Cinemorphosis

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  • Always Be Closing: The Lie We Keep Buying

    Always Be Closing: The Lie We Keep Buying

    “Always be closing,” Alec Baldwin snarls in Glengarry Glen Ross, playing Blake, a blustering emissary of pure cortisol sent to terrify a roomful of salesmen into obedience. Closing, he tells them, is the only thing that matters. Not effort. Not integrity. Not sanity. Close or die. The line is famous because it taps into something already rotting inside us. We don’t just want to close deals; we want to close life. Getting married is a close. Deciding on a religion is a close. Graduating college is a close. Buying a house, buying a car, settling on a diet, hitting a goal weight—each one dangles the same promise: after this, I can rest. After this, I’ll be done.

    The culture worships closers. Closers are decisive. Closers have plans. Closers stride forward with laminated confidence. Closers collect ceremonies, milestones, certificates, and Instagram captions. Closing is marketed as maturity itself—the moment when uncertainty is evicted and order takes possession of the premises. Winners close. Losers waffle. That’s the myth.

    But closing is a con, and a lazy one at that. It sells the toddler fantasy of permanent comfort: arrive somewhere and stay arrived. Life, unfortunately, does not honor this contract. It leaks, mutates, backslides, and doubles back. I once knew a couple who were desperate to permanently break up with each other. So they got married as a strategy for divorce. They believed the divorce would provide closure—clean lines, sealed chapters, emotional foreclosure. Instead, they remarried. Then divorced again. Then they remarried. Then got another divorce. Closure didn’t show up. It never does. The story simply kept going, indifferent to their paperwork.

    The same lie infects consumer life. I know a man who believed salvation came in the shape of a Rolex Explorer. Ten thousand dollars later, he congratulated himself on having found his Exit Watch—the final piece, the closing bell. Within months, he was browsing watches that made the Rolex look like an appetizer. The watch didn’t close anything. It became a monument to the futility of the attempt.

    We love the idea of closing because we are exhausted—by the volatility of the world and the chaos inside our own skulls. “Always be closing” offers a fantasy of stillness, a promise that motion can end and anxiety can be put in storage. But it’s just another pressure pitch, no more real than the sales patter Mamet skewered. Life doesn’t close. It revises, reopens, and keeps charging interest. The only thing that truly closes is the sales pitch itself.

  • Why Men Can’t Stop Writing Manifestos

    Why Men Can’t Stop Writing Manifestos

    My wife has never been one to traffic in lazy generalizations about men and women, but a few years ago she offered one observation so sharp it lodged itself in my brain. Men, she said, have a peculiar itch that women conspicuously lack: the need to write a manifesto. Not a gentle essay about waking up early to tend tomatoes and eggplant while discovering the joys of fiber and self-care. No. A manifesto is something else entirely—a doctrinal collision, an absolutist thunderclap so brimming with rectitude, so certain of its own world-historical importance, that its author feels morally obligated to broadcast it to the four corners of the earth. Silence would be selfish. Restraint would be unethical.

    A manifesto, of course, cannot emerge from a vacuum. It requires a conversion story—preferably violent. The man was once lost, deformed, wandering in a fog of ignorance. Then something happened. The cosmos intervened. He was singled out. Enlightened. Charged with a mission. His truth, having been hard-won and privately revealed, must now be universalized. To keep it to himself would be a crime against humanity. Thus the manifesto is born: part gospel, part grievance, part personal branding exercise.

    My wife was not complimenting men. She was diagnosing a particular strain of virulent egotism—one that disguises itself as sincerity and moral urgency while quietly pursuing something else: control. To impose a worldview is to dominate. To dominate is to feel powerful. Strip away the rhetoric and you find that many manifestos are not about helping others live better lives but about arranging the world so it finally stops resisting the author’s will.

    Because many men will inevitably produce many manifestos, conflict follows. Doctrines metastasize. Defenses harden. Footnotes sprout like fortifications. Converts gather. Commentaries appear. Some commentaries become so influential they eclipse the original manifesto and establish themselves as superior, corrected versions. The ecosystem expands, competitive and self-referential, like an intellectual CrossFit gym where everyone is chasing the same leaderboard.

    What my wife was really saying, I think, is that men don’t create philosophies primarily to serve others. They create them the way athletes build muscle: to compete. A manifesto is intellectual athletics—grandstanding, bluster, and chest-thumping in paragraph form. It’s less a tool for understanding the world than a way to announce dominance within it.

    Here is my confession, one I may or may not share when my wife gets home tonight: I, too, feel the pull of the manifesto. The fantasy of a grand conversion, followed by the construction of a flawless, infallible system that explains everything, is intoxicating. But if I’m honest, what draws me to that fantasy isn’t egotism so much as fear. The world is a roiling swamp of ambiguity and uncertainty. A manifesto promises certainty on a silver platter, a pacifier for the anxious adult who wants the noise to stop.

    Perhaps my wife is right. Egotism may just be fear in a tuxedo. Men, for whatever reason—biology, culture, testosterone, self-loathing—seem especially adept at projecting their inner chaos onto the world and then mistrusting it for the mess they recognize in themselves. The manifesto becomes a coping mechanism, a way to simulate control in a reality that stubbornly refuses to cooperate.

    Women don’t write manifestos because a manifesto lectures. It talks down. It closes the case. Women talk instead. Life, as they seem to understand it, is an open court—conversation, improvisation, shared meaning, surprise, trust. Men, by contrast, barricade themselves inside doctrine, shout it through a megaphone, and grow indignant when no one salutes.

    When my wife gets home, I think I’ll abandon the manifesto project. I’ll try something riskier. I’ll start a conversation. I’ll listen.

  • Why Sitting Still Is Killing Your Writing

    Why Sitting Still Is Killing Your Writing

    You can’t write all day and expect to produce anything alive. You can sit hunched in your creative cocoon for hours, but don’t be surprised when your prose comes out pale and airless. You’ve ignored your body, your need for oxygen and circulation, your need for what can only be called Otherness—a physical and spiritual encounter with the world that does not occur while you’re marinating in your own chair. I’ve always known this in my bones. Recently, Bonnie Tsui gave it language in her essay “The Writer’s Secret Weapon.” For Tsui, creativity peaks not at the desk but in the water. Swimming becomes a form of mobile meditation, a way of clearing internal static. A body in motion reroutes the brain. Kinetic energy pries open doors that inertia bolts shut. When she swims, she doesn’t skim her subjects; she descends into them.

    Tsui also makes a bracing point writers love to resist: you can’t write about something while you’re still drenched in it. When she was working on a book about swimming, she couldn’t write fresh from the pool, water still in her ears. The experience had to ferment. The mind needs distance, a change of context, a step into Otherness to metabolize meaning. This is why even writers who log eight-hour days at their desks punctuate them with long walks. You must toggle between worlds. Living in only one—especially the interior one—is claustrophobic, coercive, and hostile to genuine creativity.

    When I think of a writer who never leaves the room, I think of Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat. Akaky Akakievich copies documents all day, takes his copying home at night, and copies some more. Eventually, copying is all he can do. He no longer registers the world: not mockery, not humiliation, not even a horse sneezing on him. He produces mountains of text and nothing of consequence. He has become a Non Player Character. Only when winter cold seeps into his bones does he wake from his stupor, lured by a demonic tailor into an overcoat that violently reconnects him to the world. The shock is too much. His mind, underdeveloped by isolation, cannot withstand reality’s ambitions and fever dreams. He breaks. Gogol understood something essential: the writer’s task is not to hide from the physical world but to be altered by it. That radical shift in perception—the moment when the world intrudes and rearranges you—is not a distraction from writing. It is the point.

  • Captain Cancel and the Rise of Domestic Hermit Drift

    Captain Cancel and the Rise of Domestic Hermit Drift

    The other day my wife went to lunch with a longtime friend—call her A—and, as women do with admirable efficiency, they covered marriage in a single sitting. A complained that her husband had been drinking more, growing possessive, increasingly controlling. During the meal, he called her three times. By the third interruption, my wife said, the phone might as well have been sitting at the table demanding a chair. When she told me the story later, I said it reminded me of the Tears for Fears song “Woman in Chains.” She didn’t hesitate. “That’s her life exactly,” she said.

    After a pause, the conversation turned, as it inevitably does, to me. “I told A you don’t drink,” my wife said. “You’re not jealous or possessive. But you won’t leave the house. You’re a shut-in.”
    “Doesn’t he go to the gym?” A asked.
    “Not for twenty years,” my wife replied. “He does yoga and kettlebells at home. He’s been trapped in the man cave ever since. And what scares me,” she added, “is that he’s happy.”

    I’m not entirely sure I am happy. I just know my tolerance for annoyance is perilously low, and it drops another notch with each passing birthday. I also know that my friends from my formative college years now live scattered across the country, like artifacts from a previous civilization. We’ve grown apart without drama, which is to say, efficiently. Locally, I have two friends. Tom, a wrestling coach, is either teaching or in Santa Barbara with his girlfriend. I see him about once a year, usually when he drives me to Home Depot so I can transport oversized items back to my cave. My other friend, Pedro, is an engineer who is thirty years younger than I am. The generational differences are… pronounced. We have lunch about four times a year. Add it up and yes—half a dozen social encounters annually qualifies me as a shut-in. Which makes me, by default, an authority on a condition many men my age quietly acquire: Domestic Hermit Drift.

    Domestic Hermit Drift is the gradual, mostly unintentional retreat of a married man from friendships and public life into the managed comfort of home, where routine, hobbies, and solitude replace the effort and risk of maintaining relationships. It isn’t fueled by hostility or misanthropy but by convenience, irritability, fatigue, and the slow atrophy of social muscles. As his world contracts, his wife’s often expands, creating an asymmetry in which she carries the invisible labor of social connection, public presence, and emotional buffering. The genius of the drift is its stealth. No announcement is made. No door slams. The man simply mistakes peace for fulfillment and stability for sufficiency.

    As an expert in Hermit Drift, allow me to identify the warning signs.

    First, your sleepwear, gym clothes, and home clothes become indistinguishable. You sleep in gym shorts and a workout shirt, wear them around the house, exercise in them, shower, and rotate in a freshly washed identical set. You call this efficiency. You experience genuine pleasure in this loungewear optimization and feel morally superior to the sheeple who change outfits multiple times a day. Minimalism, you insist, is a virtue.

    Second, while your wife and her friends design custom T-shirts and handmade signs for rock concerts in the desert, you remain home on a Saturday night swapping straps on your diver watches. You build watch-rotation calendars. You track wrist time. You rank your collection by annual usage. The fact that you know you wore your Seiko Marine Master for exactly 863 hours last year strikes you as reasonable, even impressive. Others find it alarming.

    Third, because your tolerance for irritation is low, you shop only at dawn, when grocery stores are nearly empty and the few people present are still half-asleep—docile, unthreatening, manageable. You take pride in shopping before the rat race wakes up. This dovetails nicely with your time-management philosophy: bed at nine, up at five. By the time the world stirs, you’ve had your coffee, your steel-cut oats, your kettlebell workout, and your canvas grocery bags—your weekly macros—put neatly away. You are, in your own mind, winning.

    The rest of the day unfolds under a regime your wife has named Captain Cancel. Every proposed outing meets a veto. You can’t attend a concert because it might rain, despite cloudless skies. You can’t go to a restaurant because parking is inadequate, and when your wife reminds you of the new parking structure, you explain that it’s widely known to be contaminated with asbestos. A comedian you once loved is playing in Hermosa Beach, but you inform her he hasn’t been funny since the Reagan administration. A trip to Maui is ill-advised due to avian flu, especially dangerous during air travel. A beach picnic is canceled because of a sewage spill that, you explain, has compromised not just the water but the atmosphere. You agree to Taco Tuesday at the local brewery, but it’s too loud. You stuff toilet paper in your ears, announce you’re unwell, and Uber home. You are never invited again. This makes you smile as you drift into a deeply satisfying sleep.

    If you recognize any of these traits, congratulations. You are anti-social. You are Captain Cancel. You have chosen your isolation, locked yourself in your cage, and—most importantly—convinced yourself it was the sensible thing to do.

  • Death by Beauty: Looksmaxxing and the Collapse of Meaning

    Death by Beauty: Looksmaxxing and the Collapse of Meaning

    Thomas Chatterton Williams takes a scalpel to the latest mutation of social-media narcissism in his essay “Looksmaxxing Reveals the Depth of the Crisis Facing Young Men,” and what he exposes is not a quirky internet fad but a moral and psychological breakdown. Looksmaxxing is decadence without pleasure, cruelty without purpose, vanity stripped of even the dignity of irony. It reflects a culture so hollowed out that aesthetic dominance is mistaken for meaning and beauty is treated as a substitute for character, responsibility, or thought.

    I first encountered the term on a podcast dissecting the pronouncements of an influencer called “Clavicular,” who dismissed J.D. Vance as politically unfit because of his face. Politics, apparently, had been reduced to a casting call. Vote for Gavin Newsom because he’s a Chad. At first, this struck me as faintly amusing—Nigel Tufnel turning the cosmetic dial to eleven. Williams disabuses us of that indulgence immediately. Looksmaxxing, he writes, is “narcissistic, cruel, racist, shot through with social Darwinism, and proudly anti-compassion.” To achieve their idealized faces and bodies, its adherents break bones, pulverize their jaws, and abuse meth to suppress appetite. This is not self-improvement. It is self-destruction masquerading as optimization, a pathology Williams rightly frames as evidence of a deeper moral crisis facing young men.

    Ideologically, looksmaxxers are incoherent by design. They flirt with right-wing extremism, feel at home among Groypers, yet will abandon ideology instantly if a rival candidate looks more “alpha.” Their real allegiance is not conservatism or liberalism but Looksism—a belief system in which aesthetics trump ethics and beauty confers authority. Williams traces the movement back to incel culture, where resentment and misogyny provide a narrative to explain personal failure. The goal is not intimacy or community but status: to climb the visual pecking order of a same-sex digital hive.

    At the center of Williams’ essay is a quieter, more unsettling question: what conditions have made young men so desperate to disappear into movements that erase them? Whether they become nihilistic looksmaxxers or retreat into rigid, mythic religiosity, the impulse is the same—to dissolve the self into something larger in order to escape the anxiety of living now. As Williams notes, this generation came of age online, during COVID, amid economic precarity, social fragmentation, and the reign of political leaders who modeled narcissism and grifting as leadership. Meaning became scarce. Recognition became zero-sum.

    Williams deepens the diagnosis by invoking John B. Calhoun’s infamous mouse-utopia experiment. In conditions of peace and abundance, boredom metastasized into decadence. A subset of male mice—“the beautiful ones”—withdrew from social life, groomed obsessively, avoided conflict, and stopped reproducing. Comfort bred collapse. Beauty became a dead end. Death by preening. These mice didn’t dominate the colony; they hollowed it out. NPCs before the term existed.

    The literary echo is unmistakable. Williams turns to Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray, where beauty worship corrodes the soul. Wilde’s warning is blunt: the belief that beauty exempts you from responsibility leads not to transcendence but to ruin. Dorian’s damnation is not excess pleasure but moral vacancy.

    The final irony of looksmaxxing is that it produces no beauty at all. The faces are grotesque, uncanny, AI-slicked, android masks stretched over despair. Their ugliness is proportional to their loneliness. Reading Williams, I kept thinking of a society fractured into information silos, starved of trust, rich in spectacle and poor in care—the perfect compost for a movement this putrescent. Looksmaxxing is not rebellion or politics. It’s a neglected child acting out. Multiply that child by millions and you begin to understand the depth of the crisis Williams is naming.

  • Why I Must Become the Skinny Yoga Guy

    Why I Must Become the Skinny Yoga Guy

    As the clock keeps punching holes in the calendar and I drift into the middle distance of my sixties, I’m stalked by the uneasy sense that I am not the man I’m supposed to be. I carry thirty extra pounds like unpaid emotional invoices. I cave to food temptations with embarrassing regularity. I indulge in narcissistic spirals of self-pity. My body bears the archaeological record of a lifetime of weightlifting injuries. Something has to give. The question isn’t whether I’m a complex human being—of course I am—but which single image can give me dignity, courage, and self-possession as I face my obligations, stay engaged with this lunatic world, and fend off entropy. The image that keeps returning, uninvited but insistent, is this: I am the Skinny Yoga Guy.

    The Skinny Yoga Guy eats vegan, clean, and whole, not as a performance but as a quiet discipline. He hits his protein macros with buckwheat, pumpkin seeds, peas, soy, garbanzos, and nutritional yeast, without sulking or negotiating. He cooks plant-based meals anchored in Thai, Mexican, and Indian traditions, not sad beige bowls marketed as “fuel.” He doesn’t snack like a raccoon in a pantry; he sips cucumber water and green tea and moves on with his day.

    He practices yoga six days a week, a full hour each time, sweating without complaint. The body lengthens. The spine straightens. He appears taller, calmer, less compressed by life. There’s a faint health glow—less “Instagram guru,” more “someone whose joints don’t hate him.” The discipline reshapes his temperament. The short fuse and indulgent sulks fade. In their place emerges a man who notices other people, attends to their needs without sermonizing, and discovers—almost accidentally—that service makes him sturdier, not smaller.

    In this revised operating system, the watch obsession quietly dies. No more chunky diver watches as heroic cosplay. No rotation. No drama. Just one watch: the G-Shock GW-5000. The purest G-Shock because it refuses theater. Shockproof, accurate, solar-powered, atomically synced. No Bluetooth, no notifications, no begging for attention. It does one thing relentlessly well: it tells the truth about time. It is reliability without narcissism.

    If the GW-5000 is indestructibility stripped of spectacle, then my assignment is clear: I must become its carbon-based counterpart. Less bloat. Fewer features. More uptime. Yoga becomes joint maintenance. Vegan food becomes corrosion control. No supplements that blink. No gadgets that chirp. No dietary Bluetooth pairing with guilt. Just a lean system designed to absorb impact, recover quickly, and remain accurate. GW-5000 firmware, now awkwardly attempting to run on two legs.

    The longing is real. I want to be the Skinny Yoga Guy—disciplined, light, healthy—wearing a single $300 G-Shock as a quiet marker of having stepped off the status treadmill. I no longer want validation from a $7,000 luxury watch. Wanting this man is easy. Becoming him is not. That requires character, not aspiration.

    My hunch is that I need to write my way into him. A novel titled The Skinny Yoga Guy. Not a parody, not a self-help tract, but a chronicle of real-time change rendered with mordant humor and unsparing honesty. The book isn’t the point. Transformation is. The novel would simply be the witness.

    So here I am, a larval creature trapped in my cocoon. I must emerge as a new creature. The challenge is issued. Whether the world is waiting for my metamorphosis is irrelevant. I am. And that, for once, feels like enough.

  • The Shingles Shot, the Vanishing Kettlebell Workout, and a Brief Descent Into Strap Madness

    The Shingles Shot, the Vanishing Kettlebell Workout, and a Brief Descent Into Strap Madness

    I got my shingles vaccine yesterday at noon and felt absolutely nothing afterward—so nothing, in fact, that I woke up the next morning feeling smugly invincible. I went to Trader Joe’s, bantered with the employees about the collective psychosis surrounding their limited-edition mini tote bags, came home, unloaded the groceries, and mentally penciled in a righteous kettlebell session in the garage. Then, right around 10 a.m., my immune system cleared its throat. A slow, heavy wave of fatigue rolled in, the kind that doesn’t ask permission. I took what I told myself was a “precautionary” nap. I made a deal with my body: if I felt fine in an hour, the kettlebells were back on. By 11, the aches had arrived, lethargy had unpacked its bags, and the deal was quietly voided. The iron would have to wait.

    Now, 28 hours post-shot, I’m more tired than I was this morning, which feels like a violation of some unspoken contract. In what I can only describe as a low-grade vaccine fever fugue, I apparently decided this was the perfect moment to perform strap surgery on my watch collection. The Seiko SLA051, 055, and 023 all lost their OEM waffle straps and emerged reborn on Divecore FKM. Yes, I’m aware that FKM is rumored to whisper chemical lullabies into the bloodstream. No, I’m not persuaded that wearing these watches a few hours a week is going to tip me into a Superfund site.

    In any case, I’m already planning to swap the FKMs for Divecore’s hydrogenated waffle straps in a few months. If there’s any exposure happening, it’s brief, intermittent, and vastly overshadowed by whatever biochemical fireworks the shingles vaccine is currently setting off inside me. For now, I’ll rest, hydrate, and let my immune system do its thing—apparently with a side hobby in horological rearrangement.

  • Learning About Rejection on a Flight to Miami

    Learning About Rejection on a Flight to Miami

    In the summer of 1972, when I was ten years old and convinced my destiny was to become a musclebound baseball god in the image of Reggie Jackson, I found myself on a flight from LAX to Miami, pressed against the window and staring out at adulthood like it was another continent. In the middle seat sat a blonde bombshell in her mid-twenties wearing pink hot pants with psychedelic purple-and-white stripes and legs so aggressively tanned they could have powered a citrus-processing plant. She wasn’t just attractive; she was a mood. She radiated the entire seventies—optimism, excess, invitation. I wasn’t merely drawn to her. I was drawn to the future she seemed to promise.

    On the aisle sat her conversational counterpart: a pencil-necked, dark-haired man of similar age with impeccable manners, minimal charisma, and the quiet dignity of a man who alphabetizes his spice rack. He was an accountant. She was in dental hygiene school. For five uninterrupted hours, the two of them performed their biographies live, with me as the captive audience. Mostly she spoke. He nodded, gasped on cue, and occasionally supplied a sentence fragment to prove he was still alive. She talked about school, snacks, weather, philosophy—everything. It felt like watching a reality show pilot that forgot to end. But I didn’t mind. She was animated. She was confident. She was hope in hot pants.

    At one point she announced that her ears needed to pop and offered both of us Dentyne gum, explaining that it helped with altitude. I briefly wondered if she thought we were participating in some sort of triathlon of inner-ear resilience. The accountant accepted the gum solemnly, like a man taking medical advice from destiny.

    When the plane finally shuddered to a stop at the gate, the accountant—buoyed by five hours of uninterrupted conversation and the survival glow of having endured it—asked her out on a date. She declined with practiced kindness, the sort of smile perfected by women who have said no thousands of times without ever raising their voice. He accepted the rejection gracefully, even apologetically, as if her disinterest were an inconvenience he had caused.

    My ten-year-old brain short-circuited. I felt like I’d witnessed something indecent. Rejection, I believed, was supposed to be private. Public rejection multiplied the shame. I flashed back to junior high dances where I’d cross the cafeteria, ask a popular girl to dance, watch her recoil as if I’d mistaken bravery for stupidity, then retreat to my friends’ laughter. Now I was seeing the adult version. How could this accountant—handsome, polite, numerically gifted—be rejected after such an extended airborne courtship? I sat there, my romantic assumptions collapsing like cheap sci-fi scenery. Maybe he was too bland. Maybe she had a chaotic love life waiting in Miami. Or maybe—this was the real lesson—she’d simply enjoyed a conversation to pass the time on a long flight. Whatever the reason, I absorbed his rejection as if it were my own. I remain convinced that somewhere in the universe’s permanent records, my name appears next to a small but enduring note: rejected by attractive woman. And yes, it still stings.

  • Flying First Class Is a State of Mind

    Flying First Class Is a State of Mind

    I was born in America in 1961, and if I had to explain this country to a foreigner in one image, I wouldn’t reach for the flag or the Statue of Liberty. I’d point to flying first class. Not the policy of it, not the logistics—just the concept. First class is America in an airline cabin. It grabs you by the collar and says, This is how we do hierarchy. We don’t hide it. We parade it down the aisle.

    Yes, we have our obnoxious luxury cars and coastal dream houses, but nowhere is class difference so intimate as on an airplane. You’re breathing the same recycled air as the people sipping champagne up front. You share the same narrow aisle, the same claustrophobic bathrooms, the same airborne flu incubator. 

    The difference is ceremonial. The first-class passenger is already settled—wrapped in a sherpa blanket, nibbling brie, greeted by flight attendants who address them the way courtiers addressed minor royalty. 

    Then comes the procession: coach passengers filing past, stealing glances, marching toward the back where crying babies, bare feet with ambitious toenails, and circulation-threatening seat pitch await. This is the real luxury—not the champagne, but the ceremony and the choreography. The pleasure is sharpened by contrast. As a first-classer, you’re not cruel. You don’t wish misery on anyone. But your comfort glows brighter because someone else is uncomfortable ten feet away.

    And that glow whispers. Not “you’re lucky.” Not “you’re comfortable.” It whispers the more dangerous phrase: you’re special. That’s the real drug of first class—not legroom, but psychological elevation. The sense that you cracked some hidden code of life, that you’ve unlocked a cheat mode where ordinary frustrations can’t touch you. 

    I once heard a comedian joke that in a plane crash, first-class passengers would survive while the rest of us perished. It’s absurd. And yet… it sounds exactly like something we want to believe.

    This is America. You don’t just earn money here. You earn the right to hear that whisper.

    I’ll confess something anticlimactic: I flew first class once, in 1994, thanks to my father, who sent me to his condo in Maui. I remember almost nothing about it. No ecstasy. No glow. Maybe I suffer from flight anhedonia—the inability to experience joy at 30,000 feet. 

    But I have felt the first-class sensation elsewhere. A friend once let me borrow his Omega Planet Ocean. I wore it to Trader Joe’s and found myself standing in line with organic arugula and the faint, ridiculous thrill of superiority. A luxury watch did what a luxury airline seat never could.

    I could afford such a watch. I owned a Tudor Black Bay once. I sold it quickly, like someone who realized halfway through a costume party that he’d come dressed as the wrong person.

    Now I’m sixty-four, and the urge to gloat has evaporated. I don’t want status anymore. I want clarity. I want restraint. I want a temperament that doesn’t need applause from inanimate objects. Wearing an expensive watch I don’t need feels less like success and more like cosplay—me auditioning for the role of a man who’s made it. The problem is, I know the actor too well. Under the costume is not a titan of confidence but an anxious, fractured soul with the spiritual DNA of Franz Kafka and the comedic timing of Richard Lewis. No amount of Swiss engineering is going to fix that. And pretending otherwise would only make me feel like a fool in very fine clothes.

  • How 2025 Made Me Believe in Movies Again

    How 2025 Made Me Believe in Movies Again

    I lost my love for movies sometime in the last decade, when Hollywood began to feel less like a dream factory and more like an actuarial office with better lighting. Everything started to look like a boardroom decision in costume. I can count on one hand the films I bothered to see in theaters over fifteen years: Avatar, World War Z, Black Panther, Get Out. A few streamed titles shook me awake—Uncut Gems and Good Time from the Safdies, Paul Giamatti’s bruised soul in Private Life and The Holdovers, Paul Thomas Anderson’s sunburned nostalgia in Licorice Pizza, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. But 2025 hit differently. Four films—Eddington, One Battle After Another, Bugonia, and Weapons—did something rare: they stared directly into the national nervous breakdown. These weren’t escapist fantasies. They were dispatches from a culture unraveling—where institutions inspire no faith, conspiracies feel more plausible than facts, politics has become cosplay, and we live in sealed-off realities that collide without ever conversing.

    Eddington blindsided me. Joaquin Phoenix plays a bitter, alienated, anti-mask sheriff in a New Mexico town during the pandemic, and he’s so fully possessed by the role that I didn’t recognize him for several minutes. I went in braced to hate the film—expecting a grim slog through our worst collective memories. Instead, I got something braver: a devastating portrait of a society that has slipped its moorings and drifted into a lonely fever swamp. The film doesn’t mug for satire or cheap laughs. It trusts the material. Every scene tightens the vise on your attention. It’s the kind of movie nine hundred ninety-nine directors would have drowned in. Ari Aster somehow swims.

    One Battle After Another turns political polarization into tragic pageantry. Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw—a grotesque ICE-agent archetype—faces off against Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rocket Man, who might as well be an Antifa folk demon. But the movie’s real target isn’t left or right; it’s the theater of identity itself. We’ve become a nation of people in costumes, fighting playground wars with adult consequences. Once your political tribe becomes your personality, nuance feels like betrayal. The film suggests a hard truth: a country run by permanent adolescents doesn’t collapse in flames—it collapses in tantrums. Penn has built a career on operatic excess, but Lockjaw may be his most disturbingly perfect creation yet.

    Bugonia is stranger still. Jesse Plemons—leaner, sharper, and channeling a high-IQ Dale Gribble—plays Teddy, a man-child whose conspiracy obsessions keep him tuned to late-night AM radio and convinced that a tech CEO, played by Emma Stone, is an alien in need of kidnapping and repatriation. Once tied up in his house, she attempts to weaponize corporate confidence as an escape strategy, and her faith in managerial language becomes its own punchline. Plemons is reliably excellent, but Emma Stone has crossed into something rarer: the kind of presence Daniel Day-Lewis had in the nineties, where the screen bends around her. The film’s bizarre logic and eerie beauty sent me straight into the arms of Yorgos Lanthimos’ odd, seductive universe.

    Weapons brings the nightmare home—literally. Set in the suburbs, it tells the story of a witch who makes a classroom of children vanish. The teacher is blamed. The principal responds with bureaucratic platitudes. The town spirals. Beneath the horror scaffolding is a sharp allegory about addiction and institutional cowardice: when a society loses its ability to think clearly, every crisis metastasizes. The adults talk in slogans. The children disappear.

    Taken together, these films diagnose the same disease. Chaos becomes pandemonium when a culture retreats into fantasy and calls it identity. We dress up our impulses as ideologies. We curate personas instead of building character. The center doesn’t hold—not because of some invading barbarian, but because we’ve all invited the barbarian inside and handed him the keys. The good news, if there is any, is that there are still filmmakers brave enough to tell the truth about the mess we’re in. In 2025, cinema finally stopped trying to soothe me—and started telling me what I already knew but didn’t want to admit.