The Social World

Tag: Film

  • Is Martin Scorsese America’s greatest living director?

    Is Martin Scorsese America’s greatest living director?

    Who’s the greatest living American film director? Many would say Steven Spielberg, and that can’t be dismissed, but he hasn’t made a really good film since Munich (2005). There are many younger pretenders – such as David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino – and the more esoterically inclined might make the case for anyone from Terrence Malick to Spike Lee. Yet it’s hard not to feel that the don of contemporary American cinema is Martin Scorsese, whose career over the past five-and-a-half decades has existed, sans pareil, thanks to a vast dollop of talent, a considerable degree of good fortune and, crucially, an ability to lure both A-list collaborators and deep-pocketed moneymen into financing his films.

    Many of these A-list collaborators are on display in Rebecca Miller’s new five-part Apple TV documentary Mr. Scorsese, a comprehensive, if slightly safe, show that is the most laudatory single-director profile since Susan Lacy’s Spielberg (2017). Many of the same collaborators pop up here: the starry likes of Spielberg himself, Cate Blanchett, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brian De Palma and Daniel Day-Lewis (Miller’s husband) are on hand in both instances to gush as to the excellence of that director. (Scorsese, naturally, was equally warm in Spielberg.)

    Yet the two filmmakers could hardly be more different. One is a Jewish-American optimist from Ohio whose primarily heartwarming pictures – even the darker ones – focus on the virtues of kindness, personal decency and the nuclear family. For Scorsese, meanwhile, a fast-talking Italian-American from New York, the idea of “the family” is largely wrapped up with loyalty to a particular code, whether it’s criminal, spiritual or social. This has resulted in some of the very finest American pictures of the last five decades, whether it’s his earlier work with Robert De Niro –Taxi Driver, Mean Streets and Raging Bull – his more recent collaborations with DiCaprio such as The Wolf of Wall Street, The Departed and Killers of the Flower Moon, or some of the most fascinating examinations of religious faith on screen, not least Silence, Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ.

    Scorsese, now 82 and in the final act of what has been a truly remarkable career, is unafraid to be filmed in an occasionally vulnerable light, looking conspicuously aged (although not frail) and puffing on an inhaler. The motormouth may still be functioning at high speed, but at 80 miles an hour, rather than the previous 120. (There are rumors of a new film, but nothing concrete.)

    Miller is clearly impressed by her articulate and brilliant subject, but it would not have hurt to have had a little more rigor at times: while it is hard to think of a single Scorsese film that is bad, per se, there is a real case for examining what, for instance, possessed him to spend nearly $200 million of a studio’s money on the charming but ephemeral children’s picture Hugo, made in 3D when that format was briefly popular.

    Still, the stories that are included are well worth five hours of anyone’s time. It’s commonly known that the levels of bloodshed in Taxi Driver gave the Motion Picture Association sleepless nights, but it was a revelation to discover that a distraught Scorsese wished to steal the print away from the concerned studio, possibly with the aid of a firearm, just as it’s amusing to hear Spielberg recount how his friend kept saying, “They want me to cut all the blood spurting, they want me to cut the guy who loses his hand.” Marty was, of course, right to stick to his guns.

    There are many strands of the Scorsese saga that are barely touched on here but which remain intriguing. He came up in the New Hollywood era of such young, daring filmmakers as De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola, but he and Spielberg alone continue to attract vast budgets and appreciative audiences in the decidedly dumbed-down new era of cinema that we currently inhabit. This is testament both to his ability to work well with actors – 24 Oscar nominations or wins for his pictures – and his reputation for producing serious yet accessible work.

    Nor is he afraid to rattle cages. His remarks on superhero movies – “they’re not cinema… [they’re] theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being” – outraged bean-counters and internet fanboys alike. But he had hit upon a vital truth, namely that these mass-market pictures – most of which are underperforming financially these days – are not serious intellectual nourishment but grossly ephemeral fast food for the brain.

    I doubt that Mr. Scorsese, or its subject, will ever meet the same fate. Miller is sufficiently humble and savvy enough not to impose herself on the narrative that she has constructed, which is, justifiably, a celebration of the director. Earlier this year, many of us laughed at his self-deprecating cameo in The Studio. He’s one of the few working directors who’s recognizable enough for such an appearance to land. As we watch Mr. Scorsese, the question lingers at the back of our minds as to whether the series is a celebration of the director or a premature eulogy. Let’s hope it’s the former.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • Franco Zeffirelli’s slice of paradise in Positano

    Franco Zeffirelli’s slice of paradise in Positano

    If you say the name Franco Zeffirelli to anyone under about 40, you’re likely to be met with bemusement. Find any opera or film lover over that age, however, and you will be greeted with a warm exclamation – “Ah!” – followed by a recitation of the Italian director’s greatest achievements.

    From his emergence in international culture in the 1960s with his seminal film of Romeo and Juliet to his legendary work on stage with such operatic titans as Maria Callas and Plácido Domingo, Zeffirelli became synonymous with tasteful, intelligent productions of the classics, all of which made him, for a time, the best-known cultural figure in Italy.

    It is fair to say that Zeffirelli, who died in 2019, didn’t always get it right, personally or politically. As his career went on, some of his films tended towards the self-parodic and as a man, he seemed torn between his right-wing political instincts and his own sexuality. To further the former, he joined Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party and came out with reactionary, even shocking public statements on such subjects as abortion and, ironically, homosexuality; as regards the latter, a string of young, handsome actors who worked with the director have come forward since his death in 2019 to testify to his distinctly hands-on working process.

    Still, while one would never wish to whitewash Zeffirelli’s actions, there is no doubt that he was a man of exquisite taste, which he extended into both his work and his private residence, Villa Treville, just outside Positano on Italy’s Amalfi Coast. When Zeffirelli’s biographer David Sweetman was summoned to meet the great man there, it was an inauspicious journey. “It took hours. The taxi bill was unreal, but eventually we arrived at the top of this little winding road. And there was just a gate, and I had to go down all these bloody stairs to the villa.”

    However, the destination soon justified the expense and effort. “Eventually, some ancient servant let me in, and I was shown on to this opera set. I’ve never seen anything like it. It seemed, just possibly, the most beautiful place on Earth.”

    Sweetman was not wrong. Zeffirelli lived at Villa Treville for more than 40 years, during which time he saw Positano change from an obscure fishing village and occasional haunt of the glitterati into one of the world’s most celebrated destinations for cultured A-listers. He did more than his share to bring in international icons, musing on his guests as he sold his home in 2007: “Leonard Bernstein, Laurence Olivier, Maria Callas, Elizabeth Taylor – it sounds like a legend, doesn’t it?”

    Now, a decade and a half since it first changed from being a private home of legendary status to what is surely even this ultra-exclusive area’s most impressive boutique hotel Villa Treville is keen both to honor its past and, in particular, its legendary owner, but also to look to the future. Other five-star options are available, in an area filled with opulent accommodations, but none has quite this level of cachet or history.

    The hotel is reached via private transfer from Naples, which takes about an hour and a half. The last part of the journey is comfortably the most spectacular, as the car must negotiate the narrow roads hugging the Lattari Mountains, and peerless views of the Amalfi Coast are on offer to the enraptured passengers: assuming, of course, that the winding, vertiginous journey has not led to carsickness. Yet upon arrival, earthly cares and worries slip away in moments. Not for Villa Treville some grand, attention-seeking entrance. Instead, the car suddenly turns off through a discreet private gate and you walk down a small track into the reception, where the views – the peerless views – of glittering blue sea and the houses of Positano alike are enough to make even the most jaded and weary of travelers pause, slack-jawed in admiration.

    Wandering round Villa Treville is an education both in aesthetics and in history. While the hotel has been carefully and sympathetically expanded from Zeffirelli’s day – it now comprises six houses, rather than the three (or tre ville) that it originally consisted of when the director lived here – it retains his sense of chutzpah and style in every well-furnished nook and cranny. There have, inevitably, been a few nods to the present day, with a useful lift connecting the various floors and, of course, wifi, along with the usual conveniences of a five-star hotel, but what is so refreshing about Villa Treville is that it has been kept as close to Zeffirelli’s own lifestyle and taste as possible.

    To this end, the director’s books, personal possessions and objets d’art are festooned around the hotel, along with countless photographs of him and his famous friends. If you’re an opera lover, you’ll be delighted to find Zeffirelli’s original sketches for many of the set designs of the shows that he staged at the Met, the Royal Opera House and beyond. But this sense of the impresario just having popped out for a few moments extends far beyond simple décor. At breakfast in the appropriately named Maestro’s restaurant, for instance, guests are encouraged to walk into what was Zeffirelli’s kitchen to choose from a comprehensive and generous buffet selection of fresh fruit, locally sourced cheeses and deliciously decadent cakes and pastries, all of which are accompanied by a wider selection of eggs and pancakes from the à la carte menu.

    The views are peerless, the food sublime; it’s enough to make you want to stay here forever. Zeffirelli was nothing if not well-connected: many of the suites bear the names of some of the famous guests at Villa Treville. Many of them have individual quirks that extend far beyond decorative decisions. The Bernstein suite, named after the composer, conductor and regular visitor Leonard Bernstein, contains a shower in the form of a converted bread oven and an outdoor bathtub in its tropical garden, just as the largest and most lavish suite, named after Zeffirelli himself, has been kept largely as it was when it was his bedroom.

    Yet even the humbler accommodations, junior suites named after operas he staged such as Tosca and Carmen, still feature whitewashed tiles on the floors, walk-in showers, wonderfully large and comfortable beds and, of course, those breathtaking views, which manage to enrapture even the most seen-it-all of travelers whether by day or night.

    The whole point of coming to the hotel is to relax and unwind, rather than embark on a hectic program of activities. Which is not to say that there aren’t plenty of things on offer to entertain you. Peerless treatments, complete with Barbara Sturm cosmetics, are conducted in the La Traviata spa, which itself is housed in a greenhouse rescued from one of Zeffirelli’s opera productions. It’s as peaceful and tranquil a place to unwind as you can imagine.

    Then, if you wish to pep things up a bit, slide over to the all-white, appropriately named Bianca Bar, and admire the Moorish decor (again, another Zeffirelli holdover) while sipping one of the beautifully made and deceptively strong cocktails. Whether you fancy a classic espresso martini, a negroni or a twist on an old favorite, there will be something palate-cleansing on offer for a pre-prandial.

    One of the joys of Villa Treville – and presumably the reason why it pays host to A-list celebrities who have recently included Madonna and Jennifer Lopez – is that it sticks firmly to a policy of complete discretion. The only people who are welcome here are guests of the hotel, meaning that dinner at Maestro’s, which is usually held outside on the terrace, is a relaxed and relatively informal affair. Chef Vincenzo Castaldo specializes in the pasta dishes of your dreams – if you want to see how they’re made, private cookery classes can be arranged, along with everything from ceramics decoration to cocktail masterclasses – and they’re served up along with a selection of pescetarian-heavy dishes, accompanied by a finely chosen variety of local Italian wines.

    Yet even here, the maxim is one of pleasing the guests. I remarked in passing how much I’d love an oyster; a few moments later, a pair of beautifully dressed specimens, complete with apple granita, appeared before me, as if by magic. And magic, in its various forms, is what’s to be found in this most blissfully sybaritic corner of the Amalfi Coast. There is something otherworldly about Villa Treville, which clings to the side of the mountain like an especially opulent barnacle. Immersing oneself in this lifestyle for a few days is as enjoyable an experience as it’s possible to imagine.

    Zeffirelli once remarked that, “Now I could start creating my dream world out of the three villas.” Entering into his dream is opulent, extravagant and unique. Just like its famous creator, then.

    From €830 ($950) per night. For more information, visit: www.villatreville.com.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • The Running Man runs out of steam

    The Running Man runs out of steam

    After a spectacularly bad few weeks for the box office – with only the Predator sequel overperforming, probably because it was rated PG-13 – Paramount is no doubt eyeing the release of their Edgar Wright/Stephen King/Glen Powell would-be blockbuster The Running Man with unusual trepidation. As well they might. Although it has been marketed as an all-action thriller in the vein of the studio’s Mission: Impossible films, it comes with the slight air of tainted goods. Wright hasn’t had a hit since 2017’s Baby Driver; King has been damaged by both the let-down of The Long Walk earlier this year and his problematic Charlie Kirk comments; and while Powell is an effervescent and charming presence on chat shows and screen alike, the jury is still out on whether he’s an actual movie star.

    Well, the good news for Powell, at least, is that The Running Man showcases him at his best. As Ben Richards, a beleaguered everyman who signs up for a deadly contest in a dystopian America – survive for 30 days in a televised endurance test in which you’re mercilessly hunted down by elite hit squads, and you receive $1 billion – he is simultaneously charming, heroic and adept at the physical demands of the role. King’s novel was first adapted in the Eighties with none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead – there’s an amusing in-joke about the Governator that’s too good to spoil – and Powell, although hardly a weakling, doesn’t have Arnie’s sheer physical presence. But he is a proper actor, rather than merely a screen icon, and he manages to make Richards an engaging and sympathetic lead. This will do his career ambitions no harm.

    Unfortunately, the rest of the film is not a success. It’s hard to say whether Wright was the wrong director for the material or whether the script (by Wright and Michael Bacall) was simply DOA, but The Running Man ends up being an uneasy combination of broad social satire, bloody fight scenes and poorly conceived conspiracy thriller. The idea is that Richards is recruited by Josh Brolin’s Machiavellian television producer Dan Killian (resemblance to a former reality TV show presenter currently residing at the White House clearly intentional, in what is a highly politicized and determinedly left-leaning picture) in order to participate in an ultra-violent game show, but as he becomes a cult figure – “RICHARDS LIVES,” sloganeers shout – he starts to inspire the populace in ways unimagined by the powers that be.

    All very Orwell or Huxley, but this is simultaneously over-explained – with laborious scenes in which characters spell out the subtext to one another – and barely touched upon. Although it’s not vastly long at two and a quarter hours, the picture drags horribly for what should be a fleet-footed pursuit thriller. To be sure, there’s 40-50 minutes of genuine entertainment to be had in its mid-section, as Powell evades goons with a mixture of smarts and disguise, and Wright’s Scott Pilgrim lead Michael Cera pops up in a scene-stealing cameo as an anarchist with literal mommy issues. But by the time you reach its series of endings – which, for a moment, promise something really subversive and then chicken out – it is hard not to be both bored and frustrated by the wasted potential.

    King on screen, at best, can produce pictures that can scare the bejeezus out of you (The Shining, Carrie, The Mist) or be both inspirational and heartwarming, as in The Shawshank Redemption. Running Man falls awkwardly between the two and seems destined to take a box-office bath in consequence. Once, its anti-MAGA, determinedly liberal politics (complete with jokes about The Kardashians, which feel left over from a screenplay draft of a decade ago) would have chimed with audiences, but now it is hard not to feel that this is too little, too late. Richards lives, but The Running Man dies on its ass.

  • Woody Allen’s first novel takes on cancel culture

    Woody Allen’s first novel takes on cancel culture

    Say what you like about the actor, director and writer Woody Allen – and people have undeniably been known to – but it takes a certain amount of gall to publish your first novel at the age of 89. Not that Allen doesn’t have form in this regard: he has brought out five collections of short stories, most recently 2022’s Zero Gravity and a 2020 memoir, Apropos of Nothing, which was greeted with horror by the publishing industry and literary critics alike. The New York Post described it as one of “the most tone-deaf, disgusting, bitter, self-pitying, horrifically un-put-downable memoirs since Mein Kampf.”

    And all this because allegations of sexual abuse towards his adopted child Dylan Farrow, allegedly taking place in April 1992 when she was seven, which have never been proved but continue to rumble in the background of an increasingly becalmed career. Be honest: what is the last Woody Allen film that you paid to see at the cinema? For most, it would probably be 2011’s Midnight in Paris or 2013’s Blue Jasmine, but he has made another seven films since then. And Apropos of Nothing was ditched by its original publisher Grand Central, an offshoot of Hachette, and ended up with the independent Arcade Publishing.

    It is not wholly surprising that What’s With Baum?, Allen’s debut work of longform fiction, has also emerged from another indie, Post Hill Press, and in an irony that its author will no doubt appreciate, it will jostle for shelf space with a catalog including The Tragedy of Islam, Dangerous Misinformation and At Peace With Money, all of which sound like the kind of spoof plays that may have featured in Allen’s successful 1994 comedy Bullets Over Broadway. Yet first-time novelists, especially octogenarians, cannot afford to be too fussy about the company they keep.

    If What’s With Baum? was published by a completely unknown novelist, it may well have ended up at Post Hill rather than a major imprint, but that is not to say that it’s without charm or accomplishment. The novel’s protagonist is the “intelligent mutt” Asher Baum, a 51-year-old writer on the skids with “full but incoherent” hair and a failing career, which has led him to start talking to himself with increasing fervor and passion about the difficulties of his life. These include, in no particular order, his failing third marriage to Connie (“still with that biting instinct for the jugular… of course, Dracula had a biting instinct for the jugular”) whom he fears is having an affair with his younger, more successful brother Josh, his disastrous last book has sold no copies – “most failed to see the satire and lambasted it for making light of the Holocaust” – and, most problematically of all, Baum has had an inappropriate interaction with a younger Japanese journalist, Cindy Tanaka, about a play that he has written.

    It is this last subplot that most clearly resonates with Allen, on a personal level. From an early point in his cinematic career, his films revolved around how the – to be frank – unexceptional-looking protagonists he played would fall into bed with far more beautiful and increasingly younger women. At first, around the time of Manhattan, this felt daring and fresh, as Allen’s twice-divorced comedy writer dates a 17-year old girl. But by the time he was making Hollywood Ending in 2002, it felt simply grim and exploitative. Yet art imitated life, as the filmmaker had, by that point, left his partner Mia Farrow for her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, to whom What’s With Baum? is dedicated. Previn is 34 years Allen’s junior.

    In recent years, Allen has moved away from the usual liberal Hollywood stances of his younger days in favor of offering guarded praise for none other than Donald Trump, although he still professes to be a Kamala-voting Democrat. Yet any man who can be so comprehensively canceled by the industry he once dominated is likely to have thoughts about it, and a few weeks ago, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Allen lambasted cancel culture as “just dumb.” This novel, then, has to be viewed as his contribution to the debate. Baum is hardly a hapless victim, but those around him are even worse, not least the increasingly unhinged Connie and his plagiarist son-in-law Thane. And many of the lines resonate, not least when Baum’s agent remarks, “In today’s culture, an accusal is as good as a conviction.” He is not wrong.

    If you are an Allen fan, What’s With Baum? will be an essential purchase. If you’re the kind of admirer of his work who prefers the early, funny ones, then this will be a diverting, if slight and brief, read, quickly dealt with on a train or plane journey. And if you are convinced that the once-fêted Oscar-winning writer and director is an evil pedophile whose ability to escape justice for his crimes is an outrage, then you’re hardly the target audience for this book.

    It may also be that you’re not an obvious Spectator reader either, but we are a broad church: broader, in fact, than the market for this entertaining but flimsy novel will probably be. Will there be a sophomore novel? Unlikely, but as with all things Allen, don’t count it out just yet.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • Drowning in the neon swamp of Tron: Ares

    Drowning in the neon swamp of Tron: Ares

    Sitting in the nearly empty movie theater at which I saw Tron: Ares, I found myself swamped by neon. Its hues are unappealing in real life – redolent of dive bars, arcades and other unsavory venues – but neon is downright unbearable when experienced in a movie theater, where you have no choice but to stare at the screen unless you want a perfectly good $21.51 to go to waste.

     As a rule, the Tron films – this is the third, following the somewhat inventive original film from 1982 and the delinquent sequel from 2010 – are ugly in the same way the videogame Pong, the A-ha music video “Take On Me” or Keanu Reeves’s “virtual reality” thriller Johnny Mnemonic are ugly: they substitute for actual humanity a simulacrum of the same, and the simulacrum is often clunky, choppy and weird. Of course, having been produced with a high budget in 2025, Tron: Ares is smooth as silk. But its technical proficiency makes it even less inviting than its antecedents. The more effectively movie producers imagine a scenario in which humanoid computer programs fight within computer worlds (the gambit of Tron and its progeny), the more off-putting the product is likely to be.

    The plot here is likely to be comprehensible only to those familiar with the previous entries which, given their irregular timing as well as the general lack of Tron-ness in popular culture, fail to meet the definition of a cult. The lead character in the new movie is a computer program called Ares (Jared Leto). A programmer manages to bring the digital construct into the non-computer world for brief stretches of time. Ares perceives the world through RoboCop-like vision, speaks with a soft, empathetic voice and sports facial hair that would invite the condemnation of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. That Ares is sensitive, inquisitive, and played by the star of Dallas Buyers Club suggests that he may not be content to remain ensconced inside a computer forever. But the forces of Dillinger Systems want to bring him to terra firma primarily to fight wars on the evil company’s behalf.

    This is about to get a lot more boring. Here we must attend to the corporate rivalry between Dillinger Systems and ENCOM. Not since Super Nintendo dueled with Sega Genesis for the attention of adolescents everywhere have the video-game wars raged so brutally. The quest to make Ares permanently available in the real world sets Dillinger CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) against ENCOM CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee). What commences is a conflict of hacking and coding that quickly becomes wearisome, but at least these characters are flesh and blood with flesh-and-blood motivations.

    That’s more than you can say for Ares who, even when liberated into the material world, is an entirely uninvolving “character.” HAL 9000, the disembodied computer from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, was written more engagingly, though Tron: Ares surely has that film beat as for the number of chases and explosions.

    Director Joachim Rønning will never be mistaken for a master of subtlety. One potentially interesting thread involves Dillinger’s depositing Eve into the digital realm, where he attempts to wrest the sought-after code from her brain. Predictably, Ares and Eve develop puppy dog-like feelings for one another. “Being human is hard,” Eve says to Ares, though much of the dialogue is often barely intelligible under the barrage of sound effects and music by Nine Inch Nails (which, at various points, caused the seats in my theater to rumble, presumably on purpose).

    That I have semi-coherently recounted the plot of this distressingly long two-hour mess is something of a miracle, though I will admit I perked up when the inaugural star of Tron, Jeff Bridges, logged an appearance at the eleventh hour.

    Alas, Bridges’s performance does not suggest a continuation of his actual role as much as a bizarre homage to Marlon Brando’s performance as Jor-El in Superman (as has apparently been noted across the internet, they are wearing virtually the same white costume) and, inevitably, the Dude. “Classic humor, man,” Bridges says to Ares with appreciation after the latter tells a joke of some sort. The real joke is the film’s conclusion, in which Ares, at last liberated, is seen living out of the country and with his hair grown out.

    I was dazed and confused by all the neon in Tron: Ares. However, the lasting damage was not done to my eyes – but to my remaining brain cells.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • Has Los Angeles killed America’s imagination?

    Has Los Angeles killed America’s imagination?

    The magnificent Griffith Park Observatory turned 90 this year and, as fans of nonagenarians, my wife and I hiked up the south slope of Mount Hollywood – well, our rental car did the hard work – to pay our respects.

    The city of Los Angeles sprawled out before us; the Hollywood sign loomed ominously above us. I suppose I should hate this city, the Typhoid Mary of cultural imperialism, infecting and deadening imaginations from Bangor to Bend. As Morrissey crooned: “We look to Los Angeles for the language we use/ London is dead.”

    But I dunno: it’s my wife’s hometown, I love her Armenian relatives and I’ve always been a sucker for the movies, at least in their pre-CGI, pre-Marvel, pre-woke, pre-franchise age.

    Griffith Park is something of a sentimental spot for us, as Lucine and I once reenacted the Observatory knife fight scene from Rebel Without a Cause here, sans cutlery, way back where the past was. So the first thing we did on this visit was scoot toward the Kenneth Kendall-sculpted bust of James Dean on the west side of the Observatory lawn.

    Several dozen gamesome schoolchildren were horsing around on the grounds, none paying the slightest attention to the brooding Hoosier overactor’s bronze visage, but it’s hard to score the LA School District for deficiencies in teaching film history: Rebel was released 70 years ago, so teenagers today are as unlikely to know, much less idolize, Dean as I would have been to have drooled over Florence Lawrence at their age.

    Then again, kids these days listen to the Doors and wear Beatles T-shirts, digging the pop music of threescore years earlier, though I rather doubt that many flowerchildren of the 1960s were grooving to “Yes, We Have No Bananas” or the “Swanee” stylings of Al Jolson.

    The James Dean bust – which the actor himself commissioned – is accompanied by an inscription that calls him “an American original who on a basis of high school honors and in a period of five years time rose to the very pinnacle of the theatrical profession and through the magic of motion pictures lives on in legend.”

    Speaking of the very pinnacle, Lucine snapped a shot of me standing in front of the Griffith Park Observatory’s Astronomers Monument, a 35-foot high sculpture featuring likenesses of the stellar sextet of Galileo, Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Hipparchus and William Herschel. I titled the photo “Seven Great Astronomers.”

    I share a birthday with Herschel, discoverer of Uranus – and isn’t the seventh planet from the sun the favorite planet of every giggling 12-year-old boy? Uranus has not yet been canceled by planetary puritans – unlike its little brother Pluto, victim of microphobic astronomers. The erstwhile ninth planet’s demotion to the demeaning status of “dwarf planet” (no offense to little people) still pisses me off.

    I once interviewed David Levy, the greatest comet hunter of our age. He knew Pluto’s discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, whose biography he wrote. Levy told me that the elderly Tombaugh feared that his ejection from the exclusive Planet Discoverers Club was only a matter of time. At least the members of the International Astronomical Union had the minimal decency to wait until Clyde was dead before they committed their foul deed. (Mike Brown’s How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming is a lively account by the chief murderer.)

    Yet I was glad to see that the Pluto plaque remains firmly in the ground of Griffith Park’s Solar System Lawn Model. It hasn’t been dug up by the planetary precisians yet.

    The eccentric musician Sufjan Stevens, who once claimed – tongue somewhat in cheek – the extraordinarily inspired ambition of devoting an album to each of the 50 states, recorded an instrumental, “For Clyde Tombaugh,” as part of his Illinois effort. Stevens only musicalized two states, the other being his native Michigan, but his was a rare pop-culture recognition that the states are not just administrative units of a national behemoth, as nanny-state progressives and power-mad Trumpsters seem to believe. They are real places with real histories, distinct and individuated and idiosyncratic and tragic and funny.

    In one of his best tunes, the late folksinger Phil Ochs hymned “Jim Dean of Indiana” and I suppose Stevens would have packed Dean into an Indiana album, standing at a cool remove from his fellow subjects Larry Bird and Kurt Vonnegut and Theodore Dreiser and the Jackson 5 and Eugene V. Debs and Booth Tarkington.

    We do not need to look to Los Angeles for the language we use – or to Washington, DC, for that matter.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • The free market can’t stop AI actress Tilly Norwood

    The free market can’t stop AI actress Tilly Norwood

    The British actress Tilly Norwood began appearing in viral videos and short films across the internet earlier this year. She is young, fresh-faced, with girl-next-door vibes. She will be signed by a major talent agency soon.

    But Tilly Norwood is not real. She is an artificial-intelligence synthetic. She is not in the real world, not embodied. She is not a person or an actress. She is a digital Frankenstein’s monster of video software and ChatGPT. Tilly was created by Particle6 Productions, an AI studio founded by Dutch comedian and actress Eline Van der Velden. Tilly is her project. Van der Velden moved to the UK when she was 14 to study drama and musical theater – and Tilly is fairly clearly her idealized self. Tilly, and by extension Van der Velden, is increasingly famous.

    Tilly represents an inflection point for the entertainment industry. The buzz and controversy around her feels like a marketing ploy by Particle6 Productions, part of a rollout or testing process in which the public’s willingness to accept AI replacements for actors is being measured and analyzed. Traditional executives and agents must be watching closely.

    If Tilly fails, there will be other Tillys and other AI studios that will attempt to succeed where she didn’t. Studios and agencies have every incentive to replace expensive human capital, expensive human stars, with comparatively cheap simulacra. Her creators say she can reduce production costs by 90 percent. And the technology that makes Tillys will only get cheaper. Human replacement is already happening in other artistic industries. Spotify recently announced it will be working with major studios to develop AI music. It is already sucking streams away from real musicians.

    But the visceral shock from AI simulation will be even greater in film than in music, as we both see and hear these creations. Van der Velden has compared Tilly to the use of CGI. That leaves us movie-goers in a position where we must delineate the line between CGI – which is widely acceptable as ethical – and the Tillys of the world. We know that Robert Downey Jr. isn’t really doing all the things Iron Man does, but we don’t mind – at least not morally. But to imagine Tilly integrated in a live-action movie the same way that CGI is provokes a disturbed response.

    This discomfort is not irrational. If AI becomes able to convincingly capture the full range of human expression – if it becomes indistinguishable from actors on film – then we will have arrived at a dangerous place. First, because the consequences for actors are existential. Second, because our collective sense of reality will be at risk. We may come to prefer the artificial to the real. The age of apps has taught us that humans can easily fall prey to this temptation. We like the frictionless, easy options offered by apps and we ignore their trade-offs: heightened isolation, digital addiction, coarsened social bonds. Apps – by reducing opportunity costs and by creating sanitized digital pathways for real experience – have made dating, eating and communicating worse. People will swipe incessantly on Hinge rather than date, order delivery rather than cook or go out and text rather than talk. Simulated actors pose the same risk.

    And they’re worse, too. AI can only re-present us with what we’ve already made. Tilly can only predict what an actor – in her case, a British female millennial actor – might do, how they might act. It is pure pastiche, recursion. To become accustomed to this, to want this, is to lose taste for the unpredictable, the strange, the uncanny, the circumstantial and accidental things that happen on set when great actors, writers and directors collaborate: an unscripted moment of hesitation, a look that wasn’t in the script, the way weather or location affects a scene. We will lose our taste for the subtler nuances of light and sound and embodied human acting. Will we also lose our taste for human behavior?

    Even before the intrusion of AI, digital streaming content had become predictable and stupid. This content will be derivative of this derivative slop. When we use the word slop, this is what we’re referring to – recursive, median, flavorless products. To have a taste for slop is to have no taste at all.

    Outrage and statements from Hollywood actors and producers will not be enough to stop Tilly’s rise. The economic incentives for media and AI companies to push this slop are too high, and there are very few checks in place that could possibly work.

    There’s no free-market solution, but there is a free-spirit solution. The only real hope lies in consumers, viewers, tastemakers. The only rational response to the rise of Tilly Norwoods is for filmmakers and the studios that still wish to produce great movies to double down on analog methods, and for actors to spend more time in the theater.

    Those of us who produce televisual media must redouble our efforts to provide consumers a meaningful alternative to AI streaming slop. We will have to give audiences the reason to prefer human experience over AI falsehoods.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • Del Toro’s Frankenstein deserves the big screen

    Del Toro’s Frankenstein deserves the big screen

    If you want to see Guillermo del Toro’s no-expense-spared adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein this Halloween, you’ll have to hope that you’re living in a major city with an arthouse cinema. That is because, as part of the Faustian deal that Netflix strikes with the filmmakers whom it gives blank checks to realize their dream projects, the pictures that they make get only the most token of cinematic releases before they are sent onto the streaming service, there to become part of the algorithm for all eternity. This has been the fate – albeit one willingly entered into – that has befallen films from the likes of David Fincher, Kathryn Bigelow and Martin Scorsese, but somehow it’s all the more depressing in the case of Frankenstein, del Toro’s passion project of many decades standing. If ever a film not only deserved but positively needed to be seen on the big screen, it’s this one.

    Del Toro has adapted the famous Gothic novel with a reasonable degree of fidelity, but he has also brought in aspects of the famous Universal Studios pictures from the early Thirties, Frankenstein and its superior sequel Bride of Frankenstein. While he retains the basic structure and characterisation of Shelley’s original, concerning a scientist who creates life but at a terrible cost, there are new characters – enter Christoph Waltz’s apparently charming arms dealer Harlander, who offers to fund Victor Frankenstein’s research into creating life, at a price – and a more redemptive approach towards Jacob Elordi’s Creature. Here, he is portrayed less as a murderous brute and more as a noble savage, coming to terms with both his immortality (a del Toro addition that works well) and his cursed status.

    Yet ultimately this is a well-trodden story that is told straight, without any attempts to make the saga seem “relevant” or “contemporary”. Oscar Isaac’s Byronic Victor is a dashing hero in the first half, told from his perspective, and a snivelling villain in the second, told from that of the Creature. He is undeniably a scientific pioneer, but also arrogant and lecherous; del Toro sensibly switches Mia Goth’s character of Elizabeth from being Victor’s betrothed to that of his younger brother William’s fiancée, thereby creating a love triangle of sorts which is only complicated when Elordi’s (surprisingly hot) Creature also forms a tendresse for her. This, naturally, enables del Toro to recreate his usual Beauty and the Beast themes, as last seen to Oscar-winning effect in The Shape of Water.

    If one wished to criticise the film, it feels its length at two and a half hours (this is where streaming may win out, as there’s an obvious midway point for a break) and, for a film supposedly billed as horror, it isn’t remotely frightening. The Creature is pitiable and noble rather than terrifying, and although there are several instances of creative throat-ripping gore – a del Toro specialty – this is less an exercise in shock tactics than it is a mournful examination of man’s overreach, complete with allusions to Paradise Lost and “Ozymandias”. The latter, of course, was written by Shelley’s husband Percy Bysshe, thereby providing a nice literary Easter egg for those so inclined.

    I did miss the intellectual cut and thrust that was found on stage between Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller in Nick Dear’s 2011 play, in which Frankenstein was presented as a Faustus-esque truth-seeker and the Creature took on aspects of Milton’s Satan. Yet set against this is del Toro’s signature lush costume and production design (Kate Hawley and Tamara Deverell both deserve Oscars), to-die-for cinematography by Dan Laustsen and a beautifully evoked sense of Gothic romance.

    This has been del Toro’s most eagerly awaited film for years, and after the relative disappointment of Crimson Peak, it proves that this kind of rapturous, beautiful cinema is not yet dead. So, this Halloween, give yourself a treat, rather than a trick, and get to the nearest place showing Frankenstein. There, you can wallow in its aesthetic glories, and breathe a sigh of relief that Netflix, for all its faults, is still bankrolling work as individual and striking as this.

  • Unpacking Tucker Carlson’s 9/11 documentary

    Unpacking Tucker Carlson’s 9/11 documentary

    What if the country responsible for almost 3,000 deaths on September 11, 2001, was not Afghanistan, and certainly not Iraq, but Saudi Arabia? Did the US invade the wrong country?

    A lawsuit in Manhattan makes this case. The legal action, by 9/11 survivors and victims’ families, has unearthed new evidence that puts the blame for the attacks squarely on the -Saudis. The families believe the government of Saudi Arabia plotted the attack from the start – and afterwards, the US government let them get away with it.

    The CIA kept information from the FBI, Carlson says, because ‘the CIA was grooming the hijackers as sources’

    At the same time, a new Tucker Carlson documentary, The 9/11 Files, makes a different accusation against Saudi Arabia. Carlson argues that Saudi agents were working undercover to get inside al-Qaeda and, in the process, gave the hijackers crucial support. Carlson says the CIA knew about, or even directed, the effort – then covered it up after the September 11 attacks.

    The most important revelations are being made in a courtroom in the Southern District of New York, where the Saudi government is being sued by victims’ families. Among the plaintiffs is Terry Strada, who lost her husband, Tom, a bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 104th floor of the North Tower. She was left to bring up three children on her own and now leads 9/11 Families United, a coalition of victims’ relatives and survivors. She tells me: “We know that the government failed us, but we also know that the kingdom, Saudi Arabia, sponsored the attacks.”

    A federal judge has recently denied a Saudi motion to dismiss the case, finding enough evidence of the country’s involvement to move forward to trial. In court, the families’ lawyers described how Saudi Arabia built up a network of extremists around the world throughout the 1990s. Combing through thousands of documents from the Saudi government, the lawyers say they have identified more than 50 Saudi agents placed in the US to support and direct Sunni jihadists. Strada lists the places: Falls Church, -Virginia; Paterson, New Jersey; Scottsdale, Arizona; Twin Cities, Minnesota; Vero Beach, Florida. Saudi Arabia “had people in every single city. It’s horrifying.” One Saudi family in Sarasota, Florida – who were “obviously supporting the hijackers” – disappeared two weeks before 9/11. They left their house with food in the refrigerator and cars in the driveway. Strada says the Saudis knew what was going to happen on 9/11 because “the Saudis orchestrated it.” 

    Central to the story is a Saudi civil servant named Omar al-Bayoumi. Bayoumi moved to California in 1994 to become a “student,” though he rarely attended class. He befriended two of the al-Qaeda operatives who eventually carried out the 9/11 attacks, offering them extraordinary support. Much of this has been known since 2002: Bayoumi invited the two men to stay with him in his apartment in San Diego in 2000, then found them their own place across the street; he co-signed their lease and loaned them money for the deposit and first month’s rent; he got them bank accounts and driver’s licenses. The official report from the 9/11 Commission accepted that Bayoumi did all this unwittingly.

    But the lawsuit has turned up new and damning information. The most consequential material comes from the Metropolitan Police in London – the file had been hidden from public view until now. The Met had this evidence because Bayoumi moved to the English city of Birmingham a year before 9/11, signing up to study at a university there (where he once again failed to attend class). Ten days after the Twin Towers fell, British counterterrorism officers arrested Bayoumi and searched the garage at his home. They found his address book, some videos and numerous documents and notes. This was Bayoumi’s personal archive and, the families’ lawyers say, the key to what happened on 9/11.

    One video shows Bayoumi on a visit to the US Capitol in 1999. It’s not your typical tourist film. He concentrates on entrances, exits and structural features such as interior columns. He points out security personnel and patrols by the Capitol police. He speaks of a “plan.” An expert witness for the families said the video had all the “hallmarks” of reconnaissance for a terror-ist attack. Bayoumi refers to “demons” in the White House. One of the families’ lawyers described the video to me as a show of “seething contempt” for the symbols of US power.

    Most revealing was a small yellow notepad found in Bayoumi’s garage. One page had a sketch of a passenger plane; another had an equation and calculations. Ten years passed before an FBI expert examined the calculations, and another ten before the notebook was given to the court in Manhattan. A pilot testifying for the families said the formula would have been used to work out the minimum altitude an aircraft would have to be flown at to see a target on the horizon. Lawyers for the Saudi government said this was a homework project by Bayoumi’s son. But Bayoumi had admitted in a deposition that the handwriting was his, explaining: “Perhaps this was an equation that we studied before in high school.” Asked why he would want to calculate the height of a plane from Earth, all he could say was: “It’s an equation like any other equation.”

    Bayoumi told the British police officers interrogating him it was “pure coincidence” that he repeatedly “just happened to meet” the al-Qaeda men – as he did in Los Angeles, in San Diego and in Saudi Arabia. One of the cops told him: “You are a very unlucky person, or you are involved.” The British police expected the US authorities to ask for extradition and bring Bayoumi back to the US for questioning. They were incredulous when the US told them to let Bayoumi go. One of the officers told London’s Sunday Times: “I am still shocked to this day… I would have taken Bayoumi to the cleaners on those pieces of evidence.”

    The 9/11 families’ lawyers believe the Saudis successfully lobbied the US government to get Bayoumi released. With 15 of the 19 hijackers identified as Saudis, the royal family was panicking and – as one of the lawyers told me – began “an audacious manipulation” of its relationship with the US. The lawyers are still trying to obtain the cable traffic they think would prove this. But they claim that the kingdom was telling the US its help would be needed for the new War on Terror – to prevent a future 9/11 – and for the invasion of Iraq. The result was a joint effort to conceal the “direct line of culpability leading back to Riyadh.”

    In The 9/11 Files, Carlson says the Bush White House was all too happy to let the Saudis off the hook. Bush himself had ignored intelligence briefings warning that al-Qaeda planned to attack the US. 

    Carlson, you may think, has gone down a few rabbit holes since he left Fox News, moving his studio to what looks like a log cabin on the American frontier (it’s actually a garage in Maine). But Carlson does not claim that 9/11 was an “inside job,” an attack orchestrated by the US government, nor does he argue that the Saudis directly planned the attack. Instead, we get a story of failure and cover-up by the CIA. 

    Carlson says the official account of 9/11 is a “lie.” According to that version of events, the US government “just didn’t have the intelligence it needed” to prevent the attack. In fact, the CIA was closely tracking two of the al-Qaeda men as they arrived in the US – the same two housed by Bayoumi in San Diego. The CIA kept this information from the FBI, Carlson says, because the agency was using the Saudis for a surveillance operation targeting al-Qaeda. “The CIA was grooming the hijackers as sources.” 

    In the documentary, a former FBI agent, Mark Rossini, tells us this was the CIA’s “delusional” grand plan. Rossini was one of the FBI’s representatives in the CIA’s bin Laden unit. In effect, he says, the CIA protected these terrorists from the rest of law enforcement, especially the FBI. “You have the CIA following two men all over the planet, then landing in Los Angeles, California, and you don’t tell the FBI… You had a duty to protect Americans, and you failed because of your fucking fantastical delusion.” 

    The CIA is not allowed to spy within the United States. But, Carlson tells us, the agency used Bayoumi as a “workaround” – he was on the payroll of the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, Carlson says. He quotes declassified government documents showing that Bayoumi got large sums of money from the Saudi embassy. The money was apparently funneled from accounts belonging to the wife of the ambassador. By using the Saudis as a proxy to recruit the 9/11 hijackers, Carlson says, the CIA gave itself cover if things went wrong – which of course they did, -spectacularly. The 9/11 Commission’s report doesn’t even mention this alleged recruitment scheme. Carlson says the CIA stopped the -officer supposedly running the operation from speaking to investigators. As he puts it, the Commission allowed the CIA to get away with saying it made an “honest mistake” in failing to tell anyone that two al-Qaeda terrorists had arrived on American soil. 

    Terry Strada isn’t buying it. If this was a CIA operation that spun out of control, why didn’t the agency loudly blame the Saudis after 9/11? “They did the opposite. They bent over backwards to protect the Saudis,” she says. The cover-up was not about a spying operation gone sideways, she says, but about the much bigger story that 9/11 was a plot hatched by one of America’s closest allies. The Saudi royal family have always denied that their government had anything to do with 9/11; there may now be new inquiries in the US Congress and elsewhere. The new evidence prompts many questions; the Saudi government should be afraid of the answers.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • One Battle After Another may be the worst movie ever made

    One Battle After Another may be the worst movie ever made

    One Battle After Another may be the worst movie ever made. Not in the petty and obvious way of a normal bad movie, though. It is a grand, multifaceted masterpiece of badness. It is dramatically bad, morally bad, historically bad and even erotically bad. And to cram in all this badness, it is an hour too long. But you won’t be bored – it is even entertainingly bad. This film is so bad that most people will think it is good, and it will probably make a lot of money. Proving only that America is the kingdom of Cain. But we knew that.

    But why not start with praise, eh? The film has a beautiful celluloid look. I saw it from the second row of a baby IMAX, centered like a potentate amid my intrepid team of Urban Tigers (Jeff Goldblum’s team of chads in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou). Wow! It had been way too long since I saw such a film in the theater. My sensorium was thrown into total global overload, like a Tasaday tribesman before his first television. Will digital ever be able to match this? Yeah, probably, with artificial intelligence. Sad.

    Paul Thomas Anderson remains a brilliant visual director. One Battle is a film-school masterpiece. Most bad films are boring. But PTA, while often bad, is never boring. Perhaps that makes him the perfect director for the eternally bored 21st century.

    But! But! Let’s get back to the dramatic badness of One Battle. Like all of PTA’s badnesses, it passes as great. Great dramatists can mix the tones of drama. Tragedy flows smoothly into comedy into romance. Thomas Pynchon, from whom PTA is stealing in One Battle, has this in Vineland (1990). Pynchon can master every tone without being cringe.

    One Battle is completely off the rails. Melodrama swings abruptly to tragedy to slapstick to romance to action to erotica. These transitions are unnerving and harmful to the soul. They do not naturally cause the audience to engage with the work, but to be thrown off it like a cowboy off a bull. Pynchon, of course, has an element of this – but Pynchon is under control.

    PTA is just random. The first rule of classical drama is: action must be necessary. Randomness creates detachment. You know what else is random? AI slop is random. Expect 21st-century art to move away from anything that AI can do well. Gratuitous randomness will come to feel dated and 20th-century. It’s bad, and it disengages the audience.

    Only when the audience then feels some ulterior attraction (such as political or sexual energy), a complicated structure of tension is created. I, of course, came to One Battle with an ulterior repulsion – creating a completely different vibe. So take this review with a grain of salt.

    Speaking of repulsion: let’s go straight there. In Vineland, the revolutionary heroine, babe and mother Frenesi Gates, is the blue-eyed, stunning child of mid-century Hollywood communists. Her beauty enables her to win the love of the evil chad-prosecutor Brock Vond and of the stoner-hero Zoyd Wheeler.

    One Battle opens with an action sequence in which Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), the stoner leader and technical mastermind of an American revolutionary cell (of mainly women of color? Set in what looks like 1990?), storms an ICE detention center and frees women and children from cages.

    Ferguson’s beautiful revolutionary partner in crime has become Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). Even PTA’s character names are AI-slop Pynchon. Perfidia captures the evil ICE villain, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). At gunpoint, she forces him to flexcuff himself and, in a timeless Western trick, trap himself in his own spotlit cage. But on the way, excited by this bondage moment and by her stunning beauty, Lockjaw springs a boner! This allows Perfidia to sexually torment him, which is cool. Lockjaw is a mix of the stock villains from Avatar, American Beauty, Dr. Strangelove, etc., with a touch of Leslie Nielsen. This slapstick dick moment, which would have seemed heavy-handed in a Leslie Nielsen film, is also the inciting incident of the plot.

    While this is bad enough, the real problem is that Taylor, given a three-hour, $4,500 stage makeup job which involves stitching actual eagle feathers to her temples, might pass as a five. PTA sometimes shoots her with makeup. But generally not. She and all the other glamorous women of color who make up Ferguson’s unit, the “French 75,” (a) have feminist body types, and (b) tend to elocute in those dialects of English to which Hollywood refers as “street.”

    When we feed these traits into the Tinder simulator, it doesn’t look good. It’s not clear why PTA did a cross-racial casting. Maybe Hollywood antifa has dirt on him – a Hail, Caesar effect? Maybe he thought it would work at the box office. Still, Penn and DiCaprio are among our great leading men, and have at least remained so. But they’re only human. (Don’t get me started on Benicio del Toro as Chuck Norris meets Harriet Tubman.)

    I estimate that this movie will probably inspire between one and ten murders – maybe even my own

    Imagine Sean Penn planting a deep, hot kiss on Snoop, the lesbian gangster girl from The Wire. While Taylor is not quite Snoop, she is also not Naomi Watts. Penn can’t quite vibe it – and PTA has already put us in the domain of implausibly perverse eroticism. The result is that, for the first 45 minutes of the movie, we are treated, both with Penn and DiCaprio, to some of the worst romantic chemistry ever shown on screen. The vibe is so bad that it forces us to confront a trope sometimes seen in the work of Julius Streicher, but seldom in a major Hollywood motion picture: interracial romance as a paraphilia. It does not help that Lockjaw’s cartoonish fascist cabal, the “Christmas Adventurers,” see it just this way.

    So it is almost a physical relief when Perfidia’s place on the screen is taken by her homely, biracial teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti, with a real-life Pynchon name). Eros is wisely avoided in the world of Willa. Infiniti would make an excellent character actress but will no doubt be abused, Zendaya-style, as a leading woman.

    Fundamentally, One Battle is a religious film. It is entirely set in the fantasy landscape of the great American religion, progressivism, the 20th-century evolution of our ancient Puritan tradition. If you are a true believer, imagine watching Battlefield Earth without being a Scientologist. For non-progressives, One Battle may be necessary viewing. It displays the interior landscape of the narcissistic narrative of our world’s dominant cult of power. We seldom get to strap a GoPro to the inside of a lib’s forehead.

    Let’s take the approach to leftist violence. In the 1930s, a real communist terrorist was part of a genuine global revolutionary organization. His 1960s equivalent was at least part of a genuine revolutionary cell, and of course could take liberating sugarcane-harvest tours of Cuba (as did Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles). This was still real power. Evil, communist, murderer Joanne “Assata Shakur” Chesimard, perhaps the closest thing to a real-life Perfidia, just died in Havana. Venceremos!

    Take a moment to think about the first time you heard about the Weather Underground – and the emotional context in which you received it. You probably thought it was cool. This was an organization that got its greeting, a four-fingered salute, from Bernadine Dohrn, who for all her faults was genuinely hot. Before becoming a law professor at Northwestern University, she praised the Manson Family for sticking a fork in the uterus of a pregnant woman they had just murdered in an attempt to start a race war. And you thought the Weather Underground was cool! I thought it was cool. The name was certainly cool. The power of 20th-century marketing. What a product! What a cunning humiliation of a whole society!

    Feminists speak of “body betrayal” when a woman feels involuntary sexual excitement while being raped. The journalists who taught us to revere Dohrn and the other allies of Charles Manson and Jim Jones raped our brains. They corrupted us with the satanic joy of evil. We will never get our innocence back, not even by killing them. It’s important not to fantasize about killing journalists. We shouldn’t stoop to their level. It’s fine to picture them spending the rest of their lives harvesting sugarcane – I’d start sweetening my coffee for that.

    Even by the 1980s, though, all this homegrown terrorism was in the past. One Battle is a fantasyland where the 1930s and 1960s are still alive in the 1990s and the 2000s. And in the 2000s, they are even still the 1930s. Reality has voted differently. Yes, there is real-world 21st-century leftist violence. I estimate that this movie will probably inspire between one and ten murders – maybe even my own. Stuff happens. But the leftist murderers of the 21st century are all lone nuts. They are actually just like the rightist murderers, except that their murderous ideas come from Whole Foods, not the dark web. At most, they might have a few equally deranged accessories on a Discord server. They are as likely to form a new revolutionary state as Jacob Chansley, the QAnon Shaman. Horseshoe theory as murderous farce. Again: America is the kingdom of Cain.

    So this film is out there – recruiting damaged people by presenting them as romantic heroes in a propaganda fantasy. Few will kill. But many will clap. When bad movies succeed, as One Battle will, they diagnose something bad in the audiences they entertain. Corrupt art is the pathognomonic mark of a corrupt society. Shitty people will watch this shitty film, and love it. Shitty journalists have already given it a standing ovation – the politics makes them hard, like Lockjaw. This evil is at the very heart of our culture.

    As Leonard Cohen noted: “I have seen the future, brother. It is murder.” Murder is as old as Cain. The anonymous internet is young. Nobody asked for the combination. But they’ll get it.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.