For those tracking the streaming wars, the news is grim for both studios and consumers. Last month, Netflix raised the monthly price of its basic and premium plans in the United States, with the premium offering crossing $20 per month for the first time. Disney+ announced its second price hike this year. Peacock had its first price hike since its launch. Apple TV+ jumped from $6.99 to $9.99. Paramount promises a hike within the next two years. Even Shudder is raising its price by a buck a month.

The reasons for these hikes are obvious. The companies are floundering. Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing has grown its user base, but its quarterly revenue growth and forecast still lag estimates. Disney+ lost 11.7 million subscribers and $512 million in the second quarter of 2023, bringing total losses on the service to more than $11 billion. In that same period, Max lost 1.8 million subscribers. Apple TV+ has reportedly seen its market share diluted in the past year.

Even those streaming services that have seen an increase in subscriptions are struggling to balance the books. Peacock gained 2 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2023, but lost $651 million. Paramount’s direct-to-consumer businesses lost $424 million in that same window, which is actually down from the $511 million losses in the previous quarter. That appears to be the thing about the streaming wars. Even the winners end up losing.

Of course, the streaming bubble was always an illusion. Part of the appeal of Netflix was that it was really the only service of its kind, and that a single subscription could grant a user access to a huge library of titles. That appeal couldn’t be replicated by studios who created rival services, as those platforms fragmented the market and siloed the content. There was never going to be a way for all the major studios to compete with Netflix.

The problem was compounded by the fact that Netflix, Apple, and Amazon operated in an entirely different ecosystem. They were valued as tech companies, combined with Facebook and Google as the “FAANG” stocks. This suggested a different mode of valuation than traditional media companies, to the point that when they did release movies in theaters they often refused to publish box office results. The emphasis was placed on growth and potential, allowing them to generate huge debt.

To put it simply, these streaming services were playing a different game than the traditional studios. They were just built differently. As a result, studios struggled to compete. The past few months have suggested that the studios have no real idea how to make this model work, as demonstrated by Disney’s recent dispute with Charter Communications, its attempt to blend intellectual property with live sports for “Toy Story Funday” football, and even Max’s decision to fold in live sports.

Studios are desperately looking for anything that might work as the bottom falls out of the market. In hindsight, the cracks were present from the outset. The streaming wars really kicked into high gear with the launch of Disney+ in November 2019. The following year, a global pandemic would effectively create a captive audience for these services with more disposable income. For parents locked in a house with a couple of kids for an extended period, Disney+ was an essential service.

This created an illusion of sustainability, even if the cracks were obvious to anybody paying attention. However, with the end of the pandemic, those cracks have developed into full-blown fissures. There is an inflation crisis and a looming global recession. Surveys suggest that customers are curbing their spending on entertainment. Streaming is particularly affected, with studies suggesting that households are spending about 25% less on streaming services than they were two years ago.

This may explain why it feels like studios have been trying to push back the clock. Along with price hikes, streaming services have announced ad-supported tiers, effectively reintroducing television advertising. Indeed, Netflix had disavowed advertising as recently as three years ago. Services are no longer dropping shows like The Rings of Power and Ahsoka at midnight, but instead scheduling them to line up with American prime-time broadcast slots. Streaming now looks a lot like television.

Much of the streaming wars was built around the idea of “disruption” — the destruction of established models and the creation of something more porous. The boundaries between film and television blurred, with companies like Marvel treating television as a new world to conquer and services like Disney reducing intellectual property to “content soup.” The past few weeks have seen Marvel concede that this model isn’t working for them. Maybe television should be made like television.

It’s very bloody out there. Streaming services are becoming a lot more frugal, with even deep-pocketed giants like Amazon and Netflix working harder to justify their spending on film and television. Companies like Warner Bros. have completely scrapped almost-finished movies rather than sending them to streaming and even removed existing titles from their libraries. There has been a spate of high-profile cancellations, including shows being “unrenewed.”

Looking at the state of the current media landscape, it can feel like the major studios got swept up in the tech company mindset of “move fast and break things.” However, these companies moved so fast that they never put any effort into figuring out what workable model was going to replace the one that they had just broken. The assumption seemed to be that everything would work itself out, and that these companies could improvise their way to success.

Of course, of the major studios, the big exception is Sony. Sony does not have its own streaming service. Instead, the company figured out that the safest way to get rich during a gold rush is to sell the shovels, adhering to the traditional model of licensing its content out to the highest bidder. Sony effectively survived the streaming wars by becoming “the biggest arms dealer on the battlefield.” This is also good for the services, as theatrically released movies tend to do better on streaming.

Indeed, there is some small sense that nature is healing. At the height of the pandemic, Warner Bros. announced that they would be sending all of their biggest movies to their streaming service, then called HBO Max, as part of what came to be known as “Project Popcorn.” As a result of this decision, films like The Suicide Squad, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, Reminiscence, and Dune all landed on the service on the same day that they were released in theatres.

The grand plan was that these massive releases would drive subscribers to the service. In doing so, it would solidify corporate owners AT&T’s plans for complete vertical integration. AT&T would sell customers movies they made on a streaming service they owned over an internet infrastructure that they provided. Suffice to say, the plan did not go as expected. The underperformance of these movies led to AT&T’s retreat from the market and the merging of Warners with Discovery.

Warner-Discovery CEO David Zaslav has made cash flow a top priority, hoping for quick returns on bold decisions. Zaslav had driven Warner Bros. to start licensing out its content again, meaning that its shows and films are no longer siloed on Max. Netflix has apparently been a major buyer for international markets. Indeed, many of those movies that were used to bolster the subscriber base of HBO Max can now be watched on Netflix. Zaslav got his cash and Netflix got their content.

It seems to be working for both parties. Over the past few weeks, Netflix’s top ten list in countries like the United Kingdom has included a number of the “Project Popcorn” films, including bigger titles like Space Jam: A New Legacy but also giving space to smaller titles like Those Who Wish Me Dead and The Little Things. It seems entirely possible that more people have seen The Little Things on Netflix than watched it on HBO Max.

This is the way that this model used to work. As demonstrated by shows like Breaking Bad or Cobra Kai, Netflix used to be very good at taking an underseen show from another developer and turning it into a zeitgeist hit. Indeed, Netflix can still do that. Suits, an episodic show that aired in the USA between 2011 and 2019, is currently one of the biggest shows in the world because it is streaming on Netflix. In this sense, Netflix is filling a function that used to be held by home media — somewhat ironically.

Of course, even allowing for this shift back towards a model that is at least more stable and sustainable, there are lingering questions. The recently resolved writers’ strike came to be known as “the Netflix strike,” because many of its issues hinged on the sustainability of the streaming model. Many of those concerns have bled over into the ongoing actors’ strike. There are questions around royalties and profit-sharing, not to mention transparency and accountability.

After an intense few years of heated combat, it feels like the streaming wars are finally simmering down and that most of the heavy ordinance has been discharged. The trenches have been dug and the boundaries clearly defined. Much infrastructure has been razed and much earth has been salted. As the survivors stumble dazed through the wreckage of what remains, it’s hard not to wonder if the struggle has irreparably damaged what they claimed to be fighting over.

Situated in the middle of Carpenter’s phenomenal run that stretches from Assault on Precinct 13 to They Live, Christine is frequently overlooked in favor of movies like Halloween or The Thing. It says a lot about the quality and consistency of Carpenter’s output that movies like Christine and Prince of Darkness tend to be ignored because they are simply “very good” rather than genre-redefining masterpieces. Still, Christine is a movie that feels ripe for reappraisal.

Carpenter arrived on Christine by accident. His adaptation of Stephen King’s Firestarter was derailed by the commercial failure of The Thing, making King’s Christine a second choice. In hindsight, he concedes Christine “turned out better than it had any right to.” Discussing Bryan Fuller’s planned re-adaptation of King’s novel, Carpenter simply offered, “Well, good luck to him. It will probably be better.” (It remains to be seen if Fuller’s version will make it to screen, given the allegations of harassment against him.)

Still, Christine has developed something of a devoted cult following over the decades. Notably, it was a key influence on David Gordon Green’s Halloween Ends, to the point that Green asked Carpenter to let him know if the script was “too Christine.” Halloween Ends’ Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) shares a surname with Christine’s Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon), and both characters find work in junkyards fixing up cars. Both young men also undergo similar transformations.

Stephen King’s Christine is obviously the story of a killer car, a concept that is ripe for mockery. To a certain extent, Carpenter just plays this straight. The movie’s opening sequence has the soundtrack play “Bad to the Bone” as the car rolls through the Detroit assembly line. Seemingly operating from pure malice, the car breaks the hand of one auto worker (Joe Unger) and murders another (Art Evans). Carpenter never explains why the car is evil. It just is.

However, like a lot of Kings’ novels, Christine is rich with subtext about masculine anxieties. Indeed, Carpenter and King make for a good pairing, sharing a lot of similar influences and interests. Jumping forward in time by two decades, the car finds its way into the possession of Arnie Cunningham. Arnie is a nerd and a loser. He’s bullied at school by Buddy (William Ostrander) and at home by his mother Regina (Christine Belford). Arnie is a young man stewing in resentment.

Much of that resentment is explicitly sexual in nature, even before the car gets involved. In his very first scene, he chats with his best friend Dennis Guilder (John Stockwell) about wanting to lose his virginity. He also complains about the game of Scrabble that he played with his mother the previous evening, which he lost because she disqualified his use of the word “fellatio.” He recalls, “She said obscenity’s not allowed in scrabble. I looked it up. It’s in the dictionary.”

Christine is not always subtle in communicating its theme of frustrated masculine anxieties. At one point, Regina sends her son to school with a packed lunch that includes a yogurt. Buddy steals the brown paper bag and penetrates it with his switchblade. The white goop splatters all over the floor of their shop class. There is a sense that something is simmering below the surface, that Arnie’s masculine and sexual anxieties are being sublimated.

They seem to be sublimated into the car. As the name implies, Christine itself is frequently gendered and sexualized. Even before he buys the car, Arnie refers to it as “her” and “she.” The previous owner, George Lebay (Roberts Blossom), recalls that Christine “had the smell of a brand new car. That’s just about the finest smell in the world, except maybe for pussy.” Later in the movie, Arnie opines that “there is nothing finer than being behind the wheel of your own car, except maybe for pussy.”

However, Christine is presented as an alternative to feminine sexuality. The car’s violence is often framed in explicitly sexual terms and often in masculine sexual terms. Christine is very forceful. It rams and crushes. It asphyxiates. The car squeezes itself down an impossibly narrow loading bay to cut Buddy’s friend Moochie (Malcolm Danare) “in half,” recalling a Family Guy joke. It later rams Buddy’s car repeatedly, smashing into a garage. That garage then explodes dramatically.

Arnie is fixated on sex, but from a place of insecurity. When he invites Leigh (Alexandra Paul) on a date to a drive-in, he feels impotent as Christine tries to choke her. He watches powerlessly as another patron performs the Heimlich maneuver on his date. Shot from a low angle, with rain falling as the pair thrust and grunt, ending with both collapsing in satisfaction, this is an explicitly sexual scene. Arnie is watching Leigh and another man. “Get your goddamn hands off her!” he screams.

However, Christine is not really interested in the relationship between Arnie and Leigh. Leigh is introduced as a potential love interest for both Arnie and Dennis, but then just drifts through the movie. The film is much more fascinated by the dynamic between its two male leads. In particular, the idea that the car itself comes between the relationship that these two young men share. “I know you’re jealous,” Arnie tells Dennis when his friend voices concern about the car.

Dennis is a fascinating contrast to Arnie. In many ways, Dennis is more conventionally masculine. He plays football, he drives a car, he is popular with the girls at school. If Arnie is a stereotypical nerd, then Dennis initially appears to be a stereotypical jock. However, as Christine unfolds, Dennis comes to embody a much more complicated and nuanced sort of masculinity. Indeed, it often seems like Arnie himself misunderstands what makes Dennis so much more popular and so much happier than he is.

Dennis is not hyper-aggressive. When he catches Buddy bullying Arnie, he doesn’t solve the situation by resorting to violence; he summons their teacher, Mr. Casey (David Spielberg), and reports Buddy’s switchblade. Dennis is portrayed as genuinely caring. He is constantly looking out for Arnie. There’s a compelling vulnerability to Stockwell’s performance, who plays the second half of the film as if Dennis is constantly on the verge of breaking into tears. Dennis understands his own feelings.

There’s a definite subtext to Arnie and Dennis’ relationship. When Arnie confesses he is drawn to the car because “for the first time in [his] life, [he] found something uglier than [him],” Dennis replies, “You’re not ugly, Arnie.” When Arnie rejects this, Dennis adds, “Queer, maybe, but not ugly.” On the page, this moment could be read as casually homophobic in the way that many movies of the era are. However, as played by Stockwell, it’s strangely tender. As he drives away, Dennis listens to Bonnie Raitt’s “Runaway”: “As I walk along I wonder what went wrong with our love, a love that was so strong.”

Arnie lacks Dennis’ comfort in his own skin. Befitting a movie released in the middle of Reagan’s first term, wealth plays into this. Arnie lives in the suburbs and is going to college. His mother dislikes that he is taking shop class, as if “it embarrasses her or something.” Class informs Arnie’s relationship with Darnell (Robert Prosky), who runs the auto shop. Darnell insists the shop is for “working stiffs gotta keep their cars running so they can put bread on the table,” not wealthy dilettantes slumming.

Over the course of Christine, Arnie transforms himself from a seemingly sweet and timid nerd into a complete monster. Christine predated Revenge of the Nerds by a whole year, but there was undoubtedly something stirring in the popular consciousness. Christine has aged remarkably well; the study of a young man who channels his own insecurities and frustrations about his inability to embody a stereotypical masculine ideal into something poisonous and monstrous.

That said, Christine hits on many of Carpenter’s recurring themes and fixations. After all, it directly followed The Thing, which is also about a set of unarticulated masculine anxieties. However, there are other points of overlap within Carpenter’s filmography. Christine feels like a strange companion piece to Halloween. Like King’s source novel, the bulk of Christine is even set in 1978, the same year as Halloween. Both are also stories about suburban repression.

In some ways, Christine is a gender-flipped take on Halloween. Carpenter has argued that Halloween is best understood as the story of Laurie Strode’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) sexual frustration. “The one girl who is the most sexually uptight just keeps stabbing this guy with a long knife,” he explained. “She’s the most sexually frustrated. She’s the one that’s killed him. Not because she’s a virgin but because all that sexually repressed energy starts coming out. She uses all those phallic symbols on the guy. She doesn’t have a boyfriend … and she finds someone — him.”

By this logic, Laurie seems to almost conjure Michael Myers (Nick Castle) back to Haddonfield. During their very first encounter, as she drops the key off at the old Myers house, she sings idly to herself, “I wish I had you all alone.” Myers steps obligingly into shot. In her conversations with her friends Lynda (P J Soles) and Annie (Nancy Loomis), it becomes clear that Laurie does have desires, even if she refuses to act on them. As Carpenter puts it, Laurie “is more like the killer, because she’s repressed.”

The Halloween series repeatedly uses “Mr. Sandman” as a music cue, as if Michael is Laurie’s dream manifested. The use of that song, much like the use of so much 1950s rock-and-roll in Christine, suggests the repression that informed that decade. In Christine, Arnie’s own repression seems to attract and empower the 1958 Plymouth Fury in the same way that Laurie’s repression seemed to draw Michael. All those unarticulated feelings have to go somewhere, and the results are horrific.

Of course, allowing for the opening scene of Halloween Resurrection, Laurie always vanquishes Michael. Arnie is not so lucky. At the climax of Christine, he stumbles out of the car and grasps Leigh. He gasps and collapses, a sequence just as sexual as the Heimlich maneuver earlier in the film. Ultimately, it’s revealed that Arnie has achieved penetration: a shard of glass sticks through his abdomen. Arnie has been impaled by Christine. Repression kills.

Sammy “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) leaves the casino that he operates and walks to his car. As he starts the engine, the bomb planted under the passenger’s seat ignites. Ace is consumed by fire. The opening credits, designed by Elaine and Saul Bass and set to the closing movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion, imagine Ace propelled through a Las-Vegas-themed inferno. It’s a man’s body thrown through a sea of fire and neon.

Scorsese revisits that scene towards the climax of Casino. Ace explains that the car bomb was not lethal. Because of how the bomb was planted and the design of the car, Ace can actually escape the vehicle before it explodes. His suit jacket catches fire, but he is not even burnt. As such, Scorsese reframes that opening credits sequence as even more allegorical than it initially appeared. Ace’s body has been untouched by the flames, but his soul has not been so lucky.

When it premiered in 1995, reviews often framed Casino as an inferior copy of Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Gene Siskel opined that it broke “no new ground for Scorsese,” while Desson Howe argued that Scorsese was “trying to disinter the success of Goodfellas.” Even Empire’s positive review jokingly pondered whether Casino should have been considered “Goodfellas Part II?” Casino’s reputation has only grown in the years since, but the criticism still sticks.

It’s easy to understand where these criticisms come from. Casino is a mob-centric crime movie directed by Martin Scorsese, released just half a decade after Goodfellas. It marks another collaboration between Scorsese and Goodfellas author Nicholas Pileggi. It reunites Scorsese with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, who had starred together for Scorsese in both Raging Bull and Goodfellas. Both films employ a similar voiceover narration to guide viewers through flashbacks.

However, Casino is a much richer film than these stock comparisons might suggest. Indeed, Casino feels like a point of intersection for a number of Scorsese’s recurring motifs and fascinations. There is a tendency to flatten the filmmaker’s career to “mob” movies like Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, and The Irishman, but his body of work is much more diverse than such a description would allow. Casino is a crime movie, but it is also so much more.

For example, Casino is effectively a western, in the same way that something like Apocalypse Now is a western. It is the story of the mob expanding west in its own form of manifest destiny. It is a story of the lawless desert, and an untamed frontier. Ace’s narration makes it sound like he is bringing civilization to the local population. “In Vegas, I had to keep a few juiced-in local cowboys working,” he explains. “I mean, without us, these guys, they’d still be shoveling mule shit.”

For gangster Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci), “Las Vegas was the fucking wild west.” Nicky blows into town like a hurricane. He even brings his own band of “desperados” with him, stealing safes out of walls. Casino is a retelling of the American foundational myth. Anybody can come to Las Vegas and reinvent themselves. Phillip Green (Kevin Pollak) was “an Arizona real estate hustler who barely had enough gas money” to make it to Las Vegas who ended up appointed chairman of the board of the Tangiers.

This fits with one of the other strands simmering through Scorsese’s filmography. Scorsese is a director fascinated with the intersection of American history and American mythology. The last film he’d made before Casino had been The Age of Innocence, an Edith Wharton adaptation set against the backdrop of 1870s New York. He would go on to make Gangs of New York and Killers of the Flower Moon, two more stories about the foundations of American identity.

There is something inherently self-aware in all of this. After all, the western archetype evolved in American consciousness. Over time, the cowboy became the outlaw. As modernity encroached, the outlaw became the gangster. Casino is in some ways a dramatization of that transition. The cowboy archetype is supplanted by the gangster. Just as the cowboy was rendered obsolete by the railroad, the gangster is displaced by the market forces of capitalism that turn Las Vegas into “Disneyland.”

However, Casino ties this mythmaking into another of Scorsese’s recurring interests. Scorsese is one of the great Catholic filmmakers. He even considered becoming a priest. Scorsese’s religious interest permeates his filmography. The director spent most of the 1980s struggling to get The Last Temptation of Christ made. He would make Silence later in his career. He is reportedly working on another movie about Jesus Christ. In broader religious terms, he followed Casino with Kundun, a film about the Dalai Lama.

Casino is not just a retelling of the classic western mythology. It is also a religious parable. This makes sense. The American fantasy of manifest destiny is rooted in religious imagery and ideology. Many of the early settlers believed that God had provided them with the continent as a mark of their exceptionalism. John Winthrop evoked this idea in his sermon in which he described America as “a city upon a hill,” which Ronald Reagan repurposed in his invocation of a “shining city on a hill.”

Casino weds these two themes together by suggesting that Ace and Nicky have found themselves in something approaching the Garden of Eden. Ace describes Las Vegas as “paradise on earth.” He speaks of the city’s redemptive power in explicitly religious terms. “For guys like me, Las Vegas washes away your sins,” he boasts. “It’s like a morality car wash. It does for us what Lourdes does for humpbacks and cripples.” In this context, it is perhaps worth noting that Ace is Jewish.

Casino ties this image of westward expansion to more explicitly religious iconography. Las Vegas seems like the Garden of Eden. “Ace saw Vegas one way,” Nicky recalls. “But I saw it another. I saw it as untouched.” It is a world free of original sin, in which gangsters like Nicky and hustlers like Ginger (Sharon Stone) seem to believe they can escape their pasts. This is a fiction, of course. Ace believes that he can reinvent and remake Ginger as his wife, but soon discovers his folly.

Just outside the city lies the desert. “At night, you couldn’t see the desert that surrounds Las Vegas,” Ace narrates. He then adds, “But it’s in the desert where lots of the town’s problems are solved.” Exile and expulsion from Las Vegas often means an eternity spent in a hole in that desert. The desert marks another point of intersection between the film’s western and religious subtext. The Israelites’ exile in the desert was a common touchstone for theories of manifest destiny.

Scorsese has acknowledged the religious subtext of Casino. “God gives them this paradise of sin, Las Vegas, and they can do anything and they screw it up,” he recounts. “And they’re cast out of the paradise.” He made the comparison in contemporary press, musing, “It’s like the Old Testament. It was so obvious they couldn’t see it coming.” The movie opens with the closing movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion, which recounts the betrayal of Jesus Christ.

Writing in The Baltimore Sun, critic Stephen Hunter summarized Casino as the story of “two men who inherited the Garden of Eden and managed in a very short time to destroy everything for no more cogent reason than their own bitter and unmalleable pride, which goeth before the fall every darn time.” Both Ace and Nicky imagine themselves in a sacred and untouchable position, operating in a space where there is no divine or human judgment.

“You know what the best part is?” Nicky boasts of his plan to import mob violence to Las Vegas. “Nobody’s gonna know what we’re doing. There’s nobody here to see us. Everybody’s back home.” Of the bosses for whom Nicky and Ace ostensibly work, Nicky muses, “They were a thousand miles away, and I don’t know anybody who can see that far.” During his break-ins, Nicky even turns away the photos of the homeowners. “I didn’t like the people I was rippin’ off looking at me,” he explains.

Ace is just as anxious about being seen. He narrates a lot of the movie but, unlike Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) in Goodfellas, he never acknowledges the camera. He even wears big sunglasses, as if to hide his eyes from the audience’s gaze. When FBI agents show up with photographic evidence of an affair between Ginger and Nicky, he refuses to even acknowledge the images. “I didn’t want to look at them,” he muses. “I didn’t want to look at the guys who brought them either.”

This is reflected in the visual language of the film. As shot by cinematographer Robert Richardson, there is a murky quality to Casino. Much of the movie takes place in smoke-filled rooms, as if to suggest that something is being obscured. The edges of the frame are often dark and blurred, characters seeming to occupy strange empty spaces. In contrast, the characters themselves are often well-lit in contrast to their environment, given halos and sheens.

This is the tragedy of Casino. “Nicky thought nobody was watching him,” Ace recounts. “But he was wrong.” It turns out that the authorities are watching Ace and Nicky. As the film builds to its climax, both Ace and Nicky discover that they are subject to the rules that they thought they could ignore. Scorsese is an inherently Catholic filmmaker, and as much as critics might argue that his films “glamorize” violence, there is always a strong moral component to them.

At one point, Ace explains how the system works in the casino. “The dealers are watching the players,” he tells the audience. “The boxmen are watching the dealers. The floormen are watching the boxmen. The pit bosses are watching the floormen. The shift bosses are watching the pit bosses. The casino manager is watching the shift bosses. I’m watching the casino manager. And the eye in the sky is watching us all.” It is a none-too-subtle religious parable. Somebody is always watching.

At the end of the film, Nicky and Ginger are both dead. Ace has returned to his life as a sports handicapper. He has avoided the sort of punishment mandated by the Hays Code in the classic gangster movies that influenced Scorsese. He is not killed or imprisoned. Instead, his punishment is more spiritual and existential. Ace has been cast out of paradise. As he succinctly explains, “Paradise. We managed to really fuck it all up.” It is a bitter and cynical ending to the American fairytale.

In terms of subgenre, The Exorcist belongs to a long lineage of supernatural and demonic movies. In the broadest possible terms, it evokes contemporary movies like Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby or Ken Russell’s The Devils. One could even tie it back to British horrors like Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon or Terence Fisher’s The Devil’s Bride. In that sense, it is a traditional horror; it came out the year before proto-slashers The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Black Christmas.

However, part of Friedkin’s genius with The Exorcist was rooting this horror in a grounded setting. Friedkin was a key figure in the “New Hollywood” movement, which represented a clear break from the old-fashioned studio system. Young and upcoming directors were able to construct grittier and more grounded takes on familiar genres that spoke to contemporary audiences. What Friedkin did with demonic horror in The Exorcist, Francis Ford Coppola did to the classic mob movie in The Godfather.

The movie begins with an extended atmospheric prologue following Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow) at an archeological dig in Northern Iraq. This feels like the opening of a more conventional genre picture. However, The Exorcist then pivots sharply. It cuts to Georgetown in Washington, D.C. It becomes the story of Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), an actress and single mother trying to raise her daughter Regan (Linda Blair).

Regan strikes up a relationship with a strange entity named “Captain Howdy.” This mysterious force communicates with the teenager through a Ouija board, and seems to know a lot more than it should. Chris starts hearing strange noises around the house. Regan’s personality begins to shift; she experiences strange seizures, she lashes out, she seems tormented. Chris seeks answers in science, but there’s no medical explanation forthcoming.

One night, while babysitting Regan for Chris, the director Burke Dennings (Jack MacGowran) disappears from her bedroom. His body is found at the bottom of a set of stone stairs outside the house, his neck broken. This draws the attention of Lieutenant William F. Kinderman (Lee J. Cobb). Panicking, Chris consults Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller). The pair come to believe that Regan may be possessed by a monstrous demonic force.

Strip the more heightened supernatural elements out of the plot synopsis and The Exorcist remains a compelling social drama. It is the story of a mother dealing with a dramatic change in her daughter. “Look, Doc, I really don’t understand how her whole personality could change,” Chris complains to Dr. Barringer (Peter Masterson). Barringer replies that it could just be a lesion on the temporal lobe. It is “very common” and can lead to “destructive, even criminal, behavior.”

This feels like only a slight exaggeration of how some parents react to children entering their teenage years. However, it feels particularly charged in the context of The Exorcist. Both the film and novel feel like a reckoning with the legacy of the 1960s. Chris is filming a movie about the decade’s campus protests. More broadly, the 1960s had been defined by a generational trauma, as parents worried about their kids partaking in the “youth rebellion,” embracing counterculture, or even joining cults.

The Exorcist is also obviously a reaction against the sexual revolution of that earlier decade. One of its most shocking scenes finds Regan masturbating with a crucifix, screaming “Let Jesus fuck you.” Later on, the demon teases Karras, “Your mother sucks cocks in hell.” Even setting aside the demonic possession, there’s the unarticulated question about what Burke Dennings was doing in Regan’s bedroom before he was thrown from her window. There’s also some debate about Karras’ sexuality, which perhaps makes sense in the larger context of Friedkin’s career.

In this sense, The Exorcist is a profoundly conservative work, like a lot of exorcism movies. William Peter Blatty, who wrote the novel and the screenplay, is quite candid about this. “It’s an argument for God,” he has acknowledged. “I intended it to be an apostolic work, to help people in their faith.” It feels somewhat pointed that the demonic force manages to gain entry to a household headed by a divorced single working mother, tapping into many of the anxieties of the time.

This conservatism was a reaction against broader cultural trends. The Exorcist was released in December 1973, at the end of a busy year. The Supreme Court had decided Roe v. Wade that January, decriminalizing abortion nationwide. On television that February, the PBS docuseries An American Family ended up covering the dissolution of the Loud family, with Pat Loud seeking a divorce from her husband after 21 years. In August, the National Organization for Women protested Wall Street.

Even outside of these feminist advances, America was working through some very dramatic changes. Although the resonance is entirely coincidental, there is something evocative about Father Merrin unearthing an ancient and buried evil in the Middle East that comes to torment the United States in a movie released in the midst of the Arab oil embargo. It also feels pointed that The Exorcist presents evil taking root in Washington, just as the nation was working through the Watergate Scandal.

More broadly, The Exorcist is about anomie. As Karras wanders through Washington, the city seems to be collapsing into itself. Kids dance on car hoods in a rundown neighborhood. A homeless man (Vincent Russell) begs for change on the subway platform. “Can you help an old altar boy?” the stranger implores. Ultimately, Karras can’t. It seems that nobody can. Friedkin shoots these relatively mundane scenes of urban decay as if the city itself has become possessed and degraded like Regan.

The sound mix on The Exorcist is incredible. Friedkin uses silence sparingly, and to great effect. There is always something happening, some activity unfolding. The noise is often industrial in nature. Even in Northern Iraq, Father Merrin listens to the clang of the anvil as ironsmiths beat metal into useful shapes. At one point, a horse and cart nearly knocks him down, its driver and occupant too busy getting where they are going to pay attention. It screeches like the Washington subway.

“At one level, The Exorcist appears to be arguing that the modern world, like Sodom and Gomorrah, has sold itself to the devil,” Barbara Creed wrote, “hence, the moral climate is so corrupt that the devil is able to take possession of the young with the greatest of ease. Life in the modern city is marked by a sense of decay associated with poverty, overcrowding, alienation, loneliness, neglect of the old, divorce, alcoholism and violence.” It is a film that is firmly rooted in its particular moment.

In some ways, The Exorcist could only really exist in December 1973. That is the only context in which it truly makes sense. It is a film terrified of encroaching modernity, but a very particular sort of modernity. The Exorcist is a snapshot of a particular set of American anxieties. While its underlying themes are universal, its frame of reference is very specific. This may explain why the original stands as a towering and singular accomplishment, hitting the pop culture like a lightning bolt.

The Exorcist has spawned a variety of sequels. Indeed, there are multiple versions of the third (Exorcist III and Legion) and fourth (Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist) films in the series, not to mention an alternate cut of Exorcist II: The Heretic. However, these sequels have made no tangible impact on pop culture. They don’t even register in the same way as the schlocky later sequels in the Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises.

This might be because there’s nowhere for these movies to go. The sequels go wrong immediately. John Boorman’s The Heretic is a fascinating misfire because it feels like a complete rejection of everything that made Friedkin’s original such a masterpiece. It feels like a throwback, with a very old-fashioned central performance from Richard Burton and a lot of studio and model work. It rejects any sense of a specific time or place, moving away from the grounding of the horror in the mundane.

Many of these sequels focus on Father Merrick’s time in Africa, a uniting thread of The Heretic, The Beginning, and Dominion. Even setting aside that each of those films has their own issues, this choice has an alienating effect. It exoticizes the horror for the American audience by moving it overseas. The choice to present The Beginning and Dominion as prequels further distances the franchise from the original’s engagement with its specific moment.

This may be why Exorcist III (and Legion) remains the most successful of the Exorcist sequels. Directed by Blatty, the film is still defined by the 1970s. It stars Hollywood legend George C. Scott as Kinderman, several decades removed from the peak of his career. Brad Dourif plays “the Gemini Killer,” an obvious allusion to the Zodiac Killer of the late 1960s. Still, Exorcist III is at least firmly rooted in Georgetown and engages with those familiar themes about urban decay and corruption.

This is perhaps the challenge in seeking to build a long-delayed sequel to The Exorcist, as director David Gordon Green is attempting to do with The Exorcist: Believer. The beauty of The Exorcist lay in taking a very traditional and even old-fashioned horror template and applying it in a thoroughly modern context. Any worthy successor to The Exorcist needs to be willing to do the same thing in the context of its own moment, without feeling nostalgically beholden to a 50-year-old film.

In many long-running film series, especially horror franchises, there comes a point where – consciously or otherwise – the films seem to scream, “Enough!” Often, entries seem couched in a contempt for both the films themselves and for the audience eagerly consuming them. Such entries tend to arrive around the third installment of a given series; the point at which the series is no longer just the original and a sequel, but instead threatens to become a brand unto itself.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the last in the original run of films to involve franchise creator John Carpenter, ends with lead actor Tom Atkins trying to avert an apocalyptic advertisement following a broadcast of Halloween. He stares down the camera, screaming at the audience, “Turn it off!” Alien 3, one of the most bleakly nihilistic franchise films ever made, can be read as a metaphor for the self-perpetuating horror of the Alien film series.

The Saw franchise is interesting. For seven years, like clockwork, the series churned out a new film for Halloween. The poster for Saw IV promised, “If it’s Halloween, it must be Saw.” The franchise has grossed over a billion dollars at the global box office, which is not bad for a combined budget of under $100 million. Before The Hunger Games and John Wick, Saw was the flagship franchise for Lionsgate, just as the A Nightmare on Elm Street series had been for New Line Cinema in the 1980s.

However, the legacy of the franchise is somewhat contested. Contemporary press coverage often dismissed the series as “torture porn.” This is interesting, because the original Saw isn’t actually that violent. Very little gore is shown on screen. While it’s certainly nastier than some of director James Wan’s subsequent work in the genre, like Insidious or The Conjuring, it’s not graphic for the sake of being graphic. The sequels, however, are a different story.

Wan has discussed his relationship with the franchise and what it became after the original film. “I definitely feel like in a lot of ways Saw did so many great things for me, but it put me into this category that I don’t really see myself in,” he told IndieWire in March 2011. “I don’t want to be known as the king of gore. And here’s the irony, the first one isn’t that gory, it’s more psychological. People forget that. People have retroactively given me this reputation based on the whole franchise.”

Despite transitioning to mainstream blockbusters like Furious 7 and Aquaman, Wan still rankles at the classification of the original Saw as “torture porn.” “There was a lot of thought and craft put into the screenplay, and so it felt like a derogatory term to describe it,” he explained to The Hollywood Reporter this June. “It was eventually used to describe the subgenre that it became — and Saw was a big part of that particular movement — but I definitely wasn’t too excited about that term.”

Wan’s co-writer on Saw, Leigh Whannell, has been a bit less vocal in his criticisms of the term, but has admitted to tiring of graphic violence as a crutch in horror. “I think the violence on screen has reached a certain point where that taboo has been broken,” he told JoBlo in press for Saw III. “There’s only a couple more things you could do. What are you going to do, have someone castrating themselves for real on screen? At some point, you’re going to have to put a lid on it and say, ‘We’ve done all this.’”

The franchise pivots hard into graphic gore with Saw II, the sequel rushed into cinemas the next year. Saw II was actually a rewrite of an original screenplay by director Darren Lynn Bousman, The Desperate, retrofitted to the franchise. Originally, none of the three creative forces involved with Saw and Saw II – Wan, Bousman, and Whannell – wanted anything to do with Saw III. “In a lot of [Saw II] interviews I said that there would not be a Saw III,” Bousman confessed in press for Saw III.

However, when producer Gregg Hoffman passed away prematurely, the three decided to shepherd Saw III into cinemas as a tribute. As Bousman recalls, “We were sitting there and we were like, ‘You know what? They’re going to do Saw III with or without us, so let’s do it for Greg.[sic]’” That sets up the vibe for Saw III, which finds a surgeon named Lynn (Bahar Soomekh), sharing the director’s middle name, desperately fighting to keep the franchise’s flagship cancer-ridden killer John Kramer (Tobin Bell) going for one more Saw film.

There’s an exhaustion to Saw III. The opening moments join Matthews in the aftermath of the climax of Saw II, trapped in the bathroom from Saw. He is chained to the floor. There is a saw nearby. It’s all very familiar. Matter-of-factly, understanding he’s a protagonist in a Saw film, Matthews picks up the saw, rolls up his jeans, and takes his sock off to use as a gag. It’s business as usual. That’s what the audience expects. However, stopping to think about it, he then uses a nearby shattered toilet lid to break his foot instead. Saw III rejects the saw.

Like most major horror franchises, the Saw films go back and forth in their opinion of John Kramer. He is the closest thing that the series has to a main character, and so the franchise’s perspective tends to align with his own. Some of the films seem to enthusiastically embrace his rationalizations for the torture that he inflicts upon others, treating them as some grim millennial self-help. Other films are somewhat more skeptical, suggesting that he is lying to himself as much as others.

From the beginning, Saw III dismisses Kramer’s justifications that these trials serve any purpose beyond torture and sadism. Examining an early trap, Detective Kerry (Dina Meyer) notes that the door to the room was welded shut, meaning the trap was inescapable. When she is trapped herself, she retrieves the key that should unlock her torture mechanism, but discovers that it doesn’t work. The game was rigged. It was unwinnable. It was really just an excuse for some grotesque body horror.

Saw III adopts a different structure than Saw or Saw II. The film’s protagonist is Jeff (Angus Macfadyen). Jeff isn’t a victim in any elaborate trap or a police officer trying to catch Kramer. Jeff’s son was killed in a hit-and-run. He wakes up in an old, abandoned abattoir and effectively wanders through a series of complicated torture mechanisms that inflict pain and suffering on other people. His primary function is to witness this suffering. He can also decide whether to stop it.

Jeff is an audience surrogate wandering through his own Saw film. Saw III is decidedly lurid. The first trap that Jeff encounters finds a naked woman named Danica Scott (Debra Lynne McCabe) chained up and sprayed with ice-cold water. “Why are you doing this to me?” Danica demands. It turns out she was a witness to the death of Jeff’s son, but wouldn’t testify. “I didn’t do anything to you!” she screams. Jeff replies, “That’s exactly it. You didn’t do anything.” The irony seems lost on him as he stands by and watches her suffer.

Soomekh has acknowledged struggling with the graphic violence in Saw III. “I think I asked Darren a couple times,” she confessed to IGN when asked about it. “From what I understand, this is what the fans want.” According to Hoffman, the decision to increase the amount of onscreen gore in Saw II was in response to fan feedback. As such, Jeff’s role in Saw III as a voyeuristic and passive observer of this graphic violence feels like an indictment of the franchise’s audience.

After all, the original Saw feels like a movie heavily indebted to David Fincher’s Se7en, another movie about a self-righteous serial killer with a passion for elaborate torture mechanisms. Se7en remains one of the great depictions of urban anomie in American mainstream cinema; of the disconnect that people feel from one another in these anonymous cities. So much of the Saw franchise unfolds in eerily empty and abandoned communal spaces like classrooms, hospitals, and clinics.

Saw III argues that Kramer’s motivation is a desire to shake his victims out of apathy, to wake Jeff up from the stupor following the death of his son. However, he also seeks to awaken some empathy in Lynn. “Why are you living with the dead when you have such a beautiful family, a husband who is indeed alone, a daughter who needs her mother, patients who need a competent physician who looks them in the eye and treats them like human beings?” he asks her. What if the audience and the filmmakers lack that same empathy?

Of course, the irony is that Kramer’s work has been misunderstood — perhaps in the same way that the original Saw was misunderstood. It turns out that Kramer’s apprentice, Amanda, has been rigging the traps to make them inescapable. She’s also been killing survivors. This is something of a clumsy retcon, in that the original Saw makes it clear that Kramer knew that Amanda hid the key to Adam’s (Leigh Whannell) chain in the water where it would go down the drain, something Saw III omits in its edit of the flashback.

Still, the point stands. Amanda was supposed to be Kramer’s lasting legacy, a lost young woman who survived her trap and was seemingly transformed by it. Instead, she’s a monster. In his final hours, John builds one last trap to test her. She fails spectacularly, and so Kramer has failed spectacularly. There was reportedly an even more explicit scene in which Kramer would acknowledge his regrets over what he has done, although actor Tobin Bell admits to being “glad they cut that scene.”

Still, Kramer’s left dying in an abattoir, confronted with the complete failure of his grand artistic work as his successor runs it into the ground. Given that Saw III marks the last involvement of Wan and Whannell in the franchise, it feels like a none-too-subtle metaphor. Saw III seems to torch the franchise on the way out the door. The film ends with Jeff shooting Amanda and murdering Kramer with an electric saw, which triggers an explosive collar around Lynn’s neck. It’s the franchise equivalent of “rocks fall, everyone dies.”

The decision to kill Kramer three movies into the Saw franchise arguably stunts the series. Somehow, Bell goes on to appear in six of the next seven entries, with Saw X promising more Kramer than any previous entry. The series contorts itself into weird shapes to justify bringing Bell back, creating an increasingly tangled continuity of prequels, interquels, and flashbacks. Bousman argued Saw III was intended as the closing chapter of “a complete story. It is one complete story, basically. It is a tragic epic.” This wasn’t how it turned out, but it was meant to be.

Saw III is a remarkable franchise film, one that seems to hold both itself and its audience in sheer contempt. However, it was also a massive success. Its opening weekend was the biggest launch for the franchise and for Lionsgate to that point, and the biggest opening for the Halloween holiday weekend to that point. There was no way that John Kramer could be allowed to rest in peace. The pieces may have been smashed, but the game was far from over.

A lot has been written over the past decade or so about how Hollywood has failed to produce a new generation of movie stars to replace ageing veterans like Tom Cruise or Leonardo DiCaprio. However, to anybody watching movies, the problem is not a lack of talent. There are plenty of young actors who have the raw potential, something that could be harnessed into a compelling screen persona that could attract audiences and even develop with them over decades.

Most casual viewers will recognize Powell from Top Gun: Maverick, where he played the conceited fighter pilot Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin. It’s pure swagger, and the film even goes out of its way to give Powell’s supporting character his own miniature arc in which he learns to be just a little bit less self-centered. However, Powell has been around for over a decade at this point. It’s frustrating that Maverick was the first time many viewers noticed him and that it may even be the peak of his career.

Powell started as a child actor and worked his way through the trenches. There is some retroactive recognition of his role as a sleazy stock trader in The Dark Knight Rises. However, he seemed to arrive with the release of Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! in 2016, a charming hangout movie following a set of young men and one woman in the week before college begins. Powell has enjoyed a steady relationship with Linklater, appearing in Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood and Hit Man.

Powell has put in a lot of the work that one might expect from an emerging young talent. He had a memorable supporting role playing a real-life celebrity in Hidden Figures, cast as the charismatic astronaut John Glenn. He played the decoy romantic interest for Lily James in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, but really popped opposite Everybody Wants Some!! co-star Zoey Deutsch in Set It Up as a smug corporate personal assistant.

This year, Powell has garnered a great deal of attention as the lead character in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, which almost feels like awards season counterprogramming to Michael Fassbender in David Fincher’s The Killer. Powell plays a police officer who goes undercover as a killer-for-hire, and who falls in love with a woman named Maddy (Adria Arjona). The festival reviews for Hit Man were effusive, with particular praise for Powell.

“Richard Linklater’s sexy comedy makes a star out of Glen Powell,” raved The Hollywood Reporter. “Glen Powell makes a case for movie stardom in Hit Man,” contended Vanity Fair. “If Glen Powell’s not already a star, this movie will make him one,” hedged Vulture. A feature on the film from Associated Press included praise for the “movie-star turn by Glen Powell” in its headline. There was a palpable excitement to the coverage. Somebody who had done the work was getting the recognition.

Then Netflix swooped in and bought the distribution rights for Hit Man for $20m. While the deal reportedly includes stipulation for “a theatrical component”, that would seem to signal the end of any hope of Hit Man enjoying a significant release in cinemas. More than that, given that The Killer is a major awards contender for the streaming service, it seems highly unlikely that Hit Man will receive the same level of attention or publicity in the months ahead.

To a certain extent, this is business as usual for Netflix. Over the past decade or so, the streaming services have arrived at the major film festivals with an insatiable appetite and bottomless pockets, spending like “drunken sailors.” They hoover up titles for often absurd amounts of money. In 2019, Amazon spent $40m on three titles at Sundance. The following year, Netflix paid $35m for Malcolm & Marie at Toronto. In 2021, Apple bought CODA at Sundance for $25m.

Some of these titles do go on to massive success. Amazon paid $10m for Manchester by the Sea at Sundance in 2016, and became the first streaming service with a Best Picture nomination. CODA was the first film from a streaming service to win the Best Picture Oscar. However, many more fade into obscurity, often buried by the algorithm or released with no real push from a service that paid a frankly absurd amount of money for them.

This isn’t an abstract observation. Filmmakers feel the same way. “Apollo 10½, I loved that whole experience,” Linklater told Associated Press in an interview before Netflix sealed the deal on Hit Man. “It was such a personal experience. And then one day it showed up on a platform with no fanfare. It’s always kind of sad when you realize even your friends don’t know your film is out.” Given that even a token theatrical release adds value to a streaming title, it’s easy to get lost in the content churn.

After all, many of Powell’s best and most charming performances went straight to streaming rather than through the traditional distribution model. He was great in Hidden Figures, which earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, but it was a supporting role. Audiences who wanted to see if Powell could carry a movie as a lead would have to find Set It Up on Netflix, a film which got somewhat lost amid a summer of streaming romantic comedies.

Discussions about the dearth of modern movie stars tend to focus on the kinds of major releases that make it into theatres, particularly intellectual-property-driven blockbusters. It seems that making blockbusters alone is not enough to transform a charismatic performer into a movie star, as demonstrated by the careers of actors like Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans. This makes sense. Classic movie stars tended to build their personas by demonstrating talent across a variety of genres.

At a distance, Powell’s career echoes that of his Maverick co-star, Tom Cruise. Sure, Cruise was an action star in Top Gun, but he was also a precocious teenager in Risky Business, a romantic lead in Cocktail, a hotshot hustler in The Color of Money and an awards-caliber leading man in Rain Man. He could do all those things. However, those kinds of movies don’t tend to get major theatrical releases today, so there’s less opportunity for emerging talent to showcase the range of their star persona.

There is a broader question of whether streaming can make a star. Theoretically, it is a democratic medium that is more easily accessible. It pumps content into people’s homes. People can watch streaming anywhere on their phones or laptops. However, there are perhaps two key problems here. The first is just the sheer volume of content, which can devalue the form and make it harder to spot true talent. The second is that stardom was always built on a certain inaccessibility.

Stranger Things is one of the biggest shows in the world. While actors like Millie Bobbie Brown and Finn Wolfhard have certainly pursued interesting careers, they don’t feel like stars. Pedro Pascal headlines two of the biggest shows in the world, The Mandalorian and The Last of Us, but he was still cast as the character in awe of movie star Nicholas Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. No matter how much schlock Cage makes, there is a categorical difference between Cage and Pascal.

Powell is not a unique case. Later this year, Netflix will release the erotic drama Fair Play, which they snapped up from Sundance for $20m. Fair Play stars Alden Ehrenreich, another promising young performer who feels like a lost star. Ehrenreich was famously spotted in a bat-mitzva video by Steven Spielberg. He began his career working with directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Park Chan-Wook. He seemed like an actor who was destined to go places.

He broke out in the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar! The movie’s second trailer was based entirely around Ehrenreich’s lovable cowboy actor Hobie Doyle. He’s great in the role. He’s charming, sweet, funny, earnest and vulnerable. That performance has aged very well. In the wake of all the controversy around Solo: A Star Wars Story, a film that felt like it should have been a launching pad for the actor, it’s affecting to watch Ehrenreich as a young star trying to navigate Hollywood.

Of course, Ehrenreich found his career derailed by the modern studio franchise machine, and was the subject of unpleasant rumors that Disney had brought in an acting coach, which Ehrenreich found himself having to address. Ehrenreich arguably spent the next five years trying to recover from it. This year, he really popped in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, playing an unnamed Senate aide who drives a lot of the film’s flashback structure and lands a real whopper at the movie’s climax.

For those lamenting the death of the movie star, the talent is obviously there. Powell broke out in Everybody Wants Some!!, a coming-of-age movie from Richard Linklater that recalled Dazed and Confused. That film is a hotbed for emerging 1990s talent: Milla Jovovich, Rory Cochrane, Adam Goldberg, Anthony Rapp, Cole Hauser, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Matthew McConaughey, Nicky Katt and Renée Zellweger. Everybody Wants Some!! contains its own deep bench of talent.

However, so much of that talent seems lost. Blake Jenner’s biggest role since was perhaps the streaming show What/If on Netflix. Tyler Hoechlin played Superman on the CW and in Superman & Lois, but seems unlikely to be considered a defining Man of Steel by mainstream audiences. Zoey Deutsch has worked more consistently than many of her co-stars, but her biggest roles tend to be on streaming. She was in Set It Up with Powell and was the second lead on Netflix’s The Politician.

Looking at this larger pattern, it’s clear that this movie star energy is getting syphoned off into various black holes. Would a theatrical release of Hit Man or Fair Play be enough on their own to make movie stars of Glen Powell and Alden Ehrenreich? It seems unlikely. It seems more realistic that they’d be stepping stones and calling cards in a larger body of work that could build cumulatively to the status of movie star. Instead, they wind up part of vast libraries of formless content.

Even stars can’t shine under those conditions.

There is a surprising amount of narrative and thematic overlap between The Equalizer 3 and My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, even beyond their function as trilogy-cappers.

Although The Equalizer 3 is a gritty revenge thriller and My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is a broad romantic comedy, they are both movies with surprisingly low stakes. In The Equalizer 3, there is never any doubt or tension concerning Robert McCall’s (Denzel Washington) confrontation with local crime lord Vincent Quaranta (Andrea Scarduzio). McCall is never in any real danger. There is never a sense that these local criminals could be anything other than a mild irritation to him.

Similarly, the stakes in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 are remarkably low. There is no doubt that Paris (Elena Kampouris) and Aristotle (Elias Kacavas) are going to end up together by the end of the film. While the characters worry that nobody else is going to turn up, there is no chance that Victory’s (Melina Kotselou) planned reunion will pay off without a hitch. Even the forbidden love between Qamar (Stephanie Nur) and Christos (Giannis Vasilottos) is amicably resolved in a handful of scenes.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is a movie entirely about good vibes. Nobody ever has any profound disagreements. There are no conflicts. About one third of the scenes end with characters enthusiastically embracing one another. Throughout the film, Toula (Nia Vardalos) and her husband Ian (John Corbett) fear that their daughter Paris is keeping a secret from them. When it turns out that she is on academic probation from college, there are some raised voices, but it’s quickly forgotten.

Of course, this makes a certain amount of sense. While they have different tones and belong to different genres, both The Equalizer 3 and My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 are essentially vacation movies. They ship the characters (and the audience) across the ocean from the United States to Europe. As such, it is only fitting that the films should have a gentle tone. Nobody takes a holiday to be stressed out — even unstoppable killing machines like Robert McCall.

While The Equalizer 2 included brief excursions to Istanbul and Brussels, the bulk of the first two Equalizer films unfolded around Boston. However, the cold open of The Equalizer 3 finds Robert McCall dealing with organized crime in Sicily, having followed a money trail. The first two Big Fat Greek Wedding movies focus on a family of Greek immigrants in Chicago, but the third film finds the entire Portokalos family decamping to visit the homeland.

The Equalizer 3 and My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 are not anomalies. There has been a wave of recent movies that feature characters taking big trips abroad. These are often sequels to established properties. In Downton Abbey: A New Era, Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville) leads half the cast on a trip to a villa in the South of France. Book Club: The Next Chapter finds the eponymous quartet taking a trip to Italy. Magic Mike’s Last Dance sends Mike (Channing Tatum) to London.

As with so many modern movies, these films rarely acknowledge that there was a recent global crisis that severely restricted people’s capacity to travel internationally. Obviously, A New Era is a period film, but the others seem to be set contemporaneously. The biggest exception to this “don’t mention the pandemic” rule may be George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing, in which traveling academic Alithea (Tilda Swinton) is shown wearing a mask on her trip to Istanbul.

Of course, during the early days of the pandemic, one of the easiest ways to produce a piece of media was to structure it around the idea of a vacation, to take the cast and crew to a remote and isolated location to minimize the risk of infection or transmission. So many of the pandemic’s early films were resort stories like Mike White’s The White Lotus or M. Night Shyamalan’s Old. However, those were about specific fictional places, not tours of real cities or countries.

Other related trends are working their way through pop cinema. The past few years have seen a resurgence in adventure movies set overseas, like Bullet Train and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. There have also been some old-fashioned globe-trotting archeological action movies, like Uncharted or Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Beyond that, there are obviously new entries in long-running franchises built around this template, like No Time to Die or Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One.

There is also a renewed emphasis on stories of (often second-generation) immigrants exploring their relationship between their American and their original identities. This trend goes back a little bit earlier than the previous examples, extending to Jon M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians and Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, and continuing to recent films like Adele Lim’s Joy Ride or Celine Song’s Past Lives. All of these movies are about young women trying to navigate complicated questions of identity.

Although there are certainly echoes of this subgenre in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 — another story about a female character returning to her parents’ homeland — it is arguably its own thing. It perhaps makes sense to think of movies like Crazy Rich Asians, The Farewell, Joy Ride, and Past Lives as a response to the rise of ethno-nationalism in contemporary American politics and the increase in racism against Asian Americans. It is only reasonable that these movies would find Asian characters looking overseas to explore their identity.

In contrast, movies like The Equalizer 3, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, Downton Abbey: A New Era, Book Club: The Next Chapter, and Magic Mike’s Last Dance are doing something quite different. These movies often feel like travelogues. They take audiences to exotic international settings and allow them to luxuriate in the beauty. It provides an opportunity for the audience to imagine what it might be like to venture to Europe and experience the culture and climate.

Cinema has always done this. Travelogues were very popular during the 1950s. Hollywood embraced widescreen formats like Cinerama to combat the rise of television and to serve audiences who were more curious about the outside world in the wake of the Second World War, releasing movies like Search for Paradise or Seven Wonders of the World. The highest grossing film of 1955 in the United States was Cinerama Holiday, a documentary about two couples touring Europe and America.

The more recent wave of travelogue films feels like a response to the recent global pandemic — an extended period in which people were expected to lockdown and shelter in place. After years of relative isolation, it makes sense that individuals would be eager to travel the world again, whether literally or figuratively. Over the past year, there has been a resurgence in American tourists traveling to Europe, despite an inflation crisis. In some ways, these films reflect that same impulse.

It’s worth acknowledging that there is also a demographic factor at play here. As a rule, films like The Equalizer 3 and My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 are aimed at older audiences. 49% of the audience for The Equalizer 3 was over 45, with the largest individual demographic (26%) over 55. 48% of the opening weekend audience for Downton Abbey: A New Era was over 55. That demographic made up the exact same percentage of the audience for Book Club: The Next Chapter.

This is notable for two reasons. First, that older audience has been reluctant to return to theaters following the pandemic, perhaps because they feel underserved or perhaps because of lingering health risks. Secondly, and perhaps relatedly, for that demographic the pandemic is still real. Older people are obviously at greater risk from the disease, and even those who want to travel now face steeper premiums and tighter restrictions, making vacations more expensive and prohibitive.

As such, these movies offer a less risky and more affordable way to vicariously experience international tourism, whether it’s Robert McCall sipping a morning coffee as local football supporters fill up the town square or Toula Portokalos getting day drunk while negotiating with local small-town shopkeepers. It’s no wonder that The Equalizer 3 includes a small scene in which McCall criticizes a young CIA operative (Dakota Fanning) for reading the wrong tourist guidebook.

That said, many of these movies feel like post-pandemic films in other more subtle ways. Most obviously, there is a frequent recurring subtext of mortality that creeps in around the edge of the frame, a cinematic memento mori. The opening sequence of The Equalizer 3 ends with McCall getting shot in the back and attempting suicide, only to find his way to a small-town doctor (Remo Girone) who tends to his wounds and aids his recovery. However, even the gentler examples of this trend constantly remind the audience of the characters’ mortality.

The first Downton Abbey movie ends with the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) acknowledging that she received a terminal diagnosis. This colors much of A New Era, in which she reveals that a former lover, the Marquis de Montmirail, gifted her a mansion. The Marquis has died and, contemplating her own mortality, the Dowager Countess bequeaths that mansion to her own great-granddaughter, Sybbie (Fifi Hart). The movie ends with the Dowager Countess’ death, her portrait hanging in the wall.

This theme of death and loss is most pronounced in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, in which the return to Greece is in part motivated by the death of Toula’s father, Gus (Michael Constantine). Indeed, Toula’s brother, Nikos (Louis Mandylor), has smuggled their father’s remains back to Greece, in the hope of scattering them in the shade of the village’s biggest tree. There is a surprising tenderness to this, which perhaps informs the gentleness of the movie around it.

However, Gus’ death is not the only loss that the characters have experienced. Toula and Nikos’ mother, Maria (Lainie Kazan) is suffering from a degenerative condition, and is increasingly unaware of her surroundings and the faces of her family. That is its own form of loss. In a quiet conversation at a seaside café, Tuola tenderly acknowledges that her husband Ian also lost his father over the previous year. The pandemic and the virus are never mentioned, but that sense of parental loss resonates.

It may be years before we can properly assess the impact of the pandemic on the kind of popular culture being produced. Certainly, there has been a marked increase in movies directed by actors, often gestated during lockdown. There is also an increasing trend of auteur-driven movies about isolated and quarantined communities, like Asteroid City, Knock at the Cabin, and Oppenheimer. However, it feels important to acknowledge the rise of the post-pandemic travelogue.

Blood and Honey can be understood in a couple of different contexts. Most obviously, it is a transgressive horror film that uses the iconography of beloved childhood figures in a grotesque and unsettling way as a shortcut to cheap thrills. There has been a recent spate of these movies, including The Banana Splits Movie and The Mean One. Later this year, Five Nights at Freddy’s will adapt the beloved video game, riffing on the same basic idea of cute childish things turned violent.

However, Blood and Honey stands apart from these contemporaries. It isn’t a pastiche like Five Nights at Freddy’s, it isn’t a licensed production like The Banana Splits Movie, and it’s not an unauthorized parody like The Mean One. It is an adaptation of A. A. Milne’s beloved children’s classic, made possible by the fact that Winnie the Pooh has entered the public domain. Nobody has to pay to use the character, and no authority has the power to veto what can be done with him.

Copyright law is an interesting thing. The Copyright Act of 1790 enshrined legal protection of an author’s right to their work for “the term of fourteen years from the recording the title thereof in the clerk’s office.” However, that period of protection would be expanded over the ensuing centuries. With the Copyright Term Extension Act, arriving in 1998, that protection was extended to the life of the author plus another seven decades.

Of course, the reality is that copyright doesn’t always protect the artists. It often exists to enrich corporate entities. Much of the most lucrative intellectual property on the planet is controlled by faceless companies that ruthlessly exploit the artistry of their employees and contractors. Comic book movies are a billion-dollar industry, but key creative figures have to fundraise to pay medical bills, like Bill Mantlo. Creators like Jack Kirby or Bill Finger never got to enjoy the spoils of their labor.

Indeed, these extensions to the period of copyright were largely driven by companies holding these intellectual property rights. The Copyright Term Extension Act was known in some circles as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act,” reflecting Disney’s proactive lobbying in favor of the extension. Incidentally, Disney paid $350 million to buy Winnie the Pooh from the A. A. Milne estate in March 2001. It is ruthless capitalism, rooted in these companies’ desires to control the public imagination.

The Copyright Term Extension Act ensured that no media entered the public domain between 1998 and 2019. As much as writers like Grant Morrison might argue that superheroes are the modern equivalent to the classic Greek gods, this ignores the fact that mythology is a public resource. The classic myths were not owned by large corporations that could use the threat of legal action to pull Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker from the Toronto International Film Festival after a single screening.

This makes Blood and Honey a pointed act of transgression. The film comes from writer and director Rhys Frake-Waterfield, best known as a producer of low-rent schlock like Dinosaur Hotel and Dragon Fury. Realizing that A. A. Milne’s beloved childhood fable was entering the public domain, Frake-Waterfield sensed an opportunity. With a budget of under $100,000, he set out to make a quick cash-in slasher movie.

Of course, Frake-Waterfield could only draw from elements included in the earliest stories. He had to avoid the iconic material added to the mythos in the years that followed. “Only the 1926 version is in the public domain, so those were the only elements I could incorporate,” Frake-Waterfield admitted. “Other parts like Poohsticks, and Tigger, and Pooh’s red shirt — those aren’t elements I can use at the moment because they’re the copyright of Disney and that would get me in a lot of trouble.”

Blood and Honey is a bad movie. It is lazy, uninspired, and boring. It has no sense of character, theme, or basic structure. It’s a lazily reskinned version of Halloween or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre from a filmmaker who spent a significant portion of the press tour passive-aggressively complaining about how Halloween Ends took “itself too seriously.” There is nothing of any merit here, nothing to hold the audience’s interest. The film’s 84-minute runtime lasts several lifetimes.

That said, there is a germ of an interesting idea in the central concept, which has an adult Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon) returning to the childhood fantasy that he abandoned to go to college. He discovers that his childhood did not take well to this abandonment. Winnie the Pooh (Craig David Dowsett), now a feral and mute beast, chains Christopher up and tortures him. He whips the adult with Eeyore’s tail. However, Winnie the Pooh cannot kill Christopher. He must possess him.

It is too much to suggest that this plot is mirrored in the story of the film’s actual protagonist and decoy final girl, Maria (Maria Taylor). Maria is taking a trip into the country with her girlfriends, recovering from a traumatic experience with a male stalker (Chris Cordell). When Maria’s friend Lara (Natasha Tosini) spots Pooh lurking around the Airbnb, she assumes that he must be Maria’s stalker. Pooh’s psychopathic sidekick, Piglet, is also played by Cordell, to underscore this connection.

At times, Blood and Honey seems like it might be a clever and subversive commentary on the way in which so much modern pop culture infantilizes its audience. Christopher has tried to grow up and leave his childhood behind, even planning to marry his fiancée Mary (Paula Coiz), but his childhood won’t leave him behind. Pooh needs Christopher, his validation and his love. However, that relationship is not as innocent as it appears framed through childhood memory.

Many modern adults would empathize with this idea, as their childhood nostalgia is weaponized against them by streaming services and studios. Even if one lives in a remote cabin in the woods, franchises like Star Wars, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, He-Man, and X-Men: The Animated Series are inescapable. Entertainment that was once aimed at children is now aimed at the adults those children became. There is no indication that these corporations are ever going to stop.

Of course, this gives Blood and Honey too much credit, suggesting that it can be read as a subversive commentary on the role that this sort of intellectual property plays in cultural stagnation. In reality, Blood and Honey is an illustration of just how pervasive this model of capitalism can be. Frake-Waterfield isn’t using Pooh to make a point about the cynical exploitation of these cultural touchstones. He is using it as a cynical exploitation of these cultural touchstones.

Blood and Honey grossed nearly $5 million at the global box office, and one suspects that it performed very well on home media and streaming. There is already a sequel in the works with “five times the budget.” More than that, Frake-Waterfield has made a conscious effort to expand the brand into a shared universe built around similar properties. He will direct Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare and will produce Bambi: The Reckoning, which was sold to international distributors at Cannes this year.

Frake-Waterfield doesn’t just have his eye on these sequels and spin-offs. He dreams of a bigger childhood horror shared universe. “The idea is that we’re going to try and imagine they’re all in the same world, so we can have crossovers,” he boasted. “People have been messaging saying they really want to see Bambi versus Pooh.” It’s incredibly ruthless and cynical. It is a transparent attempt to build a massive multimedia franchise from elements that the production team don’t have to pay for.

In theory, the liberation of these iconic characters from copyright should herald encourage creativity and ingenuity. It should allow for more projects like The People’s Joker or Apocalypse Pooh. There are certainly artists engaged in that sort of work. It also provides the opportunity for commentary and engagement with the modern media landscape. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is already salivating at the satirical potential of Mickey Mouse’s entry into the public domain.

Blood and Honey suggests an alternative to these creative uses of works leaving corporate purview. Blood and Honey is just as cynical and ruthless in its exploitation of this intellectual property as Disney had been. Frake-Waterfield is clearly aspiring to exploit these properties in exactly the same way that Disney did, hoping to create a scale model of their production machine. It is a trickle-down shared universe, a reheat of a familiar meal constructed from pre-digested ingredients.

For all the moral handwringing about how the movie “ruined people’s childhoods,” this is the real horror of Blood and Honey. It suggests the limits of creative imagination, an inability to conceive of an alternative to the model of intellectual property management that defines so much contemporary pop culture. The roots of this mode of thinking run so deep that it seems impossible to imagine any alternative. The public domain doesn’t free this intellectual property from endless exploitation, it just means somebody else gets to take a turn.

If the rights to Winnie the Pooh are entering the public domain, why wouldn’t somebody use the brand recognition to make a quick and easy buck? After all, the business logic behind Blood and Honey is the same logic behind something like The Little Mermaid or Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. People recognize the brand, and that will make it easier to sell. Even this seemingly subversive and rebellious act is just a cheaper, more cynical, and less competent iteration of the larger processes that drive modern media.

All things considered, the cynicism of Blood and Honey is a small price to pay for the possibility of more work like The People’s Joker. More than that, if it helps to undermine or shatter the brand loyalty that these corporations have cultivated among generations of movie-goers, it may serve some purpose. Still, it’s disheartening to watch Blood and Honey, realizing that these modes of exploitation are so deeply ingrained in pop culture that they perpetuate even in the public domain.

Even as the end of copyright becomes a reality, the end of this intellectual property churn remains beyond imagination. Oh bother.

Billing itself as “an occasionally true story”, The Great follows young Empress Catherine (Elle Fanning) as she wrests control of Russia from her boorish husband Peter (Nicholas Hoult). Catherine seeks to drag Russia into the modern world, to embrace the arts and sciences while abolishing the caste system. Catherine longs to build a better world, fashioning a progressive ideal from a country steeped in ritual superstition and carnal hedonism.

The Great premiered in May 2020, just a few months after Catherine the Great, a prestige miniseries from HBO and Sky Atlantic tackling the same subject matter. Starring Helen Mirren and Jason Clarke, Catherine the Great was an austere and traditional period drama. As director Philip Martin wrote, Catherine the Great was a spectacle of “epic magnitude and budget-busting enormity: vast battling armies, brutal peasant rebellions and towering gold palaces.”

The Great was something very different. It is a much less opulent production. Much of the filming was confined to grand houses, like Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire and Hever Castle in Kent. While the show occasionally ventures beyond the walls of the palace, most of the action takes place inside corridors, dining rooms, royal courts and private chambers. Over the show’s three seasons, the audience has come to appreciate the internal geography of the palace.

The world of The Great rarely extends beyond the palace itself. Occasionally, this becomes surrealist and absurdist, such as when Catherine’s coup against Peter turns the palace into a literal a battleground over the nation’s future. Sometimes, it feels allegorical, such as when Catherine launches her initiative to welcome girls into education by arranging for the tutoring of the court’s royal children or enacts her plan to elevate the serfs by promoting a palace servant (Ninette Finch).

This makes sense. The Great began as a stage play, and that sensibility carries over to the show. Catherine the Great embraced the maximalist scale that audiences expect in the modern prestige era, where these shows are often likened to blockbuster movies. In contrast, The Great harks back to a more traditional mode of television. After all, for much of its history, the medium owed more to theatre than to cinema, with early television drama compared to “photographed stage plays.”

Although it is an hour long and lacks a laugh track, The Great occasionally feels like a very polished sitcom. It is a show that has an established central cast of characters, many of whom are drawn in broad archetypes. Catherine is the show’s frustrated straightwoman. Peter is a petulant man-child with surprising vulnerability. General Velementov (Douglas Hodge) is the washed up, drunken, horny, belligerent military leader. “Archie” (Adam Godley) is the confused archbishop.

Many episodes employ familiar sitcom tropes. In “Stapler”, Catherine’s mother Joanna comes to visit, played by special guest star Gillian Anderson. Meanwhile, Catherine hopes to cement Russia’s international reputation by winning a prestigious international scientific competition. Desperate to win her affection, Peter promises to handle Russia’s entry. When he can’t come up with an idea, he decides to lazily rob the Norwegian delegation and present their invention as his own. With a few tweaks, this could be an episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

While the show grapples directly with Catherine’s efforts to reform Russia, it also invests heavily in the lives of its character. During the second season, Catherine’s bookish advisor Orlo (Sacha Dhawan) tries to find some satisfaction in his love life. Catherine’s servant Marial (Phoebe Fox) is a former noble woman who has been demoted to servant, and who finds herself struggling to adapt when she is elevated once again. Catherine herself has to navigated her complicated relationship to Peter. It’s a classic sitcom set-up.

However, McNamara – who wrote the stage play and is credited as writer on almost every episode of the show – is using this familiar framework to underscore a larger point. The Great is undeniably a farce, but it is a farce with a purpose. The show seems to argue that there is no real difference between the politics of the nation and the interpersonal dynamics of the people who run it. Catherine’s efforts to manage the royal court are indistinguishable from her attempts to modernize Russia.

The entire show is allegory. McNamara has been candid about this fact. “In reality, Catherine felt she needed the church, the military, and the aristocrats to overthrow the thing,” he explained of the fictional characters that he invented whole clothe for the show, “so we needed people who represent all these things.” Archie might be a compelling character in his own right, a fully fleshed out human being that is a mess of complicated motivations, but he also represents the confused place of organized religion in modern life.

The Great argues that the health and the state of a nation, particularly an autocracy, is inseparable from that of its leader. Sometimes the body politic is just the body itself. Catherine wrestles with her internal emotional turmoil by slapping herself in the face, manifesting her unease through violence. Catherine spends most of the second season pregnant with her son, Paul, a none-too-subtle metaphor for the new Russia that she hopes to usher into being. That new Russia will be inexorably tied to Peter, the monster that she deposed yet cannot bring herself to vanquish.

This is not a novel idea. Political journalists frequently talk about leaders and nations in this way. There are plenty of historical examples, most of them tied to ideas of corruption and decline. Silvio Belusconi’s relationship to Italy has often been framed as symbiotic and symbolic, with Beppe Severgnini contending that “Berlusconi is not only Italy’s head of government, but the nation’s autobiography.” The idea is that, to understand Italy, one need only study Berlusconi.

Of course, The Great is not really about Russia. By its own admission, it is only “occasionally” a “true story.” However, many observers have read the show as a commentary on the Trump era. Hoult’s revelatory performance as Peter has frequently been compared to Donald Trump, although the actor himself insists that he took his cues from The Office. Still, whether intentionally or not, the show is filtered through the concerns and the anxieties of the past few years.

The past few years have seen an explosion in depictions of feudal or pre-industrial life in film and television, such as The Last Duel, Outlaw King, The King, The Northman and The Green Knight. Many of these are filtered through the lens of fantasy and science-fiction, in projects like The Rings of Power, The Wheel of Time, The Witcher, House of the Dragon, Dune, The Handmaid’s Tale and even Willow. McNamara himself has a screenwriting credit on The Favourite, a Best Picture nominee read by some as a commentary on “the so cheaply performed palace intrigues of today.”

Undoubtedly, there is a trend being chased, following the success of Game of Thrones. As has been noted, this trend was already underway before Donald Trump was elected, as reflected by projects like The Last Kingdom, Vikings and The Bastard Executioner. However, this fascination also plays out against the backdrop of concerns about the rise of “neo-feudalism”, the increased concentration of wealth and power in private ownership and distortion of individual rights. Perhaps these stories resonate.

Alexei Bayer has argued that Trump attempted to reshape the American government to resemble “the neo-feudal system” favored by Vladimir Putin in Russia. Certainly, the past decade has not been a healthy one for American democracy. Trump consistently demonstrated autocratic tendencies, and has a long history of corruption. Despite the democratic and institutional guardrails in place, there is no denying that – as President of the United States – Trump reshaped the country in his own image.

In January 2017, the Economist Intelligence Unit downgraded America from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy”, ironically placing it on par with Italy. That same year, the Civicus Monitor noted that the “civic space” had “narrowed” in the United States. The United States has consistently fallen in the rankings of Freedom House, ending the Trump era ranked below Western Europe and most of the Caribbean. That is before getting into the attempted coup in January 2021.

However, Trump’s influence was arguably more symbolic and metaphorical. According to Michael Goldfarb, “he gave a human shape to a fact that predated him and will continue after he’s gone.” David Smith contends that Trump “put himself at the center of American life and made his country look more like him.” Jennifer Senior argued that he made America more selfish. Jill Filipovic contended that the nation became “a reflection, sadly, of the President himself.”

“First Donald Trump remade the Republican Party in his own image, and now he is trying to remake America the same way,” alleged Thomas Friedman, “into a selfish, dishonest country with no close friends, totally unpredictable, free of any commitment to enduring values, ready to stab any ally in the back on Twitter if it doesn’t do our bidding and much more comfortable with mafia-like dictators than elected democrats.” Overseas, the image of America became inseparable from that of Trump.

Much of pop culture’s strongest response to Trump came through comedy. The animated sitcom Our Cartoon President ran for three seasons. Saturday Night Live enjoyed something of a creative renaissance by bringing in celebrity guest stars to cartoonishly lampoon the key figures of the era: Trump himself (Alec Baldwin), Sean Spicer (Melissa McCarthy), Brett Kavanaugh (Matt Damon). The only way to deal with the absurdity of what was happening was to reframe it as an absurdist joke. Even the black comedy of Succession felt like the perfect response to the Trump era.

The Great exists at the intersection of these two larger trends. Its period setting taps into those same underlying anxieties about the erosion of democratic norms and values. It reflects the concern about the power and wealth concentrated through accidents of birth in those unfit to wield it. It understands the bleak absurdity of the situation, that these figures shaping history are not masterminds or visionaries, but instead short-sighted buffoons driven by their own carnal impulses. These figures exert such gravity that they warp nations in their own grotesque self-image.

Karl Marx famously amended Georg Hegel’s theory that history repeats by specifying, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” The Great wryly suggests that sometimes the process doesn’t take as long, and that often the joke is on the nations these leaders embody.

For almost as long as there have been movies, there have been dogs in movies. Blair the Dog was a star of early British silent films, such as Rescued by Rover from 1905 and its sequel The Dog Outwits the Kidnapper from 1908. In America, a tricolor Scotch collie named Jean starred in 25 silent movies between 1910 and 1916. Charlie Chaplin enjoyed great success with his short, A Dog’s Life, which would go on to be a major influence on The Kid, which itself featured some great dog-centric bits.

People like dogs. It transcends language, demonstrated by their ubiquity in silent films, even modern examples like The Artist. Since 2001, critics at the Cannes Film Festival have handed out a “Palm Dog” award. Canine characters can reach a level of ubiquity reserved for the biggest bipedal stars. Dr. No director Terence Young once mused, “There are only two great stars in my recollection who have not been changed by great massive success: Sean Connery and Lassie, and both of them Scottish.”

Historically, the trend has suggested that these pooch performers were largely suited to children’s entertainment. Many of the most obvious dog-centric movies of the talkie era were animated family films like 101 Dalmatians, The Lady and the Tramp, All Dogs Go to Heaven, and even Rover Dangerfield. Even live action mutt movies tended to be aimed at the youngest and least discerning of viewers, from The Shaggy D.A. to Homeward Bound to The Shaggy Dog to Beethoven and beyond.

Strays is aware of this. Much of the movie’s humor derives from the juxtaposition of taking a seemingly family-friendly setup like the classic talking dog movie, and then transgressing within that framework. At its core, this is a movie built around the template of Homeward Bound. Reggie (Will Ferrell) is a dog abandoned by his owner Doug (Will Forte), who is desperate to get back home before Doug moves. The dogs featured in the movie swear, poop, take drugs, and have sex.

However, Strays is also engaged with a more modern trend within the canine canon. The turning point came 15 years ago. 2008 was an important year in determining the future arc of American moviegoing. The Dark Knight and Iron Man laid out two competing visions of what superhero blockbusters could look like. However, there was also a battle being waged over the future of the dog movie — one that would have profound and long-lasting consequences.

In one corner, Beverly Hills Chihuahua represented the old guard. It was a talking dog movie, a broad family comedy starring the voices of Drew Barrymore, Andy García, and George Lopez, of a piece with films like Cats & Dogs. Beverly Hills Chihuahua earned largely negative reviews, but was popular enough with audiences that it made $149 million worldwide and received an “A” CinemaScore. It even spawned two sequels, albeit ones that went direct to video.

In the other corner, there was Marley and Me. Adapted from John Grogan’s memoir, Marley and Me was a much more prestigious project. Most obviously, the dog did not talk. More than that, the film was clearly aimed at an older audience, focusing on the dysfunctional relationship between writer John (Owen Wilson) and his new wife Jenny (Jennifer Aniston). Insecure about Jenny’s professional success and wanting her to settle down to have kids, John follows the advice of a friend (Eric Dane) and adopts Marley, a yellow Labrador retriever.

Marley may not talk, but the dog has a lot to teach. He becomes a creative muse for John, inspiring his twice-weekly column. He also serves to bring John and Jenny closer together, allowing the couple to have three kids. Marley and Me is interesting, because it is a dog movie that grapples with ostensibly adult themes: marriage, parenting, postpartum depression, career insecurity. It was also a massive success, earning $255 million at the global box office and comparatively positive reviews.

In Strays, Doug hasn’t watched Marley and Me, but he’s aware of it. To a certain extent, the film can be understood as a light riff on the basic premise of Marley and Me. After all, Reggie was adopted by Doug and his partner Ashley (Jade Marie Fernandez). While it’s possible to read Marley and Me as a story about how John suppresses his feeling of masculine inadequacies in a way that allows Marley to serve as “an external manifestation of John’s id,” Strays inverts this by casting Doug as pure id.

Still, one movie does not make a trend. This push towards more prestige pupper pictures that began with Marley and Me was cemented the following year with the release of Hachi: A Dog’s Tale. While Marley and Me featured stars-of-the-moment Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson, Hachi was built around classic 1980s and 1990s movie star Richard Gere. More than that, with a supporting role for Jason Alexander, Hachi was a low-key reunion for Pretty Woman, one of the highest-grossing movies of 1990.

In a match made in hound heaven, Hachi was directed by Lasse Hallström. Hallström had been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director twice, for the Swedish film My Life as a Dog and for folksy abortion drama The Cider House Rules. Hallström would remain a key figure in this rover renaissance, also directing A Dog’s Purpose. Hachi didn’t make that much money in its theatrical release — only $46 million — but there are other ways of measuring a movie’s cultural cachet.

While Beverly Hills Chihuahua was once listed among the Worst 100 Movies of All Time at IMDb, Hachi has consistently ranked among their Top 250 Movies of All Time. In January 2014, Hachi was apparently the most popular movie in Rhode Island, beating out Dumb and Dumber. However, despite starring Richard Gere, the movie could not secure a theatrical window in the United States and had to be broadcast on the Hallmark Channel.

It is notable where the movie was successful. According to star Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, it rolled out very well internationally. On IMDb, only about 37,000 of the 299,000 user votes come from the United States, lower than many other titles. On Douban, the Chinese answer to the IMDb, Hachi ranks comfortably among the twenty best films ever made, beating out competitors like The Godfather or The Dark Knight. The film even has a Chinese remake.

China is a growing market for American films, as evidenced by the success of movies like World of Warcraft or The Meg. Dog movies tend to play particularly well in China, with A Dog’s Purpose earning $88 million in China compared to $64 million in the United States. China is so fond of these American canine stars that they produced an anthology film, Adoring, featuring a number of veteran Hollywood stars like Luther from Pup Star, Que from Show Dogs, and Benny from Dog Days.

The twin successes of Marley and Me and Hachi: A Dog’s Tale seemed to set the course for the new canine canon, leading to a whole set of very treacly and earnest films in which dogs impart life lessons to either their owners or the viewing audience. Another obvious touchpoint for the genre was A Dog’s Purpose from 2017. This film was something of a crossbreed, trying to wed this new up-market sincere dog movie with the classic trope of the talking dog.

A Dog’s Purpose features Josh Gad as the voice of a dog – known as “Boss Dog” – that finds itself tasked with guiding and shaping the lives of the Montgomery family. To do this, “Boss Dog” reincarnates several times, hoping each death will get them closer. None of the human characters can hear Boss Dog’s profound ruminations on the human condition, but they are eventually reunited with their aged owner, Ethan (Dennis Quaid).

A Dog’s Purpose and its sequel, A Dog’s Journey, are a very obvious touchstone for Strays, to the point that its two biggest cameos are built around it. Josh Gad makes a small appearance as Gus, “one of them narrator dogs” who considers himself too posh to speak directly to the movie’s other talking canines. Later on, there is a brief cutaway gag to Dennis Quaid, an appearance that only really makes sense in the context of his appearances in those two movies.

Its arc once again intertwined with the superhero blockbuster, when the prestige pooch picture hit market saturation in 2019. This was the year that A Dog’s Purpose author W. Bruce Cameron seemed to exert maximal impact on the culture. Not only did Universal adapt his sequel, A Dog’s Journey, but Sony released an adaptation of his other big dog book, A Dog’s Way Home. However, “the new good boy canon” reached its apotheosis with that year’s release of The Art of Racing in the Rain, adapted from Garth Stein’s novel.

The Art of Racing in the Rain is perhaps best understood as the Book of Job narrated by a race-car-loving golden retriever. It’s the story of Denny (Milo Ventimiglia), a racing driver who finds himself beset by tragedy upon tragedy. After his wife, Eve (Amanda Seyfried), dies of brain cancer, his father-in-law, Maxwell (Martin Donovan) tries to take custody of his daughter, Zoë (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). In a heated argument, Maxwell falls, breaking his rib. He uses this injury to derail Denny’s career.

If Hachi banked on the old-fashioned 1980s and 1990s movie star charisma of Richard Gere to bolster his canine co-star, The Art of Racing in the Rain goes one step further, casting Kevin Costner as Denny’s loyal dog Enzo. It’s a surreal film, part harrowing family drama and part cute dog movie. It’s a movie where Maxwell threatens to destroy Denny’s family and career, only for Enzo to use “the tools of [his] dogness to exact justice” by deliberately fouling himself on Maxwell’s beloved rug.

2019 represented a peak for this movement, but its legacy lingers on. Chris Sanders’ adaptation of The Call of the Wild, starring Harrison Ford, owes more to these recent doggy dramas than it does to earlier movies like Snow Dogs, with critic Kim Newman comparing it to “an animal version of 12 Years a Slave.” Perhaps the release of Strays suggests that the genre has had its heyday, that it’s less of an ongoing concern than a building block to whatever the next movement in animal cinema will be.

It’s interesting to wonder why these films became so popular and so profound. Perhaps it’s because millennials and Gen Zers can empathize. Those generations are marrying later, putting off having kids, and can’t afford houses. However, they d0 own pets — and love them, often more than family. Perhaps it’s more basic than that. As the world seems more divided than ever, there’s something appealing in the belief that even an animal as simple as a dog might hold the key to life’s mysteries.

Only Murders in the Building is one the genuine “surprise” successes of the modern media era, a word-of-mouth hit that managed to break out of the streaming bubble. According to Hulu Originals President Craig Erwich, the show was “the most-watched comedy ever on Hulu, by a good measure”, even beating library titles like Gilmore Girls. Its second season outperformed one of Disney’s signature brands, even charting ahead of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.

The first season is a charming, albeit fairly straightforward, mystery. Set in an upper crust New York apartment building called the Arconia, loosely modelled on the real-life Belnord, Only Murders in the Building follows a trio of crime-solving podcasters: veteran cop show lead Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin), failed Broadway director Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) and young artist Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez). In the first season, they investigate the murder of resident Tim Kono (Julian Cihi).

Only Murders in the Building is, to put it simply, an incredibly charming show. The casting of Martin and Short does a lot of the heavy lifting. The duo has been collaborating for decades, starring together in movies like The Three Amigos and the Father of the Bride sequels. They also tour as a comedy double act, promising “an evening you will forget for the rest of your life.” Gomez proves a more-than-capable millennial straight man to her two comedy legend co-stars.

The first season of Only Murders in the Building offers a fairly conventional murder mystery. There are plenty of dark secrets revealed about the inhabitants of the exclusive apartment building, such as the black-market dealings of restaurateur Teddy Dimas (Nathan Lane). There are the obligatory red herrings that lead the trio astray, such as a tangent involving the building’s resident celebrity, Sting (himself). Ultimately, the killer is revealed to be Charles’ lover, bassoonist Jan Bellows (Amy Ryan).

Only Murders In The Building — “Persons of Interest” – Episode 201 — Welcome home, Arconiacs! Minutes after Season 1’s finale, Charles, Oliver and Mabel are now implicated in the murder of Board President, Bunny Folger. They must choose whether to lay low or risk their safety by catching the killer themselves. As they grapple with that choice, fireworks ensue. Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez), shown. (Photo by: Barbara Nitke/Hulu)

However, as tends to be the way with successful and breakout television shows, the second season is decidedly more complex and reflexive. The show remains as charming and accessible as ever, but it turns its focus inwards. While the eponymous podcast was treated largely as a plot device in the first season, a way to bring the leading trio together and a framing device for voiceover bookends on various episodes, the second season is much more interested in the industry and its ethics.

”True crime” podcasts are a huge industry. Serial is very much the standard bearer here. Described as “podcasting’s first breakout hit”, it was the fastest podcast to hit 5m downloads with the New York Times reportedly paying “about $25m” to buy the production company behind it. The genre only became more popular during the global pandemic, with a Pew Research survey from June suggesting that “true crime” accounted for nearly a quarter of top-ranked podcasts in America.

These podcasts can be incredibly lucrative. Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, cohosts of My Favorite Murder, reportedly earned $15m in 2019. Even outside of the overlap with the resurgent interest in true crime film and television, podcasts such as Dirty John and The Dropout were adapted directly into successful television shows. This is to say nothing of the sponsorship deals that such podcasts can strike with brands desperate to reach a loyal, obsessive and attentive audience.

These podcasts can have very serious real-world implications. Again, Serial is the most obvious case study, with the podcast helping to attract public attention to the case of Adnan Syed, who was recently exonerated two decades after being convicted for the murder of Hae Min Lee. Syed is the most high-profile example, but podcasts also played a role in freeing Kaj Linna, Cain Joshua Storey and Darrell Lee Clark. Podcasts have also helped lead to convictions, like that of Paul Flores.

As such, the industry holds a lot of power and influence. “True crime” podcasts are, to put it mildly, an ethical minefield, even before getting into issues around the exploitation of real people’s trauma as entertainment. The young industry, often driven by amateur sleuths, has been beset with allegations of plagiarism, racial blind spots and a potentially problematic relationship with law enforcement. As “cozy” and “oddly comforting” as the genre might be, it’s also complicated.

Only Murders In The Building — “Persons of Interest” – Episode 201 — Welcome home, Arconiacs! Minutes after Season 1’s finale, Charles, Oliver and Mabel are now implicated in the murder of Board President, Bunny Folger. They must choose whether to lay low or risk their safety by catching the killer themselves. As they grapple with that choice, fireworks ensue. Cinda (Tina Fey), shown. (Photo by: Craig Blankenhorn/Hulu)

Without sacrificing its gentle comedic energy, the second season of Only Murders in the Building grapples with this thorniness in an interesting way. In particular, the second season is preoccupied with the voyeurism and the exploitation that underpins so much of the modern interest in true crime. This is most obvious in how the show treats its three lead characters. During the first season, the trio were presented as outside observers. The second season makes them subjects.

The second season of Only Murders in the Building is driven by the murder of Bunny Folger (Jayne Houdyshell), the board president of the Arconia. During the first season, Bunny was an antagonist of the trio. When she is murdered in Mabel’s apartment with Mabel’s knitting needles, it becomes clear that somebody is trying to frame Charles, Oliver and Mabel for the crime. They are no longer the investigators operating at a remove from the case, they are thrown right into the mix.

Throughout the second season, Only Murders in the Building places its leads in focus. They are constantly being watched and scrutinized. They discover a network of secret corridors running through the Arconia, allowing the killer to move from apartment to apartment and spy on the building’s inhabitants. Charles discovers a painting of his father, engaged in a torrid extramarital love affair. When Mabel is attacked on a train and defends herself, misleading footage goes viral.

Just as Charles, Oliver and Mabel used the death of Tim Kino to generate content in the first season, the second season finds the trio being exploited in a similar manner. They deal with a collection of increasingly impatient fans who run their fan site, The Itty-Bitty Omit-Bitty Committee. Mabel strikes up a relationship with an artist named Alice (Cara Delevingne), only to discover that Alice is building an art exhibit around her, “looking at [her] trauma through a fine-art lens.”

Only Murders In The Building — “I Know Who Did It” – Episode 210 — One question remains: Who did it??? Oh, who are we kidding — there’s a few more questions raised, too. Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez), shown. (Photo by: Patrick Harbron/Hulu)

In the first season, the three leads bond over their shared affection for the true crime podcast All Is Not OK in Oklahoma, hosted by Cinda Canning (Tina Fey) with a great deal of help from her put-upon assistant Poppy White (Adina Verson). It delves into the disappearance of Becky Butler, a young woman from Oklahoma. This obviously exists at a distance from these three inhabitants of a luxurious New York City apartment block, and so they can enjoy it.

During the first season, Cinda is presented as a somewhat distant figure. The trio pay her a visit looking for advice in starting their own podcast, but she is largely filtered through media. Her voice is heard on clips from All is Not OK in Oklahoma and she even appears on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. She’s initially an inspiration for the three determined investigators, although they are quickly disillusioned. Cinda is a canny, cynical and self-serving celebrity.

In the second season, the trio find themselves the subject of greater scrutiny from Cinda. She launches her own podcast about Bunny’s death, Only Murderers in the Building. It’s all very clever and very self-referential, a beautiful illustration of the way in which everything becomes commodified. Human lives become narratives to be packaged and sold between Cinda’s plugs for “Gut Milk Lite”, which has “all the flavor of Gut Milk and none of the unexplained crunch.”

Beneath the show’s warmth and charm, there is a biting cynicism to the second season. The season makes an effort to humanize and develop Bunny, devoting an entire episode to her life and back story. However, it also reveals that her murder wasn’t about her at all. Her plans to remodel the Arcania are a red herring. Ultimately, Bunny wasn’t killed for any particular reason. She was killed because the narrative that the killer was constructing needed a victim, and Bunny fit the story being told.

Only Murders In The Building — “I Know Who Did It” – Episode 210 — One question remains: Who did it??? Oh, who are we kidding — there’s a few more questions raised, too. (Photo by: Patrick Harbron/Hulu)

The second season builds to the reveal that All is Not OK in Oklahoma was a lie, which showrunner John Hoffman suggests was the culmination of “a two-season arc” that was “sort of in [his] head” from the outset. Poppy White is really Becky Butler, the subject of that podcast. Becky was a young woman from Oklahoma who grew tired of her life and saw an opportunity to escape it by fashioning it into content for public consumption.

Reinventing herself as Poppy, Becky turned her disappearance into a national story, and then sold that story to Cinda as a way out. That podcast led to the conviction of her former employer, Mayor Tipton (Todd Conner).In New York, working with a crooked cop named Kreps (Michael Rapaport), Becky plotted an even bigger podcast mystery that would lead to much greater success. Bunny’s death was just a paving stone on the road to success.

Coverage of Only Murders in the Building tends to describe the show using words like “gentle”, “smiley-sweet” or “affectionate”, and that is certainly true. It has a very earnest and sincere fondness for most of its characters, and which understands that much of its appeal is rooted in the easy charisma of its three leading performers. However, it’s a very smart show, and the second season has something very interesting and very insightful to say about the genre in which it positioned itself.

The show’s third season has shifted away from podcasting, towards a particularly New York institution: Broadway. This makes sense. The second season took one of the most popular and warmly received celebrations of the “true crime” podcast industry and flipped it on its head, subjecting its protagonists to the horrors of a system that reduces humanity to nothing more than empty content. That’s a true crime, and Only Murders in the Building is smart enough to realize that.

Capaldi’s tenure was controversial at the time. Conventional wisdom argued he had “been good in the role, but [hadn’t] had the best stories to work with” and he had “divided viewers, alienating almost as many as he won over.” However, his tenure has been subject to a quiet reassessment. He was voted the show’s third most popular lead in a Radio Times poll in September 2020 and ranked second when Digital Spy compiled IMDb scores in July 2023.

The collaboration of Capaldi and Moffat led to perhaps the most ambitious and experimental era in the history of Doctor Who. Building off the show’s 50th anniversary celebrations, the duo pushed Doctor Who in bold new directions, interrogating concepts that the show had long taken for granted. During Capaldi’s three seasons, Doctor Who asked tough questions about its lead character and the show’s internal logic, and arrived at interesting answers.

This era of the show exists in conversation with decades of continuity that preceded it. It can be hard to properly assess Moffat’s vision of Doctor Who without understanding how it relates to the show’s legacy and history. In particular, Peter Capaldi’s version of the Doctor existed in contrast to his immediate predecessors, played by Matt Smith and David Tennant. This was most obvious in Capaldi’s age, which sparked much discussion after he was cast.

Matt Smith’s take on the role had — to quote journalist Matthew Sweet — “a quality of the old man trapped in the young man’s body.” Capaldi inverted that dynamic, feeling like a teenager who had discovered the universe’s most convincing fake ID. This self-styled “Doctor Funkenstein” would eschew the traditional sonic screwdriver for a set of sonic sunglasses and was constantly strumming an electric guitar. Capaldi’s Doctor was decidedly punk rock.

Capaldi’s Doctor was the most openly anarchistic take on the character since the version played by Sylvester McCoy towards the end of the 1980s, when the show was — according to script editor Andrew Cartmel — planning to “overthrow the government.” This was a version who would casually describe the monarchy as “an entirely pointless stratum of society who contribute nothing of worth to the world and crush the hopes and dreams of working people” in “The Husbands of River Song” and who would happily topple capitalism in “Oxygen.”

However, Capaldi’s take on the character was also more introspective and more vulnerable than earlier iterations. At the end of his second episode, “Into the Dalek,” he confronts his companion, Clara Oswald (Jenna Colman), with a question. “Clara, be my pal and tell me, am I a good man?” This question hangs over the character’s three seasons. To Moffat’s credit, this is not moral ambiguity for the sake of it. Capaldi’s version of Doctor Who honestly and meaningfully grapples with what it means both to be good and to be a man.

Under Moffat’s predecessor, Russell T. Davies, the Doctor had presented as something of a force of nature. “Do you know what they call me in the ancient legends of the Dalek Homeworld?” demanded Christopher Eccleston’s version of the character of his iconic pepper pot arch enemies. “The Oncoming Storm. You might have removed all your emotions but I reckon right down deep in your DNA, there’s one little spark left, and that’s fear. Doesn’t it just burn when you face me?” It’s a badass boast. The Doctor terrifies his enemies.

Davies’ Doctors routinely resorted to genocide, eradicating entire species in stories like “School Reunion” and “The Christmas Invasion.” As Latimer (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) stated in “The Family of Blood,” the Doctor was “fire and ice and rage. He’s like the night and the storm in the heart of the sun. He’s ancient and forever. He burns at the center of time and he can see the turn of the universe.” He was awe-inspiring. He was “the Lonely God.”

Moffat was somewhat ambivalent about the notion of the Doctor as a morally ambiguous figure sweeping through time and space with the force of a hurricane. Even writing under Davies, he turned “the Oncoming Storm” from a badass boast into a wry punchline in “The Girl in the Fireplace.” During his own era overseeing Doctor Who, the show tended to treat it like a joke (as in “The Lodger”) or as something worthy of derision (as in “Amy’s Choice”).

“When you began, all those years ago, sailing off to see the universe, did you ever think you’d become this?” his wife, River Song (Alex Kingston), asks the Doctor in Moffat’s “A Good Man Goes to War.” “The man who can turn an army around at the mention of his name. Doctor, the word for healer and wise man throughout the universe. We get that word from you, you know. But if you carry on the way you are, what might that word come to mean? To the people of the Gamma Forests, the word Doctor means mighty warrior. How far you’ve come.”

Davies embraced the Doctor as an archetypal pulp hero, “the gentleman explorer” wandering the cosmos destined to remain emotionally detached. The women who loved him, like Rose (Billie Piper) or Martha (Freema Agyeman), inevitably ended up heartbroken. The only woman to make a convincing claim to be his equal was Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), and the punishment for that hubris was to have her memory of her time with the Doctor erased.

Moffat pushed back against this romanticized masculine ideal. The Doctor isn’t a force of nature. Instead, “Doctor” is a title to which the character aspires. “The name I chose is the Doctor,” explained Matt Smith’s version. “The name you choose… it’s like a promise you make.” As Capaldi’s version confessed to archenemy Davros (Julian Bleach) in “The Witch’s Familiar,” “There’s no such thing as the Doctor. I’m just a bloke in a box, telling stories.”

Capaldi’s Doctor tended to deal with smaller threats in smaller ways. In “The Girl Who Died,” the Doctor saves one species by luring their enemies far across the universe and draining their weapons. “What’s to stop them re-arming and trying again?” Clara asks. “Nothing,” the Doctor replies. “It’s the best I could do, Clara.” This is key to understanding Capaldi’s Doctor. He is trying to be “a good man” rather than a “lonely god,” simply doing the best that he can.

Moffat has described his conception of the Doctor as “an angel who aspires to be human.” One of the more interesting aspects of Capaldi’s tenure is its recurring fascination with the idea of what it means to be good in a universe that is not. After all, Capaldi’s final season overlapped with political developments like the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum, which were likely shocking to Moffat’s self-described “wetly liberal” sensibilities.

That final season confronts the Doctor, who Moffat describes as “the number one liberal do-gooder of the universe,” with the inevitability of his own failure. In “Extremis,” he confronts an alien invasion only to realize that he is just a simulation and there is nothing that he can do to stop the real invasion. In “The Pyramid at the End of the World,” he fails to convince humanity to reject fascism. In “The Doctor Falls,” he sacrifices his life to buy a colony ship a few more years and in a doomed effort to redeem his old friend, Missy (Michelle Gomez).

As Missy abandons the Doctor, he makes a final case for his moral philosophy. “I’m not trying to win,” he argues. “I’m not doing this because I want to beat someone, or because I hate someone, or… because I want to blame someone. It’s not because it’s fun and God knows it’s not because it’s easy. It’s not even because it works, because it hardly ever does. I do what I do, because it’s right! Because it’s decent! And above all, it’s kind. It’s just that.”

Moffat and Capaldi’s exploration of what it means to be “a good man” is also gendered. Much like Moffat used the character of Clara to interrogate the gendered assumptions about the role of the companion, he also used Capaldi to ask the same questions about the Doctor. Much of those three seasons is spent deconstructing stereotypical ideas of masculinity. “The Girl Who Died” finds the Doctor outwitting a race of space Vikings who drink smoothies made of testosterone through the power of farce, embarrassing them into retreat.

Under Moffat, the Doctor learns what it means to be a good man, becoming emotionally present and cultivating meaningful relationships instead of retreating from emotional intimacy. Matt Smith’s Doctor spends the first half of his final season checking in on companions Amy (Karen Gillen) and Rory (Arthur Darvill) after they leave the TARDIS. Smith’s final adventure finds him taking up long-term residence on the planet Trenzalore, becoming “the man who stayed for Christmas.” He’s no longer just a reckless cad running around the universe.

For Moffat, the masculine ideal is that of a healer and a listener rather than a warrior or an adventurer. Sontaran soldier Strax (Dan Starkey) finds new purpose as a medic. As a nurse, Rory is initially less exciting than the Doctor, but he quietly proves himself “the most beautiful man [Amy] ever met.” This applies just as much to Capaldi’s Doctor, whose arc becomes a rejection of the archetypal portrayal of the character as “a learned and patrician white male” who had spent most of the previous fifty years as an absolute and unquestionable authority.

Capaldi’s tenure inverted the show’s classic structure in which “a dominant male character is accompanied by a succession of subordinate, mainly female companions”. Clara was a governess, then a nanny, finally a teacher. The Doctor was her student, and had much to learn. After asking if he’s a good man, the Doctor reassures Clara, “I think you’re probably an amazing teacher.” Clara responds, “I think I’d better be.” Clara pushes back against the Doctor’s patronizing grandstanding in early episodes like “Kill the Moon,” warning, “Don’t you ever tell me to mind my language. Don’t you ever tell me to take the stabilizers off my bike.”

Capaldi’s Doctor is the first to have a relationship of genuine equality with the women in his life, learning that being a good man often means supporting those women. He so internalizes his “duty of care” to Clara that he burns billions of years to bring her back to life after she dies in “Face the Raven.” In “The Husbands of River Song,” he spends 24 years with his wife River Song on the planet Darillium, knowing that this is the last time they will have together. In “Extremis,” he promises to give up his life of cosmic adventuring to devote himself to rehabilitating Missy, even though he inevitably relapses. He may fail, but the effort counts.

At the end of “Into the Dalek,” Clara returns to that question he asked her at the start of the episode. “You asked me if you’re a good man and the answer is: I don’t know,” she admits, honestly. “But I think you try to be and I think that’s probably the point.” This was the beauty of Capaldi’s tenure as the Doctor. It was a version of Doctor Who that argued that the lead character could still change and grow, even after fifty years. That capacity to evolve, to try to be better and do the right thing even when all is lost is what it means to be a good man.