2025-10-01 06:59:52
Inspired by my friend Rain’s annual tradition, I’m pledging to spend my (little) free time in October getting caught up on spooky movies I’ve never seen, or ones that I haven’t seen in years. Last night I started with Horror of Dracula (or just Dracula outside the US), the 1958 Hammer Horror classic with Peter Cushing and not nearly enough Christopher Lee.
This one is such an undisputed classic that it’s almost inexcusable that I haven’t seen it before. In my defense, I have seen much of it, but never in its entirety. And the imagery is ubiquitous enough that I can recognize most of it on sight. I just took it for granted that I got what it was all about, and the act of actually watching it was nothing more than a formality.
I was mistaken! It surprised me how much I enjoyed it. I went in knowing that I’d have to make plenty of concessions to account for its being made in the 50s, its being a Hammer picture, and its being based on a book that I honestly have never liked. So I was surprised to see how many signs there were that these guys really knew what they were doing!
After a ponderous opening with some of the worst music I’ve heard in a movie, we see the familiar beginning of the story, with Jonathan Harker arriving at the curiously empty Castle Dracula to take a new job with the Count, in this version as his librarian. He’s quickly met by a nightgown-wearing woman, though, who warns him that the Count is evil and begs him to help her escape.
We meet the Count, and he doesn’t have any of the immediately-visible weirdness of Nosferatu or Bela Lugosi’s or Gary Oldman’s versions; he’s just a handsome dude who takes care of everything politely and efficiently. But then we get the first major deviation: Harker writes in his diary about his real plans, acknowledging that he’s not the hapless dipshit from the original story and most adaptations, but a vampire hunter working in league with Van Helsing!
(Of course, he later goes on to do one of the single stupidest things any character has ever done in any horror movie ever. But I guess if he didn’t, there’d be no movie left).
There are several small but clever changes like this throughout, and especially after recently seeing Nosferatu and noticing its deviations from the original book, I really appreciated how much this movie reworked the original. It’s a complete Hammerization: it excises as much as possible of the boring stuff or psychological/psychosexual material, and just spends all its time advancing the plot and keeping it a story about vampire hunters.
I love this version of Lucy. Mostly just by taking her hair out of braids, she seems to undergo a complete transformation from innocent to monstrous. I’ve seen stills from later in the movie several times over the years, and I never made the connection that it was the same character.
And as for the rest of it, it’s almost exactly what I want from a mid-century adaptation of Dracula. Everything keeps moving, innocents are in peril but neither completely powerless nor completely innocent, and the comic relief is overlong and corny as hell.
I would have liked to see more Christopher Lee, though. I’m guessing that he’s a larger presence in the various sequels. I wonder if it would’ve spent the entire makeup budget of the film trying to cover up his prominent five o’clock shadow. (Or maybe that was a key element of his undead character? I prefer to think that the man was just too virile to keep from poking through layers of vampire makeup).
He’s as suave as I’d always expected, not bothering to bring any eastern-European business to the character, both because it’s a little xenophobic but just as much because all of the locations have been quietly relocated to Germany. Or at least the British section of Germany.
Most delightful to me was how the last scenes of the movie transform into a kind of gruesome Benny Hill bit. Especially when Dracula is shoveling dirt into a grave and he spots Van Helsing approaching. He gives the perfect “oh shit!” expression, tosses the shovel aside, and makes a mad dash into the castle. During the ensuing chase, he keeps looking not like the fearsome King of All Vampires, but as if he’s thinking “oh no is this the end of poor Dracula?!”
So I think I’m off to a good but early start to my October spooky-movie viewing. I don’t think I’m going to be able to watch one a night, but I’ll try to cram in as many as possible while I’m avoiding all the tasks I’m supposed to be doing this month.
2025-10-01 01:00:00
Archival photo of early greyhound racing from the Emeryville Historical Society
EDIT: IT HAS COME TO MY ATTENTION that the events described below were at horse racing, not greyhound racing as I had been remembering for the last twenty-or-so years. As the great movie star HAL-9000 once said: “my mind is going… I can feel it… I can feel it…”
My favorite song by The English Beat is “Mirror in the Bathroom,” but that may be partly just because I can never remember the actual title of “Save it for Later.” Every time I try to search for it, it runs away and lets me down.
The band has more significance for me as an adult than it did in the 1980s, because I remember they were playing at a dog-racing track in Emeryville, California on the night that I came out to my best friends. My friends were cool, and the band was pretty cool, too.1
I had actually forgotten that all three of those things (dog racing, coming out of the closet, The English Beat) happened on the same night until I started writing this post. That wasn’t a venue that I’d specifically planned for the occasion; I guess it was just long overdue and it was just a question of time. As the Grass Roots said: sooner or later, love is going to win.
2025-09-30 07:29:08
Last night I finally watched The Innocents from 1961, after years of seeing praise for it from people on the internet convinced me to spring for the Criterion Collection edition.
Things did not start out well. I actually started watching it a few weeks ago, but gave up less than a half hour in, partly because using the PlayStation 5 as a Blu-ray is a drag, but also because not much seemed to be happening. The cinematography is outstanding, but even allowing for how short attention spans have gotten since the 1960s, it seemed to be inexcusably slow to get going.
Once it does get going, though, you can entirely see why the movie has the reputation it does. It is intensely creepy. The imagery is far more tame than anything you’d see in horror movies today, but is easily as effective. The sinister face of a man visible just outside a window in darkness. A woman in black standing in the reeds in the distance, just watching in broad daylight. A hand reaching up in the darkness — suggesting Miss Giddens’s devotion at the beginning of the movie and Miss Jessel’s desperation at the end.
I don’t want to be too critical of Mike Flanagan’s mini-series The Haunting of Bly Manor, since it was aimed at a different type of audience, and it was trying to do something almost entirely different. But it is remarkable to consider how much it had to go so heavy on the horror imagery, when something far simpler could be so effective.
But the real creepiness of The Innocents is in the psychological. Characters who are truly innocent, left to fend for themselves against forces they’re unable to make any sense of. Deborah Kerr is truly exceptional as a kind of unreliable protagonist who still remains entirely sympathetic. I actually wonder whether the movie works better now than it did in 1961 — I felt as if I were watching her performance with the same sense of detachment I’d give to any 60-year-old movie that was itself a period piece, all without noticing just how much Miss Giddens was losing her grip until it was too late.
A few years ago I read The Turn of the Screw, because like The Innocents it perpetually showed up on lists of the best ghost stories. And I found it impenetrable. It’s so over-written that I couldn’t make sense of it beyond the plot. People would frequently say that the mastery of it is how it leaves it ambiguous whether any of the supernatural occurrences actually happened, or whether it was all in the governess’s head. I just had to take their word for it, because I didn’t get any hint of that at all.
But with this adaptation, that ambiguity is in full force, and it’s the core of what makes this such an unsettling classic. It takes the central conceit of the ghost story — our primal fear that we don’t know what happens after we die — and expands on it to become an existential threat. It’s not just that we don’t know what happens after we die; we don’t even know why we’re here in the first place.
The governess, who’d had a very sheltered and religious fundamentalist upbringing, was dropped into this house by an employer who makes a point of stressing that she’s on her own, and he doesn’t want to be bothered. When you watch it right after the opening titles showing her hands in prayer in the darkness, it’s difficult not to see the analogy: we’ve been dropped onto Earth to fend for ourselves, by a God who refuses to talk to us.
You begin to see why a woman with such a past would cast everything in terms of good vs. evil, how hearing stories of a wicked man and “sinful” former governess would turn into thoughts about vengeful ghosts, and how she’d be unable to understand an otherwise delightful child’s misbehavior as anything other than ghostly possession.
And then the most unsettling question for anyone first forced to question their faith: what if I’m wrong? Throughout, she’s been driven by the conviction that she was doing what must be done to protect two innocent children from being possessed by the spirits of wicked adults. If that’s not the case, then her behavior crosses the line from “inappropriate” to “unspeakable.” By today’s standards, not just Victorian ones, where pretty much everything was unspeakable.
So I think The Innocents is exceptional at suggesting why ghosts are scary. But is it a good ghost story?
I’m still on the fence. Its strength is entirely in its ambiguity; if you go in with either the assumption that it’s entirely supernatural, or it’s entirely psychological, then the story is pretty slight. Either it’s a story about a couple of creepy sightings and a threat that’s mostly benign until a weird ending, or it’s a story about a devout religious woman going insane. Either version on its own would leave me feeling like there should’ve been more.
Which leaves me at a loss for thinking of any ghost stories that actually work for me like I expect them to. Even at the time of The Turn of the Screw, ghost stories were already so common as to be considered trite, and the story even describes itself (through one of its multiple narrators) as an example of raising the bar. But for a genre that’s supposedly so common, I have a hard time thinking of any great ones.
The Others is unquestionably my favorite. It’s been forever since I’ve seen it, so it might have just expanded in my head over the decades, but it was exactly what I want a ghost story to be. Not a postmodern spin, or an extended metaphor, but a good, old-fashioned story about sympathetic characters in a definitely haunted house.
Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House is up there. It definitely is an extended metaphor about families and generational trauma, but it’s never content to let the ghosts be nothing more than a metaphor.
And of course, The Shining is the evergreen example of how I have better taste than both Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King, because I like both the book and the movie. And it, too, lets ghosts be a metaphor for alcoholism and family dysfunction, but also stay ghosts.
But apart from that, I’ve read and seen so many of the books and movies that make Best Ghost Stories lists, and few have really worked for me. I’ve read The Haunting of Hill House and seen both movie adaptations, and I have to say that I just don’t get it.
I watched both The Devil’s Backbone and The Orphanage around the same time, and I liked them both, but Backbone isn’t strictly a ghost story so much as a Guillermo del Toro movie with ghosts in it, and Orphanage I’ve already forgotten almost entirely. Maybe this month would be the perfect time for a rewatch.
And somehow, Poltergeist has never felt like a “ghost story” to me, even though I’m at a loss to explain why, considering that ghosts are kind of its whole thing. Maybe I’m just into the idea of gothic ghost stories, or period pieces?
In any case, for a genre that has a reputation for being overused and played out, I sure have a hard time finding good ones that don’t turn into something else. Even Peter Straub’s Ghost Story felt like a perfect example of “You had one job!!!” because I’m still not entirely clear on whether its villains were technically even ghosts?
Still in the queue is Grady Hendrix’s How to Sell a Haunted House, which I honestly haven’t been that excited to get back into. And I’ve been compiling a list for recommendations of books with classic or modern ghost stories, including Whistle And I’ll Come To You, The Woman in Black, The Apparition Phase, The Little Stranger, The Whistling, and Wuthering Heights. Again, it seems like the perfect month to start reading some of them.
But ultimately, I think I’m really looking forward to another movie that worked for me as well as The Others did. I hope I find one eventually, so that it doesn’t become the unfinished business that binds me to this mortal plane.
2025-09-30 05:15:45
This morning I watched a video about the LA Comic Con, and there was a brief shot of a Sideshow Collectibles statue from Star Wars that I hadn’t seen before. It has Yoda straight-up stabbing a Clone Trooper with his light saber while standing on his chest.
I don’t remember the actual scene; apparently, he’s actually retrieving his light saber after throwing it into the guy’s chest? In any case, even as a man who spends at least 10 minutes a day thinking about the Galactic Empire, I didn’t recall Yoda ever fighting anybody other than the most super-powerful bad guys. It was jarring to see this specific image chosen as the one cool and iconic enough to make a statue out of, since it’s the entire franchise’s main spokesman for The Light Side of The Force depicted skewering a man being controlled by a computer chip in his head.
And sure, I am familiar with the whole Defense vs Offense loophole in The Force. I’m not here to re-litigate any possible war crimes that might have happened so long ago and so far away. For that matter, I’m also aware that even movies directed primarily at kids can’t stay satisfying if the good guys do nothing besides just slicing up robots.
I’m more interested in the optics of the whole thing. More specifically, why the prequels — and why action movies in general — keep turning up the dial on spectacle but are unable to make any of it feel like it has real stakes or consequences. You guys like Yoda, right? And you like seeing magical space samurai flipping around and stabbing dudes with laser swords, right? Well, buckle up, kids!
Anybody who had the misfortune of reading this blog during the summer is well aware of how I got blind-sided by Superman, and spent a lot of time and a lot of words trying to figure out exactly why it came seemingly out of nowhere and hit me so hard. It is so straightforward in its tone and its themes that it explicitly tells you what it’s all about, multiple times. So why did so much of the movie’s message resonate with me as if I’d unlocked its many ambiguous, multi-layered puzzle boxes?
I think it’s simply because it took so many iconic comic-book-super-hero images, which are so clear and so easy-to-read that they’re even corny, and it insisted on inserting them into scenes where a less “yes, throw it all in!” director than James Gunn might’ve shown more restraint. Superman saves a squirrel in the middle of a battle! Superman uses his body to shield an actual girl scout! Superman holds up a giant monster until he’s able to get a tiny dog to safety! Superman holds up a falling building to allow a panicked woman to drive to safety!
Any one of these would be so obvious that it wouldn’t register as more than “hey, that’s cute, charming, and clever.” That was my initial read of the movie: this is a movie that truly gets the appeal of comic books. And it’s definitely not new; it’s part of the inherent corniness of Superman. Even the Richard Donner Superman included a scene where he rescues a girl’s cat from a tree.
But that was its own scene; I still believe that the 1978 Superman had an ever-present need to signal the audience that everyone was in on the joke. There are the parts that are affectionate nods to the nostalgia of kids’ comic books, and there are the parts that are intended to read like a bona fide grown-up — or at least family-oriented — action movie of the late 1970s. James Gunn’s version refuses to make that distinction. Everything is blended together, corny and cool, all at the same time. And the moments of unashamed corniness are relentless, like Lex Luthor shouting “1A! 1A! 1A!”
And the net effect of all of that, at least on me, is that the slug-fests do double duty as character development. That’s also why the extended battle between Superman and Ultraman at the end feels like such a slog, and is still my least favorite part of the movie. It doesn’t do anything besides offer possible redemption for the Engineer, which I don’t care about, and sell the idea that Superman is more than just his power set, which is something they could’ve gotten across in much shorter time.
I even make an exception for the scene where Mister Terrific is wrecking dudes in a detainment camp, because it both establishes how cool he is and also shows Lois witnessing first-hand the kind of thing that Clark does regularly, instead of just watching it from within the offices of the Daily Planet. And also the song is catchy.
But the larger net effect is that it makes the spectacle have stakes again. One of the most baffling things about the first time I saw the new Superman was why I felt such anxiety seeing the buildings of Metropolis falling over like dominoes while the city was threatened by an inter-dimensional rift or whatever. This is exactly the kind of meaningless spectacle-of-destruction that’s so common to 21st century movies that it’s completely boring. Scenes of buildings getting destroyed and car chases are the moments when my eyes glaze over and I just let the VFX people have their fun for a few minutes, waiting until the movie goes back to showing me something I care about. But here, I was genuinely concerned to see so much damage being done to a fictional city that we hadn’t even gotten that familiar with yet.
And it’s simply because the movie’s shown us repeatedly that Superman spends as much time protecting the city as he does punching bad guys. I got invested in it just because my hero was invested in it.
So going back to that Yoda statue, my immediate thought was that it was a weird image to focus on such a powerful hero killing some faceless soldier. The idea that the quicker and easier path isn’t the most powerful one is kind of his whole deal. It’s more interesting when the work is harder for the heroes because they can’t just win, they need to win the right way. The stakes are higher, and the scenes are more interesting. (Even beyond the obvious fact that there’s no mortal threat to Yoda not just because he’s super-powerful, but because this is a prequel to movies where we saw him very not dead).
I love big, loud action movies, so obviously I’m not opposed to spectacle for its own sake, and I’m not opposed to giving characters plot armor. But I so frequently hear other action movie fans insist that it’s practical effects vs CGI that makes all the difference, and the reasons so many blockbusters feel so empty is because it’s all green screens and not “real.” I think that the problem is deeper than that. An audience can still get engaged and invested in VFX-heavy spectacle as long as we’re given a reason to care about it.
2025-09-29 11:00:55
My favorite thing in One Battle After Another is Jim Downey’s performance as a shitty, racist, rich white man who’s part of a shadowy organization of other shitty, racist, rich white men called the Christmas Adventurers Club. There’s a scene near the end where he has only one line: “A semen demon?” and he delivers it so brilliantly. Fully aware that it’s an absurdly silly punchline, but also fully aware of exactly why it works.
That’s not my favorite of his scenes; I really liked his first scene in the movie, in which he’s helping induct a new member into the club. Unfortunately, I can’t remember any of the lines in that scene, in much the same way that I can’t remember conversations from my childhood so many years ago.
The movie is long, is my point. I’d read and heard many, many breathless reviews of One Battle After Another that described it as “taut” and “excellently paced” and said that it doesn’t feel like it’s almost three hours long. And I wish that I’d seen the same movie that those people did, because I needed not one but two bathroom breaks, and I’d swear that by the end of it, my beard and fingernails were visibly longer than they had been when I went in.
When I say “I wish I’d seen the same movie that they did,” it’s not just me being sarcastic. I genuinely do wish that I could’ve connected with the movie that strongly, because there’s a ton of outstanding stuff in it. Brilliant performances from every single member of the cast, with Chase Infiniti, Benicio del Toro, and Sean Penn being standouts. An approach to storytelling that lets ideas gradually unfold and weave in and out of each other in a way that feels novel, while rarely feeling too showy or “art-movie” experimental.
I can still remember the first time I saw Children of Men, and how it felt as if I was watching something that was taking command of the potential of cinema and showing me something unlike anything I’d ever seen before. There’s an entire, lengthy sequence crammed into the middle of One Battle After Another, showing DiCaprio and del Toro working their way into and then escaping from a safe house for immigrants, all while a riot is taking place on the streets outside. And it doesn’t feel as if the movie is offering up a set piece or a showcase, but simply that we’re following the action as it happens. It was only after the sequence was over that I appreciated just how much had gone into it.
I can also remember the first time I saw The Untouchables, and being struck by how it seemed to break from bullet-heavy, hyper-violent action movies at the time by showing the real damage that bullets (or a baseball bat) could do to human bodies. One Battle After Another isn’t anywhere near as gory, but there was a sequence where the revolutionary group is falling apart that suddenly shocked me back into being extremely aware of gun violence. Characters we’d become familiar with are dispassionately taken out without warning, and I felt every shot.
And even though it rarely feels like it’s drawing attention to its own filmmaking, there are moments that take deliberate and purposeful control over the camera. An extended car chase over rolling hills through the desert, seen from a camera that seems to be mounted on the front of the pursuing car and dangerously too close to the road. Or my favorite: a very short shot where Infiniti’s character hurriedly gets into a car, and we see it from a camera that seems to be mounted onto the door as she slams it and begins driving away.
All of that is without mentioning how well it handles issues that are depressingly relevant. There are several scenes showing the plight of immigrants being detained or in hiding — as well as citizens who just happen to not be white — and they’re presented matter-of-factly, urgent without being didactic. The movie doesn’t need to tell you that this shit is injustice; any human being with a soul can recognize that. I thought the most effective parts of the movie had a high school dance being interrupted by camo-wearing military, or even more than that, scenes of kids who refuse to get off their smart phones even while an urgent crisis is going on around them.
The idea should be clear to white, middle-class audiences like myself: these aren’t inscrutable aliens to be seen and pitied from a comfortable distance; they’re human beings just like everyone else, simply trying to live their lives in peace.
Which leads back into the scenes with the Christmas Adventurers Club, and Downey’s performance in particular. Most of the recognizable actors in One Battle After Another dispense with their usual, recognizable mannerisms and disappear into their roles. (And Sean Penn completely transforms into a bigoted psychopath with a distinct and unnerving set of facial tics and a manner of walking that seems as if he’s unable to move all of his joints). Downey distinctly doesn’t do that; I think his performance works so well for me specifically because I was aware the entire time that this was Jim Downey, and I’m a particular fan of his writing and work with SNL.
His scenes are surreal and absurd, introducing a self-appointed Illuminati of rich, entitled, white men in positions of power, pulling the strings while being openly racist, misogynist, and out of touch, all while sharing ridiculous Christmas-themed oaths and secret knocks. Tony Goldwyn’s character describes the group as being “better than other humans,” and he manages to deliver it not just as bigotry, but as if it’s a solemn responsibility. A true believer in the White Man’s Burden.
And Jim Downey seems to delight in showing complete contempt for these clueless, awful, white men by portraying one of them. Showing us the absurd banality of their evil; they’re hopelessly dated, out-of-touch, and buffoonish. Capable of perpetrating very real harm, but they don’t deserve our fear, just our mockery. It never feels like he’s winking at the camera, but it always feels like he’s deliberately showing the audience what a real asshole looks and sounds like, and enjoying every second of it.
I get the sense that some fans of the movie would be furious with me for even mentioning that there’s a shadow organization in the movie, and that I’m spoiling one of the biggest plot revelations. But I really want people who’d be open to this movie to go see it, because there’s so much that it does well. And knowing that it has such a dark sense of absurd humor is exactly the kind of thing that would make it connect with me.
This is the first Paul Thomas Anderson movie that I’ve seen since Boogie Nights, which I absolutely hated. Enough to swear off any of his non-music-video work, even while everyone I knew was raving about how brilliant his films are. And even while many of my friends are huge fans of his work, while he attracts so much great talent, and while so many artists and entertainers that I like are fans of him and his work. If nothing else, this movie has convinced me to go back and watch several of his movies that I’ve missed, since it feels like an enormous cultural blind spot.
It’s entirely possible that they’ll remain movies that I can appreciate but never really connect with. But I do think that there’s a roughly two-hour-long masterpiece inside of One Battle After Another, and it just had almost an additional hour of material that didn’t work for me.
2025-09-28 12:31:46
Dead of Winter is a thriller starring Emma Thompson as a woman traveling to a remote lake in Minnesota to go ice fishing, when she stumbles upon a pair of kidnappers who are holding a young woman hostage for some mysterious purpose. So in other words, it has almost nothing to do with the Paddington movies.
A more obvious comparison would be to Barbarian. Dead of Winter doesn’t have anything like that movie’s sense of humor, but both are centered around a normal woman who’s pulled into a horrific situation because she chooses to do the right thing.
But the most affecting scene for me in Dead of Winter involved the same thing as the most affecting scenes in Paddington: a moving act of kindness from an unexpected source.
The motivation here isn’t nearly as noble or selfless. Characters in this movie are largely driven by desperation. But throughout the movie, we’ve seen flashbacks to main character Barb’s past (in which she’s played by Thompson’s real-life daughter Gaia Wise) that gradually reveal why she’s chosen to come to this lake in the middle of nowhere during whiteout conditions. And we’ve seen her desperate search for something of extreme sentimental value, and if you’re like me, we’ve wondered why she’d devote so much time to the search while in the middle of a tense life-or-death situation. So the unexpected payoff of all that was extremely affecting.
There’s an awful lot to like about Dead of Winter. I’d heard reviews say it was kind of a “Fargo-lite,” with most reviews praising Thompson’s performance and describing her as going “full Marge Gunderson” with her accent. I don’t think that’s the case at all; they do kind of overdo the “sore-y” but overall, this movie is a lot more grounded than Fargo, and it doesn’t get nearly as much mileage out of playing with the idea of “Minnesota Nice” confronted with selfishness and evil.
The screenplay does a particularly good job with exposition. The details of the story take the entire running time to completely unfold, to learn exactly what’s motivating each of the characters and why they’re in this situation, and it’s all delivered naturally. The audience is invited to make the connections themselves, and the story feels much larger as a result.
I was really impressed with most of it. It was a solid, self-contained, realistically-scaled thriller that respected the audience’s intelligence and told its story well. And then the ending came along, which knocked it back down a few pegs. It’s not horrible, and it doesn’t come completely out of left field. But it did feel kind of sloppy for a story that had otherwise felt so tightly and confidently delivered. It felt as if stuff started happening because it was a movie, more than because it fit the story.
I liked that it was left a little ambiguous what the theme of the movie was intended to be, assuming there was the intention of a theme beyond “a tight thriller about a Minnesotan woman versus kidnappers.” Throughout, Barb fights back against villains who are more ruthless and much more heavily-armed not by becoming a super-hero, but by being clever. And she delivers a pretty lengthy monologue at one point — the kind of monologue that seems specifically written to appeal to actors like Thompson — that’s all about how her great-grandfather survived a deadly blizzard by pushing forward and refusing to give up.
You might then conclude that it’s about the strength and resilience of “normal” women who refuse to give up. But Judy Greer’s character is also an example of a woman who refuses to give up in the face of adversity. And without spoiling anything, I’ll say that she’s clearly not intended to be a role model.
So I think that the more significant theme of resilience is about refusing to give up our values of kindness and compassion, insisting on helping people who need our help even when it feels like we’re powerless to do anything. It implicitly asks the question why are we so bent on survival? Why do we cling to life and keep relentlessly pushing forward? And it offers the simple answer: we’re here for each other.