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Taxi Driver Doesn’t End in Violence. It Ends in Applause. That’s the Horror.
Travis Bickle does not snap. This is the most important thing to understand about Taxi Driver, and it is the thing almost everyone gets wrong. The popular reading goes something like this: a lonely, disturbed Vietnam veteran drives a cab through the hellscape of 1970s New York, spirals into madness, and eventually explodes in a…
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Mulholland Drive Is Not a Puzzle. It’s a Suicide Note.
Everyone wants to solve Mulholland Drive. That’s the first mistake. The second is thinking David Lynch wants you to. Since 2001, the film has generated more decoding attempts than perhaps any American film of its era. Reddit threads, YouTube essays, academic papers, all trying to crack the sequence, identify the “real” timeline, map the dream…
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Every Institution Takes Your Name. Spirited Away Is About Getting It Back.
A girl walks through a tunnel. She’s ten years old. She’s sulking. Her parents are moving to a new town and she doesn’t want to go. She clutches a bouquet of flowers someone gave her as a going-away gift, and she slumps in the back seat, and her face is the universal face of a…
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There Is No Green Place. Fury Road Is About What You Do When the Dream Is Dead.
Drive. That’s all there is. The road and the rig and the dust and the engines behind you. Don’t think about why. Don’t think about where. Don’t think about what comes after, because after is a luxury that belongs to people who have water and time and neither of those things exists anymore. Just drive.…
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Every Tool in 2001 Is a Descendant of the Bone. Including HAL. Including Us.
The ape picks up the bone. This is where everything starts. Not human history. Everything. Every institution, every extraction, every performance, every lie, every dream, every building, every bomb. It starts here, on a dry African plain, four million years ago, when a starving hominid looks at the skeleton of a dead animal and sees,…