Christopher Nolan is not okay. I mean that mostly as a compliment. The evidence is in theaters right now: The Odyssey, three hours of IMAX-scale myth about a man being punished.

Odysseus spends 20 years trying to get home. He is blown across the sea by a god he wronged; he loses every man who sailed with him. And the home he is trying to reach has stopped resembling the one he left. Suitors eat his food, drink his wine, and harass his queen. Odysseus’s son Telemachus, meanwhile, has grown up inside the wreckage of his absence, impotently guarding what remains of a fractured kingdom while waiting on a father who may never come.

Talking to Empire, Nolan called the sea “vast and terrifying and wonderful and benevolent,” and described “the leap of faith that was being made in an unmapped, uncharted world.” Of every myth available, every story he could tell at blockbuster scale, this is the one he chose: the story of a man whose own deeds caused him to lose his crew, his family, his home, and his faith in the future.

And that is the theme Nolan cannot put down: generational guilt. The suspicion that we are handing our children a world worse than the one we were handed, and that they will — rightly — hold this against us. That we will never be forgiven.

The Odyssey is the third original feature he has made since 2016 — since Brexit, since Trump. (Dunkirk I’m setting aside; it was written and shot before the break.) All three turn on this deep-seated anxiety, each in its own register.

In Tenet, the first of the three, the guilt is more subtextual. When the villain explains why the future is working with him to declare war on the present, he says: “Their oceans rose and their rivers ran dry.” Then the movie hurries on to the next reversed car chase.

(I think. I’ve seen the film at least three times and still believe I only vaguely understand what happens in it.)

When Tenet came out, some climate writers read the line as an evasion. An “exculpatory fantasy,” one called it — blaming a vengeful future for a catastrophe the present is busy causing. I think they had it backwards. Nobody in the film ever answers the charge. No one stands up to say the future is wrong about us. The accusation hangs there, without a rebuttal.

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The guilt in Oppenheimer, meanwhile, is obvious and unrelenting.

The film ends with a quiet conversation by a pond between “Oppie” and Einstein. The former reminds the latter of their old fear that the bomb, when it was sparked for the first time, might ignite the atmosphere of the whole world, destroying it entirely. Then, the iconic final line: “I believe we did.”

In Oppenheimer, the missiles fly. In The Odyssey, the walls of Troy collapse. In both cases, the world burns.

A guilt this profound stands one short step from despair: if the damage is already made, after all, then nothing can be done and the future is already written. Nolan does not take that step. Oppenheimer, he has said, is “a movie about consequences.”

His films are not fatalistic declarations that doom is inevitable. They’re warnings — multimillion-dollar warnings — that everything we do, including the things we don’t do, comes with a cost. Tenet said it plainly. “What’s happened, happened,” a character explains. “Which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world,” he adds, “not an excuse to do nothing.”

The past is closed. The future is not. Nolan has spent 10 years looking straight at what we are doing to the people who will come after us, and — to his credit — he is not okay with it. How could he be?

[Spoilers throughout!]

There’s a moment in the seventh episode of Widow’s Bay when Wyck (Stephen Root) — the grizzled old skipper who has spent all season warning anyone who’ll listen that their island is cursed — stops warning and starts admitting.

He shows the town’s mayor, Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), a photograph of two teenage boys: himself, and his best friend Mark, the brother of Wyck’s then-girlfriend Gerrie (Nancy Lenehan). Then he shares the story he’s never trusted Loftis enough to tell — a story, one suspects as he tells it, he may have never told anyone before.

They were 16, the island sealed under one of its periodic lockdowns, when they and a few other kids took a boat that wasn’t theirs out past the safe water. Something vast and Lovecraftian came up beneath the hull — all tentacles and appetite — and shattered it, spilling the kids into the black water to drown, be eaten, why not both? Swimming for the surface, Wyck felt a hand close around his ankle: Mark, reaching for the only thing left to hold onto. And Wyck, to save himself, kicked his best friend loose.

Tom tells him it wasn’t his fault, which is both true and asinine (a Tom speciality). Wyck isn’t after absolution. Wyck is trying to make the mayor understand that his lifelong conviction that Widow’s Bay is evil isn’t a crank’s superstition — it’s the story he has built his whole life around to explain the unforgivable thing he did at sixteen. It’s the story that gives his existence structure and meaning.

And if you really listen, the way Wyck is begging Tom to, you can hear the show’s entire argument hiding inside Wyck’s monster story. The thing that has turned Widow’s Bay into a clearinghouse of sea hags and killer clowns and satanic rites isn’t a curse or a demon. It’s guilt.

Reviewing the series for The A.V. Club, Saloni Gajjar praised it for not “succumb[ing] to the trend of making grief its monster” — and she’s exactly right, because the monster here isn’t grief, which is something done to you. The monster here is the thing you did, or failed to do, for which you believe you cannot — and perhaps you should not — ever truly be forgiven.

The terrible debt-collector that is waiting, always waiting, to demand its due — just when you thought you were home-free, just when you can least afford to pay it.

Beneath the show’s spooky and spectacular surface, the supernatural in Widow’s Bay is a decoy; and, as we learned watching the show transform from a Rhys vehicle to a Golden Era HBO-style ensemble piece, for too many residents of Widow’s Bay, it’s an alibi. Every islander who treats as fate the primordial curse, that anyone born on the island will die if they try to leave it, gets to believe their worst moment was written in advance, that nothing they do is ever really a choice.

In the show’s moments of comic relief, Tom rails against his community’s fatalism, complacency, and self-pity — he’s not wrong. (He’s just an asshole.)

This is the show’s sharpest and least fashionable idea. The conventional version of this story — the inherited-trauma register that ran prestige TV for a decade — would locate its wisdom in the naming: surface the buried wound, feel the repressed guilt, sit in that for a moment. But Widow’s Bay complicates this admonition. In ways they’ll joke about and in deeper ways that shape their entire lives, the people of Widow’s Bay know they’re the beneficiaries of an absurdly long history of atrocity and injustice. But that hasn’t brought wisdom. And it hasn’t brought healing, either.

There’s a reason the characters in Widow’s Bay who exude the most moral authority are the ones who carry the heaviest loads and keep choosing anyway.

Patricia (Kate O’Flynn), Tom’s lonely, aggrieved assistant, survived the serial killer who murdered a string of island girls in the ‘90s — despite doing little more than hiding under the bed. This was trauma done to her, but she also carried survivor’s guilt. Why did she live when so many others didn’t? The question doesn’t just haunt her; it’s the main basis for the belief, widespread among those in Widow’s Bay who went to high school with her, that she made the whole thing up.

And yet despite her initial depiction as a thoroughly woke and comically repressed carrier of that flame, Patricia’s character arc resolves in her becoming a survivor who, as one critic’s headline had it, puts every final girl to shame.

Ruth (K Callan) goes further still. In the show’s bravura finale, she reveals ample reason to carry perpetual guilt and grief, but she neither hides from it nor lets it petrify her. First, she forgives herself and finds ways to delight in and support the daughter she never got to raise. Then she carries the story with her not as a dark secret but simply as what it is: a fact of her life, not the meaning of it.

Which brings us back to those poor teenagers and that nightmarish thing in the deep that was waiting for them.

Prophet of ruin that he is, it would be easy to file Wyck with the paralyzed. But look again at what he is actually doing during his disclosure to Tom. For decades, the curse has been his alibi, the great cosmic story that turned a frightened boy’s terrible, human choice — to kick Mark away, to swim for survival, to live — into fate.

But now, and perhaps for the first time, he says the unsayable thing aloud, to a man he has finally chosen to trust. He cannot save Mark. Yet telling the truth is something he does, in the present, of his own free will. A character who was once presented as a walking repository of the island’s many curses and inescapable fates refuses, at last, to let the curse do his living for him.

The two break-ins

• The whole movie is really just the outside world coming through the front door twice — first the drifters, then the Philly mob — and each time it turns out the nice quiet life was never actually self-made. It was always sitting on top of something.

• It doesn’t even open on the family. It opens on two guys living out of a car, and before they’re anywhere near Tom’s diner they’ve killed a motel clerk, a maid, and a child. A dad, a mom, a kid. They wipe out a little family unit before the story technically starts.

• You hear them before you see them. Cronenberg lays this wall of insect noise under the opening — buzzing, chittering, the works — and the message is basically: these men come from nature. Not the town, not civilization. The lawless part underneath, where the soundtrack is a million bugs.

Everybody’s already faking it

• Cut from that straight to the Stall house, where the little daughter’s screaming from a nightmare and Tom tells her “there’s no such thing as monsters.” Which is true! And also completely useless, because the monsters in this movie are real and about four scenes away.

• Here’s the part I think gets missed: Tom’s life is already a performance before a single violent thing happens to him. The drive-in joke, the fumbled baseball advice, wiping down the diner — he’s running a “wholesome American dad” bit he clearly absorbed from TV.

• And the quotation marks around all of it aren’t just Cronenberg’s. They’re Tom’s. He built the whole life out of what movies told him a good life looks like. Which honestly tells you everything you need to know before Joey Cusack ever surfaces.

• Even the kid. Jack takes his bully apart with words instead of fists and you want to read him as the evolved one — but he’s still doing aggression, he’s just picked the ground where he wins. Not different from the bully. More repressed. Not the same thing, and the movie knows the difference.

Edie in denial, in real time

• When the mob guys show up, Edie calls them “reporters.” Twice. A black sedan, sunglasses indoors, one of them in a suit that looks beamed in from 1987 — these men could not read less like press. She’s not confused. You’re watching denial do its job.

• What finally cracks it is a throwaway line: one of them jokes they should clear out before Tom gets mad. That’s the thing that makes her look up. First time she’s heard what Tom did at the diner framed as anything but heroic, and something about the knowingness of it gets through.

And then the thing I actually wrote about

• All of that is setup for the person the movie’s really about. Once Edie can see it — the whole ugly foundation the nice life was resting on — the film drops one question in her lap and cuts to black. Doesn’t answer it. Won’t.

• That question, the one she’s really praying over at the last dinner table, is what I couldn’t stop turning over, so I wrote the whole piece about it — what the movie makes her carry, and then quietly makes us carry too.

In the last scene of A History of Violence, a wife must decide whether she can look her husband in the face without wanting to retch.

Edie Stall (Maria Bello) sits at the dinner table with her head bowed and her hands folded, and if you didn’t know better you’d think she was saying grace. Played by Viggo Mortensen, the man across the table — a split personality who she’s always known as mild-mannered Tom Stall, but who has revealed himself to be a former mafia hitman by the name of Joey Cusack — has just come home from killing at least four men, including his own brother. Tom and Edie’s youngest, Sarah, too small to know why the dinner has gone silent, sets her father’s plate at his usual spot. Wordlessly, their teenage son Jack (Ashton Holmes) puts a plate of meatloaf next to his father.

David Cronenberg’s 2005 film is remembered for its flashes of visceral mayhem, but its real subject is Edie, who must decide whether she can go on living in peace and comfort now that she has seen the violence it takes to secure them. Adapted by Josh Olson from the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, A History of Violence begins as a private matter — one wife, one marriage, one small Indiana town — before revealing itself to be about something much larger, and much harder for the viewer to disown.

Cronenberg has called himself “a complete Darwinian,” and in his review of the film, Roger Ebert took him at his word. The movie, Ebert argued, is about survival of the fittest, “not the good, the moral, the nice, but the fittest.” And when two itinerant serial killers descend on Tom’s small-town diner looking for blood and a quick score, it’s Joey, the sadistic murderer, and not Tom, the decent family man, who displays with shocking clarity what “survival of the fittest” can really mean.

Yet even if this “Darwinian” interpretation of life is the engine of the film, I think it’s merely the beginning — and not the endpoint — of the conversation Cronenberg wants to inspire. Yes, life is red in tooth and claw; and all those who survive today are the descendants, however distant, of people who did things in the past for their own survival that would make their genetic inheritors blush. To Cronenberg, that’s a given.

What’s more interesting to him is how we, as individuals and as societies, take that stubborn and ugly truth about survival and either repress it or transmute it into something we find more palatable. What happens when the facts before us are so severe, so ugly, and so undeniable that they threaten to overwhelm our capacity to rationalize and accept? What happens when the product of the “survival of the fittest” isn’t an abstraction but a real-life man, covered in the blood of those he’s just maimed and pulverized, standing before us and asking again for the love and comfort we once gave so freely?

That’s the question that has Edie praying over her meatloaf in the film’s final scene. It’s a question that, ultimately, only she can answer. But it’s a question that, in some form or another, and whether we want to admit it or not, structures the life of anyone lucky enough to be born into comfort and peace.

Consider what went down that terrible night in Tom’s little diner, and then think about how, according to the film, the wider community digests it. Tom breaks a coffeepot over one robber’s face, shoots the other, and then, after being stabbed in the foot by the man whose face he’s mangled, delivers a killing gunshot to his first target. And for perhaps two seconds it is thrilling, because the men are vile and a waitress is about to be raped. Then the thrill curdles. Where the director of a traditional thriller would look away, Cronenberg holds: on the waitress, sobbing; on the mangled flesh and death-gurgles of the first attacker; on Tom, clutching the gun and looking as sick as anyone in the room.

Tom hasn’t done anything wrong. But it would be absurd to say that, in that diner, at that moment, anyone is feeling “saved.”

And yet, within a day, everyone who wasn’t there has decided that what Tom did was magnificent. The half-empty diner fills with locals who want their eggs served where the shooting happened. A newscaster calls him a hero. His son grabs his arm and crows, “You’re a hero, Dad!” And when Tom asks his wife if she’s as sick of hearing about it as he is, Edie says, “No. I kind of like it,” and reveals the day’s newspaper so Tom can see his own face on the front page.

The one man who actually did the killing is the only one still insisting it was terrible. Everyone else has moved on to stories of heroes and adventure. But before you blame the people of Millbrook too harshly, ask yourself: Wasn’t there some part of you, too, that cheered when Tom sprang into violent action? Didn’t some part of you want to see these murderous rapists put down for good? Now imagine that was your husband.

It is Edie who, earlier in the film, in happier times, dreams up some sexual roleplay for her and Tom: a chance for them to be “teenagers together,” something, she says, the two of them never got to experience. After they have finished with what must be one of the tenderest depictions of mutual oral sex in the history of cinema, Edie takes Tom’s face in her hands and tells him: “You’re the best man I’ve ever known.” Not the best person, the best man.

But it’s during the film’s second sex scene, the masterfully complex “stairwell scene,” that we witness the fantasy of Edie and Tom’s bond congeal into something more complicated, more violent, and more real. After insisting on Tom’s false identity to a newly skeptical sheriff — “Hasn’t this family suffered enough?” she asks — Edie once again rejects Tom the moment the lawman leaves. She pushes him away, her disgust and betrayal visible in her eyes, and attempts to flee the living room by ascending a nearby staircase. Tom pulls at her, desperate for her to understand him, to forgive him, to once again love him — but she lashes out, kicking and hitting him as she tries to get away.

Seemingly triggered into action by Edie’s violence, Joey takes over Tom, and for a horrifying moment it looks as though the fight on the staircase is about to become a rape. And then, at the last second, right when he’s on top of her, Tom regains control of himself and begins to stop and turn away. It’s at this crucial juncture that Edie reaches up, grabs Tom by the hair, and pulls him back down toward her. The sex that follows is animalistic, furious, and hard to distinguish from violence. But it is also, unquestionably, sex that some part of Edie — perhaps the part of her that was excited and proud when she heard about what Tom did that night at the diner — wants to have.

As soon as it’s over, though, and both Edie and Tom return to “themselves” — a concept the film is increasingly problematizing — Edie’s contempt for Tom returns. Notably, throughout their stairwell fuck, Edie has kept her eyes closed. Once it’s over and she has to look at Tom again, she cannot get away from him quickly enough. He seems to want to cuddle, under the impression that they’ve just reconciled. She pushes his face away with evident disgust, gets up, scampers back up the stairs, and immediately takes a shower. One wonders whether, in the first moment when she locks eyes with Tom in that stairwell, Edie can hear the question about her husband that one of Joey’s pursuers, Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), has planted in her head like a poisoned seed: “Ask him how come he’s so good at killing people.”

“There is no document of civilization,” Walter Benjamin wrote, “that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The good coffee and the front-page hero and the sleeping child who has been promised there are no monsters all sit on top of the barbarism that keeps them safe, and the price of keeping the document intact is that you never turn it over. But what happened at the diner, and the revelations that followed, did not just turn that document over; it made that hideous underside the only thing Edie could see.

During the film’s final scene, as she readies herself to make eye contact with Tom one more time, one wonders who is more terrified of what she’ll find: Edie, Tom, or the audience. That, of course, is when Cronenberg cuts to black.

I recently rewatched First Reformed, writer-director Paul Schrader’s 2018 masterpiece about a bitter, self-destructive, and thoroughly hopeless Lutheran Dutch Reform reverend named Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) who — supposedly in the name of environmental justice — embraces the logic of violent martyrdom.

I remember the first time I saw the film in theaters I was glued to my seat at the end; I may have even been clichéd enough to mutter “holy shit” once the screen cut to black. But during my most recent rewatch, I realized that, despite the film’s environmentalist trappings, its main themes are intensely personal and psychological, rather than political.

In other words, this isn’t a movie about why someone becomes an environmental terrorist. It’s a movie about how despair — the “sickness unto death,” as Kierkegaard, and Toller himself, calls it — can become an all-consuming force that drives those afflicted with it towards self-destruction for the sake of self-actualization.

Nearly 10 years after it was first released, it was this element of the film that struck me as both most prescient for its time and most important for understanding our own.

And while it would be misleading and mistaken to say the film offers “solutions” or an escape from this spiritual death-trap, I do think it’s fair to argue that by presenting such a psychologically acute (yet merciless) depiction of that “sickness unto death,” he also suggests means of escaping it and finding, if not quite hope, then something that both promises less but offers more.

That something is faith.

Sickness Unto Death

As a starting point for understanding what First Reformed is about and what Schrader is trying to do, it’s important to understand that before the film begins, Toller is already well down the dark path of despair. This is not a story of someone holding onto the edge of faith or reason and losing his grip; this is a story about someone who, when we meet him, is already in free-fall, whether he fully realizes it or not.

Toller’s background is genuinely tragic. He is a reverend and an inheritor, of sorts, of the family business. His father and his grandfather were men of the cloth, and more than that, they were both military chaplains. So was Toller. This is a man who believed in traditional institutions, who saw no distinction between serving God and country. He does not seem to be the kind of person who will embrace the logic of a suicide bomber.

But as we soon learn, recent life has been brutally hard for Toller. Because of his background and family traditions, he tells us, he encouraged his son — despite the passionate objections of his wife — to enlist during the Second Iraq War. Soon thereafter, his son is dead, and because his wife cannot forgive him for encouraging their son to go and die, Toller’s marriage collapses.

Understandably, he can no longer bear to be a military chaplain and leaves the service.

So, by the time we meet him, he is running First Reformed, a small and old church, dating to pre-Revolutionary times, that functions as a tourist attraction for the larger megachurch — Abundant Life — that owns and operates it. While Toller never explicitly complains about his loss of status, the film makes clear that becoming a glorified tour-guide for a megachurch’s loss-leader has wrecked his self-esteem and bred resentment.

Wrestling With God

From the very beginning of the film, it’s clear that these traumas — both personal and professional — have caused Toller to retreat into himself. While he is polite and cordial, good with children and earnest in fulfilling his duties as a tour-guide, he is not a social creature. He does not seem to have friends. His home is dark and barren.

Beyond ruminating (and self-castigating) in a notebook — and drinking to excess every night, despite his self-evidently failing health — it’s unclear what he does with his time. First Reformed isn’t exactly a tourist hot-spot. And only once do we see him engaging in typical pastoral work, feeding the poor. His sermons are usually attended by no more than a handful of people. And when he preaches, he’s going through the motions. In his sermons, the Word sounds hollow.

It is no surprise, then, that when Toller is asked by one of his congregants Mary (Amanda Seyfried) to speak to her increasingly depressed and doom-obsessed husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), an environmental activist who is wracked with rage and guilt about becoming a father in a world he is sure is destined for unfathomable suffering, it is Toller — and not Michael — who comes away from their conversations irrevocably altered.

During the conversation, Toller says all the right things. He even quotes Kierkegaard’s “sickness unto death” formulation when telling Michael that the latter’s despair cannot be reasoned-through; that the only real answer to this “sickness” is faith. And yet when Toller recounts their conversations in his journal, he likens it to the Biblical stories of Jacob wrestling with the Angel (who in many interpretations is understood to have been God).

This means that, to Toller, Michael’s prophecies of environmental collapse, epidemics, refugee chaos, and political dissolution are not the racing thoughts of a deeply depressed person; they’re the word of God. Moreover, whether he realizes it or not, by putting himself in the position of Jacob — who, after his struggle with the Angel, is renamed Israel (which means “contends-with-God”) — Toller is elevating himself into rarefied air indeed.

Toller’s Tragic Flaw

This may seem like a detail, but I believe it’s the heart of the film and the essence of Toller’s tragic folly.

Toller says he is invigorated by their conversation. And the two make plans to speak again. But they never do. Michael asks Toller to meet him at a park. Toller arrives, only to find Michael’s body. He’s committed suicide — violently, gruesomely — and evidently wants Toller to be the first one to find his body. Once again, in a sense, Toller has failed to save a (surrogate) son.

From this point onwards, Toller’s slow decline becomes a free-fall. Toller takes Michael’s laptop (as well as a suicide-bomber vest that Mary finds Michael hiding in their garage) back to his own home. Instead of disposing of either, he immerses himself in the mental world Michael inhabited before taking his own life. He admires the vest. He reads all of the stories Michael has printed or saved on his computer about environmental catastrophe.

He begins to drink more. He withdraws into himself even further. He becomes increasingly obsessed with Edward Balq, an industrialist and polluter who bankrolls Abundant Life — and, by extension, First Reformed — and begins to fantasize about donning the “armor of God” in order to kill Balq and avenge the crimes against Nature (and by extension God) that fuel his business empire. His contempt, for the fallen world around him and for his own inability to strike a blow against it, curdles and deepens.

Mary And Esther

Yet as dangerous as this all is, Toller is not on some inexorable path to self-destruction. First Reformed is not a Greek tragedy. There is no fate. Indeed, the idea that there is fate — that the future is fixed, knowable, and inescapable — is at the heart of despair, the great villain of the film. Rather than some cosmic conspiracy against him, Toller’s real problem is himself.

We see this most obviously in the way Toller treats the two main women characters — Mary (the widowed congregant) and Esther (his former lover). With Mary, Toller gets to pretend to be the person he wants to be. The perfect reverend. A source of benign but uncontested authority. Benevolent, patriarchal, but always at a level of remove. Mary doesn’t know the real Toller. She knows the Toller she wants to see — and, crucially, the version she wants to see is the version he wants to be.

Esther is a much different story.

While Toller tells her that he does not regret their sexual liaison — he says he has seen enough sin to know that what they did together was no such thing —as the film progresses, he treats her with increasing viciousness. He tells her that he finds her concern for him, her desire for him to allow himself to experience happiness and joy, to be burdensome. He seethes at her that she reminds him of everything he wishes he were but is not.

“I despise you,” he sneers. “I despise what you bring out in me. Your concerns are petty. You are a stumbling block.”

I think the key line there is the final one: “You are a stumbling block.” By this point, it’s clear, Toller has given up on the idea of his life being something more than his own. Esther’s supposedly “petty” worries are that Toller seeks medical treatment, that he allows himself to experience love, that he forgives himself for his past enough to believe he deserves a happier future.

Only someone who has decided their life is worth both less and more than a “regular” person could possibly regard any of these issues as “petty.” But that is very much who Toller has become. Battered and bruised as his ego and identity have become, simply being a human being — just one person, more or less like any other — is something Toller simultaneously believes he doesn’t deserve and deserves more than.

As a therapist once told someone close to me: “You know, believing you’re the worst person in the world is, in some ways, not that different from believing you’re the best.” And that is the trap within which Toller has locked himself.

The Gift Of Grace

While Toller does not end up committing murder-suicide, it would be wrong to say that he escapes this prison.

The film’s ending is intentionally ambiguous, and Schrader has said he considered three different conclusions. The one he went with — and thank God he did, because it’s the reason that, as I said earlier, the film left me with that “holy shit” feeling when I first saw it — involves Toller giving up on his plan to don the “armor of God” (a suicide vest) and, it seems, choosing instead to commit suicide.

Fully embodying his messianism as well as his self-loathing, he puts on his own version of a crown of thorns by wrapping barbed wire around his naked torso, and then, it seems, he decides to drink a glass full of Drano. (Another Christ reference, although Toller, unlike Jesus, does not ask God to “let this cup pass from me.”) He won’t kill anyone; but he refuses to save himself.

What we see next, however, is that right when Toller is going to gulp down the poison, Mary somehow confronts him in his home — even though the doors are locked and no one knows where he is — and the two embrace and kiss while the camera circles them before a hard cut to black.

Whether this is actually happening is something Schrader has said he wanted to leave unclear. Perhaps, somehow, Mary gets to him before he drinks the poison chalice; perhaps, instead, what we are seeing is a hallucination — maybe even a moment of grace being given to him by God — before his expiration.

Whatever is “actually” happening (which seems rather irrelevant to me), though, what we are seeing is Toller finally embracing — or, to further the metaphor of grace, perhaps it’s better to say he is being given, rather than he is embracing — the simple and transcendent pleasures of love that he has so assiduously denied himself throughout the film. Whether faith is earned or given is, of course, something that theologians have argued about for centuries.

What First Reformed makes clear, however, is that the question is, ultimately, an academic one. Whether Toller finds faith or whether it is given to him, the point is that, after spending the entire film falling deeper and deeper into the sandtrap of despair — that “sickness unto death” — Toller’s story ends with faith.

The environment is still dying, the world is still fallen, his son is still dead; but for at least one fleeting moment, Toller is able to forget himself long enough to let God in.

In Empire of AI, Karen Hao pressed OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman on whether AI was ultimately designed to replace human beings. Brockman initially pushed back, saying, “We’ve been building technologies for thousands of years now, right? We do it because they serve people. [AI] is not going to be different.”

Later, however, Brockman revealed that his definition of “serv[ing] people” was one that, I believe, most of its recipients would regard as a frontal assault. After granting that OpenAI’s ultimate success would sever the connection between work and survival, Brockman said: “I actually think that’s a very beautiful thing.”

Perhaps people will greet their obsolescence with awe and wonder. Perhaps they will find out that no one with wealth or power (a distinction increasingly without a difference) sees them as useful as “a very beautiful thing.” But I doubt it.

What I suspect people will feel, instead, is what Hannah Arendt once called “superfluousness,” which she regarded as a state of being alienated from — and hostile towards — the world itself.

Superfluousness, in this sense, is deep-seated sullenness and cynicism about not only the present but also the future. It’s a kind of nihilism — how can one think anything really matters if one does not believe they themselves matter? — but it’s one that is fueled by a white-hot rage.

The rage of someone for whom, and contra Brockman, the severing of work and survival represents unfreedom far more than something “beautiful.”

Or, as Arendt put it in Origins of Totalitarianism, the rage of someone who feels lonely, uprooted, and utterly inessential to the world into which they were born:

Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government … is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the break-down of political institutions and social traditions in our own time. To be uprooted means to have no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others; to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at all.

In this gloomy climate, I think the idea of AI — and the extent to which we’ve all started thinking of our present lives as existing in some liminal “pre-AI” space, some period that posterity will regard as dull and mere prologue, much as we today think of, let’s say, the 1890s — plays a larger role than the technology itself.

And the best way I can think of illustrating the horror of a world beyond human reckoning, a world in which nearly everyone is superfluous, is to talk about a character from a 19-year-old movie who murders people with the kind of captive bolt pistols used to kill steer.

“You need to call it.”

The man who wields the steer-killer is named Anton Chigurh. He is the villain in No Country for Old Men, the 2007 masterpiece written and directed by the Coen brothers, based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name.

He is played by Javier Bardem, who rightly won an Academy Award for a performance that embodies the old-fashioned meaning of the word “sublime” — what Edmund Burke called the state in which, thanks to a combination of terror and awe, "all [the soul's] motions are suspended, with some degree of horror."

Despite his dead-eyed stare, weird haircut, and boundless contempt for all other living beings, what actually makes Chigurh so “sublime” is not what he does to people, hideous though many of those deeds are. It’s what he believes.

To understand that belief-system, it’s worth examining what is probably the most famous scene in the whole film: Chigurh’s darkly comic exchange with a gas station proprietor (Gene Jones) who, as their conversation progresses, seems to become dimly aware that the stakes for Chigurh’s signature demand — that his victim play a game of heads-or-tails with him — are truly life or death.

Here’s how their conversation progresses:

CHIGURH: What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?

PROPRIETOR: Sir?

CHIGURH: The most. You ever lost. On a coin toss.

PROPRIETOR: I don’t know. I couldn’t say.

[Chigurh flips a quarter from the change on the counter and covers it with his hand]

CHIGURH: Call it.

PROPRIETOR: Call it?

CHIGURH: Yes.

PROPRIETOR: For what?

CHIGURH: Just call it.

PROPRIETOR: Well, we need to know what we’re calling it for here.

CHIGURH: You need to call it. I can’t call it for you. It wouldn’t be fair.

PROPRIETOR: I didn’t put nothin’ up.

CHIGURH: Yes, you did. You’ve been putting it up your whole life, you just didn’t know it. You know what date is on this coin?

PROPRIETOR: No.

CHIGURH: 1958. It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here. And it’s either heads or tails. And you have to say. Call it.

PROPRIETOR: Look, I need to know what I stand to win.

CHIGURH: Everything.

PROPRIETOR: How’s that?

CHIGURH: You stand to win everything. Call it.

PROPRIETOR: All right. Heads, then.

[Chigurh removes his hand, revealing the coin is indeed heads]

CHIGURH: Well done.

Chigurh then leaves, and the proprietor closes up his shop — confused, terrified, but conscious that he just survived a brush with a self-appointed Angel of Death.

The key line here is “You’ve been putting it up your whole life, you just didn’t know it.”

It represents Chigurh’s belief that the wisdom he carries, which separates him from everyone else, is that our lives have already been decided. And that he — Chigurh — is merely a kind of cosmic bounty-hunter sent to collect on those unknown but inescapable preexisting debts.

The gas station proprietor is, in Chigurh’s terms, a man who has simply never thought about any of this.

He stumbled into the encounter the way he has stumbled through his whole life — passively, without examination, putting up the wager without knowing he was doing it. “You don't know what you're talking about, do you?” Chigurh sneers.

Chigurh does not respect this man, but he does not particularly despise him, either. No more so than he does any other human being, at least.

Instead, he regards him the same way most of us regard an insect we’ve found where it’s not supposed to be. The proprietor’s life is too meaningless to Chigurh to be anything more than a source of fleeting, sadistic diversion.

“…of what use was the rule?”

Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) is different.

Wells is a professional killer who has been hired specifically to find and stop Chigurh. He’s familiar with him, too. At one point, when asked how dangerous Chigurh is, he jokes, “Compared to what? The bubonic plague?”

Yet his respect — or perhaps his need to perform bravado — only allows him to go so far. “He’s a psychopathic killer, but so what?” Wells says. “There’s plenty of them around.” He decides to take the contract.

While Wells does a good job of finding the money that Chigurh was originally contracted to retrieve, his attempts to best Chigurh are anticlimactic in the extreme. Their fight is basically over before it’s started, and Chigurh quickly forces Wells, at gunpoint, to join him in a motel room and share a final colloquy.

Brief as their conversation is, it’s the most important exchange in the film in terms of understanding Chigurh’s worldview — because it reveals that what Chigurh finds most threatening, and holds in the greatest contempt, is not an individual rival, per se, but rather anyone who believes in free will.

Here’s their final exchange:

CHIGURH: And you know what’s going to happen now. You should admit your situation. There would be more dignity in it.

WELLS: You go to hell.

CHIGURH: [Chuckles] All right. Let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

The line I want you to focus on here is “There would be more dignity in it.” On one level, this is a taunt. He’s playing with Wells just like he played with the gas station proprietor.

But on a deeper level — and this is the level at which the cryptic remark about “the rule you followed brought you to this” is best understood — the charge that Chigurh is leveling against Wells is one he’d likely apply to everyone who does not share his worldview.

Because when Chigurh says “brought you to this” to Wells, he’s saying it while pointing a loaded shotgun at him. By “this” he means “your death.”

And by “the rule,” he doesn’t mean some particular code — Wells is not some anti-Chigurh; Wells is an unapologetic cynical-pragmatist — but rather any code, any rule other than Chigurh’s own.

If every rule or code or belief-system eventually leads to death, Chigurh is suggesting, then of what value are they when compared to that inescapable and immovable finality?

When Chigurh tells Wells there would be “more dignity” in “admit[ting] your situation,” he isn’t simply making reference to the situation in which Wells finds himself — i.e., at the wrong end of a gun — but rather the “situation” of being a relatively powerless individual condemned, at birth, to die.

While I’m sure he’d like to hear Wells admit that he’s been bested, what Chigurh really wants to hear Wells confess is that he was defeated before he began. In that context, by saying “You go to hell,” Wells chooses to die in defiance.

“…the path in front of us is now lit.”

In June 2025, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, wrote the following:

We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started ... We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out ... most of the path in front of us is now lit, and the dark areas are receding fast.

Whenever I read this drivel — and, I’m sorry, but that’s what it is: drivel — I’m reminded of something else Hannah Arendt once wrote, again in Origins:

[T]he last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

Although Altman is not a murderer, and even though his haircut is (barely) better than the one they saddled Bardem with in No Country for Old Men, I would be lying to you if I said I didn’t recognize profound similarities between the two men’s respective “keys to history,” as well as the way they make their arguments.

Like a utopian cult-leader, Altman’s manipulation is filtered through the language of optimism and faith — seemingly the exact opposite of Chigurh’s grim fatalism.

But in both cases, we have men positing that they have a unique grasp of the nature of the universe and the direction of human history. And at the risk of stating the obvious: This is not a small claim!

In another era, in another culture, this hubristic assertion of having discerned the golden path to the inevitable future would be grounds for charges of heresy or blasphemy. The egomania here is astounding, no less so than that of a character who fancies himself Fate (and/or Death) incarnate.

And in both cases, we are confronted with false prophets who are telling us, albeit in different registers, that human superfluousness is either already true (Chigurh) or inevitable (Altman). In the face of such monstrous certainty, despair would be understandable.

Yet I still see reason for hope. And I find that reason, in part, by remembering how Chigurh’s story in No Country for Old Men ends.

“The coin don’t have no say.”

Chigurh’s final confrontation is not with a killer. It’s with Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald), the wife of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who, because of her husband’s refusal to submit to Chigurh, is fated to be murdered as a kind of posthumous punishment against her husband.

Carla Jean is the strongest and most principled character in the whole story, however, and she greets her death with something even more heroic than Wells’ defiance. She doesn’t just refuse Chigurh — she refutes him.

CARLA JEAN: You don’t have to do this.

CHIGURH: [smiles] People always say the same thing.

CARLA JEAN: What do they say?

CHIGURH: They say, “You don’t have to do this.”

CARLA JEAN: You don’t.

CHIGURH: Okay.

[Chigurh flips a coin and covers it with his hand]

CHIGURH: This is the best I can do. Call it.

CARLA JEAN: I knowed you was crazy when I saw you sitting there. I knowed exactly what was in store for me.

CHIGURH: Call it.

CARLA JEAN: No. I ain’t gonna call it.

CHIGURH: Call it.

CARLA JEAN: The coin don’t have no say. It’s just you.

Unlike every other character who crosses paths with Chigurh, Carla Jean understands that his real power — and his real weakness — is what he believes, and the way that he tries to force all those around him to submit to his philosophy.

And she refuses. When he tells her that people “always” tell him he has agency, that he’s not simply enacting a fate that was written long ago, she doesn’t retreat. She suggests that the reason people “always” say that to him is because it’s true.

Chigurh is not some abstract force; there is no pre-written plan. He is a human being in a contingent world who makes choices, just like anyone else.

The best evidence the film gives us that Carla Jean is not only righteous but right comes immediately thereafter. After killing her, while driving away, Chigurh is t-boned by a driver running a red light. He survives, but he’s terribly wounded and must flee the scene on foot.

In this crucial moment, the randomness and unpredictability of the universe — the very thing he has spent the whole film, and presumably his whole career, trying to dispute — is made undeniably clear. And this, more than anyone killing Chigurh, represents the ultimate abnegation of his philosophy.

Now, I don’t know what metaphorical car-crash is awaiting Greg Brockman or Sam Altman or any of AI’s other high priests. I certainly don’t expect AI to go away. I believe that, as Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor have argued, it is likely a “normal technology” — which means it will indeed change the world.

But — and this is crucial — it will change the world in ways no one can predict. Contra Altman, the path in front of us is not “lit.” It never is. We will stumble forward, as we always have, in shadow and doubt. But that’s not something to lament. It’s something to celebrate.

The coin don’t have no say. It’s just us.

I read V for Vendetta for the first time recently. I’m already an enormous admirer of Watchmen, and I loved From Hell. If I have to choose one, I’m still sticking with Dr. Manhattan; but Vendetta might be my new second-favorite of Moore’s work.1

That said, I am hardly an expert on comics as a medium. But I am a guy with a Substack, so I can at least do this much: Tell you what about V for Vendetta has stuck with me in the time since I read it, and offer you a theory about why I found the story so resonant during the particular moment in which I experienced it.

What stuck with me about Vendetta is how principled it is. And I don’t mean that in the sense that it presents a theory of the world — and/or a program for how to fix it — and then delivers on that promise.

That would be a kind of principled certainty. But the principle I see and admire in the work is quite the opposite. What makes Vendetta so compelling is not that it presents final answers; it’s that it not only defends — but actually embodies, through its storytelling — a principle of relentless uncertainty and doubt.

Here’s what I mean: Alan Moore is an anarchist. And I don’t mean that in a figurative sense. I’m not saying he doesn’t play by other people’s rules or something similarly cheap and hollow.

I mean, instead, that Alan Moore is someone who has thought deeply about politics and concluded that the only ideology that makes sense to him — the only ideology that can be defended as something more than new branding for the same-old ideas of domination and control — is anarchism.

“In diversity, there is strength”

From an interview with Margaret Killjoy:

Way back in the early 80s, when I was first kicking off writing V for Vendetta … the story was very much a result of me actually sitting down and thinking about what the real extreme poles of politics were. Because it struck me that simple capitalism and communism were not the two poles around which the whole of political thinking revolved. It struck me that two much more representative extremes were to be found in fascism and anarchy.

Here’s how Moore defines fascism:

Fascism is a complete abdication of personal responsibility. You are surrendering all responsibility for your own actions to the state on the belief that in unity there is strength, which was the definition of fascism represented by the original roman symbol of the bundle of bound twigs. Yes, it is a very persuasive argument: “In unity there is strength.” But inevitably people tend to come to a conclusion that the bundle of bound twigs will be much stronger if all the twigs are of a uniform size and shape, that there aren’t any oddly shaped or bent twigs that are disturbing the bundle. So it goes from “in unity there is strength” to “in uniformity there is strength” and from there it proceeds to the excesses of fascism as we’ve seen them exercised throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

And here’s how he contrasts that with anarchy:

Now anarchy, on the other hand, is almost starting from the principle that “in diversity, there is strength,” which makes much more sense from the point of view of looking at the natural world. Nature, and the forces of evolution … did not really see fit to follow that “in unity and in uniformity there is strength” idea. If you want to talk about successful species, then you’re talking about bats and beetles; there are thousands of different varieties of different bat and beetle … The whole program of evolution seems to be to diversify, because in diversity there is strength. And if you apply that on a social level, then you get something like anarchy.

In V for Vendetta, V — the “hero,” for lack of a better word — is not just an anarchist. He is, like, the ultimate anarchist. He is to anarchism what Michael Jordan was to basketball. He’s smarter than everyone, faster than everyone, stronger than everyone, and always a step ahead. If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was a superhero.

Moreover, the “Norsefire” government V is fighting — which seems to be in control of most, but not all, of the former UK — is a fascist totalitarian dictatorship.

It rounds-up people because of their race or religion or sexual orientation, and then it murders them in concentration camps. It’s a police-state panopticon whose agents are sadistically violent and shamelessly corrupt. Its religious figurehead is a pedophile. Its “Leader” is a self-hating recluse who routinely threatens subordinates with death.

The situation that Moore has created, in other words, could hardly be more perfectly suited for the heroic intervention of V, his cape-wearing super-anarchist. And in other, lesser hands, V for Vendetta would end up as a kind of anarchist equivalent to Top Gun or Red Dawn. A counter-culture-coded version of what is, fundamentally, propaganda and kitsch.

But that’s not what Moore gives us. While he doesn’t deny us the thrill of seeing V kill the fascists trying to stop him — or the spectacle of watching V blow up Parliament as a combined homage to Guy Fawkes and declaration of war against Norsefire — he also doesn’t let us kid ourselves about what we are watching.

Because what we are watching, what we are cheering for, are the actions of a terrorist and unrepentant murderer who has decided — regardless of anyone else’s wishes — that he not only has the desire but the right to watch the world burn.

This isn’t just my read. Here’s what Moore says, in the interview I shared above, about the idea of violent revolution:

I don’t believe that a violent revolution is ever going to work, simply on the grounds that it never has in the past. I mean, speaking as a resident of Northampton, during the English civil war we backed Cromwell—we provided all the boots for his army—and we were a center of antiroyalist sentiment … Cromwell’s revolution? I guess it succeeded. The king was beheaded … But give it another ten years; as it turned out, Cromwell himself was a monster. He was every bit the monster that Charles I had been. In some ways he was worse. When Cromwell died, the restoration happened … And the status quo was restored. I really don’t think that a violent revolution is ever going to provide a long-term solution to the problems of the ordinary person. I think that is something that we had best handle ourselves…

Take a beat to appreciate how complex and rigorous this is.

The “hero” we’re rooting for throughout V for Vendetta — and, make no mistake, we are always rooting for V, even if we’re increasingly uncomfortable with his methods; there’s no question that Norsefire is an evil regime that “deserves” to be destroyed — is someone who is enacting a program that Moore himself does not believe will work.2

But as that quote above shows, Moore doesn’t argue that it won’t work because he subscribes to some version of the sentimental liberal idea that violence is always wrong.

He’s saying it won’t work because it never has — at least not if you define “work” as in “creates a political order that is better, more humane, more just than the one that came before” rather than defining it down as, well, “we wanted to cut off the king’s head, and we did it; so it worked!”

And, to be fair, V is too smart — and too complex a character — to be ignorant of this. He never promises that what he’s doing will usher in some golden age. He never says that all he needs to do is break the chains of oppression, to tear down the walls of the panopticon, and that individual freedom will flourish in the absence of dictatorial control.

What he does, instead, during what is definitely my favorite part of the whole series, is take the mirror, as it were, and direct it back at the people themselves. He doesn’t say: You’re now free. Go enjoy it! He says, I am giving you the opportunity to decide if you want to be free. This is a test. Will you fail it?

This moment comes a little more than halfway through the story. V has commandeered Norsefire’s television broadcast studio and is speaking directly to the people. He has already blown up a lot of the regime’s power-centers, as well as murdered many of the regime’s power-players. Now he’s finally speaking, directly, to the people.

And rather than provide some kind of rhapsodic defense of anarchism that paints a beautiful picture of the utopia that’s right there if they’ll just take it, he takes his audience to task for — as Moore describes the essence of fascism in the quote above — their willingness to live under a regime that represents “is a complete abdication of personal responsibility.”

Here’s the key moment from the graphic novel — the speech he delivers as Norsefire’s security services desperately try to retake control of the broadcast and kill V — but I’ll also provide the raw text of his speech below in case these screen-grabs are hard to see:

And here’s the speech (with light edits on my part):

Good evening, London. I thought it time we had a little talk. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…

I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you here this evening. Well, you see, I’m not entirely satisfied with your performance lately…I’m afraid your work’s been slipping, and…and, well, I’m afraid we’ve been thinking about letting you go.

[…]

Do you know what I think it stems from? I’ll tell you: It’s your basic unwillingness to get on within the company. You don’t seem to want to face up to any real responsibility, or to be your own boss. Lord knows, you’ve been given plenty of opportunities…

We’ve offered you promotion time and time again, and each time you’ve turned us down. “I couldn’t handle the work, Guv’nor,” you wheedled. “I know my place.” To be frank, you’re not trying, are you?

[…]

And it’s no good blaming the drop in work standards upon bad management, either…though, to be sure, the management is very bad. In fact, let us not mince words…the management is terrible! We’ve had a string of embezzlers, frauds, liars, and lunatics making a string of catastrophic decisions. This is plain fact.

But who elected them?

It was you! You who appointed these people! You who gave them the power to make decisions for you! While I’ll admit that anyone can make a mistake once, to go on making the same lethal errors century after century seems to me nothing short of deliberate.

You have encouraged these malicious incompetents, who have made your working life a shambles. You have accepted without question their senseless orders. You have allowed them to fill your workspace with dangerous and unproven machines.

You could have stopped them. All you had to say was “no.” You have no spine. You have no pride. You are no longer an asset to the company.

I will, however, be generous. You will be granted two years to show some improvement in your work. If at the end of that time you are still unwilling to make a go of it… you’re fired.

That will be all. You may return to your labours. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

That last part — the line about how the people will be “granted two years to show some improvement” that is key, and that is the essence of my argument that what makes V for Vendetta so compelling is that it denies us resolution, that it forces us to live in uncertainty.

Because, by the end of the story, while it certainly seems clear that Norsefire is kaput, the question of whether the people will “show some improvement” — whether they will take the opportunity V has given them by creating an opening where once there was an iron wall — remains profoundly in doubt.

As the government collapses and the people begin to riot, V says:

Anarchy means “without leaders”, not “without order”. With anarchy comes an age or ordnung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order... this age […] will begin when the mad and incoherent cycle of verwirrung that these bulletins reveal has run its course... This is not anarchy […] This is chaos.

And, indeed, the final image we see in the comic of the liberated people is not exactly encouraging:

Will people choose true freedom, true “personal responsibility,” true agency? Or will they allow themselves to degenerate into an orgy of violence and looting until, inevitably, some new strongman — some new would-be Leviathan — arrives to promise peace and order in exchange for total submission?

Moore leaves it as an open question. It is, to my mind, an incredibly principled and even somewhat brave choice. He is denying himself — and us — the easy answer. He is foregoing the serene and complacent confidence that the human spirit yearns for freedom that would make the viability of anarchism seem so compelling, so self-evident.

In his way, he is choosing “personal responsibility” — the responsibility of the artist to tell the truth as best they can understand it, rather than to tell comforting fictions, especially self-comforting fictions — through his storytelling.

That is what I mean when I say that V for Vendetta doesn’t simply tell us we should live in doubt and with the burden of responsibility; it shows us how to do that through its own narrative choices. These are the principled choices it makes that I admire so deeply.

Do we “look to be ruled”?

I promised that I’d do my best to explain what I found so inspiring and powerful about V for Vendetta on its own terms and simply as a piece of art. But I also said I’d try to offer a theory as to why I found it, at this particular moment, so resonant.

Well, simply put, I think it’s because in many places across the world today, but certainly and most crucially in the United States, the question of whether people actually want to be free — free in the sense that V means, in the sense that Moore means — is very much to be determined.

We are living through an era of revenant strongman politics. And we have spent much of the last 10 years searching for explanations — often materialist explanations, answers having to do with economic anxiety or rising interest rates or unaffordable housing or skyrocketing healthcare costs, and so on — that allow us to avoid a more uncomfortable possibility.

That possibility, in a nutshell, is that when then-President Barack Obama said this during the 2016 Democratic National Convention, he was wrong (emphasis mine):

Ronald Reagan called America “a shining city on a hill.” Donald Trump calls it “a divided crime scene” that only he can fix. It doesn’t matter to him that illegal immigration and the crime rate are as low as they’ve been in decades — because he’s not actually offering any real solutions to those issues. He’s just offering slogans, and he’s offering fear. He’s betting that if he scares enough people, he might score just enough votes to win this election.

And that’s another bet that Donald Trump will lose. And the reason he’ll lose it is because he’s selling the American people short. We’re not a fragile people. We’re not a frightful people. Our power doesn’t come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order as long as we do things his way. We don’t look to be ruled. Our power comes from those immortal declarations first put to paper right here in Philadelphia all those years ago: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that We the People, can form a more perfect union.

That’s who we are. That’s our birthright — the capacity to shape our own destiny.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that, for nearly 10 years, this quote has haunted me. I remember hearing it in real-time and thinking: “God, I hope he’s right.” I still do.

But I remain profoundly uncertain. Taking responsibility on this level is a heavy lift. It’s always tempting to think the problem, to paraphrase V, can be solved through a simple “change in management.”

Yet when I worry that somehow, someway, we’ve passed the point of no-return — that we have definitively proven ourselves incapable of recognizing that the world is what we make of it — I also take solace in another classic line from Moore, this time from Watchmen:

“Nothing ever ends.”

The week in posts

This is a new feature I’m trying out. Let’s see if y’all dig it.

Basically, I spend too much time on Bluesky. And sometimes I do posts on Bluesky that I think are — well, if not good, then at least not bad.

Sometimes I take those posts and I build them out into larger arguments or essays. But sometimes, I think, I’ve basically said what I wanted to say and there’s no need for further elaboration.

So, with all that in mind, and realizing that many of you are sane and therefore not using Bluesky on the regular, I’ve decided I’m going to share some of my posts here.

I think you’ll notice a theme…

The allegations of insider trading tied to the Iran war had a familiar shape: people close enough to power to know what was coming using their knowledge of a pending catastrophe to profit before it became public.

For millennials, elite impunity and financial markets intersecting tends to summon 2008. And then I found myself thinking about how much worse this is. The villainy of the people responsible for the greatest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression looks, from today’s vantage, almost quaint.

It’s one thing to knowingly spread toxic assets across the market in the hope that your employer won’t be left holding the bag; it’s another to see the death and destruction of a war of choice as a chance to get that bag.

So I decided to rewatch Margin Call and see if I could understand, on a characterological level, this process of moral degradation.

“I’m here for one reason and one reason alone.”

The film, which was written and directed by J.C. Chandor, takes place over a single night at a large investment bank.

The people running “the firm,” as they call it, have just discovered they are holding investments that are so bad that they threaten to overwhelm the company’s entire market capitalization — so bad that, if they don’t spread the poison throughout the market before anyone else knows, the whole company will go under.

The film’s most powerful figure is John Tuld (Jeremy Irons), the CEO who arrives by helicopter in the small hours and decides, before dawn, to dump the firm’s entire toxic position onto an unsuspecting market. As he puts it:

Do you care to know why … I earn the big bucks? I’m here for one reason and one reason alone. I’m here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That’s it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I’m afraid that I don’t hear a thing. Just silence.

When pushed, he continues:

What have I told you since the first day you stepped into my office? There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat. Now, I don’t cheat. And although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first. Sell it all. Today.

Cynical as he may sound, nothing Tuld says here is untrue.

When Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), his head of sales, warns him that they’ll be selling assets they know have no value, Tuld cuts him off: “We are selling to willing buyers of the current fair-market price. So that we may survive.”

Tuld is not a deep thinker. He jokes at one point that a junior colleague should explain the situation by speaking to him “as you might to a young child. Or a golden retriever.”

But he isn’t full of shit. He knows who he is. He knows the business he’s chosen.

“The fear that they might jump”

The more interesting characters are the ones who haven’t made that peace, the ones who are living in what Sartre would call bad faith.

Rogers is one example. His sudden bouts of conscience, despite working at the firm for more than 30 years, are both sympathetic and, in context, risible. He bridles when Tuld accuses him of “going soft” — but after Tuld hands him a piece of paper with a “very generous” number on it, he follows orders.

Rogers’ guilt is real. It is also, entirely, beside the point.

Will Emerson (Paul Bettany) is the film’s most volatile figure, and its most revealing one. Whereas Rogers pretends to have less agency than he does, Emerson imagines he has more.

He is 10 years into a career he regards with sardonic detachment. He spent $76,520 last year on, as he puts it, “hookers, booze, and dancers. But mainly hookers.” He jokes that if he doesn’t get nicorette soon, he’ll be forced to kill somebody.

Early in the film, before Tuld arrives, Emerson climbs onto the ledge of the firm’s skyscraper roof and looks down over the city. His younger colleagues tell him to get down. Before he does, he offers this:

The feeling people experience when they stand on the edge like this isn’t a fear of falling. It’s the fear that they might jump.

“That’s very deep and depressing,” one of his underlings shoots back. “Yeah, well, I’m a little dark sometimes,” Emerson says.

Then, after another bitter joke — “Not today!” — he gets down and says: “It looks like they’re going to make us dump this shit. You watch.”

Later, driving back to Manhattan from Brooklyn, Emerson explains himself to one of the men he spoke with on the roof:

Listen, if you really want to do this with your life, you have to believe you're necessary. And you are. People want to live like this, in their cars and the big fucking houses they can't even pay for, then you're necessary. The only reason that they all get to continue living like kings is because we've got our fingers on the scales in their favor.

I take my hand off, then the whole world gets really fucking fair really fucking quickly, and nobody actually wants that. They say they do, but they don't. They want what we have to give them, but they also want to play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from. That's more hypocrisy than I'm willing to swallow.

“So,” he concludes, “fuck normal people.”

The difference between Emerson and Tuld

Emerson’s real foil is not Rogers but Tuld. The difference between them isn't conscience versus cold rationalism; it’s bitter disillusion vs. unbothered fatalism.

But where Emerson's cynicism is performed, Tuld's fatalism is almost terrifyingly sincere. Confronted at the end of the film by Rogers, who demands to be let go as a kind of penance for what they’ve done, Tuld responds:

When did you start feeling so sorry for yourself? It’s unbearable.

So you think we might have put a few people out of business today. That’s all for naught. But you’ve been doing that every day for almost 40 years, Sam. And if this is all for naught, then so is everything out there. It’s just money. It’s made up, pieces of paper with pictures on it so that we don’t have to kill each other just to get something to eat. It’s not wrong. And it’s certainly no different today than it’s ever been…

We can’t help ourselves. And you and I can’t control it or stop it or even slow it down. Or even ever so slightly alter it. We just react. And we make a lot of money if we get it right. And we get left by the side of the road if we get it wrong.

Emerson's argument is organized around contempt for "people" — their hypocrisy, their appetites, their need to play innocent. He hates that they render someone like himself “necessary” — and that without him, “the whole world gets really fucking fair really fucking quickly,” something that “nobody actually wants.”

The difference between Emerson and Tuld can be seen in their points of emphasis. Unlike Emerson, Tuld doesn’t talk about “people” — he talks about “we.” He doesn’t say people can’t help themselves; he says “We can’t help ourselves.” And he doesn’t say that he and Rogers have their fingers “on the scales,” but rather that, “you and I can’t control it or stop it or even slow it down … We just react.”

Tuld does not imagine himself as a moral or civic leader. As he says earlier in the film, his job is “to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That’s it. Nothing more.” But by absolving himself he absolves everyone else.

He does not say “fuck normal people.” He says: “It’s not wrong. And it’s certainly no different today than it’s ever been.”

From the Great Recession to Operation Epic Fury

Nearly 20 years have passed since the events depicted in Margin Call. I don’t know where Will has ended up. Maybe he’s in early retirement, living in New Zealand, meditating and getting into woodworking.

But I do know where the US has ended up. And the road from there to here has been paved by people like Emerson — angry, bitter, and disillusioned elites who have opted to give the “normal people” what they supposedly both deserve and want.

In early March, the US and Israel launched a sweeping attack on the nation of Iran that the US has called Operation Epic Fury (OEF).

As American and Israeli missiles have continued to fall on Iran, killing more than a thousand civilians so far, the White House has posted a series of videos on social media splicing together actual war footage and clips from video games and action movies.

The videos are willfully transgressive, likely designed to send a different message to two distinct audiences. For the primary audience — the kind of people who post all day on X about how international law is for “simps” who suffer from “suicidal empathy” — the message is clear: It is “based” when the US military kills people.

For the second audience, however, the message is even more unvarnished: You want to be innocent? You want to imagine you can live your lives as Americans without having to sully your consciences by supporting violence against its “enemies”? Fuck you. That is more hypocrisy than we’re willing to swallow.

Unlike Tuld, who celebrates the market, even at its most heartless, because it allows humans to avoid “kill[ing] each other just to get something to eat,” the heirs of Emerson in the Trump Administration celebrate “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” They talk about their kitschy videos of mechanized death as “banger memes.”

The world Tuld presides over accepts unjust outcomes as a necessary price for a great harmony; the one Emerson’s heirs have built celebrates cruelty as a kind of meaning in itself.

Watching Margin Call again, I kept thinking about the difference between the Olympian remove of a man like Tuld and the barely suppressed hatred of a man like Emerson. They may be two evils, but one is clearly the lesser.

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord — remembered, simply, as Talleyrand — was one of the “great” diplomats and statesmen of his era.

He spent years helping Napoleon Bonaparte build his empire, only to eventually betray the Emperor when it became clear to him that the latter’s time was running out. He was cynical to the point of nihilism, a shameless womanizer, and corrupt as hell.

He was also the author of more than a few sterling bon mots. If he had been born a few centuries later, it is likely he would have also been a top-tier, Hall of Fame-level poster.

There are two quotes attributed to him that I particularly enjoy.

The first, which I think about whenever I’m reminded that there’s a whole generation of people who never knew what it was like to live in a world before Instagram, is this:

He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the [French] Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and cannot imagine that there can be happiness in life.

My second-favorite, however, requires a pinch of context.

For one thing, it turns out that the quote, while often attributed to Talleyrand, was actually said by someone else, although it’s not clear who.

More importantly for my purposes here, though, is that the quote was a response to Napoleon Bonaparte’s decision to have a rival kidnapped and executed.

The move had short-term gains (and Napoleon would go to his death insisting he was right to do it) but many people, then and now, believed the benefits were more than outweighed by long-term costs.

Eventually, somebody described the affair as:

Worse than a crime — a mistake.

And that is what came to my mind during my recent re-watch of Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood’s masterful revisionist Western.

Like any truly great film, Unforgiven is about a lot of things, and like any great Western, those things include: capitalism, progress, self-mythology, and US history.

What makes Unforgiven especially compelling, however, is that it is interested — on a deep and almost spiritual level — in what philosophers call the question of “desert”, and what normal people call the basic question of whether we get what we deserve.

But as I watched Unforgiven this past weekend, I was struck by how much the film is also about something much simpler: the importance of having a government staffed with serious people who take their jobs seriously. The absolute necessity of basic competence. The value of good bureaucrats.

Because what really sets the plot of Unforgiven into motion is not a crime; it’s a mistake.

Despite being the closest thing the film has to a defender of the rule of law, the man who makes this mistake — Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) — is domineering and sadistic. But the source of his error is neither his authoritarianism nor his brutality.

It’s his utter incompetence.

The two Williams

William Munny was once the kind of man other killers invoked like a curse. A drunk, “a killer of women and children,” infamous for savagery that even by the standards of the frontier was considered extreme.

Then he met a woman who seemed to see something in him nobody else did. Married her, got sober, spent eleven years trying to become the pig farmer she apparently believed he could be.

By the time the film begins, she’s dead from smallpox. He’s failing at the farm, face-down in the mud more often than not, but still sober, still trying.

Little Bill Daggett has also reinvented himself. He’s the sheriff of Big Whiskey now, which means he still gets to hit people, but with a badge.

He is building a house, too — literally, with his own hands, and badly. As one of his deputies says: “He don’t have a straight angle in that whole god-damned porch, or the whole house for that matter.”

Little Bill can dominate a room, humiliate a man in the street, run a protection racket with the confidence of someone who has never once questioned his own judgment. What he cannot do is build anything that lasts.

Whatever order he maintains rests entirely on the threat of violence. He doesn’t cite a law when he demands new arrivals disarm. He cites a hand-painted sign.

Little Bill’s big blunder

There is no such thing as equality under Little Bill’s corrupt facsimile of “the law.” He does not judge people according to what they’ve done. He judges them according to who they are.

After two cowboys are detained in a brothel for viciously assaulting a sex-worker — slashing her repeatedly across the face because she involuntarily laughed at how small one of their penises were — Little Bill is initially inclined to punish via bullwhip.

The plan is hardly a model of restorative justice, but it’s at least consonant with an idea of justice: namely, “an eye for an eye.”

But then Skinny, the brothel’s owner and resident pimp, complains that Little Bill’s plan would leave him at a financial loss:

SKINNY: Little Bill, a whipping ain’t going to settle this. This here is a lawful contract between me and Delilah Fitzgerald, the cut whore. I brought her clear from Boston, I paid her expenses and all, and I’ve got a contract here that represents an investment of capital.

LITTLE BILL: Property.

SKINNY: Damaged property. Like if I was to hamstring one of their cow ponies.

LITTLE BILL: So you figure nobody will want to fuck her now, right?

SKINNY: Hell no, least ways they won’t pay to do it. Maybe she can clean up the place or something, but nobody’s going to pay good money for a cut up

“I guess you’d just as soon not have a trial. No fuss, huh?” Little Bill asks the cowboys.

They agree, and a deal is struck: instead of being whipped, they will give Skinny some of their finest ponies — seven of them, which is almost certainly worth more than Delilah’s contract — or else.

The brothel’s madam, Alice, dissents:

ALICE: You ain’t even going to whip them?

LITTLE BILL: Well, fined them instead, Alice.

ALICE: For what they done? Skinny gets some ponies, and that’s it? That ain’t fair, Little Bill. That ain’t fair!

He could have stopped here. The deal was already done, the cowboys spared.

Instead he turns to Alice and explains that they were just “boys” who were being “foolish” — not like, he doesn’t quite say, the women in this room:

LITTLE BILL: Haven’t you seen enough blood for one night, Huh? Hell, Alice, it ain’t like they were tramps, or loafers or bad men, you know there were just hard working boys who were foolish. If they was given over to wickedness in a regular way then I could see…

ALICE: Like whores?

Alice doesn’t miss it. Neither does the audience.

The quip — which makes a mockery of his “system” of order — does not enhance but rather diminishes Little Bill’s authority. It exposes the fortress of his power as rickety and jerry-rigged, representing nothing more than his arbitrary will.

Now it is clear to Alice, if it weren’t already, that Little Bill’s sovereignty over Big Whiskey stands — solely — on his use of brute force. And in the Wild West of 1880, there are plenty of other men who are happy to exchange their violence for someone else’s money.

“What I’m doing is talking.”

Little Bill knows immediately what he’s done. The bounty Alice and the other women put out — pooling their savings, for which Alice is beaten by Skinny — is a direct challenge to his authority. And because that authority rests entirely on force, the only answer he can think of is more force.

English Bob (Richard Harris) comes to Big Whiskey with hopes of an easy score. Like Little Bill, he too has had a late-career shift, becoming muscle for railroad companies trying to keep their Chinese laborers as weak, unorganized, and exploited as possible. Unlike Little Bill, however, he cannot claim that his actions carry with them the imprimatur of the law.

So when Little Bill catches English Bob walking around Big Whiskey with multiple firearms on his person, he decides the best way to shore-up his dwindling authority is to make an example of the man. He disarms him, then sucker-punches him, and then proceeds to brutally beat him in the middle of his little fiefdom’s one main street.

And as he literally — and repeatedly — kicks English Bob while he’s down, Little Bill proclaims:

I guess you think I’m kicking you, Bob. It ain’t so. What I’m doing is talking. You hear? I’m talking to all those villains down there in Kansas! I’m talking to those villains in Missouri! And all those villains down there in Cheyenne! And I’m telling them, there ain’t no whores’ gold! And even if there was, well, they wouldn’t want to come looking for it anyhow!

As far as English Bob goes, the tactic works. Bob is thoroughly defeated and, after suffering through a night in Big Whiskey’s jailhouse, subject to Little Bill’s mockery and derision, the would-be assassin is sent packing.

But those “villains” in Kansas and Missouri and Cheyenne that Little Bill is so worried about aren’t in Big Whiskey to witness English Bob’s humbling. They don’t see a thing. Neither do Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) nor his partner, William Munny.

The final mistakes

Repeatedly throughout Unforgiven, we are shown that although Little Bill is an adequate destroyer of other men’s pride and bodies, he has no capacity for building. He can break things — the social contract, his own rules, people’s bones — but he cannot make anything. He is “the worst carpenter.”

Little Bill fails at his chief goal: to keep the cowboys from getting killed. The first one is shot by Munny in a surprise attack. The second one, despite being “guarded” by one of Little Bill’s deputies, is similarly dispatched by a young assassin — the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) — who is sharing the reward with Logan and Munny.

At this point in the narrative, however, Logan is no longer riding with the Kid or Munny. After finding that he’s lost his stomach for murder during the first assassination, he decides to ride back to his wife and home. But, inevitably, he is captured and dropped into Little Bill’s clutches.

After Little Bill hears that both of the cowboys under his protection have been murdered, he tortures Logan so badly that he kills him. Logan’s death is an accident — another example of Little Bill’s incompetence.

Here’s how Kate, one of the sex-workers, shares the news with Munny:

KATE: A cowboy come in saying you killed Quick Mike in a shithouse at the Bar-T.

MUNNY: So Little Bill killed him for what we done.

KATE: Not on purpose, but he started hurting him worse, making him tell stuff. First Ned wouldn’t say nothing, and then Little Bill hurt him so bad that he said who you was. He said how you was really William Munny out of Missouri and Little Bill said, “The same William Munny that dynamited the Rock Island and Pacific in ’69 killing women and children and all?” and Ned said you done worse than that. Said you was more cold-blooded than [Billy the Kid] and how, if he hurt Ned again, you was going to come kill him like you killed a U.S. Marshall in ’70.

This is what finally that breaks Munny’s wavering resolve and causes him to once again embody the angel of death that he once was and still sees in his dreams.

And it doesn’t happen because Little Bill makes a considered decision to kill Logan and risk Munny’s vengeance; it happens because Little Bill is too weak, too stupid, and too fundamentally incompetent to realize what he is doing.

After Munny has killed the pimp Skinny, as well as five or so of Little Bill’s deputies, but before he delivers the coup de grace to Little Bill, the latter whines:

I don’t deserve this. To die like this. I was building a house.

Munny’s response is the film’s most famous line, and one of the greatest send-offs in film history: “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

Part of what makes the line so indelible is its ambiguity.

Is it a statement about might-makes-right? A refutation of the idea that it was the forces of “good” and “progress” that “won” the West? An expression of an even deeper nihilism? Or evidence that Munny has truly lost whatever it was that inspired his late-wife to marry and rehabilitate him?

Given these choices, my answer is: Yes.

But I’d also suggest that, on one level, Munny’s answer is quite simply incorrect. Little Bill does deserve this. Not because the world is fair and good triumphs over evil, but because he had a job — a job with life-or-death consequences — and he was absolutely, abysmally terrible at it.

He “deserves” it not because of his crimes, but because of his mistakes.​​​​​​​​

There is a story that Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s friend and literary executor, once told about a conversation he had with the novelist in 1920:

I remember a conversation with Kafka which began with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race.

“We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God’s head,” Kafka said.

This reminded me at first of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil demiurge, the world as his Fall.

“Oh no,” said Kafka, “our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his.”

“Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know.”

He smiled. “Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope — but not for us.”’

When, against my better judgment, I find myself ruminating and feeling rather doomy about the direction of things, I often think about this exchange.

It makes me smile. The combination of humor and despair; the seemingly glib, yet sneakily profound, irony of saying there is hope “— but not for us”; it’s Kafka’s whole style in miniature. Finding comedy, and therefore a kind of humanity, while staring into the abyss. Gallows humor as art.

This story is always wandering somewhere in the recesses of my mind. But it came to the forefront most recently as I was re-watching Network — recently released as part of the Criterion Collection1 — for the umpteenth time. It’s still masterful. It’s still hilarious. It’s still prophetic.

But, goddamn, is it hopeless too.

Paddy Chayefsky's bad day

Network was directed by Sidney Lumet. But if the film has an auteur, it's Paddy Chayefsky, the screenwriter who was so closely involved with every aspect of the film, even holding "final cut" rights, that he’s better understood as its co-director.

And if Chayefsky is Network's demiurge, then it's fair to say — to paraphrase Kafka — that he's having a very bad day indeed.

As the film begins, the network in question, Union Broadcasting System (UBS), is a failing enterprise, behind in the ratings and bleeding cash. Its longtime anchor is Howard Beale (Peter Finch), an old lion in the vein of Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite, and he’s getting sacked.

There is also every indication that things are about to get worse.

Lurking in the background is Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), a banal corporate enforcer dispatched by the conglomerate that has just acquired UBS — the Communications Corporation of America (CCA) — to seize control of the network and jack up its profits, first and foremost by gutting the money-losing news division.

The national zeitgeist, meanwhile, is increasingly grim.

We are decisively in the post-’60s fugue state: the dream is over, stagflation is king, and Gerald Ford is a caretaker president who nobody voted for. As the film’s chief antagonist, a striving and amoral executive named Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), puts it when summarizing “a concept analysis report”:

The American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered by Vietnam, Watergate, inflation, the Depression. They’ve turned off, shot up and fucked themselves limp. And nothing helps.

It’s not quite 2026-level bad. But, to quote another Jewish poet, it’s getting there.

The hope outside

Yet the awful truth is that the world of Network is even worse than it seems.

I don’t just mean that the film gets darker, and yet also funnier; I mean that as the film accumulates, the despairing thoughts of its demiurge, Chayefsky, become increasingly nihilistic and suicidal — to the point that, by the end, the world of Network is nothing less than a totalitarian nightmare.

That is a common interpretation of the movie, and I’ll admit that there were times during my latest watch when I felt suffocated by Chayefsky’s methodical construction of a kind of existential prison that its characters are not only unable to escape but unable to even imagine escaping.

After some more of that damn rumination, however, I decided that reading of the movie was wrong. Not because it’s too bleak — this is a movie where suicide is repeatedly played for laughs — but because it’s too pat.

To return to the Brod-Kafka conversation I mentioned in the beginning: I don’t think Chayefsky’s point is simply that there’s no hope for the men and women of Network, but rather that there is “an infinite amount of hope.”

But it’s not for them. It’s for us.

How Network negates itself

There are four scenes, all of which involve Beale, that, taken together, show how Chayefsky manages to find hope in hopelessness.

The scenes trace a temptation narrative — a fall. In the person of Howard Beale, the soul defends itself. Incoherently, “madly,” and almost by accident; but still. There is a wild holiness to Beale urging his audience to proclaim, “I’m a human being, goddammit!”

And then, corrupted by pride, and overwhelmed by the awesome power of a false god, Beale embraces his own annihilation.

Scene one: “And I’m not God!”

In the first scene, Beale goes on the air and recounts a visitation he experienced the night before after awaking from “a fitful sleep”.2 He says that the Voice — which he describes as “shrill, sibilant, faceless” — tells him: “I want you to tell the people the truth” even though “the people don’t want to know the truth.”

Beale says he initially refused, telling the Voice, “How the hell would I know what the truth is?” But the Voice, he says, had no patience for this. “Don’t worry about the truth,” he says it told him, “I’ll put the words in your mouth.”

At this point in the film, Beale is lucid enough to recognize that the story he is telling is more or less the same as the one recounted in Exodus, and he says he tells the Voice, with incredulousness, “What is this, the burning bush?! For God’s sake, I’m not Moses!”

But the Voice — crucially — does not respond by saying, as God did to Moses, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob,” nor does it declare “I AM WHO I AM.”

Rather, the Voice responds: “And I’m not God! What’s that got to do with it?!”

Then, according to Beale, the Voice offers a fuller explanation of itself and its mission to him (emphasis mine):

“We’re not talking about eternal truth or absolute truth or ultimate truth! We’re talking about impermanent, transient, human truth! I don’t expect you people to be capable of truth — but, goddammit, you’re at least capable of self-preservation! That’s good enough! I want you to go out and tell the people to preserve themselves!”

Again, the Voice affirmatively disclaims godhood. It explicitly says it is not offering some kind of all-encompassing, permanent, eternal truth. It repeats, in fact, that “I don’t expect you people to be capable of truth.”

All it is asking for Beale to articulate is what it sees as the bare minimum — “self-preservation” — which, it insists, is “good enough!”

Like Moses, Beale asks, “Why me?” But unlike God, the Voice does not tell Beale, as God does Moses: “I will be with you.” It gives, instead, a far more prosaic — but practical — answer:

“Because you’re on television, dummy! You have forty million Americans listening to you, man!”

It’s all terribly compelling, but it’s also still — clearly — the ravings of someone losing his mind.

Scene two: “I am imbued, Max.”

Immediately after Beale shares his story of the Voice, he meets with his boss, Max Schumacher (William Holden), who at this point in the story is still under the (mistaken) impression that he’s running his own news division.

Schumacher is Beale’s best friend, and although he knows Christensen and Hackett are thrilled with Beale’s ratings, he does not want to continue putting someone he loves on the air to humiliate himself for CCA’s benefit.

But Beale — exhilarated by the effects of a psychotic breakdown and the unexpected revival of his career — refuses to relinquish his pulpit. When Schumacher tells him he plans to take him off the air, Beale responds (emphasis mine):

What’s happening to me, Max, isn’t mensurate in psychiatric terms. This is not a psychotic episode. It is a cleansing moment of clarity. I am imbued, Max. I am imbued with some special spirit. It’s not a religious feeling at all. It is a shocking eruption of great electrical energy … It is not a breakdown. I have never felt so orderly in my life! It is a shattering and beautiful sensation! It is the exalted flow of the space-time continuum, save that it is spaceless and timeless and of such loveliness! I feel on the verge of some great ultimate truth.

At the crescendo of this rant, Beale faints — but not before bellowing: “You will not take me off the air for now or for any other spaceless time!”

I want you to notice two things here.

Beale is already forgetting what the Voice told him. It did not promise him “some great ultimate truth”; it explicitly said the truth it offered was not “eternal truth or absolute truth or ultimate truth.”

And the Voice said something else: “I’m not God!”

Christensen and the other opportunists at CCA are branding Beale “the mad prophet of the airwaves” — but the Voice flatly contradicted that. If the Voice is not God, then Beale is no prophet.

But it’s unclear whether he cares anymore. He is back on TV. He is imbued.

Scene three: “My life has value!”

The third scene, Beale’s “mad as hell” diatribe, is the most famous moment in Network and one of the most iconic scenes in American cinema. It is also much hollower — and much darker — than the endorphin-rush of catharsis it provides may lead you to believe.

This is intentional, and it has a lot to do with the way Chayefsky structures the monologue. The worst parts — the warning signs that we’re listening to the ravings of an increasingly unwell and megalomaniacal demagogue — are all in the front.

Here, for example, is how Beale begins. You’d only need to tweak a few words here and there and it could be a run-of-the-mill Facebook post from a MAGA3 supporter (emphasis mine):

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shop-keepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street, and there’s nobody anywhere who seem to know what to do about it. There’s no end to it.

Although Beale has already forgotten that he is not “imbued” and that the Voice that spoke to him was not God, he still has the self-awareness to admit that he has no solutions: “I don’t want you to riot or write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write.”

Despite his increasing mania and rising messianism, Beale is sticking to the script the Voice has given him. He is not offering some kind of “truth.” He is simply urging — demanding — that his audience assert its right to “self-preservation”:

All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad! You’ve got to say, “I’m a human being, God damn it! My life has value!”

Next is the culmination:

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs! I want you to get up right now, go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

That’s usually where the clip stops.

But I want you to watch the rest of the scene, because a closer look reveals that as stirring as what Beale is saying feels, and as noble as the basic impulse that all human lives “have value” is, what we’re actually watching — and what he’s inspiring — is not something to celebrate:

Yes, people are screaming the phrase from their fire-escapes and out their windows. It seems like a thrilling display of collective self-assertion.

But notice what else is happening: ominous thunderclaps, flashing lightning. These are not signs God gives us when he is happy. And as you examine the scene more closely, it’s clear that the “God” of Network, Chayefsky, is not happy either.

Do all those people in their little apartments, indistinguishable from one another, chanting the same phrase — a phrase they’re repeating from someone else — strike you as true individuals? Is this what liberation looks like? Or is it meaningless, commodified catharsis?

As Schumacher listens to the crowd with a look of weary barrenness, Diana Christensen — who has supplanted Schumacher and now controls the broadcast — is effervescent.

He turns his face from the empty spectacle; she calls various regional stations to hear the chants and revel in her triumph.

Scene four: “They say I can sell anything.”

I want to now focus on the second-most famous scene in Network, in which Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), the chairman of CCA, and the film’s true villain, explains that Beale has “meddled with the primal forces of nature” by urging his audience to flood the White House with telegrams to stop a Saudi-backed front company from buying the conglomerate — and, with it, UBS.

But before we get into Jensen’s nightmarish and towering rant about “a holistic system of systems” and the “primal forces of nature” that represent “the atomic, subatomic, and galactic structure of things today,” it’s worth taking a beat to appreciate how the scene begins.

Because it doesn’t start with the rant. It begins with Jensen, in a rather unpretentious and down-to-earth manner, introducing himself to Beale and saying — with no less explicitness than that of the Voice — exactly what he is, as well as his intentions (emphasis mine):

I started as a salesman, Mr. Beale. I sold sewing machines and automobile parts, hair brushes and electronic equipment. They say I can sell anything. I’d like to try to sell something to you.

After walking him into the conference room — or “Valhalla,” as Jensen calls it — Jensen sits Beale down on one end of the long table and stands before him at the other end. And then he thunders:

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it, is that clear?! You think you have merely stopped a business deal — that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance!

Jensen, knowing his mark, understands that the best way to get through to the “mad prophet of the airwaves” is to speak far more like the “burning bush” that confronted Moses than the Voice that confronted Beale ever did. He doesn’t quite scream “I AM THAT I AM,” but he may as well have.

Still, he’s not content to simply demand Beale let the deal go through.

Appreciating the power of Beale’s hold over his audience, Jensen wants to turn Beale — this advocate of the “human being” and its right to “self-preservation” — into an apostle of a corporate cosmology that is nothing less than the absolute annihilation of the very idea of the individual human.

And so he makes a hard-sell (emphasis mine):

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! Petro-dollar, electro-dollars, multi-dollars; reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic, and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!

Then, almost as if breaking character, Jensen lowers his arms and, back in the mode of the kindly salesman who walked Beale into “Valhalla,” asks: “Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?”

Beale is mute with wonder. So Jensen continues — and in absolute contrast with the Voice, which insisted it was not God and that the truth it offered was “not eternal truth or absolute truth or ultimate truth,” Jensen insists that Beale bow down to a truth that, although horrifying, is fixed, immutable, and beyond even a scintilla of hope of resistance (emphasis mine):

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today … We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime.

Jensen’s peroration is so powerful — and Beale’s capacity to resist, which was never strong, is so corrupted by his own messianism and deteriorating mental health — that Beale never notices what we, watching from outside, can plainly see: this corporate Lucifer has tipped his hand.

Is this “corporate cosmology” the “natural order of things today,” or is it how the world has always been “since man crawled out of the slime”? It cannot be both. If it’s new, it’s contingent — something that happened, and could therefore unhappen. If it’s eternal, then Jensen’s rage at Beale makes no sense; you don’t thunder at a man for “meddling” with the inevitable.

The speech is a sales pitch; it is designed not to tell the truth but to manipulate its recipient into giving the speaker what he wants. Jensen told Beale he was a salesman. Beale should have believed him.

But Beale is too far gone. And as he asks the same question of Jensen that he asked of the Voice — and accepts the exact opposite answer — we see how fully he has fallen:

Howard Beale: Why me?

Arthur Jensen: Because you’re on television, dummy.

Howard Beale: I have seen the face of God.

Arthur Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.

Jensen has closed his deal. Beale will soon go on the airwaves and insist, to his audience’s chagrin (and despite rapidly declining ratings) that, “It’s the individual that’s finished. It’s the single, solitary human being who’s finished.”

“Is dehumanization,” he later asks, “such a bad word?”

A flicker in the dark

What happens next to Beale doesn’t really matter.

In keeping with Beale’s new philosophy, the movie begins to move forward with a kind of pitiless determinism. And why not? Through the serpent of Jensen, Chayefsky-the-demiurge has seemingly snuffed out the last flicker of humanity left in Network’s nightmare-world.

Yet I still don’t think that’s Chayefsky’s ultimate point, nor is it the conclusion we should take from the film.

Because that contradiction I noted earlier from Jensen — his mutually exclusive claim that his “corporate cosmology” was a new order and how the world has always been — is not the only example of the film’s plot undermining its characters’ explanations.

If there truly were no America, Jensen wouldn’t need the SEC to cooperate. Yet Hackett, in an earlier scene, warns: “The SEC could hold this deal up for twenty years if they wanted to!”

If there were truly a kind of sublime wisdom to what Beale said once he became Jensen’s mouthpiece, why would audiences turn against it so viscerally? I suppose one could say, echoing the Voice, that people don’t want to hear the truth. But in the film, the reason we are given is that the audience finds Beale’s new schtick “very tedious and depressing” and quickly stops watching.

I think that’s a perfectly Chayefskyian phrasing.

Because while it’s not optimistic — it would be better if the audience rejected it as blasphemy, rather than simply for being dull! — it’s also not fully nihilistic. To stick with the Gnostic frame: it would suggest that somewhere in Network there remains a flicker of the spirit trapped in the otherwise evil physical world around it.

And if there’s a flicker of that in Network, which Chayefsky has almost designed as a perfect trap, imagine how much more there is in our world? I don’t think that’s an excessively sunny gloss on this, either; Chayefsky put everything he had into this screenplay, and whatever else he was, he was a brilliant writer.

That’s not quite Kafka’s “infinite amount of hope,” but maybe it’s just enough.

In my writings here so far, I have focused on visual media — television, movies, and political reporting. But I contain multitudes, and storytelling comes in a nearly endless variety of forms.

The first form was aural. When hunter-gatherers sat around a fire sharing the myths and fables that structured their worldview, they weren’t reading. They were listening.

So, before you read any further — and in the interest of minimizing the contradiction of writing about how not all stories can be understood through the written word, I’ll keep my comments brief — I want you to stop and listen to a new song by Cameron Winter, the lead singer and chief songwriter of Geese (your hipster dad’s favorite new band).

The song is called “Warning,” and it’s part of a new compilation, HELP(2), from War Child Records, to support children in conflict zones.

This is a worthy cause at all times, of course, but one that is especially vital at a time when the government of Israel is perpetrating, at the very least, a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and when USAID, which was once one of the chief vehicles for delivering aid to those most in need, has been fed “into the wood chipper.”

It is the angriest and most devastating thing you’ll hear all day.

I am not going to describe the music or try to translate into text a work of art that is nontextual — that’s not even a xerox of a xerox, but something worse.

But I want you to read some of the lyrics. They’re deceptively simple but cumulatively devastating.

Good morning

This is your warning

This is your warning

You’re gonna appear before a stranger

I don’t know if you’ll be in any danger

For some are not pulled into moving cars

Some are not dragged down Fifth Avenue by the hairs in their ears

Some get away with it, some get away with it for many years

And are not punished, but some are

The stranger

Two lines are especially noteworthy here: “You’re gonna appear before a stranger” and “Some are not dragged down Fifth Avenue by the hairs in their ears.”

Initially, Winter’s reference to “a stranger” sounds like he’s talking about God — a suspicion confirmed later in the song when he refers to “a tall far-off thing with eyes / Whose existence I cannot prove or disprove / Looking at everybody all the time.”

But that phrase, “a stranger,” has special meaning and resonance within Judaism.1

Exodus 22:21 says: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

And in Leviticus 19:34, we’re told: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

What Winter is suggesting, I believe, is that if God is real — “Whose existence I cannot prove or disprove” — then God is “a stranger.” In this respect, he’s echoing what Jesus says in Matthew 25:35-40 (emphasis mine):

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.

Recall that this is a song for a compilation about children in “conflict zones.” If anyone is a stranger, it is them.

Remember, too, what Jesus said: “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

As to the second line — “Some are not dragged down Fifth Avenue by the hairs in their ears” — I think the allusion is clear enough that it doesn’t require further elaboration:

The reckoning

As rich and powerful as these lyrics are, it’s not until we reach the end of the song that “Warning” becomes something more than a jeremiad.

If you’re not wrong and there’s really nobody out there who can do the impossible

And who’s gonna forgive you?

Who is gonna forgive you?

This is a fascinating reversal of the idea that a Godless universe is one in which those who do evil — the people who “get away with it … for many years” — go unpunished.

What Winter sees here is the inverse: If there is no reckoning, there is also no forgiveness.

The “stranger” who is being hurt by this evildoer, and the people who love the “stranger” and identify with them, will not forget what has been done to them. And they won’t forgive it, either.

The work that must be done

Next come what I think are the most affecting lyrics in the whole song, a series of lines that I believe are coming from the strangers who will not forgive what has been done to them.

They are both cryptic and chilling, an eerie combination of sadistic reverie and ambient menace:

Now, there is work to be done on the sides of your body

And there are hot things that are unusually long and they burn very badly

There are things I hope one day to hook around the corners of your mouth

There are plans that I have in this house, written down

And there are plenty of people that I can very easily call who can come over here within an hour

And do the work that must be done on your heart

There is so, so, so, so much work to be done on your heart

There is so much work to be done on your heart

And it’s not the kind of work that you do around the house

“There is so much work to be done on your heart / And it’s not the kind of work that you do around the house.”

If that doesn’t put the fear of God — or, more to the point, the fear of there being no God — into one’s heart, I don’t know what could.

And this, in the end, is Winter’s “warning.” Woe to those who refuse to hear it.

Every few years, when I feel as if the state of the world necessitates “a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off,” I try to calm myself by rewatching Deadwood, the David Milch-helmed HBO show that ran from 2004 to 2006.

I never regret it. The experience always leaves me with a sense of awe.

How did something so sophisticated, so ambitious, so weird, and so expensive manage to survive the entertainment industrial complex death-march from pre-production to public release? How did it manage to hold on for 3 whole seasons before HBO pulled the plug? Was the demiurge who seems to be in control of the world today on some kind of sabbatical? Can we send him back?

But during my most recent rewatch of the show, I found myself fixating on something else — something more particular — that the state of the world today doubtless primed me to notice in a way I would not have 10 years ago.

That something was George Hearst (Gerald McRaney) — a fictionalized version of the father of William Randolph Hearst, aka Charles Foster Kane — who is the closest thing the show has to a Big Bad and, in ways I’ll try to explain below, an embodiment of what Milch (via Deadwood) argues are the human forces in this world who drive us, with terrifying certainty and utter remorselessness, towards a future characterized by alienation, domination, and exploitation.

But before I fully turn towards examining Hearst — both as a symbol and as an archetype of the kind of people, with all their self-justifications and pride and self-pity, who are the chief proponents of tyranny — it’s worth explaining in fuller detail what Deadwood is about and why Hearst’s arrival in the camp is both dramatically and thematically necessary.

Deadwood’s triune truth

So what is Deadwood about? First, it’s worth recognizing the deceptive simplicity of this question. Deadwood is an audaciously ambitious project. It is trying to be about what it means to be a human being in the modern world; it is, therefore, in a sense, about everything.

That said, it is reasonable to argue that, from the most elevated vantage, Deadwood, despite its capaciousness, is making a specific argument about human nature and human society. And you must understand that argument to understand why Hearst is so important — and so disturbing.

Now, I do not here claim any special powers of divination. Among its many seemingly impossible feats, Deadwood is at once unusually entertaining and exceptionally didactic. If the show were a politician, we’d call it “on message.”

Moreover, Milch, through interviews and his own writings about the show, has been more than happy to explain — with a kind of intellectual rigor that reminds us that he was a star pupil at Yale and spent time as a professor — what he was trying to say in Deadwood, and why.1

The show is an explanation for why human beings, despite their often selfish and anarchic nature, manage so consistently, and of their own volition, to form together into something we call “society” or “civilization,” something better — something nobler — than the sum of its parts.

Or, as the late scholar and media critic Paul Cantor put it (emphasis mine):2

[W]hat intrigued Milch about Deadwood is the way a motley group of human beings, pursuing—sometimes viciously—their own self-interest could—in the absence of any legal institutions or established government—nevertheless manage to organize themselves into a community and pursue some form of common good.

In short, Milch’s “big idea” about society is a combination of three ideas that are, by themselves, plenty big already. Those three ideas are as follows:

1. Society is based on “operating fiction[s]”

2. Society is an “organism”

3. This “organism” is how God (or “the body of God,” as Milch has called it) is made manifest in our world

Put these three together, and you have Deadwood’s big idea.

The operating fiction(s)

Let’s start with the first idea — that society relies on multiple and overlapping “operating fictions.” (Each one being, to quote the title of the two-part episode that opens Deadwood’s second season, “a lie agreed upon.”)

In a 2005 interview with Salon, Milch spoke of that greatest operating fiction of them all, the law (emphasis mine):

You know, the cop series I had done [NYPD Blue] tried to engage the theme that in order to administer the law, you have to break the law. That is, that the idea of equality before the law is an operating fiction of democracy. Any cop will tell you. If a cop is forced to watch a cop show, and he hears the suspect given his Miranda warning, he just turns away, because no suspect is ever given his Miranda warning until after the cop has gotten the information he needs. If he’s given his Miranda warning, the cop can’t do his job, because then the cop has to turn him over to a lawyer. What cops are hired to do is to control people who will not abide by the social contract.

Milch takes this idea of the foundation of human coexistence being “operating fictions” a step further, though, and connects it to the foundational “operating fiction” of the Declaration of Independence (emphasis mine):

What we say in our treasured documents is not, “These truths are self-evident, that all men are created equal.” What we say is, “We hold these truths to be self-evident” — in other words, we’re going to act as if these truths are self-evident, but in practice, those truths have never been self-evident. And the reason that cops only trust other cops is because they know that they’ve been hired to lie, they’ve been hired to beat the balls off people, and get them to confess so they can be excluded from society. That’s the first part of their job. The second part of their job is to lie about what they did. And the third part of their job is to know that if they’re caught, they’re going to be put in jail.

But rather than wax philosophical about how Deadwood is really about America (though it quite obviously is), Milch returns to the idea of the law and notes two paradoxes. The first paradox is cops acting lawlessly in the name of upholding the law. The second paradox is violently lawless people nevertheless creating a society based on restricting violence and lawlessness (emphasis mine):

I wanted to push that situation further, to the point where it was acknowledged by everyone that there was no law, and then to try and figure out how we govern ourselves, how we improvise the structures of governance in an environment which acknowledges that it is the abrogation of everything but brute force.

What Milch means by that “abrogation” comment, I’m pretty sure (it’s a little confusing) is: At the beginning of the show, the environment in which the town of Deadwood is built is one in which no law beyond brute force holds any real power.

And this is not just a descriptive thing; it’s not just acknowledging that, in Deadwood — especially during its first season, the camp’s early days — a man can kill another man and, provided the victim didn’t have any creditors upset about losing their investment, likely go about his day without further consequence.

It’s also a factual thing; Deadwood is an illegal settlement on what is, at the time of its founding, land that belongs to the Lakota people, not the United States. Deadwood is, quite literally, operating entirely outside the law. It is not in America; it is, in fact, a flagrant violation of the sovereignty of the people who nominally control the land on which it stands.

And yet, by the time we reach season three, it is on the verge of being annexed to a US territory — governed out of Yankton, even though the state of South Dakota does not yet formally exist — and it has (at least nominally) a mayor and a sheriff and health inspector. As Milch put it, the residents of Deadwood, seeing that outside forces are keen to claim the town — and most especially its gold — begin to “act governmental.”3

Crucially, they do not do this because they have any fondness (or desire) for government in the abstract. Quite the opposite; most of the people who have come to Deadwood have done so, at least in part, to escape government.

But what Milch suggests in the show (and has said explicitly elsewhere) is that the leaders of Deadwood believe that in order to protect their own interests from Yankton — and, behind it, the US government — it is essential that they cooperate to form some semi-official countervailing institutions of their own.

In other words, if government is a means of taking people’s wealth from them, then, the leaders of Deadwood conclude, the best chances they have of stopping that from happening is to form a (minimal) government of their own to combat that larger government’s purposes.

Here, too, then, we see another “operating fiction.”

According to Milch, government is not formed by “the people” to pursue some high-minded vision of the greater good. Government is something made, ad hoc, by one group of self-interested individuals to protect themselves against another group of self-interested individuals.

That’s the inoperable truth; “of, by, and for the people” is the operating fiction.

It is worth emphasizing, though, that it would be wrong to see this as Milch saying this is all bullshit. As I hope the sections below on the more spiritual aspects of Deadwood will make clear, Milch is what John F. Kennedy called an “idealist without illusions.” He is not a nihilist.

Rather, he is an adult who — like every adult must — holds two contradictory ideas in his head at the same time. The “lies” we “agree upon” are “fictions,” yes; but they’re necessary fictions, and it is through an accretion of these fictions that an anarchic rabble of self-interested individuals is transformed into a community.

Or, as Milch often refers to it, “an organism.”

Society as an “organism”

To understand what Milch means when he refers to society as an “organism,” I want to ask you to indulge me and read a long quote from episode three of Deadwood’s first season.

It’s a funeral oration given by Deadwood’s preacher, Reverend Smith (Ray McKinnon), at the funeral of Wild Bill Hickock (Keith Carradine), a celebrity gunslinger who is depicted in the show as a kind, decent, and profoundly self-loathing depressive with a death-wish that is eventually consummated by an alcoholic gambler.

Hickock and the gambler have been playing poker against one another for days. The tension between them is palpable. (At one point Hickock, who is usually near-stoical in his reserve and performative dignity, tells his adversary, in a rage, that the latter’s mouth reminds him of female genitalia.)

But after a game during which Hickock takes his sparring partner for all he’s got, Wild Bill goes one step too far — he tosses the man a poker chip and urges him to buy himself a meal. The moment speaks well of Hickock’s basic humanity, but one can tell that his foe takes it as a serious affront.

He wants to take Hickock down. He does not want to be reminded, via Hickock’s act of pity, that he is the lesser man.

And so, inevitably and not long thereafter, the man sneaks up behind Hickock and shoots him in the back of the head, killing him instantly. Everything about the scene implies that Hickock is aware of what is coming and simply chooses to let it happen. (Indeed, in an earlier scene, we see Hickock shoot a man he rightly suspects intends to kill him, even before the latter has had the chance to draw his weapon.)

It is difficult, therefore, to interpret Hickock’s demise as anything less than a kind of suicide by proxy. This is certainly the interpretation that those at the camp who knew Hickock best draw, and we can see how it haunts them for the remainder of the series.

Throughout the show, Milch suggests that one of the solvents that turns a collection of individuals into a community is shared trauma. And, in the world of Deadwood, Hickock’s murder is a shocking and tragic event — so much so that this town’s otherwise brutally unsentimental residents form a long, long line to pay their respects to Hickock’s corpse before its burial.

The tragedy elicits, even in Deadwood’s hardest hearts, “pity” — something that, Milch suggests, is no less essentially human than “lower” qualities like selfishness and aggression.

This is the context in which Reverend Smith — a character who immediately differentiates himself from the rest of Deadwood’s population by his capacity for kindness and pity — delivers an oration that, in many ways, also functions as not only Deadwood’s mission-statement but Milch’s philosophy.4

Smith says (emphasis mine):

St. Paul tells us, “By one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jew or Gentile, bond or free, and have all been made to drink into one Spirit. For the body is not one member but many.” He tells us, “The eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee; nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of thee. Nay, much more those members of the body which seem to be more feeble, and those members of the body which we think of as less honorable, all are necessary.” He says that “there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care, one to another, and whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.” I believe in God’s purpose, not knowing it. I ask Him, moving in me, to allow me to see His will. I ask Him, moving in others, to allow them to see it.

As Kristen Martin wrote for NPR, this is nothing less than a declaration “that solipsism is a lie, that we must remember that we are as humans all interconnected.”

But here, through Reverend Smith-channeling-Saint-Paul, we hear what Milch believes is true. We are “not one … but many.” None of us has a right to say, “I have no need of thee” to another, because “all are necessary.”

In the Salon interview I quoted above, Milch had this to say about Smith’s remarks (emphasis mine):

In other words, because we misunderstand our natures, does that exclude us from the community of spirits? And the answer is no, it just means we misunderstand our natures. So many of these characters misunderstand their natures, but that does not prevent us from recognizing that they’re of the body of Christ. My feeling about “Deadwood” is it’s a single organism, and I think human society is the body of God...

Our belief that we are separate from each other — that we are distinct, atomized individuals; that we are not part of some larger “body” — is the “solipsism,” as Martin puts it, that causes us to “misunderstand our own natures.”

But even though we are all afflicted with this pernicious misunderstanding, Milch does not believe we are doomed to remain in perpetual ignorance. We are capable, he believes, of recognizing — even just dimly — that we are part of a community, part of the “body.” He explains (emphasis mine):

If you go to any small town, you’ll see in the center of town signs that advertise the weekly meeting of the Lion’s Club and the Optimists and the Kiwanis. You know, a bowling team, a bridge club? All of those things express our impulse to recognize that our most confident and satisfied sense of our individuality is found in relating to something outside of us.

Here, then, is another paradox: In order to most fully and confidently embody “our own individuality,” we must “relat[e] to something outside of us.”

And within the world of Deadwood, populated though it is by self-seeking murderers and pimps and alcoholic gold-diggers, no one misunderstands themselves more profoundly — and more destructively — than George Hearst.

Enter Hearst

In Deadwood, George Hearst, a mining tycoon who would go on to become a U.S. Senator, is the rejection and negation of every aspect of Milch’s philosophy.

He considers himself to be the prophet of a higher truth and has no time for society’s “operating fictions.” He does not recognize himself as part of a larger organism; he is an open misanthrope who insists he’s only happy when he’s with the earth and she is “telling me where to dig into her.”5

When he observes Deadwood, the town, its people, their tangled lives, he does not see the “body of God.” Speaking to a Pinkerton he has enlisted to help him bring Deadwood under his heel — or destroy it, if it refuses — he sneers, with wolfish contempt: “The camp is galvanized. People scurry about. They’ve tasks to perform. They feel important.”

It’s hard to imagine Hearst believes in God; but if he does, his God is “progress.” His version of progress is not of the humanistic kind, however. It’s the progress of the brutal industrialist, the ruthless hyper-capitalist, the imperious tech baron — progress as a boot stamping on a human face, forever.

How Hearst willfully misunderstands his nature

Unlike some of the most sympathetic characters in Deadwood, Hearst isn’t entirely ignorant of his nature. For example, in an exchange with his deputy, Francis Wolcott (Garret Dillahunt), with whom he is “severing” his connection on account of the latter’s compulsive need to murder sex workers, we see Hearst’s signature combination of self-awareness and willful self-ignorance:

Wolcott: As when the earth talks to you particularly, you never ask its reasons.

Hearst: I don’t need to know why I’m lucky!

Wolcott: What if the earth talks to us to get us to arrange its amusements?

Hearst: That sounds like goddamned nonsense to me.

Wolcott: Suppose, to you, it whispers, “You are king over me. I exist to flesh your will.”

Hearst: Nonsense.

Wolcott: And to me... “There is no sin.”

And then, as they part:

Hearst: Does some spirit overtake you? Is that what you mean by the “talk”?

Wolcott: No.

Hearst: It tells me where the color [gold] is. That’s all it tells me.

Despite his egoism, Hearst even shows hints of self-loathing.

In the scene with the Pinkerton I mentioned earlier, Hearst, after mocking Deadwood’s residents for “feel[ing] important,” pauses. Then, as if he is disgusted by his own disgust, he adds, “I oughtn’t to work in these places. I was not born to crush my own kind.” In a similar moment later in the series, he growls to another underling: “My proper traffic is with the earth. In my dealings with people, I ought solely have to do with [—s] and whites who obey me like dogs.”

And yet, in another scene, he cries tears of self-pity over, in so many words, his position as an outsider — as separate from the “body” of the camp (and, more generally, it seems, the “body” of human society itself):

I hate these places … because the truth that I know, the promise that I bring, the necessities I’m prepared to accept, make me outcast. Isn’t that foolish? Isn’t that foolishness? An old man, disabused long ago of certain yearnings and hopes as to how he would be held by his fellows; and yet I weep.

Then, having composed himself, he once again adopts his self-appointed role as a prophet — if not God Himself — and vows to “take [Deadwood] down like Gomorrah.”

Hearst as “the best in us, as well as the worst”

Due to a combination of Milch’s writing and Gerald McRaney’s performance, however, we recognize something human in Hearst. His will-to-power, his impatience, his disdain for the irrationalities and hypocrisies — the operating fictions — that stand in the way of the “truths” he believes he understands and represents; these are all, in at least some ways, relatable character traits.

He is unquestionably Deadwood’s villain; but there is also something correct, if not quite “right,” about George Hearst. His desire to impose order on this motley rabble is not attractive. But it is understandable.

For example, the kind of “progress” on whose behalf he claims to speak — “amalgamation and capital” as Charlie Utter (Dayton Callie) calls it, only half-comprehendingly — is indeed coming. We know that, of course; but most of the characters in Deadwood also take it for granted, regardless of whether they welcome it.

And, most interestingly, especially from today’s vantage, Hearst’s indifference to the on-the-ground messy realities of human civilization — his preference for what Cantor describes in his essay as “abstraction” — leads him to be, by the extremely low standards prevalent within the camp, one of the show’s least-racist characters.

To be clear, this is not because he is a humanist. As Cantor explains, it is, ironically, because Hearst so insistently places himself apart from and above the rest of society that he is — again, relatively speaking — indifferent to white supremacy, one of the most noxious “operating fictions” of the time.

This is made explicit during a scene in which Hearst converses with his Odell Marchbanks (Omar Gooding), the son of his cook, both of whom are Black, about the latter’s claim that he has found gold in Liberia and would like to sell the rights to Hearst.

First, that Hearst is having a sit-down meal — in public, no less — with a Black man is, in the Deadwood of the time, a transgressive act. There are precious few Black people in Deadwood, and those that we do see live under the constant threat of being lynched. We are still decades away from Jim Crow being fully institutionalized; but the direction of things is clear. This is not a time of racial progress.

Still, because Hearst cares much more about gold than he cares about the “small-mindedness and self-interested behavior that’s so pervasive in this shithole,” he has dinner with Odell. At one point during their conversation — which is much more like a duel, given Odell’s falsity and Hearst’s narcissistic paranoia — ⁠Odell stands up, offended by Hearst’s suggestion that he (Odell) may be trying to fleece him.

Hearst is impressed, in a patronizing way, by Odell’s pride, and urges him to calm himself and sit back down. He then explains why, to him, gold is the only “color” that matters (emphasis mine):

Hearst: But for that gold, you’d never have sat at my table. And for the effrontery in your rising-up, except that you’d showed me the gold, I’d’ve shot, or seen you hanged, without a second thought. The value I gave the gold restrained me, you see, your utility in connection with it … Gold confers power, and that power is transferable. Power comes to any man who has the color.

Odell: Even if he is black.

Hearst. ⁠⁠That is our species’ hope—that, uniformly agreeing on its value, we organize to seek the color⁠⁠.

In Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills, Milch writes about this with characteristic directness (emphasis mine):

Yet the process of abstraction that Hearst embodies, which is symbolized in gold, is also at the very heart of what makes us human. It’s the best in us, as well as the worst, and it is often both at the same time … Hearst sees the power of gold … in the way [it] can eliminate the stickier aspects of our human particularity. That’s why Hearst can befriend Odell, the son of his black chef, Aunt Lou. Odell has discovered gold in Liberia. For Hearst, the agreed-upon value of gold is the root of all civilized behavior. It mandates a calculus of utility that trumps even the most deep-seated prejudice.

As noxious as he is, I will confess that, here in 2026, I wouldn’t mind if more of our world-destroying oligarchs were similarly uninterested in the kind of racist determinism that Hearst regards as contemptibly “small-minded.”

Hearst, Deadwood, and the “community of spirits”

At this point, I hope, I’ve persuaded you that Hearst is the antithesis of the first two of Milch’s three big ideas. He refuses to accept the necessity of “operating fictions,” and he refuses to recognize that human society is “an organism,” rather than a thing onto which he can impose — through a combination of his wealth, his willpower, and “the truth” he “know[s]” — a kind of top-down direction.

To close, then, I’d like to turn to the final of Milch’s three big ideas: that the organism of society represents the “body of God.”

What I want to suggest here is that as we witness Deadwood’s people organize in opposition to Hearst, we see how that “organism” — somewhat despite itself, and with only a vague awareness of its own purposes — responds to threats by making manifest those higher ideals and aspirations we associate with Godliness.

There is a key moment in Deadwood that illustrates this dynamic — and represents a realization of Milch’s argument that although we “misunderstand our natures,” that doesn’t “exclude us from the community of spirits.”

A law beyond law

First, some context: At this point in the narrative, Hearst, frustrated and humiliated by his inability to bend the town to his will, is engaging in wild escalations that seem driven more by his sense of lèse-majesté than pragmatism.

He is bringing in Pinkertons by the dozens — these are the agents through which he hopes to turn Deadwood into another “Gomorrah” — while also openly flaunting the authority of the town’s nascent system of law and order by having multiple Cornish laborers who work at his mines murdered for attempting to form a union.

The town’s de facto leader, Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) can see no recourse other than to call in “guns” of his own and launch a preemptive strike against the Pinkertons and even Hearst himself. Yet Swearengen also believes that this will be, at most, a pyrrhic victory; the conflagration will likely destroy the town, and Hearst, being the representative of corporate interests, will simply be replaced by his shareholders with some other titan of industry. Swearengen has no intention of being Hearst’s slave; but even if for no other reason than self-interest, he also does not want to destroy the town he has worked so hard to build.

Out of desperation, Swearengen convenes Deadwood’s leading figures, such as they are, and shares his thinking. He nearly begs, however, for anyone with ideas for a less apocalyptic resolution to share them. None are forthcoming. But then, Deadwood’s Sheriff, Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), shares with the group a letter he has written for the family of one of the Cornish laborers Hearst has had killed.

He hands the letter to A.W. Merrick (Jeffrey Jones), who runs Deadwood’s lone newspaper; and he does this wordlessly, almost as if he himself does not understand what he is doing or why. The letter, which ostensibly has nothing to do with the immediate question Swearengen is trying to answer, is read aloud by Merrick, and is as follows (emphasis mine):

It becomes my painful duty to inform you that Pasco Carwen was killed earlier this week. His body was found in the road. It was not mutilated in any way. His death seems to have been instantaneous as he was stabbed through the heart. Pasco’s funeral occurred today and was attended by coworkers and friends who all shared the same high opinion of him. Everything was done by kind hands that was possible under the circumstances, and a Christian burial was given him. I was not personally acquainted with Mr. Carwen, save for one encounter where he demonstrated grief and deep compassion at the passing of a friend. I knew him by reputation as an earnest worker and a diligent believer in right and wrong. His memory I am sure will always be with those who knew and loved him, among whose number I imagine you as first. A letter from you which I found in his tent causes me to convey this sad intelligence to you. Sincerely yours, Seth Bullock.

It is a remarkable piece of writing (and, according to Reddit, quite similar to a letter the real-life Seth Bullock wrote) and everyone at the meeting is clearly affected by it. Yet Bullock’s purpose remains obscure. Merrick asks him, “What shall I do with this, Mr. Bullock?” In response, Swearengen says, “What’s your fucking paper for? You fucking publish as witness, for Hearst and others to read.”

And thus ends the meeting. Instead of agreeing to organize a preemptive strike that would amount to a kind of murder-suicide, the leaders of Deadwood decide to publish a letter about the murder of an immigrant worker that none of them knew, nor especially cared to know. It feels right to them — or at least most of them — and yet it would be wrong to say that any of them entirely understand why that is or what they think its publication will do.

But this is an essential, pivotal moment. This is when, to go back to one of Milch’s earlier quotes, we see how a collection of individuals who “misunderstand [their] nature” can nevertheless, when embodied in the “organism” of society, find themselves in communion with a “community of spirits.”

Or as Reverend Smith put it, channeling Paul during his eulogy for Hickock, they recognize that “all are necessary” — even the immigrant — and therefore can experience “Him, moving in me, to allow me to see His will” and “ask Him, moving in others, to allow them to see it.”

Later in the episode, when recounting the meeting to his friend, the theater troupe leader Jack Langrishe (Brian Cox), Swearengen reveals that, in retrospect, he is “mystified” by his own behavior. He went into the meeting expecting to be told to organize his forces for an orgy of violence; he left it having commissioned the publication of a letter that, he confesses, “Never once mention[s] Hearst,” and certainly doesn’t call him to account for his crimes against both the law and Deadwood’s social contract.

Whether out of friendship, sycophancy, or true wisdom, however — and I think Milch would say the reason is not so important as the result; because, again, we so often “misunderstand” our own nature — Langrishe argues that Swearengen should not be mystified.

The decision to publish the letter, he says, makes perfect sense (emphasis mine):

Mystified, Al, at proclaiming a law beyond law to a man who’s beyond law himself? It’s publication invoking a decency whose scrutiny applies to him as to all his fellows. I call that strategy cunningly sophisticated, befitting and becoming the man who sits before me.

Similarly, when Swearengen’s two most loyal henchmen are discussing what transpired during the meeting, clearly trying to understand it themselves, one of them, Swearengen’s chief deputy, Dan Dority (W. Earl Brown), says, with halting but increasing confidence (emphasis mine):

[T]he letter’s contents is witness that... Bullock wrote a nice fucking letter. And it proves... that that’s the sort we are here, the caring sort that would write a letter of that ilk. Furthermore, we don’t give a fuck who knows it, George fucking Hearst included.

While it is hard to draw a direct line from its publication to the series’ resolution, it’s clear that the letter’s publication does indeed have an effect. When Hearst confronts Merrick about its publication, it is obvious that this reminder of, as Langrishe puts it, “a law beyond law,” both shames and offends him (emphasis mine):

Hearst: Thanks, too, for publishing Sheriff Bullock’s letter of condolence to the family of that murdered worker of mine.

Merrick: Oh, you’re welcome.

Hearst: I suppose I should have written them myself.

Merrick: I’d not presumed to suppose in that regard, Mr. Hearst, one way or another.

Hearst: Was the Sheriff’s making his letter part of the public record meant to embarrass or reproach me?

Under Hearst’s orders, a Pinkerton will later savagely beat Merrick for this affront.

Why Hearst is necessary

Ultimately, and to return to the point I made at the beginning of this essay, this is why Hearst is necessary.

It is not until the “organism” of Deadwood is faced by its antithesis that it is able, however fitfully and ignorantly, to connect with that “community of spirits” that helps a group of self-interested individuals, who “misunderstand their nature,” reveal themselves more fully as members of “the body of God,” capable of evoking the “law beyond law” that allows us to recognize that, as Paul says, “there should be no schism in the body … and whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.”

To recognize that “all are necessary” — even, in his way, someone like George Hearst.