Cinemorphosis

Category: TV and Movies

  • The Truth vs. Alex Jones Points to Larger Battles We Face

    The Truth vs. Alex Jones Points to Larger Battles We Face

    Yesterday I watched The Truth vs. Alex Jones and came away unsettled and discouraged. The film lays out, with testimony and footage, how a powerful falsehood about the Sandy Hook massacre metastasized into a lived reality for many—how ordinary people came to believe grieving parents were actors in some sinister plot. The human cost is plain: families harassed, reputations shredded, lives made worse by a rumor that would not die. The documentary also cites polling that suggests this belief is far from fringe, which is precisely what made me sit up and take notice.

    Alan Jacobs, in How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, gave me a frame for that discomfort. Jacobs argues that critical thinking is not merely a set of intellectual tools; it is a moral posture. It requires humility—the readiness to admit you might be wrong—intellectual rigor, and a willingness to engage, civilly, with rival views. In a public sphere where grievance entrepreneurs monetize confusion and cruelty, Jacobs’s point feels less like scholastic nicety and more like civic equipment. To believe in the conspiracy about Sandy Hook is less of an intellectual deficiency and more of a moral one. Willful ignorance is born of belligerence.

    There are historical moments when falsehoods gain unusual traction and the public square warps into a theater of lies. Watching the documentary, I thought about those moments not as distant epochs but as warnings: when social media rewards certainty over care, and when spectacle drowns out verification, civic habits fray. On the evening he announced his retirement, anchor Brian Williams put it bluntly when he spoke of “evil winds” in our national weather—less a prophecy than an observation that the job of keeping the truth in view has grown harder.

    That’s where I am: uneasy, but oddly steadied by the thought that civic muscles can be strengthened with small, repeated acts. Viktor Frankl reminded us that life’s circumstances often determine the work we must do; perhaps one task for this hour is to preserve the habits that let a shared reality exist in the first place.

  • How The Monkees Taught Me That the Intellectual Can Beat the Bodybuilder and Inspired a Song

    How The Monkees Taught Me That the Intellectual Can Beat the Bodybuilder and Inspired a Song

    October 16, 1967, was a victory for the writers of cynicism. It was the day I learned the universe doesn’t give a damn. This was the day the veil was lifted. I was five, just shy of my sixth birthday, watching The Monkees, blissfully unaware that my entire worldview was about to be wrecked. The episode? “I Was a 99-lb. Weakling.” The plot? Micky Dolenz, the Monkee I admired most, gets metaphorically pancaked by Bulk, a human monument of muscle played by Mr. Universe Dave Draper. Bulk was no ordinary gym rat; he was a colossus in Speedos, the prototype Schwarzenegger. Worse, he stole Brenda, the beach goddess, right out from under Micky’s nose.

    Micky, desperate to win her back, did what any of us would: he signed up for Weaklings Anonymous. Their solution? Hoisting weights the size of small cars and downing fermented goat milk curd—an elixir I can only assume tasted like liquid despair. He even sold his drum set, jeopardizing the band’s future, all to build enough brawn to challenge Bulk.

    And for what? Brenda, fickle as fate, had a sudden epiphany—muscles were passé. She ditched Bulk for a scrawny intellectual buried in Remembrance of Things Past. Apparently, Proust’s multivolume exploration of memory and ennui was hotter than biceps.

    There, in front of my Zenith TV, I watched Micky’s heart crumple, and with it, mine. The moral of the story was clear and soul-crushing: hard work guarantees nothing. You could sacrifice, sweat, and sip goat curd until you resembled a Greco-Roman statue, only to find the universe had other plans—plans that favored nerds with library cards.

    The Monkees changed everything. The show taught me the brutal truth of irony: things don’t go the way as planned. I didn’t have the word for irony as a five-year-old, but I could feel it sending an existential chill through my bones. 

    As the decades passed, I finally processed that childhood memory into a piano song I wrote, titled “The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz”:

  • We All Wanted to be Adopted by The Brady Bunch

    We All Wanted to be Adopted by The Brady Bunch

    In the hellfire of the summer of 1971—sun like a coin press and every pine needle a tiny oven—I was nine and certain the world owed me a miracle. My family and four others had staked a two-week claim on a rugged patch of Mount Shasta: we fished, water-skied, swatted hornets, and lazed beneath the buzzing halo of a massive battery radio that vomited The Doors, Paul McCartney, Carole King, and Three Dog Night into the pines. It should have been Eden. It should have been bliss. Instead it felt like the production meeting for a childhood trauma.

    One dawn I lay cocooned in my tent, not merely asleep but translating into the rarest dream of my short life. In that vivid pantomime I’d been plucked off our campsite and dropped into San Francisco, standing before a gleaming red cable car with the Brady Bunch beaming at me like a panel of missionary saints. Mike and Carol had already signed the papers. I was family now—promised the split-level, the avocado-green kitchen, my very own bunk. My brain supplied questions with the urgency of a petition: Would I get a room? Would Greg tolerate me? When would they shoot my induction episode?

    Then Mark and Tosh—the twin saviors of sobriety—tore the dream away like a curtain ripped mid-scene. “C’mon, man, fishing,” they croaked, their voices the sound of gravestones being lowered. Fishing? Fishing?! I had been adopted by television perfection and now I was expected to sniff out worms like a commoner. I sulked with the theatricality of a miniature tyrant, trudging the rest of the day with the scowl of a man exiled from paradise, my secret grief lodged like a splinter under the skin of my soul. There was no way to explain. “Sorry, I can’t bait a hook—my new stepfamily needs me on stage.” Right. I bit my lip and chewed on humiliation.

    My father barked like a sergeant and cut the melodrama down with a single order: “Get with the program. We’re living in the wild.” The wild, he meant, with its yellowjackets circling our biscuits and a lake full of indifferent fish. I wanted the Brady kitchen, not a fishing pole and a chorus of stings. The pointy little deaths of mosquito bites and the cheap tin of powdered pancake mix were the actualities. The dream stayed lodged; reality kept showing us its rough, unvarnished palm.

    That sulking boy at Mount Shasta believed his fantasy was a portal out of chaos—a personal miracle nobody else would imagine. The joke is that it wasn’t original. Millions of American children were fed the same sedatives: thirty-minute morality plays in which family harmony was manufactured to lipstick level. While we bathed in their canned warmth, the actors backstage were burning through lives: addiction, affairs, fights that would make our own messy households look like spas. The dissonance between stage-gleam and soap-opera sludge is almost religious in its cruelty.

    Should we expect actors’ private lives to line up with the squeaky-clean product they sell? Of course not. It would be as reasonable to expect Superman to sort his recycling. Hollywood is a factory of facades: glossy façades varnished over dysfunction. The Brady Bunch was the perfect exhibit—an engineered Eden whose actors were stuck inside their own human messes. Yet we kept praying to that televised altar because fantasy is sweet and often cheaper than facing the real family across your table.

    Decades later, the fantasy will still sneak up on me. Sometimes I dream my face is a square in that opening montage—cheeks plump, grin kerchiefed to perfection—living, forever, inside a clapboard postcard where problems resolve in thirty minutes. In the dream I am blissfully ignorant of the backstage carnage. I wake up with that small, ridiculous ache—a taste for a world that never existed, an appetite for a comfort that, like cheap candy, rots faster than it satisfies.

  • Old Age and Father Time’s Frenemies

    Old Age and Father Time’s Frenemies

    I often think back to the summer of 2019 when my wife and twin daughters were vacationing in Maui. There, on the beach, I spotted a short, compact man in his mid-seventies parading around in dark-blue Speedos with a woman at least fifty years his junior — a striking Mediterranean beauty in her twenties. The guy was trim, well-manscaped, scampering confidently on the sand like a millionaire who spends half his life in boardrooms and the other half trying to outrun the Grim Reaper. He dove into the waves with the vigor of someone convinced that as long as he keeps moving, Father Time can’t catch him.

    You could smell the wealth on him. He was probably a CEO with a portfolio big enough to buy the illusion of eternal youth. He worked hard and played harder, to borrow Hugh Hefner’s mantra. Now, I’m not here to pass moral judgment on a man who chooses a partner young enough to be his granddaughter — that’s his business. What fascinates me is the fantasy: money, discipline, and a little manscaping used as talismans against aging, as if youth were a rare potion you could sip to stay forever young.

    The whole tableau, though, felt wrong. He and his youthful companion were mismatched puzzle pieces jammed together by brute will. It was as if two jagged halves of a broken mirror had been glued into place; every forced smile and awkward embrace chipped another sliver off, until all that remained was a pile of glittering shards — the perfect image for the futility of trying to cheat time.

    This rich, fit man is Father Time’s frenemy — the one who insists they’re on friendly terms while secretly plotting a hostile takeover. He may have sold himself a “perfect picture,” but the public sees the mismatch as plainly as a traffic cone in a tuxedo. The spectacle exposes his poverty: an inability to relinquish something that no longer belongs to him, a clinging to youth that reveals fear rather than confidence. That fear, in turn, sabotages his aspiration to curate an enviable life; the attempt to perform eternal youth only underlines the loss he refuses to admit.

    I’m reminded, uncomfortably, of Joe Ferraro from Netflix’s Mafia: Most Wanted. Born in Ecuador in 1962 and raised in Toronto, Ferraro turned to bodybuilding, gambling, and organized crime as a teenager, hungry for money, women, clothes, and respect. He got it all — a Rolex Daytona, gold necklaces, designer sunglasses large enough to require their own zip code — until seven months in prison and eventual deportation stripped him of his infrastructure. In his sixties, he’s a sculpted caricature: tank top, ostentatious sport coat draped like a cape, and penetrating melancholy eyes that reveal he knows the score. He says he wants his life back, but knows he’s too old for the young man’s game and can’t look away from it.

    Both the rich man in Maui and Ferraro in exile put me in mind of Lot’s wife. They cannot relinquish the lifestyle that defines them; youth is their identity, and the thought of being disconnected from it registers as a kind of death. Unable to let go, they calcify into pillars of salt — frozen monuments to a self that no longer exists.

  • Zosia Mamet and My Personal Reading Revival

    Zosia Mamet and My Personal Reading Revival

    It’s rare that I fall in love with books these days, but when it happens, I’m grateful because reading reminds me of my glory days, the early 80s when I consumed books with ferocity, imaginative pleasure, and obligation like a bodybuilder taking protein powder and creatine. Three major factors have curtailed my reading of books: One, I’ve grown so cynical over the years that I’ve come to the belief that 99% of books are in actuality just a short story or essay with padding. An author has an intriguing idea, and they sit down with their agent and cook up a book that is mostly chicanery with a dash of substance. 

    Then three days ago, I heard actor Zosia Mamet talking about her memoir Does This Make Me Funny?, a collection of essays, with KCRW host Sam Sanders, and I was so struck by her depth of wit, intelligence, and moral perspective that I immediately bought her book, or I should say the Kindle eBook version of it. Even more rare than buying books as intellectual property, it is even rarer that I buy a hard copy of something, unless it is a kettlebell training book or a cookbook like Miyoko Schimmer’s The Vegan Creamery. 

    Getting most of my books on Kindle speaks to the second reason my reading has diminished. The physical act of reading is unpleasant. Holding the book, turning the pages, getting into a comfortable position, attenuating my eyes to the various font sizes. I find the whole thing disconcerting and unpleasant, like trying to figure out the seat positions, buttons, and levers of an unfamiliar car. The most comfortable forms of reading are either sitting at my desktop and reading the Kindle on a 27-inch screen or reading while sitting in bed with a 16-inch laptop.

    The third reason I don’t read as much is that the Internet and its attention economy have fried my brain over the decades. The attention muscles inside my cortex have atrophied to a woeful state. 

    But occasionally a rose grows out of the cracks in the cement sidewalk, and such is the case with Zosia Mamet’s memoir, as witty, deep, self-deprecating, and salient as the author speaking to Sam Sanders three days ago. Reading the memoir is to connect with someone for whom her writing voice and the core of her being are the same. The result is something distinctive and salient, something that recoils and then snaps forward to leave its literary fangs inside you. Isn’t that what writing is supposed to be about? Nabokov was like that. So was Kafka. And so is Zosia Mamet.

    I detest some confectionary celebrity memoir reeking of privilege, superfluousness, and mediocrity. None of that is in Zosia’s collection of essays. 

    As we read in Jancee Dunn’s New York Times article “At Least Zosia Mamet Can Laugh About It,” the core of her book is about her mental, physical, and spiritual health. Coming from a family that is deeply entrenched in literature and the arts is a double-edged sword with excruciating pressure to live up to superhuman expectations causing Zosia’s thorn in her side to be the constant sense that she is falling abysmally short. 

    Like the best comedia, she opts out of self-pity for humor as she does a deep dive into her anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, anorexia, and anhedonia, and all the self-destructive behaviors she succumbed to in order to overcome these afflictions. Because she knows that body dysmorphia is a delusion that hijacks her brain, she says about herself: “I am often an unreliable narrator of my own reality.” 

    Which in a nutshell is the human condition: Can we trust ourselves or are we getting duped by our own fake narrative? 

    What tools from our emotional toolbox can we use to be more reliable? Perhaps comedy is one of them. Think of our irrational states: overcome by maudlin self-pity, vanity, and grandiosity, we spin grotesque narratives about ourselves that compel us to behave in ways that are ridiculous and often result in self-sabotage. Perhaps comedy is the antidote. Perhaps comedy distances us from our preposterous self-mythology and helps us in the arduous process of self-reinvention. That’s the sense I’m getting from Zosia Mamet’s very necessary book, a book that has no padding at all but has been made from a brilliant mind with blood, sweat, and tears. 

  • The Villages Killed My Florida Dream

    The Villages Killed My Florida Dream

    Recently I dreamed I was in a public park. The grass was cartoonishly green, a kind of chlorophyll utopia, and families sprawled across it like they’d been carefully arranged for a Chamber of Commerce brochure. My suitcase sat at my side like a misplaced airport refugee, and then I looked up.

    Looming above the park was a billboard—a monstrosity of sun-bleached cheer—featuring a leathery couple in their seventies. They were bronzed like overcooked turkeys, grinning wide, basking in the eternal glow of some Florida condo where “Margaritaville” played on an endless loop. This was not their first rodeo: it was their fifth marriage each, the residue of decades spent riding the carousel of lust, liquor, and litigation. Their message was plastered across the sky: hedonism may lead to divorce court, bankruptcy, and sun-damaged skin, but look—if you just keep grinning, it’s practically a lifestyle brand.

    I felt an almost religious revulsion at the billboard. It was hollow cheer dressed up as wisdom, a glossy ad for despair masquerading as joie de vivre. Pulling my luggage closer, I glanced at my watch and felt relief that my wife and daughters would be joining me soon. The counterfeit joy overhead only made me hunger more for the real life that I have.

    The “Margaritaville” billboard—two geriatric smiles frozen in sunlit rapture—reminded me I’d been meaning to watch Some Kind of Heaven, the documentary about The Villages, that gargantuan playground-for-the-aged about forty-five miles from Orlando. If synchronized water ballet to Neil Sedaka and margarita-fueled Parrothead parties sounds like paradise, The Villages will sell you heaven with a tiki umbrella on top. For anyone with taste, patience, or shame, it reads more like an early-onset hell: a tropical gulag where you pay staff to micromanage your leisure until even leisure looks like a job interview.

    The film’s most magnetic human mess is Dennis Dean—an eighty-one-year-old small-time grifter wanted for a DUI in California, living out of a blue van on the edge of The Villages and scheming his way into the bed of a rich widow. He prowls bingo halls and church socials with the persistence of a con man who’s practiced charm until it’s fossilized. When police finally close in, Dennis slips back into Nancy’s apartment and in a scene that sticks with you he lies on her bed while she calls from the kitchen: “Lunch!” He doesn’t move. He stares at the ceiling fan as if it’s a slow, merciless clock—and you can see, plain as day, that comfort can be prison for someone whose last liberty was earned by deceit.

    The director never sneers at the subjects. Pain and longing are shown with a kind of blunt respect. But the portrait of The Villages itself isn’t charitable: it’s a retirement complex caught mid-regression, a carnival mirror that reflects geriatrics clinging to perpetual adolescence until the spectacle curdles into something queasy and cringe-worthy. The architecture of fun—shuffleboard courts, themed parties, and scheduled joy—becomes a machine that demands you perform your own amusement. It’s not freedom; it’s occupation by leisure.

    And yes, I realized, sitting there with my pride intact and my Florida fantasies suddenly damp, that watching this must have been my wife’s brilliant little psy-ops. For a year I’d been nagging her about moving the family to Florida—stilt houses, salt air, a hammock with my name on it. Some Kind of Heaven demolished the fantasy with water ballet and sedated margaritas. The obsession evaporated. Apparently, all it took was Neil Sedaka and a ceiling-fan stare.

  • The Carton of Milk Expiration Date on Your $3,000 Smart TV

    The Carton of Milk Expiration Date on Your $3,000 Smart TV

    Today to make room for a brand new LG OLED TV, we played a round of Musical TVs, the sad cousin of Musical Chairs, where everyone gets a screen but no one gets a perfect fit. The ten-year-old, 43-inch LG—now equipped with a trusty Roku brain—was dragged into the limbo-like office while my daughter debates whether it’s worth sacrificing square footage in her already modest quarters. The 50-inch Samsung, a QLED that once lorded over the living room, now teeters on another daughter’s dresser, swallowing what little space she had left for, say, books. I myself dragged the other Samsung—a year-old 50-incher—into the primary bedroom, wedging it precariously above the dresser like a luminous monolith threatening to tip over in the night.

    Here’s the irony: both Samsungs, with their decent QLED panels, are sluggish as elderly donkeys thanks to endless software updates. The new champ in the living room, a sleek 55-inch LG OLED with all the bells, whistles, and marketing superlatives, purrs along just fine and the interface moves at lightning speed. 

    The oldest and smallest of the TVs, the 43-inch LG, weighs more than both Samsungs combined. It radiates old-school build quality, but if I mounted it on the wall, the drywall would come crashing down in an avalanche that would obliterate my family mid–Netflix binge. 

    What important lesson have I learned? These so-called “smart TVs” are dumb as dirt. You spend $700 to $3,000, and in a few years the software updates strangle the hardware until it wheezes. The fix is cheap and almost comically obvious: don’t throw the TV out—give it a new brain. A Roku or Apple TV box, a mere $100 to $150, resurrects the panel for another decade. A carton of milk lasts longer than a smart TV OS, but a $99 box of plastic keeps the pixels glowing.

  • Pleasure Island with Humidity: My Obsession with It’s Florida, Man

    Pleasure Island with Humidity: My Obsession with It’s Florida, Man

    I find myself embarrassingly smitten with It’s Florida, Man on HBO Max, a six-episode documentary romp that most critics dismiss with a shrug. The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg summed it up with clinical indifference: “The premise is very straightforward. Each half-hour recounts a real-life mishap of the kind that helped Florida develop its national reputation as a meme in state form . . .”

    Fienberg is right about the meme, but he undersells the spectacle. Florida isn’t just weird—it’s a hallucinatory soup pot where the heat never turns down. A bubbling Bouillabaisse of runaways, con artists, half-baked dreamers, and humidity-pickled misfits; the broth gets richer, stranger, and more intoxicating by the hour. Novelists like Carl Hiaasen dip their ladles in and remind us with glee: “You couldn’t write this if you tried.” Comedian Marc Maron, who has roamed the continental madhouse, concurs: there is no asylum wing quite as deranged as the Sunshine State.

    The final episode, “Mugshot,” is my favorite. A wanted man from Pensacola turns into a social-media celebrity after his mugshot detonates across Instagram. The local police, suddenly auditioning for daytime television, turn their manhunt into a Jerry Springer-style circus, complete with suspect-shaming and moral squalor masquerading as civic duty. You couldn’t script it unless you were drunk, desperate, and willing to risk being fired by HBO for turning in satire disguised as reportage.

    As a college writing instructor, I confess I watch shows like this with an ulterior motive: I’m always looking for essay prompts hidden in the wreckage. It’s Florida, Man practically delivers one to my desk, gift-wrapped in neon: “Freedom and its Discontents.” Not the noble kind of freedom—what philosophers used to call “freedom for”—where self-discipline leads to self-agency, flourishing, and mastery, the Cal Newport variety of cultivated freedom. No, Florida, Man wallows in the basement: “freedom from.” Freedom from the Id, from restraint, from consequence, from sobriety. It’s Pleasure Island on a peninsula, and the longer you stay the faster your ears sprout into donkey ears, your voice degenerates into animal brays, and your dreams curdle into swamp gas.

    It’s Florida, Man isn’t just entertainment. It’s anthropology of the grotesque, a front-row ticket to America’s most unruly carnival, where freedom is mistaken for license and the monsters are very much real.

  • True Crime Shows Us the Demon That Hides Behind the Diagnosis

    True Crime Shows Us the Demon That Hides Behind the Diagnosis

    I still gag a little when I think of tabloid TV from the ’80s and ’90s—A Current Affair, Hard Copy, Inside Edition. The formula was simple: snarl into the camera, crank up the drama, and serve audiences their daily ration of moral panic wrapped in neon graphics. Having swallowed enough of that sludge in my twenties, I swore off the “true crime” genre, suspecting most modern entries were little more than tabloid reruns with higher production values.

    Then my wife and daughters talked me into it. In the last week I watched Love Con Revenge, a six-episode saga of con artists devouring their marks and detectives chasing them down like bloodhounds, and Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, the tale of a grotesque mother harassing her own daughter and boyfriend with a relentless barrage of obscene texts. Both were polished, chilling, and—for my sins—utterly absorbing.

    No shock, then, that Netflix, Hulu, and every other platform groan under the weight of hundreds of these fraudster chronicles. They mirror our times: technology weaponized into psychological napalm, the digital swamp rising up to engulf ordinary people. The stories console us by drawing a line between the “real world” of decent citizens and the fever swamp where predators feed—though that line, as these shows prove, is faint and fragile.

    What gnaws at me are the faces of these fraudsters: unrepentant, smug, cannibalizing innocence with the appetite of vultures while spinning narratives in which they—God help us—are the real victims. Watching Unknown Number, I thought of Scott Peck’s People of the Lie, a book that haunted my twenties. The book explores the unsettling terrain where mental illness and evil blur into one another, arguing that certain destructive patterns of thought and behavior cannot be neatly filed under psychiatric diagnosis alone. Peck suggests that some people hide behind the language of neurosis or dysfunction when what they are really exhibiting is a willful commitment to deceit, denial, and cruelty—a kind of “malignant self-righteousness” that psychiatry struggles to name. In his case studies, ordinary families cloak acts of profound betrayal and abuse in banality, showing how evil masquerades as normality. The book’s disturbing thesis is that evil is not always the exotic monster of horror stories but can manifest in the evasions, manipulations, and rationalizations of those who choose to deform their humanity, collapsing the categories of illness and moral corruption into one corrosive force.

    And here’s the ugly echo: the fraudster’s toolbox of deceit, self-victimization, and gaslighting isn’t confined to con men or deranged mothers. It has migrated, wholesale, into the attention economy. TikTok influencers now weaponize the same tactics, performing ailments and afflictions as if auditioning for sainthood, diagnosing themselves in real time while amassing legions of followers. This is fraud with a ring light: branding through pathology, monetized self-deception packaged as authenticity. It is the same theater of manipulation, dressed up in pastel filters instead of burner phones. And maybe that’s why these true-crime tales fascinate us: they remind us that manipulation, gaslighting, and deception have found their ultimate playground online. We watch to reassure ourselves that we’re still anchored to reality, but what we see instead is how terrifyingly porous the line is between mental illness and pure, corrosive evil.

    When we slap a psychiatric label on every grotesque act, we risk letting the guilty off the hook. To call fraud, cruelty, or sadism merely a “condition” is to dodge the darker truth—that people are capable of choosing evil. Peck was right to warn that deceit and malignant self-righteousness are not just quirks of the psyche but deliberate acts of corruption. If we keep misnaming evil as illness, we blind ourselves to the reality that a demon can take root inside ordinary people, feeding on their rationalizations until it grows strong enough to wreak chaos and devastation in the world around them.

  • When the Radio Becomes God: Eavesdropping on Despair

    When the Radio Becomes God: Eavesdropping on Despair

    The word “satisfactory” can be a bit of an oxymoron. There’s not much that is satisfying about being satisfactory when the word is a proxy for mediocrity and ennui. To be in life’s sweet spot of income, career, and social status may feel like a prison. To keep your “satisfactory” status, you may be playing house, as they say. You go through the motions of what is considered respectable but feel empty inside. You may find yourself to be the unflattering subject of the famous Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime.” The song’s theme is the shock of waking up inside your own life and not recognizing how you got there. David Byrne delivers his lines like a dazed preacher, cataloging the trappings of middle-class success—“a beautiful house,” “a beautiful wife”—yet always undercutting them with the anxious refrain, “Well, how did I get here?” The song captures the disorientation of modern existence, where routines and consumer comforts can feel alien, as if someone else scripted your life while you were sleepwalking through it. Beneath its hypnotic bassline and tribal rhythm, the song is less celebration than existential panic: a reminder that time moves in one direction, that choices pile up invisibly, and that one day you might look around and realize the current has carried you somewhere you never meant to go. The song came out as a video in 1981 and remains one of the most famous videos ever made.

    Cut to 2014 and you’ll find a companion song–Father Misty’s “Bored in the USA.” The song skewers the hollowness of the American Dream by presenting a narrator who has all the trappings of comfort yet feels utterly vacant inside. Over a piano ballad that mimics Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. anthem but inverts its spirit, he lists his modern dissatisfactions—student debt, prescription meds, existential malaise—with a deadpan delivery that borders on satire. The song’s title itself is a punchline: in a land of abundance, the greatest affliction is ennui. Misty sharpens the critique by layering laugh-track chuckles over his lament, exposing the absurdity of personal despair as entertainment. The theme is clear: American prosperity doesn’t guarantee purpose, and in a culture that commodifies everything, even boredom becomes a spectacle.

    Perhaps the precursor to the above songs is Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes” (1962).  All three songs wrestle with the discontent lurking beneath middle-class comfort. Reynolds’ folk satire ridicules postwar conformity: rows of identical houses, “ticky-tacky” lives, and the way education, careers, and family structures stamp people into cookie-cutter molds. Byrne picks up this theme two decades later, asking in “Once in a Lifetime” how one can inhabit that prefab life without ever choosing it, caught in the current of routine until bewilderment sets in. Misty, in turn, gives the 21st-century update: not only are the houses still there, but so is the crushing boredom, debt, and medicated detachment that follow from chasing that same ideal. Together, the songs form a lineage of American self-critique—“Little Boxes” mocking the architecture of conformity, “Once in a Lifetime” exposing the existential vertigo inside it, and “Bored in the USA” diagnosing its emptiness in an age of irony and overmedication.

    All three songs—“Little Boxes,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and “Bored in the USA”—resonate with Paula Fox’s masterpiece novella Desperate Characters in their shared critique of middle-class paralysis. Fox’s novel follows Sophie and Otto Bentwood, a couple trapped in a Brooklyn brownstone, surrounded by the comforts of professional success yet gnawed by alienation, decay, and a sense that life has slipped beyond their control. Reynolds’ “Little Boxes” mocks the social machinery that produces people like the Bentwoods—educated, well-off, but indistinguishable. Byrne’s “Once in a Lifetime” channels Sophie’s disorientation, the feeling of waking up one day to a “beautiful house” and a “beautiful wife” yet asking, “How did I get here?” Misty’s “Bored in the USA” pushes the critique further, mirroring the Bentwoods’ emptiness with a 21st-century inventory of malaise: debt, pharmaceuticals, and soul-crushing ennui. Taken together, the songs and Fox’s novella expose the fragility beneath affluence, suggesting that comfort without meaning curdles into desperation.

    John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio” joins the chorus. Jim and Irene Westcott are respectable enough to be alumni-brochure fodder, yet their lives hum with nothingness. Then comes the radio, their supposed luxury upgrade—a hulking gumwood cabinet that looks less like a household appliance and more like a coffin standing on end. At first it malfunctions with grotesque noises, coughing and wheezing like a consumptive beast. But when it “works,” its real gift is supernatural: it picks up not Brahms or Mozart but the raw, unedited conversations of the neighbors. Suddenly Irene is granted an unwanted superpower, the ability to eavesdrop on lives stripped of pretense. Through the radio’s crackle, she overhears quarrels, confessions, betrayals, the bitter sediment of other people’s marriages. Respectable couples she once envied are exposed as small, petty, furious, and miserable. Irene becomes both priest and voyeur, holding court over the private sins of her building. The radio doesn’t merely broadcast sound; it rips open walls, tears down curtains, and forces Irene into an intimacy she never asked for but quickly can’t live without. Jim recoils in disgust, but Irene is entranced, feeding on the poison like it’s oxygen. The radio becomes their third eye, their unwelcome oracle, a device that transforms a bourgeois apartment into a haunted theater of human despair.

    The question Cheever poses—and which Reynolds, Byrne, and Misty circle—is whether too much knowledge of others, or of ourselves, is corrosive. The radio doesn’t merely reveal secrets; it corrupts. Irene begins with curiosity, but soon she’s chained to the cabinet, hypnotized by its stream of confessions and recriminations. What she hears doesn’t just stain her view of others; it infects her own marriage, her finances, even her sense of self. She grows convinced that her life is flimsy, precarious, and wasted, as though the radio is no longer a machine but a judgmental deity, casting its pitiless light on everything she’s tried to keep tidy and respectable. For Irene, the radio becomes both oracle and executioner, transforming her from passive listener into a woman undone by revelation. And that’s the horror Cheever leaves us with: the possibility that self-examination, when magnified by an unblinking device, doesn’t lead to wisdom at all, but to paralysis and despair. Respectability is not protection. The walls are paper-thin. The “satisfactory” life is a coffin with good upholstery.