGOs, media, academia, corporate DEI… and public schools. Each act as a conduit of propaganda and activism.

The progressive regime today is largely comprised of an identity-based coalition of groups, and this has become the central organizing principle for its nexus of power. As such, this regime elevates people who would be low-status in a purely meritocratic, traditional, or naturally ordered (biologically determined) society — basically anyone who would rank low on natural hierarchies of competence, attractiveness, health, and traditional family formation. Groups that get uplifted and granted institutional power include non-White ethnic groups (particularly Blacks and Browns); LGBTs and people with other deviant sexualities; those with various other psychological disorders (“neurodivergence”); etc.

Along the way, the gender dysphoria underlying transgenderism goes from being a mental disorder to being normalized, a point of pride, even something to aspire to. This leads to an elevated moral status, a heightened sense of moral self-righteousness. The progressive coalition members become fanatically loyal enforcers (“political commissars”) precisely because their elevated position depends entirely on the continuation of the progressive regime model itself. If merit, tradition, or natural status hierarchies were to return — if the progressive regime were to lose its ruling class status — these groups would lose their position and prestige.

The mania surrounding gender dysphoria in youth is very much a social contagion phenomenon, where misfit kids seek to reinvent themselves into something new and fashionable, to immediately gain a boost in social status, and to suddenly possess a strange level of social power over adults. In those instances where outright social contagion is not in play, there is still a high likelihood that even these gender-dysphoric children are simply gay or lesbian.

In his famous 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation,” Max Weber argued that the spread of rationalization, bureaucratization, and scientific thinking had systematically drained the world of its sense of mystery, magic, and transcendent meaning. Secularization had made our world disenchanted. A parallel track to this has been the idea of social fragmentation, something that has long been on conservatism’s radar screen. The inertia of the free-market ethos leans toward dissolving traditional norms and institutions, and toward the ever-novel commodification of all things, actions, and relationships. When concatenated across society, an emergent value system of consumer capitalism takes shape and coalesces. The cultural contradictions of capitalism are such that a vast array of choices and options (oriented around increasingly unbounded and free-floating values of self-actualization) leads to a hyper-individualism devoid of familial and communal ties, to an atomized society, to a culture of narcissism (to quote Lasch). From every conceivable angle, one is told that one ought to have the choice to do this or that, to become this or that.

In many ways, Trans-mania is a logical consequence of this societal inertia. Why should the biological reality of your gender prevent you from being your ‘true self’? From this vantage point, gender dysphoria acts as a re-enchantment of one’s being in the world. The contradiction, however, is that when people are ‘liberated’ from unchosen obligations, they are not necessarily happier individuals with healthy, integrated psyches, but are all too often weighed down with anxiety, depression, uncertainty, and anomie.

***

In the third act of Weapons, Archer eventually comes to realize that his take on Justine has been all wrong, that she is just as anxious and determined to find out what’s happened to the missing children as he is. In Archer’s eyes, Justine goes from being the scapegoat to being a partner aimed at rescuing the children. Since we are in the general Jungian wheelhouse in this essay, there’s an added element that is part of Jung’s psychological theory. That the conservative-coded male Archer and the (presumably) feminist Justine (which can plausibly be inferred from her irresponsible drinking, promiscuity, and overall appearance) resolve their differences and join forces can be seen as the embodiment of a healthy, integrated psyche.

Part of Jung’s concept of psychological wholeness rests on the idea that every human psyche contains contrasexual elements that must be acknowledged and integrated rather than suppressed. In men, this inner feminine dimension is referred to as the anima — a living psychological force embodying feeling, intuition, relatedness, and the capacity for deep emotional life. In women, the corresponding inner masculine dimension is animus — associated with logos, rationality, assertion, and directed will. (In many ways, this aligns with sociobiology’s discussion of sex differences in temperament and social roles). Jung’s argument is that a man who represses his anima becomes rigid, emotionally distant, and vulnerable to moods he can’t consciously account for. Since the anima doesn’t disappear when denied, it instead goes underground and operates autonomously as a Shadow, prone to erupting in irrational behavior. The same dynamic applies to a woman whose animus remains unconscious: she becomes vulnerable to dogmatic thinking, compulsive opinionating, suicidal empathy, and neuroticism. True individuation — Jung’s term for the lifelong process of becoming a fully realized self — requires a conscious, ongoing, and balanced relationship between these inner figures, so that the ego can draw on the full resources of the psyche rather than just a part of it.

In the film’s finale, Justine and Archer enter Alex’s house. This provides a sufficient distraction to allow Alex to take control of the spell that possesses the children and redirect it towards Gladys herself. Alex aims these ‘weapons’ at Gladys and the children proceed to chase her out of the house and through the suburban neighborhood. As the children smash through doors and windows of houses to get to Gladys, we see her wearing another pink and blue outfit, the last set of clothes she’ll ever wear before her grisly death at the hands of the children who literally tear her apart from limb to limb.

The film ends with the spell being lifted from the children, and most of them returning to normal. A voiceover tells us: “All of the kids from [Alex’s] class got reunited with their parents. Some of them even started talking again this year.” Some will successfully detransition, while others are just too far gone. This finale of Weapons can be interpreted as society’s rejection of the sexual transitioning of minors and of the accompanying ‘liberation’ of children from the clutches of radical transgender ideology.

References

• Belmont, N., Cronin, T. J., & Pepping, C. A. (2024). “Affirmation-support, parental conflict, and mental health outcomes of transgender and gender diverse youth,” International Journal of Transgender Health, 25(1), 50–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/26895269.2023.2252418
• Chichizola, Corey. “Weapons’ Amy Madigan Reacts To Aunt Gladys Becoming A Gay Icon (And She Deserves It),” Cinemablend, November 28, 2025, https://www.cinemablend.com/movies/weapons-amy-madigan-reacts-aunt-gladys-becoming-a-gay-icon
• Earl, William. “‘Weapons’ Director Zach Cregger on David Fincher’s Advice, Sequel Plans and What His ‘Resident Evil’ Movie Will Look Like,” Variety, August 8, 2025, https://variety.com/2025/film/features/weapons-sequel-director-david-fincher-1236468200/.
• Freud, Sigmund (2008). The Uncanny. Penguin Books: New York.
• Garcia CC, Schwarz K, Costa AB, Bridi Filho CA and Lobato MIR (2021). “Perceived Parenting Styles of Individuals With Gender Dysphoria,” Frontiers in Psychology, 12:655407. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.655407
• Grant, Barry Keith (ed.) (2018). Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews. Wayne State University Press: Detroit.
• Johnson, S. L., & Benson, K. E. (2014). “It’s Always the Mother’s Fault”: Secondary Stigma of Mothering a Transgender Child. Journal of GLBT Family Studies, 10 (1–2), 124–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/1550428X.2014.857236.
• Jung, C. G. “Psychology and Literature”, in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, translated by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933.
• Jung, C. G. “Approaching the Unconscious”, in Jung, C. G., and Marie-Luise Franz. Man and His Symbols. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1964.
• Lowenstein, Adam (2002). Horror Film and Otherness. Columbia University Press: New York.
• Spandrell. “Biological Leninism,” November 13, 2017, https://spandrell.ch/2017/11/13/biological-leninism.
• Sullivan, Andrew. “How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and Lost Its Way,” New York Times, June 26, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/gay-lesbian-trans-rights.html.
• Upadhyaya, Kayla Kumari. “‘Weapons’ and the Demonization of Teachers,” Autostraddle, August 15, 2025, https://www.autostraddle.com/weapons-film-review-queer/.
• Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited & translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Oxford University Press, 1958.
• Wood, Robin (1979). “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Andrew Britton, Richard Lippe, Tony Williams, and Robin Wood. Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 1979. Reprinted in Grant (2018).

End Notes

1. See also Lowenstein (2002). ↑
2. We can see allegorical anxiety over trans-mania in other recent films such as Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid (2023) and the Alt-Right-adjacent film Bugonia (2025). In the latter film, which has been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, the working-class White antagonist Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) has been silo-ed into online conspiracy theories. He believes that some ‘humans’ walking among us are actually Andromedans, wily and capable of using sexual manipulation to achieve their goals. As a defense measure against this, Teddy has undergone chemical castration and convinces his autistic cousin and cohort Dan (Aidan Delbis) to begin doing the same. Dan reluctantly obliges and his subsequent suicide serves as a commentary on the suicide risks of transgender hormone treatments. Teddy and Dan’s pattern of kidnapping and murdering suspected Andromedans may also serve as an allegory about the propensity of transgendered individuals to commit murders in the U.S. ↑
3. Cregger has cited Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) as a big influence on him in the making of Weapons. However, Cregger’s use of this type of multi-perspective device doesn’t entirely succeed here: it feels somewhat forced and the secondary character development is oftentimes pointless to the plot. See Earl (2025). ↑
4. The gender divide between parents, which shows fathers least likely to support a child’s transition, is consistently documented. See Johnson & Benson (2014), Garcia et al (2021), and Belmont et al (2024). ↑
5. It is worth noting that some liberal reviewers of Weapons see Justine as representing a conservative moral panic, namely, the demonization of queer or trans teachers accused of grooming and indoctrinating students for “simply” discussing LGBTQ+ identity topics. See, for instance, Upadhyaya (2025). ↑
6. Various groups in the LGBTQ coalition hold incompatible assumptions about what sex and gender are. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), for example, hold a core position that biological sex is real and immutable. From this foundation, it follows that womanhood is defined by biology and not gender identity. A trans “woman” is biologically male and therefore not a woman in the full sense. In the end, the core conflict is a philosophical disagreement about whether gender is purely a social construct (the trans position) or whether biological sex is an immutable category. The confusing myriad of positions that different groups hold on this topic has led to a proliferation of different ‘pride’ flags. ↑
7. The concept originated in the neoreactionary (NRx) online scene circa 2017-2018 and was coined by the blogger Spandrell. ↑
8. The role of status anxiety has been central in the theories of various influential sociologists, including Weber, Veblen (conspicuous consumption), Goffman, Bourdieu, and Girard (mimetic rivalry). ↑

SCORE: 4/5

This 38 min avant-garde silent film by French-Russian director Dimitri Kirsanoff displays early modernist techniques far ahead of its time (e.g., superimpositions, dissolves, unexpected juxtapositions). There are no intertitles, the film relying (successfully) on pure visual narration and viewer engagement. The violent opening scene is likely influenced by the murder of Kirsanoff’s father by Bolsheviks in 1919.

There is an emotional sequence where the impoverished young woman played by the striking Nadia Sibirskaïa (with her out-of-wedlock-newborn in tow, the product of a cad’s manipulation of her) is in a torturous psychological state: rapid superimpositions convey her frenzied and turbulent mind. We cling to our chair as she, holding her newborn, considers suicide (via long gazes into the river).

There is a scene where she is sitting on a park bench, hungry and cold, while an old man sits down nearby to eat his lunch. She is too proud to beg. From a sidelong glance, the man can see she is homeless and hungry, and so pushes a piece of bread and some meat towards her on the bench. She doesn’t immediately take it, but instead begins to tear up. With just these facial expressions, we see the sudden depth of her painful realization of how dire her situation is, how her dreams are utterly shattered, her pride smashed. She eventually takes the food and nods to the man in thanks. It’s one of the most emotional scenes I’ve ever seen.

SCORE: 4/5

SPOILERS BELOW —

In the style of Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays (e.g., Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)), Norwegian writer/director Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario (his first English-language feature film) is a smart and stinging rebuke to the celebrity of influencer culture, consumer capitalism and, perhaps most provocatively, cancel culture. As such, there is a decidedly conservative streak to this satirical film with, at one point, overt references made to the ‘Alt-Right’ and IDW-aligned figures (e.g., Rogan, Peterson, Tucker). As an outsider’s critique of American culture, Dream Scenario follows in the steps of Borgli’s first film, the well-received black comedy Sick of Myself (2022), which skewers the social cult of inclusivity/diversity and its associated reward mechanisms for exaggerated claims of victimization. “Though there were good intentions,” Borgli has noted, “an economy formed around being a victim, being marginalized or looking differently. That’s what incentivized me to think that placed in the wrong hands, it could have a very fatalistic outcome” (Keogan, 2023). (Borgli wrote the scripts of both films shortly after moving from Norway to Los Angeles, a place he found far more narcissist than his home country).

In Dream Scenario, Nic Cage plays Paul Matthews, a meek and frumpy professor of evolutionary biology who lives with his wife and two teen daughters (both perpetually glued to their cell phones) in an upscale suburban neighborhood in Massachusetts. He is a drab and unremarkable figure, and somewhat emasculated: we learn, for example, that he “chose” to take his wife’s last name in a cringe-worthy, misplaced gesture of feminist solidarity; at home we see him continuously defer to the females of his household, and at the college where he teaches we see him generally ignored by his class of bored students. As the movie unfolds, one could argue that Paul’s arc becomes an allegory for the accumulated cultural repression of White males in modern American society and the potentially explosive, defensive reactions from said White males that might ensue if pushed to the breaking point. Borgli subtly frames the film’s events within the Darwinian contours of evolutionary biology and its sister field of memetics.

Influenced by Jung’s writings on the tension between the conscious and unconscious mind, as well as his internet dives into online discussions of astral projection (Kaplan, 2023), Borgli depicts a freak phenomenon of the collective unconsciousness manifesting itself in a strange new way: Paul begins to appear in other people’s dreams, the common feature of these dreams being Paul’s disinterest and inaction while the dreamer is being hunted or otherwise threatened. In these dream scenarios, Paul’s curbed role as a bystander partially serves as a representation of the aforementioned generalized White male anxiety, emasculation, and beta male passivity. In an interview about the film, Borgli notes:

We spend a lot of our lives dreaming in bed, but we also spend our waking life mostly in our heads too. I feel like we’re not participating in reality as much as we are thinking about our past or the imagined future at any moment. That is a big part of the experience of life. I thought of this movie as a possibility of going there and exploring that. There’s a discrepancy between reality and what you dream about, and I wanted to put those two in dialogue and explore that tension (Lee, 2023).

Despite his bystander passivity, and due largely to the novelty of the phenomenon, Paul becomes fleetingly famous, a viral sensation driven primarily by Gen Z types on social media. At the college where Paul teaches, a throng of students has experienced his appearance in their dreams. As Paul enters the lecture hall one day, instead of it being nearly empty (as is typical for his lectures) the room is crowded. The students in attendance give him a round of applause, and although he’s a bit embarrassed by the adulation, Paul soaks it in before talking to the students:

PAUL: Who’s really here for the lecture on kin selection? Show of hands… Okay, the rest of you, I’ll give you five minutes before I start the lecture, okay? Ask me anything… Yes, you?

STUDENT: How does it feel to go viral?

PAUL: Huh… Well, we can discuss that when we get to memetics later this year.

Paul hopes to leverage his newfound fame to find a publisher for his yet-to-be-written academic book on ants — itself an apt allusion to the collective, hive-mind, human behavior generated by social media and ubiquitous advertising. Borgli says of Paul:

He feels he is being robbed of academic success and has an image of himself that doesn’t match his image in the world. It’s interesting that while he has this midlife crisis, that’s when everyone starts dreaming about him. He’s so starved for attention that he conflates being seen in this way with success (Lee, 2023).

As he listlessly attempts to find a publisher, we see the awfulness of Madison Avenue types represented in Trent (Michael Cera), an unscrupulous upstart public relations agent and his sycophant assistant Mary, who essentially deliver to Paul one false promise after another in an effort to lock him down as an account. They’re eager for Paul to agree to do product-placement (Sprite) in other people’s dreams, a proposition that Paul is disgusted by. However, despite extolling such principles we see the lure of fame ensnare Paul: a young woman from the Madison Ave agency named Molly pursues him in the hopes of actualizing the sexually explicit dreams she’s had of him. He clumsily facilitates the setting for this scenario, but for Molly it doesn’t go down quite as expected, and for Paul it leads to a moment of humiliation that begins a subsequent unraveling of his life.

“So, I’m starting to think that maybe Nick Bostrom was right about the simulation theory,” Paul says at a dinner party that turns sour. “That would sure explain a lot about my situation.”

Whereas in Act 1 Paul was an odd but welcome feature in others’ dreams, Act 2 takes a darker turn as Paul becomes a Freddie Krueger-type nightmare character in these people’s dreams, engaging in all sorts of sadistic depravities there. It is within this context — where some of his college students become “traumatized” by Paul’s sudden appearance in their nightmares — that the film engages in an effective critique of cancel culture. When pushed into a corner by false and baseless allegations, and with nowhere else to turn, might the White male become the very thing society is accusing him of being?

At Paul’s college, we see a cognitive behavioral therapist working with a dozen or so students who feel “unsafe” around Paul. In several instances, the film mocks woke mantras of “lived experience” and how infantilized students being triggered is, on woke campuses, sufficient cause for a college to cancel someone, especially if the ‘offender’ is a straight White male. The bullying mob mentality of social media-fueled cancel culture is most pointedly depicted when a large group of students paint “Loser” on Paul’s car and in response he shouts insults at them (his rage captured on students’ cell phone cameras, of course). To the college’s Dean, Paul protests against the absurdity that he is somehow responsible for their dreams, but his protests are in vain. The handwriting is already on the wall. Despite tenure, his employment at the college is threatened. Fissures begin to appear in his marriage, leading to its ultimate dissolution.

Trent, the Madison Ave agent, explains to Paul that, given the dark turn people’s dreams of Paul have taken, Sprite has pulled out of consideration as an advertiser. The corporations are now scared and risk-averse, Trent and his team explain to Paul, however, they propose an “audience-pivot”:

TRENT: We’re talking about a complete 180. We have to think fresh. Corporate culture won’t touch this. It’s too risky.

MARY: Yeah, but we are getting positive signals from a different venue. The whole — I don’t want to say ‘alt-right’ — but the kind of anti-establishment space, you know, kind of the Jordan Peterson route.

TRENT: Yeah, we can maybe get you on Rogan or something. Share your experience of being cancelled and just, like, pivot…

PAUL: Guys, no. I hate that idea. I don’t want to be some culture war person. I… I… I don’t want to be controversial.

TRENT: There is a chance, we think, to get you on Tucker Carlson this week… So, that’s a big audience. Just think about that. Don’t answer right now.

MARY: And then also, there’s France, Paul. For some reason, they love you over there. Even with the nightmares, they love it.

TRENT: Yeah. You’re building a fanbase over there.

A striking sequence is when Paul dreams of being hunted with bow and arrow by a version of himself wearing hunter camouflage. The allegory here seems to be that while in a social media age where the operative dynamics of ‘natural selection’ appear to be shaped less by physical prowess (genetics) and more by the cunning manipulation of cultural tropes (memetics), especially with respect to wokeness and how it currently serves as a winning strategy in our current ‘evolutionary biological’ game/model, it is physical strength and power – however dormant it might be at the moment – that will prevail in the end.

Desperate to keep his job, Paul tries to get ahead of the cancel culture mob by releasing a self-pitying apology video, where he cries and asserts that he is the victim, which might provide him some leeway in a culture animated by the victimology cult of wokeness. This video humiliates his wife and leads to their imminent divorce.

In the final sequences of the film, set at some undetermined but near point in the future, we see how the discovery of a shared collective unconscious experience has led Silicon Valley to develop wearable tech allowing one to enter someone else’s dream… and promote corporate advertising or one’s personal projects. We see youth gravitate towards this tech commodification and praise it in the most superficial and conformist of ways. Of this sequence in the film, Borgli says:

I was thinking about taking a strange, abstract, and metaphysical concept from an H.P. Lovecraft story and placing it into our banal and real culture to see how they clash. I just followed what I thought would be the playbook of how that would all play out. I thought that if this were to really happen, at some point, the dream phenomenon would get co-opted and made into a product. It captured some of my fears—i.e. if we let everything be a race to the bottom of market decisions, we will have nothing sacred left. I’m scared of the American model winning over and then turning everything into products (Lee, 2023).

With respect to the uncertain future between Paul and his wife, the film ends on an ambiguous and bittersweet note, although that ambiguity is somewhat clarified by Borgli in an interview. “He loses perspective over his values,” notes Borgli, “and at the film’s conclusion you see a man who finally understands what is important, but at the cost of having lost everything” (Lee, 2023).

***

In its critique of American culture, Dream Scenario offers many prescient and interwoven layers. Being a Norwegian who is quite fluent in English, Borgli offers us an outsider’s perspective, and Dream Scenario is instructive satire, pressing various themes that the New Right has been pressing for quite a long time. Of the commodification of virtually everything, Borgli notes:

As a filmmaker from a country where they have a film institute that funds movies and who’s coming to work in America where there’s no such system, there’s only the business model. I’m always aware and fearful of how market incentives can corrupt anything good, original, or sacred. It’s something that I want to talk about because there are ways that we don’t even see that advertising and marketing are slowly paving the road to hell (Shaffer, 2023).

Of social media and influencer culture:

There [are] so many of these 24-hour viral sensations—unlikely celebrities—and some capitalize on it and even create a career around this accidental fame. Some, of course, get completely humiliated and shamed and wish they could delete themselves from the internet. It just feels like more of a scary time to engage with the public, because the public is the world now (Kaplan, 2023).

Through both the film and in interviews, Borgli hammers home the detrimental and dysfunctional aspects of this dominant cultural trend:

We’re more and more pressured into making ourselves personal brands. It’s hard to live up to that personal brand. I think the discrepancy between person and persona is extremely vital and vibrant in the culture right now because we’re curating and branding ourselves. Maybe in ways that we don’t know, it’s damaging our own identity and self-worth. It’s harder to change positions on things because you’ve made yourself a solid, one-idea brand. That’s sort of how we deal with people now. There’s less space for nuance in that way, and we’re contributing to that (Shaffer, 2023).

When asked if he believes the celebrity and fame dynamics of social media and influencer culture are redeemable in their current form, Borgli offers a trenchant reply that employs an Aristotelian definition of excellence:

We need to understand that some of the goals we pursue in the more conceptual and abstract parts of our modern life have an effect on our bodies. For example, we realized that fast food is not something we can run on. We can’t live a life on empty calories. Similarly, I think there’s a lot of empty calories in our culture right now. There’s a lot of noise and not a lot of signals. There’s something positive about status and recognition. It’s important that collectively, we can deem something as “good,” such as a good piece of art. While this mechanism for recognition is positive and a good cultural tool, it has been weaponized against us with all these different ways that we can self-promote and get what we think feels like status. But it’s this empty calorie version of status. We need to parse out what is healthy and unhealthy, and we need to stop chasing the byproduct of achievement and start chasing achievement itself (Lee, 2023).

Lastly, there is a metatextual element to Dream Scenario when one considers the memeification of Nic Cage himself, usually surrounding his often intense (and sometimes endearingly over-the-top) performances. In a highly informative interview to promote the film, Cage discusses all of this and places it within the context of his character Paul:

I think the movie works on many different levels. It’s a bit like peeling an onion, it has different layers. On my mind was more of my own memeification and how I was trying to process waking up in 2009 and foolishly Googling my name and seeing those ‘Cage Loses His Sh*t’ memes, and thinking, well, I signed up to be a film actor. I didn’t sign up to be an internet meme. I don’t know what this is. I had no reference point for it. I found it frustrating, but I also found it stimulating. I thought it was confusing, but I had nowhere to put it.

So, when Dream Scenario came along, I quickly thought I might have, in some strange little way, the life experience to play Paul’s dreamification, because what he’s going through is not really unlike that: People start dreaming about him overnight and then they start talking about their dreams and it goes viral. And I thought, I can make it real for myself and real within the performance because of my memeification. I don’t say this with any complaint anymore or with any ill will. I’ve made friends with it, subsequently, and I’ve decided that, if anything, it’s kept me in the conversation. And it’s also given people a kind of id release. I mean, when they see these meltdowns, I think there’s some vicarious enjoyment to be able to kind of play out those fantasies that we can’t really do, because we all want to behave in society, you know? (Wise, 2024)

References

Kaplan, Ilana. “‘Dream Scenario’ Director Kristoffer Borgli on How His Surreal A24 Film Is Inspired By ‘Shin Godzilla’,” Backstage, November 15, 2023, https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/dream-scenario-director-interview-kristoffer-borgli-76637/

Keogan, Natalia. ‘“I’m Very Comfortable With Repeating Ideas Until They Are Perfected”: Kristoffer Borgli on Sick of Myself ,’ Filmmaker, April 12, 2023, https://filmmakermagazine.com/120781-interview-kristoffer-borgli-sick-of-myself/.

Lee, Zachary. “Inside My Head: Kristoffer Borgli on Dream Scenario,” RogerEbert.com, November 06, 2023, https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/inside-my-head-kristoffer-borgli-on-dream-scenario.

Shaffer, Marshall. “Interview: Kristoffer Borgli on Satirizing Meme-ification and Cancellation in Dream Scenario,” Slant, November 10, 2023, https://www.slantmagazine.com/features/kristoffer-borgli-interview-dream-scenario/.

Wise, Damon. “Nicolas Cage On ‘Dream Scenario,’ Resurrecting Superman And Working In Television: “I Never Would’ve Considered It Five Years Ago.”,” Deadline, January 11, 2024, https://deadline.com/2024/01/dream-scenario-nicolas-cage-the-flash-interview-1235699131/.

SCORE: 4/5

A flop when it was first released, Peter Fonda’s directorial debut The Hired Hand (1971) is now widely considered a minor classic in the then-burgeoning anti-Western subgenre (otherwise known as ‘revisionist Westerns’ , e.g., Little Big Man, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Sam Peckinpah’s westerns), with splashes of experimental ‘Acid Western’ stylizations (e.g., The Shooting). It is a simple but extraordinarily powerful film.

After the huge success of Easy Rider (1969), Universal Studios helped launch the brief New Hollywood phase of the industry by giving Peter Fonda $1,000,000 to make a movie (it is Fonda’s directorial debut), granting him full artistic control, as they had similarly done with Dennis Hopper, who would make the acid-drenched The Last Movie in the same year.

Fonda and a superb Warren Oates (Fonda gave up part of his producing fee to bring Oates aboard) play world-weary drifter cowhands at something of an impasse in life. Seven years prior, Fonda had left his wife and child for the ‘freedom’ of the open terrain of the American Southwest; he now longs to return home, unsure of how his wife will receive him but nonetheless determined to try. Although Oates would rather continue westward to California and the Pacific Ocean, he is game for returning to Fonda’s old homestead. (In many ways, Oates’ balanced and nuanced performance is the centerpiece of the film, the gravity upon which all events revolve around).

Verna Bloom plays Fonda’s forlorn wife, a woman hardened by loneliness and abandonment, yet still vulnerable and emotionally fragile in the presence of her husband… and Oates. She doesn’t initially accept Fonda back into her life in the role of traditional husband, but allows both he and Oates to stay on as ‘hired hands’. While Fonda plays a sort of aimless Odysseus returning home, Bloom is an all-too-human Penelope who, in the seven year interim, has both succumbed to various suitors’ advances and made her own advances to various cowhands she’s employed.

The screenplay by Scottish novelist Alan Sharp has some extraordinary dialogue, subtle and existential in the best of Western traditions. There is one scene between Bloom and Oates that is one of the most moving scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie.

The terrific cinematography is by the now-legendary Vilmos Zsigmond (McCabe and Mrs. Miller; Deliverance; The Long Goodbye; Close Encounters of the Third Kind; The Deer Hunter; Heaven’s Gate), but it is Frank Mazzola’s editing of Zsigmond’s footage that gives The Hired Hand such a unique feel. Moving images stop in freeze-frame and then dissolve into another, similarly-shaped still which then proceeds into new moving imagery, providing a poetic element to the visuals. This further coalesces vis-à-vis the haunting and atmospheric soundtrack self-recorded by Greenwich Village folk scene fixture Bruce Langhorne. Minimalist instrumental pieces involving banjo, sitar, and fiddle perfectly matches the film’s mood. The movie’s heralded, opening montage sequence – which consists of slow-motion footage of Oates bathing in a river while Fonda fishes – is a mini-masterpiece: the soft light and deliberate sunlight-infused lens refraction, the slow dissolves, and Langhorne’s simple banjo-centered melody collectively create a powerful and emotional backstory… without a single word. It is bookended by the film’s silent and very moving ending.

There is a sense of foreboding throughout the film, with incarnations of death (as well as unmitigated evil in nature) all around: a boy crying out for his mother as he lays dying; the corpse of a young drowned girl slowly cascading down a river. Christ symbolism (a widely-used trope in hippie films of the era) is present, but not in an overbearing way. The film’s longevity, however, is assured through its overarching thematic elements: With age comes the abandonment of youthful dreams and idealism (represented here through the discussions of California), the yearning to return ‘home’, the pragmatic acceptance of one’s limited lot in life and love, and the resignation that comes with seeing these truths.

SCORE: 5/5

This movie is a f*cking revelation. A cult fave, I was expecting a more conventional muscle car movie, but this is so much more. Directed by the underrated Richard Sarafian, with stunning cinematography by John Alonzo. A mythopoetic road movie + existentialism + knockout performances from everyone, especially from the lead actor, the equally underrated Barry Newman who plays ‘Kowalski’, the guy the police are chasing and who challenges authority and all around him in his souped-up Dodge Challenger. He downs a supply of amphetamines to reach his Sisyphean goal of driving from Denver to SF in record time, for an unspecified goal. All the secondary actors are top-notch. Though countercultural ala Easy Rider, it is incredibly based and salient for the New Right of today, who are today’s counterculture.

SPOILERS BELOW:

The layers of symbolism and allegory here are many. Though he doesn’t show it, Kowalski is damaged goods. He served with distinction in Vietnam. He became a cop but left that role after acting against police corruption. He then became a race car driver, but saw some die in wrecks and nearly died himself. And he is haunted by memories of his lost surfer girlfriend. For the most part, he refrains from the temptations of pot, ‘free love’, and whatnot for a higher purpose… getting to SF in record time, but does succumb to a desert seduction by a young hitchhiker (Charlotte Rampling) who, in her downhearted musings about waiting and eternity, may represent death itself.

In getting the car he’s driving to SF, we never learn why it is so urgent to get it there in record time, and it seems that Kowalski’s urgency is a purpose-in-itself, where the ultimate telos of one’s ‘vanishing point’ – the eyes fixed as far as one can see down the road — is the annihilation of being which comes with death.

The fantastic era-specific soundtrack, with its evangelical rock tinge (which serves as meta-commentary on the film’s proceedings), accentuates the Christ allegory of the protagonist. In the third act, Kowalski is aided by a guardian angel of sorts, a blonde hippie biker dude named ‘Angel’, who lives in a trailer in the middle of the desert with his gorgeous blonde girlfriend (who herself rides around the house naked on a motorcycle).

The role of the desert is central throughout. The sequence where, in the middle of Death Valley, Kowalski (fixing a flat tire) is stumbled upon by an old man snake collector, is like something out of the Bible. While the movie leans to the left for the time, by today’s standards this is less apparent. For example, on a lone stretch of desert highway, Kowalski picks up two gay hitchhikers whose car had broken down (one is carrying a “just married” sign that was on the back of their car), but this humorous interlude soon turns dangerous when they pull a gun on Kowalski to rob him. He bests them in the end though.

George Miller must have been greatly influenced by this movie when making Mad Max. From the centrality of desert highway, to the highway chase sequences, to the similarity in names between Kowalski, Max Balchowsky (the ex race car driver who maintained the five 1970 Dodge Challenger R/Ts used during filming), and Max Rockatansky, the name of Mel Gibson’s character in Mad Max.

If you haven’t seen this movie, do check it out. It’s achieved cult status for very good reasons. The cinematography is sharp, wide, and spectacular. The car driving is top-notch. And the deeper allegorical levels of the film will pull you in.

SCORE: 4.5/5

This vastly underrated comedy directed by Billy Wilder stars Jack Lemmon, Juliet Mills, and the criminally underrated British actor Clive Revill, who is a comic revelation (his comic timing is absolutely perfect) as Italian hotel manager Carlo Carlucci. The supporting cast is terrific, especially Gianfranco Barra as Bruno, the valet who desperately wants to get to America, and Edward Andrews in a small but hilarious role as a swinging-dick, conservative State Dept official.

Based on a 1968 play by Samuel A. Taylor, and with a script co-written by Wilder and longtime script partner I.A.L. Diamond, dialogue was tailored to Jack Lemmon, who is at the height of his comedic powers in this movie, playing the son of a recently deceased corporate magnate who has traveled to Italy to claim his father’s body, and is rushing to get back in time for a high-profile funeral already scheduled in the U.S. He soon learns that his father did not die in his traffic accident alone, but a woman he’d been having a passionate, 10 year-long affair with died with him as his passenger. Juliet Mills plays wonderfully a carefree British woman of very modest means, who has similarly come to claim her mother’s body, her mother having been the mistress of Lemmon’s father. Through a series of farcical misfortunes, and the classic situational comedy that Wilder excels at, Lemmon & Mills are drawn together.

Wilder wanted to make a film “a little like Brief Encounter, which I always admired,” but the comedic element supersedes the romantic. Mills agreed to gain twenty-five pounds for her role, and a couple of scenes involving explicit nudity (breasts and buttocks, not the other bits), at first seem out-of-place, but ultimately resonate satisfactorily given the associated existential sub-theme of mortality and physical imperfection.

The movie has great poignancy today, with anti-Nixon, political jokes that — while being topical — still have relevancy today, as well as a subplot involving the theme of people desperately wanting to immigrate to America. The movie is chock full of hilarious Italian stereotypes and pokes fun at Italian inefficiency, bureaucracy, and the norm of 3-hour lunches during the work week.

After viewing a number of Italian films, Wilder selected Luigi Kuveiller as his cinematographer, which was a superb choice. Avanti! is beautifully shot on the islands of Ischia and Capri, and along the spectacular Amalfi Coast. Both exteriors and interiors pop with a vibrant color that are masterful in their composition.

Upon its release, the film’s stars were rightfully hailed (Lemmon, Mills, and Revill were all nominated for Golden Globes for their performances here), but reviews were mixed. Some critics felt Wilder was floundering here, trying to stay hip with post-60s, Euro-cinema nudity and sex, but the the script makes some veiled self-referentiality on this. Wilder himself expressed disappointment with the end product, having wished the comedy to be secondary to the romance. Some also found Avanti! to be 30 minutes too long (it stands at 140 minutes), and while I agree that some scenes could have been trimmed or excised altogether, the movie’s length is a minor critique for what is otherwise a hidden masterpiece.

SCORE: 3/5

Woody Allen has had an incredibly prolific output of films – an average of one per year over the past 45 years – and I, as a big fan of his work, have seen them all. With that volume of material, there are bound to be misses among the hits, but a mediocre Allen movie is still better than 95% of what Hollywood puts out. Now a 100% persona non grata in Hollywood circles, Allen was unable to get a single U.S. distributor for Rifkin’s Festival, a movie which was filmed in (and is set in) the beautiful Spanish coastal city of San Sebastian.

Throughout his entire career, Allen has obsessed over existential questions about mortality and the fundamental meaningless and pure contingency (moral luck) of existence. Now 85, Allen surely realizes his own existence is reaching its conclusion. As such, the themes and concerns depicted in Rifkin’s Festival (one of Allen’s worst films) serve as a distillation, of sorts, of Allen’s own psyche and its ever-narrowing and repetitive concerns: the certainty of death; the meaninglessness of existence; disintegrating marriages; art and passion and sex (invariably involving the ‘excitement’ of infidelity) as primary pursuits, ways to feel young again, and a means to distract us from nihilism and the repetitive boredom of domesticity, which is itself a distraction of sorts. But whereas his early films in the late 70s through the mid-80s explored these themes brilliantly, vis-à-vis hilarious characters & plots or characters mired in relatable pathos, Allen’s films of the past 10 years feel like uninspired copies of a copy of a copy.

His last truly great film was Midnight in Paris (2011), but since then his movies have lost any sense of originality and, worse, reflect the rarified insularity in which Allen himself has been living in for more than half his life. For instance, the first dialogue of Rifkin’s Festival is the following voiceover by Wallace Shawn (the surrogate for Woody Allen’s typical nebbish on-screen persona, even down to the Allen’s signature, green military field jacket):

I actually don’t know where to begin. I had to stop work on the novel I was writing and accompany my wife to the San Sebastian Film Festival. Well, Sue had to go. For her it was work. She represented several clients who were there, and did the press for them. Now the ironic part was that, you know years ago when I taught my film class, the thought of going to any film festival would’ve been very exciting to me.

But film festivals are no longer what they were. I mean it was no longer what I was teaching. I taught cinema as art — the great European masters. I only went because I couldn’t shake the suspicion that she had a little crush on this bullshit movie director she did publicity for.

The layers and surfeit of elite lifestyle and concerns alluded to here are almost bottomless. In Woody Allen movies, nearly everyone is either a writer, an artist, a filmmaker, or some other extension of the culture industry, all living in magnificent apartments in exciting cities. They are rarely ever middle-class characters, or low-level white collar workers working tedious jobs, or blue collar people. This is a reflection and function of Allen’s own closed-circle lifestyle and cadre of friends.

Movies often require us to suspend disbelief, but Rifkin’s Festival stretches this concept to its breaking point in that we are expected to find plausible the idea that someone with the looks of Gina Gershon would be the wife of Wallace Shawn, or that (even more implausibly) a strikingly beautiful, middle-aged, Spanish female doctor would almost fall in love with Shawn’s character: a whiny, chinless, balding, pot-bellied, hypochondriac, septuagenarian Jew from NYC, all because Shawn’s character mentions he taught film on the ‘European masters’ (e.g., Fellini, Bergman, Godard, Truffaut).

While the mutual attraction between Shawn’s character and the doctor is not consummated (it does not get to the stage of even a kiss), there are revealing depictions of how Allen sees the ‘artist’ as having license for infidelity and, presumably, other discretions. “He has affairs,” the doctor says to Shawn’s character, regarding her tempestuous artist husband, “and I accept it. After all he’s an artist. And you can’t judge an artist by bourgeois standards.” (This theme has been in several Allen films, most fully in Vicky Cristina Barcelona).

Rifkin’s Festival inserts several dream sequences that are direct homages to several of Allen’s favorite films: Fellini’s 8 & ½, Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, and several films by Ingmar Bergman (Allen’s favorite director) such as The Seventh Seal and Persona, but the gimmick falls flat in most instances. 

As has been increasingly true with Allen’s career as it has progressed, Rifkin’s Festival contains several explicit references to Jewishness and, ipso facto, characters separating the outside world of Gentiles and their culture from that of Jews and their cosmopolitan culture. And, to me, that has been the allure of Allen’s films: one gets the universality of existential and moral philosophical concerns and also the particularism of the quintessential NYC Jewish worldview.

At one point in the movie Shawn’s character voices a sentiment that Allen has made in numerous films: “There’s no doubt the American [Hollywood] masters were wonderful, but generations of Americans were mislead into thinking that Hollywood endings were real and not make believe. And then the Europeans came along and movies grew up.”

Rifkin’s Festival ends as an antithesis to the happy ‘Hollywood ending’, not with any intense or sudden or violent apogee, but by conveying the contingency and randomness of existence, and how even the rich cannot escape the despised routinization of the bourgeois, the plodding, almost uneventful, meandering of life itself.