Cinemorphosis

Category: TV and Movies

  • The Attention Vultures Descend

    The Attention Vultures Descend

    I watched Netflix’s three-part documentary Idaho Murders: College Nightmare, expecting another true-crime chronicle. Instead, I found a cautionary tale about the moral corrosion of the social media age.

    The murders shattered the illusion of an idyllic college town where doors, friendships, and assumptions of decency had long remained open. Into that atmosphere of trust stepped a doctoral teaching assistant in criminology whose crimes seemed almost grotesquely theatrical: an aspiring expert in criminal behavior who became the very monster he purported to study. The documentary is unsettling not merely because it chronicles an act of staggering brutality, but because it reveals how quickly evil can erupt into places that imagine themselves immune from it.

    Yet the documentary’s most instructive chapter unfolds after the killings, during the long months when investigators had no public suspect. That vacuum of knowledge became oxygen for the internet. Social media influencers rushed to fill the silence, speaking with the confidence of detectives while possessing none of the evidence. Their videos, podcasts, and livestreams transformed ignorance into certainty. Innocent college students—already traumatized by the murders—were publicly identified as suspects, dissected as if they were characters in a murder mystery rather than human beings whose lives could be permanently scarred by reckless speculation.

    These people were not engaged in an earnest search for truth. They were engaged in a hunt for attention. Every accusation, every dramatic thumbnail, every emphatic declaration became another bid for clicks, subscribers, and algorithmic favor. Tragedy had become raw material for personal branding.

    Years ago, Jaron Lanier warned that social media rewards the most primitive parts of our psychology. The platforms appeal less to our reflective minds than to our craving for recognition, outrage, and status. They encourage us to chase attention as if it were oxygen. Watching the documentary, I felt as though Lanier’s warning had escaped the pages of his book and materialized on the screen. The influencers were not simply exploiting a tragedy; they had become creatures shaped by an economy in which visibility matters more than truth and confidence is valued above evidence.

    The documentary left me thinking less about the murderer than about myself. Over the last fifteen years, I have spent enough time on social media to recognize the same impulse in miniature—the subtle desire to post, comment, and share simply because an audience is there. The temptation is rarely malicious, but it springs from the same psychological soil: the hope of being noticed.

    The film made me want to cultivate a new habit. Before posting, I want to pause and ask a simple question: Am I adding light, or am I merely asking strangers to look at me? That brief moment of hesitation may be the smallest possible act of resistance against an attention economy that profits from our worst instincts.

    The documentary’s greatest lesson, then, has little to do with criminology. It is about character. It asks whether we will become citizens who value truth enough to remain silent when we do not know—or whether we will join the growing flock of attention vultures circling every human tragedy, mistaking spectatorship for significance. I know which path I hope to avoid. If that requires changing my relationship with social media, it is a price well worth paying.

  • The Conversion We Never Finish

    The Conversion We Never Finish

    Afflicted by depression, anxiety, and relentless religious doubt, Emmanuel Carrère wrote The Kingdom partly as an act of remembrance—a way of revisiting the years when belief and unbelief tore him apart with equal ferocity. He could summon every argument against faith. Years of therapy had supplied him with a formidable psychological vocabulary, while Nietzsche, Freud, and other skeptics stood ready to dismantle every religious impulse that arose within him.

    Yet every skeptical argument seemed to awaken an equally persuasive rebuttal.

    Nietzsche argued that religion is an escape from reality, a consoling fantasy that allows frightened creatures to imagine a God who knows their names and treasures their souls. Carrère’s reply is disarmingly simple: perhaps anxiety is not evidence against God but one of His instruments. Perhaps our restlessness exists precisely to drive us toward Him.

    The skeptic objects that religious conversion is merely a psychological escape hatch from despair.

    Carrère counters that despair itself may be God’s invitation to conversion.

    The debate becomes impossible to resolve because every objection is absorbed into the very faith it seeks to destroy.

    Yet Carrère eventually discovers that the greatest threat to his belief is not Nietzsche.

    It is Emmanuel Carrère.

    He confesses that he wants to believe too desperately. His longing for faith becomes evidence against the authenticity of that very faith. Like someone compulsively insisting that he is happy, the insistence itself begins to sound suspicious. The more urgently Carrère reaches for God, the more he wonders whether the reaching itself proves that God has already slipped away.

    That dilemma belongs to far more people than religious believers.

    It may describe the human condition itself.

    Our hunger for conversion explains, in part, why we go to the movies.

    For two hours we borrow another person’s destiny. We watch an ordinary soul undergo extraordinary transformation and momentarily imagine the same miracle awaiting us. We feel our throats tighten as Jor-El tells his son that he must become not merely Superman but a light to the world. For one luminous moment we are convinced that greatness, sacrifice, and moral courage are the only things that matter.

    Then the credits roll.

    The spell evaporates somewhere between the parking lot and the nearest café, where we resume discussing office gossip over coffee and cake. The desire for transformation was genuine.

    Its duration was not.

    New Year’s resolutions repeat the same ritual.

    Each January we announce that this year will be different. We join the gym. We buy immaculate workout clothes. We embrace a revolutionary diet and enthusiastically explain to friends how astonishingly “simple” the whole thing is. Six weeks later the gym card has migrated to the back of the wallet, the diet books have become decorative objects, and the only weight we’ve successfully lost is our enthusiasm.

    Social media has industrialized this cycle.

    Every week a new influencer appears bearing the latest gospel of self-reinvention. Follow this morning routine. Buy this supplement. Build this side hustle. Practice this mindset. Soon you will possess wealth, influence, discipline, admiration, and a jawline sharp enough to cut glass.

    Millions eagerly enroll in these digital revival meetings.

    Almost none experience resurrection.

    What they experience instead is rebranding.

    Life increasingly resembles a succession of false conversions.

    We repeatedly announce the beginning of a new chapter, only to abandon the manuscript after the novelty fades. We restart our lives the way aspiring novelists restart first drafts—full of magnificent intentions, derailed by boredom, distraction, or the irresistible glitter of the next shiny object.

    The modern self has become a serial convert without a church.

    We are forever renouncing one identity in favor of another, mistaking novelty for transformation and enthusiasm for character.

  • The Trapdoor Effect

    The Trapdoor Effect

    Alfred North Whitehead argued that religion arises from the desire to discover permanence in a transient world. Schopenhauer believed religion exists because we fear death. Tolstoy reached a more demanding conclusion. Death, he argued, forces us to make a choice: either surrender to despair or reshape our lives so that death cannot rob them of meaning. For Tolstoy, that reckoning culminated in religious conversion.

    Most of us encounter this reckoning in waves. There are seasons when mortality remains an abstraction, politely waiting its turn. Then there are moments when it barges through the front door and makes itself at home.

    The first time that happened to me was in 2004 with the death of football legend Reggie White. He had been born only a month after I was. At forty-three, he died from a cardiac arrhythmia related to sleep apnea. His death shook me, but I eventually regained my footing.

    Then came Lance Reddick.

    His death in 2023 hit me with far greater force. Reddick was sixty—my age. On screen he projected effortless authority. He played towering, intimidating police officers, wore a Tag Heuer as Chief Irvin Irving in Bosch, and somehow combined physical power with artistic refinement as an accomplished jazz pianist. He seemed built to endure. Seeing a man who embodied such strength simply vanish was profoundly disorienting. Nearly every day for the past three years, his death has crossed my mind.

    As if that weren’t enough, Facebook has become an obituary page for my adolescence.

    High school classmates—people who were posting vacation photos, political opinions, and pictures of their grandchildren only weeks earlier—suddenly reappear as memorial tributes. Healthy faces become framed portraits. Birthday wishes become eulogies. A life that looked perfectly ordinary on Tuesday has become a remembrance by Friday.

    The algorithm has quietly become an undertaker.

    Against that backdrop, my own routines begin to feel faintly absurd.

    There I am on my exercise bike, obsessed with burning exactly seven hundred calories in under an hour. I calculate how many grams of omega-3 a can of salmon will contribute to lunch. I debate whether next week’s garage workout should include walking lunges with twenty-pound kettlebells. I fine-tune my health strategy with the seriousness of a NASA engineer.

    And yet another part of me whispers that I am merely organizing deck chairs above a collapsing floor.

    At times I feel consumed by what I call The Trapdoor Effect: the unsettling awareness that beneath the routines of ordinary life—planning meals, exercising, paying bills, booking vacations, arguing over cholesterol, buying retirement clothes—lies an invisible trapdoor that may open without warning. We behave as though the future belongs to us, when in fact we possess nothing more than a reasonable expectation that tomorrow will resemble today.

    That expectation is comforting.

    It is also, perhaps, life’s most necessary illusion.

  • The Great Mutation

    The Great Mutation

    Emmanuel Carrère has become my literary patron saint because he asks the questions I cannot stop asking myself. Of all his books, The Kingdom has lodged itself deepest inside me because it dramatizes the same conflict that has haunted my life: the impossible task of separating myself from Christianity without ever quite escaping its gravitational pull.

    In The Kingdom, Carrère intertwines autobiography with the story of Luke, imagining the evangelist as a writer following the missionary adventures of his hero, Paul. Luke becomes more than a biblical figure. He becomes Carrère’s alter ego, a fellow writer trying to make sense of extraordinary events while simultaneously making sense of himself.

    That double inquiry is what captivates me.

    Carrère interrogates not merely Christianity but his own soul.

    One of the most striking subjects of that interrogation is success.

    By any worldly standard, Carrère has won the lottery. He is one of France’s most celebrated writers. His opinions carry cultural weight. He serves on prestigious literary juries. Filmmakers seek his advice. Publishers court him. His books travel farther than most people ever will. He stays in elegant hotels, dines with influential people, and inhabits the rarefied atmosphere reserved for intellectual celebrities.

    Yet success has not quieted him.

    If anything, it has sharpened his discomfort.

    Part of him believes that his accomplishments have carried him farther from Jesus than closer to him. Although he long ago emerged from what he calls his “Christian period,” the desire to follow Jesus never entirely disappeared. It lingers like an old melody that refuses to leave his mind.

    That desire creates an almost unbearable tension because Jesus demands a way of life that appears to mock nearly every modern definition of success.

    Love your enemies.

    Bless those who persecute you.

    Do not exalt yourself.

    Sell your possessions.

    Take up your cross.

    Act as though this world is passing away.

    Measured against that standard, literary fame begins to resemble an embarrassing distraction.

    Carrère is fascinated by Christianity’s vision of salvation, yet he recoils from its radicalism. The Gospel asks us to hold our earthly attachments lightly. Marriage, children, wealth, reputation, and ambition all become secondary to membership in the family of Christ. Love itself is transformed. Instead of reserving our deepest affection for spouses, children, and friends, Jesus seems to demand an indiscriminate love that embraces everyone equally.

    Carrère pauses here.

    Can love that is equally distributed still be called love?

    Or has it become something so abstract that it evaporates into an ideal rather than a human experience?

    He contrasts this vision with what he sees as the Jewish ideal of the good life. There, holiness unfolds not by fleeing the world but by inhabiting it fully. One marries. One raises children. One prospers through honest work. One celebrates weddings, feasts, and holy days. One delights in family, longevity, generosity, and community. Earth itself becomes the stage upon which covenant is lived.

    Christianity, by contrast, often seems suspicious of precisely those satisfactions. Earthly success is fleeting. Family loyalties yield to discipleship. Riches become spiritual liabilities. This life is preparation for another kingdom.

    Carrère never completely chooses between these competing visions.

    My sense is that he is temperamentally drawn toward the Jewish embrace of earthly life. Yet he cannot stop returning to Jesus.

    Because no one ever spoke like Jesus.

    For Carrère, the singularity of Christ lies not primarily in miracles or doctrine but in language itself. Borrowing the linguistic term hapax legomenon—a word that appears only once in a body of literature—he suggests that Jesus himself is a kind of hapax: an unrepeatable event in human speech.

    He recalls the temple guards in John’s Gospel who return empty-handed after being sent to arrest Jesus.

    Their explanation is breathtakingly simple:

    “No one ever spoke like this man.”

    Carrère believes that even if one stripped away the miracle stories, even if one doubted the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and every supernatural claim, the sayings of Jesus would still stand beside those of Buddha, Laozi, Confucius, and history’s greatest spiritual teachers.

    Something unprecedented happened in those words.

    The New Testament captivates him for another reason as well.

    Some scenes possess the awkward unpredictability of eyewitness memory.

    Who invents the young man who flees naked from Gethsemane after slipping out of his linen cloth? Carrère suspects the embarrassed youth may even have been Mark himself, accidentally preserving his own humiliation in the Gospel.

    Or consider the paralyzed man whose friends dismantle a roof simply to lower him into a crowded room before Jesus.

    These episodes feel too strange, too specific, too gloriously unnecessary to be manufactured.

    By contrast, the Virgin Birth, the bodily Resurrection, and other overtly miraculous episodes leave Carrère unconvinced. They strike him as theological architecture erected after the fact.

    Yet disbelief has never extinguished fascination.

    Quite the opposite.

    Carrère remains mesmerized by what he calls “the Great Mutation.”

    Within only a few generations, an obscure Jewish movement transformed the imagination of the Western world. Millions—and eventually billions—came to believe in the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Eucharist, eternal life, and the astonishing claim that God had entered history as a poor Jewish carpenter.

    When I encounter Carrère’s phrase, “the Great Mutation,” my own imagination travels somewhere entirely different.

    It returns to Saturday evenings in 1978.

    I am alone in the living room watching The Incredible Hulk.

    Dr. David Banner is gentle, decent, almost saintly. He suffers injustice with Job-like patience until one humiliation too many unleashes something volcanic inside him. Suddenly the transformation begins. Muscles swell. Clothes tear. Humanity gives way to myth.

    The catharsis overwhelms me.

    I begin to cry.

    I don’t merely want to become stronger.

    I want to mutate.

    I want my own body to erupt into something so magnificent that every weakness, every humiliation, every fear disappears forever.

    Then the rage subsides.

    The green giant vanishes.

    David Banner returns.

    And finally comes the sequence that broke my heart every single week.

    Banner walks alone down a lonely highway while Joe Harnell’s mournful piano theme, “The Lonely Man,” drifts over the closing credits.

    That was the image I carried inside myself.

    Not the Hulk.

    David Banner.

    The solitary wanderer searching for redemption.

    As a child, I mistook that identification for purity.

    What I could not yet see was the narcissism quietly hiding inside the fantasy. I imagined myself not merely misunderstood but uniquely chosen, destined for some dramatic transformation that would finally justify my existence.

    Looking back, I realize I was already rehearsing the emotional architecture of the religious conversion that awaited me only a year later.

    Long before I met Jesus, I was already waiting for a Great Mutation.

  • Breaking Bad for the Book of Romans

    Breaking Bad for the Book of Romans

    The great stories of the Bible—Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Moses, David, Job, Jesus, and Paul—deserve to be reimagined as a series of prestige television miniseries, each spanning ten meticulously crafted episodes for a platform such as Hulu or Netflix. The goal would not be to produce religious propaganda or anti-religious satire. The series would avoid both sanctimony and cynicism. Its allegiance would be to literature, art, and compelling storytelling.

    Just as audiences were captivated by Walter White’s extraordinary moral descent in Breaking Bad, they could be equally captivated by Paul’s astonishing transformation on the road to Damascus. Few character arcs in world literature rival its dramatic force.

    Just as we recoil from the nihilistic corruption of Sodom and Gomorrah, we recoil from the feral moral depravity that consumes the Roy family in Succession.

    After reading the work of biblical scholars, believers, agnostics, and skeptics alike, I have come to appreciate that the Bible possesses an artistic and literary power that transcends theological debate. Its stories are filled with psychological depth, moral ambiguity, epic conflict, and unforgettable characters. Faith may shape how viewers interpret these narratives, but it need not determine whether they are moved by them. If adapted with intelligence and artistic courage, these stories could stand alongside the greatest achievements of modern television—not because they preach, but because they illuminate the enduring drama of the human condition.

  • The Unlived Life

    The Unlived Life

    In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield compresses an entire philosophy of life into a sentence worthy of Blaise Pascal: “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.” On its surface, the book is about writing—showing up every day, overcoming procrastination, and producing meaningful work. In reality, it is about something much larger. It is about the tragedy of the human condition. Every person carries within himself an unrealized version of who he might have become, yet too often that person dies unborn. Resistance is the invisible executioner. It persuades us that tomorrow is a better day to begin, that comfort is wiser than sacrifice, that another hour of distraction is harmless, and that our highest calling can safely wait until after one more episode, one more dessert, one more purchase, one more excuse. By the time we recognize the fraud, life has become a museum of abandoned intentions. We discover, to our horror, that our greatest betrayal was not committed against other people but against ourselves.

    Pressfield has no patience for sentimental psychology. He describes Resistance as “the most toxic force on the planet,” adding with characteristic mischief that it causes more misery than poverty, disease, and erectile dysfunction. Hyperbole, yes—but purposeful hyperbole. He wants to jolt the reader into recognizing that Resistance is not ordinary laziness. It is a corrosive force that slowly deforms the soul. It shrinks ambition into routine, courage into rationalization, and discipline into negotiation. Left unchecked, it transforms gifted people into spectators of their own lives. They spend decades curating plans they never execute, polishing dreams they never inhabit, and congratulating themselves for intentions that never survive contact with reality.

    What makes Pressfield so compelling is that he refuses both fashionable nihilism and fashionable indulgence. He rejects the existential shrug that declares life meaningless and equally rejects the consumerist gospel that happiness consists of maximizing pleasure. His ethic is austere. Work matters. Discipline matters. Routine matters. Character matters. Most of all, contribution matters. Your life is not private property to be squandered in self-absorption. It belongs, at least in part, to your family, your friends, your community, and the civilization that shaped you. The image that repeatedly comes to my mind is not one from Pressfield but from Superman. Before Kal-El leaves Krypton, his father, Jor-El, entrusts him with a mission: become a light to a world wandering in darkness. Pressfield issues a similar summons. Your vocation is not self-expression. It is illumination.

    This is why The War of Art feels less like a productivity manual than a spiritual manifesto. Pressfield believes we inhabit a battlefield. He calls the enemy Resistance. He calls our higher nature “genius,” borrowing the ancient Roman idea of an inner guiding spirit that is “holy and inviolable.” Whatever name one gives it, the struggle is unmistakable. There is a force drawing us upward toward courage, creativity, and service, and another dragging us downward toward vanity, distraction, and decay. Resistance rarely announces itself dramatically. It works with exquisite subtlety. It whispers rather than shouts. It convinces us that procrastination is prudence, that entertainment is recovery, and that comfort is wisdom. By the time we recognize the deception, entropy has already advanced. We find ourselves wandering in the woods, uncertain how we lost the path home.

    It is here that Pressfield’s vision begins to overlap strikingly with Christianity. His ideas emerge from a broad stream of Western thought that includes Christianity, Plato, the Stoicism, Romantic notions of genius, Jungian psychology, and the mythic Hero’s Journey. Like Christianity, he believes human beings possess a higher vocation continually frustrated by an internal adversary. Like Christianity, he portrays life as a form of spiritual warfare in which unseen forces contend for the human soul. Like Christianity, he rejects radical individualism, insisting that our gifts exist not merely for self-fulfillment but for service.

    Yet Pressfield ultimately parts company with Christian theology in significant ways. Christianity locates humanity’s highest calling in communion with God, and its deepest tragedy in alienation from Him. Transformation comes through grace as well as discipline. Pressfield, by contrast, places his faith in professionalism, habit, and relentless labor. His highest authority is not God but genius—the inner creative spirit that summons each person toward his vocation. Accordingly, his greatest catastrophe is not separation from God but dying with one’s best work still trapped inside. His universe is fundamentally vocational; Christianity’s is fundamentally theocentric.

    That distinction leaves me with a question I cannot confidently answer. Can the devout Christian and the devoted disciple of Pressfield ultimately arrive at the same destination? Can both escape the wide road of self-indulgence and find the narrow road that leads to genuine human flourishing? I honestly do not know.

    I often think of religions and philosophies as insurance companies. Thousands of offices line the boulevard, each promising protection against humanity’s oldest anxieties. Every one claims to offer security for the soul. Every one publishes its own policy, exclusions, deductibles, and fine print. Christianity itself contains competing agencies. Universalists, Catholics, Calvinists, Orthodox Christians, and countless Protestant traditions disagree about the terms of coverage while affirming they represent the same Provider. In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argues that there is, ultimately, one true household of faith beneath those denominational rooms. I continue to wrestle with whether reality resembles Lewis’s vision of one enduring house or whether human beings, in good faith, may arrive at the same destination by different roads. It is one of the questions that has haunted me for decades, and I suspect it will continue to do so long after I have finished reading Steven Pressfield.

  • Beyond the Platitude “Believe in Yourself”

    Beyond the Platitude “Believe in Yourself”

    In the documentary Queen of Chess, Judit Polgár recounts how she became a grandmaster at the age of fifteen, shattering one of the oldest gender barriers in competitive chess. She entered a world where many male players regarded women not merely as underdogs but as biological impossibilities. Looking back on her extraordinary rise, she credits her parents with many gifts, but one towers above the rest: they taught her always to believe in herself.

    I have heard those words my entire life. Believe in yourself. They are stitched onto graduation speeches, embroidered across motivational posters, and recited by well-meaning adults with the mechanical confidence of people reading assembly instructions. The phrase has always struck me as strangely hollow, a verbal vitamin whose label promises transformation while omitting the active ingredient. Yet when Judit Polgár uttered those same words, they landed differently. Here was someone who had walked into hostile rooms, defeated the world’s strongest players, and emerged victorious. Her confidence had survived contact with reality. That gave the cliché a gravity it had never possessed before.

    Over the months since watching the documentary, I have tried to understand what believing in yourself actually means. It is not wishful thinking, nor is it chanting affirmations in the bathroom mirror before work. It is trust. It is the confidence that your conscious intentions and your unconscious habits are allies rather than enemies. It is the quiet expectation that when difficulty arrives, you will respond with discipline instead of sabotage. Believing in yourself also means possessing the assurance that you belong in rooms where others doubt your right to enter. It is the conviction that closed doors are obstacles to overcome rather than verdicts to accept.

    The difficulty, at least in my case, is that I have accumulated decades of evidence against myself. My adversary has never been an unsympathetic chess establishment. It has been the unruly republic inside my own skull. I resolve to become more patient, then lose my temper over some trivial irritation before lunchtime. I promise to eat sensibly, only to find myself negotiating peace treaties with pizza and signing unconditional surrender documents to apple pie crowned with vanilla ice cream. I announce noble intentions with presidential confidence, while my appetites quietly stage a coup before dinner. After enough of these episodes, self-doubt ceases to be a philosophical problem and becomes a statistical conclusion.

    Then there is vanity, perhaps the most elegant form of self-deception ever invented. Blaise Pascal observed that we expend more effort creating the appearance of virtue than acquiring virtue itself. I have often found that observation painfully accurate. It is easier to curate the image of a disciplined life than to endure the discipline required to build one. Vanity offers applause without achievement, while laziness quietly pockets the bill. Together they form a conspiracy against genuine confidence. You cannot consistently admire a person who repeatedly breaks promises to himself, even when that person happens to be you.

    Of course, recognizing these flaws carries its own danger. Honest self-examination can quickly mutate into sophisticated excuse-making. One can become so fascinated by one’s defects that they begin functioning as permanent alibis. “This is simply who I am,” the inner defense attorney argues, as though diagnosis absolves responsibility. It does not. Accurate self-knowledge should produce accountability, not acquittal.

    That is why I admire Judit Polgár. Her confidence does not appear theatrical or narcissistic. It rests upon competence, discipline, and years of keeping promises to herself. I suspect her parents did more than encourage her to believe in herself. They taught her to become the sort of person who deserved her own trust.

    For those of us who did not inherit that gift so naturally, there is another path. We cannot manufacture self-belief through slogans. We must earn it the old-fashioned way, by repeatedly choosing character over compulsion, humility over vanity, discipline over appetite, and substance over performance. Confidence is not bestowed by motivational speeches. It is accumulated, one kept promise at a time.

  • The First Forty-Eight Shows When the Fantasy Ends

    The First Forty-Eight Shows When the Fantasy Ends

    Twenty-six years ago, while I was teaching at Cal State Dominguez Hills, one of my students was a man in his late thirties who worked as a probation officer. Before that, he had been a prison guard. Our conversations often drifted from freshman composition to crime, punishment, and the psychology of offenders. One observation has stayed with me ever since. The older gang members, he explained, were rarely the ones who frightened him most. The “Old Gs” had lived long enough to understand consequences. They could negotiate, calculate, and occasionally be reasoned with. The truly terrifying offenders were the teenagers. They were impulsive, reckless, and detached from reality. They committed acts so irrational that even hardened career criminals regarded them with apprehension. “The Old Gs are scared of them,” he told me. At the time, the comment struck me as paradoxical. Today it feels almost self-evident.

    I have found myself thinking about that conversation while watching nearly a hundred episodes of The First 48, the remarkable series that follows homicide detectives as they race to solve murders before the trail grows cold. Again and again, the interrogation room fills with teenage boys. Many slump defiantly in their chairs, radiating annoyance rather than remorse, as though the detectives have interrupted an otherwise pleasant afternoon. They insist they know nothing. They deny what surveillance footage plainly shows. They contradict eyewitnesses with astonishing confidence, even when the evidence leaves virtually no room for doubt. Much of the violence appears heartbreakingly trivial—a slight, an insult, a perceived challenge to someone’s reputation. Masculinity has been reduced to performance: proving toughness, defending street credibility, and refusing to appear weak, no matter how catastrophic the consequences.

    The most revealing moments arrive when the performance finally begins to crack. Even after hours of deception, many of these teenagers continue demanding to be released. “I just want to go home,” they protest, genuinely bewildered that anyone would keep them in custody. Then comes the moment detectives often recognize before the suspect does. Watching through a one-way mirror, an investigator quietly observes, “It’s starting to dawn on him. He’s realizing this isn’t a game anymore.” You can almost see reality entering the room. Sometimes the teenager collapses into uncontrollable sobbing. Sometimes he erupts in rage, screaming at officers, pounding walls, or thrashing against restraints. The emotional explosion is not simply fear of prison. It is the violent collision between fantasy and consequence. The imaginary world in which bravado guaranteed invincibility suddenly gives way to one governed by handcuffs, courtrooms, grieving families, and prison sentences measured in decades.

    That, to me, is the deepest tragedy. These young offenders often seem to inhabit a fever dream in which they are the untouchable protagonists of their own stories, convinced that swagger, intimidation, or reputation can somehow suspend the ordinary laws of cause and effect. Reality arrives only after irreversible damage has been done—to victims, to families, and ultimately to themselves. One cannot help wondering how many parents, teachers, pastors, coaches, or counselors warned them where this road would lead. Perhaps they all did. But adolescence possesses a peculiar arrogance: the conviction that every caution applies to someone else. The young man who believes he is the smartest person in the room often discovers otherwise only after the interrogation begins. Every time I watch that realization settle across a suspect’s face, I hear my former student’s voice from twenty-six years ago. The Old Gs, he said, feared the teenagers—not because the teenagers were stronger or smarter, but because they had not yet learned that reality is undefeated.

  • The Woman Who Blew Up Her Neighborhood

    The Woman Who Blew Up Her Neighborhood

      The algorithms at Hulu and Netflix have learned one undeniable fact about me: I am powerless to resist true crime. Every evening they present another descent into human depravity, as if politely asking, Would you like to witness civilization unravel once more? More often than not, I oblige. Among the many stories they have served me, one from Netflix’s Worst Neighbor Ever has lingered in my mind. The episode, “Midwest Meltdown,” begins not with a monster but with a woman who once fit comfortably into her small-town community. Moncy Shirley was a respected nurse in Richmond Hill, Indiana, living what appeared to be an ordinary life. Then came divorce. Her husband left, and it was as though she resolved to reclaim a youth she believed had been stolen from her. She plunged into a whirlwind of dating, flaunted her sexual adventures with startling indiscretion, and cultivated an image built on expensive cars, cosmetic surgery, and perpetual reinvention. Her neighbors had admired the earlier Moncy—the dependable wife and community member whose values resembled their own. The new Moncy seemed intoxicated by exhibitionism. One neighbor, disturbed by Moncy’s increasingly explicit stories, decided she no longer wanted her daughter exposed to such influences. It was not merely the promiscuity that alienated people; it was the sense that Moncy had begun treating every social norm as an obstacle to be mocked.

      Then came Mark Leonard, a man whose appearance alone seemed to advertise bad decisions. With frosted blond hair, puka-shell necklaces, and the slick confidence of a carnival swindler, Leonard looked less like a trustworthy neighbor than someone who would sell counterfeit watches from the trunk of a car. The documentary patiently assembles his résumé of deception: woman after woman manipulated, savings siphoned away, trust converted into profit. Leonard did not simply enter the neighborhood; he infected it. Moncy, meanwhile, withdrew further from longtime friends while publicly displaying her romance with theatrical defiance. The couple’s conspicuous affection on the front porch felt less like love than a declaration that ordinary standards of decency no longer applied to them. Their message seemed unmistakable: our freedom is none of your business.

      That illusion exploded—literally—on the night of November 10, 2012. Moncy’s home became the epicenter of a blast so violent that it leveled neighboring houses and transformed a quiet subdivision into what aerial footage resembled after a military strike. Investigators from the ATF quickly concluded this was no accidental gas leak. Evidence pointed instead to meticulous planning: removed gas valves, a microwave modified as a delayed ignition device, and a conspiracy involving Moncy, Mark Leonard, and his brother to stage a fire for a $300,000 insurance payout. Their greed weaponized an entire neighborhood. Two innocent people died. Dozens suffered injuries. Families lost homes that had taken decades to build. One chilling detail captures the moral inversion at the heart of the crime: Moncy carefully arranged for someone to care for her cat before the explosion while displaying astonishing indifference toward the hundreds of human beings living just beyond her property line.

      Listening to the survivors, I was struck not only by their grief but by their bewilderment. They had welcomed Moncy into their community, befriended her, trusted her, and watched her transform into someone willing to sacrifice their lives for money and fantasy. Many eventually left Richmond Hill, unable to bear living among the memories of that night. Moncy received a fifty-year prison sentence. Mark Leonard was sentenced to life and died in prison in 2018. Yet the moral force of the story reaches beyond criminal justice. “Midwest Meltdown” is ultimately about what happens when freedom is severed from responsibility. Moncy came to believe that happiness meant satisfying every appetite, flaunting every impulse, and treating other people as incidental to her own self-expression. The residents of Richmond Hill understood freedom differently—as something inseparable from loyalty, trust, and mutual obligation. That contrast explains why the explosion feels larger than an insurance scam. It is the physical manifestation of a moral philosophy in which the self becomes the highest authority and the community is reduced to collateral damage. The lesson is difficult but indispensable: our lives are not private playgrounds. They are bound to the lives of others, and the choices we make inevitably either strengthen the communities that sustain us or, as in Richmond Hill, leave them in ruins.

    1. Why Cape Fear Left Me Cold

      Why Cape Fear Left Me Cold

      Apple TV’s Cape Fear boasts an embarrassment of riches. Javier Bardem is mesmerizing as the sly, unhinged Max Cady, a man who transforms grievance into an art form and revenge into a religious vocation. Amy Adams brings intelligence and emotional complexity to Anna, the defense attorney whose perceived betrayal becomes the object of Cady’s meticulously orchestrated vengeance. The direction is assured, the cinematography elegant, the score thrums with menace, and every frame announces that this is Prestige Television.

      And yet, by the fifth episode, my wife and I had gone numb.

      Halfway through the episode, I paused the television and tried to explain why the series wasn’t working. I finally arrived at a diagnosis: the show has no meaningful stakes because everyone already despises everyone else.

      Drama depends on the possibility of loss. Someone must have something precious worth protecting—a marriage, a friendship, a family, a moral center, a fragile hope. Cape Fear begins after those treasures have already been pawned off. Alienation saturates every relationship. Resentment hangs over every conversation like mildew creeping across a damp wall. The characters don’t merely dislike one another; they seem exhausted by one another’s existence.

      So what, exactly, is Max Cady threatening?

      He isn’t shattering an intact family. He’s tormenting people who already appear spiritually bankrupt, emotionally estranged, and halfway to divorce lawyers, therapists, and antidepressants. His campaign of terror feels less like an invasion than a remodeling project. When every room in the house is already on fire, the arsonist loses much of his dramatic power.

      That is the paradox of the series. It mistakes relentless darkness for dramatic intensity. But darkness has no force unless it threatens to extinguish something luminous. Evil matters only when goodness stands in danger of being destroyed. Without love, trust, or decency to defend, suspense dissolves into mere endurance. Episode after episode becomes an exercise in watching damaged people become incrementally more damaged.

      None of this is Bardem’s fault. He remains one of the finest actors of his generation, capable of turning the smallest gesture into something simultaneously magnetic and terrifying. I would gladly watch him read a phone book if he found one inhabited by demons. But even an actor of his stature cannot manufacture stakes that the story itself refuses to supply. I’m no longer sure I’ll finish the series.

      After putting Cape Fear on hold, my wife and I sampled the first two episodes of Alice and Steve. The show is unabashedly awkward, funny, and deeply human. Jemaine Clement and Nicola Walker are a delight together, and their chemistry gives every misunderstanding and emotional misstep genuine consequence. Unlike Cape Fear, watching Alice and Steve doesn’t feel like fulfilling an obligation to the gods of prestige television. It feels like spending time with people whose happiness actually matters.

      One show demands that I admire it. The other quietly invites me to care. In the end, caring is infinitely more compelling than admiration.