2026-08-02 07:07:36
YouTube loves recommending video essays to me, so for a long time I’ve seen thumbnail after thumbnail promising a deep dive on “The scariest scene ever filmed!” or “The hidden secrets of the most surprising twists!” and the like.
Often, it’ll be “The most horrifying TV broadcast you’ve never heard of!” and about 90% of the time, they’ll be talking about Ghostwatch as if they’re the first ones to introduce it to anyone. So I’ve had years of having the internet hyping it up, elevating it to legendary status, and introducing the basics before I was able to see it.
Ghostwatch is a horror movie that aired on the BBC on Halloween night in 1992. It’s presented as if it were a live broadcast, split between studio segments and a remote crew spending the night in one of London’s most haunted houses. The family living there — a single mother and her two daughters — have a long history with poltergeist activity in the house, an entity that the younger daughter has nicknamed “Pipes.” A crew of three has gone inside with a camera and sensitive audio recording equipment to try and catch any evidence of ghostly activity for the live broadcast.
Slashfilm has a write-up from 2022 by Lee Adams, who watched the original broadcast. I think a non-sensationalized essay like that is essential for getting an idea of the movie’s original context and why it became so notorious. As an American watching it streaming in 2026 (on Shudder), clearly labeled as fiction, it was near impossible to put myself in the mindset of someone in England watching in 1992.
For instance: four of the lead actors are playing themselves, banking on their notoriety as real-life television presenters. The only one that I recognized was Craig Charles, from Red Dwarf, who does segments outside the house and treats the whole thing like a big joke, but he’s getting paid to entertain. Sarah Greene is inside the house and interacts most closely with the children and their mother; like Charles, she was both an actress and a television presenter, so her presence alone wouldn’t have been an indicator of whether it was real or fiction. Her husband Mike Smith also played himself, manning the phone bank during the broadcast. As I understand, he would also have been an immediately-recognizable presenter to anyone who was familiar with the BBC, but wasn’t known as an actor.
The host is Michael Parkinson, who from the descriptions of Ghostwatch that I’d seen over the years, I’d assumed to be a newscaster. But as I understand it, he was primarily known as a talk show host and frequent presenter. When trying to “translate” the cast to an American context, I’d been imagining that he’d be like us seeing Dan Rather or Charles Brokaw witnessing a live haunting, but it might be more accurate to compare him to someone like Johnny Carson or Mike Douglas? Or there might not even be a perfect American alternative.
In any case, they add a sense of legitimacy to the whole thing that still works, even if you don’t have that immediate sense of familiarity with them. The first part does a pretty great job of hitting that sweet spot of awkward corniness that feels more like a live broadcast than the setup of a found footage movie. Any cracks in the verisimilitude are immediately patched over by knowing how people on live television so often sound awkward or wooden, artificially friendly, or vamping to fill time. It’s especially interesting since the actors playing purely fictional characters often come across as fake or wooden, simply because they don’t have that built-in veneer of artificiality.
The other thing that makes it difficult for me to put myself in the right context has nothing to do with being American, but simply unable to remember what the state of VFX was in 1992. One of the cleverest parts of the movie happens early on, when a live caller to the show says that she spotted something hidden in the background of video footage they’d aired earlier. There’s a really great build-up of tension as they politely thank her for the call and then have to cut to a different segment while they wait for the technicians in the studio to be able to bring up the footage again. You’re spending the entire time wondering, “what did she see? Did I just miss it?” I had to resist the urge to rewind the movie to look for myself, because I knew that that wouldn’t have been an option for most people watching the original.
It’s one of the most effective and creepiest things a found footage or ghost story has in its arsenal, and it’s done especially well in stuff like Lake Mungo and Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House. So it’s a little disappointing that it’s given such a brilliant set-up here, but is a bit lessened by the execution.
A mild spoiler for Ghostwatch: the effect here is cheapened a little bit by some obvious trickery. They play the footage back once where the figure is pretty clearly visible if you’re looking for it, but when the people in the studio rewind it to look one more time, they use a different clip. A clever addition is when they have the resident “paranormal expert” in the studio outline the spot with a light pen, to make you question whether you saw what you think you saw. But on the whole, it felt like it could’ve been a flawless moment, but was hobbled by early 1990s television VFX.
So I’d been ready to think of this as a good-but-not-great experiment in unconventional horror moviemaking and broadcasting, more interesting as a historical novelty than as a genuinely scary movie. I figured that years of hype had been over-playing just how traumatized the people of England had been, or how many people believed it was the real thing. We’ve seen similar with War of the Worlds and The Blair Witch Project, and I guess even as far back as The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat station, where the urban legends about people being fooled were able to gain so much more traction in the public consciousness than the reality.
But the whole “were people tricked into thinking this was real?” aspect isn’t what makes Ghostwatch remarkable. It’s both more clever than I would’ve expected from a production like this, and it goes harder, too.
One of the cleverest aspects is how it bakes in its content warnings in a way that doesn’t interfere with the fiction. After the opening, there’s little indication that you’re watching a movie instead of a live broadcast. But Parkinson gives content warnings to the viewers before certain clips or audio recordings are played back for the audience, a perfectly in-universe method of getting the creepy moments but also being responsible broadcasters. Even more clever are the frequent reminders that kids should be in bed instead of watching this. Both of the daughters are put to bed with a reminder of what time it is, and there are lines of dialogue about how they shouldn’t still be awake. When a “caller” phones into the studio to report a strange occurrence — which happens right before the story takes a darker turn — Parkinson seems more curious about why her children are still up after the “watershed,” and practically begs her to put them to bed.
And the darker moments pay off more than I’d expected. The exposition for what’s happening is delivered gradually and mostly naturally, as we get seemingly unrelated info from neighbors and unseen people calling into the live studio. It all gets lumped in with the various other reports of ghostly incidents reported over the course of the show — with Greene’s description of her own previous experience being an interesting highlight — until it all crystalizes into an understanding of who “Pipes” is.
So I really enjoyed Ghostwatch, possibly even more than I’d expected to. It definitely feels like the best time to see it would’ve been when you were a British adolescent or teenager in 1992, but the next best time is whenever you’re in the mood to see a clever ghost story and early pioneer of the whole found footage format.
2026-08-01 08:42:11
Yesterday when I was giving the definitive take on Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey, I made a kind-of throwaway mention of O Brother, Where Art Thou? as a case of the Coen Brothers’ being uninterested in adapting The Odyssey so much as making fun of the pretentiousness of filmmakers who’d presume to adapt The Odyssey.
Today, I saw a good essay titled “All Coens Are Liars: O Brother, Where art Thou? and Homer’s Odyssey“ by Anise K. Strong-Morse, where she goes deeper into comparing the movie and the source material, as well as its various references to other sources throughout film history, in particular The Wizard of Oz and Sullivan’s Travels, along with the history of the southern US and bluegrass music. I recommend it to anyone who’s a fan of the movie! It provides a lot of context that I wasn’t aware of, and suggests some elements (like Everett’s hair nets) that I wouldn’t have recognized as having any possible connection to mythology.
But the most interesting part to me is the central question she uses to frame it. Basically, why did the Coens lie about never having read The Odyssey?
I feel like I should remind anybody reading this that I am a huge, verging on simpering, admirer of the Coen Brothers. To the point of deliberately avoiding interviews with them, or anything mentioning their takes on their own work. I’ve got a huge backlog of books, commentaries, and making-of featurettes scattered around on various forms of media, but I won’t go near them, just in case it ruins or even lessens my interpretations. Like Llewyn Davis says, you don’t want to find out too much about an artist, because “It ruins the mystique.”
Two of the comments they’ve made that have crept into my awareness over the years: their claim that Tommy’s hat in Miller’s Crossing is “just a hat,” and their claim that Tim Blake Nelson was the only person involved in O Brother who’d ever actually read The Odyssey.1
I believe the latter claim a lot more than the former, but I’m not entirely convinced of either one of them. Leaving people guessing is a key part of their whole schtick. And to be 100% clear, Strong-Morse gets this, and the title of the essay is jokingly part of her comparing them to the character of Odysseus in that they’re all tricksters. I imagine that they’re happy letting people — like me, specifically, who get a kick out of writing about things other people have made — get stuck in spirals trying to figure out what’s the “truth” or not. I don’t believe that there’s any genuine deception behind it, any more than they need people to believe that the Roderick Jaynes who edited their movies is a real person.
But I don’t think it’s nothing more than a gag, either. And the alias, the hat, and the insistence that they never read the story they adapted, are all part of the same thing. The desire to avoid this:
That’s a screenshot from the imdb entry for The Odyssey, which after the starring cast, lists “Director: Christopher Nolan” and “Writers: Christopher Nolan and 1 other.”
I don’t know that much about Nolan outside his movies, either, but it’s pretty hilarious to imagine anyone getting into a “Puppet Show and Spinal Tap” situation with Homer. I’ve got to point out that the credits for O Brother list the Coens after one of the most influential authors in the history of western literature, even though that movie is even less of a direct adaptation than Nolan’s is. It’d be silly to criticize Nolan over an imdb entry, but I think it’s okay to laugh that he wasn’t savvy enough to avoid the situation outright.
My grand unified theory of the Coens’ movies is that they’re adamantly populist, or at least anti-elitist. That post is one of the few things I’ve written on here that I’m genuinely proud of. It’s responding to an excellent essay that concluded that their movies are about flawed characters with the best of intentions, who are doomed to be punished far beyond the severity of their transgressions, all by the capricious whims of fate. I still don’t agree with that. I say that they’re punished for hubris, arrogance, and the belief that they’re somehow exceptional.
And by that measure, I think Nolan’s version of The Odyssey and O Brother, Where Art Thou? are surprisingly similar. One is almost painfully earnest and entirely humorless2, and the other goes so hard in not taking itself seriously that even its title is a joking reference. But they both do basically the same thing with the main character, which is undermine his status as a clever, smooth-talking hero who gets repeatedly tested due to divine intervention. Both versions center on guys who think they’ve got everything figured out, and then spend a long time being shown repeatedly that actions have consequences.
Which surprised me for a few reasons. One is that my impression of Nolan has always been that he’s so self-serious that he’s practically the anti-Coen Brothers. Another is that as much as I love O Brother, Where Art Thou?, I have always thought of it as a couple of very smart filmmakers goofing off, without thinking much about how they might be using the format of The Odyssey for anything more than a framework for a comedy.
And the third is it’s made me soften a little on my assertion that familiarity with the source material doesn’t have much of anything to do with your interpretation of an adaptation.
I’m still adamant that movies don’t need pre-requisites. Even Marvel ones! It’s most often used as gate-keeping, to suggest that somebody’s take on an adaptation is more valid than anyone else’s, just because of their familiarity with the source material. “Here’s a detail about the Jim Crow south you might not have noticed in Sinners” is great. “Here’s everything this movie got wrong, from someone who actually read the book,” is garbage.3
But it’s silly to claim (as I did) that familiarity with the source material is completely irrelevant, because it helps you recognize what the adaptation chooses to cut, change, or leave intact. That’s what makes an adaptation additive. And recognizing the changes makes you think about why the adaptation made those changes.
In Nolan’s Odyssey, removing the physical presence of the gods, which I think is a huge part of the original stories, emphasizes that core idea of self-determination and a clear moral code: you can’t use them as justification for your transgressions, or blame them for your failures.
In O Brother, Where Art Thou? depicting Ulysses as vain, cocky, and easily flummoxed isn’t just funny, but it undermines his own self-image as a charming, smooth-talking hero who’s always one step ahead of everyone else. He’s repeatedly shouting “Damn! We’re in a tight spot!” as if he weren’t the one responsible.4
And it makes the movie fit even more snugly into my grand unified theory: a “hero” being punished for his vanity, arrogance, and dismissing people as hayseeds and yokels. The only people who seem to hate anyone giving the high hat more than Johnny Caspar are the Coen Brothers themselves.
Maybe one day I’ll get Marshal McLuhaned, and I’ll get an email from one of the Coens saying “you don’t understand our movies at all.” (That would be kind of awesome, actually). But until then, I’m sticking with the idea that they’re very, very smart filmmakers who take an extremely precise, exacting approach5 to making movies that are ultimately all about taking yourself less seriously, and rejecting the idea that you’re better than anybody else, or more in control over your own destiny.
So whether “we never read The Odyssey” is true or not isn’t as important as why they’d mention it. It’s the same reason as insisting “it’s just a hat:” to say that they’re not the owners of your interpretation of the movie. They’re not going to claim that their work is the definitive take, or that their version of it is more valid than what you got out of it, just because they went to film school or studied philosophy. They’re not going to tell you in an interview what it means or everything it represents; that’s what the movie is for.
2026-07-31 11:51:21
I didn’t like The Odyssey (2026) very much, and any objections to that take are going to fall on deaf ears.
Literally, since I saw it yesterday and my ears are still ringing. I honestly don’t understand why people are so eager to give bad audio a pass — I’ve even seen reviews praising it! — as if it were just like any other stylistic quirk of a well-known director. You know, Wes Anderson insists on fixed cameras and rigidly symmetrical shots, and Christopher Nolan makes movies that are so unbearably loud it’s physically painful to experience, and I always leave the theater feeling like I’ve been beaten up.
The whole point of my take is going to be that there’s no such thing as a single definitive, correct version of any piece of art. Still, I do think it’s a misstep for any version of The Odyssey to leave the audience thinking, “Man, I wish I were one of Odysseus’s crew! They had it so good!” And yet I’ve rarely been so envious of any movie characters as when they all got to use beeswax to plug up their ears.
To clarify that this isn’t just a grumpy old man talking: sitting next to me in the theater were two young women who were chatting with each other at full volume throughout the trailers and the opening of the movie. I thought, “Well, at least this is a Christopher Nolan movie, so it won’t be long until I’m unable to hear them.” That turned out to be true, but I glanced over during the Cyclops scene, and they both were wincing and had their hands over their ears. They walked out partway through that scene. I remained faithfully at my loom and awaited their return, but they never came back.
And a lot of the rest felt like it was exactly what I’d expect from a Christopher Nolan movie. I jumped ship after The Dark Knight Rises, and my reaction to The Odyssey is a lot like my reaction to that Batman trilogy. It seems almost obsessively committed to taking a fantastic, even absurd, story and presenting it in as grounded and serious way as possible.
There are tons of people who want exactly that. They want an adaptation or interpretation that shows proper respect to source material they love, and which does it justice. That’s not what I’m into, though. For me, it just drains the color and wonder and joy out of the story, undermining the sense of magic. And occasionally, since several of the Nolan movies I’ve seen have story elements that are patently absurd, it backfires.
The scene with the Trojan Horse seems less silly in context than it did in that extended teaser trailer from a few months ago. But I still had to chuckle when Menelaus calls Odysseus “the wisest of us all,” and then recounts the story of building the most impractical version of the Trojan Horse imaginable, clown-car stuffing a dozen men into it, getting them drowned when the tide comes in, stabbed when the Trojans test if it’s hollow, and flipped turned upside down when it’s hauled into the city. Because I guess putting wheels on it would’ve made it seem “silly” or “implausible.”
I would’ve been all set to complain that the Greek heroes at the center of the story are all played by the most Caucasian members of Nolan’s repertory company, but considering how the movie makes all of the Mediterranean look gray and overcast like the British Isles, it seemed somehow appropriate.
And I always imagined that the part of the story where Odysseus is held captive by Calypso takes place in some lush paradise; here, it just looks like he and Furiosa spent seven years living on a flotsam-covered beach, with even fewer luxuries than the crew of the SS Minnow.
But the other thing it has in common with every Nolan movie I’ve seen is that there’s at least one scene that is genuinely excellent. In The Odyssey, the first runner-up is the scene where Odysseus meets Sinon, Agamemnon, and the other shades on the outskirts of Hades. It’s where the more grounded approach really pays off. There are enough sinister and fantastic aspects, especially the character (Tiresias played by James Remar, I think?) half-emerged from the ground and covered with a black shroud. Contrasted with a kind of similar scene in The Return of the King, which was going for rousing high fantasy, it felt more in line with a mythology where the divine realms are physical places, and the gods regularly take human form.
The casting in that scene is excellent, too. Most notably Elliot Page as Sinon, who’s able to convey both youthful idealism and the rage of betrayal, at the same time as the cynical detachment of knowing that his story is already over. Even more surprising to me was a barely-visible-under-the-helmet Benny Safdie as Agamemnon. While the scene was playing out, I thought he was comically miscast: the voice of Just Some Random Guy coming out of this over-the-top bad-ass suit of armor. But after the movie was over, I started to suspect that may have been the point. This legendary hero was ultimately human.
But the best scene in the movie is the one where Circe changes Odysseus’s crew into pigs. It’s tense and genuinely horrific, and best of all novel and inventive. Even if you somehow don’t already know what’s going to happen, there’s a prolonged sense of something terrible approaching, just by how greedily and compulsively all the men are eating. As she goes around, matter-of-factly working her magic, it’s the one part of the entire movie where I felt like everything was working in concert: the devotion to “realism,” the cinematography that hints at spectacle more than delivers on it, even the sound design. Unlike the more magical transformations in some other movies, it’s prolonged and gruesome. And unlike the horrific transformations in something like An American Werewolf in London, it’s a much more hands-on process.
I was disappointed that the scene just kind of fizzles out after that. The conversation between Samantha Morton and Matt Damon is well-performed, and it’s shot as if it’s full of significance, but I didn’t get anything out of the dialogue, and Odysseus didn’t say or do anything particularly clever to resolve it. He basically just asked nicely, and she agreed. Which is perfectly fitting with the movie’s ideas of hospitality and civilization, of course, but doesn’t come across as dramatic or cinematic.
That part of the story is the only one I know well from The Odyssey, because I really enjoyed the book Circe by Madeline Miller. But I didn’t mind at all that it’s so abbreviated in the movie, seeming to take place over the course of a single day instead of having Odysseus spend a year on the island, because that didn’t fit into what this movie was trying to say. And that gets at what I liked most about Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey: it’s very opinionated, it does try to say something, and it says it explicitly and repeatedly.
And the thing it’s absolutely not trying to say is “Here is the definitive version of The Odyssey.” That’s why I can be sitting here in view of my own copy of Robert Fagles’s translation, which I bought years ago with the best of intentions but have never read beyond the first page, and still declare that the strengths of this adaptation have little to do with how well they present the source material. You could say it’s because I’m a semi-literate rube with an American public school education — and again, I won’t be able to hear you — but I appreciated seeing a long, big-budget movie adaptation of one of the most classic pieces of Western literature that seemed so unconcerned with “getting it right.”
Basically, I like that one of the biggest movies of the summer is generating so many different, even contradictory, interpretations.
Not the bad faith ones, obviously. Those are just creeps with a fetish for getting yelled at, trying to ride the coattails of a marketing campaign to normalize backwards ideas and make people act like the most basic aspects of human decency are somehow “controversial.” I wish everybody had just ignored them, but I guess people can’t resist the siren song of Someone Saying Something Stupid On The Internet.
What I’m talking about are the people actually engaging with the movie and the mythology it’s based on. I’d been expecting to skip the movie in theaters (since IMAX screenings are all sold out for weeks) and wait until I could watch it at home, but I was swayed by various interpretations I saw online. It’s about American imperialism? Maybe I wasn’t giving the movie enough credit!
After seeing it, I’m not quite as impressed with some of the interpretations, because the movie isn’t very subtle about the ideas it’s trying to get across. But it definitely has ideas, and unlike other adaptations and “inspired by” versions of The Odyssey I’ve seen, it brings those ideas to the forefront, more than the obligation to be a comprehensive or even faithful adaptation.
In other words: as much as I enjoyed Circe, and how it brought an equally opinionated mindset and clear point of view to the material, it was also careful to structure its story to include as much of the original mythology as possible. It felt obligated — or at least, it felt as if Miller were enjoying the challenge — to fit everything into an existing classical continuity.
My other favorite adaptation, unsurprisingly, is O Brother, Where Art Thou? But the Coens use The Odyssey to make fun of themselves and their own pretentiousness, casting themselves as self-important Barton Finks trying to present the classics in a way that the Common Man can understand.
Nolan’s version cuts the parts that don’t fit with his overall message, or reinterprets others. The various vignettes feel included less out of an obligation to present The Odyssey to people, than to use the different elements of the story to pound home his ideas: about hospitality, honor, trust, responsibility, and respect being the foundations of civilization; and hubris, guilt, and regret being associated with its downfall.
So the seemingly unrelated adventures of Odysseus and his crew are actually one example after another of invading the homes of people, demanding resources and subservience. When people refuse to comply, they’re either violating “Zeus’s Law” of hospitality at best, or called monsters and witches at worst. The year that Circe spent treating Odysseus as a charming fixer-upper doesn’t fit into that story, so it was cut. Polyphemus being sentient and capable of being tricked by Odysseus doesn’t fit with that, so there’s no hint of it until the end of that story.
I don’t think it was done flawlessly by any means. The one that seems like an outright mis-step, as opposed to not just being to my preference, is the scene where the ship passes the sirens. I always thought that the only thing Christopher Nolan loved more than loudness was non-linear storytelling, and The Odyssey is largely told through flashbacks, stories, fragmented memories, and a meaningful reveal at the climax meant to tie everything together. But when the sirens appear, Odysseus gives no justification for being tied to the mast other than wanting to be the first man to hear their song and live.
In the moment, it only feels a little bit off, mostly because Matt Damon has the cockiness to sell it. But in both the movie’s timeline and Odysseus’s timeline, he’s already been shown over and over again that his self-aggrandizing arrogance gets him into trouble. He’s supposed to be a thoroughly haunted and shamed man by that point in the story, but it’s played as a cocky “Let’s give ’em a listen!” But the whole reason for the scene to exist in this movie is for his account at the end, where he describes longing and regret and the idea of wanting something so badly but knowing that you don’t deserve it.1
I think the even more interesting aspect of The Odyssey is the one that seems to directly contradict the core of the original: removing all of the gods. I wasn’t blown away by most of the dialogue in the movie, but I really liked Athena’s response to Odysseus’s claim that the gods don’t speak in ways that humans can understand: “Who doesn’t understand thunder? Fire? A child’s smile? A good harvest?” The basic idea is echoed throughout, especially in the scenes with Calypso, that all of these characters have more control over their actions and their fates than they like to admit.
They’re not separate ideas, since the frequent mention of “Zeus’s Law” is at the heart of it. Characters insist that the law is universal, and that everyone understands it: show hospitality to that poor beggar, since he might be a god in disguise. When someone reminds Antinous of this, he stops chewing the scenery just long enough to point out that this particular old man clearly isn’t a god.
I don’t know if everyone else picked up on the subtlety, but Antinous is supposed to read as a bad guy. His reaction shows how ritual and tradition (and by extension, modern organized religion) have taken the place of a genuine moral code: the reason to be hospitable to strangers is to avoid punishment from the gods, not simply because it’s the right thing to do. If there’s a codified set of rules, then there are loopholes and exploits, and ways to take advantage of people.
From my vague, half-remembered Cliffs Notes/Wikipedia understanding of Homer’s The Odyssey, that goes almost completely against the entirety of it. It’s all about the gods directly interfering and intervening in the lives of the characters, manipulating them, taking revenge on them, rescuing them at the last minute, or sending them to hell as punishment for a previous transgression. The idea of self-determination doesn’t even enter into it.
Which means that the audience’s appreciation of this movie has little to do with their familiarity with the source material. So even my read of the movie — as somebody who either forgot or never knew that Clytemnestra and Helen were two different people2 — is as valid as someone who is a foremost authority on it, and has likely forgotten more about the original stories than I ever knew.
I’m referring to the most notable part of the “hot takes” on the movie, where Emily Wilson, whose translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad have become some of the preeminent contemporary versions, wrote a pretty condescending review of the movie for The London Review of Books. She got a lot of praise and then a ton of flak for it, of the “who does she think she is?” variety. To her credit, she seems pretty good-natured about all of it. And that’s as it should be, since her take on the movie, which I largely disagree with, doesn’t have a ton to do with her take on the source material, which I have absolutely no place agreeing or disagreeing with.
She herself distances her own work from the movie, even though it had been cited as a major inspiration for the movie. And that’s also as it should be, even though the idea gets kind of lost as she’s dismissing it as shallow blockbuster entertainment. I’ve seen a few responses to all of this that say everybody needs to back off and be more respectful to her, because the act of translating a work requires not just transliterating it, but understanding it line by line. Knowing how to make the jump not just between languages, but between its original context and its current one.
I say everybody should back off and be more respectful, but not because she’s the translator, but just because it’s the right thing to do. (Which is kind of like using “Zeus’s Law” as justification for hospitality instead of just “being a decent person.”) And especially because a translation and an adaptation are very different things. A translation is obliged to convey as much as possible of the original, the spirit and intent of the story as much as the story itself. There is a standard of “accuracy” there.
But adaptations aren’t obliged to be “accurate.” So in a weird way, The Odyssey is kind of a companion piece to “Wuthering Heights”. A depressing number of reactions to that movie were of the gatekeeping variety, insisting that Emerald Fennell didn’t understand the original, refusing to acknowledge that the movie was trying to do something different than present a cinematic translation of the original.
I’ve seen a lot of takes on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey that start by establishing their bona fides.3 As if an academic familiarity with the classics makes someone more qualified to have an opinion about a work that’s not presented in an academic context. I’m happy whenever a piece of popular entertainment makes people talk about what it said to them, or how it made them feel, instead of whether they got the correct answer.
The Odyssey didn’t make me feel much of anything, but I did like its ideas. And as critical as I am of the self-seriousness of Christopher Nolan and the often over-the-top praise of his fans, I like that he’s built a team of people who like collaborating with him, and I like that he’s interested in popular entertainment that makes audiences think. I’ve tried hard to detect any sign of condescension in his movies, the sense that he feels like he’s got deep ideas that he’s trying to communicate in a way that the uncultured masses might understand, and I just can’t see it. I get the sense he understands that you can still say something without having to give the last word on it.
2026-07-24 04:37:50
Field Notes sends out a monthly newsletter called “Staple Day” to its customers, and as I was going through this morning’s email, I casually read this month’s installment: promoting their new run of notebooks1, a mention on Jeopardy!, some blogger talking about how they use the notebooks, the writer’s commonplace journal, and a discount for people working in education to get their pocket-sized editions of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.2
All pretty standard stuff for a company that… wait, hang on. I’d gotten to the end of the newsletter without even realizing that the notebook-obsessed blogger they’d mentioned was me. It was this post in particular.
Any time something I write “escapes containment,” I go back and re-read to gauge how it sounds to someone who’s not already familiar with my usual bullshit.3 So I was surprised by how much that post sounds not just critical, but dismissive! Saying I was “under the thrall” of the company’s marketing. Calling them “overpriced for what they are.” Claiming “the paper isn’t that great.”
An embarrassingly odd thing to be linked to in a marketing newsletter. Even if you assume, like I did, that the photo of a desk full of the things and a commitment to subscribe to them4 would make it clear that “overpriced for what they are” meant “compared to cheap, purely functional notebooks you can get just about anywhere” and “the paper isn’t that great” meant “for fountain pens, which isn’t how most people want to use them anyway.”
It also made me hyper-aware of all the times I’ve called the Playdate a “hipster GameBoy,” assuming that of course it was clear to everyone that I’m still deeply enamored of the platform and the entire philosophy behind it. Seems pretty arrogant of me to assume that people would even know who I am, much less that I’ve got a long history5 with the platform. Or that it literally saved my interest in game development, after decades of working in the industry had pretty much killed it.
But then I realized that the Field Notes newsletter isn’t a marketing newsletter with some community mentions contained in it; it’s a community newsletter with some marketing blurbs contained in it. Meaning the focus isn’t just on selling the product, but paying attention to how people use it and the ideas behind selling the product in the first place.
The old The Adventurer catalog from LucasArts was the main thing responsible for my becoming such a big fan of the company, and the interviews and “Games to Play After Hours”6 sections made me have parasocial relationships with the people who worked there long before I met them. It was a focus on the community of fans, instead of the market of customers, that sold the philosophy of the product just as much as the product itself. And it’s an idea that Telltale’s community team worked hard to carry on, at least in the early years.
I also suspect it’s one of the clearest generational breaks between Gen-X and millennials, which I’d been starting to think was a purely made-up distinction, as they kept getting older and I remained steadfastly a 40-year-old trapped in a 55-year-old’s body. But I was so infected by Late Night With David Letterman — my belief that his mockery of General Electric genuinely was stickin’ it to The Man — that I think it metastasized into a constant, impotent cynicism. It’s only people younger than me who can genuinely like things, instead of always feeling the need to be suspicious of them, or qualify my enthusiasm by making it clear I’m neither a shill nor a sellout.
Maybe that’s too optimistic. Maybe the prevalence of influencer culture, and being constantly surrounded by grifters, has made it even worse. But it’s comforting for me to believe that it’s a mindset that will gradually die off, and good riddance.
The reason I feel strongly about it at all is that I genuinely believe small, ethical businesses are going to be a huge part of what saves us. I canceled Amazon Prime about a year ago, after many years of wondering whether I was part of the problem and then shrugging for the sake of convenience. The most surprising thing has been realizing just how unnecessary it was the whole time. I haven’t missed it at all. It just had me often buying stuff I didn’t need.
I had come to the conclusion that if small businesses couldn’t compete on price — which was perfectly understandable when you’ve got a corporate giant doing everything it can to undercut everyone and drive out competition — then they had to make up for that some other way, like curation. When I kept going to local businesses, not finding something in stock, and then seeing them just go to the computer and order it, I started to wonder what was the advantage of shopping locally in the first place? “Support small businesses” sounded more like altruism than anything else: no, they don’t have what you want in stock, and they’ll have to order it online just like you would have, but at least it’ll cost more!
But now, I am 100% back on the small business bandwagon, except this time for partly selfish reasons. None of the logistics issues have changed; I could still go on Amazon and most often find exactly what I’m looking for, get it cheaper, and get it faster. But the real cost to me turns out to be exactly the same thing that makes Amazon’s prices so cheap: volume.7 Any saving I’d have on any one item is counteracted by the fact that I’m also buying a ton of shit I don’t need.
But the less selfish and more feel-good part of the equation is even more true than it’s ever been. Small businesses are unlikely to ever buy out your doctor’s office and make you wonder how a bookstore ended up dealing in HIPAA violations. And they’re unlikely to be contributing to the net worth of one of the world’s most embarrassing billionaires.8
And I still say, as cruel as it may sound, that if a small local business never has what you want in stock, but just offers to order it for you online, so you just go home and do it yourself, there’s a good possibility it deserves to go out of business. Not because a small business needs to have an inventory as large as the world’s largest online retailer. But because a good small business has more going for it than just “we have that in stock.” Maybe they’ve built a nice environment that’s enjoyable to be in even if you don’t buy anything. Maybe they don’t have what you came in for, but they can recommend something you’ll like even more. Maybe they’ve built up a community and an ethos, that makes you feel like you’re buying an idea as much as a product.
Maybe they just give you a sticker and a lollipop. As part of my latest weird thing with fountain pens, I recently ordered one that cost a couple dollars more than it would have on Amazon, simply because the company’s YouTube videos had been so helpful. The box took a little over a week to get here. It contained a free set of sample inks for being a new customer and giving them my email. The box also had a sticker, and a Tootsie Pop.
Doesn’t seem like the most consequential thing, especially since I don’t like lollipops. But it just made me happy to be reminded that there were real human beings involved on both sides of that transaction. And it made me even happier to remember that the person who put a lollipop in my box almost certainly wasn’t having to pee in a jar to meet their quota.
2026-07-22 04:54:32
St Vincent’s music doesn’t always hit with me, but when it does, it hits hard. Actor is one of my top 10 favorite albums, even though I don’t particularly like half of the tracks on it.
A huge part of that comes from Annie Clark treating it like a concept album, a bunch of songs loosely related around the idea of a fairy tale gone wrong. It’s more explicit on some tracks than others, but there’s a consistent theme of darkness roiling beneath the peaceful, idyllic surface. And more interesting to me, as suggested by the title, repeated themes of deception, repression, and keeping up appearances.
But I think what made it hit so hard with me was Clark’s looking to fairy tale music as inspiration. In interviews, she called out the swirling music of Sleeping Beauty in particular. The most recognizable is probably “Once Upon a Dream”.
Listening to that music again now, for the first time in forever, gives me a greater appreciation for how much is going on in Actor and in Sleeping Beauty. The movie was already referencing something that was decades old by the time it was made, iterating on the formula that built the studio, not just by commercializing it, or solidifying the “Disney style” (although there is plenty of that going on too), but by bringing fine artists to it. It’s easy to think of Disney as being a straight line from Snow White to The Little Mermaid, simplifying and streamlining every aspect of both storytelling and production design, making everything more uniform and conventional. It’s good to be reminded that there was still a push to be unconventional and experimental at that point within the studio’s history, and that philosophy wasn’t just limited to Fantasia and then abandoned.
But I also realized that the music itself has a specific style, and as somebody who’s ignorant of music history, I can only call it “mid-century orchestra.” Very specific arrangements and choice of instruments, each with a very specific but still immediately recognizable connotation. (e.g. “Music for small animals causing mayhem.”) As somebody who’s been going to the Disney parks my entire life, it’s so ubiquitous that I’ve grown to just think of it as “music,” similar to how some Americans insist that they don’t have an accent, simply because the American accent is so familiar to them.
So I think with Actor, Clark was drawing attention to what the music itself was doing. Obviously, there’s the most recognizable sense of subverting a fairy tale with a chorus repeating “paint the black hole blacker.” But it wasn’t just parody or pastiche, either. It’s an acknowledgement that there’s genuinely interesting stuff going on with this music, and the way it can instantly trigger an emotional response.
My favorite track from Actor is “Black Rainbow,” and I love hearing it years later, from a live recording performed at the Royal Albert Hall. I definitely am not claiming that “I was a fan before she was popular,” but it is satisfying to remember first hearing the song on the album (which Clark said she initially did completely with GarageBand), and then as part of a five-piece band on Austin City Limits, and then finally with a full orchestra. That most powerful moment in the song getting more and more powerful with each new arrangement, that high-concept song about depression and rage going from alt-rock fairy-tale subversion to a full-on fire-breathing dragon.
Another thing I never noticed about Sleeping Beauty until today is that none of the characters, including Aurora/Briar Rose, cast shadows. So I’ve also got a new appreciation for Actor asking, “what if she does cast shadows, but you just can’t see them?”
2026-07-21 05:36:21
Book
Strange Pictures by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion
Synopsis
Seemingly unrelated stories about drawings found on an abandoned blog, a child’s drawing in pre-school, and an art teacher who’d made a quick sketch on the day he went missing, all reveal a sinister story that stretches back decades.
Notes
I read the sequel, Strange Houses, first, because the original always has a long wait at the (virtual) library. There’s been a lot of buzz around the book, both as an unusual and accessible mystery-horror story, and because of its unknown author, who only appears online wearing a mask.
Both books are very similar, in that they’re written in the creepypasta style, where “here’s what happened” takes precedence over the inner minds of the characters. And they go to great lengths to put all the facts before the reader, giving multiple diagrams, charts, or timelines to illustrate every detail mentioned, with all of the pertinent facts highlighted in bold type. It often feels like overkill, a combination of the author wanting to “show his work” and also wanting to pad out the page count.
I think Strange Houses works a little better for me. Both because it was the first I read, so it still had that novelty, but also because it played more to the author’s strengths. Some of the sections in Strange Pictures that tried to get into the inner minds of the characters were pretty effective, especially when it was around the suspense or the horror. But more often, it revealed that they were caricatures or stereotypes — unless it was a topic the author’s personally familiar with, like school clubs or online culture — and were prone to melodrama.
Verdict
Has a lot of the same appeal as reading creepypasta, or if you’re older, a book of murder mystery short stories of the “did you spot the clue?” variety. Or mystery/horror manga like The Kendaichi Case Files, which I imagine were an inspiration. The situations are all wildly contrived, and the people investigating often take extreme leaps in logic and are always proven correct, so it’s not exactly a satisfying mystery. But as a bunch of mildly creepy stories to read before bedtime, it works as advertised.