It’s easy to forget now that at the beginning of 2020, before the pandemic had taken hold of our consciousness, for a brief moment, High Fidelity was back. Not only did Nick Hornby’s debut novel and Stephen Frears’ film adaptation celebrate major milestones this year — 25th and 20th anniversaries, respectively — but a TV adaptation premiered on Hulu in February. In light of all of these arbitrary signposts, multiple thinkpieces and remembrances litigated Hornby’s original text on familiar, predictable grounds. Is the novel/film’s protagonist Rob actually an asshole? (Sure.) Does Hornby uphold his character’s callous attitudes towards women? (Not really.) Hasn’t the story’s gatekeeping, anti-poptimist approach to artistic taste culturally run its course? (Probably.) Why do we need to revisit this story about this person right now? (Fair question!)

Despite reasonable objections on grounds of relevancy, enough good will for the core narrative—record store owner seeks out a series of exes to determine a pattern of behavior following a devastating breakup—apparently exists to help produce a gender-flipped streaming show featuring updated musical references and starring a decidedly not-middle-aged Zoë Kravitz. I only made it through six of ten episodes in its first (and only) season, but I was surprised by how closely the show hewed to High Fidelity’s film adaptation, to the point of re-staging numerous scenes down to character blocking and swiping large swaths of dialogue wholesale. (Similarly, the film adaptation hewed quite close to the novel, with most of the dialogue ripped straight from Hornby.) Admittedly, the series features a more diverse cast than the film, centering different experiences and broadly acknowledging some criticisms of the source material regarding its ostensibly exclusionary worldview. Nevertheless, it seemed like a self-defeating move for the show to line itself so definitively with a text that many consider hopelessly problematic, especially considering the potential to repurpose its premise as a springboard for more contemporary ideas.

High Fidelity’s endurance as both a piece of IP and a flashpoint for media discourse is mildly baffling for obvious reasons. For one thing, its cultural milieu is actually dated. Even correcting for vinyl’s recent financial resurgence, the idea of snooty record store clerks passing judgment on customer preferences has more or less gone the way of the dodo. With the Internet came the democratization of access, ensuring that the cultivation of personal taste is no longer laborious or expensive, or could even be considered particularly impressive (if it ever could have been). Secondly, as one might imagine, some of Hornby’s insights into heterosexual relationships and the differences between men and women, even presented through the flawed, self-deprecating interiority of High Fidelity’s main character, are indeed reductive. Frears’ film actually strips away the vast majority of Hornby’s weaker commentary, but the novel does include such cringeworthy bits like, “What’s the deal with foreplay?” that are best left alone.

Accounting for all of that, though, it’s remarkable how many misreadings of Hornby’s text have been accepted as conventional wisdom. It’s taken as a given by many that the novel and film earnestly preach the notion that what you like is more important than what you are like when, in fact, the narrative arc is constructed around reaching the opposite conclusion. (The last lines of the novel and film are, literally, “…I start to compile in my head a compilation tape for her, something that’s full of stuff she’s heard of, and full of stuff she’d play. Tonight, for the first time ever, I can sort of see how it’s done.”) That’s relatively minor compared to the constant refrain that Rob’s narcissism goes uncriticized, even though the story’s thematic and emotional potency derives from what the audience perceives that Rob cannot. To put it bluntly, High Fidelity’s central irony revolves around a man who listens to music for a living being unable to hear the women in his life.

While Hornby’s prose immerses the reader in Rob’s interior monologue, providing ample room for the character to spout internal justifications of his behavior, the novel hardly obscures or conceals this conclusion. Moreover, the film makes it unavoidably explicit in numerous scenes. Rob (John Cusack) triumphantly pantomimes Rocky Balboa’s boxing routine soundtracked to Queen’s “We Are The Champions” after his ex-girlfriend Laura (Iben Hjejle) confirms she hasn’t yet slept with her new boyfriend Ray (Tim Robbins), but doesn’t hear the part where she says she prefers to sleep next to him. When Laura informs Rob that she did eventually sleep with Ray, Rob completely falls apart. In an earlier, more pointed scene, Rob goes out with his ex-girlfriend from high school (Joelle Carter) to ask why she chose to have sex with an obnoxious classmate instead of him. She venomously informs him that he actually broke up with her because she was too prudish, an abrupt, cruel bit of business we actually witness at the film’s beginning. It was in her moment of heartbroken vulnerability that she agreed to quickly sleep with someone else (“It wasn’t rape because I technically said, ‘Okay,’ but it wasn’t far off,” she sneers), which ultimately put her off sex until after college. Rob doesn’t hear this explanation or the damning portrait of his teenaged self. Instead, he’s delighted to learn that he wasn’t actually dumped.

These are evidently low character moments, one’s that are comedic in their depiction of blinkeredness but whose emotional takeaways are crystal clear, and one’s that have been written about before. My personal pick from the film, though, comes late when Rob attends Laura’s father’s funeral. He sits in the back and, in typical fashion, turns to the camera to deliver a list of songs to play at his funeral, concluding with his professed wish that “some beautiful, tearful woman would insist on ‘You’re The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me’ by Gladys Knight.” It’s a really galling, egotistical moment that still makes me wince despite having seen the movie umpteen times. Yet, it’s immediately followed by the casket being lowered to the ground as Laura’s sobs ring out in the church. In a movie defined by John Cusack’s vocal timbre, it’s one of the few times when he completely shuts up. From two-thirds down the center aisle, Frears’ camera pushes into Cusack’s face until tears in his eyes are visible, but what you really see is an appropriately guilt-ridden, ashamed expression.

However, none of this evidence carries any weight if your objection to High Fidelity is that Rob suffers no material consequences for his behavior. While Rob is frequently called out for his actions, he is never actively punished. He doesn’t, say, receive a restraining order for continually calling Laura after they’ve broken up or end up alone mending a permanent broken heart because of his past relationships. By the end, Rob and Laura get back together and Rob even starts an independent record label on the side. It’s a stretch to characterize Hornby’s High Fidelity as a redemption tale, but it is a sideways rehabilitation narrative with a happy ending that arises at least partly out of mutual exhaustion.

Those two elements—Rob’s asshole recovery and the exhausted happy ending—rarely seem to factor into High Fidelity discourse. Granted, there’s credence to the idea that, socially and culturally, people have less patience for the personality types depicted in High Fidelity, and thus are less inclined to extend them forgiveness, let alone anything resembling retribution. I suppose that’s a valid reaction, one against which I have no interest in arguing, but it’s somewhat ironic that High Fidelity has endured for reasons that have nothing to do with its conclusions regarding inflexible personal principles and the folly of escapism. Both the book and film are specifically about someone who slowly comes to terms with accepting reality rather than live in a world mediated by pop cultural fantasies whose unrealistic expectations have only caused personal suffering. It’s not unfair to characterize this as a fairly obvious epiphany, but considering we currently live in a world dominated by virtual echo chambers with an entertainment culture committed to validating arrested adolescence, it retroactively counts as “mature” and holds more weight than it otherwise should.

Near the end of High Fidelity, the book, after Rob and Laura have gotten back together in the aftermath of Laura’s father’s death, Hornby includes a chapter featuring five conversations between the couple unpacking the state of their relationship. During the third conversation, Rob and Laura fight about how she doesn’t care about music as strongly as he does, catalyzed by Rob’s objection to Laura liking both Solomon Burke and Art Garfunkel, which, in his mind, is a contradiction in terms. Laura finally admits that not only does she not really care about the difference between them, but that most people outside of his immediate circle of two don’t care about the difference, and that this mentality is indicative of a larger problem. It’s part of what keeps him stuck in his head and reluctant to commit to anything. “I’m just trying to wake you up,” she says. “I’m just trying to show you that you’ve lived half your life, but for all you’ve got to show for it you might as well be nineteen, and I’m not talking about money or property or furniture.”

I fell for High Fidelity (first the movie, then the book) as a younger man for the reasons I assume most sensitive-cum-oblivious, culturally preoccupied straight guys do: it accurately pinpoints a pattern of music consumption and organizationally anal-retentive behavior with which I’m intimately familiar. I spent the vast majority of my early years listening to and cataloguing albums, and when I arrived at college, I quickly fell in with a small group of like-minded music obsessives. We had very serious, very prolonged discussions filled with impossibly strong opinions about our favorite artists and records. Few new releases came and went without them being scrutinized by us, the unappreciated scholars of all that is righteous. List-making wasn’t in vogue, but there wasn’t a song that passed us by that we didn’t judge or size up. I was exposed to more music during this relatively short period of time than I likely will ever absorb again. Some of these times were the most engaging and fun of my life, and I still enjoy discussing and sharing music with close friends, but I’m not such a true believer to fully feel comfortable with this behavior. It’s not entirely healthy on its own and definitely alienating to others, and there comes a point when you hear yourself the way a stranger might, or maybe even catch a glimpse of someone’s eyes when you’re midst rant about some stupid album, and realize, “That’s all there is of me. There isn’t anything else.”

This is what Rob proclaims to Laura in the conversation when she tells him she was more interested in music during their courtship than she is now. It’s a patently self-pitying statement on his part that doesn’t go unchallenged by her in the moment or bear fruit in the rest of the novel. Yet, it’s this type of uncomfortably relatable sentiment that goes under-discussed. If High Fidelity will continue to have a life well after its cultural moment has passed, then it’s worth addressing what it offers on its own terms. Near the end of the book, Laura introduces Rob to another couple with whom he gets along quite well. When the evening comes to an end, she tells him to take a look at their record collection, and it’s predictably filled with artists he doesn’t care for, e.g. Billy Joel, Simply Red, Meat Loaf. “'Everybody’s faith needs testing from time to time,” Laura tells him later when they’re alone. Amidst Rob’s self-loathing and sullen pettiness, Hornby argues that one should contribute in some way rather than only consume and that, at some point, it’s time to put away childish ideas in order to get the most out of life. It’s an entirely untrendy argument, one that goes against the nostalgic spirit of superhero films and reboot culture, but it doesn’t lack merit. Accepting that some values aren’t conducive to a full life, especially when it’s shared with someone else, doesn’t have to mean abandoning interests or becoming an entirely different person. It just means that letting go isn’t an admission of defeat.

It’s why I’ve always found the proposal scene in the film to be quite moving, albeit maybe not specifically romantic. It plays out similarly in both the book and the film, but the film has the added benefit of Cusack and Hjejle’s performances to amplify the vulnerability and shared understanding. Laura meets Rob for a drink in the afternoon where he sheepishly asks if she would like to get married. Laura bursts out laughing and says that he isn’t the safest bet considering he was making mixtapes for some reporter a few days prior. When asked what brought this on, Rob notes that he’s sick of thinking about love and settling down and marriage and wants to think about something else. (“I changed my mind. That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. I do. I will,” she sarcastically replies.) He goes on to say that he’s tired of fantasizing about other women because the fantasies have nothing to do with them and everything to do with himself and that it doesn’t exist never mind delivering on its promise. “I’m tired of it,” he says, “and I’m tired of everything else for that matter, but I don’t ever seem to get tired of you.”

This sort of anti-Jerry Maguire line would be callous if Laura didn’t basically say the same thing to him when they got back together. (“I’m too tired not to be with you.”) It’s possible to read this as an act of mutual settling, but I always thought Hornby’s point was personal growth and accepting one’s situation were intertwined. The key moment in High Fidelity, the film, comes when Laura finds Rob’s list of top five dream jobs. (In the book, Laura makes Rob compile the list.) At the bottom of the list, after such standard choices like music journalist and record producer, lies architect, a job that Rob isn’t entirely sure about anyway. (“I did put it at number five!” he insists.) Laura asks Rob the obvious question: wouldn’t you rather own your own record store than hypothetically be an architect, a job you’re not particularly enthused with anyway?

It’s Laura who convinces Rob that living the fifth-best version of your life can actually be pretty satisfying and doesn’t have to be treated like a cruel fate worse than death. Similarly, Rob and Laura both make the active decision to try to work things out instead of starting over with someone else. Laura’s apathy may have reunited them, and Rob’s apathy might have kept him from running, but it’s their shared history that keeps them together. More than the music and the romance, High Fidelity follows the necessary decisions and compromises one has to maneuver in order to grow instead of regress. “I’ve been letting the weather and my stomach muscles and a great chord change in a Pretenders single make up my mind for me, and I want to do it for myself,” Rob says near the end of Hornby’s novel. High Fidelity’s emotional potency lies in taking that sentiment seriously.

The most famous shot in Woody Allen’s Manhattan was photographed in the early light near the Queensboro Bridge, with Allen and Diane Keaton sitting on a bench in Sutton Place Park at East 58th Street. The bench occupies the far-right corner of Gordon Willis’ widescreen, black-and-white frame, with the bridge itself, illuminated by two sets of necklace lights, stretching from end to end. Folding this romantic moment into an unabashed love letter to the city itself, the shot was such a perfect distillation of the film’s spirit that it was used for the poster.

Two years later, on the same bench with the same view of the Queensboro Bridge, Thana, the mute heroine of Abel Ferrara’s rape/revenge exploitation movie Ms. 45, pulls a gun on another in a series of lowlifes she’s murdered in the wake of two sexual assaults in a single afternoon. Surely, Ferrara was cackling at the juxtaposition: Woody Allen’s New York is a magical place, “a town that existed in black-and-white, and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.” Ferrara’s New York is grimy and loud and violent, a hunting ground for cat-calling lotharios and lowlife predators. Defiling the famed Manhattan bench is Ferrara’s way of thumbing his nose at Allen’s romanticism.

Back when Allen was releasing Manhattan, still riding high off his Best Picture win for Annie Hall, Ferrara was in the exploitation-movie trenches with The Driller Killer, a horror movie that Variety found so risible that its critic wrote “Abel Ferrara makes Tobe Hooper look like Federico Fellini.” (Ferrara and his team were thrilled by the notice.) Though Ms. 45 was a huge leap forward in ambition and sophistication, it wasn’t so far removed from the grindhouse aesthetic of The Driller Killer, with an all-the-animals-come-out-at-night vibe that outsleazed the likes of Taxi Driver and Death Wish. 40 years later, Ms. 45 still feels like a powder keg of a movie, notable for how much it subverts the rape/revenge story without trying to transcend it. It’s full of fascinating contradictions, tied to a character whose mission of vengeance is righteous and cathartic in some respects, and messy and disproportionate in others.

Ferrara wastes not a second of his 80-minute running time in establishing New York as a hostile place for an attractive young woman like Thana (Zoë Lund, then credited as Zoë Tamerlis), who walks through a gauntlet of harassment to her job as a seamstress in the Garment District. She doesn’t have the voice to put these men in their place, and she certainly doesn’t have the voice to scream when a mugger snatches her off the sidewalk and rapes her in a back alleyway. Her powerlessness is cruelly reinforced when she gets back to her apartment and a burglar seizes the opportunity to assault her a second time. Getting raped twice in the same day may sound like a wild coincidence, but through Ferrara’s lens, it seems more like a silent conspiracy, like a pack of wolves circling a wounded gazelle. Thana gets the upper hand by clocking her second attacker in the head with a blunt object—specifically a red apple made of glass, the Catholic Ferrara’s nod to Eve in the Garden—and Thana suddenly emerges as an avenging angel.

Were Ms. 45 as simple as Thana taking revenge on behalf of herself and other victims of harassment and assault in New York City, it wouldn’t be nearly as provocative and compellingly ambiguous. Once she gets her hands on a gun and starts playing the role of vigilante, there’s something undeniably thrilling about her wandering into the night and blowing would-be rapists away, like Batman in heels and ruby-red lipstick. But there’s an extent to which she’s simply broken psychologically, with an increasing inability to distinguish between deserving targets of her violence and other men who may not have it coming. She’s been made numb to humanity, which explains why she’s able to carve her second attacker into pieces and distribute parts of him in garbage bins and bus-station lockers around the city.

The Taxi Driver connection is critical, underlined in a late scene where Thana, packing her pistol in the stockings of sexy-nun Halloween costume, does her own version of the famed mirror scene in Martin Scorsese’s film. She’s much more sympathetic than Travis Bickle, whose madness is rooted in his own isolation and simmering resentment, but there comes a point toward the finale where she has a Bickle-like need to kill, regardless of the worthiness of her target. There’s an important irony in Scorsese’s film that society rewards him for killing a pimp instead of a politician, even though it makes no difference to him. Thana simply wants to kill men, and the climax at the Halloween party is where it ceases to make a difference to her, either.

And yet, Ms. 45 doesn’t minimize the sympathy we feel for Thana or the trauma that has been visited upon her, even as events inevitably spin out of her control. Her muteness is a brilliant ploy on the film’s part. When a sleazy photographer makes a move on a co-workers over lunch, she’s not able to tell him off like her friend. She can only “speak” through violence later. But Thana’s muteness isn’t just about letting her gun do the talking. It’s also about the incuriosity of men who have no interest in anything a woman has to say. There’s an entire scene at a bar where Thana listens to a drunk suitor ramble on and on, with no indication that he’s aware of her condition. She’s simply a sounding board for him now, and a hoped-for sex object later.

New York is just as much a “character” in Ms. 45 as it is in Manhattan, brought to life by the grimy texture of Ferrara’s location work and his rigorous efforts to see the world through Thana’s eyes. The city is a snarling monster even before two of its denizens attack her, and it then becomes impossible for Thana to see men as anything other than a threat, whether it’s a relatively innocuous skirt-chaser or the lecherous boss who’s looking to leverage her lapses at work to his advantage. There’s no quarter for a woman like Thana in this New York, neither in the streets where men leer at her nor in a workspace where her livelihood is subject to sexual renegotiation. The threat of violence is everywhere—and she’s given herself license to an extremely proactive form of self-defense.

Ms. 45 exists in an uncomfortable space between raw exploitation and high art, which has been more or less Ferrara’s territory ever since. It recognizes that there’s no tidy way for Thana to express herself, and so the violence she unleashes doesn’t have the satisfying moral clarity of Charles Bronson popping off on the punks who wronged him. Some of the men get what’s coming to them. Others are collateral damage. All Ferrara and Lund seem to ask is for Thana to be understood, to be heard. She’s owed that much at a minimum.

1.

So, we’ll start with the fact that all movies are make-believe. It’s a bunch of actors on a set, wearing costumes and standing with props picked out by hordes of people you’ll never see, under the guidance of a director, saying things that have been written down for them while doing their best to say these things so that it sounds like they’re just now thinking of them. We all know this—saying it feels incredibly stupid, like pointing out that water is wet—but it’s still worth noting. There is, for example, no such person as Luke Skywalker. Never has been, never will be. He was invented by a baby boomer from Modesto. He is not real.

And we know this, and that’s part of the fun. We know that Luke Skywalker isn’t real but is being portrayed by an actor (another boomer from the Bay Area, come to think of it), and that none of the things we’re seeing are real. But we give ourselves over to the collective fiction for the greater experience of becoming involved in a story. This is one of the most amazing things that we do as humans. We know—deep down, in our bones, without-a-doubt know—that the thing we’re watching is fiction, but we enter a state of suspended reality where we imagine the story to be real, and we allow ourselves to be moved by it. We’ve been doing this since we developed language. The people telling these stories know this and bring the same level of commitment and imagination and assurance that we do as viewers, too. The storyteller knows that the story isn’t real, but for lack of a better way to get a handle on it, it feels real. So, to continue with the example, we’re excited when Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star because he helped the good guys win. For us viewers, in this state of mutually reinforced agreement, that “happened.” It’s not real, but it’s “real”—that is, it’s real within the established boundaries of the invented world that we’ve all agreed to sit and look at for a couple of hours. Every viewer knows this, and every filmmaker acts on it, too. Except:

Christopher Nolan does not do this.

2.

There’s no one single owner or maker of any movie, and anyone who tells you different has their hand in your pocket. But there’s an argument to be made that when somebody both writes and directs the movie, it’s a bit easier to locate a sense of personhood in the final product. (This is all really rough math, too, and should not be used in court.) Christopher Nolan has directed 11 films to date, and while his style can be found in all of them, his self is more present in the ones where he had a hand in the shaping of the story—and crucially, not just that, but in the construction of the fictional world. Take away the superhero trilogy, the remake of a Norwegian thriller, the adaptation of a novel, and the historical drama, and Nolan’s directed five films that can reasonably be attributed to his own creative universe:Following (1998), Memento (2000), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and Tenet (2020). These movies all involve themes that Nolan seems to enjoy working with no matter the source material, including identity, memory, and how easily reality can be called into question when two people refuse to concede that they had very different experiences of the same event. Basically, he makes movies about how perception shapes existence. How he does this, though, is unlike pretty much everybody else.

Take Inception. After a decade spent going from hotshot new talent to household name (thanks to directing the two highest-grossing Batman movies ever made, as well as the first superhero movie to earn an Oscar for acting), he had the credit line to make something big and flashy that was also weird and personal. So we got an action movie that, when first announced in the Hollywood trades, was described as being set within “the architecture of the mind.” Although this at first seemed to be a phrase that only a publicist could love, it turned out to be the best way to describe the film. This is a film, after all, about a group of elite agents who use special technology to enter someone’s subconscious dream-state and then manipulate that person’s memories and emotions. The second half of the film sees team leader Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the rest of the squad actually descend through multiple nested subconsciouses to achieve their goal, even as they’re chased every step of the way by representations of Mal (Marion Cotillard), Dom’s late wife, who committed suicide after spending too much time in another’s subconscious and lost the ability to discern whether she was really alive or still in the dream-world.

I say “representations” because that’s what they are: Mal is long dead, but Dom still feels enormous guilt over his complicity in her actions, and that guilt shows up looking like Mal, whose villainous actions (the representation’s actions, that is) are just more signs of Dom not being able to come to grips with his own past. It’s his own brain making these things up and attacking itself, and it chases his entire crew down three successive layers of dream worlds. You get caught up in the movie’s world as a viewer, and you go along because Nolan is pretty good at making exciting movies that feel like theme-park rides. You accept that Dom and everybody else refer to Mal as Mal and not, say, Dom. Dom even addresses her (“her”) when her projection shows up, speaking to her as if she’s a separate being with her own will and desires and not a puppet that he’s pretending not to know he’s controlling. It’s only later that you realize that the movie is in some ways just a big-budget rendition of what it would look like to really, really want to avoid therapy.

Which is what makes Nolan different from other filmmakers:

None of this is actually happening.

Again, yes, it’s happening in the sense that we see things on screen—explosions, chases, a fight scene in a rotating hallway that’s still some of the best practical-effects work in modern action movies—but within the universe of the film, none of what’s going on is taking place in the real world. It’s all unfolding in the subconsciouses of Dom’s teammates. In the movie’s real world, they’re all asleep on a luxury jet. They’re “doing” things that have an outcome on the plot, but Nolan sets more than half the movie inside dreams. It’s a movie about reality where we spend less time in reality than in fantasy. Half the movie is pretend.

For Nolan, filmmaking is about using a dazzling array of techniques to create a visual spectacle that distracts the viewer from the fact that the real and true story is happening somewhere else: in the fringes we can’t quite see, in the things we forget to remember, or even in the realm of pure speculation.

3.

Memento arrived like (and with) a gunshot. It seemed to come out of nowhere and leave people struggling to describe it, and they usually wound up saying something like “it goes backward, but also forward at the same time, except some parts are actually really backward, like in reverse, so it’s maybe a circle?” Written by Christopher Nolan from an idea originally shared with him by his brother, Jonathan (who eventually turned it into a very different short story titled “Memento Mori”), the film follows a man named Leonard (Guy Pearce) who has anterograde amnesia and can’t form new memories, so every few minutes he sort of just resets and has to figure out where he is, what he’s doing there, and so on. He’s on the hunt for the man who attacked him and his wife, leaving his wife dead and Leonard in his present condition, which you can imagine does not make the gathering and synthesis of clues easy.

What’s more, Nolan puts the viewer in Leonard’s shoes by breaking the film’s linear timeline into two halves—call them A and B—and then alternating between them, with the added disorientation coming from the fact that one of those timeline halves plays out backward, with each successive scene showing what happened before the one you previously saw. So, if you numbered all the scenes in each timeline in chronological order, they’d look something like this when arranged in the final film: Scene A1, Scene B22, Scene A2, Scene B21, Scene A3, Scene B20, etc. You get why it messed with people’s heads.

As a result, we spend most of the movie pretty confused, just like Leonard, whose suppositions about what might or might not take place next begin to substitute for our own understanding of the film. It’s not until the end that we find out the shoe already dropped, and that Leonard killed the original attacker some time ago and has since been led on a series of goose chases by his cop friend, Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), who’s planting fake clues to get Leonard to take out other criminals. In other words, we realize that the story we thought was happening was pretend, and the real story was happening all around us, in the margins, memories, and imaginations of the characters. The most honest moment in the movie is the scene where Leonard hires a sex worker to wait several minutes in the bathroom while he gets in bed, then make a noise with the door to wake him, at which point his amnesia has kicked in again and he briefly thinks that the noise is being made by his wife. He’s wrong, of course, but this is the only time in the movie that we actually know he’s wrong. It’s the only time we truly know what’s real and what isn’t.

Yet you can’t talk about Memento without talking about Following, Nolan’s first feature. Although the film’s production was so extremely low-budget you’d think they were lying—the cast and crew all had day jobs and could only film on the weekends, so the thing took a year to make—Nolan’s willingness to dwell completely in a make-believe world that the viewer never knows about is already evident. It’s about a bored young writer who starts following strangers through the city for kicks, only for one of those strangers to catch him in the act and confront him. The stranger introduces himself as Cobb—I kindly submit here that it is not a coincidence that this is also Leonardo DiCaprio’s character’s name in Inception, but you already knew that—and reveals himself to be a burglar, spooked by the tail but willing to take on an apprentice. Cobb trains the writer to be a burglar, only for the situation to ultimately wind up implicating the writer himself in a complex blackmail plot. You see, the writer didn’t latch onto Cobb in a crowd; Cobb lured him in. The whole movie has been Cobb’s story all along, with the writer as a patsy who doesn’t understand the truth until the final frame. None of what we saw mattered, and everything that actually happened happened off-screen just before or just after we came in on a given scene. It’s like realizing the movie you’re watching turned out to be just deleted scenes from something else. You can’t say Nolan didn’t show his hand from the start.

4.

That same general concept—that the movie we’re watching is actually the knock-on effect of a movie we’ll only glimpse, or maybe never even see—underpins Nolan’s latest movies, Interstellar and Tenet, too. Interstellar has some concepts that are iffy even for Nolan (it makes total sense for someone to do something for another out of love, but somewhat less sense that that love somehow reshapes the physical universe), but it’s still a big, bold approach to exploring how time and perception shape our actions. As the film follows its core group of astronauts while they search for potentially habitable new worlds, they encounter strange visions and experiences that turn out to be their handiwork from the future reflected back at them. Sure, it raises the paradoxical question of whether they had a first mission before this that failed, so now their future selves are intervening to make the second one (which feels like the first one to the astronauts the whole time) successful, and all sorts of other stuff that your sophomore-year roommate would like to talk with you about in great detail. But so much of what we see isn’t the stuff that happens, or that winds up being important. There’s the great scene where the astronauts land on a planet near a black hole, which is wreaking havoc on how time passes on the planet. A minor disaster delays their departure for the main ship still in orbit, but when the landing team returns, they find that more than 20 years have “passed” since they left, with the one remaining team member on the ship having spent more than two decades waiting for them to return. It’s a moment of genuine horror, and it underscores the fact that what we thought was the one true reality was just the perspective of a handful of characters we happened to follow for a few minutes. There were whole things happening that changed the plot and story and direction of everything that would follow, and we never saw them; we didn’t even know we’d missed them.

Tenet is, of course, the latest and most recursive exploration yet of Nolan’s obsession with showing us a story that turns out to be mostly fake. It is almost perversely hard to even begin to explain the film (Google “Tenet timeline infographic” and have fun). One way to think about it is to imagine if the two timeline halves from Memento somehow existed at the same time, with people moving both forward and backward through time while inhabiting the same location. Basically, some scientists figured out how to “invert” the basic entropy of objects, so that they exist backward: you hold out your hand and the ball on the ground leaps up into it, because you’ve dropped it in the future, so now you can pick it up, etc. … Look, it doesn’t get easier to understand.

The upshot is, though, that we spend the film following the Protagonist (that’s his name), a CIA agent played by John David Washington, as he’s tasked with tracking down the source of the inverted stuff to figure out what’s unfolding in the future and why it’s suddenly started to make itself known in the present. He gets marginally closer to understanding the truth by the end of the film, but because this is a Nolan film that is maybe more expressly about the nature of reality than anything he’s ever done, his journey doesn’t so much take him forward as it does in a large circle. Because, and stop me if you’ve heard this, the true story of Tenet is taking place outside the Protagonist’s actions and knowledge, alongside him but invisible, often steered by people who themselves are moving “backward” through time and thus have already met the Protagonist in the future and are old friends with him by the time he meets them in his youth. Even more brain-liquefying, some of these people have been working under the orders of the Protagonist himself—the future version, that is—because his past self has already achieved the victories that allowed him to send the future people backward through time to meet his younger self so they’d achieve the victories that allow him to etc., etc., etc.

With Tenet, Nolan didn’t just make a movie that challenged perception, like Memento, or that dwelt in fiction, like Inception. He made a movie that can only be understood (to whatever degree true understanding is possible) by rewatching the movie itself, over and over, as the multiple timelines and harrowingly complex bits of cause and effect come into some kind of focus. The whole movie itself isn’t happening, in a sense, but is just the ramifications of something else, the echoes of a shout whose origin we’re straining to pinpoint. It both is and isn’t.

5.

Christopher Nolan is a talented director of action-driven suspense thrillers. He’s canny at controlling the audience’s emotions, and he knows how to put on a dazzling show. Plus he’s fantastic at picking when to deploy non-computer-generated effects for maximum impact. But you could say that about a lot of other directors, too. What sets Nolan apart from the rest, and what makes him a director to keep watching and returning to, is the teasing way his movies wind up being just deceptive enough to fool you into thinking that you know what’s going on, then just harsh enough to disabuse you of that notion. Looking at what seems to drive him, I don’t think Tenet is his best movie-movie, but it’s his most-Nolan movie. It’s almost a culmination of his continuing efforts to tell stories where what you see and what actually happens are two different things. It’s not that he makes puzzles to solve. There is no solving these movies. Rather, it’s that he sculpts these delicate artifacts that only let you see two dimensions at a time, never all three, no matter how you twist your head. Craning back and forth, you can almost see the whole thing, but not quite. Some part of it will always have to exist in your memory. And that’s where Christopher Nolan likes to be.

“Shitsville.” That’s the name Killing Them Softly director Andrew Dominik gave to the film’s nameless town, in which low-level criminals, ambitious mid-tier gangsters, nihilistic assassins, and the mob’s professional managerial class engage in warfare of the most savage kind. Onscreen, other states are mentioned (New York, Maryland, Florida), and the film itself was filmed in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, though some of the characters speak with Boston accents that are pulled from the source material, George V. Higgins’s novel Cogan’s Trade. But Dominik, by shifting Higgins’s narrative 30 or so years into the future and situating it specifically during the 2008 Presidential election, refuses to limit this story to one place. His frustrations with America as an institution that works for some and not all are broad and borderless, and so Shitsville serves as a stand-in for all the places not pretty enough for gentrifying developers to turn into income-generating properties, for all the cities whose industrial booms are decades in the past, and for all the communities forgotten by the idea of progress._ Killing Them Softly_ is a movie about the American dream as an unbeatable addiction, the kind of thing that invigorates and poisons you both, and that story isn’t just about one place. That’s everywhere in America, and nearly a decade after the release of Dominik’s film, that bitter bleakness still has grim resonance.

In November 2012, though, when Killing Them Softly was originally released, Dominik’s gangster picture-cum-pointed criticism of then-President Barack Obama’s vision of an America united in the same neoliberal goals received reviews that were decidedly mixed, tipping toward negative. (Audiences, meanwhile, stayed away, with Killing Them Softly opening at No. 7 with $7 million, one of the worst box office weekends of Brad Pitt’s entire career at that time.) Obama’s first term had been won on a tide of hope, optimism, and “better angels of our nature” solidarity, and he had just defeated Mitt Romney for another four years in the White House when Killing Them Softly hit theaters on Nov. 30. Cogan’s Trade had no political components, and no connections between the thieving and killing promulgated by these criminals and the country at large. Killing Them Softly, meanwhile, took every opportunity it could to chip away at the idea that a better life awaits us all if we just buy into the idea of American exceptionalism and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ingenuity. A fair amount of reviews didn’t hold back their loathing toward this approach. A.O. Scott with the New York Times dismissed Dominik’s frame as “a clumsy device, a feint toward significance that nothing else in the movie earns … the movie is more concerned with conjuring an aura of meaningfulness than with actually meaning anything.” Many critics lambasted Dominik’s nihilism: For Deadspin, Will Leitch called it a “crutch, and an awfully flimsy one,” while Richard Roeper thought the film collapsed under the “crushing weight” of Dominik’s philosophy. It was the beginning of Obama’s second term, and people still thought things might get better.

But Dominik’s film—like another that came out a few years earlier, Adam McKay’s 2010 political comedy The Other Guys—has maintained a crystalline kind of ideological purity, and perhaps gained a certain prescience. Its idea that America is less a bastion of betterment than a collection of corporate interests, and the simmering anger Brad Pitt’s Jackie Cogan captures in the film’s final moments, are increasingly difficult to brush off given the past decade or so in American life. This is not to say that Obama’s second term was a failure, but that it was defined over and over again by the limitations of top-down reform. Ceaseless Republican obstruction, widespread economic instability, and unapologetic police brutality marred the encouraging tenor of Obama’s presidency. Donald Trump’s subsequent four years in office were spent stacking the federal judiciary with young, conservative judges sympathetic toward his pro-big-business, fuck-the-little-guy approach, and his primary legislative triumph was a tax bill that will steadily hurt working-class people year after year.

The election of Obama’s vice president Joe Biden, and the Democratic Party securing control of the U.S. Senate, were enough for a brief sigh of relief in November 2020. The $1.9 trillion stimulus bill passed in March 2021 does a lot of good in extending (albeit lessened) unemployment benefits, providing a child credit to qualifying families, and funneling further COVID-19 support to school districts after a year of the coronavirus pandemic. But Republicans? They all voted no to helping the Americans they represent. Stimulus checks to the middle-class voters who voted Biden into office? Decreased for some, totally cut off for others, because of Biden’s appeasement to the centrists in his party. $15 minimum wage? Struck down, by both Republicans and Democrats. In how many more ways can those politicians who are meant to serve us indicate that they have little interest in doing anything of the kind?

Modern American politics, then, can be seen as quite a performative endeavor, and an exercise in passing blame. Who caused the economic collapse of 2008? Some bad actors, who the government bailed out. Who suffered the most as a result? Everyday Americans, many of whom have never recovered. Killing Them Softly mimics this dynamic, and emphasizes the gulf between the oppressors and the oppressed. The nameless elites of the mob, sending a middle manager to oversee their dirty work. The poker-game organizer, who must be brutally punished for a mistake made years before. The felons let down by the criminal justice system, who turn again to crime for a lack of other options. The hitman who brushes off all questions of morality, and whose primary concern is getting adequately paid for his work. Money, money, money. “This country is fucked, I’m telling ya. There’s a plague coming,” Jackie Cogan says to the Driver who delivers the mob’s by-committee rulings as to who Jackie should intimidate, threaten, and kill so their coffers can start getting filled again. Perhaps the plague is already here.

“Total fucking economic collapse.”

In terms of pure gumption, you have to applaud Dominik for taking aim at some of the biggest myths America likes to tell about itself. After analyzing the dueling natures of fame and infamy through the lens of American outlaw mystique in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Dominik thought bigger, taking on the entire American dream itself in Killing Them Softly. From the film’s very first second, Dominik doesn’t hold back, equating an easy path of forward progress with literal trash. Discordant tones and the film’s stark, white-on-black title cards interrupt Presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s speech about “the American promise,” slicing apart Obama’s words and his crowd’s responding cheers as felon Frankie (Scoot McNairy), in the all-American outfit of a denim jacket and jeans, cuts through what looks like a shut-down factory, debris and garbage blowing around him. Obama’s assurances sound very encouraging indeed: “Each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will.” But when Frankie—surrounded by trash, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and eyes squinting shut against the wind—walks under dueling billboards of Obama, with the word “CHANGE” in all-caps, and Republican opponent John McCain, paired with the phrase “KEEPING AMERICA STRONG,” a better future doesn’t exactly seem possible. Frankie looks too downtrodden, too weary of all the emptiness around him, for that.

Dominik and cinematographer Greig Fraser spoke to American Cinematographer magazine in October 2012 about shooting in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans: “We were aiming for something generic, a little town between New Orleans, Boston and D.C. that we called Shitsville. We wanted the place to look like it’s on the down-and-down, on the way out. We wanted viewers to feel just how smelly and grimy and horrible it was, but at the same time, we didn’t want to alienate them visually.” They were successful: Every location has a rundown quality, from the empty lot in which Frankie waits for friend and partner-in-crime Russell (Ben Mendelsohn)—a concrete expanse decorated with a couple of wooden chairs, as if people with nowhere else to go use this as a gathering spot—to the dingy laundromat backroom where Frankie and Russell meet with criminal mastermind Johnny “Squirrel” Amato (Vincent Curatola), who enlists them to rob a mafia game night run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), to the restaurant kitchen where the game is run, all sickly fluorescent lights, cracked tile, and makeshift tables. Holding up a game like this, from which the cash left on the tables flows upward into the mob’s pockets, is dangerous indeed. But years before, Markie himself engineered a robbery of the game, and although that transgression was forgiven because of how well-liked Markie is in this institution, it would be easy to lay the blame on him again. And that’s exactly what Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell plan to do.

The “Why?” for such a risk isn’t that hard to figure out. Squirrel sees an opportunity to make off with other people’s money, he knows that any accusatory fingers will point elsewhere first, and he wants to act on it before some other aspiring baddie does. (Ahem, sound like the 2008 mortgage crisis to you?) Frankie, tired of the crappy jobs his probation officer keeps suggesting—jobs that require both long hours and a long commute, when Frankie can’t even afford a car (“Why the fuck do they think I need a job in the first place? Fucking assholes”)—is drawn in by desperation borne from a lack of options. If he doesn’t come into some kind of money soon, “I’m gonna have to go back and knock on the gate and say, ‘Let me back in, I can’t think of nothing and it’s starting to get cold,’” Frankie admits. And Australian immigrant and heroin addict Russell is nursing his own version of the American dream: He’s going to steal a bunch of purebred dogs, drive them down to Florida to sell for thousands of dollars, buy an ounce of heroin once he has $7,000 in hand, and then step on the heroin enough to become a dealer. It’s only a few moves from where he is to where he wants to be, he figures, and this card-game heist can help him get there.

In softly lit rooms, where the men in the frame are in focus and their surroundings and backgrounds are slightly blown out, slightly blurred, or slightly fuzzy (“Creaminess is something you feel you can enter into, like a bath; you want to be absorbed and encompassed by it” Fraser told American Cinematographer of his approach), garish deals are made, and then somehow pulled off with a sobering combination of ineptitude and ugliness. Russell buys yellow dishwashing gloves for himself and Frankie to wear during the holdup, and they look absurd—but the pistol-whipping Russell doles out to Markie still hurts like hell, no matter what accessories he’s wearing. Dominik gives this holdup the paranoia and claustrophobia it requires, revolving his camera around the barely-holding-it-together Frankie and cutting every so often to the enraged players, their eyes glancing up to look at Frankie’s face, their hands twitching toward their guns. But in the end, nobody moves. When Frankie and Russell add insult to injury by picking the players’ pockets (“It’s only money,” they say, as if this entire ordeal isn’t exclusively about wanting other people’s money), nobody fights back. Nobody dies. Frankie and Russell make off with thousands of dollars in two suitcases, while Markie is left bamboozled—and afraid—by what just happened. And the players? They’ll get their revenge eventually. You can count on that.

So it goes that Dominik smash cuts us from the elated and triumphant Russell and Frankie driving away from the heist in their stolen 1971 Buick Riviera, its headlights interrupting the inky-black night, to the inside of Jackie Cogan’s 1967 Oldsmobile Toronado, with Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” providing an evocative accompaniment. “There’s a man going around taking names/And he decides who to free, and who to blame/Everybody won’t be treated all the same,” Cash sings in that unmistakably gravelly voice, and that’s exactly what Jackie does. Called in by the mob to capture who robbed the game so that gambling can begin again, Jackie meets with an unnamed character, referred to only as the Driver (Richard Jenkins), who serves as the mob’s representative in these sorts of matters. Unlike the other criminals in this film—Frankie, with his tousled hair and sheepish face; Russell, with his constant sweatiness and dog-funk smell; Jackie, in his tailored three-piece suits and slicked-back hair; Markie, with those uncannily blue eyes and his matching slate sportscoat—the Driver looks like a square.

He is, like the men who replace Mike Milligan in the second season of Fargo, a kind of accountant, a man with an office and a secretary. “The past can no more become the future than the future can become the past,” Milligan had said, and for all the backward-looking details of Killing Them Softly—American cars from the 1960s and 1970s, that whole masculine code-of-honor thing that Frankie and Russell break by ripping off Markie’s game, the post-industrial economic slump that brings to mind the American recession of 1973 to 1975—the Driver is very much an arm of a new kind of organized crime. He keeps his hands clean, and he delivers what the ruling-by-committee organized criminals decide, and he’s fussy about Jackie smoking cigarettes in his car, and he’s so bland as to be utterly forgettable. And he has the power, as authorized by his higher-ups, to approve Jackie putting pressure on Markie for more information about the robbery. It doesn’t matter that neither Jackie nor the mob thinks Markie actually did it. What matters more is that “People are losing money. They don’t like to lose money,” and so Jackie can do whatever he needs. Dominik gives him this primacy through a beautiful shot of Jackie’s reflection in the car window, his aviators a glinting interruption to the gray concrete overpass under which the Driver’s car is parked, to the smoke billowing out from faraway stacks, and to the overall gloominess of the day.

“We regret having to take these actions. Today’s actions are not what we ever wanted to do, but today’s actions are what we must do to restore confidence to our financial system,” we hear Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson say on the radio in the Driver’s car, and his October 14, 2008, remarks are about the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008—the government bailout of banks and other financial institutions that cost taxpayers $700 billion. (Remember Will Ferrell’s deadpan delivery in The Other Guys of “From everything I’ve heard, you guys [at the Securities and Exchange Commission] are the best at these types of investigations. Outside of Enron and AIG, and Bernie Madoff, WorldCom, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers …”) Yet the appeasing sentiment of Paulson’s words applies to Jackie, too, and to the beating he orders for Markie—a man he suspects did nothing wrong, at least not this time. But debts must be settled. Heads must roll. “Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still/Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still/Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still,” Cash sang, and Jackie is all those men, and he’ll collect the stolen golden crowns as best he can. For a price, of course. Always for a price.

“I like to kill them softly, from a distance, not close enough for feelings. Don’t like feelings. Don’t want to think about them.”

In “Bad Dreams,” the penultimate episode of the second season of The Wire, International Brotherhood of Stevedores union representative Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), having seen his brothers in arms made immaterial by the lack of work at the Baltimore ports and the collapse of their industry, learns that his years of bribing politicians to vote for expanded funding for the longshoremen isn’t going to pay off. He is furious, and he is exhausted. “We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket,” he says with the fatigue of a man who knows his time has run out, and you can draw a direct line from Bauer’s beleaguered delivery of those lines to Liotta’s aghast reaction to the horrendous beating he receives from Jackie’s henchmen. Sobotka in The Wire had no idea how he got to that helpless place, and neither does Markie in Killing Them Softly—he made a mistake, but that was years ago. Everyone forgave him. Didn’t they?

The vicious assault leveled upon Markie is a harrowing, horrifying sequence that is also unnervingly beautiful, and made all the more awful as a result of that visual splendor. In the pouring rain, Markie is held captive by the two men, who deliver bruising body shots, break his noise, batter his body against the car, and kick in his ribs. “You see fight scenes a lot in movies, but you don’t see people systematically beating somebody else. The idea was just to make it really, really, really ugly,” Dominik told the New York Times in November 2012, and sound mixer Leslie Shatz and cinematographer Fraser also contributed to this unforgettable scene. Shatz used the sound of a squeegee across a windshield to accentuate Markie’s increasingly destroyed body slumping against the car, and also incorporated flash bulbs going off as punches were thrown, adding a kind of lingering effect to the scene’s soundscape. And although the scene looks like it’s shot in slow motion, Fraser explained to American Cinematographer that the combination of an overhead softbox and dozens of background lights helped build that layered effect in which Liotta is fully illuminated while the dark night around him remains impenetrable. Every drop of rain and every splatter of blood stands out on Markie’s face as he confesses ignorance regarding the robbery and begs for mercy from Jackie’s men, but Markie has already been marked for death. When the time comes, Jackie will shoot him in the head in another exquisitely detailed, shot-in-ultrahigh-speed scene that bounces back and forth between the initial act of violence and its ensuing destruction. The cartridges flying out of Jackie’s gun, and the bullets destroying Markie’s window, and then his brain. Markie’s car, now no longer in his control, rolling forward into an intersection where it’s hit not just once, but twice, by oncoming cars. The crunching sound of Markie’s head against his windshield, and the vision of that glass splintering from the impact of his flung body, are impossible to shake.

“Cause and effect,” Dominik seems to be telling us, and Killing Them Softly follows Jackie as he cleans up the mess Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell have made. After he enlists another hitman, Mickey (a fantastically whoozy James Gandolfini, who carries his bulk like the armor of a samurai searching for a new master), whose constant boozing, whoring, and laziness shock Jackie after years of successful work together, and who refuses to do the killing for which Jackie secured him a $15,000 payday, Jackie realizes he’ll need to do this all himself. He’ll need to gather the intel that fingers Frankie, Russell, and Squirrel. He’ll need to set up a police sting to entrap Russell on his purchased ounce of heroin, violating the terms of his probation, and he’ll need to set up another police sting to entrap Mickey for getting in a fight with a prostitute, violating the terms of his probation. For Jackie, a career criminal for whom ethical questions have long since evaporated, Russell’s and Frankie’s sloppiness in terms of bragging about their score is a source of disgust. “I guess these guys, they just want to go to jail. They probably feel at home there,” he muses, and he’s then exasperated by the Driver’s trepidation regarding the brutality of his methods. Did the Driver’s bosses want the job done or not? “We aim to please,” Jackie smirks, and that shark smile is the sign of a predator getting ready to feast.

Things progress rapidly then: Jackie tracks Frankie down to the bar where he hangs out, and sneers at Frankie’s reticence to turn on Squirrel. “They’re real nice guys,” he says mockingly to Frankie of the criminal underworld of which they’re a part, brushing off Frankie’s defense that Squirrel “didn’t mean it.” “That’s got nothing to do with it. Nothing at all,” Jackie replies, and that’s the kind of distance that keeps Jackie in this job. Sure, the vast majority of us aren’t murderers. But as a question of scale, aren’t all of us as workers compromised in some way? Employees of companies, institutions, or billionaires that, say, pollute the environment, or underpay their staff, or shirk labor laws, or rake in unheard-of profits during an international pandemic? Or a government that spreads imperialism through allegedly righteous military action (referenced in Killing Them Softly, as news coverage of the economic crisis mentions the reckless rapidity with which President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001), or that can’t quite figure out how to house the nation’s homeless into the millions of vacant homes sitting empty around the country, or that refuses, over and over again, to raise the minimum wage workers are paid so that they have enough financial security to live decent lives?

Perhaps you bristle at this comparison to Jackie Cogan, a man who has no qualms blowing apart Squirrel with a shotgun at close range, or unloading a revolver into Frankie after spending an evening driving around with him. But the guiding American principle when it comes to work is that you do a job and you get paid: It’s a very simple contract, and both sides need to operate in good faith to fulfill it. Salaried employees, hourly workers, freelancers, contractors, day laborers, the underemployed—all operate under the assumption that they’ll be compensated, and all live with the fear that they won’t. Jackie knows this, as evidenced by his loathing toward compatriot Kenny (Slaine) when the man tries to pocket the tip Jackie left for his diner waitress. “For fuck’s sake,” Jackie says in response to Kenny’s attempted theft, and you can sense that if Jackie could kill him in that moment, he would. In this way, Jackie is rigidly conservative, and strictly old-school. Someone else’s money isn’t yours to take; it’s your responsibility to earn, and your employer’s responsibility to pay. Jackie cleaned up the mob’s mess, and the gambling tables opened again because of his work, and his labor resulted in their continued profits. And Jackie wants what he’s owed.

“Don’t make me laugh. ‘We’re one people.’”

We hear two main voices of authority urging calm throughout Killing Them Softly. Then-President Bush: “I understand your worries and your frustration. … We’re in the midst of a serious financial crisis, and the federal government is responding with decisive action.” Presidential hopeful Obama: “There’s only the road we’re traveling on as Americans.” Paulson speaks on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, and various news commentators chime in, too: “There needs to be consequences, and there needs to be major change.” Radio commentary and C-SPAN coverage combine into a sort of secondary accompaniment to Marc Streitenfeld’s score, which incorporates lyrically germane Big Band standards like “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” (“You work, you save, you worry so/But you can’t take your dough”) and “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (“It’s a Barnum and Bailey world/Just as phony as it can be”). All of these are Dominik’s additions to Cogan’s Trade, which is a slim, 19-chapter book without any political angle, and this frame is what met so much resistance from contemporaneous reviews.

But what Dominik accomplishes with this approach is twofold. First, a reminder of the ceaseless tension and all-encompassing anxiety of that time, which would spill into the Occupy Wall Street movement, coalesce support around politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and fuel growing national interest in policies like universal health care and universal basic income. For anyone who struggled during that time—as I did, a college graduate entering the 2009 job market after the journalism industry was already beginning its still-continuing freefall—Killing Them Softly captures the free-floating anger so many of us felt at politicians bailing out corporations rather than people. Perhaps in 2012, only weeks after the re-election of Obama and with the potential that his second term could deliver on some of his campaign promises (closing Guantanamo Bay, maybe, or passing significant gun control reform, maybe), this cinematic scolding felt like medicine. But nearly a decade later, with neither of these legislative successes in hand, and with the wins for America’s workers so few and far between—still a $7.25 federal minimum wage, still no federal paid maternity and family leave act, still the refusal by many states to let their government employees unionize—if you don’t feel demoralized by how often the successes of the Democratic Party are stifled by the party’s own moderates or thoroughly curtailed by saboteur Republicans, maybe you’re not paying attention.

More acutely, then, the mutinous spirit of Killing Them Softly accomplishes something similar to what 1990’s Pump Up the Volume did: It allows one to say, with no irony whatsoever, “Do you ever get the feeling everything in America is completely fucked up?” The disparities of the financial system, and the yawning gap between the rich and the poor. The utter lack of accountability toward those who were supposed to protect us, and didn’t. And the sense that we’re always being a little bit cheated by a ruling class who, like Sobotka observed on The Wire, is always putting their hand in our pocket. Consider Killing Them Softly’s quietest moment, in which Frankie realizes that he’s a hunted man, and that the people from whom he stole would never let him live. Dominik frames McNairy tight, his expression a flickering mixture of plaintive yearning and melancholic regret, as he quietly says, “It’s just shit, you know? The world is just shit. We’re all just on our own.” A day or so later, McNairy’s Frankie will be lying on a medical examiner’s table, his head partially collapsed from a bullet to the brain, an identification tag looped around his pinky toe. And the men who ordered his death want to underpay the man who carried it out for them. Isn’t that the shit?

That leads us, then, to the film’s angriest moment, and to a scene that stands alongside the climaxes of so many other post-recession films: Chris Pine’s Toby Howard paying off the predatory bank that swindled his mother with its own stolen money in Hell or High Water, Lakeith Stanfield’s Cash Green and his fellow Equisapiens storming billionaire Steve Lift’s (Armie Hammer’s) mansion in Sorry to Bother You, Viola Davis’s Veronica Rawlings shooting her cheating husband and keeping the heist take for herself and her female comrades in Widows. So far in Killing Them Softly, Pitt has played Jackie with a certain level of remove. A man’s got to have a code, and his is fairly simple: Don’t get involved emotionally with the assignment. Pitt’s Jackie is susceptible to flashes of irritation, though, that manifest as a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and as an octave-lower growl that belies his impatience: with the Driver, for not understanding how Markie’s reputation has doomed him; with Mickey, for his procrastination and his slovenliness; with Kenny, for stealing a hardworking woman’s tip; with Frankie, when he tries to distract Jackie from killing Squirrel. Jackie is a professional, and he is intolerant of people failing to work at his level, and Pitt plays the man as tiptoeing along a knife’s edge. Remember Daniel Craig’s “’Cause it’s all so fucking hysterical” line delivery in Road to Perdition? Pitt’s whole performance is that: a hybrid offering of bemusement, smugness, and ferocity that suggests a man who’s seen it all, and hasn’t been impressed by much.

In the final minutes of Killing Them Softly, Obama has won his historic first term in the White House, and Pitt’s Jackie strides through a red haze of celebratory fireworks as he walks to meet the Driver at a bar to retrieve payment. An American flag hangs in this dive, and the TV broadcasts Obama’s victory speech, delivered in Chicago to a crowd of more than 240,000. “Crime stories, to some extent, always felt like the capitalist ideal in motion,” Dominik told the New York Times. “Because it’s the one genre where it’s perfectly acceptable for the characters to be motivated solely by money.” And so it goes that Jackie feels no guilt for the men he’s killed, or the men he’s sent away. Nor does he feel any empathy or kinship with the newly elected Obama, whose messages of unity and community he finds amusingly irrelevant. The life Jackie lives is one defined by how little people value each other, and how quick they are to attack one another if that means more opportunity—and more money—for them. Thomas Hobbes said that a life without social structure and political representation would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and perhaps that’s exactly what Jackie’s is. Unlike the character in Cogan’s Trade, Dominik’s Jackie has no wife and no personal life. But he’s surviving this way with his eyes wide open, and he will not be undervalued.

The contrast between Obama’s speech about “the enduring power of our ideas—democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope”—and Jackie’s realization that the mob is trying to underpay him for the three men he assassinated at their behest makes for a kind of nauseating, thrilling coda. He’s owed $45,000, and the envelope the Driver paid him only has $30,000 in it. Obama’s audience chanting “Yes, we can,” the English translation of the United Farm Workers of America’s slogan and the activist César Chávez’s iconic “Sí, se puede” catchphrase, adds an ironic edge to the argument between the Driver and Jackie about the value of his labor. Whatever the Driver can use to try and shrug off Jackie’s advocacy for himself, he will. Jackie’s killings were too messy. Jackie is asking for more than the mob’s usual enforcer, Dillon (Sam Shepard), who would have done a better job. Jackie is ignoring that the mob is limited to “Recession prices”—they’re suffering, so that suffering has to trickle down to someone. Jackie made the deal with Mickey for $15,000 per head, and the mob isn’t beholden to pay Jackie what they agreed to pay Mickey.

On and on, excuse after excuse, until one finally pushes Jackie over the edge: “This business is a business of relationships,” the Driver says, which is one step away from the “We’re all family here” line that so many abusive companies use to manipulate their cowed employees. And so when Jackie goes coolly feral in his response, dropping knowledge not only about the artifice of the racist Thomas Jefferson as a Founding Father but underscoring the idea that America has always been, and will always be, a capitalist enterprise first, the moment slaps all the harder for all the ways we know we’ve been let down by feckless bureaucrats like the Driver, who do only as they’re told; by faceless corporate overlords like the mob, issuing orders to Jackie from on high; and by a broader country that seems like it couldn’t care less about us. “I’m living in America, and in America, you’re on your own … Now fucking pay me” serves as a kind of clarion call, an expression of vehemence and resentment, and a direct line into the kind of anger that still festers among those continuously left behind—still living in Shitstown, still trying to make a better life for themselves, and still asking for a little more respect from their fellow Americans. For all of Killing Them Softly’s ugliness, for all its nihilism, and for all its commentary on how our country’s ruthless individualism has turned chasing the American dream into a crippling addiction we all share, that demand for dignity remains distressingly relevant. Maybe it’s time to listen.

The way things currently stand, it’s probably safe to say that William Friedkin has retired. Not that there isn’t still a market for his brand of hilarious, opinionated coarseness—as two recent documentaries, Francesco Zeppel’s Friedkin Uncut, and Alexandre O. Philippe’s Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist can attest—but as a filmmaker, as a director of movies of all kind, movies that are often idiosyncratic, sometimes nakedly commercial, not infrequently provocative, even deeply shocking, he appears to have packed it in. Friedkin is 85 now, so who can blame him, especially when you consider how much longer the gaps between his films had become? He’s made just three in the last fifteen years.

One of those, the last one, is a documentary called The Devil and Father Amorth, which purports to document the genuine exorcism of a woman actually possessed by an evil spirit. I have my doubts about this, but regardless, if that film does indeed turn out to be Friedkin’s last, there’s a neat symmetry to it, as his first picture was also a documentary. The People vs. Paul Crump was made for television, and combines noirish reenactments and interviews with the key subjects to tell the case of Paul Crump, a black man on Death Row for the murder of a security guard during an attempt to rob the payroll office of a Chicago meatpacking plant. The crime occurred in 1953, and Friedkin’s film—which in addition to suggesting Crump was innocent, also asserts that even if he’s guilty, he was rehabilitated—aired in 1962. 

The People vs. Paul Crump was very successful, and allowed Friedkin to pick up more TV work until, in the late 60s, he was finally able to begin his career in features. It’s one hell of a wild career, too, one that can be divided into sections that show both the occasionally scattershot nature of his subject matter and the years when his focus on theme and his own specific style was much sharper, which I’ve done. Let’s get started:

I. Do You Recognize an External Force?

There is no better evidence that Friedkin’s life as a filmmaker has been a unique one than the fact that his first feature was Good Times, a kind of sketch comedy film starring Sonny & Cher (and quite frankly starring Sonny more than Cher) that was ultimately kind of a dry-run for their eventual TV variety shows. It co-stars, naturally enough, George Sanders as a movie executive whose pitch to Sonny about getting him and his wife into the movie business leads to a series of fantasies in which Sonny plays the bumbling hero in different genre movies— a Western, jungle adventure, and so on. 

I’ll say this much for Good Times: it could be worse. It sure as hell could also be better, and in any case it’s not very distinctive as far as Friedkin’s own work on it goes. The kind of palatable, big-cartoon-flower Laugh-In-style psychedelia of the film doesn’t exactly jibe with the sensibilities and preoccupations that define most of his work. Friedkin would follow up Good Times with another comedy, The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968), a period film about the origins of striptease. Made in collaboration with producer and co-writer (with Sidney Michaels and Arnold Schulman) Norman Lear, the film is, according to Friedkin, a complete shambles, a disaster that threatened to ruin his career before it had really begun. In his memoir The Friedkin Connection, he describes his fraught relationship with Lear, and writes: “I brought what I could to the picture, but I was the director in name only.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I was unable to watch The Night They Raided Minsky’s in time for this piece, but following a Sonny and Cher sketch film and a comedy about burlesque striptease, his next film was an adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. “It was the first film I really wanted to make, and felt passionate about,” he writes in his memoirs, and that hunger and inspiration is evident. The Birthday Party is, to my mind, Friedkin’s first masterpiece. Taking place almost entirely in just two rooms, the film stars Robert Shaw as Stanley, a shambolic, drunken tenant of a small boarding house run by Meg (Dandy Nichols) and her husband Petey (Moultrie Kelsall). After a long, strange, almost sinisterly flirtatious conversation between Stanley and the dowdy Meg, two new boarders arrive: McCann (Patrick Magee) and Goldberg (Sydney Tafler). These two men appear to know something about Stanley—indeed, they seem to be there, at this boardinghouse, entirely because of Stanley—and as they charm the naïve Meg into throwing a birthday party for Stanley (whether it is even really his birthday is unclear), the atmosphere of the kitchen, and of the parlor, and of the film, grows increasingly infernal.

When turning a stage play into a work of cinema, it’s a common mistake for the director to overwork the camera, and to block the scenes so that the actors never stop moving, all in a desperate attempt to save the audience from what they imagine would otherwise be immense boredom. A good example of this is Michael Corrente’s film of David Mamet’s American Buffalo, in which Dennis Franz is forever wandering around his pawn shop while he talks to Dustin Hoffman, with no clear purpose behind his movements. Friedkin, on the other hand, waits until the camera needs to do something before he does it. Early on, there’s an elegant shot during breakfast: the camera dollies in on the plate of fried bread that Meg has set on the counter for Stanley. It then moves around the counter and into the kitchen itself. This happens slowly, but is dynamic, and opens up the geography of the space. It also expresses the curious menace of the everyday, which is the psychological level from which Pinter’s play begins.

Later, as the action and dialogue during the party (and especially when the characters play Blind Man’s Bluff) becomes increasingly surreal, absurdist, and frightening—and as good as Magee, Shaw, and Nichols are, the terrifying Sydney Tafler steals the film—Friedkin’s direction becomes more chaotic, switching from color to black-and-white any time the lights are turned off, and employing stark, grainy afterimage optical effects that he would use again five years later in The Exorcist. And the overall impact of The Birthday Party is, for me, that of an unusually powerful horror film. What happens in the film, why it happens, is essentially inexplicable, but at the core is something horrible. It’s the terror of the unknown in the everyday. To me, it most closely resembles the exquisitely unnerving horror fiction of Robert Aickman, and of “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff,” a novella by horror writer and Aickman acolyte Peter Straub.

By now seemingly obsessed with plays about birthday parties, Friedkin’s next film was an adaptation of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1970). The play, and film, takes place over the course of a day and night, about a group of gay men who are gathering at Michael’s (Kenneth Nelson) to celebrate the birthday of Harold (Leonard Frey). Harold is late to his own party, and acts like a satyr, or Satan, when he does.

The Boys in the Band is a bit more conventional, as a piece of filmmaking, than The Birthday Party, but it’s a good movie, and the first example in Friedkin’s career of his willingness to either consciously buck against, or simply not think about, what, in a given era, is considered polite or tasteful, or to attempt to make mainstream that which others believe should be hidden. The Boys in the Band was, in fact, one of the first American films to focus exclusively on the lives of gay characters. Not all of the actors were gay, but many were, and the tragedy of it all is that several of them, including Nelson and Frey, would die in the ‘80s and ‘90s of AIDS-related illnesses. Another, Reuben Greene, seems to have vanished off the face of the earth.

II. I Am No One

And then suddenly, everything changed. The French Connection happened in a very ordinary way. William Friedkin met and got to know the producer Phil D’Antoni, who one day told him about a non-fiction book by Robin Moore he’d optioned, about an enormous heroin bust, so they flew to New York to meet the two cops at the center of the case. They had to shop Ernest Tidyman’s script around for a while, but that’s not unusual, either. What was unusual was that it was 1971, New Hollywood was taking over, and it was possible to make The French Connection the way Friedkin saw it, and the way it should be made. Or, the way it could be made to work, at least. Friedkin was at the time, by his own admission, an abusive, ill-tempered director. In order to get the performance out of the anxious, uncertain, surly Gene Hackman (playing the racist, ruthless and brilliant cop Popeye Doyle) that he wanted, Friedkin was intentionally tyrannical towards the actor, stoking the rage he wanted Doyle to express: “Gene had to play an angry, obsessive man, and I could provoke that anger in him and let him focus it on me,” he writes in his memoir.

I’m no director, but there are perhaps better ways of handling that. Worse still is the way he shot the famous car/subway chase. From The Friedkin Connection: “I…would not…risk the lives of others as we did, but the best moments of the chase came from this long run with three cameras; pedestrians and cars dashed out of the way, warned only by the oncoming siren.” When Friedkin appeared on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast, he told Maron that now he would use computer effects to shoot a scene like that. Dubious, Maron pointed out how real The French Connection was, and when reminded by Friedkin that it’s not real, it’s a movie, Maron protested “You just said people’s lives were in danger!” Friedkin gently responded “That’s not a good thing, Marc.”

But two things are unavoidable: no one died or was even hurt in that scene, and to this day that chase scene kills. It is headlong, heedless, as wild and dangerous as it looks. And Hackman’s Doyle, one senses, would just as soon run down the woman with the baby carriage if he didn’t think it would slow him down more than swerving around her at the last second. Suddenly, the world of Friedkin’s cinema was one of terrifying moral uncertainty, both in the stories they told, and in their making.

While making his next film, The Exorcist (1973), based on the best-selling novel by William Peter Blatty, who wrote the screenplay, Friedkin slapped the face of Father William O’Malley, an actual priest who was cast to play Father Dyer, so that when he yelled “Action!” a second later, O’Malley’s hands would shake the way Friedkin wanted, as Dyer gave Last Rites to his best friend, Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller). Further, in order to get the shot of Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil, the harried single mother of the demonically possessed young girl Regan (Linda Blair), being thrown across the room by Regan, Friedkin put a harness on the actress, which was attached to a device that would lift her off the ground and yank her backward. This stunt, for which Burstyn was not fully prepared, badly injured her back, from which she still suffers. In the various documentaries about the making of The Exorcist in which she has appeared, Burstyn doesn’t seem to have ever forgiven him. And of course, the depraved horror imagery of the film remains repulsive. I still cannot believe that the “Let Jesus fuck you!” scene exists in a big budget studio film. It’s mind-boggling, not only that it’s there, but that it passed the MPAA with an R rating.

If any of this sounds like I disapprove of the film, think again. I think The Exorcist is Friedkin’s greatest achievement; I’m one of those boring people who considers it the best horror film ever made. The wintery cinematography casts a pall over the MacNeil home before anything has happened to Regan. Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” playing over the nuns in flowing white habits that Chris sees on the street makes them seem alien and unknowable. The secular world of post-“Is God Dead?” America as represented by Chris (more so than Regan, who probably hasn’t given the matter much thought) is about to have a lot of questions it had never asked itself before. Blatty was very much a Catholic, and Friedkin, who was born Jewish, has an approach to religious faith that is at least complex. (He’s described himself as an agnostic who believes the teachings of Jesus. He and Blatty were close up until the writer’s death in 2017.) 

The energizing idea behind The Exorcist is to express both religious faith and Blatty and Friedkin’s belief in mankind’s essential decency through extreme transgression. This isn’t going to sit well with everybody, of course, but that’s finally what The Exorcist is, however many people wish to psychoanalyze Blatty and Friedkin by claiming the film is really about man’s (small “m”) fear of female puberty and sexuality. By which I don’t mean that Regan’s age and gender were chosen by throwing darts at a board, but this reading of the film seems to not only want to treat the ending as meaningless or arbitrary, but to pretend that Father Karras and Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) have no function in the story at all. The still-shocking obscenities in The Exorcist are meant to show the corruption not only of Regan’s innocence, but the natural growth that her puberty is bringing forth, as well. Blatty and Friedkin don’t see her pending womanhood as terrifying—they view the unnatural exploitation of it by the demon as terrifying.

The Exorcist was a sensation. Having won the Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture for The French Connection two years earlier, Friedkin was nominated for both again in 1973. His string of failures was at an end. He seemed to be spending the ‘70s the same way Francis Ford Coppola was, with one incredible artistic and commercial achievement after another. Maybe this is where karma stepped in. If so, the form it took was that of Sorcerer (1977), one of his best films. (I’d call it his best, if not for The Exorcist.) Based on Henri-Georges Clouzot 1953 classic The Wages of Fear, Sorcerer (screenplay by Walon Green) is about a group of men—a hitman (Francisco Rabal), a terrorist (Amidou), a disgraced banker (Bruno Cremer), and a thief and getaway driver (Roy Scheider)—on the run from their various crimes and countries, who find themselves together in Porvenir, a small Latin American town. There they land work transporting crates of unstable dynamite, each stick sweating nitroglycerine, over hills and mountains, across swaying bridges and through violent storms. And so the stage is set for an unbearably tense journey, with every jolt along the way potentially setting off the dynamite and killing them all.

The actions of each of these men have brought them to a situation where every rock in the dirt road could bring instant death, a fact not lost on them. Sorcerer is a film of exhaustion—physical, mental, metaphysical, and existential. A long sequence featuring the two gigantic trucks slowly moving across a rotten, rainswept bridge, is a masterpiece of theme as plot, theme as action. In this moment for these men, inches from being blown to pieces, it seems impossible to move forward, but also impossible to go back. So they move forward. Later in the film, when Scheider is the only one left and his truck has died mere miles from his destination, Friedkin and cinematographers Joseph M. Stephens and Dick Bush film the barren landscape where the once huge, now contextually miniscule truck sits stranded as if these were images from a different planet or a dark, lifeless underworld. It is one of the purest visual depictions of despair I’ve ever seen.

In a way, Sorcerer is a combination of Friedkin’s previous two films: it has all the gritty, hard-nosed cynicism of The French Connection as well as The Exorcist’s quest for something more beyond the Hell of these men’s lives, even if the quest is carried out ignorantly, the goal swept at blindly, futilely. According to Friedkin, he had no doubt it would be a hit. It was not.

III. You Want Bread, Fuck a Baker

Needing to find a way back from the wilderness of Sorcerer to the brief days of his glorious success after The French Connection and The Exorcist, Friedkin’s next film was The Brink’s Job (1978). The film, which is not at all bad, seems like a blatant plea for commercial acceptance. It’s a heist comedy, based on a true story, roughly along the lines of the wildly successful The Sting from 1973 (a film that beat out The Exorcist at that year’s Oscars). Boasting a stacked cast that includes Peter Falk, Peter Boyle, Paul Sorvino, and Warren Oates, it nevertheless more closely resembles Friedkin’s earlier job-for-hire films. It’s well-made, at times pretty funny, and contains at least one great performance, that given by Warren Oates. But it has no personality of its own, which on the one hand is strange considering how distinct Friedkin’s aesthetic had become in the first half of the ‘70s, but on the other hand, given that he is very outspokenly against the Auteur Theory, perhaps it’s not so strange after all.

At any rate, The Brink’s Job was another commercial disappointment, so Friedkin’s response to which was to say “Fine,” and then go ahead and make Cruising (1980). Perhaps the worst career decision Friedkin could have made, it’s also clearly a film that only Friedkin was ever going to make. Based in part on the only novel written by Gerald Walker, editor and journalist for The New York Times Magazine, the story of the film is a fictionalized account of a real series of murders of gay men in the late ‘70s. The killer turned out to be Paul Bateson, a former radiologist at NYU Medical Center, and who appeared briefly, as a radiologist’s assistant, in The Exorcist. However, Walker’s novel was published in 1970, before Bateson’s murders, so in crafting the screenplay (one of only a handful he’s written) Friedkin pulled material from the book, Bateson’s story, and conversations he’d had with Randy Jurgensen, a homicide detective who’d worked a case undercover in much the same way Al Pacino’s cop Steve Burns does in the film.

Set largely amidst the gay BDSM subculture in New York, Cruising is relentlessly grimy—a grime similar to but apart from that of The French Connection—and aggressive, and for this reason it was, and remains, enormously controversial. Gay activists at the time of its release, and even during filming, protested, believing that the movie would only be used to justify the prejudices of the straight world. Friedkin claims that was never his intention, and Pacino, who almost never discusses the film, said the same thing. This is at least partially borne out by Don Scardino as Ted Bailey, Steve’s neighbor after he goes undercover and rents an apartment near the Meatpacking District, where the BDSM culture is strongest. Ted’s just a normal guy who happens to be gay, and whose murder at the film’s end is the final, nasty shock of this nasty, shocking movie. But Ted’s just one character, and it’s not difficult to understand why activists were so upset about Cruising. Add to this the fact that, originally, Friedkin shot footage of explicit gay sex to include in the nightclub scenes (which, to the surprise of no one, he was forced to remove, and which subsequently, according to Friedkin, was lost) and that, later, when he went back to restore the film for a home video release, he added split-second inserts of hardcore sex during the brutal knife murders, well, perhaps you could at least surmise that Friedkin wanted controversy, and he got it.

Which of course does not mean Cruising is a bad film. The central idea—that this investigation awakens something in Steve Burns, having to do with both his own sexuality, but of a dormant violent streak, even a psychotic one—is fascinating, and played with a kind of brash subtlety so unique to the Pacino of that era that he probably could have trademarked it. And Friedkin’s use of Boccherini’s “La Musica Notturna Delle Strade di Madrid, No. 6, Op. 30” is utterly inspired— incongruous, counterintuitive, and absolutely perfect. But Cruising is a film that struggles with itself, one that at turns seems to be trying to wrench a dark, meaningful thriller from the jaws of empty provocation, and throwing up its hands and succumbing. This is also the source of its power.

This all went about as well for Friedkin as you can imagine, and so with his next film he tried again for commercial viability. The resulting film, 1983’s political comedy Deal of the Century (written by Paul Brickman of Risky Business fame) needn’t concern us for very long. It’s about illegal arms dealers, and it stars Chevy Chase, Sigourney Weaver, and Gregory Hines. They’re all pretty good here, and the way Chase, as one of those arms dealers, says, while demonstrating all the features of a newfangled machine gun to a trio of revolutionaries, “There’s a built-in wire cutter here; you got a wire you wanna cut, it’s built in here” is something I find inexplicably amusing. But that’s about it. The biggest problem in a movie that’s full of them is that, especially in the scene just referenced, Chase’s character is supposed to be a tonier version of Steven Prince’s character from Taxi Driver. And, incredibly, we’re supposed to like this guy, even before he develops a conscience. You know, like illegal arms dealers are always doing? It’s misjudged on almost every level, and, again, exhibits none of Friedkin’s most compelling gifts.

A lot of Friedkin’s post-Sorcerer work suggests a “one for me, one for nobody” philosophy was at play, but his next film, at least when looked at within the full context of its influence, is as close to a cross-over hit as he’d had since The Exorcist. Indeed, To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) is still talked about, still watched, still discovered by new audiences, and deservedly so. A crime film about the rarely explored job of the Secret Service to track down and arrest counterfeiters—and based on a novel by Gerald Petievich, a former Secret Service agent who did that same job—perhaps the most surprising thing about the film is that it basically could not have been influenced by Michael Mann. At that time, Mann had only made (outside of some TV work) Thief and The Keep, the latter of which doesn’t apply to this situation. (Miami Vice had been on for about a season). Which means that in the mid-’80s, Mann and Friedkin were roughly, and independently, on the same wavelength. Or roughly the same wavelength, because while Mann’s color schemes tend to be brazen and primary, even neon at times, in To Live and Die in L.A., Friedkin’s take on Los Angeles crime is more pastel, somehow both muted and bright.

What Friedkin does amp up are the shock and sleaze, elements that Mann uses sparingly. To Live and Die in L.A. begins with a suicide bomber exploding (as he falls off a building, no less), for example, and is rather frank in its sexuality. It also may include the only example in film history of its particular type of villain, the sadistic counterfeiter, played here by an almost boyish Willem Dafoe. This man, Eric Masters, is the foil to Secret Service agent Richard Chance, played by William Petersen, who was one year away from starring in Mann’s Manhunter, and whose scary blankness serves him well in both. Here, Petersen is basically doing his version of Hackman’s Popeye Doyle: both men are so eerily focused on catching their prey that all other considerations, including the safety of the public, or of their fellow law enforcement colleagues, fall by the wayside. Similarly, John Pankow—as John Yukovich, Chance’s partner—matches Roy Scheider’s Buddy Russo, in that both men have a perspective and conscience that their partners lack, though Yukovich is a bit quicker to panic than Russo.

To Live and Die in L.A. is perhaps best remembered for its jaw-dropping car chase—at one point Petersen drives against traffic on the freeway—a cop/action movie trope Friedkin has returned to often, finding a new twist on it each time. As with the chase in The French Connection, this one is incredibly visceral. Despite, or perhaps because, of the fact that a chase like this could not possibly last this long without ending in catastrophe, the threat of sudden death is ever-present. It hangs over the entire film, in fact, appropriately so, given where our protagonist ends up. Speaking of which, a curious motif, and always effectively and disturbingly applied, in Friedkin’s crime films is the image of someone getting shot in the face. This goes back as far as The People vs. Paul Crump, appears again in the opening minutes of The French Connection, and occurs more than once in To Live and Die in L.A. There’s no jolt of violence quite as upsetting as that millisecond flash of a human face being ruined. If he does nothing else, Friedkin will make you feel that.

IV. It’s the Devil Station

To Live and Die in L.A. was a modest success, critically and commercially, but it didn’t put Friedkin back on the A-list. His next film, Rampage, was shot in 1987 but due to producer Dino De Laurentiis’s shifty finances, it remained unreleased in the United States until 1992, when it was acquired by Miramax. It did poorly. In The Friedkin Connection, the director describes this experience as the time he “hit bottom”: “There have been successful filmmakers of my generation, before and since, who didn’t survive disasters like Rampage. They never directed another film. It was entirely possible the same fate awaited me.”

Very well, but I happen to think Rampage is one of Friedkin’s most gripping pictures. Based on a novel by former criminal prosecutor William P. Wood, which itself was based on the murders, arrest, and trial of serial killer Richard Chase (and if you don’t know anything about Chase or his crimes, I urge to continue down this path of blissful ignorance), it’s about a murderer named Charles Reece (Alex McArthur) whose vicious crimes lead the Sacramento District Attorney to insist that the prosecutor assigned to the case, Anthony Fraser (Michael Biehn), pursue the death penalty. This despite the belief that no jury would ever find someone like Reece legally sane. And what Rampage turns out to be, quite surprisingly, is a pro-death penalty film. This is a long way from the stance Friedkin took in The People vs. Paul Crump, although wherever you stand on this issue, I’d say Crump is somewhat easier to sympathize with than Richard Chase.

Anyway, on top of everything else, without being as graphic as some of Friedkin’s films before and after this, Rampage contains some of his most disturbing imagery. It begins, bizarrely, on a freeze-frame of Reece from behind, walking down the street. The frame stays like that for maybe a second before kicking into motion. Friedkin wants the audience to start off disoriented, and then proceed from there. Of the violent imagery—very few of the killings occur on-screen—most unforgettably for me is the blood-soaked measuring cup being put into an evidence bag. Rampage also recalls, in many ways, The Exorcist, with Fraser’s flashbacks to the death of his young daughter resembling Karras’s dream sequence in that earlier film. There’s also a disquieting scene that involves a desecrated church.

It really is the damnedest movie: a melodramatic (the Morricone score is relentless) pro-execution polemic/horror film with incredibly tense, absorbing, and occasionally absurd courtroom scenes. There should have been a mistrial about three different times. But it also includes some wonderful character performances—McArthur is chilling, and especially great when the cops show up at the gas station where Reece works, and they know he’s their guy, but he pretends he’s not Reece—and some genuine emotion. The late Royce D. Applegate is especially memorable as a man trying to find a way to survive after Reece murders his wife and eldest son.

Friedkin would spend the rest of the 90s not quite living up to Rampage. His next film, The Guardian (1990, filmed three years after but released two years before Rampage), is the only other horror film he’s made, outside of The Exorcist, than you couldn’t argue belonged to another genre. But while I find the movie kind of fun (there’s a bit where a bunch of young punks are killed by trees, bushes, etc., that I quite enjoyed), and, at least in the scenes that take place in the forest, it has an interesting, low-budget kind of Labyrinth thing going on visually, it’s not actually something to go out of your way to see. Along with Deal of the Century, it’s the only film he doesn’t even mention in The Friedkin Connection.

Better, though flawed, especially at the end, and anyway not especially Friedkin-esque is 1994’s Blue Chips, a sports drama starring Nick Nolte and Shaquille O’Neal(!). Nolte plays a college basketball coach, which is a role I hope we can all agree is the one Nolte was born to play, providing as it does ample opportunities for him to say things like “Jesus Christ” and “goddamnit.”  

Friedkin’s most notorious film from this era is Jade (1995), one of the films that lured David Caruso away from NYPD Blue, before sending him back to CSI: Miami. This one’s not much good either, but I’d argue it’s not without interest. One of those erotic thrillers they used to make (many of which were written by Joe Eszterhas, including this one), Friedkin—who over the years has gone from being famous for his out-sized ego to being extremely self-critical—believes Jade “contains some of my best work.” I don’t know about that, but it does have another terrific car chase, mostly slow-speed this time, through a parade in Chinatown (where there is apparently always a parade), resulting in injuries, some possibly fatal, to many innocent bystanders. It would be more interesting if it wasn’t always clear who was responsible for the injuries, David Caruso’s district attorney character or whoever the hell it was he was chasing (I have forgotten), but nobody was prepared to push the protagonist that far to the dark side. It also has a quite grim ending that should have had a better movie behind it, and a shot of Linda Fiorentino, as Jade, on all fours, facing the camera, her features grossly distorted by the stocking pulled over her head, that is more jarring and, in its way, sexually blunt than anything in Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven’s thriller Basic Instinct.

V. Abe Says “Where Do You Want This Killin’ Done?” and God Says “Out on Highway 61”

Friedkin spent the first half of the 2000s making a pair of military thrillers. The first, Rules of Engagement (2000), has a script from decorated Vietnam vet, successful novelist, former Secretary of the Navy, and future U.S. Senator James Webb. It stars Samuel L. Jackson as Terry Childers, a Marine colonel who, during a mission to stop an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Yemen, in which members of his platoon are killed, orders his men to fire on a group of protestors. Though Childers gave the order because he believed the protestors were armed and fired on his soldiers first, for various reasons this is perceived by the National Security Advisor (Bruce Greenwood) as murder, and Childers is charged. Childers goes to his old Vietnam buddy Hays Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones), now a military lawyer, to represent him. He agrees, squaring off in court with prosecutor, Major Mark Briggs (Guy Pearce, distractingly accented).  

It’s an interesting film, and largely a good one, in my view, but it’s also the sort of thing that attracted an enormous amount of controversy, as it does ultimately support the idea that such a massacre as the audience is witness to can be justified. When the Marines fired down from the roof of the embassy at the protestors, we see, quite clearly, that the crowd includes women and children; this is something from which Friedkin does not flinch, as militarily and morally justifiable. While of course it can be, in the scenario laid out in the film (one can’t expect Marines to not return fire on their attackers), if Friedkin was surprised by the reaction, you do have to kind of wonder how he could be. Then again, at least in The Friedkin Connection, the aspect of the controversy that seems to have concerned him most was those coming specifically from Yemen, and how the film, it was believed, was both racist towards Arabs and would ruin that country’s reputation. Friedkin assures his readers that he was able to smooth things over.

It’s a rather clichéd film too, though, in a lot of ways. The worst example of this is when Hodges returns from Yemen, where he was investigating the incident, and is unable at this point in the film to prove Childers’s version of the story. He goes straight to Childers’s house (drunk, of course), furious with the colonel because he’s starting to believe his friend is a war criminal. Naturally, the two men get into a fist fight, which ends in a tie, both men battered and exhausted on the floor, and then they start laughing. Which is the sort of thing that only happens in movies, and is also the sort of thing that I would have expected Friedkin, at this point in his career, to have cut.

Much better is The Hunted (2003). Written by David Griffiths, Peter Griffiths, and Art Monterastelli, and starring Benicio del Toro and, once again, Tommy Lee Jones, it’s about Sgt. Hallam (del Toro), a former special forces operative turned assassin for the U.S., who, after an especially grueling assignment in Kosovo, snaps. He retreats to the forests of Oregon, where he murders two hunters. It is determined that Hallam is behind the killings, so the FBI agent in charge (Connie Nielsen) asks Lt. Bonham (Jones), the man who trained Hallam, to help with the case. He agrees.

The Hunted is more directly critical of the U.S. military than Rules of Engagement, and what it can force its soldiers to do, and experience, and how these things can warp a person, and turn them into something they weren’t before. Although like the earlier film, its sympathies lay with the soldiers on the ground, not those behind the desk. It is also an absolutely propulsive thriller, so primal that when the action moves from the forest to “civilization,” it feels like the film is stepping out of the world in which it really belongs, into something alien, oppressive, and unfree. It climaxes with what is to me one of the great fight scenes in modern American cinema. We’re back in the wilderness, and Jones and del Toro, armed only with knives, the only two men who belong there, are finishing what was started a very long time ago.

VI. I Am the Super Mother Bug!

The Hunted did not set the world on fire. It probably should have, but it didn’t. Friedkin wouldn’t make another movie for three years, but when he returned, and setting aside The Devil and Father Amorth, he seemed to have come to the conscious decision to end his filmmaking life making two of the best movies of his career. They are also, if I may be blunt, two of the most fucked-up films he’s ever made, which you must admit is saying something; they’re even more fucked up than The Exorcist, because it might be impossible to locate the moral center in either.

Each is based on a play by Tracy Letts, and Letts also wrote both scripts. Another play of his, August: Osage County, was turned into a film by network TV director John Wells, and a third, Superior Doughnuts, was turned into a short-lived network sitcom. I guess you’d have to call that range. Anyway, Friedkin got there first, and as with The Birthday Party, Friedkin took the inherent limitations of a cinematic adaptation of a stage production into virtues and turned Bug (2006) into an expressionistic nightmare. The film is about a woman named Agnes (Ashley Judd) who works as a waitress in a lesbian bar. She is married to a violent convict named Jerry (Harry Connick, Jr.), with whom she had a son, who we discover has disappeared. One night, through a friend, she meets Peter (Michael Shannon), an odd but friendly man with whom she starts a relationship. Peter seems like a charming eccentric at first, telling Agnes that he makes people uncomfortable because he notices things they don’t, and he knows a great deal about insects. But it soon becomes clear that Peter is a genuine madman. His brain is in a constant state of short circuit, bursting with nonsensical conspiracy theories, ranging from the belief that smoke detectors cause illness, to microchips being implanted into every American born after 1982 as a means of surveillance, and even beyond that. Unfortunately, the insanity of all this is noticed by the audience, not by Agnes. She accepts it, and it doesn’t even take her that long to come around. The title Bug applies not only to literal insects, but to the synonym for “virus,” as the story being told is that of Agnes’s infection. 

The film itself is also infected. As Bug proceeds towards its ultimate conflagration (check your smoke detectors, people), Agnes and Peter become more and more connected to each other, and less connected to anyone else. At a certain point, Peter rips from his mouth, with pliers, teeth that he considers compromised, and while Agnes screams at him to stop, she soon comes to understand the wisdom behind his actions. This extraction scene goes on and on, at such a high pitch of hysteria—so many teeth are pulled—that you may be forgiven for eventually laughing. Friedkin calls the film a comedy, though I must say I didn’t laugh. I don’t know what’s wrong with the rest of you.

In another scene, their paranoia reaches such an extreme that what they believe is going on outside of their motel room—a sort of attack by intimidation by bugs and the government, some kind of air assault—is shown by Friedkin DP Michael Grady, and felt by the audience: the room begins to shake, blinding lights stream through the window. In this moment, Peter and Agnes are correct in their beliefs. We’re the ones still asleep. The last scene of Bug is bathed in blue light, the motel room is wrapped in foil. All the blood that is spilled in this scene, a not insignificant amount, is black in this light. Judd as Agnes and Shannon as Peter have been completely untethered. And somehow, Judd is not crushed by the Mack truck that is Michael Shannon. Rather, she matches him minute to minute, second to second, as outlandishly magnificent as he is, right down to her final “Oh!”

Then there’s Killer Joe (2012). The only other time I can think of off the top of my head of a filmmaker in his mid-70s releasing a picture as transgressive as this, that so upset so many people, is when, on Christmas Day 2013, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street came out. Mind you, in that case the larger issue was critics and audiences not understanding Scorsese’s intent (or maybe while they understood it, they didn’t believe you would). In the case of Killer Joe, I don’t think it can be fairly argued that an essential point was missed by those who reviled it. They simply reviled it. (One prominent critic wrote on Letterboxd that those of his colleagues that he respected who had admitted to laughing throughout the film were “making [him] sick to [his] stomach”).  

The plot is simple enough: Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) convinces his father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) to hire a cop and killer-for-hire named Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) to murder Chris’s mother and Ansel’s ex-wife, Adele. It is Chris’s belief that Adele’s $50,000 life insurance payout will go to his sister Dottie (Juno Temple). Soon Chris, Ansel, Dottie, and Ansel’s new wife Sharla (Gina Gershon) are all in agreement to go ahead with this. The first problem they encounter is that Joe demands payment in advance, but they don’t have the money. So, in lieu of that, Chris and Ansel agree to Joe’s proposal that he be given Dottie for a night.  

This is troubling enough, of course, Dottie being a good deal younger than Joe, and it’s simply an unpleasant idea anyway. But wait, it gets worse: at one point we learn that when she was a child, Adele tried to smother Dottie. Since Dottie doesn’t seem as mature as her apparent age would suggest, it’s not a leap to assume that the failed murder attempt by her own mother has resulted in Dottie suffering from some kind of developmental disability. (It is also my belief that she and Chris have, or once had, an incestuous relationship, though I don’t have a lot to hang that theory on.) This does not stop anybody. The subsequent scene between Joe and Dottie involves a bizarre, unsettling seduction, in which Joe tells her to recount to him her first experiences with love and sex. During this, talking to her as if the experience was currently happening, he asks her “How old are you now?” Dottie says “Twelve,” and in a grotesquely impassioned whisper, Joe says “So am I…” Did this make me laugh? Due to the sheer insanity of it, I admit that it did. I still think it’s funny, or “funny,” whichever.

Put simply, Killer Joe just doesn’t care. The long last scene is a small masterpiece of black comedy, discomfort, and escalating horror, ending back at the start with comedy of the darkest kind. The last image, and the cut to end credits, with the most perfect choice of end credits song I’ve seen, is the biggest laugh in a movie full of them, however little you might want to give Killer Joe what it wants from you. And if you don’t laugh, fine. The most controversial moment in the film, and the one that got it an NC-17 from the MPAA (though the uncut version is officially “unrated”), is when, in this last section, Joe, after beating Sharla because he’s learned she was double-crossing everybody, forces her to simulate fellatio on a KFC chicken drumstick, acting the whole time as though it was not a drumstick he was holding. And it’s awful, truly awful, and I don’t think it’s funny. And it goes on and on. 

But I believe it’s fair to ask the question, when looked at in the context of the kind of person we understand Joe to be, why should the audience believe he would be better than that? Of course, it’s not because we believe that, it’s because we don’t want to see him do it. And we definitely don’t want to laugh at it. So don’t laugh at it, I’d argue; I certainly didn’t (though I did laugh at the moment when Ansel grabs his son around the waist to keep him from escaping from Joe’s brutal attack, crying “Get ‘im, Joe!”). But too rarely do modern films try to make the audiences squirm. They may make you upset because you disagree with their politics, but the makers of those films don’t care, or even want, you to watch them anyway. Killer Joe wants you to watch it, and wants you to react to it however you react to it. I won’t say it “challenges” the audience, because Killer Joe isn’t pushing forward any particular idea or philosophy. It’s a wild, depraved scream of amoral laughter.

And it would appear to be William Friedkin’s last feature film. When looked at in the context of his entire career, Killer Joe and Bug feel like the work of a man who has spent too much of his career not making the kinds of movies he was passionate about, that it was his natural instinct to make. Then again, the unavoidable and obvious fact of the film industry is that you have to have success, or at least some kind of positive reputation, to make anything at all. If not for his two monumental successes of the early 70s, there’s no way Friedkin would have been allowed, by anyone, to make these last two pictures. His name still meant something in 2006 and 2012, as it does now. Thank God by then he had the power of will, and the ability to put “From the Director of The Exorcist” on a poster, to go back to doing what he does best: shooting the audience in the face.

When asked during his first ever on-camera interview if he’d like to continue acting, a young Ethan Hawke replied, “I don’t know if it’s going to be there, but I’d like to do it.” He then gives a guileless shrug of relief as the interview ends, wiping imaginary sweat off his brow. The simultaneous fusion of his nervous energy and poised body language will be familiar to those who’ve seen later interviews with the actor. The practicality and wisdom he exudes at such a young age would prove to be a through-line of his nearly 40-year career. In an interview many decades later, he told Ideas Tap that many children get into acting because they’re seeking attention, but those who find their calling in the craft discover that a “desire to communicate and to share and to be a part of something bigger than yourself takes over, a certain craftsmanship—and that will bring you a lot of pleasure.”

Through Hawke’s dedication to his craft, we’ve also seen his maturation as a person unfold on screen. Though none of his roles are traditionally what we think of when we think of autobiography, many of Hawke’s roles, as well as his work as a writer, suggest a sort of fictional autobiographical lineage. While these highlights in his career are not strictly autofiction, one can trace Hawke’s Künstlerromanesque trajectory from his childhood ambitions to his life now as a man dedicated to art, not greatness. 

Hawke’s first two films, Joe Dante’s sci-fi fantasy Explorers with River Phoenix and Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society with Robin Williams, set the tone for a diverse filmography filled with popcorn fare and indie cinema in equal measure, but they also served as touchstones in his development as person drawn to self-expression through art. In an interview with Rolling Stone’s David Fear, Hawke spoke about the impact of these two films on him as an actor. When River Phoenix, his friend and co-star in Explorers, had his life cut short by a drug overdose, it hit Hawke personally. He saw from the inside what Hollywood was capable of doing to young people with talent. Hawke never attempted to break out, to become a star. He did the work he loved and kept the wild Hollywood lifestyle mostly at arm’s length. 

Like any good film of this genre, Dead Poets Society is not just a film about characters coming of age, but a film that guides the viewer as well, if they are open to its message. Hawke’s performance as repressed schoolboy Todd in the film is mostly internal, all reactions and penetrating glances, rather than grandiose movements or speeches. Through his nervy body language and searching gaze, you can feel both how closed off to the world Todd is, and yet how willing he is to let change in. Hawke has said working on this film taught him that art has a real power, that it can affect people deeply. This ethos permeates many of the characters Hawke has inhabited in his career. 

In Dead Poets Society, Mr. Keating (Robin Williams) tells the boys that we read and write poetry because the human race is full of passion. He insists, “poetry, beauty, romance, love—these are what we stay alive for.” Hawke gave a 2020 TEDTalk entitled Give Yourself Permission To Be Creative, in which he explored what it means to be creative, pushing viewers to ask themselves if they think human creativity matters. In response to his own question, he said “Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, right? They have a life to live and they’re not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems, or anybody’s poems, until their father dies, they go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don’t love you anymore, and all of the sudden you’re desperate for making sense out of this life and ‘has anyone ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?’ Or the inverse, something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes. You love them so much, you can’t even see straight, you know, you’re dizzy. ‘Did anybody feel like this before? What is happening to me?’ And that’s when art is not a luxury. It’s actually sustenance. We need it.” 

Throughout many of his roles post-Dead Poets Society, Hawke explores the nature of creativity through his embodiment of writers and musicians. Often these characters are searching for a greater purpose through art, while ultimately finding that human connection is the key. Without that human connection, their art is nothing.

We see the first germ of this attraction to portray creative people on screen with his performance as Troy Dyer in Reality Bites. As Troy Dyer, a philosophy-spouting college dropout turned grunge-band frontman in Reality Bites, Hawke was posited as a Gen-X hero. His inability to keep a job and his musician lifestyle were held in stark contrast to Ben Stiller’s yuppie TV exec Michael Grates. However in true slacker spirit, he isn’t actually committed to the art of music, often missing rehearsals, as Lelaina points out. Troy even uses his music at one point to humiliate Lelaina, dedicating a rendition of “Add It Up” by Violent Femmes to her. The lyrics add insult to injury as earlier that day he snuck out of her room after the two had sex for the first time. Troy’s lack of commitment to his music matches his inability to commit to those relationships in his life that mean the most to him. 

Reality Bites is also where he first positioned himself as one of the great orators of modern cinema.” Take this early monologue, in which he outlines his beliefs to Winona Ryder’s would-be documentarian Lelaina Pierce: “There’s no point to any of this. It’s all just a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes. So I take pleasure in the details. You know, a quarter-pounder with cheese, those are good, the sky about ten minutes before it starts to rain, the moment where your laughter become a cackle, and I, I sit back and I smoke my Camel Straights and I ride my own melt.” 

Hawke brings the same intense gaze to this performance as he did to Dead Poets Society, as if his eyes could swallow the world whole. But where Todd’s body language was walled-off, Troy’s is loud and boisterous. He’s quick to see the faults of those around him, but also the good things the world has to offer. It’s a pretty honest depiction of how self-centered your early-20s tend to be, where riding your own melt seems like the best option. As the film progresses, Troy lets others in, saying to Lelaina, “This is all we need. A couple of smokes, a cup of coffee, and a little bit of conversation. You, me and five bucks.”

Like the character, Hawke was in his early twenties and as he would continue to philosophize through other characters, they would age along with him and so would their takes on the world. If you only engage with anyone at one phase in their life, you do a disservice to the arc of human existence. We have the ability to grow and change as we learn who we are and become less self-centered. In Hawke’s career, there’s no better example of this than his multi-film turn as Jesse in the Before Trilogy. While the creation of Jesse and Celine are credited to writer-director Richard Linklater and his writing partner Kim Krizan, much of what made it to the screen even as early as the first film were filtered through the life experiences of Hawke and his co-star Julie Delpy. 

In a Q&A with Jess Walter promoting his most recent novel A Bright Ray of Darkness, Hawke said that Jesse from the Before Trilogy is like an alt-universe version of himself, and through them we can see the self-awareness and curiosity present in the early ET interview grow into the the kind of man Keating from Dead Poets Society urged his students to become. 

In Before Sunrise, Hawke’s Jesse is roughly the same age as Troy in Reality Bites, and as such is still in a narcissistic phase of his life. After spending several romantic hours with Celine in Vienna, the two share their thoughts about relationships. Celine says she wants to be her own person, but that she also desperately wants to love and be loved. Jesse shares this monologue, “Sometimes I dream about being a good father and a good husband. And sometimes it feels really close. But then other times it seems silly, like it would ruin my whole life. And it’s not just a fear of commitment or that I’m incapable of caring or loving because… I can. It’s just that, if I’m totally honest with myself, I think I’d rather die knowing that I was really good at something. That I had excelled in some way than that I’d just been in a nice, caring relationship.”

The film ends without the audience knowing if Jesse and Celine ever see each other again. That initial shock is unfortunately now not quite as impactful if you are aware of the sequels. But I think it is an astute look at two people who meet when they are still discovering who they are. Still growing. Jesse, at least, is definitely not ready for any kind of commitment. Then of course, we find out in Before Sunset that he’s fumbled his way into marriage and fatherhood, and while he’s excelling at the latter, he’s failing at the former. 

As in Reality Bites, Hawke explores the dynamics of band life again in Before Sunset, when Jesse recalls to Celine how he was in a band, but they were too obsessed with getting a deal to truly enjoy the process of making music. He says to her, “You know, it’s all we talked about, it was all we thought about, getting bigger shows, and everything was just…focused on the future, all the time. And now, the band doesn’t even exist anymore, right? And looking back at the… at the shows we did play, even rehearsing… You know, it was just so much fun! Now I’d be able to enjoy every minute of it.”

The filming of Before Sunset happened to coincide with the dissolution of Hawke’s first marriage. And while these films are not autobiographical, everyone involved have stated that they’ve added personal elements to their characters. They even poke fun at it in the opening scene when a journalist asks how autobiographical Jesse’s novel is. True to form, he responds with a monologue, “Well, I mean, isn’t everything autobiographical? I mean, we all see the world through our own tiny keyhole, right? I mean, I always think of Thomas Wolfe, you know. Have you ever seen that little one page note to reader in the front of Look Homeward, Angel, right? You know what I’m talking about? Anyway, he says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that, anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own life, that you can’t avoid that.”

While Before Sunset was shot in 2003, released in 2004 and this monologue refers to the fictional book within the trilogy entitled This Time, Hawke would take this same approach more than a decade later with his novel A Bright Ray of Darkness.

In the novel, Hawke crafts a quasi-autobiographical story, using his experience in theater to work through the perspective he now has on his failed marriage to Uma Thurman. Much like Jesse in Before Sunset, Hawke is reluctant to call the book autobiographical, but the parallels to his own divorce are evident. And as Jesse paraphrased Wolfe, isn’t everything we do autobiographical? In the book, movie star William Harding has blown up his seemingly picture-perfect marriage with a pop star by having an affair while filming on location in South Africa. The book, structured in scenes and acts like a play, follows the aftermath as he navigates his impending divorce, his relationship with his small children, and his performance as Hotspur in a production of Henry IV on Broadway. 

Throughout much of the novel, William looks back at the mistakes he made that led to the breakup of his marriage. He’s now in his 30s and has the clarity to see how selfish he was in his 20s. Hawke, however, was in his forties while writing the book. Through the layers of hindsight, you can feel how Hawke has processed not just the painful emotional growth spurt of his 20s, but also the way he can now mine the wisdom that comes from true reflection. Still, as steeped as the novel is in self-reflection, it does not claim to have all the answers. In fact, it offers William, as well as the readers, more questions to contemplate than it does answers.

The wisdom to know that you will never quite understand everything is broached by Hawke early in the third film in the Before Trilogy, 2013’s Before Midnight. At this point in their love story, Jesse’s marriage has ended and he and Celine are parents to twin girls. Jesse has released two more books: That Time, which recounts the events of the previous film, and Temporary Cast Members of a Long-Running But Little Seen Production of a Play Called Fleeting. Before Midnight breaks the bewitching spell of the first two films by adding more cast members and showing the friction that comes with an attempt to grow old with someone. When discussing his three books, a young man says the title of his third is too long, Jesse says it wasn’t as well loved, and an older professor friend says it’s his best book because it’s more ambitious. It seems Linklater and company already knew how the departure of this third film might be regarded by fans. But it is this very departure that shows their commitment to honestly showing the passage of time and our relationship to it. 

About halfway through the film Jesse and Celine depart the Greek villa where they have been spending the summer, and we finally get a one-on-one conversation like we’re used to with these films. In one exchange, I feel they summarize the point of the entire trilogy, and possibly Hawke’s entire ethos: 

Jesse: Every year, I just seem to get a little bit more humbled and more overwhelmed about all the things I’m never going to know or understand. 

Celine: That’s what I keep telling you. You know nothing!

Jesse: I know, I know! I’m coming around! 

[Celine and Jesse laugh.] 

Celine: But not knowing is not so bad. I mean, the point is to be looking, searching. To stay hungry, right?

Throughout the series, Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke explore what they call the “transient nature of everything.” Jesse says his books are less about time and more about perception. It’s the rare person who can assess themselves or the world around them acutely in the present. For most of us, it takes time and self-reflection to come to any sort of understanding about our own nature. Before Midnight asks us to look back at the first two films with honesty, to remove the romantic lens with which they first appeared to us. It asks us to reevaluate what romance even truly is. 

Hawke explores this same concept again in the 2018 romantic comedy Juliet, Naked. In this adaptation of the 2009 Nick Hornby novel, Hawke plays a washed-up singer-songwriter named Tucker Crowe. He had a big hit album, Juliet, in the early ‘90s and then disappeared into obscurity. Rose Bryne plays a woman named Annie whose longtime boyfriend Duncan is obsessed with the singer and the album, stuck on the way the bummer songs about a bad breakup make him feel. As the film begins, Annie reveals that she thinks she’s wasted 15 years of her life with this schmuck. This being a rom-com, we know that Hawke and Byrne’s characters will eventually meet-cute. What’s so revelatory about the film is its raw depiction of how hard it is for many to reassess who they really are later in life. 

Duncan is stuck as the self-obsessed, self-pitying person he likely was when Annie first met him, but she reveals he was so unlike anyone else in her remote town that she looked the other way for far too long. Now it’s almost too late. By chance, she connects with Crowe and finds a different kind of man.

See, when Crowe wrote Juliet, he also was a navel-gazing twentysomething whose emotional development had not yet reached the point of being able to see both sides in a romantic entanglement. He worked through his heartbreak through art, and though it spoke to other people, he didn’t think about the woman or her feelings on the subject. In a way, Crowe’s music sounds a bit like what Reality Bites’s Troy Dyer may have written, if he ever had the drive to actually work at his music. Eventually, it’s revealed that Crowe walked away from it all when Julie, the woman who broke his heart, confronted him with their child—something he was well aware of, but from which he had been running away. Faced with the harsh reality of his actions and the ramifications they had on the world beyond his own feelings, he ran even farther away from responsibility. In telling the story to Annie, he says, “I couldn’t play any of those songs anymore, you know? After that, I just… I couldn’t play these insipid, self-pitying songs about Julie breaking my heart. You know, they were a joke. And before I know it, a couple of decades have gone by and some doctor hands me… hands me Jackson. I hold him, you know, and I look at him. And I know that this boy… is my last chance.”

When we first meet Crowe, he’s now dedicated his life to raising his youngest son, having at this point messed up with four previous children. The many facets of parenthood is something that shows up in Hawke’s later body of work many times, in projects as wholly different as Brooklyn’s Finest, Before Midnight, Boyhood, Maggie’sPlan, First Reformed, and even his novel A Bright Ray of Darkness. In each of these projects, decisions made by Hawke’s characters have a big impact on their children’s lives. These films explore the financial pressures of parenthood, the quirks of blended families, the impact of absent fathers, and even the tragedy of a father’s wishes acquiesced without question. Hawke’s take on parenthood is that of flawed men always striving to overcome the worst of themselves for the betterment of the next generation, often with mixed results. 

Where Juliet, Naked showed a potential arc of redemption for a father gone astray, First Reformed paints a bleaker portrait. Hawke plays Pastor Toller, a man of the cloth struggling with his own faith who attempts to counsel an environmental activist whose impending fatherhood has driven him to suicidal despair. Toller himself is struggling under the weight of fatherhood, believing he sent his own son to die a needless death in a morally bankrupt war. Sharing the story, he says “My father taught at VMI. I encouraged my son to enlist. It was the family tradition. Like his father, his grandfather. Patriotic tradition. My wife was very opposed. But he enlisted against her wishes… .  Six months later he was killed in Iraq. There was no moral justification for this conflict. My wife could not live with me after that. Who could blame her? I left the military. Reverend Jeffers at Abundant Life Church heard about my situation. They offered me a position at First Reformed. And here I am.” How do we carry the weight of actions that affect lives that are not even our own? 

If Peter Weir set the father figure template in Dead Poets Society, and Paul Schrader explored the consequences of direct parental influence on their children’s lives, director Richard Linklater subverts the idea of a mentor-guide in Boyhood, showing both parents are as lost as the kid himself. When young Mason (Ellar Coltrane) asks his dad (Hawke) what’s the point of everything, his reply is “I sure as shit don’t know. Nobody does. We’re all just winging it.” As the film ends, Mason sits atop a mountain with a new friend he’s made in the dorms discussing time. She says that everyone is always talking about seize the moment—carpe diem!—but she thinks it’s the other way around. That the moments seize us. In Reality Bites, Troy gets annoyed at Lelaina’s constant need to “memorex” everything with her camcorder, yet Boyhood is a film about capturing a life over a 12-year period. The Before Trilogy checks in on Jesse and Celine every nine years. Hawke’s entire career. in fact, has captured his growth from an awkward teen to a prolific artist and devoted father, a master of his craft and philosopher at heart.