PROLOGUE

It’s a longer one this month. If you want to read a movie review, that’s up first in Art; in Craft, I dive into some Ursula Le Guin excerpts. If you’ve the patience for both, I think they complement each other in an interesting way.

This is another edition where I attempt a degree of deeper thinking. It reads to me, at plenty of moments, as trite. 

Through practice, I will get better at meaningful reflection. I am reminding myself that critical thinking itself requires practice; I’m also reminding myself that the goal of this newsletter is not for me to sound smart, much as I seek to project intelligence regardless. As always, I hope this month’s newsletter stands as a place to start conversations. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

ART

One Battle After Another.

The first I saw of One Battle After Another was in the previews ahead of Sinners. The latter had drawn me out to the movie theatres after a long absence, and I was eager to take in my first cinema experience since Dune II.

As a theatre artist who enjoys and stages plays at theaters, I feel an obligation to use the more specific, if perhaps more conceited, “cinema” to refer to a place where we go to see movies on a big screen. When I refer to a “cinema experience,” I don’t mean to say I watch movies that infrequently—a cinematic experience is its own beast, characterized by the adjective-noun form instead of noun-noun. When I say “cinema experience,” I mean to say “an experience at the cinema.” “Going to the movies.”

Now I set the aside aside. I’m not here to talk about how the  above two experiences are different—I’m sure you have some idea. I have my own definitive experience of what movie**going** ought to be: the IMAX theatre at Jordan’s Furniture, Interstellar, the basso rumbling in the core of my body as the Endurance took off. Me, rising into space with Joseph Cooper’s crew, the misty Earth diminishing beneath a cascade of fire.

While Dune II reminded me of that otherworldly experience, Sinners returned me to the habit of moviegoing. While I cannot deny ticket prices are high, well… they’re cheaper than a lot of theatre tickets; I can regularly find decent discounts; and with regards to the pricing complaint I hear about perhaps most often, I truly don’t care to spend more money in order to listen to myself chew popcorn over the carefully-crafted work of a team of audio designers and technicians. I typically find popcorn to be an underwhelming snack, anyhow.

To review: Interstellar → a whirlwind of a decade → Sinners → Sinners pre-roll ads → ad for One Battle After Another → etc. etc. Sinners is an awesome movie, by the way. It’s slick, it’s stylish, it’s got great music, and it’s got fun characters and theming. It’s a movie’s movie—I think its box office sales agree with me. It was enough for me to want to make a habit of seeing films with friends, and I was back again in August, if I have my dates right, for the new Demon Slayer… where there was another trailer for One Battle. 

This film is getting pitched well enough, huh? I’d seen trailers on YouTube in the interim: a pregnant woman hip-firing a machine gun, a wan Benicio del Toro consoling Leonardo DiCaprio in the midst of the latter’s nervous fit, a driving and riffy piano-drums duet… It seemed plenty interesting. I’d never seen the work of its writer/director, this “Paul Thomas Anderson” guy, but the buzz around the movie seemed to indicate he was good.

Then the reviews dropped. Like with my reflection on season four of The Bear—edition April 2025, “*The Bear* VS Sonic the Hedgehog”—I wanted to hold off on reading protracted commentary on the film before I’d formed my own opinion. Given how much I love to read a good artistic critique, this was agony to me, but I had enough snippets to subsist off of, most of which boiled down to “It’s awesome” (which may have actually even been the full and exact language of that particular recommendation).

I had an odd Thursday off early in the month, so I hauled my butt to a cinema just a bit past noon to snag one of the aforementioned decent discounts. I remember trailers for 28 Years Later, a handful of films I keep seeing in subway ads, and a particularly raunchy-looking adaptation of Wuthering Heights (a lot of BDSM that I didn’t know about in that Victorian book, if the film adaptation is faithful).

Then One Battle itself. 

My goodness. Like Sinners, a movie’s movie, though in its own way. I was swept away by its score, its scope—I will happily sit through three hours of movie as long as I’m enjoying it. Transport me, filmmakers. And I was struck by the movie’s prescience. It depicts a world where a militarized state inflicts evil both cruel and banal, tyranny of racism and captivity alongside and intertwined with tyranny of bureaucracy. It features rebels in it for the cause and rebels in it for the thrill, altruistic and selfish and tired and earnest and furtive and bold, depending on the wind.

Family is at the core of the film, which revolves around a burned and burnt-out revolutionary (DiCaprio) seeking his daughter (Chase Infiniti) after the pair is separated by a governmental raid on their home. (It was striking, the way in which the carbine-toting soldiers in body armor and camouflage wore patches that said “POLICE”). A dour-faced antagonist seeks to hunt down Infiniti’s character, Willa, in order to tie up loose ends ahead of his acceptance into a club of uber-racists that is as hilarious as it is absurd as it is probably not too far-fetched. The film itself is apparently loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s book Vineland.

The acting was fantastic. I have misgivings about DiCaprio’s personal character, but I have always been charmed by his onscreen characters; based on this movie and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he seems to play “washed-up” very well. Benicio del Toro was beguiling, as he often is. It is cutting to see his character’s level-headed response to a crisis next to that of DiCaprio’s Bob. The latter is a drug-addled white man who tags many a sentence with “viva la revolucion” and has been in hiding for sixteen years; the former is a Latino community leader who has to deal with the realities of the circumstances every day. The rest of the cast was similarly charismatic, and were able to balance a tone that was serious as well as darkly absurd.

It would be a little presumptuous of me to speak too much on the film’s direction (P.T. Anderson) and composition, me not being specifically trained in film direction myself. I can say it felt kinetic and compelling, revealing information with a subtle hand and maintaining suspense as well as a sharp sense of humor. The writing was excellent, for much of the same reasons. It’s a film that rewards close attention being paid.

At the same time, I felt as if I was missing something at the end, and I’m not entirely sure what. The central arc, that of Bob and Colonel Lockjaw’s—right?—pursuit of Willa, was resolved in a satisfying manner; the film concludes with a persistent, hopeful call to revolution. I wonder if, given the unjust world the film presents its audience with, I was naively hoping that the whole broken system would crumble by the end, that somehow the moral resolve of the movie would tangibly seep into the world outside the cinema. The former doesn’t, though I think the film’s reflections on love and family are ultimately more profound. With regards to the latter… who knows?

The movie itself, I think, is less about Revolution than it is about the relentless pursuit of the things that matter the most to us. It’s not about saving the world—it’s about taking a stand for one thing, one person, we believe in.

In the midst of a cloud of uncertainty surrounding the future of human-made art in general, One Battle After Another is a sweeping film with a very human message. It’s an assurance that the big screens will still deliver stories that will be replaying in our heads, over and over again.

CRAFT

Looking at Le Guin — a Reflection Upon Reflections

I have determined I am a huge fan of Ursula K. Le Guin.

This is not a product of having experienced many of her books; I think the last novel of hers I read was from the Earthsea series, surely well over a decade ago by now and likely a fair bit longer. That said, I recently finished The Language of the Night on the recommendation of an internet stranger and have been absolutely blown away. Her authorial voice dances with intellect and humor, and is guided by a thoughtfulness that is critical as well as creative. Her wisdom reminds me of my favorite mentors, her empathy some of my most cherished loved ones. I am, it would be fair to say, rather star-struck. I figure the only thing I can do now is read as much of her work as possible so as to cement my admiration of her.

The Language of the Night, it bears mentioning, is not even one of Le Guin’s works of fiction—it’s a collection of her essays and speeches throughout the years, be they forewords found in novels or addresses to science fiction conventions or longform musings about fantasy and “SF” for other publications. The collection is brimming with insight, and its temporal positioning just as the aforementioned genres were becoming more popular makes it a fascinating window into a past literary era as much as a philosophical reflection on the craft as a whole.

There were many passages from the book that resonated with me; I have chosen but a few to reflect upon below. I am not so bold as to assume my reflection may lead to any grand discoveries not yet captured by Le Guin, but rather, I hope that I can simply share these musings of a brilliant author who so moved me, and contextualize where they sit in my own train of thought.

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Le Guin writes a lot about Jungian psychology, a philosophy fascinated with the subconscious and human archetypes. If the body of my psychology education had not taken place around half a decade ago, I would be able to speak more intelligently about his theories. In this essay, Le Guin’s fascination is with that titular “shadow,” her claim being how great writing embraces and examines the shadow, and how fantasy is an excellent medium in which to make the shadow palatable.

When I was a kid, I didn’t consume The Lord of the Rings as a philosophically rich text—at least, I don’t think I did. I have no desire to dismiss kids’ critical thinking abilities, I just can’t place any specific memories of having thought, “Ahh yes… Gollum is indeed a manifestation of Frodo’s psychological shadow, his id, and Sam his superego.” I do feel I remember reflecting on the pity Gandalf advised Frodo to consider for Gollum; it was at least clear to me how Saruman and Gandalf were positioned as mirrors, bearers of wizardly might possessing different relationships with their own ambition.

I like to think Le Guin would have loved Avatar: The Last Airbender for much of the same reason she admired Tolkien’s work. I would hazard to say it is a definitive contemporary example—never mind its original premier was a teensy bit more than two decades ago now—of how fantasy may facilitate deep reflections on serious topics while still being digestible for anyone who might watch it.

I’d like to keep this in mind as I plot out my animated series I’ve written the pilot for. I have yet to fully encounter what “shadow” it might reflect—its palate has been pretty bright so far—but I’ll be staying in touch with what my imagination tells me is valuable to explore as I consider what directions for it compel me.

This particular essay of hers was a fairly direct indictment of how I have viewed mythology. When I read The Lightning Thief with my fourth and fifth-graders, I discuss the meaning of mythology with them, and how ancient peoples developed their gods as a response to things they didn’t understand, things that we now attribute to science.

Le Guin see this as reductionist. She writes—I’m going to reflect on her quote here with this other quote of hers from the same essay—“And insofar as the content of myth is rational and the function of myth is explanatory, this definition is suitable. However, the rational and the explanatory is only one function of the myth. Myth is an expression of one of the several ways the human being […] relates to the world. Like science, it is a product of a basic human mode of apprehension.” Humans are not simply rational—we engage with the world through our experience of our feelings and desires, as well, our phobias and apprehensions, and those escape precise quantification. Evolving from those intangible experiences, myth speaks to something more protean than rational thought.

I think this view of mythology is valuable in how it encourages us to seek inspiration that resonates deeply with us; said line of thinking seems to be her primary point here. I don’t know if the point about originality and authenticity were novel to me; I’ve heard it said plenty of times that the more specific and personal one gets, the more universal their writing will become. I do think it’s interesting, however, how the final image of this essay of hers is a young woman waiting to coax a bolt of lightning, how that ties so beautifully in the context of her examination of mythology. Thunderbolts, after all, are the armaments of Zeus. 

This essay inspires me to reeeeally reach beyond the derivative. One doesn’t mine great inspiration for new Star Wars media by watching Star Wars—they get it by watching samurai films and World War II dogfighting movies.

When I visited Los Angeles with Ryan in the summer of 2024, we ended up visiting the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures at the recommendation of a family friend. I later wrote this bit for a play Ryan and I just finished Draft Zero of:

But Le Guin says those superheroes aren’t the gods. They’re “sub-myths,” a sort of idolatry. Captain America’s potency perhaps diminishes in the eyes of a person from, say, South Africa or Korea. A majority of people, though, have a name for the god of the sky.

In The Language of the Night, Le Guin includes footnotes reflecting on her own words here. In them, she notes a significant change, years later, from her initial perspective:

She doesn’t cite a specific source for the bit about singular usage of the pronoun “they,” so I found a couple. The Oxford English Dictionary, definition I.2 is one example; the publication goes into detail here. Merriam-Webster concurs. If neither of these strike as academic or American enough, the Chicago Manual of Style and the American Psychological Association—the latter the grammarian of my college education—also stand by its use as such.

Given Art and Craft’s readership, I imagine I am generally preaching to the choir in putting these excerpts here. I just loved reading this example of an established author of American English changing her mind after having engaged in self-reflection, and I was tickled that said shift took place, at least in this highly successful writer’s mind, about half a century ago. 

This is a cool essay, with cooler footnotes. No further comments on my end.

This one resonates as… pertinent. It strikes me that the described phenomenon of “writing for a market” is likely the product of living in a capitalist system, or at least seeking to produce profitable artwork in a capitalist system. Now, granted, I think self-censorship would likely occur in a variety of other settings, as well—perhaps to avoid the gaze of a governmental regulatory body. I think that it’s truthful to say that “vulnerability or exposure to an expressed or manifested consensus typically results in self-regulation.”

There are plenty of people wiser than I who have already written about various grave forms of this: Du Bois, Sartre, Mulvey. So, is the key to avoiding self-censorship… the avoidance of submitting oneself to popular consensus once one has released their own work? That takes place after the art is written, though. Is it simply a matter of developing a proverbial thicker skin?

Maybe it’s not that consequential where my cis-white-male expression is involved. After all, the aforementioned philosophers’ exploration of “the gaze” applies to more vulnerable populations: Du Bois speaks to the experience of non-white people presenting themselves differently to a racist society; Mulvey speaks to the experience of women being perceived in a patriarchal society. Le Guin’s own example in this essay specifically recalls a time she presented herself as the genderless—and passably male—“U. K. Le Guin” when she wrote a piece that ended up in Playboy, a decidedly male space. Though she acquiesced to the recommendation of the editor at the time, she expressed chagrin that she’d repressed her own identity as such. To my knowledge, she never withheld her name like that again.

Then there’s the chicken-or-egg aspect of the topic—to what degree does art guide consensus, and to what degree does consensus guide art? I have to wonder whether Le Guin would have censored her own name had many other femme artists put their own names forward. Then again, there is surely a reason they didn’t—consensus is enforced through social consequences and certainly even violence. (“Duh, Michael. Do you think this is news?”)

I’m not sure self-censorship is always negative, when it happens free of fear of violence. Humans are naturally social creatures with a deep desire to belong; particularly in earlier times, belonging was key to our survival.

Speaking of earlier times, I enjoy the example of the production of Spring Awakening I was in in high school. Within this musical—beautiful piece exploring coming-of-age and the dangers that accompany it—is a song called “Totally Fucked.” 

I almost self-censored that title just now! After some reflection, I determined that my audience here can handle explicit language in a neutral context. 

In this song, the titular expletive is repeated many times as the primary singer, Melchior, reflects on an almighty punishment soon to be wrought upon him after an essay on sex he wrote was found amidst the belongings of his recently-deceased friend (the show takes place in 19th-century Germany, and many of its themes center around the dangers to youth that arise when sex is feared and avoided as taboo). So, this being a musical, Melchior sings it out in the face of his damnation.

In my high school’s production, though, we sang the song as “Totally Stuck.” Our director, who had built many community dialogues and talkbacks into our run of the show, didn’t want the discussions around our performances to be rooted in shock that we teens had used the f-word so many times in front of a local audience primarily comprised of friends, family, and community members.

At the time, the cast was rather disappointed. “Why can’t we sing the song as written? It’s what the characters are feeling deeply in the moment!” “What, do these audiences think we don’t already swear?” Michael Towers, though, was mindful of the consensus of our audience, which would already be witnessing content that was substantially harder to swallow over the course of the musical.

Despite whispers that we ought to sing the final performance with full f-bombs, the cast of Spring Awakening sang a clean rendition of the song throughout our run. Perhaps as a product, the discussions that accompanied the shows had the space to fully center topics of sexuality and trust, rather than face the admonition of parents shocked about the language. 

We blunted the language of the piece to make it more palatable for the people who benefited from discussions around it. Despite the voluntary self-censorship, Spring Awakening remains one of the proudest undertakings of my practice of theatre. No regrets there.

I suppose the takeaway for me is then to recognize when I am omitting information in my writing and interrogate why I am partaking in said omission. What eyes do I perceive to be fixing themselves on me and my work? Is my act of withholding a product of my belief that doing so will result in a product with more artistic or cultural merit, or is it because I fear the judgement of a consensus, or even an individual? What is the nature of the consensus I fear, and what power does it have over me?

“A government cannot grant [freedom of speech]. It can only accept it, or deny it and withhold it by force.” Despite this, we’ve seen self-censorship in American mass media regardless in response to the whims of a government that used to “mostly” accept free speech. So there’s the other takeaway I’ve been hearing from thought leaders that this wise author echoes from the past: do not comply in advance.

I mentioned in passing last month that I recently finished a draft of a play I’ve been turning over again and again. I’m calling it Standardized now; it’s about a tutor and his student, the latter preparing for his military aptitude tests and the former trying to convince him to consider a different path. I think my concern with this piece is that I do indeed depict the “how and what,” while failing to dig into the “why.” I want the play to examine the panoply of methods by which the American military targets boys for recruitment; I want to interrogate the implications of my own interest in weaponry and war from an early age; I want to examine why military service is lauded as king amongst the ways an American man can contribute selflessly to his society, and what alternatives to that exist. Right now though, I’m not sure I’m accomplishing that.

What does it take to ask why? Honesty, certainly, with oneself and one’s audience. But then, is it a matter of relentlessly posing questions? Depicting various perspectives and ways of living? Amassing reams and reams of research and expertise before one even sets pen to paper?

AH!! Would that there were an easy answer to everything. I guess I’ll just have to read Le Guin’s full canon to see how she goes about it.

…Maybe that’s a series for the newsletter. “Ursula K. Le Guin: Book by Book.” Perhaps. There are many people more qualified for such an undertaking than I, and probably plenty of such chronicles already.

Then again—and I will gladly cede the last word of this edition to one much wiser than I—Le Guin says herself:

(“fortunately”!!)

—

Michael