Meaninglessness and Horror: A Review of Weapons
The way the bewitched children – and Marcus – run, with their arms outstretched like birds toward an unknown point, creates a recurring pattern. We are conditioned by mysticism to[…]
Category: Essays
Semiotic Transubstantiation: A Comparative Semiotics of Literary and Cinematic Sign Systems
The comparative analysis developed throughout this article points toward a broader theoretical conclusion: literary and cinematic signs do not exist in isolation but inhabit a shared semiotic ecology – a[…]
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Make It Grief: Hamnet, Train Dreams, and the Prestige of Loss
Placed side by side, these films illuminate two competing models of prestige naturalism. One builds solemnity through cultural capital, symbol-heavy nature, and affective devices that arrive pre-loaded with meaning. In[…]
Godzilla and Kong: The Hollow World and the Spirit of Capitalism
And so we arrive at the hollow world. Not merely the subterranean kingdom of Kong and Godzilla but the cultural landscape of global capitalism itself: a world filled with endless[…]
Desire as a Postcard: Michael Mann’s Cinema and the Postmodern Male Subject
In a world in which the space of the city, once peremptorily defined by its lights and shadows, has been transformed into a reflection of itself devoid of identity, an[…]
Class System · Essays · Historical & Epic · Immigrant Experience
The House Was Never Ours: Cavalcade, Winfield Sheehan, and the Immigrant Grammar of Indirect Grief
The house was never ours. It was the Marryots’ house, and the Bridges served it. It was England’s house, and the Irish lived in it under conditions that were[…]
The Haptic Screen: A Phenomenology of Modern Auteurism from Christopher Nolan to Charlotte Wells
This essay attempts to map a “haptic geography” of contemporary cinema, exploring how directors like Christopher Nolan, Bong Joon-ho, Denis Villeneuve, Paul Thomas Anderson, Céline Sciamma, Charlotte Wells, and Yorgos[…]
Costume Drama · Drama · Essays · Mystery · Psychology · Thrillers & Action
Weirdness All the Way Down: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut
Like the subtle differences of someone else’s cleaning efforts, our past is inescapable. A seemingly small choice can have myriad consequences, and this is what Kubrick is on about in[…]
Drama · Essays · SF & Fantasy
A Film for No One (Except Me): On The Adam Project
Perhaps this is a fantasy. Perhaps this is the father as imagined, not as experienced. Perhaps this is what the students receive, and what the son never did. And so,[…]
The Unseen Line: Cinema as Geometry
When everything is shown, little is felt. * * * Cinema has always been described through movement – of images, of time, of bodies across space. Yet what if its[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · Franchises & Series · Politics · Superheroes
Predicting the Rise of Trump: Captain America: Civil War (2016)
I only dimly perceived that one day Trump would threaten without provocation war against Denmark, so we could conquer Greenland, and who would willingly abet genocide in Gaza. I could[…]
Conspiracies · Essays · Superheroes
Batman Reserves: Burton’s Sequel as Anti-Fed Allegory
The opening shot of Bruce Wayne arriving at Max Schreck’s elite ball in Batman Returns, featuring a guest in a menorah headpiece. The shot is framed so Bruce collides head-on[…]
Comedy · Comics · Essays · Hollywood · Men & Masculinity · Philosophy · Silents
Three’s a Crowd: Harry Langdon and the Poetics of Fragility
He isn’t just a clown; he is a deconstructionist who reveals the hollowness of the Hollywood dream. The “pause” – those agonizing seconds where Langdon stands motionless – is far[…]
Crime · Essays · Thrillers & Action
Trigger Warning, or: How Jessica Alba Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Woke Imperialism
Commando Parker is the Jeanne D’Arc of a morally bankrupt, corrupt, violent, and racist Empire, and she’s gakked-to-the-gills high on the stupidest and shallowest form of identity politics, giddy with[…]
Drama · Essays · Surrealism
The (Re)Turn: Vicious Retooling of Teenager Archetypes in the Twin Peaks Revival
Lynch takes the glamorized version of youth (even some of the glamor from his very own ’90s series) often presented on-screen and renders it unrecognizable. Dramatized teenhood usually tries to[…]
Drama · Essays · Men & Masculinity · Nature
Notes on Jaws Then and Now
The myth of the Great White bears numerous meanings, of variable relevance, from the perspective of then and now. Either way, the old Ahab type is unable to triumph, but[…]
Animation · Artificial Intelligence (AI) · Colonialism · Essays · Horror · SF & Fantasy
Becoming Alien – Establishing Posthuman Bioethics in The Martian and Scavengers Reign
Ultimately, the comparison of human–ecology relationships in both The Martian and Scavengers Reign reveals two contrasting modes of becoming alien: The former envisions human survival as contingent on an anthropocentric[…]
Class System · Crime · Essays · Race
“Who Gets a Trial, Who Gets Killed”: Race, Class, and Legal Morality in the Film Versions of To Kill a Mockingbird and A Time to Kill
The ethical contrast between due process and vigilantism is not the deepest fault line between these movies. A sharper divide concerns who counts as fully human within the moral universe[…]
Body Horror · Eco-horror · Essays · Horror · Myth and Archetype · Splatter & Gore
The Lingua Franca of Fear: A Dialectical History of Global Horror Cinema
This article argues that the history of global horror is not a linear progression of influence from a dominant West to the passive rest of the world but a dynamic,[…]
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